When I wish to find out about a person from the past, the first thing I look for, to wrap my mind around so that I feel like I might know this person, is an image, a portrait or photograph. But Tecumseh lived before the days of photography and, according to Glenn Tucker, in a recent biography, Techumseh, A Vision of Glory, “Tecumseh would never allow a white man to paint his portrait, and no Indian undertook it.”

So Tecumseh joins a large list of famous and not so famous people from the past for which no image from life exists. As my mind seeks to know this person, lacking an image, I must go to other sources: recorded descriptions of him, literary sources, traditions. But why is a physical likeness important? A portrait based on life allows the observer to gleam personality traits and characteristics by gazing at the image. The lack of such a portrait leads to so much speculation and imagination. In my own writing and research I have spent years coming to know people from the past for which there are no images from life: Jesus of Nazareth and Christopher Columbus, for example; I have even written books about people, contemporaries of Tecumseh, one of the them a French scientist named Berlandier, another an American frontiersman named John Evans, for whom no portrait survives, which has forced me somewhat reluctantly to describe them without quite knowing what they looked like. Proponents of the old pseudo-science of physiognomy used to claim that by examining the facial and cranial features of an object of inquiry the observer could gain important insights into character. I could not do this with the objects of my inquiry. Nor with Tecumseh. So, I must rely on other sources to paint a visual portrait in my mind.

My mental portrait begins, therefore, with any kind of personal connection I can make with Tecumseh. The first of which is that there is evidence, not conclusive, that he was part Muskogee Creek, his mother having been descended from the Muskogee Creeks of the American Southeast. I teach at an institution, Bacone College, founded in 1880 on the lands of the Creek Nation in Muskogee, OK. Everyday I teach students of varying tribal backgrounds, especially the Creeks, about history and philosophy. I was born and raised in Tulsa, OK, which was also part of the Creek Nation. The Muskogee Creeks have been a part of my life for the three score years, though subconsciously; not until I took my present job at Bacone College in Muskogee did I realize how much the Indian heritage meant for me, a person born and bred in Oklahoma, which until 1907 was associated with Indian Territory, and still retains so many connections with the Indian past that I hitherto had largely ignored. Although I am not Indian, I have been around Creek Indians my entire life; perhaps Tecumseh had some of the same physical and emotional traits as these people.

The next step in my mental portrait: Tecumseh’s mother (perhaps) was Muskogee Creek, but Tecumseh himself was born in Ohio in 1768, his parents having moved from Alabama in the previous few years. The second connection I can make with Tecumseh is based on my frequent driving of Interstate 70 through the American Midwest. Tecumseh was born near Springfield Ohio on the Mad River, about where Interstate 70 crosses the Mad River, which I have driven over countless times on my way to and from New England, and recently, to and from Canada, as I have traveled back and forth from Oklahoma to New England, where my wife’s family lives, and back and forth from Oklahoma, where my family are, to Canada. On such long drives of over 700 miles my mind seeks diversion, and I find it in thinking about what this area would have been like in 1768, just a few years before the beginning of the American War for Independence. This was a frontier land under competition by whites and Indians; it should have been land shared by all, but human acquisitiveness and lust for power made it otherwise.

The third connection I can make with Tecumseh as I research his life, was that he was raised in the surroundings of continual violence between American frontiersmen and the Shawnee and other tribes. His father, for example, was murdered by whites when he was a young boy, which provided him with an initial childhood reaction to hate war, though war would in time consume him. I have never experienced such tragedy as Tecumseh did, but as a child growing up during the Vietnam War of the 1960s, I grew to hate war as well, and ever since my adolescent years, watching on television the images of war in a far-off country, I have spoken out against, and despise, war.

The fourth connection I can make with him is more difficult, as he sided with the British in the War of 1812, and I was born and bred an American.

But I can empathize with his cause, to unite his people in the face of aggression, to seek a way to gain what is right and just for his people in the face of centuries of dishonesty, violence, broken treaties, and broken promises. I have taught at a college where half the students feel the same way that Tecumseh felt, and I, a white Caucasian, everyday have to meet the challenge of what my ancestors did to the Indians, and I ask myself the question, am I responsible for the mistakes of my ancestors? And my answer is unclear, except that I taught at a small college, Bacone College in Oklahoma, which is dedicated to helping educate the American Indian to help them embrace their future in an America that is no longer tainted so much by prejudice and violence. Perhaps that I, a white male, taught at such a school, which for 145 years was oriented toward helping the Indian, is an answer to my question.

The fifth connection I can make with Tecumseh is that I have repeatedly driven Canadian Highway 401 from Windsor to Hamilton to St. Catharines and back, and I drive over a flat, fertile land, well-watered, where grapes and grain grow. Near where I drive, on the Thames River in Chatham, Ontario, is where Tecumseh met his death facing overwhelming American forces in October, 1813. For some reason the mere fact that I drive across this land where nearly 200 years ago this man died violently stirs some emotion, some connection, in me, and I feel I know him a bit better for seeing where he met his end.

The sixth and final connection I make with Tecumseh is that I have studied Protestant and Catholic missionaries to the First Nations of Canada, particularly in Ontario, and I found, in my research, the following account by the American missionary Jedidiah Morse: “Tecumseh, before his untimely death, had conceived a plan of collecting all the Indians of N. America on some portion of the continent, not inhabited by white people, there to dwell together under their own government and laws, to enjoy their own customs and religion, inherited from their ancestors—to live in a state of independence; to sell no more of their lands to the white people; to cultivate, by all means, peace with them; to wage no other than necessary defensive wars; to quit roving and hunting for subsistence; to divide their territory into farms; and to live, as do the whites, by agriculture and the arts. In this way, and by these means, he conceived that Indians might recover what they had lost, rise again into importance and influence, and once more assume their rank among the nations of the earth. This plan, though no adequate means of accomplishing it exist, is a noble one, and worthy the great and patriotic mind of its author. Had he lived, and in earnest attempted its accomplishment, it probably might have been easily shaped, and, by compromise, have been brought, to coincide with that which is now contemplated by the government of the United States.”

What is remarkable about his comment, penned by the American scientist and clergyman Jedidiah Morse in 1821, is that just eight years before, in 1813, Tecumseh would have been considered the inveterate enemy of any patriotic American, which Morse was. Now just a few years later he lauds this man, a Tory and an Indian, as reflecting the same principles that he, Jedidiah Morse, has been espousing for decades. And these principles were that the Indians of America deserved the freedom to pursue their own lives, to pursue their own destiny, in a continent the dominant government of which espoused the same principles, that freedom and equality are the paramount rights of all peoples, everywhere, on the earth.

Let me conclude with a final anecdote, taken from the many sources on Tecumseh, that relates what his character was like, and also provides us with a fitting connection to another person honored in Canada, General Isaac Brock. According to Benjamin Drake, in his Life of Tecumseh, written in 1841, when the two men were contemplating the attack on American forces at Detroit during the War of 1812, the following event happened:

“Previously to general Brock’s crossing over to Detroit, he asked [Tecumseh] what sort of a country he should have to pass through, in case of his proceeding farther. Tecumseh, taking a roll of elm bark, and extending it on the ground by means of four stones, drew forth his scalping knife, and with the point presently etched upon the bark a plan of the country, its hills, rivers, woods, morasses and roads; a plan which, if not as neat, was for the purpose required, fully as intelligible as if Arrowsmith [the great mapmaker] himself had prepared it. Pleased with this unexpected talent in Tecumseh, also by his having, with his characteristic boldness, induced the Indians, not of his immediate party, to cross the Detroit [River], prior to the embarkation of the regulars and militia, general Brock, as soon as the business was over, publicly took off his sash, and placed it round the body of the chief,” which was a distinct mark of honor.

(The foregoing is the gist of remarks I made at the “Tecumseh and Brock Portraits Unveiling” at Brock University, Ontario, October 15, 2010)