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3 Chickamauga Raiders

The Shawnee of Tecumseh’s time were wanderers. Probably no other North American Indian nation split so often and moved so much. Some of their movements were dictated by politics and war, like when the Iroquois pushed them from the Ohio Country valleys in the 1600s. This displacement saw them mingle with other nations; the Cherokee and Seminoles, among others.

Aside from that, they enjoyed moving about. They were a congenial people who liked visiting and socializing. They were well accepted by other Indian nations and adept at good relations and the art of diplomacy. They were Algonquian speakers, meaning they spoke a dialect of one of North America’s most widespread Indian tongues, and the language facilitated movements among others.

Their style of living also made moving about easier. Their bark houses were quickly rebuilt wherever forests existed. Thin but sturdy poles lashed together made a house framework to which they attached large pieces of bark. When bark was not available, or when time was an issue, animal skins were fitted over the frame.

As a youth, Tecumseh was driven from place to place on the Ohio frontier by the advancement of the whites. As he grew to adulthood he travelled with Cheeseekau for hunting and for raids aimed at stopping the encroachment of settlements. Later he would travel even more extensively — by horse, canoe, and on foot — in his efforts to organize Indians into a confederacy to stop the settlers.

Tecumseh was twenty when Cheeseekau organized a major move. He planned to relocate to Spanish-held territory in Missouri. Many of the Shawnee were tired of the settlers’ encroachments and the constant wars. At this time, North America was divided up between the British, who had Canada, the Spanish, who had much of the territory west of the Mississippi, and the Americans, who were expanding across the Appalachians. They were all rivals and drew the Indians into warfare to further their own purposes.

The Shawnee brothers and their followers travelled at the invitation of an enterprising fellow named Louis Lorimier, a Montrealer who traded south of Lake Erie. Lorimier spoke several Indian languages, had a Shawnee-French wife, and had helped the Indians fight American settlement on the Ohio frontier. All that made him a rogue in American eyes, and he fled the American advancement on the Ohio Country for Spanish Territory west of the Mississippi River. He opened a new trading business at Ste. Genevieve (Missouri) then hatched a plan to colonize the area with Shawnee and Delaware Indians. The Spanish liked his idea because they wanted to build their presence in the West to help ward off the hostile Osage Indians and the new United States of America.

Cheeseekau and Tecumseh were among two hundred Shawnee and Delawares who left the Ohio frontier for Missouri in the summer and fall of 1788. A hunting accident delayed the trip. Tecumseh was chasing buffalo when he was thrown from his horse and broke his thigh bone. He could not travel, so the group set up a winter camp. The leg was still not fully healed when spring arrived, but Cheeseekau said they could wait no longer and suggested that Tecumseh stay behind with a few warriors until he was fit to travel. Tecumseh refused and resumed the Missouri trek, using crutches when he had to walk. The injury left him with a limp and one leg bowed and shorter than the other.

Lorimier had land for them when they arrived, but they were not the only newcomers. The Spanish had made a deal with a former United States Indian Agent to bring in American settlers who were building New Madrid on the banks of Mississippi. He warned the Americans not to interfere with the Indians, but it wasn’t long before trouble started. Some Americans passing through the area shot at Delaware and Cherokee hunters and stole their furs. The Indians were outraged and talked of burning New Madrid in retaliation, but that cooled. Cheeseekau saw, however, that sharing the territory with Americans was not going to work. Soon after arriving, his group left, crossed the Mississippi, and headed south to the Tennessee River Territory to join the Chickamauga War against American settlement.

The Chickamauga War had raged for twelve years before Cheeseekau and Tecumseh arrived. The worst of it had begun in 1776, at the beginning of the American Revolution. Tribes from north of the Ohio River, encouraged and supported by the British, had urged Cherokee tribes to join in the war against the Americans. The Cherokee raided white settlements east of the Appalachians, but succumbed to the white man’s musket balls, diseases, and land grabs. The British then offered guns, ammunition, money for scalps, and a powerful alliance to launch new efforts against the breakaway colonists.

Most of the Cherokees declined and remained neutral. Some, led by the fierce fighter Tsi’-yu-gunsi-ni, or Dragging Canoe, attacked American settlements, killing, scalping, and taking captives. The Americans retaliated, attacking thirty Cherokee villages and destroying houses and crops. The main body of Cherokees, most of whom had not fought, signed “peace” treaties in 1777, ceding five million acres of land to the Americans.

Dragging Canoe refused to recognize the treaties and took his rebels to Chickamauga Creek, which flowed into the Tennessee River at present-day Chattanooga. They built village strongholds in the forested mountains overlooking the Tennessee, and raided white settlements and the boats bringing even more settlers downriver. They became known as Chickamaugas to distinguish them from the Cherokees who signed the treaties. They were not just Cherokees, but Creeks, Shawnees, and other Indians, plus rebel whites and African Americans who were opposed to the settlement of the Tennessee frontier.

Cheeseekau and Tecumseh join the Chickamaugas because they could not find a more fierce or powerful ally in the struggle against settlement. They were all brothers in a family of oppressed people. The Chickamauga Cherokees had often visited Shawnee villages in Ohio, promoting the fight against the Americans. And the Shawnee were no strangers to the wild Tennessee frontier. They had lived on the Cumberland River in northern Tennessee during the late 1600s and early 1700s, until they were displaced by the Chickasaws, who had been powerful enough at the time to enforce hunting rights over the wildlife rich Tennessee and Kentucky wilderness.

The brothers and their warriors arrived among the Chickamaugas in late 1789, or early 1790, and immediately joined raiding parties attacking settlements and boats coming down the Tennessee River. It was a repeat of the Ohio River days: hit and run raids to discourage settlement.

One raid was against a barge being brought upriver. It was manned by sixteen American soldiers commanded by a major. The Indians approached the barge and Cheeseekau talked to the major, feigning friendship. Later, when the soldiers put down their arms to man the oars, the Indians opened fire on them. More than half of the Americans were killed or wounded and their mission, which the Indians believed was to build a fort in the area, was aborted.

In another attack the Shawnees poured musket fire into a passing barge and when it drifted ashore they found thirty-two men dead or wounded.

Their raids were effective. They slowed the rate of settlement, forcing some land development companies to delay or even abandon plans for settlements. Cheeseekau and others hit hard at Cumberland River settlements near Nashville, spreading panic among the settlers. For a while, the Chickamaugas believed that the war against settlement might be won.

On June 26, 1792, Cheeseekau and others hit a settlement called Ziegler’s Station near where Nashville now stands. Twenty-one people gathered in a blockhouse for safety, but the warriors set fire to vacant buildings and watched the flames spread to the blockhouse. When the fire became intense, a young man opened the door and was shot in the chest as he ushered out his wife and six children. Other men bolted for freedom. Some of them escaped, but others were killed. Jacob Ziegler was burned to death inside his house.

Women and children captives were marched through the forest, the children in bare feet. At one point, the Indians stopped and made little moccasins for them, an incredible contrast to the savagery of the raid. One man in a pursuing posse commented: “At the next muddy spot, we saw little footprints of moccasins. There was that much kindness in them (the Indians).”

Cheeseekau released three children a few weeks later, in return for fifty-eight dollars each. The taking of captives was an important part of Indian warfare. Captives were useful as fighters or slaves, or as currency in trade for almost anything.

Tecumseh is not named anywhere as being part of that raiding party, but that does not mean he was not there. He had gone north to Ohio the year before, when tribes there issued a call for help in a major offensive expected from the Long Knives. However, he certainly was among the Chickamaugas about three months after the Ziegler’s Station raid, and was part of an attack that would bring more personal tragedy.

In September 1792, war chiefs gathered at Lookout Mountain at Chattanooga to plot more campaigns against the settlers. There were heated arguments about whether the Americans were too powerful to defeat, and whether it was better to stop fighting and accept their gifts. Cheeseekau was enraged. He stepped forward among the chiefs, raised his hands, and declared:

“With these hands I have killed three hundred, and I will kill three hundred more, drink my fill of blood, and sit down and be happy.”

The chiefs agreed. There would be a new campaign of killing and destruction along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers — one to shock the whites into abandoning their settlements.

Buchanan’s Station was four miles south of Nashville; a typical frontier settlement. Its few log cabins were protected by a log palisade and blockhouse occupying a rise on Mill Creek, near where it flowed into the Cumberland. Late on the night of September 30, Cheeseekau and roughly thirty Shawnee slipped through the shadows created by a bright and full moon, advancing silently on the settlement. A shadow flickered and alarmed the livestock, which grew restless and set the dogs to barking. Two sentries in the blockhouse peered out their port holes and saw the Indians advancing. They fired shots and the Indians began pouring shots into the blockhouse port holes.

There are differing stories about what happened that night. One is that the sentries’ first shot struck Cheeseekau in the centre of the forehead, killing him instantly. The other is that the Indians tried for an hour to take the station and Cheeseekau was trying to set fire to the blockhouse when he was hit by a musket ball. As he died, he is said to have told the warriors, including Tecumseh, that he was happy to die in battle rather than in a wigwam like an old woman.