Showing posts with label Miami Indians. Show all posts

Friday, September 4, 2020

Little Turtle: War Chief of the Miami Indians

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ME-CHE-CUN-NA-QUAH, 0R LITTLE TURTLE.
Was the son of Aque-nac-que, the great war chief of the Twightwecs [Miamis] at the beginning of the eighteenth century, who was also the principal of the three Deputies who represented the Twightwee nation at the Treaty of Lancaster. Penn, on the 23d day of July, 1748. His mother was of the tribe of the Mohegans, and is reputed as having been a superior woman, transmitting many of her best qualities to her son. Aquenacque was of the Turtle branch of the Miamis, and lived in the Turtle Village on Eel River, some sixteen miles north west of Fort Wayne.
At this village Little Turtle was born. about the year 1747, and was the senior of his sister Algomaqua, wife of Capt. Holmes, by less than two years. He became chief at an early age, not on account of any right by inheritance, because the condition of the offspring follows the mother, and not the father, and his mother not standing in the line of descent from hereditary chiefs, the child stood in the same category, but because of his extraordinary talents and adaptedness for the position, which were noticeable from early boyhood. Upon the death of his father, therefore, he became the principal chief of the Miamis, by selection. His ﬁrst eminent services were those of a warrior, in which he distinguished himself above all competitors. His courage and sagacity, in the estimation of his countrymen, were proverbial, and his example inspired others to unwanted achievements in council and the ﬁeld. Neighboring consanguineous tribes, in their operations against the whites, drew courage from his presence. and achieved successes under his leadership. He was in himself a host on the battle ﬁeld, and his counsel always commanded respect.
At the time of St. Clair's expedition against the Wabash Indians, Little Turtle was the acknowledged leader, directing the movement of his people, which resulted in the defeat of the former. as he had previously done in the several actions in the campaign of Gen. Harmar. In comparison with Gen. St, Clair, as director of forces at Fort Recovery, his exhibitions of skill and tact in the management of the assault upon the white troops, were those of the more expert tactician. His loss in that engagement was light, while that- of Gen. St. Clair was heavy.
  “ Again, he commanded a body of Indians in November. 1792, who made a violent attack on a detachment of Kentucky volunteers under Maj. Adair, under the walls of Fort St. Clair, near Eaton, Ohio, but the savages were repulsed with loss. He was also at the action of Fort Recovery, in June, 1794. The campaign of Gen. Wayne, in August of the same year, proved too successful for the Turtle and superior to the combined force. Prior to the battle of Fort Miami. two miles below Maumee City, a council was held, when Little Turtle showed his sagacity and prudence by refusing to attack the forces of Gen. Wayne."
  Having satisﬁed himself of the impracticability of further opposition to the whites, Little Turtle lent his inﬂuence toward the maintenance of peace, and, in part consideration for his services in this respect, the American Government erected for him, at his village on Eel River, a comfortable house in which to live. "His habits were those of the whites, and he had black servants to attend to his household wants and duties. He was true to the interests of his race, and deplored their habits of drunkenness. In 1802 or 1803, he went before the Legislature of Kentucky, and, through his interpreter, made an appeal in person for a law preventing the sale of ardent spirits to the Indians. The like mission he performed before the Legislature of Ohio, but without success. He described the Indian traders to life, via: ‘Thcy stripped the poor Indian of skins, guns, blankets, everything, while his squaws ‘and children, dependent upon him,_ lay starving and shivering in his wigwam.‘
In a communication dated at Fort Wayne, January 25, 1812, bearing his own signature, addressed to Gov. Harrison, he expressed himself as anxious to do all in his power to preserve peaceful relations between the white and red people. He was destined, however, to take no part in the pending conﬂict. “ He came to this city, in 1812, from his residence, to procure medical aid, and was under the treatment of the Unitid States Surgeon, and in the family of his brother-in law, Capt. Wells, at the Old Orchard——-or rathcr was cared for by Capt. Well's family at his own tent, a few rods distant, preferring it to the more civilized mode of living ‘in doors.’ His disease was the gout, of which he died in the open air, at the place (Old Orchard), above described, July 14, 1812, having the universal respect of all who knr-w him. The Commandant of the fort at that time, Capt. Buy, the friend of Little Turtle, buried the remains of the chief with the honors of war. A writer says: ‘ His body was born to the grave with the highest honors by his great enemy, the white man. The muﬁlcd drum, the solemn march, the funeral salute, announced that a great soldier had fallen, and even enemies paid the mournful tribute to his memory.’ "

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Ohio as Part of France

OHIO AS A PART OF FRANCE.

In Ohio they had a post on the Maumee, and everywhere they had settlements at each of the forts, where there was always a chapel and a priest for the conversion of the Indians. With the French, the sword and the cross went together, but very few of the savages knew that they were either conquered or converted. From time to time they knew that companies of picturesque strangers visited their towns, and promised them the favor of the French king if they would have nothing to do with the traders from the English colonies on the Atlantic, and threatened them with his displeasure if they refused. When these brilliant strangers staid among them, and built a fort and a chapel, and laid out farms, then the savages willingly partook of the great king's bounty, and clustered around the French post in their wigwams and settled down to the enjoyment of his brandy, his tobacco, his ammunition, and his religion. When the strangers went away, almost as soon as they had promised and threatened, then the savages went back to business with the English traders.

The company of Frenchmen who visited our Miami Indians at their town of Pickawillany, on the head waters of the Miami River in 1749, was of this last sort. It was commanded by the Chevalier Céloron de Bienville, and it counted some two hundred Canadians and French troops, officered by French gentlemen, and attended by one of those brave priests who led or followed wherever the French flag was carried in the wilderness. Céloron was sent by the governor of Canada to lay claim to the Ohio valley for his king, and he did this by very simple means. He nailed plates of tin to certain trees, and he buried plates of lead at the mouths of the larger streams. The leaden plates no one ever saw for a hundred years, till some boys going to bathe found them here and there in the wave-worn banks; but if the Indians could have read anything, or if the English traders could have read French, they might have learned at once from the tin plates that the king of France owned the "Ohio River and all the waters that fell into it, and all the lands on both sides." As it was, however, it is hard to see how anybody was the wiser for them, or could know that the king had upheld his right to the Ohio country by battle and by treaty and would always defend it.

In fact, neither the battles nor the treaties between the French and English in Europe had really settled the question of their claim to the West in America, and both sides began to urge it in a time of peace by every kind of secret and open violence. As for the Miamis and their allies among the neighboring tribes, they believed that God had created them on the very spot where Céloron found them living, and when he asked them to leave their capital at Pickawillany, and go to live near the French post on the Maumee, they answered him that they would do so when it was more convenient. He bade them banish the English traders, but they merely hid them, while he was with them, and as soon as he was gone, they had them out of hiding, and began to traffic with them. They never found it more convenient to leave their town, until a few years later, when a force of Canadians and Christian Indians came down from the post on the Maumee, and destroyed Pickawillany.

Céloron came into the Ohio country through the western part of New York. He launched his canoes on the head waters of the Beautiful River, as the French called the Ohio, and drifted down its current till he reached the mouth of the Great Miami. He worked up this shallow and uncertain stream into Shelby County, where he had his friendly but fruitless meeting with the chief of the Miamis. After that he kept on northward to the Maumee, and then embarked on Lake Erie, and so got back to Canada. It could not be honestly said that he had done much to make good his king's claim to the country with his plates of tin and lead. He had flattered and threatened the Indians at several places; and the Indians had promised, over the cups of brandy and pipes of tobacco which he supplied them, to be good subjects to Louis XV., who was such a very bad king that he did not deserve even such subjects as they meant to be. They seem not to have taken Céloron's warnings very seriously, though he told them that the English traders would ruin them, and that they were preparing the way for the English settlers, who would soon swarm into their country, and drive them out.

The Indians did not believe Céloron, and yet he told them the truth. The English traders were often men of low character, thoroughly dishonest in their dealings, and the English settlers were only waiting for the end of the struggle with the French to come and take the Indians' lands from them. If the French soldiers and the French priests had won in that struggle, Ohio and the whole West might now be something like the Province of Quebec as it was then. The Indians would have been converted to the Catholic faith, and they would still be found in almost as great numbers as ever throughout the vast region where hardly one of their blood remains.

But this was not to be. The French built their forts with a keen eye for the strongest points in the wilderness, and the priests planted the cross even beyond the forts. But all around and between the forts and the missions, the traders from our colonies, which afterwards became our states, stole into the country claimed for the king of France. At that time, there was peace between the king of France and the king of England in Europe, and they pretended that there was peace between their nations in America. They were very civil to each other through their ministers and ambassadors, over there, but their governors and captains here never ceased to fight and trick for the ownership of the West. From their forts, built to curb the English settlers, the French set the savages on to harass the frontier of our colonies, which their war parties wasted with theft and fire and murder. Our colonies made a poor defense, because they were suspicious of one another. New England was suspicious of New York, New York of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania of Virginia, and the mother country was suspicious of them all. She was willing that the French should hold Canada, and keep the colonies from joining together in a revolt against her, when she could easily have taken that province and freed them from the inroads of the Canadian Indians. The colonies would not unite against the common enemy, for fear one would have more advantage than another from their union; but their traders went out singly, through the West, and trading companies began to be formed in Pennsylvania and Virginia. While Céloron was in Ohio claiming the whole land for the king of France, the king of England was granting a great part of the same to a company of Virginians, with the right to settle it and fortify it The Virginia Company sent its agents to visit the Miamis at Pickawillany a year later, and bound them to the English by gifts of brandy, tobacco, beads, gay cloths, and powder.

The allied tribes, who had their capital at Pickawillany, numbered some two thousand in all. The Miamis themselves are said to have been of the same family as the great Iroquois nation of the East, who had beaten their rivals of the Algonquin nation, and forced them to bear the name of women. But many of the Ohio Indians were Delawares, who were of the Algonquin family; they were by no means patient of the name of women, and they and their friends now took the side of the French against the English. When at last the West, together with the whole of Canada, fell to the English and there presently began to be trouble between the American colonists and the English king, all the Indians, both Iroquois and Algonquins took part against the Americans. A little victory for either side, however, with gifts of brandy and tobacco, would turn their savage hearts toward the victors; and one must not be too confident in saying that the Indians were always for the French against the English, or always for the English against the Americans.

In fact, one must speak mostly of the Indians in words that have a double sense. The old explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and traders all talk of nations, towns, villages, kings, half-kings, queens, and princes, but these words present false images to our minds. Calling the chief town of the Miamis at Pickawillany their capital gives the notion of some such capital as Columbus or Washington; but if we imagine the chief town of the Miamis as it really was, we see some hundreds of wigwams in straggling clusters along the banks of the river, in the shadow of the ancient woods, or in the sunshine of the beautiful meadows, as the earliest white visitors to Ohio called the small prairies which they came upon in the heart of the forests. We see a large council house of bark, as nearly in the midst of the scattered huts as may be, where the Miamis hold their solemn debates, receive embassies from other tribes, welcome their warriors home from their forays, and celebrate their feasts and dances. We see fields bordering the village, where the squaws plant their corn and beans, and the maple groves where they make their sugar. Among the men and boys we see the busy idleness of children, all day long, except when the grown-up children go out upon a hunt, or take the warpath. Sometimes we see an English trader coming with his merchandise and presents, or a captive brought in to be tortured and burnt, or adopted into the tribe.

The tribes in the Ohio country were far abler than those that the English first met to the eastward, and they were fiercer than the fiercest which the Americans have at last brought under control in the plains of the Far West. Pitiless as Sioux and Apache and Comanche have shown themselves in their encounters with the whites in our day, they were surpassed in ferocity by the Shawnees, the Wyandots, and the Miamis whom the backwoodsmen met in a thousand fights, a century or a century and a half ago. The Ohio Indians were unspeakably vicious, treacherous, and filthy, but they were as brave as they were vile, and they were as sagacious as they were false. They produced men whom we must call orators, statesmen, and generals, even when tested by the high standards of civilization. They excelled us in the art of war as it was adapted to the woods, and they despised the stupid and wasteful courage of the disciplined English soldier. Till the white men studied war from them they were always beaten in their fights with the red men, and it was hardly the fault of the Indians if the pioneers learned from them to be savages: to kill women and children as well as armed men, to tomahawk and scalp the wounded, to butcher helpless prisoners. But this befell, and it is this which makes many of the stories of Ohio so bloody. We must know their hideous facts fully if we would know them truly, or if we would realize the life that once passed in the shadows of our woods.

The region that we now call Ohio was wonderfully varied and pleasant. The many rivers that watered it cleared their space to the sky where they ran, and here and there the meadows or prairies smiled to the sun in grass and flowers. But everywhere else there was the gloom of forests unbroken since the Mound Builders left the land. The long levels that bordered the great lake at the north, the noble hills that followed the course of the Beautiful River, the gently varied surfaces of the center, and the southwest, the swamps and morasses of the northwest, were nearly everywhere densely wooded. Our land was a woodland, and its life, when it first became known to the white man, was the stealthy and cruel life of the forest. Where the busy Mound Builders once swarmed, scanty tribes of savages lurked in the leafy twilight, hunting and fishing, and warring upon one another. They came and went upon their errands of death and rapine by trails unseen to other eyes, till the keen traders of Pennsylvania and Virginia began to find their way over them to their villages, and to traffic with the savages for the furs which formed their sole wealth.

All is dim and vague in any picture of the time and place that we can bring before us. There are the fathomless forests, broken by the prairies and rivers; there are the Indian towns widely scattered along the larger streams throughout the whole region; there are the French posts on the northern border, with each a priest and a file of soldiers, and a few Canadian farmers and traders. Under the cover of peace between the French king and the English king, there is a constant grapple between the French soldiers and the English settlers for the possession of the wilds which shall one day be the most magnificent empire under the sun; there are the war parties of Indians falling stealthily upon the English borders to the eastward; there is the steady pressure of the backwoodsman westward, in spite of every hardship and danger, in spite of treaties, in spite of rights and promises. These are the main features of the picture whose details the imagination strives to supply, with a teasing sense of the obscurity resting upon the whole. It is all much farther off than ancient Rome, much stranger than Greece; but it is the beginning of a mighty history, which it rests with the children of this day, and their children after them, to make the happiest and noblest chapter in the history of the world. It is a part of that greater history, and I should like my young readers to remember that the Ohio stories which I hope to tell them are important chiefly because they are human stories, and record incidents in the life of the whole race. They cannot be taken from this without losing their finest meanings.

Monday, February 16, 2015

Origin of the Name "Miami Indians"

The Quest for Fort Wayne, 1994

The origin of the name "Miami" is uncertain. Some suggested that it came from the Ojibwa word "Oumamik" which means "people of the peninsula," from which the French derived the name Miami. The British referred to them as the Twightwees which was derived from an Indian word meaning "naked ones.' Others suggested the latter symbol derived from "twah-twah" mimicking the call of the Miami symbol, the Sandhill crane.

Other names that were used for the Miami were the "Linnewas," or "Minnewas,' which means men, and later by the various names of "Omees," "Aumees" and "Omamees"

Saturday, October 1, 2011

The Miami Indian Massacre of General St. Claire - 700 Dead

The struggle to open the Wabash portage resulted in three massacres that included the massacre of DeLaBalme near Fort Wayne, Indiana, The massacre of Harmer and his men at the site of Fort Wayne and the massacre of St. Clair.

ST. CLAIR'S MASSACRE

—The first great massacre to the Federal armies brought about by the Miamis.

The objectives of General St. Clair have already been mentioned. He was now to take the village of Kekionga, establish a garrison there, and erect a chain of posts stretching from the new establishment to Fort Washington at Cincinnati.
Miami Indian Photo Gallery

The army with which St. Clair was expected to accomplish this task consisted of "two small regiments of regulars, two of six months' levies, a number of Kentucky militia, a few cavalry, and a couple of small batteries of light guns." In all there were fourteen hundred men and eighty-six officers. The Kentucky militia were under the command of Colonel Oldham, a brave officer who afterwards fell on the field of battle. The levies were "men collected from the streets and prisons of the city, hurried out into the enemy's country and with the officers commanding them, totally unacquainted with the business in which they were engaged." Their pay was miserable. Each private received two dollars and ten cents a month; the sergeants three dollars and sixty cents. Being recruited at various times and places, their terms of enlistment were expiring daily, and they wanted to go home. As they were reckless and intemperate, St. Clair, in order [Pg 196]to preserve some semblance of order, removed them to Ludlow's Station, about six miles from Fort Washington. Major Ebenezer Denny, aide to St. Clair, says that they were "far inferior to the militia." On the morning of October twenty-ninth, when St. Clair's army was penetrating the heart of the Indian country, this disorderly element was keeping up a constant firing about the camp, contrary to the positive orders of the day.

In the quartermaster's department everything "went on slowly and badly; tents, pack-saddles, kettles, knapsacks and cartridge boxes, were all 'deficient in quantity and quality.'" The army contractors were positively dishonest, and the war department seems to have been fearfully negligent in all of its work. Judge Jacob Burnet records that "it is a well authenticated fact, that boxes and packages were so carelessly put up and marked, that during the action a box was opened marked 'flints,' which was found to contain gun-locks. Several mistakes of the same character were discovered, as for example, a keg of powder marked 'for the infantry,' was found to contain damaged cannon-powder, that could scarcely be ignited."

St. Clair was sick, and so afflicted with the gout that he was unable to mount or dismount a horse without assistance. On the night before his great disaster he was confined to his camp bed and unable to get up. Born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, in 1734, he was now fifty-seven years of age, and too old and infirm to take command of an army in a hazardous Indian campaign. Besides, he had had no experience in such a contest. He was, however, a man of sterling courage. He had been a lieutenant [Pg 197]in the army of General Wolfe at Quebec. He espoused the cause of the colonies, and had fought with distinguished valor at Trenton and Princeton. Under him, and second in command, was General Richard Butler, of Pennsylvania. Butler was a man of jealous and irritable temperament and had had a bitter controversy with Harmar over the campaign of the year before. A coolness now sprang up between him and St. Clair, which, as we shall see, led to lamentable results. The mind of General Harmar was filled with gloomy forebodings. Taking into consideration the material of which the army was composed and the total inefficiency of the quartermaster and the contractors, "it was a matter of astonishment to him," says Denny, "that the commanding general * * * * should think of hazarding, with such people, and under such circumstances, his reputation and life, and the lives of so many others, knowing, too, as both did, the enemy with whom he was going to contend; an enemy brought up from infancy to war, and perhaps superior to an equal number of the best men that could be taken against them."

Owing to delays the army which was to rendezvous at Fort Washington not later than July tenth, did not actually start into the wilderness until the fourth day of October. On the seventeenth of September, a halt had been made on the Great Miami, and Fort Hamilton erected. Twenty miles north of this place, a light fortification known as Fort St. Clair, was built. About six miles south of the present town of Greenville, in Darke county, Ohio, the army threw up the works of Fort Jefferson, and then moved forward at a snail's pace into the forests and [Pg 198]prairies. Every foot of the road through the heavy timber had to be cleared. Rains were constant. The troops were on half rations and terribly impatient. Parties of militia were daily deserting. On the twenty-seventh of October, Major Denny entered in his diary the following: "The season so far advanced it will be impracticable to continue the campaign. Forage entirely destroyed; horses failing and cannot be kept up; provisions from hand to mouth." The Little Turtle was again on the watch. A hostile army was entering the sacred domain of the Miamis. Indian scouts and runners were constantly lurking on the skirts of the army. In after years, a woman heard the great chief say of a fallen enemy: "We met; I cut him down; and his shade as it passes on the wind, shuns my walk!" This terrible foe, like a tiger in his jungle, was waiting for the moment to spring on his prey. It soon came. On the thirty-first of October, a party of militia, sixty or seventy in number, deserted the camp and swore that they would stop the packhorses in the rear, laden with provisions. St. Clair sent back after them the First United States Regiment under Major John Hamtramck, the most experienced Indian fighters in the whole army. These were the men the Indians most feared. The savage chieftain determined to strike.

Later than usual, and on the evening of November third, the tired and hungry army of St. Clair emerged on the headwaters of the river Wabash. "There was a small, elevated meadow on the east banks of this stream, while a dense forest spread gloomily all around." A light snow was on the ground, and the pools of water were covered [Pg 199]with a thin coat of ice. The Wabash at this point was twenty yards wide. The militia were thrown across the stream about three hundred yards in advance of the main army. As they took their positions, a few Indians were routed out of the underbrush and fled precipitately into the woods. The main body of troops was cooped up in close quarters. The right wing was composed of Butler's, Clark's, and Patterson's battalions, commanded by Major General Butler. These battalions formed the first line of the encampment. The left wing, consisting of Bedinger's and Gaither's battalions, and the Second United States Regiment of regulars, under the command of Colonel William Darke, formed the second line. An interval between these lines of about seventy yards "was all the ground would allow." St. Clair thought that his right flank was fairly well secured by a creek, "while a steep bank, and Faulkner's corps, some of the cavalry, and their picquets, covered the left flank." No works whatever were thrown up to protect the army, but the great camp-fires of the soldiers illumined the whole host. In the circumjacent forests, and a little in advance of the position occupied by the militia, was a camp of over eleven hundred Indians, composed of Miamis, Shawnees, Potawatomi, Delawares, Ottawas, Chippewas and Wyandots, with a number of British adherents from Detroit, waiting for the first hours of dawn of the coming day.

What strange sense of security lulled the vigilance of the American leaders will never be known. During the night the frequent firing of the sentinels disturbed the whole camp, and the outlying guards reported bands of [Pg 200]savages skulking about in considerable numbers. "About ten o'clock at night," says Major Denny, "General Butler, who commanded the right wing, was desired to send out an intelligent officer and party to make discoveries. Captain Slough, with two subalterns and thirty men, I saw parade at General Butler's tent for this purpose, and heard the general give Captain Slough very particular verbal orders how to proceed." Slough afterwards testified before a committee of Congress, that he was sent out during the night with a party of observation and that he saw a force of Indians approaching the American camp, with a view to reconnoitering it, whereupon, he hastened to the camp of the militia and reported to their leader. "I halted my party," says Slough, "near Colonel Oldham's tent, went into it, and awakened him, I believe about twelve o'clock. I told him that I was of his opinion, that the camp would be attacked in the morning, for I had seen a number of Indians. I proceeded to the camp, and as soon as I had passed the camp guards, dismissed the party, and went to General Butler's tent. As I approached it, I saw him come out of the tent, and stand by the fire. I went up to him, and took him some distance from it, not thinking it prudent that the sentry should hear what I had seen. I also told him what Colonel Oldham had said, and that, if he thought proper, I would go and make a report to General St. Clair. He stood some time, and after a pause, thanked me for my attention and vigilance, and said, as I must be fatigued, I had better go and lie down." Fatuous and unexplainable conduct in the face of certain peril!

[Pg 201]At a half hour before sunrise on the morning of November fourth, 1791, the army of St. Clair is at parade. The soldiers have just been dismissed and are returning to their tents, when the woods in front ring with the shots and yells of a thousand savages. On the instant the bugles sound the call to arms, but the front battalions are scarce in line, when the remnants of the militia, torn and bleeding, burst through them. The levies, firing, check the first mad rush of the oncoming warriors, but the Indians scattering to right and left, encircle the camp. The guards are down, the army in confusion, and under the pall of smoke which now settles down to within three feet of the ground, the murderous red men approach the lines. The yelling has now ceased, but from behind every tree, log and stump a pitiless fire rains on the troops. The officers shout, the men discharge their guns, but they see nothing. The artillery thunders with tremendous sound, but soldiers are falling on every hand.

St. Clair is valorous, but what can valor do in a tempest of death? He tries to mount a horse, but the horse is shot through the head, and the lad that holds him is wounded in the arm. He tries to mount a second, but horse and servant are both mowed down. The third horse is brought, but fearing disaster, St. Clair hobbles to the front lines to cheer his troops. He wears no uniform, and out from under his great three cornered hat flows his long gray hair. A ball grazes the side of his face and cuts away a lock. The weight of the savage fire is now falling on the artillery in the center. The gunners sink beneath their guns. The herculean lieutenant-colonel, [Pg 202]William Darke, who has fought at Yorktown, is ordered to charge on the right front. The troops rush forward with levelled bayonets, the savages are routed from their coverts, are visible a moment, and then disappear. As the levies advance the savages close in behind. Darke is surrounded on all sides—his three hundred men become thirty, and he falls back.

In the absence of Darke, the left flank of the army is now pressed in. Guns and artillery fall into the hands of the foe. Every artillery-man is killed but one, and he is badly wounded. The gunners are being scalped. St. Clair leads another charge on foot. The savages skip before the steel, disappear in the smoke and underbrush, and fire on the soldiers from every point as they make retreat. Charge after charge is made, but all are fruitless. The regulars and the levies, out in the open, unable to see the enemy, die by scores. The carnage is fearful.

The troops have fought for about three hours, and the remnants of the army are huddled in the center. The officers are about all down, for the savages have made it a point to single them out. Butler is fatally wounded and leaning against a tree. The men are stupefied and give up in despair. Shouts of command are given, officers' pistols are drawn, but the men refuse to fight. The wounded are lying in heaps, and the crossfire of the Indians, now centering from all points, threatens utter extermination. There is only one hope left—a desperate dash through the savage lines, and escape. "It was past nine o'clock," says Denny, "when repeated orders were given to charge towards the road. * * * Both officers [Pg 203]and men seemed confounded, incapable of doing anything; they could not move until it was told that a retreat was intended. A few officers put themselves in front, the men followed, the enemy gave way, and perhaps not being aware of the design, we were for a few moments left undisturbed."

In after years it was learned that Captain William Wells was in charge of a party of about three hundred young Indian warriors, who were posted behind logs and trees, immediately under the knoll on which the artillery stood. They picked off the artillery-men one by one, until a huge pile of corpses lay about the gun wheels. As the Indians swarmed into the camp in the intervals between the futile charges of the regulars, the artillery-men were all scalped. Wells belonged to a Kentucky family and had been captured by the Miamis when a child twelve years of age, and is said to have become the adopted son of Little Turtle. He had acquired the tongue and habits of a savage, but after the battle with St. Clair he seems to have been greatly troubled with the thought that he might have slain some of his own kindred. Afterwards when Wayne's army advanced into the Indian country he bade the Little Turtle goodbye, and became one of Wayne's most trusty and valuable scouts. After Fallen Timbers he returned to his Indian wife and children, but remained the friend of the United States. In General Harrison's day he was United States Indian agent at Fort Wayne, but was killed in the massacre of Fort Dearborn, in 1812, by the faithless bands of Potawatomi under the chief Blackbird.

[Pg 204]The retreat of St. Clair's army was very precipitate. "It was, in fact, a flight." The fugitives threw away their arms and accouterments and made a mad race for the walls of Fort Jefferson, twenty-nine miles away, arriving there a little after sunset. The loss of the Americans was appalling, and recalled the disaster of Braddock's defeat on the Monongahela. Out of an army of twelve hundred men and eighty-six officers, Braddock lost seven hundred and twenty-seven in killed and wounded. St. Clair's army consisted of fourteen hundred men and eighty-six officers, of whom eight hundred and ninety men and sixteen officers were killed or wounded. The slaughter of officers of the line had been so disastrous, that in the spring of the next year, Anthony Wayne, the new commander, found it extremely difficult to train the new troops. He had first to impart the military tactics to a group of young officers. "Several pieces of artillery, and all the baggage, ammunition, and provisions, were left on the field of battle, and fell into the hands of the Indians. The stores and other public property, lost in the action, were valued at thirty-two thousand eight hundred and ten dollars and seventy-five cents." The loss of the Indians was trifling. As near as may be ascertained, they had about thirty killed and fifty wounded.

The field of action was visited by General James Wilkinson about the first of February, 1792. An officer who was present relates the following: "The scene was truly melancholy. In my opinion those unfortunate men who fell into the enemy's hands, with life, were used with the greatest torture—having their limbs torn off; and [Pg 205]the women had been treated with the most indecent cruelty, having stakes, as thick as a person's arm, drove through their bodies." In December, 1793, General Wayne, having arrived at Greenville, Ohio, sent forward a detachment to the spot of the great defeat. "They arrived on the ground, on Christmas day, and pitched their tents at night; they had to scrape the bones together and carry them out to make their beds. The next day holes were dug, and the bones remaining above ground were buried; six hundred skulls being found among them."

The whole nation was terribly shocked by the news of the defeat. The bordermen of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky were immediately exposed to a renewal of Indian attacks and the government seemed powerless. St. Clair came in for severe censure, more severe in fact, than was justly warranted. The sending back of Hamtramck's regiment, the unfortified condition of the camp on the night before the attack, the posting of the militia in advance of the main army, and the utter lack of scouts and runners, were all bad enough, but on the other hand, the delay and confusion in the quartermaster's department, the dereliction of the contractors, and the want of discipline among the militia and the levies, were all matters of extenuation. To win was hopeless. To unjustly denounce an old and worthy veteran of the Revolution, who acted with so much manly courage on the field of battle, ill becomes an American. A committee of Congress completely exonerated him.

The administration itself and the department of war, were sharply criticized. But the representatives of the [Pg 206]people themselves were more to blame than the government. Thousands had deprecated the attempt of the President to protect the frontiers and to sustain the arm of the western generals. The mean and niggardly support accorded the commander-in-chief, was largely instrumental in bringing about the lamentable result. The jealous and parsimonious states of the east, had regarded only their own selfish ends, to the utter exclusion of the national interest.

Land of the Miami Indians Illustrated

THE LAND OF THE MIAMIS

By Elmore Barce

THE PRAIRIE AND THE BUFFALO

—The buffalo as the main food supply of the Indians.

To describe all the wonders in the interior of the northwest would be a serious, if not an impossible task. The Grand Prairie, however, stands alone. It was one of the marvels of creation, resembling the ocean as nothing else did, making men who saw, never forget.

On Sunday, the third day of November, 1811, General Harrison's army, with scouts in front, and wagons lumbering along between the flanks, crossed the Big Vermilion river, in Vermilion County, Indiana, traversed Sand Prairie and the woods to the north of it, and in the afternoon of the same day caught their first glimpse of the Grand Prairie, in Warren County, then wet with the cold November rains. That night they camped in Round Grove, near the present town of Sloan, marched eighteen miles across the prairie the next day, and camped on the east bank of Pine creek, just north of the old site of Brier's Mills. To the most of them, the sight must have been both novel and grand; if they could have known then that the vast undulating plain before them stretched westward in unbroken grandeur, a distance of two [Pg 21]hundred and fifty miles to the Mississippi river at Quincy; that these vast possessions in a few short years would pass from the control of the savage tribes that roamed over them, and would become the future great granaries of the world, producing enough cereals to feed an empire, what must have been their thoughts?

The magnitude of this great plain, now teeming with thousands of homes and farms, is seldom realized. Draw a straight line west from old Fort Vincennes to the Mississippi, and practically all north of it, to the Wisconsin line, is the Grand Prairie. "Westward of the Wabash, except occasional tracts of timbered lands in northern Indiana and fringes of forest growth along the intervening water courses, the prairies stretch westward continuously across Indiana, and the whole of Illinois to the Mississippi. Taking the line of the Wabash railway, which crosses Illinois in its greatest breadth, and beginning in Indiana, where the railway leaves the timber, west of the Wabash near Marshfield (in Warren County), the prairie extends to Quincy, a distance of more than two hundred and fifty miles, and its continuity the entire way is only broken by four strips of timber along four streams running at right angles with the route of the railway, namely, the timber on the Vermilion river between Danville and the Indiana state line; the Sangamon, seventy miles west of Danville, near Decatur; the Sangamon again a few miles east of Springfield, and the Illinois river at Meredosia, and all the timber at the crossing of these several streams, if put together, would not aggregate fifteen miles, against the two hundred and fifty miles [Pg 22]of prairie. Taking a north and south direction and parallel with the drainage of the rivers, one could start near Ashley, on the Illinois Central railway, in Washington county, and going northward, nearly on an air line, keeping on the divide between Kaskaskia and Little Wabash, the Sangamon and the Vermilion, the Iroquois and the Vermilion of the Illinois, crossing the latter stream between the mouths of the Fox and DuPage, and travel through to the state of Wisconsin, a distance of nearly three hundred miles, without encountering five miles of timber during the whole journey."

All that portion of Indiana lying north and west of the Wabash, is essentially a part of the Grand Prairie. "Of the twenty-seven counties in Indiana, lying wholly or partially west and north of the Wabash, twelve are prairie, seven are mixed prairies, barrens and timber, the barrens and prairie predominating. In five, the barrens, with the prairies, are nearly equal to the timber, while only three of the counties can be characterized as heavily timbered. And wherever timber does occur in these twenty-seven counties, it is found in localities favorable to its protection against the ravages of fire, by the proximity of intervening lakes, marshes or watercourses." On the Indiana side, the most pronounced of the tracts of prairie occur in western Warren, Benton, southern and central Newton, southern Jasper, and western White and Tippecanoe. Benton was originally covered with a great pampas of blue-stem, high as a horse's head, interspersed here and there with swamps of willows and bull grass, while only narrow fringes of timber [Pg 23]along the creeks, and some five or six groves of timber and woodland, widely scattered, served as land marks to the early traveler.

Those who early observed and explored the grassy savannas of Indiana and Illinois, always maintained that they were kept denuded of trees and forests by the action of the great prairie fires. Among those who have supported this theory are the Hon. James Hall, author of "The West," published in Cincinnati in 1848; the Hon. John Reynolds, former governor of the state of Illinois, and the Hon. John D. Caton, a late judge of the Supreme Court of Illinois. Caton's observations on this subject are so interesting and ingenious that we cannot refrain from making the following quotation:

"The cause of the absence of trees on the upland prairies is the problem most important to the agricultural interests of our state, and it is the inquiry which alone I propose to consider, but cannot resist the remark that wherever we do find timber throughout the broad field of prairie, it is always in or near the humid portions of it, as along the margins of streams, or upon or near the springy uplands. Many most luxurious growths are found in the highest portions of the uplands, but always in the neighborhood of water. For a remarkable example, I may refer to the great chain of groves extending from and including the Au Sable grove on the east and Holderman's grove on the west, in Kendall county, occupying the high divide between the waters of the Illinois and the Fox rivers. In and around all the groves flowing springs abound, and some of them are separated by marshes, to[Pg 24]the borders of which the great trees approach, as if the forests were ready to seize upon each yard of ground as soon as it is elevated above the swamps. Indeed, all our groves seem to be located where the water is so disposed as to protect them, to a greater or less extent, from the prairie fire, although not so situated as to irrigate them. If the head waters of the streams on the prairies are most frequently without timber, as soon as they have attained sufficient volume to impede the progress of fires, with very few exceptions, we find forests on their borders, becoming broader and more vigorous as the magnitude of the streams increase. It is manifest that the lands located on the borders of streams which the fire cannot pass, are only exposed to one-half the fires to which they would be exposed, but for such protection. This tends to show, at least, that if but one-half the fires that have occurred had been kindled, the arboraceous growth could have withstood their destructive influences, and the whole surface of what is now prairie would be forest. Another confirmatory fact, patent to all observers, is, that the prevailing winds upon the prairies, especially in the autumn, are from the west, and these give direction to the fires. Consequently, the lands on the westerly sides of the streams are the most exposed to the fires, and, as might be expected, we find much the most timber on the easterly sides of the streams."

A Section of the Grand Prairie in Benton County, Indiana, which extends west to Peoria, Illinois.
Miami Indian Photo Gallery

Local observation in Benton County, Indiana, which is purely prairie throughout, would seem to confirm the judge's view. Parish grove, on the old Chicago road, was filled with springs, and a rather large spring on the [Pg 25]west side of the grove, supplied water for the horses of the emigrants and travelers who took this route to the northwest in the early 40's. Besides this, the grove was situated on rather high uplands, where the growth of grass would be much shorter than on the adjoining plain. It is probable that this spring on the west side, and the springy nature of the highlands back of it, kept the ground moist and the vegetation green, and these facts, coupled with the fact that the grass as it approached the uplands, would grow shorter, probably retarded and checked the prairie fires from the southwest, and gave rise to the wonderfully diversified and luxuriant growth of trees that was the wonder of the early settler. Sugar grove, seven miles to the northwest of Parish grove, and a stopping place on the old Chicago road, lay mostly within the point or headland caused by the juncture of Sugar Creek from the northeast, and Mud Creek from the southeast. Scarcely a tree is on the southwestern bank of Mud creek, but where it widens on the south side of the grove, it protected the growth of the forest on the northern side. Turkey Foot grove, east and south of Earl Park, formerly had a lake and depression both on the south and west sides of it. Hickory Grove, just west of Fowler, in the early days, had a lake or pond on the south and west. The timber that skirted the banks of Pine creek, was heaviest on the eastern side. The headwaters of Sugar, Pine and Mud creeks, being small and narrow, were entirely devoid of trees on their banks, but as they flowed on and acquired strength and volume, a skirt of forest appeared.

[Pg 26]The Grand Prairie, the home of the ancient Illinois tribe, the Sacs and Foxes, the Kickapoos, and the prairie Potawatomi, was also the home of the buffalo, or wild cow of America. No story either of the northwest or its Indian tribes would be complete without mention of the bison. Think of the sight that Brigadier General Harmar saw on the early prairies of Illinois, when marching from Vincennes to Kaskaskia, in November 1787! With him the Miami chief, Pachan (Pecan) and a comrade, killing wild game for the soldiers; before him stretching the vastness of the prairie, "like the ocean, as far as the eye can see, the view terminated by the horizon;" here and there the herds of deer and buffalo far in the distance.

For centuries before the advent of the white man the buffalo herds roamed the plain. The savage, with no weapon in his hands, save rudely chipped pieces of stone, was unable to reduce their numbers. With the coming of firearms and the rifle the buffalo passed rapidly away.

In the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries the buffalo ranged as far east as western New York and Pennsylvania, and as far south as Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. Father Marquette, in his explorations, declared that the prairies along the Illinois river were "covered with buffalos." Father Hennepin, in writing of northern Illinois, between Chicago and the Illinois river, asserted that "There must be an innumerable quantity of wild bulls in this country, since the earth is covered with their horns. * * * They follow one another, so that you may see a drove of them [Pg 27]for about a league together. Their ways are beaten, as are our great roads, and no herb grows therein."

Of the presence of large numbers of buffalo, that resorted to the salty licks of Kentucky, we have frequent mention by both Humphrey Marshall and Mann Butler, the early historians of that state. In the year 1755, Colonel James Smith mentions the killing of several buffalo by the Indians at a lick in Ohio, somewhere between the Muskingum, the Ohio and the Scioto. At this lick the Indians made about a half bushel of salt in their brass kettles. He asserts that about this lick there were clear, open woods, and that there were great roads leading to the same, made by the buffalo, that appeared like wagon roads. The wild cattle had evidently been attracted thither by the mineral salts in the water. In the early morning of June 13, 1765, George Croghan, an Indian agent sent out by William Johnson, of New York, to report to the English government conditions in the west, coming into view of one of the fine large meadows bordering on the western banks of the Wabash, saw in the distance herds of buffalo eating the grass, and describes the land as filled with buffalo, deer and bears in "great plenty." On the 18th and 19th of the same month, he traveled through what he terms as a "prodigious large meadow, called the Pyankeshaw's Hunting Ground," and describes it as well watered and full of buffalo, deer, bears, and all kinds of wild game. He was still in the lower Wabash region. On the 20th and 21st of June he was traveling north along the Wabash in the vicinity of the Vermilion river in Vermilion county, and states that [Pg 28]game existed plentifully, and that one could kill in a half hour as much as was needed. He spoke, evidently, of the large variety of game before mentioned. The whole of the prairie of Illinois, filled with an abundant growth of the richest grasses, and all the savannas north of the Wabash in Indiana, that really constituted an extension of the Grand Prairie, were particularly suited to the range of the wild herds, and were the last grounds deserted by them previous to their withdrawal west, and across the Mississippi.

The economical value of the herds of buffalo to the Indian tribes of the northwest may be gathered from the uses to which they were afterwards put by the tribes of the western plains. "The body of the buffalo yielded fresh meat, of which thousands of tons were consumed; dried meat, prepared in summer for winter use; pemmican (also prepared in summer) of meat, fat and berries; tallow, made up into large balls or sacks, and kept in store; marrow, preserved in bladders; and tongues, dried and smoked, and eaten as a delicacy. The skin of the buffalo yielded a robe, dressed with the hair on, for clothing and bedding; a hide, dressed without the hair, which made a tepee cover, when a number were sewn together; boats, when sewn together in a green state, over a wooden frame work; shields, from the thickest portions, as rawhide; clothing of many kinds; bags for use in traveling; coffins, or winding sheets for the dead, etc. Other portions utilized were sinews, which furnished fibre for ropes, thread, bowstrings, snow shoe webs, etc.; hair, which was sometimes made into belts [Pg 29]and ornaments; "buffalo chips," which formed a valuable and highly prized fuel; bones, from which many articles of use and ornament were made; horns, which were made into spoons, drinking vessels, etc." The Rev. John Heckewelder, in speaking of the skill of the Delawares of Ohio, in dressing and curing buffalo hides, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, says that they cured them so that they became quite soft and supple, and so that they would last for many years without wearing out.

All at once, and near the beginning of the last decade of the eighteenth century, the buffalo herds east of the Mississippi, suddenly disappeared. George Wilson, in his history of Dubois County, Indiana, says that, "toward the close of the eighteenth century a very cold winter, continuing several months, froze all vegetable growth, starved the noble animals, and the herds never regained their loss." This statement is borne out by the testimony of the famous Potawatomi chieftain Shaubena, of northern Illinois, who says that the trade in buffalo robes east of the Mississippi ceased in about the year 1790; that when a youth he joined in the chase of buffalos on the prairies, but while he was still young, they all disappeared from the country. "A big snow, about five feet deep, fell, and froze so hard on the top that people walked on it, causing the buffalo to perish by starvation. Next spring a few buffalo, poor and haggard in appearance, were seen going westward, and as they approached the carcasses of dead ones, lying here and there on the prairies, they would stop, commence pawing and lowing, then start off again in a lope for the west." It is true [Pg 30]that Brigadier-General Josiah Harmar, in marching from Vincennes to Kaskaskia, in 1787, gives a striking account of the early prairies, "like the ocean, as far as the eye can see, the view terminated by the horizon," and describes the country as excellent for grazing, and abounding with deer and buffalo. Pachan, or Pecan, a famous Miami chieftain from Miamitown, and an Indian comrade, supplied the military party with buffalo and deer meat on the march out, and on the return. Notwithstanding these facts, the story of the terrible winter and the deep snow as told by Shaubena seems authentic, and while scattered remnants of the great herds may still have existed for some time afterward, the great droves stretching "for above a league together," were seen no more.

The great snowfall was the culminating tragedy. In order to secure whiskey and brandy the horse tribes of the prairies had slaughtered thousands, and bartered away their robes and hides. What distinguishes the savage from civilized man is, that the savage takes no heed of the morrow. To satisfy his present passions and appetites he will sacrifice every hope of the future. He no longer cures the skins and clothes his nakedness. He thinks no longer of husbanding his supply of meat and game. He robs the plain, and despoils every stream and river, and then becomes a drunken beggar in the frontier towns, crying for alms. The same thing that happened on the plains of Illinois at the close of eighteenth, took place on the plains west of the Mississippi in the last half of the nineteenth century. The giant herds melted away before the remorseless killings of the still hunters [Pg 31]and savages, who threw away a meat supply worth millions of dollars in a mad chase for gain and plunder, and no one took a more prominent part in that killing than the Indian himself.

"When the snow fall was unusually heavy," says William T. Hornaday, "and lay for a long time on the ground, the buffalos fast for days together, and sometimes even weeks. If a warm day came, and thawed the upper surface of the snow, sufficiently for succeeding cold to freeze it into a crust, the outlook for the bison began to be serious. A man can travel over a crust through which the hoofs of a ponderous bison cut like chisels and leave him floundering belly-deep. It was at such times that the Indians hunted him on snow-shoes, and drove their spears into his vitals as he wallowed helplessly in the drifts. Then the wolves grew fat upon the victims which they, also, slaughtered without effort." This is probably an accurate description of what took place east of the Mississippi river about the year 1790, and left the bones of the herds to bleach on the prairies.

However the facts may be, it is certain that at the opening of the nineteenth century the buffalo were practically extinguished in the territory of the northwest. A few scattered animals may have remained here and there upon the prairies, but the old herds, whose progenitors were seen by Croghan were forever gone. In the month of December, 1799, Judge Jacob Burnet was traveling overland on horseback from Cincinnati to Vincennes on professional business, and while at some point north and west of the falls of the Ohio, he and his companions [Pg 32]surprised a small herd of eight or ten buffalos, that were seeking shelter behind the top of a fallen beech tree on the line of an old "trace," during a snow storm. This is one of the last accounts given of any buffalos in Indiana. On August 18th and August 27th, 1804, Governor William Henry Harrison, as Indian agent for the United States government, bought a large tract of land in southern Indiana, between the Wabash and the Ohio rivers, from the Delaware and Piankeshaw tribes. The right to make this purchase was disputed by Captain William Wells, the Indian agent at Fort Wayne, and by the Little Turtle, claiming to represent the Miamis, and it was claimed among other things, that the lands bought were frequented as a hunting ground by both the Miamis and Potawatomi, and that they went there to hunt buffalo. The truth of this statement was denied by Governor Harrison, who said that not an animal of that kind "had been seen within that tract for several years."

Photo by Heaton

A typical buffalo wallow on the Donaldson farm in Benton County, Indiana.ToList

Traces of the old buffalo wallows are occasionally met with, even to this day. The great animals "rolled successively in the same hole, and each carried away a coat of mud," which, baking in the sun, served to protect them against the great swarm of flies, gnats and insects that infested the marshes and prairies of that early time. One of these wallows, in a perfect state of preservation, exists in the northwest quarter of section thirty, in township twenty-five north, range six west, in Benton County, Indiana. It is several yards in diameter, hollowed out to a depth of four or five feet, and its periphery is almost an exact circle. It is situated on a rather high, springy [Pg 33]knoll, commanding a view of the surrounding plain for several miles. A great number of Indian arrow heads have been picked up in the immediate vicinity, showing that the Indiana had previously resorted thither in search of game.