That Dark and Bloody River

by Allan Eckert

  Crawford’s force neared the grove on the other side, and the commander and his men could hear the distant gunfire coming from the northern fringe of the island of trees. Following the trail, they thundered up the low wooded hill to the glen where Rose had deposited his baggage. Recognizing the advantage the elevation on this slight hill would play as a defensive position, the commander selected its crest as a core for their stand. He ordered a number of the companies to spread out on the perimeter of the entire woodland, drive out any enemy encountered and hold the ground. Immediately, then, he led the remainder of his troops down the northern slope of the wooded knoll to the relief of Rose’s detachment.

  None of Rose’s men had been killed, either in the ambush or during the three-mile retreat, although a couple were slightly wounded. Rose reported, however, that he believed that at least a couple of the attacking Indians had been killed, despite the advantage their ambush afforded. It was difficult to be certain, however, because of the shoulder-high grasses.

  Even though all this initial fighting had occurred on the northern and eastern perimeters of the woodland, a rumor soon circulated that, under cover provided by the tall grasses, the Indians had spread out around the entire grove. Whether true or not, those on the northern side provided little target for the Americans as they popped up into sight only long enough to aim and fire, then squatted again, hidden, to reload.

  The battle of Sandusky was on.

  Capt. John Hoagland, who had so brashly advocated going on, against the advice of Jonathan Zane, soon became one of the first casualties. A ball struck him in the forehead and knocked him lifeless to the ground.525 A short time later Pvt. James Little also fell dead, when he momentarily stepped from behind his protective tree and took a bullet in the center of his throat that broke his neck.

  Crawford was informed that the Indians had penetrated the southeastern end of the grove, and he ordered several companies to drive them out, which they did after a brief hot fight, during which Capt. James Munn pursued several warriors into the grass, only to be sent sprawling when a bullet passed through his right leg just above the ankle.526 A Wyandot with upraised tomahawk raced past screaming and Munn tried to scramble out of the way, but his leg was broken and he was unable to lunge as much to the side as he intended. It was enough to save his life, but the tomahawk grazed him and laid open the side of his face. Before other warriors could rush up and finish the job, one of Munn’s privates, William Brady, hoisted him onto a horse and plunged back into the woodland with him.527 The private brought him to the knoll where the wounded were being treated, and Dr. John Knight skillfully set Munn’s leg and bandaged his face.

  At the same time, Indians all along the woodland’s northern perimeter continued firing from the grasses. If there were Indians on the south side of the grove, they were keeping well hidden and the way seemed open for retreat, but, though Crawford seriously considered such a move, he decided against it, figuring it to be a trap where his force, strung out in a retreat march, could be successfully ambushed by unseen Indians already in hiding in the tall grasses.528

  Pvt. Jonas Sams had taken a position behind a huge, relatively isolated black oak standing at the very edge of the northern flank of the woods. Unlike so many of his fellow volunteers, who were firing at every movement of the grass, real or imagined, he chose his targets with care. At age 26, he was an experienced hunter and woodsman, and well knew the value of waiting to let the quarry betray itself.529 When the call had been raised for this campaign against the Sandusky towns, he had ridden with other militia members from Thorn’s Tavern—located on the road from Redstone to Washington village—to the rendezvous at Mingo Bottom.

  Using a Pennsylvania rifle that shot a .69 caliber ball, Jonas Sams methodically selected his targets and fired with considerable success throughout the day. Specializing in long shots, by the end of a few hours he had fired his rifle 18 times and knocked down at least half of the Indians at whom he had aimed, with little doubt in his mind that he had killed the majority of those who fell. At one point he spotted a British officer a considerable distance away, clad all in white except for his hat and boots. Jonas took a bead on him and fired. The range was even greater than he thought, and the ball ripped through the grasses short of his target. Jonas reloaded and, revising his aim, shot again. As he later wrote to his father:

  the second time I fetcht him to the ground. He was a great way off but I had a gun that carried almost an ounce ball and I raised the hind sight the second time and he fell off his white horse.530

  A short while later Sams again shot an Indian, and, spotting another within range, he got in too much of a hurry and dropped a fresh ball into the barrel of his gun before putting in the gunpowder. Because of this, he was forced to run back into the woods to get the jammed ball out by on-briching it.531 While doing so, he was disgusted to see a number of the volunteers hiding from the Indian gunfire, cowering behind fallen trees or in root holes, either not firing their rifles at all or occasionally shooting at random, without aiming and without the least possibility of hitting an enemy.532 Once he got the ball out and properly reloaded his weapon, he raced back to the isolated oak tree and continued to fire at the Indians until it got too dark to see them.

  Casualties were fairly light during the first few hours and, in the middle of the afternoon, convinced that the Indian force attacking them was not as strong as at first believed, Col. David Williamson sought out Col. Crawford and requested permission to take a detachment of 200 men and make a sudden charge out of the woods to engage them. Crawford, however, continued to believe it would be ill advised to divide his force and, much to Williamson’s dismay, rejected the plan. Crawford was correct in his refusal because, as the day wore on, it became evident that the Indian force ranged in numbers from 600 warriors to as many as 1,000, perhaps more. Pvt. Hugh Workman of Leet’s light horse had been paying close attention to how many Indians were arrayed against them and he was appalled by the odds, concluding that there were no fewer than 1,000 warriors on hand, plus the British Rangers, making the odds greater than two to one against the Americans.533

  Not long after the battle first broke out, the rifle of Pvt. John Sherrard of Capt. Biggs’s company became jammed and useless. Looking for some way to continue helping, he approached Dr. Knight at the knoll, who was having a tough time keeping up in his care for the wounded. The surgeon, in the process of treating Pvt. John McDonald, whose right thigh had been broken by a ball, suggested that since Sherrard had no weapon, he scout around in the woods and try to find a spring or some other source of water for the men, wounded or otherwise, who were suffering from thirst because of the acrid smoke that so severely burned their throats.

  Sherrard methodically searched the woods for the better part of an hour before he finally located a deep pool of stagnant water in the root hole of a large storm-toppled tree. From that point on, while the battle continued raging about him, he made frequent trips to the pool, filling canteens and other containers and bringing the water to the wounded and to the soldiers still actively fighting. The water was warm and distasteful, but it was wet and the soldiers accepted it gratefully. Unfortunately, it was also contaminated and, within just a few hours, the men who drank it began getting very sick, weak and feverish and were wracked by vomiting.

  By four in the afternoon, the noise of the gunfire was deafening and the fighting had become quite general all along the grove’s northern perimeter. A pall of murky bluish-white smoke drifted wraithlike through the trees and hung like an evil mist over the prairie. Several of the horses of the volunteers had been killed or injured early in the fighting, and by this time all that could be reached and moved had been taken well into the woods.

  While directing the defense amid the trees, Col. Crawford reached for the powderhorn on his hip, but it was shattered and carried away by a ball only an instant before he would have grasped it. A nearby private who had two powderhorns stepped up and, grinning, handed the extra one to his commande
r. “Try to take better care of this one, sir,” he said jokingly. An instant later that soldier’s grinning was ended for a long time, or perhaps permanently, as his upper lip was shot away.534

  In the midst of all the thunder of gunfire, shrieks, yells and cries of pain, there came the wholly unexpected sound of singing. It was Pvt. John Gunsaula. His rifle had misfired and, in checking it for the reason, he found that he had fired so much that a charred residue of gunpowder was coating the underside of his flint, preventing it from creating a spark when it struck the pan. So now, seated on a log with his hunting knife in hand, he unconcernedly sang a Dutch melody of his youth while he picked his flint with the tip of his knife, bit by bit cleaning off the black debris.

  “Mighty nice singin’, John.” The voice of Pvt. Daniel Canon drifted down to him from above, and Gunsaula looked up and waved, continuing to sing through his smile. High overhead in the treetop, Canon and a few other men had found a far more advantageous and successful location than ground level for spotting their attackers. Their gaze moved back and forth continuously as they watched the grasses beyond the trees, anticipating that telltale movement of the foliage that would indicate the hiding place of a warrior who would sooner or later rise to shoot and would instead meet a bullet from one of these sharpshooting snipers.

  By late afternoon, a number of squaws had come forward and joined in the affray in their own way. Beating on kettles with sticks and screeching in shrill, harsh voices, they added significantly to the din in an effort to further intimidate and demoralize the Americans. When they happened across dead Americans, most of them already scalped, they took their weapons and goods and stripped them of their clothing. If the dead they encountered were Indians, they quickly carried them off. Mortally wounded prisoners they encountered were dispatched with tomahawks or knives, scalped and similarly stripped of anything worthwhile. Any soldiers not mortally wounded were carried off as prisoners to the villages to be questioned and most likely tortured to death.

  It was from one such prisoner that the Indians learned that Col. David Williamson, perpetrator of the Moravian Massacre, was with the Americans as second in command. At once plans were discussed about how they might be able to kill him.

  Later in the afternoon, Simon Girty, riding a large gray horse, appeared alone at a distance, a white cloth of truce hanging from the end of a pole tilted over his shoulder. So far as could be seen, he was unarmed. When a slight lull came in the firing, he cupped his mouth and called out loudly:

  “I want to talk to Colonel Williamson. The Indians are agreeable to talking peace if he will come out to meet me and discuss terms.”

  Someone among the defenders yelled back for Girty to wait while the colonel was summoned. Girty, responding with a wave, remained sitting quietly astride his horse. At the end of some ten minutes, Col. Williamson, on foot, appeared at the fringe of the woods, accompanied by several volunteers and Dr. Knight. The latter had known Girty well at Fort Pitt, and there had been a degree of friendship between them at one time. Col. Williamson had known Girty, too, but he viewed the distant horseman with distaste; no love had ever been lost between himself and Girty at Fort Pitt. In fact, eight years ago, just before Dunmore’s War, he and Girty had been engaged in a brawl, until Girty, who was getting the worst of it, was unexpectedly rescued by a huge young frontiersman who turned out to be Simon Kenton. Now the officer motioned those with him to stay where they were among the trees, and he took several steps out into the open.

  “Girty!” he called. “This is Dave Williamson. What do you want?”

  “Peace talk,” Girty shouted in return. “Just you’n me to start. Let’s end this damn fight right now. C’mon out here, an’ you an’ me’ll talk it out.”

  “So you can kill me when I get close?” Williamson replied scornfully.

  “I ain’t got no weapons,” Girty replied. “Tell you what. You come seven steps forward an’ stop, an’ I’ll do the same.”

  Williamson considered this a moment and then stepped forward seven paces and stopped. Girty kneed his horse forward even more than that and stopped, the movement carrying him within range of a good shot. Immediately one of the volunteers at the fringe of the woodland leveled his rifle and took a bead on Girty, and was in the process of squeezing the trigger when Dr. Knight’s hand closed across the cocked hammer and thwarted the shooting.

  “What’s the matter with you, man?” he growled. “You don’t shoot a man under a flag of truce.”

  Almost on the heels of this little tableau, an Indian suddenly rose from hiding in the grasses, hardly 30 yards from Williamson, and snapped off a shot at him. The ball missed, and the colonel wheeled and raced back behind the closest tree, a large sugar maple slightly apart from the grove. As he spun into cover behind the broad trunk, five or six other shots came from the grasses and slammed into the tree but did not harm the officer. Immediately the volunteers returned the fire, but neither Girty nor any of the Indians appeared to be hit. Girty, cursing loudly, wheeled his big gray horse around and galloped off in the deep grass.

  Once again the pitch of battle rose and continued as the day dwindled away. The Indians found a certain degree of both satisfaction and frustration in the prolonged fighting: satisfaction in the knowledge that their bullets were gradually taking a toll on the Americans boxed in within the island of trees, and frustration from the failure of the attempt to kill Col. Williamson and from the fact that these Americans had managed to get themselves ensconced in a defensive posture considerably to their advantage. Already too many Indians had been killed or wounded in the effort to draw them out of the timber and onto a more equal footing. Many of the younger, brasher warriors, overconfident in their fighting abilities, wanted merely to plunge into the woods and meet the Americans in hand-to-hand combat, but Pimoacan, Wingenund and Monakaduto dissuaded them of such a notion; it was not the Indian way to engage in a war of attrition. Nevertheless, not even the chiefs themselves were pleased with the results of the battle thus far.

  “Patience, my brothers,” Matthew Elliott told them. “You have them where you want them. They cannot go anywhere and they have no water, so they will very soon begin to suffer from the lack of it. It will drive them to do desperate acts, and men who are desperate make mistakes. You have only to hold them here until the artillery arrives, and then the woods will no longer protect them.”

  It was reassuring, but only because they were as yet unaware that the British artillery was bogged down in a marsh some seven or eight miles to the north; the exhausted horses were no longer able to budge the heavy guns.535

  Just before sunset a number of individual American soldiers, their eyes reddened and smarting from the searing mist of gunsmoke in which they had been fighting for so many hours, began making daring dashes out of the protective timber and into the prairie in search of the enemy. One of these was Pvt. Michael Myers, who took refuge behind a single large black walnut tree some distance from the grove. As he stood leaning against the tree and looking for an Indian to shoot, the bark of the tree exploded close to his head as it was struck by a ball, showering splinters painfully into his cheeks and forehead but luckily missing his eyes. Carefully peeking around the trunk in the direction from which the shot had come, Myers saw a warrior ducking down below his own cover, an oak that was the only other isolated tree in this area. The oak tree forked into two main trunks three feet above the ground, and Myers aimed his rifle steadily at the base of the V. A few moments later there was a movement, and the head of the hidden warrior came into view. The ball from Myers’s rifle struck him in the center of the forehead and carried away the whole back of his skull.

  A short while later, Myers detected a movement in the grass that he assumed was several Indians crawling along. Instead of shooting at the moving grass as so many others were doing, he waited, watching closely. Eventually the crawlers reached an area where the grasses were thinner and Myers saw one of them rise to shoot. He shot first, sending the Indian tumbling with a br
oken thigh and scattering his companions. Two of the army’s sentinels rushed out into the grass and one, who had a sword, cut off the wounded Indian’s head with a single hard slash.

  The other volunteers who had left the cover of the woods moved about in a stooped manner below the tops of the deep grasses, emulating the mode of fighting of their attackers, bobbing up to aim and fire, then ducking down again to reload before continuing their crouching search. But it was a very hazardous pursuit and so many were being wounded—Pvts. Joseph Edgington and James Bane among them—that Col. Crawford quickly sent out an order curtailing the practice.

  Pvt. Angus McCoy, while remaining in the fringe of timber, did not take advantage of the available cover but chose to stand fully exposed to the Indians as he fired. Remarkably, after several hours he remained unwounded, but his clothing had been riddled with holes from the balls that had so narrowly missed him.

  As evening came on and the twilight deepened, the heavy gunfire gradually diminished until it became only isolated and momentary exchanges. The question of whether the Americans were truly surrounded by the foe was more or less resolved when, in the growing darkness, fires sprang into life in a wide arc out of effective rifle range. Both to contain the Americans and to prevent their making a surprise night attack, the Indians built 50 or more individual fires, mainly along the northern rim of the woodland and around its eastern end, closest to the Sandusky River, but there were also scattered blazes on the southern flank and the western end. They kept the fires burning brightly all night. About the only areas that remained dark were those where the trail to the south passed through, and toward the southwest where an expansive cranberry bog was close to the grove.

  The day-long battle had left the Americans exhausted and victims of growing demoralization. They were all suffering from thirst, and those who had drunk the contaminated water from the root pool were miserable in their sickness and could no longer be considered effective fighting men. Worse yet, their supply of ammunition was precariously low; the hours of shooting had gravely diminished their powder and lead. As the soldiers refilled their powderhorns and shot pouches from the dwindling reserves, they were cautioned about excessive shooting and advised to choose their targets carefully and fire only when reasonably sure of hitting an enemy.