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106 a child of the revolution chapter eleven Legionville and a Trip East t Duty at the new camp was not exactly like fighting savages in the wilderness , but it was as close to it as Harrison had yet come. A few weeks before, the camp had been an unnamed spot on the high north bank of the Ohio River; now, by order of the commander, it was to become a collection of huts called Legionville, temporarily home to two thousand men; next spring, if all went well, it would again be a deserted clearing in the forest. And there were, in fact, Indians about; one or two had been seen in the woods near the site, although, cowed into inactivity by the size of Wayne’s army, they gave the Legion no trouble.1 There was every sign of another harsh winter coming. The men had barely gotten to work, wearing the hunting shirts Wayne had issued them in lieu of the winter clothing that had not yet arrived from the east, when the snow came, falling at least six inches deep. Still the men were kept at it, felling trees, clearing brush, and shaping the fallen trunks with broadaxe and adze to fit together into huts. The soldiers’ quarters were to be built first, and then the officers’, with Wayne’s last of all. For several weeks, then, the officers shared the men’s lot, sleeping under linen tents, eating half-cooked meat and bread, and huddling around smoky fires for warmth. No doubt they all looked and felt rather grubby; in the circumstances, anything beyond minimal bathing and grooming was out of the question. By 6 December, nearly everyone was “under cover . . . warm and secure.” By the middle of the month there was enough ice in the Ohio to hamper the shipment of supplies from Pittsburgh.2 106 Booraem text.indb 106 5/22/12 1:53 PM legionville and a trip east 107 When the men were not detailed to construction work, they resumed the routine familiar from Fort Fayette: morning parade, morning rifle practice outside camp (with a gill of whiskey for the best shots), bayonet drill, and marching over muddy snow in the afternoons. Sergeants did much of the drilling, but at parade Lieutenant Harrison would be out walking alongside his company, espontoon in hand.3 Harrison had been in the army for more than a year now, and it is fair to ask how much progress he had made toward assuming the role of his dreams, that of military officer. No measuring stick is readily available. The Legion of the United States, an institution less than a decade old, had no procedures for rating junior officers, and, indeed, no firm criteria for evaluating them. It did have, as William Skelton has pointed out in his masterly study of the early officer corps, a rough ideal, derived mainly from British and Continental models: an officer should be a gentleman, someone comfortable and experienced with command; he should have mastery of the practical skills that went with his position, like administration, discipline, and specifically military procedures; and ideally he should be an educated person, with a “liberal,” humane point of view. To these requisites, Americans often added another, particularly significant in their own environment: a good officer needed high levels of physical strength and stamina, since his duties might well pit him against the fleet, uncivilized original inhabitants of North America in their ancestral wilderness.4 Lieutenant Harrison clearly met the first and third of these criteria: his Virginia gentry upbringing made him ipso facto a gentleman, while his education, though second-rate by the standards of his own class, was superior to that of most army officers. He did not need to change his behavior at all in order to fit into his new identity. As to the final criterion, however, Harrison’s own account highlights the nervousness he felt about his ability to measure up. Slender and delicate in appearance , he did not look as if he belonged in a frontier military force. His accounts of his first solo assignment, the march to Fort Hamilton, and of the construction of Fort St. Clair in severe weather, show his anxiety to convince his superiors, his colleagues, and most of all himself that he was tough enough to handle the rigors of Western duty. His success in doing so was a powerful boost to his identity as a military man.5 Harrison’ one area of...

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