own injuries in the contemplation of our misfortunes. General Burgoyne was struck with General Schuyler's generosity, and said to him, 'You show me great kindness, though I have done you much injury.' That was the fate of war,' replied the brave man; let us say no more about it.'"'

Arnold's Strategy. - Immediately after the battle of Oriskany, Schuyler sent Benedict Arnold with twelve hundred men to the rescue of Fort Stanwix. While en route he captured several Tory spies, among whom was a half-witted fellow named Yan Yost Cuyler. All were condemned to death. The mother and brother of Cuyler, hearing of this, hastened to the camp to plead for his life. At length Arnold offered him his freedom if he would go to the camp of St. Leger and spread the report that Burgoyne was totally defeated and that a great American army was coming to the rescue of Fort Stanwix. Cuyler agreed, and his brother was detained as a hostage to be put to death in case of his failure. Cuyler did his part well. With a dozen bullet holes in his coat he ran into the British camp and declared that a great American host was close at hand, and that he had barely escaped with his life. He was known to many of the British as a Tory, and they readily believed his story. The Indians instantly took fright and began to desert. The panic soon spread to the regulars, the camp became a pandemonium, and, ere noon of next day, the whole army was in full flight to Canada. See Fiske, Vol. I, p. 294.

The Surrendered Army. In the convention between Gates and Burgoyne, the former agreed that the British soldiers be transported to England on the condition that they were not to serve again during the war. But erelong the belief gained ground that they would be used in Europe to take the place of other troops who would be sent to America. Congress, therefore, found one excuse after another for not carrying out the convention. First, it demanded pay for the soldiers' subsistence since the surrender, not in Continental money, but in British gold. Congress thus made a spectacle to the world by refusing to accept its own money. It next imposed an impossible condition by demanding that Burgoyne make out a descriptive list of all the officers and men of the army. So in various ways Congress evaded carrying out the agreement. The British soldiers were in fact never sent home. After being kept a year in New England they were sent to Charlotteville in Virginia, making the overland march of seven hundred miles in midwinter. Here a village of cottages was built for them. When, in 1780, Virginia became the seat of war, they were scattered, some being sent to Maryland, and others to Pennsylvania. Meantime their number had constantly diminished by desertion, death, and exchange. At the close of the war most of the Germans remained in America. Burgoyne was permitted to return to England soon after the surrender. He resumed his seat in Parliament, where he proved himself a gentleman of the highest honor. If not an open friend of the Americans, he at least never failed to do them justice.

U

THE REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XIV

THE FRONTIER, THE OCEAN, AND THE
SOUTH

THE story of the Revolution would be incomplete without some notice of the border warfare that raged at intervals through the halfsettled wilderness of the frontier. The dreadful massacre of the innocents during that period by the savage natives of the forest is usually laid at the door of George III, and it is certain that the bloody work was approved by him and instigated by his still more heartless minister, Lord George Germain; but in fairness to the British people it must be said that most of them, on both sides of the Atlantic, were not in sympathy with this cruel business. Nor can we believe that the hellish work was carried on usually from a spirit of vindictive cruelty, as many think, but rather to terrify the patriots into submission and to break the spirit of rebellion. The result, however, was favorable to the Americans, for it unified them, and even turned many loyalists against the English cause.

BORDER WAR IN THE SOUTH AND WEST

At the very threshold of the long war, even before the battle of Lexington, there occurred at Point Pleasant, on the Great Kanawha River, near its junction with the Ohio, one of the most desperate battles with the Indians ever fought on American soil. A thousand Virginians lay sleeping under the trees, when at daybreak they were surprised by a larger body of Indians who had crept with catlike tread upon the sleeping army. They were led by the fierce warrior, Cornstalk, and his lieutenant, the famous and eloquent Logan,2 chief

1 The patriots enlisted some Indians also in the war; but in no case are they known to have aided or encouraged the massacre of women and children, as was frequently done by the enemy.

2 Logan's famous speech is well known. It was not Colonel Cresap, as he believed, that murdered his family, but a heartless wretch named Greathouse.

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291

of the Mingos. The battle raged till toward evening, when a detachment of the whites gained the rear of the Indians and opened a deadly fire. The Indians, panic-stricken, broke and fled in every direction. About one fifth of each army was slain; but the rout of the red men was complete.

The Indians were now willing to make peace, and five months after the battle, on a sunny day in March, twelve hundred warriors gathered on the green at the white settlement of Watauga; and here they were met by some hundreds of white men, among whom were John Sevier and James Robertson, the great colony builders of the Southwest, and Daniel Boone, the most famous of American pioneers. Here again the children of the forest promised to live at peace with their pale-faced brethren, and they ceded to the latter the broad and beautiful tract south of the Ohio, the paradise of the buffalo, Kentucky. But the peace was short-lived. A month after it was made came the fight at Lexington; the royal governor of North Carolina declared the treaty illegal, and soon again the Indians were on the warpath. A desperate attack was made on the Watauga settlement by the Cherokees and loyalists in 1777, but Sevier and Robertson saved the colony from destruction, and at length forced the Indians to give up all their lands between the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. A stream of emigration soon began to pour into the great Tennessee Valley, and the memory of General Nash, who perished in the battle of Germantown, has been kept green by the beautiful town founded on the Cumberland, and called, after him, Nashville.

Daniel Boone.

The temporary peace after the Point Pleasant affair enabled Daniel Boone to move into Kentucky with his family, where he founded a settlement and built the fort called Boonesborough. Born and reared in the forest, Boone loved above all things a wild life in the wilderness, untrammeled by the restraints of civilization. The roaring of the wild beast and the yells of the Indian had no terrors for Boone, and the screaming of the wild bird in the lonely night was music to his ears. He lived in the wilderness because he loved it; and when civilized society grew up about him, he moved farther into the vast solitudes of the unbroken forest. Boone was not a colony builder nor a state founder in the true sense, nor had he a thought, perhaps, of leaving a name in history. He was simply a frontiersman, a hunter, an In1 See Gilmore's "Rearguard of the Revolution," p. 97.

dian fighter; and in these respects, and in woodcraft, his skill was so marvelous as to attract the attention of the world. During the last years of the Revolution Boone figured in various battles with the Indians, the most destructive of which was the battle of the Blue

Blue Licks.

Licks, fought on the banks of the Licking River, in August, 1782. Soon after this George Rogers Clark led a thousand men into the Indian country of western Ohio and spread havoc on every hand. So weakened were the Indians by this raid that they never again led an army into Kentucky. But the greatest achievement of Clark, and that which gave him a permanent name in our history, had already been won. Late in the autumn of 1777 the thrilling news of Burgoyne's surrender spread through the South. At this time, George Rogers Clark, a young surveyor, a member of the Virginia assembly, stalwart, brave, and patriotic, conceived the plan of conquering the Illinois country from the British. His plan was approved by Patrick Henry, then governor of Virginia; and in the following May Clark floated down the Ohio, from Pittsburg to its mouth, with one hundred and eighty picked riflemen. After an incredible march across the prairie and through swamps, this little band captured, without bloodshed, Kaskaskia, Vincennes, and adjacent posts, and the country was annexed to Virginia as the county of Illinois. The inhabitants were chiefly French, and they welcomed the change of rulers when they learned of the American alliance with France. This achievement of Clark was of the greatest importance, for it enabled the Americans at the close of the war to claim successfully the vast prairie region of Illinois as a possession of the United States.

THE WYOMING VALLEY AND OTHER VALLEYS

In north-central Pennsylvania there lies a beautiful valley, nestled between two mountain ranges that rise high on either side, as if nature had chosen to guard the lovely spot from the outer world. This valley of Wyoming, watered by the sparkling Susquehanna that winds among the hills like a belt of silver, seems from a distant view like a dream of Eden; and yet this beautiful spot, where "all save the spirit of man was divine," became the scene of the most fiendish massacre of the long and bloody war.

The Wyoming Valley was claimed by Connecticut by right of her charter of 1662, and her people had begun settling there more

THE VALLEY OF WYOMING

293

than a decade before the war with England began. Pennsylvania also claimed this territory, and there was strife between the sister colonies; but the family quarrel was hushed for a season in the presence of a common foe.

It was midsummer, 1778, less than a week after the battle of Monmouth, when a force of eight hundred Tories and Indians1 under Colonel John Butler swooped down from New York upon the settlement of New Englanders in the Wyoming Valley. The settlers, dwelling mostly in peaceful hamlets with their schools and churches, numbered something more than three thousand souls; but they were ill prepared for defense, as most of their young men had joined the Continental army. Nevertheless, a force of some three hundred men, commanded by Colonel Zebulon Butler, a resident of the valley, offered battle on July 3, near the site of Wilkesbarre. After an hour of fierce fighting, the Americans broke and fled for their lives, but more than half of them were slain in the battle or in Wyoming the massacre that followed. The British commander Massacre, afterward reported the taking of "227 scalps," and of July 4, 1778. course laid all the blame on the Indians. During the night the Indian thirst for blood seemed to increase, and next day they began anew the massacre. Dreadful was the scene in the Wyoming Valley on that fateful day. The fort in which many had taken refuge surrendered, and the lives of the occupants were spared by the English commander; but the savages put many of the others to the tomahawk. All who could do so fled to the woods, and a large number perished in crossing a swamp, which has since been called the "Shades of Death." Others perished of starvation in the mountains. The country was abandoned for the season, and the blooming valley became a field of desolation.

Brant.

The barbarities of Wyoming were long attributed to the great Mohawk chieftain, Joseph Brant, whom we have already met at the battle of Oriskany. But he was not present at the Wyoming massacre. Brant, who was known to his Joseph own race as Tha-yen-dan-e-gea, was a very remarkable character, a full-blooded Mohawk, a man of powerful physique, handsome, affable, and well educated. He was a devoted Episcopalian, served for a time as missionary among his own people, and

1 Some historians say a thousand or more.

2 Fiske pronounces Brant the greatest Indian of whom we have any knowledge; but I cannot agree to place him above, or even equal to, Pontiac or Tecumseh.