Military Roads of the Mississippi Basin

by Archer Butler Hulbert

[From the original in the library of Harvard University]

A happy interest attaches to an old route like Wayne’s, from the very fact that the labor spent in hewing it out and in transporting over it vast quantities of provisions and ammunition was not expended in vain. Wayne’s Road, like Forbes’s route across the Alleghenies, led to victory; the dark winding tracks of the armies of Braddock and St. Clair possess a romantic element that is fascinating in the extreme, but wholly unsatisfactory. There is an inspiration in following the rough tracks of men who won which is not found in the paths of men who, after struggles perhaps more heroic because facing greater odds, failed. Wayne was a thousand times better equipped for his campaign than was St. Clair. Before his campaign, the savage war was not taken very seriously. Now proper preparations had been made, approximately sufficient stores accumulated, the official personnel sifted down; and as the “Legion of the United States” went swiftly forward in the October sunlight of that Indian summer, there was a sane consciousness of preparedness and power which was all but victory. The Indians were quick to recognize and describe, in their figurative way, the two chief characteristics of Wayne as a frontier commander—he was both the “Black Snake” and the “Whirlwind.” When in motion, he swept through the forests like a cyclone; the record of no pioneer army in America equals the marching records of Wayne’s Legion. It was a standing order that every march should be under high pressure and that no break or interruption should in any case delay the movement of the main body a single moment. This impressed the savages tremendously; they had known no such army as this—which advanced into their country almost as fast as others had run out of it. Thus they talked of the “Whirlwind” around their northern fires. Wayne, too, was a “Black Snake.” He was as cunning as he was impetuous. As will be seen, he built roads he never traversed, doubled his track, and over and again completely outwitted the astonished Indian spies that attempted, with sharp eyes in the brown leaves, to fathom his purposes.

The lateness of the season prevented a more elaborate campaign than Wayne had suggested to the Secretary of War. The army swept northward to Greenville Creek and on the present site of Greenville, Ohio, erected Fort Greenville—named by Wayne in honor of his dead friend General Nathaniel Greene of Revolutionary fame. By November 16, Posey records, all the houses were completed and once more the drilling and manœuvering began. We have it under the hand of the same authority that General Wayne affirmed that never in the Revolutionary War had he commanded such well-drilled troops as these which spent the winter with him buried deep in those Ohio forests. It is sure that a general never needed well-drilled soldiers more; and no less sure that no troops needed encouragement more than these. There were, however, the bright sides to life even here. Though coffee was a dollar and brown sugar seventy-five cents a pound, and whiskey five dollars a gallon, yet there was good cheer and merrymaking. A battery was built for the officers to play “fiver,” of which the younger men became very fond. On one evening the veteran General Scott entertained the officers in his apartments and was drawn out to tell of pioneer Kentucky in whose battles he had displayed so much courage and lost his three sons. “He told us how Col^o Boon first discovered Kentucky,” wrote Posey; “‘Col^o Boon was a very enterprizing, smart man,’ said General Scott, ‘but very whimsical.’” There were frequent scouting expeditions in which the whole garrison was interested. On one occasion Wells’s audacious rangers fell upon three Indians at their midday repast; one of the three in the pursuit was compelled to leap into a creek and when he “came up” he was found to be a white man, Christopher Miller. His life being saved, he renounced the wild career, visited his aged parents in Kentucky, and then returned to become one of Wayne’s most successful spies. No doubt the soldiers laughed at this transformation of a red into a white man, and perhaps swore that if other Indians were dowsed equally well they would be found to be equally white and to be wearing British uniforms!

There was one duty that fell now to Wayne that was not congenial. Posey was one of the detachment which pushed forward in the December snow to St. Clair’s slaughter-ground and erected there the most advanced of the chain of forts between the Ohio and Maumee. As the company neared the spot, Captain Edward Butler touched Posey on the shoulder and said: “When you reach the ground go to a large spreading oak which you cannot fail to see. Under that oak my brother’s marquee was pitched and there you will find his bones which you can identify by a fracture of one thigh bone.”

“We went to the place,” writes Posey, “and found part of his [General Richard Butler’s] bones, his skull and both thy bones, one we discovered had been broken.... We collected all the bones and laid them in one Pile, on every skul bone you might see the mark of the skulping knife a round every skul bone.” The pieces of guns—many barrels bent double by fiendish Indians—were collected, and four cannon were discovered just where an Indian prisoner had said they would be found. A strong fort was built and very appropriately named Fort Recovery, Captain Alexander Gibson commanding the garrison. On the sixth day, a portion of the party returned to Fort Greenville. The erection of Fort Recovery was another leap toward the Maumee and soon Indians began to arrive at Fort Greenville bearing white flags and talking of an armistice and peace. Wayne, obeying orders from the Secretary to end the war without another campaign if possible, received the emissaries as though he believed their lying rôle. Deceived by Wayne’s attitude, one of the Allegheny chiefs, Big Tree, committed suicide. He had sworn to kill three hostile Indians to avenge the death of his “very dear friend” General Butler; exasperated at the hint of peace he made way with himself.

The peace emissaries, and all talk of an armistice, faded with the winter snows, and by early summer every plan for the crucial campaign had been made both by the Indians and by Wayne. It was July before Scott’s fifteen hundred mounted volunteers arrived at Greenville. Already one bloody skirmish had taken place near the walls of Fort Recovery in which near a thousand Indians had participated. Large quantities of stores had been forwarded to Greenville and Fort Recovery, and the grand advance on the Maumee was on the eve of starting. Of this campaign we have Lieutenant Boyer’s official narrative,[151] supplemented by the slight records of Posey and Lieutenant William Clark, a brother of George Rogers Clark.[152]

At eight o’clock in the morning of July 28 Wayne with two thousand regulars and fifteen hundred mounted volunteers set out for the Maumee Valley from Fort Greenville. The route followed by St. Clair and used during the winter by the Fort Recovery garrison was the course pursued, and camp was pitched in the afternoon on Stillwater Creek after a twelve-mile march. The next day the army was off before sunrise; we “pushed forward without regard to bag or baggage,” records Clark, “as if not in search, but in actual pursuit of a flying & disorderly enemy.” Fort Recovery was reached at noon and the army camped a mile beyond. On the day following the army crashed onward, following the winding stream called a tributary of the “St. Mary’s” by St. Clair, but which was in fact the head of the Wabash. Clark says the stream was crossed “more than a dozen times” and “Camp Beaver Swamp” was pitched where the stream was found to be impassable, eleven miles from Fort Recovery. Much of the journey today had been through wide prairies covered with nettles, the water unfit to drink and mosquitoes, “larger than I ever saw,” observed Boyer. Today the road was opened as the army advanced and the route was up the Wabash from the present village of Fort Recovery, Mercer County, Ohio.

The construction of a bridge at Camp Beaver Swamp seventy yards in length delayed the army one day but enabled the road-cutters to hew a way through to the St. Mary River.[153] On August 1, the army pressed on over the backbone of Ohio and down the northern slope into the basin of the Maumee River, and encamped beside the famous little St. Mary River. Today, emerging suddenly from the vast stretch of nettles and brush that grew in the swampy district, the army suddenly drew out into a beautiful level meadow, every corps of the army having the first view of all the other divisions. This day Clark affirms that the army crossed the trace followed by General Harmar in 1790 to the Miami village. Tonight the army encamped by the St. Mary and on the morrow the erection of what was first called Fort Randolph and later Fort Adams was begun.[154] This was the seventh fortified post in the chain from the Ohio and was located on the south bank of the St. Mary, four miles above Rockford (the old Shane’s Crossings), Mercer County, Ohio.

On the fourth the army hurried on about eleven miles to “a small, dirty water,” as Clark described it, “a branch of the Glaize [Auglaize] River,” where camp was fortified for the night. The day after, a march of equal length “down the creek” to the camp described by Boyer as “Camp forty-four miles in advance of Fort Recovery.” Wayne’s camps were each proof against insult from the enemy, which accounts for his encamping early each afternoon. On the afternoon of August 6, the army reached the banks of the celebrated “Glaize,” the Auglaize River. Here, according to Posey, a stronger encampment than usual was built, named Fort Loramie.

As the Maumee was neared the feeling of the army was intense. While at Fort Adams, Wayne had made feints at cutting two roads, one down the St. Mary River and another northwest straight toward Roche de Bout. These routes were both opened for some distance, that down the St. Mary at least as far as the famous ford at Shane’s Crossing—the present Rockford.[155] That the Indian spies would report the building of these roads, there was no doubt. But when on August 4 the swift advance was renewed neither road was followed! A straight course northward into the Auglaize Valley was taken—a route that could not have been pursued in any but the driest weather. It ran northward from Fort Adams, probably near the Fort Jennings of the War of 1812, situated on the left bank of the Auglaize in the northwest part of Jennings Township, Putnam County, Ohio. Thence the route was straight down the Auglaize in general alignment with the present Defiance Road.