Americas
![Peter Stark - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B07BHWT3L7.jpg)
Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation
A vivid account of the rivalry between future president William Henry Harrison and the Shawnee chief Tecumseh-and of the Native American alliance that fought westward expansion-from the New York Times bestselling author of Astoria
"Taut, multi-layered . . . a much-needed reevaluation of this crucial period of our nation's history."-Laurence Bergreen, author of Over the Edge of the World
The conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. In Gallop Toward the Sun, acclaimed author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequential struggle between two extraordinary leaders.
William Henry Harrison was born to a prominent Virginia family, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He journeyed west, became governor of the vast Indiana Territory, and sought statehood by attracting settlers and imposing one-sided treaties.
Tecumseh, by all accounts one of the nineteenth century's greatest leaders, belonged to an honored line of Shawnee warriors and chiefs. His father, killed while fighting the Virginians flooding into Kentucky, extracted a promise from his sons to "never give in" to the land-hungry Americans. An eloquent speaker, Tecumseh traveled from Minnesota to Florida and west to the Great Plains convincing far-flung tribes to join a great confederacy and face down their common enemy. Eager to stop U.S. expansion, the British backed Tecumseh's confederacy in a series of battles during the forgotten western front of the War of 1812 that would determine control over the North American continent.
Tecumseh's brave stand was likely the last chance to protect Indigenous people from U.S. expansion-and prevent the upstart United States from becoming a world power. In this fast-paced narrative-with its sharply drawn characters, high-stakes diplomacy, and bloody battles-Peter Stark brings this pivotal moment to life.
"Taut, multi-layered . . . a much-needed reevaluation of this crucial period of our nation's history."-Laurence Bergreen, author of Over the Edge of the World
The conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. In Gallop Toward the Sun, acclaimed author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequential struggle between two extraordinary leaders.
William Henry Harrison was born to a prominent Virginia family, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He journeyed west, became governor of the vast Indiana Territory, and sought statehood by attracting settlers and imposing one-sided treaties.
Tecumseh, by all accounts one of the nineteenth century's greatest leaders, belonged to an honored line of Shawnee warriors and chiefs. His father, killed while fighting the Virginians flooding into Kentucky, extracted a promise from his sons to "never give in" to the land-hungry Americans. An eloquent speaker, Tecumseh traveled from Minnesota to Florida and west to the Great Plains convincing far-flung tribes to join a great confederacy and face down their common enemy. Eager to stop U.S. expansion, the British backed Tecumseh's confederacy in a series of battles during the forgotten western front of the War of 1812 that would determine control over the North American continent.
Tecumseh's brave stand was likely the last chance to protect Indigenous people from U.S. expansion-and prevent the upstart United States from becoming a world power. In this fast-paced narrative-with its sharply drawn characters, high-stakes diplomacy, and bloody battles-Peter Stark brings this pivotal moment to life.
Editorial Reviews
"Peter Stark takes us back to a crucial fork in the road of the frontier past, where the course of our national life might have turned out so differently. You can't read this fresh and surprising work without thinking, ‘What if?'"-Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder and In the Kingdom of Ice
"In Stark's vivid and skillful and passionate telling, the story of the struggle between Tecumseh and future president William Henry Harrison carries the reader breathlessly along. If you don't know about Tecumseh, you don't know the first thing about the U.S.A. This is a terrific book."-Ian Frazier, bestselling author of Great Plains
"As the title promises, Peter Stark's taut, multi-layered narrative of the legendary Shawnee chief Tecumseh, William Henry Harrison, and the making of a very young United States of America pulled me in and wouldn't let go. Gallop Toward the Sun offers a much-needed reevaluation of this crucial period of our nation's history."-Laurence Bergreen, author of Over the Edge of the World
"In this irresistible dual biography, Stark documents the violent confrontation between the United States and the Indigenous tribes in the wake of the American Revolution. And he does so with a profound grasp of both narrative storytelling and the major, violent themes of our nation's life. You can't understand America without understanding this book."-Rinker Buck, bestselling author of The Oregon Trail and Life on the Mississippi
"[A] lively joint biography . . . Readers will come away with deeper admiration for Tecumseh-and disdain for his conniving foe."-Kirkus Reviews
"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."-Publishers Weekly
"Stark is a master of...
"In Stark's vivid and skillful and passionate telling, the story of the struggle between Tecumseh and future president William Henry Harrison carries the reader breathlessly along. If you don't know about Tecumseh, you don't know the first thing about the U.S.A. This is a terrific book."-Ian Frazier, bestselling author of Great Plains
"As the title promises, Peter Stark's taut, multi-layered narrative of the legendary Shawnee chief Tecumseh, William Henry Harrison, and the making of a very young United States of America pulled me in and wouldn't let go. Gallop Toward the Sun offers a much-needed reevaluation of this crucial period of our nation's history."-Laurence Bergreen, author of Over the Edge of the World
"In this irresistible dual biography, Stark documents the violent confrontation between the United States and the Indigenous tribes in the wake of the American Revolution. And he does so with a profound grasp of both narrative storytelling and the major, violent themes of our nation's life. You can't understand America without understanding this book."-Rinker Buck, bestselling author of The Oregon Trail and Life on the Mississippi
"[A] lively joint biography . . . Readers will come away with deeper admiration for Tecumseh-and disdain for his conniving foe."-Kirkus Reviews
"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."-Publishers Weekly
"Stark is a master of...
Readers Top Reviews
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
The Stripling
A young woman sprinted ahead of the fleeing soldiers on the forest path, her long red hair streaming on the wind as if it were a banner urging them onward to escape their own destruction. As they ran, the soldiers flung their muskets into the underbrush, then their ammunition, their packs, uniforms, rations-anything to lighten their loads and speed their flight. They left behind the wounded who could not help themselves, but not before ensuring that each had a musket charged with powder and ball in order to sell his life as dearly as he could to the Native Americans. Or take his own on his own terms-before they took it for him with war clubs, knives and tomahawks.
This was the scene that greeted eighteen-year-old William Henry Harrison as he stepped ashore from the Ohio River flatboat in November 1791 at the wilderness outpost known as Fort Washington-at present-day Cincinnati, Ohio. Survivors of the massacre-so humiliating that it never received a proper name in U.S. history-staggered out of the woods toward the fort wearing "clothing reduced to rags," as he described it years later. Their shocked faces and broken bearing showed "the Privations and Suffering encountered."
Young Ensign Harrison's stiff new uniform distinguished him from the survivors wearing shreds. The long blue coat with its scarlet lapels and epaulets draped awkwardly over his slight frame and gangly limbs. A long nose protruding from a long face weighted him with a gravity that bordered on melancholy. Yet Harrison was an earnest, energetic, and conscientious young man with an eye toward self-improvement. Both studious in the classroom and engaged in the outdoor world, he enjoyed the natural sciences and steeping himself in the classics. Nothing in his studies, however, had prepared him for the chaos and desperation of the massacre's survivors as they flung themselves into the muddy safety of Fort Washington's log stockade after a three-day, hundred-mile flight. Breaking into the outpost's casks of grog, they drank themselves into a stupor of oblivion and forgetfulness that stretched for days-they hoped forever.
Only months earlier, as a first-year student, he had walked the hushed corridors and reeking laboratories of the young nation's oldest medical school-the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He was to be tutored by the celebrated Dr. Benjamin Rush, his father's old friend from the heady days of the Revolution. But Harrison had dropped out and left all that behind for this new life in the wilds. He had not felt a great deal of enthusiasm for extracting human blood in precise quantities, or measuring and weighing the copious discharges of other bodily fluids and excretions-sputum, vomit, urine, feces-emitted by patients left in his care. But such was the career his father had chosen for the seventeen-year-old "Master Billy." For a student training to be a "physic"-a doctor-following Dr. Rush's system of medicine, there was no end to the bodily fluids that had to be drawn and catalogued to restore the body's balance of "humors." Worse, it was all done indoors.
Harrison family fortunes had fallen since British troops had raided their Berkeley Plantation during the Revolutionary War, burned the family paintings, shot its cattle, and freed many of its enslaved people in retribution for the central role that William Henry's father, Virginia planter Benjamin Harrison V, had played in launching the Revolution. Profane in speech and Falstaffian in appetite, Benjamin V had proved helpful in lightening the mood at crucial moments during the rebels' deliberations. After presiding over the final debate of the Declaration of Independence during the Second Continental Congress, Benjamin V had come up to the signing table in the "silence and the gloom" that pervaded the hall that fateful morning in 1776. He famously cracked to Elbridge Gerry, the scrawny Massachusetts delegate lined up next to him: "I shall have a great advantage over you Mr. Gerry when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead."
While he had escaped hanging, Benjamin V's finances were squeezed by the British pillaging of Berkeley. Benjamin V, like other eighteenth-century Virginia plantation owners, was part lord of a medieval fief and part corporate CEO of a complex enterprise, its fortunes swinging on the vagaries of weather, European tobacco prices, credit extended (or denied) by London agents, and other factors beyond his control. But during his long absences pursuing revolutionary politics, he could not track Berkeley's daily business affai...
The Stripling
A young woman sprinted ahead of the fleeing soldiers on the forest path, her long red hair streaming on the wind as if it were a banner urging them onward to escape their own destruction. As they ran, the soldiers flung their muskets into the underbrush, then their ammunition, their packs, uniforms, rations-anything to lighten their loads and speed their flight. They left behind the wounded who could not help themselves, but not before ensuring that each had a musket charged with powder and ball in order to sell his life as dearly as he could to the Native Americans. Or take his own on his own terms-before they took it for him with war clubs, knives and tomahawks.
This was the scene that greeted eighteen-year-old William Henry Harrison as he stepped ashore from the Ohio River flatboat in November 1791 at the wilderness outpost known as Fort Washington-at present-day Cincinnati, Ohio. Survivors of the massacre-so humiliating that it never received a proper name in U.S. history-staggered out of the woods toward the fort wearing "clothing reduced to rags," as he described it years later. Their shocked faces and broken bearing showed "the Privations and Suffering encountered."
Young Ensign Harrison's stiff new uniform distinguished him from the survivors wearing shreds. The long blue coat with its scarlet lapels and epaulets draped awkwardly over his slight frame and gangly limbs. A long nose protruding from a long face weighted him with a gravity that bordered on melancholy. Yet Harrison was an earnest, energetic, and conscientious young man with an eye toward self-improvement. Both studious in the classroom and engaged in the outdoor world, he enjoyed the natural sciences and steeping himself in the classics. Nothing in his studies, however, had prepared him for the chaos and desperation of the massacre's survivors as they flung themselves into the muddy safety of Fort Washington's log stockade after a three-day, hundred-mile flight. Breaking into the outpost's casks of grog, they drank themselves into a stupor of oblivion and forgetfulness that stretched for days-they hoped forever.
Only months earlier, as a first-year student, he had walked the hushed corridors and reeking laboratories of the young nation's oldest medical school-the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He was to be tutored by the celebrated Dr. Benjamin Rush, his father's old friend from the heady days of the Revolution. But Harrison had dropped out and left all that behind for this new life in the wilds. He had not felt a great deal of enthusiasm for extracting human blood in precise quantities, or measuring and weighing the copious discharges of other bodily fluids and excretions-sputum, vomit, urine, feces-emitted by patients left in his care. But such was the career his father had chosen for the seventeen-year-old "Master Billy." For a student training to be a "physic"-a doctor-following Dr. Rush's system of medicine, there was no end to the bodily fluids that had to be drawn and catalogued to restore the body's balance of "humors." Worse, it was all done indoors.
Harrison family fortunes had fallen since British troops had raided their Berkeley Plantation during the Revolutionary War, burned the family paintings, shot its cattle, and freed many of its enslaved people in retribution for the central role that William Henry's father, Virginia planter Benjamin Harrison V, had played in launching the Revolution. Profane in speech and Falstaffian in appetite, Benjamin V had proved helpful in lightening the mood at crucial moments during the rebels' deliberations. After presiding over the final debate of the Declaration of Independence during the Second Continental Congress, Benjamin V had come up to the signing table in the "silence and the gloom" that pervaded the hall that fateful morning in 1776. He famously cracked to Elbridge Gerry, the scrawny Massachusetts delegate lined up next to him: "I shall have a great advantage over you Mr. Gerry when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead."
While he had escaped hanging, Benjamin V's finances were squeezed by the British pillaging of Berkeley. Benjamin V, like other eighteenth-century Virginia plantation owners, was part lord of a medieval fief and part corporate CEO of a complex enterprise, its fortunes swinging on the vagaries of weather, European tobacco prices, credit extended (or denied) by London agents, and other factors beyond his control. But during his long absences pursuing revolutionary politics, he could not track Berkeley's daily business affai...
