I would have visited it; but I was afraid the boat in which I was traveling would leave the wharf by some means sooner than was expected, and it would be a sad thing to be left in port, with our trunks all on board. Many of the company did venture, however, and they returned, too, in good time.
Bridgeport, a small but flourishing village, is on the Ohio side of the river, just opposite Wheeling. This whole region is noted for burnings and massacres, during the wars of our country with the Indians little more than fifty years ago.
One anecdote I will relate very briefly. In March, 1793, about fifty-nine years ago, as two brothers by the name of Johnson, one of them twelve, the other nine years of age, were playing by the side of the river some ten or twelve miles above Wheeling, they were suddenly seized by two Indians and carried about six miles into the woods. Here the savages built a fire and halted for the night. When they lay down to rest, each Indian took a boy on his arm. As may easily be conjectured, however, the boys did not sleep. Finding the Indians to be very sound asleep, they concerted a plan, young as they were, for destroying them and effecting their escape. The plan succeeded. One of the Indians was shot with his own rifle; the other was killed with a tomahawk. The boys returned to their own homes the next day in safety.
CHAPTER XIII. LOGAN, THE MINGO CHIEF.
On board our steamboat was one man, a citizen of Cincinnati, whose extensive and intimate acquaintance with the country through which we were traveling made his society both interesting and valuable.
As we were passing between some very abrupt hills, he took occasion to remark that all this was once the hunting ground of Logan, the celebrated Mingo chief, whose sad story is familiar, as I suppose, to nearly every school-boy in the country.
Logan was a savage; but he was, at the same time, a man, and had a man's heart. Indians are men, and have the feelings of men; and one cannot help pitying them. How greatly to be regretted that they were not treated, by everybody, as William Penn treated them, in and about Pennsylvania!