Glenn Tucker macht glaubhaft, dass er ein ungewöhnlich begabter Redner war, wohl der beste indianische Redner seiner Zeit, dass Kanada seinen Fortbestand Tecumsehs Kampf an der Seite der britischen Truppen verdankte und dass Tecumseh asketisch der einen Aufgabe Abwehr des Vordringens der Weißen lebte.
Was mir - wohl zu Recht - nicht bewusst war, ist, dass er als Jugendlicher eine Zeit lang mit dem besten Waldläufer seiner Zeit, Daniel Boone, als Adoptivkind eines Shawnee Häuptlings zusammenlebte.
Tecumseh wurde zwar nach dem Tod seines Vaters von dem Shawnee-Häuptling Black Fish erzogen. Dass er mit Daniel Boone zusammen erzogen wurde, findet sich in beider Wikipediaartikeln nicht. Allerdings heißt es im englischen Artikel zu Boone: "Boone was taken in by Shawnees in 1778 and adopted into the tribe".
Glenn Tucker schreibt:
"When he was at the impressionable age of ten, Tecumseh had opportunity to observe at first hand, in his own family, the most wily and resourceful of the frontiersmen, Daniel Boone. Blackfish, enraged by the murder of Cornstalk, had determined to invade Kentucky. Before the year 1777 ended, he had his forces at the Ohio River crossing. In January he carried the war to the white settlements. Daniel Boone and thirty companions had left Boonesborough on January 1, 1778, for the Licking River salt springs, known as the lower Blue Licks, to obtain salt for the forts and stations. Salt, used for preserving food, was one of the primary requirements in the Kentucky wilderness. They took on their pack animals the large pans which Governor Patrick Henry of Virginia had given them for boiling down the salt water. They worked each day through the January cold. The process was slow because 840 gallons of water had to be boiled in order to procure a single bushel of salt. Boone, the expert rifleman, took to the woods to procure game. On the bitter cold day of February 7, having just shot down a buffalo and taken the best cuts to carry back to the camp eight miles away, he was suddenly confronted by four Shawnee warriors. They took him prisoner and brought him before Blackfish. The main force of Indians then marched him to the camp of the salt-makers, and Boone persuaded the twenty-six others present to surrender peacefully, much to the disgust of some of them. The journey to Old Chillicothe in the severe February weather was one of extreme hardship. The prisoners were bound with thongs of buffalo hide around their arms and walked through the deep snow. They ate all the dogs that had followed the Indians and lived on oak-bark brew until a warrior chanced to kill a deer. [...]
By the time he reached Detroit Blackfish had determined not to part with Boone at any price. Hamilton gave Boone a horse and trappings, paid Blackfish and the warriors a thousand dollars in provisions for the ten others and soothed Blackfish by allowing him to keep Boone. Boone rode his new horse to Old Chillicothe, which he and the Shawnee reached on April 10. There he and one of the salt-makers who had stayed behind, a youth named Benjamin Kelly, became Tecumseh’s brothers by adoption.
[...]
Despite Boone’s sharp wits, physical agility and dexterity as a hunter, the delighted Blackfish named him after the slowest of the animals, “Big Turtle.” Possibly it was because the turtle was supposed to have wisdom, but more likely it was one of the jesting contradictions that appealed to the Shawnee sense of bantering humor. Boone was keenly observant. He left an account of life in the tribe which discloses the intense schooling and training given to the youth from the eighth year to the sixteenth. For hardening of the body and developing stoicism and discipline of character, it compared in sternness to the training of the ancient Spartans. To Tecumseh, who was undergoing this education, Daniel Boone was the leading figure of the white race, the greatest of the Long Knives who had come over the mountains and set up the Kentucky settlements and whose feats of courage were already legends of the frontier. For about three months, from April to June 1778, they were adopted brothers at Old Chillicothe. What Tecumseh saw first was a man of quick intelligence and great skill in hunting, woodcraft and everything else an Indian boy admired. What he saw also, in the end, was slyness and cunning, the willingness to employ trickery and falsehood to assure his safety and make possible his escape from the red men he was pretending to meet on terms of the greatest cordiality and friendship."
Glenn Tucker: Tecumseh: Vision Of Glory (Teilansicht bei Google Books)
Britannica: Tecumseh
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