Tecumseh’s name means Shooting Star, and there is something fitting about the trajectory of his life: brilliant, brief, and impossible to ignore while it lasted.

He was born into a world that was already in the process of losing its centuries-old order to the pressure of American expansion.

He understood that process more clearly than almost anyone of his time.

He developed a political philosophy that directly confronted the legal and moral assumptions on which that expansion was based.

He built, from nothing, a political coalition that spanned multiple nations and multiple languages and was larger and more coherent than anything that had been attempted before.

And he did all of this in forty-five years.