LORD DUNMORE'S WAR, 1774.
On the eve of the Revolution, in 1774, the frontiersmen had planted
themselves firmly among the Alleghanies. Directly west of them lay the
untenanted wilderness, traversed only by the war parties of the red men,
and the hunting parties of both reds and whites. No settlers had yet
penetrated it, and until they did so there could be within its borders
no chance of race warfare, unless we call by that name the unchronicled
and unending contest in which, now and then, some solitary white
woodsman slew, or was slain by, his painted foe. But in the southwest
and the northwest alike, the area of settlement already touched the home
lands of the tribes, and hence the horizon was never quite free from the
cloud of threatening Indian war; yet for the moment the southwest was at
peace, for the Cherokees were still friendly.
It was in the northwest that the danger of collision was most imminent;
for there the whites and Indians had wronged one another for a
generation, and their interests were, at the time, clashing more
directly than ever. Much the greater part of the western frontier was
held or claimed by Virginia, whose royal governor was, at the time, Lord
Dunmore. He was an ambitious, energetic man, who held his allegiance as
being due first to the crown, but who, nevertheless, was always eager to
champion the cause of Virginia as against either the Indians or her
sister colonies. The short but fierce and eventful struggle that now
broke out was fought wholly by Virginians, and was generally known by
the name of Lord Dunmore's war.
Virginia, under her charter, claimed that her boundaries ran across to
the South Seas, to the Pacific Ocean. The king of Britain had graciously
granted her the right to take so much of the continent as lay within
these lines, provided she could win it from the Indians, French, and
Spaniards; and provided also she could prevent herself from being ousted
by the crown, or by some of the other colonies. A number of grants had
been made with the like large liberality, and it was found that they
sometimes conflicted with one another. The consequence was that while
the boundaries were well marked near the coast, where they separated
Virginia from the long-settled regions of Maryland and North Carolina,
they became exceeding vague and indefinite the moment they touched the
mountains. Even at the south this produced confusion, and induced the
settlers of the upper Holston to consider themselves as Virginians, not
Carolinians; but at the north the effect was still more confusing, and
nearly resulted in bringing about an intercolonial war between
Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The Virginians claimed all of extreme western Pennsylvania, especially
Fort Pitt and the valley of the Monongahela, and, in 1774, proceeded
boldly to exercise jurisdiction therein.[1] Indeed a strong Party among
the settlers favored the Virginian claim; whereas it would have been
quite impossible to arouse anywhere in Virginia the least feeling in
support of a similar claim on behalf of Pennsylvania. The borderers had
a great contempt for the sluggish and timid government of the Quaker
province, which was very lukewarm in protecting them in their
rights--or, indeed, in punishing them when they did wrong to others. In
fact, it seems probable that they would have declared for Virginia even
more strongly, had it not been for the very reason that their feeling of
independence was so surly as to make them suspicious of all forms of
control; and they therefore objected almost as much to Virginian as
Pennsylvanian rule, and regarded the outcome of the dispute with a
certain indifference.[2]
For a time in the early part of 1774 there seemed quite as much
likelihood of the Virginians being drawn into a fight with the
Pennsylvanians as with the Shawnees. While the Pennsylvanian
commissioners were trying to come to an agreement concerning the
boundaries with Lord Dunmore, the representatives of the two contesting
parties at Fort Pitt were on the verge of actual collision. The Earl's
agent in the disputed territory was a Captain John Conolly,[3] a man of
violent temper and bad character. He embodied the men favorable to his
side as a sort of Virginian militia, with which he not only menaced both
hostile and friendly Indians, but the adherents of the Pennsylvanian
government as well. He destroyed their houses, killed their cattle and
hogs, impressed their horses, and finally so angered them that they
threatened to take refuge in the stockade at Fort Pitt, and defy him to
open war,--although even in the midst of these quarrels with Conolly
their loyalty to the Quaker State was somewhat doubtful.[4]
The Virginians were the only foes the western Indians really dreaded;
for their backwoodsmen were of warlike temper, and had learned to fight
effectively in the forest. The Indians styled them Long Knives; or, to
be more exact, they called them collectively the "Big Knife."[5] There
have been many accounts given of the origin of this name, some ascribing
it to the long knives worn by the hunters and backwoodsmen generally,
others to the fact that some of the noted Virginian fighters in their
early skirmishes were armed with swords. At any rate the title was
accepted by all the Indians as applying to their most determined foes
among the colonists; and finally, after we had become a nation, was
extended so as to apply to Americans generally.
The war that now ensued was not general. The Six Nations, as a whole,
took no part in it, while Pennsylvania also stood aloof; indeed at one
time it was proposed that the Pennsylvanians and Iroquois should jointly
endeavor to mediate between the combatants.[6] The struggle was purely
between the Virginians and the northwestern Indians.
The interests of the Virginians and Pennsylvanians conflicted not only
in respect to the ownership of the land, but also in respect to the
policy to be pursued regarding the Indians. The former were armed
colonists, whose interest it was to get actual possession of the
soil;[7] whereas in Pennsylvania the Indian trade was very important and
lucrative, and the numerous traders to the Indian towns were anxious
that the redskins should remain in undisturbed enjoyment of their
forests, and that no white man should be allowed to come among them;
moreover, so long as they were able to make heavy profits, they were
utterly indifferent to the well-being of the white frontiersmen, and in
return incurred the suspicion and hatred of the latter. The Virginians
accused the traders of being the main cause of the difficulty,[8]
asserting that they sometimes incited the Indians to outrages, and
always, even in the midst of hostilities, kept them supplied with guns
and ammunition, and even bought from them the horses that they had
stolen on their plundering expeditions against the Virginian border.[9]
These last accusations were undoubtedly justified, at least in great
part, by the facts. The interests of the white trader from Pennsylvania
and of the white settler from Virginia were so far from being identical
that they were usually diametrically opposite.
The northwestern Indians had been nominally at peace with the whites for
ten years, since the close of Bouquet's campaign. But Bouquet had
inflicted a very slight punishment upon them, and in concluding an
unsatisfactory peace had caused them to make but a partial reparation
for the wrongs they had done.[10] They remained haughty and insolent,
irritated rather than awed by an ineffective chastisement, and their
young men made frequent forays on the frontier. Each of the ten years of
nominal peace saw plenty of bloodshed. Recently they had been seriously
alarmed by the tendency of the whites to encroach on the great
hunting-grounds south of the Ohio;[11] for here and there hunters or
settlers were already beginning to build cabins along the course of that
stream. The cession by the Iroquois of these same hunting-grounds, at
the treaty of Fort Stanwix, while it gave the whites a colorable title,
merely angered the northwestern Indians. Half a century earlier they
would hardly have dared dispute the power of the Six Nations to do what
they chose with any land that could be reached by their war parties; but
in 1774 they felt quite able to hold their own against their old
oppressors, and had no intention of acquiescing in any arrangement the
latter might make, unless it was also clearly to their own advantage.
In the decade before Lord Dunmore's war there had been much mutual
wrong-doing between the northwestern Indians and the Virginian
borderers; but on the whole the latter had occupied the position of
being sinned against more often than that of sinning. The chief offence
of the whites was that they trespassed upon uninhabited lands, which
they forthwith proceeded to cultivate, instead of merely roaming over
them to hunt the game and butcher one another. Doubtless occasional
white men would murder an Indian if they got a chance, and the traders
almost invariably cheated the tribesmen. But as a whole the traders were
Indian rather than white in their sympathies, and the whites rarely made
forays against their foes avowedly for horses and plunder, while the
Indians on their side were continually indulging in such inroads. Every
year parties of young red warriors crossed the Ohio to plunder the
outlying farms, burn down the buildings, scalp the inmates, and drive
off the horses.[12] Year by year the exasperation of the borderers grew
greater and the tale of the wrongs they had to avenge longer.[13]
Occasionally they took a brutal and ill-judged vengeance, which usually
fell on innocent Indians,[14] and raised up new foes for the whites. The
savages grew continually more hostile, and in the fall of 1773 their
attacks became so frequent that it was evident a general outbreak was at
hand; eleven people were murdered in the county of Fincastle alone.[15]
The Shawnees were the leaders in all these outrages; but the outlaw
bands, such as the Mingos and Cherokees, were as bad, and parties of
Wyandots and Delawares, as well as of the various Miami and Wabash
tribes, joined them.
Thus the spring of 1774 opened with every thing ripe for an explosion.
The Virginian borderers were fearfully exasperated, and ready to take
vengeance upon any Indians, whether peaceful or hostile; while the
Shawnees and Mingos, on their side, were arrogant and overbearing, and
yet alarmed at the continual advance of the whites. The headstrong
rashness of Conolly, who was acting as Lord Dunmore's lieutenant on the
border, and who was equally willing to plunge into a war with
Pennsylvania or the Shawnees, served as a firebrand to ignite this mass
of tinder. The borderers were anxious for a war; and Lord Dunmore was
not inclined to baulk them. He was ambitious of glory, and probably
thought that in the midst of the growing difficulties between the mother
country and the colonies, it would be good policy to distract the
Virginians' minds by an Indian war, which, if he conducted it to a
successful conclusion, might strengthen his own position.[16]
There were on the border at the moment three or four men whose names are
so intimately bound up with the history of this war, that they deserve a
brief mention. One was Michael Cresap, a Maryland frontiersman, who had
come to the banks of the Ohio with the purpose of making a home for his
family.[17] He was of the regular pioneer type; a good woodsman, sturdy
and brave, a fearless fighter, devoted to his friends and his country;
but also, when his blood was heated, and his savage instincts fairly
roused, inclined to regard any red man, whether hostile or friendly, as
a being who should be slain on sight. Nor did he condemn the brutal
deeds done by others on innocent Indians.
The next was a man named Greathouse, of whom it is enough to know that,
together with certain other men whose names have for the most part, by a
merciful chance, been forgotten,[18] he did a deed such as could only be
committed by inhuman and cowardly scoundrels.
The other two actors in this tragedy were both Indians, and were both
men of much higher stamp. One was Cornstalk, the Shawnee chief; a
far-sighted seer, gloomily conscious of the impending ruin of his race,
a great orator, a mighty warrior, a man who knew the value of his word
and prized his honor, and who fronted death with quiet, disdainful
heroism; and yet a fierce, cruel, and treacherous savage to those with
whom he was at enmity, a killer of women and children, whom we first
hear of, in Pontiac's war, as joining in the massacre of unarmed and
peaceful settlers who had done him no wrong, and who thought that he was
friendly.[19] The other was Logan, an Iroquois warrior, who lived at
that time away from the bulk of his people, but who was a man of
note--in the loose phraseology of the border, a chief or headman--among
the outlying parties of Senecas and Mingos, and the fragments of broken
tribes that dwelt along the upper Ohio. He was a man of splendid
appearance; over six feet high, straight as a spear-shaft, with a
countenance as open as it was brave and manly,[20] until the wrongs he
endured stamped on it an expression of gloomy ferocity. He had always
been the friend of the white man, and had been noted particularly for
his kindness and gentleness to children. Up to this time he had lived at
peace with the borderers, for though some of his kin had been massacred
by them years before, he had forgiven the deed--perhaps not unmindful of
the fact that others of his kin had been concerned in still more bloody
massacres of the whites. A skilled marksman and mighty hunter, of
commanding dignity, who treated all men with a grave courtesy that
exacted the same treatment in return, he was greatly liked and respected
by all the white hunters and frontiersmen whose friendship and respect
were worth having; they admired him for his dexterity and prowess, and
they loved him for his straightforward honesty, and his noble loyalty to
his friends. One of these old pioneer hunters has left on record[21] the
statement that he deemed "Logan the best specimen of humanity he ever
met with, either white or red." Such was Logan before the evil days came
upon him.
Early in the spring the outlying settlers began again to suffer from the
deeds of straggling Indians. Horses were stolen, one or two murders were
committed, the inhabitants of the more lonely cabins fled to the forts,
and the backwoodsmen began to threaten fierce vengeance. On April 16th,
three traders in the employ of a man named Butler were attacked by some
of the outlaw Cherokees, one killed, another wounded, and their goods
plundered. Immediately after this Conolly issued an open letter,
commanding the backwoodsmen to hold themselves in readiness to repel any
attack by the Indians, as the Shawnees were hostile. Such a letter from
Lord Dunmore's lieutenant amounted to a declaration of war, and there
were sure to be plenty of backwoodsmen who would put a very liberal
interpretation upon the order given them to repel an attack. Its effects
were seen instantly. All the borderers prepared for war. Cresap was near
Wheeling at the time, with a band of hunters and scouts, fearless men,
who had adopted many of the ways of the redskins, in addition to their
method of fighting. As soon as they received Conolly's letter they
proceeded to declare war in the regular Indian style, calling a council,
planting the war-post, and going through other savage ceremonies,[22]
and eagerly waited for a chance to attack their foes.
Unfortunately the first stroke fell on friendly Indians. The trader,
Butler, spoken of above, in order to recover some of the peltries of
which he had been robbed by the Cherokees, had sent a canoe with two
friendly Shawnees towards the place of the massacre. On the 27th Cresap
and his followers ambushed these men near Captina, and killed and
scalped them. Some of the better backwoodsmen strongly protested against
this outrage;[23] but the mass of them were excited and angered by the
rumor of Indian hostilities, and the brutal and disorderly side of
frontier character was for the moment uppermost. They threatened to kill
whoever interfered with them, cursing the "damned traders" as being
worse than the Indians,[24] while Cresap boasted of the murder, and
never said a word in condemnation of the still worse deeds that followed
it.[25] The next day he again led out his men and attacked another party
of Shawnees, who had been trading near Pittsburg, killed one and wounded
two others, one of the whites being also hurt.[26]
Among the men who were with Cresap at this time was a young Virginian,
who afterwards played a brilliant part in the history of the west, who
was for ten years the leader of the bold spirits of Kentucky, and who
rendered the whole United States signal and effective service by one of
his deeds in the Revolutionary war. This was George Rogers Clark, then
twenty-one years old.[27] He was of good family, and had been fairly
well educated, as education went in colonial days; but from his
childhood he had been passionately fond of the wild roving life of the
woods. He was a great hunter; and, like so many other young colonial
gentlemen of good birth and bringing up, and adventurous temper, he
followed the hazardous profession of a backwoods surveyor. With chain
and compass, as well as axe and rifle, he penetrated the far places of
the wilderness, the lonely, dangerous regions where every weak man
inevitably succumbed to the manifold perils encountered, but where the
strong and far-seeing were able to lay the foundations of fame and
fortune. He possessed high daring, unflinching courage, passions which
he could not control, and a frame fitted to stand any strain of fatigue
or hardship. He was a square-built, thick-set man, with high broad
forehead, sandy hair, and unquailing blue eyes that looked out from
under heavy, shaggy brows.[28]
Clark had taken part with Cresap in his assault upon the second party of
Shawnees. On the following day the whole band of whites prepared to
march off and attack Logan's camp at Yellow Creek, some fifty miles
distant. After going some miles they began to feel ashamed of their
mission; calling a halt, they discussed the fact that the camp they were
preparing to attack, consisted exclusively of friendly Indians, and
mainly of women and children; and forthwith abandoned their proposed
trip and returned home. They were true borderers--brave, self-reliant,
loyal to their friends, and good-hearted when their worst instincts were
not suddenly aroused; but the sight of bloodshed maddened them as if
they had been so many wolves. Wrongs stirred to the depths their moody
tempers, and filled them with a brutal longing for indiscriminate
revenge. When goaded by memories of evil, or when swayed by swift,
fitful gusts of fury, the uncontrolled violence of their passions led
them to commit deeds whose inhuman barbarity almost equalled, though it
could never surpass, that shown by the Indians themselves.[29]
But Logan's people did not profit by Cresap's change of heart. On the
last day of April a small party of men, women, and children, including
almost all of Logan's kin, left his camp and crossed the river to visit
Greathouse, as had been their custom; for he made a trade of selling rum
to the savages, though Cresap had notified him to stop. The whole party
were plied with liquor, and became helplessly drunk, in which condition
Greathouse and his associated criminals fell on and massacred them, nine
souls in all.[30] It was an inhuman and revolting deed, which should
consign the names of the perpetrators to eternal infamy.
At once the frontier was in a blaze, and the Indians girded themselves
for revenge. The Mingos sent out runners to the other tribes, telling of
the butchery, and calling on all the red men to join together for
immediate and bloody vengeance.[31] They confused the two massacres,
attributing both to Cresap, whom they well knew as a warrior;[32] and
their women for long afterwards scared the children into silence by
threatening them with Cresap's name as with that of a monster.[33] They
had indeed been brutally wronged; yet it must be remembered that they
themselves were the first aggressors. They had causelessly murdered and
robbed many whites, and now their sins had recoiled on the heads of the
innocent of their own race. The conflict could not in any event have
been delayed long; the frontiersmen were too deeply and too justly
irritated. These particular massacres, however discreditable to those
taking part in them, were the occasions, not the causes, of the war; and
though they cast a dark shade on the conduct of the whites, they do not
relieve the red men from the charge of having committed earlier, more
cruel, and quite as wanton outrages.
Conolly, an irritable but irresolute man, was appalled by the storm he
had helped raise. He meanly disclaimed all responsibility for Cresap's
action,[34] and deposed him from his command of rangers; to which,
however, he was soon restored by Lord Dunmore. Both the earl and his
lieutenant, however, united in censuring severely Greathouse's deed.[35]
Conolly, throughout May, held a series of councils with the Delawares
and Iroquois, in which he disclaimed and regretted the outrages, and
sought for peace.[36] To one of these councils the Delaware chief,
Killbuck, with other warriors, sent a "talk" or "speech in writing"[37]
disavowing the deeds of one of their own parties of young braves, who
had gone on the warpath; and another Delaware chief made a very sensible
speech, saying that it was unfortunately inevitable that bad men on both
sides should commit wrongs, and that the cooler heads should not be led
away by acts due to the rashness and folly of a few. But the Shawnees
showed no such spirit. On the contrary they declared for war outright,
and sent a bold defiance to the Virginians, at the same time telling
Conolly plainly that he lied. Their message is noteworthy, because,
after expressing a firm belief that the Virginian leader could control
his warriors, and stop the outrages if he wished, it added that the
Shawnee head men were able to do the like with their own men when they
required it. This last allegation took away all shadow of excuse from
the Shawnees for not having stopped the excesses of which their young
braves had been guilty during the past few years.
Though Conolly showed signs of flinching, his master the earl had
evidently no thought of shrinking from the contest. He at once began
actively to prepare to attack his foes, and the Virginians backed him up
heartily, though the Royal Government, instead of supporting him,
censured him in strong terms, and accused the whites of being the real
aggressors and the authors of the war.[38]
In any event, it would have been out of the question to avoid a contest
at so late a date. Immediately after the murders in the end of April,
the savages crossed the frontier in small bands. Soon all the back
country was involved in the unspeakable horrors of a bloody Indian war,
with its usual accompaniments of burning houses, tortured prisoners, and
ruined families, the men being killed and the women and children driven
off to a horrible captivity.[39] The Indians declared that they were not
at war with Pennsylvania,[40] and the latter in return adopted an
attitude of neutrality, openly disclaiming any share in the wrong that
had been done, and assuring the Indians that it rested solely on the
shoulders of the Virginians.[41] Indeed the Shawnees protected the
Pennsylvania traders from some hostile Mingos, while the Pennsylvania
militia shielded a party of Shawnees from some of Conolly's men;[42] and
the Virginians, irritated by what they considered an abandonment of the
white cause, were bent on destroying the Pennsylvania fur trade with the
Indians.[43] Nevertheless, some of the bands of young braves who were
out on the war-path failed to discriminate between white friends and
foes, and a number of Pennsylvanians fell victims to their desire for
scalps and their ignorance or indifference as to whom they were at war
with.[44]
The panic along the Pennsylvania frontier was terrible; the out settlers
fled back to the interior across the mountains, or gathered in numbers
to defend themselves.[45] On the Virginian frontier, where the real
attack was delivered, the panic was more justifiable; for terrible
ravages were committed, and the inhabitants were forced to gather
together in their forted villages, and could no longer cultivate their
farms, except by stealth.[46] Instead of being cowed, however, the
backwoodsmen clamored to be led against their foes, and made most urgent
appeals for powder and lead, of which there was a great scarcity.[47]
The confusion was heightened by the anarchy in which the government of
the northwestern district had been thrown in consequence of the quarrel
concerning the jurisdiction. The inhabitants were doubtful as to which
colony really had a right to their allegiance, and many of the frontier
officials were known to be double-faced, professing allegiance to both
governments.[48] When the Pennsylvanians raised a corps of a hundred
rangers there almost ensued a civil war among the whites, for the
Virginians were fearful that the movement was really aimed against
them.[49] Of course the march of events gradually forced most, even of
the neutral Indians, to join their brethren who had gone on the
war-path, and as an example of the utter confusion that reigned, the
very Indians that were at war with one British colony, Virginia, were
still drawing supplies from the British post of Detroit.[50]
Logan's rage had been terrible. He had changed and not for the better,
as he grew older, becoming a sombre, moody man; worse than all, he had
succumbed to the fire-water, the curse of his race. The horrible
treachery and brutality of the assault wherein his kinsfolk were slain
made him mad for revenge; every wolfish instinct in him came to the
surface. He wreaked a terrible vengeance for his wrongs; but in true
Indian fashion it fell, not on those who had caused them, but on others
who were entirely innocent. Indeed he did not know who had caused them.
The massacres at Captina and Yellow Creek occurred so near together that
they were confounded with each other; and not only the Indians but many
whites as well[51] credited Cresap and Greathouse with being jointly
responsible for both, and as Cresap was the most prominent, he was the
one especially singled out for hatred.
Logan instantly fell on the settlement with a small band of Mingo
warriors. On his first foray he took thirteen scalps, among them those
of six children.[52] A party of Virginians, under a man named McClure,
followed him: but he ambushed and defeated them, slaying their
leader.[53] He repeated these forays at least three times. Yet, in spite
of his fierce craving for revenge, he still showed many of the traits
that had made him beloved of his white friends. Having taken a prisoner,
he refused to allow him to be tortured, and saved his life at the risk
of his own. A few days afterwards he suddenly appeared to this prisoner
with some gunpowder ink, and dictated to him a note. On his next
expedition this note, tied to a war-club, was left in the house of a
settler, whose entire family was murdered. It was a short document,
written with ferocious directness, as a kind of public challenge or
taunt to the man whom he wrongly deemed to be the author of his
misfortunes. It ran as follows:
"CAPTAIN CRESAP:
"What did you kill my people on Yellow Creek for? The white people
killed my kin at Conestoga, a great while ago, and I thought nothing of
that. But you killed my kin again on Yellow Creek, and took my cousin
prisoner. Then I thought I must kill too; and I have been three times to
war since; but the Indians are not angry, only myself.
"July 21, 1774. CAPTAIN JOHN LOGAN."[54]
There is a certain deliberate and blood-thirsty earnestness about this
letter which must have shown the whites clearly, if they still needed to
be shown, what bitter cause they had to rue the wrongs that had been
done to Logan.
The Shawnees and Mingos were soon joined by many of the Delawares and
outlying Iroquois, especially Senecas; as well as by the Wyandots and by
large bands of ardent young warriors from among the Algonquin tribes
along the Miami, the Wabash, and the Lakes. Their inroads on the
settlements were characterized, as usual, by extreme stealth and
merciless ferocity. They stole out of the woods with the silent cunning
of wild beasts, and ravaged with a cruelty ten times greater. They
burned down the lonely log-huts, ambushed travellers, shot the men as
they hunted or tilled the soil, ripped open the women with child, and
burned many of their captives at the stake. Their noiseless approach
enabled them to fall on the settlers before their presence was
suspected; and they disappeared as suddenly as they had come, leaving no
trail that could be followed. The charred huts and scalped and mangled
bodies of their victims were left as ghastly reminders of their visit,
the sight stirring the backwoodsmen to a frenzy of rage all the more
terrible in the end, because it was impotent for the time being.
Generally they made their escape successfully; occasionally they were
beaten off or overtaken and killed or scattered.
When they met armed woodsmen the fight was always desperate. In May, a
party of hunters and surveyors, being suddenly attacked in the forest,
beat off their assailants and took eight scalps, though with a loss of
nine of their own number.[55] Moreover, the settlers began to band
together to make retaliatory inroads; and while Lord Dunmore was busily
preparing to strike a really effective blow, he directed the
frontiersmen of the northwest to undertake a foray, so as to keep the
Indians employed. Accordingly, they gathered together, four hundred
strong,[56] crossed the Ohio, in the end of July, and marched against a
Shawnee town on the Muskingum. They had a brisk skirmish with the
Shawnees, drove them back, and took five scalps, losing two men killed
and five wounded. Then the Shawnees tried to ambush them, but their
ambush was discovered, and they promptly fled, after a slight skirmish,
in which no one was killed but one Indian, whom Cresap, a very active
and vigorous man, ran down and slew with his tomahawk.[57] The Shawnee
village was burned, seventy acres of standing corn were cut down, and
the settlers returned in triumph. On the march back they passed through
the towns of the peaceful Moravian Delawares, to whom they did no harm.
1. "American Archives," 4th series, Vol. I., p. 454. Report of Penn.
Commissioners, June 27, 1774.
2. Maryland was also involved, along her western frontier, in border
difficulties with her neighbors; the first we hear of the Cresap family
is their having engaged in a real skirmish with the Pennsylvanian
authorities. See also "Am. Arch.," IV., Vol. I., 547.
3. "Am. Arch.," IV., Vol. I., 394, 449, 469, etc. He was generally
called Dr. Conolly.
4. See _do_., 463, 471, etc., especially St. Clair's letters,
_passim_.
5. In most of the original treaties, "talks," etc., preserved in the
Archives of the State Department, where the translation is exact, the
word "Big Knife" is used.
6. Letter of John Penn, June 28, 1774. "Am. Arch.," IV., Vol. IV.
7. "Am. Archives," _do_., 465.
8. _Do_., 722.
9. _Do_., 872.
10. "Am. Arch.," IV., Vol. I., p. 1015.
11. McAfee MSS. This is the point especially insisted on by Cornstalk in
his speech to the adventurers in 1773; he would fight before seeing the
whites drive off the game.
12. In the McAfee MSS., as already quoted, there is an account of the
Shawnee war party, whom the McAfees encountered in 1773 returning from a
successful horse-stealing expedition.
13. "Am. Archives," IV., Vol. I., 872. Dunmore in his speech enumerates
19 men, women, and children who had been killed by the Indians in 1771,
'72, and '73, and these were but a small fraction of the whole. "This
was before a drop of Shawnee blood was shed."
14. "Trans-Alleghany Pioneers," p. 262, gives an example that happened
in 1772.
15. "Am. Archives," IV., Vol. I. Letter of Col. Wm. Preston, Aug. 13,
1774.
16. Many local historians, including Brantz Mayer (Logan and Cresap, p.
85), ascribe to the earl treacherous motives. Brantz Mayer puts it thus:
"It was probably Lord Dunmore's desire to incite a war which would
arouse and band the savages of the west, so that in the anticipated
struggle with the united colonies the British home-interest might
ultimately avail itself of these children of the forest as ferocious and
formidable allies in the onslaught on the Americans." This is much too
futile a theory to need serious discussion. The war was of the greatest
advantage to the American cause; for it kept the northwestern Indians
off our hands for the first two years of the Revolutionary struggle; and
had Lord Dunmore been the far-seeing and malignant being that this
theory supposes, it would have been impossible for him not also to
foresee that such a result was absolutely inevitable. There is no reason
whatever to suppose that he was not doing his best for the Virginians;
he deserved their gratitude; and he got it for the time being. The
accusations of treachery against him were afterthoughts, and must be set
down to mere vulgar rancor, unless, at least, some faint shadow of proof
is advanced. When the Revolutionary war broke out, however, the earl,
undoubtedly, like so many other British officials, advocated the most
outrageous measures to put down the insurgent colonists.
17. See Brantz Mayer, p. 86, for a very proper attack on those
historians who stigmatize as land-jobbers and speculators the perfectly
honest settlers, whose encroachments on the Indian hunting-grounds were
so bitterly resented by the savages. Such attacks are mere pieces of
sentimental injustice. The settlers were perfectly right in feeling that
they had a right to settle on the vast stretches of unoccupied ground,
however wrong some of their individual deeds may have been. But Mayer,
following Jacob's "Life of Cresap," undoubtedly paints his hero in
altogether too bright colors.
18. Sappington, Tomlinson, and Baker were the names of three of his
fellow miscreants. See Jefferson MSS.
19. At Greenbriar. See "Narrative of Captain John Stewart," an actor in
the war.--_Magazine of American History_, Vol. I., p. 671.
20. Loudon's "Indian Narratives," II., p. 223.
21. See "American Pioneer," I., p. 189.
22. Letter of George Rogers Clark, June 17. 1798. In Jefferson MSS., 5th
Series, Vol. I. (preserved in Archives of State Department at
Washington)
23. Witness the testimony of one of the most gallant Indian fighters of
the border, who was in Wheeling at the time; letter of Col. Ebenezer
Zane, February 4, 1800, in Jefferson MSS.
24. Jefferson MSS. Deposition of John Gibson, April 4, 1800.
25. _Do_. Deposition of Wm. Huston, April 19, 1798; also
depositions of Samuel McKee, etc.
26. "Am. Archives," IV., Vol. I., p. 468. Letter of Devereux Smith June
10, 1774, Gibson's letter, Also Jefferson MSS.
27. _Historical Magazine_, I., p. 168. Born in Albemarle County,
Va., November 19, 1752.
28. Military Journal of Major Ebenezer Denny, with an introductory
memoir by William H. Denny (Publication of the Hist. Soc. of Penn.),
Phil., 1860, p. 216
29. The Cresap apologists, including even Brantz Mayer, dwell on
Cresap's nobleness in not massacring Logan's family! It was certainly to
his credit that he did not do so, but it does not speak very well for
him that he should even have entertained the thought. He was doubtless,
on the whole, a brave, good-hearted man--quite as good as the average
borderer; but nevertheless apt to be drawn into deeds that were the
reverse of creditable. Mayer's book has merit; but he certainly paints
Logan too black and Cresap too white, and (see Appendix) is utterly
wrong as to Logan's speech. He is right in recognizing the fact that in
the war, as a whole, justice was on the side of the frontiersmen.
30. Devereux Smith's letter. Some of the evil-doers afterwards tried to
palliate their misdeeds by stating that Logan's brother, when drunk,
insulted a white man, and that the other Indians were at the time on the
point of executing an attack upon them. The last statement is
self-evidently false; for had such been the case, the Indians would, of
course, never have let some of their women and children put themselves
in the power of the whites, and get helplessly drunk; and, anyhow, the
allegations of such brutal and cowardly murderers are entirely unworthy
of acceptance, unless backed up by outside evidence.
31. Jefferson MSS., 5th Series, Vol. I. Heckewelder's letter.
32. Jefferson MSS. Deposition of Col. James Smith, May 25, 1798.
33. _Do_., Heckewelder's letter.
34. "Am. Archives," IV., Vol. I., p. 475.
35. _Do_., p. 1015.
36. _Do_., p. 475.
37. _Do_., p. 418.
38. _Do_., p. 774. Letter of the Earl of Dartmouth, Sept. 10, 1774.
A sufficient answer, by the way, to the absurd charge that Dunmore
brought on the war in consequence of some mysterious plan of the Home
Government to embroil the Americans with the savages. It is not at all
improbable that the Crown advisers were not particularly displeased at
seeing the attention of the Americans distracted by a war with the
Indians; but this is the utmost that can be alleged.
39. _Do_., p. 808.
40. _Do_., p. 478.
41. _Do_., p. 506.
42. _Do_., p. 474.
43. _Do_., p. 549.
44. _Do_., p. 471.
45. _Do_., pp. 435, 467, 602.
46. _Do_., pp. 405, 707.
47. _Do_., p. 808.
48. _Do_., p. 677.
49. _Do_., pp. 463, 467.
50. _Do_., p. 684.
51. _Do_., p. 435.
52. _Do_., pp. 468, 546.
53. _Do_., p. 470.
54. Jefferson MSS. Dep. of Wm. Robinson, February 28, 1800, and letter
from Harry Innes, March 2, 1799, with a copy of Logan's letter as made
in his note-book at the time.
55. "Am. Archives.," p. 373.
56. Under a certain Angus MacDonald, _do_., p. 722. They crossed
the Ohio at Fish Creek, 120 miles below Pittsburg.
57. "Am. Archives," IV., Vol. I., pp. 682, 684.