The “late campaign” referred to had taken place that fall well to the west on the Miami River and had been a disaster that only made the situation worse. A makeshift frontier army of almost 1,500 men, regulars and militia, under the command of General Josiah Harmar, had set out to punish the Miami and Shawnees. Harmar was known to be a drinker, prone to “indulge . . . to excess in a convivial glass,” as his friend Secretary of War Henry Knox expressed it. Both Knox and President Washington had been greatly concerned about this and as it turned out Harmar and his men were soundly defeated by a much smaller force led by the Miami war chief, Little Turtle. Of the regulars and militia 183 were dead or missing. The Indian loss had been fewer than a dozen.
One regular officer called the militia’s behavior “scandalous.” Many of the militiamen, he said, “never fired a shot but ran off,” and left a few regulars to be sacrificed. Some of them never halted until they crossed the Ohio.
Even more ominous to Rufus Putnam, as he stressed to the president, was the vanished presence of the numerous Delawares and Wyandots who for so long had been part of the everyday life in the settlement. Except for two familiar women, none was to be seen any longer, and word was they had reason to move north, some eighty miles up the Muskingum. Trouble was coming. Of this Putnam was certain.
“When or where it will fall God only knows,” he continued in his letter to the president, “but I trust, Sir, that in the multiplicity of public concerns which claim your attention, our little colony will not be forgotten. . . .
I believe you will not think me vain and presumptuous when I say that the inhabitants that compose this settlement have as great a claim to protectionism as any under the Federal Government. A great proportion of us served our country through the war . . . and being good subjects in general, as well as [being] disposed to live in friendship with our savage neighbors if possible.
Less than two weeks later, on Sunday, January 2, 1791, a calamity such as Rufus Putnam so feared took place on the eastern bank of the Muskingum, thirty miles upstream from Marietta.
The location was called Big Bottom, for the generous size of the rich bottomland at that point along the river, which gave it great appeal as a place for a settlement. Even so, Putnam and others of the Ohio Company strongly opposed any venturing out that far at this time. Moreover, those determined to establish themselves there were young and little acquainted with native warfare. But impatient to get started and confident in their ability to cope with whatever they had to face, the young settlers went ahead.
All were single men from New England, except for one Virginian, an experienced hunter with a wife and two children. They put up a log blockhouse that, in an emergency, could accommodate them all, and in doing this made the first of several crucial mistakes. They failed to chink the building between the logs. That the weather was extremely cold, the river frozen, may explain this in part.
The second mistake was posting no sentry after dark, and for this there was no excuse. Nor had any dogs been left outside to sound an alarm. There was little or no order. Rifles were left lying about in different places. No system of defense had been worked out.
Two nearby cabins housed four other men, Francis and Isaac Choate in one, Asa and Eleazer Bullard in the other.
It would be said that the raiding party of Delawares and Wyandots that arrived on the old path on the opposite side of the river on the afternoon of Sunday, January 2, had not been aware of there being a settlement at Big Bottom.
From the ridge [reads an account by Samuel Hildreth] they had a view of all that part of the bottom, and could see how the men were occupied, and the defenseless condition of the block house. After completing their reconnaissance and holding a council as to the mode of attack, they crossed the river on the ice a little above, and divided their warriors into two divisions; the larger one to assault the block house, and the smaller one to make prisoners of the men in the upper cabin without alarming those below.
The plan was skillfully arranged and promptly executed.
At the Choate cabin the raiders found those inside at supper. A few of the Indians stepped through the door in a friendly manner and were offered something to eat. They at once pounced on and bound the settlers and told them they were prisoners.
At the blockhouse the slaughter took but minutes. One stout Indian smashed open the door and stood by to keep it open while others outside opened fire through the unchinked logs.
The inhabitants had also been at supper. One man, Zebulon Troop from Massachusetts, was frying meat and fell dead in the fire. Several others fell at the discharge. The Indians then rushed in and killed the rest with tomahawks.
Everything happened so fast there was no resistance, except for the wife of the Virginian Isaac Meeks, a stout backwoods woman who, seeing her husband shot dead and her children killed with tomahawks, seized an ax and in rage struck a blow at the head of the Indian who opened the door. Only a slight turn of the head saved his skull and her ax sliced through his cheek and into the shoulder. She was instantly killed with the tomahawk of another of the Indians.
A young man named John Stacy tried to escape out a window. When spotted by Indians outside as he clambered onto the roof, he begged to be spared, saying he was the only one left. They shot and killed him.
After the slaughter ended, the scalps taken, and the raiders proceeded to round up the plunder, sixteen-year-old Philip Stacy was discovered hiding under a pile of bedding in the corner of the room. He, it was decided, would be spared and along with the two Choates taken away as captives.
As for the Bullards, they, at the first sound of the Indians near their cabin, had snatched up their rifles and barely escaped out the door and into the woods. It was they who would sound the alarm.
Fourteen people had been killed in the attack. Before leaving the scene the raiders piled up the bodies and lit the blockhouse on fire, and expecting all traces of what had taken place to go up in flame, they went on their way. But it was a building of still green logs, and except for the floor and roof, it did not burn. Neither did the bodies, though most were charred and blackened beyond recognition.
Word of the massacre spread rapidly and struck terror as nothing had since the first settlers came ashore at the Point. The time had come, said Rufus Putnam, “to prepare for the worst.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Havoc
Beware of surprise! You know how the Indians fight us.
—GEORGE WASHINGTON
The sad and dreadful havoc of our army at the westward cast a gloom over us all.
—ABIGAIL ADAMS
I.
For more than three years Rufus Putnam had devoted all he had in time and strength to his frontier settlement on the Ohio and despite continuing setbacks and adversities of every variety he had seen progress such as had, until then, been only talked about or dreamed of.
Now, suddenly, all seemed threatened with annihilation. The Indians were claiming that by the time spring arrived there would be no more smoke coming from a settler’s cabin anywhere along the Ohio. As Putnam himself said, “A horrid savage war stares us in the face.” How or where it would begin, how long it might go on, there was no telling.
The situation at Marietta was critical. Most of the troops stationed at Fort Harmar had been sent downriver at the time of General Harmar’s unfortunate attack on the Indians, leaving behind only a small detachment comprised mainly of invalids. But Putnam also knew that in the face of adversity the people of Marietta had, as said, “spunk to the backbone.”
On January 5, he called a special meeting in the northwest blockhouse, where it was resolved that additional fortifications were necessary for the safety and defense of the settlement, these to be built without delay on the Point at Marietta, and at Belpre, and that six experienced backwoods hunters be hired as rangers or “spies” to go out daily into the surrounding wilderness over a route of roughly twenty miles to watch for any signs of a surprise attack. Meantime, all who could in Marietta
were to take up residence after dark inside the stockade, which itself was to be much improved by additional defenses.
Under orders from Governor St. Clair, Campus Martius was to be kept under strict discipline. The men, divided into squads, were called to their posts at daylight, while through the night four other squads kept watch at the bastions. Sentries were set and the watchword cried every half hour. Cannon were mounted in the northeast and southwest blockhouses, and especially to be fired as alarm signals to residents at home or at work in the surrounding fields, who were then to go directly to their alarm posts within the walls.
Rufus Putnam was said to have had a stormy temper—it was thought to have been one of his few human flaws—but seldom if ever seen. Then on January 6, in a letter to the governor of Massachusetts, Caleb Strong, the general exploded in outrage at the apparent indifference back home to the situation in which he and the people of Marietta found themselves. Because of “the prudence of our people, the friendship with which we treated the natives, we remained in a state of general quiet without any apprehension from the Delawares and other tribes, till the [Harmar] expedition. . . .
“If therefore we had no claim to the protection of government before, I trust we have now.
For a parent to invite his children to gather plumbs under a hornet’s nest, and then beat the nest without giving them notice to get out of the way or covering them, while he provokes the hornets, has something so cruel in its nature that the mind revolts at the idea. . . . I ask are not allegiance and protection reciprocal? Have we not given the most unequivocal proof of our allegiance and love of our country with constitutional government, through the revolution and ever since? Why then in the name of God will you not protect us?
Two days later on January 8, Putnam sent another frantic letter, this time to President Washington. The situation had become “truly critical,” he wrote. The garrison at Fort Harmar, consisting by then of little more than twenty men, offered no protection, the number of men in the settlement capable of bearing arms did not exceed 287, and many of these were badly armed.
The situation of our people is nearly as follows:
At Marietta are about 80 houses in the distance of one mile with scattering houses for three miles up the Ohio; a set of mills at Duck Creek four miles distant and another mill two miles from Marietta; up the Muskingum 22 miles distant is a settlement of about 20 families; and on Wolf Creek about 18 miles from Marietta is a set of mills where are five families. Down the Ohio and opposite Little Kenhawa, commences the settlement of Belpre, which extends on the bank of the river with little interruption about twelve miles, and contains six block-houses and can muster about sixty fighting men. Before the late disaster [Big Bottom] we had several other settlements which had commenced, and are now entirely abandoned. . . . [I] beg leave with the greatest deference to observe that unless government speedily sends a body of troops for our protection we are a ruined people.
. . . and only observe further, that our present situation is truly distressing. I do therefore most earnestly implore the protection of government for myself and friends inhabiting these wilds of America. To this we consider ourselves justly entitled and rest assured that so far as you, sir, have the means in your power, you will grant it.
In yet another letter written the same day, to Secretary of War Henry Knox, Putnam said much the same as he had to the president, but adding, “better that [the] government disband their troops now in the [Northwest] country, and give it up altogether than be wasting the public money in supporting a few troops totally inadequate to the purpose of giving peace to the territory.”
The weather was cold and miserable, with ice on the Ohio and extreme tension everywhere as work on the defenses proceeded with all possible speed. Still, nothing out of the ordinary happened as the weeks passed, nothing until March.
On Sunday, March 13, two of the rangers employed to keep watch against surprise attack, Captain Joseph Rogers and Edward Henderson, on return from duty up the Muskingum were suddenly attacked a mile north of the stockade. Four Indians rose up from behind a log and shot Rogers through the chest. As he fell Rogers told Henderson to run for his life, he himself was “a dead man.”
Henderson managed to escape, but Rogers was later found both dead and scalped and there was to be much talk about him and the ominous dream he had had the night before.
Rogers was a veteran soldier from Pennsylvania in his fifties who had seen much. He it was who had accompanied General Parsons in the canoe when Parsons was killed trying to shoot the rapids on the Beaver River. Calm by nature, he was not one known for flights of fancy, but as he had told others earlier that morning, he was much shaken by a dream he had had the night before that he was to kill an Indian that day, or be killed himself. On his way out the gate he had remarked to the guards, “Well, boys, today we take a scalp, or lose one.”
Alarm guns and cannon were fired at the stockade. It was not just that Rogers had been killed but that the Indians were said to have chased Henderson all the way to the gate.
“All was consternation,” wrote Joseph Barker, who, with his family, was still quartered in the garrison, and who went on to describe the scene in his own distinctive way:
Everyone made immediately for his alarm post. . . . The first person for admittance at the central blockhouse was Col. E. Sproat with a box of papers, then came some young men with their arms, then a woman with her bed and children, then came old Mr. William Moulton, from Newburyport, aged 70, with his leather apron full of old goldsmiths tools and tobacco. His daughter Anna brought the China teapot, cups and saucers. Lydia brought the great Bible, but when all were in mother was missing. Where was mother? She must be killed. No, says Lydia, mother said she would not leave a house looking so, she would put things a little to rights, and then she would come. Directly mother came, bringing the looking glass, knives, forks, and spoons, etc. . . . All returned to their homes in the morning and a party from the Point and Campus Martius went out about 10 o’clock, and brought in Capt. Rogers and buried him.
With the advance of spring more scouts were ambushed on duty. Indians killed Benoni Hurlburt at Belpre, James Kelly at Bellville, and captured his small son, Joseph. On the Virginia side of the Ohio, seven miles from Marietta, four white men were killed, three others taken prisoners. On June 16, just above the mouth of the Muskingum, the elderly Mathew Kerr from Ireland, one of the earliest of Marietta settlers, was gunned down and scalped.
It was a loss deeply felt in the settlement and shortly afterward that summer of 1791, Kerr’s son, Hamilton, and several others happened on a party of six Indians near Mill Creek and, as would be said, Hamilton was unable to resist the opportunity to gratify his revenge. He not only shot and killed an Indian but cut off his head, fixed it to the end of a pole, and marched it back to the stockade.
Horace Nye, one of Ichabod Nye’s several sons, would remember as a small boy going out the gate with his mother and seeing Kerr and others bringing home the trophy. “Some whites are more savage than the Indians,” Horace would write recalling the scene.
In Philadelphia, meantime, President Washington made certain Congress became well aware of General Putnam’s call for help. There was talk of raising an army of 4,000 or more.
On May 3, Congress, having decided something had to be done, authorized Governor St. Clair to raise a force of 2,000 to put down the native confederacy and to do so without delay. The major general appointed to command the army was Arthur St. Clair, who was also to remain governor of the territory.
It was a tall order. The government had virtually no troops or money and the Ohio frontier, “the far west,” was in itself no easy matter to contend with, Indians or no Indians. And then there was the choice of St. Clair to take command.
A native of Scotland who had come to America as a young officer in the British Army, he had married an American, Phoebe Bayard of Boston, and with money inherited from her estate purchased 4,000 acres in the Ligonier Valley of western Penns
ylvania, making him then the largest resident landowner west of the Allegheny Mountains.
At the start of the Revolution he had enlisted at once in the American army. Rising rapidly from the rank of colonel to brigadier general, he was with Washington at the battles of Trenton and Princeton. However, when put in command of Fort Ticonderoga, a stronghold widely believed to be impregnable, he ordered its evacuation, a decision that, as said, “filled the public mind with much dismay.” Though exonerated by a court-martial that followed, he was to receive no further assignment of consequence for the remainder of the war.
Many on the frontier thought him arrogant and overly determined to dominate. Further, by that spring of 1791 he was at fifty-five noticeably aged, overweight and in poor health, suffering from ague and gout. Much of the time the pain of swelling joints caused by gout was such that he could hardly walk.
In early May during a visit to Fort Washington at Cincinnati he found the quantity of arms and other military supplies available insufficient for a major campaign.
Many of those on hand were hard at work. Indeed, the fort had “as much appearance of a large manufactory on the inside, as it had of a military post on the outside.” An armory had to be built since the arms of the detachment were nearly all in bad order. Blacksmiths, carpenters, harness makers, colliers, wheelwrights were all in great need.
The expedition was supposed to have been under way by July 10. With time running out, it became even more apparent how much had still to be done. Weeks passed. Pressure from Philadelphia grew greater. “The President of the United States still continues anxious that you should at the earliest moment, commence your operations,” wrote Secretary of War Knox to St. Clair on August 4. Again on August 11 and again on August 25, Knox wrote to say how greatly the president lamented the delays.
The Pioneers Page 10