Tecumseh: Shooting Star, Crouching Panther

Jim Poling Sr.

Jim Poling Sr. was a newspaper journalist for thirty-five years before turning to freelance magazine and book writing. Much of his journalism career was spent with the national news agency Canadian Press. His postings there included Edmonton, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Toronto, as well as assignments across the Far North, Alaska, Russia, Scandinavia, and Cuba. He began his CP career as a reporter and worked as editor, bureau chief, editor-in-chief, and general manager.

Jim is also the author of Waking Nanabijou, a memoir about his search for his mother’s origins and an exploration of the shameful ongoing discrimination against First Nations people. His other books include Tom Thomson: The Life and Death of the Famous Canadian Painter and The Canoe: An Illustrated History. Jim lives in Alliston, Ontario.

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Sharon Stewart, Louis Riel: Firebrand

André Vanasse, Gabrielle Roy: A Passion for Writing

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John Wilson, Norman Bethune: A Life of Passionate Conviction

Rachel Wyatt, Agnes Macphail: Champion of the Underdog

JIM POLING SR.

TECUMSEH

SHOOTING STAR, CROUCHING PANTHER

DUNDURN PRESS

TORONTO

Copyright © Jim Poling Sr., 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Poling, Jim (Jim R.)

     Tecumseh : shooting star, crouching panther / by Jim Poling Sr.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-55488-414-8

              1. Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief, 1768-1813. 2. Shawnee

Indians--Kings and rulers--Biography. 3. Indians of North

America--Wars--Northwest, Old. 4. Indians of North

America--Wars--1812-1815. I. Title.

E99.S35T169 2009      974.004’973170092      C2009-900495-X

1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

Printed on recycled paper.

www.dundurn.com

Cover photo: Portrait of Tecumseh from the play Tecumseh: A Drama written by Charles Mair, 1886. Artist unknown.

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

1 A Shooting Star Appears

2 Death at Point Pleasant

3 Chickamauga Raiders

4 Rising Hope, Fallen Timbers

5 Descent into Sickness

6 Casting Out Witches

7 Tippecanoe

8 War Comes to Canada

9 The Fall of Detroit

10 Fort Meigs

11 We Have Met the Enemy …

12 Invasion!

13 The Forlorn Hope

Epilogue Chronology

Chronology of Tecumseh

Sources Consulted

Index

Author’s Note

Trying to find perfect consistency in North American frontier history, especially where First Nations are involved, is an exercise in frustration. Native people did not have written languages, so spellings of spoken Native words and phrases are so inconsistent as to be distracting. For instance, the word for bear in Ojibwe (Ojibway, Ojibwa) can be maakwaa, muqua, mukwa, or a number of other combinations of letters that make up the same sounds.

Thus we have Tecumseh, Tecumseth, Tecumtha, Tecumsay, and other spellings passed down over the two hundred years since the great chief lived.

There are other inconsistencies that distract: Where was Tecumseh actually born? Where was he at certain times of his life? Exactly how many wives and children did he have? Where is he buried? Military happenings create other inconsistencies. Each side in a battle or war has its own version of what exactly transpired and how many were killed or wounded.

In reading the history of Tecumseh, variable spellings, lack of precise dates, and inconsistent numbers can be frustrating, but in the end they don’t really matter. It’s the overall story that counts, the story of a man who stood up for what he believed was right for his people. A man, considered by most white North Americans of the day to be an uneducated savage, who became a symbol of all that is noble in any race.

Scholars continue to frustrate themselves trying to confirm the tiniest details of Tecumseh and his times, while two centuries have further obscured details that were already obscure. Theirs is an important job — to doggedly pursue the latest, best available facts. For the rest of us, what matters most are the main elements of this remarkable life and its impact on Canadian and American history.

Tecumseh lived in much different times, but the story of his life, which is the struggle to protect a vanishing culture, provides lessons for lives lived in any time.

Introduction

Tecumseh’s Curse

"Sleep not longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws, in false

security and delusive hopes … Will not the bones of

our dead be ploughed up, and their graves turned into

ploughed fields?"

— Tecumseh in September 1811, travelling the

Mississippi Territory while attempting to

unite Indians into a confederacy against U.S.

settlement.

Almost fifty years after Tecumseh spoke those words before a council of Choctaws and other Indians, James Dickson, a settler in Southwestern Ontario, ploughed up six skeletons while tending his homestead along the Thames River, east of Chatham. The homestead occupied the battlefield on which

Tecumseh and his British allies were defeated by American invaders on October 5, 1813. Before ploughing, Dickson felled some black walnut trees, which were blazed or carved with animal figures, so the bones were believed to have belonged to Indians, likely Tecumseh and his warriors. Dickson reburied the bones. Some people believed Dickson’s discovery fulfilled Tecumseh’s prophesy of Indian graves being turned to ploughed fields.

Unearthing the bones was only one unusual event connected to Tecumseh. There are other stories of him predicting his own death, of him foretelling the 1811 New Madrid, Missouri, earthquake that the Creek (Muscogee) Indians believed he caused. The most extraordinary series of events related to Tecumseh is what has become known as Tecumseh’s Curse on certain presidents of the United States.

When William Henry Harrison, Tecumseh’s nemesis, was sworn into office in March 1841, he caught a pneumonia that killed him thirty-two days after his inauguration. Harrison, one of the most influential figures in the taking of North American Indian land, was elected president in late 1840. He led the army that killed Tecumseh and his dream of a united Indian front against American land grabs west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Twenty years later, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected. He was assassinated before completing his term. James Garfield, elected president in 1880, was also assassinated. William McKinley, re-elected in 1900, was shot and killed. Next was Warren Harding’s death in office after his election in 1920.

A pattern was noticed and reported by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in the early 1930s. All those presidents who died in office were elected, like Harrison, in a year ending in zero.

The Prophet, Tecumseh’s brother. Painting by Charles Bird King.

A story developed that Tecumseh cursed Harrison for destroying Indian life, and that the curse applied to presidents elected in twenty-year intervals after him. Another version had Tenskwatawa the Prophet, Tecumseh’s somewhat disturbed brother, laying the curse on Harrison in 1836, the year of Harrison’s first attempt to become president, and the year of Tenskwatawa’s death.

The Prophet was supposedly having his portrait painted when the presidential election race between Martin Van Buren and Harrison entered the conversation. Tenskwatawa is reported to have said, Harrison will not win this year to be the great chief. But he may win next time. If he does … he will not finish his term. He will die in office.

No president has ever died in office, someone challenged.

But Harrison will die, I tell you, said the Prophet. And when he dies you will remember my brother Tecumseh’s death. You think that I have lost my powers: I who caused the sun to darken and red men to give up firewater. But I tell you, Harrison will die. And after him, every great chief chosen every twenty years thereafter will die. And when each one dies, let everyone remember the death of our people.

After Ripley’s Believe It Or Not reported the series of unexplainable deaths of presidents elected in years ending with zero, the presidential election of 1940 was watched with interest. Franklin Roosevelt, elected to a third term that year, died in office in 1945. Then Jack Kennedy was elected in 1960, and assassinated before completing his term. There now is an astonishing list of seven U.S. presidents, elected twenty years apart, who have died before completing their respective terms.

Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, became the first president to escape this unusual string of bad luck, but not completely. He was shot, but his life saved by modern medical technology.

Many people who followed Tecumseh’s Curse held their collective breath in the final months of George W. Bush’s presidency, which began in 2000. On January 20, 2009, he left the White House, the first U.S. president in almost two hundred years to leave office alive or unharmed after being elected in a year ending with zero.

There is no proof that Tecumseh or his brother pronounced the curse. However, the run of presidential deaths in office is disquieting. Snopes.com, a website reporting on urban legends, notes that Such a string of presidential mortality is too improbable to have occurred naturally….

Snopes notes that there is no record to support the curse as anything other than an undocumented folktale, but it does take note of some astrological beliefs. Astrologists who analyzed Tecumseh’s Curse concluded that the election of the presidents who did not live out their terms coincided with the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn that happens every twenty years. They believe that Reagan was saved by the alignment of these two planets under an air sign, while those who died in office were aligned under an earth sign. Bush was elected in 2000 under the earth sign of Taurus and he survived, so who knows?

One way or another, Tecumseh’s Curse, if it ever existed, appears to be done. The same cannot be said for the continuing debate over where Tecumseh’s bones rest. For almost two hundred years there has been speculation about where Tecumseh is buried, and attempts to identify his bones. John Richardson, a young soldier-writer who fought beside Tecumseh, made one of the earliest attempts to find Tecumseh’s bones, but his 1840 search did not even find the battlefield on which he was captured and Tecumseh died.

There were other attempts, some claiming success in finding the right bones, plus numerous stories that Tecumseh’s followers buried him in a creek,