The Winning of the West

by Theodore Roosevelt

  6 Do., Series B, Vol. 122, p. 253, return of forces on Dec. 24th.

  7 Do. Hamilton’s letter of July 6, 1781, the “brief account.” Clark’s estimate was very close to the truth; he gave Hamilton six hundred men, four hundred of them Indians. See State Department MSS., No. 71, Vol. I, p. 247. Papers Continental Congress. Letter of G. R. Clark to Gov. Henry, April 29, 1779. This letter was written seven months before that to Mason, and many years before the “Memoir,” so I have, where possible, followed it as being better authority than either.

  8 Haldimand MSS. Hamilton’s “brief account.”

  9 Do. The French officer had in his pocket one British and one American commission; Hamilton debated in his mind for some time the advisability of hanging him.

  10 Do. Intercepted letter of Captain Helm, Series B, Vol. 122, p. 280.

  11 Letter of Hamilton, Dec. 18-30, 1778. The story of Helm’s marching out with the honors of war is apparently a mere invention. Even Mann Butler, usually so careful, permits himself to be led off into all sorts of errors when describing the incidents of the Illinois and Vincennes expeditions, and the writers who have followed him have generally been less accurate. The story of Helm drinking toddy by the fireplace when Clark retook the fort, and of the latter ordering riflemen to fire at the chimney, so as to knock the mortar into the toddy, may safely be set down as pure—and very weak—fiction. When Clark wrote his memoirs, in his old age, he took delight in writing down among his exploits all sorts of childish stratagems; the marvel is that any sane historian should not have seen that these were on their face as untrue as they were ridiculous.

  12 Do.

  13 Do. “Fourscore at Kaskaskia and thirty at Cahokia.”

  14 Haldimand MSS.; in his various letters Hamilton sets forth the difficulties at length.

  15 Do. B, Vol. 122, p. 287. Return of Vincennes garrison for Jan. 30, 1779.

  16 Hamilton’s “brief account,” and his letter of December 18th.

  17 The rumor came when Clark was attending a dance given by the people of the little village of La Prairie du Rocher. The Creoles were passionately fond of dancing and the Kentuckians entered into the amusement with the utmost zest.

  18 Haldimand MSS. Hamilton’s letter, January 24, 1779.

  19 State Department MSS. Letters to Washington, 33, p. 90.

  20 State Department MSS. Papers of Continental Congress, No. 71, Vol. I, p. 267.

  21 Do.

  22 Under the command of Clark’s couisn, Lt. John Rogers.

  23 Letter to Henry. The letter to Mason says it was the 5th.

  24 Clark’s “Memoir.”

  25 State Department MSS. Letters to Washington, Vol. 33, p. 90. “A Journal of Col. G. R. Clark. Proceedings from the 29th Jan’y 1779 to the 26th March Inst,” (by Captain Bowman). This journal has been known for a long time. The original is supposed to have been lost; but either this is it or else it is a contemporary MS. copy. In the “Campaign in the Illinois” (Cincinnati, Robert Clarke and Co., 1869), p. 99, there is a printed copy of the original. The Washington MS. differs from it in one or two particulars. Thus, the printed diary in the “Campaign,” on p. 99, line 3, says “fifty volunteers”; the MS. copy says “50 French volunteers.” Line 5 in the printed copy says “and such other Americans”; in the MS. it says “and several other Americans.” Lines 6 and 7 of the printed copy read as follows in the MS. (but only make doubtful sense): “These with a number of horses designed for the settlement of Kantuck &c. Jan. 30th, on which Col. Clark,” etc. Lines 10 and 11 of the printed copy read in the MS.: “was let alone till spring that he with his Indians would undoubtedly cut us all off.” Lines 13 and 14, of the printed copy read in the MS. “Jan. 31st, sent an express to Cahokia for volunteers. Nothing extraordinary this day.”]

  26 This is not exactly stated in the “Memoir”; but it speaks of the horses as being with the troops on the 20th; and after they left camp, on the evening of the 21st, states that he “would have given a good deal … for one of the horses.”

  27 Law, in his “Vincennes” (p. 32), makes the deeds of the drummer the basis for a traditional story that is somewhat too highly colored. Thus he makes Clark’s men at one time mutiny, and refuse to go forward. This they never did; the creoles once got dejected and wished to return, but the Americans, by Clark’s own statement, never faltered at all. Law’s “Vincennes” is an excellent little book, but he puts altogether too much confidence in mere tradition. For another instance besides this, see page 68, where he describes Clark as entrapping and killing “upward of fifty Indians,” instead of only eight or nine, as was actually the case.

  28 Bowman ends his entry for the day with: “No provisions yet. Lord help us!”

  29 Bowman.

  30 Clark’s “Memoir.”

  31 Clark’s “Memoir.”

  32 In the Haldimand MSS., Series B, Vol. 122, p. 289, there is a long extract from what is called “Col. Clark’s Journal.” This is the official report which he speaks of as being carried by William Moires, his express, who was taken by the Indians (see his letter to Henry of April 29th; there seems, by the way, to be some doubt whether this letter was not written to Jefferson; there is a copy in the Jefferson MSS., Series I, Vol. I). This is not only the official report, but also the earliest letter Clark wrote on the subject and therefore the most authoritative. The paragraph relating to the final march against Vincennes is as follows:

  “I order’d the march in the first division Capt. Williams, Capt. Worthingtons Company & the Cascaskia Volunteers in the 2d commanded by Capt. Bowman his own Company & the Cohos Volunteers. At sun down I put the divisions in motion to march in the greatest order & regularity & observe the orders of their officers. Above all to be silent—the 5 men we took in the canoes were our guides. We entered the town on the upper part leaving detached Lt. Bayley & 15 rifle men to attack the Fort & keep up a fire to harrass them untill we took possession of the town & they were to remain on that duty till relieved by another party, the two divisions marched into the town & took possession of the main street, put guards &c without the least molestation.”

  This effectually disposes of the account, which was accepted by Clark himself in his old age, that he ostentatiously paraded his men and marched them to and fro with many flags flying, so as to impress the British with his numbers. Instead of indulging in any such childishness (which would merely have warned the British, and put them on their guard), he in reality made as silent an approach as possible, under cover of the darkness.

  Hamilton in his narrative, speaks of the attack as being made on the 22d of February, not the 23d as Clark says.

  33 Hamilton’s “brief account” in the Haldimand MSS. The party was led by Lt. Schieffelin of the regulars and the French captains Lamothe and Maisonville.

  34 Haldimand MSS. Series B, Vol. 122, p, 337. Account brought to the people of Detroit of the loss of Vincennes, by a Captain Chene, who was then living in the village. As the Virginians entered it he fled to the woods with some Huron and Ottawa warriors; next day he was joined by some French families and some Miamis and Pottawatomies.

  35 Clark’s letter to Henry.

  36 A son of the Piankeshaw head-chief Tabac.

  37 Hamilton’s Narrative. Clark in his “Memoir” asserts that he designedly let them through, and could have shot them down as they tried to clamber over the stockade if he had wished. Bowman corroborates Hamilton, saying: “We sent a party to intercept them, but missed them. However, we took one of their men, … the rest making their escape under the cover of the night into the fort.” Bowman’s journal is for this siege much more trustworthy than Clark’s “Memoir.” In the latter, Clark makes not a few direct misstatements, and many details are colored so as to give them an altered aspect. As an instance of the different ways in which he told an event at the time, and thirty years later, take the following accounts of the same incident. The first is from the letter to Henry (State Department MSS.), the second from the “Memoir.” 1. “A few days ago
I received certain inteligence of Wm. Moires my express to you being killed near the Falls of Ohio, news truly disagreeable to me, as I fear many of my letters will fall into the hands of the enemy at Detroit.” 2. “Poor Myres the express, who set out on the 15th, got killed on his passage, and his packet fell into the hands of the enemy; but I had been so much on my guard that there was not a sentence in it that could be of any disadvantage to us for the enemy to know; and there were private letters from soldiers to their friends designedly wrote to deceive in cases of such accidents.” His whole account of the night attack and of his treating with Hamilton is bombastic. If his account of the incessant “blaze of fire” of the Americans is true, they must have wasted any amount of ammunition perfectly uselessly. Unfortunately, most of the small western historians who have written about Clark have really damaged his reputation by the absurd inflation of their language. They were adepts in the forcible-feeble style of writing, a sample of which is their rendering him ludicrous by calling him “the Hannibal of the West,” and “the Washington of the West.” Moreover, they base his claims to greatness not on his really great deeds, but on the half-imaginary feats of childish cunning he related in his old age.

  38 Clark’s letter to Henry.

  39 Do. In the letter to Mason he says two scalped, six cap tured and afterward tomahawked. Bowman says two killed, three wounded, six captured; and calls the two partisans “prisoners.” Hamilton and Clark say they were French allies of the British, the former saying there were two, the latter mentioning only one. Hamilton says there were fifteen Indians.

  40 The incident is noteworthy as showing how the French were divided; throughout the Revolutionary war in the west they furnished troops to help in turn whites and Indians. British and Americans. The Illinois French, however, generally remained faithful to the Republic, and the Detroit French to the crown.

  41 Hamilton, who bore the most vindictive hatred to Clark, implies that the latter tomahawked the prisoners himself; but Bowman explicitly says that it was done while Clark and Hamilton were meeting at the church. Be it noticed in passing, that both Clark and Hamilton agree that though the Vincennes people favored the Americans, only a few of them took active part on Clark’s side.

  42 Letter to Henry. Hamilton’s letter says sixty rank and file of the 8th regiment and Detroit volunteers; the other nineteen were officers and under-officers, artillerymen, and French partisan leaders. The return of the garrison already quoted shows he had between eighty and ninety white troops.

  43 Hamilton himself, at the conclusion of his “brief account,” speaks as follows in addressing his superiors: “The difficulties and dangers of Colonel Clark’s march from the Illinois were such as required great courage to encounter and great perseverance to overcome. In trusting to traitors he was more fortunate than myself; whether, on the whole, he was entitled to success is not for me to determine.” Both Clark and Hamilton give minute accounts of various interviews that took place between them; the accounts do not agree, and it is needless to say that in the narration of each the other appears to disadvantage, being quoted as practically admitting various acts of barbarity, etc.

  44 Letter to Henry.

  45 “Memoir.”

  46 One hundred and fifty thousand acres of land opposite Louisville were finally allotted them. Some of the Pianke- shaw Indians ceded Clark a tract of land for his own use, but the Virginia Legislature very properly disallowed the grant.

  47 In Hamilton’s “brief account,” he says that their lives were often threatened by the borderers, but that “our guard behaved very well, protected us, and hunted for us.” At the Falls he found “a number of settlers who lived in log-houses, in eternal apprehension from the Indians,” and he adds: “The people at the forts are in a wretched state, obliged to enclose the cattle every night within the fort, and carry their rifles to the field when they go to plow or cut wood.” He speaks of Boone’s kindness in his short printed narrative in the “Royal Gazette.”

  48 Clark, in his letter to Mason, alludes to Hamilton’s “known barbarity”; but in his memoir he speaks very well of Hamilton, and attributes the murderous forays to his subordinates, one of whom, Major Hay, he particularly specifies.

  49 See Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe,” II, 421, for examples of French payments, some of a peculiarly flagrant sort. A certain kind of American pseudo-historian is especially fond of painting the British as behaving to us with unexampled barbarity; yet nothing is more sure than that the French were far more cruel and less humane in their contests with us than were the British.

  50 State Department MSS. [Intercepted Letters], No. 51, Vol. II, pp. 17 and 45. Letter of James Colbert, a half-breed in the British interest, resident at that time among the Chicka saws, May 25, 1779, etc.

  51 The history of the early navigation of the Ohio and Mis sissippi begins many years before the birth of any of our Western pioneers, when the French went up and down them. Long before the Revolutionary War occasional hunters, in dugouts, or settlers going to Natchez in flat-boats, descended these rivers, and from Pittsburg craft were sent to New Or leans to open negotiations with the Spaniards as soon as hos tilities broke out; and ammunition was procured from New Orleans as soon as Independence was declared.

  52 In Lat. 36° 30'; it was named Port Jefferson. Jefferson MSS., 1st Series, Vol. 19. Clark’s letter.

  53 It is of course impossible to prove that but for Clark’s conquest the Ohio would have been made our boundary in 1783, exactly as it is impossible to prove that but for Wolfe the English would not have taken Quebec. But when we take into account the determined efforts of Spain and France to confine us to the land east of the Alleghanies, and then to the land southeast of the Ohio, the slavishness of Congress in instructing our commissioners to do whatever France wished, and the readiness shown by one of the commissioners, Franklin, to follow these instructions, it certainly looks as if there would not even have been an effort made by us to get the Northwestern territory had we not already possessed it, thanks to Clark. As it was, it was only owing to Jay’s broad patriotism and stern determination that our Western boundaries were finally made so far-reaching. None of our early diplomats did as much for the West as Jay, whom at one time the whole West hated and reviled; Mann Butler, whose politics are generally very sound, deserves especial credit for the justice he does the New Yorker.

  It is idle to talk of the conquest as being purely a Virginian affair. It was conquered by Clark, a Virginian, with some scant help from Virginia, but it was retained only owing to the power of the United States and the patriotism of such Northern statesmen as Jay, Adams, and Franklin, the negotiators of the final treaty. Had Virginia alone been in interest, Great Britain would not have even paid her claims the compliment of listening to them. Virginia’s share in the history of the nation has ever been gallant and leading; but the Revolutionary War was emphatically fought by Americans for America; no part could have won without the help of the whole, and every victory was thus a victory for all, in which all alike can take pride.

  54 A probably truthful tradition reports that when the Virginian commissioners offered Clark the sword, the grim old fighter, smarting under the sense of his wrongs, threw it indignantly from him, telling the envoys that he demanded from Virginia his just rights and the promised reward of his services, not an empty compliment.

  CHAPTER VIII

  CONTINUANCE OF THE STRUGGLE IN KENTUCKY AND THE NORTHWEST, 1779–1781

  CLARK’S SUCCESSFUL campaigns against the Illinois towns and Vincennes, besides giving the Americans a foothold north of the Ohio, were of the utmost importance to Kentucky. Until this time, the Kentucky settlers had been literally fighting for life and home, and again and again their strait had been so bad that it seemed—and was—almost an even chance whether they would be driven from the land. The successful outcome of Clark’s expedition temporarily overawed the Indians, and, moreover, made the French towns outposts for the protection of the settlers; so that for several years therea
fter the tribes west of the Wabash did but little against the Americans. The confidence of the back woodsmen in their own ultimate triumph was like wise very much increased; while the fame of the Western region was greatly spread abroad. From all these causes it resulted that there was an immediate and great increase of immigration thither, the bulk of the immigrants of course stopping in Kentucky, though a very few, even thus early, went to Illinois. Every settlement in Kentucky was still in jeopardy, and there came moments of dejection, when some of her bravest leaders spoke gloomily of the possibility of the Americans being driven from the land. But these were merely words such as even strong men utter when sore from fresh disaster. After the spring of 1779, there was never any real danger that the whites would be forced to abandon Kentucky.

  The land laws which the Virginia Legislature enacted about this time1 were partly a cause, partly a consequence, of the increased emigration to Kentucky, and of the consequent rise in the value of its wild lands. Long before the Revolution, shrewd and far-seeing speculators had organized land companies to acquire grants of vast stretches of Western territory; but the land only acquired an actual value for private individuals after the incoming of settlers. In addition to the companies, many private individuals had acquired rights to tracts of land; some, under the royal proclamation, giving bounties to the officers and soldiers in the French war; others by actual payment into the public treasury.2 The Virginia Legislature now ratified all titles to regularly surveyed ground claimed under charter, military bounty, and old treasury rights, to the extent of four hundred acres each. Tracts of land were reserved as bounties for the Virginia troops, both Continentals and militia. Each family of actual settlers was allowed a settlement right to four hundred acres for the small sum of nine dollars, and, if very poor, the land was given them on credit. Every such settler also acquired a pre-emptive right to purchase a thousand acres adjoining, at the regulation State price. which was forty pounds, paper money, or forty dollars in specie, for every hundred acres. One peculiar provision was made necessary by the system of settling in forted villages. Every such village was allowed six hundred and forty acres, which no outsider could have surveyed or claim, for it was considered the property of the townsmen, to be held in common until an equitable division could be made; while each family likewise had a settlement right to four hundred acres adjoining the village. The vacant lands were sold, warrants for a hundred acres costing forty dollars in specie; but later on, toward the close of the war, Virginia tried to buoy up her mass of depreciated paper currency by accepting it nearly at par for land warrants, thereby reducing the cost of these to less than fifty cents for a hundred acres. No warrant applied to a particular spot; it was surveyed on any vacant or presumably vacant ground. Each individual had the surveying done wherever he pleased, the county surveyor usually appointing some skilled woodsman to act as his deputy.