The Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, urged tribes to join the British against the Americans. (As portrayed by Lorne Cardinal in Canada: A People's History)

"The white men aren't friends to the Indians... At first they only asked for land sufficient for a wigwam; now, nothing will satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds from the rising to the setting sun." This warning came from Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who'd emerged as the greatest Indian leader to head the resistance against American expansion.

Tecumseh had lost both his father and a brother to white settlers. He fought his first battle at age 15, against the Kentucky Volunteers. His younger half-brother Tenskwatawa, known simply as the Prophet, gained early prominence preaching a religion that urged a return to pure Indian values.

	Tecumseh (centre) wanted a unified and independent Indian confederacy powerful enough to resist American expansion. (As portrayed in Canada: A People's History)

Tenskwatawa was an angry, one-eyed mystic with a fast temper. He told his Indian brothers that their present misery was a test and soon they would be delivered from the predatory grasp of the white man.

When Governor James Craig had heard about the Prophet a few years earlier, he looked into buying his influence, hoping to use him as a weapon against the Americans. But he remained his own weapon.

Tecumseh joined his brother, emerging as the political arm of the religious campaign. After four marriages, he was resolutely single, devoted to a cause. He lobbied up and down the East Coast, trying to unite the Indians into an effective continental confederacy.

Tecumseh visited the Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Mohawk and Wyandot.
Support was strongest among the Potawatomi, Ojibwas, Shawnee, Ottawa, Winnebago and Kickapoo. He wanted a united Indian nation, a native mirror of the Thirteen Colonies. And he argued for communal land use rather than private ownership.

"The whites have driven us from the sea to the lakes. We can go no further... unless every tribe unanimously combines to give a check to the ambition and avarice of the whites they will soon conquer us apart and disunited and we will be driven from our native country and scattered as autumn leaves before the wind."

For four years Tecumseh had been in perpetual motion. He was known to every tribe from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
Tecumseh dreamed of a unified Indian Confederacy powerful enough to resist American aggression: a nation within a nation.

To white leaders, intent on expanding settlement, Tecumseh was a dangerous man. Indiana Governor William Henry Harrison had bought up more than 100 million acres and he intended to fill the spaces with settlers. Half of present-day Indiana, large parts of Wisconsin, Missouri and Illinois were gained by bullying, deceit, fraud, cash and whiskey.

Harrison wanted to create a mid-western empire and he recognized the threat posed by the charismatic and tireless Tecumseh whom he both feared and admired.

"The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him," Harrison noted, "bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions...
If it were not for the vicinity of the U.S. he would perhaps be the founder of an Empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico."

Tecumseh and Harrison met at Vincennes, Indiana Territory, in 1810 to discuss their opposing viewpoints on land development. Tecumseh arrived with 300 warriors. Harrison had hoped to use the meeting to defuse the growing Indian militancy but Tecumseh seized the opportunity to make a political speech.

"Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the clouds and the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?" He talked for three hours and threatened to kill any chief who sold land to the white man.
The outdoor meeting ended with brandished tomahawks, drawn swords and a nervous departure.