Roosevelt's the Winning of the West

As a subject of historical research, “the West” has recently come into prominence, it having become, by position, population, and political influence, what Mr. Roosevelt calls “ the heart of the nation.” In the “standard histories ” of the United States written by Eastern men, very little attention has been given to Western history, and what little there is is, in the main, inaccurate and superficial. Before the treaty between Great Britain and France, in 1763, the history of the territory west of the Alleghenies pertained to that of Canada. Mr. Parkman has learnedly and most felicitously set forth the Discovery of the West and the Pontiac Conspiracy, which, for a year after the signing of the treaty of 1763, ravaged the frontier settlements, and was ended by the expedition of Colonel Bouquet into Ohio in 1764. The first occupation of the Illinois country by British troops occurred in October of the following year. Not until recently has the subsequent history of the West been treated with the care and scholarly use ot original documents which Mr. Parkman has bestowed upon his works. The Johns Hopkins University, in its Historical and Political-Science Studies, has done some admirable work in this department of study. Books concerning the West have, nevertheless, been many, and some of them valuable ; more of them, however, have been thin and sensational, and relate traditionary tales of doubtful authenticity. Their authors have been Western men of limited education, and without access to manuscript materials such as are now available to historical students.

Mr. Theodore Roosevelt is the latest writer who has entered this field, and his two volumes on The Winning of the West¹ will find many appreciative readers. His style is natural, simple, and picturesque, without any attempt at fine writing, and he does not hesitate to use Western words which have not yet found a place in the dictionary. He has not taken the old story as he finds it printed in Western books, but has sought for new materials in manuscript collections ; and has consulted original documents in the State Department at Washington, the Canadian Archives at Ottawa, — unrivaled on this continent for materials in Western history, — and many private manuscript collections ; and he has read the printed American State Papers and Archives and the Virginia State Papers. Few writers of American history have covered a wider or better field of research, or are more in sympathy with the best modern method of studying history from original sources; and yet, in reading his narrative and noting his references, we have a feeling that he might profitably have spent more time in consulting and collating the rich materials to which he had access, and thereby have enlarged his information and modified many of his opinions.

Time is an essential requisite in producing a standard, authoritative historical work. No man, whatever may be his ability or industry, — even if he be a ranchman, — can write history in its best form on horseback. It is evident from these volumes that Mr. Roosevelt is a man of ability and of great industry. He has struck out fresh and original thoughts, has opened new lines of investigation, and has written paragraphs, and some chapters, of singular felicity; and then he has tripped on level ground where there was no need of it. The documents before him, if he had taken the time to study them, would have shown him his errors. Horace prescribed that authors should keep their manuscripts by them for nine years; perhaps half that time would be judicious in this fast age. There are indications in the text before us that copy was sent to the printers as soon as it was written ; and hence the seasoning process, which is as essential in historical composition as in wood-working, has been lost. Mr. Roosevelt, in making so good a work, has clearly shown that he could make a better one, if he would take more time in doing it. Writers, and young writers especially, — Mr. Roosevelt is only thirty-one years of age, — are apt, in the glow of composition, to deal in sharp epithets and sneering comments concerning preceding writers who they think have erred ; and these passages are commonly toned down, or, what is better, canceled, in a deliberate revision of the manuscript. Our author allows his to stand, and they look strangely on the printed page. We note a few of these instances. He says (i. 240), “ Some minor historians ” assert so and so ; who are the major historians ? And again (ii. 87) : “ A certain kind of pseudo-historian ” is fond of writing about the barbarity of the British in employing Indian scalping-parties. “Only a few of the early Western historians had the least conception of the value of evidence ” (ii. 159). “ That a contraiy impression prevails is due to the gross ignorance of the average writer” (ii. 372). The full measure of his wrath he persistently pours upon the head of James R. Gilmore (Edmund Kirke), who wrote the Life of John Sevier and other books of fiction, giving them the guise of biography and history. It would seem that a doubt might arise in the mind of a contemplative sporting-man, who has shot buffalo and grizzlies and owns a ranch in Montana, whether such game was worth so much powder. Of Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor, he says: “ The spirit in which it is written cannot be called even technically honest. As a history it would be beneath criticism, were it not for the high character of its author ’ (i. 334). And again : " Some of the small Western historians who have written about George Rogers Clark have really damaged his reputation by the absurd inflation of their language; a sample of which is rendering him ludicrous by calling him ‘ the Hannibal of the West’ and ‘the Washington of the West’” (ii. 82). The “small Western historian ” who termed Clark “ the Hannibal of the West ” was John Randolph of Roanoke, who was not a Westerner nor a historian ; and the other “small Western historian ” quoted was Governor John Reynolds, who made use of the expression in a sentence as follows: “ He [Clark] was in the West what General Washington was in the East, the unrivaled champion of the Revolution ; and he may be styled with great propriety the Washington of the West.”

There is an obvious historical incongruity in comparing Colonel Clark with Hannibal or Washington; but in the connection in which the expressions were originally used — by the former writer as showing Clark’s extraordinary energy and sagacity in the invasion of a foreign country, and success in wrestling with enormous physical obstacles ; and by the latter as showing Clark to he the champion of the Revolution in the West — they do not exhibit quite such questionable literary taste as does the author’s allusion to “ small Western historians,” which he neglected to cancel in the revision of his manuscript.

No one more highly appreciates the patriotic and heroic services of George Rogers Clark than our author, or has set them forth in more truthful or forcible language. In fact, his constant and just eulogy of Clark is one of the most creditable and striking features of the work. He says (i. 24) : “ Had it not been for the conquest of the Illinois towns in [1778 and] 1779, we should probably never have had any Northwest to settle. He [Clark] was the sole originator of the plan for the conquest of the Northwestern lands, and, almost unaided. he had executed his own scheme. For a year he had been wholly cut off from all communication with the home [Virginia] authorities, and had received no [outside] help of any kind. Alone, and with very slender means, he had conquered and held a vast and beautiful region, which but for him would have formed part of a foreign and hostile empire; he had clothed and paid his soldiers with the spoils of his enemies [and the contributions of the French settlers, whose friendship he had won] ; and he spent his own fortune as carelessly as lie risked his own life. When we take into account the determined efforts of Spain and France to confine us to the land east of the Alleghanies, and then to the land southwest of the Ohio, the slavishness of Congress in instructing our commissioners to do whatever France wished, and the readiness shown by one of the commissioners — Franklin — to follow those instructions, it certainly looks as if there would not even have been an effort made by us to get the Northwest territory, had we not already possessed it, — thanks to George Rogers Clark ” (i. 89, 90).

It is a notable fact that Clark was only twenty-five years of age when he made this campaign. Clark’s capture of Vincennes is also described in fitting terms as follows: “Clark, without artillery, took a heavy stockade protected by cannon and swivels, and garrisoned by trained soldiers. The boldness of his plan and the resolute skill with which he followed it out; his perseverance through the intense hardships of the midwinter march ; the address with which he kept the French and Indians neutral ; the masterful way in which he controlled his troops, together with the ability and courage he displayed in the actual attack, combined to make his feat the most memorable of all the deeds done west of the Alleghanies in the Revolutionary War. It was likewise the most important in its results ; for, had he been defeated, we would not only have lost Illinois [the Northwest territory], but in all probability Kentucky also ” (i. 85).

The writer speaks of this as being the most memorable feat done west of the Alleghanies during the Revolutionary War. Was there one done east of the mountains, with such feeble means, which in heroism and results could equal it ? Mr. Roosevelt, by the way, has a poor opinion of the fighting done in the East. He says, “ We certainly have overestimated the actual fighting qualities of the Revolutionary troops, and have never laid stress enough on the folly and jealousy with which the States behaved during the contest ” (ii. 404).

“ It is idle,” says Mr. Roosevelt, " to talk of the conquest [of the Northwest] as being purely a Virginia affair ” (ii. 90). It was, nevertheless, nothing else. Clark was a Virginian, and held his commission from the governor. Three of his four companies were recruited in Virginia and western Pennsylvania, then controlled by Virginia. Their rendezvous was at Redstone, now Brownsville, thirty miles south of Pittsburg. Redstone is wrongly located on Mr. Roosevelt’s map. Not an officer in Clark’s little command of one hundred and seventy men had a continental commission, nor did a man of them “ care a continental ” for the authority of Congress or of the great Eastern commander-in-chief. Mr. Roosevelt repeats the error when he says (i. 25), “ All our territory lying beyond the Alleghanies, North and South, was first won for us by the Southwesterners [meaning probably Kentucky men] fighting for their own land.” Clark had a short residence in Kentucky, but his men, as already stated, were in the main Virginians, and had never been in Kentucky. Clark says of them, “ The [recruiting] officers got only such as had friends in Kentucky, or those induced by their own interest and desire to see the country. " He had the promise of four companies from the Holston settlements in east Tennessee ; but only one company came to the rendezvous at Louisville, and the men deserted when it was ascertained that the objective point of the expedition was the Illinois country. One hundred and fifty of the one hundred and seventy men in the expedition were brought by Clark from Redstone.

Virginia not only conquered the Northwest territory, but established civil government over it, and held it as a county of Virginia until January 2, 1781, when the Virginia legislature ceded the territory to the United States under certain conditions, the chief of which were that the State should be reimbursed for the expenses it had incurred in conquering the ceded territory, and that Clark, his officers and soldiers, should have a certain quantity of land given them. The United States acceded to these conditions, and in the treaty of peace of 1783 it was included within the boundaries of the United States. And yet Mr. Roosevelt says, ” It is idle to talk of the conquest as being purely a Virginia affair.” The saving of the Northwest from recapture by the British was also a Virginia affair, as will appear in a narrative we shall presently relate, which Mr. Roosevelt has overlooked.

Our author makes only two divisions of the West, — the Northwest and the Southwest, the Ohio being the dividing line. A more natural subdivision would be one which regarded Kentucky and Tennessee the Central West.

Mr. Roosevelt’s first chapter, on The Spread of the English-Speaking People, has no necessary connection with his main subject, and is marred by inaccuracies which were needless if he had taken more time and judicious counsel in writing it. Bacon, whose English was better than his Latin, wrote his scientific works in Latin because it was then the language of science, and not, as our author says, through “ fear lest his works should remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimportant insular kingdom ; ” and it can hardly yet be said that English is “ now the speech of two continents.”

To Mr. Roosevelt Kentucky and Tennessee are the most attractive portions of the West, and t.o them, the Holston, Watauga, and Cumberland settlements, the writer has given his chief attention ; and this part of the work is well done. his account of the Watauga commonwealth, formed in 1772, the first organized government west of the mountains, is an interesting contribution to our political history. The settlers there adopted a constitution, and he says “ they were the first men of American birth to establish a free and independent community on the continent.” Having devoted a hundred pages to the manners and customs of the Western Indians and the backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies, he begins his story of Winning the West at the date May 1, 1769, when Daniel Boon left his home in North Carolina to explore Kentucky. (Mr. Roosevelt uniformly omits the final e from the name of the Kentucky pioneer.) The same year, the Watauga settlement was made in western North Carolina, where James Robertson appeared in 170 and John Sevier in 1772, men who became eminent in the later history of the West. In 1780 Robertson founded the settlement on the Cumberland River. The Dunmore war broke out in the spring of 1774, in which the Ohio Indians inflicted untold miseries on the frontier settlements. It raged but a few months, during which the Indians under Chief Cornstalk were defeated in a pitched battle at Point Pleasant, at the mouth of the Great Kanawha, and a peace was concluded with the Indians by Lord Dunmore.

The origin of the Dunmore war has been discussed with much partisan zeal. Mr. Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia, 1787, printed what purported to be Logan’s speech, in which appeared this sentence: “ Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature.” Jefferson accompanied the speech with the comment that Captain (not Colonel) Michael Cresap was “ a man infamous for the many murders he had committed on those much-injured people.” Luther Martin, the attorneygeneral of Maryland, who had married a daughter of Cresap, bitterly attacked Jefferson for printing the speech and making the comment; showed that Cresap was not present when Logan’s family was killed at Baker’s Landing ; and asserted that the speech was probably fictitious. Jefferson was greatly incensed by this attack, and went about collecting evidence to prove that the speech was genuine, and that the allegations against Cresap were true. Such of the testimony collected as answered his purpose he printed in Appendix IV. of the next edition of his Notes, 1800. The letters and sworn statements which did not suit his purpose he suppressed, and they are now with his papers in the State Department at Washington, having been bought by the government in 1848. One of these suppressed letters was written by George Rogers Clark, then twenty-one years of age, who was in a party with Cresap, many miles from the spot where the murder was committed. The letter proves conclusively Cresap’s innocence of the charge, and states that when the report of the killing came into camp the actors were severely condemned by Cresap. Mr. Jefferson was able to assert that he did not invent the speech; that it was shown by General John Gibson in Dunmore’s camp, and printed in 1774. The sister of Logan, who was killed at Baker’s Landing, was Gibson’s squaw. She had with her a half-breed infant, whose life was saved, and the child was brought up and educated by Gibson. Gibson asserted that the speech was made to him by Logan, in the Indian language, the two being by themselves in the woods, and that he wrote out a translation, which he showed in the Dumnore camp. It will never be known how much of the speech was Logan’s and how much of it was Gibson’s. Mr. Roosevelt does not fully acquit Cresap of the charges which Jefferson and his correspondents made and insinuated against him. The record of Cresap, so far as is known, was good. When the Revolutionary War broke out, he raised a company of one hundred and thirtytwo riflemen in Maryland, and marched with them to Boston in twenty-two days, He died in New York city, in October. 1775, and his tombstone is in Trinity Church graveyard.

The letter of Clark which has just been mentioned shows how the Dumnore war began, and is an important document for other reasons. Mr. Roosevelt cites it as being in “ Jefferson MSS., 5th series, vol. i., Archives of State Department, Washington,” where it is not easily accessible to general readers. The letter has been printed at least five times, in as many historical books which are not rare, and the reference should have been made to one of these. It is common for our author to cite manuscript collections when the document is readily accessible in print. Another instance of such citation of an important document is that of Governor Henry Hamilton’s report to General Haldimand of July 6, 1781, giving his (the British) account of his campaign of 1779 and of Clark’s capture of Vincennes. It is referred to as “Hamilton’s ‘brief account’ in the Haldimand MSS.,” whereas it is in print in the Michigan Pioneer Collections, ix. 489-510. As a “ brief account ” it fills eighty-five pages of folio manuscript, and twenty-seven closely printed octavo pages. Hamilton gave it no heading.

Mr. Roosevelt mentions the raid of Captain Byrd from Detroit into Kentucky, in May, 1780, which ended very abruptly; but he does not see the connection between it and larger operations frustrated on the Mississippi, the only outcrop of which was a feeble raid on St. Louis during the same month. If our author had taken more time to examine the Haldimand Collection at Ottawa, or had even read the portions of it printed in the Michigan Pioneer Collections, he would have “ struck (as he says) a mine of information which has never been used in any Western history. The Byrd raid was simply a diversion to keep George Rogers Clark busy while other affairs were secretly in progress. These matters can here be only briefly outlined.

The cabinet at London in 1779 conceived two similar schemes, one at the East, the other at the West, for bringing the Revolutionary War to a close. The one on the Eastern coast was to send a naval and military force, under Clinton and Cornwallis, to Charleston, S. C., which should subdue and ravage the Southern States, and work its way of conquest northward. The British fleet was laying siege to Charleston, while Byrd was making his raid into Kentucky. The Western project was to send a naval and military force, under General Campbell, from Pensacola up the Mississippi, — for Spain, May 8, 1779, had declared war against Great Britain, — to capture New Orleans and other Spanish settlements on the river; and meeting at Natchez a large force of Indians sent down from the North, to proceed to the recapture of the Northwest territory, Kentucky, and Tennessee from the Americans. The Indians, in their passage from the North, were to capture St. Louis and St. Genevieve on the west bank of the river.

On June 17, 1779, Lord George Germain sent to General Haldimand orders concerning the Western scheme. These were transmitted to the Western governors in a circular letter. George Rogers Clark captured one of these letters, and Governor Galvez, of New Orleans, another, or at least became possessed of the contents of it; and both took prompt measures to defeat the project. Governor Sinclair, of Michilimackinac (Mackinaw), was to furnish the Indians; and February 15, 1780, he wrote to General Haldimand acknowledging the receipt of his lordship’s requisition, and said : “ I sent a war party of Indians to the country of the Sioux, to put that nation in motion under their chief, Wabasha. They are directed to proceed with all dispatch to the Natchez. I shall send other bands of Indians from thence on the same service as soon as I can safely disclose the object of their mission,” Two days later he wrote that the Mine mines, Puants, Sacs, and Rhenards were to assemble at the portage of the Wisconsin and Fox rivers.

March 8, Governor De Peyster, at Detroit, wrote to Sinclair, “ Your movements down the Mississippi will be seconded from this place; ’ and to Haldimand, the same day : " I flatter myself that this early movement [the Byrd expedition] will facilitate Governor Sinclair’s parties in their enterprises down the Mississippi, and he of use to General Campbell, if he has not already taken New Orleans. The Wabash Indians and some from Mackinaw have promised to amuse Mr. Clark at the Falls.”

This well - devised scheme failed. Clark knew not only the general features of the scheme, but by means of spies every movement of the enemy, and was ready to meet every emergency. His activity and military sagacity were never more conspicuous than at this period. Governor Galvez, at New Orleans, also showed wonderful energy and ability. He collected a fleet and army, and proceeded to assault and capture all the British ports and garrisons on the river, including those of Natchez ; and he took eight British vessels engaged in the Mobile and Pensacola public transport service. He then captured Mobile and laid siege to Pensacola. General Campbell, therefore, had other engagements in May, 1780, than to meet the Sioux Indians and other Northern tribes at Natchez.

The Indians, having no tidings from the South, appeared, May 26, before St. Louis, and here probably heard for the first time of the disasters which had befallen the British posts on the river and General Campbell at Pensacola. Clark, also, whose name was a terror to Indians, had been informed by his spies of their approach, and, with his men from the Falls, was on the opposite bank of the river, near Cahokia, twenty-four hours before the Indians appeared, ready to give his aid when summoned by the Spanish governor of St. Louis. The savages, in this emergency, were naturally undecided what to do. They made a feeble raid on the town, killing and capturing persons found outside the palisades, but not venturing to make an attack on the fortified in closure. Some of them crossed the river and made a similar raid around Cahokia. Then all departed northward to their homes, and the Northwest territory was saved for Americans.

The Byrd expedition from Detroit was in progress during Clark’s absence in the defense of St. Louis. He hurried back to Kentucky. Dressed and painted like an Indian, be pressed his way, with two companions, through the wilderness to Harrodsburg, closed up the land office, and, drafting four fifths of the grown men, raised a thousand troops to follow the Indians. Byrd, having captured two stockades at a fork of the Licking River, retreated as expeditiously as did the Indians from St. Louis. Clark followed into Ohio, and severely punished the invaders. The great scheme of Lord Germain having failed, no further attempt was made by the British to conquer the West.

The Eastern scheme, which for a time seemed like a success, failed in the end as signally as did the Western. The battle of King’s Mountain, fought on the side of the Americans by the hardy and unenrolled mountaineers of Tennessee and North Carolina, under Campbell and Shelby, turned the scale ; and the proud army of Cornwallis, driven northward, was penned up at Yorktown, where it surrendered. No further attempt was made by the British to conquer the colonies on the east slope of the Alleghanies, and the war was ended.