Rachel Wheeler: Review of Adam Jortner's "The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier"

Rachel Wheeler is associate professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis and is Senior Fulbright Scholar in American Studies at the Universities of Mainz and Heidelberg during the 2011-12 year. She is the author of To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (2008).

I wanted to like this book. I really did. But Jortner lost me pretty early on. The premise appeared promising. He would show how two religious cultures—Indian nativism and Anglo-American deism—clashed and led to the dramatic battle at Tippecanoe, where the nativist Shawnee Prophet (Tenskwatawa) and his brother Tecumseh faced off against deist William Henry Harrison, who later became our nation's oldest (until Reagan) and shortest-serving president. My initial misgivings—prompted by the "holy war" in the title—soon grew into more serious reservations.

The Gods of Prophetstown promises an important scholarly contribution: Jortner challenges the reader to un-know what she already knows, for, he suggests, the United States' victory over Indian peoples was not a foregone conclusion (10). It is a perfect opportunity to build on the excellent scholarship of recent decades with new primary research woven together into a sensitive dual biography that explores the intersection of religion, politics, and race. Unfortunately, what we are left with instead are caricatures. The problems fall into several categories: conceptual, tonal, and factual, all of which might have been resolved with a bit more care in the revision process....