October 5 · This Day in America
At a river in present-day Ontario, William Henry Harrison's American army overtakes a retreating British and Native force, and in the fighting the Shawnee leader Tecumseh is killed. For a decade he had carried an idea across the frontier on horseback: that the scattered nations of the interior could stop ceding their land one treaty at a time only if they stood as one — an alliance that did not recognize the United States' right to buy the ground out from under them. It was the most serious attempt in American history to hold the continent against the line moving west. With his death the confederacy he built dissolved within months, and the resistance lost the one man who could hold so many nations together. He became, strangely, a hero to both sides — admired by the very country whose expansion he gave his life trying to halt.
Source: www.battlefields.org
Also on this day · 1947
From the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, Harry Truman delivers the first televised presidential address — asking Americans to skip meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays so grain could be sent to a starving postwar Europe. Only about 44,000 American homes had a television set. Almost no one saw it. But the door had been opened, and the presidency would never again be only a voice on the radio.
Source: www.trumanlibrary.gov