‘Tecumseh and the Prophet’ Review: Brothers in Arms

The brothers’ houses were close to each other on Prophetstown’s southwestern edge, from which they could see the wide Wabash flowing through the prairie. And they could see pilgrims coming and going, visiting this place of hope in a dark time. A vast diversity of Native peoples—Wyandots, Ottawas, Lenapes (Delawares), Miamis, Potawatomis, Sauks—would pilgrimage to this multiethnic religious community, some staying and some returning home to spread the brothers’ universal Nativist message. As Tenskwatawa explained: The “Master of Life had taken pity on his red children,” who had been pushed around so long by white men. He “wished to save them from destruction” if they would cast aside “wealth and ornaments,” whisky and other trappings of “evil and unclean” white Americans and band together against those who “have taken your lands, which were not made for them.”

In “Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation,” Peter Cozzens tells the intertwined history of the brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa and makes the important argument that, without Tenskwatawa—who was known as “the prophet” for his spiritual visions and prophecies—“there would have been no Tecumseh.”

In most biographies and popular versions of this history, the famous warrior Tecumseh, who led a pan-Native force against the United States in the War of 1812, stands alone—exactly the opposite of his mission in life. As Mr. Cozzens shows, the brothers sought to bring together all Native Americans under Tenskwatawa’s teachings, persuading them to cast aside their political, cultural and religious differences to become one mighty race.

While the Master of Life spoke to the prophet Tenskwatawa, Tecumseh traveled throughout the eastern half of North America to spread the word, from Creek and Choctaw towns in the deep South to the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) nations in the Northeast, and across the Mississippi River to the Quapaws, the powerful Osages and bands of the brothers’ own Shawnee people who had already moved west. Everywhere, Tecumseh preached Tenskwatawa’s prophecies and readied men for battle against the United States.

The author of many books on the Civil War, Mr. Cozzens puts his narrative skills to great use. His compelling prose and deep research in both primary sources and histories of the period combine to place the reader on the ground with the Shawnee brothers. He clearly explains the complicated geography and history of this contested place and time, when both U.S. and Native American individuals, families and whole towns often picked up and moved. Readers come to understand the brothers and their followers within the larger religious, political and military context, including the history of U.S. expansion and the War of 1812.

The book’s sharply drawn characters go beyond the central figures of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. One of their greatest influences was their older brother Cheeseekau, killed in 1792 fighting against Tennessee settlements alongside Cherokees and Creeks. Their Shawnee opponent, Chief Black Hoof, believed Tenskwatawa’s call for pan-Indian resistance, instead of Shawnee-directed diplomacy, was madness. The great Miami war leader Little Turtle defeated U.S. forces in the 1790s, but by the time of Tenskwatawa’s movement he believed that compromise with the United States was the only path. As governor of the Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison was impressed by Tecumseh’s rhetorical and martial skills and frightened by his popularity. Harrison later would win the U.S. presidency as “Old Tippecanoe,” famed for defeating Tecumseh.

“Tecumseh and the Prophet” follows the youth of both boys through the rise of their movement and their great success in spreading it across mid-America. Taking advantage of the War of 1812, they allied with the British and won victories against the United States. Yet with Tecumseh’s death at the Battle of the Thames, on the northern shore of Lake Erie in October 1813, and the British decision to end the war, the movement fell apart. Tenskwatawa eventually moved west across the Mississippi River with other Shawnees. Sometimes it is harder to be the one who survives than the hero who dies.

Mr. Cozzens astutely notes that white Americans’ fascination with Tecumseh comes from a belief that, as a political and military leader, he “acted as they would have acted under similar circumstances”—a belief that underestimates both Tecumseh’s deep faith in his brother’s prophecies and the no-win situation that faced Native Americans on the borders of the expanding 19th-century United States. In contrast, Mr. Cozzens observes, Tenskwatawa, an “ex-alcoholic who as a boy had accidentally shot his right eye out with an arrow,” has faded in the memory of white Americans, along with his harder-to-say name. Yet Tecumseh’s organizational and military actions were fueled by Tenskwatawa’s visions, and the brothers won converts by preaching together about the same Native past, present and future.

Nothing in Mr. Cozzens’s book will surprise historians. Those of us who study and teach about this time and place already know that the movement was a religious as much as military one, and that it built on past Nativist movements, such as that of the Lenape prophet Neolin and the Ottawa war leader Pontiac in the 1760s, who also called for all Native Americans to see themselves as one race and form a united military front. Pathbreaking work by historians R. David Edmunds and Gregory E. Dowd in the 1980s and 1990s established the fundamental religious underpinning of Tecumseh’s movement and those of other Nativist leaders. Mr. Cozzens’s prodigious endnotes credit these histories, although at times he skates a bit close to the work of others. His chapter structure resembles that of John Sugden’s magisterial “Tecumseh: A Life” (1998), which, although its title mentions only Tecumseh, credits Tenskwatawa as a crucial partner and the founder of their movement. Just as without Tenskwatawa there would have been no Tecumseh, without Mr. Sugden’s “Tecumseh: A Life” there would be no “Tecumseh and the Prophet.”

Like many biographies, “Tecumseh and the Prophet” ends anti-climatically, with the death of Tenskwatawa in the 1830s and the perspective of the unimpressed white physician who attended him. But Shawnees didn’t die with Tenskwatawa, and they didn’t merge their Shawnee identity with other Native nations as he said they should. Over 10,000 people today are citizens of the Shawnee tribes. The Shawnee Tribe Cultural Center in Miami, Okla., is next to the Inter Tribal Council building, which they share with the Wyandotte Nation, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, and the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma—members of which joined the Shawnee brothers’ movement but, like the Shawnees, didn’t give up their separate identities. The diverse Native peoples that Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa attempted to meld live on today, despite the efforts of both the United States to destroy them and the Shawnee brothers to make them one.

—Ms. DuVal, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of “Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution.”