Part 2 (1/2)
Everywhere the waters of the great stream were clear and pellucid. The plow-share of civilization had not as yet turned up the earth, nor the filth and sewerage of cities been discharged into the current. In places the gravelly bottom could be seen at a great depth and the forms of fishes of great size reposing at ease. ”Schools of fishes--salmon, ba.s.s, red-horse and pike--swam close along the sh.o.r.e, catching at the bottoms of the red-bud and plum that floated on the surface of the water, which was so clear that myriads of the finny tribe could be seen darting hither and thither amidst the limpid element, turning up their silvery sides as they sped out into deeper water.”
The whole valley of the Wabash abounded with deer, and their tiny hoofs wrought foot paths through every hollow and glen. The small prairies bordered with shady groves, the patches of blue-gra.s.s, and the sweet waters of the springs, were great attractions. The banks of the Mississinewa, Wild Cat, Pine Creek, Vermilion, and other tributaries, were formerly noted hunting grounds. George Croghan, who described the Wabash as running through ”one of the finest countries in the world,”
mentions the deer as existing in great numbers. On the march of General Harrison's men to Tippecanoe, the killing of deer was an every day occurrence, and at times the frightened animals pa.s.sed directly in front of the line of march. Racc.o.o.ns were also very plentiful. On a fur trading expedition conducted by a French trader named La Fountaine, from the old Miamitown (Fort Wayne), in the winter of 1789-90, he succeeded in picking up about eighty deer skins and about five hundred racc.o.o.n skins in less than thirty days. He descended the Wabash and ”turned into the woods” toward the White River, there bartering with the Indians for their peltries.
As to wild game, the whole valley was abundantly supplied. In the spring time, great numbers of wild ducks, geese and brant were found in all the ponds and marshes; in the woody ground the wild turkey, the pheasant and the quail. At times, the sun was actually darkened by the flight of wild pigeons, while the prairie chicken was found in all the open tracts and gra.s.s lands.
The bottom lands of this river, were noted for their fertility. The annual inundations always left a rich deposit of silt. This silt produced excellent maize, potatoes, beans, pumpkins, squashes, cuc.u.mbers and melons. These, according to Heckewelder, were important items of the Indian food supply.
To the Indian we are indebted for ash-cake, hoecake, succotash, samp, hominy and many other productions made from the Indian maize. The Miamis of the Wabash, with a favorable climate and a superior soil, produced a famous corn with a finer skin and ”a meal much whiter” than that raised by other tribes. How far the cultivation of this cereal had progressed is not now fully appreciated. In the expedition of General James Wilkinson against the Wabash Indians in 1791, he is said to have destroyed over two hundred acres of corn in the milk at Kenapacomaqua, or the Eel river towns, alone, and to have cut down a total of four hundred and thirty acres of corn in the whole campaign. In General Harmar's campaign against Miamitown in the year 1790, nearly twenty thousand bushels of corn in the ear were destroyed. On the next day after the battle of Tippecanoe the dragoons of Harrison's army set fire to the Prophets Town, and burned it to the ground. Judge Isaac Naylor says that they found there large quant.i.ties of corn, beans and peas, and General John Tipton relates that the commissary loaded six wagons with corn and ”Burnt what was estimated at two thousand bushel.”
Of the many other natural advantages of this great valley, much might be written. Wheat and tobacco, the latter of a fine grade, were growing at Vincennes in 1765, when Croghan pa.s.sed through there. Wild hemp was abundant in the lowlands. The delicious pecan flourished, and walnuts, hazelnuts and hickory nuts were found in great plenty. The sugar maple existed everywhere, and the Indians, who were the original sugar makers of the world, made large quant.i.ties of this toothsome article. In addition to this the whole valley was filled with wild fruits and berries, such as blackberries, dewberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and the luscious wild strawberry, that grew everywhere in the open s.p.a.ces and far out on the bordering prairies.
This sketch of the Wabash and its wonderful possibilities may not be more aptly closed, than by appending hereto the description of Thomas Hutchins, the first geographer of the United States. It appears in his ”Topographical Description,” and mention is made of the connection of the Wabash by a portage with the waters of Lake Erie; the value of the fur trade at Ouiatenon and Vincennes, and many other points of vital interest.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Wabash River at Merom Bluff, Sullivan County, Indiana, La Motte Prairie beyond.]
”Ouiatenon (Author's note: Just below Lafayette), is a small stockaded fort on the western side of the Wabash, in which about a dozen families reside. The neighboring Indians are the Kickapoos, Musquitons, Pyankeshaws, and a princ.i.p.al part of the Ouiatenons. The whole of these tribes consists, it is supposed, of about one thousand warriors. The fertility of soil, and the diversity of timber in this country, are the same as in the vicinity of Post Vincent. The annual amount of skins and furs obtained at Ouiatenon is about 8,000 pounds. By the river Wabash, the inhabitants of Detroit move to the southern parts of Ohio, and the Illinois country. Their route is by the Miami river (Maumee) to a carrying place (Author's note: Miamitown or Fort Wayne), which, as before stated, is nine miles to the Wabash, when this river is raised with fres.h.i.+es; but at other seasons, the distance is from eighteen to thirty miles, including the portage. The whole of the latter is through a level country. Carts are usually employed in transporting boats and merchandise, from the Miami to the Wabash river.”
No less wonderful was the valley of the Maumee, directly on the great trade route between the Wabash and the post of Detroit. Croghan, who was a good judge of land, and made careful observations, found the Ottawas and Wyandots here in 1765, the land of great richness, and game very plentiful. It was a region greatly beloved by the Indian tribes, and the scene after the revolution, of many grand councils of the northwestern confederacy. In a letter of General Anthony Wayne, written in 1794, he a.s.serts that: ”The margins of these beautiful rivers, the Miamis of the Lake (Maumee), and the Au Glaize (A southern tributary), appear like one continued village for a number of miles, both above and below this place, Grand Glaize, nor have I ever before beheld such immense fields of corn in any part of America, from Canada to Florida.”
After General Wayne's army had defeated the Indians at the battle of Fallen Timbers on this river in 1794, they spent many days after that conflict in destroying the fields of grain. One who marched with the army, in August of the above year, describes Indian corn fields extending for four or five miles along the Au Glaize, and estimated that there were one thousand acres of growing corn. The whole valley of the Maumee from its mouth to Fort Wayne, is described as being full of immense corn fields, large vegetable patches, and old apple trees, and it is related that Wayne's army, while constructing Fort Defiance for a period of eight days, ”obtained their bread and vegetables from the corn fields and potato patches surrounding the fort.”
Is it any wonder that along these wonderful basins should be located the seats of power of the Miami Indians, the leaders of the western confederacy that opposed the claims of the United States to the lands north of the Ohio; that from the close of the Revolutionary war until Wayne's victory in 1794, the princ.i.p.al contest was over the possession of the Miami village, now Fort Wayne, which controlled the trade in both the Wabash and the Maumee Valleys, and that President George Was.h.i.+ngton, consummate strategist that he was, foresaw at once in 1789, the first year of his presidency, that the possession of the great carrying place at Miamitown would probably command the whole northwest and put an end to the Indian wars?
CHAPTER VI
THE TRIBES OF THE NORTHWEST
--_A description of the seven tribes of savages who opposed the advance of settlement in the Northwest. Their location. Kekionga, the seat of Miami power._
We have now to consider those Indian tribes and confederacies, which at the close of the Revolutionary war, inhabited the northwest territory.
Chief among them were the Wyandots, Miamis, Shawnees, Delawares, Ottawas, Chippewas and Potawatomi. These were the seven tribes known in after years as the ”western confederacy,” who fought so long and bitterly against the government of the United States, and who were at last conquered by the arms and genius of General Anthony Wayne in the year 1794.
The Ottawas, Chippewas and Potawatomi formed a sort of loose confederacy known as the Three Fires, and Ma.s.sas, a Chippewa chief, so referred to them at the Treaty of Greenville.
The Miamis, the most powerful of the confederates, were subdivided into the Eel Rivers, the Weas, and the Piankeshaws. The Kickapoos, a small tribe which lived on the Sangamon, and the Vermilion of the Wabash, were a.s.sociated generally with the Potawatomi, and were always the allies of the English. The Winnebagoes of Wisconsin were of the linguistic family of the Sioux; were generally a.s.sociated with the confederates against the Americans, and many of their distinguished warriors fought against General Harrison at Tippecanoe. The decadent tribes known in early times as the Illinois, did not play a conspicuous part in the history of the northwest.
While the limits of the various tribes may not be fixed with precision, and the boundary lines were often confused, still there were well recognized portions of the northwest that were under the exclusive control of certain nations, and these nations were extremely jealous of their rights, as shown by the anger and resentment of the Miamis at what they termed as the encroachment of the Potawatomi at the Treaty of Fort Wayne, in 1809.
The Wyandots, for instance, were the incontestable owners of the country between the Cuyahoga and the Au Glaize, in the present state of Ohio, their dominion extending as far south as the divide between the waters of the Sandusky river and the Scioto, and embracing the southern sh.o.r.e of Lake Erie from Maumee Bay, to the mouth of the Cuyahoga. Large numbers of them were also along the northern sh.o.r.es of Lake Erie, in Canada. Their territory at one time probably extended much farther south toward the Ohio, touching the lands of the Miamis on the west, but certainly embracing parts of the Muskingum country, to which they had invited the ancient Delawares, respectfully addressed by them as ”grandfathers.” Intermingled with the Wyandots south and west of Lake Erie were scattered bands of Ottawas, but they were tenants of the soil by sufferance, and not as of right.
The Miamis have been described by General William Henry Harrison as the most extensive landowners in the northwest. He stands on record as saying that: ”Their territory embraced all of Ohio, west of the Scioto; all of Indiana, and that part of Illinois, south of the Fox river and Wisconsin, on which frontier they were intermingled with the Kickapoos and some other small tribes.” Harrison may have been right as to the ancient and original bounds of this tribe, but Little Turtle, their most famous chieftain, said at the Treaty of Greenville, in 1795: ”It is well known by all my brothers present, that my fore-father kindled the first fire at Detroit; from thence, he extended his lines to the head-water of Scioto; from thence, to its mouth; from thence, down the Ohio, to the mouth of the Wabash, and from thence to Chicago, on Lake Michigan.” The truth is, that the ancient demesne of the Miamis was much curtailed by the irruption of three tribes from the north in about the year 1765, the Sacs and Foxes, the Kickapoos and the Potawatomi, who conquered the old remnants of the Illinois tribes in the buffalo prairies and divided the country among themselves.
Says Hiram Beckwith, in speaking of the Potawatomi: ”Always on friendly terms with the Kickapoos, with whom they lived in mixed villages, they joined the latter and the Sacs and Foxes in the exterminating war upon the Illinois tribes, and afterwards obtained their allotment of the despoiled domain.” The Potawatomi advancing by sheer force of numbers, rather than by conquest, finally appropriated a large part of the lands in the present state of Indiana, north of the Wabash, commingling with the Kickapoos at the south and west, and advancing their camps as far down as Pine creek. The Miamis were loud in their remonstrances against this trespa.s.sing, and denounced the Potawatomi as squatters, ”never having had any lands of their own, and being mere intruders upon the prior estate of others,” but the Potawatomi were not dispossessed and were afterwards parties to all treaties with the United States government for the sale and disposal of said lands. The Miamis also lost a part of their lands on the lower west side of the Wabash to the Kickapoos. Pressing eastward from the neighborhood of Peoria, the Kickapoos established themselves on the Vermilion, where they had a village on both sides of that river at its confluence with the main stream. They were, says Beckwith, ”Greatly attached to the Vermilion and its tributaries, and Governor Harrison found it a difficult task to reconcile them to ceding it away.”
To the last, however, the Miamis remained the undisputed lords and masters of most of the territory watered by the two Miamis of the Ohio, and by the Wabash and its tributaries down to the Ohio. The great head and center of their power was at Kekionga (now Fort Wayne), always referred to by President Was.h.i.+ngton as ”the Miami Village.” It was a pleasant situation in the heart of the great northwest, at the junction where the swift flowing St. Joseph and the more gentle stream of the Saint Marys, formed the headwaters of the Maumee. On the eastern side of the St. Joseph was the town of Pecan, a head chief of the Miami, and the same savage who had supplied deer and buffalo meat for Brigadier General Harmar on his mission to Kaskaskia in 1787. Pecan was an uncle of the famous chief, Peshewah, or Jean Baptiste Richardville, who after the death of Little Turtle in 1812, became the head chief of the Miami tribe, and was reputed to be the richest Indian in North America. The southern end of this town was near the point of juncture of the St.