Blood and Treasure, page 22
Their apparent pacifism notwithstanding, it was certainly not lost on the war-weary tribal leaders that if the white men stealing their lands were intent on killing each other in what the Indians considered a civil war, why should red men interfere?
Morgan reported the success of the negotiations in a euphoric communiqué to the Continental Congress, adding that Cornstalk even planned to relocate his Mekoche people from Chillicothe on the Scioto to nearer the Delaware capital town of Coshocton on the Muskingum River. Yet what the Americans accustomed to hierarchal lines of authority did not understand—what they could not understand and would not understand across the Indian Wars of the ensuing century—was that no individual brave took “orders” from what the whites perceived to be their “kings.” With the vast majority of Indians belonging to kin- and clan-based societies, their extreme loyalty to extended family worked naturally against any individual attaining regal eminence.
In reality, a tribal leader’s influence was commensurate to his ability to provide for his people and most particularly to his accrued wisdom. The idea that any one man, however well regarded, could be granted absolute authority over his band or tribe, and most especially over its warrior class, was more than anathema to Native American culture. It was incomprehensible. Why not just tell the wind to stop blowing or the rivers to cease flowing?
Nor were the tribes the utopian societies imagined by Enlightenment-era European philosophers composing teleological paeans to aboriginal nature. Eighteen hundred years earlier Plutarch had described the Greek concept of democratic government as the individual being responsible to the group, and the group responsible to its core principles. This was about as close as an eighteenth-century Shawnee or Cherokee or Iroquois could or would come to what the Americans deemed representative government. Anything hinting at formal political titles or fixed terms of office other than the occasional elevation of a war chief was as culturally foreign to the Indian as the fine art of scalp-taking would have been in the corridors of London’s Whitehall.
Notwithstanding tribal affiliations, the woodlands Indians of the eastern United States were accustomed to going where they wanted when they wanted and taking what they wanted on the strength of their courage and cunning. Unlike the “civilized” Europeans, they venerated in their leaders the good judgment and common sense acquired with age as opposed to a coat of arms or how well an ancestor had fought in the Crusades. In short, public opinion and ancient custom substituted for both regal lineage and the ballot box.
Despite the Spanish, French, British, and eventually American determination to elevate notable leaders like Cornstalk into “all-commanding monarchs, with whom to negotiate and sign treaties,” the point was beyond moot. The Cherokee Dragging Canoe’s break with his own father was evidence enough of this. To also expect white newcomers to North America’s interior to be able to delineate the subtle power shifts of any tribe’s political, religious, and military societies was folly. Nor did they much try. Absent war paint, only the most experienced frontiersmen were capable of physically distinguishing a hostile Mingo from, say, a friendly Delaware. The fallback reflex for too many whites was too often to shoot the Indian, any Indian, on sight.
Thus at the very moment when Cornstalk and White Eyes were pledging their neutrality, British representatives were being dispatched throughout Indian country to convince the tribes to make war on the Americans. Some were more successful than others. In the South the British Indian agent John Stuart, suddenly no longer a peacemaker, accompanied fifteen Shawnee warriors on a seventy-day trek to the Cherokee seat of Chota in southeastern Tennessee. The Northern Indians entered the town painted black from head to toe and presented the southern chiefs with a nine-foot war belt. A few Cherokee warriors were eager to accept the invitation. But the older leaders, already twice defeated by the whites, sat silent.
North of the Ohio River, however, emissaries circulating among the Shawnee towns on the Scioto and Little Miami Rivers found greater empathy with warrior clans already bristling over the loss of their Kentucky hunting grounds and who wanted them back.
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The British were vexed. With close to seven thousand British and Hessian troops soon to assemble in Montreal and march south under General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, the Crown’s military strategists were also seriously pondering an assault from the west on the American-held Fort Pitt. But Gen. Howe and, more important, Lord George Germain—London’s new secretary of state for the colonies—recognized that the five hundred or so Redcoats already overextended among Fort Niagara, Fort Detroit, and Fort Michilimackinac in northern Michigan’s Mackinac Straits were too few to constitute the western prong of any military campaign. Into the equation stepped the British Indian agent John Connolly, who offered to scour Canada and the Northwest Territories to raise an auxiliary Canadian-Indian army of what he dubbed “Loyal Foresters.”
Gen. Howe gave Connolly his blessing. Howe envisioned Burgoyne’s army severing New England from the other rebel colonies while Connolly’s patchwork force captured Fort Pitt and then moved south into Kentucky and western Virginia. Simultaneously, an immense British landing party would march inland from the southern seacoast, trapping the southern revolutionaries in a vise. But the plan was banjaxed when Connolly was captured by patriots while traveling to Fort Detroit.
Soon enough the notion of raising Canadian loyalists was discarded in favor of an all-Indian force consisting of multiple tribes. It fell to the civilian commander at Fort Detroit, the former British Army officer Henry Hamilton, to devise a strategy.
The forty-two-year-old Hamilton, the third son of an Irish viscount, possessed a keen martial mind gleaned from his twenty-one years of military service. He had been in North America since 1758, when his unit was dispatched to fight in the French and Indian War, and had eventually risen to the rank of brigade major. Hamilton had familiarized himself with Native American customs by working closely with the Iroquois Confederacy. For this he was groomed for administrative duties by Guy Carleton, the Crown’s Quebec-based governor-general of British North America.
At Carleton’s urging Hamilton had resigned his military commission in 1775 and been promptly appointed by Carleton to one of the four newly created positions of lieutenant governor. While stationed at Fort Detroit—whose tiny garrison was nominally under the command of Captain Richard Lernoult—Hamilton studied the strategy proposed by the since-captured John Connolly for his “Loyal Foresters.” He liked Connolly’s ideas, with a twist. He would eschew recruiting Canadian militiamen and rely solely on Indian irregulars.
This plan led to a break with his mentor, Governor Carleton, who considered repugnant the idea of arming red warriors. But officials in London sided with Hamilton and gave him free rein to recruit a Native American force by any means possible. Hamilton immediately convened a grand assemblage of Ottawas, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Miami, Shawnee, Mingoes, and Delaware at Fort Detroit. Breaking with the shibboleths of the Amherst era and taking a page from his French precursors, he supplied them with food, war paint, guns, ammunition, and scalping knives as a good-faith gesture from their “Great Father King” in London.
Hamilton was a student of human nature and recognized that the northern tribes were already skeptical of the United States’ cause. He played up the fact that America’s weak, young government made promises it could not keep. As evidence, he pointed to its failure to curtail the market hunters, rumrunners, and landjobbers who roamed their lands with impunity. Finally, toward the end of the gathering, he donned Indian garb, painted his face, and sang the tribal war songs. The Indians were won over. That Hamilton was also offering one hundred dollars for a captured Continental soldier or militiaman and fifty dollars for the scalp of a rebel American—prompting George Rogers Clark to damn Hamilton with the sobriquet “Hair Buyer”—was but added incentive.
Hamilton’s understanding of North America’s indigenous peoples served him so well that over time he displaced Guy Johnson as the Crown’s head Indian interlocutor in reality, if not in title. This, in turn, would eventually lead him back onto the battlefield.
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On December 6, 1776, with Lord Dunmore having fled Williamsburg for refuge aboard a British man-of-war anchored in Chesapeake Bay, the new Virginia governor, Patrick Henry, officially incorporated Kentucky County as the state’s westernmost district. Anticipating this move, six months earlier the territory’s voters had selected the bellicose George Rogers Clark to represent their interests in the state assembly. Though not yet technically a member of the legislative body, the twenty-four-year-old Clark had journeyed to Williamsburg, where he spent the late summer and early fall lobbying the delegates to supply the Kentucky stations with gunpowder and lead.
Citing the continued restiveness of the Cherokees and the palpable threat from the Northern Indians, Clark implored Gov. Henry and his Executive Council to spare him some of the much-needed ammunition, nearly all of which had already been earmarked for the war effort along the seaboard. Clark was a persuasive man, and by November he and six volunteers were not only freighting five hundred pounds of powder and galena, or concentrated lead, by way of Fort Pitt, but Gov. Henry had appointed Clark as Kentucky County’s justice of the peace and commissioned him a major in the Virginia state militia.
Toting his deadly load to Fort Pitt, Clark was met there by the experienced Kentucky long hunter John Gabriel Jones, who had also been elected to represent the new Kentucky County’s interests. Jones had secured a barge, and the group loaded the flatboat with the cargo and floated it nearly three hundred miles down the Ohio. Despite the professions of peace by Cornstalk and White Eyes, Clark feared an Indian raid farther downriver, and ordered the craft docked at a natural harbor where Limestone Creek flows into the Ohio River in what is now Maysville, Kentucky. Clark calculated that he did not have enough hands to withstand an Indian attack while transporting the gunpowder and lead overland, so he ordered the payload buried in a hidden cache. He then left the others to watch over it while he set off to gather reinforcements at Harrodsburg, one hundred miles away.
Not long after Clark departed, Jones was joined by four more frontiersmen. Perhaps foolishly and certainly lethally, he judged his party of nearly a dozen riflemen strong enough to fend off any assault. The little company retrieved the cached ammunition and by Christmas morning had made about thirty miles when they were ambushed by a conglomeration of some forty to fifty Mingoes, Shawnee, Wyandot, Ottawas, and Chippewa—the warriors from the latter three tribes providing proof that British efforts to turn the Great Lakes tribes was effective. The war party was led by a noted Mingo warrior whose somewhat farcical Anglicized name—“Captain Pluggy”—belied the ferociousness he had displayed as Logan’s chief lieutenant during Lord Dunmore’s War.
Jones and one of his companions were killed in the fight, and another two whites were captured, including Clark’s cousin Joseph Rogers. The remaining seven managed to elude the Indians and reach McClelland’s Station with the stores of powder and lead. There they met Clark returning with a party of thirty Harrodsburg men. Four days later the same Indians—likely having tortured their prisoners into revealing the nature of the consignment they carried—executed a bold frontal assault on the station. After failing to set fire to the blockhouse’s log walls, they attempted to batter down the gate. It was during this attack that Captain Pluggy fell mortally wounded, picked off by a sharpshooter from the parapets. With their leader bleeding out, the Indians retrieved Captain Pluggy’s body, rounded up the settlement’s horses, slaughtered its cattle, and blended back into the forest.
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ABANDONED SETTLEMENTS
In the aftermath of the fight at McClelland’s Station, the checkerboard of Kentucky settlements once again rearranged itself. The station’s founder and namesake, the former Virginia militia captain John McClelland, had been one of two men killed by Captain Pluggy’s raiders. McClelland’s slow demise—it took him two days to die from his wounds—was a psychological blow to his followers. With their leader McClelland dead, their horses stolen, and their cattle butchered, the station’s remaining inhabitants saw no choice but to abandon the blockhouse and accompany George Rogers Clark back to Harrodsburg.
Among Clark’s command was another former Virginian named Benjamin Logan. The thirty-five-year-old Logan was a battle-scarred veteran of both the Cherokee campaigns and Lord Dunmore’s War, where he achieved the rank of lieutenant. Logan had emigrated to Kentucky in 1776 and briefly established an eponymous settlement some twenty-two miles southeast of Harrodsburg, one that eventually would grow into the town of Saint Asaph, named in honor of Logan’s maternal forebears who had immigrated from Wales. That same year he was appointed Kentucky County’s sheriff, the second-ranking officer in the county behind Clark. Though a seasoned and dedicated Indian fighter, Logan was described by a fellow soldier as “a dull narrow body from whom nothing clever need be expected.” Which is probably why Clark was astonished when, as his party neared Harrodsburg, Logan and fourteen followers split off to reoccupy his old site.
Once again Kentucky was left with three manned outposts on the western frontier, each over two hundred miles from the nearest Virginia communities. The desperate mood in the settlements was highlighted by the plaintive communiqué dispatched to Patrick Henry by the Harrodsburg resident Hugh McGary. McGary, a volatile man even by frontier standards, was one of the ranking officers in Kentucky County’s militia, such as it was. In truth, every man and boy able to heft a long rifle constituted the entirety of Kentucky’s official fighting force. Writing to the governor, McGary warned him that the territory the Virginia legislature had only just absorbed as part of the state could very likely be shorn of its entire population when the winter weather broke, and he predicted a resumption of Indian attacks in the spring, “that fills our minds with a thousand fears.” He envisioned a massive attack of Cherokee from the south, Shawnee from the north, and even Miami from the west. “We are surrounded with enemies on every side [and] every day increases their number,” McGary wrote. “Our fort is already filled with widows and orphans; their necessities call upon us daily for supplies.”
McGary proved no less prophetic than Dragging Canoe. Precisely eight days after a courier rode east with his letter, sixty to seventy Shawnee under the war chief Blackfish appeared outside Harrodsburg’s gates singing their war song: “The water will wash them away, / The wind will blow them down, / Darkness will come upon them, / And the earth will cover them.”
The militant Blackfish was a mystery to most of the whites though the Indians knew him well as for some years he had been vying with Cornstalk for tribal leadership. A short, wiry man who, at fifty, was some ten years younger than Cornstalk, Blackfish had been close with Tecumseh’s slain father, Puckeshinwa. He had even become a mentor to the fatherless boy. Like his late friend, he, too, refused any accommodation with the Americans. Years later the Native American portraitist Charles Bird King portrayed Blackfish as a man whose still face was dominated by a pair of hooded eyes sparkling ominously, as if both amused and threatening. Moreover, like Logan of the Mingoes, Blackfish considered his excursion south of the Ohio as both a martial and personal journey. Though he and his followers had been encouraged by the British to harass, if not eliminate, the Kentucky “rebels,” it had been Blackfish’s son whom Boone’s party had shot and killed during their rescue of Jemima. This attack was his revenge.
After establishing a central camp for his two hundred or so warriors on the Licking River, Blackfish personally led the rump contingent that fell on Harrodsburg. Initially he instructed his braves to burn a dilapidated cabin adjacent to the stockade in the hope that the sparks would spread to the log walls, which his scouts had splashed with buffalo tallow. When that failed, a long-distance gunfight ensued, with one man from each side struck by a lethal ball. Two more of the stockade’s defenders, including Hugh McGary, sustained minor wounds.
Meanwhile, on the same day as the Harrodsburg attack, a separate force of Blackfish’s Shawnee raided Boonesborough to much the same result. The Indians were driven away after killing a Negro slave working the communal vegetable garden. Boone immediately posted round-the-clock sentries and assigned armed guards to any farmer venturing out into the surrounding cornfields to continue the essential spring planting. He also led several scouting missions into the deep woods to search for Shawnee sign in an attempt to adjudge just how many hostiles were roaming the territory.
“The Indians seemed determined to persecute us for erecting this fortification,” Boone told the biographer Filson. He had no idea that it may have been his musket ball that killed the son of the war leader now attacking the stations.
Boone had recently been commissioned a captain in the Kentucky militia, serving under George Rogers Clark, and had spent the previous months attempting to complete the stockade on the south bank of the Kentucky River. That it had held fast against the Shawnee assault was testament to his engineering skills. Given Blackfish’s tactics, however, one is left to marvel over the sagacity of Humphrey Marshall, the great chronicler of Kentucky’s frontier era.
In his contemporaneous The History of Kentucky, Marshall questioned the curious logic of the Indian sieges, noting that had the Shawnee “possessed the skill which combines individual effort with a concerted attack; and had they directed their whole force against each of the feeble forts in succession, instead of dissipating their strength … they could have easily rid Kentucky of its new inhabitants.”
Over the next two months the Shawnee at first appeared to heed Marshall’s words, first surrounding and besieging Harrodsburg for most of March to the point where the fort faced a serious food shortage. Yet with victory nearly in hand they inexplicably broke off their blockade to turn their attention to Boonesborough.
