The Winning of the West

by Theodore Roosevelt

  20 State Dept. MSS., Madison Papers, Hubbard Taylor to Madison, Jan. 3, 1782.

  21 Do., Taylor to Madison, April 16, 1792; May 8 and 17, 1792; May 23, 1793, etc.

  22 Bradley MSS. Letters and Journal of Captain Daniel Bradley; see entry of May 7, 1793, etc.

  23 “Major General Anthony Wayne,” by Charles J. Stille, P- 323.

  24 Bradley MSS., Journal, entries of Feb. 11, Feb. 24, June 24, July 12, 1792.

  25 Am. State Papers, IV., 335. Adair to Wilkinson. Nov. 6, 1792.

  26 Bradley MSS., Journal, entry of October 17, 1793.

  27 Canadian Archives, Duggan to Chew, February 3, 1794, inclosing his journal for the fall of 1793. American State Papers, IV, 361, Wayne to Knox, October 23, 1793. The Americans lost 13 men; the Indian reports of course exaggerated this.

  28 Draper MSS., William Clark to Jonathan Clark, May 25, 1794.

  29 Do. Also Canadian Archives, Duggan to Chew, May 30, 1794. As an instance of the utter untrustworthiness of these Indian or British accounts of the American losses, it may be mentioned that Duggan says the Indians brought off forty scalps, and killed an unknown number of Americans in addition; whereas in reality only two were slain. Even Duggan admits that the Indians were beaten off.

  30 Canadian Archives, McKee to Chew, July 7, 1794.

  31 Am. State Papers, IV, 488, Wayne to the Secretary of War, 1794.

  32 Canadian Archives, G. La Mothe to Joseph Chew, Michilimackinac, July 19, 1794. McKee says, “17 men killed”; evidently he either wilfully understated the truth, or else referred only to the particular tribes with which he was associated. La Mothe says, “they have lost twenty-five people amongst different nations,” but as he was only speaking of the Upper Lake Indians, it may be that the total Indian loss was 25 plus 17, or 42. McKee always understates the British force and loss, and greatly overstates the loss and force of the Americans. In this letter he says that the Americans had 50 men killed, instead of 22; and that 60 “drivers” (pack-horsemen) were taken and killed; whereas in reality 3 were taken and 2 killed.

  33 “Knoxville Gazette,” August 27, 1793.

  34 American State Papers, IV, 48r, 94. Examination of two Pottawatomies captured on the 5th of June; of two Shawnees captured on the 226. of June; of a Shawnee captured on Aug. nth, etc., etc.

  35 McBride collects or reprints a number of narratives dealing with these border heroes; some of them are by contemporaries who took part in their deeds. Brickell’s narrative corroborates these stories; the differences are such as would naturally be explained by the fact that different observers were writing of the same facts from memory after a lapse of several years. In their essentials the narratives are undoubtedly trustworthy. In the Draper collection there are scores of MS. narratives of similar kind, written down from what the pioneers said in their old age; unfortunately it is difficult to sift out the true from the false, unless the stories are corroborated from outside sources; and most of the tales in the Draper MSS. are evidently hopelessly distorted. Wells’ daring attack on the Indian camp is alluded to in the Bradley MSS.; the journal, under date of August 12th, recites how four white spies went down almost to Lake Erie, captured two Indians, and then attacked the Indians in their tents, three of the spies being wounded.

  36 American State Papers, IV, 490, Wayne to Secretary of War, Aug. 14, 1794.

  37 Bradley MSS. Letter of Captain Daniel Bradley to Ebenezer Banks, Grand Glaize, August 28, 1794.

  38 “American Pioneer,” 1, 317, Daily journal of Wayne’s Campaign. By Lieutenant Boyer. Reprinted separately in Cincinnati in 1866.

  39 American State Papers, 491, Wayne’s Report to Secretary of War, August 28, 1794.

  40 Canadian Archives, McKee to Chew, August 27, 1794. McKee says there were 1,300 Indians, and omits all allusion to Caldwell’s rangers. He always underestimates the Indian numbers and loss. In the battle one of Caldwell’s rangers, Antoine Lasselle, was captured. He gave in detail the numbers of the Indians engaged; they footed up to over 1,500. A deserter from the fort, a British drummer of the 24th Regiment, named John Bevin, testified that he had heard both McKee and Elliott report the number of Indians as 2,000, in talking to Major Campbell, the commandant of the fort, after the battle. He and Lasselle agree as to Caldwell’s rangers. See their depositions, American State Papers, IV, 494.

  41 Draper MSS., William Clark to Jonathan Clark, August 28, 1794. McBride, II, 129; “Life of Paxton.” Many of the regulars and volunteers were left in Fort Defiance and the breastworks on the Maumee as garrisons.

  42 A curious name, but so given in all the reports.

  43 Bradley MSS., entry in the journal for August 20th.

  44 Wayne’s report; of the wounded 11 afterward died. He gives an itemized statement. Clark in his letter makes the dead 34 (including 8 militia instead of 7) and the wounded only 70. Wayne reports the Indian loss as twice as great as that of the whites; and says the woods were strewn with their dead bodies and those of their white auxiliaries. Clark says 100 Indians were killed. The Englishman, Thomas Duggan, writing from Detroit to Joseph Chew, Secretary of the Indian Office, says officially that “great numbers” of the Indians were slain. The journal of Wayne’s campaign says 40 dead were left on the field, and that there was considerable additional, but unascertained, loss in the rapid two miles pursuit. The member of Caldwell’s company who was captured was a French Canadian; his deposition is given by Wayne. McKee says the Indians lost but 19 men, and that but 400 were engaged, specifying the Wyandots and Ottawas as being those who did the fighting and suffered the loss; and he puts the loss of the Americans, although he admits that they won, at between 300 and 400. He was furious at the defeat, and was endeavoring to minimize it in every way. He does not mention the presence of Caldwell’s white company; he makes the mistake of putting the American cavalry on the wrong wing, in trying to show that only the Ottawas and Wyandots were engaged; and if his figures, 19 dead, have any value at all, they refer only to those two tribes; above I have repeatedly shown that he invariably underestimated the Indian losses, usually giving the losses suffered by the band he was with as being the entire loss. In this case he speaks of the fighting and loss as being confined to the Ottawas and Wyandots; but Brickell, who was with the Delawares, states that “many of the Delawares were killed and wounded.” All the Indians were engaged; and doubtless all the tribes suffered proportionately, and much more than the Americans. Captain Daniel Bradley in his above quoted letter of Aug. 28th to Ebenezer Banks (Bradley MSS.) says that between 50 and 100 Indians were killed.

  45 Daily Journal of Wayne’s Campaign “American Pioneer,” I, 351.

  46 Draper MSS., William Clark to Jonathan Clark, November 23, 1794.

  47 Canadian Archives, William Johnson Chew to Joseph Chew, December 7, 1794.

  48 Brickell’s Narrative.

  49 Canadian Archives, Joseph Brant to Joseph Chew, Oct. 22, 1794; William J. Chew to J. Chew, Oct. 24, 1794.

  50 Canadian Archives, Brant to Joseph Chew, Feb. 24, and March 17, 1795.

  51 Do., Brant to Chew, Jan. 19, 1796.

  52 Canadian Archives, McKee to Chew, March 27, 1795.

  53 Canadian Archives, Geo. Ironside to McKee, Dec. 13, 1794.

  54 Do., Antoine Lasselle to Jacques Lasselle, Jan. 31, 1795.

  55 Do., Letter of Lt.-Col. England, Jan. 30, 1795; also copy of treaty of peace of Feb. nth.

  56 American State Papers, IV, 562-583.

  57 The ordinary American histories, often so absurdly unjust to England, are right in their treatment of the British actions on the frontier in 1793-94. The ordinary British historians simply ignore the whole affair. As a type of their class, Mr. Percy Gregg may be instanced. His “History of the United States” is a silly book; he is often intentionally untruthful, but his chief fault is his complete ignorance of the facts about which he is writing. It is, of course, needless to criticise such writers as Mr. Gregg and his fellows. But it is worth while calling attention to Mr. Goldwin Smith’s “The U
nited States,” for Mr. Goldwin Smith is a student, and must be taken seriously. He says: “That the British government or anybody by its authority was intriguing with the Indians against the Americans is an assertion of which there seems to be no proof.” If he will examine the Canadian Archives, from which I have quoted, and the authorities which I cite, he will find the proof ready to hand. Prof. A. C. McLaughlin has made a capital study of this question in his pamphlet on “The Western Posts and the British Debts.” What he says can not well be controverted.

  LOUISIANA AND AARON BURR

  PREFACE

  THIS VOLUME covers the period which followed the checkered but finally successful war waged by the United States Government against the Northwestern Indians, and deals with the acquisition and exploration of the vast region that lay beyond the Mississippi. It was during this period that the West rose to real power in the Union. The boundaries of the old West were at last made certain, and the new West, the Far West, the country between the Mississippi and the Pacific, was added to the national domain. The steady stream of incoming settlers broadened and deepened year by year; Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio became States, Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi Territories. The population in the newly settled regions increased with a rapidity hitherto unexampled; and this rapidity, alike in growth of population and in territorial expansion, gave the West full weight in the national councils.

  The victorious campaigns of Wayne in the North, and the innumerable obscure forays and reprisals of the Tennesseeans and Georgians in the South, so cowed the Indians that they all, North and South alike, made peace; the first peace the border had known for fifty years. At the same time the treaties of Jay and Pinckney gave us in fact the boundaries which the peace of 1783 had only given us in name. The execution of these treaties put an end in the North to the intrigues of the British, who had stirred the Indians to hostility against the Americans; and in the South to the far more treacherous intrigues of the Spaniards, who showed astounding duplicity, and whose intrigues extended not only to the Indians but also to the baser separatist leaders among the Westerners themselves.

  The cession of Louisiana followed. Its true history is to be found, not in the doings of the diplomats who determined merely the terms upon which it was made, but in the Western growth of the people of the United States from 1769 to 1803, which made it inevitable. The men who settled and peopled the Western wilderness were the men who won Louisiana; for it was surrendered by France merely because it was impossible to hold it against the American advance. Jefferson, through his agents at Paris, asked only for New Orleans; but Napoleon thrust upon him the great West, because Napoleon saw, what the American statesmen and diplomats did not see, but what the Westerners felt; for he saw that no European power could hold the country beyond the Mississippi when the Americans had made good their foothold upon the hither bank.

  It remained to explore the unknown land; and this task fell, not to mere wild hunters, such as those who had first penetrated the wooded wilderness beyond the Alleghanies, but to officers of the regular army, who obeyed the orders of the National Government. Lewis, Clark, and Pike were the pioneers in the exploration of the vast territory the United States had just gained.

  The names of the Indian fighters, the treaty-makers, the wilderness wanderers, who took the lead in winning and exploring the West, are memorable. More memorable still are the lives and deeds of the settler folk for whom they fought and toiled; for the feats of the leaders were rendered possible only by the lusty and vigorous growth of the young commonwealths built up by the throng of westward-pushing pioneers. The raw, strenuous, eager social life of these early dwellers on the Western waters must be studied before it is possible to understand the conditions that determined the continual westward extension of the frontier. Tennessee, during the years immediately preceding her admission to Statehood, is especially well worth study, both as a typical frontier community, and because of the opportunity afforded to examine in detail the causes and course of the Indian wars.

  In this volume I have made use of the material to which reference was made in the first; besides the American State Papers I have drawn on the Canadian Archives, the Draper Collection, including especially the papers from the Spanish Archives, the Robertson MSS., and the Clay MSS. for hitherto unused matter. I have derived much assistance from the various studies and monographs on special phases of Western history; I refer to each in its proper place. I regret that Mr. Stephen B. Weeks’ valuable study of the Martin family did not appear in time for me to use it while writing about the little State of Franklin, in my third volume.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Sagamore Hill, Long Island,

  May, 1896

  LOUISIANA AND AARON BURR

  CHAPTER I

  TENNESSEE BECOMES A STATE, 1791–1796

  THE TERRITORY of the United States of America South of the River Ohio” was the official title of the tract of land which had been ceded by North Carolina to the United States, and which soon after became the State of Tennessee. William Blount, the newly appointed Governor, took charge late in 1790. He made a tour of the various counties, as laid out under authority of the State of North Carolina, rechristening them as counties of the Territory, and summoning before him the persons in each county holding commissions from North Carolina, at the respective court-houses, where he formally notified them of the change. He read to them the act of Congress accepting the cessions of the claims of North Carolina; then he read his own commission from President Washington; and informed them of the provision by North Carolina that Congress should assume and execute the government of the new Territory “in a manner similar to that which they support northwest of the River Ohio.” Following this he formally read the ordinance for the government of the Northwestern Territory. He commented upon and explained this proclamation, stating that under it the President had appointed the Governor, the Judges, and the Secretary of the new Territory, and that he himself, as Governor, would now appoint the necessary county officers.

  The remarkable feature of this address was that he read to the assembled officers in each county, as part of the law apparently binding upon them, Article 6 of the Ordinance of 1787, which provided that there should be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the Northwestern Territory.1 It had been expressly stipulated that this particular provision as regards slavery should not apply to the Southwestern Territory, and of course Blount’s omission to mention this fact did not in any way alter the case; but it is a singular thing that he should without comment have read, and his listeners without comment have heard, a recital that slavery was abolished in their territory. It emphasizes the fact that at this time there was throughout the West no very strong feeling on the subject of slavery, and what feeling there was, was if anything hostile. The adventurous backwoods farmers who composed the great mass of the population in Tennessee, as elsewhere among and west of the Alleghanies, were not a slave-owning people, in the sense that the planters of the seaboard were. They were pre-eminently folk who did their work with their own hands. Master and man chopped and plowed and reaped and builded side by side, and even the leaders of the community, the militia generals, the legislators, and the judges, often did their share of farm work, and prided themselves upon their capacity to do it well. They had none of that feeling which makes slave-owners look upon manual labor as a badge of servitude. They were often lazy and shiftless, but they never deified laziness and shiftlessness or made them into a cult. The one thing they prized beyond all others was their personal freedom, the right of the individual to do whatsoever he saw fit. Indeed they often carried this feeling so far as to make them condone gross excesses, rather than insist upon the exercise of even needful authority. They were by no means entirely logical, but they did see and feel that slavery was abhorrent, and that it was utterly inconsistent with the theories of their own social and governmental life. As yet there was no thought of treating slavery as a sacred institution, the righteousness of which must not be
questioned. At the Fourth of July celebrations toasts such as “The total abolition of slavery” were not uncommon.2 It was this feeling which prevented any manifestation of surprise at Blount’s apparent acquiescence in a section of the ordinance for the government of the Territory which prohibited slavery.

  Nevertheless, though slaves were not numerous, they were far from uncommon, and the moral conscience of the community was not really roused upon the subject. It was hardly possible that it should be roused, for no civilized people who owned African slaves had as yet abolished slavery, and it was too much to hope that the path toward abolition would be pointed out by poor frontiersmen engaged in a life and death struggle with hostile savages. The slaveholders were not interfered with until they gradually grew numerous enough and powerful enough to set the tone of thought, and make it impossible to root out slavery save by outside action.

  Blount recommended the appointment of Sevier and Robertson as brigadier-generals of militia of the Eastern and Western districts of the Territory, and issued a large number of commissions to the justices of the peace, militia officers, sheriffs, and clerks of the county courts in the different counties.3 In his appointments he shrewdly and properly identified himself with the natural leaders of the frontiersmen. He made Sevier and Robertson his right-hand men, and strove always to act in harmony with them, while for the minor military and civil officers he chose the persons whom the frontiersmen themselves desired. In consequence he speedily became a man of great influence for good. The Secretary of the Territory reported to the Federal Government that the effect of Blount’s character on the frontiersmen was far greater than was the case with any other man, and that he was able to get them to adhere to the principles of order and to support the laws by his influence in a way which it was hopeless to expect from their own respect for governmental authority. Blount was felt by the frontiersmen to be thoroughly in sympathy with them, to understand and appreciate them, and to be heartily anxious for their welfare; and yet at the same time his influence could be counted upon on the side of order, while the majority of the frontier officials in any time of commotion were apt to remain silent and inactive, or even to express their sympathy with the disorderly element.4