OCTOBER 5:

 1885 Battleford Saskatchewan - Itka and Man Without Blood tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang for killing farm instructor Payne on the Mosquito reserve on March 29.

1871 St. Norbert, Manitoba - Louis Riel 1844-1885 secretly returns to Manitoba to help government put down Fenian Raid; publicly thanked by Lieutenant-Governor Adams Archibald.

October 5, 1813:  Near the Thames River in Canada, American forces led by General William Henry Harrison and British-Indian forces led by Henry Proctor and Tecumseh fought a decisive battle.  Harrison's forces were much stronger.  Setting up an ambush, the British and Indian forces took up different positions.  When Harrison's forces attacked the 700 British soldiers, they caved in almost immediately.  Tecumseh's Indians, fighting in a swamp, held out until Tecumseh was killed.  At the end of the fighting, 600 British were captured, 18 were killed. Thirty-three Indians were killed; none were captured.  The American forces lost 18 men as well.

October 5, 695:  Forces under Maya King Jasaw Chan K'awiil I (Sky Rain) defeat an army from Calakmul under Maya King Yich'aak K'ak' (Fiery Claw).
 

BACKGROUND:
 

Words Spoken:  Tecumthe (Tecumseh), Shawnee
 

"When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home."
 

*****
 

>From http://www.jmu.edu/madison/tecumseh/tecumsehsdeath.htm
 

The Death of Tecumseh Devin Bent (devin@bents.net)

There are differing accounts of the death of Tecumseh. All agree that he joined forces with the British in the War of 1812. He and his British allies met with initial success capturing Detroit. After Oliver Hazard Perry's victory on Lake Eerie, however, they were forced to retreat into Canada, pursued by an U.S. army under General William Harrison.

On October 5, 1813, the two armies met in the Battle of the Thames. The British fled, but Tecumseh covered their retreat.

Here the accounts diverge. One widely repeated story is that Tecumseh attacked Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky with a tomahawk and was killed by a single shot from Johnson's pistol. Johnson himself was severely wounded in the battle.

Johnson was a Kentucky Congressman who supported the War of 1812 and raised his own troop of mounted Kentucky riflemen in support of Harrison. His bravery in the Battle of the Thames and his claim to have killed Tecumseh furthered his political career. He became a U.S. Senator in 1819 and received the Democratic nomination for the Vice Presidency in 1836. Martin Van Buren, the Democratic nominee for President, won easily, defeating Harrison. Johnson won a plurality, but not a majority, of votes in the Electoral College. The election was decided by a vote of the Senate (as provided for in the twelfth amendment) and Johnson was elected. He is the only Vice President elected in this manner.

Today, Johnson's claim to have killed Tecumseh is viewed with some skepticism. Nonetheless, his version of events was believed by many and is depicted on the U.S. Capitol frieze.

A different version is told by Andrew J. Blackbird, or Mack-e-te-be-nessy, son of the Ottawa Chief, Mack a-de-pe-nessy, in his history of the Ottawa and Chippewa.

". . . in the history of the United States . . . there are some mistakes concerning the accounts of the Indians, particularly the accounts of our brave Tecumseh, as it is claimed that he was killed by a soldier named Johnson, upon whom they conferred the honor of having disposed of the dreaded Tecumseh. Even pictured out as being coming up with his tomahawk to strike a man who was on horseback, but being instantly shot dead with the pistol. Now I have repeatedly heard our oldest Indians, both male and female, who were present at the defeat of the British and Indians, all tell a unanimous story, saying that they came to a clearing or opening spot, and it was there where Tecumseh ordered his warriors to rally and fight the Americans once more and in this very spot one of the American musket balls took effect in Tecumseh's leg so as to break the bone of his leg, that he could not stand up. He was sitting on the ground when he told his warriors to flee as well as they could, and furthermore said, "One of my leg is shot off! But leave me one or two guns loaded; I am going to have a last shot. Be quick and go!" That was the last word spoken by Tecumseh. As they look back, they saw the soldiers thick as swarm of bees around where Tecumseh was sitting on the ground with his broken leg, and so they did not see him any more; and, therefore, we always believe that the Indians or Americans know not who made the fatal shot on Tecumseh's leg, or what the soldiers did with him when they came up to him as he was sitting on the ground. (From the American Memory Collection of the Library of Congress.)

All accounts agree that Tecumseh died bravely and that with him died effective resistance to the U.S. settlement of the Northwest Territory.
 

*****
 

Tecumthe - From http://www.axel-jacob.de/chiefs.html
 

c.1768-183. Tecumseh ("Crounching Tiger" or "Shooting Star") was a major military leader and alliance builder who sought to stop Euro-American expansion into the Ohio Valley area early in the ninteenth century. Tecumseh was born about 1768 near present-day Oldtowm. Ohio. He was raised from birth to make war on the encroaching whites by his mother, Methoataske, whose husband, the Shawnee Puckeshinwa, was killed in cold blood by settlers when Tecumseh was a boy. Tecumseh and his mother found him dying. As he watched his father die, Tecumseh vowed to become like " a fire spreading over the hill and valley, consuming the race of dark souls." A few years later, Tecumseh's hatred for the whites was compounded by the murder of Cornstalk, a Shawnee chief who had been a mentor to the young man.

As Euro-American settlement began to explode accross the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes shortly after 1790, Native resistance expressed itself in attempts at confederation along lines of mutual interest. A confederation that included elements of the Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, Miamis, and Ottawas told the United States in 1790 that settlers were not to transgress beyond the Ohio River. Thousands of settlers were surging into the area, ignoring governmental edicts from both sides. The settlers, who were squatters in the Indians' eyes, sought military help after members of the Native confederacy began attacking their settlements. Military expeditions were sent into the Ohio country during 1790 and 1792, but the Native confederacy remained unbowed and unmoved. In 1794, a force under the command of General "Mad Anthony" Wayne defeated the confederacy's warriors at Fallen Timbers ( a battle in which a young Tecumseh fought). In 1795, most of present-day Ohio and parts of Indiana were surrendered at the Treaty of Greenville.

Native resistance surged again shortly after the turn of the century under the aegis of Tecumseh. As he came of age after the American Revolution, his influence grew rapidly not only because of his acumen as a statesman and a warrior, but because he forbade torture of prisoners. Both settlers and his Native allies trusted Tecumseh. By the turn of the century, as the number of settlers grew, Tecumseh beagn to assemble the Shawnees, Delawares, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Kickapoos, and Wyandots into a confederation with the aim of establishing a permanent Native state that would act as a buffer zone between the United States to the east and English Canada to the north. One white observer recalled Tecumseh as a commanding speaker. His voice was said to have "resounded over the multitude...his words like a succesion of thunderbolts." He advanced the doctrine that no single Native nation could sell its land without the consent of the entire confederacy that he was building. Rallying Native allies with an appeal for alliance about 1805, Tecumseh said, "Let us unite as brothers, as sons of one Mother Earth...Sell our land? Why not sell the air... Land cannot be sold." He tried to unite the southern tribes by appealing to history.

Territorial governor William Henry Harrison (who would later popularize his coming battle with Tecumseh at Tippecanoe in a successful campaign for the presidency with the campaign slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too") tried to undermine the growing strength of Tecumseh's Indian union by negotiating treaties of cession with individual tribes. Since only a portion of each tribe or nation's warriors elected to follow Tecumseh, Harrison found it easy enough to find "treaty Indians" among those who did not elect to fight. By 1811, Harrison negotiated at least fifteen treaties, all of which Tecumseh repudiated. Harrison's wariness of Tecumseh's power sprang from a deep respect for him "The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really astonishing and more than any other circumstances bespeaks him as one of those uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and to overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would, perhaps, be the founder of an Empire that would rival in glory Mexico or Peru. No difficulties deter him". For his part, Tecumseh was particularly galled by the fact that Harrison had chosen as his territorial capital the village of Chillicothe, the same site (with the same name) as the Shawnees' former principal settlement. At one treaty council, Tecumseh refused to meet Harrison's terms. Finding himself seated next to Harrison on a bench, Tecumseh slowly but aggressively pushed him off its edge then told Harrison that that was what was happening to his people. During his last conference with Tecumseh, Harrison bid the chief to take a chair. "Your father requests you take a chair," an interpreter told Tecumseh, to which the chief replied, "My father!  The sun is my father and the earth is my mother. I will repose upon her bosom." He then sat crosslegged on the ground.

Tecumseh was also angry over Harrison's treaty of September 30, 1809, with the Delaware, Potawatomi, Miami, Kickapoo, Wea, and Eeel River peoples. For $8,200 in cash and $2,350 in annuties, Harrison had laid claim for the United States to roughly three million acres of rich hunting land along the the Wabash River, in the heart of the area in which Tecumseh wished to erect his Native confederacy. When Tecumseh and his brother , also a Shawnee war chief, complained to Harrison that the treaty terms were unfair, Harrison at first rebuked Tecumseh by saying that the Shawnees had not even been part of the treaty. The implicit refusal to recognize Tecumseh's alliance angered the Indians even more. Realizing that Tecumseh's influence made it politic for him to do so, Harrison agreed to meet with him. At a meeting on August 12, 1810, each side drew up several hundred battle-ready warriors and soldiers. Harrison agreed to relay Tecumseh's complaints to the president, and Tecumseh said that his warriors would join the Americans against the British if Harrison would annul the treaty. Nothing came of Harrison's promises, and in 1811, bands of warriors allied with Tecumseh began ranging out of the settlement of Tippecanoe to terrorize nearby farmsteads and small backwoods settlements. Harrison said he would wipe out Tippecanoe if the raids did not stop; Tecumseh said they would stop when the land signed away under the 1810 treaty was returned. Tecumseh then journeyed southward to bring the Creeks, Chickasaws and Choctaws into his alliance. He carried the message that he had used to recruit other allies.

For the most part the trip failed to bring new allies. During this time, the command of the existing alliance fell to Tecumseh's brother Tenskatawa, who was called the Prophet. On September 26, 1811, Harrison decamped at Vincennes with more than nine hundred men, two-thirds of them Indian allies. He built a fort and named it after himself on the present-day site of Terre Haute, Indiana. Harrison then sent two Miamis to the Prophet to demand the return of property Harrison alleged had been stolen in the raids, along with the surrender of Indians he accused of murder. The Miamis did not return to Harrison's camp. The governor's army marched to within sight of Tippecanoe and met with Tenkswatawa, who invited them to make camp, relax, and negotiate. Instead, Harrison's forces set up in battle configurations, and the Prophet's warriors readied an attack. Within two hours of pitched battle, Harrison's forces routed the Indians and burned the village of Tippecanoe as Tenskwatawa's forces scattered into the woods.

Returning to the devastation from his travels, Tecumseh fled to British Canada, where, during the war of 1812, he was put in command of a force of whites and Indians as a British brigadier general. Harrison's forces met Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames in Kentucky. During the battle, Tecumseh was killed on October 5, 1813. After it, some of the Kentucky militia who had taken part found a body they thought was Tecumseh's and cut strips from it for souvenirs. (His warriors, who had dispersed in panic when Tecumseh died, said later that they had taken his body with them.) Having committed twenty thousand men and $5 million to the cause, the United States had effectively terminated armed Indian resistance in the Ohio Valley and sourrounding areas.