That Dark and Bloody River

by Allan Eckert

  During the following month Christopher Gist visited old friends and neighbors in the area where he had previously lived along the Yadkin River. He held his listeners enthralled as he regaled them with the tale of his exploits with George Washington, both in the journey to Fort Le Boeuf and in the disaster that had occurred at Great Meadows. When he told them about Braddock’s impending arrival and that the famed general would be building an army to strike the French at Fort Duquesne, a young man of 21 years seated among his listeners asked if he thought Braddock was going to need good wagon men. Gist replied that he undoubtedly would, and the young man, Daniel Boone, said he was as good a man as there was with horses and wagons, and he reckoned he’d mosey on back to Fort Cumberland with Gist when he left and join up. He did so, separating from Gist and heading for Alexandria with Gist’s son, Nathaniel, when the elder Gist himself veered off on another path to return to his burned-out place at Chestnut Hill and continue the rebuilding he had begun.

  In April young Boone was actively at work as a wagoner for Braddock’s army in Alexandria and was becoming very friendly with another wagoner who had not only journeyed down the Ohio and visited with the Shawnees in their villages but had even built a small trading post in their Kan-tuck-kee hunting grounds south of the Ohio River. John Findlay, former trader, explorer and adventurer, without half-trying had ignited a spark in the imagination of Daniel Boone and an absolute determination to one day see for himself that marvelous land.

  Early in May 1755 the long-anticipated call came to the various tribes from Contrecoeur, a note of desperation in his summons. The new British army—larger, stronger and commanded by Maj. Gen. Edward Braddock—was advancing on Fort Duquesne, where there were now only 300 soldiers. Braddock had 2,500 men, and the French, without the help of their Indian allies, would be annihilated. The British Army was approaching by way of the Nemacolin Trail, now being called Braddock’s Road.

  Some of the Indians were on raids so far distant that they were unable to get news of the summons in time to respond. One of these was a 40-man war party led by the Shawnee subchief Black Wolf. For weeks he had been leading his warriors in fierce attacks against isolated cabins on the frontier. On July 8, 1755, they found themselves farther up the New River than any of them had been before, and abruptly they discovered the settlement known as Draper’s Meadows.

  The attack they launched that bright Tuesday morning was so wholly unexpected that scarcely a hand was raised in defense. The first to see them coming was Bettie Draper, who was a little distance from her cabin. She shrieked a warning and ran back to the house, snatched up her baby and bolted through the back door, running as she had never run before. A shot sounded, and the lead ball broke her right arm, causing her to drop the infant. She stumbled, caught herself, snatched up the baby with her left hand and resumed running. In a moment she was overtaken, captured and brought back to the cabins, where a general massacre was occurring. Her baby was crying, and the warrior finally snatched it away from her, swung it around by an ankle and crushed the child’s head against one of the cabin logs.

  Col. James Patton, 63, who had arrived only the day before with a supply of gunpowder and lead for the settlement, was inside one of the cabins writing, his sword on the table beside him. He snatched up the weapon and ran to the door, almost colliding with a cluster of Shawnees entering. He managed to cut down two of them before he was killed.

  Elsewhere in the little community similar events were occurring. Early that morning Col. Patton had sent his 16-year-old nephew, Tom Preston, to the cabin of Philip Lybrook on Sinking Creek, three miles distant, to ask him to come and help with some heavy work. Grateful that the lad was gone, Patton was reaching for his rifle over the fireplace when he fell with Black Wolf’s tomahawk buried in his skull. Hannah Schmidt, a visiting German woman from Pennsylvania, cowered in a corner, then was captured without resistance by the ferocious subchief.

  Ruth Draper, trying to escape from her cabin through an open window, was tomahawked from inside and from outside simultaneously and died draped over the sill. Henry Lenard, realizing the futility of any resistance, simply raised his hands and surrendered. Casper Barrier grappled with two Indians but was no match for them, and a knife plunged into his heart ended his struggles. Mary Draper Ingles, athletic though she was, might have been able to outrun the attackers and escape but for two things: she was greatly pregnant, and her two sons, four-year-old Thomas and two-year-old George, were terrified and clung to her legs. All three were easily captured.

  Her husband, William, was cultivating a small cornfield beyond a rise some distance away, out of sight and hearing of the settlement. He was unaware that anything was occurring until he happened to see a plume of smoke rising from that direction. Instantly he dropped his hoe and ran as fast as he could toward the cabins. Topping the rise 100 yards or so distant, he saw the buildings in flames, Indians loading goods onto the settlement’s own horses and captives being led away. Even at this distance he could make out his wife and sons among them. At the same instant he saw two tomahawk-wielding Indians running in his direction, and he realized he had been seen. He turned and raced away but was about to be overtaken by the time he reached the nearby woodland. No sooner had he entered it than, in attempting to leap over a fallen tree, he caught his foot in the branches and fell. Immediately he rolled into the heaviest of the cover and lay still. Moments later the two Indians, silent and deadly, raced past without seeing him. After a moment or two he came to his feet and slipped away hastily in another direction.

  Ingles encountered John Draper who, like himself, had been working in a distant field, had seen what was happening and had escaped unobserved. Together they headed in the direction of Pattonsburg to spread the word and get help in attempting a rescue.

  The Indians had wasted no time in heading away with their stolen horses, loot and prisoners, following the path that led to the mile-distant cabin of an old man named Philip Barger. When they encountered it, a handful of the Indians rushed ahead and burst in, found Barger alone and beheaded him with Col. Patton’s sword. They took his gun and whatever other goods they wanted, set the place afire and moved on. Fortunately for young Preston and Philip Lybrook, that moment on their way over the mountain heading toward Draper’s Meadows, they were not seen by the Indians, who quickly vanished as they followed the New River downstream. Because of her greatly advanced pregnancy and her attempts to carry both her little sons, Mary Ingles was finally allowed to ride one of the horses, holding two-year-old George before her and four-year-old Thomas astraddle behind and clinging to her waist.92

  Not too far from there an even worse massacre occurred when the Shawnee principal chief himself, Hokolesqua, leading a war party of 80, struck on Muddy Creek and wiped out the Filty Yolkum and Frederick Lea families, then followed the creek to its mouth at the Greenbrier, where some 50 settlers had gathered at the house of Archibald Clendenin, and wiped out all the men and many of the women and children. From there they went to the settlements on Jackson Creek and struck them equally hard.

  Simultaneously, far to the north, the Indians responded in droves to Contrecoeur’s summons, coming overland from the northwest and in flotillas of canoes up the Ohio and down the Allegheny.93 With only a modicum of French assistance, the Indians ambushed the British force on July 9 along the right bank of the Monongahela, just ten miles from Fort Duquesne, and inflicted a devastating defeat on them, killing 456 and wounding an additional 421.

  In the midst of the battle, the Shawnee subchief Red Hawk recognized George Washington, whom he had first seen at Logstown. Though priding himself on being an excellent shot, the Shawnee did not realize that his rifle barrel had become slightly bent in the affray. He took a bead on Washington, fired and was amazed when he missed. Angry with himself, he reloaded and fired again, with the same result. A third effort was no different. Now it became a matter of honor and pride to bring the officer down with his shot, and so he kept his eye on Washington, following him and sh
ooting whenever the opportunity afforded itself. Eleven times he shot, and 11 times he missed. At that point, believing Washington to be under the protection of the Great Spirit, he ceased his attempts and soon lost sight of Washington in the tumult.94

  Even Gen. Braddock was dead, but he had been shot by one of his own men rather than the enemy. An advocate of the traditional British method of battle—standing in fully exposed formation and firing at an army similarly arrayed against him—he simply could not adjust to a foe who fought from behind protective cover, as the Indians and Canadians did; nor would he tolerate such “ungentlemanly” conduct in his own troops. When he spied one of his militia soldiers, Pvt. Edward Faucett, firing from behind the cover afforded by a large tree, he ordered the man to fight in the open as a proper soldier should. Pvt. Faucett refused, whereupon Braddock instantly struck him down with his sword. The militiaman’s younger brother, Thomas, crouched behind another tree nearby, saw what Braddock had done and, in retaliation, promptly shot him in the back. Severely wounded, Braddock finally died on July 13. The remaining provincial soldiers nearby continued fighting from under cover, and as a result, many survived who would otherwise have been killed.95 The scope of the victory was enhanced when the statistics involving the French and Indians were considered: three French officers had been killed and two wounded, plus a total of 27 soldiers and Indians killed and about the same number wounded. Late on the night of the battle, numerous British prisoners were brought back to Fort Duquesne and tortured to death on the banks of the Allegheny opposite the fort.96

  Despite the victory, the Shawnees feared that the British would mount another offensive that was even stronger, that they would overwhelm the French at Fort Duquesne and then stream down the Ohio. With this fearful thought in mind, the Shawnees soon abandoned their upper and lower towns on the Ohio—Conedogwinit and Sinioto. The majority of those inhabitants moved up the Scioto River to the Pickaway Plains or beyond, as far as the upper Little Miami and the remote headwaters of the Mad River. Even the huge village of Chalahgawtha on the Scioto near the mouth of Paint Creek was felt to be too exposed, and it was reestablished, after several temporary placements, on the Little Miami River, fully 70 river miles above its mouth on the Ohio.

  By now the frontier from New York to South Carolina was afire with burning settlers’ cabins and littered with the bodies of horses, cows, hogs, poultry—and people. Many hundreds of people were taken into captivity by the Indians, among them the three Girty brothers, Simon, James and George. Their father, also named Simon, had died some time ago, and the three were living with their mother and stepfather, John Turner, when they were captured in July 1756 by Delawares and Shawnees on the Juniata River and taken to the large village of Kittanning on the Allegheny. Turner was executed in grisly manner. Kittanning was destroyed the following September by an army under Col. John Armstrong, but the Girty boys were not recovered. Simon had been taken away and adopted by the Senecas, James by the Shawnees and George by the Delawares.

  The war raged everywhere on the frontier and kept the greater majority of men, red and white alike, away from their homes for long periods. Gradually the British forces took the upper hand, and the initial jubilation among the French and Indians diminished as the fortunes of war turned against them.

  In September 1758 the British under Gen. Thomas Forbes moved again against Fort Duquesne. There the unnerved French, to the dismay of their Indian allies, spiked their only cannon, dumped it into the river, packed up what they could carry, set the fort afire and fled—half ascending the Allegheny to their forts and beyond, the other half descending the Ohio to Fort Massac, only 60 river miles above the Mississippi. The fire they had set did little damage, and the British took it over, made repairs and improvements and renamed it Fort Pitt.97

  It marked the end of the French presence in the Ohio River Valley, and as if a switch had been thrown, a marked influx of settlers from Virginia and Pennsylvania spilled into the area between the crest of the Alleghenies and the two large rivers that formed the Ohio. Undaunted by the terrible dangers that might well befall them, all wanted land as their share of the spoils of war, and though the colonial governments inveighed against such precipitate actions, they came anyway. Thomas Decker established the Decker’s Creek Settlement where the stream he named emptied into the Monongahela; within six months the Indians had slain the inhabitants and destroyed it. The three Eckerly brothers, who were Dunkards, settled on and named Dunkard Creek close to where it entered the Monongahela. Dr. Thomas Eckerly took some furs they trapped to a trading post on the Shenandoah, and when he returned, the settlement had been destroyed and his two brothers killed and scalped. Other settlements were similarly formed and destroyed, but some managed to hang on to their precarious existence. Among the many new settlements that were so quickly formed was the first one to actually be in sight of the Ohio River. It sprang up as a scattering of shacks and lean-tos and half-face camps, then rapidly gave way to more substantial cabins. It was outside the walls of Fort Pitt and was given its own name—Pittsburgh.

  By 1759, new forts were springing up all over the frontier—some built by the government, others by private individuals or groups. Fort Redstone was built by Col. William Byrd near the ruins of the Ohio Company storage post at the mouth of Redstone Creek. Cassino’s Fort and Westfall’s Fort were built on the Tygart Valley River, and Jackson’s Fort and Prickett’s Fort on the Monongahela tributary creeks for which they had been named.

  It was this same year when Col. John Gibson left Fort Pitt under the command of Lt. David Williamson and led a detachment in pursuit of a party of Indians that had struck another new settlement at the mouth of Decker’s Creek. The Indians had fled down the Ohio and, feeling safe, made camp. Gibson came up on them before they were aware anyone was nearby. They were a party of ten Mingoes, under the temporary chief, Kiskepila—Little Eagle.98 Gibson and his men approached stealthily and then unexpectedly burst upon the campsite. Kiskepila shrieked a war whoop and sent a shot at Gibson. The ball passed through the edge of his shirt without harming him and wounded the soldier directly behind him. Gibson, with a mighty swing of his sword, lopped off the chief’s head, and the other Indians immediately fled. Later, at their village, the Mingoes held a war dance and filled the air with shrieks for revenge on “the long knife” and his “long knife nation,” meaning the Virginians. The name stuck, and from that time forward the Virginians were referred to as the Shemanese—the Long Knives.

  When the British under Sir William Johnson took Fort Niagara in July 1759, the French quickly abandoned Forts Machault, Le Boeuf and Presque Isle. Quebec fell to the British the following September, and a year later Montreal fell as well, and the French capitulated. All French posts in the region of the Great Lakes were to be given up, making Canada and all its dependencies British Crown possessions. By the terms of the treaty, however, this did not include the French in Louisiana, who were morally bound to continue the war still in progress elsewhere between England and France; they did all they could to promulgate bad feelings in the Indians toward the British until informed that an official French-English treaty had been signed. As a result, many of the western posts, instead of being formally surrendered, were simply abandoned, and their garrisons fled to the Mississippi Valley to join the French garrisons in southwestern Illinois and farther downstream on the Mississippi. The French installation closest to the new British holdings in Canada and the Northwest was now Fort de Chartres.

  British trade boomed in the Great Lakes region, but the new British commander was Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who not only did not understand Indians but actively and intensely disliked them. So, too, evidently, did the new British sovereign, George III, who was crowned on October 25, 1760, following the death of George II. The Shawnees, Delawares and other northwestern tribes had agreed they would cease attacks on settlers coming over the Alleghenies, but the British had to agree as well to prohibit further settlement. George Croghan had become Sir William Johnson’s new fir
st deputy Indian superintendent in the west, and to salve relationships with the tribes, he scheduled a huge council with them at Pittsburgh. He arrived from the east with an extensive packhorse train of goods to distribute to the tribes as a measure of goodwill, following the customary protocol of gift-giving in the interest of a strong Indian trade. For this measure Amherst soundly castigated both Johnson and Croghan, considering this to be extravagant and unnecessary.

  The Shawnees were among the tribes who attended at Pittsburgh and agreed to a new peace with the British. Along with the gifts they were given there, however, they also came away with smallpox. The disease ravaged the tribe—and other tribes as well—and among those who died was the Shawnee war chief, Kishkalwa. Pucksinwah now became the new war chief of the tribe and head of its Kispokotha sept, with the ugly, powerful Shemeneto—Black Snake—as his second.

  The trade restrictions promulgated by Amherst soon reduced the majority of the tribes to a degree of poverty they had never before known. The permission given to the British to build a fort at the Forks of the Ohio was understood to have been a temporary grant, and that as soon as it was no longer needed in order to fight the French, it would be dismantled, and all the whites, except for traders, were expected to withdraw east of the mountains. When this did not occur and, instead, forts all over the frontier were strengthened and regarrisoned with seasoned soldiers, and when settlers continued to move west of the Susquehanna and Shenandoah and into the valleys of the Youghiogheny, Cheat and Monongahela, the anger of the tribes rose.99 That anger finally spilled over in the person of the war chief of the Ottawas—a fiery individual named Pontiac—who, encouraged by promises of support by French agents still secretly moving through their country, united the tribes in a confederation and in May 1763 directed a simultaneous attack against all northwestern installations under British control.100 In one fell swoop, virtually all of the western posts were overthrown and destroyed by surprise attacks, their garrisons killed or captured. This included Forts Sandusky, St. Joseph, Miamis, Ouiatenon, Michilimackinac, Presque Isle, Machault, Le Boeuf, and Edward Augustus (formerly Fort La Baye). Detroit—that name now supplanted the French designation of Fort Pontchartrain—was put under siege by Pontiac and his allies from May to October but managed to hold its own.