The 2nd task was another story. Acting on your mother’s suggestion, in 1808 Tecumseh establisht for his brother “the Prophet’s Town” near where the Tippecanoe joins the Wabash: a mixt Indian community dedicated to industriousness, sobriety, the common ownership of property, brotherhood amongst the nations of red men, & repudiation of all things learnt from the “Long Knives,” by which term they call’d us whites. So successful was the town, & the strategy, Governor Harrison mistook the Prophet (who had changed his name from Lalawethika, or “Loud Mouth,” to Tenskwatawa, “Open Door”) for the leader of the confederacy, & invited him in the summer of 1809 to confer at Vincennes, the territorial capital, concerning the proposed treaty. That year I met all three.

Child: I am a Cook, not a Burlingame. You Burlingames get from your ancestor H.B. III a passion for the world that fetches you everywhere at once, in guises manifold as the world’s, to lead & shape its leaders & shapers. We Cooks, I know now, get from our forebear Ebenezer, the virgin poet of Maryland, an inexhaustible innocence that, whatever our involvement in the world (we are not merely Cooks), inclines us to be followers — better, learners: tutees of the Burlingames & those they’ve shaped. If Aaron Burr & Harman Blennerhassett had been one & the same man, as it sometimes seem’d to me they were, that man would be the Burlingame I despise & wish dead. If Tecumseh & Tenskwatawa were one man — a distillation & embodiment of the Indian blood flowing thro our line — that man would be the father I could love, admire, & pity. Of the Prophet I will say little: Jefferson agrees with Harrison that he is a rogue & charlatan, a former brawling drunk who, after a “conversion” as dramatical as Paul’s on the Damascus Road, became a teetotaling faker. I myself believe him to be both authentic & authentically half-mad, nowise to be trusted; I believe further that Tecumseh so saw him too, from the beginning.

As for the “Shooting Star”: what greater expression of my admiration can I make than that Tecumseh is more deserving of Andrée’s love than I? That I had rather be esteem’d by him than by anyone save her? That I think him worth a Jefferson, two Madisons, three Barlows, five Napoleons? I never felt more my grandfather’s son (but remember, I did not yet know that history in detail) than when I first sat at the feet of this successor to Pontiac, whom I pray it will be your fortune one day to meet as the head of a great free league of Indian nations, and to love as I do.

He began our closer connection in July 1810, by saving my life. On the strength of my relation to Andrée & my father’s & grandfather’s to Pontiac, Tecumseh had permitted me to live in the Prophet’s town (over the Prophet’s objections) & practice the Algonkin language thro the summer & fall of 1809, between my embassies to John Henry. He had heard me out carefully, thro an interpreter, on Andrée’s proposal regarding the Wyandots & the Harrison treaty, and had replied that while it did not strike him as the best strategy, it was the course he would probably follow anyhow, inasmuch as he expected the “village chiefs” to sign the treaty despite his threats. He also told me that William Henry Harrison was no villain, but a worthy tho implacable adversary who had champion’d legal justice for the Indians (vainly) in the Indiana legislature in 1807, even whilst dickering to buy their land at 3½ mills the acre—600 times less than the government’s standard selling price! But he would not talk to me further about such important matters as Pontiac’s rebellion, or his opinion of my father & grandfather, or my betrothal to his young friend “Star-of-the-Lake,” until we could discuss them in Algonkin.

I learnt fast. And in the process came to respect, even more than formerly, the red men’s famous harmony with their land (to sell which, they regarded less as treason than as fraud, since in their view no man had title to what was every man’s). I saw the ultimate harmlessness of even the fierce Wyandots & once-fierce Senecas, by contrast with the whites: Tecumseh’s comparison was of a pack of wolves to a forest fire. To my surprise I came to feel ever more clearly my distance from the Indians, even as I bridged it: were I not part Indian, there could have been no bridge; were I not mainly & finally European-American, no bridge would have been needed. From this last I came to see what Tecumseh later told me Pontiac had seen (and what I now know my grandfather knew before Pontiac): that while the wolf may make the deer a finer animal, & the eagle quicken the race of rabbits, all flee together from the fire, or perish in it. As there was no longer any real where for the Indian to flee…

Yet he was no defeatist. That the Indians perhaps had only different ways to lose meant to Tecumseh that the choice of ways was all the more important. Hence his preference for the tomahawk, for example, together with his recognition that only British artillery might truly drive back American artillery. Hence his tireless exhortations to the chiefs not to forget their differences, which were as old & “natural” as those between hare & hawk, but to work for their common good despite them, against the menace. The flaw in his reasoning, of course, was that exemplary conduct presumes someone to benefit from the example. If deer & wolf rise above their ancient differences to stand together, what have they taught the fire? Tecumseh’s reply to this question (which I never put) was in his bearing, his eloquence, his selfless energy, his spaciousness of heart & the general fineness of his character, which I think must far exceed his hero Pontiac’s: to be thus-&-such a man (these virtues preacht), to behave in thus-&-such a fashion, were excellent & sweet yea tho one perish — especially if one is to perish in any case. This tragical (but nowise despairing) lesson is what Tecumseh taught, in a language neither English nor Algonkin.

By the time that contemptible treaty was sign’d (September 30, 1809, anniversary as it happens of Adam & Eve’s eviction from Paradise, according to tradition, & of Ebenezer Cooke’s inadvertent loss of his father’s estate), I had enough grasp of the language to be trusted with the errand of reporting to Governor Harrison Tecumseh’s anger, as well as the Wyandots’ enlistment into the confederacy. With credentials supplied by the Canadian secret service, I pass’d as a scout for the U. States secret service charged with learning the extent of British instigation of the Indian alliance, and reported truthfully to Harrison that the confederacy grew stronger every season. That while the British understandably were cheer’d by it, they had as yet provided little beyond moral support to Tecumseh & the Prophet, but were likely to supply them with weapons if the confederacy chose to resist the new “treaty” with force, as Tecumseh was prepared to do. That the real instigators of Indian solidarity were just such spurious or broken treaties. That the best strategy against that solidarity (and against driving the Indians to join the British in the coming war) was to cease invading their territory & murdering them with legal impunity.

The last point Harrison granted; he even worried (what I’d not dared hope) that President Madison, who rather shared my general position, might be persuaded to set aside the treaty he Harrison had just negotiated — a move which would put the Governor uncomfortably betwixt his constituents & the man he must rely on for political & military support. Cheer’d, I went off to Boston & my business with John Henry; then return’d to the Prophet’s town by way of Vincennes (& Castines Hundred) in the spring, this time as Harrison’s messenger to the Prophet, whom he invited to the capital to discuss the treaty. I reminded him that the real leader was Tecumseh. All the more reason to invite his brother instead, Harrison felt: promote any jealousy betwixt them. Andrée & I agreed that now the obnoxious treaty was accomplisht, the next great step toward Indian confederacy would be for Tecumseh successfully to resist by force its implementation, then to negotiate with President Madison its repeal. This would establish his leadership in the eyes of the Americans, the British, & his own people, & give him authority in Washington & London to barter his allegiance or neutrality in the coming war for firm guarantees of an Indian free state. I deliver’d myself (in Algonkin) of this opinion, together with Harrison’s invitation. To my dismay, Tenskwatawa loudly declared I should be executed as a spy: he had got wind thro the winter of my pose with Harrison, and feign’d to believe it was no pose; that I & possibly Star-of-the-Lake as well were in the pay of the Long Knives.