length a tall Indian was discovered through the glimmering of the fire, cautiously moving toward them, making no noise, and apparently using every means in his power to conceal himself from any one about the camp. For a time his actions showed him to be suspicious that a guard might be stationed to watch any unusual appearance, who would give the alarm in case of danger; but all appearing quiet, he ventured forward more boldly, rested upon his toes, and was distinctly seen to move his finger as he numbered each log of wood, or what he supposed to be a human being quietly enjoying repose. To satisfy himself more fully as to the number, he counted them over a second time, and cautiously retired. He was succeeded by another Indian, who went through the same movements, and retired in the same manner. Soon after the whole party, sixteen in number, were discovered approaching, and greedily eyeing their supposed victims. The feelings of the sargeant's men can better be imagined than described, when they saw the base and cruel purpose of their enemies, who were now so near that they could scarcely be restrained from firing upon them. The plan, however, of the sargeant, was to have his men remain silent in their places of concealment till the muskets of the savages were discharged, that their own fire might be more effectual, and opposition less formidable.
Their suspense was not of long duration. The Indians, in a body, cautiously approached, till within a short distance; they then halted, took deliberate aim, discharged their pieces upon inanimate logs, gave the dreadful war-whoop, and instantly rushed forward with tomahawk and scalping-knife in hand, to dispatch the living, and obtain the scalps of the dead. As soon as they had collected in close order, more effectually to execute their horrid intentions, the party of the sargeant, with unerring aim, discharged their pieces, not on logs of wood, but perfidious savages, not one of whom escaped destruction by the snare into which they led themselves.
There must have been a touch of grim humor about that sargeant as well as of cool courage.
Many instances are on record of those days of danger—where either in battle or in the settlement of new countries, the cruel and crafty red-man had to be encountered—where the minds of men have been thrown from their balance by the sight of barbarities, or the suffering of afflictions, which overthrow their shuddering reasons. Some men have been called monomaniacs, from the fact of their restless and rankling hatred of the race who had inflicted some great misery upon them or theirs. But it is hardly strange that when they saw those savages behave worse than tigers, they decided to treat them like wild beasts, and that they were justified in the attempt to exterminate them. There must be men in Minnesota, at this day, who are monomaniacs on the subject of the red-skins. One of the most noted of these Indian haters was John Moredock, of Kentucky; and these are the circumstances which made him so, as given in a fine paper on the early settlers, in Harper's Magazine for 1861:
Toward the end of the last century there lived at Vincennes a woman whose whole life had been spent on the frontier. She had been widowed four or five times by the Indians; her last husband, whose name was Moredock, had been killed a few years before the time of which we speak. But she had managed to bring up a large family in a respectable manner. Now, when her sons were growing up, she resolved to better their condition by moving "West." The whole of Illinois was a blooming waste of prairie land, except in a few places where stood the trading-posts built a hundred years before by the French.
The lower peninsula of Illinois was not of a nature to attract emigrants when so much finer lands were to be found on the banks of the Great River and its tributaries; nor was a land journey over that marshy region, infested as it was by roving bands of savages, to be lightly undertaken, when the two rivers furnished a so much more easy though circuitous way to the delightful region beyond. Hence it was usual for a company of those intending to make the journey to purchase a sufficient number of pirogues, or keel-boats, in them descend the Ohio, and then ascend the Mississippi to the mouth of the Kaskaskia, or any other destined point. By adopting this mode of traveling all serious danger of Indian attacks was avoided, except at one or two points on the latter stream, where it was necessary to land and draw the boats around certain obstructions in the channel.
To one of these companies the Moredock family joined itself—several of the sons being sufficiently well-grown to take a part not only in the ordinary labors of the voyage but in any conflict that might occur. All went well with the expedition until they reached the rock known as the "Grand Tower" on the Mississippi, almost within sight of their destination. Here, supposing themselves to be out of danger, the men carelessly leaped on shore to drag the boats up against the current, which here rushed violently around the base of the cliff. The women and children, fifteen or twenty in number, tired of being cooped in the narrow cabins for three or four weeks, thoughtlessly followed. While the whole party were thus making their way slowly along the narrow space between the perpendicular precipice on one hand, the well-known yell of savage onset rung in their ears, and a volley of rifles from above stretched half a dozen of the number dead in their midst, while almost at the same moment a band of the painted demons appeared at each end of the fatal pass. The experienced border men, who saw at a glance that their condition was hopeless, stood for one moment overwhelmed with consternation; but in the next the spirit of the true Indian fighter awoke within their hearts, and they faced their assailants with hopeless but desperate valor.
The conflict that ensued was only a repetition of the scene which the rivers and woods of the West had witnessed a thousand times before, in which all the boasted strength and intelligence of the whites had been baffled by the superior cunning of the red-men. "Battle Rock," "Murder Creek," "Bloody Run," and hundreds of similar names scattered throughout our land, are but so many characters in that stern epitaph which the aborigines, during their slow retreat across the continent toward the Rocky Mountains, and annihilation, have written for themselves in the blood of the destroying race. The history of Indian warfare contains no passage more fearful than is to be found in the narrative of the massacre at the Grand Tower of the Mississippi. Half armed, surprised, encumbered with their women and children, and taken in so disadvantageous a situation, being all huddled together on a narrow sand-beach, with their enemies above and on either side, their most desperate efforts availed not even to postpone their fate; and in the space of ten minutes after the warning yell was heard, the mangled bodies of forty men, women and children lay heaped upon the narrow strip of sand. The conflict had ended in the complete destruction of the emigrant company—so complete that the savages imagined not a single survivor remained to carry the disastrous tidings to the settlements.
But one such wretched survivor, however, there was. John Moredock, who, having fought like a young tiger until all hope of saving even a part of the unfortunate company was lost, and who then, favored by the smoke, and the eagerness of the assailants for scalps, and the plunder of the boats, glided through the midst of the savages and nestled himself in a cleft of the rocks. Here he lay for hours, sole spectator of a scene of Indian ferocity which transformed his young heart to flint, and awoke that thirst for revenge which continued to form the ruling sentiment of his future life, and which raged as insatiably on the day of his death, forty years later, when he had become a man of mark, holding high offices in his adopted State, as it did when crouching among the rocks of the Grand Tower; and, beholding the bodies of his mother, sisters and brothers mangled by the Indian tomahawk, he bound himself by a solemn oath never from that moment to spare one of the accursed race who might come within reach of his arm; and especially to track the footsteps of the marauding band who had just swept away all that he loved on earth, until the last one should have paid the penalty of life for life.
How long he remained thus concealed he never knew; but at length, as the sun was setting, the Indians departed, and John Moredock stepped forth from his hiding-place, not what he had entered it, a brave, light-hearted lad of nineteen, the pride of a large family circle and the favorite of a whole little colony of borderers, but an orphan and an utter stranger in a strange land, standing alone amidst the ghastly and disfigured corpses of his family and friends. He had hoped to find some life still lingering amidst the heaps of carnage; but all, all had perished. Having satisfied himself of this fact, the lonely boy—now transformed into that most fearful of all beings, a thoroughly desperate man—quitted the place, and, guiding himself by the stars,
