He had bitterly opposed the British decision to retreat up the Thames River into Canada. Now, on this crisp October morning in 1813, Shawnee Chief Tecumseh watched in horror as a mounted force of Americans armed with tomahawks, knives and long rifles scattered his British allies and crashed into his own force. “Be brave! Be brave!” he reportedly cried out, but to no avail. Shot down by a future vice president of the United States, Tecumseh was at least spared the sight of his own warriors fleeing into a swamp while British soldiers surrendered en masse.
In less than an hour the American commander, Maj. Gen. William Henry Harrison, had crippled British power in the Great Lakes region, regained possession of the Northwest Territory and destroyed forever the confederacy of tribes Tecumseh had so painstakingly created. At one fell swoop Harrison effectively separated the British from their Indian allies and ended a series of American defeats that had characterized the War of 1812 to that point.
War had ended in 1783 with a treaty that acknowledged the independence of the former colonies, Britain was slow to acknowledge the rights the United States demanded as a sovereign nation. In violation of the Treaty of Paris, the British refused to relinquish forts and outposts in the Northwest Territory (roughly encompassing the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and northeastern Minnesota). Worse yet, they fomented often bloody attempts by regional tribes to discourage the movement of American settlers into the territory. Amid its interminable wars against Napoléonic France, Britain also imposed a maritime blockade of the Atlantic coast, devastating American trade, and outraged the nascent nation’s pride with the seizure of its merchant ships and impressment of its Britishborn sailors to serve in the Royal Navy. On June 18, 1812, the United States, fed up with the cascade of insults and injuries,
