Tales, Traditions and Romance of Border and Revolutionary Times. Edward Sylvester Ellis
are but so many characters in that stern epitaph which the aborigines, during their slow retreat across the continent toward the Rocky Mountains, and annihilation, have written for themselves in the blood of the destroying race. The history of Indian warfare contains no passage more fearful than is to be found in the narrative of the massacre at the Grand Tower of the Mississippi. Half armed, surprised, encumbered with their women and children, and taken in so disadvantageous a situation, being all huddled together on a narrow sand-beach, with their enemies above and on either side, their most desperate efforts availed not even to postpone their fate; and in the space of ten minutes after the warning yell was heard, the mangled bodies of forty men, women and children lay heaped upon the narrow strip of sand. The conflict had ended in the complete destruction of the emigrant company—so complete that the savages imagined not a single survivor remained to carry the disastrous tidings to the settlements.
But one such wretched survivor, however, there was. John Moredock, who, having fought like a young tiger until all hope of saving even a part of the unfortunate company was lost, and who then, favored by the smoke, and the eagerness of the assailants for scalps, and the plunder of the boats, glided through the midst of the savages and nestled himself in a cleft of the rocks. Here he lay for hours, sole spectator of a scene of Indian ferocity which transformed his young heart to flint, and awoke that thirst for revenge which continued to form the ruling sentiment of his future life, and which raged as insatiably on the day of his death, forty years later, when he had become a man of mark, holding high offices in his adopted State, as it did when crouching among the rocks of the Grand Tower; and, beholding the bodies of his mother, sisters and brothers mangled by the Indian tomahawk, he bound himself by a solemn oath never from that moment to spare one of the accursed race who might come within reach of his arm; and especially to track the footsteps of the marauding band who had just swept away all that he loved on earth, until the last one should have paid the penalty of life for life.
How long he remained thus concealed he never knew; but at length, as the sun was setting, the Indians departed, and John Moredock stepped forth from his hiding-place, not what he had entered it, a brave, light-hearted lad of nineteen, the pride of a large family circle and the favorite of a whole little colony of borderers, but an orphan and an utter stranger in a strange land, standing alone amidst the ghastly and disfigured corpses of his family and friends. He had hoped to find some life still lingering amidst the heaps of carnage; but all, all had perished. Having satisfied himself of this fact, the lonely boy—now transformed into that most fearful of all beings, a thoroughly desperate man—quitted the place, and, guiding himself by the stars, struck across the prairie toward the nearest settlement on the Kaskaskia, where he arrived the next morning, bringing to the inhabitants the first news of the massacre which had taken place so near their own village, and the first warning of the near approach of the prowling band which had been for several months depredating, at various points along that exposed frontier, in spite of the treaties lately made by their nations with the Federal Government.
John Moredock was by nature formed for a leader in times of danger, and his avowed determination to revenge the massacre of his friends and kindred by the extirpation of the murderous band coincided so exactly with the feelings of the frontiersmen, that, in spite of his lack of previous acquaintance, he in a few days found himself at the head of a company of twenty-five or thirty young men, whose lives had been spent in the midst of all kinds of perils and hardships, and who now bound themselves to their leader by an oath never to give up the pursuit until the last one of the marauding band engaged in the attack at Grand Tower should be slain.
Stanch as a pack of blood-hounds this little company of avengers ranged the frontier from the Des Moines to the Ohio, now almost within reach of their victims, and now losing all trace of them on the boundless prairies over which they roamed, unconscious of the doom by which they were being so hotly but stealthily pursued. Once, indeed, the whites came up with their game on the banks of a tributary of the Missouri, a hundred and fifty miles beyond the utmost line of the settlements; but as the Indians, though unsuspicious of any particular danger, had pitched their camp in a spot at once easy to defend and to escape from, and as Moredock wished to destroy and not to disperse them, he forbore striking a partial blow, and resolved rather to postpone his revenge than to enjoy it incompletely.
Fortune, however, seemed to repay him for this act of self-restraint by presenting the very opportunity he had sought, when, a few weeks afterward, he discovered the whole gang of marauders encamped for the night on a small island in the middle of the Mississippi. After a hasty consultation with his companions, a course of procedure was determined upon which strikingly displays both the monomaniacal tendency of the leader and the desperate ascendancy he had acquired over his followers. This was nothing less than to shut themselves up on that narrow sand-bar and to engage the savages in a hand-to-hand conflict—a conflict from which neither party could retreat, and which must necessarily end in the total destruction of one or the other. A most desperate undertaking truly, when we reflect that the numbers of the combatants were about equal, and that to surprise an Indian encampment was next to impossible. But John Moredock, and, probably, more than one of his companions, were monomaniacs, and considerations of personal danger never entered into their calculations. Revenge, not safety, was their object, and they took little thought of the latter when the opportunity of compassing the former was presented.
Slowly and stealthily, therefore, the canoes approached the island when all sounds there had ceased, and the flame of the camp-fire had sunk into a pale-red glow, barely marking the position of the doomed party among the undergrowth with which the central portion of the little isle was covered. The Indians, confiding in their natural watchfulness, seldom place sentinels around their camps; and thus Moredock and his band reached the island without being discovered. A few moments sufficed to set their own canoes as well as those of the Indians adrift, and then, with gun in hand and tomahawk ready, they glided noiselessly, as so many panthers, into the thicket, separating as they advanced so as to approach the camp from different quarters. All remained still as death for many minutes while the assailants were thus closing in around their prey, and not a twig snapped, and scarcely a leaf stirred in the thick jungle through which thirty armed men were making their way in as many different directions, but all converging toward the same point, where a pale glimmer indicated the position of the unsuspected savages. But though an Indian camp may be easily approached within a certain distance, it is almost impossible, if there be any considerable number of them, to actually strike its occupants while asleep. As savages, roaming at large over the face of the continent without fixed habitations, and relying upon chance for the supply of their few wants, they know nothing of that regularity of habit which devotes certain fixed portions of time to the various purposes of life, but each one eats, sleeps or watches, just as his own feelings may dictate at the moment, without any regard to established usages of time or place. Hence the probability of finding all the members of an Indian party asleep at the same time is small indeed.
On the present occasion two or three warriors, who were smoking over the embers, caught the alarm before the assailants had quite closed in. Still the surprise gave the white men a great advantage, and half a dozen of the savages were shot down in their tracks before they comprehended the meaning of the hideous uproar, which suddenly broke the midnight stillness as Moredock and his company, finding their approach discovered, rushed in upon them. This fatal effect of the first volley was a lucky thing for the adventurers; for the Indians are less liable to panics than almost any other people, and they closed with their assailants with a fury that, combined with their superior skill in nocturnal conflict, would have rendered the issue of the struggle a very doubtful matter had the number of combatants been more nearly even. As it was, the nimble warriors fought their way against all odds to the point where their canoes had been moored. Here, finding their expected means of flight removed, and exposed upon the naked sand-beach, the survivors still made desperate battle until all were slain except three, who plunged boldly into the stream, and, aided by the darkness, succeeded in reaching the main land in safety.
Twenty-seven of those engaged in the massacre at the Grand Tower had been destroyed at a single blow. But three had escaped from the bloody trap, and while these lived the vengeance of John Moredock was unsatisfied. They must perish, and he determined that it should be by his own hand. He therefore dismissed his faithful band, and thenceforth continued the pursuit alone. Having learned the names of the three survivors