15
Anthony and Astor
THERE WERE THOSE—THEY were few—who wanted the western war with the Indians to end, even before the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolution. The most notable of these was George Morgan, the son of Welsh immigrants, who had set up as a fur trader and partner in the mercantile firm of Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan. During the American Revolution, he was commissioned a colonel and given the principal job of Indian agent, assigned to Fort Pitt, where, from 1776 to 1779, he represented the Continental Congress in its diplomacy (or attempted diplomacy) with the Indians of the Ohio Country.
As a trader, Morgan wanted to use the trading model to make peace in the West and thereby free up Patriot resources to concentrate on fighting the war in the East. Morgan well knew that fur traders—especially the French—were capable of comfortably coexisting with the Indians precisely because they had no claim on either Native lands or Native spirits. They wanted to acquire neither empire nor religious converts. The Indians were willing to hunt and trap beaver, and the traders were willing to allow them to be the primary producers of this merchandise. Except for those committed to the Hudson’s Bay Company and its factory system, traders were willing to work within the framework of the Indian culture and the Indian production model. In exchange for the pelts, they offered trade goods—value for value, with no political, moral, religious, or real estate strings attached.
Morgan saw that Patriot politicians, administrators, and military men failed to understand the importance of the trading model and therefore mightily resisted adopting it. When the Mingo chief White Mingo reminded American Indian commissioners who had come to negotiate in the Ohio Country that “the ancient custom of our Forefathers”—by which he meant the custom of gift giving—ensured that the parties in a negotiation were “always treated well,” the commissioners stubbornly refused to take the hint and instead bristled at what they saw as a demand for bribes. They therefore reported that negotiating with the western Indians was an exercise in extortion. Morgan also recognized that Indians who tried to persuade their brethren to ally themselves with the British often pointed out that the Patriots, even when they were willing to trade, demanded higher prices for lesser merchandise than the British asked for better goods. This was proof, the Indians said, that the Americans were no friends. In 1777, dissension developed within the Delaware tribe over whether or not to side with the Patriots. The argument against the alliance (Morgan recorded) was that the paucity and poorness of American presents and American trade goods would bring down ridicule on any foolish enough to attach themselves to a people “who cannot [even] furnish … a pair of stockings or a Blanket.”
When Morgan appealed to the Continental Congress and to local settlers, militia leaders, and other military officials to reintroduce gift giving and to do so generously, he was greeted with suspicion and accused of being a secret Tory, perhaps even a Loyalist spy. In 1777, when Morgan went further, suggesting that the surest road to peace in the West was to withdraw from Kentucky, the Continental Army general Edward Hand briefly arrested him, convinced that the British had put him up to suggesting the territorial concession. For his part, George Rogers Clark called for increasing pressure on the hostiles by making threats to force the neutrals and other fence sitters to choose sides. Clark’s patron, Virginia governor Patrick Henry, put it this way: “Savages must be managed by working on their Fears.”
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The Patriots’ aggressive policy in the Ohio Country would prove to be a miserable failure. Morgan proposed conciliating the Indians with presents, an “ancient” custom that had worked well in the past, and he also proposed withdrawing from the contested far frontier in order to concentrate all military effort on combat in the eastern theater, the quicker to win the war’s principal objective, national independence from the British Empire. These were strategically rational moves, proposed by a former Indian trader who understood that trading value for value was more likely to produce a successful outcome than extorting value through violence. Yet Morgan’s rationality could not prevail over the pervasive irrational need to conquer and kill.
On the Ohio frontier, Indian hating was a more powerful motive than national independence. In part, this was because the white settlers of the far frontier had great interest in acquiring their own independence—in the form of land—but very little interest in acquiring national independence. Their overriding concerns were local and had as little in common with the concerns of such colonial capitals as Boston, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg as they did with London fashions. The irrational roots of the policy of limitless aggression seemed to run even deeper than this, though. After all, immediate, local gain may be strategically shortsighted, but it isn’t necessarily crazy. The infamous Gnadenhutten Massacre of March 8, 1782, however, was.
On October 19, 1781, Joseph Brant, representing the Mohawks, and Pimoacan and Pipe, chiefs of the Delaware, met with Abraham, chief of the “Moravian Indians”—also known as the Christian Munsee, members of the Delaware tribal group who had been christianized by Moravian missionaries. Brant and the others tried to persuade Chief Abraham to unite with them in attacking white settlements, but Abraham refused, arguing that the Americans would surely leave peaceful Christian Indians alone. Captain Matthew Elliott, in command of the British garrison at Fort Detroit, then ordered the Moravian Indians to leave their homes (in what is today western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio) “for their own safety” and to resettle closer to territory covered by the British stronghold at Detroit. Accordingly, Abraham and the Moravian Indians set out for the banks of the Sandusky River in Ohio Country. By early 1782, however, a harsh winter famine compelled them to seek permission to move back temporarily to their mission towns on the Tuscarawas River. The permission granted, they arrived just after Brant and his Delaware allies had raided the area. In February, Pennsylvania militia Colonel David Williamson was ordered to “punish” all of the “hostiles” he could find. As it turned out, Williamson’s mission coincided with the Moravian Indians’ return.
In March, Williamson and a force of one hundred marched into Gnaddenhutten, a town German Moravians and the Indians affiliated with them had founded on the Tuscarawas River. The English equivalent of its German name, “Huts of Grace,” expressed the aspiration of both the Indian as well as the white residents. Encountering Chief Abraham and the forty-seven men, women, and boys gathered with him there, Williamson announced that he had been sent to take them back to Fort Pitt, where they would be protected from all harm. At Williamson’s request, Abraham sent runners to the neighboring Moravian Indian town of Salem to fetch the Indians there and bring them back to Gnaddenhutten. No sooner was this done than Williamson ordered the wrists of each Indian bound behind him or her, and when the fifty-two people from Salem arrived, he bound them as well. All were thus confined until the following morning, when Williamson announced to them that were to be executed as punishment for the recent raids. To Abraham’s plea that they had refused to take part in the raids, Williamson turned a deaf ear and a stone heart. At nightfall, his men killed a total of ninety-eight men, women, and children, delivering to each a mallet blow to the back of the head. Two boys managed to escape, surviving to tell the grisly tale.
The Gnaddenhutten Massacre was universally condemned, including by the Pennsylvania legislature, but neither Williamson nor anyone else was punished for it. That the atrocity would trigger acts of Delaware vengeance was, of course, inevitable. These raids, in turn, prompted an order to Colonel William Crawford, who was assigned, on May 25, to undertake the so-called Second Moravian Campaign for the purpose of destroying the Moravian Indian, Delaware, and Wyandot towns all along the upper Sandusky River, including the principal village of Sandusky. One of the 480 volunteers Crawford commanded was John Rose, whose real name was Baron Gustave Rosenthal, a Russian nobleman self-exiled from his homeland to escape familial vengeance after he had killed a man in a duel. Rose recorded his impressions of Colonel Crawford and left a picture of what a frontier citizen army was really like:
[Crawford was] kind and exceedingly affectionate … Brave, and patient of hardships.… As a Commanding Officer, cool in danger, but not systematical. Like others in the same stations, he wanted to be all in all: by trusting everything to the performance of his own abilities only, everything was but half done, and Everybody was disgusted.… Jealous of his military Knowledge & Superiority, but a mere quack in the profession of a Soldier. No military Genius; & no man of Letters.
As to the men of Crawford’s command:
Upon these Volunteer Expeditions, every Man allmost appears on Horseback; but he takes care to mount the very worst horse he has upon the farm. This horse he loads with at least as much provisions as he is well able to carry. No man calculates the distance he is going, or how long he can possibly be absent. As he has provisions enough to maintain at least three Men on the Campaign, he does not stint himself to a certain allowance. Lolling all day unemployed upon his horse, his only amusement is chewing [tobacco], particularly as all noise in talking, singing & whistling is prohibited.
The horses, Rose observed, were actually an impediment to a wilderness campaign, overloaded as they were with provisions, which made it particularly difficult for them to negotiate thickets and swamps. “Add to this that every Man hangs upon his horse to the very moment of attack. Then instead of being disencumbered & ready to defend himself, his first care is his horse. Him, he must tye and look after during an engagement, because all his dependence is in his horse & his horses burthen.” Furthermore, Rose complained, order—“regularity and precaution”—was “looked upon as … mere Moonshine.” Lack of discipline and their commander’s want of skill promised disaster.
Simon Girty was a man of Scots-Irish ancestry who, taken captive by Seneca when he was a child, spent between four and seven years (sources vary) with the tribe before he was returned to his family. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, he declared himself a Patriot, but when the Seneca sided with the Loyalists, so did he, and he was thereafter vilified as a turncoat—a double turncoat, really, betrayer of the American cause as well as his race. Girty served as a liaison between the British and their Indian allies, yet he was also clearly averse to gratuitous killing and was known to have ransomed Patriot prisoners at his own expense. Thus when he approached Crawford under a flag of truce with a warning to turn back, some in Crawford’s command implored their leader to listen. Girty explained that Crawford and his men were surrounded by Shawnee and Delaware. Turn back now, he said, before it was too late.
Crawford would hear none of it. Spurning both Girty and his advice, he pressed on until on June 4, near Sandusky, the Shawnee began to pick off isolated members of his force. On June 5, they encircled the militiamen and pinned them down, awaiting the arrival of additional warriors. Crawford attempted to organize a retreat, but his command had dissolved in confusion and panic. Clots of men deserted en masse. Others just wandered off into the woods. Some forty to fifty were known to have been killed or captured, and twenty-eight were wounded. Among those taken captive was Colonel Crawford.
Relationships were seldom cut-and-dried on the far frontier, and Crawford, though he led a punitive expedition, actually had a reputation among the Delaware as a fair-minded and honorable man. He asked his captors to send for Wangomend, a Native religious leader revered as a prophet. Wangomend was a voice of peace, who had been Crawford’s guest at Fort Pitt and who was known to be sympathetic to the Americans. He answered Crawford’s summons but told him, in sorrow, that he could not intercede on his behalf. Although it was understood that Crawford had not massacred the men, women, and children at Gnadenhutten, it was more than enough to be associated with those murderers. He was therefore beyond saving. At the conclusion of this exchange, a tearful Wangomend bid Colonel Crawford farewell as Chief Pipe tied him to a stake and lit the low fire that would slowly, very slowly, burn him to death. Before the flames consumed his life, a Moravian Indian named Joseph was sent forward with a scalping knife. It was he who took the colonel’s scalp while the colonel still had the consciousness to feel it.
Crawford’s defeat emboldened others to undertake new raids along the upper Ohio, and these, in turn, prompted a Patriot call for yet another expedition against the Sandusky villages. Joseph Brant, who had been planning an attack against Wheeling, decided to turn his force of eleven hundred Indians and Loyalists back to the Ohio to head off that new Sandusky expedition. En route, on August 16, 1782, a detachment from his force, three hundred Wyandots and Tory rangers, including Simon Girty, surrounded Bryant’s (or Bryan’s) Station, five miles north of Lexington, Kentucky. After a brief siege, Girty withdrew, destroying crops, killing livestock, and stealing horses as he went. While he retreated, reinforcements from Lincoln and Fayette counties (the latter group led by Daniel Boone) arrived at Bryant’s Station. From here, 180 mounted riflemen lit out after Girty’s party. At Lower Blue Licks, they caught sight of a few Indians—whereupon Boone, suspecting a trap, argued for holding off the attack until the arrival of reinforcements. Hugh McGary, a blustering major of militia, countered that Girty and his men must not be allowed to escape. Brushing aside Boone’s objections, he led the small force in an assault.
Boone, of course, was right.
In no time, the Patriots were flanked in ambush, and in the ensuing battle on August 19, seventy Americans were killed and twenty were captured or wounded in what was the Kentucky militia’s costliest defeat to date. It boded the abandonment of the Kentucky frontier—the very thing Morgan had argued for as a matter of deliberate strategy—but neither the Continental Congress nor General George Washington wanted to deliver the Loyalists such a victory. General William Irvine, who had replaced Brodhead as commander of the Continental Army’s Western Department, assembled 1,200 regulars and militiamen for an assault on the Sandusky Shawnee, Wyandot, and Delaware towns. In the meantime, George Rogers Clark mustered an additional force of 1,050 Kentuckians on the Ohio shore opposite the mouth of the Licking River. His objectives were the destruction of the just-rebuilt towns of Shawnee strongholds of Chillicothe and Piqua, and on November 9, 1782, he issued his general orders:
As an action with the Enemy may be hourly Expected the Officers are Requested to pay the Strictest attention To their duty as Suffering no man to Quit his Rank Without leave as Nothing is more dangerous than Disorder. If fortunately any prisoner Should fall in to our hands they are by no means to be put to Death without leave as it will be attended with the Immediate Masseerce [massacre] of all our Citizens that are in the hands of the Enimy and Also deprive us of the advantage of Exchanging for our own people, no person to attempt to take any Plunder until Orders Should Issue for that purpose under penalty of Being punished for Disobedience of orders and to have no share of Such plunder himself. The Officers in perticular are requested to Observe that the Strictest Notice be paid to this Order, as much Depends on it all plunder taken to be Delivered to the Quarter Master, to be Devided among the Different Batallions in proportion to their Numbers any person Concealing Plunder of any kind Shall be Considered as Subject to the penalty of the Above Order.
Clark was on the move well before Irvine, but, as had happened in Sullivan’s campaign in western New York (chapter 14), the Indians eluded him. He burned Chillicothe and other abandoned Shawnee towns, and he destroyed by his estimate ten thousand bushels of corn, but he encountered only twenty of the enemy, killing ten and capturing the others before the preliminary articles of peace between the United States and Great Britain were signed on the thirtieth of the month, and the Ohio Country officially became the property of the United States. At least, that is what the papers drawn up in Paris said. In physical fact, as 1782 was drawing to a close, the English, having just made peace, controlled more Indian allies than they had had in the entire French and Indian War and at any other time in the American Revolution. None of them had signed a treaty.
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To their Indian allies, the withdrawal of the British when they were clearly at the height of their power in the West was incomprehensible. Nevertheless, the Algonquians for the most part complied with British instructions to end offensive operations, although they appealed to their erstwhile partners to look after their interests in making a final treaty with the Americans. In simply ceding the Ohio Country and the entire Old Northwest to the Americans, the British clearly did no such thing. The Iroquois expressed greater outrage than the Algonquians, protesting that the British were giving away what was not theirs. This, of course, was precisely what the British and the Iroquois had jointly done in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix with regard to the Algonquian land in Ohio and Kentucky.
Although the crown did enter into the Treaty of Paris without regard for the interests of its Indian allies, a number of the local British officers did feel some sense of obligation. General Frederick Haldimand believed that simply abandoning the Indians to their fate at American hands was not only morally wrong, it posed a danger to British Canada as well as to the British fur trade, which still extended from Canada into the ceded territory below. Noting that the Paris treaty left the timing and terms of the British evacuation of the western outposts vague, Haldimand and others proposed that garrisons be maintained indefinitely to help ensure good treatment of the Indians. His goal was to maintain rather than end the Anglo-Indian alliances and to enable the continuation of British trade with the Indians on both sides of the border.
The British fur trade had actually prospered during the American Revolution. Not only did the Hudson’s Bay Company come into its first great maturity during this period, but a new firm, the North West Company, was founded in 1779, during the height of the Revolution, to compete with it. Both companies were headquartered in British Canada, and both operated north as well as south of the border. In 1787, the North West Company merged with Gregory, McLeod and Co., which brought into the firm the Mackenzie cousins, Roderick and Alexander. The remarkable Alexander Mackenzie led exploration of Canada’s vast western territories and established Grand Portage, Minnesota, on Lake Superior, as the company’s regional headquarters and its main supply depot for the mountain men who were trapping and trading in the far western peltries. Grand Portage had been a fur-trading center since the seventeenth century, but the North West Company greatly augmented its importance and ensured that Detroit and Michilimackinac would, the Treaty of Paris notwithstanding, continue to function as major British fur-trading posts as well.
Whereas the local British, such as Haldimand, were motivated by a sense of moral rectitude reinforced by a desire to maintain the profitability of the far western fur trade to reassert their role as “fathers” to the Indians, George Rogers Clark observed in a letter to Virginia governor Benjamin Harrison on May 22, 1783, that “we shall be Eternally Involved in a war with some [Indian] nation or other of them, until we shall at last in order to save blood and treasure be Reduced to the necessity of convincing them that we are always able to crush them at pleasure, and determined to do it when Even [ever?] they misbehave.” Moreover, Clark believed that, with armies in the field and the war against Britain ended, “a greater Opportunity can never offer to Reduce them to Obedience than the present moment.”
As it turned out, the Shawnee, Ottawas, and Miami in the Ohio Country had no intention of being so “reduced.” They hadn’t lost the war between the British and the Americans. Quite the contrary, it seemed to them that their position had never been stronger and that there was no greater opportunity to drive the Americans from their land than the “present moment.”
The national government of the newly independent United States made offers to purchase (albeit cheaply) Indian territory, but the Shawnee spurned them all, and, in January 1786, a Shawnee chief named Kekewepellethe, known to the Americans as Tame Hawk, declared emphatically that the Kentucky and Ohio land the settlers desired was Shawnee land and would always be Shawnee land. Richard Butler, the U.S. commissioner endeavoring to conclude a treaty with the Ohio Country tribes, replied to Tame Hawk that, on the contrary, the land was the sovereign territory of the United States, claimed by virtue of the American victory over the Indians’ British allies, and that the purchase offer was a generous expression of friendship and goodwill rather than an act of necessity. Under threat of war, and with his people suffering the effects of a hard winter and the loss of the presents they had received from the British, Kekewepellethe at length agreed to relinquish the entire Miami Valley. Almost immediately, however, other Shawnee septs, together with the Miami, repudiated the agreement. Led principally by the war chiefs Blue Jacket (Shawnee) and Little Turtle (Miami), the Shawnee and Miami intensified a campaign of hit-and-run raids that had begun during the American Revolution.
During the fall of 1786, George Rogers Clark raised a two-thousand-man militia force in Kentucky and marched it toward the Wabash Valley, where Shawnee, Miami, and Ottawa warriors had banded together and were meeting with British military officers and fur traders, who, taking advantage of the vague language of the Treaty of Paris, loitered in the Ohio Country.
Clark was no longer the man he had been during the Revolution. Given to strong drink, he was prematurely aged and infirm. Not only did he fail to encounter the enemy, he did not try very hard to do so, and his militia disbanded and returned home as soon as their short-term enlistments had expired. Another force of eight hundred militiamen, under Colonel Benjamin Logan, did attack Shawnee villages on the Miami River shortly after the dissolution of Clark’s force, but did so with little lasting effect. In the summer of 1787, Logan conducted a more intensive raid, destroying large stocks of Shawnee provisions. According to Clark’s theory of intimidation, this should have reduced them to obedience. Instead, it drove the Shawnee into a closer union with the Miami and drew other tribes into the alliance, including Ottawas, Ojibwa, Kickapoo, and Potawatomis. Together, these tribes, which were periodically joined by the Chickamauga and Cherokee, raided settlements all along the Cumberland River from 1788 on.
What would be known as Little Turtle’s War was now in full swing, and by 1790, weary of chronic Indian trouble, settlers appealed for a federal campaign against the Indians throughout the entire Ohio Valley. This prompted mobilization of the “First American Regiment,” which had been formed in 1784. In 1790, it was placed under the command of Josiah Harmar, a not particularly distinguished Continental Army officer during the Revolution but now—by default—the senior commander in the diminutive United States Army. Harmar led 353 regimental regulars and 1,133 militiamen in a westward march during the full of 1790.
Both Little Turtle and Blue Jacket were exceedingly well informed of Harmar’s plan of attack. President George Washington’s secretary of war, Henry Knox, fearful that the British in the area would interpret the movements of the First American Regiment as an attack on them, ordered territorial governor Arthur St. Clair to tell Major Patrick Murray, the British commandant at Detroit, that an assault was being launched against the Indians, not His Majesty’s subjects. Murray thanked St. Clair for the information—then, like a good father, informed the Indians.
On October 19, Harmar dispatched 150 mounted militiamen under John Hardin in the hope of locating a few hostiles to fight. Little Turtle and his Miami warriors got the jump on Hardin’s company, however, springing an ambush that sent it withdrawing in panic and disorder. The mounted troops collided with infantrymen who had been sent as reinforcements and, infecting them with their own fear, sent them into retreat as well. A mere thirty army regulars and nine militiamen stood their ground against the attack. Harmar had no choice but to order a general withdrawal. On October 21, he sent a small body of regulars and four hundred militiamen to act as a rear guard for the retreating First American Regiment. This rear guard, however, was also ambushed, this time by Blue Jacket and his Shawnee. As before, the militia broke and ran, though not before 108 of them had been killed, along with 75 regulars. This encounter was not as one-sided as the first—Blue Jacket also lost at least a hundred warriors—but he held the tactical upper hand and was inclined to return to the fray. He would have done so, too, had it not been for a total lunar eclipse that took place the night following the battle, which Blue Jacket’s Ottawa allies took as an evil omen. Against Blue Jacket’s anguished protests, they refused to renew the fight, and his Shawnee followed suit. Thus the First American Regiment was saved from likely annihilation.
After Harmar’s defeat, the Shawnee and allied tribes staged a series of winter raids—an innovative and daring tactic, since Indians traditionally avoided fighting in the winter. Early in January 1791, Blue Jacket and two hundred Shawnee warriors laid siege to Dunlap’s Station, near Cincinnati. They also hit other outposts and even ambushed flatboat traffic on the Ohio River. At the height of violence in 1791, the British fur traders working with both the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company volunteered to intercede. The war was disrupting trade, and they began to fear that the incessant raiding would unleash a massive American response, which would drive out fur-trapping Indians and very likely result in the eviction of the British traders as well.
The Shawnee and other Indians listened to the British proposal with interest but without commitment. The Americans, represented by Washington’s secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, summarily rejected the proposal. Rather than treat with “savages” as sovereign nations, Hamilton proposed that the United States should punish them once and for all. This time, the Second American Regiment, a force of 2,300 men—half of them temporary soldiers (enlisted for a period of six months)—convened at Fort Washington under the command of Governor Arthur St. Clair. He was an experienced soldier, having fought in the regular British army during the French and Indian War and as a Patriot major general in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. He had, however, suffered court-martial when, on July 5, 1777, he retreated from Fort Ticonderoga, relinquishing it to a British siege without so much as firing a shot. Acquitted, he was returned to duty, but General Washington recognized that his days as a field commander were over. He adopted the man as his aide-de-camp, maintaining, without particular warrant, a high opinion of him as a general. Apparently, he entertained no second thoughts about entrusting to him the new expedition against Blue Jacket and Little Turtle.
St. Clair and his men advanced to the Great Miami River, where they built Fort Hamilton. On October 4, 1791, the punitive expedition pushed off from here, but progress was painfully slow, and the army was poorly supplied. By October 19, the force was still a hundred miles from the Maumee River, its objective. St. Clair paused to erect Fort Jefferson, but during a spell of miserably wet weather, he was plagued by desertions. Fearing that his army would waste away if he delayed much longer, he left behind 120 men to garrison Fort Jefferson (most of these were ill or simply unreliable), dispatched a 300-man patrol to round up deserters, then set off with 1,400 troops to seek out Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and their warriors.
A full month passed without an encounter. Then, on November 3, 1791, the army made camp on a plateau above the upper Wabash. Doubtless, St. Clair had chosen it because of the visibility it afforded, but, in truth, it was a terrible place for a camp, since it was exposed and quite vulnerable to attack. Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, leading a thousand warriors, took full advantage of the army’s bad position. At dawn on November 4, the Indians rushed the camp from three directions. Once again, the Americans were gripped by panic. Many soldiers dropped their weapons and either ran aimlessly or cowered in prayer. The artillery, positioned too high to be of any use, fired without effect, whereupon Blue Jacket led a party of Shawnee against the gunners. St. Clair’s second in command, Richard Butler, attempted to rescue the artillerymen, but his detachment of the Second American Regiment was quickly cut down and Butler himself mortally wounded.
After three hours, those who could—about five hundred men in all—fled back down the road they had laboriously cut through the wilderness. They were fortunate, for the triumphant Indians, celebrating their victory with looting and whiskey, were too engrossed to give chase. They were celebrating having just killed 623 officers and men, along with 24 civilian teamsters. A total of 271 soldiers were wounded, whereas Indian losses were just 21 warriors, with about 40 wounded. In proportion to the number of men fielded that day, it stands as the worst loss in U.S. Army history. When news of it reached President Washington, he vented his wrath before Tobias Lear, his private secretary:
Here on this very spot [the president’s study], I took leave of him [St. Clair]; I wished him success and honor; you have your instructions, I said, from the Secretary of War, I had a strict eye to them; and will add but one word—BEWARE OF A SURPRISE. I repeat it, BEWARE OF A SURPRISE—you know how the Indians fight us. He went off with that as my last solemn warning thrown into his ears. And yet!! O God, O God, he’s worse than a murderer! how can he answer it to his country;—the blood of the slain is upon him, the curse of widows and orphans—the curse of Heaven!
Following his defeat, Arthur St. Clair resigned as head of the army but retained his post as governor of the Northwest Territory. The catastrophe persuaded President Washington to abandon any thought he may have had concerning a conciliatory Indian policy. Although a still war-weary public was inclined toward peace, in 1792 the House of Representatives authorized a larger army—with the proviso that an earnest attempt first be made to conclude a treaty. Washington used this proviso to buy the time necessary to reorganize his shattered western forces, which had been reduced to a mere 750 men. At the president’s direction, Iroquois agents, including Chief Red Jacket, were hired to present an American peace proposal at a meeting with the Shawnee and other tribes on the Auglaize River during the summer of 1792. The U.S. government proposed a boundary line along the Muskingum River, beyond which whites agreed not to settle—though tracts already settled would remain unmolested. To this, the Shawnee responded with contempt, asserting that all of the land north of the Ohio River was theirs, and demanding that all Americans settled on it must move and that restitution must be made for the usurpation and spoliation of Kentucky hunting grounds. In reporting this rebuke to the American commissioners, Red Jacket, perhaps reluctant to admit diplomatic defeat, put the response in its best light and announced that the Shawnee, Miami, and other western tribes were willing to consider peace at a conference next year. In the meantime, however, the Shawnee resumed raiding the Ohio Country, and President Washington found himself a new general.
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He settled on one of his revolutionary generals, Anthony Wayne, who bore the nickname “Mad Anthony.” Contemporary legend interpreted this sobriquet as homage to the commander’s fearless impetuosity—which he unquestionably possessed; however, the nickname was the product of a fairly irrelevant set of circumstances. A neighbor of Wayne’s who was serving in the Continental Army had deserted, was arrested, and told the authorities to contact General Wayne, who would surely vouch for him. Wayne not only refused to help but denied even knowing the man. Informed of this, the stunned deserter responded, “He must be mad,” and the name stuck.
Wayne accepted the commission in April 1792 and set about recruiting his army, which he mustered at Pittsburgh that summer. After assembling a thousand men, he prudently avoided calling the force the Third American Regiment and instead christened it the Legion of the United States. He then moved his headquarters twenty miles downstream from Pittsburgh to a campsite he named Legionville. As he recruited more troops, he instituted a program of thorough training while he, in vivid contrast to previous commanders, endeavored to learn all he could about the lives and military tactics of the western Indians he would be up against. Based on this study, he concluded that it was best to pursue a strategy of sustained conflict, to fight the kind of war of attrition that the Indians were least suited to win.
By the spring of 1793, Wayne moved his growing army to Fort Washington, then set up camp—called Hobson’s Choice—just outside of it. While these preparations were under way, a final peace commission offered the Indians a considerable array of concessions, which were presented to the Shawnee and their allies on July 31, 1793. Most significantly, the commissioners recanted the previous position of the United States, that the western Indians were a conquered people by virtue of their alliance with the defeated British. They also announced that the government would relinquish all claim to lands north of the Ohio River, except in the immediate vicinity of Cincinnati and the Scioto and Muskingum rivers; for these lands, the government would pay the Indians. The Shawnee replied on August 15, 1793, through the British trader Alexander McKee:
You agreed to do us justice, after having long, and injuriously, withheld it. We mean in the acknowledgment you now have made, that the King of England never did, nor ever had a right to give you our Country, by the Treaty of peace, and you want to make this act of Common Justice a great part of your concessions, and seem to expect that, because you have at last acknowledged our independence, we should for such a favor surrender to you our country.… Money to us is of no value … and no consideration whatever can induce us to sell the lands on which we get sustenance for our women and children; we hope we may be allowed to point out a mode by which your settlers may be easily removed, and peace thereby obtained.… We know these settlers are poor, or they would never have ventured to live in a country which has been in continued trouble ever since they crossed the Ohio; divide, therefore, this large sum of money [$50,000 plus a $10,000 annual annuity], which you have offered to us, among these people … and we are persuaded, they would most readily accept of it, in lieu of the lands you sold them.… If you add also, the great sums you must expend in raising and paying Armies, with a view to force us to yield you our Country, you will certainly have more than sufficient for the purposes of repaying these settlers for all their labor and improvements.
On September 11, 1793, Big Tree, an Iroquois the Americans had hired as a secret agent and courier, informed Wayne of the breakdown of peace talks. Although the general himself had warned against doing battle during the fall, when the Indians were at their greatest post-hunt strength, he believed that delay would communicate weakness and decided therefore to break his own rule and attack immediately. The corruption and incompetence that had plagued the supply of St. Clair’s army came back to haunt Wayne. Worse, the army’s second in command, Brigadier General James Wilkinson, deliberately sabotaged supply lines, inadequate as they were, in a scheme to overthrow Wayne and take his place. (Wilkinson would prove an inveterate schemer: As a secret agent in the employ of the Spanish and perhaps even the British, he later conspired unsuccessfully with Aaron Burr to force the secession of the western territories from the United States.) During the delay, Wayne built a fort at Greenville, Ohio, and then, farther west, erected Fort Recovery, on the site of St. Clair’s defeat. While the American commander thus consolidated his position, many of the allies of the Shawnee and Miami, disgruntled in their idleness, began to desert the cause. Thus, when Wayne, still impeded by lack of supply, failed to get his campaign under way by May 1794, Little Turtle and Blue Jacket decided to strike the first blow.
Their plan was to attack the army’s already tenuous supply line, thereby drawing soldiers out of the forts to defend the baggage trains. Once exposed, the Legionnaires could be ambushed, and the chiefs hoped this latest army would follow those of Harmar and St. Clair into ignominious retreat, if not annihilation. With twelve hundred warriors, Blue Jacket and a remarkable young Shawnee warrior named Tecumseh set out from the Maumee River to blockade Fort Recovery. A scout—one of the sixty Chickasaw, traditional enemies of the Shawnee, fighting on the American side—spotted them on June 29. Unfortunately, he knew little English, and the Legion captain to whom he reported, Alexander Gibson, knew no Chickasaw. The June 30 attack on the pack train and its escort of 140 Legionnaires was therefore a total surprise and resulted in a rout. Victorious, Blue Jacket and Tecumseh tried to call off their warriors, but the Ottawas and other allies insisted on advancing to Fort Recovery itself. Wayne directed his artillery (ordnance recovered from the site of St. Clair’s defeat) against them, turning them back with the loss of perhaps thirty warriors.
At this point, the grand Indian alliance began to crack after warriors fighting alongside the Shawnee raped and robbed a number of Shawnee women. The alliance with the British traders also faltered when promised aid, including two pieces of artillery, failed to materialize. In the meantime, on July 28, the bulk of the American forces, 2,200 regulars and 1,500 Kentucky militiamen, arrived at Fort Recovery. Wayne ordered the construction of a more advanced post, Fort Defiance, which the augmented army reached on August 8.
Just downstream from this newest fort, Little Turtle was counseling the leaders of his 1,500 warriors that victory over Mad Anthony Wayne was now impossible. It was time, he said, to negotiate peace. Both Blue Jacket and Tecumseh refused to yield, however, and overall command of the forces passed to Blue Jacket; Little Turtle would lead no more than his 250 Miami warriors.
Blue Jacket, the new commander, decided to intercept the Legion at a place opposite the rapids of the Maumee. Pocked with deep ravines and strewn with the trunks of trees that had been blown down by a tornado years earlier, the site was known as Fallen Timbers. Not only would the rugged terrain provide both cover and concealment, the battleground was only five miles from Fort Miamis, a longtime British stronghold the Indians believed would provide sanctuary and succor if the battle went badly.
Wayne, whose scouts had informed him of the Indians’ latest position, halted on August 18 a few miles from that position to build Fort Deposit. Here he cached all that was not immediately needed for combat. It was August 20 before he advanced against Blue Jacket. Perhaps this delay was a brilliant tactical stroke gained from his study of Indian customs; perhaps it was just good luck. In either case, the delay made the most of the warriors’ custom of fasting before battle in order to put an edge on reflexes and ferocity. The Indians had expected an encounter on the eighteenth, so had advanced to Fallen Timbers without rations on the seventeenth. By the twentieth, the warriors had gone without food for three days. On that day, some absented themselves to look for food; many of the others who remained waiting for the Americans were now weak from hunger.
Blue Jacket’s plan was to entrap Wayne in a vast, half-moon-shaped line, but an Ottawa commander acted prematurely, leading his men in a charge against Wayne’s advance guard of 150 mounted Kentucky militia. Those men panicked and broke, thereby inciting the front line of Wayne’s main body of infantry to do the same. It looked like another rout was in the making, but Mad Anthony was no Arthur St. Clair. In a brilliant display of personal leadership, he rallied his troops—in part by the singularly effective expedient of shooting anyone seen running away—and ordered not a defense but an attack on the Indians’ line, which had been cut up by the hasty action of the Ottawa warriors. Even though Brigadier Wilkinson failed to obey the command to charge (he later claimed he had not heard it), two regiments commanded by Colonel John Hamtramck attacked spiritedly, bloodying their bayonets. It was now Blue Jacket who suffered a rout.
Retreating to their planned fallback position, Fort Miamis, he and his warriors were dealt yet another blow. British commandant Captain William Campbell, under orders to avoid involvement in the battle, refused to admit the Indians into the fort. The father disowned his children.
After taunting both the Indians and the British garrison, Wayne withdrew on August 23, destroying abandoned Indian towns in his path, and at Kekionga, principal village of the Miami, he built Fort Wayne.
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In January 1795, his warriors defeated and many of his people now refugees, Blue Jacket journeyed to Fort Greenville, in western Ohio near the present Indiana state line, to negotiate a treaty with Anthony Wayne. Formally signed in August 1796, the Treaty of Greenville secured American occupancy of lands northwest of the Ohio River, established yet another “permanent” boundary of settlement west of the present state of Ohio, and instituted a program of compensation for territory lost ($20,000 as a lump sum and annual $9,500 payments). For their part, the British agreed at last to vacate the Ohio Country. Peace came to this region at last and endured until the outbreak of the War of 1812.
With peace came a resurgence of the fur trade. Even as the leaders of the new American republic celebrated Wayne’s victory, a fresh army of fur traders was carrying commerce—as well as smallpox—to the farther Northwest, the land of the Dakotas. Thus was the ground prepared for the greatest of all fur fortunes, that of John Jacob Astor, the signal figure of the trade in the nineteenth century, the man who transformed it from a desperate and daring wilderness enterprise to big business and the basis of a fortune of mythic proportions.
Astor was born in Walldorf, Germany, in 1763, lived for a time in London, where he worked for his brother, a flute maker, and learned English. He immigrated to the United States in 1784, the year after the Treaty of Paris became final, and he started in the fur business at the bottom, trading with Indians, then opened up a small fur goods shop in New York City before the end of the decade. His breakthrough into big business came in 1794–95. In 1794, the Jay Treaty, negotiated by John Jay during the Washington administration, finalized the British withdrawal from the Ohio Country and the Pacific Northwest. This was mandated by the 1783 Treaty of Paris, but it had been left vague as to timing; the Jay Treaty made it specific. U.S. entrepreneurs now had the confidence to enter the American western fur trade without fear of being crushed by the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, and the Jay Treaty also opened new markets for the United States in Canada. In 1796, Mad Anthony Wayne’s Treaty of Greenville made the Great Lakes region safe for American fur traders. The combination of the Jay Treaty with the British and the Treaty of Greenville with the Indians presented Astor with an opportunity he seized with a ferocious passion.
Working with both the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, Astor developed the early U.S. trade with China. In this he prospered until President Thomas Jefferson’s 1807 embargo threatened to bring his import-export business to a crashing end. Astor turned this catastrophe into yet another unparalleled opportunity by appealing to the president for a charter authorizing a new American company, the American Fur Company, which he presented to the powerful New York governor DeWitt Clinton (from whom he sought support) on January 25, 1808, as a way “to embrace in the course of 4 or 5 years the whole of the fur trade & to extend it to the western ocean [the Pacific] … and to have a range of Posts or trading houses on the Rout[e] made by Captain Lewis to the sea.” Thus Astor portrayed his scheme to monopolize the American fur trade not as the product of personal ambition but as the fulfillment of Jefferson’s own vision, the vision that had moved the president to send Lewis and Clark on their western journey and had motivated as well the Louisiana Purchase. Astor made common cause with Jefferson—who had just laced himself and the nation into the economic straitjacket of the embargo—by proposing a venture that would not only perfect the U.S. claim to sovereignty over the continent from sea to shining sea but would make the controversial Louisiana Purchase turn a profit sooner rather than later.
Astor financed fur-trading outposts in the Ohio Country and the Great Lakes region that had been won first from the British and then from the Shawnee and their allies. Next, he pushed out to the virgin fur country of the Pacific Northwest. The enterprise became so large that Astor turned the American Fur Company into one of the first great corporate “trusts” of the nineteenth century, creating the subsidiary South West Company to handle the fur trade in the Midwest and the Pacific Fur Company to run coastal operations. While these competed with both the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, Astor had the great advantage of a continuous and direct line of communication between his far western sources of product and the markets for that product in the East, especially New York City.
In April 1811, Astor’s men established Fort Astoria on the Columbia River, which was the first United States settlement on the Pacific coast. The epic overland Astor Expedition of 1810–12, which he financed to establish direct communication with that outpost, opened up the South Pass on the Continental Divide through the Rocky Mountains, thereby pioneering the principal route of the first great national migratory waves into the transmountain West. Although the War of 1812 disrupted American Fur Company operations, Astor was sufficiently diversified to weather the crisis and, resuming his intimacy with the federal government after the war, secured passage in 1817 of protectionist legislation that effectively barred foreign fur traders from U.S. territory.
The American Fur Company became the dominant force in the American fur trade, and the establishment in 1822 of Astor House on Mackinac Island created the new fur-trading capital of the continent. By this time, however, the demand for fur was beginning to level off as fashions changed. In particular, beaver no longer possessed the extraordinary cultural value it had had beginning in Samuel Pepys’s seventeenth century. No matter. Astor had already built his fortune, and he used it now to amass vast tracts of Manhattan real estate, which he leased to those who developed it and expanded New York northward, making it an international commercial capital. In the process, John Jacob Astor became the first great personal icon of American capitalism, his wealth and power founded on fur as surely as future fortunes would be founded on gold, on oil, and on steel. When he retired from active management of his fur and real estate empire in the early 1830s, he financed some of the early cultural life of the young republic and left in his will the major endowment for what would become the New York Public Library.
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As Astor helped to create high culture in the East, his industry contributed to the rapid decline of the hybrid Euro-American/Native American civilization that had developed in many of the places defined by the fur trade.
Toward the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, in the Far West, the counterparts of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century coureurs de bois were the “mountain men,” figures Washington Irving compared to Robin Hood and the twentieth-century historian Bernard DeVoto to Odysseus and Siegfried. The first mountain men answered the call that trading partners William Henry Ashley and Andrew Henry put out in the February 13, 1822, issue of the St. Louis Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, for “Enterprising Young Men … to ascend the Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years.” Jedediah Strong Smith, James Bridger, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Edward Rose, Hugh Glass, James Clyman, and Milton and William Sublette were all hired and became the most celebrated trappers of the Rocky Mountain fur trade: the original mountain men.
Like the coureurs de bois, the mountain men lived in Indian country; unlike them, they did not generally trade with the Indians for beaver but trapped the animals themselves. Thus the fur trade of the Rocky Mountain West did not tend to create the Euro-American/Native American hybrid civilization that developed in parts of the Ohio Country frontier. Instead, the mountain men lived solitary lives of tireless trapping, interrupted only for one month out of every year, when they converged at a designated “rendezvous.” This trading pattern had its origin in the winter of 1824–25, when Ashley led an expedition out of Fort Atkinson, Nebraska, bound for the Rockies. The march across prairie and mountain was pounded by wind and snow. Before long, Ashley’s men were forced to abandon their wagons. Their horses came near to starving until the men stumbled across a stand of cottonwood, whose bark made lifesaving forage. The Indians they encountered, eager for trade, were mostly friendly, and that contributed to the salvation of expedition as well.
At length, Ashley’s men crossed the Rockies south of South Pass at Morrow Creek. After reaching the Green River on April 19, Ashley divided his party of twenty-five into four groups: one to explore the Green; one to trap its tributaries; one to find the source of the river today known as the Colorado; one to trap beavers in the mountains to the west. As he sent his men in all directions, he made plans to meet them fifty miles downriver at a “place of randavoze [rendezvous] for all our parties on or before the 10th July next.” It was the first rendezvous in the history of the far western fur trade, and it rapidly developed into a major economic feature of the American Rocky Mountain fur trade and became the defining social institution for the mountain men.
Each year, they would come in from the wilderness to the designated rendezvous in the heart of the mountains. They would meet with Ashley or another company trader to exchange whiskey, guns, knives, and the like for the year’s take in beaver. A good mountain man arrived at the rendezvous with three or four hundred pelts—a very fortunate one, with maybe twice that take. Before the trade began its decline, pelts brought between $2 and $4 each and could be resold in St. Louis at a 200 percent markup, but the mountain men seemed satisfied enough with the $2,000 or so they cleared at a time when skilled labor earned perhaps $1.50 a day—though they tended to spend much of what they made during the monthlong rendezvous on liquor, Indian women, gambling, and the goods and supplies they needed for the coming year. Washington Irving, an early and eloquent historian of the western fur trade, wrote that the mountain men had “the manners, habits, dress, gesture, and even walk of the Indian.” Their plaited hair was grown long, dangling below the shoulders, where it was tied with otter skins or what Irving called “parti-colored ribands.” They wore knee-length hunting shirts made of ruffled calico brightly dyed or of “ornamented leather,” their legs wrapped in leggings “ornamented with strings, fringes, and a profusion of hawks’ bells,” their feet shod in “a costly pair of moccasins of the finest Indian fabric, richly embroidered with beads.” Across the shoulder of a mountain man, a blanket was always thrown, typically of bright scarlet, and was “girt around his waist with a red sash, in which he bestows his pistols, knife, and the stem of his Indian pipe.”
Emulating the Indian, the mountain men seemed to outdo him in demonstrations of endurance and the love of dangerous adventure. Hugh Glass told all who would listen of how he had been mauled by a grizzly bear and was saved from death by the ministrations of the Sioux. Jim Beckwourth, an African American former blacksmith, claimed to have been made a Crow war chief. On the stories went, many undoubtedly pure fiction. There was, however, nothing but truth in the fact that the work was dangerous. Some five hundred mountain men were killed over the three decades of the trade’s heyday—a 25 percent mortality rate. The greatest hazards were natural—illness, injury, exposure to the elements—but hostile Indians also took a toll. The motive in these attacks was not racial vengeance or a desire to halt unwanted incursions onto Native land. There were men, alone, carrying merchandise of great value. The Indians, now and then, killed and robbed them.
While Irving and others of a romantic turn of mind saw the mountain men as marvelous mythic figures, the mountain men saw themselves much as Charles Keemle, a former trapper, explained in the Missouri Herald and St. Louis Advertiser:
The recent expedition of General Ashley to the country west of the Rocky Mountains has been productive of information on subjects of no small interest to the people of the Union. It has proved, that overland expeditions in large bodies may be made to that remote region.… The whole route lay through a level and open country, better for carriages than any turnpike road in the United States. Wagons and carriages could go with ease as far as General Ashley went, crossing the Rocky Mountains … and descending … towards the Pacific Ocean.
That is, they saw themselves as the heralds of American civilization—white American civilization—in the Far West. Mountain men even trekked to Washington, where they lobbied Congress and the president to settle, by force if necessary, persistent British claims to the Far Northwest. Ironically, perhaps, it was not the British who ran the mountain men out of business but Astor’s American Fur Company. Astor simply bought the Upper Missouri, destroying rivals either through negotiation, absorbing them into the American Fur Company, or by underselling them, in the knowledge that short-term losses would be more than made up by long-term victory.
By 1827, the American Fur Company had a virtual monopoly on the Upper Missouri, and within another decade, the beaver in the region were on their way to extinction—or at least to population levels too low to be of commercial value, especially with the decline in demand for fur. As for the mountain men, they were gone well before midcentury, but they had left behind the routes they had opened to the Far West.
It would not be fur that would bring Euro-American settlement to this region. Other “extractive” lures—gold, silver, eventually oil—and the land itself, sometimes for farming, sometimes (as in the case of the Mormons) for religious expression, would draw hundreds of thousands to the West Coast, the Rocky Mountain West, and the vast space between the Rockies and the Appalachians. The quest to establish an empire of fur was sometimes violent, even to the point of genocide, yet it also presented an opportunity to build a new civilization on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American frontier, one that peacefully and productively blended Euro-American and Native American perceptions, values, and interests. Assailed by a thousand cuts for a century and a half, that opportunity finally died in the fight for American independence. The fur trade outlived the American Revolution—at least for a time—but the natural and human ecology of the Middle West, the Far West, and the coastal West conspired with the economic realities of the young republic and with the business model of one of the republic’s first significant capitalists to make the revival of that lost opportunity a virtual impossibility. Instead, the story of western settlement in the United States would be marked by the injustice and violence of swindle and conquest, and the western landscape would be marked not by the progress of new civilizations but by one “Indian War” after another and the ineffable squalor of reservations, despised and decried by white and Indian alike.