That Dark and Bloody River

by Allan Eckert

  483. On arrival at Half King’s Town, Edgington was forced to run the gauntlet, which he did bravely and well. Monakaduto liked what he saw and announced that he might adopt this white to take the place of his son Dakadulah, who had been killed six months earlier in the fight with Andrew Poe. Monakaduto’s wife, however, whom Edgington referred to as “the old queen,” objected so strenuously and pouted so much about it that Monakaduto gave up on the idea. Edgington was held captive in the village for three months before finally being sold to the British at Detroit. From there he was shipped to Montreal and then to Kingston on the Hudson River, from which place he was released and returned to the upper Ohio in March 1793, his family having moved back to Chartier’s Creek, not knowing whether he was still alive.

  484. John Heckewelder, in his account, is often flagrantly biased in his comments, yet there is some element of truth to the missionary’s assertions of unnecessarily cruel treatment by Girty to himself, Zeisberger and the other missionaries and their families. Heckewelder said that Girty, before leaving Lower Sandusky to accompany raids on the upper Ohio—including the one in which he and Scotach captured Thomas Edgington—ordered Levallie not to give the missionaries the comfort of being transported to Detroit by boat but instead to drive them before him as if they were cattle, all the way around the western rim of Lake Erie, not allowing them to rest nor even to halt so the women could nurse their babies. Instead, as soon as Girty departed, Levallie requested boats from Detroit to come to Lower Sandusky and transport the missionaries there. While awaiting the boats, Levallie became very nervous for fear Girty would return before they could leave. As Heckewelder relates it: “He did return and behaved like a madman on hearing that we were here, and that our conductor had disobeyed his orders, and had sent a letter to the commandant at Detroit respecting us. He flew at the Frenchman, who was in the room adjoining ours, most furiously, striking at him, and threatening to split his head in two for disobeying the orders he had given him. He swore the most horrid oaths respecting us, and continued in that way until after midnight. His oaths were all to the purport that he would never leave the house until he split our heads in two with this tomahawk and made our brains stick to the walls of the room in which we were! I omit the names he called us by, and the words he made use of while swearing, as also the place he would go to if he did not fulfill all which he had sworn he would do to us. He had somewhere procured liquor, and would, as we were told by those who were near him, at every drink renew his oaths, which he repeated until he fell asleep. Never before did any of us hear the like oaths, or know anyone to rave like him. He appeared like an host of evil spirits. He would sometimes come up to the bolted door between us and him, threatening to chop it to pieces to get at us. No Indian we ever saw drunk would have been a match for him. How we should escape the clutches of this white beast in human form no one could forsee.” While Girty was dead drunk one night, the Frenchman got them into boats sent from Detroit and transported the missionaries there, where they arrived on May 19. They were first quartered in an old fort barracks near the waterfront, then were transferred to quarters outside town in Yankee Hall, so called because only prisoners brought in by Indians were quartered there.

  485. The new temporary village of the Moravians was established on the site of present Defiance, Defiance Co., O. The Moravians subsequently removed from here and established a permanent village on the Thames River in Ontario, near present Chatham.

  486. Interestingly enough, Col. James Marshall, county lieutenant of Westmoreland County, who was one of the principal movers in putting this project into motion, was not present at the meeting, nor was Col. John Evans, Monongalia County lieutenant, but both had written to Gen. Irvine that they would “most heartily concur in any plan adopted for the good of the country.” Westmoreland County was instead represented at the meeting by its sublieutenant Col. Vallandigham. Also present were Col. Williamson, Col. Cook, Maj. Carmichael and Maj. Samuel McCulloch, as well as state legislature member James Edgar, among others.

  487. The Mingo Bottom rendezvous site was situated where the present Mingo Junction Filtration Plant is located.

  488. The actual crossing place was located some 400 yards short of a mile above the mouth of Cross Creek. While Mingo Island no longer exists, in 1782 it supported a heavy growth of large maples on good high ground. Most of that timber was washed away with the great flood of the Ohio in 1832, which reduced the size of the island to about ten acres. For many years afterward the remainder of the island was covered with scrub willow. It gradually eroded away and finally disappeared altogether about 1850.

  489. This bar, no longer in existence, was probably located in the vicinity of present Lock and Dam Number 16 opposite the present village of Ben’s Run, Tyler Co., W.Va.

  490. The demand for the boatmen to surrender has been attributed to James Girty in one account. That he did so, or was even with this party, however, has not been confirmed.

  491. One account states that the ball that wounded Carr broke his thigh bone. This is evidently incorrect, since a few weeks later, as will be seen, he was out in a boat fishing with Thomas Carr when they were again attacked by Indians.

  492. That island was, for many years afterward, called Wetzel’s Island. It washed away, however, during the especially strong flood of the Ohio in 1832.

  493. In various accounts the number of Indians involved in this attack is given as 15, 20 or 30, and about 40. Since these were the same Indians that attacked the Parkinson boat, even the low figure of 15 is likely to be somewhat of an exaggeration. Had any of the larger reported numbers of Indians been attacking, chances are those in the canoe, as close to shore as it was, would all have been killed. The most plausible assumption is that the party of 15, who were off-loading the flour, saw the canoe approaching at a distance, and part of their number, probably no more than six or seven, ran up the shore to set up the ambush of the Wetzel party.

  494. One account states that Mills, hearing the firing, crept up close, took one shot at the attacking Indians, killed one and then made his escape by land. That is highly implausible and unconfirmed by any other account. In any event, Mills did manage to get back to Wheeling safely.

  495. Some days later Lewis Wetzel and his father, along with a strong party of men from Wheeling, returned to Captina Island, disinterred the body of George Wetzel and returned with it to the Wetzel farm on Wheeling Creek, where he was reburied.

  496. Henry Baker was carried captive to the Wyandot villages, where he was condemned to death at the stake. Simon Girty, on hand at the time, bargained for Baker’s life and saved him. Baker was then taken to Detroit, where he was closely questioned in regard to frontier defenses on the upper Ohio. Set at liberty, he hired himself out to a British trader in Detroit and worked for him for nearly a year.

  497. This new village, called Monakaduto’s Town, was established just north of the present village of Tymochtee in Section 17, R14E T1S, Wyandot Co.

  498. The New Half King’s Town was located five miles downstream (northeast) from the present city of Upper Sandusky and seven miles upstream on the Sandusky River on what is now State Route 67, its center at the location of Smithville church but the village itself on both sides of the Sandusky River. There were also several villages and clusters of wegiwas, mostly Delaware, in this area in conjunction with the Valentine McCormick Trading Post and the John Leith Trading Post.

  499. Some of the militia bought cheaper horses, leaving the good ones at home, an act they would later learn to regret.

  500. The term army in reference to the force of men who marched against the Sandusky Towns is not strictly correct but is used for convenience. It was not truly an army as strict military terminology defines such a body but rather, like other volunteer forces of the frontier, a collection of men mustered and formed into units, each unit usually from a specific geographical area, and whose officers were chosen at the site of rendezvous through popular election among the volunteers. The makeup of the C
rawford Army, as it came to be known, is shown here as compiled from lists published in Pennsylvania Archives, 2nd Series (Harrisburg, 1888) and Pennsylvania Archives, 6th Series (Harrisburg, 1906). The most accurate accounting of this force may be found in the article by Parker B. Brown entitled “Reconstructing Crawford’s Army of 1782” in The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, vol. 65, no. 1 (January 1982). Brown states that by the evening of May 24 a total of 485 men had arrived at the rendezvous, but that by the time the army reached its destination, the whole force apparently amounted to 583 men.

  501. The rendezvous was 2.5 miles south of Steubenville, the area now covered by rail yards and steel furnaces.

  502. McCaddon died at age 98 in Newark, O., in 1846.

  503. Because Gen. Irvine and his regulars at Fort Pitt and Fort McIntosh did not participate in the campaign, some writers have stated that it was not a federally supported or even condoned operation. That is not true. Irvine simply had no instructions from Gen. Washington to participate in such a campaign; nor could he spare any of his regular force for that purpose. The fact that the army of volunteers was nevertheless under his control becomes evident, however, in his letter of November 10, 1799, from Carlisle, Pa., to John Lyon of Uniontown, in which he wrote: “In looking over my instructions to the officer who should be appointed to command that [Sandusky] expedition, I find that he was enjoined to regulate rank of officers before he took up his line of march, and to impress on their minds that the whole must, from the moment they march, be, in all respects, subject to the rules and articles of war for the regular troops. All the troops, both regular and militia, were under my orders.” Although many writers then and since have implied (or even flatly stated, as did such Moravians as Loskiel, Zeisberger and Heckewelder) that the Sandusky Campaign was in reality a “Second Moravian Campaign” fashioned to wipe out the remainder of the Christian Indians, there is no element of truth in the allegation.

  504. The officer known in America as John Rose was actually a Russian nobleman of Baltic German extraction, born in the Province of Livonia in 1753. Preparing for a career in diplomacy and politics, he had attended two German universities, but he fled to America after dueling with, and killing, a nobleman. The American Revolution was just then breaking out, and assuming the alias of John Rose, he joined the Sixth Pennsylvania Battalion at Fort Ticonderoga as a hospital steward. It was there that he met and was befriended by William Irvine, then colonel in command. He participated in the march into Canada and the major defeat suffered at Three Rivers on June 6, 1776. He had, in the ensuing years, experienced a wide variety of adventures both on land and at sea, including even a period of incarceration in New York. Listed in Russian records as Gustav Heinrich Johann Wetter, Baron von Rosenthal, in American records he is usually listed as Gustavus Heinrich de Rosenthal. Rose (as he will hereafter be referred to) was a very literate and perceptive individual. Perhaps the most valuable account of the Sandusky Campaign has come from his pen, though his 20-day journal of this campaign was not even known to exist until 109 years after the expedition ended. Rose made astute and extensive daily entries in his journal during the campaign and afterward added endnotes that evaluated the expedition’s officers and recommended changes that might, at some future time, improve a comparable volunteer frontier force. Rose took his journal with him when he returned to Russia two years after the expedition. When he died in 1829, his journals wound up in the Estonian State Archives at Tartu, where they would have lain forgotten had not Rose’s great-grandson in 1893 given a copy for publication to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. It was published the following year under the title “Journal of a Volunteer Expedition to Sandusky” in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 18, pp. 128–57, 293–328, and in 1969 by the Arno Press of New York.

  505. David Williamson, after the election, is reported to have said that he “preferred Crawford should be chosen, as he is the oldest man.” Both men had the militia rank of colonel and, though Williamson was named as a major for this expedition, virtually everyone continued to refer to him as colonel. To avoid confusion, the rank of colonel will be used in reference to Williamson throughout this campaign.

  506. Daniel Leet had been Gen. Washington’s brigade major at the time of the Cornwallis surrender and afterward had come west to help protect his father’s family, who had settled in 1779 on Chartier’s Creek a mile east of John Boggs’ Station. Leet’s name has been spelled Leets in various accounts about as often as Leet, though the latter appears to be correct.

  507. Thomas Nicholson, however, did not arrive at the rendezvous until the following day.

  508. The average age of the soldier in this army was 24. The eldest individual was Pvt. Michael Myers, who was 37, while the youngest was 16-year-old John Clark.

  509. John Crawford, son of Col. William Crawford, was not killed during the campaign as several accounts have suggested. Actually, he married, had seven children, applied for a federal pension in 1791, and died and was buried near Manchester, Adams Co., O.

  510. Though the records are incomplete, 19 company commanding captains have been identified, their 18 companies comprising a total of 485 men. (Some accounts say the total number at this point was 489 men, but that does not jibe with the official company count.) The 18 company commanders were: Joseph Bane (with 9 men), John Beeson (with John Biggs as co-commander) (32 men), Charles Bilderback (35 men), George Brown (32? men), Thomas Carr (34? men), John Dean (31? men), Timothy Downing (21 men), John Hardin, Sr. (12 men), John Hoagland (27 men), Andrew Hood (32 men), William Leet (26 men), John Miller (33 men), James Munn (33 men), Duncan McGeehon (20 men), Thomas Rankin (30 men), Craig Ritchie (21 men), Ezekiel Rose (21 men) and Eleazer Williamson (36 men). After being formed, the company of George Brown merged with that of John Hardin, Sr., but neither man was willing to give up command and serve under the other, so Hardin and Brown acted as co-captains of the same company. It is also likely that more companies showed up after the official tally was made and the army was on the march, raising the total number of the army to 583 men, the figure given by Maj. Thomas Gaddis.

  511. John Smith later became a U.S. senator from Ohio.

  512. A prevailing fiction exists that hardly had the last of Williamson’s contingent left Mingo Bottom than some Wyandot warriors emerged from the woods. They had been watching the army from hiding since before dawn, and they now rode over to a sign they had seen being tacked to a tree before the army began its march. The sign is alleged to have said: “No quarter to be given to an Indian, whether man, woman or child.” This story originated when Moravian John Heckewelder wrote in his narrative (pp. 341–42) that he was told about it by an Indian who had heard it from another Indian, who had heard it from yet another. Later, in 1824, the triple hearsay was written down as historical fact by historian Joseph Doddridge, and since then most accounts of the campaign have included it as truth. No other source contemporary to Heckewelder’s, however, makes any mention of such a sign or of such a sentiment being expressed in the army, and it is almost certain that it was invented by Heckewelder, who was noted for his extravagant prejudices against the American frontier people, especially following the massacre of his Moravian flock at Gnadenhütten.

  513. The Indians had been well aware of the army’s presence long before Crawford came to the conclusion they were. Thomas Edgington, who had been taken prisoner well before the campaign and who was later exchanged, reported that shortly after the beginning of the Crawford Campaign, he overheard Indians saying that the army had been spied on while at the Mingo Bottom rendezvous, and the number of men had actually been counted twice before the army reached Schoenbrun on the Tuscarawas.

  514. This ravine is now part of the Dennis McWhorter farm, just north of State Route 103 near the present village of Tymochtee, Wyandot Co., O.

  515. Butler’s British artillery consisted of a pair of three-pounder cannon of the type called the Grasshopper, plus a 4.4 caliber Royal mortar, commonly called a coeh
orn. The number of Rangers is not definitely known but was estimated at between 80 and 200, with 120 being the generally accepted figure. Some accounts have placed British Capt. William Caldwell in command of this Ranger party, but that is not possible since he was at that time rendezvousing near the mouth of the Cuyahoga—at present Cleveland—with a large force of Indians under Chief Joseph Brant—Thayendanegea—to march against the American settlements on the upper Ohio.

  516. This practice of referring to the isolated groves of trees in the prairie grasses as islands continues today and often confuses new visitors who, when they hear the names Long Island, Big Island, Green Island or Round Island, fully expect that they indicate actual islands in bodies of water. This is especially true in the case of landmark places, such as the large grove of trees where Crawford’s army first engaged the Indians and that to this day is known as Battle Island.

  517. The private who died of exhaustion was not identified. This death occurred at approximately the point where present State Route 83 crosses the common border of Holmes and Wayne counties. A highway historical marker has been erected at this point.

  518. The route of the army was generally as follows: From the rendezvous place at present Mingo Junction, just below present Steubenville, Jefferson Co., O., on an almost due-west course that carried them across Jefferson and Harrison counties to the Tuscarawas and Schoenbrun at the site of the present city of New Philadelphia in present Tuscarawas County; then northwestward into present Holmes County and then more on a due-west course practically along the present Holmes-Wayne county line; continuing to angle slightly north of west, their route took them through the lower portion of present Ashland County and through present Mansfield in Richland County, then present Ontario in the same county and entering present Crawford County (named in honor of Col. William Crawford) near the present town of Crestline; then continuing along the left bank of the Sandusky through the site of present Bucyrus and into present Wyandot County, near the present town of Wyandot. They spent the night of June 3–4 some 1,200 feet east of present Wyandot at the fine springs located along present U.S. Route 30, where Charles Dickens visited and drank in 1843. Here the river and their trail began angling northward to eventually come to the present city of Upper Sandusky.