At the end of a long gallery in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art there is a ton of marble that, after nearly 20 years of intermittent work, was completed in 1856 by Frederick Pettrich, a German-born, Italian-trained sculptor. The subject is a reclining, heroically proportioned man whose dignified and noble demeanor is unaffected by a bullet hole in the right temple. If the wound and a tomahawk held in the right hand are overlooked, the figure could be that of one of the champions of classical legend — an expiring Hector or Siegfried — who so engaged romantic artists of 19th-century Europe. In fact, the gleaming white sculpture is entitled The Dying Tecumseh, but any resemblance to the mortal Shawnee leader of that name is entirely coincidental. He died in battle and was disfigured by enemy soldiers 25 years before Pettrich began this work. While alive he posed for no known portrait. Nevertheless it is singularly appropriate that this is an imaginary figure, for no one else of Tecumseh's race and few of any other have had such a powerful and abiding impact on the collective American imagination.
The real Tecumseh was born circa 1768 in southern Ohio at the beginning of a sporadic but ferociously fought war that did not end until — and largely because — he was killed in 1813. In this conflict his Shawnee, the Miami, the Potawatomi and other nations of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley region sought to defend themselves against the white settlers pioneering westward across the Appalachians.
