owd around him. Then with
his keen eyes fixed on the Governor for a single moment, and turning
them to the sky above, with his sinewy arms pointed toward the heavens,
and with a tone and manner indicative of supreme contempt, for the
paternity assigned him, said in a voice whose clarion tones were heard
throughout the whole assembly: 'My Father?--The sun is my father--the
earth is my mother--and on her bosom I will recline!"

Thus the council opened. The Governor, with a short sword at his side,
seated on the platform with his officers and advisers; the Indians in
front of him seated on the grass; to the left, the Potawatomi chief,
Winamac, with one of his young men, extended on the green, and all about
the eager and curious faces of the crowd, now wrought up to a high state
of tension by the sarcastic retort of the Indian chieftain. The speech
that followed, "was full of hostility from beginning to end." Tecumseh
began in a low voice and spoke for about an hour. "As he warmed with his
subject his clear tones might be heard, as if 'trumpet-tongued' to the
utmost limits of the assembled crowd who gathered around him." The
interpreter Barron, was an illiterate man and the beauty and eloquence
of the chief's oration was in great part lost. He denounced with passion
and bitterness the cruel murder of the Moravian Indians during the
Revolutionary War, the assassination of friendly chieftains and other
outrages, and said that he did not know how he could ever be a friend of
the white man again; that the tribes had been driven by the Americans
"toward the setting sun, like a galloping horse," and that they would
shortly push them into the lakes where they could neither stand nor
walk; that the white people had allotted each separate tribe a certain
tract of land so as to create strife between them, and so that they
might be destroyed; that he and his brother had purposed from the
beginning to form a confederation of all the tribes to resist any
further encroachment of the whites; that the Great Spirit had given all
the land in common to the Indians, and that no single tribe had a right
to alienate any particular portion of it. He declared that the Treaty of
Fort Wayne had been made with the consent of only a few; that it was
largely brought about by the threats of Winamac, and that a reluctant
consent had been wrung from the Weas because they were few in number. So
fierce and vitriolic became his abuse of Winamac that that chie