The Winning of the West, Volume Three by Theodore Roosevelt

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At last, late in May, he started in a crowded flat-boat down the Ohio,
and was enchanted with the wild and beautiful scenery. He was equally
pleased with the settlement at the mouth of the Muskingum; and he was
speedily on good terms with the officers of the fort, who dined and
wined him to his heart's content. There were rumors of savage warfare
from below; but around Marietta the Indians were friendly. May and his
people set to work to clear land and put up buildings; and they lived
sumptuously, for game swarmed. The hunters supplied them with quantities
of deer and wild turkeys, and occasionally elk and buffalo were also
killed; while quantities of fish could be caught without effort, and the
gardens and fields yielded plenty of vegetables. On July 4th the members
of the Ohio Company entertained the officers from Fort Harmar, and the
ladies of the garrison, at an abundant dinner, and drank thirteen
toasts,--to the United States, to Congress, to Washington, to the King
of France, to the new Constitution, to the Society of the Cincinnati,
and various others.

Colonel May built him a fine "mansion house," thirty-six feet by
eighteen, and fifteen feet high, with a good cellar underneath, and in
the windows panes of glass he had brought all the way from Boston. He
continued to enjoy the life in all its phases, from hunting in the woods
to watching the sun rise, and making friends with the robins, which, in
the wilderness, always followed the settlements. In August he went up
the river, without adventure, and returned to his home. [Footnote:
Journal and Letters of Colonel John May; one of the many valuable
historical publications of Robert Clarke & Co., of Cincinnati. VOL
III--18]

Contrasts with Travels of Early Explorers.

Such a trip as either of these was a mere holiday picnic. It offers as
striking a contrast as well could be offered to the wild and lonely
journeyings of the stark wilderness-hunters and Indian fighters, who
first went west of the mountains. General Rufus Putnam and his
associates did a deed the consequences of which were of vital
importance. They showed that they possessed the highest attributes of
good citizenship--resolution and sagacity, stern morality, and the
capacity to govern others as well as themselves. But they performed no
pioneer feat of any note as such, and they were not called upon to
display a tithe of the reckless daring and iron endurance of hardship
which characterized the conquerors of the Illinois and the founders of
Kentucky and Tennessee. This is in no sense a reflection upon them. They
did not need to give proof of a courage they had shown time and again in
bloody battles against the best troops of Europe. In this particular
enterprise, in which they showed so many admirable qualities, they had
little chance to show the quality of adventurous bravery. They drifted
comfortably down stream, from the log fort whence they started, past
many settlers' houses, until they came to the post of a small Federal
garrison, where they built their town. Such a trip is not to be
mentioned in the same breath with the long wanderings of Clark and Boone
and Robertson, when they went forth unassisted to subdue the savage and
make tame the shaggy wilderness.

St. Clair.

St. Clair, the first Governor, was a Scotchman of good family. He had
been a patriotic but unsuccessful general in the Revolutionary army. He
was a friend of Washington, and in politics a firm Federalist; he was
devoted to the cause of Union and Liberty, and was a conscientious,
high-minded man. But he had no aptitude for the incredibly difficult
task of subduing the formidable forest Indians, with their peculiar and
dangerous system of warfare; and he possessed no capacity for getting on
with the frontiersmen, being without sympathy for their virtues while
keenly alive to their very unattractive faults.

The Miami Purchase.

In the fall of 1787 another purchase of public lands was negotiated, by
the Miami Company. The chief personage in this company was John Cleves
Symmes, one of the first judges of the Northwestern Territory. Rights
were acquired to take up one million acres, and under these rights three
small settlements were made towards the close of the year 1788. One of
them was chosen by St. Clair to be the seat of government. This little
town had been called Losantiville in its first infancy, but St. Clair
re-christened it Cincinnati, in honor of the Society of the officers of
the Continental army.

The men who formed these Miami Company colonies came largely from the
Middle States. Like the New England founders of Marietta, very many of
them, if not most, had served in the Continental army. They were good
settlers; they made good material out of which to build up a great
state. Their movement was modelled on that of Putnam and his associates.
It was a triumph of collectivism, rather than of individualism. The
settlers were marshalled in a company, instead of moving freely by
themselves, and they took a territory granted them by Congress, under
certain conditions, and defended for them by the officers and troops of
the regular army.

Establishment of Civil Government.

Civil government was speedily organized. St. Clair and the judges formed
the first legislature; in theory they were only permitted to adopt laws
already in existence in the old States, but as a matter of fact they
tried any legislative experiments they saw fit. St. Clair was an
autocrat both by military training and by political principles. He was a
man of rigid honor, and he guarded the interests of the territory with
jealous integrity, but he exercised such a rigorous supervision over the
acts of his subordinate colleagues, the judges, that he became involved
in wrangles at the very beginning of his administration. To prevent the
incoming of unauthorized intruders, he issued a proclamation summoning
all newly arrived persons to report at once to the local commandants,
and, with a view of keeping the game for the use of the actual settlers,
and also to prevent as far as possible fresh irritation being given the
Indians, he forbade all hunting in the territory for hides or flesh save
by the inhabitants proper. [Footnote: Draper MSS. Wm. Clark Papers.
Proclamation, Vincennes, June 28, 1790.] Only an imperfect obedience was
rendered either proclamation.

Thus the settlement of the Northwest was fairly begun, on a system
hitherto untried. The fates and the careers of all the mighty states
which yet lay formless in the forest were in great measure determined by
what was at this time done. The nation had decreed that they should all
have equal rights with the older States and with one another, and yet
that they should remain forever inseparable from the Union; and above
all, it had been settled that the bondman should be unknown within their
borders. Their founding represented the triumph of the principle of
collective national action over the spirit of intense individualism
displayed so commonly on the frontier. The uncontrolled initiative of
the individual, which was the chief force in the settlement of the
Southwest, was given comparatively little play in the settlement of the
Northwest. The Northwest owed its existence to the action of the nation
as a whole.

CHAPTER VII.

The War in the Northwest. 1787-1790

The Federal troops were camped in the Federal territory north of the
Ohio. They garrisoned the forts and patrolled between the little
log-towns. They were commanded by the Federal General Harmar, and the
territory was ruled by the Federal Governor St. Clair. Thenceforth the
national authorities and the regular troops played the chief parts in
the struggle for the Northwest. The frontier militia became a mere
adjunct--often necessary, but always untrustworthy--of the regular
forces.

The Regular Army in the Northwest.

For some time the regulars fared ill in the warfare with the savages;
and a succession of mortifying failures closed with a defeat more
ruinous than any which had been experienced since the days of the
"iron-tempered general the pipe-clay brain,"--for the disaster which
befell St. Clair was as overwhelming as that wherein Braddock met his
death. The continued checks excited the anger of the Eastern people, and
the dismay and derision of the Westerners. They were keenly felt by the
officers of the army; and they furnished an excuse for those who wished
to jeer at regular troops, and exalt the militia. Jefferson, who never
understood anything about warfare, being a timid man, and who belonged
to the visionary school which always denounced the army and navy, was
given a legitimate excuse to criticise the tactics of the regulars;
[Footnote: Draper MSS., G. R. Clark Papers. Jefferson to Innes, March 7,
1791.] and of course he never sought occasion to comment on the even
worse failings of the militia.

Shortcomings of the Regulars.

The truth was that the American military authorities fell into much the
same series of errors as their predecessors, the British, untaught by
the dreary and mortifying experience of the latter in fighting these
forest foes. The War Department at Washington, and the Federal generals
who first came to the Northwest, did not seem able to realize the
formidable character of the Indian armies, and were certainly unable to
teach their own troops how to fight them. Harmar and St. Clair were both
fair officers, and in open country were able to acquit themselves
respectably in the face of civilized foes. But they did not have the
peculiar genius necessary to the successful Indian fighter, and they
never learned how to carry on a campaign in the woods.

They had the justifiable distrust of the militia felt by all the
officers of the Continental Army. In the long campaigns waged against
Howe, Clinton, and Cornwallis they had learned the immense superiority
of the Continental troops to the local militia. They knew that the
Revolution would have failed had it not been for the continental troops.
They knew also, by the bitter experience common to all officers who had
been through the war, that, though the militia might on occasion do
well, yet they could never be trusted; they were certain to desert or
grow sulky and mutinous if exposed to the fatigue and hardship of a long
campaign, while in a pitched battle in the open they never fought as
stubbornly as the regulars, and often would not fight at all.

The Regulars in Indian Warfare.

All this was true; yet the officers of the regular army failed to
understand that it did not imply the capacity of the regular troops to
fight savages on their own ground. They showed little real comprehension
of the extraordinary difficulty of such warfare against such foes, and
of the reasons which made it so hazardous. They could not help assigning
other causes than the real ones for every defeat and failure. They
attributed each in turn to the effects of ambuscade or surprise, instead
of realizing that in each the prime factor was the formidable fighting
power of the individual Indian warrior, when in the thick forest which
was to him a home, and when acting under that species of wilderness
discipline which was so effective for a single crisis in his peculiar
warfare. The Indian has rarely shown any marked excellence as a fighter
in mass in the open; though of course there have been one or two
brilliant exceptions. At times in our wars we have tried the experiment
of drilling bodies of Indians as if they were whites, and using them in
the ordinary way in battle. Under such conditions, as a rule, they have
shown themselves inferior to the white troops against whom they were
pitted. In the same way they failed to show themselves a match for the
white hunters of the great plains when on equal terms. But their
marvellous faculty for taking advantage of cover, and for fighting in
concert when under cover, has always made the warlike tribes foes to be
dreaded beyond all others when in the woods, or among wild broken
mountains.

Striking Contrasts in our Indian Wars.

The history of our warfare with the Indians during the century following
the close of the Revolution is marked by curiously sharp contrasts in
the efficiency shown by the regular troops in campaigns carried on at
different times and under varying conditions. These contrasts are due
much more to the difference in the conditions under which the campaigns
were waged than to the difference in the bodily prowess of the Indians.
When we had been in existence as a nation for a century the Modocs in
their lava-beds and the Apaches amid their waterless mountains were
still waging against the regulars of the day the same tedious and
dangerous warfare waged against Harmar and St. Clair by the forest
Indians. There were the same weary, long-continued campaigns; the same
difficulty in bringing the savages to battle; the same blind fighting
against hidden antagonists shielded by the peculiar nature of their
fastnesses; and, finally, the same great disparity of loss against the
white troops. During the intervening hundred years there had been many
similar struggles; as for instance that against the Seminoles. Yet there
had also been many struggles, against Indians naturally more formidable,
in which the troops again and again worsted their Indian foes even when
the odds in numbers were two or three to one against the whites. The
difference between these different classes of wars was partly accounted
for by change in weapons and methods of fighting; partly by the change
in the character of the battle grounds. The horse Indians of the plains
were as elusive and difficult to bring to battle as the Indians of the
mountains and forests; but in the actual fighting they had no chance to
take advantage of cover in the way which rendered so formidable their
brethren of the hills and the deep woods. In consequence their
occasional slaughtering victories, including the most famous of all, the
battle of the Rosebud, in which Custer fell, took the form of the
overwhelming of a comparatively small number of whites by immense masses
of mounted horsemen. When their weapons were inferior, as on the first
occasions when they were brought into contact with troops carrying
breech-loading arms of precision, or when they tried the tactics of
downright fighting, and of charging fairly in the open, they were often
themselves beaten or repulsed with fearful slaughter by mere handfuls of
whites. In the years 1867-68, all the horse Indians of the plains were
at war with us, and many battles were fought with varying fortune. Two
were especially noteworthy. In each a small body of troops and frontier
scouts, under the command of a regular army officer who was also a
veteran Indian fighter, beat back an overwhelming Indian force, which
attempted to storm by open onslaught the position held by the white
riflemen. In one instance fifty men under Major Geo. H. Forsyth beat
back nine hundred warriors, killing or wounding double their own number.
In the other a still more remarkable defence was made by thirty-one men
under Major James Powell against an even larger force, which charged
again and again, and did not accept their repulse as final until they
had lost three hundred of their foremost braves. For years the Sioux
spoke with bated breath of this battle as the "medicine fight," the
defeat so overwhelming that it could be accounted for only by
supernatural interference. [Footnote: For all this see Dodge's admirable
"Our Wild Indians."]

But no such victory was ever gained over mountain or forest Indians who
had become accustomed to fighting the white men. Every officer who has
ever faced these foes has had to spend years in learning his work, and
has then been forced to see a bitterly inadequate reward for his labors.
The officers of the regular army who served in the forests north of the
Ohio just after the Revolution had to undergo a strange and painful
training; and were obliged to content themselves with scanty and
hard-won triumphs even after this training had been undergone.

Difficulties Experienced by the Officers.

The officers took some time to learn their duties as Indian fighters,
but the case was much worse with the rank and file who served under
them. From the beginning of our history it often proved difficult to get
the best type of native American to go into the regular army save in
time of war with a powerful enemy, for the low rate of pay was not
attractive, while the disciplined subordination of the soldiers to their
officers seemed irksome to people with an exaggerated idea of individual
freedom and no proper conception of the value of obedience. Very many of
the regular soldiers have always been of foreign birth; and in 1787, on
the Ohio, the percentage of Irish and Germans in the ranks was probably
fully as large as it was on the Great Plains a century later. [Footnote:
Denny's Journal, _passim_.] They, as others, at that early date, were,
to a great extent, drawn from the least desirable classes of the eastern
sea-board. [Footnote: For fear of misunderstanding, I wish to add that
at many periods the rank and file have been composed of excellent
material; of recent years their character has steadily risen, and the
stuff itself has always proved good when handled for a sufficient length
of time by good commanders.] Three or four years later an unfriendly
observer wrote of St. Clair's soldiers that they were a wretched set of
men, weak and feeble, many of them mere boys, while others were rotten
with drink and debauchery. He remarked that men "purchased from the
prisons, wheel-barrows, and brothels of the nation at foolishly low
wages, would never do to fight Indians"; and that against such foes, who
were terrible enemies in the woods, there was need of first-class,
specially trained troops, instead of trying to use "a set of men who
enlisted because they could no longer live unhung any other way."
[Footnote: Draper Collection. Letter of John Cleves Symmes to Elias
Boudinot, January 12, 1792.]

Doubtless this estimate, made under the sting of defeat, was too harsh;
and it was even more applicable to the forced levies of militia than to
the Federal soldiers; but the shortcomings of the regular troops were
sufficiently serious to need no exaggeration. Their own officers were
far from pleased with the recruits they got.

To the younger officers, with a taste for sport, the life beyond the
Ohio was delightful. The climate was pleasant, the country beautiful,
the water was clear as crystal, and game abounded. In hard weather the
troops lived on salt beef; but at other times their daily rations were
two pounds of turkey or venison, or a pound and a half of bear meat or
buffalo beef. Yet this game was supplied by hired hunters, not by the
soldiers themselves. One of the officers wrote that he had to keep his
troops practising steadily at a target, for they were incompetent to
meet an enemy with the musket; they could not kill in a week enough game
to last them a day. [Footnote: State Dept. MSS., No. 150; Doughty's
Letter, March 15, 1786; also, November 30, 1785.] It was almost
impossible to train such troops, in a limited number of months or years,
so as to enable them to meet their forest foes on equal terms. The
discipline to which they were accustomed was admirably fitted for
warfare in the open; but it was not suited for warfare in the woods.
They had to learn even the use of their fire-arms with painful labor. It
was merely hopeless to try to teach them to fight Indian fashion, all
scattering out for themselves, and each taking a tree trunk, and trying
to slay an individual enemy. They were too clumsy; they utterly lacked
the wild-creature qualities proper to the men of the wilderness, the men
who inherited wolf-cunning and panther-stealth from countless
generations, who bought bare life itself only at the price of
never-ceasing watchfulness, craft, and ferocity.

The Regulars Superior to the Militia.

The regulars were certainly not ideal troops with which to oppose such
foes; but they were the best attainable at that time. They possessed
traits which were lacking in even the best of the frontier militia; and
most of the militia fell far short of the best. When properly trained
the regulars could be trusted to persevere through a campaign; whereas
the militia were sure to disband if kept out for any length of time.
Moreover, a regular army formed a weapon with a temper tried and known;
whereas a militia force was the most brittle of swords which might give
one true stroke, or might fly into splinters at the first slight blow.
Regulars were the only troops who could be trusted to wear out their
foes in a succession of weary and hard-fought campaigns.

The best backwoods fighters, however, such men as Kenton and Brady had
in their scout companies, were much superior to the regulars, and were
able to meet the Indians on at least equal terms. But there were only a
very few such men; and they were too impatient of discipline to be
embodied in an army. The bulk of the frontier militia consisted of men
who were better riflemen than the regulars and often physically abler,
but who were otherwise in every military sense inferior, possessing
their defects, sometimes in an accentuated form, and not possessing
their compensating virtues. Like the regulars, these militia fought the
Indians at a terrible disadvantage. A defeat for either meant murderous
slaughter; for whereas the trained Indian fighters fought or fled each
for himself, the ordinary troops huddled together in a mass, an easy
mark for their savage foes.

Extreme Difficulty of the War.

The task set the leaders of the army in the Northwest was one of extreme
difficulty and danger. They had to overcome a foe trained through untold
ages how to fight most effectively on the very battle-ground where the
contest was to be waged. To the whites a march through the wilderness
was fraught with incredible toil; whereas the Indians moved without
baggage, and scattered and came together as they wished, so that it was
impossible to bring them to battle against their will. All that could be
done was to try to beat them when they chose to receive or deliver an
attack. With ordinary militia it was hopeless to attempt to accomplish
anything needing prolonged and sustained effort, and, as already said,
the thoroughly trained Indian fighters who were able to beat the savages
at their own game were too few in numbers, and too unaccustomed to
control and restraint, to permit of their forming the main body of the
army in an offensive campaign. There remained only the regulars: and the
raw recruits had to undergo a long and special training, and be put
under the command of a thoroughly capable leader, like old Mad Anthony
Wayne, before they could be employed to advantage.

The Feeling between the Regulars and Frontiersmen.

The feeling between the regular troops and the frontiersmen was often
very bitter, and on several occasions violent brawls resulted. One such
occurred at Limestone, where the brutal Indian-fighter Wetzel lived.
Wetzel had murdered a friendly Indian, and the soldiers bore him a
grudge. When they were sent to arrest him the townspeople sallied to his
support. Wetzel himself resisted, and was, very properly, roughly
handled in consequence. The interference of the townspeople was
vigorously repaid in kind; they soon gave up the attempt, and afterwards
one or two of them were ill-treated or plundered by the soldiers. They
made complaint to the civil authorities, and a court-martial was then
ordered by the Federal commanders. This court-martial acquitted the
soldiers. Wetzel soon afterwards made his escape, and the incident
ended. [Footnote: Draper MSS. Harmar's letter to Henry Lee, Sept. 27,
1789. Also depositions of McCurdy, Lawler, Caldwell, and others, and
proceedings of court-martial. The depositions conflict.]

Fury of the Indian Ravages.

By 1787 the Indian war had begun with all its old fury. The thickly
settled districts were not much troubled, and the towns which, like
Marietta in the following year, grew up under the shadow of a Federal
fort, were comparatively safe. But the frontier of Kentucky, and of
Virginia proper along the Ohio, suffered severely. There was great
scarcity of powder and lead, and even of guns, and there was difficulty
in procuring provisions for those militia who consented to leave their
work and turn out when summoned. The settlers were harried, and the
surveyors feared to go out to their work on the range. There were the
usual horrible incidents of Indian warfare. A glimpse of one of the
innumerable dreadful tragedies is afforded by the statement of one party
of scouts, who, in following the trail of an Indian war band, found at
the crossing of the river "the small tracks of a number of children,"
prisoners from a raid made on the Monongahela settlements. [Footnote:
State Dept. MSS., No. 71, vol. ii. Letters of David Shepherd to Governor
Randolph, April 30, and May 24, 1787.]

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