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 22
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We have in these early days of the Twentieth Cen- tury adopted a new Rank (John Paul Jones always spelled rank with a capital R). We call some of our great men Captains of Industry. Carlyle and Ruskin suggested such a Rank long ago, and we have acted on the suggestion. Through luck and longevity a mediocre man may lead all officers in army or navy. A ninny or degenerate may come to the Rank of cap- italist through inheritance. But the Rank of Captain of Industry is the proud title only of him who earns
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it by honest toil. If a blight fell at any time on any part of the Mississippi Valley, it was because its dominant people came to look upon labor as something to be done by slaves.
Imlay has told how men with little capital suc- ceeded in those early days. Men with an axe, a hoe and rifle came to Kentucky and succeeded. A sufficient shelter was built with an axe, and the rifle and the forest supplied the food while the trees were chopped from three acres of land. A half acre was planted with garden vegetables and the remainder in corn. Because much time had to be given to hunting, the first crop amounted to no more than seventy bushels of corn, but half that was enough to supply the settler having a family of three with bread for the ensuing year. The remainder found a ready market, though at a low price, while the skins of the animals killed formed the currency of the country.
When the second season came the clearing was five acres large, and the ensuing crop greater in pro- portion. By this time, too, the industrious man would have established himself among his neighbors so firmly that a cow could be purchased on credit, while the third year saw him driving at least one horse of his own, and a modest fortune was at hand.
All this supposes that the family escaped an In- dian raid. The common lot was not one of uninter- rupted progress. It often happened that when a man had got his house walls chinked and his roof clap- boarded; when a cow fed on the luscious cane by the river, chickens clucked and cackled in the yard and the man was guiding a plow behind his first horse,
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a party of raiders came to the clearing and wiped out the family and all they had accumulated.
The instances where some members of the family were slaughtered and some escaped are many, but rarely, if ever, did the raiders fail to burn the cabin and destroy the stock and crops. The present-day read- er notes with a feeling of relief that in this and that raid the Indians were unable to do more than burn a few cabins, but imagine the bitterness of heart with which the home maker returned to his clearing and found that the results of two or three years of the hardest kind of toil and self-denial had been all but wholly destroyed-the clearing only remained.
Yet the losses, heavy as they were, had some com- pensation in the cultivation of the sturdy qualities of the people. For it was a characteristic of the men and women who made the Mississippi Valley to persist. The unsurpassed pluck that made men with mortal wounds use their ebbing strength to give a last blow to the enemy, made the living begin over again and over again, no matter how many times they were ruined. They were of the tribe of John Paul Jones, and when asked if they had surrendered replied in- variably :
"I have not yet begun the fight."
Even when unmolested by Indians, the home mak- ers ordinarily had but a poor market for their surplus products. Here is a price list published as late as 1793, when peace was secured and the thronging emigrants consumed nearly all the surplus of the older settlers.
"Indian corn is from gd to Is per bushel. Beef is from 1 1-2d to 2d per 1b. Veal, 2 1-2d per ditto.
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Mutton, 3d ditto. Pork is from 2d to 2 I-2d per lb. Bacon, 3 1-2d to 4d. Bacon hams from 4d to 5 1-2d. Salt beef, 2d. Hung or dried beef, 3d. Neat's tongues, 6d. each. Butter is from 2 I-2d to 3 I-2d per 1b. Most people make their own sugar; but when it is sold, the price is from 3d to 4 1-2d per 1b."
In November, 1780, the Virginia Legislature di- vided Kentucky into three counties, Jefferson, Lincoln and Fayette. John Floyd, Benjamin Logan and John Todd were commissioned Colonels for the three coun- ties in the order named, and George Rogers Clark, who was stationed at the Falls, was placed over all, with the rank of Brigadier general. Roosevelt notes that at the first court held, (Harrodsburg), "the first grand jury impanelled presented nine persons for selling liquor, eight for adultery and fornication, and the clerk of Lincoln county for not keeping a table of fees." The first court house and jail were built of logs.
In 1782, several grist mills had been erected, and it is likely that sprouted corn appeared among the first grists brought to these mills, for distilleries were erected at the same time.
In 1782 one Jacob Yoder built a flat boat at Red- stone and carried a cargo of whiskey to New Orleans with some profit. It is likely that whiskey was about the first product manufactured for export, and the home demand was not inconsiderable. The fact is the frontier life-the work of chopping trees, and grubbing around stumps, day after day, and living, the while, on plenty of meat and corn bread-created an appetite for liquor. The backwoodsman liked the taste of rum and whiskey, and he also enjoyed the
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effect it produced upon him. When Wheeling was besieged in 1782, the garrison narrowly escaped de- struction because nearly all the men went down the river to a place where a keg of rum had been landed and concealed-went there with the deliberate pur- pose of getting hilariously drunk. But they sent out two scouts, as a matter of precaution, and these found signs of danger before the drinking bout was fairly started, and the garrison thus escaped.
Redstone Old Fort, (Brownsville in 1902), was the starting point of the river navigation in those days. To Redstone came all the overland traffic bound down the river, and the reputation of that town for drunken- ness and debauchery became world wide. Limestone, Ky., (now the orderly Maysville), was also called a tough town. But it must be remembered that the out- laws and ne'er-do-wells that came to the frontier, gravitated to the settlements and gave them evil reputations even when the majority of the inhabitants were reputable people. It was the rule for every man to mind his own business, and in no way meddle with that of others. And what was worse, war-the con- stantly-impending danger-made men reckless, while the idleness due to the necessity of remaining in pali- saded settlements, made any diversion welcome even to sober-minded citizens. They ran races, with bottles of whiskey for prizes. They drank their winnings. They fought each other "rough and tumble." It was not uncommon for a man to lose an eye in one of these rough and tumble fights. If one fighter got a chance he pressed his thumb into the eye of his opponent and literally "gouged" it out.
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Europeans-especially Englishmen-who came to the region as tourists, a little later, were horrified by the sight of such fighting. They said it was utterly barbarous. The civilized way to fight was for the combatants to stick swords into each other.
On the whole, however, as has been noted, the distinguishing characteristic of the early settlers was the love of order-as it is a distinguishing character- istic to-day. They talked much of their love of liberty. Their orators told them that liberty was the rock-in- place foundation of their prosperity. But now that there is no danger of any well-established republican government reverting to monarchy-now that every American fully comprehends the value of his right to select the hero who is to reign over him-it is worth while to note the influence of order on the prosperity of the people. Order and justice under a despotism are now seen to be better than anarchy, if one has to choose.
The frontiersmen made stump speeches, (literally from the stump tops), on liberty, but they loved an orderly state of society more than they did liberty! Boone and his associates at Boonesborough ; Robertson, Shelby and Sevier on the Watauga; Robertson, again, and his friends at Nashville, organized governments and enacted laws to supply what they saw to be the chief need of the communities they had gathered. And they enforced those laws-preserved order-at the muzzles of Deckhard rifles, with barrels three feet six inches long, and bullets that ran seventy to the pound, though a rawhide halter sometimes took the place of the rifle.
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One Sunday, as Col. William Campbell, a leader living at the head of the Tennessee valley, was riding home from Doak's church, he saw a disreputable citizen -a Tory-ride across the trail ahead of him. The Tory refused to stop, when hailed, and at that Camp- bell, who was carrying a baby, handed the child to a servant and dashing after the Tory caught him.
The court was convened under the nearest tree, and it was proved that the Tory was riding a stolen horse. Such violations of good order could not be endured, and they ceased forever so far as that Tory was con- cerned, for Campbell hanged him to a tree and rode on home with a good appetite for the somewhat be- lated meal.
And strong as was the liberty among the people there, a time came when, to secure certain other in- terests, many of the population, (including even John Sevier and Robertson), were ready to go over to the Spanish.
One might dwell on the prowess of many individual woodsmen in their warfare on the enemy. There were Lewis Wetzel and his brothers. There were Samuel Brady and a host of others. These men were counted the heroes of the frontiers, because of the number of scalps they took. These men stood high in the frontier estimation precisely as certain braves stood high in In- dian villages. But these men did infinitely more harm than good to the frontier. They were animated by a de- sire for revenge, and a love of blood. They were de- stroyers, not builders. There was no strategic value in their fighting, while lasting injury was done by their words and example to the young people of the whole re-
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gion. White boys were taught to hunt Indians as they were taught to hunt bears and wolves. The ambition to parade a scalp was as rampant on the frontier as among the Indian wigwams. The courage and skill of these men, if admirable when properly directed, yet became the bane of the youth of the whole frontier, from the lakes to the Gulf. It was solely because of the bar- barism in the human mind that fighters held social rank then, and hold it now.
It was on October 17, 1781, (the fourth anniver- sary of Burgoyne's surrender), that Lord Cornwallis hung out the white flag at Yorktown, and when the news reached the prime minister of England he "walked wildly up and down the room, throwing his arms about, and crying, 'Oh God ! It is all over ! It is all over ! It is all over!' "
Because of the Gnadenhutten outrage, the frontier was yet to be raided worse than ever, and the British at Detroit were to make a last effort to drive the frontier people to the east side of the mountains. But there was no power among either British or Indians to accomplish such a result. The frontier home-maker had a wide-spread footing on the soil, and with his axe he hewed the bounds of the Nation to the Mississippi.
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BRIG. GEN. ANTHONY WAYNE. From a pencil sketch by Col. John Trumbull, of the Revolutionary Army.
XXI
FIGHTING TO POSSESS LAND ALREADY WON.
Story of the Posts in the Northwest that were Retained by the British after Agreeing to Abandon Them- The Indians Urged to Slaughter the Women and Children of the American Frontier in order to Pro- mote the British Fur Trade-St. Clair's Defeat- "Mad" Anthony Wayne to the Rescue-Wayne's March to the Maumee-The Battle of Fallen Timber -Land of the Mississippi Under the Flag at Last.
The story of the making of the treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States, at the end of the War of the Revolution, is one of the most pleasing in the history of the Nation. In April, 1782, Mr. Richard Oswald was sent by Shelburne, the Brit- ish Colonial Minister to Paris to consult with Frank- lin. Oswald was one of Franklin's intimate friends.
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He had married an American. It was easy for these two men to agree on preliminary matters. John Jay and John Adams went to Paris to assist in the final work. The French minister was eager to confine the new Nation within the Atlantic watershed of the Alle- ghanies, and Congress had instructed the American commissioners to follow his dictation when making peace. But soon after the final negotiations began, we had there "the strange spectacle of the colonies joining with their enemy, the mother country, to circumvent the scheme of their own allies," as "A Century of Amer- ican Diplomacy" says. Shelburne preferred the Ameri- cans to the Spanish for neighbors along the Great Lakes. "He recommended to the British negotiator to so act as 'to regain the affections of the Americans.'" Through the work of George Rogers Clark the Ameri- cans held the Illinois region, and the British negotiator readily acknowledged the right of possession. The fact is, as pointed out by Wharton, "the treaty of peace was not a grant of independence, but was a partition of the Empire." In this "separation" so much of the British Empire as lay within stated bounds was set up as the United States of America. It was a separation that carried with it the old reciprocal rights, and "the idea of a future reciprocity between the two Nations, based on old tradition, as moulded by a mod- ern economical liberalism, was peculiarly attractive to Shelburne," (J. Q. Adams quoted by Wharton). The western limit of the United States was readily placed where the British limit had been,-on the Mississippi. Those who have confidence in the characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race may well consider what results
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would have followed if the British had continued to maintain a friendly attitude toward the new Nation.
But no sooner had the treaty been made than the British began to feel that they had shown weakness in their effort "to regain the affections of the Americans." They were poor losers. In fact they were "welchers." They refused to give up the posts they had agreed to evacuate. Ostensibly the frontier posts were held to compel the Americans to restore the Tories the property that had been confiscated, and to pay certain debts owed by individuals to British merchants. But the real cause was the feeling that they had been too liberal in mak- ing the treaty. "God forbid, if I shall ever have a hand in another peace," wrote Strachey, (an under secretary) who assisted the British commissioner Os- wald in making the treaty.
The discontent created by the feeling that too much had been conceded was greatly increased by the protests sent home by the fur traders of Canada. In the history of America the fur trade has done at the north what the discovery of gold did at the south. In grasping at the profits of the fur trade, the traders hesitated at no crime, and no outrage on human rights. Under the treaty the British fur traders were to be excluded from the United States territory, and they estimated the trade so to be lost at $450,000 a year. It was in good part to save this part of the fur trade that the frontier posts of the United States were retained by the British after they had agreed to evacuate them.
But not only were the posts retained. The com- manders of the British garrisons, and the traders who had store houses at every post, continued to urge the
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Indians to make forays against the American frontier, much as they had done during the war. The purchase of scalps came to an end, indeed, but in every other way the soldiers and traders constantly incited the In- dians to harass the advancing frontiersmen. The rea- son for this attitude was found in the fact that the fron- tiersmen were home-makers. The British were anxious that the territory northwest of the Ohio should re- main a game preserve where a crop of beaver skins could be gathered every year. Said Sir John Johnson, in a letter to Joseph Brant, the Mohawk chief, dated Montreal, 22 February, 1791 : "As you certainly are all free and independent, I think you will have a right to insist upon disposing of whatever lands you judge fit to reserve for the General Confederacy, in whatever manner, and to whomsoever you please. * * * No just right or claim can be supported beyond the line of 1768, and to the western line of the land ceded or sold by the Indians to the states since the war." He adds that in a letter to Lord Dorchester, Governor of Canada, "I took the liberty of saying that the Ameri- cans had no claim to any part of the country beyond the line established in 1768, at Fort Stanwix."
The chief object of British diplomacy in Canada, at that time, was to wrest the territory northwest of the Ohio from the United States and set it up as the territory of a "General Confederacy" of Indians who were to be, of course, under British protection. And with that end in view, for nearly twelve years the sol- diers and traders at the posts encouraged and fitted out Indian parties that haunted the Ohio river, and lurked in the forests about the cabins of the settlers.
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Indians to make forays against the American frontier, much as they had done during the war. The purchase of scalps came to an end, indeed, but in every other way the soldiers and traders constantly incited the In- dians to harass the advancing frontiersmen. The rea- son for this attitude was found in the fact that the fron- tiersmen were home-makers. The British were anxious that the territory northwest of the Ohio should re- main a game preserve where a crop of beaver skins could be gathered every year. Said Sir John Johnson, in a letter to Joseph Brant, the Mohawk chief, dated Montreal, 22 February, 1791 : "As you certainly are all free and independent, I think you will have a right to insist upon disposing of whatever lands you judge fit to reserve for the General Confederacy, in whatever manner, and to whomsoever you please. * * No just right or claim can be supported beyond the line of 1768, and to the western line of the land ceded or sold by the Indians to the states since the war." He adds that in a letter to Lord Dorchester, Governor of Canada, "I took the liberty of saying that the Ameri- cans had no claim to any part of the country beyond the line established in 1768, at Fort Stanwix."
The chief object of British diplomacy in Canada, at that time, was to wrest the territory northwest of the Ohio from the United States and set it up as the territory of a "General Confederacy" of Indians who were to be, of course, under British protection. And with that end in view, for nearly twelve years the sol- diers and traders at the posts encouraged and fitted out Indian parties that haunted the Ohio river, and lurked in the forests about the cabins of the settlers.
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Treaty of 1795 to the United States
DETROIT H
Settled
R. Rosine
Portage
Bri
Garrison
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Indians degated by the WayAnny under Gen! Maune. Ing.
Roche
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Lakes
Portade K.
R. S Joseph
or Maws
TH AKDefiance
R. Viane
D
F.Wavne
Gr. Au Glautre R.
Sanchisky R
Rapids
J'AI.Portage
St. Mary's
A PORTION OF THE MAP OF LEWIS, 1796, SHOWING FORTS WAYNE, DEFIANCE, SCENE OF WAYNE'S BATTLE, ETC.
Mississippi Valley.
No details of these raids need be given because they were all alike and similar to those of the war. Children were slaughtered, men were tortured, and every kind of property was destroyed in order to beat back the hu- man tide that was flowing through the passes of the Alleghanies. One authority says that 1,500 people were killed in Kentucky alone, by the Indian raids during the seven years following the treaty of peace with Great Britain, while another authority estimates the total loss of life due to these raids at 5,000. It should be remem- bered, too, that by the treaties of Fort Stanwix, (Oc- tober 3-21, 1784) and Fort Finney, (January 26-Feb- ruary 1, 1786), the Indians had acknowledged the sov- ereignty of the United States over their country.
For several years the Americans acted only on the defensive or made counter raids that were effective chiefly, if not solely, in glutting some private revenge.
George Rogers Clark went up to the Wabash coun- try and overawed, for a time, the Indians there, and in the Illinois country. He also confiscated the goods of some Spanish traders in retaliation for seizures of Am- erican flat boats by the Spanish down the Mississippi. Col. Benjamin Logan made a raid up to the Shawnee towns in Ohio, where he took ten scalps and thirty-two prisoners, besides burning 200 cabins and much corn.
In 1790 Gen. Josiah Harmar with a force of 320 regulars and 1,133 militia marched to the site of the modern Ft. Wayne, Indiana. He burned 300 huts and destroyed 20,000 bushels of corn, but he lost 180 men in encounters with the Indians, and instead of inclining the red men to peace he encouraged them to further warfare. And to add to the encouragement of the red
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men, the British supplied them with an abundance of ammunition immediately after Harmar's retreat. It is worth noting, too, that Lord Dorchester, Governor of Canada, while issuing ammunition through the fron- tier posts, on American territory, to the Indians was publicly denying that this had been done.
Meantime, while frontier guns were accomplishing little or nothing the frontier axe was doing something. A notable tool was the American axe-thin-bladed, long-handled, and light in weight. The best woodsmen, then as now, found that an axe weighing from three and a half to four pounds was just right, and the blade was modeled by smiths who had chopped down trees as well as hammered steel. The American axe has never been equalled.
With the axe, settlements were made on both sides of the Ohio in spite of raids. In 1785 Fort Harmar was built at the mouth of the Muskingum to restrain the In- dians. On October 27, 1787, the Ohio Company, an aggregation of New England men that included both home-makers and speculators, bought of Congress 964,- 285 acres of land opposite Fort Harmar at the junction of the Ohio and Muskingum, (the land lay on the north side of the Ohio), agreeing to pay $642,856.66. Gen. Rufus Putnam was a leader among these home makers. It was a company composed chiefly of soldiers of the Revolution, but there were enough speculators in it to throw a shadow of disrepute over the transaction. The Rev. Manasseh Cutler, a man who "believed, as that sort of man often does, in making his neighbors and those he knew best his associates in any hazardous un- dertaking," (Winsor), was the leader of the specula-
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MARIE ANTOINETTE. Queen of France, wife of Louis XVI. The town of Marietta, Ohio, was named for this lady.
Mississippi Valley.
tors. He was the man who "worked" Congress for the grant. The total breadth obtained by the specula- tors was 5,000,000 acres, the price of which was to be $3,500,000. The land beyond the grant for the settle- ment of soldiers was to be sold as a speculation, and Cutler in connection with Joel Barlow and Col. William Duer, by means of descriptive circulars that were delib- erately false, sold a considerable breadth to a com- pany of Frenchmen whose misfortunes, after reaching the banks of the Ohio, were great. An interesting and instructive but very unpleasant book might be written on the work of dishonest land speculators in the Miss- issippi Valley.
On April 2, 1788, Putnam, with a party of survey- ors and engineers, left the Youghiogheny in a bullet proof flat boat, and on the 7th reached Ft. Harmar. They then surveyed the plot purchased of Congress, and built the town of Marietta, Ohio. It is the proud boast of the Marietta people, in these days, (and of all Ohio as well), that the settlers under Putnam brought with them a library. The people of the region have often boasted, also, that the ordinance, (July 13, 1787), for the government of the region northwest of the Ohio, (in the writing and passage of which Cutler was the leading spirit), prohibited slavery. The ordi- nance did not extirpate slavery, as it was supposed to do, but it undoubtedly had much influence in creating a public sentiment againt the detestable instituion.
Then, too, the men who followed Putnam were for the most part old comrades in arms-men who had fought for the freedom of the Nation in the war of the Revolution. At a time when the demagogues in Ken-
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tucky were telling the home-makers that a separation from the States east of the Alleghanies was necessary for their welfare it was worth while to have a settlement on the Ohio composed of men who had proved their de- votion to the welfare of the whole people.
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