On October 5, 1813, Chief Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames / Battle of Moraviantown. Tecumseh had been a major enemy of Americans settling in the Northwest territory, including Michigan. As a result of Tecumseh’s death and defeat, Natives were never again considered separate and equal partners in international relations.
The rest of the story:
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.
Tecumseh was a warrior at 15; later he became a renowned field commander and a charismatic orator. By the early 1800s he had conceived of a Pan-Indian federation. In this union he hoped old tribal rivalries would be set aside so that the indigenous people of the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley could act as one in resisting the advancing whites. From a base on the Tippecanoe River in northern Indiana, he traveled from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico promoting this federation. His ambition was probably an impossible one; the Indian population of this territory was then less than 100,000 and that of the United States nearly seven million. Still, rumors of what he was up to greatly alarmed many frontier whites, including William Henry Harrison, the federal governor of the Indiana Territory. Formerly a Regular Army officer, Harrison negotiated with Tecumseh face-to-face on two occasions and assessed him as “one of those uncommon geniuses who spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.”
In the fall of 1811 Harrison gathered a thousand men and, when Tecumseh was away, made a preemptive strike against his base on the Tippecanoe. After a brief fight several hundred garrison warriors withdrew from the village. The so-called Battle of Tippecanoe was, in effect, the first engagement of the War of 1812. In that war Tecumseh fought alongside the British because, unlike the Americans, they were not invading Indian lands. In August 1812 Tecumseh, leading a multitribal group of warriors, and a combined force of Canadian militia and British regulars surrounded Detroit. Fearing imminent massacre by “hordes of howling savages,” the aging and ailing Brig. Gen. William Hull surrendered Detroit and his 2,000-man army (Smithsonian, January 1994).
Tecumseh’s warriors soon struck deep into the United States, attacking forts and sending terrified settlers fleeing back toward the Ohio River. Harrison, called back to command U.S. forces in the West, spent nearly a year converting militiamen into passable professional soldiers. In the fall of 1813 he invaded Ontario. The British general, Henry Procter, retreated in panic. Fighting almost continuously for five days, Tecumseh and 600 warriors screened the British retreat, but on October 5 Harrison caught up with Procter at the Thames River near Moraviantown. The British general ignominiously fled; after a single American volley all his regular troops surrendered. Tecumseh meanwhile positioned his exhausted men in a patch of swampy woodland and told them he would retreat no farther. Having finished the British, Harrison sent dragoons and infantry into these thickets. After an hour of fierce fighting Tecumseh was killed, or presumably so. At least he was never again seen alive. For all practical purposes the Indian resistance movement ended in the Northwest.
Warriors who survived the battle told various stories. They had been forced to leave Tecumseh’s body on the field. They had carried him off, either mortally wounded or dead, and buried him in a secret place that whites would never find. As for the Americans, none of those who first overran Tecumseh’s position were acquainted with him. But they found an impressive-looking dead Indian who they were convinced was Tecumseh. Some cut strips of skin from this body, later tanning them for razor strops and leather souvenirs. When people arrived who did know him, some said the battered corpse was indeed Tecumseh’s. Others said it was not. Even Harrison could not positively identify it.
Nevertheless a number of Americans were to claim that they had personally vanquished the Shawnee leader. Most prominent was Richard Johnson, a Kentucky politician who fought at the Thames as a cavalry commander. Whether or not he was indeed “The Man Who Killed Tecumseh,” a great many of his constituents believed he was. With supporters chanting “Rumpsey Dumpsey, Rumpsey Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh,” Johnson was first elected to the U.S. Senate and then, in 1836, to the Vice Presidency. With a little help from another catchy jingle, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” William Henry Harrison became President four years later.
Johnson killing Tecumseh from frieze in the dome of the rotunda of US Capitol. Filippo Costaggini- Architect of the Capitol.
Beyond the details and the accuracy of the scene depicted—they still are debated 200 years later—in retrospect we do know that on October 5, 1813, Tecumseh’s single-minded mission, a secure Indian homeland, died with him in Ontario, Canada, at the Battle of the Thames. Each “Death of Tecumseh” image allegorically, intended or not, captured not just the last moments of the chief’s life but also the demise of his dream.
Ironically, the same moment in time also symbolized an alternative vision. Colonel Richard M. Johnson, the man who took credit for killing Tecumseh, built a political career on his disputed accomplishment. More than two decades after the war, the colonel became the ninth vice president of the United States aided by the memorable and irreverent slogan, “Rumpsey Dumpsey, Rumpsey Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh.”
Sources:
Michigan Every Day
Autumn 1813 : Tecumseh’s Death Launches Artwork and Political Careers, National Park Service.
Alysa Landry, “Native History : Tecumseh Defeated at Battle of the Thames, Indian Country Today“, October 5, 2013.
Bill Gilbert, “The Dying Tecumseh and the Birth of a Legend“, Smithsonian Magazine, July 1995.
For more information, see Tecumseh : shooting star, crouching panther / Jim Poling Sr. Toronto : Dundurn Press, c2009.
If you like fiction, you may want to read The Frontiersmen: A Narrative by Allan W. Eckert. Description : The frontiersmen were a remarkable breed of men. They were often rough and illiterate, sometimes brutal and vicious, often seeking an escape in the wilderness of mid-America from crimes committed back east. In the beautiful but deadly country which would one day come to be known as West Virginia, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, more often than not they left their bones to bleach beside forest paths or on the banks of the Ohio River, victims of Indians who claimed the vast virgin territory and strove to turn back the growing tide of whites. These frontiersmen are the subjects of Allan Eckert’s dramatic history.
Against the background of such names as George Rogers Clark, Daniel Boone, Arthur St. Clair, Anthony Wayne, Simon Girty and William Henry Harrison, Eckert has recreated the life of one of America’s most outstanding heroes, Simon Kenton. Kenton’s role in opening the Northwest Territory to settlement more than rivaled that of his friend Daniel Boone. By his eighteenth birthday, Kenton had already won frontier renown as woodsman, fighter and scout. His incredible physical strength and endurance, his great dignity and innate kindness made him the ideal prototype of the frontier hero.
Yet there is another story to The Frontiersmen. It is equally the story of one of history’s greatest leaders, whose misfortune was to be born to a doomed cause and a dying race. Tecumseh, the brilliant Shawnee chief, welded together by the sheer force of his intellect and charisma an incredible Indian confederacy that came desperately close to breaking the thrust of the white man’s westward expansion. Like Kenton, Tecumseh was the paragon of his people’s virtues, and the story of his life, in Allan Eckert’s hands, reveals most profoundly the grandeur and the tragedy of the American Indian.
No less importantly, The Frontiersmen is the story of wilderness America itself, its penetration and settlement, and it is Eckert’s particular grace to be able to evoke life and meaning from the raw facts of this story. In The Frontiersmen not only do we care about our long-forgotten fathers, we live again with them.
On October 5, 1835 Michigan voters went to the polls to elect the state’s first governor and state legislature and to approve its first state constitution. It was a time of great apprehension. Was Michigan a state or not? In the eyes of most Michiganians we were a state. In the eyes of the federal government — whose opinion mattered more — we were still a territory. Voters overwhelmingly elected Stephen T. Mason governor. The 24-year old Mason, who had led the fight to make Michigan a state, received 7,508 votes; his closest competitor received a mere 814.
Interestingly enough, only “free, adult, white male taxpayers” could vote according to the state History Division’s “Short History of Michigan.”
Source : Michigan History, September/October 2004, p. 5
Bill Laitner, This Week in Michigan History, Detroit Free Press, October 4, 2008, B.4.
Michigan’s constitution (1835) was the first in the U.S. to specifically provide for the funding of public libraries, recognizing libraries as an integral part of the state’s education system.
Library of Michigan, Significant Dates in Michigan Library History
On October 5, 1852, State Normal School, the first of Michigan’s state-supported teacher training schools and the first of its kind west of the Allegheny Mountains, was dedicated at Ypsilanti.
A normal school had been proposed in both houses of the state Legislature in 1848, but failed to gain traction. The following year, an act calling for “the instruction of persons both male and female in the art of teaching, and in all the various branches that pertain to a good common school education; also, to give instructions in the mechanic arts, and in the arts of husbandry and agricultural chemistry, in the fundamental laws of the United States” was passed.
Ypsilanti donated four acres and another four were purchased. Other locations considered were Niles, Gull Prairie near Kalamazoo, Jackson and Marshall.
The original Normal School.
Michigan State Normal School was renamed Michigan State Normal College in 1899, Eastern Michigan College in 1956 and Eastern Michigan University in 1959.
The first graduating class, 1854, consisted of three people and for the next decade, no graduating class had more than two dozen students. Today, EMU has more than 22,000 students.
Sources:
Michigan Historical Calendar courtesy of the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University.
Zlati Meyer, “This week in Michigan history“, Detroit Free Press, October 5, 2014
Patrolman George C. Kimball was the first Detroit police officer killed in the line of duty on October 5, 1883. According to the Officer Down Memorial Web page, 245 Detroit officers have died in the line of duty, 160 from gunfire. The others died from knifings, assaults, accidental gunshots, vehicle crashes and a variety of natural causes such as heart attacks.
Source : “Kimball was first Detroit police officer to die on patrol”, Detroit Free Press, July 17, 2022.
Statue of H.H. Bandholtz
Born in Constantine, Michigan on December 18, 1864, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy in 1890, and an instructor at the Michigan Agricultural College from 1890 to 1898, Harry Hill Bandholtz went on to earn many honors, including a statue in a foreign land.
The statueis located in the center of the park on Szabadság tér, facing the American Embassy.
On August 11, 1919, General Bandholtz arrived in Budapest as one of four generals (English, French, Italian, American) to become the Inter-Allied Control Commission for Hungary, primarily to supervise the disengagement of Romanian troops from Hungary.
He became famous in Hungary when, on the night of October 5, 1919, as President of the Day of the Commission, mainly through bluff, armed only with a riding crop, he prevented a group of Romanian soldiers from removing Transylvanian treasures from the National Museum.
The statue was erected in 1936, and stood throughout World War II with the inscription, in English, “I simply carried out the instructions of my Government, as I understood them, as an officer and a gentleman of the United States Army.” In the late 1940s the statue was removed “for repair.” It lay in a statue boneyard until the 1980s, at which time it was placed in the garden of the U.S. Ambassador’s residence, at the request of then-Ambassador Salgo. It was re-placed in Szabadság tér at its original location in July 1989, just a few days before the visit of President Bush.
The new inscription on the back reads: “General Harry Hill Bandholtz, head of the American Military Mission, who on October 5, 1919 blocked the removal of the treasures of the National Museum to Romania.”
Each year, the U.S. Embassy’s Defense Attachee lays a wreath honoring Bandholtz on his birthday.
Sources:
Statue of Harry Hill Bandholtz, U.S. Department of State Embassy in Hungary.
Harry Hill Bandholtz wikipedia entry
On October 5, 1931, a Wayne County jury reached a verdict in the trial of an immigrant woman – Rose Veres – finding her guilty of murder and of being … The Witch of Delray.
The story concerns Hungarian immigrant Rose Veres and her son, who became defendants in a sensational murder case in 1931. Prosecutors claimed Rose had murdered one of the tenants in her Delray boardinghouse, and city reporters embroidered those claims into the tale of the “Witch of Delray.”
The real culprits of this caper were the ambitious judges and prosecutors and byline-seeking newswriters. The real victims were the poor immigrant, single mother who spoke little, if any, English, as well as her 18 year old son. They were finally released after spending years in prison.
Karen Dybis reveals that one of the prosecutors who worked so hard to lock them up – Duncan McCrea -and one of Michigan’s shrewdest attorneys—Alean B. Clutts – were later able to win retrials for both Rose Veres and her son in 1944 and 1945, earning exonerations.
- Rose Veres’ grave in Woodmere Cemetery, Detroit.
For the full story, see Karen Dybis, The Witch of Delray: Rose Veres & Detroit’s Infamous 1930s Murder Mystery, Charleston, S.C. : The History Press, 2017.
George Hunter, “Book looks back at Detroit’s ‘Witch of Delray’“, Detroit News, November 18, 2017.
Michael Jackman, “Setting the record straight about the ‘Witch of Delray’ “, Detroit Metro Times, December 11, 2017.
Kinsey Clarke, “‘The Witch of Delray’ is Detroit’s own witch trial : The true crime story of Detroit’s notorious Hex Woman“, A Neighborhoods Podcast.
“Burn Her Anyway: The (Wrongfully Convicted) Witch of Delray“, Crime Capsule Blog.
Meghan Barret Cousino, “Rose Veres” , The National Registration of Exonerations. The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence. The Registry also maintains a more limited database of known exonerations prior to 1989.
On October 5, 1951, the University of Notre Dame played its first night game ever when Frank Leahy’s Fighting Irish routed the University of Detroit 48-6 under the lights at Briggs Stadium.
Source : Bill Dow, “Remembering the Football Greats and Gridiron History at the Tiger Stadium Site”, Detroit Athletic Company, May 9, 2015.
The history of nuclear power in the United States has been marked by numerous milestones, many of them bad — accidents, construction snafus, engineering incompetence, etc., etc.
One incident that has cast a long shadow over the nuclear power industry’s claim for safety will be marked on Oct. 5, 1966, when Detroit Edison’s Fermi-1 nuclear plant suffered a partial meltdown, caused by a piece of floating shrapnel inside the container vessel. Not as well known as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima, but much closer to home.
The Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station was and is still located on the shore of Lake Erie near Monroe, in Frenchtown Charter Township, Michigan, approximately halfway between Detroit, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio.
The main cause of the temperature increase was a blockage in one of the spigots that allowed the flow of cooled liquid sodium into the reactor. The blockage caused an insufficient amount of coolant to enter; this was not noticed by the operators until the core temperature alarms sounded. Several fuel rod subassemblies reached high temperatures of around 700 °F (370 °C) (with an expected range near 580 °F, 304 °C), causing them to melt.
According to subsequent inspections, no radioactivity escaped to the environment. No injuries were reported inside or outside the plant. The worst case scenario of a “China Syndrome” incident in which melted fuel pooled within the containment vessel and reached critical mass didn’t even come close to occurring.
Nuclear industry apologists long have resented the public attention given to the Fermi-1 meltdown, especially through novelist John G. Fuller’s 1975 book about the case, “We Almost Lost Detroit” (which itself prompted the song of the same name by the late Gil Scott-Heron).
In many ways, the accident underscored the flaws in planning and operation of the industry that have dogged it ever since, all but destroying nuclear power’s reputation as a sustainable energy source that might supplant fossil fuel generation and help combat climate change.
To begin with, it showed how unforgiving nuclear power technology could be. The accident’s cause was trivial, yet it succeeded in shutting down the plant for four years. (Fermi-1 was permanently shut down in 1972, but its successor, the 1,100-megawatt Fermi-2, went online in 1988 and is still operating.) The plant was equipped with elaborate monitoring and alarm systems, yet when these showed unexpected readings, the onsite staff tended to dismiss them as anomalies. A partial meltdown eerily similar to the Fermi incident had occurred at a similar test reactor at Santa Susana, Calif., in 1959, yet the Detroit Edison staff failed to learn from the experience. The Fermi workers “must have remembered this accident pretty well, since they duplicated almost every key aspect of it just seven years later,” David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, commented recently.
The Fermi-1 technology was especially complex. The unit was a fast breeder reactor, which used a combined plutonium-uranium core to produce more fuel than it consumed during operation. It was cooled by a flow of liquid sodium, which can explode when it comes in contact with air or water, making “the possibility of sodium leaks a serious problem,” the nuclear expert Daniel F. Ford observed in 1982.
On a larger scale, Fermi-1, like other U.S. reactors, was the product of a government campaign to show that the technology that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 could be turned to peaceful uses. Its prime promoter was Lewis Strauss, the fanatically pro-nuclear chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who first made the over-optimistic claim that nuclear energy would be “too cheap to meter.” For Strauss, who had President Dwight Eisenhower’s ear, the quest assumed religious overtones. “I believe firmly that our knowledge of the atom is intended by the Creator for the service and not the destruction of mankind,” he wrote in 1955.
The AEC took the lead in fighting concerns about nuclear safety. The commission’s own experts considered siting Fermi only 29 miles from the major population center of Detroit to be a potential “public hazard,” but their report was suppressed. The AEC’s construction permit for the plan was challenged by local unions, whose case went to the U.S. Supreme Court — which ruled that the AEC had sufficient authority to act. The 7-2 decision promoted a thunderous dissent from Justice William O. Douglas, who called the AEC’s permit “a light-hearted approach to the most awesome, the most deadly, the most dangerous process that man has ever conceived.”
The Fermi design showed how haphazard plant engineering could be, even in the face of the dangers. At a late stage of the design, conical “flow guides” were placed on the floor of the core unit. The idea of these pie-shaped structures was to direct the flow of the incoming sodium coolant into the core, and also to ensure that any molten core material would spread out, “lessening the chances of forming a critical mass,” Lochbaum explained.
To shield the flow guides from the heat of molten fuel, they were clad with a layer of heat-resistant zirconium. Yet during operation, two of the covers broke loose and floated around within the system, occasionally obstructing the cooling sodium flow. That accounted for the occasional, anomalous readings of high heat noticed by plant operators. But they couldn’t diagnose the problem until the interior could be inspected, after the damage was done and the plant shut down. That’s when they discovered, as Lochbaum says, that “the good intention of making the plant safer actually compromised its safety.”
Sources:
Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station wikipedia entry
We Almost Lost Detroit, a 1975 Reader’s Digest book by John G. Fuller, presents a history of Fermi 1, America’s first commercial breeder reactor, with emphasis on the 1966 partial nuclear meltdown.
Michael Hiltzik, “50 years after ‘we almost lost Detroit,’ America’s nuclear power industry faces even graver doubts“, Los Angeles Times, October 3, 2016.
Robert Robinson was born in Wayne on April 30, 1896. In May 1917, he enlisted with the Marines and the action in France followed. Although seriously wounded during aerial action over Belgium, he continued to fight and successfully drove off attacking enemy scout planes before two additional bullet wounds forced his collapse. For his heroism and gallantry in this and previous action with enemy planes, while attached to the 1st Marine Aviation Force as an observer, GySgt Robinson received this Nation’s highest award.
Gunnery Sergeant Robinson, shot 13 times in the abdomen, chest, and legs, and with his left arm virtually blown off at the elbow, helped bring the plane down in Belgian Territory. His arm, hanging by a single tendon, was grafted back on by the surgeon-general of the Belgian army. The pilot of his plane, Lt Ralph Talbot of Weymouth, Massachusetts, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for this same action, was killed in a plane crash a few days later.
He was honorably discharged in 1919 as a gunnery sergeant and was appointed a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserve. His retirement was effected in May 1923 and his promotion to the rank of first lieutenant in September 1936.
Upon retirement, he made his home at St. Ignace, Michigan. Robinson died on October 5, 1974 at his home. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.
Medal of Honor Citation:
For extraordinary heroism as observer in the 1st Marine Aviation Force at the front in France. In company with planes from Squadron 218, Royal Air Force, conducting an air raid on 8 October 1918, Gunnery Sergeant Robinson’s plane was attacked by nine enemy scouts. In the fight which followed, he shot down one of the enemy planes. In a later air raid over Pitthan, Belgium, on 14 October 1918, his plane and one other became separated from their formation on account of motor trouble and were attacked by 12 enemy scouts. Acting with conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in the fight which ensured, Gunnery Sergeant Robinson, after shooting down one of the enemy planes, was struck by a bullet which carried away most of his elbow. At the same time his gun jammed. While his pilot maneuvered for position, he cleared the jam with one hand and returned to the fight. Although his left arm was useless, he fought off the enemy scouts until he collapsed after receiving two more bullet wounds, one in the stomach and one in the thigh.
Source : Robert Roberson wikipedia entry