When about fifteen years old, he was so shocked at the scene then common among the Indians—burning prisoners at the stake—that he determined to give his voice against the horrid custom. The young reformer first displayed his commanding eloquence in his bold condemnation of the practice, which through his powerful influence gradually disappeared. He advocated total abstinence from ardent spirits, the principal source of savage degradation and destruction, and urged his people to drop all superfluous ornaments, and abstain from the use of articles sold by the traders. Like his illustrious namesake, our hero, he was mighty in speech as well as in the battle-field. I will give in illustration a brief address made August 12th, 1810, to Governor Harrison, whom he met in council at Vincennes, on the Wabash River. The fine words and grand views of the warrior, will make you think of our own Tecumseh marching over the very country from which the ancestors of the Shawanoese came: “I have made myself what I am; and I would that I could make the red people as great as the conceptions of my mind, when I think of the Great Spirit that rules over all. I would not then come to Governor Harrison to ask him to tear the treaty; but I would say to him, Brother, you have liberty to return to your own country. Once there was no white man in all this country; then it belonged to red men, children of the same parents, placed on it by the Great Spirit to keep it, to travel over it, to eat its fruits, and fill it with the same race—once a happy race, but now made miserable by the white people, who are never contented, but always encroaching. They have driven us from the great salt water, forced us over the mountains, and would shortly push us into the lakes; but we are determined to go no further. The only way to stop this evil is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first and should be now—for it never was divided, and belongs to all. No tribe has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers, who demand all, and will take no less. The white people have no right to take the land from the Indians, who had it first—it is theirs. They may sell, but all must join. Any sale not made by all is not good. The late sale is bad; it was made by a part only. Part do not know how to sell. It requires all to make a bargain for all.” This upright, humane, and unequalled warrior, after struggling in vain to save his declining race, fell gloriously during the last war with England, in the battle of the Thames, not many miles from Detroit, on the Canada side. His American namesake, by a singular course of providential events, as you know and will read in the record of his life more fully, became the greatest military commander of the age, in the very region from which, with his people, he emigrated to the West.