river, who were in that country exploring the lands, and preparing for settlements. These land-jobbers were alarmed at this hostile carriage of the Indians, as they considered it, and collected themselves at a place called Wheeling Creek, the site on which Wheeling is now built, and, learning that there were two Indians on the river a little above, one Captain Michael Cresap, belonging to the exploring party, proposed to fall upon and kill them. His advice, although opposed at first, was followed, and a party led by Cresap proceeded and killed the two Indians. The same day, it being reported that some Indians were discovered below Wheeling upon the river, Cresap and his party immediately marched to the place, and at first appeared to show themselves friendly, and suffered the Indians to pass by them unmolested, to encamp still lower down, at the mouth of Grave creek. Cresap soon followed, attacked and killed several of them, having one of his own men wounded by the fire of the Indians. Here some of the family of Logan were slain. The circumstance of the affair was exceedingly aggravating, inasmuch as the whites pretended no provocation.

Soon after this, some other monsters in human shape, at whose head were Daniel Greathouse and one Tomlinson, committed a horrid murder upon a company of Indians about thirty miles above Wheeling. Greathouse resided at the same place, but on the opposite side of the river from the Indian encampment. A party of thirty-two men were collected for this object, who secreted themselves, while Greathouse, under a pretence of friendship, crossed the river and visited them, to ascertain their strength; on counting them, he found they were too numerous for his force in an open attack. These Indians, having heard of the late murder of their relations, had determined to be avenged of the whites, and Greathouse did not know the danger he was in, until a squaw advised him of it, in a friendly caution, "to go home." The sad requital this poor woman met with will presently appear. This abominable fellow invited the Indians to come over the river and drink rum with him: this being a part of his plot to separate them, that they might be the easier destroyed. The opportunity soon offered; a number being collected at a tavern in the white settlement, and considerably intoxicated, were fallen upon, and all murdered, except a little girl. Among the murdered was a brother of Logan, and his sister, whose delicate situation greatly aggravated the horrid crime.

The remaining Indians, upon the other side of the river, on hearing the firing, set off two canoes with armed warriors, who, as they approached the shore, were fired upon by the whites, who lay concealed, awaiting their approach. Nothing prevented their taking deadly aim, and many were killed and wounded, and the rest were obliged to return. This affair took place May 24th, 1774. These were the events that led to a horrid Indian war, in which many innocent families were sacrificed to satisfy the vengeance of an incensed and injured people.

A calm followed these troubles, but it was only such as goes before

the storm, and lasted only while the tocsin of war could be sounded among the distant Indians. On the 12th of July, 1774, Logan, at the head of a small party of only eight warriors, struck a blow on some inhabitants upon the Muskingum, where no one expected it. He had left the settlements on the Ohio undisturbed, which every one supposed would be the first attacked, in case of war, and hence the reason of his great successes. His first attack was upon three men who were pulling flax in a field. One was shot down, and the two others taken. These were marched into the wilderness, and, as they approached the Indian town, Logan gave the scalp halloo, and they were met by the inhabitants, who conducted them in. Running the gauntlet was next to be performed. Logan took no delight in tortures, and he in the most friendly manner instructed one of the captives how to proceed, to escape the severities of the gauntlet. This same captive, whose name was Robinson, was afterwards sentenced to be burned; but Logan, though not able to rescue him by his elo. quence, with his own hand cut the cords that bound him to the stake, and caused him to be adopted into an Indian family. He became afterwards Logan's scribe, and wrote the letter that was tied to a war-club, the particulars of which we shall relate farther onward. There was a chief among the Shawanese more renowned as a warrior than even Logan himself at this time. Cornstock was his name, and to him seems to have fallen the chief direction of the war that was now begun; the causes of which were doubtless owing to the outrages already detailed, committed by Cresap and Greathouse, but there can be but little, if any doubt, that the several tribes engaged in it had each been sufficiently injured to justify their partici pation also. The history of the murder of Bald Eagle is more than sufficient to account for the part acted by the Delawares. What this man had been in his younger days is unknown to history, but at this time he was an old inoffensive Delaware chief, who wandered harmlessly up and down among the whites, visiting those most fre quently who would entertain him best. Having been on a visit to the fort at the mouth of Kanhawa, he was met, as he was ascending alone upon the river in his canoe, by a man, who, it is said, suffered much from the Indians. It was in the evening, and whether any thing. happened to justify violence on the part of either, we have no evidence, but certain it is, the white man killed the chief, and scalped him, and, to give his abominable crime publicity, set the dead body upright in the canoe, and in this manner caused it to drift down the river, where it was beheld by many as it passed them. From the appearance of the old chief, no one suspected he was dead, but very naturally concluded he was upon one of his ordinary visits. The truth of the affair, however, soon got to his nation, and they quickly avowed vengeance for the outrage.

The Virginia Legislature was in session when the news of an Indian war was received at the seat of government. Governor Dunmore immediately gave orders for the assembling of three thousand men; one half of whom were to march for the mouth of the great Kanhawa,

under the command of General Andrew Lewis, and the remainder, under the governor in person, was to proceed to some point on the Ohio, above the former, in order to fall upon the Indian towns between, while the warriors should be drawn off by the approach of Lewis in an opposite direction. He was then to proceed down the Ohio, and form a junction with General Lewis at Point Pleasant, from whence they were to march according to circumstances.

On the 11th of September, the forces under Gen. Lewis, amounting to eleven hundred men, commenced their march from Camp Union to Point Pleasant on the Great Kanhawa, distant one hundred and sixty miles. The country between was a trackless wilderness. The army was piloted by Captain Matthew Arbuckle, by the nearest practicable route. The baggage was all transported on pack-horses, and their march took up nineteen days.

Having arrived there upon the last day of the month, an encampment was commenced on the first of October. Here General Lewis waited with anxiety to get some tidings of Dunmore, for eight or nine days. At the end of this time, no prospect of a junction appearing, news was brought into camp on the morning of the 10th of October, by one of two persons who had escaped the rifles of a great body of Indians about two miles up the Ohio, that an attack would be immediately made. These two men were upon a deer hunt, and came upon the Indians without observing them, when one was shot down, and the other escaped to the camp with difficulty. He reported "that he had seen a body of the enemy, covering four acres of ground, as closely as they could stand by the side of each other."

Upon this intelligence, General Lewis, "after having deliberately lighted his pipe," gave orders to his brother, Colonel Charles Lewis, to march with his own regiment, and another under Colonel William Fleming, to reconnoitre the enemy, while he put the rest in a posture to support them. These marched without loss of time, and about four hundred yards from camp met the Indians intent upon the same object. Their meeting was somewhere between sun's rising and sun an hour high, and the fight in a moment began. The Virginians, like their opponents, covered themselves with trees or whatever else offered, but the latter were more than a match for them, and put them to flight with great slaughter. Colonel Lewis was in full uniform, and being, from the nature of his duties, exposed at every point, soon fell mortally wounded. There was no result for which the commander-inchief was not prepared; for at this critical moment he had ordered up Colonel Field with his regiment, which, coming with great resolution and firmness into action, saved the two retreating regiments, and effectually checked the impetuosity of the Indians, who, in their turn, were obliged to retreat behind a rough breastwork, which they had taken the precaution to construct from logs and brush for the occasion.

The point of land on which the battle was fought was narrow, and the Indians' breastwork extended from river to river: their plan of attack was the best that could be conceived; for in the event of victory

on their part, not a Virginian could have escaped. They had stationed men on both sides of the river, to prevent any that might attempt flight by swimming from the apex of the triangle made by the confluence of the two rivers.

Never was ground maintained with more obstinacy; for it was slowly, and with no precipitancy, that the Indians retired to their breastwork. The division under Lewis was first broken, although that under Fleming was nearly at the same moment attacked. This heroic officer first received two balls through his left wrist, but continued to exercise his command with the greatest coolness and presence of mind. His voice was continually heard, "Don't lose an inch of ground. Advance, outflank the enemy, and get between them and the river." But his men were about to be outflanked by the body that had just defeated Lewis; meanwhile the arrival of Colonel Field turned the fortune of the day, but not without a severe loss; Colonel Fleming was again wounded, by a shot through the lungs ; yet he would not retire, and Colonel Field was killed as he was leading on his men.

The whole line of the breastwork now became as a blaze of fire, which lasted nearly till the close of the day. Here the Indians under Logan, Cornstock, Ellinipsico, Red-Eagle, and other mighty chiefs of the tribes of the Shawanese, Delawares, Mingoes, Wyandots and Cayugas, amounting, as was supposed, to fifteen hundred warriors, fought, as men will ever do for their country's wrongs, with a bravery which could only be equalled. The voice of the mighty Cornstock was often heard during the day, above the din of strife, calling on his men in these words: "Be strong! Be strong!" And when, by the repeated charges of the whites, some of his warriors began to waver, he is said to have sunk his tomahawk into the head of one who was cowardly endeavoring to desert.

General Lewis, finding at length that every charge upon the lines of the Indians lessened the number of his forces to an alarming degree, and rightly judging that if the Indians were not routed before it was dark, a day of more doubt might follow, he resolved to throw a body, if possible, into their rear. As the good fortune of the Virginians turned, the bank of the river favored this project, and forthwith three companies were detached upon the enterprise, under the three captains, Isaac Shelby, (afterwards renowned in the revolution, and since in the war with Canada,) George Matthews, and John Stewart. These companies got unobserved to their place of destination upon Crooked Creek, which runs into the Kanhawa. From the high weeds upon the banks of this little stream, they rushed upon the backs of the Indians with such fury, as to drive them from their works with precipitation. The day was now decided. The Indians, thus beset from a quarter they did not expect, were ready to conclude that a reinforcement had arrived. It was about sunset when they fled across the Ohio, and immediately took up their march for the towns on the Scioto.

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The chief of the men raised for this service were, as Burk expresses himself, "prime riflemen," and the "most expert woodsmen in Virginia." They were principally from the counties of Augusta, Botetourt, Bedford, and Fincastle, and from the enraged settlers who had fled from their frontier settlements to escape the vengeance of the injured Indians. For reasons which were not perfectly understood at that time, Lord Dunmore divided the army into two parts, as already stated. The part which Dunmore soon after took in the revolutionary events, discovered the real cause of his preposterous proceedings. His pretence of falling upon the backs of the Indians, and co-operating with General Lewis, was soon detected as such; for it is needed only to be known that he was moving no less than seventyfive miles from him, and that, therefore, no co-operation could be had. The imputation, however, of the historian Burk, "that the division under Lewis was devoted to destruction, for the purpose of breaking the spirits of the Virginians," to render his own influence and reputation brighter and more efficient, is unnatural, and without facts to warrant it. To our mind a worse policy to raise himself could not have been devised. There are two other far more reasonable conclusions which might have been offered:-The governor, seeing the justness of the Indians' cause, might have adopted the plan which was followed to bring them to a peace with the least possible destruction of them. This would have been the course of a humane philosophy; or he might have exercised his abilities to gain them to the British interest in case of a rupture between them and the colonies, which the heads of government must clearly have by this time foreseen would pretty soon follow. Another extraordinary manœuvre of Governor Dunmore betrayed either a great want of experience, generalship, or a far more reprehensible charge; for he had, before the battle of Point Pleasant, sent an express to Colonel Lewis, with orders that he should join him near the Shawanee towns with all possible despatch. These instructions were looked upon as singularly unaccountable, inasmuch as it was considered a thing almost impossible to be accomplished, had there been an enemy to fear; for the distance was near eighty miles, and the route was through a country extremely difficult to be traversed, and, to use the words of Mr. Burk, "swarming with Indians." The express did not arrive at Point Pleasant until the evening after the battle; but that it had been fought was unknown to the governor, and could in no wise excuse his sending such orders, although the power of the Indians was now broken.

The day after the battle, General Lewis caused his dead to be buried, and entrenchments to be thrown up about his camp for the protection of his sick and wounded; and the day following he took up his line of march in compliance with the orders of Governor Dunmore. This march was attended with great privations, and almost insurmountable difficulties. Meanwhile Governor Dunmore descended with his forces down the river from Fort Pitt to Wheeling, where he halted for a few days. He then proceeded down to the mouth of Hockhocking, thence over land to within eight miles of the Shawanee town,