Volume I Part 14 (1/2)

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 succ.u.mbed to the fire-water, the curse of his race. The horrible treachery and brutality of the a.s.sault 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 ma.s.sacres 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 doc.u.ment, 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 a.s.sailants 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 pa.s.sed 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, _pa.s.sim_.

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.