The Warrior and the Prophet E-Book

Peter Cozzens

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A History Book of the Year in The Times 'Cozzens is a master storyteller; his books weave a wealth of intricate detail into gripping historical narrative.' The Times 'Marvellous... One of the best pieces of Native American history I have read.' S.C. Gwynne, bestselling author of Empire of the Summer Moon Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Biography. Shawnee chief Tecumseh was a man destined for greatness - the son of a prominent war leader, he was supposedly born under a lucky shooting star. Charismatic, intelligent, handsome, he was both a fierce warrior and a savvy politician. In the first biography of Tecumseh in more than twenty years, Peter Cozzens thoroughly revises our understanding of this great leader and his movement, arguing that his overlooked younger brother Tenskwatawa, the 'Shawnee Prophet', was a crucial partner in Tecumseh's success. Until Tecumseh's death in 1813, he was, alongside Tenskwatawa, the co-architect of the greatest pan-Indian confederation in history. Over time, Tenskwatawa has been relegated to the shadows, described as a talentless charlatan and a drunk. But Cozzens argues that while Tecumseh was the forward-facing diplomat, appealing even to the white settlers attempting to steal Shawnee land, behind the scenes, Tenskwatawa unified multiple tribes with his deep understanding of Shawnee religion and culture. No other Native American leaders enjoyed such popularity, and none would ever pose a graver threat to colonial expansion than Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. Bringing to life an often-overlooked episode in America's past, Cozzens paints in vivid detail the violent, lawless world of the Old Northwest, when settlers spilled over the Appalachians to bloody effect in their haste to exploit lands won from the War of Independence. The Warrior and the Prophet tells the untold story of the Shawnee brothers who retaliated against this threat - becoming allies with the British army in the process - and reveals how they were the last hope for Native Americans to preserve ways of life they had known for centuries.

Leseprobe

THE WARRIOR AND THE PROPHET

ALSO BY PETER COZZENS

The Earth Is Weeping:

The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

Shenandoah 1862:

Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign

The Army and the Indian,

vol. 5 of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890

The Long War for the Northern Plains,

vol. 4 of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890

Conquering the Southern Plains,

vol. 3 of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890

The Wars for the Pacific Northwest,

vol. 2 of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890

The Struggle for Apacheria,

vol. 1 of Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890

The New Annals of the Civil War

(editor, with Robert I. Girardi)

Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 6 (editor)

Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 5 (editor)

General John Pope: A Life for the Nation

The Military Memoirs of General John Pope

(editor, with Robert I. Girardi)

The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Iuka and Corinth

The Shipwreck of Their Hopes: The Battles for Chattanooga

This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga

No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River

Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf,

a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Atlantic Books,

an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Peter Cozzens, 2020

The moral right of Peter Cozzens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-83895-149-8

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-150-4

Designed by Maggie Hinders

Composed by North Market Street Graphics, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Maps by Rob McCaleb at Mapping Specialists

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WCIN 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Eric

“A wind blew west over the Atlantic, driving before it a frothy foam or scum. It blew this scum, which was evil and unclean, upon the shore of the American continent, and the scum took form. The form that it took was that of a white man—of many white people, both men and women; wherever the scum lodged on the shore of the continent, it took this form.”

—TENSKWATAWA, the Shawnee Prophet, to his followers1

“The being within, communing with past ages, tells me that once, nor until lately, there was no white man on this continent; that it then all belonged to red men, children of the same parents, placed on it by the Great Spirit that made them, to keep it, to traverse it, to enjoy its productions, and to fill it with the same race, once a happy race, since made miserable by the white people who are never contented but always encroaching.

“The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for it never was divided but belongs to all for the use of each. For no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers—those who want all and will not do with less.”

—TECUMSEH in council with Gov. William Henry Harrison2

Contents

Preface

Maps

Prologue Dawn of the Long Knives

PART ONE

1 The Great Awakening

2 A Restless People

3 A Turbulent Youth

4 A Nation Divided

5 War and Wanderings

6 Out from the Shadows

7 The Making of a Chief

8 A Culture in Crisis

PART TWO

9 A Prophet Arises

10 Black Sun

11 Greenville Interlude

12 A Double Game

13 One Treaty Too Many

14 No Difficulties Deter Him

15 Southern Odyssey

16 The Prophet Stumbles

17 From the Ashes of Prophetstown

PART THREE

18 Into the Maelstrom

19 Kindred Spirits

20 A Man of Mercy

21 An Adequate Sacrifice to Indian Opinion

22 Death on the Thames

23 Twilight of the Prophet

APPENDIX The Indian World of the Shawnee Brothers

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Gov. William Henry Harrison of the Indiana Territory was amazed. In a decade on the frontier implementing a fiercely acquisitive government land policy, he had met with scores of Indian chiefs, some defiant, others malleable. Never, however, had he encountered a native leader like the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, the man he considered his principal opponent in the fight for the Northwest, as present-day Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin were then known. After a contentious council with Tecumseh in July 1811, Harrison penned a remarkable tribute to him, arguably the most effusive praise a government official ever offered an American Indian leader. Tecumseh had parried Harrison’s every verbal thrust, eloquently defending his refusal to relinquish what Harrison considered “one of the fairest portions of the globe, [then] the haunt of a few wretched savages.”

There was nothing remotely wretched about Tecumseh, however. As Harrison told the secretary of war, “The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really astonishing, and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would, perhaps, be the founder of an empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru.” Harrison marveled at the vigor with which the Shawnee chief pursued his dream of an Indian union. “No difficulties deter him. His activity and industry supply the want of letters. For four years he has been in constant motion. You see him today on the Wabash and in a short time you hear of him on the shores of Lake Erie or Michigan, or on the banks of the Mississippi, and wherever he goes he makes an impression favorable to his purposes.”

Harrison’s testimonial encapsulates the talents of this passionate and indefatigable co-architect, with his younger brother Tenskwatawa, of the greatest pan-Indian confederation the westering American Republic would ever confront. Their movement reached across nearly half of what was then the United States, from the icy upper reaches of the Mississippi River to the steamy bottomlands of the lower Alabama River. No other Indian leaders enjoyed such a broad appeal, and none would ever pose a graver threat to American expansion than Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. At the height of their appeal, the Shawnee brothers mustered twice as many warriors as would chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse on the Little Bighorn River some three generations later.

Fables flower where facts are few or forgotten. Myths endure when people want to believe them. So it was with the Shawnee brothers. Tecumseh would come to personify for Americans all that was great and noble in the Indian character as non-Indians (whites, in the parlance of the time) perceived greatness and nobility. The reasons for this are obvious. Tecumseh advocated a political and military alliance to oppose U.S. encroachment on Indian land. This was something that whites could readily comprehend. Tecumseh, who was first and foremost a political leader, acted as they would have acted under similar circumstances. Tenskwatawa, on the other hand, offered a divinely inspired solution to Indian land dispossession and cultural dissolution, drawing on native tradition that was beyond white understanding. Tenskwatawa’s person also repulsed whites. He was an unappealing, disfigured ex-alcoholic who as a boy had accidentally shot his right eye out with an arrow; a “man devoid of talent or merit, a brawling mischievous Indian demagogue,” according to an Indian agent who knew the Shawnee brothers intimately. The same official admired Tecumseh as the exemplar of Shawnee manhood—a skilled hunter and cunning war leader, charitable, and an orator of rare eloquence. In a similar manner, history, biography, and folklore all came to deify Tecumseh and demonize his brother.

The historian Alvin M. Josephy’s 1961 work The Patriot Chiefs: A Chronicle of Indian Leadership epitomized this tendency. Anticipating Dee Brown’s seminal Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by a decade, The Patriot Chiefs owed its considerable influence to Josephy’s reputation as “the leading non-Indian writer about Native Americans,” a standing that his service as an adviser on federal Indian policy to presidents Kennedy and Nixon cemented.1 Josephy singled out Tecumseh as “the greatest of all the American Indian leaders, a majestic human who might have given all the Indians a nation of their own.” He dismissed Tenskwatawa as a delusional charlatan, repeating a fabricated claim that Tecumseh tried to kill him after the Battle of Tippecanoe and advancing the equally fallacious charge that Tecumseh expelled his brother from their village to wander alone and forgotten thereafter.2

This unfortunate process of elevating Tecumseh at Tenskwatawa’s expense continued with the 1992 release of Allan Eckert’s massive and “entertaining blend of fact and fiction,”3A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh. Eckert incorporated an unconventional “hidden-dialogue”4 technique to re-create the chief’s conversations and thought. “A biography that succeeds better as fiction [and] embellishes the historical record to the point of being suspect,” a reviewer observed, A Sorrow in Our Heart relegated Tenskwatawa to the role of a “sniveling conniver achieving renown largely through his brother’s generosity.”5

The British biographer John Sugden made enormous strides in resurrecting the historical Tecumseh with Tecumseh: A Life, published in 1997. Prodigiously researched, Sugden’s work convincingly reconstructed Tecumseh’s early years, a period that had eluded previous biographers. The comparatively scant source material for Tecumseh’s life before 1805 compelled Sugden to infer certain of his activities, such as his presumed time among the Chickamauga Band of the Cherokee Indians of Tennessee. I found Sugden’s chronology sufficiently persuasive that I have incorporated it into my own work. I owe an immense debt to his pioneering study, one that I cheerfully acknowledge.

While he resurrected much of the early historical Tecumseh, Sugden failed to give Tenskwatawa adequate credit for his role in creating and sustaining the Indian confederacy of the Shawnee brothers. He also neglected the nativist religious fervor that contributed to the emergence of Tenskwatawa and that he shaped into a coherent and enthralling doctrine. Nor does Sugden address the compelling evidence that Tecumseh truly believed his brother to be a divinely inspired prophet capable of communing with the Master of Life, or Great Spirit, and also embraced his creed; both are critical aspects of the Shawnee brothers’ relationship that I explore in Tecumseh and the Prophet. The only biography of Tenskwatawa, R. David Edmunds’s 1983 work The Shawnee Prophet, addresses something of the religious underpinnings of the Shawnee brothers’ alliance. As I hope to demonstrate, Edmunds errs in contending that Tenskwatawa’s influence vanished after the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811.

I have sought to redress these and other imbalances in the historical perception of the Shawnee brothers. Simply put, without Tenskwatawa, there would have been no Tecumseh. Tenskwatawa’s program, which aimed at the moral cleansing and spiritual rebirth of a united Indian people, gave rise to the alliance that Tecumseh later built upon for political and military purposes. The relationship between the brothers that emerges in my book is symbiotic in nature. During his lifetime, Tecumseh eventually dominated but never entirely replaced Tenskwatawa as leader of their pan-Indian confederacy.

Though they did not create the concept of pan-Indianism, the Shawnee brothers’ achievements were prodigious. Before the Shawnee brothers, there had been prophetic movements and intertribal alliances against the French, British, and Americans in their turn. The Shawnee brothers themselves acknowledged the debt they owed the Ottawa war chief Pontiac and the Delaware mystic Neolin, who together had opposed British bullying of the Eastern Woodland tribes in the 1760s. The ad hoc confederacies of Pontiac and Neolin, and later of Chiefs Blue Jacket and Little Turtle had also blunted the white wave, but these were relatively localized movements. It was the Shawnee brothers who would emerge as truly transformative figures, able to unite adherents from more than a dozen tribes in confronting both the spiritual and physical menace the young American Republic posed to the Indian way of life. Their goal of a grand Indian alliance provides a window into the larger story of the turbulent early days of the United States, when American settlers spilled over the Appalachians and killed or intimidated Indians with a contemptuous disregard for treaty and law in their haste to exploit lands recently won from the British in the War of Independence. The violent treatment of the Indians and rampant lawlessness in the Old Northwest presaged the excesses of the American West half a century later and is the bloody bridge to that era, the story of which must be told if we are to appreciate the heritage of our nation’s heartland.

Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa stepped onto the stage just as the young American Republic flexed its expansionist muscles. Indisputably, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa were the most significant siblings in American Indian history. Giving Indians their due, it is only fair to conclude that the Shawnee brothers also were among the most influential siblings in the annals of America.

Here, presented together for the first time, are the interwoven lives of Tecumseh and the Shawnee Prophet. This book is their story, but I have tried to encompass also the events, personalities, and cultural and physical forces at play in their world. Let us begin, then, not with the birth of the elder brother Tecumseh, but with the tragic death of their father, Puckeshinwau, battling American colonists; Tecumseh was just six years old, and Tenskwatawa yet in his mother’s womb. The loss of their father epitomized the disruption and disintegration of thousands of Indian families during this tragic and largely forgotten epoch in America’s march westward.

List of Maps

MAP 1

The Lower Great Lakes and Upper Ohio Valley in 1768

MAP 2

The Shawnee Brothers’ Country, 1774-1794

MAP 3

Eastern North America, 1792

MAP 4

Indian Land Cessions, 1803-1809

MAP 5

The United States, 1811

MAP 6

The Shawnee Brothers’ Country, 1811

MAP 7

Tecumseh’s Southern Odyssey, 1811

MAP 8

Battle of Tippecanoe, November 7, 1811

MAP 9

The Detroit Country, 1812

MAP 10

Theater of Operations, 1813

MAP 11

Battle of Fort Meigs, May 5, 1813

MAP 12

Retreat on the Thames River, October 1813

MAP 13

Battle of the Thames, October 5, 1813

THE WARRIOR AND THE PROPHET

PROLOGUE

Dawn of the Long Knives

DAYBREAK, October 10, 1774. In dense forest, a column of 700 Shawnee and Mingo warriors uncoils into a ragged, mile-long line. Unlike years past, the warriors are not stalking game. Rather, they are preparing to strike 1,200 unsuspecting Virginia militiamen camped at Point Pleasant, a craggy triangle at the confluence of the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers, approximately 150 miles southwest of modern Wheeling, West Virginia. A carpet of red and russet leaves deadens their footfalls. The warriors wear breechclouts, which are single pieces of cloth wrapped around the hips, buckskin leggings, and moccasins. A few also sport linen hunting shirts purchased from white traders. Most carry smoothbore muskets, tomahawks, scalping knives, and bow and arrows for use if their ammunition runs out. Silver rings dangle from their noses. Huge earrings hang on distended earlobes, framing faces painted in fierce patterns of red and black.

The leader of the war party, the Shawnee chief Cornstalk, would prefer to be elsewhere. Although the provocation had been immense, he had called for restraint. Virginians had flouted a royal proclamation prohibiting settlement on Indian land and instead spilled across the Kanawha River into the Kanawha Valley, part of the greater Kentucky country, all of which was prime Shawnee hunting ground. “I have with great trouble and pains prevailed on the foolish people amongst us to sit still and do no harm till we see whether it is the intention of the white people in general to fall on us,” Cornstalk had told a British official, “and shall continue so to do in the hopes that matters may be settled.” But the royal governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunmore, who himself coveted Indian land for personal profit, had no expectation of a peaceful denouement. Frontier subjects, he wrote the Crown, despised treaties made with Indians, “whom they consider but little removed from the brute creation.” So too did the Virginia aristocracy. With the spring thaw in 1774, surveyors representing George Washington, Patrick Henry, and other Tidewater elites staked large claims along the Ohio River. Waving away the royal edict against land grabs as a “temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,” Washington told his personal surveyor not to worry.1

With the surveyors came settlers willing to wager their scalps on a scrap of land. For a time, Cornstalk succeeded in controlling his young warriors. They turned back white intruders with stern warnings but seldom harmed them. Then in April 1774 a gang of frontier ruffians butchered a small party of inoffensive Mingo men and women who had crossed the Ohio River to buy rum at a neighborhood grog shop. Other Mingoes who attempted to investigate were shot from their canoes. The dead included the sister and younger brother of the Mingo chief “Captain John” Logan, a longtime friend of the whites who, averred a pioneer who knew Logan well, represented “the best specimen of humanity, either white or red,” that he had ever met.

The massacre shocked the colonies and the Crown. The young Virginia aristocrat Thomas Jefferson excoriated the supposed perpetrators. Hard words and hand-wringing, however, marked the extent of the white response. When the Crown’s colonial justice proved empty, Logan sought revenge in the Indian fashion; he slayed just enough frontiersmen to even the score, taking care to exculpate the Shawnees from his bloody work. To the charred door of a ravaged cabin, Logan posted a succinct confession. “You killed my kin . . . then I thought I must kill too. The Indians is not angry [sic] only me.”2 Backcountry settlers saw matters otherwise. Misconstruing Chief Cornstalk’s neutrality as hostile intent, Virginia militiamen destroyed a large Shawnee village in the Ohio country. They also laid waste to six Mingo towns.

The die was cast. Shawnee and Mingo war parties retaliated. Frontiersmen reciprocated. Havoc and horror rent the wilderness. As the frontier crumbled, Lord Dunmore mustered the militia to deal the Indians a two-pronged thrashing. No longer able to keep the peace, Chief Cornstalk assumed the mantle of supreme Shawnee war leader. He tried to forge a broad Indian alliance, but British threats and cajolery sidelined other tribes. And so in late September, Cornstalk sallied forth with his Shawnee and Mingo force to defend their lands. Calculating that his only chance lay in defeating Dunmore’s armies before they could unite, Cornstalk turned his attention first to the command of Gen. Andrew Lewis, who was then creeping across the wilds of western Virginia toward Point Pleasant. Although outnumbered, Cornstalk had able Shawnee lieutenants, among them the rising star Puckeshinwau, already honored as both a war and a civil leader, offices the Shawnees rarely combined.3

The Indians hated the militiamen but respected their fighting prowess. They called the Virginians the “Long Knives” because of the butcher knives and short swords that they wielded with as much skill as the Indians did the tomahawk. Like Indian warriors, the Virginians were a colorful if undisciplined lot. A few of the officers wore regular uniforms, but most were clad in the same sort of hunting shirts, leather leggings, homemade breeches, broad-brimmed hats or animal-skin caps, and moccasins as their men. Each militiaman carried a flintlock long-rifle or English musket, a bullet pouch, and powder horn carved to individual taste. In addition to knives, many also tucked tomahawks into their belts. Well schooled in Indian warfare and raging with the Kentucky land-fever, the Virginians were impatient for the fray.4

This morning, however, they slumbered soundly, unaware of the approaching warriors. The night before, the Indians had slipped across the Ohio River in crude rafts beneath a cobalt sky, debouching on the rocky, timber-strewn Virginia riverbank four miles north of the militia camp. Cornstalk and his lieutenants oversaw the carefully choreographed battle preparations. Their warriors slept a few hours, leaning against trees or propped against forked poles, weapons at the ready. Hunters killed twelve deer and ritually sliced the venison under the watchful eyes of medicine men (spiritual and natural healers), who examined the roasted strips for spiritual purity before handing each warrior one piece. After eating, the men buried their blankets and shirts beneath leaves. Deploying in units of twenty, they each crammed four balls into their muskets to inflict maximum punishment at short range. They would tomahawk any survivors. Cornstalk selected the best marksmen to descend to the riverbank to pick off any Virginians desperate enough to plunge into the broad Ohio after the Indians sprang their trap.5

And then his plan unraveled. At dawn, October 10, 1774, two early-rising Virginians wandered into the forest to hunt deer. Instead they ran into the Indians. One militiaman crumpled, riddled with musket balls, but the other stumbled back into camp to sound the alarm. Instantly the drums beat to arms. The backwoodsmen rolled from their blankets, examined their flints and priming, and awaited orders.

Feigning composure, General Lewis lit his pipe. He blew a few puffs and then ordered two colonels to lead double columns of 150 men forward to discover the source of the commotion. Both officers fell in the first Indian volley. Concealed behind the trunks of maple and pine and in the tangled underbrush of the river bottom, the warriors dropped dozens of militiamen, screaming epithets at the “sons of bitches” and “white dogs” as they fired. Lewis pushed out reinforcements, and the combatants grappled at close quarters in the smoke-choked timber. “Hide where I would,” a Virginian recalled, “the muzzle of some rifle was gaping in my face and the wild, distorted countenance of a savage was rushing towards me with uplifted tomahawk. The contest resembled more a circus of gladiators than a battle.”6

After six hours of close combat, the two sides backed apart and traded fire from behind trees and fallen timber. Puckeshinwau and his fellow war leaders moved along the Indian line, exhorting their warriors to “lie close,” “shoot well,” and “fight and be strong.” Near sunset, General Lewis occupied a high ridge that Cornstalk had neglected to secure. Stung by bullets from above their left flank and low on ammunition, the Indians melted back into the forest and recrossed the Ohio. The Virginians contented themselves with scalping fallen warriors and collecting souvenirs.7

It had been a bloody twelve hours. The Indians killed seventy-five Virginians and wounded another 140. Perhaps forty warriors died. Hoping to disguise their losses, the Indians rolled several of their dead into the river. The Virginians nevertheless collected thirty-two scalps. These they affixed to a post at Point Pleasant.8

The battle claimed just one prominent Indian, the Shawnee war leader Puckeshinwau. His thirteen-year-old son Cheeseekau, not yet a warrior, had accompanied him into action. After Puckeshinwau fell mortally wounded, Cheeseekau helped ease him back over the Ohio in a driftwood raft. Before dying, Puckeshinwau reputedly admonished his young son to preserve his family’s honor, never reconcile with the Long Knives, and “in the future lead forth to battle his younger brothers” against them. Cheeseekau swore to obey. Puckeshinwau’s warriors buried their chief deep in the forest.

Cheeseekau had accepted a heavy burden. He had three siblings, and his now-widowed mother was pregnant with triplets. Cheeseekau’s favorite sibling, upon whom he would lavish most of his attention and who would best fulfill his father’s last wish, was his six-year-old brother Tecumseh, the “Shooting Star.”9

• PART •

ONE

1

The Great Awakening

TECUMSEH’S FATHER had never lived in the land for which he fought and died. Nor had any Shawnee resided in the Kentucky country for nearly two decades prior to the Battle of Point Pleasant.

Puckeshinwau also had been a relative newcomer to the Ohio Valley village he had come to call home. The young war leader of a peripatetic Shawnee band, he grew to manhood in the heart of the Creek Indian confederacy, six hundred miles to the south, in what is today central Alabama. By 1759, however, the time seemed propitious for a move. White settlers were pressing the Creek country from the east, and Puckeshinwau’s followers found the prospect of Shawnee unity captivating. Puckeshinwau went reluctantly, however. His first wife, since deceased, had been Creek, and he had adopted something of their ways. Methoataske, his second bride, belonged to a respected Shawnee family with ties to the Ohio bands, and she was anxious to head north.1

The southern Shawnees trekked hopefully toward the Ohio River Valley. So did the handful of Shawnees who lived in western Pennsylvania. All thought themselves headed for their ancestral homeland, presumably a country of peace and tribal unity beyond the reach of whites. Their destination, however, was the fault line between French and British interests, and as such was fated to become an imperial battleground.

The British had encouraged the Shawnees to assemble in the Ohio Valley, to “come home again, that you may become once more a people and not dispersed through the world.” English agents claimed the French “[have] deceived you and scattered you about the woods, that they might have it in their power to keep you poor.” As the brunt of mockery by other Algonquins, who derided them as “a people with nowhere a fire burning,” the Shawnees found that the British beckons reinforced their own desire to return home.2

Then the fire engulfed them. Hoping to avoid entanglements with the whites, the Shawnees instead contributed to the onset of war when they persuaded their Miami Indian allies to settle near them and invite reputable Pennsylvania merchants to compete with French traders. The proposal made sense to the Miamis; the Ohio Valley had once been theirs, too. But France saw the Miamis and Shawnees as dangerous British surrogates who threatened its trade route between French Canada and Louisiana. Descending on the Ohio Valley from the Great Lakes, the French and their Indian allies built a fort at the site of modern Pittsburgh and in November 1755 slaughtered a large British force under Gen. Edward Braddock sent to expel them. Siding with the now-dominant French, Shawnee warriors ravaged the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers. Slaughtering hundreds of settlers, they made the name Shawnee synonymous with unbridled savagery. A French officer, horrified at their apparent cruelty, lamented that the Shawnees had become “the instrument of hatred between two powerful rivals, as also that of [their] own destruction.”3

Which nearly occurred. When the British conquered Canada and defeated the French in 1763, Algonquin tribes like the Shawnees paid dearly for their French alliance. The Indians had hoped that the victorious British would abandon their frontier forts and, like the French before them, become a benevolent father who lavished presents on his red children. Unfortunately for the Indians, the recently ended European Seven Years’ War had depleted the British treasury, and the Crown economized at their expense. The gifts of gunpowder and lead on which the Indians had come to depend for the hunt ceased; let the natives revert to bows and arrows, the British reasoned. The Indians, however, wanted the best of both worlds—European goods with no whites in their country except traders.

No sooner had the British imposed their austerity regime than a smallpox epidemic devastated Shawnee and Miami villages. Puckeshinwau and his family escaped unscathed, but scores succumbed. Compounding the Indians’ despair, the British demanded they release hundreds of white captives, few of whom wanted to repatriate. Adoptive families were ripped apart. Meanwhile, as loved ones departed, unwanted whites intruded, a two-way traffic the British did not intend. Ignoring the Crown prohibition, hundreds of rural poor crossed the Alleghenies to scratch out crude homes along the upper reaches of the Ohio River.

An English missionary characterized the incoming frontier rabble as “white savages [who] subsist by hunting,” an assessment with which the British military agreed. “Lamentably dissolute in their morals,” these otherwise impoverished rascals had an abundant hatred of Indians and an ample supply of rum, with which they plied the Indians to rob them of their furs. Chiefs protested to no avail, and the corrosive effect of liquor rendered their warriors restive.4

The turmoil spared the eastern Ohio country, where the Delaware “grandfathers” of the Shawnees resided. There nevertheless lurked dangers and evil portents enough to set some Delawares to pondering. None contemplated the Delaware destiny more profoundly than did an enigmatic mystic named Neolin, who feared the white man’s diseases, abhorred the niggardly and arrogant British officials who treated the Indians as infants, and understood that colonists wanted Indian land. Perhaps, he speculated, in straying from traditional ways, the Indians themselves were to blame for their misfortunes. One night, alone by his wigwam fire, Neolin beheld a man materialize from the flames to tell him that “these things he was thinking were right.”5

The spectral visitor escorted Neolin to the gates of eternity, where the Great Spirit revealed to Neolin the path to righteousness. From that night forward, Neolin was a prophet (or an imposter, depending on the source). Clutching a hieroglyphic-painted deerskin and weeping ceaselessly, he roamed his village exhorting passersby to hear and see the Great Spirit’s teachings.

Neolin offered a selective return to the old ways interwoven with promises of heavenly rewards for the faithful and damnation for skeptics. (Heaven, the Delaware Prophet assured his disciples, contained only Indians.) Within months his doctrine spread from the Ohio Valley to the Great Lakes. By early 1763, every Algonquin tribe had its devotees, awakened to a religious and cultural movement that superseded tribal and village loyalties.

Neolin taught that Indians must abandon their sacred medicine bags, which were the playthings of evil spirits, and instead pray directly to the Great Spirit, better known to the Shawnees as the Master of Life. They must forswear rum and purify themselves by drinking and vomiting an herbal tea. The Shawnees drank and spewed the concoction with such enthusiasm that their village of Wakatomica became known to white traders as “vomit town.” Regurgitating herbs was one thing, but few Indians took seriously Neolin’s admonition to abstain from sexual intercourse far more frequently than the Indian belief in the competing sources of male and female power dictated, nor his insistence that fire made with steel and flint was impure; flames, he said, should be started only by rubbing sticks together. Easier to accept because it entailed no immediate sacrifice was Neolin’s call for the gradual abandonment of European trade goods and firearms, a seven-year transition from guns to bows and arrows.

The Indians would need their muskets in the near term because Neolin also preached a call to arms against the whites, prophesying that there would be “two or three good talks and then war.” The whites would be wiped from the continent, game animals would return in abundance, earth would become an Indian paradise, and the direct route to heaven would reopen. With Neolin’s appeal, pan-Indianism was born in the Old Northwest.6

In April 1763, near the British fort at Detroit, the Ottawa war chief Pontiac imparted a watered-down version of Neolin’s moral code to a council of Indian allies. Indians could drink rum, Pontiac assured his listeners, just not to excess, and men might enjoy sexual relations, but only with their wife, and with one wife only. Finally, it was just the British colonists who were enemies of the Indians; the Great Spirit looked favorably upon the French, who after all had implicitly offered to support war against the British. Translating Neolin’s call to arms into action, Pontiac laid siege to Fort Detroit. He sent black wampum belts, symbols of the call to war, to the tribes of the Ohio Valley. One British post after another fell until only three remained. It was a conflict of unbridled violence. Drunken Ottawas tortured and ritualistically ate captives; renegade colonists slaughtered innocent Indians. The Shawnee chief Cornstalk took a huge war party deep into western Virginia, killing and seizing civilians with abandon. Nearly 2,000 British soldiers and colonial civilians perished in the opening months of Pontiac’s War, but Forts Detroit, Niagara, and Pitt held out, and the Crown rushed in reinforcements. A stalemate ensued that neither side could break. Unable to defeat Pontiac, the British elevated him to the status of chief of all Algonquins, an office anathema to every Indian except Pontiac. In 1766 he made peace with the British. The war sputtered to a close, but Pontiac had forfeited his standing among the Indians. He went into exile deep in the Illinois country, and three years later an irate warrior murdered him on the fetid streets of a small French trading village. In accepting the British proffer of supreme leadership of the still fiercely independent Algonquins, Pontiac had reached too high.7

Tales of Neolin and Pontiac, of the prophecies of the Delaware seer and the martial talents of his Ottawa disciple, would be told around Indian campfires for years to come. They were heroes for boys to venerate, perhaps eventually to emulate.

Besides prideful stories, the Shawnees gained nothing from Pontiac’s War. The British compelled them to surrender adopted white members of the tribe, and the reinvigorated Iroquois, who had sided with the British, demanded the Shawnees abandon their claim to hunting grounds south of the Ohio River, comprising most of present-day Kentucky and West Virginia. In November 1768 the Iroquois in turn ceded these lands to the British in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. The country west and north of the Ohio, which the British lumped under the rubric “Indian Territory,” was to be inviolate, the Ohio River boundary permanent. Barred from the proceedings, the Shawnees denounced the Fort Stanwix Treaty as barefaced thievery. They ceased to recognize Iroquois leadership, endeavored to build a coalition independent of the Iroquois, and forswore addressing the British as fathers. Shawnee scouting parties patrolled the Kentucky country, on the watch for white interlopers.8

The trespassers came through the Cumberland Gap or down the Ohio River: hardscrabble farmers in search of better land, fugitives from justice, and the congenitally restless of slack moral fiber, while from the comfort of their Virginia estates land speculators deployed surveyors to finagle title to the Indian lands.9

Among the first intruders was an impoverished North Carolinian named Daniel Boone and six other poor whites. Crossing the Cumberland Gap in early 1769, they slaughtered the teeming game animals wantonly without encountering a single Indian until December, when a group of Shawnees under an English-speaking war leader named Captain Will burst into their predawn winter bivouac. “The time of our sorrow was now arrived,” mused Boone. Instead of meting out the expected torture and death, the Shawnees behaved “in the friendliest manner,” simply confiscating his party’s furs with an admonishment never to return. “Now, brothers,” declared Captain Will, “go home and stay there. Don’t come here anymore, for this is the Indians’ hunting ground, and all the animals, skins, and furs are ours. And if you are so foolish as to venture here again, you may be sure the wasps and yellow-jackets will string you severely.”

The Shawnees had shown remarkable restraint, but they were mistaken if they thought their painted faces, flashing tomahawks, and formidable war clubs would deter Boone and his companions. No sooner had the North Carolinians reached home than they made plans to return.10

The Iroquois betrayal at Fort Stanwix and the first wave of white emigrants left the Ohio Shawnees to navigate frightening but familiar waters—just become settled in one place, only to have it threatened. Tribal councils debated the viability of the Ohio Valley as a permanent home. Many were for pulling up stakes and relocating west of the Mississippi River. Not only were whites threatening the eastern periphery of the Ohio Valley, but the region also was fast repopulating with other Indians, stressing a game supply already depleted by overhunting for the trade in furs and skins. Relative to the British colonial population on the eastern seaboard, Indian numbers in the Ohio Valley were pitifully small, however. At the time of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, several tribes called the region home, but disease and warfare had taken a heavy toll on all of them. The Shawnees, numbering just 1,500, claimed most of the southern half of what is today Ohio. The Delawares, 3,500 in all, occupied eastern Ohio and northern Pennsylvania nearly to the Delaware River. Unlike the Shawnees, they had no interest in Kentucky.

Immediately north of the Shawnees were the Wyandots. Remnants of the once mighty Huron confederacy, they had been reduced by warfare and disease to 1,250 members. Although their numbers were small and they were not Algonquins, their prestige was such that many Algonquins deferred to them on boundary and other intertribal questions. The northwestern border of the Shawnee country touched land claimed by the Ottawas, most of whose 5,000 members resided in what is today western Michigan. West of the Shawnees were the 1,500 Miamis. The Shawnees did not yet have much contact with other tribes of the Great Lakes region. The total Indian population of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley in 1768 was approximately 60,000. The thirteen British colonies numbered nearly 2 million. The odds against the Indians were bad, and with high birth rates among the whites and unabated immigration to the colonies, they would only get worse.11

Tecumseh’s father Puckeshinwau stood with those Shawnees who were opposed to leaving Ohio. And by 1768 his words carried weight. He had won considerable renown in Pontiac’s War and may also have become the head chief of the Kispokos, one of five tribal divisions. His wife Methoataske belonged to the Pekowi division. Of these and the other Shawnee divisions, more will be said. Since moving to Ohio, Methoataske had given birth to the couple’s first three children— a son, Cheeseekau, born about 1761; a daughter, Tecumpease, likely born the following year; and then another son, Sauwauseekau.

Puckeshinwau probably helped found Kispoko town, a new satellite Shawnee village well north of the troubled Ohio River border and some seventy miles southeast of modern Dayton. In addition to his honors from Pontiac’s War, Puckeshinwau had returned from the conflict with a four-year-old white boy named Richard Sparks, seized in western Virginia.12

A young male addition to the family undoubtedly pleased Puckeshinwau and Methoataske. Sons were a source of pride, and a white boy taken young enough to raise as an Indian could be counted on to help fill the ranks of Shawnee warriors, which battle losses had cut to no more than four hundred. Sparks was also roughly the same age as the couple’s son Sauwauseekau, making them natural playmates, once Richard’s white identity was expunged.

Puckeshinwau grew quite fond of his adopted son. He renamed the boy Shawtunte and rejected British demands to repatriate him. Sparks lived among the Shawnees for a dozen years before returning to white society. Late in her life, Sparks’s white widow said his adoptive parents raised him “with unusual kindness and indulgence.” Perhaps that explains why Shawtunte resisted leaving Puckeshinwau and Methoataske. “I remember his telling me how great a calamity he considered it to be taken away from the Indians,” recalled his white brother-in-law, “and of his schemes for making his escape and returning to them.”13

The fateful year of the Fort Stanwix betrayal, 1768, also brought Puckeshinwau and Methoataske a natural addition to their family. Spring found them in Chillicothe, the principal Shawnee town and tribal ceremonial center forty-five miles south of modern Columbus, Ohio. Puckeshinwau had come to Chillicothe to attend another of the interminable councils held to discuss the tribe’s future. Methoataske, meanwhile, awaited the birth of her fourth child. Indian women far along in a pregnancy frequently traveled with their husbands, but they customarily gave birth only in the company of female relatives or friends. As her delivery date drew near Methoataske and her attendants retired to a secluded spot “two arrow flights” southeast of Chillicothe, near the banks of the Scioto River. One night, as Methoataske kept to the hut and waited, the other women saw a shooting star sweep across the sky and sink into the western horizon.

“One passed across,” the women excitedly told Methoataske. Almost immediately, Tecumseh was born. Such is the story of Tecumseh’s birth as his great-grandson Thomas Wildcat Alford related it. Stephen D. Ruddell, an adopted white boy and youthful confidant of Tecumseh, told a similar tale. In Ruddell’s version, which he may have gotten from Tecumseh, it was Methoataske herself who witnessed the comet. Both accounts are plausible as to the circumstances if not the location of Tecumseh’s birth.14 They also convey something of the significance of Tecumseh’s name, the meaning of which can only be rendered imperfectly in English. Even the pronunciation is elusive. Ruddell, who spoke both English and Shawnee fluently, gave it as “Tec-cum-theth.”

While Methoataske and her infant son remained cloistered, Puckeshinwau invited two elderly relatives or friends to the family’s wigwam, calling upon them to perform the sacred naming ceremony on the tenth day after his son’s birth. The name-givers were to ponder and pray until they divined two names from which the parents might choose. On the morning of the tenth day, Methoataske cleaned herself and her infant well, left her hut, and returned to the family wigwam. Her caregivers prepared the naming feast. While the extended family crowded around, the infant received a sponge-bath. Then the name-givers declaimed on the logic behind the names they offered, one of which presumably incorporated the shooting-star metaphor. They called on the Master of Life—the Shawnee creator—to protect the baby and exhorted the parents to raise him well. Having heard the name-givers out, Puckeshinwau and Methoataske made their choice.

The name they chose, Tecumseh, derives from níla-ni-tkamáthka, meaning “I cross the path or way” of a living being. As Tecumseh was born into the Panther umsoma (patrilineal clan or name group), the animal whose path he crossed was a panther—no ordinary panther, but rather a miraculous creature of transcendental existence that lived in the water but periodically burst across the skies as a shooting star.15 The panther, celestial or commonplace, was a formidable creature in the eighteenth-century Ohio Valley. A Shawnee male whose name incorporated that of the panther inspired awe because the panther’s hunting skills were an object of envy. Shawnee males of the Panther clan conceived of themselves as panthers, and the birth of a boy of the clan beneath a celestial incarnation of the beast portended immense hunting prowess.16

The infant Tecumseh viewed the world from a tkithoway, or cradleboard, strapped securely onto his mother’s back. The Shawnees believed the tkithoway helped develop good posture. To steady Tecumseh’s head, Methoataske likely added a wooden hoop adorned with shells and silver ornaments. As she performed her daily chores— carrying water, gathering firewood, cooking meals, and planting the spring corn crop (Shawnee women indulged in no postpartum rest)—Tecumseh rocked gently on her back. Methoataske attended to Tecumseh’s earthly needs; Puckeshinwau saw to the baby’s spiritual welfare. After Tecumseh’s umbilical cord fell off, Puckeshinwautucked it into his hunting bag. He carried it with him until autumn, then buried it with the antler of a young buck. The commingling of antler and umbilical cord in the earth, blessed with the proper prayers, would help Tecumseh grow into a mighty hunter.17

Freed from the cradleboard after a year, Tecumseh became subject to a mild form of discipline. If he misbehaved, the toddler might feel the swat of a stick on his tiny legs or find himself tossed into a shallow stream. Shawnees generally doted on their children, however, and he would quickly discover that his parents preferred to praise good conduct rather than punish bad behavior. He would also learn to respect the elderly, whose authority over children was absolute.18

No sooner did Tecumseh learn to walk than he was one with nature. His feet would have glided over the cool, smooth-swept dirt surface of the family wigwam in the spring and summer and sunk into the soft and warm animal-skin rugs that covered the floor in the fall and winter months. The gratifying wintergreen scent of the birchbark walls mingled in his tiny nostrils with the pungent odor of smoke rising from the central hearth. Outdoors he waddled over a carpet of crenate leaves, learning to dodge the catkin and cones that dotted the ground. A symphony of familiar sounds—the idle chatter of women at work, the laughter of lounging warriors, the ceaseless barking and yapping of countless dogs—comforted Shawnee toddlers like Tecumseh. A thousand aromas rose from the forest floor, wafted on the wind. At night broken moonlight shivered beneath the canopy of swaying treetops. Inside the wigwam Tecumseh jostled for a spot among his parents, three siblings, adopted white brother, and the inevitable evening visitors. Most Shawnees, he would discover, abhorred solitude.

When Tecumseh was two, Methoataske gave birth to her fifth child, a son named Nehaaseemo, of whom little is known. Sometime during Tecumseh’s childhood (probably when he was eight), smallpox struck Tecumseh. The vomiting, diarrhea, and excruciating headaches eventually passed, leaving in their wake a face lightly pockmarked for life.19

Then came the bitter autumn of 1774, when Puckeshinwau fell fighting the Long Knives at Point Pleasant, and Tecumseh’s fourteen-year-old elder brother Cheeseekau assumed the role of surrogate parent. His sister Tecumpease, who had married the fine young warrior Wahsikegaboe (sometimes spelled Wasabogoa) and achieved considerable status herself among the women of the village, helped ease the pregnant Methoataske’s burden. Nothing, however, could have prepared Methoataske for her delivery in spring 1775. She gave birth to triplets, a supremely rare occurrence that the Shawnees believed an ill omen and that left Methoataske shaken and ashamed. Her distress was brief, however. One of the infants, a girl, died shortly after birth. The baby boys survived, emerging from their naming ceremonies as Kumskaukau, “Cat That Flies,” and Laloeshiga, a runt whose name meant, perhaps hopefully, “Panther with a Handsome Tail.”20 In addition to Cheeseekau and Tecumpease’s contributions, Blackfish, a good-natured war chief of the Chillicothe division who had been a devoted friend of Puckeshinwau, did what he could as a foster father to Methoataske’s younger children.21

Lord Dunmore’s War had effectively ended with the Battle of Point Pleasant. Chief Cornstalk finally recognized the Ohio River boundary line as it had been fixed in the Fort Stanwix Treaty. Some Shawnees advocated peaceful coexistence. Others distanced themselves from the Long Knives. Several hundred Shawnees, representing the entire Thawekila division, resettled among the Creeks. And the residents of Chillicothe town, 170 families that included those of Methoataske and Blackfish, removed from the Scioto to the Little Miami River in southwestern Ohio.22

There was no sating the white appetite for Indian land. A memorandum to the British Secretary of State for North America urged His Majesty’s Government to abrogate any agreement to abstain from exploiting the Ohio Valley because “the lands are excellent, the climate temperate, [and] the country is well-watered by several navigable rivers communicating with each other.” Large boats were able to negotiate the Ohio River itself year round, making it cheaper to export goods to British West Florida and the West Indies by river (first along the Ohio, then down the Mississippi) than by sea from New York or Philadelphia.23

No wonder then that wealthy land speculators did a lucrative business buying up large tracts, while the less fortunate poured into the newly opened Kentucky country to grab small parcels concentrated around community forts, called stations. The more daring ventured north of the Ohio River. The deepening encroachments distressed a missionary among the Delawares. “The whole country on the Ohio River has already drawn the attention of many persons from the neighboring colonies,” he wrote. “Generally forming themselves into parties, [they] would rove through the country in search of land, and some, careless over their conduct or destitute of both honor and humanity, would join a rabble—a class of people generally met with on the frontier—who maintained that to kill an Indian was the same as killing a bear or a buffalo and would fire on Indians that came across them by the way.”24 By 1775 only Indians stood before the rabble. Unrest in the American colonies had erupted into armed conflict, forcing Great Britain to withdraw its troops from all the Indian country forts except Detroit and Niagara. The colonial empire was vanishing.

The Shawnees were uncertain what to make of the new peace emissaries who called themselves Americans. “We are often inclined to believe there is no resting place for us and that your intentions [are] to deprive us entirely of our whole country,” Shawnee chiefs told a Virginia delegation in July 1775. That summer a Continental Congress emissary found the Shawnees “constantly counseling, the women very uneasy in expectation that there would be war.” Shawnee tribal councils grew bitter. Representatives of the Kispoko and Mekoche divisions spoke for accommodation; the Chillicothe (among whom Methoataske’s family lived) and Pekowi divisions, for war.

Cornstalk did his utmost to avoid conflict with the Americans. In October 1775 he led a Shawnee delegation to Fort Pitt, on the site of Pittsburgh. In exchange for American recognition of the Ohio River as the boundary between Indian and white lands, Cornstalk and his fellow delegates signed a peace treaty that the fledgling American government would be hard pressed to enforce. For the next two years Cornstalk maintained Shawnee neutrality in the American Revolution. As American pressure on the Shawnee border grew, however, the venerable chief slowly lost his hold over all the Shawnees but the Mekoches. While Cornstalk and his people arranged to quit the roiling frontier and withdraw north toward Lake Erie, younger Chillicothe and Pekowi leaders held their ground and accepted a British call to war against the Americans. Together with the always restive Mingoes, small Chillicothe and Pekowi war parties pricked at the frontier defenses.

In November 1777, Cornstalk returned to Fort Pitt to renew his pledge of friendship and to warn of militant Shawnee designs. It was a pointless mission. The Americans had grown distrustful of all Shawnees, and Cornstalk’s words fell on deaf ears. Growing morose, he reflected, “When I was young, and went to war, I thought that each expedition might prove the last, and I would return no more. Now I am here amongst you. You may kill me if you please. I can die but once, and it is all one to me, now or another time.”

The council terminated, and the officers dispersed. Suddenly a party of enraged militiamen carrying a comrade’s scalped corpse burst into Cornstalk’s room, crying “Let us kill the Indians in the fort.” Cornstalk declared calmly, “If any Long Knife has anything against me, let him now avenge himself.” In response, a volley of eight bullets riddled his body. “If we had anything to expect from [the Shawnees],” rued the American commander, “it is now vanished.”25

Tecumseh was nine when Chief Cornstalk was murdered. He lived in the new Chillicothe town on the Little Miami River, a lovely and seemingly safe location. Wigwams interspersed with log cabins blanketed a high ridge along the river’s east bank. Just northeast of the town center stood the council house, sixty feet square and built of strong, notched hickory logs. Corn, melon, and squash fields stretched far away to the south; vegetables grew abundantly in the rich, dark soil. The Little Miami teemed with fish. The wooded hills of southwestern Ohio abounded in game animals. Twelve miles northeast of the new Chillicothe lay the smaller Shawnee community of Piqua (modern Springfield, Ohio).26

Tecumseh was a busy youngster. Strenuous exercise consumed his days. “Running, swimming, and jumping were matters of course with us,” recalled a Shawnee, “but the older men encouraged us to practice those things that developed greater strength; also, they taught us to shoot our bows and arrows with accuracy and great skill.” Tecumseh would have had a scaled-down bow and small arrows, large enough to shoot small animals or to play the hoop game (in which boys tried to send arrows through a rolling grapevine hoop), but not so large as to be a danger to him.

Adult males tested Tecumseh on his marksmanship and his endurance. “When a boy got up in the morning his face was blacked with charcoal, and he was sent out to kill some game for food,” Tecumseh’s great-grandson wrote of the woodland practicum. “It might be a quail, a rabbit, or a squirrel, seldom larger game than that. He was given no food until he returned with what he was sent out to procure. Because his face was blacked, everyone who saw him knew why he was out, and no one gave him food or helped him in any way. He was absolutely on his own resources.”

Hunting came naturally to Tecumseh. “He always killed more birds than any of his party,” recalled the métis (mixed blood) Anthony Shane, who later married a cousin of Tecumseh. Shane said that Tecumseh had his own little gang, over which he exercised implicit control.

The Shawnees expected nothing less from the son of a renowned war chief, watched over by a celestial panther guardian. Emulating the animal’s nobler qualities would naturally have become the adolescent Tecumseh’s most ardent desire. Like the panther, he longed to be a strong and stealthy beast of prey capable of catching deer at will. He learned that the panthers who stalked the forests surrounding Chillicothe never harmed humans without provocation—neither would Tecumseh. Should an Indian draw too near the den of a female panther with cubs, however, he faced mortal danger. Surviving such an encounter required absolute self-possession. Tecumseh learned never to turn his back on a she-panther, thinking he could escape. He must stare the animal down. If he lacked the courage to shoot, he must gently but firmly walk backward until he was a safe distance away. If he shot and missed, he would almost certainly forfeit his life.27

Tecumseh was careful not to play with girls; Shawnee boys who did so were doomed to merciless ridicule. From the time a boy could walk, he was taught to feel superior to his sisters. Nevertheless, Tecumseh worshipped the fifteen-year-old Tecumpease, the adolescent she-panther of the family whenever Methoataske faltered. And little girls lavished affection on him. Shane said Tecumseh told the other boys that he would never tie himself to just one girl because all the pretty girls wanted him.28

As with childhood female attention, Tecumseh seldom wanted for nourishing food. He enjoyed a varied diet. Whites who ate Shawnee dishes usually enjoyed them, too. Favorites included venison roasted over open coals with herbs and dipped in bear oil; beaver tails, duck, or squirrel wrapped in wet corn husks and baked in hot ashes; and dried pumpkin and venison cakes. Some whites objected to the absence of salt. The Shawnees also liked salt, but it was hard to come by. Obtained from naturally occurring salt springs, or licks, it required much boiling to extract even a pinch. So the Shawnees made do with herbs, a healthy alternative. As for sweets, the Shawnees favored molasses sugar but also enjoyed chocolate acquired from traders. Corn was a dietary staple venerated as a divine gift to be harvested joyfully. The dishes made from corn ranged from a wholesome cornbread mixed with fruit to emergency hunting rations in the form of parched-corn cakes.29

When not visited by white men’s diseases, the Shawnees were a healthy people who took great pride in their physical appearance. Their standards of hygiene were higher than those of white frontiersmen, which were frankly abysmal; a white captive boy remembered that his Shawnee father bathed regularly year round, plunging nude into frigid rivers in the dead of winter. Shawnee men thought facial and body hair unattractive and plucked it with mussel shells. Of at least medium height, slender, and well built, their skin tone varied from a light olive to a dark brown, and their eyes were generally brown. The Shawnees had jet-black hair when young, which grayed normally with age.

European trade goods comprised much of the clothing and adornments of the woodland tribes. In cold weather Shawnee men, and sometimes women, wore a cloak called a match-coat. Formerly made of deer, panther, or bearskin and worn with the fur facing inward, by the late eighteenth century, Indian match-coats more commonly were of coarse woolen cloth called stroud, usually about seven feet long, which the wearer wrapped around the upper part of the body like a toga. Match-coats also served in a pinch as blankets. Eventually readymade European garments replaced them in the Shawnee wardrobe.

In warm weather, men dressed in a linen shirt; a breechclout, which was a long rectangular piece of tanned deerskin, cloth, or animal fur worn between the legs and tucked over a belt, so that the flaps covered the genitals; animal-skin leggings; and deerskin moccasins. Some also donned hats bought from traders or wrapped handkerchiefs around their heads. Male hairstyles also reflected a European influence. Traditionally men had shaved their heads bald to the crown, leaving only a circular handful that they adorned with a feathered plume or a colorful hair roach. Increasingly, however, warriors wore their hair long, braided, and adorned with ostrich feathers. Tattoos, never frequent among Indians north of the Ohio River to begin with, were seldom seen in Tecumseh’s day. Only war paint—fashioned from iron oxide and most commonly worn as red, black, or white stripes—remained unchanged. Shawnee traditionalists found the wearing of long hair and linen shirts by men off-putting.30

Women’s wear, on the other hand, drew general approval, even of traditionalist males. Most adult females wore calico blouses that closed at the breasts with a silver brooch and extended about six inches below the waist; a skirt of stroud terminating just below the knee; and leggings. They greased their hip-length hair with bear fat until it sheened and then braided it. Some women daubed red dots on the cheeks, but most used no facial paint. The colorful apparel and ornamentation of Shawnee females fascinated one captive white adolescent. Elderly women dressed simply, but “all of the young and middle-aged are passionately fond of finery... having the tops of their moccasins curiously wrought with beads ribbons and porcupine quills, the borders of their leggings and the bottom and edges of their strouds tastily bound with ribbons, edged with beads, and frequently on their moccasins and leggings small tufts of deer’s hair, dyed red and confined in small pieces of twine, rattling as they walked,” he recalled. Jewelry was ubiquitous. “According to their ability they covered [themselves] with large and small silver brooches and wore on their wrists and arms silver bracelets from one to four inches in width.”

Both sexes coveted silver baubles, the more the better. Indeed, men were more ostentatious than women. Not only did they wear silver bracelets and nose rings, they also customarily cut their ears, binding the auricle with brass wire, from which dangled silver pieces nearly to their shoulders. To white men unaccustomed to the sight, a fully decked-out woodland Indian presented an aspect variously described as colorful, bizarre, or grotesque.31

In these striking surroundings, the young Tecumseh passed his evenings absorbed in stories told by male elders. Like other Shawnee boys, he learned the premium their people placed on oratorical skill. Tales of the first encounter between Shawnees and whites held boys spellbound with wonder and dread. A Mekoche chief related one such story: