St. Clair's Defeat (Fort Hamilton Days)

In the autumn of 1791, the United States Army marched north from Fort Washington into the Ohio woods to settle the Indian question once and for all. They never finished the march. They never settled anything. What was left of them came stumbling back twenty-nine miles through cast-off muskets and frozen blood and bodies the army would not return to bury for two and a half years.

This is the story of that march, the morning that ended it, and the long winter after.

On November 4, near the headwaters of the Wabash, the army of General Arthur St. Clair was met at dawn by a confederacy of warriors under Little Turtle and Blue Jacket. Inside three hours, six hundred and thirty Americans were dead. Two hundred and seventy more were wounded. Cannon were left in the mud. The old general was carried out on a litter, weeping. It remains the worst defeat the United States Army has ever suffered at the hands of an indigenous force, and you have probably never heard of it.

Word was the campaign had been ill-starred from the start. The contractors couldn't keep the column fed. The militia drank what they could carry and deserted in lots of sixty. The general was sick - gout, rheumatism, dysentery, take your pick - and rode out that morning leaning on two officers, his hair undone, his coat unbuttoned, a man already half a casualty before the first shot was fired. By breakfast he had lost his army.

Across nine voices and fifty chapters, this book follows the long unraveling.

Major David Ziegler, German-born, a Turkish saber scar across his scalp, holds the rear guard intact down the bloody Trace and is sent back north with a hundred men to relieve the cut-off garrison at Fort Jefferson, where the survivors are eating horse flesh and green hides.

Captain Erkuries Beatty stands at the gate of Fort Hamilton on the night of November 8 and counts the broken column back into the stockade, and goes on counting through the long winter, because somebody has to.

Hannah Cobb walks the Trace alone in November and walks it back with a knife scar across her face and a story she will not tell. When the survivors come south, a man she does not know hands her her husband's pocket watch, and she does not open it.

A Kentucky horse-master named Tackett counts ninety animals out of Fort Hamilton and counts them down toward nothing.

A militia scout the men call Dream Talker counts down the days to a battle he should not be able to see.

A schoolmaster named Reily walks back up the Trace in the dead of winter to write down what was left there - men frozen in postures of running, an unfinished letter in a frozen hand, a pewter button no widow will ever claim.

A free Black teamster named Solomon Ayers, who answers to Ben Crow, carries a general's litter off the field and carries the secret of his own freedom out with it.

And a Shawnee woman long dead - Nonhelema, the Grenadier - walks beside the Butler brothers in the kind of ghost story the Ohio country specializes in.

Through all of it runs the Trace, the rough cut hacked through the timber by Josiah Harmar's men the year before, widened by St. Clair's column on the way north and walked back over by ghosts on the way south. The Trace is a character in this book. So is the weather. So is the silence that fell between Fort Hamilton and Fort Washington when the express riders couldn't get the mail through.

The second volume of the Fort Hamilton chronicles. A book about a forgotten disaster, told from inside the disaster by the men and women who were there. Meant to be read with snow blowing against the window and the fire burning low.

About Richard O Jones
After 25 years writing the first draft of history as a writer and editor for his hometown newspaper, the Hamilton Journal-News, Richard O Jones left the grind of daily journalism in the fall of 2013 for a life of true crime. He is the author of two books on the History Press imprint, Cincinnati's Savage Seamstress: The Shocking Edythe Klumpp Murder Scandal (October, 2014) and The First Celebrity Serial Killer: Confessions of the Strangler Alfred Knapp (May, 2015). In 2016, he began a twice-weekly podcast "True Crime Historian" (www.truecrimehistorian.com) where he tells stories of the scoundrels, scandals and scourges of the past through newspaper accounts in the golden age of yellow journalism. He created the Two-Dollar Terror series of novella-length ebooks. Mr. Jones, a creative writing graduate of Miami University, Ohio, spent most of his career as an arts journalist and has won numerous awards for his reviews and profiles. In 2004, he was named a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts Theatre and Musical Theatre program at the Annenberg School of Journalism. The Ohio Associated Press named him Feature Writer of the Year in 2011. Since leaving the newspaper world, Mr. Jones has become an active member of his local history community as a board member of the Butler County Historical Society, a member of the History Speakers Bureau and a regular presenter at Miami University in a program titled "Yesterday's News." The Michael J. Colligan History Project of Miami University presented Mr. Jones with a Special Recognition for Contributions to Public History for his coverage of the Centennial Commemoration of the Great Flood of 1913.

Photo by Sandra M. Orlett