Shortly after this Cresap and his band started to Logan's camp, then located at Yellow Creek, some fifty miles distant. After marching several miles they began to reflect on what they were about to do; calling a halt, they discussed the fact that the camp they were going to attack consisted of friendly Indians, and mainly women and children; their better nature asserted itself, and they immediately returned home.
"But," as Roosevelt says, "Logan's people did not profit by Cresap's change of heart. On the last day of April a small party of men, women and children, including almost all of Logan's kin, left his camp and crossed the river to visit Daniel Greathouse, as had been their custom; for he made a trade of selling rum to the savages, though Cresap had notified him to stop. The whole party were plied with liquor, and became helplessly drunk, in which condition Greathouse and his associate criminals fell on and massacred them, nine souls in all. It was an inhuman and revolting deed, which should consign the names of the perpetrators to eternal infamy."
The whole family of Logan perished in this and other similar massacres; in one of the last were his brother and sister.
It will excite the wonder of no man that Logan from this moment breathed nothing but vengeance against the treacherous and inhuman whites. A general Indian war immediately followed. Logan was the foremost in leading his countrymen to the slaughter of their perfidious enemies. On July 12, with a party of only eight warriors, he attacked a settlement on the Muskingum, captured two prisoners and carried them off. When they arrived at an Indian town, they delivered them to the inhabitants, who at once prepared to put them to death by torture. Logan, however, in the heat of his vindictive feelings, displayed the humanity of his nature. He cut the cords of one of the prisoners, a man named Robinson, who was about to be burned at the stake, and saved his life at the risk of his own. A few days afterward he suddenly appeared to this prisoner with some gunpowder, ink and a wild-goose quill, wherewith to make a pen, and dictated to him a note. This note was afterward tied to a war-club and left in the house of a settler, whose entire family had been butchered by the savages. It was brief, but written with ferocious directness to the man whom he wrongly believed to be the author of his heart-rending troubles. It read as follows:
"Captain Cresap"
"What did you kill my people on Yellow Creek for? The white people killed my kin at Conestoga, a great while ago, and I thought nothing of that. But you killed my kin again on Yellow Creek, and took my cousin prisoner. Then I thought I must kill too; and I have been three times to war since; but all the Indians are not angry, only myself.
"July 21, 1774. Captain John Logan."
The frontier was now in a blaze, and the Indians made preparations for war. The Mingos, Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots and outlying Iroquois, especially the Senecas, together with a party of warriors of the Miamis from western Ohio, all banded themselves together, under the command of Cornstalk, the great Shawnee chieftain, and Logan.
Meantime Governor Dunmore was making ready a formidable army with which to overwhelm the hostile Indians. The plan was to raise three thousand men; one half, or the northern wing, was to be under the command of Lord Dunmore in person, while the other, composed entirely of border men, living among the mountains west of the Blue Ridge, was under Gen. Andrew Lewis.