The Warrior and the Prophet

The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation

Peter Cozzens

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781838951511
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838951504
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

A History Book of the Year in The Times 'Cozzens is a master storyteller; his books weave a wealth of intricate detail into gripping historical narrative.' The Times 'Marvellous... One of the best pieces of Native American history I have read.' S.C. Gwynne, bestselling author of Empire of the Summer Moon Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Biography. Shawnee chief Tecumseh was a man destined for greatness - the son of a prominent war leader, he was supposedly born under a lucky shooting star. Charismatic, intelligent, handsome, he was both a fierce warrior and a savvy politician. In the first biography of Tecumseh in more than twenty years, Peter Cozzens thoroughly revises our understanding of this great leader and his movement, arguing that his overlooked younger brother Tenskwatawa, the 'Shawnee Prophet', was a crucial partner in Tecumseh's success. Until Tecumseh's death in 1813, he was, alongside Tenskwatawa, the co-architect of the greatest pan-Indian confederation in history. Over time, Tenskwatawa has been relegated to the shadows, described as a talentless charlatan and a drunk. But Cozzens argues that while Tecumseh was the forward-facing diplomat, appealing even to the white settlers attempting to steal Shawnee land, behind the scenes, Tenskwatawa unified multiple tribes with his deep understanding of Shawnee religion and culture. No other Native American leaders enjoyed such popularity, and none would ever pose a graver threat to colonial expansion than Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. Bringing to life an often-overlooked episode in America's past, Cozzens paints in vivid detail the violent, lawless world of the Old Northwest, when settlers spilled over the Appalachians to bloody effect in their haste to exploit lands won from the War of Independence. The Warrior and the Prophet tells the untold story of the Shawnee brothers who retaliated against this threat - becoming allies with the British army in the process - and reveals how they were the last hope for Native Americans to preserve ways of life they had known for centuries.

• PART •

ONE

1

The Great Awakening

TECUMSEH’S FATHER had never lived in the land for which he fought and died. Nor had any Shawnee resided in the Kentucky country for nearly two decades prior to the Battle of Point Pleasant.

Puckeshinwau also had been a relative newcomer to the Ohio Valley village he had come to call home. The young war leader of a peripatetic Shawnee band, he grew to manhood in the heart of the Creek Indian confederacy, six hundred miles to the south, in what is today central Alabama. By 1759, however, the time seemed propitious for a move. White settlers were pressing the Creek country from the east, and Puckeshinwau’s followers found the prospect of Shawnee unity captivating. Puckeshinwau went reluctantly, however. His first wife, since deceased, had been Creek, and he had adopted something of their ways. Methoataske, his second bride, belonged to a respected Shawnee family with ties to the Ohio bands, and she was anxious to head north.¹

The southern Shawnees trekked hopefully toward the Ohio River Valley. So did the handful of Shawnees who lived in western Pennsylvania. All thought themselves headed for their ancestral homeland, presumably a country of peace and tribal unity beyond the reach of whites. Their destination, however, was the fault line between French and British interests, and as such was fated to become an imperial battleground.

The British had encouraged the Shawnees to assemble in the Ohio Valley, to “come home again, that you may become once more a people and not dispersed through the world.” English agents claimed the French “[have] deceived you and scattered you about the woods, that they might have it in their power to keep you poor.” As the brunt of mockery by other Algonquins, who derided them as “a people with nowhere a fire burning,” the Shawnees found that the British beckons reinforced their own desire to return home.²

Then the fire engulfed them. Hoping to avoid entanglements with the whites, the Shawnees instead contributed to the onset of war when they persuaded their Miami Indian allies to settle near them and invite reputable Pennsylvania merchants to compete with French traders. The proposal made sense to the Miamis; the Ohio Valley had once been theirs, too. But France saw the Miamis and Shawnees as dangerous British surrogates who threatened its trade route between French Canada and Louisiana. Descending on the Ohio Valley from the Great Lakes, the French and their Indian allies built a fort at the site of modern Pittsburgh and in November 1755 slaughtered a large British force under Gen. Edward Braddock sent to expel them. Siding with the now-dominant French, Shawnee warriors ravaged the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers. Slaughtering hundreds of settlers, they made the name Shawnee synonymous with unbridled savagery. A French officer, horrified at their apparent cruelty, lamented that the Shawnees had become “the instrument of hatred between two powerful rivals, as also that of [their] own destruction.”³

Which nearly occurred. When the British conquered Canada and defeated the French in 1763, Algonquin tribes like the Shawnees paid dearly for their French alliance. The Indians had hoped that the victorious British would abandon their frontier forts and, like the French before them, become a benevolent father who lavished presents on his red children. Unfortunately for the Indians, the recently ended European Seven Years’ War had depleted the British treasury, and the Crown economized at their expense. The gifts of gunpowder and lead on which the Indians had come to depend for the hunt ceased; let the natives revert to bows and arrows, the British reasoned. The Indians, however, wanted the best of both worlds—European goods with no whites in their country except traders.

No sooner had the British imposed their austerity regime than a smallpox epidemic devastated Shawnee and Miami villages. Puckeshinwau and his family escaped unscathed, but scores succumbed. Compounding the Indians’ despair, the British demanded they release hundreds of white captives, few of whom wanted to repatriate. Adoptive families were ripped apart. Meanwhile, as loved ones departed, unwanted whites intruded, a two-way traffic the British did not intend. Ignoring the Crown prohibition, hundreds of rural poor crossed the Alleghenies to scratch out crude homes along the upper reaches of the Ohio River.

An English missionary characterized the incoming frontier rabble as “white savages [who] subsist by hunting,” an assessment with which the British military agreed. “Lamentably dissolute in their morals,” these otherwise impoverished rascals had an abundant hatred of Indians and an ample supply of rum, with which they plied the Indians to rob them of their furs. Chiefs protested to no avail, and the corrosive effect of liquor rendered their warriors restive.⁴

The turmoil spared the eastern Ohio country, where the Delaware “grandfathers” of the Shawnees resided. There nevertheless lurked dangers and evil portents enough to set some Delawares to pondering. None contemplated the Delaware destiny more profoundly than did an enigmatic mystic named Neolin, who feared the white man’s diseases, abhorred the niggardly and arrogant British officials who treated the Indians as infants, and understood that colonists wanted Indian land. Perhaps, he speculated, in straying from traditional ways, the Indians themselves were to blame for their misfortunes. One night, alone by his wigwam fire, Neolin beheld a man materialize from the flames to tell him that “these things he was thinking were right.”⁵

The spectral visitor escorted Neolin to the gates of eternity, where the Great Spirit revealed to Neolin the path to righteousness. From that night forward, Neolin was a prophet (or an imposter, depending on the source). Clutching a hieroglyphic-painted deerskin and weeping ceaselessly, he roamed his village exhorting passersby to hear and see the Great Spirit’s teachings.

Neolin offered a selective return to the old ways interwoven with promises of heavenly rewards for the faithful and damnation for skeptics. (Heaven, the Delaware Prophet assured his disciples, contained only Indians.) Within months his doctrine spread from the Ohio Valley to the Great Lakes. By early 1763, every Algonquin tribe had its devotees, awakened to a religious and cultural movement that superseded tribal and village loyalties.

Neolin taught that Indians must abandon their sacred medicine bags, which were the playthings of evil spirits, and instead pray directly to the Great Spirit, better known to the Shawnees as the Master of Life. They must forswear rum and purify themselves by drinking and vomiting an herbal tea. The Shawnees drank and spewed the concoction with such enthusiasm that their village of Wakatomica became known to white traders as “vomit town.” Regurgitating herbs was one thing, but few Indians took seriously Neolin’s admonition to abstain from sexual intercourse far more frequently than the Indian belief in the competing sources of male and female power dictated, nor his insistence that fire made with steel and flint was impure; flames, he said, should be started only by rubbing sticks together. Easier to accept because it entailed no immediate sacrifice was Neolin’s call for the gradual abandonment of European trade goods and firearms, a seven-year transition from guns to bows and arrows.

The Indians would need their muskets in the near term because Neolin also preached a call to arms against the whites, prophesying that there would be “two or three good talks and then war.” The whites would be wiped from the continent, game animals would return in abundance, earth would become an Indian paradise, and the direct route to heaven would reopen. With Neolin’s appeal, pan-Indianism was born in the Old Northwest.⁶

In April 1763, near the British fort at Detroit, the Ottawa war chief Pontiac imparted a watered-down version of Neolin’s moral code to a council of Indian allies. Indians could drink rum, Pontiac assured his listeners, just not to excess, and men might enjoy sexual relations, but only with their wife, and with one wife only. Finally, it was just the British colonists who were enemies of the Indians; the Great Spirit looked favorably upon the French, who after all had implicitly offered to support war against the British. Translating Neolin’s call to arms into action, Pontiac laid siege to Fort Detroit. He sent black wampum belts, symbols of the call to war, to the tribes of the Ohio Valley. One British post after another fell until only three remained. It was a conflict of unbridled violence. Drunken Ottawas tortured and ritualistically ate captives; renegade colonists slaughtered innocent Indians. The Shawnee chief Cornstalk took a huge war party deep into western Virginia, killing and seizing civilians with abandon. Nearly 2,000 British soldiers and colonial civilians perished in the opening months of Pontiac’s War, but Forts Detroit, Niagara, and Pitt held out, and the Crown rushed in reinforcements. A stalemate ensued that neither side could break. Unable to defeat Pontiac, the British elevated him to the status of chief of all Algonquins, an office anathema to every Indian except Pontiac. In 1766 he made peace with the British. The war sputtered to a close, but Pontiac had forfeited his standing among the Indians. He went into exile deep in the Illinois country, and three years later an irate warrior murdered him on the fetid streets of a small French trading village. In accepting the British proffer of supreme leadership of the still fiercely independent Algonquins, Pontiac had reached too high.⁷

Tales of Neolin and Pontiac, of the prophecies of the Delaware seer and the martial talents of his Ottawa disciple, would be told around Indian campfires for years to come. They were heroes for boys to venerate, perhaps eventually to emulate.

Besides prideful stories, the Shawnees gained nothing from Pontiac’s War. The British compelled them to surrender adopted white members of the tribe, and the reinvigorated Iroquois, who had sided with the British, demanded the Shawnees abandon their claim to hunting grounds south of the Ohio River, comprising most of present-day Kentucky and West Virginia. In November 1768 the Iroquois in turn ceded these lands to the British in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. The country west and north of the Ohio, which the British lumped under the rubric “Indian Territory,” was to be inviolate, the Ohio River boundary permanent. Barred from the proceedings, the Shawnees denounced the Fort Stanwix Treaty as barefaced thievery. They ceased to recognize Iroquois leadership, endeavored to build a coalition independent of the Iroquois, and forswore addressing the British as fathers. Shawnee scouting parties patrolled the Kentucky country, on the watch for white interlopers.⁸

The trespassers came through the Cumberland Gap or down the Ohio River: hardscrabble farmers in search of better land, fugitives from justice, and the congenitally restless of slack moral fiber, while from the comfort of their Virginia estates land speculators deployed surveyors to finagle title to the Indian lands.⁹

Among the first intruders was an impoverished North Carolinian named Daniel Boone and six other poor whites. Crossing the Cumberland Gap in early 1769, they slaughtered the teeming game animals wantonly without encountering a single Indian until December, when a group of Shawnees under an English-speaking war leader named Captain Will burst into their predawn winter bivouac. “The time of our sorrow was now arrived,” mused Boone. Instead of meting out the expected torture and death, the Shawnees behaved “in the friendliest manner,” simply confiscating his party’s furs with an admonishment never to return. “Now, brothers,” declared Captain Will, “go home and stay there. Don’t come here anymore, for this is the Indians’ hunting ground, and all the animals, skins, and furs are ours. And if you are so foolish as to venture here again, you may be sure the wasps and yellow-jackets will string you severely.”

The Shawnees had shown remarkable restraint, but they were mistaken if they thought their painted faces, flashing tomahawks, and formidable war clubs would deter Boone and his companions. No sooner had the North Carolinians reached home than they made plans to return.¹⁰

The Iroquois betrayal at Fort Stanwix and the first wave of white emigrants left the Ohio Shawnees to navigate frightening but familiar waters—just become settled in one place, only to have it threatened. Tribal councils debated the viability of the Ohio Valley as a permanent home. Many were for pulling up stakes and relocating west of the Mississippi River. Not only were whites threatening the eastern periphery of the Ohio Valley, but the region also was fast repopulating with other Indians, stressing a game supply already depleted by overhunting for the trade in furs and skins. Relative to the British colonial population on the eastern seaboard, Indian numbers in the Ohio Valley were pitifully small, however. At the time of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, several tribes called the region home, but disease and warfare had taken a heavy toll on all of them. The Shawnees, numbering just 1,500, claimed most of the southern half of what is today Ohio. The Delawares, 3,500 in all, occupied eastern Ohio and northern Pennsylvania nearly to the Delaware River. Unlike the Shawnees, they had no interest in Kentucky.

Immediately north of the Shawnees were the Wyandots. Remnants of the once mighty Huron confederacy, they had been reduced by warfare and disease to 1,250 members. Although their numbers were small and they were not Algonquins, their prestige was such that many Algonquins deferred to them on boundary and other intertribal questions. The northwestern border of the Shawnee country touched land claimed by the Ottawas, most of whose 5,000 members resided in what is today western Michigan. West of the Shawnees were the 1,500 Miamis. The Shawnees did not yet have much contact with other tribes of the Great Lakes region. The total Indian population of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley in 1768 was approximately 60,000. The thirteen British colonies numbered nearly 2 million. The odds against the Indians were bad, and with high birth rates among the whites and unabated immigration to the colonies, they would only get worse.¹¹

Tecumseh’s father Puckeshinwau stood with those Shawnees who were opposed to leaving Ohio. And by 1768 his words carried weight. He had won considerable renown in Pontiac’s War and may also have become the head chief of the Kispokos, one of five tribal divisions. His wife Methoataske belonged to the Pekowi division. Of these and the other Shawnee divisions, more will be said. Since moving to Ohio, Methoataske had given birth to the couple’s first three children— a son, Cheeseekau, born about 1761; a daughter, Tecumpease, likely born the following year; and then another son, Sauwauseekau.

Puckeshinwau probably helped found Kispoko town, a new satellite Shawnee village well north of the troubled Ohio River border and some seventy miles southeast of modern Dayton. In addition to his honors from Pontiac’s War, Puckeshinwau had returned from the conflict with a four-year-old white boy named Richard Sparks, seized in western Virginia.¹²

A young male addition to the family undoubtedly pleased Puckeshinwau and Methoataske. Sons were a source of pride, and a white boy taken young enough to raise as an Indian could be counted on to help fill the ranks of Shawnee warriors, which battle losses had cut to no more than f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Prologue
• Preface
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates