Wetzel

What remains in memory through life has a logic, although that logic is often so deep in a personality as to be a mystery as well as the source of identity. Why does a Professor of Mathematics return, in retirement, to a passage from a Zane Gray novel encountered in childhood? The story of Lew Wetzel that his brother read to Richard Fleming in childhood was the story of a frontier hero. There was enough of courage, strength and adventure to catch the imagination of a boy, and Fleming remembered the story, as many boys might. What is unusual is that he returned to it in later life with an unusual amount of intensity, seven years of research and writing. Wetzel is the result of that return, and it is a historical novel whose fiction rings truer than much academic history of the encounters between European settlers and the aboriginal inhabitants of North America.

Lew Wetzel was born in 1763 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and moved near what is now Wheeling, West Virginia when he was about seven years old. The settlements on the Virginia side of the Ohio River were, in that period, the frontier of white settlement. During Wetzel’s youth and early adulthood, the ground was contested. British forces and their Indian allies carried on low intensity war during the American Revolution; after 1783, British influence was reduced, the population of settlers increased, and the conflict continued as Indian tribes still attempted to defend their territories and white settlers, who had become Americans, sought to take them. Daniel Boone is famous as an explorer and guide for these settlers. Wetzel was a contemporary of Boone’s, knew him, and apparently was as well -known as Boone in their time. Although he has not disappeared from the historical record, he is not well -known today, perhaps because of what he was famous for: he was famous for killing Indians.

That fact makes the work Fleming has done in recreating Wetzel’s life significant. It is the most balanced portrait of frontier violence that I have ever encountered. Mid-twentieth century portrayals of Indians as obstacles to white happiness who often presented themselves as targets for John Wayne and his troops have been followed more recently by portraits in film, fiction, and academic work that portray the tribes as nicer than the whites who victimized them. In this version of American history, the political structure created by the United States Constitution did not derive from James Harrington’s Oceana (1656): it was borrowed from the Iroquois. A student reading Lewis’s account of scalps hanging from a lodge pole in a Mandan village announces that Lewis must have been mistaken; the Indians didn’t take scalps. Lewis’s account of the fight that he and three of his men had with four Blackfeet who tried to steal their guns and horses becomes a crime in which cruel and violent whites murdered two Indian teenagers. The shot that nearly killed Lewis is not mentioned. Custer’s charge into Jeb Stuart’s cavalry on the Third day of Gettysburg is subsumed in the broad range of genocidal actions by whites who attempted to destroy the cultures of aboriginal peoples in the United States. Custer deserved to die. By this revision of the national history, Lew Wetzel would have deserved to die at the hands of the Indians he attacked as well; certainly he is not a suitable model for a young boy who wishes to be a hero.

Wetzel will not be many people’s hero after they read Wetzel. He killed many people, was sought out to do so, did so willingly, and did so with calm efficiency. He was jailed repeatedly during his life, but Wetzel is part of a complex history. Some of the people he killed were also, by all of the evidence available to deal with the question, cruel and brutal men. One of his shootings, although not fatal, was indefensible in his own day. Yet his story belongs in our history in as close to a factually accurate telling as is possible because his behavior and the behavior of the people around him, aboriginal and white, mirrors human reality and the role of violence in that reality. Not bad Indians, good whites. Not good Indians, bad whites, but mixtures of good and evil in the people who faced off on both sides of the frontier conflicts. For fundamental anthropological reasons, the Indians were bound to lose the contest for their territories. One of the important causes was disease. But social organization, technology, and demographics were absolute. The outcome was, at least until recently, continuing and tragic loss for the tribes, but they defended their lands with courage and skill and, because they were people engaging in what is now called asymmetrical warfare, often with ruthless violence. Thus the center of Wetzel’s life was fighting, and Wetzel the book about his life, is a history of the decades of warfare between Indians and whites who fought for control of what is now the state of Ohio.

That Fleming is not an historian, is not attached to a university history department, strikes me as a strength of his book. A biography, as non-fiction, would not have the formal structure of Wetzel which is based on a fictional stalking of Wetzel by an Indian seeking revenge for an earlier injury. Several episodes created by Fleming to enlarge our sense of Wetzel’s character would have to disappear. But Fleming is a serious and careful researcher and equally careful and transparent in his handling of his sources. In an appendix that he calls the “Underbook,” he describes very concisely what the sources available to him are and how he has used them. Some are primary, documents available in various archives and libraries. Some are secondary, local histories of towns and counties that collect accounts from individuals. These range from first to third hand reports about what happened in various places and incidents. Fleming is careful to assess the plausibility of these accounts and, where they differ, to explain his decisions. This is historical fiction, but it is an admirable effort to make clear what really happened in cases where there is enough evidence to do so.

The repeated accounts of ambush and slaughter can, in most cases, be substantiated with good evidence. Indians and whites lived alongside or near each other. Accidental encounters produced death. Typically, a party, Indian or white, would surprise and attack a party of the enemy, Indian or white, if they saw them first, were not detected themselves, and could surprise and overwhelm their victims. Wetzel was himself kidnapped in such an attack as a child. He escaped. As an adult he lost a brother and his father in such ambushes. Most of the Indians he killed fell in similar attacks by him and his parties. This was guerilla warfare that is reminiscent of turf warfare in big city gangs or of tribal conflicts in the Middle East. It was brutal. The description of the three day ceremony by which the Shawnee burned to death the first prisoner they captured each year stands alongside the hacking to death of more than a dozen captives by white militia. It was bloody stuff.

That Wetzel was successful at killing and managed to stay alive while doing so made him famous. Fleming’s character is a good shot, knows how to navigate in the woods, can run and walk very fast, understands the tactics and values of his enemy, is calm in the face of combat, even combat that is not going well, and has a rigid sense of personal honor. This portrait is plausible on the facts that Fleming is able to assemble in his research; he is not as nice as Cooper’s Chingachgook. He is as a literary type, more like Homer’s Odysseus. If you are his enemy, he kills you. As a human type in contemporary culture, we would not live next door to him because he would be in jail.

Reading this history, thinking about the violence that is its defining feature, I come back to Richard Fleming’s dedication of the book to his brother, who died young. I don’t think that it was a fascination with violence that led Fleming to remember this story that his brother read to him when he was seven. I think it is the memory of his brother reading to him that took him back to the story that his brother, whom he loved, read to him. In seeking out the story of Lew Wetzel, a skilled killer, and, incidentally, an important chunk of American history, he remembers and honors his brother.

Peter Koper, Professor of English Language and Literature (Emeritus), Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Michigan