Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, became the first president to escape this unusual string of bad luck, but not completely. He was shot, but his life saved by modern medical technology.
Many people who followed Tecumseh’s Curse held their collective breath in the final months of George W. Bush’s presidency, which began in 2000. On January 20, 2009, he left the White House, the first U.S. president in almost two hundred years to leave office alive or unharmed after being elected in a year ending with zero.
There is no proof that Tecumseh or his brother pronounced the curse. However, the run of presidential deaths in office is disquieting. Snopes.com, a website reporting on urban legends, notes that “Such a string of presidential mortality is too improbable to have occurred naturally….”
Snopes notes that there is no record to support the curse as anything other than an undocumented folktale, but it does take note of some astrological beliefs. Astrologists who analyzed Tecumseh’s Curse concluded that the election of the presidents who did not live out their terms coincided with the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn that happens every twenty years. They believe that Reagan was saved by the alignment of these two planets under an air sign, while those who died in office were aligned under an earth sign. Bush was elected in 2000 under the earth sign of Taurus and he survived, so who knows?
One way or another, Tecumseh’s Curse, if it ever existed, appears to be done. The same cannot be said for the continuing debate over where Tecumseh’s bones rest. For almost two hundred years there has been speculation about where Tecumseh is buried, and attempts to identify his bones. John Richardson, a young soldier-writer who fought beside Tecumseh, made one of the earliest attempts to find Tecumseh’s bones, but his 1840 search did not even find the battlefield on which he was captured and Tecumseh died.
There were other attempts, some claiming success in finding the right bones, plus numerous stories that Tecumseh’s followers buried him in a creek, or spirited his body away, or that his bones were removed to Walpole Island in the St. Clair River. Over many decades, the controversy over Tecumseh’s bones and where they lie has become, at times, a frenzy of ridiculousness.
No one knows for sure where Tecumseh’s bones are buried, but most likely they are somewhere in what used to be settler Dickson’s field, fulfilling Tecumseh’s prophesy that “the bones of our dead be ploughed up, and their graves turned into ploughed fields.”
The March sun warmed and loosened winter’s paralysis, stirring new life along every inch of the river’s banks. Fern stems poked their pale heads through awakening soil to feel the sunlight. In the forests, little touched by human activity, the trees stretched and felt their saps beginning to flow. Animal life, from bears to the tiniest insects, emerged and set about the business of a new cycle of life.
Nowhere was the activity more evident than among the dozens of tree-bark dwellings near the riverbank. Shawnee children laughed and chased each other around the wigwams in hide-and-seek games while their parents began the chores of the year’s most important season. The village’s hunter warriors refurbished tools and weapons, and discussed hunting plans; the women threw themselves into the work of village maintenance and prepared to ready gardens for planting. Spring meant new life, new beginnings, new adventures, and new workloads.
For a woman called Methoataaskee, the priority task of the spring of 1768 was to deliver the baby she had carried inside her since the previous summer. She lay in a small bark birthing hut near the family lodge, attended by older women. She was twenty-eight and in her fourth pregnancy. The birth came in the evening, just after they had seen a brilliant meteor brighten the darkening sky. Great joy followed the wracking pain of delivery, but the birth created little fanfare. She swaddled the child, a boy, and later strapped him to a ndiknaagan, the cradle board that would be with her every work day until he could sit on his own. The birthing done, there were the other children to feed, maple sap to render to syrup and sugar, and corn, squash, and beans to plant.
The new son had his own job: feed, grow, and survive the first delicate months of life. When he abandoned the cradle board some months later, his father, Pukeshinwau, organized his naming feast. The boy took his division or tribal affiliation from his father, a Kispoko Shawnee of the panther clan. Mshibzhii is the celestial panther spirit seen crouching or leaping in the starry skies. The naming was decided by an elder from another clan, who offered tobacco and prayers to the spirits. The name chosen was Tecumtha or Tecumseh, meaning “Shooting Star,” and fitting for a life destined to be short, but brilliant.
Tecumseh entered a growing family of some standing. Pukeshinwau, a Kispoko war chief, and Methoataaskee had three sons and a daughter. Cheeseekau had been born seven years earlier, followed by the girl Tecumapease, then Sauawaseekau. The family also included an adopted boy, a white child captured by Pukeshinwau in a raid near Wheeling, West Virginia, a few years earlier. He was born Richard Sparks but the Shawnee renamed him Shawtunte.
The Kispoko village was one of several Shawnee communities along the Scioto River, which started in west-central Ohio, ran 231 miles south through present-day Columbus, and down to Portsmouth, where it joined the mighty Ohio River. The Scioto (sigh-OH-toe), an Indian word indicating the presence of many deer, was part of an ancient trail used by the Indians to link their towns and the hunting grounds to the south, in what later became the State of Kentucky.
The Scioto Valley, sitting below the heavily forested Appalachian Foothills, offered the Shawnee the closest thing to paradise. There were open fertile places to plant food crops and the tobacco used for spiritual, medicinal, and cultural purposes. The forests provided life-giving animals including bears, cougars, deer, elk, wild turkeys, wolves, bobcats, and millions of birds — in particular the passenger pigeon, destined for extinction. The river itself was a transport corridor for their elm-bark canoes.
It was a very different land from what we know two hundred years later. The forests were primeval, the rivers and lakes pure, and the only signs of human occupation were footpaths and small habitation clearings. At the time of Tecumseh’s birth, roughly 95 percent of the Ohio Territory was covered by mature forest, compared with 30 percent today.
One person’s paradise often is another person’s envy. The wildlife, good timber, water, and fertile growing areas caught the covetous eyes of the surging population of the Thirteen British Colonies that were spread along the Atlantic Coast, east of the Appalachians. The French, who had settled Canadian lands north and east of the Great Lakes, also felt they had a stake in the Ohio Country, because of their aggressive explorations and fur trading throughout much of the New World.
The interests of both groups were known and watched nervously by the Shawnee and other Indian nations, who already knew the pain of being pushed from their homelands. The powerful Iroquois, expanding their influence and territory in the mid-1600s Beaver Wars, drove the Shawnee from their Ohio River valleys, dispersing some west, some east over the Alleghenies, and others south to the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and as far as Florida. Pukeshinwau was one of these migrants, and it was in the south that he met and married Methoataaskee.
The displaced Shawnees dreamt of regrouping in a traditional homeland south of Lake Erie. One organized reunification occurred in the 1750s with some tribes drifting back to the Ohio Country. Pukeshinwau and Methoataaskee trekked north about 1759, settling along the Scioto River, likely at or near Chillicothe, about 125 miles north of where the Scioto meets the Ohio.
About the same time, the British colonists’ interest in the Ohio frontier turned to action. In 1748, some Virginians, including George Washington’s half brother Lawrence, formed the Ohio Company, with a plan to get the land west of the Appalachians from King