Butler County, Ohio - Chapter with an unread heading (no. 1 of those read), 1905 (part 2 of 2)

A great deal of sympathy has been wasted on the fate of the Indian race which our fathers found in their settlement of this country, and a great deal is wasted on his treatment in our own time. He was never as brave, chivalrous nor blessed in intellect as writers have portrayed him. Fenimore Cooper's savage was a pleasant person to read about, but he was not the savage who massacred women and dashed out the brains of children in the Wyoming and Ohio valleys. It was with this latter kind of Indian that the early settlers hereabouts had to deal, and not the honorable sort, which had existence solely in the imagination of romancers. Time upsets many a pretty tradition. It is now nearly certain that Logan never made that eloquent speech which as schoolboys we declaimed, and it is likewise matter of grave suspicion whether Pocahontas had not liberal views regarding chastity. That in many respects the Indian was wronged is no doubt true; but his revenge was not of that sort which seeks out for retaliation the wrong doer, but rather of the kind which slays in-

"You do not know who I am, ' Red Cloud said on the stage of Cooper Institute. New York, on the occasion of a visit under the auspices of the Quaker Commission. "I am the representative of the original owners of America."

That sounded grand, but a moment's reflection will show that the utterance was sheer bombast. The original owners of America would have been ashamed to own kinship with a race which wreaked vengeance where no wrong had been done. So far as we have record of the actions of the whites in Kentucky and Ohio in the early days, they sought no quarrel, but were rather pacificators. Men like Boone or Kenton were not the ones to take life save in defense of- their own lives. In their natures there was a chivalrous element, and in all their warfare they opposed only the ablebodied who could meet their attacks. When they offered terms of treaty, those terms were presented in good -faith, while on the part of the Indians every proposition was made by them or accepted as coming from the other side, with a reservation in which lurked treachery. It is no wonder, then, that the strife became one for existence. The white man learned the cunning of the Indian, and as he was his superior in intellect and in physical strength, those advantages offset the superiority of the savages as to numbers.

The Indians of this valley fought not so much against wrongs perpetrated upon themselves as for the grievances which others of their race had elsewhere suffered, and in the hope of exterminating the white strangers.

part of the Indian confederation which controlled the region embraced by Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois. They were neither better nor worse than the average Indian wherever found on the continent.

But from the trouble in the east between their race and the whites, they seemed to have formed a resolve to make in this region their stand for their inheritance.

There was no reason why they and the whites could' not have dwelt in peace, except that in their natures they were unpacific, as the untamed Indian is everywhere. Colonel E. C. Boudinot. a half-breed Cherokee, living in 1878, expressed once the opinion that there were two futures for his race - the one extermination, and the other amalgamation. He has for years contended that the pure Indian blood could not be made to flow in quiet course, and that only by an infusion of the white strain can it be tempered to the . conditions of civilized life. His view is borne out by the experience of the early times. Treaties were made only to be broken whenever the savage* thirst for human life obtained the mastery, or the opportunity for plunder presented itself. No marvel, then, that the settlers who watched by night and felled the forests by day, with arms at their sides in fear of professing friends as well as open foes, should have come to wage a warfare as relentless as that pursued by theii enemies.

In addition to his treachery and lack of all qualities which give anything Ake honorable character to war, the domestic side of the American Indian was quite as unlovely as the one he presented in arms. We have been told in ambling verse of the romantic wooings of dusky but fair maidens by young braves, and poetry has been thrown around their nuptials. All this appears to be a figment of the imagination pretty to read but of no value as a historical statement. Marriage with them was a mercenary transaction, in which the bride was bought from her father, by ponies, furs, weapons or wampum, according as the bridegroom was rich in such possessions. The bargain and sale completed, nothing remained but for the goods to be delivered, and that was clone in an exceedingly simple manner, which the admirers of the race probably regard as evidence of purity of character. The purchaser went to the tent of the bride's father, and led her thence to his own. Thenceforth she was his property, in precisely the sense and by the tenure that he owned his bows and arrows, or his pony and dog. She was his laborer, to raise com and perform all domestic duties, while he rested in all that peculiar dignity which belongs to the nobility of man in his uncultivated state. He practiced what Petruchio, in a feigned humor, affirmed of Catharine.

But while Petruchio feigned his anger and capricious moods that he might tame his shrewish bride, the conduct of the Indian toward his spouse was all in sober earnest. His contributions to the household consisted of little more .than the meat and fish game. She performed the drudgery of the fields, for manual labor was unworthy his dignity. On the march, whether retreating from an enemy or seeking a new location, the warrior rode while the women were on foot, and if there were not enough pack ponies to carry the camp equipage, the wives and daughters of the braves acted as beasts of burden to bear what the four-footed ones could not carry. If on the journey one of them were seized with the pangs of maternity, that trifle was not sufficiently important to be worth the notice of the lords of nature. Such an incident was beneath their stoicism. The mother dropped from the line, brought into the world another noble red man, or another female slave in miniature of herself, bound her offspring in its cradle, and trudged on to overtake the line. For the great ills she suffered, and the unceasing toil of her life, she had only compensation in the fact that, in childbirth she was comparatively painless, and her recovery' almost instantaneous. Lack of fashions saved her from the agonies which fashion has entailed upon civilized mothers.

Perhaps some will think this estimate of the Indian character is an ungenerous one, and that much of the barbarity of his nature arose from the provocation of the whites and from the certainty with which he saw his inheritance slipping from him. While this may have force so far as his treatment of the invaders is concerned, it has no application whatever to his domestic customs nor to the usages which prevailed between tribes in time of war. It was in their nature to scalp their fallen foes, and to slaughter women and babes of their own race but of different tribe. The dwellers under the tropical suns of Africa, where nature provides food in all seasons and where clothing is a burden, were not so lazy and thriftless as these dwellers in a climate where some exertion is necessary to the continuance of life. Their predecessors, the mound builders, had left them vast monuments of energy - - an energy directed to self-preservation in war and to the illustration of religious belief. But such an example was lost upon the indolent race which followed, or descended from them. Permanent fortifications the Indian whom we know has never builded, because he was always too lazy for the work, and had it been imposed upon the women he would have been compelled to cultivate the crops - effeminate task unsuited to his notions of dignity, and still more repugnant to his love of ease. There were among them some exceptions, and men of ambition and pride, but not enough to leaven the mass of worthlessness. Stories of Indian gratitude and nobility of character are so rare that they may be set down as wonderful exceptions to the rule of the aboriginal nature, and therefore they have been preserved.

Of the*early history of the Indians who occupied this continent when Columbus first saw it, little can be said. Equally ignorant with the mound builders of the art of letters, they had no written records, and tradition was the only medium through which events were handed from generation to generation. The Northmen, who came here as early as the tenth century, and left behind them monuments such as the stone tower at Newport, Rhode Island, preserved the results of their discoveries in no shape to throw much light on the races they encountered here. They were freebooters, and on the seas occupied a place corresponding to that filled by the knights on land, who roamed Europe with a beggarly following, bent on "beauty or booty."

Our best knowledge of the Indian tribes comes to us through sources associated with religion. The Catholic missionaries who came into the northwestern wilds were certainly remarkable men. In the East, from Plymouth Rock, flowed the Puritan strain, and from Rhode Island the Baptist influence, which had been driven out of Massachusetts by the bigotry of the "Mayflower" adventurers. But to the West came those to whom the cross was a holy sign, and they' were filled with that zeal which has characterized the votaries of that faith alike under the suns of China or amid the wildernesses of the new world. They were men of intense convictions ; but with their severity toward themselves, their austerity and denial of self, there was associated a leniency and gentleness which strangely won the savage heart. Abstemious in their habits, and of a bravery of that peculiar kind which only religious fervor inspires, they won admiration by those traits which appeal most strongly to the Indian nature. Then they were educated, and their knowledge was beyond that of the "medicine men." In this respect they were regarded with superstitious veneration. Diseases which could not be successfully treated by the rude therapeutics known to them, readily yielded to the science of the doctor-priest. Robed in a garment whose fashion was strange, and telling a story of divine incarnation, suffering, and death whose pathos has melted millions of hearts, it was no wonder that they attained ascendancy over a people who could be reached through the imagination easier than through any other channel. To them that Great Spirit, whom they worshiped as an indefinable something or personage, who in an inexplicable way watched over human affairs, was presented by the visible symbol of the cross - a being in shape and form tangible, who had once walked the earth as themselves, and who for their good had made a sacrifice all propitiatory. To those men, who thus opened to them a new life, they gave greater measure of confidence than to any others, and to them we are indebted for even the scanty knowledge we have of what the life, manners and traditions of the Indian tribes were. They were enabled by their gentle mission, which sought only the spiritual good of those to whom they ministered, to penetrate a country where an armed invader would have met resistance at every step. The expeditions of La Salle, De Soto and others of like nature, would have been of little avail but for the lodgment which the missionaries effected.

To the student, or man of general reading, there can be no more instructive historical page than that which records the self-denial and courage of those, priests or laymen, who brought this territory into a condition fitted for occupation. They labored for posterity in a sense to which we can lay no claim. How could they anticipate that their children should see what we see today in this valley, as fair a land as lies between the oceans? Honor to them, for that they worked without a prize in sight. Doubtless they saw that there was greatness here; but they could have never imagined such lovely slopes, such landscapes, dressed in the richness of nature embellished by the husbandman's art, as greet our eyes now that the woodman's ax has done its work. They might have hoped, from some fairer airs than these, to look upon the scenes which they had as first of the palefaces discovered. But that any of them should live to see such a wonderful transformation would never at that day have been believed. Yet some of them remain, whose early recollections carrv border warfare and the subduing of the land under deadly peril. Bravely they met the labors of the field, or the dangers of Indian battle, little expecting in their own lifetimes, or in their children's, that the seed they sowed would yield such abundant harvest. Their work was unselfish. It sprang from a sturdy, manly impulse. It came from that instinct, if you so please to call it, which impels the young husband and father to stand before his wife and babe and defy all opposing odds in defense of those dearer to him than his own life. Of that sort of stock came the pioneers of the. Miami valley.

One or two instances, well authenticated, will not be uninteresting to show the dangers incurred by those who settled the region embraced by the Ohio and Miami valleys. The Ohio was the highway traveled by nearly all to the West, Pittsburg being the starting point, and Marietta, Fort Washington, Louisville, and other places the destination frQm which emigrants looked about them for new homes. To pass down the Ohio at that day must have been an experience similar to a trip overland by stage a score of years ago, only that it was attended with greater danger, for the emigrants of our time were better provided with arms to repel attack, while the savages on the plains were not so numerous as hereabouts a century ago.

Of course the Indians quickly saw the importance of the Ohio as a thoroughfare, and it was closely watched. So long as the voyagers "down the Ohio's ever-ebbing tide" kept their boats in the center of the stream their journey was comparatively safe, for though they might be fired upon from shore they could find shelter behind the bulwarks or by lying flat in the bottom of their crafts. Their great danger lay in surprises when necessity compelled them to land, for no one could say that the wooded shore at any point did not conceal an ambushed foe. Then, again, they were sometimes lure to destruction by renegade whites, who served for the Indians the same purpose as the decoys of the hunter in quest of game. Deat 1 or captivity was on every side, both from their dusky foes and from men with white

An Indian chief named Chikatommo, as we learn from Drake's "North American Indians" and other authorities, was successful in 1790 in destroying many lives of those descending the river, beside carrying others into captivity and despoiling much property. He must have had bands stationed at many points upon the Ohio, for m no other way could he have accomplished so great destruction. This chief had taken two white men prisoners, and he craftily made them the decoys with which to entice others of their race within his power Charles Johnston, of Botetourt county, Virginia, tells how he and his companions were deceived by the strategem of the wily chief. They were descending the Ohio in a flat boat, which contained several horses and considerable merchandise. Suddenly the two white men spoken of above appeared upon the bank, hailed them, represented their great distress, and begged to be taken on board. Just before a settlement called Kennedy's Bottom, in Kentucky, had been destroyed, and they represented that they had been taken prisoners there but had escaped, and unless some one would have pity upon them they must surely be retaken, or perish of want. Some of the flatboat party believed the story, but others were for turning to it a deaf ear. Finally the sentiment of humanity prevailed. The boat had been drifting rapidly down the river while the parley was in progress, and those on board argued that if there were Indians m ambush the boat must have left them so far behind that there would be no great danger of surprise. Accordingly the clumsy craft was headed inward, but so slowly did it move across the current that the Indians were able to skulk through the woods and bushes, and intercept its arrival. As soon as it touched the bank a band of warriors sprang from the thicket and poured in a volley which killed one man and wounded another and a woman. The crew endeavored to shove the boat from shore, but it became entangled in the branches of a. large tree, and all efforts to loosen it were fruitless.

All were compelled to lie down to escape the fire of the savages, and when one of their number arose with a white cap as a token of surrender, he fell dead with a bullet through his brain. With this the Indians desisted, all the plunder was taken on shore, the dead were scalped and thrown into the river, and the captives were stripped of most of their clothing. A council was then held, and the prisoners were alloted among e chiefs of the band.

In the morning another descending a was seen. All the captives were compelled to take a position on the bank where t ey could, under penalty of a horrible deat The two renegades who had the day be ore so successfully entrapped the Johnston corn panv again played their part, representing this time that their boat had become disabled, and asking for an ax with which to repair it. The plea was listened to, and the men, six in number, turned their canoe to the shore. Four were killed on the first fire, and the remaining two, who had been only wounded, were despatched with the tomahawk. All were scalped and their bodies rolled into the tide. Mr. Johnston adds, with an unconscious pathos, "Nothing I could then learn, or which has since come to my knowledge, has enabled me to understand who these unfortunate sufferers were." Anxious mothers or wives, or sisters or children waited long with sinking hearts for those forms which, mutilated, were tossed on the waters of the Ohio, victims of savage treachery.