Episode 21: The Vengeance

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode 21: The Vengeance

Written by Jim Ambuske, Ph.D.
Published November 25, 2025

JIM AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

AMBUSKE 

Soyechtowa and three other Indigenous warriors watched in silence from near the banks of Sinking Creek in western Virginia as Balthazar Lybrook walked to his grist mill. The mill sat where the creek entered the New River. The sounds of laughter and the swift footsteps of children drowned out the sound of Lybrook’s own boots as they headed for the creek to play in the shallow water and enjoy the pleasant day. It was Sunday, August 7, 1774.

AMBUSKE 

For several days now, Lybrook, his wife, Catherine, their children, and the Snidow and McGriff families had been taking refuge inside Lybrook’s blockhouse, a hastily-constructed fort built to protect themselves from Indigenous war parties then raiding throughout the backcountry. In recent days, provincial militia had seen signs of Soyechtowa and his men in the area: tracks through the woods, scattered sittings, a burned home.

AMBUSKE 

Twenty years earlier, such raids had devastated settler communities in the Virginia and Pennsylvania backcountries during the Seven Years’ War, a violence renewed in its wake during Pontiac’s Uprising, a violence that had returned in recent years as new treaties redrew the border between British and Indigenous America, intensifying a rivalry between Pennsylvanian and Virginia that propelled settlers west toward the Ohio Country, into Native homelands.

AMBUSKE 

Early that spring, Virginians – known to Indigenous people in the region as the “Long Knives” – had lured several Mingo men and women into a trap. The Mingos, a community of mostly Seneca and Cayuga peoples from the Six Nations Iroquois, had migrated west into the Ohio Country in the mid-eighteenth century.

AMBUSKE 

One Mingo village sat near the mouth of Yellow Creek, where it empties into the Ohio River, over 300 miles north of the Lybrook farm. On April 30, 1774, several unsuspecting Mingo canoed down the Yellow Creek and crossed the Ohio River to visit a tavern built along the riverbank, where the Long Knives massacred eight of them. From across the river, the attackers heard the wails of Mingo women, who knew what the Virginians had done.

AMBUSKE 

Soyechtowa’s mother, brother, and sister were among the dead. Four months later, and 300 miles to the south, their deaths still haunted him as he watched Balthazar Lybrook head for his grist mill and the children splash in Sinking Creek.

AMBUSKE 

White settlers knew Soyechtowa as James Logan, his English name, or simply, Logan. He was born in the 1720s to Neanoma, his Cayuga mother, and Shickellamy, his Onieda father.

AMBUSKE 

Few native leaders did more to shape the relationship between British provinces like Pennsylvania and Indigenous nations in the early eighteenth century than Shickellamy. The Six Nations Iroquois tasked Shickellamy to speak for the Shawnee and the Delaware over whom the Six Nations claimed dominion. He negotiated land sales and treaties with the Pennsylvania government that protected the Six Nations’ homelands, often at the expense of other native nations. He grew close to James Logan, the colony’s chief diplomat to Indigenous communities, and honored their friendship by giving two of his sons – including Soyechtowa – the English name Logan. 

AMBUSKE 

Shickellamy had raised his sons in that world of diplomacy, but by the early 1770s, “Shickellamy’s Way” had given over to renewed – and violent – rivalries between Virginians and Pennsylvanians for Native lands, and between Indigenous nations and white settlers for the Ohio country. That violence would claim the lives of his wife and two of his children along the banks of the Ohio River in the Yellow Creek Massacre.

AMBUSKE 

Indigenous customs permitted the aggrieved to assuage their mourning by covering the graves of the dead, and afforded them the right of revenge. That right brought Soyechtowa, the man most colonists knew as James Logan, deep into the Virginia backcountry on August 7, 1774, to the junction of Sinking Creek and the New River, to the Lybrook farm.  

AMBUSKE 

Despite the danger, the Lybrook, Snidow, and McGriff families thought it was safe enough to let their children out of the blockhouse to get some air and stretch their legs after days of confinement. 

AMBUSKE 

Balthazar Lybrook was inside his grist mill when Logan and the three other warriors, who had been watching silently nearby, sprang from their hiding place with war cries that the survivors never forgot. They descended on the eleven children playing and canoeing in the creek. The oldest child was fourteen, the youngest, mere months old. Some of them tried to run, some tried to paddle away, some were so petrified at the sight of the armed men running toward them, they could not move.

AMBUSKE 

Lybrook couldn’t hear the screams of the children over the noise of his grist mill. He had no idea anything was wrong until one of Logan’s warriors burst into the mill and shot him in the arm. He managed to evade the warrior, finding refuge in a nearby cave, and escape with his life. But only just barely.

AMBUSKE 

Most of the children did not.

AMBUSKE 

Logan and his men took seven scalps from the Lybrook farm. They departed with three other children as captives.

AMBUSKE 

But Logan did leave something behind.

AMBUSKE 

Hours after the attack, Lieutenant John Draper and a detachment of twenty militia men arrived near the scene. They had been searching for Logan and his war party since that morning. To motivate his men, the commander of the local fort had offered a £5 bounty to the first man who captured and delivered a Native person to the fort.

AMBUSKE 

They had found the war party’s tracks in the woods, but Logan and his men had cleverly concealed their movements, leaving the militiamen befuddled, and the warriors unseen. 

AMBUSKE 

But in their searching they found what Logan wanted them to find.

AMBUSKE 

Near the site of the attack, one of Draper’s men found a war club lying on the ground. It was nearly two-feet long, carved out of hardwood, with a dense ball at its top. A metal spike protruded out of it, a weapon to make short work of those who fell beneath its blow.

AMBUSKE 

On the handle, the militiaman found letters carved into the tip: “L. G.”:

AMBUSKE 

Logan.  

AMBUSKE 

The war club was a message, a statement that Logan had done what he believed he must do to avenge the deaths of his family.

AMBUSKE 

And it served as a warning to frighten others who might make war on them.  

AMBUSKE 

For at that very moment, as delegates to prepared to meet in Philadelphia for a Continental Congress to debate the course of human events in the east, the Royal Governor of the Long Knives was recruiting an army to come west, to capture the Forks of the Ohio River for Virginia, and conquer the Ohio Country for his colony once and for all.

AMBUSKE 

I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down. A podcast about the history of the American Revolution. 

AMBUSKE 

Episode 21: The Vengeance

AMBUSKE 

In the summer of 1773, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, arrived at Fort Pitt at the Forks of the Ohio River. The Scottish nobleman had once lamented his appointment as Virginia's royal governor, but the prospect of claiming the west for Virginia had given him a renewed sense of purpose. 

AMBUSKE 

In recent years, new treaties with the Susquehannock nations, the Cherokee, and the Haudenosaunee, who colonists knew as the Six Nations Iroquois, had remade the map of British America. These agreements opened up millions of acres of land in the west to white settlement, all at the expense of the Ohio nations. 

AMBUSKE 

But those treaties also drove a deeper wedge between Virginians and Pennsylvanians, who vied for possession of the backcountry. They triggered a renewed competition between the provinces in a decades-old rivalry for command and control of the rivers, the mountains, and the woods of the Ohio Country. 

AMBUSKE 

Virginians like the planter and Continental Congressman George Washington, and Pennsylvanians like the Scottish immigrant and British officer Arthur St. Clair, believed that their colonies had valid claims to the region, claims bolstered by charter rights, commerce, and war.

ROBERT PARKINSON 

The Ohio company builds a road from Cumberland, Maryland to Pittsburgh, at their own expense as a way of conducting trade, from Virginia to the forks of the Ohio but in the middle of the Seven Years' War, general Forbes cuts another road that's basically the Pennsylvania Turnpike that. Will funnel Philadelphia and Pennsylvanians to the fort and Washington when it's built in 1758 says, Uh oh, this is a big problem. My name is Robert Parkinson, and I am a professor of history at Binghamton University. Both Pennsylvania and Virginia have not only their eyes set on this as the key to a whole lot of things because of the way the river traffic works, but they both think it's theirs for different reasons. Virginia says it was ours. It was Virginians that had it, but the Pennsylvanians say no, it's ours. And as long as there are red coats in Fort Pitt, that's fine, and there's just unofficial trading going on.

AMBUSKE 

When Lord Dunmore entered the star-shaped walls of Fort Pitt in 1773, however, the Redcoats were gone. With costs mounting and unrest rising in the east, the British had withdrawn the army garrison in the west, leaving the Forks of the Ohio open for the taking. Dunmore wanted it for Virginia, to at last settle the argument with Pennsylvania, and extend the Old Dominion into new lands.

AMBUSKE 

So, why did Virginians and Pennsylvanians all but wage a civil war for control of the West? How did Indigenous calculations reshape the imperial landscape? And how did choices made in distant capitals and in diplomatic conferences transform the lives of settlers and Native peoples on the ground?

AMBUSKE 

To begin answering these questions, we’ll first head back to 1768, back to Fort Stanwix in northern New York, to redraw part of the border between British and Indigenous America. We’ll then travel southwest into the disputed Ohio Country, to contend with the British withdrawal from Fort Pitt, before paddling along the rivers and lakes throughout the region, to witness the consequences of choices made in an intimate war that for some seemed to have no end.

AMBUSKE 

In the fall of 1768, Sir William Johnson traveled from his home along the Mohawk River to Fort Stanwix in northern New York, consumed with planning the final details of upcoming treaty negotiations that would have far reaching personal and imperial implications.

AMBUSKE 

Johnson was the crown-appointed Superintendent for Indian Affairs for the Northern District. He was charged with managing George III’s relationship with Indigenous peoples in the northern colonies and the Ohio Country. 

AMBUSKE 

The Haudenosaunee were the key to the Irish-born superintendent's power and influence in British America as well as London. He had convinced the Six Nations to break their neutrality during the Seven Years’ War and side with the British, and his diplomatic successes in the years since were due in no small measure to the power and influence of his wife, Konwa'tsitsianni or Molly Brandt, a prominent member of the Mohawk Nation. 

AMBUSKE 

Johnson’s treaty negotiations at Fort Stanwix were meant to address vexing issues that had remained unresolved since the end of the war.

CHRISTOPHER PEARL 

Part of the problem comes from the proclamation of 1763 that cuts off parts of North America from white settlement and development. My name is Christopher pearl. I'm an associate professor of history and co director of American Studies at Lycoming College. Typically, it's shown down the Appalachian Mountains. The proclamation line also bars purchase even east of those lines, so territories that have not been purchased from native peoples previous to the 1763 Proclamation was very difficult at that point for people to figure out how to figure out how to extend the line if it was so necessary, and there are a lot of people angling to extend the line.

AMBUSKE 

In the months and years after George III’s Royal Proclamation of October 1763, British and Native diplomats began negotiating and surveying segments of a boundary line past which white settlement would be forbidden. Two years later, in 1765, when Johnson began treating with the Haudenosaunee to lay out the northern boundary, the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania loomed large on the map, a river and a region of intense interest to the governments of Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, private land companies, powerful Indigenous nations, and displaced Native peoples. At the conference, the Haudenosaunee traced a line beginning in Owego, New York, and then followed the Susquehanna River:

PEARL 

down the North Branch, to the east of the North Branch, and then to the south east of the East Branch and then to the south of the West Branch, going over to Ohio, carving out that entire territory from white settlement and development.

AMBUSKE 

However

PEARL 

They also refused to bargain north of Owego, which is near modern day Binghamton, for a line that would extend north of Owego to Canada. The creek up near the top of New York, near Canada. William Johnson realizes this is not a deal that any of the other interests will want. The Pennsylvanians won't want it. The Connecticut government, nor the Susquehanna company will want it. He doesn't want it because he wants to deal north of a Wego. Nevertheless, he makes it seem finalized. To the Haudenosaunee, to the refugee peoples, he makes it seem finalized, even some government officials like Thomas Gage and this matters, because Johnson figured that he was going to be the one to finalize that deal in another treaty.

AMBUSKE 

Johnson's subterfuge did not buy him as much time as he had hoped.

PEARL 

In the in between, King George the Third has appointed a new Secretary of the colonies, Wills Hills Lord Hillsborough, who sees much of what the colonists are doing and even what Sir William Johnson is doing as colonial truculence. Benjamin Franklin believes that He's fearful of these land agreements that extends American jurisdiction because much of Lord hillsboroughs income comes from rents on his Irish estates.

AMBUSKE 

Here's Robert Parkinson.

ROBERT PARKINSON 

Lord Hillsborough has 100,000 acres of land in County Down Ireland. His number one job is to make sure his Irish tenants don't get on boats and go to America. He is petrified of losing all of his tenants. Immigration from the British Isles is exploding to America after the Seven Years War. As Franklin says, Hillsborough is terribly afraid of dispeopling Ireland.

PEARL 

Hillsborough sends Johnson instructions once he takes office, that he is to finalize the 1765 agreement and that it must follow what was agreed upon in 1765 he calls it his precise instructions on the authority of the crown. Not only does he tell him it needs to be the same, he sends him a map that designates the exact line that the Haudenosaunee agreed to in 1765,

AMBUSKE 

Despite Hillsborough’s rigid instructions and his own self-interest, numerous Indigenous nations, several colonial governments, private individuals, and corporate interests were all keen to extend and redraw the line. Millions of acres in the Susquehanna and Ohio River Valleys, as well as the sovereignty rights of Native nations, were all at stake.

PEARL 

William Johnson wants to extend the line. He sees this as necessary because there are already encroachments on Native American land past the 1763 proclamation. He's also hearing rumors that he's going to lose his position and his status, and that's partly because the British government are trying to cut what they consider costly indigenous alliances. And those costly indigenous alliances has often elevated the status of the Haudenosaunee in British diplomacy, Johnson made his career on that elevation of the Haudenosaunee, and so Johnson wants to use a new deal to extend the line, to not only gain that new territory, but to also reaffirm the relationship between the Haudenosaunee and the British government and the Haudenosaunee over the tributaries who had been claiming independence during the Seven Years War in Pontiac war

AMBUSKE 

Johnson had other reasons for wanting to alter the line as well.

PEARL 

He's also personally vested. He has been given a grant of about 25,000 acres from the Mohawk that is effectively outlawed by the proclamation of 1763 because it's a purchase that would have happened after that proclamation. He's also has a purchase for over 100,000 acres from the Oneida that is again in dispute. Johnson has a personal interest to extend the line, because that would hypothetically bring those purchases in, or those grants in as legal.

AMBUSKE 

Connecticut was also intensely interested in the outcome of future negotiations.

PEARL 

Connecticut is claiming vast sections of the Northern Susquehanna River Valley, if not the whole of the Northern Susquehanna River Valley, as part of their Charter rights. There's the Susquehanna company, which is speculator company, that claims that they purchased much of this land from the Haudenosaunee at the Albany Congress in 1754 but they're basing their claims back on those Charter rights, the Connecticut government or the Susquehanna company, more particularly, wants to see an extension of the line so that they can start shifting their focus west from their base of operations in Wyoming in the northern Susquehanna River Valley. They're eyeing the West Branch, but that's effectively off limits right now because of the proclamation line and what's been purchased even at Albany by the Susquehanna company.

AMBUSKE 

Connecticut's claims did not go unchallenged.

PEARL 

You also have the Pennsylvania government that claims by their Charter rights that the northern Susquehanna River Valley is within the territory that. Penn's claim within Pennsylvania, but not purchased of the Native Americans.

AMBUSKE 

The question of who had the right or authority to negotiate an agreement for the Susquehanna River Valley only compounded the challenges diplomats faced at the upcoming conference at Fort Stanwix.

PEARL 

By 1768 you have two settler governments that are claiming it. You have the Haudenosaunee who are claiming it. You have refugee native peoples that are claiming it. But you also have the Ohio nations that see clan and kinship connections with many of the Susquehanna nations that are living in the northern Susquehanna River Valley. They also claim jurisdiction over much of that northern Susquehanna River Valley on the West Branch. Do you negotiate with the people who live there, Lenape, Shawnee, antico, conoy, tutelo, etc, or is it the Haudenosaunee who claims them as tributary people that becomes a source of contention in the northern Susquehanna River Valley?

AMBUSKE 

The governor of Pennsylvania also had to contend with a persistent threat from the south.

PEARL 

The Penns are also dealing with Virginians who are taking the area around Pittsburgh and claiming it for themselves. And so if he can strike a deal independently, then he can have a legal argument for why Pennsylvania has jurisdiction in this region, you also have speculators, a host of companies, really multinational companies, that are looking to use a new purchase to make good on their speculative investments in some of these western lands. So there's a lot of interest at play.

AMBUSKE 

These competing provincial, Indigenous, and personal interests backed William Johnson into a corner.

PEARL 

Johnson's in a pickle.

AMBUSKE 

Thomas Penn, the proprietor of Pennsylvania, offered to help...for a price.

PEARL 

Thomas Penn sent a letter to Johnson, telling him that he knows that Johnson has these private grants that he wants to get approved, and that Penn will help him get it approved in London, if Johnson, for him, extends the line west of Wyoming to take in almost all of the Northern Susquehanna River Valley, and does it independently of Connecticut and Virginia. Johnson responds, and it was always his intention to do this.

AMBUSKE 

But helping Penn risked incurring Lord Hillsborough’s wrath, if Johnson violated his orders not to go beyond the 1765 agreement.

PEARL 

Johnson therefore starts planning. He starts making comments about how Hillsborough made, a quote, a mistake on his map, and therefore he needed to correct that mistake. The mistake that Johnson points out is that the map does not include a line north of a Wego, and that the Haudenosaunee really wanted to make a deal for a line north of a Wego to save their territory from incoming settlers and some problematic speculators who were conjuring up old deeds and agreements to get what they wanted. And he's saying, we need this line north, or else everything will fall apart. But he's going to use the rationale to correct that mistake, to extend the line everywhere, and thus meet the agreements that he has made with Penn and with other speculators.

AMBUSKE 

Johnson sent messages to native communities and provincial governments, inviting them to convene at Fort Stanwix, near what is now Rome, New York, in September 1768. But violence nearly derailed the conference before it could even begin. 

AMBUSKE 

On a frigid January day, four Seneca and two Mohicans visited the home of a German settler named Frederick Stump along Middle Creek in central Pennsylvania. Later, when he was found hiding in a nearby grist mill, Stump claimed that the six Native people were drunk and that they had threatened him. Whether this was true we cannot know, for Stump killed them all. He dragged their lifeless bodies to the creek, smashed open a hole in the ice, and pushed them under.  

AMBUSKE 

The next day, Stump and John Ironcutter, his German-born indentured servant, walked 14 miles up the creek to a Native community. There they found a woman, two young girls, and a baby. Stump would later claim he feared the woman would raise an alarm about the missing Seneca and Mohicans, which is why he and Ironcutter murdered them all. They dragged their bodies into a cabin, and burned it. 

AMBUSKE 

Like the Paxton Boys, who slaughtered Conestoga Indians in 1763, Stump never faced justice for his crimes. He was briefly imprisoned before being rescued by an armed mob.  

PEARL 

Tensions were so high that John Penn who's the governor of Pennsylvania, told William Johnson, you've got to hold off on having this treaty at Fort Stanwix, until our arrangements and until there's a better relationship with many of these northern and western nations.

AMBUSKE 

The unrelated passing of a Seneca leader threatened further delays.

PEARL 

A Seneca leader has died, and many of the Susquehanna nations and Ohio nations make their way up through Seneca country to make their way over to Fort Stanwix stop for a condolence ceremony for that recently deceased Seneca leader, and make their way then to Fort Stanwix and Johnson thinks they're gonna arrive in September. They don't. Instead, it's weeks of them in Seneca country and Johnson's getting no news on their temper, because there's all these rumors that French and Spanish agents have gone to the Susquehanna and Ohio nations and told them that Fort Stanwix was a ruse to get them all together and murder them all, which can't be far from their imagination, because they just experienced the murder by Frederick Stump.

AMBUSKE 

Johnson understood these concerns, but he also felt the moment to conclude a new agreement was slipping away. And there was another problem. Johnson expected 3,000 Native people to attend the conference, and that was terribly expensive.

PEARL 

It would require 150 barrels of pork and flour, not to mention several casks of alcohol and a whole host of gifts just for a week of negotiation. And from Johnson's perspective, he says he has to have all of these goods at this time. And he says otherwise, it must overstep the design of this Congress. As it cannot be supposed that hungry Indians can be kept here or in any temper without a belly full that starts rolling in in September, he cannot hold off negotiations. There's supposed to be over 3000 indigenous people attending this Fort Stanwix treaty. 1000 of them arrive, and the other two are still in Seneca country waiting for a couple weeks. So now all the supplies that Johnson has maneuvered to get there are consumed, and he's panicking. He actually says, I'm distressed because he's going to have to justify added expenses to Hillsborough to gage to a host of other people that he needs to keep happy because he's going to go against the precise instructions that Hillsborough has just given him. Johnson pleads with messengers to the Seneca nations to get them to get everybody there. He promises a full condolence ceremony once they arrive, which will take days.

AMBUSKE 

As Johnson promised, the condolence ceremony took place once the remaining delegates arrived in early October. Then, the negotiations began. As they had now for decades, the Haudenosaunee claimed the right to speak on behalf of the Ohio and Susquehanna nations. They dealt directly with Johnson, who spoke on behalf of the king and many other interests. 

PEARL 

And it takes until the third day, when Johnson starts actually talking about the line. But much to his chagrin, they don't want to talk about the Northern line first. They want to talk about the southern line, and particularly want to talk about their conquering of the Cherokee and therefore selling what they have conquered in Cherokee country around the Tennessee River. And they said, If you don't give us this, it will irritate or offend our warriors who have conquered that country. What they want Johnson do is recognize that fight, but also their sovereign authority over a vast territory in North America, which puts them in a significant position, and it also takes away threats to their own land closer to home.

AMBUSKE 

With the Haudenosaunee satisfied with the southern boundary, the diplomats turned their gaze north to the more vexatious northern border. These negotiations followed a different course. 

PEARL 

Once Johnson gets to the northern portion, he doesn't do it in these public meetings. Instead, he takes a map into his private quarters and brings the Oneida in, because much of that Northern line is going to go through their territory, and starts negotiating with them. He even sweetens the pot. He offers $500 in gifts to each chief that gives him a quote, unquote, favorable answer. The Oneida are like, we can't agree to this. This is too close to our doors. We barely have hunting country left.

AMBUSKE 

It was a stratagem. Johnson wanted the Oneida to see one possible future on the map, one of white settlers vying for their lands.

PEARL 

They need to take it back, they said, to negotiate it in private with many of the Haudenosaunee and particularly their warriors. Johnson's banking on deference that they will defer to their elders. That's going to be really difficult, because many. Any of the Seneca and Cayuga Warriors don't want to give up anything, because Johnson proposed a line that would have started at the Appalachian Mountains and moved through to the north, which would have taken all of the Northern Susquehanna River Valley. And the Seneca warriors respond like we will give nothing away between and they say, this specifically great Island and Wyoming, which means all of the Northern Susquehanna River Valley, and that means to me that the Susquehanna nations, while not visible in council because they're treated as subject peoples and not visible in the treaty, actually do have some diplomatic authority behind the scenes.

AMBUSKE 

The Oneida returned to the negotiations with an unwelcome answer.

PEARL 

The Oneida go back and they replicate the 1765 agreement, and then they agree to a line that's far more Eastern than Johnson wanted. Johnson got angry. He gave this, what they called a warm speech, and said that they were going to undermine the whole purpose of this conference with such an agreement, because it imposes on quote, unquote, grants that were already given. And to my mind, he means the grants that were given to him, the Oneida go back. There's another, literally, a week of negotiation almost, and they give a line that's bit different. Now they say we're not going to go with the Appalachian Mountains. We're going to push it. We'll give you a line on the West Branch, which we never agreed to in 1765, but that's going to go up this creek called the tie data. It'll hit Burnett's hills, and then it'll follow the North Branch up to a Wego and then an easterly course to Canada Creek. Johnson said, not everything that we wanted, but it's better than the agreement that the Oneida gave a week before.

AMBUSKE 

Content with the agreement over the northern boundary, Johnson also made good on his promises to the Penn family.

PEARL 

He struck a deal independent for Pennsylvania, and that's the only independent deal in this treaty, the pens paid 10,000 Spanish dollars for all of the agreements within what they consider the jurisdiction of Pennsylvania, based on Charter rights. Johnson also got Haudenosaunee to go on the public record saying that they disavow the purchase in 1754 handed the Susquehanna company, and moreover, that the Haudenosaunee would never sell land in what is considered Pennsylvania to Connecticut. So now Penn's got a legal argument.

AMBUSKE 

But the Treaty of Fort Stanwix was far from a perfect agreement.

PEARL 

Nobody's happy with the Fort Stanwix treaty. The Haudenosaunee are divided. Many of the Seneca and Cayuga are upset that this deal was struck. They don't understand why they gave so much away in the North. The Susquehanna nations are really upset. At a meeting at Fort Augusta, which is in modern day Sunbury. They tell the officers there that they're so upset that they believe the Haudenosaunee are, quote, the slaves of the white people, the Ohio nations are upset because they were there but never given the authority to negotiate, even though they live on those lands, which Johnson recognized. Connecticut's upset because it's been excluded from the deal. And so Connecticut just decides we're just going to start moving there. Now Penn has to race Connecticut settlers to basically claim what he thinks he just purchased. Speculators are abuzz, obviously, but it irritates some other speculators because they don't get a chance to benefit from it because of the way Johnson's treaty went down.

AMBUSKE 

And Johnson's antics infuriated Lord Hillsborough.

PEARL 

Hillsborough once he gets news of the treaty berates Sir William Johnson as bringing in private interests that he shouldn't have done and from not following the precise instructions. And he actually goes back to Johnson, says, We're not going to approve this. You need to go back to the Haudenosaunee and renegotiate based on the precise instructions that I provided. Johnson can't do that, because the Haudenosaunee will never accept it, especially the line to the south, which is what Hillsborough is worried about, because the line Johnson agreed to at Fort Stanwix went against the line that Cherokee just agreed with Jon Stewart, who's the superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern District, and Hillsborough is like you've created so much confusion that is going to create another war. And he's right, but Johnson tells him, you can't do this. Oh, and by the way, this costs 20,000 pounds, and so renegotiation is going to be expensive. It might alienate the Haudenosaunee and Hillsborough is in the middle of sort of rock and a hard place. Eventually, he tells Johnson, I would wish you renegotiate, but it's no longer a command and will approve this treaty.

AMBUSKE 

The Treaty of Fort Stanwix, negotiated with the Haudenosaunee, along with later agreements struck with the Cherokee, deflected white settlers away from their homelands, and set in motion a mad scramble for the Susquehanna River Valley and the Ohio Country. The new boundary lines raced toward the Ohio River and followed its course south toward what is now Kentucky and on to the Mississippi River.

AMBUSKE 

For Pennsylvanians, Virginians, and other colonists who had long prized these lands, this was their moment. Some, like the Virginia planter George Washington, ventured west to inspect old land grants and promising ground, while deputizing others to make new purchases on his behalf.

AMBUSKE 

Others were more ambitious. Robert Parkinson explains.

PARKINSON 

There are very, very well funded investors who were wanting to create an inland colony called Vandalia, which would incorporate all of what's today West Virginia, parts of eastern Ohio and a lot of Kentucky that would be its own massive it's referred to almost as an internal Kingdom.

AMBUSKE 

The Cresap family was involved in the Vandalia scheme. And by the early 1770s, Thomas, and his son Michael, had significant experience in land speculation, provincial border disputes, and conflict with Indigenous peoples.

PARKINSON 

Thomas Cresap comes to America the very beginning of the 18th century from England. He's from Yorkshire, and he settles outside of Baltimore, and he bounces around. He rents lands from George Washington's father, and he settles on the Susquehanna River in the 1730s in what is today, maybe 30 miles inside of Pennsylvania, but they think it's Maryland, and he gets this permission from the Maryland Governor to settle there.

AMBUSKE 

Like his son after him, Thomas became embroiled in a colonial border dispute.

PARKINSON 

This one is between Maryland and Pennsylvania. There are pitched battles between the two. Press have shoots somebody who ends up dying and he is arrested for murder once the Pennsylvanians get their hands on him, he's clapped in a Philadelphia jail for a while. According to the charters, Philadelphia should have been in Maryland because the maps were so bad in the 18th century. So when he gets to Philadelphia, he says, damn, this isn't the prettiest town in Maryland.

AMBUSKE 

Thomas Cresap’s actions in the border dispute in the 1730s earned him the nickname the “Maryland Monster.” Those actions later led to the arrival of English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in 1763 to map the precise boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. 

AMBUSKE 

Once out of jail, Thomas, his wife Hannah, and their children moved west. Michael was born in 1742. 

PARKINSON 

The Cresap of family gets involved in the Ohio Company. They are original partners with the Washingtons and the Lees and the fairfaxes. Thomas cressid blazes the road to Pittsburgh for the Ohio Company. And in the years after the Seven Years War, Michael as the leader of a settlement that is south of Pittsburgh. Today it's Brownsville, Pennsylvania, but then it was called redstone on Redstone Creek. Michael is probably in his early 20s here becomes a leading trader, and then when that doesn't work out so much, he opens a store that goes under.

AMBUSKE 

Michael Cresap lent his customers credit on far too generous terms, and he struggled to stock his store in Redstone when his supplier in Frederick, Maryland withheld orders, fearing that Cresap would disappear west along with other settlers headed for the Ohio River Valley. The son of the “Maryland Monster” rode east to confront his supplier, apparently in a violent manner, and then proved his supplier right after all. Cresap left Redstone for Wheeling Creek, along the Ohio River.

PARKINSON 

He becomes a land scout. He becomes one of the most important sort of speculators, settlers, quasi soldiers of this territory in the 1760s and 70s.

AMBUSKE 

By then, the now thirty-year-old Cresap and his family had a long history of trading with Indigenous peoples, and fighting them.

PARKINSON 

The first time he comes to public knowledge, is killing native peoples in the conflicts of Pontiac's war. Thomas Cresap, home in Western Maryland, becomes a centerpiece of some of the raids that happen. We always think of Pontiac's War as a war against the forts at Detroit and for Pitt especially, but there's a lot of country raiding going on as well, and one of that happens in what's called Old Tom, Maryland. Cresap's town in a lot of ways, and natives attack. Over three days, they send out very panicked please help us. The messages back to the Governor of Maryland. Thomas sends Michael, who is 21 at this point, to go for help. And he shows up in Frederick, Maryland wearing moccasins of a native person that he has killed. He's always from a very young age, dealt with native conflict. His older brother was killed five years earlier in the Seven Years' War, and they came upon his dead body in the mountains, half chewed up by animals. This is someone who is up close and personal with the violence and trauma of these years and these places. That's not to say that he's. One of the main reasons why that violence and that trauma is happening, but it is happening to him.

AMBUSKE 

By the early 1770s, James Logan – Soyechtowa – had moved deeper into the Ohio Country as well. And like Michael Cresap, we cannot understand Logan without first understanding the life of Shickellamy, his Onedia father. 

PARKINSON 

His father, Shickellamy was one of the most important native diplomats of the 18th century. He's the Six Nations point person to try to keep the peace with all the things that are going on in the 1730s and 40s and 50s. He's sent to a town that's today Sunbury, Pennsylvania, but then it's called shamacon. He is sent there as an ambassador to negotiate to keep the peace in central Pennsylvania. He is the lead native diplomat that organizes the very infamous walking purchase in the 1737 and he does that in negotiation with and in alliance with James Logan, who is the land agent for Pennsylvania. And that relationship becomes so close that shekelemi gives his two oldest sons another name. He refers to them as Logan. The oldest brother, his name is Tachnechdorus but he's also known as John Logan Shickellamy. And the second born son is James Logan Shickellamy, but he's also known as Soyechtowa, and that, that epitome that epitomizes this kind of relationship, this tight bond between Pennsylvania and and this, this one person, Shickellamy.

AMBUSKE 

When Shickellamy died in 1748, his oldest sons John and James Logan – Tachnechdorus and Soyechtowa – took up their father’s diplomatic mantle. They tried to follow Shickellamy’s Way. But their father’s role in negotiating away Lenape lands in the Walking Purchase, their own role in the violence between settlers and Native peoples that swept through Pennsylvania during the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s War, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples like the Lenape and Shawnee, diminished their political power and influence, complicating their diplomatic efforts. They abandoned Shickellamy’s name, and with their families, retreated further west toward the Ohio River. 

AMBUSKE 

Despite all this, in the years after the war, some white settlers who encountered Logan near his home in what is now Reedsville, Pennsylvania recalled a relatively friendly man, who spoke some English, and offered assistance when it was needed.  

AMBUSKE 

Yet, for Logan, and for many Native peoples like the Shawnee and the Lenape, who colonists called the Delaware, peoples that inhabited western Pennsylvania, western Virginia, and lands to the west of the Ohio River, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, was a disaster.  

AMBUSKE 

However dissatisfied some Native peoples and provincials may have been with Sir William Johnson’s diplomatic triumph, the treaty resolved the problem of stopping settlers like the Cresap family from frequently defying the Royal Proclamation Line by bending it to their will.

PARKINSON 

In the years after 1768, instead of preventing future expansion and speculation, Fort Stanwix starts the whole machine over again. I think there are six, maybe Ohio native peoples who were at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. The treaty is there to please and placate and make happy, the Six Nations, the Haudenosaunee, the ohios, feel like their land has been sold out from under them, just like what happened before. And so tensions are rising and rising and rising and rising. And then there you see what's going on in Pittsburgh and the relighting fuses again on huge kegs of gunpowder.

AMBUSKE 

Not all members of the Six Nations were pleased and placated. For people like Logan, who was of the Six Nations, but not in them, the resurgence of white settlers heading west after 1768 had consequences far more personal. His family began to fracture. 

PARKINSON 

The Mingo Indians are Iroquois who are displeased with what's going on at home. They're Iroquois speaking, and they are an amalgamation of a number of different mostly Six Nations peoples who are creating their own groups that start in the North Branch of the Susquehanna, and eventually, by about 1770 a number of them have resettled even further to the south and west to the Ohio River. James Logan soijtawa becomes a leading member of that group. He takes his mother and his sister with him.

AMBUSKE 

By 1770, Logan, his mother Neonoma, his sister Koonay, and a younger brother, known as John Petty, were living in a Mingo village along Beaver Creek on the west side of the Ohio River, some fifty miles from Pittsburgh.

PARKINSON 

The family splits up. His older brother stays in central Pennsylvania. They never see each other again. So the family, which has been very tight and connected throughout all this bad stuff that happens then finally, does split apart in 1770.

AMBUSKE 

Two years after Logan and his family resettled along the Ohio River, the British made a critical decision that altered the balance of power in the Ohio Country.

AMBUSKE 

In one of his final acts as Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Hillsborough ordered General Thomas Gage, the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, to withdraw the army garrison from Fort Pitt. Both men had come to believe that maintaining a garrison at the Forks of the Ohio River, and one further west in the Illinois Country, was an unnecessary burden on the treasury.

AMBUSKE 

After years of dealing with colonists who defied the Proclamation Line and provoked conflict with Native peoples, Gage wasn’t sorry to see the fort abandoned. As he told the Secretary of War, the colonists ought to live with the consequences of their own choices. 

THOMAS GAGE 

 “If the Colonists will afterward force the Savages into Quarrells by using them ill, let them feel the Consequences, we shall be out of the scrape.”

AMBUSKE 

By the time the British garrison withdrew in October 1772, Lord Hillsborough had been dismissed from office. In London, powerful land speculators involved with the Ohio Company and the proposed Vandalia colony had orchestrated his downfall. William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, replaced him as the colonial secretary.

AMBUSKE 

The evacuation of British Redcoats from Fort Pitt unnerved white settlers in the region. The trauma of Indigenous raids during Pontiac’s Uprising still echoed in the forests and the glens. Rumors swirled that Native warriors had been seen with painted faces, a sign they were going to war. Just before the withdrawal, when Logan was spotted in Pittsburgh, some colonists feared that his appearance was a herald of things to come.

AMBUSKE 

But as a local minister soon learned, Logan was just as troubled. After talking with him in town, the minister later encountered Logan in the woods, who told him:

LOGAN 

“My house, the trees, and the air, are full of Devils, they continually haunt me, and they will kill me. All things tell me how wicked I have been.”

AMBUSKE 

To banish these Devils and his wicked thoughts, the minister prescribed Logan prayer, to little effect.

AMBUSKE 

The soldiers at Fort Pitt did more than just reassure white settlers who feared Native attacks; they were an imperial presence that kept the long simmering conflict between Virginia and Pennsylvania over the Forks of the Ohio River at bay.

PARKINSON 

But once they leave a huge power vacuum, very rapidly after that, Pennsylvania assembly extends the boundaries of Westmoreland County to encompass the village of Pittsburgh, and in response, the Virginians establish West Augusta County that also encompasses it. So it is both Pennsylvania and Virginia, and there are magistrates. There are two, basically Mayors of Pittsburgh, one from Virginia, one from Pennsylvania. There's also a contest going back and forth letters between Governor John Penn and Governor Dunmore about these kinds of things. So you're seeing this imperial rivalry about who gets this territory and who can make their writ run in Pittsburgh.

AMBUSKE 

John Murrary, 4th Earl of Dunmore, had been appointed Virginia’s chief magistrate in 1771, after only a year serving in the same, and more lucrative post, in New York.

AMBUSKE 

The disappointed Dunmore decamped to Williamsburg, hoping that he would have little reason to linger long in the hot and humid Virginia air, but soon, the Scottish nobleman warmed to the prospect of expanding his colony’s western borders into the Ohio Country, defeating rival Pennsylvania’s claims to Pittsburgh, and winning the adulation of the Virginia gentry and the common people.

AMBUSKE 

He believed the British withdrawal from Fort Pitt was his moment. In the summer of 1773, Lord Dunmore departed the coastal confines of Williamsburg and headed northwest into mountainous West Augusta County, in what is now West Virginia, before pressing on to Fort Pitt to stake the Old Dominion’s claims to land that Virginians and Pennsylvanians had been fighting over since before the Seven Years’ War.

AMBUSKE 

As Lord Dunmore told the Earl of Dartmouth, when he arrived in the disputed region, he found a people desperately in want of local government and order, who pleaded with him for help. 

LORD DUNMORE 

“Upon my Arrival the people flocked about me and beseeched me, not only as they were his Majesty’s Subjects, but likewise as they were of those within the government over which I preside, to appoint Magistrates, and officers of Militia, to remove these grievous inconveniences under which they laboured.”

LORD DUNMORE 

“I found upwards of ten thousand people settled, and that they had neither Magistrates to preserve Rule and order among themselves, nor Militia for their defence in case of any sudden attack of the Indians.”

AMBUSKE 

Dumore felt it was his duty to appoint magistrates and officers for the good of the king’s subjects in western Virginia, carefully obscuring the fact that Governor John Penn had done much the same for the good of the king’s subjects in western Pennsylvania.

AMBUSKE 

The contest between the Pennsylvania and Virginia governments, and between settlers on the ground, led to a great deal of confusion, no small amount of chaos, and violence.

PARKINSON 

There are magistrates who have some sort of official standing. They've been given commissions of things. John Connally, who is Dunmore's man, he's made a captain dash commandant of Pittsburgh. He has blank certificates to make anybody a militia captain, and so he has a number of deputies that he sends there, and they go and break into the Pennsylvania magistrates houses. One of the Pennsylvania's wife has attacked. She's hit by a sword in one attack, and she's badly scratched in another attack, there's all sorts of violence spilling out into their homes. At one point, they're kidnapped and taken to Stanton, Virginia, and the Pennsylvanians do the same thing. They go in in the middle of night, into John Connolly's house and roust him out of bed and haul him off to the Westmoreland, Pennsylvania jail. They're bullying and attacking each other.

AMBUSKE 

For ordinary settlers who to support Pennsylvania or Virginia wasn't always immediately obvious.

PARKINSON 

There's a lot of people going back and forth. You can almost see them as a microcosm of what's about to happen to the continent in general. A lot of them don't have a lot of ties to one or the other. I think the Virginians probably have a little bit more of an advantage in that a lot of those settlers come from either Western Maryland or Virginia, and so they feel and so they feel a little bit more beholden to Dunmore and the Old Dominion. But the Pennsylvanians, a lot of those guys, are very recent immigrants. Maybe in the last six or seven years, they've come to the New World, and so they don't really care all that much about Pennsylvania, per se. They're not really attached to it.

AMBUSKE 

They cared more about who could best ensure order and stability in the region, a piece Dunmore argued that he could best provide when he visited Fort Pitt in the summer of 1773

PARKINSON 

The other question is, what are native peoples who are seeing all this craziness? What are they thinking of this? And that's really where the conflict then immediately turns to, is seeing all this chaos and street fighting, and native peoples are watching this. And I think the easiest conclusion is, when is this going to come at us? And it very rapidly does, by March and April. And that, in many ways, is a benefit to certainly the Virginians, because then they can close ranks and say, Well, we have to fight this exterior threat. We have to stop fighting with one another.

AMBUSKE 

Governor Dunmore waited for months, until March 1774 to inform Lord Dartmouth that he had extended Virginia's government to the forks of the Ohio River, lest the King's minister stop him before he could act to strengthen Virginia's claims.

PARKINSON 

Dunmore loves to ask forgiveness, not permission. That's one of his key attributes. He'll do things and then it'll be months before he writes home to tell anybody what he's done.

AMBUSKE 

By the time that Dartmouth received Dunmore’s letter in May, Virginians had already massacred Logan’s family at Yellow Creek.

AMBUSKE 

In mid-April 1774, as confusion and bewilderment reigned at the Forks of the Ohio, violence erupted along the Ohio River. On the 14th, a trader named William Butler sent three employees and a canoe full of goods downstream from Pittsburgh to trade at a Shawnee village. When they stopped to camp for the night, they encountered four Cherokee traveling in the area. The traders foolishly: 

PARKINSON 

show that they have silver in a bag to some natives who they don't really know. They get robbed of their silver, and one of them gets killed in the frica, and somebody else also gets hurt and wounded.

AMBUSKE 

The robbery by the Cherokees, along with a report from a Shawnee man that the Ohio Seneca would soon strike against settlers, and other rumors that the Shawnee themselves would attack, raised alarms among colonists in the area. John Connolly, Lord Dunmore’s commandant at Fort Pitt, saw this as a moment of opportunity:

PARKINSON 

Connolly says, aha, here's my chance. Let's close ranks and go after these guys. And he literally in his journal, turns a new page on his journal and talks about now the expedition and the fight against the Indians, as if all the other stuff between Virginia and Pennsylvania is not happening anymore. Now this is going to become a fight with native peoples.

AMBUSKE 

Connolly circulated letters warning settlers not to provoke friendly Native peoples and to defend themselves in case a general war broke out

PARKINSON 

In the last week of April, there are really bad things happening all up and down the Ohio River. Michael Cresapis involved in some of those things.

AMBUSKE 

Four days after the Cherokees attacked William Butler’s men, a surveying party marking out lands for George Washington along the Kanawha River encountered a settler who told them of another fight between colonists and Native people that left three Natives dead. At a council among Ohio natives in the wake of the fight, they decided “to kill the Virginians and rob the Pennsylvanians."

PARKINSON 

80 years ago, we would talk about Indians and tribes, but Pennsylvania is a tribe, and Virginia is a tribe, and Maryland's a tribe, and some of those tribes are more war, like the Virginians, and some of them are more inclined to trade and peace. The Pennsylvanians and natives see it that way. They talk in the 1770s in some of these conferences, they talk about the colonists in terms of tribes, just exactly like they talk about one another.

AMBUSKE 

Some Native peoples called the Virginians “the Long Knives” in recognition of their warlike nature. After hearing the tale of the surveying party’s encounter, a young Long Knife named George Rogers Clark was among the Virginians who gathered at Point Pleasant to plan a retaliatory attack against a Shawnee village. Knowing that Michael Cresap was scouting land nearby, they sent for him, and asked him to lead the expedition. To Clark’s surprise, Cresap declined. He told the groups, he didn’t doubt that a general Indian war was coming, but didn’t want to be blamed for starting it.  

AMBUSKE 

Yet, within days, Connelly sent Cresap a note, addressing him as “Captain Cresap,” ordering him and his men to scout the countryside. They went scouting for targets instead.

AMBUSKE 

On April 26th, Cresap’s men killed a Shawnee and a Lenape, who were canoeing downstream to Shawnee villages on the Scioto River. They were traveling with the lone survivor of the Cherokee attack from days earlier. That man dove into the water when the shooting started, and despite Cresap’s denials, he believed Cresap’s men had pulled the triggers.

AMBUSKE 

The next day, Cresap’s men attacked canoes carrying the Shawnee leader Cornstalk, with at least some Shawnee killed and some colonists wounded.

AMBUSKE 

When they returned to Wheeling that evening, Cresap’s men vowed to attack a Mingo camp, about 30 miles upriver from them. Logan was there. They began to march, and then:

PARKINSON 

For some reason, Michael says, Hey guys, this is a bad idea. Let's turn around, go back, which aggravates those men who were looking for blood. For some reason, Michael thinks, yeah, I don't like the looks of this. This is probably not great.

AMBUSKE 

Cresap told the men

MICHAEL CRESAP 

“it was generally agreed that those [Mingo] Indians had no hostile intentions, as they were hunting, and their party was composed of men, women, and children, with all their stuff.”

AMBUSKE 

As they returned to camp, the party encountered John Gibson and three other traders canoeing downriver. Gibson was Logan’s brother-in-law. He spent a frightening night in camp, filled with more than 100 men, some of whom threatened to kill him for trading with the enemy. The next morning, Cresap all but told Gibson he could no longer control his men, that they meant to “Fall on and kill every Indian they met on the river.” Cresap left camp that day and headed east. Gibson continued downriver. 

PARKINSON 

I don't know what it is. I don't know if he just doesn't like the look of what's going to happen, but he takes steps to try to distance himself from Yellow Creek. It does not work.

AMBUSKE 

Logan was away from Yellow Creek hunting on Saturday, April 30, 1774

PARKINSON 

Yellow Creek is about 50 miles downstream from Pittsburgh. Yellow Creek dumps into the Ohio River from the West,

AMBUSKE 

And in the days prior, some shots had rang out across the Ohio River.

PARKINSON 

There's a minor skirmish that happens, and so an arrangement is made to try to keep the peace. People send emissaries up to the Mingo settlement that is about a mile up yellow Creek, to say, why don't you guys come over to a tavern run by Joshua Baker and his wife called Baker's bottom. Why don't you come over to Baker's bottom? Just have a drink with us. We will go through the negotiations of peace to make sure that nothing further happens after as a result of this, let's come over on Saturday morning. The people that they're talking to are these descendants of shekelemi who've been raised to listen to these kinds of opportunities and a chance to keep the peace. It's no surprise that it is the wife of shekelemi and the daughter of shekelemi and one of the sons of shekelemi and about four other mingos who paddle down yellow Creek and cross the Ohio River when the hopes of keeping the peace. This is what the family has been raised to do. This is what they do.

AMBUSKE 

 Logan’s mother, Neonoma, his younger brother, John Petty, his sister, Koonay and her baby girl, and three other men crossed the river that morning.

PARKINSON 

It's a trap. A few of them go into the front room of the tavern and have a drink.

AMBUSKE 

After some time passed

PARKINSON 

Someone proposed a shooting contest see who can hit this thing over there first.

AMBUSKE 

John Petty remained inside while some of the men headed outside for the contest,

PARKINSON 

and the colonists say, why don't you guys go first? And the point being to unload their weapons

AMBUSKE 

Back inside the tavern, a British officer’s coat belonging to Nathniel Tomlinson was hanging on the wall. John Petty allegedly took it down, put it on, and began strutting around, taunting the white men. Tomlinson threatened to kill him if he didn’t give his coat back. 

PARKINSON 

There's some scuffling again. Tensions are at their highest point. Some hard words are exchanged, partly after some alcohol has been consumed, alcohol being another kind of colonial weapon.

AMBUSKE 

One of the colonists shot petty as he made for the door.

PARKINSON 

As soon as the shooting starts, unbeknownst to the Mingo, there are somewhere between 10, maybe even as high as 20, people hiding in another room a back compartment of Banker's Bottom.

AMBUSKE 

Edward King knifed John Petty to death. Outside, Neanoma was killed, and Koonay began to run with her baby girl.

PARKINSON 

Koonay with her baby, runs tries to reach the Ohio River. Get back in her canoe. She stopped right as she gets to the river bank, she turns around and begs for the child to be spared. They hand over the child and they shoot her in the forehead and kill her. They have a debate on whether or not to kill the child. They don't.

AMBUSKE 

In the same moment, the colonists fired on Native peoples who began paddling across the river when they heard the first shots, killing some of them.

AMBUSKE 

When the gunfire ended, the attackers heard something they never forgot.

PARKINSON 

They tell stories of the moans and the wails of the women on the other side of the river that wafted across the water. They could hear the screaming and yelling from Mingo women on the other side about what they had known had happened.

AMBUSKE 

The colonists left the tavern with Koonay’s baby girl. They later returned her to her father, the trader John Gibson, who at the time of the killings was far downriver visiting Shawnee villages.

AMBUSKE 

Just when Logan learned of the Yellow Creek Massacre, we do not know. But we do know: 

PARKINSON 

Logan is broken by this.

PARKINSON 

Everybody understands after this happens that Logan has to seek revenge whenever they try to tamp the lid down on what happens after this, everybody says, Yeah, except for Logan, like, let's not go to war with the Virginians. The Shawnee shouldn't go to war with the Virginians. Or the Delaware shouldn't. But Logan has permission to do whatever he wants to do, and everybody kind of understands that. Logan then initiates a set of about four different raids that are increasingly gaslier and gaslier as we go along into June and then August and into September. And by that, you can see that what has happened to his family, the shekelemi way for the most part, I can still see traces of it. There are still some moments in which he pulls back and tries to limit the violence, but what he has been taught to do is broken by Yellow Creek.

AMBUSKE 

Logan’s quest for vengeance encompassed a wide geography. In the first week of June, Logan and several warriors attacked the Spicer family farm near Redstone, Pennsylvania. They killed William and his wife Lydia. Three of their children never had a chance. They took two more children captive.

AMBUSKE 

The attack near Redstone, the Cresap family seat, was no accident. In his grief, Logan came to believe that Michael Cresap was the architect of his family’s slaughter at Yellow Creek. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption, given Cresap’s role in recent events, but he was 30 miles away when the attack took place. 

PARKINSON 

Who exactly tells him that this is Michael Cresap fault. I don't know. Logan definitely believes it.

AMBUSKE 

Word of Logan’s raids reached Philadelphia and Williamsburg, as well as the ears of Sir William Johnson in northern New York. In early July, Johnson convened an emergency conference with 600 Iroquois at Johnson Hall, his home, hoping to stave off a full-scale war. He would not live to see peace. Two hours after delivering an opening speech in which he pledged that the British would bring the attacking colonists to justice, the fifty-nine-year-old Anglo-Irishman, long the fulcrum on which the British alliance with the Haudeonsaunee rested, collapsed and died. 

AMBUSKE 

The next day, hundreds of miles to the south, Logan struck in western Virginia. 

PARKINSON 

In the second set of raids. He takes a couple of people captive, and one of them knows how to read and write. We know Logan can read, but I don't think he can write because of what he. Does here. He adopts Robinson, a Virginia columnist, and He preserves his life. And he goes and visits this guy a couple of different times and gives him a piece of paper and says, write down what I'm going to say:

LOGAN 

“To Captain Cressap. What did you kill my people on Yellow Creek for[?]. The white People killed my kin at Conestoga a great while ago, & 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 the Indians is not Angry only myself.”

PARKINSON 

In that he says, This is not between the colonists and all Indians. This is me and you, brother. Why don't we meet somewhere and we'll settle this out man to man. Here, that is a way of limiting the violence. There's an appearance there of the old shekel in the way that surfaces when he writes that note.

AMBUSKE 

Logan carried that note with him as he turned south toward the Lybrook farm on Sinking Creek, deep in Virginia. He had with him the war club carved with his initials as well.

AMBUSKE 

By then, Lord Dunmore had begun assembling a Virginia army to conquer the Ohio Country, using the outbreak of violence along the river that spring to justify calling out the militia.

PARKINSON 

Dunmore has realized fantastic opportunities in escalating a war with native peoples. It solves the problem of Pittsburgh and makes it theirs. And then there are future potential conquests to come if we can subdue what is today, the eastern half of Ohio. Fantastic. We can line our pockets with tremendous amounts of gold. Dunmore sends two wings of an army, one north of Pittsburgh, to come down the Ohio River, and one over land across the mountains of West Virginia. They're going to meet at a place called Point Pleasant where the Kanawha River meets the Ohio River. Logan goes very close to where they're gathering for that Southern wing of the army in his raids in August, he gets really close to some pretty dangerous territory.

AMBUSKE 

On August 7, 1774, a Sunday, Logan and three other warriors stalked the Lybrook, Snidow, and McGriff families at the Lybrook farm along Sinking Creek. As they vanished into the woods with the scalps of seven children, and three other children in tow as captives, Logan dropped his war club, with his note tied around it.

PARKINSON 

When he does that, he drops the club and the note in a way, I think, to be very loud. He's not trying to be silent in these things. He's trying to do what he can to stop that Southern wing of the army from just raiding and killing more and more and more of His people, His children. He's killing children so his children won't get killed. That club is meant to terrify and it does. Actually, it has a significant effect on recruitment for that Southern army. That Southern army is delayed for weeks because they can't get enough people, because no one wants to leave their women and children vulnerable to go volunteer and march in an army. The Note doesn't work very much, but the club very much works. That's what a diplomat does. That's what a political strategist does.

AMBUSKE 

Logan's warning could only delay the southern wing of dunmore's army for so long, he soon headed south to raid in what is now eastern Tennessee. In the meantime, the Royal Governor led the northern wing of the army of 1700 men from Fort Pitt, down the Ohio River. The southern wing, with 1100 men led by Andrew Lewis, moved west across the mountains toward the junction of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers. They intended to attack Shawnee villages, but the two wings of the army never linked up.

PARKINSON 

The Shawnees, under the leadership of Cornstalk, realizes that these two wings are about to join, and we should not let that happen. So he engages the Southern army, who arrives at Point Pleasant first on the 10th of October, 1774 and this is right in the middle of the first colonial Congress, in one of the biggest battles in American history between natives and colonists, somewhere between 800 1000 natives, we think, are there, and more colonists are there than that, but it's a significant engagement that goes on for hours and hours and hours.

AMBUSKE 

Cornstalk led a coalition of Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, and Wyandots against the Virginians. When it was over the Virginians had lost 75 men, with another 140 wounded. The Native confederacy lost dozens, but threw many of their dead in the river to conceal their losses.

AMBUSKE 

As one Virginian put it with some considerable understatement.

PARKINSON 

We had a very hard day

AMBUSKE 

Learning of the battle, Dunmore crossed the Ohio River with his wing of the army and marched west to Pickaway Plains, near what is now Circleville, Ohio. The governor established Camp Charlotte, named for the British queen, just miles from a major Shawnee village. 

PARKINSON 

The Shawnees are not broken, but they are soundly defeated, and Cornstalk is convinced by some of the people around him that we. We can't continue this, and so they're going to negotiate.

AMBUSKE 

As Cornstalk and his people deliberated before the talks with Dunmore, Logan arrived in the Shawnee village, having just returned from his raid in east Tennessee. He had not been at the Battle of Point Pleasant. Nor would he attend the upcoming Treaty of Camp Charlotte, where the Shawnee would give up their claims to land south and east of the Ohio River, finishing what the Treaty of Fort Stanwix had started. 

PARKINSON 

It was a good thing that Logan did not had he actually gone the first century, he would have encountered at Camp Charlotte, would have been one of the people who was at yellow Creek. He was the officer of the day on that day. And Michael cressid, of course, is there at Camp Charlotte, and there are a number of cressets there, not just Michael, but his brother and his two nephews. So Logan decides to make himself scarce.

AMBUSKE 

Logan still blamed Cresap for his family’s deaths. But the weight of vengeance was a heavy load to bear. He was done fighting. And in the days ahead, he would release his captives as a token of peace.

AMBUSKE 

Finding that his brother-in-law, John Gibson, was in the village, an agitated Logan asked Gibson to join him under the branches of a great elm tree. He had a story to tell, his own since the beginning of the last great war, one that began not far from where he and Gibson rested under that tree.

AMBUSKE 

Gibson watched as his brother-in-law composed himself “after shedding [an] abundance of tears.” And then, Logan began to speak.

AMBUSKE 

In the centuries to come, Logan’s Lament would become twisted to mean something it did not, an allegory for vanishing Native peoples, an oration recited by the descendants of British Americans as they pushed further west. But under that elm tree, in a Shawnee village in Pickaway Plains, it was a far more personal history of what had been lost in the rivers, the mountains, and the woods of the Ohio Country. 

LOGAN 

“I appeal to any white man, if he entered Logan’s cabin hungry, and he gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked, and he clothed him not. During the course of that long and bloody war, Longan remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites, that my countrymen pointed as they passed, and said, ‘Logan is the friend of white men.”

Logan 

“I had even thought to have lived with you, but for the injuries of one man, Col. Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it: I have killed many: I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbour a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? – Not one.”

AMBUSKE 

Two hundred miles downriver from Pittsburgh, some of Lord Dunmore’s officers gathered in Fort Gower. Michael Cresap was among them. It was Saturday, November 5, 1774.

AMBUSKE 

The Virginians had constructed Fort Gower at the confluence of the Ohio and Hocking Rivers, a temporary camp built by the provincial army as they marched west against the Shawnee and their allies during Dunmore’s War. 

AMBUSKE 

The officers were not unaware that Parliament had passed the Coercive Acts to punish Bostonians for destroying tea in their harbor, but as they would write when they returned to Fort Gower after the Battle of Point Pleasant, “We have lived about three months in the woods without any intelligence from Boston; or from the Delegates at Philadelphia.” 

AMBUSKE 

In the days since they had returned to the fort, they had learned that the Continental Congress had called for the Continental Association, a trade boycott on British goods, an escalation of this “very alarming crisis.” 

AMBUSKE 

As Virginians would soon read in their newspapers, the veterans of Dunmore’s War were ready to do their part. In a series of resolves at Fort Gower, they pledged:

OFFICERS 

"the most faithful Allegiance to his Majesty King George III, whilst his Majesty delights to reign over a brave and free People; that we will, at the Expense of Life, and every Thing dear and valuable, exert ourselves in Support of the Honour of his Crown and the Dignity of the British Empire.”

AMBUSKE 

But warned

OFFICERS 

“we can live Weeks without Bread or Salt, that we can sleep in the open Air without any Covering but that of the Canopy of Heaven, and that our Men can march and shoot with any in the known World.”

AMBUSKE 

And resolved that

OFFICERS 

“as the Love of Liberty, and Attachment to the real Interests and just Rights of America outweigh every other Consideration, we resolve, that we will exert every Power within us for the Defence of American Liberty, and for the Support of her just Rights and Privileges; not in any precipitate, riotous, or tumultuous Manner, but when regularly called forth by the unanimous Voice of our Countrymen.”

AMBUSKE 

Michael Cresap would soon make good on that promise. Just over two months after the king’s subjects fired on each other at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts Bay, Michael Cresap began raising a company of men in Maryland. In July 1775, Cresap and his men began the long march from Maryland north to Boston, a town where a rebel force was now laying siege to his majesty’s soldiers. 

AMBUSKE 

Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

AMBUSKE 

I’m your host, Dr. Jim Ambuske.

AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

AMBUSKE 

Head to r2studios.org to find a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading. ​

AMBUSKE 

Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick.  

AMBUSKE 

Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent. 

AMBUSKE 

Our lead audio editor for this episode is Curt Dahl of cd squared.

AMBUSKE 

Annabelle Spencer is our graduate assistant.

AMBUSKE 

Our thanks to Robert Parkinson and Christopher Pearl for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.  

AMBUSKE 

Thanks also to our voice actors Adam Smith, John Terry, Anne Fertig, and Evan McCormick.

AMBUSKE 

Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.