Daviess County, Indiana - Chapter 4 (1 of 2 so headed), 1886

Chapter 4

vlncennes from 1779 to 1800 - ceremonies of the surrender of Sackville - Capture of the English Fleet - Disposal of the Distinguished Prisoners - Promotion of Clark and Bowman- Defeat of the Delawakes - The Establishment of a Court - LaBalm's Expedition and Fate - Attack of the Peorias - The Pursuit and Defeat - Beautiful Pen-Picture of Vincennes.

rT^HE ceremonies by which the post of Vincennes was again -*- transferred to a foreign power occurred at 10 o'clock on the 25th of February, 1779. At that hour two companies, under Capts. Bowman and McCarthy, paraded along St. Louis Street on the left of the fort gate. The British ensign was slowly hoisted upon the staff above Sackville, while the American drums rolled a salute to its honor and to the courage of those who had defended it. When the drums ceased Hamilton ordered the flag lowered, and at the head of his command, just outside of the fort, stepped up to Clark and presented his sword. Col. Clark, at the head of Capts. Williams1 and Worthington's companies, passed into the gate, followed by the color bearer, Nicholas Cardinal. As the Americal flag arose above this stronghold, all the fort guns were discharged in salute, followed by thirteen shots - one for each State - at intervals of a minute. Just at the last fire a battery magazine, containing twenty-six six-pound cartridges exploded, seriously wounding Bowman, Worthington and four privates.

Capture Of The English Fleet

Clark had received intelligence that a fleet from Detroit, with provisions and re-enforcements, was hourly due, and Capts. Helm and Henry and Maj. Legare were empowered to take fifty of the militia and proceed up the river to intercept the flotilla. A proclamation was prepared, duly rendered into the French language, and posted, calling for fifty volunteers from among the inhabitants for this expedition. In less than two hours after its appearance more than twice that number appeared, pressing to be employed upon that service. On the afternoon of the 26th, with three boats, each armed with a swivel taken from the fort, with Bowman in command, the expedition started. At the foot of the island, near Bellgrade, on the evening of the 28th, Bowman tied his boats under the overhanging willows, and sent out a party in light canoes to explore the river above and give notice of the descent of the enemy. At Point Coupee, about sunrise the next morning, the descending fleet, consisting of seven batteaux (a long, flatbottomed craft), was discovered. Frederick Mehl, one of the Virginia troops, who led the recormoitering party, pulled rapidly back to Bowman and gave information of the strength of the approaching fleet. On the evening of the 2d of March the unsuspecting Canadians came into the narrow channel, between the island and main shore, where the American boats lay in ambush. A cry to " round to and come ashore" was the first intimation the party from Detroit received that an enemy lay in these waters of the king. The hail was quickly followed by a shot across the path of the descending fleet, and a demand for a surrender. Bowman sent out boats with Maj. Legare, who ordered those in charge to take out a line and make fast to the shore. When this was done, Adimar, a captain of the commissary, who was in command, formally turned over the fleet, with thirty-eight private soldiers as prisoners, and all its stores of provisions and balegoods, estimated to be of the value of $25,000. Among those on board was Mr. De Jean, the grand judge of Detroit, who, with a Mr. Andre, also of the party, was interested in the goods taken. On the 5th, with songs and shouts, calling the entire village, men and women, to the shore, this naval expedition, with its valuable prizes in tow, entered the long stretch above the town. Everybody became wild with excitement and zeal. The women ran more than a mile up the river, to be first to meet and convey the heroes into the town. Men waded and swam out into the river to be the first to hear the details, while a volley of queries from the shore was answered by good-natured, boasting replies. This display of prowess, and its rich fruits, kindled a flame. The love of distant adventure, the chivalrous courage of the Frenchman, which, in after years, led a great host to the shadow of the pyramids, was aroused, until it conceived the recovery of Quebec.

Through the humble streets of this little village in the forest went the demand to be led against Detroit, in that same sublime confidence which, upon a Sunday morning nearly one hundred years afterward, filled all Paris with the cry: "A Berlin dans huit jours."*

Disposal Of The Distinguished Prisoners

On the 7th Capt. "Williams and Lieut. Rogers with a detail of twenty-five men, having in charge the following distinguished prisoners, were sent by water to the Ohio Falls, Lieut. -Gov. Henry Hamilton, Maj. John Hay, Capt. LaMotte, Lieut. Shiflin, Monsieur Da Jean, the grand judge of Detroit; Pierre Andre, his partner; Dr. McEboth, Francis Maisonville and Mr. Bell Fenilb, together with eighteen privates. Lieut. Rogers had orders to conduct these prisoners to Williamsburgh, where, on the 18th of June, 1779, by order of the governor of Virginia, Hamilton, Hay, La- Motte and De Jean were " put into irons, confined in the dungeon of the public jail, debarred the use of pen, ink and paper and excluded all converse except with their keeper," and were so kept until the 20th of the following September, when they were ordered to Hanover Court House, where they were released on a parole to remain within certain limits. The order dispatching these prisoners was issued from "Fort Patrick Henry," the new name Clark had conferred upon Sackville in honor of the great orator of the Revolution.

clark's promotion and subsequent acts. On the 27th of February, two days after the surrender, the batteau, which had preceded Clark from Kaskaskia, arrived, bearing "William Myers, an express from Gov. Henry, who had been picked up on the Ohio. He carried dispatches assuring Clark of re-enforcements, and promoting, by commissions, Clark and Bowman, the first to be a general and the other to be a major. The Indians now began to come into the town in large delegations to obtain some explanation of this surprising revolution. The Puans and Miamis waited upon Clark, and speaking, as they claimed, for all their brothers, assured him of their fidelity to the

American cause and asked to be included in his protection. The privates taken on the boats with De Jean were now drawn up in line, as if preparatory to sending them to Virginia ; Clark then addressed them to the effect that he had learned that many of them were torn from their fathers and mothers and forced on this expedition; others, ignorant of the true cause in contest, had engaged from a principal that actuates a great number of men, that of being fond of enterprise, that the United States are very strong, and instead of confining them in jail during the war, they should be privileged to return to Detroit in the boats in which they had come, and which they were to accept as a present. On the 20th of March Clark appointed Lieut. Kichard Brashears to command the garrison, which consisted of Lieuts. Bagley and Chapline; Capt. Leonard Helm, commandant of the town; Moses Henry, Indian agent; Patrick Kennedy, quartermaster, and forty picked men, and upon that same day set sail on board his galley, now made complete, attended by five armed boats and seventy men, for Fort Clark, at Kaskaskia, where he arrived to the great joy of Capt. George, who had succeeded Dillard.

Attack On The Delawares

At the junction of the two forks of White River, there was settled a fragment of the Delaware nation of Indians, having their hunting grounds on the Ohio and Mississippi. Professing great friendship for the Americans upon their first arrival, they had entered into articles of peace with every manifestation of sincerity. About the 1st of May a party of five traders proceeding to the falls from Vincennes, were ambushed, killed and plundered by a party of these Delawares. Clark determined to make this conduct an example to all the other Indians by whom he was surrounded. Accordingly he sent orders to Vincennes to make war on the Delawares. A night attack upon the Indian village proved a complete surprise, many were killed, and others brought to the town and put to death, the woman and children only being spared. The effect of this prompt and plenary retaliation was instantly apparent everywhere, in the demeanor of the savages.

A Court Established

lieutenant for the county of Illinois, arrived at Vincennes and organized a court consisting of Col. Le Gras, Louis Edeline, Pierre Gainelin, Pierre Quersez and Le Grand, who became its clerk. This court seemed to conceive its functions were sovereign, and included the right to execute grants of the soil. Even in those days so tempting were the public lands that frauds were openly committed. This court granted to its own members over 12,000 acres of the common domain, the member to be benefited by the grant absenting himself from the sessions of the court upon the day it was entered, that the act might appear to be that of bis fellows, in which he had taken no part.

La Balm'S Unfortunate Expedition

In August, 1780, Louis La Balm, who had served with St. Ange at St. Louis, crossed the Mississippi with a small band of adventurers and began to recruit at Cahokia a company for the reduction of the British post at Detroit. In a few days fifty brave spirits had enlisted under his banner, when he proceeded to Vincennes to obtain further recruits. On the 22d La Balm embarked upon the Wabash for the town of the Miamis (Fort Wayne), where he arrived on the 3d of September, and at once began to pillage the stores of the English traders stationed there. After securing what booty the town offered he encamped at the mouth of the river Aboite, where, on the night of the 3d of September, a party of savages led by one of the British merchants, who had been plundered, crawled stealthily through the long grass, almost to the encampment. Rembault, who had joined La Balm at Vincennes, discovered the approach of the foe, and gave a shout of alarm to his sleeping companions, and the next instant fell dead, cleaved with a tomahawk. The assault was so successful that the commander and forty-one of his followers were killed outright, while twelve were taken prisoners, and reserved for the more horrible fate of torture.

The Peoria Attack And Pursuit

On the 4th of April, 1785, a band of Peorias, numbering sixty warriors, crossed the Wabash below Fort Patrick Henry, and proceeded to the River Duchee, where they encamped. Just before daylight the next morning the cabin inhabited by a settler named Latroumelle, with his wife and two children, was attacked from the heavy woods surrounding the clearing in which stood the dwelling, and the roof fired. In a few moments the doors were broken in, Latroumelle killed and scalped, and the woman and children made prisoners. The Indian party then proceeded toward the Wabash, passing, without discovering it, a camp of two hunters, who immediately set out upon their ponies to give the alarm at Vincennes. By 9 o'clock the whole populace assembled in answer to the alarm given by the church bell. About eighty men hastily mounted, and under the leadership of Capt. John Small, proceeded down the west bank of the Wabash until they struck the trail of the retreating Indians, below the mouth of the Embarrass. Following the trail northwest to Blue Spring, near the south bank of the Embarrass, they came upon the savages encamped about sunset. Small so disposed of his forces as to completely surround the party on three sides, with the river obstructing retreat upon the other. At a signal the whites opened fire upon the camp from every available tree, killing eleven, and wounding four so severely that they were left behind by their retreating friends, who plunged into the Embarrass and swam out of harm. After tomahawking the wounded Indians Small caused their bodies to be thrown into the stream. The woman, with her two children taken from the cabin, was found bound to a tree, still unharmed. Small's party suffered a loss of two killed, Antoine Lafont and Ettrinne Patvin, and three wounded.

Beautiful Pen-Picture Of Old Vincennes

The sea-board States poured their overflow, a restless, battling swarm of home-hunters, through the notches of the Alleghanies out upon the vast savannahs northwest of the Ohio. As the curtain rose, back of the dissolving line of untamed savages, the advancing Saxon and Celt, who in his American home, was unaccustomed to habitations within hail one with another, beheld with awe the mystery of Latin civilization upon the Wabash. Vincennes, a puzzle, a mystery, a curious thing, a marvel, " a page torn from some book of enchantment." A bit of Europe, a fragment from the gardens of Versailles, suddenly dropped in his path, could scarce have awakened more of his astonishment. Long lines of gleaming white houses thatched with yellow straw, each with its arcade festooned with trailing vines and half hidden in season under the bloom of peach and pear, radiated like the spokes from the center of a wheel from a vast square, from which arose the frowning walls of a citadel, overlooking a belfried church; and a necropolis, entombing a century's dead, stood against his horizon, so unlike all his experience in the woods, so like a dream, a story of a vision, it seemed the work of magic. Its streets thronged with brightly dressed, dark eyed women, who familiarly chatted in the soft accents of a strange tongue with beaux who might have donned their dress in sunny France, so elegant it seemed; its stores crowded with island sweetmeats, silks and ribbons, flowers, laces, and fine cloths from the famous factories and looms of the world ; upon the water floated vessels modeled upon the Seine, and the Loire, all presented a panorama of never ceasing wonder. Did he mingle with these strange people, their balls, festivals, holidays, saints' days; their fasts, penances and mortifications were inscrutable. In the church of Christ, the altar blazing with lights, before which robed priests chanted Latin prayers, and intoned the music of the uncomprehended mass, bewildered while it enchanted his senses. Under such influnces, held as in the grip of a vice by race and religious prejudice, hard, dominant, alert, grasping and discourteous, as if thrown by a troubled sea of population upon its outer shore, as it slowly stilled from the great storm of revolution, fell the first adventurers of the English speaking race upon the ancient French habUan. And what of the Gaul and his beautiful civilization? His race has withered away with its red companion, but the soft, elegant passion-subduing civilization, the tenderness of his creed, the sublimity of his devotions, the fortitude of his charity, his faithfulness and his joy, are all woven thick in the web and warp of "the cloth of gold," whereon American majesty impresses the world.