USA > Ohio > Ohio and her Western Reserve, with a story of three states leading to the latter, from Connecticut, by way of Wyoming, its Indian wars and massacre > Part 4
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
60
Wyoming
Pennsylvania's claim to the lands lying about Wyoming, the subject of the Connecti. cut contention, was as sound and just as to any within her charter limits.
The charter granted to Pennsylvania, upon the north, territory extending through the 42° or to the beginning of the 43º north latitude, thus overlapping by 1° the grant made to Connecticut by the same sovereign nineteen years before. Sir William Jones, the attorney of the Crown, had reported that : "The tract of land desired by Mr. Penn seems to be undisposed of by his Majesty, except the imaginary lines of New England patents, which are bounded westwardly by the main ocean, should give them a real, though impracticable, right to all of those vast territories." Thus the seed of strife was sown far away across the ocean ; and fate so generously nourished the troublesome trans- planted nettle here, that the Quaker husband- man labored in vain for half a century to clear it from the soil.
The peace-loving Quaker colony had been assaulted on all sides. Maryland and Virginia had endeavored to despoil her on the south,
61
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
and New York, and even New Jersey, had successively sought to secure a fraction of her dominion. These efforts were all brief, bloodless, without result.
But now Connecticut began, with well- organized system, persistent purpose, and strong promise of permanent success, what with the other colonies had been mere casual and ephemeral aggressions. The little Yankee colony seemed possessed of an irrepressible expansive spirit, which made it impossible for her to rest content within her bounds. As early as 1653 she had made a bold bluster of armed attack upon the placid Dutch of Manhattan Island, and threatened to annex certain towns on Long Island. The same restless pioneering and colonizing spirit which eventually led the Connecticut men to Wyo- ming, and caused the settlement of western New York and northern Ohio, had been active, fully forty years before the coming of Penn, in planting settlements on the Dela- ware.
There was thus nothing particularly new in Connecticut's purpose regarding the inva- sion of Pennsylvania. It was merely a later
62
Wyoming
manifestation of an old-time tendency turned in a new direction, a trifle more carefully planned, and very much more pertinaciously prosecuted.
Spies were sent to spy out the land, and it is probable that in the summer of 1750 some of these for the first time looked down from its flanking mountain wall upon the fair virginal valley of Wyoming. Three years later the Susquehanna Company was formed, and under this organization (consisting of 840 persons, afterward augmented to 1,200) it was proposed to occupy the coveted ground. The company, as its first step to this end, sent agents to Albany in 1754, to purchase from the Indians of the Six Nations the land in the Wyoming Valley. The Pennsylvanians had been alert to the danger that was men- acing the province, but their protests were unavailing against the Susquehanna Com- pany's offer of £2,000 of New York money ; and the Connecticut men went away tri- umphant in the possession of the Indian title to the land, which they regarded as complet- ing the legal title of their colony. Governor Hamilton of Pennsylvania about this time
63
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
wrote to the Governor of Connecticut remon- strating against the proposed settlement at Wyoming. Governor Wolcott of Connecti- cut answered in a non-committal but per- suasive way, and at the same time touched upon what was really the key-note of the " Pennamite War," although it has very gen- erally been lost sight of, even by usually careful historians, in viewing the complicated contention which ensued. Ignoring any re- sponse to the request that he should restrain the "invaders," he urged that those who be- came settlers should be made "freeholders," artfully arguing upon the inestimable value of ready and resolute defense to be rendered by men whose vital interest was thus en- listed, in case of French aggression. They should have something "to fight for of their own."
Now the heirs of William Penn owned the lands of the province in fee simple, and their policy was to settle the best of them under leases. Thus one of the worst features of feudalism was planted upon the soil of Pennsylvania. The question whether those who cultivated the acres they dwelt upon
64
Wyoming
should be serfs or freeholders really underlay the whole Wyoming controversy.
This explains, in a large measure, the sympathy which came to be extended to the Connecticut settlers by a considerable element among the Pennsylvania people. The " Yan- kee " settlers were of precisely the kind that the proprietors did not want, for they cer- tainly were not of such character as to offer any promise of tractability or subservience to those ideas which governed the landed aristocracy. Herein lay the secret of the motive for the constant resort to official and military demonstrations by which the Penns sought the forcible expulsion of the settlers, rather than the employment of diplomacy to secure their recognition of the proprietary civil jurisdiction and the peaceful settlement of the northern boundary dispute.
Indian war intervening, the Susquehanna Company effected no settlement during all the years between its organization and 1762. But if idle, so far as outward appearances went, it was storing strength, and in the meantime the Delaware Company, having come into existence and bought an Indian
65
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
title, had settled Cushutunk, as we have seen, in 1757.
This first act of aggression aroused the Penns to a conviction that there would ensue a veritable invasion, and they took steps to fortify their title. They obtained from Charles Pratt (afterward Lord Camden), the attorney of the Crown, an opinion adverse to Connecticut's claim ; but the Yankees were even better grounded in the law, for they had, not from one only, but from four emi- nent London barristers opinions against Pennsylvania.
Measures of coercion were resorted to by the Penns against the little colony at Cush- utunk, proclamations issued, sheriffs' officers sent there with warnings, and a series of actions followed which constituted a prelude to the long contention at Wyoming.
The Delaware Indians, whose home was in Pennsylvania, complicated affairs by con- tending that they had been victimized by their old-time enemy, the Six Nations, who had "sold their lands from under their feet"; that they themselves, the real owners, had sold none at all.
66
Wyoming
Such was the situation when in the early spring of 1762 about 200 Connecticut men made the first settlement, under the auspices of the Susquehanna Company (about a mile above the site of Wilkesbarre) in the Wyo- ming Valley. This term was then, as now, applied to a stretch of the Susquehanna bot- toms about 21 miles long and averaging 3 miles in width, shut in by actual moun- tain walls 1,000 feet in height. Fertile and fair as heart could wish, abounding in the richest growth of all that was natural to the clime, watered by the broad river and by innumerable cascades that leaped down the verdure-clad hills, it must, in its primeval condition, have seemed to those pioneers a veritable garden of the gods.
Though the Delaware Indians demanded of the Governor of Pennsylvania their im- mediate expulsion from the new-found Eden, nothing was done, and tranquillity reigned in the lovely land for two seasons. But it was only such calm as lulls to a false sense of security.
A storm was portending. The Indians were sullen. Their great chief, Teedyuscung,
67
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
had been mysteriously burned to death in his cabin by some of his Indian enemies among the Six Nations, but Indian cunning threw suspicion upon the poor Yankees. The Delawares, brooding for months upon the murder, and obtaining no satisfactory answer to their repeated demands that the settlers should be driven out of the country, x at last, on the night of October 15th, fell in fury-but silently, without a single warning whoop-on the little village, and murdered 20 of its people. The rest fled, some to the lower settlements in Pennsylvania, some to Connecticut. This was the first massacre
of Wyoming, not indeed an incident of the " Pennamite War," but an example of Indian ferocity in the resentment of real or imagined wrong, and an experience sufficient to deter forever any less pertinacious people than the Connecticut settlers from returning to the scene of its occurrence.
It did indeed keep Wyoming a wilder- ness for half a dozen years. But in 1769 the natural charms of the region had so far over- come the horrors enacted there, that the Yankees were constrained to possess them-
68
Wyoming
selves again of the valley. In February came a body of 40 determined men, sent out by the Susquehanna Company to occupy the country and defend it at all hazards against the Pennsylvanians. They were to be reenforced by 200 more and they were given land and money liberally for their serv- ices. They were commanded by a native of Connecticut, a resolute soldier, a hero of the French and Indian wars, who had gained honors also at the taking of Havana in 1762 -Colonel Zebulon Butler. He and his men built "Forty Fort," so called from their number, a mere blockhouse, but destined to be famous-the site of which is still promi- nently identified.
In the meantime the Penns had induced the Indians to repudiate their sale to the Yankees, and, on the principle that posses- sion is nine points of the law, had founded a settlement in Wyoming, under one Captain Amos Ogden, an Indian trader from New Jersey, whose armed band Butler was not a little surprised to find there ready for resist- ance.
And now commenced a hand-to-hand con-
69
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
test for the lovely, fatally alluring valley, and practically for all that part of Pennsyl- vania between the forty-first and forty-second parallels of latitude-one of the strangest struggles in the history of the country-a contest having many of the elements of an opera-bouffe war, but unfortunately, a pleni- tude of tragedy, too.
Ogden opened the war by the arrest of the Yankee leaders, whom he marched through the woods to Easton jail, 60 miles away. They were speedily released on bail furnished by their followers and by some Penn- sylvania sympathizers. Then Ogden arrested the whole 40, and the little jail received a glut of prisoners that fairly strained its walls, but again all went free on bail and trooped triumphantly back to Wyoming. By the next summer the settlements contained over 300 men, while more were constantly coming. Some of the later arrivals erected Fort Dur- kee, named in honor of their captain. Again Ogden appeared on the scene, this time with 200 men, and after he had captured Durkee by strategy, and sent him in irons to Phila- delphia, the rest surrendered, possibly awed
70
ARREST OF THE CONNECTICUT SETTLERS.
Wyoming
by the appearance of a little four-pounder cannon which the warlike Ogden had un- limbered before the fort. The poor settlers were peremptorily put on the road to Con- necticut.
Ogden now went to Philadelphia to re- ceive applause after this first act of the drama, but he had scarcely heard the first congratulations of the proprietaries when news came that the little garrison he had left to guard the valley had been as summarily ejected as were the Yankees a few days before. And the worst of it was that the aggressors were Pennsylvanians, of the class who sympathized with the Connecticut peo- ple. They were under Captain Lazarus Stew- art, and had moved with a spirit stimulated by the presentation of a whole township of land from the Susquehanna Company.
In this entry upon the scene of Stewart and his men we have a suggestion of one secret of the long continuance of the Penna- mite Wars. They were not the only Penn- sylvanians who actively sympathized with and succored the Yankees; and there were still more who, while they had no particular
71
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
love for the intruders, had none whatever for the Penns. These conditions made it well-nigh impossible for the proprietaries to sweep back, and keep back, the rising tide of immigration. It was not the powerful prov- ince of Pennsylvania, but the mere private family of William Penn, impoverished and unpopular, which was opposing the invasion. Had it been a matter of colony against colony, Pennsylvania would doubtless have prevailed over the intruders in one grand de- cisive action, and so summarily have ended the strife.
But, as it was, there followed a tedious and trying succession of strategic movements, skirmishes, sieges, counter-sieges, sorties, sal- lies, captures, capitulations, and evictions of one party or the other, all without perma- nent result.
The first blood flowed soon after Stew- art's appearance in the valley, when, he hav- ing restored Wyoming to the possession of the Yankees, they were in turn attacked by Ogden's posse and one of the Connecticut men was killed and several wounded. This gave to future clashings of the two parties
72
Wyoming
an increased ardor, and from thence onward there were many sanguinary conflicts in this miniature war. Once after Ogden had been long besieged, and had finally to surrender, there came a period of five months of peace. Colonel Butler returned, recruits came with a rush, and there were new life and activity in the valley. But Ogden was again sent by the alarmed Penns to break up the settle- ment. A battle ensued in September, 1770, and several of the Connecticut men were killed, many prisoners taken, and all who could do so made their way to their old New England homes. This was the fourth time that Connecticut in Pennsylvania had totally ceased to be.
But the Yankees, as promptly and cheer- fully as if nothing had happened, came back in the spring with bluff Colonel Butler again at their head, and hostilities reopened in earnest, which involved enough of thrilling adventure to constitute a whole Odyssey of woodcraft war. Finally, after Ogden had been summarily defeated, with the loss of nine men, an interval of peace ensued which lasted four years.
7
73
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
Up to this time Connecticut as a colony had not, at least openly, taken any part in the Wyoming controversy ; but now, when there was for the first time some reason to think that the Penns had succumbed to the inevitable, the colony sought to extend gov- ernment over the territory so long fought for by its subject, the Susquehanna Company. Accordingly, in January, 1774, Wyoming, Pa., was included in a county of Connecticut, under the name of Westmoreland, and shortly afterward a "town " was established, practi- cally coextensive with the former, and of the same name. The principal settlement was duly named Wilkesbarre, in honor of John Wilkes and Colonel Isaac Barre, champions of the colonies in the British Parliament. The "town-meeting" idea, of New England root, flourished from the first, and soon burst into full bloom. Elections were held, and representatives sent to the Connecticut legis- lature. The great county of Westmoreland extended from the river Delaware westward 15 miles beyond Wyoming, and in extent from north to south was the whole width of the charter bounds. It thus included Cushu- 74
Wyoming
tunk (as we have already seen, the first set- tlement of the Connecticut people) and other settlements on the Delaware.
All told, some 6,000 people had now come into Yankee Pennsylvania. Peace had pre- vailed longer than the Connecticut men had ever before experienced it. But the isolation of one of the new, outlying settlements tempted a revival of Pennsylvania authority ; and the success which attended the expedi- tion of one Plunkett. in destroying it made him such a hero that he was given a far larger force with which to strike a supreme blow at the stronger settlements.
There were other and entirely new cir- cumstances, however, which combined to pro- duce this action. The fate of Wyoming was still, indeed, in some sense, involved in the affairs of the Pennamite Wars, but the little ripples on the local sea of trouble were fast being swallowed up in the great ground-swell of the Revolution. Wyoming had for a time enjoyed peace because of the Revolution ; that is, because the Penns, aware of its ap- proach, and long cognizant, too, of the fact that their régime was not to the liking of a
75
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
majority of the people, had desisted from demonstrations which would attract to them undesirable attention. But now the rumblings of the Revolution, which had given Wyoming peace, brought it a revival of the Pennamite War; that is, of the Pennamite War with all of the Penn animus plus that of entirely new interests. In explanation, it must be said that the Penns had begun in 1771 to sell lands in Wyoming which theretofore they would only rent. Many Pennsylvanians had . purchased, and so had strong personal motive for the expulsion of the Yankee settlers under Connecticut's claim.
And now came the year 1775 and the battles of Lexington and Concord. The war was begun. If it should end favorably to the colonies, there would attach to Wyoming a new and far greater value than that it had possessed under a feudal proprietorship. Therefore, many more Pennsylvanians became interested, and where it had formerly been a slow and difficult task to raise 100 or so men for one of the Ogden expeditions, 700 were quickly enlisted for Plunkett's. Men who until then had been entirely indifferent to
76
Wyoming
the welfare of Wyoming-such prominent Pennsylvanians as Morris, Meredith, Biddle, Shippen, Tilghman-were liberal contributors to the fund raised for the equipment of the expedition.
An army of 700 men, led by as plucky a commander as Plunkett, would at any time prior to this period have routed the Yankees from Wyoming, and a permanent garrison of half that number would have kept them for- ever from returning, but now it was too late.
Plunkett marched bravely up with his 700, a formidable train, and a field-piece or so ; but Butler, with only half as many fight- ing men, beat him off in a decisive battle, and the Pennsylvanians hopelessly retired. Thus, by force of arms and with the blood of her sons, Connecticut had sealed the claim she believed just to the soil of a sister colony, and the Wyoming men now settled down to enjoy the loveliness of that land they had conquered and clothed with law. But their roseate hopes were doomed to a deep and speedy disappointment.
77
CHAPTER III
BATTLE AND MASSACRE OF WYOMING
NOTWITHSTANDING the fact that the Revo- lutionary War was in progress, and that many of the leaders and able-bodied men were withdrawn from the settlement, having patri- otically entered the Continental army, Wyo- ming was blessed with peace and prosperity. Its people realized pretty closely the condi- tion of those in the fanciful "Happy Valley " of Rasselas. So they might have continued to do, as far as any molestation from their old enemy, the Pennamites, was concerned ; but a new terror was taking form. A great storm was gathering in the North, which was soon to shut the sunshine from the basking valley, and bring down in its place such dark- ness and devastation as, with all its tribula- tions, it never yet had known.
The powerful Iroquois, or Six Nations,
78
Battle and Massacre of Wyoming
with other Indians, allies of the British, had, until the defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga, been held in the northern region; but now they were released, and their war-roused pas- sion was to be wreaked on the defenceless border settlements.
The full fury of the savages was seemingly reserved for fated Wyoming.
There was a partial reason for this in one of the facts which linked with the Wyo- ming massacre, as an event of the Revolution, the miniature Pennamite War. The intense patriots in the limits of the Connecticut claim had, in 1775, aroused a general enmity among the Tories by expelling from Wyoming some forty of their number (mostly Dutch and Scotch-Irish of the Mohawk region); and of course they had incurred the most active and implacable animosity of the individuals whom they had cast out. These now added the venom of their vindictiveness to the compos- ite malevolence brewing as in a caldron. They were associated with the Indians in all of their maraudings on the border; one of their number actually built a blockhouse in the upper part of Wyoming Valley to assist
79
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
in masking the incursion, and it has been thought by many that their machinations were the chief influence in drawing the In- dians thither.
As to the Indians who were regularly in the employ of the British, it is a curious fact that they had been long dominated-speaking in a broad way-by Sir William Johnson, and he in turn had been influenced to a con- siderable extent by one of their number-his mistress, Molly Brant, whose brother, Joseph, was the great captain of the Six Nations. But Sir William was now dead, and what- ever of his old-time influence was continued came into operation through his son and nephew and Molly Brant.
As the signs of danger increased at Wyo- ming in the early summer of 1778, wives besought their husbands to return from the army, and the people generally clamored for protection, calling alike upon the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania authorities ; but no effective measures were taken by either for their aid. Finally, a number of the officers sent in their resignations, and a score or so of the privates deserting, they
80
Battle and Massacre of Wyoming
hurried to the threatened settlements. Among them was Colonel Zebulon Butler, who by common consent became commander. There was not only lack of men, but lack of ammu- nition ; and as danger grew daily nearer, Colonel Butler, having already employed all of the males in scouting, strengthening the forts, and generally preparing for the threat- ened attack, now set the women all at work in a most strange undertaking-the actual manufacture of much-needed gunpowder, to which, even with the crude conveniences at hand, Yankee ingenuity proved equal. And while they leached saltpeter from the soil in the blockhouses, prepared charcoal, bruised quantities of each with pestle and mortar, blended them, cast bullets and rifle-balls- while the situation daily and hourly grew more tense, and no tidings of relief came- the enemy was rapidly massing in the North for an attack which the Wyoming people knew was inevitable.
The Indian and British and Tory forces were concentrated at Tioga toward the close of June, 1778, while its leaders sent a dele- gation of Seneca chiefs to Philadelphia to
81
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
put Congress off its guard, and at the same time sent spies down to Wyoming to ascer- tain, under the guise of friendship, the exact situation there and to disarm suspicion. But one of them (who was purposely made drunk) revealed enough to confirm positively the worst fears of the settlers-though even the holders of the extremest of these were far from foreseeing the sweeping, all-surpassing horror that was swiftly to fall.
And now, while this army-so soon to bring to Wyoming its crowning calamity and to engage in a sweeping butchery that was to appal the whole world-lies idle at Tioga, let us look at its composition and command- ers. Surely no more heterogeneous herd of murderous soldiers and savages ever assem- bled in America. It has three elements, and in each many varieties. Its total is not far from 1,200 fighting men. First, there are 400 British provincials, consisting of Colonel John Butler's Rangers and Sir John Johnson's Royal Greens, with a rabble of Tories from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Then there are not far from 700 Indians, chiefly Senecas, with detachments from the Mohawks
82
Battle and Massacre of Wyoming
and other tribes. The enemy is in almost every conceivable dress, and in appearance of every varying degree, from the martial dig- nity of the trained soldiers down to the ruffian type of the most abandoned and depraved of the Tories. The regulars are in smart uni- forms-Butler's Rangers in rich green; the Tories and renegades in every form of back- woods rusticity and tattered motley ; the In- dians half naked or in savage attire, with their war paint and barbarous adornment, varied with the martial trappings of soldiers slain in northern battles. With them swarms a band of squaws, if possible more bloodthirsty than their masters. Three classes, indeed ; but well-nigh 1,000 diverse, fantastic figures, all actuated, however, by a single animus-a ferocious appetite for blood and the possibili- ties of paltry loot in the humble cabins of the doomed frontiersmen.
But if the rank and file and rabble of this nondescript assemblage are unparalleled in the border war of the Revolution for its complexity, the personalities of its command- ers offer contrasts as strange and startling and incongruous. The expedition is avow-
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.