Although but twenty-six years of age, and without a vote in the House of Representatives, Harrison succeeded in procuring from Congress in 1800 an act dividing the Territory into two distinct "governments," separated by the old Greenville treaty line as far as Fort Recovery and then by a line running due north to the Canadian boundary. The division to the east was named Ohio, that to the west Indiana; and Harrison was made Governor of the latter, with his residence at Vincennes. In 1802 the development of the back country was freshly emphasized by the admission of Ohio as a State.
Meanwhile the equilibrium between the white man and the red again became unstable. In the Treaty of 1795 the natives had ceded only southern Ohio, southeastern Indiana, and a few other small and scattered areas. Northward and westward, their country stretched to the Lakes and the Mississippi, unbroken except by military posts and widely scattered settlements; and title to all of this territory had been solemnly guaranteed. As late as 1800 the white population of what is now Indiana was practically confined to Clark's Grant, near the falls of the Ohio, and a small region around Vincennes. It numbered not more than twenty-five hundred persons. But thereafter immigration from the seaboard States, and from the nearer lands of Kentucky and Tennessee, set in on a new scale. By 1810 Indiana had a white population of twenty-five thousand, and the cabins of the energetic settlers dotted river valleys and hillsides never before trodden by white man.
In this new rush of pioneers the rights of the Indians received scant consideration. Hardy and well-armed Virginians and Kentuckians broke across treaty boundaries and possessed themselves of fertile lands to which they had no valid claim. White hunters trespassed far and wide on Indian territory, until by 1810 great regions, which a quarter of a century earlier abounded in deer, bear, and buffalo, were made as useless for Indian purposes as barren wastes. Although entitled to the protection of law in his person and property, the native was cheated and overawed at every turn; he might even be murdered with impunity. Abraham Lincoln's uncle thought it a virtuous act to shoot an Indian on sight, and the majority of pioneers agreed with him.
"I can tell at once," wrote Harrison in 1801, "upon looking at an Indian whom I may chance to meet whether he belongs to a neighboring or a more distant tribe. The latter is generally well-clothed, healthy, and vigorous; the former half-naked, filthy, and enfeebled by intoxication, and many of them without arms excepting a knife, which they carry for the most villainous purposes." The stronger tribes perceived quite as clearly as did the Governor the ruinous effects of contact between the two peoples, and the steady destruction of the border warriors became a leading cause of discontent. Congress had passed laws intended to prevent the sale of spirituous liquors to the natives, but the courts had construed these measures to be operative only outside the bounds of States and organized Territories, and in the great unorganized Northwest the laws were not heeded, and the ruinous traffic went on uninterrupted. Harrison reported that when there were only six hundred warriors on the Wabash the annual consumption of whiskey there was six thousand gallons, and that killing each other in drunken brawls had "become so customary that it was no longer thought criminal."
Most exasperating, however, from the red man's point of view was the insatiable demand of the newcomers for land. In the years 1803, 1804, and 1805 Harrison made treaties with the remnants of the Miami, Eel River, Piankeshaw, and Delaware tribes—characterized by him as "a body of the most depraved wretches on earth"—which gained for the settlers a strip of territory fifty miles wide south of White River; and in 1809 he similarly acquired, by the Treaty of Fort Wayne, three million acres, in tracts which cut into the heart of the Indian country for almost a hundred miles up both banks of the Wabash. The Wabash valley was richer in game than any other region south of Lake Michigan, and its loss was keenly felt by the Indians. Indeed, it was mainly the cession of 1809 that brought once more to a crisis the long-brewing difficulties with the Indians.
About the year 1768 the Creek squaw of a Shawnee warrior gave birth at one time to three boys, in the vicinity of the present city of Springfield, Ohio. ¹ One of the three barely left his name in aboriginal annals. A second, known as Laulewasikaw, "the man with the loud voice," poses in the pages of history as "the prophet." The third brother was Tecumseh, "the wild-cat that leaps upon its prey," or "the shooting star," as the name has been translated. He is described as a tall, handsome warrior—daring and energetic, of fluent and persuasive speech, given to deep reflection, an implacable hater of the white man. Other qualities he possessed which were not so common among his people. He had perfect self-command, a keen insight into human motives and purposes, and an exceptional capacity to frame plans and organize men to carry them out. His crowning scheme for bringing together the tribes of the Middle West into a grand democratic confederacy to regulate land cessions and other dealings with the whites stamps him as perhaps the most statesmanlike member of his race.
¹ Authorities differ as to the facts of Tecumseh's birth. His earliest biographer, Benjamin Drake, holds that he was "wholly a Shawanoe" and that he was a fourth child, the Prophet and another son being twins. William Henry Harrison spoke of Tecumseh's mother as a Creek.
While yet hardly more than a boy, Tecumseh seems to have been stirred to deep indignation by the persistent encroachment of the whites upon the hunting-grounds of his fathers. The cessions of 1804 and 1805 he specially resented, and it is not unlikely that they clinched the decision of the young warrior to take up the task which Pontiac had left unfinished. At all events, the plan was soon well in hand. A less far-seeing leader would have been content to call the scattered tribes to a momentary alliance with a view to a general uprising against the invaders. But Tecumseh's purposes ran far deeper. All of the Indian peoples, of whatever name or relationships, from the Lakes to the Gulf and from the Alleghanies to the Rockies, were to be organized in a single, permanent confederacy. This union, furthermore, was to consist, not of chieftains, but of the warriors; and its governing body was to be a warriors' congress, an organ of genuine popular rule. Joint ownership of all Indian lands was to be assumed by the confederacy, and the piecemeal cession of territory by petty tribal chiefs, under pressure of government agents, was to be made impossible. Only thus, Tecumseh argued, could the red man hope to hold his own in the uneven contest that was going on.
The plan was brilliant, even though impracticable. Naturally, it did not appeal instantly to the chieftains, for it took away tribal independence and undermined the chieftain's authority. Besides, its author was not a chief, and had no sanction of birth or office. Its success was dependent on the building of an intertribal association such as Indian history had never known. And while there was nothing in it which contravened the professed policy of the United States, it ran counter to the irrepressible tendency of the advancing white population to spread at will over the great western domain.
By these obstacles Tecumseh was not deterred. With indefatigable zeal he traveled from one end of the country to the other, arguing with chiefs, making fervid speeches to assembled warriors, and in every possible manner impressing his people with his great idea. The Prophet went with him; and when the orator's logic failed to carry conviction, the medicine-man's imprecations were relied upon to save the day. Events, too, played into their hands. The Leopard-Chesapeake affair, ¹ in 1807, roused strong feeling in the West and prompted the Governor-General of Canada to begin intrigues looking to an alliance with the redskins in the event of war. And when, late in the same year, Governor Hull of Michigan Territory indiscreetly negotiated a new land cession at Detroit, the northern tribes at once joined Tecumseh's league, muttering threats to slay the chiefs by whom the cession had been sanctioned.