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f them all, Tecumseh is easily foremost. He was a man who, had he been born to great position among civilized nations, would have stamped his name and fame upon the world. He was not a mere savage of the ordinary type, bloodthirsty, brutal beyond description, going upon one aimless raid after another to glut his passion for rapine and murder. These savage traits were not his, though all the good qualities of the Indian he possessed in double measure. He was fearless, he was untiring, and when once started toward an end he knew no rest until he had accomplished his design. He had a primitive dignity of thought and expression that marked him as a great orator. At the famous council at Vincennes, when Tecumseh had finished his speech and was about to sit down with his braves, the interpreter, pointing to General W. H. Harrison, said, "Your father wishes you to take a chair." But the ordinary courtesy of calling the white Governor the father of the red men was repugnant to Tecumseh, and with lofty mien and unpremeditated eloquence he declined the proffered seat. "No," he exclaimed, "the sun is my father, the earth is my mother, and I will rest on her bosom." And he sat down on Mother Earth with his assembled warriors, this act and fiery speech more than ever binding them to his fortunes. Tecumseh was in reality the first of the great Ohio men. He was a Shawnee Indian, and his tribe, in the middle of the eighteenth century, had emigrated from Florida to what is now the State of Ohio, Tecumseh being born in what is now Clarke County, near the present city of Springfield, in an Indian town that bore the name of Piqua. This must not be confounded with the present Ohio town of Piqua, which is in another county altogether, the birthplace of Tecumseh now being the site of a straggling village bearing the name, West Boston. In his boyhood there was nothing unusual. He grew up in the stirring times when Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton, and the other hardy Kentucky pioneers. Long Knives the Indians called them--were leading their forces into the West. It was a time when the Indians were constantly fighting. They did not live in Kentucky, but they regarded the fertile woods and prairies south of the Ohio River as their hunting-grounds, and they attacked with savage cruelty all the whites that dared to encroach upon this territory. The whites in turn crossed the Ohio in reprisal, burnt the Indian towns, tomahawked women and children, dest
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