Historic Highways of America/Volume 3/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
THE HUNTING-GROUND OF THE IROQUOIS
IT must be next to impossible for one in this day to realize what a tangled wilderness this West was a century and a half ago. "The thing which puzzles us," writes W. H. H. Murray, "is not the past but the future; not the door which has been shut, but the strange door which has never been opened. . . . For who, though knocking with reddened knuckles against it may start even an echo?" True words indeed; yet were the task put to us, it is to be seriously doubted if we of untrained imagination could not draw a truer picture of this land as it will appear a century hence than we could conjure up of the land as it appeared a century ago. Suppose the latter picture could be true to the dense growth of bush and tree, the wallowings of the plunging buffalo, the ways of the wild animals tunneled through the tangled maze of bush and vine—true, in short, to the groundwork—would it faithfully picture the tangled tops of the giant trees, where a more intricate network of Nature's handiwork might have been seen than on the ground? Who but one acquainted with primeval forests can picture the straggling branches of the giant trees reaching out into the etherial battle ground to a last death grapple with its hoary rivals, both weighed down by luxuriant masses of moss and tangled vine? Records of early pioneers affirm that when this forest was first invaded by the woodman's ax it was found to be one thing to cut a tree's trunk but quite another thing to dislodge its top from the network of forest overgrowth, from which giant trees have been known to hang suspended in mid-air after their trunks had been severed. Felling of trees often began at the top; boys were sent up to strip the branches before the trunk was cut. Where are the trees the like of which Washington found on the Ohio near the Great Kanawha with a diameter of over fourteen feet?
What a sight the woodland rivers must have presented! Think of the plunder of the forests which the Wabash and Kentucky at flood-tide must have carried on their boiling bosoms. Picture the gigantic gorges of forest trees, blocked in their wild course down the Allegheny and piled in monstrous and grotesque confusion from bank to bank, forcing even the river itself to find a new course through the forests. And so the vistas seen on our rivers today could not have been so beautiful in the old days; perhaps they were never visible on the lesser streams. For the continuous falling of the solid walls of trees which lined both banks must have well-nigh roofed our smaller streams completely over, and the venturous trapper in his canoe must have found the fear of falling trees added to his other fears. When General Moses Cleaveland attempted to ascend the Cuyahoga in a boat from Lake Erie, the great quantity of fallen trees compelled him to desist from the undertaking. An early Kentucky pioneer, in giving directions to prospective voyagers down the Ohio river, warns them against rowing at night as the noise of the oars would prevent their hearing the "riffling" of the water about the rocks and sunken logs which made river traveling, especially on swift streams, difficult and dangerous.
Nor have our rivers always held the position in respect to size which they relatively hold today. It is doubtful if one who knew the old Monongahela would recognize the placid, turbid, faithful river which bears that name today. As though these streams of ours recognize in some way that they must needs conform to the state of civilization which they see about them, and may not run wild and free as when amenable only to the caprice of savage aborigines! Of course the greater difference would be discoverable in such rivers as have been bound in locks and dams, and deepened by the dredge. Such was the rapidity of the current of many of our streams that the time now made by swift packets is more than double the time taken by canoes before slack-water navigation was introduced. With the damming of these streams, local history, in all our states, has lost many landmarks well known in the earliest days of navigation. On the Allegheny river, as on the Susquehanna on the eastern side of the mountains, rocks, upon which the Indians inscribed their hieroglyphics, are now under water, so that these inscriptions are visible only at low tide, and indeed in some cases are never seen above the surface of the water. Of all streams the majestic Ohio, alone, moves on much as of old; and, though many islands have passed from sight, there is hardly a mile in all her course which does not recall, in name, the days when that river was the great highway through the hunting-ground of the Iroquois and of the race of "men who wore hats" who came upon its tide to found the empires which today exist along its sweeping shores. And yet the Ohio is soon to undergo great changes which will materially alter its aspect. Surveys for dams are being made, which, when completed, will give a minimum depth of six feet between locks.
The animal life of the forests one can fancy, perhaps, with more accuracy than any other characteristic, for the deer and turkey, the wolf and buffalo of that day have their antitypes in ours. And yet here one might fall short, for few recall the vast flocks of pigeons that swarmed above the primeval forest, even darkening the heavens as though a cloud were passing, and blighting the trees in which they spent a night. Harris, an early Western traveler, has left record that from a single hollow tree several wagon loads of feathers have been extracted.
The history of this West is a long history of war, from the earliest days even to our own century. This territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi is one of the greatest battle-fields in the world. It is certainly the oldest and most renowned in our America. The first European to enter it looked with wondering eyes upon the monstrous earthen forts of a prehistoric race whom we have loosely named from the relics they left behind, the mound-builders. Of this race of early Indians the later red men knew nothing, save what the legends handed down by their fathers told of a race of giants which was driven out of the Central West, and sent flying down the Ohio and Mississippi to reappear no more in human history. Antiquarians find that these forts and mausoleums reveal little in addition to the bloody story told by crude implements of war, of
"Old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago."
In certain instances, great piles of human bones are found at strategic revetment angles where heaviest attack was made and stoutest resistance encountered. Here bones are sometimes found pierced by death-dealing arrow-heads. What power hurled the flints of these warriors of prehistoric days? The Indian legend, that they were giants in strength, has been easily believed. Nowhere else on the continent are found such forts as were built by these ancient defenders of the Central West.
Throughout the eighteenth century this territory was a continual battle-ground. To it, both France and England, in turn, clung with equal determination, and both tried the foolish experiment of attempting to win it back, when once it was lost, by means of the Indians who made it their lair.
When the first explorers entered the West, early in the eighteenth century, it was found to be the princely hunting-ground of the Iroquois, better known as the Six Nations. Of all American Indians the Iroquois were ever preëminent, invincible. The proud races of the furthest south had felt the weight of their tomahawks and the nations that camped about the shores of Lake St. John "kept their sentinels pushed well southward in dread of their fierce invasion." As conquerors of half a continent, the choicest hunting-grounds were theirs, and so the forests, divided by the Oyo, Ohio, which took its rise in the Iroquois home-land south of Lake Ontario, was the nation's choice.
Still, during Iroquois sovereignty over the Central West, it is not probable that they alone knew of the treasures of turkey, buffalo, and pike which the land and its streams contained. In the Far West the Iroquois left the Miami nation undisturbed in their old home between the Miami and Wabash. Ottawas, "traders" from the north, who had never built a fire beside more splendid streams than the Central West contained, were at times vagrant, frightened visitors to the lands between the great lakes and the Oyo. Other scattered remnants of Indian nations are rumored to have built fires in the hunting-ground of the Iroquois; if so, they hid the charred embers of their camp fires in the leaves, to obliterate all proofs of their sly incursions.
Ever and anon, from the Iroquois home-land, came great armies into the West in search of game. Launching their painted canoes on the headwaters of the Oyo (now the Allegheny and Ohio), they came down with the flood-tides of the spring and fall and scattered into all the rivers of the forest—the Kanawha, Muskingum, Scioto, Kentucky, Miami, and Wabash. Other canoes came up Lake Ontario to Lake Erie and passed up the Cuyahoga and down the Muskingum, or up the Sandusky and down the Scioto, or up the Miami-of-the-Lakes and down the Wabash. Then were the forests filled with shouting, and a hundred great fires illuminated the primeval shadows. After the hunters came the warriors in brightly colored canoes, their paddles sweeping in perfect unison. And woe to the arrogant southern nation whose annual tribute had failed to come! Down to the south the warriors sped, to return with terrible proofs of their prowess, leaving upon the rocks in the rivers haughty symbols of their victories.
But, at last, the supremacy of the arrogant Six Nations was challenged, and the territory over which they were masters began to grow smaller instead of greater. The white men came to America. Their "new" empires were being erected on the continent. "New Spain" arose to the south; "New Sweden" was spoken of, and "New Scotland," "New Hampshire," and "New Amsterdam;" "New England" was heard of between the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic Ocean, and "New France" was founded amid the Canadian snows, with its capital on the tumbling river St. Lawrence.
Though both came from beyond the same ocean, the Iroquois found that there was a great difference between the founders of "New England" and the founders of "New France." The former settled down quietly, bought land, cleared it and raised crops. They treated the Indian very respectfully—paying little attention to him or his land. The French, however, were different. There was no end to their running about. Their arrival was scarcely noised abroad before they were seen hurrying up the inland rivers on missions of various import.
And so the Iroquois came to hate the French, especially after their first encounter with them on the shores of Lake Champlain when the white captain, Champlain, fired a horrid arquebus which killed two chieftains and wounded another, and liked to have scared the whole Indian army to death. This hatred was augmented as the French made friends with the Algonquin tribes of the lower St. Lawrence, who, having fled from before the Iroquois warriors like dust before the wind, now, in revenge, piloted the French up the Ottawa and showed them a way to enter the Great Lakes of the Iroquois by the back door, Georgian Bay. Once acquainted with the five Great Lakes, the French were even less satisfied than before, and down into the hunting-grounds of the Iroquois they plunged in search of a great river and a sea which would lead to China. Already they had named the portage around one of the St. Lawrence rapids La Chine, believing that the river led "to China"—a country of which the farthest western nations, the fierce Chippewas and Dacotahs, even, had never heard!
As the eighteenth century grew older, the Iroquois became too busy with affairs of war and diplomacy and trade to come each year to their western hunting-grounds and guard them with the ancient jealousy. Situated as they were between the French and English settlements they found a neutral rôle difficult to maintain and they became fitfully allied now with the Albany, now with the Quebec governments, as each struggled to gain possession of the great fur trade which was controlled by the Six Nations who claimed to control the Ottawa, St. Lawrence, and all the New York rivers.
But this hunting-ground was too delightful a land to remain long unoccupied. Had Providence willed that these forests in and west of the Appalachian mountain system should have continued to be unoccupied until the white man came to possess it, many of the darkest pages of American history would never have been written. But the reverse of this happened. Not only was it filled with Indians, but there came to it from far distant homes, as if chosen by fate, three of the most desperate Indian nations on the continent, each having been made ready, seemingly, by long years of oppression and tyranny, for the bloody work of holding this West from the white man. The three nations found by the first explorers in the abandoned hunting-grounds of the Iroquois had been fugitives on the face of the earth for half a century, bandied about between the stronger confederacies like outcasts, denied refuge everywhere, pursued, persecuted, half destroyed. The story of any one of them is the story of the other two—a sad, desperate tale.
These nations were the Shawanese, Delawares, and Wyandots. The centers of population which they formed were on the Scioto, Muskingum, and Sandusky rivers, respectively. And, with the fierce Miamis and the remnants of the Iroquois, these tribes fought the longest and most successful war ever waged by the red race in the history of the continent. From their lairs on the Allegheny, Scioto, and Muskingum they defied the white man for half a century, triumphing at Braddock's and St. Clair's defeats, the greatest victories over the white man ever achieved by the red.
The first of these nations to enter the old hunting-ground of the Iroquois was the Wyandot. Their home was about Sandusky Bay, and along the shores of the Sandusky river. Originally the Wyandots dwelt on the upper St. Lawrence, and were neighbors of the Seneca tribe of the Six Nations. As the result of a quarrel over a maiden, as legend has it, but more likely as result of Iroquois conquest, the Wyandots were driven from their homes, vanishing westward into the land of the Hurons, who lived by the lake which bore their name. Here the brave Jesuit missionaries found them, where they were known as the Tobacco Nation. The confederation of the Iroquois as the Six Nations sounded the doom of the Hurons, and with the Senecas at the head of the confederacy, only ruin stared the fugitive Wyandots in the face. By the beginning of the eighteenth century they had again fled westward, hopelessly seeking a new refuge. Some of the nation continued journeying even beyond the Sioux and Dacotahs to the "Back-bone of the World," as they called the Rocky Mountains. There, tradition states, they found wanderers like themselves, who spoke a familiar language—Wyandots who had come hither long before to escape the revengeful Senecas! But the majority of the nation built great rafts and set float on the Detroit river. This was a reckless alternative to choose, but it brought the persecuted nation to their long-sought place of refuge. As they passed the present site of Detroit they saw with amazement an array of white tents and soldiers dressed in white, keeping watch. The Wyandots had found the French building a fort, and fear of the Senecas vanished. On the shores of neighboring Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie the Wyandots built their fires, and the relations between them and the French were most cordial. The year of this memorable Wyandot hegira is given as 1701, which, fortunately, corresponds with the founding of Detroit.
When Mad Anthony Wayne was waging his last campaign against the western Indians in 1794, he once summoned to him a knowing frontiersman and asked him if he could not capture an Indian in order to get some information concerning the enemy.
"Can you not capture one near Sandusky?" asked the general, as the man hesitated.
"No, not Sandusky," was the ready reply.
"And why not at Sandusky?"
"There are only Wyandots at Sandusky."
"Well, why will not a Wyandot do?" insisted the irrepressible Wayne.
"Because, Sir," replied the woodsman, "a Wyandot is never captured alive."
The story is typical of the Wyandots throughout all their history for a century—for it lacked but five years of a century when they signed the treaty at Greenville after General Wayne's campaign. Allied, in the beginning, as we have seen, to the French, the Wyandots fought sturdily for their cause until New France was abandoned. Under Pontiac they joined in the plot to drive out the English from the West and win back the land for France. In turn they became attached to the British interests at the breaking out of the Revolutionary War and they were as true to the very last to them as they had formerly been to the French. Through their aid England managed to retain forts Sandusky, Miami, and Detroit for twenty years after the close of the Revolution, despite the solemn pledges given in the Treaty of Paris.
The Wyandots came from the far north. The second nation to enter the Alleghany forests were the Shawanese who came from the far south. The Shawanese were the only American Indians who had even so much as a tradition of having come to this continent from across the ocean. Like that of the savage Wyandots, the history of the Shawanese before they settled down on the swift Scioto is a cheerless tale. Too proud to join one of the great southern confederacies, if, indeed, the opportunity was ever extended to them, they sifted northward through the forests from Florida until they settled between the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. Here the earliest geographers found them and classified them as the connecting branch between the Algonquins of New England and the far northwest, so different were they from their southern neighbors. They remained but a short time by the Cumberland, for the Iroquois swept down upon them with a fury never exceeded by the Cherokees or Mobilians, and the fugitives scattered like leaves eastward toward the Alleghanies. By permission of the government of Pennsylvania, seventy families, perhaps three hundred souls, settled down upon the Susquehanna at the beginning of the eighteenth century. By 1730 the number of Indian warriors in Pennsylvania was placed at seven hundred, one-half of whom were said to be Shawanese. This would indicate a total population of perhaps fifteen hundred Shawanese. With the approaching of the settlements of the white man and the opening of the French and Indian war, they left the Susquehanna and pushed straight westward to the Scioto River valley beyond the Ohio.
The Shawanese have well been called the "Bedouins of the American Indians." The main body of the nation migrated from Florida to the Cumberland and Susquehanna and Scioto rivers. Fragmentary portions of the nation wandered elsewhere. Cadwallader Cobden said, in 1745, that one tribe of the Shawanese "had gone quite down to New Spain." When La Salle wished guides from Lake Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico in 1684, Shawanese were supplied him, it being as remarkable that there were Shawanese so far north (though they may have been prisoners among the Iroquois) as it was that they were acquainted with the Gulf of Mexico. In the Black Forest the Shawanese gained another and a well-earned reputation—of being the fiercest and most uncompromising Indian nation with which the white man ever dealt. They were, for the half century during which the Black Forest of Ohio was their home and the Wyandots their allies, ever first for war and last for peace. Under their two well known terrible chieftains, Cornstalk and Tecumseh, they were allied both with the French and with the British in the vain attempt to hold back the tide of civilization from the river valleys of the Central West. Missionary work among them proved a failure. They made treaties but to break them. Not an acre of all the land which lay south of them, Kentucky, but was drenched by blood they spilt. Incited by such hellhounds as the Girty boys, there was no limit to which the Shawanese could not be pushed, and for it all they had been trained by instinct and tradition through numberless years of desperate ill fortune.
The Wyandots and Shawanese came from the North and South. The third nation which made the hunting-grounds of the Iroquois its home-land came from the eastern seaboard. The legendary history of the Lenni-Lenapes cannot be equaled, in point of romance, in Indian history. Tradition states that they lived at a very early period west of the Mississippi river. Uniting with their neighbors, the Iroquois, the two nations began an eastward conquest which ended in driving the giant Alleghans, the mound-builders, from the alluvial valleys of the Scioto, Miami, Muskingum, Wabash, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Illinois, where their mounds and ring forts were found, and dividing between them the Atlantic seaboard, the Iroquois taking the north and the Lenni-Lenapes settling in the valley of the Delaware, where they took the name of Delawares. But not long after this division had been effected the spirit of jealousy arose. The Iroquois, receiving arms from the Dutch who founded New Amsterdam (New York), became expert in the accomplishments of war. The Delawares adapted themselves to peaceful modes of living, and their laden maize fields brought them rich returns for their labors. With the confederation of the Iroquois tribes into the Six Nations the doom of the Delawares was sealed. By treachery or by main force the upstart "uncles" from the north fell to quarreling with their southern "nephews." Seeing that nothing but ruin stared them in the face, the Delawares began selling their land to the Dutch, the friends of their "good minion," Penn. "How came you to take upon yourselves to sell land?" was the infuriated cry of the Iroquois, who sent, by their orator Cawassatiego, their ultimatum to the weakened Delawares; "you sell land in the dark. Did you ever tell us you sold land to them? . . . We find you are none of our blood. Therefore we charge you to remove instantly. We assign you two places to go, either to Ugoman or Shamokin. Go!"
Dismayed and disgraced, the Delawares retired from the green maize fields which they loved, and fell back, a crowd of disordered fugitives, into the Alleghany forests. Sifting through the forests, crowding the Shawanese before them, they at last crossed the Allegheny and settled down on the upper Muskingum, about 1740. Here they lived for half a century, fighting with Villiers and Pontiac and Little Turtle. Here they were visited by armies, and by missionaries who did noble work among them. The Delawares, later, fought against the armies of Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne, after they abandoned the valley which was first their home, and then sank hopelessly into the general rout of the broken tribes moving westward after the battles of Fallen Timbers and Tippecanoe. On the Kansas river and its tributaries the remnant of the once powerful Lenni-Lenape range today over a territory of a million acres, still dreaming, it is said, of a time when they will again assume their historic position at the head of the Indian family. A great mass of tradition lives with them of their eastward conquest, the homes on the Delaware, Allegheny, and Muskingum, where the poet had Evangeline visit them in her search of Gabriel. And still the massacre of Gnadenhutten is told to wondering children in Delaware wigwams which dot the Ozark mountains as they once dotted the Alleghany valleys.
The total number of Indians in the hunting-ground of the Iroquois would be difficult to estimate. During the Revolutionary War, when the Central West was filled with a hundred fugitive tribes, a United States commissioner reported the number of Indians affiliated with the Iroquois as 3,100, divided as follows: Wyandots, 300, Mingoes, 600, Senecas, 650, Mohawks, 100, Cuyahogas, 220, Onondagas, 230, Oneidas and Tuscarawas, 400, Ottawas, 600; the other nations were given as follows: Chippewas, 5,000, Pottawatomies, 400; scattering, 800. Considering the Indian family as consisting of four persons, the total Indian population east of the Mississippi would be 40,000, probably a very liberal estimate.