4 Rising Hope, Fallen Timbers
5 Descent into Sickness
6 Casting Out Witches
7 Tippecanoe
8 War Comes to Canada
9 The Fall of Detroit
10 Fort Meigs
11 “We Have Met the Enemy …”
12 Invasion!
13 “The Forlorn Hope”
Epilogue Chronology
Chronology of Tecumseh
Sources Consulted
Index
Trying to find perfect consistency in North American frontier history, especially where First Nations are involved, is an exercise in frustration. Native people did not have written languages, so spellings of spoken Native words and phrases are so inconsistent as to be distracting. For instance, the word for bear in Ojibwe (Ojibway, Ojibwa) can be maakwaa, muqua, mukwa, or a number of other combinations of letters that make up the same sounds.
Thus we have Tecumseh, Tecumseth, Tecumtha, Tecumsay, and other spellings passed down over the two hundred years since the great chief lived.
There are other inconsistencies that distract: Where was Tecumseh actually born? Where was he at certain times of his life? Exactly how many wives and children did he have? Where is he buried? Military happenings create other inconsistencies. Each side in a battle or war has its own version of what exactly transpired and how many were killed or wounded.
In reading the history of Tecumseh, variable spellings, lack of precise dates, and inconsistent numbers can be frustrating, but in the end they don’t really matter. It’s the overall story that counts, the story of a man who stood up for what he believed was right for his people. A man, considered by most white North Americans of the day to be an uneducated savage, who became a symbol of all that is noble in any race.
Scholars continue to frustrate themselves trying to confirm the tiniest details of Tecumseh and his times, while two centuries have further obscured details that were already obscure. Theirs is an important job — to doggedly pursue the latest, best available facts. For the rest of us, what matters most are the main elements of this remarkable life and its impact on Canadian and American history.
Tecumseh lived in much different times, but the story of his life, which is the struggle to protect a vanishing culture, provides lessons for lives lived in any time.
Tecumseh’s Curse
“Sleep not longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws, in false security and delusive hopes … Will not the bones of our dead be ploughed up, and their graves turned into ploughed fields?”
— Tecumseh in September 1811, travelling the
Mississippi Territory while attempting to
unite Indians into a confederacy against U.S.
settlement.
Almost fifty years after Tecumseh spoke those words before a council of Choctaws and other Indians, James Dickson, a settler in Southwestern Ontario, ploughed up six skeletons while tending his homestead along the Thames River, east of Chatham. The homestead occupied the battlefield on which
Tecumseh and his British allies were defeated by American invaders on October 5, 1813. Before ploughing, Dickson felled some black walnut trees, which were blazed or carved with animal figures, so the bones were believed to have belonged to Indians, likely Tecumseh and his warriors. Dickson reburied the bones. Some people believed Dickson’s discovery fulfilled Tecumseh’s prophesy of Indian graves being turned to ploughed fields.
Unearthing the bones was only one unusual event connected to Tecumseh. There are other stories of him predicting his own death, of him foretelling the 1811 New Madrid, Missouri, earthquake that the Creek (Muscogee) Indians believed he caused. The most extraordinary series of events related to Tecumseh is what has become known as Tecumseh’s Curse on certain presidents of the United States.
When William Henry Harrison, Tecumseh’s nemesis, was sworn into office in March 1841, he caught a pneumonia that killed him thirty-two days after his inauguration. Harrison, one of the most influential figures in the taking of North American Indian land, was elected president in late 1840. He led the army that killed Tecumseh and his dream of a united Indian front against American land grabs west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Twenty years later, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected. He was assassinated before completing his term. James Garfield, elected president in 1880, was also assassinated. William McKinley, re-elected in 1900, was shot and killed. Next was Warren Harding’s death in office after his election in 1920.
A pattern was noticed and reported by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in the early 1930s. All those presidents who died in office were elected, like Harrison, in a year ending in zero.
The Prophet, Tecumseh’s brother. Painting by Charles Bird King.
A story developed that Tecumseh cursed Harrison for destroying Indian life, and that the curse applied to presidents elected in twenty-year intervals after him. Another version had Tenskwatawa the Prophet, Tecumseh’s somewhat disturbed brother, laying the curse on Harrison in 1836, the year of Harrison’s first attempt to become president, and the year of Tenskwatawa’s death.
The Prophet was supposedly having his portrait painted when the presidential election race between Martin Van Buren and Harrison entered the conversation. Tenskwatawa is reported to have said, “Harrison will not win this year to be the great chief. But he may win next time. If he does … he will not finish his term. He will die in office.”
“No president has ever died in office,” someone challenged.
“But Harrison will die, I tell you,” said the Prophet. “And when he dies you will remember my brother Tecumseh’s death. You think that I have lost my powers: I who caused the sun to darken and red men to give up firewater. But I tell you, Harrison will die. And after him, every great chief chosen every twenty years thereafter will die. And when each one dies, let everyone remember the death of our people.”
After Ripley’s Believe It Or Not reported the series of unexplainable deaths of presidents elected in years ending with zero,