Tecumseh

A meteor did give him his name, but not the way the story is usually told. His father and most of his brothers belonged to the Panther clan of the Shawnee, and Panther clan names all came off the same streak of light. His father Puckeshinwau was killed at Point Pleasant in 1774, when the boy was six, and an older brother, Cheeseekau, finished raising him while George Rogers Clark burned Shawnee towns behind them. He learned war on the Ohio River, attacking flatboats carrying settlers west, and came away from it with a documented distaste for the torture of prisoners. A fall from a horse broke his thighbone. He limped for the rest of his life.

From about 1805 he spent most of every year on the road, arguing village council by village council that ground held in common could not be signed away by any single nation. He said it to William Henry Harrison's face at Vincennes in 1810: rescind the Fort Wayne treaty or we settle it another way. When Washington did not, he took a British commission and a war. BriefHistory carries that campaign and what its collapse opened up. What is left over here is the man rather than the movement.

The politics never worked without the religion, and the religion belonged to his brother. Tenskwatawa's revival supplied the converts, the discipline and the reason for people from a dozen nations to live in one town, and it was Tenskwatawa who was left holding that town in November 1811 while Tecumseh was hundreds of miles south recruiting. Two years later, at the Thames, the British general Henry Procter fled and the British line folded within minutes, leaving a Native force outnumbered by better than three to one to fight the rest of it. Nobody has ever established who fired the shot that killed him. Richard Mentor Johnson claimed it, and rode the claim to the vice presidency in 1837.

Nobody knows where he is. One early account has Canadians burying him at Sandwich, another puts him on the battlefield, and a tradition holds that an Ojibwe man named Oshahwahnoo dug him up in the 1860s and reburied him on St. Anne Island. When those bones were examined in 1931, both thighs were unbroken, so they were not his. They were buried on Walpole Island in 1941 in his honor anyway. A study in 2005 concluded the remains are simply lost. The name traveled better than the body: an Ohio family gave it to a boy who became William Tecumseh Sherman, and Harrison, who beat him, called him an uncommon genius.

Tecumseh's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Prophetstown building
  Built with Tenskwatawa where the Tippecanoe meets the Wabash, and unusual for holding Shawnees, Potawatomis, Kickapoos, Winnebagos, Sauks and others together 1808
• The common-ownership doctrine other
  That no single nation could cede land belonging to all — the argument he spent eight years carrying 1805
• Confrontation with Harrison at Vincennes speech
  An indictment rather than a protest, demanding the Fort Wayne treaty be rescinded 1810
• Message to Harrison at Fort Meigs speech
  A challenge to come out and fight instead of hiding in the earth like a ground hog 1813

• October 10, 1774 aged 6 His father is killed at the Battle of Point Pleasant Tecumseh was six. His older brother Cheeseekau took over his education.
• 1792 aged ~24 Cheeseekau is killed fighting Americans near Nashville
• August 20, 1794 aged 26 Fights at Fallen Timbers, and the Native confederacy of that generation breaks
• 1795 aged ~27 Refuses to attend or sign the Treaty of Greenville The treaty gave away two-thirds of present-day Ohio.
• 1808 aged ~40 Founds Prophetstown with Tenskwatawa in present-day Indiana
• August 1810 aged 42 Tells Harrison at Vincennes to rescind the Fort Wayne treaty or fight
• November 7, 1811 aged 43 Harrison attacks Prophetstown while Tecumseh is recruiting in the South Tenskwatawa gave battle and lost it. The movement never recovered the ground.
• August 16, 1812 aged 44 Detroit surrenders to a British and Native force he helped command
• October 5, 1813 aged 45 Killed at the Battle of the Thames after the British line collapses Henry Procter fled. Nobody has established who fired the fatal shot.

• William Henry Harrison 1773–1841
  Whig general elected ninth president who died one month into his term. opposed
• William Tecumseh Sherman 1820–1891
  Union general whose campaigns through Georgia and the Carolinas helped destroy the Confederacy’s capacity to wage war. named after him
• Andrew Jackson 1767–1845
  Seventh President whose populist policies and Indian Removal Act left a deeply contested legacy. signed the removal act
• Sitting Bull 1831–1890
  Hunkpapa Lakota leader and spiritual figure who resisted U.S. expansion and defended tribal sovereignty. carried the same argument later
• Chief Joseph 1840–1904
  Nez Perce leader remembered for resistance to forced removal and eloquent advocacy for his people. carried the same argument later