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MAJ.
JONATHAN HASKELL was born in Rochester, Mass., the 19th of
March, 1775. Like the larger portion of the New Englanders of
that day, he was brought up on a farm, and received only a common
school education, which fitted him for conducting the usual concerns
of life to which he might be called.
At the commencement of the war of Independence, when he
was twenty years old, he was engaged in agriculture. How early
he entered the army is not known. In 1779 he was aid-de-camp
to Gen. Patterson, of the Massachusetts line, and was
commissioned as a lieutenant. He continued to serve until the
close of the war, either as an aid, or in the line of the army.
When the Ohio Company was formed, he became an
associate, and moved out there in company with Capt. Devol's
family, in the autumn of 1788. In 1789 he united with the
Belpre settlement, and commenced clearing his farm. On the
breaking out of the Indian war, in January, 1791, he received the
appointment of captain in the regular service, and went to
Rochester, Mass., where he recruited a company, and returned to
Marietta in December; where he was stationed for the defense of
that, and the adjacent settlements; as the troops had been withdrawn
from Fort Harmer in the fall of 1790. After the defeat of
Gen. St. Clair, he remained in Marietta until March, 1 793, when
he was commissioned as a captain in the second sub-legion under
Gen. Wayne, and joined the army on the frontiers that summer.
He was stationed at Fort St. Clair, where he remained until June,
1794, when he was appointed to the command of the fourth sub-legion,
ranking as a major, although his commission was not filled until
August, 1795. In a letter to Griffin Greene, Esq.,
whose relative he married, he gives a sketch of the campaign which
defeated the combined forces of the Indians and closed the war.
"HEAD QUARTERS, MIAMI OF THE LAKE, August 29th, 1794.
SIR: The 28th of July the army moved forward,
consisting of about eighteen hundred regulars and fifteen hundred
militia, from the state of Kentucky, passing by the way of St.
Clair's battle ground, now Fort Recovery. We then turned more
to the eastward, and struck the St. Mary's in twenty miles, where we
erected a small fort, and left a sub altern's command. We then
crossed the St. Mary's, and in four or five days' marching found the
Auglaize river, and continued on down that stream to its junction
with the Miami of the lake; distant one hundred miles from
Greenville, by the route we pursued. At this place we built a
garrison and left a major to command it. The army then marched
down the river forty-seven miles from the new garrison and on the
20th inst., at nine o'clock in the morning, came up with the
Indians, who had posted themselves in a position chosen as most
favorable for defense. The troops charged upon them with the
bayonet, and drove them two miles, through a thicket of woods,
fallen timber, and underbrush, when the cavalry fell upon and
entirely routed them. Our line extended two and a half miles,
and yet it was with difficulty we outflanked them. One of the
prisoners, a white man, says the number of the Indians engaged was
about twelve hundred, aided by two hundred and fifty white men form
Detroit. Our loss in the action was two officers killed, and
four wounded, with abut thirty days killed, and eighty wounded.
The Indians suffered much; about forty or fifty of their dead fell
into our hands. The prisoner was asked why they did not fight
better? He said that we would give them no time to load their
pieces, but kept them constantly on the run. Two miles in
advance of the battleground, is a British garrison, established last
spring, which we marched round within pistol shot, and demanded a
surrender; but they refused to give it up. Our artillery being
too light, and the fort too strong to carry by storm, it was not
attacked; but we burnt their out-houses, destroyed all their
gardens, cornfields, and grass, within musket shots of the place,
and all below for eight or nine miles, without any opposition.
On the 27th we arrived at this place, where we have a fort, and
shall halt a few days to rest. We have marched through the
Indian settlements and villages for about sixty miles, destroyed
several thousand acres of corn, beans, and all kinds of
vegetables, burned their houses, with furniture, tools &c. A
detachment has gone into Fort Recovery for a supply of provisions
for the troops, and when it returns, we shall march up the Miami
sixty miles, to where the St. Mary's unites with the St. Joseph's,
and destroy all the corn in that country.
This letter describes, in plain terms, the ruin and
devastation that marked the course of the American army. It
might have been considered a wise policy to devote to
destruction the dwellings, cornfields, gardens, and in fact every
species of property that belonged to the hostile savages, but it was
also a most cruel policy. The British troops, in their
inroads amongst the rebel settlements of the Revolutionary war,
never conducted more barbarously. The Indian villages on the
Miami and the Auglaize, were snugly and comfortably built - were
furnished with many convenient articles of house-keeping and
clothing. They had large fields of corn and beans, with
gardens of melons, squashes, and various other vegetables. Mr.
Joseph Kelly, of Marietta, then a boy of twelve years old,
and for several years a prisoner with the Indians who treated him
kindly and was adopted into a family as one of their own children,
was living at this time with them at the junction of the St.
Mary's and Auglaize, the spot where Maj. Haskell says the
army would next go, to complete their work of destruction.
Mr. Kelly was there when an Indian runner announced that the
American troops had arrived in the vicinity of the village.
His friends had not expected them so soon, and with the utmost haste
and consternation, the old men, with the utmost haste and
consternation, the old men, with the women and children, the
warriors being absent, hurried aboard their canoes, taking nothing
with them but a few kettles and blankets, not having time to collect
any provisions from their fields and gardens. The sun was only
an hour or two high when they departed, in as deep sorrow at the
loss of their country and homes, as the Trojans of old when they
evacuated their favorite city. Before the next day at noon,
their nice village was burnt to the ground; their cornfields of
several hundred acres, just beginning to ripen, were cut down and
trampled under foot by the horses and oxen of the invaders, while
their melons and squashes were pulled up by the roots. The
following winter, the poor Indians deprived of their stock of corn
and beans, which were grown every year and laid up for their winter
food as regularly as among the white people, suffered the extreme of
want. Game was scarce in the country they retreated to on the
west of the Miami, and what few deer and fish they could collect,
barely served to keep them alive. It was a cruel policy; but
probably subdued their Spartan courage more than two or three
defeats, as for many years thereafter, until the days of Tecumseh,
they remained at peace.
After the close of the war, Maj. Haskell
returned to his farm at Belpre, where he died in December, 1814.
He was considered a brave man and a good officer. Several of
his descendants are living in Washington county.
SOURCE: Biographical and
Historical Memoirs of the Early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio with
Narratives of Incidents and Occurrences in 1775
by S. P. Hildreth, M. D. and Colonel R. J. Meigs -
Publ. Cincinnati: H. W. Derby & Co., Publishers - 1852 - Page
345 |
