Butler and the rear guard stood on one bank, Ross on the opposite, with some Whigs trying to cross. The enemies fired their guns. Butler was hit, and the rangers retreated so quickly that they left him on the ground.
“He was not dead when found by one of our Indians, who finished his business for him and got a considerable booty,” Willett said of the scalping, although other reports say Butler was already dead. “I am certain the loss of the enemy must be great. It is, however, out of my power to ascertain it. . . . Their killed is by no means trifling and many, very many, must be scattered about the wilderness almost sure of perishing there.”31
Then, with his own provisions “quite exhausted,” Willett ended the chase.
The British and Loyalists mourned Butler’s death. Haldimand told Ross: “I read with much concern the fate of Capt. Butler. He was a very active, promising officer, and one of those whose loss at all times, but particularly in the present, is much to be lamented.”32
For New York Whigs, Butler’s death was a cause for celebration. “They say the Oneida Indians have scalped him,” wrote an Albany official. “This is certain: that he is killed and that part of his clothes and ornaments have already been sold at Schenectady. . . . It gives me pleasure to see the mortification of those miscreants [Tories] whose souls are black as hell and whose minds are as dark as the midnight shades.”33
Willett’s son later wrote that Butler’s death caused more joy among settlers than the Yorktown surrender, “such was the terror in which he [Butler] was held by the inhabitants of the frontiers, so cruel a scourge had he been to them.”34
Ross probably left Butler’s scalpless corpse to wolves and rot; John Butler later offered an unclaimed reward for his son’s body. One unlikely legend persisted—that he was secretly buried in a Schenectady church, where a minister wrote:
Beneath the pew in which you sit
They say that Walter Butler’s buried.
In such a fix, across the Styx
I wonder who his soul has ferried.35
After the raid, Ross was promoted to major. In what is now Kingston, Ontario, he provided for Loyalist refugees and served as a magistrate. In late 1784, he received permission to return to England to care for his elderly father. Ross returned to Kingston in 1786, where he was arrested and exonerated in connection with charges brought by his second-in-command. He and his regiment returned to England in 1787. Two years later, he retired. Historians don’t know about his life after that, although he might have married the sister of Captain John McDonell, who had fought with Caldwell, Brant, and John Butler and later became a Canadian politician.36
In November 1781, two dozen Indians led by a Loyalist ranger attacked Schoharie, twenty-five miles west of Schenectady. They killed one civilian and five militiamen. In spring 1782, Indians destroyed a gristmill at Little Falls and took prisoners. “The Indians are committing ravages in most parts of this county . . . ,” Willett wrote Washington. “They are not deficient in art to improve the many advantages they have over us.”37
Hearing reports that Schenectady or Albany or both would be attacked, Washington paid a morale visit to the Mohawk Valley in June 1782. In Schenectady, the town honored him at a banquet, and he wrote an open letter of support, saying: “May you, and the good people of this town . . . be protected from every insidious and open foe . . .” He also urged the Oneidas to raid Loyalist and pro-British Indian strongholds and capture as many prisoners as they could.38
Willett intended to help by seizing Oswego, on the New York shore of Lake Ontario, 160 miles from Schenectady. In spring 1782, Ross and four hundred rangers had strengthened and garrisoned the fort; it became a safe haven for Indians and a base for future raids. To Whigs, the garrison was dangerous. “While the enemy remain posted in force at Oswego,” wrote one politician, “we have nothing to expect but total desolation of the scattered remains of that once flourishing district.”39
Washington blessed Willett’s proposal to attack in early February 1783. Such an attack “appears very practicable in my eyes, provided the troops for the enterprise can be properly accommodated.” He would provide Willett woolens for the winter raid, but Willett would have to find his own sleds, moccasins, and snow shoes. Finally, Washington recommended that Willett seize British or Loyalist deserters who were acquainted with Oswego and use them as guides.40
Willett used a trusted Oneida man as a guide. He was the wrong choice. The guide, “who has a commission from Congress [and] whose behavior has been uniform and upright,” got lost and led Willett’s four hundred men in circles just a few miles from Oswego. With his men becoming hypothermic and frostbitten, Willett abandoned the raid. “It is no small mortification to me,” he wrote Washington. “Great fatigue got the better of the spirits of the soldiers, and . . . we could have no right to hope to remain undiscovered through the day.” Two men, including a slave whose freedom was promised for his military service, “got frozed to death.”41
Washington tried to ease Willett’s “mortification.” “No imputation or reflection can justly reach your character,” he wrote Willett. “The failure, it seems, must be attributed to some of those unaccountable events which are not within the control of human means; and which, though they often occur in military life, yet require, not only the fortitude of the soldier, but the calm reflection of the philosopher, to bear.”42
British governor Haldimand had no sympathy. “Fortunately for Mr. Willett,” Haldimand had discouraged Indians from wintering at Oswego. “Otherwise, it is probable that not a man of his detachment would have escaped.”43
Willett was also fortunate after the war. Voters elected him to a number of political positions: the state assembly, New York City sheriff, and mayor. He died in 1830.
18. Massacre and Revenge
THE INDIANS NEVER FOUGHT FOR THE BRITISH; THEY FOUGHT with them in a calculated, self-interested way that would best protect native property rights, while maximizing economic gain. In this war, in this place, the ally just happened to be the British.
Most Iroquois in New York, Shawnees in the Ohio Valley, Cherokees and Creeks in the South, and the affiliated, allied, and kinship-related nations in between—Mingoes, Delawares, Chickasaws, Wyandots, and others—united against the rebels. More often than not, they combined their military forces and, sometimes, their diplomatic efforts.
The anti-Indian incidents that William Johnson and other sympathetic whites complained about before the war escalated during the war. They culminated in the mass murder of neutral, pacifist Christian Indians.
The Reverend David Zeisberger, 61, was a modest, religious man, said an acolyte. “He was of a humble, meek spirit, and always thought lowly of himself. . . . His words were few, and never known to be wasted at random or in an unprofitable manner.” Short, even by eighteenth-century standards, he had “a cool, active, intrepid spirit, not appalled by any danger or difficulties, and a sound judgment to discern the best means of meeting and overcoming them.”1
At seventeen, he immigrated to Georgia to join his parents, who were part of a community of fellow German-speaking immigrants from Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic). The community was a religious one founded by members of the evangelical, pacifist Moravian Church, formally known as the United Brethren. Zeisberger immediately began participating in missionary work with Creek Indians.2
He and his parents left Georgia two years later to help establish a mission in eastern Pennsylvania. In the early 1740s, Zeisberger prepared for his personal mission among the Iroquois. He learned their language, as well as Delaware, Mohigan, and Ojibway dialects, and became a prolific author of Indian grammars and dictionaries. Starting in his twenties, Zeisberger traveled widely, frequently lived with Indians, converted many of them, and helped found settlements for Christian Indians forced off their land by whites.
Three of the settlements, begun in 1770, were strung along the Tuscarawas River in Ohio country about ninety miles west of Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh). Since the Tuscarawas f
eeds into the Muskingum River, whites referred to the region as the Muskingum. The largest Moravian Indian settlement was Gnadenhütten (“huts of grace”). Schoenbrunn (“beautiful spring”) was ten miles upriver; Salem, six miles downriver.
Both the British and their Indian allies, as well as the Whigs and white settlers, suspected the Moravian Indians of colluding with the enemy. Part of the perception was caused by Zeisberger’s efforts to appease both sides. On one hand, he and the villagers provided intelligence to the Whigs; at the same time, they offered supplies and hospitality to anyone who passed through, regardless of who was fighting whom.3
It was a lose-lose situation for the Moravians. In fall 1781, with most of the cornfields ready to be harvested, the British and Indian allies forcibly removed the Moravians from the three villages. They relocated them about 125 miles west, with the intention of moving them closer to the British stronghold at Detroit. Any collaboration with the enemy would be much harder.
Without adequate food, the Moravians nearly starved that winter. “Many of the brethren went to the Shawnee towns to see for corn, for here in this neighborhood no more is to be had, and what there is, is enormously dear,” Zeisberger wrote in January 1782. “So some went also to the Muskingum to harvest yet something from our plantations.” The trickle of the Moravian Indians back to their homes continued the next month, and Zeisberger despaired. “The hunger among our people . . . is so great that for some time already they have had to live upon dead cattle, cows, and horses. Never in their lives have they felt such want. . . . Why, then, does the Savior let all this come upon us?” In mid-February, Zeisberger wrote that “yet more brethren have gone to the Muskingum. Indeed, they would prefer to move there than here to suffer want and hunger.”4
The country the Moravians returned to was a tinderbox. Indians had continued to raid Whig settlements throughout the winter. “The country talks of nothing but killing Indians, and taking possession of their lands,” said Whig colonel William Croghan. After one raid near Fort Pitt, the Wyandot and Delaware warriors, with their prisoners, stopped in Gnadenhütten for food. They warned the Moravians to leave; Whig pursuers were probably near. In fact, one Whig prisoner escaped, returned to Fort Pitt, and reported that many Moravian Indians had returned, and had fed the raiding party.5
Without the knowledge of Fort Pitt’s commander, one hundred fifty to two hundred militia met and voted to ride to Gnadenhütten.
As leader, they elected Colonel David Williamson, 30, of the Washington County, Pennsylvania, militia. Continental army lieutenant John Rose, who accompanied Williamson on a later expedition, described him as “brave as Caesar and active, but divested of conduct. Fond of thrusting himself into danger, he leaves everything else to chance. . . . He knows too well how high he is in the opinion of the people in general, and among these, he takes upon himself the airs of a man of consequence. However, he is open to advice and instructions. His oratory is suited to the taste of the people his countrymen, and their bigoted notions stand him in lieu of arguments.”6
What happened after the militia left Fort Pitt is based largely on the accounts of two Moravian Indian eyewitnesses who escaped, with confirmation by Continental officers; most of the militia didn’t talk. “There seems to have been some difference amongst themselves about that business, yet they will say nothing,” a newspaper reported two months later.7
The militia approached Gnadenhütten on March 7, 1782. They saw a young man in a field—one account says he was a white Moravian who had married a native woman. They killed him, scalped him, and then peacefully entered the village. There, they warned the Moravian Indians of dangers they faced and offered to escort them back to Fort Pitt and safety. The Indians agreed, and they sent a messenger to the Salem settlement, telling the people there to rendezvous in Gnadenhütten.
Over night, most of the militia became convinced that the furs, clothes, axes, pewter utensils, horses, and other evidence of wealth they saw in Gnadenhütten were proof that the Moravians had plundered whites. The militia even saw what they believed to be the dress of a white woman killed in a raid. They voted to execute the Indians. A handful of men dissented.
In the morning, the militia isolated the Indians in two homes, bound them, bludgeoned them to death with a mallet or tomahawk, and then scalped many. When the Indians from Salem arrived, the militia did the same to them. Some militia went to Schoenbrunn, which had been abandoned thanks to someone finding the scalped body of the white Moravian outside Gnadenhütten and alerting the others. In all, more than ninety men, women, and children were murdered.8
But the militia weren’t done. They returned to Fort Pitt with eighty horseloads of confiscated Indian property. Then, on March 24, they attacked friendly Indians living on an island in the Ohio River near Fort Pitt, the day before Continental brigadier general William Irvine arrived to take command. The Indians “were not only under our protection, but several actually had commissions in our service,” Irvine said. The militia also imprisoned the island’s guard of Continental troops, and sent the acting Fort Pitt commander a message that “they would also scalp him . . . [because they] imagine that he has an attachment to Indians in general.” The acting commander had been adopted by Indians, and his common-law wife was Indian.9
The newly arrived Irvine quickly learned about Gnadenhütten. “My Dearest Love,” he wrote his wife. The militia had attacked the Moravian Indians “while they were singing hymns and killed the whole. Many children were killed in their wretched mothers’ arms. Whether this was right or wrong, I do not pretend to determine. . . . People who have had fathers, mothers, brothers, or children butchered, tortured, scalped by the savages reason very differently on the subject of killing the Moravians to what people who live in the interior part of the country in perfect safety do.”
Another Continental officer, Major William Croghan, was livid: “Instead of going against the enemies of the country, they [the militia] turned their thoughts on a robbing, plundering, murdering scheme on our well-known friends, the Moravian Indians.” Rose later inspected the remains of Gnadenhütten and found that “the ruins of the lowest house in town were mixed with the calcined [ashy] bones of the burnt bodies of Indians.”10
The first word Zeisberger received of the murders was March 14, the day before he and the remaining Moravians left under guard for Detroit. A messenger said that most of the Indians were sent to Fort Pitt, and a few were “bound and some killed, but all of this we could not believe.” Nine days later, Zeisberger learned what really happened. “Our Indians were mostly on the plantations and saw the militia come, but no one thought of fleeing, for they suspected no ill,” he wrote in his diary. “They prayed and sang until the tomahawks struck into their heads.” (Zeisberger and the remaining Indians, after moving several times, ended up back in Ohio, where Zeisberger died in 1808.)11
The massacre shocked many: all Indians, regardless of whom they fought with; the British; and Whigs as far away as Franklin in Paris, who wrote “the abominable murders . . . has given me infinite pain and vexation.”12
But the Whig frontier was ready to continue the fight, and Indians continued to attack, this time with revenge in mind.
Irvine, commanding Fort Pitt, felt he was in a weak position, undermanned and beset by both the enemy and the friendly militia. “The present strength of the garrison at Fort Pitt is 230, with at least thirty of these are unfit for field duty, and several [for] even garrison duty,” he told Washington. All along the frontier, the situation was similar. “The inhabitants are dispirited, and talk much of making their escape early in the spring to the east side of the mountain[s], unless they see a prospect of support.” He was worried about what the British commander in Detroit had in store for them—possibly an attack on Pitt itself. “There is no magazine of provision laid in at any of our posts to hold out a siege. Ammunition exhausted, no craft to transport materials for repairing the fort, or to keep up a communication with Fort McIntosh or Wheeling—or to supply these po
sts with provision or stores in case of exigency.” Irvine concluded that he wanted to go on the offensive to take the pressure off Whig settlements, but he had no wherewithal to do so.13
His own men complained in a petition. “Your honor . . . saw when you first arrived here in what a deplorable condition we were, for want of clothing, almost naked, several days wanting provisions, in cold, open barracks with little fuel or fire.” Irvine ended a May mutiny by whipping and executing two soldiers.14
As for Pittsburgh, the settlement around Fort Pitt, the residents “live in paltry houses and are as dirty as in the north of Ireland or even in Scotland,” said a traveler. “There is a good deal of small trade carried on. . . . There are in the town four attorneys, two doctors, and not a priest of any persuasion, nor church nor chapel, so they are likely to be damned without the benefit of clergy. . . . The place, I believe, will never be very considerable.”15
Meanwhile, the British and Indian attacks continued. On March 22, Indians killed seven Whigs near Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. March 31: Two killed at Miller’s blockhouse. April 6: Two killed, two taken prisoners near Fort McIntosh. April 7: One farmer killed and a sixteen-year-old girl tomahawked and scalped outside Waldhauer’s blockhouse. April 15: Tory rangers destroyed the Bald Eagle Creek blockhouse. May 12: A woman, her husband, and five children attacked near Garard’s Fort; two daughters and their father survived, the girls recovering from scalping.
“The Indians are murdering frequently,” said a militia colonel and Cumberland County official. “Last Friday night, two men were killed on the frontiers of this county, and about a week before I got home, 14 people were killed and captured in different parts, and last week some mischief was done near Hannastown.”16
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