What Happened to Tecumseh?
No one really knows for sure. There is nothing like a mystery to keep people guessing, even now, 212 years later. There are as many stories about Tecumseh’s final moments and the location of his body as there were survivors of the Battle of the Thames. Originally, there were few indications that Tecumseh’s death would become the most controversial incident of the Western Theatre of this particular American Invasion in 1813. None of the victorious Americans in that battle, General Harrison, Governor Shelby, or even Colonel Richard Mentor Johnson, the Kentucky leader of the ‘Forlorn Hope’ charge, mention Tecumseh’s death in their reports or letters. General Harrison viewed the bodies of several dead Natives on the battlefield, but they were so badly damaged that he could not say for sure if Tecumseh was among them. Thus, he refrained from announcing Tecumseh’s death in his official dispatch of October 9, 1813. Governor Shelby was fighting in a different sector of the battle, so he wasn’t a witness to Tecumseh’s death. Colonel Johnson was so badly wounded that he was delirious. He knew that his last action was to shoot a Native with his pistol, but whether or not that Native was Tecumseh, he could not tell and never claimed that it was Tecumseh. No matter. When he ran for Congress in 1820, representing Kentucky, and later, when he became Vice President from 1837 until 1841, the political machine did his speaking for him. The American political machine has a penchant for extolling the virtues of a candidate’s enemies in order to make their candidate’s victory over them even more illustrious. A gullible public, hungry for sensationalism, ate it up. General Harrison fared even better. He ran for the office of President of the United States and won the election in 1841, largely because of his victory at the Battle of the Thames over Tecumseh. Tecumseh’s exploits got the full treatment. His legacy was so great that the General who burned Atlanta during the American Civil
War carried the name William Tecumseh Sherman. No likenesses of Tecumseh appeared during his lifetime. Nevertheless, there are statues of him at West Point and also a rather poor likeness of him at the US Naval Academy, to name a few. So what did happen to Tecumseh’s body? It is likely that his followers melted with it into the forest in the late afternoon shadows of that day. Where they buried him, no one would say and even if they did, it would have to come through a white man’s translation in order to reach us. Our monument to Tecumseh can be found at the edge of the battlefield, 14249 Longwoods Road (4 km east of Thamesville). Meanwhile, during the battle, General Proctor and his entourage were seen riding furiously away towards the village of Moraviantown with the Kentuckians in hot pursuit. Moraviantown, that quiet, peaceful, God-fearing village, was totally unprepared for what was to follow. (To be continued...see page 24)
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