The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  As it did so, Harmar sent Major John Wyllys with 340 militia and 60 regulars to attack the Indians as they returned to Kekionga. The Indians lured the militia into giving chase, and then caught and killed Wyllys and most of regulars at the village. By the time Harmar’s army limped into Fort Washington, it had suffered more than two hundred casualties, lost a third of the packhorses, and abandoned much equipment. At first Harmar claimed a victory, but it quickly became clear the campaign was a humiliating defeat.28

  By November 2 Washington was concerned that there had been no news from Harmar. “I am not a little anxious to know the result of it,” he told Knox.29 As the first reports trickled in, he “prepared for the worst,” confiding to Knox “that my forebodings with respect to the Expedition against the Wabash Indians are of disappointment; and a disgraceful termination under the conduct of B. Genl Harmar.” Washington had appointed Harmar, but now he fumed, “I expected little from the moment I heard he was a drunkard. I expected less as soon as I heard that on this account no confidence was reposed in him by the people of the Western Country. And I gave up all hope of Success, as soon as I heard that there were disputes with him about command.”30 In the historian John Ferling’s assessment, the reports of insobriety were unfounded and Washington was simply looking for a scapegoat. If Harmar was such a drunkard, why leave him in command of the army?31 A court of inquiry exonerated Harmar, and blame for the defeat fell on the militia.32 Still, Knox informed the discredited general, with a degree of understatement, “It would be deficiency of candor on my part were I to say your conduct is approved by the President of the United States, or the public.”33

  Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania took a dim view of the whole thing. “A war has actually been undertaken against the Wabash Indians without any authority of Congress,” he wrote, when the first suggestions of a defeat reached the Senate in early December. “Mind what comes of it.” Then, when the official information followed: “The ill-fortune of the affair breaks through all the coloring that was given to it.” Maclay was convinced that Washington and his government fomented the Indian war as a pretext for raising an army that could be employed to cow its own citizens into submission.34 Thomas Jefferson shared those suspicions and also condemned the tactics. “The federal council has yet to learn by experience, what experience has long taught us in Virginia, that rank and file fighting will not do against Indians,” he wrote in implicit criticism of the Virginian veteran of Braddock’s defeat who was now commander in chief. He hoped the next expedition would “be made in a more auspicious form.”35

  Indian raids intensified after Harmar’s defeat, and the alarm spread to the frontiers of Washington’s home state.36 In the Ohio country, speculators could not sell land to emigrants who were now afraid to emigrate. They hoped the president would dispatch another invasion in the spring.37 Marietta and other frontier communities that were supposed to be the vanguard of civilization now faced a full-blown Indian war. Rufus Putnam bombarded Washington that winter with requests to send troops and do it soon, before the settlements were “swallowed up.” The only way to prevent an all-out attack on the frontiers come spring, Putnam preached to the choir, was to carry the war into the Indians’ own country. If the government defeated the Indians and protected the settlers, it could reasonably expect a rapid sale of its lands that might pay off millions of dollars of the national debt. If it left its citizens at the mercy of the Indians, the consequences were obvious: no more lands would be sold, and they would probably be snatched up by speculators who paid no regard to the laws of the United States or the rights of the Indians—precisely what Washington hoped to avoid.38

  Knox echoed Putnam’s warnings. Things could not remain as they were, he told Washington. Another campaign into Indian country was essential to stop the Indians wreaking havoc on the frontiers in the spring. If the rapidly increasing frontier population did not receive protection from the government, it might look elsewhere and lean toward separation. Knox now estimated the Wabash Indians could muster about 1,100 warriors, with perhaps another 1,000 joining them from more distant tribes; that being so, it would take an army of 3,000 men to convince the Indians of the futility of resistance and “the absolute necessity of submitting to the justice and mercy of the United States.” The army would quash resistance, destroy towns and food supplies, capture as many women and children as possible, and build a fort at the site of the Miami village. It was the same strategy Washington had advocated in the French and Indian War and implemented during the Revolution: “That is, by carrying the war into the enemy’s country, prevent in a great degree their invading the frontiers.” 39 Even Jefferson, who usually preferred gift-giving to war as a more cost-effective tactic for dispossessing Indians of their land, told Washington, “I hope we shall give the Indians a thorough drubbing this summer.”40

  Knox duly requested expansion of the regular army to 3,000—1,200 regulars, 1,300 volunteer levies enlisted for four months, and 500 rangers at a cost of $100,000—in preparation for a new offensive in the summer.41 On March 3, 1791, Congress authorized raising a second regiment of 912 men and authorized the president to raise 2,000 levies and a body of militia for six months. The next day, Washington appointed St. Clair to command the army. “Your knowledge of the country north-west of the Ohio, and of the resources for an army in its vicinity, added to a full confidence in your military character, founded on mature experience, induced my nomination of you to the command of the troops on the frontiers,” the president wrote to his general.42 The levies were to be raised from the various states, assemble at Fort Pitt, and then float downriver to Fort Washington. From there St. Clair would march to Kekionga and build a fort “in the heart of the Miami villages” that would keep the Indians in check. Knox was certain that “disciplined valor will triumph over the undisciplined Indians.”43

  So was Washington. As “the great chief of the thirteen fires,” he sent the Indians at the Miami towns a message “unmixed with fear, and dictated by the pure principles of humanity,” giving them a last chance: they must see reason, make peace, and take up farming, or suffer the consequences. “The United States are powerful, and able to send forth such numbers of warriors, as would drive you entirely out of the Country,” he warned. The campaign “would occasion some trouble to us, but it would be absolute destruction to you, your women and your children.”44 Like Sullivan’s officers who had drunk a toast as they set out to invade Iroquois country in 1779, Washington offered the Indians a choice between “civilization or death.” It reflected a consistent formula in his Indian policy.

  The Indians, too, had been preparing for renewed war in the spring. After the American attacks, they moved their villages downriver to an area known as the Glaize, which now became the center of their resistance. Blue Jacket traveled to Detroit in the fall to request British food and clothing for families whose fields and homes the Americans had destroyed, and a promise of assistance in the fighting to come. The commander at Detroit promised to do what he could but cautioned that he had no authority to commit troops “as I am only a Small Finger on the hand of your Father at Quebec.”45

  Brigadier General Charles Scott, who had served under Washington in Braddock’s campaign, kicked off the 1791 campaign. Washington instructed him to assemble “men of reputation,” meaning known Indian fighters, and to fight “according to your mode.” He directed them to take captive Indian women and children to be held as hostages. In late May, Scott and eight hundred Kentucky mounted militia crossed the Ohio and headed for the Wabash Valley, where they destroyed a group of Wea villages known as Ouiatenon and other towns farther upriver. They met no opposition, and most of the Indians who were killed died trying to escape cross the river in canoes or by swimming. Scott reported killing thirty-two people, but did not specify age or gender, and took fifty-eight captives. Five Americans were wounded. The captive Indian women were taken first to Fort Steuben and then to Fort Washington, where they remained in prison next to the army barracks f
or almost a year. As the historian Susan Sleeper-Smith points out, Washington had pushed his war against Indian women to another level; in addition to targeting their homes and crops, he now turned to kidnapping them.46 This was the way to fight Indians, exulted George Nicholas, Kentucky’s first attorney general; Scott had not encountered much opposition, “but more real service was effected than by the expedition last fall which cost so much blood and treasure.” St. Clair could expect little trouble when he launched his campaign in the summer.47 News of Scott’s success sent Ohio Company shares soaring in value.48

  In August, St. Clair dispatched Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkinson and five hundred mounted troops on a second raid into the Wabash Valley. Wilkinson burned a cluster of villages along the Eel River and then reburned the Ouiatenon villages that Scott had destroyed and the Indians had since rebuilt. Knox forwarded the news of Wilkinson’s success to Washington, and Washington laid the reports before Congress.49 So far, so good.

  st. clair, however, was having trouble. He was supposed to advance into Indian country on the heels of Scott’s campaign. Instead, he was delayed by illness and did not reach Fort Washington and assume command until mid-May. At that point, he had barely one hundred men present and fit for duty. The start date of July was abandoned. Incompetence and corruption in supplying the army caused further delays. The provisions contract for the campaign was first awarded to a New York merchant named Theodosius Fowler, who transferred the contract to William Duer.50 Duer, who had played an important role in the Ohio and Scioto Companies’ machinations in 1787, had resigned from his position as assistant secretary of the treasury to pursue a career in contracting and speculating. He received more than $75,000 in cash advances from the government to purchase army supplies but used some of it to fend off creditors and invested some of it in land speculations. He loaned his friend Henry Knox $10,000, and they formed a secret partnership speculating in land in Maine.51 Knox appointed as quartermaster general another friend and business associate, the Philadelphia merchant Samuel Hodgdon. Knox’s younger brother, William, was Hodgdon’s chief assistant.

  The quartermaster general was supposed to deal with contracts and inspection in Philadelphia, buy boats and horses, arrange for the manufacture of artillery shells at Pittsburgh, and have everything shipped downriver, before proceeding himself to Fort Washington. Although Hodgdon had enough funding to get the job done, recurrent deficiencies and problems arose. Clothing was shoddy and was slow reaching Fort Pitt. Knapsacks ripped and leaked. Shoes were too small and split after a few days’ wear. Packsaddles were too big, and new ones had to be made. The lightweight tents were suitable only for a summer campaign. Many of the firearms were in poor repair and some unfit for use. Gunpowder was packed in casks that leaked and let in moisture; the cartridge paper was flimsy. The beef supplies were insufficient, and the meat was sometimes barely edible.52 St. Clair had to employ local coopers, carpenters, wheelwrights, and gunsmiths in Cincinnati while he waited for the quartermaster and supplies to arrive.53 “For God’s sake, put the matter of provisions on the frontier in perfect train,” Knox wrote Duer privately in late June.54

  Troops trickled into Pittsburgh during the summer, but low water levels on the upper Ohio prevented General Richard Butler, St. Clair’s second-in-command, from moving them downriver. As the summer ticked by, Washington began to fret. Knox communicated the president’s growing concern to St. Clair and Butler. In July, Washington, “exceedingly anxious” to have the campaign begin as soon as possible, ordered Butler to descend the Ohio immediately with all the troops at his command. In August, Washington was “by no means satisfied by the long detention of the troops on the upper part of the Ohio, which he considers unnecessary and improper” and feared it was “an unhappy omen.” The delays were jeopardizing the campaign, and unless all parts of the army made great exertions to make up for lost time, the money invested in the campaign would be wasted, and “the measures from which so much has been expected will issue in disgrace.”55 Butler’s troops finally headed downriver. Butler, Quartermaster Hodgdon, and three companies of the 2nd Regiment arrived at Fort Washington on September 10.56 But the powerful army that Washington had threatened would destroy any Indians who resisted did not materialize. In Kentucky so few men and officers volunteered that one thousand “reluctant citizens” had to be drafted.57 Most of the soldiers were raw recruits with little or no preparation for a campaign into Indian country, and regular officers complained the militia lacked training and discipline.58

  St. Clair had serious doubts whether the campaign should go ahead so late in the season. But Washington needed a victory, and he needed it soon. St. Clair said later that Knox wrote repeatedly “in the name of the president, in the most positive terms, to press forward the operations.”59 On September 1 Knox wrote: “The president enjoins you, by every principle that is sacred, to stimulate your exertions in the highest degree, and to move as rapidly as the lateness of the season, and the nature of the case will possibly admit.”60 St. Clair assured Knox a week later that “every possible exertion shall be made to bring the campaign to a speedy and happy issue.”61 On October 1 he asked Knox to assure Washington “that nothing can exceed the anxiety I feel to have the operations of the Campaign begun.” He would rather have started the campaign two months earlier but was sparing no effort.62 Pressured by his commander in chief, St. Clair pushed ahead.

  The army headed north from Fort Washington along an Indian path that ran between the Ohio and the Glaize. The problems continued to mount. As Forbes had done in 1758, St. Clair constructed a supply route with a series of garrisoned posts at intervals along the way, sending supplies forward from each post as the troops advanced. Hacking its way through the woods, with oxen pulling the artillery and many of the wagons, the army made slow progress, sometimes advancing only a few miles each day, and even at that pace it frequently stalled as it waited for supply wagons to catch up.63 Soldiers wearing shoddy clothes and shoes and sheltering in thin and leaky tents suffered misery when the weather turned wet and then freezing. Disease and desertion thinned the ranks, and levies left as their six-month terms expired. St. Clair himself was so sick he sometimes had to be carried on a litter. Courts-martial, floggings, and hangings further reduced morale. At one point, fearful that deserters would plunder the supply train coming up behind, St. Clair sent Major Hamtramck and the 1st Regiment back to protect it.64

  By the time St. Clair reached the Wabash River on November 3, discharges, desertions, and the absence of the 1st Regiment had reduced his army to about fourteen hundred effective men.65 Still, he was confident it would resume its march the next day, reach the Miami villages, and build a fort. He anticipated little or no resistance.66 Indian scouts had been monitoring the army’s progress, running off horses and lifting an occasional scalp, but Piominko and a contingent of Chickasaw warriors who had come to scout for St. Clair saw little sign of the enemy. They missed the Indian army.67

  When the Shawnees and Miamis got word of St. Clair’s invasion, they had sent war belts and painted tobacco, calling on other nations to join them.68 Delawares, Shawnees, Kickapoos, Miamis, Wyandots, Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomis, together with some Conoys and Nanticokes, Mohawks from Canada, and a few Creeks and Cherokees, gathered at the Glaize. Simon Girty, Alexander McKee (whom Washington had met during his trip to the Ohio country in 177069), and Matthew Elliott of the British Indian Department, together with various French and British traders in the vicinity, supported and supplied the coalition.70 Indian men prepared for war by fasting, abstaining from sexual intercourse, observing rituals that gave them access to spiritual power, and drinking herbal concoctions to cleanse their bodies before combat. On October 28, 1,040 warriors set out to do battle, singing prayers as they went. Girty, who counted them, said they “were never in greater Heart to meet their Enemy, nor more sure of Success.”71

  They covered fifty miles in four days. When St. Clair made camp on November 3, they were just two or three miles away.
During the night, they advanced through the woods to the outskirts of the American positions. According to Joseph Brant and John Norton, a Cherokee-Scot and adopted Mohawk who wrote his account based on talking with Indian people years after the event, the tribes lined up in a crescent or half-moon formation. The Shawnees, Delawares, and Miamis under Blue Jacket, Buckongahelas, and Little Turtle occupied the center; the Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomis took the left wing; the Wyandots and Iroquois, the right.72 Spiritually and tactically ready for combat, they waited for dawn.

  They attacked just before the sun was up and just after the soldiers had been dismissed from parade. They routed the Kentucky militia, who were camped ahead of the main body of the army across a creek, and sent them reeling into the other battalions as the men scrambled to arms, throwing the army into disorder.73 The warriors quickly enfiladed the American position—St. Clair recalled his army was surrounded in a matter of minutes. Firing from the trees, they picked off the American officers and the artillery crew, silencing the guns.74 Some officers managed to mount hastily assembled bayonet charges, but the Indians simply melted away until the charges lost their momentum, and then they resumed their deadly target shooting.75 Amid the chaos and confusion, noncombatants and camp followers—mostly women and children—huddled in terror in a hollow square within the American lines.76 The lines contracted and crumbled under the relentless assault, rendering soldiers and noncombatants even more vulnerable. Most of the officers fell, including Richard Butler, whom Shawnee warriors tomahawked and scalped.77