THE CHEMAWA AMERICAN
H. E. WADSWORTH, Superintendent
VOLUME U>
NOVEMBER, 1913
NUMBER 2
TECUMSEH, THE SHAW NEE
E . O. R A N D A L L IN
Kit-Kat
HIO was the greatest center of that prehistoric race,
called the Mound Builders. Later it became the
habitat of many of the most famous Indian tribes,
and in what is now the State of Ohio there were born
and flourished the most distinguished heroes and
chiefs of the red race: Pontiac, Cornstalk, Little
Turtle, Blue Jacket, Logan, Tarhe, and, greatest of
all, Tecumseh. Restless and fearless, wary, warlike and nomadic, the
Shawnees were the vagrants of the trackless forest, the aboriginal Arabs,
ever seeking and always the most implacable foe of the intruding white
man. The Ohio Shawnees were immigrants from the South in the ear
ly years of the Eighteenth century. They first made settlement in the
Scioto Valley and later in the valleys of the Miamis.
Tecumseh first saw the light of day on the banks of the Mad River,
in the Shawnee village of Piqua, in the Spring of 1768, and here he
spent his boyhood until the summer of 1780, when his native town was
utterly destroyed by the expedition from Kentucky led by that redoubt
able Washington of the West, Colonel George Rogers Clark. Ever after
that event, Tecumseh was a wanderer in the wilderness of the West,
having sworn eternal enmity to the Pale Face. Nor was he without jus
tifiable cause for that hatred. His father, Puckesliinwau, a chief of the
Shawnees, was killed in the battle of Point Pleasant, October 10, 1774,
the first battle of the American Revolution. The chief Puckesliinwau,
on receiving his mortal wound addressed his eldest son, Cheeseekau,
who was fighting by his side, and committed to his keeping the promis
ing young brother, Tecumseh, then but six years old. Cheeseekau
sacredly carried out the father’s request. Tecumseh, endowed with
unusual ability, bravery and aptitude, was thoroughly schooled in all the
accomplishments of Indian life—dexterity with the lx>w and arrow and