“July 21, 1774.  CAPTAIN JOHN LOGAN."[54]

There is a certain deliberate and blood-thirsty earnestness about this letter which must have shown the whites clearly, if they still needed to be shown, what bitter cause they had to rue the wrongs that had been done to Logan.

The Shawnees and Mingos were soon joined by many of the Delawares and outlying Iroquois, especially Senecas; as well as by the Wyandots and by large bands of ardent young warriors from among the Algonquin tribes along the Miami, the Wabash, and the Lakes.  Their inroads on the settlements were characterized, as usual, by extreme stealth and merciless ferocity.  They stole out of the woods with the silent cunning of wild beasts, and ravaged with a cruelty ten times greater.  They burned down the lonely log-huts, ambushed travellers, shot the men as they hunted or tilled the soil, ripped open the women with child, and burned many of their captives at the stake.  Their noiseless approach enabled them to fall on the settlers before their presence was suspected; and they disappeared as suddenly as they had come, leaving no trail that could be followed.  The charred huts and scalped and mangled bodies of their victims were left as ghastly reminders of their visit, the sight stirring the backwoodsmen to a frenzy of rage all the more terrible in the end, because it was impotent for the time being.  Generally they made their escape successfully; occasionally they were beaten off or overtaken and killed or scattered.

When they met armed woodsmen the fight was always desperate.  In May, a party of hunters and surveyors, being suddenly attacked in the forest, beat off their assailants and took eight scalps, though with a loss of nine of their own number.[55] Moreover, the settlers began to band together to make retaliatory inroads; and while Lord Dunmore was busily preparing to strike a really effective blow, he directed the frontiersmen of the northwest to undertake a foray, so as to keep the Indians employed.  Accordingly, they gathered together, four hundred strong,[56] crossed the Ohio, in the end of July, and marched against a Shawnee town on the Muskingum.  They had a brisk skirmish with the Shawnees, drove them back, and took five scalps, losing two men killed and five wounded.  Then the Shawnees tried to ambush them, but their ambush was discovered, and they promptly fled, after a slight skirmish, in which no one was killed but one Indian, whom Cresap, a very active and vigorous man, ran down and slew with his tomahawk.[57] The Shawnee village was burned, seventy acres of standing corn were cut down, and the settlers returned in triumph.  On the march back they passed through the towns of the peaceful Moravian Delawares, to whom they did no harm.

1.  “American Archives,” 4th series, Vol.  I., p. 454.  Report of Penn.  Commissioners, June 27, 1774.

2.  Maryland was also involved, along her western frontier, in border difficulties with her neighbors; the first we hear of the Cresap family is their having engaged in a real skirmish with the Pennsylvanian authorities.  See also “Am.  Arch.,” IV., Vol.  I., 547.