A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier (10 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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
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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!’”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.”
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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

F
EAR

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
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