USA > West Virginia > Preston County > A History of Preston County, West Virginia, V.1 > Part 5
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The Indian had a very accurate sense of direction, yet he had opened out numerous paths with the help of his stone tomahawk. These had their origin in one of the three great pursuits of the native; war, hunting, and trade. A narrow path, leading to some hunting ground, became konwn to the whites as a trail. A track broad enough to admit a wagon was known as a warpath. These military highways struck directly
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toward the hostile region. They were marked by coverts for ambuscad- ing an enemy and by an occasional large clearing. The latter were designed as safe camping places, a good spring helping to govern the choice of location.
Though pursuing a given direction, these old paths kept as much as possible on the high ridges whence a free outlook might be had. The native has been gone from here much more than a century. yet traces of his paths now remain. They are generally noticeable by a well-defined furrow twelve to eighteen inches wide and sometimes a foot deep. Where the forest is unchanged, the old warpath may be traced by the absence of big trees along its course and the comparative openness of the under- brush.
Our own Preston was threaded by several of these warpaths. The "Great Warpath" entered near Rohr and took a southeast course, keeping very near the line of the Morgantown and Kingwood pike. Kingwood was left to the right, and the Cheat was crossed very near the Dunkard Bottom. The direction was then more nearly to the east, the Maryland line being entered near Cranesville. In this part of its course the Burch- inal road is said to follow the old trail a considerable distance.
Another, styled the Northwestern Trail, entered south of Evansville, and running eastward came upon the course of the Northwestern Pike near the Drover's Rest at the top of Laurel Hill. It then pursued the line of the pike some distance, crossed the river above Rowlesburg, and keeping along the Goff ridge came to the Maryland line rear Eglon. At the side of this path in Reno is the "Indian Foot Rock," so called from the human feet and the pictures of birds and beasts carved upon it.
The South Trail was a connecting path. It left the first between Masontown and Reedsville, passed east of Gladesville, crossed Raccoon Creek between Newburg and Independence, and followed York's Run to its junction with the other path at the old Ice's Mill on Sandy Creek.
Toward the Pennsylvania line was the Northern Trail. This one en- tered from the vicinity of Wymp's Gap, crossed the Big Sandy near Bruceton, and then by way of Morgan's Glade and the Craborchard it came to the Maryland line north of Cranesville.
In warfare the Indian was a guerilla. His fewness of numbers forbade the taking of great risks. The very impossibility of carrying more than a nominal supply of provisions caused him as a rule to conduct his military operations with very small detachments of warriors. The war party had to live off the wilderness as it went along, and if possible
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had to accomplish its victory by stealth and stratagem. The attempt to deceive the enemy as well as mistify him is practiced in all wars. In this particular the only difference between the savage and the modern white man is that the former plays the game without any restraint. With the Indian deception became treachery. He gave quarter- only when it suited him to do so. Toward an enemy he was cruel and vindictive, yet in his own light he was logical and consistent. He killed his enemy, so that he might never have to fight him again. He then scalped and mutilated, not only to preserve a trophy of his victory but to unfit his enemy for the happy hunting ground of the future life. He killed the foe's wife, so that she might not bear any more children to grow up and fight him. He killed the boys so that they might not become warriors, and he killed the girls, so that they might not become the mothers of still more warriors. He then burned the house after taking out of it anything that ne could use. In brief, his idea of war was to do his enemy the greatest possible harm in the least possible time.
It is true that he often spared the lives of those who fell into his hands, but not from humane considerations pure and simple. When he went on the warpath he expected to undergo some loss of life. By coming back with captives he could repair his loss. He made one of three dis- positions of a prisoner, his choice depending on his mood and on the availability of the captive for the Indian mode of life. If the tribe had sustained great damage, the prisoner was very likely put to a torturing death upon arrival at the native village. Otherwise he was either made a drudge or was adopted into the tribe. And if adopted he was then treated with kindness.
Persons taken by the Indians in childhood have become greatly at- tached to their dusky companions and to the free life of the forest. After being restored to their people they have often tried to return, and sometimes have done so even after a lapse of years. As for the Indian himself, he could recognize the power of the white man, yet he could not see wherein he would be happier for adopting his civilization, with its social inequality and its complex and artificial restraints. His contact with the Caucasian usually meant an introduction to drunkenness, im- morality, and a boundless greed. The treaties he entered into with him were sooner or later broken by the white man. He was told of a pure religion which nevertheless was practiced by few of those who had dealings with him.
The Indian first came in touch with the trapper and fur trader. Such
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men were not positively objectionable. In exchange for his furs he ob- tained steel tomahawks, iron pots, and other articles of much better service than those he already had. He also provided himself with fire- arms and became a good marksman, except at long distances. His flint- lock he did not keep in good condition.
His feeling toward the settlers was very different. The latter came to stay. They scared away the large game, and they wanted the country for their exclusive use. They did not consider it settled until it was brought into private ownership and cultivation. Their numbers were rapidly increasing, and it was insufferable to them that millions of acres of good land should remain a wilderness. They declared that the native must live as they were doing and be content with a little of the land, or that he must get out of the way.
To the Indian the white man was a trespasser. To the white man the Indian was an obstacle to settlement, just as were the panthers and wolves. The native resented the encroachment by burning the frontier cabin and killing the inmates. He thought all whites were brothers to one another, because all his clansmen were brothers to himself, and in acordance with his usage he scalped any white man he could reach in return for the killing of one of his own people. Cruelty on his part was repaid by the white man with equal cruelty. The latter learned to scalp, and to make no distinction between offender and non-offender.
To this ceaseless friction there could be only one result. The whites were a host while the natives were but a squad. The former came per- sistently onward. The latter sullenly fell back, yet not without putting up a more gallant fight for their homeland than. was ever waged by any barbarous nation of the other hemisphere. They won many victories in battle and nearly always against superior numbers.
Yet after all, the native taught many useful things to the white man. He had his own house-raisings and husking bees. He showed the settler how to clear his land by deadening the trees ; how to make deerskin seives and how to use medicinal herbs; how to utilize cornhusks and how to prepare corn for food in new ways. The costume of the frontiersman was an approach to that of the native, and sometimes his cabin was no more tidy.
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CHAPTER VI
DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION
Preston an Almost Unknown Land Before 1746 - The Fairfax Stone - The Eckerlins - The Pringles.
Wiley thinks that prior to the fall months of 1746 no white man had set foot on the soil of Preston. But both the probabilities and the facts are against this belief. All along the border, previous exploration was unquestionably carried on of-which we have no written record whatever. By 1732 settlers had begun to occupy the fertile bottom on the South Branch of the Potomac. A dozen years later there was a considerable population in that valley. The airline distance of the South Branch from the southeast angle of Preston is only thirty miles. To suppose none of those people had the curiosity to know what lay beyond the mountain ridge on the western skyline is rather gratuitous.
Through a royal grant Lord Thomas Fairfax had come into possession of the Northern Neck of Virginia. This was the name given to the country between the Potomac and the Rappahannock. The latter rises in the Blue Ridge and in a region already well known. The source of the Potomac was known to lie somewhere in the mountain labyrinth west of the Shenandoah Valley. It was needful to determine this source, in order that a line might be drawn between the fountain-heads of the two rivers. Fairfax had an eye for Number One, and his surveyors went up the North Branch with the evident purpose of including a larger territory than in the case of the South Branch. There is little or no material difference in the volume of the two rivers, and it was therefore permissible to adjudge the North Branch to be the main stream. Had they decided otherwise, the Fairfax Stone would have been placed at Hightown, Highland county, a distance of 54 miles west of south from its actual location. Preston county would as a result be narrower than it is.
The famous landmark was set up at the southeast angle of this county, October 17, 1746. The source of the North Branch had. however, been found December 14, 1736. It is of interest to know that the surveyors who set up the monument made stops, both going and coming, at the home of James Coburn, near the mouth of Mill Creek, in Grant county. These pauses were made on the 9th and 28th of October. Coburn, who
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had a mill and was well-to-do, was the ancestor of the Cobuns of Pres- ton. Thomas Lewis, one of the surveyors, speaks of the miller, who probably was a daughter of Coburn, as a buxom lass. Lewis gave the North Branch the uncomplimentary name of Styx, and a map of 1747 places "dismal laurel thickets" at the source of the river. In 1748, George Washington, then a youth of only sixteen, was surveying the valley lands along the South Branch .* No one as yet seemed to care for what lay on the North Branch, and Washington was not called in that direction.
Before 1750 the Virginia government had issued what were known as orders of council for 2,050,000 acres on streams flowing into the Mis- sissippi. Some of these orders were not perfected, yet in several instances there had been a partial or complete survey. One order, issued Novem- ber 4, 1745, in favor of John Blair and others, was for 100,000 acres, de- scribed as "lying to the westward of the line of Lord Fairfax on the waters of Potomack and Youghyaughye," and it is stated that the greater part was surveyed. March 22, 1747, there was an order for 60,000 acres adjoining John Blair and in favor of William McMacham and others. The latter tract is described as "upon the waters of Potomack west and N. W. of the line of Lord Fairfax and the Branches of Youghyaughus & Monongahela." The plain inference is that prospectors had been ex- amining Preston soil for some years previous to the erection of the Fairfax Stone.
In 1748 traders from Wills Creek, where Cumberland now stands, began making trips to the Monongahela. They may at times have used the McCulloch path through the north of this county. In 1752 the Ohio Company built a stockade on the Monongahela to protect its large grant of land. This was known in frontier annals as Redstone Old Fort, and it became the site of Brownsville. The company also began the building of what was to become famous as Fort Duquesne, and afterward as Fort Pitt. In 1755 the French authorities put forth a fairly accurate map of the region between the Blue Ridge and the Ohio. This map mentions a coal mine in the vicinity of where Frostburg now stands. Very near the Fairfax Stone it locates "impassable thickets of laurel."
A few persons came to make homes on the lands offered for sale by the Ohio Company. Among them were at least two brothers of the name of Eckerlin. The leader of these was Samuel. Wiley speaks of him as Thomas and calls him a doctor. In at least the former respect Wiley is misinformed, although Thomas may very possibly have been the name
*Not as the chief surveyor but as an assistant.
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of a brother Local tradition has designated the Eckerlins as Dunkards. But they appear to have been members of the monastic community at Ephrata, 58 miles west of Philadelphia. Its huge wooden houses, now in a decayed condition, are one of the curious architectural relics of colonial America. Except in their celibacy and other monastic peculiari- ties, the Ephrata people were very similar to the Dunkards. Like the Quakers also, they were non-resistants and did not approve of war and military service.
In the surveyor's books of Augusta county is the following entry :
"Survey'd for Samuel Eckerlin 360 acres of land in Augusta County Lying on ye East Side of Monongalo River Between the mouth of Indian Creek & Ecker- lin's Creek. This 20th ap. 1753.
By Andr Lewis asst s. Thos Lewis sur."
The actual surveyor was the General Andrew Lewis who fought and won the great battle of Point Pleasant, and whom Washington thought the proper man to lead the American armies in the Revolution. He also surveyed for Samuel Eckerlin four other tracts, aggregating 820 acres. Two of the entire five were on the east side of the river. One is men- tioned as three miles below where Eckerlin "now lives." This circum- stance makes it probable that the brothers arrived on the Monongahela in 1752. Their settlement was in the immediate vicinity of the line between Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and Dunkard's Creek derives its name from them.
The ninth of November following the visit of the surveyor, the gov- ernor of Virginia signed an order of council "to Samuel Eckerlainse & others, 5,000 acres, part of the vacant land lying between Lord Fairfax line and the line of John Blair, Esq. and Co.'s and that of ye Ohio Com- pany." This grant did not go into effect, partly no doubt because of the Indian war which broke out the following season. The wording of the order makes it probable that the tract was to include the Dunkard Bot- tom. And as the party to whom an order of council was given was re- quired to parcel out the grant among actual settlers, it would look as though the Eckerlins were planning to establish a colony of their co- religionists. It appears somewhat singular to us that such people, who were non-resistants, should be willing to settle on the very frontier, and face the everpresent danger of Indian warfare.
It was probably a feeling that they would be safer on the Cheat that led the Eckerlins to abandon their Monongahela settlement and make a new home on the broad expanse ever since known as the Dunkard Bot-
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tom. It is believed that their cabin stood on the east side of the river, a mile above the bridge at Caddell. Here are the remembered traces of a small clearing in which fragments of dishes have been found. The spot was dangerously near the Great Warpath.
In this remote locality, not less than fifty miles by any practicable route from the settlements on the South Branch, the brothers lived until about 1756. Their ammunition and salt running low, Samuel Eckerlin went eastward by the Indian path, and in the Shenandoah Valley he got what he wanted in exchange for his furs. But on his return, while lodg- ing at Fort Pleasant on the South Branch, he was arrested as a spy in the service of the red men. The suspicious settlers would allow him to pro- ceed only as a prisoner under guard. The French and Indian war was now well under way, and having suffered much already, they were de- termined to take no chances.
But when Eckerlin and his escort arrived at the Dunkard Bottom, it was only to look upon the ashes of the cabin and the scalped and muti- lated body of the slain brother. During his absence the Indians had de- tected the settlement, and had made a summary example of what they regarded as poaching on their domain. The surviving brother was now glad to accompany his guard on their return, and the valley of the Cheat seems to have known him no more.
He came from the Valley of Virginia. In October, 1747, he had taken a survey of 900 acres on New River, at a spot which at once became known as Mahanaim, or Dunkard Bottom, and is often mentioned during the war for independence. In 1767, Samuel Eckerlin brought suit against one Valentine Zinn, whose father Garrett, had purchased a part of this New River survey. In his bill Eckerlin states that he left the bonds with his brother, and that they were destroyed when the latter was mur- dered and his effects burned. Not wishing to lose his own scalp, Garrett Zinn moved to the Carolinas, and Valentine, his oldest son, sold the land to Israel Christian. It is thus a little curious that two river-tracts, some two hundred miles apart, should have received the same name from the same person. In 1751, Samuel Eckerlin purchased of one John Mills 100 acres on Little River in the valley of Virginia, paying the price of $33.33 .*
Another episode of the Indian war took place on the Dunkard Bottom in Preston. A party of rangers from the South Branch here overtook a retreating war party of Shawnees. The fight seems to have been a sur- prise after dark, and several of the Indians were slaughtered. Some years
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later, in a time of peace, their graves were visited by members of the tribe.
The year 1760 witnessed the collapse of the French power in America. As a quite natural result there was a lull in the hostilities of their savage allies. The following year four soldiers deserted from the garrison at Fort Pitt, where Pittsburgh now stands. Their names were John and Samuel Pringle, William Childers, and Joseph Lindsay. They established a camp in the glades between Aurora and Eglon. A year later they fol- lowed the Indian path which ran close by, and it led them to Looney's Creek in Grant county. Here they were arrested as deserters, but the Pringles escaped and returned to their camp. In 1764 they were joined by John Simpson who came upon them by way of the same Indian path. Simpson was in search of furs and induced the Pringles to help him. But the glades east of the Youghiogheny were now being visited by other hunters from the South Branch. Not wishing any further acquaintance with these suspicious people, the refugees abandoned their camp and re- tired further into the wilderness until they were well beyond the confines of Preston. In 1767 the Pringles ventured to the Shenandoah Valley and found the long war was at an end. John finally went to Kentucky, but Samuel married on the South Branch and lived there a while.
In the names of Dunkard Bottom and Pringle's Run we have memorials of these early comers. But theirs were bachelor settlements and therefore lacking in permanence.
Having ousted the French, the British government sought to pacify the natives by discouraging its own people from migrating beyond the Alleghanies. In 1763 the king of England and the governor of Virginia issued proclamations forbidding settlers from going into the Western country. But in 1764 a treaty with the Indians ushered in a period of peace lasting ten years. Homeseekers now began to pour over the moun-
*From information kindly supplied by General John E. Roller, of Harrison- burg, we learn that the Eckerlins were forced out of the Ephrata community by Its founder, owing to a disagreement in matters of administration. They came to the Shenandoah Valley in 1745, living a while at Strasburg. Opposite the present town they owned the Major Newell farm. Thence they removed to the New River and founded the settlement of Mahanaim, the precise location of which Is unknown, though it was probably near the Dunkard Bottom. The settlement was broken up by the Indians, the Eckerlins being taken to the Ohio River and then to Canada, where they were released by the French upon telling them they had been members of a monastic fraternity. It was after this that the two brothers went to the Monongahela. Samuel Eckerlin spent the last years of his life in the east of Pennsylvania, where his will is on record.
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tains, giving no more heed to the orders of government than to so much waste paper.
In 1767 the surveyors, Mason and Dixon, ran their famous line along the northern edge of the county. Not far east from its crossing of the Youghiogheny it intersected the Braddock road going from Cumberland to Pittsburgh. The path cut out by the surveyors was used as a highway by the westward bound settlers. In 1768 the governor of Pennsylvania sent a messenger to warn these land hunters to return, yet they did not budge from where they were locating.
By 1766 the Preston area must have been quite well explored by hunters and prospectors. Some knowledge of it must have spread east- ward and reached the ears of people who were thinking of going west. But so far as we are aware, no further attempt at actual settlement took place until the above named date. On the Gordon farm in the valley of the Three Fork has been found a slab, apparently a gravestone, and bear- ing the date 1768. It may have marked the burial place of some hunter.
In the northwest of Union the early settlers found six holes, each about six feet in diameter and dug down eighteen feet to a bed of solid rock. In the creek below were found the remains of a log dam. The holes are now quite filled up. It is not known who dug the holes or built the dam. The pioneers imagined that the Eckerlins had tried to find gold or silver here.
Another seeming vestige of white occupation was found near Carmel by one of the pioneers of 1787. On his land was a little clearing, the re- mains of a hut, and a growth of potato vines. This would not seem to have been the work of the Pringles.
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CHAPTER VII
EARLY PIONEER PERIOD
Beginning of Transalleghany Settlement - West Augusta - Organization of Mon- ongalia - Butler Our Real Pioneer - The Disputed Northern Boundary - Settlers in Sandy Creek Glades - First Visit by County Surveyor - Settlers Here in. 1776 - Pioneer Life - The Morris and Butler Forts - The Revolution - Indian Forays - Lewis Wetzel - Householders in 1782.
In 1634, after twenty-seven years of settlement, Virginia had an im- migrant population of 5,000, including possibly a hundred negroes. All these were living on tidal waters and on or near the Chesapeake Bay. The colony was now divided into eight counties. From parts of three of these, Spottsylvania was formed in 1720, being named for Alexander Spottswood, the governor who led an exploring party across the Blue Ridge, into what is now the county of Rockingham. The new county reached into the Valley of Virginia as far as the South Fork of the Shen- andoah River, although there was no white settlement beyond the moun- tains until 1727. In 1734, Orange county was established. It included the whole of Virginia west of the Blue Ridge.
Four years later still, the transmontane region was set off into the counties of Augusta and Frederick. The boundary between the two was the line which Fairfax had run between the Fairfax Stone and the source of Conway River in Madison. County government for Augusta was set up in 1745. by which time there were more than 3000 people within its limits. Immigration, temporarily checked by the war of 1754-64, grew rapid, and made a single county too unwieldly for a region running 190 miles along the Blue Ridge and stretching indefinitely westward.
Subdivision was soon begun. In 1776 the District of West Augusta was laid off to
"Begin on Alleghany Mountain between the heads of Potowmack, Cheat, and Greenbrier Rivers, thence along the ridge of mountains which divide the waters of Cheat from those of Greenbrier, and that Branch of the Monon- gahela River called Tyger's Valley River to the Monongahela River; thence up the said River and the west fork thereof to Bingamon's Creek on the northwest side of the said west fork; thence up the said Creek to the head thereof; thence in a direct course to the head of Middle Island Creek, and thence to the Ohio, including all the waters of the said creek in the aforesaid District of West Augusta, all that territory lying to the northward of the aforesaid boundary, and to the westward of the States of Pennsylvania and Maryland."
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