He was persevering beyond all example, and exhibited endurance which astonished even the stoical savage. Three or four hours' rest, after weeks of hardship and exposure, prepared him for another expedition. If the severity of his vengeance, or the success of a daring enterprise, intimidated the Indian for a time, and gave him a few days' leisure, he grew impatient of inactivity, and was straightway planning some new exploit. The moment one suggested itself, he set about accomplishing it—and its hardihood and peril caused no hesitation. He would march, on foot, hundreds of miles, through an unbroken wilderness, until he reached the point where the blow was to be struck; and then, awaiting the darkness, in the middle of the night, he would fall upon his unsuspecting enemies and carry all before him.
During the war of independence, the rangers had not yet assumed that name, nor were they as thoroughly organized, as they became in the subsequent contest of eighteen hundred and twelve. But the same material was there—the same elements of character, actuated by the same spirit. Let the following instance show what that spirit was.
In the year seventeen hundred and seventy-seven, there lived at Cahokia—on the east side of the Mississippi below Saint Louis—a Pennsylvanian by the name of Brady—a restless, daring man, just made for a leader of rangers. In an interval of inactivity, he conceived the idea of capturing one of the British posts in Michigan, the nearest point of which was at least three hundred miles distant! He forthwith set about raising a company—and, at the end of three days, found himself invested with the command of sixteen men! With these, on the first of October, he started on a journey of more than one hundred leagues, through the vast solitudes of the prairies and the thousand perils of the forest, to take a military station, occupied by a detachment of British soldiers! After a long and toilsome march, they reached the banks of the St. Joseph's river, on which the object of their expedition stood. Awaiting the security of midnight, they suddenly broke from their cover in the neighborhood, and by a coup de main, captured the fort without the loss of a man! Thus far all went well—for besides the success and safety of the party, they found a large amount of stores, belonging to traders, in the station, and were richly paid for their enterprise—but having been detained by the footsore, on their homeward march, and probably delayed by their plunder, they had only reached the Calumet, on the borders of Indiana, when they were overtaken by three hundred British and Indians! They were forced to surrender, though not without a fight, for men of that stamp were not to be intimidated by numbers. They lost in the skirmish one fourth of their number: the survivors were carried away to Canada, whence Brady, the leader, escaped, and returned to Cahokia the same winter. The twelve remained prisoners until seventeen hundred and seventy-nine.
Against most men this reverse would have given the little fort security—at least, until the memory of the disaster had been obscured by time. But the pioneers of that period were not to be judged by ordinary rules. The very next spring (1778), another company was raised for the same object, and to wipe out what they considered the stain of a failure. It was led by a man named Maize, over the same ground, to the same place, and was completely successful. The fort was retaken, the trading-station plundered, the wounded men of Brady's party released, and, loaded with spoil, the little party marched back in triumph!
There is an episode in the history of their homeward march, which illustrates another characteristic of the ranger—his ruthlessness. The same spirit which led him to disregard physical obstacles, prevented his shrinking from even direful necessities. One of the prisoners whom they had liberated, became exhausted and unable to proceed. They could not carry him, and would not have him to die of starvation in the wilderness. They could not halt with him, lest the same fate should overtake them, which had defeated the enterprise of Brady. But one alternative remained, and though, to us, it appears cruel and inhuman, it was self-preservation to them, and mercy, in a strange guise, to the unhappy victim—he was despatched by the hand of the leader, and buried upon the prairie! His grave is somewhere near the head-waters of the Wabash, and has probably been visited by no man from that day to this!
Mournful reflections cluster round such a narrative as this, and we are impelled to use the word “atrocious” when we speak of it. It was certainly a bloody deed, but the men of those days were not nurtured in drawing-rooms, and never slept upon down-beds. A state of war, moreover, begets many evils, and none of them are more to be deplored than the occasional occurrence of such terrible necessities.
The ranger-character, like the pioneer-nature of which it was a phase, was compounded of various and widely-differing elements. No one of his evil qualities was more prominent than several of the good; and, I am sorry to say, none of the good was more prominent than several of the bad. No class of men did more efficient service in defending the western settlements from the inroads of the Indians; and though it seems hard that the war should sometimes have been carried into the country of the untutored savage by civilized men, with a severity exceeding his own, we should remember that we can not justly estimate the motives and feelings of the ranger, without first having been exasperated by his sufferings and tried by his temptations.