Part 3

It is believed that six hundred others were never given up. The captives were not always glad to go back to their old homes, and the Indians had sometimes to use force in bringing them to the camp where their friends and kindred who had come with Bouquet’s army were waiting to receive them. Many had been taken from their homes when they were so young that they could not remember them, and they had learned to love the Indians, who had brought them up like their own children, and treated them as lovingly as the fathers and mothers from whom they had been stolen. In the charm of the savage life these children of white parents had really become savages; and certain of the young girls had grown up and married Indian husbands to whom they were tenderly attached. The scenes of

## parting between all these were very touching on both sides, and it is

told of one Indian who had married a Virginian girl that he followed her back to the frontier at the risk of his life from her people. The Indians gave up the captives often so dear to them, with tears and lamentations, while on the other hand their kindred waited to receive them in an anguish of hope and fear. As the captives came into the camp, parents sought among them for the little ones they had lost, and husbands for the wives who had been snatched from their desolated homes. Brothers and sisters met after a parting so long that one or other had forgotten the language they once spoke in common. The Indians still hung about the camp, and came every day to visit their former prisoners and bring them gifts. When the army took up its march some of them asked leave to follow it back to Fort Pitt, and on the way they supplied their adopted children and brothers with game, and sought in every way to show their love for them.

Bouquet reached Pittsburg in ten days, without the loss of a single life at the hands of the savages, and with all his men in excellent health. Each day of his march he had pitched his camp among scenes of sylvan loveliness, on the banks of the pleasant streams that watered the fertile levels and the wild meadows, or wound through the rich valleys between the low hills. It would have been wonderful if his Pennsylvanian and Virginian recruits had not looked upon the land with covetous eyes: even the fathers and husbands and brothers who had come seeking their kindred among the Indians, had seen it with a longing to plant their homes in it. Its charms had been revealed to great numbers of the people who had known of it only from the traders before, and the savage was doomed from that time to lose it; for it already belonged to the king of England, and it rested with the English colonists to come and take it; or so, at least, they thought.

IV. THE FORTY YEARS’ WAR FOR THE WEST.

The French king gave up the West to the English king in 1763, but, as we have seen, the Indians had no part in the bargain. They only knew that they were handed over by those who had been their friends to those who had been their enemies, and they did not consent. They had made war upon the English colonists before, and now, in spite of the failure of Pontiac, and in spite of Bouquet’s march into the Ohio country, they kept up their warfare for forty years, with a truce when it was convenient, and a treaty of peace when it was convenient, but with a steadfast purpose to drive the English settlers out, and to hold the wilderness for themselves. It was not until long after their power was broken by the American arms in 1794 that their struggle ended in the region which ten years later became the state of Ohio.

There was misunderstanding on both sides. The Indians naturally supposed that their own country belonged to them, and the colonists supposed that their eastern and western borders were the two oceans. These were commonly the boundaries which the English king had given them; and when he had not been quite clear about it in his grants of territory which he had never even imagined, they did not allow him to deal less splendidly with them than such a prince ought. He had, as we know, given the Ohio Company of Virginia a large tract of the best land beyond the Ohio even while the French still claimed the West, and he had encouraged the Virginians to believe they had a right to settle it and to fortify it. But after the capture of Quebec, when the West, as well as Canada, fell into the power of Great Britain, the English king, or rather his ministers, began to change their minds about letting the colonists take up lands in the Back Country, as they called it. The jealousy between the colonies grew less, but the jealousy between them and Great Britain grew greater; there were outbreaks here and there against her rule, and there was discontent nearly everywhere. The colonists were disappointed and embittered that the West should be treated as a part of Canada, by the mother country, when it ought to have been shared among the English provinces. The British government tried to hinder the settlement of the whites on the Indians’ lands; and though it could not keep them off altogether, it did enough to make the savages feel that it was their friend against its own subjects. In 1774, Parliament passed a law which declared the whole West, between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and below the Great Lakes, a part of the Province of Quebec. This was felt by our colonies to be so great an injury that it was charged against Great Britain in the Declaration of Independence, as one of the causes for separation. It was in fact an act hostile to a people of the British race, language, and religion, and it was meant not so much to help the savages, as to hurt the colonists, though it did really help the savages. When the Revolutionary War broke out a year or two later, the British government did not scruple to make use of the cruel hatred of the Indians against its rebellious subjects.

[Illustration: Indian war parties joining the English 047]

It set on the war parties that harried the American border, and when the blood-stained braves came back with their plunder, their captives, and the scalps of the men, women, and children they had murdered, they were welcomed at the British forts as friends and allies. In certain cases, to be sure, British officers did what they could to soften the hard fate of the prisoners, but the British government was guilty, nevertheless, of the barbarous deeds done by the Indians. Its agents furnished them with arms and ammunition, and its ministers upheld them in the same atrocities against the American rebels as the French in their time had urged and tempted them to commit against the settlers when they were English subjects.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Indians were as slow to lay down their arms as they had been after the French War. In each case they fought the victors, as far as they could get at them in the persons of the hapless backwoodsmen and their wives and children. These backwoodsmen did not change greatly, in their way of life, during that long Indian war of forty years. They were of the hardy English, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish stock which a generation or two in the wilderness had toughened and strengthened. They had not yet ciphered it out that one red hunter and trapper must waste the fifty thousand acres which would support the families of a hundred white farmers in comfort and prosperity; but they knew that to the westward there was a region, vast and rich beyond anything words could say, and they longed to possess it, with a hunger that was sometimes a pitiless greed, and always a resistless desire. Yet it was not until the French gave up this region that they could even venture lawlessly into it, and it was not until it fell from Great Britain to the new power of the United States that the borderers began openly to press into the backwoods, singly as hunters and trappers, in families as neighborhoods as the founders of villages and towns. The pioneers felt that they were going to take their own wherever they found it, from the savages who could not and would not use it, and they were right, for the land truly belongs to him who will use it. The savages felt that the pioneers were coming to take their own from them, for in their way they were using the land; and they were right, too. All that is left for us to ask at this late day is which could use the land best and most; and there can hardly be any doubt of the answer.

[Illustration: Pioneers 049L]

To understand the situation clearly, the reader must keep in mind certain dates. Céloron de Bienville visited the Miamis in 1749, and the French kept the Ohio Indians on the warpath against the English settlements to the eastward until 1763, when they gave up the West to Great Britain. Then, until 1775, the savages alone fought the settlers as the subjects of the English king. The Revolutionary War broke out, and the Indians became the allies of the British. Then, in 1783, their country was given up to the United States, and they still fought their old enemies, who had not changed their nature by changing their name to Americans. In 1794, the great battle of Fallen Timbers was fought on the banks of the Maumee, and the long struggle was ended.

It had grown more and more fierce and cruel as time passed, and only three years before General Wayne won his lasting victory, General St. Clair had suffered his terrible defeat by the Indians. Through this defeat, the power of the whites in the West was shaken as it had never been before; the savages were filled with pride and hope by the greatest triumph they had achieved over their enemies; and all the settlements in the Northwestern Territory were endangered.

Perhaps I had better say seemed endangered. The Indians were really less to be feared than at any time before. They were weaker, and the whites were stronger. They were striving against destiny; and though their fate was sealed with the blood of their enemies, their fate was sealed. All the chances that had favored them had favored them in vain, and neither their wily courage nor their pitiless despair availed them against the people who outnumbered them, as the stems of the harvest field outnumber the trees of the forest.

V. THE CAPTIVITY OF JAMES SMITH

The stories of captivity among the Ohio Indians during the war that ended in 1794 would of themselves fill a much larger book than this is meant to be. Most of them were never set down, but some of them were very thrillingly told, and others very touchingly, either by the captives themselves, or by such of their friends as were better able to write them out. One, at least, is charming, and the narrative of Colonel James Smith deserves a chapter by itself, not only because it is charming, but because it shows the Indians in a truer and kindlier light than they were often able to show themselves.

Smith was born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, which in 1737 was the frontier of the white settlement, and he was taken prisoner in 1755, by a small party of Delawares, near Bedford, while he was helping to cut a road for the passage of General Braddock’s ill-fated expedition against the French. The Indians hurried from the English border, and forced him to run with them nearly the whole way to Fort Duquesne, which afterwards became Fort Pitt, and is now Pittsburg. A large body of savages was encamped outside the post, and there Smith expected to be burned to death with the tortures he afterwards saw inflicted upon many other prisoners; but he was only made to run the gantlet. Two lines of Indians were drawn up, with sticks in their hands, and Smith dashed at the top of his speed between their ranks. He was cruelly beaten, and before he reached the goal he fell senseless. When he came to himself he was in the hands of a French surgeon. He was well cared for, and he lived in hopes of rescue by Braddock’s army, which was marching against Fort Duquesne in greater force than had ever been sent into the wilderness. But while he was still so broken and bruised as to be scarcely able to walk, the Indians came in with plunder and prisoners from the scene of their bloody victory over the British troops.

A little later, Smith’s captors claimed him from the French, and carried him to an Indian town on the Muskingum. The day after their arrival a number of the Indians came to him, and one of them began to pull out his hair, dipping his fingers in ashes to get a better hold, and plucking it away hair by hair till it was all gone except a lock on the crown. This they plaited with strings of beadwork and silver brooches, and then they bored his ears and nose and put rings in them. They painted his face and body in different colors, hung a band of wampum about his neck, and fitted his arm with bracelets of silver. An old chief led him into the street of the village, and gave the alarm halloo, when all the Delawares, Caughnewagas, and Mohicans of the place came running, and formed round the chief, who held Smith by the hand, and made them a long speech. He then gave Smith over to three young squaws, who pulled him into the river waist-deep, and made signs to him that he should plunge his head into the water. But Smith’s head was full of the tortures of the prisoners whom he had seen burnt at Fort Duquesne; he believed all these ceremonies were the preparations for his death, and he would neither duck.

He struggled with them, amidst the shouts and laughter of the Indians on the shore, until one of them managed to say in English, “No hurt you,” when he suffered them to plunge him under the water and rub at him as long as they chose.

[Illustration: Indian baptism of James Smith 053]

By this means they washed away his white blood, and he was adopted into the tribe in place of a great chief who had lately died. He seems never to have known why this honor was done him; but he was then a lusty young fellow of eighteen who might well have taken the fancy of some of his captors; and he probably fell into their hands at a moment which their superstition rendered fortunate for him.

When the squaws had done with him, he was taken up into the council house of the village, where he was dressed in a new ruffled shirt, leggins trimmed with ribbons and wrought with beads, and moccasins embroidered with porcupine quills. His face was painted afresh, and his scalp lock tied up with red feathers; he was given a pipe and tobacco pouch and seated upon a bear skin, while one of the chiefs addressed him in the presence of the assembled warriors. “My son,” so the speech was interpreted to Smith, “you are now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. You are taken into the Caughnewaga nation, and initiated into a warlike tribe; you are adopted into a great family... in the room and place of a great man. After what has passed this day, you are now one of us by an old strong law and custom. My son, you have now nothing to fear; we are now under the same obligations to love, support, and defend you, that we are to love and defend one another; therefore you are to consider yourself as one of our people.”

A grand feast of boiled venison and green corn followed, and Smith took

## part in it on the same terms as all the rest of his tribe and family. In

due time he found out that no word the chief had addressed him was idly spoken, and he began to live the life of the savages like one of themselves, under the affectionate care and constant instruction of his brethren. He was given a gun, at first, and sent to hunt turkeys, but he came upon the trace of buffalo, and was lured on by the hope of larger game, and so lost his way. The Indians found him again easily enough, but as a punishment for his rashness his gun was taken from him, and for two years he was allowed to carry only a bow and arrows. Once when the hunters had killed a bear and he went out with a party to bring in the meat, Smith complained of the weight of his load; the Indians laughed at him, and to shame him they gave part of his burden to a young squaw who already had as much as he to carry. At another time, he went to the fields with some other young men to watch the squaws hoeing corn; one of these challenged him to take her hoe, and he did so, and hoed for some time with the women. They were delighted and praised his skill, but when he came back to the village, the old chiefs rebuked him, telling him that he was adopted in the place of a great man, and it was unworthy of him to hoe corn like a squaw.

Smith owns that he never gave them a chance to chide him a second time for such unseemly behavior. After that he left all the hard work to the squaws like a true Indian, and guarded his dignity as a hunter. He was never trusted, or at least he was never asked, to take part in any of the forays against the white frontier, when from time to time parties were sent to the Pennsylvania borders to take scalps and steal horses. It was a sorrowful thing for him when his savage brethren set forth on these errands of theft and murder among his kindred by race, and it was long before he could make the least show of returning their affection.

It was not until they gave him back some books which they had brought him from other prisoners, but had then taken from him for some caprice, that he says he felt his heart warm towards them. They pretended that the books had been lost, but declared that they were glad they had been found, for they knew that he was grieved at the loss of them. “Though they had been exceedingly kind to me,” he says, “I still as before detested them, on account of the barbarity I beheld after Braddock’s defeat. Neither had I ever before pretended kindness, or expressed myself in a friendly manner; but now I began to excuse the Indians on account of their want of information.”

The family which Smith had been taken into did not stay long in the Muskingum country, but began the wandering life of the hunters and trappers, working northward mostly, and visiting the shores and waters of Lake Erie. It was all very pleasant and full of a wild charm while the fine weather lasted, especially for the men, who had nothing to do but to bring in the game and fish for the squaws to cook and care for. The squaws made the sugar in the spring; they felled the trees and fashioned from the barks the troughs to catch the maple sap, which they boiled down into sugar; they planted and tended the fields of corn and beans; they did everything that was like work, indoors and out, and the men did nothing that was not like play or war. While their plenty lasted, it was for all; when the dearth came, every one shared it. But in this free, sylvan life there was the grace of an unstinted hospitality. The stranger was pressed to make the lodge of his host his home, and he was given the best of his store. One day when his Indian brother came in from the hunt, Smith told him that a passing Wyandot had visited their camp, and he had given him roast venison. “And I suppose you gave him also sugar and bear’s oil to eat with his venison?” Smith confessed that as the sugar and bear’s oil were in the canoe, he did not go for them. His brother told him he had behaved just like a Dutchman, and he asked, “Do you not know that when strangers come to our camp we are to give them the best we have?” Smith owned that he had been wrong, and then his brother excused him because he was so young; but he bade him learn to behave like a warrior, and do great things, and never be caught in any such mean actions again.

The Indians were as prompt to praise and reward what they thought fine in him, as to rebuke what they deemed unworthy; and the second winter that they spent in Northern Ohio, they gave him a gun again for the courage and endurance he twice showed when he had lost his way from camp. Once when he was caught in a heavy storm of snow; he passed the night in the hollow of a tree, which he made snug by blocking it up with brush and pieces of wood, and by chopping the rotten inside of the trunk with his hatchet until he had a soft, warm bed. Another time, when he was looking at his beaver traps he was overtaken by the dark, and kept himself from freezing by dancing and shouting till daylight. His Indian friends honored him for his wise behavior, and as they had now beaver skins enough, they carried them to the French post at Detroit, where they bought a gun for him. They bought for themselves a keg of brandy, and they paid Smith the compliment, when he refused to drink, of making him one of the guards set over the drinkers to keep them from killing one another. He helped bring them safely through their debauch, but nothing could prevent their spending all they had got for their beaver skins in more and more brandy. Then they went back sick and sorry to the woods again.