USA > Ohio > Hamilton County > History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches > Part 15
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cuitous course towards home. The Indians easily gained upon him, however, and one of them hurled his toma- hawk at the boy with such force as to cleave his skull immediately behind the right ear. He dropped in his tracks, and, when overtaken an instant later, was again tomahawked and was then scalped. His mangled form was not found until the next morning, when John Claw- son, one of the pitying neighbors who gathered around, carried it on his back to the bereaved home. Strange to say, young Seward was not yet dead, though unconscious, and in his delirium, as his clothing and the surroundings showed, he had dragged himself round and round upon his knees. He actually survived the terrible injury for thirty-nine days, his senses returning to him, and even cheerfulness and good spirits, so that he was able to give a correct and detailed account of the affair. Obadiah was for some time unheard from; but a captive returning at length from the Indian country brought word that he had been killed by a bloodthirsty and drunken Indian, simply for taking the wrong fork of a trail. The young man, it is said, had long cherished a presentiment that he should perish at the hands of the savages. The doubly bereaved father afterwards removed to Springdale, where he suffered the loss of another son by the fall of a tree.
The captive just mentioned was Ned Larkin, an em- ploye of Mr. John Phillips who was seized and taken by the Indians the same day the young Sewards were at- tacked. He was alone in the field at the time, cutting and binding cornstalks for fodder, and was bound and marched through the wilderness to Detroit, where his cap- tors sold him to a French trader. By this man, who seems to have had a heart in his bosom, Larkin was lib- erated not long after, and with other released captives made his way to Pittsburgh, whence he found conveyance down the river to Columbia.
In 1790 there were further outrages by the Indians at this place. At one time the families, of whom there were several, located on that part of the face of the hill afterwards called Morristown, lost all their clothes hung out to dry. A party of the thieving redskins being sus- pected, was pursued, the property found in their posses- sion and partially recovered; but they had already de- stroyed the coverlets to make belts. James Newell, one of the most valued of the early settlers of Columbia, also lost his life by the red hand of Indian murder-at just what date we have not ascertained.
One of the most interesting incidents of the Indian period in Hamilton county occurred July 7, 1792, on the river between Cincinnati and Columbia, and about four miles from the present Broadway, then Eastern Row. It was the custom of boats on the river, both large and small, to hug pretty closely the Kentucky side, as being the safer from Indian attack ; but a canoe which left Cin- cinnati for Columbia on the afternoon of the day named, had neglected this precaution, and was proceeding up what was designated, from its perils, as the "Indian shore." It contained one lady, Mrs. Coleman, wife of a settler at Columbia, two men named Clayton and Light, and another whose name has not been preserved, and a
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young lad, Oliver M., the only son of Colonel Spencer, a prominent pioneer then residing at Columbia, and who had served gallantly in the war of the Revolution. The boy had been to Cincinnati to spend the Fourth of July, and had remained for two or three days after. The stranger, a drunken soldier from the fort, presently lurched overboard, nearly upsetting the canoe; but managed to get ashore, and was soon left behind, thus escaping mas- sacre, although his late companions, looking back at him, remarked that he "would be good food for Indians." The boy also took to the water-side path, and walked along near the party remaining in the canoe. A pair of Indians had concealed themselves near the path which connected the two villages, and as the boat approached fired a volley upon its occupants. Clayton was wounded at the first fire, fell overboard, was at once dragged ashore by the Indians, killed and scalped. Light was also wounded in the arm, but not severely, and throwing him- self into the stream, swam off with one arm through the fire of the Indians and escaped. Mrs. Coleman like- wise flung herself into the water, and the Indians, saying, "squaw must drown," left her to her fate. She was buoyed up by her clothing, however, and floated down a mile, to a point where she could get ashore, then took the path for Cincinnati, crossing Deer creek at its mouth, went to the house of Captain Thorp, at the artificer's yard near Fort Washington, where she obtained dry clothing, and remained until recovered from her fright and fatigue. The Indians had seized young Spencer, without doing him injury, and hastily departed with him, carrying him into captivity. He was taken to their towns on the head- waters of the Great Miami, where he was adopted into an Indian family, and lived with them several months, when he was ransomed for one hundred and twenty-five dollars through the intervention, it is said, of President Washington, who had a very high regard for his father, Colonel Spencer, and secured the ransom of the son through the British Minister and the commandant of the British forces at Detroit. Young Spencer afterwards be- came a distinguished citizen, a clergyman and bank officer in Cincinnati. In his manhood he wrote and pub- lished a narrative of his capture and captivity.
The settlers at Columbia became exceedingly hostile to the red men, and with reason, as these narratives show. Their labors were greatly interrupted by the constant necessity for the exercise of vigilance against the onset of the wily foe. For a time they had to work and watch in equal divisions, as many as one-half standing guard, while the other half labored, the divisions being ex- changed in the morning and afternoon. Their annoy- ances, and the outrages from which they suffered, bore their natural fruit in an intense and abiding desire for re- venge. On the principle, we suppose, that the devil must be fought with fire, they even adopted some of the Indian methods. Colonel Whittlesey, of Cleveland, contributes this corroborative paragraph in one of his valuable his- torical pamphlets :
In 1844 I spent an evening with Benjamin Stites, jr., of Madison- ville, Ohio, the son of Benjamin Stites, who settled at Columbia, near Cincinnati, in 1788. Benjamin, junior, was then a boy, but soon grew
to be a woodsman and an Indian fighter. Going over the incidents of the pioneer days, he said the settlers of Columbia agreed to pay thirty dollars in trade for every Indian scalp. He related an instance of a man who received a mare for a scalp, under this arrangement. The frontier men of those times spoke of "hunting Indians," as they would of hunting wolves, bears, or any other wild animal. 1 met another old man who then lived near Covington, on the Kentucky side of the Ohio, who said he had often gone alone up the valley of the Miami on a hunt for scalps. With most of these Indian hunters the bounty was a minor consideration. The hatred of the red man was a much stronger motive.
A tradition goes that on one occasion a reeking scalp, just torn from the head of an Indian, was brought on the Sabbath into or near the house of God in Columbia, breaking up the meeting and sending the inhabitants home to prepare against an attack from the savages.
The settlers of Cincinnati of course shared the gen- eral peril. Some fifteen or twenty of them were killed by the Indians in the one year 1790. Not only was it necessary to post sentinels when at work in the out-lots or improving the town property, but rifles were carried to service by the congregation of the First Presbyterian church, whose place of meeting was close by where the the same society worships now, near the corner of Main and Fourth streets. A fine of seventy-five cents was imposed upon male attendants neglecting this precau- tion; and it is said to have been actually inflicted upon Colonel John S. Wallace, a noted hunter and Indian fighter of those days, and perhaps upon others.
In 1790 the road from Cincinnati eastward crossed the mouth of the water-course near the then eastern limits of the town, as noted in the account of the adven- ture to Mrs. Coleman. At the point of crossing there was a dense forest of maple and beech, with tangled grape-vines and a heavy undergrowth of spicewood. Mr. Jacob Wetzel, of the village, had had a successful day of hunting, October 7th, of that year, and on his way home to get a horse with which · to bring in his heavier spoils, sat down here upon a decayed tree-trunk to rest. He shortly heard a rustling in the woods; his dog pricked up his ears, growled, and a moment afterwards barked loudly as he saw an Indian presenting his rifle from behind a large oak tree. Wetzel caught sight of him at the same instant, and, springing behind another tree, both fired together. He received the Indian's fire un- harmed, and succeeded in wounding his enemy's left elbow. Before the Indian could reload, Wetzel took the offensive and charged upon him with his hunting knife, and the Indian drew his to defend himself. The conflict that ensued was sharp and desperate, a life-or- death struggle. The white man made the first blow as he rushed, but the red one parried it, knocking the other's knife from his hand to a distance of thirty feet or more. Nothing daunted, Wetzel seized him with a vice- like grasp about the body, holding down and tightly against it the arm with the knife. In the struggle both were thrown, but the Indian got uppermost and was about to use his knife with deadly effect, when the dog sprang at his throat ·with such a savage attack as made him drop the weapon, which Wetzel seized and instantly stabbed his antagonist to the heart. The Indian so far had maintained the contest on his side alone; but after
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the victor had despoiled his body of its armament and gone a little distance on his way home, he heard the whoop of a party of savages, and ran hastily to the river, where he seized a canoe and escaped to the cove then existing at the foot of Sycamore street. He afterwards learned that the Indian killed was one of the bravest chiefs of his tribe, by whom he was greatly lamented.
The savages were also making mischief this year on the other side of the river, in the interior. Judge Symmes wrote the last of April :
The Indians are beyond measure troublesome throughout Kentucky. They have destroyed Major Doughty and a party of troops on the Tennessee. If the President knew of half the murders they commit, he surely would rouse in indignation and dash those barbarians to some other clime.
After the defeat of General Harmar in two actions by the Indians, in October, they grew bolder, but still made no concerted attacks upon the settlements on the Symmes Purchase until January, when Dunlap's station was attacked, as will be presently narrated. November 4th the judge writes :
The strokes our army has got seem to fall like a blight upon the prospect, and for the present seem to appall every countenance. I con- fess that, as to myself, I do not apprehend that we shall be in a worse situation with regard to the Indians than before the repulse. What the Indians could do before, they did, and . they now have about one hun- dred less of their warriors to annoy us with than they had before the two actions; besides, it will give them some employment this winter to build up new cabins and repair by hunting the loss of their corn.
The settlers at them [the stations] are very much alarmed at their situation, though I do not think that the houses will be at- tacked at those stations; yet I am much concerned for the safety of the men while at work, hunting, and travelling.
Judge Symmes did not divine with his usual prescience in this case. Scarcely more than two months had passed after this deliverance before the Indians appeared in force but a few miles from his home and made a desperate attack upon one of his stations. On the eighth of Janu- ary, 1791, Colonel John S. Wallace, of Cincinnati, lately mentioned in this chapter, together with Abner Hunt, who was a surveyor, John Sloane, and a Mr. Cunning- ham, engaged in exploring the country, fell in with this war-party, or a detachment of it, somewhere on the west bank of the Great Miami, where the whites had encamped the night before. When setting out that morning to ex- plore the bottoms above their camp, towards Colerain, or Dunlap's station, they had got but about seventy yards away when they were assailed by savages from the rear, an ambuscade having evidently been prepared for them. Cunningham was shot down instantly; Hunt was vio- lently dismounted by the fright of his horse, and made prisoner; and Sloane was shot through the body, but managed to keep his feet and effect his escape. Wallace also dashed off, but on foot, and was followed by two In- dians, when he overtook Sloane and mounted Hunt's riderless horse, which had kept along with its companion. Both Wallace and Sloane thus escaped safely and unin- jured to Dunlap's station. Colonel Wallace had a nar- row escape, however. He was repeatedly fired upon in his flight, and at the first shot his leggings became loose, the fastenings perhaps cut by the missile, when he tripped and fell. Coolly but rapidly he retied the strings, in time to resume his flight without being overtaken. Hunt's
fate was terrible, being that which too often befell the captive among the savages. During a lull in the siege of Dunlap's station, the third night after the capture, they occupied themselves in the torture of the hapless pris- oner. He was prostrated across a log with his legs and arms stretched and fastened in painful positions to the ground; he was scalped, his body agonized by knife- wounds, and the cruel work completed, as one account relates, by building a fire upon his naked abdomen, or, as others have it, by thrusting blazing firebrands into his bowels, which had been exposed by the cutting and slashing to which he had been subjected. In this dreadful situation his remains were found after the In- dians had retired, and were taken up decently and buried by the garrison.
The attack on Dunlap's began in the early morning of January roth. About five hundred Indians appeared be- fore the stockade, with three hundred more in reserve in the neighborhood, and demanded its surrender, promis- ing the garrison and settlers safety. They are believed to have been led by the notorious white renegade, Simon Girty, who was guilty of so many atrocities and barbarities toward the whites, and is said to have died, himself, in the centre of a blazing log-heap, where he was placed by a party of avengers, who recognized him long after Indian hostilities had ceased. Girty's brother was also in the attacking force, with Blue Jacket and other well-known chiefs. During the parley with Kingsley, which lasted two hours, Simon Girty was seen holding the rope with which the prisoner's (Hunt's) arms were tied, and sheltered behind a log. Lieutenant Kingsley was in command, but had only eighteen reg- ulars, who, with eight or ten armed residents, made but a feeble garrison in point of numbers. Nevertheless the Indian demand was refused and fire was opened by the garrison, being promptly returned by the besiegers. As soon as possible a runner was got off to Fort Washing- ton for reinforcements, and the defence continued to be stoutly maintained. The women in the station kept up the supply of bullets to their defenders by melting spoons and pewter plates and running them into balls; and the fire on both sides was scarcely intermitted for hours. The Indians entirely surrounded the stockade on the land side, their flanks resting on the river; and their fire was hot and distressing. It was kept up until late in the afternoon, when the Indians drew off and during the night put Hunt to the torture in full view of the garrison, between the fort and an ancient work remaining near. The attack was renewed in the evening and maintained in a desultory way until midnight, when the beleagured people again had comparative rest, but no refreshment in their weariness and terror except parched corn, their sup- ply of water being cut off by the merciless foe. The Indians in this attempt set fire to the brush about the station and threw many blazing brands upon the struc- tures within it, but they were happily extinguished before serious mischief was done. Again the Indians came on the next day, but were met with the steady, unrelenting fire of the garrison, and hastily withdrew, probably hastening their retreat from the report of their scouts that relief was
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marching from Fort Washington. In their retreat the Indians shot all the cattle within their reach. A force of thirty regulars and thirty-three volunteers had been dis- patched from Fort Washington, under the command of Captain Timmons, reaching the neighborhood of the station the next forenoon about ten o'clock, but finding the Indians already gone. They went in pursuit at once, but with little effect, the detachment not being numerous. enough to make an effective attack.
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This heroic defence of Colerain against an overwhelm- ing force of savages is one of the most noteworthy inci- dents in the history of the county. Sometime before the fight David Gibson and John Crum, of the station, had been taken prisoners by the Indians, and Thomas Lawi- son and William Crum driven to the stockade, to the imminent danger of their lives. The inhabitants there were kept in a pretty constant state of alarm, and, after the defeat of General St. Clair the following November, the settlers at Dunlap's, vividly remembering the attack which followed Harmar's misfortune, and reasonably ex- pecting a similar sequel to St. Clair's, abandoned the sta- tion, and were only persuaded to return with considerable difficulty. It was important that this station should be maintained. Judge Symmes wrote in January, 1792: "Colerain has always been considered the best barrier to all the settlements, and when that place became re-peo- pled the inhabitants of the other stations became more reconciled to stay."
At North Bend, during the same year, there were fresh attacks by the Indians. In September, 1791, a Mr. Ful- ler and his son William, employes of John Matson, sr., were accompanied by Matson's mother and George Cul- lum to a fish-dam that was planted in the Great Miami, about two miles from North Bend. Towards night Ful- ler sent his son away alone, to take the cows to the settle- ment, when he disappeared, and was seen no more until after Wayne's victory, or nearly four years after he was taken by the Indians, when he was restored to his friends by Christopher Miller, a white man who was among the savages at the time of his capture.
The outrages at Cincinnati were also numerous in 1791. In May of this year Colonel Wallace, whose misfortune it was to figure considerably in the Indian his- tory of this period, was at work with his father and a small lad, hoeing corn upon the subsequent site of the Cincinnati hospital, while two men named Scott and Shepherd were plowing corn upon a spot near the corner of Central avenue and Clinton street. To them suddenly appeared five or six Indians, who jumped the fence and raised a yell, whereupon the plowmen took to their heels, and were fortunately not caught by the pursuing savages, though they were chased as far as the corner of Fifth and Race streets. Colonel Wallace may have been forgetful, as before noted, about taking his rifle to church; but he had it with him on this occasion, lying in an adjacent - furrow, and telling the rest to escape to town as quietly as possible, snatched it up and fired at an Indian about eighty yards distant, who took himself off at once. The other Indians rode away on the plow-horses at the top of their speed. Contrary to their usual custom, however, they,
in the haste of their flight, unintentionally, of course, left something by way of exchange. Light blankets and blan- ket capotes, a leg of bear meat, a horn of powder, and some other small articles, were the spoils from the raiders; but they hardly made up an equivalent for the horses taken. As soon as the alarm could be given and pre- parations made, the best foresters and hunters in town started in pursuit, mounting all the horses available, a party going ahead at once on foot. The chase was fol- lowed up the Great Miami valley to where Hamilton now stands ; but unavailingly, as the Indians had just crossed, and the pursuers were turned back by tremendous rains and floods.
On the twenty-first of the same month Benjamin Van- Cleve and Joseph Cutler, while engaged in clearing an out-lot, were fired at, and the latter captured, carried off, and never heard of afterwards. The trail of the party was easily followed, as Cutler had lost a shoe, and was kept at full run till dark, and resumed the next day; but the Indians got off safely with their captive.
Eleven days after, on the first of June, Mr. VanCleve, again working in his out-lot, with two others, was attacked and pursued. He started first in the retreat; but was stopped an instant by a fallen tree-top, giving an Indian time to seize him. VanCleve threw his assailant, but the savage rose at once and stabbed him, following this by the usual barbarity of scalping. He then took himself out of the way of the two white men who were running some distance in VanCleve's rear, and who found their companion lifeless when they reached the spot. On the same day Sergeant Michael Hahn, of the garrison, with a corporal and a young man from Colerain, taking a cow to Dunlap's station, the party was attacked soon after starting, within the present limits of the city, and all were killed and scalped.
These are recorded as the last cases of assasination by the red men in Cincinnati; but they continued to prowl. about the outlying streets and roads, and sometimes killed cattle; in one case, it is said, an Indian shot his stone-headed arrow clean through the body of an ox. They also stole horses from time to time, and committed other depredations, until Anthony Wayne instituted his energetic measures for the protection of this region in 1793 and 1794.
In the spring of the latter year, however, John Lud- low, brother of Colonel Israel Ludlow, of the station, left his late residence in Cincinnati to return to his farm, near the junction of the old Hamilton road with the hill road to Carthage. An attack had been made on White's station, in the country, which, with a defeat sustained by Lieutenant Lowrey near Eaton, Preble county, had greatly alarmed the Cincinnatians. Mr. White himself was in this party, which was escorted by Colonel Ludlow and his company of militia. They reached the farm without molestation, and began unloading the wagon with them, while White, mounted on a sick horse, went on toward his station. When he reached a point about two hun- dred yards from the stream since called Bloody run, he heard rifle-shots, and presently saw four pack-horses where as many whites had been waylaid by the Indians.
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One of them was killed, tomahawked, and scalped; his body was found in the river. Another was mortally hurt, but managed to get to Abner Benton's place, at Ludlow's Ford on Mill creek, where he died of his wounds. A third was slightly wounded, and the fourth escaped unhurt. White now abandoned the journey to his station, and returned to Ludlow's party to give the alarm. Pursuit was promptly taken up by the whole company and the Indians followed vainly for five or six miles, when the party rode back to the scene of the at- tack and buried the dead.
One of the saddest incidents of this time occurred while Wayne's campaign was in progress. Colonel Robert Elliott, a Pennsylvanian born, but a resident of Hagerstown, Maryland, was a contractor for the supply of General Wayne's army, and was in person superin- tending the delivery of supplies. While on the way from Fort Hamilton to Cincinnati, on the present Winton road, he was fired upon and killed by the enemy, his servant escaping in safety with both horses. An attempt was made to scalp the Colonel, which, from the absence. of his natural capillary covering and the adoption of a substitute, led the Indian attempting it to the exclama- tion, as is reported in English, "big d-d lie!" Mr. Elliott's body was recovered the next day, put in a box, and started for Cincinnati in one of his own wagons. Near or exactly at the place where the Colonel was shot, the servant, by a singular fatality, received a second fire from the savages, and was this time killed. The escort was stampeded, and the Indians seized the box and broke it, but did not further disturb its contents, though they took away the horses that drew it. An armed party was then detached from Fort Washington, which went out and brought the body in. It was buried in the old Presbyterian cemetery at the corner of Main and Fourth streets, and afterwards removed to the new "God's acre" of that church on Twelfth street. A monument was erected many years after, to commemorate the tragedy, by Commodore Elliott, his son, with an inscription as follows: "In memory of Robert Elliott, slain by a party of Indians near this point, while in the service of his country. Placed by his son, Commodore J. D. Elliott, United States Navy, 1835. Damon and Fidelity."
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