Greatly respected and deeply interested in the problems among his own people, Little Turtle spent his declining years. When asked one day why he did not live in Philadelphia instead of in his cabin on the Wabash, he replied: "I admit that you whites live better than do we red men, but I could not live with you because I am as a deaf and dumb man. I cannot talk your language. When I walk through the city streets I see every person in his shop employed at something. One makes shoes, another makes hats, a third sells cloth, and everyone lives by his labor. I say to myself, 'Which of these things can you do?' Not one. I can make a bow or an arrow, catch fish, kill game, and go to war, but none of these are any good here. To learn what is done in Philadelphia would require a long time. Old age is coming on me; I should be a piece of furniture among the whites, useless to them, useless to myself. I must return to my own country."
What he said of old age coming on was only too true. Not long afterwards he came to his death on the turf of the open camp, and with the composure which characterizes his race. He was buried at Fort Wayne with all the honors of war, and, it is said, was about seventy years of age at the time of his departure to the Happy Hunting Grounds: those fields of elysian bliss of which the old Indian poets have told in song and story. Courageous, kind, far-seeing, eloquent, well-balanced, the memory of Little Turtle yet stirs the hearts of his few descendants, who look back upon his career with satisfaction and high regard.
Courtesy of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institute.
TECUMSEH.
TECUMSEH, "THE SHOOTING STAR": CELEBRATED SHAWANOE DIPLOMAT, ORATOR AND SOLDIER
When Little Turtle and his army were battling with "Mad Anthony" Wayne at Fallen Timbers, one warrior—a Shawanoe—was present, who was subsequently to play an important part in the struggle between the whites and redskins for the possession of America. This was Tecumseh, or "The Shooting Star," a Shawanoe, or Shawnee warrior who was born on the Mad River in Ohio, in 1768, and whose father was killed in the fierce battle of the Great Kanawha. His twin brother, Elsk-wata-wa, the Prophet, was to become a man of note among the Western Indians, just as he was, himself, to obtain fame and notoriety.