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previous: Chapter 7 This webpage reproduces a chapter of The Southern Indians by R. S. Cotterill University of Oklahoma Press Norman, Oklahoma, 1954 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 9

 p166  VIII
Tecumseh
1811

On August 5, 1811, Tecumseh, the great Shawnee chief, left Vincennes, where he and Governor Harrison had spent an agreeable week in mutual recrimination, and started south on a visit to the Creeks and Choctaws. His announced purpose of uniting these two nations with him in a league of peace was interpreted by the logical Governor as an intention of exciting them to war.⁠1 The Governor, however, failed even to surmise what practically all later writers have assumed as a fact, that Tecumseh went to secure the Southern Indians as British allies for the War of 1812.

If it is legitimate to substitute contemporary evidence for clairvoyance and patriotic introspection, it would seem clear that Tecumseh went south in response to an invitation, which perhaps had the urgency of an appeal, brought to him in Indiana by Tuscanea (Tusca Heneha), eldest son of Big Warrior (Tustennuge Thlocco), the head chief and speaker of the Creek Nation in succession to Opoie Micco. The invitation was perhaps suggested by some member of John Forbes and Company, was probably endorsed by Big Warrior, and was certainly sponsored by the element of the Creeks that was opposing the civilization program of Benjamin Hawkins.⁠2 The opposition in its main manifestations  p167 was so closely similar to that which Tecumseh had for four years been promoting in the Northwest as to suggest that its development may even have inspired, as its origin antedated, the teachings of the Shawnee leader. For Tecumseh himself was of Creek descent; both his father and mother had been born at Sauwanogee in 1811. The retention in peace of that close association with the Shawnees often evidenced in war permitted the Creeks to know, as their own vicissitudes caused them to applaud, the efforts of Tecumseh to prevent the alienation of land and the abandonment of primitive ways. It was so fitting as to be almost inevitable that in the crisis of 1811 they should call their renowned kinsman home for counsel and assistance.

The impetuous summons to Tecumseh in 1811 was apparently an expression of the surge of resentment against the arbitrary seizure of the Coosa Road by the United States in an action which the Creeks, against all assurances, regarded correctly as a threat to their remaining land and liberty. But behind this specific discontent lay a vast reservoir of ill will, which had been accumulating from the time Hawkins had become agent and had begun his reforms. In its early stage, when Bowles was troubling the waters the opposition to these reforms had been more prevalent among the Lower Creeks; the opposition now shifted its strength to the Upper Creeks, among whom Hawkins, who had his agency on the Flint, had fewer opportunities to exert his influence. Twenty-nine of the thirty-four Upper Creek towns were antagonistic; indeed, it was only from the Natchez and Hillaubee people that the agent could expect undeviating support.⁠3 The malcontents, their numbers increasing and their virulence intensifying with each American encroachment on their land and customs, now comprised probably the larger and certainly the more articulate portion of the nation. Big Warrior, although his political orthodoxy had been validated by Hawkins as a necessary prelude to election, was  p168 thought to be in secret sympathy with them. This, if true, was because he was descended from the Piankashaw, a tribe closely associated with the Shawnees, and not because of ratiocination since the chief seems to have gained his name by his physical rather than his intellectual endowment.⁠4

It is safe to accept the testimony of Governor Harrison, notwithstanding his tendency to exaggerate the number of his enemies, that Tecumseh's diplomatic entourage, including himself, consisted of twenty men. From the Governor's statement that they descended the Wabash, it may be deduced that they began the journey in canoes. Since no one saw them after they left Vincennes, or if so did not report them until they arrived in the Chickasaw towns, it may be inferred that, instead of following the riparian route to Chickasaw Bluffs, they discarded their canoes after crossing the Ohio, and made the remainder of the trip overland. An anonymous correspondent, who had himself not seen them, wrote that the party consisted of six Shawnees, six Kickapoos, two Creeks, and six of some unknown tribe far to the northwest.⁠5 If Tecumseh hoped to proselytize the Chickasaws, he displayed neither tact nor intelligence in taking with him a group of their hereditary enemies. It is, indeed, fairly evident that he selected his route not to secure Chickasaw converts but to avoid American observation. His activities among the Chickasaws can be evaluated from testimony that he told them only that he was on his way to the Creeks, from reports that the Shawnees and Kickapoos solicited the aid of the Chickasaw king, or from a tradition that Tecumseh himself appealed to George Colbert.⁠6 The unidentified six who had come with Tecumseh, not as members of his party or to support his pleas, but on a mission of their own, tendered Chickasaws a war pipe and solicited an alliance  p169 with them for a war on the Americans. The opposing counsel of Tecumseh was as earnest as it was unnecessary for securing a Chickasaw rejection.⁠7

Agent Neelly, being without recourse to the traditions and retrospections which have been so fruitful for later writing on Tecumseh, apparently failed to notice his passing through the Chickasaws or else considered it too unimportant to report. The agent, to be sure, was perhaps preoccupied, since he had received instructions to "prepare the minds" of the Chickasaws for a cession of their Kentucky and Tennessee lands, and this certainly entailed much preparation. The Chickasaws considered their territory perpetually protected by the talisman of Washington's written guarantee, and to any Chickasaw chief the idea of ceding tribal land held the same pleasure as a prospect of personal dismemberment. Neelly was engaged in the delicate but more promising task of securing Chickasaw consent for another Tennessee-Tombigbee road, the War Department having decided that the road selected by George Gaines was unsuitable, presumably because, of all those considered, it was the shortest, most convenient, and possessed the best terminals.⁠8 This road Neelly obtained, but whatever effort he was exerting in trying to secure an additional road from the Chickasaw agency to the "widow Runnold on the Tennessee" (as the Secretary of War at the behest of Kentucky had instructed him) was apparently labor taken in vain.⁠9

 p170  The practically entire absence of contemporary records has permitted conjecture to run even more than usually rampant on Tecumseh's visit to the Choctaws. He went to them from the Chickasaws, and, as he was evidently trying to avoid contact with white men, in all probability followed the old Six Towns road. Riding now, according to tradition, on black ponies (concerning the obtaining of which tradition gives no details) Tecumseh and his party traversed that region between Macon and Meridian in which the Choctaw towns were concentrated; some of his party, including Seekabo, his kinsman, may have visited the Six Towns. In contrast to his Chickasaw experience, Tecumseh seems to have been received among the Choctaws with honors, treated with consideration, and heard with sympathy. In each of the three districts the chiefs called councils (some half-dozen in all) for him where he explained his mission and delivered his appeals. Tradition is certainly correct in remembering his pleas for intertribal peace, for the sparing of women and children in war, for denying future land cessions, and for a return to those ancient ways from which, in truth, the provincial Choctaws had yet not had much opportunity to depart. These were sermons practically copyrighted by Tecumseh and previously preached by him in many a Northern tribe. But the tradition that he exhorted the Choctaws to war against the United States and to alliance with Great Britain contradicts the entire tenor of his contemporary teaching and must be credited to later imaginings overstimulated by patriotism and consequent prejudice. It is possible that blurred tradition has attributed to Tecumseh not only his own undoubted, and not doubtful, speeches but also those of the Sioux delegates who accompanied (or slightly preceded him) and whose appeals Tecumseh opposed at every opportunity. Tradition is probably correct in remembering that Tecumseh met opposition from Pushmataha, Pitchlynn, and others in the pay of the United States, but their opposition was not to any hypothetical advocacy of war; it was to his appeals for peace and humanity, for a denial of land cessions and a retention of old customs.⁠10

 p171  If Tecumseh was preaching war, it was reprehensible that Agent Dinsmoor left it unopposed and apparently unreported. The vacation habit, which Dinsmoor seems to have contracted as soon as he began work, had so increased that he seems to have spent very little time at his agency from 1807 to 1811. To this confirmed absenteeism the War Department, although twice ordering him back to his agency for specific tasks, had shown remarkable indulgence until the fall of 1810 when the West Florida crisis and a memorial from the Mississippi territorial legislature had stirred it to more positive action. To its complaint that Dinsmoor had left the Choctaw country and was living in Washington (Mississippi), the memorial appended a recommendation that all agents be required to live among the Indians to whom they were assigned.⁠11 Influenced by this memorial and perhaps by complaints from William Simpson that Dinsmoor was speculating with the land cession proceeds instead of paying them to Forbes as the Choctaw treaty of 1805 had provided, the Secretary of War in February, 1811, had directed Dinsmoor to return to his agency and stay there. The harassed Secretary added that if Dinsmoor found this inconvenient, he should notify the Department, which would try to find for him "a successor whose personal views and interests will be consistent with his public duties."⁠12 Returning to his agency after receiving this ultimatum, Dinsmoor had been displaying his devotion to national interests by a literal execution of his instructions to arrest all travelers without passports on the Natchez Trace. These included some slaves whose masters protested so explosively that shortly after Tecumseh left, Dinsmoor was admonished by the Secretary that his zeal must be tempered by discrimination.⁠13

About the middle of September, after a final council at Mushulatubbe's residence, Tecumseh left the Choctaws for the Creek country. The success of his mission among the Choctaws is suggested by the length of his visit and by the addition of nineteen  p172 Choctaws to his party. It was doubtless not a result of chance that his arrival at Tuckabatchee coincided with the regular meeting of the Creek national council on September 20. The presence of five thousand Creeks testified both to the popularity of Tecumseh and to the publicity Big Warrior had given to his visit. The forty-six Cherokees present justified their attendance by the perennial excuse that they had come to arrange with the Creeks an interval of repose from the mutual activities in horse stealing. The aged and ailing Hawkins attended as a matter of course, but seems to have left the routine of business in the hands of his assistant, Christian Limbaugh.

Tecumseh as a visiting notable lodged with Big Warrior and, either by his counsel or from custom, delayed an address until the council had finished transacting the tribal business. In the meantime, notwithstanding his lameness, he joined in the ceremonial dances in the public square, took occasion again to oppose the persistent Sioux who had tendered their war pipe to the Creeks, and talked to Hawkins on the subject of his mission. It seems evident that in his conversation with Hawkins he, from politeness or prudence, stressed only his opposition to war against the Americans and his ambitions for intertribal peace. The departure of Hawkins for the Flint before the Tuckabatchee council ended is an indication amounting to proof that he considered Tecumseh's mission harmless and that he had no apprehensions concerning the coming address of the Shawnee leader.

This address, delayed by council business and not postponed (as has often and fatuously been supposed) until after the departure of the agent, was delivered apparently about September 30 and was duly reported to Hawkins by Big Warrior. He reported that the burden of Tecumseh's talk was his conversation with the Great Spirit concerning Indian affairs, that after the address he (Big Warrior) and some others tried to find out from Tecumseh what he meant, that the result of their efforts was a conviction that Tecumseh was a madman or a great liar, or both, and that they did not understand and would take no notice of his foolish talk.⁠14 Either Big Warrior in his report was displaying unsuspected  p173 powers of dissimulation or was bewildered by the introduction of a spiritual note in Tecumseh's address. The latter is the more probable, for dissembling would have been both dangerous and useless in reporting a speech heard by so many in Hawkins' pay.

There is no contemporary evidence that Tecumseh visited either the Cherokees or the Seminoles, and there is contemporary evidence that his intention was to do neither. It is possible that conversations with the Cherokee delegation at Tuckabatchee convinced him that no co‑operation in his program could reasonably be expected from a tribe so divided and so browbeaten. By the election of Pathkiller as head chief, the Cherokees had ended the interregnum resulting from the deposition of Black Fox, but their formal unity and outward harmony covered so many dissensions as to paralyze the tribal will.

In the early spring of 1811, Meigs had been instructed to urge again on the hapless Cherokees the policy, temporarily in abeyance, of mass migration to trans-Mississippi lands for which they should exchange their eastern territory.⁠15 Individual migration, which had been in progress for two years and had taken some two thousand Cherokees to the White River country, was resulting only in a gradual shifting of Cherokee population without any accompanying cession of Cherokee land. Irritated by this unseemly development, Meigs proposed that the Cherokees, since their inappreciation of United States benevolence prevented any voluntary change in their status as land­owners, should either be compelled to remove as a tribe or else be brought under the civil jurisdiction of Georgia and Tennessee. In the latter case the United States should assign their two thousand families 2,000,000 acres in severalty, and appropriate the remaining 11,000,000 for $200,000. The anticipated reluctance of the Cherokees to surrender either their identity or their lands brought from the agent the  p174 candid and ruthless statement: "I have ever been of the opinion that the Indians have not the right to put their veto on any measure deliberately determined and decreed by the Government."⁠16 This, however, was a theory that Madison, because of his entanglements and perhaps because of his scruples, could not accept, and Meigs was constrained to limit his promotion of removal to the customary forms of persuasion. Apparently as a method of fitting the prospective émigrés for the wild life of Arkansas, he continued to promote their civilization at home; in August, 1811, he reported that the Cherokees possessed 20,000 black cattle, 20,000 hogs, 6,000 horses (presumably their own), and 1,000 sheep.⁠17

After the Tuckabatchee council, Tecumseh probably spent some time in the Creek country, going from town to town, visiting his friends and relatives, and doubtless in private conversations urging the views he had publicly expressed. He may have gone to the Seminoles at this time; earlier he could not possibly have gone. Of such a trip, tradition has preserved the details only of his return in October: of coming up the Alabama River and crossing it at Autage, of making a speech there and others at Coosada and the Hickory Grounds.⁠18 It was probably November when he finally left the Creeks for his long trip home. Seekabo, who had been born among the Creeks, and a few others of the Shawnees remained among the Creeks, presumably to confirm the Creeks in the faith that Tecumseh had preached and to carry the gospel further. Some of the Creeks accompanied Tecumseh on his return. Presumably he visited the Osages as he had intended. In December, 1811, Governor Clark noted his passing through Missouri, his addressing the Shawnees and Delawares there, and his pressing on to the Sac and Fox and to the Sioux.⁠19 By January 25,  p175 1812, he, with eight men, had rejoined his brother, the Prophet, in Indiana.⁠20

For his contemporaries the visit of Tecumseh to the Southern Indians had no such significance as it has assumed for later writers substituting for direct information a tangled mass of inference, retrospection, and blurred tradition. Hawkins reported it so casually that he did not even mention Tecumseh's name; the Secretary of War considered it too unimportant even for investigation.⁠21 The visit of Tecumseh, however, did give Governor Harrison an opportunity to gain fame, if not victory, at Tippecanoe, to the resulting political advantage of himself and his descendants. It had no connection with the War of 1812 except to precede it. Although it almost certainly strengthened the hands of those Creeks who opposed Americanization, it is probable that, instead of contributing to, it delayed the imminent Creek civil war. Tecumseh came to the South not to bring war but to bring peace.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 Logan Esarey, Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, Indiana Historical Collection, VII and VIII, I, Harrison to Secretary of War, August 6, 1812; ibid., I, idem to idem, August 7, 1811.

2 Thomas S. Woodward, Reminiscences of the Creek or Muscogee Indians, 94, 116.

3 Indian Affairs, I, 851, Big Warrior to Hawkins, August 4, 1813; Woodward, op. cit., 96.

4 Woodward, op. cit., 116. Woodward said that Big Warrior was the largest man he ever saw among the Creeks and that he was almost as spotted as a leopard.

5 Indian Affairs, I, 801, (anonymous) to Secretary of War, September 10, 1811. This letter mentions the fact that there were two Creeks in the party and conjectures that the object of the delegation was to incite Creeks and Cherokees to war. Tecumseh is not mentioned.

6 Indian Affairs, I, 801, (anonymous) to Secretary of War, September 10, 1811; ibid., I, 801, (anonymous) to Secretary of War, November 29, 1811; H. S. Halbert and T. H. Ball, The Creek War of 1813 and 1814, 41.

7 I. O. R., War Department Letters Received, Hawkins to Secretary of War, September 21, 1811. Hawkins identified these Indians as members of the "Wappomooka and Too-e‑Toosh" tribe, who lived high up on the west side of the Mississippi. They were probably Sioux.

8 Carter, op. cit., VI, 213‑14, Secretary of War to Wade Hampton, July 10, 1811. Hampton opened the road — Gaines' Trace — from the Tombigbee to the upper end of Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee. This was the longest of the routes surveyed by Gaines in 1807 and was chosen presumably because its northern terminal was the newly established Fort Hampton on the Tennessee. The best description of the road is G. J. Leftwich, "Cotton Gin Port and Gaines' Trace," Mississippi Historical Society Publications, Vol. VII, 263‑70.

9 I. O. R., War Department Letter Book C. 66, Secretary of War to Neelly, March 11, 1811; ibid., C, 91‑92, idem to idem, August 17, 1811. The Chickasaw agency was situated on the headwaters of the Halky, a Tombigbee tributary, near the Tombigbee-Yazoo divide (I. O. R., Letters Received, Long to McKenney, November 5, 1824).

10 The Halbert and Hall report, in op. cit., is the best account of Tecumseh's stay among the Choctaws.

11 I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, memorial of the Mississippi legislature, November 30, 1810.

12 Carter, op. cit., VI, 178, Secretary of War to Dinsmoor, February 22, 1811.

13 I. O. R., War Department Letter Book C, 103, Secretary of War to Dinsmoor, October 15, 1811.

14 The only contemporary accounts of Tecumseh's visit to the Creeks are two letters from Hawkins to the Secretary of War on September 21, 1811 and January 7, 1812 (I. O. R., Secretary of War Letters Received). Woodward's account (op. cit., 94‑95) is hearsay recalled nearly forty years after the event. A few additional items of Tecumseh's talk are given in a letter from Hawkins to Big Warrior, June 16, 1814 (Indian Affairs, I, 845); not to injure Americans, to preserve peace and friendship, not to steal.

15 I. O. R., War Department Letter Book C, 70, Secretary of War to Meigs, March 27, 1811.

16 I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, Meigs to Secretary of War, April 6, 1811. Meigs' views are given in this letter and two others written to the Secretary of War, April 5 and May 30, 1811 (I. O. R., Retired Classified Files).

17 Ibid., Meigs to Secretary of War, August 20, 1811. In 1813 the Cherokees were reported also to have 1500 spinning wheels, 400 looms, and 500 plows (ibid., idem to idem.) July 30, 1813.

18 A. J. Pickett, History of Alabama and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, II, 240‑41.

19 Indian Affairs, I, 807, William Clark to Secretary of War, April 12, 1812.

20 Ibid., I, 805, Little Turtle to Harrison, January 25, 1812.

21 I. O. R., Secretary of War Letters Sent, October 5, 1811.

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