USA > Ohio > Ross County > Chillicothe > Ohio centennial anniversary celebration at Chillicothe, May 20-21, 1903 : under the auspices of the Ohio State Archaelogical and Historical Society : complete proceedings > Part 15
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* The actual number of Wayne's soldiers engaged in the battle was probably only about one thousand.
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chosen was at the Falls of the Maumee on the wind swept banks, covered with fallen timber. The ground gave the Indians every advantage, as they secreted themselves in the tall grass amid the branches and roots of the upturned trees. Wayne directed his front line to advance and charge with lowered arms, to arouse the crouching Indians from their coverts at the point of the bayonet, and then when they should arise to deliver a close and well-pointed fire on their backs, followed by an instant charge before they might load again. The savages were outwitted and overwhelmed. They fled in wild dismay toward the British fort. The gates were closed, Britain's customary perfidy was completed. Wayne's tri- umph (August 20, 1794) was unsurpassed in Indian warfare. The brilliant and dashing victory of Stony Point was encored. Wayne had become the hero of the second Revolution in the western wilderness, as he had been the victor in its earlier days. on the historic fields of New England. The name of Wayne was. ever after a terror to the savages. They called him the "Tor- nado" and the "Whirlwind." He was mettlesome as the eagle,. swift and unerring as the arrow. The Indian warfare was shat- tered. The redmen's hope was blasted. Moreover, the Indians were crushed and incensed beyond measure at the falsity of the British, who not only failed to come to their assistance with troops from Detroit as they had promised, but barred the gates of Fort Miami to them on their panic-stricken retreat from Fallen Timbers. At Greenville, Wayne was visited by numer- ous chiefs and warriors to whom he explained that the United States, having conquered Great Britain, were entitled to the peaceful possession of the lake posts, and that the new nation was anxious to make terms with the Indians to protect them in the occupation of abundant hunting grounds and to compensate them for the lands needed by the white settlers. The Indians were prepared to negotiate but the British agents, John Graves Simcoe, Alexander McKee and Joseph Brant, still strove to stimu- late them to continue hostilities; advised the Indians to make pretense of peace so as to throw the Americans off their guard and thus permit another and more successful attack. These Machiavelian British miscreants even advised the Indians to con- vey by deed their Ohio land to the king of England "in trust""
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so as to give the British a pretext for assisting them, and in case the Americans refused to abandon their settlements and stock- ades and quit their alleged possession and go beyond the Ohio to the East and South, the allied British and Indians might make a united and general attack and drive the Americans across the Ohio river boundary. The righteous (?) protection by Great Britain of the oppressed Indian knew no bounds! It is the grimmest joke in historic annals.
It will thus be seen that England was still (1794) fighting the Revolution and endeavoring to regain in Ohio what she had lost a dozen years before on the New England coast and the in- land western frontier. For twenty years the fair valley of the Ohio, especially the land of the Buckeye, had been the camping ground and tramping field of the American pioneer patriot, the native forest inhabitant and the unyielding British soldier. His- toric territory - the arena of the war for national independence and the conquest of civilization over savagery. The latter con- test was not yet ended. In the ranks of Little Turtle at Fallen Timbers, as a chosen chief at the head of the Shawanees, was Te- cumseh, destined in later years to be the greatest and most con- spicuous hero of his people. In the ranks of Anthony Wayne as a trusted officer, was the future first Ohio president, William Henry Harrison. Twenty years later these two great leaders were to meet in desperate and final conflict, on Ohio soil, for the supremacy of race. But the battle of Fallen Timbers was the closing incident in the war for undisputed national independence and freedom. The Indians began to realize the imminent peril of their position. They had learned at their dear cost the power and skill of the Americans and the trickery and treachery of the British. The redmen sealed their defeat and doom in the treaty at Greenville. The British posts were abandoned. Wayne, with one fell blow, drove the British from American possessions and opened Ohio to the peaceful settlement of the western pioneer. The American Revolution had terminated at last, in the battle on the banks of the Maumee, on the soil of Ohio - the same soil upon which, on the banks of the Scioto, took place, in part, the first military movement of freedom's warfare in Dunmore's campaign in the
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fall of 1774. In the fair valley of the "beautiful river," in the native land of the Buckeye, after a score of years of struggle, strife and sacrifice, with a rugged but resistless heroism greater than which history doth not relate, the fearless frontiersmen secured forever to the new-born republic the empire of the North- west, the most precious inheritance promised the freemen in their triumph at Yorktown.
Where are the hardy yeomen Who battled for this land, And trod these hoar old forests, A brave and gallant band ?
They knew no dread of danger, When rose the Indians' yell; Right gallantly they struggled, Right gallantly they fell.
Authorities chiefly relied upon in the above address; Albach's West- ern Annals; American Archives, (4th Series, Vol. 1); Bancroft's United States; Brownell's American Indians; Brice's Fort Wayne; Burk's Vir- ginia; Brown's Illinois; Butler's Kentucky; Butterfield's Crawford; Butterfield's Girtys; Campbell's Virginia; Cook's Virginia; Dillon's Indiana; Dodge's Redmen; Doddridge's Notes; De Hass' Indian Wars; Drake's Tecumseh; English's Clark; Fernow's Ohio Valley; Fiske's American Revolution; The Hesperian; Harvey's Shawanee Indians; Hildreth's Ohio Valley; Hinsdale's Old Northwest; Hosmer's Mississippi Valley; Jacob's Life of Cresap; Jefferson's Virginia Notes; Kercheval's Virginia; King's Ohio; Lewis' West Virginia; Lodge's Washington; McAfee's War in West; Mayer's Logan and Cresap; Marshall's Wash- ington; Moore's Northwest, etc .; McClung's Sketches; Mclaughlin's Western Posts; McDonald's Sketches; McKnight's Western Border; Monette's Mississippi Valley; Parkman's Pontiac; Ryan's Ohio; Roose- velt's Winning the West; Stone's Joseph Brant; Read's Simcoe; Whittle- sey's Essays; Winsor's Western Movement; Wither's Border War- fare, etc.
THE MILITARY HISTORY OF OHIO, INCLUD- ING THE WAR OF 1812.
THOMAS M'ARTHUR ANDERSON.
It has been given to me to read the First Lesson, taken from the Old Testament of Ohio history.
Nearly every state had its birth in war, and Ohio like the rest had its baptism of fire. As the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, so the foundation of our Commonwealth was cemented with the blood of its pioneer heroes. We have no tradi- tions of a Romulus, no record of a mailed Charlemagne as a founder. Our stalwart forefathers founded it themselves, those citizen-soldiers who came with an ax in one hand and a gun in the other to hew and fight their . way to success. We have no hero- THOMAS M. ANDERSON. worship. Yet our records tell us of the unsurpassed energy, courage, perseverance, and self-sacri- ficing heroism of the men and women of our pioneer period.
Our early history has been told so often, that its repetition would be
As tedious as a twice-told tale, Whispered in the dull ear of night.
I will not tax your patience with needless detail; but as his- tory is philosophy, teaching by example, the lessons we can learn from some of its salient episodes should have for us an abid- ing interest.
First let me invite your attention to an object lesson.
A monument stands on the right side of the state-house at Columbus. Upon its pedestals stand the bronze statues of eight
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of Ohio's sons : of Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, McPherson, Hayes, Garfield, Stanton and Chase. This monument with its heroic figures stood in front of the Ohio building at the Columbian Centennial.
"These are my jewels," was Ohio's challenge; did any state answer? Not one. Yet these men only represented one episode in her history, one brief period of four years out of her full century. Mark you ; we could put another monument with eight other of her sons, who would represent all the different periods of her career. I suggest that Rufus Putnam, the Revolu- tionary hero, who led the first of emigrants who settled on her soil, should have the first place. Next I would place by his side a statue of Ohio's typical pioneer, Simon Kenton; then I would place our first president, William Henry Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe. For the next pedestal I would suggest Thomas. Ewing, a great lawyer and statesman, and a cabinet minister under several administrations; then Thomas Corwin, governor, senator and inspired orator. Then should come another of our presidents, Mckinley, the wellbeloved, who represented American manhood in the turning-point of our history. If peace has its victories no less renowned than war, then there is a man born on Ohio's soil who deserves to stand beside her greatest. When we ask who made the lightning of Heaven our most obedient minister, there is but one answer, and Thomas Edison takes his place among the immortals.
There is one vacant pedestal : who should fill it? Tiffin, the first governor; Worthington, the first senator; MacArthur, the first Ohio general; or Massie, our first surveyor ; or Morrow, or Allen, or Trimble, or Thurman, or Wade? Here we have enough to fill nine pedestals, illustrative of Ohio's fecundity in able men.
Will you note how many of the men I have mentioned in this connection were military men? Seven out of the, eight who stand on the Columbus monuments, and four that I have sug- gested for the second. But for these men our history would have had a different reading.
I will not attempt to give even an outline of our pioneer history, yet it is important to know what kind of people they
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were, and to understand the problem they had to solve, what dangers to face, and what obstacles to overcome.
What you have read about, and heard from tradition, I have seen, in my service on the frontier. I have seen the same kind of men and women, braving the same kind of danger, and endur- ing similar privations. I have seen them making their way into unknown regions, where there were no paths to guide them, except the buffalo trails. I have seen them crossing dangerous rivers on rafts and in bull boats. I have seen them climbing mountains, to which Mount Logan would be a mere foot-hill. I have seen a sage brush wilderness transformed by their industry into productive farms. In my western service I have seen ten territories admitted as states to the Union, thus I have witnessed the development of Ohio, reenacted under similar conditions.
It gives me pleasure, therefore, to bear witness to the worth of the pioneer ; his bravery, energy, hospitality, generosity, fidelity. These were virtues common to the old pioneer and his successors of this generation. If the latter were somewhat better provided with comforts, they had in many instances to endure greater de- grees of heat and cold than their predecessors of the Middle West. The Sioux and the Apache were just as merciless as the Shawanees and the Iroquois; but in fighting the Indians thirty or forty years ago we had the immense advantage of knowing that we had a rich and powerful country behind us. In spite of occasional disasters, like the Fetterman and Custer massacres, we were always sure of ultimate success.
Undoubtedly our early settlers passed through more trying ordeals. There were times when famine was a more dreaded foe than the savage, and when disease claimed more victims than war. A greater proportion were murdered by prowling Indians and renegade whites. With the first wave of immigration there comes the sewage and wreckage of civilization, the murderer, the bandit, the outlaw. The darkest pages in the history of the West tell of the outrages of these border ruffians.
These things are mentioned to call to your minds the trials our grandparents and great-grandparents experienced. The Mo- ravian massacre was perpetrated by such barbarians. The awful immolation of the brave and chivalrous Crawford was in revenge
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for this outrage. It was an instance of the innocent suffering for the guilty - for the fiend Williamson, who was responsible- for that horrible butchery, escaped.
Let us now try to form some estimate of the party of the- second part, of the noble redman. He is a survival of the stone age and probably belongs to the oldest race of man. He is brave, patient, enduring, loyal to his tribe, and fairly honest, until demoralized by evil association. On the other hand, he was cruel, revengeful, lazy, and unreliable. The curse of Reuben is upon him. "Unstable as water, he cannot excel." Naturally the Indian has a warlike and not peaceful characteristic. We used to hear stories of a handful of white men standing off hordes of howling savages. The fact is, that, under the conditions of frontier warfare, the Indians are man for man equal to the white men. Success in war does not depend on the half-hour's fight- ing, but on weeks or months of hard campaigning. Trained in warfare from his boyhood, a master in woodcraft, and a past master in stratagems, the Indian is a better campaigner than any except the best trained soldier .*
The regulars sent out to defend the Ohio settlement were men who were only paid three dollars a month, and were the poorest material possible for the service. They performed, how- ever, an invaluable service in holding the forts established to defend the frontier. There were twenty-seven of these forts within the borders of this state. Mr. Roosevelt says truly, in his "Winning of the West," that no other state received so much protection from the general government as Ohio.
The campaigns of Bouquet and Bradford, in 1764, should be considered under the head of colonial wars rather than as epi-
*The character of the Indian fighting in the heavily wooded country of Oregon and Washington was very similar in character to the Indian warfare in Ohio in its pioneer days. Colonel Shaw, an experienced Indian fighter in that part of the country, gave the writer this statement of his. experience. "The Indians," he said, "fight like wolves or other wild animals which hunt and fight in droves. As the wolves attack with great fierceness wounded animals, so the Indian, by some instinct of fight at- tacks the weakest part of your line, and if they have made any impression crowd on that point." "This," he said, "they do without orders." While:
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sodes in our local history. Yet they were the first links in our chronological chain and require a brief notice. They were made in consequence of the rising of the western tribes brought about by the conspiracy of Pontiac.
Bradford, after raising the siege of Detroit, invaded the Wyandotte settlements along the Sandusky River and compelled that warlike tribe to sue for peace.
Bouquet's expedition to the head-waters of the Muskingum brought the Delawares to terms and secured the surrender of a number of white prisoners.
The peace secured was of short duration, for during the Revolutionary War the Six Indian Nations of New York and all of the western tribes, with the possible exception of the Min- goes, broke out in open, fierce hostility to the American colonies. After the massacre of Wyoming had been avenged and the power of the Six Nations broken at the battle of Oriskaney, the Eighth Pennsylvania regiment of the Continental Line under General McIntosh was sent to Fort Pitt.
In 1778 Patrick Henry, then governor of Virginia, author- ized George Rogers Clark to raise an independent command to invade the Illinois country. In the fall of that year, Congress authorized a demonstration against Detroit. There is no evi- dence to show that these two expeditions were intended to co- operate. In furtherance of the Detroit project, McIntosh led an expedition from Fort Pitt against the Sandusky Indians. He had a thousand men, and in every way his command was better equipped than Clark's, yet he got no further than the Tuscarora River, where he constructed Fort Laurens and left it garrisoned by a battalion under General Gibson.
After McIntosh returned to Fort Pitt, this garrison was closely besieged for several months. Major Bauman attempted to make a diversion by leading an expedition against the Shawa- nee villages on the Upper Miami. This was ineffective, and the next winter Fort Laurens was abandoned.
In 1780 Colonel Broadhead raided the Muskingum country with small results. These expeditions were made by the Eighth
this is true, their chiefs have been known in battle to give orders by flashes from old mirrors.
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Pennsylvania. The only other expeditions made within our bor- ders were made from Kentucky.
At the close of the War for Independence all the state troops were discharged ; and all of the Continental Line except one bat- talion of artillery. This constituted the entire army- of which General Knox was commander.
In 1784 a regiment of infantry was organized of which Josiah Harmer was lieutenant-colonel commanding. When General Knox was made the first secretary of war, Harmer be- came commander-in-chief, with the brevet rank of brigadier- general.
Fort Pitt was held, as heretofore stated, by a garrison of Continental troops under General Lackland McIntosh. He is sometimes spoken of as "Come, and take it McIntosh." It was his brother, John McIntosh, who, when the British demanded the surrender of '96, replied, "If you want it, come and take it."
Vincennes and Kaskaskia were held by a provisional regi- ment of Illinois troops, organized by General Clark. As soon as Harmer's regiment was organized, detachments from it were sent to garrison these posts.
Of the twenty-seven posts established in Ohio, only twelve require special notice. Lauramie, Steuben and Harmer were on or near the eastern border; the others were on the western frontier.
Fort Harmer was established by Major John Doughty, at the mouth of the Muskingum River, in 1785. Three years later the Ohio Company made their first settlement at Marietta, under Putnam and Cutler, on the left bank of the Muskingum. As their settlements extended several miles, several sub-posts and block-houses were built for their protection; none of these were ever actually besieged, yet they afforded a very necessary pro- tection.
Fort Washington was also established by Major Doughty within the present limits of Cincinnati. It never was actually attacked, but was the base of operations in the campaigns of Harmer, St. Clair, and Wayne.
Before the fort was built, and before any regulars were sent, either to the mouth of the Big Miami, or the Falls of the
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Ohio, Clark and Logan led their expeditions up the Miami from this vicinity.
Logan's expedition, in 1786, burned the Indian villages in the vicinity of Mac-a-Cheek, in Logan County.
Todd led a party of Kentuckians into the Scioto Valley in 1788.
Major Doughty, who had been an artillery officer in the Continental Army, when he came from Fort Harmer, in June 1789, to build Fort Washington, brought with him 140 men. Lieutenant Colonel Harmer came in the fall of the same year, bringing a reinforcement of 300 men. From Fort Washington he sent detachments to Kaskaskia and Vincennes. After the Louisi- ana Purchase, Kaskaskia was abandoned, and its garrison re- moved to St. Louis.
Forts Hamilton, Jefferson, and St. Clair were built along the line of St. Clair's advance in 1791.
Forts Greenville and Recovery were built by General Wayne in 1793. The last named fort was erected in what is now Mer- cer County, on the site of St. Clair's disaster.
Forts McArthur, Stevenson and Meigs were constructed during the War of 1812. Fort McArthur was located at the crossing of the Scioto, in Hardin County, on the line of Hull's advance. It was a defensive position on his line of communica- tions. It was attacked a number of times, but always success- fully defended.
Of Forts Stevenson and Meigs we will have something to say in speaking of the campaign of 1813. There are certain episodes in our history which must be noted in proper sequence.
Twenty-one years before Chillicothe was laid out by Massie, the drums and trumpets of Dunmore echoed and re-echoed from the hills which border this valley. This expedition came in two columns, which gave Cornstalk an opportunity to fight the in- vading forces in detail. The Shawanee chief probably never heard of strategy, yet he used excellent strategy in taking ad- vantage of interior lines. If he had defeated Lewis at Point Pleasant, he could have cut Lord Dunmore's line of retreat and have given him a very unpleasant experience.
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This picturesque campaign had no permanent results. The destinies of the Northwest were decided fourteen years later by George Rogers Clark's famous expedition, which resulted in the capture of Kaskaskia and Vincennes. Clark's subsequent cam- paigns in Ohio, and his defeat of the Miamis, Delawares and Shawanees, was another fortunate diversion for the settlers in Eastern Ohio.
Here let us note that in all our Indian wars between 1774 and 1814 victory or defeat seemed to depend on the relative ability of the leaders on either side. Cornstalk, Little Turtle and Tecumseh had unquestionably greater military ability than any of our generals with the exception of Clark, Harrison and Wayne. We had scores of daring fighters, but it was reckless courage which caused such disasters as befell the Kentuckians at the river Rasin and Fort Meigs. The expeditions of Boone, Bowman, Broadhead and Logan would be called raids now-a-days, yet they put the Indians upon the defensive, and in that way made the settlement of Ohio a possibility.
As this place, Chillicothe, is called the Ancient Metropolis,. there is an impression that it was one of the first settlements ; the fact is, however, that the Scioto Valley was the last part of the state open to occupation. The act of the Continental Con- gress, setting aside the Virginia Military Land District, provided that the section between the Scioto and the Little Miami should not be open to location until the good lands in Kentucky were exhausted.
Harmer's expedition was the first that had in it any con- siderable number of Ohio militia. They did creditable service, but Harmer was not as able a commander as Little Turtle, nor were his men, brave as they were, any match for the picked war- riors of the Miamis and Shawanees.
St. Clair was also outgeneraled by the great chief of the Miamis. The excuse is often made for his defeat that our troops were ambushed and surprised. This is a puerile explanation. Strategem and surprise is a part of the game of war. It is what the soldier should practice against his enemy, and guard against himself. There is small glory in Indian warfare, although it is full of dangers, hardships, and perplexities. St. Clair was com-
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pelled, by the urgency of the situation, to make a campaign with- out adequate means and sufficient preparation. An army can- not be improvised, nor men disciplined, in a day.
As this monograph is intended as a comment upon our early military history rather than a chronicle of events, it may not be out of place to refer to one statement made in the ac- counts of St. Clair's defeat. It is that the militia gave way with little or no resistance. We find similar statements made as to their inefficiency in the histories of all our early wars.
In the Revolutionary War there were battles in which they fought bravely and effectively, as at Bunker Hill and Bennington ; while at Long Island and Camden they gave way almost at the first fire. In the War of 1812 their service was notoriously in- efficient, and at Bladensburg they hardly made only a show of re- sistance.
Of late years the service of our National Guard regiments has been highly creditable and free from the humiliating stam- pedes of early times. Let us consider what has caused the change for the better.
We have in this country three kinds of military service. That of the regular establishment, filled by volunteer enlistments, and permanently under the control of the general government. Then we have volunteer troops, distinctively so called, which are our chief dependence in war. They are state organizations, mustered into the service of the national government for a stated period. Lastly, we have the militia organizations, where ser- vice under the laws of nearly all states and territories is obliga- tory. In practice their enlistments in time of peace are volun- tary. Nevertheless, unless specifically excused, militia service is obligatory. At the time of which we are writing, compulsory calls were often made. The question recurs : why was their ser- vice so often unsatisfactory ?
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