Survival Strategies
Digital History ID 663

Author:   William Tecumseh Sherman
Date:1811

Annotation: Tecumseh calls on his native brethren to join together to resist white encroachments on their lands.

Document: Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pocanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun.... Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn, without making an effort worthy of our race? Shall we, without a struggle, give up our homes, our lands, bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit? The graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us?...I know you will say with me, Never! Never!

Sleep not longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws, in false security and delusive hopes....Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields?

Source: H.B. Cushman, History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez Indians (Greenville, Texas: 1899), 310 ff.