Early life and training Tecumseh was born in an Indian village near present-day Xenia, Ohio. His father was killed by whites in 1774. His mother, a Muskogee (Creek Confederacy), left him, when he was seven years old, to accompany part of the tribe to Missouri and then passed into obscurity. Tecumseh was reared by an elder sister, Tecumapease, who trained him in the strict Shawnee code of honesty; an elder brother, Cheeseekau, taught him woodcraft and hunting. He was adopted by the Shawnee chief Blackfish and grew to young manhood with several white foster brothers whom Blackfish had captured. Murder, massacre, and the invasion of the Shawnee’s lands and the destruction of their crops deepened a hatred of whites that was instilled in Tecumseh by his mother. When he was about 14 years old, during the American Revolution, he accompanied Blackfish in combined British and Indian attacks on Americans. As hostile as he was toward whites, however, Tecumseh rebuked his fellow Shawnees about a year later for the cruelty that they themselves practiced, and it was then that he discovered that words could be as powerful as weapons. He had accompanied one of the predatory Shawnee raids on the flatboats that were bringing encroaching white settlers down the Ohio River; he had seen a white man tied to a stake and burned. Horrified, he had showered his fellow tribesmen with such abuse that they never tortured a prisoner in his presence again. After the war Tecumseh was for a number of years a marauder, fighting small actions against the whites in the Old Northwest and assisting the Cherokees in the South. He saw his brother Cheeseekau killed in an unsuccessful raid near Nashville, Tennessee, in September 1792. Although he was the youngest of the Shawnee band, Tecumseh was chosen leader, fought small actions in the South, and made an acquaintance with the Creeks that helped him later to form an alliance with them. Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. Subscribe today At the call of Bluejacket, the Shawnee chief who was collecting a force to meet a U.S. army under Major General Anthony Wayne, Tecumseh returned to Ohio, where he directed the unsuccessful attack on Fort Recovery in June 1794. On August 20, he led part of Bluejacket’s force when it was decisively defeated by Wayne at Fallen Timbers. There he saw another older brother, Sauwaseekau, killed.

Break with the “peace” chiefs When the leading chiefs of the Old Northwest gathered at Wayne’s call at Greenville, in Ohio, Tecumseh held aloof; and, when the Treaty of Greenville was negotiated in August 1795, he refused to recognize it and roundly attacked the “peace” chiefs who signed away land that he contended they did not own. Land, he said, was like the air and water, the common possession of all Indians. This doctrine of communal ownership of the land became the cornerstone of his policy. Greenville, Treaty of Gen. Anthony Wayne, representing U.S. forces, and Miami chief Little Turtle, representing the Northwest Indian Confederation, signing the Treaty of Greenville, August 3, 1795. Superstock/age fotostock Partly because of his superb oratory, which the whites compared with that of the young Henry Clay, the rising political leader in Kentucky, Tecumseh became the spokesman for the Indians in great councils in Ohio, at Urbana (1799) and Chillicothe (1804), that undertook to settle grievances. For a time he studied treaties, spoke at councils, and lived peacefully in Ohio and Indiana. About 1808 Tecumseh settled in the area of present-day Indiana with his brother Tenskwatawa, called “the Prophet” because he claimed to have had a revelation from the “Master of Life.” There the brothers sought to induce the Indians to discard white customs and goods and to abjure intertribal wars for unity against the white invader. The code of the Prophet had a mysticism that appealed to the Indians, and many became converts.