The Winning of the West

by Theodore Roosevelt

  This was only bravado, however; they had suffered too heavily to renew the attack, and under cover of darkness they slipped away, and made a most skilful retreat, carrying all their wounded in safety across the Ohio. The exhausted Americans, having taken a number of scalps, as well as forty guns, and many tomahawks38 and some other plunder,39 returned to their camp.

  The battle had been bloody as well as stubborn. The whites, though the victors, had suffered more than their foes, and indeed had won only because it was against the entire policy of Indian warfare to suffer a severe loss, even if a victory could be gained thereby. Of the whites, some seventy-five men had been killed or mortally wounded, and one hundred and forty severely or slightly wounded,40 so that they lost a fifth of their whole number. The Indians had not lost much more than half as many; about forty warriors were killed outright or died of their wounds.41 Among the Indians no chief of importance was slain; whereas the Americans had seventeen officers killed or wounded, and lost in succession their second, third, and fourth in command. The victors buried their own dead and left the bodies of the vanquished to the wolves and ravens. At midnight, after the battle, Col. Christian and his Fincastle men reached the ground.

  The battle of the Great Kanawha was a purely American victory, for it was fought solely by the backwoodsmen themselves. Their immense superiority over regular troops in such contests can be readily seen when their triumph on this occasion is compared with the defeats previously suffered by Braddock’s grenadiers and Grant’s highlanders, at the hands of the same foes. It was purely a soldiers’ battle, won by hard individual fighting; there was no display of generalship, except on Cornstalk’s part.42 It was the most closely contested of any battle ever fought with the Northwestern Indians; and it was the only victory gained over a large body of them by a force but slightly superior in numbers.43 Both because of the character of the fight itself, and because of the results that flowed from it, it is worthy of being held in especial remembrance.

  Lewis left his sick and wounded in the camp at the Point, protected by a rude breastwork, and with an edequate guard. With the remainder of his forces, over a thousand strong, he crossed the Ohio, and pushed on to the Pickaway plains. When but a few miles from the earl’s encampment he was met by a messenger informing him that a treaty of peace was being negotiated with the Indians.44 The backwoodsmen, flushed with success, and angry at their losses, were eager for more bloodshed; and it was only with difficulty that they were restrained, and were finally induced to march homeward, the earl riding down to them and giving his orders in person. They grumbled angrily against the earl for sending them back, and in later days accused him of treachery for having done so; but his course was undoubtedly proper, for it would have been very difficult to conclude peace in the presence of such fierce and unruly auxiliaries.

  The spirit of the Indians had been broken by their defeat. Their stern old chief, Cornstalk, alone remained with unshaken heart, resolute to bid defiance to his foes and to fight the war out to the bitter end. But when the council of the headmen and war-chiefs was called it became evident that his tribesmen would not fight, and even his burning eloquence could not goad the warriors into again trying the hazard of battle. They listened unmoved and in sullen silence to the thrilling and impassioned words with which he urged them to once more march against the Long Knives, and if necessary to kill their women and children, and then themselves die fighting to the last man. At last, when he saw he could not stir the hearts of his hearers he struck his tomahawk into the war-post and announced that he himself would go and make peace. At that the warriors broke silence, and all grunted out approvingly, ough! ough! ough! and then they instantly sent runners to the earl’s army to demand a truce.45

  Accordingly, with all his fellow-chiefs, he went to Lord Dunmore’s camp, and there entered into a treaty. The crestfallen Indians assented to all the terms the conquerors proposed. They agreed to give up all the white prisoners and stolen horses in their possession, and to surrender all claim to the lands south of the Ohio, and they gave hostages as an earnest of their good-faith.46 But their chief spokesman, Cornstalk, while obliged to assent to these conditions, yet preserved through all the proceedings a bearing of proud defiance that showed how little the fear of personal consequences influenced his own actions. At the talks he addressed the white leader with vehement denunciation and reproach, in a tone that seemed rather that of a conqueror than one of the conquered. Indeed, he himself was not conquered; he felt that his tribesmen were craven, but he knew that his own soul feared nothing. The Virginians, who, like their Indian antagonists, prized skill in oratory only less than skill in warfare, were greatly impressed by the chieftain’s eloquence, by his command of words, his clear, distinct voice, his peculiar emphasis, and his singularly grand and majestic, and yet graceful, bearing; they afterward said that his oratory fully equaled that of Patrick Henry himself.47

  Every prominent chief but one came to the council. The exception was Logan, who remained apart in the Mingo village, brooding over his wrongs and the vengeance he had taken. His fellows, when questioned about his absence, answered that he was like a mad dog, whose bristles were still up, but that they were gradually falling; and when he was entreated to be present at the meeting he responded that he was a warrior, not a councilor, and would not come. The Mingos, because they failed to appear at the treaty, had their camp destroyed and were forced to give hostages, as the Delawares and Shawnees had done,48 and Logan himself finally sullenly acquiesced in, or at least ceased openly to oppose, the peace.

  But he would not come in person to Lord Dun-more; so the earl was obliged to communicate with him through a messenger, a frontier veteran49 named John Gibson, who had long lived among the Indians and knew thoroughly both their speech and their manners.50 To this messenger Logan was willing to talk. Taking him aside, he suddenly addressed him in a speech that will always retain its place as perhaps the finest outburst of savage eloquence of which we have any authentic record. The messenger took it down in writing, translating it literally,51 and returning to camp, gave it to Lord Dunmore. The earl then read it, in open council, to the whole backwoods army, including Cresap, Clark, and the other scouts. The speech, when read, proved to be no message of peace, nor an acknowledgment of defeat, but, instead, a strangely pathetic recital of his wrongs, and a fierce and exulting justification of the vengeance he had taken. It ran as follows:

  “I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan’s cabin hungry and he gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked and he clothed him not? During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his camp, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites that my countrymen pointed as I passed and said, ‘Logan is the friend of the white man.’ I had even thought to have lived with you, but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not even sparing my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace; but do not harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.”

  The tall frontiersmen, lounging in a circle round about, listened to the reading of the speech with eager interest; rough Indian haters though they were, they were so much impressed by it that in the evening it was a common topic of conversation over their camp fires, and they continually attempted to rehearse it to one another.52 But they knew that Greathouse, not Cresap, had been the chief offender in the murder of Logan’s family; and when the speech was read, Clark, turning round, jeered at and rallied Cresap as being so great a man that the Indians put everything on his shoulders; whereat, Cresap, much angered, swore that he had a good mind to tomahawk Greathouse for the murder.53

  The speech could not have been
very satisfactory to the earl; but at least it made it evident that Logan did not intend to remain on the warpath; and so Lord Dunmore marched home with his hostages. On the homeward march, near the mouth of the river Hockhocking, the officers of the army held a notable meeting. They had followed the British earl to battle; but they were Americans, in warm sympathy with the Continental Congress, which was then in session. Fearful lest their countrymen might not know that they were at one with them in the struggle of which the shadow was looming up with ever increasing blackness, they passed resolutions which were afterward published. Their speakers told how they had lived in the woods for three months, without hearing from the Congress at Philadelphia, nor yet from Boston, where the disturbances seemed most likely to come to a head. They spoke of their fear lest their countrymen might be misled into the belief that this numerous body of armed men was hostile or indifferent to the cause of America; and proudly alluded to the fact that they had lived so long without bread or salt, or shelter at night, and that the troops they led could march and fight as well as any in the world. In their resolutions they professed their devotion to their king, to the honor of his crown, and to the dignity of the British empire; but they added that this devotion would only last while the king deigned to rule over a free people, for their love for the liberty of America outweighed all other considerations, and they would exert every power for its defence, not riotously, but when regularly called forth by the voice of their countrymen.

  They ended by tendering their thanks to Lord Dunmore for his conduct. He was also warmly thanked by the Virginia Legislature, as well as by the frontiersmen of Fincastle,54 and he fully deserved their gratitude.

  The war had been ended in less than six months’ time; and its results were of the utmost importance. It had been very successful. In Braddock’s war, the borderers are estimated to have suffered a loss of fifty souls for every Indian slain; in Pontiac’s war, they had learned to defend themselves better, and yet the ratio was probably as ten to one;55 whereas in this war, if we consider only males of fighting age, it is probable that a good deal more than half as many Indians as whites were killed, and even including women and children, the ratio would not rise to more than three to one. Certainly, in all the contests waged against the Northwestern Indians during the last half of the eighteenth century there was no other where the whites inflicted so great a relative loss on their foes. Its results were most important. It kept the Northwestern tribes quiet for the first two years of the Revolutionary struggle; and above all it rendered possible the settlement of Kentucky, and therefore the winning of the West. Had it not been for Lord Dunmore’s war, it is more than likely that when the colonies achieved their freedom they would have found their western boundary fixed at the Alleghany Mountains.56

  Nor must we permit our sympathy for the foul wrongs of the two great Indian heroes of the contest to blind us to the fact that the struggle was precipitated, in the first place, by the outrages of the red men, not the whites; and that the war was not only inevitable, but was also in its essence just and righteous on the part of the borderers. Even the unpardonable and hideous atrocity of the murder of Logan’s family was surpassed in horror by many of the massacres committed by the Indians about the same time. The annals of the border are dark and terrible.

  Among the characters who played the leaders’ parts in this short and tragic drama of the backwoods few came to much afterward. Cresap died a brave Revolutionary soldier. Of Greathouse we know nothing; we can only hope that eventually the Indians scalped him. Conolly became a virulent tory, who yet lacked the power to do the evil that he wished. Lewis served creditably in the Revolution; while at its outbreak Lord Dunmore was driven from Virginia and disappears from our ken. Proud, gloomy Logan never recovered from the blow that had been dealt him; he drank deeper and deeper, and became more and more an implacable, moody, and bloodthirsty savage, yet with noble qualities that came to the surface now and then. Again and again he wrought havoc among the frontier settlers; yet we several times hear of his saving the lives of prisoners. Once he saved Simon Kenton from torture and death, when Girty, moved by a rare spark of compassion for his former comrade, had already tried to do so and failed. At last he perished in a drunken brawl by the hand of another Indian.

  Cornstalk died a grand death, but by an act of cowardly treachery on the part of his American foes; it is one of the darkest stains on the checkered pages of frontier history. Early in 1777 he came into the garrison at Point Pleasant to explain that, while he was anxious to keep at peace, his tribe were bent on going to war; and he frankly added that of course if they did so he should have to join them. He and three other Indians, among them his son and the chief Redhawk, who had also been at the Kanawha battle, were detained as hostages. While they were thus confined in the fort a member of a company of rangers was killed by the Indians near by; whereupon his comrades, headed by their captain,57 rushed in furious anger into the fort to slay the hostages. Cornstalk heard them rushing in, and knew that his hour had come; with unmoved countenance he exhorted his son not to fear, for it was the will of the Great Spirit that they should die there together; then, as the murderers burst into the room, he quietly rose up to meet them, and fell dead pierced by seven or eight bullets. His son and his comrades were likewise butchered, and we have no record of any more infamous deeds.

  Though among the whites, the men who took prominent parts in the struggle never afterward made any mark, yet it is worth noting that all the aftertime leaders of the West were engaged in some way in Lord Dunmore’s war. Their fates were various. Boone led the vanguard of the white advance across the mountains, wandered his life long through the wilderness, and ended his days, in extreme old age, beyond the Mississippi, a backwoods hunter to the last. Shelby won laurels at King’s Mountain, became the first Governor of Kentucky, and when an old man revived the memories of his youth by again leading the Western men in battle against the British and Indians. Sevier and Robertson were for a generation the honored chiefs of the southwestern people. Clark, the ablest of all, led a short but brilliant career, during which he made the whole nation his debtor. Then, like Logan, he sank under the curse of drunkenness,—often hardly less dangerous to the white borderer than to his red enemy,—and passed the remainder of his days in ignoble and slothful retirement.

  1 Stewart’s Narrative.

  2 “Am. Archiv.” Col. Wm. Preston’s letter, Sept. 28, 1774.

  3 Do., p. 872.

  4 Doddridge, 235.

  5 See Mag. of Am. Hist., XV, 256.

  6 De Haas, p. 161. He is a very fair and trustworthy writer; in particular, as regards Logan’s speech and Cresap’s conduct. It is to be regretted that Brantz Mayer, in dealing with these latter subjects, could not have approached them with the same desire to be absolutely impartial, instead of appearing to act solely as an advocate.

  7 His eight captains were George Matthews, Alexander Mc Clannahan, John Dickinson, John Lewis (son of William), Benjamin Harrison, William Paul, Joseph Haynes, and Samuel Wilson. Hale, “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” p. 181.

  8 His seven captains were Matthew Arbuckle, John Murray, John Lewis (son of Andrew), James Robertson, Robert Mc Clannahan, James Ward, and John Stewart (author of the Narrative).

  9 As the Kanawha was sometimes called.

  10 Whose five captains were Evan Shelby, Russell, Herbert, Draper, and Buford.

  11 Born December 11, 1750, near Hagerstown, Md.

  12 Letter of Col. Wm. Preston, September 28, 1774. “Am. Archives.”

  13 Letter of one of Lord Dunmore’s officers, November 21, 1774. “Am. Archives,” IV, Vol. I, p. 1017. Hale gives a minute account of the route followed; Stewart says they started on the 11th.

  With the journal of Floyd’s expedition, mentioned on a previous page, I received MS. copies of two letters to Col. William Preston, both dated at Camp Union, at the Great Levels; one, of September 8th from Col. Andrew Lewis, and one of September 7th (9th?) from Col. William Christian.

>   Col. Lewis’ letter runs in part: “From Augusta we have 600; of this county [Botetourt] about 400; Major Field is joined with 40… . I have had less Trouble with the Troops than I expected… . I received a letter from his Lordship last Sunday morning which was dated the 30th of August at Old Towns, which I take to be Chresops; he then I am told had Col. Stephens and Major Conolly at his Elbow as might easily be discovered by the Contents of his Letter which expressed his Lordship’s warmest wishes that I would with all the troops from this Quarter join him at the mouth of the little Kanaway; I wrote his Lordship that it was not in my power to alter our route… . The Indians wounded a man within two miles of us … and wounded another; from this we may expect they will be picking about us all the March.” He states that he has more men than he expected, and will therefore need more provisions, and that he will leave some of his poorest troops to garrison the small fort.

  Col. Christian’s letter states that the Augusta men took with them 400 pack-horses, carrying 54,000 pounds of flour, and 108 beeves; they started “yesterday”; Field marched “this evening”; Fleming and his 450 Botetourt men, with 200 pack-horses, “are going next Monday.” Field had brought word that Dunmore expected to be at the mouth of the Great Kanawha “some days after the 20th.” Some Indians had tried to steal a number of pack-horses, but had been discovered and frightened off.

  Christian was very much discontented at being bidden to stay behind until he could gather 300 men, and bring up the rear; he expresses his fear that his men will be much exasperated when they learn that they are to stay behind, and reiterates: “I would not for all I am worth be behind crossing the Ohio and that we should miss lending our assistance.” Field brought an account of McDonald’s fight (see ante, p. 216); he said the whites were 400 and the Indians but 30 strong, that the former had four men killed and six wounded; the Indians but three or four killed and one captured, and their town was burnt. The number of the Shawnees and their allies was estimated at 1,200 warriors that could be put into one battle. The 400 horses that had started with the Augusta men were to return as fast as they could (after reaching the embarkment point, whence the flour was carried in canoes).