ple, but they failed to notice that only a handful were there at the time. hand
“conjectured they were Warriors coming into Our settlements & proceeded
to attack them.” On storming the town, they killed a man and a woman and
captured micheykapeecci. hand then sent a detachment to the nearby mun-
see camp, where they killed three more women and a boy.17
in attributing these murders to state weakness, historians echo hand
himself, who insisted he “could not prevent” his men’s “impetuous” brutality.
like hamilton, his British counterpart, hand sought to distance himself
from the actions of men he had mobilized for war. such excuses ring hollow.
hand’s expedition fell through, in part, because too few colonists answered
his call to arms. however readily some militia would “murder a defenceless
unsuspecting indian,” many refused to join his army at al . hand himself or-
dered cornstalk’s murderers to point pleasant without enough food to sup-
port them, necessitating gilmore’s ill- fated hunt. he also ordered the attack
on micheykapeecci’s camp. The general’s abortive attempts to wage a more
orderly war brought about the very kinds of atrocities he was supposed to
prevent. and he accepted that outcome. his distaste for murder and his de-
sire for indian allies were overshadowed by the imperative to win the Ohio
Valley for the United states. hand tolerated the militia’s “savage conduct” as
a necessary evil, a price he willingly paid for their future services in battle.
reluctance, 1777–79
105
These killers of defenseless women and children, he mused, “would Behave
well if they had men to contend with.”18
On that point, hand was wrong. to be sure, Ohio Valley colonists were a
hardy lot. since arriving in the mid- 1760s, those in the monongahela country
had fended off British soldiers, pennsylvania magistrates, and Virginian
speculators. They now enjoyed government support: local militia officers
raised over one hundred men to guard small forts, and hand supplied them
with ample food and ammunition. Until late march 1778, the area seemed
reasonably secure. But then dunquat’s Wyandots attacked three separate
homesteads on dunkard creek, killing five colonists and capturing four.
panicked inhabitants fled, leaving their forts unguarded. Within days, they
had “entirely evacuated” the surrounding area. in mid- april, on the upper
monongahela, a haudenosaunee party killed three more and captured seven,
then burned an abandoned fort just a few miles from the county magazine.
The attackers met so little resistance that they took time to kill and skin the
colonists’ sheep. John evans, the local militia commander, complained that
“the forts [we]re all a Breaking” as families fled for safety. evans soon fol-
lowed, leaving the militia’s precious provisions unguarded. The raiders
promptly torched his stockade, destroying nine thousand pounds of salted
pork. elsewhere, news of the raids eviscerated local defenses and emptied
hundreds of square miles of recently colonized territory. By mid- may, no one
remained in northern Westmoreland county and its militia commander, ar-
chibald lochry, feared “a general evacuation” of all frontier forts. in south-
west Virginia, his counterpart William preston reported that “the people
below me are quite cleared off,” pulling back the frontier by at least thirty
miles. terrified colonists upstream begged preston for protection, but they
refused to help defend the homes of others. at Fort pitt, a beleaguered gen-
eral hand warned that, without reinforcements, “this whole country will be
abandoned or over- run by the enemy in a short time.”19
army officers blamed cowardice, faulting colonists for “constantly calling
for reinforcements whilst [they] themselves run away.” But the weakness of
frontier defenses had more to do with social and material circumstances. a
household’s ability to defend itself hinged on the presence and resolve of a
wider community acting together for the greater good. in a newly created
landscape of scattered small farms, with churches, courts, and militias in
their infancy, such col aboration proved a tall order. The militias’ effective-
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training, most of whom had known one another for a few years at most.
neighbors huddled for safety in makeshift stockades, but doing so enabled
attackers to strike their fields and livestock. in Kentucky, fear of attack pre-
vented colonists from sowing crops. hundreds of miles upriver, indians
burned Westmorelanders’ “houses, Barns and grain.” at point pleasant,
dunquat’s forces killed nearly all of the garrison’s 150 cattle, depriving the
militia of their only nearby food source. chronic lack of salt prevented colo-
nists from preserving meat, and livestock that were left unslaughtered some-
times starved for lack of winter forage. Where cattle remained for sale,
eastern merchants paid a premium to drive them across the mountains to the
war- torn seaboard colonies.20
to solve these problems, colonists turned to the nascent revolutionary
governments. at Fort pitt, hand fielded endless pleas for troops to protect
stockades, mil s, and fields. a southwest Virginia militia officer warned that
his county could avoid ruin only with help from either “congress or our own
state.” alarmed by the retreating frontier, government officials tried to oblige.
Virginia dispatched a militia company to guard far- off Boonesborough and
bought food and ammunition “for the general use of the so. Western Fron-
tier.” a local militia commander sold colonists gunpowder from the county
arsenal, explaining that they “could not be supplied elsewhere.” On another
occasion, the Fort pitt garrison sent 1,500 pounds of army flour to deter col-
onists at ligonier from fleeing. in a span of a few months, pennsylvania’s ex-
ecutive council sent lochry a large supply of ammunition, as well as £3,500 to
buy rifles, salt, and horses. lochry in turn promised his neighbors militia pay
and rations simply for remaining in place. Their refusal to flee, he reasoned,
itself amounted to military service.21
even with state support, mobilizing and supplying Ohio Valley colonists
proved an immense challenge. east of the mountains, congress and the states
repeatedly failed to equip the continental army with necessary food, cloth-
ing, and blankets. delivering them to scattered outposts across the alleghe-
nies posed more problems. robbery, corruption, and the lack of boats or
horses repeatedly kept shipments from their destinations. in southwest Vir-
ginia, forted- up colonists fed militia out of their own meager supplies, gam-
bling that the official commissary would someday repay them. But payment
proved a problem as wel . By the late 1770s, wartime inflation rendered paper
currency all but worthless. congress and the states bought supplies and paid
militia with certificates, but recipients had no way to redeem them for hard
money.22
reluctance, 1777–79
107
These challenges crippled the militia. men volunteered readily to garri-
son stockades near their homes, but they resisted orders to defend other
areas, let alone march across the Ohio. some exploited the ongoing boundary
dispute to avoid militia drafts, and many who did show up subsequently de-
serted. Officers struggled to collect fines from cash- poor farmers, leaving
them no money for supplies. an uncertain chain of command made matters
worse. Virginia governor patrick henry, deeming hand’s defensive plans
“too complex,” told county commanders to ignore them and act on their own
initiative. south of Wheeling, colonists refused to send men to guard a dis-
tant fort and threatened to “move off with our families and stock” if hand did
not back down. Upriver, another community seized “all the ammonition and
guns” intended for the local militia, promising to “stay & difend themselves”
and “acct. wt. the publick” for the cost.23 such resources could bolster local
defenses, but quickly escaped the control of the governments that provided
them.
Finding little help from the official militia, some communities tried to
organize their own defenses. in pennsylvania’s Bedford county, east of the
alleghenies, inhabitants “voluntarily formed ranging parties” to patrol the
surrounding countryside. These select rangers could do far more, the orga-
nizers argued, than militia drafted from the general population, most of
whom “would only be a dead weight & unnecessary expence.” But the volun-
teers remained on duty only after community leaders petitioned hand to pay
them “as militia in actual service.” even the scheme’s promoters stressed that
the rangers needed “officers to command them . . . & persons appointed to
furnish them with provisions.” When colonists downstream from pittsburgh
proposed raising a similar company, they similarly turned to hand for sup-
plies. in the fall of 1778, Westmoreland county leaders raised 150 volunteers
to attack the allegheny Valley senecas, but they, too, relied on the continen-
tal army for provisions and ammunition. after marching ninety miles those
supplies ran out, thanks to “much waste and destruction,” and the Westmore-
landers turned back without seeing a single seneca.24
These military failures had little to do with lack of courage or fighting
ability: as individuals, many colonists possessed both. But personal virtues
alone could not mobilize, supply, or command collective military operations.
in contrast to eastern colonies like massachusetts, whose inhabitants had
shared militia service for generations,25 Ohio Valley colonists lived in a new-
born, scattered, and fractious society with tenuous interpersonal ties, weak
social institutions, and chronic shortages of food and other vital supplies. The
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resources and coordination necessary for large- scale mobilization proved
hard to come by, even with the aid of congress, state governments, and the
continental army. Upper Ohio colonists outnumbered their indian neigh-
bors and repeatedly demonstrated a readiness to kill them, but without state
aid they lacked the means to wage war.
even after British and revolutionary regimes mobilized the region for war,
opportunities for peace remained, thanks to both military failures and indian
diplomacy. Ongoing violence undermined these efforts, but the greatest im-
pediments proved to be the ineptitude and prejudices of continental army
officers. Ohio indians repeatedly proposed peace talks, and each time revolu-
tionary leaders bungled their end of the negotiations.
These bids for peace revolved around the neighboring towns of
goschachgünk and lichtenau. The delaware built goschachgünk in 1775 as
part of their program of cultural adaptation. They laid it out in a grid pattern,
following the model of moravian mission towns, assigning different clans to
different streets. White eyes and netawatwees initial y suggested the moravi-
ans settle there as wel , but many of their people refused to accept resident
missionaries. For his part, Zeisberger preferred to run his own mission,
where he could closely regulate his converts’ education, family structure, and
sexuality. so the moravians founded lichtenau a short distance downriver,
within walking distance yet physical y separate. despite Zeisberger’s supervi-
sion, the mission remained a delaware and mohican place, where isaac
glikhican and other “indian helpers” governed day- to- day affairs. a onetime
war leader and councilor, glikhican personal y converted many other dela-
wares, including israel Welapachtschiechen, a widely respected elder whose
fused elbow earned him the title “straight- armed man.” Both men remained
active in delaware politics and diplomacy. The mission’s proximity to
goschachgünk strengthened ties between christian and non- christian del-
awares while also respecting the differences between them. it enabled dela-
ware leaders to employ the missionaries as scribes and kept the moravians
well informed of events in the surrounding world.26
These twin towns became centers for diplomacy, thanks to their close ties
to the general y pro- British Wyandot to the northwest. The two nations had
enjoyed a close relationship for years. The delaware had settled in the
muskingum Valley at the Wyandots’ invitation. The arrangement gave the
delaware a new homeland, while the Wyandot gained friendly neighbors to
help protect their own territory. like the delawares of lichtenau, many
reluctance, 1777–79
109
Wyandots considered themselves christian, though they followed the ca-
tholicism of French Jesuits rather than the protestantism of german moravi-
ans. in both cases, they had accepted new beliefs and rituals while maintaining
substantial control over their communities. in 1777, dunquat’s people an-
swered hamilton’s call to arms, while White eyes, gelelemend, and glikhi-
can persuaded most delawares to remain neutral. White eyes became the
United states’ closest Ohio indian al y. But these contrasting positions did
not lessen Wyandot- delaware goodwil . dunquat’s embrace of the moravian
missionaries as kin, even as he went to war against the United states, reflected
this deep- seated amity.27
in the months after hamilton’s war song, White eyes, glikhican, and
Welapachtschiechen resolved a series of crises that threatened to poison
delaware- american relations. in september 1777, messengers from Fort pitt
warned that general hand planned to “eradicate” all indians. soon after-
ward, rumors of Virginian attack sparked a panic, but White eyes investi-
gated personal y and found only a herd of wild horses. about a week later
new letters from hand and morgan assured them of U.s. goodwill and of-
fered to build a fort to protect the delaware for the duration of the war. mor-
gan also sent a precious supply of salt. reassured, delaware leaders renewed
their commitment to neutrality, openly deriding hamilton’s plan to “restore
peace by making War.” in the spring of 1778, micheykape
ecci returned home
and reported the attack on her family. Then a group of defecting interpreters
and indian agents visited on their way from Fort pitt to detroit. Their warn-
ings split the goschachgünk council. One delaware community, led by Wan-
dochale and his son Buckongahelas, had already joined the British alliance.
many others argued that the americans “were offering [them] peace with
one hand and were using the hatchets against [them] with the other.” mora-
vian delawares intervened. Welapachtschiechen lobbied wavering council
members, while glikhican joined White eyes on a new peace delegation to
Fort pitt. There, they persuaded hand to define a territory where delawares
could hunt without fear of american attacks.28 These concessions helped pre-
serve goschachgünk’s neutrality.
The Wyandots, meanwhile, began to doubt the value of their British alli-
ance. in may 1778, dunquat and one hundred warriors returned to lichtenau
on their way to attack point pleasant. as usual, Zeisberger noted that the
Wyandots were “all orderly and polite.” many attended moravian religious
services, where some prayed with their rosaries as their Jesuit teachers had
taught them. in the weeks that followed, similarly well- behaved warriors
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passed through, always respecting the missionary’s dislike of native ceremo-
nies. Their kinship seemed firm, but dunquat’s campaign went badly. On 16
may the point pleasant garrison repulsed his attack; two weeks later, ten of
his men died attacking a small Virginian stockade. a war that dunquat had
joined reluctantly had become far more costly than expected. at a June coun-
cil, hamilton congratulated his allies for driving the colonists “a great dis-
tance from your hunting grounds,” and his superiors later agreed that the
Wyandots could keep any land they “conquer[ed] from the rebels.” But the
disastrous point pleasant campaign revived old divisions between more and
less militant factions, convincing White eyes that his friends were becoming