"No," he exclaimed, "the sun is my father, the earth is my mother, and I will rest on her bosom." And he sat down on Mother Earth with his assembled warriors, this act and fiery speech more than ever binding them to his fortunes. Tecumseh was in reality the first of the great Ohio men. He was a Shawnee Indian, and his tribe, in the middle of the eighteenth century, had emigrated from Florida to what is now the State of Ohio, Tecumseh being born in what is now Clarke County, near the present city of Springfield, in an Indian town that bore the name of Piqua. This must not be confounded with the present Ohio town of Piqua, which is in another county altogether, the birthplace of Tecumseh now being the site of a straggling village bearing the name, West Boston. In his boyhood there was nothing unusual. He grew up in the stirring times when Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton, and the other hardy Kentucky pioneers. Long Knives the Indians called them--were leading their forces into the West. It was a time when the Indians were constantly fighting. They did not live in Kentucky, but they regarded the fertile woods and prairies south of the Ohio River as their hunting-grounds, and they attacked with savage cruelty all the whites that dared to encroach upon this territory. The whites in turn crossed the Ohio in reprisal, burnt the Indian towns, tomahawked women and children, destroyed corn-fields, and were as unrelenting and barbarous in their revenge as their savage foes. Tecumseh was born about 1776, and in 1780 the village of Piqua was attacked by a party of 1,000 Kentuckians, who, after a fierce battle, drove out the Indians and destroyed the place. It was amid such scenes that the Indian boy grew to manhood. In that wild time, war was the only science, and butchery the only trade that an Indian could follow. One of the favorite Indian pursuits of the day was the capture of parties of emigrants and traders who came floating down the Ohio in canoes or "broadhorns." For miles the Indians would secretly follow such a party, and then when their opportunity came would strike their deadly blow. When a boy of seventeen Tecumseh was in a party making an attack on some boats near the present site of Maysville, Ky. The boats were captured and all the people in them slaughtered on the spot except one person, who was spared and later burnt alive. The horror of the spectacle so impressed Tecumseh that he then and there said he would never again be guilty of such cruelty, and the vigorous manner in which he protested against it so moved his companions that they agreed with him to not repeat the act. This resolution Tecumseh never altered; time and time again he protected women and children from his infuriated followers. At the battle of Fort Meigs a party of Americans was captured by the British and Indians. Though they had surrendered as prisoners of war, yet the savages were firing into them promiscuously, or selecting such as they chose to tomahawk in cold blood.