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  • Of Faith, Career, and the Old Northwest
  • Jewel L. Spangler (bio)
Adam Jortner . The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 320 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95.

This book is a (dual) biography in the best tradition of such life writing. It tells the stories of two prominent figures of the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe, and uses the deep context of their life histories to makes sense not only of the razing of Prophetstown, but of conflict in the early-national Midwest more generally. The result is sometimes compelling, sometimes disappointing, and always genuinely entertaining reading.

William Henry Harrison probably needs no introduction to the readers of this journal. Born into a prominent Virginia political family, Harrison was Indiana's first territorial governor and the leader of U.S. forces at the battle that eventually provided him the nickname "Old Tippecanoe." He subsequently served as a wartime general, a peacetime congressman and senator, and as U.S. president for an underwhelming thirty-one days, before his death from pneumonia in 1841.

Adam Jortner pairs Harrison here not with Tecumseh, as one might expect, but with Tenskwatawa, more often known in government records simply as the (Shawnee) Prophet. Readers may be less familiar with this religious and civil leader than with his war-chief older brother. Tenskwatawa rose to prominence among the Ohio Shawnee and many other groups in the region after experiencing visions during the winter of 1804-5. He preached that the Great Spirit had instructed him that "the red people" would now be guided in the "proper way of living" through the Prophet and his example (p. 98). Tenskwatawa's message of complete abstinence from alcohol consumption, tenacious protection of Indian land claims, and full separation from Euro-Americans, their trade, and their ways, set him and his followers on a collision course with Harrison and the U.S. Army.

This book aims to advance the argument that conflict between Harrison and the Prophet was emblematic of a broader "Holy War" between a developing pan-Indian traditionalism and a Euro-American deistic sense of Providence. Ultimately, in Jortner's view, the War of 1812 in the West "was very much a [End Page 431] religious war . . . with the vast expanse of the western frontier, a holy land, as the prize" (p. 11). And he asserts that the outcomes of conflict were far from predetermined. It was the "decisions made on the frontier by leaders in specific circumstances between 1800 and 1815 [that] resulted in American success and Indian defeat" (p. 11). He consistently emphasizes moments of contingency, "wherein events could have turned out otherwise and the history of the United States and even its borders could have been radically different" (p. 10). For Jortner, the Prophet and his followers were not tragically doomed figures, not merely subalterns with some measurable agency, but full actors who shaped the story of U.S. history at every step until their ultimate battlefield defeat in 1813 (which itself could have been avoided).

Jortner takes us far back into the childhoods of Tenskwatawa (then called Lalawethika) and Harrison. Both were last sons, likely to be overshadowed by older brothers from the start. Their fathers were important and absent, one killed heroically in Dunmore's War, the other a busy member of the Continental Congress and then Governor of Virginia. The Shawnee boy grew up in the Ohio country during the Revolutionary struggle and its aftermath. In his formative years he witnessed the success of Indian resistance, as a Northwest confederacy repeatedly repelled Euro-American encroachment, including a resounding victory over Arthur St. Claire's forces in 1791. However, the confederacy's military defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, and its subsequent disintegration, led to the Treaty of Greenville the following year, with utterly devastating consequences for Indians in the region. Huge swaths of land were transferred to the Americans, and Tenskwatawa's people found themselves subject to American assimilationist policies. It is rumored that, for the next ten years, the future prophet was something of a lost soul, an impoverished drunkard.

Harrison...

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