XXIV St. Clair
“Kentucky! Kentucky! I hear nothing else,” exclaimed the Fighting Parson of the Revolution, who had thrown aside his prayer-book and gown to follow the armies of Washington. “If this western exodus continues Virginia bids fair to be depopulated.” Even Jack Jouett, who had ridden to warn Jefferson of Tarleton’s raid, had gone to become an honoured member of Kentucky’s first legislature.
“Father, let me go.”
Charles Mynn Thruston, the son of the Fighting Parson, had long desired to follow Fanny Clark, but his father held him back. Smiling now at the ardour of his son, he said, “You may go, my boy. I am thinking of the western country myself.”
Preparations were immediately made, business affairs settled, and a farewell dinner brought friends to historic Mount Zion, the famous Shenandoah seat of the Fighting Parson.
“A strangah desiahs to know, sah, if he can get dinnah, sah,” announced black Sambo.
“Certainly, certainly.” Parson Thruston was the soul of hospitality. “Bring him at once to the table, Sambo.”
The stranger seated himself and ate in silence.
“I perceive,” remarked the Parson after the courses had been removed, “I perceive that you are a traveller. May I inquire whence you come?”
Every ear was intent. “From Kentucky, sir,” answered the stranger.
“Ah, that is fortunate. I am about to leave for that country myself,” exclaimed young Thruston, “and shall be glad to hear such news as you may have to communicate.”
The stranger smiled and pondered. “The only interesting incident that I recall before my departure from Louisville, was the marriage of the Kentucky belle, Miss Fanny Clark, to Dr. O’Fallon.”
As if struck by a bolt from heaven, Charles Mynn Thruston fell unconscious to the floor.
Dr. O’Fallon was a young Irish gentleman of talent and learning. An intimate friend of the Governor of South Carolina, just before the Revolution he had come to visit America, but espousing the cause of the colonists, the Governor promptly clapped him into prison.
“Imprisoned O’Fallon!” The people of Charleston arose, liberated him, and drove the Governor to the British fleet in the harbour.
Dr. O’Fallon enlisted as a private soldier. But surgeons were needed,—he soon proved himself one of skill unexcelled in America. General Washington himself ordered him north, and made him Surgeon-General in his own army. Here he remained until the close of the war, and was thanked by Congress for his services.
And now he had visited Kentucky to assist in securing the navigation of the Mississippi, and met—Fanny. With the charming Fanny as his wife, Dr. O’Fallon rode many a mile in the woods, the first great doctor of Louisville.
Other emigrants were bringing other romances, and other tragedies. “Ohio! Ohio! We hear nothing but Ohio!” said the people of New England.
One rainy April morning the “Mayflower,” a flatboat with a second Plymouth colony, turned into the Muskingum and founded a settlement.
“Marie, Marie Antoinette,—did she not use her influence in behalf of Franklin’s mission to secure the acknowledgment of American independence? Let us name our settlement Marietta.”
So were founded the cities of the French king and queen, Louisville and Marietta. A few months later, Kentuckians went over and started Cincinnati on the site of George Rogers Clark’s old block-house.
Into the Ohio, people came suddenly and in swarms, “institutional Englishmen,” bearing their household gods and shaping a state.
“These men come wearing hats,” said the Indians. Frenchmen wore handkerchiefs and never tarried.
Surveyors came.
Squatting around their fires, with astonishment and fear the Indians watched “the white man’s devil,” squinting over his compass and making marks in his books. Wherever the magical instrument turned all the best lands were bound with chains fast to the white man.
The Indians foresaw their approaching destruction and hung nightly along the river shore, in the thick brush under the sycamores, stealing horses and sinking boats. With tomahawk in hand, a leader among them was young Tecumseh.
“The Ohio shall be the boundary. No white man shall plant corn in Ohio!” cried the Indian.
“Keep the Ohio for a fur preserve,” whispered Detroit at his back.
While wedding bells were ringing at Mulberry Hill, Marietta was suffering. The gardens were destroyed by Indian marauders, the game was driven off, and great was the privation within the walled town.
That was the winter when Governor St. Clair came with his beautiful daughter Louisa, the fleetest rider in the chase, the swiftest skater on the ice, and, like all pioneer girls, so skilled with the rifle that she could bring down the bird on the wing, the squirrel from the tree.
Creeping out over the crusty February snow, every family in the settlement had its kettle in the sugar orchard boiling down the maple sap. Corn-meal and sap boiled down together formed for many the daily food.
But with all the bravado of their hearts, men and women passed sleepless vigils while the sentinel stood all night long in the lonely watchtower of the middle blockhouse. At any moment might arise the cry, “The Indians! The Indians are at the gates!” and with the long roll of the drum beating alarm every gun was ready at a porthole and every white face straining through the dark.
When screaming wild geese steering their northern flight gave token of returning spring, when the partridge drummed in the wood and the turkey gobbled, when the red bird made vocal the forest and the hawthorn and dogwood flung out their perfume, then too came the Indian from his winter lair.
“Ah,” sighed many a mother, “I prefer the days of gloom and tempest, for then the red man hugs his winter fire.”
Always among the first in pursuit of marauding Indians, William Clark as a cadet had already crossed the Ohio with General Scott, “a youth of solid and promising parts and as brave as Cæsar,” said Dr. O’Fallon.
Joseph Brant, Thayendanegea, presented a memorial to Congress insisting upon the Ohio as the Indian boundary. His son came down to Marietta.
“Ah, yes,” was the whispered rumour at Marietta, “young Brant, the educated son of the famous Mohawk leader, aspires to the hand of Louisa St. Clair.” But the Revolutionary General spurned his daughter’s dusky suitor.
The next day after New Year’s, 1791, the Indians swept down on Marietta with the fiendish threat, “Before the trees put forth their leaves again no white man’s cabin shall smoke beyond the Ohio.”
“Capture St. Clair alive,” bade the irate Mohawk chieftain. “Shoot his horse under him but do not kill him.” Did he hope yet to win consent to his marriage with Louisa?
The next heard of St. Clair was when the last shattered remnant of his prostrate army fell back on Cincinnati, a defeat darker, more annihilating, more ominous than Braddock’s.
“My God,” exclaimed Washington, “it’s all over! St. Clair’s defeated—routed; the officers are nearly all killed, the men by wholesale; the rout is complete—too shocking to think of—and a surprise into the bargain.”
No wonder Secretary Lear stood appalled as the great man poured forth his wrath in the house at Philadelphia.
Fifteen hundred went out from Cincinnati,—five hundred came back. A thousand scalps had Thayendanegea.
The news came to Mulberry Hill like a thunderbolt. Kentucky, even Pittsburg, looked for an immediate savage inundation,—for was not all that misty West full of warriors? The old fear leaped anew. Like an irresistible billow they might roll over the unprotected frontier.
From his bed of sickness General Clark started up. “Ah, Detroit! Detroit! Hadst thou been taken my countrymen need not have been so slaughtered.”
At Marietta, up in the woods and on the side hills, glittered multitudes of fires, the camps of savages. Hunger added its pangs to fear. The beleaguered citizens sent all the money they could raise by two young men to buy salt, meat, and flour at Redstone-Old-Fort on the Monongahela. Suddenly the river closed with ice; in destitution Marietta waited.
“They have run off with the money,” said some.
“They have been killed by Indians,” said others. But again, as suddenly, the ice broke, and early in March the young men joyfully moored their precious Kentucky ark at the upper gate of the garrison at Marietta.