White War, Red Blood

The American Revolution was really two wars. Along the eastern seaboard, it was a contest of one army against another. Farther inland, the fighting resembled that of the French and Indian War. Both sides employed Indian allies, but the British recruited more of them and used them as agents of terror to raid and burn outlying settlements. From the earliest days of the war, the royal lieutenant governor of Detroit, Henry Hamilton, played a key role in stirring the Indians of the Indiana-Illinois frontier to wage ferocious war on Patriot settlers. Hamilton’s Indian nickname tells the tale: they called him “Hair Buyer.” In 1778, the young George Rogers Clark (1752-1818), a hard-drinking Kentucky militia leader, overran the British-controlled Illinois and Indiana region and took “Hair Buyer” prisoner. Even more celebrated in the western war campaign—albeit less militarily significant—was the intrepid frontiersman Daniel Boone.

Bloody though the Kentucky frontier was, conditions were even worse on the New York—Pennsylvania frontier, which was terrorized by the Iroquois. Washington dispatched Major General John Sullivan into western New York with instructions to wipe out tribal towns wherever he found them. Nevertheless, the Iroquois persisted in raiding, as did the tribes throughout the Ohio country. They were supported and urged on by Loyalist elements in this region, and their combined activity would not come to an end even with the conclusion of the war. Indeed, this western frontier would smolder and be rekindled periodically, bursting into open flame as the War of 1812.