Boys' Book of Indian Warriors Part 10

Then Pontiac boldly besieged Detroit, in white race fas.h.i.+on--the closest, longest siege ever laid by Indians against any fort on American soil.

His two thousand Indians swarmed in the forest, held the fences and walls and buildings of the fields, peppered the palisade with bullets and arrows, shot fire into the town; captured a supply fleet in the river, ambushed sallying parties, cut to pieces a column of reinforcements.

The siege lasted six months. The orders to attack went out. On May 16 Fort Sandusky, at Lake Erie in northern Ohio, was seized by the Wyandots and Ottawas, during a council.

On May 25, Fort St. Joseph of St. Joseph, Michigan, on Lake Michigan across the state from Detroit, was seized in like manner by the Potawatomis. On May 27, Fort Miami, near present Fort Wayne of Indiana, commanded by Ensign Holmes who had discovered the b.l.o.o.d.y Belt, was forced to surrender to the Wyandots. Ensign Holmes himself was decoyed into the open, and killed.

On June 4, populous Michilimackinac of northern Michigan was pillaged.

The Chippewas and Sacs celebrated the King's Birthday, in honor of the English, with a great game of lacrosse in front of the post.

Michilimackinac _did not know that Detroit was being besieged_! The gates were left open, the officers gathered to witness the game. The ball was knocked inside the palisades, the players rushed after--and that was the end of Michilimackinac.

On June 15 the little fort of Presq' Isle, near the modern city of Erie on the Lake Erie sh.o.r.e of northern Pennsylvania, was attacked. It was captured in two days, by the Ottawas and Potawatomis from Detroit.

On June 18, Fort Le Boeuf, twelve miles south of it, was burned. Just when Fort Venango, farther south, fell to the Senecas, no word says, for not a man of it remained alive. June 1, Fort Ouatanon, below Lafayette on the Wabash River in west central Indiana, had surrendered.

Niagara in the east was threatened; Fort Legonier, forty miles southeast of Pittsburg in Pennsylvania, was attacked by the Delawares and Shawnees, but held out; the strong Fort Pitt (now Pittsburg), with garrison of over three hundred soldiers and woodsmen, was besieged by the united Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots and Mingo Iroquois.

A second b.l.o.o.d.y Belt had been dispatched by Pontiac from Detroit; as fast as it arrived, the allies struck hard. Of twelve fortified English posts, eight fell. Not only that, but the fiery spirit of Pontiac had aroused twenty-two tribes extending from Canada to Virginia, and from New York to the Illinois. A hundred English traders were murdered in camp, and on the trail. A thousand English are supposed to have been killed. Five hundred families of northern Virginia and of western Maryland fled for their lives.

While this work was going on, and the frontier settlements shuddered, and feared the morrow, Pontiac was sternly sticking to his siege of Fort Detroit.

The French around there complained to him that his men were robbing them of provisions, and injuring the corn-fields.

"You must stand that," rebuked Pontiac. "I am fighting your battles against the English."

He gave out receipts, for the supplies as taken. These receipts were pieces of bark, pictured with the kind of supplies taken, and signed with the figure of an otter--the totem of the Ottawas. After the war every receipt was honored, by payment.

Only his Ottawas were still fighting Detroit, when on October 30, this 1763, there arrived, from the French commander on the lower Mississippi, a peace belt and a messenger for Pontiac.

He had been told that peace had been declared between the French and the English, but he had not believed. Now he was told again, by word direct, that the king of France and the king of England had signed peace papers; the country was English, his father the king of France could not help him. He must stop his war, and "take the English by the hand."

Weeks before this, the Indians to the south had withdrawn; his other allies were fading into the forest. So, sullen and disappointed, he, too, withdrew. His sun had set, but he tried to follow it southwestward.

Before he gave his hand to the English he did attempt another war. The tribes of the Illinois hesitated, in council.

"If you do not join my people," thundered Pontiac, "I will consume you as the fire eats the dry gra.s.s of the prairies!"

The plot failed, but the Illinois did not forget his insulting words.

In April, 1769, while leaving a council with the Illinois beside the Mississippi River, and wearing a blue-and-silver uniform coat given to him years before by the brave General Montcalm of the French, he was murdered by a Kaskaskia of the Illinois nation, in the forest which became East St. Louis.

The Kaskaskia had been bribed by an English trader, with a barrel of whiskey, to do the deed. There died Pontiac. He was buried, it is said, on the site of the present Southern Hotel in St. Louis City.

The Illinois suffered from this foul crime. All of Pontiac's loyal people--the Ottawas, the Potawatomis, the Sacs, the Foxes, the Chippewas--rose against them and swept them from the face of the earth.

Now what of Catharine, who saved Detroit from Pontiac? She saved Detroit, but Fort Detroit did not save _her_. Pontiac was no fool; he very quickly had suspected her. He well knew that Major Gladwyn was her friend, and that she had taken the moccasins in to him.

She was seized by the chief, beaten almost lifeless with a lacrosse racquet, and condemned to the meanest of labor. After the siege, Major Gladwyn made no effort to rescue her or reward her. At last, when an old and miserable woman, she fell into a kettle of boiling maple sap, and died.

CHAPTER VIII

LOGAN THE GREAT MINGO (1725-1774)

AND THE EVIL DAYS THAT CAME UPON HIM

During the French-and-Indian war with England, and during the war waged by Pontiac, there was one prominent chief who did not take up the hatchet. His name was the English one of John Logan. He was a Mingo, or Iroquois, of a Cayuga band that had drifted south into east central Pennsylvania.

There Chief s.h.i.+kellemus, his father, had settled and had proved himself a firm friend of the whites. Old s.h.i.+kellemus invited the Moravian missionaries to take refuge on his lands. He spoke good English. He acted as agent between his people and the Province of Pennsylvania. He was hospitable and shrewd, and ever refused to touch liquor because, as he said, he "did not wish to become a fool."

His house was elevated on stilts, as protection against the "big drunks."

About 1725, a second son was born to him and his wife, and named Tah-gah-jute, meaning "His-eye-lashes-stick-out," or, "Open-eyes." In admiration of his good friend James Logan, of Philadelphia, secretary of Pennsylvania, and sometimes acting governor, Chief s.h.i.+kellemus gave little Tah-gah-jute the English name of Logan.

As "John Logan" he was known to the settlers.

The wise and upright s.h.i.+kellemus died--"in the fear of the Lord." His people scattered wider. Logan his son moved westward, to the Shawnee and Delaware country of Pennsylvania.

Here he married a Shawnee girl. He set up housekeeping and traded venison and skins with the white settlers, for powder, ball, and sugar and flour.

The tide of white blood was surging ever farther into the west, and the Indians' hunting grounds. Many of the Indians grew uneasy. Pontiac's b.l.o.o.d.y Belt pa.s.sed from village to village, but the weary and nervous traveler was always welcome at the cabin of Logan, "friend of the white man."

A white hunter, Brown, trailing bear in the Pennsylvania timber, laid aside his rifle and stooped to drink at a spring. Suddenly he saw mirrored in the clear water the tall figure of an armed Indian, watching him. Up he sprang, leaped for his gun, leveled it--but the Indian smiled, knocked the priming from his own gun, and extended his hand.

This was Logan--"the best specimen of humanity I ever met with, red or white," wrote Brown. "He could speak a little English, and told me there was another white hunter a little way down the stream, and guided me to his camp."

Other stories of Logan's kindnesses to the whites in his country are told. In the latter part of 1763, a party of white settlers had broken in upon the refuge of twenty Conestoga Iroquois, in southern Pennsylvania, and killed every one. The Conestogas were kin to the other Mingos; but Logan made no war talk about it.

Simon Kenton, one of the most famous scouts of Daniel Boone's time in Kentucky and Ohio, says that his form was "striking and manly," his countenance "calm and n.o.ble."

Although Logan started out to walk the straight path of peace, sore days were ahead of him. He moved westward again in 1770, erected a cabin at the mouth of Beaver Creek, on the Ohio side of the Ohio River about half way between Pittsburg of Pennsylvania and Wheeling of West Virginia.

His cabin was kept wide open. Everybody spoke well of Logan. He removed once more. The new cabin, "home of the white man," was built on the Sciota River of central Ohio, among the Shawnees of Chief Cornstalk's tribe. He and Chief Cornstalk were close friends. They both stood out for peace. But Cornstalk had been a war chief also, during the Pontiac up-rising. He and his warriors had obeyed the b.l.o.o.d.y Belt. His name, Cornstalk, meant that he was the support of the Shawnee nation.

Now the evil days of Logan were close at hand.

Since the treaty signed with the twenty-two tribes of Pontiac, in 1765, there had been general peace between the red men and the white men in America. This peace was not to continue.

For instance, Bald Eagle, a friendly old Delaware chief, who frequently came in, by canoe, to trade for tobacco and sugar, was killed, without cause, by three white men, in southern Pennsylvania. They propped him, sitting, in the stern of his canoe, thrust a piece of journey-cake, or corn-bread, into his mouth, and set him afloat down the stream. Many settlers who knew him well saw him pa.s.s and wondered why he did not stop for a visit. Finally he was found to be dead, and was brought ash.o.r.e for burial.

There were bad Indians, too, who murdered and stole. For this, the good Indians suffered. Western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio were a wild and lawless country.

Up to 1774 these t.i.t-for-tats had not brought on war. But the French of Canada and the Great Lakes country still secretly urged the Indians to drive out the settlers. The Americans were becoming annoyed by the harsh laws of the English king. There were English officials who desired an Indian war. That would give the Colonists something else to think about.

Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, was one of these officials.

He had claim to land extending into Pennsylvania; Fort Pitt, at present Pittsburg, was garrisoned by Virginia troops, and he wanted to keep them there, to help his land schemes.

April 25, 1774, he issued a proclamation calling upon the commander at Fort Pitt to be ready to repel the Indians. The commander called on the border settlers.