Letters

The 2nd task was another story. Acting on your mother’s suggestion, in 1808 Tecumseh establisht for his brother “the Prophet’s Town” near where the Tippecanoe joins the Wabash: a mixt Indian community dedicated to industriousness, sobriety, the common ownership of property, brotherhood amongst the nations of red men, & repudiation of all things learnt from the “Long Knives,” by which term they call’d us whites. So successful was the town, & the strategy, Governor Harrison mistook the Prophet (who had changed his name from Lalawethika, or “Loud Mouth,” to Tenskwatawa, “Open Door”) for the leader of the confederacy, & invited him in the summer of 1809 to confer at Vince

Child: I am a Cook, not a Burlingame. You Burlingames get from your ancestor H.B. III a passion for the world that fetches you everywhere at once, in guises manifold as the world’s, to lead & shape its leaders & shapers. We Cooks, I know now, get from our forebear Ebenezer, the virgin poet of Maryland, an inexhaustible i

As for the “Shooting Star”: what greater expression of my admiration can I make than that Tecumseh is more deserving of Andrée’s love than I? That I had rather be esteem’d by him than by anyone save her? That I think him worth a Jefferson, two Madisons, three Barlows, five Napoleons? I never felt more my grandfather’s son (but remember, I did not yet know that history in detail) than when I first sat at the feet of this successor to Pontiac, whom I pray it will be your fortune one day to meet as the head of a great free league of Indian nations, and to love as I do.

He began our closer co

I learnt fast. And in the process came to respect, even more than formerly, the red men’s famous harmony with their land (to sell which, they regarded less as treason than as fraud, since in their view no man had title to what was every man’s). I saw the ultimate harmlessness of even the fierce Wyandots & once-fierce Senecas, by contrast with the whites: Tecumseh’s comparison was of a pack of wolves to a forest fire. To my surprise I came to feel ever more clearly my distance from the Indians, even as I bridged it: were I not part Indian, there could have been no bridge; were I not mainly & finally European-American, no bridge would have been needed. From this last I came to see what Tecumseh later told me Pontiac had seen (and what I now know my grandfather knew before Pontiac): that while the wolf may make the deer a finer animal, & the eagle quicken the race of rabbits, all flee together from the fire, or perish in it. As there was no longer any real where for the Indian to flee…

Yet he was no defeatist. That the Indians perhaps had only different ways to lose meant to Tecumseh that the choice of ways was all the more important. Hence his preference for the tomahawk, for example, together with his recognition that only British artillery might truly drive back American artillery. Hence his tireless exhortations to the chiefs not to forget their differences, which were as old & “natural” as those between hare & hawk, but to work for their common good despite them, against the menace. The flaw in his reasoning, of course, was that exemplary conduct presumes someone to benefit from the example. If deer & wolf rise above their ancient differences to stand together, what have they taught the fire? Tecumseh’s reply to this question (which I never put) was in his bearing, his eloquence, his selfless energy, his spaciousness of heart & the general fineness of his character, which I think must far exceed his hero Pontiac’s: to be thus-&-such a man (these virtues preacht), to behave in thus-&-such a fashion, were excellent & sweet yea tho one perish — especially if one is to perish in any case. This tragical (but nowise despairing) lesson is what Tecumseh taught, in a language neither English nor Algonkin.

By the time that contemptible treaty was sign’d (September 30, 1809, a

The last point Harrison granted; he even worried (what I’d not dared hope) that President Madison, who rather shared my general position, might be persuaded to set aside the treaty he Harrison had just negotiated — a move which would put the Governor uncomfortably betwixt his constituents & the man he must rely on for political & military support. Cheer’d, I went off to Boston & my business with John Henry; then return’d to the Prophet’s town by way of Vince