Gallop Toward the Sun

March 1, 2023

In the early 1800s, Shawnee warrior Tecumseh traveled from Minnesota to Florida to the Great Plains to persuade wide-ranging Indigenous peoples to join him in resistance to U.S. expansion. In a bid to control U.S. power, the British backed Tecumseh's confederacy in battles along the western front during the War of 1812, where he faced off against future U.S. president William Henry Harrison. The New York Times best-selling Stark (Astoria) tells the story. Prepub Alert.

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April 24, 2023
In this intriguing study, historian Stark (Young Washington) examines the conflict between two major figures of the America’s “western destiny,” William Henry Harrison and Shawnee chief Tecumseh. Focusing on the decades leading up to the War of 1812, Stark reveals how the actions of both men—often in direct response to the other—affected the development of “the continent’s center—spanning from Lake Superior in the North to the Gulf of Mexico in the South, and from the Appalachians in the East to the Rockies in the West,” and the decimation of the region’s Native American communities. As Indiana’s territorial governor, Harrison enforced dubious claims in the “relentless” pursuit of new lands for settlement, while Tecumseh sought to unite America’s Indigenous tribes in a confederacy of resistance. A brilliant orator, Tecumseh fiercely condemned the deceitful behavior of the U.S. government, comparing the “forced exodus” of Native Americans to “a galloping horse... being driven westward toward the setting sun.” Eventually, Tecumseh and his forces allied with the British during the War of 1812, where he cemented his fame as a military leader before he was killed in the Battle of the Thames. Vivid biographical detail and astute analysis of how Harrison and Tecumseh’s competing visions for the future fueled the conflict make this is an informative chapter in the history of the American frontier.

May 15, 2023
Lively joint biography of two bitter enemies: William Henry Harrison and Shawnee chief Tecumseh. Popular historian Stark, author of Astoria and The Last Empty Places, offers a kind of thought experiment at the outset: What might have happened if Tecumseh, the builder of a geographically extensive and ethnically diverse Indigenous confederacy, had been successful in keeping White settlers out of the Ohio River Valley and environs? After all, for a time, when he was a young war fighter, it looked as if the Native peoples might have been able to pull it off, having inflicted "the worst massacre the U.S. Army ever suffered at the hands of Native warriors" when they attacked an American column that George Washington sent to destroy Miami and Shawnee villages in northern Ohio. Harrison, a footloose medical school dropout, came to the area as a soldier on another expedition, and he and Tecumseh led parallel lives, the one trying to seize the Wabash River Valley and the other trying to keep the White invaders out. Stark effectively contrasts Tecumseh, a man of his word who preferred peace to war, and Harrison, who had ambitions that included the White House, fueled by "a voracious and bottomless appetite for acreage--in the tens of millions." The author notes that historians consider his 1840 run "the first modern presidential campaign," though Harrison held office for only a month before dying of typhoid. Stark's prose is occasionally overwrought, especially when he's enthusiastically building battlefield set pieces: "The gunners wanted permission to put their fuses to the touchholes unleashing sheets of flame and smoke, the muzzle roar, and a winging spray of death." Still, his book provides a solid bookend to Peter Cozzens' somewhat better Tecumseh and the Prophet, particularly in its account of Harrison's many machinations. Readers will likely come away with deeper admiration for Tecumseh--and disdain for his conniving foe.

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August 1, 2023
In a well-organized, vivid text complemented by maps and illustrations, Stark, a self-described "adventure historian," details how William Henry Harrison, the shortest serving U.S. president, and Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief, had complexly consequential lives. As a congressman, Harrison developed the Land Act of 1800, which opened federal lands to white settlers of limited means. As governor of Indiana Territory, he, like Thomas Jefferson, believed Native Americans should change their ways or be moved out. He played tribes off against each other and used other trickery and force to acquire land, resulting, Stark asserts, in genocide. In combat, Tecumseh combined Native American strategy and tactics with modern weaponry to lethal effect. A capable diplomat, he united geographically dispersed tribes and became a British ally to contain Harrison's "land hunger." America's westward expansion is often assumed inevitable; Stark shows Tecumseh's military and diplomatic prowess briefly made expansion uncertain. His capable summary of the War of 1812 in the West enriches frontier history while his insightful epilogue ties the past to the lives of present-day Native Americans.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.