[60]IHC, VII, Harrison’s Messages and Letters, ed. Logan Esarey, p. 146.
[61]Wells to Friends at Baltimore, May 10, 1805, quoted in Kathryn Troxel, “A Quaker Mission Among the Indians”, Old Fort News, VII, (1942) 11.
[62]IHC, VII, Harrison’s Messages and Letters, ed. Logan Esarey, p. 146.
[63]Ibid., p. 161.
[64]Ibid., pp. 508-9.
[65]Ibid., p. 149.
[66]Ibid., p. 149.
Chapter III
The Impending Conflict
A dozen years had passed since the battle of Fallen Timbers and the defeat suffered by the Indians at that time was growing dim in their memories. English traders and military officials at Malden encouraged the red men to strike once again the Americans who were fast turning their hunting lands into farms and settlements. The occasion awaited only a second Pontiac. That leader came in the person of Tecumseh, the Shawnee. Tecumseh saw his race driven from their native land, their morals debased, their independence destroyed, and their means of subsistence cut off. He looked for the cause of these evils, and believed he found it in the flood of white immigration.
With Tecumseh came his brother Elskwatwa, better known as “the Prophet”. The Prophet prophesied the resurgence of the Indians, and although his character was not as great as Tecumseh’s, for a time he overshadowed Tecumseh. As Pontiac had conspired against the British, so Tecumseh and the Prophet came to destroy the Americans. Unfortunately for the white settlers on the frontier, their great scheme neared its climax simultaneously with the outbreak of war between the United States and Great Britain.