Produced by David Widger
STORIES OF OHIO
By William Dean Howells
Copyright, 1897, by American Book Company.
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.
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
XXVI. Incidents and Characteristics
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.
[Illustration: Stone Axes 017L]
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.
[Illustration: Serpent Mound 019L]
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.
[Illustration: Pichawillany, Chief town of the Miamis 030]
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.
[Illustration: Indians carry off the women 036R]
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.”
[Illustration: Indians delivering up captives 041]
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.
[Illustration: Indian war parties joining the English 047]
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.