war play was described by Stephen Ruddell, a white youth captured by the Shawnee:
During his boyhood he used to place himself at the head of the youngsters and divide them … he would make them fight sham battles in which he always distinguished himself by his activity, strength, and skill.
Ruddell was another white boy who grew up with the Shawnee after they snatched him during a raid on Ruddell’s Station, a small settlement in Kentucky. He and Tecumseh became blood brothers, sharing war games, and later hunting expeditions and real war.
The war games were important for Shawnee boys because their destiny was not to live in peace. The frontier was always alive with war talk, if only squabbles between tribes or small skirmishes between the Indians and intruders on their territory.
King George’s proclamation protecting the Ohio Country and its Indians did not last long. The year Tecumseh was born, the Iroquois Six Nations Confederacy, which had claimed the Ohio Country since the 1600s, sold part of it to the colonists for ten thousand pounds. Other tribes protested that the land belonged to all Indians and it was not up to the Iroquois alone to sell it. Not long after the sale, the Shawnee watched a new procession of surveyors and settlers from the Thirteen Colonies float down the Ohio River to open new settlements. The colonists, who had started to call themselves Patriots or Americans, ignored the King’s proclamation. This was no big deal for them because they no longer tolerated King George and his laws from abroad. Differences between the new Americans and the British set off the American Revolution, which began as Tecumseh approached the age of reason.
The Revolution impacted all tribes south of Lake Erie, directly and dramatically. The breakaway colonists were expansionists who wanted the Indian lands west of the Appalachians. The British, although they had broken promises before, offered some hope of protection against this expansion if they could put down the American revolt. They needed allies against the upstart Americans, so they gave the Indians guns and supplies, and while reminding them of King George’s promised protection, incited them into raids on American settlements.
In the summer of 1774, Tecumseh’s sixth year, the Shawnee boy’s life and the future of his people was decided. Colonists in Virginia, taking control of the new lands given up by the Iroquois, decided to crush any Indian resistance, which included the Shawnee. The Indians called the Virginians “Long Knives” or “Big Knives,” because of the long swords carried by colonial military officers, and later the name was applied to all Americans. The Long Knives marched on the Ohio Country, determined to destroy the Shawnee villages along the Scioto.
The leaves were changing colour when Pukeshinwau received a messenger delivering a red tomahawk, the call to war chiefs to gather for war. Young Tecumseh, the drums pounding in his ears, watched his father’s warriors strip to breechcloths and prepare their weapons. They painted their faces and shaved their heads to scalp locks. They drank vegetable potions, fasted, and called on the spirits for success in war.
One can imagine the emotions of a six-year-old boy standing with his mother and siblings as the war party prepared to leave. The whoops of warriors and the neighing of excited horses rolling through the autumn air already filled with dust, the smell of horse flesh, tension, and determination. He must have been overcome with envy and pride as his older brother Cheeseekau, just thirteen, took his place in the war party beside his father.
Tecumseh and his family watched the war party disappear in the distance, Methoataaskee with a large belly that told of another child to come in winter. Tecumseh ached for the day that he would join them on the trail to war. He could not know, however, that his own path to war would be part of a desperate struggle to save his people. Neither did he know that he would never see his father again.
Shawnee Chief Hokoleskwa, known in English as Cornstalk, preferred peace, but in the autumn of 1774 he had little choice but to fight. Long Knives from Virginia marched into a Mingo Indian village on the Ohio River, near today’s Pennsylvania-Ohio border, and massacred eleven people, including the headman’s mother and sister. The Mingos, a mixed tribe of mainly Iroquois, were generally peaceful and were outraged. They found support among the Shawnee, who were seeking revenge for the deaths of some tribesmen in separate incidents.
Mingos and Shawnee attacked white settlements in Pennsylvania to even the score. They killed thirteen settlers and handed Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia, an excuse to settle the growing Indian problem. Dunmore retaliated against two Shawnee villages near the current West Virginia border, then assembled two armies to march on the Indian towns along the Scioto.
Cornstalk wanted to avoid war but it was coming at him, so he sent the red tomahawk to Shawnee chiefs throughout the central Ohio Territory. The red tomahawk put Pukeshinwau and his warriors on the war trail south to meet Cornstalk and the main assembly of warriors.
Cornstalk planned to take the offensive. He had three to five hundred warriors prepared to hit the Virginia army near where the Kanawha River meets the Ohio in southern Ohio. Early in the morning of October 10, 1774, Cornstalk, Pukeshinwau, and their warriors crossed the Ohio River and met the Long Knives at Point Pleasant. The fighting was severe, much of it hand-to-hand, and raged until near nightfall. Cornstalk was heard shouting above the battle clamour for his warriors to “be strong” and carry the fight. The Shawnee were hugely outnumbered, however, and by day’s end retreated back across the river.
The Shawnee lost the battle, but the Virginians paid heavily, with seventy-five dead and 150 wounded. Perhaps forty Shawnee were dead, but no count was available because the Indians threw their dead into the Ohio to prevent the Long Knives from scalping and mutilating them. Mutilating enemy corpses was a common feature of North American frontier warfare. All sides — Indians, British, French, and Americans — did it. The whites scalped to terrorize the Indians and play on their superstitions about scalp locks containing spiritual power. They also encouraged their people, and Indians allied to them, to take enemy scalps in return for cash bounties. It was a savage practice that grew throughout the 1700s because of the use of official bounties.
The Indians, before bounties were offered, sometimes kept scalps as trophies, hanging them from poles or along the gunwales of canoes. The practice was witnessed by Thomas Gist, the son of the Ohio Country surveyor, after he was held prisoner by a group of Indians in the Ohio Country:
The men began to scrape the flesh and blood from the scalps, and dry them by the fire, after which they dressed them with feathers and painted them, then tied them on white, red, and black poles.
In Tecumseh’s time, scalping was done by shoving the victim, dead or alive, face first into the ground, pushing a foot or knee between the shoulders, yanking the head back by the hair, then making a crescent slice along the forehead and ripping the scalp back.
A scalping was described by John Richardson, the teenager who served with the British and Tecumseh, and who later became a famous Canadian writer. He wrote of an Indian chief at the 1813 Battle of the Thames throwing a tomahawk at a Kentuckian’s head, then:
Laying down his rifle, he drew forth his knife, and after having removed the hatchet from the brain, proceeded to make a circular incision throughout the scalp. This done, he grasped the bloody instrument between his teeth, and placing his knees on the back of his victim, while at the same time he fastened his fingers in the hair, the scalp was torn off without much apparent difficulty and thrust, still bleeding, into his bosom. The warrior then arose, and having wiped his knife on the clothes of the unhappy man, returned it to its sheath, grasping at the same time the arms he had abandoned, and hastening to rejoin his comrades.
