the great avenue to the West, became a scene of con- CHAP. fusion.

XV.

The territory north and west of the Ohio, belonged 1774. by act of parliament to the province of Quebec; yet Dunmore professed to conduct the government and grant the lands on the Scioto, the Wabash and the Illinois. South of the Ohio river Franklin's inchoate province of Vandalia stretched from the Alleghanies to Kentucky river; the treaty at Fort Stanwix bounded Virginia by the Tennessee; the treaty at Lochaber carried its limit only to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. The king's instructions confined settlements to the east of the mountains. There was no one, therefore, having authority to give an undisputed title to any land west of the Alleghanies, or to restrain the restlessness of the American emigrants. With the love of wandering that formed a part of their nature, the hardy backwoodsman, clad in a hunting shirt and deerskin leggins, armed with a rifle, a powder horn, and a pouch for shot and bullets, a hatchet and a hunter's knife, descended the mountains in quest of more distant lands which he forever imagined to be richer and lovelier than those which he knew. Wherever 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 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

XV.

CHAP. they still held young men and women of Virginia in captivity; and the annals of the wilderness never 1774. 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 year 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.

Oct.

1.

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

XV.

1774.

on the Ohio, killed the men on board, and carried CHAP. their goods to the Shawanese 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. In this state of affairs, Conolly, 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 Conolly 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. Just before the end of April, five Delawares and Shawanese, 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 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 day following, a Shawanese was killed, and another man wounded. The whole number of Indians killed between the

CHAP. twenty-first of April and the end of the month, was about thirteen.

XV.

1774.

At the tidings of this bloodshed, fleet messengers of the Red Men ran with the wail of war to the Muskingum, and to the Shawanese 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 embodied 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 Susquehanna 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 Shawanese, 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.

To restrain the backwoodsmen and end the mise

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Sept.

ries which distracted the frontier, and to look after CHAP. his own interests and his agents, Dunmore, with the hearty approbation of the colony, called out the 1774. militia of the southwest, and himself repaired to Pittsburg. In September he renewed peace with the Delawares and the Six Nations. Then, with about twelve hundred men from the counties around him, he descended the Ohio; and without waiting, as he had promised, at the mouth of the little Kanawha, for the men from the southwestern counties of Virginia, he crossed the river and proceeded to the Shawanese towns, which he found deserted.

of

The summons from Dunmore, borne beyond the Blue Ridge, roused the settlers on the Green Briar, the New River, and the Holston. The Watauga republicans also, who never owned English rule, and never required English protection, heard the cry 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 Green Briar. 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 packhorses and droves of cattle through the old home of the wolf, the deer, and the panther. After a fortnight's strug