USA > Ohio > History of Ohio, covering the periods of Indian, French and British dominion, the territory Northwest, and the hundred years of statehood > 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 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48
* Lewis Wetzel. one of the most famous frontier knights, who passed his time hunting, fighting Indians, wrestling and foot-racing. made many incur- sions in Ohio alone, and in the course of his career gathered thirty Indian scalps.
95
OHIO IN THE REVOLUTION.
improved the opportunity to advise the missionaries to remove their flock under his protection to Pittsburg, and soon afterward, Buck- ongehelas, the great war chief, urged them to go under his protection, to the Manmee valley. But the Moravians were blind to their danger, and for the sake of their property decided to wait until after harvest. De Peyster had signified his desire to have the Moravians brought into the interior, within what might be called the British lines. The work was entrusted to Captain Pipe and Pomoacan, the Wyandot "half-king." Pipe himself, though he had talked mueh against his Christian brothers, was half ashamed of the errand, which the Iro- quois, Ottawas and Chippewas had refused, and after he and the half- king had led a party of Wyandot, Delaware and Muneie warriors to Gnadenhiitten in Angust, 1781, and ealled Glickhegan and the other Christian head-men into conference, he was willing to drop the mat- ter and fire on the British flag. But Captain Elliott was with the party, and encouraged Pomoaean to seize the five missionaries and their families. The settlements were then given over to plundering, and the luekless Moravians were forced to remove to the Sandusky river, leaving property and erops worth, it is estimated, twelve thou- sand dollars. Selecting a spot in the region to which they were taken, they began in poverty and distress the building of another town in the wilderness. De Peyster, after giving the missionaries a hearing at Detroit, sent them back to their new home with some clothing and supplies. Afterward they were subjected to much annoyance from Pipe and Girty, and compelled to live apart from their flock.
Meanwhile Clark's Detroit campaign had been thwarted. He was unable to collect a sufficient foree, and though he started down the river from Pittsburg late in July, 1781, with four hundred men, he was convinced, by the time he reached Wheeling, that the project was hopeless. Proceeding to the falls of the Ohio, he was followed by a body of over a hundred volunteers, "the best men of the frontier," said Gen. William Irvine, under Col. Archibald Longhrey. McKee and Brant were in the field under orders to intercept Clark's expedi- tion, and Brant obtained an opportunity to surprise the Loughrey volunteers when they were on shore, August 24, to cook a buffalo that had been shot on the bank a few miles below the mouth of the Great Miami. One-third of the command were killed, the rest surrender- ing, and when Colonel Loughrey and other captives were found unable to travel they also were massaered. "Not a man escaped, either to join General Clark or return home." A later reinforce- ment, two companies of artillery, under Capt. Isaac Craig, came down the river safely, but Clark's whole force was entirely too small to invade Ohio, and by taking refuge in his fort at the falls he avoided an attack from MeKee and Brant.
The military affairs of the United States west of the Alleghanies were at this time in a most deplorable condition. The few regulars
96
CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
were unpaid and unfed, and the militia forees were disorganized and lawless. Col. David Williamson was the nominal commander of the militia of Washington county, Pa. It appears that he was not aware of the removal of the Moravians by the British allies, though the young daughter of Gliekhegan had started out on horseback alone, at the arrival of Pomoaean's command, to carry the word to Pittsburg. Williamson, consequently, set out to break up the settlement, after its destruction, but found there only a few of the Moravians, who had returned to gather corn for food. These he arrested and carried back into Pennsylvania, where they were set at liberty. Later, in March, 1782, the murder of a Pennsylvania family by Indians from Sandusky, a name of terror along the frontier, caused Williamson to again enter Ohio, in pursuit of the marauders. The frontiersmen of his party were looking for Indians to kill in revenge. They were not eoneerned as to whether the Indians they found were good Indians or bad Indians, and they doubtless would have heartily conenrred in a more modern opinion that the only good Indian is one who has been entirely removed from temptation.
Unfortunately, they marched straight to the deserted Moravian towns and found Glickhegan and more than a hundred of his people engaged in gathering their abandoned erops, to carry back to Upper Sandusky. The frontiersmen did not fall upon them suddenly in the heat of passion, but treacherously persuaded them to give up their guns and hatchets and submit to being taken to Pittsburg. Worn out by persecution, the Christians submitted. As the story is told by Loskiel, the historian of the Moravians, when they had exposed their little stores of food to the whites, and were ready to travel, all were seized and bound. To those thus collected at Gnadenhütten were added a number from Salem. Then Williamson, who may have had human instinets, left it to the vote of his men whether the Mora- vian Indians should be put to death or taken to Pittsburg as had been promised. Less than twenty of the ninety or more white men stepped to the front as opposed to treachery and murder. The remainder "only differed concerning the mode of exeention. Some were for burning them alive, others for taking their scalps, and the latter was at last agreed upon." Then, as the vietims were Christians, they were kindly given until the morrow to prepare for a better world. Gliekhegan, the converted warrior, yielded quietly to his fate, and all spent the time allotted them as did the Christian martyrs in the days of Nero and Dioeletian. At the appointed hour ninety-six Indians, who were bound and imprisoned in two houses, so that the women and children were apart from the men, were butchered and sealped.
It is difficult to add any comment to the simple narration of fact. If the Indians thus killed had been warriors, caught red-handed, the treachery of their executioners would have been shameful. As it
97
OHIO IN THE REVOLUTION.
was, the massacre of inoffensive Christians was a deed so horrible, so utterly beyond the conceptions of honorable and humane men, that no denunciations can do it justice. Yet, some of the men with Will- iamson, no doubt, had hunted for the bones of wife and children in the ashes of desolated frontier homes. It was a time of terror and savage war in which the disciples of peace must expiate the crimes of the vicious."
The Indian resentment of the massacre of the Moravians aided the strenuous efforts of the British at Detroit to draw all the northwest- ern tribes into war upon the border, and from the beginning of 1782 the trails of Ohio were followed by many savage parties going out in war paint and returning with scalps and plunder. Among the Delawares it was vowed that after Gnadenhütten, no captive should escape torture. The situation was never more desperate for the frontiersmen, and there was no safety on the border except within the stockades. The men, organized as mounted riflemen, were kept busy patrolling the country. In the east, Williamson, the hero of Gnadenhütten, proposed to Gen. William Irvine, who had been appointed to command at Pittsburg and Wheeling, to lead an expe- dition against the Wyandot headquarters on the Sandusky. It is a noteworthy circumstance that at the same time a seheme was on foot, in which Williamson was interested, to organize a colony to cross the Ohio, possess the land and set up a new and independent state. The convention of frontiersmen for this purpose was announced by pla- card to be held at Wheeling on the same day that Williamson pro- posed to start for Sandusky .; General Irvine endeavored to separate the two enterprises, fixed the military rendezvous at Mingo bottoms, used his influenee against the selection of Williamson as commander of the volunteer force, and sent a surgeon, and his aide- de-camp, Lieut. John Rose,¿ to aid the expedition. At the election, held by the 480 Virginia and Pennsylvania soldiers, Williamson was defeated by five votes by Col. William Crawford, a Virginian about fifty years of age, who had been the companion of Washington in his voyage down the Ohio, and had made a good record in the Indian and Revolutionary campaigns.
The expedition marched out from the Mingo bottoms, in the latter
* After the massacre the congregation at Sandusky separated and took refuge with the Shawanees on the Scioto and the Delawares on the Mau- mee. Zeisberger and the other missionaries lived for some time with another remnant in Canada. Finally they went back to the Tuscarawas. Land was given them by congress, a new church was built, at Gnadenhütten, and the town of Goshen founded on the site of Schonbrun. At the latter place Zeisberger died in 1808. Heckewelder survived until 1823, and pub- lished several valuable books as the fruit of his experience. +"The Crawford Expedition." by C. W. Butterfield.
#Who afterward, returning to Europe, succeeded to his title as Baron Rosenthal, of Livonia.
I-7
98
CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
part of May, with the object of breaking up the Sandusky settle- ments of the Wyandots and fugitive Delawares (such as Captain Pipe's town on the Tymochtee) whence the war parties went out to the border. It was a continuation of successive attempts at invasion begun several years before."
Crawford and his men marched, through or near the present sites of Mansfield and Crestline, to the upper Sandusky river, and were disappointed to find the Wyandot town (five miles below the site of Upper Sandusky ) deserted.
The Wyandots and hostile Delawares gathered to meet their invaders, and a reinforcement of rangers, with artillery, under the command of Captain Caldwell, was hastened to the field by De Pey- ster. While Crawford was moving about on the Sandusky plains, seeking his enemy, he encountered, on the evening of June 4th, Cald- well and his Detroit rangers and about two hundred Delawares, Wyandots and upper lake Indians.+ Captain Pipe, it is said, was in command of the skirmish line of red men. Crawford drove the enemy from a grove in which they were posted, but was held there by the effective fire of Caldwell's command, sheltered in the high grass and bushes of the prairie, and the day closed with a loss of twenty-four killed and wounded of Crawford's men, and seventeen on the other side, including Caldwell among the wounded. Next day the same situation continued with some skirmishing, until a hundred and forty Shawanees came up to reinforce Caldwell. Then the militia decided to retreat at dark, but the watchful Indians detected the movement and made it a night of terror to the discomfited Amer- icans. Colonel Crawford, hunting for his son in the darkness, be- came separated from the main body, and with Dr. Knight and others wandered about until they were captured. The main body retreated through the Sandusky town they had found deserted, and on the evening of the 6th made a stand at Oletangy creek, losing eleven killed and wounded, but repelling the assaults of the Indians. The skirmishing continued until after they passed the neighborhood of Crestline, and after that, having lost in all seventy men, the de- feated army pursued its way, without molestation, but with much suffering and privation, to Mingo bottoms.
Crawford was turned over to Captain Pipe, who determined to
* Loskiel and Heckewelder may be excused for regarding Crawford's com- mand as an excursion of "banditti and murderers," thirsting for more Mora- vian blood, and some volunteers may have merited those appellations.
Doddridge also considered one of the objects of the expedition the finish- ing of the work of murder and plunder begun at Gnadenhütten. But But- terfield's account of the campaign puts the matter in a more reasonable light. It is not probable that a force under Colonel Crawford would have been guilty of such atrocities. It is natural that the Moravian chroniclers believed themselves the objects of all the military activity, but in fact, their misfortunes were deplorable incidents.
+ De Peyster's report to General Haldimand.
99
OHIO IN THE REVOLUTION.
execute him with torture, and Knight was given the Shawances for the same purpose. Accordingly their faces were painted black, and after they had witnessed the slanghter of nine other prisoners, they were taken to the Delaware town on the Tymochtee. Crawford appealed to Simon Girty for relief from his fate, and it is related that Girty offered $350 as a ransom, which was refused. The col- onel was tied to a stake, as many as seventy musket-loads of powder were shot in his skin, his ears were ent off, and he was tortured with thrusts of live coals at the ends of burning poles. After an hour or two of this he fell from exhaustion, and his scalp was taken and thrown in the face of Knight. Ronsed to consciousness by more ingenious tortures, his life finally ended in the flames. Knight, while being carried to the Shawanee town for similar treatment, managed to escape. John Slover, a scout, also had a wonderful escape, and some other captives were burned. Crawford was, accord- ing to the chronicles of his day, an honorable man, and in no wise deserving of such a fate." Many others, as innocent as he of com- plicity in outrages upon the red men, suffered deaths equally horrible during the border wars.
To follow up this repulse of the Americans by an invasion of the upper Ohio country, and to destroy Wheeling and other posts, De Peyster's captains, Caldwell and McKee, marched eastward through Ohio in July, attended by the largest army of Indians ever collected during that war, the number being estimated at one thousand. But, as they advanced, rumors came of danger to the Shawanee towns in the southwest, probably due to the arrival in Ohio of General Clark's western gunboat, and the British captains were compelled to divert their intended blow. Finding the Shawanee towns safe, most of the red men withdrew from the army. With but three hundred Wyan- dots and lake Indians, Caldwell and McKee, aided by Simon Girty, erossed the Ohio to attack Lexington and its surrounding stockades. But the frontiersmen at Bryan's Station withstood the attack of Angust 16th and 17th, and the invaders returned to the Blue Licks, where they were rashly attacked by two hundred Kentuckians, August 19th. The result was what appears to have been inevitable where the Indians had equal or greater strength than their enemy. After five minutes of fighting the Kentuckians fled in a wild ront, leaving seventy killed on the field, among them Colonels Todd and Trigg, Major Harlan and a son of Daniel Boone. This terrible blow and the ravages that followed, threatened to bring about the object of British effort, the depopulation of Kentucky, but again General Clark mastered the situation, and called together over a thousand mounted riflemen under his lieutenants, Logan and Floyd,
* According to the Moravian narrative, he suffered in expiation of the Gnadenhütten massacre, and it is further asserted that on reaching the Sandusky he sought first the Moravian town.
100
CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
at the month of Licking. Thence they crossed over to the site of Cincinnati, where a stockade had been established the year before, and a few people then resided in log cabins.# Marching northward to a crossing of Mad river not far from the site of Dayton, the army kept up the valley of the Great Miami, crossed to the west side, and arrived, about November 10th, at the Piqua towns of the Shawanees, which were found deserted. There was no opportunity to avenge the slaughter of Blue Liek and only ten scalps were taken, but the upper and lower Piqua towns, and the fields about them, and Loramie's trading post, were burned and devastated. The blow was a serious one to the Indians, and, according to McKee, opened the road to Detroit, If Clark realized this, he was not able to improve the opportunity, for which he longed.
The proposed attack on Wheeling was not abandoned, being made in September by a large party of Indians under Captain Pratt and one of the Girtys. It was during this siege that Jonathan Zane defended his fortified honse, as an outpost of Fort Henry, and his sister, Elizabeth, immortalized herself by running from fort to cabin and carrying back, in full view of the Indians, a supply of powder for the garrison. During the frontier raids following Crawford's defeat also happened the famous combat between Adam and Andrew Poe, settlers on the upper Ohio, and the Wyandot warrior, Bigfoot. i General Irvine began preparations for another campaign in Ohio, but the success of the war for American independence put a stop to hostilities by January, 1783.
* Reminiscences of Abraham Thomas, of Troy.
Such is the date given by Butterfield, but there is much conflict in dates and facts. Even the identity of the girl who carried powder at Wheeling is contested.
CHAPTER V.
THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY (1783-1788).
CESSION TO UNITED STATES-CESSIONS OF THE STATES-JEFFER- SON'S ORDINANCE-GRAYSON'S ORDINANCE-TREATIES WITH INDIANS-BRITISHI INFLUENCE-SPANISH INTRIGUE-THE OR- DINANCE OF 1787-THE OHIO COMPANY-MARIETTA SETTLE- MENT-THE VIRGINIA MILITARY LANDS.
W 7 HEN the war of the Revolution closed, there were sev- eral claimants of the Ohio country. Spain had driven the British from the Natchez country on the lower Mis- sissippi, and had contributed materially to what con- quest had been made on the Illinois and Wabash. That nation, the original claimant, and for a short time in 1762-63 grantees of the title of France to all the vast country within the drainage of the Mississippi and its tributaries, in 1782 had undisputed dominion west of the Mississippi, and demanded that the terms of peace should return to her possession the eastern valley of the Mississippi and Ohio. If that could not be, she preferred that the interior be left in the hands of Great Britain, rather than added to the territory of the United States. France was inclined to support the policy of Spain, and if the statesmen of these monarchies had had their way, the United States would have been confined between the Atlantic and the Alleghany mountains.
Great Britain was not disposed to give up the region between the Ohio river and the lakes. Even if in other quarters the colonies might be permitted to extend back to the Mississippi, that region had been made a part of the province of Quebec, and so held throughout the war.
The United States was represented in the negotiation of a treaty at Paris by abler men than the other powers had at the head of their affairs, namely : John Adams, John Jay and Benjamin Franklin. Partly through shrewd policy and partly through good luck, they were able to make an arrangement with England for a separate treaty. Asking for Canada as well as the Ohio valley, they contented them-
.
102
CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
selves with England's yielding all south of Canada and east of the Mississippi, north of Florida. The idea of thwarting the Spanish and French Bourbons persuaded England to recognize the claim of the United States to all that the colonies had claimed under their old and obsolete charters back to the Mississippi, and though at one time it appeared that England would be compelled to accept such terms as the European allies of the United States proposed, certain timely naval victories changed the situation. An indispensable condition of this separate treaty with Great Britain was that the United States should be recognized as an independent, treaty-making power, and it was to this central power, representing a nation in its infancy, that Ohio and the Northwest was ceded by Great Britain in 1783.
Then, when the federal congress had acquired a good title from Great Britain to the Northwest, the discussion of the claims of the states was resumed, hand in hand with treaties to obtain right of set- tlement from the Indians, and the study of plans for the creation of new states. In June, 1783, Colonel Bland, of Virginia, introduced an ordinance for erecting a territory north of the Ohio, with provisions for encouragement of seminaries of learning. The veterans of the Jate war also took a hand in the discussion. Col. Timothy Pickering, quartermaster-general, proposed in behalf of the army the settlement of a new state on the Ohio river, east of the Seioto. This effort was inspired by the deplorable plight of the soldiers who, after devoting their time and often their fortunes to the cause of independence, were paid in certificates that sold as low as a tenth of their face value. An example was Abraham Whipple, of Rhode Island, a famous naval commander, who had served his country seven years without pay or subsistence, besides advancing $7,000 in specie. Ile was paid in certificates that were discounted eighty per cent when he attempted to obtain money on them. These men were compelled to seek new opportunities in the West, where they hoped to be able to buy land with their serip at its face value and locate the land donated them as bounties.
Gen. Rufus Putnam," of Massachusetts, the worthy patriot whom Washington considered the ablest military engineer on the continent, interested himself in the projeet, and sent a petition to General Wash- ington, signed by 288 officers. In the original proposition slavery
* He was born in Sutton, Mass., April 9, 1730; was his own teacher; began his military life in the old French war, and had adventures that sound like those of Cooper's romances. In 1773 he aided in founding a famous New England colony in the Yazoo country. He joined the camp of the rebels at Cambridge as a lieutenant-colonel of volunteers just after the battle of Lex- ington. Washington made him chief engineer during the siege of Boston, though Putnam had never read a word of the science. It was he who put up in a night, on Dorchester Heights, the log intrenchments that suggested to the British next morning that they were the victims of enchantment and magic, and persuaded them the Americans must have an army larger than their own, and so Ied to the evacuation of Boston.
103
THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY.
was to be totally excluded from the State, and Putnam suggested a survey in townships six miles square, and reservations of land for support of schools and clergy. Washington recommended this to the attention of Congress, and suggested two new states in the west, probably conforming to Jefferson's early idea of one north and the other south of the Ohio. In October Congress resolved to ereet a government north of the river, but settlers were advised to go west of the present limits of Ohio on account of Indian troubles. About the same time the congressional committee recommended the accept- ance of the cession of Virginia, without a guarantee of Kentucky to that state, and ordered the establishment of the sovereignty of the United States in the western country. Virginia was thus induced to agree to a compromise, in the same year, and execute a deed of ees- sion of her elaim to the Northwest, March 1, 1784, based on the res- olutions of 1780, and with the special provisions among others that 150,000 aeres should be donated in one traet to the soldiers of General Clark, and that should certain Southern lands reserved for Virginia soldiers prove insufficient, the deficieney should be made up between the Seioto and Little Miami. In October following the eession by New York, of her claim through the Iroquois, was accepted, and Massachusetts ceded her claim, north of 42°, in 1785.
"All these cessions taeitly, and those of Virginia and Massachus- etts expressly, referred to the resolve of October, 1780. By the acceptance of these cessions, therefore, Congress became the trustee of the Confederacy ; the resolve of 1780 was invested with the solemn character of a great national compaet, of high and permanent obliga- tion ; and the faith of the Union was pledged that the trusts upon. which the western lands were ceded, should be faithfully per- formed."" On the same day that Jefferson and his colleagues, rep- resenting Virginia, deeded Virginia's elaim to the United States, he reported March 1, 1784, as chairman of a committee, a plan of organ- ization designated to cover the whole West from the lakes to Florida. According to this scheme the country northwest of the Ohio would have been divided into ten states; by arbitrary meridians and par- allels, regardless of natural boundaries. It was provided that the states thus formed, as well as the seven southern states proposed, should be republican in government, and "forever remain a part of
*S. P. Chase, History of Ohio, 1833.
+ Jefferson proposed to give these states names of classical form, in most cases founded on natural features, such as Sylvania for the far northwestern woods, Cheronesus for the Michigan peninsula, and Metropotamia for the region of the sources of the Miami, Maumee, Sandusky and Wabash. South of the latter would be the state of Saratoga; and south of it, to the Ohio, Pelisipia, and east of these, between the Ohio and Lake Erie, the state of Washington. This clause was stricken out while the hill was in committee. The plan would have divided Ohio among four states.
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.