第26章 Chapter VI. The Fight For Kentucky(3)

Two hundred thousand acres in the West--Kentucky and West Virginia--had been promised to the colonial officers and soldiers who fought in the Seven Years' War. But after making the Proclamation the British Government had delayed issuing the patents. Washington interested himself in trying to secure them; and Lord Dunmore, who also had caught the "land-fever,"* prodded the British authorities but won only rebuke for his inconvenient activities. Insistent, however, Dunmore sent out parties of surveyors to fix the bounds of the soldiers' claims. James Harrod, Captain Thomas Bullitt, Hancock Taylor, and three McAfee brothers entered Kentucky, by the Ohio, under Dunmore's orders.

John Floyd went in by the Kanawha as Washington's agent. A bird's-eye view of that period would disclose to us very few indeed of His Majesty's loving subjects who were paying any attention to his proclamation. Early in 1774, Harrod began the building of cabins and a fort, and planted corn on the site of Harrodsburg. Thus to him and not to Boone fell the honor of founding the first permanent white settlement in Kentucky * See Alvord, "The Mississippi Valley in British Politics," vol.

II, pp. 191-94.

When summer came, its thick verdure proffering ambuscade, the air hung tense along the border. Traders had sent in word that Shawanoes, Delawares, Mingos, Wyandots, and Cherokees were refusing all other exchange than rifles, ammunition, knives, and hatchets. White men were shot down in their fields from ambush.

Dead Indians lay among their own young corn, their scalp locks taken. There were men of both races who wanted war and meant to have it--and with it the land.

Lord Dunmore, the Governor, resolved that, if war were inevitable, it should be fought out in the Indian country. With this intent, he wrote to Colonel Andrew Lewis of Botetourt County, Commander of the Southwest Militia, instructing him to raise a respectable body of troops and "join me either at the mouth of the Great Kanawha or Wheeling, or such other part of the Ohio as may be most convenient for you to meet me." The Governor himself with a force of twelve hundred proceeded to Fort Pitt, where Croghan, as we have seen, was extending his hospitality to eleven hundred warriors from the disaffected tribes.

On receipt of the Governor's letter, Andrew Lewis sent out expresses to his brother Colonel Charles Lewis, County Lieutenant of Augusta, and to Colonel William Preston, County Lieutenant of Fincastle, to raise men and bring them with all speed to the rendezvous at Camp Union (Lewisburg) on the Big Levels of the Greenbrier (West Virginia). Andrew Lewis summoned these officers to an expedition for "reducing our inveterate enemies to reason."

Preston called for volunteers to take advantage of "the opportunity we have so long wished for...this useless People may now at last be oblidged to abandon their country." These men were among not only the bravest but the best of their time; but this was their view of the Indian and his alleged rights. To eliminate this "useless people," inveterate enemies of the white race, was, as they saw it, a political necessity and a religious duty. And we today who profit by their deeds dare not condemn them.

Fervor less solemn was aroused in other quarters by Dunmore's call to arms. At Wheeling, some eighty or ninety young adventurers, in charge of Captain Michael Cresap of Maryland, were waiting for the freshets to sweep them down the Ohio into Kentucky. When the news reached them, they greeted it with the wild monotone chant and the ceremonies preliminary to Indian warfare. They planted the war pole, stripped and painted themselves, and starting the war dance called on Cresap to be their "white leader." The captain, however, declined; but in that wild circling line was one who was a white leader indeed. He was a sandy-haired boy of twenty--one of the bold race of English Virginians, rugged and of fiery countenance, with blue eyes intense of glance and deep set under a high brow that, while modeled for power, seemed threatened in its promise by the too sensitive chiseling of his lips. With every nerve straining for the fray, with thudding of feet and crooning of the blood song, he wheeled with those other mad spirits round the war pole till the set of sun closed the rites. "That evening two scalps were brought into camp," so a letter of his reads. Does the bold savage color of this picture affright us? Would we veil it? Then we should lose something of the true lineaments of George Rogers Clark, who, within four short years, was to lead a tiny army of tattered and starving backwoodsmen, ashamed to quail where he never flinched, through barrens and icy floods to the conquest of Illinois for the United States.

Though Cresap had rejected the role of "white leader," he did not escape the touch of infamy. "Cresap's War" was the name the Indians gave to the bloody encounters between small parties of whites and Indians, which followed on that war dance and scalping, during the summer months. One of these encounters must be detailed here because history has assigned it as the immediate cause of Dunmore's War.

Greathouse, Sapperton, and King, three traders who had a post on Yellow Creek, a tributary of the Ohio fifty miles below Pittsburgh, invited several Indians from across the stream to come and drink with them and their friends. Among the Indians were two or three men of importance in the Mingo tribe. There were also some women, one of whom was the Indian wife of Colonel John Gibson, an educated man who had distinguished himself as a soldier with Forbes in 1768. That the Indians came in amity and apprehended no treachery was proved by the presence of the women.