“Ye said it well,” George began. “It was one thing in my heart and another thing in my head. A fire was in my heart, and I have never felt so strong. But then when it had ended and the fire left-my heart, it was my head that was full of ashes.”
He shrugged, out of words. “I’m not proud that I enjoyed it so much. I’d rather never do it again. I’ll have to think on it each time it happens.”
“Yes,” said Logan. “You must think on it. A man is a wolf, but he is meant to be more than a wolf. The glory of my people is in war, and my heart often has burned with that glory. But I too grew sick and full of ashes. I put away the blade long ago, and since have always talked for peace. I do not want that blaze in my heart again; I no longer need it.” He looked up from the fire, into which he, too, had been talking. “Did you take any life by your own hand when you rode with Cresap?”
“I don’t know. But when I struck I had the feeling of it.”
Logan nodded, again understanding. “Your God tells you not to kill. I hope you will always think of that. A warrior believes his courage is proven each time he makes blood flow. But there are some chiefs who understand further than that; they know greater courage sometime may be proven by preventing the flow of blood.”
“But most chiefs were warriors first.”
“Yes,” said Logan. “And sometimes they are forced to be warriors again.”
TWO WEEKS LATER, CHIEF LOGAN AND HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW rode down into the valley of Yellow Creek toward their camp leading a pack horse with two small deer strapped across its back. They had been gone two days and their hunting trip had been easy. Morning sunlight dappled the forest floor. Through the fresh spring foliage, still glistening with droplets from a pre-dawn shower, Logan could now see a glimpse of his lodge. He raised his voice in a pleasant call of homecoming.
No voice came back. That was curious. He did not hear the music of the voices of his sister’s children. And there was no woodsmoke. The camp was deserted, except for two dogs. Under the kettle outside the lodge, the ashes were cold and wet. Logan sniffed the air. He scanned the ground. There were no new footprints since the rainshower, only those of the dogs. That meant his family had been gone overnight, or at least since before daybreak. He peered inside the lodge. It seemed undisturbed, but a string of cured peltries was gone from the roof-poles where they had hung. His father’s and brother’s muskets and powder horns and bullet bags were not in the lodge.
So the whole family had gone someplace. He could not imagine where, but he was not alarmed. The men had taken their weapons with them.
Then Logan saw something that made a needle of alarm prick at the base of his skull: in a patch of soft earth in the packed dirt at the center of the lodge there was a boot print; the heel and sole of a large white man’s foot. Cresap, Logan thought.
Yesterday on the hunt Logan had seen Cresap and a dozen Virginians riding along a bluff, two hours’ distance from here. Logan had recognized some of them. His friend Clark had not been with them. They had passed without seeing Logan.
Quickly now, Logan and his brother-in-law hung the deer carcasses from an oak limb, out of reach of dogs or wolves. Then they searched the ground more carefully.
Under the canopy of a dense maple they found the prints of an iron-shod hoof heading toward the river. Walking, leading their horses, carrying primed guns, stooped low over the faint trail, peering ahead now and then into the foliage and listening intently, they followed the hoofprints. Logan came to a boggy place where the hoofprints were sunk deep and were full of water, and here they saw moccasin prints also. One was small, a woman’s print, but deep. He thought of his sister with her burden of child. The needle of alarm in his spine was burning and shining now as he pointed this out to his brother-in-law.
The trail was faint as they went down a slope toward the Ohio’s bank, but here was a piece of torn moss, there a broken may-apple stem. Logan was jolted by a strange noise, half cry, half gasp, behind him. He glanced back quickly at the awful sound, not realizing it was his brother-in-law’s voice until he saw him stopped there in his tracks, hand at throat, mouth agape, bulging eyes fixed on some high point ahead. Logan shot his gaze in that direction.
A bloody baby hung in a tree, upside down. It was impaled on the sharp end of a lopped-off limb, its skin strangely wrinkled by dried slime. From its belly hung a cord and placental sac. Flies swarmed over it.
Beyond and below it was a hazel shrub draped with intestines. At the base of the shrub lay Logan’s father, his abdomen cut open and alive with flies, his scalp gone, eyesockets shredded by buzzards. Something hung from another tree beyond the shrub.
It was Logan’s sister, strung up by her thumbs, naked, scalped, slit open from her ribs to her genitalia, both breasts gone. Logan and her husband saw her at the same moment.
Teeth bared and clenched, panting and whimpering, the two Indians darted about in the glade until they had found them all. They found the children, and Logan’s brother; all had been tomahawked and mutilated, partly skinned, and their carcasses had been gnawed by animals and pecked by buzzards. Under a bush there was an empty liquor jug. Fastened on a tree trunk nearby was a swatch of cloth with two bullet holes in it.
Ice-cold shivers had been racing from Logan’s temples down to his knees as he searched the glade, and a bubble of grief grew bigger and bigger in his chest; now his entire body was quaking and the veins distended in his neck. Every blood relative of Tah-gah-ju-te, whom the whites had called Chief Logan, lay or hung butchered in this bright green glade, over blood-darkened ground. No family was left but this whimpering brother-in-law who knelt, chest heaving and eyes bloodshot, under the eviscerated carcass of his wife.
The bubble in Tah-gah-ju-te’s chest was too big to contain. In the bright red whirlpool in his brain he saw the face of Cresap and then an endless line of Virginians. The bubble in Tah-gah-ju-te’s bosom burst. A long, throbbing howl poured out of his throat, once, twice, again and again. The other’s voice joined his.
Tah-gah-ju-te and his last of kin howled like wolves for a long time on the bank of the Beautiful River, and then became silent and began to collect the remains of their family. They took them back to the camp on the pack horse that had carried the deer from their hunt.
PANIC SWEPT THE VIRGINIA FRONTIER.
Tah-gah-ju-te, once peacemaker and friend of the white men, had renounced his English name of Logan. He had sent word to the white settlements that he had taken up his hatchet and would not put it down until he had killed ten whites for each slaughtered member of his family. He had called on other chiefs to help him avenge the massacre, and there were many in the mood to join him. Bands of painted warriors from many of the Algonquian tribes soon were flitting silently along their trails through the deep woods, going to the isolated cabins and the small settlements the Virginians had built in clearings beside creeks and springs and rivers throughout the Ohio Valley. There was much ground to cover; the cabins numbered in hundreds. But the Indians knew where each one was. Soon, white men were falling dead behind their plows, struck by arrows or musketballs from the woods. Mothers and their children, working or playing in sunny clearings outside their cabins, would look up and see the last sight they were to see: painted, copper-skinned forms running toward them with hatchets and knives. Babies were sliced to death screaming in their cradles. Dirty smoke rose from burning cabins. Vultures circled through the smoke and slowly settled through it to pick at the flesh of disemboweled women or throat-cut cattle. Then the long files of warriors, bloody-fresh scalps of auburn or white or brown hair tied to their belts or gun muzzles, would vanish into the sun-flecked woods again, to lope over a hill or down a ravine to the next cabin. Sometimes a sobbing survivor from one farm would have outrun them to the next and warned its inhabitants, and here the Indians would have to besiege the fortified cabin and burn the defenders out into the open where they could be killed. Thirty Virginians—men, women, and children—looked up into the fury-crazed eyes of Tah-gah-ju
-te himself as their life leaked out of them. He had thirty scalps by June, ten for his father’s, ten for his brother’s, and ten for his sister’s, and then he put down his tomahawk. But the war had started, and it went on.
All but the bravest or most foolhardy Virginians fled as the panic raced along the frontier. On one day, George Rogers Clark sat in his saddle among Cresap’s militiamen guarding a ford and counted a thousand settlers crossing the Monongahela eastward with their baggage and livestock. Cresap rode to and fro, bristling with weapons, his hatchet face gray and sullen. He had just learned from a survivor that the mad Mingo was blaming him for the slaughter of his family. George, who now had in his pocket a militia captain’s commission signed by Governor Lord Dunmore, rode alongside Cresap and put a hand on his arm.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “You must be a big man around here if the Indians palm everything that happens onto your shoulders.”
Cresap finally smiled, but it was a smile with a sneer in it. He said, “By th’ Eternal, if I could find Jake Greathouse, I’d cut his liver out and feed it to ’im on a plate!”
For it was Greathouse who had murdered Logan’s family. The Mingoes had traded with Greathouse often, and had had no reason to be wary of him, other than for his sharp trading practices. But on the last day of April, with a gang of ruffians, he had lured Logan’s relatives out with drink, proposed a target-shooting contest, and, after the Indian men had emptied their guns at a target of cloth on a tree, fallen upon them with knives and tomahawks. The story had been pieced together later when Cresap questioned two of the accomplices. Greathouse had fled, no one knew where. “Lord look th’ other way if I ever find that reeky villain,” Cresap muttered.
“Or if the Mingoes ever find him,” George said.
A LONG RANK OF MILITIAMEN MOVED SLOWLY ON FOOT through a beanfield toward the Shawnee town. Behind them strode another rank. George was riding slightly behind the second rank, looking over their heads toward the silent village. The sky was overcast and the air was so close and sultry it was hard to breathe.
The rank kept moving forward, rifles at ready. George looked to his right and could see another company advancing through tall corn toward the north side of the town. There was not a voice anywhere, just the whispering tread of the militiamen through the field. Most were ragged, sweat-drenched, shirtless or in hunting shirts of gray homespun. The straps of their powder horns and gun bags crisscrossed their backs. Joe Bowman from Dunmore County, a sinewy, straw-blond lieutenant of George’s age, his second in command of the company, looked up the line toward him, and their eyes met. George nodded. They had predicted this morning that this town, like all the others they had invaded, would prove abandoned, and it looked as if they had been right.
The column, under the command of Colonel Angus McDonald, had marched from Wheeling to the upper Muskingum River country, to carry the war into the heart of the Shawnees’ lands. Most of the warriors had gone to join the great Shawnee chief Cornstalk and his army of a thousand somewhere down on the Ohio, thus leaving their towns undefended. The militia had seen Shawnee scouts everywhere along the way, but the populations of the towns had simply melted away before their advance, taking with them everything portable. In each case, the column had formed ranks and marched cautiously into the village just this way, finding no one to shoot and nothing to plunder.
In ten minutes, the Virginians occupied the town. The captains sent their men out in squads to cut down and burn the crops and set wigwams and lodges to the torch. Soon the air was dense with sharp-smelling smoke; fires crackled and rushed. This was the last town. Now they would return to Wheeling. Bowman came up to George and yawned, his eyes reddened by smoke. “Sure is an exciting war, hain’t it?” he said.
“Surely is. Don’t know if my poor heart can take it. But,” he added, “I doubt we could be spendin’ our time better.” A council lodge nearby collapsed and its flames rushed higher, sending up ash. “They’ll have to come in off the war path soon. They’ll have a hard time getting ready for winter after what we’ve done.” This campaign on the Muskingum had been a valuable lesson. Tedious and businesslike though it was, it proved that there is far more value in offensive war than in defensive. “And,” he added with a wink at Bowman, “unless our boys die o’ boredom, why, I do prefer a war without casualties.”
A few weeks of Lord Dunmore’s War, as it had come to be called, had created a conviction in George’s mind, a strange conviction for a soldier, one he seldom discussed with others: that bloodshed was useless and tragic, and that any strategy which accomplished an objective with the least bloodshed was the best strategy. It reminded him of something his mother had said once while bandaging him after he had cut himself with an ax: “Blood belongs in a body. To me, blood is an obscenity when it gets out of its veins.” George had repeated those words often in his mind. He had thought a great deal about that bloodlust that had boiled in his heart that day at Pipe Creek, and had decided that bloodletting was not the glorious thing soldiers pretended it was. Pa is right, George thought. There was not much he could do to avoid being a soldier, the world being as it was, and there would always be fighting. But he’d be damned if he would ever have that sick weariness again that he had felt after his first battle. He would still have nightmares sometimes in which he rode howling through Indian hordes with a bloody broadsword and gore up to his elbows and a belt full of scalps, and then he would reach the bank of a creek and his mother and father would be standing there looking at him in dismay, and then they would turn their backs on him.
DUNMORE’S WAR ENDED WITH A BATTLE GEORGE ONLY heard about. He was among fifteen hundred officers and men who were moving down the Ohio from Fort Pitt under the direct command of Lord Dunmore when runners from downriver brought news that Colonel Andrew Lewis and a thousand mountain men had fought Cornstalk’s warriors to a draw in a daylong battle at the mouth of the Ka-na-wha. It had occurred on October 10 and it had cost the lives of twenty-two officers and fifty-five privates, but Colonel Lewis had stood fast until the united tribes had broken off and withdrawn in the evening.
Now, with Lewis’s force and Governor Dunmore’s main army about to join together in the heart of their country, Cornstalk and the other chiefs sent runners to Dunmore, asking to talk peace.
Lord Dunmore’s army encamped on the Piqua Plains, a grand array of tents dominated by Dunmore’s spacious pavilion all aflutter with flags and banners, and the chiefs came to this camp to sue for peace.
Governor Dunmore was a haughty man, very aloof from all his troops and officers, even, it seemed, contemptuous of them. He insulted his colonial officers by excluding them from his negotiations with the Indian chiefs. He and his Indian agent, Dr. Connolly, took the great warrior chiefs—Cornstalk, Blue Jacket, Moluntha—into the pavilion and talked to them in secret. And when even Colonel Lewis, the hero of the conflict, was excluded from the negotiations, there was such an uproar of indignation that the whole army was on the verge of mutiny. George saw the hard-bitten veteran Lewis and rosy-cheeked Dunmore arguing violently with each other on the parade ground, and then, before the astonished gaze of half the army, Lord Dunmore actually drew his sword and threatened Lewis with it. The troops were roaring with anger.
Somehow, Lewis controlled himself, and kept his men from rising in mutiny against the Royal Governor. But from that moment on, Dunmore was the object of hatred and suspicion and rumor. George sat by a cookfire in the evenings and listened to Bowman and others talk. “Th’ fancy fool’s no friend o’ Virginia, that’s plain. He’s a King’s man, all out, and he’s got to be watched.” Some of the officers claimed to know that Dunmore had precipitated the war deliberately for the purpose of calling the Virginians back inside their frontiers. George remembered his own suspicions, those dubious thoughts he had had last spring in Logan’s lodge. George sat gazing down at his red breeches and weskit, the officer’s uniform of Dunmore’s Royal Virginia Militia, and had the awful feeling that he was in the wrong uniform.
He wished he had been with Lewis’s division instead of Dunmore’s.
The rumors grew uglier as the army sat in the field at Piqua Plains and watched the chiefs come and go. Some of Cresap’s scouts gossiped that Jake Greathouse had murdered Chief Logan’s family under secret orders from Dr. Connolly, to get Dunmore’s War started for him.
Bowman and Helm were members of a society called the Sons of Liberty, and they were keenly suspicious of the governor. “What’s he cookin’ up with those redmen in that tent?” Bowman would whisper, his eyes narrowed. “I warn ye, it’s for the advantage o’ King George, not us. I tell ye, boys, he’s a King’s man, and he’s slippin’ the King’s sceptre up our ass!”
There was no doubt anymore that Dunmore was a King’s man. He had proven that earlier in the year. When the Virginia Assembly in Williamsburg had passed a resolution declaring sympathy with Massachusetts after the Boston Tea Party, Dunmore had dissolved the Assembly. Even out here on a golden plain in the Ohio territory, the stress between the Crown and the colonies could be felt. “I’ll say this,” Bowman murmured one chilly night. “Every man jack of us is goin’ to have to take his stand ’fore long. As for me, I can’t wait to get out o’ these Goddamn red clothes. They itch on me like lice.”
TAH-GAH-JU-TE, THE MAN WHOSE VENDETTA HAD PUT THE frontier in flames, would not come to Lord Dunmore’s peace talks. The governor wanted him, and sent a special messenger to persuade him to come to the council.
The messenger returned without the Mingo chief. Tah-gah-ju-te had refused to come. But he had dictated a reply. George read it, his heart squeezing with sadness.
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 11