cover image The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier

The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier

Adam Jortner. Oxford Univ, $27.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-19-976529-4

Auburn University historian Jortner offers a stimulating perspective on the frontier war that culminated in 1811 against the Shawnee at Tippecanoe. His central Native American protagonist is Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa—“the Prophet.” He rose to prominence among the Shawnee preaching “penance and sanctification” by returning to traditional ways. He purportedly “made the sun go dark at midday” in response to a taunting challenge issued by William Henry Harrison, territorial governor of Indiana (and future American president). How the prophet gained foreknowledge of a solar eclipse is less important to Jortner than the event’s consequences. To the peoples of the Ohio frontier, the eclipse was a spiritual sign placing their resistance to white encroachment in a context of moral and social reform. That in turn presented a threat to Harrison, who had his own sense of a providential mission to fulfill America’s destiny by expanding its power. Jortner makes a solid case that the outcome was not inevitable. The battle of Tippecanoe was indecisive; but Harrison’s spin machine transformed it into a triumph of civilization over superstition. And Jortner’s hypothesis that a different outcome could have led to an Indian state, underwritten by British Canada and shaped by the Prophet’s doctrines, is a provocative might-have-been. Maps. (Dec.)