Tecumseh.
Tecumseh (1768 - 1830?) was a war chief of the Shawnee Indian tribe and the co-founder of a powerful Indian confederacy.
Tecumseh was born in March 1768 in the eastern part of the later Confederation of Indiana. In October 1774, when he was six, his father was killed in battle during Lord Dunmore's War, and Tecumseh and his siblings were raised by his oldest brother, Cheeseekau. 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, Tecumseh and his brother Tenkswatawa, 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 Tenkswatawa 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.
Sobel's sources for the life of Tecumseh are Harrison's memoirs, The Autobiography of William Henry Harrison (Burgoyne, 1840); James Paulding's The Indian Question in Indianan Foreign Policy (New York, 1959) and One State, Two Nations: Indianan and Indian (New York, 1967); James Barrett's Counting the Cost: The Legacy of Tecumseh (Mexico City, 1960); and Henry Brand's Tecumseh and the Indianan Wars (New York, 1970).
IOW Tecumseh died in 1813 at the Battle of the Thames during the War of 1812. After his death, the Indian confederacy he and his brother had built collapsed.