Strangest Mysteries of the World and Beyond !

Tecumseh's Curse

Tecumseh's Curse

On October 5, 1813, nearly 4,000 American soldiers led by General William Henry Harrison engaged in a battle near the Thames River in present-day Chatham, Ontario, Canada against a much-smaller allied force of British troops and Native American warriors from a confederacy of tribes led by the great Shawnee chief, Tecumseh.  It was the final battle of a long feud between Harrison and Tecumseh and their respective militias. 

As Governor of the Indiana Territory several years earlier, Harrison negotiated the Treaty of Fort Wayne, which induced a delegation of Indian leaders to cede over 3 million acres of land to the United States government.  There were some questions about the treaty, mainly the fact that President Madison hadn’t authorized Harrison to negotiate it and some of the Indian lands didn’t belong to the tribal leaders who sold them.  Not only that, but Harrison used some fairly controversial bargaining tactics — he bribed the tribes that agreed to sell the land and provided whiskey to the Indian delegation in order to get them liquored up nicely during the negotiations.

Tecumseh’s people, the Shawnee tribe of present-day Indiana, had no claims to the land purchased by Harrison, yet Tecumseh had major qualms about the treaty and worried about the precedent of Native Americans selling huge tracts of land to the government of the fledgling United States and being forced to relocate elsewhere.  Traveling throughout different tribal areas of the Ohio country, Tecumseh urged tribes to band together as a confederacy, to oppose the treaty, and to cast out the tribal leaders that sold their land out from under them.

In the summer of 1810, Tecumseh and a band of warriors showed up at Harrison’s home in Vincennes, Indiana and asked the Governor to rescinded the Treaty of Fort Wayne.  Harrison angrily refused and the scene nearly turned into a violent clash between Tecumseh and his warriors and Harrison and the people of Vincennes, but the tensions were calmed by another Indian chief who persuaded the warriors to leave.  Tecumseh continued building an alliance with various tribes and warned Harrison that they would partner with the British if the treaty stood.

In November of 1811, Harrison and a detachment of over a thousand soldiers decided for some payback, returning the visit of Tecumseh and marching from Vincennes to Tecumseh’s settlement in Prophetstown.  Tecumseh was away recruiting warriors and tribes for his alliance, but his brother Tenskwatawa led an attack on Harrison’s men while they rested at an encampment near the Tippecanoe River.  Harrison’s men easily defeated the Native Americans, forced them to abandon their village, burned Prophetstown, and handed Tecumesh’s confederacy a serious setback. 

The Battle of Tippecanoe became synonymous with William Henry Harrison and gave him the nickname “Old Tippecanoe”.  Thirty years later, he campaigned for President alongside John Tyler with the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!”.

By the time the War of 1812 broke out, Tecumseh had rebuilt his shattered confederacy and entered the war as a solid ally of the British Empire

The Battle of the Thames was short, but had long-lasting effects for students of Presidential folklore and believers of superstition. 

When Harrison’s troops attacked Tecumseh’s on October 5, 1813, a Colonel named Richard Mentor Johnson charged into the Indian force and, in the midst of battle, killed the 45-year-old Shawnee chief.  Johnson was wounded five times and the men of his cavalry regiment suffered the heaviest losses, but Johnson became as big of a political hero as his commander, General Harrison.  In 1836, merely on the strength of the belief that he personally killed Tecumseh, Richard Mentor Johnson was elected Vice President of the United States. 

Four years later, it was William Henry Harrison’s turn to win high office. “Old Tippecanoe” campaigned on his military victories and the defeat of Tecumseh was certainly one of his biggest triumphs.