USA > Mississippi > A history of the Mississippi valley, from its discovery to the end of foreign domination. The narrative of the founding of an empire, shorn of current myth, and enlivened by the thrilling adventures of discoverers, pioneers, frontiersmen, Indian fighters, and homemakers > Part 15
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It is most important to observe that even when an innocent man is lynched the victim is less to be pitied than the lynchers. For the degradation they inflict upon themselves and the comunity is far worse than death.
The Watauga people on learning that they were beyond the limits of Virginia, themselves made a treaty with the Cherokees by which they leased the lands they
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occupied, thereby evading the king's proclamation, for- bidding the private purchase of Indian lands. But on March 17, 1775, when Henderson bought his Transyl- vania tract of the Cherokees, the Watauga people made another treaty, and bought their tract, paying £2,000 in goods for it. It was during those treaty-making days that the leading Cherokee chief, Oconostota, spoke of the Kentucky region as a "dark and bloody ground," and another chief said to Boone :
"Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I be- lieve you will have much trouble in settling it," (Imlay, p. 361).
In 1770 Ebenezer, Silas, and Jonathan Zane came to Wheeling Creek, and where the city of Wheeling now stands, made a "tomahawk claim." Blazing a tree they marked on it, (engraved on it with a knife), the extent of land claimed, with its river boundary. There was no law authorizing such an "entry" of land, but it was a method usually (not always), recognized by the home makers, and such claims were commonly made valid by legal process afterwards. The Zane claim was a fine townsite, for to this day it is at the head of deep water navigation on the Ohio. The Zanes were pioneers on that part of the river, and Zanesville, Ohio, perpetuates their memory.
On October 18, 1770, at Lochabar, the Cherokees signed a treaty locating the Indian boundary line be- tween a spot on the south branch of the Holston, six miles east of Long Island, and the mouth of the Kana- wha, a confirmation of the treaty of 1768. Thereafter the Virginia Legislature offered every actual settler on the western lands, 400 acres of land free, save for the
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Mississippi Valley.
expense of registering the claim, with the privilege of buying 1,000 acres adjoining it, at a price but little above the cost of surveying the claim and filing the papers.
About this time good inducements were offered to people who would emigrate to the British territory on the lower Mississippi between Natchez and the Man- chac Bayou. To this region went many people, includ- ing not a few New Englanders. They usually passed the Alleghanies in companies to the head waters of the Tennessee, where they usually arrived early in the spring. On the Holston or the Clinch they squatted down and passed the summer in raising corn, hunting and building boats. When the corn was harvested they went afloat with their families and corn; braved the terrors of the Boiling Pot, the Suck and the Muscle Shoals; fought the Indians as the occasion required ; and finally reached the promised land. These were the first house boatmen of the Great Valley, properly so called. The village of Boatyard, in Sullivan County, Tenn., got its name from the fact that it was the point from which most of these voyagers took their depar- ture.
In 1773 General Lyman, of Connecticut, and some military friends, laid out several additions to the old French settlement at Natchez, and to that point no less than 400 families emigrated during the year named, passing down the Ohio in flat boats, while an unre- corded host traveled by way of Boatyard.
In February, 1764, Capt. George Johnson arrived at Pensacola to take possession of the Territory which had been acquired by the treaty with France. He
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soon sent detachments of soldiers up the Mississippi to Baton Rouge and Natchez. A fort was built on the Bayou Manchac, a short distance from the Missis- sippi, and named Fort Bute, in honor of the Prime Minister. Meantime, on February 27, Major Loftus and a force of 400 men were sent up the river in ten barges rowed by sixteen oars each, to take command of the Illinois country, with head quarters at Fort Chartres. At the end of three weeks the force was toiling around the base of the bluff where Fort Adams landing is now found, (ten miles above the mouth of the Red River), when a host of Tunica or Yazoo Indians attacked them, and inflicted such severe loss that the force turned down the river, abandoning the enterprise.
On securing peaceable possession of the territory along the lower Mississippi, the British first of all opened a smuggling trade with the people of New Orleans. Fort Bute was built for a smuggling sta- tion, no doubt. Trade flourished so well there that when the Spanish came into power at New Orleans they built a fort opposite and about 400 yards from Fort Bute as a check on the smugglers, though with- out materially hurting the trade.
The slave trade was the most important branch of the business. The slavers of Newport, Rhode Island, competed with those from Bristol, London and Liverpool, in supplying the demand for ignorant black laborers. Moreover a demand for slaves grew up in the British territory. It is a notable fact that the pioneers of the Ohio watershed hewed their homes out of the solid green woods with their own strong
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arms, while the lands on the lower Mississippi were developed chiefly by slave labor. The emigrants who made homes below Natchez appear to have been wealthier, as a class, than those locating in Kentucky. Among the old land grants of the time, yet to be found on file in the Natchez district land office, (Washington, Miss.), is one of 25,000 acres to Amos Ogden, dated October 27, 1772. Another for 20,000 acres was granted to Thaddeus Lyman, of Connecti- cut. Many others of varying size are to be seen.
These people cultivated sugar cane and cotton, and lived such quiet lives that no record of their doings is found in history, save only that when the 'Atlantic colonies revolted under the oppression of the British Government, they remained loyal to the King, but were not sufficiently numerous or aggressive to take any material part in the struggle.
Fort Chartres was surrendered by the Command- ant, (St. Angé), early in 1765, to Captain Sterling, who came by the way of Detroit. It was then, and continued to be, the head post of all the western ter- ritory while the British ruled there.
Meantime many surveyors came into the Ohio Valley, among whom none was more notable than Capt. Thomas Bullitt. Bullitt laid out a town, (1773), where Charleston, West Virginia, now stands -an excellent location because at the head of the deep-water navigation of the Great Kanawha. Then he went to the falls of the Ohio, and in August laid out a townsite where Louisville, Ky., has since de- veloped. The first house was built on this site by John Cowan in 1774.
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In 1773 James, George and Robert McAfee, with Hancock Taylor, went to the Kentucky River, and on July 16, surveyed a plot of 600 acres where Frank- fort now stands. In 1774 James Harrod with a party of forty men went to the spot where Harrods- burg is found, and beginning on June 16, built a log house-the first house of any kind erected in Kentucky. They also planted corn-made a corn- patch claim-and that was a claim no one would dispute. During that season the woods were full of homeseekers, speculators and surveyors, but an- other Indian war was to interrupt their work, and to that the next chapter shall be given.
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SIMON KENTON.
The companion of Boone in many of his enterprises. A portrait from life, by Morgan.
CORNSTALK'S TOMAHAWK
XII
LORD DUNMORE'S WAR.
An unfair Distribution of Goods was one Cause of the Trouble-Men who Delighted in Murder and Theft -Robbed Soldiers and White Home Makers as well as Indians-Desired an Indian War as an aid in Set- tling a Colony's Boundary-An Official Letter that Turned the White Desperadoes Loose on the In- dians-The Battle of Point Pleasant-The True Story of the Famous Speech of Logan.
The brief and decisive conflict known as Lord Dunmore's war was brought on partly by the heedless ignorance of the Indian ways which the whites have always displayed, and partly by the devilish depravity of some of the white men on the frontier. At the treaty of Fort Stanwix the whites paid $50,000 to
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the Indians for the lands on the southerly side of the Ohio River as far as the Tennessee. The goods were delivered to the representative chiefs gathered at Fort Stanwix. The Six Nations chiefs so far dominated at that treaty that they signed it for the Delawares and Shawnees, and it was therefore but natural that they should dominate in sharing the goods received for the land. To the Delaware and Shawnee chiefs a small portion was given and they went away partly satisfied. When they reached their homes in the Ohio country with their attenuated share of the goods they divided with their immediate relatives and friends. The masses of the Delawares and Shawnees did not get so much as a smell of the Fort Stanwix rum, or more than a long range look at the arms, tools and good cloths dealt out there. The lands, where the buffalo and the deer ranged in herds al- most as tame as the white men's oxen, had been sold; the white man would soon kill off all that game and make farms of the lands, and not one glass bead were the masses of these Indians to get in return.
The thought of it was maddening. Worse yet, the white man, having spread to the Tennessee, would cross the Ohio as he had crossed the Alleghanies. The Indian foresaw that event very clearly, and even the chiefs who had been bribed at Fort Stanwix soon realized that they had resigned a lasting heritage for goods that, at best, were soon worn out and lost. It was in this kind of bargaining that the whites were heedless.
Following the Zanes to Wheeling came many peo- ple, of whom the majority were the homemakers whom
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we cannot sufficiently honor. But along with these came others whom we cannot sufficiently detest. In our later history, when our frontier was far be- yond the Mississippi, the existence of frontier des- peradoes was well known, and vigilance committees were necessary, perhaps, to rid the fair earth of their depraved presence. The existence of this class, when the Ohio country was the frontier, seems not to be so well known, but they were there in force. They were men who sought the frontier because govern- ment among the whites there was about as loose as among the Indians at all times. They not only robbed the white homemakers, but they even formed wide- spread organizations for that purpose. They were so bold, in fact, that they would rob a Government expedition in the wilderness. When in 1785 General Butler went down the Ohio river with a force of national soldiers to establish posts and make a treaty, these desperadoes robbed the expedition.
"I find we are infested by scoundrels more unruly and unprincipled than the savages, and who wish to frustrate the treaty," wrote Butler in his journal.
They were men who delighted in theft and murder, and who thrived best when there was open war be- tween the whites and the Indians. But while many of them were lynched for stealing horses from white men, their disregard of Indian rights was considered very lightly by the homemaker who had suffered or seen his neighbor suffer from Indian raids.
Early in 1774 Virginia's claim to the land in the forks of the Ohio added to the trouble. Dr. John Connelly came to Fort Pitt, (then grown to be quite
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a settlement), and as a representative of Lord Dun- more, governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation calling the people there and at Redstone to meet at Fort Pitt and organize themselves as Virginia militia. Connelly was arrested by Arthur St. Clair, who rep- resented Pennsylvania, but a mob gathered in answer to the proclamation, and after drinking freely, fired at an Indian village across the Alleghany.
When Connelly was released, (on bail), he de- termined to precipitate a war with the Indians because such a war would give excuse for Virginia's governor to call out all the militia, when, with an overwhelming force, he could settle the disputed boundary. To this end, on April 21, 1774, Connelly wrote a circular letter to the white settlers down the Ohio, warning them to prepare for a Shawnee outbreak.
Coming from a man set in authority, though by unrighteous means, this letter was sufficient for the purpose intended. The peaceable homemakers fled by thousands to Fort Pitt and Redstone for safety. Daniel Boone ranged through Kentucky and warned the people there to fly through the Cumberland Gap.
But the desperadoes did not flee immediately. In- stead of that they sought for scalps, knowing that the Indians were not expecting trouble, and that attacks could be made in safety on the unsuspicious.
It was in vain that the trader, George Croghan, then living near Fort Pitt, gave warning. "There is too great a spirit in the frontier people for killing Indians, and if the assembly gives in to that spirit, no doubt they will soon have a general rupture," instead of a conflict with the Shawnees merely, he said.
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A copy of Connelly's letter reached the Zane set- tlement at Wheeling, and fell into the hands of Mi- chael Cresap. This Cresap was a son of Col. Thomas Cresap, the "vagrant Yorkshire man" previously men- tioned as a settler in Western Maryland. Young Michael had been trained on the frontier, and had been a trader, like his father; but he had become bankrupt, and was now on the Ohio, hoping to recruit his for- tunes by land speculations. To Cresap the letter of Connelly was a sufficient warrant for any deed of blood. According to George Rogers Clark, who was present, "the war post was planted, a council called, the letter read, the ceremonies used by the Indians on so important an occasion acted, and war was for- mally declared."
These civilized white men, before going out to kill Indians, went through with the ceremonies used by Indians. They circled around the war post, and each struck his tomahawk into it, while all gave the war whoop repeatedly.
Clark adds: "The same evening two scalps were brought into camp." The story of these two scalps is interesting. Word reached the settlement that a canoe with two or three Indians in it was coming down the Ohio. Cresap gathered a party and started up the river in a canoe to meet them, sending another party to lie in ambush in the weeds of the river bank, mean- time.
This canoe contained a white man named Ste- vens, a friendly Delaware and a friendly Shawnee, all in the employ of a Pittsburg trader named Butler. They were coming down the river to get some furs
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belonging to their employer, which had been lost by other employees of the trader in a brawl with a party of Cherokees some days earlier.
On seeing Cresap's canoe, Stevens thought from the way it was handled that it contained the party of Cherokees that had made trouble on the former occa- sion, and he steered for the bank. This brought his canoe within range of the men Cresap had placed in ambush, and they, although they could see that Ste- phens was a white man, shot the two Indians dead.
These Indians were murdered on April 26, 1774. On the 27th, (one account says the 26th), a man named McMahon brought word to Cresap that four- teen Indians had passed down the river. Cresap, with a party of fifteen, pursued and overtook them at Grave Creek. Having heard of the aggression of Cresap the day before, the Indians, when Cresap opened fire, re- turned it, and then they fled into the woods, leaving one of their party dead. It appears that others were mortally wounded. Cresap brought but one scalp to Wheeling, but the Indians said afterward that "sev- eral" were killed. George Rogers Clark, then a youth of twenty-one, but afterwards a noted military officer of the frontier, was with Cresap. In after years Clark tried to excuse this attack by saying that these Indians acted in a suspicious manner when going down the river,-that is, they passed on the further side of an island in order to keep clear of the whites; and he adds that "we found a considerable quantity of ammu- nition and other warlike stores," in their canoe when they fled. What Cresap actually did find was "six- teen kegs of rum, two saddles and some bridles,"-and
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nothing more. The idea that Indians would leave am- munition behind on such an occasion is pure nonsense. But even if they had been supplied with enough to leave some behind, the fact would have shown only that they were going hunting.
On returning to Wheeling, Cresap organized a company to go up the river and attack an Indian vil- lage, under the famous chief Logan, at the mouth of Yellow Creek, opposite a trading station belonging to a man named Joshua Baker. The company marched five miles, and then abandoned the plan for reasons not fully known. Clark's statement that these men "argued the impropriety" of the attack, and abandoned it on humane grounds, is unbelievable. They were frontier toughs, and it is likely that the revulsion of feeling often seen in such characters-a panic of fear following murderous deeds-came upon them. At any rate Cresap and more than half of the gang imme- diately fled to safety at Redstone, on the Monongahela. A few continued on to Baker's, being determined to slaughter the red people at all hazards. A man named Daniel C. Greathouse now took the lead, and gathered a gang of thirty-two. On April 30, he went across to Yellow Creek alone, pretending friendship for, but really to count, the Indians. He found them too nu- merous even for a night attack, although thirty-two white men had been induced by love of blood and the hope of plunder to make the attack.
While he was still among the Indians a friendly squaw, (a relative of Chief Logan), told Greathouse that her people had heard of the deeds of Cresap, and were meditating revenge. She advised him to leave,
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and he did so, after inviting, as he left, a considerable number of Indians to cross to Baker's and get some rum as a treat.
Accordingly several Indians did cross to Baker's. The accounts vary as to the number, but it appears that four red men, three squaws and a little girl went. Definite statements are made that one of the squaws was Logan's mother, that another squaw, (one who carried the little girl), was his sister, and that one of the red men was his brother. Two Indians got drunk, and two refused to drink, but these two were induced to shoot at a mark, after the other two were helpless.
When the Indians had fired their guns, and were thus incapable of defending themselves, the thirty-two white men attacked and slaughtered the party all but the child. The man who killed Logan's sister boasted that he shot her at a range of six feet. He was then going to "dash out the child's brains," but on seeing the little thing fall with her mother, "felt some re- morse," and desisted. The Indians over at Yellow Creek, on hearing the reports of guns, sent a canoe with five warriors to learn why the guns were fired. These were ambushed and four, (or perhaps but two), were killed, while another was wounded.
It was during these days that John Heckwelder and David Zeisberger, Moravian missionaries, animated by a feeling which frontier writers have ever since, with lofty contempt, called "Quaker sentiment," were teaching the Ohio Indians to grub stumps and dig the ground and plant corn, and adopt a new religion-they were building Gnadenhutten, of which something more shall be told.
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Logan had been the friend of the whites, but now the red blood in his veins boiled. Three separate raids were made by parties under him into the Monongahela valley. In the first of these he alone took thirteen scalps. What other raiders did is told only in general terms. It was a war on the Virginians, and the whole Virginia frontier blazed, and ran red with blood, the innocents suffering, as always, for the crimes of des- peradoes, who sneaked away to safety when the danger became great. But when Logan took a prisoner, as happened on one raid, he saved the man from the stake at the risk of his own life.
But the story of the white treachery is not yet com- plete. The traders then among the Indians fled for their lives and were helped from the country by per- sonal friends among the red men. Some of these friendly Indians went as far as Fort Pitt with the tra- ders. And while these friendly Indians were at Fort Pitt, Connelly tried to imprison them, but Croghan, the trader, foiled him. Then finding that they were getting away, Connelly sent men who waylaid and shot three of them from ambush.
An old account says that "the character developed" by Connelly on this occasion was such as to draw down "the reproof of Lord Dartmouth."
The Ohio Indians had been restless for months. They had been expecting large quantities of goods in payment for lands that were to be organized as the colony of Vandalia, and had been disappointed. They were angered because they had been driven from the lands within the forks of the Ohio. They were alarmed and angered by the influx of whites that had followed
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the treaty of Fort Stanwix. The devilish work of Con- nelly, Cresap and Greathouse came just at the right time to rouse them to the point where almost to a man they would dig up the hatchet, as Logan had done.
To meet the overwhelming red force thus turned loose on the Virginia frontier, Gen. Andrew Lewis, with 1, 100 or 1,200 men (of whom fifty came from the Watauga settlement, under Capt. Evan Shelby), marched from Virginia over the range to and down the Kanawha. Lord Dunmore himself, with another force, announced that he would join Lewis at this point, and the united forces were then to cross the Ohio, and lay desolate the Indian villages.
When Lewis reached the Ohio, on October 9, 1774, however, Lord Dunmore was nowhere near. Instead of Dunmore came Cornstalk, the Shawanese, with 1,000 warriors, to fight these white men on their own ground. Cornstalk had learned Dunmore's plan of bringing the Virginians in two bodies to unite on the Ohio, and, with admirable tactics, determined to attack and destroy the smaller force first. The Indians knew all they needed to know, as they crossed the Ohio above the Kanawha, about the position of the Virginians. The Virginians knew nothing of the coming of the Indians.
At four o' clock next morning, October 10, the In- dians came gliding through the woods to surprise the white man's camp, and they would have succeeded, but for the lack of discipline in the camp! The General had ordered the poorest of the cattle, driven along to supply the men with beef, to be killed and served. Men who didn't like this beef left camp without permission, to
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go and kill game. Several men were going out hunting in pairs, that morning, before daylight. One pair, whose names were Mooney and Hickman, met the In- dians about a mile from camp, and were fired on. Hickman was killed. At about the same time James Robertson and another Watuga man met the Indians, but both of these escaped, and with Mooney ran to camp.
It was a camp of frontiersmen. They were asleep, but the shouts of the hunters and the rolling of drums brought them to their feet, gun in hand. And leaping behind trees and logs they were instantly ready for the conflict.
It began in the dusk of morning. The commanding general thought only a scouting party had been seen, and sent out a detachment with two scouts leading the way-two to serve as a sacrifice that the men might not be surprised. The two were soon killed. The at- tack on the detachment soon followed. Reinforcements came swiftly to support them, but the Indians took position on a commanding piece of ground, and be- fore the sunlight brightened the tops of the trees, the two hosts were spread out in lines more than a mile long, facing each other at a range that never exceeded twenty yards. They crouched behind trees, and look- ing up or down the line, fired at glimpses of white or red flesh, or coon skin caps or disordered plumes. They leaped from shelter, and with jeers and taunts invited assault, only that the assaulters might be decoyed into exposing themselves to those lying in wait. Indians were never more aggressive in open battle. They re- peatedly called the whites the sons of female dogs, and
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shouted "why don't you whistle now?" (referring to the fifes), and "we'll learn you to shoot." They even charged on the whites, singly and in squads, and with knife and tomahawk, fought it out, hand to hand, man fashion. Many men with mortal wounds fought on until death froze the look of hate on their faces.
And through it all old Cornstalk raged up and down his line, shouting in a voice heard above the roar of guns :
"Be strong ! Be strong !"
GEN. WM. HENRY HARRISON'S RESIDENCE. (FROM A CONTEMPORARY PRINT.)
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