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 5
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edly under command of Colonel John Butler (a remote connection of Colonel Zebulon Butler, in command at Wyoming). He cer- tainly led the British troops, and probably the Indians, at the actual time of the battle and massacre ; but the great Mohawk chief- tain, Joseph Brant, now in his prime- aged thirty-six - the dignified and able semicivilized brother of Sir William John- son's mistress, and the virtual head of the Six Nations, was with the force at Tioga Point shortly before it reached Wyoming, and, while he did not descend the river from that place and go into the fight, at least had some hand in assembling the Indians for the expedition. He had attained considerable education, and had translated the Bible into the Mohawk tongue.
Los. Brand
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Colonel John Butler, commonly called at this time "Indian " Butler, offers a curious contrast to Brant, and is one of the most singular of the sanguinary characters engaged in the great strife. In Brant we see a superb, semi-tamed Indian, for the most part now reverted to savagery, but in whose naturally superior soul some sparks of humanity, en- gendered by contact with civilization, still glimmer. On the other hand, in Butler there is exhibited, in all that extreme reversion of the type of which the human is capable, the brutalized white man. He was a representa- tive of a more than usually cultivated and gentle line, who had perversely sought sav- agery, and become more savage than the In- dian himself ; and now he was called "Indian " Butler, partly to distinguish him from his kinsman, Colonel Zebulon Butler, and partly for the simple reason that the sobriquet seemed supremely fit. "Indian " Butler was a de- scendant from a no less personage than that James Butler who was the great Duke of Ormond (1610-'88), of the ancient Anglo- Irish family which traced its genealogy to the dukes of Normandy before the Conquest.
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He was, perhaps, the ablest, certainly the most atrocious, Tory leader of the period, and had figured as the commander of a motley band of marauding whites and Indians in 1776 ; had fought at their head in the battle of Oriskany, and had otherwise sought fame, and gained infamy.
Fat, and squat of figure, with round, rough visage, he was not in appearance an ideal leader, nor a man of prepossessing per- son ; yet he was noted for his success in the former capacity, and he was not without agreeable traits as a heritage from his high ancestry, that not even his long life among scenes of blood, and his abandonment to more than savage cruelty, could wholly obliterate or conceal. In preparation for the proposed onslaught at Wyoming he was exceedingly active, and no detail escaped him. He was seemingly everywhere at once, never still, nervously but effectively bustling among sol- diers, guerrillas, and savages alike, inciting them afresh from hour to hour, yet ceaselessly cautioning and exercising control.
If there was contrast between the digni- fied savage Brant and the excitable, degen-
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erate scion of nobility, "Indian " Butler, the final element of the incongruous and grotesque Was reached in a third person of sinister and subtle influence in this strangely mixed mass of harsh humanity. This was a woman, no less than the redoubtable, eccentric enthusiast, " Queen Esther." Catharine Montour was the real name of this picturesque and grue- some figure in the strangest scene of the drama of the Revolution. She was a half- breed, and the reputed daughter of one of the French governors of Canada. She had been liberally educated - possessed refine- ment, indeed-and the best society of colo- nial Philadelphia, of Albany, and New York had petted and fêted her as a romantic and engaging young woman, in whose veins coursed a mingling of cultured and savage blood. Soft hands had caressed her, and she was keenly sensible to the gentility of her frequent sur- roundings, and, in a sense, fitted for them ; yet such are the contradictions of wild nature, how- ever restrained temporarily, that this dusky, one-time favorite of stately drawing rooms was the Hecate of the most horrible occurrence in the entire annals of savage war in America.
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Queen Esther was a widow now-the widow of a chief-enjoying the repute of a seeress. At all times the possessor of a strange power over the people of her race, but now inflamed by the losses of her kin- dred, and very recently of a son, she had become a veritable fury, who swayed her followers into the utmost extravagances of fanaticism. Even the bloodthirsty Butler, the scourge of the border patriots, though he probably would hesitate at nothing in the way of rapine and murder, feared, upon pol- itic grounds, the supreme ascendency of this fiery, insanely vengeful "Queen," and hence his activity among his troops, Tory rangers, and their red allies. That he did not wholly succeed was shown by the fact that when the final advance was made, Queen Esther became the actual leader of the Indian contingent of the army.
The wild aggregation led by "Indian " Butler and Queen Esther, 1,200 men-sol- diers, Indians, renegade whites, all brutalized by three years of fierce frontier warfare ; a majority by lifelong savagery ; many incited
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" QUEEN ESTHER " (CATHARINE MONTOUR) INCITING THE INDIANS TO ATTACK WYOMING. Brant and Indian Butler in background.
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by bitter personal animosity, and some by simple thirst for blood ; energized by cupidity and cruelty ; goaded by race hatred and by human hatred; urged on by all the craft of "Indian " Butler and the crazed cries of the zealot queen-finally advanced as if animated by a single will upon doomed Wyoming. The Indians descended the Susquehanna, their flotilla of canoes, in long, sinuous lines, following the current to a point a score of miles above the settlement, where they took to the shore to continue their advance. To the solitary Wyoming scout, who from his lofty mountain station watched every move- ment of this approach of the enemy, it may easily have seemed that some serpent monster passed the great curves of the stream and drew its slow length over the hills and along the plains-a monster, mightier and more ma- lignant than the fabled ones of the medieval forests-moving slowly and inexorably, upon its prey.
It was highly characteristic of the hardy frontiersmen at Wyoming, that though they were fully aware that they were to be at- tacked by superior numbers and had only 8
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vague hope of the arrival of reenforcements, the idea of flight seems never to have occurred to them. Their forces numbered, all told, only about 300 men, and nearly all of these, according to the inscription on the monument erected in their honor, were "the undisciplined, the youthful, the aged." There were 230 " en- rolled men "-many, in fact, minors-and the remaining seventy were all either boys or old men. They embraced six companies, and were mustered at Forty Fort, on the west side of the river, where the families of the settlers on the east side had taken refuge. Such was the situation on that memorable day, the 3d of July, 1778, when the British and Indians, having advanced deliberately down the valley, feeling sure that their vic- tims could not escape them, were finally met in battle. They had destroyed everything in their way. Jenkins's Fort had capitulated, a score of murders had been perpetrated, and Wintermoot's (which, as was afterward learned, had been built to aid the incursions of the Tories ) had at once opened its gates to the invading host.
The settlers, with a desperation of courage
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rarely equaled in the history of war, resolved to put suspense at an end, actually marched forth to meet the enemy that outnumbered them four to one. Some few had counseled delay, and Colonel Zebulon Butler was of that minority, but he acquiesced in the ver- dict of the majority and led them out, the lit- tle force of 300, in the middle of the after- noon, with drums beating, colors flying, and in true military array.
There were six companies, and the officers of the little force, under Butler, were Colonels John Durkee and Nathan Dennison, Lieu- tenant-Colonel George Dorrance, Major John Garrett, Captains Dethic Hewitt, Asaph Whittlesey, Lazarus Stewart, James Bidlack, Jr., Rezin Geer, and Aholiab Buck. There were other officers in the battle which en- sued, but without definite commands, as Cap- tains Samuel Ransom, Robert Durkee, and William McKarrican. They marched up the valley, with the river upon their right. On coming up with the enemy the column de- ployed to the left and formed in line of bat- tle, with its right resting on the high bank of the river and its left extending across the
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plain to a swamp. Colonel Butler, supported by Major John Garrett, commanded the right wing, and Colonel Dennison, supported by Lieutenant-Colonel Dorrance, commanded the left.
The enemy then advancing, the colonel gave the order to fire, and a volley rang out along the entire line with precision and some effect. The British flinched and actually fell back before the Yankee spartans, but it was only for a moment, and they pressed forward again. Then with quick alternations of the orders " Advance !"-"Fire !" the brave But- ler performed the almost impossible feat of moving his thin line slowly forward against the overwhelming force that faced it. But this well-nigh incredible resoluteness was all in vain, for even as the line advanced the Indians slipped singly and by dozens into the brush of the swamp and flanked its left.
On the side of the invaders "Indian " Butler, his subordinate officers, the Seneca chiefs, and even Queen Esther in person di- rected the fight in different quarters. Butler, divested of his usual Indian finery, and with a flame-colored handkerchief bound round his
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head, darted among his men, shrieking in his high voice orders to rangers and red men alike, and wildly evinced his delight as he saw the certainty of success, while his round face, red with his frantic excitement and intense activ- ity, shone with a devilish triumph. The Wy- oming men's left became confused, though the old men and boys did not retreat, and the Indians, seizing the opportunity, rushed for- ward with their frightful whoops and toma- hawked right and left those still left standing. Many had already fallen under the murder- ous fire of four times their number. Lieu- tenant-Colonel Dorrance and Major John Gar- rett were killed; every captain commanding a company and nearly every lieutenant was dead. The little band melted like wax be- fore a fire. The Indians pressed the surviv- ors toward the river, along the bank of which wives and mothers of the brave fighters had crowded in agonized watchfulness. Some swam over and escaped. Others were pur- sued and tomahawked in the water or shot from the shore. A few, promised quarter, returned, only to be treacherously struck down as they climbed the bank. Several
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found concealment on Monocacy Island, and others sought it only to be discovered and cut to pieces in their hiding-places, or dragged forth to be tortured at the leisure of their captors. It was there that one Tory killed his own brother, and that several other al- most unbelievable horrors attested the atro- cious fury of the assailants of these poor patriot settlers.
Massacre began when battle left off. One hundred and sixty men had been killed, and 140 had escaped-some only to be subse- quently captured. Crack marksmen among the Indians had brought down officers and conspicuous fighters by breaking their thigh- bones or otherwise incapacitating them, so that they could by no possibility escape, and thus were reserved for torture a hundred times worse than death. Captain Bidlack was thrown alive on blazing logs, pinned down with pitchforks that happened to be at hand, and so held in spite of his powerful paroxysms until death relieved him. William Mason, a boy captain of a boy company, was similarly slain.
A debauch of blood followed for the
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especial delectation of Queen Esther. That seemingly insane savage ordered a score of the prisoners brought before her for torture, and her followers, springing to obey, quickly assembled them around a great boulder, known to this day as "the bloody rock." They were bound and compelled to kneel about the rock, and then this fanatic fury, who had once graced drawing-rooms and been the admiration of gentle dames, seized a heavy tomahawk, and, raising a wild song, swept swiftly aroung the circle and dashed out the brains of sixteen victims, while the warriors, crowded close about the scene of butchery, leaping and yelling, expressed their fierce joy. Four escaped from sacrifice at the hands of the savage queen, but fell not far away, for they were pursued by a hundred fleet-footed Iroquois. After all was over, there were dis- covered near bloody rock nine more corpses, all mutilated and scalped.
When night came on, the still insatiate savages built fires, and stripping the remain- ing prisoners naked, drove them back and forth through the flames, finally thrusting them on the embers with their spears, when
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they fell from exhaustion, until all were de- spatched.
Altogether, in the battle and after, nearly 300 men were killed. Of the wretched people remaining, there were made that day in the valley 150 widows and nearly 600 orphans.
But a flight had already been begun while the massacre was in progress; and on the next day-after the arrival of ineffectually small reenforcements, and the surrender of the detachments of militia at Pittston and Forty Fort, and when the entire valley had been given over to the pillage of the Indians (whom Butler afterward said he could not restrain)-all the survivors of the tragedy followed in the footsteps of those who had fled at first.
The Indians, dividing into small bands, passed up and down the valley, burning every building and slaughtering all the inhabitants they found-except some children whom they carried into captivity. Finally, they rendezvoused and withdrew to the north- ward in a swarming, savagely triumphant body, the squaws bringing up the rear on
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stolen horses, their bridle-reins hanging heavy with strings of sodden scalps. As often the ludicrous treads hard on the heels of tragedy, so here with garish ghastliness these furies appeared fantastically garbed in the raiment of the slain settlers' wives and daughters- which they had abandoned in taking flight- while household spoils, pans, pots, kettles, ladles, and the like, clattered on the flanks of their horses, and added to the discordant din amid which the wild horde departed.
Desolation reigned supreme throughout the valley. In all directions there were only the charred ruins of cabins and the unburied dead, lying stark under the serene sky and pitiless sun of that 4th of July, 1778, where had so lately been happy homes and throng- ing, varied, busy human life.
In the meantime the wild flight of the survivors, begun while the battle still raged, or at least before the massacre, streamed through the wilderness to the Delaware and Lehigh settlements -chiefly to the safety afforded by Fort Penn, built by Colonel Jacob Stroud, where Stroudsburg now stands, near the famous Water Gap. This place of
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refuge was only 60 miles distant, but the way lay over mountains and through almost impenetrable swamps, in a region absolutely uninhabited-the wildest part of eighteenth- century Pennsylvania. Frantic with fright, exerting every faculty, impelled by the one intense impulse of eluding the savage, of escaping death or awful torture, and with the vivid scenes of the horror in the valley ever before them, these pitiable refugees- men, women, and children-fled onward into the blessed protection of the forest and the hiding of night. This forlorn flight led into and through the great "Dismal Swamp of the North," or, as it was then, and is some- times to this day called, "the Shades of Death." This was, and is yet to-day, a swamp upon a mountain-top, the vast, wet, marshy plateau of the Pocono and Broad mountains, an area still unreclaimed, included now in three counties, and surrounding the head waters of the romantic Lehigh. Over the greater part of this singular, saturated table-land there was a dense growth of pines and a tangled, almost impenetrable under- growth, the whole interspersed here and
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Denman Fink
FLIGHT OF THE CONNECTICUT SETTLERS THROUGH "THE SHADES OF DEATH."
Battle and Massacre of Wyoming
there with expanses of dark, murky water, often concealed by a lush growth of mosses or aquatic plants, and swarming with creep- ing things, even as the matted forest abounded with wild beasts. But the terrors of the "Shades of Death " were as nothing now to these poor fugitives.
Women, more than men, made up the throng. In one band upon the old "War- rior's Path " there were nearly a hundred women and children, with but a solitary man to advise or aid them. All were without food, many scarcely clothed, but they pressed on, weak, trembling, and growing constantly worse from their unaccustomed labor through the thickets, mire, and ooze. The aged sank by the side of the rude trail. One by one the weakest gave out. Some wandered from the path and were lost, some fell from ex- haustion, some from wounds incurred in the battle, but the majority maintained life in some miraculous way and pressed on. The only manna in that wilderness was the whor- tleberry, and this they plucked and eagerly devoured without pausing.
Children were born and children died in
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the fearful forced march. One babe that came into the world in this scene of terror and travail was carried alive to the settle- ments. At least one which died was left upon the ground, while the agonized mother went on. There was not time nor were there means to make even a shallow grave. One woman bore her dead babe in her arms for 20 miles rather than abandon its little body to the beasts. Finally, the refugees reached Fort Penn and the towns of the good Mora- vians, where, half-famished, they were given food, and those who needed it tender care, until they could go to their old homes or find new ones.
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CHAPTER IV
FAR-REACHING RESULTS OF THE MASSACRE
IT needed no exaggeration in the story of Wyoming to fire the hearts of the colonists with a new zeal against the enemy under whose auspices the appalling deed of that July day had been committed. But in the meantime Wyoming was silently working in the minds of men far away a vaster result.
The significance of events-the relation of cause and consequence-is seldom seen contemporaneously, and sometimes not fully recognized when time has finally unrolled the scroll on which it is written, so slow are men to read aright. But in this case it did not take long to reveal the fact that Wyoming had won the heart of the world for the strug- gling colonies of America, against whom the mother country had armed and arrayed savages who could perform such atrocities as were
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now told. What was of vastly more practical importance, it became apparent that the mas- sacre had struck confusion into the camp of the Tories in England, who had to endure the odium of employing the Indians in sub- duing the rebellion ; and finally, when men had gone far enough from the event to see clearly its meaning, they read that what had seemed at first an unmitigated disaster was in reality a disguised victory, and that Wyo- ming must take rank with Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill in effect upon the long fight for freedom. The victims who fell in the valley before British muskets in Indian hands, and those slain by the tomahawks of savages who were British allies and com- manded by a British officer, deserve a prouder monument than the one erected to their memory on the battle-field. They were really the marked martyrs of the Revolution, and the blood of the martyrs was the seed of independence and of the republic. These men-"the undisciplined, the youthful, the aged "-who marched out to battle against great odds, with guns poorly loaded with powder and ball made by their besieged
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women, in the awful deaths they died, sup- plied a mass of telling ammunition of fact to Edmund Burke and the Earl of Chatham which they employed against the Tory ranks in Cabinet and Parliament until the party tottered.
Another and later effect of the massacre abroad, was that for the first time an Amer- ican subject engaged the pen of a British poet, and Thomas Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming confirmed the renown of its au- thor. It was not published until 1809, but long before that time it was given to the co- terie which assembled at Holland House, and the tragic event which inspired the produc- tion, having become universally familiar to the English, had carried with its horrors the fame of the region which was its theater. The Wyoming Valley was the Yosemite of those days, but with the added interests of tragedy and romance, of the pastoral, and all the charms of sylvan solitude, so that it is not strange it appealed to the poetic mind and became in the imagination of Coleridge and Southey, the Lloyds and Charles Lamb, the { ideal planting-ground for that projected ex-
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periment in communal life which they called Pantisocracy, and for a long time cherished. With all that was written of Wyoming it is curious that its charms were not overdrawn, but they were not; and when in later years Halleck and Drake and Bryant and scores of prose writers came to dwell upon the beauties of the spot, each in turn seems to have been surprised that more had not been said in song and story of the most romantic region in all known America.
The bodies of the murdered men of Wyo- ming remained where they had fallen, a prey for the wolves and for the elements, until Oc- tober 22d, nearly four months, when a mili- tary guard repaired there, and collected and buried them in one huge grave.
The blood of the martyrs cried aloud for retribution, and slowly but surely prepara- tions were making to shatter the whole sys- tem of the hostile Indian alliance in New York. The once struggling settlement of the Susquehanna Company, looking only to its own people and indirectly to Connecticut for sympathy and support, now that it was struck
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A portion of Abraham's Plains, Exeter Township, Wyoming Valley. PRESENT ASPECT OF THE WYOMING BATTLE-FIELD.
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from physical being, had suddenly become a subject for general consideration. Washing- ton himself was at the head of the movement for avenging its great wrong, and General John Sullivan, one of the best soldiers and most picturesque personages of the Revolu- tion, being selected to "chastise and humble " the Six Nations, most effectually performed that duty.
Almost any other people than the Con- necticut Yankees would now have abandoned Wyoming for all time, but these pioneers seemed not only to have been filled with the spirit of New England enterprise, but to have developed extra determination through long- time opposition. Many of them returned to the valley even in the autumn of the year for- ever made memorable by the massacre. They built a little fort and took up again their old manner of life, which was one of calm, matter- of-fact defiance of danger and death. The Indians made a notable raid in November, but the majority of the settlers never appear to have been greatly disconcerted. The tide of immigration was renewed and bore in a great throng. With the rank and file came
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new leaders, among them Colonel John Frank- lin, destined to be one of the conspicuous char- acters in the militant new Connecticut.
Pennsylvania, during the Revolution, had made no attempt to renew hostilities nor to repeal the invasion, for the colony had been urged by Congress to remain inactive until the greater struggle was over. But as the Revolution drew to a close she prepared to resist aggression. The lands now belonged to the State instead of a private family, and there was an access of general interest in their disposal. A greater change in the situation, however, lay in the fact that there was a new power to appeal to for settlement-the Con- gress of the Confederation. There was im- patience to have the question of ownership decided, and only a fortnight after Cornwallis's × surrender, on November 3, 1781, a petition was presented to Congress asking that the case be adjudicated by that body, under the clause of the Articles of Confederation relat- ing to disputed boundaries. It was finally agreed that the subject of jurisdiction should be left to a board of commissioners to be se- lected by the delegates from the two colonies,
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