has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.
Cover photo: Portrait of Tecumseh from the play Tecumseh: A Drama written by Charles Mair, 1886. Artist unknown.
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Contents
4 Rising Hope, Fallen Timbers
5 Descent into Sickness
6 Casting Out Witches
7 Tippecanoe
8 War Comes to Canada
9 The Fall of Detroit
10 Fort Meigs
11 “We Have Met the Enemy …”
12 Invasion!
13 “The Forlorn Hope”
Epilogue Chronology
Chronology of Tecumseh
Sources Consulted
Index
Trying to find perfect consistency in North American frontier history, especially where First Nations are involved, is an exercise in frustration. Native people did not have written languages, so spellings of spoken Native words and phrases are so inconsistent as to be distracting. For instance, the word for bear in Ojibwe (Ojibway, Ojibwa) can be maakwaa, muqua, mukwa, or a number of other combinations of letters that make up the same sounds.
Thus we have Tecumseh, Tecumseth, Tecumtha, Tecumsay, and other spellings passed down over the two hundred years since the great chief lived.
There are other inconsistencies that distract: Where was Tecumseh actually born? Where was he at certain times of his life? Exactly how many wives and children did he have? Where is he buried? Military happenings create other inconsistencies. Each side in a battle or war has its own version of what exactly transpired and how many were killed or wounded.
In reading the history of Tecumseh, variable spellings, lack of precise dates, and inconsistent numbers can be frustrating, but in the end they don’t really matter. It’s the overall story that counts, the story of a man who stood up for what he believed was right for his people. A man, considered by most white North Americans of the day to be an uneducated savage, who became a symbol of all that is noble in any race.
Scholars continue to frustrate themselves trying to confirm the tiniest details of Tecumseh and his times, while two centuries have further obscured details that were already obscure. Theirs is an important job — to doggedly pursue the latest, best available facts. For the rest of us, what matters most are the main elements of this remarkable life and its impact on Canadian and American history.
Tecumseh lived in much different times, but the story of his life, which is the struggle to protect a vanishing culture, provides lessons for lives lived in any time.
Tecumseh’s Curse
“Sleep not longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws, in false security and delusive hopes … Will not the bones of our dead be ploughed up, and their graves turned into ploughed fields?”
— Tecumseh in September 1811, travelling the
Mississippi Territory while attempting to
unite Indians into a confederacy against U.S.
settlement.
Almost fifty years after Tecumseh spoke those words before a council of Choctaws and other Indians, James Dickson, a settler in Southwestern Ontario, ploughed up six skeletons while tending his homestead along the Thames River, east of Chatham. The homestead occupied the battlefield on which
Tecumseh and his British allies were defeated by American invaders on October 5, 1813. Before ploughing, Dickson felled some black walnut trees, which were blazed or carved with animal figures, so the bones were believed to have belonged to Indians, likely Tecumseh and his warriors. Dickson reburied the bones. Some people believed Dickson’s discovery fulfilled Tecumseh’s prophesy of Indian graves being turned to ploughed fields.
Unearthing the bones was only one unusual event connected to Tecumseh. There are other stories of him predicting his own death, of him foretelling the 1811 New Madrid, Missouri, earthquake that the Creek (Muscogee) Indians believed he caused. The most extraordinary series of events related to Tecumseh is what has become known as Tecumseh’s Curse on certain presidents of the United States.
When William Henry Harrison, Tecumseh’s nemesis, was sworn into office in March 1841, he caught a pneumonia that killed him thirty-two days after his inauguration. Harrison, one of the most influential figures in the taking of North American Indian land, was elected president in late 1840. He led the army that killed Tecumseh and his dream of a united Indian front against American land grabs west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Twenty years later, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected. He was assassinated before completing his term. James Garfield, elected president in 1880,
