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When the British arrived, Leonard Helm was probably drunk. He often was.
Whether drunk or not, there was no question about what the Virginia officer did next. He opened the gates of the frontier outpost and pointed a cannon at the British troops. Waving a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a lit match in the other, Helm was then ready to negotiate. Or not.
Not keen to be blown to bits by this drunken Colonial, but knowing they had the advantage of numbers, the British granted favorable terms. Only then did they learn the truth: Helm had just three men in the ramshackle outpost the Virginians insisted on calling Fort Patrick Henry.
Helm was part of the Virginia gentry that moved west into the frontier
We often think of the American Revolution as an affair conducted by high-class gentlemen in white wigs. Some certainly were. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Lees and the Randolphs — they were all very much part of the Virginia gentry, a gentry that found itself in debt to British merchants and resented paying taxes imposed by distant parliamentarians they hadn’t voted on. They had the time and money to read and think grand philosophical thoughts about what they were doing. But there were others of much lower social stations who helped win American independence, including women and enslaved laborers whose stories don’t often make it into our history books. And then there was Leonard Helm, a frontiersman who spent much of his time in a drunken haze but whose actions helped clear the British out of the territory that those in the Virginia gentry craved — the land beyond the Appalachians.
Helm’s drunken surrender of Fort Patrick Henry turned out to be just a colorful setback in that overall goal. Helm’s fondness for the bottle is likely one of many reasons why his story never got told in our history books.
Helm came from that Virginia gentry but took a different route, a route that lay west. He was born sometime around 1720 to a wealthy family whose farm overlapped parts of what is now Fauquier and Prince William counties but then was still an enlarged Stafford County. We don’t know much about his upbringing except that in 1748 — by then Helm was about 28 — he married Margaret Farr. Helm, like many Virginians at the time, appears to have been restless for new lands and new adventures. At some point, likely in the 1770s, Helm and his family moved west to what is now Kentucky but then was simply a western extension of Virginia. This was not an uncommon thing for some Virginians of that era, but it also put Helm and all his neighbors in defiance to King George III, whose Proclamation of 1763 had forbade settlement west of a line that ran through the Appalachians. The king was trying to minimize conflicts with Native Americans — and the military costs those conflicts entailed. Virginians simply saw the king denying them what they felt was their right to settle those lands.
In 1774, two things happened that changed the life of the then-54-year-old farmer. His wife died giving birth to triplets — and war broke out. The native tribes west of the mountains mounted a series of raids to try to drive off the growing wave of settlers. Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, led a military force to the Ohio River to confront them, a conflict that became known as Lord Dunmore’s War. Helm buried his wife and went off to that war.
The war didn’t last long — one big battle at Point Pleasant, on the banks of the Ohio, that resulted in a Virginia victory that pushed the native tribes across the river for good. During that brief war, Helm served with a fellow member of the Virginia gentry who had moved to Kentucky — George Rogers Clark. They likely knew each other already; Clark was a prominent figure in Kentucky and Helm had been a longstanding member of the local militia. Whether Helm had been a heavy drinker in his youth or turned to it for solace after his wife’s death, we don’t know, although there is some evidence that he started drinking a lot more during Lord Dunmore’s War. A National Park Service biography of Helm says: “During this time, Helm developed such a fondness for liquor that one commanding officer, after settling Helm’s extensive tavern bills, reprimanded him for his disorderly conduct while drinking.”
Whatever Helm’s shortcomings with sobriety may have been, he retained the confidence of Clark. In 1777, Gov. Patrick Henry authorized Clark to undertake a secret mission to attack the British outposts in modern-day Indiana and Illinois — land that the British considered part of the Province of Quebec but which Virginians felt was rightly theirs. Clark named Helm as one of his top lieutenants on that mission. (See our previous story on Henry’s secret plan to win the west for Virginia.)
Clark went about this task in an unusual way. He bypassed the closest British fort — Fort Sackville at modern-day Vincennes, Indiana — and instead went to the westernmost settlements along the Mississippi River in modern-day Illinois. He took those with ease in early 1778 then turned attention back to Fort Sackville. He also turned to Helm.
The French were settling west of the Alleghenies before the British barely crossed the Blue Ridge
We now think of the Midwest as the American heartland, but the first European settlers of those lands had been French. Just four years after the first European settlers moved into the Shenandoah Valley, the French established a settlement much further west — in modern-day Indiana. They called it Fort Vincennes. They then proceeded to set up other communities as far west as modern-day Saskatchewan on the Canadian prairies. The French were ranging across the continent while the British settlements clung to the coast. Then came the French & Indian War (internationally, part of the larger Seven Years War) and the French lost all that. Their dreams of a North American empire came to an end, although many French citizens remained behind, living uneasily under a British flag.
That was the situation in 1778, when the American Revolution was raging in the east. The British held the former French forts west of the Alleghenies. They renamed Vincennes as Fort Sackville, after Lord Sackville, a British politician who had responsibility for the Colonies. The British, though, skimped on security costs. They sent someone to take over the fort, but they gave him no troops. Edward Abbott mostly presided over a small town of French settlers whose loyalties were very uncertain.
Clark consulted with Pierre Gibault, a French priest in Kaskakia, one of those towns on the Mississippi he now controlled. He found Gibault “inclined to the American interest.” Gibault advised Clark there was no need to attack Vincennes because Abbott had left for Detroit; the real question was what the French residents and the native tribes in the area would think. Gibault thought they could be easily persuaded to support the Americans and offered to go speak with them along with a French doctor, Jean Baptiste Laffont. Both Clark and those French settlers were likely unaware that France and the United States were making a formal alliance; they were already creating an informal one on their own.
Gibault did as he promised. “After spending a day or two explaining matters to the people, they universally acceded,” Clark later wrote. The French residents of Fort Sackville “went in a body to the church, where the oath of allegiance was administered to them in the most solemn manner. A commander was elected and the fort was immediately taken possession of and the American flag displayed, to the great astonishment of the Indians.”
In August 1778, Clark sent Helm and a company of Virginians to take charge of the place. Helm, Clark wrote, “was received with acclamation by the people.” The French were no longer the worry, though, the Native Americans were, because many of them had been siding with the British (who, after all, had tried to keep settlers out of the region under the Proclamation of 1763). Helm “was well acquainted with Indian affairs” and one of his first tasks was making sure the natives were as friendly as the French settlers were. The leader of the local Piankeshaw tribe was alternately known as Young Tobacco (his father had been known as Tobacco) or “the Grand Door,” because of the influence he held with other tribes.
Helm sent for the Grand Door and gave him a friendly letter from Clark which asked him to switch allegiances from the British to the Americans. “After reading it,” Clark wrote, “the chief informed the Captain that he was happy to see him, one of the Big Knife chiefs, in this town. He admitted that he had joined with the English against the Americans, but confessed that he had always thought the sky looked gloomy.” He would need time to consider Clark’s letter. After several days, the Grand Door invited Helm to a conference. The chief said he had never really understood what the war between the British and the Americans were about. “He had always thought that he was in the dark as to the truth of the matter, but now the sky was clear,” Clark wrote. “In short, his ideas were quite changed, and he would tell all the Indians of the Wabash to bloody the land no more for the English. At this he sprang up, struck his breast, called himself a man and a warrior, and saying that he was now a Big Knife, took Captain Helm by the hand. His example was followed by all present, and the evening was spent in merriment.”
The Grand Door sent word to other tribes and Helm soon found himself meeting with a steady parade of chiefs who proclaimed their allegiance. “The British cause lost ground daily in this section, and in a short time our influence over the Indians extended to the River St. Joseph and the lower end of Lake Michigan,” Clark wrote.
Not surprisingly, the British did not take kindly to this. Henry Hamilton was the nearest British army officer; he was in Detroit. He marched a British force down to Fort Sackville to take it back. The Virginia militia that Helm had at Sackville didn’t mind tromping around the western wilderness, but doing battle with British regulars was not something they had signed up for. As Hamilton’s force approached, most of Helm’s men deserted. Hamilton didn’t know that, though, setting him up for the negotiations with the bluffing Helm.
Hamilton wound up with the fort but no army of American prisoners.
A naval battle in the Midwest?
Now it was Clark’s turn to be unhappy. Clark resolved to take the fort back. He marched his men through icy waters in winter. They arrived in February 1778, surrounded the fort and settled in for a siege. Inside the fort, Hamilton was busy . . . playing cards with his captive, Helm.
Although he had been tricked, Hamilton honored his agreement with Helm, who remained a prisoner at the fort — a rather well-treated one. Clark later wrote that Helm “amused himself greatly during the siege and I believe did much damage.” When Hamilton heard a volley of gunfire, he dismissed it as nothing more than the Native Americans in the neighborhood shooting for sport. It wasn’t until later that Hamilton was informed he was surrounded — by Americans. Specifically, Virginians.
Seeing himself outnumbered, Hamilton decided to negotiate. Clark laid down harsh terms, at which point Helm offered to negotiate on Hamilton’s behalf. Clark said that wasn’t allowed because Helm was a prisoner, at which point Hamilton freed him. Clark still wasn’t amused and essentially told Helm to go “await fate.” In the end, Hamilton surrendered, and found himself shipped to Williamsburg. We’ll have more about what happened to him there in a future story.
Clark renamed Fort Sackville as Fort Patrick Henry — after all, in his mind, he was capturing the fort for Virginia. However much Clark may have been peeved at Helm during the negotiations, that unhappiness didn’t seem to last. Clark soon dispatched Helm on another mission.
In March 1779, Helm took 50 men in three boats up the Wabash River, where they surprised a British force and captured 40 prisoners and seven boats who had been trying to deliver supplies to Hamilton, not realizing he’d been captured. This action, just west of Pointe Coupee, Indiana is sometimes called “the westernmost naval battle of the American Revolution.” It wasn’t really a battle and the naval aspect seems a little exaggerated. Helm and his men saw the British campfires at night and simply walked into camp; taking the British prisoners without firing a shot. With that, though, Clark secured the lands west of the Alleghanies for Virginia.
As for Helm, his war continued after the revolution. He died in 1782 fighting Native Americans near modern-day Louisville, Kentucky. It’s said his only personal possessions were the clothes he wore when he was slain. Virginia later granted his heirs 4,666 acres in modern-day Illinois for his service.
