His crowning scheme for bringing
together the tribes of the Middle West into a grand democratic
confederacy to regulate land cessions and other dealings with the
whites stamps him as perhaps the most statesmanlike member of his
race.
* Authorities differ as to the facts of Tecumseh's birth. His
earliest biographer, Benjamin Drake, holds that he was "wholly a
Shawanoe" and that he was a fourth child, the Prophet and another
son being twins. William Henry Harrison spoke of Tecumseh's
mother as a Creek.
While yet hardly more than a boy, Tecumseh seems to have been
stirred to deep indignation by the persistent encroachment of the
whites upon the hunting-grounds of his fathers. The cessions of
1804 and 1805 he specially resented, and it is not unlikely that
they clinched the decision of the young warrior to take up the
task which Pontiac had left unfinished. At all events, the plan
was soon well in hand. A less far-seeing leader would have been
content to call the scattered tribes to a momentary alliance with
a view to a general uprising against the invaders.
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