While preparations were being made the Indians struck a blow against the border. Early in September, Captain Andrew Bradt and forty Canadian Rangers and 238 Indians, Wyandot, Delaware and Shawnee, set out from Upper Sandusky to attack Wheeling.
Fort Henry, at that place, was defended by twenty-seven men, only eighteen of whom were fit for duty. One swivel gun, which had been discarded by the French and thrown into the river when Fort Duquesne was evacuated in 1758, had been recovered by the pioneers and again set up.
All the inhabitants of that neighborhood flocked to the stockade on the news of the approach of the enemy. Colonel Ebenezer Zane was in command of the garrison.
Captain Bradt’s force crossed the Ohio and paraded in front of Fort Henry in the evening of Wednesday, September 11. The captain displayed the British flag and demanded a surrender, which was promptly rejected, and soon firing was opened on the fort from long range.
At midnight the savages attempted to carry the fort by storm, but were repulsed. The French swivel gun proved to be more than a relic and rendered a good account of itself, and especially as the Indians were much afraid of any sort of cannon.
Two more attempts to gain by storm were made before daybreak, and both proved futile. The enemy, however, kept up a steady fire during the day. Captain Bradt sent a Negro to the fort with a second demand for surrender, and during Thursday night a fourth desperate attempt to take the fort by storm was made.
Again the brave riflemen repulsed the savage horde and broke their spirit, and they retired and recrossed the Ohio. Only one defender was wounded in the foot.
After the failure to invest Wheeling, seventy of the Indians who cut loose from the main force and went for scalps and plunder, attacked the blockhouse of Abraham Rice, on Buffalo Creek, within the present Donegal Township, Washington County.
Six men in that blockhouse successfully defended it from 2 o’clock in the afternoon of September 13 until 2 o’clock the following morning. They killed four Indians and lost one of their own number, George Felebaum, who was shot in the brain while looking through a loophole.
The savages killed many cattle and burned the barn. On their return toward the Ohio they met and killed two settlers who were going to the relief of Rice’s blockhouse. This was the last invasion of Western Pennsylvania by a large body of Indians.