The nickname ties him to a battle fought against the man everyone assumes — and that man was several hundred miles away. On November 7, 1811, near Prophetstown in the Indiana Territory, the warriors who attacked Harrison's camp were led by Tenskwatawa, called the Prophet. His brother Tecumseh was in the south recruiting among the Muscogee and Choctaws, and had asked him specifically to avoid a fight while he was gone. Harrison had roughly a thousand men — four hundred Indiana militia, a hundred and twenty Kentucky cavalry, three hundred regulars and his scouts — against perhaps five hundred warriors, though the estimates run anywhere from three hundred and fifty to a thousand. The attack came at dawn, and it very nearly worked, because Harrison had left his campfires blazing, which lit his own perimeter for the men shooting into it, and had declined to fortify the position at all. Secretary of War William Eustis said so afterward, in as many words. Sixty-two Americans were killed and a hundred and twenty-six wounded; Native losses are disputed, perhaps fifty dead and seventy or eighty wounded. Harrison held the field, burned Prophetstown and destroyed the winter food stored there — and within a year the Shawnee had partially rebuilt the town, and the confederacy was still standing. It was a battle he was nearly caught out in, fought against the wrong brother, that did not accomplish what it was later said to have accomplished. Twenty-nine years afterward it made him president.

The figure is Harrison two years later, in the blue and gold of a major general in 1813 — heavy bullion epaulettes, a crimson sash, white trousers and black riding boots, sword at his hip and the bicorne held under his arm. That summer and fall were the making of his military reputation, and he did not make them alone; Commodore Perry's victory on Lake Erie in September cleared the water and opened the road that Harrison's army then took into Upper Canada. On the far side of the same war stands General Isaac Brock, and beside him Andrew Jackson, the other American of that war whom a single battle carried to the White House. Harrison's own arrival there is worth a footnote: in 1840 the Whigs sold him as a log-cabin frontiersman with the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," which required quietly forgetting that he had been born into a wealthy Virginia family. He won, and his presidency lasted barely a month.

Model: 10111 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set