STORIES OF OHIO
By William Dean Howells
Copyright, 1897, by American Book Company.
CONTENTS
[ I ]THE ICE FOLK AND THE EARTH FOLK.
[ II]OHIO AS A PART OF FRANCE.
[ III]OHIO BECOMES ENGLISH.
[ IV]THE FORTY YEARS’ WAR FOR THE WEST.
[ V]THE CAPTIVITY OF JAMES SMITH
[ VI]THE CAPTIVITY OF BOONE AND KENTON.
[ VII]THE RENEGADES.
[ VIII]THE WICKEDEST DEED IN OUR HISTORY.
[ IX]THE TORTURE OF COLONEL CRAWFORD
[ X]THE ESCAPE OF KNIGHT AND SLOVER.
[ XI]THE INDIAN WARS AND ST, CLAIR’S DEFEAT.
[ XII]THE INDIAN WARS AND WAYNE’S VICTORY.
[ XIII]INDIAN FIGHTERS.
[ XIV]LATER CAPTIVITIES.
[ XV]INDIAN HEROES AND SAGES.
[ XVI]LIFE IN THE BACKWOODS.
[ XVII]THE FIRST GREAT SETTLEMENTS.
[ XVIII]THE STATE OF OHIO IN THE WAR OF 1812.
[ XIX]A FOOLISH MAN, A PHILOSOPHER, AND A FANATIC.
[ XX]WAYS OUT.
[ XXI]THE FIGHT WITH SLAVERY.
[ XXII]THE CIVIL WAR IN OHIO
[ XXIII ]FAMOUS OHIO SOLDIERS
[ XXIV]OHIO STATESMEN
[ XXV]OTHER NOTABLE OHIOANS
[ XVI]INCIDENTS AND CHARACTERISTICS.ILLUSTRATIONS
[ Pichawillany, Chief Town of the Miamis ]
[ Indians Carry off the Women ]
[ Indians Delivering up Captives ]
[ Indian War Parties Joining the English ]
[ Indian Baptism of James Smith ]
[ Daniel Boone Shooting With the Indians ]
[ Massacre of the Christian Indians by The Whites ]
[ Brickell Leaves his Indian Father ]
[ Alder Returns to his Family ]
[ Admiral Perry on Lake Erie ]
[ Aarun Burr and Blennerhassett ]
[ Proclaimed Himself the Lord Jesus Christ ]
[ Indian Evacuation by River ]
[ John Brown Making Pikes for Slaves ]
[ John Morgan Invades Ohio in 1863 ]
[ A Copperhead Walks With General Morgan ]
PREFACE.
In the following stories, drawn from the annals of Ohio, I have tried to possess the reader with a knowledge, in outline at least, of the history of the State from the earliest times. I cannot suppose that I have done this with unfailing accuracy in respect to fact, but with regard to the truth, I am quite sure of my purpose at all times to impart it.
The books which have been of most use to me in writing this are the histories of Francis Parkman; the various publications of Messrs. Robert Clarke and Co. in the “Ohio Valley Series”; McClung’s “Sketches of Western Adventure”; “Ohio” (in the American Commonwealths Series) by Ruf us King; “History and Civil Government of Ohio,” by B. A. Hinsdale and Mary Hinsdale; “Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley,” by W. H. Venable; Theodore Roosevelt’s “Winning of the West”; Whitelaw Reid’s “Ohio in the War”; and above all others, the delightful and inexhaustible volumes of Henry Howe’s “Historical Collections of Ohio.”
W. D. H. [ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]
STORIES OF OHIO.
I. THE ICE FOLK AND THE EARTH FOLK.
The first Ohio stories are part of the common story of the wonderful Ice Age, when a frozen deluge pushed down from the north, and covered a vast part of the earth’s surface with slowly moving glaciers. The traces that this age left in Ohio are much the same as it left elsewhere, and the signs that there were people here ten thousand years ago, when the glaciers began to melt and the land became fit to live in again, are such as have been found in the glacier drift in many other countries. Even before the ice came creeping southwestwardly from the region of Niagara, and passed over two thirds of our state, from Lake Erie to the Ohio River there were people here of a race older than the hills, as the hills now are; for the glaciers ground away the hills as they once were, and made new ones, with new valleys between them, and new channels for the streams to run where there had never been water courses before. These earliest Ohioans must have been the same as the Ohioans of the Ice Age, and when they had fled southward before the glaciers, they must have followed the retreat of the melting ice back into Ohio again. No one knows how long they dwelt here along its edges in a climate like that of Greenland, where the glaciers are now to be seen as they once were in the region of Cincinnati. But it is believed that these Ice Folk, as we may call them, were of the race which still roams the Arctic snows. They seem to have lived as the Eskimos of our day live: they were hunters and fishers, and in the gravelly banks of the new rivers, which the glaciers upheaved, the Ice Folk dropped the axes of chipped stone which are now found there. They left nothing else behind them; but similar tools or weapons are found in the glacier-built river banks of Europe, and so it is thought that the race of the earliest Ohio men lived pretty much all over the world in the Ice Age.
One of the learned writers[*] who is surest of them and has told us most about them, holds that they were for their time and place as worthy ancestors as any people could have; and we could well believe this because the Ohio man has, in all ages, been one of the foremost men.
* Professor G. F. Wright.
Our Ice Folk were sturdy, valiant, and cunning enough to cope with the fierce brute life and the terrible climate of their day, but all they have left to prove it is the same kind of stone axes that have been found in the drift of the glaciers, along the water courses in Northern France and Southern England.
Our Ice Folk must have dressed like their far-descended children, the Eskimos, in furs and skins, and like them they must have lived upon fish and the flesh of wild beasts. The least terrible of these beasts would have been the white bear; the mammoth and mastodon were among the animals the Ice Folk hunted for game, and slew without bows or arrows, for there was no wood to make these of. The only weapon the Ice Folk had was the stone ax which they may have struck into their huge prey when they came upon it sleeping or followed in the chase till it dropped with fatigue. Such an ax was dug up out of the glacial terrace, as the bank of this drift is called, in the valley of the Tuscarawas, in 1889, perhaps ten thousand years after it was left there. It was wrought from a piece of black flint, four inches long and two inches wide; at the larger end it was nearly as thick as it was wide, and it was chipped to a sharp edge all round. Within the present year another of the Ice Folk’s axes has been found near New London, twenty-two feet under ground, in the same kind of glacial drift as the first. But it seems to have been made of a different kind of stone, and to have been so deeply rotted by the long ages it had been buried that when its outer substance was scratched away, hardly anything of the hard green rock was left.
After the glaciers were gone, the Ohio climate was still very cold, and vast lakes stretched over the state, freezing in the long winters, and thawing in the short summers. One of these spread upward from the neighborhood of Akron to the east and west of where Cleveland stands; but by far the largest flooded nearly all that part of Ohio which the glaciers failed to cover, from beyond where Pittsburg is to where Cincinnati is. At the last point a mighty ice dam formed every winter till as the climate grew warmer and the ice thawed more and more, the waters burst the dam, and poured their tide down the Ohio River to the Mississippi, while those of the northern lake rushed through the Cuyahoga to Lake Erie, and both lakes disappeared forever. For the next four or five thousand years the early Ohio men kept very quiet; but we need not suppose for that reason that there were none. Our Ice Folk, who dropped their stone axes in the river banks, may have passed away with the Ice Age, or they may have remained in Ohio, and begun slowly to take on some faint likeness of civilization. There is nothing to prove that they went, and there is nothing to prove that they staid; but Ohio must always have been a pleasant place to live in after the great thaw, and it seems reasonable to think that the Ice Folk lingered, in part at least, and changed with the changing climate, and became at last the people who left the signs of their presence in almost every part of the state.
Those were the Mound Builders, whose works are said to be two or three thousand years old, though we cannot be very sure of that. There are some who think that the mounds are only a few hundred years old, and that their builders were the race of red men whom the white men found here. One may think very much as one likes, and I like to think that the Mound Builders were a very ancient people, who vanished many ages before the Indians came here. They could not have been savages, for the region where they dwelt could not have fed savages enough to heap up the multitude of their mounds. Each wild man needs fifty thousand acres to live upon, as the wild man lives by hunting and fishing; in the whole Ohio country, the earliest white adventurers found only two or three thousand Indians at the most; and the people who built those forts and temples and tombs, and shaped from the earth the mighty images of their strange bird-gods and reptile-gods, could have lived only by tilling the soil. Their mounds are found everywhere in the west between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi River, but they are found mostly in Ohio, where their farms and gardens once bordered the Muskingum, the Scioto, the two Miamis, and our other large streams, which they probably used as highways to the rivers of the southwest.
Their forts were earthworks, but they were skillfully planned, with a knowledge which no savage race has shown. They were real strongholds, and they are so large that some of them inclose hundreds of acres within walls of earth which still rise ten and twelve feet from the ground. They are on a far grander scale than the supposed temples or religious works; and there are more of them than of all the other ruins, except the small detached mounds, which are almost numberless.
These, from the charred bones found among the ashes in them, are known to be tombs, and they were probably the sepulchers of the common people, whose bodies were burned. The large mounds are heaped above walled chambers, and in these were platforms, supposed to have been altars, and whole skeletons, supposed to be the skeletons of priests buried there. The priests are supposed to have been the chiefs of the people, and to have ruled them through their superstitions; but there is nothing to prove this, for their laws were never put in written words or any other sign of speech. In some of the mounds little figures of burnt clay have been found, which may be idols, and pieces of ancient pottery, which may be fragments of sacred vessels, and small plates of copper, with marks or scratches on them, which may be letters. Some antiquarians have tried to read these letters, if they are letters, and to make sense out of them, but no seeker after true Ohio stories can trust their interpretations.
The Mound Builders used very little stone and showed no knowledge of masonry. But they built so massively out of the earth, that their works have lasted to this day in many places, just as they left them, except for the heavy growth of trees, which the first settlers found covering them, and which were sometimes seven or eight hundred years old. At Marietta, these works when the white people came were quite perfect and inclosed fifty acres on the bank of the Muskingum, overlooking the Ohio. They were in great variety of design. The largest mound was included in the grounds of the present cemetery, and so has been saved, but the plow of the New England emigrant soon passed over the foundations of the Mound Builders’ temples. At Circleville the shape of their fortifications gave its name to the town, which has long since hid them from sight. One of them was almost perfectly round, and the other nearly square. The round fort was about seventy feet in diameter, and was formed of two walls twenty feet high, with a deep ditch between; the other fort was fifty-five rods square, and it had no ditch; seven gateways opened into it at the side and corners, and it was joined to the round fort by an eighth. It is forever to be regretted that these precious ancient works should have been destroyed to make place for the present town; but within a few years one of the most marvelous of the Mound Builders’ works, the great Serpent Mound near Loudon, in Adams County, has been preserved to after time by the friends of science, and put in the keeping of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.
The state of Ohio has passed a law protecting the land around it as a park, and there is now reason to hope that the mound will last as long as the rocky bluff on which the serpent lies coiled. This huge idol is more than twelve hundred feet long, and is the most wonderful symbol in the world of the serpent worship, which was everywhere the earliest religion of our race.
The largest military ruin is the famous Fort Ancient in Warren County, where, on a terrace above the Little Miami River, five miles of wall, which can still be easily traced, shut in a hundred acres. In Highland County, about seventeen miles southeast of Hillsborough, another great fortress embraces thirty-five acres oh the crest of a hill overlooking Brush Creek. Itswalls are some twenty-five feet wide at the base, and rise from &ix to ten feet above the ground. Within their circuit are two ponds which could supply water in time of siege, and in the valley, which the hill commands, are the ruins of the Mound Builders’ village, whose people could take refuge in the fort on the hilltop and hold it against any approaching force.
For the rest, the works of the Mound Builders, except such as were too large to be destroyed by the farmer, have disappeared almost as wholly as the Mound Builders themselves. Their mole-like race threw up their ridges and banks and larger and lesser heaps, and then ceased from the face of the earth, as utterly as if they had burrowed into its heart. They may have fled before the ancestors of the savages whom our ancestors found here; they may have passed down peacefully into Mexico and built the cities which the Spaniards destroyed there. Or, they may have come up out of Mexico, and lost the higher arts of their civilization in our northern woods, warring with the wild tribes who were here before them. In either case, it is imaginable that the Mound Builders were of the same race as the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, and it is probable that they were akin to the Zufiis of our own day. The snake dances of the Zufiis are a relic of the old serpent worship; and the fear and hate which the Zufiis bear the red savages of the plains may be another heritage from the kindred race which once peopled our Ohio valleys.
II. OHIO AS A PART OF FRANCE.
If the people of Ohio were Eskimos in the ages before history began, and then thousands of years after, but still thousands of years ago were Aztecs, there is no doubt that when history first knew of them they were Frenchmen. The whole Great West, in fact, was once as much a province of France as Canada; for the dominions of Louis XV. were supposed to stretch from Quebec to New Orleans, and from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi. The land was really held by savages who had never heard of this king; but that was all the same to the French. They had discovered the Great Lakes, they had discovered the Mississippi, they had discovered the Ohio; and they built forts at Detroit, at Kaskaskia, and at Pittsburg, as well as at Niagara; they planted a colony at the mouth of our mightiest river, and opened a highway to France through the Gulf of Mexico, as well as through the Gulf of St. Lawrence; and they proclaimed their king sovereign over all.
In Ohio they had a post on the Maumee, and everywhere they had settlements at each of the forts, where there was always a chapel and a priest for the conversion of the Indians. With the French, the sword and the cross went together, but very few of the savages knew that they were either conquered or converted. From time to time they knew that companies of picturesque strangers visited their towns, and promised them the favor of the French king if they would have nothing to do with the traders from the English colonies on the Atlantic, and threatened them with his displeasure if they refused. When these brilliant strangers staid among them, and built a fort and a chapel, and laid out farms, then the savages willingly partook of the great king’s bounty, and clustered around the French post in their wigwams and settled down to the enjoyment of his brandy, his tobacco, his ammunition, and his religion. When the strangers went away, almost as soon as they had promised and threatened, then the savages went back to business with the English traders.
The company of Frenchmen who visited our Miami Indians at their town of Pickawillany, on the head waters of the Miami River in 1749, was of this last sort. It was commanded by the Chevalier Céloron de Bienville, and it counted some two hundred Canadians and French troops, officered by French gentlemen, and attended by one of those brave priests who led or followed wherever the French flag was carried in the wilderness. Céloron was sent by the governor of Canada to lay claim to the Ohio valley for his king, and he did this by very simple means. He nailed plates of tin to certain trees, and he buried plates of lead at the mouths of the larger streams. The leaden plates no one ever saw for a hundred years, till some boys going to bathe found them here and there in the wave-worn banks; but if the Indians could have read anything, or if the English traders could have read French, they might have learned at once from the tin plates that the king of France owned the “Ohio River and all the waters that fell into it, and all the lands on both sides.” As it was, however, it is hard to see how anybody was the wiser for them, or could know that the king had upheld his right to the Ohio country by battle and by treaty and would always defend it.
In fact, neither the battles nor the treaties between the French and English in Europe had really settled the question of their claim to the West in America, and both sides began to urge it in a time of peace by every kind of secret and open violence. As for the Miamis and their allies among the neighboring tribes, they believed that God had created them on the very spot where Céloron found them living, and when he asked them to leave their capital at Pickawillany, and go to live near the French post on the Maumee, they answered him that they would do so when it was more convenient. He bade them banish the English traders, but they merely hid them, while he was with them, and as soon as he was gone, they had them out of hiding, and began to traffic with them. They never found it more convenient to leave their town, until a few years later, when a force of Canadians and Christian Indians came down from the post on the Maumee, and destroyed Pickawillany.
Céloron came into the Ohio country through the western part of New York. He launched his canoes on the head waters of the Beautiful River, as the French called the Ohio, and drifted down its current till he reached the mouth of the Great Miami. He worked up this shallow and uncertain stream into Shelby County, where he had his friendly but fruitless meeting with the chief of the Miamis. After that he kept on northward to the Maumee, and then embarked on Lake Erie, and so got back to Canada. It could not be honestly said that he had done much to make good his king’s claim to the country with his plates of tin and lead. He had flattered and threatened the Indians at several places; and the Indians had promised, over the cups of brandy and pipes of tobacco which he supplied them, to be good subjects to Louis XV., who was such a very bad king that he did not deserve even such subjects as they meant to be. They seem not to have taken Céloron’s warnings very seriously, though he told them that the English traders would ruin them, and that they were preparing the way for the English settlers, who would soon swarm into their country, and drive them out.
The Indians did not believe Céloron, and yet he told them the truth. The English traders were often men of low character, thoroughly dishonest in their dealings, and the English settlers were only waiting for the end of the struggle with the French to come and take the Indians’ lands from them. If the French soldiers and the French priests had won in that struggle, Ohio and the whole West might now be something like the Province of Quebec as it was then. The Indians would have been converted to the Catholic faith, and they would still be found in almost as great numbers as ever throughout the vast region where hardly one of their blood remains.
But this was not to be. The French built their forts with a keen eye for the strongest points in the wilderness, and the priests planted the cross even beyond the forts. But all around and between the forts and the missions, the traders from our colonies, which afterwards became our states, stole into the country claimed for the king of France. At that time, there was peace between the king of France and the king of England in Europe, and they pretended that there was peace between their nations in America. They were very civil to each other through their ministers and ambassadors, over there, but their governors and captains here never ceased to fight and trick for the ownership of the West. From their forts, built to curb the English settlers, the French set the savages on to harass the frontier of our colonies, which their war parties wasted with theft and fire and murder. Our colonies made a poor defense, because they were suspicious of one another. New England was suspicious of New York, New York of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania of Virginia, and the mother country was suspicious of them all. She was willing that the French should hold Canada, and keep the colonies from joining together in a revolt against her, when she could easily have taken that province and freed them from the inroads of the Canadian Indians. The colonies would not unite against the common enemy, for fear one would have more advantage than another from their union; but their traders went out singly, through the West, and trading companies began to be formed in Pennsylvania and Virginia. While Céloron was in Ohio claiming the whole land for the king of France, the king of England was granting a great part of the same to a company of Virginians, with the right to settle it and fortify it The Virginia Company sent its agents to visit the Miamis at Pickawillany a year later, and bound them to the English by gifts of brandy, tobacco, beads, gay cloths, and powder.
The allied tribes, who had their capital at Pickawillany, numbered some two thousand in all. The Miamis themselves are said to have been of the same family as the great Iroquois nation of the East, who had beaten their rivals of the Algonquin nation, and forced them to bear the name of women. But many of the Ohio Indians were Delawares, who were of the Algonquin family; they were by no means patient of the name of women, and they and their friends now took the side of the French against the English. When at last the West, together with the whole of Canada, fell to the English and there presently began to be trouble between the American colonists and the English king, all the Indians, both Iroquois and Algonquins took part against the Americans. A little victory for either side, however, with gifts of brandy and tobacco, would turn their savage hearts toward the victors; and one must not be too confident in saying that the Indians were always for the French against the English, or always for the English against the Americans.
In fact, one must speak mostly of the Indians in words that have a double sense. The old explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and traders all talk of nations, towns, villages, kings, half-kings, queens, and princes, but these words present false images to our minds. Calling the chief town of the Miamis at Pickawillany their capital gives the notion of some such capital as Columbus or Washington; but if we imagine the chief town of the Miamis as it really was, we see some hundreds of wigwams in straggling clusters along the banks of the river, in the shadow of the ancient woods, or in the sunshine of the beautiful meadows, as the earliest white visitors to Ohio called the small prairies which they came upon in the heart of the forests. We see a large council house of bark, as nearly in the midst of the scattered huts as may be, where the Miamis hold their solemn debates, receive embassies from other tribes, welcome their warriors home from their forays, and celebrate their feasts and dances. We see fields bordering the village, where the squaws plant their corn and beans, and the maple groves where they make their sugar. Among the men and boys we see the busy idleness of children, all day long, except when the grown-up children go out upon a hunt, or take the warpath. Sometimes we see an English trader coming with his merchandise and presents, or a captive brought in to be tortured and burnt, or adopted into the tribe.
The tribes in the Ohio country were far abler than those that the English first met to the eastward, and they were fiercer than the fiercest which the Americans have at last brought under control in the plains of the Far West. Pitiless as Sioux and Apache and Comanche have shown themselves in their encounters with the whites in our day, they were surpassed in ferocity by the Shawnees, the Wyandots, and the Miamis whom the backwoodsmen met in a thousand fights, a century or a century and a half ago. The Ohio Indians were unspeakably vicious, treacherous, and filthy, but they were as brave as they were vile, and they were as sagacious as they were false. They produced men whom we must call orators, statesmen, and generals, even when tested by the high standards of civilization. They excelled us in the art of war as it was adapted to the woods, and they despised the stupid and wasteful courage of the disciplined English soldier. Till the white men studied war from them they were always beaten in their fights with the red men, and it was hardly the fault of the Indians if the pioneers learned from them to be savages: to kill women and children as well as armed men, to tomahawk and scalp the wounded, to butcher helpless prisoners. But this befell, and it is this which makes many of the stories of Ohio so bloody. We must know their hideous facts fully if we would know them truly, or if we would realize the life that once passed in the shadows of our woods.
The region that we now call Ohio was wonderfully varied and pleasant. The many rivers that watered it cleared their space to the sky where they ran, and here and there the meadows or prairies smiled to the sun in grass and flowers. But everywhere else there was the gloom of forests unbroken since the Mound Builders left the land. The long levels that bordered the great lake at the north, the noble hills that followed the course of the Beautiful River, the gently varied surfaces of the center, and the southwest, the swamps and morasses of the northwest, were nearly everywhere densely wooded. Our land was a woodland, and its life, when it first became known to the white man, was the stealthy and cruel life of the forest. Where the busy Mound Builders once swarmed, scanty tribes of savages lurked in the leafy twilight, hunting and fishing, and warring upon one another. They came and went upon their errands of death and rapine by trails unseen to other eyes, till the keen traders of Pennsylvania and Virginia began to find their way over them to their villages, and to traffic with the savages for the furs which formed their sole wealth.
All is dim and vague in any picture of the time and place that we can bring before us. There are the fathomless forests, broken by the prairies and rivers; there are the Indian towns widely scattered along the larger streams throughout the whole region; there are the French posts on the northern border, with each a priest and a file of soldiers, and a few Canadian farmers and traders. Under the cover of peace between the French king and the English king, there is a constant grapple between the French soldiers and the English settlers for the possession of the wilds which shall one day be the most magnificent empire under the sun; there are the war parties of Indians falling stealthily upon the English borders to the eastward; there is the steady pressure of the backwoodsman westward, in spite of every hardship and danger, in spite of treaties, in spite of rights and promises. These are the main features of the picture whose details the imagination strives to supply, with a teasing sense of the obscurity resting upon the whole. It is all much farther off than ancient Rome, much stranger than Greece; but it is the beginning of a mighty history, which it rests with the children of this day, and their children after them, to make the happiest and noblest chapter in the history of the world. It is a part of that greater history, and I should like my young readers to remember that the Ohio stories which I hope to tell them are important chiefly because they are human stories, and record incidents in the life of the whole race. They cannot be taken from this without losing their finest meanings.
III. OHIO BECOMES ENGLISH.
Neither the French nor the English had any right to the Ohio country which they both claimed. If it belonged to any people of right, it belonged to the savages, who held it in their way before the whites came, and who now had to choose which nation should call itself their master. They chose the French, and they chose wisely for themselves as savages; for, as I have said, if the French had prevailed in the war that was coming, the Indians could have kept their forests and lived their forest life as before. The French would have been satisfied in the West as they had been in the North, with their forts and trading stations, and the Indians could have hunted, and fished, and trapped, as they had always done. In fact, the French people would often have become like them. They understood the Indians and liked them; sometimes they mated with them, and their children grew up as wild as their mothers. The religion that the French priests taught the Indians, pleased while it awed them, and it scarcely changed their native customs.
Wherever the English came, the Indians’ woods were wasted, and the Indians were driven out of the land.
The English tried neither to save their souls nor to win their hearts; they both hated and despised the savages, and ruthlessly destroyed them. Now, when the smoldering strife between the French and English in the West burst into an open flame of war between the two nations, the Western tribes took the side of those whom reason and instinct taught them to know as their best friends.
But ten years after Céloron visited Ohio, Wolfe captured Quebec, and France gave up to England not only the whole of Canada, but the whole of the vast region between the lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, and kept for herself only the Province of Louisiana. The Indians were left to their fate, and they made what terms they could with the English. They promised peace, but they broke their promises, and constantly harassed the outlying English settlements. At one time they joined together under the great chief Pontiac, and tried to win back the West for themselves. The French forts had been ceded to Great Britain and garrisoned with British troops, and the allied Indians now took all of these but Detroit and Fort Pitt. In the end they failed, and then they made peace again, but still they kept up their forays along the English borders. They stole horses and cattle, they burned houses and barns, they killed men, women, and children, or carried them off into captivity. In the Ohio country alone their captives counted hundreds, though the right number could never be known, for they could easily be kept out of the way when the tribes were summoned to give them up.
It was the same story in the West that it had been in the East, and the North, and the South, wherever the savages fell upon the lonely farms or the scattered hamlets of the frontiers, and it was not ended until our own day, when the Indians were at last shut up in reservations.
It was their custom to carry off the women and children. If the children were hindered the march of their mothers, or if they cried and endangered or annoyed their captors, they were torn a hawked, or their brains were dashed out against the trees. But if they were well grown, and strong enough to keep up with the rest, they were hurried sometimes hundreds of miles into the wilderness. There the fate of all prisoners was decided in solemn council of the tribe. If any men had been taken, especially such as had made a hard fight for their freedom and had given proof of their courage, they were commonly tortured to death by fire in celebration of the victory won over them; though it sometimes happened that young men who had caught the fancy or affection of the Indians were adopted by the fathers of sons lately lost in battle. The older women became the slaves and drudges of the squaws and the boys and girls were parted from their mothers and scattered among the savage families. The boys grew up hunters and trappers, like the Indian boys, and the girls grew up like the Indian girls, and did the hard work which the warriors always left to the women. The captives became as fond of their wild, free life as the savages themselves, and they found wives and husbands among the youths and maidens of their tribe. If they were given up to their own people, as might happen in the brief intervals of peace, they pined for the wilderness, which called to their homesick hearts, and sometimes they stole back to it. They seem rarely to have been held for ransom, as the captives of the Indians of the Western plains were in our time. It was a tie of real love that bound them and their savage friends together, and it was sometimes stronger than the tie of blood. But this made their fate all the crueler to their kindred; for whether they lived or whether they died, they were lost to the fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters whom they had been torn from; and it was little consolation to these that they had found human mercy and tenderness in the breasts of savages who in all else were like ravening beasts. It was rather an agony added to what they had already suffered to know that somewhere in the trackless forests to the westward there was growing up a child who must forget them. The time came when something must be done to end all this and to put a stop to the Indian attacks on the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The jealous colonies united with the jealous mother country, and a little army of British regulars and American recruits was sent into Ohio under the lead of Colonel Henry Bouquet to force the savages to give up their captives.
This officer, who commanded the king’s troops at Philadelphia, was a young Swiss who had fought in the great wars of Europe, in the service of the king of Piedmont and of the Dutch republic, before he was given a commission by the king of Great Britain. He had distinguished himself by his bravery, his skill, and his good sense. He seems to have been the first European commander to disuse the rules of European warfare, and to take a lesson from our pioneers in fighting the Indians, and the year before he set out for the Ohio country, he had beaten the tribes in a battle that taught them to respect him. They found that they had no such wrong-headed leader as Braddock to deal with; and that they could not hope to ambush Bouquet’s troops, and shoot them down like cattle in a pen; and the news of his coming spread awe among them.
He gathered his forces together at Fort Pitt, after many delays. At one time a full third of his colonial recruits deserted him, but he waited till he had made up their number again, and then he started at the head of fifteen hundred men, on the 3d of October, 1764. A body of Virginians went first in three scouting parties, one on the right and one on the left, to beat up the woods for lurking enemies, and one in the middle with a guide, to lead the way. Then came the pioneers with their axes, and two companies of light infantry followed, to clear the way for the main body of the troops. A column of British regulars, two deep, marched in the center with a file of regulars on their right, and a file of Pennsylvanian recruits on their left.
Two platoons of regulars came after these; then came a battalion of Pennsylvanians in single file on the right and left, and between them the convoy, with the ammunition and tools first, then the officers’ baggage and tents, then the sheep and oxen in separate droves for the subsistence of the army, then the pack horses with other provisions. A party of light horsemen followed, and last of all another body of Virginians brought up the rear. The men marched in silence, six feet from one another, ready, if any part of the force halted, to face outward, and prepare to meet an attack.
The Indians hung upon Bouquet’s march in large numbers at first, but when they saw the perfect order and discipline of his army, and the knowledge of their own tactics which he showed in disposing his men, they fell away, and he kept his course unmolested, so that in two weeks he reached a point in the Ohio country which he could now reach in two hours, if he took rail from Pittsburg direct. But the wonder is for what he did then, and not for what he could do now. His two weeks’ march through the wilderness was a victory such as had never been achieved before, and it moved the imagination of the Indians more than if he had fought them the whole way.
His quiet firmness in establishing his force in the heart of their country, where they had gathered the strength of their tribes from all the outlying regions, must have affected them still more. At the first halt he made on the Muskingum, they sent some of their chiefs to parley with him, but he gave them short and stern answers, bidding them be ready to bring in their captives from every tribe and family; and again took up his march along the river till he reached the point where the Tuscarawas and Waldhonding meet to form the Muskingum. There his axmen cleared a space in the forest, and his troops built a town, rather than pitched a camp. They put up four redoubts, one at each corner of the town, and fortified it with a strong stockade. Within this they built a council house, where the Indians could come and make speeches to their hearts’ content, and deliver up their captives. Three separate buildings, one for the captives from each of the colonies, with the officers’ quarters, the soldiers’ cabins, the kitchens, and the ovens, were inclosed within the fort, and the whole was kept in a neatness and order such as the savages had never seen, with military severity.
The tribes soon began to bring in their prisoners, each chief giving up the captives of his tribe with long harangues, and many gifts of wampum, as pledges of good faith, and promises of a peace never to be broken. They said they had not merely buried the hatchet now, where it might sometime be dug up, but they had thrown it into the sky to the Great Spirit, who would never give it back again. They wished Bouquet to notice that they no longer called the English brothers, as they commonly did when they were friendly, but they called them fathers, and they meant to be their children and to do their bidding like children. They made him a great number of flattering speeches, and he gravely listened to their compliments, but as to the reasons they gave for breaking their promises in the past he dealt very frankly with them. He reminded them of their treacheries, and cruelties of all kinds, and of their failure to restore their captives after they had pledged themselves to do so, and he said, “This army shall not leave your country till you have fully complied with every condition that is to precede my treaty with you.... I give you twelve days from this date to deliver into my hands all the prisoners in your possession, without any exception; Englishmen, Frenchmen, women and children, whether adopted into your tribes, married or living amongst you under any pretense whatsoever, together with all negroes. And you are to furnish the said prisoners with clothing, provisions, and horses, to carry them to Fort Pitt.... You shall then know on what terms you may obtain the peace you sue for.”
These words are said to have quite broken the spirit of the savages, already overawed by the presence of such an army as they had never seen in their country before. One of the great chiefs of the Delawares said: “With this string of wampum we wipe the tears from your eyes, we deliver you these prisoners... we gather and bury with this belt all the bones of the people that have been killed during this unhappy war, which the Evil Spirit occasioned among us. We cover the bones that have been buried, that they may never more be remembered. We again cover their place with leaves that it may no more be seen. As we have been long astray, and the path between you and us stopped, we extend this belt that it may be again cleared.... While you hold it fast by one end, and we by the other, we shall always be able to discover anything that may disturb our friendship.”
Bouquet answered that he had heard them with pleasure, and that in receiving these last prisoners from them he joined with them in burying the bones of those who had fallen in the war, so that the place might no more be known. “The peace you ask for, you shall now have,” he said, but he told them that it was his business to make war, and the business of others to make peace, and he instructed them how and with whom they were to treat. He took hostages from them, and he dealt with the other tribes on the same terms as they brought in their captives. On the 18th of November, he broke up his camp and marched back to Fort Pitt, with more than two hundred men, women, and children whom he had delivered from captivity among the savages.
It is believed that six hundred others were never given up. The captives were not always glad to go back to their old homes, and the Indians had sometimes to use force in bringing them to the camp where their friends and kindred who had come with Bouquet’s army were waiting to receive them. Many had been taken from their homes when they were so young that they could not remember them, and they had learned to love the Indians, who had brought them up like their own children, and treated them as lovingly as the fathers and mothers from whom they had been stolen. In the charm of the savage life these children of white parents had really become savages; and certain of the young girls had grown up and married Indian husbands to whom they were tenderly attached. The scenes of parting between all these were very touching on both sides, and it is told of one Indian who had married a Virginian girl that he followed her back to the frontier at the risk of his life from her people. The Indians gave up the captives often so dear to them, with tears and lamentations, while on the other hand their kindred waited to receive them in an anguish of hope and fear. As the captives came into the camp, parents sought among them for the little ones they had lost, and husbands for the wives who had been snatched from their desolated homes. Brothers and sisters met after a parting so long that one or other had forgotten the language they once spoke in common. The Indians still hung about the camp, and came every day to visit their former prisoners and bring them gifts. When the army took up its march some of them asked leave to follow it back to Fort Pitt, and on the way they supplied their adopted children and brothers with game, and sought in every way to show their love for them.
Bouquet reached Pittsburg in ten days, without the loss of a single life at the hands of the savages, and with all his men in excellent health. Each day of his march he had pitched his camp among scenes of sylvan loveliness, on the banks of the pleasant streams that watered the fertile levels and the wild meadows, or wound through the rich valleys between the low hills. It would have been wonderful if his Pennsylvanian and Virginian recruits had not looked upon the land with covetous eyes: even the fathers and husbands and brothers who had come seeking their kindred among the Indians, had seen it with a longing to plant their homes in it. Its charms had been revealed to great numbers of the people who had known of it only from the traders before, and the savage was doomed from that time to lose it; for it already belonged to the king of England, and it rested with the English colonists to come and take it; or so, at least, they thought.
IV. THE FORTY YEARS’ WAR FOR THE WEST.
The French king gave up the West to the English king in 1763, but, as we have seen, the Indians had no part in the bargain. They only knew that they were handed over by those who had been their friends to those who had been their enemies, and they did not consent. They had made war upon the English colonists before, and now, in spite of the failure of Pontiac, and in spite of Bouquet’s march into the Ohio country, they kept up their warfare for forty years, with a truce when it was convenient, and a treaty of peace when it was convenient, but with a steadfast purpose to drive the English settlers out, and to hold the wilderness for themselves. It was not until long after their power was broken by the American arms in 1794 that their struggle ended in the region which ten years later became the state of Ohio.
There was misunderstanding on both sides. The Indians naturally supposed that their own country belonged to them, and the colonists supposed that their eastern and western borders were the two oceans. These were commonly the boundaries which the English king had given them; and when he had not been quite clear about it in his grants of territory which he had never even imagined, they did not allow him to deal less splendidly with them than such a prince ought. He had, as we know, given the Ohio Company of Virginia a large tract of the best land beyond the Ohio even while the French still claimed the West, and he had encouraged the Virginians to believe they had a right to settle it and to fortify it. But after the capture of Quebec, when the West, as well as Canada, fell into the power of Great Britain, the English king, or rather his ministers, began to change their minds about letting the colonists take up lands in the Back Country, as they called it. The jealousy between the colonies grew less, but the jealousy between them and Great Britain grew greater; there were outbreaks here and there against her rule, and there was discontent nearly everywhere. The colonists were disappointed and embittered that the West should be treated as a part of Canada, by the mother country, when it ought to have been shared among the English provinces. The British government tried to hinder the settlement of the whites on the Indians’ lands; and though it could not keep them off altogether, it did enough to make the savages feel that it was their friend against its own subjects. In 1774, Parliament passed a law which declared the whole West, between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and below the Great Lakes, a part of the Province of Quebec. This was felt by our colonies to be so great an injury that it was charged against Great Britain in the Declaration of Independence, as one of the causes for separation. It was in fact an act hostile to a people of the British race, language, and religion, and it was meant not so much to help the savages, as to hurt the colonists, though it did really help the savages. When the Revolutionary War broke out a year or two later, the British government did not scruple to make use of the cruel hatred of the Indians against its rebellious subjects.
It set on the war parties that harried the American border, and when the blood-stained braves came back with their plunder, their captives, and the scalps of the men, women, and children they had murdered, they were welcomed at the British forts as friends and allies. In certain cases, to be sure, British officers did what they could to soften the hard fate of the prisoners, but the British government was guilty, nevertheless, of the barbarous deeds done by the Indians. Its agents furnished them with arms and ammunition, and its ministers upheld them in the same atrocities against the American rebels as the French in their time had urged and tempted them to commit against the settlers when they were English subjects.
At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Indians were as slow to lay down their arms as they had been after the French War. In each case they fought the victors, as far as they could get at them in the persons of the hapless backwoodsmen and their wives and children. These backwoodsmen did not change greatly, in their way of life, during that long Indian war of forty years. They were of the hardy English, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish stock which a generation or two in the wilderness had toughened and strengthened. They had not yet ciphered it out that one red hunter and trapper must waste the fifty thousand acres which would support the families of a hundred white farmers in comfort and prosperity; but they knew that to the westward there was a region, vast and rich beyond anything words could say, and they longed to possess it, with a hunger that was sometimes a pitiless greed, and always a resistless desire. Yet it was not until the French gave up this region that they could even venture lawlessly into it, and it was not until it fell from Great Britain to the new power of the United States that the borderers began openly to press into the backwoods, singly as hunters and trappers, in families as neighborhoods as the founders of villages and towns. The pioneers felt that they were going to take their own wherever they found it, from the savages who could not and would not use it, and they were right, for the land truly belongs to him who will use it. The savages felt that the pioneers were coming to take their own from them, for in their way they were using the land; and they were right, too. All that is left for us to ask at this late day is which could use the land best and most; and there can hardly be any doubt of the answer.
To understand the situation clearly, the reader must keep in mind certain dates. Céloron de Bienville visited the Miamis in 1749, and the French kept the Ohio Indians on the warpath against the English settlements to the eastward until 1763, when they gave up the West to Great Britain. Then, until 1775, the savages alone fought the settlers as the subjects of the English king. The Revolutionary War broke out, and the Indians became the allies of the British. Then, in 1783, their country was given up to the United States, and they still fought their old enemies, who had not changed their nature by changing their name to Americans. In 1794, the great battle of Fallen Timbers was fought on the banks of the Maumee, and the long struggle was ended.
It had grown more and more fierce and cruel as time passed, and only three years before General Wayne won his lasting victory, General St. Clair had suffered his terrible defeat by the Indians. Through this defeat, the power of the whites in the West was shaken as it had never been before; the savages were filled with pride and hope by the greatest triumph they had achieved over their enemies; and all the settlements in the Northwestern Territory were endangered.
Perhaps I had better say seemed endangered. The Indians were really less to be feared than at any time before. They were weaker, and the whites were stronger. They were striving against destiny; and though their fate was sealed with the blood of their enemies, their fate was sealed. All the chances that had favored them had favored them in vain, and neither their wily courage nor their pitiless despair availed them against the people who outnumbered them, as the stems of the harvest field outnumber the trees of the forest.
V. THE CAPTIVITY OF JAMES SMITH
The stories of captivity among the Ohio Indians during the war that ended in 1794 would of themselves fill a much larger book than this is meant to be. Most of them were never set down, but some of them were very thrillingly told, and others very touchingly, either by the captives themselves, or by such of their friends as were better able to write them out. One, at least, is charming, and the narrative of Colonel James Smith deserves a chapter by itself, not only because it is charming, but because it shows the Indians in a truer and kindlier light than they were often able to show themselves.
Smith was born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, which in 1737 was the frontier of the white settlement, and he was taken prisoner in 1755, by a small party of Delawares, near Bedford, while he was helping to cut a road for the passage of General Braddock’s ill-fated expedition against the French. The Indians hurried from the English border, and forced him to run with them nearly the whole way to Fort Duquesne, which afterwards became Fort Pitt, and is now Pittsburg. A large body of savages was encamped outside the post, and there Smith expected to be burned to death with the tortures he afterwards saw inflicted upon many other prisoners; but he was only made to run the gantlet. Two lines of Indians were drawn up, with sticks in their hands, and Smith dashed at the top of his speed between their ranks. He was cruelly beaten, and before he reached the goal he fell senseless. When he came to himself he was in the hands of a French surgeon. He was well cared for, and he lived in hopes of rescue by Braddock’s army, which was marching against Fort Duquesne in greater force than had ever been sent into the wilderness. But while he was still so broken and bruised as to be scarcely able to walk, the Indians came in with plunder and prisoners from the scene of their bloody victory over the British troops.
A little later, Smith’s captors claimed him from the French, and carried him to an Indian town on the Muskingum. The day after their arrival a number of the Indians came to him, and one of them began to pull out his hair, dipping his fingers in ashes to get a better hold, and plucking it away hair by hair till it was all gone except a lock on the crown. This they plaited with strings of beadwork and silver brooches, and then they bored his ears and nose and put rings in them. They painted his face and body in different colors, hung a band of wampum about his neck, and fitted his arm with bracelets of silver. An old chief led him into the street of the village, and gave the alarm halloo, when all the Delawares, Caughnewagas, and Mohicans of the place came running, and formed round the chief, who held Smith by the hand, and made them a long speech. He then gave Smith over to three young squaws, who pulled him into the river waist-deep, and made signs to him that he should plunge his head into the water. But Smith’s head was full of the tortures of the prisoners whom he had seen burnt at Fort Duquesne; he believed all these ceremonies were the preparations for his death, and he would neither duck.
He struggled with them, amidst the shouts and laughter of the Indians on the shore, until one of them managed to say in English, “No hurt you,” when he suffered them to plunge him under the water and rub at him as long as they chose.
By this means they washed away his white blood, and he was adopted into the tribe in place of a great chief who had lately died. He seems never to have known why this honor was done him; but he was then a lusty young fellow of eighteen who might well have taken the fancy of some of his captors; and he probably fell into their hands at a moment which their superstition rendered fortunate for him.
When the squaws had done with him, he was taken up into the council house of the village, where he was dressed in a new ruffled shirt, leggins trimmed with ribbons and wrought with beads, and moccasins embroidered with porcupine quills. His face was painted afresh, and his scalp lock tied up with red feathers; he was given a pipe and tobacco pouch and seated upon a bear skin, while one of the chiefs addressed him in the presence of the assembled warriors. “My son,” so the speech was interpreted to Smith, “you are now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. You are taken into the Caughnewaga nation, and initiated into a warlike tribe; you are adopted into a great family... in the room and place of a great man. After what has passed this day, you are now one of us by an old strong law and custom. My son, you have now nothing to fear; we are now under the same obligations to love, support, and defend you, that we are to love and defend one another; therefore you are to consider yourself as one of our people.”
A grand feast of boiled venison and green corn followed, and Smith took part in it on the same terms as all the rest of his tribe and family. In due time he found out that no word the chief had addressed him was idly spoken, and he began to live the life of the savages like one of themselves, under the affectionate care and constant instruction of his brethren. He was given a gun, at first, and sent to hunt turkeys, but he came upon the trace of buffalo, and was lured on by the hope of larger game, and so lost his way. The Indians found him again easily enough, but as a punishment for his rashness his gun was taken from him, and for two years he was allowed to carry only a bow and arrows. Once when the hunters had killed a bear and he went out with a party to bring in the meat, Smith complained of the weight of his load; the Indians laughed at him, and to shame him they gave part of his burden to a young squaw who already had as much as he to carry. At another time, he went to the fields with some other young men to watch the squaws hoeing corn; one of these challenged him to take her hoe, and he did so, and hoed for some time with the women. They were delighted and praised his skill, but when he came back to the village, the old chiefs rebuked him, telling him that he was adopted in the place of a great man, and it was unworthy of him to hoe corn like a squaw.
Smith owns that he never gave them a chance to chide him a second time for such unseemly behavior. After that he left all the hard work to the squaws like a true Indian, and guarded his dignity as a hunter. He was never trusted, or at least he was never asked, to take part in any of the forays against the white frontier, when from time to time parties were sent to the Pennsylvania borders to take scalps and steal horses. It was a sorrowful thing for him when his savage brethren set forth on these errands of theft and murder among his kindred by race, and it was long before he could make the least show of returning their affection.
It was not until they gave him back some books which they had brought him from other prisoners, but had then taken from him for some caprice, that he says he felt his heart warm towards them. They pretended that the books had been lost, but declared that they were glad they had been found, for they knew that he was grieved at the loss of them. “Though they had been exceedingly kind to me,” he says, “I still as before detested them, on account of the barbarity I beheld after Braddock’s defeat. Neither had I ever before pretended kindness, or expressed myself in a friendly manner; but now I began to excuse the Indians on account of their want of information.”
The family which Smith had been taken into did not stay long in the Muskingum country, but began the wandering life of the hunters and trappers, working northward mostly, and visiting the shores and waters of Lake Erie. It was all very pleasant and full of a wild charm while the fine weather lasted, especially for the men, who had nothing to do but to bring in the game and fish for the squaws to cook and care for. The squaws made the sugar in the spring; they felled the trees and fashioned from the barks the troughs to catch the maple sap, which they boiled down into sugar; they planted and tended the fields of corn and beans; they did everything that was like work, indoors and out, and the men did nothing that was not like play or war. While their plenty lasted, it was for all; when the dearth came, every one shared it. But in this free, sylvan life there was the grace of an unstinted hospitality. The stranger was pressed to make the lodge of his host his home, and he was given the best of his store. One day when his Indian brother came in from the hunt, Smith told him that a passing Wyandot had visited their camp, and he had given him roast venison. “And I suppose you gave him also sugar and bear’s oil to eat with his venison?” Smith confessed that as the sugar and bear’s oil were in the canoe, he did not go for them. His brother told him he had behaved just like a Dutchman, and he asked, “Do you not know that when strangers come to our camp we are to give them the best we have?” Smith owned that he had been wrong, and then his brother excused him because he was so young; but he bade him learn to behave like a warrior, and do great things, and never be caught in any such mean actions again.
The Indians were as prompt to praise and reward what they thought fine in him, as to rebuke what they deemed unworthy; and the second winter that they spent in Northern Ohio, they gave him a gun again for the courage and endurance he twice showed when he had lost his way from camp. Once when he was caught in a heavy storm of snow; he passed the night in the hollow of a tree, which he made snug by blocking it up with brush and pieces of wood, and by chopping the rotten inside of the trunk with his hatchet until he had a soft, warm bed. Another time, when he was looking at his beaver traps he was overtaken by the dark, and kept himself from freezing by dancing and shouting till daylight. His Indian friends honored him for his wise behavior, and as they had now beaver skins enough, they carried them to the French post at Detroit, where they bought a gun for him. They bought for themselves a keg of brandy, and they paid Smith the compliment, when he refused to drink, of making him one of the guards set over the drinkers to keep them from killing one another. He helped bring them safely through their debauch, but nothing could prevent their spending all they had got for their beaver skins in more and more brandy. Then they went back sick and sorry to the woods again.
The family Smith was taken into was honored for its uncommon virtue and wisdom. His two brothers, Tontileaugo and Tecaughretanego were men of great sense, with good heads and good hearts. They treated Smith with the greatest love and patience, and took him to task with affectionate mildness when he transgressed the laws of taste or feeling. The Indians all despised the white settlers, whom they thought stupid and cowardly, and they expected to drive them beyond the sea. They despised them for their impiety, and Tecaughretanego once said to Smith, “As you have lived with the white people, you have not had the same advantage of knowing that the Great Being above feeds his people and gives them their meat in due season, as we Indians have, who are wonderfully supplied, and that so frequently that it is evidently the hand of the Great Owaneeyo that doeth this; whereas the white people have commonly large flocks of tame cattle, that they can kill when they please, and also their barns and cribs filled with grain, and therefore have not the same opportunity of seeing and knowing that they are supported by the ruler of Heaven and Earth.”
At this time the Indians were suffering from the famine that their waste and improvidence had brought upon them; and perhaps Smith might have said something on the white man’s side. But he had nothing to say when rebuked for smiling at Tecaughretanego’s sacrifice of the last leaf of his tobacco to the Great Spirit “Brother, I have something to say to you, and I hope you will not be offended when I tell you of your faults. You know that when you were reading your books, I would not let the boys or any one disturb you; but now when I was praying I saw you laughing. I do not think you look upon praying as a foolish thing; I believe you pray yourself. But perhaps you think my mode or manner of prayer foolish; if so, you ought in a friendly manner to instruct me, and not make sport of sacred things.”
The prayer which Tecaughretanego thought ought to have escaped Smith’s derision was one which he made after he began to get well from a long sickness; and it was certainly very quaint; but if the Father of all listens most kindly to those children of his who come to him simply and humbly, he could not have been displeased with this old Indian’s petition.
“Oh, Great Being, I thank thee that I have obtained the use of my legs again, that I am now able to walk about and kill turkeys without feeling exquisite pain and misery: I know that thou art a hearer and a helper, and therefore I will call upon thee. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that my ankles and knees may be right well, and that I may be able not only to walk, but to run and to jump as I did last fall. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that on this voyage we may frequently kill bears, as they may be crossing the Scioto and Sandusky. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that we may kill plenty of turkeys along the banks, to stew with our bear meat. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that rain may come to raise the Olentangy about two or three feet, that we may cross in safety down to the Scioto, without danger of our canoe being wrecked on the rocks. And now, oh, Great Being, thou knowest how matters stand—thou knowest that I am a great lover of tobacco, and that though I know not when I may get any more, I now make a present of the last I have unto thee, as a free burnt offering. Therefore I request that thou wilt hear and grant these requests, and I thy servant will return thee thanks, and love thee for thy gifts.”
Smith tells us that a few days after Tecaughretanego made his prayer and offered up his tobacco, rain came and raised the Olentangy high enough to let them pass safely into the Scioto. He does not say whether he thought this was the effect of the old Indian’s piety, but he always speaks reverently of Tecaughretanego’s religion. He is careful to impress the reader again and again with the importance of the Indian family he had been taken into, and with the wisdom as well as the goodness of Tecaughretanego, who held some such place among the Ottawas, he says, as Socrates held among the Athenians. He was against the Indians’ taking part in the war between the French and English; he believed they ought to leave these to fight out their own quarrels; and in all the affairs of his people, he favored justice, truth, and honesty. The Indians, indeed, never stole from one another, but they thought it quite right to rob even their French allies; and it will help us to a real understanding of their principles, if we remember that the good and wise Tecaughretanego is never shown as rebuking the cruelty and treachery of the war parties in their attacks on the English settlements. The Indian’s virtues are always for his own tribe; outside of it, all the crimes are virtues, and it is right to lie, to cheat, to steal, to kill; as it was with our own ancestors when they lived as tribes.
Smith was always treated like one of themselves by his Indian brothers, and he had a deep affection for them. Once, in a time of famine, when Tecaughretanego lay helpless in his cabin, suffering patiently with the rheumatism which crippled him, Smith hunted two whole days without killing any game, and then came home faint with hunger and fatigue. Tecaughretanego bade his little son bring him a broth which the boy had made with some wildcat bones left by the buzzards near the camp, and when Smith had eaten he rebuked him for his despair, and charged him never again to doubt that God would care for him, because God always cared for those children of his who trusted in him, as the Indians did, while the white men trusted in themselves. The next day Smith went out again, but the noise made by the snow crust breaking under his feet frightened the deer he saw, and he could not get a shot at them. Suddenly, he felt that he could bear his captivity no longer, and he resolved to try and make his way back to Pennsylvania. The Indians might kill him, long before he could reach home; but if he staid, he must die of hunger. He hurried ten or twelve miles eastward, when he came upon fresh buffalo tracks, and soon caught sight of the buffalo. He shot one of them, but he could not stop to cook the meat, and he ate it almost raw. Then the thought of the old man and little child whom he had left starving in the cabin behind him became too much for him. He remembered what Tecaughretanego had said of God’s care for those who trusted in him; and he packed up all the meat he could carry, and went back to the camp. The boy ate ravenously of the half-raw meat, as Smith had done, but the old man waited patiently till it was well boiled. “Let it be done enough,” he said, when Smith wished to take off the kettle too soon; and when they had all satisfied their hunger, he made Smith a speech upon the duty of receiving the bounty of Owaneeyo with thankfulness. After this, Smith seems to have had no farther thoughts of running away, and he made no attempt to escape until he had been four years in captivity. He was then at Caughnewaga, the old Indian village which the traveler may still see from his steamboat on the St. Lawrence River near Montreal. He had come to this place with Tecaughretanego and his little son in an elm-bark canoe, all the way from Detroit; and now, hearing that a French ship was at Montreal with English prisoners of war, he stole away from the Indians and got on board with the rest. The prisoners were shortly afterwards exchanged, and Smith got home to his friends early in 1760. They had never known whether he had been killed or captured, and they were overjoyed to see him, though they found him quite like an Indian in his walk and bearing.
He married, and settled down on a farm, but he was soon in arms against the Indians. He served as a lieutenant in Bouquet’s expedition, and became a colonel of the Revolutionary army. After the war he took his family to Kentucky, where he lived until he died in 1812. The Indians left him unmolested in his reading or writing while he was among them, and he had kept a journal, which he wrote out in the delightful narrative of his captivity, first published in 1799. He modestly says in his preface that the chief use he hopes for it is from his observations on Indian warfare; but these have long ceased to be of practical value, while his pictures of Indian life and his studies of Indian character have a charm that will always last.
VI. THE CAPTIVITY OF BOONE AND KENTON.
Colonel Smith was not the first whose captivity was passed in the Ohio country, but there is no record of any earlier captivity, though hundreds of captives were given up to Bouquet by the Indians. In spite of the treaties and promises on both sides, the fighting went on, and the wilderness was soon again the prison of the white people whom the savages had torn from their homes. The Ohio tribes harassed the outlying settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia, whose borders widened westward with every year; but they were above all incensed against the pioneers of Kentucky. Ohio was their home; there they had their camps and towns; there they held their councils and festivals; there they buried their dead and guarded their graves. But Kentucky was the pleasance of all the nations, the hunting ground kept free by common consent, and left to the herds of deer, elk, and buffalo, which ranged the woods and savannas, and increased for the common use. When the white men discovered this hunter’s paradise, and began to come back with their families and waste the game and fell the trees and plow the wild meadows, no wonder the Indians were furious, and made Kentucky the Dark and Bloody Ground for the enemies of their whole race, which they had already made it for one another in the conflicts between the hunting parties of rival tribes. It maddened them to find the cabins and the forts of the settlers in the sacred region where no red man dare pitch his wigwam; and they made a fierce and pitiless effort to drive out the invaders.
Among these was the famous Daniel Boone. He had heard of the glories of the land from a hunter who wandered into Kentucky by chance and returned to North Carolina to tell of it among his neighbors. Two years afterwards, in 1769, when a man of forty, Boone came to see for himself the things that he knew by hearsay, and he found that the half had not been told. But among other surprises in store for him was falling into the clutches of an Indian hunting party which ambushed him and the friend who was with him. They both escaped, and soon afterwards Boone’s brother and a neighbor, who had followed him from North Carolina, chanced upon their camp. Boone’s friend was before long shot and scalped by the Indians; the brother’s neighbor was lost in the woods and devoured by the wolves. Then the brother went home for ammunition, and Boone was left a whole year alone in the wilderness. The charm of its life was so great for him that after two years more he returned to North Carolina, sold his farm, and came to Kentucky with his family. Other families joined them, and the little settlement founded in the woods where he had ranged solitary with no friend but his rifle and with foes everywhere, was called Boonesborough.
The Revolutionary War broke out, and the Ohio Indians, who had hitherto fought the pioneers as Englishmen, now fought them as Americans with fresh fury, under the encouragement of the British commandant at Detroit. In January, of 1778, Boone took thirty of his men, and went to make salt at the Blue Licks, where, shortly after, while he was hunting in the woods, he found himself in the midst of two hundred Indian warriors, who were on their way to attack Boonesborough. He was then fifty years old, and the young Indians soon overtook him when he tried to escape by running, and made him their prisoner. His captors treated him kindly, as their custom was with prisoners, until they decided what should be done with them, and at the Licks his whole party gave themselves up on promise of the same treatment. This was glory enough for the present; the Indians, as they always did when they had won a victory, went home to celebrate it, and left Boonesborough unmolested.
They took all their prisoners to the town of Old Chillicothe, on the banks of the Little Miami in Greene County. What became of his men we are not told; none of them kept a journal, as Smith did, but it is certain that Boone was adopted into an Indian family as Smith was. The Indians, in fact, all became fond of him, perhaps because he was so much like themselves in temperament and behavior, for he was a grave, silent man, very cold and wary, with a sort of savage calm. He was well versed in their character, and knew how to play upon their vanity. One of the few things he seems to have told of his captivity was that when they asked him to take part in their shooting matches he beat them just often enough to show them his wonderful skill with the rifle, and then allowed them the pleasure of beating such a splendid shot as he had proved himself. But probably he had other engaging qualities, or so it appeared when the Indians took him with them to Detroit. The British commandant offered them a ransom of a hundred pounds for him, while several other Englishmen, who liked and pitied him, pressed him to take money and other favors from them. Boone stoically refused because he could never hope to make any return to them, and his red brethren refused because they loved Boone too well to part with him at any price, and they took him back to Old Chillicothe with them.
He never betrayed the anxiety for his wife and children that constantly tormented him, for fear of rousing the suspicions of the Indians; but when he reached Old Chillicothe, and found a large party painted and ready to take the warpath in a new attack upon Boones-borough, he could bear it no longer. He showed no sign of his misery, however; he joined the Indians in all their sports as before, but he was always watching for some chance to escape, and one morning in the middle of June he stole away from his captors. He made his way a hundred and sixty miles through the woods, and on the ninth day entered Boonesborough, faint with the fast which he had broken but once in his long flight, to find that he had been given up for dead and his family had gone back to North Carolina.
Boone spent the rest of his days fighting wild men and hunting wild beasts in Kentucky, until both were well-nigh gone and the tamer life of civilization pressed closer about him. Then he set out for Missouri, where he found himself again in the wilderness, and dwelt there in his beloved solitude till he died. Nothing ever moved him so much as the memoir which a young man wrote down for him and had printed. He was fond of having it read to him (for he could not read any more than he could write), and he would cry out in delight over it, “All true; not a lie in it!” But it is recorded that he once allowed himself to be so far excited by the heroic behavior of a friend who had saved his life in an Indian fight, at the risk of his own, as to say, “You behaved like a man, that time.”
This friend was Simon Kenton, or rather Simon Butler, one of the greatest of all the Indian hunters of Kentucky and Ohio. He had changed his name to escape pursuit from his old home in Virginia, when he fled leaving one of his neighbors, as he supposed, dead on the ground after a fight, and he kept the name he had taken through the rest of his life. He wandered about on the frontier and in the wilderness beyond it for several years, fighting the savages single handed or with a few comrades, and at times serving as scout or spy in the expeditions of the English against them. When the Revolution began, he sided of course with his own people, and he stood two sieges by the Indians in Boonesborough. It was here that Boone found him in 1778 when he escaped from Old Chillicothe, and they promptly made a foray together into the Ohio country, against an Indian town on Paint Creek. They fell in with a war party on the way, and after some fighting, Boone went back, but Kenton kept on with another friend, and did not return till they had stolen some Indian horses. As soon as they reached Boonesborough the commandant sent them into Ohio again to reconnoiter a town on the Little Miami which he wished to attack, and here once more Kenton was tempted by the chance to steal horses. He could not bear to leave any, and he and his men started homeward through the woods with the whole herd. When they came to the Ohio, it was so rough that Kenton was nearly drowned in trying to cross the river. He got back to the northern shore, where they all waited for the wind to go down, and the waves to fall, and where the Indians found them the second morning. His comrades were killed and Kenton was taken prisoner by the Indians whose horses they had stolen. The Indians were always stealing white men’s horses, but they seemed to think it was very much more wicked and shameful for white men to steal Indians’ horses. They fell upon Kenton and beat him over the head with their ramrods and mocked him with cries of, “Steal Indians’ hoss, hey!” But this was only the beginning of his sufferings. They fastened him for the night by stretching him on the ground with one stick across his breast and another down his middle, and tying his hands and feet to these with thongs of buffalo skin: stakes were driven into the earth, and his pinioned arms and legs were bound to them, while a halter, which was passed round his neck and then round a sapling near by, kept him from moving his head. All the while they were making sure in this way that he should not escape, the Indians were cuffing his ears, and reviling him for a “Tief! A hoss steal! A rascal!” In the morning they mounted him on an unbroken colt, with his hands tied behind him and his legs tied under the horse, and drove it into the briers and underbrush, where his face and hands were torn by the brambles, until the colt quieted down of itself, and followed in line with the other horses. The third day, as they drew near the town of Old Chillicothe, where Boone had been held captive, they were met by the chief Blackfish, who said sternly to Kenton in English, “You have been stealing horses.” “Yes, sir.” “Did Captain Boone tell you to steal our horses?” “No, sir, I did it on my own accord.” Blackfish then lashed him over the naked back with a hickory switch till the blood ran, and with blows and taunts from all sides Kenton was marched forward to the village.
The Indians could not wait for his arrival. They came out, men, women, and children, to meet him, with whoops and yells, and when they had made his captors fasten him to a stake, they fell upon him, and tore off all that was left of his clothes, and amused themselves till midnight by dancing and screaming round him, and beating him with rods and their open hands. In the morning he was ordered to run the gantlet, through two rows of Indians of all ages and sexes, armed with knives, clubs, switches, and hoe handles, and ready to cut, strike, and stab at him as he dashed by them on his way to the council house, a quarter of a mile from the point of starting. But Kenton was too wary to take the risks before him. He suddenly started aside from the lines; he turned and doubled in his course, and managed to reach the council house unhurt except for the blows of two Indians who threw themselves between him and its door. Here a council was held at once, and he was sentenced to be burnt at the stake, but the sentence was ordered to be carried out at the town of Wapatimika on Mad River. A white renegade among the Indians told him of his fate with a curse, and Kenton resolved that rather than meet it he would die in the attempt to escape. On the way to Wapatimika he gave his guard the slip and dashed into the woods; and he had left his pursuers far behind, when he ran into the midst of another party of Indians, who seized him and drove him forward to the town. A second council was now held, and after Kenton had run the gantlet a second time and been severely hurt, the warriors once more gathered in the council house, and sitting on the ground in a circle voted his death by striking the earth with a war club, or by passing it to the next if inclined to mercy. He was brought before them, as he supposed, to be told when he was to die, but a blanket was thrown upon the ground for him to sit upon in the middle of the circle, and Simon Girty, the great renegade, who was cruder to the whites than the Indians themselves, began harshly to question him about the number of men in Kentucky. A few words passed, and then Girty asked, “What is your name?” “Simon Butler,” said Kenton, and Girty jumped from his seat and threw his arms around Kenton’s neck. They had been scouts together in the English service, before the Revolution began, and had been very warm friends, and now Girty set himself to save Kenton’s life. He pleaded so strongly in his favor that the council at last voted to spare him, at least for the time being.
Three weeks of happiness for Kenton followed in the society of his old friend, who clothed him at his own cost from the stores of an English trader in the town, and took him to live with him; and it is said that if the Indians had continued to treat him kindly, Kenton might perhaps have cast his lot with them, for he could not hope to go back to his own people, with the crime of murder, as he supposed, hanging over him, and he had no close ties binding him to the whites elsewhere. But at the end of these days of respite, a war party came back from the Virginian border, where they had been defeated, and the life of the first white man who fell into their power must pay, by the Indian law, for the life of the warrior they had lost. The leaders of this party found Kenton walking in the woods with Girty, and met him with scowls of hate, refusing his hand when he offered it. The rage of the savages against him broke out afresh. One of them caught an ax from his squaw who was chopping wood, and as Kenton passed him on his way into the village, dealt him a blow that cut deep into his shoulder. For a third time a council was held, and for a third time Kenton was doomed to die by fire. Nothing that Girty could say availed, and he was left to tell his friend that he must die.
Kenton’s sentence was to be now carried out at Sandusky, and with five Indian guards he set out for that point. On their way they stopped at a town on the waters of the Scioto, where the captive found himself in the presence of a chief of noble and kindly face, who said to him, in excellent English, “Well, young man, these young men seem very mad at you.” Kenton had to own that they were so, indeed, and then the Indian said, “Well, don’t be discouraged. I am a great chief. You are to go to Sandusky; they speak of burning you there, but I will send two runners tomorrow to speak good for you.”
This was the noble chief Logan, whose beautiful speech ought to be known to every American boy and girl, and who, in spite of all he had suffered from them, was still the friend of the white men. He kept his word to Kenton, though he seemed to fail, as Girty had failed, to have his sentence set aside, and Kenton was taken on to Sandusky. But here, the day before that set for him to die, a British Indian agent, a merciful man whose name, Drewyer, we ought to remember, made the Indians give him up, that the commandant at Detroit might find out from him the state of the American forces in Kentucky. He had to promise the savages that Kenton should afterwards be returned to them; but though Kenton could not or would not tell him what he wished to know, Drewyer assured him that he would never abandon any white prisoner to their cruelty.
At Detroit Kenton was kindly treated by the English, and beyond having to report himself daily to the officer who had charge of him, there was nothing to make him feel that he was a prisoner. But he grew restive in his captivity, and after he had borne seven months of it, and got well of all his wounds and bruises, he plotted with two young Kentuckians, who had been taken with Boone at the Blue Licks, to attempt his escape with them. They bought guns from some drunken Indians, and hid them in the woods. Then in the month of June, 1778, they started southward through the wilderness, and after thirty days reached Louisville in safety. Kenton continued to fight the Indians in all the wars, large and little, till they were beaten by General Wayne in 1794. Eight years later he came to live in Ohio, settling near Urbana, but removing later to Zanesfield, on the site of the Indian town Wapatimika, where he was once to have been burned, and where he died peaceably in 1836, when he was eighty-one years old. He is described as a tall, handsome man, of an erect figure and carriage, a fair complexion, and a most attractive countenance. “He had,” his biographer tells us, “a soft, tremulous voice, very pleasing to the hearer, and laughing gray eyes that appeared to fascinate the beholder,” except in his rare moments of anger, when their fiery glance would curdle the blood of those who had roused his wrath. He was above all the heroes of Ohio history, both in his virtues and his vices, the type of the Indian fighter. He was ready to kill or to take the chances of being killed, but he had no more hate apparently for the wild men than for the wild beasts he hunted.
VII. THE RENEGADES.
Simon Girty, who tried so hard to save Kenton’s life at Wapatimika, was the most notorious of those white renegades who abounded in the Ohio country during the Indian wars. The life of the border was often such as to make men desperate and cruel, and the life of the wilderness had a fascination which their fierce natures could hardly resist. Kenton himself, as we have seen, might perhaps have willingly remained with the Indians if they had wished him to be one of them, though he was at heart too kindly and loyal ever to have become the enemy of his own people, and if he had been adopted into an Indian family he would probably have been such an Indian as Smith was. But in the sort of backwoodsman he had been there was such stuff as renegades were made of. Like him these desperadoes had mostly fled from the settlements after some violent deed, and could not have gone back to their homes there if they would. Yet they were not much worse than the traders who came and went among the Indians in times of peace, and supplied them with the weapons and the ammunition they might use at any moment against the settlers.
Indeed, wherever the two races touched they seemed to get all of each other’s vices, and very few of each other’s virtues; and it is doubtful if the law breakers who escaped from the borders to the woods were more ferocious than many whom they left behind. Neither side showed mercy; their warfare was to the death; the white men tomahawked and scalped the wounded as the red men did, and if the settlers were not always so pitiless to their prisoners or to the wives and children of their warriors, they were guilty of many acts of murderous treachery and murderous fury. One of the best and truest friends they ever had, the great Mingo chief Logan, who was at last the means of Kenton’s escape from the stake, bore witness to these facts in his famous speech; for in spite of his friendship for the whites, he had suffered the worst that they could do to the worst of their foes. When such white men as butchered Logan’s kindred sided with the Indians, they only changed their cause; their savage natures remained unchanged; but very few of these, even, seem to have been so far trusted in their fear and hate for their own people as to be taken by the Indians in their forays against the whites.
The great Miami chief Little Turtle, who outgeneralled the Americans at the defeat of St. Clair, used to tell with humorous relish how he once trusted a white man adopted into his tribe. This white man was very eager to go with him on a raid into Kentucky, and when they were stealing upon the cabin they were going to attack, nothing could restrain his desire to be foremost. When they got within a few yards, he suddenly dashed forward with a yell of “Indians, Indians!” and left his red brethren to get out of the range of the settlers’ rifles as fast as they could.
But Simon Girty led many of the savage attacks, and showed himself the relentless enemy of the American cause at every chance, though more than once he used his power with the Indians to save prisoners from torture and death. He was born in Pennsylvania, and he was captured with his brothers, George and James, during Braddock’s campaign. They were all taken to Ohio, where George was adopted by the Delawares, James by the Shawnees, and Simon by the Senecas. George died a drunken savage; James became the terror of the Kentucky border, and infamous throughout the West by his cruelty to the women among the Indians’ captives; he seems to have been without one touch of pity for the fate of any of their prisoners, and his cruelties were often charged upon Simon, who had enough of his own to answer for. Yet he seems to have been the best as well as the ablest of the three brothers whose name is the blackest in Ohio history. Many of the stories about him are evidently mere romance, and they often conflict. As he was captured when very young, he never learned to read or write; and it is said that he was persuaded by worse and wiser men to take sides with the British in the Revolution. But we need not believe that he was so ignorant or so simple as this in accounting for his preference of his red brethren and their cause. In fact, several letters attributed to him exist, though he may have dictated these, and may not have known how to write after all.
It is certain that he was a man of great note and power among the Indians, and one of their most trusted captains. He led the attack on Wheeling in 1777, where he demanded the surrender of the fort to the English king, whose officer he boasted himself. In 1782 he attacked Bryan’s Station in Kentucky with a strong force of Indians, but met with such a gallant resistance that he attempted to bring the garrison to terms by telling them who he was and threatening them with the reënforcements and the cannon which he said he expected hourly. He promised that all their lives should be spared if they yielded, but while he waited with the white flag in his hand on the stump where he stood to harangue them, a young man answered him from the fort: “You need not be so particular to tell us your name; we know your name and you, too. I’ve had a villainous untrustworthy cur dog this long while named Simon Girty, in compliment to you, he’s so like you, just as ugly and just as wicked. As to the cannon, let them come on; the country’s aroused, and the scalps of your red cutthroats, and your own too, will be drying in our cabins in twenty-four hours; and if, by chance, you or your allies do get into the fort, we’ve a big store of rods laid in to scourge you out again.”
The Indians retreated, but Girty glutted his revenge for the failure and the insult in many a fight afterwards with the Americans and in many a scene of torture and death. The Kentuckians now followed his force to the Blue Licks, where the Indians ambushed them and beat them back with fearful slaughter.
Girty remained with the savages and took part in the war which they carried on against our people long after our peace with the British. He was at the terrible defeat of St. Clair in 1791, and he had been present at the burning of Colonel Crawford in 1782. By some he is said to have tried to beg and to buy their prisoner off from the Wyandots, and by others to have taken part in mocking his agonies, if not in torturing him. It seems certain that he lived to be a very old man, and it is probable that he died fighting the Americans in our second war with Great Britain.
But the twilight of the forest rests upon most of the details of his history and the traits of his character. The truth about him seems to be that he had really become a savage, and it would not be strange if he felt all the ferocity of a savage, together with the rare and capricious emotions of pity and generosity which are apt to visit the savage heart. There have always been good Indians and bad Indians, and Simon Girty was simply a bad Indian.
VIII. THE WICKEDEST DEED IN OUR HISTORY.
The Indians despised the white men for what they thought their stupidity in warfare, when they stood up in the open to be shot at, as the soldiers who were sent against them mostly did, instead of taking to trees and hiding in tall grass and hollows of the ground, as the backwoodsmen learned to do. Smith tells us that when Tecaughretanego heard how Colonel Grant, in the second campaign against Fort Duquesne, outwitted the French and Indians by night and stole possession of a hill overlooking the post, he praised his craft as that of a true warrior; but as to his letting his pipers play at daybreak, and give the enemy notice of his presence, so that the Indians could take to trees and shoot his Highlanders down with no danger to themselves, he could only suppose that Colonel Grant had got drunk over night.
The savages respected the whites when they showed cunning, and they did not hate them the more for not showing mercy in fight; but we have seen how fiercely they resented the crime of horse stealing in Kenton’s case, though they were always stealing horses themselves from the settlers; and any deed of treachery against themselves they were eager and prompt to punish, though they were always doing such deeds against their enemies. Still, it is doubtful whether with all their malignity they were ever guilty of anything so abominable as the massacre of the Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten, by the Americans; and if there is record of any wickeder act in the history not only of Ohio, but of the whole United States, I do not know of it. The Spaniards may have outdone it in some of their dealings with the Indians, but I cannot call to mind any act of theirs that seems so black, so wholly without justice and without reason. It is no wonder that it embittered the hostilities between the red men and the white men and made the war, which outlasted our Revolution ten years, more and more unmerciful to the very end.
The missionaries of the Moravian Church were more successful than any others in converting the Indians, perhaps because they asked the most of them. They made them give up all the vices which the Indians knew were vices, and all the vices that the Indians thought were virtues when practiced outside of their tribe. They forbade them to lie, to steal, to kill; they taught them to wash themselves, to put on clothes, to work, and to earn their bread. Upon these hard terms they had congregations and villages in several parts of Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania, which flourished for a time against the malice of the disorderly and lawless settlers around them, but which had yielded to the persecutions of white men and red men alike when, in 1771, the chiefs of the Delawares sent messages to the Moravians and invited them to come out and live among them in Ohio. The Lenni-lenape, as the Delawares called themselves, had left the East, where they were subject to the Iroquois, and they now had their chief towns on the Muskingum. Near the place where the Tuscarawas and Walhonding meet to form the Muskingum they offered lands to the Moravians, and in 1772 the Christian Indians left their last village in Western Pennsylvania and settled there at three points which they called Schönbrun, the Beautiful Spring, Lichtenau, Field of Light, and Gnadenhutten, the Tents of Grace.
It was in the very heart of the Western wilderness, but the land was rich and the savages friendly, and in a few years the teachers and their followers had founded a fairer and happier home than they had known before, and had begun to spread their light around them. The Indians came from far and near to see their fields and orchards and gardens, with the houses in the midst of them, built of squared logs and set on streets branching to the four quarters from the chapel, which was the peaceful citadel of each little town. It must have seemed a stately edifice to their savage eyes, with its shingled roof, and its belfry, where, ten years before any white man had settled beyond the Ohio, the bell called the Christian Indians to prayer. No doubt the creature comforts of the Christians had their charm, too, for the hungry pagans. They were not used elsewhere to the hospitality that could set before them such repasts as one of the missionaries tells us were spread for the guest at Gnadenhutten. A table furnished with “good bread, meat, butter, cheese, milk, tea and coffee, and chocolate,” and such fruits and vegetables as the season afforded could hardly have been less wonderful in the Indian’s eyes than red men with their hair cut, and without paint or feathers, at work in the fields like squaws.
Their heathen neighbors began to come into the Moravians’ peaceful fold, and the three villages grew and flourished till the war broke out between the colonies and Great Britain. Then the troubles and sorrows of the Moravians, white and red, began again. They were too weak to keep the savage war parties from passing through their towns, and they dared not refuse them rest and food. The warriors began to come with the first leaves of spring, and they came and went till the first snows of autumn made their trail too plain for them to escape pursuit from the border. The Moravians did what they could to ransom their captives and to save them from torture when the warriors returned after their raids, but all their goodness did not avail them against the suspicion of the settlers. The backwoodsmen looked on them as the spies and allies of the savages, and the savages on their side believed them in league with the Americans.
The Delawares had promised the Moravian teachers that if they settled among them, the Delaware nation would take no part in the war, and the most of ‘them kept their promise. But some of the young men broke it, and the nation would not forbid the Wyandots from passing through their country to and from the Virginia frontier. It was true that the Moravians held thousands of Delaware warriors neutral, and that our American officers knew their great power for good among the Indians; but the backwoodsmen hated them as bitterly as they hated the Wyandots. Their war parties passed through the Christian villages, too, when they went and came on their forays beyond the Ohio, and at one time their leaders could hardly keep them from destroying a Moravian town, even while they were enjoying its hospitality.
This situation could not last. In August, 1781, a chief of the Hurons, called the Half King, came with a large body of Indians flying the English flag and accompanied by an English officer, to urge the Christians to remove to Sandusky, where they were told they could be safe from the Virginians. They refused, and then the Half King shot their cattle, plundered their fields and houses, and imprisoned their teachers, and at last forced them away. When the winter came on, the exiles began to suffer from cold and hunger, and many of their children died. To keep themselves and their little ones from starving, parties stole back from Sandusky throughout the winter to gather the corn left standing in the fields beside the Muskingum.
In March a larger party than usual returned to the deserted villages with a number of women and children, all unarmed, except for the guns that the men carried to shoot game. But in February the savages had fallen upon a lonely cabin and butchered all its inmates with more than common cruelty, and the whole border was ablaze with fury against the redskins, whether they called themselves Christians or not. A hundred and sixty backwoodsmen gathered at Mingo Bottom under the lead of Colonel David Williamson, who had once disgraced himself among them by preventing them from killing some Moravian prisoners, and who now seems to have been willing to atone for his humanity. They marched swiftly to the Muskingum, where they stole upon the Indians in the cornfields, and seized their guns. They told them at first that they were going to take them to Fort Pitt, and at the vote held to decide whether they should burn their prisoners alive or simply tomahawk and scalp them, there was really some question of their transfer to Pittsburg. This plan was favored by the leaders, and it is believed that if Colonel Williamson could have had his way, it would have been carried out. But there is no proof of this, and the rest, who were by no means the worst men of the border, but some of the best, voted by a large majority to kill their prisoners.
They gave them the night to prepare for death. One poor woman fell on her knees before Williamson and begged for her life, but the most of them seem to have submitted without a word. They spent the night in prayer and singing, and when their butchers sent at daybreak to know if they were ready, they answered that they had received the assurance of God’s peace. Then the murderers parted the women and children from the men and shut them up in another cabin, and the two cabins they fitly called the slaughterhouses. One of them found a cooper’s mallet in the cooper’s shop, where the men were left, and saying: “How exactly this will answer for the business,” he made his way through the kneeling ranks to one of the most fervent of the converts, and struck him down.
While the Indians still prayed and sang, he killed twelve more of them, and then passed the mallet to another butcher with the words: “My arm fails me. Go on in the same way. I think I have done pretty well.” Among the women and children the slaughter began with a very old and pious widow, and soon the sound of the singing and the praying was silenced in death.
The victims were scalped as they fell, and when the bloody work was done, the cabins were set on fire and the bodies burned in the burning buildings. Two boys who had been scalped with the rest feigned death, and when the murderers had left them they tried to escape. One stuck fast in the window and was burned, but the other got safely away and lived to tell the awful tale.
The backwoodsmen themselves seem not to have been ashamed of their work, though it is said that Williamson could never be got to speak of it. The event was so horrible that it killed the Moravians’ hopes of usefulness among the Ohio Indians. The teachers settled with the remnant of their converts in Canada, but the Christian Indians always longed for Gnadenhutten, where they had lived so happily, and where ninety-six of their brethren had suffered so innocently. Before the close of the century Congress confirmed the Delawares’ grant of the Muskingum lands to them, and they came back. But they could not survive the crime committed against them. The white settlers pressed close about them; the War of 1812 enkindled all the old hate against their race. Their laws were trampled upon and their own people were seen drunk in the streets.
Some of the Christians had fallen back into heathen savagery. One of these, who was found in a war party, painted and armed like the rest for a foray against the whites, said to a Christian brother: “I cannot but have bad thoughts of our teachers. I think it was their fault that so many of our countrymen were murdered in Gnadenhutten. They betrayed us.... Tell me now, is this the truth or not?” He had lost his children and all his kindred in that fearful carnage, and yet he could not believe his own accusations against the Moravians. He added mournfully: “I have now a wicked and malicious heart, and therefore my thoughts are evil. As I look outwardly, so is my heart within. What would it avail, if I were outwardly to appear as a believer, and my heart were full of evil?”
IX. THE TORTURE OF COLONEL CRAWFORD
The slaughter of the Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten took place in March, 1782, and in May ol the same year, four hundred and fifty horsemen from the American border met at Mingo Bottom, where the murderers had rendezvoused, and set out from that point to massacre the Moravian converts who had taken refuge among the Wyandots on the Sandusky. They expected, of course, to fight the warlike Indians, but they openly avowed their purpose of killing all Indians, Christian or heathen, and women and children, as well as warriors. We must therefore call them murderers, but we must remember that they had been hardened against mercy by the atrocities of the savages, and we must make allowance for men who had seen their wives and little ones tomahawked and scalped or carried off into captivity, their homes burnt, and their fields wasted. The life of the frontier at a time when all life was so much ruder than now was as fierce, if not as cruel, among the white men as among the red men.
The murderers at Mingo Bottom voted whether Colonel David Williamson or Colonel William Crawford should lead them, and their choice fell upon Crawford. He seems to have been a man of kinder heart than his fellows, and he unwillingly took command of the turbulent and disorderly band, which promptly set out on its march through the wilderness towards the Sandusky country. They had hoped to surprise the Indians, but spies had watched their movements from the first, and when they reached the Moravian villages on the Sandusky River, they found them deserted. They decided then to go on toward Upper Sandusky, and if they could not reach that town in a day’s march, to beat a quick retreat. The next day they started, but at two o’clock in the afternoon they were attacked by large numbers of Indians hidden in the tall grass of the prairies, and they fought a running battle till nightfall. Then both sides kindled large fires along their lines, and fell back from them to prevent a surprise.
In the morning the Americans began their retreat, and the Indians renewed their attack with great fury in the afternoon, on all sides except the northeast, where the invaders were hemmed in by swamps. There seems to have been no cause for their retreat, except the danger of an overwhelming onset by the savages, which must have been foreseen from the start. But the army, as it was called, was wholly without discipline; during the night not even a sentry had been posted; and now their fear became a panic, their retreat became a rout. They made their way as best they could through the marshes, where the horses stuck fast, and had to be abandoned, and the men themselves sometimes sank to their necks in the soft ooze. Instead of keeping together, as Crawford advised but had no power to compel, the force broke up into small parties, which the Indians destroyed or captured. Many perished in the swamps; some were followed as far as the Ohio River. The only one of the small parties which escaped was that of forty men under Colonel Williamson, the leader of the Gnadenhiitten massacre, who enjoyed the happier fortune denied to Colonel Crawford.
This ill-fated officer was tormented after the retreat began by his fear for the safety of his son, his son-in-law, and his nephews, and he left his place at the head of the main body and let the army file past him while he called and searched for the missing men. He did not try to overtake it till it was too late to spur his wearied horse forward. He fell in with Dr. John Knight, who accompanied the expedition as surgeon, and who now generously remained with Crawford. They pushed on together with two others through the woods, guided by the north star, but on the second day after the army had left them behind, a party of Indians fell upon them and made them prisoners.
Their captors killed their two companions, Captain Biggs and Lieutenant Ashley, the following day, but Crawford and Knight were taken to an Indian camp at a little distance, and then to the old Wyandot town of Sandusky, where preparations were made for burning Crawford. He seems to have had great hopes that Simon Girty, who was then at Sandusky, would somehow manage to save him, and it is said that the renegade really offered three hundred dollars for Crawford’s life, knowing that he would be many times repaid by Crawford’s friends. But the chief whom Girty tried to bribe answered, “Do you take me for a squaw?” and threatened, if Girty said more, to burn him along with Crawford. This is the story told in Girty’s favor; other stories represent him as indifferent if not cruel to Crawford throughout. In any case, it ended in Crawford’s return to the Indian camp, eight miles from the Indian town, where he suffered death.
The chiefs who had been put in charge of him were two Delawares of great note, Captain Pipe and Captain Wingenund. They were chosen his guards because the Christian Indians were of their nation, and the Delawares, more than any other nation, were held to have been injured and insulted by their massacre. It was Captain Pipe who refused Girty’s offer, if Girty ever made it, and it was Captain Pipe who urged the death of the prisoners, while treating them with mock politeness. Nine others were brought back from the town with Knight and Crawford, and Captain Pipe now painted all their faces black, the sign of doom. While he was painting Knight’s face, he told him that he should be taken to see his friends at the Shawnee village, and he told Crawford that his head should be shaved, meaning that he should be made an Indian and adopted into the tribe. But when they came to the place where Crawford was to suffer, Captain Pipe threw off the mask of kindness; he made a speech to the forty warriors and seventy squaws and papooses met to torture him, and used all his eloquence to inflame their hate.
The other Delaware chief, Captain Wingenund, had gone into his cabin, that he might not see Crawford’s death. They knew each other, and more than once Crawford had been good to Wingenund. The captive now sent for the chief, and Wingenund came unwillingly to speak with him, for he was already tied to the stake, and his friend knew that he could not save him. The chief acknowledged the kindness that they had once felt for each other, but he said that Crawford had put it out of his power to give him help.
“How so, Captain Wingenund?” asked Crawford.
“By joining yourself to that execrable man, Williamson; the man who but the other day murdered such a number of Moravian Indians, knowing them to be friends; knowing that he ran no risk in murdering a people who would not fight, and whose only business was praying.”
In vain, Crawford declared that he would never have suffered the massacre if he had been present. Wingenund was willing to believe this, but he reminded him that the men whom he had led to Sandusky had declared that they came to murder the remaining Moravians. No one, he said, would now dare to speak a word for him; the king of England, if he came with all his treasure, could not save him from the vengeance which the Indians were going to take upon him for the slaughter of their innocent brethren.
“Then my fate is fixed,” said Crawford.
Wingenund turned away weeping, and could never afterwards speak of the scene without deep feeling.
Crawford had already undergone the first of his punishment. The savages stripped him naked and made him sit down on the ground before the fire kindled to burn him, and beat him with their fists and with sticks till they had heated their rage. Then they tied his wrists together and fastened the rope that bound them to a post strongly planted in the ground with leash enough to let him walk round it once or twice, five or six yards away from the fire. Girty was present, and Crawford asked if the Indians meant to burn him; the renegade briefly answered, “Yes.” Then Captain Pipe spoke, and Wingenund saw his friend for the last time. After this chief left Crawford, the Indians broke into a loud yell and began the work of torture which ended only with his death.
At one point he besought Simon Girty to put an end to his sufferings; but Girty would not, or dared not.
Then Crawford began to pray, imploring God to have mercy upon him, and bore his torment for an hour and a half longer with manly courage. It is not known how long his torture lasted; Knight was now taken away, and no friend remained to witness Crawford’s agony to the end.
I have thought it well to recount his story, for without it we could not fully realize what the white people of that day underwent in their long struggle with the Ohio Indians. Cruelty so fiendish could never have a cause, but it cannot be denied that the torture of Crawford was the effect of the butchery of the Christian Indians. That awful deed was an act of even greater wickedness, for it was the act of men who were not savage by birth or race or creed. It was against the white man’s law, while the torture of Crawford was by the red man’s law. It is because of their laws that the white men have overcome and the red men have gone under in the order of mercy, for whenever we sin against that order, contrary to our law, or according to our law, we weaken ourselves, and if we continue in our sin, we doom ourselves in the end to perish.
X. THE ESCAPE OF KNIGHT AND SLOVER.
When the Indians made a raid on the settlements, they abandoned even victory if they had once had enough fighting; as when they had a feast they glutted themselves, and then wasted what they had not eaten. They seemed now to have had such a surfeit of cruelty in the torture of Crawford that they took little trouble to secure Knight for a future holiday. They promised themselves that he should be burnt, too, at the town of the Shawnees, but in their satiety they left him unbound in the charge of a young Indian who was to take him there from Sandusky. It is true that Knight was very weak, and that they may have thought he was unable to escape, though even in this case they would probably have sent him under a stronger guard at another time, when they were not gorged with blood.
His Indian guard was armed and was mounted on a pony, while Knight went on foot; but Knight had made up his mind that he would escape at any risk rather than be burned like Crawford. His face had again been painted black; and he had Simon Girty’s word, given him before Crawford was put to death, that he was to be burned at Old Chillicothe. But he pretended not to know what the Indians were going to do with him there, and he easily deceived his guard, who seems to have been a good-natured, simple fellow. Knight asked him if they were going to live together like brothers in the same wig-wam, and the Indian answered they were, and they went in very friendly talk. At night-fall when they camped, Knight let his guard bind him, but he spent the hours till daybreak trying secretly to free himself. At dawn the Indian rose and unbound his captive. Then he rekindled the fire, at the same time fighting the gnats that swarmed upon his naked body. He willingly consented that Knight should make a smoke to drive them from his back, and Knight took a heavy stick from the fire as if to do this; but when he got behind the Indian he struck him on the head with all his strength. The Indian fell forward into the fire, but quickly gathered himself up and ran off howling. Knight wanted to shoot him as he ran; in his eagerness to cock the rifle he broke the lock, and the Indian escaped. He got safely to the Shawnee town, where he described the fight in terms that transformed the little doctor into a furious giant, whom no amount of stabbing had any effect upon.
The other Indians, who seem to have understood this cowardly boaster, received his story with shouts of laughter. But Knight was very glad to make off with his gun and ammunition, and leave them to settle the affair among themselves. When he came to the prairies he hid himself in the grass and waited till dark before venturing to cross them, and by daybreak he was in the woods again. He could kill nothing with his broken gun, and he lived for twenty-one days on wild gooseberries, with two young blackbirds and a tortoise, which he ate raw. He reached the Ohio River on the twenty-second day, and crossed in safety to Fort Mcintosh.
The tragic adventures of the Indian captives must often have been relieved by comic incidents like those of Knight’s escape from his guard; but there is very little record of anything except sorrow and suffering, danger and death. Certainly in the captivity of John Slover, another of Crawford’s ill-starred and ill-willed crew of marauders, there were few gleams of happier chance to distinguish it from most histories of the sort. He had been captured by the Indians when a boy of eight years, and carried from his home in Virginia to their town of Sandusky, where he was adopted into their nation, and where he lived quite happily till his twentieth year, when he was given up to his own people.
He fought through two years of the Revolutionary War, and he was thoroughly fitted to act as a guide for Crawford.
After the battle, or rather the disorderly rout, he was one of those who was mired in the swamps. He left his horse there, and with a few others tried to make his way to Detroit. Twice the party escaped capture by hiding in the grass, as the Indians passed near them, but on the third morning they were ambushed; two were killed, one ran away, and the remaining three gave themselves up on the promise of good treatment. They were taken to Wapatimika, where Simon Kenton was to have been burned, and they soon proved how far the promises of the savages were to be trusted.
The Indians knew Slover at once, and they bitterly reproached him with having come to betray his friends. At the council held to try him, James Girty urged them to put him to death for his treason. But Slover strongly defended himself, reminding the Indians that they had freely given him up, and had no longer any claim upon him. His words had such weight that the council put off its decision. In the meantime he was left with an old squaw, who hid him under a bear skin, and scolded off the messengers who came to bring him before a grand council of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Chippewa, and Mingo warriors. But shortly after, Girty came with forty braves and seized him. Slover was now stripped, and with his hands tied and his face painted black, he was taken to a village five miles off, where he was beaten as usual by the people, and then driven a little farther to another village, where he found everything made ready to burn him, as Crawford had been burned. He was tied to the stake, and the fire was lighted; an orator began to kindle the anger of the savages; but at the last moment a heavy shower of rain burst over the roofless council house where they had gathered to torture their captive, put out the fire, and drove them to a sheltered part of the lodge, where they consoled themselves as best they could by beating him till midnight, and promising him that he should be burned the next day. He was then carried to the blockhouse and left bound with two guards, who entertained themselves, but did not amuse Slover, by talking over his probable behavior under the torture that awaited him. They fell asleep, worn out, about daybreak, when Slover made a desperate effort to free himself, and to his own astonishment, succeeded. He stepped across his snoring guards out into the open air. No one was astir in the village, and he ran to hide himself in a cornfield, where he nearly fell over a sleeping squaw and her papooses. On the other side of the field he found some horses, and making a halter of the buffalo thong that had bound him, and that still hung upon his arm, he leaped upon one of them and dashed through the woods. By ten o’clock in the forenoon he had reached the Scioto fifty miles away.
He allowed his horse to breathe here; then he remounted, crossed the river, and galloped half as far again. At three o’clock his horse gave out, and Slover left him and ran forward afoot, spurred on by the yells of the pursuers close behind him. The moon came up, and knowing that his trail could be easily followed by her light, he ran till daybreak. The next night he reached the Muskingum, naked, torn by briers, and covered with the mosquitoes which swarmed upon his bleeding body. A few wild raspberries enabled him to break his fast for the first time, but the next day he feasted upon two crawfish. When he came to the Ohio, just across from Wheeling, and called to a man whom he saw on the island there, to bring his canoe and take him over, it is not strange that the man should have hesitated at the sight of the figure on the Ohio shore. Not till Slover had given him the names of many men in Crawford’s army, as well as his own name, did the man come to his rescue and ferry him over to the fort, where he was safe at last.
XI. THE INDIAN WARS AND ST. CLAIR’S DEFEAT.
The Indians and the renegades at Sandusky would not believe their prisoners when Crawford’s men told them that Cornwallis and his army had surrendered to Washington; but the Revolutionary War had now really come to an end. The next year Great Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States, and gave up the whole West to them, as France had given it up to her before. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia claimed each the country lying westward of them, but the other states denied this claim. The West was finally declared the property of the whole Union, and in 1784 the first ordinance was passed by Congress for its government. It was not until 1787 that the great ordinance was passed which gave the future empire of the world to the West on terms of freedom to all men: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory otherwise than in the punishment of crime.”
This made the West free forever, but no law of Congress could make it safe without the consent of the savage nations which had again changed masters by the treaty of foreign powers. The war between England and America was over, but the war between white men and red men raged more fiercely after our peace with Great Britain than before. The backwoodsmen took this peace for a sign that they might now cross the river from New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to settle in the Ohio country; and they were soon there by hundreds. It is true that the United States had made treaties with the United Tribes for certain tracts beyond the Ohio River, but the Indians declared that they had been tricked into these treaties. It is true that Congress meant to deal fairly by them so far as to drive the hard bargains with them for their lands which the white men had always driven with the Indians; but the backwoodsmen waited for nothing, and the old story of surprises and slaughters, of captivities and tortures, went on, with the difference that the war parties now need not cross the Ohio to take scalps and prisoners, and the vengeance of the pioneers had not so far to follow them in their return to the woods.
The first white settlers in Ohio were largely the kind of half-savages who had butchered the Christians at Gnadenhiitten. They built their cabins and cleared their fields on lands so shamelessly stolen that in 1785 a force of United States troops was sent to drive them out of their holdings. They seemed to go, but in reality they staid, and wherever the backwoodsman planted his foot west of the Ohio, he never turned his face eastward again.
He was unlawfully there, but from the Indian’s point of view he was no more unrightfully there than the settlers who came a few years later to take up farms under the land companies authorized by Congress. If any other proof were wanting that these companies possessed themselves of land which the Indians believed they had never sold, it would appear in the fact that the first thing the settlers did was to build a stockade, or high bullet-proof fence of logs with a strong blockhouse for a kind of citadel, where they might gather for safety in case of attacks from any of the wild natives of the woods about them.
The invaders were from New England, from New Jersey, from Pennsylvania, and from Virginia, and with their coming, nearly all in the same year, there began that mingling of the American strains which has since made Ohio the most American state in the Union, first in war and first in peace; which has given the nation such soldiers as Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, McPherson; such presidents as Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley; such statesmen and jurists as Ewing, Cor-win, Wade, Chase, Giddings, Sherman, Waite. We have to own, in truth and honesty, that the newcomers might be unlawfully and unrightfully in the great territory which was destined to be the great state, but it is consoling to realize that they were not unreasonably there. It was not reasonable that the land should be left to savages who must each keep fifty thousand acres of it wild for his needs as a hunter. The earth is for those who will use it, and not for those who will waste it, and the Indians who would not suffer themselves to be tamed could not help wasting the land.
If the whites made any mistake, it was in allowing any man to own more land than he could use; but this is a mistake which prevails in our own day as it prevailed in the days of the pioneers, and they were not to blame for being no wiser at the end of the eighteenth century than we are at the end of the nineteenth. The states consenting to the organization of the Northwest Territory meant that their citizens who had fought for the independence of the nation in the Revolutionary War should first of all have their choice of its lands, and so we find Ohio divided up into the Virginia Military District, the Connecticut Western Reserve, and the Bounty Lands of Pennsylvania. But large grants were made to land companies, and the innumerable acres were juggled out of the hands of the people into the hands of the speculators, as the public lands have been ever since, until now there are no public lands left worth having.
The Ohio Indians knew nothing of all this, or as little as they have ever known of the fate of their ancient homes on the frontier which we have pressed further and further westward. They held in their stubborn way that the line between them and the whites was still the Ohio River, as it had been for fifty years; and they made war upon the invaders wherever they found them. At times they gathered force for a great battle, and in the first two of these battles they were the victors, but in the third they were beaten and their strength and spirits were broken. In 1790 General Harmar destroyed the towns of the Miamis on the Wabash; but they ambushed his retreat and punished his fifteen hundred men so severely that he was forced back to the Ohio. In 1791 General Arthur St. Clair led an army against the Indians in the Maumee country, and was attacked and routed with greater havoc than the savages had ever yet made of the whites, except perhaps in Braddock’s defeat. In 1792 General Anthony Wayne set about gathering another army for the Indian campaign. He moved into the enemy’s country slowly, building forts in Darke County and Mercer (where St. Clair was routed) as he advanced. In 1794, at the meeting of the Auglaize and Maumee, twenty miles from the last post, which he named Fort Defiance, he finally met the tribes in great force, and defeated them so thoroughly that for sixteen years they never afterwards made head against the Americans.
At this day we can hardly imagine the dismay that the rout of St. Clair and the slaughter of his men spread through the Ohio country. He was a gallant officer, the governor of the Northwest Territory, and the trusted friend of Washington. It is true that his army was largely the refuse of the Eastern States, picked up in the streets of the larger towns and lured into the wilderness with the promise of three dollars a month; that these men were badly fed, badly clothed, and badly drilled; and that they were led by a general whose strength and spirits were impaired by sickness. But with them was a large body of Kentuckians and other backwoodsmen, skilled in Indian warfare, and eager for the red foes with whom they had long arrears of mutual injury to bring up; and the hopes of the settlers rested securely upon these. The Indians were led by Little Turtle, one of their greatest war chiefs, and at the point where General Wayne two years later built one of his forts, and called it Recovery, they surprised St. Clair’s troops.
It was an easy slaughter. St. Clair was suffering so much with gout that he could not move from his horse when he was helped to the saddle, and was wholly unfit to fight. Yet he went undauntedly through the battle; horse after horse was shot under him, and his clothes were pierced with nine of the bullets which the Indians rained upon his men from every tree of the forest. The backwoodsmen had hardly a chance to practice the Indians’ arts against them before the rout began. The cannon which St. Clair had brought into the wilderness with immense waste of time and toil, proved useless under the fire that galled the artillerymen. The weak, undisciplined, and bewildered army was hemmed in on every side, and the men were shot down as they huddled together or tried to straggle away, till half their number was left upon the field. Of course none of the wounded were spared. The Americans were tomahawked and scalped where they fell; one of the savages told afterwards that he plied his hatchet until he could hardly lift his arm. All the Ohio tribes shared in the glory of this greatest victory of their race,—Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots, Ottawas, Chippeways, and Pottawottomies. There had been plenty of game that year; they were all in the vigor and force which St. Clair’s ill-fated army lacked; and they lustily took their fill of slaughter.
Many stories of the battle were told by those who escaped. Major Jacob Fowler, of Kentucky, an old hunter, who went with the army as surveyor, carried his trusty rifle, but he had run short of bullets, the morning of the fight, which began at daybreak. He was going for a ladle to melt more lead, when he met a Kentucky rifleman driven in by the savages, and begged some balls of him. The man had been shot through the wrist, and he told Fowler to help himself from his pouch. Fowler was pouring out a double handful, when the man said, “Stop; you had better count them.” Fowler could not help laughing, though it was hardly the time for gayety. “If we get through this scrape, my dear fellow,” said he, “I will return you twice as many.” But they never met again, and Fowler could only suppose that his cautious friend was soon tomahawked and scalped with the other wounded. Fowler took to a tree, and shot Indians till his gunlock got out of order. Then he picked up a rifle which had been thrown away, and which he found his bullets would fit, and renewed the fight. It was a very cold November morning, and his fingers became so stiff that he could not hold the bullets, which he had to keep in his mouth, and feed into his rifle from it. At one time he was behind a very small tree, and two Indians fired on him at such close range that he felt the smoke of their guns and gave himself up for dead. But both had missed him, and he got away from the battlefield unhurt.
Another Kentuckian, a young ranger named William Kennan, was one of the first riflemen driven back by the overwhelming force of Indians. He tried to hide in the tall grass, but found that his only hope was in his heels. The savages endeavored to cut him off, but he distanced all except one, who followed him only three yards away. Kennan expected him every moment his tomahawk at him, and he felt in his belt for his own. It had slipped from its place, and he found himself wholly unarmed, just as he came to a tree which the wind had blown down, and which spread before him a mass of roots and earth eight or nine feet high. He gathered all his strength, bounded into the air, and cleared it, while a yell of wonder rose from the baffled Indians behind him. A little later he came upon General Madison of Kentucky sitting on a log, so spent with the day’s work and loss of blood from a wound, that he could no longer walk, and waiting for the Indians to come up and kill him. Kennan ran back and caught a horse which he had seen grazing, put Madison on it, and walked by his side till they were out of danger. The friendship thus begun lasted through their lives.
This is one of the few softer lights in the picture whose darker features we must not fail to look upon. One of the grimmest of them was the war chief of the Missasagos, Little Turtle, who planned the surprise, against the advice of all the other chiefs, and who merits the fame of the awful day. To the Americans who saw him then, he was a sullen and gloomy giant, who fought with his men throughout the battle, arrayed in the conspicuous splendor of a great war, chief, with silver ornaments dangling from his nose and ears. Hardly less terrible than the figure of this magnificent butcher is that of the Chickasaw warrior who accompanied the American army, to glut the hate of his nation for the Northern tribesmen. When the fight began, he said he would not stand for the Shawnees to shoot him down like a wild pigeon, and he left the ranks and took to a fallen log, where he fired with unfailing aim. But he could not be kept from leaving it to scalp the other Indians as he shot them, and his own turn to be shot and scalped came at last.
The battle ground was covered with a thick slush from the new-fallen snow, and this made the retreat more exhausting. A poor mother, perhaps one of the soldiers’ or pioneers’ wives, staggered along with a baby in her arms till she fell with it. The ranger McDowell then carried it awhile for her. When he gave it back, she threw it away in the snow, to save her own life, and the Indians found it, and took it to Sandusky, where they brought it up as their own.
Two years after, when a detachment of Wayne’s army camped upon the scene of the carnage, they had to scrape away the heaps of bones and carry them out of their tents before they could make their beds, and they buried six hundred skulls on the field. Such is war, and we cannot look too closely on its hideous face, which is often so alluringly painted that we forget it is the face of a pitiless demon.
XII. THE INDIAN WARS AND WAYNE’S VICTORY.
The Indians who had been so well generaled and had fought so ably, failed as usual to follow up their victory by moving on the American settlements in force. They kept on harassing the pioneers in small war parties, but gave the country time to send an army, thoroughly equipped and thoroughly disciplined, against them. They made a second attack on the Americans on the old battle ground where General Wayne had built his Fort Recovery, but they were beaten off with severe loss, though in their attack they had the aid of many white Canadians and even of some British officers, or at least of men wearing the uniform of British officers.
By the treaty of 1783 Great Britain agreed to give us the whole West below a certain line, but when the time came for the surrender, she refused to yield the forts south of this line. With the bad faith of wanton power she kept her posts at Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, and Mackinaw, because we were weak and she was strong; and from these points her agents abetted the savages in their war upon the American frontiers. Just before the battle of Fallen Timbers, where Wayne won his victory, the Lieutenant Governor of Canada marched a force of Canadian militia and British regulars into the Ohio country, and built a fort on the Maumee, near the battle ground, which he held until 1796, when Great Britain at last gave up all the places she had unrightfully kept. The Indians expected this fort to open its gates to them, when they fled before Wayne’s men, and were astonished and indignant at the behavior of then-British friends in denying them refuge. This was not from want of ill will toward the Americans, who taunted them as they passed, and whom the garrison wished to fire upon for approaching the post in force. Sharp letters passed between the American general and the British commandant, but it ended in nothing worse, and our jealous army, which remained in the neighborhood laying waste the Indian fields and villages, could not perceive that the British gave any aid or comfort to the savages.
The battle of Fallen Timbers was fought on the 20th of August, 1794, on the banks of the Maumee, near a rising ground called Presque Isle, about two miles south of the present Maumee City, and four miles from the British Fort Miami. The place was called Fallen Timbers because it was covered with trees blown down long before in a tornado. These formed a natural stronghold for the savages, but Wayne had every other advantage, especially in numbers; he had almost twice as many men, well drilled, armed, and clothed, while the miserable and disorderly army of St. Clair had fallen a prey to a far greater force of Indians.
On the morning of the battle, Wayne sent a flag of truce to the united tribes, offering peace, but he did not wait for its return. He met his envoy coming back with an evasive answer, and he pushed on to Fallen Timbers without stopping. As soon as he reached the battlefield, he ordered his infantry to beat up the covert of the enemy, who were hidden among the logs, brush, and grass, with the bayonet, and as they rose to deliver their fire. His order was carried out so thoroughly and promptly that this charge of nine hundred men began and ended the fight. Two thousand; Indians, Canadian militia and volunteers fled before them, and the rout was complete.
The affair was so quickly over that there was no time for the incidents of heroism and suffering which heightened the tragedy of St. Clair’s defeat. At the beginning of the action, General William Henry Harrison, afterwards President of the United States, but then one of Wayne’s aids, said to him, “General Wayne, I’m afraid you will get into the battle yourself, and forget to give us the necessary field orders.” “Perhaps I may,” said Wayne, “and if I do, recollect the standing order for the day is, Charge the rascals with the bayonets!” Wayne had got his nickname of Mad Anthony in the Revolution from his habit of swearing furiously in battle, and now he called the Indians something more than simply rascals. We have seen how his men carried out the spirit of his instructions, and it is told of one of them who got astray from the rest that he met an Indian alone and gave him the bayonet. At the same time the Indian gave the American the tomahawk, and they were found dead together, one with the blade in his breast, the other with the hatchet in his skull.
A runaway negro who had followed the Kentucky horsemen to the battle, saw three Indians swimming the river from the shore where the cavalry were posted, and shot one of them. The other two tried to swim on with the body. The negro fired again with deadly aim, and the only Indian left was now in water so shallow that he was dragging the bodies to land when once more the negro fired and killed his man. Then he ran up to look at the dead men and found them so like one another that he knew they must be brothers.
A strange and romantic incident of the campaign, before the battle, occurred while three American scouts, Wells, McClellan, and Miller, were ranging the woods to bring in some Indians for Wayne to question. They came upon a party of three Indians; Wells shot one, and Miller another, while McClellan, who was very swift of foot, ran down the third. Pursuer and pursued both stuck in the oozy bottom of a stream, and when Wells and Miller came up, they were threatening each other with knife and tomahawk. Miller had been taken captive when a child with one of his brothers; he had escaped, but this brother had remained with the savages, and somehow Miller felt that the Indian confronting Mc-Clellan was his brother. They seized him and washed off his paint; he was white; he was Miller’s brother. They persuaded him, with much trouble at first, to join Wayne’s army, and he fought through the rest of the war on the American side.
At another time as Wells and a party of his scouts came to the banks of a stream, they saw on the opposite shore a family of savages who began to cross the river towards them in a canoe. The scouts, taking them for Indians, were about to fire on them when Wells suddenly called out that the first who fired should have a bullet through his own head. He had recognized the Indians, and he said that when he was a captive in their tribe, this family had fed and clothed him, and nursed him in sickness, and treated him as tenderly as one of themselves. The backwoodsmen joined Wells in talk with his friends, urging them to do what they could for peace among their people, and left them to paddle away in their canoe unharmed.
Wells had been the adoptive son of Little Turtle, who led the Indians at St. Clair’s defeat, and he had fought on the side of the savages in that battle. But after it was over he foresaw that the war must end in favor of the white men, and he decided to abandon his wild brethren. He spoke first with Little Turtle as they were walking in the woods together and warned him in words that a real Indian might have used. “When the sun reaches the meridian, I leave you for the whites; and whenever you meet me in battle you must try to kill me, as I shall try to kill you.”
But the real Indians had not Wells’s forecast, and they continued the war till they were beaten by Wayne, in whose army Little Turtle might have found his adoptive son. Little Turtle was himself one of the last chiefs to yield, but he came in with the rest at Greenville, and one year after the battle of Fallen Timbers signed the treaty by which ninety chiefs and the deputies of twelve tribes gave up the Ohio River as the Indian border, and ceded half the Ohio lands to the United States.
Little Turtle, or Moshokonoghua, as he was called in the tongue of his nation, the Miamis, lived for thirty years after signing the treaty, and then died of gout at Fort Wayne. He traveled through the Eastern States in the first years of the peace, and gave people there a different impression from that received by those who knew him before the defeat of St. Clair, and saw him leading the victors in that battle. He struck all who met him as a man of intelligence and wit; he got the habit of high living and bore himself like the gentlemen whose company he loved to frequent. At Philadelphia the famous Polish exile and patriot Kosciusko gave him his pistols and bade him shoot dead with them any man who attempted to rob him of his country.
His business in the East was to interest people in the civilization of his tribe, but he had no purpose of living among the whites. In Philadelphia, he said, “When I walk through the streets I see every person in his shop employed about something: one makes shoes, another pots, a third sells cloth. I say to myself, which of these things can you do? Not one. I can make a bow or an arrow, catch fish, kill game, and go to war; but none of these things is of any use here. To learn what is done here would require a long time. Old age comes on. I should be a useless piece of furniture, useless to my nation, useless to myself. I must go back to my own country.”
This was what he did, and as long as he lived he was steadfast for peace, for he remembered that it would be foolish for the Indians to fight the Americans, and Little Turtle was not a fool. Even before the battle of the Fallen Timbers, he urged his people to treat with Wayne rather than fight. “We have beaten the enemy twice under separate commanders,” he said, referring to Har-mar and St. Clair. “The Americans are now led by a chief who never stops; the night and the day are alike to him. And during all the time that he has been marching upon your villages, notwithstanding the watchfulness of our young men, we have never been able to surprise him. Think well of it. There is something which whispers to me that it will be prudent to listen to his offers of peace.”
XIII. INDIAN FIGHTERS.
In the long war with the Indians, the great battles were nearly all fought within the region that afterwards became our state, and the smaller battles went on there pretty constantly. The first force on the scale of an army sent against the Ohio tribes was that of Colonel Bouquet in 1766; but, as we have seen, the chief object of this was to treat for the return of their white captives. In 1774 Lord Dunmore marched with three thousand Virginians to destroy the Indian towns on the Scioto in Pickaway County. He cannot be said to have led his men, who believed in neither his courage nor his good faith, and who thought that he was more anxious to treat with the savages for the advantage of England in the Revolutionary War, which he knew was coming, than to attack their capital. This was that Old Chillicothe, which has been so often mentioned before, and here Dunmore made peace with the Indians, instead of punishing them, as the backwoodsmen expected. The feeling among them was so bitter that one of them fired through Dunmore’s tent where he sat with two chiefs, hoping to kill all three. He missed, but he easily escaped among his comrades, who looked upon Dunmore as an enemy of their country and a traitor to their cause.
Their spirit, both lawless and fearless, was the spirit of that race of Indian Fighters, as they were called, which grew up on the border in the war ending with Wayne’s victory. It led them into countless acts of daring and into many acts of cruelty, and the story of their adventures is too bloody to be fully told. But unless something of it is told we cannot have a true notion of what the life of our backwoodsmen was. We have seen what they could do when they were at their worst in the Gnadenhutten massacre; but we cannot understand them unless we realize that they not only held all life cheap, but held the life of an Indian no dearer than that of a wolf.
Belmont County was the scene of two exploits of Lewis Wetzel, perhaps the most famous of these Indian fighters. One day he went home with a young man whom he met while hunting, and they found the cabin burnt and the whole family murdered except a girl who had lived with them, and whom the young man was in love with. They started on the trail of the Indians who had done the cruel deed, and came up with them after nightfall sleeping round their camp-fire. The girl was awake, crying and lamenting, and Wetzel had great ado to keep her lover from firing at once upon the Indians. But he made him wait for daylight, so that they could be sure of their aim; and then at the first light of dawn, they each chose his mark and fired. Each killed his Indian, but two others escaped into the woods, while the lover rushed, knife in hand, to free the girl. Wetzel made after the Indians, firing into the air to draw them out of their concealment. Then he turned, loading as he ran, and wheeled about and shot the Indian nearest him. He fled again, dodging from tree to tree till his gun was reloaded, when he shot the last Indian left. He took their scalps, and got home with the girl and her lover unhurt.
In 1782, together with one of Crawford’s men, he fell in with a party of forty Indians about two miles from St. Clairsville. Both sides fired; Wetzel killed one of the Indians, but his friend was wounded and promptly scalped, while four of the Indians followed Wetzel. He turned, shot the foremost, and ran on, loading his rifle. The next was so close upon him that when Wetzel turned again, the Indian caught the muzzle of his gun. After a fearful struggle Wetzel got it against the Indian’s breast, pulled the trigger, and killed him. The remaining two followed him a mile farther, and then Wetzel shot one of them as he was crossing a piece of open ground. The last left of the Indians stopped with a yell, and Wetzel heard him say as he turned back, “No catch that man; gun always loaded.”
Wetzel had fought Indians nearly all his life. When he was a boy of fourteen they attacked his father’s cabin in Virginia, and Wetzel was wounded before he was taken prisoner, with a younger brother, and carried into the Ohio wilderness. One night the Indians forgot to tie their captives, and the two boys escaped. Lewis returned to the camp, after they had stolen away, for a pair of moccasins, and again for his father’s rifle, which the Indians had carried off. They followed the boys, but the young Wetzels got safely back to the Ohio, and crossed the river on a raft which they made of logs.
In 1786 the settlers of Wheeling, who had been troubled by Indians, offered a purse of a hundred dollars to the man who should first bring in a scalp. A party crossed the Ohio, but after some days turned back, leaving Wetzel alone in the woods, where he roamed about looking for Indians. The second morning he came upon one sleeping, and drove his knife through his heart. Then he went home with his scalp, and got the reward.
One of the tricks of the savages was to imitate the cry, or call, of the wild turkey and then to shoot the hunter who came looking for the bird. Wetzel was one day in the woods when this call came to his ear from the mouth of a cave, a place where several whites had been found scalped. He watched till the feathered tuft of an Indiana head appeared from the cave. The call of the wild turkey sounded, and at the same time the sharp crack of Wetzel’s rifle noted the Indian’s death.
It was Wetzel’s habit in the autumn to go on a long hunt into the Ohio country. Once he went as far as the Muskingum, some ninety miles from Wheeling, when he came on a camp of four Indians. He crept upon them with no weapon but his knife, which he drove through the skulls of two as they lay asleep. The two others struggled to their feet stupefied; Wetzel killed one of them, but the fourth escaped in the shadow of the woods. When Wetzel returned and was asked what his luck in hunting had been, he said, “Not much; I treed four Indians, but one got away.”
These were acts of war, but they were very like mere murders, and one of Wetzel’s exploits could hardly be called anything but murder. General Har-mar in 1779 had invited the Indians to come and make peace with him in the fort near where Marietta now stands. Wetzel and another Indian fighter lay in wait for the envoys who passed from the tribes to the general, and in pure wantonness, shot one. He then took refuge with his friends at Mingo Bottom, where the officer sent by Harmar to arrest him, dared not even attempt it. Wetzel was the hero and darling of the border, where the notion of punishing a man for shooting an Indian was laughed at. But after a while he was taken, and lodged, heavily ironed, in the fort. He sent for the general and asked him to give him up, with a tomahawk, to a large band of armed Indians present, and let him fight for his life with them. Of course Harmar could not do this, but Wetzel won upon him so far that the general had his fetters removed, leaving only the manacles on his wrists, and allowed him to walk about outside the fort. He made a sudden dash for the woods; the guards fired upon him, but Wetzel got safely away; and at a distant point he reached the Ohio. He could not swim, with his hands in irons, but by good luck he saw a friend on the Virginia shore, who came in answer to his signs and set him over in his canoe. Later the soldiers found him in a tavern at Marysville, and arrested him again. He was taken to the fort at Cincinnati, where Harmar was now in command, but he was released by a judge of the court just in time to save the fort from an attack by the backwoodsmen, who were furious that Wetzel should be so persecuted simply for killing an Indian.
One of the stories told of Wetzel’s skill in Indian warfare relates to an adventure he had after his escape from hanging by the soldiers. He was coming home at the end of a hunt in the Ohio woods when he saw an Indian lifting up his gun to fire. Each sprang behind a tree, and each waited patiently for the other to expose himself. At last Wetzel put his bearskin cap on his ramrod, and pushed it a little beyond the edge of his shelter. The Indian took it for his enemy’s head and fired. Before he could load again Wetzel was upon him, and his end had come.
It is not easy for us at this day to understand how a man so blood-stained as this should be by no means the worst man of the border. Wetzel is said to have been even exemplary in his life apart from his Indian killing, which, indeed, was accounted no wrong, but rather a virtue by his savage white friends. In person he might well take their rude fancy. He was tall, full-chested, and broad-shouldered; his dark face was deeply pitted with smallpox; his hair, which he was very proud of, fell to his knees when loose; his black eyes, when he was roused, shone with dangerous fire. He was silent and shy with strangers, but the life of any party of comrades. It is not certainly known how or where he died. Some say that he went South, and ended his stormy life quietly at Natchez; others that he went West, and remained a woodsman to the last, hunting wild beasts and killing wild men.
Lewis Wetzel had two brothers only less famous than himself in the backwoods warfare, and more than once Indian fighting seems to have run in families. Adam Poe and Andrew Poe were brothers whose names have come down in the story of deadly combats with the savages. They are most renowned for their heroic struggle with a party of seven Wyandots near the mouth of Little Yellow Creek, in 1782. The Wyandots, led by a great warrior named Big Foot, had fallen suddenly on a settlement just below Fort Pitt, killed one old man in his cabin, and begun their retreat with what booty they could gather. Eight borderers, the two Poes among them, followed in hot haste across the river into the Ohio country, where the next morning Andrew Poe came suddenly on Big Foot and a small warrior talking together by their raft at the water’s edge. They stood with their guns cocked, and Poe aimed at Big Foot; but his piece missed fire. The Indians turned at the click of the lock, and Poe, who was too close to them for any chance of escape, leaped upon them both and threw them to the ground together. The little warrior freed himself, and got his tomahawk from the raft to brain Poe, whom he left in deadly clutch with Big Foot. Twice he struck, but Poe managed each time, by twisting and dodging, to keep his head away from the hatchet, and as the warrior struck the third time, Poe, though badly hurt on the arm by one of his blows, wrenched himself free from Big Foot, caught up one of the Indians’ guns, and shot the little warrior through the breast. Then Big Foot seized him again, and they floundered together into the water, where each tried to drown the other. Poe held Big Foot under the water so long that he thought he must be dead, but the moment he loosed his hold upon his scalp lock, the Wyandot renewed the fight. They presently found themselves in water beyond their depths, and let go to swim for their lives. The Indian reached the shore first, and got hold of one of the guns to shoot Poe, but luckily for Poe it was the gun he had fired in killing the little warrior.
Adam had heard the shot, and he now came hurrying up. His gun was empty, too, and it was a question Whether he or Big Foot should load first: he shot the Indian as he was lifting his gun to fire. But Big Foot was not killed, and Andrew shouted to Adam not to mind him, but to keep the Indian from rolling himself into the water. Big Foot was too quick for them: he got into the current, which whirled him away, and so saved his scalp in death. About the same time another of the party who came up took Andrew Poe for an Indian and shot him in the shoulder. Poe got well of his wounds and lived for many years, proud of his fight with Big Foot, who was a generous foe, and had often befriended white captives among his tribe.
It is told of Adam Poe that five Indians, all rather drunk, once came to his cabin, and tried to force the door open. He sent his wife with the children out into the cornfield behind the house, remarking, “There is a fight and fun ahead,” but when he saw the state the Indians were in, he did not fire at them. He fell upon them with his fists, knocked them all down, and then threw them one after another over the fence, and the fun was ended.
One of the hunters detailed from Wayne’s command to supply the officers with game while the army lay at Greenville in 1793 was the Indian fighter, Josiah Hunt, who died a peaceful Methodist many years afterwards. When he passed a winter in the woods he had to build a fire to keep from freezing, and yet guard against letting the slightest gleam of light be seen by a prowling foe. So he dug a hole six or seven inches deep with his tomahawk, filled it with the soft lining of dead oak bark, and with his flint started a fire. He left two holes at the edges to breathe the flame; then covered the pit with earth, spread brush over it, and seated himself on the heap, with his blanket drawn over his head, and dozed through the night. The Indians had a great honor and admiration for him, and when they came to make peace at Greenville, after Fallen Timbers, they all wanted to see Captain Hunt. “Great man, Captain Hunt,” they said. “Great warrior—good hunting man-Indian no can kill,” and they told him they had tried to find out the secret of his fire, and catch him off his guard so that they could get his scalp, which they felt would have been the highest distinction they could have achieved, next to getting General Wayne’s scalp. He was indeed both hunted and hunter. He never fired at a deer without first putting a bullet in his mouth to reload for an Indian, who might be about to fire on him. When he skinned a deer, he planted his back against a tree, and stood his rifle by his side; from time to time he stopped and listened for the slightest noise that hinted danger. His life had its disappointments as well as its perils. Once he saw three Indians whom he might easily have killed at one shot if he could have got them in range, but they persisted in walking Indian file. If he fired and killed only one, the other two would have killed him; so he was obliged to let them all go. Captain Hunt was a quiet, modest man, very frank and sincere, and seems never to have boasted of his exploits; we have no means of knowing whether he was glad or sorry that those Indians got away in safety. Probably he was not very glad; for though the fighters on both sides could admire, they could never spare one another.
The Indian fighters were commoner in the southern and eastern parts of Ohio than in the north, but there was at least one whose chief exploit had the north for its scene. Captain Samuel Brady, in 1780, gathered a number of his neighbors and pursued a retreating war party of Indians from the Ohio as far as the Cuyahoga, near Ravenna. Here he found that the savages far outnumbered his force, and he decided that it would be better for him to retreat in his turn, and he bade each of his men look out for himself. He discovered that the Indians were pressing him hard with the purpose of taking him alive and glutting many an old grudge against him by torture. But he knew his ground, for he had often hunted there with them in friendlier days, and he saw a chance for his life at a point where another man would have despaired. This was where the river narrowed to a gorge twenty feet wide, with walls of precipitous rock. As he neared this chasm in his flight, Brady gathered himself for the leap and cleared it. He caught at some low bushes where he alighted and pulled himself up the steep, while the Indians stood stupefied. They had now no hope of taking him alive, and they all fired upon him. One bullet wounded him badly in the hip, but he managed to swim a pond which he came to, and to hide himself behind a log near the shore. When the Indians came up and saw the blood on its surface, they decided that he was drowned, and gave up the chase. Some of them stood on the very log that hid him while they talked over his probable fate, and then they left him to make his long way home unmolested.
Duncan McArthur, an early governor of Ohio, though not an Indian fighter like these others, was in many fights with the Indians. In the summer of 1794 he was hunting deer in the hills near the mouth of the Scioto, when two Indians fully armed came in sight. McArthur was waiting for the deer behind a screen or blind near the salt lick which they frequented, and he took aim at one of the Indians and shot him. The other did not stir till McArthur broke from his covert and ran. He plunged heedlessly into the top of a fallen tree, and before he could disentangle himself, he heard the crack of the Indian’s rifle, and the bullet hissed close to his ear. He freed himself and ran, followed now by several other Indians, but he managed to distance them all and reached the Ohio River in safety.
It was war to the death between the red and white borderers. Neither spared the other, except in some rare mood of caprice or pity. A life granted on either side meant perhaps many lives lost, and the foes vied with one another in being the first to shed the blood which seems, as you read their savage annals, to stain every acre of the beautiful Ohio country.
XIV. LATER CAPTIVITIES.
The Indians seem to have kept on carrying the whites into captivity, to the very end of the war, which closed with the Greenville treaty of 1795. As they had always done, they adopted some of them into their tribes and devoted others to torture. Nothing more clearly shows how little they realized that their power was coming to an end, and that they could no longer live their old life, or follow their immemorial customs.
The first captive in Ohio, of whom there is any record, was Mary Harris; she had been stolen from her home in New England when a child, by the French Indians, and was found at White Woman Creek in Coshocton County, about the year 1750. When the last captive was taken is not certainly known, but two white boys were captured so late as 1791, and one of these was adopted by the Delawares in Auglaize County. His name was Brickell, and he was carried off from the neighborhood of Pittsburg when nine years old. He wrote a narrative of his life among the Indians, and gave an account of his parting with them which is very touching. After the first exchange of prisoners Brickell was left because there was no Indian among the whites to exchange for him, but later his adoptive father went with him to Fort Defiance, and gave him up. Brickell had hunted with the rest of the children, and shared in all their sports and pleasures, and they now clung about him crying, when their father told them he must go with him to the fort. They asked him if he was going to leave them, and he could only answer that he did not know. At the fort, his Indian father, Whingy Pooshies, bade him stand up before the officers, and then spoke to him.
“My son, these are men the same color as yourself, and some of your kin may be here, or they may be a great way off. You have lived a long time with us. I call on you to say if I have not been a father to you, if I have not used you as a father would a son.”
“You have used me as well as a father could use a son,” said Brickell.
“I am glad you say so,” Whingy Pooshies returned. “You have lived long with me; you have hunted for me; but your treaty says you must be free. If you choose to go with the people of your own color, I have no right to say a word; if you choose to stay with me, your people have no right to speak. Now reflect on it, and take your choice, and tell us as soon as you make up your mind.”
Brickell says that he thought of the children he had left crying, and of all the Indians whom he loved; but he remembered his own people at last, and he answered, “I will go with my kin.”
Then Whingy Pooshies said, “I have reared you; I have taught you to hunt; you are a good hunter; you are better to me than my own sons. I am now getting old and I cannot hunt. I thought you would be a support to my old age. I leaned on you as on a staff. Now it is broken; you are going to leave me; and I have no right to say a word, but I am ruined.”
He sank into his seat, weeping, and Brickell wept too; then they parted and never saw each other again.
One of the later captivities was that of Israel Donolson, who has told the story himself. The night before he was captured, he says that he dreamed of Indians, and took it as a sign of coming trouble; but in the morning, the 22d of April, 1791, he went prospecting for land with another young surveyor, named Lytte, and a friend named Tittle. They worked together along the Ohio River in Adams County till they came to one of the ancient works of the Mound Builders. The surveyors were joking Tittle, and telling him what a fine place that would be for him to build his house, when they saw a party of Frenchmen in two canoes. The Frenchmen turned out to be Indians, who landed and instantly gave chase to the white men. Donolson tripped and fell, and three warriors were quickly upon him. He offered no resistance; they helped him up, and had leisure to secure him in full sight of the blockhouse on the Kentucky shore, where they could all see men moving about, but Donolson could not call to them for help. His captors pushed off with him northward. The next morning it rained, and one of the Indians took Donolson’s hat; he complained to a large warrior, who gave him a blanket cap, and helped him through the swollen streams. When they killed a bear, and wanted to make their captive carry the meat, he flung it down; and then his big friend carried it for him.
One day an Indian, while they were resting, built a little fence of sticks, and planted some grains of corn inside of it, saying, “Squaw!” as a hint to Donolson that he should be put to work with the women. When they got to the Shawnee camp, they dressed his hair in Indian fashion, and put a tin jewel in his nose, and upon the whole they treated him kindly enough. But almost every day he saw war parties setting off for Kentucky, or coming back with scalps and horses, and he was always watching for a chance to escape. One night he encamped with two guards who had bound him as usual with a rope of bark. He gnawed at it all night long, and just at daybreak he freed himself. After his first dash he stopped to put on his moccasins, and knew that he was missed, by the terrific yells that the Indians were giving. He ran on, and to hide his trail kept as much as he could on fallen trees. At ten o’clock he hid between two logs and slept till dark; then he started again, and passed that night in a hollow tree. The day following he came to the Miami River, and tried to drift down its current on a raft which he made of logs tied together with bark, but he was soon forced to the shore again. He broke his long fast on two eggs he found in a wild turkey’s nest; they proved to have each two yolks, and he made them last for two days. In the woods he caught a horse and tried to ride it with a bark halter; but the halter rubbed a sore on its lip, and the horse threw him, and hurt him so badly that he lay insensible for a time; then he rose up and pressed on, but very slowly, for his feet were full of thorns. The twelfth day after his capture he heard the sound of an ax, and found himself in the neighborhood of Fort Washington, or Cincinnati.
In 1793, the year before Wayne’s victory, Andrew Ellison was taken by the Indians in a clearing near his cabin in Adams County, and was hurried off before his family knew that anything had happened. They roused the neighborhood, and the Indians were hotly pursued, but they got away with their prisoner, and made swiftly off to Upper Sandusky, where they forced him to run the gantlet. He was a heavy man, not fleet of foot, and he was terribly beaten; but he got through alive, and at Detroit a British officer ransomed him for a hundred dollars. By that time prisoners must have been getting cheap: it was perhaps more and more difficult to hold them.
Two boys, John Johnson, thirteen years old, and Henry Johnson, eleven, were captured in 1788 near their home at Beach Bottom in Monroe County. They were cracking nuts in the woods, and when the Indians came upon them the boys thought that they were two of their neighbors. They were seized and hurried away, one Indian going before and one following the boys, who told them their father treated them badly, and tried to make their captors believe they were glad to be leaving home. The Indians spent the day in a vain attempt to steal horses, and stopped to pass the night only four miles from the place where they had taken the boys. After supper they lay down with the prisoners between them, and when they supposed the boys were asleep one of the Indians went and stretched himself on the other side of the fire. Presently he began snoring, and John rose, cocked one of the guns, and left it with Henry aimed at this Indian’s head, while he took his station with a tomahawk held over the head of the other. Henry fired and John struck at the same time; neither Indian was killed at once, but both were too badly hurt to prevent the boys’ escape, and the brothers found their way to the settlement by daybreak. The neighbors who returned to their camp with them found the body of the Indian who had been tomahawked, but the other had vanished. Years afterwards a skeleton with a gun was discovered in the woods, where he must have crept after he was shot.
In the autumn of 1792 Samuel Davis and William Campbell set out from Massie’s Station, now Manchester, to trap beaver on the Big Sandy. One night as they lay asleep beside their camp fire they were roused by a voice saying in broken English, “Come, come; get up, get up!” and they woke to find themselves in the clutches of a large party of Indians returning from a raid into Virginia. The Indians bound their captives and started, driving before them a herd of stolen horses. They crossed the Ohio country, and pushed on toward Sandusky, for they were Shawnees. At night they tied each prisoner with buffalo thongs and made these fast to the waist of two Indians, who lay down one on either side of him, and quieted him with blows if he became restive. At daylight the captives were untied, but they were warned that they would be instantly killed if they attempted to escape. Davis was in dread of being burned at Sandusky, and as the Indians, encumbered with their booty, made only ten or twelve miles a day, the terror had full time to grow upon him. At last one morning just before dawn he woke one of the Indians beside him and asked to be untied; he was answered with a blow of the savage’s fist. He waited a moment, and then woke the other guard, who lifted his head, and seeing some of his people building a fire, released Davis.
It was still too dark for any of them to get a good shot at him if he made a dash from their midst, and Davis decided to try for life and liberty. He knocked a large warrior before him into the fire, bounded over him, burst through the group around him, and before they could seize their rifles, which were all stacked together, he had vanished in the shadows of the forest. They followed him, whooping and yelling, but none could draw a bead on him, and not a shot was fired. One Indian was so near that Davis fancied he felt his grasp at times, but he fell behind, and Davis kept on. When he had distanced them all, he stopped to tear up his waistcoat, and wrap his feet, naked and bleeding from the sharp stones which had cut them in his wild flight, and then hurried on toward the Ohio. Three days without food or fire, in the cold of the early winter, passed before he reached the river, eight or ten miles below the mouth of the Scioto. He then saw a large boat coming down the stream, but his troubles did not end with this joyful sight. One of the dreadful facts of the dreadful time was the frequent deception of boatmen by Indians and renegades who pretended to be escaping prisoners, and who lured them to their destruction by piteous appeals for help. The boatmen now refused to land for Davis; they told him they had heard too many stories like his, and they kept on down the stream, while he followed wearily along the shore. At last he entreated them to row in a little nearer, so that he could swim out to them. They consented to this, and he plunged into the icy water, and was taken on board just as his strength was spent.
In 1782, John Alder, then a child of eight years, was captured in Wythe County, Virginia, by a party of Min-goes, who at the same time wounded and killed his brother. They already had two prisoners, Mrs. Martin, the wife of a neighbor, and her little one four or five years old: it proved troublesome, on their rapid march across the Ohio country to their village on Mad River, and they tomahawked and scalped it. The next morning little Alder was somewhat slow in rising from his breakfast when bidden, and on the ground he saw the shadow of an arm with a lifted tomahawk. He glanced upward and found an Indian standing over him, who presently began to feel of Alder’s thick black hair. He afterwards confessed that he had been about to kill him, but when he met his pleasant smile he could not strike, and then he thought that a boy with hair of that color would make a good Indian, and so spared him.
At the Mingo village Alder was made to run the gantlet between lines of children armed with switches, but he was not much hurt, and he was now taken into the tribe. He was given to a Mingo family, and the mother washed him and dressed him in the Indian costume. They were kind to him, but for a month he was very homesick, and used to go every day to a large walnut tree near the town and cry for the friends and home he had lost. After he had learned the Mingo language he began in time to be more contented. He had no complaint to make of any of the family, except one sister, who despised him as a prisoner, and treated him like a slave. Another sister and her husband were his special friends, and he relates that when he used to sit up with the Indians round their camp fire, listening to their stories, he would sometimes drowse; then this gentle sister and her husband would take him up in their arms and carry him to bed, and he would hear them saying, “Poor fellow! We have sat up too long for him, and he has fallen asleep on the cold ground.”
About a year after he was adopted, Alder met that poor mother, whose little one the Indians had cruelly murdered before her eyes. “When she saw me, she came smiling, and asked if it was me. I told her it was. She asked me how I had been. I told her I had been very unwell, for I had had fever and ague for a long time. So she took me off to a log, and there we sat down; and she combed my head, and asked a great many questions about how I lived, and if I didn’t want to see my mother and little brothers. I told her I should be glad to see them, but never expected to see them again. We took many a cry together, and when we parted, took our last and final farewell, for I never saw her again.”
Alder always remained delicate, and could not thrive on the Indians’ fare of meat and hominy, with no bread or salt; of sugar and honey there was plenty; but he missed the things he was used to at home. When he grew older he was given a gun, and sent hunting, and whenever he came back with game the Indians praised his skill and promised him he should be a great hunter some day. He continued with them until the peace of 1795, which followed Wayne’s victory, and even then he stayed for a time in the region where he had dwelt so long. He had married a squaw, and had become a complete Indian, so that the first settlers in his neighborhood had to teach him to speak English. But he did not live happily with his Indian wife; they agreed to part, and then Alder thought of going back to his own people. He reached the house of one of his brothers in the neighborhood of his old home, one Sunday afternoon, and found several of his brothers and sisters there, and his mother with them. They could scarcely be persuaded that it was their son and brother come back to them, and he had to tell them of some things that no one else could know before they would believe him. His old, white-haired mother whom he remembered in her youth with a “head as black as a crow,” was the first to take him in her arms, and she said, as she wept over him, “How you have grown! I dreamed that you had come to see me, but you was a little ornary-looking fellow, and I would not own you for my son; but now I find I was mistaken, that it is entirely the reverse, and I am proud to own you for my son.”
In 1792, Moses Hewit was taken near Neil’s Station, on the Little Kanawha, by three Indians, who at once pushed off with him towards Sandusky. They used him very kindly, and shared fully with him the wild honey which they found in the bee trees, and invited him to take part in their foot races and other sports. He found that he could outrun two of them, and he resolved to try for his liberty, though he kept a cheerful outside with them, and seemed contented with his lot. One day they left him tied hand and foot and fastened to two small trees while they went on a hunt, but he contrived to free himself, and made his escape with their whole stock of provisions, two small pieces of venison. He struck out for the settlements on the Muskingum, and the first night his captors passed so near him in pursuit that he might have touched them in the darkness. Nine days later he came in sight of a station on the Muskingum, so spent with hunger and fatigue that he could not halloo to the garrison. He had nothing on his wasted and bleeding body, which was all torn by briers and brushwood, except a cloth about his loins, and he was afraid of being mistaken and shot for an Indian. He waited till nightfall and then crept to the station, where his presence was unknown till a young man of his acquaintance caught sight of his face in the firelight, and called out, “Here is ‘Hewit!”
Captain Charles Builderback and his wife were surprised by a party of Indians while they were looking for cattle in the Ohio country, near Wheeling, in 1789. Mrs. Builderback hid herself, but the Indians had captured her husband, and now they forced him to call out to her. She hesitated to answer, thinking of the children they had left at home in the cabin which she could see across the river, and knowing how useless it would be to give herself up. But he called again, saying that if she surrendered, it might save his life. Then she showed herself, and was seized and hurried away by one band of savages, while her husband remained with the others. A few days later these came up and showed her his scalp: he was one of the assassins of the Gnadenhiitten Indians, and he was doomed as soon as they knew his name. She was taken to their towns on the Great Miami, where she lived nine months, drudging with the squaws and suffering from the rude and filthy life of the savages, but not ill-treated. Then the commandant at Cincinnati ransomed her and sent her home to her two orphan children.
So lately as 1812 two little girls were stolen from their fathers’ houses in Preble County by the Indians. They could not be traced, but twenty-five years later, one of them, named Parker, was found living with her savage husband in Indiana. She refused then to go home with her father, saying coldly that she should be ridiculed there for her Indian customs.
XV. INDIAN HEROES AND SAGES.
The Ohio Indians were of almost as mixed origin as the white people of Ohio, and if they had qualities beyond those of any other group of American savages, it was from much the same causes which have given the Ohioans of our day distinction as citizens. They made the Ohio country their home by a series of chances, and they defended it against the French, the English, and Americans in turn, because it had bounds which seemed to form the natural frontier between them and the Europeans.
It is now believed that before the coming of our race there was a balance of power between those two great North American nations, the Iroquois and the Algonquins, and that our wars and intrigues destroyed this balance, which was never restored, and put an end to all hope of advance in the native race. Whether this is true or not, it is certain that the hostilities between the tribes raged down to our day, and that these seem to have continued if not begun through one family, the Algonquins, siding with the French, and the other family, the Iroquois, siding with the English. The Algonquins were most powerful in New England and Canada, and the Iroquois in New York. Their struggle ended in the overthrow of the Algonquins in the regions bordering on the English colonies, where, as has been told, a great branch of that people who called themselves the Lenni-lenape, and whom we called the Delawares, dwelt in a sort of vassalage to the Iroquois.
In Ohio, however, these families, so long broken elsewhere by their feuds, united in a common fear and hate of the white men. Many of the Ohio Indians were Delawares, but the Miamis were Iroquois, while the Wyandots again were Hurons, one of the finest and ablest of the Iroquois nation. They ceased to make war upon each other, and in their union the strongest traits of both were blended. Their character appears at its’ best, I think, in Tecaughretanego, the adoptive brother of James Smith, and in the great Mingo chief, Logan.
Of Tecaughretanego, his unselfishness, his piety, his common sense, his wisdom, we already know something from Smith’s narrative, which I wish every boy and girl might read; and of Logan’s noble spirit we have had a glimpse in the story of Kenton’s captivity. He was the son of Shikellimy, a Cayuga chief who lived at Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and who named him after James Logan, the Secretary of the Province. Shikellimy was a convert of the Moravian preachers, and it is thought that Logan himself was baptized in the Christian faith. He spent the greater portion of his early life in Pennsylvania, and he took no part in the war between the French and English, except to do what he could for peace. When he came to Ohio, he dwelt for a time at Mingo Bottom in Jefferson County, the rendezvous of the assassins who marched against Gnadenhiitten under Williamson, and of the assassins who were beaten back from Sandusky under Crawford. Here, as before, Logan was the friend of the white man, and it was not till the murder of his father, brother, and sister, cried to him for vengeance, that he made war upon them.
His kindred were of a small party of Indians whom some Virginians lured across the Ohio near the mouth of Yellow Creek in 1774. On the Virginia side the murderers made three of the Indians drunk and tomahawked them, and when they had tricked the others into discharging their guns at a mark, and so had them defenseless, they ruthlessly shot them down. Logan’s sister, who was the only woman in the party, tried to escape, but a bullet cut short her flight, and she died praying her murderers to have mercy on the babe she held in her arms. They spared it, and he who tells the cruel tale saw it the next day in his own mother’s arms smiling up into her face, while she fed and fondled it.
The news came to Logan while he was speaking at a council of the Indians, and urging them to make peace with the whites. He instantly changed his plea; he lifted up his hatchet, and yowed never to lay it down till he had avenged himself tenfold. He kept his word, and that summer thirty scalps and prisoners bore witness to his fury.
But it was a short-lived impulse of a nature essentially so good that it could not long keep the memory of even such an injury. In this very war, or this out-Durst of the long Indian war, Logan showed himself as before the friend of the white men. He had pity on many of the captives he made, and when he could he tried to move other captors to pity. Major William Robinson, who was one of Logan’s prisoners, tells how he was surprised, together with two friends, by a party of Indians who fired on them. Robinson ran with a savage in hot chase behind him, who called to him in English, “Stop; I won’t hurt you.” “Yes, you will,” Robinson retorted. “No, I won’t,” the Indian insisted; “but if you don’t stop, I’ll shoot you.” Robinson fell over a log, and the Indian seized him. It was Logan, who told him not to be frightened for he should be adopted into his own tribe when they reached his village. There he was made to run the gantlet, but Logan instructed him how to manage so that he got through without harm. Robinson was then tied to the stake and the Indians prepared to burn him. It was the summer after the murder of Logan’s kindred, and they had already whipped one Virginian to death merely because his brother was present at the massacre. They could not forgive, but Logan rose before the council and pleaded with all his eloquence for Robinson’s life. Three times the captive was untied from the stake, and three times tied to it again before Logan’s words prevailed. At last the great chief was allowed to lay the belt of wampum on the prisoner for a sign that he was adopted. Then he gave him in charge to a young Indian, saying, “This is your cousin; you are to go home with him, and he will take care of you.”
But still the sense of his wrong, and the hunger for revenge, gnawed at Logan’s heart, and one day he came to Robinson with a piece of paper and bade him write a letter for him. He said he meant to leave it in the cabin of a white man which he was going, to attack, and it was afterwards found there tied to a war club. He made Robinson write it several times before he thought the words strong enough. It was addressed to the man whom Logan thought guilty of the death of his kindred, but who was afterwards known to have been not even present at their murder.
“Captain Cresap: What did you kill my people on
Yellow Creek for? The white people killed my kin at
Conestoga, a great while ago, and I thought nothing
of that. But you killed my kin again on Yellow Creek,
and took my cousin prisoner. Then I thought I must
kill, too. I have been three times to war since then;
but the Indians are not angry; only myself.
“July 21, 1774.
“Captain John Logan.”
Both the matter and the language of this letter are so like those of Logan’s famous speech, that it is clear he must often have thought his wrongs over in the same terms, brooding upon them with an aching heart, but not with hate so much as grief. The speech was made at the Chillicothe town where Lord Dunmore treated with the Ohio tribes for peace in the August after Logan had written his letter, but it was not spoken in the council. Logan held aloof from the council, and Dunmore sent to his cabin for him. It is said by some that his messenger was the great renegade Simon Girty, who had not yet turned against his own people, and was then, with his friend Simon Kenton, a scout in Dunmore’s service. Others say that the messenger was a young man named Gibson, but whoever he was, Logan met him at the door, and coming out into the woods sat down under a tree which was long known as Logan’s Elm. Here, with a burst of tears, he told the story of his wrongs in language which cannot be forgotten as long as men have hearts to thrill for others’ sorrows.
“I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan’s cabin and I gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked and I gave him not clothing. During the course of the last long and bloody war Logan remained in his tent an advocate of peace. Nay, such was my love for the whites that those of my own country pointed at me as they passed, and said, ‘Logan is the friend of the white man.’ I had even thought to live with you but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, cut off all the relatives of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any human creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. Yet do not harbor the thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.”
This speech, or rather this message, which Logan sent to Lord Dunmore, has come down to us in two forms, one which Dunmore’s officers wrote out from the report of the message, and one which Thomas Jefferson framed upon it. They do not differ greatly, and I have given Jefferson’s version here, because it best expresses the noble mind of a noble man, a savage, indeed, but far less savage than many of the white men of that day or any day. A pioneer of Western Pennsylvania, William Brown, who afterwards became a judge of the Mifflin County courts, calls him “the best specimen of humanity he ever met with, white or red,” He first saw him in the woods, while stooping to drink at a spring. The figure of a tall Indian showed itself to him in the water, and he sprang for his rifle, but the Indian knocked the priming out of his own gun, and offered his hand. It was Logan, and he guided Brown to the hunting camp of another white man, with whom he afterwards visited Logan’s camp. There they all shot at a mark for a dollar each round, and Logan lost. A deerskin was worth a dollar, and Logan offered five skins for his five failures. Brown’s friend refused them, saying they were his guests and had shot with him merely for a trial of skill. Logan answered with dignity, “Me try to make you shoot your best; me gentlemen, and me take your dollar if me beat,” and he would not allow the victor even to give him a horn of powder in return.
A lovely story was told by the daughter of Judge Brown concerning Logan, who was one day at her father’s camp when her mother happened to regret that she had no shoes for her little one then just beginning to walk. Logan said nothing, but shortly after he came and asked the mother to let the child spend the day with him at his camp. The mother trembled, but she knew the delicacy of Logan, and she would not wound him by showing fear of him. He took the child away, and the long hours passed till nightfall. Then she saw the great chief coming with his tiny guest through the woods, and the next moment the child bounded into the mother’s arms, proud and glad to show her feet in the moccasins which Logan had made for her.
In his old age Logan wandered from place to place, broken by the misfortunes of his people, and homeless in his own land. He fell a prey to drink, the enemy of all his race, and he was at last murdered near Detroit, where, as the story goes, he was sitting by his camp fire, with his blanket over his head, and lost in gloomy thought, when an Indian whom he had offended stole upon him and sank his tomahawk in Logan’s skull.
Of all the Indians he seems to me the grandest because he was the kindest. Tecaughretanego was wise and good. He had a thoughtful mind and a serene spirit; he could be just and loving to the white man whom he had taken for his brother, but he had not so noble an ideal of conduct as Logan. This chief grasped the notion of friendship with all the whites; he was more than a tribesman; he imagined what it was to be a citizen. Among the Ohio men of the past there is no nature more beautiful, no memory worthier than his. He was a savage, and his thirst for vengeance, or rather the smoldering thought of his wrongs, lowered him for a time to the level of the white and red men about him. Yet he was framed for gentleness, and he surpassed another great Ohio Indian as much in breadth of character, as he surpassed Tecaughretanego in an ideal of conduct.
Tecumseh, the famous war chief of the Shawnees, was born at the ancient town of Piqua on Mad River, not far from the present city of Springfield, in Clark County. His name means Shooting Star, and he was indeed the meteoric light of his people while he lived. He was of a high Indian, family of the Turtle Tribe, and his father had come with his clan to Ohio from their home in Florida, about the middle of the last century. Tecumseh was born, as nearly as can be reckoned, in the year 1768, and from his earliest childhood he showed the passion for war which ruled him through life. He led his playmates in their mimic fights, and at seventeen he went on his first war party against the Kentuckians. The Indians attacked some boats on the Ohio River, and killed all the boatmen but one, whom they brought back and burned at the stake. Tecumseh was present, and though he said nothing, the sight of the torture filled him with such horror, that he used his power with the Indians to put a stop forever to the burning of prisoners. He was such a hater of our race that, as he once confessed, the mere presence of a white man made the flesh of his face creep; but he hated cruelty more, and in the bloody events which he spent all his power in bringing about, he could always be trusted to keep the captives from torture, and to save the lives of women and children.