September/October 2014, Muzzleloader, pages 55-62, illustrated with site photos.
Point Pleasant West Virginia, right across the river from Ohio, was a key site in paleface-redskin relations over the course of two lifetimes. In the 18th Century Traveler column Matt Wulf summarizes the strategic importance and overall history of the site and then focuses on Fort Randolph, one of numerous forts built at this location as a spearhead into redskin territory.
After reading this Indian war tale one might well imagine that Robert E. Howard based his classic Conan story Beyond the Black River on this very drama. I have made the site a key location in my Amerindian sci-fi Sunset novels, and have not yet gotten around to letting my Amerindian time traveler decry the content of the jingoistic Point Pleasant Battlefield marker.
The actual story of the siege clearly exemplifies the four unavoidable dynamics of paleface-redskin warfare in the Eastern Woodlands:
1. Wilderness campaigns were so hard to supply from an 18th Century colonial economic base that campaigns moved at a snail’s pace.
2. European and colonial soldiers were hopelessly outmatched by their savage foes in the areas of maneuver, man-to-man combat, tactics, and intelligence, and were generally incapable of effective wilderness operations. To the extent wilderness operations succeeded it was due to the use of small parties of frontiersmen.
3. Native Americans never did find a practical solution for defeating enclosed fortified positions.
4. Amerindian culture was less tolerant of heavy loss of life than the European invaders, whose more autocratic leaders rarely seemed to be deterred by slaughter among the rank and file.
I really enjoyed this article and will be sure to visit the site next year with a copy of Mat Wulf’s article in hand.
