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Introduction

Tecumseh’s Curse

“Sleep not longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws, in false security and delusive hopes … Will not the bones of our dead be ploughed up, and their graves turned into ploughed fields?”

— Tecumseh in September 1811, travelling the

Mississippi Territory while attempting to

unite Indians into a confederacy against U.S.

settlement.

Almost fifty years after Tecumseh spoke those words before a council of Choctaws and other Indians, James Dickson, a settler in Southwestern Ontario, ploughed up six skeletons while tending his homestead along the Thames River, east of Chatham. The homestead occupied the battlefield on which

Tecumseh and his British allies were defeated by American invaders on October 5, 1813. Before ploughing, Dickson felled some black walnut trees, which were blazed or carved with animal figures, so the bones were believed to have belonged to Indians, likely Tecumseh and his warriors. Dickson reburied the bones. Some people believed Dickson’s discovery fulfilled Tecumseh’s prophesy of Indian graves being turned to ploughed fields.

Unearthing the bones was only one unusual event connected to Tecumseh. There are other stories of him predicting his own death, of him foretelling the 1811 New Madrid, Missouri, earthquake that the Creek (Muscogee) Indians believed he caused. The most extraordinary series of events related to Tecumseh is what has become known as Tecumseh’s Curse on certain presidents of the United States.

When William Henry Harrison, Tecumseh’s nemesis, was sworn into office in March 1841, he caught a pneumonia that killed him thirty-two days after his inauguration. Harrison, one of the most influential figures in the taking of North American Indian land, was elected president in late 1840. He led the army that killed Tecumseh and his dream of a united Indian front against American land grabs west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Twenty years later, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected. He was assassinated before completing his term. James Garfield, elected president in 1880, was also assassinated. William McKinley, re-elected in 1900, was shot and killed. Next was Warren Harding’s death in office after his election in 1920.

A pattern was noticed and reported by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in the early 1930s. All those presidents who died in office were elected, like Harrison, in a year ending in zero.