Tippecanoe (and Tyler too)
Monday, August 17, 2020
The Shawnee Indian leader Tecumseh is perhaps best remembered for his namesake, the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, nicknamed "Cump" for the middle name he preferred.
But the chief of what came to be called "Tecumseh's Confederacy," the large group of Native Americans who followed him and his brother Tenskwatawa (known as "The Prophet") and including several thousand warriors, was a leader of men in his own right. Born in 1768 in the present-day state of Ohio (where Sherman was later born in 1820), he led his men against the United States in what came to be called "Tecumseh's War."
The Shawnees had lived under a treaty with the U.S. since 1795, having ceded an area that included Ohio and parts of three surrounding modern states to the Americans. But in 1805, The Prophet emerged as a leader among Indian witch hunters, seeking out those who seemed to be causing deaths among the people--deaths more likely to have resulted from smallpox or influenza.
The Prophet preached against those who cooperated with the government of the whites, and called for a return to the "old ways." Some three thousand Native Americans gathered at a settlement called Tippecanoe, known to whites as Prophetstown, in Indiana.
In 1811, while Tecumseh was in the south seeking alliances with other tribes (an effort which failed), William Henry Harrison--then governor of Indiana territory and an Army general--countered an Indian attack at Tippecanoe. The natives were outnumbered--and defeated. As a result, the Americans burned "Prophetstown" to the ground.
The British were accused of stirring up trouble among the Indians, contributing to the tensions which led to the War of 1812 the following year.
Harrison went on to run for president with his running mate John Tyler in 1840, building on the reputation he gained in the battle by using the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." He won, but died a month after his inauguration. Many at the time thought he had contracted pneumonia from the bad weather at his ceremony; it's now believed he died of typhoid fever. Tyler became president after him.