William Henry Harrison is perhaps best remembered for dying a month after his coatless inaugural address in 1841. At the time, though, Harrison was recognized as one of the nation's most famous military and political figures. Perhaps the most memorable campaign slogan in American history, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too” recalled for voters Harrison's most notable contribution: his 1811 victory at Tippecanoe over a pan-Indian confederacy, following Tecumseh and aligned with the British, that threatened to close off the lands to the West and stifle U.S. expansion into the Ohio region.

Landmark battles and groundbreaking victories involving American Indians led Harrison to the presidency, and catapulted the careers of many other officials in politics and government in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. In the race against Harrison, for example, Martin Van Buren's running mate was Richard M. Johnson – widely credited with actually killing Tecumseh, and known to be the driving force behind the popular and effective Choctaw Academy school, founded in 1825. Andrew Jackson, in some ways Harrison's opposite number in the South, rode a military background built in large part on Indian affairs into the presidency. Yet a focus on the military events of the early nineteenth century obscures what men like Harrison did far more often and with far quieter effectiveness: they managed the orderly acquisition of lands and territories in the West. The process was difficult: slow, incremental years of building relationships, trading, negotiating, pressuring, cajoling, and cheating.