McWhorter: “Mrs. Cunningham stated that an Indian stood over her with an uplifted tomahawk, to prevent her from crying out. At times, the whites were upon the very rock above their heads.”––R. G. T.
McWhorter says local tradition has it that the Indians remained in the cave a night and a day; they departed before daylight, during the second night. Mrs. Cunningham related that just before leaving, the wounded brave was borne from the cave by his fellows, and she never again saw him; her opinion was, that he was then dead, and his body was sunk in a neighboring pool.––R. G. T.
Mrs. Cunningham had been over three years with the savages, when she was taken to a great Indian conference held at the foot of the Maumee rapids, “at or near the site of the present Perrysburgh, Ohio,” in the autumn of 1788. Girty brought the attention of McKee, then a British Indian agent, to the matter, and McKee furnished the trinkets which constituted the ransom.––R. G. T.
See McKnight’s Our Western Border, pp. 714, 716.––R. G. T.
Superstition was rife among the Scotch-Irish borderers. McWhorter writes: “On the day before the capture, a little bird came into Mrs. Cunningham’s cabin and fluttered around the room. Ever afterwards, she grew frightened whenever a bird would enter her house. The fear that such an occurrence would bring bad luck to a household, was an old and widely-spread superstition.”––R. G. T.