Battle Ground: Where Tecumseh's Confederacy Fell

The small town of Battle Ground takes its name from one of the most consequential fights in early American history. On November seventh, eighteen eleven, General William Henry Harrison's army clashed with warriors from Tecumseh's Native American confederacy on the banks of the Tippecanoe River. Harrison won the battle, and Tecumseh's dream of a unified Native resistance east of the Mississippi never recovered.

Harrison later rode the slogan Tippecanoe and Tyler Too to the White House in eighteen forty. The sixteen-acre battlefield was deeded to Indiana in eighteen thirty-six on the fight's twenty-fifth anniversary, and designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty. The town that grew beside the site was formally named Battle Ground in eighteen sixty-seven when it merged with a neighboring village called Harrisonville, already honoring the general.