That Dark and Bloody River

by Allan Eckert

  Col. Williamson shrugged. “Just a mention of it, John,” he said. “No details. What happened?”

  McCulloch shook his head. “Case of pure bad luck turning into pure good luck. Happened a couple of weeks ago—February sixteenth, I think it was. Carpenter’s got a little place on Buffalo just below Ramsey’s. Party of six Delawares surprised ’im. Said two of ’em spoke good Dutch and claimed they were Moravians. Anyway, they took him and his two horses and swam over the Ohio. Carpenter said the horses had never been in big water and he thought they were going to lose ’em before they got across. The Indians roughed him up a lot when they got to the other side. Saw a number of other war parties heading down Tuscarawas toward the Moravian towns. His party made camp eventually on Tuscarawas and hobbled the horses. Guess he could hardly walk by that time, but they sent him out to get the horses anyway. He followed their tracks and found the horses had circled around the camp and got back to the trail they’d come on. He found ’em headin’ back for the Ohio. Figured the Indians were probably going to kill him when they got to their village, so decided to take a chance on escaping. Took the hobbles off and lit out with the two horses. Came back by way of Fort Laurens and Pittsburgh and got in all right.”

  “He said war parties were heading down the Tuscarawas?” Williamson asked.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “To the Moravian towns?”

  McCulloch shrugged. “Presumably. Don’t know if he knew for sure.”

  “Well, we’ll soon find out,” Williamson said grimly. “What else?”

  Zane spoke up. “Worst one recently was the hit on Wallace’s place up Raccoon.” He went on to explain that last week a fairly large war party of Wyandots crossed over near the mouth of Little Beaver and struck the cabin of Robert Wallace on Raccoon Creek. Wallace himself had gone off early in the morning to Washington village, formerly Catfish Camp. When he got home that evening, he found his wife, Jane, and their three children gone. Two of the children were boys; James, 10, and Bob, only two and a half, while the third child was Sarah Jane, a nursing infant. The cabin had been plundered of everything of value, the furniture destroyed, the cabin itself broken up and his cattle all shot to death. Wallace raised a party of men and they started to follow, but a snowfall quickly obliterated the tracks and they had to return. Wallace, aflame with desire for vengeance, swore he would make himself part of the first force to be raised to cross the Ohio and crush the Indians.

  The closest attack to Wheeling recently, Zane had gone on, occurred three days ago, only three miles below Fort Henry, at the sugar camp established by Sam Boggs a few weeks ago on Boggs’ Run. The camp consisted of a new cabin, a half-face cabin, and a number of troughs for sap collection. When Boggs had requested a couple of the militia soldiers from Fort Henry to serve as guards, two privates—Hugh Cameron and Richard Davids—were assigned to the duty. Boggs had hardly begun his operation, however, when he discovered the tracks of a pair of Indians close by, so he immediately moved his family to Wheeling. Cameron and Davids, however, did not think the tracks of two Indians constituted much of a threat and decided to remain at the camp for a while to make some syrup. They had been at work only a few hours when the Indians crept up and fired on them. Davids was not hit, but Cameron was shot through the hand. It was not a serious wound, but he was so terrified that when Davids shouted “To the fort!” and raced off, Cameron simply stood where he was, quaking with fear, and allowed the Indians to rush up and capture him. They started taking him away, but then one of the Indians, fancying the new hat Cameron was wearing—a black wool cap bound with white linen—drove his tomahawk into the back of Cameron’s neck, severing his spine and killing him. They then scalped him and took his gun, as well as his hunting shirt and new hat, and fled.

  The very boldness of such attacks so close to the largest and strongest settlement on the Ohio River had led the settlers to appeal to Gen. William Irvine to mount an expedition to punish the hostile Indians. The general said he approved of the idea but could not commit Continental troops to such an operation without higher approval. However, he notified the county lieutenant of Westmoreland County, Col. James Marshall, that if he wished to raise a militia force to march against the hostiles, believed now to be operating out of the former Moravian towns on the Tuscarawas, he could certainly do so. Col. Marshall issued a call and raised 100 men for such an expedition, then assigned his second in command, Col. David Williamson, to lead it. They were to rendezvous at Wheeling with their own food and weapons and horses and march on the Moravian towns from there.

  So now they had assembled in Wheeling, and Col. Williamson, having met with Col. Zane and the McCulloch brothers, was more than ever determined to punish the offenders. Without further delay, he issued an order for the expedition to begin.

  [March 5, 1782—Tuesday]

  The Moravian Indians were in a very pitiable state. Though the winter had been exceptionally mild, they had nevertheless suffered terribly in their makeshift quarters at the Captives’ Town on the upper Sandusky River. Hunger continued to be the greatest menace to their survival. The leader of these Delaware converts, Abraham—Chief Netawatwees—had been unflagging in continuing his pleas to Chief Monakaduto to allow a party of the Moravians, led by himself, to return to their towns to salvage whatever small amount of unharvested corn might have weathered the winter. At last Monakaduto had given in.

  A party of 150 of the Moravian men, women and children had made the difficult march back to the Tuscarawas, where they split into three groups of 50 each. One, under Abraham, would work in the Gnadenhütten area, gathering what could be found of the crops still in the fields. A second group at the Salem Village, some 12 miles downstream from Gnadenhütten, would do the same, as would the final group at Schoenbrun, a like distance upstream.

  As it turned out, more of the crops remained, especially corn, than they had dared to hope for, and they worked diligently to gather it up, clean and dry it and store it in old cloth and skins sewn into sacks. They were still busily engaged in this work today when a large party of warriors arrived at Gnadenhütten, returning from their raids across the upper Ohio. They had prisoners with them, along with a considerable amount of plunder from the American settlements, and they boasted loudly of the success of their raids and of the people they had killed without the loss of a single warrior.

  “You should not have come here,” Abraham chided them. “We have troubles enough already. You are not welcome, and we wish you to go.”

  The warriors laughed and said they would leave only when they were ready to go, but it was obvious that some among them were anxious to push on. For a little while the warriors mingled with the Moravians and even traded a few items for corn to fill their pouches. But before long they did leave, heading for the Sandusky Valley.

  Shortly after their departure, Abraham held a meeting with the elders of all three Moravian villages to discuss what they should do at this point. There was a distinct fear that the Americans might be following the war party and would show up here, but Abraham calmed them.

  “Even should that happen,” he said reassuringly, “we have nothing to fear. The Americans know we are not hostile; they know we are Christians and have taken the hand of God and wish harm for no one. They have long known of our peaceable ways and of our innocence in any of those bad things that may have occurred.”

  The discussion continued for a long time and, in the end, they accepted what Abraham proposed: that they would begin at once to gather up the small residue of corn remaining in the fields now, clean and pack it. That would take only one more day and as soon as the task was finished, they would head for the Captives’ Town with the desperately needed grain.

  [March 8, 1782—Friday]

  Col. David Williamson’s little army of 100 militiamen had been sickened by what they found shortly after leaving Wheeling and crossing the Ohio River. They had not traveled more than six or eight miles along the path leading toward the Tuscarawas when they enc
ountered two bodies that had obviously been deliberately left for them to find. The bodies had been impaled on two saplings trimmed of branches, cut off at a height of about five feet and the standing ends sharpened. The victims, tomahawked, scalped and nude, had been thrust down over these stakes and wedged there, face up; a warning to any who might be following.

  One of the bodies was that of Jane Wallace; the other, her infant daughter, Sarah Jane.476

  Robert Wallace was a private in Williamson’s force, and his grief and rage at the hideous discovery of his wife and daughter communicated itself with remarkable intensity to the others. They wept along with Wallace as the bodies were gently removed, wrapped together in a blanket and buried, and they resolved among themselves to “make the savages pay” for this unconscionable outrage.

  Two days later, as evening approached, they were within a mile of Gnadenhütten, mere hours after the war party had passed through. The horses and men had been pushed hard, and Col. Williamson ordered his men to make a cold camp for the night, establish a strong sentry patrol, eat some food, and get as much sleep as they could in order to start off fresh in the morning for the village. During the evening, as they ate, they discussed their plan of approach for the morning.

  In the morning Williamson sent out a detachment under Capt. Charles Bilderback, a greatly overweight man with the reputation of being the type of individual who shoots first and asks questions later.477 A cooper by trade, Bilderback had settled near the mouth of Short Creek four or five years earlier. His instructions were to circle around along the Tuscarawas and then approach from the north while the main force approached from the southeast. The detachment moved away quickly, and just before reaching the river it came upon one of the Moravian converts, a young Delaware named Kemah, who had taken the Christian name of Jacob. He had been sent out early from the village to catch a horse that had wandered off, and the detachment had intercepted him before he realized they were near. One look at the expressions of the men convinced Kemah that they meant to kill him. He dropped to his knees and clasped his hands together in front of him, addressing his comments to Bilderback, who was in the front of the squad.

  “Please,” he begged, “don’t kill me. I have done nothing. I am a Christian. My name is Jacob. Don’t kill me. I am not your enemy. I am—”

  His words were cut off as Bilderback jerked out a tomahawk and swung a vicious blow that struck Kemah in the temple, the narrow blade penetrating into his brain. He tumbled onto his side and his body was still twitching when they scalped him. With scarcely another look at him, the detachment continued toward the riverbank. Before reaching it, however, they passed a fairly large field of weatherbeaten corn.

  In that cornfield, squatting down while tearing cobs of dried corn from their husks and stuffing them into a sack, was another of the Delaware converts, Shabosh, or Joseph, brother of the wife of Kemah. He saw the squad of men coming before they saw him. He paused in what he was doing, largely hidden in the corn, and watched them closely, not sure at first who they were.

  The detachment would undoubtedly have seen him in a moment or so more had not their attention been distracted by a movement on the river ahead of them. It turned out to be yet another Delaware convert, paddling his canoe downstream, apparently arriving from Schoenbrun.

  As the squad passed at their closest point to him, Joseph abruptly recognized one soldier as a man he knew from Fort Pitt. He was just on the point of hailing him when one of the soldiers brought his rifle to his shoulder and it cracked crisply in the morning air. The man in the canoe half rose, flinging out his hands and losing his paddle, then toppled into the bottom of the canoe. The men in the squad yelped with glee and congratulated the shooter.

  Shabosh was stunned and uttered no sound, only crouched lower to avoid detection. As the soldiers moved farther away, he scrambled off on all fours in the other direction until safely out of their range, then leaped to his feet and ran through the remainder of the cornfield and into the woodland beyond. He continued to run, even there, and did not stop until he was a few miles away, at which point he crept into hiding and remained there, determined not to budge again until the following morning.

  In the meanwhile, Col. Williamson and the main party reached the Tuscarawas just below Gnadenhütten and saw a number of Indians in a cornfield on the opposite side of the river. The stream was running high and fast, risky for a horse crossing, so Williamson detached 15 men to go across with him in a large, boatlike sugar trough they found lying on the bank. It could carry a paddler and two men at a time, so it took the better part of half an hour for all 16 to get across. As soon as they were all on the other side, Williamson reassembled them and they moved toward the workers in the cornfield.

  The main part of the army, having waited until the colonel and his detachment had safely crossed, now moved into the village proper, expecting to find a large number of Indians there, but they discovered only two, a man and his wife, both of whom they killed instantly with their tomahawks to prevent their raising an alarm. When the men spread out to find others, John McCulloch went down near the riverbank and found two young boys there. Looking around and seeing no one else nearby, McCulloch spoke to them hurriedly. “You’re in danger. Go hide yourselves. Quickly!” The pair raced off at once.478

  As the detachment under Col. Williamson approached the cornfield across the river, the Indians saw them coming and rose up from their work. There were considerably more of them than Williamson at first realized: 48 men, women and youngsters, nearly all of whom had weapons. The colonel had the men of the detachment wave and hail them as friends and warmly shake hands when they came up to them. The leader, an elderly Indian with very long gray hair, introduced himself as Abraham Netawatwees, Delaware by birth and Christian by choice. He seemed very glad to see the Americans and was anxious to learn what had brought them here.

  Williamson introduced himself and then added blandly, “I come with good news. We have been sent here to take you back with us to the neighborhood of Fort Pitt where, in the future, you will be protected from all harm. You may quit your work here now; there is no need. Soon you will be given good food in abundance, warm clothing and sturdy shelter.”

  Abraham smiled broadly and enthusiastically shook the colonel’s hand again. For those of his followers who had not understood, he interpreted, and there were cries of joy and relief. They all remembered how last year some of their people had been taken to Fort Pitt in a similar manner and had been well treated by the commander of the fort and at length dismissed with fine gifts and tokens of lasting friendship. Because of that, the Moravian leader had no objection when Williamson smoothly added that as a show of good faith, Abraham’s people should surrender their weapons, then all go back across the river immediately to rejoin the soldiers already in town. At Abraham’s order, his people turned their weapons over to the detachment and he then led the way to where they had beached their canoes. The trip back across was much more easily made with the canoes.

  On a high point of ground some distance west of the river, two of the Moravian Delawares, John Martin and his son, Little John Martin, watched curiously and with a faint stirring of concern over what was happening. They saw the detachment cross the river and greet the Moravians in the cornfield in what seemed to be a very friendly manner, complete with handshakes. Still not sure exactly what was going on, Martin directed his son to go over to the town, while he would himself go downstream to Salem to tell his Moravian brothers there what was happening at Gnadenhütten.

  By the time the river crossing was completed again, Col. Williamson had discovered from Abraham that 50 more of his people were at the Salem Mission, a dozen miles downstream. Before the Moravian leader had a chance to remark that another 50 were upstream at the Schoenbrun Mission, Williamson interrupted and suggested that he send at once for those at Salem to come to Gnadenhütten. Abraham dispatched a pair of runners for this purpose at once. Those runners, approaching Salem, encountered John Martin and two of th
e men from Salem coming toward Gnadenhütten to see what was happening. When it was explained, all five returned to Salem, announced the good news to the remainder there, and the whole group started the walk back to Gnadenhütten.

  Back at that village, all the Moravians on hand had assembled with the soldiers, and perhaps Col. Williamson might really have taken them back to Fort Pitt, but then something occurred that changed everything. Pvt. Robert Wallace abruptly uttered a cry of outrage and pointed at a young Delaware woman.

  “By damn!” he cried. “That’s Jane’s dress. She’s wearing my wife’s dress!”

  It was true. The young woman had gotten the somewhat bloodstained dress early yesterday from the hostile Indians that had passed through, giving one of them a pouchful of the dried corn in exchange for it. There was an immediate echoing cry of outrage from the soldiers. Were that not enough, the atmosphere quickly became even more tense when a volunteer pointed at a Moravian man who was wearing a hunting shirt and a black wool cap bound with white linen. He identified both as having belonged to Hugh Cameron, the soldier who had been slain at the Boggs’ Sugar Camp.

  At once the volunteers all brought their weapons to bear on the Indians. Greatly frightened, the Moravians tried to explain that they had just gotten those items of clothing in trade for corn from the party of Indians that had passed through the previous day. The militiamen were by this time in no mood to listen to any explanations; the clothing was, to them, clear proof that these Moravians, only suspected till now, were actually confederates of the hostiles.

  At Col. Williamson’s order, a further search of the village was made. All sorts of pewter tableware, clothing, guns, cookpots, basins and other goods were discovered and declared to be items stolen from settlers. They also found some horses with brands on them and said this proved them to be horses that had been taken from the settlements.