Chapter 22.

1763.

DESOLATION OF THE FRONTIERS.

The advancing frontiers of American civilization have always nurtured a class of men of striking and peculiar character.  The best examples of this character have, perhaps, been found among the settlers of Western Virginia, and the hardy progeny who have sprung from that generous stock.  The Virginian frontiersman was, as occasion called, a farmer, a hunter, and a warrior, by turns.  The well-beloved rifle was seldom out of his hand; and he never deigned to lay aside the fringed frock, moccasons, and Indian leggins, which formed the appropriate costume of the forest ranger.  Concerning the business, pleasures, and refinements of cultivated life, he knew little, and cared nothing; and his manners were usually rough and obtrusive to the last degree.  Aloof from mankind, he lived in a world of his own, which, in his view, contained all that was deserving of admiration and praise.  He looked upon himself and his compeers as models of prowess and manhood, nay, of all that is elegant and polite; and the forest gallant regarded with peculiar complacency his own half-savage dress, his swaggering gait, and his backwoods jargon.  He was wilful, headstrong, and quarrelsome; frank, straightforward, and generous; brave as the bravest, and utterly intolerant of arbitrary control.  His self-confidence mounted to audacity.  Eminently capable of heroism, both in action and endurance, he viewed every species of effeminacy with supreme contempt; and, accustomed as he was to entire self-reliance, the mutual dependence of conventional life excited his especial scorn.  With all his ignorance, he had a mind by nature quick, vigorous, and penetrating; and his mode of life, while it developed the daring energy of his character, wrought some of his faculties to a high degree of acuteness.  Many of his traits have been reproduced in his offspring.  From him have sprung those hardy men whose struggles and sufferings on the bloody ground of Kentucky will always form a striking page in American history; and that band of adventurers before whose headlong charge, in the valley of Chihuahua, neither breastworks, nor batteries, nor fivefold odds could avail for a moment.

At the period of Pontiac’s war, the settlements of Virginia had extended as far as the Alleghanies, and several small towns had already sprung up beyond the Blue Ridge.  The population of these beautiful valleys was, for the most part, thin and scattered; and the progress of settlement had been greatly retarded by Indian hostilities, which, during the early years of the French war, had thrown these borders into total confusion.  They had contributed, however, to enhance the martial temper of the people, and give a warlike aspect to the whole frontier.  At intervals, small stockade forts, containing houses and cabins, had been erected by the joint labor of the inhabitants; and hither, on occasion of alarm, the settlers of the neighborhood congregated for refuge, remaining in tolerable security till the danger was past.  Many of the inhabitants were engaged for a great part of the year in hunting; an occupation upon which they entered with the keenest relish.  Well versed in woodcraft, unsurpassed as marksmen, and practised in all the wiles of Indian war, they would have formed, under a more stringent organization, the best possible defence against a savage enemy; but each man came and went at his own sovereign will, and discipline and obedience were repugnant to all his habits.

The frontiers of Maryland and Virginia closely resembled each other; but those of Pennsylvania had peculiarities of their own.  The population of this province was of a most motley complexion, being made up of members of various nations, and numerous religious sects: English, Irish, German, Swiss, Welsh, and Dutch; Quakers, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Dunkers, Mennonists, and Moravians.  Nor is this catalogue by any means complete.  The Quakers, to whose peaceful temper the rough frontier offered no attraction, were confined to the eastern parts of the province.  Cumberland County, which lies west of the Susquehanna, and may be said to have formed the frontier, was then almost exclusively occupied by the Irish and their descendants; who, however, were neither of the Roman faith nor of Celtic origin, being emigrants from the colony of Scotch which forms a numerous and thrifty population in the north of Ireland.  In religious faith, they were stanch and zealous Presbyterians.  Long residence in the province had modified their national character, and imparted many of the peculiar traits of the American backwoodsman; yet the nature of their religious tenets produced a certain rigidity of temper and demeanor, from which the Virginian was wholly free.  They were, nevertheless, hot-headed and turbulent, often setting law and authority at defiance.  The counties east of the Susquehanna supported a mixed population, among which was conspicuous a swarm of German peasants; who had been inundating the country for many years past, and who for the most part were dull and ignorant boors, like some of their descendants.  The Swiss and German sectaries called Mennonists, who were numerous in Lancaster County, professed, like the Quakers, principles of non-resistance, and refused to bear arms.

It was upon this mingled population, that the storm of Indian war was now descending with appalling fury,—a fury unparalleled through all past and succeeding years.  For hundreds of miles from north to south, the country was wasted with fire and steel.  It would be a task alike useless and revolting to explore, through all its details, this horrible monotony of blood and havoc.  The country was filled with the wildest dismay.  The people of Virginia betook themselves to their forts for refuge.  Those of Pennsylvania, ill supplied with such asylums, fled by thousands, and crowded in upon the older settlements.  The ranging parties who visited the scene of devastation beheld, among the ruined farms and plantations, sights of unspeakable horror; and discovered, in the depths of the forest, the half-consumed bodies of men and women, still bound fast to the trees, where they had perished in the fiery torture.

Among the numerous war-parties which were now ravaging the borders, none was more destructive than a band, about sixty in number, which ascended the Kenawha, and pursued its desolating course among the settlements about the sources of that river.  They passed valley after valley, sometimes attacking the inhabitants by surprise, and sometimes murdering them under the mask of friendship, until they came to the little settlement of Greenbrier, where nearly a hundred of the people were assembled at the fortified house of Archibald Glendenning.  Seeing two or three Indians approach, whom they recognized as former acquaintances, they suffered them to enter without distrust; but the new-comers were soon joined by others, until the entire party were gathered in and around the buildings.  Some suspicion was now awakened; and, in order to propitiate the dangerous guests, they were presented with the carcass of an elk lately brought in by the hunters.  They immediately cut it up, and began to feast upon it.  The backwoodsmen, with their families, were assembled in one large room; and finding themselves mingled among the Indians, and embarrassed by the presence of the women and children, they remained indecisive and irresolute.  Meanwhile, an old woman, who sat in a corner of the room, and who had lately received some slight accidental injury, asked one of the warriors if he could cure the wound.  He replied that he thought he could, and, to make good his words, killed her with his tomahawk.  This was the signal for a scene of general butchery.  A few persons made their escape; the rest were killed or captured.  Glendenning snatched up one of his children, and rushed from the house, but was shot dead as he leaped the fence.  A negro woman gained a place of concealment, whither she was followed by her screaming child; and, fearing lest the cries of the boy should betray her, she turned and killed him at a blow.  Among the prisoners was the wife of Glendenning, a woman of a most masculine spirit, who, far from being overpowered by what she had seen, was excited to the extremity of rage, charged her captors with treachery, cowardice, and ingratitude, and assailed them with a tempest of abuse.  Neither the tomahawk, which they brandished over her head, nor the scalp of her murdered husband, with which they struck her in the face, could silence the undaunted virago.  When the party began their retreat, bearing with them a great quantity of plunder packed on the horses they had stolen, Glendenning’s wife, with her infant child, was placed among a long train of captives guarded before and behind by the Indians.  As they defiled along a narrow path which led through a gap in the mountains, she handed the child to the woman behind her, and, leaving it to its fate, slipped into the bushes and escaped.  Being well acquainted with the woods, she succeeded, before nightfall, in reaching the spot where the ruins of her dwelling had not yet ceased to burn.  Here she sought out the body of her husband, and covered it with fence-rails, to protect it from the wolves.  When her task was complete, and when night closed around her, the bold spirit which had hitherto borne her up suddenly gave way.  The recollection of the horrors she had witnessed, the presence of the dead, the darkness, the solitude, and the gloom of the surrounding forest, wrought upon her till her terror rose to ecstasy; and she remained until daybreak, crouched among the bushes, haunted by the threatening apparition of an armed man, who, to her heated imagination, seemed constantly approaching to murder her.

Some time after the butchery at Glendenning’s house, an outrage was perpetrated, unmatched, in its fiend-like atrocity, through all the annals of the war.  In a solitary place, deep within the settled limits of Pennsylvania, stood a small school-house, one of those rude structures of logs which, to this day, may be seen in some of the remote northern districts of New England.  A man chancing to pass by was struck by the unwonted silence; and, pushing open the door, he looked in.  In the centre lay the master, scalped and lifeless, with a Bible clasped in his hand; while around the room were strewn the bodies of his pupils, nine in number, miserably mangled, though one of them still retained a spark of life.  It was afterwards known that the deed was committed by three or four warriors from a village near the Ohio; and it is but just to observe that, when they returned home, their conduct was disapproved by some of the tribe.

Page after page might be filled with records like these, for the letters and journals of the day are replete with narratives no less tragical.  Districts were depopulated, and the progress of the country put back for years.  Those small and scattered settlements which formed the feeble van of advancing civilization were involved in general destruction, and the fate of one may stand for the fate of all.  In many a woody valley of the Alleghanies, the axe and firebrand of the settlers had laid a wide space open to the sun .  Here and there, about the clearing, stood rough dwellings of logs, surrounded by enclosures and cornfields; while, farther out towards the verge of the woods, the fallen trees still cumbered the ground.  From the clay-built chimneys the smoke rose in steady columns against the dark verge of the forest; and the afternoon sun, which brightened the tops of the mountains, had already left the valley in shadow.  Before many hours elapsed, the night was lighted up with the glare of blazing dwellings, and the forest rang with the shrieks of the murdered inmates.

Among the records of that day’s sufferings and disasters, none are more striking than the narratives of those whose lives were spared that they might be borne captive to the Indian villages.  Exposed to the extremity of hardship, they were urged forward with the assurance of being tomahawked or burnt in case their strength should fail them.  Some made their escape from the clutches of their tormentors; but of these not a few found reason to repent their success, lost in a trackless wilderness, and perishing miserably from hunger and exposure.  Such attempts could seldom be made in the neighborhood of the settlements.  It was only when the party had penetrated deep into the forest that their vigilance began to relax, and their captives were bound and guarded with less rigorous severity.  Then, perhaps, when encamped by the side of some mountain brook, and when the warriors lay lost in sleep around their fire, the prisoner would cut or burn asunder the cords that bound his wrists and ankles, and glide stealthily into the woods.  With noiseless celerity he pursues his flight over the fallen trunks, through the dense undergrowth, and the thousand pitfalls and impediments of the forest; now striking the rough, hard trunk of a tree, now tripping among the insidious network of vines and brambles.  All is darkness around him, and through the black masses of foliage above he can catch but dubious and uncertain glimpses of the dull sky.  At length, he can hear the gurgle of a neighboring brook; and, turning towards it, he wades along its pebbly channel, fearing lest the soft mould and rotten wood of the forest might retain traces enough to direct the bloodhound instinct of his pursuers.  With the dawn of the misty and cloudy morning, he is still pushing on his way, when his attention is caught by the spectral figure of an ancient birch-tree, which, with its white bark hanging about it in tatters, seems wofully familiar to his eye.  Among the neighboring bushes, a blue smoke curls faintly upward; and, to his horror and amazement, he recognizes the very fire from which he had fled a few hours before, and the piles of spruce boughs upon which the warriors had slept.  They have gone, however, and are ranging the forest, in keen pursuit of the fugitive, who, in his blind flight amid the darkness, had circled round to the very point whence he set out; a mistake not uncommon with careless or inexperienced travellers in the woods.  Almost in despair, he leaves the ill-omened spot, and directs his course eastward with greater care; the bark of the trees, rougher and thicker on the northern side, furnishing a precarious clew for his guidance.  Around and above him nothing can be seen but the same endless monotony of brown trunks and green leaves, closing him in with an impervious screen.  He reaches the foot of a mountain, and toils upwards against the rugged declivity; but when he stands on the summit, the view is still shut out by impenetrable thickets.  High above them all shoots up the tall, gaunt stem of a blasted pine-tree; and, in his eager longing for a view of the surrounding objects, he strains every muscle to ascend.  Dark, wild, and lonely, the wilderness stretches around him, half hidden in clouds, half open to the sight, mountain and valley, crag and glistening stream; but nowhere can he discern the trace of human hand or any hope of rest and harborage.  Before he can look for relief, league upon league must be passed, without food to sustain or weapon to defend him.  He descends the mountain, forcing his way through the undergrowth of laurel-bushes; while the clouds sink lower, and a storm of sleet and rain descends upon the waste.  Through such scenes, and under such exposures, he presses onward, sustaining life with the aid of roots and berries or the flesh of reptiles.  Perhaps, in the last extremity, some party of Rangers find him, and bring him to a place of refuge; perhaps, by his own efforts, he reaches some frontier post, where rough lodging and rough fare seem to him unheard-of luxury; or perhaps, spent with fatigue and famine, he perishes in despair, a meagre banquet for the wolves.

Within two or three weeks after the war had broken out, the older towns and settlements of Pennsylvania were crowded with refugees from the deserted frontier, reduced, in many cases, to the extremity of destitution.  Sermons were preached in their behalf at Philadelphia; the religious societies united for their relief, and liberal contributions were added by individuals.  While private aid was thus generously bestowed upon the sufferers, the government showed no such promptness in arresting the public calamity.  Early in July, Governor Hamilton had convoked the Assembly, and, representing the distress of the borders, had urged them to take measures of defence.  But the provincial government of Pennsylvania was more conducive to prosperity in time of peace than to efficiency in time of war.  The Quakers, who held a majority in the Assembly, were from principle and practice the reverse of warlike, and, regarding the Indians with a blind partiality, were reluctant to take measures against them.  Proud, and with some reason, of the justice and humanity which had marked their conduct towards the Indian race, they had learned to regard themselves as its advocates and patrons, and their zeal was greatly sharpened by opposition and political prejudice.  They now pretended that the accounts from the frontier were grossly exaggerated; and, finding this ground untenable, they alleged, with better show of reason, that the Indians were driven into hostility by the ill-treatment of the proprietaries and their partisans.  They recognized, however, the necessity of defensive measures, and accordingly passed a bill for raising and equipping a force of seven hundred men, to be composed of frontier farmers, and to be kept in pay only during the time of harvest.  They were not to leave the settled parts of the province to engage in offensive operations of any kind, nor even to perform garrison duty; their sole object being to enable the people to gather in their crops unmolested.

This force was divided into numerous small detached parties, who were stationed here and there at farm-houses and hamlets on both sides of the Susquehanna, with orders to range the woods daily from post to post, thus forming a feeble chain of defence across the whole frontier.  The two companies assigned to Lancaster County were placed under the command of a clergyman, John Elder, pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Paxton; a man of worth and education, and held in great respect upon the borders.  He discharged his military functions with address and judgment, drawing a cordon of troops across the front of the county, and preserving the inhabitants free from attack for a considerable time.

The feeble measures adopted by the Pennsylvania Assembly highly excited the wrath of Sir Jeffrey Amherst, and he did not hesitate to give his feelings an emphatic expression.  “The conduct of the Pennsylvania legislature,” he writes, “is altogether so infatuated and stupidly obstinate, that I want words to express my indignation thereat; but the colony of Virginia, I hope, will have the honor of not only driving the enemy from its own settlements, but that of protecting those of its neighbors who have not spirit to defend themselves.”

Virginia did, in truth, exhibit a vigor and activity not unworthy of praise.  Unlike Pennsylvania, she had the advantage of an existing militia law; and the House of Burgesses was neither embarrassed by scruples against the shedding of blood, nor by any peculiar tenderness towards the Indian race.  The House, however, was not immediately summoned together; and the governor and council, without waiting to consult the Burgesses, called out a thousand of the militia, five hundred of whom were assigned to the command of Colonel Stephen, and an equal number to that of Major Lewis.  The presence of these men, most of whom were woodsmen and hunters, restored order and confidence to the distracted borders; and the inhabitants, before pent up in their forts, or flying before the enemy, now took the field, in conjunction with the militia.  Many severe actions were fought, but it seldom happened that the Indians could stand their ground against the border riflemen.  The latter were uniformly victorious until the end of the summer; when Captains Moffat and Phillips, with sixty men, were lured into an ambuscade, and routed, with the loss of half their number.  A few weeks after, they took an ample revenge.  Learning by their scouts that more than a hundred warriors were encamped near Jackson’s River, preparing to attack the settlements, they advanced secretly to the spot, and set upon them with such fury that the whole party broke away and fled; leaving weapons, provisions, articles of dress, and implements of magic, in the hands of the victors.

Meanwhile the frontier people of Pennsylvania, finding that they could hope for little aid from government, bestirred themselves with admirable spirit in their own defence.  The march of Bouquet, and the victory of Bushy Run, caused a temporary lull in the storm, thus enabling some of the bolder inhabitants, who had fled to Shippensburg, Carlisle, and other places of refuge, to return to their farms, where they determined, if possible, to remain.  With this resolution, the people of the Great Cove, and the adjacent valleys beyond Shippensburg, raised among themselves a small body of riflemen, which they placed under the command of James Smith; a man whose resolute and daring character, no less than the native vigor of his intellect, gave him great popularity and influence with the borderers.  Having been, for several years, a prisoner among the Indians, he was thoroughly acquainted with their mode of fighting.  He trained his men in the Indian tactics and discipline, and directed them to assume the dress of warriors, and paint their faces red and black, so that, in appearance, they were hardly distinguishable from the enemy.  Thus equipped, they scoured the woods in front of the settlements, had various skirmishes with the enemy, and discharged their difficult task with such success that the inhabitants of the neighborhood were not again driven from their homes.

The attacks on the Pennsylvania frontier were known to proceed, in great measure, from several Indian villages, situated high up the west branch of the Susquehanna, and inhabited by a debauched rabble composed of various tribes, of whom the most conspicuous were Delawares.  To root out this nest of banditti would be the most effectual means of protecting the settlements, and a hundred and ten men offered themselves for the enterprise.  They marched about the end of August; but on their way along the banks of the Susquehanna, they encountered fifty warriors, advancing against the borders.  The Indians had the first fire, and drove in the vanguard of the white men.  A hot fight ensued.  The warriors fought naked, painted black from head to foot; so that, as they leaped among the trees, they seemed to their opponents like demons of the forest.  They were driven back with heavy loss; and the volunteers returned in triumph, though without accomplishing the object of the expedition; for which, indeed, their numbers were scarcely adequate.

Within a few weeks after their return, Colonel Armstrong, a veteran partisan of the French war, raised three hundred men, the best in Cumberland County, with a view to the effectual destruction of the Susquehanna villages.  Leaving their rendezvous at the crossings of the Juniata, about the first of October, they arrived on the sixth at the Great Island, high up the west branch.  On or near this island were situated the principal villages of the enemy.  But the Indians had vanished, abandoning their houses, their cornfields, their stolen horses and cattle, and the accumulated spoil of the settlements.  Leaving a detachment to burn the towns and lay waste the fields, Armstrong, with the main body of his men, followed close on the trail of the fugitives; and, pursuing them through a rugged and difficult country, soon arrived at another village, thirty miles above the former.  His scouts informed him that the place was full of Indians; and his men, forming a circle around it, rushed in upon the cabins at a given signal.  The Indians were gone, having stolen away in such haste that the hominy and bear’s meat, prepared for their meal, were found smoking upon their dishes of birch-bark.  Having burned the place to the ground, the party returned to the Great Island; and, rejoining their companions, descended the Susquehanna, reaching Fort Augusta in a wretched condition, fatigued, half famished, and quarrelling among themselves.

Scarcely were they returned, when another expedition was set on foot, in which a portion of them were persuaded to take part.  During the previous year, a body of settlers from Connecticut had possessed themselves of the valley of Wyoming, on the east branch of the Susquehanna, in defiance of the government of Pennsylvania, and to the great displeasure of the Indians.  The object of the expedition was to remove these settlers, and destroy their corn and provisions, which might otherwise fall into the hands of the enemy.  The party, composed chiefly of volunteers from Lancaster County, set out from Harris’s Ferry, under the command of Major Clayton, and reached Wyoming on the seventeenth of October.  They were too late.  Two days before their arrival, a massacre had been perpetrated, the fitting precursor of that subsequent scene of blood which, embalmed in the poetic romance of Campbell, has made the name of Wyoming a household word.  The settlement was a pile of ashes and cinders, and the bodies of its miserable inhabitants offered frightful proof of the cruelties inflicted upon them.  A large war-party had fallen upon the place, killed and carried off more than twenty of the people, and driven the rest, men, women, and children, in terror to the mountains.  Gaining a point which commanded the whole expanse of the valley below, the fugitives looked back, and saw the smoke rolling up in volumes from their burning homes; while the Indians could be discerned roaming about in quest of plunder, or feasting in groups upon the slaughtered cattle.  One of the principal settlers, a man named Hopkins, was separated from the rest, and driven into the woods.  Finding himself closely pursued, he crept into the hollow trunk of a fallen tree, while the Indians passed without observing him.  They soon returned to the spot, and ranged the surrounding woods like hounds at fault; two of them approaching so near, that, as Hopkins declared, he could hear the bullets rattle in their pouches.  The search was unavailing; but the fugitive did not venture from his place of concealment until extreme hunger forced him to return to the ruined settlement in search of food.  The Indians had abandoned it some time before; and, having found means to restore his exhausted strength, he directed his course towards the settlements of the Delaware, which he reached after many days of wandering.

Having buried the dead bodies of those who had fallen in the massacre, Clayton and his party returned to the settlements.  The Quakers, who seemed resolved that they would neither defend the people of the frontier nor allow them to defend themselves, vehemently inveighed against the several expeditions up the Susquehanna, and denounced them as seditious and murderous.  Urged by their blind prejudice in favor of the Indians, they insisted that the bands of the Upper Susquehanna were friendly to the English; whereas, with the single exception of a few Moravian converts near Wyoming, who had not been molested by the whites, there could be no rational doubt that these savages nourished a rancorous and malignant hatred against the province.  But the Quakers, removed by their situation from all fear of the tomahawk, securely vented their spite against the borderers, and doggedly closed their ears to the truth.  Meanwhile, the people of the frontier besieged the Assembly with petitions for relief; but little heed was given to their complaints.

Sir Jeffrey Amherst had recently resigned his office of commander-in-chief; and General Gage, a man of less efficiency than his predecessor, was appointed to succeed him.  Immediately before his departure for England, Amherst had reluctantly condescended to ask the several provinces for troops to march against the Indians early in the spring, and the first act of Gage was to confirm this requisition.  New York was called upon to furnish fourteen hundred men, and New Jersey six hundred.  The demand was granted, on condition that the New England provinces should also contribute a just proportion to the general defence.  This condition was complied with, and the troops were raised.

Pennsylvania had been required to furnish a thousand men; but in this quarter many difficulties intervened.  The Assembly of the province, never prompt to vote supplies for military purposes, was now embroiled in that obstinate quarrel with the proprietors, which for years past had clogged all the wheels of government.  The proprietors insisted on certain pretended rights, which the Assembly strenuously opposed; and the governors, who represented the proprietary interest, were bound by imperative instructions to assert these claims, in spite of all opposition.  On the present occasion, the chief point of dispute related to the taxation of the proprietary estates; the governor, in conformity with his instructions, demanding that they should be assessed at a lower rate than other lands of equal value in the province.  The Assembly stood their ground, and refused to remove the obnoxious clauses in the supply bill.  Message after message passed between the House and the governor; mutual recrimination ensued, and ill blood was engendered.  The frontiers might have been left to their misery but for certain events which, during the winter, threw the whole province into disorder, and acted like magic on the minds of the stubborn legislators.

These events may be ascribed, in some degree, to the renewed activity of the enemy; who, during a great part of the autumn, had left the borders in comparative quiet.  As the winter closed in, their attacks became more frequent; and districts, repeopled during the interval of calm, were again made desolate.  Again the valleys were illumined by the flames of burning houses, and families fled shivering through the biting air of the winter night, while the fires behind them shed a ruddy glow upon the snow-covered mountains.  The scouts, who on snowshoes explored the track of the marauders, found the bodies of their victims lying in the forest, stripped naked, and frozen to marble hardness.  The distress, wrath, and terror of the borderers produced results sufficiently remarkable to deserve a separate examination.