Sunday, August 17, 2003

By Mark Roth, Post-Gazette Assistant Managing Editor

As Meriwether Lewis and William Clark pushed off toward the unknown West in May 1804, a 35-year-old Shawnee Indian was already working to achieve a grand vision for his people, a vision that was meant to thwart the very goal of the Lewis & Clark expedition.

His name was Tecumseh, meaning the "panther passing across," in token of a meteor his father saw on the night of his birth in 1768, in the village of Chalahgawtha, near present-day Xenia, Ohio.

A striking 6-foot-tall warrior, highly intelligent and a gifted orator, Tecumseh worked much of his adult life to create a union of all Indian tribes, dedicated to the proposition that the westward movement of white settlers needed to be stopped in its tracks, and Indians needed to return to the purity and simplicity of their former way of life.

Tecumseh and his emotionally unstable brother, Tenskwatawa, also known as The Prophet, urged Indians to stop using whites' goods and to return to bow-and-arrow hunting, stone tools and earthenware pots, native religion, no intermarriage with whites and no more use of alcohol, which had become the great scourge of many tribes.

A key part of Tecumseh's strategy was to use his brother to announce "visions" that Tecumseh actually devised, so that Tenskwatawa would appear to be the chief spiritual leader of the movement, while Tecumseh concentrated on political and war planning.

But the strategy backfired at a critical moment. In late 1811, as Tecumseh was on a trip to the South to try to recruit tribes there, Tenskwatawa took it upon himself to confront American troops near the Indian village of Prophetstown, near the Tippecanoe River, next to modern day Lafayette, Ind.

When American Gen. William Henry Harrison approached with his army, Tenskwatawa told the tribesmen he had received a vision that the Indians would defeat the Americans without any warriors dying. The Americans' bullets, he said, would pass through their bodies without doing any harm. Starting in the predawn darkness, the battle actually killed more Americans than Indians, but Tenskwatawa was exposed as a liar, and the Indians were driven back.

The defeat at Tippecanoe not only gave Harrison a slogan for his future presidential election race -- "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" -- but it crippled 10 years of unification work by Tecumseh.

The alliance he had traveled thousands of miles to build up would never again come together, and eventually, Tecumseh had to rely on the British as allies when the War of 1812 began.

On Oct. 5, 1813, at the Battle of the Thames in Ontario, Tecumseh was killed by an American soldier, shot twice in the chest.

Although his cause had failed, his reputation remained strong, even among the whites he so desperately wanted to stop. His sayings were memorized by generations of students, and many Americans bestowed his name on their children, the best known example being the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman.

Much of this article was based on "A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh" by Allan W. Eckert.

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