Tippecanoe, Indiana and Tyler too?
Being on the Tippecanoe River, we had to visit the battlefield, which named after William Henry Harrison, who also ran for president under the Tippecanoe and Tyler flag. The battle is called “Where two cultures collided.” As European settlers began to settle the Northwest Territory (OH, IN, IL, etc.), Native Americans were driven from their hunting and farming lands. The European mindset was that land was owned by the individual as property. The Indians believed that one could claim the land, but in reality it was everyone’s for hunting and general use. Taking a lesson from the formation of the United States, Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief, dreamed of organizing the territory’s many tribes into a confederation and creating his own government like that of the US. He had a younger brother, known as El Prophet, who claimed to divine the future. He had been a drunkard and a scoundrel, but he was born again. Like many born against, he became a fan of returning to the ‘old’ ways of life before European settlement. The capital of his new nation was at Prophetstown, situated on a hill near the Tippecanoe River. James Madison found out about this plan and told Harrison, the governor of the territory, to do something about it. While Tecumseh was out recruiting new tribes to join the Confederacy, Harrison marched with his troops to face the Confederacy, without his leader.
The Prophet had another of his dreams and said that the white man’s bullets would dissolve into dust. On November 2, 1811, the Indians attacked before dawn, lost the battle, Prophetstown was burned, the Confederacy lost face, and Tecumseh was furious. Who knows what would have happened if a cool head had prevailed?
Today, the battlefield is enshrined by a wrought-iron fence, guarded by tercentennial white oaks, sentinels to the events of that cold November day. A small museum offers a balanced view of the clash of the two cultures and the events that led to the confrontation and the consequences.
About a mile away as the crow flies is Prophetstown, now a state park. A museum there describes the life of the Confederacy and the dreams of Tecumseh.
A short drive from the battlefield is West Lafayette, IN, the home of the Purdue University Boilermakers. We drove through their campus and saw many of the old Victorian houses in the city and its sister city, Lafayette.
On the way home we stopped in Delphi. The Palace of Justice has a museum and archives for genealogical research. The museum is quite quaint with memorabilia everywhere. Yes, there is an Oracle at Delphi; the high school yearbook. The city also has a canal, the Erie-Wabash Canal with a museum depicting life on the canal.