That Dark and Bloody River

by Allan Eckert

  At length they came to a major fork where another creek entered from the east, not much smaller than the one they were following.118 Below this point the principal creek was considerably enlarged, and there were some quite impressive bottomlands. It was here, quite unexpectedly, they encountered an old Delaware Indian in his small camp, holding a lengthwise spitted fish over his fire. He was apprehensive at first, but they made it clear he had nothing to fear from them, and he relaxed. They gave him some tobacco and jerky and discovered he could speak a smattering of English.

  “What is this stream?” Zane asked, indicating the creek with a turn of his thumb. The Delaware, confused, shook his head. Zane tried again: “Name. Name of creek. Name of … of—sepe.” He was pleased to have remembered the Delaware word for river.

  The old Indian nodded and grinned. “Weiling,” he said, then nodded again and repeated himself: “Weiling.”

  “Wheeling, eh?” Zane automatically spoke the word in a phonetic sense. “All right, then, Wheeling it is. Jonathan, Si”—he smiled at his brothers—“this is Wheeling Creek.”

  They had left the old Indian in peace and continued downstream. Silas was frowning, and soon put his thoughts into words. “Supposing,” he said, “he tells some of his friends about seeing us?”

  Ebenezer, expressionless, reined up and looked back at his brothers as they, too, stopped. “Did you want to kill him?”

  “No,” said Silas at once.

  “Good. Me neither. So then, you want to turn back?”

  “No!” both younger brothers answered in unison.

  “Then let’s get on with it. I can’t imagine there’s much farther to go. Keep alert, though, and keep your guns ready.”

  They encountered no one else, and just short of eight miles farther downstream, they came to the mouth of the creek, where it emptied into what could be nothing but the great Ohio River. The immense bottom they found here overjoyed them, and they made camp at once. The first claim made was by Ebenezer who, as leader of the party, got first choice. He selected the fine level terrace on the upstream side of the creek’s mouth, some 16 feet above the water. Jonathan also paced off a claim near the creek mouth. Then, for the next month, the brothers spent their waking hours exploring, pacing off claims, and carefully marking them, eventually claiming all the way upstream to the Forks of the Wheeling, where Silas finally chose his own special claim.119 Wherever possible, they or their servants climbed high into trees to make tomahawk improvements, sometimes 30 to 40 feet above the ground, where they couldn’t easily be reached and defaced. When there were no trees where markers were needed, they erected cairns of flat rocks with their initials carefully chipped into them.

  Isaac Williams was not so driven to claim as were the Zanes, preferring to hunt and provide the party with meat while they made their claims. However, on one of his outings upstream on the Ohio, he encountered a sizable creek 16 miles above Wheeling Creek. He followed it a considerable distance upstream to a pleasant little bottom where he spied a small herd of woods bison feeding on lush grasses. Selecting a fine yearling for the best meat, he brought the animal down with a well-placed shot and, even before approaching his kill, decided the stream should be named Buffalo Creek. He expertly dressed out his quarry, taking the tongue and other select cuts to share with the Zanes. Before starting back, however, he made tomahawk improvements on a 400-acre tract that he found especially appealing, including the bottom.120

  As the Zane party worked, occasional boats passed with individuals or teams of men bent on locating and claiming good lands. Invariably they stopped to talk, sharing news of the moment, looking with envy at the wonderful bottom these boys had discovered and claimed, wishing they had gotten there first. For his own part, Williams envied their downstream adventure on the Ohio and several times remarked that if he had a canoe, he’d head downstream, too. He was more than pleased when one of the parties that stopped agreed to give him, in exchange for a good supply of fresh meat, a small canoe they were towing that was interfering with their travel by continually overtaking them.

  As soon as they finished claiming, they engaged in a final, considerably harder labor—clearing a good-size area and erecting a good cabin. This was done on a ten-acre tract of Ebenezer’s claim at the creek mouth. When it was finished, Isaac Williams gave his horse into the keeping of the brothers, shook hands and cheerfully set off downstream into the unknown with only his gun, knife, tomahawk and a pouch containing jerky and some essentials.

  “You’ll see me when I get back, boys,” he said, tossing them a wave, “and I do intend on getting back.”121

  Now it was time to go home. The brothers had agreed among themselves that Silas would remain behind in the cabin, holding the claims from possible interlopers and await the return next spring of Ebenezer and Jonathan, who this time would be coming with all their goods and the family. While Silas lent a hand with the packing, Ebenezer told them to keep at it, he’d be back before long. He strode off then, heading toward the large bluff overlooking the bottom from the north.

  It took him the better part of an hour to climb the heavily forested slopes of the hill and reach its summit.122 Now at last, it was all spread out well over 300 feet below him. A quarter-mile to the west, the Ohio was a silvery ribbon that split itself into two channels as it swept around the large island opposite the Wheeling bottom. A half-mile wide at its thickest, the island tapered to a sharp point at either end and was about two miles long. It was heavily overgrown with trees and shrubbery, indicating that it was not an island prone to being washed away by seasonal flooding and Ebenezer reckoned that at some future time he would claim the island, too, and perhaps plant crops there.

  Directly below was the Wheeling bottom itself, a half-mile-square area of rich lush growth, where one day, perhaps, there would be a sizable town to offer welcome haven to river travelers.123 Far across the bottom, at the mouth of Wheeling Creek, the cabin stood isolated in the midst of the wilderness. He could see the tiny stick figures that were Silas and Jonathan, busily loading the three packhorses, and knew he must get back down to them. Still, he took one last lingering look.

  “I’m coming home now, Elizabeth,” he spoke aloud, “to get you and bring you back here, because all this is yours.”

  And many miles away, in the Zane cabin on Redstone Creek, Elizabeth Zane was at this very moment giving birth to their first child—a daughter who would be named Catherine.124

  [September 30, 1773—Thursday]

  It had taken a while for the word to spread that the Fort Stanwix Treaty had abolished the Proclamation of 1763 and suddenly opened to legal settlement everything west of the Alleghenies and east and south of the Ohio River.

  Among the very first to act on the incredible occurrence were the large land companies—the Mississippi Land Company, Ohio Land Company, Illinois Land Company, the Walpole Company and others—who swiftly dispatched numerous teams of skilled surveyors down the Ohio to seek out and claim the very best lands.

  Along with these were many individual land-jobbers and surveyors who saw this as an opportunity not to sink roots into a new land, but to get very rich very quickly by claiming lands far beyond the limitations prescribed, mapping these locations and then quickly returning to the frontier areas and selling these claims to the eager would-be settlers streaming to the frontier. And there were those surveyors and claimers who did the same but who also retained for themselves the very best of the land they encountered.

  George Washington, already with considerable frontier experience under his belt and trained as a surveyor, was among the first. In 1770, he set out down the Ohio with a strong party of men, including his friend Capt. William Crawford, who had already claimed 1,600 acres for Washington in the valley of the Youghiogheny. They inspected lands at the mouths of all the major streams but missed seeing Wheeling because they passed it on the channel that flowed on the west side of Wheeling Island. They claimed at Round Bottom, on a sharp bend of the river, where a surveyor
named Michael Cresap was already busily claiming, and they stopped and explored at the Hockhocking and Muskingum and Little Kanawha.125 Because they had been told by traders that there was a small Delaware village a short distance up the Little Kanawha—a village they called Bulltown, under a surly chief named Captain Bull—they did not explore up that stream but continued downriver some 70 miles farther to the mouth of the Great Kanawha.126 There they turned upstream, and just above its mouth, Washington personally claimed 10,000 acres on both sides of the river. They followed the stream up to the fine salt licks at Campbell’s Creek, where Washington and another friend, Andrew Lewis, jointly claimed 250 acres.127 At the same time his helpers were claiming additional lands for him, for themselves and others. In effect, they and the other land-jobbers and surveyors now on the Ohio were like little children loosed in a candy store, snatching and grabbing the best of everything that caught their eye.

  Finished in the Kanawha Valley, the Washington party returned to the Ohio, floated down to the Big Sandy and ascended it.128 Twenty-five miles up that river, they came to where a good-size stream entered from the southwest. Washington turned up that creek and stopped in about a mile at a good bottomland and marked out a considerably oversize claim, in excess of 2,000 acres, for his friend John Fry.129 Finally, exhausted with their efforts, they returned up the Ohio to Fort Pitt, finding the river peppered with boatloads of settlers hurrying to find land and numerous camps of claiming parties on the shores. Washington finally got home on December 1, having been absent for over nine weeks.

  Among the many surveying parties on the Ohio was one led by Dr. John Wood and Hancock Lee, who had been commissioned by the new Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, in the name of King George III, to survey for possible future development by the colony. They, too, had been busy claiming down as far as Big Sandy.

  The Thomas Bullitt party of surveyors went much farther. Instead of descending the Ohio from Pittsburgh, they had descended the New and Kanawha rivers, claiming well over 1,000 acres as they went, entered the Ohio River at the Kanawha mouth and joined briefly with other surveying parties they met, such as that under Wood and Lee, as well as the rough group of frontiersmen-cum-surveyors led by Joel Reese and Jacob Greathouse, including the Mahon brothers, John and Rafe, and the party led by Hancock Taylor and the McAfee brothers—James, George and Robert.

  It was Bullitt’s party and that under Taylor and the McAfees that were the most daring. These two parties descended past the stream one of their surveyors, Thomas Hedges, named Limestone Creek, continued well below the mouth of the Licking and stopped to survey the Big Bone Lick area, where they, as others had before them, used the huge individual fossilized vertebrae of woolly mammoths as camp stools. At the mouth of the Kentucky River the Taylor-McAfee party went up the tributary and did extensive surveying some 80 miles above.130 The Bullitt party continued down the Ohio even farther, to the Falls of the Ohio, where they ascended a stream they called Beargrass Creek, penetrating many miles into the Kentucky country.131

  At the same time, much farther down the Ohio, in the Illinois country, William Murray, acting on behalf of the Illinois Land Company, made illegal purchases from Indians of two large land tracts, one on the Illinois River and the other south of Kaskaskia, fronting on the lower Ohio just above its mouth at the Mississippi.

  Wolf Creek Fort, a small log blockhouse, was built in 1772 on the west side of the New River at the mouth of Wolf Creek to protect the scattered settlers of that area. Shortly after its erection, a party of four men left there and descended the New and Kanawha rivers, to explore and claim. They were led by John Van Bibber and included his brother, Peter, as well as Matthew Arbuckle and Joseph Alderson. These four reached the Falls of the Kanawha, and luckily for them, saw a war party of Shawnees without themselves being seen. They quickly went into hiding beneath a large shelving rock and stayed throughout the night to escape detection. After the Indians were well away, John Van Bibber chipped out his name with the poll end of his tomahawk, and then they continued downstream.132 At length they came to the salt lick at Campbell’s Creek, followed it upstream several miles and came to a most remarkable sight: a spring that was afire with a peculiar blue and orange smokeless flame that constantly covered its surface. They named it Burning Spring.133 So prevalent was Indian sign in the area that they gave up the idea of claiming lands at this time and returned home in haste.

  While the skilled surveying teams were among the first to descend the Ohio and Kanawha when these lands were opened for settlement, they were only the vanguard. Ordinary citizens inclined to make their own tomahawk improvements throughout the entire frontier took longer to prepare to emigrate into these forbidding, unknown lands, but what began as a scattering of people acting on unprecedented opportunity quickly evolved from a trickle to a flow to a flood of humanity spilling over the Allegheny crest.

  They came on foot, rifles in hand, possessions in backpacks. They came by horseback, singly, in small family groups, among friends and neighbors, in trains of mounted people leading scores of heavily laden packhorses. They came in wagons where they could, though with only two wagon roads open and jammed with traffic, progress was slow, especially when inclemencies turned those roads into mires. Still they came.

  Where Braddock’s Road ended at the mouth of Redstone Creek on the Monongahela, there was great congestion, and people who had boat-building skills were abruptly deluged with orders for canoes, piroques, bateaux, flatboats, broadhorns, even ordinary rafts—anything that would enable prospective settlers means for getting to and down the Ohio River. Where the Military Road terminated at Pittsburgh, the community swelled out of all proportion, and people erected tents, half-face camps, lean-tos, shacks, cabins, anything for shelter, and they, too, needed water transportation. Wagons that did reach a terminus became objects for barter, to be torn apart and the planking used to build shelter or boats.

  Entrepreneurs flourished. Boatyards were established, taverns and wayhouses built, sawmills and gristmills sprang up, supply houses and stores were erected, and still the demand by far exceeded the supply. Pittsburgh swiftly changed from a community of scattered camps and cabins to a town that couldn’t grow quickly enough, and new communities named Braddock and Elizabethtown were being established along the Monongahela, the latter already becoming noted as a boat-building center.

  There was surprisingly little concern for safety in these terminal areas; the very numbers of people who congregated engendered a false sense of safety. Everyone able to continue down the Ohio, however, understood the peril, knew that around any given bend or behind any given bush or tree or rock, death might lurk, but it did little to deter them, the desire to possess land overshadowing the risk. Friendly Indians who visited were regarded with fear and suspicion, while those even glimpsed along the river shores immediately became targets and many were killed. It wasn’t a war—not yet—but the river was becoming known as a deadly place to be, for whites and Indians alike, where all too often the waters became stained with blood.

  Everywhere, everywhere on the frontier, people fearing to penetrate deeper into the unknown interior to the west elected to find a suitable place along this nebulous frontier fringe to sink their roots, either temporarily or permanently. New settle-ments were established in the most isolated places as the human overflow spread up the valleys to the remote reaches of every creek or run that emptied into the Monongahela and Allegheny, the West Branch Susquehanna, the Cheat and Tygart Valley rivers, the Youghiogheny, the Kiskeminetas, Conemaugh and Loyalhannon, the West Fork Monongahela, the Buffalo, Chartier’s, Dunkard and Tenmile—and the upper Ohio River.

  Alarmed by the number of Indian attacks occurring against the flurry of settlers establishing themselves in the Greenbrier Valley, the Virginia government, late in 1769, had erected a strong little fortification some 35 miles up the Greenbrier from its mouth at New River and called it Camp Union.134 Now, when danger threatened, at least the outlying settlers might be able to make it
to the refuge the fort provided. Comfortable in this knowledge, John Stewart, Robert McClennahan, Thomas Renix and William Hamilton all settled close together nine miles north of the new fort.135

  True to his word, Ebenezer Zane moved his wife and new daughter and all their goods from Redstone to the Wheeling Creek claims as soon as the season opened in 1770. As he anticipated, Elizabeth was quite as taken with the beauty of the area as he had been, and they agreed they had at last found the place to permanently sink roots.

  Lewis Bonnett, formerly a captain in Braddock’s army, and his friend John Wetzel, a powerful middle-aged German of renowned courage, had settled close together on Dunkard Creek early in 1769. Now they joined forces with nine other family heads at Redstone and were among the first to strike out, as the Zanes had before them, overland to the west.136 These 11 men found the headwaters of Wheeling Creek and eagerly followed it downstream, only to be deeply disappointed when they reached the Forks of the Wheeling and found the land from that point to its mouth already taken up with claims being protected by Ebenezer Zane and his brothers. So they settled on Wheeling above the Forks, Bonnett, as party leader, getting first choice and the others drawing lots to make their tomahawk improvements on the remaining choice locations.137 The parcels of land adjoined one another for several miles above the Forks. Wetzel, with poor luck in the drawing of lots, wound up with the claim farthest up from the mouth of the creek, 14 miles upstream and seven miles above the Forks.138 Claiming his land, he followed a rill to its source at a beautiful spring. Close at hand was a dead hollow tree, and in its branches some distance up was a young black bear that had climbed the tree to take refuge at Wetzel’s approach. Wetzel easily brought the rotted tree down with hefty strokes of his ax. When the bear tumbled out, somewhat dazed by its fall, Wetzel leaped on its back, encircled its throat with one arm and quickly killed it with a few well-aimed tomahawk blows, amidst the laughter and hooting of his companions.139