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 23
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Another interesting feature of this settlement is found in the method of dividing the land. Instead of al- lowing the settlers to go into the region and pick out claims which were to be afterwards surveyed, to please the settler, as was done in Kentucky, the whole tract was first surveyed into townships six miles square and each township into sections one mile square. Accordingly when a man located a claim the land taken already had ascertained and definite bounds. There were no over- lapping claims as under the haphazard scheme that had previously prevailed.
Marietta was settled during a busy season on the Ohio river. The officers at Fort Harmar counted more than 500 flat boats carrying 10,000 emigrants down the Ohio river.
On July 9, 1788, Gen. Arthur St. Clair, who had seen service under Wolf at Quebec, and had but re- cently been president of Congress, arrived at Marietta, bringing an appointment as Governor of the "North- west Territory."
Meantime, (May 15, 1788), John Cleve Symmes bought a large tract of land on the Ohio river between the Great and Little Miami rivers; and in July "with fourteen four-horse wagons and sixty persons in his train," he came to his purchase. Among the followers of Symmes was John Filson, a surveyor, who is best known as the reporter who wrote the story of Daniel
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MAJ. GEN. ARTHUR ST. CLAIR. From a pencil sketch by Col. John Trumbull.
Mississippi Valley.
Boone. When the company wished a name for the town which they proceeded to lay out, Filson made one. Directly opposite the new town was the mouth of the Licking river. Filson thought that "Town-opposite-the- mouth-of-the-Licking" would be a proper name for the settlement, and he wrote it thus: L for Licking; os for mouth ; anti for opposite, and ville for town, which being combined gave Losantiville. But when St. Clair came to the settlement he determined to bestow on the town the name of the society of the Revolutionary offi- cers, known as the Cincinnati.
It was on November 4, 1790, that Harmar began his "disorderly retreat" from the Indian country. On Jan- uary 2, 1791, a big party of Indians, Delawares and Wyandottes, attacked a settlement on the Muskingum called Big Bottom, an off-shoot of Gen. Rufus Putnam's Marietta settlement. They killed twelve and carried off four prisoners. On the 10th Simon Girty, with 300 warriors, appeared at Dunlap Station, near Cincinnati, but accomplished little because aid came from the larger town. In February the Indians swarmed along the Al- leghany river.
When the news of the first of these raids reached Washington, he notified Congress, (January 24, 1791), and in due course a new expedition, of which Gov. St. Clair was to have charge in person, was authorized.
Washington believed that this expedition would convince the Indians that the "enmity of the United States is as much to be dreaded as their friendship is to be desired," while Jefferson said, "I hope we shall drub the Indians well this summer, and then change our plan from war to bribery."
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Both these expressions are of interest chiefly be- cause it is apparent that neither Jefferson nor Wash- ington saw the strong hand of the British that was pushing the Indians into aggressions. But the strength of that hand appeared nevertheless, further on.
St. Clair reached Ft. Washington, at Cincinnati, where he was to take charge of the forces for the ex- pedition, in May, 1791, but it was not until October that a number of soldiers deemed adequate for the oc- casion was gathered there. While waiting for the re- inforcements St. Clair fell sick, and so did Gen. Richard Butler, a notable soldier, the second in command. The powder supplied by the swindling, (one ought to say murderous) contractors was bad. The oxen were few in number and too lean in body. Worse yet, the recruits were, with few exceptions, an utterly worthless mob swept from the streets of the seaboard cities.
However, St. Clair set forth, at last, and on Novem- ber 3, 1791, made camp at a spot where Fort Recovery, Ohio, now stands on a branch of the Wabash river. Little scouting had been done, and no adequate precau- tions to repel an attack were made after pitching the camp.
Taking advantage of these conditions the Indians, led by Little Turtle, fell upon the camp half an hour before sunrise next day, and by 9 o'clock, the army was in disorderly retreat. The killed numbered 630, the seriously wounded 280, and of 1,400 all told, under St. Clair, "scarce half a hundred were unhurt."
St. Clair's defeat, in its effect on the American peo- ple, was stupefying, exasperating and conducive to a mental condition not far from imbecility-all accord-
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Mississippi Valley.
ing to the quality of individuals. A few were made firmer in their determination to resist aggression. The exasperated wished to wreck vengeance on St. Clair. The partially-made imbeciles, if they may be called so, demanded negotiations with the victorious red men in order to buy peace of them. Incredible as it may seem, those were the days when the American Congress re- fused to build war ships to protect American commerce, but they did actually build a fine frigate, ballast it with barrels of silver dollars and send it as tribute to an African pirate to purchase his favor. The Jeffersonian policy of "bribery" was fully tried.
Negotiations were opened with the Indians, through the intervention of the Senecas. Brant, the Mohawk Chief, who was a leader in the council, in a speech some years later, told how the British exerted their influence to defeat the efforts for peace. "To our surprise," he said, "when on the point of entering upon a treaty with the Commissioners, we found that it was opposed by those acting under the British government."
In fact the Commissioners were treated with marked insolence by Simon Girty, who was interpreter for the Indians. It was a particularly gloomy period on the frontier, for the Spanish still held Natchez, and were grasping for a wide territory in the southwest by means of Indian raids.
But in the meantime one of the inspiring men of the American army-General Anthony Wayne-"Mad Anthony"-was appointed to command a new expe- dition against the Indians, and there was, at last, hope for peace.
In the history of the early struggles of the Amer-
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A History of the
ican people the one man who has not received the full measure of credit due him is Gen. Anthony Wayne. If the average reader be asked what Wayne did to gain fame the reply, quickly given, is that he captured Stony Point. The spectacular dash of the man at Stony Point may well be remembered, for we all love a good leader in the thick of the fight; but the capture of the rocky peninsula below West Point was but a trivial skirmish in comparison with the splendid work he was now to do. Indeed, when rightly considered, the charge up the rocks of the promontory called Stony Point was less significant than the fact that he ordered his command to appear on parade "well powdered" before he started them on their long march through the mountains to reach the point of attack.
Even Washington, it appears, failed, after the Revo- lution ended, to appreciate all the worth of this most capable brigadier, for when he was going over the names of the men available to retrieve the Ohio country, Wayne was really his second choice. Here is Wash- ington's valuation of "Mad" Anthony Wayne in 1791 :
"More active and enterprising than judicious and cautious. No economist, it is feared. Open to flattery, vain; easily imposed upon and liable to be drawn into scrapes." In such words did Washington describe this General, while choosing him for the command. But Hammond, the British minister to the United States, described him as the most active, vigilant, and enter- prising officer in the American army.
When Wayne reached Pittsburg, and began to pre- pare for the work before him, (June, 1792), the task might well have appalled a man less resourceful. The
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contractors-they who had supplied St. Clair with pow- der unfit for any purpose-were there, eager for oppor- tunity to fit out the new expedition in like manner. The town contained, as frontier towns have always con- tained, numerous vile resorts to which the recruits were enticed whenever a shilling could be wrung from them. And the recruits were of the quality most easily enticed. Judge Symmes in speaking of the recruits supplied to St. Clair said :
"Men who are purchased from prisons, wheelbar- rows and brothels at two dollars per month will never answer for fighting Indians."
It was so. They were utterly worthless in the St. Clair expedition, but now Wayne was supplied with a second sweeping from the "prisons and brothels." By sleepless vigilance Wayne could sift out the unfit pow- der that the contractors wished to foist upon him, but from these unfit, rotten and sick recruits there was no escape.
Moreover, he had to wait for the outcome of the negotiations that had been opened by the commissioners with the exultant Indians-negotiations that were in- cited, not by Christian philanthropy, but by cowardice and penury-an important distinction, by the way, and the reader may well consider for himself the bearing of this distinction on what has been said, hitherto, about the Quaker-Moravian policy of philanthropy toward the Indians, and the Jeffersonian system of "bribery."
Nevertheless here was the man for the place, and once the choice had been made, he had the full support of Washington, who wrote him "not to be sparing of powder and lead to make his soldiers marksmen."
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To get the recruits away from the evil influences of a frontier town a camp was established on the Ohio, twenty-seven miles below Pittsburg. Officers as well as men were raw, for nearly all of the available experi- enced officers had been killed at St. Clair's defeat; but at this camp, with unwearied patience, Wayne took his forces in hand, and day by day drilled them till their watery eyes grew clear, their trembling chins grew firm, their backs stiffened and a springing step replaced their slouching gait.
When this much was done he taught them to play with the bayonet, and then he taught them to shoot.
The writers of the annals of the Ohio river pioneers tell, with wondering zest, how Lewis Wetzel was able to load his rifle while running at top speed through the forest, and their wonder is justified by the fact. But this Mad Anthony Wayne trained his "boys and mis- creants" from the city slums until he had an army of more than a thousand men who could load their rifles as they ran, with scarce a stop, fire with frontier pre- cision; and run and load and fire again, yelling the while like a legion of demons. They could shoot with precision-could hit a six-inch target at a hundred paces-while marching at quick-step speed, and many of them could do as well on the run.
The commissioners that had been appointed to ne- gotiate with victorious Indians for a peace reached Niagara in May, 1793, where they met the enemy-a combination of Indian chiefs and British officials. While there they heard fairly accurate accounts of the work Wayne was doing, and after the fashion of peace com- missioners who are appointed at the behest of cow-
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ardice and penury, they made haste to send protests to Washington. Wayne's successful work with the re- cruits was angering the Indians, said the commissioners, and the British-the British considered such work "un- fair and unwarrantable"!
Happily a Washington was at the head of the Amer- ican Government, and Wayne was not restrained in his work as drill master. He moved down the Ohio to Cincinnati, (May, 1793), and from that place he marched (October 7, 1793), to the north with a force of more than 2,000 men.
The time for a fight was yet a long way off, how- ever. Negotiations inspired by penury and cowardice were yet in hand, and on October 13, Wayne camped for the winter and named the camp Greenville, after his old commander when fighting for liberty in the South ; and Greenville, Ohio, now perpetuates the mem- ory of the camp.
Having secured the camp, Wayne sent a force for- ward to the field where St. Clair had been defeated, and built Fort Recovery. The Fort was armed with can- non abandoned by St. Clair.
The effect of all this work upon the enemy, In- dians and British, was notable. As the years had passed, after the signing of the treaty of peace with Great Britain, a new source of trouble had risen. The long reign of corruption in France had culminated in the French Revolution. The war between France and England that followed was unavoidable. With the progress of this war the attitude of the British Gov- ernment toward the United States had steadily grown arrogant. It is important to note that this arrogance
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was due, as every one now admits without dispute, to the weakness of the young Republic. There is no more important lesson to be learned in history than this, that governments are always devoid of the chivalry that keeps a good fighter from hitting an antagonist when he is down. The British wanted some favors from the Americans-harbors where their warships could refit and dispose of prizes and recruit their crews-but it never occurred to a British statesman to show any less arrogance and antagonism toward the Americans on that account. On the contrary, as said, the arrogance increased.
While Wayne was at Greenville, Lord Dorchester was Governor of Canada. Lord Dorchester, in other days, had been known as Sir Guy Carleton, and as Sir Guy Carleton while on a victorious march from Canada to the Hudson, had been stopped by a puny force on Lake Champlain under the command of Benedict Ar- nold. "The face of the enemy" at Lake Champlain had turned him back to Canada. Lord Dorchester had no love for the Americans, and on February 10, 1794, at a council with the Indians hostile to the United States, he said, referring to the American frontier :
"Children, since my return I find no appearance of a line remains, and from the manner in which the peo- ple of the States push on, and act, and talk, on this side, and from what I learn of their country towards the sea, I shall not be surprised if we are at war with them in the course of the present year ; and if so, a line must be drawn by the warriors.
"Children: You talk of selling your lands to the State of New York. I have told you there is no line
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Mississippi Valley.
between them and us. I shall acknowledge no lands to be theirs which have been encroached on by them since the year 1783. They broke the peace, and as they kept it not on their part, it doth not bind ours.
"Children : What further can I say to you? You are witnesses on our parts we have acted in the most peaceable manner, and borne the language and conduct of the people of the United States with patience. But I believe our patience is almost exhausted."
For years the British had kept the Indians fully supplied with arms for forays against the American frontier, and now that Wayne was pushing forward a well-drilled force, and the Indians needed to be en- couraged to meet it, the Governor of Canada said to them, "I shall not be surprised if we are at war with them in the course of the present year." The Indians who heard those words accepted them as a promise that the British would help with troops as well as with arms and other supplies. Lord Dorchester so intended his words to be understood.
But the British encouragement did not stop with an implied promise of help. To emphasize the effect of Dorchester's speech, Lieut. Gov. John Graves Sim- coe was sent with three companies of British regulars to the rapids of the Maumee, where a fort was built. It was a deliberate invasion of American territory for the purpose of wresting the Ohio country from the American people, and was therefore a pleasant work for Simcoe, who also hated the Americans.
The acts of the British authorities had theretofore been characterized by what Roosevelt calls "double dealing" and "smooth duplicity," but they now "began
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to adopt that tone of brutal insolence which reflects the general attitude of the British people towards the Americans."
If the reader thinks this is laying undue stress on the attitude of the British I must apologize by saying that stress seems desirable because of the tremendous contrast afforded when compared with the present (1902) conditions which have been brought about by the advancement of Christian civilization, and the de- velopment of an unequalled fleet of American warships.
Hammond, the British minister, not only admitted that aggressions had been made by his Government, but he justified them by complaining of American ag- gressions, the chief of which was what he called "the unparallelled insult which has been recently offered at Newport, Rhode Island," wherein the citizens of that town had taken six impressed Americans from the Brit- ish sloop of war Nautilus, by holding her captain a prisoner on shore until he released them. (See Wait's "State Papers," vol. ii). To liberate American citi- zens who had been carried by a press gang aboard a British warship, and there compelled to serve as sailors, was Hammond's idea of an "unparalleled insult," and one to justify an armed invasion.
An impartial reading of the documents of those days shows that war with Great Britain loomed high above the horizon. With a less capable man in Wayne's place the deluge would have fallen upon us.
That the building of the fort at the foot of the Mau- mee encouraged the Indians is certain, for on June 30, 1794, they swarmed down to Fort Recovery. But they were driven back, and Wayne having been reinforced,
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Mississippi Valley.
meantime, with 1,600 mounted Kentuckians, he marched to the St. Marys river, a branch of the Mau- mee, and built Fort Adams in what is now Mercer county, Ohio. Thence he marched on through Van Wert and Paulding counties, (the trail could be seen forty years ago), to the junction of the Big Auglaize and the Maumee, where he built Fort Defiance.
The French had named this tributary of the Mau- mee Au Glaize because of the rich loam of the plains found there. The fields of corn stretched away for miles in all directions, but no night trailing of a maid- en's robe around those fields could save them from the desolating host that had come to them. The corn was in the black silk, but the Indians were to have no green corn dance that year. The fields were laid waste to the last stalk. The Tories and Dorchester and Simcoe were responsible for the ills the Americans had suffered, but the Indians had to bear the burden then, as ever.
Having destroyed the corn, Wayne marched, August 15 , down the left bank of the Maumee. It was a slow march because Wayne was still willing to grant peace to the Indians. But a delegation of Span- iards from the lower Mississippi came to give heart to the Indians by tales of the uprising of the Southern Indians, and promises of Spanish help. More impor- tant still, the new British fort was close at hand, and the Indians, looking to its garrison for help and succor, scorned the offer. On August 18, Wayne threw up a small earthwork at the head of the rapids of the Mau- mee, at Waterville, Ohio, to secure the baggage and provisions, and on the morning of August 20, 1794, the final advance was made.
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Most remarkable was that field of battle. In days not long past, a tornado had come whirling along from the lakes, ripping up the giant forest trees by the roots, and piling them in confused masses, for miles along the river bottom. Behind these tangled heaps of logs -the "Fallen Timbers"-lay the Indians, numbering at the lowest estimate 1,300. With them lay seventy Canadians commanded by Capt. William Caldwell. Had the whole territory been searched no safer ground could have been found for that waiting host of red men.
To feel his way, Wayne sent a squadron of cavalry against the entanglement, but the horsemen were hurled back with losses that threw them into confusion, and then the supreme moment of the day had come.
Ordering his infantry to fix bayonets, Wayne stretched a line of them, 900 strong, before the fallen timbers, placed the remainder of the infantry some dis- tance in the rear for a reserve, divided the cavalry into two bodies to turn the Indian flanks, and sounded the charge.
And as the long roll of the guns began, the battle line dashed forward with blood curdling yells, pitch- forked the enemy from behind the logs, shot them down as they fled, and leaping on in relentless pursuit, loaded and fired, again and again, till they had driven the panic-stricken hosts far beyond the British fort.
The American loss was 33 killed and 100 wounded, most of whom fell in the preliminary charge of cavalry. The Indian and Tory loss was three times as great. Four British rangers were found dead on the field.
It was a decisive victory. Not only were the In- dians scattered in a panic, but what was of far greater
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importance, the battle taught them that they had been meanly deceived by the British. Dorchester, Simcoe and the Tories had sicked them on to ravage the Amer- ican frontier, and then, as they fled for life, shut tight the gates of the fort that had been ostentatiously built for their support. The defeat of St. Clair was, in a way, the worst in the history of our Indian wars; the victory of Wayne was the most convincing.
They called the hero of Stony Point and the Mau- mee Rapids, Mad Anthony Wayne. The title was originated by an Irish soldier who had been confined in a guard house at the order of the General, and it was taken up by the people, because of the wild enthusi- asm with which Wayne led his men when the supreme moment of battle came. But observe that when the war of the Revolution impended, he "ransacked history" for accounts of battles that he might learn military tactics, and he gave his days to the training of his neigh- bors. At Stony Point he appealed to the pride of the men by parading them "clean-shaved and with hair well powdered," while the prelaid plans included even the slaughter of the dogs of the region that no yelp should betray the approach of the assaulting host. And last of all, when the honor of the Nation and the integrity of its territory were committed to his care, he took a legion of "boys and miscreants," gathered from the slums of the coast cities, and trained them until their skill equalled if it did not surpass that of the most noted backwoods Indian fighters. His courage and brilliancy in time of battle were unsurpassed, his record as a. drill master is unequalled.
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