XXV The Sword of “Mad Anthony” Wayne
“Another defeat will ruin the reputation of the government,” said Washington, as he sent out “Mad Anthony” Wayne, the uproarious Quaker general, with ruffles, queue, and cocked hat, the stormer of Stony Point in the Revolution.
In vain Wayne sent commissioners to treat with the Indians. Elated with recent victories, “The Ohio shall be the boundary,” was the defiant answer.
An Indian captured and brought to Wayne said of the British: “All their speeches to us are red, red as blood. All the wampum and feathers are painted red. Our war-pipes and hatchets are red. Even the tobacco is red for war.”
“My mind and heart are upon that river,” said Cornplanter, an Indian chief, pointing to the Ohio. “May that water ever continue to be the boundary between the Americans and the Indians.”
Commissioned by Washington First Lieutenant of the Fourth Sub-Legion, on the first of September, 1792, William Clark crossed the Ohio and spent the winter at Legionville where Wayne was collecting and drilling his army.
“I will have no six months men,” said Wayne. “Two years will it take to organise, drill, and harden them before we think of taking the field.”
“We are certain to be scalped,” whispered timorous ones, remembering St. Clair’s slaughter. Hundreds deserted. The very word Indian inspired terror.
But horse, foot, and artillery, he drilled them, the tremblers took courage, and the government, at last awakened, stood firmly behind with money and supplies.
“Remember, Stony Point was stormed with unloaded muskets. See! You must know the use of the broadsword and of the bayonet, a weapon before which the savages cannot stand.”
At work went “Mad Anthony” teaching his men to load and fire upon the run, to leap to the charge with loud halloos, anticipating all possible conditions.
“Charge in open order. Each man rely on himself, and expect a personal encounter with the enemy.” The men caught his spirit. Wayne’s Legion became a great military school.
Now he was drilling superb Kentucky cavalry, as perfectly matched as the armies of Europe, sorrel and bay, chestnut and gray, bush-whacking and charging, leaping ravines and broken timber, outdoing the Indians themselves in their desperate riding.
And with all this drill, Wayne was erecting and garrisoning forts. In the fall of 1793, Lieutenant Clark was dispatched to Vincennes.
“It appears that all active and laborious commands fall on me,” he wrote to his brother Jonathan, in Virginia. “Not only labour, but I like to have starved,—was frozen up in the Wabash twenty days without provisions. In this agreeable situation had once more to depend on my rifle.”
After several skirmishes with Indians, Lieutenant Clark returned to Fort Washington (Cincinnati) in May, to be immediately dispatched with twenty-one dragoons and sixty cavalry to escort seven hundred packhorses laden with provisions and clothing to Greenville, a log fort eighty miles north of Cincinnati.
The Shawnees were watching. Upon this rich prize fell an ambuscade of sixty Indians. Eight men were killed, the train began to retreat, when Clark came dashing up from the rear, put the assailants to flight, and saved the day. For this he was thanked by General Wayne.
Washington, Jefferson, the whole country impatiently watched for news of Wayne on the Ohio.
Drill, drill, drill,—keeping out a cloud of scouts that no peering Indian might discover his preparations, Wayne exercised daily now with rifle, sabre, and bayonet until no grizzly frontiersman surpassed his men at the target, no fox-hunter could leap more wildly, no swordsman more surely swing the sharp steel home. At the sight young Tennesseeans and Kentuckians, Virginians of the border and Pennsylvanians of lifetime battle, were eager for the fray.
About midsummer, 1794, Wayne moved out with his Legion, twenty-six hundred strong, and halted at Fort Greenville for sixteen hundred Kentucky cavalry. Brigades of choppers were opening roads here and there to deceive.
“This General that never sleeps is cutting in every direction,” whispered the watchful Shawnees. “He is the Black Snake.”
For a last time Wayne offered peace. His messengers were wantonly murdered.
The issue at Fallen Timbers lasted forty minutes,—the greatest Indian battle in forty years of battle. Two thousand Indians crouching in the brush looked to see the Americans dismount and tie their horses as they did in St. Clair’s battle,—but no, bending low on their horses with gleaming sabres and fixed bayonets, on like a whirlwind came thundering the American cavalry.
“What was it that defeated us? It was the Big Wind, the Tornado,” said the Indians.
Matchekewis was there from Sheboygan with his warriors, the Black Partridge from Illinois, and Buckongahelas. The Shawnees had their fill of fighting that day; Tecumseh fell back at the wild onset, retreating inch by inch.
William Clark led to the charge a column of Kentuckians and drove the enemy two miles. But why enumerate in this irresistible legion, where all were heroes on that 20th of August, 1794.
Wayne’s victory ended the Revolution. Ninety days after, Lord St. Helens gave up Ohio in his treaty with Jay, and England bound herself to deliver the northwestern posts that her fur traders had hung on to so vainly.
Niagara, Michilimackinac, Detroit, keys to the Lakes, entrepôts to all the fur trade of the Northwest, were lost to Britain for ever. It was hardest to give up Detroit,—it broke up their route and added many a weight to the weary packer’s back when the fur trade had to take a more northern outlet along the Ottawa.
It was ten o’clock in the morning of July 11, 1796, when the Detroiters peering through their glasses espied two vessels. “The Yankees are coming!”
A thrill went through the garrison, and even through the flag that fluttered above. The last act in the war of independence was at hand.
The four gates of Detroit opened to be closed no more, as the drawbridge fell over the moat and the Americans marched into the northern stronghold. It was Lernoult’s old fort built so strenuously in that icy winter of 1779-80, when “Clark is coming” was the watchword of the north. Scarce a picket in the stockade had been changed since that trying time. Blockhouse, bastion, and battery could so easily have been taken, that even at this day we cannot suppress a regret that Clark had not a chance at Detroit!
Barefooted Frenchmen, dark-eyed French girls, and Indians, Indians everywhere, came in to witness the transfer of Detroit. At noon, July 11, 1796, the English flag was lowered and the Stars and Stripes went up where Clark would fain have hung them seventeen years before.
And the old cellar of the council house! Like a tomb was its revelation, for there, mouldered with the must of years, lay two thousand scalps, long tresses of women, children’s golden curls, and the wiry locks of men, thrown into that official cellar in those awful days that now were ended.
The merry Frenchmen on their pipestem farms,—for every inhabitant owned his pathway down to the river,—the merry Frenchmen went on grinding their corn by their old Dutch windmills, went on pressing their cider in their gnarled old apple orchards. They could not change the situation if they would, and they would not if they could. The lazy windmills of Detroit swung round and round as if it had been ever thus. Still the Indians slid in and out and still the British traders lingered, loath to give up the fur trade of the Lakes.
The next year after Wayne’s victory the last buffalo in Ohio was killed, and in 1796 the first American cabins were built at Cleveland and Chillicothe. For the first time the Ohio, the great highway, was safe. Passenger boats no longer had bullet-proof cabins, no longer trailed cannon on their gunwales. In that year twenty thousand emigrants passed down the Ohio. Astonished and helpless the red men saw the tide. By 1800 there were more whites in the Mississippi valley than there were Indians in all North America.