Chapter 6
At one point he besought Simon Girty to put an end to his sufferings; but Girty would not, or dared not.
Then Crawford began to pray, imploring God to have mercy upon him, and bore his torment for an hour and a half longer with manly courage. It is not known how long his torture lasted; Knight was now taken away, and no friend remained to witness Crawford’s agony to the end.
I have thought it well to recount his story, for without it we could not fully realize what the white people of that day underwent in their long struggle with the Ohio Indians. Cruelty so fiendish could never have a cause, but it cannot be denied that the torture of Crawford was the effect of the butchery of the Christian Indians. That awful deed was an act of even greater wickedness, for it was the act of men who were not savage by birth or race or creed. It was against the white man’s law, while the torture of Crawford was by the red man’s law. It is because of their laws that the white men have overcome and the red men have gone under in the order of mercy, for whenever we sin against that order, contrary to our law, or according to our law, we weaken ourselves, and if we continue in our sin, we doom ourselves in the end to perish.
X. THE ESCAPE OF KNIGHT AND SLOVER.
When the Indians made a raid on the settlements, they abandoned even victory if they had once had enough fighting; as when they had a feast they glutted themselves, and then wasted what they had not eaten. They seemed now to have had such a surfeit of cruelty in the torture of Crawford that they took little trouble to secure Knight for a future holiday. They promised themselves that he should be burnt, too, at the town of the Shawnees, but in their satiety they left him unbound in the charge of a young Indian who was to take him there from Sandusky. It is true that Knight was very weak, and that they may have thought he was unable to escape, though even in this case they would probably have sent him under a stronger guard at another time, when they were not gorged with blood.
His Indian guard was armed and was mounted on a pony, while Knight went on foot; but Knight had made up his mind that he would escape at any risk rather than be burned like Crawford. His face had again been painted black; and he had Simon Girty’s word, given him before Crawford was put to death, that he was to be burned at Old Chillicothe. But he pretended not to know what the Indians were going to do with him there, and he easily deceived his guard, who seems to have been a good-natured, simple fellow. Knight asked him if they were going to live together like brothers in the same wig-wam, and the Indian answered they were, and they went in very friendly talk. At night-fall when they camped, Knight let his guard bind him, but he spent the hours till daybreak trying secretly to free himself. At dawn the Indian rose and unbound his captive. Then he rekindled the fire, at the same time fighting the gnats that swarmed upon his naked body. He willingly consented that Knight should make a smoke to drive them from his back, and Knight took a heavy stick from the fire as if to do this; but when he got behind the Indian he struck him on the head with all his strength. The Indian fell forward into the fire, but quickly gathered himself up and ran off howling. Knight wanted to shoot him as he ran; in his eagerness to cock the rifle he broke the lock, and the Indian escaped. He got safely to the Shawnee town, where he described the fight in terms that transformed the little doctor into a furious giant, whom no amount of stabbing had any effect upon.
The other Indians, who seem to have understood this cowardly boaster, received his story with shouts of laughter. But Knight was very glad to make off with his gun and ammunition, and leave them to settle the affair among themselves. When he came to the prairies he hid himself in the grass and waited till dark before venturing to cross them, and by daybreak he was in the woods again. He could kill nothing with his broken gun, and he lived for twenty-one days on wild gooseberries, with two young blackbirds and a tortoise, which he ate raw. He reached the Ohio River on the twenty-second day, and crossed in safety to Fort Mcintosh.
The tragic adventures of the Indian captives must often have been relieved by comic incidents like those of Knight’s escape from his guard; but there is very little record of anything except sorrow and suffering, danger and death. Certainly in the captivity of John Slover, another of Crawford’s ill-starred and ill-willed crew of marauders, there were few gleams of happier chance to distinguish it from most histories of the sort. He had been captured by the Indians when a boy of eight years, and carried from his home in Virginia to their town of Sandusky, where he was adopted into their nation, and where he lived quite happily till his twentieth year, when he was given up to his own people.
He fought through two years of the Revolutionary War, and he was thoroughly fitted to act as a guide for Crawford.
After the battle, or rather the disorderly rout, he was one of those who was mired in the swamps. He left his horse there, and with a few others tried to make his way to Detroit. Twice the party escaped capture by hiding in the grass, as the Indians passed near them, but on the third morning they were ambushed; two were killed, one ran away, and the remaining three gave themselves up on the promise of good treatment. They were taken to Wapatimika, where Simon Kenton was to have been burned, and they soon proved how far the promises of the savages were to be trusted.
The Indians knew Slover at once, and they bitterly reproached him with having come to betray his friends. At the council held to try him, James Girty urged them to put him to death for his treason. But Slover strongly defended himself, reminding the Indians that they had freely given him up, and had no longer any claim upon him. His words had such weight that the council put off its decision. In the meantime he was left with an old squaw, who hid him under a bear skin, and scolded off the messengers who came to bring him before a grand council of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Chippewa, and Mingo warriors. But shortly after, Girty came with forty braves and seized him. Slover was now stripped, and with his hands tied and his face painted black, he was taken to a village five miles off, where he was beaten as usual by the people, and then driven a little farther to another village, where he found everything made ready to burn him, as Crawford had been burned. He was tied to the stake, and the fire was lighted; an orator began to kindle the anger of the savages; but at the last moment a heavy shower of rain burst over the roofless council house where they had gathered to torture their captive, put out the fire, and drove them to a sheltered part of the lodge, where they consoled themselves as best they could by beating him till midnight, and promising him that he should be burned the next day. He was then carried to the blockhouse and left bound with two guards, who entertained themselves, but did not amuse Slover, by talking over his probable behavior under the torture that awaited him. They fell asleep, worn out, about daybreak, when Slover made a desperate effort to free himself, and to his own astonishment, succeeded. He stepped across his snoring guards out into the open air. No one was astir in the village, and he ran to hide himself in a cornfield, where he nearly fell over a sleeping squaw and her papooses. On the other side of the field he found some horses, and making a halter of the buffalo thong that had bound him, and that still hung upon his arm, he leaped upon one of them and dashed through the woods. By ten o’clock in the forenoon he had reached the Scioto fifty miles away.
He allowed his horse to breathe here; then he remounted, crossed the river, and galloped half as far again. At three o’clock his horse gave out, and Slover left him and ran forward afoot, spurred on by the yells of the pursuers close behind him. The moon came up, and knowing that his trail could be easily followed by her light, he ran till daybreak. The next night he reached the Muskingum, naked, torn by briers, and covered with the mosquitoes which swarmed upon his bleeding body. A few wild raspberries enabled him to break his fast for the first time, but the next day he feasted upon two crawfish. When he came to the Ohio, just across from Wheeling, and called to a man whom he saw on the island there, to bring his canoe and take him over, it is not strange that the man should have hesitated at the sight of the figure on the Ohio shore. Not till Slover had given him the names of many men in Crawford’s army, as well as his own name, did the man come to his rescue and ferry him over to the fort, where he was safe at last.
XI. THE INDIAN WARS AND ST. CLAIR’S DEFEAT.
The Indians and the renegades at Sandusky would not believe their prisoners when Crawford’s men told them that Cornwallis and his army had surrendered to Washington; but the Revolutionary War had now really come to an end. The next year Great Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States, and gave up the whole West to them, as France had given it up to her before. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia claimed each the country lying westward of them, but the other states denied this claim. The West was finally declared the property of the whole Union, and in 1784 the first ordinance was passed by Congress for its government. It was not until 1787 that the great ordinance was passed which gave the future empire of the world to the West on terms of freedom to all men: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory otherwise than in the punishment of crime.”
This made the West free forever, but no law of Congress could make it safe without the consent of the savage nations which had again changed masters by the treaty of foreign powers. The war between England and America was over, but the war between white men and red men raged more fiercely after our peace with Great Britain than before. The backwoodsmen took this peace for a sign that they might now cross the river from New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to settle in the Ohio country; and they were soon there by hundreds. It is true that the United States had made treaties with the United Tribes for certain tracts beyond the Ohio River, but the Indians declared that they had been tricked into these treaties. It is true that Congress meant to deal fairly by them so far as to drive the hard bargains with them for their lands which the white men had always driven with the Indians; but the backwoodsmen waited for nothing, and the old story of surprises and slaughters, of captivities and tortures, went on, with the difference that the war parties now need not cross the Ohio to take scalps and prisoners, and the vengeance of the pioneers had not so far to follow them in their return to the woods.
The first white settlers in Ohio were largely the kind of half-savages who had butchered the Christians at Gnadenhiitten. They built their cabins and cleared their fields on lands so shamelessly stolen that in 1785 a force of United States troops was sent to drive them out of their holdings. They seemed to go, but in reality they staid, and wherever the backwoodsman planted his foot west of the Ohio, he never turned his face eastward again.
He was unlawfully there, but from the Indian’s point of view he was no more unrightfully there than the settlers who came a few years later to take up farms under the land companies authorized by Congress. If any other proof were wanting that these companies possessed themselves of land which the Indians believed they had never sold, it would appear in the fact that the first thing the settlers did was to build a stockade, or high bullet-proof fence of logs with a strong blockhouse for a kind of citadel, where they might gather for safety in case of attacks from any of the wild natives of the woods about them.
The invaders were from New England, from New Jersey, from Pennsylvania, and from Virginia, and with their coming, nearly all in the same year, there began that mingling of the American strains which has since made Ohio the most American state in the Union, first in war and first in peace; which has given the nation such soldiers as Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, McPherson; such presidents as Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley; such statesmen and jurists as Ewing, Cor-win, Wade, Chase, Giddings, Sherman, Waite. We have to own, in truth and honesty, that the newcomers might be unlawfully and unrightfully in the great territory which was destined to be the great state, but it is consoling to realize that they were not unreasonably there. It was not reasonable that the land should be left to savages who must each keep fifty thousand acres of it wild for his needs as a hunter. The earth is for those who will use it, and not for those who will waste it, and the Indians who would not suffer themselves to be tamed could not help wasting the land.
If the whites made any mistake, it was in allowing any man to own more land than he could use; but this is a mistake which prevails in our own day as it prevailed in the days of the pioneers, and they were not to blame for being no wiser at the end of the eighteenth century than we are at the end of the nineteenth. The states consenting to the organization of the Northwest Territory meant that their citizens who had fought for the independence of the nation in the Revolutionary War should first of all have their choice of its lands, and so we find Ohio divided up into the Virginia Military District, the Connecticut Western Reserve, and the Bounty Lands of Pennsylvania. But large grants were made to land companies, and the innumerable acres were juggled out of the hands of the people into the hands of the speculators, as the public lands have been ever since, until now there are no public lands left worth having.
The Ohio Indians knew nothing of all this, or as little as they have ever known of the fate of their ancient homes on the frontier which we have pressed further and further westward. They held in their stubborn way that the line between them and the whites was still the Ohio River, as it had been for fifty years; and they made war upon the invaders wherever they found them. At times they gathered force for a great battle, and in the first two of these battles they were the victors, but in the third they were beaten and their strength and spirits were broken. In 1790 General Harmar destroyed the towns of the Miamis on the Wabash; but they ambushed his retreat and punished his fifteen hundred men so severely that he was forced back to the Ohio. In 1791 General Arthur St. Clair led an army against the Indians in the Maumee country, and was attacked and routed with greater havoc than the savages had ever yet made of the whites, except perhaps in Braddock’s defeat. In 1792 General Anthony Wayne set about gathering another army for the Indian campaign. He moved into the enemy’s country slowly, building forts in Darke County and Mercer (where St. Clair was routed) as he advanced. In 1794, at the meeting of the Auglaize and Maumee, twenty miles from the last post, which he named Fort Defiance, he finally met the tribes in great force, and defeated them so thoroughly that for sixteen years they never afterwards made head against the Americans.
At this day we can hardly imagine the dismay that the rout of St. Clair and the slaughter of his men spread through the Ohio country. He was a gallant officer, the governor of the Northwest Territory, and the trusted friend of Washington. It is true that his army was largely the refuse of the Eastern States, picked up in the streets of the larger towns and lured into the wilderness with the promise of three dollars a month; that these men were badly fed, badly clothed, and badly drilled; and that they were led by a general whose strength and spirits were impaired by sickness. But with them was a large body of Kentuckians and other backwoodsmen, skilled in Indian warfare, and eager for the red foes with whom they had long arrears of mutual injury to bring up; and the hopes of the settlers rested securely upon these. The Indians were led by Little Turtle, one of their greatest war chiefs, and at the point where General Wayne two years later built one of his forts, and called it Recovery, they surprised St. Clair’s troops.
It was an easy slaughter. St. Clair was suffering so much with gout that he could not move from his horse when he was helped to the saddle, and was wholly unfit to fight. Yet he went undauntedly through the battle; horse after horse was shot under him, and his clothes were pierced with nine of the bullets which the Indians rained upon his men from every tree of the forest. The backwoodsmen had hardly a chance to practice the Indians’ arts against them before the rout began. The cannon which St. Clair had brought into the wilderness with immense waste of time and toil, proved useless under the fire that galled the artillerymen. The weak, undisciplined, and bewildered army was hemmed in on every side, and the men were shot down as they huddled together or tried to straggle away, till half their number was left upon the field. Of course none of the wounded were spared. The Americans were tomahawked and scalped where they fell; one of the savages told afterwards that he plied his hatchet until he could hardly lift his arm. All the Ohio tribes shared in the glory of this greatest victory of their race,--Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots, Ottawas, Chippeways, and Pottawottomies. There had been plenty of game that year; they were all in the vigor and force which St. Clair’s ill-fated army lacked; and they lustily took their fill of slaughter.
Many stories of the battle were told by those who escaped. Major Jacob Fowler, of Kentucky, an old hunter, who went with the army as surveyor, carried his trusty rifle, but he had run short of bullets, the morning of the fight, which began at daybreak. He was going for a ladle to melt more lead, when he met a Kentucky rifleman driven in by the savages, and begged some balls of him. The man had been shot through the wrist, and he told Fowler to help himself from his pouch. Fowler was pouring out a double handful, when the man said, “Stop; you had better count them.” Fowler could not help laughing, though it was hardly the time for gayety. “If we get through this scrape, my dear fellow,” said he, “I will return you twice as many.” But they never met again, and Fowler could only suppose that his cautious friend was soon tomahawked and scalped with the other wounded. Fowler took to a tree, and shot Indians till his gunlock got out of order. Then he picked up a rifle which had been thrown away, and which he found his bullets would fit, and renewed the fight. It was a very cold November morning, and his fingers became so stiff that he could not hold the bullets, which he had to keep in his mouth, and feed into his rifle from it. At one time he was behind a very small tree, and two Indians fired on him at such close range that he felt the smoke of their guns and gave himself up for dead. But both had missed him, and he got away from the battlefield unhurt.
Another Kentuckian, a young ranger named William Kennan, was one of the first riflemen driven back by the overwhelming force of Indians. He tried to hide in the tall grass, but found that his only hope was in his heels. The savages endeavored to cut him off, but he distanced all except one, who followed him only three yards away. Kennan expected him every moment his tomahawk at him, and he felt in his belt for his own. It had slipped from its place, and he found himself wholly unarmed, just as he came to a tree which the wind had blown down, and which spread before him a mass of roots and earth eight or nine feet high. He gathered all his strength, bounded into the air, and cleared it, while a yell of wonder rose from the baffled Indians behind him. A little later he came upon General Madison of Kentucky sitting on a log, so spent with the day’s work and loss of blood from a wound, that he could no longer walk, and waiting for the Indians to come up and kill him. Kennan ran back and caught a horse which he had seen grazing, put Madison on it, and walked by his side till they were out of danger. The friendship thus begun lasted through their lives.
This is one of the few softer lights in the picture whose darker features we must not fail to look upon. One of the grimmest of them was the war chief of the Missasagos, Little Turtle, who planned the surprise, against the advice of all the other chiefs, and who merits the fame of the awful day. To the Americans who saw him then, he was a sullen and gloomy giant, who fought with his men throughout the battle, arrayed in the conspicuous splendor of a great war, chief, with silver ornaments dangling from his nose and ears. Hardly less terrible than the figure of this magnificent butcher is that of the Chickasaw warrior who accompanied the American army, to glut the hate of his nation for the Northern tribesmen. When the fight began, he said he would not stand for the Shawnees to shoot him down like a wild pigeon, and he left the ranks and took to a fallen log, where he fired with unfailing aim. But he could not be kept from leaving it to scalp the other Indians as he shot them, and his own turn to be shot and scalped came at last.
The battle ground was covered with a thick slush from the new-fallen snow, and this made the retreat more exhausting. A poor mother, perhaps one of the soldiers’ or pioneers’ wives, staggered along with a baby in her arms till she fell with it. The ranger McDowell then carried it awhile for her. When he gave it back, she threw it away in the snow, to save her own life, and the Indians found it, and took it to Sandusky, where they brought it up as their own.
Two years after, when a detachment of Wayne’s army camped upon the scene of the carnage, they had to scrape away the heaps of bones and carry them out of their tents before they could make their beds, and they buried six hundred skulls on the field. Such is war, and we cannot look too closely on its hideous face, which is often so alluringly painted that we forget it is the face of a pitiless demon.
XII. THE INDIAN WARS AND WAYNE’S VICTORY.
The Indians who had been so well generaled and had fought so ably, failed as usual to follow up their victory by moving on the American settlements in force. They kept on harassing the pioneers in small war parties, but gave the country time to send an army, thoroughly equipped and thoroughly disciplined, against them. They made a second attack on the Americans on the old battle ground where General Wayne had built his Fort Recovery, but they were beaten off with severe loss, though in their attack they had the aid of many white Canadians and even of some British officers, or at least of men wearing the uniform of British officers.