At the Battle of Tippecanoe on 7 November 1811, American forces under Governor William Henry Harrison withstood a pre-dawn attack by warriors of Tecumseh's Native confederacy near Prophetstown in the Indiana Territory, then destroyed the settlement. Tecumseh himself was away. The clash weakened his growing confederacy and later gave Harrison the campaign slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too."3
On the Wabash in 1811, two visions of the frontier collided. Tecumseh was building a confederacy to stop American expansion; William Henry Harrison marched to break it. The battle came at dawn, at the place called Tippecanoe.4
Part of The greatest battles in American history · Next: The Battle of Lake Erie
Who won the Battle of Tippecanoe and why?
Harrison's army won. It held its camp through a two-hour night attack because his men slept at their posts in a closed square, the officers fed fresh companies into each threatened corner, and the warriors could not break the line before daylight. The Native fighters then withdrew, and Harrison burned their abandoned town.5
Tecumseh's confederacy
As American settlers pressed west, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh worked to unite the Native nations of the frontier into a confederacy that would resist further land cessions. Its spiritual center was Prophetstown, led by his brother Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet.6
The brothers founded Prophetstown in 1808 where the Tippecanoe River flows into the Wabash, after pressure from settlers had pushed them out of Ohio. Tecumseh, born in 1768, spent the following years traveling to win over other nations; Indiana's state park service credits him with persuading warriors from more than 14 of them to set aside old disputes and gather at the town.7
The immediate grievance was land. On 30 September 1809, at Fort Wayne, Harrison signed a treaty with Delaware, Potawatomi, Miami and Eel River Miami leaders that ceded about three million acres to the United States, at an immediate cost, the Indiana Historical Bureau notes, of about one-third of a cent per acre. Tecumseh rejected it. In August 1810 and again in July 1811 he met Harrison at Vincennes, the territorial capital, and argued that Native land was the common property of all the nations and could not be sold by a few village chiefs.8
The march on Prophetstown
With Tecumseh away recruiting in the south, Governor William Henry Harrison marched a force up the Wabash and camped near Prophetstown, seeking either to overawe the confederacy or to provoke a fight while its leader was gone.9
The Indiana Historical Bureau dates the start of the campaign to 26 September 1811, when Harrison left Vincennes with about 1,000 men. From 1 October his troops built Fort Harrison near present-day Terre Haute, and on 29 October they resumed the march north. The column mixed regulars of the 4th U.S. Infantry with Indiana militia, mounted riflemen and dragoons.10
Harrison reached the outskirts of Prophetstown on the evening of 6 November. A messenger under a white flag asked for a pause until the leaders could talk, and both sides agreed not to fight before then. Distrusting the truce, Harrison camped on a rise about a mile from the town beside Burnett Creek and had his men sleep in a rough rectangle, with militia on the perimeter and about 300 regulars held in reserve.11
Harrison's choices on 6 November
The camp was itself the result of an argument. When the army came within sight of Prophetstown that afternoon, Harrison's officers, led by Major Joseph Hamilton Daveiss of the dragoons, urged him to march straight on the town while the men were eager. The army's own log of the march records that the governor proposed to camp but was advised to move on and attack at once. Harrison later explained that his instructions did not allow him to attack while there was still a chance the Prophet would accept the government's demands, and that he would not lead raw troops into ground he had not seen.12
He advanced anyway, cautiously, until the Prophet's envoys met him and the two sides agreed to talk the next day. The ground beside the Wabash below the town was too open and lacked wood, so two of his officers, Majors Waller Taylor and Marston Clark, were sent to find a better site and chose the low rise beside Burnett Creek. Harrison's critics later claimed the Indians had led him into a trap there; Taylor answered in 1817 that he and Clark had picked the spot themselves. The American Battlefield Trust likewise describes Harrison retiring to the hill of his own accord, skeptical of the truce.13
Harrison prepared for a night attack. Each company slept opposite its place in the line, with weapons beside it, and every officer knew the standing order to hold his ground until relieved. The dragoons were to form on foot as a reserve, and the troops were roused every morning an hour before dawn. The American Battlefield Trust puts about 300 regulars in reserve to steady the militia on the perimeter.14
How many soldiers fought at Tippecanoe?
Roughly 1,000 to 1,200 Americans faced somewhere between 250 and 500 warriors. The American Battlefield Trust counts about 1,040 soldiers and militia under Harrison and around 500 Native fighters, while Indiana's state park service gives Harrison 1,200 troops. No roll of the warriors survives, so their strength is an estimate, not a count. The British Indian agent Matthew Elliott, writing from Amherstburg after talking to a Kickapoo who had fought, put the warriors at 250 to 300, of whom no more than 100 were ever engaged.15
American losses are better documented: the White House Historical Association puts them at 190 killed and wounded and the American Battlefield Trust at 189, nearly a fifth of the 1,040 men the Trust counts. Native losses were never recorded; the Trust estimates about 120.16
Harrison's own return of 18 November listed 37 killed, 25 wounded who had since died and 126 wounded, 188 in all. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives about 60 American dead. Among the fallen were Daveiss, Captain Spier Spencer and both of Spencer's lieutenants.17
The Native losses are guesswork. Harrison reported that the warriors left 36 to 40 dead on the field and carried off others; Elliott's informant counted only 25 killed, nine of them Kickapoo and six Winnebago. The American Battlefield Trust estimates about 120 casualties and the Canadian Encyclopedia about 50 dead.18
The dawn attack
Before dawn on 7 November the warriors attacked Harrison's camp, hoping to surprise and scatter it. The soldiers held their lines through fierce fighting in the dark, and when daylight came the attackers drew off after American counterattacks.19
Why the Prophet attacked is disputed. Indiana's state park service says he wanted to avoid a fight but, fearing an attack, decided to strike first. Elliott's Kickapoo informant told a different story: that American sentries shot at two young Winnebagos who crept near the camp, and that the insult roused the warriors to revenge. Both accounts agree that the attack came in the last hours of darkness.20
According to the American Battlefield Trust, Tenskwatawa ignored his brother's warnings not to start a war before the confederacy was ready. From the ledge now called Prophet's Rock he sang war songs through the night and promised his followers that his power would protect them from bullets. The first shots came from a feint against the north end of the camp. The heavier blow fell on the southern flank, where Captain Spier Spencer's Indiana company, the Yellow Jackets, named for their bright yellow coats, wavered after Spencer and both his lieutenants fell. Harrison moved Captain David Robb's mounted riflemen across the camp to close the gap. A second wave then struck both ends of the rectangle; on the north, Major Joseph Hamilton Daveiss of the Indiana Light Dragoons was mortally wounded leading a counter-charge.21
Harrison's report gives the view from inside the camp. He had risen at about a quarter past four and was about to have the men called out when the first shot was fired. The sentries fled, and in his account the first blow fell on the companies of Captains Robert Barton and Frederick Geiger at one corner of the rear line, where a few warriors broke into the camp. The campfires lit the soldiers for the attackers and were put out as quickly as possible. Harrison rode from corner to corner moving companies to wherever the line was giving way, his aim being to keep it unbroken until there was light enough for a general charge.22
The fighting lasted about two hours by the reckoning of the American Battlefield Trust and Indiana's state park service, about three by the Canadian Encyclopedia's. At first light the soldiers charged out of their lines and drove the warriors back across the marsh. As the light grew, the warriors pulled back through the marsh to Prophetstown and then left it, many of them fleeing toward Wildcat Creek, according to Indiana's state park service.23
Was Tecumseh at the Battle of Tippecanoe?
No. Tecumseh was in the South, recruiting among the Creek, Chickasaw and Choctaw, and he had warned his brother not to provoke a war until the confederacy was stronger. Tenskwatawa launched the attack without him, and the defeat cost the Prophet much of the trust his followers had placed in his promises.24
The American Battlefield Trust places Tecumseh's return about three months after the battle, when he found Prophetstown in ruins. The defeat did not end the resistance: raids on settlements continued into the spring of 1812, and the setback pushed Tecumseh toward an alliance with Britain.25
Prophetstown burned
Harrison's men then advanced on Prophetstown, found it abandoned, and burned it along with its stores. The destruction struck a blow at the confederacy's base, though it did not destroy the movement itself.26
The town was set on fire on 8 November, and Harrison's column began the long march home; the Indiana Historical Bureau dates his return to Vincennes to 18 November. Some at first saw the costly night action as close to a defeat, but Harrison presented it as a great strategic victory, and that version prevailed.27
Why Tippecanoe mattered
Tippecanoe damaged Tecumseh's confederacy and inflamed the frontier on the eve of the War of 1812, in which Tecumseh allied with the British and was later killed. For Harrison the battle became a lasting political asset, remembered decades later in his presidential slogan, Tippecanoe and Tyler too.28
When the war came, Tecumseh and his remaining followers fought beside the British around the Great Lakes, including at the capture of Fort Detroit. After the American naval victory at Lake Erie in September 1813 left the British without support on the water, they abandoned Detroit and retreated into Upper Canada, with Harrison, now a brigadier general commanding in the Northwest, in pursuit. On 5 October 1813 he caught them at the Battle of the Thames. Tecumseh was killed there, and the alliance he had built fell apart.29
The battle also made a president. In 1840 the Whigs nominated "Old Tippecanoe" with John Tyler as his running mate, and their Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign turned the frontier general into a symbol of the West. On 29 and 30 May 1840 the party held a mass rally on the Tippecanoe battlefield itself. Harrison won the Electoral College by 234 votes to 60 over Martin Van Buren, but he died on 4 April 1841, about a month into his term, the first president to die in office.30
Where is the Tippecanoe battlefield today?
The field is preserved as Tippecanoe Battlefield Park in Battle Ground, Indiana, north of Lafayette. The 96-acre park is a National Historic Landmark, with a museum and an 85-foot marble obelisk erected in 1908. Next to it, Prophetstown State Park covers the ground where the Tippecanoe meets the Wabash.31
The museum, run by the Tippecanoe County Historical Association, traces the action on a fiber-optic map and tells the story of Tecumseh, the Prophet and Harrison; the county parks department maintains the grounds and the monument. Prophetstown State Park, Indiana's newest, is restoring tallgrass prairie and wetland between the two rivers and takes its name from the Native town that stood there. For the war that followed, see our account of the Battle of New Orleans.32
