On October 5, 1813, nearly 4,000 American soldiers led by General William Henry Harrison engaged in a battle near the Thames River in present-day Chatham, Ontario, Canada against a much-smaller allied force of British troops and Native American warriors from a confederacy of tribes led by the great Shawnee chief, Tecumseh. It was the final battle of a long feud between Harrison and Tecumseh and their respective militias. As Governor of the Indiana Territory several years earlier, Harrison negotiated the Treaty of Fort Wayne, which induced a delegation of Indian leaders to cede over 3 million acres of land to the United States government. There were some questions about the treaty, mainly the fact that President Madison hadn't authorized Harrison to negotiate it and some of the Indian lands didn't belong to the tribal leaders who sold them. Not only that, but Harrison used some fairly controversial bargaining tactics — he bribed the tribes that agreed to sell the land and provided whiskey to the Indian delegation in order to get them liquored up nicely during the negotiations.
Tecumseh's people, the Shawnee tribe of present-day Indiana, had no claims to the land purchased by Harrison, yet Tecumseh had major qualms about the treaty and worried about the precedent of Native Americans selling huge tracts of land to the government of the fledgling United States and being forced to relocate elsewhere. Traveling throughout different tribal areas of the Ohio country, Tecumseh urged tribes to band together as a confederacy, to oppose the treaty, and to cast out the tribal leaders that sold their land out from under them. In the summer of 1810, Tecumseh and a band of warriors showed up at Harrison's home in Vincennes, Indiana and asked the Governor to rescinded the Treaty of Fort Wayne. Harrison angrily refused and the scene nearly turned into a violent clash between Tecumseh and his warriors and Harrison and the people of Vincennes, but the tensions were calmed by another Indian chief who persuaded the warriors to leave. Tecumseh continued building an alliance with various tribes and warned Harrison that they would partner with the British if the treaty stood.
