The Winning of the West Volume I Part 14

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 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 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.

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 antic.i.p.ated 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 grat.i.tude; 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 n.o.bleness in not ma.s.sacring 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.