“Their friendship alone can keep our frontiers in peace. It is essential to the development of our fur-trade, — an object of immense importance. The attempt at the expulsion of so desultory a people is as chimerical as it would be pernicious. War with them is as expensive as it is destructive. It has not a single object, for the acquisition of their lands is not to be wished till those now vacant are filled; and the surest as well as the most just and humane way of removing them is by extending our settlements to theirneighborhood. Indeed, it is not impossible that they may be already willing to exchange their former possessions for more remote ones.”[1]
Accordingly, as chairman of a committee in 1783, he
reported that “the general superintendence of Indian affairs
under Congress be annexed to the Department of War,”
that “offensive hostilities” be suspended, and that four
districts — by the points of the compass — be established in
the United States, with an agent for each, to transact
Indian affairs. The plan was not adopted, because the
Governors of Territories had the power under the War
Department.
Tecumseh, with the help of his famous brother, the “Prophet,” essayed to repeat the experiment made, before he was born, by the great chief Pontiac. But he laid even a broader basis for his enterprise. This was to unite the Western, Southern, and Northern tribes, with the open sympathy and the covert aid of the British in Canada, to drive the whites back from the frontiers, and to make the Ohio a permanent boundary between them and the Indians. We know what significance Tecumseh and our President Harrison gave to the word “Tippecanoe.” Tecumseh's enterprise was already flagging from its first earnestness and hopefulness, when the opening of our war with Britain, in 1812, gave it a formidable aspect. It is curious to note how the savages had learned from our colonies the value and strength of union in a confederacy. Tecumseh's able
- ↑ Works, i. 408.
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