by James Laxer
One day in the autumn of 1805, smoking in his wigwam, he dropped his pipe and fell into a coma or trance so deep that those around him believed he was dead. When he regained consciousness, he told his fellow tribesmen that he had been transported up to the clouds, where he spoke with the Great Spirit. Calling himself Tenskwatawa, he started preaching a religious doctrine to wean his people from the ways of the white man and back to the course they had been created to follow. Those who became his followers called him the Prophet. The mantle of “prophet” was a respectable calling among the Shawnees; Tenskwatawa assumed it shortly after the death of an elderly prophet named Penagashega.3
He told others of his life-altering experience, in which he had embarked on the spectral journey taken by the souls of the departed. At a critical point, Tenskwatawa reached a crossroads. There he saw a few natives taking the fork to the right, which led to heaven; far more of them, though, took the fork to the left. Three houses appeared at the side of this fateful road. Beside the first two houses, paths led the journeyers back to the road to salvation. These houses were “last chance” way stations offering the souls of the dead a final opportunity to redeem themselves and come back to the light. Most, however, continued past them on the road to perdition, the road to the last house, named Eternity, from which there was no return.
Having seen the point of no return, Tenskwatawa came back to consciousness. From then on, he was on a mission. He believed that the Great Spirit had chosen him to convey the message to the people that they must change. Tenskwatawa amazed others, including his brother Tecumseh, with his sudden transformation. Because revelations transmitted through a dream were an accepted part of Shawnee culture, and since these were fearful times, people listened. Not only people from his own village but other Shawnees, Ottawas, Senecas, and Wyandots beat a path to his door to hear what he had to say.4 Propelled by the necessity to pay heed to his dream, and undoubtedly reinforced and energized by the positive responses of so many others, Tenskwatawa’s message grew into an agenda.
Tenskwatawa taught his tribe that they were the original creations of the Masters of Life and that this imposed a great responsibility on them. They had to return to the traditional customs of the tribe and to eschew the ways they had borrowed from the white man. Henceforth, native women must not marry white men. Tenskwatawa preached against all innovations in clothing and declared that the Shawnees must continue to wear the original dress of their people. He issued a powerful warning against drunkenness, claiming that when he was lifted into the clouds, the first place he reached was the dwelling of the Devil, where those who had died drunkards were confined. Flames shot out of the mouths of the unfortunate wretches; this terrible scene had put an end to his own excessive drinking. He insisted that native peoples should practise a code of community property, and proclaimed that the young must cherish and respect the aged and infirm.5
Above all, the Prophet took a very hard line where the Americans were concerned. He declared that they “grew from the scum of the great water, when it was troubled by the Evil Spirit. They are numerous, but I hate them. They are unjust. They have taken away your lands, which were not made for them.” As for commercial dealings with the Americans and British, the Prophet had pithy advice: “Pay the white traders only half of what you owe, because they have cheated you.”
The Prophet’s gospel affected many people, including his brother Tecumseh. It drove home a powerful ideological message: the Great Spirit intended a separation between natives and whites, a fundamental division that must not be breached. Becoming dependent on the ways of the whites was the path to demoralization. Instead, native people needed to return to their old ways. Not only should men dress the way their ancestors had, they should shave their heads, leaving only a scalp lock. The crowns of their heads should be adorned with eagle feathers, and they should paint their faces.
He did not want natives to be reduced to settler-style farmers. Instead, he advocated a lifestyle that combined growing food with hunting over a wide area of land. When doubters complained that there was no longer enough game to sustain the native people, he responded that the animals were being laid waste to meet the appetites of the whites and those natives who had taken up the whites’ customs. He directed his people to give up animals introduced by the Europeans, with the exception of the horse, which had been fully integrated into traditional native hunting practices and had become indispensible to the hunters.
As one of his followers transcribed it, the Prophet preached that the message of the Great Spirit was clear: “My children, you complain that the animals of the forest are few and scattered. How shall it be otherwise? You destroy them yourselves, for their skins only, and leave their bodies to rot or give the best pieces to the whites. I am displeased when I see this, and take them back to the earth that they may not come to you again. You must kill no more animals than are necessary to feed and clothe you.”6
Where previously Lalawethika had been the object of derision, he now was taken very seriously by a growing number of people in his own tribe and eventually other tribes as well.
Tenskwatawa’s emergence as the Prophet occurred at a time of deep unease among the Shawnees. The winter of 1804–5 was unusually cold, and floods accompanied the spring that followed, resulting in severe damage to the cornfields. Disease struck many native villages, including Tecumseh’s. Fever struck suddenly, carrying people off within days. Native doctors did their best to combat the severity and spread of the malady, but to no avail. Called “bilious fever” at the time, the disease was likely influenza or smallpox.
For the native peoples of North America, virulent and deadly outbreaks of illness were already an old story by the beginning of the nineteenth century. From the first days of their conquest of the Americas, Europeans brought diseases against which the native peoples had no immunity, and these were far more destructive than the weapons of the white man. In the first decades, whole villages were felled. Even in Tecumseh’s time, sudden epidemics in native villages wiped out large swaths of the population.
When disease struck, it brought in its wake not only suffering and death but also anxiety and fear. Many natives believed that such misery could only mean that the Great Spirit was deeply displeased. Another explanation was that witches were at work in the villages and that they had caused the epidemic. Those suspected of being witches could be either male or female. The accused were usually elderly people who were believed to use medicine to the detriment of those around them.7
Witch hunts could tear communities apart. People were terrified of being accused next. For example, George Blue Jacket, the son of the famous warrior chief who had been educated by whites, pronounced, “This witchcraft is a very wicked thing. They [witches] can go a thousand miles in less than an hour and back again, and poison anybody they hate and make them lame, and torment them in many wicked and cruel ways.” He believed that witches could “go into houses with their poison even if the doors are locked ever so tight, and the people cannot get awake till they are gone. This witchcraft has prevailed greatly and been very common among our people, and some of the white people have learned it and practice it, and it’s a very wicked thing.”8
While the Prophet was developing the Weltanschauung on which the native confederacy of Tecumseh would be based, he was also drawn into the dark task of outing the witches and punishing them. In March 1806, a great council of the Delawares was convened at Woapicamikunk, and people from the surrounding area were pressured to attend. Especially anxious were the elderly and those unfortunate enough to be regarded as anti-social or strange. Such people feared that if they attended the council they could be singled out as witches. If they failed to participate in the ceremonies at the council, on the other hand, this could heighten suspicions against them.
By the time the Prophet arrived at Woapicamikunk, the council was already underway and the principal suspects had already been identified. Two Delawar
e chiefs, Tetepachsit and Hackinkpomska, who had been centrally involved in ceding land to white settlers, had been placed under guard and were being forced to confess that they were witches. Young men bound the elderly Tetepachsit and tortured him with flaming torches. To assuage his tormenters, the old chief at last admitted to having practised sorcery. He claimed, though, that he had left his medicine bag in the house of a Christian-born native named Joshua, who spoke a number of native languages and served as an interpreter.9
A search party set out for the nearby Moravian mission to fetch Joshua and bring him back to act as a witness. Tetepachsit swore, when Joshua was paraded before him, that his testimony while he was being tortured had been false and that the poisonous medicine was hidden elsewhere. That was enough to keep Joshua from harm for the moment, but it did nothing to end the ordeal for the old chief.
As soon as the Prophet arrived, men and women were walked past him in a circle so that he could search for signs that some among them were practitioners of witchcraft. He confirmed that Tetepachsit and Hackinkpomska were witches. Although Joshua was deemed to possess no evil medicine, he too was condemned because he was said to have influence with an evil spirit.
The first person to be put to death, though, was an old woman. While enduring torture — she was slowly roasted over a fire for four days — the old woman confessed to having given her medicine to her grandson, who was away hunting at the time of the trials. Fortunately for the young man, he was spared when he admitted that his grandmother’s story was true and that he had used the evil medicine to fly from Kentucky to the Mississippi and back in a single day.10
Then Tetepachsit met his death. He claimed to have hidden his medicine in several places, which were duly searched. Nothing was found. The old man, aware that he could not escape death, dressed in his finest apparel and assisted in the building of the pyre on which he would be burned. His dignity and age moved one of the executioners to tomahawk him. The old chief’s body was placed in the blazing fire. The executioners then proceeded to put Joshua to death.11 Further executions ensued, but soon the hysteria declined as fewer Delawares succumbed to the epidemic.
In the spring of 1806, when William Henry Harrison learned of the executions, he dispatched a messenger to deliver a speech to the Delawares that denounced the Prophet as a fraud and counselled an end to the executions of those accused of witchcraft. “Who is this pretended prophet who dares to speak in the name of the Great Creator,” challenged Harrison. “Examine him. Is he more wise or virtuous than you are yourselves, that he should be selected to convey to you the orders of your God? . . . Clear your eyes, I beseech you . . . No longer be imposed upon by the arts of an imposter.”
“Let your poor old men and women sleep in quietness, and banish from their minds the dreadful idea of being burnt alive by their own friends and countrymen,” read Harrison’s message. “I charge you to stop your bloody career . . . if you value the friendship of your great father, the President — if you wish to preserve the good opinion of the Seventeen Fires . . .”12
Tecumseh’s brother had launched a new career. His harsh message grew out of the profound insecurities facing the tribes of the region. His was an ideology that brooked no compromise with the United States and its advancing line of settlements. It was, in that sense, an ideology of resistance.
Undoubtedly, such personalities are present in all societies. But they gain an audience and become significant societal actors only in times of great crisis. They are products of their communities as much as they are unique individual actors. What repels us about the Prophet are the witch hunts. The Prophet did not initiate the witch hunts, but he lent himself to them with no reservations. He was immersed in kindred cultures that sought personalized explanations for great calamities. Finding evildoers and determining responsibility for plagues, famines, and natural disasters has been commonplace in the civilizations of the world.
The rise of the Prophet had a visible effect on Tecumseh, influencing him to stop wearing European-style shirts and trousers, instead clothing himself in soft deerskin suits and moccasins embroidered with dyed porcupine quills.13
The change gave him the appearance of a warrior from an earlier time, which added to his distinctiveness as he rose to fame and helped him to promote his cause of native unity. Significantly, Tecumseh borrowed some ideas from his brother’s revelations, but he kept his own counsel in important ways. From a very early age, he strongly opposed cruelty toward others. When he was in a position to do so, he forbade the torture of prisoners and would not countenance physical abuse of women and children.
While the Prophet was a fundamentalist in his manner and in his unbending certitudes, Tecumseh was much more flexible. He was prepared to work with native groups quite different culturally from his own. And while he had no illusions about the possibility of a complete understanding with the Americans or the British, he was ready to work with or against either of them in pursuit of his goals. In that sense, he was a political leader. It was exactly his clarity of purpose that made him so formidable and adept at commanding respect from his opponents.
The brothers were on a parallel course, though sharp disagreements did flare between them at times. The Prophet was set on establishing a theocracy with himself at the head. Tecumseh was determined to establish a confederacy that could launch a native state with the full rights and recognition of the other states on the continent. Differences aside, the brothers were both leaders, building a bold resistance movement among the native peoples.
Alarmed by the growing number of warriors who had congregated at Prophetstown, and by the rising strength of the native confederacy, William Henry Harrison decided that the United States must take action against the native threat. Even prior to his meeting with Tecumseh at Vincennes, Harrison had sent a dispatch to U.S. Secretary of War William Eustis, seeking permission to attack Prophetstown. Two months later, on July 17, 1811, Eustis replied, “If the Prophet should commence, or seriously threaten, hostilities, he ought to be attacked; provided the force under your command is sufficient to ensure success.”14 In a further missive, on October 20, the Secretary of War was less bellicose. Stating that he had “been particularly instructed by the President, to communicate to Your Excellency his earnest desire that peace may, if possible, be preserved with the Indians . . . Circumstances conspire, at this particular juncture, to render it peculiarly desirable that hostilities of any kind, or to any degree, not indispensably required, should be avoided.”15
In those days of slow communications, field commanders were much freer to follow their own inclinations. Aware that Tecumseh was away on a journey to win the southern tribes to his confederacy, Harrison believed the moment for action was at hand. “There can be no doubt,” he wrote to Eustis, “but his [Tecumseh’s] object is to excite the Southern Indians against us . . . I do not think there is any danger of any hostility until he returns. And his absence affords a most favourable opportunity for breaking up his Confederacy . . . I hope . . . before his return that that part of the fabrick [sic], which he considered complete will be demolished and even its foundations rooted up.”16
Harrison sent couriers with secret messages to key military and political figures so that troops would be readied for the assault on Prophetstown. He alerted Kentucky to have troops in readiness to march by September 20. He rallied Governors Ninian Edwards of Illinois and Benjamin Howard of Upper Louisiana to prepare their militias to join the battle if necessary.
While Harrison was preparing for conflict, which was clearly his preferred option, he was assuring the Madison administration that he was doing everything possible to achieve a peaceful outcome. On August 13, Harrison wrote to Eustis to assure him that while he had alerted the other governors of the growing hostilities, he still hoped for a peaceful outcome: “The President may rest assured that our united councils and exertions will be directed to preserve peace with the Indians . . . recourse to ac
tual hostilities shall be had only when every other means shall have been tried in vain to effect the disbanding of the Prophet’s force.”17
As he prepared to march, Harrison resorted to the time-honoured tactic of seeking to divide his potential foes. He dispatched a warning to the residents of Prophetstown urging them to save themselves by abandoning the Prophet. He also sent a message to the nearby Miami, Eel River, and Wea tribes, cautioning them to stay neutral. “My children,” he wrote, “be wise and listen to my voice. I fear that you have got on a road that will lead you to destruction. It is not too late to turn back. Have pity on your women and children. It is time that my friends should be known. I shall draw a line. Those that keep by me by the hand must keep on one side of it and those that adhere to the Prophet on the other.”
The governor’s warning did not intimidate Laprusieur, the Wea chief, who replied that he considered himself to be a friend of both the Prophet and the Americans, but went on to let Harrison know in no uncertain terms where he stood. “Father,” he said in his message, “Your speech . . . has not scared us, we are not afraid of what you say . . . We have our eyes on our lands on the Wabash with a strong determination to defend our rights, let them be invaded from what quarter they may; that when our best interest is invaded, we will defend them to a man.”18
In late September 1811, Harrison marched north at the head of his force of more than a thousand men. One-third were U.S. Army regulars and over four hundred were Indiana militiamen. Eighty Indiana riflemen and 120 mounted Kentucky volunteers filled out the ranks. In less than two weeks, the force marched two-thirds of the way to Prophetstown. They halted at a location close to the present-day city of Terre Haute, and Harrison’s men spent the next half-month building Fort Harrison.
