Tecumseh, the Prophet

and Indian Resistance

Ruth Ann Denaci

Department of History

            American land and Indian civilization policies in the old Northwest precipitated devastating changes in the lives of the Indians, igniting the flame of a nativistic resistance movement. In the early nineteenth-century, Tecumseh, a Shawnee war chief, and his brother, Tenskwatawa, a religious visionary, led a multitribal resistance movement culminating at the Battle of Tippecanoe and the Battle of the Thames. Their movement was an extension of the continuing Indian resistance to white encroachment and expansion. With his charismatic personality and military prowess, Tecumseh would rise to prominence as the leader of the intertribal confederacy; he would also become the dominant figure of the resistance movement in American history and mythology. However, it is Tenskwatawa, the religious prophet who seems to have emerged first as an influential figure among his own people, the Shawnee. His religious doctrines later spread among the Delaware, Wyandots, Ottawas and Chippewas. Potawatomis from western Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, eager for his spiritual message, hoped to spread the Prophet’s doctrine to other western tribes. Tenskwatawa’s religious doctrine, inspired by a vision, promoted a social program in response to the problems affecting his people, proposing a ban on drinking, less dependence on white trade, a prohibition on skin hunting, an end to the cohabitation of Indian women with white men, and monogamous marriage among the Shawnees.     

This paper will explore the significance and influence of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Prophet. In particular, it will examine how they are portrayed in a contemporary source, Benjamin Drake’s The Life of Tecumseh, and of his Brother the Prophet (1841). Drake’s sources reflect the perspectives and interpretations of white Americans living amidst the violence of the northern frontier and include written accounts of military and government officials, interviews conducted by Indian agents, and the letters and journals of former white captives among the Shawnees. The descriptions of battles and conferences depend upon military sources, in particular the correspondence of William Henry Harrison, the Governor of the Ohio Territories and the victorious commander of the American forces at the Battle of Tippecanoe. Drake’s retelling of the story of the Indian resistance movement and the roles of the Shawnee brothers can best be understood in the context of American westward expansion and the emerging national identity of the young republic. Looking closely at Drake’s work on Tecumseh may help to explain how white Anglo-American cultural values and objectives have influenced the interpretation and understanding of both Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. Why in the Anglo-American view is Tecumseh perceived as more admirable, as the leader and the impetus of the movement, if in fact the Prophet’s influence was earlier, and perhaps more powerful, among the Shawnee and other tribes? In contrast to the spiritual doctrine of the Prophet, Tecumseh’s plans to unify the tribes and his attempt to centralize political and military authority were clearly more understandable to white Anglo-American society. Tecumseh’s valiant endeavor to form a multi-tribal confederacy mirrored the young American republic’s own struggle to unite and create a new nation. Richard White observes, “Americans made Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa into symbols of the alternatives between assimilation and otherness.”[1] Paradoxically, Tecumseh, the Indian resistance leader, had risen “above the prejudices and customs of his people”[2] and was assimilated into Anglo-American mythology. Tenskwatawa, conversely, became the alien savage, the superstitious shaman who promoted “otherness” in his doctrine of separateness from white society and culture. I will attempt to show, however, that the Shawnee Prophet’s religious message was a vital, unifying force: integrating the religious and political dimensions of the Indian resistance movement. 

Tenskwatawa was a problematic figure for white Americans to comprehend; Indian religious beliefs were considered inferior to Christianity, white Americans could not accept “heathen superstition” as legitimate religious doctrine. Thomas Jefferson considered the Shawnee Prophet

more rogue than fool, if to be a rogue is not the greatest of all follies. He pretended to be in constant communication with the Great Spirit; that he was instructed by him to make known to the Indians that they were created by him distinct from the whites . . . that they must return from all the ways of the whites to the habits and opinions of their forefathers . . . I concluded from all this, that he was a visionary, enveloped in the clouds of their antiquities . . . I thought there was little danger of his making many proselytes from the habits and comfort they had learned from the whites, to the hardships and privations of savagism . . . [3]

Jefferson was clearly skeptical of the Prophet’s “pretended” spiritual message, and, moreover, he dismissed the vitality and the motivating force of his message among the Indians. In Jefferson’s view, the Prophet’s vision, “enveloped in the clouds of antiquity,” looked back to a savage Indian past offering the Indians nothing in comparison to the civilizing influences of white society and culture. 

More importantly, white Americans were unwilling to confront the conditions which produced the religious resistance movement: United States Indian policy and Indian complaints of white encroachment on Indian land. For example, Harrison, the governor of the Ohio territories, attributed Indian hostility and the influence of Tenskwatawa to the instigation of British traders and agents: “His character as a Prophet would not, however, have given him any very dangerous influence, if he had not been assisted by the intrigues and advice of foreign agents . . . who have for many years omitted no opportunity of counteracting the measures of the government with regard to the Indians, and filling their . . . minds with suspicions of the justice and integrity of our views towards them.”[4]  The Prophet is characterized by Harrison as the malleable pawn of white Europeans. His “influence” is dependent on the British; he is perceived as passive and ineffectual.

Tecumseh, seen through the lens of Anglo-European culture, embodied the American spirit of the frontier: masculine, aggressive, and martial. Drake juxtaposes the active self-determining portrayal of Tecumseh to the passive inactive role of the Prophet. Tecumseh is depicted as brave strong, and pragmatic, an image which would clearly have resonated with the frontier spirit of nineteenth-century America. In spite of the fact that they were adversaries, Harrison respected Tecumseh’s military and leadership abilities:

The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really astonishing and more than any other circumstance bespeakes him one of those uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would perhaps be the founder of an Empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru. No difficulties deter him. His activity and industry supply the want of letters. For four years he has been in constant motion. You see him today on the Wabash and in a short time you hear of him on the shores of Lake Erie or Michigan, or on the banks of the Mississippi and wherever he goes he makes an impression favorable to his purpose.[5]

Such a formidable opponent not only elicited respect, but he also clearly enhanced Harrison’s own military abilities: Harrison successfully ran for president in 1840 on the slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”  

In contrast, Drake portrays Tenskwatawa as effeminate, lazy and cowardly: “Among other doctrines of his [the Prophet’s] new code, he insisted on a community of property--a very comfortable regulation for those, who like himself, were too indolent to labor for the acquisition of it.”[6] The Prophet’s religious teachings serve to conceal his personal inadequacies: his laziness and ineptitude as a hunter and provider--essential male attributes of the frontier. His guise of spirituality indicates weakness and effeminacy. Drake’s characterization of Tenskwatawa as ineffectual and feminine reduces his significance in the Indian resistance movement, and more importantly it diminishes his image in the American perception. In contrast to Tecumseh’s bravery in battle, the Prophet is characterized as cowardly. For instance, at the Battle of Tippecanoe, Drake writes that the Prophet, “Availing himself of the privilege conferred by his peculiar office, and, perhaps, unwilling in his own person to attest at once the rival powers of a sham prophecy and a real American bullet, he prudently took a position on an adjacent eminence.”[7] Not only is the Prophet depicted as a coward, but his “sham” prophecy defines him as an opportunist and a pretender as well. The descriptions of Tecumseh, however, typify the military and leadership abilities admired by white nineteenth-century society; he is explicitly compared to white Europeans:

            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.[8]

              Western culture provides the reference point from which the two brothers are viewed: Tecumseh embodied those qualities which are valued in western culture, Tenskwatawa conversely, represented the opposite of what is valued by the West. Drake depicts Tenskwatawa as the superstitious, “cunning” savage; he is fanatical and irrational. Tecumseh transcends the savagery of his race and rises “above the moral degradation in which [Indian civilization] is shrouded.”[9] If Tecumseh is perceived as embodying Anglo-American qualities, he is nonetheless portrayed as an exception to his race; it is his brother, the religious “pretender,” who is the quintessential savage. His savage fanaticism exemplifies the degradation of Indian civilization. The roles of the brothers in the resistance movement have historically been portrayed as separate and distinct. Tecumseh personified the political-military aspect of the movement; Drake writes: “The celebrated Tecumseh commanded the Indians. His cautious and fearless intrepidity made him a host wherever he went.”[10] Drake also accentuates those actions of Tecumseh which seem to demonstrate white European values, elevating him above his savage companions. As a young warrior, he witnessed the burning of a prisoner, Tecumseh “expressed in strong terms, his abhorrence of the act, and it was finally concluded by the party that they would never burn any more prisoners . . . it is not less creditable to the humanity than to the genius of Tecumseh, that he should have taken this noble stand.”[11]

              In contrast, the Prophet is depicted as the conniving shaman, steeped in Indian superstition and meaningless ritual. Drake places Tenskwatawa in the shadow of his brother; he links the Prophet’s influence to the more dominant position of Tecumseh: “He became, under the influence of his brother, Tecumseh, a powerful agent in arousing the superstitious feeling of the north-western Indians.”[12] Drake frequently defines Indian religion as “superstition” and “fanaticism”; this characterization of Indian ritual and religion further diminishes the significance of Tenskwatawa and the religious impulse of the movement. As Gregory Evans Dowd has observed, both Tecumseh, and Pontiac before him, “personify the . . . secular dimension. Pontiac and Tecumseh, both warriors, stand, negotiate, and fight as great, even pragmatic Americans.”[13] In the opposite camp are the two major prophets, the Delaware Neolin and the Shawnee, Tenskwatawa, personifying the “sacred sphere.”[14] Dowd notes that “several works from the age of Parkman to our own day” assert that “the Delaware Prophet ‘may serve as a counterpart to the famous Shawnee Prophet,’ that Tecumseh ‘took Pontiac for his model.’”[15] Tenskwatawa, however, saw no such distinction between the secular and spiritual spheres; in 1810 he told Harrison “that he would follow in the footsteps of the Great Pontiac.”[16] The prophets and the military leaders of the resistance movement drew their inspiration from the same sources, integrating the religious and the political.

              Tenskwatawa’s emergence as a visionary prophet parallels both earlier religious leaders and contemporary visionaries, such as the Seneca, Handsome Lake. Dowd suggests that Tecumseh and Pontiac, “long viewed as exceptionally innovative strategists and as authors of militant pan-Indianism . . . were . . . its products or, better, its adherents. They were not its creators.”[17] Both Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, must be placed within the context of continuing Indian resistance, with its combined religious and political elements and its reaction and relationship to American land and civilizing policies. White observes that Tecumseh, “for all his ability and audacity, essentially sought the same political ends as the Indian confederations of the 1790s . . . even his extension of the confederation into the South only followed the efforts of other Shawnee emissaries.”[18] Indian spiritual leaders who professed special knowledge of the Great Spirit came to be called “prophets” by the Anglo-Americans. Their spiritual doctrines intensified the religious dimension of the resistance movement; at the same time they generated internal conflict, raising fierce opposition within Indian communities and villages.

              Tenskwatawa’s religious doctrine and influence were predicated on a vision that came to him on the White River in the harsh winter of 1804-5; food was scarce and drunkenness and disease were rampant in the village. Smoking his pipe at the fire, he passed out as if dead. When he awakened, he revealed his vision: the Master of Life had granted him a glimpse of heaven and hell; he had witnessed the cruel sufferings of sinners atoning for their sins and drunkenness. After his experience, he changed his name from Laulewasikaw to Tenskwatawa, meaning “the Open Door,” because “he undertook to point out to the Indians the new modes of life which they should pursue.”[19] Shortly thereafter, Drake writes, Tenskwatawa “commenced that career of cunning and pretended sorcery, which enabled him to sway the Indian mind in a wonderful degree, and win for himself a name on the page of history.”[20] Drake’s contempt for the Prophet as a “crafty impostor” is evident. According to Drake, at this time “nothing, it is believed, was said by him in regard to the grand confederacy of the tribes, for the recovery of their lands, which shortly afterwards became an object of ambition with his brother.”[21] Drake explicitly separates the Prophet’s religious doctrine from the political-military agenda of Tecumseh. The American perception of the separation of the religious impulse from the political-military aspect of the movement further intensified the distinction between the active military role of Tecumseh and the passive spiritual role of Tenskwatawa.

              The Prophet’s first pronouncements concerned witchcraft: “those who continued bewitched, or exerted their arts on others, would never go to heaven nor see the Great Spirit.”[22] Tenskwatawa’s message spread through the Delaware villages. Eager to follow his teachings the villagers searched within their own communities for witches. Members of the village who had converted to Christianity or maintained close ties with the white community were suspected of witchcraft. The first Delaware condemned by the Prophet was Anne Charity, an old woman and an avowed Christian. She had been raised in Ohio among the Moravians; significantly, she had adopted white modes of dress and manners.[23] The Prophet’s witchcraft accusations reveal the integration of the religious and the political within the movement; the accusations were directed specifically at Indians, both male and female, young and old, who either cooperated with the white community or advocated the sale of lands to the United States. All of the known condemned Delawares had close ties with the Americans and with the civilizing mission. Tedapachsit and Hackingpomska, two condemned Delaware chiefs, had both signed the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 and ceded land to the United States in the Delaware Treaty of 1804, where it was agreed that the new annuities would be “exclusively appropriated to the purpose of ameliorating their condition and promoting their civilization.”[24] Another victim of the Prophet’s witch-hunt was “Brother Joshua”; not only was he a convert to Christianity, but it was suspected that he had spied for the Americans during the Revolution.[25] It is significant that those accused or condemned of witchcraft supported American intervention in Indian tribal structures, religion and society. Clearly, this demonstrates the close connection between the Prophet’s spiritual doctrine and the political policies of nativist militants. Gregory Dowd points out that “witch-hunts and accusations had bedeviled Indian communities during the nativistic upheavals of the 1750s, 1760s, and early 1770s.”[26]

Among the Shawnees, Tenskwatawa accused two of the followers of Black Hoof of using “bad Medisin.”[27] Black Hoof was a political adversary of Tecumseh and the Prophet, who had cooperated with the Americans after the signing of the Treaty of Greenville and who supported the federally sponsored Quaker Mission. In this context, Gregory Dowd’s use of the terms accomodationist and nativist are useful. He defines accomodationists as “Indians who identified with ‘tribal’ leaders” and “emphasized the interests of their particular people; these often cooperated with, although they were only rarely controlled by the imperial powers,”[28] those men who would later be known as ‘government chiefs’ or ‘annuity chiefs’. Dowd terms those leaders who advocated a more militant policy nativist, “holding less regard for ‘tribal affiliation.’” However, he correctly rejects the implication that nativism suggests conservatism and regression, or a retreat into the past to deal with present problems. Rather, nativists “identified with other native inhabitants of the continent, they self-consciously proclaimed that selected traditions and new . . . modes of behavior held keys to earthly and spiritual salvation,” and more importantly  “they rejected the increasing colonial influence in native government, culture, and economy in favor of native independence.”[29] The Prophet’s witchcraft accusations deeply divided the Indian villages, creating internal conflict and strife; moreover, they further exacerbated the growing split between accomodationist policies and the more militant policies of the nativists.

Much of Tenskwatawa’s religious doctrine, however, dealt with living according to “good principles”; in particular, Tenskwatawa “harangued” his followers against the evils of drunkenness.[30]  The great spirit had revealed the “dwelling of the Devil, and that all who had died drunkards were there, with flames issuing out of their mouths.” [31] He confessed that he too had been a drunkard but claimed that his visions had reformed him. His message was so powerful that many of his followers ceased to “drink the ‘fire-water,’ a name by which whiskey is significantly called among the Indians.” In addition to abstinence from liquor, the Prophet exhorted the Indians against the custom of Indian women “intermarrying with white men, and denounced it as one of the causes of their unhappiness.” Central to his spiritual doctrine was an admonition “against all innovations in the original dress and habits of the Indians”; he promised that “all who would believe his doctrines and practice his precepts, the comforts and happiness which their forefathers enjoyed before they were debased by their connection with the whites.”[32]

At the heart of this doctrine is a reinterpretation of Indian identity as separate, distinct and antithetical to Anglo-Americans. The Prophet’s teachings promulgated a unique Indian identity which could not be shared by whites, as the Prophet explained to Harrison: “we ought to consider ourselves as one man; but [W]e ought to live agreeable to our several customs, the red people after their mode, and the white people after theirs . . . Those Indians were once different people; they are now but one; they are all determined to practice what I have communicated to them, that has come immediately from the Great Spirit to me.”[33] In advocating a return to traditional Indian ways, the Prophet denounced American technology and culture: he encouraged his followers to wear skins instead of cloth, to put aside metal utensils and weapons and return to the stone and wooden tools of their ancestors. This is clearly a reaction to American civilization policies and the growing dependence of the Indian community on American trade goods. Indian dependence on trade goods resulted in increased debt and the further sale of Indian lands. Tenswatawa’s vision of a pan-Indian confederacy incorporated the diverse Indian peoples and nations of the Ohio Valley in response to white encroachment and expansion into Indian territory. Dowd observes that this

was not a ‘revival’ of a religious spirit that had lain, somehow, dormant. In its most important aspect, it was an ‘awakening’ to the idea that, despite all the boundaries defined by politics, language, kinship, and geography, Indians did indeed share much in the way of their pasts and their present. It was an awakening to the notion that Indians shared a conflict with Anglo-America, and that they, as Indians, could and must take hold of their destiny by regaining sacred power.”[34]

Understood in this context, the Prophet’s religious doctrine is not passive or inactive, together with Tecumseh’s call for military unity among the tribes, it is an aggressive and self-determining social and political program. In light of increasing American expansion, the significance of Tenskwatawa’s religious message was its power as a unifying force, reaching beyond the limiting boundaries of tribal politics, essential for intertribal communication and unity.

The Shawnees had a long tradition of prophecy; however, within the context of Tecumseh’s  pan-Indian movement, Tenskawatawa’s prophetic teachings expressed a relationship and reaction to Anglo-American expansion. It was not backward-looking; rather it used traditional teachings in a new way. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that Native Americans “acted in a world beyond the locality, that they explored ranges of possibilities and traveled widely . . . they taught, learned from, and argued with each other in the process.”[35]  Between the years 1745 and 1815 these disputes concerned the question of Indian identity: shamans taught that “all Indians were of a single people, separately created and required to perform special duties. Failure to perform these obligations had brought on a dispiriting loss of power.”[36] Tenkswatawa, like the Delaware Neolin and the Seneca Handsome Lake before him, perceived the suffering and the degradation of his people before experiencing his vision. In 1760, Neolin sat by his fire “greatly concerned” about his people’s “evil ways”; in 1799, Handsome Lake, fearing that he was “evil and loathsome,” fell “upon his bed sick and behold he was in a trance for nearly the space of an hour”; Tenskwatawa, in 1805 living among the diseased and drunken Delawares and Shawnees, collapsed “with a deep and awful sense of his sins.”[37]  Handsome Lake and Tenskwatawa saw similar torments inflicted upon the souls of departed drunkards. In Tenskwatawa's vision the drunkard was offered “a cup of liquor resembling melted lead...upon drinking it, his bowels were seized with an exquisite burning.”[38]  Handsome Lake’s vision included the suffering of sinners “whose torments approximated their misdeeds; first among them staggered the sot in his scorching cups.”[39]  Similarly, Neolin’s teaching “forbade the drinking of rum, an evil practice he associated with Anglo-America.”[40] 

There are significant parallels between Tenskwatawa’s vision and the Shawnee creation tradition. Drake recounts the Shawnee tradition of creation as told by “one of their chiefs . . . at fort Wayne” in 1803:

The Master of Life . . .who was himself an Indian, made the Shawanoes before any other of the human race; and they sprang from his brain: he gave them all the knowledge he himself possessed, and placed them upon the great island, and all the other red people are descended from the Shawanoes. After he had make the Shawanoes, he made the French and English out of his breast, the Dutch out of his feet and the long-knives out of his hands. All these inferior races of men he made white and placed them beyond the stinking lake [Atlantic Ocean]. The Shawanoes for many ages continued to be masters of the continent, using the knowledge they had received from the Great Spirit in such a manner as to be pleasing to him, and to secure their own happiness. In a great length of time, however, they became corrupt, and the Master of Life told them that he would take away the knowledge which they possessed, and give it to the white people, to be restored, when by a return to good principles they would deserve it.”[41]

            Tenskwatawa’s vision shares the creation tale’s emphasis on a return to the proper or traditional way of living and the clear distinction between Indian and white creation; they are clearly not one people. Similarly, sacred power or “knowledge” will be returned when they “return to good principles.” According to Shawnee tradition, the sea was the home of the Great Serpent, the embodiment of evil and it was from the sea that the white people had come: “After these white people had landed, they were not content with having the knowledge that belonged to the Shawnees, but they usurped the land also. The Master of Life is about to restore to the Shawnees their knowledge and their rights and he will trample the Long Knives under his feet.” [42] This tradition is clearly reflected in Tenskwatawa’s doctrine of reform: the ban on alcohol and sexual contact with whites, and a return to traditional forms of dress and subsistence. The appeal for reformation was also a call for action, generating a religious-political movement in opposition not only to acculturation and “civilization,” but also to the further cession of land to the United States.

             The terms of the Treaty of Greenville, following Anthony Wayne’s victory over the northern tribes at Fallen Timbers in 1794, formally institutionalized United States influence within the tribal villages through the implementation of the annuity system. The distribution of the annuities gave the Americans the means to exert pressure and influence within the tribal power structures. In addition to the annuity system, the treaty instituted the United States’ commitment to the “civilizing” mission among the northern Indians. As white settlers continued to surge into Indian hunting grounds northeast of Vincennes, Governor Harrison made plans to purchase a tract of land along the Wabash and a smaller region in eastern Indiana. These sales were fully in accord with the policies of assimilation and civilization established earlier, during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s fully developed Indian policy became not only the means to civilize and acculturate the Indians, it provided the United States with a program to acquire Indian land for the western settlement of white Americans:[43]

I consider the business of hunting as already become insufficient to furnish clothing and subsistence to the Indians. The promotion of agriculture . . . household manufacture, are essential in their preservations . . . This will enable them to live on much smaller portions of land . . . I feel it consistent with morality to lead them towards it, to familiarize them to the idea that it is for their interest to cede lands at times to the United States.[44]

             The seemingly benevolent and paternalistic tone of Jefferson’s policy of civilization and assimilation, does not obscure its underlying intent: the acquisition of Indian land for the expansion of white Americans. In return, Indians would be offered the chance to be assimilated into white American society, yet only on Jefferson’s terms--there was no room in the new republic for Indians as Indians. They would have no choice but to relinquish their culture and previous way of life and live like white Americans, if not, they would face removal beyond the Mississippi. Increased economic dependency became a conscious by-product of the American civilizing mission; it ensured the further purchase of Indian hunting grounds and at the same time it was a reaction to the increasing threat of British influence because it rendered the Indians dependent on American goods and annuities. American military officers, Indian agents and government officials attributed the Prophet’s growing influence to the machinations of Great Britain. The Indians were perceived as weak and ineffectual, subject to the manipulations and influences of European and American powers. Jefferson, writing to John Adams shortly before the War of 1812, explained that “his administration left the Shawnee alone, till the English thought him worth corrupting and found him corruptible.”[45]                                                 

In the summer of 1807 Jefferson’s initial impression of the Shawnee Prophet as a harmless ‘visionary’ underwent a significant change. An American naval vessel was attacked and boarded by a British warship searching for deserters, some of them American citizens. Shortly after this incident, Harrison wrote a letter to the secretary of war, informing him of increasing resentment among the tribes in the territory over the United States’ failure to punish the known murderers of inoffensive Indians. Harrison feared that the Prophet was inciting the local Indians to violence. Jefferson was undoubtedly made aware of this potentially threatening situation on the frontier. In response, he wrote to the secretary of war that justice must be done and suggested a $1,000 reward for the capture of one suspect.[46] More interesting, however, is his suggestion that perhaps the Prophet could be  bribed into alliance. Failing that, he could be assassinated, not by the Americans, but by Indians of a rival faction: “With respect to the prophet, if those who are in danger from him would settle it in their own way it would be their affair. But we should do nothing towards it. That kind of policy is not in the character of our government, and still less of the paternal spirit we wish to show towards that people. But could not Harrison gain over the prophet, who no doubt is a scoundrel, and only needs his price.”[47]  Jefferson’s appraisal of the Prophet as an easily “corruptible scoundrel” justified not only bribery, but manipulation and interference in intertribal politics as well. Harrison’s warnings of the hostile intentions of the Prophet and those of his followers  convinced Jefferson that the situation required more aggressive action: he instructed the governors of Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana to mobilize their militia and gather the arms, ammunition and supplies necessary for defending the posts and settlements. The Prophet was no longer a harmless “pretender”; in light of British influence and increasing Indian hostility, he and his more militant followers posed a  growing threat to the safety and stability of the region. Jefferson instructed the secretary of war to caution the Indians of the inevitable consequences of heeding the Prophet’s counsel: “We have learnt that some tribes are already expressing intentions hostile to the United States, we think it proper to apprise them of the ground on which they now stand . . . we make them this solemn declaration of our unalterable determination, that we wish them to live in peace . . . and we have no intention ever to strike them . . . unless first attacked or threatened; but that learning that some of them meditate war on us, we too are preparing for war against those . . . and that if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.”[48]    

As war with Great Britain loomed closer, Harrison’s fears escalated: “the Prophet is a tool of British fears or British avarice, designed for the purpose of forming a combination of the Indians, which in case of war between that power and the United states may assist them in the defense of Canada.”[49]  As he continued to bribe and influence the more accommodationist chiefs into sales of tribal lands, Harrison continued to attribute Indian hostility to the influence of British agents on the Prophet and his followers. While Harrison denigrated the Prophet and his religious doctrine, he nonetheless perceived the threat to the U.S. frontier of unity among the tribes in the Ohio Valley. In a letter to William Eustis, Secretary of War under Jefferson and Madison, Harrison expressed his apprehension of peace between the Indian tribes:

The mind of a savage is so constructed that he cannot be at rest, he cannot be happy unless it is acted upon by some strong stimulus that which is produced by war is the only one that is sufficiently powerful to fill up the intervals of the chase if he hunts in the winter he must go to war in the summer, and you may rest assured Sir, that the establishment of tranquility between the neighboring tribes will always be a sure indication of war against us.[50]

            Notable here, in addition to the explicit fear of peace and tranquility between the tribes, is Harrison’s racial characterization of the Indians as warlike and unstable: the “mind of the savage” is different from the mind of white men. Indians, unlike whites, could not be trusted in negotiation; they must be controlled. The Americans frequently attempted to exploit intertribal factionalism and conflict in order to prevent unification among the tribes, and more importantly to facilitate the purchase of land from individual tribes and tribal leaders indebted to the United States.

            On September 30, 1809, the Treaty of Fort Wayne was signed; the tribes ceded over three million acres in Indiana and Illinois to the United States. The government chiefs received an increase in their annuities and a gift of trade goods worth $5,200.[51] The Delaware and the Miamis had legitimate claims to the ceded region, but the Potawatomis’ claim was more tenuous: their villages did not extend into the area, and they hunted there only occasionally. Significantly, the treaty signatories were all “government chiefs”: they shared in the government annuities, but their influence was waning with the more militant members of their tribes.[52] For example, Miami warriors long faithful to Little Turtle, signer of the treaty for the Miamis, began to question his leadership. After the Treaty of Fort Wayne, the nature of the movement changed: ostensibly a victory for Harrison and the annuity chiefs, the treaty in fact weakened the influence of the accommodationists and increased the influence of the more militant factions within the tribes.           

The continuing concern over the loss of land urged the adoption of the more pragmatic and militant measures of Tecumseh, who used the religious movement to forge a political and military confederation among the western tribes. Tecumseh contended that Indian land belonged in common to all the tribes and therefore individual portions could not be ceded by those who were temporarily settled upon them. Tecumseh explained his position in a speech to Harrison in 1807:

You try to force the red people to do some injury. It is you that is pushing them on to do mischief. You endeavour to make distinctions, you wish to prevent the indians to do as we wish them to unite and let them consider their land as the common property of the  whole you take tribes aside and advise them not to come into this measure and until our design is accomplished  we do not wish to accept of your invitation to go and visit the  President.

The reason I tell you this is--you want by your distinctions of Indian tribes in allotting to each a particular track of land to make them to war with each other. You never see an Indian come and endeavour to make the white people do so. You are continually driving the red people when at last you will drive them into the great lake where they can’t either stand or work.[53]

Concerned with the growing number of warriors gathering at Tippecanoe under the influence of the Prophet, Harrison sent agents to ascertain the Prophet’s intentions. The Prophet denied hostile intention towards the United States, he had been unjustly accused, he said, of intending to make war. He asserted “that it was by the express commands of the Great Spirit that he had fixed himself there; and that he was ordered to assemble the Indians at that spot.”[54]  When pressed further to state his complaints against the United States, he responded by saying that “the Indians had been cheated of their lands; that no sale was valid unless sanctioned by all the tribes.”[55] Later that same year, Tecumseh, accompanied by four hundred warriors “fully armed with tomahawks and war-clubs, descended the Wabash to Vincennes”[56] to meet in council with Harrison and establish the position of the Indians gathered at Tippecanoe and his objections to the Treaty of Fort Wayne. Tecumseh opened the council by “boldly” avowing “the principle of his party to be, that of resistance to every cession of land, unless made by all their tribes, who, he contended, formed but one nation.”[57]  Furthermore, he admitted his intention to “kill the chiefs who signed the treaty of fort Wayne; and that it was his fixed determination not to permit the village chiefs, in future to manage their affairs, but to place the power with which they had been heretofore invested, in the hands of the war chiefs.” While disavowing his intention of making war on the United States,“he declared it to be his unalterable resolution to take a stand, and resolutely oppose the further intrusion of the whites upon the Indian lands.”[58] 

In 1811, while Tecumseh was in the south seeking support among the Creeks for his confederacy, Harrison and the militia attacked the Prophet’s settlement at Tippecanoe. In the war that followed, Harrison as commander of the American forces in the northwest succeeded in expelling the British and their Indian allies led by Tecumseh from Detroit. The British and the Indians retreated to Canada where Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames. With the Indian confederacy destroyed and peace restored on the frontier, Harrison was able to procure the cession of more Indian land in Indiana and Illinois. After the War of 1812, Lewis Cass assumed the positions of governor of the Michigan Territory and Indian superintendent. In 1830, after Congress passed the Removal Act, Cass, as secretary of war under President Andrew Jackson, was responsible for further treaties of cession and the removal of tens of thousands of unwilling Indians west of the Mississippi.[59]                                                                     

The Anglo-American perception of Indian resistance consistently failed to recognize the integration of the religious and political within the movement, and equally important, it denied the Indians the quality of self-determination. This is most clearly demonstrated in Drake’s characterization of the Prophet as a weak and ineffectual “pretender.” The Prophet came to represent the moral decline of Indian civilization, the decline and degradation of a people that morally justified American dominance and control. Yet, as we have seen, the religious impulse in the resistance movement was vital; the religious and political elements of resistance were clearly integrated. Tenskwatawa’s call for racial unity and a distinct, separate Indian identity that transcended tribal affiliations foreshadowed the later Indian resistance movements of the nineteenth century. The Shawnee Prophet’s emphasis on a return to tradition and proper ritual which would ensure the restoration of Indian land and cultural independence are “like the Ghost Dance part of an anticolonial movement spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and combining religious and political forms of resistance.”[60] 

              Drake, writing of the forced removal of the Indians beyond the Mississippi, implied the possibility of their extinction:

Whether the new position west of the Mississippi, in which the Indian tribes have been placed, will tend to promote their civilization, arrest their deterioration in morals, or their decline in number, we think extremely problematical. Should such, however, be the happy result, it may be anticipated that the tribe which has produced a Logan, a Cornstalk and a Tecumseh, will be among the first to rise above the moral degradation in which it is shrouded, and foremost to exhibit the renovating influences of christian civilization.”[61] 

The Indians had a noble, proud history, Drake suggests, but their time is past, and their fate seems inevitable. While they can be admired, as Tecumseh demonstrated, he clearly represented the exception; the rest are “shrouded in moral degradation.” In memory, if not in reality, they can be respected and their passing mourned. In 1829, when Congress was planning the removal of the southern tribes from the lands east of the Mississippi, Colonel McKinney observed that “the failed nobility of Tecumseh had sealed the fate of his people: his life paid the forfeit of his gallant enterprise; and with it vanished all hope of all allies to him of ever again becoming lords of their domain.”[62] Nineteenth-century Americans identified with Tecumseh’s “failed nobility”; they saw in his independent spirit to resist and form an Indian confederacy, a reflection of their own bold endeavor to forge a new nation, subdue the frontier and expand westward. In defining Tecumseh by the qualities they admired in themselves, white Americans not only reinforced their own self-image, but also assimilated Tecumseh’s virtues into American mythology: Tecumseh became part of their own past and the history of western expansion.     

If nineteenth-century Americans assimilated the heroic warrior Tecumseh into the mythology of the American west, Tenskwatawa was clearly placed outside white American society. The vital, unifying force of the Prophet’s religious message among the Indians was dismissed by white Americans, diminishing his significance and his role in the resistance movement. However, the religious impulse of the movement was an essential element in the program for social and political change. In vilifying the Prophet and his religious message, Americans like Drake and Jefferson made him the symbol of the decline and deterioration of Indian civilization, giving moral justification for the further acquisition of Indian land, their removal beyond the Mississippi and the inevitable extinction of their race. Jefferson was not solely responsible for creating the United States Indian policy, but his policies of civilization were integral in the development of federal Indian and land policies.[63]  In mourning the Indians’ removal beyond the Mississippi, or their possible extinction, Americans reinforced their self -perception as a benevolent and moral people; at the same time they justified the further acquisition of Indian lands. More importantly, Americans came to see themselves as the rightful heirs to Jefferson’s vision of America’s destiny to expand westward.

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Notes

[1] Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 518.