By nine o’clock the army had been exposed for three hours to the merciless Indian fire. Hundreds had fallen; the ground was literally covered with dead and dying. The only question was, Could the remainder escape? The army was cut off from the road. Benjamin Van Cleve, a young man, has left record of this memorable break for the road when order to retreat was at last given: “I found,” he says, “the troops pressing like a drove of bullocks to the right. I saw an officer ... with six or eight men start on a run a little to the left of where I was. I immediately ran and fell in with them. In a short distance we were so suddenly among the Indians, who were not apprised of our object, that they opened to us and ran to the right and left without firing. I think about two hundred of our men passed through them before they fired.”[121] An opening being made, the army poured heedlessly along. No order or semblance of order existed, save in a remnant of Clark’s command which essayed to cover the rear. In the very rear, on a horse which could not be pricked out of a walk, came St. Clair, unmindful of the bloody tumult behind him where the old men and wounded were being killed.
This awful battle was a fitting close for such a campaign. In almost every sense it was the greatest defeat suffered by white men on this continent at the hands of aborigines. St. Clair’s army numbered on the eve of November 3 one thousand four hundred and eighty-six men and eighty-six officers. Of these, eight hundred and ninety men and sixteen officers were killed or wounded. The army poured back to Fort Jefferson and then on to Fort Washington. The path hewn northward became, like Braddock’s Road, a route for the hordes of Indians toward the frontiers. Their victory, so bloody, so overwhelming, gave confidence. Perhaps never before nor afterward did any battlefield present a scene equal to that Wabash slaughter field. The dying were tortured and the dead frightfully mutilated. On the theory that the army sought to conquer the Indian land, sand was crushed into the eyes of the dead in cruel mockery. Several scores of women followed the army—though contemporary records are singularly silent on this point.[122] Many of them, it is sure, fell into the hands of the savages and the first white visitors to the battleground found great stakes driven through many corpses.[123]
The two underlying causes for this terrible reverse of American arms were the long delay in getting the army on its feet, properly supplied; and the undisciplined condition of the troops. The immediate cause of the defeat was, without question, the failure of all the officers who knew of Captain Slough’s discoveries on the night of November 3 to communicate them to General St. Clair. Colonel Oldham ordered Slough to St. Clair; he went only to General Butler who dismissed him without acceding to his spoken request to be allowed to take the news to the commander-in-chief. The words of the standard authority on St. Clair’s defeat are perhaps severe, but no new information has come in half a century to give ground for altering them; Albach says: “The circumstances under which the omission occurred, would favor an inference that he [Butler] sacrificed the safety of the army to the gratification of his animosity against St. Clair. The evidence given before the committee of Congress is conclusive that he failed, at least to perform his whole duty in the premises.”[124] Butler’s side of the story could never be told; fatally wounded while heroically exhorting his men, the poor man was carried to his marquee under an oak, by his brother, Captain Edward Butler. Propped up on his mattress, a loaded revolver placed in each hand, the old veteran was left to his fate. As his friends left the tent by the rear, the Indians surged in at the front.[125]
St. Clair’s road northward was the main thoroughfare to Fort Hamilton and Fort Jefferson from the Ohio and, though superseded by another route soon built parallel to it, was ever of importance in the burst of population from Pennsylvania and Kentucky into the Old Northwest. But the soldiers of St. Clair’s successor were too superstitious to follow that ill-starred track. And, as Forbes came successfully to Fort Duquesne over a new route built parallel to Braddock’s, so the second conqueror of the Old Northwest cut a new road parallel to St. Clair’s.
CHAPTER IV
WAYNE AND FALLEN TIMBER
The defeat of St. Clair’s army cast a nation into gloom. As the terrible tidings sped eastward a thousand frontier cabins were filled with dismayed men, women, and children. The passion into which it is said the patient Washington was thrown, upon hearing the melancholy story, was typical of the feeling of a whole people. There could be no doubt, now, what the future would bring forth; a deluge of raiding savages, such as had never overrun the frontiers since Braddock’s defeat in 1755, would certainly come; the desperate cry, “White men shall not plant corn north of the Ohio,” would now ring out over the thin fringe of frightened settlements on the Miami and Muskingum, and with that cry would come frenzied raiders from whose tomahawks men would do well to escape death and women be fortunate if they were quickly killed. From all the western settlements in Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania a cry, anxious and often piteous, was hurried over the mountains to Philadelphia for aid and protection.
The young government now faced a problem difficult in the extreme with fine courage, fully conscious of its own dignity and its own latent power. Within six weeks of St. Clair’s annihilation, the Secretary of War submitted a statement to Congress which summed up the situation briefly and clearly. The former treaties with the Indians, the efforts for peace, the sorry details of the campaign were all described. Peaceful and warlike efforts, alike, had failed. So much for the past. For the future, the plan was already formulated and ready for adoption by Congress. First, the war must be brought to an end; if peace could be secured without further resort to arms, well and good; “it is submitted,” read the Secretary’s communication, “that every reasonable expedient be again taken ... that the nature of the case, and a just regard to the national reputation, will admit.” Those in best position to judge, however, were sure that the pride of victory was so strong among the confederated nations that “it would be altogether improper to expect any favorable result from such [peaceful] expedients,” and Congress was warned accordingly that it was “by an ample conviction of superior force only, that the Indians can be brought to listen to the dictates of peace on reasonable terms.” It was properly insisted that relinquishment of territory formerly ceded by the savages could not be arranged “consistently with a proper regard to national reputation.” The plan included the organization of a new army, comprising three hundred cavalry, three hundred artillerymen, and five regiments of infantry of four thousand five hundred and sixty men. It was to be styled “The Legion of the United States,” and was to be divided into four sub-legions of one thousand two hundred and eighty non-commissioned officers and privates each. The mistakes of the past dictated the necessity of having this force disciplined “according to the nature of the service;” its ultimate object was to establish a strong post on the present site of Fort Wayne, Indiana.