Tecumseh and Brock (4 page)

However, the Shawnee forays into Kentucky did not halt the migration of white settlers there. By 1782, Kentucky could arm and equip 1,300 men, a force that dwarfed the number of warriors the Shawnees and their allies could raise to counter them. By the time peace returned, the Shawnees had effectively lost the southern part of their territory; settler possession of Kentucky was irreversible.

In 1783, the United States was recognized by the British as an independent republic. The Treaty of Paris established the U.S. border along the line of the Great Lakes and extended its territory west to the Mississippi River. Spain held the territory west of the Mississippi and south of the U.S. in Florida. North of the new country were the British colonies that would one day become parts of Canada. The Treaty of Paris made no provision for the sovereignty of the native peoples. Under it, the Six Nations' lands were ceded by Britain to the United States. The U.S. government regarded the lands of the native peoples in the Ohio country and in western New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky as theirs, won in a war and legitimized in a treaty. Even though the British held forts on the American side of the Great Lakes for years after the treaty came into effect, the Americans were determined to extend their effective sovereignty to the region, which put the Shawnees and the young Tecumseh directly in the line of the U.S. advance.

The end of the Revolutionary War and the Treaty of Paris transformed Quebec and the Atlantic colonies, Britain's remaining holdings on the continent. With the Patriots victorious, tens of thousands of British Loyalists left the United States. While many voyaged to Britain, others set out for British North America. Some Loyalists settled in the part of Nova Scotia that became the newly founded colony of New Brunswick. Others made their new homes in Quebec's Eastern Townships, or the north shore of the St. Lawrence River west of Montreal, or the northern shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie. In 1791, the British Parliament took note of the fact that tens of thousands of Loyalists were flooding into the province when it passed the Constitutional Act that divided Quebec into the colonies of Lower and Upper Canada.

The Treaty of Paris also had consequences for the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Mohawk leader Joseph Brant convinced the governor of Quebec, Sir Frederick Haldimand, to grant land for a Mohawk settlement on the Grand River. In the fall of 1784, the Six Nations divided, with half of their people remaining in New York while the other half followed Brant to Quebec.

But the Treaty of Paris did not quash native resistance to the seizure
of their land. Between 1783 and 1795, Brant returned to provide inspired direction to the native confederacy movement on the U.S. side of the frontier.
20
As a youth, Brant had believed that land negotiations between the Americans and individual tribes or small groups of native leaders were illegitimate. The confederacy as a whole had to agree to any sales of land, because the lands of native peoples were a common holding, a holding that included the territory on which their settlements were established as well as their hunting and fishing grounds.

In December 1786, Brant and the Shawnee war chief Blue Jacket participated in the formation of an alliance of northwestern tribes — Iroquois, Hurons, Delawares, Shawnees, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Potawatomis, Miamis, and Wabash River tribes — whose delegates assembled in a council at the mouth of the Detroit River. The common goal of this alliance was to hold on to native lands as agreed to in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, negotiated with the British in 1768. In a message they sent to the United States Congress, the members of the confederacy insisted that any cession of native lands to the U.S. “should be made in the most public manner, and by the united voice of the confederacy; holding all partial treaties as void and of no effect.” While the confederacy preferred a peaceful outcome, its members were ready to use force to halt American expansion if they had to.
21

Then, as later, the representatives of the U.S. government rejected outright the concept that all native peoples held their land in common. The government's tactic was to divide the peoples from each other, win over particular leaders, and make land deals with each of them, insisting on the legitimacy of these undertakings. In 1784, U.S. commissioners met with the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix — Brant was not present — to bludgeon them into recognizing that they had been conquered and giving up their claims to the Ohio country. The same tactic was used in 1785 in talks with the Wyandots, Delawares, Ottawas, and Ojibwas.

That same year, the representatives of the United States summoned the Shawnees to a similar session at the mouth of the Great Miami River, where the Americans had built Fort Finney. In January 1786, 230 Shawnees attended the meeting with the commissioners. Moluntha, an elderly Mekoche who was the head civil chief, led the Shawnee delegation. The U.S. representatives were intent on forcing the Shawnees to give up almost all of their territory. They insisted that the Shawnee people had been conquered, and if they did not accede to the U.S. ultimatum, force would be used to compel acceptance. Many of the younger warriors in the delegation were visibly angry.

Joseph Brant and Kekewepelethy, a Mekoche leader who strongly supported the confederacy, pressed for resistance. When Brant had
heard about the agreements forced on other peoples by the Americans,
he had declared, as recorded by U.S. commissioners, that “all nations of us of one colour were there and agreed as one man not to make peace or war without the consent of the whole, and you likewise know that one or two nations going to our brothers' council fire cannot do anything without the whole were there present.” At Fort Finney, Kekewepelethy rejected the American claim that the native peoples had been defeated in battle and had therefore lost any claim to their land. “We do not understand measuring out the lands. It is all ours,” he insisted. The reply from one of the U.S. commissioners was just as clear: “We plainly tell you that this country belongs to the United States.”

Threatened with force, the Shawnee chiefs yielded, and on January 31, 1786, they agreed to a treaty through which they gave up most of present-day eastern and southern Ohio, the lion's share of their territory. Instead of bringing peace, the deal drove those Shawnees who had not been present at Fort Finney to prepare for war. They were joined in their rejection of the U.S. position by local Mingoes, Cherokees, and Delawares. They also sought the support of the native peoples of the Wabash, dispatching riders with the message “to destroy all the men wearing hats . . . who seem to be leagued against us to drive us away from the lands which the Master of Life has given to us.”
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In October 1786, eight hundred mounted militiamen from Kentucky crossed the Ohio River and assaulted the Mekoche town of Mackachack in a fight against the Shawnees who had rejected the Treaty of Fort Finney. Moluntha, the most important chief in the town, favoured peace with the Americans and had tried to restrain the younger warriors who wanted to take up the fight. The Kentuckians had no interest in the views of the chief or of the townspeople, who made an attempt to demonstrate their peaceful intentions by raising an American flag. Most of the town's warriors were away hunting when the attack occurred. The Kentuckians shot a few warriors and seized a number of prisoners, most of them women and children. The elderly Moluntha surrendered and was interrogated by Colonel Hugh McGary. The colonel concluded, almost certainly incorrectly, that in 1782 the old man had been involved in a native attack on Kentuckians. McGary struck Moluntha with a tomahawk, and when the chief tried to stand up, the colonel sank the blade of the weapon into the side of his head and proceeded to scalp him. McGary was later suspended from duty for one year for this atrocity.

The Kentucky force, taking their women and children captives along, looted and destroyed about half a dozen native towns. They put two hundred houses to the torch, slaughtered livestock, and destroyed about fifteen thousand bushels of corn. As a part of their haul, the Kentuckians took with them ten scalps. Shawnees were discovering that it made little difference whether you made peace or war with the Big Knives.

During these tempestuous years, Tecumseh learned an approach to land negotiations that relied on allegories for the commonality of native life. In one allegory, land was presented as a common meal consumed by all, “a dish with one spoon.”
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The young Tecumseh drew inspiration from the effort to form a common front among native peoples. Here was an attempt to do what had been tried a number of times before — to unite peoples who had different languages and ways of life and a long history of mutual hostility and warfare. In the late seventeenth century, Algonquin tribes had banded together to resist the aggression of the Iroquois. Early in the following century, the Iroquois peoples had cooperated to ensure their mutual security after deals were forced on them by the French and the native allies of the French. Shawnees, Delawares, and
Mingoes in the Ohio country made common cause in the mid-eigh
teenth century to counter threats to their lands from both the
British and the French. Another example occurred during Tecumseh's
childhood, when his people allied themselves with other natives and with the British to fight the Kentucky settlers.

With their father gone, it fell to his older brother Cheeseekau to oversee Tecumseh's personal spiritual journey and groom him to become a warrior who would one day fight to defend native land.
24
He blackened his younger brother's face and sent him by himself into the woods to fast, meditate, and pray with the goal of finding his guardian spirit. It was customary for the spirit to appear to the young male in the form of a creature, often during a dream or trance. Having discovered his guardian spirit, the adolescent would never reveal it to anyone else. It was a source of power for him alone. The boy would normally repeat these journeys a number of times, the final journey lasting as long as three days.
25

For Tecumseh, the transition from boyhood to early manhood was swift. He was acquiring the skills that would one day make him the greatest warrior and native leader of his time. Once, on a hunting expedition with Stephen Ruddell, Tecumseh reportedly felled sixteen buffalo with a bow and quiver of arrows. Years later, when Tecumseh had become a legendary figure, stories were often told about his prowess as a teenager. While some of them are no doubt exaggerations, he was clearly an accomplished hunter and therefore a valued provider to his community.

Those who knew him during these years have passed down accounts of Tecumseh as an athletic, attractive, friendly, and warm-hearted young man who drew many friends and admirers. “He was fond of creating his jokes,” Stephen Ruddell wrote, “but his wit was never aimed to wound the feelings of his comrades.” Young women found him appealing. While there were many opportunities for Tecumseh to develop relationships with women during games and hunting parties that involved both sexes, he tended to shun advances. A favourite activity was called the “bringing dance.” The young men began the dance and then the young women would join in, each one selecting the man she wanted as a partner. The women often chose Tecumseh, but he usually laughed it off and didn't pursue these advances. “The women were very fond of him,” Stephen Ruddell recalled, “much more so than he was of them.”
†
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Despite his good humour, Tecumseh had a serious goal that he pursued with unwavering dedication. He not only developed the skills he would need to be a superb hunter and warrior, he also learned lessons about his own and other native peoples that would prepare him to become a unique leader with a vision that could unite different tribes. The suffering he had experienced at the hands of the Big Knives — the death of his father, the destruction of villages in which he lived, and the loss of hunting grounds — had taught him that native peoples must stand together if they were to succeed in halting the usurpation of their lands by white settlers.

It is likely in a fight against the Kentuckians on the Mad River that eighteen-year-old Tecumseh found himself on a field of battle for the first time. To his shame, he learned that becoming a warrior was not easy. Tecumseh looked across the small, deadly space that separated him and his comrades from their foes, a moment for which he had long prepared. But when the soldiers unleashed volleys of musket fire, he panicked and turned tail. His brother and the others stayed and fought, until Cheeseekau was hit and fellow warriors carried him from the battlefield to safety.
27

Late-eighteenth-century warfare required combatants to stand facing each other fifty or sixty metres apart, exchanging volleys of musket fire. It took nerve — and often not a little alcohol — to engage in such counterintuitive behaviour. The British regular army trained a soldier for three years to ready him for the battlefield.

Tecumseh had faced his first test as a warrior, and he had failed. He vowed never to show such cowardice again. It was a vow he kept.