CHAPTER XII

WAYNE’S INDIAN CAMPAIGN

With the turn of a single page of history and the passage of a single decade of time, during this century of struggle for possession, the actors in the drama change, or if the same actors remain, a new set of circumstances makes them play a new part amid the old scenes. Like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope they are shaken up and come out in new combinations, and with them our ideas and sympathies are shaken up and must be readjusted.

We have followed the fortunes of the little English garrisons at Detroit and Mackinac in their struggles against a horde of savages, and have breathed a sigh of relief when a strong British army came to the rescue and England once more resumed possession of her lake posts. We return to Detroit in twelve years to find General Hamilton, the British commander of the French-English town, reading with scorn the announcement in a stray copy of the _Pennsylvania Gazette_ of July, 1776, that a new American nation has been formed and a Declaration of Independence has been adopted. Within two years Daniel Boone, the hero pioneer, is brought to Detroit a British prisoner, taken by Indians in their raid on Kentucky, and before he has made his escape from prison, Hamilton is chanting the war-song and dancing the war-dance at a grand council of Indians. To them he is offering his congratulations on the success of their raids into the southern states of the newly formed Union, on the number of prisoners they have taken, and especially on the far greater number of scalps they have brought. The War of the Revolution has begun, and with it a period of bloodshed in the Northwest.

While the main bodies of troops were being marshalled and the decisive battles were being fought in the south and the east, the British carried on upon the western frontier an incessant Indian warfare. This border campaign was marked by a horrible series of bloody raids and massacres, many of which were planned at Niagara and Detroit. Niagara, wrested in the past from the Indians and the French, became at this time a place of refuge for the loyalists of New York, “a nest of Tories,” and a centre of British influence so strong that an American leader could make no more telling expression of his dread of the threatened loss of a southern point of vantage than to say that it must be saved, for if taken by the British it would become “another Niagara.”

From Detroit, Hamilton set out in the summer of 1778 with a force of one hundred and seventy-five men to oust from Kaskaskia and Vincennes the American “rebel,” George Rogers Clark, who had taken these British strongholds. But instead of returning to Detroit triumphant, Hamilton was taken by that same young rebel and started on a twelve-hundred-mile journey to a Virginia prison. Even after this it seemed to the Americans that plans and conspiracies came out from Detroit as fast as prisoners and scalps went into the British prison there. There were many schemes to take the fort, but all were abandoned because of its inaccessibility.

When the negotiators met at Paris, in 1782, to arrange terms of peace between Great Britain and the American colonies or states, it was difficult to decide what should be done with the Great Lakes. At first it was suggested that the boundary line between the United States and Canada should be so drawn as to give the territory south of the Ottawa River and Lake Superior to the United States, as far west as the Mississippi. At another time it was proposed that all of the land north of the Ohio and west of the Alleghanies should continue to be English. Finally it was arranged that the Great Lakes, with the exception of Michigan, should form the boundary line between the United States and Canada in that part of the world. This arrangement gave to the United States the posts at Detroit, Mackinac, and other points on the lakes; but the English would not surrender them, justifying their not doing so on the ground that the Americans had broken the treaty in other respects. As long as the British retained the posts in the Northwest, the Indians of that region looked to them for support and were inclined to take up an attitude of hostility to the government of the United States and to colonists, who now came into the Ohio Valley in great numbers. Treaties were made with them, but these the Indians failed to keep, and there ensued a period of confusion and bloodshed on the frontier. Into the details of this petty warfare it is not worth our while to enter.

At first the British seemed anxious to preserve peace for the sake of the fur trade, but as time went on and relations between England and the United States became more strained, the English lent undisguised assistance to the Indians. It was inevitable that there should be constant strife between the rough, encroaching frontiersman who overstepped the original boundaries and the jealous, suspicious Indian who met all wrongs by treachery and violence. The record of the years shows a succession of efforts for peace by the United States government and a series of councils, treaties, ruptures, and hostilities on the part of the Indians.

A formal government had been organized in the Northwest by the Ordinance of 1787, which created the great Northwest Territory, out of which were later formed the five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. By 1789 and 1790 the United States government began to realize that it had to deal in this region with no petty skirmishes with scattered tribes, but with a widespread Indian uprising. Raids and counter-raids must be abandoned, and war with organized armies and carefully planned campaigns must be waged against the lawless hordes of savages who were breaking faith with the white man and murdering whom they pleased.

An expedition under the leadership of General Harmar, sent north in 1790 from Fort Washington (Cincinnati), met defeat at the hands of the Indians at the present Fort Wayne. A similar expedition, commanded a year later by General St. Clair, was routed on a battle-ground in central Ohio, and the whole frontier was terrorized. Matters had now become serious. Armies of regulars had been defeated by these savage masters of the art of treacherous warfare, and the Indians were becoming more and more aggressive in their elation at their victories, while the British were becoming more and more open in their support of the lake tribes.

Needing a leader who could drive back the Indians, President Washington turned to a soldier who had distinguished himself in the Revolutionary War for hard fighting and daring bravery. Major General Anthony Wayne had so often snatched success in the face of almost certain defeat that he had earned for himself the nickname “Mad Anthony.” He was the grandson of a Pennsylvanian pioneer and had had hard schooling from his Indian-fighting grandfather and father in the methods of frontier warfare. Above all else he gloried in difficulty and danger.

In April, 1792, Washington appointed General Wayne to the command of the army and sent him to the Ohio to drill his men. Wayne found there the remnant of St. Clair’s force, to which were being constantly added hundreds of raw recruits enlisted under new legislation for the campaign by Congress. The one stipulation that Wayne had made when he took command was that he be allowed to wait to fight until his ranks were full and his men thoroughly trained. He knew that he had to deal with the same kind of men who had failed St. Clair. He attributed this failure to poor organization and lack of military discipline. He knew, too, that he had the added difficulty of meeting the paralyzing discouragement caused by previous defeats and well-remembered scenes of horror. Patiently and deliberately he went to work, and new recruits arriving in the summer and autumn found themselves living in a camp where an army was being taught with all speed the essentials of warfare. By spring Wayne had twenty-five hundred soldiers who were eager for the campaign and worthy of their commander.

Congress was reluctant to begin war and kept Wayne waiting all through the summer of 1793, while it made fruitless negotiations with the Indians. The tribes finally demanded that the Ohio River should be the boundary of American advance, and to this the government could not agree. In October Wayne was given permission to open his campaign, but with cautions that on no account was he to run any risks of defeat. He moved his men from Fort Washington to a point eighty miles north, which he fortified as a winter camp and named Greenville in honor of his former comrade at arms, Captain Nathanael Greene. Here he spent the winter, sending a large detachment of his men north to build on St. Clair’s fatal battle-ground a fort which was prophetically named Fort Recovery. Several skirmishes with the Indians took place at Greenville during the winter, and in the early summer a large war-party made an unsuccessful attack on Fort Recovery. On the 27th of July, 1794, General Wayne started with his “legion” of troops, more than two thousand men, for the Miami towns of northern Ohio.

The march of the American army was watched with wonder and admiration by the Indians, who reported to the British that the soldiers went twice as far in a day as St. Clair’s had done, that Wayne kept scouts out in every direction, and that he was always ready for attack and guarded carefully against ambush by day or surprise by night. At the junction of the Maumee and Auglaize rivers, where the line of hostile Indian villages began, Wayne built a strong log stockade which he christened with the characteristic name of Fort Defiance, a name perpetuated to this day. Warned of his approach, the Indians had fled, leaving their homes and their rich fields of corn and vegetables, in which the soldiers revelled after their hard march and short rations. From Fort Defiance Wayne sent a final offer of peace to the Indians, declaring that he would restore to them their lands and villages and preserve their women and children from famine should they agree to a lasting peace. The Indians returned an evasive answer, and Wayne advanced against them. From scouts he learned that the natives were encamped near the British fort on the Maumee River a few miles west of the present city of Toledo. There were between fifteen hundred and two thousand warriors in all, with seventy rangers from Detroit,--the latter company being made up of French, English, and other refugees.

On the 20th of August Wayne met the Indians at a spot some six miles down the river, known as the Fallen Timbers because there a whirlwind had overturned the forest and left the trees piled across one another in rows. Wayne’s army numbered about three thousand men, two-thirds of whom were regulars, and one-third mounted volunteers from Kentucky led by General Scott. At the front of the line was a small force of mounted volunteers, and back of them were the carefully placed lines of infantry and cavalry. The Indians were secreted as usual in the woods and tall grass and behind the piles of trees. From their shelter they poured a murderous fire into the ranks of the army, but the volunteers pressed on. The front line of infantry rushed up and dislodged the savages from their covert, the cavalry dashed over the rough ground and the piles of logs, and the Indians fled before the second line of soldiers could even come up to the battle-field. Of this engagement one of the men wrote that there was not “a sufficiency of the enemy for the Legion to play upon.” The entire action lasted less than forty minutes, and not a third of Wayne’s force took part in it. The army pursued the fugitives two miles to the shelter of the British fort, and then burned everything near by. Thirty-three Americans were killed and one hundred wounded in this engagement, which closed a forty years’ warfare with the Indians in as many minutes. Wayne’s carefully drilled troops had won the most decisive victory ever gained over the Indians of the Northwest.

General Wayne completed his conquest by marching back to Fort Recovery, and thence westward to the Miami towns at the junction of St. Mary’s and St. Joseph’s rivers, the scene of Harmar’s disaster. The Indians dared offer no resistance, but fled before his triumphant army. Along his route he burned their villages, and at the meeting-place of the rivers he built the fort which was to perpetuate his name to the present day, Fort Wayne. Then he returned to Greenville for the winter. Meanwhile the anger of the Indians had been stirred by the inaction of their British allies, who had urged them on to war but had furnished no troops from Detroit. A new respect had been called forth for the Americans. All the winter Wayne received at Greenville delegations from various Indian tribes, and in the summer of 1795 a formal treaty was signed, in which Wayne, representing the United States, made peace with all the western tribes. Eleven hundred and thirty Indians assembled, making a full representation from all tribes previously hostile. Gathered about the council-fire and supplied with a pile of wampum strings, the chiefs and the American general conferred day after day as the various groups of Indians arrived during the months of June and July. The record of their speeches is eighty pages long and carries one back to the days when Champlain and Frontenac conferred with their Indian children and received their repentant promises of good behavior in the future; but now Wayne was addressed by the chiefs as “Elder Brother,” and he called them always his younger brothers.

By the treaty of Greenville the Indians ceded to the United States all of what is now southern Ohio and southeastern Indiana, various reservations about the forts of Detroit, Michilimackinac, and those which Wayne had built, a six-mile tract at Chicago, and a large grant of land near the Falls of the Ohio. The government, in its turn, agreed to the Indian title to the remaining country, and promised to pay the tribes large annuities. Both sides were to return all prisoners. Wayne, by his skill at warfare, had brought to the borders a peace that lasted for fifteen years, when new conditions brought new difficulties.

While Wayne was fighting for the supremacy of the United States in the Northwest, John Jay was representing the government in London in negotiations for a treaty which should settle disputed points between the two nations, providing, among other things, for the settlement by a commission of any ambiguities in the boundaries and for the surrender of the lake posts to the Americans. In 1796 this treaty was ratified by Congress, and American officers were sent to take command of the various posts. With appropriate ceremonies the English flag was lowered and the American Stars and Stripes were raised at each of the posts whose history we have followed under French and later under English control. General Wayne was sent by a grateful Congress to conduct the final transfer of the forts. After a twelve-hundred-mile journey he arrived at Detroit, where he was received with great honor by Indians, English, French, and Americans. Leaving there in November for Presque Isle, he was taken with his old enemy, the gout, and died at that place. His remains were later removed by his son to Philadelphia, but a log-house, patterned after the one which Wayne himself built there in 1790, marks to-day the place of his grave at the present city of Erie, Pennsylvania.

It is worthy of note that the month before General Wayne started for Detroit to conclude the ceremonies of taking possession of that post, Moses Cleveland, with a party of Connecticut pioneers, set out to found on the shores of Lake Erie the city which bears his name,--the advance guard of an army of occupation which the stipulations of the treaty of Greenville and Wayne’s intimidation of the Indians made possible.