WITH GEORGE WASHINGTONINTO THE WILDERNESSIROBERT THE HUNTER MAKES DISCOVERIES
WITH GEORGE WASHINGTONINTO THE WILDERNESS
It had been raining with a cold spring rain for two days, and the vast forest here in southern Pennsylvania of 1748 was dripping and soggy. The Indians did not mind; they were well greased with bear’s grease and well painted, and their skin scarcely felt the wet. Besides, they were in a hurry.
Robert, whose Seneca name was the Hunter, did not mind it either. He also was Indian. To be sure, his mother was called the White Woman. But she had been captured forty years ago, when a little girl, by the Mohawks of the French from the north, and had been traded south, and had become the wife to Chief Feather Eagle of the Delawares in the Ohio Country.
So Robert had been brought up as an Indian boy. When his father had died the great Tan-a-char-i-son, head chief of all the Mingo Iroquois and known as Half-King, passing by White Woman’s Creek on return home from a visit to the Shawnees in the west, had taken him to train him as a warrior.
To a warrior there is no weather. Heat and cold, dry and wet, they are the same to a warrior, especially a Mingo warrior of the Six Nations who have council-seats in the Long House of the proud Iroquois.
Less than a moon ago, at Logstown which was the principal village of the Mingos, upon the Ohio River, Half-King had said to Robert the Hunter:
“Listen: Tomorrow White Thunder bears a speech belt to our brothers the Delawares near the Susquehanna and I wish you to go with him. You will learn much; and if you are to be a warrior it is well that you should know your way through the woods and across the mountains.”
From that Logstown upon the north bank of the upper Ohio—the Ohion-hiio or Beautiful River—seventeen or eighteen miles down from where Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, now stands, Robert had set out with White Thunder the Keeper of the Mingo wampum belts, and with Aroas or Silver Heels the warrior, to travel afoot eastward through the forests and mountains for the Delawares of central Pennsylvania.
The Mingos were those Oneidas, Senecas and others of the Iroquois Six Nations who had moved from New York into Western Pennsylvania which the Iroquois claimed to have conquered. They thought little of the Delawares. The Iroquois had claimed to have conquered the Delawares also, and called them “women.” But all the Indian peoples—Iroquois, Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots, Miamis—had been invited to meet the English in council at Albany, the capital of New York, this coming June, to talk peace again. Therefore Half-King Tanacharison wisely wished to learn what the Delawares to the east of him were going to do.
Now this was no small journey, although, of course, it was nothing to an Indian. Nobody except Indians and birds and beasts lived in that country, and the only white persons to cross it were thetraders. But the game such as bear, deer and turkeys was plentiful, and the three travellers from Logstown had meat at every camp.
Little happened during the first half of the trip. Then, on a sudden in a cloudy day, Aroas, who was leading with gun in hand, stopped short.
“Wah!” he said, to White Thunder. “This is it.”
“Yes,” replied White Thunder, stopping also. “This is it. It is alive?”
“Men have passed,” said Silver Heels. “And not long ago.”
They both studied the trail. The trail was a narrow one, wending right on amid the great trees of the silent, sunless forest. Something about the trail, and the manner with which Aroas and White Thunder held back from it struck the Hunter like a sensation of lurking death.
They two were bending forward, reading the trail. The Hunter himself could see that there were tracks in it—moccasin tracks lightly printed upon the soft soil and pressing twigs into the mud and leaves.
“Do we fear the Delaware?” he asked.
“No,” answered White Thunder. “This is not their land. The land once given to them by the Iroquois has flowed through their stomachs, for they sold it to the English for rum. They wear petticoats. Here is a danger trail.”
“What is that?”
“It is the Catawba Trail. Be silent.”
The Catawba Trail! There was war between the Catawbas and the Pennsylvania Indians. The fierce Catawbas lived in the south, near the Cherokees.They were not many, but they sent warriors from South Carolina up through Virginia and Maryland into Ohio, Pennsylvania, and clear into New York to attack the Shawnees, the Wyandots, the Delawares and the Iroquois.
This much Robert the Hunter knew. Evidently Catawbas had passed here. He waited while Aroas and White Thunder, speaking low, discussed matters.
“Catawba moccasins. I think not many,” said Aroas.
“They stepped each in the other’s track, but the tracks are not deep,” White Thunder agreed. “The leaves and twigs are still flat; the break in this piece of rotten wood is fresh. The Catawba passed an hour ago.”
“Wah!” said Aroas. “That is good. Come.”
He leaped over the trail; White Thunder leaped; and the Hunter, without asking why that was done, also leaped. Now Aroas again led through the forest, travelling rapidly so that Robert, at the end of the single file, was kept at a little trot.
All the afternoon they hurried, hurried, without speaking, through the dense forest, into ravines and out, up hill and down, until at dusk Silver Heels halted, with hand raised. He went forward alone, and bent to examine the ground. He came back.
“We are ahead,” he said.
“The trail is empty?”
“Yes.”
“Good!” exclaimed White Thunder. “This is the place. We will stay.”
The “place” proved to be a nearby ledge of rock. It overhung at one side, making a roof; beneath the roof the ground was dry and soft with leaves blownin, and leaves were massed into a bed as though a panther or other wild animal had lain upon them.
In here they three could sit. They did sit, and munched cold deer meat and corn cake, while in the dark forest wolves began to howl and many things rustled.
Neither Silver Heels nor White Thunder made a fire, by which the Hunter understood that enemies might be near.
“Let us drink,” said White Thunder. “Then sleep. We must be up before daylight.” And he added, to Robert, “Follow Aroas and do as he does.”
A little stream sounded not far away, in the night. Silver Heels went out, on a half circle, to the stream; and lying down drank, and the Hunter drank beside him. Ah, but that cold water was good, for they had not drunk since noon.
They met White Thunder, coming to drink. Then they rolled in their blankets, upon the leaves of the shallow cave, to sleep. But White Thunder spoke:
“The boy should know, so that he will wake and be ready for the thing that will happen.”
“That is right,” replied Aroas. “You should tell him about the Catawba. Some day he will fight the Catawba.”
“Listen, boy,” said White Thunder: “Now we sleep beside the Catawba Trail. We left the trail, and we have come to it again. First the Catawba were ahead of us; now they are behind us. Since the day of the first man and woman the Catawba and Cherokee have fought us who live in the north. This trail is the great war trail upon which the Catawba travel. I will tell you why we did not follow it, but jumped across it and went around.
“A long time ago the Catawba marched into the country of the Delaware. They found a Delaware camp. They tied buffalo hoofs to their feet and made buffalo tracks in the snow. Then in the morning the Delaware saw the buffalo tracks, and followed to hunt meat. The Catawba surprised them, and killed many and ran off with the scalps. The Delaware from the camp gave chase, for the trail was plain. But the Catawba had set sharp splinters dipped in snake poison in the trail, and the Delaware stepped on these and were made sick. Then the Catawba turned about and caught the Delaware and killed more.
“The Catawba are cunning. Their minds are full of evil tricks. To hunt the Catawba is more dangerous than hunting the panther or the mother bear. When you see a Catawba trail, be very careful of it. Now in the morning we rise early, to be ready. The Catawba are not many. They shall run home weeping.”
By his snores Silver Heels was asleep before White Thunder had finished. White Thunder himself went to sleep right away. And the Hunter, with White Thunder’s words in his mind, fell asleep too, and dreamed of the dread Catawba from the south.
Aroas and White Thunder were up early, when the birds were first twittering and the wolves were slinking to their dens after the night’s hunt.
“Wake. You may come,” said White Thunder to Robert the Hunter, shaking him by the shoulder. “It is time.”
They crawled out of their own den, and climbed on top of the ledge. The top was flat and screenedby low bushes. Here they lay, with the Hunter just behind.
The gloom of the forest gradually thinned. Birds began to flit. A raccoon passed, humping to his hollow tree. The dawn swiftly brightened. Squirrels chattered. Then one discovered the three persons upon the top of the ledge. He sat upon a branch and scolded angrily.
“Brother!” Aroas hissed. “Go! We mean you no harm.”
The squirrel only whisked hither and thither, still scolding, so that he disturbed the forest. White Thunder spoke to Robert.
“That squirrel is a fool. He must be silenced. Shoot him.”
The Hunter strung his bow and fitted an arrow to the string. Sitting up he drew and aimed; he loosed. The bow twanged, the blunt arrow streaked through the air and with a thud knocked the squirrel far.
“Wah!” uttered Aroas. “That was well done.”
The sun was about to rise. Peering ahead, as Silver Heels and White Thunder were peering, Robert could see the Catawba Trail which opened clearly and crossed the stream down there in front of the ledge. Now a doe came, mincing and craning, through the trees. She did not smell them, for she paused at the stream, and drank. Suddenly she lifted her head, with long ears set forward, and sniffed. She wheeled about and away she leaped, and was gone.
“They come,” whispered White Thunder to Aroas. The two cocked their muskets, and settledmotionless; and behind them Robert the Hunter glued more flatly, his heart beating.
Nothing was to be heard, for a few minutes. Then around a curve of the narrow trail a warrior trotted, and another and another. The Catawbas! There were six dark, round-faced men, in red-fringed buckskin, with turkey-feathered head-dresses and with guns. This was the first time that the Hunter had seen a Catawba.
Before they arrived at the stream they stopped. They seemed to suspect the ledge as an ambush place. But Aroas gave the call of a blue-jay, as if the blue-jay were seeing the Catawbas and was giving an alarm. The jay had not cried before. The Catawbas would think they were the only strangers here. They came on.
The muskets of White Thunder and Silver Heels had been thrust forward. The first Catawba stooped, to drink at the stream, when with a terrible whoop White Thunder fired. Aroas whooped and fired. Robert the Hunter whooped and sent an arrow whizzing. All the forest echoed to the whoops and the shots, as if a dozen men had attacked; and still whooping while they reloaded in a jiffy, drawing their hatchets White Thunder and Aroas ran boldly down. But the Catawbas had vanished; the last of them could just be heard bolting through the brush up the trail. The warrior at whom White Thunder had fired lay at the edge of the stream; the warrior at whom Aroas had fired had left blood.
“Wah!” exclaimed Aroas. “Let him go.”
“And we will go, too, before they stop to think,” said White Thunder. So he took the scalp of thedead Catawba. Then, they hurried on, and travelled all day without a stop.
White Thunder delivered the wampum belt to the Delawares of the Susquehanna. They promised to join the Mingos in the march to the Albany council. This promise was made quickly, for the trophy of the Catawba scalp spread excitement. As soon as the Delawares learned that the Catawbas were in the country they made ready to pursue, on the war trail.
Big Bear commanded the Delawares. The Mingos were invited to join, and travel home that way. So they all set out, to see what had become of the Catawbas.
The forest seemed peaceful again. It was hard to believe that danger lurked among the trees, but the scalp at White Thunder’s belt showed what might happen at any moment.
In the second night the rain commenced; and when they wakened at daybreak they were wet and the forest was wet and soon the trails would be washed bare.
“This is bad,” said Big Bear. “But we will go on and maybe the rain will stop. If it doesn’t, our guns will be wet and we will be blind, and the Catawba will get away.”
The rain did not stop. At noon they halted, to talk.
“I feel that somebody is following us,” said Aroas, to Big Bear. “We should be careful.”
“The Mingo is thinking of his wife and a lodge fire,” answered Big Bear. “He hears the rain drip and it sounds to him like the feet of a Catawba. But the Delaware mean to strike the Catawba.”
“Just the same,” insisted Aroas, “there are enemynear. The Delaware have seen that the Mingo are not afraid, but these woods are full of evil.”
And even while he was speaking a gun cracked and with a screech a Delaware warrior sprang high and fell flat. In an instant everybody had dived behind a tree. From his tree trunk the Hunter, squatting low like a partridge, listened breathlessly. A Delaware, peeking, suddenly pointed his gun, and fired—and in the same moment a gun answered him and he dropped, shot through the head. A man yelled loudly, and darted backward into the brush. Robert glimpsed him—a large man, with long black hair and dark skin, in leggins and hunting shirt and fur cap. That was not an Indian. Big Bear leaped forward, and his gun only snapped upon the flint, for the priming was wet.
He stopped and ducked just in time; a bullet must have sped over him. Now the Delawares were crying—“The Black Rifle! It is death! Run!” Run they did, Big Bear the same as the others, and the Mingos and Robert following.
They ran helter skelter, much as the Catawbas had run when surprised. At last they stopped, and gathered again.
“You said truly, brother,” Big Bear panted, to Aroas. “The Black Rifle was upon our trail. Now we have lost two warriors. Wah! But he is not a man; he is a demon.”
“We have heard of the Black Hunter,” said White Thunder. “He is like death on the trail of the Indian. He strikes to kill, like the wounded bear. The Delaware have lost many warriors to the Black Hunter of the Juniata.”
And Robert himself had heard of Captain Jack,the giant settler who roamed the Pennsylvania woods, killing Indians in revenge for his family whom Indians had killed. The “Black Rifle” and the “Black Hunter” were the names given him. He feared nothing, no bullet could hurt him; he always struck before he was seen. It was small wonder that the Delawares ran to save their lives.
“The way home is closed,” Big Bear was saying. “But there will be English in the south, and blood shall pay for blood.”
“No. Your talk is wild talk,” White Thunder opposed. “You will do foolish to go against the English, and break the chain of friendship.”
“The Black Rifle is English, and two fresh Delaware scalps are hanging at his belt,” Big Bear retorted. “Why should we not kill the English?”
“The Black Rifle did it; not the English. He is a mad dog. The English are friends of the Mingo. They are welcome at Logstown. They will help us against the French who claim the country of the Ohio.”
“The English are driving the Delaware from the land granted them by the first father called Penn,” Big Bear answered. “Soon there will be only the Ohio Country in the west for the Delaware. The Delaware would rather have the French. The French do not take land; they give it. The English build forts and houses and clear off the land and there is no game, no place for the Indian. They shoot us. They call the Indians, dogs. The French leave things as they are; they ask the Indian to live near and hunt; they call the Indian, brother.”
“The friendship chain between the English and the Six Nations is strong,” said White Thunder.“The men of Onontio (which was the name for the French governor of Canada) are not wanted on the Ohio. The English bring us goods and that is enough.”
“We hear that the English claim all the land on one side of the Ohio and the French claim all the land on the other side,” replied Big Bear. “Then where does the Indian’s land lie? But seeing you will not strike the English with us, we will all go on to the trading house of the Englishman Cresap on the River Potomac. He will give us presents and fire-water to keep out the wet.”
That was all right. The Delawares and the Mingos with Robert the Hunter marched on through the rain. The Black Rifle and the rain had spoiled the war trail and the hearts of the Delawares were heavy.
The law of the forest seemed to be tit for tat. The Indians killed other Indians and white persons; the white men killed Indians. As to the French, Robert knew little, except he had heard that the French, who lived in the north, would shut the English traders from the Ohio Country.
They hastened southward, and the next noon a scout came back with word that he had seen a company of English. In these years before the War of the Revolution all the white men of the Colonies were English to the Indian, for America was a British province.
“How many?” asked Big Bear.
“The fingers of two hands.”
“What are they doing?”
“They are camped in the rain above the house of the Englishman Cresap.”
“Our guns are wet,” Big Bear said. “It is a bad time to fight. Let us go in to them. We will tell them we are poor and they will give us food and drink.”
They went on. The rain stopped. In the middle of the afternoon they sighted the Englishmen’s camp in a clearing of the forest upon the north bank of the upper Potomac of northern Maryland.
Then they whooped the scalp whoop and ran in. The English were eight Long Knives of Virginia, and stayed firm. Trader Cresap was here; two of the others were young; and when Big Bear asked who was the captain, Trader Cresap pointed to the younger of the two.
This captain appeared to be few in years, but was large and well formed, and had the grave air of a chief.
“Wah! A boy!” White Thunder grunted.
Big Bear shook hands with the boy, intending to grip him hard and make him cry out, which was an Indian joke. Instead it was Big Bear who cried out, astonished, for the young Englishman had gripped him first and had squeezed his hand so that the bones were almost crushed.
“Ugh!” Big Bear exclaimed. “A strong boy. As strong as a man.”
After they had shown the Catawba scalp and had received presents, Big Bear ordered a war dance, to celebrate the scalp. They built a large fire and all sat around while Big Bear made a speech, telling of the deeds of the Delawares and of the love they had for the English. Then the dance began, and so did the music. One warrior thumped a deer hide stretched tightly over a pot half full of water; andanother shook a rattle, of a dry gourd with shot inside it and a horse tail tied to it. The other Delawares, and Silver Heels, pranced around the fire, whooping.
White Thunder and Robert the Hunter looked on, with the English. The English, especially the young captain, were much pleased, for it was a fine dance.
After a time the young captain moved and sat beside White Thunder and Robert, as if curious to ask questions. The friend whom he had left was slender and tall and handsome, in three-cornered hat and red wool blanket-coat and decorated leather belt and deerskin trousers and knee boots. His name was Fairfax. The young captain himself was not so handsome; but he had steady blue eyes and large, straight nose, and a kind, but sober face tanned brown; and he was as heavy and as muscular as White Thunder.
He wore three-cornered hat, deer-hide shirt and cloth trousers and moccasins. Like his friend he was very different from the English traders who came with pack horse and canoe to Logstown of the Mingos.
He kept glancing at Robert. What he saw was a hard, wiry boy, in beaded hunting-shirt and leggins and moccasins, with bow and otter-skin quiver, and black eyes and long brown hair and skin as brown as an Indian’s, and both cheeks painted with a red dot in a blue circle—a Mingo sign that Robert thought very becoming.
“Your boy?” the young captain asked of White Thunder.
And White Thunder, the Keeper of Wampum, who spoke English, said:
“No. Belong Tanacharison, Half-King.”
“Delaware?”
“No! Seneca. No Delaware. Seneca.”
“Where are you from?”
“Shenango, what English call Logstown, ’way off beyond mountains, on Beautiful River.”
“The Ohio?”
“Yes. What you do here?”
“We make lands,” said the young captain.
“Injun lands?”
“No. English lands.”
“You walk heap ’round?” For that had been the way: to take as much land as one could walk around in a day, and the Indians had lost much land because the white men had cleared a path beforehand and had sent their fastest walkers.
“No,” the young chief answered. “We measure with a steel rope and spy-glass. I am a surveyor.”
“Humph!” said White Thunder. “Pretty soon mebbe you come with spy-glass to make English lands of Injun lands other side mountains.”
“That too is the country of the great king across the water,” answered the young captain. And he asked of Robert, very gravely: “You are Indian?”
“His father Injun, he Injun,” said White Thunder. “Some day he great warrior.”
“What is your name?”
“The Hunter,” said Robert.
“You’re not all Indian. You have white boy’s hair.”
“My mother called the White Woman. But meInjun; Seneca. My father Tanacharison, Half-King. He chief of all the Mingo,” Robert asserted proudly. His father really was not Tanacharison. Tanacharison had only adopted him, but there was no use in saying that.
“Where does your mother live?”
“White Woman Creek, in Shawnee country. I live Logstown with Half-King. Learn to be warrior; then follow war trail.”
“Against the English?”
“No. English are brothers of the Mingo.”
“Are the French not brothers?”
“No,” said Robert the Hunter. “Do not want French.”
“There are English in Logstown?”
“Many. Traders.”
“How old are you?”
“Ten summers.”
“I am sixteen,” said the young English captain. “My name is George Washington.Perhaps some day I will be a warrior.”
“You come to your brothers the Mingo?” proposed Robert.
“Maybe I shall,” agreed George Washington. “Wouldn’t you like to stay here and be English?”
“No,” said Robert. “Me Seneca.”
And it seemed to him that to be a Seneca was the best thing in the world, for the Senecas were of the Six Nations and had a council seat in the Long House of the Iroquois. But if the English were like this young chief they were not so bad, either.
The dance was slackening. The young captain moved away to his companions. After the dancethe Indians ate and drank again, and made camp in the dusk.
The next day the English broke camp, and marched up river, to cross over. The Indians followed, to watch and to get last presents. George Washington waded far out, driving his horse before him, to swim it. The current tugged at him, and Robert the Hunter brought him a large rock.
“Carry this, to keep feet down,” he said to George Washington. “That Injun way.”
George Washington thanked him politely, and carried the rock. Thus a Seneca boy had showed a white boy what an Indian could do better.
The English all crossed. The Delawares went on, and the Mingos turned for home. And this was the first meeting of Robert the Hunter, whose mother was Mary Harris of White Woman Creek, and of George Washington, the surveyor. But they were to meet again.
“He is a strong young man,” said White Thunder, speaking of Washington. “He will be a chief. He is now marking off lands for the English to live on. Some day he will mark off lands clear to the Ohio. The English will live there, the Injuns will live on the other side, and there will be no place for the French. That is good. When white men fight over Injun land the Injun gets the blows.”
They travelled rapidly into the west; and in due time were at Logstown, where Tanacharison the Half-King heard from White Thunder and from Robert of their adventures.
“What you say of this Washington sounds well,” he uttered, to the Hunter, that night. “But he isonly a boy, and so are you. When he grows to a warrior, then let him come to Logstown. Meanwhile the English should send a captain chief with men and big guns to build a great house on the Ohio so that we may trade with them and not be bothered by the French.”
“Why should the French try to drive out the English?” Robert asked.
“Because they also wish the Indian furs. And they wish the Beautiful River and all the land that it waters, from the Great Lakes to the big water south of the home of the Creeks.”
“Did they conquer it?” asked Robert.
“No, the Iroquois have conquered it by conquering the people. The French say that a captain of theirs, many years ago, discovered it by floating down the River Mississippi in the west, in a canoe. He took it for the King of France. But the Indians owned it; they were here first; the French have not conquered the Indians. The Iroquois are the conquerors, and they say that their brothers the English shall trade in this land and that their enemies the French shall stay out. The French have their own country. The Indians and the English have theirs. We are children of the British father, who treats us well. We cannot share our lands with two white nations or pretty soon we shall have nothing. I am telling you these things so that you may understand, and not listen to the foolish words of the Delawares.”
Robert continued to think a great deal about that other boy, George Washington, who asked questions like a boy but acted like a man. If the Long Knife and the Pennsylvania boys were that kind ofa boy, so strong and steady, the English beyond the mountains were going to be very powerful when the boys grew up.
George Croghan the trader, and Andrew Montour who spoke for Onas the governor of Pennsylvania, and gay Captain Joncaire of the French, were fine men; but somehow George Washington was different, like a young eagle among hawks, or a young oak in a clearing.