Courts Established in the North West.

181

The Indians beheld these innovations into their country with rueful thoughts. The United States had neither surveyed nor sold any of these lands that had not been bought and paid for through treaties with certain chiefs, but it was claimed by the great mass of Indians that these chiefs had no authority to sell the lands.

To enumerate the various treaties by which the first purchases were made along the Ohio river, would fill a volume with monotonous formula. They are preserved in government archives, but are seldom referred to now.

They were the instruments by which the Indian was driven from his native soil, and having executed their mission, are filed away like writs of ejectment after having been served. In almost all cases they were signed by the Indians under a pressure from which they could not extricate themselves.

If they signed them they would get pay for their lands, which the borders of advancing civilization had rendered useless to them, while if they refused, they would nevertheless be forced back without any remuneration. The chiefs could plainly see this, but the great masses of red men could not. Neither could they understand how, by virtue of these instruments, the white man should come among them, cut away the forests, and whelm the fabric of savage society in ruin.

In vain the poetry, the romance, and the conscience of the nation might lift up its voice in behalf of the poor Indian. There was but one way in which he could be saved, which was to beat his scalping knife into a plowshare, and till the soil, but he was as incapable of doing this as the drones in the hive of industry in our day are to contribute to the public weal their share of its burdens.

Having established courts at Kaskaskia and Vincennes, St. Clair returned to his headquarters at Cincinnati early in the summer of the same year, 1790. During his absence the outcropping discontents of the Indians had been made manifest by their waylaying the emigrants as they came down the Ohio in arks, and unless some means were taken to stop these attacks, this great and only highway to the West would soon be closed.

This was what the Indians aimed at in their attacks, nor had they yet learned the impossibility of the undertaking.

St. Clair now determined to invade the Indian country to punish the disturbers of the peace, and by virtue of authority vested in him by the President, he called for 1,000 militia from Virginia, and 500 from Pennsylvania.

*

So careful was President Washington at this time not to pro

The State of Virginia then included Kentucky, in which settlements had been made before the Northwest Territory was organized.

182 voke a quarrel with the British, that he deemed it imprudent to invade the Indian country, without sending an apology to the English commander at Detroit, lest he might take offense that the Americans had dared to make war on his allies. The following is the letter which St. Clair sent him:

Apology to the English for Fighting the Indians.

"MARIETTA, 19th September, 1790.

"Sir: As it is not improbable that an account of the military preparations going forward in this quarter of the country may reach you, and give you some uneasiness, while the object to which they are to be directed is not perfectly known to you, I am commanded by the President of the United States to give you the fullest assurances of the pacific disposition entertained toward Great Britain and all her possessions; and to inform you explicitly that the expedition about to be undertaken is not intended against the post you have the honor to command, nor any other place at present in the possession of the troops of his Britannic majesty, but is on foot with the sole design of humbling and chastising some of the savage tribes, whose depredations are become intolerable, and whose cruelties have of late become an outrage, not on the people of America only, but on humanity; which I now do in the most unequivocal manner. After this candid explanation, sir, there is every reason to expect, both from your own personal character, and from the regard you have for that of your nation, that those tribes will meet with neither countenance nor assistance from any under your command, and that you will do what in your power lies, to restrain the trading people, from whose instigations there is too good reason to believe, much of the injuries of the savages has proceeded. I have forwarded this letter by a private gentleman, in preference to that of an officer, by whom you might have expected a communication of this kind, that every suspicion of the purity of the views of the United States might be obviated.".

Harmar's whole force amounted to 1,453 men all told. On the 26th of September Col. Hardin led the advance to cut a road, but the main body did not leave Fort Washington till the 3d of October, 1790.

The objective point was the Miami village at the bend of the Maumee, where Fort Wayne now stands.

After a march of sixteen days, Col. Hardin reached the place with the advance, intending to surprise the Indians, but on entering the village he found it deserted. Their store of corn was then rated at twenty thousand bushels in the ear,* which was consigned to the flames by the invaders.

*Brice's History of Fort Wayne, p. 125.

Little Turtle Defeats Hardin.

183

The troops were very disorderly, and despite the efforts of Gen. Harmar, who soon arrived with the main body, everything like reasonable discipline was impossible.

After a few days the celebrated chief, Little Turtle, fell suddenly upon Col. Hardin's detachment, while some miles away from the main body, and put them to flight with heavy loss. Af ter visiting destruction on another Indian village two miles farther south, Gen. Harmar took up his march for Fort Washing

ton.

But ere they left the scene of operations, Little Turtle managed to bring on another battle with a strong detachment under Col. Hardin, and severely defeated them.

The main body were not brought into action with the Indians at all, but continued their retreat to Fort Washington, where it, with Hardin's detachment, arrived on the 4th of November, having lost 183 men killed, besides many who were wounded.

While this expedition had been in progress, Gen. Hamtramck led a force from Vincennes up the Wabash, and destroyed the Piankeshaw villages, with their stores. The loss of their corn was severely felt by the Indians, but the prestige of victory was with them, and they were much elated with the success that had attended their arms.

The Indians were emboldened, and the apprehensions of the settlements were aroused, particularly those of the Marietta colony, who were more distant from succor in case of an Indian raid than Cincinnati, as the latter was within ready reach of the Kentucky settlements, where aid could be obtained at short notice.

After Harmar's expedition, the Indians, firm in the belief that the British would make common cause with them in their war with the United States, sent a deputation to Lord Dorchester, who then held command at Detroit, to learn from himn the amount of support they could expect in the coming war.

Up to this time such inquiries had been answered with metaphor, uttered from the tongues of such villainous apostates of civilization as Girty, Elliot and McGee.

This notorious trio had used every means in their power to deceive the Indians into the belief that the English were ready to take up the hatchet in their behalf. Nor can it be denied that

the English officers themselves had given the Indians grounds for such expectations. Indeed, they had, according to savage rites, pledged themselves to such a policy by making the Indians presents of hatchets, painted red as blood, by which emblem the Indian is bound as solemnly as by vows, and he had no reason to look upon such a symbol as not equally binding on the part of the whites, till he learned to the contrary by experience.

The issue soon came before Lord Dorchester in unequivocal form, and he declined the warlike proposals, greatly to the disappointment of his swarthy friends. No pretext offered for war with the United States, thanks to the prudence of Washington and Jay, by whose flexible but transcendant policy, any expecta tions which the English might entertain of winning jurisdiction over the Northwest had vanished into a forlorn hope.

Harmar's expedition having made no impression on the Indians another was planned, to be undertaken the next year, 1791, by General Charles Scott. It consisted of eight hundred mounted men, the flower of Kentucky bush-fighters, and its destination was the Indian towns on the Wabash above Vincennes. The place was soon reached by the mounted scouts, the Indian towns destroyed, and about fifty prisoners taken, but no decisive action was fought.

This expedition, like Harmar's which preceded it, only served to inflame the resentment of the Indians and widen the breach between them and the whites into an impassable gulf.

Scott's raid was succeeded by another similar one under General Wilkinson, the succeeding summer. He went up the Wabash as far as Ouiatanon laying waste towns and fields as he went. Ouiatanon was then a thriving village of about seventy comfortable dwellings besides many Indian huts. It was composed of French, half-breeds and Indians, and many signs of progress, such as books and pictures, were manifest in this wilderness post. Their fields of corn were cultivated with ploughs, like the English and their horses and cows were well taken care of.*

The town was burnt and everything destroyed that the invaders could seize, whether the property of French or Indians. They all belonged to a less ambitious race than the Americans. The French and Indians had lived together here since 1733, and the hybrid offspring that rose up in the forest in consequence, was essentially Indian in social matters, while the French themselves manifested no disposition to break through the toils of savage manners, customs and superstitions. Whatever may have been their standard of honor or their communistic propensities o equality and indisposition to eclipse each other in wealth o grandeur, these were the last qualifications that would recom mend them to the favor of Americans, whose motto is Excelsior. *Am. State Papers, Vol. V. p. 121.

CHAPTER XII.

Little Turtle-His Masterly Abilities-Privations of the Early Settlers-St. Clair's Expedition against the Indians-His Defeat-Its Causes-He Resigns- Gen. Anthony Wayne Succeeds him-Peace Commissioners on the Canada Border The Indians claim the Ohio River as a Boundary Line between Themselves and the Whites-The Terms Inadmissible and the Council a Failure.

Among the forest heroes whose exploits have made their history illustrious in their downfall, was a chief named Little Turtle. Gifted with the essential qualities which make up the model great man in civilized communities, and nearly exempt from the eccentricities peculiar to his race, his many virtues shone with untarnished lustre amidst the turmoil of the camp and the vengeful spirit of the times. He was not a chief by birth, but rose to that distinction per force of his merit, both as counselor and warrior, and at maturity he became principal chief of the Miamis, and the acknowledged leader of the neighboring tribes who had confederated themselves together to beat back the white invaders of their soil. Immediately after the raids of Harmar, Scott and Wilkinson, the forest echoed with the war-whoop from the Muskingum to the Wabash. The Miamis, Chippewas, Delawares, Pottawattomies, Hurons and Shawanese, gathered under the banner of Little Turtle, who, with the assistance of Girty, McGee and Elliot, and his subordinate chiefs, constituted the best drilled army of Indian warriors that ever fought the white man. St. Clair had foreseen all this vengeful animosity that rankled in the hearts of the Indians, and had made preparations to meet it. The country over which he had been appointed governor was a wilderness of forest and prairie, tenanted by its native inhabitants; some of whom, under the tutelage of the French, had erected log cabins to live in instead of bark huts. The American settlers did not number two thousand in the entire territory. They were settled within the limits of Washington county, at the mouth of the Muskingum and Symes' Purchase, on the Ohio,