The Incredible Tales of Ohio (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells
from them he joined with them in burying the bones of those who had fallen in the war, so that the place might no more be known. "The peace you ask for, you shall now have," he said, but he told them that it was his business to make war, and the business of others to make peace, and he instructed them how and with whom they were to treat. He took hostages from them, and he dealt with the other tribes on the same terms as they brought in their captives. On the 18th of November, he broke up his camp and marched back to Fort Pitt, with more than two hundred men, women, and children whom he had delivered from captivity among the savages.
It is believed that six hundred others were never given up. The captives were not always glad to go back to their old homes, and the Indians had sometimes to use force in bringing them to the camp where their friends and kindred who had come with Bouquet's army were waiting to receive them. Many had been taken from their homes when they were so young that they could not remember them, and they had learned to love the Indians, who had brought them up like their own children, and treated them as lovingly as the fathers and mothers from whom they had been stolen. In the charm of the savage life these children of white parents had really become savages; and certain of the young girls had grown up and married Indian husbands to whom they were tenderly attached. The scenes of parting between all these were very touching on both sides, and it is told of one Indian who had married a Virginian girl that he followed her back to the frontier at the risk of his life from her people. The Indians gave up the captives often so dear to them, with tears and lamentations, while on the other hand their kindred waited to receive them in an anguish of hope and fear. As the captives came into the camp, parents sought among them for the little ones they had lost, and husbands for the wives who had been snatched from their desolated homes. Brothers and sisters met after a parting so long that one or other had forgotten the language they once spoke in common. The Indians still hung about the camp, and came every day to visit their former prisoners and bring them gifts. When the army took up its march some of them asked leave to follow it back to Fort Pitt, and on the way they supplied their adopted children and brothers with game, and sought in every way to show their love for them.
Bouquet reached Pittsburg in ten days, without the loss of a single life at the hands of the savages, and with all his men in excellent health. Each day of his march he had pitched his camp among scenes of sylvan loveliness, on the banks of the pleasant streams that watered the fertile levels and the wild meadows, or wound through the rich valleys between the low hills. It would have been wonderful if his Pennsylvanian and Virginian recruits had not looked upon the land with covetous eyes: even the fathers and husbands and brothers who had come seeking their kindred among the Indians, had seen it with a longing to plant their homes in it. Its charms had been revealed to great numbers of the people who had known of it only from the traders before, and the savage was doomed from that time to lose it; for it already belonged to the king of England, and it rested with the English colonists to come and take it; or so, at least, they thought.
IV. The Forty Years' War for the West
The French king gave up the West to the English king in 1763, but, as we have seen, the Indians had no part in the bargain. They only knew that they were handed over by those who had been their friends to those who had been their enemies, and they did not consent. They had made war upon the English colonists before, and now, in spite of the failure of Pontiac, and in spite of Bouquet's march into the Ohio country, they kept up their warfare for forty years, with a truce when it was convenient, and a treaty of peace when it was convenient, but with a steadfast purpose to drive the English settlers out, and to hold the wilderness for themselves. It was not until long after their power was broken by the American arms in 1794 that their struggle ended in the region which ten years later became the state of Ohio.
There was misunderstanding on both sides. The Indians naturally supposed that their own country belonged to them, and the colonists supposed that their eastern and western borders were the two oceans. These were commonly the boundaries which the English king had given them; and when he had not been quite clear about it in his grants of territory which he had never even imagined, they did not allow him to deal less splendidly with them than such a prince ought. He had, as we know, given the Ohio Company of Virginia a large tract of the best land beyond the Ohio even while the French still claimed the West, and he had encouraged the Virginians to believe they had a right to settle it and to fortify it. But after the capture of Quebec, when the West, as well as Canada, fell into the power of Great Britain, the English king, or rather his ministers, began to change their minds about letting the colonists take up lands in the Back Country, as they called it. The jealousy between the colonies grew less, but the jealousy between them and Great Britain grew greater; there were outbreaks here and there against her rule, and there was discontent nearly everywhere. The colonists were disappointed and embittered that the West should be treated as a part of Canada, by the mother country, when it ought to have been shared among the English provinces. The British government tried to hinder the settlement of the whites on the Indians' lands; and though it could not keep them off altogether, it did enough to make the savages feel that it was their friend against its own subjects. In 1774, Parliament passed a law which declared the whole West, between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and below the Great Lakes, a part of the Province of Quebec. This was felt by our colonies to be so great an injury that it was charged against Great Britain in the Declaration of Independence, as one of the causes for separation. It was in fact an act hostile to a people of the British race, language, and religion, and it was meant not so much to help the savages, as to hurt the colonists, though it did really help the savages. When the Revolutionary War broke out a year or two later, the British government did not scruple to make use of the cruel hatred of the Indians against its rebellious subjects.
It set on the war parties that harried the American border, and when the blood-stained braves came back with their plunder, their captives, and the scalps of the men, women, and children they had murdered, they were welcomed at the British forts as friends and allies. In certain cases, to be sure, British officers did what they could to soften the hard fate of the prisoners, but the British government was guilty, nevertheless, of the barbarous deeds done by the Indians. Its agents furnished them with arms and ammunition, and its ministers upheld them in the same atrocities against the American rebels as the French in their time had urged and tempted them to commit against the settlers when they were English subjects.
At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Indians were as slow to lay down their arms as they had been after the French War. In each case they fought the victors, as far as they could get at them in the persons of the hapless backwoodsmen and their wives and children. These backwoodsmen did not change greatly, in their way of life, during that long Indian war of forty years. They were of the hardy English, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish stock which a generation or two in the wilderness had toughened and strengthened. They had not yet ciphered it out that one red hunter and trapper must waste the fifty thousand acres which would support the families of a hundred white farmers in comfort and prosperity; but they knew that to the westward there was a region, vast and rich beyond anything words could say, and they longed to possess it, with a hunger that was sometimes a pitiless greed, and always a resistless desire. Yet it was not until the French gave up this region that they could even venture lawlessly into it, and it was not until it fell from Great Britain to the new power of the United States that the borderers began openly to press into the backwoods, singly as hunters and trappers, in families as neighborhoods as the founders of villages and towns. The pioneers felt that they were going to take their own wherever they found it, from the savages who could not and would not use it, and they were right, for the land truly belongs to him who will use it. The savages felt that the pioneers were coming to take their own from them, for in their way they were using the land; and they were right, too. All that is left for us to ask at this late day is which could use the land best and most; and there can hardly be any doubt of the answer.
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