Tecumseh's face, and the men who carried his name

SUMMARYRECORD, the witnesses on his complexion: the British officer John Richardson, who fought beside Tecumseh in 1812-13, wrote of the "darkness of his complexion" (quoted in Rachel Buff, "Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa: Myth, Historiography and Popular Memory," Historical Reflections, 1995, p. 294). The American William Stanley Hatch, who served under Hull in 1812, wrote his complexion was "more of a light brown or tan than red" (Buff, p. 291). Samuel G. Drake's 19th-century history, not an eyewitness, wrote "his complexion light copper... with bright hazel eyes." RECORD, his mother: family stories that his father "had been married to a white captive," and a Crawford County, Indiana tradition that his father was a captured white boy (Pleasant, 1926), have not been endorsed by major historians; his biographer Sugden calls the mother's ancestry a mystery (Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life, 1997, pp. 13-16). RECORD, the men named for him: William Tecumseh Barks (born 1840, Bedford, Pennsylvania), corporal in the 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner (1863), Pittsburgh's second Black policeman (1884), poet and organizer; William Tecumseh Vernon (born 1871, Lebanon, Missouri), president of Western University in Quindaro, Kansas (1896-1906), Register of the Treasury under Theodore Roosevelt and Taft (1906-1911), then AME bishop.

PATTERNthe eyewitness who stood next to him says dark; the lighter words come from the American side and the later books, and the "white captive" stories try to give him a white parent. Our people named their sons Tecumseh.

LENS (WW9)they lightened his face and gave him a white mother on paper, the same way they lightened the land's people everywhere else; our families kept his name. COLONIZER COMEBACK: "Lots of white families named sons Tecumseh too" (William Tecumseh Sherman, 1820). True, and it shows how big the name was; the name alone is not proof of a family's ancestry, so each family's own reason is the next dig.

OPENthe full Richardson passage in his own book (Richardson, War of 1812, 1842); whether the Le Dru sketch behind Lossing's famous portrait is real; why the Barks and Vernon families chose the name. Photos of Barks (1906 newspaper) and Vernon (BlackPast) wait for review before use.

SOURCEBuff (1995); Sugden (1997); Drake; Wikipedia, Family of Tecumseh; Kiddle, William Tecumseh Barks; BlackPast, William Tecumseh Vernon (1871-1944)