Tecumseh: A Life

From Barnes & Noble

The charismatic warrior-hero and visionary leader of the first North American Indian confederacy is profiled in this unprecedented comprehensive biography.

From the Publisher

“A richly detailed, utterly scrupulous account that is as poignant as it is informative.”—Barry Gewen, The New York Times Book Review

“Sugden has mined previously ignored British regimental histories that are scattered all over the English countryside—an approach that indicates the breadth of his scholarship and the thoroughness of his analysis....Intricate....Insightful.”—Jennifer Veech, The Washington Post Book World

David Dixon

This is the first comprehensive and reliable biography of [Tecumseh]. Sugden's efforts will force scholars to recognize that a balanced understanding of the period requires an examination of the native role. Even with such ambitious goals, Sudgen's definitive work manages to tell the inspirational story of a great American leader. -- American History

Library Journal

Running a simple search in WorldCat, OCLC's vast bibliographic database, yields scores of titles concerned with "TecumsehShawnee Chief1768-1813." The biographical literature devoted to Tecumseh perhaps exceeds that given to any other American Indian.

Now Sugden, whose previous title on the Shawnee leader, Tecumseh's Last Stand (LJ 1/86), focused primarily on Tecumseh's final major campaign and ensuing death, has come out with a full biography of this great leader. This intelligent study of Tecumseh's life relates a great deal as well about the history of the Shawnee, especially in the Ohio region, and the wider context of Tecumseh's attempt to create a Pan Indian resistance, including a history of earlier such attempts.

A very competent addition to the literature on this remarkable man; recommended for most academic and larger public libraries.

--Charlie Cowling, SUNY at Brockport

Booknews

The British author of writes further of this Shawnee chief<-->purportedly for the first time in the historical-cultural context of his tribe. The inside cover maps ground the charismatic leader dreamed of as a pan-Indian confederacy. While this alliance never materialized, Sugden's biography details his military powers as displayed in the War of 1812 as well as his family life. Includes b&w illustrations (several related to his 1813 last stand at Moraviantown near Detroit). Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

NY Times Book Review

A detailed, scrupulous account of the great leader who envisioned a pan-Indian alliance against the whites but came, inevitably, to grief in the War of 1812.

Barry Gewen

Tecumseh, the greatest of American Indian leaders, is both known and unknown to us....Yet ask Americans today what they know about him and you are likely to receive blank stares. He deserves better, and in John Sugden he has got the biographer he deserves. Tecumseh: A Life is a richly detailed, utterly scrupulous account that is as poignant as it is informative -- for Tecumseh seems to have been doomed from the start. Indeed, the story of this failed champion may be the most classically tragic in all of American history.

--Barry Gewen, New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

This biography demythologizes the legendary Shawnee chief while still according him mythic stature.

In popular culture, Tecumseh is a tragic symbol of the American Indian: a brilliant and charismatic leader who tried against impossible odds in the early 1800s to unite dozens of tribes against the steady march of American settlement into their historic lands. British Historian Sugden (Sir Francis Drake, 1991, etc.) has spent 30 years searching for the real Tecumseh, but, for all that, in the end he delivers a portrait remarkably similar to popular perceptions.

Sugden's Tecumseh was a remarkable man who rose to eminence at the precise historical moment when a thousand years of Native American life east of the Mississippi were coming to an end. Tecumseh did nothing to change what happened to the Indians. Indians who rallied to his defiant cause and those who decided instead to do whatever the Americans asked shared precisely the same fate: loss of lands and culture and eventual forced removal. But even by the time of Tecumseh's death in 1813 in battle against future US president William Henry Harrison, his enemies were describing Tecumseh as the noble embodiment of the best of the American Indian and as the tragic embodiment of the Indians' fate. Cowed by Tecumseh's already mythic stature, an American general chose not to take him and his British allies on in the early days of the War of 1812, when an American victory might have led to the fall of Canada. To make Tecumseh's story read even more like a Hollywood script, his brother was the Prophet, leader of a religious reform movement among the Shawnee that was another desperate, and ultimately futile, expression ofIndian resistance.

Sugden has written that rare biography that documents and justifies its worshipfulness. Tecumseh was not well served by history, but history is well served by him.