Eine deutsche Einführung findet sich hier:
"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. [...]" Location: 580
"Boone’s grimaces as he drank, under duress, vastly amused the warriors as another oddity of this peculiar white race. However, they were beginning to accept the story he told that he really disliked the Americans and preferred the life of the Indians. The policy of the British during the Revolutionary War fighting in the West was to employ the Indians but to offer them a substantially higher reward for prisoners—”live meat,” the British Colonel Henry Hamilton called them—than for scalps, in order to discourage inhumane slaughter. So prisoners were customarily marched to Detroit, where each was worth goods valued at a hundred dollars. Boone’s party reached Old Chillicothe on February 18. Ten of them were parceled out among the Shawnee for adoption, while eleven others, including Boone, were marched off to Detroit, accompanied by Blackfish and forty Shawnee braves. Blackfish was as fascinated with Boone as with a new trinket, though Boone had killed the chief’s son in an earlier raid. 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. Kelly remained with the tribe for over four years, from 1778 to 1783. [...]" Location: 592
"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. Boone must have proved an enigma to the Indian boy, for his conduct baffled even the adult Kentuckians. They themselves could not understand for a time with which side he truly sympathized. They had to have it all threshed out at a court-martial before they were convinced that he was working for the Americans and employing strategems to deceive the Indians and British. On their return from a salt-making trip with the Indians, Boone saw 450 Shawnee—their “choicest warriors,” he termed them—gathered in Old Chillicothe. They had been repulsed at Donnelly’s Fort on the… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits. [...]" Location: 1,348
"Wayne called them to a great peace meeting at Greenville. The chiefs and the warriors came—ninety-two chiefs with squaws and nearly a thousand warriors—and entered into the leisurely discussions. Wayne acquired still another name—Wabang, meaning “Tomorrow.” That came from the answer he gave the chiefs as often as they asked when the money that was to be provided by the treaty would be distributed. They talked from June 16 until August 10. Representatives of twelve tribes signed the treaty, which drew across central Ohio, from Fort Recovery to the Cuyahoga River, what was known as the Greenville Treaty line. On the western side it ran from Fort Recovery to the Ohio River opposite the mouth of the Kentucky. The whites were ceded the territory south and east of the lines, and that included a wedge of what is now Indiana. The Indians received goods valued at $20,000 and the promise of annuities amounting to $9,500. They agreed to give up all white prisoners, and indeed the treaty was followed by a general liberation. Freed from Indian captivity, Stephen Ruddell went back to Kentucky. He did not have an opportunity to say good-by to Tecumseh before he left and gained the mistaken impression that Tecumseh favored the Treaty of Greenville. The Indians ceded also sixteen separate tracts of land, mainly around the forts north of the Ohio, and a plat for George Rogers Clark opposite Louisville. The United States obtained about 25,000 square miles of territory, an area a little larger than the state of West Virginia. [...]" Location: 1,365
The treaty bore the names of the leaders of the race: Little Turtle, the Crane, New Corn, Leatherlips, Buckongahelos, Red Pole, Black Hoof and many others. The name of one Indian who had become outstanding in the battles against the whites was missing. Tecumseh stood apart. He would not attend the Greenville council. He scorned all treaties that gave Indian lands to the encroachers. [...]" Location: 1,395
Tecumseh was five feet ten, but because of his erect carriage gave the impression of greater height, which led some to judge him at six feet or “nearly six feet.” He was of average size among the Shawnee, who, although they did not have the stature of the Sioux, were perhaps a trifle larger than their Algonquian kinsmen. After his penetrating hazel eyes, overhung by heavy black eyebrows, his teeth were his most remarked-on feature. He had the haughtiness that stemmed from deep pride in his race. He had also, it seems, the need of the homeless orphan to build about himself a fortress of protective reserve and self-control. When he was off guard his face lighted and mirrored his deep emotions—warmth, anger or the scorn that often ran through his chance remarks as well as his speeches. A distinguishing characteristic of Tecumseh among the Indians was his abstinence, already noted at the age of twenty-seven. It was by no means unique, for some of the better elements in the higher tribes looked with as much contempt on their drunken compatriots as the better class of whites did on sots around the settlements. Yet the number of abstemious Indians was relatively small, and there were few if any moderate drinkers. When liquor was available it was consumed until the supply was exhausted or all in the party were in a drunken stupor. Whisky almost inevitably led to brawls and cutting affrays and frequently to murder. Sobriety was generally a matter of not being able to get whisky. Tecumseh tried liquor once when young, became intoxicated, found the effects unpleasant and never touched it again. [...] Location: 1,408
Tecumseh’s power of quick decision and the swiftness of his movements were among the martial attributes that caused the Ohio historian E. O. Randall to rate him the most capable military leader produced by Ohio except Grant and Sherman. The rating would place him ahead of McPherson, Rosecrans, Sheridan, Buell, McDowell, Custer, Garfield and a number of other Civil War generals, as well as Pontiac, William Henry Harrison, Duncan McArthur and other early Ohioans who rose to high military distinction. At the age of twenty-seven Tecumseh was the outstanding young Indian along the great river which he contended was the true boundary between the white and red races—the Ohio, so named by the Iroquois who came over the mountains, a Seneca word meaning “beautiful river.” [...] Location: 1,445
"The facts about Tecumseh’s relations with women are scant, scattered and provocative. They invite a historical novelist to supply motivation and explanation in racial and individual psychology and in conflicting cultures and mores. Without stretching the imagination a biographer is compelled to some speculation. Tecumseh was a bachelor till he was twenty-eight years old. He felt blessed in the single state and gave it up only when the traditions of his tribe and the pressure of his friends became too insistent to ignore. He seems to have been quite indifferent, even a little spiteful, about the step. He who might have had his pick of the Shawnee maidens married abruptly, after a brief courtship, a half-breed woman considerably older than he. Her name was Manete. Romantic efforts to make her a beauty have nothing to rest on. She had no qualities of face, form or mind to win admiration. She is spoken of flatly as an “old woman.” She was not too old to bear him a son, in 1796 or 1797. The child was named Pugeshashenwa." Location: 1,481
Über Tecumsehs Freundin Rebecca:
"He was fascinated by the Book of Exodus and the parting of the waters for the children of Israel—a story which the old Shawnee tradition paralleled, for it told how the waters had been rolled back by the Great Spirit in order that the tribe might pass through on dry land—the “Alaskan Bridge”—to America. She read Shakespeare to him—more than one of the plays, since he expressed a preference for Hamlet—a natural preference, for on the Prince of Denmark too had rested the fearful duty of avenging a father. She read him enough history to enable him to talk familiarly about Alexander the Great. More than all else she dwelt on humaneness. He who had had a compassionate father, who had stopped the torture of the prisoner from the flatboat and denounced the murder of the helpless captive McIntosh was an apt pupil." Location: 1,488
"Rebecca naturally attracted the intense and earnest Indian who was so different from her in every respect. Tecumseh fell deeply in love. She aroused in him all of his more tender sentiments. Whenever he called he brought her a present—a large silver comb for her hair; a birchbark canoe in which they might paddle beneath the canopy of trees that fringed the Little Miami; choice furs and meat from the hunt. He called her the Star of the Lake. In keeping with the Indian custom he asked her father if he might marry her. James Galloway thought well of Tecumseh. In intelligence and personal attainment he stood far ahead of the young white men who might be his rivals. Galloway referred Tecumseh to Rebecca for his answer. When he went to ask if she would marry him, he offered her “fifty broaches of silver,” a pitiable gesture that showed how little he understood the courting ways of the whites. Rebecca did not reject him. She was undoubtedly fond of him. He was the most remarkable man she had ever known, handsome, dignified, of a strong personal magnetism. His talents had elevated him to the rank of chief. They might carry him far in any community. She told him she would marry him on condition that he give up his life as an Indian and adopt her family’s manner of living, their customs and their dress. When she said that, she went bravely to the heart of the matter. For they were, in fact, a whole civilization apart." Location: 1,504
"He left and never saw Rebecca again. But the warmth of her spirit and the influence of her culture never left him. It is natural to wonder what the consequence to history would have been had Tecumseh accepted her offer. Possibly, just possibly, there would not have been a Dominion of Canada." Location: 1,520
6. A YOUNG ORATOR APPEARS IN OHIO
"In 1799 events of great consequence were occurring on both sides of the Alleghenies. As a forecast that the new century would cut ties with the old, George Washington passed into history at his Mount Vernon home. The capital was moved from Philadelphia to the District of Columbia. No small quantity of records had already been accumulated in a dozen years, and these were loaded and hauled by draft horse and oxcart to the new city on the Potomac. The Northwest Territory had been given a fresh organization, looking to the establishment in 1800 of Indiana Territory under a separate administration and leaving Ohio eligible for statehood." Location: 1,558
"Lewis Cass, himself a popular frontier orator, said that Tecumseh’s bravery was a trait possessed in common with his fellow tribesmen, but— His oratory speaks more for his genius. It was the utterance of a great mind roused by the strongest motives of which human nature is susceptible and developing a power and a labor of reason, which commanded the admiration of the civilized, as justly as the confidence and pride of the savage. When he spoke to his brethren on the glorious theme that animated all his actions, his fine countenance lighted up, his firm and erect frame swelled with deep emotion, which his own stern dignity could scarcely repress; every feature and gesture had its meaning, and language flowed tumultuously and swiftly, from the fountains of his soul. The ultimate and positive proof of his ability as advocate and pleader is the action to which, again and again, his words stirred his red audiences." Location: 1,625
"When Tecumseh rose to speak, as he cast his eye over the vast multitude ... he appeared one of the most dignified men I ever beheld. While this orator of nature was speaking, the vast crowd preserved the most profound silence. From the confident manner in which he spoke of the intention of the Indians to adhere to the treaty of Greenville, and live in peace and friendship with their white brethren, he dispelled, as if by magic, the apprehensions of the whites—the settlers returned to their deserted farms, and business generally was resumed throughout that region. The incident demonstrates that the whites of Ohio had come to look on Tecumseh as the leading Indian exponent, whose influence extended over all the tribesmen inclined to be hostile. Though he had not been a party to the Greenville Treaty, he had concluded that just now the best policy for his race was to observe its provisions. He did not have the power to follow any other course. He never accepted the treaty as a just settlement, nor is there evidence that he ever described it as such. He did not sanction, he merely conformed." Location: 1,634
Über Laulewasika, den Propheten:
"Tecumseh was thirty-seven years old in 1805 when his career suddenly became closely interwoven with that of his strange younger brother Laulewasika, with whom he had had little association since the boyhood days at Old Piqua. To trace and follow this pregnant partnership and its urgencies, the great problem they had to deal with in their own race needs to be examined first."
7. THE INDIANS SQUAT AROUND THE KEG
"The new century was still in its dawn when the insidious despoiler whisky was threatening the destruction of some of the stalwart, independent and resourceful prairie tribes." Location: 1,640
"The Piankeshaw of southwestern Indiana, a branch of the Miami, succumbed to whisky and disease and were grouped with the Wea in Harrison’s uncharitable but understandable remark that they were “the most depraved wretches on earth.” He reckoned the Miami, who in 1791 had been the principal force in the destruction of St. Clair’s army, “a poor, miserable, drunken set, diminishing every year.” Location: 1,647
"Harrison said that although there were only 600 warriors on the Wabash, 6,000 gallons were brought in for their use annually. The whisky came from American sources. The governor’s proclamations in 1801 and 1802 prohibiting the sale of liquor to the Indians proved utterly ineffectual. It is no surprise that the Indians drank heavily, considering the example set them. The frontier whites consumed huge quantities of liquor. Figures available for a few years later indicate that they drank quite as heavily as the red men. In 1826, two years after Indianapolis was designated the capital of Indiana and numbered 760 persons, 213 barrels of whisky were sold in the town. Because of the large families it was the custom to rate one fourth of a population as adult. Whisky was a standard frontier product with which the settlers fought off the rigors of the sub-zero weather, [...]" Location: 1,685
"Then, all in an instant, there was a spectacular change in Laulewasika. It was as if a cicada had abandoned its dry shell. He was transformed. From a slothful drunkard he became a man of intense energy and rigid abstemiousness. He began to exhort the Indians to come out of their wickedness and live simple, virtuous lives. Indian Agent Forsyth, who had his information from one of Laulewasika’s acquaintances during the vagabond years, said the Prophet owed his reformation to preachers whose words he could not even understand but whose motions so influenced him that he quit drinking and adopted a new mode of life. These preachers were Shakers, newly arrived in the West, whose spiritual devotions were expressed in dancing, jerking and other exuberant physical manifestations. The preaching of the Shaker faith in Kentucky and Indiana was one of a number of profound influences brought to bear on Laulewasika that lifted him out of his intemperance and indolence and made him one of the most extraordinary religious leaders of his race or time." Location: 1,726
"But he at once encountered resistance from the village chiefs, whom he held “very wicked” because they encouraged their followers to “continue their wicked ways.” At this juncture, early in 1805, the Master of Life, with whom he believed he had a rapport of aim and understanding, directed him to go to Greenville, “to the big ford where the peace was concluded” and found a place of worship." Location: 1,745
"It was not until November 1805 that the younger brother appeared before the Greenville settlement in a new role, with a new religious code, as a prophet sent by the Master of Life. He announced that he had dropped the name of Laulewasika and adopted that of Tenskwautawa, “the Open Door,” a term he took from the saying of Jesus, “I am the door,” in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of St. John. His code was built on the anti-white doctrine Tecumseh had gleaned from his familiarity with the aims of Pontiac and had nourished and developed. On this were superposed precepts selected from the Shaker creed. Finally the code was given a cloak of Indian mysticism and ritualism that covered it with Algonquian traditions and the legends and preachings of the noted Indian prophets of the past." Location: 1,758
"The spontaneous surge of religious sentiment had begun in 1800 in Logan and Christian counties, Kentucky, and then had swept northward across the state into Ohio and southern Indiana. The frontier awakening, called the “Great Kentucky Revival,” but also “the wild carnival,” was perhaps unparalleled [...]" Location: 1,773
"One striking feature of the Shaker belief was a conviction taken from Jeremiah XXXI, the fourth and thirteenth verses, which revealed to them that dancing was the ancient method of adoration and reverence. The men and women danced facing each other but in separate groups. Because of the excitable nature of these demonstrations, which affected the entire body, the denomination was called “Shakers,” at first derisively. Later the term was accepted by the church as appropriate and a distinction." Location: 1,845
"From all we could gather, from their account of the work, and of their faith and practice, what we heard and felt in their evening and morning worship—their peaceful dispositions, and attention to industry, we were induced to believe that God, in very deed, was mightily at work among them. The Shakers invited some of the Indians to visit them at Union Village. McNemar’s parting observation was: Although these poor Shawnees had had no particular instruction but what they received by the outpouring of the Spirit, yet in point of real light and understanding, as well as behavior, they shame the Christian • I world. The Shakers left them some money with which to buy corn. Later, when a few followers of the Prophet went to Union Village and got food, the other whites of the neighborhood rose in great indignation and threatened to run the Shakers out of Ohio if they persisted in feeding the Indians. This was the first rumble against the Shakers—a forewarning of the approaching mob violence that would leave them very little in Ohio except their name attached to a Cleveland suburb." Location: 1,874
"The Shawnee Prophet was always ready to oblige with a miracle, and he had ample guile to take advantage of the opening offered by Harrison’s challenge. He immediately proclaimed that on June 16, 1806, he would cause the sun to darken. It was whispered later across the frontier that British agents had given him the date of the coming eclipse. The charge deserves some examination, because it was one of the first of many efforts to associate the Prophet’s religion with British chicanery. The truth is that any alert individual in the West had plenty of advance warning of the eclipse. The surprising point is that Harrison did not guess he might be caught in his own trap. Universities and individual scientists were as eager for information then as now. The site of Springfield, Illinois, was directly in the path of the total eclipse, and there on the open prairie Harvard University set up its observation station well in advance." Location: 1,887
"The day of June 16, 1806, chanced to be clear and beautiful throughout the Mississippi basin. An hour before the sun was to begin to darken, the Prophet came from his wigwam and stepped slowly and portentously to the center of the vast circle. He was a heavy man of great physical strength. He stood haughty and erect, adorned with a crest of outspread raven’s wings, which gave him commanding height. He wore dark, flowing robes like King Arthur’s wizard or a prophet of old. Tecumseh, who sat with a group of chiefs, was seven years his senior, yet looked younger than his brother. The traces of a dissipated life were fading but slowly from the Prophet’s battered but arresting countenance. A black silk handkerchief tied around his head to cover his mutilated eye added a bizarre touch to his celestial show." Location: 1,893
"[...] at 11:32 A.M. the Prophet pointed a summoning finger at the sun. Slowly, but in apparent response to his gesture, the disk of the moon began to move across its face. An unearthly, ashen hue spread over the faces of the copper-toned Indians seated in the great circle. The fowls went to roost and the gaunt cows lay down in their pasture. In the heavens Venus and Mars shone brilliantly, and the three bright stars could be seen in the Belt of Orion, together with such stars as Sirius and Capella. Then the Prophet called out in all his vigor, asking the Good Father of the universe to take his hand from the face of the sun. He knew the period of total eclipse would be brief and timed his sorcery accordingly. The Master of Life responded to his supplications and light gradually returned to the earth." Location: 1,901
(wird fortgesetzt)
