whites. In
Philadelphia, he said, "When I walk through the streets I see every
person in his shop employed about something: one makes shoes, another
pots, a third sells cloth. I say to myself, which of these things can
you do? Not one. I can make a bow or an arrow, catch fish, kill game,
and go to war; but none of these things is of any use here. To learn
what is done here would require a long time. Old age comes on. I should
be a useless piece of furniture, useless to my nation, useless to
myself. I must go back to my own country."
This was what he did, and as long as he lived he was steadfast for
peace, for he remembered that it would be foolish for the Indians to
fight the Americans, and Little Turtle was not a fool. Even before the
battle of the Fallen Timbers, he urged his people to treat with Wayne
rather than fight. "We have beaten the enemy twice under separate
commanders," he said, referring to Har-mar and St. Clair. "The Americans
are now led by a chief who never stops; the night and the day are alike
to him. And during all the time that he has been marching upon your
villages, notwithstanding the watchfulness of our young men, we have
never been able to surprise him. Think well of it. There is something
which whispers to me that it will be prudent to listen to his offers of
peace."
XIII. INDIAN FIGHTERS.
In the long war with the Indians, the great battles were nearly all
fought within the region that afterwards became our state, and the
smaller battles went on there pretty constantly. The first force on
the scale of an army sent against the Ohio tribes was that of Colonel
Bouquet in 1766; but, as we have seen, the chief object of this was
to treat for the return of their white captives. In 1774 Lord Dunmore
marched with three thousand Virginians to destroy the Indian towns on
the Scioto in Pickaway County. He cannot be said to have led his men,
who believed in neither his courage nor his good faith, and who thought
that he was more anxious to treat with the savages for the advantage
of England in the Revolutionary War, which he knew was coming, than to
attack their capital. This was that Old Chillicothe, which has been so
often mentioned before, and here Dunmore made peace with the Indians,
instead of punishing them, as the backwoodsmen expected. The feeling
among them was so bitter that one of them fired through Dunmore's tent
where he sat with two chiefs, hoping to kill all three. He missed, but
|