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Updated: June 17, 2025
With the opening of the spring of 1811, the insolence and effrontery of the Shawnee leaders measurably increased. About the first of April twelve horses were stolen from the settlement of Busseron, about twenty miles above Vincennes. The pillaging bands of the Potawatomi, directly under the influence of the Prophet, were committing robberies and murders on the Illinois and Missouri frontiers.
About the twentieth of June, five Shawnees and ten Winnebagoes of the Prophet's party invaded Vincennes bringing a number of rifles and tomahawks to be repaired. They were boldly accused by some Potawatomi of Topenebee's faction to be meditating war against Harrison and to be making observations on the situation of affairs within the town.
The official account of the proceedings as made by Peter Jones, secretary to the Governor, and now reposing in the archives of the United States government, shows that instead of attempting to make any purchase of Indian lands when only a small number of representatives of the tribes were present, that the Governor on the eighteenth of September, dispatched messengers to Detroit to summon certain Delawares and Potawatomi who were absent; that on the same day he also directed Joseph Barron to go to the Miami villages along the Wabash to call in Richardville, one of the principal chiefs of that tribe.
Notwithstanding frequent demands, he constantly refused to deal out any liquor except in the most meager quantities he restrained the Potawatomi and made them smoke the pipe of peace with their offended allies he met and answered all the arguments suggested by the British agents and after fifteen days of constant and unremitting effort won over the chiefs of the Mississinewa and gained the day.
Here are Colonels Joseph Brant and Alexander McKee, with Captains Bunbury and Silvie, of the British troops. They are living in clever cabins built by the Potawatomi and other Indians, eighteen miles above Lake Erie. They have great stores of corn, pork, peas and other provisions, which, together with arms and ammunition, they are daily issuing to the Indians.
A great council on the banks of the Detroit in June, 1778, was duly opened with prayer, after which Hamilton harangued the assembled Chippewas, Hurons, Mohawks, and Potawatomi on their "duties" in the war and congratulated them on the increasing numbers of their prisoners and scalps, and then urged them to redoubled activity by holding out the prospect of the complete expulsion of white men from the great interior hunting-grounds.
Jesse S. Birch, of Oxford, an accurate local historian, has preserved an interesting account of this village as seen by the early settlers in the years from 1830 to 1840. The Kickapoos had, at that time, moved on to other places, but bands of the Potawatomi were still on the ground. "Pits," says Birch, "in which the Indians stored their corn, were to be seen until a few years ago.
In the circumjacent forests, and a little in advance of the position occupied by the militia, was a camp of over eleven hundred Indians, composed of Miamis, Shawnees, Potawatomi, Delawares, Ottawas, Chippewas and Wyandots, with a number of British adherents from Detroit, waiting for the first hours of dawn of the coming day.
The confederacy among them, the Kickapoos and the Sacs and Foxes, resulted in the extermination of the old Illinois tribes, and after that extermination, the Kickapoos took possession of the country around Peoria and along the Vermilion river, the Potawatomi of eastern and northern Illinois, while the Sacs and Foxes went farther to the west.
Now that the hour of destiny is at hand, his heart fails him. He counsels caution and a postponement of the fight. He urges that a treaty be entered into; a compliance made with the demands of the Governor, and that the Potawatomi murderers be surrendered up. The army must be thrown off its guard and a treacherous attack made on its return home. But the young men and warriors think otherwise.
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