That Dark and Bloody River

by Allan Eckert

  It had been almost exactly a month ago that Lochry, on his arrival at Fort Pitt, discovered that boats were waiting for his detachment but that Gen. Clark had already departed for Wheeling and had left orders for Lochry and his force to meet him there. Col. Lochry, as county lieutenant of Westmoreland County, had experienced considerable difficulty in recruiting men in his home region and those he did raise had been late in arriving at Pittsburgh. By the time they assembled, Clark’s force had had several days’ head start on them.

  Lochry and his men had finally left Pittsburgh but, on arriving at Wheeling on July 29, they found that Clark, with his force augmented by some Wheeling militiamen, had also left there; his orders were for Lochry to follow immediately with his detachment. Clark had also changed the place of rendezvous from the mouth of the Great Miami River to the Falls of the Ohio at the new settlement of Louisville.

  Clark had been having his own troubles on the descent. A few days after leaving Wheeling he had reached a huge island three miles long and half a mile wide in the Ohio a mile below the mouth of the Little Kanawha River, and here he had ordered his troops to camp overnight.428 During that night two officers—Lieutenants Samuel Craig and Paddy Hunter—led 50 men in a mass desertion. Some of them struck out overland for the east, while others stole boats and began returning upstream. The latter were intercepted by Lochry and put under arrest, to be returned to Clark and brought up for courts-martial.

  When Clark and his force continued down the Ohio, the commander left behind Maj. Craycraft and Q.M. Richard Wallace with a squad of five men to wait with dispatches to give to Col. Lochry when he arrived.429 With this done, the Lochry force continued downstream. At the Three Islands, some 400 miles below Pittsburgh, Lochry’s force encamped and Maj. Craycraft and his squad, with Lochry’s approval, continued in a single canoe to attempt to overtake Clark and inform him about Lochry coming behind with the deserters he had managed to capture.

  Less than 100 miles downstream, the main party of Indians under McKee, George Girty, a renegade named Brice Reagen, who had deserted from the Thirteenth Virginia Regiment, and Thayendanegea, reached the Ohio and were heading down toward the Falls when some of Shemeneto’s spies had overtaken them with the news that a single canoe with seven men was coming downstream.430 Using canoes brought along on packhorses, the Indians took positions on both sides of the Ohio and waited. When the canoe bearing Maj. Craycraft and his squad appeared, the soldiers suddenly found a horde of Indians in canoes on all sides and, with resistance futile, were easily captured without a shot being fired.

  Jim Girty and Reagen questioned the captives, and though both Craycraft and Wallace refused to talk, the other men broke when threatened with death and told of the Lochry force coming along behind them to join Clark. McKee confronted Craycraft and detailed the excruciating tortures awaiting him if he did not cooperate and lure Col. Lochry’s force ashore. He also assured Craycraft that it was the only way to save Lochry and his men, as otherwise they would be attacked and killed down to the last man. Maj. Craycraft agreed to call them ashore when they neared and the Indians took up posts in hiding on both sides of the river. McKee ordered that Craycraft and Q.M. Wallace, along with the other five men, be tied to trees and a close watch be maintained over them throughout the night.

  Meanwhile, late yesterday afternoon Col. Lochry’s force had come ashore again and camped on the wide bar at the mouth of the Great Miami. It was there, after they had messed and were preparing their blankets for the night, that the lone buffalo had blundered out of the woods and was shot before it had a chance to wheel and gallop out of sight. Since the men had already eaten and were preparing to turn in, Col. Lochry promised that after an early start in the morning, they would come ashore in order to cook and eat the buffalo meat, so several of the men had stayed up late to finish cleaning the animal.

  This morning they had proceeded four or five miles downstream when Col. Lochry, spying the broad pleasant bottom along the right bank, ordered the boats ashore for the buffalo feast. By a quirk of happenstance, it was only a few dozen yards above the place where the proposed ambush of Lochry’s force had been set up. Lochry, of course, was wholly unaware that Maj. Craycraft and his squad, prisoners of the Indians, were behind a screen of brush there and had been on the point of stepping out and hailing the boats to shore. Now, with the Lochry boats already coming ashore, it hadn’t been necessary to use Craycraft as a decoy.

  As Lochry’s boat scraped to a stop and he stepped ashore and other boats of the flotilla were beginning to do the same, McKee’s horde of Indians burst from cover and McKee shouted for the soldiers to surrender instantly or be killed. Those still in their boats and coasting to shore tried desperately to get away but a barrage of gunfire broke out at them. More than 30 of Lochry’s men were killed and others were wounded. Only one gun was fired in defense—that by Pvt. Ephraim Relfe, who was quickly cut down by several shots.

  The captive force was made to sit down and their wrists were bound behind them by some of the Indians, while others retrieved the boats still drifting on the inshore eddy, scalped the dead and collected guns and other supplies. Capt. Robert Orr, wounded in the shoulder, was led with Col. Lochry to a driftwood log and directed to sit. They had not been there more than a minute when a Shawnee warrior walked up and methodically killed Lochry with a single tomahawk blow and scalped him.431 Orr was certain he would be killed, too, but the warrior simply walked off with his bloody trophy.432

  Not far away, the heavy-set Capt. Thomas Shannon was seated on the ground beside Capt. William Campbell. They were similarly approached and, before either suspected what was going to happen, Campbell was tomahawked and scalped.433 The same thing happened to a number of the privates. These, however, were isolated cases and it did not turn into a wholesale slaughter as the captives feared.434

  And now, having been so successful in their attack on the Lochry force, the Indians sent the prisoners north toward Detroit under strong guard and turned their steps toward Gen. George Rogers Clark at the Falls of the Ohio.

  [September 13, 1781—Thursday]

  Col. David Shepherd, commanding at Fort Henry in Wheeling, was flushed with anger as he ran toward the open gate of the fort where the men were racing out. Those who saw him coming hesitated in their rush and he thrust past them and planted himself in the center of the main portal.

  “Back!” he ordered furiously, jerking his pistol out of his belt. “Back! Dammit, are you men completely crazy? Where the hell are your brains? Get back! I promise you, I’ll shoot the next man who tries to leave!”

  He couldn’t believe, after all the warnings that had been given, what these fools were doing. It wasn’t as if their exodus were coming as a surprise. Everyone was aware of the danger; notices had been posted for over a fortnight now, ever since the warnings had been received from both Col. Brodhead and Col. Gibson. Had none of it sunk in? Had they learned nothing from past experience?

  These past couple of weeks had been a hectic, fearful time. Even before the warnings were received, troubles had broken out. The planned rendezvous at Fort McIntosh for the Sandusky Expedition was, of course, put in abeyance. There was a sharp increase in the number of small raiding parties of Indians ranging over the frontier and, though every effort had been made to alert even the inhabitants of the most isolated cabins and settlements, for some the warnings had not come in time.

  On the very next day after the warnings were written at Fort Pitt and well before they had been transmitted to the more distant settlements, about 100 Indians appeared in the vicinity of Wheeling in the afternoon. Two youngsters named David Glenn and Johnny Ryan were, at the time, playing near the spring at the foot of Wheeling Hill. They saw the Indians and ran. Both were closely pursued, and ten-year-old Ryan tried to get away by racing along a log spanning the swampy ground below the spring. The Wyandot chasing him overtook him halfway across and slammed a tomahawk into him, sending him sprawling dead in the mud. Twelve-year-old Glenn was captured a
short distance away.

  By this time, those in Wheeling, alerted by Glenn’s cries, were racing for cover. George Reagan was only about five yards from the gate of Fort Henry when a ball passed through his wrist, and though it spun him around, he managed to retain his feet and get safely inside the fort. A few shots were fired by the inhabitants in the direction the Indian shots had come from, but there was no response. There was good reason: Under questioning, David Glenn told his Wyandot captors that Wheeling and the entire frontier in general had been alerted to the approach of the Indians, and that everyone was alarmed and on guard, especially at Wheeling.

  They believed him and, deciding it would be wise to avoid Wheeling for the moment, the Indians moved on to range through the hills eastward. On Middle Wheeling Creek, 14 miles above Fort Henry, they came to the cabin of Jacob Link. Link’s wife and daughter were absent, visiting friends in Wheeling, but Adam Miller had spent last night in Link’s cabin, and this morning they had been visited by two young men they knew, Moses Shepherd and Jacob Wetzel. Those two had been engaging in some target practice with Link and Miller and had just left there only a short time before the party of Indians arrived. Link and Miller, hearing someone outside, thought it was Shepherd and Wetzel returning and swung the cabin door open. They were taken by surprise by the Indians and both killed and scalped.

  The following day the Indians appeared on the Dutch Fork of Buffalo Creek and attacked the Jacob Peek cabin. Two or three men were killed in an exchange of gunfire, and then the Indians captured Peek’s son, Presley, along with John Blackburn and William Hawkins. The latter, a rotund, red-headed little Irishman, was all but hysterical in his fright. He begged the Indians to spare his life and said that, if they would, he would lead them to where his wife and children were, hardly a quarter-mile away, convince them to go with him and they would all go and live with the Indians. They started for the place, but the distant gunfire had been heard in the other cabin, and the inhabitants had attempted to escape. Hawkins’s wife and three of her children, one an infant only two weeks old, fled into a large thicket of hazel bushes and managed to get away. Her eldest daughter, Rebecca, was ill, but she and a man who had been in the cabin with them, John Hill, whose leg was badly swollen from a copperhead bite, raced into the nearby cornfield. The pair, because of their respective ailments, could not go far and so they tried to hide themselves among the cornstalks. The Indians followed their tracks, however, and caught them. They killed Hill and took Rebecca captive.435

  Sam Gray, the half-breed who had captured Billy Boggs on July 30, was leading one of the small war parties of Wyandots sent out by Monakaduto, and he was definitely making his mark. In the forenoon on September 9, his party killed William Huston while he was working in his cornfield. Huston had ignored his brother’s entreaty, only ten minutes earlier, to get to the fort for safety.436 A short distance away, less than two hours later, Jesse Cochran was similarly killed by them and, the same afternoon, Benjamin Rogers took Sam Gray’s bullet through the heart while hoeing in his little corn patch adjacent to his cabin. Hardly an hour after that, William Ayres, fleeing to the protection of Rice’s Settlement on the upper Buffalo, at the new blockhouse called Rice’s Fort, was shot from his horse in a hasty ambush set up by Sam Gray. And before sunset on that same busy day, Sam Gray capped his party’s activities by killing Capt. Sam Leter and a settler he was riding with at the head of Buffalo Creek.

  By now most of the frontier was alerted to the new attacks and most of the residents had taken refuge at Fort Henry, Ramsey’s Fort, Shepherd’s Fort and Catfish Camp. The fact that the Holliday’s Cove Fort had burned to the ground a month ago hadn’t helped matters. The fire had been accidental and no one was hurt, but an imperative link in the frontier defense structure had been broken.437 Reconstruction had already been undertaken by Thomas Edgington and others, but it would be a very long time before a fully functional fort was reestablished. A fairly substantial fort was presently being erected on the Ohio side of the river at Mingo Bottom by Jacob White and his company, but it was much too exposed and not yet completed enough to be of any real use. A small fortified cabin had also been erected, just a few weeks before the Holliday’s Cove fire, on the George Sparks claim at the mouth of Short Creek. It was being called Sparks’ Fort, but it certainly didn’t answer the needs that Holliday’s Cove Fort had. As a result, the majority of the residents from Holliday’s Cove had come to Wheeling for protection.

  That settlement, with its own large population and now the center for those fleeing to safety from miles around, was bulging at the seams. In addition to the scores of women and children, somewhat over 100 men were at Wheeling, all of whom were longtime members of the militia or had just been inducted into temporary service. Duties had been outlined, regular around-the-clock sentry patrols were inaugurated and longer spying scouts undertaken. All this was done by Col. Shepherd in response to the warnings from Brodhead and Gibson at Fort Pitt, but the urgency was augmented by the receipt late on September 9 of a letter written by Brodhead two days earlier:

  Headquarters, Fort Pitt, September 7th, 1781

  Gentlemen: By the inclosed extract of a letter just come to hand by express, you will learn the fate of the Moravians on the Muskingum and the dangers to which our dependent posts and the settlements are exposed.

  I think it is probable that this large party of Indians would not have remained so long at the Moravian town had they not expected a greater force from another quarter down the Allegheny river to cooperate with them. It will therefore be highly expedient for the militia immediately to assemble in bodies consisting of at least one hundred men, and step to the frontiers to cover them to keep out spies and small scouts at least for a few days, or until we can ascertain what the principal object of the enemy is.

  You will therefore immediately appoint such places of rendezvous as may be best calculated for the purpose I have mentioned, and give me notice thereof that in case of extreme necessity they may be collected to a general rendezvous, in order to raise a siege, or otherwise act according to circumstances.

  County lieutenants who have not and cannot otherwise procure a supply of ammunition are immediately to apply to me to have a suitable quantity deposited in their respective county to enable the militia to act in conjunction with the regular troops, and this application, with the means of transportation, must not be delayed. I am, &c.,

  D.B.

  Circular to the County Lieutenants

  The earlier attacks in the isolated areas were, Col. Shepherd believed, only preliminaries to a major assault to be leveled against Wheeling itself. Under his orders, this principal settlement braced itself for whatever was to come. For three full days they were on utmost alert, and only this morning, believing the attack had been aborted for one reason or another, Shepherd reduced the full alert by one-half.

  Now, only moments before, distant shots had been fired and an orderly had run to Shepherd’s headquarters room with the excited announcement that a small group of Indians—one of them believed to be Sam Gray—had appeared halfway up Wheeling Hill. They had fired several random shots at the fort, then gone off in a manner that could only be described as casual, pausing now and then to bend over and slap their behinds toward the fort in an insulting manner. It was more than some of the newly inducted settlers could tolerate and they snatched up their guns, opened the gate and began streaming out in pursuit, led by John Caldwell.

  By the time Col. Shepherd reached the gate and stopped others from following by threatening to shoot the next man who tried, Caldwell and nine other men were already at the base of Wheeling Hill and starting their ascent. Above them, Sam Gray and the few Wyandots were still climbing uphill casually and just reaching the top. There they paused and pointed at the men scrambling upward after them at top speed and laughed lustily. Then they turned and walked out of sight over the crest.

  Caldwell and his nine men were gasping for breath when they reached the summit, some 250 feet above the fort, a
rriving there hardly half a minute after the small party of Wyandots left. They rushed over the crest, prepared to stop and shoot the instant they saw the departing Indians ahead of them. What they found, instead, was a great horde of Indians in a semicircle before them and another group appearing behind, all of them leveling their own weapons and beginning to fire. Several of the whites fell in the first barrage, and more were killed as they raced to the only avenue of possible escape open to them—the precipitous slope to the northeast, plunging down to Wheeling Creek.

  Two of the men who made it to the lip of that steep dropoff were David Herbert in the lead and his friend, John Caldwell, in the rear. Scrambling and sliding, they started down, each losing his rifle almost immediately. Within mere yards a ball struck Herbert in the back and he tumbled down 30 feet or more before wedging against a tree. As Caldwell passed, Herbert called out, “John, don’t leave me,” but Caldwell didn’t pause.

  Hearing a clattering of rocks behind him, Caldwell glanced back and saw two Wyandots scrambling after them, one wielding a tomahawk, the other, Sam Gray, a spear. The former stopped at the motionless form of David Herbert and struck him with his tomahawk, but Sam Gray kept coming. Two-thirds of the way down, with Sam Gray virtually at his heels, Caldwell tripped over an exposed root, fell and rolled up against a log wedged between a couple of saplings.

  Gray was very quickly upon him and thrust his spear with a powerful jab. The point barely grazed Caldwell’s hip, hit the top of the log and glanced upward, burying itself deeply in the sapling on the down side of the log. While Sam Gray struggled to pull the embedded spearhead free, Caldwell regained his feet and plunged on. At the bottom he turned sharply right and raced along the narrow bottom back to the level ground of the Wheeling bottom. Fifteen minutes later, almost dead from exhaustion, he staggered to the gate of Fort Henry and was let in. Some 20 minutes later another of the party came in with one of his arms broken and dangling. All eight others had been killed.