Books: The Old Northwest, A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond
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Frederic Austin Ogg >> The Old Northwest, A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond
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11 The Old Northwest, A Chronicle Of The Ohio Valley And Beyond
By Frederic Austin Ogg
New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.91
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1919
CONTENTS
I. PONTIAC'S CONSPIRACY
II. "A LAIR OF WILD BEASTS"
III. THE REVOLUTION BEGINS
IV. THE CONQUEST COMPLETED
V. WAYNE, THE SCOURGE OF THE INDIANS
VI. THE GREAT MIGRATION
VII. PIONEER DAYS AND WAYS
VIII. TECUMSEH
IX. THE WAR OF 1812 AND THE NEW WEST
X. SECTIONAL CROSS CURRENTS
XI. THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The Old Northwest
Chapter I. Pontiac's Conspiracy
The fall of Montreal, on September 8, 1760, while the plains
about the city were still dotted with the white tents of the
victorious English and colonial troops, was indeed an event of
the deepest consequence to America and to the world. By the
articles of capitulation which were signed by the Marquis de
Vaudreuil, Governor of New France, Canada and all its
dependencies westward to the Mississippi passed to the British
Crown. Virtually ended was the long struggle for the dominion of
the New World. Open now for English occupation and settlement was
that vast country lying south of the Great Lakes between the Ohio
and the Mississippi--which we know as the Old Northwest--today
the seat of five great commonwealths of the United States.
With an ingenuity born of necessity, the French pathfinders and
colonizers of the Old Northwest had chosen for their settlements
sites which would serve at once the purposes of the priest, the
trader, and the soldier; and with scarcely an exception these
sites are as important today as when they were first selected.
Four regions, chiefly, were still occupied by the French at the
time of the capitulation of Montreal. The most important, as well
as the most distant, of these regions was on the east bank of the
Mississippi, opposite and below the present city of St. Louis,
where a cluster of missions, forts, and trading-posts held the
center of the tenuous line extending from Canada to Louisiana. A
second was the Illinois country, centering about the citadel of
St. Louis which La Salle had erected in 1682 on the summit of
"Starved Rock," near the modern town of Ottawa in Illinois. A
third was the valley of the Wabash, where in the early years of
the eighteenth century Vincennes had become the seat of a colony
commanding both the Wabash and the lower Ohio. And the fourth was
the western end of Lake Erie, where Detroit, founded by the
doughty Cadillac in 1701, had assumed such strength that for
fifty years it had discouraged the ambitions of the English to
make the Northwest theirs.
Sir Jeffrey Amherst, to whom Vaudreuil surrendered in 1760,
forthwith dispatched to the western country a military force to
take possession of the posts still remaining in the hands of the
French. The mission was entrusted to a stalwart New Hampshire
Scotch-Irishman, Major Robert Rogers, who as leader of a band of
intrepid "rangers" had made himself the hero of the northern
frontier. Two hundred men were chosen for the undertaking, and on
the 13th of September the party, in fifteen whaleboats, started
up the St. Lawrence for Detroit.
At the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, near the site of the present
city of Cleveland, the travelers were halted by a band of Indian
chiefs and warriors who, in the name of their great ruler
Pontiac, demanded to know the object of their journeying. Parleys
followed, in which Pontiac himself took part, and it was
explained that the French had surrendered Canada to the English
and that the English merely proposed to assume control of the
western posts, with a view to friendly relations between the red
men and the white men. The rivers, it was promised, would flow
with rum, and presents from the great King would be forthcoming
in endless profusion. The explanation seemed to satisfy the
savages, and, after smoking the calumet with due ceremony, the
chieftain and his followers withdrew.
Late in November, Rogers and his men in their whaleboats appeared
before the little palisaded town of Detroit. They found the
French commander, Beletre, in surly humor and seeking to stir up
the neighboring Wyandots and Potawatomi against them. But the
attempt failed, and there was nothing for Beletre to do but
yield. The French soldiery marched out of the fort, laid down
their arms, and were sent off as prisoners down the river. The
fleur-de-lis, which for more than half a century had floated over
the village, was hauled down, and, to the accompaniment of
cheers, the British ensign was run up. The red men looked on with
amazement at this display of English authority and marveled how
the conquerors forbore to slay their vanquished enemies on the
spot.
Detroit in 1760 was a picturesque, lively, and rapidly growing
frontier town. The central portions of the settlement, lying
within the bounds of the present city, contained ninety or a
hundred small houses, chiefly of wood and roofed with bark or
thatch. A well-built range of barracks afforded quarters for the
soldiery, and there were two public buildings--a council house
and a little church. The whole was surrounded by a square
palisade twenty-five feet high, with a wooden bastion at each
corner and a blockhouse over each gateway. A broad passageway,
the chemin du ronde, lay next to the palisade, and on little
narrow streets at the center the houses were grouped closely
together.
Above and below the fort the banks of the river were lined on
both sides, for a distance of eight or nine miles, with little
rectangular farms, so laid out as to give each a water-landing.
On each farm was a cottage, with a garden and orchard, surrounded
by a fence of rounded pickets; and the countryside rang with the
shouts and laughter of a prosperous and happy peasantry. Within
the limits of the settlement were villages of Ottawas,
Potawatomi, and Wyandots, with whose inhabitants the French lived
on free and easy terms. "The joyous sparkling of the bright blue
water," writes Parkman; "the green luxuriance of the woods; the
white dwellings, looking out from the foliage; and in the
distance the Indian wigwams curling their smoke against the
sky--all were mingled in one broad scene of wild and rural
beauty."
At the coming of the English the French residents were given an
opportunity to withdraw. Few, however, did so, and from the
gossipy correspondence of the pleasure-loving Colonel Campbell,
who for some months was left in command of the fort, it appears
that the life of the place lost none of its gayety by the change
of masters. Sunday card parties at the quarters of the commandant
were festive affairs; and at a ball held in celebration of the
King's birthday the ladies presented an appearance so splendid as
to call forth from the impressionable officer the most
extravagant praises. A visit in the summer of 1761 from Sir
William Johnson, general supervisor of Indian affairs on the
frontier, became the greatest social event in the history of the
settlement, if not of the entire West. Colonel Campbell gave a
ball at which the guests danced nine hours. Sir William
reciprocated with one at which they danced eleven hours. A round
of dinners and calls gave opportunity for much display of
frontier magnificence, as well as for the consumption of
astonishing quantities of wines and cordials. Hundreds of Indians
were interested spectators, and the gifts with which they were
generously showered were received with evidences of deep
satisfaction.
No amount of fiddling and dancing, however, could quite drown
apprehension concerning the safety of the post and the security
of the English hold upon the great region over which this fort
and its distant neighbors stood sentinel. Thousands of square
miles of territory were committed to the keeping of not more than
six hundred soldiers. From the French there was little danger.
But from the Indians anything might be expected. Apart from the
Iroquois, the red men had been bound to the French by many ties
of friendship and common interest, and in the late war they had
scalped and slaughtered and burned unhesitatingly at the French
command. Hardly, indeed, had the transfer of territorial
sovereignty been made before murmurs of discontent began to be
heard.
Notwithstanding outward expressions of assent to the new order of
things, a deep-rooted dislike on the part of the Indians for the
English grew after 1760 with great rapidity. They sorely missed
the gifts and supplies lavishly provided by the French, and they
warmly resented the rapacity and arrogance of the British
traders. The open contempt of the soldiery at the posts galled
the Indians, and the confiscation of their lands drove them to
desperation. In their hearts hope never died that the French
would regain their lost dominion; and again and again rumors were
set afloat that this was about to happen. The belief in such a
reconquest was adroitly encouraged, too, by the surviving French
settlers and traders. In 1761 the tension among the Indians was
increased by the appearance of a "prophet" among the Delawares,
calling on all his race to purge itself of foreign influences and
to unite to drive the white man from the land.
Protests against English encroachments were frequent and, though
respectful, none the less emphatic. At a conference in
Philadelphia in 1761, an Iroquois sachem declared, "We, your
Brethren, of the several Nations, are penned up like Hoggs. There
are Forts all around us, and therefore we are apprehensive that
Death is coming upon us." "We are now left in Peace," ran a
petition of some Christian Oneidas addressed to Sir William
Johnson, "and have nothing to do but to plant our Corn, Hunt the
wild Beasts, smoke our Pipes, and mind Religion. But as these
Forts, which are built among us, disturb our Peace, and are a
great hurt to Religion, because some of our Warriors are foolish,
and some of our Brother Soldiers don't fear God, we therefore
desire that these Forts may be pull'd down, and kick'd out of the
way."
The leadership of the great revolt that was impending fell
naturally upon Pontiac, who, since the coming of the English, had
established himself with his squaws and children on a wooded
island in Lake St. Clair, barely out of view of the
fortifications of Detroit. In all Indian annals no name is more
illustrious than Pontiac's; no figure more forcefully displays
the good and bad qualities of his race. Principal chief of the
Ottawa tribe, he was also by 1763 the head of a powerful
confederation of Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomi, and a leader
known and respected among Algonquin peoples from the sources of
the Ohio to the Mississippi. While capable of acts of
magnanimity, he had an ambition of Napoleonic proportions, and to
attain his ends he was prepared to use any means. More clearly
than most of his forest contemporaries, he perceived that in the
life of the Indian people a crisis had come. He saw that, unless
the tide of English invasion was rolled back at once, all would
be lost. The colonial farmers would push in after the soldiers;
the forests would be cut away; the hunting-grounds would be
destroyed; the native population would be driven away or
enslaved. In the silence of his wigwam he thought out a plan of
action, and by the closing weeks of 1762 he was ready. Never was
plot more shrewdly devised and more artfully carried out.
During the winter of 1762-63 his messengers passed stealthily
from nation to nation throughout the whole western country,
bearing the pictured wampum belts and the reddened tomahawks
which symbolized war; and in April, 1763, the Lake tribes were
summoned to a great council on the banks of the Ecorces, below
Detroit, where Pontiac in person proclaimed the will of the
Master of Life as revealed to the Delaware prophet, and then
announced the details of his plan. Everywhere the appeal met with
approval; and not only the scores of Algonquin peoples, but also
the Seneca branch of the Iroquois confederacy and a number of
tribes on the lower Mississippi, pledged themselves with all
solemnity to fulfill their prophet's injunction "to drive the
dogs which wear red clothing into the sea." While keen-eyed
warriors sought to keep up appearances by lounging about the
forts and begging in their customary manner for tobacco, whiskey,
and gunpowder, every wigwam and forest hamlet from Niagara to the
Mississippi was astir. Dusky maidens chanted the tribal
war-songs, and in the blaze of a hundred camp-fires chiefs and
warriors performed the savage pantomime of battle.
A simultaneous attack, timed by a change of the moon, was to be
made on the English forts and settlements throughout all the
western country. Every tribe was to fall upon the settlement
nearest at hand, and afterwards all were to combine--with French
aid, it was confidently believed--in an assault on the seats of
English power farther east. The honor of destroying the most
important of the English strongholds, Detroit, was reserved for
Pontiac himself.
The date fixed for the rising was the 7th of May. Six days in
advance Pontiac with forty of his warriors appeared at the fort,
protested undying friendship for the Great Father across the
water, and insisted on performing the calumet dance before the
new commandant, Major Gladwyn. This aroused no suspicion. But
four days later a French settler reported that his wife, when
visiting the Ottawa village to buy venison, had observed the men
busily filing off the ends of their gunbarrels; and the
blacksmith at the post recalled the fact that the Indians had
lately sought to borrow files and saws without being able to give
a plausible explanation of the use they intended to make of the
implements.
The English traveler Jonathan Carver, who visited the post five
years afterwards, relates that an Ottawa girl with whom Major
Gladwyn had formed an attachment betrayed the plot. Though this
story is of doubtful authenticity, there is no doubt that, in one
way or another, the commandant was amply warned that treachery
was in the air. The sounds of revelry from the Indian camps, the
furtive glances of the redskins lounging about the settlement,
the very tension of the atmosphere, would have been enough to put
an experienced Indian fighter on his guard.
Accordingly when, on the fated morning, Pontiac and sixty
redskins, carrying under long blankets their shortened muskets,
appeared before the fort and asked admission, they were taken
aback to find the whole garrison under arms. On their way from
the gate to the council house they were obliged to march
literally between rows of glittering steel. Well might even
Pontiac falter. With uneasy glances, the party crowded into the
council room, where Gladwyn and his officers sat waiting. "Why,"
asked the chieftain stolidly, "do I see so many of my father's
young men standing in the street with their guns?" "To keep them
in training," was the laconic reply.
The scene that was planned was then carried out, except in one
vital particular. When, in the course of his speech professing
strong attachment to the English, the chieftain came to the point
where he was to give the signal for slaughter by holding forth
the wampum belt of peace inverted, he presented the emblem--to
the accompaniment of a significant clash of arms and roll of
drums from the mustered garrison outside--in the normal manner;
and after a solemn warning from the commandant that vengeance
would follow any act of aggression, the council broke up. To the
forest leader's equivocal announcement that he would bring all of
his wives and children in a few days to shake hands with their
English fathers, Gladwyn deigned no reply.
Balked in his plans, the chief retired, but only to meditate
fresh treachery; and when, a few days later, with a multitude of
followers, he sought admission to the fort to assure "his
fathers" that "evil birds had sung lies in their ears," and was
refused, he called all his forces to arms, threw off his
disguises, and began hostilities. For six months the settlement
was besieged with a persistence rarely displayed in Indian
warfare. At first the French inhabitants encouraged the
besiegers, but, after it became known that a final peace between
England and France had been concluded, they withheld further aid.
Throughout the whole period, the English obtained supplies with
no great difficulty from the neighboring farms. There was little
actual fighting, and the loss of life was insignificant.
By order of General Amherst, the French commander still in charge
of Fort Chartres sent a messenger to inform the redskins
definitely that no assistance from France would be forthcoming.
"Forget then, my dear children,"--so ran the admonition--"all
evil talks. Leave off from spilling the blood of your brethren,
the English. Our hearts are now but one; you cannot, at present,
strike the one without having the other for an enemy also." The
effect was, as intended, to break the spirit of the besiegers;
and in October Pontiac humbly sued for peace.
Meanwhile a reign of terror spread over the entire frontier.
Settlements from Forts Le Boeuf and Venango, south of Lake Eric,
to Green Bay, west of Lake Michigan, were attacked, and ruses
similar to that attempted at Detroit were generally successful. A
few Indians in friendly guise would approach a fort. After these
were admitted, others would appear, as if quite by chance.
Finally, when numbers were sufficient, the conspirators would
draw their concealed weapons, strike down the garrison, and begin
a general massacre of the helpless populace. Scores of pioneer
families, scattered through the wilderness, were murdered and
scalped; traders were waylaid in the forest solitudes; border
towns were burned and plantations were devastated. In the Ohio
Valley everything was lost except Fort Pitt, formerly Fort
Duquesne; in the Northwest, everything was taken except Detroit.
Fort Pitt was repeatedly endangered, and the most important
engagement of the war was fought in its defense. The relief of
the post was entrusted in midsummer to a force of five hundred
regulars lately transferred from the West Indies to Pennsylvania
and placed under the command of Colonel Henry Bouquet. The
expedition advanced with all possible caution, but early in
August, 1763, when it was yet twenty-five miles from its
destination, it was set upon by a formidable Indian band at Bushy
Run and threatened with a fate not un-like that suffered by
Braddock's little army in the same region nine years earlier.
Finding the woods full of redskins and all retreat cut off, the
troops, drawn up in a circle around their horses and supplies,
fired with such effect as they could upon the shadowy forms in
the forest. No water was obtainable, and in a few hours thirst
began to make the soldiery unmanageable. Realizing that the
situation was desperate, Bouquet resorted to a ruse by ordering
his men to fall back as if in retreat. The trick succeeded, and
with yells of victory the Indians rushed from cover to seize the
coveted provisions--only to be met by a deadly fire and put to
utter rout. The news of the battle of Bushy Run spread rapidly
through the frontier regions and proved very effective in
discouraging further hostilities.
It was Bouquet's intention to press forward at once from Fort
Pitt into the disturbed Ohio country. His losses, however,
compelled the postponement of this part of the undertaking until
the following year. Before he started off again he built at Fort
Pitt a blockhouse which still stands, and which has been
preserved for posterity by becoming, in 1894, the property of the
Pittsburgh chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
In October, 1764, he set out for the Muskingum valley with a
force of fifteen hundred regulars, Pennsylvania and Virginia
volunteers, and friendly Indians. By this time the great
conspiracy was in collapse, and it was a matter of no great
difficulty for Bouquet to enter into friendly relations with the
successive tribes, to obtain treaties with them, and to procure
the release of such English captives as were still in their
hands. By the close of November, 1764, the work was complete, and
Bouquet was back at Fort Pitt. Pennsylvania and Virginia honored
him with votes of thanks; the King formally expressed his
gratitude and tendered him the military governorship of the newly
acquired territory of Florida.
The general pacification of the Northwest was accomplished by
treaties with the natives in great councils held at Niagara,
Presqu'isle (Erie), and Detroit. Pontiac had fled to the Maumee
country to the west of Lake Erie, whence he still hurled his
ineffectual threats at the "dogs in red." His power, however, was
broken. The most he could do was to gather four hundred warriors
on the Maumee and Illinois and present himself at Fort Chartres
with a demand for weapons and ammunition with which to keep up
the war. The French commander, who was now daily awaiting orders
to turn the fortress over to the English, refused; and a
deputation dispatched to New Orleans in quest of the desired
equipment received no reply save that New Orleans itself, with
all the country west of the river, had been ceded to Spain. The
futility of further resistance on the part of Pontiac was
apparent. In 1765 the disappointed chieftain gave pledges of
friendship; and in the following year he and other leaders made a
formal submission to Sir William Johnson at Oswego, and Pontiac
renounced forever the bold design to make himself at a stroke
lord of the West and deliverer of his country from English
domination.
For three years the movements of this disappointed Indian leader
are uncertain. Most of the time, apparently, he dwelt in the
Maumee country, leading the existence of an ordinary warrior.
Then, in the spring of 1769, he appeared at the settlements on
the middle Mississippi. At the newly founded French town of St.
Louis, on the Spanish side of the river, he visited an old
friend, the commandant Saint Ange de Bellerive. Thence he crossed
to Cahokia, where Indian and creole alike welcomed him and made
him the central figure in a series of boisterous festivities.
An English trader in the village, observing jealously the honors
that were paid the visitor, resolved that an old score should
forthwith be evened up. A Kaskaskian redskin was bribed, with a
barrel of liquor and with promises of further reward, to put the
fallen leader out of the way; and the bargain was hardly sealed
before the deed was done. Stealing upon his victim as he walked
in the neighboring forest, the assassin buried a tomahawk in his
brain, and "thus basely," in the words of Parkman, "perished the
champion of a ruined race." Claimed by Saint-Ange, the body was
borne across the river and buried with military honors near the
new Fort St. Louis. The site of Pontiac's grave was soon
forgotten, and today the people of a great city trample over and
about it without heed.
Chapter II. "A Lair Of Wild Beasts"
Benjamin Franklin, who was in London in 1760 as agent of the
Pennsylvania Assembly, gave the British ministers some wholesome
advice on the terms of the peace that should be made with France.
The St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes regions, he said, must be
retained by England at all costs. Moreover, the Mississippi
Valley must be taken, in order to provide for the growing
populations of the seaboard colonies suitable lands in the
interior, and so keep them engaged in agriculture. Otherwise
these populations would turn to manufacturing, and the industries
of the mother country would suffer.
The treaty of peace, three years later, brought the settlement
which Franklin suggested. The vast American back country, with
its inviting rivers and lakes, its shaded hills, and its sunny
prairies, became English territory. The English people had,
however, only the vaguest notion of the extent, appearance, and
resources of their new possession. Even the officials who drew
the treaty were as ignorant of the country as of middle Africa.
Prior to the outbreak of the war no widely known English writer
had tried to describe it; and the absorbing French books of
Lahontan, Hennepin, and Charlevoix had reached but a small
circle. The prolonged conflict in America naturally stimulated
interest in the new country. The place-names of the upper Ohio
became household words, and enterprising publishers put out not
only translations of the French writers but compilations by
Englishmen designed, in true journalistic fashion, to meet the
demands of the hour for information.
These publications displayed amazing misconceptions of the lands
described. They neither estimated aright the number and strength
of the French settlements nor dispelled the idea that the western
country was of little value. Even the most brilliant Englishman
of the day, Dr. Samuel Johnson, an ardent defender of the treaty
of 1763, wrote that the large tracts of America added by the war
to the British dominions were "only the barren parts of the
continent, the refuse of the earlier adventurers, which the
French, who came last, had taken only as better than nothing." As
late indeed as 1789, William Knox, long Under-Secretary for the
Colonies, declared that Americans could not settle the western
territory "for ages," and that the region must be given up to
barbarism like the plains of Asia, with a population as unstable
as the Scythians and Tartars. But the shortsightedness of these
distant critics can be forgiven when one recalls that Franklin
himself, while conjuring up a splendid vision of the western
valleys teeming with a thriving population, supposed that the
dream would not be realized for "some centuries." None of these
observers dreamt that the territories transferred in 1763 would
have within seventy-five years a population almost equal to that
of Great Britain.
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