A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier (11 page)

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
.
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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.
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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 Graham 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.
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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.”
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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.
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One woman who was held captive learned from her captors that they had observed the farm for some time prior to their attack. They told her they had “looked through cracks around the house, and saw what [we] had for supper” two days prior to her kidnapping. As she walked to the nearby blockhouse the next day, her two dogs sprinted away into the woods and came back “growling and much excited.” Later, she would find out that the dogs had indeed approached the warriors hiding in the woods before returning in an attempt to warn her of the danger. Eventually, she and her family decided to seek the protection of the blockhouse. However, as they walked toward the safety of its walls, she fell behind her husband and son. Seeing this opportunity, the Indians “reached from the bushes, and took hold of her, charging her to make no noise, and covering her mouth with their hands.”
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On the upper Monongahela, similar events had a telling effect. One historian studied all the records and anecdotal evidence available in an attempt to determine the costs of Indian raids during the period from 1777 to 1780. The data indicates that at least forty-seven attacks took place in the upper Monongahela Valley during this four-year period alone. In these reports, 84 settlers are specifically reported to have been killed, while in four of the attacks, the accounts are too vague to determine precisely how many settlers may have become casualties. However, by applying a conservative standard of “some” equaling at least 4 people, “several” as 3 and “children” as 5, the deaths from Indian attacks in the region can be calculated to have been at least 100. Given that Monongalia County’s population in 1782 included less than 2,300 residents, this means that Indian raids accounted for the deaths of approximately 5 percent of the county’s populace in only four years. Add an approximate figure of 42 additional people taken into captivity during the same period, and you have 142 casualties, or more than 6 percent of the population.
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It is not surprising, therefore, that many settlers abandoned their homes and moved east of the Alleghenies during the period from Dunmore’s War until the late 1780s. Although no data on settler desertions in Monongalia County is available, one resident of nearby Fayette County, Pennsylvania, wrote in 1774 that “the country at this time is in great confusion…I suppose there have been broken up and gone off at least 500 families within one week past.”
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That same year, it was reported that some settlers near present-day Bridgeport, West Virginia, “broke up” their farms and “moved down to Prickets [
sic
] Settlement and Built a Fort.”
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F
ORTING
U
P

Those hardy souls who elected to stay west of the mountains had no choice but to try to defend themselves. To that end, they organized county militia units and began building refuge forts. Any advance warning of potential Indian attack was crucial, so the militia employed what they called “Indian spies,” essentially scouts who constantly patrolled the woodlands watching for any signs of raiding party activity in the vicinity. Should these scouts discover footprints or other evidence, such as the remains of a recent campsite, they tried to determine the size of the party, what tribe they might be from and if there was hostile intent. They then sent word to the nearest militia commander and “would fly from Fort to Fort and give the alarm.”
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Joseph Doddridge later wrote of those nights when, as a young boy, his family received the alarm from scouts, what they called an “express,” and hurriedly gathered what they could before fleeing to the safety of the refuge fort:

I well remember that, when a little boy, the family were sometimes waked up in the dead of night by an express with a report that the Indians were at hand. The express came softly to the door, or back window, and by a gentle tapping waked the family. This was easily done, as an habitual fear made us ever watchful and sensible to the slightest alarm. The whole family were instantly in motion. My father seized his gun and other implements of war. My stepmother waked up and dressed the children as well as she could, and being myself the oldest of the children I had to take my share of the burdens to be carried to the fort. There was no possibility of getting a horse in the night to aid us in removing to the fort. Besides the little children, we caught up what articles of clothing and provision we could get hold of in the dark, for we durst not light a candle or even stir the fire. All this was done with the utmost dispatch and the silence of death. The greatest care was taken not to awaken the youngest child. To the rest it was enough to say Indian and not a whimper was heard afterwards. Thus it often happened that the whole number of families belonging to a fort who were in the evening at their homes were all in their little fortress before the dawn of the next morning
.
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Sometimes the settlers’ stay at the fort might be only a matter of a few days, but at the height of Indian raiding in the mid-1770s, they often remained for months at a time. Given the small size of many of the forts and the number of settlers seeking refuge, these visits could become quite unpleasant. Noise, crowding, disease and the typical human filth that accompanies such conditions made for a difficult, even miserable stay. Naturally, during long stays, the condition of homes and especially crops became a concern. So residents would return to their farms during daylight hours, often in the company of their neighbors who came along armed with rifles to stand guard as they worked in the fields. Occasionally, a variation of this approach was employed, with groups of armed men venturing forth and traveling from farm to farm, functioning as an armed work party.
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Moreover, because of the seasonal nature of the raiding activity, an entire generation of Allegheny Plateau settlers grew up “forted up in the summer and staying at home in the winter.”
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Settlers’ quarters line the stockade walls at the contemporary re-creation of Prickett’s Fort.
Photo by the author
.

Refuge forts of the upper Monongahela Valley.
Drawn by the author using data from the Prickett’s Fort Memorial Foundation
.

The surge in Indian raids beginning in 1774 resulted in a corresponding increase in the building of refuge forts. Within a few years, there were forty-five refuge forts and blockhouses in the upper Monongahela Valley alone. While some of these were merely two-story log blockhouses, others included sleeping quarters and corner blockhouses, all enclosed within twelve-foot-high stockade walls whose foundations were sunk deep into the earth. Prickett’s Fort, where Phebe and Thomas Cunningham were married, was of the latter, more complex variety.

Prickett’s Fort was born out of the turmoil surrounding Dunmore’s War, when concern about imminent strikes from Shawnees drove the settlers living near Prickett’s Creek and the Monongahela to organize a militia company. Zackwell Morgan was elected captain, with James Chew serving as his second-in-command, and every fit male adult in the immediate area between the age of eighteen and fifty was required to serve. Sometime in mid-May 1774, the militiamen mustered in for the first time, with a total strength of forty-five men. However, over the course of the next two weeks, new families arrived near Jacob Prickett’s settlement and increased the militia’s ranks to ninety-six men.
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