"For the scalp of every Indian woman, fifty dollars."
Let this fixed price for scalps not stand upon the pages of history as a stigma against the peaceable and non-resistant Quakers of the province; for, at the time these bounties were offered, John and Thomas Penn had abjured the habits, customs, and religion of that people.
Fort Shirley was built in Aughwick Valley in the fall of 1755, and the winter following Crogan resigned his commission, after which the command was given to Captain Hugh Mercer.
Tradition says that one or two very serious battles were fought in Aughwick, after Fort Shirley was erected; but the accounts of them are so vague that we can give nothing like reliable information touching them.
In January, 1756, two Indians named Lackin, brothers, who professed to be friendly, came to what was then still called Crogan's Fort. The commander of the fort made them some few trifling presents, and plied them well with rum, when they promised to bring in a large number of prisoners and scalps. On leaving the fort, they fell in with a soldier, whom they invited to accompany them a short distance and they would give him some rum. To this the soldier assented, and, after getting out of sight of the fort, one of them suddenly turned and stabbed the soldier in the side with a scalping-knife. A man passing at the time of the occurrence immediately alarmed the garrison, and a posse of thirteen men sallied out; but when they came up near the Indians the latter suddenly turned and fired upon the soldiers, wounding one of them in the thigh. The savages were then surrounded, and one of them shot; the other they attempted to take to the fort alive, but he acted so outrageously that one of the soldiers beat his brains out with the stock of his musket. The Lackins were rather worthless fellows, and it required no wampum, or even coin, to dry up the tears of their friends.
Fort Shirley was abandoned for a while after the burning of Fort Granville, by order of Governor Morris, but the importance of the point prevented it from standing idle long. We hear of some few murders committed near the Three Springs of the valley at a later day, but no attack was made in the neighborhood during the second Indian war, as the entire valley was well protected by the friendly Indians of the Six Nations.
The Delawares and Shawnees, or at least a great portion of them, left the valley in 1754-55-56, and before 1761 all had disappeared. But to the friendly Indian the beautiful Aughwick was a favorite haunt until the Anglo-Saxon fairly ploughed and harrowed him out of his home and his hunting-grounds. The last of the Six Nations left Aughwick for Cattaraugus in 1771.
CHAPTER XII.
RAYSTOWN BRANCH — EARLY SETTLEMENT OF RAYSTOWN — GENERAL FORBES'S EXPEDITION — COLONELS WASHINGTON AND BOQUET — COLONEL ARMSTRONG'S LETTER — SMITH AND HIS BLACK BOYS — BLOODY RUN — ROBBERY — INDIAN MASSACRES — REVOLUTIONARY LIEUTENANTS OF BEDFORD COUNTY, ETC.
The earliest settlement on the Raystown Branch of the Juniata was made by a man named Ray, in 1751, who built three cabins near where Bedford now stands. In 1755 the province agreed to open a wagon-road from Fort Louden, in Cumberland county, to the forks of the Youghiogheny River. For this purpose three hundred men were sent up, but for some cause or other the project was abandoned.