USA > Ohio > History of Ohio; the rise and progress of an American state, Volume Two > Part 4
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muscular strength and superior intellect. She was the sister of the one, who at that time, was the ablest and most influential chief of his nation. That one was Keightughqua, signifying a blade or stalk of the maize, hence the cornstalk, or chief support of his people and who was therefore known to the whites as Cornstalk, in early works sometimes written Cornstock.
As we learn from the Draper manuscripts in the Wisconsin Historical Society library, Cornstalk was born, about 1720, in one of the Scioto towns of the Shawnees and first appears in historical annals as a leader of the Shawnee bands in their forays into the interior settlements of Virginia during and after the French and Indian War and Pontiac's War. At the head of his fearless followers, Cornstalk in his raids, crossed the Ohio, penetrated the Greenbrier regions and scaled the Alleghany Mountains, murdering the inhabitants and plundering the white settlements in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. Many were the captives he carried from the Virginia backwoods dwellings to the Shawnee towns on the Scioto. He was one of the hostages retained by Colonel Bouquet (1764) and carried to Fort Pitt from which he escaped and returned to his people. Cornstalk is described as a large man, of commanding appearance and pos- sessed of "oratorical ability and intellectual grasp." His capital, called Cornstalk's Town, was on the north bank of Scippo Creek, a short distance from his sister's village. The Shawnees, it will thus be seen, occupied geographical advantage ground in Ohio, and the politi- cal center. They boasted they could put in the field a thousand warriors.
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Such in general was the Indian situation in Ohio in the Fall of 1770; and while the canoes of Washington, in his voyage down the Ohio, were gently riding the current of the majestic river, the Indians up the trib- utary Ohio valleys, and especially the Shawnees on the Pickaway Plains, were busy with "enterprises of great pith and moment;" none other than plans for an invincible confederation.
Since the French and Indian War the Ohio Indians had watched with increasing apprehension the influx into their territory of traders and prospectors; they liked not, nor had they acquiesced in, the Stanwix Treaty, for they denied the right of the Six Nations to convey to the English a title to all hunting grounds south of the Ohio; the haughtiness and highhandedness of the Iroquois aroused their anger and their jealousy, and gradually the Ohio tribes grew stronger in reciprocal sympathy, and more and more they recognized the necessity of mutual plan and action. They would form a great and all-powerful confederacy that should surpass the prowess of the Iroquois, their racial masters, and that should hurl back from their frontiers the invading white foe. For our knowledge of their gigantic scheme and the movements to put it into effect we rely mainly upon the correspondence between Sir William Johnson and his home government supe- riors, the Earl of Hillsborough, and his successor (in 1772) the Earl of Dartmouth, successively secretaries in the British cabinet for American affairs; a corre- spondence published in the New York Colonial Docu- ments.
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Johnson's watchful ear had caught the whisperings, flitting from tribe to tribe, concerning this proposed alliance and its far-reaching purpose. The word had been passed along that a congress would be called, at the opportune time, on the Pickaway Plains. As early as the Summer of 1770 the Baronet of Johnson Hall wrote the Earl in London that he had "taken measures to be informed as early as possible with the proceedings and issues of the Congress, which they are about this time to hold at the great plain of Sioto (Scioto) near the Ohio, where some are endeavoring to form a confederacy for many bad purposes, secretly counte- nanced and supported by French traders, renegades and all those Indians who have not hitherto been heartily attached to the English, but with wonderful art, have for a time past endeavored to shake the fidelity of the Six nations, through the means of some of the Seneca towns, who are most dissatisfied with our (English) conduct."
The first Congress of the various tribes met at the Shawnee headquarters in the late Summer or early Fall of 1770. There was no stenographer present to record the proceedings, not even a newspaper corre- spondent to make note of the salient features and sensa- tionally print them as "exclusively appearing" in his enterprising daily. To the reader of history that council sat behind closed doors in executive session. William Johnson, however, sums up the result, as he obtained it, in a letter to the Earl of Hillsborough, written in February, 1771; "the advices I now have received enable me to acquaint you that the Great Council lately held at the Plains of the Scioto is ended;
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that the design and endeavors of the Indians in that quarter was to promote such a Union as I before apprehended and endeavored with all possible caution to obstruct."
The Baronet then continues at some length to state that the Congress dissolved "after many debates in general resolutions for promoting peace amongst all the nations as a necessary introduction to a more strict alliance between the Northern and Southern people," that is the Ohio Indians and the tribes of the South. The ulterior purpose of the proposed confederacy was not at this first Congress sufficiently divulged. Evi- dently the Ohio tribes hoped for an alliance with the Long House of New York, that all nations in solid union might be massed against the English. Johnson, who had great influence with the Iroquois and was addressed by them as Brother Warraghiyagey, "Mana- ger of Affairs," put forth every effort to retain the Six Nations steadfast to the Crown and in accordance with that purpose he held a council with their repre- sentatives at the German Flats. That he might influ- ence the Ohio Indians and at the same time become thoroughly informed as to their projects and progress he sent an Indian chief known as Thomas King, and one Anawaske, next in authority, with Nickaroondase, and several young Indians, as an embassy to the Ohio country "with ample powers for restoring peace and effectively checking all those who would disturb us."
It was in the Summer of 1771 that Thomas King with his retinue met "all the nations at Scioto and first addressed the Shawnees whom he upbraided for return- ing so far down the Ohio and for confederating with
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other people unmindful of their engagements. * * * The Shawnees answered that the Six Nations had long seemed to neglect them and to disregard the promises they formerly made, of giving them the lands between the Ohio and the Lakes; that thus distressed they went on board their canoes, determined to go whither- soever fortune should drive them, but were stopped many years ago at Scioto by the Six Nations who took them by the hands and fixed them there, charging them to live in peace with the English. * * The Shawnees and the representatives of other nations present, then showed some emblematical belts repre- senting themselves and the Illinois Indians in alliance with ten other confederate Nations."
At the gathering, apparently the second Congress, or second session in the promotion of the Confederacy, there were present representatives from the far western tribes, Potawattomies, Kickapoos, etc., and from the South, Catawbas, Creeks, Chickesaws and Cherokees. It was an international or rather inter-tribal game of diplomacy with all the white man's embellishments of bravado and duplicity. William Johnson strove to play the Iroquois power against the proposed Ohio confeder- acy and in this he did not labor in vain. The Six Nations naturally regarded an Ohio confederacy with jealousy if not open hostility, and their alleged representative, in the complicated negotiations, appears in the person of Gaustarax or Agastarax, a Seneca chief with head- quarters at Chenussio Town (Geneseo, N. Y.). He appeared among the Ohio tribes and proposed "to re- move the door of the Six Nations which was formerly at his village, Chenussio, down to the Scioto plains."
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This was evidently an act of cajolery or menace, perhaps a mingling of both, to induce the Ohio tribes to desist in their proposed union. Under an alarm, real or assumed, the Shawnees sent by Agastarax, belts of peace and amity to strengthen their union with the Six Nations, but they never received any answer thereto, for Agastarax never delivered the emblems of friendship.
Meanwhile in July, 1771, William Johnson summoned a council of the Six Nations at Johnson Hall. The purpose of this was to further influence the Long House against any Ohio alliance, also to imbue the New York braves with the idea that the Ohio tribes should be held in friendly relationship. This council was attended by three hundred and fifty representatives, including Iroquois chiefs and their retinue. The speech, as reported by Johnson, made at this gathering by the Iroquois orator, is most adroit. He vouched for the friendly feeling held by the Six Nations for the Ohio tribes and declared that "any evil yet remaining pro- ceeds from Gaustarax the chief of Chenussio, who is now under ground [he had just died] and was always a busy man, that privately and wickedly concerned himself in mischief in the name but without the privity of the Six Nations. This troublesome man sent, at the late Indian War, a belt hatchet with many bad speeches to the Shawanese, and to all the people living that way but kept it very secret from Sagenquaraghta [Chief of the Senecas] knowing he was a friend of the English."
This bold deceit of Gaustarax "a very artful and designing man, always employed in mischief," was not discovered for a considerable time by the Ohio
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tribes, and when complained of by them was disavowed, as we have seen, by the Six Nations. It is a question, however, if the Shawnees, the agents of the Ohio tribes in all this matter, were not equally disingenuous, when they sent peaceful emblems to the Iroquois; were not the Greeks giving gifts?
In October (1771) Sir William Johnson received the "disagreeable news that Thomas King died at Charles Town, South Carolina, after having discharged the embassy committed to him." After the Ohio Con- gress, which King attended, had completed its work and adjourned, the Catawba delegates escorted King and his party to Charleston, where he sickened and died. The others sailed for Philadelphia but Anawaske died on the voyage; the remaining members of the party reached Johnson Hall where Nickaroondase made report of the embassy and journey to the Ohio Indian Congress.
But all this time the Ohio Indians and tribes West and South, were persistently prosecuting their plans for the great confederacy, and another Congress was held at the Pickaway Plains in July, 1772, at which the confederacy was consummated, if indeed it had not been fully organized a year before. Thus on the banks of the Scioto were united Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, Ottawas, Miamis, Illinois, and western tribes-in a great Western Confederacy, "the most powerful that ever menaced the frontiers or con- fronted English civilization in America." The Shaw- nees were the chief constituency of this union and Corn- stalk their great leader was recognized as the head of the tribal alliance.
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In the year 1773, the elements of hatred and strife were rife on both sides of the Ohio. The embers of war among the allied tribes were here and there bursting into flames, which were fanned by the increasing incursion of surveyors, speculators and settlers. Many of these intruding whites were lawless in their methods and regarded the redmen as having no rights they were bound to respect. On the north the French Canadians were urging on the discontent of the Ohio tribes while the Spaniards west of the Mississippi were goading to enmity the tribes on the Illinois. On the south the Virginians were growing bolder and more frequent in their trans-river invasions; on the east the Iroquois held to the English. The Ohio Indians grew more sullen and desperate and the warlike mutter- ings in their wigwams and villages became ever more alarming. In the spring of this year (1773) Sir Johnson wrote the Earl of Dartmouth that the general alliance and confederacy of the western savage "has a very unfavorable appearance and will most probably be attended with many dangerous consequences; we may probably be soon involved in the dreadful conse- quences of an Indian war." The Baronet was unceas- ing in his watchfulness over the Six Nations, counseling them to summon to their chief settlements all the tribes- men scattered along the river and on the north side of the Ohio.
The Shawnee messengers kept in touch with the tribes on the Wabash and the Illinois, while at the same time Johnson sent deputies among the more western nations, especially those in the vicinity of Detroit and succeeded in no small measure in detaching
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them from the Ohio confederation. The tribes of the far south found obstacles in the way of their cooperation with the Ohio Confederacy, though they were in sympathy with it, especially the Cherokees, for they particularly, as well as the other Carolinian and Geor- gian nations, were unfriendly to the Iroquois, because of the latter's assumed supremacy over the southern country in the Stanwix Treaty; but there was the physical barrier of the Virginian white settlements, lying between the Carolinian nations and the numer- ous Ohio tribes.
But the followers of Cornstalk were undaunted and dreamed not of failure. In the Summer (1773) another general Congress of the tribesmen met on the Scioto Plains and the Ohio tribes were found constant in their hostility and firm in their plans for a war of extermination upon the English. The inevitable con- flict was precipitated partially by the events occurring at the Forks of the Ohio, partially by more momentous proceedings further down the river.
George Croghan, Pennsylvania's deputy Indian agent, located at Fort Pitt, in the late Autumn of 1773, summoned to his quarters some Shawnee chiefs, that he might confer with them concerning the threatening situation. Upon their compliance he retained them as "quasi-hostages" from December (1773) to the April following. During their detention they were fired upon in their huts by a "party posing as Virginian Militia," assembled by one John Connolly.
Fort Pitt was a point of disputed proprietorship. For more than twenty years the colonies of Pennsyl- vania and Virginia had each laid claim to the Forks
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of the Ohio and the adjacent country. The claim of Virginia was stoutly maintained by Governor Dinwiddie on the grounds, aside from the dispute as to provincial boundaries, that in the war of 1754, Virginia took the lead and bore the brunt of the contest for the gateway to the Ohio Valley, while Pennsylvania held back and took slight interest and small part in the opposition to the attempted French occupation. The disputed possession was a standing question, when early in 1774 Lord Dunmore, who had become by royal appointment -in 1772-governor of the Virginia province, deter- mined by forceful measures to assert Virginia's rights and dispatched Dr. John Connolly, nephew of George Croghan, with a captain's commission and instructions, to proceed to Fort Pitt and take possession, in the name of the King, of that point and the adjacent country upon the Monongahela. It was a high- handed piece of business, but Dr. Connolly was an ambitious and unscrupulous man, eminently fitted to carry out the orders of the imperious and arbitrary Dunmore. Connolly proceeded to the scene of action and issued a proclamation calling upon the people in the regions of Redstone and Pittsburg, claimed to be in the territory of Augusta County, Virginia, to meet on the last days of January (1774) in order to be enlisted as Virginia militiamen.
Arthur St. Clair, of whom we shall hear much later on, the representative, in that section, of the proprietors of the Pennsylvania province, was then in Pittsburg and in defense of the rights of his colony promptly arrested Connolly, before the latter's militia could assemble. In his report of the affair, written to the
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governor of the province and printed in the Pennsyl- vania Archives, St. Clair says: "About eighty persons in arms assembled themselves, chiefly from Mr. Croghan's neighborhood and the country west of and below the Monongahela and after parading through the town and making a kind of feu de joy, proceeded to the Fort, where a cask of rum was produced on the parade and the head knocked out. This was a very effectual way of recruiting."
It was the members of this "militia" mob that fired on the huts of Colonel Croghan's Shawnee prisoners. Connolly, on being released, hastened to Williamsburg, capital of Virginia, where he was further commissioned with civil and military authority to execute the laws of Virginia. On his way back to Pittsburg, Connolly stopped at the quarters of William Crawford, who wrote Washington telling him of Connolly's call and saying "he tells me that it is now without doubt that the new government is fallen through and that Lord Dunmore is to take charge of so much of the quarter as falls out of Pennsylvania." As Butterfield remarks, "the return of Connolly was the opening of Pandora's box" for thus empowered, and accompanied by one hundred and fifty armed Virginians, Connolly defied the court of Pennsylvania and took possession of the Ohio Forks.
By the orders of General Gage, British commandant in the colonies, Fort Pitt had been, in 1772, dismantled and practically demolished, as being no longer required for military purposes. Its destruction was also intend- ed to reassure the Indians of the peaceful attitude towards them of the English authorities. Connolly
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rebuilt a new defensive structure, a small stockade, and named it, after his patron, Fort Dunmore. The contest between Connolly at the head of his armed volunteer militia and the Pennsylvania authorities waxed warm, and it was intimated by St. Clair, in his letters to the Pennsylvania Assembly, that Connolly, assuming to act for the province of Virginia, was instigating further mischief by fostering the growing jealousy between the frontier settlers and the Indians. At any rate in April, Connolly sent messages to the settlers along the Ohio, that the Shawnees were in a state of uprising and the frontiersmen should be prepared to protect themselves and to revenge any wrongs done them. A Williamsburg paper printed an address to Governor Dunmore, urging a speedy declara- tion of war against the Indians.
While the stirring events were being enacted at Fort Dunmore, occurrences were happening down the river, that contributed to the coming storm. Under the patronage of Washington and other prominent Virginians, surveying parties were seeking to lay out tracts for colonial officers entitled to land grants, along the Ohio in the vicinity of the Kanawha River. They were attacked by the Ohio Shawnees, who claimed to have received instructions from Colonel Croghan, whose intentions and actions in all these affairs is rather difficult of explanation, "to kill all Virginians and to whip and rob any Pennsylvanians found tres- passing upon their territory." In the middle of April a canoe belonging to William Butler, a Pittsburg trader, was attacked by Cherokee Indians and the white canoeman killed. Wild rumors flew up and
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down the river. The panic became contagious. Set- tlers and traders in hundreds, fled from the banks of the Ohio to the interior of Pennsylvania and Virginia.
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CHAPTER III. CRESAP'S WAR
V IRGINIA surveying parties along the Ohio were compelled to cease their clashes with the Ohio Indians. One party among whom was George Rogers Clark was at the mouth of the Little Kanawha; another party under Michael Cresap was located farther up the river at Long Beach. Attacks from the Indians across the Ohio became so fierce and frequent that the surveying parties, in self protection, gathered at the mouth of Wheeling Creek, where the Zane brothers, Ebenezer, Silas and Jonathan, had made settlements in the year 1770. In this com- pany taking temporary refuge at Wheeling were George Rogers Clark, a youthful Virginian, who was destined to play a prominent part in western history, and Captain Michael Cresap, who now demands our special attention. This Cresap was the son of Colonel Thomas Cresap, who after various migrations in the colonies, settled at Old Town, near the juncture of the north and south branches of the Potomac; he was, as will be recalled, one of the charter members of the original Ohio Company, and marked and laid out the first road from "Wills Creek," Cumberland, to Red- stone, following the trail of the Indian Nemacolin, who aided Thomas Cresap in this pioneer road build- ing enterprise.
Captain Michael Cresap, the son, at this time thirty-two years of age, born and reared amid the privations and perils of backwoods life, early set up as a trader and in 1772 had a store at Redstone. He had come to the Ohio to look after some of the land interests of some Virginia gentlemen, one of whom was Washing- ton. The inflammatory messages of Connolly and the
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news of the warlike outbreaks along the Ohio aroused the resentment of the Rogers-Cresap party. A pro- posal to march against the Indians "in any direction" was enthusiastically embraced by the land-seekers and surveyors. Colonel Ebenezer Zane, the most influential resident of the Wheeling settlement, en- deavored to dissuade the party from entering upon their bloody plan. Cresap at first acquiesced in Zane's good counsel, but on the arrival of Connolly's circular urging hostilities, war was declared after the Indian fashion. Cresap was selected as the leader of the raiding party, though against his expressed wishes. His involuntary leadership in the events immediately following caused them to be popularly styled "Cresap's War," spoken of by Jacob in his Life of Cresap, as "the portico to the American Revolution."
Cresap's participation in the war bearing his name, led to charges, against him, of many acts of cruelty and inhumanity of which he was entirely innocent. Hearing that some Indians were coming down the Ohio in a boat, members of Cresap's party, he among them, proceeded up stream, and firing from ambush, upon the canoemen, killed two Indians, who proved to be a Shawnee and a Delaware, according to the subsequent report of a trader named Stephens, who was in the canoe with the Indians but escaped unhurt. It was the first blood shed in this "war" and the opening of the flood gates of carnage that preceded Dunmore's War. The same, or the next day, after the killing of the Indian canoemen, the Cresap party boated down the river to the mouth of Captina Creek, where they attacked the encampment of the Shawnee Indians,
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killing several of them. This incident is by some writers located at the mouth of Pipe Creek which was six or seven miles above the mouth of Captina Creek. In these affairs, just related, Cresap took part but he was absent from the horrible massacre that followed at Baker's tavern. The sources of our information concerning this event, one of the most historic in western frontier annals, and about which much mis- statement has been promulgated, are the Draper Manuscripts in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives, published with valuable notes by R. G. Thwaites; the New York Colonial Documents; the Archives of the Pennsylvania province; and the Wash- ington-Crawford Letters.
According to George Rogers Clark, who was with the party, on the night of the Captina Creek affair, and whose account of it, written June 17, 1798, appears in English's Life of Clark, a resolution was formed by Cresap's party to attack the camp of Logan, chief of the Mingoes, at the mouth of Yellow Creek. "We actually marched five miles and halted to take some refreshments. Here the impropriety of the proposed enterprise was argued, the conversation was brought forward by Cresap himself. It was generally agreed that those Indians had no hostile intentions, as it was a hunting camp, composed of men, women and children, with all their stuff with them. This we knew, as I, myself, and others then present, had been in their camp about four weeks before that time, on our way down from Pittsburg. In short, every person present, par- ticularly Cresap (upon reflection) was opposed to the projected measure. We turned, and on the same
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