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American Frontier Wars – Tecumseh & William Henry Harrison – Peter Stark
207 Plays1 year ago
Ep 039 – Nonfiction. Tecumseh’s military stand against William Henry Harrison was a last chance to protect Indigenous people from U.S. expansion. Peter Stark joins me to discuss his new book, "Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation."
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Transcript
Introduction: The Battle of No Name
00:00:00
Speaker
his initial forces that he sent over got crushed by the confederated forces led by Little Turtle of the Miamis and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees and other chiefs. And I think you say the crush so badly that this battle doesn't actually have a name because it was such a shameful moment. It was such a shameful moment. American history. Under the rug of US history because this army was destroyed
00:00:30
Speaker
in November 1791.
Meet the Author: Peter Stark
00:00:34
Speaker
And we talk about Battle of the Little Bighorn or Custer's Last Stand being this crushing of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Cavalry, and that would be 100 years later. But I think it was something like 200 soldiers and officers died in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Well, three times more died in what's called the Battle of No Name.
00:01:09
Speaker
Hi everyone, this is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I am really excited to have on the show Peter Stark for his new book, Gallop Towards the Sun, Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of an Ancient.
00:01:31
Speaker
Peter is an adventure and exploration writer and historian. Born in Wisconsin, he studied English and anthropology at Dartmouth College and Journalism at the University of Wisconsin.
00:01:43
Speaker
A longtime correspondent for Outside Magazine, he's also been published in the Smithsonian, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Men's Journal. His book Astoria was a New York Times bestseller and it received the Penn USA Literary Award nomination. It was adapted into an epic two-part play, which is really cool and I think might be the first Peter that we've had on this show. How are you doing today?
Personal Connections to History
00:02:10
Speaker
Good, good. Yeah, I'm so delighted to talk to you. We have a lot to talk about. We have so much to talk about. And it was like it took all of my willpower to not just bombard you with questions before we actually started recording. Because I personally am very fascinated by this topic, because I grew up right next to where the Battle of Tippecanoe took place in Indiana, in rural Indiana, which, of course, William Henry Harrison
00:02:40
Speaker
Well, and Tecumseh, but William Henry Harrison, very well known for that particular battle. And I knew hardly anything about it growing up too. So yeah, so excited for this discussion. I imagine in your research, did you
00:03:01
Speaker
Did you spend a lot of time in that part of the world? Did you travel back through Vincennes and Fort Wayne and Lafayette at all in Indiana? I went to your childhood home. Well, I was about to start talking about because there's a great, the Tippecanoe River has right upstream from where this battle took place. In the 1920s, two man-made lakes were created there.
00:03:30
Speaker
In Indiana Beach, an amusement park has been put up right above where the Battle of Tippecanoe took place. On the Tippecanoe River or on the Wabash?
Transforming Historical Landscapes
00:03:41
Speaker
On the Tippecanoe, what they did is they dammed up part of it and they made it into a man-made lake. Now there's something called Indiana Beach right above where this battle took place. If you write another book about this part of the world, you've got a good Indiana Beach.
00:03:59
Speaker
Yeah, this was a different beach at the time. Different beach, yes. Well, you know, one of the things that I, when I reached out to you, so I saw this book in Barnes and Noble, and I don't think anything has, I mean, I'm sure things have been written about the part of the world where I grew up, but certainly nothing like your book.
00:04:17
Speaker
And I was asking before we went on, we don't actually know where this photo is right here on the cover. And for everybody listening and not watching, the cover to Peter's book has this beautiful sunset over a river. And when I first saw it, I was like, oh, is that the Tippecanoe River? Is that where I grew up? But we were not able to confirm that before we went on, right, Peter? Yeah, actually, I've had several people ask me that very same question. And when I see that photograph, I love that photograph. I love that cover. It's such a beautiful cover that
00:04:48
Speaker
That was my immediate reaction. Where, you know, where was that taken? I think I know that place. I've been, you know, I've canoed all my life. I've been on so many rivers. And I just feel it was so familiar. And, you know, I was thinking it's got to be a river in the Midwest and where I grew up. And so I think what I'll do is I'll try to track that down and figure out where it is because it's a sort of burning question.
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah, well, we won't, it could, you know, who knows? Maybe it is a tiffy canoe river. Maybe it just so happens. Well, this conversation, as I mentioned, very kind of personal to me because growing up, I really, and I grew up in this part of the world and I really knew nothing about this battle. I knew nothing about
00:05:35
Speaker
how the Native Americans were, I mean, I knew a little bit about how the Native Americans were treated, but certainly not to the extent, in your prologue, I mean, you call the fighting between the white settlers and the Native Americans, you call it genocide.
00:05:53
Speaker
And that certainly was not a term that was taught to me in high school history.
Uncovering Overlooked Native American History
00:06:00
Speaker
So I was born in Miami County in Indiana. There's Tecumseh Middle School in Lafayette. There's William Henry Harrison High School. Do you find that most people, if either they don't know anything about
00:06:21
Speaker
this time in American history, or if they do know things about this point in time, it's not much about Native Americans. Oh, definitely. Yeah. And that's what attracted me to the subject to begin with, that as you say, a lot of Americans who know the outlines of American history don't even register this particular region at this particular time.
00:06:49
Speaker
What I say is that it's, you know, I talk about it being over the mountains. And, you know, here I've lately given readings on the West Coast. And so I explained to audiences there, well, when I say over the mountains, I don't mean over the Cascades. I don't mean over the Sierras. I don't mean over the Rockies. I mean over the Appalachian Mountains. And so here you have the events of the revolution.
00:07:14
Speaker
the events before the revolution, during the revolution, and after the revolution, which is, this book spans that era, and especially just after the revolution. We are so, as Americans who have studied history in our, you know, regular schools, are so aware of what happened on the East Coast, on the Eastern Seaboard, on those, you know, the colonies then states, the 13 colonies then states that went from the Atlantic Coast
00:07:42
Speaker
basically up to the foothills of the Appalachians. And so that's almost entirely our focus in that period of history. But at that time, there were pivotal events going on over the mountains, really important events that would have a huge impact on the ultimate shape and values and fabric of this nation.
00:08:09
Speaker
And they are just not acknowledged very much in American history.
00:08:16
Speaker
I chose to focus on these two individuals, Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison, because they embody the dynamics of that era. And they were both extremely influential figures. And I mean, it's funny, like Harrison, now William Henry Harrison, he's known, I mean, he's more like the answer to a bar trivia question, which is, you know, who was the shortest lived president, which president had the shortest term in office?
00:08:45
Speaker
As a young man, I think he was in his 60s when he became president, but as a young man in his 20s and 30s, he was extremely influential in launching the Western movement. And likewise, Tecumseh, who unified tribes from Lake Superior all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico,
00:09:06
Speaker
to hold the land as one and try to stop this relentless onslaught of white settlers. So those were pivotal moments and we're living with the consequences today.
00:09:18
Speaker
Yeah, well, and I got a little bit ahead of myself because we're talking about things and events that happen in the book, but a question I generally like to start off asking people is to say in your own words, what is your book about? Could you set the stage for our listeners real quick and just say in your own words, what's this book about?
Tecumseh and Harrison: Pivotal Figures
00:09:40
Speaker
Well, you know, it's somewhat what I just said, it's about the events that took place over the mountains in the Ohio wilderness and around the Great Lakes in the era, before and after the revolution, and especially the events from about 1790 to 1813. And that's when
00:10:06
Speaker
Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison eventually rose to be each the leader of a separate movement that came head to head, face to face, literally face to face on the lawn of the governor's mansion out in Indiana territory and had it out verbally and then with weapons.
00:10:29
Speaker
Would you say that this is, so the War of 1812 plays a big part in this story, but is there like a particular war that we might call?
00:10:41
Speaker
the events from the 1790s up until the 1820s and this first time? Well, you could. This is something I address in the book and when I've been giving talks lately is that I've tried to recount that whole history in a few minutes.
00:11:02
Speaker
that there is a war that most Americans have never heard of, and I hadn't really heard of it until I dug into this. It's called the Northwest Indian Wars, or Little Turtles War. And that took place basically between about 1789, 1790, and 1794, so the first half of the 1790s.
00:11:24
Speaker
And that was when the United States was, I mean, it wasn't even a baby nation. It was a fledgling nation. It hadn't figured out what it was doing. It didn't even really, it didn't have an official army. And at that point, the United States, the founding fathers didn't want an official standing army. They thought that's where the kings and tyrants of Europe used.
00:11:48
Speaker
Yet there were these settlers going over the mountains and mostly illegally and settling on Indian lands over the mountains. And eventually conflicts broke out between the settlers and the tribes. And then the Northwest Indian Wars, you could say, really started in around 1790 when
00:12:11
Speaker
George Washington, what's he in office? 1791 year. I mean, he'd just gone into office and he sent this kind of motley collection of states, militias. And I think there was one small body of actual US
Challenges of Early US Military Conflicts
00:12:30
Speaker
troops left over from the revolution. And he cobbled together this force and sent them over the mountains. And as he called it, punish the Bandini.
00:12:41
Speaker
the Shawnees and Cherokees and Miamis over the mountains in the Ohio Valley. And they were based, especially the Shawnees out of what's now Southern Ohio.
00:12:54
Speaker
His initial forces that he sent over got crushed by the confederated forces led by Little Turtle of the Miamis and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees and other chiefs. And I think you say the crush so badly that this battle doesn't actually have a name because it was such a shameful moment. It was such a shameful moment. American history. Under the rug of US history because this army was destroyed.
00:13:24
Speaker
in November 1791. And we talk about Battle of the Little Bighorn or Custer's Last Stand being this crushing of the US Army, the US Cavalry, and that would be 100 years later. But I think it was something like 200
00:13:45
Speaker
soldiers and officers died in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Well, three times more died in what's called the Battle of No Name. It has various names, but that's kind of the classic one. And yet, we don't even know what it is. We never heard of it. Yeah, and one of the questions that, since this is the War Books podcast, a question that I often have about
00:14:11
Speaker
the military situation between Native Americans in the
00:14:16
Speaker
Would you, I think in the book you called them just like the white settlers, but would I, would you say native Americans on one side and in Americans on the other side, how would you frame that? Settlers generally. And because that's primarily what they were, they, you know, they, they, they weren't, I suppose they weren't always white, but the, the number of, of, you know, freed blacks coming over and being settlers was extremely limited if, if, if at all. And.
00:14:45
Speaker
And they were primarily settlers trying to establish farm holdings. And a lot of the troubles initially started when merchants started going over earlier, but before the revolution. So the battles that take place for the white settlers are either militias or part of the regular army.
00:15:07
Speaker
on the Native American side. My question is, how are these battles actually being fought? What types of equipment? What types of weapons? How are the Native Americans equipped versus how are the white settlers equipped? Yeah, and that's a really good question, and it's a really good question for this particular podcast. It really varies.
00:15:31
Speaker
by the time, the circumstance, and the individuals. For instance, Tecumseh, who really came into his own as a warrior in probably like the early 1790s, and who fought in some of these battles with the Northwest Indian Wars. His preferred weapon was the weapon, he called it the weapon of his ancestors, the war club. And he could be way more effective with a war club than he could with a musket. And you know the reason for that,
00:16:01
Speaker
your muskets a one-shot deal. And this fighting inevitably with native warriors would devolve into hand-to-hand combat. And that's one of the reasons that the US forces got crushed so often and so easily because they try to stave them off with muskets and it worked for a minute and then it didn't. But the Indian
00:16:29
Speaker
Indians also had muskets and kind of almost surprising numbers of them that, you know, I never, I haven't heard much of Indian forces in these battles lacking muskets, but they also, you know, they had bows and arrows, they had war clubs, they had preferred weapons depending on the circumstance.
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think too, you know, today we think about, you know, guns being superior to like knives or clubs. But I am reminded of during like the Napoleonic Wars, oftentimes like cavalry charges, like the cavalry would have, they would rely more on their swords and their bayonets because the musket was just wildly inaccurate.
00:17:21
Speaker
So we think of guns now as being vastly superior, but back at this time, maybe it makes a little bit of sense why the white settlers were at such a disadvantage in a battle like that. Along those same lines, decades later, when you get into the mid 1800s,
00:17:41
Speaker
and you get into the Plains Indian Wars, the Plains Indians could dominate the US forces for a long time in part because they could shoot arrows at the rate off a horse like at 15 arrows a minute. And the US soldiers had like a one shot and reload maybe three shots a minute.
00:18:03
Speaker
And so it was once the repeating revolver and rifle came into play, that made a huge difference in turning the tide in the Plains Indian Wars. Yeah. Well, let's talk about our main characters, if you want to call them that, in this story, Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison.
Tecumseh and Harrison: Beginnings and Influences
00:18:26
Speaker
I'm not sure which one to start with. Which one would you like to kind of give the backstory about first? Well, you know, it's funny that
00:18:33
Speaker
I've realized, both in writing and researching the book, and also when I've been speaking to audiences just since the end of August when the book came out, that most of us don't have native backgrounds, most of the audience. Most of us, not everyone, of course, but have been brought up or descended in some way from the European-American tradition.
00:18:59
Speaker
And so I realized kind of early in the going and the research and the writing, it's easier for the European American mind to get into this story from the European American side and then merge with the native side. And so what I've been doing is I like to start with Harrison and talk about how
00:19:28
Speaker
His dad, Benjamin Harrison V, was one of the primary founding fathers of the United States. And even though he doesn't get the billing that Madison or Jefferson or Washington does, he was right up there with those guys. And he's a sort of big jovial, boisterous guy and very frank. And he was a fifth generation plantation owner.
00:19:55
Speaker
And he was at the signing of the Declaration, too, correct? That's exactly. He was the head of the Committee of the Whole during the Continental Congress in June of 1775, which meant he was the guy who ran the debate and shepherded the votes to pass the Declaration of Independence. So he was like the guy who got it done. And so he was right there at the beginning. But so he's a fifth generation, you know, Virginia slave
00:20:25
Speaker
holder and plantation owner with this beautiful mansion on the James River called Berkeley Plantation. But then he got caught up in revolutionary politics. And once the revolution started, this is again feeds into your War Books podcast. Once the revolution started, we all know the story of Benedict Arnold flipping sides. So Benedict Arnold becomes, I think he was named a general, a very high officer in the British Royal Army.
00:20:54
Speaker
And within very short time, he's leading a large body of redcoats down the James River and surrounds Berkeley Plantation. And he orders his soldiers to pull all the furnishings and all the, you know, the furniture, the family heirlooms, the paintings out of Berkeley Plantation, the Harrison mansion, piled them on the front lawn and set fire to them.
00:21:20
Speaker
And then he has his soldiers shoot the cows and set the slaves free, all because of revenge against Benjamin Harrison V for getting this declaration done. William Henry, he's the youngest of three sons. While this chaos is going on and his plantation heirlooms are getting burned up, he and his mom and his little sister flee in a carriage while this is going on. And that's an informative moment of his childhood.
00:21:51
Speaker
Whereas at the same time, over the mountains, but actually a few years earlier, but it's almost the same arc in a boy's life, Tecumseh's dad was a Shawnee war chief, a long tradition of war chiefs and leaders.
00:22:11
Speaker
And he died when Tecumseh was six years old. And he died fighting the British, Virginia colonial soldiers coming over the mountains to try to protect white settlers who were trying to settle there. And so Tecumseh's father died, you know, on the over the mountain side of this turmoil. And in his father's dying words,
00:22:38
Speaker
this father said to his oldest son, you know, I want you to raise your younger brothers as, you know, to be honorable, to be respectful, to be great honorable warriors. And I want you never to give in to the whites. So that was the legacy to come to grew up in. And then it, it goes from there that, uh,
00:23:04
Speaker
The white settlers kept coming over the mountains. You know, Daniel Boone chops the wilderness road in 1775.
00:23:12
Speaker
And a lot of this happened during the revolution because suddenly it became more of a free-for-all on the other side of the mountains. Whereas when the British were in charge, they were trying to restrict white settlement over the mountains because it would cause too much trouble. But once the revolution broke out, many more white settlers came over the mountains. And when Tecumseh was 12,
00:23:42
Speaker
Shawnee Warriors had besieged Boonsboro, you know, Daniel Boone's outfit, his settlement. And they besieged it but didn't capture it, you know, like it was an eight-day siege. And then in retaliation for that, the Kentuckians around Boonsboro, the long knives, Shawnees called them, put together a midnight raid on horseback and attacked and burned
00:24:09
Speaker
the major Shawnee villages around Chillicothe in today's Ohio. And as that village burned in the middle of a, was a 12-year-old Tecumseh huddled with his mother and his younger brothers and sisters in a lodge in the middle of this. So kind of in the same parallel universe with Harrison's mansion going up. When he's a boy, Tecumseh's village gets burned up when he's 12. And then his mom decides it's too violent.
00:24:39
Speaker
And, you know, the dad's dead. The mom has like five or six kids. And so the mom takes her youngest children and migrates across the Mississippi River to Spanish territory. And then Tecumseh left in the care of his older sister and his race there. So this is, you know, these are the seeds of where these guys come from.
00:24:57
Speaker
Yeah, which is for, I mean, I think for
Motivations Behind Westward Expansion
00:25:01
Speaker
what makes this such a fascinating story is that for a long time in American
00:25:10
Speaker
literature, there's not been a focus on the origin story for Native Americans. And seeing where Tecumseh came from, what happened to him, growing up him, and every, you know, as you say at the beginning of the book, these are people experiencing genocide, you know, to come at it from that perspective is incredibly valuable, I think.
00:25:34
Speaker
Talk a little bit about, first, back up just a second, why are white settlers coming over the mountains anyway in the first place at this point in time? That's where the land is, that the Eastern seaboard, take Virginia, for instance, and the Virginians were, I think out of all the, they used to call it land hunter. Out of all the land hunger hungry American colonists and citizens, the Virginians were the hungriest.
00:26:03
Speaker
And there are reasons for that. One is that tobacco is a notorious exhaust of the soil. And so the Virginia tobacco plantation owners were always needing more and more land. And they had slaves to work it. They had slaves to clear new, huge new plots of land to clear the forest and to plant the tobacco very labor intensive. So they were just kind of inflamed with the need and desire for land.
00:26:33
Speaker
The Virginians especially kept pushing over the mountains into new territory. People just want a new land to settle into plant. And it wasn't only the Virginians, but they were a huge part of it.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about how William Henry Harrison ends up in Indiana territory anyway, or actually, I guess first season Ohio territory. Is there a difference between Ohio and- To pick up his biography again, because it's a crazy, both of them have kind of crazy biographies. And I don't want to go on too long about either of them, but the brief outline is so, you know,
00:27:20
Speaker
The old man, old man Harris and Benjamin V, the passer of the Declaration of Independence, he comes back after his foray into revolutionary politics. And now the plantation, the furniture's burned, the slaves are freed, the cows are shot, the soil's exhausted. And he says to his three sons, and William Henry is the youngest, he says to his three sons, well, this Berkeley plantation
00:27:49
Speaker
has supported the Harrison family for five generations, but it's not gonna support you guys, so you better get a job. And so the oldest son, he said, okay, you're gonna be a lawyer. The middle son says, he says, Benjamin, the fifth says, you're gonna be a merchant. Youngest son, William Henry, you're gonna be a doctor. And William Henry, you know, at this point is like a teenager and he's good and he's a good student. He likes the outdoors, he's a good student, but he likes to read Latin, he likes to read
00:28:19
Speaker
about Caesar's military conquest. So the old man packs him off at age 17 to medical school at Philadelphia, the only medical school in North America at the time, and where he's going to study under the tutelage of Dr. Benjamin Rush.
00:28:37
Speaker
And for those of you who know your Lewis and Clark history, he's been known as the doctor to the revolution, but he's a real character. And so out here, I'm in Montana, but one of the reasons he's famous out here is
00:28:54
Speaker
to Lewis and Clark, and he was the inventor of what the medicine that Lewis and Clark carried, it was called, they were the infamous thunder clapper pills. And they were a purgative of astounding strength based on mercury. And so that's one reason that modern archaeologists have been able to find Lewis and Clark campsites in along their trail is that they can
00:29:18
Speaker
Eventually, they can find a trace mercury metals where the latrines were and because thanks to Dr. Rush, I read that and I was like, well, if that gives anybody a sense of what medicine was like at this point in time.
00:29:35
Speaker
William Henry was not all that much into the medicine because Dr. Rush was trained in kind of the old school from Edinburgh, really kind of a medieval school of medicine, which was ways to balance the body's humors, which you did through bloodletting and through purgatives and various emetics. And then you would measure the discharges and weigh them.
00:29:59
Speaker
And so it was like William Henry gets to medical school and think, you know, I'm not sure this is what I want to be doing, you know, measuring and weighing all these excretions, you know, the rest of my life. And just at that time, the old man dies, and then William Henry drops out. He's 17 going on 18. And a family friend, Edmund Randolph,
00:30:24
Speaker
is just been named the first Attorney General of the United States and offers, there's of course the Capitol that is in Philadelphia, everybody's wandering around the streets there after the revolution. And Edmund Randolph offers William Henry a job in the first US Attorney's Office, which is like a bare room with a desk. And William Henry says, I don't think this is for me. And then William Henry runs into
00:30:51
Speaker
Light Horse Harry Lee, you know, another revolutionary hero and buddy of his father who says, well, hey, if you're looking for action, you should go over the mountains and, you know, there's some Indian fighting going on over there. And so William Henry decides he's going to join the, you know, what's not even the U.S. Army, it's the military kind of early. Like the Legion of, the Legion of something. What is it? It's called the Legion of the United States. Legion of the United States, yeah.
00:31:20
Speaker
But he's a Virginia gentleman. He only rides horses. He doesn't want to be a foot soldier. He wants to be an officer. But he's 18, and the rule says you have to be 20 to be an officer in this force. And so it's not quite clear how he does it, but he gets in touch with his father's old roommate from the Continental Congress.
00:31:42
Speaker
who happens to be now president of the United States, George Washington. And he gets like George Washington to sign off on his fake ID, you know, so he could be an officer at age 18. He's named and he goes over the mountains and ends up in Fort Washington, which is now Cincinnati, where
00:32:04
Speaker
which is way out in the wilderness at that point. And that was kind of the epicenter of where these expeditions were launched to go punish the Bandini. Yeah. And William Henry Harrison throughout your book, so not that there's a good guy and a bad guy, but William Henry Harrison is more villainous in this story than most people would probably think.
00:32:29
Speaker
What do we know about his personality? Was he a jerk? That's a distressing thing. He seems like a fun guy actually, but also very clever and slick when he had to be. He seemed like this genial guy and
00:32:52
Speaker
fairly easy going. However, he was extremely ambitious. I mean, it was like he wanted to recapture the glory that his father had as a founding father. And so he was very ambitious. And that's one of the problems was that so he joined this early military operation in the Northwest Indian Wars. But then when those Indian Wars ended in 1794 with what's called the Battle of Fallen Timbers,
00:33:21
Speaker
And that's when Washington appointed Matt Anthony Wayne, you know, these are all revolutionary guys, to really train a US force and to fight Indians. And Matt Anthony realized, you know, he said, hey, guys, don't even think about the musket thing. Whatever's going to, this is going to be up close, hand to hand fighting. So you better get used to it. And so he, Wayne trained them in, you know, like real serious bayonet fighting.
00:33:51
Speaker
Wayne's forces beat the Indian forces at the, defeated them at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, 1794. Then there was a major piece then, the Treaty of Greenville, 1795, which drew a line down what's basically the middle of Ohio, you know, it's going to end all wars forever. And white settlers on the east side of the line, Indians on the Indian tribes on the west side,
00:34:20
Speaker
And at that point William Henry, who was an aide-de-camp to Matt Anthony, realized his career prospects had just kind of fallen through the floor because the Army was being disbanded and he had no real career prospects with the Army. So he became enmeshed in or joined territorial politics. And that whole region had been named the Northwest Territory. So he became a young delegate
00:34:48
Speaker
from the Northwest Territory to Congress in 1800. And he proposed and helped get past a very important land law, Harrison Land Law of 1800, convincing, he helped convince Congress to sell land taken from the Indians to little yeoman farmers rather than to sell it in big chunks to Eastern investors.
00:35:15
Speaker
And then at that point, Jefferson came into office and Harrison ended up being a Jefferson Territorial Governor for what was called the Indiana Territory because Ohio would split off. So now Indiana Territory would be Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, part of Minnesota. So he's age 27 and he becomes the Territorial Governor
00:35:45
Speaker
of, of, uh, Indiana territory. And then that's where the trouble begins. Yeah. And, um, Thomas Jefferson, um, to more of a villainous role, you know, Thomas Jefferson, like the more, the more I learned about kind of like his, his darker sides, you know, it's, it's very hard to, you know, he's a founding father and this is a conversation that,
00:36:11
Speaker
recently has been going on all across this country, of course, is like some of these darker sides to our founding fathers. And he was he was obsessed with kicking Native Americans off that land. And him and William Henry Harrison, he's at one point he's like writing secret letters to William Henry Harrison, instructing him how to kick or how to trick the Native Americans and how to get them off this land.
00:36:42
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about Thomas Jefferson and the role that he plays in your story? Yeah, and you're so right. Thomas Jefferson has been a hero of mine for a long time and still is in many ways. Not all of Thomas Jefferson, part of Thomas Jefferson, I think this is really great heroic
00:37:03
Speaker
figure with, you know, enlightenment values and a very broad visionary outlook on the world and on what the U.S. might be. But he also had this side that was really self-interested, all these founding fathers did. And, you know, I try to make that point that every one of them whom I've gone into in depth, and I know a lot about George Washington now, and I know a good bit about Thomas Jefferson,
00:37:32
Speaker
They were amazing guys in their courage for putting themselves out there and starting the revolution. It could be a dead end really quickly, and they really put themselves out there. They did so many heroic and great things, and brilliant and far-seeing, yet every single one of them had
00:37:56
Speaker
self-interested part. And in Washington, Washington had a bunch of them, but one of the things I really know about was he talked about land hunger. That man was obsessed with land hunger. And likewise Jefferson was obsessed with pushing the US westward. And so I don't want to get too bogged down in all the historical politics, but
00:38:24
Speaker
essentially when the revolution ended, the colonies, the states, more or less ended at the settlement, ended at the foothills of the Appalachians. But in the settlement ending the revolution, the Treaty of Paris, the US demanded from Britain and got it all British claims from the top of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River.
00:38:48
Speaker
And so there's a huge area claimed by British, but it's populated by hundreds of Indian tribes. And so the fate of that huge area is kind of up in the air. And Thomas Jefferson was very instrumental in securing that. And of course, later the Louisiana territory
00:39:09
Speaker
But even before he secured the Louisiana Territory, he was really paranoid about securing the western border of the US, which at that point was the Mississippi River. And there was Spanish territory on the far bank of the Mississippi River. And then that became French territory. And then Napoleon was charging through Europe, you know, at the Emperor of France.
00:39:34
Speaker
And so Jefferson started freaking out that he needed to nail down U.S. rights to land all the way to the Mississippi River, legal rights. The tribes technically held the legal rights, even though it was U.S. territory, and to get settlers out there as soon as possible. So in Harrison,
00:40:00
Speaker
kind of, you know, got his finger in the wind as he was appointed territorial governor. And he's way out and just where you were near where you grew up in Vincennes, Indiana, which is on the Indiana, Illinois border, if you went probably if you went straight south of Lake Michigan, Chicago, like 200 miles, he'd be kind of in that area. And so he's way out there at his territorial capital. And
00:40:30
Speaker
He says to Jefferson, he indicates to Jefferson, well, you know, we got this line, the Greenville line, where, you know, the whites are on one side and the Indians are on the other. But, you know, I actually think there's a way we can get land from the Indians on the Indian side of the land. And Jefferson, you know, at first doesn't respond to that.
00:40:50
Speaker
And then in early 1803, he writes a letter and he says, do not show this letter to anybody. He writes to Harrison. Do not show it to anybody. Hold it close to your breast. But here's the plan. We need to get as much land as quickly as we can from the Indians. And here's how you do it.
00:41:08
Speaker
You get the leading Indian chiefs in as deeply as debt as you can at the government trading posts. And then in order to settle their debts, they'll have to give up their lands. They'll have to sell away their lands. And Harrison does just that and many other tricks. And in three years between 1802 and 1805, he acquires 30 million acres of land on the far side of the Greenville line, on the Indian side of the Greenville line.
00:41:38
Speaker
And to make the longer story short, eventually Tecumseh, who had become a young war chief and a leader of a band, and who had fought at the Battle of Fallen Timbers under Little Turtle, and then had led a band peacefully in the piece that followed
00:41:58
Speaker
the Battle of Fallen Timbers, yet as Harrison started taking more and more and more land over the Greenville line, Tecumseh eventually rose up and said, no more. There are a lot more permutations to the story, but that's essentially what happened. And then he went on this extraordinary
00:42:21
Speaker
years of diplomacy and unified tribes from Lake Superior down to the Gulf of Mexico to hold the land as one. So no one chief or tribe or sub-band could sell a piece of land unless all tribes, all chiefs agreed to it. And that led to his confrontation with Harrison.
00:42:46
Speaker
Yeah, well, firstly, I was really struck by the level of deception that William Henry Harrison used, especially when it came to things like alcohol and understanding that the Native Americans have a very low tolerance for alcohol and getting them intoxicated to manipulate them at big meetings and things like that.
00:43:12
Speaker
even though he banned the speech sale of alcohol until it came to the time to get greedy that he needed to sign. We'll talk a little bit about Tecumseh.
Tecumseh's Leadership and Legacy
00:43:22
Speaker
Here's personality is really interesting too.
00:43:27
Speaker
When, you know, we were talking about when, how his Chillicothe village was burned and his mom left, and he was raised by his older sister to come peace, who I think is, it was a female, Shawnee female chief, and I think one of the most remarkable women in American history. And I'd write a book about her if I could get more like actual detailed information. I have some, but it was clear that she was an enormous influence in the lives of both her brothers Tecumseh and the Prophet.
00:43:58
Speaker
So Tecumseh was raised by his older sister, and yet when he was 12, showing up in their village was a white captive boy named Stephen Rudell, who had been captured by out of one of the Kentucky white posts. And he was adopted into Tecumseh's family and families nearby as a full fledged Shawnee. And so as his younger brother learned to speak Shawnee, grew up alongside Tecumseh.
00:44:27
Speaker
And it's from him that we have detailed written records of Tecumseh's childhood and time as a young man, which is an incredible document to have because this is from the late 1700s.
00:44:46
Speaker
And that he says Steven Riddell says it to come to was just a natural leader that he was as a boy, he was always leading the games and he's a very smart, really athletic, but very fair minded, you know, he seems like a really fair minded guy. And the one of the game, they're always playing these games, these games that train young, young boys in both hunting and warfare. So one of the
00:45:12
Speaker
And there's so many things I could go into, but one of the games that jumps to mind is where the boys, the Indian boys make a hoop out of wild grape vines. And then they weave bark, strips of bark through the middle of the hoop to make a disc, kind of like a frisbee. And then they roll this frisbee disc really like a wheel, really fast down along the ground. And then they shoot arrows at it. And whoever nails it in the middle,
00:45:41
Speaker
You know, it's like a running deer or a running enemy. Whoever nails it in the middle wins and gets to keep everybody else's arrows, which is, you know, it's like playing marbles with lethal weapons and, you know, and you have to make your own arrow. So it's, it's, you know, there's something at stake here. And so anyway, Tecumseh goes on and he becomes a young warrior with a young band. And one of the very early things he does is there's a capture of a, um,
00:46:09
Speaker
flat boat of settlers and some of his fellow warriors, I think they burn, which is not uncommon in Eastern tribes, burn one of the captives. And Tecumseh is just enraged. And he said, that will never happen again. We will never mistreat captives. We'll always be kind to them. And so he had that.
00:46:33
Speaker
he brought this real sense of care, human care with him. And then he became a young leader of a small band of warriors, and eventually that expanded. And then, as I mentioned, he fought at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, where my little turtle lost.
00:47:01
Speaker
then the peace, the Treaty of Greenville came on and then Tecumseh was happy to, he said he was happy with the Treaty of Greenville and was leading, at that point he had a band of about 250 Chinese and families and warriors and they were living peacefully and hunting. He was a very generous hunter, he was a great hunter and he loved to hunt and give his oils to the old people of the village. So that was another thing that was
00:47:31
Speaker
very outstanding, noted about him. And when troubles started breaking out on the frontier and right around 1800, about the time William Henry Harrison showed up in a political position, the Tecumseh
00:47:48
Speaker
very quickly rose to prominence, first in a smaller way, but as a guy who was a very good spokesperson for the Indian side. So he was brought in to try to help settle white Indian disputes on a small scale in those first years of the 1800s. And then eventually as tensions rose, he became a larger and larger leader. And then when the
00:48:18
Speaker
You know, the Battle of Tippecanoe happened when he was in the south. Then he rebuilt the, you know, burned-out prophet's town on the Indian Coalition. Then the War of 1812 broke out. Then he joined with the British, Sheena's forces joined with the British. And it was looking like that Tecumseh and his British forces were, as I was saying, you know, they were headed east.
00:48:45
Speaker
And at the same time, Tecumseh, you know, as a personality is really interesting, too, because I think, you know, he was, in a way, we might have called him bipolar today, which I've written about a lot of early great beaters and explorers, and a surprising number exhibit these symptoms pretty clearly. And Tecumseh would go through these periods of depression. I mean, really deep, dark depression that were noted at the time.
00:49:12
Speaker
And one happened when he was in his late teens and he broke his leg buffalo hunting and he couldn't walk. And he really, some stories said he tried to kill himself. And then another time was early going into the War of 1812 and he got wounded and there were some setbacks in the War of 1812 and he really plummeted for a while. But then he came back
00:49:38
Speaker
There's a lot of back and forth on the Western frontier in the War of 1812. Tecumseh, the one great problem was that Tecumseh's brother-in-arms, British brother-in-arms, Isaac Brock, who with Tecumseh led the capture of Fort Detroit,
00:49:57
Speaker
Isaac Brock was such an effective leader that the British brought him back east to fight against Americans who were invading Canada farther to the east. And Brock was killed leading a charge. And so now the British on the Western frontier were led by a guy named Proctor, who was much less bold than Brock and was not
00:50:25
Speaker
It was not the equal of Tecumseh in staging these really bold movements and strategies.
Shifts in Alliances and Leadership Dynamics
00:50:41
Speaker
Proctor's British forces tried to take Fort Wayne, they tried to take a few other places and they got knocked back.
00:50:49
Speaker
And the Indians with him, the warriors with him were saying, this guy doesn't know what he's doing. And we're not going to walk into a suicide attempt. So that kind of faltered. The British Indian Coalition ran into some difficulties once Brock was killed and Proctor took over. But things were coming to a head.
00:51:18
Speaker
And one of the deciding factors is a part of the War of 1812 that we've heard about, the Battle of Lake Erie, which made a huge difference out this way. And that's a huge drama of its own, really, really interesting. Yeah. Well, talking about Tecumseh real quick, we haven't really mentioned his brother, his family. I mean, we mentioned briefly, but his brother plays a big role.
00:51:46
Speaker
talk about his brother. And then I'd like to talk about the battle of the Tippecanoe and how they start coming in too long. So his brother, his younger brother was known as, at least in reputation, historical reputation, says near, do well, drunk, couldn't support his family by hunting. And yet then one day in 1805, he falls into a trance.
00:52:15
Speaker
for hours, and he comes out of a trance, and he says he's been to visit the Great Spirit. And the Great Spirit has given him instructions in how the tribes should live in order to regain their stability and their place in the world in face of all this white onslaught of settlers and land grabs.
00:52:41
Speaker
The brother, who's in Tents Wada Wai, he's known as the prophet in the white world. So the prophet ends up attracting followers and tribes from all over. I mean, from, you know, up in the Great Lake, up at Lake Superior, you know, down in the south, they start coming to the brothers have a village at the juncture of the Tippie canoe and the Wabash River.
00:53:10
Speaker
And that's the main village for Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet. And as the prophet's attracting all these spiritual followers, Tecumseh merges, in essence, a political movement with the spiritual movement. And so Tecumseh becomes the secular leader of this movement to unify tribes while the prophet is attracting spiritual followers to this movement, this revival,
00:53:41
Speaker
And so that's how these brothers, they work in tandem, and Tecumseh is this brilliant warrior and war chief, and the prophet is not. The prophet is a guy who's very charismatic in his spiritual way, and people are very attracted to. Whereas Tecumseh is much more
00:54:06
Speaker
the strategist, the brilliant orator who's unifying these tribes. So that's where we are when in 1810, that's where I opened the prologue opens with it's jumping ahead, when Tecumseh with 80 canoes of warriors and chiefs comes down the Wabash River from his headquarters at Prophetstown,
00:54:33
Speaker
200 miles to Vincennes, where Harrison has his mansion in the wilderness on the Wabash, and Tecumseh walks up the front lawn of Crouseland Mansion, Harrison's mansion, and says, we need to talk. And they have a face-to-face talk with Tecumseh saying to Harrison, you can't take any more land. And it ends up being a big confrontation right there.
00:55:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, let's talk about what leads to, so we've talked about William Henry Harrison and kind of how he got to where he was. And of course, Tecumseh, he's a war chief at this point, but talk about like this Confederacy that he has assembled that leads to the Battle of Tippecanoe, which I think is in 1811? 1810? Yeah, 1811. Yeah.
00:55:31
Speaker
So working with that spiritual leadership of the prophet, Tecumseh has literally ridden thousands of miles to, you know, he goes up to Lake Superior. He goes up to what's now upstate New York to the Iroquois. It's not just Shawnee. It's Miami. No, it's not just Shawnee. I mean, it's a tribe at the time. He goes down to the southeast and, you know,
00:55:58
Speaker
He's involved probably with the Cherokee and then, you know, the southeastern tribes and the Creeks. And he goes out on the plains to the Osage and he goes, you know, of course, then there's midwestern, upper midwestern tribes like the Potawatomi, the Miami, the Huron, you know, there's so many different tribes. And he's unifying these tribes and these leaders and these huge missions of diplomacy.
00:56:22
Speaker
But over just a few years, he covers so much ground. And so this tribal unity really starts forming. And he's not the only leader, but he's the primary leader. So in then 1810, that the tribes, 1809 and 1810, the prophet's town near your hometown, and at the juncture of the Tippee canoe and the Wabash,
00:56:51
Speaker
You know, it's become a big Indian village with warriors and chiefs and families coming from all over the center of the continent to see the Prophet. And Harrison, 200 miles south down the river, starts getting paranoid that all these people are going to gang up and attack him. And so first he has this meeting with Tecumseh.
00:57:18
Speaker
on the front lawn of the governor's mansion. And to come to this meeting with Harrison to say, look, we're fine. We don't want war or everything's cool. Just don't take this last piece of land that you're wanting to take, this piece of land that actually is really kind of almost a butts on profits town.
00:57:36
Speaker
that the Indians are fine with the way things are now, even though you've taken all this land beyond the Greenville line, but just don't take this last one. And so Tecumseh meets Harrison down on the front lawn of the Groslin mansion to have this conversation. And Harrison, it's a very dramatic scene that almost comes to blows because Harrison says, well, I'll take your concerns. Tecumseh is saying,
00:58:05
Speaker
We don't want war, but if you take this last piece of land, there will be troubles among us. And Harrison says, well, you know, I'll take your concerns to the great father in Washington, but I don't think he's going to do anything. And this meeting should be noted, too, that that is how Harrison refers to the president is the great father. And he addresses the Native Americans as children.
00:58:31
Speaker
And it's a kind of a strange thing to read about, but I think it's actually a custom. It's a custom, yeah, it's not within the Native Americans invented at all. That among the tribes, the Eastern tribes, there were, the relations between tribes were often designated as family relations. So, you know, one tribe might be uncles to another tribe. Other tribes might be grandfathers to another tribe. So, but on the
00:59:02
Speaker
Harrison says, well, I'll take your concerns to the great father in Washington. And it's clear that he's not going to do anything of this sort. And Tecumseh says, well, OK, yeah, you do that. And then in the meantime, I'm going to go recruit more southern tribes. But please don't do any attacks. Don't do any military action while I'm gone. He says to Harrison, well, of course, this is the moment that Harrison, who is this, as we say, this genial, clever guy,
00:59:32
Speaker
says, okay, now comes as a way. Now is the moment to move against these Indians gathered at Prophetstown, even though these Indians at Prophetstown pose no threat. I mean, he thinks they do, and he writes to now President Madison, and he says, I need all these troops to go fight these Indians who are being aggressive. Well, there are no Indians being aggressive,
01:00:03
Speaker
And Madison keeps telling him, no, just whatever you do, you know, don't buy any land that's going to make people unhappy. And he keeps Madison, President Madison, keep telling Harrison, just keep it cool. You know, we don't want trouble. But Harrison keeps pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, buying land and then sending soldiers up to Prophetstown. And that's where the, that's the root of the battle that we're talking about. Yeah. And something interesting about the battle too,
The Battle of Tippecanoe: Media and Legacy
01:00:34
Speaker
This was a defining moment for William Henry Harrison. Of course, later on when he was president, the slogan was, Tippecanoe and Tyler too referring to this battle because in the American media, it was really, so the battle was fought and I think that there were similar casualty counts. There was no real winner. There was not a winner yet. And Harrison,
01:01:03
Speaker
In fact, Harrison was criticized in frontier newspapers for being a loser of the Battle of Tippecanoe. I mean, this guy knew how to spin. I mean, he was an early champion of spinner. You compare it to Vietnam, you're like, declare victory and get out. That's exactly what he did. Yeah.
01:01:25
Speaker
Well, talk about kind of after this battle then takes place, like what does this mean now for William Henry Harrison and for Tecumseh? Well, I mean, there's so much history here, as you know, that Harrison, well, in the course of the Battle of Tippecanoe after it, Harrison burns Prophetstown, the whole town.
01:01:53
Speaker
and this is while Tecumseh's away, but Tecumseh quickly rebuilds his coalition. And Harrison is, you know, kind of reassumes his governorship. And at that point, you know, things are getting tenser and tenser between Tecumseh and Harrison, but just then the War of 1812, for example. And Harrison,
01:02:23
Speaker
immediately tries to get himself appointed like the head of the forces in the Northwest.
War of 1812: Impact on Frontier and Forts
01:02:30
Speaker
And meanwhile, Tecumseh, who's been talking to the British in Canada for some time, makes a formal alliance with the British in Canada based at Fort Malden, which is across the Detroit River from Port Detroit. And some of the really cool stuff that happened
01:02:50
Speaker
that we don't really hear about. As you know, the War of 1812 does not figure large in the American popular consciousness. It's like kind of what happened while the Capitol got burned and there was the Star Spangled Banner lyrics. That's about the two things that people know. And yet on the Western frontier, a lot was going on that was really important.
01:03:11
Speaker
So, one of the things I think is so cool is that, of course, you know, the British had taken over Canada from the French and you had all the, the voyagers up there and you had all the trading canoes, you know, the big,
01:03:26
Speaker
those huge birch bar canoes. And so there was an extremely fast communication system up in Canada through the Great Lakes by canoe. And so Madison and Congress declare a war of, I don't know, June 17th or something of 1812. And
01:03:43
Speaker
It takes weeks for the word to get out to the, you know, to the U.S. frontier. But it races up the word, the message that the U.S. has declared war on Britain, races by these giant voyager canoes out to Great Lakes and up to the, all the way to Lake Superior and Lake Huron. And there's the kind of primary American fort there is at Mackinac Island at the head of those two lakes.
01:04:13
Speaker
And there's a British post nearby, but the British get word that the US has just declared war on Britain. And so the Britain forces combined with Indian forces, and they do a secret midnight attack. They never even fire a gun because there was no hope for the Americans on Fort Mackinac, Fort Mackinac. And so Fort Mackinac falls. And so that's the first US post to fall in the West.
01:04:38
Speaker
Soon after that, Tecumseh and British General Isaac Brock, who's a very bold kind of swashbuckling British general, launched an attack on Fort Detroit, which is a huge, very significant, it was probably the most significant Western outpost of the US. And they capture Fort Detroit, and so Fort Detroit falls.
01:05:01
Speaker
And then the post that's at what we now call Chicago was the Chicago Portage, Fort Dearborn, then that is attacked by Indian forces. So that falls. And so within the first, you know, that summer of 1812, the major US outposts on the Western frontier fall one by one to the combined Indian and British forces.
01:05:27
Speaker
And the US on the East Coast, it starts freaking out that it's like the back door has been sprung open to the nation from the West where these British and Indian forces closing in from the West on the little tiny United States that really doesn't go much farther than Ohio.
01:05:48
Speaker
It's a big plot. Yeah. And for the United States for the war of 1812, something that most people don't know is the United States for most of it did really horribly. Like they were, they were losing battles all over the place. Yeah. So Tecumseh's last kind of his, how does his like last stand, uh, I know that's maybe a reference to later in history, but how does, you know, what's, what's Tecumseh die fighting for?
Tecumseh's Final Battle and Death
01:06:17
Speaker
Well, and so the Battle of Lake Erie is essentially a battle between U.S. warships and British warships on Lake Erie. And again, it looked like the British had won and the Americans were done. But it was, you know, Kamala Perry who, you know, comes out in a rowboat with a flag that says don't give up the ship and, you know, has one ship left and they managed to defeat the British fleet.
01:06:46
Speaker
And at that point Tecumseh and his, his, you know, his thousands of warriors and families gathered with him near the British Fort Malden near in that Detroit area, Detroit River area. And they're awaiting the outcome of this battle of Fort of Battle of Lake Erie. And that it's not clear what the outcome is and they don't get word and they don't get word. And then the British who are at
01:07:15
Speaker
at their outpost Fort Malden right in that area led by Proctor, this guy who's not as bold as Brock. One day, you know, they're waiting to get word that the native forces are getting the, waiting to get word what happened with the Battle of Lake Erie. And one day Proctor starts packing up his suitcases and the British start packing up their fort and knocking down the walls. And it turns out the British have lost the Battle of Lake Erie
01:07:45
Speaker
And they are now giving up that whole Western frontier to the Americans, and they're just walking away from it. Even though they'd pledged to the tribes, we're here to help you, and we'll take these Western lands. And so Proctor and his British forces literally march inland, and the native forces and Tecumseh, there are these speeches, powerful speeches, what are you doing?
01:08:14
Speaker
We're here to, you know, make a stand, you know, on and on. And why are you leaving? And so then the proctor says, okay, well, here's the deal. We'll retreat inland up the Thames River, whatever it is, 50 or 60 miles, and then we'll set up a fort there, a barrier there, and then we'll confront the American forces there. And so that kind of unfolds and they, thousands of Indians and families and warriors
01:08:43
Speaker
and British soldiers march up to this place on the Thames River. Meanwhile, William Henry Harrison lands like 5,000 troops on the Canadian shore and starts marching up the Thames River. The British really give it no effort whatsoever. They set up one little cannon in one road and, well, Tecumseh and his Indian warriors
01:09:11
Speaker
setting up a line in the woods and the swamps. And what happens is Harrison with thousands of Kentuckians and other soldiers on horses comes in and the British don't even fire a shot from their cannon and they turn and run. And that the
01:09:30
Speaker
Kentuckians under Harrison go out into the woods in swamps and on horses and they eventually get to Tecumseh and his horses and Tecumseh's shot and killed at that point. The bat is called the Battle of the Thames.
01:09:46
Speaker
And does William Henry Harrison, does he have any reaction to Tecumseh's being killed? Do we know anything about... Oh yeah, that's a good question. Well, he was very celebratory about it, for sure. And he'd been searching for glory his whole life. There are a lot of stories about what happened to Tecumseh and his body, and actually, did he really die?
01:10:12
Speaker
You know, there are some of these stories that, oh, he actually survived and went on to lead, you know, in a more secret way. There are stories about how his body was, you know, pieces of skin stripped off and made into razor strops and, you know, all sorts of stories. And it's not quite clear who killed him that there was one guy, Richard Mentor Johnson, who I think he,
01:10:39
Speaker
later became Vice President Iran. I'm trying to think, he became a politician, but he claimed to have killed Tecumseh and used that to ride to political fame. And at the same time, Harrison, years later, he had Tecumseh's death of Tecumseh, sort of a feather in his hat. And he also used the Battle of Tippecanoe in what was considered the first modern presidential campaign
01:11:08
Speaker
in 1840, so this is like, you know, almost three decades later, that Harrison portrayed himself as a huge hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, of which he was not. And he also advantage to, you know, it's kind of classic political posturing.
Harrison's Political Ascendancy
01:11:26
Speaker
His opponent, I think Martin Van Buren was trying to portray Harrison as his backwoods hick, who just sat around at his log cabin drinking hard cider.
01:11:36
Speaker
So William Henry Harrison just ran with that. And he said, yeah, I'm the backwoods candidate. I'm the frontier candidate. I'm the hard cider. And he loved having a hard cider candidate. And I'm the hero of Tippie Canoe. And his running mate was Tyler. So it became the slogan, Tippie Canoe and Tyler too. Yeah. And well, we know that also too, and you make note of this in the epilogue of your book, William Henry Harrison, true to his public relations
01:12:07
Speaker
the vanity that he had in what he's well-known for, or maybe not well-known for, but like that bit of trivia that he's the shortest president in office is because he didn't wear a coat and gave a tour of his speech in the rain and because he wanted to look like he was very tough and he didn't need a coat and he was going to speak for two hours and then he comes down with pneumonia and then he
01:12:26
Speaker
dies. Yeah.
Theories on Harrison's Death and Legacy
01:12:28
Speaker
In March and why he gives apparently the longest inauguration speech on record is like two hours and it's late winter. So it's a cold brain. It's like March in Washington DC. And I think he wrote his own horse to get to the inauguration. So he wasn't wearing a hat or a coat then. And then he's out in the rain. And then
01:12:48
Speaker
You know, he's just showing what a tough frontier guy is. And then a month later, he dies from pneumonia. That's the story that more modern research has shown he might have died of cholera from tainted White House water, that there was an tainted well near the White House. So either way, the story, you know, it was kind of a karmic justice for Harry. Yeah. Well, and, you know, after reading your book, I see that, you know, he was he images was so important to him.
01:13:19
Speaker
And as you noted earlier, he wanted to reclaim that glory that his father had at the founding of the country. And so, yeah, some poetic justice, maybe. Some poetic justice, yeah. Well, we're way over our time. So I'll make this my last question here, Peter. First of all, thank you so much for this interview. Very fascinating.
01:13:48
Speaker
Yeah, really fun to talk to you. Yeah. So we know this about William Henry Harrison, the story about how he was shortest president, and he's kind of a footnote in your white culture, American culture.
Tecumseh's Enduring Influence
01:14:04
Speaker
How is Tecumseh remembered in Native American communities? How is the story remembered by Native Americans? Yeah, that's a really good question. And he is known as a great leader, a great hero. Among white historians in the 19th century, he was known as the greatest Indian leader of the 19th century. This is compared to Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and the famous ones we know.
01:14:30
Speaker
So he was very well known to whites in the 1800s, not so much today, but he was always a very prized figure among Native people.
01:14:44
Speaker
one of the regrets of this my research is that most of what occurred during the pandemic and so I was trying to get out to the you know the Shawnee tribal headquarters in mostly in Oklahoma but during the pandemic most reservations were just really shut down and so that was kind of off the table. Since I actually got a really nice
01:15:08
Speaker
message on social media from a woman who had studied under a Shawnee chief and said, you know, you told these stories much like this chief whom I learned these stories from had told them. And so that was a really reaffirming thing to hear.
01:15:30
Speaker
And I mean, I know the stories are remembered and he's a great guy. I really focused my research on the documented record of the time.
01:15:41
Speaker
Yeah. Well, Peter, again, thank you so much for your time today. Everyone, I'm looking at the image on here again, and I'm really curious. I got to find out like where this is. I'll cover this book. We'll make out our project. Everyone, Peter Stark galloped towards the sun, Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison struggle for the destiny of a nation.
01:16:07
Speaker
go buy a copy, go check it out from your library because what a fascinating piece of American history that is not told often enough. And Peter, thank you again for your time. Well, I should just interject here for a moment that when you said earlier that you really haven't heard much about this period or not much has been written about it. But there's another good book that came out a few years ago
01:16:32
Speaker
by Peter Cousins, who's a good historian and has done a lot of civil war and also Indian warfare histories, is called Tecumseh and the Prophet. And that he focuses a lot more on the Prophet than I do. I focus a lot on Harrison, but that would be more reading too. But, you know, there's a lot there, but it's very well known.
01:17:03
Speaker
You also have to apparently be named Peter in order to write about this topic. Well, Peter, thank you again for your time and appreciate the discussion today. Yeah, great. Thanks so much, AJ. Thank you.