Courtesy Cook Collection, Valentine Museum. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Sept. 6, 1866
Bacon's Castle, Surry County, Virginia
From the Church Catalogue
Photo by T.L. Williams
But since it was now too late to restore peace, the Virginians and Marylanders agreed upon a joint campaign to force the Susquehannocks to leave the region and give hostages for their peaceful conduct. It was late in September when the Maryland troops, under Major Thomas Trueman, arrived on the north bank of the Piscataway Creek, the site of Fort Washington. A few days later a body of Virginians under Colonel John Washington, great-grandfather of George Washington, and Colonel Isaac Allerton, landed from a fleet of sloops.
Across the creek, on a low bit of land, protected by patches of swamp, the Susquehannocks had built a fort. Had it been no more than a round stockade, after the traditional Indian style, it could have been taken with ease. But the Marylanders themselves had taught the Susquehannocks the art of fortification. So they had laid out a large square, raised embankments on all four sides, with an outer defence of palisades, and a ditch between. At each corner was a bastion, from which an attacking force could be enfiladed. Lacking artillery to batter down these works the three commanders decided to invest the fort and starve out the defenders.
In the meanwhile Major Trueman invited the "great men" to a parley. When five of them came out, he charged them with recent murders in Maryland. The Indians placed the blame on prowling bands of Senecas. This was an obvious lie, for Susquehannocks had been seen wearing the clothing of some of the murdered whites, and raiding parties had come directly to the fort, their canoes laden with beef. Seeing himself in imminent danger, one of the Indians produced a medal bearing the image of Lord Baltimore, and a paper which he said was a pledge from a former governor of Maryland to protect the tribe from harm. Despite this, and despite the fact that the "great men" had come under a truce to discuss peace, Trueman ordered his men to knock them on the head.
When word of this outrage reached Governor Berkeley he was furious. "If they had killed my grandfather and my grandmother, my father and mother and all my friends, yet if they had come to treat of peace, they ought to have gone in peace," he blurted out. Major Trueman was impeached in Maryland, fined and sentenced to imprisonment, but this did not undo the wrong or prevent the terrible consequences.
The Indians in the fort put up a desperate resistance. Weeks passed, and they still held out. To every suggestion of parley they asked: "Where are our great men?" At last, when "brought to great distress" through hunger, they broke through the encircling English with their wives and children, and vanished into the forest. Making their way up the Maryland side of the river, they crossed over to Virginia, and began a series of raids upon the frontier plantations on the upper Rappahannock and Mattapony rivers.
Within a few days they had killed sixty persons. The fortunate ones were those who fell at the first volley, for the miserable captives were subjected to tortures that would have baffled the imagination of a Dante. "Some they roast alive, offering their flesh to such English prisoners as they keep languishing by a lingering death, pulling their nails off, making holes and sticking feathers in their flesh. Some they rip open and make run their guts round trees."