Tecumseh

Tecumseh by Paul Reaume

Tecumseh

Height: Unknown – approx. 6′

Tecumseh was born somewhere in modern-day Kentucky around the time of the American Revolution. As Shawnee legend goes, on the night he was born a comet streaked across the heavens. Tecumseh means “the cougar which leaps across the sky” and is their term for a comet. It meant that a great leader had come to unite their people against annihilation at the hands of the “Longknives!”

His youth was rife with warfare with and against against the whites and diseases like smallpox. These tragedies forced his family to move back to Ohio, their ancestral homeland. Tecumseh was well educated and could speak and was literate in English. However, losing his father and older brother to the Americans made him leery of western culture and the United States in particular.

Tecumseh wanted nothing less than a permanent nation-state for his people and was willing to fight for it but had no wish to harm innocents and did not engage in the wanton slaughter of civilians or the enemy. He found the means to this goal in the most unlikely place, his worthless alcoholic younger brother Lalawethika. Lalawethika’s transformation into the prophet enabled him to entice the other tribes into banding together against the USA allowing him to revitalize the dream of those who came before such as the great Cornplanter or Pontiac or even Joseph Brant.

Comments are closed.