USA > Kentucky > The history of Kentucky, from its earliest discovery and settlement, to the present date, V. 1 > Part 13
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" Hinkson's settlement on Licking has been broken up. Nineteen of the settlers are now here on their way in. John Hinkson among the rest. They all seem deaf to anything we can say to dissuade them. Ten of our people, at least, are going to join them, which will leave us with less than thirty men at this fort. I think more than three hundred have left the country since I came out, and not one has arrived except a few cabineers down the Ohio."
Two weeks before, the Indians had harassed the Licking settlers, killed John Cooper, and done much damage to stock and property. In this sec- tion improvements had extended, and several little neighborhood colonies had been added to those of the year before, and the improvers had increased their plantings of corn. potatoes, peach stones, and apple seeds, with a view to home like permanency. The region was nearly depopulated, as the pre- caution to build a strong defensive fort, as at Boonesborough and Harrods- town, had not been taken. Others sought refuge in McClelland's fort at Georgetown Spring, among whom were Captain Haggin, some from Hink- son's, and others from Drennon's Lick in Henry county.
Colonel Patterson, one of the leading men in building this fort at Royal Spring, with six others, started on a trip to Pittsburgh, to replenish the supply of ammunition and other necessaries, which had run very low. Halting a few days at Blue Licks to barbecue and jerk a supply of buf- falo meat for their journey, they passed on to Limestone (now Maysville), where they obtained a canoe, and ascended as far up as Point Pleasant, at the mouth of the Kanawha, without interruption from Indians. From this point they proceeded with great caution, sleeping without fire, and starting before the break of day, and {relying on their cured meats for daily ra- tions. 1 Late in the evening, on the 12th of COL. ROBERT PATTERSON. October, they landed a few miles below the mouth of Hockhocking, on the north side of the Ohio, and, contrary to usual practice, made a fire, being less cautious as they neared the settle- ments. They laid upon their arms around the fire, and at dead of night were attacked by eleven Indians, who gave them a volley and then fell on them with their tomahawks. Colonel Patterson's right arm was broken by two balls in it. and a tomahawk sunk into his side between severed ribs,
Collins. Vol. II., p. 699.
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HISTORY OF KENTUCKY.
penetrating to the cavity. He sprang out into the darkness and got clear, supposing all his companions killed. He made for the river, in hopes of get- ting into the canoe and floating down to Point Pleasant; but as he approached it, he found an Indian in it. Soon the whole Indian party got aboard and floated down the river. Colonel Patterson succeeded in reaching the fire again, where he found a companion named Templeton, wounded very much like himself; another named Warnock, wounded dangerously; and Perry, wounded slightly. Of the other three, one was killed, one missing, and Mitchell remained unhurt. They had saved but one gun and some ammu- nition. The next morning Warnock was unable to move, when they arranged for Perry to try and reach Grave creek and bring aid, while Mitchell remained to care for the others. Warnock soon died, and the others sought shelter under a projecting cliff some two hundred yards distant from the camp, until relieved by the assistance brought by Perry. After eight days of suffering and nursing, they were removed to Grave creek. Patterson lay twelve months under the surgeon's care.
Before the close of the year 1776, the pioneer defenders were to experi- ence the first attempt by the Indians at an investment and assault on one of their fortified stations, on the issue of which would certainly depend the question of holding their possessions in Kentucky for the future. In regard to their method of siege and attack, Marshall, who was cotemporary with the pioneer age of the Commonwealth, gives the following graphic descrip- tion: "The Indian manner of besieging a place is somewhat singular, and will appear novel to those who have derived their ideas of a siege from the tactics of regular armies. It is such, however, as profound reflection or acute practical observation, operating by existing circumstances, would dic- tate. They have not great armies nor battering engines, nor have they learned the use of the scaling ladder. Besides, caution, the natural offspring of weakness, is more observed than courage. To secure himself is the first object of the Indian warrior; to kill his enemy, the next. Hence, in besieg- ing a place, they are seldom seen in force upon any quarter, but dispersed, and acting individually or in small parties. They conceal themselves in the bushes or weeds, behind trees or stumps, waylay the path or places to which their enemies resort, and when one or more can be taken down they fire the gun or let fly the arrow aimed at the mark. If necessary. they retreat; if they dare, they advance upon their killed or crippled adversary, and take his scalp or make him prisoner, if possible. They aim to cut off the garrison supplies by killing the cattle, and watch the watering places for those who go for that article of prime necessity, that they may, by these means, reduce the place to their possession or destroy the inhabitants in detail. In the night they will place themselves near the fort gate, ready to sacrifice the first person who may appear in the morning; in the day, if there be any cover, such as grass, a bush, a little mound of earth, or a large stone, they will avail them- selves of it to approach the fort by slipping forward, face downward, within
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77
ATTACK ON M'CLELLAND'S FORT.
gun-shot, and then whoever appears gets the fire, while the assailant makes his retreat behind the smoke from his gun. At other times they approach the walls or palisades with the utmost audacity, and attempt to fire them or beat down the gate. They often make feints to draw out the garrison on one side of the fort, and, if opportune, enter it by surprise on the other. When their stock of provision is exhausted by protracted siege, this being an indi- vidual affair, they supply themselves by hunting; then frequently return to the siege, if by any means they hope to increase the number of their scalps.
"Such was the enemy who infested Kentucky, and with whom the early adventurers had to contend. In the combat they were brave, in defeat they were dexterous, in victory they were cruel. Neither sex nor age nor the prisoner was exempted from their tomahawk or scalping knife. They saw their perpetual enemy taking possession of their hunting-ground, to them the source of amusement, of supply, and of traffic; and they were deter- mined to dispute it to the utmost extent of their means. Had they pos- sessed the skill which combines individual effort with a concerted attack, and had they directed their whole force against each of the few and feeble forts in succession, instead of dissipating strength by attacking all at the same time, they could easily have rid Kentucky of its new inhabitants, and once more restored it to the buffalo and the Indian. The usual result was to inflict great distress on the settlers, to kill some of them, and to destroy their crops and cattle, without being able to capture the forts.
"Of the settlers, it is to be said that they acquired fortitude, confidence, and dexterity in proportion to the occasional pressure. In the most diffi- cult times the Indians were obliged to retire into the woods for game or for safety, and generally by night they withdrew to encamp at a distance. In these intervals the white men would plow their corn, gather their crops, or get up their cattle, or hunt the buffalo, the deer, and bear for their food. When traveling, they left the beaten paths, and frequently employed the night in going to and from the garrison, often exchanging shots with the enemy."
On the 29th of December, McClelland's fort, with some twenty men to garrison it, was invested and threatened by about fifty Indians under the Mingo chief, Pluggy, quite noted as a warrior; the same who had recently defeated Colonel John Todd and party, in their expedition to Mason county to convoy in the powder donated by Virginia through Major Clark. The garrison sallied out imprudently to attack, and were repulsed by the Indians. McClelland and two of his men were killed and four wounded: among the latter Colonel Todd and Captain Edward Worthington, both men of promi- Dence and worth. The Indian chief, Pluggy, was slain, among others of the Indians, and they at once abandoned further effort and withdrew. This station was soon after abandoned, amid the lament of the men and women there, who sought safety within the stronger palisades of Harrodstown. 1
: Collins, Vol. 11., p. 699.
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HISTORY OF KENTUCKY.
The first mention made of divine service in Kentucky was in Hender- son's diary : "Sunday, 28th May, 1775 .- Divine service, for the first time in Kentucky, was performed by the Rev. John Lythe, of the Church of England." This was doubtless under the shade of the grand old elm, of which Henderson speaks in raptures in this same diary. No doubt Rev. Lythe often repeated such services at Boonesborough and elsewhere, and especially at Harrodstown, where he made his home. Says Collins: "The first preaching in Mercer county was at the Big Spring, on the farm recently owned by William Payne, and now within the corporate limits of Harrods- burg, by Revs. Peter Tinsley and William Hickman, Baptist ministers, from the text, "Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his." The congregation assembled at the edge of the spring, under the shade of a magnificent elm tree, the stump and roots of which were remain- ing in 1873. This was early in May, 1776.1
These incidents, seemingly trivial, unfold to us the rude and robust hab- its of the foresters, unsubdued by conventional forms and usages. In its social, civil, and religious phases and expressions, the life of no community of people was ever more unrestrained and independent in the citizen. These characteristics gave an intense individuality and self-reliance to each man; yet with an implied and tacit reserve that the crude little social fabrics demanded that no one should, with impunity, use his liberty for a license to do a wanton wrong or injustice to his neighbor. Behind the outward manifestation of this personal freedom of opinion and action, there was a profound respect for social purity, profound regard for civil authority, and a profound reverence for the worship of the true God; traits of sentiment never found absent from the Anglo-Saxon mind, and the observance of which has given to the modern world its finest types, in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American civilization. Kentucky doubtless, at this time, had her full quota of lawless and reckless spirits ; but the main body of the settlers were men of earnest and honest purpose, who were ever forward in upholding the principles of law and order: "Among the whole were some of gifted and sagacious minds, and of practical education and experience-men whose genius, in older and populous governments, where the theaters of opportu- nity were broader and more fruitful, would have placed them in the front ranks as civilians, as statesmen, or as military chieftains. All classes were represented in these advance guards of pioneers, who ventured to the fertile and expansive wilderness to repair their fortunes or to build their homes.
The importance of the Kentucky district of Fincastle county, of which it was still a part, could no longer remain unobserved by the government of Virginia, When the Legislature of the State assembled, such was the disposition to accommodate the people of this remote part of its territory with the benefits of civil and military organization, that an act was passed, on the 6th of December, to erect Kentucky county out of the south-west ter-
: Collins, Vol. II , p. 617.
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LEGISLATIVE ENCOURAGEMENT TO THE COLONISTS.
ritory of Fincastle county, "lying south and westward of a line beginning on the Ohio, at the mouth of Great Sandy, and running up the same, and the north-easterly branch thereof, to the Great Laurel ridge or Cumberland mountain, and with that to the line of North Carolina."
This was a measure of great importance to the colonists. To this time they had no voice in the choosing of civil magistrates and a protective police, none in the election of representatives in the Legislature of the parent government, and none in the regular military organizations for de- tense. Now they would be entitled to two representatives, to have a county court of civil jurisdiction in matters of law and equity, to justices of the peace, military officers, sheriff, and other county officers; in fine, to be a vivil municipality, with powers competent for all the wants of local govern- ment.
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HISTORY OF KENTUCKY.
CHAPTER XI.
Kentucky county organized.
Quarterly court opened, with power to sit monthly.
Settlements reduced.
Intrigues of the English to incite the North-west Indians to hostilities.
Civilization outraged.
The French guilty of similar crimes.
Captain Smith's narrative.
Instigated only by vengeance and malice, passions common to all conditions of war- like strife.
Ray party attacked near Harrodstown.
Rescued by McGary.
Ray's fleetness of foot.
Foils an attack on Harrodstown.
Ruse of the Indians to draw out the garrison.
Defeated in this.
McConnell killed.
Ray escapes again.
Fort closed on him.
James Ray's invaluable services while yet a boy.
Indian ambuscade near the fort discov- ered by cattle.
Major Clark routs them.
Pursuing, finds the main camp.
Kenton and Haggin attacked near Hinkson's.
Escape to Boonesborough.
Organized band of spies patrol the Ohio border.
Boonesborough attacked.
Rattling fight.
Kenton kills three Indians, and carries Boone, wounded. into the fort.
Indians disperse.
Gloomy outlook for the foresters. Weak stations abandoned.
Reduced garrisons in the stronger. Shaler's description of the fort.
Boonesborough again besieged.
Feints made on Harrodstown and St. Asaph's.
Savages defeated and siege raised.
Captain Smith pursues and defeats two bands of Indians.
Colonel Logan moves his family all to St. Asaph's.
This fort attacked.
Colonel Logan's daring rescue of the wounded.
Desperate defense.
Powder nearly exhausted.
No supply nearer than Holston, in Vir- ginia.
Logan resolves to secure it, or perish.
Goes for it, and returns successful.
Two months' siege.
Food supply nearly gone.
Colonel Bowman, with one hundred men, relieves the garrison.
British amnesty proclamation found on one of the slain soldiers.
Logan attacks an Indian party at Flat Lick.
His right arm broken by a bullet.
Clark sends spies to Illinois.
Census of Harrodstown.
Relief party reach Boonesborough.
The Long Knife.
The late season brings some rest and re- lief to the harassed settlers.
The period of the earlier months of this year (1777) was not an auspi- cious one for the future of the settlers. During the latter half of the previous . year, the Indians, dispersed in small bands, had spread destruction and dismay throughout the land, and the more exposed improvements were gen- erally abandoned. It was the custom of many improvers to come out in the
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GEORGE ROGERS CLARK
SIMON KENTON
DANIEL BOONE.
8 [
GREAT BRITAIN IN LEAGUE WITH THE INDIANS.
spring and extend their clearings, plant their seeds and fruit trees, gather in and consume the temporary supplies, and then return to spend the winter" in the old colony. with a view to a permanent move of family and home at a safer day in the future. We read from Colonel Floyd's letter that Boones- borough was left with thirty guns but a few months before. The foresters did not return with re-enforcements at the opening of this season, as they did the last. The reduced settlers, however, were destined soon to be visited with incursions of more formidable bodies of Indians than had yet ventured to invade the disputed ground of strife.
The war of the Revolution had now been in progress for nearly two years, since the hostile demonstrations at Lexington and Bunker's Hill. Six months ago. the Delaration of Independence was signed, and the vow for liberty or death found an echo of sympathy in the hearts of all true American colonists. It was more an obvious fact than an open secret that Great Britain was, from the frontier posts of Canada and the forts of Vincennes and Kaskaskia, not only furnishing the Miami tribes and their North-west confederates with arms and munitions of war, but inciting them with the arts and intrigue of unscrupulous diplomacy. They lured them with gifts and bribes to wage a war upon the feeble Kentucky colonies, which they well knew, after the Indian fashion, meant nothing less than butchery of men, women, and children, and mutilation and savage outrage, wherever it might be possible for them to commit such atrocities. Ashamed to license their own regular troops to violate the laws of civilized warfare, the English Government did not scruple to purchase and employ the cruelest of savages to perform these revolting crimes against a people of their own kindred and blood, and with whom they were but recently allied in the fraternal bonds of a common citizenship.
To add to the enormity of this national crime of the English Government, ») often committed and repeated on the children of Kentucky, wherever her armies have invaded or her gold corrupted, the scenes of savage cruelty, aided and abetted by the French in the war ending with the treaty of Paris, in 1763, and perpetrated upon her own captive soldiers, were vivid and fresh upon the pages of her journals and military reports. The protest of her people against the barbarous cruelty of these should have restrained the fratricidal hand, and taught her not to neglect the quality of mercy in the policies of warfare against her own children. however wayward they seemed. We quote from the narrative of Colonel James Smith, an old Indian fighter, long a prisoner with the Indians, and for years a member of the Legislature of Pennsylvania, and who moved to and settled in Bourbon county, Ken- tucky, in 1788. He was a captive and an eye-witness of some of the cruelties of the Indians in the presence of French officers, at Fort Duquesne, now Pittsburgh, toward the English prisoners brought in after Braddock's defeat. He says :1
: Collins, Vol. II., p. 78.
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HISTORY OF KENTUCKY.
"About sunset on the day of the battle, I heard at a distance the well- known scalp hallo, followed by wild, quick, joyful shrieks, and accompanied by long-continued firing of guns. This too surely announced the fate of the day. About dusk, the party returned to the fort, driving before them twelve British regulars, stripped naked, and with their faces painted black, an evidence that the unhappy wretches were devoted to death. Next came the Indians, displaying their bloody scalps, of which they had immense num- bers, and dressed in the scarlet coats, sashes, and military hats of the officers and soldiers. Behind all came a train of baggage-horses, ladened with piles of booty and scalps, canteens, and all the accoutrements of British soldiers. The savages appeared frantic with joy, and when I beheld them entering the fort, dancing, yelling, and brandishing their red tomahawks, and waving their scalps in the air, while the great guns of the fort replied to the incessant discharge of rifles without, it looked as if h-Il had given a holiday, and turned loose its inhabitants. The most melancholy spectacle was the band of prisoners. They were dejected and anxious. Poor fellows! they had but a few months before left London, at the command of their superiors, and we may easily imagine their feelings at the strange and dreadful spec- tacle around them. The yells of delight and congratulation were scarcely over, when those of vengeance began. The devoted prisoners- British regulars-were led out from the fort to the banks of the Alleghany, and to the eternal disgrace of the French commandant, were burnt to death at the stake, one after another, with the most awful tortures. I stood upon the battlements and witnessed the shocking spectacle. The prisoner was tied to a stake, with his hands raised above his head. stripped naked, and sur- rounded by Indians. They would touch him with red-hot irons, and stick his body full of pine splinters and set them on fire, drowning the shrieks of the victim in the yells of delight with which they danced around him. His companions in the meantime stood in a group near the stake, and had a foretaste of what was in store for each one of them. As fast as one prisoner died under his tortures, another filled his place. until the whole perished. All this took place so near the fort that every scream of the victims must have rung in the ears of the French commandant."
All this nature and usage of these savages in war were familiar to the mind and experience of the British Government and its military representa- tives. To add intensity to the repugnant horror which should have restrained them from engaging such allies or instruments to war upon the exposed and unsheltered frontiersmen, they knew that these and like barbarous atroci- ties, which had sealed in death the tortures of captive British soldiers at Fort Duquesne, would not only be visited upon the citizen soldiers of Kentucky, but on the aged non-combatant, the sainted pure mother and maiden, and the cradling infant as well. Hundreds of spots in Kentucky are stained with the blood of these innocents, murdered by Indian rifle, or arrow, or tomahawk, to appease the cruel vengeance of England's rulers against her
83
THE RESISTANCE OF THE BACKWOODSMEN.
colonist children for the constructive crime of loving liberty and hating tyr- anny. The guilt of these crimes against humanity will stand out upon the pages of history, an indictment and verdict of the common sentiment of mankind, more against the rulers of the British Government than against the ignorant and wretched instruments whom they purchased or incited to do the revolting deeds. How many families of to-day yet hold among their ancestral traditions, reminiscences of these savage cruelties perpetrated on some kindred grandparent, maiden, or babe, and instigated by the remorse- less vengeance of the English authorities, from 1776 to the close of the war of 1812.
We treat this method of warfare as prompted only by vengeance, for it could by no possibility have any favorable bearing toward the English side in the issues of legitimate war between that country and the colonies. On the other hand, the effect that followed was to arouse an indignant resistance on the part of the stern backwoodsmen, and to lead to those measures of retaliation which not only visited terrible punishment on the guilty Indian tribes, but accomplished the downfall of the frontier forts garrisoned and held by the guiltier English.
We have not discussed this episode of history in any spirit of prejudice against the English Government and people. They were then, and are now, the best types of European development. We have seen that the French were just as guilty in instigating their Indian allies to deeds of savage cruelty and atrocity against their enemies in war, in violation of civilized usages. Any nation of Europe at war with another would have pursued the same revengeful and inhuman practices, if the same tempting opportunities had offered. The spirit of revenge and cruelty in warfare is not an incident peculiar to any nation of people, civilized or not. War is in itself anger, strife, and retaliation. Its existence implies the dominance of the unbridled spirit of revenge and cruelty; a spirit that lies latent in times of peace, in that greatest of necessary evils in a government-its military arm and equip- ment-and which finds its worst expression in the midst of the storm and carnage of warfare. It converts the civilized into the barbarian, and the barbarian into the fiend incarnate. It sweeps along the multitude with the resistless tide of angry and violent sentiment. and if the few resist the temptation to be cruel and remorseless, it is because they can be better than, and superior to their surroundings. Against this spirit of war, our condemna- tion and protest may properly be directed when we recall the sufferings of our ancestors from the cruelties of savages. The apology that the Eng- lish did, perhaps, only what any other warring nation would have done under like circumstances may be urged. And yet this view does not excuse or atone for the guilt of the crimes in question, for no nation claiming to be civilized should have been their author.
The militia had just organized at Harrodstown. under the provisions of government for the new county. About the same date, James Ray.
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HISTORY OF KENTUCKY.
afterward the noted frontiersman, General James Ray, but now a youth of seventeen, his younger brother, and two neighbors, William Coomes and Thos. Shores, were engaged in clearing land at Shawanee Springs, for Col- onel Hugh McGary, who had married Mrs. Ray, the mother of the two boys named.
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