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.
[Illustration: The defeat of St. Clair 107]
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.
[Illustration: The escape of Kennan 109]
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.
[Illustration: St. Clair’s Defeat 114]
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.
[Illustration: A White Indian 116]
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.