The Winning of the West, Volume Two | Page 3

their countrymen with determined
ferocity. Girty won the widest fame on the border by his cunning and
cruelty; but he was really a less able foe than the two others. McKee in
particular showed himself a fairly good commander of Indians and
irregular troops; as did likewise an Englishman named Caldwell, and
two French partisans, De Quindre and Lamothe, who were hearty
supporters of the British.
The British Begin a War of Extermination.
Hamilton and his subordinates, both red and white, were engaged in
what was essentially an effort to exterminate the borderers. They were
not endeavoring merely to defeat the armed bodies of the enemy. They
were explicitly bidden by those in supreme command to push back the
frontier, to expel the settlers from the country. Hamilton himself had
been ordered by his immediate official superior to assail the borders of
Pennsylvania and Virginia with his savages, to destroy the crops and
buildings of the settlers who had advanced beyond the mountains, and
to give to his Indian allies,--the Hurons, Shawnees, and other
tribes,--all the land of which they thus took possession. [Footnote:
Haldimand MSS. Haldimand to Hamilton, August 6, 1778.] With such
allies as Hamilton had this order was tantamount to proclaiming a war
of extermination, waged with appalling and horrible cruelty against the
settlers, of all ages and sexes. It brings out in bold relief the fact that in
the west the war of the Revolution was an effort on the part of Great
Britain to stop the westward growth of the English race in America,
and to keep the region beyond the Alleghanies as a region where only
savages should dwell.
All the Northwestern Tribes go to War.
All through the winter of '76-77 the northwestern Indians were
preparing to take up the tomahawk. Runners were sent through the
leafless, frozen woods from one to another of their winter camps. In

each bleak, frail village, each snow-hidden cluster of bark wigwams,
the painted, half-naked warriors danced the war dance, and sang the
war song, beating the ground with their war clubs and keeping time
with their feet to the rhythmic chant as they moved in rings round the
peeled post, into which they struck their hatchets. The hereditary
sachems, the peace chiefs, could no longer control the young men. The
braves made ready their weapons and battle gear; their bodies were
painted red and black, the plumes of the war eagle were braided into
their long scalp locks, and some put on necklaces of bears' claws, and
head-dresses made of panther skin, or of the shaggy and horned frontlet
of the buffalo. [Footnote: For instances of an Indian wearing this
buffalo cap, with the horns on, see Kercheval and De Haas.]
Before the snow was off the ground the war parties crossed the Ohio
and fell on the frontiers from the Monongahela and Kanawha to the
Kentucky. [Footnote: State Department MSS. for 1777, passim. So
successful were the Indian chiefs in hoodwinking the officers at Fort
Pitt that some of the latter continued to believe that only three or four
hundred Indians had gone on the war path.]
On the Pennsylvanian and Virginian frontiers the panic was
tremendous. The people fled into the already existing forts, or hastily
built others; where there were but two or three families in a place, they
merely gathered into block-houses--stout log-cabins two stories high,
with loop-holed walls, and the upper story projecting a little over the
lower. The savages, well armed with weapons supplied them from the
British arsenals on the Great Lakes, spread over the country; and there
ensued all the horrors incident to a war waged as relentlessly against
the most helpless non-combatants as against the armed soldiers in the
field. Block-houses were surprised and burnt; bodies of militia were
ambushed and destroyed. The settlers were shot down as they sat by
their hearth-stones in the evening, or ploughed the ground during the
day; the lurking Indians crept up and killed them while they still-hunted
the deer, or while they lay in wait for the elk beside the well-beaten
game trails.
The captured women and little ones were driven off to the far interior.
The weak among them, the young children, and the women heavy with
child, were tomahawked and scalped as soon as their steps faltered. The
able-bodied, who could stand the terrible fatigue, and reached their

journey's end, suffered various fates. Some were burned at the stake,
others were sold to the French or British traders, and long afterwards
made their escape, or were ransomed by their relatives. Still others
were kept in the Indian camps, the women becoming the slaves or
wives of the warriors, [Footnote: Occasionally we come across records
of the women afterwards making their escape; very rarely they took
their half-breed babies with them.