That Dark and Bloody River

by Allan Eckert

  815. A good part of the reason why the British were finally willing to surrender these posts to the Americans had its basis in the fur trade. Due to various human conflicts and overharvesting of the fur animals in the Northwest Territory, less than one-fifth of the current British fur trade revenue in North America, of £200,000, was being generated from there, and the cost it was entailing to maintain these posts for that purpose and to maintain good relations with the tribes was really no longer worth the expense. New British trade routes to the far west, spearing far beyond the Mississippi and into the vast northwestern territory beyond, all the way to the Pacific, were opening far greater prospects for an unopposed continuation of the fur trade.

  816. Conner’s Trading Post was situated at or near present Connersville, Fayette Co., Ind.

  817. Wampum strings (for minor points) and belts (for major issues) were always exchanged at such treaties as an important adjunct to record-keeping. Although such belts were valuable, they were not (as many easterners thought, and as many people still think) a form of currency. Rather, they were a form of record-keeping developed among the tribes through the centuries and used to impress indelibly the desired points embodied in the message of the speaker delivering them. Most often made from tubular shell beads strung into strings a foot and a half in length, the individual strands of the belt were skillfully woven together to form intricate variations of color and design, each significant in its own right and each imparting a special message. Even seasoned frontiersmen and traders who had been among the Indians for many years found it uncanny how an Indian could glance at such a belt and then recite verbatim the terms of a treaty or words of an agreement, as if he were reading from a printed page. Sometimes the strands woven together would form a belt as long as 10 or 12 feet, but most often they were only four or five inches wide and about three to four feet long. And though the belts were originally constructed from freshwater or ocean shell pieces drilled through in a laborious process with a slender flint drill rolled between the palms, a revolution in wampum belt construction had occurred when traders began stocking variously colored clear and opaque glass beads. Easterners became fond of snickering over the passion of the Indians for the beads, believing them to be for ornamentation purposes only. Such, in fact, was rarely the case. Those beads fulfilled as important a function in Indian record-keeping as did paper and pen for the whites; thus, beads became enormously profitable items in the Indian trade. In general terms (though there were variations), a black wampum belt signified war talk, while white was one of peace, prosperity and health. Violet signified tragedy, death, sorrow and disaster, sometimes even war. To make the message of the belts plainer, stick figures would be woven into the belts, or there would be geometric designs of various types—diamond shapes, stars, hexagons, parallel lines, wavy lines, intersecting line patterns, etc.—each with its own significance. Metaphoric expressions transferred to beaded wampum belts required extreme care in preparation lest any wrong idea be relayed. Metaphors commonly used and transferred to wampum belts included a raised hatchet, signifying war, and a buried hatchet, signifying peace; kindling a fire, meaning deliberation and negotiations; covering the bones of the dead, meaning giving or receiving reparation and forgiveness for those killed; a black cloud, signifying a state of disaster or imminent war; brilliant sunshine or an unobstructed path between two nations signifying peace; a black bird, representing bad news; a white or yellow bird, good news. Indian speakers rarely spoke without lengths of wampum, either strings or belts or both, draped over their shoulders or arms, to which they referred frequently as they spoke and which were sporadically presented to dignitaries in attendance as points were made.

  818. When the new secretary of war, Timothy Pickering, received a copy of the completed treaty on September 27, he expressed grave concern to both Gen. Wayne and President Washington that too few Potawatomi chiefs had been present to negotiate and sign the treaty, and that cessions of certain lands without the concurrence of all the chiefs might result in further strife on the far northwestern frontier. A listing of names of the 16 Potawatomi chiefs who signed the treaty, along with their alternative names and English translations of their names, appears in James A. Clifton’s The Prairie People (Lawrence, Kan., 1977), pp. 152–55.

  819. Gen. Wayne had been given sole power to negotiate for the United States in all matters, but with very specific instructions from President Washington, through Secretary of War Timothy Pickering, regarding what he should say and what his primary considerations should be—foremost of which being very large cessions of land.

  820. Part of Wayne’s specific instructions were to avoid making any such assertion, which would only serve to irritate and alienate those in attendance.

  821. Although in the open council this is what Wayne told the chiefs that the treaty included, that treaty in its actual written form called for the Indians to turn over to white authorities any Indian guilty of killing a white person unjustly, but there is no mention whatever of whites turning over to the Indians any white person guilty of unjustly killing an Indian.

  822. With those words, the Americans gained cession to more than half of the entire Ohio Territory without restriction. (See map, “The Partitioning of Ohio.”) The final phrase did not limit the boundary to the Ohio country but instead, in drawing a line from Fort Recovery to opposite the mouth of the Kentucky River, the line did not go due south but angled in a south-south-westward direction, taking in a wedge-shaped piece of present southeastern Indiana. That line entered Indiana a thousand yards or so north of the southeastern corner of present Jay County and continued in the south-southwestern line through the present counties of Randolph, Wayne, Union and Franklin, formed the western boundary of present Dearborn and Ohio counties and split the western end of present Switzerland County, terminating at the Ohio River close to the present village of Lamb.

  823. Wayne was here doing a little improvising, since his instructions had authorized him to negotiate for only ten such tracts, but the attitude of the Indians in attendance made him feel he could push for the additional six and they would not question it, and in this he was quite correct and successful.

  824. And, though Wayne did not say it, most importantly to cow the Indians and keep them in check in case of future unrest.

  825. By the terms of the Greenville Treaty, the Indians ceded to the United States an area of territory comprising some 25,000 square miles, not even including those 16 separate tracts, which were each about six miles square. For this cession of such unbelievable value, economically, strategically and territorially, the United States agreed to pay in goods the value of $1,666 for each of the 12 tribes there represented, plus an additional annuity of $825 worth of goods to each of the tribes. When averaged out, it meant that the United States were paying one cent for every six acres acquired!

  826. The completed Greenville Treaty was immediately dispatched special express by Wayne to Secretary of War Timothy Pickering, who in turn presented it to President George Washington. Heartily approving of it, the President presented it to the United States Senate on December 9, and on December 22, 1795, the Greenville Treaty, one of the most important treaties ever made between the Indians and the Americans, was ratified.

  827. The headwaters of Deer Creek were located close to the headwaters of the Mad River but were in the Scioto River drainage, and the area where Tecumseh established his Deer Creek Village was northwest of present London, O., and close to the present boundary separating Champaign and Madison counties.

  828. Sauganash (pronounced SAW-guh-nash) was the son of a Potawatomi woman, said to have been “of remarkable beauty and keen intelligence” but whose name is not known to be recorded, and a British officer of Detroit named Capt. William Caldwell, who was a sometimes trader and frequent liaison with the Indians in the company of McKee, Elliott and Girty. The name Sauganash was a nickname meaning The Englishman (which comes down in the Ottawa tongue as Sagonas). However, his real Potawatomi name was Tequi
toh (teh-KWEE-toe) which, in English, means Straight Tree. One source, unverified by any other and discounted by the author, states that the mother of Sauganash was a Mohawk and the daughter of a chief named Rising Sun.

  829. The exact number of Shawnees who threw in their lot with Tecumseh at that time is not known. Some sources have claimed more than 100, others as few as 16. From the size of the village ultimately established by Tecumseh at Deer Creek for himself and his followers, a reasonable guess would be that there were probably in the vicinity of 50 to 60.

  830. Tecumseh did go on to put together the most comprehensive amalgamation of tribes ever produced in North America, forming this group over the period of the next 16 years until, in 1811, it was undermined by his megalomaniac younger brother, Lowawluwaysica, who by then had changed his name to Tengskwatawa and was known as The Prophet. Tecumseh then, with his remaining warriors, threw his lot in with the British to oppose the Americans in the War of 1812, during which he was killed at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813. Full details of all this may be found in the author’s A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh (New York: Bantam, 1992).

  831. David Bradford did not return to the Ohio with Wetzel. He remained in Louisiana and settled at Bayou Sara, where he drank himself to death.

  832. It is generally assumed that Wetzel took his revenge on Pedro Hermoso by killing him, but Hermoso’s body was never found, and Wetzel never admitted he had done so.

  833. This place of Wetzel’s was located opposite Fairfield Island in the present state of Mississippi, fairly close to where Interstate Route 20 crosses the Big Black River, 25 miles west of Jackson and 15 miles east of Vicksburg.

  834. Lewis Wetzel was never apprehended for this murder. The remainder of his life is shrouded with bits and pieces of hearsay. In October 1829, when Lewis would have been 65, Capt. Ebenezer Clark, grandson of the Ebenezer Zane’s second daughter, Elizabeth, met Lewis Wetzel in St. Louis. Wetzel was at that time living in the southern Missouri country among the Delawares in the area of Cape Girardeau. Sometime after that, when some Delawares and Absentee Shawnees turned up dead, Wetzel was suspected of the crimes, but he had already drifted away, and no one knew where he had gone. It is said that later he connected with a distant relative, Philip Sikes, with whom he journeyed to the Brazos River in Texas. There he built another cabin and remained there, hunting—and presumably shooting Comanche Indians—until he finally died in 1839 at the age of 75 and was buried near Austin, Texas. It is said that in his lifetime, he personally killed in excess of 70 Indians.

  835. Martin Wetzel died almost exactly a year later, in the early fall of 1812 at the age of 55. He was, as he had wished, buried beside his old friend, John Baker, who had been killed when he and Martin were out Indian hunting together on August 22, 1777.

  836. There was, by this time, however, relatively little game left to be found. Deer had dwindled to alarmingly low numbers. Despite the incredible numbers of woodland bison that had once roamed the Ohio River drainage, the last known buffalo killed was in 1815 by Archibald Price on the Little Sandy Creek tributary of the Elk River, itself a tributary of the Great Kanawha River, 12 miles from present downtown Charleston, W.Va. Elk had never been quite so abundant as buffalo, but they had been very numerous; nevertheless, the last known elk was killed on the Two Mile Creek tributary of Elk River in 1820 by a hunter named Billy Young, some five miles from present Charleston. Johnny Wetzel, hired as a hunter, worked at this trade for only a few years and then finally died in May 1815 at age 45.

  837. Jacob Wetzel died at his place on the White River in Indiana, not far from present Indianapolis, in 1833 at the age of 67.

  838. Daniel Boone, after a short illness, finally died at the home of his son, Col. Nathan Boone, on the Ferne-Osage River, a tributary of the Missouri, on September 26, 1820, at the age of 86.

  839. Simon Kenton eventually moved even farther north in Ohio to the headwaters of the Mad River and lived with his daughter hardly a stone’s throw from where the village of Wyandot Chief Tarhe had been, on the site of the present town of Zanesfield, Logan Co., O., where he died on April 29, 1836, at the age of 81.

  840. Tecumseh’s rise to power, his formation of the great amalgam of tribes—some 50,000 warriors—and the undermining by his ambitious brother of his great plan to drive the whites back east of the Alleghenies, may be found in the author’s A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh.

  841. The steamboat New Orleans amazed and delighted settlers as she made her maiden voyage. At Wheeling she anchored for some time, and settlers from near and far came to see her, paying a quarter each for the privilege of wandering about on her and marveling at such a wonder. Her voyage all the way down to New Orleans was a distinct success, and for three years after that she made regular trips between New Orleans and Natchez. She was eventually lost in 1814 when she struck a snag near Baton Rouge, La., and sank.

  Principal Sources

  Prologue

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