by James Laxer
Land was the chief form of wealth in the America of the day. Great landowners, notably those who ran the Virginia plantations, hungered for more property so that they could expand their operations when the soil on their existing plantations was depleted. And the American settlers’ appetite for land could only be satisfied at the expense of native peoples. The war of the native peoples against the Europeans and later the settler invaders was an endless war. The conflict shifted from region to region over time as the British, the French, the Spaniards, and later the settler regimes took one piece of territory after another from the original inhabitants. Conventional maps of North America display national, provincial, and state boundaries. Another kind of map tells an equally important story: a map of the continent blocked off into regions and dated with the cessions of parcels of territory from native peoples to imperial and settler regimes.
Native peoples also fought one another for territory. Access to guns and horses played a major role in determining which native peoples won or lost particular struggles, as did the vagaries of epidemics. The winners periodically took the men, women, and children of the vanquished into slavery, sometimes using the slaves as currency with the whites to purchase guns, ammunition, and other goods.
In their struggles in the heart of the continent, French and British traders and soldiers fought to secure military and commercial alliances with particular tribes and to block their adversaries from achieving such alliances. For the whole of Tecumseh’s life, the Ohio country was a theatre of nearly constant warfare, with brief stretches of peace punctuating long periods of conflict.
William Henry Harrison, the Indiana governor and future president of the United States, was Tecumseh’s deadliest foe. He once described the great Shawnee leader as “one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.”2
Born in 1768 in one of two Shawnee settlements (either Chillicothe or Kispoko Town) along the Scioto, a tributary of the Ohio River, the legendary warrior chief Tecumseh entered a world engulfed by turmoil that extended from his village all the way to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. There is some dispute about the date of his birth. His younger brother Lalawethika, who later changed his name to Tenskwatawa and became famous as the Prophet, claimed that Tecumseh was born in 1764 or 1765, but it seems more likely that he was born in 1768, based on the testimony of his childhood friend Stephen Ruddell, who played the twin roles of actor and commentator in Tecumseh’s life.
According to Ruddell, on the evening of Tecumseh’s birth his mother, Methoataaskee, looked into the heavens to see “a meteor shooting across the sky.”3 That was the origin of his name, Tecumethe, which in its abbreviated translation means “Shooting Star” or “Blazing Comet,” but in a longer rendering means “I Cross the Way.” (English-speakers have settled on the distorted form Tecumseh.) According to Shawnee custom, when a baby was six months old, his father would host a feast for friends and relatives to name the new member of the family. An older member of another clan would then select the baby’s name and recite a prayer to promote his well-being. But in Tecumseh’s case, the striking vision of the shooting star suggested the name.
Highly influential in Tecumseh’s life were his eldest brother, Cheeseekau, and his sister, Tecumpease. Less influential was his older brother Sauawaseekau. Following Tecumseh came a brother, Nehaaseemoo, and then triplets, all boys, one of whom died at birth.4 One of the two survivors was Lalawethika, who was to play an immense role in shaping Tecumseh’s vision and politics.
Timing isn’t everything for those whom history thrusts to the fore, but it does matter. Tecumseh was born the year before the arrival of Brock, Napoleon, and the Duke of Wellington, which put them all at the right age to play major roles in the interrelated conflicts of the era.
By the time Tecumseh was born, the Shawnees had long been a wandering people. Shawnee tradition claims that their tribe previously inhabited another land. According to the story, under the leadership of a member of the tribe’s Turtle clan, the people congregated and marched to the seashore. As they walked into the sea, the waters instantly parted, allowing them to pass unharmed along the ocean bottom, until they reached the island where they would live.5
The Algonquian languages, of which Shawnee was one, were often found around the Great Lakes. The name Shawnee, which means “southerners,” is one clue among others that indicates that the Shawnees dwelt in the South, possibly on the Savannah River in South Carolina. Mentions of the Shawnees show up in the stories of other tribes as well as in the records of the French and the English. French writers called them Chaouanons and sometimes Massawomees. The tribe’s name has been written as Shawanos, Sawanos, Shawaneu, Shawanoes, and Shawnees.6 By the 1660s and 1670s, when the Shawnees were featured in written records, they had settled on the Ohio and Cumberland Rivers. Not long after this date, however, Iroquois warriors attacked the Shawnees, who were dispersed to the east across the Appalachian Mountains, west to Illinois, and south to the Savannah.
In 1836, Albert Gallatin, who served as one of the U.S. commissioners appointed to negotiate peace with Britain during the War of 1812, published a study of the history of the native American tribes east of the Rocky Mountains, drawing on a host of earlier sources. Gallatin concluded that the Shawnees originally belonged to the Lenape tribes of the north and classified the Shawnee tongue as one of the Algonquian-Lenape languages. He conjectured that the Shawnees separated from other Lenape tribes and settled south of the Ohio River in what is now Kentucky. During the first half of the seventeenth century, wars with the Cherokees and Chickasaws drove a portion of the Shawnee people out of that territory as far east as the Susquehanna River. Then the Miamis invited the main body of the Shawnees to move to the Ohio country. There, in alliance with other tribes, the Shawnees went to war against the Iroquois, suffering a final defeat in that conflict in 1672. The vanquished Shawnees dispersed, some settling on the rivers of the Carolinas and many settling among the Muscogees (known to Americans as the Creeks) after being driven farther south. Other Shawnees settled in Pennsylvania and some stayed along the Ohio River.7
Five divisions composed the Shawnee tribe at the time of Tecumseh’s birth: Mekoche, Hathawekela, Pekowi, Kispoko, and Chillicothe. A common language and culture bound the divisions together into the loosely constituted confederacy of the Shawnee tribe. The divisions appear to have emerged with the establishment of largely autonomous villages. In addition to belonging to one of the divisions, each Shawnee was a member of one of about a dozen clans. A Shawnee would choose a sexual partner from outside his or her own clan.
In Shawnee settlements, women and men did different jobs. Women built houses, made clothes, roasted meat, cooked stews, and baked bread cakes. They also worked in the fields to raise crops such as corn, beans, and pumpkins. In the spring, they tapped maple syrup from the trees. Men fished and hunted deer, rabbits, and buffalo. They also made weapons and trained to become warriors who could defend Shawnee settlements from attack.
Tecumseh’s father, Pukeshinwau, meaning “Something That Falls,” was an admired warrior who belonged to the Kispoko division and the Panther clan. Methoataaskee, Tecumseh’s mother, belonged to the Pekowi division and was a member of the Turtle clan. Her name meant “A Turtle Laying Her Eggs in the Sand.”8
Tecumseh’s father and mother both lived among the Muscogees along the banks of the lower Tallapoosa River in present-day Alabama, likely having arrived by different routes. The Tallapoosa Shawnees, among whom Pukeshinwau was probably born, frequently intermarried with neighbouring native peoples, and as well with French and British traders.
Whether Tecumseh had Muscogee and even English as well as Shawnee ancestry has always been a matter of speculation. According to one rumour, Tecumseh’s mother was a Muscogee. Decades after Tecumseh’s birth, John Prophet, the grandson of Methoataaskee, claimed that his grandmother had b
een of Muscogee ancestry. Evidence suggests that Tecumseh’s father may have had Muscogee and English as well as Shawnee ancestors. Tecumseh’s brother the Prophet claimed much later that their mother was their father’s second wife. Shawnees were customarily polygamous, but if Tecumseh’s father did have an earlier marriage, no children resulted, and he never married again after his union with Methoataaskee.
The couple moved north from Alabama to the Ohio country, most likely in 1759. Nine years later, when Tecumseh was born, representatives of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (present-day Rome, New York). For a payment of 10,460 pounds, the Iroquois sold Kentucky and western Pennsylvania to the British, which allowed settlers to flood into Shawnee territory.9 When they made the sale, the Iroquois claimed that the Shawnee and other native peoples who inhabited the land did so under the jurisdiction of the Six Nations Confederacy. The treaty robbed the Shawnee and other native peoples of their hunting grounds in Kentucky and threatened their settlements along the Ohio. Although the Shawnees did not accept the treaty, their views were swept aside.
A land rush brought an influx of settlers and profiteers. On April 3, 1769, a land office opened in Pittsburgh. On the first day of business, nearly three thousand applications for titles were filed, not just by individuals but also by the American colonies (still under British rule) themselves. In 1773, the governor of Virginia, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, seized control of the region of Fort Pitt, elbowing Pennsylvania aside. He planned to make Kentucky a colony of Virginia. The landed elites of Virginia, the most powerful and populous of the colonies, needed to expand to keep their plantations profitable.
In August 1774, two contingents of Virginia militiamen, one commanded by Colonel Andrew Lewis and the other by Governor John Murray, Lord Dunmore, pushed into the Ohio country. The expedition destroyed a few Shawnee villages on the Muskingum River. The Virginians — natives called them the Big Knives, a term they later extended to all Americans — headed toward the territory where Tecumseh’s family lived. Although the Shawnees did not have nearly enough men to match the Virginians’ numbers, the tribal council decided that the warriors must make a desperate attempt to defeat one of the advancing armies; a victory might draw other natives into the battle.
Tecumseh’s father, Pukeshinwau, organized the Kispokos for the struggle and decided to take his eldest son, Cheeseekau, with him on the expedition. Six-year-old Tecumseh witnessed the war dances of the warriors and their ceremonies of purification as they readied themselves to confront the invaders. On the morning of October 10, 1774, at Point Pleasant at the mouth of the Kanawha River, the Shawnees attacked the contingent led by Colonel Lewis. Badly outnumbered, the Shawnees nonetheless inflicted significant casualties on the Virginians before being forced to withdraw. Having failed to stop the Big Knives, the warriors knew the enemy would press on to attack their villages.
The Mekoches and their chief, Cornstalk, who had led the fight at Point Pleasant, decided that the only viable course was to conciliate the Big Knives, a policy bitterly opposed by most of the Pekowis, Chillicothes, and Kispokos. Cornstalk agreed to give up Kentucky and surrender prisoners, including whites and blacks who had been taken as captives and white children who had been raised by Shawnees from a very early age. Despite intense opposition from the members of the other Shawnee divisions, Cornstalk went ahead with this offer of peace. In the Shawnee council, he stood and asked, “The Long Knives are coming upon us by two routes. Shall we turn out and fight them?” Hearing no reply, he declared, “Since you are not inclined to fight, I will go and make peace.”10
Among the warriors who died at Point Pleasant was Pukeshinwau. During his final moments, he counselled Cheeseekau “to preserve unsullied the dignity and honour of his family and directed him in future to lead forth to battle his younger brothers,” according to the account of Stephen Ruddell.11
For Tecumseh’s family, the death of Pukeshinwau was followed by a one-year period of mourning that fell heavily on his widow, Methoataaskee, who was pregnant with the last of her children. It is hard to calculate how the loss of his father and the surrender of native land affected the young Tecumseh. What we do know is that he lived in a time of violence and war, that he witnessed the armies burn settlements and kill the inhabitants, and that he decided to devote his life to stopping the Big Knives from seizing native land.
When Tecumseh’s father died in 1774, American colonists were embroiled in the political conflict that soon led to the American Revolutionary War. That same year, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act, a measure that deeply alienated the colonists, just as the Royal Proclamation of 1763 had the previous decade. Under the Quebec Act, the British government vastly increased the territory of Quebec to include a portion of the Indian Reserve and much of what is now southern Ontario, in addition to the territories now included in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and portions of Minnesota. The act dropped any reference to the Protestant faith from the oath of allegiance in Quebec, which guaranteed the practice of Catholicism and restored the use of the French civil code to settle private disputes, while keeping the English common law for public administration, including criminal proceedings. The British government, already concerned about rising discontent in the Thirteen Colonies, hoped the Quebec Act would bind the French Canadians to the British side in the event of conflict with the colonists.
The Quebec Act contributed to the rising fury of the mostly Protestant English-speaking colonists, who saw the territorial extension of Quebec as a barrier to their own expansion, opposed the new rights for Catholics, and feared an attack on their own powers of self-government. Delegates to the First Continental Congress, which assembled representatives of twelve of the Thirteen Colonies, met in Philadelphia in September and October 1774. The congress agreed to mount a boycott on British goods as a way of pressuring Britain to repeal the so-called Intolerable Acts, which imposed taxes on the colonies and asserted the right of the British Parliament to legislate for the colonies. The Quebec Act was included on this list. The congress agreed to call a Second Continental Congress to convene the following May. But on April 19, 1775, before the second congress was to meet, armed struggle broke out in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. The American Revolutionary War was underway.
The war between the British and the Thirteen Colonies exacerbated the political divisions among native peoples. Both sides in the conflict recognized native warriors as a force to be reckoned with, and they had an interest in recruiting them to their cause or at least neutralizing them. The British drew Mohawk leader Joseph Brant to their side. As a youth, Brant had attended a school in Connecticut, where he learned to speak, read, and write English. During the Revolutionary War, he mobilized Mohawk warriors and led colonial Loyalists in the struggle against the Patriots in the northern region of the Province of New York. In the summer of 1777, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy joined the struggle on the side of the British. In 1779, Sir Frederick Haldimand, the governor of Quebec, gave Brant the commission of captain of the Northern Confederated Indians.
Of the Shawnees along the Ohio, Cornstalk and the Mekoches agreed with some of the Delawares that neutrality was the best plan: it would not serve their interests to get involved in a white man’s war. But many of the Shawnees and the Mingoes, who had opposed Cornstalk’s deal with the Virginians, saw the war as an opportunity to win back Kentucky. If they sided with the British, who were anxious to recruit them, they could expect to receive the arms and provisions they needed to take up the fight.
Neither side got what it wanted. In November 1777, Cornstalk, along with one of his sons, was gunned down by American militiamen incensed by a recent native ambush of two white men, one of whom had been killed.12
The newly founded United States, having declared its independence on July 4, 1776, after more than a year of war against Britain, proved incapable of outfitting its native allies with weap
ons and provisions, and was even unable to prevent attacks on them by white settlers. Formerly neutral Shawnees became antagonistic toward the Patriot side during the war.
But the more militant natives who had fought against the Patriots failed to recover their lost hunting grounds in Kentucky. In the chaotic conditions that prevailed, many Shawnees, including Tecumseh’s mother and her family, moved farther west, abandoning their former settlements and establishing new ones. Nine-year-old Tecumseh’s new home was the village of Pekowi. Not far west of present-day Springfield in Clark County, Ohio, the village was established on the northwestern bank of the Mad River, a tributary of the Great Miami River.13 Bluffs dominated the north side of the water; farther along were woodlands and marsh. South of the river, a bountiful prairie invited the sowing of corn.
To the southeast of Pekowi, the Shawnees established the largest of their new settlements. Called Old Chillicothe, the town replaced the Chillicothe that had been abandoned farther east. It was located on the southeastern bank of the upper Little Miami River. Blackfish, the warrior leader of the Chillicothe division, was the dominant figure in the community. In 1777 and 1778, as part of their wartime struggle against the Patriots, the British backed Blackfish and the Shawnee armed expeditions into Kentucky. In February 1778, during a raid on the Licking River, Blackfish and his warriors captured twenty-eight settlers, including the legendary Daniel Boone. The captives were transported to the Shawnee settlements; some were adopted and the British paid a ransom to have others released. Boone and a few others managed to escape and return to Boonesborough, Kentucky, in time for an unsuccessful eleven-day siege of the settlement undertaken by three hundred native warriors and eleven whites.14
