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 rôle 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 1758. That the Indians came in amity and apprehended no treachery was proved by the presence of the women. Gibson's wife carried her half-caste baby in her shawl. The disreputable traders plied their guests with drink to the point of intoxication and then murdered them. King shot the first man and, when he fell, cut his throat, saying that he had served many a deer in that fashion. Gibson's Indian wife fled and was shot down in the clearing. A man followed to dispatch her and her baby. She held the child up to him pleading, with her last breath, that he would spare it because it was not Indian but “one of yours.” The mother dead, the child was later sent to Gibson. Twelve Indians in all were killed.
Meanwhile Croghan had persuaded the Iroquois to peace. With the help of David Zeisberger, the Moravian missionary, and White Eyes, a Delaware chief, he and Dunmore had won over the Delaware warriors. In the Cherokee councils, Oconostota demanded that the treaty of peace signed in 1761 be kept. The Shawanoes, however, led by Cornstalk, were implacable; and they had as allies the Ottawas and Mingos, who had entered the council with them.
A famous chief of the day and one of great influence over the Indians, and also among the white officials who dealt with Indian affairs, was Tach-nech-dor-us, or Branching Oak of the Forest, a Mingo who had taken the name of Logan out of compliment to James Logan of Pennsylvania. Chief Logan had recently met with so much reproach from his red brothers for his loyalty to the whites that he had departed from the Mingo town at Yellow Creek. But, learning that his tribe had determined to assist the Shawanoes and had already taken some white scalps, he repaired to the place where the Mingos were holding their war council to exert his powers for peace. There, in presence of the warriors, after swaying them from their purpose by those oratorical gifts which gave him his influence and his renown, he took the war hatchet that had already killed, and buried it in proof that vengeance was appeased. Upon this scene there entered a Mingo from Yellow Creek with the news of the murders committed there by the three traders. The Indian whose throat had been slit as King had served deer was Logan's brother. Another man slain was his kinsman. The woman with the baby was his sister. Logan tore up from the earth the bloody tomahawk and, raising it above his head, swore that he would not rest till he had taken ten white lives to pay for each one of his kin. Again the Mingo warriors declared for war and this time were not dissuaded. But Logan did not join this red army. He went out alone to wreak his vengeance, slaying and scalping.