Shawnee war chief Tecumseh.
The Shawnee are a North American Indian tribe. When Europeans first began to settle North American in the seventeenth century, the Shawnee lived a semi-nomadic life, hunting in the future provinces of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia, and in the future confederation of Indiana.
In the eighteenth century, growing British settlement in Pennsylvania and eastern Virginia caused the Shawnee to migrate west of the Appalachian Mountains. The Shawnee initially sided with the French during the French and Indian War, but in 1758 they made peace with the British in the Treaty of Easton, which recognized the Allegheny Ridge as their mutual border. This border was also recognized by the British government in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, but it was impossible for the government in London to enforce the proclamation on the American colonists. A second treaty between the British and the Iriquois Confederacy in 1768 opened the lands south of the Ohio River to white settlement, but the Shawnee were not party to this agreement and did not recognize it. When violence between the Shawnee and the incoming white settlers escalated, Lord Dunmore's War broke out in 1774. The war ended with the Shawnee recognizing the 1768 treaty boundary.
The Shawnee aided the British during the North American Rebellion, carrying out a series of raids against white settlers in trans-Appalachian Virginia in the last year of the Rebellion. However, despite the British victory over the rebels in 1778, the Britannic Design of 1781 granted the newly-created Confederation of Indiana the power to negotiate land treaties with the Indians. The Confederation government, located in Fort Radisson on the Mississippi, wished to encourage white settlement of the new Confederation, and the Shawnee found themselves being forced from their lands.
In 1803, the Shawnee war chief Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, began to gather most of the Indian tribes in Indiana and eastern Vandalia into a confederation to protect their lands from settlement by the white colonists. In 1808, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa established a political organization at a city called Prophetstown to govern the confederation, and the following year Tecumseh established an Indian army and launched Tecumseh's War against the white settlers. Tecumseh's army defeated a force of Indiana militia under General William Henry Harrison at the Battle of Twin Forks in 1810. The next year, Tecumseh's army wiped out another militia force at the Battle of Bloody Creek. Although Sobel does not say so, it is possible that Tecumseh captured Fort Radisson afterwards.
By 1814, Tecumseh's army was laying siege to the North American capital at Burgoyne, and Harrison was obliged to seek help from the eastern confederations. Army units from the east arrived in Indiana in the summer of 1815, and Harrison was able to lift the siege of Burgoyne and force Tecumseh's army to retreat. However, Harrison was unable to inflict a decisive defeat on Tecumseh, and the Indian leader's confederation remained a threat to Indiana's settlers until the coming of the Rocky Mountain War in the 1840s. For the next two generations, most of the cities in Indiana were enclosed within defensive fortifications to protect them from attacks by the Prophetstown Confederacy.
Chief John Miller.
Tecumseh's death led to the dissolution of his confederacy of Indian nations, but in the late 1830s Chief John Miller of the Osage was able to revive it. Miller, a convert to Christianity, proclaimed himself to be both the Messiah and the ghost of Tecumseh. He claimed that whites were the agents of the devil, and he promised to establish an earthly paradise in North America after they had been destroyed. Thousands of Indians in Indiana and Vandalia joined his army, and in the summer of 1839 he launched his holy war against the whites by marching on Michigan City. After a two-week seige, Miller's army took the city on 21 July 1839, which the celebrated by killing 5,000 of its inhabitants.
News of the fall of Michigan City reached Burgoyne within days, prompting the Viceroy, Sir Alexander Haven, to call an emergency meeting of the Grand Council. The Council agreed to the formation of a united North American army, placing General Winfield Scott of Indiana in command. Scott was able to reach Michigan City on 18 October, and the next day he entered the city, overrunning Miller's army, then carrying out a mass slaughter of his Indian prisoners. An inquiry was held on Scott's actions which revealed that he had ordered his officers to take no prisoners. However, Scott was acquitted of any wrongdoing, and he became a national hero.
The collapse of John Miller's revived Confederacy left the Shawnee and the other Indian tribes of Indiana at the mercy of the white settlers. When war broke out between the C.N.A. and the United States of Mexico in 1845, most of the Indians emigrated to the U.S.M. and fought alongside the Mexican Army. After the Hague Treaty of 1855 ended the war, the Shawnee settled in the Mexican states of Mexico del Norte and Arizona.