[18] Like the Mississippian culture peoples of this period, they built earthwork mounds as part of their expression of their religious and political structure.

Most likely their society, like the Mississippian culture to the south, was severely disrupted by waves of epidemics from new infectious diseases carried by the first Spanish explorers in the 16th century.

The Algonquian nations of present-day Canada, who extended to the interior along the St. Lawrence River and around the Great Lakes from the Atlantic coast, regarded the Shawnee as their southernmost branch.

[24]According to one English colonial legend, some Shawnee were descended from a party sent by Chief Opechancanough, ruler of the Powhatan Confederacy of 1618–1644, to settle in the Shenandoah Valley.

[26] The Shawnee were "driven from Kentucky in the 1670s by the Iroquois of Pennsylvania and New York, who claimed the Ohio valley as hunting ground to supply its fur trade.

[24] In 1671, the colonists Batts and Fallam reported that the Shawnee were contesting control of the Shenandoah Valley with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois) in that year and were losing.

Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, founder of New Orleans and the French colony of La Louisiane, writing in his journal in 1699, describes the Shawnee (or as he spells them, Chaouenons) as "the single nation to fear, being spread out over Carolina and Virginia in the direction of the Mississippi.

"[27] Historian Alan Gallay speculates that the Shawnee migrations of the middle to late 17th century were probably driven by the Beaver Wars, which began in the 1640s.

The Iroquois had helped some of the Tuscarora people from North Carolina, who were also Iroquoian speaking and distant relations, to resettle in the vicinity of what is now Martinsburg, West Virginia.

Also at this time, Seneca (an Iroquois nation) and Lenape war parties from the north often fought pitched battles with pursuing bands of Catawba from Virginia, who would overtake them in the Shawnee-inhabited regions of the Valley.

While they gained arms and European goods, they also traded for rum or brandy, leading to serious social problems related to alcohol abuse by their members.

Unable to protect themselves, in 1745, some 400 Shawnee migrated from Pennsylvania to Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama and Illinois, hoping to escape the traders' influence.

Several other Shawnee villages were located in the northern Shenandoah Valley: at Moorefield, West Virginia, on the North River; and on the Potomac at Cumberland, Maryland.

In 1753, the Shawnee on the Scioto River in the Ohio Country sent messengers to those still in the Shenandoah Valley, suggesting that they cross the Alleghenies to join the people further west, which they did the following year.

[34] "[I] saw four Indian Chiefs of the Shawnee Nation, who have been at War with the Virginians this summer (i.e. 1774), but have made peace with them, and they are sending these people to Williamsburg as hostages.

They are tall, manly, well-shaped men, of a Copper colour with black hair, quick piercing eyes, and good features.

Their ears are cut from the tips two thirds of the way round and the piece extended with brass wire till it touches their shoulders, in this part they hang a thin silver plate, wrought in flourishes about three inches diameter, with plates of silver round their arms and in the hair, which is all cut off except a long lock on the top of the head.

Ever since the Beaver Wars, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had claimed the Ohio Country as their hunting ground by right of conquest, and treated the Shawnee and Lenape who resettled there as dependent tribes.

They made formal peace with the British colonies at the Treaty of Easton, which recognized the Allegheny Ridge (the Eastern Divide) as their mutual border.

This peace lasted only until Pontiac's War erupted in 1763, following Britain's defeat of France and takeover of its territory east of the Mississippi River in North America.

[37] War leaders such as Blackfish and Blue Jacket joined Dragging Canoe and a band of Cherokee along the lower Tennessee River and Chickamauga Creek against the colonists in that area.

[37] After the Revolution and during the Northwest Indian War, the Shawnee collaborated with the Miami to form a great fighting force in the Ohio Valley.

Other Shawnee groups rejected this treaty, migrating independently to Missouri west of the Mississippi River, where they settled along Apple Creek.

The two principal adversaries in the conflict, Chief Tecumseh and General William Henry Harrison, had both been junior participants in the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers.

In September 1809, Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, invited Potawatomi, Lenape, Eel River people, and Miami representatives to a meeting at Fort Wayne.

Finally, the tribes signed the Treaty of Fort Wayne on September 30, 1809, thereby selling the United States more than 3,000,000 acres (12,000 km2), chiefly along the Wabash River north of Vincennes, Indiana.

[39] In response, Tecumseh began to expand on the teachings of his brother Tenskwatawa, a spiritual leader known as The Prophet who called for the tribes to return to their ancestral ways.

To improve Indian morale, Procter and Tecumseh attempted to storm Fort Stephenson, a small American post on the Sandusky River.

American control of Lake Erie meant the British could no longer provide essential military supplies to their Native allies, who dropped out of the war.

[58][better source needed] According to mid-19th century historian Henry Harvey, the Shawnee were ruled by kings, whom they called sachema [or sachems], who reigned by succession in the matrilineal line.