Tecumseh's Confederacy and the Battle of Tippecanoe

In the autumn of eighteen eleven, a Shawnee leader named Tecumseh was traveling south through Tennessee and Alabama, recruiting nations to a confederacy he had spent years building. While he was gone, his brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, held their intertribal settlement on the Tippecanoe River in what is now western Indiana. And William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, marched north with roughly one thousand soldiers to end it.

Tecumseh had warned Tenskwatawa not to fight. The Prophet did not listen. On the morning of November seventh, eighteen eleven, warriors attacked Harrison's camp in the predawn darkness.

After two hours of fighting in the river-bottom fog, the confederacy's warriors retreated. Harrison burned the town of Prophetstown to the ground. The Battle of Tippecanoe did not destroy the confederacy.

Tecumseh regrouped and allied with the British in the War of eighteen twelve. But it fatally weakened the unified resistance he had built across a dozen nations. He died at the Battle of the Thames in October eighteen thirteen, fighting alongside British forces in what is now Ontario.

Harrison returned home as a hero, parlayed the nickname 'Tippecanoe' into a presidential campaign slogan in eighteen forty, and won the White House. His vice presidential candidate was John Tyler, making 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too' one of the most famous campaign slogans in American political history. Harrison died of pneumonia thirty-one days into his presidency.

Tecumseh's vision of a unified Indigenous nation died with him at the Thames. The land that would become Indiana was opened to rapid American settlement almost immediately after Prophetstown burned.