The Conquest. Eva Emery Dye
instruct Andrew Lewis and George Washington how to fight Indians! Had not the Shawnees harried his border for years? Had he not led rangers from Fairfax's lodge to the farthest edge of Bottetourt? Side by side with Washington he fought at Long Meadows and spilled blood with the rest on Braddock's field. More than forty years before, his father, John Lewis, had led the first settlers up the Shenandoah. They had sown it to clover, red clover, red, the Indians said, from the blood of red men slain by the whites.
But what were they to do when peaceful settlers, fugitives from the old world, staked their farms on vacant land only to be routed by the scalp halloo? Which was preferable, the tyranny of kings or the Indian firestake? Hunted humanity must choose.
The Shawnees, too, were a hunted people. Driven from south and from north, scouted by the Cherokees, scalped by the Iroquois, night and day they looked for a place of rest and found it not. Beside the shining Shenandoah, daughter of the stars, they pitched their wigwams, only to find a new and stronger foe, the dreaded white man. Do their best, interests would conflict. Civilisation and savagery could not occupy the same territory.
And now a party of emigrants were pressing into the Mingo country on the upper Ohio. Early in April the family of Logan, the noted Mingo chief, was slaughtered by the whites. It was a dastardly deed, but what arm had yet compassed the lawless frontier? All Indians immediately held accountable all whites, and burnings and massacres began in reprisal. Here was an Indian war at the hand of Lord Dunmore.
Few white men had gone down the Kanawha in those days. Washington surveyed there in 1770, and two years later George Rogers Clark carried chain and compass in the same region. That meant settlers—now, war. But Lewis, blunt, irascible, shrank not. Of old Cromwellian stock, sternly aggressive and fiercely right, he felt the land was his, and like the men of Bible times went out to smite the heathen hip and thigh. Buckling on his huge broadsword, and slipping into his tall boots and heavy spurs, he was off.
At his call they gathered, defenders of the land beyond the Blue Ridge, Scotch-Irish, Protestants of Protestants, long recognised by the Cavaliers of tidewater Virginia as a mighty bulwark against the raiding red men. Charles Lewis brought in his troop from Augusta, kinsfolk of the Covenanters, fundamentally democratic, Presbyterian Irish interpreting their own Bibles, believing in schools, born leaders, dominating their communities and impressing their character on the nation yet unborn.
It was August when, in hunting shirts and leggings, they marched into rendezvous at Staunton, with long knives in their leathern belts and rusty old firelocks above their shoulders. In September they camped at Lewisburg. Flour and ammunition were packed on horses. Three weeks of toil and travail through wilderness, swamp, and morass, and they were at the mouth of the Great Kanawha.
But where was Dunmore? With his thousand men he was to march over the Braddock Road to meet them there on the Ohio. Rumour now said he was marching alone on the Shawnee towns.
"And so expose himself!" ejaculated Lewis.
But just then a runner brought word from Lord Dunmore, "Join me at the Shawnee towns."
"What does it mean?" queried Lewis of his colonels, Charles Lewis of Augusta, Fleming of Bottetourt, Shelby and Field of Culpepper. "It looks like a trap. Not in vain have I grown gray in border forays. There's some mistake. It will leave the whole western portion of Virginia unprotected."
Brief was the discussion. Before they could cross the Ohio, guns sounded a sharp surprise. Andrew Lewis and his men found themselves penned at Point Pleasant without a hope of retreat. Behind them lay the Ohio and the Kanawha, in front the woods, thick with Delawares, Iroquois, Wyandots, Shawnees, flinging themselves upon the entrapped army.
Daylight was just quivering in the treetops when the battle of Point Pleasant began. At the first savage onset Fleming, Charles Lewis, and Field lay dead. It was surprise, ambuscade, slaughter.
Grim old Andrew Lewis lit his pipe and studied the field while his riflemen and sharp-shooters braced themselves behind the white-armed sycamores. There was a crooked run through the brush unoccupied. While the surging foes were beating back and forth, Andrew Lewis sent a party through that run to fall upon the Indians from behind. A Hercules himself, he gathered up his men with a rush, cohorns roaring. From the rear there came an answering fire. Above the din, the voice of Cornstalk rose, encouraging his warriors, "Be strong! be strong!" But panic seized the Indians; they broke and fled.
Andrew Lewis looked and the sun was going down. Two hundred whites lay stark around him, some dead, some yet to rise and fight on other fields. The ground was slippery with gore; barked, hacked, and red with blood, the white-armed sycamores waved their ghostly hands and sighed, where all that weary day red men and white had struggled together. And among the heaps of Indian slain, there lay the father of a little Shawnee boy, Tecumseh.
Cornstalk, chief of the Shawnees, Red Hawk, pride of the Delawares, and Logan, Logan the great Mingo, were carried along in the resistless retreat of their people, down and over the lurid Ohio, crimson with blood and the tint of the setting sun.
On that October day, 1774, civilisation set a milestone westward. Lewis and his backwoodsmen had quieted the Indians in one of the most hotly contested battles in all the annals of Indian warfare.
"Let us go on," they said, and out of the debris of battle, Lewis and his shattered command crossed the Ohio to join Lord Dunmore at the Shawnee towns.
"We have defeated them. Now let us dictate peace at their very doors," said Lewis. But Dunmore, amazed at this success of rebel arms, sent the flying word, "Go back. Retrace your steps. Go home."
Lewis, astounded, stopped. "Go back now? What does the Governor mean? We must go on, to save him if nothing else. He is in the very heart of the hostile country." And he pressed on.
Again the messenger brought the word, "Retreat."
"Retreat?" roared Lewis, scarce believing his ears. "We've reached this goal with hardship. We've purchased a victory with blood!" There was scorn in the old man's voice. "March on!" he said.
But when within three miles of the Governor's camp, Lord Dunmore himself left his command and hastened with an Indian chief to the camp of Lewis. Dunmore met him almost as an Indian envoy, it seemed to Lewis.
"Why have you disobeyed my orders?" thundered the Governor, drawing his sword and reddening with rage. "I say go back. Retrace your steps. Go home. I will negotiate a peace. There need be no further movement of the southern division."
His manner, his tone, that Indian!—the exhausted and overwrought borderers snatched their bloody knives and leaped toward the Governor. Andrew Lewis held them back. "This is no time for a quarrel. I will return." And amazed, enraged, silenced, Andrew Lewis began his retreat from victory.
But suspicious murmurings rolled along the line.
"He ordered us there to betray us."
"Why is my lord safe in the enemy's country?"
"Why did the Indians fall upon us while the Governor sat in the Shawnee towns?"
"That sword—"
Andrew Lewis seemed not to hear these ebullitions of his men, but his front was stern and awful. As one long after said, "The very earth seemed to tremble under his tread."
All Virginia rang with their praises, as worn and torn and battered with battle, Lewis led his troop into the settlements. Leaving them to disperse to their homes with pledge to reassemble at a moment's notice, he set forth for Williamsburg where news might be heard of great events. On his way he stopped at Ivy Creek near Charlottesville, at the house of his kinsman, William Lewis. An infant lay in the cradle, born in that very August, while they were marching to battle.
"And what have you named the young soldier?" asked the grim old borderer, as he looked upon the sleeping child.
"Meriwether Lewis, Meriwether for his mother's people," answered the proud and happy father.
"And will you march with the minute men?"
"I shall be there," said William Lewis.