Volume 4, Chapter 51, The War in the West
The war in the West, as in the North, largely consisted of a series of terror raids.
But here the essence of the war was not a series of raids by heavily armed, counter-revolutionary forces at war with the populace itself.
Here the main pro-British forces were the Indians, understandably deeply hostile to the settlers who had pushed back their territory. Indian raids were proportionately more massive, and warfare in the West was a guerrilla war on both sides, a genocidal war between two hostile peoples.
Of course, another difference in the Western War was the vast amounts of unoccupied land
and the scarcity of inhabitants. That made the war in the West relatively unimportant
and overlooked in the scale of the war as a whole. Its ultimate and long-range importance,
however, was considerable, for the ultimate disposition of the vast Western Territory
was at stake.
The region north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, captured by the British from
the French in the Seven Years' War, was virtually unoccupied.
This region, as well as what is now northern and western New York, was controlled during
the Revolution by the British.
The two strong British forts commanding the region, Detroit on Lake Michigan and Niagara
in Western New York were the hub of operations for British regulars, Tory bands and Indians
against the frontier.
The mutual devastation, especially in more populated upstate New York, was enormous.
The story of the Revolutionary War in the West is essentially the story of the brilliant
young Virginia frontiersman George Rogers Clark.
It has already been shown that Clark played a large part in the early phases of the war,
in saving the Kentucky settlers from the domination of the Transylvania Company.
He had also been appointed as a major in the Virginia militia and the head of its forces
in Kentucky.
Clark conceived a truly daring scheme with his handful of Kentuckians he would strike
Secretly and swiftly at the French towns in what is now southern Illinois, towns that
could serve as sources of attack upon the Kentuckians by Illinois Indians.
The complacent British had left these French towns virtually undefended.
Approving of Clark's plan, Governor Patrick Henry made him a lieutenant colonel and authorized
him to proceed.
By the time Clark reached the last lap of his expedition, the departure from the Falls
of the Ohio on June 26, 1778, his force had dwindled to considerably fewer than 200, and
he had estimated 500 men as his minimum need. His command would be outnumbered five to one
by the resident militia of the French towns, and more than that by the Indians of the region.
Nevertheless, he characteristically paid little attention to the odds.
The more I reflected on my weakness, the more I was pleased with the enterprise.
Sailing down the Ohio to the mouth of the Tennessee River by June 30, Clark marched
up quietly through the Illinois country.
On the night of July 4, the hungry little band reached and captured the French town
In the town of Cascasquia, without firing a shot, the surprise had been complete.
Clark shrewdly spared the people of Cascasquia from any military reprisals or plunder, and also told them of the French entry into the war.
Led by Father Pierre Gibault, the French now hailed the American forces as liberators.
The nearby towns of Cahokia and Prairie du Rocher fell as painlessly.
It was clear that to safeguard the newly captured towns, the next objective would have to be
Vincennes, another French town 180 miles to the east.
Vincennes, on the Wabash River, was a key town commanding the Great Portage and River
Route from the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes and Detroit down to the Wabash and thence
2, The Ohio River. Vincennes, too, was left in the hands of French militia and undefended
by British troops. Father Gibault rushed to Vincennes and persuaded the French population
to change sides, and the people of Vincennes readily agreed. A single American platoon
was enough to occupy the town. Clark's meager force, now dwindled to 100, was scattered
among the four French towns and was kept supplied from Spanish-held New Orleans. Through bravery
and bluff, Clark's charismatic personality and his ability to appear out of the blue
deeply impressed the powerful Indian tribes of the region, and he was not only able to
occupy the four towns of the Illinois-Indiana region, but also to neutralize the massive
Indian Power on which the British had counted to move against the American frontier.
At this point, British Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton, Commandant of Detroit, embarked
upon the reconquest of the Illinois-Indiana region.
Ultimately, he hoped to join with British agent John Stewart and southern Indians to
sweep away all traces of Americans west of the Appalachians.
Setting out in early October 1778, Hamilton expected to attract thousands of Indians along
his march. He reached Vincennes on December 17 with 600 men and marched in and took the
town without opposition. The French militia, seeing on which side their bread was now buttered,
had quickly shifted back to the English side. The winter weather was extremely bad and so
So Hamilton decided to wait until spring to rendezvous with Stuart's Southern Indians
on the Tennessee River. Clark, of whom Hamilton had just heard for the first time, and the
town of Kaskaskia could be attended to in due course. Confidently, Hamilton sent home
most of his force to winter more comfortably in Detroit, and sent out his Indians on various
AIDS. He remained at the Vincennes Fort with eighty men, awaiting the Great Assembly in
advance the following spring. An ordinary American commander would have taken advantage
of this respite to hightail it out of the Illinois area. But Clarke was no ordinary
commander. To Clarke the situation was clear. In the spring, Hamilton would be able to assemble
Clark was able enough men at Vincennes not only to capture Illinois but Kentucky and
perhaps Pittsburgh, able indeed to sweep the Americans out of the West.
Now Hamilton was weak and the only course for the Americans was an immediate surprise attack
against an overconfident British force who would never expect an American attack in the
midst of the vile midwinter weather.
Clark decided on a joint attack by land and by water, the latter consisting of one warship
which proved unable to reach Vincennes in time for the fray.
To supplement his fewer than 90 Americans, Clark attracted about 80 Frenchmen to the
cause by display of enormous confidence and assurance.
He launched his seemingly quixotic expedition on February 5.
Slogging through intense rains and rising floods, his little band was able to reach Vincennes undetected by the enemy by February 23rd.
Replacing surprise by bluff, Clark won over the opportunistic French townspeople, none of whom ever dared to inform the British garrison in the fort of the arrival of the Americans.
He swiftly occupied the town, added eager French militia to his force and laid siege to the British fort.
He continued to employ daring and braggadocio to cripple the morale of the British forces,
so impressing the French half of the garrison that they were ready to surrender.
The gamble had succeeded with hardly the loss of a single man.
Stunned at the sudden reversal of his fortunes,
The intimidated Hamilton was induced to surrender on February 25. Universally hated by the
frontiersmen for buying American scalps from the Indians, he was almost killed several
times en route to his prison, where he was treated very badly for nearly two years by
his Virginia captor, the usually humane Governor Thomas Jefferson.
At this point, Clarke's remarkable and intuitive daring temporarily deserted him.
It was now, with the British demoralized and the French population of Detroit on the verge
of rebellion, that Clarke could have taken his two hundred men and struck at the heart
of British power in the West, Detroit.
But he allowed himself to be guided by more conventional military considerations and waited
for Expected Reinforcements, most of which never arrived.
By June, the opportunity to seize Detroit was lost.
Even so, his achievement was still monumental, for he had stopped in its tracks the mammoth
British invasion southward that would have conquered the West.
By early spring of 1779, five British expeditions, picking up hundreds of French and Indians
en route were on the way to meet Hamilton in Illinois. Two expeditions left southwestward
from Lake Erie and three set forth from Mackinac at the head of Lake Michigan. The electrifying
news of Hamilton's capture totally demoralized the French and Indians who deserted en masse.
All the columns were forced to return home and the British timetable for conquest in
in the West was completely disrupted. The 1779 campaign was finished. In addition, thousands
of frontiersmen and settlers were so buoyed by Clark's victory as to pour into Kentucky
and add to its defenses. Others erected completely new settlements at the bend of the Tennessee
River. To the northeast on the New York frontier, the density of the population of American
and of Indian villages led to a more genocidal form of warfare than on the sparsely populated
frontier of the Ohio Valley region.
With the failure of the Burgoyne and St. Leisure expeditions of 1777, it was clear that the
brunt of fighting on the New York frontier thereafter would have to be borne by the Iroquois
and by the Tories.
In charge of the Indian effort was the brilliant, well-educated, and fiercely pro-British Mohawk
chieftain, young Joseph Brandt.
The Tory forces were led by Butler's Rangers, organized by Sir John Johnson's old deputy
Indian agent, Colonel John Butler.
In the late spring of 1778, the two agreed that Butler would launch an attack on the
in the Wyoming Valley, while Brandt would launch a series of covering raids further
north in New York.
The Loshan isolated Wyoming Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania on the Susquehanna River had
been populated by settlers from Connecticut who, with some logic, claimed it on behalf
of their home state.
But Pennsylvania's bitter hostility to the settlers and to Connecticut's claims weakened
the Defense of the Valley and gave Butler and his Tories an easy target for mayhem and
plunder.
In late June, about the same time Clark left Kentucky for Illinois, Butler set forth from
his camp at Unidilla from which he could strike north and east at New York or south at Pennsylvania.
With 200 Tory Rangers and 500 Indians, he marched down the valley, forcing two stock
aides to surrender.
He then trapped the main American defense force in a clever ambush on July 3 and massacred
the fleeing defenders.
With several hundred Americans slaughtered in the battle and only three losses to the
Tory Indian force, the remainder of the Garrison and settler families surrendered at the main
and Stockade of Forty Fort. The terms of the surrender called for their being disarmed and
then released unharmed in return for their promise that they would not fight any further
in the American cause. Butler and his Indians were surprisingly scrupulous in keeping the
agreement even though the valley's homes, mills and livestock were burned, plundered
and Destroyed. But in their hysteria, the Wyoming refugees confused the disastrous battle
with the later surrender, and convinced everyone, even the British, that Butler and the Indians
had conducted a horrible massacre in the Wyoming Valley. Such was the power of atrocity propaganda
that the Wyoming campaign became well known as the Wyoming Valley Massacre. Actually,
The breaking of agreements cut the other way, for most of the survivors promptly broke their
promise unhappily for Americans captured in later campaigns.
Butler's successful devastation of the Wyoming Valley had strategic significance. Congress
had just authorized General Lachlan McIntosh, Commandant at Pittsburgh, to march westward
to capture the critical British base of Detroit. But Butler's strike near home ended that
expedition, and this relief of pressure enabled Hamilton to embark on his autumn campaign
against Vincennes and the Shawnee Indians to attack settlements in Kentucky.
In the meantime, beginning at the end of May 1778, Joseph Brandt conducted a spectacular
A series of covering raids in the Mohawk Valley on the New York frontier.
Fighting with him were some 300 Indians, plus a floating number of eager Tories of whatever
neighborhood he happened to be in.
Employing mobile and elusive guerrilla tactics, he marched back and forth for two months among
the villages and farmlands of the Mohawk, the Susquehanna and the Delaware watersheds,
burning, plundering, destroying, terrorizing American patriots, especially the leaders,
and rescuing and recruiting Tories. But while Brandt systematically destroyed American property,
depriving Washington's army of the important Mohawk Valley source of wheat and meat, he
took care not to murder indiscriminately. There were no complaints in an age when such
Much protest readily arose of his killing or maltreating American civilians.
The only Americans he killed were armed men in the heat of battle.
Most prisoners were released after Brandt lectured them on their wickedness as rebels
against King George.
Hated by the Butler Rangers, Brandt went on to strike a devastating blow in mid-September
to the most fertile part of the Mohawk Valley.
The German Flats District in the West Valley, while the citizens of the community huddled
safely but helplessly in Forts Herkimer and Dayton, the 500 Indians and Tories thoroughly
and methodically burned and destroyed all the homes and property of that region.
The American military authorities decided that counter raids of vengeance and collective
punishment upon the Indian communities were in order.
The most important of these took place in early October when Colonel William Butler
led four companies of continental riflemen upon Indian towns on the upper Susquehanna
River.
Only defenseless women and children were to be found in these villages and the Americans
added mass rape of the captured Indian women to the usual plundering and devastation of
property on both sides.
This gratuitous sexual brutality greatly shocked the Indians and led to escalating counter-brutalities
in subsequent Indian attacks upon New York.
All that Butler and the other American raiders had accomplished was to goad the Indians into
to Greater and More Destructive Attacks.
By late 1778, the year's campaign was supposed to be over.
The New York and Pennsylvania frontiers had suffered devastating losses, including the
destruction of potential supplies for the American Army.
Sporadic Indian raids had also been severe on the southern frontier, but for the energetic
Young Tory Walter Butler, who had replaced his ailing father John as head of Butler's
Rangers, the year's work was not over.
He persuaded Brandt and the Indians, infuriated by the barbarities of the American raids,
to join him in a winter march on strategic Fort Alden in New York's Cherry Valley.
Butler failed to keep his advance a complete surprise, but this did not matter.
Colonel Ichabod Alden, commandant of the fort, not only refused to heed warnings of the Tory-Indian
approach, but also refused to allow anyone to take refuge inside the walls of his command.
He and his top officers heedlessly lived outside the fort and paid for this carelessness with
for their lives when Butler swept down to attack on November 11, 1778.
Butler, however, at once lost control of his Indian troops, especially the Seneca and the
Cayuga, who preferred to attack the defenseless residents of Cherry Valley rather than the
armed fort.
The defenders, meanwhile, remained in the safety of their garrison.
This time it truly was a massacre, as lives were no longer spared in the general devastation.
Even the Wells family, old friends of Brant and Butler, were slaughtered by the rampaging
Indians without their commander's knowledge.
Only when the British forces reassembled did Brant and Butler prevail over the bitter objections
of the Indians and set free the prisoners taken at Cherry Valley.
The Cherry Valley Massacre, occurring so close to the center of population and late and isolated
in the winter campaign, also found an important place in the public consciousness and in American
propaganda against the British, and with more justice than the Wyoming incident.
The next year, 1779, Congress decided upon total retaliation against the Iroquois.
The plan was to devastate the Indian country on the New York-Pennsylvania frontier by sending in three divisions of troops.
The main body of three brigades under Sullivan was to advance north from eastern Pennsylvania through the Wyoming Valley and up the Susquehanna River to Tioga.
Brigades under Sullivan was to advance north from eastern Pennsylvania through the Wyoming
Valley and up the Susquehanna River to Tioga. General James Clinton was to take another
brigade southwest from the Mohawk and down the Unidilla River to join Sullivan at Tioga.
In the meantime, Colonel Daniel Broadhead was to march northeast from Pittsburgh up
What's the Allegheny Toward Tioga?
The campaign began inauspiciously as Clinton sent a force of nearly 600 to attack and devastate
the Onondaga country.
A swift surprise force in late April dutifully burned three Onondaga towns.
The difficulty here was that the Onondaga had been the least warlike of the Iroquois
tribes and had yearned for peace.
Now they resolved to fight the Americans.
By late June, Clinton had assembled sixteen hundred troops at Lake Otsego and was ready
to go.
But Sullivan was having his troubles.
Not only was Pennsylvania still reluctant to defend the Connecticut settlers of the
Wyoming Valley, but his long unpaid New Jersey troops began to mutiny.
Furthermore, he kept insisting upon ever more troops and supplies for the campaign.
Sullivan was not ready to march until the end of July.
The British and Allied forces knew of the developing American plans, and for their part
the Iroquois, always oriented to New York rather than to the West, were undaunted by
the news of Clark's capture of Hamilton at Vincennes.
Grant and Butler tried flank attacks on New York settlements, but Sullivan refused to be
lured into defending the frontier areas. Only aggression, not mere defense, he argued, could
eliminate the Indian menace for good and all. He joined forces with Clinton at Tioga, and
on August 26 they marched west with a huge force of 4,000 veteran Continental troops
intent on totally devastating the Indian villages and farms.
Guarding against surprise attack were veteran frontiersmen, Oneida Scouts and Morgan's former
rifle unit.
His force, numbering only 750, Butler was obviously no match for this massive troop
and he assumed a defensive position at the Indian village of Newtown.
He counted on surprise, however, and surprise he did not have.
He and Brandt were smashed at the Battle of Newtown on August 29 and were forced to flee
post haste westward to the Genesee.
The bodies of the Indian fallen were savagely mutilated by the American forces.
The entire heartland of the powerful Iroquois nation lay open to total destruction, to which
which Sullivan applied himself with a will. It was to be so devastating as to eliminate
any capacity of the Iroquois to make war or even to subsist in their homeland. Towns,
substantial wooden and stone houses with windows, cornfields, gardens, orchards, livestock,
storehouses, all were burned to the ground. There were few prisoners or hostages taken
and Few Indian Lives Lost, as the despairing Indians fled before Sullivan's advance.
Meanwhile, during late August and early September, Broadhead's force of over 600 devastated Seneca
and Mingo towns on the Allegheny, burning 11 towns and returning to Pittsburgh without
losing a single man.
Washington reached the Genesee on September 15 and levelled the great Seneca Castle, the
mighty stronghold of the Seneca tribe.
Lacking supplies to press on to Niagara, he turned back to finish off those towns and
farmlands overlooked in the previous devastation.
No captives were taken, despite Washington's desire for hostages.
They did manage to burn alive a very aged squaw and a crippled Indian child, whom they had
taken prisoner. Returning, he was hailed throughout the country for his achievements. His policy
of brutal devastation of Indian houses and property, his sweeping attacks on Indian villages
seem to have reaped great fruits and to have justified the risk of employing a large chunk
of Washington's Continental Army. The Tory-Iraquois military force had been routed. Forty-one
Iraquois towns and surrounding farms had been mercilessly burned to the ground, leaving
only one town left standing in the entire Iraquois region. Thousands of distraught Indian
men, women and children were homeless and starving. The Indians were surely impressed
by the Invincibility of the American Forces, and all this achieved with the loss of only
40 Americans dead.
The end of 1779 thus saw the Americans victorious on the two frontier fronts, New York and the
Ohio Valley, and seemingly in command of both frontier regions.
For his efforts Sullivan was rewarded by Congress by what was fast becoming an American tradition.
He was forced into retirement.
In Sullivan's case, however, it was because of his chronic complaining.
There was a fatal flaw, however, in these seemingly coldly realistic calculations which
ignored the fate of innocent Indian women and children.
The Indians' property was devastated, but they were still alive, thirsting for vengeance.
Now based at the English stronghold at Niagara, they were utterly dependent on English supplies,
both food and munitions.
The Americans, their absolute and total enemy, they were irrevocably wedded to the English
war effort.
The aggrieved Iroquois could and did strike back.
The victories of 1779 turned out to be mere delaying actions, delays forming a prelude
to mighty British offensives of 1780.
The resurgence in 1780 of Indian attacks on the New York frontier rapidly demonstrated
the ultimate pragmatic failure of the Sullivan campaign.
As early as April, Joseph Brandt was back, wreaking havoc up and down the frontier.
The pro-American Oneida were severely punished by his forces, and he took particular satisfaction
in the destruction of his old birthplace of Kana Jahari.
This town had had to be evacuated by the Mohawks at the outbreak of the war, when their places
were taken by white settlers who received their comeuppance when Brandt emulated Sullivan
by burning their grain fields as well as their horses and livestock.
In the meantime, Sir John Johnson, taking over from Butler as head of the Tory Rangers,
burst down from Crown Point to capture his old hometown of Johnstown and used this as
his headquarters for pillaging and burning the lower Mohawk Valley and killing many of
of its inhabitants. By the time Governor Clinton had gathered enough militia to march against
him, Johnson had burned Johnstown to the ground before abandoning it to return safely to Crown
Point and thence to Canada. George Washington, who had spared a huge force the previous year
for Sullivan's brutal and ultimately inconclusive offensive, now felt that he could spare no
No. 1 for the worthier task of defending the frontier settlements. Though worried about
diminishing supplies, he made no attempt to save the principal sources of his provisions.
The next series of incursions on the New York frontier was a more organized and systematic
effort. In a miniature of the two-pronged attack of 1777, Major Guy Carlton, nephew
The view of the former Canadian governor advanced down Lake Champlain in October 1780 with 800 men, including 600 British regulars.
At the same time, Johnson and Brandt burst upon the frontier with 1200 men further south near the headwaters of the Schoharie River.
This was supposed to coincide with a thrust by General Sir Henry Clinton up the Hudson from New York City upon the delivery of West Point by Benedict Arnold.
Carlton managed to capture Forts Ann and George, but was forced to turn back after capturing Balston near Saratoga.
Johnson and Brant laid waste the Schoharie River region but turned west from Albany and, avoiding American forts, devastated the Mohawk Valley and crushed several militia units.
Johnson was finally defeated on October 19 at Clocks Field by 1,500 Hudson Valley militia under General Robert Van Rensselaer,
Pursued only briefly by the sluggish Van Rensselaer, who thereby gave up the chance of a smashing victory, Johnson's forces fled westward to return to Oswego on Lake Ontario and thence to Canada.
The revived English threat of capturing Albany and uniting on the Hudson had been easily thwarted.
But at the end of 1780, the whole New York frontier west of Schenectady was a smoking desert for whites and Indians alike.
One amusing incident of the Johnson brand foray was the single-handed saving of the Middle Fort by Morgan's crack rifleman Timothy Murphy, the same man who had shot General Frazier at the Battle of Bemis Heights.
When Johnson demanded that the fort surrender, the cowardly major, Melanchthon Woolsey, was quickly ready to comply, he was prevented several times by Murphy, who threatened to kill anyone, including Woolsey, who attempted to carry out such a surrender.
Murphy was backed in this courageous mutiny by the militia and the Tory Indian units moved on.
In the West, the British launched an attack southward in 1780, similar to the invasion of the year before.
Again, the proximate goal was to conquer Illinois and Kentucky.
The ultimate goal was to capture the entire West.
Spain had entered the war against Britain in 1779, and this time the British hoped to use their base at Pensacola,
in West Florida to sweep the Spanish out of Louisiana, the land west of the Mississippi.
It was this time a three-pronged invasion of armies of Indians stiffened by Tories, French-American militia and a few English regulars.
One force of nearly a thousand, commanded by Captain Emmanuel Hess, set forth from Mackinac, then down the Wisconsin and the Mississippi.
A second and smaller force commanded by Captain Charles LaGlade sailed down Lake Michigan
from Mackinac and thence down the Illinois to meet Hess at the Mississippi.
LaGlade's force was to serve as a distraction from the main Hess column.
The third and largest English troop of over a thousand men marched south from Detroit
under Captain Henry Byrd, south down the Miami River Valley and into Kentucky.
The Byrd force carried with it two huge cannon to breach American fortifications.
This three-pronged blow at the American west got smoothly underway in early May of 1780.
The defense against this formidable threat devolved again upon George Rogers Clark, whose
His already small force had been decimated by the staggering depreciation of the inflated
paper dollar. His supply system from Spanish New Orleans was undone by Virginia's refusing
to honor his requisitions, a pattern that was to be set for the remainder of his life.
He was now virtually reduced to the local militia of the scattered towns of the Illinois
In late May, Clark was suddenly informed of Hess's march down the Mississippi and its
grave threat to Cahokia and to the Spanish town of St. Louis on the other side of the
Mississippi River.
Rushing up north as few men from Fort Jefferson, which Clark was constructing near the mouth
South of the Ohio, Clark happily reached Cahokia on May 25, the day before Hesse's assault.
The British confidently launched twin attacks on Cahokia and St. Louis. Clark repulsed the
assault on Cahokia while Spanish soldiers and French natives managed to repulse the
major action against St. Louis. As usual, when facing any rebuff, Hesse's Indians became
became intensely discouraged and began to melt away, unhappy in any event because of
the military despotism enforced in the British Army. Hess was forced to retreat rapidly,
pursued eagerly by a Franco-Spanish-American volunteer force organized by Clark. He was
chased as far as the Rock River, while the Glan's force, its Indian support also crumbly,
As Pursued Back to Lake Michigan
Clark had to deny himself the pleasure of leading the pursuit, for he had to race eastward
to save Kentucky from Bird's army.
To evade capture by Chickasaw Indians besieging Fort Jefferson, Clark and two companions disguised
themselves as Chickasaws and rushed 300 miles through the wilderness to reach Harrodsburg
in Time to Organize Kentucky Against the Coming Invasion.
In late June, Byrd struck directly at Populous Central Kentucky, quickly storming the stockade
at Ruddell's Station by devastating use of his big cannon.
Byrd personally guaranteed the safety of the surrendered Americans, but as the gate opened,
the Indians ignored their commander and rushed in to massacre and mutilate most of the helpless
Next, the smaller stockade at Martin's Station quickly fell to the British, but the Indians
were getting out of hand and were increasingly restive at Byrd's attempts to save the lives
of his prisoners.
Moreover, their range-of-the-moment attitude toward food supply, for example, immediate
Slaughter of All Captured Cattle caused food shortages in Bird's Army. The final straw
came when the Indians learned that George Rogers Clark, of whom they were already in
great awe, had miraculously turned up to lead the Kentucky defense. They began to melt away,
and the disillusioned bird had no option but to leave Kentucky as fast as he could, dismiss
The Great English Invasion of the West in 1780 had been repulsed and driven back, virtually
the single-handed achievement of George Rogers Clark.
But Clark was not finished with the year's work.
In retaliation, he swiftly raised a force of 1,000 Kentucky volunteers who assembled
He sailed on the Ohio River on August 1 with a captured cannon. He took his men up the
Miami to punish the Shawnee, the Indian tribe most hated by the Kentuckians. Slashing swiftly
upriver, Clark captured Chillicothe, a leading Shawnee town, and burned it and its adjacent
cornfields to the ground. At the next town, Pequois, the heavily outnumbered Shawnee made
The Americans then burned Piquois and its cornfields. Despite the accelerating collapse of the paper dollar and subsequent economic chaos and shortage of supplies created by reversion to barter in the West, the emboldened Clark attempted to strike at the heart of the enemy and captured Detroit itself.
Despite Virginia's increasing military distress, he left for Pittsburgh in late January 1781. He had planned to assemble 2,000 militia at Pittsburgh, move down the falls of Ohio and northward to Detroit.
But this year, the British decided to avoid the failing strategy of relying on massive Indian invasions and to rely instead on a lengthy series of violent raids on the frontier.
The Americans' troubles were aggravated by the previously neutral Delaware Indians coming down on the British side.
Finally, the Americans were forced to pull back from Kaskaskia, from Vincennes and from Fort Jefferson.
To cap these problems, Clark found it impossible to recruit the necessary troops for his projected march.
Thus, Daniel Broadhead refused to join Clark and instead struck westward from Pittsburgh to punish the Delawares for entering the war.
With a force of nearly 300, Broadhead swiftly seized and burned Cosh Cotton and murdered a batch of Delaware prisoners.
The major effect of this brutality was to intensify the Delaware's anti-American resolve, and they burned nine Kentucky prisoners in reprisal.
Pennsylvania, moreover, was distrustful of Virginia's lead in the projected Clark Expedition and sent no troops to support it.
Finally, Clark's potential recruits from the Valley of Virginia refused to join his force.
Instead, they sprang to counter the British invasion of eastern Virginia and heeded Virginia's decision to call off the expedition.
Clark could only rely on local Kentucky and Ohio Valley settlers.
He finally assembled 400 volunteers at Wheeling. Inauspiciously, the continuing mass desertions from his army forced him to start down the Ohio. Luck continued to fail him when the force of over 100 Pennsylvanians under Colonel Archibald Lockrey, marching to join Clark, was wiped out in late August in a sudden slashing attack by a slightly smaller force led by none other than Joseph Brandt.
At Louisville, a series of councils in early September had to decide Kentucky's course.
While Clark's faithful Illinois officers argued for his plan to attack Detroit, the majority of the Kentucky councils realized that the force was too small for such a campaign.
They decided there would be no American offensive, and a discouraged Clark lamented that
I have lost the object that was one of the principal inducements to my fatigues and transactions
for several years past. My chain appears to have run out. I find myself enclosed with
few troops in a trifling fort.
Brandt had been shifted to the west in the early summer of 1781 to help check the expected
drive by Clark against Detroit. Now, after the destruction of Lockrey's force, he proposed
to move swiftly upon Clark at Louisville with his full force of Tories and Indians, while
the Americans were still demoralized. But once again, the Indians themselves were as
fully demoralized by victory as by defeat. In learning of Kentucky's abandonment of
the Detroit invasion plan, they no longer feared destruction at the hands of an invading
American Force. They deserted en masse, as did the Tory Rangers, reducing a sizeable
force to a mere troop of 200 men. The projected attack on Clark had necessarily
become a surging terror raid of killing and plundering in the Kentucky settlements, at
which point Brandt was forced by the Indians' satisfaction with their loot to turn back
Back Across the Ohio Because he could not conquer Kentucky, Brant
finished out the war disgruntled, like his counterpart, Clark. 1781 ended with Kentucky
still in the hands of American settlers and with the British back in control of the land
north of the Ohio, roughly the status quo at the outset of the Revolutionary War.
In contrast to these mixed conditions, the New York frontier was in virtually a hopeless
state during 1781.
Brandt and the Indians were emphatically in control of western New York.
Indian terror raids began as early as January, and the American settlers were permanently
confined to two dozen stockades from which they dared emerge only to plant their fields
under armed guard.
Moreover, the redoubtable Fort Stanwix, the westernmost American stronghold in the Mohawk Valley, had to be abandoned under siege, and the western bastion fell back to Fort Herkimer.
Raiding parties roamed and destroyed the New York frontier almost at will, and the two major upstate towns of Albany and Schenectady feared imminent attack.
Left to defend the New York region was the radical young Colonel Marinus Willett, who conducted guerrilla warfare on his own by using Kana Jahari as his base from which to attack Indian raiding parties.
But these were only last-ditch actions, and once again Washington felt he could spare no man to assist in the grievous burden of defense.
One gauge of the terrible American losses on the frontier during the war was the depopulation of frontier Tryon County.
At the start of the war, the county had 2,500 enrolled in its militia.
By 1781, fewer than 800 were eligible.
One contemporary estimate held that of the mammoth reduction, one-third were casualties.
The final British thrust on the New York frontier came in the autumn of 1781, as Washington's move south to Yorktown emboldened the British to try, for the third time, a three-pronged offensive to cut New York in two.
The American force had dwindled to only 2,000 men under General William Heath in the Hudson
Highlands, and this seemed to provide a golden opportunity.
Driving down Lake Champlain to Ticonderoga, St. Leisure became embroiled in negotiations
with the independent state of Vermont and never proceeded further.
Until Sir Henry Clinton, commanding 16,000 idle men in New York City, failed with his
typical indolence to make any move northward to attack Heath. Only Major John Ross moved
from Oswego on October 10, falling upon the Lower Schoharie. But Brandt's absence in
the West deprived Ross of the bulk of the expected Iroquois allies, and his own force
A force of nearly 500 was not sufficient to penetrate further than the outskirts of Schenectady.
His withdrawal was harried by Ouellette, who had quickly assembled hundreds of militia.
The engagements in the pursuit were inconclusive, but the settlers were immeasurably cheered
by the news that, fallen in battle, was perhaps the most hated man on the New York frontier,
Walter Butler.
As Van Every puts it, there was more rejoicing in Tryon County over his death than over
the coincidental news from Yorktown.
Spain was willing to aid the American cause, but when it entered the war against Great
Britain in 1779, it was to recapture her territory and weaken her old enemy, Great Britain, not
to aid Republican revolutionaries.
William Clark won his great victories in Illinois in 1778 and James Willing, brother of the
partner of Robert Morris, headed a band early that year to plunder unmercifully the planters
of Natchez in West Florida.
Spain realized that the aggressive Americans in the long run posed a greater threat to
her holdings and ambitions in the West than did Britain's bases there.
The only thing that Willing's plunder accomplished for the American cause was to make confirmed
tories of the natchez planters, and to lead Britain to construct a series of forts on
the lower Mississippi that effectively blocked American navigation.
As soon as Spain went to war openly in 1779, she moved swiftly to recapture the coveted
territory Britain had seized from her in the Peace of 1763.
Spain's young governor, Bernardo de Galvez, with remarkable swiftness, attacked and overwhelmed
every English post on the lower Mississippi, before the defenders had had a chance to learn
that Spain was in the war.
Fort Manchac, Baton Rouge, Fort Pamur and Natchez all fell to de Galvez in September,
The Spanish ships defeated the British to gain control of Lake Pontchartrain, north of New
Orleans.
In a few weeks, de Galvez had captured over 1,100 English troops and eight English ships.
The following March, he captured Mobile, gaining control of the entire lower Mississippi Valley.
To forestall American settlers, Spanish commanders crossed the Mississippi further north in the
The Spanish flag was even hoisted in early 1781 over St. Joseph, now in southern Michigan, which had been captured by Captain Eugene Poore in a march from St. Louis.
Spain's final spoils of the war was de Galvez's capture, in May 1781, of mighty Pensacola.
The Spanish flag was even hoisted in early 1781 over St. Joseph, now in southern Michigan, which had been captured by Captain Eugene Poore in a march from St. Louis.
The mighty Pensacola, the major English base in the South, a capture which included the final surrender by Britain of all of West Florida.
Once in control of West Florida, the Spanish proved extremely lenient rulers, even to British rebels who had temporarily seized Fort Penmure.