Life of Daniel Boone, the Great Western Hunter and Pioneer

by Cecil B. Hartley

The year 1783 passed away without any disturbance from the Indians, who were restrained by the desertion of their allies the British. In 1784, the southern frontier of Kentucky was alarmed by the rumor of an intended invasion by the Cherokees, and some preparations were made for an expedition against them, which fell through, however, because there was no authority to carry it on. The report of the hostility of the Cherokees proved to be untrue.

Meanwhile difficulties arose in performance of the terms of the treaty between England and the United States. They appear to have originated in a dispute in regard to an article contained in the treaty, providing that the British army should not carry away with them any negroes or other property belonging to the American inhabitants. In consequence of what they deemed an infraction of this article, the Virginians refused to comply with another, which stipulated for the repeal of acts prohibiting the collection of debts due to British subjects. The British, on the other hand, refused to evacuate the western posts till this article was complied with. It was natural that the intercourse which had always existed between the Indians and the garrisons of these posts, during the period they had acted as allies, should continue, and it did.

In the unwritten history of the difficulties of the United States Government with the Indian tribes within her established boundaries, nothing appears clearer than this truth: that the fierce and sanguinary resistance of the aborigines to the encroachments of the Anglo-Americans has ever been begun and continued more through the instigations of outlawed white men, who had sought protection among them from the arm of the law or the knife of individual vengeance, and been adopted into their tribes, than from the promptings of their own judgments, their disregard of death, their thirst for the blood of their oppressors, or their love of country.[^[46]]

That their sense of wrong has at all times been keen, their hate deadly, and their bravery great, is a fact beyond dispute; and that they have prized highly their old hunting-grounds, and felt a warm and lively attachment to their beautiful village-sites, and regarded with especial veneration the burial-places of their fathers, their whole history attests; but of their own weakness in war, before the arms and numbers of their enemies, they must have been convinced at a very early period: and they were neither so dull in apprehension, nor so weak in intellect, as not soon to have perceived the utter hopelessness, and felt the mad folly, of a continued contest with their invaders. Long before the settlement of the whites upon this continent, the Indians had been subject to bloody and exterminating wars among themselves; and such conflicts had generally resulted in the flight of the weaker party toward the West, and the occupancy of their lands by the conquerors. Many of the tribes had a tradition among them, and regarded it as their unchangeable destiny, that they were to journey from the rising to the setting sun, on their way to the bright waters and the green forests of the "Spirit Land;" and the working out of this destiny seems apparent, if not in the location, course, and character of the tumult and other remains of the great aboriginal nations of whom even tradition furnishes no account, certainly in what we know of the history of the tribes found on the Atlantic coast by the first European settlers.

It seems fairly presumable, from our knowledge of the history and character of the North American Indians, that had they been left to the promptings of their own judgments, and been influenced only by the deliberations of their own councils, they would, after a brief, but perhaps most bloody, resistance to the encroachments of the whites, have bowed to what would have struck their untutored minds as an inevitable destiny, and year after year flowed silently, as the European wave pressed upon them, further and further into the vast wildernesses of the mighty West. But left to their own judgments, or their own deliberations, they never have been. Early armed by renegade white men with European weapons, and taught the improvement of their own rude instruments of warfare, and instigated not only to oppose the strides of their enemies after territory, but to commit depredations upon their settlements, and to attempt to chastise them at their very thresholds, they drew down upon themselves the wrath of a people which is not slow to anger, nor easily appeased; and as far back as the Revolution, if not as the colonizing of Massachusetts, their breasts were filled with a hatred of the whites, deadly and unslumbering. Through all our subsequent transactions with them, this feeling has been increasing in magnitude and intensity: and recent events have carried it to a pitch which will render it enduring forever, perhaps not in its activity, but certainly in its bitterness. Whether more amicable relations with the whites, during the first settlements made upon this continent by the Europeans, would have changed materially the ultimate destiny of the aboriginal tribes, is a question about which diversities of opinion may well be entertained; but it is not to be considered here.

The fierce, and bloody, and continuous opposition which the Indians have made from the first to the encroachments of the Anglo-Americans, is matter of history; and close scrutiny will show, that the great instigators of that opposition have always, or nearly so, been renegade white men. Scattered through the tribes east of the Alleghanies, before and during the American Revolution, there were many such miscreants. Among the Western tribes, during the early settlement of Kentucky and Ohio, and at the period of the last war with Great Britain, there were a number, some of them men of talent and great activity. One of the boldest and most notorious of these latter, was one whom we have had frequent occasion to mention, SIMON GIRTY—for many years the scourge of the infant settlements in the West, the terror of women, and the bugaboo of children. This man was an adopted member of the great Wyandot nation, among whom he ranked high as an expert hunter, a brave warrior, and a powerful orator. His influence extended through all the tribes of the West, and was generally exerted to incite the Indians to expeditions against the "Stations" of Kentucky, and to acts of cruelty to their white prisoners. The bloodiest counsel was usually his; his was the voice which was raised loudest against his countrymen, who were preparing the way for the introduction of civilization and Christianity into this glorious region; and in all great attacks upon the frontier settlements he was one of the prime movers, and among the prominent leaders.

Of the causes of that venomous hatred, which rankled in the bosom of Simon Girty against his countrymen, we have two or three versions: such as, that he early imbibed a feeling of contempt and abhorrence of civilized life, from the brutality of his father, the lapse from virtue of his mother, and the corruptions of the community in which he had his birth and passed his boyhood; that, while acting with the whites against the Indians on the Virginia border, he was stung to the quick, and deeply offended by the appointment to a station over his head, of one who was his junior in years, and had rendered nothing like his services to the frontiers; and that, when attached as a scout to Dunmore's expedition, an indignity was heaped upon him which thoroughly soured his nature, and drove him to the Indians, that he might more effectually execute a vengeance which he swore to wreak. The last reason assigned for his defection and animosity is the most probable of the three, rests upon good authority, and seems sufficient, his character considered, to account for his desertion and subsequent career among the Indians.

The history of the indignity alluded to, as it has reached the writer[^[47]] from one who was associated with Girty and a partaker in it, is as follows: The two were acting as scouts in the expedition set on foot by Governor Dunmore, of Virginia, in the year 1774, against the Indian towns of Ohio. The two divisions of the force raised for this expedition, the one commanded by Governor Dunmore in person, the other by General Andrew Lewis, were by the orders of the governor to form a junction at Point Pleasant, where the Great Kenhawa empties into the Ohio. At this place, General Lewis arrived with his command on the eleventh or twelfth of September; but after remaining here two or three weeks in anxious expectation of the approach of the other division, he received dispatches from the governor, informing him that Dunmore had changed his plan, and determined to march at once against the villages on the Scioto, and ordering him to cross the Ohio immediately and join him as speedily as possible. It was during the delay at the Point that the incident occurred which is supposed to have had such a tremendous influence upon Girty's after-life. He and his associate scout had rendered some two or three months' services, for which they had as yet drawn no part of their pay; and in their present idleness they discovered means of enjoyment, of which they had not money to avail themselves. In this strait, they called upon Gen. Lewis in person, at his quarters, and demanded their pay. For some unknown cause this was refused, which produced a slight murmuring on the part of the applicants, when General Lewis cursed them, and struck them several severe blows over their heads with his cane. Girty's associate was not much hurt; but he himself was so badly wounded on the forehead or temple that the blood streamed down his cheek and side to the floor. He quickly turned to leave the apartment; but, on reaching the door, wheeled round, planted his feet firmly upon the sill, braced an arm against either side of the frame, fixed his keen eyes unflinchingly upon the general, uttered the exclamation, "By God, sir, your quarters shall swim in blood for this!" and instantly disappeared beyond pursuit.

General Lewis was not much pleased with the sudden and apparently causeless change which Governor Dunmore had made in the plan of the expedition. Nevertheless, he immediately prepared to obey the new orders, and had given directions for the construction of rafts upon which to cross the Ohio, when, before daylight on the morning of the 10th of October, some of the scouts suddenly entered the encampment with the information that an immense body of Indians was just at hand, hastening upon the Point. This was the force of the brave and skillful chief Cornstalk, whose genius and valor were so conspicuous on that day, throughout the whole of which raged the hardly-contested and moat bloody Battle of the Point. Girty had fled from General Lewis immediately to the chief Cornstalk, forsworn his white nature, and leagued himself with the Redman forever; and with the Indians he was now advancing, under the cover of night, to surprise the Virginian camp. At the distance of only a mile from the Point, Cornstalk was met by a detachment of the Virginians, under the command of Colonel Charles Lewis, a brother of the general; and here, about sunrise on the 10th of October, 1774, commenced one of the longest, severest, and bloodiest battles ever fought upon the Western frontiers. It terminated, as we have seen, about sunset, with the defeat of the Indians it is true, but with a loss to the whites which carried mourning into many a mansion of the Old Dominion, and which was keenly felt throughout the country at the time, and remembered with sorrow long after.

Girty having thrown himself among the Indians, as has been related, and embraced their cause, now retreated with them into the interior of Ohio, and ever after followed their fortunes without swerving. On arriving at the towns of the Wyandots, he was adopted into that tribe, and established himself at Upper Sandusky. Being active, of a strong constitution, fearless in the extreme, and at all times ready to join their war parties, lie soon became very popular among his new associates, and a man of much consequence. He was engaged in most of the expeditions against the frontier settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia—always brave and always cruel—till the year 1778, when occurred an incident which, as it is the only bright spot apparent on the whole dark career of the renegade, shall be related with some particularity.