Tecumseh's Ohio Country: The Shawnee War for the Heartland

For two years Hokoleskwa, the Mekoche leader the English called Cornstalk, had told anyone who would listen that the war coming down the Ohio from Virginia was one the Shawnee could not win and should not fight. On the tenth of October, 1774, with the corn still standing in shocks in the Scioto bottoms, he led several hundred Shawnee and Mingo warriors against it at Point Pleasant, where the Kanawha meets the Ohio.

Among the Shawnee killed that day was a warrior named Pukeshinwau. His son, a small boy back in the towns, was Tecumseh.

Point Pleasant opens four decades of war for the Ohio Country: the Revolution in the West and the burning of the Shawnee towns, peace treaties that never held, Blue Jacket's war and the council at the Glaize, and the defeat at Fallen Timbers. Two brothers on the White River carry the middle of the book: Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, whose town on the Tippecanoe drew people from many nations until an American army marched on it in 1811 while Tecumseh was away in the South. Two years later, fighting alongside the British, Tecumseh was killed at the Thames. What became of the Shawnee after him, and of his confederacy in memory, closes the book.

Cornstalk had said the war could not be won. Tecumseh spent his whole life refusing to accept it.