On 5 October 1813 an American army under William Henry Harrison1 defeated a retreating British force and its Native allies on the Thames River in Upper Canada. The Shawnee leader Tecumseh was killed, and with him the Native confederacy that had fought alongside the British collapsed.
On 5 October 1813 the armies of the young United States won one of their clearest victories of the War of 1812, deep in Upper Canada on the banks of the Thames River. It destroyed a British army, and it killed Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader whose confederacy had been Britain's most important ally on the frontier. This is how it happened.
Part of The greatest battles in American history · Before: The Battle of Lake Erie · Next: The Battle of Baltimore and Fort McHenry
After the victory on Lake Erie
In September 1813 the American navy under Oliver Hazard Perry won command of Lake Erie2, cutting the supply line that fed the British army holding Detroit and the western frontier. Without it, the British general Henry Procter could not stay. He abandoned Detroit and the fort at Amherstburg1 and began a slow retreat eastward up the valley of the Thames.
Procter's Native allies, led by the Shawnee statesman and war leader Tecumseh, were dismayed by the withdrawal. Tecumseh had built a broad confederacy of peoples to resist American expansion, and he had staked it on the British alliance. He urged a stand rather than a retreat, and reluctantly followed as the army fell back.
Harrison's pursuit
William Henry Harrison, commanding the American army of the Northwest, crossed into Canada and pursued hard, his force swollen by a large body of mounted Kentucky volunteers under Richard Mentor Johnson3. Procter's retreat was badly managed, his men tired and short of food, and Harrison steadily closed the gap.
At last, near the Moravian mission town on the Thames, Procter turned to fight, placing his thin line of British regulars across the road with Tecumseh's warriors anchored in a swamp on the flank2. He was outnumbered more than two to one.
The battle
Harrison saw that the British line was thin and loosely formed and did something unusual: he ordered Johnson's mounted riflemen to charge straight through it1. The horsemen broke the British regulars almost at once, and Procter's line collapsed; the general himself fled the field1, and hundreds of his men surrendered.
The harder fighting was on the flank, where Tecumseh and his warriors held the swampy ground and resisted fiercely. There the battle was close and bitter, until Tecumseh fell and the heart went out of the Native resistance.
The death of Tecumseh
Tecumseh was killed in the fighting on the flank, and his death decided far more than the battle. The confederacy he had spent years building, the most serious Native attempt to halt American expansion in the region, fell apart without him, and his allies drifted away.
Exactly who killed Tecumseh was never established4. Richard Mentor Johnson was widely credited with it and made political capital of the claim for the rest of his career, but the truth was never proven and his body was never identified with certainty. What was certain was the result: the leader was gone, and so was the alliance.
Aftermath
The Battle of the Thames secured the Northwest frontier for the United States5 and ended British power in the region for the rest of the war. It also ended the long partnership between Britain and the Native peoples of the Ohio country, who were left without their great leader or their foreign backer.
For Harrison the victory was the making of a reputation that, with his earlier fight at Tippecanoe, would one day carry him to the presidency. Procter was court-martialled for his handling of the retreat2. And Tecumseh passed into legend as one of the most formidable leaders the frontier ever produced.