One can imagine the emotions of a six-year-old boy standing with his mother and siblings as the war party prepared to leave. The whoops of warriors and the neighing of excited horses rolling through the autumn air already filled with dust, the smell of horse flesh, tension, and determination. He must have been overcome with envy and pride as his older brother Cheeseekau, just thirteen, took his place in the war party beside his father.
Tecumseh and his family watched the war party disappear in the distance, Methoataaskee with a large belly that told of another child to come in winter. Tecumseh ached for the day that he would join them on the trail to war. He could not know, however, that his own path to war would be part of a desperate struggle to save his people. Neither did he know that he would never see his father again.
Shawnee Chief Hokoleskwa, known in English as Cornstalk, preferred peace, but in the autumn of 1774 he had little choice but to fight. Long Knives from Virginia marched into a Mingo Indian village on the Ohio River, near today’s Pennsylvania-Ohio border, and massacred eleven people, including the headman’s mother and sister. The Mingos, a mixed tribe of mainly Iroquois, were generally peaceful and were outraged. They found support among the Shawnee, who were seeking revenge for the deaths of some tribesmen in separate incidents.
Mingos and Shawnee attacked white settlements in Pennsylvania to even the score. They killed thirteen settlers and handed Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia, an excuse to settle the growing Indian problem. Dunmore retaliated against two Shawnee villages near the current West Virginia border, then assembled two armies to march on the Indian towns along the Scioto.
Cornstalk wanted to avoid war but it was coming at him, so he sent the red tomahawk to Shawnee chiefs throughout the central Ohio Territory. The red tomahawk put Pukeshinwau and his warriors on the war trail south to meet Cornstalk and the main assembly of warriors.
Cornstalk planned to take the offensive. He had three to five hundred warriors prepared to hit the Virginia army near where the Kanawha River meets the Ohio in southern Ohio. Early in the morning of October 10, 1774, Cornstalk, Pukeshinwau, and their warriors crossed the Ohio River and met the Long Knives at Point Pleasant. The fighting was severe, much of it hand-to-hand, and raged until near nightfall. Cornstalk was heard shouting above the battle clamour for his warriors to “be strong” and carry the fight. The Shawnee were hugely outnumbered, however, and by day’s end retreated back across the river.
The Shawnee lost the battle, but the Virginians paid heavily, with seventy-five dead and 150 wounded. Perhaps forty Shawnee were dead, but no count was available because the Indians threw their dead into the Ohio to prevent the Long Knives from scalping and mutilating them. Mutilating enemy corpses was a common feature of North American frontier warfare. All sides — Indians, British, French, and Americans — did it. The whites scalped to terrorize the Indians and play on their superstitions about scalp locks containing spiritual power. They also encouraged their people, and Indians allied to them, to take enemy scalps in return for cash bounties. It was a savage practice that grew throughout the 1700s because of the use of official bounties.
The Indians, before bounties were offered, sometimes kept scalps as trophies, hanging them from poles or along the gunwales of canoes. The practice was witnessed by Thomas Gist, the son of the Ohio Country surveyor, after he was held prisoner by a group of Indians in the Ohio Country:
The men began to scrape the flesh and blood from the scalps, and dry them by the fire, after which they dressed them with feathers and painted them, then tied them on white, red, and black poles.
In Tecumseh’s time, scalping was done by shoving the victim, dead or alive, face first into the ground, pushing a foot or knee between the shoulders, yanking the head back by the hair, then making a crescent slice along the forehead and ripping the scalp back.
A scalping was described by John Richardson, the teenager who served with the British and Tecumseh, and who later became a famous Canadian writer. He wrote of an Indian chief at the 1813 Battle of the Thames throwing a tomahawk at a Kentuckian’s head, then:
Laying down his rifle, he drew forth his knife, and after having removed the hatchet from the brain, proceeded to make a circular incision throughout the scalp. This done, he grasped the bloody instrument between his teeth, and placing his knees on the back of his victim, while at the same time he fastened his fingers in the hair, the scalp was torn off without much apparent difficulty and thrust, still bleeding, into his bosom. The warrior then arose, and having wiped his knife on the clothes of the unhappy man, returned it to its sheath, grasping at the same time the arms he had abandoned, and hastening to rejoin his comrades. All this was the work of a few minutes.
Scalping was only one indignity committed on the battlefield. The Virginians and Kentuckians were well known for stripping skin from Indians bodies, using it for razor strops and other household accessories. Some of most heroic frontier battlefield stories are about Indians recovering dead comrades to save their bodies from mutilation. The Indians were adept at recovering their dead and secretly burying them or dropping them into streams, a practice that became an interesting issue with the death of Tecumseh years later.
One of the Shawnee dead at Point Pleasant was Pukeshinwau. His young son Cheeseekau was at his side when he died. The story of the death was related throughout the Shawnee community and Stephen Ruddell later recounted what he had been told:
At his dying moment he called to him his oldest son, a youth of twelve or thirteen years … and strongly enjoined on him to preserve unsullied the dignity and honour of his family; and directed him in future to lead forth to battle his younger brothers.
Cheeseekau followed a sorrowful trail home with the surviving Shawnee and set to work looking after his younger brothers, especially Tecumseh, instructing them in the arts of living and war. By winter’s end he had two more brothers to train; Methoataaskee had given birth to triplets, one of whom died. One of the surviving boys, Lalawéthika, was destined to play a huge role in helping Tecumseh make history.
Pukeshinwau was not the only Tecumseh family member lost in the Point Pleasant battle. The defeat forced the Shawnee into a peace treaty in which they agreed to give up their white captives. Shawtunte, now about fourteen, was sought by his parents who had heard about the treaty. They found him but he didn’t recognize them, nor could he speak English. His mother identified him by a birthmark. He returned home with his parents, and later became a scout for the new United States Army. He eventually attained the rank of colonel.
Tecumseh’s boyhood was filled with war. The Americans, fighting for complete independence from Britain, worried about the British coming at them from the back door — the northwest Indian country south and west of Lake Erie. Out there the Shawnee were supporting the British in the hopes that the Americans would be beaten, and defeat would end the flow of American settlers and militias crossing into their lands from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. The Shawnee knew that more settlers meant more farms, less forest, and diminished game, which in turn meant more reliance on trade goods and white lifestyles. With British help they intended to push the Americans back across the mountains.
The Indians were the ones who got pushed, however. They were pushed from eastern Ohio, from the Scioto and the Mad rivers, and later from the Great and Little Miami rivers in western Ohio into present-day Indiana. Eventually they were pushed completely out of the lives they had known for hundreds of years before people first arrived from Europe.
