A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier (8 page)

This also meant that Indians seldom, if ever, conducted frontal attacks on fortified positions. During their alliances with the French, they had seen firsthand that such attacks were seldom successful unless you had cannon to knock down the stockade walls. Furthermore, even if a fort was seized, the advantage allowed to the stockade’s defenders resulted in an unjustifiable number of casualties. Instead, the Indians often would resort to wholesale burning of nearby crops and homes, which caused the fort’s inhabitants to sally forth in an effort to save their farms, allowing the Indians to lure them into easy ambushes.

One of the more confusing aspects of the Indian execution of warfare against European settlers is the use of what seems barbarous cruelty, and this a difficult issue for a modern observer to truly understand. As discussed above, fighting between Indian warriors seldom resulted in many casualties. Often rather as not, Indians preferred to take their enemies captive, especially noncombatants. These people were usually adopted into the tribe as a means of maintaining population levels under stress from disease, famine or warfare.

Indian ritual and custom also played a large part in their treatment of prisoners. The fate of all captives was the prerogative of the tribe’s collective matriarchs, the Clan Mothers. In most cases, women and children were automatically adopted, as were most men. However, when a captive was sentenced to die, which happened far more often to opposing Indian prisoners than settlers, there was always a clear adjudication of the crime prior to execution, with both those condemning the accused as well as his supporters given an equal opportunity to speak. It came as a great surprise to Native Americans when Europeans condemned this practice. One Lenape responded to his colonial critics, saying, “You white people also try your criminals, and when they are found guilty, you hang them or kill them, and we do the same among ourselves.”
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A colonial soldier tries to stop Indians from torturing a captive in this nineteenth-century drawing.
Library of Congress
.

While those condemned to die usually faced a painful death by ritual torture or burning at the stake, an adoptee also was processed into the tribe through rituals, which were intended to accord them full status as a member of the tribal family. One settler, Thomas Grist, who was captured near Fort Duquesne in 1758, was fortunate enough to be adopted into an Indian family as a replacement for a deceased family member:

I was led into the house where I was to live, there strip’d
[sic]
by a female relation, and then led to the river. There she wash’d
[sic]
me from head to foot, leavin[g] none of the paint itself on me. We then returned to the house, where was gather[ed] all my relations and I believe few men has so many. Such hug[g]ing and kissing from the women and crying for joy, I never saw before. The men acted in a different manner; they looked very serious, shook my hand, and spake
[sic]
little. As soon as this ceremony was over I was clad from head to foot; then there was an interpreter brought to tell me which of my kin was nearest to me. I think they re
[c]
onded
[sic]
from brother to seventh cousins
.
⁸⁶

Another important cultural element of the woodland Indians prosecution of war was what is commonly referred to as the Law of Innocence. Evidence indicates this law dated from at least the twelfth century, and it protected all noncombatants, especially the elderly, women and children, as well as “Messengers of Peace,” the couriers who carried peaceful or neutral messages. Further, under its tenets, women, children, elders and noncombatant males might be taken captive and adopted, but they were never to be killed, scalped or tortured. In addition, the Law of Innocence firmly prohibited rape. Rape was considered an utterly reprehensible act by all the woodland nations and was seen as literally unthinkable in these societies, which deeply revered women and afforded them such high status. In fact, one historian points out that, among these eastern tribes, “the concept of sexual violation was a grotesque aberration, held to be on the same level as wanton child murder.”
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Therefore, one must question why, given these various cultural imperatives, Indian warriors did indeed scalp and kill white women and children.

Several factors influenced what must appear to be utterly aberrant behavior. First, one must remember that Indian warriors were fighting a guerilla war, with operations sometimes ranging deep into “enemy” territory. As a result, military expedience might dictate the elimination of captives who were either not useful or might otherwise slow down the warriors’ successful retreat back to their village. It also appears that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indians did not perceive enemies or any non-member of their tribal group or community as fully human. Further compounding these views is the fact that the Indians did not perceive a distinction between war and murder, as Europeans might. In historian Richard White’s study of colonial-period Great Lakes Indians, he found that the Algonquian peoples believed there were two kinds of killings: those perpetrated by enemies and those committed by allies. If someone’s killer belonged to an ally, the victim’s family and community expected that the dead would be “covered” by appropriate compensation and ceremony. If this did not happen, the killer became an enemy and a blood feud began. The Indians did not, however, see the battlefield as a unique cultural zone in which killing was sanctioned to the exclusion of other acts of killing that whites might define as murder. Therefore, while Europeans believed murder to be a crime requiring blood revenge, Indians maintained that killings by enemies demanded such revenge whether in or out of battle.
⁸⁸

Despite this, however, the largest single factor influencing warrior behavior in this regard was the wanton, brutal killings carried out by Anglo-American colonists from virtually the moment they arrived in America. The Puritans were the first, employing a philosophy that “nits make lice,” their cold, racist rationale for the purposeful killing of Native American women and children.
⁸⁹
Furthermore, the British borrowed heavily from European practices of the Thirty Years War, as well as their own legacy of “search and destroy” operations in both Scotland and Ireland, all of which included the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants. As a result, the British provided the lessons of conducting “hard war” to the Native Americans—not the other way around. In fact, it must be said that the British, as well as the Americans who followed them on the frontier, were, in reality, more brutal than their “savage” opponents because their atrocities were usually intentional and the result of carefully calculated plans and policies.

The best and, without doubt, most horrible example of this kind of warfare by the white colonists occurred on the Ohio frontier in 1782. Late the year before, several groups of Christian Delaware Indians, who had been converted by Moravian missionaries, were ordered by Major Arendt DePeyster, the British commander in Detroit, to move west for their own protection, away from their villages along the Tuscarawas River in eastern Ohio. These Christian Delawares were forced to leave their homes on short notice and had to leave behind not only many of their possessions but also crops that would be badly needed during the coming winter. By February, the Delawares’ plight was becoming serious, as the food supplies in their new village on the Sandusky River were inadequate. Fearing starvation, they begged the chief of their Seneca hosts, Half King, to allow them to return to their villages and harvest the corn that was still standing in their fields. Although Half King had his doubts about the idea, he allowed them to go out of pity. The next day, about 120 hungry men, women and children began their trek across central Ohio, leaving a pathway through the deep snow that covered the wooded hills and open prairie. Upon reaching the Tuscarawas, 96 of the party went to their main settlement at Gnadenhutten and began to harvest their frozen crops.

About the same time the Christian Delawares were arriving in Gnadenhutten, an Indian raiding party made an unusual winter attack on isolated settler homesteads in western Pennsylvania. The settlers believed the Christian Delaware villages had somehow been involved in these attacks, when nothing could have been further from the truth. As a result, a group of one hundred American colonial militiamen under the leadership of Colonel David Williamson gathered at Mingo Bottom, about seventy-five miles downriver from Fort Pitt, and set out for the Tuscarawas River villages.

These converted Delawares were dedicated pacifists and posed no threat to anyone. Further, they had maintained a long and friendly relationship with the region’s white settlers. Evidently, that did not matter—they were Indian, and that was all Williamson needed as proof of their complicity in the attacks. Late in the afternoon of March 6, 1782, Williamson and his militia arrived at Gnadenhutten and encircled the town. As they approached, they came upon six Delaware men and women working in the fields and immediately killed them, despite the fact that they were all wearing European-style clothing and clearly were not warriors.

When the remainder of the village saw Williamson’s men approaching, they did not attempt to flee, believing they had nothing to fear. In fact, some of the Delaware recognized a few militiamen as neighbors with whom they had shared food and shelter in the past. Williamson told them that he and his men had come to take them to Fort Pitt, where they would be provided food, shelter and protection. The Delaware had no reason not to trust the militia commander and willingly handed over their hunting weapons. Indeed, some thought this was a good offer, as, given their history of friendship with the Americans, they believed they would receive far better treatment at Fort Pitt than the British had provided on the Sandusky. However, what they received in return for their honest friendship and faith was a savage betrayal.

Williamson proceeded to herd the men and older boys into one cabin, while he locked up the women and children in another. He then announced to their leaders that he was certain they had perpetrated the attacks in Pennsylvania, and, as a result, he would execute every member of the village. Of course, the Delawares protested their innocence and pleaded for their lives, but it was to no avail. Williamson held a council with his officers not to formally agree on whether or not to kill all the Delawares but rather to decide how best to carry out the process of execution. Some men actually protested and refused to be a party to the killings. As one militiaman recalled, “They wrung their hands—and calling God to witness that they were innocent of the blood of these harmless Christian Indians, they withdrew to some distance from the scene of slaughter.”
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When told of their impending deaths, the Delawares asked for time to prepare themselves, to which the cold-hearted Williamson agreed. The air was soon filled with the sounds of wailing and prayers, and a mixture of Delaware death songs and Christian hymns. Saddest of all, however, were the tearful goodbyes that echoed out in the chilly night air, as husbands, wives and children called out to one another between the two buildings in which they were imprisoned.

At dawn on March 8, the killing began. First, the militia dragged the women and girls out into the snow and systematically raped them. Then, they began a cold, methodical process of brutal murder using two additional cabins, which they designated as “slaughterhouses.” Two or three captives were hauled into the cabins at a time, where a militiaman would cave in their skulls with a large wooden cooper’s mallet. When the first executioner’s arm tired, he was eagerly replaced by another militiaman.

None of the Delaware resisted, but a few did try to run and were quickly shot down, falling forward into the snow, their blood staining the cold white powder. Meanwhile, the rape and murder continued unabated until eighty-eight of the remaining Indians were dead, of which some thirty-five were children. Then Williamson’s men piled the corpses high in the slaughterhouses and set the entire mission village afire. Within a few hours, the village of Gnadenhutten, whose name meant “Houses of Grace,” was reduced to ashes along with the remains of its peaceful residents.

Unbeknownst to the militia, however, two of the Delaware boys they scalped and left for dead survived and fled to spread the news of what had happened. The outrage it produced throughout the Indian nations was virtually without precedent. To be sure, the Indians had seen similar depredations by the settlers and their soldiers over the decades since the first Englishmen arrived in North America. Nevertheless, this was different—these were Indians who had converted to the European’s Christian god, renounced the warrior culture and made a supposed permanent peace with the settlers. If these Indians were not safe and could not trust the settlers, then no one could. The only answer for the rest of the woodlands nations was to continue their war against the American settlers and respond to white atrocities with the same brand of brutality exacted at Gnadenhutten.