Over the course of the next five years, as the British moved steadily toward victory over the French, British colonial officials moved to uphold the treaty and maintain peace with the Indian nations, who told them any breach of the treaty’s provisions would bring a new war west of the Alleghenies. To this end, the prominent Delaware sachem Keekyuscung (also known as Ketiushund) sent a friendly warning to the British:
That all the Nations had jointly agreed to defend their Hunting Place at Allegheny, and suffer no body to settle there; and as these Indians are very much inclined to the English Interest, for he begged us very much to tell the Governor, General, and all other People not to settle there. And if the English would draw back over the Mountain, they would get all the other Nations into their Interest, but if they staid and settled there, all the Nations would be against them, and he was afraid it would be a great War, and never come to a Peace again.98
The British heard the Indian message very clearly and continued to tell the Indians precisely what they needed to hear. Only a few days after Forbes and his army seized the mouth of the Ohio, Colonel Bouquet sent a message to the Delawares, telling them, “We have not come here to take possession of your hunting Country…but to open a large and extensive Trade with you…to serve you in every necessary you want, and on the cheapest Terms.”99 However, as previously seen, British efforts to close the frontier were subverted by land speculators and corrupt colonial officials, and the settlement flood was quickly underway.
The French cession of their North American empire in the Treaty of Paris came as a great shock to the Indian nations that had allied themselves with France against Britain. In their minds, the French had always shared the land with the Indians, and therefore it was not theirs to give away. Although many must have felt deeply betrayed, some had begun to suspect that the French relationship with the Indians was changing in the years leading up to the war. The French had begun to build more forts and import soldiers from France to the frontier, leading some tribes to see their alliance with the French as the lesser of two great evils.
While the initial British actions to close the frontier satisfied most Indian leaders, the British policies on dealing with the Native American nations that soon emerged did not. The British officer assigned to deal with the nations of both the Great Lakes region and Ohio Valley, General Jeffrey Amherst, did not take the Indians seriously, regarding them as mere savages who needed to learn their place as His Majesty’s subjects. Contrary to their promises to abandon the Ohio Country at the end of the war with France, the British maintained Fort Pitt and began to build a network of forts from the confluence of the Ohio and Monongahela to Lake Erie and along its shores all the way to Detroit. Further, Amherst dismantled the French practice of negotiating trade rights by providing generous gifts to the Indians, replacing that process with a strict insistence on receiving the market value for goods. In his mind, Great Britain had “won” the ownership of the Indian lands by right of conquest and could now simply impose trade practices on the Indians that suited the British government.
The militarization of the Ohio Country and Amherst’s arrogance led to a new war, this time involving a broad alliance of the Indian nations. Despite the fact that the war became known as “Pontiac’s Conspiracy” and “Pontiac’s War,” Pontiac was not by any means the single leader of the alliance. Pontiac was, however, a great military leader, and he led the first attacks of the war by assaulting the British garrison at Detroit in May 1763, only three months after the Treaty of Paris was signed. The Indians under Pontiac, who lived along the Great Lakes, had different motives for fighting than those of the Ohio Valley. Pontiac and his followers hoped to resurrect the French alliance, while the Ohio Indians sought to stop the flow of settlers from the east.
The British response to this new Indian threat included some unconventional and immoral tactics. Amherst, seeing the Indians as a subhuman species, delivered what one historian calls “one of the most extraordinary suggestions ever made by a British officer.”100 On May 4, 1763, Amherst wrote to Colonel Bouquet at Fort Pitt, saying, “You will Do well to try to Inoculate the Indians ‘with smallpox,’ by means of Blankets, as well as to Try Every other Method, that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.”101 In his reply on July 13, Bouquet demonstrated as vile a moral posture as that of Amherst when he added a postscript in his response to Amherst’s instructions saying, “I will try to inoculate the [Indians] with Some Blankets that may fall in their Hands, and take Care not to get the disease myself…As it is a pity to expose good men against them I wish we would make use of the Spanish Method to hunt them with English Dogs supported by Rangers and Some Light Horse, who would I think extirpate or remove that Vermin.”102
Although the Indians would win most of the battles of Pontiac’s War and seize virtually all of the isolated British outposts, they did not have the resources to achieve a complete military victory. The casualties required for victory were, again, too high, and while it is unknown if any of the infected blankets arrived in Indian villages, smallpox did once more ravage their villages, sapping the will and resources required to fight. In 1765, the Indian nations agreed to return all prisoners, including those adopted by the tribes, and the British wisely abstained from making any demands for additional land. The British also saw that Amherst was a disaster as commander and replaced him with Thomas Gage, who employed a more conciliatory and respectful approach with the Indians on trade. However, even Gage could not slow the flow of settlers, and by 1774, the frontier was again engulfed in a new round of warfare that would continue without pause for twenty years.
General Jeffrey Amherst, the British officer who ordered Colonel Bouquet to “inoculate the Indians with smallpox.” Library and Archives Canada.
The surge in settlement west of the Alleghenies led to steadily increasing hostility in the Indian villages of the Allegheny Plateau and Ohio Valley, especially among the Shawnee. As early as February 1773, Welsh Baptist missionary David Jones ran headlong into the rage building within the Shawnee villages of Ohio. In the course of a single evening, Jones faced two open threats. First, one warrior threatened him with a large knife over an unfulfilled request for the missionary’s tobacco, and only intercession by the warrior’s mother prevented Jones from being killed. Later, another angry warrior named Old Will entered the lodge where Jones was sleeping, and he was warned by a comrade to hide beneath some blankets in the loft, as Old Will seemed bent on doing him harm. “Presently in comes Old Will,” Jones recalled, “making inquiry for me, with terrible threats in such a rage, that he soon began to cry with venomous anger. Often he repeated, ‘Oh! If I could get one stroke, one stroke!’”103
Within a year of Jones’s encounters, the number of violent acts committed by both sides began to increase rapidly. First, in mid-1773, a mixed party of Shawnee, Delaware and Cherokee warriors raided into southwestern Virginia, where they tortured and killed Henry Russell and James Boone, one of Daniel Boone’s sons.104 Not long thereafter, Shawnee warriors captured seven men as they made camp along the Ohio, and while they made threats against them, cooler heads prevailed and the men were released. However, as the settlers were headed home, another group of more than twenty-five Shawnees recaptured them, took their possessions and sent them on their way with a warning to all Virginians: stay off the Ohio or be killed. In April 1774, matters began to escalate toward general warfare when a small Cherokee raiding party attacked three traders, leaving one trader dead and another wounded.105
For their part, the settlers were not innocent in the least, perpetrating several brutal attacks against the Indians. On April 27 and 30, 1774, two separate groups of Virginians, whom the Indians now referred to as the “Long Knives,” added significantly to the level of frontier violence. First, a party led by Michael Cresap killed two Indian employees of trader William Butler, murdered and scalped two other Indians and then attacked a Shawnee encampment located along Captina Creek near present-day Wheeling.
Next, a body of hunters and
some “ruffians” led by Daniel Greathouse lured a Mingo hunting party into their camp and then ambushed them, killing nine. Greathouse’s attack was especially bloodthirsty and had far-reaching implications. Among the Mingo casualties were the mother, brother and sister of the Mingo chief, John Logan. Logan, who had always been an avowed friend of the settlers and a voice for peace among the tribes, now swore he would avenge these deaths. After sending the surviving members of his camp to the Shawnee village of Kispoko Town, Logan, along with eight warriors, unleashed his vengeance on the frontier settlements of Virginia in a classic mourning war. Once he had killed nine colonials, he ended his campaign and went home.106
In this nineteenth-century drawing, Chief Logan, a man who always supported peaceful relations with the settlers, finds that Daniel Greathouse and his men have killed members of his family. Library of Congress.
However, the damage done by these attacks, both Indian and settler, could not be undone. Although many key Shawnee leaders did their best to restrain their war chiefs and preserve some semblance of peace, voices in the settler community called out for a war of vengeance. As a result, John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore and governor of Virginia, assembled a militia army and moved against the Shawnee in what became known as Dunmore’s War. Lord Dunmore and his army advanced into the Ohio Country in October, and the war ended quickly after the Shawnee defeat at Point Pleasant. The resulting treaty called for the Shawnee to return prisoners and agree to remain north of the Ohio River, thus surrendering Kentucky to the Virginians.107
However, the treaty did little to stop what became a constant, enduring campaign of guerrilla warfare along the frontier, and the coming of the Revolutionary War only intensified matters. Some of the Indian nations elected to remain neutral in the war between Great Britain and its American colonists, but the vast majority of those who fought allied themselves with the British. From their point of view, the British had at least tried to stop new settlements, and they knew if the Americans proved victorious, they would never cease their relentless movement west.
When the rebellious colonies did finally defeat the British, the Indians never paused in their raiding along the frontier. Meanwhile, the Americans, for their part, moved immediately to seize lands in the Ohio Country and Kentucky. Even before the war was over, Washington ordered a series of brutal raids on the Iroquois villages in Ohio. As a result, to this day, the Iroquois’ common name for George Washington is one that translates as “Town Destroyer.”108 These attacks were followed by a series of treaties executed by the fledgling American government between 1781 and 1789, each of which took more Indian land while promising to reserve what was left to the Indians. Each, in turn, was quickly broken by the settlers and the government, making them utterly meaningless. The Indian response was to continue raiding the settlements in the vain hope of stalling the Americans’ westward invasion.
As a result, the fear of Indian attack became a painful, terrifying fact of life for settlers on the Allegheny Plateau. More refuge forts were built, and “forting up” often became the rule rather than the exception in frontier life. The Indian raiders, who sometimes roamed far from their home villages, even hundreds of miles, came looking for captives, or on occasion, they attacked to avenge wrongs done to their tribes. Eventually, this protracted, bloody conflict, which was the product of decades of cultural and imperial warfare, would arrive on Phebe and Thomas Cunningham’s doorstep.
Chapter 3
The Raid
FEAR
The fear and intense anxiety that the mere possibility of an Indian attack on their homes created among settlers should not be understated. At times, it must have felt like there was a constant stream of rumors and reports regarding yet another Indian “outrage” on either lives or property. It might be a neighbor reporting a stolen cow or pilfered food supplies, but more often than not, settlers learned that a nearby farm was burned to the ground, its occupants murdered, scalped or taken captive. Consequently, settlers lived under an omnipresent shadow that ruled the nature of their routine daily activities and even invaded their dreams. In a letter to a friend, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur described the absolute sense of dread and terror produced by the simple sound of a tree branch rattling against the cabin roof or your dog barking at a perceived threat:
What renders these incursions still more terrible is, that they most commonly take place in the dead of the night; we never go to our fields but we are seised [sic] with an involuntary fear, which lessens our strength and weakens our labour [sic]. No other subject of conversation intervenes between the different accounts, which spread through the country, of successive acts of devastation; and these told in chimney-corners, swell themselves in our affrighted imaginations into the most terrific ideas! We never sit down either to dinner or supper, but the least noise immediately spreads a general alarm and prevents us from enjoying the comfort of our meals. The very appetite proceeding from labour [sic] and peace of mind is gone; we eat just enough to keep us alive: our sleep is disturbed by the most frightful dreams; sometimes I start awake, as if the great hour of danger was come; at other times the howling of our dogs seems to announce the arrival of the enemy: We leap out of bed and run to arms; my poor wife with panting bosom and silent tears, takes leave of me, as if we were to see each other no more; she snatches the youngest children from their beds, who, suddenly awakened, increase by their innocent questions the horror of the dreadful moment. She tries to hide them in the cellar, as if our cellar was inaccessible to the fire…Fear industriously encreases [sic] every sound; we all listen; each communicates to the other his ideas and conjectures. We remain thus sometimes for whole hours, our hearts and our minds racked by the most anxious suspense: what a dreadful situation, a thousand times worse than that of a soldier engaged in the midst of the most severe conflict! Sometimes feeling the spontaneous courage of a man, I seem to wish for the decisive minute; the next instant a message from my wife, sent by one of the children, puzzling me beside with their little questions, unmans me: away goes my courage, and I descend again into the deepest despondency. At last finding that it was a false alarm, we return once more to our beds.109
In these circumstances, sending children to the nearby woods to gather berries, going out after dusk to get water from the well or an early morning trip to the barn to milk a cow was cause for anxiety, trepidation and genuine foreboding. Susannah Johnson, a frontier farmer’s wife who later became a captive of the Indians, remembered:
The fears of the night were horrible beyond description, and even the light of day was far from dispelling painful anxiety. While looking from the windows of my log-house and seeing my neighbors tread cautiously by each hedge and hillock, lest some secreted savage might start forth to take their scalp, my fears would baffle description…Imagination now saw and heard a thousand Indians; and I never went round my own house, without first looking with trembling caution by each corner, to see if a tomahawk was not raised for my destruction.110
Another settler recalled, “The Indians were around every night, and round the stable…We shut our door early; and in the morning, it was sun up before we opened it.” Another remembered, “In those times they always shut the doors towards night, and never opened them again, till after we had peaked [sic] out at the port-holes next morning.” Daniel Drake, a settler who grew up on the Ohio frontier, recounted that as a young man living on a frontier farm, his first chore of every day was to climb up the ladder to the loft at dawn and look through the cracks for Indians.111
Given that children were often the targets of Indian captive raids, it is not surprising that parents issued numerous warnings, tried to encourage awareness in their children and made every attempt to restrict their movements, especially during the spring and summer months, when Indian raids were most likely to occur. Naturally, as children are prone to do, frontier youngsters often did their best to circumvent these parental directives, probably to the extreme anxiety of their parents. As a young girl, Sarah Graha
m was forbidden to wander away from her family’s refuge fort during the summer months, but, nonetheless, she remembered sneaking out into the woods to gather wild cherries and papaws. Meanwhile, young boys chafed at being told they could not venture out to the banks of a nearby stream or river to fish. When he was a boy, William Moseby and his friends were under orders not to go fishing alone. Despite this restriction, it became their favorite pastime. The problem they encountered was how to conceal their catch. In one case, he convinced his “old aunt Sarah” to cook the buffalo fish he and his friends planned to hook, and “pa wouldn’t know it.” However, the potential dangers of their fishing did come home to roost. When William and the other boys went back in the evening to check their lines, they heard an owl that “hallooed very pert.” Having been taught by their fathers that Indians “could halloo like owls, and these owls were on the ground,” the boys abandoned their lines, ran back to the settlement and immediately confessed their crime to their parents.112
Although William’s story did not end badly, the psychological impact from these constant warnings must have had a telling effect on the minds of frontier children. Daniel Drake recounted that he received numerous warnings from his parents about the “great enemies,” the Shawnee and Wyandot, which gave him many a childhood nightmare. At bedtime, he and his siblings were told to “lie still and go to sleep, or the Shawnees will catch you.” Not surprisingly, this led to dreams that continued until adulthood and “included either Indians or snakes—the copper-colored man, and the copper-colored snake, then extremely common.”113
Another factor that played heavily on the fears of settlers was the constant sense that they were being watched by Indians lurking nearby, which was a premonition actually grounded in reality. Indian attacks on settlers were often not merely the result of a chance meeting in the woods. Raiding parties of warriors typically conducted what we might call “intelligence gathering” activities by observing the farms in a region, determining which were the best targets, studying the inhabitants’ daily activities and planning how best to make their approach. The latter might mean carefully setting up an ambush in lieu of an assault on the main cabin. One settler, William Longley, went out to do the morning chores one day and discovered his livestock were loose and wandering about the cornfields. Unarmed, Longley rushed out to drive the cattle back to their pens, which was exactly what a nearby raiding party desired. The warriors emerged from hiding, killed the unsuspecting farmer and then attacked the undefended cabin where they killed his wife and two children before carrying three other children away to captivity.114
A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier Page 7
