by James Laxer
Tecumseh had faced his first test as a warrior, and he had failed. He vowed never to show such cowardice again. It was a vow he kept.
* * *
* Raised in a native family, Stephen and Abraham Ruddell became Shawnee warriors, fighting side by side with other members of the tribe when they were young men. Stephen, who was named Sinnamatha (“Big Fish”) by his Shawnee family, later became a Baptist preacher and proselytized for the Kentucky Baptist Church. Abraham, who had been captured when he was only six, had a harder time adapting back into white society. He spoke broken English and was not socially comfortable. In Shawnee style, he wore ornaments that hung from the split rims of his ears.
† Tecumseh “never evinced any great regard for the female sex,” according to Ruddell. At different times over the course of his life he did live with a wife “whom he did not keep very long before he parted from her. He had a Cherokee squaw who lived with him the longest of any other.” The custom among the Shawnees was for men to marry a number of women and to cohabit with them, usually one after the other.
Chapter 2
A Warrior’s Odyssey
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION opened the way for the citizens of the new republic to move west. In 1787, the U.S. Congress took a huge step toward exercising effective control over a vast stretch of territory on the northwestern margin of the new republic. It enacted the Northwest Ordinance to provide for the administration of the territory west of Pennsylvania and northwest of the Ohio River. Covering 673,000 square kilometres, the Northwest Territory comprised the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and the northeastern section of Minnesota. Thousands of American settlers surged into the lands. And at the mouth of the Muskingum River, the U.S. built Fort Harmar, a military post from which the passage of newcomers could be monitored.
That same year, delegates from the thirteen American states convened in Philadelphia, where they drafted a new constitution for the republic that gave the country a more centralized form of government than it had under the first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation of 1781. In 1788, George Washington, who had led the Patriot army to victory during the Revolution, was elected as the first president of the United States. Administratively, the nascent republic was much better equipped to collect taxes, raise an army, and launch a navy than the loosely connected states had been. For the native peoples, the new American government posed an existential threat. The Northwest Ordinance put the native peoples on notice that the U.S. intended, either through purchase and treaties or through force if necessary, to seize the land on which they lived.
While tribal chiefs made some efforts to negotiate peace with American representatives of the Northwest Territory, on the ground, militant Shawnees, Mingoes, Delawares, Cherokees, and Wabash warriors took matters into their own hands by mounting raids against the new settlers. Tecumseh’s eldest brother, Cheeseekau, had a major role in these fights and grew in stature to become a minor war chief. On some occasions, his only companion in hit-and-run attacks was Tecumseh.1
Steeled by determination after his first failure in battle and groomed by his brother, Tecumseh also participated in ambushes on the flatboats that took settlers, along with their belongings and their livestock, down the Ohio River to Kentucky, where they planned to make their homes. The flatboats were obvious targets for native warriors — not only because their human cargo represented an immediate threat to the natives’ villages and way of life, but also because they were a tempting source of weapons, clothing, furniture, and other possessions. About a hundred warriors — including Shawnees, Cherokees, and Mingoes — attacked the boats. Among the warriors were five whites, including Tecumseh’s companion Stephen Ruddell, all of whom had been captured as children in Kentucky during the Revolutionary War.
In March 1788, the warriors established their camp on the Ohio River, just upstream from the mouth of the Great Miami River. Outfitted with a flatboat of their own, they set up their ambush around a point on the river where their prey would have little chance to avoid attack. The flatboats were lumbering craft that could not swiftly alter their course.
On the morning of March 21, a flatboat carrying five white men and a black woman sailed into the ambush point. About forty warriors pushed their own vessel out into the current and quickly boarded the settlers’ boat. The victims did not resist. Two of the men were tied to a tree and had locks of their hair cut off, then were reunited with the others from their boat.
That same afternoon, the warriors attacked another vessel, this one with five men aboard. One of those captured was a sixty-year-old Baltimore merchant by the name of Samuel Purviance, who was travelling with his manservant.2 Another was Thomas Ridout, an Englishman in his thirties who later became the surveyor-general of Upper Canada.3
The raiders stripped the travellers of many of their possessions and conveyed them to shore, where they joined the prisoners who had been captured that morning. The booty taken from Ridout, including clothes, a watch, cloth, a cane, two flutes, a writing desk, trunks, and a collection of books, was divided up among the natives. A third attack followed two days later. While many of those captured in the three attacks eventually made it home, others met a grisly fate.
On March 26, the warriors attacked two more boats on the Ohio, but those on board defended themselves and managed to escape. Later that same day, another flatboat rounded the bend in the river. Attacking from their own vessel, eight or ten natives quickly overcame three French scientists and their companion. One of the Frenchmen, offering his hand to help a native onto the flatboat, was struck with a tomahawk; another was shot and killed. The remaining two men jumped into the river and made good their escape, even though one of them had been seriously wounded.
Some of the warriors proceeded to kill prisoners — as many as five of them, including Purviance, the Baltimore merchant, who was either burned or battered to death. Purviance’s manservant was beaten to death, and another man lost his life when he was burned alive.
As Stephen Ruddell later reported, Tecumseh distinguished himself during the attacks on the flatboats but was deeply distressed by the killing of prisoners, and he was especially appalled by the horrific torment endured when one of the captives was burned to death. Since the prisoners, as well as the booty, had been divided up among the warriors, Tecumseh was not in a position to halt the torture and the killing. According to Ruddell’s account, “Tecumseh, who had been a spectator, expressed great abhorrence of the deed, and finally it was concluded among them not to burn any more prisoners that should afterwards be taken, which was ever after strictly adhered to by him.”4
Whether Tecumseh, who was still a young warrior, was able to change the behaviour of the others is open to question. What is clear is that he was learning how to be a warrior without giving up his humanity. Ruddell wrote that the young Tecumseh “always expressed the greatest abhorrence when he heard of or saw acts of cruelty or barbarity practiced.”5 For the first twenty years of his life, Tecumseh was absorbing the world view of others. In his rejection of torture, he was beginning to shape his own responses to the disordered world around him, showing signs of the originality that would so distinguish him in the years to come.
By the autumn of 1788, Cheeseekau and a band of followers, tired of the endless and perhaps unwinnable fight against the Americans, decided to move to the other side of the Mississippi River. The territory there remained under the jurisdiction of Spain, a weak and tottering imperial power that exercised little effective control over the vast territory it supposedly ruled. A French merchant by the name of Louis Lorimier encouraged the move.
Lorimier had worked out an arrangement with the Spaniards to help them colonize territory along the Missouri River. The Spaniards favoured the idea of Shawnees and Delawares coming to the Missouri country, which would help ward off hostile native peoples to the west and strengthen Spanish def
ences against the Americans to the east. In the summer of 1787, word spread among the native peoples of the Ohio country that they could make a new life for themselves farther west. Tecumseh and his younger twin brothers, Lalawethika and Kumskaukau, who were about fourteen years old, were to accompany Cheeseekau on the westward odyssey.‡
With the harvest in hand, the party set out for several months to hunt so that they would be well supplied with meat for their odyssey on the other side of the Mississippi. They travelled down the Ohio River en route to the Mississippi. Below the mouth of the Tennessee River, they came upon a herd of buffalo and chased them at high speed. Tecumseh was thrown from his horse and lay on the ground in agony. He had broken a thigh bone.6
Cheeseekau and the others felt that Tecumseh could go no farther until his wound had healed. They found shelter for the winter and waited until spring to resume the journey. But when spring came, the broken bone had not set properly. Tecumseh feared the wound would never heal and that his hopes of becoming a warrior had come to an end.
Cheeseekau decided that the party needed to resume its journey west, so he counselled his brother to remain behind with a few warriors and catch up when he had recovered sufficiently. But Tecumseh refused to be left behind and fought off his feelings of depression and even thoughts of suicide. Although he could walk only with the aid of crutches, he set out with the party for the country west of the Mississippi.7 Eventually the bone would heal, leaving Tecumseh with a slight limp for the rest of his life.
When the party crossed the Mississippi onto Spanish territory in the spring of 1789 — a pregnant historical moment when the new U.S. Constitution took effect and the French Revolution was about to erupt — things didn’t turn out as Cheeseekau had hoped. Problems arose as a consequence of the ambitious plans of an American Indian agent and trader by the name of George Morgan, who wanted to establish a settlement to be populated by Americans on the western shore of the Mississippi River. Just below the point where the Ohio flowed into the Mississippi, Morgan planned to build a town he called New Madrid, which he hoped would become the focal point of commerce for the Mississippi.
In February 1789, not long before the arrival of Cheeseekau and his party, seventy American settlers sailed down the Ohio and into the Mississippi to reach Morgan’s new Mecca.§ Cheeseekau and his party chose an odd historical moment to cross to the western shore of the Mississippi. The Spanish Empire, which nominally controlled the territory, was in steep decline against its British and French rivals. And the energetic and expansionist American Republic was already eyeing the lands west of the great river.
Although Cheeseekau and the others were not unwelcome west of the Mississippi, they soon abandoned the dream of a good life there and returned to the other side of the river. From there they headed southeast to the rugged land located at the meeting point of the present-day states of Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. In late 1789 or early 1790, the party of Shawnees journeyed to that largely inaccessible country of plunging rivers, narrow gorges, and rocky heights. Its high point, Lookout Mountain, rises to an elevation of 729 metres above sea level, dominating the surrounding countryside and providing ideal cover for a defensive military force. Not far from the present-day city of Chattanooga, the territory was home to the Chickamauga Cherokees, who had been fighting a long battle of their own against the Americans. They had been pushed down the Tennessee River to this redoubt from which they could strike those unwise enough to travel through the area. The Shawnees, perceived by the warriors of the region as a similarly victimized people, were welcomed there.
Over the next half-decade, Tecumseh grew into manhood as a warrior in his own right and developed his own small following. Warriors became leaders not through formal promotion, as in the case of the British or American armies, but by winning the respect of their peers.
During his time near Lookout Mountain, Tecumseh and Cheeseekau and the other members of the Shawnee party, along with the Cherokees, took part in attacks on American vessels that navigated the swift rivers of the regions. Ugly, vicious fights ensued; travellers were robbed and killed and native warriors paid their own price in blood. It was vicious combat, the kind of warfare that had once been common along the frontier between the English and French colonies in eastern North America.
In the summer of 1791, Tecumseh left Cheeseekau at Lookout Mountain and returned to the Ohio country. Why he went is not clear; perhaps it was to play a role in the struggle in the North, where Joseph Brant’s confederacy had disintegrated and the Americans were once again pressing for new cessions of land from native peoples.8 By 1789 Brant’s confederacy was in disarray, and some tribes signed a new treaty with the United States at Fort Harmar. Most tribes, disgusted by how they knew the negotiations would turn out, did not attend the meetings. Representatives of the Iroquois and some tribes from the Great Lakes did show up. There, in exchange for goods reckoned at nine thousand dollars in value and divided into two parts, they acknowledged the previous surrender of southern and eastern Ohio that dated all the way back to the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768.9
The Shawnees, not prepared to accept the outcome at Fort Harmar, began to organize a new coalition of tribes, which included local Miamis, Delawares, Mingoes, and Cherokees, to resume the fight. In response to the renewed resistance, the United States dispatched a military force to the region, but the coalition warriors promptly routed the U.S. troops. The Shawnees were under no illusions that the U.S. would accept this single setback, and they expected a much more substantial expedition to be organized. In April 1791, Shawnee leaders sent dispatch riders far and wide, perhaps as far south as Lookout Mountain, urging warriors to come to the Ohio country to fight the Americans.
Tecumseh’s journey north at the head of a party of eight warriors, which included his younger brothers Lalawethika and Kumskaukau, may have been in response to this call to arms. Back in the Ohio country where he had grown up, Tecumseh rekindled old friendships. No longer a promising young warrior from a family with a martial reputation, he was now a war chief, albeit a minor one.
As it turned out, Tecumseh missed out on the greatest military triumph ever won exclusively by native peoples against the Americans or the British. On November 4, 1791, one thousand warriors, led by Blue Jacket, an influential Shawnee chief; Little Turtle, a Miami chief10; and Buckongahelas, a Delaware leader (described by his people as their own George Washington), mounted a pre-emptive strike on the Wabash River (near present-day Fort Recovery, Ohio) against an American force commanded by Major General Arthur St. Clair, which was on its way to attack native towns. The warriors swept into the American encampment, killing and wounding a thousand U.S. troops and driving the survivors into flight.
The natives’ triumph generated political shockwaves and inspired hope in the Ohio country that they might actually reverse the onslaught of settlement and take back some of the land they had lost. Impressed by the scale of the victory, the British briefly considered the idea of establishing a native buffer state between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, a project that would come back to life almost two decades later, at the height of Tecumseh’s career.
Defeat in the American Revolutionary War had not marked the end of British interest and ambition in the region that Americans called the Northwest Territory. For one thing, when the Treaty of Paris concluded the war in 1783, the British military still clung to many posts on the U.S. side of the new border. For another, the British retained a lively interest in the fur trade south of the Great Lakes. As far as the British were concerned, the Americans had not achieved unchallengeable control of this vital region. The British could recall a long series of changes in territorial arrangements in North America over the course of the eighteenth century. They had no reason to believe that the current boundaries were set in stone.
But the Americans did not see things that way. The administration of George Washington had no intention of accepting the stunning defeat
on the Wabash as final. While the government was prepared to negotiate a temporary peace settlement with the native peoples in the region, its intention was to buy time until it could send a more effective military force into the territory to reassert U.S. control.11
In this urgent new conflict with the Americans, Tecumseh and his small band of followers skirmished with the enemy, sometimes on the attack and sometimes bearing the brunt of ambushes. Tecumseh learned how to give no ground when he found himself in a fight. He assessed a battleground with cool intelligence, discovered the enemy’s weak point, and struck it with such force that he filled his adversaries with terror. It was over the course of these battles in which Tecumseh acted as a leader on his own that he developed a reputation as a formidable warrior.
Cheeseekau, still a more important leader than his younger brother, was also drawn into this new round of warfare farther south. Often his missions were launched against American settlements on the Cumberland River in Tennessee. Hit-and-run warfare against the settlers was a gruesome business. For a leader such as Cheeseekau, survival hung in the balance during each raid.
Tecumseh soon returned to Tennessee to fight at his brother’s side. In late September 1792, Cheeseekau and his followers prepared to hit John Buchanan’s Station, located six and a half kilometres south of Nashville. Stephen Ruddell records that before the attack commenced, Cheeseekau predicted that he would be killed. “Saying that his father had fell [sic] gloriously in battle,” Ruddell wrote, “he considered it an honour to die in battle and that it was what he wished and did not wish to be buried at home like an old squaw to which he preferred that the fowls of the air should pick his bones.”12
As in other episodes in this gruelling guerilla warfare, Cheeseekau and his allies positioned themselves around the station at midnight. They left their horses about a kilometre and a half away and stealthily approached the target on foot, under a clear full moon. They were only a few yards away from the gate when their footsteps spooked some cattle into flight. Alerted by the sound of the cattle and then by the approach of the warriors, an American soldier who was inside the blockhouse at the gate shoved his weapon through a porthole, fired, and shot Cheeseekau dead. For about an hour the assault against the station continued, but the Americans held a strong defensive position — they managed to kill and wound several warriors and escaped with no casualties.