Tecumseh's War or the War of Tecumseh's Confederacy was a series of battles fought between the multi-tribal Indian army of the Shawnee war chief Tecumseh and the military forces of the Confederation of North America.
In 1803, Tecumseh and his brother Tenkswatawa, known as the Prophet, began to gather most of the Indian tribes in the Confederations of Indiana and eastern Vandalia into a confederation to protect their lands from settlement by whites from the Northern and Southern Confederations. 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.
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 Tecumseh's War 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).