USA > Ohio > Montgomery County > Dayton > History of Dayton, Ohio. With portraits and biographical sketches of some of its pioneer and prominent citizens Vol. 1 > Part 3
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INDIAN HISTORY.
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English were making to take possession of the Ohio country, resolved to anticipate England, and at once, in 1749, they sent out Celoron de Bienville with three hundred soldiers to trace the boundaries of the Ohio valley and occupy it. He was furnished with lead plates, on which was engraved the inscription, that "from the farthest ridge whence water trickled towards the Ohio the country belonged to France." These plates he was directed to bury in the Indian mounds and along the banks of the Ohio and its tributaries. In token of possession, the Lilies of France were also nailed to a forest tree at a certain point on the south bank of the Ohio.
He forbade the tribes to trade with the English, and told the Indians at Logstown, seventeen miles below Pittsburgh: "I am going down the river to scourge home my children, the Miamis and the Wyandots." Accord- ingly, he ascended the Great Miami in boats to the Twightwee villages, though the ascent in August must have been made with difficulty, unless the season was unusually rainy. But the Indians, unmoved by his threats, replied that the lands were theirs, and that they had a right to freedom of trade. They understood well the ceremony of burying the lead plates, and murmured: "We know it is done to steal our country from us." Instead of being cowed into submission, they appealed to the Six Nations and the English for protection. Yet the Ohio Indians were jealous of the English also, and threatened the agent of the Ohio Company when he reached Logstown. "You are come," they cried, "to settle the Indians' lands; you never shall go home safe." However, as a messenger from the English king, they respected him, and allowed him to go on.
In 1750 the' Ohio Land Company built their trading post at Wills' Creek, now Cumberland, Maryland. They did not themselves venture into the Indian country, but their goods were purchased by strolling traders, who had no settled homes, but wandered among the tribes who lived as far west as the Miamis. In February, 1751, however, as already mentioned, Christopher Gist, the agent of the company, who was sent out to examine western lands, visited the Miami Confederacy. With the assistance of presents and the persuasions of Croghan and Montour, who accompanied him and had great influence with the tribes, he induced the representatives of the confederacy, assembled in council at the Twightwee village, to make a treaty with the English. The Ottawa agents of the Canadians, who had also brought presents, in vain endeavored to induce the Indians to renew their alliance with the French. Their tears, and howls, and prophecies of woe to the Miamis were without effect, and they departed in a rage. After they were gone, the French colors were taken down, and the council house became a scene of wild revelry. The Indians
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danced the feather dance, pausing at intervals at the signal of a war chief to hear the recital of his brave exploits. Having exhausted his cloquence, he threw presents lavishly to the musicians and dancers, when the turmoil began again. On the first of March, Gist departed. Later in the same year Croghan again visited the Ohio Indians, and obtained from them permission to build a trading post. The Indians also urged the English to build a fort at the forks of the Monongahela, now Pittsburg.
In May, 1752, the English and Ohio Indians met at Logstown, and ratified the treaty made at Lancaster in 1744. The chiefs of the Six Nations declined to appear at this council, as it "did not suit their customs to treat of affairs in the woods and weeds." The Miamis had promised Gist that they would never give heed to the words of the French, and that their friendship with the English should "stand like the loftiest mountains," and for some time they kept their promise. The English about the time of Gist's visit, had built a fortified trading house, called Pickawillany, sixteen miles northwest of the present town of Sidney. Early in the year 1752, the French hearing of this post, sent an armed body of men against the Miamis. The Indians were informed that the English traders were intruding on French lands, and must be given up to their men. The Miamis refused to obey, and the French, with the assistance of some Ottawas and Chippewas, attacked and destroyed the place after a severe battle. A number of Indians were wounded and fourteen were killed. The king of the Piankeshaws, who was chief of the whole Miami Confederacy, was taken captive, and sacrificed and eaten by the Indian allies of the French.
William Trent, the messenger of Virginia, went from Logstown to Pickawillany shortly after this battle, and found it deserted. He took down the French flag, which was floating over the ruins, and substituted the English colors. He then returned to Logstown to meet the repre- sentatives of the stricken confederacy, who had assembled there for "condolence and concert in revenge." They sent messengers to the English and the Six Nations, soliciting protection and vengeance against the French. Pennsylvania presented the Miamis two hundred pounds for their courageous defense of her traders. After the destruction of Pickawillany, no English settlement was made in Ohio till it passed into the possession of the United States.
In 1753 a French army of twelve hundred men marched from Canada to take possession of Ohio. The Six Nations warned the English and the western Indians of the projected invasion. The tribes on the Ohio sent envoys in April to meet the French at Niagara and endeavor to
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persuade them to turn back, but were received with contempt and derision. In September representatives of the Mingos, Shawnees, Wyandots, Delawares, and Miamis met Franklin and his colleagues at Carlisle. The Indians promised, with the assistance of the English, to repel the French, who had established posts at Erie, Waterford, and Venango. In 1754 the fort, which the English had begun at the forks of the Monongahela, was taken by the French and renamed Duquesne, but was retaken by Washington in 1758 and called Pitt. Some of the western Indians became allies of the French, and were so tenderly attached to them that, as Colonel Johnston relates, fifty years later they . would burst into tears when speaking of the time when their French fathers had dominion over them. One of the chiefs, a report of whose speech is given in the "American Pioneer," said to the English when they made the treaty of peace with the Indians at Easton in 1758: " Brethren, the cause why the Indians at Ohio left you was owing to yourselves. When we heard of the French coming there, we desired the governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania to supply us with implements and necessaries for war, and we would defend our lands; but these governors disregarded our message; the French came to us, traded with our people, used them kindly, and gained their affections. The governor of Virginia settled on our lands for his own benefit, but when we wanted his assistance, forsook us. . .. You deal hardly with us; you claim all the wild creatures, and will not let us come on your lands so much as to hunt after them; you will not let us peel a single tree. Surely this is hard. You take of us what lands you please, and the cattle you raise on them are your own; but those that are wild are still ours, and should be common to both; for our nephews, when they sold the land, did not propose to deprive themselves of hunting the wild deer, or using a stick of wood."
About 1763 a battle was fought at the Twightwee villages, on the Great Miami, between French and English traders, assisted by Indians. The English had for allies the Delawares, Shawnees, Munsees, part of the Senecas from Pennsylvania, the Cherokees, and Catawbas, while the Miamis were on the side of the French. The fort was besieged by the English and their Indian allies for more than a week, but could not be taken. The assailants met with severe losses. A number of the besieged were killed, and all their unprotected property was destroyed. It was said that after the battle baskets full of bullets could have been gathered from the ground. Shortly after this the Miamis removed to Miami of the Lakes, near Fort Wayne.
By the treaty of peace with France in 1763, the Northwest was ceded
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to the British; but the Indians denied the right of France to transfer their lands to Great Britain, and they resolved "since the French must go, no other nation should take their place." If the English had kept their promises to the tribes instead of, for nearly a century, habitually breaking them, and had conciliated instead of aggravating them, they. might have been spared Pontiac's cruel war, which began in May, 1763. In this conspiracy were engaged all the western tribes to the banks of the Mississippi. Nine British posts fell, and the savages drank from their clasped hands the blood of many Englishmen; but in August, 1763, the Indians were routed, and made peace with the English.
One day in the year 1773, the Shawnees at Chillicothe, near Xenia, saw, with wonder and amazement, a solitary white man, carrying a flag of truce, boldly entering their village. This was the intrepid Captain Bullitt, one of a party of surveyors from Virginia, who were on their way down the Ohio. He had come alone to Chillicothe from the river to ask the friendship of the Indians and their consent to make a settlement in Kentucky. Won by his courage and his wit, the Shawnees granted his request, and he set off on his dangerous return journey through the wilderness to rejoin his companions at Maysville. This amicable powwow was the prelude to years of war.
In the eighteenth century this valley, now so peaceful and prosperous, and teeming with people noted for intelligence, refinement, and benevo- lence, was the gloomy abode of cruelty and death. The wild animals which roamed through the woods were scarcely more brutal and fierce than the inhabitants of the infrequent villages scattered along the borders of the Miami hunting grounds, for this was the terrible "Indian country," which the imagination of trembling women in far-distant block houses invested with all the horrors of a veritable hell on earth.
The pioneers of Kentucky looked with jealous and longing eyes on the great Indian game preserve across the Ohio. The wily and suspicious savages used their best endeavors to exclude them; but though they ventured over here at the risk of being burned, they frequently came. Lord Dunmore's war against the towns on the Scioto ended in 1774 with a treaty of peace, concluded near the Pickaway Plains, in which the Indians agreed to make the Ohio their boundary, and the people of Virginia, of which Kentucky was a part, promised not to pass beyond that river; but, as usual, neither party kept their word.
From the time of the first settlement of Kentucky small parties of Shawnees and their warm friends, the Wyandots, were constantly slipping across the Ohio to surprise the Kentucky settlements, and then hastening back through the Miami valley with booty and prisoners to their secluded
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villages. The pioneers never knew when these terrible foes would appear. They slept with loaded guns at their bedsides, and when they went into the fields to plant their corn, part of the men stood on guard, while the rest hurriedly performed the labor. Less sad was the fate of settlers whose scalps were carried home as trophies, than that of the captives who were dragged through the Miami woods to Chillicothe, there to endure all the indignitics and excruciating agonies which the malice of pitiless savages could inflict.
Once the Indians, during the Revolution, brought Daniel Boone back with them, and kept him as an honored guest, rather than as a captive, at Chillicothe, near Xenia. They took a great fancy to him, "fondly caressed him," and adopted him into a family. In vain Governor Hamilton, of Detroit, who had also taken a great fancy to the fascinating Kentuckian, offered the Indians a considerable sum of money if they would release him. They refused to part with him. But discovering, after he had been at Chillicothe for several months, that a party of one hundred and fifty warriors were about starting for Boonesborough, Boone managed to make his escape from the town, and, by hard traveling, arrived at home in time "to foil the plans of the enemy, and not only saved the borough which he had founded, but probably all the frontier parts of Kentucky from devastation."
For a time there was no concerted action in Kentucky against the Indians, who, as emigration increased, stirred up by the English, by whom they were told that the frontiersmen were trespassing on Indian lands, became more and more jealous, restless, and revengeful. Retali- ation was left to' single families or individuals who had suffered from Indian raids, and the pioneers fought, each man for himself, without consultation or combination. Often a solitary frontiersman, burning to revenge the loss of property or friends, and carrying only his gun and a bag of parched corn, fearlessly, though cautiously, made his way into the Indian country, and slyly creeping near a village, killed at least one of his detested foes, stole off with one or more ponies, and got safely home to Kentucky.
In the summer of 1779, the first military expedition from Kentucky against the Ohio Indians crossed the river. Colonel Bowman marched with one hundred and sixty volunteers to Chillicothe, on the Little Miami, and burned the town, but was then forced to retreat. The Indians retal- iated in October by attacking one hundred men under command of Colonel Rogers and Captain Benham, who were passing up the river in two boats. Nearly all the men, after a brave fight, were tomahawked and scalped.
In June, 1780, a party of six hundred Canadians and Indians
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organized at Detroit, and, under the command of Colouel Byrd, invaded Kentucky and sacked Ruddell's and Martin's stations. Byrd could not control the savages, who were guilty of their usual atrocities. After taking the stations, Byrd retreated to the forks of the Licking, over the road which he had cut from the Ohio through the woods on his advance. When he reached his camp, the Indians immediately made off for Chillicothe and Piqua. He had come down the Great Miami to the · Ohio in bateaux, bringing, it is said, six pieces of artillery with him. But the Miami was now so low, that he was obliged to return by land, leaving his cannon in the woods to be, perhaps, brought on later by Indians.
In the summer of 1780, soon after Byrd's invasion of Kentucky, General George Rogers Clarke led an expedition of experienced Indian fighters to Ohio. Among the officers who held command under Clarke was Captain Robert Patterson, one of the founders of Lexington and Cincinnati, and from 1804 till 1827 a citizen of Dayton. When Clarke reached Chillicothe, near Xenia, he found it deserted and in flames, kindled by the Indians. After destroying several hundred acres of corn, he proceeded to the Piqua towns, near Springfield and about twelve miles from Chillicothe. The Shawnees were defeated. Clarke burned the houses, cut down the growing corn and vegetables, and then returned to Chillicothe and destroyed a field which he had saved to feed his horses, after which the expedition set out for home. By this victory of Clarke the homes, crops, and other property of about four thousand Shawnees were destroyed, and for some time they were wholly engaged in rebuilding their wigwams, and in hunting and fishing to obtain food for their families.
In March, 1781, Colonel Broadhead made a successful expedition from Wheeling against the Delawares on the Upper Muskingum. In July of the same year the Indians attacked a party of one hundred and six American soldiers, who were descending the river, killed forty-one, and captured the rest. Enraged by constant attacks from the savages, the settlers were not careful to distinguish friends from foes, and in March, 1782, occurred the disgraceful massacre of friendly and non-resistant Moravian Indians, in the Tuscarawas valley, by a force of one hundred Virginians and Pennsylvanians. In June, 1782, Colonel Crawford made a second expedition against the Moravians and the Wyandots, in what is now Wyandot County. It was utterly routed, and the commander was horribly tortured and burned at the stake. In July of this year the British at Detroit sent a force of six hundred men against Bryant's Station, near Lexington. A number of Shawnees, Wyandots, Miamis, and Delawares assembled at Chillicothe, near Xenia, and joined the expedition. The Indians, after heavy losses, retreated from Bryant's Station; but a party
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of one hundred and sixty Kentuckians, who pursued them, were drawn into an ambush near the Blue Licks and sixty of them killed and seven captured.
Finding that the Indians were recovering from their defeat in 1780, Clarke, in the fall of 1782, led a second expedition of one thousand Kentuckians to Ohio. They met with no resistance till they reached the mouth of Mad River, on the ninth of November, where they found a small party of Indians stationed to prevent their crossing the stream. A skir- mish on the site of Dayton followed, in which the Kentuckians were victorious. They spent the night here, and then proceeded to Upper Piqua, on the Great Miami, which the Shawnees had built after the destruction of their villages in 1780. On the road to Piqua they rescued a captive Kentucky woman, a Mrs. McFall, from a party of Indians. She accompanied them when they returned home.
Having destroyed Upper Piqua, Clarke went on to the trading station which had been built about 1775 by a Frenchman named Laramie, on the site of Pickawillany. They plundered and burnt the store, and destroyed the Indians' wigwams and crops. Soon after this Laramie, who was a favorite with the Indians, emigrated with a large number of Shawnees to the Spanish territory, and there the remainder of their race gradually gathered. Some of the Shawnees, after the destruction of Upper Piqua, built towns at St. Mary's and Wapakoneta, and here they were living when Dayton was settled. The Delawares were in the same neighborhood ..
For some time after the peace with Great Britain in 1783, the Indians, · who had met with many reverses and losses during the Revolution, did not trouble the settlements as much as formerly, but about 1785 they recommenced hostilities. It became necessary in. 1786 to send a force against the Wabash and Mad River villages. The latter expedition was under command of Colonel Logan. It was divided into brigades, com- manded by Colonel Robert Patterson and Colonel Thomas Kennedy, who took different directions. They harried and ruined the Indian country, destroying houses, crops, and vegetables, taking a large number of horses, and leaving the Indians in a state of destitution and starvation, from which it took them nearly a year to recover.
Eight large towns, called Macachack, situated in what is now Logan County, were destroyed, seventy or eighty prisoners taken, and twenty warriors, one of them a chief, killed. Among the captives was an Indian lad whom the commander of the force carried with him to his Kentucky home, where he lived for some time. Colonel Logan became much attached to the boy, who took his name, and was for life the staunch friend of the whites. After a few years he was allowed to return
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to his tribe, and became the friendly Shawnee chief, Logan. He was mortally wounded during the War of 1812, while, by command of General Harrison, engaged in service against some Indian allies of the British. The more famous orator, Logan, was also named for a white man, James Logan, secretary of the colony of Pennsylvania.
The Kentuckians returned to the Ohio by way of the Mad River valley, and, as in 1782, at the mouth of the river found a party of Indians on guard. With them was Tecumseh, at this time about fourteen years old. Having, after some slight resistance, beaten the Indians, and driven them up Mad River, and gained the second battle or skirmish fought on the site of Dayton, they camped for the night. Being well supplied with provisions from the captured towns, they remained here for two or three days examining land, with a view to recommending a settlement in this neighborhood. The Indians, driven across the Scioto by Logan, did not immediately return to the Miami valley, and when the Kentuckians departed they left an uninhabited country behind them.
These successful raids were a necessary preparation for the settlement of this region, for till the powerful Shawnees were driven out, no white town could be built in the Miami valley. The Indians were the allies of the British, so that Clarke's expeditions to Ohio were really as much a part of the Revolutionary War as his Indiana and Illinois campaigns. To this brave patriot and military genius we are indebted, not only for victories over the savages, but for the possession of the Northwest, which, but for his foresight and efforts, might have remained a part of the British dominions.
Some of his most valuable victories were gained by diplomacy. In the winter of 1785, a fort had been built at North Bend for the purpose of guarding emigrants down the Ohio, and also to prevent squatters from encroaching on Indian lands, for the United States Government was anxious to prevent all pretext for Indian hostilities. The first regiment sent west was raised principally for the purpose of driving the whites off of the reservation. The fort at North Bend was named for Captain Finney, of the First Infantry, which, with the exception of two com- panies, constituted the whole of the United States Army. In January, 1786, General George Rogers Clarke, Colonel Richard Butler, and Samuel H. Parsons were commissioned by the government to make a treaty of peace with the Mad River and Wabash Indians. The commissioners met representatives of the tribes at Fort Finney, but would have failed to accomplish their object but for the determination, coolness, and intrepidity of Clarke. His firm and undaunted manner overawed the Indians, who, instead of murdering the commissioners and proclaiming war, as was
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their probable intention when they arrived at Fort Finney, made a treaty, giving both the Miami valleys to the United States. The Indians, how- ever, continued to resent the intrusion of the whites. Symmes treated the Indians with consideration. The surveying party, which he led in 1787, met a party forty miles from Cincinnati. He protected them from the rifles of the Kentuckians, and his clemency so offended the latter that they abandoned the company and returned home. Yet Filson, another member of the party, who started back to the Ohio from the northern boundary line of Hamilton County, was killed by the implacable savages. In April, 1788, a party of six surveyors, camped near Mad River, were surprised and two of them killed. In the summer of 1789, Major Doughty, of the United States Army, built Fort Washington in the center of Losanteville, now Cincinnati. Stations and block houses, surrounded by cabins of settlers, were built at distances of five, nine, and twelve miles from the fort, and were able to successfully defend themselves.
In September, 1790, General Harmar, with an army of fourteen hundred and fifty men, three hundred and twenty of whom were United States troops, marched from Fort Washington up the Miami valley, past. the destroyed towns of Chillicothe, Piqua, and Laramie, to the Indian settlements, near the present city of Fort Wayne. Though he burnt seven villages and twenty thousand bushels of corn, yet, as few of the enemy were killed, and he was obliged to retreat to Cincinnati, the Indians did not consider themselves conquered. Nevertheless, the loss of their houses and provisions hampered them, and but for this check the suffer- ings of the settlers from their depredations would have been much greater. During the whole of the winter of 1790-1791, numerous parties of Indians were organizing in the Miami valley to attack weak block houses. Dayton was one of their favorite rendezvous. Parties came down the Miami in canoes, and, having formed a camp of supplies at the mouth of Mad River, in charge of squaws, and sent out hunters, started on their raids. Four hundred warriors attacked Dunlap's Station, on the Great Miami; wounded two and murdered Abner Hunt, but were repulsed. For months they were very daring, skulking about the streets of Cincinnati, and keeping the people in a constant state of terror, yet they did not succeed in destroying the settlements on the Upper Ohio and between the Miamis, eight in all, which had been begun in 1788.
In May and August, 1791, General Scott and Colonel Wilkinson made successful raids on the Wabash towns. These expeditions were followed in the fall by St. Clair's campaign against the Indians. He had a force of twenty-three hundred regular soldiers and six hundred militia.
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