In spite of his hatred of white men, it is said that he was once in love with a white woman, the daughter of a settler in Greene County. He offered her fifty silver brooches if she would marry him; but she refused, saying that she did not wish to be a wild woman and drudge like a squaw; and she would not be tempted even when he promised her that she should not work, but should be a great squaw.
He was not always terrible, even with white men, and it is told of him that once meeting in a settler’s cabin a stranger who showed alarm at sight of him, Tecumseh went up and amiably shook him, saying, “Big baby, Big baby.” But he could be fierce and arrogant when he chose, and he delighted to make the Americans bend to him. At one of their parleys, General Harrison asked him to sit on his veranda with him. Tecumseh haughtily refused, and forced the general to come out and meet him under the trees, on the breast of the earth, who was, he said, the Indian’s mother.
He was in every fight with the Americans before Wayne’s victory, but he was not made a chief until the year following that battle. Then, though he seemed resigned to the fate of his people, he became the leader in their discontent, and in the parts of Ohio and Indiana where he lived he kept it alive. In this he had the help of his brother Elkskuatawa, the Prophet, who pretended to have dreams and revelations favorable to Tecumseh’s designs. In 1806, while they were at Greenville, the Prophet somehow learned that there was to be an eclipse of the sun; he foretold the coming miracle, and excited the savages through their superstitions so dangerously that Governor Harrison urged them to banish the Prophet. They made evasive answers, and kept the Prophet with them, while Tecumseh amused the governor with meetings and parleys, and went and came upon his errands among the Southern tribes stirring them up to join the Northern nations in a revolt against the Americans. He used all his eloquence and reason in trying to form this union of the red men, and when these would not avail, he did not scruple to employ the arts of his brother. In exhorting one of the Southern tribes he rebuked their coldness, and told them that when he reached Detroit, he would stamp his foot, and they should feel the earth tremble as a sign of his divine authority for his work. About the time it would have taken him to reach Detroit, the great earthquake of 1810 shook the Seminoles with terror of the man whose arguments they had rejected.
In fact, Tecumseh and the Prophet constantly played into each other’s hands, but in one of Tecumseh’s absences the Prophet made the mistake of attacking General Harrison at Tippecanoe, and the savages were severely beaten. The Prophet had also made the mistake of promising them a victory, and after the defeat he lost his power over them.
This was in 1811, but the next year the war between the United States and Great Britain broke out, and then Tecumseh seized his chance for renewing the war against the Americans. He served so faithfully against them that the king made him brigadier general, and Tecumseh tried to fight according to the laws of civilized warfare. At the attack on Fort Meigs in Wood County, he stopped, at the risk of his own life, the massacre of the American prisoners, and he bade the British commandant, who declared that the Indians could not be controlled, go and put on petticoats. An American who saw him at this time says, “This celebrated chief was a noble, dignified personage. His face was finely proportioned, his nose inclined to be aquiline, and his eye displayed none of that savage and ferocious triumph common to the other Indians on that occasion.”
Tecumseh with his Indians witnessed the battle of Lake Erie at Put-in-Bay, where Perry defeated the English fleet, and he was not deceived by the pretense of General Proctor that the Americans were beaten and the English ships were merely putting in there for repairs. Proctor was then preparing to retreat into Canada from Detroit, and Tecumseh demanded to be heard in the name of the Indians. He had some very bitter words to say: “The war before this our British father gave the hatchet to his red children.... In that war our father was thrown upon his back by the Americans, and our father took them by the hand without our knowledge, and we are afraid our father will do so again at this time.... Our ships have gone away, and we are much astonished to see our father tying up everything and preparing to run away.... We are sorry to see our father doing so without seeing the enemy. We must compare our father’s conduct to a fat dog that carries his tail on his back, and when affrighted drops it between his legs and runs off.
“Father, you have got the arms and ammunition which our great father sent for his children. If you have an idea of going away, give them to us, and you may go and welcome. Our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit. We are determined to defend our lands, and if it be his will, we wish to leave our bones upon them.”
But the British retreated, and the Indians had to follow them into Canada. There in the battle of the Thames the Americans defeated them and their savage allies with great slaughter, and Tecumseh, whose war-cry had been heard above the tumult of the onset, was among the slain. He is supposed to have been killed by a pistol shot fired by Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and it is said that the body of this generous enemy did not escape barbarous usage at the hands of Johnson’s men, who literally flayed it and bore portions of their ghastly trophy home with them in triumph.