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The Prophet, Tecumseh’s brother. Painting by Charles Bird King.

A story developed that Tecumseh cursed Harrison for destroying Indian life, and that the curse applied to presidents elected in twenty-year intervals after him. Another version had Tenskwatawa the Prophet, Tecumseh’s somewhat disturbed brother, laying the curse on Harrison in 1836, the year of Harrison’s first attempt to become president, and the year of Tenskwatawa’s death.

The Prophet was supposedly having his portrait painted when the presidential election race between Martin Van Buren and Harrison entered the conversation. Tenskwatawa is reported to have said, “Harrison will not win this year to be the great chief. But he may win next time. If he does … he will not finish his term. He will die in office.”

“No president has ever died in office,” someone challenged.

“But Harrison will die, I tell you,” said the Prophet. “And when he dies you will remember my brother Tecumseh’s death. You think that I have lost my powers: I who caused the sun to darken and red men to give up firewater. But I tell you, Harrison will die. And after him, every great chief chosen every twenty years thereafter will die. And when each one dies, let everyone remember the death of our people.”

After Ripley’s Believe It Or Not reported the series of unexplainable deaths of presidents elected in years ending with zero, the presidential election of 1940 was watched with interest. Franklin Roosevelt, elected to a third term that year, died in office in 1945. Then Jack Kennedy was elected in 1960, and assassinated before completing his term. There now is an astonishing list of seven U.S. presidents, elected twenty years apart, who have died before completing their respective terms.

Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, became the first president to escape this unusual string of bad luck, but not completely. He was shot, but his life saved by modern medical technology.

Many people who followed Tecumseh’s Curse held their collective breath in the final months of George W. Bush’s presidency, which began in 2000. On January 20, 2009, he left the White House, the first U.S. president in almost two hundred years to leave office alive or unharmed after being elected in a year ending with zero.

There is no proof that Tecumseh or his brother pronounced the curse. However, the run of presidential deaths in office is disquieting. Snopes.com, a website reporting on urban legends, notes that “Such a string of presidential mortality is too improbable to have occurred naturally….”

Snopes notes that there is no record to support the curse as anything other than an undocumented folktale, but it does take note of some astrological beliefs. Astrologists who analyzed Tecumseh’s Curse concluded that the election of the presidents who did not live out their terms coincided with the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn that happens every twenty years. They believe that Reagan was saved by the alignment of these two planets under an air sign, while those who died in office were aligned under an earth sign. Bush was elected in 2000 under the earth sign of Taurus and he survived, so who knows?

One way or another, Tecumseh’s Curse, if it ever existed, appears to be done. The same cannot be said for the continuing debate over where Tecumseh’s bones rest. For almost two hundred years there has been speculation about where Tecumseh is buried, and attempts to identify his bones. John Richardson, a young soldier-writer who fought beside Tecumseh, made one of the earliest attempts to find Tecumseh’s bones, but his 1840 search did not even find the battlefield on which he was captured and Tecumseh died.

There were other attempts, some claiming success in finding the right bones, plus numerous stories that Tecumseh’s followers buried him in a creek, or spirited his body away, or that his bones were removed to Walpole Island in the St. Clair River. Over many decades, the controversy over Tecumseh’s bones and where they lie has become, at times, a frenzy of ridiculousness.

No one knows for sure where Tecumseh’s bones are buried, but most likely they are somewhere in what used to be settler Dickson’s field, fulfilling Tecumseh’s prophesy that “the bones of our dead be ploughed up, and their graves turned into ploughed fields.”