USA > Ohio > The history of the state of Ohio; from the discovery of the great valley, to the present time > Part 22
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" From these facts your Excellency may form an idea of our situation. I know that your own circumstances are critical. But are we to be wholly forgotten? I hope not. I trust that about five hundred men may be sent to our assistance immediately. If these shall be stationed as our county lieutenant shall deem nec- essary, it may be the means of saving our part of the country. But if they are placed under the direction of General Clarke, they will be of little or no service to our settlement. The Falls of the Ohio lie one hundred miles west of us, and the Indians are in the northeast; while we are continually called to protect those at the Falls.
"I have encouraged the people in this county, all that I could. But I can no longer justify them or myself, in risking our lives here under such extraordinary hazards. The inhabitants of this county are very much alarmed at the thoughts of the Indians bringing another campaign into our county this Fall. If this should be the case, it will break up the settlements. I hope, therefore, that your Excellency will take the matter into consid- eration, and send us some relief as soon as possible."
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CHAPTER XIV.
EMIGRATION AND ITS RESULTS.
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ANECDOTE OF GENERAL CLARKE-RAID THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE LITTLE MIAMI - FLIGHT OF THE SAVAGES - THE DE- VASTATION - PEACE WITH ENGLAND - CONTINUED HOSTILITY OF THE INDIANS - THE TIDE OF EMIGRATION - LAND TITLES -- THE TREATY OF PEACE - POLICY OF THE FEDERAL GOV- ERNMENT - TREATY WITH THE CHIEFS - THE THEFT OF HORSES - GREATNESS OF THE LOSS - PERILS OF EMIGRATION -WARNING TO COLONEL MARSHALL -THE DECOY - ESCAPE OF CAPTAIN WARD - PERILOUS ADVENTURE OF MR. ROWAN AND PARTY - TESTIMONY OF MR. ROWAN'S SON - MR. DAL- TON'S SPEECH - REPLY OF THE CHIEF.
THE FALLS of the Ohio, where General Clarke was established, as military leader of Kentucky, are near the present City of Louis- ville. This is many miles south-west of the extreme western border of Ohio, opposite the State of Indiana. The British authorities, who were engaged in this terrible warfare against the frontier settlements, were admirably situated at Detroit for these operations. Here they held all the Indian tribes, north of the Ohio River, completely in hand, to hurl them in whatever direction they pleased. General Clarke was a man of great energy of char- acter and of considerable military ability.
The following anecdote is worthy of record, both as illustrative of the man and of the savages with whom he had to deal. Upon one of his expeditions a large reward had been offered by the British authorities for his capture, whether taken dead or alive. Some Indian chiefs formed a conspiracy to kill him while asleep. The plot was discovered. They were arrested and sent to the guard-house. . The next day they were brought, in irons, before the General. He was engaged in business at the time, and, assum- ing an air of perfect indifference, paid no attention to them what-
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'ever. When his business was transacted, he turned to them very contemptuously, and said :
" You ought to die for your treacherous attempt upon my life. I had determined to put you to death. But when I reflected upon the meanness of your conduct, in trying to catch a man and kill him when asleep, I became convinced that you were not war- riors, but old women. You are therefore too mean to be killed by a Long Knife. You have put on men's clothes, pretending to be men, when you are only women."
Then turning to his orderly, he said : "Strip these people of their clothes, and dress them in women's clothes. Then send them home. As women know nothing about hunting, give them food for their journey. While they remain, let them be treated, in all respects, like squaws, as they are."
He then resumed conversation with his friends in attendance, as though the proud warriors before him were too contemptible to be further noticed. The offending chiefs were greatly agitated. One of them rose, and wished to offer the pipe of peace, and to make a speech. General Clarke spurned the calumet, and would not permit him to utter a word.
" The Big Knife," said he, "never treats with squaws."
Several chiefs of other tribes, who chanced to be present, moved by this terrible humiliation of their brother chiefs, rose to inter- cede in their behalf, entreating General Clarke to pity their fami- lies, assuring him that they would deem this a disgrace which could never be wiped out. The General replied :
" The Big Knife never makes war upon squaws. When we come across such Indians as these in the woods, we shoot them, as we do wolves, to prevent their eating the deer."
This mediation having failed, a consultation took place among themselves. Soon two of their young men, advancing into the middle of the floor, sat down and flung their blankets over their heads, to the astonishment of the whole assembly. Two of the more venerable chiefs then arose, and, with a pipe of peace, stood by these self-devoted victims, and offered the " lives of the young warriors as an atonement for the conduct of the chiefs of their tribe. This sacrifice," said they, " we hope will appease the Big Knife." And again they offered him the pipe of peace.
General Clarke himself was deeply moved. In subsequently describing the event, he said: " I never before felt so powerful
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a gust of emotion." For a moment there was perfect silence. Anxiety to know the fate of the victims was depicted upon every countenance. The history of the past has seldom exhibited such an act of magnanimity, of self-devotion, as was thus displayed by these children of the forest. General Clarke soon recovered his self-possession, ordered the two heroic young Indians to arise. Then addressing them he said :
"I rejoice to find that there are men in all nations. Such alone are fit to be chiefs. With such I like to treat. I recognize you henceforth as chiefs. Through you I grant peace to your tribe."
He then took them by the hand, and presented them, as chiefs, to several American, French, and Spanish officers, who were
present. Then he presented them to the other Indian chiefs. All saluted them as chiefs of their tribe. There was no hesita- tion. Presents were interchanged, and cordiality restored. Gen- eral Clarke was afterwards informed that the incident was widely talked of among the Indians. No one disputed the legitimacy of the title of these young warriors to Indian nobility.
General Clarke very strenuously urged the colonial government to furnish him with an army of two thousand men, with which he felt confident he could capture Detroit, and thus, at one blow, put an end to the ravages which the Indians were perpetrating. The savages would be comparatively powerless, when deprived of the abundant ammunition with which the British government was supplying them.
As soon as General Clarke heard of the disastrous battle at Blue Licks, he resolved immediately to pursue and punish the Indians in their own homes. The savages, greatly elated, had re-crossed the Ohio, and returned to their towns on the Little Miami for a general triumph. General Clarke ascended the Licking River with about five hundred men, to its entrance into the Ohio. There he formed a junction with the troops under Colonels Logan and Floyd, which created a force of about a thousand men, all well mounted. Colonel Boone accompanied this avenging army as a volunteer.
The troops crossed the Ohio, in flat-bottomed boats, on the 30th of September, 1782, and commenced their march up the Little Miami, the bosom of every man glowing with the desire for vengeance. So rapid had been the movement, and so skillfully had it been concealed, that the Indians had no suspicion of the
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approach of their foe, until they were within a few miles of Old Chillicothe. In the utmost consternation the savages fled, men, women and children. A thousand mounted warriors were within an hour's march of them. Resistance was not for a moment to be thought of. Their only safety was in precipitate flight.
Everything was abandoned. It is probably well for the repu- tation of the colonists that the women and the children had escaped. The memory of their own burned dwellings, their comrades slain and scalped, their women and children toma- hawked, their captive friends burned at slow fires, put to death by horrible tortures, so inflamed this colonial army that the women and the children would probably have been shot down like she- wolves and cubs. They deemed it a matter of duty and of humanity to punish these savages with severity which they should never forget; so to chastise them, as to put an end to their horri- ble atrocities.
The avenging army swept the fertile valley of the Little Miami, from its mouth to its head-waters, a distance of about eighty miles, with utter desolation. Every Indian that was seen was, like pan- ther or bear, the object of pursuit, and the target for their bullets. Five of their towns were laid in ashes. The torch was applied to every solitary hut. Every tree bearing fruit was cut down.
It was the Fall of the year. The golden corn was just ripen- ing in their extensive fields. It had been carefully cultivated by the women and the children, while the warriors were devastating the settlers' homes in Kentucky. Upon this they mainly de- pended for sustenance the coming Winter. There was by no means sufficient game in the forest to preserve them from starva- tion. This whole harvest was entirely destroyed, either being trampled in the dust, or piled in heaps and burned. The savages had fled so precipitately that almost nothing was saved from the awful wreck. Their homes, their blankets, their furs, their cook- ing utensils, and most of their ammunition, were destroyed. Abso- lutely nothing was left to them. In utter destitution they were roaming the forest, with cold Winter approaching. Many of them must have perished of starvation. As many as were able toiled through the wilderness to Detroit, to receive from the British authorities support under the dreadful calamities which this ad- herence to the British cause had brought upon them.
The punishment of the Indians was indeed terrible. They were
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alike astonished and dismayed by it. In their ignorance they had supposed that, in the carnage of the " Blue Licks," they had de- stroyed nearly all the warriors which the colonists could bring into the field. They were rejoicing in the thought that they could, at their leisure, recross the Ohio, and load themselves with the booty of the desolated homes of Kentucky, and that they could bring back with them the wives and children of the white men as captives and slaves. Instead of that, they had scarcely reached their homes ere an overwhelming army of a thousand white men came sweeping their valley with fire and ruin. The tidings of this avenging campaign, in the Valley of the Little Miami, soon reached the ears of all the Indian tribes in Ohio. They were so disheartened that they made no further attempt for the organized invasion of Kentucky.
In the year 1783, peace was made with England, and the inde- pendence of the colonies was recognized. But as the waves of the ocean do not subside until long after the gale has ceased to blow, so the agitation on the frontiers, between the settlers and the Indians, continued for many years. The intense passions which had been called into exercise by the bloody conflict were too powerful to be speedily allayed. The settlers were determined to get possession of the lands of the Indians. The Indians were determined not to relinquish their ancient hunting grounds.
A wonderful tide of emigration, across the mountains, imme- diately set in from North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. But none of these emigrants ventured to penetrate the heart of Ohio, which was populated by such numerous and hostile tribes. Nearly all directed their steps toward the rich and beautiful re- gion south of the river. A few families settled upon the upper waters of the Ohio, near the fort at Pittsburgh. These emigrants generally crossed the mountains in long lines of wagons, driving, their flocks and herds before them, till they reached the waters of either the Alleghany or Monongahela. They then took flat- bottomed boats or rafts, and, borne by the currents of those: streams to the Ohio River, floated down that stream for several hundred miles to points near the Licking and the Kentucky. Here they scattered south through one of the most beautiful regions of the globe, taking possession of their lands by what was called the Tomahawk Claim.
The Virginia Legislature, which was then the recognized pro-
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RETURN JONATHAN MEIGS Governor 1810 14 ..
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prietor of all these regions of indefinite boundaries, allowed each settler four hundred acres of any unoccupied lands, besides the preference right to purchase, at government prices, one thousand more contiguous acres. These settlements were generally marked by the initials of the claimant s name, cut with the tomahawk in several beech trees. These "tomahawk rights " were generally respected, even though the claimant had not taken up his actual residence on the lands. If he had cut down a few trees, and erected a log hut, his claim was considered as established. The pioneers were generally satisfied with one settlement-right; but others, more ambitious of large landed estates, and of the wealth which was sure eventually to accrue from them, bought up many of these frail titles. This led, in after years, to almost endless litigation.
Nearly the whole country, from the Alleghanies to these cen- tral rivers, of what was then called the District of Kentucky, for a distance of nearly five hundred miles, was an uninhabited moun- tain wilderness. There were, however, one or two stations along the south banks of the Ohio River. So great was the immigra- tion from the Atlantic States into these attractive fields, that by the close of the year 1784, the population of Kentucky was esti. mated to amount to nearly thirty thousand souls.
By the Treaty of Paris, 1783, Great Britain renounced all claim to all the territory south of the Great Lakes, and east of the Mis- sissippi to its sources. The British Government also stipulated to withdraw her garrisons from all that territory. The most im- portant stations, then held by the British, were at Niagara, at Detroit, and on the Miami and Maumee Rivers, and near the head-waters of the Wabash. This region, then called the North- western Territory, was a vast undivided realm, almost entirely uninhabited by white men. The powerful Indian tribes, clus- tered through the valleys of the tributaries of the Ohio, flowing from the North, had been nearly all enlisted under the banners of Great Britain. The horrible atrocities which these savages had perpetrated had enkindled in the bosoms of the Americans, generally, undying hatred. Still there was a disposition to con- ciliate the savages, as peace on the frontiers was essential to the prosperity of the rapidly-growing settlements there.
The Federal Government consequently adopted a humane policy, and did everything in its power to restrain the exasper-
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ated western people from aggressions upon the Indians. Every effort was made to prevent collision, and to cultivate friendly relations with these still formidable tribes. Indian agencies were established to confer with the chiefs upon all measures of impor- tance. Annuities were granted, which perhaps too often assumed the form of bribes, to induce the leading men of the nation to enter into treaties, by which they relinquished large portions of their lands.
These agents were required strictly to enforce the laws of Con- gress, prohibiting lawless white men from residing in the Indian country, and from carrying on contraband trade with the Indians. Trading posts were established, under governmental control, to supply them with useful articles at fair prices, and to rescue them from the impositions of fraudulent traders.
A large council of the chiefs of the Ohio Indians was held at Fort McIntosh on the 21st of January, 1785. This fort was in the extreme western frontier of Pennsylvania. The Ohio tribes represented were the Wyandots, Delawares, Ottawas, and Chippe- was. These tribes occupied the extreme northern portions of the present State of Ohio, west of the Cuyahoga River. In this treaty, the chiefs, sachems, and warriors of these tribes relinquished to the United States all the lands south of Lake Erie, and east of the Cuyahoga River, as well as all the southeastern portion of the present State of Ohio.
The boundary line, which was definitely laid down, was as fol- lows: Beginning at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, it ran up the east bank of that stream till it reached the head-waters of the Tuscarawas. Thence it followed that stream to its junction with Walhonding Creek. Then the line ran across the country a distance of about 150 miles to the mouth of Mad River, one of the largest tributaries of the Great Miami. Thence it followed the main branch of that river to the portage across to the St. Mary's. Then it followed that river in its very circuitous course till it reached the Maumee, which stream it followed to its entrance into Lake Erie. All the lands east and south of this line were ceded to the United States.
On the other hand, the government recognized the title of the ยท
Indians to all the land north and west of this line, to be occupied by them as dwelling places and hunting grounds, free from en- croachments from the whites. The government also reserved
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the right of constructing certain roads through the Indian Terri- tory, and the possession of six miles square, contiguous to all its military posts on the Northwestern frontier.
Though there were thus nominally peaceful relations between the United States Government and the chiefs of these tribes, still there were malcontents on both sides, who paid no regard to trea- ties. They were equally savage, and their atrocities were equally fiend-like. In the month of March, 1785, a lawless band of Shawa- nese Indians crossed the Ohio, burned the house of a Mr. Elliott, killed him and took his scalp. In some way, members of his family escaped, carrying the tidings to other settlements, exciting great indignation and alarm. The main object of these maraud- ing bands of Indians seems to have been not so much to take scalps as for the purpose of stealing horses. In parties of three or four, these gangs of savage horse-thieves, ever at home in the wilderness, would cross the Ohio, skulk in concealment around some settlement, and in the morning several of these valuable animals would have disappeared, no one knew where. Not an Indian would have been seen, and all traces of the direction of their flight would have been carefully concealed.
Towards the close of 1786, these depredations became so fre- quent, that the settlements were very seriously disturbed and injured by them. The horse had become an absolute necessity in the agricultural operations and the social habits of the country. But no man was safe in the possession of this property. The horses must graze in the open fields. The farmer could not guard them, gun in hand, night after night. The prowling savage, having watched his chances from his covert by the light of day, in the dead hour of darkness and sleep seized his booty, and when the morning dawned was far away beyond pursuit.
It was no uncommon occurrence for a party of five or six Indians after an absence of a week or ten days, to return to their rendezvous with ten or fifteen horses. Sometimes each individual would bring in one every night, until their complement was full. These free rangers of the forest, descending from the Valleys of the Great and Little Miami, the Scioto, and others of the Ohio Rivers, would penetrate Western Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, often extending their raids two or three hundred miles. They moved in silence and unseen, like spirits of darkness, leaving no indication of their coming or going, save in the disappearance of the horses.
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It is said that during the five years preceding 1791, these frontier settlements had been robbed of not less than twenty thousand horses. And these estimates were based on authentic information.
To prevent, as far as possible, these depredations and to dis- cover the trail of these thieving bands, each settlement employed scouts or rangers to be continually traveling the forest around in search for any signs of the Indians. Thus in the midst of nominal peace, the most cautious measures of war had to be adopted. Though these rangers made every possible effort to search out the trail of the marauders, yet the savages were so cautious that it was very seldom that any of their movements were discovered. It was ascertained that the most active of these plunderers came from the upper waters of the Sandusky, and of the Great and Little Miami.
They infested the banks of the Ohio River, continually attacking and plundering the boats descending to different points on the Kentucky shore. Frequently whole families were massacred.
It is estimated that during the years 1783 and 1784, twelve thousand persons, mainly from Virginia and Pennsylvania, emi- grated to Kentucky. The following incidents will show the perils they had to encounter, and the caution with which it was necessary to move.
Colonel Thomas Marshall, a man of much distinction in those days, crossed the Alleghanies with his large family. At Pittsburgh he purchased a flat-bottomed boat, to float down the Ohio. He had passed the mouth of the Kenhawa without encountering any incident of note. One night, about ten o'clock the boat had drifted quite near the northern or Ohio bank of the stream, when he was hailed in English by a man upon the shore, who inquired who he was, and where he was bound. Upon receiving a reply he added :
" I have been stationed here by my brother, Simon Girty, to warn all boats of the danger of being decoyed ashore. My brother regrets very deeply the injury he has inflicted upon his countrymen. To convince them of the sincerity of his repentance, and of his earnest desire to be restored to their society, he has stationed me here to warn all boats of the snares which are spread for them by the cunning of the Indians. Renegade white men will be placed upon the banks, who will represent themselves as in the greatest distress. Even children, taken captive, will be compelled, by threats of torture, to declare that they are all alone upon the shore,
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and to entreat the boats to come and rescue them. But keep in the middle of the river, said Girty, and steel your hearts against any supplications you may hear."
Colonel Marshall thanked him for his warning, and floated un- molested down the stream. This caution was by no means a needless one. There were many incidents like the following. A boat was descending the stream with an emigrant family on board. A band of prowling Indians discovered it and followed along, in concealment, through the forest, watching an opportunity for its capture. The large flat-bottomed boat, almost an ark, containing the family, their cattle and all their household goods, touched at a point of land for a supply of fuel. The Indians, in ambush, fired upon their victims, and then rushing upon them with the tomahawk, soon silenced all in death except one girl of fourteen. They took her captive, and began to ascend the stream in search of another boat. At length they saw one descending the river.
They gave their captive some dreadful experience of what were horrors of the Indian torture, and then told her that they would thus torture her to death, unless she would implicitly obey their directions. They tied her feet, so that she could not plunge into the river, placed themselves in ambush, at a distance of but a few yards, and then compelled her to cry as though her heart were breaking, and to tell a piteous story, that she was descending the river in a boat, with her family, that the Indians had attacked the boat and killed all but herself, that she had escaped in the night, and that she was almost dead of hunger and of terror lest she should be recaptured. And then, in the most heart-rending tones, she entreated them to come to her rescue.
The agonizing cries of the poor child touched every heart. With much hesitation they cautiously moved towards the shore. The moment the bows of the boat touched the beach a deadly fire was opened upon them from the ambush; the howling, leaping savages rushed with gleaming tomahawks upon their victims, and the fiend-like deed of blood and death was soon accomplished. All perished.
About the same time Captain James Ward was taking several horses down the river for sale. He purchased at Pittsburgh a large flat-bottomed boat, forty-five feet long and eight feet wide. His crew consisted of half a dozen men and a lad, his nephew. The gunwale of the boat was composed of a single pine plank,
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