Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/550

530 spirit seized the purpose of imitating it among the red men. In the many councils and conferences between Tecumseh and his associated chieftains and General Harrison, the forest champion took and resolutely held two positions, identified, as he said, with the rights of the Indians: First, Harrison having complained of him for trying to unite the tribes in a league, Tecumseh acknowledged the fact, and maintained his right to do so. The Indians might combine and confederate in a common cause as justly as the white men had done. Harrison was the agent for what he called “the Seventeen Fires” united in council, — the States of the Union. “Why might not the Indian tribes unite their council fires?” asked Tecumseh. Again, Harrison insisted on the fact that the territory in dispute had been already ceded by the Miamis to the United States. Tecumseh replied that a few Indian tribes had no right to sell lands which belonged as a whole to the whole Indian race. The whole land being the common inheritance of the aborigines, the Miamis could not alienate one portion, the Delawares another, and so on. The Great Spirit, he said, had given the whole to the red man, and put the whites on the other side of the big water. The whites had no right to come here and gradually dispossess the Indian race by cozening grants of land from single tribes. General Harrison stood stoutly in his answer against Tecumseh's plea. He denied that the Indians ever were or could be regarded as one nation. He urged that the land in dispute had been purchased from the Miamis, who had long possessed it, and that the Shawnees, whom Tecumseh represented, were intruders from Georgia, whence they had been driven by the Creeks, and that they had no right to interfere with the Miamis in the disposition of their own territory. Here we have, put into a practical form, the fundamental question as to the tenure of Indian tribes in unimproved regions, free to be coursed over. Tecumseh's grievance was that in Jefferson's administration the