Tom Strong, boy-captain : a story of America

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TOM STRONG

WASHINGTON’S SCOUT

Illustrated. 2nd printing

“ ' The Courant ’ has recently received a copy of a ‘boys’ book’ which strikes us as meeting all the wants in the case. Kind friends can safely give it in the knowledge that it is really a good and informing work, and the boys needn’t cast it aside because it is good for ’em. If they start, they will read it clear through. It is the story of a youth in the Revolution. It is very cleverly written. The reader never loses interest in the adventurous boy, but, as he reads, the chief events of the Revolution pass in review .” — The Hartford Louraut.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Publishers New York

Washington’s Headquarters, Hasbrouck House, Newburg, New York

A STORY OF AMERICA

By

ALFRED BISHOP MASON

;i

Author of “Tom Strong, Washington’s Scout”

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

. V\ 3ns

Copyright, 1913,

BY

Published August, 1913

This Tale of a Stout-hearted Boy Is Dedicated to a Dear Little Girl Harriet

Foreword

Many of the. persons and personages who appear upon the pages of this book have already lived, some in history and some in the pages of “ Tom Strong, Washington’s Scout.” Those who wish to know the boy’s story from its beginning should read that book too.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Washington’s Headquarters, Hasbrouck House,

Newburg, New York Frontispiece

PAGE

Daniel Boone 24

Van Cortlandt House, Built in 1748 .... 77

James Watt 83

Fraunces’ Tavern 91

From an etching by Wm. Sartain

Washington Resigning at Annapolis .... 94

From the painting by E. H. Blashfield

Mount Vernon . 117

Washington’s Tomb 119

Robert Morris 153

Rufus King 168

John Jacob Astor 186

After a painting by G. C. Stuart

Gunston Hall * 204

Early Ohio River Flatboat 212

General James Wilkinson ...... 225

From a portrait in the State House, Philadelphia, Pa.

Hernando de Soto 238

Independence Hall in 1776 ...... 291

The Washington Arch, New York .... 292

Statue of Washington, New York Sub-Treasury . 312

The Walter Franklin House, Washington’s Residence IN New York 315

Washington Taking the Oath 316

MAPS

Eastern Half of the United States .... 2

Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island . .179

CHAPTER I «gTOP!’’

The old trapper had said it under his breath, but the word rang like a trumpet in Tom Strong’s ear. When men are walking side by side with Death, every sense is strained, every nerve is tense.

Tom stopped and stood still, peering around a tree-trunk into the tangled forest, so bright with the colors of autumn that a painted savage might well escape detection amid the blaze of red and yellow leaves.

Zed Pratt slipped to Tom’s side with a step as noiseless as a feather floating in the air. His voice sank yet lower.

“ It’s too still. The birds have stopped singing. See that squirrel hide a hundred yards ahead. There are men near us, Tom. And men means Injuns in Kentucky.”

Tom tried to see the squirrel, but in vain. It took Zed’s trained eye — trained by years of danger in the Indian-haunted forests where he had trapped the otter and the beaver — to distinguish the little animal that had suddenly flattened itself on the topmost bough of a giant tree further down the trail. It had seen the boy and the trapper, perhaps; but it had seen other men. It knew that when there was a certain motion below, the motion of men, men who carried guns, guns that shot with deadly precision, it was time for squirrels to hide and keep still.

The man and the boy looked and listened. For a while they saw nothing and heard nothing. Then the trapper both saw and heard. His grasp tightened on Tom’s elbow. He pushed him gently into the hollow trunk of the tall sycamore behind which they had been standing. He followed him into the shelter.

In a moment an Indian, almost naked, in full warpaint, slipped noiselessly by, coming from the west. Tom and the trapper had come from the east. Then came another, and another, and another. A few seconds later, from a little glade near by, where a tiny sparkle of water danced across the trail, there came a guttural sound.

‘‘Ugh! Foot!”

The foremost savage had stopped and was bending over the little brook. His comrades crowded about him. There was the mark of a foot there. Zed had taught Tom much woodcraft during the five years since the boy tumbled into the trapper’s arms in the boat at the foot of Wall Street, bound for the battle of Long Island, but the pupil was not yet perfect. While Zed always walked the wilderness without leaving a trace, Tom did so only sometimes. At the brooklet, his foot had slipped from a stone and had left on the gravel-shore a faint print of moccasined toes. The fierce eye of the Delaware read it as if it were the print in a book.

“Is it fresh?”

The speaker was a tall man, dressed (or undressed) as an Indian, painted as an Indian, but the lines of his face and the tone of his voice betrayed him. He was Simon Girty, a renegade white, fiercer, more bloodthirsty, more cruel than the demons who obeyed him throughout the smiling plains and tree-clad hills of what is now Ohio, and throughout the lovely glades and splendid forests of what was even then often called Kentucky and, perhaps, more often “ the Dark and Bloody Ground.” Simon Girty was one of four brothers, captured by Indians with their mother and stepfather years before in a foray on the Pennsylvania frontier. They had been taken across the Ohio. In an Indian village on the Miami, they had seen their stepfather bound to the stake and tortured to death. The mother’s fate is a mystery, but the four sons grew up to manhood among their captors and were adopted into the tribe. All of them were dreaded in every little hamlet, in every solitary hut, where the white pioneers of civilization made their clearings and plowed their fields or pitched their bark wigwams and trapped for furs at a daily risk of life, but with a daily draught of that splendid freedom that only the wilderness has to give. Of the four, Simon was the worst. Mothers scared their children into stillness with his name. Men shuddered as they told the tale of his devilish doings. He once spared an old friend; he once ransomed a captive woman. The rest of his record was as black and as red as the paint that covered his face on the warpath. He was the leader of the wolf-packs that harried the western frontier in this Year of Our Lord, 1781. Again he asked:

“Is it fresh?”

The savage who had kneeled over the footprint rose to his feet with a hyena smile.

“ Few minutes. Not more. White man.”

“ Only one?”

There was another close study of earth and water, leaf and fallen twig. Despite their deadly danger. Zed grinned and nudged Tom, as they crouched together in the tree-trunk, when the Indian answered:

“ One. No more. My scalp. You go on. I find, kill, catch up.”

“ We will all find and kill.”

“ The Bear-Who-Walks needs no help.”

The eyes of the savage flashed angrily, but Girty’s look dominated him. His fierce glance fell, yet he

muttered :

The scalp belongs to me.”

Tom felt his scalp crawl over his ears.

“ You shall have it,” said Girty.

The three Indians and the renegade spread into a half-circle and began casting about for signs of their prey, like hounds on the trail of a fox. Zed looked at the priming of Tom’s gun and of his own. Those were the days of flintlocks. There was a firm hand-clasp between man and boy. Then they waited.

We left Tom and Zed, on the closing page of

Tom Strong, Washington’s Scout,” captains of the Continental Army, serving for the day on Washington’s staff, on that day of days, October 19, 1781, when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Then they were hunters of men in the midst of an army. Now, alone in this farflung forest, they were hunted of men. This was the way of it.

A few days after the capture of Cornwallis, the boy and the man, captains both, both made sO' for gallantry on the field of battle, were sitting together on a Virginia rail fence, in front of the log-house where they were quartered in Yorktown.

“ Tom,” said the trapper, “ the war’s over. Our country’s ours, not the King’s any longer. What are ye goin’ to do ? ”

“ Do ? I’m going to stay in the army until we know the war’s over. Then I’m going to New York — and to Mother ”

“ God bless h^r,” interjected the trapper. She’s the motherest mother I ever knew.”

“ And work and make her as happy as I can. You must come with me. Zed. Mother and I want you to stay with us forever.”

'' No town for me,” said the trapper, sturdily. “ I’ll come and visit ye and tell your mother what a fine lad ye are — she’s never tired of hearing that — whenever I have the chance, but I must see the Big Woods again, and trap the beaver again, and bet my life against Indian tricks again. I want to breathe free once more. There ain’t room to breathe this side the Alleghanies. Come with me. Try it for a year and I’ll go home with ye then. I can’t now.

lo Tom Strong, Boy-Captain

I just can’t. I just must have the great open spaces and the Big Woods. Come with me, my boy.”

“ But we can’t leave the army. The King may send more troops here and the army must be ready for them.”

There’ll be no more. Colonel Hamilton says so. He ought to know. He knows everything. And he says he can get us furloughs, so we can go now and come back if needs be.”

I’d like a furlough if there’s to be no more fighting, but I’d go home to Mother.”

It’s little ye’ll see of your mother for a year or so. The Britishers will hold New York till peace is signed. She can’t get out of town, and if ye go there, the only choice they’ll give ye is to be shot or to be hung, perhaps not that. They’ll just hang ye offhand.”

Colonel Alexander Hamilton got them their furloughs, on condition that they would go to Kentucky. What is now the splendid State of that name was then a province of Virginia. General Washington was glad to guide their minds and turn

Tom Strong, Boy-Captain ii

their steps to the western outpost of the Old Dominion he loved so well.

While the Americans were battling against British armies and their hired Hessians in the East, they had to battle in the West against British officials and their hired Indians. Early in the war Colonel George Rogers Clark had led a Virginian force far to the West and captured the English outposts at Vincennes, Indiana, and at Cahokia and Kaskaskia, two sleepy old Erench settlements in Illinois, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, near St. Louis. The little garrison he left could not, however, overawe the many Indian villages between the Alleghanies and the Father-of-Waters, as the Indians had baptized the majestic Mississippi. These Indians were constantly spurred on to murder and rapine by the commandants of the English posts along the Great Lakes, Ogdensburg, Oswego, and Niagara in New York, Detroit and Mackinaw in Michigan. These five posts were held by England until after Washington’s second presidential term began, in 1793. Detroit was the especial center of activity, where savage forays were planned, guns and ammunition supplied, scalps and spoils bought. In the Southwest, too, English officers stirred up Indian raids. From the Southwest, Captain Alexander Cameron officially reported, July 15, 1779: “They [the Indians] keep continually scalping and killing in Virginia, North Carolina, and the frontier of Georgia.” An official report from Detroit, October 23, 1781, to Lord George Germaine at London says : “ Many smaller Indian parties have been very successful.

. . . Parties are continually employed upon the back settlements. From the Illinois country to the frontiers of New York there is a continual succession. . . . The perpetual terror and losses of the inhabitants will, I hope, operate powerfully in our favour.” Washington planned wisely when he sent the trapper and Tom to join the thin line of the defenders of our Western frontier.

They had climbed the Alleghanies, and had seen from their summits the Promised Land, and had passed through the little settlements that fringed the mountains and became fewer and smaller as one tramped toward the setting sun. They were pressing forward to Boone’s Station, where Daniel

Boone stood sentinel on the farthest frontier. They were but a few miles from it when they had sought refuge in the hollow tree, near which Simon Girty, Bear- Who- Walks, and the two other braves were now searching for them.

Was the old trapper trapped at last?

If he had been alone, he would have wriggled silently away through the underbrush which surrounded them, and which hid the cavity in the tree, but there was no chance of Tom’s being able to do that. They must await their foes where they were. In a thistledown of a whisper, a mere shadow of speech, he gave Tom his instructions.

“ Shoot as soon as ye’re sure to kill, not a tenth of a second before. As soon as ye’ve shot, fling yourself on your face and reload. Their bullets’ll go over ye. Have your knife handy.”

The silence was terrible. There was not a sound from the four demons so near. Tom fancied they were holding their very breath.

Then came a roar, a crash, a blow that shook the earth. A great tree near by, eaten away by the slow decay of centuries, fell headlong. Two braves leapt into sight, leaping to avoid death by the treefall only to meet death by the flight of bullets. Zed and Tom fired together, flung themselves on their faces, and reloaded with -feverish energy. The two Indians went to the Happy Hunting Grounds. One bullet whizzed through the tree, three feet above the ground. Then silence again, the terrible silence. Then a whisper.

“ Stay here.”

Tom nodded as Zed crawled, snakelike, out into the brush. A moment later, there was a shout, a furious struggle, a frantic yell from Zed : “ Tom ! Come ! ”

The boy leapt forward with great bounds, to find Zed and a painted savage locked in an iron grip, their guns on the ground beside them. The Indian’s right hand, gripping a hunting-knife, was slowly escaping from Zed’s grasp. A second more and the blade would have pierced the trapper’s heart. But there was a second to spare. Tom’s bullet flew towards its mark. It struck a finger of the upraised hand. The knife dropped. The man twisted himself out of Zed's hold and dived into the brush. He could be heard crashing through the forest like a maddened deer. Then there was silence again.

Zed sank to the ground, gasping.

‘‘Are you hurt, Zed? Are you hurt?” Tom cried, with a sob in his voice.

“ Nary a mite, son,” the trapper grinned. “ He squeezed the breath out o’ me, that’s all. He’s got away, but we’re a gun and a knife to the good, anyway. Hush, Tom. What am I thinking of? Where’s the fourth Indian? Two of ’em won’t ever hurt anybody any more; the one that jumped on me hasn’t a weapon left; but where’s the other? ”

A long, gasping sigh answered the question. Zed sprang to his feet, clutched his gun, and, stooping, ran towards the sound. Tom was close behind him. Under one of the big boughs of the fallen tree lay Bear-Who-Walks. He had been knocked senseless and now lay helpless. His tomahawk was in his belt, his gun was beside him, but both arms were pinioned to the ground. Consciousness had returned with the long sigh. He glared at his approaching enemies with stoic calm, with haughty defiance.

Zed drew his knife as he approached the helpless warrior. His eyes gleamed with as savage hate as that which flashed from Bear-Who-Walks. Tom stepped between the two and laid his hand upon the trapper’s arm.

“Don’t, Zed; please, don’t. I couldn’t stand having you kill him.”

The old trapper stared at him with utter amazement.

“Couldn’t stand — my — killing him? Why, boy, you just killed one of the varmints yourself.”

“ In the hot blood of a fight, to save our lives, yes. But not this way, in cold blood. ’Twould be murder.”

“ Get out of my way, boy. The only good Injun is a dead Injun. Quit your foolin’. I’m goin’ to kill him as I would a snake. He’s worse’n the pizenest rattler that ever struck.”

“ Zed, I just had the good luck to save your life. Give me a life for a life. Let this fellow go. Please, Zed.”

It was hard work, but Tom carried his point. The grumbling trapper gave way to what he thought was the wildest folly.

“ Have it your own way, son. Have it your own blame fool way. Turn the murderer loose to murder some more. Shall we give him our guns and knives as well as his own ? ”

The boy laughed. “ Well, hardly that. His are fair spoils of war.”

They took his weapons, then lifted the bough that held him down. Bruised and bleeding, he rose to his feet and faced them steadily.

Bear- Who- Walks will sing the death-song of the Delaware. No Long Knife can make him a squaw in his heart.”

“ Oh, hush, you red devil. Go ! ”

Zed pointed to the forest about them. The Delaware stood still, bewildered, unbelieving. He thought his foes could not be such fools.

“ Go, I tell you. I wanted kill you. Boy says ‘ Go.’ Not I. But go.”

The Indian turned tO' Tom.

“ Go — and go quick,” said Tom. And he, too, .pointed to the forest.

Bear-Who-Walks pressed the fingers of his right hand into the blood upon his side and smeared Tom’s forehead red.

“ In my wigwam there will be venison and maize for my blood-brother. The young Long Knife need never fear the tomahawks of the Delawares. I, Bear-Who-Walks, say it.”

With the stately tread of a chief, he walked into the forest and was swallowed up in it.

“ Why did he call me ‘ Young Long Knife ’ ? ”

‘‘ ’Tis their name for the whites, my boy. Well, well, perhaps the red devil may do ye a good turn some day. Tve heard of such things. But I misdoubt it. ’Twould have been safer to kill him. At any rate, we’ve two scalps to show old Daniel Boone.”

As he spoke, he tucked the hideous trophies into his belt. Then the man and boy, laden with their enemies’ weapons as well as their own, turned to the trail, and plodded silently along. The scalps swinging as Zed moved made Tom rather ill, but he knew the old trapper was sore over the release of Bear- Who-Walks and he knew, too, that scalping was the bloody rule of the Dark and Bloody Ground, for white man and red man alike. So he said nothing.

Little red drops fell on the ground as Zed walked.

Chapter II

^ Jj^ ^HE trail led them to a clearing. At its edge they halted and waved a handkerchief in sign of peace until the same signal was given from the log-stockade that stood in the center of the open space. The clearing stretched a little more than a rifle-shot on every side of the palisade. This was to prevent a besieging force hiding under cover and still attacking. Tom and the trapper stepped into the open and walked forward to the door of the little fort. A gun-barrel gleamed in the afternoon sun at a porthole on each side of the gateway. They were within twenty feet of it before the guns were withdrawn and the gate opened. In Kentucky in 1781 eternal vigilance was the price not only of liberty, but of life. Even then, a half-dozen armed men barred their way for a moment.

Who be ye ? ” said their spokesman.

Captain Zed Pratt,” answered the trapper, “ and this is Captain Tom Strong, both of the Continental Army.”

“ Downv East you must make captains out of rather young saplings,” laughed the frontiersman. “ A man has to be grown up hereabouts to lead other men. Come in, Old-Man-Cap, and you, Boy- Cap, too.” He smiled at the embarrassed boy and held out the ready hand of Kentucky hospitality. “ I’m Simon Kenton,” he added. ‘‘ Most Kentuckians knows who Simon Kenton is. And so does lots of Indians.”

Despite the braggadocio of the man, he had a winning way with him. And his boast was a true one. Next to Daniel Boone ranks Simon Kenton in the annals of the Kentucky frontier. He was born in Fauquier County, Virginia, in 1755. When he was nineteen, he could neither read nor write.. Leadership was born in him. He had a row over some rustic belle; knocked his rival down; thought he had killed him; fled across the mountains to “ the Dark and Bloody Ground.” Since then, his life had been one long Indian fight. He had been captured many times. He had run the gauntlet thirteen times. Running the gauntlet between two long lines of Indians whose idea of joy was to see how near they could come to killing a captive without quite doing so was a ghastly torture. Once he had been tied to the stake and a fire kindled at his feet. There was no risk he had not run, none he was not ready to run. Unlike Daniel Boone, who was by nature a lover of peace, Simon Kenton loved fighting. He liked hunting big game. The biggest game of all was a live Indian.

The attitude of the American to the Indian has always been barbarian. Washington commented, in a letter, upon the fact that the frontiersman killed Indians when he could and did not seem to regard them as human. William Campbell, a man of sterling and gentle character, inserts in a loveletter to his wife, “ his dearest Betsey,” the sister of Patrick Henry : ‘‘ I have now the scalp of an Indian. . . . The first time I go up, I shall take it along to let you see it.”

Not a great many years ago, a dozen men camped for some weeks in Wyoming. The party had a guide, a man who spent his winters with his old parents in Pennsylvania, the rest of his time on the plains. He seemed a gentle person. The Indians were at peace just then. Soon after the campers reached Salt Lake City, one of them had a letter from this guide. He wrote, in substance : “ I am sending you a good headdress. I got it from an Indian. I saw him before he saw me and got a good shot at him.’’

When our heroes were safe inside Boone’s Station, they saw it was 250 by 125 feet, with walls of alternate log-cabin and stockade; with corner blockhouses projecting beyond the walls, so as to protect them by a flanking fire; with two massive framed gates. There was not a pound of iron used in the making of the fort. Windows there were none, but portholes were a-plenty. The cabin doors were thick and solid, with massive bars. Each hut was a little fort in itself, so that if the stockade which surrounded them were carried each could be defended to the last. A cold spring bubbled up in the center. Buffalo meat and venison were drying in the open, hung from long poles supported in the crotches of uprights. Two or three robust women were on an open porch. In a corner half a dozen children, who had gathered in a shy group to see the strangers, went back to their play. They were playing Indian. One of them was bound to a stake and the others were piling firewood about him. It was grim sport, fit for the children of the backwoods.

There was eager questioning. Tom and Zed told the details of Cornwallis’s surrender, rumors of which had filtered through the countryside before their arrival. They told of their tramp over the Blue Ridge. They told of the journey from hamlet to hamlet on the Dark and Bloody Ground. Finally they told of their escape that day.

“ I seen them two scalps wuz fresh,” said Jim Kerr, a long, slabsided, tobacco-chewing frontiersman. “ I sort o’ wondered where you got ’em. Me and Bear-Who-Walks has shot at each other more’n once. When you’ve bin hereabouts a while longer, Boy-Cap, you won’t let any redskin git away like you did the Bear. Will he, boys? ”

There was a full-throated savage growl of assent from all the men.

‘‘ So there’s two of the devils loose near here, Bear-Who-Walks and t’other one that ran. He must be the white man you heerd talkin’. Gosh, do you s’pose he was Girty? ”

There was a moment’s silence. The men looked almost scared. Then they sprang to their feet, seized their guns, and ran to the gateway. A shot had been fired at the edge of the clearing. A man was running at full speed to the stockade. It was Daniel Boone.

Boone was a mild-mannered man, five feet, ten inches high, with a gentle smile, but with hazel eyes that could flash fire. He was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1735. He married, farmed, and half-starved on the Yadkin River in North Carolina. In 1769, he came to Kentucky. He was for long a captive among the Ohio Indians. He was once adopted, in fact, by Blackfish, a Shawnee chief. An Indian adoption was a rather painful ceremony. Every hair on Boone’s head except enough of them to make a scalp-lock was plucked out with tweezers. Then he was stripped, thrown into a creek, and scrubbed for hours “ to take the white blood out.” It was only after this that the new tribesman was painted and the feasting

Daniel Boone so, but we all wuz so interested in what Old-Man- Cap and Boy-Cap here wuz tellin’ us we sort o’ forgot.”

“Ye sort o’ forgot the wimmen and children too, didn’t ye? If the Indians hed come when you all wuz flappin’ your ears aroun’, they wouldn’t ’a’ forgot to kill them after they’d settled you. Don’t forgit ag’in, that’s all. Who all are our new friends?”

So Tom and the trapper told their tale again. Daniel Boone fingered the two scalps with evident pleasure, but his face fell as he looked at them.

“ I’d hoped,” he said, “ I’d hoped ye might ’a’ got the white man. If ye had, I could ’a’ forgiven ye, Boy-Cap, for being such a durn fool as to let Bear- Who-Walks git away. That white man was — Simon Girty ! ”

No orator ever made a stronger climax. Boone’s words thrilled his audience. They rose like one man and clamored for him to lead them in chase of the dreaded fugitive.

“ It ain’t no use,” replied Boone. “ Girty’s got four hours’ start of us. Night’s a-comin’. We’ve lost our chance this time. .But when we do cotch him ”

They vied with each other in describing how the tortures Girty had given others would be meted out to him, when once he fell into their hands. It was a scene of savagery, made worse by the women’s joining eagerly in the talk and supplying one gruesome suggestion after another as to methods of torture. The red man learned from the white the love of liquor, and the white man learned from the red the love of cruelty. Both sets of pupils were apt.

Here in Boone’s Station our heroes spent that winter, with an occasional week in the open by themselves. There were no forays in winter, for the snow made tracking a raiding party too easy. Tom learned to trap, to hunt, to cook, to make a barkshanty. He became wise in the lore of the woods. He taught the children of the little fort to read and write. In the children’s class for a while was Daniel Boone, but when the old pioneer had learned to scrawl something he was pleased to regard as his signature, his interest in “ book-l’arnin’ ” slackened.

He told Tom he would rather read the leaves of trees than the leaves of books.

“ The sky talks to me and the winds and the trees. I don’t care much for the chatter o’ men, whether it be spoken or writ. When a real man’s alone in the forest, he ain’t never lonely. Somethin’s sayin’ somethin’ to him every minnit.”

It was a mild winter. The snow vanished early in February. With it vanished the peace of the frontier. The Ohio tribes were on the warpath before March began. The frontier stirred in its wrath and planned revenge. Word trickled through the hills and valleys that the white man was going to strike home at the Indians’ homes. Volunteers were to gather at Mingo Bottom on the Ohio in May. They came by twos and threes. One of the twos was Zed and Tom. The trapper was in high good humor over the watchword of the campaign-to-be : “ No prisoners.” Tom himself, after six months of frontier life, after hearing hundreds of tales of incredible barbarity, was less inclined to plume himself upon having freed Bear-Who-Walks. What had that particular savage done since ? What was he doing now ? What would he do ? How far was Tom responsible for what Bear-Who-Walks had done, was doing, would do?