That Dark and Bloody River Read online

  Twelve years later, in 1666, another party under Henry Batte, also commissioned by Sir William Berkeley, followed the route Wood had taken and got much farther downstream on the New and Kanawha River, past the low Falls of the Kanawha to the mouth of a creek where there was a large salt spring only about 60 miles upstream from where the Kanawha empties into the Ohio River.20 They found some vacant Indian shelters at the spring, in which they left a number of trinkets as gifts. However, unnerved by such abundance of Indian sign, they made an immediate about-face and hastily retreated to their own side of the mountains.

  Three years later another explorer commissioned by Berkeley, Dr. John Lederer, a German physician, followed the Rapidan River upstream and reached the crest of the Blue Ridge in northern Virginia.21 He did not go far beyond that crest, and though he was not actually in the Ohio River drainage as he supposed, he encountered no streams and soon turned back toward home. Berkeley, disappointed at the failure, sent him on the same route the following year, this time with a larger party including Indian guides, but once again, having achieved the Blue Ridge summit, Lederer simply turned around and went home.

  It was during the following year, 1671, that the Cherokees wiped out the Xualae tribe and took possession of the Kanawha, only to be ousted themselves the ensuing year by an Iroquois war party. That same year, 1672, may have been when Robert Sieur de Cavalier de La Salle ascended the Maumee from Lake Erie, portaged to the Wabash and followed it down to the Ohio River. There he traveled upstream on the Ohio some 240 miles to the Falls of the Ohio before retracing his canoe route back up the Wabash.

  The Franciscan priest Louis Hennepin reported that in 1677 he was on the headwaters of the Allegheny about 150 miles above where that stream joins the Monongahela to form the Ohio River, but the statement is in doubt because of Hennepin’s propensity for self-aggrandizement by falsifying his reports.

  During the next decade, certain bold British traders made their way to the Monongahela and followed it to where it merges with the Allegheny. No record has been found that any of them descended the Ohio, although logic indicates that some of them must have. It is known that a large party of these traders did ascend the Allegheny, portaged up to Lake Erie and greatly alarmed the French when they were sighted in their ten canoes filled with trade goods on that lake in 1686. The French trade agent Denonville wrote about it to Seignelay in Quebec, saying:

  I consider it a matter of importance to preclude the English from this trade, as they doubtless would entirely ruin ours … by the cheaper bargains they would give the Indians.

  In 1690 an emissary from the upper Susquehanna Delawares visited the Shawnees living on the Illinois under war chief Opeththa and invited them to come to the Pennsylvania country to help discourage the rapidly encroaching British colonists. Weary of living on the Illinois, Opeththa agreed, but on the way he and his people stopped for a time with the Miamis at their principal village of Pickawillany on the upper Great Miami River.22 Here they were invited by the Miami principal chief, Unemakemi, to return to the Scioto Valley and make their home there again, and to encourage others of their tribe to do so as well. Opeththa said he would consider it and perhaps in a few years take him up on it. In the meanwhile he would stay in the Scioto Valley only a short time before continuing to the Susquehanna to aid the Delawares, as he had promised.

  Arriving at the Susquehanna in 1692, Opeththa was appalled at the number of whites that were flooding into the fertile valleys from the east, and he realized at once that if they were not stopped and turned back quickly, there might be no turning them back at all. He immediately sent word to his fellow Shawnees in the south, still living on the rivers that bore their tribal name, both in the Tennessee country and Florida, asking them to come to the Susquehanna as soon as they could to participate in the looming struggle. It took a while, but by 1694 many of the southern Shawnees had abandoned their villages and were again on their way north.

  This migration suited the southern tribes very well, as they had never entirely overcome their fear of the Shawnees. To hurry the warriors on their way and resume dominance in their own lands, they had formed a confederation much as the Iroquois had done years before and demanded that the Shawnees leave. The confederation included a number of tribes that had previously warred savagely against one another—the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Natchez, Choctaw and others. Had these southern tribes not done this, the no-longer-welcome Shawnees would probably have left the south sooner in response to Opeththa’s call, but wishing to avoid any semblance of fleeing before an enemy, they lingered for almost two years longer and only then began leaving at their leisure.

  Despite the added strength their arrival gave to the Indians in the valley of the Susquehanna, the influx of whites continued. Farther south, in northern Virginia, more and more traders were making their way up the Potomac to a major trading point that had been established at the mouth of Will’s Creek, less than 25 miles east of the Allegheny divide.23 By following an Indian path known as the Nemacolin Trail, they soon crossed that divide and continued following the trail as it angled to the northwest and finally terminated at an ancient earthworks studded with reddish rocks. The place was promptly dubbed Redstone Old Fort. Here they found themselves on the shore of a very substantial river—the Monongahela—flowing northward toward its confluence with the Allegheny to form the Ohio, only a bit over 50 miles downstream. At that point, the entire Ohio River Valley was open to them.24

  In March 1700, William Murray encouraged westward expansion, and his urgings undoubtedly had effect: A brief, tantalizing tidbit in the historical record, annoyingly without names or details, indicates that British traders in that same year began plying the waters of the Ohio—the first authentically recorded instance.

  Among those hardy souls who took Murray’s advice was an individual named Ebenezer Zane, who had come to Pennsylvania with William Penn in 1681 when the Colony of Pennsylvania was established by charter from King Charles II. The following year he had been with Penn when the site of Philadelphia was purchased from the Indians. Ebenezer Zane, like Penn, was a Quaker, but he did not entirely agree with his fellow Quakers’ strong contention that Europeans were only guests of the native inhabitants and, as such, should in all matters treat them gently and with kindness, regardless of what provocation there might be to do otherwise.

  The Quaker elders had forbidden all their followers from participating in any act that would separate the Indians from anything that was rightfully theirs or from engaging in acts that might injure the Indians in any way. Zane did not endear himself to the Quaker elders when he attended, with Penn, the Kensington Treaty—or Great Elm Treaty, as some called it—on April 23, 1701, to purchase a tract of the great forested lands stretching north and west from the site of Philadelphia—a treaty that years later, because of an ambiguity, greatly defrauded the Delawares. Were that not enough, Ebenezer Zane was finally ostracized by his Quaker brethren when he married without the sanction of the Society of Friends. Infuriated and wanting nothing more to do with them, he moved out of the land now called Penn’s Woods—Pennsylvania—and into Virginia, following the South Branch of the Potomac upstream to the site of present Moorefield, where he started carving a new settlement out of the wilderness. It was there, several years later, that his son was born and named William Andrew.

  In 1699 and 1700 another notable Frenchman passed the mouth of the Ohio River with very little comment about it. This was Pierre LeSeuer, who had been exploring on the upper Mississippi in the Minnesota country for more than a decade. He left there in 1699, floated down to the mouth of the Mississippi where he remained for some months and then paddled all the way back to Minnesota. Though he noted in his journal passing the mouth of the Ohio in mid-July, he seemed singularly unimpressed.

  In 1710 the Tuscarora tribe in the Carolinas, harassed by the Shawnees and southern tribes, appealed to the Iroquois League to be allowed to move to their country and be taken in as a member of the League. The Five Na
tions met and discussed the matter for nearly two years. At the end of that time, as much because it would irritate the Shawnees as for any other reason, they agreed to accept them—but with provisos: The Tuscaroras would be on a ten-year probation in the League and could be ejected during that period at any time, with or without cause; even after full and final acceptance in 1722, they would bear the status of “children” of (and therefore subservient to) the Oneidas, who sponsored them; finally, while they would be allowed to send delegates to the tribal councils and express their views just as any other delegates could, they would have no power to vote in any League matters until and after their full acceptance. The Tuscaroras agreed to the terms without hesitation, and henceforth the Iroquois League was known as the Six Nations rather than the Five Nations.

  Meanwhile, British traders continued penetrating deeper into the unknown territory that would eventually become Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. In 1715 a hardy group of them paddled up the Wabash and convinced the Ouiatenons that it would be to their advantage to allow a small British trading post to be built in their village on the Wabash. Dazzled by the array of goods the traders brought, the Ouiatenons were delighted. Not so the French traders already on hand who, only a few months earlier, had built their own trading post at the village under the direction of Jean Baptiste Bissot, variously calling it Gatanois, the Miami Post and the Ouiatenon Post. The intrusion of these British traders greatly angered the French traders, and they endeavored to convince the Ouiatenons to leave and resettle on the St. Joseph River of the Maumee, which would effectively take them out of reach of the British traders. The Ouiatenons adamantly refused, and the frustrated French traders found themselves helpless to do anything except send runners with reports of all this to Detroit, Niagara and Montreal.

  In 1716, 46 years after the failure of the last expedition sent by Gov. Berkeley to explore beyond the crest of the Blue Ridge, the new Virginia governor, Alexander Spotswood, became determined to succeed in a like endeavor and planned to insure that success by personally leading the exploratory party up the Rapidan. He did so, reached the crest and went through a gap and well into a great valley beyond, coming to the shore of a large northward-flowing river.25 Convinced that he had discovered a major tributary of the Ohio River if not the actual headwaters of that fabled stream, he nevertheless solemnly named it the Euphrates.

  The explorers killed and roasted an elk and a buffalo, feasted well, fired a salute with their muskets and drank a toast to the King. Then, leaving a party of rangers behind to explore, Spotswood returned home. The name Euphrates did not stick, however, because the name the Indians had already given that stream was too well entrenched and more euphonious. They called it the Shenandoah, and instead of being a tributary of the Ohio, it angles northeastward and eventually empties into the upper Potomac, which itself runs into Chesapeake Bay, an arm of the Atlantic.26

  By 1723, even the staid Governor of Pennsylvania, John Keith, had joined Gov. Spotswood in his sharp concern occasioned by the French presence and claims west of the Alleghenies. Both governors wanted increased expansion westward and advocated giving every individual the right to claim as much as 400 acres on the frontier, provided he lived upon it. Settlers immediately began flocking into the land.

  All this became too much for the long-beleaguered Delawares. Even with the help of the Shawnees and some bands of Wyandots, they were unable to check the white tide moving in on them, and so in 1724 they began moving away and settling considerably farther west upon the Allegheny and Beaver rivers in far western Pennsylvania and on the Muskingum River in the Ohio country. The Shawnees went with them, some settling with them, others in different places. With warm Miami approval, they reestablished their numerous former villages on the Muskingum, Scioto, Little Miami, Great Miami and Mad rivers and some new ones as well. In 1725 they established a substantial village French traders named Chiniqué, located on a broad bottom of the right bank of the Ohio 22 miles below the Forks.27 Here for the first time they used skills learned from the whites and built substantial log cabins instead of the usual flimsy wegiwas, constructed of interwoven branches covered with skins. Almost at once, ignoring the name presently being used, the British traders dubbed the place Logstown, and the name stuck.28

  Moving farther down the Ohio, the Shawnees established a new village on the Ohio side of the river several miles above the mouth of the Kanawha, calling the place Conedogwinit, which the traders called the Upper Shawnee Town. The Lower Shawnee Town—a much larger and more substantial village built by the Chalahgawtha sept of the Shawnees, was located on a broad flat bottom on the downstream side of the mouth of the Scioto River. They named the village after themselves—Chalahgawtha—although it was more familiarly known by the name of Sinioto. Nevertheless, the traders persisted in calling it the Lower Shawnee Town. The principal village of the tribe, however, called Wapatomica, was established at the Forks of the Muskingum, where that river is formed by the confluence of the Walhonding from the west and the Tuscarawas from the east. Wapatomica was situated on the point of land formed at the downstream side of the mouth of the Walhonding. Directly across the Muskingum from it, on the point of land formed at the downstream side of the Tuscarawas, was the new principal village of the Delawares, Goschachgunk.29

  Slowly but surely the British settlers inched westward. In 1726 a Welshman named Morgan Morgan crossed over the Blue Ridge in Virginia and gained the distinction of being the first British colonist to erect a permanent residence west of the Allegheny Divide and in the Ohio River drainage.

  In 1727 some of the Shawnees returning from the south found, in the valley of the Greenbrier tributary of the Kanawha, a Shawnee village that had been established here some 20 years earlier, and they were met by the villagers with great joy. Among those greeting the Shawnees arriving from the south was a young man of about 18 who had been born in the Greenbrier village less than two years after its establishment; a young man who was destined to become the tribe’s principal chief. He was named Hokolesqua—Cornstalk. The Greenbrier location was not, however, quite to the liking of the newly arrived group of Shawnees, and they soon prepared to leave and continue their journey to the Ohio country. They had company: The long-established village there was abandoned, and its inhabitants—including Hokolesqua — went with them and reestablished themselves in Sinioto, at the mouth of the Scioto.

  The British fears that the French would soon open their proposed new route from the eastern Great Lakes to New Orleans became a fact in 1729, when a party in canoes, commanded by the military surveyor, Capt. Chaussegros de Léry, opened a portage route from Lake Erie via Lake Chautauqua to the upper Allegheny River, which was at that time considered to be the upper Ohio River.30

  Carefully surveying as they traveled, de Léry and his party followed the Allegheny 150 miles to where the Ohio River actually begins at the mouth of the Monongahela—called the Forks of the Ohio—then continued down the Ohio another 490 miles to the mouth of the Great Miami River. They then followed this waterway upstream some 200 river miles to Pickawillany, where they were met coolly by the Miami principal chief, Unemakemi, and discourteously hurried on their way, but not before they had seen the encampment of the British traders. De Léry warned the traders to leave before the next visit of the French or bear the consequences, but they only sneered and ignored the warning. The de Léry party then followed a tributary of the Great Miami to near its headwaters, portaged to the St. Marys River, floated down to its mouth at the Maumee and followed that latter stream down to Lake Erie. They then followed the south shore of Lake Erie back to the Niagara Portage and continued east on Lake Ontario to the head of the St. Lawrence. Their journey ended at Montreal, culminating an absence of more than five months.

  It was only two and a half years after the conclusion of de Léry’s journey that a baby was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, who was to develop keen interest in and have a great impact upon the Ohio River Valley. His parents, Augustine and Mary Ball Washingto
n, named him George.31

  The following year, in Reading, Pennsylvania, another individual was born who was destined to have as much influence on the opening of the western frontier as anyone: Daniel Boone. About this same time tangible evidence of the expansionist inclinations of Virginia came as the colony divided its huge Spotsylvania county and created a new county named Orange—a county that encompassed more than the whole of present West Virginia. Its white population was virtually nil, its permanent Indian population rapidly diminishing, and it seemed temptingly poised to accept any new settlers who might be courageous—or perhaps foolhardy—enough to risk staking a claim. There were plenty of takers, and the tempo of settlement picked up markedly from this time onward.

  During 1737 those Delawares still in Pennsylvania were learning a bitter lesson about just how dishonorable the whites could be in their treaty making. The treaty William Penn had made with them half a century earlier had a clause in it that had never been acted upon. Now, 19 years after his death, the Proprietary of Pennsylvania took advantage of it in a way that would never have occurred to Penn himself. The treaty signed by the Delawares stated that the Proprietary of Pennsylvania was given title to lands west and north of the Delaware at Philadelphia “as far as a man can go in a day and a half.” In that remark the Delawares had meant this to be nothing more than a good brisk walk of perhaps 30 miles. The distance had never actually been measured out, and now with good land availability diminishing in the Philadelphia area, the proprietors elected to interpret the nebulous remark in their own way. With considerable care, beginning at the farthest inward bend of the Delaware River within Philadelphia, they cleared a very straight path angling only slightly north of due west. Then they carefully selected a man noted for his athletic abilities and stamina, and one minute after midnight on the appointed day, April 9, 1737, they set him running as fast and as steadily as he could on that path. At the end of 36 hours he collapsed, having accomplished the feat of running a full 150 miles. This was the spot from which the Proprietary of Pennsylvania established the western boundary. The Pennsylvanians laughingly referred to it thereafter as the “Walking Treaty.” The Indians were justifiably angry, but they had made a bargain and reluctantly adhered to it. Whatever Delaware and Shawnee villages remained within the new limits of Pennsylvania were abandoned, and their native inhabitants moved to the valleys of the Wyoming and Shamokin or farther west—many all the way to the Muskingum in Ohio.