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"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
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