When the celebrated traveler Catlin went among the prairie tribes some thirty years later, he found that the prophet’s emissaries—he says the prophet himself, which is certainly a mistake—had carried the living fire, the sacred image, and the mystic strings (see portrait and description) even to the Blackfeet on the plains of the Saskatchewan, going without hindrance among warring tribes where the name of the Shawano had never been spoken, protected only by the reverence that attached to their priestly character. There seems no doubt that by this time they had developed the plan of a confederacy for driving back the whites, and Catlin asserts that thousands of warriors among those remote tribes had pledged themselves to fight under the lead of Tecumtha at the proper time. His account of the prophet’s methods in the extreme northwest agrees with what Tanner has reported from the Ojibwa country. ([Catlin], 1.) But disaster followed him like a shadow. Rivals, jealous of his success, came after him to denounce his plans as visionary and himself as an impostor. The ambassadors were obliged to turn back to save their lives and retrace their way in haste to the far distant Wabash, where the fatal battle of Tippecanoe and the death of his great brother, Tecumtha, put an end to all his splendid dreams.
Chapter IV
TECUMTHA AND TIPPECANOE
These lands are ours. No one has a right to remove us, because we were the first owners.—Tecumtha to Wells, 1807.
The Great Spirit gave this great island to his red children. He placed the whites on the other side of the big water. They were not contented with their own, but came to take ours from us. They have driven us from the sea to the lakes—we can go no farther.—Tecumtha, 1810.
The President may sit still in his town and drink his wine, while you and I will have to fight it out.—Tecumtha to Harrison, 1810.
And now we begin to hear of the prophet’s brother, Tecumtha, the most heroic character in Indian history. Tecumtha, “The Meteor,” was the son of a chief and the worthy scion of a warrior race. His tribe, the Shawano, made it their proud boast that they of all tribes had opposed the most determined resistance to the encroachments of the whites. His father had fallen under the bullets of the Virginians while leading his warriors at the bloody battle of Point Pleasant, in 1774. His eldest and dearest brother had lost his life in an attack on a southern frontier post, and another had been killed fighting by his side at Wayne’s victory in 1794. What wonder that the young Tecumtha declared that his flesh crept at the sight of a white man!
But his was no mean spirit of personal revenge; his mind was too noble for that. He hated the whites as the destroyers of his race, but prisoners and the defenseless knew well that they could rely on his honor and humanity and were safe under his protection. When only a boy—for his military career began in childhood—he had witnessed the burning of a prisoner, and the spectacle was so abhorrent to his feelings that by an earnest and eloquent harangue he induced the party to give up the practice forever. In later years his name was accepted by helpless women and children as a guaranty of protection even in the midst of hostile Indians. Of commanding figure, nearly six feet in height and compactly built; of dignified bearing and piercing eye, before whose lightning even a British general quailed; with the fiery eloquence of a Clay and the clear-cut logic of a Webster; abstemious in habit, charitable in thought and action, brave as a lion, but humane and generous withal—in a word, an aboriginal American knight—his life was given to his people, and he fell at last, like his father and his brothers before him, in battle with the destroyers of his nation, the champion of a lost cause and a dying race.
His name has been rendered “The Shooting Star” and “The Panther Crouching, or Lying in Wait.” From a reply to a letter of inquiry addressed to Professor A. S. Gatschet, the well-known philologist, I extract the following, which throws valuable light on the name system and mythology of the Shawano, and shows also that the two renderings, apparently so dissimilar, have a common origin:
Shawano personal names are nearly all clan names, and by their interpretation the clan to which the individual or his father or mother belongs may be discovered. Thus, when a man is called “tight fitting” or “good fit,” he is of the Rabbit clan, because the fur fits the rabbit very tightly and closely. The name of Tecumtha is derived from nila ni tka′mthka, “I cross the path or way of somebody, or of an animal.” This indicates that the one so named belongs to the clan of the round-foot or claw-foot animals, as panther, lion, or even raccoon. Tecumtha and his brother belonged to the clan of the manetuwi msipessi or “miraculous panther” (msi, great, big; pishiwi, abbreviated pessi, cat, both combined meaning the American lion). So the translations “panther lying in wait,” or “crouching lion,” give only the sense of the name, and no animal is named in it. But the msi-pessi, when the epithet miraculous (manetuwi) is added to it, means a “celestial tiger,” i. e., a meteor or shooting star. The manetuwi msi-pessi lives in water only and is visible not as an animal, but as a shooting star, and exceeding in size other shooting stars. This monster gave name to a Shawano clan, and this clan, to which Tecumtha belonged, was classed among the claw-foot animals also. The quick motion of the shooting star was correctly likened to that of a tiger or wildcat rushing upon his prey. Shooting stars are supposed to be souls of great men all over America. The home of the dead is always in the west, where the celestial bodies set, and since meteors travel westward they were supposed to return to their western home.
