That Dark and Bloody River

by Allan Eckert

  Making so-called tomahawk improvements was the most popular form of marking the land being claimed, and such claims were then called tomahawk rights. The process was simple enough: The individual stepped off the bounds of his claim and at the corners used a tomahawk to chop his initials or mark into a large tree.

  During the summer the families of Jacob Vanmetre, Thomas Hughes and John Swan toiled their way to the mouth of Redstone Creek. Here they crossed over the big Monongahela River, turned upstream, followed the shoreline for 15 miles and came to the mouth of a roily stream they promptly named Muddy Creek. They then followed the creek upstream for five miles until coming to a lovely bottomland at the outward bow of a large bend. Here they made their claims, sank their roots, built their cabins and planted grain, and they called the place Vanmetre’s Settlement.109

  Arriving soon after the Vanmetre party and traveling even farther upstream on the Monongahela but along the east bank, two brothers named David and Zackwell Morgan came to the Cheat River, which they crossed and continued up the east side of the Monongahela another dozen miles until they came at length to the mouth of the stream called Decker’s Creek. There they found the ruins of the old Decker’s Creek Settlement, where the first settlers, under Thomas Decker, had been slain in an Indian attack four years ago last May. Undaunted at possibly tempting fate, the Morgans made their own tomahawk improvements and left, determined to return with their families the following spring; determined as well that their settlement would survive and they would call it Morgantown.110

  They were not the only ones undaunted by what disasters may have befallen others who had arrived before them. Fourteen years ago David Tygart and Thomas Files had settled on the Tygart Valley River, where shortly afterward the Files family was massacred and Tygart moved away, leaving only his name. Ten years later a new settlement had been made by the Pringle brothers, John and Samuel, in that same valley. They had held on for four years, and now, leaving Samuel to hold the place, John went east and returned in a couple of months with the families of George, Edward and John Jackson, Edgar Hughes, Philip Hacker, William Radcliffe and others. They spread out in the valley and made their own settlements on such Tygart tributaries as the Buckhannon River, Hacker’s Creek, Bushy Fork, Turkey Run and others … and they, too, hung on.111 The Solomon Burkham family, seeking more security, settled on the Youghiogheny River not very far above its mouth at the Monongahela, close to the little blockhouse built by Jacob Beeson and being called Beeson’s Fort, adjacent to the claim recently made by a well-known young soldier, Capt. William Crawford.

  Among those who came to the Redstone area was a 21-year-old man from the settlement his own grandfather had daringly established on the South Branch Potomac River 67 years ago. Accompanying him were his two younger brothers, Silas and Jonathan, a few Negro slaves, several other young men and his own new wife. This young man had wooed and won a lovely girl a year younger than he, Elizabeth McCulloch, and they had been married last February. Now the newlyweds were establishing themselves near the mouth of Redstone Creek, but it was, he warned, a temporary place for them only. Despite the potentially extreme danger involved, he was intent upon settling on the very shore of the Ohio River far below Fort Pitt. That was no place to take his young wife until he had at least staked his claims and built a cabin. But come next spring, he and his brothers—and perhaps a few hardy volunteers with them—would head for the area in question and make his dream a reality. Then, he promised, he would come back for her. He was a very determined young man who never made promises lightly and who was every bit as hardy a pioneer as his grandfather had been, after whom he had been named.

  He was Ebenezer Zane.

  [November 22, 1768—Tuesday]

  Few things in the past had stirred such excitement in the colonies as the treaty just consummated by Sir William Johnson on behalf of the British with the Iroquois. It was one of the largest and best-attended councils ever held. In addition to commissioners from Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, more than 3,000 Indians had attended, by far the great majority being representatives of the Six Nations comprising the Iroquois League, but also a scattering of others—Caughnawagas, Abnakis and Algonkins, a few Hurons and their splinter tribe, the Wyandots, a few Ottawas and Delawares and, uninvited and coldly treated, some Shawnees.

  The treaty council had been held at Fort Stanwix, on the Mohawk River headwaters.112 It began on October 24 and ended just last week, and its ramifications were staggering for Indians and whites alike. For one thing, the restrictive policies established by the Royal Board of Trade were rescinded, and control of trade was placed back into the hands of the individual colonies, meaning that a great swell of traders would undoubtedly flock into Indian lands, and without the previous regulations being enforced, there would be a huge increase in the trade of weapons and liquor. As serious as that was, it was as nothing compared with the foremost goal the treaty accomplished for the colonists: abolition of the Indian-white boundary line set by the Proclamation of 1763—the wavering line following the Allegheny crest from deep in the South to upper New York. A new boundary was agreed upon—the Ohio River; everything to the north and west of that stream would be Indian territory, proclaimed inviolate. South and east of the Ohio, including the whole of the Kentucky lands south to Tennessee and east to the Allegheny crest, would now be open for settlement. No longer was there a ban—even nominally—on prospective settlers crossing the summit of those mountains. Now they could legally migrate into this vast area, and far more significantly, speculators in large landholdings, such as the Ohio Land Company, were free to advertise their western lands for sale. Almost immediately George Washington, Arthur Lee and others set themselves up as the Mississippi Land Company and petitioned King George for a grant of 2.5 million acres in the Kanawha River Valley, where they planned to establish a new British colony to be called Kanawha. Benjamin Franklin—one of the treaty commissioners—along with Thomas Walpole, George Mercer, Thomas Pownall and the firm of Baynton, Wharton and Morgan were not far behind, setting up the Walpole Land Company, hoping to get a similar grant in the Illinois country and establish a new British colony named Vandalia.

  The great tract of land involved was not, of course, the property of the Iroquois League by any stretch of the imagination, and for them to sell it was tantamount to a farmer blandly selling the fields belonging to another farmer some distance away. Yet as they had done in the past, the Iroquois grandly proclaimed that all those lands were theirs “by right of conquest,” and the British, as they had in the past, chose to accept and honor the preposterous claim. For goods to the value of £10,000, the fraudulent land sale called the Fort Stanwix Treaty was consummated.113

  Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Indian Affairs and closely allied to the Iroquois through marriage into the tribe and adoption by the Mohawks, was fully aware that the Iroquois claim to the western lands was fanciful, but he went along with it, even to the extent of not inviting delegates from the tribes living on or using those lands—the Shawnees and Cherokees in particular—to attend the council. When they showed up in small numbers anyway, he was very upset, spoke to them curtly, treated them coldly and grudgingly allowed them to sit in on the council, but without voice or vote.

  Pucksinwah, who was head of the Shawnee delegation, was positively outraged at what was occurring and angrily confronted Sir William. The Indian superintendent listened impatiently to the harangue that declared him guilty of cheating the Indians of the Northwest, then shook his head with unbudging finality.

  “It is you Shawnees,” he told Pucksinwah, “who should feel guilty, considering the way you have previously treated Englishmen. You should go home and pay due regard to the boundary line now made.” He then added insult to this injury by giving the Shawnee delegation £27 worth of goods as a sop, with the order that they give half of it to the Delawares.

  Pucksinwah, nostrils flaring, was silent for a moment, bridling the temper that encouraged him to jerk ou
t his tomahawk and strike down this friend of the Iroquois, this enemy of the Shawnees. When at last he spoke, the words were steely, cold:

  “At the close of the last war,” he said, “we and you buried our hatchets deep that they might never again be seen, but now the wind that has issued from your mouth these past days has blown away the dirt and exposed them. They now wait only our picking them up. By what you have done, you have already picked up yours. When my chiefs learn of this, we shall soon see whether we pick up ours. I have nothing further to say to you, Warraghiyagey!”

  [December 30, 1768—Friday]

  Pucksinwah stood before the chiefs in the great msi-kah-mi-qui—council house — at the Shawnee capital village of Wapatomica at the Forks of the Muskingum River. He was finished speaking now, and as war chief of the tribe, he would be bound to follow their decision, whatever it might be.

  For the past two hours he had spoken, recalling to them what he had heard and witnessed at the great council held at Fort Stanwix. He had reminded them of how, when he had returned here following the conclusion of that council and reported to them, they at first did not believe him, saying the report was so incomprehensible that he must have misunderstood those things said and done. It was well known, they said, that the Iroquois despised them and would not hesitate to hurt them if such were in their power, but they would do so in an honorable way. There was no iota of honor in what Pucksinwah had told them the Iroquois had done.

  He reminded them that at that point they had selected another delegation led by him, to return to the Iroquois and speak to their head men and clear away the fogs misting the view of what was real. And, he reminded them, he and his delegation had returned, and spoken to the chiefs, and their own ears had heard the response: The Iroquois chiefs had refused to recant the stance they had taken at Fort Stanwix; refused to return the goods they had accepted for fraudulently selling land that was not theirs to sell; refused to admit that Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, Miamis or other northwestern tribes had any right whatsoever to any of the lands they had sold.

  “The bargain has been made,” they had told Pucksinwah, “and now you must accept it and you must not again pick up your hatchets, which you run about with doing great mischief. If you do so, then a great party of our warriors will strike out into Ohio against you and the consequences will be fatal.”

  “Many summers ago,” Pucksinwah had responded coldly, “we drove the Iroquois out of our lands on the Susquehanna River. Fewer years ago we drove them out of the valley of the Spaylaywitheepi—the Ohio River. Be warned. Should you again show your faces in our land, it will be for the Iroquois, not the Shawnee, that the consequences will be fatal.”114

  Having heard and considered all these matters, the Shawnee chiefs came to their decision. They held nothing but contempt for the hollow threat of the Iroquois, knowing they had nothing to fear from that direction. Where the Long Knives were concerned, however, they had no recourse but this: They would maintain peace so long as they were not themselves injured, but they refused to acknowledge the Spaylaywitheepi as the border between white man and red—and they would not allow the Shemanese to take the game or the lands south of the river.

  [June 28, 1769—Wednesday]

  Of the five men who made up the party of hunters led by John Findlay, none was so skilled in hunting, tracking and stalking, nor so totally enthralled with the Kentucky country, as the man with whom he had served as a wagoner under General Braddock in that disastrous campaign 15 years earlier—Daniel Boone.

  Boone, at 35, was steady and dependable, a man one could count on when things got tough. Ever since Findlay had first told him of the incredible richness of Kentucky and its boundless herds of buffalo, elk, deer and other game, Boone had been burning to go there, but it hadn’t been until earlier this year that they had finally made the long-considered trip an actuality. The other four who accompanied them were good hunters, but they had eyes only for the game they were seeking. Only Boone, of them all, appreciated the country to its fullest—the great fertile valleys watered by fine clear streams, the vast stretches of forest wilderness and the rolling hills cloaked in lush buffalo grass and towering cane, the many intriguing caves and, most compelling to him, the numerous excellent salt licks that attracted unbelievable congregations of game animals.

  They had left the valley of the Yadkin River in North Carolina the first of May, and Findlay had guided them through the Cumberland Gap into a land that surpassed even the glories that Boone had imagined from the stories Findlay had told him. For weeks they had moved along at their leisure, hunting in the beautiful valleys of unnamed streams that they called Red River, Green, Kentucky, Elkhorn and Licking, among others. In all their miles of traveling thus far, they had seen no other humans. They had established a base camp on a particularly pretty little tributary of the Kentucky River, calling the spot Station Camp and the stream Station Camp Creek.115 From here they spread out individually or in pairs, drinking in the wonders of the land as if it were the sweetest of nectars.

  The men had told their families they would be gone for about a month, yet here it was almost the end of June, and even if they started home immediately, it would probably be another month before they got back, and they would have been gone three times longer than planned.116 Though some of the men were itching to start back, Findlay and Boone would gladly have stayed on indefinitely had not Findlay been taken ill and then given in to the majority opinion to return. Boone, however, reckoned he would remain and continue to hunt and explore. Findlay was not surprised and, promising to tell Boone’s kin he was all right, set off with the others.

  Boone watched them go without regret; he had always preferred being in the woods alone, where he was responsible only for himself. And now, spread out before him was a land that continued to enthrall him as none other had before—a land, he was now convinced, where his destiny lay.

  [June 27, 1769—Tuesday]

  Ebenezer Zane, at 22, was a man with a vision and the determination to make that vision become reality, despite whatever difficulties the fates might thrust into his path. He was also, befitting his Scots Presbyterian heritage, a young man who planned ahead.

  Over the winter he had talked with several traders who had been down the Ohio for considerable distances, and when specifically questioned, all gave the same answer: The Ohio River below Fort Pitt angled northwestward for 25 miles to the mouth of the Beaver River, then turned and angled southwestward for a similar distance to where Yellow Creek entered from the Ohio country. At that point the big river turned again until it was running only a little west of due south, and maintained that course, excluding a few major bends, for at least 200 miles more, before angling north and west again.

  Sketching this out in his mind’s eye, Zane had come to the rather exciting conclusion that if he crossed the Monongahela at the mouth of Redstone Creek and headed due west, eventually he would find a stream flowing westward and emptying into the Ohio instead of the Monongahela. Or even if he didn’t hit such a tributary stream, sooner or later, by continuing to follow that westward course, he would encounter the Ohio River itself.

  Another fascinating and equally exciting bit of information had reached him in midwinter: details of the Fort Stanwix Treaty last fall and the momentous news that the Ohio Valley—at least the land south and east of the river—was opened for settlement. Though he had planned on claiming Ohio Valley land anyway, as many others had been doing despite prohibition, this wonderful news of the Proclamation of 1763 being negated only served to strengthen his resolve, because now the land-claiming he envisioned would be perfectly legal.

  Young Zane was quite sure that with such news sweeping across the land, there would undoubtedly be a rush of would-be settlers coming in to make claims as soon as the weather warmed sufficiently in the spring; he knew as well that the overwhelming majority would take the course of least resistance and simply float down the Monongahela to Pittsburgh and then down the Ohio from there. He aimed to get
first choice of the lands that would be available. So during late winter he got everything into readiness and waited. It was not until early April, however, that those bent on claiming Ohio lands began reaching Redstone and setting off downriver toward Pittsburgh. At once he and his brothers, Silas and Jonathan, together with a friend named Isaac Williams, four of the Zane dogs and two of their Negro slaves, loaded up their mounts and packhorses, kept their flintlocks at ready and set out on their great adventure.

  They had swum their horses across the Monongahela just above Redstone Creek and struck out on a due-west course. Isaac Williams, who loved to hunt more than anything, had been this way before on short hunting trips, and easily recognized Tenmile Creek when they encountered it less than two hours later. However, the party then did what he had never done before: They turned upstream and followed its winding course to the headwaters.

  Although reason told Zane that on the other side of the divide lay streams eventually draining into the Ohio, he was hardly prepared to encounter one so quickly. Only three miles after leaving the head of Tenmile Creek, they came to a lovely clear little stream running southwest.117 There was always the possibility that it might curve around and wind up heading eastward again to empty into the Monongahela, but they took the chance. In a short time, to their great joy, the stream swung west and then even somewhat northwest. They had taken their time following it, noting approvingly each time another spring-fed stream emptied into it, camping beside it at night and refreshing themselves with its sparkling clean waters. By the end of the third day they found that this stream was no longer a little brook running through the hills but a substantial creek, deep and strong.