History of Fayette County, Pennsylvania : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 3

Author: Ellis, Franklin, 1828-1885
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts & Co.
Number of Pages: 1314

USA > Pennsylvania > Fayette County > History of Fayette County, Pennsylvania : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men > Part 3

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"The neighborhood of Brownsville, or Redstone, in With regard to the origin of these ancient works and relies many theories have been advanced, some apparently reasonable and others wholly absurd. Some writers on the subject have believed that they were built by the French, while some have attributed their construction to the Spanish.1 Others, with more Pennsylvania, abounds with monuments of antiquity. A fortified camp of a very complete and curious kind, on the ramparts of which is timber of five feet in diameter, stands near the town of Brownsville. This camp contains thirteen acres inclosed in a circle, the elevation of which is seven feet above the adjoining ground. This was a herculean work, Within the 1 De Witt Clinton, in an a 'hess deliveredl before the New York His- torical Society in 1811, in alluding to the various improbabile theories which ascribed the building of these works to Europeans, sail, " An American writer of no inconsiderable repite prononneed some years ngo that the two forts at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers, one covering forty and the other twenty neres, were created by Fernando De Soto, who laumled with one thousand men in Florida in 1539, and penetrated a considerable distance into the interior of the country. He allotted the large finit for the use of the Spanish army, circle a pentagon is accurately described, having its sides four feet high, and its angles uniformly three feet from the outside of the circle, thus leaving an unbroken communication all around. A pentagon is a figure having five angles or sides. Each side of the pentagon has a postern or small gateway, opening into a passage between it and the circle, but the circle . and after being extremely puzzled how to dispose of the small oue in

THE INDIAN OCCUPATION.

apparent show of reason, have endeavored to prove that the builders were the ancient Aztecs, and finally some have advanced theopinion that they were erected by descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. What- ever may be said of these latter theories, the idea of their construction by the French or Spanish seems wholly inadmissible, on account of the number and extent of the works west of the Alleghanies ; again, on account of their evident antiquity, many of them having from every appearance been erected long before the discovery of America, and finally by their form, which is entirely different from any system of Euro- pean fortification, ancient or modern.

This much and no more may be set down as reasonably certain, that these works were reared by a people who preceded those found here by the first Eu- ropean visitors, but whether they were Aztecs, Toltecs, or of Jewish origin, as some have supposed, is a ques- tion which will probably never be solved. The imagi- nation, unrestrained by facts, may roam at will in the realm of ingenious speculation, but the subject is one of pure conjecture which it is not profitable to pursue.

CHAPTER III.

THE INDIAN OCCUPATION.

THERE is nothing found either in written history or in tradition to show that the section of country which now forms the county of Fayette was ever the permanent home of any considerable number of the aboriginal people whom we know as Indians, the suc- cessors of the mysterious mound-builders.

When the first white traders (who preceded the earliest actual settlers by several years) came into this region, they found it partially occupied by roving Indian bands, who had here a few temporary villages, or more properly eamps, but whose principal perma- nent settlements were within a few miles of the con- fluenee of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers,

Its vicinity, he at last assigned it to the swine that generally, as he said, attended the Spanish in those days, it being, in his opinion, very necessary in order to prevent them from beconung estrays and to protect thein from the depredations of the Indians.

" Lewis Dennie, a Frenchman, aged upwards of seventy, and who had been settled und married among the Confederates (Six Nations) for more thau half a century, told me in 1810 that, according to the traditions of the ancient Indians, these forts were crected by an army of Spaniards, who were the first Europeans ever seen by them (the French next, then the Dutch, and finally the English); that this army first appeared at Oswego in great force, and penetrated through the interior of the coun- try searching for the precious metals; that they continued there two years and then went down the Ohio." After giving several reasons why this account was to be considered unworthy of 1 elief, Mr. Clinton con- tinned : " It is equally clear that they were not the work of the Indians. Until the Senecas, who are renowned for their national vanity, had seen the attention of the Americans attracted to these erections, and had in- vented the fabulous account of which I havo spoken, the Indians of the present dny did not pretend to know anything about the origin of these works. They were beyond the reach of all their traditions, and were lost in the abyss of unexplored antiquity."

both above and below that point. These were com- posed of the Delaware and Shawanese1 tribes and some colonized bands of Iroquois, or "Mingoes," as they were commonly called, who represented the powerful Six Nations of New York. These last named were recognized as the real owners of the lands on the upper Ohio, the Allegheny, and the Monongahela Rivers, and it was only by their permission2 that the Delawares and Shawanese were allowed to occupy the

1 Zeisbergor, the Moravian, says, "Tho Shawanos, a warlike people, lived in Florida, but having been subdued in war by the Muchikus, they left their land and moved to Susquehanna, and from one place to another. Meeting a strong party of Delawares, and relating to them their forlorn condition, they took them into their protection as grandchildren ; the Shawanos called the Delawaro nation their grandfather. They lived thereupon in the Forks of the Delaware, and settled for a time in W3 -" oming. When they had increased agnin they removed by degrees to the Allegheny." When they came from the East to the Ohio, they located at and near Montour's Island, below the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela. The Delawares came with them to the West. both tribes having been ordered away from tho vulley's of the Delaware and Sasquelnun by the Iroquois, when they were compelled hy conquest to recognize ns their masters.

" The fact that tho Six Nations were the neknowledged owners of this region of country, and that tho Shawquese and Delawares were hero only on sufferance, seems clear. At the treaty held with the Indians at Fort Pitt, in May, 1768, a Shuwanese chief complained bitterly to the English of their encroachments, und said, " We desired you to do- struy your forts. . . . We also desired you not to go down the river." In the next day's council, Guynsuthe, a chief of the Six Nations, rose, with a copy of the treaty of 1761, and said, " By this trenty you had a right to build forts and trading-houses where you pleased, and to travel the road of peace from the sun rising to the sun setting. At that treaty the Delawares and Shawanese were with me and they know all this well ; and they should never have spoken to you as they did yesterday." Soon efter. the Shawanese chief, Kissinanghta, rose and said, apologetically, to the English, "You desired us to spenk from our hearts and tell you what gave us uneasiness of mind, and wo did so. We are very sorry we should have said anything to give offense, and we acknowlodge we were in the wrong."

In the same year (1768), when the Pennsylvania commissioners, Allen and Shippen, proposed to the Indians to send a deputation of chiefs with the white messengers, Frazer and Thempson, to warn off the white settlers who hnd located without authority ou tho Monongahela River and Redstone Creek, in what is now Fayette County, the " White Mingn" (whose " Cuatle" was on the west side of tho Allegheny, a few miles abovo its mouth) and three uther chiefs of the Six Nations were selected to go on that mission, but no notice was taken of the Delaware or Shnwanese chiefs in the matter, which shows clearly enough that these two tribes were not regarded as bnving any ownershipin the lands.

And it is related by George Croghau, in his account of a treaty conncil held with the Six Nations at Logstowe, on the Ohio, below Pittsburgh, in 1731, that " A Dunkard from Virginin came to town and requested leave to settle on the Yo-yo-gaine [Yunghiogheny] River, a branch of the Ohio. He was told that he must apply to the Onondaga Council and be recommended by the Governor of Pennsylvania." The Onondaga Conncil was held on a hill near the present sito of Syracuse, N. Y., and the central hendquarters of the Six Nations.

Another fact that shows the Six Nations to have been the recognized owners of this region of country is that when the surveyors were about to extend the Mason nnd Dixon line westward, in 1767, the proprietaries nsked, not of the Delawares and Shawanese but of the Iroquois (Six Na- tions) permission to do so. This permission was given by their chiefs, who also sent several of their warriors to accompany tho surveying party. Their presence afforded to the white men the desired protection, and the Shawanese and Delawares dared not offer uny molestation. Bet after the Iroquois escort left (as they did at a point on the Maryland line) the other Indians became, in the absence of their masters, so de- fiant and threatening that the surveyers were compelled to abandon the running of the line west of Dunkard Creek.

Finally, it was not from the Delawnres and Shewanese but from the Six Nations that the Penas purchased this territory by the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 17G8.

HISTORY OF FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.

linnting-grounds extending from the head of the Ohio eastward to the Alleghenies. Still they always boldly claimed these lands as their own, except when they were confronted and rebuked by the chiefs of the Six Nations. At a conference held with the Indians at Fort Pitt in 1768, " the Beaver," a chief speaking in behalf of the Delawares and Mohicans, said, " Breth- ren, the country lying between this river and the Al- legheny Mountain has always been our hunting- ground, and the white people who have scattered themselves over it have by their hunting deprived us of the game which we look upon ourselves to have the only right to. . . . " And it is certain that, though the Iroquois were the owners of these hunting-grounds, they were occupied almost exclusively by the Dela- wares and Shawanese. Washington, in his journal of a trip which he made down the Ohio from the mouth of the Allegheny in 1770, says, "The In- dians who reside upon the Ohio, the upper part of it at least, are composed of Shawanese, Delawares, and some of the Mingoes. .. . " And in the journal of his mission to the French posts on the Allegheny, seventeen years before, he said, " About two miles from this (he then being at the mouth of the Alle- gheny), on the south side of the river (Ohio), at the place where the Ohio Company intended to lay off their fort, lives Shingiss, king of the Delawares."1 The exact point where this "king" was located is said to have been at the mouth of Chartiers Creek, and the principal settlements of his people were clus- tered around the head of the Ohio. From here and from the neighboring settlements of the Shawanese went forth from time to time the hunting-parties of these tribes, which formed the principal part of the Indian population of the territory of the present county of Fayette.

These Indians had, as has already been remarked, but very few settlements east of the Monongahela, and most of those they had were more of the nature of temporary camps than of permanent villages. Judge Veech, in his " Monongahela of Old," men- tions those which he knew of as existing within the limits of Fayette County, as follows: "Our territory (Fayette County) having been an Indian hunting- ground, had within it but few Indian towns or vil- lages, and these of no great magnitude or celebrity. There was one on the farm of James Ewing, near the southern corner of Redstone and the line between German and Luzerne townships, close to a fine lime- stone spring. Near it, on a ridge, were many Indian graves. Another was near where Abram Brown lived, about four miles west of Uniontown. There was also one on the land of John M. Austin, formerly Samuel Stevens', near Sock. The only one we know of north of the Youghiogheny was on the Strickler land, eastward of the Broad Ford."

There was also an Indian village on the Mononga- hela, at the mouth of Catt's Run, and it is said that this village was at one time the home of the chief Cornstalk, who commanded the Indian forces at the battle of Point Pleasant, Va., in 1774.

On the Monongahela, at the mouth of Dunlap's Creek, where the town of Brownsville now stands, was the residence of old Nemacolin, who, as it ap- pears, was a chief, but with very few, if any, warriors under him, though it is not unlikely that he had had a respectable following in the earlier years, before the whites found him here. It was this Indian who guided Col. Thomas Cresap across the Alleghenies, in the first journey which he made to the West from Old Town, Md., for the Ohio Company in 1749. The route which they then pursued was known for many years as "Nemacolin's path." Later in his life this Indian removed from the Monongahela and located on the Ohio River. It is believed that the place to which he removed was the island now known as Blenner- hassett's Island, in the Ohio, below Parkersburg, W. Va .; the reason for this belief being that there is found, in Gen. Richard Butler's journal of a trip down that river in 1785, with Col. James Monroe (afterwards President of the United States), to treat with the Miami Indians, mention of their passing, in the river between the mouths of the Little Kanawha and Hocking, an island called " Nemacolin's Island." This was, without much doubt, the later residence of the old chief of that name.

An old Indian named Bald Eagle, who had been a somewhat noted warrior (but not a chief) of the Dela- ware tribe, had his home somewhere on the Upper Monongahela, probably at the village at the mouth of Catt's Run, but whether there or higher up the river near Morgantown is not certainly known. He was a very harmless and peaceable man and friendly to the settlers, yet he was killed without cause about 1765, and the cold-blooded murder was charged by the Indians upon white men. Of the Bald Eagle and the circumstances of his death, Mr. Veech says, " He was on intimate terms with the early settlers, with whom he hunted, fished, and visited. He was well known along our Monongahela border, up and down which he frequently passed in his canoe. Somewhere up the river, probably about the month of Cheat, he was killed, by whom or on what pretense is unknown.2 His dead body, placed upright in his canoe, with a piece of corn-bread in his elinched teeth, was set adrift in the river. The canoe came ashore at Prov-

1 King Shingiss, however, was inferior in rank and power to Tanach- arison, the Half-King, who was a sachem of the Six Nations, residing near the head of the Ohio.

" Withers, in his " Chronicles of Border Warfare," states the case dif- ferently, and gives the names of tho murderers. He says, "The Bald Eagle was an Indian of notoriety, not only among his own nation, but nlso with the inhabitants of the Northwestern frontier, with whom ho was in the habit of associating and hunting. In one of his visits among them he was discovered alone by Jacob Scott, William Hacker, and Elijah Rnaner, who, reckless of the consequences, murdered him, solely to gratify a most wanton thirst for Indian blood. After the commission of this most outrageous enormity, they seated him in the stern of a canoe, with a piece of journey-cake thrust into his mouth, and set him afloat in the Monongahela."

THE INDIAN OCCUPATION.

anee's Bottom, where the familiar old Indian was at onee recognized by the wife of William Yard Prov- ance, who wondered he did not leave his eanoe. On close observation she found he was dead. She had him decently bnried on the Fayette shore, near the early residence of Robert McClean, at what was known as McClean's Ford. This murder was re- garded by both whites and Indians as a great out- rage, and the latter made it a prominent item in their list of grievances."

A number of Indian paths or trails traversed this county in various directions. The principal one of these was the great war-path over which the Senecas and other tribes of the Six Nations traveled from their homes in the State of New York on their forays against Cherokees and other Southern tribes in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. This was known as the Cherokee or Catawba Trail. Passing from the " Gen- esee country" of Western New York, down the valley of the Allegheny, it left that river in the present county of Armstrong, Pa., and traversing Westmore- land, entered the territory of Fayette near its north- eastern extremity, crossing Jacob's Creek at the month of Bushy Run. From there its route was southwest- wardly, passing near the present village of Pennsville to the Youghiogheny River, which it crossed just below the mouth of Opossum Run ;1 thence up that small stream for some distance, and then on, by way of Mount Braddock, to Redstone Creek, at the point where Uniontown now stands. From there it passed in a general sonthwesterly direction, through the pres- ent townships of South Union, Georges, and Spring Hill ; and crossing Cheat River at the mouth of Grassy Run, passed out of the county southward into Vir- ginia, on its route to the Holston River and the Caro- linas. From this main trail, at a point a little soutlı of Georges Creek, in Fayette County, there struck off a tributary path known as the Warrior Branch,2 which passed thence across the Cheat and Monongahela Rivers, and up the valley of Dunkard Creek into Vir- ginia. It was at this trail, near the second crossing of Dunkard Creek, that the surveyors who were run- ning the extension of the Mason and Dixon line, in October, 1767, were compelled to stop their work, on account of the threats of the Delaware and Shawanese warriors, and their positive refusal to allow the party

to proceed farther west; and it was not until fifteen years later that the line was run beyond this trail.

An Indian path much used by the natives was one which led from the " Forks of the Ohio" (now Pitts- burgh) to the Potomac River at the mouth of Wills' Creek (where Cumberland, Md., now stands). This was known as " Nemacolin's P'ath" or trail, though it was doubtless traveled by Indian parties many years, and perhaps ages, before the birth of the old Delaware whose name it bore.3 This trail, starting from the head of the Ohio, joined the Cherokee trail in Westmoreland County, and from the point of june- tion the two trails were nearly identical as far south as Mount Braddock, at which point Nemacolin's trail left the other, and took a sontheasterly course, by way of the Great Meadows, in the present township of Wharton, the Great Crossings of the Youghiogheny, near the southeast corner of Fayette County ; thence it crossed the southwestern corner of Somerset County into Maryland. There were numerous other trails traversing the county of Fayette, but none of them as important or as much traveled as those above men- tioned.

These trails were the highways of the Indians,- the thoroughfares over which they journeyed on their business of the chase or of war, just as white people pursue their travel and traffic over their graded roads. " An erroneous impression obtains among many at the present day," says Judge Veech, " that the In- dian, in traveling the interminable forests which once covered our towns and fields, roamed at random, like a modern afternoon hunter, by no fixed paths, or that he was guided in his long journeyings solely by the sun and stars, or by the courses of the streams and mountains. And true it is that these untutored sons of the woods were considerable astronomers and geog- raphers, and relied much upon these unerring guide- marks of nature. Even in the most starless night they could determine their course by feeling the bark of the oak-trees, which is always smoothest on the south side, and roughest on the north. But still they had their trails or paths, as distinctly marked as are our county and State roads, and often better located. The white traders adopted them, and often stole their names, to be in turn surrendered to the leader of some Anglo-Saxon army, and finally obliterated by some costly highway of travel and commerce. They are

1 The place where this trail crossed the Youghioghieny was identical with that where Gen. Braddock crossed his army, on his march towards Fort Du Quesne, in 1755.

" Judge Verch describes tho route of this trail (proceeding northward) as follows: " A tributary trail called the Warrior Branch, coming from Tennessee, through Kentucky and Southern Ohio, came up Fish Creek and down Dunkard, crossing Cheat River at McFarland's. It ran out n junction with tho chief trail, intersecting it at William Gans' sugar- camp (between Morris' Cross-Roads and Georges Creek, in Spring Hill township!, but it kept on by Crow's Mill, James Robinson's, and the old gun factory (in Nicholson township) and thence towards the mouth of Redstone; intersecting the old Redstone trail from the top of Laurel Hill, near Jackson's, or Grace Church, on the National road."

3 It received this name from the fact that when the old " Ohio Company" was preparing to go into the Indian trade nt the hend of the Ohio, in the year 1749, one of the principal agents of that company-Col. Thomas Cresnp, of Okl Town, Md .- employed the Indian Nemacolin (who lived, as before mentioned, at the mouth af Dunlap's Creek, on the Monongahela ) to guide him over the best ronte for n pack-horso path from the Potomac to the Indian villages on the Ohio, a short distance below the confluence of tho Allegheny and Monongahela, The old Indian pointed out the path in question as being the most feasible route, and it was adopted. Jo 1754, Washington followed its line with his troops as far north and west ns Gist's plantation, in Fayette County ; and in 1755, Gen. Braddock made it, with few variations, his route of march from Fort Cumberland to Gist's, and thence northwardly to near the point in Westmoreland County where he first crossed the Monongahela.

IIISTORY OF FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.

now almost wholly effaced and forgotten. Hundreds travel along or plow across them, unconscious that they are in the footsteps of the red man."

The Indian history connected with the annals of Fayette County is very meagre. During the military operations of the years 1754 and 1755, when the op- posing forces of England and France marched to and fro over the hills and through the vales of this county, they were accompanied on both sides by In- dian allies, who did their share of the work of slaughter, as will be narrated in the history of those campaigns, given in succeeding pages. After the French and their Indian allies had expelled the Eng- lish power from the region west of the Alleghenies, in 1755, nearly all the Indians of the Allegheny and Monongahela Valleys sided with the victorious French ; but many years elapsed from that time be- fore there were any white settlers here to be molested, and when they did come to make their homes here they suffered very little from such outrages as were constantly committed by the savages upon the inhabit- ants west of the Monongahela. This was doubtless largely due to the fact that the red men regarded the people east of that river as Pennsylvanians, with whom they were on comparatively friendly terms ; while those west of the same stream were considered by them to be Virginians, against whom they held feelings of especial hatred and malignity. With the exception of the murder of two men on Burnt Cabin Run,1 and the taking of some prisoners south of Georges Creek, the inhabitants of the territory that is now Fayette County were entirely exempt from the savage incursions and barbarities with which the people living between them and the Ohio River were so often visited during the thirty years of Indian warfare and raidings which preceded Gen. Anthony Wayne's decisive victory on the Maumee, in August, 1794.

1 The circumstances attending this Indian outrage are thus narrated by Judge Vecch : " This case, as related by Joseph Mendenhall, au old soldier aud settler nt the place known as Mendenhall's Dum, in Menallen township, was thus: About three and a half miles west of Uniontown, on the south side of the State or Heaton rond, which leads from the poor- house thiongh New Salem, etc., and within five or six reds of the road, um land now ( 1869) of Joshua Woodward, are the remains of nn old clear- ing of about one-fourth of an acre, and within it the remains of an old chimney. Two or three rods southeastward is a small spring, the drain of which leads off westward into the " Burnt Cabia fork' of Dunlap's or Nemacolin's Creek ; and still farther south, some four or five rods, is the old trail or path called Dunlap's rond. The story is that in very early times-perhaps nbout 1767-two men cam over the mountains by this path to hunt, etc., and began an improvement at this clearing, and p .t np a small cabin npou it. While nsleep in their cabin, some Indians came to it and shot them, and then ort fire to the cabin. Their names are unknown. So far ns known, this is the only ense of the kind that ever occurred within our county limits."

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History of Fayette County, Pennsylvania : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 3

Author: Ellis, Franklin, 1828-1885 Publication date: 1882 Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts & Co. Number of Pages: 1314

Author: Ellis, Franklin, 1828-1885
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts & Co.
Number of Pages: 1314