worst instincts were not suddenly aroused; but the sight of bloodshed maddened them as if they had been so many wolves.  Wrongs stirred to the depths their moody tempers, and filled them with a brutal longing for indiscriminate revenge.  When goaded by memories of evil, or when swayed by swift, fitful gusts of fury, the uncontrolled violence of their passions led them to commit deeds whose inhuman barbarity almost equalled, though it could never surpass, that shown by the Indians themselves.[29]

But Logan’s people did not profit by Cresap’s change of heart.  On the last day of April a small party of men, women, and children, including almost all of Logan’s kin, left his camp and crossed the river to visit Greathouse, as had been their custom; for he made a trade of selling rum to the savages, though Cresap had notified him to stop.  The whole party were plied with liquor, and became helplessly drunk, in which condition Greathouse and his associated criminals fell on and massacred them, nine souls in all.[30] It was an inhuman and revolting deed, which should consign the names of the perpetrators to eternal infamy.

At once the frontier was in a blaze, and the Indians girded themselves for revenge.  The Mingos sent out runners to the other tribes, telling of the butchery, and calling on all the red men to join together for immediate and bloody vengeance.[31] They confused the two massacres, attributing both to Cresap, whom they well knew as a warrior;[32] and their women for long afterwards scared the children into silence by threatening them with Cresap’s name as with that of a monster.[33] They had indeed been brutally wronged; yet it must be remembered that they themselves were the first aggressors.  They had causelessly murdered and robbed many whites, and now their sins had recoiled on the heads of the innocent of their own race.  The conflict could not in any event have been delayed long; the frontiersmen were too deeply and too justly irritated.  These particular massacres, however discreditable to those taking part in them, were the occasions, not the causes, of the war; and though they cast a dark shade on the conduct of the whites, they do not relieve the red men from the charge of having committed earlier, more cruel, and quite as wanton outrages.

Conolly, an irritable but irresolute man, was appalled by the storm he had helped raise.  He meanly disclaimed all responsibility for Cresap’s action,[34] and deposed him from his command of rangers; to which, however, he was soon restored by Lord Dunmore.  Both the earl and his lieutenant, however, united in censuring severely Greathouse’s deed.[35] Conolly, throughout May, held a series of councils with the Delawares and Iroquois, in which he disclaimed and regretted the outrages, and sought for peace.[36] To one of these councils the Delaware chief, Killbuck, with other warriors, sent a “talk” or “speech in writing"[37] disavowing the deeds of one of their