Sunday, May 15, 2011

How would William Henry Harrison have answered Tecumseh's claim that the Indians had no right to sell the land?

In his conference with Harrison at a council in Vincennes (located in modern Indiana) Tecumseh claimed that the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1809, which sold large swaths of land to the United States, was invalid because not all of the Native peoples affected by the treaty had agreed to the sale. "Any sale," he said, "not made by all is not valid." Tecumseh's speech to Harrison is very famous, and while there are few published accounts of Harrison's response, we do know more or less how he responded. He said, simply, that Indians were not one people, and that different Indian tribes were entitled to sell land to the United States of their own volition. He also disputed the Shawnee's claims to the land (they were relatively recent arrivals in the region) and essentially discredited the pan-Indian movement that Tecumseh was attempting to forge. The talks ended with mutual insults and near violence. 

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