In September 1811, sixteen Shawnees, nineteen Choctaws, forty-six Cherokees, and two or three unidentified native groups met Creek leaders and warriors in the square ground of Tuckabatche, the Upper Creek town on the Tallapoosa River. Led by the Shawnee warrior Tecumseh, the delegation had come with important news. Among literate peoples, the weight of the information might have been conveyed with official documents, perhaps marked by seals. Tecumseh instead carried a pipe whose purpose, Benjamin Hawkins explained, was “to unite all the red people in a war against the white people.” Tecumseh hoped to form a military alliance between the Creeks and the Shawnees, Delawares, and other Indians of the Old Northwest.

The Shawnees had long occupied a position between the native peoples of the Old Northwest and the Southeast. Scattered many times by their enemies, they had fled in the seventeenth century from the Ohio to the Cumberland River, and from there, breaking into two groups, to the lower Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and the head of the Savannah River in Georgia and South Carolina. By the middle 1700s, Shawnee settlements stretched from the Susquehanna west down the Ohio to the mouth of the Cumberland. Some Shawnees also lived among the Upper Creeks in a town called Sawanogee on the Tallapoosa. These peregrinations encouraged the Shawnees to act as go-betweens, and as early as the 1760s, they were brokering Indian alliances against the British and carrying “long belts and great talks from all the Northward Nations” to the South.