Books: Tenacity on the Old Frontier

A COMPANY OF HEROES (328 pp.)—Dale Van Every—Morrow ($6).

To the armchair historian, often as ignorant of the Revolutionary War as he is overinformed about the Civil War, Washington’s suffering at Valley Forge may rank as the outstanding example of hardship heroically endured in the American Revolution. But the Continental Army spent only one terrible winter at Valley Forge. In the populous East, as Historian Van Every points out in this workmanlike second book of a projected four-volume history of The Frontier People of America (the first book was the well-received Forth to the Wilderness), “the war struck as a succession of violent but passing storms.” Boston and Philadelphia were occupied for only nine months each. The campaigns in the South were savage, but did not begin until 1780. And from the Battle of Monmouth (June 1778) till the beginning of the siege of Yorktown (September 1781), Washington’s main army was obliged to fight no major battles.

The exception to this pattern of long calm and fitful bloodshed was the war on the western frontier, which began in 1776. From then until more than a decade after Cornwallis’ surrender, not a day passed when any settler in western New York, the valley of Virginia or the wilderness drained by the Ohio could count himself safe. His enemies were not merely the British, fighting at first to put down rebellion and later to hold the Great Lakes fur trade, but also the Indians, fighting for vengeance and survival.

Blood & Starvation. In 1775, a year of lull before the years of Indian raids and counterraids began again, the average settler (perhaps, like Daniel Boone, a “long hunter” turned family man) lived in “a stump-dotted clearing of two or three acres in a one-room, earthen-floored cabin which had just taken the place of last year’s half-faced camp.” His possessions were what he had made himself or carried on his back from civilization. If he had had a cow, he had butchered her that winter to save his family from starving. He could count on a small squash and corn crop, if the Indians did not burn his fields, but the abundant game in the forests did him little good; his tiny supply of gunpowder was hoarded for fighting.

There was, perhaps, an undermanned stockade a mile or so away. If the alarm was given soon enough, he could crouch there in relative safety and watch his homestead burn. If there was no alarm-the usual case—he would almost certainly be butchered or held captive for the squaws to torture. Occasionally a captive would be ransomed or adopted, but young children were never spared; they were too weak to stand a long march to an Indian village, and were customarily brained against trees. Both sides took scalps as a matter of course, but on the whole the Indians behaved with more honor. They sometimes broke treaties, but did not as a rule murder ambassadors; a safe-conduct given by the frontiersmen, on the other hand, was almost worthless.

As the years of starved winters and bloody springs wore on, each of the living had his dead. Bitterness between frontiersman and Indian, and between patriot and Tory, passed the bounds of sanity. West of the mountains, there was general approval when a frontiersman who had been living with the Indians murdered his Cherokee wife and children to get the bounty payment for their scalps.

Polished Indian. Among the dozens of astonishing men who give shape to the recital of dates and places, two giants stand out. Virginian George Rogers Clark in his 20s captured Kaskaskia and Vincennes on little more than a series of bluffs, and bogged British plans for a full-scale conquest of the Ohio. Joseph Brant was a Mohawk (his ancestors may have taken their name from an English family named Barnet) raised and educated by England’s Indian agent. Sir William Johnson. Brant, a brilliant man whose sophistication had been polished by an early visit to London, correctly guessed that the white man’s appetite for land was boundless, and led a bloody and for a long time successful resistance to the frontiersmen’s advance.

Company of Heroes traces the agonizing border war through 1783—the year of the final three-cornered peace treaty among France, the new United States and England. France attempted to limit the U.S.’s western boundary to the Appalachians, and England, hoping to anger France, magnanimously ceded to the U.S. the half-continent bounded by the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the Spanish and French settlements in the South. As Author Van Every justly points out, it was the incredible tenacity of the frontiersmen that made England’s land cession—which was to lead to the coastto-coast growth of the U.S.—a political and military necessity. The settlers had come to stay.