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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stories Of Ohio, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stories Of Ohio
+       1897
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: January 23, 2008 [EBook #21381]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STORIES OF OHIO ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+STORIES OF OHIO
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+Copyright, 1897, by American Book Company.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+In the following stories, drawn from the annals of Ohio, I have tried to
+possess the reader with a knowledge, in outline at least, of the history
+of the State from the earliest times. I cannot suppose that I have done
+this with unfailing accuracy in respect to fact, but with regard to the
+truth, I am quite sure of my purpose at all times to impart it.
+
+The books which have been of most use to me in writing this are the
+histories of Francis Parkman; the various publications of Messrs. Robert
+Clarke and Co. in the "Ohio Valley Series"; McClung's "Sketches of
+Western Adventure"; "Ohio" (in the American Commonwealths Series) by Ruf
+us King; "History and Civil Government of Ohio," by B. A. Hinsdale and
+Mary Hinsdale; "Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley,"
+by W. H. Venable; Theodore Roosevelt's "Winning of the West"; Whitelaw
+Reid's "Ohio in the War"; and above all others, the delightful and
+inexhaustible volumes of Henry Howe's "Historical Collections of Ohio."
+
+W. D. H.
+
+     CONTENTS.
+
+
+     I.      The Ice Folk and the Earth Folk
+
+     II.     Ohio as a Part of France
+
+     III.    Ohio becomes English
+
+     IV.     The Forty Years' War for the West
+
+     V.      The Captivity of James Smith
+
+     VI.     The Captivity of Boone and Kenton
+
+     VII.    The Renegades
+
+     VIII.   The Wickedest Deed in our History
+
+     IX.     The Torture of Colonel Crawford
+
+     X.      The Escape of Knight and Slover
+
+     XI.     The Indian Wars and St. Clair's Defeat
+
+     XII.    The Indian Wars and Wayne's Victory
+
+     XIII.   Indian Fighters
+
+     XIV.    Later Captivities
+
+     XV.     Indian Heroes and Sages
+
+     XVI.    Life in the Backwoods
+
+     XVII.   The First Great Settlements
+
+     XVIII.  The State of Ohio in the War of 1812
+
+     XIX.    A Foolish Man, a Philosopher, and a Fanatic
+
+     XX.     Ways Out
+
+     XXI.    The Fight with Slavery
+
+     XXII.   The Civil War in Ohio
+
+     XXIII.  Famous Ohio Soldiers
+
+     XXIV.   Ohio Statesmen
+
+     XXV.    Other Notable Ohioans
+
+     XXVI.   Incidents and Characteristics
+
+
+
+
+STORIES OF OHIO.
+
+
+
+
+I. THE ICE FOLK AND THE EARTH FOLK.
+
+The first Ohio stories are part of the common story of the wonderful Ice
+Age, when a frozen deluge pushed down from the north, and covered a vast
+part of the earth's surface with slowly moving glaciers. The traces that
+this age left in Ohio are much the same as it left elsewhere, and the
+signs that there were people here ten thousand years ago, when the
+glaciers began to melt and the land became fit to live in again, are
+such as have been found in the glacier drift in many other countries.
+Even before the ice came creeping southwestwardly from the region of
+Niagara, and passed over two thirds of our state, from Lake Erie to the
+Ohio River there were people here of a race older than the hills, as the
+hills now are; for the glaciers ground away the hills as they once were,
+and made new ones, with new valleys between them, and new channels for
+the streams to run where there had never been water courses before.
+These earliest Ohioans must have been the same as the Ohioans of the
+Ice Age, and when they had fled southward before the glaciers, they must
+have followed the retreat of the melting ice back into Ohio again. No
+one knows how long they dwelt here along its edges in a climate like
+that of Greenland, where the glaciers are now to be seen as they once
+were in the region of Cincinnati. But it is believed that these Ice
+Folk, as we may call them, were of the race which still roams the Arctic
+snows. They seem to have lived as the Eskimos of our day live: they were
+hunters and fishers, and in the gravelly banks of the new rivers, which
+the glaciers upheaved, the Ice Folk dropped the axes of chipped stone
+which are now found there. They left nothing else behind them; but
+similar tools or weapons are found in the glacier-built river banks
+of Europe, and so it is thought that the race of the earliest Ohio men
+lived pretty much all over the world in the Ice Age.
+
+[Illustration: Stone Axes 017L]
+
+One of the learned writers[*] who is surest of them and has told us
+most about them, holds that they were for their time and place as worthy
+ancestors as any people could have; and we could well believe this
+because the Ohio man has, in all ages, been one of the foremost men.
+
+     * Professor G. F. Wright.
+
+Our Ice Folk were sturdy, valiant, and cunning enough to cope with the
+fierce brute life and the terrible climate of their day, but all they
+have left to prove it is the same kind of stone axes that have been
+found in the drift of the glaciers, along the water courses in Northern
+France and Southern England.
+
+Our Ice Folk must have dressed like their far-descended children, the
+Eskimos, in furs and skins, and like them they must have lived upon fish
+and the flesh of wild beasts. The least terrible of these beasts would
+have been the white bear; the mammoth and mastodon were among the
+animals the Ice Folk hunted for game, and slew without bows or arrows,
+for there was no wood to make these of. The only weapon the Ice Folk had
+was the stone ax which they may have struck into their huge prey when
+they came upon it sleeping or followed in the chase till it dropped with
+fatigue. Such an ax was dug up out of the glacial terrace, as the bank
+of this drift is called, in the valley of the Tuscarawas, in 1889,
+perhaps ten thousand years after it was left there. It was wrought from
+a piece of black flint, four inches long and two inches wide; at the
+larger end it was nearly as thick as it was wide, and it was chipped
+to a sharp edge all round. Within the present year another of the
+Ice Folk's axes has been found near New London, twenty-two feet under
+ground, in the same kind of glacial drift as the first. But it seems to
+have been made of a different kind of stone, and to have been so deeply
+rotted by the long ages it had been buried that when its outer substance
+was scratched away, hardly anything of the hard green rock was left.
+
+After the glaciers were gone, the Ohio climate was still very cold, and
+vast lakes stretched over the state, freezing in the long winters,
+and thawing in the short summers. One of these spread upward from the
+neighborhood of Akron to the east and west of where Cleveland stands;
+but by far the largest flooded nearly all that part of Ohio which
+the glaciers failed to cover, from beyond where Pittsburg is to where
+Cincinnati is. At the last point a mighty ice dam formed every winter
+till as the climate grew warmer and the ice thawed more and more, the
+waters burst the dam, and poured their tide down the Ohio River to
+the Mississippi, while those of the northern lake rushed through the
+Cuyahoga to Lake Erie, and both lakes disappeared forever. For the next
+four or five thousand years the early Ohio men kept very quiet; but we
+need not suppose for that reason that there were none. Our Ice Folk, who
+dropped their stone axes in the river banks, may have passed away with
+the Ice Age, or they may have remained in Ohio, and begun slowly to take
+on some faint likeness of civilization. There is nothing to prove that
+they went, and there is nothing to prove that they staid; but Ohio must
+always have been a pleasant place to live in after the great thaw, and
+it seems reasonable to think that the Ice Folk lingered, in part at
+least, and changed with the changing climate, and became at last the
+people who left the signs of their presence in almost every part of the
+state.
+
+Those were the Mound Builders, whose works are said to be two or three
+thousand years old, though we cannot be very sure of that. There are
+some who think that the mounds are only a few hundred years old, and
+that their builders were the race of red men whom the white men found
+here. One may think very much as one likes, and I like to think that the
+Mound Builders were a very ancient people, who vanished many ages before
+the Indians came here. They could not have been savages, for the region
+where they dwelt could not have fed savages enough to heap up the
+multitude of their mounds. Each wild man needs fifty thousand acres to
+live upon, as the wild man lives by hunting and fishing; in the whole
+Ohio country, the earliest white adventurers found only two or three
+thousand Indians at the most; and the people who built those forts and
+temples and tombs, and shaped from the earth the mighty images of their
+strange bird-gods and reptile-gods, could have lived only by tilling
+the soil. Their mounds are found everywhere in the west between the
+Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi River, but they are found mostly
+in Ohio, where their farms and gardens once bordered the Muskingum, the
+Scioto, the two Miamis, and our other large streams, which they probably
+used as highways to the rivers of the southwest.
+
+Their forts were earthworks, but they were skillfully planned, with a
+knowledge which no savage race has shown. They were real strongholds,
+and they are so large that some of them inclose hundreds of acres within
+walls of earth which still rise ten and twelve feet from the ground.
+They are on a far grander scale than the supposed temples or religious
+works; and there are more of them than of all the other ruins, except
+the small detached mounds, which are almost numberless.
+
+These, from the charred bones found among the ashes in them, are known
+to be tombs, and they were probably the sepulchers of the common people,
+whose bodies were burned. The large mounds are heaped above walled
+chambers, and in these were platforms, supposed to have been altars, and
+whole skeletons, supposed to be the skeletons of priests buried there.
+The priests are supposed to have been the chiefs of the people, and
+to have ruled them through their superstitions; but there is nothing to
+prove this, for their laws were never put in written words or any other
+sign of speech. In some of the mounds little figures of burnt clay have
+been found, which may be idols, and pieces of ancient pottery, which may
+be fragments of sacred vessels, and small plates of copper, with marks
+or scratches on them, which may be letters. Some antiquarians have tried
+to read these letters, if they are letters, and to make sense out
+of them, but no seeker after true Ohio stories can trust their
+interpretations.
+
+The Mound Builders used very little stone and showed no knowledge of
+masonry. But they built so massively out of the earth, that their works
+have lasted to this day in many places, just as they left them, except
+for the heavy growth of trees, which the first settlers found covering
+them, and which were sometimes seven or eight hundred years old. At
+Marietta, these works when the white people came were quite perfect and
+inclosed fifty acres on the bank of the Muskingum, overlooking the Ohio.
+They were in great variety of design. The largest mound was included in
+the grounds of the present cemetery, and so has been saved, but the
+plow of the New England emigrant soon passed over the foundations of
+the Mound Builders' temples. At Circleville the shape of their
+fortifications gave its name to the town, which has long since hid them
+from sight. One of them was almost perfectly round, and the other nearly
+square. The round fort was about seventy feet in diameter, and was
+formed of two walls twenty feet high, with a deep ditch between; the
+other fort was fifty-five rods square, and it had no ditch; seven
+gateways opened into it at the side and corners, and it was joined to
+the round fort by an eighth. It is forever to be regretted that these
+precious ancient works should have been destroyed to make place for the
+present town; but within a few years one of the most marvelous of the
+Mound Builders' works, the great Serpent Mound near Loudon, in Adams
+County, has been preserved to after time by the friends of science, and
+put in the keeping of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.
+
+[Illustration: Serpent Mound 019L]
+
+The state of Ohio has passed a law protecting the land around it as a
+park, and there is now reason to hope that the mound will last as long
+as the rocky bluff on which the serpent lies coiled. This huge idol is
+more than twelve hundred feet long, and is the most wonderful symbol
+in the world of the serpent worship, which was everywhere the earliest
+religion of our race.
+
+The largest military ruin is the famous Fort Ancient in Warren County,
+where, on a terrace above the Little Miami River, five miles of wall,
+which can still be easily traced, shut in a hundred acres. In Highland
+County, about seventeen miles southeast of Hillsborough, another great
+fortress embraces thirty-five acres oh the crest of a hill overlooking
+Brush Creek. Itswalls are some twenty-five feet wide at the base, and
+rise from &ix to ten feet above the ground. Within their circuit are
+two ponds which could supply water in time of siege, and in the valley,
+which the hill commands, are the ruins of the Mound Builders' village,
+whose people could take refuge in the fort on the hilltop and hold it
+against any approaching force.
+
+For the rest, the works of the Mound Builders, except such as were too
+large to be destroyed by the farmer, have disappeared almost as wholly
+as the Mound Builders themselves. Their mole-like race threw up their
+ridges and banks and larger and lesser heaps, and then ceased from the
+face of the earth, as utterly as if they had burrowed into its heart.
+They may have fled before the ancestors of the savages whom our
+ancestors found here; they may have passed down peacefully into Mexico
+and built the cities which the Spaniards destroyed there. Or, they
+may have come up out of Mexico, and lost the higher arts of their
+civilization in our northern woods, warring with the wild tribes who
+were here before them. In either case, it is imaginable that the Mound
+Builders were of the same race as the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians,
+and it is probable that they were akin to the Zufiis of our own day. The
+snake dances of the Zufiis are a relic of the old serpent worship; and
+the fear and hate which the Zufiis bear the red savages of the plains
+may be another heritage from the kindred race which once peopled our
+Ohio valleys.
+
+
+
+
+II. OHIO AS A PART OF FRANCE.
+
+If the people of Ohio were Eskimos in the ages before history began,
+and then thousands of years after, but still thousands of years ago were
+Aztecs, there is no doubt that when history first knew of them they were
+Frenchmen. The whole Great West, in fact, was once as much a province
+of France as Canada; for the dominions of Louis XV. were supposed to
+stretch from Quebec to New Orleans, and from the Alleghanies to the
+Mississippi. The land was really held by savages who had never heard of
+this king; but that was all the same to the French. They had discovered
+the Great Lakes, they had discovered the Mississippi, they had
+discovered the Ohio; and they built forts at Detroit, at Kaskaskia, and
+at Pittsburg, as well as at Niagara; they planted a colony at the mouth
+of our mightiest river, and opened a highway to France through the
+Gulf of Mexico, as well as through the Gulf of St. Lawrence; and they
+proclaimed their king sovereign over all.
+
+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 Celoron 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. Celoron
+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 Celoron 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.
+
+Celoron 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 Celoron'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 Celoron, 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 Celoron 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.
+
+[Illustration: Pichawillany, Chief town of the Miamis 030]
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+III. OHIO BECOMES ENGLISH.
+
+Neither the French nor the English had any right to the Ohio country
+which they both claimed. If it belonged to any people of right, it
+belonged to the savages, who held it in their way before the whites
+came, and who now had to choose which nation should call itself their
+master. They chose the French, and they chose wisely for themselves as
+savages; for, as I have said, if the French had prevailed in the war
+that was coming, the Indians could have kept their forests and lived
+their forest life as before. The French would have been satisfied in
+the West as they had been in the North, with their forts and trading
+stations, and the Indians could have hunted, and fished, and trapped, as
+they had always done. In fact, the French people would often have become
+like them. They understood the Indians and liked them; sometimes they
+mated with them, and their children grew up as wild as their mothers.
+The religion that the French priests taught the Indians, pleased while
+it awed them, and it scarcely changed their native customs.
+
+Wherever the English came, the Indians' woods were wasted, and the
+Indians were driven out of the land.
+
+The English tried neither to save their souls nor to win their hearts;
+they both hated and despised the savages, and ruthlessly destroyed them.
+Now, when the smoldering strife between the French and English in
+the West burst into an open flame of war between the two nations, the
+Western tribes took the side of those whom reason and instinct taught
+them to know as their best friends.
+
+But ten years after Celoron visited Ohio, Wolfe captured Quebec, and
+France gave up to England not only the whole of Canada, but the whole of
+the vast region between the lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, and kept for
+herself only the Province of Louisiana. The Indians were left to
+their fate, and they made what terms they could with the English. They
+promised peace, but they broke their promises, and constantly harassed
+the outlying English settlements. At one time they joined together under
+the great chief Pontiac, and tried to win back the West for themselves.
+The French forts had been ceded to Great Britain and garrisoned with
+British troops, and the allied Indians now took all of these but Detroit
+and Fort Pitt. In the end they failed, and then they made peace again,
+but still they kept up their forays along the English borders. They
+stole horses and cattle, they burned houses and barns, they killed men,
+women, and children, or carried them off into captivity. In the Ohio
+country alone their captives counted hundreds, though the right number
+could never be known, for they could easily be kept out of the way when
+the tribes were summoned to give them up.
+
+It was the same story in the West that it had been in the East, and the
+North, and the South, wherever the savages fell upon the lonely farms or
+the scattered hamlets of the frontiers, and it was not ended until our
+own day, when the Indians were at last shut up in reservations.
+
+[Illustration: Indians carry off the women 036R]
+
+It was their custom to carry off the women and children. If the
+children were hindered the march of their mothers, or if they cried and
+endangered or annoyed their captors, they were torn a hawked, or their
+brains were dashed out against the trees. But if they were well grown,
+and strong enough to keep up with the rest, they were hurried sometimes
+hundreds of miles into the wilderness. There the fate of all prisoners
+was decided in solemn council of the tribe. If any men had been taken,
+especially such as had made a hard fight for their freedom and had given
+proof of their courage, they were commonly tortured to death by fire in
+celebration of the victory won over them; though it sometimes happened
+that young men who had caught the fancy or affection of the Indians were
+adopted by the fathers of sons lately lost in battle. The older women
+became the slaves and drudges of the squaws and the boys and girls were
+parted from their mothers and scattered among the savage families. The
+boys grew up hunters and trappers, like the Indian boys, and the girls
+grew up like the Indian girls, and did the hard work which the warriors
+always left to the women. The captives became as fond of their wild,
+free life as the savages themselves, and they found wives and husbands
+among the youths and maidens of their tribe. If they were given up to
+their own people, as might happen in the brief intervals of peace, they
+pined for the wilderness, which called to their homesick hearts, and
+sometimes they stole back to it. They seem rarely to have been held for
+ransom, as the captives of the Indians of the Western plains were in our
+time. It was a tie of real love that bound them and their savage friends
+together, and it was sometimes stronger than the tie of blood. But this
+made their fate all the crueler to their kindred; for whether they lived
+or whether they died, they were lost to the fathers and mothers, and
+brothers and sisters whom they had been torn from; and it was little
+consolation to these that they had found human mercy and tenderness in
+the breasts of savages who in all else were like ravening beasts. It
+was rather an agony added to what they had already suffered to know that
+somewhere in the trackless forests to the westward there was growing up
+a child who must forget them. The time came when something must be done
+to end all this and to put a stop to the Indian attacks on the frontiers
+of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The jealous colonies united with the
+jealous mother country, and a little army of British regulars and
+American recruits was sent into Ohio under the lead of Colonel Henry
+Bouquet to force the savages to give up their captives.
+
+This officer, who commanded the king's troops at Philadelphia, was a
+young Swiss who had fought in the great wars of Europe, in the service
+of the king of Piedmont and of the Dutch republic, before he was given a
+commission by the king of Great Britain. He had distinguished himself
+by his bravery, his skill, and his good sense. He seems to have been the
+first European commander to disuse the rules of European warfare, and
+to take a lesson from our pioneers in fighting the Indians, and the year
+before he set out for the Ohio country, he had beaten the tribes in a
+battle that taught them to respect him. They found that they had no such
+wrong-headed leader as Braddock to deal with; and that they could not
+hope to ambush Bouquet's troops, and shoot them down like cattle in a
+pen; and the news of his coming spread awe among them.
+
+He gathered his forces together at Fort Pitt, after many delays. At one
+time a full third of his colonial recruits deserted him, but he waited
+till he had made up their number again, and then he started at the head
+of fifteen hundred men, on the 3d of October, 1764. A body of Virginians
+went first in three scouting parties, one on the right and one on the
+left, to beat up the woods for lurking enemies, and one in the middle
+with a guide, to lead the way. Then came the pioneers with their axes,
+and two companies of light infantry followed, to clear the way for the
+main body of the troops. A column of British regulars, two deep, marched
+in the center with a file of regulars on their right, and a file of
+Pennsylvanian recruits on their left.
+
+Two platoons of regulars came after these; then came a battalion of
+Pennsylvanians in single file on the right and left, and between them
+the convoy, with the ammunition and tools first, then the officers'
+baggage and tents, then the sheep and oxen in separate droves for the
+subsistence of the army, then the pack horses with other provisions.
+A party of light horsemen followed, and last of all another body of
+Virginians brought up the rear. The men marched in silence, six feet
+from one another, ready, if any part of the force halted, to face
+outward, and prepare to meet an attack.
+
+The Indians hung upon Bouquet's march in large numbers at first, but
+when they saw the perfect order and discipline of his army, and the
+knowledge of their own tactics which he showed in disposing his men,
+they fell away, and he kept his course unmolested, so that in two weeks
+he reached a point in the Ohio country which he could now reach in two
+hours, if he took rail from Pittsburg direct. But the wonder is for
+what he did then, and not for what he could do now. His two weeks' march
+through the wilderness was a victory such as had never been achieved
+before, and it moved the imagination of the Indians more than if he had
+fought them the whole way.
+
+His quiet firmness in establishing his force in the heart of their
+country, where they had gathered the strength of their tribes from all
+the outlying regions, must have affected them still more. At the first
+halt he made on the Muskingum, they sent some of their chiefs to parley
+with him, but he gave them short and stern answers, bidding them be
+ready to bring in their captives from every tribe and family; and again
+took up his march along the river till he reached the point where the
+Tuscarawas and Waldhonding meet to form the Muskingum. There his axmen
+cleared a space in the forest, and his troops built a town, rather than
+pitched a camp. They put up four redoubts, one at each corner of the
+town, and fortified it with a strong stockade. Within this they built a
+council house, where the Indians could come and make speeches to
+their hearts' content, and deliver up their captives. Three separate
+buildings, one for the captives from each of the colonies, with the
+officers' quarters, the soldiers' cabins, the kitchens, and the ovens,
+were inclosed within the fort, and the whole was kept in a neatness and
+order such as the savages had never seen, with military severity.
+
+The tribes soon began to bring in their prisoners, each chief giving up
+the captives of his tribe with long harangues, and many gifts of wampum,
+as pledges of good faith, and promises of a peace never to be broken.
+They said they had not merely buried the hatchet now, where it might
+sometime be dug up, but they had thrown it into the sky to the Great
+Spirit, who would never give it back again. They wished Bouquet to
+notice that they no longer called the English brothers, as they commonly
+did when they were friendly, but they called them fathers, and they
+meant to be their children and to do their bidding like children. They
+made him a great number of flattering speeches, and he gravely listened
+to their compliments, but as to the reasons they gave for breaking their
+promises in the past he dealt very frankly with them. He reminded them
+of their treacheries, and cruelties of all kinds, and of their failure
+to restore their captives after they had pledged themselves to do so,
+and he said, "This army shall not leave your country till you have fully
+complied with every condition that is to precede my treaty with you....
+I give you twelve days from this date to deliver into my hands all
+the prisoners in your possession, without any exception; Englishmen,
+Frenchmen, women and children, whether adopted into your tribes, married
+or living amongst you under any pretense whatsoever, together with
+all negroes. And you are to furnish the said prisoners with clothing,
+provisions, and horses, to carry them to Fort Pitt.... You shall then
+know on what terms you may obtain the peace you sue for."
+
+[Illustration: Indians delivering up captives 041]
+
+These words are said to have quite broken the spirit of the savages,
+already overawed by the presence of such an army as they had never seen
+in their country before. One of the great chiefs of the Delawares said:
+"With this string of wampum we wipe the tears from your eyes, we deliver
+you these prisoners... we gather and bury with this belt all the bones
+of the people that have been killed during this unhappy war, which
+the Evil Spirit occasioned among us. We cover the bones that have been
+buried, that they may never more be remembered. We again cover their
+place with leaves that it may no more be seen. As we have been long
+astray, and the path between you and us stopped, we extend this belt
+that it may be again cleared.... While you hold it fast by one end, and
+we by the other, we shall always be able to discover anything that may
+disturb our friendship."
+
+Bouquet answered that he had heard them with pleasure, and that in
+receiving these last prisoners from them he joined with them in burying
+the bones of those who had fallen in the war, so that the place might no
+more be known. "The peace you ask for, you shall now have," he said, but
+he told them that it was his business to make war, and the business of
+others to make peace, and he instructed them how and with whom they were
+to treat. He took hostages from them, and he dealt with the other tribes
+on the same terms as they brought in their captives. On the 18th of
+November, he broke up his camp and marched back to Fort Pitt, with more
+than two hundred men, women, and children whom he had delivered from
+captivity among the savages.
+
+It is believed that six hundred others were never given up. The captives
+were not always glad to go back to their old homes, and the Indians had
+sometimes to use force in bringing them to the camp where their friends
+and kindred who had come with Bouquet's army were waiting to receive
+them. Many had been taken from their homes when they were so young that
+they could not remember them, and they had learned to love the Indians,
+who had brought them up like their own children, and treated them as
+lovingly as the fathers and mothers from whom they had been stolen. In
+the charm of the savage life these children of white parents had really
+become savages; and certain of the young girls had grown up and married
+Indian husbands to whom they were tenderly attached. The scenes of
+parting between all these were very touching on both sides, and it is
+told of one Indian who had married a Virginian girl that he followed
+her back to the frontier at the risk of his life from her people. The
+Indians gave up the captives often so dear to them, with tears and
+lamentations, while on the other hand their kindred waited to receive
+them in an anguish of hope and fear. As the captives came into the
+camp, parents sought among them for the little ones they had lost, and
+husbands for the wives who had been snatched from their desolated homes.
+Brothers and sisters met after a parting so long that one or other had
+forgotten the language they once spoke in common. The Indians still hung
+about the camp, and came every day to visit their former prisoners and
+bring them gifts. When the army took up its march some of them asked
+leave to follow it back to Fort Pitt, and on the way they supplied their
+adopted children and brothers with game, and sought in every way to show
+their love for them.
+
+Bouquet reached Pittsburg in ten days, without the loss of a single life
+at the hands of the savages, and with all his men in excellent health.
+Each day of his march he had pitched his camp among scenes of sylvan
+loveliness, on the banks of the pleasant streams that watered the
+fertile levels and the wild meadows, or wound through the rich valleys
+between the low hills. It would have been wonderful if his Pennsylvanian
+and Virginian recruits had not looked upon the land with covetous eyes:
+even the fathers and husbands and brothers who had come seeking their
+kindred among the Indians, had seen it with a longing to plant their
+homes in it. Its charms had been revealed to great numbers of the people
+who had known of it only from the traders before, and the savage was
+doomed from that time to lose it; for it already belonged to the king of
+England, and it rested with the English colonists to come and take it;
+or so, at least, they thought.
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE FORTY YEARS' WAR FOR THE WEST.
+
+The French king gave up the West to the English king in 1763, but, as we
+have seen, the Indians had no part in the bargain. They only knew that
+they were handed over by those who had been their friends to those who
+had been their enemies, and they did not consent. They had made war
+upon the English colonists before, and now, in spite of the failure of
+Pontiac, and in spite of Bouquet's march into the Ohio country,
+they kept up their warfare for forty years, with a truce when it was
+convenient, and a treaty of peace when it was convenient, but with a
+steadfast purpose to drive the English settlers out, and to hold the
+wilderness for themselves. It was not until long after their power was
+broken by the American arms in 1794 that their struggle ended in the
+region which ten years later became the state of Ohio.
+
+There was misunderstanding on both sides. The Indians naturally supposed
+that their own country belonged to them, and the colonists supposed
+that their eastern and western borders were the two oceans. These were
+commonly the boundaries which the English king had given them; and when
+he had not been quite clear about it in his grants of territory which he
+had never even imagined, they did not allow him to deal less splendidly
+with them than such a prince ought. He had, as we know, given the Ohio
+Company of Virginia a large tract of the best land beyond the Ohio
+even while the French still claimed the West, and he had encouraged the
+Virginians to believe they had a right to settle it and to fortify it.
+But after the capture of Quebec, when the West, as well as Canada,
+fell into the power of Great Britain, the English king, or rather his
+ministers, began to change their minds about letting the colonists take
+up lands in the Back Country, as they called it. The jealousy between
+the colonies grew less, but the jealousy between them and Great Britain
+grew greater; there were outbreaks here and there against her rule, and
+there was discontent nearly everywhere. The colonists were disappointed
+and embittered that the West should be treated as a part of Canada, by
+the mother country, when it ought to have been shared among the English
+provinces. The British government tried to hinder the settlement of
+the whites on the Indians' lands; and though it could not keep them off
+altogether, it did enough to make the savages feel that it was their
+friend against its own subjects. In 1774, Parliament passed a law which
+declared the whole West, between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and
+below the Great Lakes, a part of the Province of Quebec. This was felt
+by our colonies to be so great an injury that it was charged against
+Great Britain in the Declaration of Independence, as one of the causes
+for separation. It was in fact an act hostile to a people of the British
+race, language, and religion, and it was meant not so much to help
+the savages, as to hurt the colonists, though it did really help the
+savages. When the Revolutionary War broke out a year or two later, the
+British government did not scruple to make use of the cruel hatred of
+the Indians against its rebellious subjects.
+
+[Illustration: Indian war parties joining the English 047]
+
+It set on the war parties that harried the American border, and when the
+blood-stained braves came back with their plunder, their captives, and
+the scalps of the men, women, and children they had murdered, they were
+welcomed at the British forts as friends and allies. In certain cases,
+to be sure, British officers did what they could to soften the hard fate
+of the prisoners, but the British government was guilty, nevertheless,
+of the barbarous deeds done by the Indians. Its agents furnished them
+with arms and ammunition, and its ministers upheld them in the same
+atrocities against the American rebels as the French in their time had
+urged and tempted them to commit against the settlers when they were
+English subjects.
+
+At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Indians were as slow to lay
+down their arms as they had been after the French War. In each case they
+fought the victors, as far as they could get at them in the persons
+of the hapless backwoodsmen and their wives and children. These
+backwoodsmen did not change greatly, in their way of life, during that
+long Indian war of forty years. They were of the hardy English, Welsh,
+and Scotch-Irish stock which a generation or two in the wilderness had
+toughened and strengthened. They had not yet ciphered it out that one
+red hunter and trapper must waste the fifty thousand acres which
+would support the families of a hundred white farmers in comfort and
+prosperity; but they knew that to the westward there was a region, vast
+and rich beyond anything words could say, and they longed to possess
+it, with a hunger that was sometimes a pitiless greed, and always a
+resistless desire. Yet it was not until the French gave up this region
+that they could even venture lawlessly into it, and it was not until it
+fell from Great Britain to the new power of the United States that the
+borderers began openly to press into the backwoods, singly as hunters
+and trappers, in families as neighborhoods as the founders of villages
+and towns. The pioneers felt that they were going to take their own
+wherever they found it, from the savages who could not and would not use
+it, and they were right, for the land truly belongs to him who will use
+it. The savages felt that the pioneers were coming to take their own
+from them, for in their way they were using the land; and they were
+right, too. All that is left for us to ask at this late day is which
+could use the land best and most; and there can hardly be any doubt of
+the answer.
+
+[Illustration: Pioneers 049L]
+
+To understand the situation clearly, the reader must keep in mind
+certain dates. Celoron de Bienville visited the Miamis in 1749, and
+the French kept the Ohio Indians on the warpath against the English
+settlements to the eastward until 1763, when they gave up the West to
+Great Britain. Then, until 1775, the savages alone fought the settlers
+as the subjects of the English king. The Revolutionary War broke out,
+and the Indians became the allies of the British. Then, in 1783, their
+country was given up to the United States, and they still fought their
+old enemies, who had not changed their nature by changing their name to
+Americans. In 1794, the great battle of Fallen Timbers was fought on the
+banks of the Maumee, and the long struggle was ended.
+
+It had grown more and more fierce and cruel as time passed, and only
+three years before General Wayne won his lasting victory, General St.
+Clair had suffered his terrible defeat by the Indians. Through this
+defeat, the power of the whites in the West was shaken as it had never
+been before; the savages were filled with pride and hope by the greatest
+triumph they had achieved over their enemies; and all the settlements in
+the Northwestern Territory were endangered.
+
+Perhaps I had better say seemed endangered. The Indians were really less
+to be feared than at any time before. They were weaker, and the whites
+were stronger. They were striving against destiny; and though their fate
+was sealed with the blood of their enemies, their fate was sealed. All
+the chances that had favored them had favored them in vain, and neither
+their wily courage nor their pitiless despair availed them against the
+people who outnumbered them, as the stems of the harvest field outnumber
+the trees of the forest.
+
+
+
+
+V. THE CAPTIVITY OF JAMES SMITH
+
+The stories of captivity among the Ohio Indians during the war that
+ended in 1794 would of themselves fill a much larger book than this is
+meant to be. Most of them were never set down, but some of them were
+very thrillingly told, and others very touchingly, either by the
+captives themselves, or by such of their friends as were better able to
+write them out. One, at least, is charming, and the narrative of
+Colonel James Smith deserves a chapter by itself, not only because it is
+charming, but because it shows the Indians in a truer and kindlier light
+than they were often able to show themselves.
+
+Smith was born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, which in 1737 was the
+frontier of the white settlement, and he was taken prisoner in 1755, by
+a small party of Delawares, near Bedford, while he was helping to cut a
+road for the passage of General Braddock's ill-fated expedition against
+the French. The Indians hurried from the English border, and forced him
+to run with them nearly the whole way to Fort Duquesne, which afterwards
+became Fort Pitt, and is now Pittsburg. A large body of savages was
+encamped outside the post, and there Smith expected to be burned to
+death with the tortures he afterwards saw inflicted upon many other
+prisoners; but he was only made to run the gantlet. Two lines of Indians
+were drawn up, with sticks in their hands, and Smith dashed at the top
+of his speed between their ranks. He was cruelly beaten, and before he
+reached the goal he fell senseless. When he came to himself he was in
+the hands of a French surgeon. He was well cared for, and he lived in
+hopes of rescue by Braddock's army, which was marching against Fort
+Duquesne in greater force than had ever been sent into the wilderness.
+But while he was still so broken and bruised as to be scarcely able to
+walk, the Indians came in with plunder and prisoners from the scene of
+their bloody victory over the British troops.
+
+A little later, Smith's captors claimed him from the French, and carried
+him to an Indian town on the Muskingum. The day after their arrival a
+number of the Indians came to him, and one of them began to pull out his
+hair, dipping his fingers in ashes to get a better hold, and plucking it
+away hair by hair till it was all gone except a lock on the crown. This
+they plaited with strings of beadwork and silver brooches, and then they
+bored his ears and nose and put rings in them. They painted his face
+and body in different colors, hung a band of wampum about his neck, and
+fitted his arm with bracelets of silver. An old chief led him into
+the street of the village, and gave the alarm halloo, when all the
+Delawares, Caughnewagas, and Mohicans of the place came running, and
+formed round the chief, who held Smith by the hand, and made them a long
+speech. He then gave Smith over to three young squaws, who pulled him
+into the river waist-deep, and made signs to him that he should plunge
+his head into the water. But Smith's head was full of the tortures of
+the prisoners whom he had seen burnt at Fort Duquesne; he believed
+all these ceremonies were the preparations for his death, and he would
+neither duck.
+
+He struggled with them, amidst the shouts and laughter of the Indians on
+the shore, until one of them managed to say in English, "No hurt you,"
+when he suffered them to plunge him under the water and rub at him as
+long as they chose.
+
+[Illustration: Indian baptism of James Smith 053]
+
+By this means they washed away his white blood, and he was adopted into
+the tribe in place of a great chief who had lately died. He seems never
+to have known why this honor was done him; but he was then a lusty young
+fellow of eighteen who might well have taken the fancy of some of his
+captors; and he probably fell into their hands at a moment which their
+superstition rendered fortunate for him.
+
+When the squaws had done with him, he was taken up into the council
+house of the village, where he was dressed in a new ruffled shirt,
+leggins trimmed with ribbons and wrought with beads, and moccasins
+embroidered with porcupine quills. His face was painted afresh, and his
+scalp lock tied up with red feathers; he was given a pipe and tobacco
+pouch and seated upon a bear skin, while one of the chiefs addressed him
+in the presence of the assembled warriors. "My son," so the speech was
+interpreted to Smith, "you are now flesh of our flesh and bone of our
+bone. You are taken into the Caughnewaga nation, and initiated into a
+warlike tribe; you are adopted into a great family... in the room and
+place of a great man. After what has passed this day, you are now one
+of us by an old strong law and custom. My son, you have now nothing to
+fear; we are now under the same obligations to love, support, and defend
+you, that we are to love and defend one another; therefore you are to
+consider yourself as one of our people."
+
+A grand feast of boiled venison and green corn followed, and Smith took
+part in it on the same terms as all the rest of his tribe and family. In
+due time he found out that no word the chief had addressed him was
+idly spoken, and he began to live the life of the savages like one of
+themselves, under the affectionate care and constant instruction of his
+brethren. He was given a gun, at first, and sent to hunt turkeys, but he
+came upon the trace of buffalo, and was lured on by the hope of larger
+game, and so lost his way. The Indians found him again easily enough,
+but as a punishment for his rashness his gun was taken from him, and for
+two years he was allowed to carry only a bow and arrows. Once when the
+hunters had killed a bear and he went out with a party to bring in the
+meat, Smith complained of the weight of his load; the Indians laughed at
+him, and to shame him they gave part of his burden to a young squaw
+who already had as much as he to carry. At another time, he went to the
+fields with some other young men to watch the squaws hoeing corn; one of
+these challenged him to take her hoe, and he did so, and hoed for some
+time with the women. They were delighted and praised his skill, but when
+he came back to the village, the old chiefs rebuked him, telling him
+that he was adopted in the place of a great man, and it was unworthy of
+him to hoe corn like a squaw.
+
+Smith owns that he never gave them a chance to chide him a second time
+for such unseemly behavior. After that he left all the hard work to the
+squaws like a true Indian, and guarded his dignity as a hunter. He was
+never trusted, or at least he was never asked, to take part in any of
+the forays against the white frontier, when from time to time parties
+were sent to the Pennsylvania borders to take scalps and steal horses.
+It was a sorrowful thing for him when his savage brethren set forth on
+these errands of theft and murder among his kindred by race, and it was
+long before he could make the least show of returning their affection.
+
+It was not until they gave him back some books which they had brought
+him from other prisoners, but had then taken from him for some caprice,
+that he says he felt his heart warm towards them. They pretended that
+the books had been lost, but declared that they were glad they had been
+found, for they knew that he was grieved at the loss of them. "Though
+they had been exceedingly kind to me," he says, "I still as before
+detested them, on account of the barbarity I beheld after Braddock's
+defeat. Neither had I ever before pretended kindness, or expressed
+myself in a friendly manner; but now I began to excuse the Indians on
+account of their want of information."
+
+The family which Smith had been taken into did not stay long in the
+Muskingum country, but began the wandering life of the hunters and
+trappers, working northward mostly, and visiting the shores and waters
+of Lake Erie. It was all very pleasant and full of a wild charm while
+the fine weather lasted, especially for the men, who had nothing to do
+but to bring in the game and fish for the squaws to cook and care for.
+The squaws made the sugar in the spring; they felled the trees and
+fashioned from the barks the troughs to catch the maple sap, which they
+boiled down into sugar; they planted and tended the fields of corn and
+beans; they did everything that was like work, indoors and out, and
+the men did nothing that was not like play or war. While their plenty
+lasted, it was for all; when the dearth came, every one shared it.
+But in this free, sylvan life there was the grace of an unstinted
+hospitality. The stranger was pressed to make the lodge of his host his
+home, and he was given the best of his store. One day when his Indian
+brother came in from the hunt, Smith told him that a passing Wyandot had
+visited their camp, and he had given him roast venison. "And I suppose
+you gave him also sugar and bear's oil to eat with his venison?" Smith
+confessed that as the sugar and bear's oil were in the canoe, he did not
+go for them. His brother told him he had behaved just like a Dutchman,
+and he asked, "Do you not know that when strangers come to our camp we
+are to give them the best we have?" Smith owned that he had been wrong,
+and then his brother excused him because he was so young; but he bade
+him learn to behave like a warrior, and do great things, and never be
+caught in any such mean actions again.
+
+The Indians were as prompt to praise and reward what they thought fine
+in him, as to rebuke what they deemed unworthy; and the second winter
+that they spent in Northern Ohio, they gave him a gun again for the
+courage and endurance he twice showed when he had lost his way from
+camp. Once when he was caught in a heavy storm of snow; he passed the
+night in the hollow of a tree, which he made snug by blocking it up with
+brush and pieces of wood, and by chopping the rotten inside of the trunk
+with his hatchet until he had a soft, warm bed. Another time, when he
+was looking at his beaver traps he was overtaken by the dark, and kept
+himself from freezing by dancing and shouting till daylight. His Indian
+friends honored him for his wise behavior, and as they had now beaver
+skins enough, they carried them to the French post at Detroit, where
+they bought a gun for him. They bought for themselves a keg of brandy,
+and they paid Smith the compliment, when he refused to drink, of making
+him one of the guards set over the drinkers to keep them from killing
+one another. He helped bring them safely through their debauch, but
+nothing could prevent their spending all they had got for their beaver
+skins in more and more brandy. Then they went back sick and sorry to the
+woods again.
+
+The family Smith was taken into was honored for its uncommon virtue and
+wisdom. His two brothers, Tontileaugo and Tecaughretanego were men of
+great sense, with good heads and good hearts. They treated Smith with
+the greatest love and patience, and took him to task with affectionate
+mildness when he transgressed the laws of taste or feeling. The Indians
+all despised the white settlers, whom they thought stupid and cowardly,
+and they expected to drive them beyond the sea. They despised them for
+their impiety, and Tecaughretanego once said to Smith, "As you have
+lived with the white people, you have not had the same advantage of
+knowing that the Great Being above feeds his people and gives them their
+meat in due season, as we Indians have, who are wonderfully supplied,
+and that so frequently that it is evidently the hand of the Great
+Owaneeyo that doeth this; whereas the white people have commonly large
+flocks of tame cattle, that they can kill when they please, and also
+their barns and cribs filled with grain, and therefore have not the same
+opportunity of seeing and knowing that they are supported by the ruler
+of Heaven and Earth."
+
+At this time the Indians were suffering from the famine that their waste
+and improvidence had brought upon them; and perhaps Smith might have
+said something on the white man's side. But he had nothing to say when
+rebuked for smiling at Tecaughretanego's sacrifice of the last leaf of
+his tobacco to the Great Spirit "Brother, I have something to say to
+you, and I hope you will not be offended when I tell you of your faults.
+You know that when you were reading your books, I would not let the boys
+or any one disturb you; but now when I was praying I saw you laughing.
+I do not think you look upon praying as a foolish thing; I believe you
+pray yourself. But perhaps you think my mode or manner of prayer
+foolish; if so, you ought in a friendly manner to instruct me, and not
+make sport of sacred things."
+
+[Illustration: An Indian Prayer 059L]
+
+The prayer which Tecaughretanego thought ought to have escaped Smith's
+derision was one which he made after he began to get well from a long
+sickness; and it was certainly very quaint; but if the Father of all
+listens most kindly to those children of his who come to him simply
+and humbly, he could not have been displeased with this old Indian's
+petition.
+
+"Oh, Great Being, I thank thee that I have obtained the use of my legs
+again, that I am now able to walk about and kill turkeys without feeling
+exquisite pain and misery: I know that thou art a hearer and a helper,
+and therefore I will call upon thee. _Oh, ho, ho, ho!_ grant that my
+ankles and knees may be right well, and that I may be able not only to
+walk, but to run and to jump as I did last fall. _Oh, ho, ho, ho!_
+grant that on this voyage we may frequently kill bears, as they may be
+crossing the Scioto and Sandusky. _Oh, ho, ho, ho!_ grant that we may
+kill plenty of turkeys along the banks, to stew with our bear meat. _Oh,
+ho, ho, ho!_ grant that rain may come to raise the Olentangy about two
+or three feet, that we may cross in safety down to the Scioto, without
+danger of our canoe being wrecked on the rocks. And now, oh, Great
+Being, thou knowest how matters stand--thou knowest that I am a great
+lover of tobacco, and that though I know not when I may get any more,
+I now make a present of the last I have unto thee, as a free burnt
+offering. Therefore I request that thou wilt hear and grant these
+requests, and I thy servant will return thee thanks, and love thee for
+thy gifts."
+
+Smith tells us that a few days after Tecaughretanego made his prayer and
+offered up his tobacco, rain came and raised the Olentangy high enough
+to let them pass safely into the Scioto. He does not say whether he
+thought this was the effect of the old Indian's piety, but he always
+speaks reverently of Tecaughretanego's religion. He is careful to
+impress the reader again and again with the importance of the Indian
+family he had been taken into, and with the wisdom as well as the
+goodness of Tecaughretanego, who held some such place among the Ottawas,
+he says, as Socrates held among the Athenians. He was against the
+Indians' taking part in the war between the French and English; he
+believed they ought to leave these to fight out their own quarrels;
+and in all the affairs of his people, he favored justice, truth, and
+honesty. The Indians, indeed, never stole from one another, but they
+thought it quite right to rob even their French allies; and it will help
+us to a real understanding of their principles, if we remember that the
+good and wise Tecaughretanego is never shown as rebuking the cruelty
+and treachery of the war parties in their attacks on the English
+settlements. The Indian's virtues are always for his own tribe; outside
+of it, all the crimes are virtues, and it is right to lie, to cheat,
+to steal, to kill; as it was with our own ancestors when they lived as
+tribes.
+
+Smith was always treated like one of themselves by his Indian brothers,
+and he had a deep affection for them. Once, in a time of famine, when
+Tecaughretanego lay helpless in his cabin, suffering patiently with
+the rheumatism which crippled him, Smith hunted two whole days without
+killing any game, and then came home faint with hunger and fatigue.
+Tecaughretanego bade his little son bring him a broth which the boy had
+made with some wildcat bones left by the buzzards near the camp, and
+when Smith had eaten he rebuked him for his despair, and charged him
+never again to doubt that God would care for him, because God always
+cared for those children of his who trusted in him, as the Indians did,
+while the white men trusted in themselves. The next day Smith went out
+again, but the noise made by the snow crust breaking under his feet
+frightened the deer he saw, and he could not get a shot at them.
+Suddenly, he felt that he could bear his captivity no longer, and he
+resolved to try and make his way back to Pennsylvania. The Indians might
+kill him, long before he could reach home; but if he staid, he must die
+of hunger. He hurried ten or twelve miles eastward, when he came upon
+fresh buffalo tracks, and soon caught sight of the buffalo. He shot one
+of them, but he could not stop to cook the meat, and he ate it almost
+raw. Then the thought of the old man and little child whom he had left
+starving in the cabin behind him became too much for him. He remembered
+what Tecaughretanego had said of God's care for those who trusted in
+him; and he packed up all the meat he could carry, and went back to the
+camp. The boy ate ravenously of the half-raw meat, as Smith had done,
+but the old man waited patiently till it was well boiled. "Let it be
+done enough," he said, when Smith wished to take off the kettle too
+soon; and when they had all satisfied their hunger, he made Smith
+a speech upon the duty of receiving the bounty of Owaneeyo with
+thankfulness. After this, Smith seems to have had no farther thoughts
+of running away, and he made no attempt to escape until he had been four
+years in captivity. He was then at Caughnewaga, the old Indian village
+which the traveler may still see from his steamboat on the St. Lawrence
+River near Montreal. He had come to this place with Tecaughretanego and
+his little son in an elm-bark canoe, all the way from Detroit; and now,
+hearing that a French ship was at Montreal with English prisoners of
+war, he stole away from the Indians and got on board with the rest. The
+prisoners were shortly afterwards exchanged, and Smith got home to his
+friends early in 1760. They had never known whether he had been killed
+or captured, and they were overjoyed to see him, though they found him
+quite like an Indian in his walk and bearing.
+
+He married, and settled down on a farm, but he was soon in arms against
+the Indians. He served as a lieutenant in Bouquet's expedition, and
+became a colonel of the Revolutionary army. After the war he took his
+family to Kentucky, where he lived until he died in 1812. The Indians
+left him unmolested in his reading or writing while he was among
+them, and he had kept a journal, which he wrote out in the delightful
+narrative of his captivity, first published in 1799. He modestly says in
+his preface that the chief use he hopes for it is from his observations
+on Indian warfare; but these have long ceased to be of practical value,
+while his pictures of Indian life and his studies of Indian character
+have a charm that will always last.
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE CAPTIVITY OF BOONE AND KENTON.
+
+Colonel Smith was not the first whose captivity was passed in the
+Ohio country, but there is no record of any earlier captivity, though
+hundreds of captives were given up to Bouquet by the Indians. In spite
+of the treaties and promises on both sides, the fighting went on, and
+the wilderness was soon again the prison of the white people whom the
+savages had torn from their homes. The Ohio tribes harassed the outlying
+settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia, whose borders widened westward
+with every year; but they were above all incensed against the pioneers
+of Kentucky. Ohio was their home; there they had their camps and towns;
+there they held their councils and festivals; there they buried their
+dead and guarded their graves. But Kentucky was the pleasance of all the
+nations, the hunting ground kept free by common consent, and left to the
+herds of deer, elk, and buffalo, which ranged the woods and savannas,
+and increased for the common use. When the white men discovered this
+hunter's paradise, and began to come back with their families and waste
+the game and fell the trees and plow the wild meadows, no wonder the
+Indians were furious, and made Kentucky the Dark and Bloody Ground for
+the enemies of their whole race, which they had already made it for one
+another in the conflicts between the hunting parties of rival tribes.
+It maddened them to find the cabins and the forts of the settlers in the
+sacred region where no red man dare pitch his wigwam; and they made a
+fierce and pitiless effort to drive out the invaders.
+
+Among these was the famous Daniel Boone. He had heard of the glories of
+the land from a hunter who wandered into Kentucky by chance and
+returned to North Carolina to tell of it among his neighbors. Two years
+afterwards, in 1769, when a man of forty, Boone came to see for himself
+the things that he knew by hearsay, and he found that the half had not
+been told. But among other surprises in store for him was falling into
+the clutches of an Indian hunting party which ambushed him and the
+friend who was with him. They both escaped, and soon afterwards Boone's
+brother and a neighbor, who had followed him from North Carolina,
+chanced upon their camp. Boone's friend was before long shot and
+scalped by the Indians; the brother's neighbor was lost in the woods and
+devoured by the wolves. Then the brother went home for ammunition, and
+Boone was left a whole year alone in the wilderness. The charm of its
+life was so great for him that after two years more he returned to North
+Carolina, sold his farm, and came to Kentucky with his family. Other
+families joined them, and the little settlement founded in the woods
+where he had ranged solitary with no friend but his rifle and with foes
+everywhere, was called Boonesborough.
+
+The Revolutionary War broke out, and the Ohio Indians, who had hitherto
+fought the pioneers as Englishmen, now fought them as Americans with
+fresh fury, under the encouragement of the British commandant at
+Detroit. In January, of 1778, Boone took thirty of his men, and went to
+make salt at the Blue Licks, where, shortly after, while he was hunting
+in the woods, he found himself in the midst of two hundred Indian
+warriors, who were on their way to attack Boonesborough. He was then
+fifty years old, and the young Indians soon overtook him when he tried
+to escape by running, and made him their prisoner. His captors treated
+him kindly, as their custom was with prisoners, until they decided
+what should be done with them, and at the Licks his whole party gave
+themselves up on promise of the same treatment. This was glory enough
+for the present; the Indians, as they always did when they had won a
+victory, went home to celebrate it, and left Boonesborough unmolested.
+
+They took all their prisoners to the town of Old Chillicothe, on the
+banks of the Little Miami in Greene County. What became of his men
+we are not told; none of them kept a journal, as Smith did, but it is
+certain that Boone was adopted into an Indian family as Smith was. The
+Indians, in fact, all became fond of him, perhaps because he was so much
+like themselves in temperament and behavior, for he was a grave, silent
+man, very cold and wary, with a sort of savage calm. He was well versed
+in their character, and knew how to play upon their vanity. One of the
+few things he seems to have told of his captivity was that when they
+asked him to take part in their shooting matches he beat them just often
+enough to show them his wonderful skill with the rifle, and then allowed
+them the pleasure of beating such a splendid shot as he had proved
+himself. But probably he had other engaging qualities, or so it appeared
+when the Indians took him with them to Detroit. The British commandant
+offered them a ransom of a hundred pounds for him, while several other
+Englishmen, who liked and pitied him, pressed him to take money and
+other favors from them. Boone stoically refused because he could never
+hope to make any return to them, and his red brethren refused because
+they loved Boone too well to part with him at any price, and they took
+him back to Old Chillicothe with them.
+
+[Illustration: Daniel Boone shooting with the Indians 067]
+
+He never betrayed the anxiety for his wife and children that constantly
+tormented him, for fear of rousing the suspicions of the Indians; but
+when he reached Old Chillicothe, and found a large party painted and
+ready to take the warpath in a new attack upon Boones-borough, he could
+bear it no longer. He showed no sign of his misery, however; he joined
+the Indians in all their sports as before, but he was always watching
+for some chance to escape, and one morning in the middle of June he
+stole away from his captors. He made his way a hundred and sixty miles
+through the woods, and on the ninth day entered Boonesborough, faint
+with the fast which he had broken but once in his long flight, to find
+that he had been given up for dead and his family had gone back to North
+Carolina.
+
+Boone spent the rest of his days fighting wild men and hunting wild
+beasts in Kentucky, until both were well-nigh gone and the tamer life
+of civilization pressed closer about him. Then he set out for Missouri,
+where he found himself again in the wilderness, and dwelt there in his
+beloved solitude till he died. Nothing ever moved him so much as the
+memoir which a young man wrote down for him and had printed. He was fond
+of having it read to him (for he could not read any more than he could
+write), and he would cry out in delight over it, "All true; not a lie
+in it!" But it is recorded that he once allowed himself to be so far
+excited by the heroic behavior of a friend who had saved his life in
+an Indian fight, at the risk of his own, as to say, "You behaved like a
+man, that time."
+
+This friend was Simon Kenton, or rather Simon Butler, one of the
+greatest of all the Indian hunters of Kentucky and Ohio. He had changed
+his name to escape pursuit from his old home in Virginia, when he fled
+leaving one of his neighbors, as he supposed, dead on the ground after
+a fight, and he kept the name he had taken through the rest of his life.
+He wandered about on the frontier and in the wilderness beyond it
+for several years, fighting the savages single handed or with a few
+comrades, and at times serving as scout or spy in the expeditions of the
+English against them. When the Revolution began, he sided of course with
+his own people, and he stood two sieges by the Indians in Boonesborough.
+It was here that Boone found him in 1778 when he escaped from Old
+Chillicothe, and they promptly made a foray together into the Ohio
+country, against an Indian town on Paint Creek. They fell in with a war
+party on the way, and after some fighting, Boone went back, but Kenton
+kept on with another friend, and did not return till they had stolen
+some Indian horses. As soon as they reached Boonesborough the commandant
+sent them into Ohio again to reconnoiter a town on the Little Miami
+which he wished to attack, and here once more Kenton was tempted by the
+chance to steal horses. He could not bear to leave any, and he and his
+men started homeward through the woods with the whole herd. When they
+came to the Ohio, it was so rough that Kenton was nearly drowned in
+trying to cross the river. He got back to the northern shore, where they
+all waited for the wind to go down, and the waves to fall, and where
+the Indians found them the second morning. His comrades were killed and
+Kenton was taken prisoner by the Indians whose horses they had stolen.
+The Indians were always stealing white men's horses, but they seemed to
+think it was very much more wicked and shameful for white men to steal
+Indians' horses. They fell upon Kenton and beat him over the head with
+their ramrods and mocked him with cries of, "Steal Indians' hoss, hey!"
+But this was only the beginning of his sufferings. They fastened him
+for the night by stretching him on the ground with one stick across
+his breast and another down his middle, and tying his hands and feet to
+these with thongs of buffalo skin: stakes were driven into the earth,
+and his pinioned arms and legs were bound to them, while a halter, which
+was passed round his neck and then round a sapling near by, kept him
+from moving his head. All the while they were making sure in this
+way that he should not escape, the Indians were cuffing his ears, and
+reviling him for a "Tief! A hoss steal! A rascal!" In the morning they
+mounted him on an unbroken colt, with his hands tied behind him and his
+legs tied under the horse, and drove it into the briers and underbrush,
+where his face and hands were torn by the brambles, until the colt
+quieted down of itself, and followed in line with the other horses. The
+third day, as they drew near the town of Old Chillicothe, where Boone
+had been held captive, they were met by the chief Blackfish, who said
+sternly to Kenton in English, "You have been stealing horses." "Yes,
+sir." "Did Captain Boone tell you to steal our horses?" "No, sir, I did
+it on my own accord." Blackfish then lashed him over the naked back with
+a hickory switch till the blood ran, and with blows and taunts from all
+sides Kenton was marched forward to the village.
+
+The Indians could not wait for his arrival. They came out, men, women,
+and children, to meet him, with whoops and yells, and when they had made
+his captors fasten him to a stake, they fell upon him, and tore off all
+that was left of his clothes, and amused themselves till midnight by
+dancing and screaming round him, and beating him with rods and their
+open hands. In the morning he was ordered to run the gantlet, through
+two rows of Indians of all ages and sexes, armed with knives, clubs,
+switches, and hoe handles, and ready to cut, strike, and stab at him as
+he dashed by them on his way to the council house, a quarter of a mile
+from the point of starting. But Kenton was too wary to take the risks
+before him. He suddenly started aside from the lines; he turned and
+doubled in his course, and managed to reach the council house unhurt
+except for the blows of two Indians who threw themselves between him and
+its door. Here a council was held at once, and he was sentenced to be
+burnt at the stake, but the sentence was ordered to be carried out at
+the town of Wapatimika on Mad River. A white renegade among the Indians
+told him of his fate with a curse, and Kenton resolved that rather than
+meet it he would die in the attempt to escape. On the way to Wapatimika
+he gave his guard the slip and dashed into the woods; and he had left
+his pursuers far behind, when he ran into the midst of another party
+of Indians, who seized him and drove him forward to the town. A second
+council was now held, and after Kenton had run the gantlet a second time
+and been severely hurt, the warriors once more gathered in the council
+house, and sitting on the ground in a circle voted his death by striking
+the earth with a war club, or by passing it to the next if inclined to
+mercy. He was brought before them, as he supposed, to be told when he
+was to die, but a blanket was thrown upon the ground for him to sit upon
+in the middle of the circle, and Simon Girty, the great renegade, who
+was cruder to the whites than the Indians themselves, began harshly to
+question him about the number of men in Kentucky. A few words passed,
+and then Girty asked, "What is your name?" "Simon Butler," said Kenton,
+and Girty jumped from his seat and threw his arms around Kenton's
+neck. They had been scouts together in the English service, before the
+Revolution began, and had been very warm friends, and now Girty set
+himself to save Kenton's life. He pleaded so strongly in his favor that
+the council at last voted to spare him, at least for the time being.
+
+[Illustration: Kenton and Girty 072]
+
+Three weeks of happiness for Kenton followed in the society of his old
+friend, who clothed him at his own cost from the stores of an English
+trader in the town, and took him to live with him; and it is said that
+if the Indians had continued to treat him kindly, Kenton might perhaps
+have cast his lot with them, for he could not hope to go back to his own
+people, with the crime of murder, as he supposed, hanging over him, and
+he had no close ties binding him to the whites elsewhere. But at the
+end of these days of respite, a war party came back from the Virginian
+border, where they had been defeated, and the life of the first white
+man who fell into their power must pay, by the Indian law, for the life
+of the warrior they had lost. The leaders of this party found Kenton
+walking in the woods with Girty, and met him with scowls of hate,
+refusing his hand when he offered it. The rage of the savages against
+him broke out afresh. One of them caught an ax from his squaw who was
+chopping wood, and as Kenton passed him on his way into the village,
+dealt him a blow that cut deep into his shoulder. For a third time a
+council was held, and for a third time Kenton was doomed to die by fire.
+Nothing that Girty could say availed, and he was left to tell his friend
+that he must die.
+
+Kenton's sentence was to be now carried out at Sandusky, and with five
+Indian guards he set out for that point. On their way they stopped at a
+town on the waters of the Scioto, where the captive found himself in
+the presence of a chief of noble and kindly face, who said to him, in
+excellent English, "Well, young man, these young men seem very mad at
+you." Kenton had to own that they were so, indeed, and then the Indian
+said, "Well, don't be discouraged. I am a great chief. You are to go to
+Sandusky; they speak of burning you there, but I will send two runners
+tomorrow to speak good for you."
+
+This was the noble chief Logan, whose beautiful speech ought to be known
+to every American boy and girl, and who, in spite of all he had suffered
+from them, was still the friend of the white men. He kept his word
+to Kenton, though he seemed to fail, as Girty had failed, to have his
+sentence set aside, and Kenton was taken on to Sandusky. But here, the
+day before that set for him to die, a British Indian agent, a merciful
+man whose name, Drewyer, we ought to remember, made the Indians give him
+up, that the commandant at Detroit might find out from him the state
+of the American forces in Kentucky. He had to promise the savages that
+Kenton should afterwards be returned to them; but though Kenton could
+not or would not tell him what he wished to know, Drewyer assured him
+that he would never abandon any white prisoner to their cruelty.
+
+At Detroit Kenton was kindly treated by the English, and beyond having
+to report himself daily to the officer who had charge of him, there was
+nothing to make him feel that he was a prisoner. But he grew restive in
+his captivity, and after he had borne seven months of it, and got well
+of all his wounds and bruises, he plotted with two young Kentuckians,
+who had been taken with Boone at the Blue Licks, to attempt his escape
+with them. They bought guns from some drunken Indians, and hid them
+in the woods. Then in the month of June, 1778, they started southward
+through the wilderness, and after thirty days reached Louisville in
+safety. Kenton continued to fight the Indians in all the wars, large
+and little, till they were beaten by General Wayne in 1794. Eight years
+later he came to live in Ohio, settling near Urbana, but removing later
+to Zanesfield, on the site of the Indian town Wapatimika, where he was
+once to have been burned, and where he died peaceably in 1836, when he
+was eighty-one years old. He is described as a tall, handsome man, of
+an erect figure and carriage, a fair complexion, and a most attractive
+countenance. "He had," his biographer tells us, "a soft, tremulous
+voice, very pleasing to the hearer, and laughing gray eyes that appeared
+to fascinate the beholder," except in his rare moments of anger, when
+their fiery glance would curdle the blood of those who had roused his
+wrath. He was above all the heroes of Ohio history, both in his virtues
+and his vices, the type of the Indian fighter. He was ready to kill or
+to take the chances of being killed, but he had no more hate apparently
+for the wild men than for the wild beasts he hunted.
+
+
+
+
+VII. THE RENEGADES.
+
+Simon Girty, who tried so hard to save Kenton's life at Wapatimika, was
+the most notorious of those white renegades who abounded in the Ohio
+country during the Indian wars. The life of the border was often such
+as to make men desperate and cruel, and the life of the wilderness had
+a fascination which their fierce natures could hardly resist. Kenton
+himself, as we have seen, might perhaps have willingly remained with the
+Indians if they had wished him to be one of them, though he was at heart
+too kindly and loyal ever to have become the enemy of his own people,
+and if he had been adopted into an Indian family he would probably have
+been such an Indian as Smith was. But in the sort of backwoodsman he
+had been there was such stuff as renegades were made of. Like him these
+desperadoes had mostly fled from the settlements after some violent
+deed, and could not have gone back to their homes there if they would.
+Yet they were not much worse than the traders who came and went among
+the Indians in times of peace, and supplied them with the weapons and
+the ammunition they might use at any moment against the settlers.
+
+Indeed, wherever the two races touched they seemed to get all of each
+other's vices, and very few of each other's virtues; and it is doubtful
+if the law breakers who escaped from the borders to the woods were more
+ferocious than many whom they left behind. Neither side showed mercy;
+their warfare was to the death; the white men tomahawked and scalped
+the wounded as the red men did, and if the settlers were not always
+so pitiless to their prisoners or to the wives and children of their
+warriors, they were guilty of many acts of murderous treachery and
+murderous fury. One of the best and truest friends they ever had, the
+great Mingo chief Logan, who was at last the means of Kenton's escape
+from the stake, bore witness to these facts in his famous speech; for in
+spite of his friendship for the whites, he had suffered the worst
+that they could do to the worst of their foes. When such white men as
+butchered Logan's kindred sided with the Indians, they only changed
+their cause; their savage natures remained unchanged; but very few of
+these, even, seem to have been so far trusted in their fear and hate for
+their own people as to be taken by the Indians in their forays against
+the whites.
+
+The great Miami chief Little Turtle, who outgeneralled the Americans at
+the defeat of St. Clair, used to tell with humorous relish how he once
+trusted a white man adopted into his tribe. This white man was very
+eager to go with him on a raid into Kentucky, and when they were
+stealing upon the cabin they were going to attack, nothing could
+restrain his desire to be foremost. When they got within a few yards, he
+suddenly dashed forward with a yell of "Indians, Indians!" and left his
+red brethren to get out of the range of the settlers' rifles as fast as
+they could.
+
+But Simon Girty led many of the savage attacks, and showed himself the
+relentless enemy of the American cause at every chance, though more than
+once he used his power with the Indians to save prisoners from torture
+and death. He was born in Pennsylvania, and he was captured with his
+brothers, George and James, during Braddock's campaign. They were all
+taken to Ohio, where George was adopted by the Delawares, James by the
+Shawnees, and Simon by the Senecas. George died a drunken savage; James
+became the terror of the Kentucky border, and infamous throughout the
+West by his cruelty to the women among the Indians' captives; he seems
+to have been without one touch of pity for the fate of any of their
+prisoners, and his cruelties were often charged upon Simon, who had
+enough of his own to answer for. Yet he seems to have been the best as
+well as the ablest of the three brothers whose name is the blackest in
+Ohio history. Many of the stories about him are evidently mere romance,
+and they often conflict. As he was captured when very young, he never
+learned to read or write; and it is said that he was persuaded by worse
+and wiser men to take sides with the British in the Revolution. But
+we need not believe that he was so ignorant or so simple as this in
+accounting for his preference of his red brethren and their cause.
+In fact, several letters attributed to him exist, though he may have
+dictated these, and may not have known how to write after all.
+
+It is certain that he was a man of great note and power among the
+Indians, and one of their most trusted captains. He led the attack on
+Wheeling in 1777, where he demanded the surrender of the fort to the
+English king, whose officer he boasted himself. In 1782 he attacked
+Bryan's Station in Kentucky with a strong force of Indians, but met with
+such a gallant resistance that he attempted to bring the garrison
+to terms by telling them who he was and threatening them with the
+reenforcements and the cannon which he said he expected hourly. He
+promised that all their lives should be spared if they yielded, but
+while he waited with the white flag in his hand on the stump where he
+stood to harangue them, a young man answered him from the fort: "You
+need not be so particular to tell us your name; we know your name and
+you, too. I've had a villainous untrustworthy cur dog this long while
+named Simon Girty, in compliment to you, he's so like you, just as ugly
+and just as wicked. As to the cannon, let them come on; the country's
+aroused, and the scalps of your red cutthroats, and your own too, will
+be drying in our cabins in twenty-four hours; and if, by chance, you or
+your allies do get into the fort, we've a big store of rods laid in to
+scourge you out again."
+
+[Illustration: Simon Girty 079L]
+
+The Indians retreated, but Girty glutted his revenge for the failure and
+the insult in many a fight afterwards with the Americans and in many a
+scene of torture and death. The Kentuckians now followed his force to
+the Blue Licks, where the Indians ambushed them and beat them back with
+fearful slaughter.
+
+Girty remained with the savages and took part in the war which they
+carried on against our people long after our peace with the British. He
+was at the terrible defeat of St. Clair in 1791, and he had been present
+at the burning of Colonel Crawford in 1782. By some he is said to have
+tried to beg and to buy their prisoner off from the Wyandots, and by
+others to have taken part in mocking his agonies, if not in torturing
+him. It seems certain that he lived to be a very old man, and it is
+probable that he died fighting the Americans in our second war with
+Great Britain.
+
+But the twilight of the forest rests upon most of the details of his
+history and the traits of his character. The truth about him seems to
+be that he had really become a savage, and it would not be strange if he
+felt all the ferocity of a savage, together with the rare and capricious
+emotions of pity and generosity which are apt to visit the savage heart.
+There have always been good Indians and bad Indians, and Simon Girty was
+simply a bad Indian.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. THE WICKEDEST DEED IN OUR HISTORY.
+
+The Indians despised the white men for what they thought their stupidity
+in warfare, when they stood up in the open to be shot at, as the
+soldiers who were sent against them mostly did, instead of taking
+to trees and hiding in tall grass and hollows of the ground, as the
+backwoodsmen learned to do. Smith tells us that when Tecaughretanego
+heard how Colonel Grant, in the second campaign against Fort Duquesne,
+outwitted the French and Indians by night and stole possession of a hill
+overlooking the post, he praised his craft as that of a true warrior;
+but as to his letting his pipers play at daybreak, and give the enemy
+notice of his presence, so that the Indians could take to trees and
+shoot his Highlanders down with no danger to themselves, he could only
+suppose that Colonel Grant had got drunk over night.
+
+The savages respected the whites when they showed cunning, and they did
+not hate them the more for not showing mercy in fight; but we have seen
+how fiercely they resented the crime of horse stealing in Kenton's case,
+though they were always stealing horses themselves from the settlers;
+and any deed of treachery against themselves they were eager and prompt
+to punish, though they were always doing such deeds against their
+enemies. Still, it is doubtful whether with all their malignity they
+were ever guilty of anything so abominable as the massacre of the
+Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten, by the Americans; and if there is
+record of any wickeder act in the history not only of Ohio, but of the
+whole United States, I do not know of it. The Spaniards may have outdone
+it in some of their dealings with the Indians, but I cannot call to mind
+any act of theirs that seems so black, so wholly without justice and
+without reason. It is no wonder that it embittered the hostilities
+between the red men and the white men and made the war, which outlasted
+our Revolution ten years, more and more unmerciful to the very end.
+
+The missionaries of the Moravian Church were more successful than any
+others in converting the Indians, perhaps because they asked the most of
+them. They made them give up all the vices which the Indians knew were
+vices, and all the vices that the Indians thought were virtues when
+practiced outside of their tribe. They forbade them to lie, to steal, to
+kill; they taught them to wash themselves, to put on clothes, to work,
+and to earn their bread. Upon these hard terms they had congregations
+and villages in several parts of Connecticut, New York, and
+Pennsylvania, which flourished for a time against the malice of the
+disorderly and lawless settlers around them, but which had yielded
+to the persecutions of white men and red men alike when, in 1771, the
+chiefs of the Delawares sent messages to the Moravians and invited
+them to come out and live among them in Ohio. The Lenni-lenape, as the
+Delawares called themselves, had left the East, where they were subject
+to the Iroquois, and they now had their chief towns on the Muskingum.
+Near the place where the Tuscarawas and Walhonding meet to form the
+Muskingum they offered lands to the Moravians, and in 1772 the Christian
+Indians left their last village in Western Pennsylvania and settled
+there at three points which they called Schoenbrun, the Beautiful Spring,
+Lichtenau, Field of Light, and Gnadenhutten, the Tents of Grace.
+
+It was in the very heart of the Western wilderness, but the land was
+rich and the savages friendly, and in a few years the teachers and their
+followers had founded a fairer and happier home than they had known
+before, and had begun to spread their light around them. The Indians
+came from far and near to see their fields and orchards and gardens,
+with the houses in the midst of them, built of squared logs and set on
+streets branching to the four quarters from the chapel, which was the
+peaceful citadel of each little town. It must have seemed a stately
+edifice to their savage eyes, with its shingled roof, and its belfry,
+where, ten years before any white man had settled beyond the Ohio,
+the bell called the Christian Indians to prayer. No doubt the creature
+comforts of the Christians had their charm, too, for the hungry pagans.
+They were not used elsewhere to the hospitality that could set before
+them such repasts as one of the missionaries tells us were spread for
+the guest at Gnadenhutten. A table furnished with "good bread, meat,
+butter, cheese, milk, tea and coffee, and chocolate," and such fruits and
+vegetables as the season afforded could hardly have been less wonderful
+in the Indian's eyes than red men with their hair cut, and without paint
+or feathers, at work in the fields like squaws.
+
+Their heathen neighbors began to come into the Moravians' peaceful
+fold, and the three villages grew and flourished till the war broke out
+between the colonies and Great Britain. Then the troubles and sorrows
+of the Moravians, white and red, began again. They were too weak to keep
+the savage war parties from passing through their towns, and they dared
+not refuse them rest and food. The warriors began to come with the first
+leaves of spring, and they came and went till the first snows of autumn
+made their trail too plain for them to escape pursuit from the border.
+The Moravians did what they could to ransom their captives and to save
+them from torture when the warriors returned after their raids, but all
+their goodness did not avail them against the suspicion of the settlers.
+The backwoodsmen looked on them as the spies and allies of the
+savages, and the savages on their side believed them in league with the
+Americans.
+
+The Delawares had promised the Moravian teachers that if they settled
+among them, the Delaware nation would take no part in the war, and the
+most of 'them kept their promise. But some of the young men broke it,
+and the nation would not forbid the Wyandots from passing through
+their country to and from the Virginia frontier. It was true that the
+Moravians held thousands of Delaware warriors neutral, and that our
+American officers knew their great power for good among the Indians;
+but the backwoodsmen hated them as bitterly as they hated the Wyandots.
+Their war parties passed through the Christian villages, too, when they
+went and came on their forays beyond the Ohio, and at one time their
+leaders could hardly keep them from destroying a Moravian town, even
+while they were enjoying its hospitality.
+
+This situation could not last. In August, 1781, a chief of the Hurons,
+called the Half King, came with a large body of Indians flying the
+English flag and accompanied by an English officer, to urge the
+Christians to remove to Sandusky, where they were told they could be
+safe from the Virginians. They refused, and then the Half King shot
+their cattle, plundered their fields and houses, and imprisoned their
+teachers, and at last forced them away. When the winter came on, the
+exiles began to suffer from cold and hunger, and many of their children
+died. To keep themselves and their little ones from starving, parties
+stole back from Sandusky throughout the winter to gather the corn left
+standing in the fields beside the Muskingum.
+
+In March a larger party than usual returned to the deserted villages
+with a number of women and children, all unarmed, except for the guns
+that the men carried to shoot game. But in February the savages had
+fallen upon a lonely cabin and butchered all its inmates with more than
+common cruelty, and the whole border was ablaze with fury against the
+redskins, whether they called themselves Christians or not. A hundred
+and sixty backwoodsmen gathered at Mingo Bottom under the lead of
+Colonel David Williamson, who had once disgraced himself among them by
+preventing them from killing some Moravian prisoners, and who now seems
+to have been willing to atone for his humanity. They marched swiftly to
+the Muskingum, where they stole upon the Indians in the cornfields, and
+seized their guns. They told them at first that they were going to take
+them to Fort Pitt, and at the vote held to decide whether they should
+burn their prisoners alive or simply tomahawk and scalp them, there
+was really some question of their transfer to Pittsburg. This plan was
+favored by the leaders, and it is believed that if Colonel Williamson
+could have had his way, it would have been carried out. But there is no
+proof of this, and the rest, who were by no means the worst men of the
+border, but some of the best, voted by a large majority to kill their
+prisoners.
+
+They gave them the night to prepare for death. One poor woman fell on
+her knees before Williamson and begged for her life, but the most of
+them seem to have submitted without a word. They spent the night in
+prayer and singing, and when their butchers sent at daybreak to know if
+they were ready, they answered that they had received the assurance of
+God's peace. Then the murderers parted the women and children from the
+men and shut them up in another cabin, and the two cabins they fitly
+called the slaughterhouses. One of them found a cooper's mallet in the
+cooper's shop, where the men were left, and saying: "How exactly this
+will answer for the business," he made his way through the kneeling
+ranks to one of the most fervent of the converts, and struck him down.
+
+While the Indians still prayed and sang, he killed twelve more of them,
+and then passed the mallet to another butcher with the words: "My arm
+fails me. Go on in the same way. I think I have done pretty well." Among
+the women and children the slaughter began with a very old and pious
+widow, and soon the sound of the singing and the praying was silenced in
+death.
+
+The victims were scalped as they fell, and when the bloody work was
+done, the cabins were set on fire and the bodies burned in the burning
+buildings. Two boys who had been scalped with the rest feigned death,
+and when the murderers had left them they tried to escape. One stuck
+fast in the window and was burned, but the other got safely away and
+lived to tell the awful tale.
+
+[Illustration: Massacre of the Christian Indians by the Whites 087]
+
+The backwoodsmen themselves seem not to have been ashamed of their work,
+though it is said that Williamson could never be got to speak of it. The
+event was so horrible that it killed the Moravians' hopes of usefulness
+among the Ohio Indians. The teachers settled with the remnant of
+their converts in Canada, but the Christian Indians always longed for
+Gnadenhutten, where they had lived so happily, and where ninety-six
+of their brethren had suffered so innocently. Before the close of the
+century Congress confirmed the Delawares' grant of the Muskingum lands
+to them, and they came back. But they could not survive the crime
+committed against them. The white settlers pressed close about them; the
+War of 1812 enkindled all the old hate against their race. Their laws
+were trampled upon and their own people were seen drunk in the streets.
+
+Some of the Christians had fallen back into heathen savagery. One of
+these, who was found in a war party, painted and armed like the rest for
+a foray against the whites, said to a Christian brother: "I cannot but
+have bad thoughts of our teachers. I think it was their fault that so
+many of our countrymen were murdered in Gnadenhutten. They betrayed
+us.... Tell me now, is this the truth or not?" He had lost his children
+and all his kindred in that fearful carnage, and yet he could not
+believe his own accusations against the Moravians. He added mournfully:
+"I have now a wicked and malicious heart, and therefore my thoughts are
+evil. As I look outwardly, so is my heart within. What would it avail,
+if I were outwardly to appear as a believer, and my heart were full of
+evil?"
+
+
+
+
+IX. THE TORTURE OF COLONEL CRAWFORD
+
+The slaughter of the Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten took place
+in March, 1782, and in May ol the same year, four hundred and fifty
+horsemen from the American border met at Mingo Bottom, where the
+murderers had rendezvoused, and set out from that point to massacre
+the Moravian converts who had taken refuge among the Wyandots on the
+Sandusky. They expected, of course, to fight the warlike Indians, but
+they openly avowed their purpose of killing all Indians, Christian or
+heathen, and women and children, as well as warriors. We must therefore
+call them murderers, but we must remember that they had been hardened
+against mercy by the atrocities of the savages, and we must make
+allowance for men who had seen their wives and little ones tomahawked
+and scalped or carried off into captivity, their homes burnt, and their
+fields wasted. The life of the frontier at a time when all life was so
+much ruder than now was as fierce, if not as cruel, among the white men
+as among the red men.
+
+The murderers at Mingo Bottom voted whether Colonel David Williamson or
+Colonel William Crawford should lead them, and their choice fell upon
+Crawford. He seems to have been a man of kinder heart than his fellows,
+and he unwillingly took command of the turbulent and disorderly band,
+which promptly set out on its march through the wilderness towards the
+Sandusky country. They had hoped to surprise the Indians, but spies
+had watched their movements from the first, and when they reached the
+Moravian villages on the Sandusky River, they found them deserted. They
+decided then to go on toward Upper Sandusky, and if they could not reach
+that town in a day's march, to beat a quick retreat. The next day they
+started, but at two o'clock in the afternoon they were attacked by large
+numbers of Indians hidden in the tall grass of the prairies, and they
+fought a running battle till nightfall. Then both sides kindled large
+fires along their lines, and fell back from them to prevent a surprise.
+
+In the morning the Americans began their retreat, and the Indians
+renewed their attack with great fury in the afternoon, on all sides
+except the northeast, where the invaders were hemmed in by swamps. There
+seems to have been no cause for their retreat, except the danger of an
+overwhelming onset by the savages, which must have been foreseen
+from the start. But the army, as it was called, was wholly without
+discipline; during the night not even a sentry had been posted; and now
+their fear became a panic, their retreat became a rout. They made their
+way as best they could through the marshes, where the horses stuck fast,
+and had to be abandoned, and the men themselves sometimes sank to their
+necks in the soft ooze. Instead of keeping together, as Crawford advised
+but had no power to compel, the force broke up into small parties, which
+the Indians destroyed or captured. Many perished in the swamps; some
+were followed as far as the Ohio River. The only one of the small
+parties which escaped was that of forty men under Colonel Williamson,
+the leader of the Gnadenhiitten massacre, who enjoyed the happier
+fortune denied to Colonel Crawford.
+
+This ill-fated officer was tormented after the retreat began by his fear
+for the safety of his son, his son-in-law, and his nephews, and he left
+his place at the head of the main body and let the army file past him
+while he called and searched for the missing men. He did not try to
+overtake it till it was too late to spur his wearied horse forward. He
+fell in with Dr. John Knight, who accompanied the expedition as surgeon,
+and who now generously remained with Crawford. They pushed on together
+with two others through the woods, guided by the north star, but on the
+second day after the army had left them behind, a party of Indians fell
+upon them and made them prisoners.
+
+Their captors killed their two companions, Captain Biggs and Lieutenant
+Ashley, the following day, but Crawford and Knight were taken to an
+Indian camp at a little distance, and then to the old Wyandot town of
+Sandusky, where preparations were made for burning Crawford. He seems to
+have had great hopes that Simon Girty, who was then at Sandusky, would
+somehow manage to save him, and it is said that the renegade really
+offered three hundred dollars for Crawford's life, knowing that he would
+be many times repaid by Crawford's friends. But the chief whom Girty
+tried to bribe answered, "Do you take me for a squaw?" and threatened,
+if Girty said more, to burn him along with Crawford. This is the story
+told in Girty's favor; other stories represent him as indifferent if not
+cruel to Crawford throughout. In any case, it ended in Crawford's return
+to the Indian camp, eight miles from the Indian town, where he suffered
+death.
+
+The chiefs who had been put in charge of him were two Delawares of great
+note, Captain Pipe and Captain Wingenund. They were chosen his guards
+because the Christian Indians were of their nation, and the Delawares,
+more than any other nation, were held to have been injured and insulted
+by their massacre. It was Captain Pipe who refused Girty's offer, if
+Girty ever made it, and it was Captain Pipe who urged the death of the
+prisoners, while treating them with mock politeness. Nine others were
+brought back from the town with Knight and Crawford, and Captain Pipe
+now painted all their faces black, the sign of doom. While he was
+painting Knight's face, he told him that he should be taken to see
+his friends at the Shawnee village, and he told Crawford that his head
+should be shaved, meaning that he should be made an Indian and adopted
+into the tribe. But when they came to the place where Crawford was to
+suffer, Captain Pipe threw off the mask of kindness; he made a speech to
+the forty warriors and seventy squaws and papooses met to torture him,
+and used all his eloquence to inflame their hate.
+
+The other Delaware chief, Captain Wingenund, had gone into his cabin,
+that he might not see Crawford's death. They knew each other, and more
+than once Crawford had been good to Wingenund. The captive now sent for
+the chief, and Wingenund came unwillingly to speak with him, for he was
+already tied to the stake, and his friend knew that he could not save
+him. The chief acknowledged the kindness that they had once felt for
+each other, but he said that Crawford had put it out of his power to
+give him help.
+
+[Illustration: Execution of Crawford 093]
+
+"How so, Captain Wingenund?" asked Crawford.
+
+"By joining yourself to that execrable man, Williamson; the man who but
+the other day murdered such a number of Moravian Indians, knowing them
+to be friends; knowing that he ran no risk in murdering a people who
+would not fight, and whose only business was praying."
+
+In vain, Crawford declared that he would never have suffered the
+massacre if he had been present. Wingenund was willing to believe
+this, but he reminded him that the men whom he had led to Sandusky had
+declared that they came to murder the remaining Moravians. No one, he
+said, would now dare to speak a word for him; the king of England, if he
+came with all his treasure, could not save him from the vengeance which
+the Indians were going to take upon him for the slaughter of their
+innocent brethren.
+
+"Then my fate is fixed," said Crawford.
+
+Wingenund turned away weeping, and could never afterwards speak of the
+scene without deep feeling.
+
+Crawford had already undergone the first of his punishment. The savages
+stripped him naked and made him sit down on the ground before the fire
+kindled to burn him, and beat him with their fists and with sticks
+till they had heated their rage. Then they tied his wrists together
+and fastened the rope that bound them to a post strongly planted in the
+ground with leash enough to let him walk round it once or twice, five or
+six yards away from the fire. Girty was present, and Crawford asked if
+the Indians meant to burn him; the renegade briefly answered, "Yes."
+Then Captain Pipe spoke, and Wingenund saw his friend for the last time.
+After this chief left Crawford, the Indians broke into a loud yell and
+began the work of torture which ended only with his death.
+
+At one point he besought Simon Girty to put an end to his sufferings;
+but Girty would not, or dared not.
+
+Then Crawford began to pray, imploring God to have mercy upon him, and
+bore his torment for an hour and a half longer with manly courage. It is
+not known how long his torture lasted; Knight was now taken away, and no
+friend remained to witness Crawford's agony to the end.
+
+I have thought it well to recount his story, for without it we could not
+fully realize what the white people of that day underwent in their long
+struggle with the Ohio Indians. Cruelty so fiendish could never have
+a cause, but it cannot be denied that the torture of Crawford was the
+effect of the butchery of the Christian Indians. That awful deed was an
+act of even greater wickedness, for it was the act of men who were not
+savage by birth or race or creed. It was against the white man's law,
+while the torture of Crawford was by the red man's law. It is because
+of their laws that the white men have overcome and the red men have gone
+under in the order of mercy, for whenever we sin against that order,
+contrary to our law, or according to our law, we weaken ourselves, and
+if we continue in our sin, we doom ourselves in the end to perish.
+
+
+
+
+X. THE ESCAPE OF KNIGHT AND SLOVER.
+
+When the Indians made a raid on the settlements, they abandoned even
+victory if they had once had enough fighting; as when they had a feast
+they glutted themselves, and then wasted what they had not eaten. They
+seemed now to have had such a surfeit of cruelty in the torture of
+Crawford that they took little trouble to secure Knight for a future
+holiday. They promised themselves that he should be burnt, too, at the
+town of the Shawnees, but in their satiety they left him unbound in the
+charge of a young Indian who was to take him there from Sandusky. It is
+true that Knight was very weak, and that they may have thought he was
+unable to escape, though even in this case they would probably have sent
+him under a stronger guard at another time, when they were not gorged
+with blood.
+
+His Indian guard was armed and was mounted on a pony, while Knight went
+on foot; but Knight had made up his mind that he would escape at any
+risk rather than be burned like Crawford. His face had again been
+painted black; and he had Simon Girty's word, given him before Crawford
+was put to death, that he was to be burned at Old Chillicothe. But he
+pretended not to know what the Indians were going to do with him there,
+and he easily deceived his guard, who seems to have been a good-natured,
+simple fellow. Knight asked him if they were going to live together like
+brothers in the same wig-wam, and the Indian answered they were, and
+they went in very friendly talk. At night-fall when they camped, Knight
+let his guard bind him, but he spent the hours till daybreak trying
+secretly to free himself. At dawn the Indian rose and unbound his
+captive. Then he rekindled the fire, at the same time fighting the gnats
+that swarmed upon his naked body. He willingly consented that Knight
+should make a smoke to drive them from his back, and Knight took a heavy
+stick from the fire as if to do this; but when he got behind the Indian
+he struck him on the head with all his strength. The Indian fell forward
+into the fire, but quickly gathered himself up and ran off howling.
+Knight wanted to shoot him as he ran; in his eagerness to cock the rifle
+he broke the lock, and the Indian escaped. He got safely to the Shawnee
+town, where he described the fight in terms that transformed the little
+doctor into a furious giant, whom no amount of stabbing had any effect
+upon.
+
+[Illustration: Knight escapes 097L]
+
+The other Indians, who seem to have understood this cowardly boaster,
+received his story with shouts of laughter. But Knight was very glad
+to make off with his gun and ammunition, and leave them to settle the
+affair among themselves. When he came to the prairies he hid himself in
+the grass and waited till dark before venturing to cross them, and
+by daybreak he was in the woods again. He could kill nothing with his
+broken gun, and he lived for twenty-one days on wild gooseberries, with
+two young blackbirds and a tortoise, which he ate raw. He reached the
+Ohio River on the twenty-second day, and crossed in safety to Fort
+Mcintosh.
+
+The tragic adventures of the Indian captives must often have been
+relieved by comic incidents like those of Knight's escape from his
+guard; but there is very little record of anything except sorrow and
+suffering, danger and death. Certainly in the captivity of John Slover,
+another of Crawford's ill-starred and ill-willed crew of marauders,
+there were few gleams of happier chance to distinguish it from most
+histories of the sort. He had been captured by the Indians when a boy
+of eight years, and carried from his home in Virginia to their town of
+Sandusky, where he was adopted into their nation, and where he lived
+quite happily till his twentieth year, when he was given up to his own
+people.
+
+He fought through two years of the Revolutionary War, and he was
+thoroughly fitted to act as a guide for Crawford.
+
+After the battle, or rather the disorderly rout, he was one of those who
+was mired in the swamps. He left his horse there, and with a few others
+tried to make his way to Detroit. Twice the party escaped capture by
+hiding in the grass, as the Indians passed near them, but on the third
+morning they were ambushed; two were killed, one ran away, and the
+remaining three gave themselves up on the promise of good treatment.
+They were taken to Wapatimika, where Simon Kenton was to have been
+burned, and they soon proved how far the promises of the savages were to
+be trusted.
+
+The Indians knew Slover at once, and they bitterly reproached him with
+having come to betray his friends. At the council held to try him,
+James Girty urged them to put him to death for his treason. But Slover
+strongly defended himself, reminding the Indians that they had freely
+given him up, and had no longer any claim upon him. His words had such
+weight that the council put off its decision. In the meantime he was
+left with an old squaw, who hid him under a bear skin, and scolded off
+the messengers who came to bring him before a grand council of Shawnee,
+Delaware, Wyandot, Chippewa, and Mingo warriors. But shortly after,
+Girty came with forty braves and seized him. Slover was now stripped,
+and with his hands tied and his face painted black, he was taken to a
+village five miles off, where he was beaten as usual by the people,
+and then driven a little farther to another village, where he found
+everything made ready to burn him, as Crawford had been burned. He was
+tied to the stake, and the fire was lighted; an orator began to kindle
+the anger of the savages; but at the last moment a heavy shower of rain
+burst over the roofless council house where they had gathered to torture
+their captive, put out the fire, and drove them to a sheltered part of
+the lodge, where they consoled themselves as best they could by beating
+him till midnight, and promising him that he should be burned the next
+day. He was then carried to the blockhouse and left bound with two
+guards, who entertained themselves, but did not amuse Slover, by talking
+over his probable behavior under the torture that awaited him. They fell
+asleep, worn out, about daybreak, when Slover made a desperate effort to
+free himself, and to his own astonishment, succeeded. He stepped across
+his snoring guards out into the open air. No one was astir in the
+village, and he ran to hide himself in a cornfield, where he nearly fell
+over a sleeping squaw and her papooses. On the other side of the field
+he found some horses, and making a halter of the buffalo thong that had
+bound him, and that still hung upon his arm, he leaped upon one of them
+and dashed through the woods. By ten o'clock in the forenoon he had
+reached the Scioto fifty miles away.
+
+He allowed his horse to breathe here; then he remounted, crossed the
+river, and galloped half as far again. At three o'clock his horse gave
+out, and Slover left him and ran forward afoot, spurred on by the yells
+of the pursuers close behind him. The moon came up, and knowing that his
+trail could be easily followed by her light, he ran till daybreak. The
+next night he reached the Muskingum, naked, torn by briers, and covered
+with the mosquitoes which swarmed upon his bleeding body. A few wild
+raspberries enabled him to break his fast for the first time, but the
+next day he feasted upon two crawfish. When he came to the Ohio, just
+across from Wheeling, and called to a man whom he saw on the island
+there, to bring his canoe and take him over, it is not strange that the
+man should have hesitated at the sight of the figure on the Ohio shore.
+Not till Slover had given him the names of many men in Crawford's army,
+as well as his own name, did the man come to his rescue and ferry him
+over to the fort, where he was safe at last.
+
+
+
+
+XI. THE INDIAN WARS AND ST. CLAIR'S DEFEAT.
+
+The Indians and the renegades at Sandusky would not believe their
+prisoners when Crawford's men told them that Cornwallis and his army had
+surrendered to Washington; but the Revolutionary War had now really come
+to an end. The next year Great Britain acknowledged the independence
+of the United States, and gave up the whole West to them, as France
+had given it up to her before. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York,
+Pennsylvania, and Virginia claimed each the country lying westward
+of them, but the other states denied this claim. The West was finally
+declared the property of the whole Union, and in 1784 the first
+ordinance was passed by Congress for its government. It was not until
+1787 that the great ordinance was passed which gave the future empire
+of the world to the West on terms of freedom to all men: "There shall
+be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory
+otherwise than in the punishment of crime."
+
+This made the West free forever, but no law of Congress could make it
+safe without the consent of the savage nations which had again changed
+masters by the treaty of foreign powers. The war between England and
+America was over, but the war between white men and red men raged
+more fiercely after our peace with Great Britain than before. The
+backwoodsmen took this peace for a sign that they might now cross the
+river from New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to settle in the Ohio
+country; and they were soon there by hundreds. It is true that the
+United States had made treaties with the United Tribes for certain
+tracts beyond the Ohio River, but the Indians declared that they had
+been tricked into these treaties. It is true that Congress meant to deal
+fairly by them so far as to drive the hard bargains with them for their
+lands which the white men had always driven with the Indians; but the
+backwoodsmen waited for nothing, and the old story of surprises and
+slaughters, of captivities and tortures, went on, with the difference
+that the war parties now need not cross the Ohio to take scalps and
+prisoners, and the vengeance of the pioneers had not so far to follow
+them in their return to the woods.
+
+The first white settlers in Ohio were largely the kind of half-savages
+who had butchered the Christians at Gnadenhiitten. They built their
+cabins and cleared their fields on lands so shamelessly stolen that in
+1785 a force of United States troops was sent to drive them out of their
+holdings. They seemed to go, but in reality they staid, and wherever the
+backwoodsman planted his foot west of the Ohio, he never turned his face
+eastward again.
+
+He was unlawfully there, but from the Indian's point of view he was no
+more unrightfully there than the settlers who came a few years later to
+take up farms under the land companies authorized by Congress. If any
+other proof were wanting that these companies possessed themselves of
+land which the Indians believed they had never sold, it would appear in
+the fact that the first thing the settlers did was to build a stockade,
+or high bullet-proof fence of logs with a strong blockhouse for a kind
+of citadel, where they might gather for safety in case of attacks from
+any of the wild natives of the woods about them.
+
+The invaders were from New England, from New Jersey, from Pennsylvania,
+and from Virginia, and with their coming, nearly all in the same year,
+there began that mingling of the American strains which has since made
+Ohio the most American state in the Union, first in war and first in
+peace; which has given the nation such soldiers as Grant, Sherman,
+Sheridan, McPherson; such presidents as Grant, Hayes, Garfield,
+Harrison, McKinley; such statesmen and jurists as Ewing, Cor-win, Wade,
+Chase, Giddings, Sherman, Waite. We have to own, in truth and honesty,
+that the newcomers might be unlawfully and unrightfully in the great
+territory which was destined to be the great state, but it is consoling
+to realize that they were not unreasonably there. It was not reasonable
+that the land should be left to savages who must each keep fifty
+thousand acres of it wild for his needs as a hunter. The earth is for
+those who will use it, and not for those who will waste it, and the
+Indians who would not suffer themselves to be tamed could not help
+wasting the land.
+
+If the whites made any mistake, it was in allowing any man to own more
+land than he could use; but this is a mistake which prevails in our own
+day as it prevailed in the days of the pioneers, and they were not to
+blame for being no wiser at the end of the eighteenth century than
+we are at the end of the nineteenth. The states consenting to the
+organization of the Northwest Territory meant that their citizens who
+had fought for the independence of the nation in the Revolutionary War
+should first of all have their choice of its lands, and so we find Ohio
+divided up into the Virginia Military District, the Connecticut Western
+Reserve, and the Bounty Lands of Pennsylvania. But large grants were
+made to land companies, and the innumerable acres were juggled out of
+the hands of the people into the hands of the speculators, as the public
+lands have been ever since, until now there are no public lands left
+worth having.
+
+The Ohio Indians knew nothing of all this, or as little as they have
+ever known of the fate of their ancient homes on the frontier which we
+have pressed further and further westward. They held in their stubborn
+way that the line between them and the whites was still the Ohio River,
+as it had been for fifty years; and they made war upon the invaders
+wherever they found them. At times they gathered force for a great
+battle, and in the first two of these battles they were the victors,
+but in the third they were beaten and their strength and spirits were
+broken. In 1790 General Harmar destroyed the towns of the Miamis on the
+Wabash; but they ambushed his retreat and punished his fifteen hundred
+men so severely that he was forced back to the Ohio. In 1791 General
+Arthur St. Clair led an army against the Indians in the Maumee country,
+and was attacked and routed with greater havoc than the savages had ever
+yet made of the whites, except perhaps in Braddock's defeat. In 1792
+General Anthony Wayne set about gathering another army for the Indian
+campaign. He moved into the enemy's country slowly, building forts in
+Darke County and Mercer (where St. Clair was routed) as he advanced. In
+1794, at the meeting of the Auglaize and Maumee, twenty miles from the
+last post, which he named Fort Defiance, he finally met the tribes in
+great force, and defeated them so thoroughly that for sixteen years they
+never afterwards made head against the Americans.
+
+At this day we can hardly imagine the dismay that the rout of St. Clair
+and the slaughter of his men spread through the Ohio country. He was
+a gallant officer, the governor of the Northwest Territory, and the
+trusted friend of Washington. It is true that his army was largely the
+refuse of the Eastern States, picked up in the streets of the larger
+towns and lured into the wilderness with the promise of three dollars a
+month; that these men were badly fed, badly clothed, and badly drilled;
+and that they were led by a general whose strength and spirits were
+impaired by sickness. But with them was a large body of Kentuckians and
+other backwoodsmen, skilled in Indian warfare, and eager for the red
+foes with whom they had long arrears of mutual injury to bring up; and
+the hopes of the settlers rested securely upon these. The Indians were
+led by Little Turtle, one of their greatest war chiefs, and at the point
+where General Wayne two years later built one of his forts, and called
+it Recovery, they surprised St. Clair's troops.
+
+[Illustration: The defeat of St. Clair 107]
+
+It was an easy slaughter. St. Clair was suffering so much with gout that
+he could not move from his horse when he was helped to the saddle, and
+was wholly unfit to fight. Yet he went undauntedly through the battle;
+horse after horse was shot under him, and his clothes were pierced with
+nine of the bullets which the Indians rained upon his men from every
+tree of the forest. The backwoodsmen had hardly a chance to practice the
+Indians' arts against them before the rout began. The cannon which St.
+Clair had brought into the wilderness with immense waste of time and
+toil, proved useless under the fire that galled the artillerymen. The
+weak, undisciplined, and bewildered army was hemmed in on every side,
+and the men were shot down as they huddled together or tried to straggle
+away, till half their number was left upon the field. Of course none of
+the wounded were spared. The Americans were tomahawked and scalped where
+they fell; one of the savages told afterwards that he plied his hatchet
+until he could hardly lift his arm. All the Ohio tribes shared in the
+glory of this greatest victory of their race,--Delawares, Shawnees,
+Wyandots, Ottawas, Chippeways, and Pottawottomies. There had been plenty
+of game that year; they were all in the vigor and force which St.
+Clair's ill-fated army lacked; and they lustily took their fill of
+slaughter.
+
+Many stories of the battle were told by those who escaped. Major Jacob
+Fowler, of Kentucky, an old hunter, who went with the army as surveyor,
+carried his trusty rifle, but he had run short of bullets, the morning
+of the fight, which began at daybreak. He was going for a ladle to melt
+more lead, when he met a Kentucky rifleman driven in by the savages, and
+begged some balls of him. The man had been shot through the wrist, and
+he told Fowler to help himself from his pouch. Fowler was pouring out
+a double handful, when the man said, "Stop; you had better count them."
+Fowler could not help laughing, though it was hardly the time for
+gayety. "If we get through this scrape, my dear fellow," said he, "I
+will return you twice as many." But they never met again, and Fowler
+could only suppose that his cautious friend was soon tomahawked and
+scalped with the other wounded. Fowler took to a tree, and shot Indians
+till his gunlock got out of order. Then he picked up a rifle which had
+been thrown away, and which he found his bullets would fit, and renewed
+the fight. It was a very cold November morning, and his fingers became
+so stiff that he could not hold the bullets, which he had to keep in his
+mouth, and feed into his rifle from it. At one time he was behind a very
+small tree, and two Indians fired on him at such close range that he
+felt the smoke of their guns and gave himself up for dead. But both had
+missed him, and he got away from the battlefield unhurt.
+
+Another Kentuckian, a young ranger named William Kennan, was one of
+the first riflemen driven back by the overwhelming force of Indians. He
+tried to hide in the tall grass, but found that his only hope was in
+his heels. The savages endeavored to cut him off, but he distanced all
+except one, who followed him only three yards away. Kennan expected him
+every moment his tomahawk at him, and he felt in his belt for his own.
+It had slipped from its place, and he found himself wholly unarmed, just
+as he came to a tree which the wind had blown down, and which spread
+before him a mass of roots and earth eight or nine feet high. He
+gathered all his strength, bounded into the air, and cleared it, while a
+yell of wonder rose from the baffled Indians behind him. A little later
+he came upon General Madison of Kentucky sitting on a log, so spent with
+the day's work and loss of blood from a wound, that he could no longer
+walk, and waiting for the Indians to come up and kill him. Kennan ran
+back and caught a horse which he had seen grazing, put Madison on it,
+and walked by his side till they were out of danger. The friendship thus
+begun lasted through their lives.
+
+[Illustration: The escape of Kennan 109]
+
+This is one of the few softer lights in the picture whose darker
+features we must not fail to look upon. One of the grimmest of them
+was the war chief of the Missasagos, Little Turtle, who planned the
+surprise, against the advice of all the other chiefs, and who merits
+the fame of the awful day. To the Americans who saw him then, he was a
+sullen and gloomy giant, who fought with his men throughout the battle,
+arrayed in the conspicuous splendor of a great war, chief, with silver
+ornaments dangling from his nose and ears. Hardly less terrible than the
+figure of this magnificent butcher is that of the Chickasaw warrior who
+accompanied the American army, to glut the hate of his nation for the
+Northern tribesmen. When the fight began, he said he would not stand for
+the Shawnees to shoot him down like a wild pigeon, and he left the ranks
+and took to a fallen log, where he fired with unfailing aim. But he
+could not be kept from leaving it to scalp the other Indians as he shot
+them, and his own turn to be shot and scalped came at last.
+
+The battle ground was covered with a thick slush from the new-fallen
+snow, and this made the retreat more exhausting. A poor mother, perhaps
+one of the soldiers' or pioneers' wives, staggered along with a baby
+in her arms till she fell with it. The ranger McDowell then carried it
+awhile for her. When he gave it back, she threw it away in the snow, to
+save her own life, and the Indians found it, and took it to Sandusky,
+where they brought it up as their own.
+
+Two years after, when a detachment of Wayne's army camped upon the scene
+of the carnage, they had to scrape away the heaps of bones and carry
+them out of their tents before they could make their beds, and they
+buried six hundred skulls on the field. Such is war, and we cannot look
+too closely on its hideous face, which is often so alluringly painted
+that we forget it is the face of a pitiless demon.
+
+
+
+
+XII. THE INDIAN WARS AND WAYNE'S VICTORY.
+
+The Indians who had been so well generaled and had fought so ably,
+failed as usual to follow up their victory by moving on the American
+settlements in force. They kept on harassing the pioneers in small war
+parties, but gave the country time to send an army, thoroughly equipped
+and thoroughly disciplined, against them. They made a second attack on
+the Americans on the old battle ground where General Wayne had built
+his Fort Recovery, but they were beaten off with severe loss, though in
+their attack they had the aid of many white Canadians and even of some
+British officers, or at least of men wearing the uniform of British
+officers.
+
+By the treaty of 1783 Great Britain agreed to give us the whole West
+below a certain line, but when the time came for the surrender, she
+refused to yield the forts south of this line. With the bad faith
+of wanton power she kept her posts at Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, and
+Mackinaw, because we were weak and she was strong; and from these points
+her agents abetted the savages in their war upon the American frontiers.
+Just before the battle of Fallen Timbers, where Wayne won his victory,
+the Lieutenant Governor of Canada marched a force of Canadian militia
+and British regulars into the Ohio country, and built a fort on the
+Maumee, near the battle ground, which he held until 1796, when Great
+Britain at last gave up all the places she had unrightfully kept. The
+Indians expected this fort to open its gates to them, when they fled
+before Wayne's men, and were astonished and indignant at the behavior of
+then-British friends in denying them refuge. This was not from want of
+ill will toward the Americans, who taunted them as they passed, and
+whom the garrison wished to fire upon for approaching the post in
+force. Sharp letters passed between the American general and the British
+commandant, but it ended in nothing worse, and our jealous army,
+which remained in the neighborhood laying waste the Indian fields and
+villages, could not perceive that the British gave any aid or comfort to
+the savages.
+
+The battle of Fallen Timbers was fought on the 20th of August, 1794, on
+the banks of the Maumee, near a rising ground called Presque Isle, about
+two miles south of the present Maumee City, and four miles from the
+British Fort Miami. The place was called Fallen Timbers because it was
+covered with trees blown down long before in a tornado. These formed a
+natural stronghold for the savages, but Wayne had every other advantage,
+especially in numbers; he had almost twice as many men, well drilled,
+armed, and clothed, while the miserable and disorderly army of St. Clair
+had fallen a prey to a far greater force of Indians.
+
+On the morning of the battle, Wayne sent a flag of truce to the united
+tribes, offering peace, but he did not wait for its return. He met his
+envoy coming back with an evasive answer, and he pushed on to Fallen
+Timbers without stopping. As soon as he reached the battlefield, he
+ordered his infantry to beat up the covert of the enemy, who were hidden
+among the logs, brush, and grass, with the bayonet, and as they rose to
+deliver their fire. His order was carried out so thoroughly and promptly
+that this charge of nine hundred men began and ended the fight. Two
+thousand; Indians, Canadian militia and volunteers fled before them, and
+the rout was complete.
+
+[Illustration: St. Clair's Defeat 114]
+
+The affair was so quickly over that there was no time for the incidents
+of heroism and suffering which heightened the tragedy of St. Clair's
+defeat. At the beginning of the action, General William Henry Harrison,
+afterwards President of the United States, but then one of Wayne's aids,
+said to him, "General Wayne, I'm afraid you will get into the battle
+yourself, and forget to give us the necessary field orders." "Perhaps I
+may," said Wayne, "and if I do, recollect the standing order for the day
+is, Charge the rascals with the bayonets!" Wayne had got his nickname
+of Mad Anthony in the Revolution from his habit of swearing furiously
+in battle, and now he called the Indians something more than simply
+rascals. We have seen how his men carried out the spirit of his
+instructions, and it is told of one of them who got astray from the rest
+that he met an Indian alone and gave him the bayonet. At the same time
+the Indian gave the American the tomahawk, and they were found dead
+together, one with the blade in his breast, the other with the hatchet
+in his skull.
+
+A runaway negro who had followed the Kentucky horsemen to the battle,
+saw three Indians swimming the river from the shore where the cavalry
+were posted, and shot one of them. The other two tried to swim on with
+the body. The negro fired again with deadly aim, and the only Indian
+left was now in water so shallow that he was dragging the bodies to land
+when once more the negro fired and killed his man. Then he ran up to
+look at the dead men and found them so like one another that he knew
+they must be brothers.
+
+A strange and romantic incident of the campaign, before the battle,
+occurred while three American scouts, Wells, McClellan, and Miller, were
+ranging the woods to bring in some Indians for Wayne to question. They
+came upon a party of three Indians; Wells shot one, and Miller another,
+while McClellan, who was very swift of foot, ran down the third. Pursuer
+and pursued both stuck in the oozy bottom of a stream, and when Wells
+and Miller came up, they were threatening each other with knife and
+tomahawk. Miller had been taken captive when a child with one of
+his brothers; he had escaped, but this brother had remained with the
+savages, and somehow Miller felt that the Indian confronting Mc-Clellan
+was his brother. They seized him and washed off his paint; he was white;
+he was Miller's brother. They persuaded him, with much trouble at first,
+to join Wayne's army, and he fought through the rest of the war on the
+American side.
+
+[Illustration: A White Indian 116]
+
+At another time as Wells and a party of his scouts came to the banks of
+a stream, they saw on the opposite shore a family of savages who began
+to cross the river towards them in a canoe. The scouts, taking them for
+Indians, were about to fire on them when Wells suddenly called out that
+the first who fired should have a bullet through his own head. He had
+recognized the Indians, and he said that when he was a captive in their
+tribe, this family had fed and clothed him, and nursed him in sickness,
+and treated him as tenderly as one of themselves. The backwoodsmen
+joined Wells in talk with his friends, urging them to do what they could
+for peace among their people, and left them to paddle away in their
+canoe unharmed.
+
+Wells had been the adoptive son of Little Turtle, who led the Indians at
+St. Clair's defeat, and he had fought on the side of the savages in that
+battle. But after it was over he foresaw that the war must end in favor
+of the white men, and he decided to abandon his wild brethren. He spoke
+first with Little Turtle as they were walking in the woods together and
+warned him in words that a real Indian might have used. "When the sun
+reaches the meridian, I leave you for the whites; and whenever you meet
+me in battle you must try to kill me, as I shall try to kill you."
+
+But the real Indians had not Wells's forecast, and they continued the
+war till they were beaten by Wayne, in whose army Little Turtle might
+have found his adoptive son. Little Turtle was himself one of the last
+chiefs to yield, but he came in with the rest at Greenville, and one
+year after the battle of Fallen Timbers signed the treaty by which
+ninety chiefs and the deputies of twelve tribes gave up the Ohio River
+as the Indian border, and ceded half the Ohio lands to the United
+States.
+
+Little Turtle, or Moshokonoghua, as he was called in the tongue of his
+nation, the Miamis, lived for thirty years after signing the treaty, and
+then died of gout at Fort Wayne. He traveled through the Eastern States
+in the first years of the peace, and gave people there a different
+impression from that received by those who knew him before the defeat of
+St. Clair, and saw him leading the victors in that battle. He struck all
+who met him as a man of intelligence and wit; he got the habit of high
+living and bore himself like the gentlemen whose company he loved to
+frequent. At Philadelphia the famous Polish exile and patriot Kosciusko
+gave him his pistols and bade him shoot dead with them any man who
+attempted to rob him of his country.
+
+His business in the East was to interest people in the civilization
+of his tribe, but he had no purpose of living among the whites. In
+Philadelphia, he said, "When I walk through the streets I see every
+person in his shop employed about something: one makes shoes, another
+pots, a third sells cloth. I say to myself, which of these things can
+you do? Not one. I can make a bow or an arrow, catch fish, kill game,
+and go to war; but none of these things is of any use here. To learn
+what is done here would require a long time. Old age comes on. I should
+be a useless piece of furniture, useless to my nation, useless to
+myself. I must go back to my own country."
+
+This was what he did, and as long as he lived he was steadfast for
+peace, for he remembered that it would be foolish for the Indians to
+fight the Americans, and Little Turtle was not a fool. Even before the
+battle of the Fallen Timbers, he urged his people to treat with Wayne
+rather than fight. "We have beaten the enemy twice under separate
+commanders," he said, referring to Har-mar and St. Clair. "The Americans
+are now led by a chief who never stops; the night and the day are alike
+to him. And during all the time that he has been marching upon your
+villages, notwithstanding the watchfulness of our young men, we have
+never been able to surprise him. Think well of it. There is something
+which whispers to me that it will be prudent to listen to his offers of
+peace."
+
+
+
+
+XIII. INDIAN FIGHTERS.
+
+In the long war with the Indians, the great battles were nearly all
+fought within the region that afterwards became our state, and the
+smaller battles went on there pretty constantly. The first force on
+the scale of an army sent against the Ohio tribes was that of Colonel
+Bouquet in 1766; but, as we have seen, the chief object of this was
+to treat for the return of their white captives. In 1774 Lord Dunmore
+marched with three thousand Virginians to destroy the Indian towns on
+the Scioto in Pickaway County. He cannot be said to have led his men,
+who believed in neither his courage nor his good faith, and who thought
+that he was more anxious to treat with the savages for the advantage
+of England in the Revolutionary War, which he knew was coming, than to
+attack their capital. This was that Old Chillicothe, which has been so
+often mentioned before, and here Dunmore made peace with the Indians,
+instead of punishing them, as the backwoodsmen expected. The feeling
+among them was so bitter that one of them fired through Dunmore's tent
+where he sat with two chiefs, hoping to kill all three. He missed, but
+he easily escaped among his comrades, who looked upon Dunmore as an
+enemy of their country and a traitor to their cause.
+
+Their spirit, both lawless and fearless, was the spirit of that race of
+Indian Fighters, as they were called, which grew up on the border in
+the war ending with Wayne's victory. It led them into countless acts of
+daring and into many acts of cruelty, and the story of their adventures
+is too bloody to be fully told. But unless something of it is told we
+cannot have a true notion of what the life of our backwoodsmen was.
+We have seen what they could do when they were at their worst in the
+Gnadenhutten massacre; but we cannot understand them unless we realize
+that they not only held all life cheap, but held the life of an Indian
+no dearer than that of a wolf.
+
+Belmont County was the scene of two exploits of Lewis Wetzel, perhaps
+the most famous of these Indian fighters. One day he went home with a
+young man whom he met while hunting, and they found the cabin burnt and
+the whole family murdered except a girl who had lived with them, and
+whom the young man was in love with. They started on the trail of
+the Indians who had done the cruel deed, and came up with them after
+nightfall sleeping round their camp-fire. The girl was awake, crying
+and lamenting, and Wetzel had great ado to keep her lover from firing at
+once upon the Indians. But he made him wait for daylight, so that they
+could be sure of their aim; and then at the first light of dawn, they
+each chose his mark and fired. Each killed his Indian, but two others
+escaped into the woods, while the lover rushed, knife in hand, to free
+the girl. Wetzel made after the Indians, firing into the air to draw
+them out of their concealment. Then he turned, loading as he ran, and
+wheeled about and shot the Indian nearest him. He fled again, dodging
+from tree to tree till his gun was reloaded, when he shot the last
+Indian left. He took their scalps, and got home with the girl and her
+lover unhurt.
+
+In 1782, together with one of Crawford's men, he fell in with a party
+of forty Indians about two miles from St. Clairsville. Both sides
+fired; Wetzel killed one of the Indians, but his friend was wounded and
+promptly scalped, while four of the Indians followed Wetzel. He turned,
+shot the foremost, and ran on, loading his rifle. The next was so close
+upon him that when Wetzel turned again, the Indian caught the muzzle
+of his gun. After a fearful struggle Wetzel got it against the Indian's
+breast, pulled the trigger, and killed him. The remaining two followed
+him a mile farther, and then Wetzel shot one of them as he was crossing
+a piece of open ground. The last left of the Indians stopped with a
+yell, and Wetzel heard him say as he turned back, "No catch that man;
+gun always loaded."
+
+Wetzel had fought Indians nearly all his life. When he was a boy of
+fourteen they attacked his father's cabin in Virginia, and Wetzel
+was wounded before he was taken prisoner, with a younger brother, and
+carried into the Ohio wilderness. One night the Indians forgot to tie
+their captives, and the two boys escaped. Lewis returned to the camp,
+after they had stolen away, for a pair of moccasins, and again for his
+father's rifle, which the Indians had carried off. They followed the
+boys, but the young Wetzels got safely back to the Ohio, and crossed the
+river on a raft which they made of logs.
+
+[Illustration: Wetzel, Indian Fighter 122]
+
+In 1786 the settlers of Wheeling, who had been troubled by Indians,
+offered a purse of a hundred dollars to the man who should first bring
+in a scalp. A party crossed the Ohio, but after some days turned back,
+leaving Wetzel alone in the woods, where he roamed about looking for
+Indians. The second morning he came upon one sleeping, and drove his
+knife through his heart. Then he went home with his scalp, and got the
+reward.
+
+One of the tricks of the savages was to imitate the cry, or call, of the
+wild turkey and then to shoot the hunter who came looking for the bird.
+Wetzel was one day in the woods when this call came to his ear from the
+mouth of a cave, a place where several whites had been found scalped.
+He watched till the feathered tuft of an Indiana head appeared from
+the cave. The call of the wild turkey sounded, and at the same time the
+sharp crack of Wetzel's rifle noted the Indian's death.
+
+It was Wetzel's habit in the autumn to go on a long hunt into the Ohio
+country. Once he went as far as the Muskingum, some ninety miles from
+Wheeling, when he came on a camp of four Indians. He crept upon them
+with no weapon but his knife, which he drove through the skulls of two
+as they lay asleep. The two others struggled to their feet stupefied;
+Wetzel killed one of them, but the fourth escaped in the shadow of the
+woods. When Wetzel returned and was asked what his luck in hunting had
+been, he said, "Not much; I treed four Indians, but one got away."
+
+These were acts of war, but they were very like mere murders, and one
+of Wetzel's exploits could hardly be called anything but murder. General
+Har-mar in 1779 had invited the Indians to come and make peace with him
+in the fort near where Marietta now stands. Wetzel and another Indian
+fighter lay in wait for the envoys who passed from the tribes to the
+general, and in pure wantonness, shot one. He then took refuge with his
+friends at Mingo Bottom, where the officer sent by Harmar to arrest
+him, dared not even attempt it. Wetzel was the hero and darling of the
+border, where the notion of punishing a man for shooting an Indian was
+laughed at. But after a while he was taken, and lodged, heavily ironed,
+in the fort. He sent for the general and asked him to give him up, with
+a tomahawk, to a large band of armed Indians present, and let him fight
+for his life with them. Of course Harmar could not do this, but Wetzel
+won upon him so far that the general had his fetters removed, leaving
+only the manacles on his wrists, and allowed him to walk about outside
+the fort. He made a sudden dash for the woods; the guards fired upon
+him, but Wetzel got safely away; and at a distant point he reached the
+Ohio. He could not swim, with his hands in irons, but by good luck he
+saw a friend on the Virginia shore, who came in answer to his signs and
+set him over in his canoe. Later the soldiers found him in a tavern
+at Marysville, and arrested him again. He was taken to the fort at
+Cincinnati, where Harmar was now in command, but he was released by a
+judge of the court just in time to save the fort from an attack by
+the backwoodsmen, who were furious that Wetzel should be so persecuted
+simply for killing an Indian.
+
+One of the stories told of Wetzel's skill in Indian warfare relates to
+an adventure he had after his escape from hanging by the soldiers. He
+was coming home at the end of a hunt in the Ohio woods when he saw an
+Indian lifting up his gun to fire. Each sprang behind a tree, and each
+waited patiently for the other to expose himself. At last Wetzel put his
+bearskin cap on his ramrod, and pushed it a little beyond the edge of
+his shelter. The Indian took it for his enemy's head and fired. Before
+he could load again Wetzel was upon him, and his end had come.
+
+It is not easy for us at this day to understand how a man so
+blood-stained as this should be by no means the worst man of the border.
+Wetzel is said to have been even exemplary in his life apart from his
+Indian killing, which, indeed, was accounted no wrong, but rather a
+virtue by his savage white friends. In person he might well take their
+rude fancy. He was tall, full-chested, and broad-shouldered; his dark
+face was deeply pitted with smallpox; his hair, which he was very proud
+of, fell to his knees when loose; his black eyes, when he was roused,
+shone with dangerous fire. He was silent and shy with strangers, but the
+life of any party of comrades. It is not certainly known how or where he
+died. Some say that he went South, and ended his stormy life quietly at
+Natchez; others that he went West, and remained a woodsman to the last,
+hunting wild beasts and killing wild men.
+
+[Illustration: Bearskin Cap on a Ramrod 125]
+
+Lewis Wetzel had two brothers only less famous than himself in the
+backwoods warfare, and more than once Indian fighting seems to have run
+in families. Adam Poe and Andrew Poe were brothers whose names have
+come down in the story of deadly combats with the savages. They are most
+renowned for their heroic struggle with a party of seven Wyandots near
+the mouth of Little Yellow Creek, in 1782. The Wyandots, led by a great
+warrior named Big Foot, had fallen suddenly on a settlement just below
+Fort Pitt, killed one old man in his cabin, and begun their retreat with
+what booty they could gather. Eight borderers, the two Poes among them,
+followed in hot haste across the river into the Ohio country, where the
+next morning Andrew Poe came suddenly on Big Foot and a small warrior
+talking together by their raft at the water's edge. They stood with
+their guns cocked, and Poe aimed at Big Foot; but his piece missed fire.
+The Indians turned at the click of the lock, and Poe, who was too close
+to them for any chance of escape, leaped upon them both and threw them
+to the ground together. The little warrior freed himself, and got his
+tomahawk from the raft to brain Poe, whom he left in deadly clutch with
+Big Foot. Twice he struck, but Poe managed each time, by twisting and
+dodging, to keep his head away from the hatchet, and as the warrior
+struck the third time, Poe, though badly hurt on the arm by one of
+his blows, wrenched himself free from Big Foot, caught up one of the
+Indians' guns, and shot the little warrior through the breast. Then
+Big Foot seized him again, and they floundered together into the water,
+where each tried to drown the other. Poe held Big Foot under the water
+so long that he thought he must be dead, but the moment he loosed his
+hold upon his scalp lock, the Wyandot renewed the fight. They presently
+found themselves in water beyond their depths, and let go to swim for
+their lives. The Indian reached the shore first, and got hold of one of
+the guns to shoot Poe, but luckily for Poe it was the gun he had fired
+in killing the little warrior.
+
+Adam had heard the shot, and he now came hurrying up. His gun was empty,
+too, and it was a question Whether he or Big Foot should load first: he
+shot the Indian as he was lifting his gun to fire. But Big Foot was
+not killed, and Andrew shouted to Adam not to mind him, but to keep the
+Indian from rolling himself into the water. Big Foot was too quick for
+them: he got into the current, which whirled him away, and so saved his
+scalp in death. About the same time another of the party who came up
+took Andrew Poe for an Indian and shot him in the shoulder. Poe got
+well of his wounds and lived for many years, proud of his fight with Big
+Foot, who was a generous foe, and had often befriended white captives
+among his tribe.
+
+It is told of Adam Poe that five Indians, all rather drunk, once came to
+his cabin, and tried to force the door open. He sent his wife with the
+children out into the cornfield behind the house, remarking, "There is a
+fight and fun ahead," but when he saw the state the Indians were in, he
+did not fire at them. He fell upon them with his fists, knocked them all
+down, and then threw them one after another over the fence, and the fun
+was ended.
+
+One of the hunters detailed from Wayne's command to supply the officers
+with game while the army lay at Greenville in 1793 was the Indian
+fighter, Josiah Hunt, who died a peaceful Methodist many years
+afterwards. When he passed a winter in the woods he had to build a fire
+to keep from freezing, and yet guard against letting the slightest gleam
+of light be seen by a prowling foe. So he dug a hole six or seven inches
+deep with his tomahawk, filled it with the soft lining of dead oak bark,
+and with his flint started a fire. He left two holes at the edges to
+breathe the flame; then covered the pit with earth, spread brush over
+it, and seated himself on the heap, with his blanket drawn over his
+head, and dozed through the night. The Indians had a great honor and
+admiration for him, and when they came to make peace at Greenville,
+after Fallen Timbers, they all wanted to see Captain Hunt. "Great man,
+Captain Hunt," they said. "Great warrior--good hunting man-Indian no can
+kill," and they told him they had tried to find out the secret of his
+fire, and catch him off his guard so that they could get his scalp,
+which they felt would have been the highest distinction they could have
+achieved, next to getting General Wayne's scalp. He was indeed both
+hunted and hunter. He never fired at a deer without first putting a
+bullet in his mouth to reload for an Indian, who might be about to fire
+on him. When he skinned a deer, he planted his back against a tree, and
+stood his rifle by his side; from time to time he stopped and
+listened for the slightest noise that hinted danger. His life had its
+disappointments as well as its perils. Once he saw three Indians whom he
+might easily have killed at one shot if he could have got them in range,
+but they persisted in walking Indian file. If he fired and killed only
+one, the other two would have killed him; so he was obliged to let them
+all go. Captain Hunt was a quiet, modest man, very frank and sincere,
+and seems never to have boasted of his exploits; we have no means of
+knowing whether he was glad or sorry that those Indians got away in
+safety. Probably he was not very glad; for though the fighters on both
+sides could admire, they could never spare one another.
+
+The Indian fighters were commoner in the southern and eastern parts of
+Ohio than in the north, but there was at least one whose chief exploit
+had the north for its scene. Captain Samuel Brady, in 1780, gathered a
+number of his neighbors and pursued a retreating war party of Indians
+from the Ohio as far as the Cuyahoga, near Ravenna. Here he found that
+the savages far outnumbered his force, and he decided that it would be
+better for him to retreat in his turn, and he bade each of his men look
+out for himself. He discovered that the Indians were pressing him hard
+with the purpose of taking him alive and glutting many an old grudge
+against him by torture. But he knew his ground, for he had often hunted
+there with them in friendlier days, and he saw a chance for his life at
+a point where another man would have despaired. This was where the river
+narrowed to a gorge twenty feet wide, with walls of precipitous rock. As
+he neared this chasm in his flight, Brady gathered himself for the
+leap and cleared it. He caught at some low bushes where he alighted and
+pulled himself up the steep, while the Indians stood stupefied. They had
+now no hope of taking him alive, and they all fired upon him. One bullet
+wounded him badly in the hip, but he managed to swim a pond which he
+came to, and to hide himself behind a log near the shore. When the
+Indians came up and saw the blood on its surface, they decided that he
+was drowned, and gave up the chase. Some of them stood on the very log
+that hid him while they talked over his probable fate, and then they
+left him to make his long way home unmolested.
+
+Duncan McArthur, an early governor of Ohio, though not an Indian fighter
+like these others, was in many fights with the Indians. In the summer of
+1794 he was hunting deer in the hills near the mouth of the Scioto, when
+two Indians fully armed came in sight. McArthur was waiting for the deer
+behind a screen or blind near the salt lick which they frequented, and
+he took aim at one of the Indians and shot him. The other did not stir
+till McArthur broke from his covert and ran. He plunged heedlessly into
+the top of a fallen tree, and before he could disentangle himself, he
+heard the crack of the Indian's rifle, and the bullet hissed close
+to his ear. He freed himself and ran, followed now by several other
+Indians, but he managed to distance them all and reached the Ohio River
+in safety.
+
+It was war to the death between the red and white borderers. Neither
+spared the other, except in some rare mood of caprice or pity. A life
+granted on either side meant perhaps many lives lost, and the foes vied
+with one another in being the first to shed the blood which seems, as
+you read their savage annals, to stain every acre of the beautiful Ohio
+country.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. LATER CAPTIVITIES.
+
+The Indians seem to have kept on carrying the whites into captivity,
+to the very end of the war, which closed with the Greenville treaty
+of 1795. As they had always done, they adopted some of them into their
+tribes and devoted others to torture. Nothing more clearly shows how
+little they realized that their power was coming to an end, and that
+they could no longer live their old life, or follow their immemorial
+customs.
+
+The first captive in Ohio, of whom there is any record, was Mary Harris;
+she had been stolen from her home in New England when a child, by the
+French Indians, and was found at White Woman Creek in Coshocton County,
+about the year 1750. When the last captive was taken is not certainly
+known, but two white boys were captured so late as 1791, and one of
+these was adopted by the Delawares in Auglaize County. His name was
+Brickell, and he was carried off from the neighborhood of Pittsburg when
+nine years old. He wrote a narrative of his life among the Indians, and
+gave an account of his parting with them which is very touching. After
+the first exchange of prisoners Brickell was left because there was
+no Indian among the whites to exchange for him, but later his adoptive
+father went with him to Fort Defiance, and gave him up. Brickell had
+hunted with the rest of the children, and shared in all their sports and
+pleasures, and they now clung about him crying, when their father told
+them he must go with him to the fort. They asked him if he was going to
+leave them, and he could only answer that he did not know. At the
+fort, his Indian father, Whingy Pooshies, bade him stand up before the
+officers, and then spoke to him.
+
+"My son, these are men the same color as yourself, and some of your kin
+may be here, or they may be a great way off. You have lived a long time
+with us. I call on you to say if I have not been a father to you, if I
+have not used you as a father would a son."
+
+"You have used me as well as a father could use a son," said Brickell.
+
+"I am glad you say so," Whingy Pooshies returned. "You have lived long
+with me; you have hunted for me; but your treaty says you must be free.
+If you choose to go with the people of your own color, I have no right
+to say a word; if you choose to stay with me, your people have no right
+to speak. Now reflect on it, and take your choice, and tell us as soon
+as you make up your mind."
+
+Brickell says that he thought of the children he had left crying, and of
+all the Indians whom he loved; but he remembered his own people at last,
+and he answered, "I will go with my kin."
+
+Then Whingy Pooshies said, "I have reared you; I have taught you to
+hunt; you are a good hunter; you are better to me than my own sons. I am
+now getting old and I cannot hunt. I thought you would be a support to
+my old age. I leaned on you as on a staff. Now it is broken; you are
+going to leave me; and I have no right to say a word, but I am ruined."
+
+[Illustration: Brickell leaves his Indian Father 133]
+
+He sank into his seat, weeping, and Brickell wept too; then they parted
+and never saw each other again.
+
+One of the later captivities was that of Israel Donolson, who has told
+the story himself. The night before he was captured, he says that he
+dreamed of Indians, and took it as a sign of coming trouble; but in
+the morning, the 22d of April, 1791, he went prospecting for land with
+another young surveyor, named Lytte, and a friend named Tittle. They
+worked together along the Ohio River in Adams County till they came
+to one of the ancient works of the Mound Builders. The surveyors were
+joking Tittle, and telling him what a fine place that would be for him
+to build his house, when they saw a party of Frenchmen in two canoes.
+The Frenchmen turned out to be Indians, who landed and instantly gave
+chase to the white men. Donolson tripped and fell, and three warriors
+were quickly upon him. He offered no resistance; they helped him up,
+and had leisure to secure him in full sight of the blockhouse on the
+Kentucky shore, where they could all see men moving about, but Donolson
+could not call to them for help. His captors pushed off with him
+northward. The next morning it rained, and one of the Indians took
+Donolson's hat; he complained to a large warrior, who gave him a blanket
+cap, and helped him through the swollen streams. When they killed a
+bear, and wanted to make their captive carry the meat, he flung it down;
+and then his big friend carried it for him.
+
+One day an Indian, while they were resting, built a little fence of
+sticks, and planted some grains of corn inside of it, saying, "Squaw!"
+as a hint to Donolson that he should be put to work with the women. When
+they got to the Shawnee camp, they dressed his hair in Indian fashion,
+and put a tin jewel in his nose, and upon the whole they treated him
+kindly enough. But almost every day he saw war parties setting off
+for Kentucky, or coming back with scalps and horses, and he was always
+watching for a chance to escape. One night he encamped with two guards
+who had bound him as usual with a rope of bark. He gnawed at it all
+night long, and just at daybreak he freed himself. After his first dash
+he stopped to put on his moccasins, and knew that he was missed, by the
+terrific yells that the Indians were giving. He ran on, and to hide his
+trail kept as much as he could on fallen trees. At ten o'clock he hid
+between two logs and slept till dark; then he started again, and passed
+that night in a hollow tree. The day following he came to the Miami
+River, and tried to drift down its current on a raft which he made of
+logs tied together with bark, but he was soon forced to the shore again.
+He broke his long fast on two eggs he found in a wild turkey's nest;
+they proved to have each two yolks, and he made them last for two days.
+In the woods he caught a horse and tried to ride it with a bark halter;
+but the halter rubbed a sore on its lip, and the horse threw him, and
+hurt him so badly that he lay insensible for a time; then he rose up
+and pressed on, but very slowly, for his feet were full of thorns. The
+twelfth day after his capture he heard the sound of an ax, and found
+himself in the neighborhood of Fort Washington, or Cincinnati.
+
+In 1793, the year before Wayne's victory, Andrew Ellison was taken
+by the Indians in a clearing near his cabin in Adams County, and was
+hurried off before his family knew that anything had happened. They
+roused the neighborhood, and the Indians were hotly pursued, but they
+got away with their prisoner, and made swiftly off to Upper Sandusky,
+where they forced him to run the gantlet. He was a heavy man, not fleet
+of foot, and he was terribly beaten; but he got through alive, and at
+Detroit a British officer ransomed him for a hundred dollars. By that
+time prisoners must have been getting cheap: it was perhaps more and
+more difficult to hold them.
+
+Two boys, John Johnson, thirteen years old, and Henry Johnson, eleven,
+were captured in 1788 near their home at Beach Bottom in Monroe County.
+They were cracking nuts in the woods, and when the Indians came upon
+them the boys thought that they were two of their neighbors. They were
+seized and hurried away, one Indian going before and one following the
+boys, who told them their father treated them badly, and tried to make
+their captors believe they were glad to be leaving home. The Indians
+spent the day in a vain attempt to steal horses, and stopped to pass
+the night only four miles from the place where they had taken the boys.
+After supper they lay down with the prisoners between them, and when
+they supposed the boys were asleep one of the Indians went and stretched
+himself on the other side of the fire. Presently he began snoring, and
+John rose, cocked one of the guns, and left it with Henry aimed at this
+Indian's head, while he took his station with a tomahawk held over the
+head of the other. Henry fired and John struck at the same time; neither
+Indian was killed at once, but both were too badly hurt to prevent the
+boys' escape, and the brothers found their way to the settlement by
+daybreak. The neighbors who returned to their camp with them found the
+body of the Indian who had been tomahawked, but the other had vanished.
+Years afterwards a skeleton with a gun was discovered in the woods,
+where he must have crept after he was shot.
+
+In the autumn of 1792 Samuel Davis and William Campbell set out from
+Massie's Station, now Manchester, to trap beaver on the Big Sandy. One
+night as they lay asleep beside their camp fire they were roused by a
+voice saying in broken English, "Come, come; get up, get up!" and they
+woke to find themselves in the clutches of a large party of Indians
+returning from a raid into Virginia. The Indians bound their captives
+and started, driving before them a herd of stolen horses. They crossed
+the Ohio country, and pushed on toward Sandusky, for they were Shawnees.
+At night they tied each prisoner with buffalo thongs and made these fast
+to the waist of two Indians, who lay down one on either side of him, and
+quieted him with blows if he became restive. At daylight the captives
+were untied, but they were warned that they would be instantly killed
+if they attempted to escape. Davis was in dread of being burned at
+Sandusky, and as the Indians, encumbered with their booty, made only
+ten or twelve miles a day, the terror had full time to grow upon him. At
+last one morning just before dawn he woke one of the Indians beside
+him and asked to be untied; he was answered with a blow of the savage's
+fist. He waited a moment, and then woke the other guard, who lifted his
+head, and seeing some of his people building a fire, released Davis.
+
+It was still too dark for any of them to get a good shot at him if he
+made a dash from their midst, and Davis decided to try for life and
+liberty. He knocked a large warrior before him into the fire, bounded
+over him, burst through the group around him, and before they could
+seize their rifles, which were all stacked together, he had vanished in
+the shadows of the forest. They followed him, whooping and yelling, but
+none could draw a bead on him, and not a shot was fired. One Indian
+was so near that Davis fancied he felt his grasp at times, but he fell
+behind, and Davis kept on. When he had distanced them all, he stopped
+to tear up his waistcoat, and wrap his feet, naked and bleeding from the
+sharp stones which had cut them in his wild flight, and then hurried
+on toward the Ohio. Three days without food or fire, in the cold of the
+early winter, passed before he reached the river, eight or ten miles
+below the mouth of the Scioto. He then saw a large boat coming down the
+stream, but his troubles did not end with this joyful sight. One of
+the dreadful facts of the dreadful time was the frequent deception of
+boatmen by Indians and renegades who pretended to be escaping prisoners,
+and who lured them to their destruction by piteous appeals for help. The
+boatmen now refused to land for Davis; they told him they had heard
+too many stories like his, and they kept on down the stream, while he
+followed wearily along the shore. At last he entreated them to row in
+a little nearer, so that he could swim out to them. They consented to
+this, and he plunged into the icy water, and was taken on board just as
+his strength was spent.
+
+In 1782, John Alder, then a child of eight years, was captured in Wythe
+County, Virginia, by a party of Min-goes, who at the same time wounded
+and killed his brother. They already had two prisoners, Mrs. Martin, the
+wife of a neighbor, and her little one four or five years old: it proved
+troublesome, on their rapid march across the Ohio country to their
+village on Mad River, and they tomahawked and scalped it. The next
+morning little Alder was somewhat slow in rising from his breakfast
+when bidden, and on the ground he saw the shadow of an arm with a lifted
+tomahawk. He glanced upward and found an Indian standing over him,
+who presently began to feel of Alder's thick black hair. He afterwards
+confessed that he had been about to kill him, but when he met his
+pleasant smile he could not strike, and then he thought that a boy with
+hair of that color would make a good Indian, and so spared him.
+
+At the Mingo village Alder was made to run the gantlet between lines of
+children armed with switches, but he was not much hurt, and he was now
+taken into the tribe. He was given to a Mingo family, and the mother
+washed him and dressed him in the Indian costume. They were kind to
+him, but for a month he was very homesick, and used to go every day to a
+large walnut tree near the town and cry for the friends and home he had
+lost. After he had learned the Mingo language he began in time to be
+more contented. He had no complaint to make of any of the family, except
+one sister, who despised him as a prisoner, and treated him like a
+slave. Another sister and her husband were his special friends, and he
+relates that when he used to sit up with the Indians round their camp
+fire, listening to their stories, he would sometimes drowse; then this
+gentle sister and her husband would take him up in their arms and carry
+him to bed, and he would hear them saying, "Poor fellow! We have sat up
+too long for him, and he has fallen asleep on the cold ground."
+
+About a year after he was adopted, Alder met that poor mother, whose
+little one the Indians had cruelly murdered before her eyes. "When she
+saw me, she came smiling, and asked if it was me. I told her it was. She
+asked me how I had been. I told her I had been very unwell, for I had
+had fever and ague for a long time. So she took me off to a log, and
+there we sat down; and she combed my head, and asked a great many
+questions about how I lived, and if I didn't want to see my mother and
+little brothers. I told her I should be glad to see them, but never
+expected to see them again. We took many a cry together, and when we
+parted, took our last and final farewell, for I never saw her again."
+
+Alder always remained delicate, and could not thrive on the Indians'
+fare of meat and hominy, with no bread or salt; of sugar and honey there
+was plenty; but he missed the things he was used to at home. When he
+grew older he was given a gun, and sent hunting, and whenever he came
+back with game the Indians praised his skill and promised him he should
+be a great hunter some day. He continued with them until the peace of
+1795, which followed Wayne's victory, and even then he stayed for a time
+in the region where he had dwelt so long. He had married a squaw,
+and had become a complete Indian, so that the first settlers in his
+neighborhood had to teach him to speak English. But he did not live
+happily with his Indian wife; they agreed to part, and then Alder
+thought of going back to his own people. He reached the house of one of
+his brothers in the neighborhood of his old home, one Sunday afternoon,
+and found several of his brothers and sisters there, and his mother with
+them. They could scarcely be persuaded that it was their son and brother
+come back to them, and he had to tell them of some things that no one
+else could know before they would believe him. His old, white-haired
+mother whom he remembered in her youth with a "head as black as a crow,"
+was the first to take him in her arms, and she said, as she wept over
+him, "How you have grown! I dreamed that you had come to see me, but
+you was a little _ornary_-looking fellow, and I would not own you for my
+son; but now I find I was mistaken, that it is entirely the reverse, and
+I am proud to own you for my son."
+
+[Illustration: Alder returns to his Family 141]
+
+In 1792, Moses Hewit was taken near Neil's Station, on the Little
+Kanawha, by three Indians, who at once pushed off with him towards
+Sandusky. They used him very kindly, and shared fully with him the wild
+honey which they found in the bee trees, and invited him to take part in
+their foot races and other sports. He found that he could outrun two of
+them, and he resolved to try for his liberty, though he kept a cheerful
+outside with them, and seemed contented with his lot. One day they left
+him tied hand and foot and fastened to two small trees while they went
+on a hunt, but he contrived to free himself, and made his escape with
+their whole stock of provisions, two small pieces of venison. He struck
+out for the settlements on the Muskingum, and the first night his
+captors passed so near him in pursuit that he might have touched them
+in the darkness. Nine days later he came in sight of a station on the
+Muskingum, so spent with hunger and fatigue that he could not halloo to
+the garrison. He had nothing on his wasted and bleeding body, which was
+all torn by briers and brushwood, except a cloth about his loins, and
+he was afraid of being mistaken and shot for an Indian. He waited till
+nightfall and then crept to the station, where his presence was unknown
+till a young man of his acquaintance caught sight of his face in the
+firelight, and called out, "Here is 'Hewit!"
+
+Captain Charles Builderback and his wife were surprised by a party of
+Indians while they were looking for cattle in the Ohio country, near
+Wheeling, in 1789. Mrs. Builderback hid herself, but the Indians had
+captured her husband, and now they forced him to call out to her. She
+hesitated to answer, thinking of the children they had left at home in
+the cabin which she could see across the river, and knowing how useless
+it would be to give herself up. But he called again, saying that if she
+surrendered, it might save his life. Then she showed herself, and
+was seized and hurried away by one band of savages, while her husband
+remained with the others. A few days later these came up and showed her
+his scalp: he was one of the assassins of the Gnadenhiitten Indians,
+and he was doomed as soon as they knew his name. She was taken to their
+towns on the Great Miami, where she lived nine months, drudging with the
+squaws and suffering from the rude and filthy life of the savages, but
+not ill-treated. Then the commandant at Cincinnati ransomed her and sent
+her home to her two orphan children.
+
+So lately as 1812 two little girls were stolen from their fathers'
+houses in Preble County by the Indians. They could not be traced, but
+twenty-five years later, one of them, named Parker, was found living
+with her savage husband in Indiana. She refused then to go home with her
+father, saying coldly that she should be ridiculed there for her Indian
+customs.
+
+
+
+
+XV. INDIAN HEROES AND SAGES.
+
+The Ohio Indians were of almost as mixed origin as the white people
+of Ohio, and if they had qualities beyond those of any other group of
+American savages, it was from much the same causes which have given the
+Ohioans of our day distinction as citizens. They made the Ohio country
+their home by a series of chances, and they defended it against the
+French, the English, and Americans in turn, because it had bounds which
+seemed to form the natural frontier between them and the Europeans.
+
+It is now believed that before the coming of our race there was a
+balance of power between those two great North American nations, the
+Iroquois and the Algonquins, and that our wars and intrigues destroyed
+this balance, which was never restored, and put an end to all hope of
+advance in the native race. Whether this is true or not, it is certain
+that the hostilities between the tribes raged down to our day, and
+that these seem to have continued if not begun through one family, the
+Algonquins, siding with the French, and the other family, the Iroquois,
+siding with the English. The Algonquins were most powerful in New
+England and Canada, and the Iroquois in New York. Their struggle ended
+in the overthrow of the Algonquins in the regions bordering on the
+English colonies, where, as has been told, a great branch of that
+people who called themselves the Lenni-lenape, and whom we called the
+Delawares, dwelt in a sort of vassalage to the Iroquois.
+
+In Ohio, however, these families, so long broken elsewhere by their
+feuds, united in a common fear and hate of the white men. Many of the
+Ohio Indians were Delawares, but the Miamis were Iroquois, while the
+Wyandots again were Hurons, one of the finest and ablest of the Iroquois
+nation. They ceased to make war upon each other, and in their union the
+strongest traits of both were blended. Their character appears at its'
+best, I think, in Tecaughretanego, the adoptive brother of James Smith,
+and in the great Mingo chief, Logan.
+
+Of Tecaughretanego, his unselfishness, his piety, his common sense, his
+wisdom, we already know something from Smith's narrative, which I wish
+every boy and girl might read; and of Logan's noble spirit we have had
+a glimpse in the story of Kenton's captivity. He was the son of
+Shikellimy, a Cayuga chief who lived at Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and who
+named him after James Logan, the Secretary of the Province. Shikellimy
+was a convert of the Moravian preachers, and it is thought that Logan
+himself was baptized in the Christian faith. He spent the greater
+portion of his early life in Pennsylvania, and he took no part in the
+war between the French and English, except to do what he could for
+peace. When he came to Ohio, he dwelt for a time at Mingo Bottom in
+Jefferson County, the rendezvous of the assassins who marched against
+Gnadenhiitten under Williamson, and of the assassins who were beaten
+back from Sandusky under Crawford. Here, as before, Logan was the friend
+of the white man, and it was not till the murder of his father, brother,
+and sister, cried to him for vengeance, that he made war upon them.
+
+His kindred were of a small party of Indians whom some Virginians lured
+across the Ohio near the mouth of Yellow Creek in 1774. On the Virginia
+side the murderers made three of the Indians drunk and tomahawked them,
+and when they had tricked the others into discharging their guns at
+a mark, and so had them defenseless, they ruthlessly shot them down.
+Logan's sister, who was the only woman in the party, tried to escape,
+but a bullet cut short her flight, and she died praying her murderers to
+have mercy on the babe she held in her arms. They spared it, and he
+who tells the cruel tale saw it the next day in his own mother's arms
+smiling up into her face, while she fed and fondled it.
+
+The news came to Logan while he was speaking at a council of the
+Indians, and urging them to make peace with the whites. He instantly
+changed his plea; he lifted up his hatchet, and yowed never to lay it
+down till he had avenged himself tenfold. He kept his word, and that
+summer thirty scalps and prisoners bore witness to his fury.
+
+But it was a short-lived impulse of a nature essentially so good that it
+could not long keep the memory of even such an injury. In this very war,
+or this out-Durst of the long Indian war, Logan showed himself as before
+the friend of the white men. He had pity on many of the captives he
+made, and when he could he tried to move other captors to pity. Major
+William Robinson, who was one of Logan's prisoners, tells how he was
+surprised, together with two friends, by a party of Indians who fired on
+them. Robinson ran with a savage in hot chase behind him, who called
+to him in English, "Stop; I won't hurt you." "Yes, you will," Robinson
+retorted. "No, I won't," the Indian insisted; "but if you don't stop,
+I'll shoot you." Robinson fell over a log, and the Indian seized him.
+It was Logan, who told him not to be frightened for he should be adopted
+into his own tribe when they reached his village. There he was made to
+run the gantlet, but Logan instructed him how to manage so that he
+got through without harm. Robinson was then tied to the stake and the
+Indians prepared to burn him. It was the summer after the murder of
+Logan's kindred, and they had already whipped one Virginian to death
+merely because his brother was present at the massacre. They could not
+forgive, but Logan rose before the council and pleaded with all his
+eloquence for Robinson's life. Three times the captive was untied
+from the stake, and three times tied to it again before Logan's words
+prevailed. At last the great chief was allowed to lay the belt of wampum
+on the prisoner for a sign that he was adopted. Then he gave him in
+charge to a young Indian, saying, "This is your cousin; you are to go
+home with him, and he will take care of you."
+
+But still the sense of his wrong, and the hunger for revenge, gnawed at
+Logan's heart, and one day he came to Robinson with a piece of paper
+and bade him write a letter for him. He said he meant to leave it in
+the cabin of a white man which he was going, to attack, and it was
+afterwards found there tied to a war club. He made Robinson write
+it several times before he thought the words strong enough. It was
+addressed to the man whom Logan thought guilty of the death of his
+kindred, but who was afterwards known to have been not even present at
+their murder.
+
+     "Captain Cresap: What did you kill my people on
+     Yellow Creek for? The white people killed my kin at
+     Conestoga, a great while ago, and I thought nothing
+     of that. But you killed my kin again on Yellow Creek,
+     and took my cousin prisoner. Then I thought I must
+     kill, too. I have been three times to war since then;
+     but the Indians are not angry; only myself.
+
+     "July 21, 1774.
+
+     "Captain John Logan."
+
+Both the matter and the language of this letter are so like those of
+Logan's famous speech, that it is clear he must often have thought his
+wrongs over in the same terms, brooding upon them with an aching
+heart, but not with hate so much as grief. The speech was made at the
+Chillicothe town where Lord Dunmore treated with the Ohio tribes for
+peace in the August after Logan had written his letter, but it was not
+spoken in the council. Logan held aloof from the council, and Dunmore
+sent to his cabin for him. It is said by some that his messenger was
+the great renegade Simon Girty, who had not yet turned against his own
+people, and was then, with his friend Simon Kenton, a scout in Dunmore's
+service. Others say that the messenger was a young man named Gibson, but
+whoever he was, Logan met him at the door, and coming out into the woods
+sat down under a tree which was long known as Logan's Elm. Here, with a
+burst of tears, he told the story of his wrongs in language which cannot
+be forgotten as long as men have hearts to thrill for others' sorrows.
+
+[Illustration: Logan's Elm 149]
+
+"I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan's cabin and
+I gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked and I gave him
+not clothing. During the course of the last long and bloody war Logan
+remained in his tent an advocate of peace. Nay, such was my love for the
+whites that those of my own country pointed at me as they passed, and
+said, 'Logan is the friend of the white man.' I had even thought to
+live with you but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the
+last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, cut off all the relatives of
+Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop
+of my blood in the veins of any human creature. This called on me for
+revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my
+vengeance. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. Yet do not
+harbor the thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear.
+He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for
+Logan? Not one."
+
+This speech, or rather this message, which Logan sent to Lord Dunmore,
+has come down to us in two forms, one which Dunmore's officers wrote out
+from the report of the message, and one which Thomas Jefferson framed
+upon it. They do not differ greatly, and I have given Jefferson's
+version here, because it best expresses the noble mind of a noble man,
+a savage, indeed, but far less savage than many of the white men of that
+day or any day. A pioneer of Western Pennsylvania, William Brown, who
+afterwards became a judge of the Mifflin County courts, calls him "the
+best specimen of humanity he ever met with, _white_ or _red_," He first
+saw him in the woods, while stooping to drink at a spring. The figure of
+a tall Indian showed itself to him in the water, and he sprang for
+his rifle, but the Indian knocked the priming out of his own gun, and
+offered his hand. It was Logan, and he guided Brown to the hunting camp
+of another white man, with whom he afterwards visited Logan's camp.
+There they all shot at a mark for a dollar each round, and Logan lost.
+A deerskin was worth a dollar, and Logan offered five skins for his five
+failures. Brown's friend refused them, saying they were his guests
+and had shot with him merely for a trial of skill. Logan answered with
+dignity, "Me try to make you shoot your best; me gentlemen, and me take
+your dollar if me beat," and he would not allow the victor even to give
+him a horn of powder in return.
+
+A lovely story was told by the daughter of Judge Brown concerning Logan,
+who was one day at her father's camp when her mother happened to regret
+that she had no shoes for her little one then just beginning to walk.
+Logan said nothing, but shortly after he came and asked the mother to
+let the child spend the day with him at his camp. The mother trembled,
+but she knew the delicacy of Logan, and she would not wound him by
+showing fear of him. He took the child away, and the long hours passed
+till nightfall. Then she saw the great chief coming with his tiny
+guest through the woods, and the next moment the child bounded into the
+mother's arms, proud and glad to show her feet in the moccasins which
+Logan had made for her.
+
+In his old age Logan wandered from place to place, broken by the
+misfortunes of his people, and homeless in his own land. He fell a prey
+to drink, the enemy of all his race, and he was at last murdered near
+Detroit, where, as the story goes, he was sitting by his camp fire, with
+his blanket over his head, and lost in gloomy thought, when an Indian
+whom he had offended stole upon him and sank his tomahawk in Logan's
+skull.
+
+Of all the Indians he seems to me the grandest because he was the
+kindest. Tecaughretanego was wise and good. He had a thoughtful mind and
+a serene spirit; he could be just and loving to the white man whom he
+had taken for his brother, but he had not so noble an ideal of conduct
+as Logan. This chief grasped the notion of friendship with all the
+whites; he was more than a tribesman; he imagined what it was to be
+a citizen. Among the Ohio men of the past there is no nature more
+beautiful, no memory worthier than his. He was a savage, and his thirst
+for vengeance, or rather the smoldering thought of his wrongs, lowered
+him for a time to the level of the white and red men about him. Yet he
+was framed for gentleness, and he surpassed another great Ohio Indian
+as much in breadth of character, as he surpassed Tecaughretanego in an
+ideal of conduct.
+
+Tecumseh, the famous war chief of the Shawnees, was born at the
+ancient town of Piqua on Mad River, not far from the present city of
+Springfield, in Clark County. His name means Shooting Star, and he was
+indeed the meteoric light of his people while he lived. He was of a high
+Indian, family of the Turtle Tribe, and his father had come with his
+clan to Ohio from their home in Florida, about the middle of the last
+century. Tecumseh was born, as nearly as can be reckoned, in the year
+1768, and from his earliest childhood he showed the passion for war
+which ruled him through life. He led his playmates in their mimic
+fights, and at seventeen he went on his first war party against the
+Kentuckians. The Indians attacked some boats on the Ohio River, and
+killed all the boatmen but one, whom they brought back and burned at the
+stake. Tecumseh was present, and though he said nothing, the sight of
+the torture filled him with such horror, that he used his power with the
+Indians to put a stop forever to the burning of prisoners. He was such
+a hater of our race that, as he once confessed, the mere presence of a
+white man made the flesh of his face creep; but he hated cruelty more,
+and in the bloody events which he spent all his power in bringing about,
+he could always be trusted to keep the captives from torture, and to
+save the lives of women and children.
+
+In spite of his hatred of white men, it is said that he was once in
+love with a white woman, the daughter of a settler in Greene County.
+He offered her fifty silver brooches if she would marry him; but she
+refused, saying that she did not wish to be a wild woman and drudge like
+a squaw; and she would not be tempted even when he promised her that she
+should not work, but should be a great squaw.
+
+[Illustration: Tecumseh 154]
+
+He was not always terrible, even with white men, and it is told of him
+that once meeting in a settler's cabin a stranger who showed alarm at
+sight of him, Tecumseh went up and amiably shook him, saying, "Big
+baby, Big baby." But he could be fierce and arrogant when he chose, and
+he delighted to make the Americans bend to him. At one of their parleys,
+General Harrison asked him to sit on his veranda with him. Tecumseh
+haughtily refused, and forced the general to come out and meet him under
+the trees, on the breast of the earth, who was, he said, the Indian's
+mother.
+
+He was in every fight with the Americans before Wayne's victory, but he
+was not made a chief until the year following that battle. Then, though
+he seemed resigned to the fate of his people, he became the leader in
+their discontent, and in the parts of Ohio and Indiana where he lived he
+kept it alive. In this he had the help of his brother Elkskuatawa,
+the Prophet, who pretended to have dreams and revelations favorable to
+Tecumseh's designs. In 1806, while they were at Greenville, the Prophet
+somehow learned that there was to be an eclipse of the sun; he foretold
+the coming miracle, and excited the savages through their superstitions
+so dangerously that Governor Harrison urged them to banish the Prophet.
+They made evasive answers, and kept the Prophet with them, while
+Tecumseh amused the governor with meetings and parleys, and went and
+came upon his errands among the Southern tribes stirring them up to join
+the Northern nations in a revolt against the Americans. He used all his
+eloquence and reason in trying to form this union of the red men, and
+when these would not avail, he did not scruple to employ the arts of
+his brother. In exhorting one of the Southern tribes he rebuked their
+coldness, and told them that when he reached Detroit, he would stamp
+his foot, and they should feel the earth tremble as a sign of his divine
+authority for his work. About the time it would have taken him to reach
+Detroit, the great earthquake of 1810 shook the Seminoles with terror of
+the man whose arguments they had rejected.
+
+In fact, Tecumseh and the Prophet constantly played into each other's
+hands, but in one of Tecumseh's absences the Prophet made the mistake of
+attacking General Harrison at Tippecanoe, and the savages were severely
+beaten. The Prophet had also made the mistake of promising them a
+victory, and after the defeat he lost his power over them.
+
+This was in 1811, but the next year the war between the United States
+and Great Britain broke out, and then Tecumseh seized his chance for
+renewing the war against the Americans. He served so faithfully against
+them that the king made him brigadier general, and Tecumseh tried to
+fight according to the laws of civilized warfare. At the attack on
+Fort Meigs in Wood County, he stopped, at the risk of his own life, the
+massacre of the American prisoners, and he bade the British commandant,
+who declared that the Indians could not be controlled, go and put on
+petticoats. An American who saw him at this time says, "This
+celebrated chief was a noble, dignified personage. His face was finely
+proportioned, his nose inclined to be aquiline, and his eye displayed
+none of that savage and ferocious triumph common to the other Indians on
+that occasion."
+
+Tecumseh with his Indians witnessed the battle of Lake Erie at
+Put-in-Bay, where Perry defeated the English fleet, and he was not
+deceived by the pretense of General Proctor that the Americans were
+beaten and the English ships were merely putting in there for repairs.
+Proctor was then preparing to retreat into Canada from Detroit, and
+Tecumseh demanded to be heard in the name of the Indians. He had some
+very bitter words to say: "The war before this our British father gave
+the hatchet to his red children.... In that war our father was thrown
+upon his back by the Americans, and our father took them by the hand
+without our knowledge, and we are afraid our father will do so again at
+this time.... Our ships have gone away, and we are much astonished to
+see our father tying up everything and preparing to run away.... We
+are sorry to see our father doing so without seeing the enemy. We must
+compare our father's conduct to a fat dog that carries his tail on his
+back, and when affrighted drops it between his legs and runs off.
+
+"Father, you have got the arms and ammunition which our great father
+sent for his children. If you have an idea of going away, give them to
+us, and you may go and welcome. Our lives are in the hands of the Great
+Spirit. We are determined to defend our lands, and if it be his will, we
+wish to leave our bones upon them."
+
+But the British retreated, and the Indians had to follow them into
+Canada. There in the battle of the Thames the Americans defeated them
+and their savage allies with great slaughter, and Tecumseh, whose
+war-cry had been heard above the tumult of the onset, was among the
+slain. He is supposed to have been killed by a pistol shot fired by
+Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and it is said that the body
+of this generous enemy did not escape barbarous usage at the hands
+of Johnson's men, who literally flayed it and bore portions of their
+ghastly trophy home with them in triumph.
+
+Tecumseh played at a later day the part which Pontiac attempted at the
+end of the old French War. He tried to unite the Indians in a general
+uprising against the Americans as Pontiac had united them against
+the English. He used the same arts, and he showed himself shrewd and
+skillful in paltering with our leaders till he was ready to strike
+his blow against them, for he managed to remain in the Ohio country
+unmolested while he was getting ready to drive the Americans out of it.
+When the war with Great Britain began, he might very well have believed
+that his hopes were about to be fulfilled; but he seems, though a brave
+warrior, never to have shown such generalship as that of Little Turtle
+at St. Clair's defeat. He was a great orator, of such a fiery eloquence
+that the interpreters often declared it impossible for them to give the
+full sense of his words; but none of his many recorded speeches have
+the pathos of Logan's. He was, on the savage lines, a statesman and a
+patriot, but unlike the wiser and gentler Logan he never could rise to
+the wisdom of living in peace with the whites. He was always an Indian;
+even at his best he was a savage, just as the backwoodsman was a savage
+at his worst. Yet his memory remains honored in tradition beyond that of
+any other Ohio Indian, and his name was given to one of the most heroic
+Ohio Americans, William Tecumseh Sherman. Such as he was, and such as
+Logan was, it must be owned that they seem now of a far nobler mold than
+any white men in early Ohio history.
+
+The Prophet outlived his brother many years, and died dishonored, and
+stripped of all the great power he had once wielded. At one time he
+wrought so strongly upon the Indians through their superstition of
+witchcraft, that they put many to death at his accusal. One of the
+victims was the Wyandot chief Leatherlips, whom six Wyandot warriors
+came from Tippecanoe to try where he lived near the site of Columbus.
+They found him guilty and sentenced him to death, of course upon no
+evidence. A white man who wished to save him asked what he had done, and
+was answered, "Very bad Indian; make good Indian sick; make horse sick;
+make die; very bad chief." When he heard his sentence, Leatherlips ate a
+hearty dinner, dressed himself in his finest clothes, painted his face,
+and at the hour fixed for his death walked from his lodge to his grave,
+chanting his death song while he went. Then as he knelt in prayer beside
+the shallow pit, one of the six Wyandots tomahawked him.
+
+The persecutions for witchcraft under the Prophet continued until at
+last a young warrior, whose sister was accused in the council, had the
+courage to rise and lead her out of the house. He came back and said to
+the council, pointing at the Prophet, "The Devil has come amongst us,
+and we are killing each other." This bold good sense brought the Indians
+to a pause in a frenzy which has raged among every people in times past.
+
+[Illustration: Tomahawk 159]
+
+
+
+
+XVI. LIFE IN THE BACKWOODS.
+
+Amidst all this tomahawking and scalping, this shooting and stabbing,
+this shedding of blood and of tears, this heartbreak of captivity,
+this torture, this peril by day and by night, the flower of home was
+springing up wherever the ax let the sun into the woods. It would be a
+great pity if the stories of cruelty and suffering which seem, while we
+read them, to form the whole history of the Ohio country, should be left
+without the relief of facts quite as true as these sad tales. Life was
+hard in those days, but it was sweet too, and it was often gay and glad.
+In times of constant danger, and even while the merciless savages were
+beleaguering the lonely clusters of cabins, there was frolicking among
+the young people in the forts, and the old people looked on at their
+joys in sympathy as well as wonder. The savages themselves had their
+harmless pleasures, and their wild life was so free that those who once
+knew it did not willingly forsake it. They were not bad-hearted so much
+as wrong-headed, and they were mostly what they were, because they knew
+no better. More than once we read how the lurking hunter heard them
+joking and laughing when off their guard in the wood; and in their
+towns, on the Miamis or the Muskingum or the Sandusky, they had their
+own games, and feasts, and merrymakings. Much that was beautiful and
+kindly and noble was possible to them, but they belonged to the past,
+and the white men belonged to the future; and the war between the two
+races had to be. Our race had outgrown the order which theirs clung to
+helplessly as well as willfully, and it was fated that we must found our
+homes upon their graves.
+
+These homes were at first of the rude and simple sort, which a thousand
+narratives and legends have made familiar, and which every Ohio boy and
+girl has heard of. It would not be easy to say where or when the first
+log cabin was built, but it is safe to say that it was somewhere in the
+English colonies of North America, and it is certain that it became the
+type of the settler's house throughout the whole middle west. It may be
+called the American house, the Western house, the Ohio house. Hardly any
+other house was built for a hundred years by the men who were clearing
+the land for the stately mansions of our day. As long as the primeval
+forests stood, the log cabin remained the woodsman's home; and not fifty
+years ago, I saw log cabins newly built in one of the richest and most
+prosperous regions of Ohio. They were, to be sure, log cabins of a finer
+pattern than the first settler reared. They were of logs handsomely
+shaped with the broadax; the joints between the logs were plastered with
+mortar; the chimney at the end was of stone; the roof was shingled, the
+windows were of glass, and the door was solid and well hung. They were
+such cabins as the Christian Indians dwelt in at Gnadenhutten, and such
+as were the homes of the well-to-do settlers in all the older parts of
+the West. But throughout that region there were many log cabins,
+mostly sunk to the uses of stables and corn cribs, of the kind that the
+borderers built in the times of the Indian War, from 1750 to 1800.
+They were framed of the round logs, untouched by the ax except for the
+notches at the ends where they were fitted into one another; the chimney
+was of small sticks stuck together with mud, and was as frail as a barn
+swallow's nest; the walls were stuffed with moss, plastered with clay;
+the floor was of rough boards called puncheons, riven from the block
+with a heavy knife; the roof was of clapboards split from logs and laid
+loosely on the rafters, and held in place with logs fastened athwart
+them.
+
+[Illustration: Ohio Cabin 162]
+
+There is a delightful account of such a log cabin by John S. Williams,
+whose father settled in the woods of Belmont County in 1800. "Our
+cabin," he says, "had been raised, covered, part of the cracks chinked,
+and part of the floor laid, when we moved in on Christmas day. There
+had not been a stick cut except in building the cabin, which was so high
+from the ground that a bear, wolf, panther, or any animal less in
+size than a cow could enter without even a squeeze.... The green ash
+puncheons had shrunk so as to leave cracks in the floor and doors from
+one to two inches wide. At both the doors we had high, unsteady, and
+sometimes icy steps, made by piling the logs cut out of the walls, for
+the doors and the window, if it could be called a window, when perhaps
+it was the largest spot in the top, bottom, or sides of the cabin where
+the wind could not enter. It was made by sawing out a log, and placing
+sticks across, and then by pasting an old newspaper over the hole,
+and applying hog's lard, we had a kind of glazing which shed a most
+beautiful and mellow light across the cabin when the sun shone on it.
+All other light entered at the doors, cracks, and chimneys. Our cabin
+was twenty-four by eighteen. The west end was occupied by two beds, the
+center of each side by a door.... On the opposite side of the window,
+made of clapboards, supported on pins driven into the walls, were our
+shelves. On these shelves my sister displayed in simple order, a host of
+pewter plates, and dishes and spoons, scoured and bright.... Our chimney
+occupied most of the east end; with pots and kettles opposite the
+window, under the shelves, a gun on hooks over the north door, four
+split-bottomed chairs, three three-legged stools, and a small eight
+by ten looking glass sloped from the wall over a large towel and comb
+case.... We got a roof laid over head as soon as possible, but it was
+laid of loose clapboards split from a red-oak, and a cat might have
+shaken every board in our ceiling.... We made two kinds of furniture.
+One kind was of hickory bark, with the outside shaved off. This we would
+take off all around the tree, the size of which would determine the
+caliber of our box. Into one end we would place a flat piece of bark or
+puncheon, cut round to fit in the bark, which stood on end the same
+as when on the tree.... A much finer article was made of slippery-elm
+bark, shaved smooth, with the inside out, bent round and sewed together,
+where the end of the hoop or main bark lapped over.... This was the
+finest furniture in a lady's dressing room," and such a cabin and its
+appointments were splendor and luxury beside those of the very earliest
+pioneers, and many of the latest. The Williamses were Quakers, and the
+mother was recently from England; they were of far gentler breeding and
+finer tastes than most of their neighbors, who had been backwoodsmen for
+generations.
+
+When the first settlers broke the silence of the woods with the stroke
+of their axes, and hewed out a space for their cabins and their fields,
+they inclosed their homes with a high stockade of logs, for defense
+against the Indians; or if they built their cabins outside the wooden
+walls of their stronghold, they always expected to flee to it at the
+first alarm, and to stand siege within it. The Indians had no cannon,
+and the logs of the stockade were proof against their rifles; if a
+breach was made, there was still the blockhouse left, the citadel of
+every little fort. This was heavily built, and pierced with loopholes
+for the riflemen within, whose wives ran bullets for them at its mighty
+hearth, and who kept the savage foe from its sides by firing down upon
+them through the projecting timbers of its upper story; but in many a
+fearful siege the Indians set the roof ablaze with arrows wrapped in
+burning tow, and then the fight became desperate indeed. After the
+Indian War ended, the stockade was no longer needed, and the settlers
+had only the wild beasts to contend with, and those constant enemies of
+the poor in all ages and conditions,--hunger and cold.
+
+Winter after winter, the Williamses heard the wolves howling round them
+in the woods, and this music was familiar to the ears of all the Ohio
+pioneers, who trusted their rifles for both the safety and support of
+their families. They deadened the trees around them by girdling them
+with the ax, and planted the spaces between the leafless trunks with
+corn and beans and pumpkins. These were their necessaries, but they had
+an occasional luxury in the wild honey from the hollow of a bee tree
+when the bears had not got at it. In its season, there was an abundance
+of wild fruit, plums and cherries, haws and grapes, berries, and nuts of
+every kind, and the maples yielded all the sugar they chose to make from
+them. But it was long before they had, at any time, the profusion which
+our modern arts enable us to enjoy the whole year round, and in the hard
+beginnings the orchard and the garden were forgotten for the fields.
+Their harvests must pay for the acres bought of the government, or from
+some speculator who had never seen the land; and the settler must be
+prompt in paying, or else see his home pass from him after all his toil
+into the hands of strangers. He worked hard and he fared hard, and if
+he was safer when peace came, it is doubtful if he were otherwise more
+fortunate. As the game grew scarcer, it was no longer so easy to provide
+food for his family, the change from venison and wild turkey to the
+pork, which early began to prevail in his diet, was hardly a wholesome
+one. Besides, in cutting down the trees, he opened spaces to the sun
+which had been harmless enough in the shadow of the woods, but which now
+sent up their ague-breeding miasms. Ague was the scourge of the whole
+region, and it was hard to know whether the pestilence was worse on the
+rich levels beside the rivers, or on the stony hills where the settlers
+sometimes built to escape it. Fevers of several kinds prevailed, and
+consumption was common in the climates that ague spared. There was
+little knowledge of the rules of health, and little medical skill for
+those who lost it; most of the remedies for disease and accident were
+such only as home nursing and home treatment could supply.
+
+When once the settler was housed against the weather, he had the
+conditions of a certain rude comfort indoors. If his cabin was not proof
+against the wind and rain or snow, its vast fireplace formed the means
+of heating, while the forest was an inexhaustible store of fuel. At
+first he dressed in the skins and pelts of the deer and fox and wolf,
+and his costume could have varied little from that of the red savage
+about him, for we often read how' he mistook Indians for white men at
+first sight, and how the Indians in their turn mistook white men for
+their own people. The whole family went barefoot in the summer, but in
+winter the pioneer wore moccasins of buckskin, and buckskin leggins or
+trousers; his coat was a hunting shirt belted at the waist and fringed
+where it fell to his knees. It was of homespun, a mixture of wool and
+flax called linsey-woolsey, and out of this the dresses of his wife and
+daughters were made; the wool was shorn from the sheep, which were
+so scarce that they were never killed for their flesh, except by the
+wolves, which were very fond of mutton, but had no use for wool. For a
+wedding dress a cotton check was thought superb, and it really cost a
+dollar a yard; silks, satins, laces, were unknown. A man never left his
+house without his rifle; the gun was a part of his dress, and in his
+belt he carried a hunting knife and a hatchet; on his head he wore a cap
+of squirrel skin, often with the plumelike tail dangling from it.
+
+The furniture of the cabins was, like the clothing of the pioneers,
+homemade. A bedstead was contrived by stretching poles from forked
+sticks driven into the ground, and laying clapboards across them; the
+bedclothes were bearskins. Stools, benches, and tables were roughed out
+with auger and broadax; the puncheon floor was left bare, and if the
+earth formed the floor, no rug ever replaced the grass which was its
+first carpet. The cabin had but one room where the whole of life went
+on by day; the father and mother slept there at night, and the children
+mounted to their chamber in the loft by means of a ladder.
+
+The food was what has been already named. The meat was venison, bear,
+raccoon, wild turkey, wild duck, and pheasant; the drink was water, or
+rye coffee, or whisky which the little stills everywhere supplied only
+too abundantly. Wheat bread was long unknown, and corn cakes of various
+makings and bakings supplied its place. The most delicious morsel of all
+was corn grated while still in the milk and fashioned into round cakes
+eaten hot from the clapboard before the fire, or from the mysterious
+depths of the Dutch oven, buried in coals and ashes on the hearth.
+There was soon a great flow of milk from the kine that multiplied in the
+pastures in the woods, and there was sweetening enough from the maple
+tree and the bee tree, but salt was very scarce and very dear, and long
+journeys were made through the perilous woods to and from the licks, or
+salt springs, which the deer had discovered before the white man or the
+red man knew them.
+
+The bees which hived their honey in the hollow trees were tame bees
+gone wild, and with the coming of the settlers, some of the wild things
+increased so much that they became a pest. Such were the crows which
+literally blackened the fields after the settlers plowed, and which the
+whole family had to fight from the corn when it was planted. Such were
+the rabbits, and such, above all, were the squirrels which overran the
+farms, and devoured every green thing till the people combined in great
+squirrel hunts and destroyed them by tens of thousands. The larger game
+had meanwhile disappeared. The buffalo and the elk went first; the deer
+followed, and the bear, and even the useless wolf. But long after these
+the poisonous reptiles lingered, the rattlesnake, the moccasin, and
+the yet deadlier copperhead; and it was only when the whole country was
+cleared that they ceased to be a very common danger.
+
+For a long time there were no mills to grind the corn, and it was
+pounded into meal for bread with a heavy wooden pestle in a mortar made
+by hollowing out some tough-grained log. The first mills were horse
+power; then small water-power mills were put up on the streams, and in
+the larger rivers boats were anchored, with mill wheels which the rapid
+current turned. But the stills were plentier than the mills, and as much
+corn was made into whisky as into bread. Men drank hard to soften their
+hard life, to lighten its heaviness, to drown its cares, to heighten
+its few pleasures. Drink was free and common not only at every shooting
+match, where men met alone, but at every log rolling or cabin raising,
+where the women met with them, to cook for them, and then to dance away
+the night that followed the toilsome day.
+
+There were no rich people then, but all were poor together, and there
+were no classes. They were so helpless without one another that people
+were kindlier and friendlier as well as freer then than now, and they
+made the most of the corn huskings and quilting bees that brought old
+and young together in harmless frolics. The greatest frolic of all was
+a wedding; the guests gathered from twenty miles around, and the frolic
+did not end with the dancing at night. Next day came the _infair_ at the
+house of the bridegroom, and all set off together. When they were within
+a mile or two, they raced for the bottle which was always waiting for
+them at the house, and the guest whose horse was fleetest brought it
+back, and made all drink from it, beginning with the bride and groom.
+
+Religion soon tempered the ruder pleasures of the backwoods, but the
+dancing ceased before the drinking. Camp meetings were frolics of a
+soberer sort, where whole neighborhoods gathered and dwelt in tents for
+days in the beautiful autumn weather, and spent the nights in prayer and
+song. Little log churches were built at the crossroads, and these served
+the purpose of schoolhouses on week days. But there was more religion
+than learning in the backwoods, and the preacher came before the
+teacher.
+
+He was often a very rude, unlearned man himself, and the teacher was
+sometimes a rude man, harsh and severe, when he was learned. Often he
+was a Scotch-Irishman, whose race gave schoolmasters to the West before
+New England began to send her lettered legions to the frontier.
+
+Such a teacher was Francis Glass, who was born in Dublin in 1790, and
+came to Ohio in 1817, to teach the children of the backwoods. One of
+these afterwards remembered a log-cabin schoolhouse where Glass taught,
+in the twilight let through the windows of oiled paper. The seats were
+of hewn blocks, so heavy that the boys could not upset them; in the
+midst was a great stove; and against the wall stood the teacher's desk,
+of un-planed plank. But as Glass used to say to his pupils, "The temple
+of the Delphian god was originally a laurel hut, and the muses deign to
+dwell accordingly in very rustic abodes." His labors in the school were
+not suffered to keep him from higher aims: he wrote a life of Washington
+in Latin, which was used for a time as a text-book in the Ohio schools.
+
+In the early days all books were costly, and they were even fewer than
+they were costly; but those who longed for them got them somehow, and
+many a boy who studied them by the cabin fire became afterwards a great
+statesman, a great lawyer, or a great preacher. In fact, almost every
+distinguished Ohioan of the past generations seems to have begun life in
+a log cabin, and to have found his way out of the dark of ignorance by
+the light of its great hearth fire. Their stories are such as kindle the
+fancy and touch the heart; but now they are tales that are told.
+
+Among the stories of life in the backwoods, none are more affecting than
+those of lost children. In the forests which hemmed in the homes and
+fields of the settlers, the little ones often strayed away, or in their
+bewilderment failed to find a path back to the cabin they had left among
+the stumps of the clearing, or the leafless trunks of the deadening.
+In 1804, two children, Lydia and Matilda Osborn, eleven and seven years
+old, went to fetch the cows from their pasture a mile from their home in
+Williamsburg, Clermont County. Lydia, the elder of the sisters, left
+the younger in a certain spot while she tried to head off the wandering
+cows. It is supposed that she failed, and came back to get Matilda. Then
+it is supposed that, after searching for her, Lydia gave up in despair
+and started homeward, but found that she no longer knew the way. In
+the meantime the cows had left their pasture, and the younger girl had
+followed the sound of their bells and got safely back to the village.
+Night came, but no Lydia, and now the neighborhood turned out and helped
+the hopeless father to search for the lost child. They carried torches,
+and rang bells, and blew horns, and fired guns, so that she might see
+and hear and come to them, and before them all, day and night, ran the
+father calling, "Lydia, Lydia." Five hundred men, a thousand men at
+last, joined in the quest, and on the fifteenth morning, they found
+in the heart of the woods a tiny hut, such as a child might build, of
+sticks and moss, with a bed of leaves inside; a path which led from it
+to a blackberry patch near by was beaten hard by the little feet of the
+wanderer. The rough backwoodsmen broke into tears when the father came
+up and at sight of the poor shelter called out, "Oh, Lydia, Lydia, my
+dear child, are you yet alive?"
+
+[Illustration: Lost in the woods 172]
+
+They never found her. A mile or two from the hut they found her bonnet,
+and a few miles further on an Indian camp. They could only guess that
+the Indians had carried her away, and go back to their homes without
+her. The father never gave up, but as long as he lived he searched for
+her among the Indians. It was thought afterwards that the very means,
+the lights and the noises, used to attract the child, might have
+frightened her from her rescuers; for a strange craze would come upon
+lost people after a time, and they would hide from those who were
+looking for them. Others became hopelessly bewildered, and it is told of
+a pioneer, Samuel Davy, who was lost near Galion, that he wandered about
+till he reached a log cabin in a clearing. There he asked of the woman
+at the door if she knew where Samuel Davy lived. She laughed and bade
+him come in and see. Then he knew that it was his own wife speaking to
+him from his own threshold.
+
+Whenever a lost child could not be found, the Indians were naturally
+suspected of stealing it; and this was probably the fate of a little one
+whom her mother lifted over the fence into the dooryard of her cabin,
+near Galion, and then went back to her work of making sugar in the
+woods. When she came home at nightfall, the child was not there, and
+no search afterwards availed to find her, though the whole neighborhood
+searched the woods for days and nights. It was known only that a party
+of Indians had lately camped near, and that they might have taken the
+child and brought it up as their own; but the mother never heard of her
+again.
+
+Galion is rather famous for lost people, but at least one of them was
+found again. This was a little girl of the name of Bashford, who was
+sent to bring home the cows. In trying to return she became confused,
+and she wisely decided to keep with the cattle. When they lay down for
+the night, she sheltered herself against the warm back of a motherly
+old cow, and then followed them about in the morning till the neighbors
+found her.
+
+She was none the worse for the night's adventure except for her
+fright at the howling of the wolves, and from the pain of her slightly
+frost-bitten feet. But the fate of a little boy who wandered from home
+in Williams County was of a singular pathos. He was found dead after a
+three-days search, when the poor little body, which was half clad, was
+still warm. It was supposed that he had undressed each night when he lay
+down to sleep, as he was used to do at home, and that the third night he
+had been so chilled by the October cold that he could not put on all
+his clothes again, and so strayed feebly about till he lay down and died
+just before rescue came.
+
+Encounters with wolves and bears were not so common as these animals
+were, by any means; but now and then the settlers came in conflict with
+them. In Crawford County so lately as 1826, a young man named Enoch
+Baker, in coming home from rather a late call on a young lady, fought
+a running fight with wolves, which left him only when he reached the
+clearing where his father's cabin stood; then they fell back into the
+woods. Daniel Cloe, a boy of the same neighborhood, was attacked by a
+pack of eleven wolves one morning before daybreak, but was saved by his
+bulldog, which seized the foremost wolf by the throat, and gave the boy
+time to climb a tree.
+
+A brother of this boy found his dogs one morning in ferocious clamor
+about some animal which they seemed afraid to grapple with. He came up
+and found that it was a bear. He had no gun, but he caught up a club,
+and when he had contrived to catch the bear by one of his hind legs,
+and to throw him over, he beat him about the head with his bludgeon and
+killed him.
+
+This was pretty well for a boy of sixteen, but the reader must not award
+the palm to him without first knowing the adventure of John Gillett of
+Williams County, who clambered down a hollow tree to get some bear cubs.
+While he was securing them, the opening overhead was darkened by the
+body of the mother bear. There was only one thing to do, and Gillett
+drove his knife into the haunch of the bear, which scrambled out in
+surprise and terror, and pulled him and the cubs out with her. She did
+not stay to look after her family, and Gillett took the cubs to the
+next town, and got five dollars apiece for them. As he told this story
+himself, I suppose it must have been true.
+
+There are some stories of wolves and bears in Ashtabula County which are
+by no means bad. Not the worst of these is told of Elijah Thompson, who
+was hunting in the woods near Geneva, when a pack of seven wolves fell
+upon his dog. He clubbed his rifle and beat them off; then when the last
+had slunk away, he gathered up his wounded dog under his arm, and walked
+away with the barrel, which was all that was left of his rifle, on his
+shoulder.
+
+Bears were very common, and very fond of pork. One night two ladies who
+were alone in their cabin, were alarmed by wild appeals from the pigpen,
+and found it invaded by a bear. They tried to frighten the intruder away
+with firebrands, but failed. Then they loaded the family rifle, which
+they had heard the men folks say took two fingers of powder. They
+therefore poured in the powder to the depth of six inches, and drove
+home the bullet. One held a light while the other pulled the trigger.
+Both were knocked down by the recoil of the gun, which flew into the
+bushes. What became of the bear was never known; but it was probably
+blown to atoms.
+
+Other pioneer women were effective with firearms, and Mrs. Sarah Thorp
+of Ashtabula County was one of these. The family fell short of food
+in their first year in the backwoods, and in June, 1799, the husband
+started to Pennsylvania, twenty miles away, to get supplies. Before he
+could return, his wife and little girls had begun to live upon roots and
+the few grains of wheat which she found in the straw of her bed. When
+these were all gone, and she was in despair, a wild turkey one day
+alighted near the cabin. She found that there was barely powder enough
+left in the house for the lightest charge; but she loaded her husband's
+rifle and crept on her hands and knees from bush to bush and log to log,
+till she was close upon the bird, wallowing in the loose plowed earth.
+Then she fired and killed it, and her children were saved.
+
+Starvation was one of the horrors which often threatened the newcomers
+in the wilderness, as it had often beset its improvident red children.
+In the first year of the settlement at Conneaut, James Kingsbury was
+forced to leave his family and go some distance into New York state.
+He fell sick, and was unable to return before winter set in. Then he
+hurried homeward as fast as he could with a sack of flour on horseback.
+His horse became disabled, and then he carried the flour on his
+shoulders. He reached home one day at nightfall, and found his older
+children starving; his wife, wasted with famine, lay on the floor, and
+near her the little one born in his absence, already dead for want of
+the nourishment which the poor mother could not give it.
+
+
+
+
+XVII. THE FIRST GREAT SETTLEMENTS.
+
+General Rufus Putnam, a brave officer of the Revolutionary war, was the
+first to call the attention of the Eastern States to the rich territory
+opened to settlement west of the Ohio by the peace with Great Britain,
+and he was one of the earliest band of pioneers which landed on the
+shores of the Muskingum. In 1787 Rev. Manasseh Cutler of Ipswich,
+Massachusetts, published a description of the Ohio country, which left
+little to the liveliest imagination. If anything was naturally lacking
+for the wants of man in a land abounding in wild fruits, "herds of deer,
+elk, buffalo, and bear," and flocks of "turkeys, geese, ducks, swans,
+teal, pheasants, partridges, etc.,... in greater plenty than the tame
+poultry are in any part of the old settlements of America," and in
+rivers "stored with fish, especially catfish, the largest, and of a
+delicious flavor," which "weighs from thirty to eighty pounds," it could
+be easily supplied by art. "The advantages of every climate," Dr.
+Cutler told his readers, "are here blended together," and the rich soil,
+everywhere underlain with valuable minerals, and covered with timber
+waiting to be built into ships and floated down the rivers to the
+sea, would produce not only "wheat, rye, Indian corn, buckwheat, oats,
+barley, flax, hemp, tobacco," but even "indigo, silk, wine, and cotton."
+
+It is no wonder that the Ohio Company found the New Englanders eager
+to come out and possess this goodly heritage, and that the first band
+should have started from Dr. Cutler's own village. At dawn, on the
+30th of December, 1787, they paraded before his church and parsonage,
+twenty-two men with their families. After listening to a short speech
+from him, they fired a salute, and set off, as the lettering on their
+leading wagon made known, "For the Ohio Country." It was eight weeks
+before they reached the headwaters of the Beautiful River, and began to
+build boats to float down its current to the mouth of the Muskingum.
+In the meantime, on the 1st of January, 1788, another company left
+Hartford, Connecticut, and in four weeks joined the first. They could
+not embark on their voyage together until April 2d, but in five days
+they arrived at Fort Harmar, beside the Muskingum, and were at their
+journey's end. They did not find the shores waving with indigo, silk,
+and cotton, but they saw that the soil could produce almost any
+crop, and the weather was so mild and lovely that they must have been
+confirmed in their belief of all that Dr. Cutler had told them of the
+climate. Captain Pipe, the Delaware chief who had brought Crawford to
+his death of cruel torment a few years before, was encamped for trade
+near the military post, and with seventy other Indians he welcomed the
+newcomers to the Muskingum, where they wisely built a stockade as soon
+as they could for defense against their red friends. They settled down
+at once to hew their fields out of the forest, and the very next year
+they had a school for their children. Bathsheba Rouse taught this first
+Ohio school, and Ohio women may well be proud that she taught it a whole
+year before a man taught the next Ohio school. The settlers called their
+town Adelphia, but soon changed its name to Marietta, which they made up
+from the name of the French queen Marie Antoinette, though Marietta was
+a common enough name in Italian before their invention of it.
+
+They built mills on the streams, and in the streams, where the current
+turned their wheels, and after a first summer of rejoicing they quieted
+down to the serious business of clearing farms, having ague, and saving
+their scalps from the hospitable Delawares and their allies. The very
+year after their arrival the wonderful climate behaved so ungratefully
+that the corn crop was cut off by an early frost; and something like a
+famine followed; but still the year of the settlement was one of high
+hopes and sober jollity. The pioneers celebrated the Fourth of July,
+1788, with a grand banquet of "venison barbecued, buffalo steaks, bear
+meat, wild fowl, and a little _pork_, as the choicest luxury of all;"
+and at least "one fish, a great pike, weighing one hundred pounds, and
+over six feet long," which could easily be "the largest ever taken by
+white men in the waters of the Muskingum." Several of the Indians, who
+were always ready for eating and drinking, took part in the celebration,
+and the settlers saw with pleasure that they did not like the sound of
+the cannon. They all "kept it up till after twelve o'clock at night, and
+then went home and slept till daylight."
+
+The Marietta people knew how to enjoy themselves, but they had not
+come to Ohio for pastime, and they were soon all hard at work improving
+themselves as well as their lands. They not only had the first school
+in Ohio, but the first Sunday school. They had a public library in 1796,
+and preaching in the blockhouse from the beginning. It was ordered
+that every one should keep the Sabbath by going to church, and all men
+between eighteen and forty should do four days of military duty every
+year, as well as "entertain emigrants, visit the sick, clothe the
+naked, feed the hungry, attend funerals, cabin raisings, log rollings,
+huskings; have their latchstrings always out." Perhaps the reader has
+heard before this of having the latchstring out, but has not known just
+what the phrase meant. The log cabin door in those days was fastened
+with a wooden latch on the inside, which could be lifted on the outside
+by a leathern string passed through a small hole in the door above it.
+When the string was pulled in, the door was locked; but the free-hearted
+man always left his latchstring out, so that every comer could enter and
+share his fireside with him.
+
+The good people of Marietta had soon occasion for all the kindness
+enjoined by their laws in befriending a hapless colony of Frenchmen,
+whom certain speculators known as the Scioto Company had lured from
+their homes in the Old World, and then abandoned to their fate in the
+heart of the Western wilderness, where they had been promised that they
+were to find "a climate wholesome and delightful, frost even in winter
+almost entirely unknown, a river called, by way of eminence, the
+_beautiful_ and abounding in excellent fish of a vast size; noble
+forests consisting of trees that spontaneously produce sugar, and a
+plant that yields ready-made candles; venison in plenty, the pursuit of
+which is uninterrupted by wolves, foxes, lions, or tigers; no taxes to
+pay, no military services to be performed."
+
+Some of the adventurers who came to Ohio on these flattering terms were
+destitute people who agreed to work three years for the company and were
+then, each to receive from it in reward for their labors fifty acres of
+land, a house, and a cow. But others were people of means, who joyfully
+sold their property in the French cities and came out to found new homes
+in the Western woods, with money in their hands, but with no knowledge
+of woodcraft, or farming, and able neither to hunt, chop, plow, sow, or
+reap for themselves. They were often artisans, masters of trades
+utterly useless in that wild country, for what were carvers and gilders,
+cloak-makers, wigmakers and hairdressers to do on the banks of the Ohio
+in 1790? Some ten or twelve peasants came with the rest, but they were
+helpless too in the strange conditions, and if it had not been for the
+settlers at Marietta, they would all have fared miserably indeed.
+
+The Scioto Company had so far provided for them as to agree with
+the Ohio Company for the erection of a little town or village where
+Gallipolis now stands; and when the first boats arrived with the
+strangely assorted company, they found a space cut out of the forest,
+and in the clearing eighty log cabins standing upon four streets
+fronting the river, with a square inclosed by a high stockade and
+fortified with blockhouses, where they might take shelter from the
+Indians. The cabins forming this square were of a better sort than those
+on the streets, and there was one meant to serve for a council chamber,
+where the newcomers promptly began to give balls. They arrived late
+in October, and there was nothing for them to do but to wait for the
+spring, even if they had known how to farm, and in the meanwhile they
+had as good a time as they could. They did not yet know that the Scioto
+Company, which failed to pay the Marietta people for building their
+village, had no power to give them titles to their land, and they
+hopefully spent their money in hiring American hunters to supply them
+with game. They seem to have been rather a light-hearted crew, in
+spite of their misfortunes and sufferings, and they not only amused
+themselves, but they amused their neighbors by their gay unfitness for
+the backwoods. If they went to fell a tree, half a dozen of them set
+to work on it with their axes at once, and when they had chopped it all
+round, they pulled it down with a rope, to the great danger of their
+lives and limbs. When they began to make gardens in the spring they
+followed the rules laid down in some books on gardening which they
+had brought with them from France, and they planted the seeds of such
+vegetables as they were used to at home. In a climate where "frost even
+in winter was almost unknown," the Ohio River froze solidly over the
+year after they came, and the hunters brought in little or none of the
+promised venison, though certainly not molested in the chase "by tigers,
+lions, or foxes." The colonists were in danger of starving, and many of
+them were already sick of the fevers bred by the past summer's sun on
+the swamp lands about them. It was one of their few advantages that
+the Indians did not trouble them much, but after killing one of them
+in mistake for an American, contented themselves with stealing the
+Frenchmen's cattle.
+
+When the colonists found that the Scioto Company could not give them
+titles to the farms they had bought with their money or their toil, they
+began to stray away from the settlement. Some went down the rivers to
+New Orleans, others wandered off elsewhere, perhaps to St. Louis, or to
+the French towns in Indiana and Illinois; and when Congress at last came
+to their relief with a grant of twenty-four thousand acres, there were
+left at Gallipolis only ninety-two persons, out of the original five
+hundred colonists, to profit by the nation's generosity. In 1807 few or
+none of them remained on the spot where they had fondly hoped to make
+peaceful and happy homes for themselves and their children. It was a sad
+ending to a romantic story, the most romantic of all the Ohio stories
+that I know, but we must not blame those who deceived the colonists (not
+quite wittingly, it seems) for all their woes and disasters. These were
+partly owing to themselves. The New Englanders who settled at Marietta
+did not find eighty comfortable cabins waiting for them, and they did
+not hire hunters to provide their food, or begin by giving balls. The
+able and educated men among the French colonists seem to have cowered
+under their disasters like the rest; and some were incurable dreamers.
+One of the best of them used afterwards to tell how he was descending
+the Ohio with two philosophers who believed so firmly in the natural
+innocence and goodness of men, that they invited some Indians aboard
+their boat and were at once tomahawked. Their skeptical companion shot
+two of the savages and then jumped into the river, where he swam for his
+life, diving at the flash of their guns, till he got safe to the farther
+shore.
+
+The Frenchmen at Gallipolis were not the stuff that the founders of
+great states are made of; but the New Englanders at Marietta were, and
+so were the New Jerseymen at Cincinnati, who followed next after them
+in time. These had even a harder struggle in their beginnings than the
+people at Marietta, for there the emigrants made their settlement under
+the guns of Fort Harmar, in a region loosely held by the milder Delaware
+tribe of the Algonquin nation; but the lands between the Great Miami and
+Little Miami were claimed and held by the fierce Miamis and Shawnees,
+and they had been so long the battle ground of the Indians and the
+Kentuckians that the region was called the Shawnee Slaughter House. The
+great warpath of the tribes ran through it from the Ohio River to
+Lake Erie, and the first white settlers had to build stations with
+blockhouses and stockades before they could begin to till the ancient
+fields, where from time to time immemorial the Indians had planted and
+gathered their harvests of corn. The first settlers arrived from New
+Jersey in December, 1788, some eight months after the settlement
+at Marietta, and in a little more than a year a fort was built at
+Cincinnati and garrisoned with United States troops; but in 1791 a band
+of five hundred Indians, led by Simon Girty, attacked Dunlap's Station
+at Colerain. They were beaten off only after a stubborn fight, though
+the Americans were armed with the cannon which the savages so much
+dreaded; and before they raised the siege they burned a white prisoner
+near the station.
+
+[Illustration: Marrieta, Ohio 186]
+
+This was a surveyor, and one of those New Jersey men of education and
+substance who were the earliest settlers in the Symmes Purchase, as the
+tract between the two Miamis was called. John Cleves Symmes, a prominent
+citizen of Trenton, had bought the land of the government, and he came
+himself with his friends to make the place his home. The events of this
+emigration were not so poetic as those of the New Englanders who settled
+on the Muskingum, but they resulted in the foundation of our greatest
+city; and if the first school in Ohio was at Marietta, the first church
+was built at Cincinnati. The hamlet opposite the mouth of the Licking
+was first known as Losantiville, a name made up of Greek and Latin words
+describing its situation, but this was soon changed to Cincinnati. The
+fort was built in 1790, and called Fort Washington; it was the strongest
+fort in the Northwest Territory, and to its strength Cincinnati owed her
+freedom from attacks by the Indians; it was of hewn timber, and was
+eighty feet square. At Cincinnati, Harmar and St. Clair began their
+march to defeat; here too the recruits for Wayne's army gathered and
+encamped before they began their march to victory.
+
+The past of the place is not so rich in legend as that of much humbler
+localities, but there is at least one Indian story which will bear
+telling over again. It concerns Jacob Wetzel, the brother of the famous
+Lewis Wetzel, who was one day returning from a hunt well within the
+bounds of the present city, and had sat down on a log to rest, when a
+growl from his dog warned him of danger. He instantly _treed_, or jumped
+behind a tree, and then saw an Indian treed behind a neighboring oak.
+They both fired; the Indian missed, but Wetzel's bullet had broken the
+savage's arm. They rushed at each other with their drawn hunting knives,
+and fell in a fearful struggle. Wetzel unhurt was no match for the
+wounded Indian, who sat astride of him with his knife lifted when
+Wetzel's dog sprung at his throat. Wetzel now flung him off, and while
+the dog held him helpless, easily dispatched him. Another story is of
+the usual ghastliness relieved by a touch of the comic. Colonel Robert
+Elliott was shot by the Indians near the northern line of Hamilton
+County. One of them sprang upon him to scalp him, but at a touch the
+poor man's wig came off in his hand. He lifted it and was heard to say
+with an oath, "Lie!" while he stared at his trophy in bewilderment.
+
+One of the later captives of the Indians was a boy of eleven named O.
+M. Spencer, who was seized near Cincinnati in 1792, and carried to a
+Shawnee village on the Maumee, where he was taken into a family. His
+case is peculiarly interesting because Washington himself asked his
+release through the British governor of Canada; and he was at last
+returned to his friends by canoe to Detroit, by sailing vessel to
+Erie, by land to Albany, by water to New York, and by land through
+Pennsylvania to Cincinnati. He was two years in getting back to his
+friends. .
+
+The next settlement in Ohio, and the first within the Virginia Military
+District, was at Massie's Station, now Manchester, where Colonel
+Nathaniel Massie, with thirty families, arrived in 1790. They at once
+made themselves safe in an inclosure of strong pickets, fortified with
+blockhouses, and as the woods and rivers abounded in game and fish, they
+began to lead a life of as much comfort as people could enjoy who were
+surrounded by a wilderness, with the lurking danger of captivity and
+death on every hand.
+
+Six years later, Colonel Massie laid out the town of Chillicothe,
+which became the first capital of Ohio, and in the same year, 1796,
+the earliest settlers from Connecticut landed at Conneaut in Ashtabula
+County. They were led by Moses Cleaveland, a lawyer of Canterbury,
+Connecticut, a man of substance and ability, and they had come from
+Buffalo, some by land and some by water, but they arrived within a few
+hours of one another. It was the Fourth of July, and Cleaveland wrote
+in his journal: "We gave three cheers and christened the place Fort
+Independence; and, after many difficulties, perplexities, and hardships
+were surmounted, and we were on the good and promised land, felt that a
+just tribute of respect to the day ought to be paid. There were in all,
+including women and children, fifty in number. The men, under Captain
+Tinker, ranged themselves on the beach and fired a federal salute of
+fifteen rounds, and then the sixteenth in honor of New Connecticut.
+Drank several toasts.... Closed with three cheers. Drank several pails
+of grog. Supped and retired in good order."
+
+This was the order of the four lawful settlements in the Ohio country:
+first that of the Massachusetts men at Marietta in July, 1788; next,
+that of the New Jersey men at Cincinnati in December, 1788; then that of
+the Virginia men at Manchester in 1790; and then that of the Connecticut
+men at Conneaut in 1796.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII. THE STATE OF OHIO IN THE WAR OF 1812.
+
+We may now begin to speak of the State of Ohio, for with the opening of
+the present century her borders were defined. The rest of the Northwest
+Territory was called Indiana Territory, and by 1804, Ohio found herself
+a state of the Union. There has never since been any doubt of her being
+there, and if it had not been for the great Ohio generals there might
+now be no Union for any of the states to be in. But it is nevertheless
+true that Ohio was never admitted to the Union by act of Congress,
+and her life as a state dates only from the adoption of her final
+constitution, or from the meeting of her first legislature at
+Chillicothe, on the 1st of March, 1803.
+
+The most memorable fact concerning the adoption of this constitution was
+the great danger there was that it might allow some form of slavery
+in the new state. Slavery had been forbidden from the beginning in the
+Northwest Territory, but many of the settlers of the Ohio country were
+from the slave states of New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky,
+and there was a strong feeling in favor of allowing women to be held as
+slaves till they were thirty-five and men till they were twenty-eight
+years old. But in the end, thanks to one of the Massachusetts men of
+Marietta, Judge Ephraim Cutler, the friends of slavery were beaten, and
+it was forbidden in Ohio in the same words which had forbidden it in the
+Northwest Territory.
+
+It had been a long fight and a narrow chance, and the clause that gave
+the future to freedom was carried by one vote only. Edward Tiffin was
+chosen governor, and the new state entered upon a career of peace and
+comfort if not of great prosperity or rapid progress. The Indians if
+not crushed were quelled, and the settlers at last lived without fear
+of them, until Tecumseh began his intrigues. In the mean time there was
+plenty to eat, and enough to wear for all; there was the shelter of the
+log cabin, and the fire of its generous hearth. The towns grew, if
+they did not grow very rapidly; new towns were founded, and the country
+gradually filled up with settlers, or at least the land was claimed.
+Immense crops were raised on the fertile soil, and these were mainly fed
+to hogs and cattle, which more rapidly found a way to market than the
+grain: they could be driven over the bad roads, and the grain had to be
+carried. The very richness of the soil when turned to mud forbade good
+roads in the new country; and the most thriving settlements were on the
+rivers, which, as in the days of the Mound Builders, formed the natural
+highways. Many streams were navigable then, which the clearing of the
+woods from their banks has since turned to shallow pools in the time of
+drouth and to raging torrents in the time of rain; and one of the most
+hopeful industries was ship building. The trees turned to masts where
+they grew, and many a stately vessel slid into the waters that had
+washed its living fibers and glided down the Ohio into the Mississippi
+to the sea.
+
+The Ohio people toiled and waited for the inventions of the future to
+open ways out into the world for them with the great riches to which
+they were shut up in their own borders; but it must have been with a
+growing uneasiness. Great Britain, as we know, had long held the forts
+in the West which she had agreed to give up to the United States, and
+after she surrendered them, her agents and subjects in Canada abetted
+the Indians in their rising against the Americans under Tecumseh and
+the Prophet. The trouble with the Indians would probably have ended at
+Tippecanoe, if it had not been for the outbreak of war between the two
+countries; yet this outbreak must have been a kind of relief to the Ohio
+people. The English insisted upon the right of searching our vessels
+on the high seas, and pressing into their navy any sailors whom they
+decided to be British subjects, and though the Ohio people could not
+feel the injury of this, as it was felt in the seaboard states whose
+citizens were forced into the English service by thousands, they could
+feel the insult. They were used to fighting, and they welcomed the war
+which at least unmasked their enemies. Their ardor was chilled, however,
+by one of its first events, which was the surrender of Detroit by
+General Hull. This threw the state open to invasion by the British and
+Indians, and the danger was felt in every part of it. The militia were
+called out, troops poured in from Kentucky, and General Harrison marched
+into the northwest to recapture Detroit. A detachment of his army was
+beaten in the first action, which took place beyond the Ohio limits,
+and after yielding to the British was butchered in cold blood by their
+Indian allies. The next spring Harrison built Fort Meigs on the Maumee;
+from this point he hoped to strike a severe blow at the enemy in Canada,
+but he was himself attacked here by General Proctor, who marched down
+from Maiden with a large force of British regulars, Canadian militia,
+and Indians led by Tecumseh.
+
+Proctor planted batteries on the shore of the river, and Tecumseh's
+Indians climbed trees and poured down a galling fire on the besieged.
+The British commander then summoned the fort to surrender, but Harrison
+answered his messenger, "As General Proctor did not send me a summons on
+his first arrival, I had supposed that he believed me determined to do
+my duty," and he dismissed the envoy with the assurance that if the post
+fell into Proctor's hands it would be in a manner to do him more honor
+than any surrender could do. The fight then continued until the British
+general found his fickle savage friends deserting him, and on the 12th
+day raised the siege.
+
+It is probable that the Indians were following their old custom of
+leaving off fighting to enjoy a sense of victory when they had won it.
+A large body of Kentucky horse had by Harrison's orders attacked one of
+the British positions, and carried it. After spiking the enemy's guns
+they pursued the flying British, and suddenly fell into an ambush of
+Indians. Out of eight hundred only one hundred escaped, and the work
+of murdering the prisoners at once began. It was on this occasion that
+Tecumseh tried to save the lives of the helpless Americans, appealing
+to the British general to support him, and even tomahawking with his own
+hatchet a disobedient chief who would not give up the work of death.
+
+The allies made a second attempt on Fort Meigs, but they were foiled in
+this too, and then they turned their attention to Fort Sandusky, where
+the town of Fremont now stands. General Harrison held a council of war,
+and it was decided that Fort Sandusky could not resist an attack and
+must be abandoned. But when the order to retire reached the gallant
+young officer in command it was too late, for the Indians were already
+in force around the post. Major Croghan therefore wrote a reply which he
+thought might fall into the enemy's hands, and which he worded for their
+eyes rather than his general's. "Sir, I have just received yours of
+yesterday, 10 o'clock p.m., ordering me to destroy this place and
+make good my retreat, which was received too late to be carried into
+execution. _We have determined to maintain this place, and by heavens we
+can!_"
+
+This answer got safely through to General Harrison, who promptly
+resented what he thought its presumption and sent to remove Major
+Croghan from his command. Croghan went to explain in person and was
+allowed to return to his post. The British and Indians appeared in force
+the next day, July 31st, and on the 2d of August made their first and
+last assault. Colonel Short of the British regulars led a force of 350
+men against the fort, and set them the example of leaping into the ditch
+before it. When the ditch was full, Croghan opened upon them from a
+masked porthole with a six pounder, and raked them from the distance
+of thirty-feet. Colonel Short, who had ordered his men to give the
+Americans no quarter, fell mortally wounded; he tied his handkerchief to
+his sword and waved it in prayer for mercy, and not in vain. Croghan
+did all in his power to relieve his disabled foes; he passed buckets of
+water to them over the pickets, he opened a space under the pickets that
+those who could might creep through into the fort out of their comrades'
+fire.
+
+That night the whole force of the enemy retreated in such haste that
+they left many stores and munitions behind them. They were commanded by
+General Proctor, who had already failed at Fort Meigs against Harrison,
+and who now dreaded an attack from him. None was made, but Harrison
+had the pleasure of writing in his report of the victory won by Major
+Croghan at Fort Stephenson: "It will not be among the least of General
+Proctor's mortifications that he has been baffled by a youth who had
+just passed his twenty-first year."
+
+A little more than a month after this repulse the British were defeated
+in the battle of Lake Erie by Commodore Perry, at Put-in-Bay. The action
+itself is by no means the most impressive part of the wonderful story
+of that great victory. Perry had not only to cope with the British in
+waters where they had been undisputed masters, but he had to create
+the means of doing so. He brought ship builders, naval stores, guns and
+ammunition, as well as sailors for his fleet, four hundred miles through
+the wilderness of New York to the wilderness at Erie, Pennsylvania, and
+there he hewed out of the forest the stuff which he wrought almost alive
+into his ships. On the 1st of August he was ready to sail with two large
+vessels of twenty guns each, and seven smaller craft carrying fourteen
+guns in all. With these, he met the enemy's force of six vessels
+carrying sixty-four guns, and on the beautiful sunny morning of the 10th
+of September the famous fight took place. The Americans at first had
+the worst of it; the British guns were of longer range, and Perry's
+flag-ship, the _Lawrence_, was so badly disabled that he had to abandon
+it for the _Niagara_, The _Lawrence_ was in fact an unmanageable wreck;
+her decks were streaming with blood, but nothing broke the awful order
+of the carnage. The men fell at their guns; if wounded, they were
+carried below; if killed, they were left where they dropped, while
+others took their places.
+
+[Illustration: Admiral Perry on Lake Erie 196]
+
+Perry hauled down his colors with his own hand, and with his flag under
+his arm was rowed to the Niagara through a storm of musketry. Once on
+board this vessel, he began to change defeat into victory, and after
+a fight lasting more than three hours in all, he could send to General
+Harrison his memorable dispatch, "We have met the enemy and they are
+ours."
+
+The next day the mournful sequel to this tragedy followed, when the
+crews of both fleets, victors and vanquished, joined in burying their
+dead on the shore of the bay. The sailors slain in the battle had been
+already sunken in the lake, but now to the sound of the minute guns from
+the ships, with the sad music of funeral marches, the measured dip of
+oars, and the flutter of half-masted flags, the last sad rites were paid
+to the fallen officers. Perhaps the Indians under Tecumseh who had seen
+with stupid dismay the great battle of the rival squadrons, witnessed
+this pathetic spectacle too, before they sullenly withdrew into Canada
+after Proctor's army. There Harrison pursued them, and in his victory
+on the banks of the Thames, their mighty chieftain fell, and their cause
+perished with him.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX. A FOOLISH MAN, A PHILOSOPHER, AND A FANATIC.
+
+"Who is Blennerhassett?" asked William Wirt, at the trial of Aaron Burr
+for treason, and many a schoolboy since has echoed the question, as many
+a schoolboy will hereafter, while impassioned oratory is music to the
+ear and witchery to the breast. The eloquent lawyer went on to answer
+himself, and painted in glowing colors a character which history sees
+in a colder light. But though Blennerhassett was not the ideal that
+Wirt imagined, he was the generous victim of a cold and selfish man's
+ambition, and the ruin of his happy home and gentle hope is none the
+less pathetic because his own folly was partly to blame for it.
+
+We must go back of the events which we have been following to an
+earlier date, if we wish to find Harman Blennerhassett dwelling with his
+beautiful wife on their fairy island in the Ohio. Their earthly paradise
+lay in the larger stream at the mouth of the Kanawha, not far from the
+present town of Belpre, and there in the first year of the century,
+Blennerhassett built a mansion which became the wonder of the West. The
+West was not then very well able to judge of the magnificence which it
+celebrated, but there seems no reason to doubt that Blennerhassett's
+mansion was fine, and of a grandeur unexampled in that new country where
+most men lived in log cabins, and where any framed house was a marvel.
+He was of English birth, but of Irish parentage, and to the ardor of
+his race he added the refinement of an educated taste. He was a Trinity
+College man, and one of his classmates at Dublin was the Irish patriot,
+Emmet, who afterwards suffered death for his country. But it does not
+appear that Blennerhassett came to America for political reasons, and
+he seems to have made his home in the West from the impulse of a poetic
+nature, with the wealth and the leisure to realize the fancies of
+his dream. "A shrubbery that Shenstone might have envied," says Wirt,
+"blooms around him. Music that might have charmed Calypso and her
+nymphs, is his. An extensive library spreads its treasures before him.
+A philosophical apparatus offers him all the secrets and mysteries of
+nature. Peace, tranquillity, and innocence shed their mingled delights
+around him. And to crown the enchantment of the scene, a wife, who
+is said to be lovely even beyond her sex, and graced with every
+accomplishment that can render it irresistible, had blessed him with her
+love."
+
+Whatever may be the facts concerning the home of the Blennerhassetts,
+the memories of those who knew its mistress bear witness to the truth
+of these glowing words. They testify that she was not only brilliant,
+accomplished, exquisite in manner, but good to every one, kind to the
+poor, and devoted to her husband and children. She was a faultless
+housewife, as well as a fearless horsewoman, and she was strong in body
+as she was active in mind. "She could leap a five-rail fence, walk ten
+miles at a stretch, and ride with the boldest dragoon. Robed in scarlet
+broadcloth, with a white beaver hat, on a spirited horse, she might be
+seen dashing through the dark woods, reminding one of the flight and gay
+plumage of a tropical bird."
+
+To this home and its inmates came Aaron Burr, as bad, brave, and
+brilliant a man as ever figured in our public life. He had been a
+gallant officer in the Revolution, he had been Vice President of the
+United States, he had come within a vote of being President. But he had
+killed Alexander Hamilton in the duel which he forced upon him, and all
+his knowledge of the world and men had taught him to worship power and
+despise virtue. It has not yet been clearly shown what Burr meant or
+hoped to do, and possibly he could not have very well said himself; but
+it is certain that in a general way he was trying to separate the West
+from the East, and to commit the warlike people of the backwoods to a
+fine scheme for conquering Mexico from Spain, and setting up an imperial
+throne there for him to sit upon. He was always willing to sell out his
+fine scheme to France, to England, to any power that would buy, even
+to Spain herself; and in the mean time he came and went in the West and
+Southwest and built up a party in his favor, which fell to pieces at the
+first touch of real adversity. General Wilkinson, of the United States
+army, who had been plotting and scheming with Burr, arrested him; he was
+tried for treason, and those who had cast their fortunes with him were
+carried down in his fall. The most picturesque of the sufferers was
+Blennerhassett, who was one of the most innocent. Burr had found other
+Ohio people too plodding, as he said, but the Blennerhassetts took him
+seriously, and when Burr in his repeated visits tempted the husband, and
+flattered the wife, who was ambitious only for her husband, he easily
+beguiled them into a belief in his glorious destiny.
+
+[Illustration: Aarun Burr and Blennerhassett 200]
+
+Blennerhassett put all his fortune into the venture. He ordered
+fifteen large boats built for transporting five hundred men down the
+Mississippi, he contracted for provisioning them, and pledged himself
+for the payments of all kinds of debts. His friends tried to reason with
+his folly in vain. Governor Tiffin called out a company of militia to
+prevent his boats from leaving the Muskingum; Blennerhassett heard
+that he was to be arrested, and fled; a troop of Virginians seized
+his island, pillaged his house and ruined his grounds; and Mrs.
+Blennerhassett with her children embarked amid the ice-floes of the Ohio
+on a small flatboat and made her way to her husband in Louisiana. Here
+he was taken, but discharged after a few weeks' imprisonment. They came
+back to their island, but they never lived there again, and in 1811 the
+house was burned. They wandered from place to place, and grew poorer
+and poorer; in 1831 he died at the house of his sister in the island of
+Guernsey, and seven years later his wife ended her days in a New York
+tenement house.
+
+[Illustration: Johnny Appleseed 202]
+
+Another picturesque figure of our early times was one who never meant
+and never imagined harm to any living creature, man or beast, but
+gave his simple, humble life to doing good, with no thought of his own
+advantage. Perhaps as the world grows more truly civilized the name of
+Johnny Apple-seed will be honored above that of some heroes of the Ohio
+country. Like so many of our distinguished men, he was not born in our
+state, but he came here in his young manhood from his birthplace in
+Massachusetts, and began at once to plant the apple seeds which gave him
+his nickname.
+
+Few knew that his real name was John Chapman, but it did not matter;
+and Johnny Appleseed became his right name if men are rightly named from
+their works. Wherever he went he carried a store of apple seeds with
+him, and when he came to a good clear spot on the bank of a stream, he
+planted his seeds, fenced the place in, and left them to sprout and grow
+into trees for the orchards of the neighborhood. He soon had hundreds
+of these little nurseries throughout Ohio, which he returned year after
+year to watch and tend, and which no one molested. When the trees were
+large enough he sold them to the farmers for a trifle, an old coat or an
+old shirt, and when he needed nothing he gave them for nothing. He went
+barefoot in the warm weather, and in winter he wore cast-off shoes; when
+he could get none and the ways were very rough he protected his feet
+with rude sandals of his own making. His hats were of his own making
+too, and were usually of pasteboard with a broad brim in front to shield
+his eyes from the sun; but otherwise he dressed in the second-hand
+clothing of others, for he thought it wrong to spend upon the vanities
+of dress. He dwelt close to the heart of nature, whose dumb children he
+would not wound or kill, even poisonous snakes or noxious insects. The
+Indians knew him and loved him for the goodness of his life, and they
+honored him for the courage with which he bore the pain he never would
+inflict. He could drive pins into his flesh without wincing; if he got
+hurt he burned the place, and then treated it as a burn; he bore himself
+in all things, to their thinking, far above other white men.
+
+It was believed that he had come into the backwoods to forget a
+disappointment in love, but there is no proof that he had ever suffered
+this. What is certain is that he was a man of beautiful qualities of
+heart and mind, who could at times be divinely eloquent about the work
+he had chosen to do in this world. He was a believer in the philosophy
+of Emanuel Swedenborg; he carried books of that doctrine in his bosom,
+and constantly read them, or shared them with those who cared to know
+it, even to tearing a volume in two. If his belief was true and we are
+in this world surrounded by spirits, evil or good, which our evil or
+good behavior invites to be of our company, then this harmless, loving,
+uncouth, half-crazy man walked daily with the angels of God.
+
+In those early days when the people were poor and ignorant, and had
+little hope of bettering themselves in this world, their thoughts
+turned much to the other world. The country was often swept by storms of
+religious excitement; at the camp-meetings the devout fell in fits and
+trances or were convulsed with strange throes called the jerks, and all
+sorts of superstitions grew up easily among them. The wildest of these
+perhaps was that of the Leatherwood God which flourished in Guernsey
+County, about the year 1828. The name of this fanatic or impostor, who
+was indeed both one and the other, was Joseph C. Dylks, and his title
+was given him because of his claim to be the Supreme Being, and because
+he first appeared to his worshipers on Leather-wood Creek at the town
+of Salesville. The leatherwood tree which gave this creek its name had
+a soft and pliable bark, which could be easily tied into knots, and was
+used as cordage by the pioneers; and the dwellers on Leatherwood Creek
+had a faith of much the same easy texture. Yet they were of rather more
+than the average intelligence, and they were so far from bigoted or
+intolerant that all sects among them worshiped in one sanctuary, a large
+cabin which they had built in common, and which they called the Temple.
+Here on a certain night, while they sat listening to one of their
+preachers, they were thrilled by a loud cry of "Salvation!" followed by
+a fierce snort, like that of a startled horse, and they discovered in
+their midst a stranger of a grave and impressive aspect, who had come no
+one knew whence or how. When he rose he stood nearly six feet high,
+and showed himself of a perfect figure, with flashing black eyes, a low
+broad forehead and a fine arched nose; his hair, black and thick, fell
+in a mass behind his ears over his shoulders; he wore a suit of black
+broadcloth, a white neckcloth, and a yellow beaver hat. His weird snort
+and his striking presence seem to have been his sole equipment for
+swaying the faith of the people; though some of the earliest believers
+saw a heavenly radiance streaming from his countenance at times, and
+when he rode, they beheld above his head a ring of light which hung
+in the air over the saddle if he dismounted. But he soon began to make
+converts, and he had quickly enough, of the best among those good men
+and women, to gain the sole use of the Temple. At first he claimed
+merely to be the Lord Jesus Christ, but he presently announced himself
+God Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth; and his followers readily
+believed him, though he failed in the simple miracle of making a
+seamless garment out of a bolt of linsey-woolsey cloth, and kept none of
+his promises to them. He probably found it sufficient to be the Deity,
+and his worshipers, among whom were two ministers, were certainly
+content; but the unbelievers felt the scandal to be too great. They had
+Dylks arrested, and brought before two justices of the peace, who one
+after the other decided that there was no law of Ohio which forbade a
+man to declare himself the Almighty.
+
+[Illustration: Proclaimed himself the Lord Jesus Christ 205]
+
+The wretched creature was acquitted, but he was thoroughly frightened.
+He made his escape from his guards, and took to the woods, where he was
+some time in hiding. When he came back to the believers, he had bated
+nothing of his claim to divinity, but he was no longer so bold. He now
+told them that the New Jerusalem would not come down at Leatherwood
+Creek, but in the city of Philadelphia, and he departed to the scene of
+his glory. Three of the believers followed him over the rugged mountains
+and through the pathless woods, finding food and shelter by hardly
+less than a miracle; but they did not find the New Jerusalem at their
+journey's end. Dylks had told them that where they should see the
+heavenly light the brightest, there they should behold the beginning of
+the New Jerusalem; but they nowhere saw this light, though they
+walked the streets of the earthly city night and day. Two of them were
+substantial farmers, and when they had lost all hope, and had lost even
+Dylks himself (for he soon vanished), they pledged their tobacco crops
+and so got money enough to come home, where they lived and died in the
+full faith that Joseph C. Dylks was God Almighty, though he never did
+anything to prove it but snort like a startled horse, wear long hair on
+foot and a halo on horseback, and fail in everything else he attempted.
+The third of this company of his followers, a young minister of the
+United Brethren, did not return for some years; then he came, well
+dressed and looking fat and sleek, and preached to the people on
+Leatherwood Creek the faith in which he had not faltered. He accounted
+for the disappearance of Dylks from the eyes of his other worshipers in
+Philadelphia very simply: he had seen him taken up into heaven.
+
+But the people had merely his word for the fact; Dylks never descended
+to earth again as his apostle promised, and the belief in his divinity
+died out with those who first accepted him.
+
+
+
+
+XX. WAYS OUT.
+
+In 1893 Jacob S. Coxey, a respectable citizen of Massillon, started a
+movement in favor of good roads which took the form of a pilgrimage to
+Washington to petition Congress for its object. Several armies, as they
+were called, from different parts of the country, met in Massillon, and
+under Mr. Coxey's leadership, set out on a long and toilsome march over
+the Alleghanies to the capital, living by charity on the way. Many of
+the soldiers of these armies might well have been idle and worthless
+persons; there were doubtless others who were sincere and sane in their
+hope that the representatives of the people might be persuaded to do
+something for bettering the highways; but the affair was so managed as
+to meet with nothing but ridicule, and in trying to force a hearing
+from Congress Mr. Coxey and some of his followers were arrested for
+trespassing on the Capitol grounds, and were sentenced to several weeks
+in jail. This ended the latest crusade for good roads from Ohio; but
+there is no Ohio idea more fixed than that we ought to have good roads,
+and this was by no means the first time that Ohio men had asked the
+nation to lend a hand in making them. The first time they succeeded as
+signally as they failed the last time; but that was very long ago, and
+it may surprise some of my readers to know that we have a National Road
+crossing our whole state, which is still the best road in it.
+
+Almost as soon as the Western people had broken into the backwoods it
+became their necessity to break out again, to find and to make roads
+between them and the civilization they had left. The ways of the
+different emigrations in reaching Ohio were: for the New Engenders,
+through New York state to Lake Erie, and westwardly along the shore
+of that water; for the Pennsylvanians, through their own state to the
+headwaters of the Ohio, and then down the river and inwardly from it;
+for the Virginians, Marylanders, and Carolinians, the valley of the
+Shenandoah and the mountain gaps to Kentucky, and so into Southwestern
+Ohio. At first the white men came by the _streets_, as the pioneers
+called the trails that the buffalo and deer had made; but they soon cut
+traces through the woods, and later these traces became wagon roads. Of
+course they used the rivers wherever they could and traveled by canoe,
+by flatboat, by keelboat, and by ark; and there grew up on the rivers a
+wild life which had its adventures and heroes like the Indian warfare.
+The most famous of the boatmen was Mike Fink, who drank hard and fought
+hard, and was a miraculous shot with his rifle. He was captain of a
+keelboat, which was the craft mostly used in ascending the river. The
+flatboats were broken up and sold as lumber when they had drifted down
+to their points of destination on the lower rivers, but the keelboat
+could make a return trip by dint of pushing with a long pole on the
+shore side and rowing on the other; sometimes even sails were used, and
+then the keelboat sped up stream at the rate of fifty miles instead of
+twelve miles a day.
+
+But these means of traffic and travel soon ceased to suffice. Then the
+Ohio people felt the need of getting out with their increasing crops,
+their multiplying flocks and herds, and they made their need known to
+the nation, to which they were everywhere akin, and the nation answered
+through Congress by beginning, in 1806, the National Road, which was
+finished by 1838, from Baltimore as far as Indiana. This road first
+opened the East to Ohio; then in 1811 a steamboat made its appearance on
+the Beautiful River, and after that steam commanded all the Southern and
+Southwestern waters for us, as well as those of the inland seas on the
+North. Then, that all these waters might be united, the state began in
+1825 to build a system of canals, from Cleveland to Portsmouth and
+from Toledo to Cincinnati. When these canals were completed, with their
+branches, they gave the people some nine hundred miles of navigable
+waters within their own borders. The main lines were built, not by
+companies for private profit as the railroads have since been built,
+but by the people for the people, and it may be said that the great
+prosperity of Ohio began with them. Wherever they ran they drained the
+swamps and made the land not only habitable but beautiful. They were dug
+by Ohio people, and the sixteen millions of dollars that they cost
+came back into the hands of the men who gladly taxed themselves for the
+outlay. The towns along their course grew, and new towns rose out of the
+forests and prairies.
+
+The Ohio people had the impulse to this great work from the New York
+people, who had built the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, and whose
+governor, De Witt Clinton, had urged forward that work. Now, when our
+whole state was ablaze with joy at the action of the legislature in
+providing for the work, Governor Clinton was invited to come and first
+strike the spade into the earth in digging the new canals. He arrived by
+steamboat at Cleveland, where the people received him and his train of
+distinguished New Yorkers with rejoicings worthy of the great event. He
+took stage for Newark, and on the 4th of July, 1825, when our state
+had just come of age, in the presence of all the Ohio magnates and
+dignitaries, and a mighty throng of citizens, he lifted a spadeful from
+the ground on the Licking Summit. Governor Morrow of Ohio lifted the
+second spadeful, and then followed a struggle among the distinguished
+men as to which should lift the third. New Yorkers and Ohioans vied in
+filling a wheelbarrow with successive spadefuls, and a happy citizen
+of Chillicothe had the honor of wheeling it away and dumping it over a
+bank. He was the captain of a company of militia, and the crowd was so
+great that a squadron of cavalry had to keep a space for the speakers
+in the midst of their hollow square. Thomas Ewing delivered the oration,
+and men all round him wept for joy.
+
+[Illustration: Governor Clinton 211L]
+
+There were like scenes when the canals were completed. Multitudes
+gathered to see the water let into the channels which to their
+impatience had been so long in digging, and they took hopefully the
+disappointment of having it sink into the gravelly beds, before it could
+slowly fill the banks, instead of rushing like a flood to their brims.
+At Dayton, 1829, when the first fleet of three canal boats arrived from
+Cincinnati, it was greeted with the firing of cannon and the shouts of
+an immense crowd lining the canal banks. This was as it should be, and
+will be wherever a great work is done for the common good; and it ought
+never to be forgotten that the canals of Ohio were dug by Ohio men that
+all Ohio men might freely prosper more and more, and not that a few rich
+men might get richer.
+
+After the National Road, which was our first way out, came the steam
+navigation of the lake and the river, and after that came the railroad,
+which will be our main reliance for getting back and forth over the
+state and to and from it, till some of the many schemes of travel
+through the air are realized. We cannot tell how far off the event may
+be; but in the mean time it is curious, if not very flattering to our
+Ohio pride, to learn that the first railroad enterprise within our
+borders was fostered by Michigan. The legislature of that state granted
+the charter of the Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad, which opened in 1836.
+The line ran from Toledo to Adrian, thirty-three miles, but when it was
+projected the matter was so far from serious with the legislature which
+authorized it, that it was granted because it was "merely a fanciful
+scheme that could do no harm, and would greatly please" certain citizens
+of Toledo; just as now a balloon line might be laughingly authorized. It
+was entirely successful, however, as far as the running was concerned,
+though the road was so hampered by the cost of fighting enemies and the
+expenses of building that it was seized for debt seven years later.
+
+This has been the history of many railroads since in Ohio, and if we
+could read between the lines that now cobweb the map of the state, we
+should come to know many tales of broken fortunes and of broken hopes.
+The railroads are no different in this from other business enterprises,
+but they are different from the canals. These, as we have seen, were
+the work of the state for the advantage of the whole people, while the
+railroads were from the beginning private schemes for making money. Each
+kind of highway came in its time, and each in its way served the purpose
+of Ohio. At the time the companies began to build their railroads,
+the state system of canals was in its highest usefulness, and it is no
+wonder that the people should have regarded the railroads as fanciful
+schemes. No one could then have dreamed how rapidly they would increase
+and multiply, and that in less than fifty years they should so far
+surpass the canals in service to the public that some of these would
+be abandoned by the state, and become grass-grown ditches hardly
+distinguishable in their look of ancient ruin from the works of the
+Mound Builders. At the most there were once nine hundred miles of
+canals in Ohio, and now there are twelve or fourteen thousand miles of
+railroads. Yet the canals were a greater achievement for Ohio in 1837
+than the railroads are in 1897.
+
+The children of this day can hardly imagine what rude and simple affairs
+the earliest railroads were. Instead of the long smooth steel rails
+which now carry the great trains, with their luxurious cars, in their
+never-ceasing flight, day in and day out the whole year round, flat
+bands of iron, spiked to wooden rails, formed the path of the
+small carriages drawn by a locomotive of the size and shape of a
+threshing-machine engine. These amazed by a speed of ten or twelve miles
+an hour the gaping spectator whose grandchildren do not turn their heads
+to look at the express as it makes its sixty miles in sixty minutes. In
+the very beginning, indeed, the carriages were drawn by horses, and it
+was several years before steam was used.
+
+[Illustration: Early Railroad 214]
+
+Little by little the railroads began to be built on the easy levels of
+the state, and before a great while a line was projected from Cincinnati
+to Columbus along the course of the Little Miami River. This was
+completed piecemeal, from point to point, and at last carried through.
+In the mean time other lines were laid out, and then all at once
+the railroad era was at hand. It was a time of great excitement and
+expectation, if not of that public rejoicing which had welcomed the
+canals.
+
+In a few years the magnificent fleets of the river began to feel
+the fatal rivalry of the trains that swept along its borders. Travel
+deserted them, and traffic sought the surer and swifter transportation
+of the shore. The great packets that had carried swarms of passengers
+to and from Pittsburg and Cincinnati and all the points between,
+disappeared or were converted into freight-boats, and then these
+began to fail for want of traffic, and the Beautiful River was almost
+abandoned to the stern-wheeler pushing a flotilla of coal-barges. A
+like change took place upon the lake; steamers which formed the means
+of communication between the towns and cities from Cleveland to Buffalo,
+and from Cleveland to Detroit, ceased to touch at the smaller ports,
+and became the pleasure-craft of the summer tourists, or the carriers
+of heavy freight, and the ports which did not become the feeders of the
+railroads dwindled to insignificance. But the railroads could not affect
+the navigation of the lake quite so disastrously as that of the river;
+the lake in such a rivalry had some such advantage as that of the sea
+from its mere vastness, and from the expanses where the railroads could
+not follow the steamer in the mere nature of things. The iron horse had
+his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period
+of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, where he drank them
+dry. or where he left their slow currents to stagnate unstirred by the
+keels of the leisurely craft once so jubilantly welcomed to them.
+
+Except for the occasional breaking of an embankment, the history of the
+canals could hardly be marked by any incidents of exciting interest. It
+was not so with steamboating and railroading, which has each its long
+tale of disasters such as give times of peace almost as dark a record
+as those of war. The most tragical of these events took place at the
+opposite extremities of the state, in Cincinnati and in Ashtabula, and
+they occurred at the beginning and the end of an interval of nearly
+forty years.
+
+The rise of steamboating on the Western rivers was perhaps all the more
+rapid because of the daring and reckless spirit of the Western people,
+who took almost any risk in order to carry a point in their rivalries
+or to gain an end of their ambition. It is certain at any rate that the
+builders and the crews of the popular boats joined in contriving and
+urging them to a speed that should leave all competitors behind. There
+was frequent racing between the packets on the Ohio and Mississippi, and
+the frightful calamities from bursting boilers continued for a long time
+before public opinion quelled the boyish love of victory which tempted
+not only the steamboatmen but their passengers too. These joined with
+the captain in forcing the boat to the top of its speed, at the risk
+of a swift or agonizing death to all on board; and it was no doubt
+with their full approval that the master of the beautiful new steamer
+_Moselle_ took the chance that resulted in the loss of more than two
+hundred lives on the 26th of April, 1838. She had just left her moorings
+at Cincinnati for her trip to Louisville, and had run up to take on a
+family from a raft a little way above the city. In order that she might
+show her speed before the crowd on the landing, and pass a rival boat in
+sight of all as she returned, the captain held to the full head of steam
+with which he had started. Her wheels had scarcely turned, after she
+parted from the raft, when her boilers burst with a roar like thunder.
+The air was instantly filled with the flying fragments of the wreck,
+and with the bodies and the heads and limbs of men, women, and children.
+These fell, strewing the shore and dropping into the river, where what
+was left of the Moselle sank within fifteen minutes. Cries of anguish,
+groans and shrieks from the sufferers, followed the awful sound of the
+explosion. Many of the victims whom the accident had spared were drowned
+before boats could reach them. The mangled body of the captain was
+hurled into the street; the pilot was thrown a hundred feet into the air
+and fell back into the stream.
+
+[Illustration: Steamboat Explosion 217]
+
+In 1876, on the evening of December 29, an express train of the Lake
+Shore Railroad, broke through the bridge at Ashtabula, and plunged
+seventy-five feet down into the bed of the creek below. The train was
+of eleven cars with a hundred and fifty-six passengers on board, and the
+bridge was further strained by the weight of the two massive locomotives
+which drew it. The night was extremely cold, and a blinding snow storm
+was raging, while the freezing wind blew a gale. The wreck at once took
+fire, and with the cries of the wounded were now mingled the agonized
+prayers of those who saw themselves doomed to death in the blazing ruins
+which imprisoned them. Nearly every one on the train was hurt more or
+less severely; eighty persons perished in the fall or the fire, and five
+died after they were rescued.
+
+There were other paths which the Ohio people had to open before they
+could reach a yet wider world than any that lay to the east of them, or
+the south of them. Their course to civilization lay not only through
+the woods and down the rivers and over the mountains, but it ran also
+through the great realm of books, and every log schoolhouse was a
+station or a junction on it; or rather, as they had things in these
+days, a milestone or a finger-post.
+
+The great glory and strength of the Ohio people, as I have hinted
+before, came from their varied origin.
+
+They have shown themselves among the first of the Americans, not because
+they were born in Ohio, but because they were born of the Massachusetts
+and Connecticut men, the New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, the New
+Jerseymen and Marylanders, the Virginians and Carolinians and
+Kentuckians who made Ohio what it was to be by the mixture of their
+characteristics and qualities here. It is of no use to pretend, however,
+that it was their virtues alone which got into the Ohio people; their
+foibles got in too, and their prejudices and their vices. A traveler
+in our state, just after it had become a state, believed that we were
+destined to be more like the people of the North and East than the
+people of the South, whom he then found, in Kentucky at least, much
+livelier in mind and manner than the Pennsylvanians, fond of public life
+and society, very hospitable and courteous, but dissipated, restless,
+and reckless. Our public spirit did not come from our Southern ancestry,
+but from our New England ancestry. The South gave Ohio perhaps her
+foremost place in war and politics, but her enlightenment in other
+things was from the North. It was the aristocratic indifference of the
+South to public schools that for twenty-four years after Ohio became
+a state kept her from profiting by the magnificent provision of school
+lands made for her by the whole nation through Congress. It was not
+until almost a generation after Ohio became a state that she began to
+have schools partly free, and it was still a generation later before
+the men of New England blood framed the present school law, and got
+it enacted by the legislature. This was in 1853, but in 1825 the first
+great effort for public schools was made. There was then a party in
+favor of canals in the legislature, and another party in favor of
+schools, and these two parties fought each other a long time. At last
+they united, and together gave the people canals and schools, the two
+ways out of the wilderness.
+
+Our canals are no longer the great avenues of commerce, because the
+modern needs and means are different from those of former days, but our
+schools are still the royal roads, the people's roads, to and from the
+world of letters and arts. Ohio is now second to no other state in her
+public school system: and well-nigh three-quarters of a century ago,
+when General Lafayette visited Cincinnati in his tour of the Republic
+which he had helped to found, nothing surprised and charmed him more
+than the greeting which the children of her public schools gave him. It
+spoke to him of a refined and graceful life, such as he could never have
+imagined in the young city so lately carven out the forests; and such
+proofs of the general culture must have done more than all the signs of
+material prosperity, all the objects of industry so proudly shown him,
+to make him regard Ohio (to use his own words) as the eighth wonder of
+the world. Six hundred boys and girls from the public schools met him at
+sunrise, on the morning of his arrival, and scattered flowers under his
+feet and made the air ring with their shouts of "Welcome to Lafayette!"
+
+As for the Indians, who fought so long and so hard here for the graves
+of their fathers and the homes of their children, they had to find their
+ways out too. But it would not be easy to say what became of them all,
+for they went such various ways out of Ohio and out of the world. Some
+remained in the country which they had lost, and in a few cases they
+tried to take on the likeness of civilized men. But oftener they only
+took on the vices of civilization; they were the drunkards and the
+vagrants of their neighborhoods, living by a little work and by the
+contemptuous charity of the settlers. In them the proud spirit of their
+race was broken; they suffered insult and outrage from their conquerors
+without resisting; a small white Titian might knock a stalwart Indian
+down with his fist, and the Indian would not attempt to revenge himself.
+For a while, the settlers feared the lingering red men, but they soon
+learned to despise them, and it was seldom that they troubled the whites
+by theft or violence.
+
+A good many of the tribesmen followed the British into Canada, after the
+War of 1812, where it must be owned to our shame as Americans that they
+had wiser, kinder, and juster treatment than we gave those who remained
+with us, and who followed westward from their old hunting grounds in
+Ohio the buffalo, the elk, the beaver, and the deer. Several nations,
+or parts of nations, were gathered on reservations in Seneca, Lucas,
+and Wyandot counties, where they were given land and taught farming and
+other trades. Missionaries came to dwell among them and try to make them
+Christians, and many were converted. The Quakers seem to have done the
+best work in this way, for the Indians always trusted and loved the men
+of peace.
+
+But although their friends could teach the Indians to plow and sow,
+to build houses and barns, to make tools and mend them, to sing and to
+pray, and to wear clothes and to lead decent and sober lives, they could
+not uproot all their old customs and superstitions. The superstition
+that seemed to last longest was the belief in witchcraft, which was
+indeed very common among their white neighbors. Nearly all forms of
+sickness were treated as the effect of witchcraft by the Indians, and
+the afflicted were carried into the woods and left alone with none near
+them except the medicine man whose business it was to expel the witch.
+
+A suspected witch or wizard might be safely killed by any kinsman of
+the sufferer; and it is said that Indians were known to walk all the
+way from the Mississippi to the Ohio reservations in order to shoot down
+persons accused of witchcraft, and then return unmolested. In 1828,
+the Mingo chief Seneca John was put to death by two of his tribesmen as
+ruthlessly as Leatherlips in 1812. He was accused of having bewitched
+the chief Comstock, and though he protested, "I loved my brother
+Comstock better than the green earth. I stand upon; I would shed my
+blood, drop by drop, to bring him back to life," yet he was sentenced
+to die, and Comstock's brothers, Coonstick and Steel, carried out the
+sentence.
+
+In 1831 the Senecas ceded their lands, forty thousand acres on the
+Sandusky, to the United States, and were removed to the southwest of the
+Missouri. Each of the other reservations was given up in turn for lands
+in the Far West, and in the early forties I myself, when a boy living in
+Hamilton, saw the last of the Ohio Indians passing through the town on
+the three canal boats which carried the small remnant of their nation
+southward and westward out of the hind that was to know them no more
+forever.
+
+[Illustration: Indian evacuation by River 223L]
+
+It was quite time. I cannot say how far they had been civilized, and for
+all I know they may have been tame farmers and mechanics, but in their
+moccasins and blankets, with their bows and arrows, they looked like
+wild hunters; and Ohio was no longer a good hunting ground. All the
+larger game had long been killed off or driven away, and the smaller
+game was fast vanishing before the rifle and the shotgun. As if its
+destruction by gunners singly was not rapid enough it was the custom in
+somewhat earlier days for whole neighborhoods to meet together for the
+wholesale slaughter of the sylvan creatures which still abounded. One of
+these great hunts took place in Medina County, in 1818, when the region
+was as yet very sparsely settled. The drive, as it was called, was fixed
+for the 24th of December, and at sunrise, six hundred men and boys drew
+up their far-spreading lines. They were armed with rifles, shotguns,
+old muskets, pistols, knives, axes, hatchets, bayonets fastened to long
+poles, and whatever other weapons they could lay hands on, to shoot,
+strike, or stab with, and they began to draw their vast circle together
+with a hideous uproar of horn, conchshells, and voices. The deer fled
+inward from all sides; bear and wolf left their coverts in terror; foxes
+and raccoons joined the panic rout, and the air was full of the flight
+of wild turkeys. Then the slaughter began, and before it ended three
+hundred deer, twenty-one bears, and seventeen wolves were killed; of the
+turkeys and the smaller game no tale was kept.
+
+Later these drives were common in the years whenever game was abundant
+in any neighborhood. They were called squirrel-hunts, because the
+squirrel was the unit, and larger or smaller game counted so many
+squirrels, or went to make up the value of a squirrel. I knew of one
+of these hunts during the late fifties in Northern Ohio, when the wild
+pigeons were still in such multitude that their flight darkened the sky,
+where now one of them is rarely seen.
+
+
+
+
+XXI. THE FIGHT WITH SLAVERY.
+
+Almost from the beginning Ohio was called the Yankee state by her
+Southern neighbors. Burr had found her people too plodding for him, as
+he said, and it would not have been strange if the older slave-holding
+communities on her southern and eastern border had seen with distrust
+and dislike the advance of the young free state, and had given her that
+nickname partly out of envy and partly out of contempt. Their citizens
+were high-spirited and generous, but they had not the public spirit
+which New England had imparted to Ohio, for public spirit comes from
+equality and from the feeling for others' rights, and the very supremacy
+which the slaveholders enjoyed was fatal to this feeling. Virginia and
+Kentucky were rich in independent character, but public spirit is
+better than this, for it cares for the independence of all through the
+self-sacrifice of each. That was the secret which Ohio early learned
+from New England, and which kept her safe from slavery when it pressed
+so hard upon her in the friendship as well as the enmity of her
+neighbors.
+
+We know that the Northwestern Territory was devoted to freedom by the
+law that created it, but we have seen that slavery was kept out of Ohio
+by one vote only when her first constitution was adopted; and for a
+very long time there was a very large party favorable to slavery in our
+state. It will seem strange to many of my readers that Ohio people of
+color were once not only not allowed to vote, but were not allowed to
+give testimony in the courts of law. They were treated in this like the
+Southern slaves, and in fact there was really a sort of slaveholding
+in Ohio, in spite of the law. In the river counties many farmers
+hired slaves from their masters in Virginia and Kentucky; and when the
+Southerners traveled through Ohio, they brought their slaves into the
+state with them, and took them out again. But when the conscience of the
+Northern people began to stir against slavery, the Ohio abolitionists
+coaxed away the slaves of these Southern travelers and sojourners,
+and this, with the constant escape of runaway slaves by their help,
+infuriated the friends of slavery inside as well as outside of the
+state. The abolitionists had what they called the Underground Railroad,
+with stations at their houses in town and country, and they sped the
+fugitives from one to another till they reached Canada. Their enemies
+accused them of tempting slaves across the Ohio, in order to give them
+their freedom, and in a little while the rage against them broke out in
+mobs and riots.
+
+It would not be easy to trace here the course of events which led to
+these outbreaks. It is no doubt true that the abolitionists were often
+rash, if not reckless, and that when they were maddened by the coldness
+or the hostility of the people to the cause of human freedom they did
+not stop at some acts which, though they were righteous enough, were
+unlawful. It was unlawful to harbor runaway slaves, but they did it
+gladly, and they appealed to the passions as well as the consciences of
+men in their hate of the sum of all villainies, as John Wesley called
+slavery. They not only met their foes half way, they carried the war
+into the hearts and homes of the enemy. From time to time wicked and
+sorrowful things happened to fret their fanaticism and keep it at a
+white heat. Peaceable negroes were attacked in their homes by ruffianly
+whites, their cattle killed, their fields wasted; and sometimes they
+made a bloody resistance. They were not always harmless, and they were
+not always pleasant neighbors. Slavery was a bad school, for the slaves
+as well as the masters; and the negroes, when not vicious and dishonest,
+were degraded and ignorant, for the public schools were shut against
+them, and they could not read, any more than they could vote or bear
+witness. So it is not strange that they should have been hunted and
+harried everywhere in Southern Ohio.
+
+In Pike County a whole neighborhood was invaded, and several lives were
+lost before one of these foolish and wicked persecutions ended. This
+incident, which was one of many more or less violent, occurred in 1830,
+and two years later something still more tragical happened. A negro
+calling himself Thomas Marshall, who had lived several years at Dayton,
+was caught up in the streets of that town by some men who, when his
+cries brought the citizens to his help, declared that he was a runaway
+slave. They took him before a magistrate, and proved their charge; but
+one of the slavecatchers held out the hope that his master would sell
+him. The poor slave gave fifty dollars himself toward his freedom, and
+his ransom was well made up when word came from his owner in Kentucky
+that he would not part with him for any sum. His captors then took
+Marshall to Cincinnati, where he was lodged for safe keeping over night
+in the fourth story of a hotel. When his guards fell asleep, the slave
+rose and threw himself out of the window to the ground fifty feet below.
+He was taken up fatally hurt, and he died at dawn.
+
+The anti-slavery meetings were often broken in upon by mobs and
+sometimes broken up. One of these riots took place in 1834 at Granville,
+in Licking County, where the Ohio Anti-slavery Convention held its
+anniversary in a barn on the outskirts. The members were returning to
+the village in a procession when the mob met them, and at sight of the
+ladies among them shouted, "Egg the squaws!" and began to pelt them with
+eggs and other missiles, while some ran and tried to trip them up.
+Many of the men were beaten and egged, and the manes and tails of their
+horses were shaved. This was a favorite argument with the friends of
+slavery, and if shaving horses' manes and tails could have availed,
+their party would easily have won.
+
+Some of the anti-slavery speakers and lecturers came on missions from
+the Eastern States, but several of the fiercest and bravest were
+like the Rev. John Rankin, of Clermont County, who had emigrated
+from Tennessee to Ohio, because he would not live in a slaveholding
+community. He used to preach against slavery at frequent peril of his
+life, and his son tells how a mob leader once mounted to his pulpit,
+and threatened him with his club. "Stop speaking, or I will burst your
+head," he shouted, but Rankin went quietly on as if nothing had been
+said, and one of his friends dragged the ruffian from his side. Of
+course, he was always coming home with his horse's mane and tail shaved,
+and of course his house was a station on the underground railroad to
+freedom.
+
+One of the boldest of the abolitionists was James G. Birney, who like
+Rankin had come to Ohio from the South. He started a newspaper called
+_The Philanthropist_ in Cincinnati, and for three months attacked
+slavery unsparingly in it. Then, on the 23d of July, 1836, the mob rose,
+broke into the printing office, threw the types into the street,
+tore down the press, and cast the fragments into the river. Then they
+assailed the black people living in one of the alleys, and shots were
+exchanged but no lives were lost. A few years later, however, in 1841,
+a general assault was made upon the negroes by the mob; several on
+both sides were killed and many wounded, and the office of _The
+Philanthropist_ was again destroyed. Of course these things did not stop
+the fight against slavery, and it did not help slavery at all when
+the authorities of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati forbade the
+students to write or to talk about it. That was foolish and useless; it
+only hurt the seminary, and drove many students from it to the college
+at Oberlin, then newly founded in the woods of Lorain County. There they
+could not only discuss slavery, but they could learn about it at
+first hand from the negro students. The founders of Oberlin were not
+abolitionists, but it is related that when they took Christ for their
+guide, they found that they could not shut out the friendless people
+whom the law kept from the schools, the polls, and the courts.
+
+These few scattered facts will give some notion of the bitter feeling
+that prevailed during the first ten or twelve years of the fight against
+slavery in Ohio. Afterwards it became less intense, as slavery became a
+political question between the two great parties of that day, the Whigs
+and the Democrats. Neither party expected to abolish slavery, but the
+Whigs hoped to keep it out of the territories and all the new states.
+Both parties split upon this question at last, and in 1856 the
+anti-slavery Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats joined in forming the
+Republican party, which in 1860 elected Abraham Lincoln upon its promise
+to shut slavery up to the states where it already existed.
+
+But it must not be supposed, because the first bitter feeling had passed
+away, that the facts were changed or that the tragedies and outrages had
+ceased. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, there was
+a new hunt for runaways all over the state, and business on the
+underground railroad was never so brisk. The hatred of slavery was
+revived in all its intensity by such cases as that of Margaret Gorden
+in 1856. This unhappy mother had escaped from Kentucky with her four
+children to the house of a free colored man below Mill Creek in Hamilton
+County, where they remained concealed with thirteen other fugitives. One
+night the place was suddenly attacked by the slavehunters under the lead
+of the United States officers. A fight followed, and several on both
+sides were wounded, but at last the slaves were overpowered. While the
+officers were dragging the others from the house, Margaret seized a
+knife from the table, and killed her little daughter rather than see
+it taken back to slavery, and then turned the bloody weapon against
+herself, but failed in the attempt on her own life. She was taken to
+Cincinnati and tried, not for murder, but for escaping from slavery,
+together with the other fugitives, who said they would "go singing to
+the gallows," if only they need not go back to the South. They were all
+found guilty of seeking to be free, and were returned to their owners.
+On her way down the river it is said that Margaret jumped from the
+boat with one of her remaining little ones in her arms. The child was
+drowned, but Margaret was saved for the fate which she dreaded, and
+which she had twice risked her own and her children's life to shun. What
+became of her at last was never known; it is only known that she was
+carried back to her owner. She had two deep scars on her black face.
+At her trial she was asked what made them, and she answered "White man
+struck me."
+
+In Champaign County, a fugitive slave named Ad White resisted the
+attempt of the slavehunters to take him, in 1857, and fired upon one of
+the United States marshals, whose life was saved by the negro's bullet
+striking against the marshal's gunbarrel. The people and their officers
+took the slave's side, and the case was fought in and out of court.
+The sheriff of the county was brutally beaten with a slungshot by the
+marshal who had so narrowly escaped death himself, and never take a
+thousand dollars for him; the money was promptly raised and paid over,
+and White lived on unmolested.
+
+[Illustration: Slavery issue 232]
+
+As late as the summer of 1860 a fugitive slave was arrested near Iberia,
+in Morrow County. A party of young men caught one of the marshals
+and shaved his head, while others beat his comrades. Rev. Mr. Gordon,
+President of Ohio Central College, stood by trying to prevent the
+punishment, but he alone was arrested. He was sentenced to prison,
+where he lay till Lincoln pardoned him. The pardon did not recognize his
+innocence, and he would not leave his cell until his friends forced him
+to do so. By this time the damp jail air had infected him, and he died,
+shortly after, of consumption.
+
+One would think that such things as these would have cured the Ohio
+people of all sentiment for slavery, for they had no real interest in
+it. But even in the second year of the Civil War, which the love of
+slavery had stirred up against the Union, the famous anti-slavery
+orator, Wendell Phillips, was stoned and egged while trying to lecture
+in Cincinnati. Before this time, however, events had gone so far that
+there was no staying them. One of the earliest and chiefest of these
+events was the attempt of John Brown to free the slaves in Virginia. He
+had already fought slavery in Kansas, where it was trying to invade free
+soil, and in 1859 he thought that the time had come to carry the war
+into the enemy's country. He did this by placing himself with a small
+force of daring young men, several of his own sons among the rest, in
+the mountains near Harper's Ferry. He hoped that when he had seized
+the United States Arsenal at that point, and given them arms the slaves
+would join him, and help to fight their way to the free states under his
+lead. But when they were attacked in the Arsenal, Brown and his men
+were easily overpowered by a detachment of Marines sent from Washington;
+several of his followers were killed; a few escaped; the rest suffered
+death with their leader on the gallows at Charlestown.
+
+Some think that Brown was mad, some that he was inspired, some that he
+was right, some that he was wrong; but whatever men think of him, there
+are none who doubt that he was a hero, ready to shed his blood for
+the cause he held just. His name can never die, so long as the name of
+America lives, and it is part of the fame of Ohio that he dwelt many
+years in our state. For many years of his younger manhood Brown had
+lived at Hudson, in Summit County; for months before his attempt in
+Virginia he and his men were coming and going at different points in the
+Western Reserve, and in Ashtabula County where one of his sons then had
+a farm, he kept hidden the pikes with which he hoped to arm the slaves.
+One of the young men who died with him on the scaffold at Charlestown
+was the Quaker lad, Edwin Coppock, of Columbiana County, who wrote, two
+days before he suffered, a touching letter of farewell to his friends.
+"I had fondly hoped to live to see the principles of the Declaration
+of Independence fully realized; I had hoped to see the dark stain of
+slavery blotted from our land.... But two more short days remain to me
+to fulfill my earthly destiny. At the expiration of those days I shall
+stand upon the scaffold to take my last look of earthly scenes. But that
+scaffold has but little dread for me, for I honestly believe that I am
+innocent of any crime justifying such a punishment. But by the taking of
+my life and the lives of my comrades, Virginia is but hastening on the
+day when the slave will rejoice in his freedom."
+
+[Illustration: John Brown making pikes for Slaves 234R]
+
+
+
+
+XXII. THE CIVIL WAR IN OHIO
+
+Though the Ohio people were too plodding for Aaron Burr, and though they
+were taunted almost from the first as the Yankee state of the West, they
+seem to have had war in their blood, which may have been their heritage
+from the long struggle with the Indians. But after the peace with Great
+Britain in 1815 there was no war cloud in the Ohio sky until Morgan
+swept across our horizon with his hard-riders, except at one time in
+1835. There had then arisen between our state authorities and those
+of Michigan a dispute concerning the border line between the two
+commonwealths, and matters went so far that the governors of both States
+called out their militia. The Michigan troops actually invaded Ohio,
+and overran the watermelon patches near Toledo, ate the chickens of
+the neighborhood, destroyed an ice house, and carried off one Ohioan
+prisoner. But the mere terror of the Ohio name sufficed to send them
+flying home again when they heard that our riflemen were waiting for
+them in Toledo, and many deserters from their ranks took to the woods
+on their way back. This vindicated the glory of our state; we cheerfully
+submitted when the arbitrators chosen to settle the dispute decided it
+mainly in favor of Michigan, and we have ever since lived at peace with
+that commonwealth.
+
+All this seems now like a huge joke, and so it has ever since been
+regarded, but a war was coming which was serious enough. It might be
+said that the great Civil War began with "John Brown's invasion of
+Virginia," in 1859, but it might just as well be said that it began with
+the fighting for and against freedom in Kansas in 1856. In fact it might
+be said that it began with the mobbing of anti-slavery speakers and the
+rescue of runaway slaves all over the North, from 1830 onwards. Yet this
+would be fantastic, even if it were true, and we had better accept the
+dates which history gives. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President
+by the men opposed to the spread of slavery, and in 1861 the slave
+states, feeling that their mastery of the Union was gone, left it one
+after another, and the first fighting took place through the effort of
+the United States government to hold its forts in the South.
+
+In this war, Ohio played so great a part, that it is hard for Ohio
+people to keep from claiming that she played the first part. Remembering
+that General Grant, General Sherman, General Sheridan, the three
+greatest soldiers of the war, were all Ohio men, we might be tempted to
+claim that without these the war would not have been won for the Union,
+but it is safer to claim nothing more than that Ohio gave the nation the
+generals who won the war. Our three greatest soldiers were only chief
+among many others under whose lead Ohio sent to the war some three
+hundred and twenty thousand men, during the four years of fighting, a
+force almost as great as that of whole nations in other times.
+
+[Illustration: John Morgan invades Ohio in 1863 237]
+
+Ohio men shed their blood on all the battlefields of the South, but
+only once was the war which consumed her children by tens of thousands
+brought home to her own hearths. This was when the state was invaded by
+John Morgan and his hard-riders in 1863. Morgan was born at Huntsville
+in Alabama, and was of the true Southern type, gallant, reckless,
+independent. He was one of the bravest and luckiest chiefs of
+Confederate cavalry, and when he was ordered to march northward from
+Tennessee through Kentucky, and attempt the capture of Louisville, but
+not to pass the Ohio, he trusted to his fortune, and crossed the river
+into Indiana at the head of some twenty-three hundred horsemen. On
+the 13th of July he entered the state of Ohio, a few miles north
+of Cincinnati, and passed eastward unmolested by the Union general
+Burnside, who preferred not to bring him to battle in the neighborhood
+of the city, but to wait some chance of attacking him elsewhere. The
+militia had been called out by the governor, and the whole country was
+on the alert. But Morgan's men passed through Clermont, Brown, Adams,
+Pike, Jackson, Vinton, Athens, and Gallia counties into Meigs with
+comparatively little molestation, though the militia learned rapidly
+to embarrass if not to imperil his course. His men suffered terribly in
+their long ride. They had to live on the country as best they could,
+and they were literally dropping with sleep as they pushed their jaded
+horses along the roads, everywhere threatened by the Ohio sharpshooters.
+They fell from their saddles and were left behind; they crawled off in
+the darkness and threw themselves down in the woods and fields, glad
+to awaken prisoners in the hands of their pursuers. At first the large
+towns were alarmed by the fear of pillage, but Morgan had hardly
+got into Ohio before it became his chief aim to get out again. His
+hard-riders were confined in their depredations mainly to the plunder of
+the country stores on their route. They stole what they could, but they
+stole without method or reason, except in the matter of horses, which
+they really needed and could use. They commonly left their worn-out
+chargers in exchange, but they took the freshest and strongest horses
+they could get, at any rate. In their horse stealing they were not
+so very unlike the Kentucky pioneers, who used to cross into the Ohio
+country for the ponies of the Indians, and they practiced it at much
+the same risk; for the Ohio people were becoming every moment madder and
+more mischievous. At first they only cut down trees to check Morgan's
+march after he got by, but they soon began to obstruct the roads in
+front of him; and though they burned one bridge over a river that
+he could easily ford, it was not long before they learned to destroy
+bridges where the streams were otherwise impassable.
+
+By the time he reached Portland the militia were closing in around him,
+and the next morning two detachments of United States cavalry struck
+him, while the gunboats which had been watching for him on the river,
+opened fire on him. In a few minutes the fight was over. Morgan left
+seven hundred of his men prisoners behind him, and with twelve hundred
+others fled north and east to seek a new way out of Ohio. The fight at
+Buffington Island took place on the 18th, five days after Morgan crossed
+the Ohio line into Hamilton County, and on the 26th he surrendered
+with the constantly lessening remnant of his force seven miles from New
+Lisbon in Columbiana County.
+
+The prisoners were all sent for safe keeping to the penitentiary at
+Columbus, but on the night of November 7th, Morgan and six of his
+comrades made their escape, by digging into an air-space under the floor
+of his cell with their table-knives, passing through this to the prison
+walls, and letting themselves down with ropes made of their bed-clothes.
+At the station where they were to take the train for Cincinnati, Morgan
+was dismayed to realize that he had no money to buy a ticket; but one
+of his officers had been supplied by a young lady who sent him some
+bank notes concealed in a book. They rode all night in great fear and
+anxiety, and just before the train drew into Cincinnati they put on the
+brakes and slowed it enough to drop from it with safety. Then they lost
+no time in making for the Ohio River, where they hired a boy to set them
+over to Kentucky in his boat. Morgan had not found the Ohio people too
+plodding for him, as Aaron Burr had, but he was quite as glad to leave
+their state, which he never revisited, for he was killed the next year
+in Tennessee. He left behind him in Ohio by no means a wholly evil
+name, and some stories are told of him that more than hint at a generous
+nature. A Union soldier whom his men had taken tried to break his musket
+across a stone, and one of the Confederate officers drew his pistol to
+shoot him. Morgan forbade it. "Never harm a man who has surrendered," he
+said. "He was only doing what I should have done in his place."
+
+We may be sure that such an enemy inflicted no wanton injury upon the
+country, and there was something in Morgan's presence that corresponded
+with this magnanimity of his character. He was a man of powerful frame,
+large beyond the common, of great endurance, and able to outride any
+of his men, without sleep or rest. He had a fresh complexion, with fair
+hair and beard, and his face was rather mild. When he gave himself up at
+last, it was with an apparently cheerful unconcern at the turn of luck
+which in other raids had enabled him to break bridges, capture trains,
+and destroy millions of value in military stores.
+
+Ohio is herself built upon so grand a scale that even her enemies seem
+to have been cast in a noble mold; and the jokes upon her own people
+that form the life of most of the stories of Morgan's raid are as large
+as he. At one point, forty miles from their line of march, a good lady
+saved the family horse from the southern troopers by locking him into
+the parlor, where his stamping on the hollow floor kept the neighborhood
+awake the whole night through.
+
+One of Morgan's men, who plundered wildly, but not very wickedly,
+carried for two days a bird cage with three canaries in it; another, at
+the looting of a country store, filled his pockets with bone-buttons;
+they were only dangerous when they met reluctance in their frequent
+horse trades. They called at the house of a gentleman in Hamilton County
+at one o'clock in the morning, and asked for breakfast; when he objected
+that there was no fire at that time, they suggested that they could
+kindle one for him that it might be hard to put out; then he made one
+himself and they got their breakfast.
+
+In Carroll County Morgan himself called for dinner at the house of a
+lady whose maiden name was Morgan, and at table they fell into such
+kindly chat about their cousinship, that she ended by giving him a clean
+shirt, which he needed badly, and gratefully wore away.
+
+[Illustration: Hiding with the pigs 242R]
+
+A farmer in Morgan County took refuge in his pigpen, where one of the
+raiders found him trying to hide behind a fat mother of a family, who
+was suckling her farrow. The raider grinned: "Hello! How did you get
+here? Did you all come in the same litter?" A stuttering hero who had
+been bragging of what he would do to the enemy if he got at them, was
+surprised by Morgan's men with a demand for his surrender. He flung up
+his hands instantly. "I s-s-surrendered f-f-f-five minutes ago!"
+
+One of the greatest jokes of all was played upon a friend of the South
+in Hamilton County. My younger readers may not suppose that there could
+be any friends of the South in Ohio, at that time; but in truth there
+were a great many, and far more than there were at the outbreak of the
+war. Then most of us believed that it would be quickly fought to an end;
+but after it had dragged on for two years, when its drain on the blood
+and the money of the nation was severest, and the end seemed as far
+off as at the beginning, those who had never loved the cause of freedom
+could easily blow the smoldering fires of discontent into a wide and
+far-raging flame. It must not be imagined that the Northern enemies of
+the North were all bad men; they were sometimes men of conscience, and
+sincerely opposed to the war against the South as unjust and hopeless.
+But they were called copperheads, because for a long time they lurked
+silently among the people, like that deadly snake which used to haunt
+the grass of the backwoods, and bite without warning. They were still
+called copperheads when they lifted their heads and struck boldly at
+the Union cause, under the lead of a very able man, Clement L.
+Vallandigham, whom we shall presently learn more of; and it was an
+old copperhead who followed Morgan's rear guard with the best horse the
+hard-riders had left him, and who tried to get speech with the officer
+in command. He explained that he was a follower of Vallandigham and
+against the war, and he pleaded that on this ground he ought to have his
+horses back. The Morgan colonel said they could not stop to listen, but
+they would hear him if he would drive along with them. He added that as
+some of his soldiers were worn out, the copperhead had better give them
+his wagon; and when the copperhead said that he could not ride, the
+colonel answered that he should be allowed to walk. After walking
+awhile, he complained that his boots hurt him, and the colonel ordered
+them taken off. The copperhead was obliged to follow in his stockings
+till the raiders camped. Then, to amuse their leisure, they taught him a
+Morgan song, and obliged him to dance, fat and fagged as he was, to his
+own music, while they applauded him with shouts of "Go it, old Yank!
+Louder!" till their commanding officer ordered them to harness a
+worn-out crow bait to his wagon, and bring him three wretched jades for
+the horses he wanted to recover, and let him go.
+
+[Illustration: A Copperhead walks with General Morgan 243L]
+
+It is not known whether this behavior of his friends turned the
+copperheads against them or not But in spite of the Morgan raid, and in
+spite of all the reasons and victories of a North, the largest vote that
+the Democratic party had ever polled, up to that time, was cast in favor
+of a man who had been bitterest against the war, and who was then in
+exile from his native country because of his treasonable words and
+practices. Even three thousand soldiers in the field voted for him, and
+this is far more surprising than that forty thousand voted against him.
+As we look back through the perspective of history, our state seems to
+have been solid for the Union and for freedom; but this is an appearance
+only, and it is better that we should realize the truth. It will do no
+harm even to realize that the man who embodied the copperhead feeling
+was by no means a malignant man, however mistaken.
+
+Clement Laird Vallandigham was born in 1820 at New Lisbon, of mixed
+Huguenot and Scotch-Irish ancestry, a stock which has given us some of
+our best and greatest men. His father was a Presbyterian minister,
+who eked out his poor salary by teaching a classical school in his own
+house. Clement was ready for college long before he was old enough to
+be received; and when he was graduated from Jefferson College, at
+Cannonsburg in Pennsylvania, he came back to New Lisbon and began to
+practice law.
+
+So far all the influences of his life should have been at least as good
+for the generous side of politics as for the ungenerous; but from the
+first he cast his lot with the oppressor. In 1845 he was sent to the
+legislature, where he took a leading part in opposing the repeal of the
+Black Laws, which kept the negro from voting at the polls or testifying
+in the courts. Two years later he fixed his home in Dayton, where
+he quickly came to the front as a States Rights Democrat in the full
+Southern sense. He was given by a Democratic house the seat to which
+Lewis D. Campbell was elected in 1856, and he remained in Congress till
+defeated in 1862. Up to the last moment he never ceased to vote and to
+speak against the war, because he believed it impossible to conquer the
+South; and when he came back to Ohio he kept on saying what he believed.
+
+This brought him under condemnation of General Order No. 38, issued
+by General Burnside at Cincinnati, forbidding any person to express
+sympathy for the enemy under pain of being sent out of the Union lines
+into the lines of the Confederates. Vallandigham defied this order; he
+was arrested by a company of the 115th Ohio, and taken to Cincinnati
+from Dayton, where a mob of his friends broke out the next day, and
+burned the office of the leading Republican newspaper. General Burnside
+sent a force and quelled the mob, and promptly had Vallandigham tried by
+a court-martial, which sentenced him to imprisonment in Fort Warren at
+Boston during the war. President Lincoln changed this sentence to
+transportation through our lines into the borders of the Southern
+Confederacy, and Vallandigham was hurried by special train from
+Cincinnati to Murfreesboro, in Tennessee, where General Rosecrans was in
+command. In a long interview, General Rosecrans tried to convince him of
+his wrongdoing, and asked if he did not know that but for his protection
+the soldiers would tear him to pieces in an instant. Vallandigham
+answered, "Draw your soldiers up in a hollow square to-morrow morning,
+and announce to them that Vallandigham desires to vindicate himself, and
+I will guarantee that when they have heard me through they will be more
+willing to tear Lincoln and yourself to pieces than they will
+Vallandigham." The general said he had too much regard for his
+prisoner's life to try it; but the charm of the man had won upon him.
+"He don't look a bit like a traitor, now, does he, Joe?" he remarked to
+one of his staff, and he warmly shook hands with Vallandigham when they
+parted at two o'clock on the morning of May 25.
+
+Vallandigham mounted into the spring wagon provided for the rest of
+his journey, and was driven rapidly out of the sleeping town toward the
+Confederate lines. It was still in the forenoon when, in response to a
+Federal flag of truce, Colonel Webb of the 51st Alabama sent word to
+say that he was ready to receive him; two Federal officers crossed the
+enemy's lines with him, where he was met by one private soldier, and
+after some hours taken into the presence of the commander. General Bragg
+received him very kindly at Shelbyville, and allowed him to report on
+parole at Wilmington, North Carolina. There he took a blockade runner
+for Nassau, where he found a steamer for Canada.
+
+He arrived in the British province early in July, to find that the Ohio
+Democrats had nominated him for governor, and that his party throughout
+the country had expressed its sympathy with him. President Lincoln met
+one of their committees, and agreed with them that Vallandigham's arrest
+was unusual, but he quaintly added: He could not be persuaded that the
+government should not take measures in time of war which must not be
+taken in time of peace, any more than he could be persuaded that a sick
+man must not take medicine which was not good food for a well one.
+
+So thought the great majority of the Ohio people, who duly chose John
+Brough, a War Democrat, for their governor in October. Vallandigham
+remained in Canada until 1864, when he returned to Dayton, where he was
+warmly received by his friends, and not molested by the authorities. But
+he had never afterwards any political importance, in spite of his great
+abilities and the peculiar charm of his manner for all kinds of people.
+After the war was over, he accepted its conclusions with earnest good
+faith, and three years later he met his death by a curious accident.
+He was showing a friend, in behalf of a client in whom he was greatly
+interested, how a pistol might go off in a pocket and cause a mortal
+wound such as his client was accused of inflicting on another. The
+pistol in his hand was really discharged; Vallandigham was fatally
+wounded and died shortly afterwards.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII. FAMOUS OHIO SOLDIERS
+
+First among these I count the great chief Pontiac, who led the
+rebellion of the mid-western tribes against the English after the French
+had abandoned them, and who was born in Auglaize County. I count
+the renowned chief Tecumseh, too, that later and lesser Pontiac, who
+attempted to do against the Americans what Pontiac tried to do against
+the English.
+
+It was some time before the great white men of Ohio began to be born
+here, but in the meanwhile there were those born elsewhere who, like
+General Harrison, became Ohioans, and so did what they could to repair
+the defect of birth. There is no reason to think that such men were
+shaped by Ohio influences, but it is the habit of our generous Ohio
+state patriotism to claim as Ohioans not only those who were born here,
+and those who came to live here, but those who were born here and then
+went to live elsewhere.
+
+Valiant and able generals came from the different parts of Ohio, and
+from the different races which settled there. But the Scotch race,
+descending through New England, has the highest place in our soldiers'
+ancestry, and the county of Clermont has the deathless glory of being
+the birthplace of Ulysses Simpson Grant, one of the greatest captains of
+all time, one of the purest patriots, one of the best and gentlest men.
+I need not speak of his career as a soldier, for that has become a part
+of the nation's history. The beginnings of his life were rude and hard;
+it was afterwards often clouded with failure; it brightened out into
+such splendid success as few lives have ever known; it was again
+darkened by trouble and disaster, and it closed in a long anguish of
+suffering. But if ever a life was worth living it was his, and his
+memory is safe forever in the love of his country and the honor of the
+world.
+
+His parents removed soon after he was born to Brown County, where
+Georgetown was his home until he was sent to West Point at seventeen.
+His whole boyhood, therefore, was spent in Southwestern Ohio, where a
+boy may live the happiest life on earth, and where Grant played, worked,
+planned, and studied not only without a dream of the place he was to
+take in history, but without special thought or liking for the calling
+in which he was to stand with Caesar and with Napoleon.
+
+When he was eight years old, he began to work in his father's tannery,
+where he drove the horse that turned the bark mill, and broke the bark
+into the hopper. He did not like the work, and he escaped from it when
+he could, and did jobs of wagoning about the village. He loved his
+horses and kept them sleek and fat; and it is told of him that when
+he first traded horses he was so eager to get a certain colt that he
+offered the man even more than he asked. He was fond of all boyish
+sports, but he was never rough, or profane, or foul-mouthed, and he was
+noted among his mates for his truth and honesty. The girls liked him for
+his gentleness, the younger children for his kindness; he never teased
+them, and he never tormented any living creature. There may have been
+better boys, but I have never heard of them; and if Grant passed only
+his first seventeen years in his native state, they were years of as
+true a greatness relatively as any that followed. From the first he
+was self-reliant, and taught himself to trust to his own powers and
+resources. When seven years old, he got an unbroken colt from the stable
+in his father's absence, hitched it to a sled which he loaded with wood
+in the forest, and then drove home with a single line. He once wished
+to ride his father's pacer on an errand he was sent upon; but his father
+could not spare it and the boy took his colt. "I will break him to
+pace," he said, and he came back with the colt pacing. At twelve he
+hauled logs with a heavy draft team. Once the men who were to load for
+him did not come, and Grant managed with the help of a fallen tree to
+get the logs on the truck alone and drove home with them. After eleven
+he had scarcely any schooling except that of hard work, until he was
+appointed to West Point.
+
+From Georgetown, another Ohioan famous in the great war was sent about
+the same time to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. This was the boy Daniel
+Am-men, who was destined to become Admiral Ammen. He had saved Grant's
+life when they were bathing together in White Oak Creek, and Grant
+remembered him with his high office and title when he became President.
+
+But Ammen had won both by his services during the war, for the Ammens
+were fighters. The admiral's brother Jacob had early distinguished
+himself by gallantry that won him a generalship. Long before this
+their father had begun the good fight by printing John Rankin's letters
+against slavery in his newspaper at Ripley.
+
+From Carroll County came that wonderful race of fighters, the McCooks.
+Daniel McCook, Presbyterian elder and Sunday-school superintendent,
+went into the war at sixty-three with his sons, and two years later was
+killed in the engagement with Morgan at Buffington Island. Latimer A.
+McCook died in 1869 of wounds received during his service as surgeon in
+the battles of the war. General Robert Latimer McCook was murdered by
+guerrillas as he lay sick and wounded near Salem, Alabama, in 1862.
+General A. McDowell McCook was a West Pointer who won his major
+generalship by his gallantry at Shiloh. General Daniel McCook, Jr., led
+the assault at Kenesaw Mountain, where he was mortally wounded. Edwin
+Stanton McCook was graduated at Annapolis, but preferred the land
+service, and rose to the rank of brevet major general, through the
+courage and ability he had shown at Fort Henry, at Fort Donelson, at
+Chickamauga, and in Sherman's March to the Sea. Charles Morris McCook
+was killed at the first Bull Run in 1861, while in his Freshman year at
+Gam-bier. His father saw him overwhelmed by the enemy and called out to
+him to surrender; but he answered "Father, I will never surrender to
+a rebel," and was shot down by one of the Black Horse Cavalry. John
+J. McCook served in the campaigns of the West and with Grant from the
+battle of the Wilderness onward to the end. He was severely wounded at
+Shady Grove, and left the army with the rank of colonel.
+
+Dr. John McCook, another Sunday-school superintendent, was the father of
+Edwin Moody McCook, who rendered brilliant service early in the war and
+left the army at its close with the rank of major general. His greatest
+exploit was breaking through the enemy's lines before Sherman began his
+march to the sea, and effecting a diversion by the damage he did and the
+prisoners he took. His brother Anson George McCook was at the first
+Bull Run and in the great battles of the Southwest, and was brevetted
+Brigadier General at the end of the war. Rev. Henry C. McCook enlisted
+first as a private soldier and became chaplain of a regiment, but did
+no actual fighting. He is well known as a naturalist and theologian,
+and his youngest brother John James is distinguished as a linguist. His
+brother left the army as colonel after seeing some of the first fighting
+and became an Episcopal minister. Roderick Sheldon McCook left Annapolis
+in 1859 and promptly shared in the capture of a slaver off the African
+coast. From 1861 to 1865 he was engaged in all the naval movements at
+Newbern, Wilmington, Charleston, Fort Fisher, and on the James, and
+suffered lasting injury to his health on the monitors. He left the navy
+with the rank of commodore. All these McCooks, except the Rev. J. J.
+McCook, now professor in Trinity College, Hartford, remained of the
+Presbyterian faith, which seems natural to their Scotch-Irish race.
+
+[Illustration: Rutherford Hayes 253R]
+
+Of all the Americans who have lived, none is securer of lasting
+remembrance than Rutherford B. Hayes, who was born in Delaware, October
+4, 1822. He was a great lawyer, a great soldier, a great statesman, a
+great philanthropist, a man without taint or stain. He had to suffer the
+doubt thrown by his enemies upon his right to the high office they
+had themselves conceded to him, but he was never wounded in his own
+conscience or in the love of the people. He was three times governor
+of Ohio, and when he became President of the United States he devoted
+himself to healing the hurts left by the war he had helped to fight. He
+made the North and South friends in the love he had for both sections,
+and then he gladly laid down his charge and went back to private life,
+after giving the country peace with honor. His presidency was not only
+one of the most distinguished and enlightened statesmanship, but it was
+consecrated by the virtues of the woman who made the White House the
+happiest home in the land. Lucy Webb Hayes, who had been like a mother
+to the soldiers of her husband's command, gave the social side of his
+administration the grace and charm of her surpassingly wise and lovely
+character. He never knew in his youth the poverty and hard work which
+narrowed the early life of Grant and Garfield. He was born to comfort
+and lived in greater and greater affluence; he had only to profit by his
+opportunities, while they had to make theirs; but he did profit by them.
+From school to college, and from college to the study of law, he passed
+easily successful in all that he tried to do, and he always tried to do
+his duty. Like Grant, he was of farther Scotch and nearer New England
+origin, but the next most distinguished native of Delaware County was of
+Dutch stock, as his name witnesses. William Starke Rosecrans was born
+in 1819, and entered West Point when only fifteen years old. He was in
+civil life when the war broke out in 1861, but of course he at once took
+part in it, and fought through a series of most brilliant campaigns,
+without one defeat, until the battle of Chickamauga in 1863. Even this
+he won, but the trust President Lincoln had felt in him and expressed up
+to the last moment was shaken by Rosecrans's enemies, and he was removed
+from his command. He left the army with the rank of major general, and
+he held afterwards places of high honor, but he felt that the wrong done
+him was never atoned for. Twenty-five years after his removal he told
+a meeting of his old comrades the touching story of how the stroke fell
+and how he bore it. "It was at night that I received the order, and I
+sent for General Thomas," who was to replace him, "He came to the tent
+and took his seat. I handed him the letter. He read it and as he did so
+his breast began to swell and he turned pale. He did not want to accept
+the command, but we agreed on consideration that he must do so, and I
+told him that I could not bear to meet my troops afterwards. 'I want to
+leave,' I said, 'before the announcement is made, and I will start early
+in the morning.' I packed up that night, and early in the morning,
+about seven o'clock, I rode away through the fog that then hung over the
+camp."
+
+[Illustration: William Tecumseh Sherman 255]
+
+William Tecumseh Sherman, who was born at Lancaster, Fairfield County,
+in 1820, was like his comrade and beloved friend Grant in the poverty he
+was born to. But his family was of historical distinction, while Grant's
+had always been obscure, and his father died a judge of the Supreme
+Court of Ohio. As he died poor, his large family of children were left
+to their mother, whose means were not equal to their maintenance and
+education. Thomas Ewing, the great man of the place, had been the
+father's friend, and he wished to adopt "the smartest of the children."
+It is not known how his choice fell upon Sherman, who was playing with
+some other boys on a sand bank near Ewing's house when it was made, and
+had apparently nothing to do with it.
+
+His father had called him Tecumseh because he admired the Indian chief's
+noble character and his merciful treatment of prisoners, and because
+he wished the boy to be a soldier. Ewing fulfilled the father's wish
+by appointing the son to a West Point cadetship at sixteen. Sherman had
+meantime fallen in love with Miss Ellen Ewing, and he married her in
+1850. Then he left the army and tried banking and the law, but liked
+neither, and he was President of the Louisiana state military academy
+when the Civil War began. With his frank, bold, impetuous nature, he
+forewarned the governor that he should side with the Union, and he asked
+to be notified in time before the state seceded.
+
+He received the surrender of the last great Confederate army, after a
+series of the most splendid strokes of generalship. His March to the
+Sea will be forever famous. The highest British military criticism
+pronounced his attempt "the most brilliant or the most foolish thing
+ever attempted by a military leader," and we all know how it turned
+out. Grant called him "the best field officer the war had produced,"
+and there has been nothing in history more sweet and beautiful than the
+friendship between these two great men. They were unlike in everything
+but their unselfishness and single-hearted patriotism, and they trusted
+as wholly as they loved each other.
+
+Irvin McDowell, born at Franklinton, Franklin County, in 1818, was the
+brave and gifted officer who lost the first battle of Bull Run, where he
+failed less ruinously than any other general of that moment of the war
+would have done. His name and fame have outlived that disaster, though
+the people did not then know enough to forgive him for his army's
+defeat. He was again of that tough Scotch-Irish breed that so many
+Ohioans are of; like our other great generals, he was a West Pointer,
+and he was of the high and kindly personal character common to them.
+
+[Illustration: General George A. Custer 258R]
+
+George A. Custer put into his life of vivid action the splendor of
+romance. His figure stands foremost in any picture of the war as that of
+the most dashing and daring cavalier of his time; but if his bearing was
+that of a young hero of fiction, his deeds were those of an accomplished
+and disciplined modern soldier. He was born at New Rumley in Harrison
+County, of a Hessian ancestor who had come over to fight for King
+George against the country which Custer lived and died to serve, and
+he inherited from him the blue German eyes, and the yellow German hair
+which he loved to wear long, and flying about his neck in his gallant
+charges. But otherwise he was of the simple matter-of-fact Ohio
+character. He got himself sent to West Point by means of a letter which
+he wrote to the congressman of his district. He frankly owned himself "a
+Democrat boy," and though the congressman was a Republican his fancy was
+taken with the honesty of the youth, whom he never saw till one day a
+young officer "with long yellow hair, hanging like Absalom's," presented
+himself at his house in Washington as Lieutenant Custer. "Mr. Bingham,
+I've been in my first battle," he said, "and I've come to tell you I've
+tried not to show the coward." After that, in numberless bold forays
+and fierce battles, he displayed such dauntless bravery, such brilliant
+prowess, that General Sheridan, in sending Mrs. Custer the table on
+which Lee signed his surrender, could write, "I know of no person more
+instrumental in bringing about this desirable event than your own most
+gallant husband." All the world knows how this glorious hero fell in the
+West, long after the war, before an overwhelming force of Indians.
+
+[Illustration: James A. Garfield 259L]
+
+If Custer was the romance of our history, James A. Garfield was its
+tragedy, the sort of noble tragedy which exalts while it awes. Again we
+have in his life the story, so often told in the Ohio annals, of early
+struggles with poverty, and of triumph over unfriendly fate. The child
+who was born in the rude farmhouse in Orange, Cuyahoga County, in 1831,
+was of Puritan lineage on his father's side and Huguenot blood on
+his mother's; and throughout his life he showed the qualities of both
+strains. He was left the youngest of four children to the care of his
+widowed mother, soon after his birth, and at the very beginning his
+blithe and dauntless spirit felt the stress of want. But he began to
+help himself and school himself, as the children of the poor must and
+do, and he early showed a passion for literature and adventure; he
+wanted to read; he wanted to go to sea; he actually tried to ship on
+a schooner at Cleveland, but, failing this, he got a chance to drive
+a canal-boat team. He fell sick and came home, and when he got well he
+learned carpentering. With his earnings in that trade he helped himself
+through the Academy at Chardon in Geauga County. From there he went
+to Hiram College, in Portage County, and then to Williams College, in
+Massachusetts. He studied law, and was elected to the Ohio Senate, which
+he left to enter the army. He was a brave and able soldier, and rose
+from lieutenant to be major general, before he left the service of his
+country in the field, to serve her in Congress. After sixteen years
+in the House, his state sent him to the Senate, and then his
+fellow-citizens chose him their President. He had been only four months
+in the White House, when the wretched Guiteau, a fool maddened by his
+own vanity and the sight of others' malevolence toward the man who
+never hated any one, shot him down; and he lingered amidst the fervent
+sympathy of the whole world, till he died nine or ten weeks later. Of
+all the great Ohioans he was the gentlest and kindest nature; he never
+did harm to any man, and his heart was as high as his aspiring intellect
+above anything base or low. His ambition was in all things for what was
+fine and noble.
+
+Quincy Adams Gilmore, who was born on a farm in Lorain County in 1825,
+was graduated at the head of his class from West Point. He achieved
+lasting fame in the siege of Fort Pulaski in Georgia, which other
+engineers had said could never be taken. Gilmore reduced it in two days
+by a feat in gunnery which changed forever the science and practice of
+that branch of the military art. In the ooze of a trembling marsh, which
+scarcely lifted its uncertain surface above the tides, he planted his
+heavy rifled cannon at three times the distance that siege artillery was
+believed effective, and battered down the walls of the fort with perfect
+ease, and with the loss of only one life in his command.
+
+The doubt as to the birthplace of Philip H. Sheridan, with a choice
+between Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, seems not to have been felt
+by Sheridan himself. He decided that he was born in Somerset, Perry
+County, Ohio, in March, 1831, and there is no good reason to suppose
+that he did not know. While so many of our soldiers were of Scotch-Irish
+origin, he was simply of Irish origin, and his father and mother were
+poor Irish laboring people, Catholics in religion, and careful to rear
+their son in their faith. Many stories are told of his boyhood, which
+seems to have been like that of most other Ohio boys of his generation.
+The most significant of these stories are those relating to his childish
+love and knowledge of horses and horsemanship; for they seem the
+prophecy of the greatest cavalry commander of modern times, who
+invented that branch of the service anew, as Gilmore reinvented gunnery.
+Sheridan's first famous ride was on a barebacked, bridleless horse which
+he mounted in the pasture where it was feeding, and clung to with his
+knees and elbows in its long flight down the highway. No poet has yet
+put this legendary feat into verse, but all my readers know the poem
+which celebrates Sheridan's ride from Winchester to Cedar Creek. This
+ride not only saved the day, but it stamped with the fiery little
+man's character the history of the whole campaign in the Valley of the
+Shenandoah; and in it, as it were, he met Sherman halfway on his
+March to the Sea, and completed the deadly circuit in which the great
+rebellion died.
+
+[Illustration: General Phillip H. Sheridan 262R]
+
+Of all our commanders he was perhaps the best beloved by his men, for
+he fought with his men. He tried to account for their liking him on no
+other ground. He once said, "These men all know that where it is the
+hottest there I am, and they like it, and that is the reason they like
+me." He was in the hottest place because he thought it was his duty to
+be there, and not because he was fearless. "The man who says he isn't
+afraid under fire, is a liar. I am afraid," he frankly said, with a
+touch of that profanity which Grant never used, "and if I followed my
+own impulse I should turn and get out. It is all a question of the power
+of mind over body."
+
+As a boy he had some schooling at a Catholic school, under an eccentric
+Irish master whom he used to play tricks upon, and who used to thrash
+him impartially with the rest. When he left school, he became a clerk in
+a hardware store in his native village, and then in a dry-goods store.
+From the last place, he was appointed in 1848 to West Point and his
+destiny was fixed. In his class was another Ohio boy, born not far from
+Sheridan's birthplace, at the little town of Clyde, Sandusky County, in
+the year 1828. This was James B. McPherson, Scotch-Irish by race as his
+name shows, and, as his history was to show later, one of the worthiest
+scions of that soldier-bearing stock. If Sheridan was the well-beloved
+of his men, McPherson was singularly dear to those who were closest
+to him and should have known him best. He was of a most affectionate
+nature, tenderly attached to his home and kindred, as men are apt to
+be if their homes are poor and their kindred have shared privation with
+them; but McPherson kept through all his prosperity and success the
+qualities which endear men to their fellows and comrades. The noble
+friendship between Grant and Sherman is one of the most precious of
+our national memories, but these great commanders seem to have loved
+McPherson next after one another.
+
+His father was a farmer who worked at the trade of blacksmithing when he
+was not following the plow; and the boy helped him in the field and at
+the forge. When James was thirteen, his father died, and then he got a
+place in a village store, and did what he could to support his widowed
+mother and orphan brothers and sisters. It is told that when he left
+them on the farm he ran tear-blinded till he got out of sight, and
+then sat down with his little bundle in the woods and cried with
+homesickness. But he went to work, and he studied and read in his hours
+of leisure, and when he got the promise of a nomination to West Point he
+managed to spend two terms at the Norwalk Academy in preparing himself.
+He was then so old that he was afraid he would not be admitted to West
+Point; but once in the army he seemed to regain his youth. When he
+took command of the Army of the Tennessee, under Sherman, he was only
+thirty-two years old.
+
+In one of the battles before Atlanta, in July, 1864, he was fired upon
+by a Confederate skirmish line, while personally leading a movement of
+his troops, and received a mortal wound. He rode a little way into the
+woods to avoid capture, and then fell from his horse; and as he lay
+there dying alone a private of an Iowa regiment found him, and cared for
+him till he expired.
+
+Sherman's grief for his loss was open and passionate. He wept over his
+dead face, and in the report of his loss to headquarters he said, "Those
+whom he commanded loved him even to idolatry; and I, his associate and
+commander, fail in words adequate to express my opinion of his great
+worth." Grant wrote to McPherson's aged grandmother: "The nation had
+more to expect from him than from almost any one living." He wished to
+express the grief of personal love for the departed, and he testified to
+"his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability, and all
+the manly virtues that can adorn a commander."
+
+Such were the greatest of the great Ohio soldiers. To say that they
+were, each in his different way, the first soldiers of the war, is to
+keep well within the modest truth. They believed in one another, they
+trusted one another, for they knew one another. The love between
+them, impassioned in Sherman, frank and hearty in Sheridan, tender in
+McPherson, deep and constant in Grant, is one of the most beautiful
+facts of our history, or of any history, a feeling without one
+ungenerous quality. It was indeed,
+
+"A goodly fellowship of noble knights,"
+
+such as has not been since that of King Arthur's Table Round.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV. OHIO STATESMEN
+
+The men who have given distinction to our state in politics could hardly
+be more than named in a record like this; and I shall not try to speak
+of them all or try to keep any order in my mention of them except the
+alphabetical order of the counties where they were born, or where they
+lived.
+
+From Ashtabula County, the names that will come at once to the reader's
+mind are those of Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade, both of a
+national fame inseparable from the history of the struggle with slavery.
+Giddings was first to cast his lot with the almost hopeless cause of
+freedom, but the fiery nature of Wade served to keep it warm in the
+hearts of its later adherents and to spread its light. Neither of
+these great Ohioans were Ohioans by birth. Giddings was born in Athens,
+Pennsylvania, in 1795, and came to Ashtabula County in 1806, where
+he dwelt until within a few years of his death, which took place at
+Montreal in 1864, while he was Consul General for Canada. He studied
+law, and succeeded at the bar before he entered political life. He
+was then twenty years in Congress as representative from the Ashtabula
+district, which promptly returned him when he was expelled from the
+House of Representatives for presenting a petition against slavery. His
+courage was so unconscious that he seemed never to assert it in his
+long career of defiance at Washington, but it never failed him in the
+presence of the dangers that often beset him there. In early life his
+people were desperately poor; he had scarcely a thought of school till
+he was twenty-three, and it was not until he had conquered from the
+wilderness a farm for his father and himself that he found time for
+study. He always loved the simplicity of the new country, and when he
+came home to the village of Jefferson from the sessions of Congress,
+he liked to "turn himself out to grass," as he called it: to put on old
+clothes and a straw hat, and walk barefoot through the streets which he
+had known when they were forest trails.
+
+Wade was born at Hills Parish, Massachusetts, in 1800, and he too was
+born in utter poverty. He worked on a farm, and then worked with pick
+and spade on the Erie Canal; but by the time he was twenty-one he
+knew much science and philosophy through studies he had pursued in a
+woodchopper's hut by the light of pine knots. In Jefferson he read law
+and became Giddings's partner. He was sent to the United States Senate
+in 1851 as an antislavery Whig, and he continued to stand four-square
+for freedom there during nearly twenty years. He was frank, bluff, even
+harsh in his speech and manner, but kind at heart, and it is told of him
+that once when he discovered a wretched neighbor robbing his corn crib,
+he moved out of sight that the man might not know he had been caught in
+the misdeed to which want had driven him.
+
+Thomas Ewing, at one time United States senator from Ohio, and at all
+times a leading statesman and lawyer, was a citizen of Athens County,
+where his father settled in 1798. There the boy led the backwoods life,
+and struggled with all its adversities in his love of books, until he
+was nineteen. He loved the woods, too, and his boyhood was not
+unhappy, though his ambition was for the things of the mind. In his
+reminiscences, he tells of his early privations and of his delight in
+the first books which came to his hands: the "Vicar of Wakefield," which
+he learned largely by heart, and the "Aeneid" of Virgil, which he used
+to read aloud to the farm hands on Sundays, and at such other leisure
+times as they all had amidst the work of clearing the land. At nineteen,
+he went to earn some money at the Salines on the Kanawha, and then
+lavished it upon the luxury of three months' study at Athens. After
+several years' labor in the salt works, he entered college at Athens,
+teaching school between terms, and going to Gallipolis to pick up French
+among the survivors of the disastrous settlement there. Then he turned
+to the law, and won his way to ease and honor. One of his daughters, as
+we know, became the wife of General Sherman, whom he had adopted as his
+son.
+
+Benjamin Lundy, the meek and dauntless Quaker who was called the
+Father of Abolitionism, lived a long time in Belmont County, at St.
+Clairsville, where he founded his Union Humane Society, in 1815, and
+inspired the formation of like societies throughout the country. He
+was born in New Jersey, and had settled in Wheeling, Virginia, but life
+there became un endurable to him from the sight of slaves chained and
+driven in gangs through the streets, on their way to be sold in the
+Southern markets. In Belmont County, also, the first native Ohio
+governor, Wilson Shannon, was born.
+
+One of the Ohioans whom history will not forget was Robert Morris, of
+Clermont County, our United States senator from 1813 till 1839. He was
+one of the earliest American statesman to own the right of the slave
+and to defend it. In his last speech he startled the Senate with the
+prophetic words in which he recognized the danger hanging over the
+Union, and he said, "That all may be safe, I conclude that the negro
+will yet be free."
+
+[Illustration: Benjamin Harrison 268R]
+
+Benjamin Harrison, one of the five presidents whom Ohio has given the
+country within thirty years, was born at North Bend in Hamilton County,
+where his grandfather General William Henry Harrison lived until chosen
+President in 1840. He remained in Ohio until he was twenty-one; then he
+went to Indianapolis, and it was from Indiana that he went to the war,
+where he achieved rank and distinction by his talent and courage.
+
+He is a great lawyer, as well as a soldier and politician, and a speaker
+of almost unsurpassed gifts.
+
+[Illustration: Salmon P. Chase 269L]
+
+Salmon P. Chase, governor of Ohio and United States senator, Lincoln's
+first Secretary of the Treasury, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
+of the United States, was an Ohioan by grace of New Hampshire, where he
+was born, and where he lived till he was a well-grown boy. In 1830, when
+he was twenty-two years old, he began the practice of law in Cincinnati,
+and prospered in spite of his bold sympathy with the slave and the
+friends of the slave. The Kentuckians called him the attorney-general of
+the negroes, and the negroes gave him a silver pitcher, in gratitude
+for his "public services in behalf of the oppressed." He was first an
+abolitionist, but later became a leader of the anti-slavery party,
+and was one of the first and foremost Republicans. As Secretary of the
+Treasury his mastery in finance was as essential to our success in the
+war as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant. He was
+followed in the office of Chief Justice by another Ohioan of New England
+birth, who, like Chase, had passed all the years of his public life in
+our state. Morrison R. Waite, of Toledo, was perhaps even more Ohioan in
+those traits of plainness and simplicity in greatness which we like to
+claim for Ohio, only upon sober second thought to acknowledge that they
+are the distinctive American traits.
+
+An Ohio Secretary of the Treasury assured to the nation the means of
+meeting the expenses of the Civil War, Ohio generals fought it to a
+victorious close, and an Ohio Secretary of War knew how to deal best
+with both the men and the money, so as to turn the struggle from its
+doubtful course. Without Edwin M. Stanton neither Chase nor Grant, with
+Sherman and Sheridan, could have availed. He was born at Steubenville
+in 1814, of a family of North Carolina Quakers, and as a boy his tastes
+were as peaceful as those of his ancestors. He had pets of all kinds,
+and he made collections of birds and insects. He was pretty diligent
+at school, but his studies there were not of the severer kind. He loved
+poetry; he founded a circulating library; and both before and after he
+went to Kenyon College, he was clerk in a bookstore. But deep within
+this quiet outside was the hot nature which fused the forces of the
+great war, and shaped them according to his relentless will. He became
+a successful lawyer, and had been President Buchanan's Attorney-General
+when Lincoln made him Secretary of War. He left that office worn out
+with the duties to which he gave mind and body, and died soon after
+Grant had appointed him, in 1869, to the bench of the Supreme Court No
+man in office ever deserved more friends, or made more enemies. He was
+tender and kindly with the friendless and hapless, but with the strong
+and the fortunate, when they crossed his mood, he was rude to savagery.
+
+[Illustration: John Sherman 270R]
+
+The chief citizen of Richland County is John Sherman, who is also one
+of the chief citizens of Ohio, and of the United States. He has been in
+Congress ever since 1855, and ever since 1861 he has been in the Senate,
+except for the four years when he was Secretary of the Treasury under
+President Hayes. If any man in our public life during this long period
+merits more than he the name of statesman, it would be hard to say who
+he may be. But in his boyhood he gave promise of anything but the sort
+of career which he has dignified. He had all the impulsiveness of his
+famous brother, General Sherman, and something more than his turbulence.
+He himself, with that charming frankness which seems peculiarly a
+Sherman trait, tells in his autobiography what reckless things he did,
+even to coming to blows with his teacher; but all this heat seems later
+to have gone to temper a most manly and courageous character for a
+career of the greatest public usefulness.
+
+[Illustration: William McKinley 271L]
+
+He was born at Lancaster in 1810, and the second President who has
+called him from the Senate to a seat in his cabinet was born at Niles in
+Trumbull County, in 1844. William McKinley entered the army as a private
+in the famous 23d Ohio, when he was only seventeen, and fought through
+the war. When it ended he had won the rank of brevet major, but he had
+then his beginning to make in civil life. He studied law, and settled
+in Canton, where he married, and began to be felt in politics. He was
+thrice sent to Congress, and then defeated; but in 1896 he was elected
+the fifth President of the United States from the state of Ohio.
+
+It is a long step backward in time, in fact more than a hundred years,
+before we reach the birthday, in 1794, of Thomas Corwin, one of the most
+gifted Ohioans who has ever lived.
+
+[Illustration: Thomas Corwin 272R]
+
+He was born in Kentucky and was brought, a child of four years, by his
+parents to Ohio, when they settled at Lebanon in Warren County. He grew
+up in the backwoods, but felt the poetry as well as the poverty of the
+pioneer days, and it is told that the great orator showed his passion
+for eloquence at the first school he attended. He excelled in
+recitations and dialogues; but he was not meant for a scholar by his
+father and he was soon taken from school, and put to work on the farm.
+In the War of 1812 he drove a wagon in the supply train for General
+Harrison's army, and the people liked to call him the Wagoner Boy, when
+he came forward in politics. A few years later he read law, and with
+the training which he had given himself at school as well as in the
+old-fashioned debating societies which flourished everywhere in that
+day, he quickly gained standing at the bar as an advocate. He was
+all-powerful with juries, and with the people he was always a favorite.
+Such a man could not long be kept out of public life. He was called to
+serve seven years in the state legislature, and ten in Congress; then
+he was elected governor. He was so beloved that when he was nominated a
+second time for the governorship it was taken for granted that he would
+be elected, but so few of his friends were at the trouble to vote for
+him that he was, to the profound astonishment of everybody, defeated.
+
+It was a joke which no one could enjoy more than Corwin himself; for he
+was not only an impassioned orator, but a delightful humorist. He could
+put a principle or a reason in the form of a jest so that it would go
+farther than even eloquence could carry it with the whimsical Western
+people; and perhaps nothing more effective was said against the infamous
+Black Laws which forbade the testimony of negroes in the courts than
+Corwin put in the form of self-satire. He was of a very dark complexion,
+so that he might have been taken for a light mulatto; and he used to say
+that it was only when a man got to be of about his color that he could
+be expected to tell the truth.
+
+He was sent to the United States Senate soon after his defeat for the
+governorship, and it was there that in 1847 he made his great speech
+against the war with Mexico, as a war of conquest for the spread of
+slavery. It may be that there are more eloquent passages in English than
+some of the finest in this speech, where he warned the American people
+against the doom of unjust ambition, but I do not know them. It was
+the supreme effort of his life, but it was addressed to a time of
+unwholesome patriotic frenzy, and Corwin's popularity suffered fatally
+from it. He never disowned it; he defended and justified it before the
+people; but he declined from the high stand he had taken as the champion
+of freedom and justice, and the later years of his political life
+were marked by rather an anxious conservatism. His final efforts were
+unavailingly made to stay the course of secession by suggestions of
+impossible compromise between the North and South. At the close of the
+war he was stricken with paralysis while visiting as a private citizen
+the Capitol at Washington, where he had triumphed as representative and
+senator, and he died almost before the laughter had left the lips of the
+delighted groups which hung about him. Of all our public men he was most
+distinctively what is called, for want of some closer term, a man of
+genius, and he shares with but three or four other Americans the fame of
+qualities that made men love while they honored and revered him. In the
+presence of this great soul, so simple, so sweet, so true, so winning,
+so wise, I think the reader will scarcely care to be reminded that among
+the notable Ohio men of our day are some of the richest, if not the very
+richest, American millionaires.
+
+
+
+
+XXV. OTHER NOTABLE OHIOANS
+
+Two names well-known in literature belong to Ashtabula County. Albion
+W. Tourgee was born there in 1838, and made a wide reputation by his
+novels, "A Fool's Errand" and "Bricks without Straw,"--impassioned and
+vivid reports of life in the South during the period of reconstruction;
+and Edith Thomas, who was born in Medina County, made Ashtabula her home
+till she went to live near New York. While she was still in Ohio, the
+poems which are full of the love of nature and the sense of immortal
+things began to win her a fame in which she need envy no others of our
+time.
+
+One of the earlier Ohioans of note was John Cleves Symmes, of Butler
+County, who believed that the earth was penetrated at the poles by
+openings into a habitable region within it. He petitioned Congress for
+means to explore the Arctic seas and verify his theory; of course
+he petitioned in vain, but he won world-wide attention and made some
+converts. He had been a gallant officer of the United States Army, and
+had fought well in the War of 1812, but he died poor and neglected. He
+was of New Jersey birth, and of that stanch New Jersey stock which gave
+character to the whole southwestern part of Ohio.
+
+Another and still more famous theorist, who is not generally known to
+have been an Ohioan, was Delia Bacon, who first maintained that the
+plays and poems of Shakespeare were written, by Sir Francis Bacon. She
+was born in Portage County at Tallmadge, where her father was settled as
+minister.
+
+A sculptor who, if not the greatest American sculptor, has yet achieved
+in his art the most American things ever done in it, is J. Q. A. Ward,
+the author of the "Indian Hunter," and many other noble if less native
+works. He was born at Urbana, in Champaign County, of the old pioneer
+stock; and in a region remote from artistic influences, he felt the
+artistic impulse in his boyhood. His earliest attempt was a figure
+modeled in the wax which one of his sisters used in making wax flowers,
+and which he clandestinely borrowed. Then he made a bas-relief of the
+first train of cars he ever saw, but this he did in clay at the village
+potter's; and he also modeled in clay the head of a negro, well known in
+the place, which all the neighbors recognized. A few years later he was
+sent to school in Brooklyn, where he used every day to pass the studio
+of the sculptor H. K. Browne, and long for some accident that would give
+him entrance. The chance came at last; he told the sculptor the wish of
+his heart, and Browne consented to let him try his hand under his eye.
+From that time the boy's future was assured. The famous sculptor lives
+absorbed in his work in New York, where his ripe years find him crowned
+with the honor that will survive him as long as his bronzes and marbles
+endure.
+
+To Clinton County belongs the name of Addison P. Russell, whose charming
+books of literary comment have so widely endeared him to book lovers;
+but whose public services in his own state are scarcely known outside of
+it among the readers of "Library Notes," or of "A Club of One."
+
+The inventor of the first successful electric light, Charles Francis
+Brush, was born on his father's farm in Euclid, Cuyahoga County, in
+1840, and still pursues in Cleveland the studies which have literally
+illumined the world. One of the earliest pioneers of science in geology
+and archaeology, Charles Whittlesey is identified with Cleveland, where
+the girlhood of the gifted novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson, was
+passed. There, too, Charles F. Browne began to make his pseudonym of
+Artemus Ward known, and helped found the school of American humor. He
+was born in Maine; but his fun tastes of the West rather than the East.
+
+[Illustration: Thomas A. Edison 277L]
+
+Thomas A. Edison, the electrician whose inventions are almost of the
+quality of miracles, and have given him worldwide celebrity, was born in
+Milan, Erie County, in 1847, of mixed American and Canadian parentage.
+His early boyhood was passed in Ohio, but he went later to Michigan,
+where he began his studies in a railroad telegraph office, after serving
+as a train boy.
+
+Another noted name in science is that of T. G. Wormley, long a citizen
+of Columbus, though a native of Pennsylvania. He wrote his work on
+poisons in our capital, where he had studied their effects on animal
+life, in several thousand cats and dogs, while a professor in Starling
+Medical College. His microscopical analysis was illustrated by drawings
+of the poison crystals, made by his wife, who learned the art of steel
+engraving for the purpose, when it was found that no one else could
+give the exquisite delicacy and precision of the original designs. Her
+achievement in this art was hardly less than her husband's in science,
+and it is a pleasure to record that she was born in Columbus.
+
+To Franklin County also belongs the honor of being the birthplace of
+the botanist, William S. Sullivant. The American Academy of Arts and
+Sciences recognized him as the most accomplished student of mosses whom
+this country has produced.
+
+I do not think it at all the least of her honors that Franklin County
+should be the birthplace of the horse tamer John S. Rarey, for whose
+celebrity the world was once not too large. He imagined a gentle art of
+managing horses by study of their nature and character, and in Europe,
+as well as America, he showed how he could subdue the fiercest of them
+to his will, through his patient kindness. In England the ferocious
+racing colt Cruiser yielded to Rarey, and everywhere the most vicious
+animals felt his magic. He was the author of a "Treatise on Horse
+Taming" which had a great vogue in various languages, and he achieved a
+reputation which was by no means mere notoriety.
+
+Coates Kinney of Xenia was not born in Greene County, or even in Ohio;
+but he came to our state from New York when a boy, he has lived here
+ever since, and has been shaped by its life. His poem of "Rain on the
+Roof" is a household word, and it is the poem which will first come into
+the reader's mind at the mention of his name. But his greatest poem is
+"Optim and Pessim," which is one of the subtlest and strongest passages
+of human thought concerning the mystery of the universe; and his next
+greatest is his "Ode for the Ohio Centennial," delivered at Columbus
+in 1888. It merits a place with the best that have celebrated, like
+Lowell's "Commemoration Ode," the achievements of the people.
+
+In Greene County began the long journalistic life of William D.
+Gallagher, who was born in Philadelphia in 1808, but came while a child
+to Southern Ohio, and grew up in the impassioned love of that beautiful
+country. There was not much besides its beauty to endear it to him, for
+his life was a long struggle there with adverse conditions. But he never
+lost heart or hope; he failed cheerfully in one literary enterprise
+after another, and turned from literature to politics until he found
+the means and the chance to fail again in the field where his heart was
+always. In Xenia, in Cincinnati, in Columbus, in Louisville, he lived,
+now here, now there, as his hopes and enterprises called him, and ended
+at last on a little farm in Kentucky. His poetic vein was genuine; it
+was sometimes overworked, but at least one poem of entire loveliness was
+minted from it; and there are few American poems which impart a truer
+and tenderer feeling for nature than Gallaghers "August," beginning--
+
+"Dust on thy summer mantle, dust."
+
+[Illustration: Whitelaw Reid 280R]
+
+The life of Whitelaw Reid, who was born near Xenia in 1837, is a
+romance of success from the beginning, of the kind that seems peculiarly
+American. His people were Scotch Covenanters, with the stern convictions
+of that race. It is said that his grandfather first settled in Hamilton
+County, but rather than run a ferry boat on Sunday, as the deed of his
+land bound him to do, he sold it and removed to Greene County, where his
+father was a farmer when the boy White-law was born. He sent his son
+to school and to college, and then left him to make his own way in the
+world, which he did by first becoming a country editor, and then going
+to the war as a newspaper correspondent, and taking part in several
+battles as an aid-de-camp. He learned to know the war at first hand,
+and he was well fitted to make his history of "Ohio in the War" the most
+important of all the state histories. He spent two years in writing this
+work of truly Ohioan proportions and of unfailing interest, and then he
+became Horace Greeley's assistant on the New York Tribune. It was in the
+course of nature that after Greeley's death he should become its owner
+and director, and should take a leading part in national politics. He
+has been our minister to France, and has acquired great wealth as well
+as honor; but he has remained affectionately true to the home of his
+youth, as his care of the old farmstead at Cedarville evinces.
+
+Among the most eminent and useful citizens of the state was Nicholas
+Longworth, who came from New Jersey to Cincinnati, when just of age, in
+1803. He was first to introduce the culture of grapes and the making
+of wine into Ohio; he planted the Catawba vine on the uplands of
+Cincinnati, where it flourished till the destruction of the forests
+changed the climate. He became very rich by his investments in lands,
+but he never outgrew his sympathy with the poor and struggling, and his
+hand was open to every one who could intelligently profit by his help.
+Many stories are told of his eccentricity. He was so simple in his dress
+that he was once mistaken for one of his own workmen by a stranger whom
+he had shown through his grounds, and who gave him a dime; Longworth
+thanked him and put it in his pocket For a long time he received the
+poor every Monday morning at his house, and gave whoever asked a loaf
+of bread, or a peck of meal, or their worth in money. His charity was of
+the divine order which does not seek desert in its objects. "I will help
+the devil's poor," he said, "the miserable drunken dog, whom nobody else
+will do anything for but despise and kick," and he left the deserving
+poor to others, knowing that they were sure of friends.
+
+Hiram Powers was the first American sculptor to give us rank in Europe.
+Longworth, who loved the arts as well as the industries, helped him
+to go to Florence from Cincinnati, where he had begun by modeling wax
+figures for a local museum. James H. Beard came from Painesville to
+Cincinnati, and won there his first success as a portrait painter. He
+was later to reveal the peculiar satirical gift for expressing human
+character in animals, for which his brother William H. Beard is perhaps
+even more famed. Among later artists, either born or bred in Cincinnati,
+Frank Dengler in sculpture, and Mr. Frank Duvaneck in painting, have
+shown extraordinary qualities. Dengler died at twenty-four, but not
+too soon to have given proof of his great talent; Mr. Duvaneck did such
+things in painting as to attract wide notice in America and Europe,
+where he headed a revolt of the young painters from the Munich School,
+and may be said almost to have founded a school of his own. These two
+young men were of the German stock which flourishes amid the Rhine-like
+hills of the Ohio; but another gifted Ohioan, who began his art life
+at Cincinnati, though he was born in Trumbull County, is of that pure
+American lineage commonest in the Western Reserve. Kenyon Cox, now
+president of the Art Student's League in New York, is the son of the
+distinguished statesman and soldier, General J. D. Cox, who was one
+of the first to enter the army from civil life, and with Garfield and
+Hayes, to show military qualities second only to those of the West Point
+men.
+
+Of this class of our generals was Ormsby M. Mitchell, the eminent
+astronomer in charge of the observatory at Cincinnati, who was among
+the first to go from that city to the war. He won rank and honor without
+fighting a battle, by virtue of the same qualities which enabled him
+to do more than any one else towards founding a public observatory at
+Cincinnati before any city in the East had one.
+
+He was of Kentucky birth, and came a child to Ohio; but William H.
+Lytle, dear to lovers of poetry as the author of the fine lyric, "Antony
+and Cleopatra," was born in Cincinnati, of the old Scotch-Irish
+stock, in 1826. He had everything pleasant in life and he enjoyed
+his prosperity, but when the war came he met its call halfway. At
+Chickamauga he fell, pierced by three bullets, in the thick of the
+fight. As he dropped from his horse into the arms of friends, he
+smiled his gratitude, and spent his last breath in urging them to save
+themselves, and leave him to his fate. The poem which begins with the
+well-known words,
+
+"I am dying, Egypt, dying,"
+
+will keep the name of Lytle in remembrance perhaps longer than all the
+poems of Phoebe and Alice Cary shall live, such are the caprices of
+fame; but the verse of these sisters is a part of American literature,
+as they themselves are a part of its history. They were true poets, and
+in their work a sense of
+
+"The broad horizons of the West"
+
+first made itself felt. They left the farm where they were born near
+College Hill and came to live in Cincinnati after they began to be known
+in literature, and later they went to dwell among the noises of New
+York, where they died; but the country, the sweet Miami country,
+remained a source of their inspiration, and now and again the reader
+tastes its charm in their verse.
+
+[Illustration: Harriet Beecher Stowe 284R]
+
+They were undeniably Ohioan, while Pennsylvania may dispute our right
+to the fame of Thomas Buchanan Read, though his most famous poem,
+"Sheridan's Ride," was written and first recited in Cincinnati. We must
+not more than remind ourselves that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe passed
+part of her early life in that city, and is known to have gathered much
+of the suggestion for "Uncle Tom's Cabin" among the Ohio scenes where
+some of its most vivid events occur.
+
+[Illustration: George Kennan 284L]
+
+In the county of Huron a man of unquestionable claim to remembrance was
+born. George Kennan, whose enviable privilege it was to let the light
+in upon the misery of Siberian exile and to awaken the abhorrence of the
+world for Russian tyranny, was a native of Norwalk, where he grew up a
+telegraph operator. He worked at night and went to school by day, and
+when only nineteen, while one of the chief operators in Cincinnati, he
+applied for leave to join an expedition for laying a cable from Alaska
+to Siberia by way of Bering Strait. He was asked if he could get ready
+to start in two weeks, and he answered that he could get ready to start
+in two hours. He was appointed, and in this way he came to know the
+horrors which he afterwards studied more fully in a second visit to
+Siberia. He traveled fifteen hundred miles through that wintry prison
+of Russia, and saw and heard the sorrowful things which the despotism of
+the Czar has done to men who dare to love freedom.
+
+His report of these cruelties has at least put their authors to shame
+before the civilized world, if it has not wrought so great an open
+change as the work of another Ohio man in dealing with even greater
+atrocities. It is interesting to note that Januarius A. Mac-Gahan
+was born in the same county as Philip H. Sheridan, of the same Irish
+parentage, to the same Catholic religion, and the same early poverty. He
+saw the light in July, 1844, in a log cabin on his father's little farm
+among the woods near New Lexington in Perry County. He studied hard at
+school, and read constantly out of school, when a boy. When a little
+older, he worked for the neighboring farmers; he hoped to get a school
+to teach; but he could not get it in his own home, where he was thought
+too young, and he had to go to Indiana for it. From there he went to
+St Louis, where he became a newspaper reporter. In 1868 he sailed for
+Europe to study French and German, hoping to come home and practice law
+in that city. But his duty as correspondent took him to the scenes of
+various European wars, and launched him at last amidst the barbaric
+outrages of the Turks in Bulgaria. His exposure of their abominable
+misdeeds in 1876 roused the whole world; the English government
+officially examined his facts and found them indisputable. The war began
+between Russia and Turkey, and MacGahan returned to Bulgaria with the
+victorious Russian troops. There, wherever the people knew him, they
+hailed him as their savior. He had made their miseries so widely known
+to mankind as to render it impossible that they should continue. It
+is not strange that they thronged upon him, and kissed his hands, his
+boots, his saddle, his horse. In the peace that followed, a whole empire
+was torn from the bloody hands of the Turks, and four Christian peoples
+were saved from their savage rule. Bulgaria, Roumania, Roumelia, and
+Servia now belong to themselves, and all this has come about from the
+efforts of an unknown young Ohio man, who went abroad to study the
+languages, and changed the map of Europe. It reads like wild romance,
+but it is sober history.
+
+Among all these Ohioans of celebrity we must not forget Johnnie Clem,
+the Drummer Boy of Shiloh. He ran away from his home in Newark, his
+native city, in 1861, when he was not yet ten years old, and joined the
+24th Ohio as drummer; but he was afraid to be seen and sent home by
+an uncle who was in that regiment, and he cast his lot with the 22d
+Michigan. He was not only at Shiloh, but the battles of Perryville,
+Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Nashville, and Kenesaw. He was
+taken prisoner in Georgia, and when his captors stripped him of his
+clothes he grieved for the loss of nothing except his cap, which had
+three bullet holes in it. After his release, he came home to get well,
+and then returned to the army, where General Thomas attached him to his
+staff. Later he was sent to West Point, where he could not be regularly
+entered because he was too small; but he made his studies, and Grant
+commissioned him as lieutenant, and he rose to be captain of infantry.
+He won the love and respect of all his generals, and while they lived
+they wrote him letters of affectionate friendship. He was once wounded
+by a shell, and once he lost his drum by the fragment of a bursting
+bomb.
+
+J. J. Platt, who is first among Ohio poets, was born in Indiana; but
+his boyhood was passed mostly in Ohio, where he grew up on his father's
+farm, amidst the scenes which he has loved to depict in his verse, until
+he became a printer's apprentice. Since then he has dwelt in cities,
+both at home and abroad; but he is always happiest in dealing with the
+traits and aspects of country life, especially in the earlier times.
+He was for many years consul at different points in Ireland; and he
+has found in England even greater recognition for the distinctively
+mid-western quality of his poems than he has enjoyed among ourselves. So
+far as he is of Ohio, he is of Logan County, which has been the seat of
+his family from the settlement of the country; as his name suggests, he
+is of French descent.
+
+Of Toledo, and therefore of Lucas County, was David R. Locke, who was
+born in New York state, but lived in Ohio from his fifth year onward. He
+was a printer and an editor, and after the war, he suddenly won national
+fame as the author of the Petroleum V. Naseby letters. These were
+satires of the old proslavery spirit which retarded the reconstruction
+of the South and harried the freedmen by mobs and lynchings. Their humor
+gave Locke a place in our literature which no history of it can ignore.
+
+Another literary man who must be taken account of in the summing up of
+American literature was S. S. Cox, who made himself known early in the
+fifties when Ohio was far less heard of than now, by his lively book of
+travels, "A Buckeye Abroad." He was a journalist and a politician; he
+was three times elected to Congress from Columbus, and when he went
+to live in New York, he was three times sent to the House of
+Representatives from that city, where he is commemorated by a statue. He
+was a native of Muskingum County, and was born in 1824 at Zanesville.
+
+The latest and most brilliant contribution of Ohio to the scholarship of
+the East is Professor W. M. Sloane, now of Princeton University, but by
+birth of Jefferson County. He must rank by his "Life of Napoleon" among
+the American historians of the first class. He is of Scotch Calvinistic
+ancestry, and the son of a Presbyterian minister.
+
+In this list of Ohioans who have done honor to our state, Mr. James
+Ford Rhodes happens to be last, though chance might well have placed him
+among the first He is the author of "A History of the United States
+from the Compromise of 1850," which has a peculiar value in the field
+of American history, and which has given Mr. Rhodes prominent standing,
+with a constantly growing reputation. He is of the New England race of
+the Western Reserve; until within a few years his home was in Cleveland,
+but he now lives in Boston.
+
+
+
+
+XVI. INCIDENTS AND CHARACTERISTICS.
+
+Nearly all the Ohio stories since 1812 have been stories of business
+enterprise and industrial adventure. I dare say that if these could be
+fully told, we should have tales as exciting, as romantic and pathetic
+as any I have set down concerning the Indian wars. But such stories are
+usually forgotten in the material interest of the affairs, and it is
+only when some tragedy or comedy arising from them finds chance record
+that we realize how full of human interest they are. The decay of
+steamboating and the rise of railroading is in itself a romance if it
+could be rightly seen, and if the facts could be clearly set before us,
+the story of commercial triumph by a great monopoly would not be less
+fascinating than that of any war of conquest.
+
+The greatest monopoly of ancient or modern times, the Standard Oil
+Company, had its rise in Ohio, and there is no more impressive chapter
+in the annals of our country than its history forms. In fact, everything
+concerning the discovery of the great underground lakes of petroleum,
+and subterranean spaces of natural gas, which suddenly enriched certain
+sections of the state, and then with their exhaustion left them to lapse
+into ruin, is picturesque and dramatic. Many tales are told of poor
+farmers who struck oil on their lands, and sold them for sums greater
+than they had ever dreamed of, and then went out into the world to waste
+their wealth in a few years of wild riot, or sank down and led idle
+and useless lives in sight of the fields they had once tilled. Similar
+stories are told of the regions where natural gas has been found, and
+some day, when the chronicles of Findlay, in Hancock County are fully
+written we shall know all these romantic episodes in their grotesqueness
+and their pathos. It had been known from the earliest settlement of the
+country that the natural gas underlay the town, and fifty years ago two
+small wells were sunk. But it was not until after the discovery of the
+natural gas at Pittsburg that the people of Findlay began to think of
+turning their treasure to account. Then, in the year 1884, the first
+great well was bored, and sent into the startled air a shaft of flame
+sixty feet high. Other wells were sunk, and the greatest of all, the
+famous Karg well, shook its flag of fire against the sky with a roar
+like that of Niagara, and made its voice heard fifteen miles away. It
+was winter when it was first lighted, but it made summer for two hundred
+yards around. The snow melted, the grass and wild flowers sprang up,
+and the crickets came and trilled in the grateful warmth. By a sad irony
+this source of future wealth became the refuge of homeless men, and
+within its genial circuit many tramps slept sweetly, secure from the
+winter beyond.
+
+Findlay grew from five thousand to fifteen thousand inhabitants in a
+year. The municipality wisely possessed itself of the most important
+wells, and supplied the gas so cheaply and abundantly to the people that
+no company could rival it. In June, 1887, it celebrated the anniversary
+of the first use of the natural gas in the industrial arts, and for
+three days the town was given over to rejoicing in its glory and
+prosperity. The streets were arched with flame, the great wells flaunted
+their banners night and day, and the gas flared from innumerable pipes
+and jets through sun and rain in every part of the town.
+
+No such festival has commemorated the introduction of the grape culture
+in Ohio, though this is one of the most poetic facts of our history.
+When the changes of climate along the Ohio River rendered it
+unprofitable in the region of Cincinnati, where the imaginative genius
+of Longworth had first invented the Catawba wine which the poetic genius
+of Longfellow celebrated in graceful song, the vine found home and
+welcome along the shores of Lake Erie. There thousands upon thousands
+of acres now spread interminable vineyards, and the grapes of every
+American variety purple in autumn to an almost unfailing harvest.
+
+It was at first only a dream when Longworth transplanted the wild vine
+from the woods, and it might well have been scoffed at as akin to
+dreams of the past which never were realized. One of these was the silk
+culture, which people believed was to be one of our greatest sources
+of wealth sixty or seventy years ago, when they planted millions of
+mulberry trees to nourish the silkworms which died rather than become
+citizens of Ohio. Another was the culture of the Chinese sorghum cane,
+which for many years tantalized our farmers with the hopes of native
+sugar never fulfilled.
+
+Still other kinds of dreams there have been native to our air or
+naturalized to it. The Leatherwood God was by no means the only
+religious impostor who has flourished among us. In 1831 Joseph Smith,
+the first of the Mormon prophets and the founder of Mormon-ism, came
+to Portage County, with one of his disciples, and began to preach. They
+made so many converts that some shortsighted people of Hiram thought
+to stop their work by tarring and feathering them. This only drove
+them from the place; but the next year, they settled in Kirtland, Lake
+County, where, in 1834, their followers built the first Mormon temple,
+for the worship of God according to the Book of Mormon. It was this
+sacred book, written on gold plates, which Smith, a native of Vermont,
+pretended to find, in a hill near Palmyra, New York, where he was
+leading an idle and useless life. His converts at Kirtland increased to
+three thousand, but they founded a bank as well as a temple, and so got
+into debt and trouble. Smith left the state to escape the sheriff, and
+went to Missouri, where the great mass of the believers joined him,
+seven hundred leaving Kirtland in one day. Before long the Missourians
+foolishly began to persecute them, and then the Mormons settled at
+Nauvoo, in Illinois, where they built their second temple, far more
+magnificent than the first at Kirtland. But here again their unwise
+neighbors began to molest them, and Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram
+were thrown into jail. A mob attacked the jail, and the Smiths were
+murdered. The Mormons then abandoned Nauvoo, and took their way through
+the desert to Salt Lake, in Utah, where they laid the foundations of
+a great commonwealth. They still own their first temple at Kirtland,
+however, and it is said to be the hope of one sect among them yet to
+return and dwell there.
+
+Among the fanaticisms or enthusiasms which flourished among our people,
+none was more striking than that which moved the Woman's Temperance
+Crusade in Hillsborough, Highland County, in 1873. Under the influence
+of a fervent speaker, who told how the women of his native village in
+New England had joined in beseeching the liquor sellers of the place to
+give up their traffic, a hundred and fifty ladies of Hillsborough banded
+together and went about to the different saloons, entreating their
+owners not to sell strong drink any more. By day and by night, in wet
+and in cold, through menace and insult, they kept up their effort the
+whole winter long. Where the dealer was very obstinate, they knelt down
+at his door, and prayed and sang till he yielded. After the crusade
+ended, the liquor selling began again, but though it seemed to have done
+little good, yet it is said that there has been far less drunkenness
+in the region than before, and public opinion was roused to enforce the
+laws against liquor selling. Among the crusaders were some of the first
+ladies of the neighborhood, and good women emulated their efforts in
+several other places.
+
+I am willing to leave the reader with the impression that the people of
+Ohio are that sort of idealists who have the courage of their dreams. By
+this courage they have made the best of them come true, and it is well
+for them in their mainly matter-of-fact and practical character that
+they show themselves at times enthusiasts and even fanatics. It is not
+ill for them that they should now and then have been mistaken. This has
+helped to keep them modest in the midst of their prosperity, and their
+eminence in saving and governing the union of these states. Such as
+they are, they seem to me, historically, the first of the Americans. The
+whole country on the eastward characterized them, and they, more than
+the people of any other state, have perpetuated and imparted their
+character to the whole country on the westward.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Stories Of Ohio, by William Dean Howells
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