1
THE DEATH OF GENERAL BUTLER
On a November morning in 1791, nearly thirty years after the French Crown abandoned its American empire, a man named Richard Butler sat against a mattress propped against the base of an oak, dying in pain near a bend of the upper Wabash River. Butler came from Pennsylvania, and to him this cold ground, once called the Illinois Country, lay indisputably in the American West, specifically in the Northwest Territory of the United States. Close by and in the distance, others were dying too, hundreds of them. Some screamed and some groaned, and through the smoke of exploded gunpowder came a sharp cacophony of musket and rifle fire, triumphant screams of the enemy, and orders yelled in English and being ignored.
Around the wounded Butler, a group of men and officers crouched in hurried conference. Butler started laughing. Evidently, he’d registered the shrieks of a cadet nearby and was struck by the sheer intensity of that noise. A beloved general, he’d been shot in the arm while trying to rally troops back from their outright flight in the face of a surprise attack from all sides. Getting his arm in a sling, he mounted a horse to take charge of the collapsing front line; shot again, he fell from the saddle. Four soldiers had lugged and carried him in a blanket to his tent in a row of tents, but he found his wound too painful to allow him to lie down, so they’d propped him against this oak, an especially huge, spreading tree, and stacked two knapsacks on either side to hold him up. Butler was a heavy man, and as he laughed, his sides shook his coat.
Some of the men around him were grieved to think he had no chance; others thought he might make it if they could only remove him from the scene, but it was becoming horribly clear that getting out of here at all, let alone lugging a large man, was more unlikely every second. Most of the officers were dead. The numb-fingered soldiers left alive had been firing as best they could, but as the enemy began to breach the perimeter, they gave up, collapsed their formations, and crowded by terrified instinct toward the center of the field of battle. There they were easy to shoot down en masse.
Now where Richard Butler sat propped, his youngest brother, Captain Edward Butler, appeared, carrying on his back another brother, Colonel Thomas Butler, both legs broken. In pain and with no time to spare—arrows were thrumming into the row of tents—the Butler brothers tried to confer.
* * *
Richard’s corpse was sure to be a prize. The Indians who were destroying the Americans knew Butler. The fighters had seen him mount, with his arm in a sling. They’d picked him off.
And Butler knew them. He’d been at various times their translator, business partner, military ally and opponent, to some a boon companion, to some a lover and a spouse. Almost everybody of every race and nation in this contested zone was some kind of line crosser, but particularly good stories attached themselves to Richard Butler. He’d run his own fur-trading operation out of the rough village of Pittsburgh at the headwaters of the Ohio River. He’d fought for Pennsylvania against the French and Shawnee, against Virginia, and against the British while serving in multiple capacities in the government of the colony and then the state, as well as the Continental Congress and now the newly formed United States, in whose service he sat dying today. During his adventuring and moneymaking, he’d fathered a child with a Shawnee wife, or so it was said, or maybe children, under Shawnee wedlock rites. His purported Shawnee bride wasn’t just any Shawnee. Nonhelema, called “Chieftess” and “the Grenadier Woman” by some whites, had a reputation as a fighter and war leader. She too made good stuff of legend. She was many years Butler’s senior, and some people seemed to believe she stood six feet six. Maybe she did. Butler’s Christian wife, Maria, living at posts and forts behind shaky lines, might or might not have known or presumed anything about all this, and the whole story might have been nothing but a cluster of rumors that Butler himself saw no percentage in denying.
Indisputable was his authorship of a Shawnee vocabulary and grammar. That project had come at the direct behest of General George Washington, so Butler had taken it up eagerly. Better yet, it was Washington’s old war comrade the Marquis de Lafayette who had asked for something on Indian languages, and that request was made on behalf of none other than Lafayette’s good friend the Austrian monarch Maria Theresa, a superstar among the crowned heads, known to many as the Great Reformer, with a name outdoing that of the king of France—it included, in a page-long host of titles, Dowager Empress of the Romans, Margravine of Moravia, and Lady of the Wendish Mark—and an interest in aboriginal languages. At his desk in a scruffy outpost village, fiddling with his words and phonetic equivalents, Butler might have imagined his work being professionally copied and ceremonially presented months or even years later at the court of Vienna, a curio from the savage American wilderness. That’s the kind of job that made Butler happy.
Nonhelema the Shawnee war leader served as a consultant for another Indian vocabulary book. Maybe she and Butler shared nothing more than certain practical and intellectual interests. Maybe they were just good friends. Maybe that’s what made Butler laugh as he sat propped amid the killing in the woods, while his friends and brothers grew frantic with desire to remove him, frantic for escape themselves. Who knows where Butler’s mind ran or why he really laughed.
* * *
Somewhere in the smoke and noise and chill of that November morning were Little Turtle and Blue Jacket. Little Turtle would be leading Miami forces, Blue Jacket the Shawnee, and both were leading the whole thing. The scene so chaotic and horrific for American soldiers was for the Indians becoming a thrilling victory, thanks to precise planning, irreproachable execution, and full coordination of forces led mainly by those two men, along with the Delaware war leader Buckongahelas.
Little Turtle and Blue Jacket never agreed on much. Those who talked about them at the time and would write about them in the future—some praising Blue Jacket to the detriment of Little Turtle, others vice versa—never agreed either. But that November morning, as a man they’d come to see as their nemesis sat dying under an oak, they were in agreement on at least one thing: this was a war for the survival of their people, and they would work together to win it. The victory they were even now achieving against U.S. forces represented a triumphant step forward in that war for survival.
Like those of the European monarchs, these leaders’ names involved mystery and tradition. It was English speakers, of course, who called the Miami leader “Little Turtle,” sometimes “the Little Turtle,” sometimes only “Turtle.” In his language, he was called something English speakers phonetically approximated as “Mi-chi-kin-i-kwa,” referring to the common painted turtle of North America. Blue Jacket’s name had once been something sounding like “Se-pe-te-ke-na-te,” which comes into this language as the “Big Rabbit,” but he changed it to something that might be translated as “Whirlpool,” and the handle Blue Jacket had nothing to do with either of his other names. There was a reason for it, but nobody remembered what it was.
You had to be there. Little Turtle was by no account little, and Blue Jacket wore scarlet. The Turtle stood over six feet tall, some said; others disagreed, but more important was his stature as a military leader. It was unexpected. He was about forty, his roots obscure, his connections strange, and he was quiet, for a war leader, philosophical yet blunt, his attitudes enigmatic. Blue Jacket, about forty-five, was more flamboyant, and his people did have a reputation as brilliant, deadly fighters, and as leaders of other nations. The way many Shawnee like Blue Jacket looked at it, they’d been pushed out of the region north of the Ohio River long ago by the powerful Six Nations of the Iroquois, reduced to wandering for generations in diaspora as far west as the grasslands, as far south as the gulf. With Blue Jacket now in command for war, some hoped for a Shawnee return here, a whole people re-formed in an ancient homeland.
Today the Indians had encircled the Americans’ camp in a crescent, with Blue Jacket’s, Little Turtle’s, and Buckongahelas’s men making up the crescent’s base and fighters from other nations on each horn. Then the crescent moved, synchronized: the leaders’ base charged the camp’s center, while the horns, not charging, ran all the way around the outside of the camp’s perimeter. Caught in that net, the Americans never had a chance. That’s what the men whom English speakers called Blue Jacket and Little Turtle were good at. It took collaboration.
* * *
Richard Butler was facing inevitability. The men around him at the tree, under fire now, began to shift into retreat mode, hoping to withdraw in some kind of order. And yet Thomas and Edward were refusing to leave their brother’s side.
Richard took charge by pointing out the obvious. He was mortally wounded; there was no chance for his escape. As both elder brother and superior officer, he gave young Edward an order: leave Richard to his fate and save their wounded brother. Over protests, Richard began handing his sword, watch, and ring to a major, and he asked for a loaded pistol.
There was nothing else to do. Retreat had been called by fife and drum, but there was no retreat, only terror, cacophony, mutilation. Thomas Butler couldn’t even walk. They found two loaded pistols, cocked them, and put them in Richard Butler’s useless hands.
* * *
Or that’s a pretty fair account of the last moments of Major General Richard Butler, as cobbled from the memories, and from other accounts based on the memories, of men who survived that victory of Indian fighters over the United States and men who heard about it later. A fair account, not the thing itself, of course. Butler died. How he died is a story, and what happened to the story is a story too.
As the losers would have it, the death of General Butler became a dramatic moment in the story of a horrifying defeat of troops led by General Arthur St. Clair in asserting legal claims of the United States in the region north and west of the Ohio River. Having become unsure of his whereabouts, St. Clair led about 1,500 officers and men, plus dozens of others—soldiers’ wives, girlfriends, and children, the wagon and packhorse drivers—to a bivouac on the bend of the upper Wabash. He failed to fortify his encampment. In the ensuing battle, about 650 American troops died, including nearly all of the officers, along with 50 civilians, including nearly all of the women and children—some claimed the total of the dead was more like 900—plus about 300 horribly wounded. Nearly a third of all of the nation’s troops, that is, were killed in a few hours, and the survivors, in their panicked flight, took away unforgettable horror at the torture and mutilation to which the dying were exuberantly and ritually subjected, the rape and burning, the amputation and evisceration, the mouths stuffed with dirt.
General St. Clair himself survived. The scale of his loss, and the horror at how the dead met their ends, would become parts of a story whose title attached itself to his name: St. Clair’s defeat.
Richard Butler, by contrast, became a hero. The Butlers had only recently come from Ireland—Richard was born there—and like other new American families they took themselves to be founders of a military, commercial, administrative, and courtly dynasty. Richard and his four brothers expected to take risks, over-deliver, and be flamboyantly rewarded. Four of the five were heroes of American independence, known as the fighting Butlers. “The Butlers and their five sons!” said General Washington, according to lore, glass in hand at Fraunces Tavern in New York at the Continental officers’ farewell dinner. “When I wished a thing well done,” said the Marquis de Lafayette, recalling his days in that war, “I ordered a Butler to do it.”
He leaned his back against a tree, and there resigned his breath,
And like a valiant soldier, sunk in the arms of death;
When blessed angels did await, his spirit to convey,
And unto the celestial fields, he quickly bent his way.
A topical ballad titled “Sinclair’s Defeat” made the death of Richard Butler a household tale.
* * *
The victorious Indians had a different way of making the death of their old friend and enemy Richard Butler a narrative high point. One day not long after that battle at the Wabash, the famous Mohawk Joseph Brant, a leader and diplomat of the Six Nations confederation of the Iroquois, took unsolicited and unexpected delivery of Richard Butler’s dried scalp. He’d been served.
As the winners would have it, Richard Butler’s death occurred not in St. Clair’s miserable failure but in their confederation’s great success. An alliance of western Indian nations, put together by the Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware people who lived, farmed, hunted, and did business north and west of the Ohio River, was successfully resisting an American incursion carried out in violation of normal diplomatic process and marked for decades by murder of noncombatants and wholesale burning of towns and food supplies. Joseph Brant’s Mohawk, and the rest of the Six Nations, lived east of the Ohio River yet claimed all land to its west: they’d dominated the western Indians for generations. Now the western Indians led by Blue Jacket and Little Turtle had begun winning a fight they felt was just gearing up, and Brant and the Iroquois, having seemed at first to offer support, had lately seemed to waffle.
Hence the delivery to Joseph Brant of a piece of Richard Butler. Cut and yanked from the head, possibly while the heart still beat wildly for life, it traveled a long way to tell Brant the story of an overwhelming victory, a story that was also an indictment, an invitation, and a demand.
* * *
A fundamental shift was about to begin in North American life. With the losers’ outrage and terror deepening, in response to St. Clair’s awful defeat on the Wabash, and with the winners’ excitement over their great victory mounting, a war would begin. The existence, purpose, and future of the United States of America was formed in that war.
And yet it would be forgotten. The first war the United States ever fought, in which the U.S. Army itself came into being, would never even be given a name.
* * *
So this all took place in present-day where?
You can walk a pleasant, quiet main street in what is now western Ohio to a plaque marking the site of Richard Butler’s death, but that’s the wrong answer. You can get the address in seconds. It won’t help. Butler died in a deep woods, the trees widely spaced and so big around that it would take many men to circle some of them. It was late fall, the branches probably not yet completely bare, so if the smoke hadn’t been so thick some sky might have been visible, but you’d have to tilt your head back to see it, and in summer that place was dim, full of birdsong and the sound of wind in leaves, the branches creaking far overhead.
But it’s not just the shorn land and artificially exposed sky that make it impossible for us to go where this story took place. It’s not even the astonishing rarity of descendants of the people who had lived there for so long. The story of the only indigenous alliance to win battles that might have defeated American expansion into the West, and the story of the founding of the U.S. Army, with all of its world-historical future coded in embryo, in the first war that the United States ever fought—the story, that is, of Americans’ real emergence as a national people—is set in regions we don’t recognize, map to our world, or have any bearings in.
Copyright © 2017 by William Hogeland
Maps copyright © 2017 by Jeffrey L. Ward