Tecumseh's Bones (review)

When Major John Richardson, self-designated as Canada's 'first and only author,' reprinted his poem Tecumseh; or The Warrior of the West (1828) in his Brockville newspaper in 1842, he announced his intention to place the last copy of the first edition 'under the foundation stone of the Monument to be erected to that celebrated Warrior.' A veteran of the Battle of the Thames in which the admired Tecumseh died, Richardson was predictably supportive of a plan announced the previous year for a memorial to be erected in Amherstberg. Earlier issues of the New Era had already praised local regiments for their support for this initiative. That monument was never built, and Tecumseh's Bones anatomizes the myths and motivations surrounding this and the many other attempts to memorialize Tecumseh in stone as Richardson and his literary contemporaries and successors would in words.

A prospective reader might assume that Guy St-Denis's title is to be read as metaphor, but Tecumseh's Bones quite literally identifies the book's focus. The fate of Tecumseh's corpse is crucial to a distinction between a monument and a 'mere cenotaph,' the latter devalued as having no direct link to its honoured subject. Beginning in 1840 with the Amherstberg initiative praised by Richardson, St-Denis traces contending claims extending over more than a century by Amherstberg, Chatham, London, Montreal, Thamesville, Walpole Island, and Wallaceburg to claim pride of place in honouring Tecumseh's bones. The proceedings of the 1841 town meeting initiating the Amherstberg project suggest the range of motives and machinations underlying these efforts in reflecting characteristic tensions between primitivism and savagism, the appropriation for nationalist purposes of a leader whose interest was in the survival of his own people in North America and whose alliance with Great Britain was strategic rather than ideological – and most of all, the need for money from other communities to support a local initiative. Meanwhile, St-Denis notes that Tecumseh's First Nations successors responded 'to the ghoulish fascination of their white neighbours by instituting a long tradition of secrecy and deception' made possible by the absence of any conclusive evidence regarding Tecumseh's burial. Accurately billed as 'part detective story, part historical inquiry,' St-Denis's book blends memoir and impressive archival research in constructing a narrative concluding with the long-delayed erection of not one but two memorials, the first in 1941 on Walpole Island, the second in 1963 on the site of the battlefield where Tecumseh died.

Tecumseh's foremost biographer, John Sugden, ended his 1985 study, Tecumseh's Last Stand, with an appendix titled 'The Dispute over Tecumseh's Burial,' and Tecumseh's Bones can be seen as unpacking and amplifying Sugden's half-dozen pages in one hundred and thirty-eight pages of text, eighty-three pages of notes, and a twenty-one-page 'Chronology of the Mystery.' Sugden's 1997 authoritative biography of Tecumseh reiterated that the fate of Tecumseh's bones remains 'the source of an enigma,' but he provides a dust-jacket assessment of Tecumseh's Bones as a 'thoroughly original work [which] casts new light on the enduring mystery of Tecumseh's fate, brilliantly demonstrating how history and myth converge.'

Having so assiduously and successfully anatomized the various claims of Tecumseh's monumentalists, St-Denis concludes that the remains of Tecumseh's body probably still lie on the site of the battlefield where he died. In an era when television's csi ('Crime Scene Investigation') is apparently attracting undergraduates to programs in forensics if not history, St-Denis's emphasis on an old injury to one of Tecumseh's thigh bones as the only evidence that could authenticate a definitive claim provides a timely resolution to his 'detective story.' That the book has already received the 2005 J.J. Talman Award from the Ontario Historical Society honouring the year's best book on Ontario's social, economic, political, or cultural history indicates St-Denis's success in yoking his mystery story to incisive historical inquiry and archival research.