Tecumseh and Brock (2 page)

Chapter 1

Tecumseh, the Shooting Star

I
N THE MID-EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY
, the eastern half of North America entered an age of upheaval. The French Empire, whose territorial holdings extended from Île-Royale (Cape Breton Island) through eastern Canada and across the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and New Orleans, was in the final phase of its unequal contest against the more populous and militarily superior British Empire in North America.

In 1755, under the command of Major General Edward Braddock, the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, British and colonial troops set out from Virginia to assault French forces in the Ohio country at Fort Duquesne. Serving as a volunteer officer in the expedition was a Virginian by the name of George Washington. In July 1755, the French and their native allies routed Braddock's army, killing the British commander in the process. Washington presided at the burial service for the fallen general.

Later that year, the British, supported by colonial troops from New England, expelled the French-speaking Acadians from their homes along the Bay of Fundy, burning their settlements to the ground as ships carried the Acadians into exile. In September 1759, following a three-month siege, the British won the very brief but decisive Battle of the Plains of Abraham at Quebec, the engagement that tore the heart out of the French Empire in North America. In 1763, the Treaty of Paris handed New France, with the exception of the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, to Great Britain.

But that same year, the Ottawa leader Pontiac led an alliance of peoples, including the Senecas, Chippewas, and Delawares, in wide-ranging attacks on British posts in the Ohio country and the Great Lakes region, capturing all except Niagara, Detroit, and Fort Pitt.
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Pontiac's mission was to restore the members of his native alliance to the position they had enjoyed in the days of the French Empire. Hundreds of settlers fled the territory where the attacks took place, and many more were killed or captured.

Though Pontiac and his allies won the battle, the war ultimately resulted in a stalemate with the British, who were forced to alter their policies and to establish a relationship with the native peoples of the region similar to the one that had existed with the French. In October 1763, the British government issued the Royal Proclamation, which recognized a vast “Indian Reserve” that stretched from the Appalachians to the Mississippi River and from the Floridas to Canada. The British were already moving toward the policies spelled out in the proclamation, but the armed struggle convinced them that white settlers and native peoples must be kept apart and that the settlers should not be permitted to encroach on native lands.

The inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies — Delaware, Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island — deeply resented the Proclamation of 1763. Its denial of western lands to American settlers added to the growing list of grievances that would explode in the American Revolution in the following decade. The leading subjects in the much more populous and substantial British colonies along the American seaboard were developing their own ambitions, which would soon put them on a collision course with the mother country. Not only did they aspire to control their own taxation and compete with British commerce on the Atlantic, they had their sights set on acquiring native land that lay on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains. The native peoples along the East Coast had already lost their lands to colonists, whose population was rapidly increasing. Now the native peoples in the Ohio country and the future state of Kentucky had to face the aggressive colonists there, who were well on their way to becoming Americans.

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 been 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.
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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.