Tag: Tecumseh

Tecumseh (March 1768 – October 5, 1813), also known as Tecumtha or Tekamthi, was a Native American leader of the Shawnee and a large tribal confederacy (known as Tecumseh’s Confederacy) that opposed the United States during Tecumseh’s War and the War of 1812. He grew up in what the Americans called the Ohio country during the American Revolutionary War and the Northwest Indian War, where he was constantly exposed to warfare. After difficult years as a young man who suffered alcoholism, his younger brother Tenskwatawa became a religious leader. Known as “The Prophet”, he advocated a return of the Shawnee and other American Indians to their ancestral lifestyle and rejection of the colonists and Americans. He attracted a large following among Indians who had already suffered major epidemics and dispossession of their lands. With Americans continuing to encroach on Indian territory after the British ceded the Ohio Valley to the new United States, the Shawnee moved further into the…