Tecumseh

"The Treaty of Greenville marked a crucial turning point in the battle for the eastern half of the continent, opening the Ohio River Valley to a flood of white settlers, and hemming the Shawnees and their allies onto dwindling tracts of land too small to sustain the old ways of life. 

Even in the newly created Territory of Indiana -- into which Tecumseh and his followers now retreated, hoping to find refuge -- a systematic policy of land loss and dispossession was soon put into place by American politicians, eager to effect the transfer of land any way they could and convinced the Indian way of life was dying. 

"The American settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, who will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. 

Some tribes are advancing, and on these English seductions will have no effect. 

But the backward will yield, and be thrown further back into barbarism and misery ... and we shall be obliged to drive them with the beasts of the forest into the stony mountains."

President Thomas Jefferson, 

1801

Stephen Warren, historian: I don't think we appreciate just how ruthless Thomas Jefferson was as President in 1801, and how ruthless folks like Jefferson's territorial governor, William Henry Harrison were in the period specifically after 1800. 

The Americans employed what was called the "factory system." 

And what that was was the establishment of government forts throughout the old Northwest where the government would accept furs in exchange for goods. 

And it became a way of making native people into debtors of the United States. 

And when Thomas Jefferson becomes President, in his first term he writes William Henry Harrison and says, you know, essentially, 

"Through the factory system, native people will incur debts beyond what they are willing to pay, and they will only be able to pay those back through a cession of lands." 

John Sugden, biographer: So for the Shawnees -- for Tecumseh -- it was a period of continual dispossession, continual violence, and continual retreat. 

There is no place at that time you could really, if you were a Shawnee, have called home. 

Because it was constantly being taken off you. 

Stephen Warren, historian: So that by 1805, native people find themselves confined to a small corridor of land -- really a spit of land -- in northwestern Ohio and northeastern Indiana. 

That's all that's left of them. And it is not enough to continue a hunting tradition. 

What was happening to them was a tragedy of epic proportions. 

Men could no longer hunt. They could no longer operate as life-sustaining killers. They could not feed their families via hunting. 

They were on a constant war footing. 

And another horrifying aspect of it is that so many men have tried to protect their people through war, and have died doing it, that these villages are 5 totally out of balance. 

So that there are probably double the number of women as men in any native village in 1805, because of this war of attrition. And so these are not only broken homes, but broken communities. 

David Edmunds, historian: It is a time in which disease flourishes and spreads across many of the tribes of the Ohio Valley. 

It is a time when alcoholism begins to spread among the tribe. 

The very fabric of tribal society, the kinship systems, seem to be under stress. 

And it's a time when, I think, a lot of Shawnees are having second thoughts about: 

"Who are we, and what is going on here?" 

"Why has the Master of Life turned his face from us?" 

"What has happened to us?"

"What have we done to cause this?"

Narrator: By the spring of 1805, the misery and suffering in northern Indiana had reached the breaking point. 

In Tecumseh's village along the White River, even so great a provider as he was helpless to defend his people from the rain of woe now descending upon them; while almost day by day, his younger brother, Lalawethika -- 

A failed hunter and warrior, who had tried without success to support his family as a holy man and healer -- sank further and further into an abyss of shame and despair. 

Stephen Warren, historian: I think that Lalawethika fell victim to all of the worst unintended consequences of colonialism. 

He was an alcoholic, and many viewed him as lazy, prone to violence; he abused his wife. 

And so every opportunity that Lalawethika had to distinguish himself resulted in failure. 

And, by most accounts, he could not support his family. 

So that he was dependent upon Tecumseh, and others like him, to literally feed his family. 

He was so caught up in the sadness and the despair of dependency upon The United States in the form of alcohol, and the fur trade, and of land loss. 

It was so destructive, and such a sad time. 

Narrator: It would be all the more surprising then in the dark spring of 1805, as the universe continued to come unhinged for the Shawnees, that a message of terrifying beauty and hope would be brought to the beleaguered people -- coming in their very darkest hour, and in the end, from the least likely of sources.