ever he fixed his halt, the hatchet hewed logs for his cabin, and blazed trees of the forest kept the record of his title deeds; nor did he conceive that a British government 1774. had any right to forbid the occupation of lands which were either uninhabited or only broken by a few scattered villages of savages, whom he looked upon as but little removed above the brute creation. The Indians themselves were regardless of treaties. Notwithstanding the agreement with Bouquet, they still held young men and women of Virginia in captivity; and the annals of the wilderness never ceased to record their barbarous murders. The wanderer in search of a new home on the banks of the Mississippi risked his life at every step; so that a system of independent defence and private war became the custom of the backwoods. The settler had every motive to preserve peace; yet he could not be turned from his purpose by fear, and trusted for security in the forest to his perpetual readiness for self-defence. Not a twelve-month passed away without a massacre of pioneers. Near the end of 1773, Daniel Boone would have taken his wife and children to Kentucky. At Powell's valley, he was joined by five families and forty men. On or near the tenth of October, as they approached Cumberland Gap, the young men, who had charge of the pack-horses and cattle in the rear, were suddenly attacked by Indians; one only escaped; the remaining six, among whom was Boone's eldest son, were killed on the spot: so that the survivors of the party were forced to turn back to the settlements on Clinch River. When the Cherokees were summoned from Virginia to give up the offenders, they shifted the accusation from one tribe to another, and the application for redress had no effect; but one of those who had escaped murdered an Indian at a horse-race on the frontier, notwithstanding the interposition of all around. This was the first Indian blood shed by a white man from the time of the treaty of Bouquet. In the beginning of February, 1774, the Indians killed six white men and two negroes; and, near the end of the same month, they seized a trading canoe on the Ohio, killed 1774. the men on board, and carried their goods to the Shawnee towns. In March, Michael Cresap, after a skirmish, and the loss of one man on each side, took from a party of Indians five loaded canoes. It became known that messages were passing between the tribes of the Ohio, the western Indians, and the Cherokees; and Connolly, from Pittsburg, on the twenty-first of April, wrote to the inhabitants of Wheeling to be on the alert. Incensed by the succession of murders, the backwoodsmen, who were hunters like the Indians and equally ungovernable, were forming war-parties along the frontier from the Cherokee country to Pennsylvania. When the letter of Connolly fell into Cresap's hands, he and his party esteemed themselves authorized to engage in private war; and, on the twenty-sixth of April, they fired upon two Indians who were with a white man in a canoe on the Ohio, and killed them both. On the thirtieth of April, five Delawares and Shawnees, with their women, among whom was one at least of the same blood with Logan, happening to encamp near Yellow Creek, on the site of the present town of Wellsville, were enticed across the river by a trader; and about noon, when they had become intoxicated, were murdered in cold blood. Two others, crossing the Ohio to look after their friends, were shot down as soon as they came ashore. At this, five more, who were following, turned their course; but, being immediately fired at, two were killed and two wounded. The next day, a Shawnee was killed, and another man wounded. Thirteen Indians were killed between the twenty-first of April and the end of the month. At the tidings of this bloodshed, fleet messengers of the red men ran with the wail of war to the Muskingum and to the Shawnee villages in Ohio. The alarm of the emigrants increased along the frontier from the Watauga to the lower Monongahela; and frequent expresses reached Williamsburg, entreating assistance. The governor, following an intimation from the assembly in May, ordered the militia of the frontier counties to be imbodied for defence. Meantime, Logan's soul called within him for revenge. In his early life he had dwelt near the beautiful plain of Shamokin, which overhangs the Susquehannah and the vale of Sunbury. There Zinzendorf introduced the Cayuga chief, his father, to the Moravians; and there, three years later, Brainerd wore away life as a missionary among the fifty cabins of the village. Logan had grown up as the friend of white men; but the spirits of his kindred clamored for blood. With chosen companions, he went out upon the war-path, and added scalp to scalp, till the number was also thirteen. "Now," said the chief, "I am satisfied for the loss of my relations, and will sit still." But the Shawnees, the most warlike of the tribes, prowled from the Alleghany River to what is now Sullivan county in Tennessee. One of them returned with the scalps of forty men, women, and children. On the other hand, a party of white men, with Dunmore's permission, destroyed an Indian village on the Muskingum. Sept. To restrain the backwoodsmen and end the miseries which distracted the frontier, and to look after his own interests and his agents, Dunmore, with the hearty approbation of the colony, called out the militia of the south-west, 1774. and himself repaired to Pittsburg. In September, he renewed peace with the Delawares and the Six Nations. Then, with about twelve hundred men, among whom was Daniel Morgan with a company from the valley of Virginia, he descended the Ohio; and, disregarding his promise to wait at the mouth of the Little Kanawha for the men from the south-western counties of Virginia, he crossed the river and proceeded to the Shawnee towns, which he found deserted. The summons from Dunmore, borne beyond the Blue Ridge, roused the settlers on the Greenbrier, the New River, and the Holston. The Watauga republicans also, who never owned English rule, and never required English protection, heard the cry of their brethren in distress; and a company of nearly fifty of them, under the command of Evan Shelby, with James Robertson and Valentine Sevier as sergeants, marched as volunteers. The name of every one of them is preserved and cherished. Leaving home in August, they crossed the New River, and joined the army of Western Virginia at Camp Union, on the Great Levels of Greenbrier. From that place, now called Lewisburg, to the mouth of the Great Kanawha, the distance is about one hundred and sixty miles. At that time there was not even a trace over the rugged mountains; but the gallant young woodsmen who formed the advance party moved expeditiously with their pack-horses and droves of cattle through the old home of the wolf, the deer, and the panther. After a fortnight's struggle, they left behind them the last rocky masses of the hill-tops; and passing between the gigantic growth of primeval forests, where, in that autumnal season, the golden hue of the linden, the sugar tree, and the hickory, contrasted with the glistening green of the laurel, the crimson of the sumach, and the shadows of the sombre hemlock, they descended to where the valley of Elk River widens into a plain. There they paused only to build canoes; having been joined by a second party, so that they made a force of nearly eleven hundred men, they descended the Kanawha, and on the sixth of October encamped on Point Pleasant, near its junction with the Ohio. But no message reached them from Dunmore. 1774. Oct. Of all the western Indians, the Shawnees were the fiercest. They despised other warriors, red or white; and made a boast of having killed ten times as many of the English as any other tribe. They stole through the forest with Mingoes and Delawares, to attack the army of South-western Virginia. At daybreak, on the tenth, two young men, ram- Oct. 10. bling up the Ohio in search of deer, fell on the camp of the Indians, who had crossed the river the evening before, and were just preparing for battle. One of the two was instantly shot down; the other fled with the intelligence to the camp. In two or three minutes after, Robertson and Sevier of Shelby's company came in and confirmed the account. Colonel Andrew Lewis, who had the command, instantly ordered out two divisions, each of one hundred and fifty men; the Augusta troops under his brother Charles Lewis, the Botetourt troops under Fleming. Just as the sun was rising, the Indians opened a heavy fire on both parties, wounding Charles Lewis mortally. Fleming was wounded thrice; and the Virginians must have given way, but for successive re-enforcements from the camp, in which Andrew Lewis himself remained to the end of the action. "Be strong," cried Cornstalk, the chief of the red men; and he animated them by his example. Till the hour of noon, the combatants fought from behind trees, never above twenty yards apart, often within six, and sometimes near enough to strike with the tomahawk. At length the Indians, under the protection of the close underwood and fallen trees, retreated, till they gained an advantageous line extending from the Ohio to the Kanawha. A desultory fire was kept up on both sides till after sunset, when, under the favor of night, the savages fled across the river. The victory, which was due not to the general, but to the indomitable courage of the soldiers, cost the Virginians three colonels of militia, forty-six men killed, and about eighty wounded. This battle was the most bloody and best contested in the annals of forest warfare. How many red men were engaged, and how many of them fell, was never ascertained. The heroes of the day proved themselves worthy to found states. Among them were Isaac Shelby, the first governor of Kentucky; William Campbell; the brave George Matthews; Fleming; Andrew Moore, afterwards a senator of the United States; Evan Shelby; James Robertson; and Valentine Sevier. Their praise resounded not in the backwoods only, but through all Virginia; but "odium was thrown on the conduct of Andrew Lewis." Soon after the battle, a re-enforcement of three hundred troops arrived from Fincastle. Following orders tardily received from Dunmore, the little army, leaving a garrison at Point Pleasant, dashed across the Ohio to defy new battles. After a march of eighty miles through an untrodden wilderness, on the twenty-fourth of October they encamped on the banks of Congo Creek in Pickaway, near old Chillicothe. The Indians, disheartened at the junction, threw themselves on the mercy of the English; and at 1774. Oct. |