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Authors: Pierre Berton
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find a few feathers clinging to the fowl when his wife served it. After his guests had gone, he handed her a bundle of clothing and ordered her to leave. Tears, entreaties, promises to do better next time all failed to move him. “I am ashamed of you,” said Tecumseh. “We must separate.” He did not see her again.
One woman, it is said, intrigued him above all others: Rebecca Galloway, a white girl of sixteen, the daughter of a literate frontiersman at Old Chillicothe, Ohio. She spoke his language, taught him English, introduced him to the Bible, Alexander the Great, Shakespeare’s plays (his favourite was
Hamlet
). The passionate Shawnee fell in love; he brought her gifts (a silver comb, a birchbark canoe, furs, venison), called her Star of the Lake, asked for her hand in marriage offering thirty silver brooches as a lure. She was agreeable but made one condition: he must give up the Indian life, adopt white customs and dress. Tecumseh struggled with this dilemma, but his decision was foreordained. He could not bring himself to adopt a course that would cost him the respect of his people. Reluctantly they parted, never to meet again.
Now he is determinedly single. His last wife, White Wing, a Shawnee woman whom he married in 1802, parted from him in 1807. There would be no more women in Tecumseh’s life. He is wedded irrevocably to an ideal.
He dreams Pontiac’s ancient dream of an Indian confederacy stretching from Florida to Lake Erie – a confederacy strong enough to resist white pressure. To that end he is prepared to travel astonishing distances preaching to the tribes – to the Kickapoo, Wea, Creek, Wyandot, Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, Miami, Choctaw, Osage and other Indian bands who, like Balkan communities, argue and squabble among themselves, to their own misfortune and the white man’s benefit. The nucleus of this alliance already exists at the mouth of the Tippecanoe where the disaffected members of half a dozen tribes have flocked in response to the mystic summons of Tecumseh’s younger brother.
The Prophet’s background is as remarkable as Tecumseh’s, though quite different. Born after his father’s death, he was raised by a sister who clearly favoured his older brother. While Tecumseh was dazzling his fellow tribesmen with his skill as a hunter and, later, his prowess as a warrior, the future Prophet, born Laulewausika, was a layabout. He seemed to be a man with no future, no ambition. Then, with the suddenness of a rocket’s flare, he changed, overcome by a sense of sin. There was talk of a trance, a visit to the Great Spirit, a vision in which he saw a forked road before him – misery in one direction, happiness in the other. What brought about this miraculous transformation that caused him to be as one reborn? There are only hints, but it is believed in Vincennes that the Shaker preachers, who were influential in the area (their new home only a few miles distant), had their effect. The new name that he adopted to symbolize his reform, Tenskwatawa, is translated as “I am the door,” a phrase used by Jesus, and much of his preaching, which began in 1805, resembles fundamentalist Christianity. He urges his followers to give up strong liquor (as he himself did instantly), to stop beating their wives, to cease intertribal warfare, to renounce crimes of theft.
But there is something more, which suggests that the Prophet is in the mainstream of a mystical movement going back to the Delaware prophet who, in 1762, laid the basis for Pontiac’s confederacy. The same movement will go forward to future prophets including the most influential of all, Wovoka of the Paiutes, who in the late eighties will spread the ritual of the Ghost Dance across the nation.
These native messiahs invariably appear during the death struggles of a threatened culture; their authority is supernatural, their message nostalgic: their people are to return to the old customs and rid themselves of the white man’s ways.
One woman, it is said, intrigued him above all others: Rebecca Galloway, a white girl of sixteen, the daughter of a literate frontiersman at Old Chillicothe, Ohio. She spoke his language, taught him English, introduced him to the Bible, Alexander the Great, Shakespeare’s plays (his favourite was
Hamlet
). The passionate Shawnee fell in love; he brought her gifts (a silver comb, a birchbark canoe, furs, venison), called her Star of the Lake, asked for her hand in marriage offering thirty silver brooches as a lure. She was agreeable but made one condition: he must give up the Indian life, adopt white customs and dress. Tecumseh struggled with this dilemma, but his decision was foreordained. He could not bring himself to adopt a course that would cost him the respect of his people. Reluctantly they parted, never to meet again.
Now he is determinedly single. His last wife, White Wing, a Shawnee woman whom he married in 1802, parted from him in 1807. There would be no more women in Tecumseh’s life. He is wedded irrevocably to an ideal.
He dreams Pontiac’s ancient dream of an Indian confederacy stretching from Florida to Lake Erie – a confederacy strong enough to resist white pressure. To that end he is prepared to travel astonishing distances preaching to the tribes – to the Kickapoo, Wea, Creek, Wyandot, Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, Miami, Choctaw, Osage and other Indian bands who, like Balkan communities, argue and squabble among themselves, to their own misfortune and the white man’s benefit. The nucleus of this alliance already exists at the mouth of the Tippecanoe where the disaffected members of half a dozen tribes have flocked in response to the mystic summons of Tecumseh’s younger brother.
The Prophet’s background is as remarkable as Tecumseh’s, though quite different. Born after his father’s death, he was raised by a sister who clearly favoured his older brother. While Tecumseh was dazzling his fellow tribesmen with his skill as a hunter and, later, his prowess as a warrior, the future Prophet, born Laulewausika, was a layabout. He seemed to be a man with no future, no ambition. Then, with the suddenness of a rocket’s flare, he changed, overcome by a sense of sin. There was talk of a trance, a visit to the Great Spirit, a vision in which he saw a forked road before him – misery in one direction, happiness in the other. What brought about this miraculous transformation that caused him to be as one reborn? There are only hints, but it is believed in Vincennes that the Shaker preachers, who were influential in the area (their new home only a few miles distant), had their effect. The new name that he adopted to symbolize his reform, Tenskwatawa, is translated as “I am the door,” a phrase used by Jesus, and much of his preaching, which began in 1805, resembles fundamentalist Christianity. He urges his followers to give up strong liquor (as he himself did instantly), to stop beating their wives, to cease intertribal warfare, to renounce crimes of theft.
But there is something more, which suggests that the Prophet is in the mainstream of a mystical movement going back to the Delaware prophet who, in 1762, laid the basis for Pontiac’s confederacy. The same movement will go forward to future prophets including the most influential of all, Wovoka of the Paiutes, who in the late eighties will spread the ritual of the Ghost Dance across the nation.
These native messiahs invariably appear during the death struggles of a threatened culture; their authority is supernatural, their message nostalgic: their people are to return to the old customs and rid themselves of the white man’s ways.
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