USA > Mississippi > The pioneers, preachers and people of the Mississippi Valley > Part 11
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24
Next spring the great chief proceeded eastward to Oswego, where he again confirmed his alliance with the English, and gave up the vast plans which he had conceived for the preservation of the Indian race. Carrying many valuable gifts, he returned westward to the Maumee. Here we lose sight of him
200
PIONEERS, PREACHERS AND PEOPLE
for four years, which he doubtless spent in hunting or in feud, like his warrior brethren.
In April, 1769, he suddenly and for the last time reappears, coming out of his woods into the Illinois country, to the great uneasiness of the English traders in those parts. He crosses the great river and visits his old friend St. Ange de Bellerive, now commanding at St. Louis for the Spaniards. After a time he hears of some meeting of Indians across the river at Cahokia, assembled there for pleasure ; and in spite of the persuasions of St. Ange, who knew the enmity of the brutal British fur-traders, he persists in going ; expressing his contempt for the English. At Cahokia, he receives invitation after invitation from one friend and another, and accepts all. Drinking himself drunk, he goes out of the village into the woods, singing magic songs. An English fur-trader, seeing him, promptly gives a miserable Kaskaskia Indian a barrel of liquor to kill him, and promises him something more. The wretch followed Pontiac, crept up behind him, and elove his head with his hatchet.
The few followers of the murdered chieftain who would have avenged his death, were driven out of the village. But the news of the death of the great war-chief spread quickly and far; and his Ottawas and their confederate tribes, gathering together, came down upon the treacherous and cowardly
201
OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
Illinois, exterminated all but thirty families of them, and a few years afterward cut off all this wretched remnant, utterly extinguishing the tribe by the adoption of the few children who alone were saved alive.
St. Ange caused the body of the slain warrior to be brought across the Mississippi and buried. No man knows the place of his grave ; but it is some- where beneath the multitudinous tread of the busy crowds that throng the city of St. Louis. There he sleeps; and far away to the northward still are vanishing into further wildernesses, into the spirit land, the decreasing bands of the Algonquins, who yet retain the memory of their greatest chieftain. Over them is rushing, as it already rushes over his forgotten bones, the vast irresistible ocean of the power of the white race. And as most of them are already laid, so their scattered remainder soon shall lie, trodden under foot, unknown, unremembered ; existing, even in history, only as a legend and a tradition. Pontiac, sleeping beneath the lofty, crowded houses of St. Louis, lies there, the symbol and the prophecy of his race, and of its doom.
Besides Pontiac himself, there are perhaps none of the actors in this story whom we need follow further, unless it be the beautiful Ojibwa girl, Catharine, whose warning saved Detroit. She was, 8*
202
PIONEERS, PREACHERS AND PEOPLE
it is said, severely whipped by Pontiac himself. And there is a further tradition that she grew old, haggish, and drunken, as the Indian women do; and that in a drunken fit, she fell into a great kettle of boiling maple sap, and died miserably.
Lecture V.
THE
CABIN HOMES
OF THE WILDERNESS,
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION.
208
CABIN HOMES OF THE WILDERNESS
AT THE OPENING OF THE REVOLUTION.
IN the year 1768, there was assembled at Fort Stanwix, in central New York, on the site of the pre- sent city of Rome, a council of the confederated Six Nations, or Iroquois, under the supervision and influ- ence of Sir William Johnson, the British agent for Indian affairs. It was much desired by sundry par- ties interested, that a title to an immense region of country lying west of the mountains should, in some way or other, be secured from the Indians ; and as these bold adventurers, the Iroquois, the wild rovers; who laid under contribution their red brethren from the seaboard coasts of Maine upon the east, to the fast-rushing flood of the Father of Waters upon the west, exacting taxes paid equally by the Shawnees and Illinois, and by the Delawares and the Hurons- as these wild rovers claimed large districts of country besides those which they themselves occupied, the agents of the British government thought it well to secure this title from them. They claimed, in virtue of their conquests, the whole region of country lying
205
206
PIONEERS, PREACHERS AND PEOPLE
upon the south of the Ohio, running from that river on the north through the whole extent of the country traversed by the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. At this council, assembled about the 1st of Novem- ber, 1768, Sir William Johnson, who had arranged the details and particulars beforehand, with an un- scrupulous skill worthy of a modern politician, and by means of a series of gifts and presents to these hardy warriors, made the purchase, securing, in the first place, that whole region lying between the mouth of the Cherokee or Tennessee River upon the westward, and the Kanawha at the east, for the crown of Great Britain ; and the lands from the Kanawha on the west to the Monongahela on the east, for such tra- ders as had been defrauded or injured during the war of Pontiac. Let it be remembered that these Indians had, in truth, no more right and title to that land than you ; and yet, by the action of its agents and officers, the British government executed this agree- ment, and by virtue of it, henceforth claimed all that district of country lying west of the Monongahela and south of the Ohio river.
Under this treaty it was determined to make a grant of 200,000 acres to such officers and soldiers as had been engaged in the old French war, and to lo- cate it just west of the Kanawha River, within the limits of the present State of Kentucky.
And now-casting a rapid glance to another por-
207
OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
tion of our present vast territory-about the year 1770 we shall find coasting along the borders of Lake Superior upon the northward, ascertaining particu- lars and gaining information regarding the copper mines of that district, passing thence westward across the Mississippi River, and making a long and perilous journey into the country of the Dacotah or Sioux Indians, a bold and hardy captain from Connecticut, one Jonathan Carver. He called the attention of the British government and of the eastern colonists to the boundless mineral and agricultural wealth within the district he had traversed, and bore the first intel- ligence of a credible and authentic character in re- gard to the Oregon or Columbia River, and the country lying west of the Rocky Mountains.
We shall find at the same time floating down the Beautiful River of the French-the Ohio-a person to whom we have had occasion before to allude, the young athletic Virginian, George Washington ; hav- ing, in common with his brethren, that American peculiarity, a powerful instinct for good land, a strong desire after real estate. Pursuing his meander- ing course, in flat-boat or canoe, down the peaceful current of this river, comes this young Virginian, to locate his own right as an officer in the French war, and also the claims of his brother soldiers and officers. His eye having been early disciplined in his pursuits as a surveyor, and long accustomed to wander as fo-
208
PIONEERS, PREACHERS AND PEOPLE
rester and woodman, he became familiar with all forms and phases of nature, a lover of beautiful scen- ery, and at the same time skilled in estimating and selecting good lands. He revels in the panorama of magnificence outspread before him. Here a stately deer is browsing upon the river bluff, and yonder an- other of his brethren steps proudly down to slake his thirst in the peaceful stream. Here herds of buffalo are quietly wandering and grazing at their will. The woods are crowded with flocks of wild turkeys; and everywhere around him, in the beautiful summer sea- son of the year, everything on earth wears the bright- est smile of benignity and beauty ; and heart and eye of our Virginian gladden and are ravished with de- light. He forms the purpose of becoming a settler of the West, and but for the near outbreak of the Ame- rican Revolution, no doubt George Washington would have been a great pioneer of western civilization, leaving his impress upon its grateful and virgin soil, as durably and lastingly as he has now left it upon our whole continent.
Just before this period, a long series of outrageous and oppressive proceedings by the government offi- cers of North Carolina, supported and encouraged by the royal governor himself, the rigid, overbearing and haughty Tryon, had thoroughly alienated the affections of that colony from the English govern- ment. The sheriff's, as collectors, had levied enor-
209
OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
mous illegal taxes, for their own private gain; and the courts were courts of anything but justice. In their well-founded indignation, all the inland inhabi- tants formed themselves into bodies of so-called " Regulators," and while they administered a rude but honest justice among themselves, broke up and prohibited the sitting of the oppressive regular courts. These hardy men violently and successfully opposed the stamp act ; and Governor Tryon, irritated by their continued resistance to the tyranny of him- self and his creatures, issuing from the executive pa- lace, headed a levy of the militia, and on the river Alamance, gave battle to the forces of the Regula- tors, in the year 1771. The brave countrymen, like their fellows at Bunker Hill, fought until their pow- der was all expended, and then sullenly fled, having lost nine of their own number, and killed just thrice as many of their foes.
Expecting no justice while under the sway of the British lion, and exasperated beyond all patience at the oppressions, the official injustice and social in- dignities they had vainly opposed, these bold and de- termined men resolved to flee to the wilderness ; from ancient times the refuge of the oppressed and the poor. Deserting their homesteads and the heartli- stones by which their children had been nursed, and where their fondest memories were garnered, with their teams, their flocks, their wives and little ones, they
210
PIONEERS, PREACHERS AND PEOPLE
toil up the steep ascents of the Alleghany Mountains, and pass westward till they find the broad alluvial lands of the river Watauga. Here, entering into a league with the chief men of the Cherokee nation, which held possession of this country, they make just and legitimate purchase of a sufficient extent of terri- tory to answer their purpose of agricultural pursuits. And here, under leadership of Col. James Robert- son, one of the noblest pioneers our history speaks of, they establish the first Republic ever founded upon the soil of the American continent-despising and escliew- ing the authority of England, from which they had only received wrong, outrage, betrayal, and their compatriots' deaths. Surrounded by the grandeur of the great primitive forms of nature, the towering moun- tain lifting its great peak to the clouds, the plains all beautiful with the white of the abounding strawberry blossom, or the rich red of its fruit; the rliododen- dron, with its bright and genial hues, and the azalea, making all the forests crimson with a touch of fire- here these hardy men plant themselves, and begin to carry their explorations and surveys far to the west- ward. This is the germ and the birth-place of the present State of Tennessee.
Still further to the southwest, we find strange events transpiring upon the banks of the Mississippi River, in the neighborhood of the present city of Natchez, where stood the old French Fort Rosalie, named after
211
OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
the fair dame of the great French nobleman, Count Pontchartrain. During the old French war, in 1755-6, General Phineas Lyman, of Durham, in Con- necticut, had buckled on the harness of war, and had approved himself a valiant and noble leader, doing faithful service in behalf of the colonies until the con- clusion of the war. IIis valor and constancy, his rare power of combination, masterful accuracy in de- tails, and able generalship, had gained him a place so high in the confidence of his countrymen, that the reputation which he won so well in his office of ma- jor-general and commander-in-chief of the Connceti- cut forces, and as commander of the expedition to Havana, in 1762, was second to that of no man in America. Men high in place in England had also repeatedly invited the able, eminent and accom- plished provincial soldier to visit the mother country. Organizing an association under the name of the " Military Adventurers," of the soldiers and officers of the war just ended, he accordingly proceeded to England as its agent, to solicit for it a grant of the desert lands lying on the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers. For these associates had heard marvellous stories of the richness of the land in the Southwest, and desired to settle upon so fair a domain ; judging that they had a right to claim the grant in return for their services to the British government. Gen. Lyman arrived in England ; but instead of meeting a kind
212
PIONEERS, PREACHERS AND PEOPLE
reception and a cordial acknowledgment of his ser- vices, was treated with coldness and contempt, and with mean and cruel ingratitude. He was deluded with promise after promise, and delay after delay, even for years; until the discovery of this long series of cheatings came upon him with such crushing violence that he fell into absolute listless despondency. The noble soldier whose spirit had passed undismayed through perils of sea and land, Indian ambuscade and pitched battle, unable to bear the thought of return- ing, deluded, to his deluded friends, sadly determined to bear his fancied ignominy as best he might, in distant England, and to lay his dishonored bones there.
Thus the unhappy General Lyman wasted eleven years of the prime of life, absent from that home which he had left in the flush of present success, and with still more radiant hopes beaming from the fu- ture-a home made sacred and beautiful, and happy, by a lovely wife, by beloved, intelligent, refined and highly educated children. And when the faithful and patient wife could endure the long heart-break no more, she sent her eldest-born to England to bring back his father.
The unhappy father, his paternal affection awak- ened at the sight of his boy, consents to return ; and the more readily, as the British government has, with a liberality too late exercised, at last made the de-
213
OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
sired grant, at the intended spot, within the limits of the present State of Mississippi, and in what was then called western Florida. To General Lyman himself was given a special grant of lands broad enough for future wealth; and a promise-never fulfilled -of a pension of £200 a year. But many of the grantees were now hoary old men, and all were aged beyond the period of life when men remove into wildernesses to undertake the rude, exhausting labors of founding new communities. But Gen. Ly- man came home, with his grant. His oldest son, a youth of brilliant promise, had completed liis studies, received and held a commission in the army, and given it up for the practice of law ; had felt to the full the effects of all these high hopes so long de- ferred, which prevented him from earnest devotion to the law. The long weary suspense and doubt hanging over his own prospects, had destroyed health of body and mind together, and when the wretched father met him, he had sunk from brokenheartedness into Iunacy. But he carried the hapless youth away, hoping that new atmospheres and new scenes might give him back his health; and with a few friends proceeded to West Florida, and located his grant. Scarcely had he done so, when his son died. In the next year, 1775, the desolate father followed him to the grave. In 1776, Mrs. Lyman came to this fatal country, with her only brother and all her child
214
PIONEERS, PREACHERS AND PEOPLE
ren except one son. She died in a few months ; and next summer her brother died.
This expedition, which sailed from Middletown, May 1st, 1776, passed through a battle with misfortune so long, so varied, and so terrible, that it deserves some- thing more than a mere reference. Let us briefly trace the affecting story. Reaching New Orleans, Angust 1st, 1776, they begin to ascend the Missis- sippi in open boats. Day after day passes; and they are yet dragging their heavily-laden craft against the furious current, through sickly airs, and under the ex- hausting southern sun. The malaria of the swamps begins its fearful work, and one and another of the hardy emigrants sicken and die ; while the fated sur- vivors, with diminished strength, more slowly drag the heavy boats up stream. Boat after boat is left-the crew too feeble to draw it-fastened to the willows or anchored in the current ; among them that of Captain Matthew Phelps. Reaching Natchez, the minister of the party, Mr. Smith, who, in genuine Puritan style, had accompanied them from Connecticut, falls a victim to the fever. The remainder of the party at last reaches the site of the intended settlement, where General Lyman had, before his death, made some small improvements ; and here it is that Madam Ly- man follows her hapless husband to another world.
Captain Phelps, who was left below on the river still remained there, his family so reduced by fever
215
OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
and-agne that they could only, at intervals, wait on each other at all. His daughter Abigail soon died, and the mourning father buried her on the bank, dig- ging her grave with his own hands. This was in the early part of Sept., 1776. On the 16th, an infant son, born at sea on the voyage ont, died, and the fa- ther again dug a grave and buried his boy by the side of his daughter. A companion in misery, named Flowers, who had lost all his family, now overtook Phelps, and joining forces, they put the property of both in a larger boat, and worn down almost to skele- tons, began again the ascent of the river. They were still toiling upward on the 12th of October, when, a little above Natchez, Mrs. Phelps died, at the house of a hospitable planter named Alston, who gave her a decent burial. Moving onward again, Capt. Phelps reached the mouth of the Big Black, on which river h's lands lay, on the 24th of Nov .; having been almost a hundred days in making the trip from New Orleans, which now occupies a few hours. Weakened by dis- ease beyond the power of labor, Phelps here hired a man and boy to help him up the river, and himself, with the boy, labored at the tow-line, leaving the man on board to steer. The boat glides into an eddy, or ' suck," and her stern catching under a willow, the steersman is thrown ont, but being a sturdy swim- mer, escapes to the shore. Phelps's two remaining children, a boy of five and a girl of ten years of age.
216
PIONEERS, PREACHERS AND PEOPLE
worn down by their long and clinging sickness, are sitting listlessly upon the bed where they have suf- fered so much. The father, from whose arms one after another of his beloved has been wrested so ter- ribly, in a transport of agony, seeing the boat cir- cling in the whirlpool, hastily ties the line to a tree, and not being able to swim, creeps out on the willow that holds down the boat, hoping to rescue the child- ren and carry them ashore. He reaches the boat, and his added weight bears down the treacherous willow, and the stern under it. But begging the sis- ter to sit still while he saves her brother, the fright- ened man calls his boy; the little fellow is wading through the water in the boat toward his father, when a high wave strikes the bow, it is carried instantly under, and the two children are swept almost out of his very arms into the devouring whirl of the river. Standing helplessly upon the dangerous tree, the mis- erable man sees them rise once, clasped in each other's arms, and then they disappear forever beneath the boiling muddy water; and bereft before of wife, daughter, infant, and now of all his little ones-every tie to earth thus rudely severed, and, though it is scarcely worth the naming in addition, his little property swept into the gulf, too-the lonely, desolate man sadly escapes to the shore and ascends slowly to the place of his proposed settlement. A brutal squat- ter has usurped his elaim, and under the protection
217
OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
of the custom of the land, defies him. Thus left ab- solutely alone and penniless, he turns his face again to his distant native State; and there, it is pleasant to know, after so many bitter sorrows, he passed the re- mainder of his days in peace and comfort; and saw another wife, and other little children, within a happy home. He often told the story of his sufferings to friend or neighbor, narrating one disaster after an- other with the steady resignation of a Christian-all but one terrible sight. He could not speak of the moment when the flood swallowed down his two youngest close before his eyes.
The survivors of this sturdy band of Connecticut farmers, after struggling through so many obstacles, became thrifty and successful planters in the country round Natchez, with handsome dwellings, large estates, and scores of slaves.
But time passed on, and the American Revolution broke out. All these Connecticut people were ardent loyalists. The contagion of independence had not been carried so far as their distant dwellings. An agent of the American Congress, Oliver Pollock, had descended from Pittsburg to New Orleans, then in the possession of the Spaniards, and made arrange- ments with the Spanish authorities to supply the set- tlements upon the Kentucky, the Cumberland, Ten- nessee, and other whig American settlements, with ammunition to carry on the war. And a little after,
10
218
PIONEERS, PREACHERS AND PEOPLE
in 1779, there descends the river one John Willing, a citizen of Philadelphia, with an American commis- sion as colonel. He is plausible of speech and of winning address; he visits these loyal settlers in the neighborhood of Natchez and in other parts of Mis- sissippi, gathers them together, makes them many ora- tions, wins their confidence, and binds them by oath to strict neutrality. They are unwilling wholly to renounce allegiance to the British crown, but promise not to interfere in the struggle then going on. Wil- ling then, ascending the river with a small force, seizes, by stratagem, a British war vessel lying there, carries her to New Orleans, sells her to the Spanish authorities, and with the proceeds spends his time, with his companions, in riotous living and debauch- ery, instead of applying the money to the purpose for which it was intended-the purchase of arms. Hav- ing wasted the whole, he reascends the river, ravages and pillages the estates in the neighborhood of Baton Rouge, then in the possession of the English, and commences the reascent of the Mississippi to do the same at the settlements of Natchez. Our Connecti- cnt settlers in that region, and their neighbors, valor- ous men, hearing of the conduct of the desperado, and all faith in him-and, unfortunately, in the Ame- rican canse-thus destroyed, collect themselves to- gether, armed and equipped, to punish him, or at least to prevent his piratical designs. He reaches
219
OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
the neighborhood of the spot where they are fortified, crosses to the other side of the river, and then, by means of his artillery, treacherously opens fire on them under cover of a flag of truce. This they re- turn with such hearty good will that some of his men are killed and some taken prisoners. IIe and the re- mainder of them return to New Orleans, and from there he escapes into the country on the banks of the Alabama River. The conduct of this desperado shook all confidence and faith, on the part of the set- tlers, in the integrity and character of the American struggle for independence ; and very justly consider- ing themselves absolved from their oath of neutrality, they resolved to remain loyal to the crown of England.
About this period France gave evidence of its lean- ing to the American cause of independence ; where- upon the English government, in anger, declared war against France. Spain, also, which had been the firm ally of France, gave favorable consideration to the designs of the revolutionists ; and England, includ- ing her within the ban, declared war against Spain. The Spanish government decided to attack the British in Louisiana ; and Don Galvez, governor of New Orleans, ascended the river, took all the British posts as far as Natchez, and then returned to capture Mo- bile and Pensacola. The loyalists, including Col. Philip Austin, John Austin, Col. Hutchins, Mr. Ly- man, Dr. Dwight, and various other of the Connecti-
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.