"A couple years ago, when a woman from the production staff at WGBH in Boston called me at an early point in the project, I told her, “If you really want to tell the story of Tecumseh and his brother, then you need to accurately explain what they were up against.”

There is a fascinating back story leading up to Tecumseh’s remarkable campaign to unify the Indian nations. It traces to the Freemason founding of the United States. Some sense of this story is revealed in the book “The Secret Founding of America: The Real Story of Freemasons, Puritans, & the Battle for the New World,” by Nicholas Hagger (1998). This is not some crackpot “conspiracy theory,” it is the lesser known history of Freemasonry which is at the heart of the founding of the United States. It involves a well-conceived, long-range plan to take over and profit from the sale of all Indian lands in the Northwest Territory. The efforts of Tecumseh and his brother, and their allies, represent a concerted effort to stop this from happening.

George Washington (a freemason) plays a prominent role in the history. He had his eye on the Ohio Valley lands from the time he was young. He was a surveyor and land speculator, and other members of his family were also land speculators (his brothers were members of the Ohio Company). He referred to the United States as “our infant empire.”

Washington was the first to propose the colonization of the Ohio Valley, and he once said, “If the scheme of establishing a new government on the Ohio, in the manner talked of, should ever be effected, these must be the most valuable lands in it.”

As historian Colin G. Calloway has explained, “The American revolutionaries who fought for freedom from the British Empire in the East also fought to create an empire of their own in the West.”"

Get the Story:
Steven Newcomb: Something missing from PBS’s ‘Tecumseh’s Vision’ (Indian Country Today 5/12)

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