When Crum reached the bend of the river, a mile below his mill, at a time when an attack from Indians would probably have been the last thing he would have thought of, he heard the sharp crack of a rifle, and on looking around saw two Indians on the hill-side. He dropped his fish, and opened the pan of his rifle to look at the priming, when he noticed that he was shot through the right thumb—at least it was so conjectured. Catching a glimpse of one of the Indians, he attempted to fire, but the blood of his wound had saturated the priming. The Indians noticed his unavailing effort to shoot, and, probably thinking that he was trying to intimidate them with an empty gun, jumped into the road. One of them, it appeared, was armed with a rifle, the other with a heavy war-club. The latter, it is supposed, approached him from behind, and dealt him a blow upon the skull, which felled him, and the blow was evidently followed up until the entire back part of his head was crushed in the most shocking manner, after which they scalped him, and disappeared.
When found, (which was supposed to be within two hours after the murder,) Crum was lying with his face to the ground, his rifle by his side, and the Indian war-club, clotted with blood and brains, lying across his body,—a sad sight for his wife, who was among the first on the spot after the tragedy.
This murder, committed in open daylight on a frequented road, in the very heart of a thickly-populated country, did not fail to produce the most intense excitement, and a party of rangers started at once after the marauders. They soon got upon their trail, and followed them to the top of the mountain, getting sight of them several times; but they were always out of rifle-range. They knew they were pursued, and took such a route as the rangers could not follow, and so eluded them, and carried in triumph to the British garrison at Detroit the last scalp taken by the red men in the Juniata Valley.
PULPIT ROCKS, WARRIOR RIDGE.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
WARRIOR RIDGE — WARRIOR'S MARK — JOB CHILLAWAY, SHANEY JOHN, AND CAPTAIN LOGAN, THE LAST RED MEN IN THE JUNIATA VALLEY.
Warrior Ridge, between Alexandria and Huntingdon, derives its name from an Indian path which ran along the summit of it. The Pulpit Rocks, not unlike the altars of the Druids, shaped into fantastic forms by the hand of nature, as well as the wild romantic scenery around them, at once suggest the idea of a place of meeting of the warriors,—a spot where the councils of the brave were held, with the greensward of the mountain for a carpet and the blue vault of heaven for a canopy. Were we not so well aware of the fact that the Indians preferred the lowlands of the valleys for places of abode, we could almost fancy the neighborhood of Pulpit Rocks to have been a glorious abiding-place; but of the occurrences and events that took place on the ridge we are in hopeless ignorance. Had some Indian historian of an early day transmitted to posterity, either by written or oral tradition, one-half the events of Warrior Ridge, we might add considerable interest to these pages; but as it is, we must content ourself, if not our readers, with this brief notice of the famous Warrior Ridge.
Warrior's Mark was another celebrated place for the Indians. It lies upon a flat piece of table-land, and is just the kind of a place where savages would be likely to meet to debate measures of great importance and to concoct schemes for their future movements. The name of the place originated from the fact of certain oak-trees in the vicinity having a crescent or half-moon cut upon them with hatchets, so deep that traces can still be seen of them, or, at least, could be some years ago. The signification of them was known to the Indians alone; but it is evident that some meaning was attached to them, for, during the Revolution, every time a band of savages came into the valley one or more fresh warrior marks were put upon the trees. The Indian town stood upon the highway or path leading from Kittaning, through Penn's Valley, to the Susquehanna. It was still considerable of a village when the white men first settled in the neighborhood, but immediately on the breaking out of the Revolution the Indians destroyed it, and moved to Ohio, and at this day there is not a trace of its existence left.
The first white settlers in Warrior's Mark were the Ricketts family. They were all wild, roving fellows, who loved the woods better than civilization; and their whole occupation, over and above tilling a very small patch of land, appeared to be hunting for wild game. Their arrival was followed by two or three other families; and when the Indian troubles commenced, the house of Ricketts was converted into a fortress, and the men turned their attention to protecting the frontier. One of them—Captain Elijah Ricketts—became quite an active and prominent man.