The Borderland of Fear

Patrick Bottiger starts his preface by directly confronting a question some scholars might have when seeing his book. “Why do we need another book about Prophetstown and the Battle of Tippecanoe?” (p. xiii). Within a tightly written 179 pages, Bottiger answers that question very well. Most important, our understanding of the village at the center of the religious and political movement built by Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh in the early nineteenth century is based largely on information created by two groups of people who stood in opposition to both the movement and the settlement. Bottiger therefore grounds his analysis in the histories and perspectives of the Miami Indians and French traders whose motives and relationships influenced both the events of the early 1800s and the historical memory of those events. To break through the mythology surrounding the customary narratives of Prophetstown and Tippecanoe, the book first addresses relevant geographic and social contexts. Prophetstown was built in Miami territory, and thus Miami attitudes and interests must be integral to the fabric of that history. Just as crucial, the Miamis and their neighbors viewed the world through the lens of community as opposed to race or nation, and this perspective shaped how they dealt with encroaching French, British, American, and native peoples from the 1700s into the early 1800s. The decentralized nature of Miami society and politics in particular allowed individual leaders and towns to negotiate an increasingly complicated and fraught world, some of which is illustrated skillfully in the competing interests of Pacanne and Little Turtle following the Treaty of Greenville in 1795

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