Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet and brother of the warrior Tecumseh, was an alcoholic and a failure prior to a profound religious experience in the spring of 1805. The Creator, he claimed, commanded him to preach to all Indians, regardless of tribe. They were to abandon white ways and re-adopt traditional native practices.
Under the direction of President James Madison, William Henry Harrison treated with at least a thousand Indians representing a variety of tribes at Fort Wayne (now Indiana) in 1809. Through much Machiavellian maneuvering and the creation of internal dissension within and among the tribes present, Harrison purchased over two million acres of prime farmland at “less than two cents per acre,” far less than the $2 per acre it was worth in market terms.[i] Nowhere near a consensus among the Indians present, the U.S. treated with only a few pro-U.S. chiefs who benefitted mightily from the exchange, leaving most of the Indians powerless and landless. The treaty served as the catalyst for the re-emergence of the Shawnee Prophet, Tenskwatawa, and the rise in power of his brother, the Shawnee warrior Tecumseh, R. David Edmunds has argued. The pro-British brothers argued that the lands the Miamis, Potawatomis, and Delawares sold to the United States had been done so illegally and unethically, as the land sold had “belonged to all Indians.” Furious, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa threated to murder the signers.[ii] It was, as historian Greg Dowd writes, the first solid step toward the Battle of Tippecanoe and the frontier theater of the War of 1812.[iii]
Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, was an alcoholic and a failure prior to a profound religious experience in the spring of 1805. Not just ignored, the Shawnees had hated the man prior to 1805, calling him Lalawethika, “the Noise Maker.” So helpless and unskilled was he in battle and the hunt, that he had actually shot out one of his eyes when practicing with a bow and arrow. Despised, he turned to alcohol. Only the reputation of his older brother, Tecumseh, allowed him to stay with the Shawnees. In a vision in 1805, however, everything changed. According to him, Tenskwatawa visited heaven and hell. Heaven, he said, was a paradise, a “rich fertile country, abounding in game, fish, pleasant hunting grounds and fine corn fields.” In paradise, one could hunt or play games as he so wished. Hell, though, was a place of never-ending fire. The tortures found in hell were also similar to those described by Dante. Alcoholics drank molten lead, and other sinners had their arms or legs burned off. The Creator commanded him to preach to all Indians, regardless of tribe. They were to abandon white ways and re-adopt traditional native practices.
The prophet also claimed that the Creator showed him the origin of white Americans. Unlike the Shawnees, the offspring of the Creator, Americans sprang from the Great Serpent of the Atlantic Ocean. Crawling onto the shores of North America, white Americans first looked like a giant crab and settled in what is now Boston. Lalawethika exempted the white British, French, and Spanish from this creation story, however—for they were also the offspring of the Great Spirit, and, therefore, brothers to the Shawnees. He forbade any Indian to have contact with the Americans, however, as they were evil. Indians should never trade with Americans, nor have relationships of any kind with them. Because the Americans are evil, though, they had corrupted some Indians (“witches”), and those Indians must be removed.
The Creator also gave Lalawethika a set of rules to give to the Indians. First, they were to reject all American ways of living and return to their native ways. Second, they were to avoid alcohol and eat only native crops. He deemed all European-derived livestock unclean. They were to give up any sexual promiscuity and polygamy.
In reality, of course, the Shawnees could no longer remember a time that did not mix European and Indian ways, the multiple strands had become too intertwined. But, they convinced themselves that what they were doing was purely native. If they followed these divine laws, Lalawethika announced, the dead would return to live among them, and the game would flourish in the forests. Finally, God renamed Lalawethika, Tenskwatawa (the “Open Door”).
After performing a “miracle” in which Tenskwatawa accurately predicted the disappearance of the sun (an eclipse), the Prophet garnered a huge following among hundreds and then thousands of discontented and dispossessed Great Lakes Indians. More impressively, Tenskwatawa gave up alcohol and lived according to his own teachings. In 1808, he moved his followers to the juncture of the Tippecanoe and the Wabash.[iv] The new village sat on Wea and Miami lands, intentionally meant to be a direct insult to Wea and Miami sovereignty and integrity.
Seven years older than Tenskwatawa, his brother Tecumseh (the “Panther” or “Comet”) was a prominent Shawnee warrior. In 1808, recognizing the power of his brother’s religious rhetoric and crusade (though he had little respect for his brother or his brother’s beliefs), Tecumseh began to transform his brother’s religious movement into a political one. He attempted to unify the village chiefs of the various northwestern tribes into a unified confederacy to counter the might of United States. He also continued to argue that all lands north of the Ohio river belonged to the Indians in common, decrying the Miami and Delaware sale in the Treaty of Fort Wayne.[v]
Fearful of the Shawnee intentions, Harrison attacked Prophetstown in November 1811. With Tecumseh in the South recruiting Indians for a new confederacy, the Prophet provided poor leadership against Harrison’s invaders. This battle destroyed much of the Prophet’s hold over the Indians, as they now saw him as a fraud for failing to protect them. Tecumseh, upon returning, assumed control of the alliance that he and his brother had created. Yet, the damage was done. Though Tecumseh led the pan-Indian pro-British force against the American valiantly in 1812-1813. Tecumseh found his allies, however, to be self-serving, far more interested in British interests than in the desires of the Pan-Indian movement. When the British prepared to withdraw from Detroit after their defeat by American forces under Oliver Perry on Lake Erie, Tecumseh had attempted to shame them into battle, charging his allies with cowardice. He rushed into battle, hoping that his Indian and British allies would follow, but he met his own death at the Battle of the Thames, October 5, 1813.
During the War of 1812, Tenskwatawa fled to Canada and remained there until 1825 when the United States invited him back, if he would help remove his band to Kansas. In 1826, he and his following removed to the site of present-day Kansas City, Kansas.
Sources
- David Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (1984)
- David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (1983)
Colin Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (2007)
Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (1992)
Richard White, The Middle Ground (1991)
Papers of William Henry Harrison
Online sources:
http://images.indianahistory.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/dc050
http://library.mtsu.edu/tps/sets/Primary_Source_Set–War_of_1812.pdf
https://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/military/war-of-1812.html
http://libguides.lib.msu.edu/c.php?g=95603&p=624342
Notes:
[i] William Henry Harrison, Fort Wayne, to the Secretary of War, 1 October 1809, in Esarey, ed., Harrison 1:358.
[ii] R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 81-85.
[iii] Dowd, A Spirited Resistence, 139.
[iv] Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet; and Edmunds, “Shawnee Prophet (Tenskwatawa),” in Hoxie, ed., Encyclopedia of North American Indians, 584-5. For a contemporary biographical sketch of the brothers, see John Johnston to editor, Vincennes Western Sun 11 January 1812.
[v] Edmunds, Tecumseh; and Edmunds, “Tecumseh,” in Hoxie, ed., Encyclopedia of North American Indians, 620-1.
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The featured image is combination of a painting of Shawnee chief Tecumseh, in water colors on platinum print, attributed to Owen Staples (1866–1949), based on the engraving published by Benson John Lossing; and a painting of Ten-sqúat-a-way, The Open Door, Known as The Prophet, Brother of Tecumseh, by George Catlin. Both images are in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.