Towards the end of the 1780s Tecumseh, together with his brother Elskwatawa or Tenskwatawa, who was called "the prophet", created an alliance of the native peoples against the expansion of the American colonists in the territories of the great lakes, north of the Midwest and the Ohio River Valley. The alliance suffered some changes over time, but was formed by several important Indian peoples.
In September 1809, William Henry Harrison, governor of the newly formed Indiana Territory, negotiated the Fort Wayne Treaty in which a delegation of Indians yielded 3 million acres (12,000 km²) of Native American territory to the government of the United States. U.S. The negotiations of the treaty were questionable since they did not have the support of the then US President James Madison, and involved what some historians have compared with a bribe, consisting of the offer of large subsidies to the tribes and chiefs involved, and the previous distribution, among the indigenous participants, of copious amounts of liquor before the negotiations to "dispose the temperaments" to them.
Tecumseh's opposition to the landmark Fort Wayne Treaty marked the emergence of the Shawnee warrior as an outstanding leader and earned him the respect of several tribes. Although Tecumseh and his people, the Shawnees had no claim to the land sold, the indigenous leader was alarmed by the massive sale, since many of the followers who accompanied him in his capital Prophetstown ("Town of the Prophet"), belonged to the tribes Piankeshaw, Kikapú and Wea, which were habitual moradores of the tramposamente negotiated land. As an argument, Tecumseh revived an idea exposed in previous years by the Shawnee leader, Blue Jacket, and by the Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant, according to which Indian land was common property of all tribes, and no fraction of it could be sold. without the consent of all, or only by decision of a few.
