Comic History of the United States Part 9

CHAPTER XI.

INTERCOLONIAL AND INDIAN WARS.

Intercolonial and Indian wars furnished excitement now from 1689 into the early part of the eighteenth century. War broke out in Europe between the French and English, and the Colonies had to take sides, as did also the Indians.

Canadians and Indians would come down into York State or New England, burn a town, tomahawk quite a number of people, then go back on snow-shoes, having entered the town on rubbers, like a decayed show with no printing.

There was an attack on Haverhill in March, 1697, and a Mr. Dustin was at work in the field. He ran to his house and got his seven children ahead of him, while with his gun he protected their rear till he got them away safely. Mrs. Dustin, however, who ran back into the house to remove a pie from the oven as she feared it was burning, was captured, and, with a boy of the neighborhood, taken to an island in the Merrimac, where the Indians camped. At night she woke the boy, told him how to hit an Indian with a tomahawk so that "the subsequent proceedings would interest him no more," and that evening the two stole forth while the ten Indians slept, knocked in their thinks, scalped them to prove their story, and pa.s.sed on to safety. Mrs. Dustin kept those scalps for many years, showing them to her friends to amuse them.

King William's War lasted eight years. Queen Anne's War lasted from 1702 to 1713. The brunt of this war fell on New England. Our forefathers had to live in block-houses, with barbed-wire fences around them, and carry their guns with them all the time. From planting the Indian with a shotgun, they soon got to planting their corn with the same agricultural instrument in the stony soil.

The French and Spanish tried to take Charleston in 1706, but were repulsed with great loss, consisting princ.i.p.ally of time which they might have employed in raising frogs' legs and tantalizing a bull at so much per tant.

This war lasted eleven years, including stops, and was ended by the treaty of Utrecht (p.r.o.nounced you-trecked).

After this, what was called the Spanish War continued between England and Spain for some time. An attempt to capture Georgia was made, and a garrison established itself there, with good prospects of taking in the State under Spanish rule, but our able friend Oglethorpe, the Henry W.

Grady of his time, managed to accidentally mislay a letter which fell into the enemy's hands, the contents of which showed that enormous reinforcements were expected at any moment. This was swallowed comfortably by the commander, who blew up his impregnable works, changed the address of his _Atlanta Const.i.tution_, and sailed for home.

Oglethorpe wore a wig, but was otherwise one of our greatest minds. It is said that anybody at a distance of two miles on a clear day could readily distinguish that it was a wig, and yet he died believing that no one had ever probed his great mystery and that his wig would rise with him at the playing of the last trump.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BELIEVING HIS WIG WOULD RISE WITH HIM.]

King George's War, which extended over four years, succeeded, but did not amount to anything except the capture of Cape Breton by English and Colonial troops. Cape Breton was called the Gibraltar of America; but a Yankee farmer who has raised flax on an upright farm for twenty years does not mind scaling a couple of Gibraltars before breakfast; so, without any West Point knowledge regarding engineering, they walked up the hill, and those who were alive when they got to the top took it. It was no Balaklava business and no dumb animal show, but simply revealed the fact that brave men fighting for their eight-dollar homes and a ma.s.s of children are disagreeable people to meet on the battle-field.

The French and Indian War lasted nine years,--viz., from 1754 to 1763.

From Quebec to New Orleans the French owned the land, and mixed up a good deal socially with the Indians, so that the slender settlement along the coast had arrayed against it this vast line of northern and western forts, and the Indians, who were mostly friendly with the French, united with them in several instances and showed them some new styles of barbarism which up to that time they had never known about.

The half-breed is always half French and half Indian.

The English owned all lands lying on one side of the Ohio, the French on the other, which led a great chief to make a P. P. C. call on Governor Dinwiddie, and during the conversation to inquire with some _navete_ where the Indian came in. No answer was ever received.

We pause here to ask the question, Why did the pale-face usurp the lands of the Indians without remuneration? It was because the Indian was not orthodox. He may have been lazy from a Puritanical stand-point, and he may also have hunted on the twenty-seventh Sunday after Easter; but still was it not right that he should have received a dollar or two per county for the United States? No one would have felt it, and possibly it might have saved the lives of innocent people.

_Verb.u.m sap._, however, comes in here with peculiar appropriateness, and the ma.s.sive-browed historian pa.s.ses on.

The French had three forts along in the Middle States, as they are now called, and Western Pennsylvania; and George Was.h.i.+ngton, of whom more will be said in the twelfth chapter, was sent to ask the French to remove these forts. He started at once.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLEASURE OF BEING ARRESTED IN PARIS.]

The commanders were some of them arrogant, but the general, St. Pierre, treated him with great respect, refusing, however, to yield the ground discovered by La Salle and Marquette. The author had the pleasure of being arrested in Paris in 1889, and he feels of a truth, as he often does, that there can be no more polite people in the world than the French. Arrested under all circ.u.mstances and in many lands, the author can place his hand on his heart and say that he would go hundreds of miles to be arrested by a John Darm.

Was.h.i.+ngton returned four hundred miles through every kind of danger, including a lunch at Altoona, where he stopped twenty minutes.

The following spring Was.h.i.+ngton was sent under General Fry to drive out the French, who had started farming at Pittsburg. Fry died, and Was.h.i.+ngton took command. He liked it very much. After that Was.h.i.+ngton took command whenever he could, and soon rose to be a great man.

The first expedition against Fort Duquesne (p.r.o.nounced du-kane) was commanded by General Braddock, whose portrait we are able to give, showing him at the time he did not take Was.h.i.+ngton's advice in the Duquesne matter. Later we show him as he appeared after he had abandoned his original plans and immediately after not taking Was.h.i.+ngton's advice.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL BRADDOCK SCORNING WAs.h.i.+NGTON'S ADVICE.]

"The Indians," said Braddock, "may frighten Colonial troops, but they can make no impression on the king's regulars. We are alike impervious to fun or fear."

Braddock thought of fighting the Indians by man[oe]uvring in large bodies, but the first body to be man[oe]uvred was that of General Braddock, who perished in about a minute.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL BRADDOCK AFTER SCORNING WAs.h.i.+NGTON'S ADVICE.]

We give the reader, above, an idea of Braddock's soldierly bearing after he had been man[oe]uvring a few times.

It was then that Was.h.i.+ngton took command, as was his custom, and began to fight the Indians and French as one would hunt varmints in Virginia.

Braddock's men fired by platoons into the trees and tore a few holes in the State line, but when most of the Colonial troops were dead the regulars presented their tournures to the foe and fled as far as Philadelphia, where they each took a bath and had some laundry-work done.

General Forbes took command of the second expedition. He spent most of his time building roads.

Time pa.s.sed on, and Forbes built viaducts, conduits, culverts, and rustic bridges, till it was November, and they were yet fifty miles from the fort. He then decided to abandon the expedition, on account of the cold, and also fearing that he had not made all of his bridges wide enough so that he could take the captured fort home with him.

Was.h.i.+ngton, however, though only an aidy kong of General Forbes, decided to take command. His mother had said to him over and over, "George, in an emergency always take command." He done so, as General Rusk would say. As he approached, the French set fire to the fort, and retreated, together with the Indians and Molly Maguires.

Pittsburg now stands on this historic ground, and is one of the most delightful cities of America.

Many other changes were going on at this time. The English got possession of Acadia and the French forts at the head of the Bay of Fundy.

In 1757 General Loudon collected an army for an attack on Louisburg. He drilled his troops all summer, and then gave up the attack because he learned that the French had one more skiff than he had.

The Loudons of America at the time of this writing are more quiet and sensible regarding their ancestry than any of the doodle-bug aristocracy of our promoted peasantry and the crested Yahoos of our cowboy republic.

The Loudons--or Lowdowns--of America had a very large family. Some of them changed their names and moved.

The next year after the _fox pa.s.s_ of General Loudon, Amherst and Wolfe took possession of the entire island.

About the time of Braddock's justly celebrated expedition another started out for Crown Point. The French, under Dieskau (p.r.o.nounced dees-kow), met the army composed of Colonial troops in plain clothes, together with the regular troops led by officers with drawn swords and overdrawn salaries. The regular general, seeing that the battle was lost, excused himself and retired to his tent, owing to an ingrowing nail which had annoyed him all day. Lyman, the Colonial officer now took command, and wrung victory from the reluctant jaws of defeat. For this Johnson, the English general, received twenty-five thousand dollars and a baronetcy, while Lyman received a plated b.u.t.ter-dish and a ba.s.s-wood what-not. But Lyman was a married man, and had learned to take things as they came.

Four months prior to the capture of Duquesne, one thousand boats loaded with soldiers, each with a neat little lunch-basket and a little flag to wave when they hurrahed for the good kind man at the head of the picnic,--viz., General Abercrombie,--sailed down Lake George to get a whiff of fresh air and take Ticonderoga.

When they arrived, General Abercrombie took out a small book regarding tactics which he had bought on the boat, and, after refres.h.i.+ng his memory, ordered an a.s.sault. He then went back to see how his rear was, and, finding it all right, he went back still farther, to see if no one had been left behind.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ABERCROMBIE WENT BACK TO THE REAR.]

Abercrombie never forgot or overlooked any one. He wanted all of his pleasure-party to be where they could see the fight.

In that way he missed it himself. I would hate to miss a fight that way.

The Abercrombies of America mostly trace their ancestry back by a cut-off avoiding the general's line.

Niagara had an expedition sent against it at the time of Braddock's trip. The commander was General s.h.i.+rley, but he ran out of money while at the Falls and decided to return. This post did not finally surrender till 1759.