The Americans, however, still continued to regard the Prophet's settlement at Greenville as a real menace. During the same autumn came another message to all the tribes under the Prophet's influence from the governor of the territory of Indiana, William Henry Harrison, afterwards president of the United States, and an active and successful leader of the Americans in the War of 1812. The message closed with these words: My children, I have heard bad news. The sacred spot where the great council fire was kindled, around which the Seventeen Fires and ten tribes of their children smoked the pipe of peace--that very spot, where the Great Spirit saw His red and white children encircle themselves with the chain of friendship,--that place has been selected for dark and bloody councils. My children, this business must be stopped. You have called in a number of men from the most distant tribes, to listen to a fool, who speaks not the words of the Great Spirit, but those of the devil and of the British agents. My children, your conduct has much alarmed the white settlers near you. They desire that you will send away those people, and if they desire to have the impostor with them, they may carry him. Let him go to the lakes; he can hear the British more distinctly. Tecumseh was absent from Greenville when this message was received, and it fell to the Prophet to make a reply. He was sorry, he said, that his father listened to the advice of bad birds. He denied that the Indians had any intercourse with the British, or that they desired anything but peace and to hear the words of the Great Spirit. Early in the spring of 1808 Tecumseh and the Prophet, with their band of followers, left Greenville and set out in a westerly direction, across what is now the state of Indiana. Land had been granted to them by the Potawatomis and Kickapoos on the banks of the Tippecanoe, near its junction with the Wabash, and here they intended to make a new town, which should be the headquarters of their proposed confederacy. No more desirable spot could have been chosen. It was almost central in relation to the tribes they were endeavouring to bring together, and it had convenient communication with Lake Erie by means of the Wabash and Maumee rivers, and with Lake Michigan and the Illinois country by way of the Tippecanoe and other connecting waters. On one side an almost impenetrable stretch of wilderness formed a natural defence. From this position, also, Tecumseh was able to watch carefully the country from which he wished to exclude white settlers.