him, Tecumseh went up and amiably shook him, saying, "Big
baby, Big baby." But he could be fierce and arrogant when he chose, and
he delighted to make the Americans bend to him. At one of their parleys,
General Harrison asked him to sit on his veranda with him. Tecumseh
haughtily refused, and forced the general to come out and meet him under
the trees, on the breast of the earth, who was, he said, the Indian's
mother.

He was in every fight with the Americans before Wayne's victory, but he
was not made a chief until the year following that battle. Then, though
he seemed resigned to the fate of his people, he became the leader in
their discontent, and in the parts of Ohio and Indiana where he lived he
kept it alive. In this he had the help of his brother Elkskuatawa,
the Prophet, who pretended to have dreams and revelations favorable to
Tecumseh's designs. In 1806, while they were at Greenville, the Prophet
somehow learned that there was to be an eclipse of the sun; he foretold
the coming miracle, and excited the savages through their superstitions
so dangerously that Governor Harrison urged them to banish the Prophet.
They made evasive answers, and kept the Prophet with them, while
Tecumseh amused the governor with meetings and parleys, and went and
came upon his errands among the Southern tribes stirring them up to join
the Northern nations in a revolt against the Americans. He used all his
eloquence and reason in trying to form this union of the red men, and
when these would not avail, he did not scruple to employ the arts of
his brother. In exhorting one of the Southern tribes he rebuked their
coldness, and told them that when he reached Detroit, he would stamp
his foot, and they should feel the earth tremble as a sign of his divine
authority for his work. About the time it would have taken him to reach
Detroit, the great earthquake of 1810 shook the Seminoles with terror of
the man whose arguments they had rejected.

In fact, Tecumseh and the Prophet constantly played into each other's
hands, but in one of Tecumseh's absences the Prophet made the mistake of
attacking General Harrison at Tippecanoe, and the savages were severely
beaten. The Prophet had also made the mistake of promising them a
victory, and after the defeat he lost his power over them.

This was in 1811, but the next year the war between the United States
and Great Britain broke out, and then Tecumseh seized his chance for
renewing the war against