Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership

Visions and prophecies are recurring motifs throughout Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. In the lead-up to the 1788 attack on Buchanan’s Station in Tennessee, Chiksika allegedly has a premonition of dying in combat, but he chooses to fight anyway, dying in the battle. Years later, Tecumseh has a similar vision the night before the Battle of Thames, and he also decides to fight. Tecumseh knew that his father and two of his brothers died fighting the “Long Knives.” If the Master of Life willed it, he would join them. Like Chiksika, Tecumseh seems to intuit his death at the hands of the Americans, but he decides to continue his struggle anyway because it is the divinely ordained fate of his family.

Tenskwatawa’s second life as the Prophet is also ordained through a vision from the Master of Life. In that vison, he is told to abandon the customs of the Europeans and to return to traditional Shawnee practices. This divine intervention sparks the movement that Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh will lead from roughly 1805 until 1813.

However, while prophecy enables the ascendancy of Tenskwatawa among the Indigenous peoples, it also fails him sometimes. The most notable example of this is the Battle of Tippecanoe. While Tecumseh is away from Prophetstown, Tenskwatawa assures their followers that the Master of Life will give them victory over the Americans by rendering them invulnerable to their enemy’s bullets. When this does not come to pass, some warriors threaten Tenskwatawa, and “his influence [is] broken” (158). Divine premonition fails Tenskwatawa at a decisive moment despite his initial vision. According to Edmunds, Tenskwatawa never recovers his authority among the Native Americans after this lapse in his prophetic abilities.

The symbol of the American Frontier has a long, ideological history. From the European perspective, the vast expanse of wild, “unexplored” territory across the North American continent represents the promise of the “New World” and the opportunity to begin life again. In the 19th century, this view stemmed from the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” According to this doctrine, white Americans were ordained by God to expand settlement to every habitable corner of the continent in pursuit of freedom and prosperity. They could only disseminate such values to the “New World.”

Even in the late 17th century, roughly 100 years before the American Revolution, the Shawnee people experience the deleterious effects of European settlement in their traditional territory around the Ohio Valley. French and Iroquois invasions displace the Shawnee throughout Illinois, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. By the middle of the 18th century, further European settlement had pushed the Shawnee back into the Ohio region. During Tecumseh’s lifetime, European and American movement into Kentucky, Ohio, and the Indiana Territory funneled the Shawnee into the area between Lakes Michigan and Erie, near the Canadian border.

The Treaty of Greenville in 1795 codified a clear demarcation between American and tribal lands. However, the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809 ceded more territory to the United States. Thus, for Tecumseh, European and American encroachment upon Indigenous peoples in the Old Northwest facilitated a centuries-long pattern of displacement punctuated by violence and cultural decline. In Tecumseh’s opinion, the only way to effectively overturn this trend is to unite the tribes in the region under one banner and defend what is left of Native American territory.