Tecumseh
1768–1813 1 entry
Biography
Tecumseh was a Shawnee leader who tried to unite the Native nations of North America against the advance of American settlers. Born in 1768 in the Ohio country, he grew up amid constant war; his father fell in battle when he was a boy. Together with his brother Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, he founded the village of Prophetstown, in today’s Indiana, and travelled from the Great Lakes to the South to build a great confederacy of tribes.
He held that the land belonged to all Native peoples in common and that no single tribe had the right to sell it, and in 1810 he told Governor William Henry Harrison so to his face at Vincennes. While he was away in 1811, Harrison’s army destroyed Prophetstown at the battle of Tippecanoe. In the War of 1812 Tecumseh allied himself with the British and helped them take Detroit, but he fell in October 1813 at the battle of the Thames, in Upper Canada. His dream of a united Native nation died with him.
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