at the Treaty of Greenville, Shawnee leaders and others ceded
about two-thirds of what is now Ohio to the Americans.
After 1795, in the Ohio country and in the Southeast,
power continued to shift toward the Americans, but in an
accelerated manner. During this period, the newly settled
states of Kentucky (1792) and Tennessee (1796) acted like
a great geopolitical wedge cutting into Indian country. On
the one hand, this “wedge” acted as a barrier that made tradi-
tional intertribal diplomacy and exchange between northern
and southern Indians more difficult and treacherous. On the
other hand, Kentucky and Tennessee provided staging
grounds for the next wave of invasion and settlement into
regions that would eventually be known as the Old North-
west and Old Southwest. New cessions of tribal lands, north
and south, chipped away at the remaining land base of interi-
or Indians. By 1810, in the Old Northwest, settlers outnum-
bered Indians nearly four to one. As newcomers threatened
to displace Indians and destroy all forms of reciprocal ex-
change (the so-called “middle ground”), a new prophetic
movement emerged among the Shawnees. It was led by Te-
cumseh’s younger brother Lalawethika (The Rattle).
Lalawethika (1775–1836) realized his own prophetic
destiny in 1804 when he awakened from a trance. He had
received a revelation directly from the Creator. This experi-
ence transformed Lalawethika. He stopped drinking and
took a new name, Tenskwatawa, the Open Door. Echoing
the messages of previous prophets, Tenskwatawa spoke
against dependency, alcohol consumption, and land ces-
sions, and in favor of intertribal solidarity, temperance, and
reform. He disliked the fact that missionaries and other
agents of American culture encouraged Native men to work
in the fields growing food crops. In his eyes, only women
tended domestic crops full time. Real men shed blood in the
forest. Tenskwatawa charged several people among the Dela-
wares with complicity with evil spirits. This witch-hunt led
to the execution of several people, including two annuity
chiefs, who had close ties to the Americans or Christian mis-
sionaries.
Other modes of internal reform were less violent, but
also revealed tensions within tribal communities, between
accommodationists and rebels, and between Native Ameri-
cans and Americans. Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh organized
an intertribal village first at Greenville (now in Ohio), then
at Prophetstown on the Upper Wabash river (now Indiana).
These towns attracted men and women from a dozen or so
tribes, including Potawatomis, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Menomi-
nees, Winnebagos, Kickapoos, Sacs, and Foxes. Inevitably,
this gathering, no matter how peaceful its intent, excited fear
and mistrust among white authorities and the chiefs closely
allied to them.
Tensions increased still further with the 1809 signing
of the Treaty of Fort Wayne, which ceded more than 2.5
million acres of Indian land. The Delaware, Potawatomi,
Miami, and other Indian leaders who signed were con-
demned by Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. The lands in the
western country were common property among all the tribes,
and a sale was void unless made by all the Tribes. his brother
concurred. Sounding an anti-colonial note that reflected in-
creased racial consciousness, Tenskwatawa taught that whites
were not created by God, but by a lesser spirit. Tenskwatawa
and Tecumseh advocated Indian solidarity against the Amer-
ican invasion. As the War of 1812 approached, they also
carefully considered allying with the British to gain military
support. Eventually they did so, only to be gravely disap-
pointed.
Tecumseh also sought support from southern tribes. In
1811, Tecumseh, accompanied by a Mequashake Shawnee
prophet named Seekaboo, traveled among Chickasaws,
Choctaws, and Creeks to promote pan-tribal cooperation
and anti-American militancy. Their only success came
among the Creeks, a strong nation increasingly vexed by
trade debts, settler incursions, land cessions, internal class di-
visions, and meddling federal Indian agents. To show their
solidarity with northern nations, rebel Creeks danced the
Dance of the Indians of the Lakes. They also attacked leaders
closely connected with U.S. government officials.
Within two years, the Creek anti-colonial movement at-
tracted nine thousand participants, about half of the entire
Creek nation. When a Creek civil war erupted between the
rebel Redsticks and their accommodationist opponents,
Americans in surrounding states and territories seized the
conflict as an opportunity to invade Creek country, ostensi-
bly in behalf of the “friendly” Indians. American armies and
militias crushed the Redstick faction and, with the war’s
close in 1814, exacted huge land cessions from the entire
Creek nation, friend and foe alike.
By then Tecumseh himself was dead, killed in the Battle
of the Thames, near Moraviantown in Canada, on October
5, 1813. Two years earlier, as Tecumseh recruited support
in the South, an army led by William Henry Harrison had
destroyed Prophetstown. With these and other defeats, Te-
cumseh’s and Tenskwatawa’s movement ended.
In some ways, however, the comprehensive religio-
political challenge that their movement embodied continued
to trouble Americans. Among other things, Americans who
wrote about this movement and its leading figures found it
much easier and popular to divide in their representations
what had been united in practice. In novels, plays, histories,
and speeches, white writers split religion and politics, di-
vorced passion from reason, contrasted Tenskwatawa with
Tecumseh. They demonized the prophet, who continued to
live for more than two decades after the war, as the font of
all of kinds of irrational excesses, the one who foolishly led
his followers into the disastrous Battle of Tippecanoe (No-
vember 7, 1811). And they mythologized his brother Te-
cumseh, now safely dead, as a romantic, but doomed, warrior
who thought strategically and fought nobly, all for nought.
In sum, white writers celebrated Tecumseh as a singular ge-
nius, though one handicapped by his brother’s incompe-
tence.9028 TECUMSEH