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