Capt. Bull was a Delaware chief whose original village of Oghkwaga was on Unadilla Kiver, an eastern branch of the Susquehanna, in what is now Boone county, N. Y. He had been the prime mover in an attempt to interest the Delawares in Pontiac’s conspiracy (1763). In March, 1764, a strong party of whites and friendly Indians were sent out to capture him, by Sir William Johnson, English Indian superintendent in New York. After a sharp struggle, Bull and a number of his adherents were captured and conveyed in irons to New York City, where they were imprisoned for a time, but finally discharged. The Delaware towns on the Unadilla having been burned, Bull and five families of his relatives settled what the whites called Bulltown, on the Little Kanawha. This was at a salt spring about a mile and a quarter below the present Bulltown P. O., Braxton county, Va. Capt. Bull and his people were inoffensive, and very friendly to their white neighbors, as our author says.––R. G. T.
Adam Stroud lived on Elk River, a few miles south of Indian Bulltown. The massacre of his family––his wife and seven children––occurred in June, 1772. Shawnees were the murderers, and not Bull’s people.––R. G. T.
Mr. McWhorter writes me that two others were Jesse Hughes and John Cutright (corruption of Cartwright?), both of them settlers on Hacker’s Creek. Hughes was a noted border scout, but a man of fierce, unbridled passions, and so confirmed an Indian hater that no tribesman, however peaceful his record, was safe in his presence. Some of the most cruel acts on the frontier are by tradition attributed to this man. The massacre of the Bulltown Indians was accompanied by atrocities as repulsive as any reported by captives in Indian camps; of these there had long been traditions, but details were not fully known until revealed by Cutright upon his death-bed in 1852, when he had reached the age of 105 years. Want of space alone prevents me from giving Mr. McWhorter’s narrative of Hughes’s long and bloody career. “Hughes died,” he says, “in Jackson county, W. Va., at a date unknown to me, but in very old age. While he was a great scout and Indian trader, he never headed an expedition of note. This no doubt was because of his fierce temperament, and bad reputation among his own countrymen.” In studying the annals of the border, we must not fail to note that here and there were many savage-hearted men among the white settlers, whose deeds were quite as atrocious as any attributed to the red-skins. Current histories of Indian warfare seldom recognize this fact.––R. G. T.
Lord Dunmore’s War (1774) was a natural outgrowth of the strained relations which had long existed between the savages and the white colonists in their midst. As our author has made clear, minor hostilities had broken out here and there ever since the Pontiac uprising, but there had been no general campaign since Bouquet’s treaty in 1764. Affairs had come to that pass by the early spring of 1774, that diplomacy was no longer possible, and an Indian war was inevitable. It was merely a question of detail, as to how and when. The immediate cause of precipitation––not the cause of the war, for that lay deeper––was the territorial dispute over the Ft. Pitt region, between Virginia and Pennsylvania. Dunmore, as royal governor of Virginia, had several reasons for bringing matters to a head––he was largely interested in land speculations under Virginia patents that would be vitiated if Pennsylvania, now becoming aggressive, should succeed in planting her official machinery at Ft. Pitt, which was garrisoned by Virginia; again, his colonists were in a revolutionary frame of mind, and he favored a distraction in the shape of a popular Indian war; finally, it seemed as though a successful raid by Virginia militia would clinch Virginia’s hold on the country and the treaty of peace that must follow would widen the area of provincial lands and encourage Western settlements. April 25, 1774, he issued a proclamation in which, after reference to Pennsylvania’s claims, it was asserted that Ft. Pitt was “in danger of some annoyance from the Indians,” and he called on his local military commandant, the fire-eating Dr. John Connolly, “to embody a sufficient number of men to repel any insult.” Connolly, evidently as part of a preconcerted plan, at once (April 26) issued a circular letter to the excited borderers, which was well calculated to arouse them, being in effect a declaration of war against the Indians. The very next day occurred the Pipe Creek affair, then came the Logan tragedy at Baker’s Bottom, three days later, and at once the war was on at full-head.––R. G. T.
Of John Findlay (so he signed his name), “the precursor and pilot of Daniel Boone to Kentucky,” but little is known and less has been published. Apparently he was a native of the north of Ireland. In early life he emigrated to the neighborhood of Carlisle, Cumberland county, Pa., a district almost wholly settled by Scotch-Irish Protestants. In February, 1752, we find him a trader among the Shawnees; the following year, he was robbed and driven off. It is probable that he served in the Pennsylvania frontier militia from the opening of the French and Indian War (1754). Boone met him on the Braddock campaign (1755), and they became fast friends. Findlay had already (1752) been in Kentucky as far as the Falls of the Ohio, in the course of his ramblings as a trader, and inspired Boone with an intense desire to seek this El Dorado of the West. It was in 1767, when settled near the head of the Yadkin River, that Boone first tried to reach Kentucky by way of the Sandy, but failed. In the winter of 1768-69, Findlay, now a peddler, with a horse to carry his traps, appeared at Boone’s cabin on the Yadkin, and the two old comrades had a happy time rehearsing their various adventures during the thirteen years of separation. An expedition to Kentucky was agreed upon, and the party set out from Boone’s cabin, May 1, 1769; it was composed of Findlay, now advanced in years, Daniel Boone, the latter’s brother-in-law, John Stuart, and three Yadkin neighbors, Joseph Holden, James Mooney, and William Cooley. The story of their expedition through Cumberland Gap, and their long hunt, is now familiar to readers of Western history. Their principal camp was probably on Red Lick Fork of Station Camp Creek. In December, Stuart and Boone were captured by Indians, but escaped early in January (1770), and on rejoining their comrades on Rockcastle River found that Daniel’s brother, Squire, had arrived with fresh horses and traps from the North Carolina home; and with him was Alexander Neely, whom Squire had found on New (Great Kanawha) River. Findlay, Holden, Mooney, and Cooley now elected to return home, leaving the others to spend a longer period in Kentucky; Findlay took the left-hand road through the West Virginia settlements, to Pennsylvania, and the others, turning to the right, wended their way to North Carolina through Cumberland Gap. Not long after this, Stuart was killed by Indians, while alone in the woods, and Neely, discouraged by his fate, returned home. The story, often copied from Withers, that Neely was killed by a wolf, is erroneous. As for Findlay, he appears to have again become an Indian trader in Western Pennsylvania; for late in 1771 he is reported to have been robbed of $500 worth of goods, by a Seneca war party raiding the Youghiogheny district. There is a tradition that not long after this he “was lost in the wilds of the West.” Holden and Cooley spent the rest of their days on the Upper Yadkin. Mooney was killed at the battle of Point Pleasant (1774).––R. G. T.