The Wild Frontier

by William M. Osborn

  Britain might have overlooked the commercial mediocrity of the colonies, but it could not overlook their “brazen and repeated flouting of British laws.”4 Parliament passed act after act that many of the colonists deemed oppressive, and many ignored them—the Molasses Act, the Navigation Acts, the Sugar Act, and the Stamp Act.5

  Then there was violence. On the same day that the chancellor of the exchequer, Lord North, announced there would be no new taxes from London, a mob of radical colonists, unaware of North’s announcement, attacked the Boston customs house. Snowballs were thrown at the British guards, who fired and killed 5 and wounded several more in what became known as the Boston Massacre.

  North came up with a plan to tax tea. In protest, John Hancock and Sam Adams formed a group poorly disguised as Mohawk Indians to board the tea ships on December 16, 1773. They dumped 342 chests of tea owned by the East India Company in the harbor. The event was ever after known as the Boston Tea Party. North was furious, and Parliament passed the Boston Port Act, which closed the port until the colony paid Britain for the cost of the tea. (The bill was never paid.) Then Parliament passed the Massachusetts Government Act (closing the Massachusetts legislature), a new Quartering Act, the Administration of Justice Act, and acts favorable to Canada, including extending its boundaries into the Ohio Valley. The colonists called these the Intolerable Acts.6

  Young plantation owner Thomas Jefferson published his Summary View of the Rights of British America, which denied Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies because “the God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” On the other hand, Benjamin Franklin and John Dickinson, principal draftsman of the Articles of Confederation, urged caution.7

  The British governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, was ordered to strike a blow at the rebels. He found out where they were and sent troops to seize them and then destroy their supply facility at Concord, Massachusetts. Boston silversmith Paul Revere set out on horseback to warn everyone the British were coming. The British arrived in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, and were met by 70 armed men, some of them “Minutemen,” local militia formed to fight on a minute’s notice. Some unknown person fired a shot; 8 Minutemen were killed and 10 wounded. The British marched on to Concord and destroyed the few colonist supplies there. On their way back to Boston, however, local farmers in the Lexington area organized into a fighting unit and fired on the British from every house, barn, and tree. Casualties were 93 colonists and 273 British soldiers.8 The colonists were colonists no more. They were revolutionaries and free men—if the Revolution could be won.

  A prophetic statement was made by a British sympathizer, a Tory, as he watched a Minuteman go by his window on the way to Lexington. He said, “There goes a man who will fight you in blood up to his knees.”9 If the Minutemen were willing to fight part of the army of the world’s greatest power, they and their descendants surely would fight the less powerful Indian tribes if necessary.

  In 1777 British general John Burgoyne (who was also a playwright) drove down the Hudson Valley with his army of about 9,000 from Canada in an attempt to isolate New England from the rest of the colonies. Indians, probably one of the Algonquin family of tribes, were part of his command. Two of those Indians, one a Wyandot named Panther, were escorting an American named Jane McCrea, who was on her way to marry one of Burgoyne’s officers, David Jones. Her long hair may have made her a target.10 The Indians tomahawked her to death, stripped off her clothing, scalped her, and perhaps raped her. The Indians then took her scalp with that of an American officer back to camp, where they had a victory dance. Her body was found later. Word spread quickly through the British army.11 The Americans were horrified. American general Horatio Gates damned Burgoyne for hiring “the savages of America to scalp Europeans and the descendants of Europeans, nay more, that he should pay a price for each scalp so barbarously taken.”12

  General Washington heard about the incident and wrote urging the Massachusetts and Connecticut militias to “repel an enemy from your borders, who, not content with hiring mercenaries to lay waste your country, have now brought savages, with the avowed and expressed intention of adding murder to desolation.”13 A record number of militia turned out and eventually defeated Burgoyne. Meanwhile, Burgoyne faced a dilemma. If he executed the Indians, his Indian allies might be turned into enemies. If he took no action, he would seem to condone the murder. He ordered Panther shot, but his superior argued that the Indians would desert unless Panther was turned loose. Burgoyne then pardoned the Indians and gave them a stern lecture. They resented this. A few days later, a large number of them deserted anyway.14 American soldiers began silently killing British sentries, as well as killing or scalping Indians and pinning notes on the bodies reading “For Jane McCrea.”15

  The war was dragging on for the British, and they were frustrated. At the beginning they had employed Indians primarily for military ends. Gradually, they started using them to punish and frighten the Americans. Englishman William Tryon, who was the royal governor of North Carolina, then, later, governor of New York, urged the British ministry to “loose the savages against the miserable Rebels in order to impose a reign of terror on the frontiers.”16 (Governor Tryon favored terror in other directions as well. He masterminded an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the life of General Washington.)17 Tryon’s recommendation became British policy. When Prime Minister North tried to defend it in Parliament, Lord Chatham declared he was

  astonished to hear such principles confessed! … Principles equally unconstitutional, inhuman, and unchristian! … What! to attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping knife? To the cannibal savage, torturing, murdering, roasting and eating; literally, my lords, eating the mangled victims of his barbarous battles! Such horrible notions shock every precept of religion, divine or natural, and every generous feeling of humanity…. They shock me as a lover of honorable war, and a detester of murderous barbarity…. We turn loose these savage hell-hounds against our brethren and countrymen in America, of the same language, laws, liberty and religion, endeared to us by every tie that should sanctify humanity.18

  Unquestionably, the object of Indian raids was to devastate the white enemy, burn his house, kill his livestock, scatter his possessions, scalp his women, carry off his children, and if possible torture him to death.19

  Henry Knox, the first secretary of war, reported to Congress in 1787 that “the deep rooted prejudices, and malignity of heart, and conduct reciprocally entertained and practiced on all occasions by the Whites and Savages will ever prevent their being good neighbors.”20 Smith noted that when the British departed after the Revolution, they left behind a legacy of bitterness that could never be alleviated. “Settler and savage [were] caught in a terrible ritual of violence.”21

  Not all the atrocities involved actual physical pain or death—a threat would do. In 1777, Fort Schuyler (old Fort Stanwix) in New York, defended by 750 Americans, was surrounded by 1,800 British soldiers and 600 Indians under the command of Colonel John Butler and Mohawk chief Joseph Brant. The British obtained a parley. Colonel Barry St. Leger threatened that if the fort did not surrender, the Indians could not be restrained and would destroy the American men, women, and children. The American commander, Lieutenant Colonel Marinus Willett, made this reply to Colonel John Butler, the British officer carrying the St. Leger message:

  Do I understand you, Sir? I think you say, that you come from a British colonel … and by your uniform, you appear to be an officer in the British service. You have made a long speech on the occasion of your visit, which, stript of all its superfluities, amounts to this, that you come from a British colonel, to the commandant of this garrison, to tell him, that if he does not deliver up the garrison into the hands of your Colonel, he will send his Indians to murder our women and children. You will please to reflect, sir, that their blood will be on your head, not on ours. We are doing our duty; this garrison is committed to our charge,
and we will take care of it. After you get out of it, you may turn around and look at its outside, but never expect to come in again, unless you come as a prisoner. I consider the message you have brought, a degrading one for a British officer to send, and by no means reputable for a British officer to carry. For my own part, I declare, before I would consent to deliver this garrison to such a murdering set as your army, by your account consists of, I would suffer my body to be filled with splinters, and set on fire, as you know has at times been practiced, by such hordes of women and children killers, as belong to your army.22

  The British threat of mass murder proved counterproductive. Willett went through enemy lines for help. A plan was worked out “to make such an exaggerated report of General [Benedict] Arnold’s force [which had relieved the fort] as to alarm them and put them to flight.” The plan worked: 500 or 600 Indians fled, and the British then gave up the siege “in the greatest hurry and confusion.”23

  Pennsylvania and New York bore the brunt of Indian raids. The worst of these attacks occurred in 1778 at Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, which is near Wilkes-Barre. It was designed to wreak vengeance and furnish plunder. A force of 1,200 British and Indians went through western Pennsylvania murdering and looting. Crèvecoeur, who lived near these towns, reported, “Many families were locked up in their houses and consumed with the furniture. Dreadful scenes were transacted which I know not how to retrace.”24 Every house in Wilkes-Barre was destroyed.25

  The Indians captured 2 white men and a black man at a mill near Wyoming Valley, took them back to the Indian camp, and murdered them. The fort at Wyoming Valley was then surrounded in 1778. Sir John Butler, the British commander, set fire to a nearby fort to give the impression he was retreating; the Americans were deceived and followed. They were ambushed and slaughtered. Battle casualties were mutilated, scalped, and burned. An American soldier, Captain Bedlock, was taken prisoner. He was stripped naked, his body was stuck full of splinters of pine knots, then more pine knots were piled around him. These were set on fire. His 2 companions, Captains Ranson and Durgee, were thrown alive into the flames and held down with pitchforks.26 Captives were tortured and burned.27 Butler claimed his men had taken 227 scalps.28 The Indians sent into the fort the bloody scalps of 196 people.29 In addition, many settlers who fled the attack perished from hunger and exhaustion in the Pocono Great Swamp.30 The Iroquois killed 360 settlers in a single day.31 The press reported these atrocities, and “the Wyoming Valley Massacre became a byword for Tory and Indian brutality.”32

  During Indian attacks, the courage of settler women was displayed time and time again. In 1778, several families were living in the Bozarth house for safety. One of the children ran in from play to report that there were Indians outside. A man went to the window and was shot by the Indians. An Indian broke into the house and started fighting with a second man, who had no weapon. He called to Mrs. Bozarth for a knife. She did not have one. She took an ax and killed the Indian with one blow to the head. A second Indian came in and shot the man with no weapon. Mrs. Bozarth hit this Indian with the ax several times until his intestines appeared. More Indians, who had been killing children outside, came toward the house. When one stuck his head in the door, Mrs. Bozarth cut it in two with the ax. The man with no weapon survived his wound. She and he barricaded the house (with the dead inside) for protection against the besieging Indians until help arrived.33

  British lieutenant colonel Henry Hamilton was lieutenant governor of Detroit. During the Revolution, he supplied the Shawnee, Delaware, and Miamis with guns, ammunition, and supplies and offered a bounty on white scalps. He was known among the settlers as the Hair Buyer. He reported that during 1778 the Indians in his district had brought in 110 scalps.34

  Colonel John Smith of Pennsylvania and his men were fighting the Indians. His men took 4 scalps. In the fight, Captain John Hinkston pursued an Indian out of sight. He later returned with a scalp, stating he had tomahawked the Indian.35

  Trouble continued in New York. Mohawk chief Joseph Brant with Mohawk and Seneca Indians attacked Cherry Valley, New York, in 1778 with a force of about 700. Friendly Indians had warned the commander of the fort there, Colonel Ichabod Alden from Massachusetts, that the Indians were going to attack the fort. The settlers asked Alden’s permission to move into the fort or at least store their most important possessions there. Alden refused on the ground that the soldiers would be tempted to steal the settlers’ goods. The officers also stayed outside the fort, for reasons unknown.

  After 4 or 5 hours when Brant was still unable to take the fort, the Indians started burning and pillaging nearby settlements. The occupants of 6 farmhouses (who were mostly women and children) were killed. In one house alone the Indians massacred the owner, his wife, his mother, brother, sister, 3 sons, a daughter, and the soldiers billeted there,36 more than 30 people.37 The Seneca and some of the Mohawk scalped, dismembered, and indulged in ritual cannibalism. British lieutenant Rolf Hare stabbed Sarah Dunlop and saw a halfbreed called William of Canajoharie eat her flesh.38

  Moses Van Campen was an American sergeant who rose to the rank of major helping to defend the frontier in Pennsylvania for 6 years except for the 2 years he was held captive by the Indians. He was with General Sullivan on his expedition against the Iroquois. In 1778 he and his father were building a fort with his brother and 2 others when the Indians attacked. His father was struck through by a spear and was scalped. His brother was tomahawked, scalped, and thrown into the fire before the sergeant’s eyes. His uncle had been killed by the same Indians that morning and his cousin taken prisoner. He was captured, but later the prisoners killed or drove off their captors. Van Campen then turned his attention to scalping the Indians. He strung their scalps on his belt for safekeeping with the scalps of his father, brother, and the others.

  He got to Fort Jenkins and was told his mother was inside. He took off the belt of scalps and gave them to an officer to keep before going in to see his mother. The next day he went to Sunbury, Pennsylvania, where his scalps were exhibited, the cannons were fired, and he was given an ensign’s commission. Two years later, he was a lieutenant. A report came that about 300 Sinnemahoning Indians were preparing to attack the frontier. His commanding officer sent Van Campen and 4 others to investigate. They found a camp of an unknown number of Indians at night and decided to attack. The militia got among the Indians undetected, then started firing and tomahawking. The Indians fled. “We were masters of the ground and all their plunder, and took several scalps.” They learned there were 25 or 30 Indians in the camp who had killed and scalped 2 or 3 families. Several scalps were found in their camp.39

  Mohawk Joseph Brant then attacked the town of Minisink, less than 50 miles from West Point, in the Mohawk Valley, in 1779. The fort, the mill, and 12 houses were burned, some with sleeping people in them. A few were killed.40

  The commander of the local militia at Goshen, 12 miles away from Minisink, was Colonel Dr. Tustin. He asked his men to meet the next day at Minisink. At a council of war, and over the objections of Tustin, it was decided to pursue the dangerous Brant. Dr. Tustin set up a field hospital for the wounded; the Indians scalped him and 17 of his patients. About 170 militia had started the battle, but only 30 returned to their homes. (There was an amusing sidelight. During the battle, Major Wood inadvertently made a Masonic sign. Brant, who had been to England, was a Mason. Wood was captured, Brant interrogated him, learned he was not a Mason, and was furious because he thought he had been tricked. He nevertheless spared Wood’s life. When he was exchanged, Wood immediately joined the lodge.)41

  In 1779, 2 Mohawk captured 16-year-old twin sisters Maria and Christina Manheim from their home in Pennsylvania. Their band had taken 23 settlers, then burned their houses. The 2 who had captured the twins couldn’t agree whose property they were, so the chiefs decided the girls should be destroyed. The Indians sharpened a supply of pine splinters about 5 inches long, then dipped the blunt ends in turpentine. The twins were stripped naked, tied t
o a sapling with their hands high above them, then had more than 600 splinters stuck in their bodies from their knees to their shoulders. Each of the splinters was set on fire. It was almost 3 hours before they died. By that time they had lost “almost every resemblance of the human form.”42

  The same year, Indians captured 2 girls in Buffalo Valley, Pennsylvania. The Indians saw some reapers from the top of a mountain and left the girls with one Indian guard while the reapers were attacked. The guard lay down to rest. It began raining. One of the girls covered the Indian with leaves on the pretense of protecting him from the rain. When he couldn’t see, she killed him with an ax. The girls then ran toward the reapers, but the Indians saw them, and one of the girls was killed.43

  Because of his fear of Indians, farmer David Morgan and his family fled to a nearby fort close to Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, in 1779. Morgan was over 60 and infirm. He saw 2 Indians approaching some of his younger children, who were at work on the farm. He yelled a warning to the children, which caused the Indians to come toward him. He ran, but the Indians were gaining, so he turned, fired his rifle, and killed one of them. The other threw his tomahawk just as Morgan swung his single-shot rifle at the Indian. The tomahawk cut off his little finger and almost cut off the one next to it. The rifle broke off in the swing.

  The Indian got on top of Morgan and tried to reach his knife, but an apron he had tied to his body interfered. Morgan got one of the Indian’s fingers in his mouth “and deprived him of the use of that hand, by holding it, and disconcerted him considerably by chewing it.” The Indian finally got his knife into the hand Morgan had in his mouth, but Morgan twisted it so that it badly cut the Indian’s hand. Morgan wrestled the Indian’s knife away from him and stabbed him in the belly. People came from the fort and found the second Indian still alive, hiding in a fallen tree. Rather strangely, the Indian asked the people from the fort how they were. They skinned both Indians “and they have made drum heads from their skins.”44