Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 1 (of 8) / Aboriginal America

by Unknown

In the raids of desolation on either side of the Alleghanies and along the sources of the Susquehannah and the Ohio, from the outbreak of the French and Indian war, down to and even after the crushing of Pontiac’s conspiracy, while more than a thousand cabins of the borderers were burned and their inmates mostly slaughtered, several hundred captives were borne off by the Indians and distributed among their villages. The ultimate fate of these captives always hung in dread uncertainty. If a panic arose among the lodges in apprehension of an onset from a war-party of the whites, the captives might be massacred. But the force of circumstances and the urgency of interested motives steadily made it an object for their captors to retain their prisoners unharmed, and even to make captivity tolerable to them. The alternative of death or life to them generally depended upon whether they might escape or be released by an avenging party without compensation, or could be held for redemption through a ransom. The knowledge that the Indians retained such captives of course became a very effective motive in inducing their relatives in the settlements to gather parties of neighbors for following the victims into the forest depths. Temporary truces also, when made by victorious parties of the whites, were conditioned upon the surrender of all their surviving countrymen who were supposed to be in duress. The savages practised all their artifices and subterfuges in concealing some of their prisoners, alleging that they had been carried deeper into the country by new masters, or by positively denying all knowledge of their whereabouts. But the persistency and threats of those who had learned how to deal with these red diplomates, with a few resolute strokes generally brought about their surrender. When Bouquet had secured possession of Fort Duquesne with his army of 1,500 men, he stoutly followed up his success beyond the Ohio to the Indian settlements near the Muskingum, and with his sturdy pluck and strong force he overawed the representatives of the neighboring tribes which he had summoned to meet him. He insisted, as the first condition of a truce, upon the delivery of all the white prisoners secluded among them, not only without the payment of any ransom, but upon their being brought in with a protecting escort and with means of sustenance. Of course there was always ignorance or doubt as to the number of captives in any particular place, and as to the hands into which any individual known or supposed to be in durance might have fallen. The word of an Indian on these points was worthless unless backed by other testimony. A stimulating of the tongue into unguarded speech by a dram of rum might in some cases serve the purpose of the rack or the thumb-screw in more civilized cross-examinations. An uncertainty of course always hung over the survival or the whereabouts of individuals or members of a family whose bodies had not been found on the scene of an Indian frontier raid. Bouquet was accompanied by friends and relatives of supposed survivors held in captivity as the spoils of some massacre, and these might be depended upon to circumvent the falsehoods and cunning of the captors, and to insist upon their giving up their prizes. The persistency and the plain evidence of resolved purpose manifested by Bouquet finally compelled from the representatives of the tribes in council a pledge to surrender all the prisoners in their hands, and messengers were sent out to gather and bring them in, though with some plausible excuses for delay, and the grudging return of only a part of them. But those who were given up became the best witnesses as to the deception practised by the cunning culprits in holding back others. Only after repeated exposures of falsehood by those so grudgingly surrendered, asserting of their own knowledge that there were others held in durance, whom they might even know by name, was there brought about a full deliverance, saving that, whether truly or falsely, in the case of a few individuals demanded the excuse was alleged that they belonged to some chief or tribe absent at a distance on a hunt, and so not to be reached by a summons. Bouquet was also absolute in his demand for all such white captives, young or old, as were alleged to have been adopted or married among the tribes. His firmly insisting upon this, and the compliance with it in many cases, led to some scenic manifestations in the wilderness, of a highly dramatic character, full of the matter of romance in their revelations of the working of human nature under novel and strange conditions. Such manifestations often attended similar scenes in the ransom or forced surrender of whites who had been in captivity among the Indians. But in this special instance of Bouquet’s resolute course with the Ohio tribes, numbers, variety, picturesqueness in those manifestations, gave to the bringing in and the reception of captives features and incidents which strongly engage alike the sympathies and antipathies of human nature. Some of those brought into Bouquet’s camp, who had once at least been whites, came with full as much reluctance on their part as that which was felt by those who gave them up. Indeed, several of them could be secured only by being bound and guarded.

Approximation in all degrees to the manners and habits of Indian life and to all the qualities of Indian nature had been realized by Europeans from the first contact of the races on this continent. Of course the instances were numerous and very decisive in which this approximation was completed, and resulted in a substitution of all the ways and habits of savagery for those of civilization. Many of those who were forced back into Bouquet’s camp clung to their Indian friends, and repelled all the manifestations of joy and affection of their own nearest kin by blood. They positively refused to return to the settlements. They had been won by preference to the fascinations and license of a life in the wilderness. This preference was by no means inexplicable, even for some full-grown men and women who had been reared in the white settlements. Life in scattered cabins on the frontiers had more points of resemblance than of difference in hard conditions and privations, when compared with savage life in the woods. Such society as these scattered cabins afforded was rude and rough, all experiences were precarious, daily drudgery was severe, the solitary homes were gloomy, and only exceptional cases of early domestic and mental training alleviated the stern exigencies of the condition of the first generation of the settlers. For women and children especially, the outlook and the routine of life were dismal enough. As for the men, the more they conformed themselves in many respects to the actual habits and resources of the Indians in the training of their instincts, in their garb, their food, their adaptation of themselves to the ways and resources of nature, the easier was their lot. Many women, likewise made captives by the savages, in some cases of mature age, and having looked forward to the usual lot of marriage, found an Indian to be preferable, or at all events tolerable, as a husband. Children who preserved but a faint remembrance of home and parents very readily adopted savage tastes, and testified by their shrieks and struggles their unwillingness to part from their red friends. Specimens from each of these classes were the most marked and demonstrative among the groups brought in to Bouquet from Indian lodges, being in number more than two hundred. Doubtless, however, the majority of them had had enough of the experiences of savage life to make a return to the settlements a welcome release. Such persons thenceforward constituted a useful class as interpreters, mediators, and messengers between the contending parties. Their knowledge of Indian character, superstitions, limitations, weak and strong points, impulsive excitability, stratagems, and adaptability to circumstance proved on many emergent occasions of good account. Such of these returned captives as had had the rudiments of an education, and were trustworthy as narrators, have made valuable contributions to local history.

Among many such intelligent and trustworthy reporters was Col. James Smith, captured on the borders of Pennsylvania in 1755, when eighteen years of age, and kept in captivity five years. Another was John McCullough, taken at about the same time and from the near neighborhood, when eight years old. He was retained eight years, and, being a quick-witted and observing youth, he kept his eyes and ears open to all that he could learn. From such sources we derive the most authentic information we possess of that transition period in the condition and fortunes of many of our aboriginal tribes when the intrusion of Europeans upon them with their tempting goods and their rival schemes, which equally tended to dispossess them of their heritage, introduced among them so many novel complications. Some of the narratives of the whites, who, under the conditions just referred to, lived for years and were assimilated with the Indians, present us occasionally by no means unattractive pictures of the ordinary tenor of life among them. In the brief intervals of peace, and in some favored recesses where game abounded and the changing seasons brought round festivals, plays, and scenes of jollity, there were even fascinations to delight one of simple tastes, who could enjoy the aspects of nature, share the easy tramp over mossy trails, content himself with the viands of the wilderness, employ the long hours of laziness in easy handiwork, delight in basking beneath the soft hazes of the Indian summer, or listening to the traditional lore of the winter wigwam. The forests very soon began to be the shelter and the roving haunts of a crew of renegades and outlaws from the settlements, who assimilated at all points with the savages, and often used what remained to them of the knowledge and arts of civilization for ingenious purposes of mischief. It has always proved a vastly more easy and rapid process for white men to fall back into barbarism than for an Indian to conform himself to civilization. Wild life brought out all reversionary tendencies, and revived primitive qualities and instincts. It gave those who shared it a full opportunity to become oblivious of all fastidious tastes and of all the squeamishness of over-delicacy. The promiscuous contents of the camp-kettle, with its deposits and incrustations from previous banquets, were partaken of with a zestful appetite. The circumstances of warfare in the woods quickened all the faculties of watchfulness, made even the natural coward brave, imparted endurance, and multiplied all the ingenuities of resource and stratagem. There is something that surpasses the merely marvellous in the feats of sturdy and persevering scouts, escaped captives, remnants of a butchery, messengers sent to carry intelligence in supreme peril, and lonely wayfarers treading the haunted forests, or creeping stealthily through ambushed defiles, penetrating marshes, using the sky and their woodcraft for guidance, fording or swimming choked or icy streams, climbing high tree-tops for a wider survey from the closed woods and thickets, subsisting on roots and berries and moss, and yielding to the exhaustion of nature only when all perils were passed and the refuge was reached. Alike on the march of armies and in the siege of some little forest stronghold surrounded by yelping savages, it was necessary from time to time to send out a single plucky hero to carry or to obtain intelligence. When such a messenger was not designated by the commander, and the extremity of the emergency left the dismal honor to a volunteer, such was never found to be lacking. It confounds all calculations of the law of chances to learn how, even in the majority of such dire enterprises as are on record, fortune favored the brave. Narratives there are which for ages to come will gather all the exciting elements of tragedy and romance, and occasionally even of comedy, as, set down in the language of the woods, without the constraints of art or grammar, they make us for the moment companions of some imperilled man or woman who borrowed of the bear, the deer, the fox, or the beaver, their several instincts and stratagems for outwitting pursuit and clinging to dear life. Rare, it may be, but still well authenticated, are cases of victims with a strong tenacity of vitality, who, left as dead, mutilated and scalped, reasserted themselves when the foe had gone, found their way back to their homes, and, after such reconstruction as the art of the time would allow, enjoyed a long life afterwards.

The conditions attending the entrance of European war-parties, with their necessary supplies, into the depths of the wilderness were of the most severe and exacting character. They involved equally the outlay of toil and an exposure to perils requiring the most watchful vigilance. Well-worn trails made by the natives, and always sufficiently travelled to keep them open, had long been in use for such purposes as were needed in primitive conditions. These were very narrow, necessitating that progress should be made through them singly, in “Indian file.” At portages or carrying-places, burdens were borne on the back from one watercourse to another, round a rapid or across an elevation. Some of these trails are even now traceable in the oldest settled portions of the country, where the woods have never been wholly cleared. Part of that which was availed of by the whites two hundred and fifty years ago between Plymouth and Boston, and others in untilled portions of the Old Colony, are clearly discernible. The thickets and undergrowths came close to the borders of these trails, and the overhanging branches of the trees were found a grievous annoyance when the earliest traders with pack-horses traversed them. In a large part of our present national domain and in Canada, it may safely be said that nineteen twentieths of all movement from place to place was made by the savages by the watercourses of lake and stream, and the same was done by the Europeans till they brought into use horses first, and then carts. These were first put to service by the traders from the English settlements on the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The pack-horses, heavily laden, trained to their rough service for rocky and marshy grounds, as well as for the thick and stifling depths of the forest, and able to subsist on very poor forage, carried goods most prized by the natives, and generally in inverse ratio to their real worth. They returned to the settlements from the Indian villages with a burden of precious furs, the traffickers mutually finding their account in their respective shares in barter and profit. These traders with their pack-horses were for a long time the pioneers of the actual settlers. The methods and results of their traffic, trifling as they may seem to be, had the two leading consequences of critical importance: first, they made the Indians acquainted with and dependent upon the white man’s goods, and then they provoked and embittered the rival competition between the French and the English for the considerable profits.

What we now call a military road was first undertaken on a serious scale in the advance of the disastrous expedition of General Braddock, in 1755, over the Alleghanies to the forks of the Ohio. The incumbrances with which he burdened himself might wisely have been greatly reduced in kind and in amount. But the exigencies of the service in which he was engaged were but poorly apprehended by him. As in the case of the even more disastrous campaign of General Burgoyne, twenty-two years later, (1777) though his route was mainly by water, the camp was lavishly supplied with appliances of luxury and sensuality. Braddock’s way for his cattle, carts, and artillery was slowly and poorly prepared by pioneers in advance, levelling trees, stiffening marshy places, removing rocks and bushes, and then leaving huge stumps in the devious track to rack the wagons and torment the draught animals. It is not without surprise that we read of the presence of domestic cattle far off in the extreme outposts of single persevering settlers. But when, on the first extensive military expeditions for building a fort on the shore of a lake, at river forks, or to command a portage, we find mention of cannon and heavy ammunition, we marvel at the perseverance involved in their transportation. The casks of liquor, of French brandy and of New England rum, which generally, without stint, formed a part of the stores of each military enterprise, furnished in themselves a motive spirit which facilitated their transport. Flour and bread could, with many risks from stream and weather, be carried in sacks. But pork and beef in pickle, the mainstay in garrisons which could not venture out to hunt or fish, required to be packed in wood. After all the persevering toil engaged in this transportation, the dire necessities of warfare under these stern conditions often compelled the destruction of the stores, every article of which had tasked the strained muscles and sinews of the hard-worked campaigners. When it was found necessary to evacuate a forest post, the stockade was set on fire, the magazine was exploded, the cannon spiked, the powder thrown into the water, and everything that could not be carried off in a hasty retreat was, if possible, rendered useless as booty. As the French and English military movements steadily extended over a wider territory and at more numerous points, with increased forces, the waste and havoc caused by disasters on either side involved an enormous destruction of the materials of war. Vessels constructed with incredible labor on the lakes, anvils, cordage, iron, and artillery having been gathered for their building and arming by perilous ocean voyages and by transit through inner waters and portages, and thousands of bateaux for Lakes Champlain and George, now lie sunken in the depths, most of them destroyed by those in whose service they were to be employed. The “Griffin,” the first vessel on Lake Erie, built by La Salle in 1679, disappeared on her second voyage, and lies beneath the waters still. After Braddock’s defeat, when the fugitive remnant of his army had reached Dunbar’s camp, a hundred and fifty wagons were burned, and fifty thousand pounds of powder were emptied into a creek, after the incredible toil by which they had been drawn over the mountains and morasses.

There were many occasions and many reasons which prompted the Europeans to weigh the gain or loss which resulted to them from the employment of Indian allies, who were always an incalculable element in any enterprise. They could never be depended upon for constancy or persistency. A bold stroke, followed, if successful, with butchery, and a rush to the covert of the woods if a failure, was the sum of their strategy. They had a quick eye in watching the turning fortunes and the probable issue of a venture, and they acted accordingly. They were wholly disinclined for any protracted siege operations. In the weary months of the investment of Detroit, the only enterprise of the sort engaged in by large bodies of savages acting in concert, we find a single exceptional case of their uniform impatience of such prolonged strategy. And even in that case there were intervals when the imperilled and starving garrison had breathing-spells for recuperation. Charges and counter-charges, pleas and criminations of every kind, plausible, false, or sincere, are found in the journals and reports of English and French officers, prompted by accusations and vindications of either party, called out by the atrocities and butcheries wrought by their savage allies in many of the conflicts of the French and Indian war. In vain did the commanders of the white forces on either side promise that their red allies should be restrained from plunder and barbarity against the defeated party. It was an attempt to bridle a storm. From the written opinions expressed by various civil and military officials during all our Indian wars one might gather a list of judgments, always emphatically worded, as to the qualities of the red men as allies. Governor Dinwiddie, writing in May 28, 1756, to General Abercrombie, on his arrival here to hold the chief command till the coming of Lord Loudon, expresses himself thus: “I think we have secured the Six Nations to the Northward to our Interest who, I suppose, will join your Forces. They are a very awkward, dirty sett of People, yet absolutely necessary to attack the Enemy’s Indians in their way of fighting and scowering the Woods before an Army. I am perswaded they will appear a despicable sett of People to his Lordship and you, but they will expect to be taken particular Notice of, and now and then some few Presents. I fear General Braddock despised them too much, which probably was of Disservice to him, and I really think without some of them any engagement in the Woods would prove fatal, and if strongly attached to our Interest they are able in their way to do more than three Times their Number. They are naturally inclined to Drink. It will be a prudent Stepp to restrain them with Moderation, and by some of your Subalterns to shew them Respect.”[1344] Baron Dieskau, in 1755, had abundant reason for expressing himself about his savage auxiliaries in this fashion: “They drive us crazy from morning to night. One needs the patience of an angel to get on with these devils, and yet one must always force himself to seem pleased with them.”[1345]

It would seem as if the native tribes, when Europeans first secured a lodgment, were beguiled by a fancy which in most cases was very rudely dispelled. This fancy was that the new-comers might abide here without displacing them. The natives in giving deeds of lands, as has been said, had apparently no idea that they had made an absolute surrender of territory. They seem to have imagined that something like a joint occupancy was possible, each of the parties being at liberty to follow his own ways and interests without molesting the other. So the Indians did not move off to a distance, but frequented their old haunts, hoping to derive advantage from the neighborhood of the white man. King Philip in 1675 discerned and acutely defined the utter impracticability of any such joint occupancy. He indicated the root of the impending ruin to his own race, and he found a justification of the conspiracy which he instigated in pointing to the white man’s clearings and fences, and to the impossibility of joining planting with hunting, and domestic cattle with wild game.

The history of the Hudson Bay Company and that of the enterprises conducted by the French for more than a century, when set in contrast with the steady development of colonization by English settlers and by the people of the United States succeeding to them, brings out in full force the different relations into which the aborigines have always been brought by the presence of Europeans among them, either as traders or possessors of territory. The Hudson Bay Company for exactly two centuries, from 1670 to 1870, held a charter for the monopoly of trade with the Indians here over an immense extent of territory, and in the later portion of that period held an especial grant for exclusive trade over an even more extended region, further north and west. The company made only such a very limited occupancy of the country, at small and widely distant posts, as was necessary for its trucking purposes and the exchange of European goods for peltries. During that whole period, allowing for rare casualties, not a single act of hostility occurred between the traders and the natives. A large number of different tribes, often at bitter feud with each other, were all kept in amity with the official residents of the company, and each party probably found as much satisfaction in the two sides of a bargain as is usual in such transactions. Deposits of goods were securely gathered in some post far off in the depths of the wilderness, under the care of two or three young apprentices of the company, and here bands of Indians at the proper season came for barter. Previous to the operations of this company, beginning as early as 1620, large numbers of Frenchmen, singly or in parties, ventured deep into the wilderness in company with savage bands, for purposes of adventure or traffic, and very rarely did any of them meet a mishap or fail to find a welcome. Such adventurers in fact became in most cases Indians in their manner of life. Nor did the jealousy of the savages manifest itself in a way not readily appeased when they found the French priests planting mission stations and truck-houses. In no case did the French intruders ask, as did the English colonists, for deeds of territory. It was understood that they held simply by sufferance, and with a view to mutual advantage for both parties, with no purpose of overreaching. The relations thus established between the French and the natives continued down till even after the extinction of the territorial claims of France. And when, just before the opening of the great French and Indian hostilities with the English colonists, the French had manifested their purpose to get a foothold on the heritage of the savages by pushing a line of strongly fortified posts along their lakes and rivers, the apprehensions of the savages were craftily relieved by the plea that these securities were designed only to prevent the encroachment of the English.

A peaceful traffic with the Indians, like that of the Hudson Bay Company and the French, had been from the first but a subordinate object of the English colonists. These last, while for a period they confined themselves to the seaboard, supplemented their agricultural enterprise by the fishery and by a very profitable commerce. As soon as they began to penetrate into the interior they took with them their families and herds, made fixed habitations, put up their fences and dammed the streams. Instead of fraternizing with the Indians, they warned them off as nuisances. We must also take into view the fact that this steadily advancing settlement of the Indian country directly provoked and encouraged the resolute though baffled opposition of the savages. They could match forces with these scattered pioneers, even if, as was generally the case, a few families united in constructing a palisadoed and fortified stronghold to which they might gather for refuge. If a body of courageous men had advanced together well prepared for common defence, it is certain the warfare would not have been so desultory as it proved to be. All the wiles of the Indians in conducting their hostilities gave them a great advantage. They thought that the whites might be dislodged effectually from further trespasses if once and again they were visited by sharp penalties for their rash intrusion. It was plain that they were long in coming to a full apprehension of the pluck of their invaders, of their recuperative energies, and of the reserved forces which were behind them. From the irregular base line of the coast the English advanced into the interior, not by direct parallel lines, but rather by successive semicircles of steadily extending radii. The advances from the middle colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia marked the farthest reaches in this curvature. The French, in the mean while, aimed from the start for occupying the interior.

The period which we have here under review is one through which the savages, for the most part, were but subordinate agents, the principals being the French and the English. So far as the diplomatic faculties of the savages enabled them to hold in view the conditions of the strife, there were doubtless occasions in which they thought they held what among civilized nations is called the balance of power. Nor would it have been strange if, at times, their chiefs had imagined that, though it might be impossible for them again to hold possession of their old domains free from the intrusion of the white man, they might have power to decide which of the two nationalities should be favored above the other. In that case the French doubtless would have been the favored party. We have, however, to take into view the vast disproportion between the numbers, if not of the resources, of these two foreign nationalities, when the struggle between them earnestly began. In 1688 there were about eleven thousand of the French in America, and nearly twenty times as many English. The French were unified under the control of their home government. Its resources were at their call: its army and navy, its arsenals and treasury, its monarch and ministers, might be supposed to be serviceable and engaged for making its mastery on this continent secure. The English, however, were only nominally, and as regards some of the colonies even reluctantly and but truculently, under the control of their home government. It had been the jealous policy of the New England colonists, from their first planting, to isolate themselves from the mother-country, and to make self-dependence the basis of independence. Their circumstances had thrown them on their own resources, and made them feel that as their foreign superiors could know very little of their emergencies, it was not wise or even right in them to interpose in their affairs. Indeed, it is evident that all the British colonists felt themselves equal, without advice or help from abroad, to take care of themselves, if they had to contend only against the savages. But when the savages had behind them the power of the French monarch, it was of necessity that the English should receive a reinforcement from their own countrymen. In the altercations with the British ministry which followed very soon after the close of the French and Indian war, a keenly argued question came under debate as to the claim which the mother-country had upon the gratitude of her colonists for coming to their rescue when threatened with ruin from their red and white enemies. And the answer to this question was judged to depend upon whether, in sending hither her fleets and armies, Britain had in view an extension of her transatlantic domains or the protection of her imperilled subjects. At any rate, there were jealousies, cross-purposes, and an entire lack of harmony between the direct representatives of English military power and the coöperating measures of the colonial government. Never, under any stress of circumstances, was England willing to raise even the most serviceable of the officers of the provincial forces to the rank of regulars in her own army. The youthful Washington, whose sagacity and prowess had proved themselves in field and council where British officers were so humiliated, had to remain content with the rank of a provincial colonel. Nor did the provincial legislatures act in concert either with each other, or with the advice and appeals of their royal governors in raising men, money or supplies for combined military operations against common enemies. Each of the colonies thought it sufficient to provide for itself. Each was even dilatory and backward when its own special peril was urgent. These embarrassments of the English did very much to compensate the French for their great inferiority in numerical strength. We are again to remind ourselves of the fact that the French, alike from their temperament and their policy, were always vastly more congenial and influential with the savages.