He almost did it.

This is the story of how he nearly succeeded, why the plan failed when it did, and what the failure cost.

Who The Shawnee Were And Where They Came From

The Shawnee were not one of the static, unchanging peoples of the popular imagination.

They were a dynamic, sophisticated society that had already been engaged with the complex world of North American geopolitics for centuries by the time Tecumseh was born.

The Shawnee language belongs to the Algonquian family, connecting them to a large web of related peoples across the eastern half of North America.

Their traditional territory was centered in the Ohio Valley, but Shawnee bands had moved, fragmented, and reformed across a wide geographic range for generations.

Some bands had been pushed south into the Carolinas in the seventeenth century by pressure from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy.

Others moved west.

The Ohio country — the territory along the Ohio River and its tributaries — was a homeland that the Shawnee maintained with force and political skill across the eighteenth century.

The Shawnee were organized into clans whose membership determined certain social roles and responsibilities.

They had established protocols for decision-making, for warfare, for ceremony, and for their relationships with the natural world.

Their political leadership was distributed: different leaders held authority in different domains, and the specific war leaders who rose to prominence in periods of conflict were not necessarily the same people who had authority in peace.

The Shawnee also had sophisticated relationships with the world of European and American powers.