Tecumseh. Jim Poling, Sr.
the time to enforce hunting rights over the wildlife rich Tennessee and Kentucky wilderness.
The brothers and their warriors arrived among the Chickamaugas in late 1789, or early 1790, and immediately joined raiding parties attacking settlements and boats coming down the Tennessee River. It was a repeat of the Ohio River days: hit and run raids to discourage settlement.
One raid was against a barge being brought upriver. It was manned by sixteen American soldiers commanded by a major. The Indians approached the barge and Cheeseekau talked to the major, feigning friendship. Later, when the soldiers put down their arms to man the oars, the Indians opened fire on them. More than half of the Americans were killed or wounded and their mission, which the Indians believed was to build a fort in the area, was aborted.
In another attack the Shawnees poured musket fire into a passing barge and when it drifted ashore they found thirty-two men dead or wounded.
Their raids were effective. They slowed the rate of settlement, forcing some land development companies to delay or even abandon plans for settlements. Cheeseekau and others hit hard at Cumberland River settlements near Nashville, spreading panic among the settlers. For a while, the Chickamaugas believed that the war against settlement might be won.
On June 26, 1792, Cheeseekau and others hit a settlement called Ziegler’s Station near where Nashville now stands. Twenty-one people gathered in a blockhouse for safety, but the warriors set fire to vacant buildings and watched the flames spread to the blockhouse. When the fire became intense, a young man opened the door and was shot in the chest as he ushered out his wife and six children. Other men bolted for freedom. Some of them escaped, but others were killed. Jacob Ziegler was burned to death inside his house.
Women and children captives were marched through the forest, the children in bare feet. At one point, the Indians stopped and made little moccasins for them, an incredible contrast to the savagery of the raid. One man in a pursuing posse commented: “At the next muddy spot, we saw little footprints of moccasins. There was that much kindness in them (the Indians).”
Cheeseekau released three children a few weeks later, in return for fifty-eight dollars each. The taking of captives was an important part of Indian warfare. Captives were useful as fighters or slaves, or as currency in trade for almost anything.
Tecumseh is not named anywhere as being part of that raiding party, but that does not mean he was not there. He had gone north to Ohio the year before, when tribes there issued a call for help in a major offensive expected from the Long Knives. However, he certainly was among the Chickamaugas about three months after the Ziegler’s Station raid, and was part of an attack that would bring more personal tragedy.
In September 1792, war chiefs gathered at Lookout Mountain at Chattanooga to plot more campaigns against the settlers. There were heated arguments about whether the Americans were too powerful to defeat, and whether it was better to stop fighting and accept their gifts. Cheeseekau was enraged. He stepped forward among the chiefs, raised his hands, and declared:
“With these hands I have killed three hundred, and I will kill three hundred more, drink my fill of blood, and sit down and be happy.”
The chiefs agreed. There would be a new campaign of killing and destruction along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers — one to shock the whites into abandoning their settlements.
Buchanan’s Station was four miles south of Nashville; a typical frontier settlement. Its few log cabins were protected by a log palisade and blockhouse occupying a rise on Mill Creek, near where it flowed into the Cumberland. Late on the night of September 30, Cheeseekau and roughly thirty Shawnee slipped through the shadows created by a bright and full moon, advancing silently on the settlement. A shadow flickered and alarmed the livestock, which grew restless and set the dogs to barking. Two sentries in the blockhouse peered out their port holes and saw the Indians advancing. They fired shots and the Indians began pouring shots into the blockhouse port holes.
There are differing stories about what happened that night. One is that the sentries’ first shot struck Cheeseekau in the centre of the forehead, killing him instantly. The other is that the Indians tried for an hour to take the station and Cheeseekau was trying to set fire to the blockhouse when he was hit by a musket ball. As he died, he is said to have told the warriors, including Tecumseh, that he was happy to die in battle rather than in a wigwam like an old woman.
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