Tecumseh and the Shawnee prophet. including sketches of George Rogers Clark, Simon Kenton, William Henry Harrison, Cornstalk, Blackhoof, Bluejacket, the Shawnee Logan, and others famous in the frontier wars of Tecumsehs time

Preface

IN this work we have related for the benefit of the general reader one of the most romantic passages in American history. We have especially sought to interest young people in the history of the country through the curiosity that everybody feels about aboriginal life and exciting adventure.

It would defeat the purpose of the book to cumber it with foot-notes and references to authorities. A large number of works, including many scarce and out of the way books, have been consulted, but we have not often thought it necessary to refer by name to an original authority, even when most closely following his lead. A list of the chief works on the various branches of our subject has been inserted at the close, for the benefit of those who may wish to study the matter further.

CHAPTER XV, General Harrison and the Prophet 135 CHAPTER XVL Plans and Character of Tecumseh 151

CHAPTER XVIL Formation of Tecumseh's Confederacy 159

CHAPTER XVIII.

Execution of Leatherlips for Witchcraft 170

CHAPTER XIX.

Meeting of Harrison and Tecumseh at Vincennes . . 174

CHAPTER XX.

The Last Council between Harrison and Tecumseh. 193

CHAPTER XXI.

Getting Ready for Wai 207

8 CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHAPTER XXII.

The Battle of Tippecanoe 216

CHAPTER XXIII.

Incidents of the Battle 224

CHAPTER XXIV, Tecumseh's Return 232

CHAPTER XXV.

Hull's Surrender 240

CHAPTER XXVI.

Sieges and Battles at the Western Forts 251

CHAPTER XXVII.

Incidents of the War — Hand to Hand Encounter,

and Death of Logan 262

CHAPTER XXVIIL

Destruction of the Mississinewa Villages — Battle and

Massacre on the River Raisin 267

CONTENTS. 9

PAGE

CHAPTER XXIX.

The Siege of Fort Meigs 271

CHAPTER XXX.

The Second Attack on Fort Meigs 283

CHAPTER XXXI.

The Attack on Fort Stephenson 289

CHAPTER XXXII.

Anecdotes of Tecumseh 296

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Perry's Victory 301

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Battle of the Thames — Death of Tecumseh 306

CHAPTER XXXV.

After Tecumseh's Death 319

APPENDIX 329

THE SHAWNEE PROPHET.

Chapter I. Tecumseh's Nation

SINCE the savages on this continent were known to civilized men, the Indian race has produced no more splendid genius than Tecumseh. He had courage and fortitude in common with most Indians, but to these he added an imagination capable of seeking the largest results, a practical wisdom that laid hold upon the readiest means of achieving his ends, and an energy rarely equaled by any commander. To this we must add the knowledge of human nature, the tact to command, the art to persuade, and the skill to mold men as he desired. He sought to unite the Indians into one vast confederacy or empire, and, putting himself at their head, to stay the progress of the whites. He was defeated, but that defeat was the result of the inherent superiority of civilization to savagery. Had his gifts been exercised in a more opportune field, he would no doubt have proven himself one of the great leaders of men. And even in his mistaken patriotism and foregone defeat, he showed himself a shrewd diplomatist, a great commander, a persuasive orator, a statesman, and a man of indomitable patience, brilliant courage, and wonclerful power of gaining and holding the allegiance of his followers.

He came of one of the most energetic and warlike of the Indian tribes. The Shawnees have always been a restless people, more adventurous than any other Indians. They belong to that family of Indian nations known as the Algonquin. This family was the most numerous of all the Indian races, and spoke a language not very different in the different tribes. The tribes which the whites first encountered in Virginia and in Massachusetts spoke dialects of this Algonquin speech. To this stock belong the Six Nations of Canada, the Chippewas or Ojibbeways of Wisconsin and Minnesota, celebrated in Longfellow's Hiawatha, the Crees of British America, the Mohegans, the Delawares, the Kickapoos, the Illinois, the Ottawas, the Sacs and Foxes, and many other tribes well known in the history of the settlement of the country. The Algonquin people are supposed to have constituted half the population east of the Mississippi at the time of the settlement of the country, and to have numbered not less than ninety thousand.

The language of the Algonquin Indians is very complex, and to the ears of those who speak languages like our own it seems to be a very strange speech. Words are joined to words, and still other words are added to express various meanings, as to time, place, person acting, person acted upon, and so forth. One of the most curious things in the Algonquin languages is that the words take on various forms, not with reference to male and female, but with reference to a division of things into superior and inferior. In some of the dialects, all, or nearly all, animate beings are superior, while inanimate objects are put into another gender, so to speak. But in one, at least, of the Algonquin tongues, the division is more remarkable — God, the spirits or angels, and men, are accounted superior; women and all lower creatures are another " gender."

The Algonquin is very stately and suited to oratory, but not well suited to light and familiar speech. It has many delicate and rhetorical turns. When a Chippewa wishes to say that a man is dead, he merely remarks that " they have put the sand upon him." When the name of a dead person is spoken they affix to it the termination of the past tense to indicate that he is not living. Tecumseh after his death becomes "Tecumseh-e-bun." Much as though we should write, " Has-been Washington," to imply that the Washington of whom we speak was no longer alive.

The history of the Shawnees, even after the settlement of America, is wrapped in obscurity. They moved about so incessantly, and were so often divided in their migrations, that we are unable to track the various divisions. Some are of the opinion that the Eries, who are said to have been destroyed by the Iroquois in very early times, were none oth ers than the Shawnees before their wanderings began. Certain it is that when we first hear of them in early documents, they seem to be divided, wandering, and of uncertain habitation. We hear of a war which was being waged against them by the Iroquois at the time of Captain John Smith's arrival in America in 1607. They were at that time located to the west of the Susquehanna, and on its banks. De Laet mentions them as on the Delaware in 1632. They are also said to have been located at the South, and to have come from near Lake Erie. We can only reconcile these conflicting accounts by supposing them to have already divided into several bands, some of which were in motion, for other authorities place their seat, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, in the basin of the Cumberland River in Kentucky. Later they are found on the Wabash, where Tecumseh long afterward made a new settlement, and in 1708 they are spoken of as removing from the Mississippi to South Carolina. The Swanee or Suwanee River, in Florida, derives its name from a party of Shawnees who had come from north of the Ohio. Yet another authority speaks of a tribe of Shawnces that had been wandering for four years in the wilderness, and who were then returning to the country of the Creeks. From all of which we gather that the Shawnees were in the earliest times what they proved to 1?e later — a people of restless energy, without fixed unity or local habitation, very energetic and warlike, breaking into small bands and reuniting again. Colden, in 1745, said that " the Shawnees were the most restless of all the Indians," and that "one tribe had quite gone down to New Spain," or Florida.

One thing that impresses us is the uselcssness of tradition among savages. The historic sense is not developed in uneducated people, and fact soon gets strangely mixed with fiction in all annals of races not yet civilized. Some authors have quoted from speeches of the Shawnees to show what their traditions of the creation are, but an Indian orator gets up his account of the creation for the purpose of carrying his point at the moment, and his story is no doubt quite as fresh to those of his own tribe who may be present as to any others.

It is inferred that the Shawnees were present at that first beneficent treaty of peace and friendship negotiated by William Penn in 1682. But there is no assurance of this fact, for to Penn and his associates but just arrived, all Indians were simply Indians, and the treaty makes no mention of their nation or names. It is quite probable that the Indian languages were at that early day so imperfectly understood that the treaty itself was apprehended by the savages more in its peaceful import than in its details. The presence of the Shawnees is inferred from* the fact that in Penn's later council with the Indians in 1701, we find Wapatha, a chief of the Shawnees, expressly mentioned as representing his people ; and in 1722, in conference with the \vhites, the Shawnees are said to have exhibited a copy of the first treaty, though the two treaties of Penn may have been confounded. f\bout 1698, nearly seventy families of Shawnees, with the consent of the government of Pennsylvania, removed from Carolina and settled on the Susquehanna. They perhaps found remaining there that portion of their tribe which was contending with the Iroquois in the time of John Smith, unless the Iroquois succeeded in quite driving them out. And these from Carolina may have been some who had been expelled in the wars in which they were almost always engaged, returning again to an old home.

In the year 1706, Thomas Chalkley, a minister of the Society of Friends, found Shawnees and Senecas living at Conestoga, near the Susquehanna. He relates that one of the tribes had a woman among the chiefs. " On informing them of our views in this visit to them," he says, in his quaint Quaker way, "they called a council, in which they were grave, and spoke one after another, without any heat or jarring." Observing that there was a woman present^ who took part in all deliberations, the missionary inquired of the interpreter how it came that a woman was admitted to council. He answered that some women were wiser than some men — a proposition not difficult even for white people to accept. This " ancient, grave woman" spoke much in council and gave her influence heartily in favor of the missionaries, so that good Thomas Chalkley adds that "the poor Indians, and in particular some of the young men and women, were under a solid exercise and concern of mind."

As early as 1684 there were Shawnees in the West, allied with the Miamis, and yet we afterward hear of Southern Shawnees expelled from Georgia emigrating to the West, and building a village at the mouth of the Wabash. They applied to the Delawares, who gave them territory in the valley of the Wyoming, whither part of them removed. In 1 742, the famous Count Zinzendorf, the leader of the Moravians, had a very curious adventure with these Indians. He went to Wyoming determined to try to introduce Christianity among them. He was not

2O TECUMSEH.

well received ; the Indians suspected him of seeking their lands, and some of them determined to assassinate him privately. He sat in his tent at night, with a small fire to keep him warm. The heat of the fire had warmed into activity a rattlesnake, that stretched itself across his leg the better to feel the fire, but the pious Count was too deeply engaged in meditation to observe the reptile. The Indians raised the blanket which served as door to his tent, but seeing the venerable missionary sitting wrapped in devout reflections and peacefully unconscious of the presence of the snake, they were seized with superstitious terror. They hurriedly returned to their village and told their associates that the old man was under the special protection of the Great Spirit, for they had found him with only a blanket for a door, and had seen a large rattlesnake crawl over him without doing him any harm.

When the war between England and France broke out in 1754 it involved the English colonies in America in a struggle with the French in Canada and the West, and the Shawnees on the Ohio took part with the French. But those residing in Pennsylvania rejected all solicitations to join them; the influence of Penn's treaties and Count Zinzendorf s missionary labors had rendered them friendly towards the whites.

TECUMSEII'S NATION. 21

About this time occurred the curious " grasshopper quarrel," which, beginning in a contest between children, ended in the expulsion of the Shawnees from the Wyoming Valley. There seems to have grown up a gradual estrangement between the Delawares and Shawnees, which was fanned to a flame by a most trivial circumstance. The women of the two tribes were gathering berries by the riverside, when some of the Shawnee children fell into a wrangle with the Delaware children over the possession of a grasshopper. The mothers took sides with their children, the Delaware women maintaining that, though a Shawnee child had caught the grasshopper, it was caught on the side of the river belonging to the Delawares, hence the Delaware children were entitled to it. From such arguments they came to blows; upon which the Shawnee women were speedily driven to their canoes by the superior numbers of their angry assailants. On their return, the Shawnee hunters, influenced by the angry complaints of the squaws, prepared to avenge the insult, but found the Delawares ready to meet them. The battle began while the Shawnees were crossing the river, and lasted afterward until many of the Delawares and full half of the Shawnees were killed. Soon after this the latter abandoned the Wyoming and settled with those Shawnee tribes that had remained in the valley of the Ohio. It was here, in their villages on the Miami, the Scioto, and the Mad River, that they became involved in the savage conflict that raged so long between the Indians and the white settlers, in which border warfare Tecumseh was cradled, educated, and spent his life.

The Shawnees were at one time divided into twelve bands or tribes, but the number gradually declined to four. Besides these bands there is another division, running through all the Algonquin tribes, into what are called " totems," the word being a corruption of "dodaim," a family mark. Each totem has some name, usually of an animal; and it is said that no man could marry a person of his own totem.

The present remnant of the once powerful Shawnees is very small, many of them having become absorbed by intermarriage with the whites no doubt. Others may have mixed with the Indian tribes, but the strength of this once powerful people has been wasted in the almost ceaseless wars in which they have been engaged, against the whites and against other Indian nations. They have ever been eager to take the sword, and they have perished by the sword. The Shawnees were accustomed to boast of their superiority to the other tribes, and their haughty pride has had much to do with their conflicts and their destruction.

" The Master of Life," said one of their chiefs in 1803, " was himself an Indian. He made the Shawnees before any other of the human race. They sprang from his brain. He gave them all the knowledge he himself possessed, and placed them upon the great island (America), and all the other red people descended from the Shawnees. After he had made the Shawnees he made the French and English out of his breast, the Dutch out of his feet, and the Long Knives (Americans) out of his hands. All these inferior races of men he made white, and placed them beyond the stinking lake (the Atlantic Ocean)."

This arrogant pride and warlike ferocity made the Shawnees one of the most formidable of all the tribes with which the white settlers had to contend in the Ohio Valley. They slew old and young, male and female, without pity and without remorse. They rejoiced in battle and carnage, in deception, stratagem, and faithlessness. But in judging them we must not forget that they were savage. Their whole education made them what they were; and in too many instances the white men, in the bitter struggles of " the dark and bloody ground," easily forgot their civilization, and fell into the cruelty, bad faith, and revengefulness of savages.

Tecumsch had the pride, the energy, and the fortitude of his race. In intellect and humanity he was superior to them, but all their fierce antipathies were in him. He confessed that he could not see a white man without feeling the flesh of his face creep. He was a savage, patriotically believing in savage life, but* he was none the less one of the very ablest men that savage life has produced.

Chapter II. The Childhood Of Tecumseh

THERE are always curious contradictions in the accounts of an event that reach us only through the traditions of Indians and frontier men. Tecumseh was born, according to some accounts, in 1768, and according to others, in 1771, some say near Chillicothe, though Tecumseh is reported to have said that his birth occurred near the old Indian village of Piqua. There is a story that he and his brother, the Prophet, were twins, and even that a third brother was born at the same time; though according to one account the Prophet and a twin brother were some years younger than Tecumseh, It seems more likely that the earlier date — 1768 — was that of Tecumseh's, and the later — 1771 — the date of the Prophet's birth, who was perhaps a twin. There can be little doubt that Tecumseh was born at the old Indian village of Piqua, or Pickaway, on the Mad River, near the Miami.

There is likewise a great contradictoriness in the accounts given of the family history. It would be easy to believe, from Tecumseh's superior mind, that there was white blood in his family. There is, however, pretty good evidence that the family was of pure Shawnee extraction. The assertions of some, that he had both Anglo-Saxon and Creek blood in his veins, seem to be entirely founded on a boast of Lauliwasikau, the Prophet, who excelled more in bragging than he did in battle, and who was more voluble than truthful The story is interesting to us as a small novel of the Prophet's own invention, rather than for any probable historical basis,

His paternal grandfather, according to this incredible tale, was a Creek Indian, who,, with other Indians, went to one of the Southern cities> either Savannah or Charleston, to hold a council with the English governor. The governor's daughter was present at some of her father's interviews with the Indians. She had previously conceived a violent admiration for the Indian character, of which she took this opportunity to inform the governor. This most obliging of fathers inquired of the Indians in council, next morning, which of them was the most expert hunter, Tecumseh's grandfather, then a handsome young man,, sitting modestly in a retired part of the room, was pointed out to him. The governor, on finding that his daughter was really desirous of marrying an Indian, directed her attention, in council the following day,, to this young Creek war-

THE CHILDHOOD OF TECUMSEH. 2/

rior, and she promptly fell in love with him. The chiefs were informed of the young lady's attachment. It seemed to them incredible, at first, but finding that the governor was in earnest, they advised the young Creek to accept this piece of fortune, to which he seems to have made no objection. He was immediately taken to another apartment, where a train of black servants disrobed him of his Indian costume, washed him, and presented him with a new suit of European clothes, after which the marriage ceremony was performed. It is customary with the Indians to bathe a man on adopting him among them, and this may be what suggested the soap and water part of the story to the Prophet's mind, though one cannot but think it possible that he appreciated the necessity for washing an Indian before presenting him to a lady.

The young warrior did not return home with the other Indians at the close of the council, but remained with his romantic wife. He amused himself with hunting, in which he was very successful, usually taking two black servants with him to bring back his large quantities of game. The Prophet's father, Puckeshinwau, was a son of this marriage, and at his birth the governor made great rejoicing, causing thirty guns to be fired. This boy, who was permitted to visit the Indians, was given by them his name, which means "something that drops." He afterwards preferred to desert the governor's house for a life among the Indians. This is the Prophet's tale ; but an account which is more credible states that Tecumseh's father, Puckeshinwau, was a full Indian belonging to the Kiscopoke, while his mother was of the Turtle tribe of the Shawnee nation. His mother's name was Methoataske, and means " a turtle laying eggs in the sand."

The parents of Tecumseh removed with others of their tribe, under the lead of the great chief Blackhoof, from the South to the valley of the Ohio, about the middle of the eighteenth century. They established themselves at first on the Scioto and afterwards on the banks of the Mad River, one of the tributaries of the Great Miami. Puckeshinwau was not a chief by birth, but he rose to that rank, and was killed in the battle of Kanawha in 1774. After her husband's death, Methoataske, who is spoken of as a respectable woman, returned t'6 the South, where she lived to an advanced age among the Cherokee Indians.

Though the Prophet is known by several names, Tecumseh never had but the one, which means " a shooting star." The influences surrounding Tecumseh in babyhood and boyhood must have tended to make him what he was in after life. The life of an Indian child is pre-eminently one of hardship.

INDIAN BABY, (on its mother's back, strapped to a board.)

THE CHILDHOOD OF TECUMSEH. 29

We can imagine him as a baby bound hand and foot, and strapped to a board and carried like a piece of baggage on his mother's back for the first six months. Then he must endure the long periods of famine which come from the vicissitudes and improvidence of an Indian hunter's life. Like other Indian boys who take to the water from the time they are babies, Tecumseh, no doubt, enjoyed swimming in the Mad and Miami Rivers during the warm summer days. His first toy was probably a bow and arrow, and he learned to hunt as naturally as to swim.

There were seven children in this remarkable Indian family, five of whom were people of more or less distinction. Tecumseh's eldest brother, Cheeseekau, is said to have taken great pains in the education of the fatherless boy. This is rather remarkable, if it be true, for there is usually little that can be called direct education among the Indians. We must remember that the only honorable occupations for an Indian man are hunting and warfare ; all else is work for squaws. Of course, Tecumseh's education was mainly in the arts of the soldier and the hunter, but Cheeseekau is said not only to have labored to make Tecumseh a great warrior, but also to have taught him a love for truth, a contempt for everything mean and sordid, and the practice of those cardinal Indian virtues, courage in battle and fortitude in suffering. If Cheeseekau attempted the education of his other brother, the Prophet, in any of these particulars, he must have failed signally, for he possessed neither truth nor courage.

" From his boyhood Tecumseh seems to have had a passion for war. His pastimes, like those of Napoleon, were generally in the sham battle-field. He was the leader of his companions in all their sports, and was accustomed to divide them into parties, one of which he always headed, for the purpose of fighting mimic battles, in which he usually distinguished himself by his activity, strength, and skill. His dexterity in the use of the bow and arrow exceeded that of all the other Indian boys of his tribe, by whom he was loved and respected, and over whom he exercised unbounded influence. He was generally surrounded by a set of companions who were ready to stand or fall by his side." Such are the stories told of Tecumseh's boyhood by some who knew him. It seems very likely that he displayed in his youth that skill in hunting and war, and above all the great powers of leadership, which marked him so strongly in after life.

That Tecumseh was capable of strong affection is shown by his regard for his only sister, Menewaulakoosee, or Tccumapease, the name by which she is better known, and which was doubtless given to her

THE CHILDHOOD OF TECUMSEH. 31

later in life, according to Indian usage, to signify her relationship to the great Tecumseh. She was " sensible, kind-hearted, and uniformly exemplary in her conduct," and must have been a person of commanding character, for she is said to have exercised a remarkable influence over the females of her tribe. She was married to a brave called Wasegoboah, or Stand Firm. Tecumapease was a great favorite with her brother Tecumseh up to the time of his death. He is said to have treated her always with respect, making her many valuable presents.

In considering the influences which surrounded the boyhood of Tecumseh, we must not forget the stories told around the Indian camp-fires of the daily events of the time ; and it will be necessary to recall here what these events were. When he was very young the war of the American Revolution began. Living in the Far West of those days, he was not so entirely removed from the Revolutionary War as not to feel some influence from it Great Britain, remote from her rebellious colonies, was engaged in war with France at the same time. She carried on the war on this continent at great disadvantage, and it was the policy of the mother country to use the savages to harass the Americans.

That Tecumseh listened well to all he heard of current events is shown in his after life, when he evinced a considerable knowledge of the past differences between the United States and England.

The news which came to the hearing of the boy Tecumseh, as fresh as that which comes to us in our newspapers to-day, consisted of accounts of perpetual skirmishings, scalpings, and fightings. The successive and exciting events of border warfare, in which the Indians were very successful during Tecumseh's early childhood, entered into his education. His patriotic feelings were all enlisted on the side of the Indians, who were opposing themselves to the ever- increasing stream of immigration which poured over the Alleghanies during the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century, and which became a flood during the first decade of the nineteenth.

Tecumseh was not more than six years old when his father was killed, and his family were several times sufferers from the war between the whites and Indians. During all his childhood this fierce border war was waging. Between 1783 and 1790, it was estimated that fifteen hundred men, women and children were slain or taken captive by the Indians upon the waters of the Ohio. The loss was also undoubtedly great on the Indian side, and the whites were often ready to learn from the Indians lessons of inhuman cruelty and torture.

Tecumseh's childhood was thus rocked in the

THE CHILDHOOD OF TECUMSEH. 33

cradle of the Indian wars of the Revolutionary period, and by all the strength of early impressions and training he learned to love war, to regard the English as allies, to hate the Americans, and to oppose himself to the tide of immigration west of the Alleghanies.

Doubtless the boy Tecumseh, sitting by the camp-fire and listening to the stories of this savage war and to reminiscences of the " good old times " when the whites had not come among them with guns and strong drink and the superfluous wants of civilization, laid in his boyish mind the foundation for his great plan, in the strong conviction that the whites had no right to leave the home on the sea-shore, which the Indians had allowed them, and to encroach still further upon the wilderness. He seems to have stored up carefully all that he heard of broken treaties and injuries inflicted on the Indians by their neighbors. He certainly was well versed in all facts of this kind, though he naturally did not take the same pains to remember also the instances of perfidy on his own side.

2*

Chapter III. Wars Of The Shawnees In Tecumseh's Childhood

ABOUT the time of Tecumseh's birth (1768), the Shawnee and Delaware nations concluded a peace with the Cherokees, a Southern nation of Indians, and remained at peace with both whites and Indians until 1774. The cause of disturbance which sent them on the war-path with the whites in this year was the murder of Indians by lawless white men in retaliation for the stealing of horses, without regard to whether the Indians killed were the offenders or not. The settlers along the frontier, feeling sure that the Indians would avenge the death of their friends, prepared for defence, and sent an express to the Assembly of the colony of Virginia, then in session, asking for assistance. Hostilities were begun by the celebrated Mingo chief, Logan, whose pathetic speech is familiar to every schoolboy. He had always been friendly to the whites, but, Indian-like, now destroyed several settlers' families indiscriminately in retaliation for the murder of his own relatives. The Earl of Dunmore, at that tkne governor of Virginia,