Tecumseh and Brock (3 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 weapons 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 cha
otic 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.
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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 settle
ment undertaken by three hundred native warriors and eleven whites.
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It's not certain whether the young Tecumseh met Blackfish, but he knew about the warrior's ultimate fate. In late May 1779, a party of three hundred whites from Kentucky carried out a raid on Old Chillicothe as a reprisal for the attacks on their settlements. Before the attackers managed to surround the town in stealth at night, their presence was discovered. Some warriors fled from the settlement, leaving only a small number to defend Old Chillicothe's women and children and the houses and council house. Blackfish led the warriors against the attackers, but he was severely wounded by a bullet that tore into his knee, splintering the bone and exiting through his thigh. His men were forced to retreat under fire. Throughout the night, the warriors kept up their defence from the council house and a few of the houses in the centre of the settlement. Although the Kentuckians put some dwellings to the torch, they eventually gave up the assault and withdrew, fearing that more warriors would arrive on the scene. While Old Chillicothe was not destroyed, seven natives were killed or mortally wounded. One of them was Blackfish.
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The Kentuckians launched further strikes against the Shawnee villages, bringing the war to where Tecumseh lived. George Rogers Clark, the highest-ranking Patriot military officer in the Northwest during the American Revolution, led a punishing mission in which a thousand men, outfitted with a 6-pounder artillery piece, burned down the town of Old Chillicothe. Although they lost many of their belongings and their crops, the inhabitants managed to evade the assault.

Clark then turned to Tecumseh's town of Pekowi. Alerted that the Americans were coming, the women and children — Tecumseh almost certainly among them — were dispatched to the bluffs near the town. Shawnee warriors managed for a time to halt the advance of Clark's force when they unleashed a volley of musket fire on them. Outnumbered and outgunned, the warriors retreated into the town. But when the 6-pounder fired on them, they pulled out of the settlement and made their escape.

When Clark and his men withdrew two days later, Pekowi and the small nearby settlement of Kispoko were burned to the ground. During their rampage, members of the Clark expedition torched five towns, destroyed the ripening corn crops in the fields, and felled the fruit trees near the settlements. In their wake was a trail of desolation.
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Tecumseh, his family, the other inhabitants of his settlement, and those who lived in nearby settlements were driven out, forced to move northwest to establish new villages. By the following spring, the Kispokos, along with the other Shawnee divisions, were creating a cluster of new villages on the upper Mad River, not far from the present-day setting of Bellefontaine. This would not be the last time that the Shawnees, Tecumseh among them, would be forced to move during the Revolutionary War.

For the duration of the war, Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Ojibwa warriors fought alongside the British in attacks against the Americans in Kentucky and on the frontiers of Virginia.
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In 1780, the British mounted a one-thousand-man incursion into Kentucky. The force combined British troops with natives from the Great Lakes and from the Ohio Valley, including Shawnees. In Kentucky, they forced the surrender of a couple of stations and captured about 350 men, women, and children — including Stephen Ruddell and his younger brother, Abraham, who were taken at Ruddell Station — and brought them back to the Shawnee settlements. Stephen and Tecumseh were both twelve years old when they first encountered each other. They soon were inseparable friends.
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By the time the boys met, the course of the Revolutionary War was about to swing inexorably in favour of the Patriots. In 1781, with the crucial support of the French on land and at sea, the Americans won the decisive engagement at Yorktown, Virginia. Earlier that year, the thirteen founding states ratified the Articles of Confederation, the first U.S. Constitution. This gave the Continental Congress added legitimacy to oversee the war and to conduct diplomacy with European powers.

Having once more moved to be farther from the Big Knives, the Shawnees were still not safe from the attacks of the Kentuckians. In November 1782, George Rogers Clark led another mission against the new settlements, including the village of New Pekowi. Yet again, the settlement where Tecumseh lived was destroyed. This time the attack was late enough in the autumn that the crop had been harvested and most of the people had moved out to their hunting camps. While Shawnee warriors attempted to parry the attack, their numbers were no match for the one-thousand-man force assembled by Clark. The Shawnees were forced to move farther northwest to establish new settlements. Although the peace treaty between Britain and the newly created United States did not come into force until 1783, the effective end of the war pitting the Shawnees and their native allies against the Kentuckians came in 1782.

The struggle had been long and gruesome. Despite the defeats they had suffered and the rising military strength of the settlers, Shawnee warriors remained a formidable force. Some had fallen in battle and others had given up the fight and migrated south to live under American control, but many surviving warriors remained. And the Shawnees were successful in replenishing their ranks through the capture of young whites, who were brought into the tribe and trained as warriors. According to one estimate, over the course of the bloody conflict between 1776 and 1782, the natives killed 860 men who had been trained as soldiers in Kentucky. The Iroquois waged a similar struggle during these years against an influx of settlers.
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