The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier

Abstract

In this imaginative, well-written dual biography of the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa and William Henry Harrison, Adam Jortner attempts, with mixed results, to reinterpret the westward expansion of the United States in the years surrounding the War of 1812. Harrison, the ambitious younger son of elite Virginia slaveholders, emerges as a ruthless politician who used cunning and personal connections to rule Indiana territory. Meanwhile, the Prophet, often cast as a charlatan or an inept follower of his brother Tecumseh, gets his due as the central figure in the great native alliance. The collision between their religious beliefs is the driving force in Jortner's grand vision. He boldly claims that the War of 1812 on the frontier “was very much a religious war—the Great Spirit against providence—with the vast expanse of the western frontier, a holy land, as the prize” (p. 11). Rather than invoking the strangeness of the native other, Jortner invokes the strangeness of the shared past. The young United States is deemed a “failed state” more on a par with native peoples experiencing the chaos of colonialism than with European nation-states (p. 51). Both societies were “stalked” by prophets and held beliefs in witches and folk medicine (p. 167). While often well placed, such relativism also leads Jortner to discount the real importance of native cultures. He rejects social science explanations, such as Anthony F. C. Wallace's “revitalization” theory, as explanations for the rise of prophets, and he downplays the obvious syncretism in the religions of Tenskwatawa and the earlier Delaware prophet Neolin (p. 10). These prophets seem to exist as individual actors somehow detached from their own cultures.