The Wild Frontier (24 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
In December a group of 75 Presbyterians from Paxton, Pennsylvania, unhappy because of the failure of the colony’s Quaker-dominated assembly to take more aggressive action against Indians, attacked some Christian Indians and murdered and scalped 3 men, 2 women, and a boy. The Paxton Boys, as they were called, claimed the attack was made because one of the Indians had melted down a stolen pewter spoon. Some Indians who had been away were given sanctuary by settlers in the Lancaster jail. Governor John Penn, the son of William Penn, issued a proclamation condemning the raid and prohibiting further violence.
Thirteen days after the first raid, the Paxton Boys broke into the jail and killed the remaining 14 Indians, including all the children. Benjamin Franklin wrote a pamphlet calling the Paxton Boys “Christian white savages.” He added that the Indians “would have been safe in any part of the known world, except in [this] very neighborhood.” Two months later, the Paxton Boys went to Philadelphia to kill the city’s Indians. The peaceful Quakers defended the Indians. A group headed by Franklin met with the Paxton Boys and worked out a settlement. The Paxton Boys agreed to call off the attack in return for bounties for scalps of Indians from warring tribes.
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An anonymous narrator told this story of his close encounter with death sometime in 1763. Five of his neighbors were killed by Indians. He literally had to run for his life to escape them. Later he and 100 soldiers
came upon 3 Indians who were about to fire on them, but surrendered instead. He asked another soldier what should be done with them. The soldier replied that they should be delivered to the commander. He reminded the other soldier about the deaths of the 5 neighbors and how he had had to run for his life. He told the soldier, “I have declared revenge on the first Indian that I saw, and the opportunity now offers.” He got 5 soldiers to agree to his plan. The Indians were told to walk ahead of the soldiers, who then shot them from behind. Two were killed and the third wounded. The third was then scalped. He got up, however, and made his escape.
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Near the close of 1763, Chief Pontiac invited several prominent French settlers to a celebration feast. When it was over, he asked one of the guests how he liked the very good young beef. Pontiac said, “ ‘Come here, I will show you what you have eaten.’ Whereupon he opened a sack lying on the ground behind him and displayed the bloody head of a British soldier, which he held up by the hair and added, with a grin, ‘There is the young beef.’ “
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Benjamin Franklin wrote that in 1764, a soldier named David Owens, who had deserted to the Indians in the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War), returned, accompanied by a white boy who had been an Indian captive. They came upon a party of 9 Indians:
In the Night Owens made the White Boy get up from among the Indians and go to the other side of the Fire; and then taking up the Indian’s
[sic]
Guns, he [Owens] shot two of the men immediately, and with his hatchet dispatch’d another Man together with the Women and Children. Two Men only made their Escape. Owens scalp’d the 5 grown persons.
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Five years later, in 1769, Pontiac was visiting a trading post in Cahokia, Illinois, when he was struck on the head and murdered by an Illinois Indian, Black Dog, believed to be in the pay of the British.
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The Ottawas, Chippewa, Potawatomis, Sac, Foxes, and Kickapoos united against the Illinois as a result of Pontiac’s murder and defeated them, reducing the number of the tribe from 1,800 to 150. The few survivors took refuge at the French settlement of Kaskaskia. Later they sold their land and went to Kansas. Earlier, in the 1680s, the Illinois Indians had stopped the long westward expansion of the Iroquois when the Iroquois failed to take Fort St. Louis on the Illinois River.
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John Smith was an English soldier of fortune who fought for the French and the Austrians before he brought settlers to Virginia and founded Jamestown. After the events discussed here, he was injured in a gunpowder explosion and had to return to England in 1609. Smith came to the New World again in 1614, when he explored around Cape Cod, and he made his last visit in 1615, during which he was captured by French pirates, then shipwrecked.
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The Hurons burned their own villages and scattered when the Iroquois invaded their territory. Some went with the French and were granted land near Quebec City; others migrated westward into Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio.
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The Wampanoags, through Squanto and Samoset, were friends of the New England colonists in the early 1600s, but during King Philip’s War, they became enemies. Those who did not fight kept their lands, particularly on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.
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The Abnakis were a confederation of Passamaquoddys, Penobscots, Micmacs, Malecites, and Pennacooks. They launched many raids against British settlements in the French and Indian War. Their stronghold, Norridgewock, fell into British hands in 1724, and the Abnaki withdrew to Quebec. They have land in Canada, Maine, and Vermont.
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The Natchez were governed by a king or queen known as the Great Sun, who had absolute power over his or her subjects. Warriors were tattooed from head to foot. There was a class system of royalty, nobles, and commoners.
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The Shawnee were widespread, living in 14 states. They migrated often. In the 1800s they were relocated by the whites to Indian Territory.
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Loudon was a Pennsylvania newspaper publisher. He put an ad in his paper asking those who had knowledge about atrocities during the Revolutionary War to advise the paper about them. Loudon then compiled their responses and published them in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
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Pontiac believed that, united, the Indians could drive the British out of the Great Lakes area. During his rebellion, he unsuccessfully tried to take Fort Detroit, then put it to siege. With the aid of other tribes, he attacked many British forts and settlements. With the coming of winter and upon the advice of a French commander, the rebellion died out.
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Chippewa, or Ojibway, were more widespread than most tribes. The French gave them firearms with which they drove the Sioux westward and the Sacs, Foxes, and Kickapoos southward out of what is now northern Wisconsin. They fought with the British in the Revolution, and when it was over, they ceded much of their land to the United States.
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The Sauk, or Sac, for much of their history were allied with the Fox tribe. After defeat in the Black Hawk War, the Sauk moved to Kansas, then to Oklahoma.
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CHAPTER 6
Atrocities During the Eras of the British Wars: The Revolutionary War and the War of 1812
T
he American colonists were as loyal to King George III
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as were the British back home when the French were defeated in the French and Indian War. Britain was soon a global power, but America, “while civilizing rapidly, was still largely a wild and untamed place.”
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But the British in the motherland didn’t understand the problems the colonists faced dealing with the Indians. George Grenville became prime minister in 1763. It was important to him that the colonists profit Britain, but they did not.
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Britain might have overlooked the commercial mediocrity of the colonies, but it could not overlook their “brazen and repeated flouting of British laws.”
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Parliament passed act after act that many of the colonists deemed oppressive, and many ignored them—the Molasses Act, the Navigation Acts, the Sugar Act, and the Stamp Act.
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Then there was violence. On the same day that the chancellor of the exchequer, Lord North, announced there would be no new taxes from London, a mob of radical colonists, unaware of North’s announcement,
attacked the Boston customs house. Snowballs were thrown at the British guards, who fired and killed 5 and wounded several more in what became known as the Boston Massacre.
North came up with a plan to tax tea. In protest, John Hancock and Sam Adams formed a group poorly disguised as Mohawk Indians to board the tea ships on December 16, 1773. They dumped 342 chests of tea owned by the East India Company in the harbor. The event was ever after known as the Boston Tea Party. North was furious, and Parliament passed the Boston Port Act, which closed the port until the colony paid Britain for the cost of the tea. (The bill was never paid.) Then Parliament passed the Massachusetts Government Act (closing the Massachusetts legislature), a new Quartering Act, the Administration of Justice Act, and acts favorable to Canada, including extending its boundaries into the Ohio Valley. The colonists called these the Intolerable Acts.
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Young plantation owner Thomas Jefferson published his
Summary View of the Rights of British America
, which denied Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies because “the God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” On the other hand, Benjamin Franklin and John Dickinson, principal draftsman of the Articles of Confederation, urged caution.
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The British governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, was ordered to strike a blow at the rebels. He found out where they were and sent troops to seize them and then destroy their supply facility at Concord, Massachusetts. Boston silversmith Paul Revere set out on horseback to warn everyone the British were coming. The British arrived in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, and were met by 70 armed men, some of them “Minutemen,” local militia formed to fight on a minute’s notice. Some unknown person fired a shot; 8 Minutemen were killed and 10 wounded. The British marched on to Concord and destroyed the few colonist supplies there. On their way back to Boston, however, local farmers in the Lexington area organized into a fighting unit and fired on the British from every house, barn, and tree. Casualties were 93 colonists and 273 British soldiers.
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The colonists were colonists no more. They were revolutionaries and free men—if the Revolution could be won.
A prophetic statement was made by a British sympathizer, a Tory, as he watched a Minuteman go by his window on the way to Lexington. He said, “There goes a man who will fight you in blood up to his knees.”
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If the Minutemen were willing to fight part of the army of the world’s greatest power, they and their descendants surely would fight the less powerful Indian tribes if necessary.
In 1777 British general John Burgoyne (who was also a playwright) drove down the Hudson Valley with his army of about 9,000 from Canada in an attempt to isolate New England from the rest of the colonies. Indians, probably one of the Algonquin family of tribes, were part of his command. Two of those Indians, one a Wyandot named Panther, were escorting an American named Jane McCrea, who was on her way to marry one of Burgoyne’s officers, David Jones. Her long hair may have made her a target.
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The Indians tomahawked her to death, stripped off her clothing, scalped her, and perhaps raped her. The Indians then took her scalp with that of an American officer back to camp, where they had a victory dance. Her body was found later. Word spread quickly through the British army.
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The Americans were horrified. American general Horatio Gates damned Burgoyne for hiring “the savages of America to scalp Europeans and the descendants of Europeans, nay more, that he should pay a price for each scalp so barbarously taken.”
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General Washington heard about the incident and wrote urging the Massachusetts and Connecticut militias to “repel an enemy from your borders, who, not content with hiring mercenaries to lay waste your country, have now brought savages, with the avowed and expressed intention of adding murder to desolation.”
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A record number of militia turned out and eventually defeated Burgoyne. Meanwhile, Burgoyne faced a dilemma. If he executed the Indians, his Indian allies might be turned into enemies. If he took no action, he would seem to condone the murder. He ordered Panther shot, but his superior argued that the Indians would desert unless Panther was turned loose. Burgoyne then pardoned the Indians and gave them a stern lecture. They resented this. A few days later, a large number of them deserted anyway.
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American soldiers began silently killing British sentries, as well as killing or scalping Indians and pinning notes on the bodies reading “For Jane McCrea.”
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The war was dragging on for the British, and they were frustrated. At the beginning they had employed Indians primarily for military ends. Gradually, they started using them to punish and frighten the Americans. Englishman William Tryon, who was the royal governor of North Carolina, then, later, governor of New York, urged the British ministry to “loose the savages against the miserable Rebels in order to impose a reign of terror on the frontiers.”
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(Governor Tryon favored terror in other directions as well. He masterminded an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the life of General Washington.)
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Tryon’s recommendation became British policy. When Prime Minister North tried to defend it in Parliament, Lord Chatham declared he was
astonished to hear such principles confessed! … Principles equally unconstitutional, inhuman, and unchristian! … What! to attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping knife? To the cannibal savage, torturing, murdering, roasting and eating; literally, my lords,
eating
the mangled victims of his barbarous battles! Such horrible notions shock every precept of religion, divine or natural, and every generous feeling of humanity…. They shock me as a lover of honorable war, and a detester of murderous barbarity…. We turn loose these savage hell-hounds against our brethren and countrymen in America, of the same language, laws, liberty and religion, endeared to us by every tie that should sanctify humanity.
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