63. After Yorktown in the West

Only in the remote western country did Yorktown have little softening impact. In early 1782, British and Indian raids on the frontier were resumed in full force: Brant and the Mohawks, in raids out of Oswego, intensified Creek sorties against the Georgia frontier and on the new Cumberland River (Tennessee) settlements. In response to the raids and the exposed western Pennsylvania frontier, the citizens of Washington County struck west from Pittsburgh against the Indians. In early March 1782, a hundred settlers marched against the Indian town of Gnadenhutten and nearby settlements on the Tuscarawas River in the Ohio Valley. There they came upon a group of Indians who had been converted to Christianity by Moravian missionaries, and who were well known to have been neutral and at peace in all conflicts since the French and Indian Wars. Assured of their unharmed removal to Pittsburgh, the friendly and unarmed Moravian Indians gathered in their chapel. Even though a tiny white minority pointed out that the Moravians had always been friendly, the overwhelming majority of whites urged that they be slaughtered on the spot, resting their case on the shameless frontier axiom, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The next morning, March 7, the whites took the Moravians, two or three at a time, to two designated “slaughter houses,” in which the Indians were brutally killed. Ninety Moravian Indians, including 61 women and children, were butchered in cold blood, and their scalps were taken home as trophies by the proud frontiersmen. Before leaving, the three Moravian mission towns were burned to the ground and the houses looted.

To this exploit was added an attack by frontier militia on a small island near Pittsburgh, where a dozen friendly Delaware Indians were stationed. Many of these had served the American militia faithfully for years; nevertheless they were captured and murdered on the spot.

The slaughter at Gnadenhutten was condemned by the Pennsylvania Assembly, which to its credit called it “an act disgraceful to humanity.” But the frontiersmen were pleased. In all their massacres, the murderers had acted in the time-honored tradition of the frontier in dealing with Indians: when you can’t successfully handle powerful Indian enemies on the frontier, fall upon and kill friendly or neutral Indians living nearby.

These exploits emboldened the frontiersmen to strike deeply westward at the focus of hostile Indian strength on the Sandusky River. The expedition set out on May 25, with nearly 500 mounted militiamen under Col. William Crawford. But the massiveness of his force and the slowness of the advance alerted the British, the Tories, and the Indians to the threat, and they gathered in force to meet the Americans near the Sandusky River. After an inconclusive skirmish, the British and Indian forces (including some Delawares) managed to encircle the Americans on June 6 and panic them into wild flight; the casualties probably amounted to over a hundred Americans, including the capture of Crawford and other leaders of the expedition. In retaliation for the massacre of the helpless Delawares and their Moravian kinsmen, the Delawares burned Crawford to death. The frontiersmen could not persuade the East to equip a retaliatory expedition.

Another important frontier raid was that of the Tory John Connolly, who struck from the British base at Niagara with 200 Seneca Indians. He attacked Hannastown, east of Pittsburgh, burned the town, killed or kidnapped 30 inhabitants, and devastated the surrounding area.

News of Yorktown finally filtered into Detroit in early April, and led to a great all-Indian congress of the western Indians at Wapatomica in late June. Seeing that the Revolutionary War was almost over, the Indians cogently decided on one last climactic effort to smash and obliterate the American frontier in the West. They resolved to burn all prisoners and to stop at no means to achieve their goal. Advancing with British Indian agents Alexander McKee and the Tory William Caldwell, 1,250 Indians and Tories approached Pennsylvania. False rumors of an approach against them by George Rogers Clark delayed the advance and caused half the Indian force to scatter. The massive invasion was transmuted into two large thrusts. One, under Capt. Andrew Bradt of the Tory rangers, besieged Fort Henry at Wheeling in mid-September, but he could not crack the defense and was soon forced to withdraw.

The other thrust, under McKee and Caldwell, moved to invade Kentucky, which now seemed a weakened target. In March, a small Wyandot raiding party against Estill’s, deep in Kentucky, had surprised and worried the frontiersmen by altering their usual pattern. Instead of fleeing from a unit of local militia, the Indians turned and fought against them and, what is more, defeated them. Furthermore, a lack of funds and a characteristic unwillingness of the militia to fight far from home prevented Clark from building defensive forts on the Ohio River. Now, in early August 1782, McKee and Caldwell, with 350 men, crossed the Ohio at the mouth of the Limestone and drove southwest to besiege the stockade at Bryan’s Station. The forty-odd defenders stoutly held their stockade, but they lost their livestock and crops to the plundering and burning of the British forces. Militia gathered all over Kentucky, and began to pursue the Caldwell column, which had retreated to Blue Licks, on the Licking River. There, with fewer than 200 men, the Americans attacked them on August 19 without waiting for reinforcements, and were completely routed by the unexpected close-quarter charge of the Indian line. Over 40 percent of the Kentuckians were killed trying to flee back across the river, after which the satisfied Indian-Tory force withdrew across the Ohio.

The Kentucky frontiersmen, who had been convinced that Indians could not fight successfully man-to-man at close quarters (an American analog to the British attitude toward the Americans), were severely shaken by the battle of Blue Licks. This blow was soon reinforced by the Indian capture of the stockade at Kincheloe’s Station.

The frontier was nevertheless able to recover toward the end of the year, a recoupment greatly aided by the British decision to call off the western Indians when the war drew to a close. In September, Virginia’s Col. John Sevier and 250 Holston River (in what is now northeastern Tennessee) horsemen invaded Chickamauga and Cherokee country and destroyed and burned many towns. And in November, Clark took more than a thousand mounted Kentucky riflemen north to destroy all of the main towns and most of the food supply of the Shawnee Indians in the Ohio country.