THE ALGONQUINS OF THE NORTHWEST, 1769-1774.
Between the Ohio and the Great Lakes, directly north of the Appalachian
confederacies, and separated from them by the unpeopled wilderness now
forming the States of Tennessee and Kentucky, dwelt another set of
Indian tribes. They were ruder in life and manners than their southern
kinsmen, less advanced towards civilization, but also far more warlike;
they depended more on the chase and fishing, and much less on
agriculture; they were savages, not merely barbarians; and they were
fewer in numbers and scattered over a wider expanse of territory. But
they were farther advanced than the almost purely nomadic tribes of
horse Indians whom we afterwards encountered west of the Mississippi.
Some of their villages were permanent, at any rate for a term of years,
and near them they cultivated small crops of corn and melons. Their
usual dwelling was the conical wigwam covered with bark, skins, or mats
of plaited reeds but in some of the villages of the tribes nearest the
border there were regular blockhouses, copied from their white
neighbors. They went clad in skins or blankets; the men were hunters and
warriors, who painted their bodies and shaved from their crowns all the
hair except the long scalp-lock, while the squaws were the drudges who
did all the work.
Their relations with the Iroquois, who lay east of them, were rarely
very close, and in fact were generally hostile. They were also usually
at odds with the southern Indians, but among themselves they were
frequently united in time of war into a sort of lax league, and were
collectively designated by the Americans as the northwestern Indians.
All the tribes belonged to the great Algonquin family, with two
exceptions, the Winnebagos and the Wyandots. The former, a branch of the
Dakotahs, dwelt west of Lake Michigan; they came but little in contact
with us, although many of their young men and warriors joined their
neighbors in all the wars against us. The Wyandots or Hurons lived near
Detroit and along the south shore of Lake Erie, and were in battle our
most redoubtable foes. They were close kin to the Iroquois though bitter
enemies to them, and they shared the desperate valor of these, their
hostile kinsfolk, holding themselves above the surrounding Algonquins,
with whom, nevertheless, they lived in peace and friendship.
The Algonquins were divided into many tribes, of ever shifting size. It
would be impossible to place them all, or indeed to enumerate them, with
any degree of accuracy; for the tribes were continually splitting up,
absorbing others, being absorbed in turn, or changing their abode, and,
in addition, there were numerous small sub-tribes or bands of renegades,
which sometimes were and sometimes were not considered as portions of
their larger neighbors. Often, also, separate bands, which would vaguely
regard themselves as all one nation in one generation, would in the next
have lost even this sense of loose tribal unity.
The chief tribes, however, were well known and occupied tolerably
definite locations. The Delawares or Leni-Lenappe, dwelt farthest east,
lying northwest of the upper Ohio, their lands adjoining those of the
Senecas, the largest and most westernmost of the Six Nations. The
Iroquois had been their most relentless foes and oppressors in time gone
by; but on the eve of the Revolution all the border tribes were
forgetting their past differences and were drawing together to make a
stand against the common foe. Thus it came about that parties of young
Seneca braves fought with the Delawares in all their wars against us.
Westward of the Delawares lay the Shawnee villages, along the Scioto and
on the Pickaway plains; but it must be remembered that the Shawnees,
Delawares, and Wyandots were closely united and their villages were
often mixed in together. Still farther to the west, the Miamis or
Twigtees lived between the Miami and the Wabash, together with other
associated tribes, the Piankeshaws and the Weas or Ouatinous. Farther
still, around the French villages, dwelt those scattered survivors of
the Illinois who had escaped the dire fate which befell their
fellow-tribesmen because they murdered Pontiac. Northward of this scanty
people lived the Sacs and Foxes, and around the upper Great Lakes the
numerous and powerful Pottawattamies, Ottawas, and Chippewas; fierce and
treacherous warriors, who did not till the soil, and were hunters and
fishers only, more savage even than the tribes that lay southeast of
them.[1] In the works of the early travellers we read the names of many
other Indian nations; but whether these were indeed separate peoples, or
branches of some of those already mentioned, or whether the different
travellers spelled the Indian names in widely different ways, we cannot
say. All that is certain is that there were many tribes and sub-tribes,
who roamed and warred and hunted over the fair lands now forming the
heart of our mighty nation, that to some of these tribes the whites gave
names and to some they did not, and that the named and the nameless
alike were swept down to the same inevitable doom.
Moreover, there were bands of renegades or discontented Indians, who for
some cause had severed their tribal connections. Two of the most
prominent of these bands were the Cherokees and Mingos, both being noted
for their predatory and murderous nature and their incessant raids on
the frontier settlers. The Cherokees were fugitives from the rest of
their nation, who had fled north, beyond the Ohio, and dwelt in the land
shared by the Delawares and Shawnees, drawing to themselves many of the
lawless young warriors, not only of these tribes, but of the others
still farther off. The Mingos were likewise a mongrel banditti, made up
of outlaws and wild spirits from among the Wyandots and Miamis, as well
as from the Iroquois and the Munceys (a sub-tribe of the Delawares).
All these northwestern nations had at one time been conquered by the
Iroquois, or at least they had been defeated, their lands overrun, and
they themselves forced to acknowledge a vague over-lordship on the part
of their foes. But the power of the Iroquois was now passing away: when
our national history began, with the assembling of the first continental
congress, they had ceased to be a menace to the western tribes, and the
latter no longer feared or obeyed them, regarding them merely as allies
or neutrals. Yet not only the Iroquois, but their kindred folk, notably
the Wyandots, still claimed, and received, for the sake of their ancient
superiority, marks of formal respect from the surrounding Algonquins.
Thus, among the latter, the Leni-Lenappe possessed the titular headship,
and were called "grandfathers" at all the solemn councils as well as in
the ceremonious communications that passed among the tribes; yet in turn
they had to use similar titles of respect in addressing not only their
former oppressors, but also their Huron allies, who had suffered under
the same galling yoke.[2]
The northwestern nations had gradually come to equal the Iroquois as
warriors; but among themselves the palm was still held by the Wyandots,
who, although no more formidable than the others as regards skill,
hardihood, and endurance, nevertheless stood alone in being willing to
suffer heavy punishment in order to win a victory.[3]
The Wyandots had been under the influence of the French Jesuits, and
were nominally Christians;[4] and though the attempt to civilize them
had not been very successful, and they remained in most respects
precisely like the Indians around them, there had been at least one
point gained, for they were not, as a rule, nearly so cruel to their
prisoners. Thus they surpassed their neighbors in mercifulness as well
as valor. All the Algonquin tribes stood, in this respect, much on the
same plane. The Delawares, whose fate it had been to be ever buffeted
about by both the whites and the reds, had long cowered under the
Iroquois terror, but they had at last shaken it off, had reasserted the
superiority which tradition says they once before held, and had become a
formidable and warlike race. Indeed it is curious to study how the
Delawares have changed in respect to their martial prowess since the
days when the whites first came in contact with them. They were then not
accounted a formidable people, and were not feared by any of their
neighbors. By the time the Revolution broke out they had become better
warriors, and during the twenty years' Indian warfare that ensued were
as formidable as most of the other redskins. But when moved west of the
Mississippi, instead of their spirit being broken, they became more
warlike than ever, and throughout the present century they have been the
most renowned fighters of all the Indian peoples, and, moreover, they
have been celebrated for their roving, adventurous nature. Their numbers
have steadily dwindled, owing to their incessant wars and to the
dangerous nature of their long roamings.[5]
It is impossible to make any but the roughest guess at the numbers of
these northwestern Indians. It seems probable that there were
considerably over fifty thousand of them in all; but no definite
assertion can be made even as to the different tribes. As with the
southern Indians, old-time writers certainly greatly exaggerated their
numbers, and their modern followers show a tendency to fall into the
opposite fault, the truth being that any number of isolated observations
to support either position can be culled from the works of the
contemporary travellers and statisticians.[6] No two independent
observers give the same figures. One main reason for this is doubtless
the exceedingly loose way in which the word "tribe" was used. If a man
speaks of the Miamis and the Delawares, for instance, before we can
understand him we must know whether he includes therein the Weas and the
Munceys, for he may or may not. By quoting the numbers attributed by the
old writers to the various sub-tribes, and then comparing them with the
numbers given later on by writers using the same names, but speaking of
entire confederacies, it is easy to work out an apparent increase, while
a reversal of the process shows an appalling decrease. Moreover, as the
bands broke up, wandered apart, and then rejoined each other or not as
events fell out, two successive observers might make widely different
estimates. Many tribes that have disappeared were undoubtedly actually
destroyed; many more have simply changed their names or have been
absorbed by other tribes. Similarly, those that have apparently held
their own have done so at the expense of their neighbors. This was made
all the easier by the fact that the Algonquins were so closely related
in customs and language; indeed, there was constant intermarriage
between the different tribes. On the whole, however, there is no
question that, in striking contrast to the southern or Appalachian
Indians, these northwestern tribes have suffered a terrible diminution
in numbers.
With many of them we did not come into direct contact for long years
after our birth as a nation. Perhaps those tribes with all or part of
whose warriors we were brought into collision at some time during or
immediately succeeding the Revolutionary war may have amounted to thirty
thousand souls.[7] But though they acknowledged kinship with one
another, and though they all alike hated the Americans, and though,
moreover, all at times met in the great councils, to smoke the calumet
of peace and brighten the chain of friendship[8] among themselves, and
to take up the tomahawk[9] against the white foes, yet the tie that
bound them together was so loose, and they were so fickle and so split
up by jarring interests and small jealousies, that never more than half
of them went to war at the same time. Very frequently even the members
of a tribe would fail to act together.
Thus it came about that during the forty years intervening between
Braddock's defeat and Wayne's victory, though these northwestern tribes
waged incessant, unending, relentless warfare against our borders, yet
they never at any one time had more than three thousand warriors in the
field, and frequently not half that number,[10] and in all the battles
they fought with British and American troops there was not one in which
they were eleven hundred strong.[11]
But they were superb individual fighters, beautifully drilled in their
own discipline;[12] and they were favored beyond measure by the nature
of their ground, of which their whole system of warfare enabled them to
take the utmost possible benefit. Much has been written and sung of the
advantages possessed by the mountaineer when striving in his own home
against invaders from the plains; but these advantages are as nothing
when weighed with those which make the warlike dweller in forests
unconquerable by men who have not his training. A hardy soldier,
accustomed only to war in the open, will become a good cragsman in fewer
weeks than it will take him years to learn to be so much as a fair
woodsman; for it is beyond all comparison more difficult to attain
proficiency in woodcraft than in mountaineering.[13]
The Wyandots, and the Algonquins who surrounded them, dwelt in a region
of sunless, tangled forests; and all the wars we waged for the
possession of the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi
were carried on in the never-ending stretches of gloomy woodland. It was
not an open forest. The underbrush grew, dense and rank, between the
boles of the tall trees, making a cover so thick that it was in many
places impenetrable, so thick that it nowhere gave a chance for human
eye to see even as far as a bow could carry. No horse could penetrate it
save by following the game trails or paths chopped with the axe; and a
stranger venturing a hundred yards from a beaten road would be so
helplessly lost that he could not, except by the merest chance, even
find his way back to the spot he had just left. Here and there it was
broken by a rare hillside glade or by a meadow in a stream valley; but
elsewhere a man might travel for weeks as if in a perpetual twilight,
never once able to see the sun, through the interlacing twigs that
formed a dark canopy above his head.
This dense forest was to the Indians a home in which they had lived from
childhood, and where they were as much at ease as a farmer on his own
acres. To their keen eyes, trained for generations to more than a wild
beast's watchfulness, the wilderness was an open book; nothing at rest
or in motion escaped them. They had begun to track game as soon as they
could walk; a scrape on a tree trunk, a bruised leaf, a faint
indentation of the soil, which the eye of no white man could see, all
told them a tale as plainly as if it had been shouted in their ears.[14]
With moccasined feet they trod among brittle twigs, dried leaves, and
dead branches as silently as the cougar, and they equalled the great
wood-cat in stealth and far surpassed it in cunning and ferocity. They
could no more get lost in the trackless wilderness than a civilized man
could get lost on a highway. Moreover, no knight of the middle ages was
so surely protected by his armor as they were by their skill in hiding;
the whole forest was to the whites one vast ambush, and to them a sure
and ever-present shield. Every tree trunk was a breastwork ready
prepared for battle; every bush, every moss-covered boulder, was a
defence against assault, from behind which, themselves unseen, they
watched with fierce derision the movements of their clumsy white enemy.
Lurking, skulking, travelling with noiseless rapidity, they left a trail
that only a master in woodcraft could follow, while, on the other hand,
they could dog a white man's footsteps as a hound runs a fox. Their
silence, their cunning and stealth, their terrible prowess and merciless
cruelty, makes it no figure of speech to call them the tigers of the
human race.
Unlike the southern Indians, the villages of the northwestern tribes
were usually far from the frontier. Tireless, and careless of all
hardship, they came silently out of unknown forests, robbed and
murdered, and then disappeared again into the fathomless depths of the
woods. Half of the terror they caused was due to the extreme difficulty
of following them, and the absolute impossibility of forecasting their
attacks. Without warning, and unseen until the moment they dealt the
death stroke, they emerged from their forest fastnesses, the horror they
caused being heightened no less by the mystery that shrouded them than
by the dreadful nature of their ravages. Wrapped in the mantle of the
unknown, appalling by their craft, their ferocity, their fiendish
cruelty, they seemed to the white settlers devils and not men; no one
could say with certainty whence they came nor of what tribe they were;
and when they had finished their dreadful work they retired into a
wilderness that closed over their trail as the waves of the ocean close
in the wake of a ship.
They were trained to the use of arms from their youth up, and war and
hunting were their two chief occupations, the business as well as the
pleasure of their lives. They were not as skilful as the white hunters
with the rifle[15]--though more so than the average regular
soldier,--nor could they equal the frontiersman in feats of physical
prowess, such as boxing and wrestling; but their superior endurance and
the ease with which they stood fatigue and exposure made amends for
this. A white might outrun them for eight or ten miles; but on a long
journey they could tire out any man, and any beast except a wolf. Like
most barbarians they were fickle and inconstant, not to be relied on for
pushing through a long campaign, and after a great victory apt to go off
to their homes, because each man desired to secure his own plunder and
tell his own tale of glory. They are often spoken of as undisciplined;
but in reality their discipline in the battle itself was very high. They
attacked, retreated, rallied or repelled a charge at the signal of
command; and they were able to fight in open order in thick covers
without losing touch of each other--a feat that no European regiment was
then able to perform.
On their own ground they were far more formidable than the best European
troops. The British grenadiers throughout the eighteenth century showed
themselves superior, in the actual shock of battle, to any infantry of
continental Europe; if they ever met an over-match, it was when pitted
against the Scotch highlanders. Yet both grenadier and highlander, the
heroes of Minden, the heirs to the glory of Marlborough's campaigns, as
well as the sinewy soldiers who shared in the charges of Prestonpans and
Culloden, proved helpless when led against the dark tribesmen of the
forest. On the march they could not be trusted thirty yards from the
column without getting lost in the woods[16]--the mountain training of
the highlanders apparently standing them in no stead whatever,--and were
only able to get around at all when convoyed by backwoodsmen. In fight
they fared even worse. The British regulars at Braddock's battle, and
the highlanders at Grant's defeat a few years later, suffered the same
fate. Both battles were fair fights; neither was a surprise; yet the
stubborn valor of the red-coated grenadier and the headlong courage of
the kilted Scot proved of less than no avail. Not only were they utterly
routed and destroyed in each case by an inferior force of Indians (the
French taking little part in the conflict), but they were able to make
no effective resistance whatever; it is to this day doubtful whether
these superb regulars were able, in the battles where they were
destroyed, to so much as kill one Indian for every hundred of their own
men who fell. The provincials who were with the regulars were the only
troops who caused any loss to the foe; and this was true in but a less
degree of Bouquet's fight at Bushy Run. Here Bouquet, by a clever
stratagem, gained the victory over an enemy inferior in numbers to
himself; but only after a two days' struggle in which he suffered a
fourfold greater loss than he inflicted.[17]
When hemmed in so that they had no hope of escape, the Indians fought to
the death; but when a way of retreat was open they would not stand
cutting like British, French, or American regulars, and so, though with
a nearly equal force, would retire if they were suffering heavily, even
if they were causing their foes to suffer still more. This was not due
to lack of courage; it was their system, for they were few in numbers,
and they did not believe in losing their men.[18] The Wyandots were
exceptions to this rule, for with them it was a point of honor not to
yield, and so they were of all the tribes the most dangerous in an
actual pitched battle.[19]
But making the attack, as they usually did, with the expectation of
success, all were equally dangerous. If their foes were clustered
together in a huddle they attacked them without hesitation, no matter
what the difference in numbers, and shot them down as if they had been
elk or buffalo, they themselves being almost absolutely safe from harm,
as they flitted from cover to cover. It was this capacity for hiding, or
taking advantage of cover, that gave them their great superiority; and
it is because of this that the wood tribes were so much more formidable
foes in actual battle than the horse Indians of the plains afterwards
proved themselves. In dense woodland a body of regular soldiers are
almost as useless against Indians as they would be if at night they had
to fight foes who could see in the dark; it needs special and
long-continued training to fit them in any degree for wood-fighting
against such foes. Out on the plains the white hunter's skill with the
rifle and his cool resolution give him an immense advantage; a few
determined men can withstand a host of Indians in the open, although
helpless if they meet them in thick cover; and our defeats by the Sioux
and other plains tribes have generally taken the form of a small force
being overwhelmed by a large one.
Not only were the Indians very terrible in battle, but they were cruel
beyond all belief in victory; and the gloomy annals of border warfare
are stained with their darkest hues because it was a war in which
helpless women and children suffered the same hideous fate that so often
befell their husbands and fathers. It was a war waged by savages against
armed settlers, whose families followed them into the wilderness. Such a
war is inevitably bloody and cruel; but the inhuman love of cruelty for
cruelty's sake,[20] which marks the red Indian above all other savages,
rendered these wars more terrible than any others. For the hideous,
unnamable, unthinkable tortures practised by the red men on their
captured foes, and on their foes' tender women and helpless children,
were such as we read of in no other struggle, hardly even in the
revolting pages that tell the deeds of the Holy Inquisition. It was
inevitable--indeed it was in many instances proper--that such deeds
should awake in the breasts of the whites the grimmest, wildest spirit
of revenge and hatred.
The history of the border wars, both in the ways they were begun and in
the ways they were waged, make a long tale of injuries inflicted,
suffered, and mercilessly revenged. It could not be otherwise when
brutal, reckless, lawless borderers, despising all men not of their own
color, were thrown in contact with savages who esteemed cruelty and
treachery as the highest of virtues, and rapine and murder as the
worthiest of pursuits. Moreover, it was sadly inevitable that the
law-abiding borderer as well as the white ruffian, the peaceful Indian
as well as the painted marauder, should be plunged into the struggle to
suffer the punishment that should only have fallen on their evil-minded
fellows.
Looking back, it is easy to say that much of the wrong-doing could have
been prevented; but if we examine the facts to find out the truth, not
to establish a theory, we are bound to admit that the struggle was
really one that could not possibly have been avoided. The sentimental
historians speak as if the blame had been all ours, and the wrong all
done to our foes, and as if it would have been possible by any exercise
of wisdom to reconcile claims that were in their very essence
conflicting; but their utterances are as shallow as they are
untruthful.[21] Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of
the Alleghanies should remain an unpeopled waste, the hunting-ground of
savages, war was inevitable; and even had we been willing, and had we
refrained from encroaching on the Indians' lands, the war would have
come nevertheless, for then the Indians themselves would have encroached
on ours. Undoubtedly we have wronged many tribes; but equally
undoubtedly our first definite knowledge of many others has been derived
from their unprovoked outrages upon our people. The Chippewas, Ottawas,
and Pottawatamies furnished hundreds of young warriors to the parties
that devastated our frontiers generations before we in any way
encroached upon or wronged them.
Mere outrages could be atoned for or settled; the question which lay at
the root of our difficulties was that of the occupation of the land
itself, and to this there could be no solution save war. The Indians had
no ownership of the land in the way in which we understand the term. The
tribes lived far apart; each had for its hunting-grounds all the
territory from which it was not barred by rivals. Each looked with
jealousy upon all interlopers, but each was prompt to act as an
interloper when occasion offered. Every good hunting-ground was claimed
by many nations. It was rare, indeed, that any tribe had an uncontested
title to a large tract of land; where such title existed, it rested, not
on actual occupancy and cultivation, but on the recent butchery of
weaker rivals. For instance, there were a dozen tribes, all of whom
hunted in Kentucky, and fought each other there, all of whom had equally
good titles to the soil, and not one of whom acknowledged the right of
any other; as a matter of fact they had therein no right, save the right
of the strongest. The land no more belonged to them than it belonged to
Boon and the white hunters who first visited it.
On the borders there are perpetual complaints of the encroachments of
whites upon Indian lands; and naturally the central government at
Washington, and before it was at Washington, has usually been inclined
to sympathize with the feeling that considers the whites the aggressors,
for the government does not wish a war, does not itself feel any land
hunger, hears of not a tenth of the Indian outrages, and knows by
experience that the white borderers are not easy to rule. As a
consequence, the official reports of the people who are not on the
ground are apt to paint the Indian side in its most favorable light, and
are often completely untrustworthy, this being particularly the case if
the author of the report is an eastern man, utterly unacquainted with
the actual condition of affairs on the frontier.
Such a man, though both honest and intelligent, when he hears that the
whites have settled on Indian lands, cannot realize that the act has no
resemblance whatever to the forcible occupation of land already
cultivated. The white settler has merely moved into an uninhabited
waste; he does not feel that he is committing a wrong, for he knows
perfectly well that the land is really owned by no one. It is never even
visited, except perhaps for a week or two every year, and then the
visitors are likely at any moment to be driven off by a rival
hunting-party of greater strength. The settler ousts no one from the
land; if he did not chop down the trees, hew out the logs for a
building, and clear the ground for tillage, no one else would do so. He
drives out the game, however, and of course the Indians who live thereon
sink their mutual animosities and turn against the intruder. The truth
is, the Indians never had any real title to the soil; they had not half
as good a claim to it, for instance, as the cattlemen now have to all
eastern Montana, yet no one would assert that the cattlemen have a right
to keep immigrants off their vast unfenced ranges. The settler and
pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent
could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid
savages. Moreover, to the most oppressed Indian nations the whites often
acted as a protection, or, at least, they deferred instead of hastening
their fate. But for the interposition of the whites it is probable that
the Iroquois would have exterminated every Algonquin tribe before the
end of the eighteenth century; exactly as in recent time the Crows and
Pawnees would have been destroyed by the Sioux, had it not been for the
wars we have waged against the latter.
Again, the loose governmental system of the Indians made it as difficult
to secure a permanent peace with them as it was to negotiate the
purchase of the lands. The sachem, or hereditary peace chief, and the
elective war chief, who wielded only the influence that he could secure
by his personal prowess and his tact, were equally unable to control all
of their tribesmen, and were powerless with their confederated nations.
If peace was made with the Shawnees, the war was continued by the
Miamis; if peace was made with the latter, nevertheless perhaps one
small band was dissatisfied, and continued the contest on its own
account; and even if all the recognized bands were dealt with, the
parties of renegades or outlaws had to be considered; and in the last
resort the full recognition accorded by the Indians to the right of
private warfare, made it possible for any individual warrior who
possessed any influence to go on raiding and murdering unchecked. Every
tribe, every sub-tribe, every band of a dozen souls ruled over by a
petty chief, almost every individual warrior of the least importance,
had to be met and pacified. Even if peace were declared, the Indians
could not exist long without breaking it. There was to them no
temptation to trespass on the white man's ground for the purpose of
settling; but every young brave was brought up to regard scalps taken
and horses stolen, in war or peace, as the highest proofs and tokens of
skill and courage, the sure means of attaining glory and honor, the
admiration of men and the love of women. Where the young men thought
thus, and the chiefs had so little real control, it was inevitable that
there should be many unprovoked forays for scalps, slaves, and horses
made upon the white borderers.[22]
As for the whites themselves, they too have many and grievous sins
against their red neighbors for which to answer. They cannot be severely
blamed for trespassing upon what was called the Indian's land; for let
sentimentalists say what they will, the man who puts the soil to use
must of right dispossess the man who does not, or the world will come to
a standstill; but for many of their other deeds there can be no pardon.
On the border each man was a law unto himself, and good and bad alike
were left in perfect freedom to follow out to the uttermost limits their
own desires; for the spirit of individualism so characteristic of
American life reached its extreme of development in the back-woods. The
whites who wished peace, the magistrates and leaders, had little more
power over their evil and unruly fellows than the Indian sachems had
over the turbulent young braves. Each man did what seemed best in his
own eyes, almost without let or hindrance; unless, indeed, he trespassed
upon the rights of his neighbors, who were ready enough to band together
in their own defence, though slow to interfere in the affairs of others.
Thus the men of lawless, brutal spirit who are found in every community
and who flock to places where the reign of order is lax, were able to
follow the bent of their inclinations unchecked. They utterly despised
the red man; they held it no crime whatever to cheat him in trading, to
rob him of his peltries or horses, to murder him if the fit seized them.
Criminals who generally preyed on their own neighbors, found it easier,
and perhaps hardly as dangerous, to pursue their calling at the expense
of the redskins, for the latter, when they discovered that they had been
wronged, were quite as apt to vent their wrath on some outsider as on
the original offender. If they injured a white, all the whites might
make common cause against them; but if they injured a red man, though
there were sure to be plenty of whites who disapproved of it, there were
apt to be very few indeed whose disapproval took any active shape.
Each race stood by its own members, and each held all of the other race
responsible for the misdeeds of a few uncontrollable spirits; and this
clannishness among those of one color, and the refusal or the inability
to discriminate between the good and the bad of the other color were the
two most fruitful causes of border strife.[23] When, even if he sought
to prevent them, the innocent man was sure to suffer for the misdeeds of
the guilty, unless both joined together for defence, the former had no
alternative save to make common cause with the latter. Moreover, in a
sparse backwoods settlement, where the presence of a strong, vigorous
fighter was a source of safety to the whole community, it was impossible
to expect that he would be punished with severity for offences which, in
their hearts, his fellow townsmen could not help regarding as in some
sort a revenge for the injuries they had themselves suffered. Every
quiet, peaceable settler had either himself been grievously wronged, or
had been an eye-witness to wrongs done to his friends; and while these
were vivid in his mind, the corresponding wrongs done the Indians were
never brought home to him at all. If his son was scalped or his cattle
driven off, he could not be expected to remember that perhaps the
Indians who did the deed had themselves been cheated by a white trader,
or had lost a relative at the hands of some border ruffian, or felt
aggrieved because a hundred miles off some settler had built a cabin on
lands they considered their own. When he joined with other exasperated
and injured men to make a retaliatory inroad, his vengeance might or
might not fall on the heads of the real offenders; and, in any case, he
was often not in the frame of mind to put a stop to the outrages sure to
be committed by the brutal spirits among his allies--though these brutal
spirits were probably in a small minority.
The excesses so often committed by the whites, when, after many checks
and failures, they at last grasped victory, are causes for shame and
regret; yet it is only fair to keep in mind the terrible provocations
they had endured. Mercy, pity, magnanimity to the fallen, could not be
expected from the frontiersmen gathered together to war against an
Indian tribe. Almost every man of such a band had bitter personal wrongs
to avenge. He was not taking part in a war against a civilized foe; he
was fighting in a contest where women and children suffered the fate of
the strong men, and instead of enthusiasm for his country's flag and a
general national animosity towards its enemies, he was actuated by a
furious flame of hot anger, and was goaded on by memories of which
merely to think was madness. His friends had been treacherously slain
while on messages of peace; his house had been burned, his cattle driven
off, and all he had in the world destroyed before he knew that war
existed and when he felt quite guiltless of all offence; his sweetheart
or wife had been carried off, ravished, and was at the moment the slave
and concubine of some dirty and brutal Indian warrior; his son, the stay
of his house, had been burned at the stake with torments too horrible to
mention;[24] his sister, when ransomed and returned to him, had told of
the weary journey through the woods, when she carried around her neck as
a horrible necklace the bloody scalps of her husband and children;[25]
seared into his eyeballs, into his very brain, he bore ever with him,
waking or sleeping, the sight of the skinned, mutilated, hideous body of
the baby who had just grown old enough to recognize him and to crow and
laugh when taken in his arms. Such incidents as these were not
exceptional; one or more, and often all of them, were the invariable
attendants of every one of the countless Indian inroads that took place
during the long generations of forest warfare. It was small wonder that
men who had thus lost every thing should sometimes be fairly crazed by
their wrongs. Again and again on the frontier we hear of some such
unfortunate who has devoted all the remainder of his wretched life to
the one object of taking vengeance on the whole race of the men who had
darkened his days forever. Too often the squaws and pappooses fell
victims of the vengeance that should have come only on the warriors; for
the whites regarded their foes as beasts rather than men, and knew that
the squaws were more cruel than others in torturing the prisoner, and
that the very children took their full part therein, being held up by
their fathers to tomahawk the dying victims at the stake.[26]
Thus it is that there are so many dark and bloody pages in the book of
border warfare, that grim and iron-bound volume, wherein we read how our
forefathers won the wide lands that we inherit. It contains many a tale
of fierce heroism and adventurous ambition, of the daring and resolute
courage of men and the patient endurance of women; it shows us a stern
race of freemen who toiled hard, endured greatly, and fronted adversity
bravely, who prized strength and courage and good faith, whose wives
were chaste, who were generous and loyal to their friends. But it shows
us also how they spurned at restraint and fretted under it, how they
would brook no wrong to themselves, and yet too often inflicted wrong on
others; their feats of terrible prowess are interspersed with deeds of
the foulest and most wanton aggression, the darkest treachery, the most
revolting cruelty; and though we meet with plenty of the rough, strong,
coarse virtues, we see but little of such qualities as mercy for the
fallen, the weak, and the helpless, or pity for a gallant and vanquished
foe.
Among the Indians of the northwest, generally so much alike that we need
pay little heed to tribal distinctions, there was one body deserving
especial and separate mention. Among the turbulent and jarring elements
tossed into wild confusion by the shock of the contact between savages
and the rude vanguard of civilization, surrounded and threatened by the
painted warriors of the woods no less than by the lawless white riflemen
who lived on the stump-dotted clearings, there dwelt a group of peaceful
beings who were destined to suffer a dire fate in the most lamentable
and pitiable of all the tragedies which were played out in the heart of
this great wilderness. These were the Moravian Indians.[27] They were
mostly Delawares, and had been converted by the indefatigable German
missionaries, who taught the tranquil, Quaker-like creed of Count
Zinzendorf. The zeal and success of the missionaries were attested by
the marvellous change they had wrought in these converts; for they had
transformed them in one generation from a restless, idle, blood-thirsty
people of hunters and fishers, into an orderly, thrifty, industrious
folk, believing with all their hearts the Christian religion in the form
in which their teachers both preached and practised it. At first the
missionaries, surrounded by their Indian converts, dwelt in
Pennsylvania; but, harried and oppressed by their white neighbors, the
submissive and patient Moravians left their homes and their cherished
belongings, and in 1771 moved out into the wilderness northwest of the
Ohio. It is a bitter and unanswerable commentary on the workings of a
non-resistant creed when reduced to practice, that such outrages and
massacres as those committed on these helpless Indians were more
numerous and flagrant in the colony the Quakers governed than in any
other; their vaunted policy of peace, which forbade them to play a true
man's part and put down wrong-doing, caused the utmost possible evil to
fall both on the white man and the red. An avowed policy of force and
fraud carried out in the most cynical manner could hardly have worked
more terrible injustice; their system was a direct incentive to crime
and wrong-doing between the races, for they punished the aggressions of
neither, and hence allowed any blow to always fall heaviest on those
least deserving to suffer. No other colony made such futile,
contemptible efforts to deal with the Indian problem; no other colony
showed such supine, selfish helplessness in allowing her own border
citizens to be mercilessly harried; none other betrayed such inability
to master the hostile Indians, while, nevertheless, utterly failing to
protect those who were peaceful and friendly.
When the Moravians removed beyond the Ohio, they settled on the banks of
the Muskingum, made clearings in the forest, and built themselves little
towns, which they christened by such quaint names as Salem and
Gnadenhutten; names that were pathetic symbols of the peace which the
harmless and sadly submissive wanderers so vainly sought. Here, in the
forest, they worked and toiled, surrounded their clean, neatly kept
villages with orchards and grain-fields, bred horses and cattle, and
tried to do wrong to no man; all of each community meeting every day to
worship and praise their Creator. But the missionaries who had done so
much for them had also done one thing which more than offset it all: for
they had taught them not to defend themselves, and had thus exposed the
poor beings who trusted their teaching to certain destruction. No
greater wrong can ever be done than to put a good man at the mercy of a
bad, while telling him not to defend himself or his fellows; in no way
can the success of evil be made surer and quicker; but the wrong was
peculiarly great when at such a time and in such a place the defenceless
Indians were thrust between the anvil of their savage red brethren and
the hammer of the lawless and brutal white borderers. The awful harvest
which the poor converts reaped had in reality been sown for them by
their own friends and would-be benefactors.
So the Moravians, seeking to deal honestly with Indians and whites
alike, but in return suspected and despised by both, worked patiently
year in and year out, as they dwelt in their lonely homes, meekly
awaiting the stroke of the terrible doom which hung over them.
1. See papers by Stephen D. Peet, on the northwestern tribes, read
before the state Archaeological Society of Ohio, 1878.
2. Barton, xxv.
3. General W. H. Harrison, "Aborigines of the Ohio Valley." Old
"Tippecanoe" was the best possible authority for their courage.
4. "Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Col. James Smith,"
etc., written by himself, Lexington, Ky., 1799. Smith is our best
contemporary authority on Indian warfare; he lived with them for several
years, and fought them in many campaigns. Besides several editions of
the above, he also published in 1812, at Paris, Ky., a "Treatise" on
Indian warfare, which holds much the same matter.
5. See Parkman's "Oregon Trail." In 1884 I myself met two Delawares
hunting alone, just north of the Black Hills. They were returning from a
trip to the Rocky Mountains. I could not but admire their strong, manly
forms, and the disdainful resolution with which they had hunted and
travelled for so many hundred miles, in defiance of the white
frontiersmen and of the wild native tribes as well. I think they were in
more danger from the latter than the former, but they seemed perfectly
confident of their ability to hold their own against both.
6. See Barton, the Madison MSS., Schoolcraft, Thos. Hutchins (who
accompanied Bouquet), Smythe, Pike, various reports of the U. S. Indian
Commissioners, etc, etc.
7. I base this number on a careful examination of the tribes named
above, discarding such of the northern bands of the Chippewas, for
instance, as were unlikely at that time to have been drawn into war with
us.
8. The expressions generally used by them in sending their war talks and
peace talks to one another or the whites. Hundreds of copies of these
"talks" are preserved at Washington.
9. _Do_.
10. Smith, "Remarkable Occurrences," etc., p. 154. Smith gives a very
impartial account of the Indian discipline and of their effectiveness,
and is one of the few men who warred against them who did not greatly
overestimate their numbers and losses. He was a successful Indian
fighter himself. For the British regulars he had the true backwoods
contempt, although having more than the average backwoods sense in
acknowledging their effectiveness in the open. He had lived so long
among the Indians, and estimated so highly their personal prowess, that
his opinion must be accepted with caution where dealing with matters of
discipline and command.
11. The accounts of the Indian numbers in any battle given by British or
Americans, soldiers or civilians, are ludicrously exaggerated as a rule;
even now it seems a common belief of historians that the whites were
generally outnumbered in battles, while in reality they were generally
much more numerous than their foes.
12. Harrison (_loc. cit._) calls them "the finest light troops in
the world"; and he had had full experience in serving with American and
against British infantry.
13. Any one who is fond of the chase can test the truth of this
proposition for himself, by trying how long it will take him to learn to
kill a bighorn on the mountains, and how long it will take him to learn
to kill white-tail deer in a dense forest, by fair still-hunting, the
game being equally plenty. I have known many novices learn to equal the
best old hunters, red or white, in killing mountain game; I have never
met one who could begin to do as well as an Indian in the dense forest,
unless brought up to it--and rarely even then. Yet, though woodcraft is
harder to learn, it does not imply the possession of such valuable
qualities as mountaineering; and when cragsman and woodman meet on
neutral ground, the former is apt to be the better man.
14. To this day the wild--not the half-tame--Indians remain unequalled
as trackers. Even among the old hunters not one white in a hundred can
come near them. In my experience I have known a very few whites who had
spent all their lives in the wilderness who equalled the Indian average;
but I never met any white who came up to the very best Indian. But,
because of their better shooting and their better nerve, the whites
often make the better hunters.
15. It is curious how to this day the wild Indians retain the same
traits. I have seen and taken part in many matches between frontiersmen
and the Sioux, Cheyennes, Grosventres, and Mandans, and the Indians were
beaten in almost every one. On the other hand the Indians will stand
fatigue, hunger, and privation better, but they seem more susceptible to
cold.
16. See Parkman's "Conspiracy of Pontiac"; also "Montcalm and Wolfe."
17. Bouquet, like so many of his predecessors and successors, greatly
exaggerated the numbers and loss of the Indians in this fight. Smith,
who derived his information both from the Indians and from the American
rangers, states that but eighteen Indians were killed at Bushy Run.
18. Most of the plains Indians feel in the same way at present. I was
once hunting with a Sioux half-breed who illustrated the Indian view of
the matter in a rather striking way, saying: "If there were a dozen of
you white hunters and you found six or eight bears in the brush, and you
knew you could go in and kill them all, but that in the fight you would
certainly lose three or four men yourselves, you wouldn't go in, would
you? You'd wait until you got a better chance, and could kill them
without so much risk. Well, Indians feel the same way about attacking
whites that you would feel about attacking those bears."
19. All the authorities from Smith to Harrison are unanimous on this
point.
20. Any one who has ever been in an encampment of wild Indians, and has
had the misfortune to witness the delight the children take in torturing
little animals, will admit that the Indian's love of cruelty for
cruelty's sake cannot possibly be exaggerated. The young are so trained
that when old they shall find their keenest pleasure in inflicting pain
in its most appalling form. Among the most brutal white borderers a man
would be instantly lynched if he practised on any creature the fiendish
torture which in an Indian camp either attracts no notice at all, or
else excites merely laughter.
21. See Appendix A.
22. Similarly the Crows, who have always been treated well by us, have
murdered and robbed any number of peaceful, unprotected travellers
during the past three decades, as I know personally.
23. It is precisely the same at the present day. I have known a party of
Sioux to steal the horses of a buffalo-hunting outfit, whereupon the
latter retaliated by stealing the horses of a party of harmless
Grosventres; and I knew a party of Cheyennes, whose horses had been
taken by white thieves, to, in revenge, assail a camp of perfectly
orderly cowboys. Most of the ranchmen along the Little Missouri in 1884,
were pretty good fellows, who would not wrong Indians, yet they
tolerated for a long time the presence of men who did not scruple to
boast that they stole horses from the latter; while our peaceful
neighbors, the Grosventres, likewise permitted two notorious red-skinned
horse thieves to use their reservation as a harbor of refuge, and a
starting-point from which to make forays against the cattlemen.
24. The expression "too horrible to mention" is to be taken literally,
not figuratively. It applies equally to the fate that has befallen every
white man or woman who has fallen into the power of hostile plains
Indians during the last ten or fifteen years. The nature of the wild
Indian has not changed. Not one man in a hundred, and not a single
woman, escapes torments which a civilized man cannot look another in the
face and so much as speak of. Impalement on charred stakes, finger-nails
split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out--these
tortures can be mentioned, but there are others equally normal and
customary which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women are the
victims.
25. For the particular incident see M'Ferrin's "History of Methodism in
Tennessee," p. 145.
26. As was done to the father of Simon Girty. Any history of any Indian
inroad will give examples such as I have mentioned above. See McAfee
MSS., John P. Hale's "Trans-Alleghany Pioneers," De Haas' "Indian Wars,"
Wither's "Border War," etc. In one respect, however, the Indians east of
the Mississippi were better than the tribes of the plains from whom our
borders have suffered during the present century; their female captives
were not invariably ravished by every member of the band capturing them,
as has ever been the custom among the horse Indians. Still, they were
often made the concubines of their captors.
27. The missionaries called themselves United Brethren; to outsiders
they were known as Moravians. Loskiel, "History of the Mission of the
United Brethren," London, 1794. Heckewelder, "Narrative of the Mission
of the United Brethren," Phil., 1820.