The Winning of the West, Volume Two by Theodore Roosevelt

T >> Theodore Roosevelt >> The Winning of the West, Volume Two

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29

Other Feats of Personal Prowess

About this time a hunter named McConnell was captured near Lexington by
five Indians. At night he wriggled out of his bonds and slew four of his
sleeping captors, while the fifth, who escaped, was so bewildered that,
on reaching the Indian town, he reported that his party had been
attacked at night by a number of whites, who had not only killed his
companions but the prisoner likewise.

A still more remarkable event had occurred a couple of summers
previously. Some keel boats, manned by a hundred men under Lieutenant
Rogers, and carrying arms and provisions procured from the Spaniards at
New Orleans, were set upon by an Indian war party under Girty and
Elliott, [Footnote: Haldimand MSS. De Peyster to Haldimand, November 1,
1779.] while drawn up on a sand beach of the Ohio. The boats were
captured and plundered, and most of the men were killed; several
escaped, two under very extraordinary circumstances. One had both his
arms, the other both his legs, broken. They lay hid till the Indians
disappeared, and then accidentally discovered each other. For weeks the
two crippled beings lived in the lonely spot where the battle had been
fought, unable to leave it, each supplementing what the other could do.
The man who could walk kicked wood to him who could not, that he might
make a fire, and making long circuits, chased the game towards him for
him to shoot it. At last they were taken off by a passing flat-boat.

The backwoodsmen, wonted to vigorous athletic pastimes, and to fierce
brawls among themselves, were generally overmatches for the Indians in
hand-to-hand struggles. One such fight, that took place some years
before this time, deserves mention. A man of herculean strength and of
fierce, bold nature, named Bingaman, lived on the frontier in a lonely
log-house. The cabin had but a single room below, in which Bingaman
slept, as well as his mother, wife, and child; a hired man slept in the
loft. One night eight Indians assailed the house. As they burst in the
door Bingaman thrust the women and the child under the bed, his wife
being wounded by a shot in the breast. Then having discharged his piece
he began to beat about at random with the long heavy rifle. The door
swung partially to, and in the darkness nothing could be seen. The
numbers of the Indians helped them but little, for Bingaman's tremendous
strength enabled him to shake himself free whenever grappled. One after
another his foes sank under his crushing blows, killed or crippled; it
is said that at last but one was left to flee from the house in terror.
The hired man had not dared to come down from the loft, and when
Bingaman found his wife wounded he became so enraged that it was with
difficulty he could be kept from killing him. [Footnote: It is curious
how faithfully, as well as vividly, Cooper has reproduced these
incidents. His pictures of the white frontiersmen are generally true to
life; in his most noted Indian characters he is much less fortunate. But
his "Indian John" in the "Pioneers" is one of his best portraits; almost
equal praise can he given to Susquesus in the "Chainbearers."]

Incidents such as these followed one another in quick succession. They
deserve notice less for their own sakes than as examples of the way the
West was won; for the land was really conquered not so much by the
actual shock of battle between bodies of soldiers, as by the continuous
westward movement of the armed settlers and the unceasing individual
warfare waged between them and their red foes.

For the same reason one or two of the more noted hunters and Indian
scouts deserve mention, as types of hundreds of their fellows, who spent
their lives and met their deaths in the forest. It was their warfare
that really did most to diminish the fighting force of the tribes. They
battled exactly as their foes did, making forays, alone or in small
parties, for scalps and horses, and in their skirmishes inflicted as
much loss as they received; in striking contrast to what occurred in
conflicts between the savages and regular troops.

The Hunter Wetzel.

One of the most formidable of these hunters was Lewis Wetzel. [Footnote:
The name is variously spelt; in the original German records of the
family it appears as Waetzel, or Watzel.] Boon, Kenton, and Harrod
illustrate by their lives the nobler, kindlier traits of the dauntless
border-folk; Wetzel, like McGarry, shows the dark side of the picture.
He was a good friend to his white neighbors, or at least to such of them
as he liked, and as a hunter and fighter there was not in all the land
his superior. But he was of brutal and violent temper, and for the
Indians he knew no pity and felt no generosity. They had killed many of
his friends and relations, among others his father; and he hunted them
in peace or war like wolves. His admirers denied that he ever showed
"unwonted cruelty" [Footnote: De Haas, 345.] to Indian women and
children; that he sometimes killed them cannot be gainsaid. Some of his
feats were cold-blooded murders, as when he killed an Indian who came in
to treat with General Harmar, under pledge of safe conduct; one of his
brothers slew in like fashion a chief who came to see Col. Brodhead. But
the frontiersmen loved him, for his mere presence was a protection, so
great was the terror he inspired among the red men. His hardihood and
address were only equalled by his daring and courage. He was literally a
man without fear; in his few days of peace his chief amusements were
wrestling, foot-racing, and shooting at a mark. He was a dandy, too,
after the fashion of the backwoods, especially proud of his mane of long
hair, which, when he let it down, hung to his knees. He often hunted
alone in the Indian country, a hundred miles beyond the Ohio. As he
dared not light a bright fire on these trips, he would, on cold nights,
make a small coal-pit, and cower over it, drawing his blanket over his
head, when, to use his own words, he soon became as hot as in a "stove
room." Once he surprised four Indians sleeping in their camp; falling on
them he killed three. Another time, when pursued by the same number of
foes, he loaded his rifle as he ran, and killed in succession the three
foremost, whereat the other fled. In all, he took over thirty scalps of
warriors, thus killing more Indians than were slain by either one of the
two large armies of Braddock and St. Clair during their disastrous
campaigns. Wetzel's frame, like his heart, was of steel. But his temper
was too sullen and unruly for him ever to submit to command or to bear
rule over others. His feats were performed when he was either alone or
with two or three associates. An army of such men would have been wholly
valueless.

Brady and his Scouts.

Another man, of a far higher type, was Captain Samuel Brady, already a
noted Indian fighter on the Alleghany. For many years after the close of
the Revolutionary war he was the chief reliance of the frontiersmen of
his own neighborhood. He had lost a father and a brother by the Indians;
and in return he followed the red men with relentless hatred. But he
never killed peaceful Indians nor those who came in under flags of
truce. The tale of his wanderings, his captivities, his hairbreadth
escapes, and deeds of individual prowess would fill a book. He
frequently went on scouts alone, either to procure information or to get
scalps. On these trips he was not only often reduced to the last
extremity by hunger, fatigue, and exposure, but was in hourly peril of
his life from the Indians he was hunting. Once he was captured; but when
about to be bound to the stake for burning, he suddenly flung an Indian
boy into the fire, and in the confusion burst through the warriors, and
actually made his escape, though the whole pack of yelling savages
followed at his heels with rifle and tomahawk. He raised a small company
of scouts or rangers, and was one of the very few captains able to
reduce the unruly frontiersmen to order. In consequence his company on
several occasions fairly whipped superior numbers of Indians in the
woods; a feat that no regulars could perform, and to which the
backwoodsmen themselves were generally unequal, even though an overmatch
for their foes singly, because of their disregard of discipline.
[Footnote: In the open plain the comparative prowess of these forest
Indians, of the backwoodsmen, and of trained regulars was exactly the
reverse of what it was in the woods.]

So, with foray and reprisal, and fierce private war, with all the border
in a flame, the year 1781 came to an end. At its close there were in
Kentucky seven hundred and sixty able-bodied militia, fit for an
offensive campaign. [Footnote: Letter of John Todd, October 21, 1781.
Virginia State Papers, II., 562. The troops at the Falls were in a very
destitute condition, with neither supplies nor money, and their credit
worn threadbare, able to get nothing from the surrounding country
(_do_., p. 313). In Clark's absence the colonel let his garrison be
insulted by the townspeople, and so brought the soldiers into contempt,
while some of the demoralized officers tampered with the public stores.
It was said that much dissipation prevailed in the garrison, to which
accusation Clark answered sarcastically: "However agreeable such conduct
might have been to their sentiments, I believe they seldom had the means
in their power, for they were generally in a starving condition" (_do_.,
Vol. III., pp. 347 and 359).] As this did not include the troops at the
Falls, nor the large shifting population, nor the "fort soldiers," the
weaker men, graybeards, and boys, who could handle a rifle behind a
stockade, it is probable that there were then somewhere between four and
five thousand souls in Kentucky.

CHAPTER V.

THE MORAVIAN MASSACRE, 1779-1782.

The Moravians.

After the Moravian Indians were led by their missionary pastors to the
banks of the Muskingum they dwelt peacefully and unharmed for several
years. In Lord Dunmore's war special care was taken by the white leaders
that these Quaker Indians should not be harmed; and their villages of
Salem, Gnadenhutten, and Schoenbrunn received no damage whatever. During
the early years of the Revolutionary struggle they were not molested,
but dwelt in peace and comfort in their roomy cabins of squared timbers,
cleanly and quiet, industriously tilling the soil, abstaining from all
strong drink, schooling their children, and keeping the Seventh Day as a
day of rest. They sought to observe strict neutrality, harming neither
the Americans nor the Indians, nor yet the allies of the latter, the
British and French at Detroit. They hoped thereby to offend neither
side, and to escape unhurt themselves.

But this was wholly impossible. They occupied an utterly untenable
position. Their villages lay mid-way between the white settlements
southeast of the Ohio, and the towns of the Indians round Sandusky, the
bitterest foes of the Americans, and those most completely under British
influence. They were on the trail that the war-parties followed whether
they struck at Kentucky or at the valleys of the Alleghany and
Monongahela. Consequently the Sandusky Indians used the Moravian
villages as halfway houses, at which to halt and refresh themselves
whether starting on a foray or returning with scalps and plunder.

The Wild Indians Hate Them.

By the time the war had lasted four or five years both the wild or
heathen Indians and the backwoodsmen had become fearfully exasperated
with the unlucky Moravians. The Sandusky Indians were largely Wyandots,
Shawnees, and Delawares, the latter being fellow-tribesmen of the
Christian Indians; and so they regarded the Moravians as traitors to the
cause of their kinsfolk, because they would not take up the hatchet
against the whites. As they could not goad them into declaring war, they
took malicious pleasure in trying to embroil them against their will,
and on returning from raids against the settlements often passed through
their towns solely to cast suspicion on them and to draw down the wrath
of the backwoodsmen on their heads. The British at Detroit feared lest
the Americans might use the Moravian villages as a basis from which to
attack the lake posts; they also coveted their men as allies; and so the
baser among their officers urged the Sandusky tribes to break up the
villages and drive off the missionaries. The other Indian tribes
likewise regarded them with angry contempt and hostility; the Iroquois
once sent word to the Chippewas and Ottawas that they gave them the
Christian Indians "to make broth of."

So Do the Americans.

The Americans became even more exasperated. The war parties that
plundered and destroyed their homes, killing their wives, children, and
friends with torments too appalling to mention, got shelter and
refreshment from the Moravians, [Footnote: Heckewelder's "Narrative of
the Mission of the United Brethren," Philadelphia, 1820, p. 166.]
--who, indeed, dared not refuse it. The backwoodsmen, roused to a mad
frenzy of rage by the awful nature of their wrongs, saw that the
Moravians rendered valuable help to their cruel and inveterate foes, and
refused to see that the help was given with the utmost reluctance.
Moreover, some of the young Christian Indians backslid, and joined their
savage brethren, accompanying them on their war parties and ravaging
with as much cruelty as any of their number. [Footnote: _Pennsylvania
Packet_ (Philadelphia, April 16, 1782); Heckewelder, 180; Loskiel's
"History of the Mission of the United Brethren" (London, 1794), P--172.
] Soon the frontiersmen began to clamor for the destruction of the
Moravian towns; yet for a little while they were restrained by the
Continental officers of the few border forts, who always treated these
harmless Indians with the utmost kindness.

They Blindly Court their Fate.

On either side were foes, who grew less governable day by day, and the
fate of the hapless and peaceful Moravians, if they continued to dwell
on the Muskingum, was absolutely inevitable. With blind fatuity their
leaders, the missionaries, refused to see the impending doom; and the
poor, simple Indians clung to their homes till destroyed. The American
commander at Pittsburg, Col. Gibson, endeavored to get them to come into
the American lines, where he would have the power, as he already had the
wish, to protect them; he pointed out that where they were they served
in some sort as a shield to the wild Indians, whom he had to spare so as
not to harm the Moravians. [Footnote: Loskiel, p. 137.] The Half King
of the Wyandots, from the other side, likewise tried to persuade them
to abandon their dangerous position, and to come well within the Indian
and British lines, saying: "Two mighty and angry gods stand opposite to
each other with their mouths wide open, and you are between them, and
are in danger of being crushed by one or the other, or by both."
[Footnote: State Department MSS., No. 41, Vol. III., pp. 78, 79; extract
from diary of Rev. David Zeisburger.] But in spite of these warnings,
and heedless of the safety that would have followed the adoption of
either course, the Moravians followed the advice of their missionaries
and continued where they were. They suffered greatly from the wanton
cruelty of their red brethren; and their fate remains a monument to
the cold-blooded and cowardly brutality of the borderers, a stain on
frontier character that the lapse of time cannot wash away; but it is
singular that historians have not yet pointed out the obvious truth,
that no small share of the blame for their sad end should be put to
the credit of the blind folly of their missionary leaders. Their only
hope in such a conflict as was then raging, was to be removed from
their fatally dangerous position; and this the missionaries would not
see. As long at they stayed where they were, it was a mere question of
chance and time whether they would be destroyed by the Indians or the
whites; for their destruction at the hands of either one party or the
other was inevitable.

Their fate was not due to the fact that they were Indians; it resulted
from their occupying an absolutely false position. This is clearly shown
by what happened twenty years previously to a small community of
non-resistant Christian whites. They were Dunkards--Quaker-like
Germans--who had built a settlement on the Monongahela. As they helped
neither side, both distrusted and hated them. The whites harassed them
in every way, and the Indians finally fell upon and massacred them.
[Footnote: Withers, 59.] The fates of these two communities, of white
Dunkards and red Moravians, were exactly parallel. Each became hateful
to both sets of combatants, was persecuted by both, and finally fell a
victim to the ferocity of the race to which it did not belong.

Evil Conduct of the Backwoodsmen.

The conduct of the backwoodsmen towards these peaceful and harmless
Christian Indians was utterly abhorrent, and will ever be a subject of
just reproach and condemnation; and at first sight it seems incredible
that the perpetrators of so vile a deed should have gone unpunished and
almost unblamed. It is a dark blot on the character of a people that
otherwise had many fine and manly qualities to its credit. But the
extraordinary conditions of life on the frontier must be kept in mind
before passing too severe a judgment. In the turmoil of the harassing
and long-continued Indian war, and the consequent loosening of social
bonds, it was inevitable that, as regards outside matters, each man
should do what seemed right in his own eyes. The bad and the good alike
were left free and untrammelled to follow the bent of their desires. The
people had all they could do to beat off their savage enemies, and to
keep order among themselves. They were able to impose but slight checks
on ruffianism that was aimed at outsiders. There were plenty of good and
upright men who would not harm any Indians wrongfully, and who treated
kindly those who were peaceable. On the other hand, there were many of
violent and murderous temper. These knew that their neighbors would
actively resent any wrong done to themselves, but knew, also, that,
under the existing conditions, they would at the worst do nothing more
than openly disapprove of an outrage perpetrated on Indians.

Its Explanation.

The violence of the bad is easily understood. The indifference displayed
towards their actions by the better men of the community, who were
certainly greatly in the majority, is harder to explain. It rose from
varying causes. In the first place, the long continuance of Indian
warfare, and the unspeakable horrors that were its invariable
accompaniments had gradually wrought up many even of the best of the
backwoodsmen to the point where they barely considered an Indian as a
human being. The warrior was not to them a creature of romance. They
knew him for what he was--filthy, cruel, lecherous, and faithless. He
sometimes had excellent qualities, but these they seldom had a chance to
see. They always met him at his worst. To them he was in peace a lazy,
dirty, drunken beggar, whom they despised, and yet whom they feared; for
the squalid, contemptible creature might at any moment be transformed
into a foe whose like there was not to be found in all the wide world
for ferocity, cunning, and blood-thirsty cruelty. The greatest Indians,
chiefs like Logan and Cornstalk, who were capable of deeds of the
loftiest and most sublime heroism, were also at times cruel monsters or
drunken good-for-nothings. Their meaner followers had only such virtues
as belong to the human wolf--stealth, craft, tireless endurance, and the
courage that prefers to prey on the helpless, but will fight to the
death without flinching if cornered.

Grimness of the Backwoods Character.

Moreover, the backwoodsmen were a hard people; a people who still lived
in an iron age. They did not spare themselves, nor those who were dear
to them; far less would they spare their real or possible foes. Their
lives were often stern and grim; they were wonted to hardship and
suffering. In the histories or traditions of the different families
there are recorded many tales of how they sacrificed themselves, and, in
time of need, sacrificed others. The mother who was a captive among the
Indians might lay down her life for her child; but if she could not save
it, and to stay with it forbade her own escape it was possible that she
would kiss it good-by and leave it to its certain fate, while she
herself, facing death at every step, fled homewards through hundreds of
miles of wilderness. [Footnote: See Hale's "Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,"
the adventures of Mrs. Inglis. She was captured on the head-waters of
the Kanawha, at the time of Braddock's defeat. The other inhabitants of
the settlement were also taken prisoners or massacred by the savages,
whom they had never wronged in any way. She was taken to the Big Bone
Lick in Kentucky. On the way her baby was born, but she was not allowed
to halt a day on account of this incident. She left it in the Indian
camp, and made her escape in company with "an old Dutch woman." They
lived on berries and nuts for forty days, while they made their way
homewards. Both got in safely, though they separated after the old Dutch
woman, in the extremity of hunger, had tried to kill her companion that
she might eat her. When Cornstalk's party perpetrated the massacre of
the Clendennins during Pontiac's war (see Stewart's Narrative), Mrs.
Clendennin likewise left her baby to its death, and made her escape; her
husband had previously been killed and his bloody scalp tied across her
jaws as a gag.] The man who daily imperilled his own life, would, if
water was needed in the fort, send his wife and daughter to draw it from
the spring round which he knew Indians lurked, trusting that the
appearance of the women would make the savages think themselves
undiscovered, and that they would therefore defer their attack.
[Footnote: As at the siege of Bryan's Station.] Such people were not
likely to spare their red-skinned foes. Many of their friends, who had
never hurt the savages in any way, had perished the victims of wanton
aggression. They themselves had seen innumerable instances of Indian
treachery. They had often known the chiefs of a tribe to profess warm
friendship at the very moment that their young men were stealing and
murdering. They grew to think of even the most peaceful Indians as
merely sleeping wild beasts, and while their own wrongs were ever
vividly before them, they rarely heard of or heeded those done to their
foes. In a community where every strong courageous man was a bulwark to
the rest, he was sure to be censured lightly for merely killing a member
of a loathed and hated race.

Many of the best of the backwoodsmen were Bible-readers, but they were
brought up in a creed that made much of the Old Testament, and laid
slight stress on pity, truth, or mercy. They looked at their foes as the
Hebrew prophets looked at the enemies of Israel. What were the
abominations because of which the Canaanites were destroyed before
Joshua, when compared with the abominations of the red savages whose
lands they, another chosen people, should in their turn inherit? They
believed that the Lord was king for ever and ever, and they believed no
less that they were but obeying His commandment as they strove mightily
to bring about the day when the heathen should have perished out of the
land; for they had read in The Book that he was accursed who did the
work of the Lord deceitfully, or kept his sword back from blood. There
was many a stern frontier zealot who deemed all the red men, good and
bad, corn ripe for the reaping. Such a one rejoiced to see his fellows
do to the harmless Moravians as the Danites once did to the people of
Laish, who lived quiet and secure, after the manner of the Sidonians,
and had no business with any man, and who yet were smitten with the edge
of the sword, and their city burnt with fire.

The Moravians Themselves not Blameless.

Finally, it must not be forgotten that there were men on the frontier
who did do their best to save the peaceful Indians, and that there were
also many circumstances connected with the latter that justly laid them
open to suspicion. When young backsliding Moravians appeared in the war
parties, as cruel and murderous as their associates, the whites were
warranted in feeling doubtful as to whether their example might not
infect the remainder of their people. War parties, whose members in
dreadful derision left women and children impaled by their trail to
greet the sight of the pursuing husbands and fathers, found food and
lodging at the Moravian towns. No matter how reluctant the aid thus
given, the pursuers were right in feeling enraged, and in demanding that
the towns should be removed to where they could no longer give comfort
to the enemy. When the missionaries refused to consent to this removal,
they thereby became helpers of the hostile Indians; they wronged the
frontiersmen, and they still more grievously wronged their own flocks.
They certainly had ample warning of the temper of the whites. Col.
Brodhead was in command at Fort Pitt until the end of 1781. At the time
that General Sullivan ravaged the country of the Six Nations, he had led
a force up the Alleghany and created a diversion by burning one or two
Iroquois towns. In 1781 he led a successful expedition against a town of
hostile Delawares on the Muskingum, taking it by surprise and
surrounding it so completely that all within were captured. Sixteen
noted warriors and marauders were singled out and put to death. The
remainder fared but little better, for, while marching back to Fort
Pitt, the militia fell on them and murdered all the men, leaving only
the women and children. The militia also started to attack the
Moravians, and were only prevented by the strenuous exertions of
Brodhead. Even this proof of the brutality of their neighbors was wasted
on the missionaries.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29