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— 215 — WarasCulturalEncounterintheOhioValley E l i z a b e t h A . P e r k i n s In his 1827 memoir, Kentucky migrant and former militia captain Daniel Trabue described the treaty negotiations at Fort Greenville as an impressive and colorful affair. The summer of 1795 had brought together Major General Anthony Wayne and his United States Legion with members of the confederacy of western Indians they had defeated one year before at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Their parlay formally ended a long and bloody contest (1774–94) over the permanence of the Ohio River as a boundary between Indian and Anglo-American settlement. As part of the military posturing that went on at such ceremonial occasions, Daniel Trabue recalled that General Wayne “Did often Muster and perrade his men,” who fired their muskets and cannon to (what Trabue naively assumed was) “the astoneshment of the Indians.” The regulars, in Trabue’s estimation, “cut a Marshal appearrince” and were “very well Disipblind,”—praise, indeed, from a member of the notoriously irregular Kentucky militia.1 Yet it was the more pacific scenes of this sprawling tableau that Trabue recalled most minutely. He witnessed the emotional reunion of Indian captives Stephen and Abraham Ruddle with their aging father Isaac, which was complicated by Stephen’s refusal to give up the Indian wife who accompanied him. The Ruddle sons, who had been taken prisoner some eighteen years before at their father’s fort on the Licking E l i z a b e t h A . P e r k i n s — 216 — River, appeared at the treaty grounds as fully acculturated Indians. Isaac Ruddle was literally knocked off his feet at his sons’ introduction, collapsing and crying out with dismay “My cheldrin is Indians!” Over the next few days, Trabue served as an intermediary between the elder Ruddle, his sons, and their Indian families, giving one adopted brother a shirt and advising “Old Riddle [sic] he ought to give stephen’s wife something,” after she was overlooked in the distribution of new clothing. Trabue minced no words in describing the Indian woman’s appearance, calling her “Old, ugly, black looking.” Nevertheless, he helped to replace her “Old smoked blankit” with a new calico outfit, and noted her pleasure in the gift. As he interacted further with the family, Trabue came to understand why Stephen so stoutly refused to trade his wife “for no woman in the world.” Indeed, after she single-handedly rounded up her party’s scattered horses, traveling for two or three days and a distance of forty miles to do so, Trabue decided that the Indian woman “was worth all the rest of the company together.”2 A frank conversation with an old Indian chief marked the climax of Trabue’s Greenville memoir. As the formal negotiations dragged on, the two men “agreed to walk out some distance and set Down and talk about the Despute between the Indeans and white people. This chief said to me, ‘You big Captain. Me big Capt. too. What Do you want to take Indian land from them for?” After sparring goodnaturedly over the role of the British king in promoting the late hostilities, the two men turned to the question of religious sanction. The Indian expressed his belief that “the Great Spirret made all the people—the Indean and the white people. He made all the land and it was the Great sperrit’s land. And it was rong [sic] for Indian or white man to say it was his land.” Trabue countered: “You got land enough left, and as the Great sperrit made the land for white folks as well as Indean, what make you Mad about it?” The chief replied that “the truth was the british give them Rum and tell them the white people will never stop untell they take all the land from them.” Trabue denied this intention, as it was not his own, and their conversation ended amicably. As is so often the case, two individuals achieved a measure of mutual understanding that continued to elude their two peoples.3 I quote from these Greenville vignettes at length because Trabue’s reactions are so plainly at variance with the image of the hot-headed, Indian-hating, Kentuckian of popular (and even scholarly) literature. History, with its constantly shifting interpretations, has played a cruel trick on men like Daniel Trabue. The erstwhile heroes of Boonesborough and Blue Licks are now history’s heavies: “Indian...

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