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2 Death at Point Pleasant

Shawnee Chief Hokoleskwa, known in English as Cornstalk, preferred peace, but in the autumn of 1774 he had little choice but to fight. Long Knives from Virginia marched into a Mingo Indian village on the Ohio River, near today’s Pennsylvania-Ohio border, and massacred eleven people, including the headman’s mother and sister. The Mingos, a mixed tribe of mainly Iroquois, were generally peaceful and were outraged. They found support among the Shawnee, who were seeking revenge for the deaths of some tribesmen in separate incidents.

Mingos and Shawnee attacked white settlements in Pennsylvania to even the score. They killed thirteen settlers and handed Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia, an excuse to settle the growing Indian problem. Dunmore retaliated against two Shawnee villages near the current West Virginia border, then assembled two armies to march on the Indian towns along the Scioto.

Cornstalk wanted to avoid war but it was coming at him, so he sent the red tomahawk to Shawnee chiefs throughout the central Ohio Territory. The red tomahawk put Pukeshinwau and his warriors on the war trail south to meet Cornstalk and the main assembly of warriors.

Cornstalk planned to take the offensive. He had three to five hundred warriors prepared to hit the Virginia army near where the Kanawha River meets the Ohio in southern Ohio. Early in the morning of October 10, 1774, Cornstalk, Pukeshinwau, and their warriors crossed the Ohio River and met the Long Knives at Point Pleasant. The fighting was severe, much of it hand-to-hand, and raged until near nightfall. Cornstalk was heard shouting above the battle clamour for his warriors to “be strong” and carry the fight. The Shawnee were hugely outnumbered, however, and by day’s end retreated back across the river.

The Shawnee lost the battle, but the Virginians paid heavily, with seventy-five dead and 150 wounded. Perhaps forty Shawnee were dead, but no count was available because the Indians threw their dead into the Ohio to prevent the Long Knives from scalping and mutilating them. Mutilating enemy corpses was a common feature of North American frontier warfare. All sides — Indians, British, French, and Americans — did it. The whites scalped to terrorize the Indians and play on their superstitions about scalp locks containing spiritual power. They also encouraged their people, and Indians allied to them, to take enemy scalps in return for cash bounties. It was a savage practice that grew throughout the 1700s because of the use of official bounties.

The Indians, before bounties were offered, sometimes kept scalps as trophies, hanging them from poles or along the gunwales of canoes. The practice was witnessed by Thomas Gist, the son of the Ohio Country surveyor, after he was held prisoner by a group of Indians in the Ohio Country:

The men began to scrape the flesh and blood from the scalps, and dry them by the fire, after which they dressed them with feathers and painted them, then tied them on white, red, and black poles.

In Tecumseh’s time, scalping was done by shoving the victim, dead or alive, face first into the ground, pushing a foot or knee between the shoulders, yanking the head back by the hair, then making a crescent slice along the forehead and ripping the scalp back.

A scalping was described by John Richardson, the teenager who served with the British and Tecumseh, and who later became a famous Canadian writer. He wrote of an Indian chief at the 1813 Battle of the Thames throwing a tomahawk at a Kentuckian’s head, then:

Laying down his rifle, he drew forth his knife, and after having removed the hatchet from the brain, proceeded to make a circular incision throughout the scalp. This done, he grasped the bloody instrument between his teeth, and placing his knees on the back of his victim, while at the same time he fastened his fingers in the hair, the scalp was torn off without much apparent difficulty and thrust, still bleeding, into his bosom. The warrior then arose, and having wiped his knife on the clothes of the unhappy man, returned it to its sheath, grasping at the same time the arms he had abandoned, and hastening to rejoin his comrades. All this was the work of a few minutes.

Scalping was only one indignity committed on the battlefield. The Virginians and Kentuckians were well known for stripping skin from Indians bodies, using it for razor strops and other household accessories. Some of most heroic frontier battlefield stories are about Indians recovering dead comrades to save their bodies from mutilation. The Indians were adept at recovering their dead and secretly burying them or dropping them into streams, a practice that became an interesting issue with the death of Tecumseh years later.

One of the Shawnee dead at Point Pleasant was Pukeshinwau. His young son Cheeseekau was at his side when he died. The story of the death was related throughout the Shawnee community and Stephen Ruddell later recounted what he had been told:

At his dying moment he called to him his oldest son, a youth of twelve or thirteen years … and strongly enjoined on him to preserve unsullied the dignity and honour of his family; and directed him in future to lead forth to battle his younger brothers.

Cheeseekau followed a sorrowful trail home with the surviving Shawnee and set to work looking after his younger brothers, especially Tecumseh, instructing them in the arts of living and war. By winter’s end he had two more brothers to train; Methoataaskee had given birth to triplets, one of whom died. One of the surviving boys, Lalawéthika, was destined to play a huge role in helping Tecumseh make history.

Pukeshinwau was not the only Tecumseh family member lost in the Point Pleasant battle. The defeat forced the Shawnee into a peace treaty in which they agreed to give up their white captives. Shawtunte, now about fourteen, was sought by his parents who had heard about the treaty. They found him but he didn’t recognize them, nor could he speak English. His mother identified him by a birthmark. He returned home with his parents, and later became a scout for the new United States Army. He eventually attained the rank of colonel.

Tecumseh’s boyhood was filled with war. The Americans, fighting for complete independence from Britain, worried about the British coming at them from the back door — the northwest Indian country south and west of Lake Erie. Out there the Shawnee were supporting the British in the hopes that the Americans would be beaten, and defeat would end the flow of American settlers and militias crossing into their lands from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. The Shawnee knew that more settlers meant more farms, less forest, and diminished game, which in turn meant more reliance on trade goods and white lifestyles. With British help they intended to push the Americans back across the mountains.

The Indians were the ones who got pushed, however. They were pushed from eastern Ohio, from the Scioto and the Mad rivers, and later from the Great and Little Miami rivers in western Ohio into present-day Indiana. Eventually they were pushed completely out of the lives they had known for hundreds of years before people first arrived from Europe.

The Shawnee Retreat from the Ohio, 1768–94.

In 1777, the wars forced the Shawnee to abandon much of their Scioto River homeland. They moved west to be less open to American attacks. Methoataaskee moved her family to the northwest bank of Mad River, just west of present-day Springfield, Ohio. It was safer and an excellent playground for the Shawnee children. The new village stood on a hill overlooking the river, with panoramic views of forests interspersed with small prairies. There were limestone cliffs behind the village, which the children climbed and explored, and a small swamp in which they developed hunting skills.

The Mad River area offered relative safety and serenity. Tecumseh and his siblings grew under the direction of Methoataaskee, until she decided to move south to Cherokee country, perhaps because she had taken another husband. The raising of Tecumseh and the younger children fell to the oldest brother, Cheeseekau, and older sister, Tecumapease.

The serenity of the Mad River was short-lived. In the summer of 1780, the western Ohio countryside was engulfed in the flames of war. The British assembled a large war group of soldiers and Indians along the Mad River, and marched south to attack settlements in Kentucky. They grabbed 350 prisoners, including young Stephen Ruddell, who met Tecumseh in one of the Indian encampments. Here they began their lifelong friendship.

The raid stunned the Kentuckians. They struck back hard with forces led by George Rogers Clark, who became known as a famous Indian fighter. They raided Shawnee villages, killing, capturing, and putting wigwams and fields into flame. On August 8, they arrived at Tecumseh’s village on the Mad River. Women and children were sent up to the bluffs for protection, while the warriors positioned themselves for battle. Clark advanced with a six-pound cannon, and after two days the Shawnee villages were destroyed. Tecumseh and his family, then war refugees, fled with other Shawnee farther up the Mad River, as far as the Little Miami River.

That was a turning point in the history of wars against Indians. The Americans realized that killing Indian warriors only made them more determined. Younger warriors were pushed forward to replace the missing, and more white captives, like young Ruddell, were taken to fill holes in the ranks. It was more effective to burn homes and crops because warriors who were forced to constantly find food and shelter for their starving people had little time for war.

The raids along the Mad River resulted in small numbers of Shawnee deaths, but the loss of homes and ripening crops was devastating. Morale was further smashed by the savagery of the Kentuckians, who plundered graves for scalps. The hungry Shawnee found themselves begging the British for food. They continued to fight, but the future of all Indians in the Ohio Country was becoming clear; the Americans were a force capable of conquering the Northwest.

The Revolutionary War ended in 1783, with Britain ceding all lands south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi River to the new American nation. The war’s end promised only a temporary peace for the Ohio Country Indians, who continued to worry about the coming of more American settlers. The British had signed away the Northwest Indian Territory with no regard for native rights, but they had not withdrawn their protection completely. They kept some forts such as Niagara, Detroit, and Michilimackinac for thirteen years after the war because they said the Americans were not living up to all the conditions of the 1783 peace treaty.

Living between the British and the Americans was like being caught in a vice. The Indians compared the two nations to the two separate blades on a pair of scissors. John Heckewelder, a longtime Moravian missionary on the frontier, described this Indian analogy in his book about Indian customs and culture:

I have heard them, for instance, compare the English and American nations to a pair of scissors, an instrument composed of two sharp edged knives exactly alike, working against each other for the same purpose, that of cutting. By the construction of this instrument, they said, it would appear as if in shutting, these two sharp knives would strike each together and destroy each other’s sharp edges; but no such thing: they only cut what comes between them. And thus the English and Americans do when they go to war against one another. It is not each other they want to destroy, but us, poor Indians, that are between them. By this means they get our land, and, when that is obtained, the scissors are closed again, and laid by for further use.

Tecumseh entered his formative teenage years and his older siblings directed him into manhood. Cheeseekau gave him the critical knowledge of how to live off the land, hunt, and trap and how to become successful on the war trails. Tecumapease instilled in him the important human traits of honour, compassion, and doing what was right.

Teenage years are years of confusion, but they must have been especially confusing for the teenagers of Tecumseh’s time. They knew little peace. Blood and flames were constants in their lives. They watched the old ways of Indian life disappear, as they struggled against a wave of newcomers bringing disease, destructive customs, and a lust for land that could not be satisfied.

In these circumstances, Tecumseh might have been expected to grow up negative, embittered, and savagely vengeful. History shows, however, that he turned out generous, intelligent, and good natured. He was among the most fearsome warriors in battle, adept at killing with war club, bow and arrow, scalping knife, or musket, but able to demonstrate a compassion not expected for the times.

Cheeseekau, as his elder brother, guided him on his vision quest, a rite of passage for most North American Indian boys and girls. They were sent out onto the land and, through meditation and deprivation, were to receive power from their spirits. They were expected to see visions of one or more spirits in the form of an animal, bird, or natural force, such as a storm. These visions came from the Master of Life, Waashaa Monetoo to the Shawnee.

Stephen Ruddell once described Cheeseekau’s influence on young Tecumseh:

[H]e took upon himself the education of his brothers and used every means to instill into the mind of Tecumtheth correct, manly and honourable principles, leading him forth himself to battle and instructing him in warfare. He taught him to look with contempt upon everything that was mean …

Ruddell called Tecumseh a born leader and an exceptionally good hunter:

He was a great hunter and what was remarkable [was that] he would never if he could avoid it hunt in parties where women were. He was free hearted and generous to excess — always ready to relieve the wants of others. Whenever he returned from a hunting expedition he would harangue his companions, and made use of all his eloquence to instill into their minds honourable and humane sentiments.

Tecumseh and Ruddell often hunted together as boys. One day they heard hunters chasing buffalo with dogs. They climbed into the trees under which the buffalo would pass. Ruddell dropped one of the running beasts with a single-shot musket. Tecumseh fired arrow after arrow into the passing animals and dropped sixteen, a number likely exaggerated by the telling.

Tecumseh grew out of his teen years as a well-built and handsome man. He stood five feet, ten inches tall, and was athletic. Ruddell later described him as an extremely active person and quite strong. There is no record of his first battles, but he was certain to have been riding with Cheeseekau, then a warrior of some note, on hunting parties and skirmishes in his early to mid-teens. A story is told of the Shawnee fighting Kentucky militia along the Mad River. Tecumseh the teenager was said to have become afraid and fled while Cheeseekau, wounded, continued the fight.

It is an unlikely story considering Indian boys were taught from birth to hunt and fight, and when they reached their teens they were obsessed with the thoughts of their first battles. Warrior is a profession among the Indians. Some boys were raised to become medicine men, others civil leaders, while the job of the warrior-hunter was to fight and kill and be killed. Also, the savagery of the times in which the Shawnee were most often engulfed in war made it unlikely that an Indian boy was afraid of anything.

In 1786–87, Tecumseh turned eighteen and two things occurred to ensure that the Shawnee would have many more battles against the Long Knives. The new U.S. Congress, desperate for revenue and hungry for more settlement, annexed the lands west of the Appalachians, which became known as the Northwest Territory. This guaranteed a new migration of settlers from the east, something the Shawnee and some other tribes would not tolerate. However, land sales faltered because prospective settlers were afraid to live in a war zone.

That autumn, a Long Knives’ militia crossed the Ohio near Limestone and hit a village that was only partially occupied because many people had moved off to winter hunting grounds. Some of the villagers raised an American flag in a vain attempt to stop the attack. The Long Knives killed some villagers then rounded up the rest as prisoners. One prisoner was the elderly chief called Moluntha, who was interrogated by an American colonel about an earlier battle in which the Kentuckians had suffered a humiliating defeat. The colonel did not like the answers he received and hit the old chief with the flat side of a tomahawk, knocking him to the ground. As the old man struggled to get up, the colonel sunk the tomahawk into his skull, then scalped him.

More settlement, and more atrocities like the killing of a defenceless elder, enraged the Shawnee. They rampaged through what is now western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, eastern Ohio, and north Kentucky. One of their favourite spots was along the Ohio River, because the transportation artery floated hundreds of settlers downriver toward new homes and new lives in Kentucky. Tecumseh was a regular among the warriors who attacked settlers’ flatboats, rich targets loaded with livestock and household possessions. The Indians launched bark canoes or simply waited at narrow spots in the river to make interceptions. Sometimes they stood white captives on the shore as decoys to lure boats into landing.

The large flatboats, some nearly one hundred feet in length, were propelled and steered by long oars, requiring four to six men as crew. When they had to man the oars in difficult situations, the men could not fight back. That’s when the Indians poured musket balls and arrows at them.

Tecumseh was among a band of Indians that attacked a large flatboat being brought downriver by traders. The Shawnee captured the boat and killed all the people aboard, except one. This man was taken prisoner and later burned alive. Tecumseh watched the burning, but was young, with no status to interfere. The burning scene seared his memory. He told other warriors of his disgust of torture and promised himself that he would prevent such brutality in future.

Dislike of needless cruelty became a Tecumseh characteristic. He believed it was wrong to murder helpless captives and was not afraid to tell others.

“He was always averse to taking prisoners in his warfare,” Ruddell wrote later in life. “But when prisoners fell into his hands he always treated them with as much humanity as if they had been in the hands of civilized people — no burning — no torturing. He never tolerated the practice of killing women and children.”