A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh
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Description
A biography of the Shawnee leader describes his vision to unite North American tribes into one powerful Indian nation capable of forcing back the encroaching white settlers and his attempts to do so. Reprint.
NYT. K.
Customer Reviews
Eckert must be one of America's finest writers
This is a historical narrative about Tecumseh the Shawnee chief. Highly recommended and another book that you have to devote some effort to. Well worth the it in the end.
2010-05-20
(AUCKLAND 1310 New Zealand) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5
More than a Biography: An Alternative History of the North American Continent
The story told here is compelling in almost every respect. It is more than just the biography of one of the most important American leaders of all times, it also provides uncommon context for the history of the North American continent as seen through Native American eyes. This story of Tecumseh, of the Ohio Valley, which is neatly divided between the time before and after his birth is "rewritten oral history" of a fiercely, proud, nomadic tribe of warriors called the Shawnee tribe.
For all Indians, history is necessarily divided between the time before and the time after the white man's arrival. Whether Spanish, French, English, or English settlers, white men in the time of the Shawnee were seen uniformly as a cowardly untrustworthy lot: weak, criminal in their intent, and although with superior military implements, untrained and unprepared militarily, and completely devoid of a code of honor. To the Indians, whites had appeared out of nowhere. And beyond engaging in trade, seemed bent on doing nothing but ravaging the land, bringing mostly disease, destruction and death as they spread out like locust across the Indian occupied territories. From the outset, it seemed that their main (not so well hidden) agenda was to take over all Indian lands (even though there was plenty non-Indian lands to go around) and make slaves out of those who had befriended them, respected them, and even held them in awe.
To assist him in this task, it is incontrovertible that trade oiled the wheels of what whites later referred to as "westward expansion," however, arguably it was disease, alcohol and guns and contrived internecine warfare that really won the west for them. And as the author takes pains to point out with respect to trade for instance, for every good white trader, there were scores of unscrupulous ones. When the Stanwix Treaty opened up trade to private enterprises, westward expansion increased from a bare trickle to a virtual deluge. Traders were quickly followed by travelers, adventurers, explorers, opportunists, religious proselytizers, surveyors, land agents, speculators, and ominously growing numbers of random settlers, all anxious to snatch up their share of Indian lands. Both sides jockeyed for advantages by pitting tribe against tribe (in the case of whites), or pitting white nation against white nation (in the case of Indians). The whites engaged first in fierce competition for Indian trade and later competed with other whites to take over his hunting grounds. Indians, on the other hand, were quite skillful at playing whites against whites: the French traders against the British, the British Crown against the defecting colonials subjects -- always gravitating to the one with either the better deals or the better prices. In short, there was perfidy on all sides. As but one example, the Iroquois, accommodating the English penchant for "land grabbing" sold them land that was in fact owned by enemy tribes, and then hired themselves out to their English buyers as mercenaries to help defend the bogus claims they had sold them.
Much more importantly, the white tribes recognized early on that the greatest danger to their tenuous foothold and unjustified claims on the new continent was the possibility that the red men would eventually unite against them, and thus it was an existential matter for them to never allow this to happen. Accordingly, for at least until their numbers became overwhelming (the better part of a century), white survival depended on fomenting maximum intertribal unrest. And in this task, the fact that Indian tribes had been warring against each other for centuries, made the white task that much easier. Colonial whites became so adept at instigating violence that for a century, the entire frontier was in a constant state of turmoil and conflagration. This artificial state of perpetual war is really what this book is about. The fact that it was avoidable, yet inevitable, is also a large part of the sorrow in the hearts of Native Americans.
As whites inevitably became more powerful and more numerous, their presence on the continent represented to the Indians a cruel fait accompli: As unjust as it was, it was always clear to the "higher Chiefs" that the hand writing was on the wall: it was only a matter of time that the whites would take over all Indian lands. And so, Native Americans had no choice but to defend their dignity by slowly playing out a suicidal losing hand, one in which the cream of their manhood (always anxious to go to war to prove their bravery even in a losing cause) would be whittled away through both internecine warfare, diseases acquired either from contact or by conscious infection by whites, and the much more damaging war against the whites themselves. War and disease eventually reduced all Indians to dependency on whites and their lethal concoction of guns and alcohol. In the main wartime scenario, on one side we had the Iroquois Nation pitted against the Shawnee League. And on the other side we had the French pitted against the British, and both pitted against the much weaker Spain. Towards the end of the 17th Century, North America east of the Mississippi seethed with all possible permutations of internecine warfare, both red and white.
Two differences between the white tribes did not fail to go unnoticed by the Indians. First the French, while lacking the high quality of tools and other goods that the British had, were nevertheless respectful of Indian culture - assimilating into it by intermarrying and adopting many of their ways. The British (and their progeny, the much more feared American Colonials), on the other hand, viewed and treated all Native Americans as inferior savages and used this disrespect to justify cheating them, fomenting warfare among them, and seeking to annihilate them by any means necessary. But what tipped the Indians off to the colonials intentions is that they always came to the trading centers with their surveyor tools in hand. This represented their own barely hidden agenda to take over as much Indian territory as possible and to eventually subjugate and enslave their redskin trading partners. Their favorite modus operandi was to ply tribal chiefs with gifts, which invariably included ample amounts of alcohol, but also often included blankets infected with small pox, measles and influenza. They then pitted them against their worse adversaries, or clandestinely surrounded their camps, burned and massacre whole villages. And when these less than honorable tactics failed, they sought to engage the Indians in empty treaties whose main objective was to further disarm, delay or undermine tribal unity and intertribal solidarity. Once disarmed, they would then renege on the agreements, making continuation of the cycle of war and eventual defeat of the Native American nations, inevitable.
In their defense however, it must be said that in the beginning, the colonials did try to negotiate with good intentions if not always in good faith. For it was in their own long-term interests (not least of which to protect their honor as a people) to at least obey the treaties they signed. However, the central government (such as it was) was simply too weak to control the tide of new European immigrants who in open defiance of it and its treaties, continued to spread out across the landscape like so many ants. To their credit, colonial negotiators were eventually compelled to give Indian Chiefs the right to allow their warrior to shoot settlers who failed to live up to the conditions of signed treaties. However, as time wore on, this mostly moral edict had no legal force or backing, and thus would not hold. In fact it quickly gave way to frontier demagoguery; the inevitable calls for more Indian scalps, followed by more broken treaties. Together these simply further incited and greatly accelerated prospects for continued cycles of war.
This was the state of affairs in 1754 at the start of the French-American War (and at Tecumseh's birth in May of 1758), where British colonial Colonel George Washington was roundly defeated by the French and sent packing back to Virginia. The outcome of the symbiosis between Indian and white man, and thus of the westward expansion, was by then all but predetermined: The die had been cast for Tecumseh to enter the stage of the North American drama as Indian leader extraordinaire: visionary, warrior, orator and negotiator. Tecumseh was born under the auspicious sign of a panther shooting star (Tecumseh is the Shawnee word for panther), and as noted above, at his birth, the logic of frontier expansion had been set into an agonizingly familiar symbiotic routine: The Colonists, became increasingly dependent on the profits of Indian hunters and trappers, which in turn required the hunters to be supplied with guns and ammunition. The guns and ammunition however, like trade itself, was a double-edged sword: if not carefully controlled and rationed by whites, it could be turned against them, and as an unintended consequence, become the primary instruments of war against them. This logic during Tecumseh's life became a routine always pregnant with fear: of trade in guns and ammunition, skirmishes, broken peace treaties, repeated encroachment on Indians hunting lands, demagogic speeches on either side, followed by war councils, and then by war. This cycle would repeat it self, not just in the Ohio valley during Tecumseh's lifetime, but also would reoccur repeatedly across the west the better part of the early 18th century.
For the Indian, this symbiotic equation was much more problematic than for whites, as the whole of Indian existence lay precariously in the hands of an enemy who would kill "game" only for tongues and for pelts and leave the meat needed for tribal subsistence to rot in the heat of the sun; would purposely spread disease that the Indians were known to have no resistance to; would routinely massacre whole villages of men women and children and think nothing of it. The white enemy had his own barbaric rules, and rule one was to annihilate Indians wherever they appeared by any means necessary. The tribes thus needed the guns and ammunition not only for trading and for fighting the whites themselves, but also to fight other tribes and for hunting to provide food for their families. By controlling both trade concessions and hunting and fighting supplies, the whites had the Indians in a vicious survival grip. The Indians' very existence was at the whim of their ever-calculating, brutal and merciless white enemy.
Bowing to the inevitability of superior power and superior numbers, the most visionary and conservative of Indian Chiefs had effectively conceded and forfeited all their "agency" beyond being able to sue for peace, which they did repeatedly as the final alternative to war. They knew that to incite the white man meant certain death for the whole tribe. But sadly, they always tried to negotiate first, but learned the hard way that it was always in vain. The whites had a different agenda than peace.
Tecumseh arrival on the scene represented the last hope to salvage Native American pride and manhood in the face of certain death at the hands of a diabolically evil and superior enemy. He represented a symbol of the Indian's ability to fight back even if it meant certain death, if only to die maintaining tribal culture and dignity. In the prearranged historical script he stepped into, Tecumseh's burden was heavy if not impossible. He lived up to his advance billing and was destined to die young, as he eventually did. The sorrow in his heart is that he had to preside over the eventual sapping of Native American cultural energy. That was the leitmotif of Tecumseh's life. His life ended in a trail of tears, a trail of broken white promises, with the sapping of Native American manhood: with plenty of sorrow but also plenty of bravery in his heart.
For the American settlers, this book makes clear that no matter how much history has been altered and revised to present a glorified picture of white heroism, there is little that was honorable about the way Indian lands were unnecessarily and unceremoniously stolen, and thus in the way "the west was subsequently won." A fabulous read. Ten stars
2009-09-15
| paulocal (Falls Church, VA USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5
A Sorrow in Or Heart - A real life Native American Hero
This book portrays the life of one of Native Americans greatest natural leaders. I only wish when I was growing up in Ohio and walking the same land as the Shawnee and Miami peoples that I would have been taught this history in a more truthful light. Allan W.Eckert vividly tells the story in a magnificient way, and it is my hope that someday a film can be made with this book as a main reference to show the true events of those times and educate the vast American public of the tragedy that befell these noble people and especially the story of Tecumseh.
2009-06-30
| Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5
A sorrow in our heart: The Life of Tecumseh
I did not realize how good this book would be! It was so full of great information about the lives of many Indian nations as well as the Shawnee nation and the great leader Tecumseh. I am very happy with this book!
2008-11-23
(Grand Rapids, MI) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5
Fair Warning
Straight up front I'll admit I'm a quitter. With grim determination I made it to page 55 and there, gentle readers, I had had it. I couldn't go any farther. I just couldn't. But then, one doesn't need to drink the whole glass to know if the milk is sour.
Maybe the tipping point lay in having reason several Francis Parkman's works ("The Frances Parkman Reader", the volumns on Pontiac, "Montcalm and Wolfe") before starting this thing. It was this book breaker.
Usually in re: to a one or two star book I'll say, "If you can get it at a yard sale, or real cheap, or someone give it to you, go ahead and read it." But not this one, brother. Your's truly got it real cheap and...well, and I'm writting this review.
What wrong with this book? For one thing, the preface is something like 34 pages long! Good grief. And when several other reviewers said this book as written like a novel, take it from me -- they weren't kidding. But, heck, I knew that going in and made allowances for it. But nothing could prepare me for early-era Political Correctness/New Age tone of this thing.
The yellow flags went up when I read the opening quote (supposedly by Tecumseh's elder brother) chosen by the author which read, in part,
'...The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is goneand then he simply moves one, leaving the waste behind him...The whole white race is a monster...'
I thought: Uh-Oh. According to this "story" the red Indianas -- particularly the Shawnee -- were the beau sauvages, the enfants de nature, of the sixities: the 1960s and the 1760s. The white man, particular the British, were the snake in this Garden of Eden. The Great Spirit, surprise surprise, is refered to as a woman. ("The Great Spirit watched over her Indian children...") The men tall and handsome, the women loving and lovely, the elders calm and wise, the children serious yet happy. The whites, esp. the British, insensitive brutes. Shades of being oh-so politically correct!
This sort of view might have been the bee's knees in the late 1980s- early 1990s but today it is 18th c. romantism at best, teeth-gritting at worst. The red Indians in this book are painted in a very different manner than can be found in Parkman, and a good many others.
2008-06-16
(Dayton) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 1
