of his tribe, but he had no purpose of living among the whites. In
Philadelphia, he said, “When I walk through the streets I see every
person in his shop employed about something: one makes shoes, another
pots, a third sells cloth. I say to myself, which of these things can
you do? Not one. I can make a bow or an arrow, catch fish, kill game,
and go to war; but none of these things is of any use here. To learn
what is done here would require a long time. Old age comes on. I should
be a useless piece of furniture, useless to my nation, useless to
myself. I must go back to my own country.”
This was what he did, and as long as he lived he was steadfast for
peace, for he remembered that it would be foolish for the Indians to
fight the Americans, and Little Turtle was not a fool. Even before the
battle of the Fallen Timbers, he urged his people to treat with Wayne
rather than fight. “We have beaten the enemy twice under separate
commanders,” he said, referring to Har-mar and St. Clair. “The Americans
are now led by a chief who never stops; the night and the day are alike
to him. And during all the time that he has been marching upon your
villages, notwithstanding the watchfulness of our young men, we have
never been able to surprise him. Think well of it. There is something
which whispers to me that it will be prudent to listen to his offers of
peace.”
XIII. INDIAN FIGHTERS.
In the long war with the Indians, the great battles were nearly all
fought within the region that afterwards became our state, and the
smaller battles went on there pretty constantly. The first force on
the scale of an army sent against the Ohio tribes was that of Colonel
Bouquet in 1766; but, as we have seen, the chief object of this was
to treat for the return of their white captives. In 1774 Lord Dunmore
marched with three thousand Virginians to destroy the Indian towns on
the Scioto in Pickaway County. He cannot be said to have led his men,
who believed in neither his courage nor his good faith, and who thought
that he was more anxious to treat with the savages for the advantage
of England in the Revolutionary War, which he knew was coming, than to
attack their capital. This was that Old Chillicothe, which has been so
often mentioned before, and here Dunmore made peace with the Indians,
instead of punishing them, as the backwoodsmen expected. The feeling
among them was so bitter that one of them fired through Dunmore’s tent
where he sat with two chiefs, hoping to kill all three. He missed, but
he easily escaped among his comrades, who looked upon Dunmore as an
enemy of their country and a traitor to their cause.
Their spirit, both lawless and fearless, was the spirit of that race of
Indian Fighters, as they were called, which grew up on the border in
the war ending with Wayne’s victory. It led them into countless acts of
daring and into many acts of cruelty, and the story of their adventures
is too bloody to be fully told. But unless something of it is told we
cannot have a true notion of what the life of our backwoodsmen was.
We have seen what they could do when they were at their worst in the
Gnadenhutten massacre; but we cannot understand them unless we realize
that they not only held all life cheap, but held the life of an Indian
no dearer than that of a wolf.
Belmont County was the scene of two exploits of Lewis Wetzel, perhaps
the most famous of these Indian fighters. One day he went home with a
young man whom he met while hunting, and they found the cabin burnt and
the whole family murdered except a girl who had lived with them, and
whom the young man was in love with. They started on the trail of
the Indians who had done the cruel deed, and came up with them after
nightfall sleeping round their camp-fire. The girl was awake, crying
and lamenting, and Wetzel had great ado to keep her lover from firing at
once upon the Indians. But he made him wait for daylight, so that they
could be sure of their aim; and then at the first light of dawn, they
each chose his mark and fired. Each killed his Indian, but two others
escaped into the woods, while the lover rushed, knife in hand, to free
the girl. Wetzel made after the Indians, firing into the air to draw
them out of their concealment. Then he turned, loading as he ran, and
wheeled about and shot the Indian nearest him. He fled again, dodging
from tree to tree till his gun was reloaded, when he shot the last
Indian left. He took their scalps, and got home with the girl and her
lover unhurt.
In 1782, together with one of Crawford’s men, he fell in with a party
of forty Indians about two miles from St. Clairsville. Both sides
fired; Wetzel killed one of the Indians, but his friend was wounded and
promptly scalped, while four of the Indians followed Wetzel. He turned,
shot the foremost, and ran on, loading his rifle. The next was so close
upon him that when Wetzel turned again, the Indian caught the muzzle
of his gun. After a fearful struggle Wetzel got it against the Indian’s
breast, pulled the trigger, and killed him. The remaining two followed
him a mile farther, and then Wetzel shot one of them as he was crossing
a piece of open ground. The last left of the Indians stopped with a
yell, and Wetzel heard him say as he turned back, “No catch that man;
gun always loaded.”
Wetzel had fought Indians nearly all his life. When he was a boy of
fourteen they attacked his father’s cabin in Virginia, and Wetzel
was wounded before he was taken prisoner, with a younger brother, and
carried into the Ohio wilderness. One night the Indians forgot to tie
their captives, and the two boys escaped. Lewis returned to the camp,
after they had stolen away, for a pair of moccasins, and again for his
father’s rifle, which the Indians had carried off. They followed the
boys, but the young Wetzels got safely back to the Ohio, and crossed the
river on a raft which they made of logs.
[Illustration: Wetzel, Indian Fighter 122]
In 1786 the settlers of Wheeling, who had been troubled by Indians,
offered a purse of a hundred dollars to the man who should first bring
in a scalp. A party crossed the Ohio, but after some days turned back,
leaving Wetzel alone in the woods, where he roamed about looking for
Indians. The second morning he came upon one sleeping, and drove his
knife through his heart. Then he went home with his scalp, and got the
reward.
One of the tricks of the savages was to imitate the cry, or call, of the
wild turkey and then to shoot the hunter who came looking for the bird.
Wetzel was one day in the woods when this call came to his ear from the
mouth of a cave, a place where several whites had been found scalped.
He watched till the feathered tuft of an Indiana head appeared from
the cave. The call of the wild turkey sounded, and at the same time the
sharp crack of Wetzel’s rifle noted the Indian’s death.
It was Wetzel’s habit in the autumn to go on a long hunt into the Ohio
country. Once he went as far as the Muskingum, some ninety miles from
Wheeling, when he came on a camp of four Indians. He crept upon them
with no weapon but his knife, which he drove through the skulls of two
as they lay asleep. The two others struggled to their feet stupefied;
Wetzel killed one of them, but the fourth escaped in the shadow of the
woods. When Wetzel returned and was asked what his luck in hunting had
been, he said, “Not much; I treed four Indians, but one got away.”
These were acts of war, but they were very like mere murders, and one
of Wetzel’s exploits could hardly be called anything but murder. General
Har-mar in 1779 had invited the Indians to come and make peace with him
in the fort near where Marietta now stands. Wetzel and another Indian
fighter lay in wait for the envoys who passed from the tribes to the
general, and in pure wantonness, shot one. He then took refuge with his
friends at Mingo Bottom, where the officer sent by Harmar to arrest
him, dared not even attempt it. Wetzel was the hero and darling of the
border, where the notion of punishing a man for shooting an Indian was
laughed at. But after a while he was taken, and lodged, heavily ironed,
in the fort. He sent for the general and asked him to give him up, with
a tomahawk, to a large band of armed Indians present, and let him fight
for his life with them. Of course Harmar could not do this, but Wetzel
won upon him so far that the general had his fetters removed, leaving
only the manacles on his wrists, and allowed him to walk about outside
the fort. He made a sudden dash for the woods; the guards fired upon
him, but Wetzel got safely away; and at a distant point he reached the
Ohio. He could not swim, with his hands in irons, but by good luck he
saw a friend on the Virginia shore, who came in answer to his signs and
set him over in his canoe. Later the soldiers found him in a tavern
at Marysville, and arrested him again. He was taken to the fort at
Cincinnati, where Harmar was now in command, but he was released by a
judge of the court just in time to save the fort from an attack by
the backwoodsmen, who were furious that Wetzel should be so persecuted
simply for killing an Indian.
One of the stories told of Wetzel’s skill in Indian warfare relates to
an adventure he had after his escape from hanging by the soldiers. He
was coming home at the end of a hunt in the Ohio woods when he saw an
Indian lifting up his gun to fire. Each sprang behind a tree, and each
waited patiently for the other to expose himself. At last Wetzel put his
bearskin cap on his ramrod, and pushed it a little beyond the edge of
his shelter. The Indian took it for his enemy’s head and fired. Before
he could load again Wetzel was upon him, and his end had come.
It is not easy for us at this day to understand how a man so
blood-stained as this should be by no means the worst man of the border.
Wetzel is said to have been even exemplary in his life apart from his
Indian killing, which, indeed, was accounted no wrong, but rather a
virtue by his savage white friends. In person he might well take their
rude fancy. He was tall, full-chested, and broad-shouldered; his dark
face was deeply pitted with smallpox; his hair, which he was very proud
of, fell to his knees when loose; his black eyes, when he was roused,
shone with dangerous fire. He was silent and shy with strangers, but the
life of any party of comrades. It is not certainly known how or where he
died. Some say that he went South, and ended his stormy life quietly at
Natchez; others that he went West, and remained a woodsman to the last,
hunting wild beasts and killing wild men.
[Illustration: Bearskin Cap on a Ramrod 125]
Lewis Wetzel had two brothers only less famous than himself in the
backwoods warfare, and more than once Indian fighting seems to have run
in families. Adam Poe and Andrew Poe were brothers whose names have
come down in the story of deadly combats with the savages. They are most
renowned for their heroic struggle with a party of seven Wyandots near
the mouth of Little Yellow Creek, in 1782. The Wyandots, led by a great
warrior named Big Foot, had fallen suddenly on a settlement just below
Fort Pitt, killed one old man in his cabin, and begun their retreat with
what booty they could gather. Eight borderers, the two Poes among them,
followed in hot haste across the river into the Ohio country, where the
next morning Andrew Poe came suddenly on Big Foot and a small warrior
talking together by their raft at the water’s edge. They stood with
their guns cocked, and Poe aimed at Big Foot; but his piece missed fire.
The Indians turned at the click of the lock, and Poe, who was too close
to them for any chance of escape, leaped upon them both and threw them
to the ground together. The little warrior freed himself, and got his
tomahawk from the raft to brain Poe, whom he left in deadly clutch with
Big Foot. Twice he struck, but Poe managed each time, by twisting and
dodging, to keep his head away from the hatchet, and as the warrior
struck the third time, Poe, though badly hurt on the arm by one of
his blows, wrenched himself free from Big Foot, caught up one of the
Indians’ guns, and shot the little warrior through the breast. Then
Big Foot seized him again, and they floundered together into the water,
where each tried to drown the other. Poe held Big Foot under the water
so long that he thought he must be dead, but the moment he loosed his
hold upon his scalp lock, the Wyandot renewed the fight. They presently
found themselves in water beyond their depths, and let go to swim for
their lives. The Indian reached the shore first, and got hold of one of
the guns to shoot Poe, but luckily for Poe it was the gun he had fired
in killing the little warrior.
Adam had heard the shot, and he now came hurrying up. His gun was empty,
too, and it was a question Whether he or Big Foot should load first: he
shot the Indian as he was lifting his gun to fire. But Big Foot was
not killed, and Andrew shouted to Adam not to mind him, but to keep the
Indian from rolling himself into the water. Big Foot was too quick for
them: he got into the current, which whirled him away, and so saved his
scalp in death. About the same time another of the party who came up
took Andrew Poe for an Indian and shot him in the shoulder. Poe got
well of his wounds and lived for many years, proud of his fight with Big
Foot, who was a generous foe, and had often befriended white captives
among his tribe.
It is told of Adam Poe that five Indians, all rather drunk, once came to
his cabin, and tried to force the door open. He sent his wife with the
children out into the cornfield behind the house, remarking, “There is a
fight and fun ahead,” but when he saw the state the Indians were in, he
did not fire at them. He fell upon them with his fists, knocked them all
down, and then threw them one after another over the fence, and the fun
was ended.
One of the hunters detailed from Wayne’s command to supply the officers
with game while the army lay at Greenville in 1793 was the Indian
fighter, Josiah Hunt, who died a peaceful Methodist many years
afterwards. When he passed a winter in the woods he had to build a fire
to keep from freezing, and yet guard against letting the slightest gleam
of light be seen by a prowling foe. So he dug a hole six or seven inches
deep with his tomahawk, filled it with the soft lining of dead oak bark,
and with his flint started a fire. He left two holes at the edges to
breathe the flame; then covered the pit with earth, spread brush over
it, and seated himself on the heap, with his blanket drawn over his
head, and dozed through the night. The Indians had a great honor and
admiration for him, and when they came to make peace at Greenville,
after Fallen Timbers, they all wanted to see Captain Hunt. “Great man,
Captain Hunt,” they said. “Great warrior--good hunting man-Indian no can
kill,” and they told him they had tried to find out the secret of his
fire, and catch him off his guard so that they could get his scalp,
which they felt would have been the highest distinction they could have
achieved, next to getting General Wayne’s scalp. He was indeed both
hunted and hunter. He never fired at a deer without first putting a
bullet in his mouth to reload for an Indian, who might be about to fire
on him. When he skinned a deer, he planted his back against a tree, and
stood his rifle by his side; from time to time he stopped and
listened for the slightest noise that hinted danger. His life had its
disappointments as well as its perils. Once he saw three Indians whom he
might easily have killed at one shot if he could have got them in range,
but they persisted in walking Indian file. If he fired and killed only
one, the other two would have killed him; so he was obliged to let them
all go. Captain Hunt was a quiet, modest man, very frank and sincere,
and seems never to have boasted of his exploits; we have no means of
knowing whether he was glad or sorry that those Indians got away in
safety. Probably he was not very glad; for though the fighters on both
sides could admire, they could never spare one another.
The Indian fighters were commoner in the southern and eastern parts of
Ohio than in the north, but there was at least one whose chief exploit
had the north for its scene. Captain Samuel Brady, in 1780, gathered a
number of his neighbors and pursued a retreating war party of Indians
from the Ohio as far as the Cuyahoga, near Ravenna. Here he found that
the savages far outnumbered his force, and he decided that it would be
better for him to retreat in his turn, and he bade each of his men look
out for himself. He discovered that the Indians were pressing him hard
with the purpose of taking him alive and glutting many an old grudge
against him by torture. But he knew his ground, for he had often hunted
there with them in friendlier days, and he saw a chance for his life at
a point where another man would have despaired. This was where the river
narrowed to a gorge twenty feet wide, with walls of precipitous rock. As
he neared this chasm in his flight, Brady gathered himself for the
leap and cleared it. He caught at some low bushes where he alighted and
pulled himself up the steep, while the Indians stood stupefied. They had
now no hope of taking him alive, and they all fired upon him. One bullet
wounded him badly in the hip, but he managed to swim a pond which he
came to, and to hide himself behind a log near the shore. When the
Indians came up and saw the blood on its surface, they decided that he
was drowned, and gave up the chase. Some of them stood on the very log
that hid him while they talked over his probable fate, and then they
left him to make his long way home unmolested.
Duncan McArthur, an early governor of Ohio, though not an Indian fighter
like these others, was in many fights with the Indians. In the summer of
1794 he was hunting deer in the hills near the mouth of the Scioto, when
two Indians fully armed came in sight. McArthur was waiting for the deer
behind a screen or blind near the salt lick which they frequented, and
he took aim at one of the Indians and shot him. The other did not stir
till McArthur broke from his covert and ran. He plunged heedlessly into
the top of a fallen tree, and before he could disentangle himself, he
heard the crack of the Indian’s rifle, and the bullet hissed close
to his ear. He freed himself and ran, followed now by several other
Indians, but he managed to distance them all and reached the Ohio River
in safety.
It was war to the death between the red and white borderers. Neither
spared the other, except in some rare mood of caprice or pity. A life
granted on either side meant perhaps many lives lost, and the foes vied
with one another in being the first to shed the blood which seems, as
you read their savage annals, to stain every acre of the beautiful Ohio
country.
XIV. LATER CAPTIVITIES.
The Indians seem to have kept on carrying the whites into captivity,
to the very end of the war, which closed with the Greenville treaty
of 1795. As they had always done, they adopted some of them into their
tribes and devoted others to torture. Nothing more clearly shows how
little they realized that their power was coming to an end, and that
they could no longer live their old life, or follow their immemorial
customs.
The first captive in Ohio, of whom there is any record, was Mary Harris;
she had been stolen from her home in New England when a child, by the
French Indians, and was found at White Woman Creek in Coshocton County,
about the year 1750. When the last captive was taken is not certainly
known, but two white boys were captured so late as 1791, and one of
these was adopted by the Delawares in Auglaize County. His name was
Brickell, and he was carried off from the neighborhood of Pittsburg when
nine years old. He wrote a narrative of his life among the Indians, and
gave an account of his parting with them which is very touching. After
the first exchange of prisoners Brickell was left because there was
no Indian among the whites to exchange for him, but later his adoptive
father went with him to Fort Defiance, and gave him up. Brickell had
hunted with the rest of the children, and shared in all their sports and
pleasures, and they now clung about him crying, when their father told
them he must go with him to the fort. They asked him if he was going to
leave them, and he could only answer that he did not know. At the
fort, his Indian father, Whingy Pooshies, bade him stand up before the
officers, and then spoke to him.
“My son, these are men the same color as yourself, and some of your kin
may be here, or they may be a great way off. You have lived a long time
with us. I call on you to say if I have not been a father to you, if I
have not used you as a father would a son.”
“You have used me as well as a father could use a son,” said Brickell.
“I am glad you say so,” Whingy Pooshies returned. “You have lived long
with me; you have hunted for me; but your treaty says you must be free.
If you choose to go with the people of your own color, I have no right
to say a word; if you choose to stay with me, your people have no right
to speak. Now reflect on it, and take your choice, and tell us as soon
as you make up your mind.”
Brickell says that he thought of the children he had left crying, and of
all the Indians whom he loved; but he remembered his own people at last,
and he answered, “I will go with my kin.”
Then Whingy Pooshies said, “I have reared you; I have taught you to
hunt; you are a good hunter; you are better to me than my own sons. I am
now getting old and I cannot hunt. I thought you would be a support to
my old age. I leaned on you as on a staff. Now it is broken; you are
going to leave me; and I have no right to say a word, but I am ruined.”
[Illustration: Brickell leaves his Indian Father 133]
He sank into his seat, weeping, and Brickell wept too; then they parted
and never saw each other again.
One of the later captivities was that of Israel Donolson, who has told
the story himself. The night before he was captured, he says that he
dreamed of Indians, and took it as a sign of coming trouble; but in
the morning, the 22d of April, 1791, he went prospecting for land with
another young surveyor, named Lytte, and a friend named Tittle. They
worked together along the Ohio River in Adams County till they came
to one of the ancient works of the Mound Builders. The surveyors were
joking Tittle, and telling him what a fine place that would be for him
to build his house, when they saw a party of Frenchmen in two canoes.
The Frenchmen turned out to be Indians, who landed and instantly gave
chase to the white men. Donolson tripped and fell, and three warriors
were quickly upon him. He offered no resistance; they helped him up,
and had leisure to secure him in full sight of the blockhouse on the
Kentucky shore, where they could all see men moving about, but Donolson
could not call to them for help. His captors pushed off with him
northward. The next morning it rained, and one of the Indians took
Donolson’s hat; he complained to a large warrior, who gave him a blanket
cap, and helped him through the swollen streams. When they killed a
bear, and wanted to make their captive carry the meat, he flung it down;
and then his big friend carried it for him.
One day an Indian, while they were resting, built a little fence of
sticks, and planted some grains of corn inside of it, saying, “Squaw!”
as a hint to Donolson that he should be put to work with the women. When
they got to the Shawnee camp, they dressed his hair in Indian fashion,
and put a tin jewel in his nose, and upon the whole they treated him
kindly enough. But almost every day he saw war parties setting off
for Kentucky, or coming back with scalps and horses, and he was always
watching for a chance to escape. One night he encamped with two guards
who had bound him as usual with a rope of bark. He gnawed at it all
night long, and just at daybreak he freed himself. After his first dash
he stopped to put on his moccasins, and knew that he was missed, by the
terrific yells that the Indians were giving. He ran on, and to hide his
trail kept as much as he could on fallen trees. At ten o’clock he hid
between two logs and slept till dark; then he started again, and passed
that night in a hollow tree. The day following he came to the Miami
River, and tried to drift down its current on a raft which he made of
logs tied together with bark, but he was soon forced to the shore again.
He broke his long fast on two eggs he found in a wild turkey’s nest;
they proved to have each two yolks, and he made them last for two days.
In the woods he caught a horse and tried to ride it with a bark halter;
but the halter rubbed a sore on its lip, and the horse threw him, and
hurt him so badly that he lay insensible for a time; then he rose up
and pressed on, but very slowly, for his feet were full of thorns. The
twelfth day after his capture he heard the sound of an ax, and found
himself in the neighborhood of Fort Washington, or Cincinnati.