ancient town of Piqua on Mad River, not far from the present city of
Springfield, in Clark County. His name means Shooting Star, and he was
indeed the meteoric light of his people while he lived. He was of a high
Indian, family of the Turtle Tribe, and his father had come with his
clan to Ohio from their home in Florida, about the middle of the last
century. Tecumseh was born, as nearly as can be reckoned, in the year
1768, and from his earliest childhood he showed the passion for war
which ruled him through life. He led his playmates in their mimic
fights, and at seventeen he went on his first war party against the
Kentuckians. The Indians attacked some boats on the Ohio River, and
killed all the boatmen but one, whom they brought back and burned at the
stake. Tecumseh was present, and though he said nothing, the sight of
the torture filled him with such horror, that he used his power with the
Indians to put a stop forever to the burning of prisoners. He was such
a hater of our race that, as he once confessed, the mere presence of a
white man made the flesh of his face creep; but he hated cruelty more,
and in the bloody events which he spent all his power in bringing about,
he could always be trusted to keep the captives from torture, and to
save the lives of women and children.
In spite of his hatred of white men, it is said that he was once in
love with a white woman, the daughter of a settler in Greene County.
He offered her fifty silver brooches if she would marry him; but she
refused, saying that she did not wish to be a wild woman and drudge like
a squaw; and she would not be tempted even when he promised her that she
should not work, but should be a great squaw.
[Illustration: Tecumseh 154]
He was not always terrible, even with white men, and it is told of him
that once meeting in a settler’s cabin a stranger who showed alarm at
sight of him, Tecumseh went up and amiably shook him, saying, “Big
baby, Big baby.” But he could be fierce and arrogant when he chose, and
he delighted to make the Americans bend to him. At one of their parleys,
General Harrison asked him to sit on his veranda with him. Tecumseh
haughtily refused, and forced the general to come out and meet him under
the trees, on the breast of the earth, who was, he said, the Indian’s
mother.
He was in every fight with the Americans before Wayne’s victory, but he
was not made a chief until the year following that battle. Then, though
he seemed resigned to the fate of his people, he became the leader in
their discontent, and in the parts of Ohio and Indiana where he lived he
kept it alive. In this he had the help of his brother Elkskuatawa,
the Prophet, who pretended to have dreams and revelations favorable to
Tecumseh’s designs. In 1806, while they were at Greenville, the Prophet
somehow learned that there was to be an eclipse of the sun; he foretold
the coming miracle, and excited the savages through their superstitions
so dangerously that Governor Harrison urged them to banish the Prophet.
They made evasive answers, and kept the Prophet with them, while
Tecumseh amused the governor with meetings and parleys, and went and
came upon his errands among the Southern tribes stirring them up to join
the Northern nations in a revolt against the Americans. He used all his
eloquence and reason in trying to form this union of the red men, and
when these would not avail, he did not scruple to employ the arts of
his brother. In exhorting one of the Southern tribes he rebuked their
coldness, and told them that when he reached Detroit, he would stamp
his foot, and they should feel the earth tremble as a sign of his divine
authority for his work. About the time it would have taken him to reach
Detroit, the great earthquake of 1810 shook the Seminoles with terror of
the man whose arguments they had rejected.
In fact, Tecumseh and the Prophet constantly played into each other’s
hands, but in one of Tecumseh’s absences the Prophet made the mistake of
attacking General Harrison at Tippecanoe, and the savages were severely
beaten. The Prophet had also made the mistake of promising them a
victory, and after the defeat he lost his power over them.
This was in 1811, but the next year the war between the United States
and Great Britain broke out, and then Tecumseh seized his chance for
renewing the war against the Americans. He served so faithfully against
them that the king made him brigadier general, and Tecumseh tried to
fight according to the laws of civilized warfare. At the attack on
Fort Meigs in Wood County, he stopped, at the risk of his own life, the
massacre of the American prisoners, and he bade the British commandant,
who declared that the Indians could not be controlled, go and put on
petticoats. An American who saw him at this time says, “This
celebrated chief was a noble, dignified personage. His face was finely
proportioned, his nose inclined to be aquiline, and his eye displayed
none of that savage and ferocious triumph common to the other Indians on
that occasion.”
Tecumseh with his Indians witnessed the battle of Lake Erie at
Put-in-Bay, where Perry defeated the English fleet, and he was not
deceived by the pretense of General Proctor that the Americans were
beaten and the English ships were merely putting in there for repairs.
Proctor was then preparing to retreat into Canada from Detroit, and
Tecumseh demanded to be heard in the name of the Indians. He had some
very bitter words to say: “The war before this our British father gave
the hatchet to his red children.... In that war our father was thrown
upon his back by the Americans, and our father took them by the hand
without our knowledge, and we are afraid our father will do so again at
this time.... Our ships have gone away, and we are much astonished to
see our father tying up everything and preparing to run away.... We
are sorry to see our father doing so without seeing the enemy. We must
compare our father’s conduct to a fat dog that carries his tail on his
back, and when affrighted drops it between his legs and runs off.
“Father, you have got the arms and ammunition which our great father
sent for his children. If you have an idea of going away, give them to
us, and you may go and welcome. Our lives are in the hands of the Great
Spirit. We are determined to defend our lands, and if it be his will, we
wish to leave our bones upon them.”
But the British retreated, and the Indians had to follow them into
Canada. There in the battle of the Thames the Americans defeated them
and their savage allies with great slaughter, and Tecumseh, whose
war-cry had been heard above the tumult of the onset, was among the
slain. He is supposed to have been killed by a pistol shot fired by
Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and it is said that the body
of this generous enemy did not escape barbarous usage at the hands
of Johnson’s men, who literally flayed it and bore portions of their
ghastly trophy home with them in triumph.
Tecumseh played at a later day the part which Pontiac attempted at the
end of the old French War. He tried to unite the Indians in a general
uprising against the Americans as Pontiac had united them against
the English. He used the same arts, and he showed himself shrewd and
skillful in paltering with our leaders till he was ready to strike
his blow against them, for he managed to remain in the Ohio country
unmolested while he was getting ready to drive the Americans out of it.
When the war with Great Britain began, he might very well have believed
that his hopes were about to be fulfilled; but he seems, though a brave
warrior, never to have shown such generalship as that of Little Turtle
at St. Clair’s defeat. He was a great orator, of such a fiery eloquence
that the interpreters often declared it impossible for them to give the
full sense of his words; but none of his many recorded speeches have
the pathos of Logan’s. He was, on the savage lines, a statesman and a
patriot, but unlike the wiser and gentler Logan he never could rise to
the wisdom of living in peace with the whites. He was always an Indian;
even at his best he was a savage, just as the backwoodsman was a savage
at his worst. Yet his memory remains honored in tradition beyond that of
any other Ohio Indian, and his name was given to one of the most heroic
Ohio Americans, William Tecumseh Sherman. Such as he was, and such as
Logan was, it must be owned that they seem now of a far nobler mold than
any white men in early Ohio history.
The Prophet outlived his brother many years, and died dishonored, and
stripped of all the great power he had once wielded. At one time he
wrought so strongly upon the Indians through their superstition of
witchcraft, that they put many to death at his accusal. One of the
victims was the Wyandot chief Leatherlips, whom six Wyandot warriors
came from Tippecanoe to try where he lived near the site of Columbus.
They found him guilty and sentenced him to death, of course upon no
evidence. A white man who wished to save him asked what he had done, and
was answered, “Very bad Indian; make good Indian sick; make horse sick;
make die; very bad chief.” When he heard his sentence, Leatherlips ate a
hearty dinner, dressed himself in his finest clothes, painted his face,
and at the hour fixed for his death walked from his lodge to his grave,
chanting his death song while he went. Then as he knelt in prayer beside
the shallow pit, one of the six Wyandots tomahawked him.
The persecutions for witchcraft under the Prophet continued until at
last a young warrior, whose sister was accused in the council, had the
courage to rise and lead her out of the house. He came back and said to
the council, pointing at the Prophet, “The Devil has come amongst us,
and we are killing each other.” This bold good sense brought the Indians
to a pause in a frenzy which has raged among every people in times past.
[Illustration: Tomahawk 159]
XVI. LIFE IN THE BACKWOODS.
Amidst all this tomahawking and scalping, this shooting and stabbing,
this shedding of blood and of tears, this heartbreak of captivity,
this torture, this peril by day and by night, the flower of home was
springing up wherever the ax let the sun into the woods. It would be a
great pity if the stories of cruelty and suffering which seem, while we
read them, to form the whole history of the Ohio country, should be left
without the relief of facts quite as true as these sad tales. Life was
hard in those days, but it was sweet too, and it was often gay and glad.
In times of constant danger, and even while the merciless savages were
beleaguering the lonely clusters of cabins, there was frolicking among
the young people in the forts, and the old people looked on at their
joys in sympathy as well as wonder. The savages themselves had their
harmless pleasures, and their wild life was so free that those who once
knew it did not willingly forsake it. They were not bad-hearted so much
as wrong-headed, and they were mostly what they were, because they knew
no better. More than once we read how the lurking hunter heard them
joking and laughing when off their guard in the wood; and in their
towns, on the Miamis or the Muskingum or the Sandusky, they had their
own games, and feasts, and merrymakings. Much that was beautiful and
kindly and noble was possible to them, but they belonged to the past,
and the white men belonged to the future; and the war between the two
races had to be. Our race had outgrown the order which theirs clung to
helplessly as well as willfully, and it was fated that we must found our
homes upon their graves.
These homes were at first of the rude and simple sort, which a thousand
narratives and legends have made familiar, and which every Ohio boy and
girl has heard of. It would not be easy to say where or when the first
log cabin was built, but it is safe to say that it was somewhere in the
English colonies of North America, and it is certain that it became the
type of the settler’s house throughout the whole middle west. It may be
called the American house, the Western house, the Ohio house. Hardly any
other house was built for a hundred years by the men who were clearing
the land for the stately mansions of our day. As long as the primeval
forests stood, the log cabin remained the woodsman’s home; and not fifty
years ago, I saw log cabins newly built in one of the richest and most
prosperous regions of Ohio. They were, to be sure, log cabins of a finer
pattern than the first settler reared. They were of logs handsomely
shaped with the broadax; the joints between the logs were plastered with
mortar; the chimney at the end was of stone; the roof was shingled, the
windows were of glass, and the door was solid and well hung. They were
such cabins as the Christian Indians dwelt in at Gnadenhutten, and such
as were the homes of the well-to-do settlers in all the older parts of
the West. But throughout that region there were many log cabins,
mostly sunk to the uses of stables and corn cribs, of the kind that the
borderers built in the times of the Indian War, from 1750 to 1800.
They were framed of the round logs, untouched by the ax except for the
notches at the ends where they were fitted into one another; the chimney
was of small sticks stuck together with mud, and was as frail as a barn
swallow’s nest; the walls were stuffed with moss, plastered with clay;
the floor was of rough boards called puncheons, riven from the block
with a heavy knife; the roof was of clapboards split from logs and laid
loosely on the rafters, and held in place with logs fastened athwart
them.
[Illustration: Ohio Cabin 162]
There is a delightful account of such a log cabin by John S. Williams,
whose father settled in the woods of Belmont County in 1800. “Our
cabin,” he says, “had been raised, covered, part of the cracks chinked,
and part of the floor laid, when we moved in on Christmas day. There
had not been a stick cut except in building the cabin, which was so high
from the ground that a bear, wolf, panther, or any animal less in
size than a cow could enter without even a squeeze.... The green ash
puncheons had shrunk so as to leave cracks in the floor and doors from
one to two inches wide. At both the doors we had high, unsteady, and
sometimes icy steps, made by piling the logs cut out of the walls, for
the doors and the window, if it could be called a window, when perhaps
it was the largest spot in the top, bottom, or sides of the cabin where
the wind could not enter. It was made by sawing out a log, and placing
sticks across, and then by pasting an old newspaper over the hole,
and applying hog’s lard, we had a kind of glazing which shed a most
beautiful and mellow light across the cabin when the sun shone on it.
All other light entered at the doors, cracks, and chimneys. Our cabin
was twenty-four by eighteen. The west end was occupied by two beds, the
center of each side by a door.... On the opposite side of the window,
made of clapboards, supported on pins driven into the walls, were our
shelves. On these shelves my sister displayed in simple order, a host of
pewter plates, and dishes and spoons, scoured and bright.... Our chimney
occupied most of the east end; with pots and kettles opposite the
window, under the shelves, a gun on hooks over the north door, four
split-bottomed chairs, three three-legged stools, and a small eight
by ten looking glass sloped from the wall over a large towel and comb
case.... We got a roof laid over head as soon as possible, but it was
laid of loose clapboards split from a red-oak, and a cat might have
shaken every board in our ceiling.... We made two kinds of furniture.
One kind was of hickory bark, with the outside shaved off. This we would
take off all around the tree, the size of which would determine the
caliber of our box. Into one end we would place a flat piece of bark or
puncheon, cut round to fit in the bark, which stood on end the same
as when on the tree.... A much finer article was made of slippery-elm
bark, shaved smooth, with the inside out, bent round and sewed together,
where the end of the hoop or main bark lapped over.... This was the
finest furniture in a lady’s dressing room,” and such a cabin and its
appointments were splendor and luxury beside those of the very earliest
pioneers, and many of the latest. The Williamses were Quakers, and the
mother was recently from England; they were of far gentler breeding and
finer tastes than most of their neighbors, who had been backwoodsmen for
generations.
When the first settlers broke the silence of the woods with the stroke
of their axes, and hewed out a space for their cabins and their fields,
they inclosed their homes with a high stockade of logs, for defense
against the Indians; or if they built their cabins outside the wooden
walls of their stronghold, they always expected to flee to it at the
first alarm, and to stand siege within it. The Indians had no cannon,
and the logs of the stockade were proof against their rifles; if a
breach was made, there was still the blockhouse left, the citadel of
every little fort. This was heavily built, and pierced with loopholes
for the riflemen within, whose wives ran bullets for them at its mighty
hearth, and who kept the savage foe from its sides by firing down upon
them through the projecting timbers of its upper story; but in many a
fearful siege the Indians set the roof ablaze with arrows wrapped in
burning tow, and then the fight became desperate indeed. After the
Indian War ended, the stockade was no longer needed, and the settlers
had only the wild beasts to contend with, and those constant enemies of
the poor in all ages and conditions,--hunger and cold.
Winter after winter, the Williamses heard the wolves howling round them
in the woods, and this music was familiar to the ears of all the Ohio
pioneers, who trusted their rifles for both the safety and support of
their families. They deadened the trees around them by girdling them
with the ax, and planted the spaces between the leafless trunks with
corn and beans and pumpkins. These were their necessaries, but they had
an occasional luxury in the wild honey from the hollow of a bee tree
when the bears had not got at it. In its season, there was an abundance
of wild fruit, plums and cherries, haws and grapes, berries, and nuts of
every kind, and the maples yielded all the sugar they chose to make from
them. But it was long before they had, at any time, the profusion which
our modern arts enable us to enjoy the whole year round, and in the hard
beginnings the orchard and the garden were forgotten for the fields.
Their harvests must pay for the acres bought of the government, or from
some speculator who had never seen the land; and the settler must be
prompt in paying, or else see his home pass from him after all his toil
into the hands of strangers. He worked hard and he fared hard, and if
he was safer when peace came, it is doubtful if he were otherwise more
fortunate. As the game grew scarcer, it was no longer so easy to provide
food for his family, the change from venison and wild turkey to the
pork, which early began to prevail in his diet, was hardly a wholesome
one. Besides, in cutting down the trees, he opened spaces to the sun
which had been harmless enough in the shadow of the woods, but which now
sent up their ague-breeding miasms. Ague was the scourge of the whole
region, and it was hard to know whether the pestilence was worse on the
rich levels beside the rivers, or on the stony hills where the settlers
sometimes built to escape it. Fevers of several kinds prevailed, and
consumption was common in the climates that ague spared. There was
little knowledge of the rules of health, and little medical skill for
those who lost it; most of the remedies for disease and accident were
such only as home nursing and home treatment could supply.
When once the settler was housed against the weather, he had the
conditions of a certain rude comfort indoors. If his cabin was not proof
against the wind and rain or snow, its vast fireplace formed the means
of heating, while the forest was an inexhaustible store of fuel. At
first he dressed in the skins and pelts of the deer and fox and wolf,
and his costume could have varied little from that of the red savage
about him, for we often read how’ he mistook Indians for white men at
first sight, and how the Indians in their turn mistook white men for
their own people. The whole family went barefoot in the summer, but in
winter the pioneer wore moccasins of buckskin, and buckskin leggins or
trousers; his coat was a hunting shirt belted at the waist and fringed
where it fell to his knees. It was of homespun, a mixture of wool and
flax called linsey-woolsey, and out of this the dresses of his wife and
daughters were made; the wool was shorn from the sheep, which were
so scarce that they were never killed for their flesh, except by the
wolves, which were very fond of mutton, but had no use for wool. For a
wedding dress a cotton check was thought superb, and it really cost a
dollar a yard; silks, satins, laces, were unknown. A man never left his
house without his rifle; the gun was a part of his dress, and in his
belt he carried a hunting knife and a hatchet; on his head he wore a cap
of squirrel skin, often with the plumelike tail dangling from it.
The furniture of the cabins was, like the clothing of the pioneers,
homemade. A bedstead was contrived by stretching poles from forked
sticks driven into the ground, and laying clapboards across them; the
bedclothes were bearskins. Stools, benches, and tables were roughed out
with auger and broadax; the puncheon floor was left bare, and if the
earth formed the floor, no rug ever replaced the grass which was its
first carpet. The cabin had but one room where the whole of life went
on by day; the father and mother slept there at night, and the children
mounted to their chamber in the loft by means of a ladder.
The food was what has been already named. The meat was venison, bear,
raccoon, wild turkey, wild duck, and pheasant; the drink was water, or
rye coffee, or whisky which the little stills everywhere supplied only
too abundantly. Wheat bread was long unknown, and corn cakes of various
makings and bakings supplied its place. The most delicious morsel of all
was corn grated while still in the milk and fashioned into round cakes
eaten hot from the clapboard before the fire, or from the mysterious
depths of the Dutch oven, buried in coals and ashes on the hearth.
There was soon a great flow of milk from the kine that multiplied in the
pastures in the woods, and there was sweetening enough from the maple
tree and the bee tree, but salt was very scarce and very dear, and long
journeys were made through the perilous woods to and from the licks, or
salt springs, which the deer had discovered before the white man or the
red man knew them.
The bees which hived their honey in the hollow trees were tame bees
gone wild, and with the coming of the settlers, some of the wild things
increased so much that they became a pest. Such were the crows which
literally blackened the fields after the settlers plowed, and which the
whole family had to fight from the corn when it was planted. Such were
the rabbits, and such, above all, were the squirrels which overran the
farms, and devoured every green thing till the people combined in great
squirrel hunts and destroyed them by tens of thousands. The larger game
had meanwhile disappeared. The buffalo and the elk went first; the deer
followed, and the bear, and even the useless wolf. But long after these
the poisonous reptiles lingered, the rattlesnake, the moccasin, and
the yet deadlier copperhead; and it was only when the whole country was
cleared that they ceased to be a very common danger.
For a long time there were no mills to grind the corn, and it was
pounded into meal for bread with a heavy wooden pestle in a mortar made
by hollowing out some tough-grained log. The first mills were horse
power; then small water-power mills were put up on the streams, and in
the larger rivers boats were anchored, with mill wheels which the rapid
current turned. But the stills were plentier than the mills, and as much
corn was made into whisky as into bread. Men drank hard to soften their
hard life, to lighten its heaviness, to drown its cares, to heighten
its few pleasures. Drink was free and common not only at every shooting
match, where men met alone, but at every log rolling or cabin raising,
where the women met with them, to cook for them, and then to dance away
the night that followed the toilsome day.