The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  The new troops left much to be desired as to material for an army soon to embark on a campaign into the unfamiliar wilderness of enemy country. They consisted largely of men collected from the streets and jails of eastern cities bribed into service with money and whiskey. Many of the officers, too, were seen to be “totally unacquainted with the business in which they were engaged.” The quartermaster and contractors in place were clearly well below standards.

  To General Josiah Harmar, it was “a matter of astonishment . . . that the commanding general [St. Clair], who was acknowledged to be perfectly competent, should think of hazarding . . . the lives of so many others.” But General Harmar was out of favor with the president and secretary of war and his views were no longer considered.

  The plan was to proceed north some 170 miles to the Maumee River, building a road through the dense forest as they went, all of which was certain to be slow-going. But one of the few positive lessons learned from the Harmar expedition was that building such a road was possible.

  Little or nothing was yet known of the size or makeup of the native forces to be confronted, or who was in command. General St. Clair was known to have little knowledge of or interest in Indians, and had given the matter no serious attention. His attitude seems to have been that so long as he did not encounter the enemy he need not worry. The problem could be dealt with if and when the occasion should arise.

  Until then the worst defeat ever suffered by an army in battle with American natives occurred in 1755, during the French and Indian War. The British general Edward Braddock, in command of some 1,400 British regulars and 700 American provincials, including young George Washington, had been ambushed and slaughtered in a heavily wooded ravine about eight miles from Pittsburgh, then the French Fort Duquesne.

  Thirty-three years later, when on the way to Marietta to take up his role as the first governor of the Northwest Territory, General St. Clair had been escorted from Pittsburgh to Marietta by young Ebenezer Denny. But before departing down the Ohio, Denny took St. Clair for a visit to Braddock’s Field, where the bones of the victims were still to be seen scattered through the woods.

  As St. Clair’s new command was now organized, Denny was to be with him almost constantly. Whether they ever recalled together their long past visit to the scene of Braddock’s defeat neither is known to have recorded.

  But months earlier, back in Philadelphia, at the close of a meeting between Washington, Knox, and St. Clair, just as St. Clair was about to return to Ohio to assume command, Washington’s parting words to him, as Washington would recall, had been, “Beware of surprise! You know how the Indians fight us.”

  As St. Clair organized his command, Winthrop Sargent, now to be Colonel Sargent, was his adjutant general, Major Denny, his aide-de-camp, and so it was to be three from Marietta largely in control.

  Most worrisome to Winthrop Sargent was the obvious lack of the essential “stamina of soldiers” so evident in the army itself.

  Picked up and recruited from the offscourings of large towns and cities; enervated by idleness, debaucheries and every species of vice, it was impossible they could have been made competent to the arduous duties of Indian warfare. . . . An extraordinary aversion to service was conspicuous among them. . . . They were, moreover, badly clothed, badly paid and badly fed.

  They had signed on for $2 a month, plus a whiskey allotment.

  By early September the greater part of the assembled troops were encamped on the banks of the Great Miami River, some twenty miles north of Fort Washington, where St. Clair began construction of another fortification to be named Fort Hamilton.

  By the end of September, the expedition that was supposed to have been under way by July 10, had still to get started, and morale among the troops grew worse by the day. On the night of October 3, one sergeant and twenty-five men deserted. The day after nine more followed.

  Finally, on October 4, with a great roll of drums, St. Clair’s army was on the march from Fort Hamilton, though not until noon because of certain “deficiencies” in packhorses.

  The army that was supposed to have numbered more than 4,000, then 2,000, now comprised approximately 1,700, and with it went some 200 camp followers, consisting of wives, mistresses, washerwomen, prostitutes, and a scattering of children with pets.

  II.

  The advance proceeded with much racket of drums, barking dogs, cattle bellowing, and innumerable undisciplined soldiers shouting and cursing, in addition to the constant crashing of trees being felled ahead. The clamor was intended, in the hope that a lot of noise and show made on the march might deter the enemy from daring to attack so mighty a force.

  Progress was slow. Not only was the forest dense with giant trees, but it was a part of Ohio about which little was known. St. Clair would later explain, “We had no guides, not a single person being found in the country, who had ever been through it, and both the geography and topography were utterly unknown.”

  The army crossed the Great Miami with little delay, the river in that season being quite low. But beyond the river, clearing a way for a cavalcade of packhorses, oxen, troops, and artillery proved extremely difficult. By day’s end they had progressed all of three miles. On the second day, the woods everywhere were so “compact” as to make the opening of a road most “tedious.” Even when marching single file they had to cut their way every step.

  Fair weather followed day after day. Still the advance remained no better than about four miles a day, the country getting even “rougher,” crowded with giant oaks, hickory, ash, walnut, sugar maples, and “a considerable portion of beech,” all, as Winthrop Sargent noted, indicating a “very rich land.”

  Not until October 12, after more than a week on the move, were the first signs of Indians seen, many tracks and the traces of camps old and recent.

  The day after, the army having advanced only a mile, General St. Clair called halt, having decided they had reached an acceptable, if not ideal location on a low knoll for another fort. By this time they had come sixty-eight miles from Fort Washington, forty-four miles from Fort Hamilton. There the army would remain encamped for another ten days.

  Two hundred men were put to work clearing land and laying a foundation. It was to be a small, square log fort.

  The good weather did not hold. Late in the day of October 14, heavy rains fell and continued through the night, the next day, and the following night. “Cold and wet.” “Weather very bad,” recorded Major Denny. The night of October 21, came a “very severe” frost and “ice upon the waters a half inch thick.”

  The troops, having been issued substandard tents, suffered severely. The substandard shoes issued were by now falling apart. Food was running low, their supply of bread nearly gone, due, as Denny noted, to “unpardonable mismanagement” in the provisions department. Of no small concern, too, was a serious decline in liquor.

  To face the emergency all the horses with the army were to be sent back to Fort Washington for supplies. When some of the men were asked to go with the horses, their reply was that if sent they would not return.

  On October 23, two artillery men who intended to desert to the Indians were, on orders from General St. Clair, tried, sentenced, and promptly hanged. Another man was hanged for shooting a comrade, and two more found sleeping on duty were subjected to fifty lashes each.

  All such miseries and suffering were greatly compounded by the physical incapacities and sufferings of the commander himself, whose physical condition had worsened. The excruciating grip of the gout had gotten to the point where he could no longer walk and had to be lifted onto his horse.

  On October 28, with the new fort nearly completed, a caravan of seventy-four horses loaded with 12,000 pounds of flour arrived, along with a few more horses loaded with clothing, and all to “good effect.”

  Clearly, the time for a decision had arrived—to push on to confront the enemy, about whom nothing was known, no matter the condition of morale or inexperience of the army, or call off the campai
gn and make an orderly withdrawal while that was still possible.

  “Our prospects are gloomy,” wrote Sargent, “. . . with the difficulties of transportation every day increasing by the season and to become still greater, as we add to our distance, may make events fatal to the whole army.”

  To what degree Sargent and Denny voiced such grave concerns to St. Clair is not known, but with so much at stake, it seems unlikely they would have held back. And just as surely, St. Clair’s past decision to abandon Fort Ticonderoga and the disapproval it had brought down on him must have figured now in his decision to push on, which, as he confided to Sargent, he saw as the one and only way to hold the army together. It was his secret design, he said, to get them deeper into enemy country, where the men “may be afraid to return.”

  As they were soon to learn, the force that lay in wait was large, highly experienced in wilderness warfare, and led by two exceptional commanders: the Miami war chief Little Turtle, who had so roundly defeated General Harmar, and the Shawnee war chief Blue Jacket, regarded by his contemporaries as a leader of exceptional wisdom and courage. In addition, they were thoroughly supplied with information about the advancing army by an ample number of scouts that included the young Shawnee warrior, Tecumseh.

  In total, the native force numbered some 1,000 warriors, representing eight more tribes other than the Miami and Shawnee—Delawares and Wyandots, Ottawas, Kickapoos, Chippewas, Pottawatomies, Mohawks from Canada, and Creeks from the south. Among them also, reportedly as an observer only, was the infamous Revolutionary War “turncoat,” Simon Girty, who had been captured in boyhood by Senecas, raised by them, and was still in the employ of the British.

  “The Indians were never in greater heart to meet their enemy, nor more sure of their success,” Girty wrote. “They are determined to drive them to the Ohio.”

  Incredibly, for General St. Clair, the unseen enemy was still a matter of little concern. On the first day of November, in a dispatch to Secretary Knox, he was happy to report, “The few Indians that have been seen were hunters only, who we fell upon by accident.”

  The army by then was again on the move, having pushed on in fair weather the morning of October 30. A small contingent of soldiers (“all men unable to march”) had been left to maintain the new stockade, Fort Jefferson. In one day, October 31, no fewer than sixty of those on the march deserted.

  As troubling as almost anything was the specter of the commander whose physical condition had so deteriorated that he now had to be carried like a corpse in a litter strung between two horses.

  During the march of November 2, in bitter weather all day, the army, hungry, cold, reduced by sickness and desertion, made eight miles. On November 3, in a “small flight of snow,” it marched another eight miles through low, damp woodlands, to a cramped piece of rising ground close by a branch of the Wabash River, and there the advance came to a halt.

  During the course of the night detachments of soldiers were supposed to have gone out to determine the enemy’s whereabouts and strength, but did not, on the excuse they were too tired. As the night passed separate shots were heard, fired “principally by our own sentinels, sometimes, no doubt, at the enemy,” wrote Winthrop Sargent, “but oftener, probably, without any object whatever.”

  III.

  The following morning—Friday, November 4—was intensely cold, but as Sargent recorded, the sky “unclouded.” The sun was not yet up. Campfires were blazing.

  The troops had already paraded as usual and been dismissed for breakfast, when, only minutes after sunrise, the woods to the front on the other side of the Wabash suddenly erupted with the yells of Indians, a sound that most of the soldiers, including Colonel Sargent, had never heard until then. “Not terrible, as has been represented,” Sargent thought, “but more resembling an infinitude of horse bells suddenly opening to you than any other sound I could compare it to.”

  All at once, a great number of painted warriors burst from cover and started firing, and almost at once the militia positioned several hundred yards in front, beyond the river, turned and fled. Then, Sargent wrote, “Close upon the heels of the flying militia followed the Indians,” estimated to have numbered at least 300.

  The rest of the troops were under arms almost instantly and “smart fire” was returned just as fire from the enemy began coming in from all sides. It was like nothing the army had been prepared for. Such was the noise, smoke, and speed of all that was happening, that all sense of order or direction vanished in an instant.

  “The enemy from the front filed off to the right and left, and completely surrounded the camp, killed and cut off nearly all the guards, and approached close to the lines,” wrote Ebenezer Denny.

  They advanced from one tree, log, or stump to another, under cover of the smoke of our fire. The artillery and musketry made a tremendous noise, but did little execution. The Indians seemed to brave everything, and when fairly fixed around us they made no noise other than their fire, which they kept up very constant and which seldom failed to tell.

  At one point, they took possession of part of the encampment, but on being exposed on what was comparatively clear ground, they were soon repulsed by troops led by General St. Clair himself on foot, despite all his agonies.

  When the attack came he had been in his camp bed. He had hurriedly put on his cocked hat, and greatcoat, and tottered out of his tent. With the help of three or four men, he had tried to mount a horse, but the animal, frightened by the gunfire, kept bolting, then was shot in the head and instantly killed. When another horse rushed into place, it, too, was shot and killed before St. Clair could be hoisted into the saddle. Refusing to wait any longer, he hobbled off on foot, his pains forgotten, he later claimed.

  The battalions in the rear charged several times, but the attackers, utterly fearless, only turned and fired back. “Indeed, they seemed not to fear anything we could do,” wrote Ebenezer Denny.

  They could skip out of reach of the bayonet and return, as they pleased. They were visible only when raised by a charge. The ground was literally covered with the dead.

  Atrocities were to be seen everywhere. Wounded men had been scalped while still alive, then flung onto campfires. Dead settler women lay scattered, some of their bodies cut in two, breasts cut off, then heaped on campfires.

  “The Indians fought like hellhounds,” said another soldier. But then so, too, did a number of soldiers. When an Indian fell wounded and tried to crawl away, a colonel named Darke, his sword drawn, rushed after him and cut his head off.

  Ohio, with its promise of the Garden of Eden, had suddenly become Hell on Earth.

  “I wish I could describe that battle,” one rifleman later wrote, “but I have not the power. . . . It seems like a wild horrid dream in which whites and savages . . . were all mixed together in mad confusion . . . melting away in smoke, fire, and blood amid groans, shouts, yells, shrieks.”

  The wounded were taken to the center, where it was thought to be most safe, and where many of those who had quit their posts unhurt had crowded together.

  General St. Clair, with others of the officers, tried to rally these men, and twice succeeded in moving them back to the lines, where, being left with few experienced officers, they gave up the fight and crowded back to the center again.

  Denny, who was in the thick of it, would write about all that he saw. Nothing, it seems, could induce those concentrated at the center to do anything in their own defense.

  As our lines were deserted the Indians contracted theirs until their shot centered from all points, and now meeting with little opposition, took more deliberate aim and did great execution.

  Exposed as to a crossfire, men and officers were seen falling in every direction. The distress, too, of the wounded made the scene such as can scarcely be conceived.

  A retreat had to be called. The battle had become a one-sided slaughter. A few minutes more and it would be too late. In Denny’s words, “Delay was death.”

  The only hope was that
the savages would be so taken up with plunder of the camp as not to follow after. No preparation could be made. Numbers of brave men must be left a sacrifice, there was no alternative.

  Shortly past nine o’clock St. Clair gave the order. In a matter of minutes the army was in full desperate retreat, a scene of utter panic and chaos. Guns, ammunition, knapsacks were thrown aside, littering the road for miles.

  A great number of the wounded were left behind, including General Richard Butler, who had been notably harsh with Indians in previous treaty negotiations and who had often been criticized for knowing so little about the Indians. Too severely wounded to be moved, Butler was left propped against a tree. Found by several of the warriors, he was tomahawked, scalped, and reportedly his heart cut out and divided into pieces to be distributed among the different tribes that fought in the battle.

  Many more of the wounded left behind—men, women, and children—were massacred, their bodies desecrated.

  One of the Delaware chiefs taking part in the battle was old Captain Pipe, who had once given such a warm welcome to Rufus Putnam and the others on their arrival at Marietta. According to his own account, he now distinguished himself differently, slaughtering white men until his arm was “weary with the work.”

  The hope that the enemy might pursue the army a short distance only, so exultant would they be over their triumph and the spoils left behind at the camp, proved to be what happened. The escaping survivors of the battle were pursued little more than a few miles and by only a few Indians, though those rushing headlong to get away were unaware of this.