[92] Croghan arrived at Fort Pitt, February 28, 1765, and from then until his departure was constantly occupied with Indian transactions in preparation for his journey. See Pennsylvania Colonial Records, ix, pp. 250-264; also Withers’s Early History of Western Pennsylvania, app., pp. 166-179.—Ed.
[93] Little Beaver Creek (near the western border of Pennsylvania) and Yellow Creek (in Ohio) were much frequented by Indians. On the former, Half King had a hunting cabin. Logan, the noted Mingo chief, lived at the mouth of the latter. Opposite, upon the Virginia shore, occurred the massacre of Logan’s family (April 30, 1774), which was one of the opening events of Lord Dunmore’s War. See Withers’s Chronicles of Border Warfare (Thwaites’s ed., Cincinnati, 1895), p. 150, notes.—Ed.
[94] The village here described was Mingo Town on Mingo bottom, situated at the present Mingo Junction, Ohio. It is not to be confused with the Mingo bottom opposite the mouth of Yellow Creek. The former town was prominent as a rendezvous for border war-parties in the Revolutionary period. From this point, started the rabble that massacred the Moravian Indians in 1782. Colonel Crawford set out from here, in May of the same year, on his ill-fated expedition against the Sandusky Indians. See Withers’s Chronicles, chap. 13.
Possibly the chief who joined Croghan at this point was Logan, since the former had known him in his earlier home on the Susquehanna, near Sunbury.—Ed.
[95] Buffalo Creek is in Brooke County, West Virginia, with the town of Wellsburg located at its mouth. The first settlers arrived about 1769. Fat Meat Creek is not identified; from the distances given, it might be Big Grave Creek, in Marshall County, West Virginia, or Pipe Creek, nearly opposite, in Belmont County, Ohio.—Ed.
[96] The “Long Reach” lies between Fishing Creek and the Muskingum, sixteen and a half miles in a nearly straight line to the southwest.—Ed.
[97] The French called the Muskingum Yanangué-kouan—the river of the Tobacco (Petun-Huron) Indians. Céloron (1749) left at the mouth of this river, one of his plates, which was found in 1798, and is now in possession of the American Antiquarian Society, at Worcester, Massachusetts. Croghan had frequently been on the Muskingum, where as early as 1750, he had a trading house. The inhabitants at that time appear to have been Wyandots; but after the French and Indian War the Delawares retreated thither, and built their towns on the upper Muskingum. Later, the Moravian missionaries removed their converts thither, and erected upon the banks of this river their towns, Salem, Schönbrunn, and Gnadenhütten. In 1785, Fort Harmar was placed at its mouth; and thither, three years later, came the famous colony of New England Revolutionary soldiers, under the leadership of Rufus Putnam, which founded Marietta.—Ed.
[98] The Little Kanawha was the terminus of the exploring expedition of George Rogers Clark and Jones in 1772. They reported unfavorably in regard to the lands; but settlers soon began to occupy them, and they were a part of the grant given to Trent, Croghan, and others at the treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) as a reparation for their losses in the previous wars. About the time of Croghan’s visit, Captain Bull, a well-known Delaware Indian of New York, removed to the Little Kanawha, and in 1772 his village, Bulltown, was the scene of a revolting massacre of friendly Indians by brutal white borderers.—Ed.
[99] Hockhocking is the local Indian name for a bottle-shaped gourd, to which they likened the course of this river. Its chief historical event is connected with Lord Dunmore’s War. Nine years after this voyage of Croghan, Dunmore descended the Ohio with his flotilla, and disembarking at the river with his army of regulars and frontiersmen—Clark, Cresap, Kenton, and Girty among the number—marched overland to the Scioto, leaving Fort Gower here to guard his rear. Signs of the earthwork of this fortification are still visible. At this place, on the return journey, the Virginia officers of the army drew up resolutions of sympathy with the Continental Congress then in session at Philadelphia.—Ed.
[100] The “Big Bend” of the river is that now known as Pomeroy’s Bend, from the Ohio town at its upper point. Alum Hill was probably West Columbia, Mason County, West Virginia. See Lewis, History of West Virginia (Philadelphia, 1889), p. 109.—Ed.