At dawn on 7 November 1811 warriors of the Native confederacy led by the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, attacked the camp of Governor William Henry Harrison's army near Prophetstown, on the Tippecanoe River in the Indiana Territory. Tecumseh himself was away in the south. After two to three hours of fighting in the half dark the warriors drew off, and the next day Harrison burned the abandoned town. The battle made Harrison famous, but how much it actually hurt the confederacy is still debated.
A town at the heart of a confederacy
In 1808 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa founded Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe River, meant as the center of a confederacy of Native nations that would stop the sale of more land to the United States. The American Battlefield Trust notes that the Treaty of Fort Wayne of 1809, under which Indiana tribes sold some three million acres, spurred Tecumseh to build that alliance. Their vision brought them into direct conflict with Harrison, the governor of the territory.1
In the autumn of 1811, with Tecumseh away recruiting among the southern nations, Harrison marched up the Wabash from Vincennes. The Canadian Encyclopedia lists his force as some 400 regulars of the 4th U.S. Infantry, a company of the 7th, 500 Indiana and 120 Kentucky militiamen, and the American Battlefield Trust puts it at roughly 1,000 soldiers and militia. On the evening of 6 November a messenger from Prophetstown under a white flag asked for a parley, and Harrison camped on high ground about a mile, or two kilometers, from the town.2
The dawn attack
Tenskwatawa decided to strike, against Tecumseh's earlier warnings not to start a war before the confederacy was ready, according to the American Battlefield Trust. The Canadian Encyclopedia judges that the warriors probably numbered about half as many as the Americans. They attacked at dawn, drove in part of the American line and pressed hardest on the southern flank, where the Indiana company known as the Yellow Jackets gave way after its captain and both lieutenants fell. Harrison shifted mounted riflemen to close the gap, and on the northern flank Major Joseph Hamilton Daveiss was mortally wounded leading a counter charge.3
After a series of American counterattacks the warriors withdrew. The American Battlefield Trust says the fight lasted about two hours and the Canadian Encyclopedia about three. The Canadian Encyclopedia puts American losses at about 200, 60 of them killed, and the confederacy's at about 130, 50 of them killed.4
Prophetstown burned
The warriors' faith in Tenskwatawa's promises of protection was shaken, and the town was abandoned. On 8 November Harrison's men burned it and marched back toward Vincennes. The two sources weigh the result differently. The American Battlefield Trust calls it the end of Tecumseh's dream of a confederacy, while the Canadian Encyclopedia says Harrison proclaimed a great victory that the evidence does not support, and notes that the town's people rebuilt it, so that Harrison destroyed it again in November 1812.5
Tecumseh allied with Britain in the War of 1812 and was killed by Harrison's troops at the Battle of the Thames on 5 October 1813. Harrison rode the memory of the battle to the presidency in 1840, when the Miller Center notes the Whigs sold him as the hero of Tippecanoe under the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”. The full story is in our article on the Battle of Tippecanoe, and Tecumseh's end in our article on the Battle of the Thames.6
Also on this day
- 1861: Battle of Belmont. Union troops under Ulysses Grant crossed the Mississippi by riverboat and raided a Confederate camp at Belmont, Missouri, his first combat test of the Civil War.
