Hamilton organized a troop of white rangers from among the French, British, and tories at Detroit. They acted as allies of the Indians, and furnished leaders to them. Three of these leaders were the tories McKee, Elliot, and Girty, who had fled together from Pittsburg8; they all three warred against their countrymen with determined ferocity. Girty won the widest fame on the border by his cunning and cruelty; but he was really a less able foe than the two others. McKee in particular showed himself a fairly good commander of Indians and irregular troops; as did likewise an Englishman named Caldwell, and two French partisans, De-Quindre and Lamothe, who were hearty supporters of the British.
Hamilton and his subordinates, both red and white, were engaged in what was essentially an effort to exterminate the borderers. They were not endeavoring merely to defeat the armed bodies of the enemy. They were explicitly bidden by those in supreme command to push back the frontier, to expel the settlers from the country. Hamilton himself had been ordered by his immediate official superior to assail the borders of Pennsylvania and Virginia with his savages, to destroy the crops and buildings of the settlers who had advanced beyond the mountains, and to give to his Indian allies,—the Hurons, Shawnees, and other tribes,—all the land of which they thus took possession.9 With such allies as Hamilton had this order was tantamount to proclaiming a war of extermination, waged with appalling and horrible cruelty against the settlers, of all ages and sexes. It brings out in bold relief the fact that in the West the war of the Revolution was an effort on the part of Great Britain to stop the Westward growth of the English race in America, and to keep the region beyond the Alleghanies as a region where only savages should dwell.
All through the winter of ‘76’77 the Northwestern Indians were preparing to take up the tomahawk. Runners were sent through the leafless, frozen woods from one to another of their winter camps. In each bleak, frail village, each snow-hidden cluster of bark wigwams, the painted, half-naked warriors danced the war dance, and sang the war song, beating the ground with their war clubs and keeping time with their feet to the rhythmic chant as they moved in rings round the peeled post into which they struck their hatchets. The hereditary sachems, the peace chiefs, could no longer control the young men. The braves made ready their weapons and battle gear; their bodies were painted red and black, the plumes of the war eagle were braided into their long scalp locks, and some put on necklaces of bears’ claws, and headdresses made of panther skin, or of the shaggy and horned frontlet of the buffalo.10 Before the snow was off the ground the war parties crossed the Ohio and fell on the frontiers from the Monongahela and Kanawha to the Kentucky.11
On the Pennsylvanian and Virginian frontiers the panic was tremendous. The people fled into the already existing forts, or hastily built others; where there were but two or three families in a place, they merely gathered into block-houses—stout log-cabins two stories high, with loop-holed walls, and the upper story projecting a little over the lower. The savages, well armed with weapons supplied them from the British arsenals on the Great Lakes, spread over the country; and there ensued all the horrors incident to a war waged as relentlessly against the most helpless non-combatants as against the armed soldiers in the field. Block-houses were surprised and burned; bodies of militia were ambushed and destroyed. The settlers were shot down as they sat by their hearthstones in the evening, or plowed the ground during the day; the lurking Indians crept up and killed them while they still-hunted the deer, or while they lay in wait for the elk beside the well-beaten game trails.
The captured women and little ones were driven off to the far interior. The weak among them, the young children, and the women heavy with child, were tomahawked and scalped as soon as their steps faltered. The able-bodied, who could stand the terrible fatigue, and reached their journey’s end, suffered various fates. Some were burned at the stake, others were sold to the French or British traders, and long afterward made their escape, or were ransomed by the relatives. Still others were kept in the Indian camps, the women becoming the slaves or wives of the warriors,12 while the children were adopted into the tribe, and grew up precisely like their little red-skinned playmates. Sometimes, when they had come to full growth, they rejoined the whites; but generally they were enthralled by the wild freedom and fascination of their forest life, and never forsook their adopted tribesmen, remaining inveterate foes of their own color. Among the ever-recurring tragedies of the frontier, not the least sorrowful was the recovery of these long-missing children by their parents, only to find that they had lost all remembrance of and love for their father and mother, and had become irreclaimable savages, who eagerly grasped the first chance to flee from the intolerable irksomeness and restraint of civilized life.13
Among others, the stockade at Wheeling14 was attacked by two or three hundred Indians; with them came a party of Detroit Rangers, marshaled by drum and fife, and carrying the British colors.15 Most of the men inside the fort were drawn out by a stratagem, fell into an ambuscade, and were slain; but the remainder made good the defence, helped by the women, who ran the lead into bullets, cooled and loaded the guns, and even, when the rush was made, assisted to repel it by firing through the loop-holes. After making a determined effort to storm the stockade, in which some of the boldest warriors were slain while trying in vain to batter down the gates with heavy timbers, the baffled Indians were obliged to retire discomfited. The siege was chiefly memorable because of an incident which is to this day a staple theme for story-telling in the cabins of the mountaineers. One of the leading men of the neighborhood was Major Samuel McColloch, renowned along the border as the chief in a family famous for its Indian fighters, the dread and terror of the savages, many of whose most noted warriors he slew, and at whose hands he himself, in the end, met his death. When Wheeling was invested he tried to break into it, riding a favorite old white horse. But the Indians intercepted him, and hemmed him in on the brink of an almost perpendicular slope,16 some three hundred feet high. So sheer was the descent that they did not dream any horse could go down it, and instead of shooting they advanced to capture the man whom they hated. McColloch had no thought of surrendering, to die by fire at the stake, and he had as little hope of resistance against so many foes. Wheeling short round, he sat back in the saddle, shifted his rifle into his right hand, reined in his steed, and spurred him over the brink. The old horse never faltered, but plunged headlong down the steep, bowlder-covered cliff-broken slope. Good luck, aided by the wonderful skill of the rider and the marvelous strength and surefootedness of his steed, rewarded, as it deserved, one of the most daring feats of horsemanship of which we have any authentic record. There was a crash, the shock of a heavy body, half springing, half falling, a scramble among loose rocks, and the snapping of saplings and bushes; and in another moment the awe-struck Indians above saw their unharmed foe, galloping his gallant white horse in safety across the plain. To this day the place is known by the name of McColloch’s leap.17
In Virginia and Pennsylvania the Indian outrages meant only the harassing of the borderers; in Kentucky they threatened the complete destruction of the vanguard of the white advance and, therefore, the stoppage of all settlement west of the Alleghanies until after the Revolutionary War, when very possibly the soil might not have been ours to settle. Fortunately Hamilton did not yet realize the importance of the Kentucky settlements, nor the necessity of crushing them, and during 1777 the war bands organized at Detroit were sent against the country round Pittsburg; while the feeble forts in the far Western wilderness were only troubled by smaller war parties raised among the tribes on their own account. A strong expedition, led by Hamilton in person, would doubtless at this time have crushed them.
As it was, there were still so few whites in Kentucky that they were greatly outnumbered by the invading Indians. They were, in consequence, unable to meet the enemy in the open field, and gathered in their stations or forted villages. Therefore the early conflicts, for the most part, took the form of sieges of these wooden forts. Such s
ieges had little in common with the corresponding operations of civilized armies. The Indians usually tried to surprise a fort; if they failed, they occasionally tried to carry it by open assault, or by setting fire to it, but very rarely, indeed, beleaguered it in form. For this they lacked both the discipline and the commissariat. Accordingly, if their first rush miscarried, they usually dispersed in the woods to hunt, or look for small parties of whites; always, however, leaving some of their number to hover round the fort and watch anything that took place. Masters in the art of hiding, and able to conceal themselves behind a bush, a stone, or a tuft of weeds, they skulked round the gate before dawn, to shoot the white sentinels; or they ambushed the springs, and killed those who came for water; they slaughtered all of the cattle that had not been driven in, and any one venturing incautiously beyond the walls was certain to be waylaid and murdered. Those who were thus hemmed in in the fort were obliged to get game on which to live; the hunters accordingly were accustomed to leave before daybreak, travel eight or ten miles, hunt all day at the risk of their lives, and return after dark. Being of course the picked men of the garrison, they often eluded the Indians, or slew them if an encounter took place, but very frequently indeed they were themselves slain. The Indians always trusted greatly to wiles and feints to draw their foes into their power. As ever in this woodland fighting, their superiority in hiding, or taking advantage of cover, counterbalanced the superiority of the whites as marksmen; and their war parties were thus at least a match, man against man, for the Kentuckians, though the latter, together with the Watauga men, were the best woodsmen and fighters of the frontier. Only a very few of the whites became, like Boone and Kenton, able to beat the best of the savages at their own game.
The innumerable sieges that took place during the long years of Indian warfare differed in detail, but generally closely resembled one another as regards the main points. Those that occurred in 1777 may be considered as samples of the rest; and accounts of these have been preserved by the two chief actors, Boone and Clark.18 Boonesborough, which was held by twenty-two riflemen, was attacked twice, once in April and again in July, on each occasion by a party of fifty or a hundred warriors.19 The first time the garrison was taken by surprise; one man lost his scalp, and four were wounded, including Boone himself, who had been commissioned as captain in the county militia.20 The Indians promptly withdrew when they found they could not carry the fort by a sudden assault. On the second occasion the whites were on their guard, and though they had one man killed and two wounded (leaving but thirteen unhurt men in the fort), they easily beat off the assailants, and slew half a dozen of them. This time the Indians stayed round two days, keeping up a heavy fire, under cover of which they several times tried to burn the fort.21
Logan’s22 station at St. Asaphs was likewise attacked; it was held by only fifteen gunmen. When the attack was made the women, guarded by part of the men, were milking the cows outside the fort. The Indians fired at them from the thick cane that still stood nearby, killing one man and wounding two others, one mortally.23 The party, of course, fled to the fort, and on looking back they saw their mortally wounded friend weltering on the ground. His wife and family were within the walls; through the loopholes they could see him yet alive, and exposed every moment to death. So great was the danger that the men refused to go out to his rescue, whereupon Logan alone opened the gate, bounded out, and seizing the wounded man in his arms, carried him back unharmed through a shower of bullets. The Indians continued to lurk around the neighborhood, and the ammunition grew very scarce. Thereupon Logan took two companions and left the fort at night to go to the distant settlements on the Holston, where he might get powder and lead. He knew that the Indians were watching the Wilderness Road, and trusting to his own hardiness and consummate woodcraft, he struck straight out across the cliff-broken, wood-covered mountains, sleeping wherever night overtook him, and traveling all day long with the tireless speed of a wolf.24 He returned with the needed stores in ten days from the time he set out. These tided the people over the warm months.
In the fall, when the hickories had turned yellow and the oaks deep red, during the weeks of still, hazy weather that mark the Indian summer, their favorite hunting season,25 the savages again filled the land, and Logan was obliged to repeat his perilous journey.26 He also continually led small bands of his followers against the Indian war and hunting parties, sometimes surprising and dispersing them, and harassing them greatly. Moreover he hunted steadily through the year to keep the station in meat, for the most skilful hunters were, in those days of scarcity, obliged to spend much of their time in the chase. Once, while at a noted game lick,27 waiting for deer, he was surprised by the Indians, and by their fire was wounded in the breast and had his right arm broken. Nevertheless he sprang on his horse and escaped, though the savages were so close that one, leaping at him, for a moment grasped the tail of the horse. Every one of these pioneer leaders, from Clark and Boone to Sevier and Robertson, was required constantly to expose his life; each lost sons or brothers at the hands of the Indians, and each thinned the ranks of the enemy with his own rifle. In such a primitive state of society the man who led others was expected to show strength of body no less than strength of mind and heart; he depended upon his physical prowess almost as much as upon craft, courage, and headwork. The founder and head of each little community needed not only a shrewd brain and commanding temper, but also the thews and training to make him excel as woodsman and hunter, and the heart and eye to enable him to stand foremost in every Indian battle.
Clark spent most of the year at Harrodstown, taking part in the defence of Kentucky. All the while he was revolving in his bold, ambitious heart a scheme for the conquest of the Illinois country, and he sent scouts thither to spy out the land and report to him what they saw. The Indians lurked round Harrodstown throughout the summer; and Clark and his companions were engaged in constant skirmishes with them. Once, warned by the uneasy restlessness of the cattle (who were sure to betray the presence of Indians if they got sight or smell of them), they were able to surround a party of ten or twelve, who were hidden in a tall clump of weeds. The savages were intent on cutting off some whites who were working in a turnip patch two hundred yards from the fort; Clark’s party killed three—he himself killing one,—wounded another, and sold the plunder they took, at auction, for seventy pounds. At other times the skirmishes resulted differently, as on the occasion chronicled by Clark in his diary, when they “went out to hunt Indians; one wounded Squire Boone and escaped.”28
The corn was brought in from the cribs under guard; one day while shelling a quantity, a body of thirty-seven whites were attacked, and seven were killed or wounded, though the Indians were beaten off and two scalps taken. In spite of this constant warfare the fields near the forts were gradually cleared, and planted with corn, pumpkins, and melons; and marrying and mirth-making went on within the walls. One of Clark’s scouts, shortly after returning from the Illinois, got married, doubtless feeling he deserved some reward for the hardships he had suffered; on the wedding night Clark remarks that there was “great merriment.” The rare and infrequent expresses from Pittsburg or Williamsburg brought letters telling of Washington’s campaigns, which Clark read with absorbed interest. On the first of October, having matured his plans for the Illinois campaign, he left for Virginia, to see if he could get the government to help him put them into execution.
The Winning of the West Page 33