The Old Northwest
By Frederic Austin Ogg
A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond
Volume 19 of the
Chronicles of America Series
∴
Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys
Abraham Lincoln Edition
New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1919
Copyright, 1919
by Yale University Press
Contents
The Old Northwest
Chapter Chapter Title Page
I. Pontiac's Conspiracy 1
II. "A Lair of Wild Beasts" 20
III. The Revolution Begins 41
IV. The Conquest Completed 57
V. Wayne, The Scourge Of The Indians 76
VI. The Great Migration 97
VII. Pioneer Days and Ways 110
VIII. Tecumseh 131
IX. The War Of 1812 And The New West 151
X. Sectional Cross Currents 172
XI. The Upper Mississippi Valley 189
Bibliographical Note 211
Index 215
THE OLD NORTHWEST
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CHAPTER I.
Pontiac's Conspiracy
The fall of Montreal, on September 8, 1760, while the plains about the
city were still dotted with the white tents of the victorious English
and colonial troops, was indeed an event of the deepest consequence to
America and to the world. By the articles of capitulation which were
signed by the Marquis de Vaudreuil, Governor of New France, Canada and
all its dependencies westward to the Mississippi passed to the British
Crown. Virtually ended was the long struggle for the dominion of the New
World. Open now for English occupation and settlement was that vast
country lying south of the Great Lakes between the Ohio and the
Mississippi--which we know as the Old Northwest--today the seat of five
great commonwealths of the United States.
With an ingenuity born of necessity, the French pathfinders and
colonizers of the Old Northwest had chosen for their settlements sites
which would serve at once the purposes of the priest, the trader, and
the soldier; and with scarcely an exception these sites are as important
today as when they were first selected. Four regions, chiefly, were
still occupied by the French at the time of the capitulation of
Montreal. The most important, as well as the most distant, of these
regions was on the east bank of the Mississippi, opposite and below the
present city of St. Louis, where a cluster of missions, forts, and
trading-posts held the center of the tenuous line extending from Canada
to Louisiana. A second was the Illinois country, centering about the
citadel of St. Louis which La Salle had erected in 1682 on the summit of
"Starved Rock," near the modern town of Ottawa in Illinois. A third was
the valley of the Wabash, where in the early years of the eighteenth
century Vincennes had become the seat of a colony commanding both the
Wabash and the lower Ohio. And the fourth was the western end of Lake
Erie, where Detroit, founded by the doughty Cadillac in 1701, had
assumed such strength that for fifty years it had discouraged the
ambitions of the English to make the Northwest theirs.
Sir Jeffrey Amherst, to whom Vaudreuil surrendered in 1760, forthwith
dispatched to the western country a military force to take possession of
the posts still remaining in the hands of the French. The mission was
entrusted to a stalwart New Hampshire Scotch-Irishman, Major Robert
Rogers, who as leader of a band of intrepid "rangers" had made himself
the hero of the northern frontier. Two hundred men were chosen for the
undertaking, and on the 13th of September the party, in fifteen
whaleboats, started up the St. Lawrence for Detroit.
At the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, near the site of the present city of
Cleveland, the travelers were halted by a band of Indian chiefs and
warriors who, in the name of their great ruler Pontiac, demanded to know
the object of their journeying. Parleys followed, in which Pontiac
himself took part, and it was explained that the French had surrendered
Canada to the English and that the English merely proposed to assume
control of the western posts, with a view to friendly relations between
the red men and the white men. The rivers, it was promised, would flow
with rum, and presents from the great King would be forthcoming in
endless profusion. The explanation seemed to satisfy the savages, and,
after smoking the calumet with due ceremony, the chieftain and his
followers withdrew.
Late in November, Rogers and his men in their whaleboats appeared before
the little palisaded town of Detroit. They found the French commander,
Belêtre, in surly humor and seeking to stir up the neighboring Wyandots
and Potawatomi against them. But the attempt failed, and there was
nothing for Belêtre to do but yield. The French soldiery marched out of
the fort, laid down their arms, and were sent off as prisoners down the
river. The fleur-de-lis, which for more than half a century had floated
over the village, was hauled down, and, to the accompaniment of cheers,
the British ensign was run up. The red men looked on with amazement at
this display of English authority and marveled how the conquerors
forbore to slay their vanquished enemies on the spot.
Detroit in 1760 was a picturesque, lively, and rapidly growing frontier
town. The central portions of the settlement, lying within the bounds of
the present city, contained ninety or a hundred small houses, chiefly of
wood and roofed with bark or thatch. A well-built range of barracks
afforded quarters for the soldiery, and there were two public
buildings--a council house and a little church. The whole was surrounded
by a square palisade twenty-five feet high, with a wooden bastion at
each corner and a blockhouse over each gateway. A broad passageway, the
chemin du ronde, lay next to the palisade, and on little narrow streets
at the center the houses were grouped closely together.
Above and below the fort the banks of the river were lined on both
sides, for a distance of eight or nine miles, with little rectangular
farms, so laid out as to give each a water-landing. On each farm was a
cottage, with a garden and orchard, surrounded by a fence of rounded
pickets; and the countryside rang with the shouts and laughter of a
prosperous and happy peasantry. Within the limits of the settlement were
villages of Ottawas, Potawatomi, and Wyandots, with whose inhabitants
the French lived on free and easy terms. "The joyous sparkling of the
bright blue water," writes Parkman; "the green luxuriance of the woods;
the white dwellings, looking out from the foliage; and in the distance
the Indian wigwams curling their smoke against the sky--all were mingled
in one broad scene of wild and rural beauty."
At the coming of the English the French residents were given an
opportunity to withdraw. Few, however, did so, and from the gossipy
correspondence of the pleasure-loving Colonel Campbell, who for some
months was left in command of the fort, it appears that the life of the
place lost none of its gayety by the change of masters. Sunday card
parties at the quarters of the commandant were festive affairs; and at a
ball held in celebration of the King's birthday the ladies presented an
appearance so splendid as to call forth from the impressionable officer
the most extravagant praises. A visit in the summer of 1761 from Sir
William Johnson, general supervisor of Indian affairs on the frontier,
became the greatest social event in the history of the settlement, if
not of the entire West. Colonel Campbell gave a ball at which the guests
danced nine hours. Sir William reciprocated with one at which they
danced eleven hours. A round of dinners and calls gave opportunity for
much display of frontier magnificence, as well as for the consumption of
astonishing quantities of wines and cordials. Hundreds of Indians were
interested spectators, and the gifts with which they were generously
showered were received with evidences of deep satisfaction.
No amount of fiddling and dancing, however, could quite drown
apprehension concerning the safety of the post and the security of the
English hold upon the great region over which this fort and its distant
neighbors stood sentinel. Thousands of square miles of territory were
committed to the keeping of not more than six hundred soldiers. From the
French there was little danger. But from the Indians anything might
be expected. Apart from the Iroquois, the red men had been bound to the
French by many ties of friendship and common interest, and in the late
war they had scalped and slaughtered and burned unhesitatingly at the
French command. Hardly, indeed, had the transfer of territorial
sovereignty been made before murmurs of discontent began to be heard.
Notwithstanding outward expressions of assent to the new order of
things, a deep-rooted dislike on the part of the Indians for the English
grew after 1760 with great rapidity. They sorely missed the gifts and
supplies lavishly provided by the French, and they warmly resented the
rapacity and arrogance of the British traders. The open contempt of the
soldiery at the posts galled the Indians, and the confiscation of their
lands drove them to desperation. In their hearts hope never died that
the French would regain their lost dominion; and again and again rumors
were set afloat that this was about to happen. The belief in such a
reconquest was adroitly encouraged, too, by the surviving French
settlers and traders. In 1761 the tension among the Indians was
increased by the appearance of a "prophet" among the Delawares, calling
on all his race to purge itself of foreign influences and to unite to
drive the white man from the land.
Protests against English encroachments were frequent and, though
respectful, none the less emphatic. At a conference in Philadelphia in
1761, an Iroquois sachem declared, "We, your Brethren, of the several
Nations, are penned up like Hoggs. There are Forts all around us, and
therefore we are apprehensive that Death is coming upon us." "We are now
left in Peace," ran a petition of some Christian Oneidas addressed to
Sir William Johnson, "and have nothing to do but to plant our Corn, Hunt
the wild Beasts, smoke our Pipes, and mind Religion. But as these Forts,
which are built among us, disturb our Peace, and are a great hurt to
Religion, because some of our Warriors are foolish, and some of our
Brother Soldiers don't fear God, we therefore desire that these Forts
may be pull'd down, and kick'd out of the way."
The leadership of the great revolt that was impending fell naturally
upon Pontiac, who, since the coming of the English, had established
himself with his squaws and children on a wooded island in Lake St.
Clair, barely out of view of the fortifications of Detroit. In all
Indian annals no name is more illustrious than Pontiac's; no figure more
forcefully displays the good and bad qualities of his race. Principal
chief of the Ottawa tribe, he was also by 1763 the head of a powerful
confederation of Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomi, and a leader known
and respected among Algonquin peoples from the sources of the Ohio to
the Mississippi. While capable of acts of magnanimity, he had an
ambition of Napoleonic proportions, and to attain his ends he was
prepared to use any means. More clearly than most of his forest
contemporaries, he perceived that in the life of the Indian people a
crisis had come. He saw that, unless the tide of English invasion was
rolled back at once, all would be lost. The colonial farmers would push
in after the soldiers; the forests would be cut away; the
hunting-grounds would be destroyed; the native population would be
driven away or enslaved. In the silence of his wigwam he thought out a
plan of action, and by the closing weeks of 1762 he was ready. Never was
plot more shrewdly devised and more artfully carried out.
During the winter of 1762-63 his messengers passed stealthily from
nation to nation throughout the whole western country, bearing the
pictured wampum belts and the reddened tomahawks which symbolized war;
and in April, 1763, the Lake tribes were summoned to a great council on
the banks of the Ecorces, below Detroit, where Pontiac in person
proclaimed the will of the Master of Life as revealed to the Delaware
prophet, and then announced the details of his plan. Everywhere the
appeal met with approval; and not only the scores of Algonquin peoples,
but also the Seneca branch of the Iroquois confederacy and a number of
tribes on the lower Mississippi, pledged themselves with all solemnity
to fulfill their prophet's injunction "to drive the dogs which wear red
clothing into the sea." While keen-eyed warriors sought to keep up
appearances by lounging about the forts and begging in their customary
manner for tobacco, whiskey, and gunpowder, every wigwam and forest
hamlet from Niagara to the Mississippi was astir. Dusky maidens chanted
the tribal war-songs, and in the blaze of a hundred camp-fires chiefs
and warriors performed the savage pantomime of battle.
A simultaneous attack, timed by a change of the moon, was to be made on
the English forts and settlements throughout all the western country.
Every tribe was to fall upon the settlement nearest at hand, and
afterwards all were to combine--with French aid, it was confidently
believed--in an assault on the seats of English power farther east. The
honor of destroying the most important of the English strongholds,
Detroit, was reserved for Pontiac himself.
The date fixed for the rising was the 7th of May. Six days in advance
Pontiac with forty of his warriors appeared at the fort, protested
undying friendship for the Great Father across the water, and insisted
on performing the calumet dance before the new commandant, Major
Gladwyn. This aroused no suspicion. But four days later a French settler
reported that his wife, when visiting the Ottawa village to buy venison,
had observed the men busily filing off the ends of their gunbarrels; and
the blacksmith at the post recalled the fact that the Indians had lately
sought to borrow files and saws without being able to give a plausible
explanation of the use they intended to make of the implements.
The English traveler Jonathan Carver, who visited the post five years
afterwards, relates that an Ottawa girl with whom Major Gladwyn had
formed an attachment betrayed the plot. Though this story is of doubtful
authenticity, there is no doubt that, in one way or another, the
commandant was amply warned that treachery was in the air. The sounds of
revelry from the Indian camps, the furtive glances of the redskins
lounging about the settlement, the very tension of the atmosphere, would
have been enough to put an experienced Indian fighter on his guard.
Accordingly when, on the fated morning, Pontiac and sixty redskins,
carrying under long blankets their shortened muskets, appeared before
the fort and asked admission, they were taken aback to find the whole
garrison under arms. On their way from the gate to the council house
they were obliged to march literally between rows of glittering steel.
Well might even Pontiac falter. With uneasy glances, the party crowded
into the council room, where Gladwyn and his officers sat waiting.
"Why," asked the chieftain stolidly, "do I see so many of my father's
young men standing in the street with their guns?" "To keep them in
training," was the laconic reply.
The scene that was planned was then carried out, except in one vital
particular. When, in the course of his speech professing strong
attachment to the English, the chieftain came to the point where he was
to give the signal for slaughter by holding forth the wampum belt of
peace inverted, he presented the emblem--to the accompaniment of a
significant clash of arms and roll of drums from the mustered garrison
outside--in the normal manner; and after a solemn warning from the
commandant that vengeance would follow any act of aggression, the
council broke up. To the forest leader's equivocal announcement that he
would bring all of his wives and children in a few days to shake hands
with their English fathers, Gladwyn deigned no reply.
Balked in his plans, the chief retired, but only to meditate fresh
treachery; and when, a few days later, with a multitude of followers, he
sought admission to the fort to assure "his fathers" that "evil birds
had sung lies in their ears," and was refused, he called all his forces
to arms, threw off his disguises, and began hostilities. For six months
the settlement was besieged with a persistence rarely displayed in
Indian warfare. At first the French inhabitants encouraged the
besiegers, but, after it became known that a final peace between England
and France had been concluded, they withheld further aid. Throughout the
whole period, the English obtained supplies with no great difficulty
from the neighboring farms. There was little actual fighting, and the
loss of life was insignificant.
By order of General Amherst, the French commander still in charge of
Fort Chartres sent a messenger to inform the redskins definitely that no
assistance from France would be forthcoming. "Forget then, my dear
children,"--so ran the admonition--"all evil talks. Leave off from
spilling the blood of your brethren, the English. Our hearts are now but
one; you cannot, at present, strike the one without having the other for
an enemy also." The effect was, as intended, to break the spirit of the
besiegers; and in October Pontiac humbly sued for peace.
Meanwhile a reign of terror spread over the entire frontier. Settlements
from Forts Le Bœuf and Venango, south of Lake Erie, to Green Bay, west
of Lake Michigan, were attacked, and ruses similar to that attempted at
Detroit were generally successful. A few Indians in friendly guise would
approach a fort. After these were admitted, others would appear, as if
quite by chance. Finally, when numbers were sufficient, the conspirators
would draw their concealed weapons, strike down the garrison, and begin
a general massacre of the helpless populace. Scores of pioneer families,
scattered through the wilderness, were murdered and scalped; traders
were waylaid in the forest solitudes; border towns were burned and
plantations were devastated. In the Ohio Valley everything was lost
except Fort Pitt, formerly Fort Duquesne; in the Northwest, everything
was taken except Detroit.
Fort Pitt was repeatedly endangered, and the most important engagement
of the war was fought in its defense. The relief of the post was
entrusted in midsummer to a force of five hundred regulars lately
transferred from the West Indies to Pennsylvania and placed under the
command of Colonel Henry Bouquet. The expedition advanced with all
possible caution, but early in August, 1764, when it was yet twenty-five
miles from its destination, it was set upon by a formidable Indian band
at Bushy Run and threatened with a fate not unlike that suffered by
Braddock's little army in the same region nine years earlier. Finding
the woods full of redskins and all retreat cut off, the troops, drawn up
in a circle around their horses and supplies, fired with such effect as
they could upon the shadowy forms in the forest. No water was
obtainable, and in a few hours thirst began to make the soldiery
unmanageable. Realizing that the situation was desperate, Bouquet
resorted to a ruse by ordering his men to fall back as if in retreat.
The trick succeeded, and with yells of victory the Indians rushed from
cover to seize the coveted provisions--only to be met by a deadly fire
and put to utter rout. The news of the battle of Bushy Run spread
rapidly through the frontier regions and proved very effective in
discouraging further hostilities.
It was Bouquet's intention to press forward at once from Fort Pitt into
the disturbed Ohio country. His losses, however, compelled the
postponement of this part of the undertaking until the following year.
Before he started off again he built at Fort Pitt a blockhouse which
still stands, and which has been preserved for posterity by becoming, in
1894, the property of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Daughters of the
American Revolution. In October, 1764, he set out for the Muskingum
valley with a force of fifteen hundred regulars, Pennsylvania and
Virginia volunteers, and friendly Indians. By this time the great
conspiracy was in collapse, and it was a matter of no great difficulty
for Bouquet to enter into friendly relations with the successive tribes,
to obtain treaties with them, and to procure the release of such English
captives as were still in their hands. By the close of November, 1764,
the work was complete, and Bouquet was back at Fort Pitt. Pennsylvania
and Virginia honored him with votes of thanks; the King formally
expressed his gratitude and tendered him the military governorship of
the newly acquired territory of Florida.
The general pacification of the Northwest was accomplished by treaties
with the natives in great councils held at Niagara, Presqu'isle (Erie),
and Detroit. Pontiac had fled to the Maumee country to the west of Lake
Erie, whence he still hurled his ineffectual threats at the "dogs in
red." His power, however, was broken. The most he could do was to gather
four hundred warriors on the Maumee and Illinois and present himself at
Fort Chartres with a demand for weapons and ammunition with which to
keep up the war. The French commander, who was now daily awaiting orders
to turn the fortress over to the English, refused; and a deputation
dispatched to New Orleans in quest of the desired equipment received no
reply save that New Orleans itself, with all the country west of the
river, had been ceded to Spain. The futility of further resistance on
the part of Pontiac was apparent. In 1765 the disappointed chieftain
gave pledges of friendship; and in the following year he and other
leaders made a formal submission to Sir William Johnson at Oswego, and
Pontiac renounced forever the bold design to make himself at a stroke
lord of the West and deliverer of his country from English domination.
For three years the movements of this disappointed Indian leader are
uncertain. Most of the time, apparently, he dwelt in the Maumee country,
leading the existence of an ordinary warrior. Then, in the spring of
1769, he appeared at the settlements on the middle Mississippi. At the
newly founded French town of St. Louis, on the Spanish side of the
river, he visited an old friend, the commandant Saint Ange de Bellerive.
Thence he crossed to Cahokia, where Indian and creole alike welcomed him
and made him the central figure in a series of boisterous festivities.
An English trader in the village, observing jealously the honors that
were paid the visitor, resolved that an old score should forthwith be
evened up. A Kaskaskian redskin was bribed, with a barrel of liquor and
with promises of further reward, to put the fallen leader out of the
way; and the bargain was hardly sealed before the deed was done.
Stealing upon his victim as he walked in the neighboring forest, the
assassin buried a tomahawk in his brain, and "thus basely," in the words
of Parkman, "perished the champion of a ruined race." Claimed by
Saint-Ange, the body was borne across the river and buried with military
honors near the new Fort St. Louis. The site of Pontiac's grave was soon
forgotten, and today the people of a great city trample over and about
it without heed.