When daylight came, Mr. Campbell and his two servants scoured the western mountain side in search of the other horse and found him. He had been shot through the fleshy part of the neck and the halter rope was entangled in a laurel bush.
While they were examining his wounds, Jerry, who had followed them, kept up an incessant barking and [pg 115] growling in a thick cluster of laurels. Investigating the cause they found an Indian, shot through the chest and murmuring in unconscious monotone.
Richard said: “Let’s kill him, he is going to die any way and a dead Indian is always a good Indian.” But Mr. Campbell forbade it, not only from kindness of heart but with the hope that from him he might learn news of the children.
He was placed upon the horse; and supported on either side by his captors was carried to the Campbell home. There, exhausted and delirious, he was put to bed in a small shed used as a store room.
After two weeks’ careful nursing he began to recover and shortly after Mr. Campbell was told by the Valley doctor: “In a few days you will have a dangerous Indian on your hands, but he is yet too weak to leave his bed.”
The morning after the doctor’s visit Mr. Campbell found the bed empty and the patient gone. Scratched on the wall in charcoal, he read: “One white man good to Indian; before cahonks fly bring back papoose. Tah-gah-jute.”
Tah-gah-jute, son of Skikellemy, a Cayuga Indian chief, was born in 1725, at Shamokin, on the Susquehanna. He was given the name of Logan, after John Logan, then Secretary of the Pennsylvania Colony, a man who many times had shown himself a friend of the Cayugas.
Logan grew to be a man of intelligence and fine personal appearance; and until he moved westward on the Ohio River in 1770, was of good personal habits. There, because of his friendliness with the whites, he, with his family, usually camped in the neighborhood of the stations [pg 116] of the white traders and by the association not only he but his family acquired habits of intemperance.
On the twentieth of April, 1774, they moved to the mouth of Yellow Creek, on the north bank of the Ohio, just across the river from Joshua Baker’s joint and trading station.
Shortly afterwards some land jobbers near the month of Sandy Creek were robbed by a band of Indians. In retaliation Captain Cresap gathered a gang of men and began killing Indians in the neighborhood of Wheeling. On Grave Creek, below Wheeling, they killed two of Logan’s kinsmen. Hearing a rumor of this and wishing to ascertain the truth, Logan on the twenty-seventh of April accompanied by two braves traveled down to Grave Creek. In the meantime, Captain Cresap and Daniel Greathouse with their gang came to Baker’s.