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GALLOP TOWARD THE SUN by Peter Stark

GALLOP TOWARD THE SUN

Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation

by Peter Stark

Pub Date: Aug. 29th, 2023
ISBN: 9780593133613
Publisher: Random House

Lively joint biography of two bitter enemies: William Henry Harrison and Shawnee chief Tecumseh.

Popular historian Stark, author of Astoria and The Last Empty Places, offers a kind of thought experiment at the outset: What might have happened if Tecumseh, the builder of a geographically extensive and ethnically diverse Indigenous confederacy, had been successful in keeping White settlers out of the Ohio River Valley and environs? After all, for a time, when he was a young war fighter, it looked as if the Native peoples might have been able to pull it off, having inflicted “the worst massacre the U.S. Army ever suffered at the hands of Native warriors” when they attacked an American column that George Washington sent to destroy Miami and Shawnee villages in northern Ohio. Harrison, a footloose medical school dropout, came to the area as a soldier on another expedition, and he and Tecumseh led parallel lives, the one trying to seize the Wabash River Valley and the other trying to keep the White invaders out. Stark effectively contrasts Tecumseh, a man of his word who preferred peace to war, and Harrison, who had ambitions that included the White House, fueled by “a voracious and bottomless appetite for acreage—in the tens of millions.” The author notes that historians consider his 1840 run “the first modern presidential campaign,” though Harrison held office for only a month before dying of typhoid. Stark’s prose is occasionally overwrought, especially when he’s enthusiastically building battlefield set pieces: “The gunners wanted permission to put their fuses to the touchholes unleashing sheets of flame and smoke, the muzzle roar, and a winging spray of death.” Still, his book provides a solid bookend to Peter Cozzens’ somewhat better Tecumseh and the Prophet, particularly in its account of Harrison’s many machinations.

Readers will likely come away with deeper admiration for Tecumseh—and disdain for his conniving foe.