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Chapter VI - An Indian Leader Dies, Tribes Surrender
An Indian Leader Dies, Tribes Surrender 1812 - 1813
After notification of Parry's heroic naval victory, General Harrison quickly moved his forty-five hundred men, mostly Kentucky volunteers, across lake Erie to defeat the British and Indian forces at the Battle of Thames on October 5. Shawnee and Chippewa warriors continued to fight even though the British had surrendered. However, when they heard of the death of their brilliant leader, Tecumseh, they left the field of combat. Tecumseh, a Shawnee chieftain, had campaigned to organize Indians and prevent American expansion into their lands, preaching racial separatism and full Indian independence. But Harrison's victory gave the United States complete control of the old Northwest, and Tecumseh's dream of a united Indian confederacy died with him. In 1813 war between pro-British Creek Indians and American frontiersmen erupted along the southwest border of the United States. Led by future president Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee militia of two thousand men set out to vanquish the Creeks once and for all. Settlers in the Mississippi region had savagely battled with the Creeks for months, and hundreds on both sides had been slaughtered. After one battle, frontiersman Davy Crockett, a member of the force attacking the Creeks, remarked, "We shot them like dogs." On March 27, 1814, at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa Rivers which is in present-day Alabama, Jackson soundly defeated the much-hated warriors. The subdued Creeks sadly signed away twenty-three million acres of their lands to the United States, including part of Georgia and most of Alabama.
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