GOD GAVE US THIS COUNTRY
Takamthi and the First American Civil War
Bil Gilbert
New York: Atheneum, 1989
347 pp., $21.95, Cloth
PANTHER IN THE SKY
James Alexander Thom
New York: Ballantine Books, 1989
655 pp., $19.95, Cloth
In the "Author's Note" appended to his novel Panther in the Sky, James Thom belittles the labors of historians. "In the 175 years since Tecumseh was killed," he remarks, "scholars and historians have quibbled over details of his life, career, and death--thus perpetuating and compounding some myths and, here and there, probably preserving a truth." Would Thom dismiss Bil Gilbert as one of these quibblers? In accepted scholarly fashion Gilbert delimits himself: His raw material must be extracted from the meager records of Tecumseh's life. (Gilbert calls him "Tekamthi," a more accurate, but less common, rendering than "Tecumer.") "What follows," he explains in the prologue to God Gave Us This Country, "is an attempt to describe a shadow, the one Tekamthi made and the conditions of an environment that caused him to cast it as he did."
The Rebecca Galloway Story
The authors' respective handling of the Rebecca Galloway episode reveals who is guilty of "perpetuating and compounding" myths. Rebecca's grandson, William, a physician in Xenia, Ohio, published a book in 1934 entitled Old Chillicothe, a mine of local lore, in which he related his grandmother's version of a story that had long circulated around the region. A decade or so before the War of 1812 the Galloway family, newly settled in the Ohio country, struck up a friendship with Tecumseh, who frequently visited the area where he had been born in 1768. At the age of fifteen Rebecca, a fetching and brainy lass, fell in love with Tecumseh, and he with her. "Mr. Tikomfa Chief," as she called him, asked for her hand, but she would consent only if he would forsake the red man's ways and settle into the groove of white respectability. After a season of agonized indecision, Tecumseh bade farewell to Rebecca; lamenting the shattering of their hopes, he begged her to understand that he could not abandon his people in their hour of severe trial. It is a charming story, replete with enough romance, nobility, and self-sacrificing love to ensure its popularity and survival over the years.
Bil Gilbert sifts the evidence, and with the caution and skepticism of a veteran historian (remarkably, most of his previous books have been on natural history and the environment), he finds it "difficult to make a case for the….tale being a true one." Gilbert speculates that Rebecca, and old lady of eighty when she regaled her young grandson, had transmuted an adolescent girl's encounter with her father's Shawnee friend into a melodramatic tale of frontier romance. For Gilbert, the point is not the trustworthiness of an elderly woman's reminiscences but what the early and persistence crediting of the story reveals about Tecumseh's ability to inflame the imagination of whites:
The creation and acceptance of the romance of Rebecca
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