William Henry Harrison

The ninth president of the United States, William Henry Harrison, was elected as a war hero. He began his army career at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794), which opened most of the Ohio territory to white settlement by driving back the Western Confederacy of the allied Miami nations. Harrison spent the next two decades fighting Native peoples who were trying to retain their ancestral homelands. Shown here in military dress uniform, Harrison made his national reputation in the leadup to the War of 1812 (1812–15). At the Battle of Tippecanoe (1811), his troops disrupted the raiding capacity of the Ohio Valley Confederacy of Shawnee, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Mamaceqtaw (Menominee), Odawa (Ottawa), and Wendot (Wyandot) nations. In 1813, after two years of bloody fighting, Harrison and his troops defeated the confederacy at the Battle of the Thames, north of Lake Erie. Shawnee leader Tecumseh was among those killed.