[475] Dawson, Harrison, 10-11.
The red men were not unconscious of the evils of intemperance, and often made pathetic appeals to the whites to protect them from temptation. "The Indian Chiefs complain heavily of the mischiefs produced by the enormous quantities of whisky which the traders introduce into their country," wrote Harrison to the Secretary of War in 1801.[476] In 1810 the Fox nation requested General Clark, Indian agent at St. Louis, to prevent whisky from coming among them as it made them "verry poor."[477] In a speech to the President of the United States in 1802 Little Turtle dwelt on the demoralization wrought among his people by liquor, and urged that its sale be prohibited. "Your children are not wanting in industry," he said, "but it is the introduction of this fatal poison which keeps them poor. Your children have not that command of themselves which you have, therefore, before anything can be done to advantage, this evil must be remedied."[478]
[476] Ibid.
[477] Edwards Papers, MSS in Chicago Historical Society library, L, 77; Maurice Blondeau to Clark, August 25, 1810.
[478] American State Papers, Indian Affairs, I, 655.
The conditions which were working the ruin of the tribes were borne by the Indians with astonishing patience.[479] "They will never have recourse to arms," said Harrison in 1806, "unless driven to it by a series of injustice and oppression."[480] Yet often there were pathetic protests. "I had not discovered," wrote Black Hawk of the spring of 1812, "one good trait in the character of the Americans that had come to the country. They made fair promises, but never fulfilled them Why did the Great Spirit ever send the whites to this island to drive us from our homes, and introduce among us poisonous liquors, disease, and death?"[481]
[479] Statement of Harrison to the Secretary of War, July 15, 1801, Dawson, Harrison, 9.
[480] Dillon, History of Indiana, 423.
[481] Black Hawk, Life, 34-35.
With the government demanding more lands and the advancing line of white settlement pressing ever forward, the game upon which the Indians subsisted became scarcer, and many of the tribes were reduced to destitution. Then came the remarkable attempt of Tecumseh, the Indian Moses, and his brother, the Prophet, to rescue their people from the impending doom. The story of Tecumseh, the greatest man of the native race, begins with the birth of three boys to the Cherokee squaw of a Shawnee warrior about the year 1770, in an obscure village near the present site of Springfield, Ohio.[482] In the nature of things not much can be known with certainty of his earlier years. His brother, the Prophet, has spun a fanciful tale of his descent from the union of a Creek warrior with the daughter of one of the colonial governors, but both this and the stories of his youthful precocity and prowess may be regarded with equal suspicion. In the same light must we view the story of the effect produced upon Tecumseh by the first spectacle, for him, of the burning of a prisoner, and his persuading his associates to abandon the custom,[483] though it is true his later career was marked by a humanity toward the vanquished foe quite unusual in an Indian.