On the bright May afternoon in 1786 when his family would be shattered and the course of his newborn country forever altered, Mordecai Lincoln was fifteen years old. The Lincolns lived on the frontier in the far western portion of Virginia, a region called Kentucky, most likely from a Wyandot or Iroquoian word meaning “land of tomorrow” or “place of meadows.” They were pioneers, and like all pioneers in the Ohio River Valley during the late eighteenth century, they were lucky just to be alive. Four years earlier the Lincoln family had crossed through the Cumberland Gap, following a trail first blazed by Daniel Boone, and today Mordecai and his brothers—Josiah, thirteen, and Thomas, eight—were assisting their father as he enclosed a cornfield, working to carve out an ever-larger pocket of civilization on a parcel of land beside Long Run, a branch of a branch of a branch of the Ohio River east of the new settlement of Louisville.
As the boys helped to position the top rail of a new fence, a shot sounded. Their father tumbled to the ground and out of the woods emerged two or three Indians. Mordecai picked up his father’s rifle and barked at Josiah to run as fast as he could to the community stockade called Hughes Station, fifteen minutes distant, to sound the alarm. Josiah ran and so did Mordecai, who reached the cabin his father had built just as he heard his other brother cry out. He turned to see Thomas, grasped by the hair and trousers, being carried toward the tree line. Mordecai required only a moment’s look, and perhaps not even that, to know that the Indians didn’t intend to kill Thomas. They intended to take him. Mordecai leveled his gun and aimed for a sun glint of metal in the late afternoon sun, a half-moon pendant dangling against the chest of his brother’s would-be captor. The teenager’s aim was remarkable; that, or luck was with him. The Indian went down; his companions vanished; Thomas was unhurt.
Many years later, Thomas’s son Abraham, risen higher in the world than any member of the Lincoln clan could have ever dared imagine, would call this story “the legend more strongly than all others imprinted upon my mind and memory.” Abraham Lincoln, namesake of his murdered grandfather, would never say much about his own early years in Kentucky, embarrassed into a lifetime of silence by his family’s shiftlessness and poverty. Yet this story, of his grandfather killed by Indians, was told often enough and in enough detail that Lincoln’s longtime law partner, William Herndon, collecting a book’s worth of reminiscences of the late president, was able to record no fewer than six versions from four different tellers, all second- and thirdhand accounts tracing back to Thomas or Mordecai.
Like so many pieces of frontier color, the Lincolns’ tale of death and attempted abduction was the story of westward expansion in miniature, tightly intertwined with breathless assumptions about the savagery of Indians and the march of civilization. For Abraham Lincoln, it was nothing less than the bedrock of the log-cabin posturing that had helped to push him toward the highest office in the land. “Owing to my father being left an orphan at the age of six years, in poverty, and in a new country,” he wrote in 1848, during his single term as a United States representative, “he became a wholly uneducated man; which I suppose is the reason why I know so little of our family history.” The future president rued the loss of a childhood spent on his grandfather’s trim and ordered farm, and worse yet, the elder Abraham’s early death represented an irrecoverable severing from the old Lincoln line and its history of military service, respectable fortune-seeking, and honorable English heritage. Writing in the third person for a campaign autobiography in 1860, framing his personal history for the American electorate, he said, “By the early death of his father and very narrow circumstances of his mother, even in childhood [Thomas was] a wandering, laboring boy,” and described his own childhood, using a line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,” as “ ‘the short and simple annals of the poor.’ ” In the same document, Lincoln also presented the death of his grandfather as the wellspring of his lifelong obsession with self-instruction: “He regrets his want of education, and does what he can to supply the want.”
Had Mordecai not shot so accurately, Thomas would have been carried off into a void. In Thomas’s and Mordecai’s tellings, the Indians emerge from that void, are that void. They pop out of the trees and act with the undifferentiating violence of nature, to whose embrace they return. They are without face, form, history, or agenda. No part of the story told to the future president by his father and uncle appears to have addressed why these particular Indians would have killed his grandfather and attempted to make off with Thomas. But in reality the encounter was not sudden, nor was it one-sided or unaccountable. In 1786, Kentucky was still contested territory, a frontier fringed with a fuzzy border and suffused with a moral ambiguity that would dog the continent’s expansion every mile of the way. Even by the free-for-all standards of frontier settlement, Kentucky did not really belong to anyone.
The men attempting to make off with Thomas were most likely Shawnees. Occupying the land across the Ohio River near where Cincinnati would soon rise—what in the eighteenth century they called “our country”—the Shawnees were the tribe of the young Tecumseh, frontline combatants in a decades-old war, renowned among whites and other Indian tribes for their fearlessness, adaptability, resolve, and physical prowess. For many years the Shawnees had been on the move, shifting westward from river to river as they chose retrenchment and survival over a final, desperate stand that might mark the end of their independence. During the quarter century before and during the American Revolution, they had fought to keep the British and then the Americans east of the Ohio River against odds that grew by the decade, odds lengthened by the lethal combination of superior guns and epidemic diseases carried by their opponents. The Shawnees viewed themselves as a people fighting less for land or honor than for freedom, a prize for which they fought in ruthless ways, burning cabins with settlers inside, defiling dead bodies, and preferring attack by ambush whenever possible, hitting hard and backing off in a cycle designed to create maximum fear and disruption while minimizing Indian losses.
The Shawnees weren’t “bloodthirsty.” On the contrary, they could demonstrate many years of gift exchange, trade relationships, and personal friendships with whites to prove their amicable, if guarded, approach. But those times were past. In the 1780s, a series of murders and depredations by white militia had devastated several riverside villages and enraged many Shawnees, who responded to the loss of a young son or daughter by an old code, one that involved taking a white child in kind and raising it as their own. This, in all likelihood, was Thomas Lincoln’s intended fate.
Before 1860 and his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln’s life intersected events on the Indian frontier so seldom—just twice, in fact—that those intersections serve as a convenient pair of narrative benchmarks. The first was the death of his grandfather; the second occurred in 1832, when Lincoln, twenty-three, volunteered as a soldier during the Black Hawk War and was elected captain of his unit, his first taste of popularity at the polls. He would many years later describe his selection as “a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since.” The Black Hawk War took the lives of seventy-seven whites and at least six hundred Sac and Fox Indians, many of them women and children who drowned or were killed in a chaotic retreat across the Mississippi River. Lincoln himself saw no battle but did come upon the mutilated corpses of white soldiers and settlers. He never wrote or spoke about these encounters, turning instead to satirical jokes about military life and tales of his wrestling prowess against more physically gifted opponents.
These yarns reached the floor of the House of Representatives in 1848, when, while making fun of the military exploits of Democratic presidential candidate Lewis Cass in the Black Hawk War, Lincoln took a poke at his own.
It is quite certain I did not break my sword, for I had none to break; but I bent a musket pretty badly on one occasion. If General Cass went in advance of me in picking huckleberries, I guess I surpassed him in charges upon the wild onions. If he saw any live, fighting Indians, it was more than I did; but I had a good many blood struggles with the musquetoes; and, although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry.
During this same legislative session he would entertain reporters with similarly lighthearted stories of his early soldiering, and during his presidency he was fond of telling thrilling tales of “Indians and frontiersmen” to his sons and their playmates.
The benign folksiness of Lincoln’s passing encounter with the realities of frontier war was cemented once and for all by Carl Sandburg, whose multivolume biography of Lincoln included a Parson Weems–style tale of the future president challenging his men to a fight in order to protect an old and hungry Indian who had wandered into their camp. Based on a fragmented description collected thirty-four years after the action, this has become the most famous story associating Lincoln with Indians, trotted out to emphasize his bravery and compassion.
During the 1840s and 1850s, the pathways bearing white settlers continued to wind their way westward, treaty by treaty, displaced tribe by displaced tribe. By the second year of the Civil War, one prominent arm of this migratory movement had arrived in the Northwest, not far away from where the Mississippi River began, in a raw, beautiful, brand-new state called Minnesota, a name derived from a Dakota word referring to the clarity of lake water. In August 1862, as Confederate forces moved mile by mile toward Washington, D.C., and Lincoln struggled to connect the actions of Union armies to the moral exigencies of emancipation, he would once more be forced to consider the collision of whites and Indians on the frontier. The Dakota War first came to the president’s desk as one far-off manifestation of an imagined Confederate conspiracy and ended with his decision to spare the lives of 265 condemned Indians while sending 38 others to their deaths on a single scaffold in what still stands as the largest mass execution in the country’s history.
The conventional narrative of United States–Indian conflict paints the Civil War as a time of suspension, an interim during which the manpower and industrial wealth of the Union had to finish subjugating the rebellious South before the federal government could return its attention to the tribes of the West. But violence between whites and a number of Indian nations was very much a part of the historical fabric of the early 1860s. By the time of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, Indian wars in the Southwest had seen the Long Walk of the Navajo and the murder of friendly Cheyennes at Sand Creek, as well as the opening of extended campaigns against the Paiutes, Shoshoni, Arapaho, Apaches, and other tribes. Before any of these events, however, the Dakota uprising and Christmas executions of 1862 sparked the sequence of confrontations called the Indian Wars of the Northwest, which would culminate in such indelible moments as the Battle of Little Big Horn, the flight of Chief Joseph, the killing of Crazy Horse, and the tragedy at Wounded Knee.
Just as whites discovered after battling the Shawnees in Ohio and Kentucky and the Sac and Fox in Illinois and Wisconsin, there was no final clarity to be extracted out of the potent brew of fear, danger, hopelessness, anger, and injustice that boiled over in Minnesota in 1862. There is only bravery and cowardice, kindness and hatred, forgiveness and vengeance, a story full of larger-than-life characters that begins with a predawn meeting on the prairie along the Minnesota River, where an aging village chieftain is asked to make the most difficult choice of a remarkable lifetime.