But

For two weeks the men had been reduced to half a pound of sour flour, and a like quantity of offensive meat, per diem; and for a week longer they were compelled to subsist upon raw hides, and such roots as could be found in the adjacent woods. A runner was sent to Fort McIntosh with a statement of their distress, and requesting an immediate supply of provisions. The inhabitants south of the Ohio volunteered their aid, and General McIntosh headed the escort. still they came near being immediately reduced to short allowance again, by an untoward accident causing the loss of a great portion of the supplies. These were transported through the wilderness upon pack-horses. The garrison, overjoyed at the arrival of succors, on their approach to within about a hundred yards of the fort, manned the parapets, and fired a salute of musketry. The horses, which were probably young in the service, became frightened, began to rear and plunge, and broke from their guides. The example was contagious, and in a moment more, the whole cavalcade of pack-horses were bounding into the woods at full gallop, dashing their burdens to the ground and scattering them in all directionsthe greater portion of which could never be recovered. Of the provisions saved, the officers very incautiously dealt out two days' rations per man, the whole of which was devoured by the famishing soldiers, to the imminent hazard of the lives of all, and the severe sickness of many. Leaving the fort again, General McIntosh assigned the command to Major Vernon, who remained upon the station several months. He, in turn, was left to endure the horrors of famine, and in the summer of 1779, Fort Laurens was threatened with another siege by forty Shawanese, twenty Mingoes and twenty Delawares, but by the interference of the friendly Delaware chiefs, they were persuaded to abandon the siege without firing a gun,

and the fort was soon after relinquished. It is worthy of notice, that while there were only four Delawares (as distinguished from Munsies) at the attack in January, twenty were present on the last occasion, thus indicating that the influence of Capt. Pipe and the war party of the tribe was on the increase.

In October, 1778, the distinguished peace-chief of the Delawares, Captain White Eyes, or Koquethagaeehlon, who had accompanied the army of General McIntosh to Tuscaroras, died suddenly of small-pox. Thenceforth the efforts of Killbuck, Big Cat, and another chief, whose Indian name was Tetepachsi, to resist the current against the Americans became less effective than before the death of their able coadjutor. In the summer of 1779, their friend, Col. Morgan, or Tamenend, resigned his post of Indian agent at Pittsburgh, and the desertion of Fort Laurens exerted an unfavorable influence. The American agents, about the same time, began to urge the Delawares to change their former attitude of neutrality, and to wage war against the Indian allies of the English. This was bad policy under the circumstances of the Ohio frontier, for, as the tribe was situated, any change of attitude must have been unfavorable to the Americans. Very soon, therefore, the few Delawares, who remained friendly to the colonies, were compelled to take refuge at or near Fort Pitt, and at length the Delaware nation may be said to have openly joined the combination of the Ohio Indians with the British.

Fortunately, this hostile demonstration had been postponed to a period when the defection was less disastrous than it would have been at any former period of the war. The pacification of the remote tribes on the Wabash and Illinois, and the favorable dispositions of the French residents there

and elsewhere-the destruction of the Seneca towns in the lake and Genesee region of New York, by the army under Sullivan, in the autumn of 1779, and a similar excursion from Pittsburgh, by Colonel Daniel Brodhead, (who had succeeded General McIntosh in February, 1779,) at the head of six hundred men, during which he destroyed many villages of the Seneca Indians on the head waters of the Alleghany, ravaged five hundred acres of standing corn, and captured a booty of skins valued at three thousand dollars-these were events which tended essentially to relieve the valley of the Ohio, at least for a season.

Upon Brodhead's return to Pittsburgh, September 14, he found deputies from the Delawares, Wyandots, and the Maquichee branch of the Shawanese, with whom a conference was held three days afterwards. The only Indian names mentioned in the report of this council are Doonyontat, a Wyandot chief, Kelleleman, a Delaware, and better known as Killbuck, and Keeshmatree, the Maquichee or Shawanese chief, and his counsellor, Nimwha. On this occasion, the professions of amity were as ample and rhetorical as usual.

For a year or two, the settlements of the upper Ohio felt the beneficial effect of these events, but, as we shall see, the main body of the Shawanese, with their British and Indian allies, continued to scourge the Kentucky station, but not without a full retribution. We shall devote a separate chapter to the narrative of these Shawanese campaigns.

CHAPTER XX.

THE KENTUCKY CAMPAIGNS AGAINST THE SHAWANESE.

THE assassination of Cornstalk and his companions at Point Pleasant, in 1777, effectually concurred with other causes of irritation to inflame the Shawanese against the Americans, and for the residue of the revolutionary period the tribe was implacably hostile. There is some evidence that the Maquichee tribe were occasionally inclined to peace, but this exception, so far as it existed, was probably attributable to the influence of the Moravian missionaries, who interchanged visits with those chiefs living near the Muskingum. The tribe at large, irritated by the encroachments on their Kentucky hunting grounds, were determined to extirpate the infant settlements; and for this purpose the channels of the prominent tributaries to the Ohio offered great facilities. The canoes of their war-parties floated down the Scioto and the Miamis, and silently ascended the Licking and Kentucky rivers until within striking distance of the scattered stations.

At this time the Shawanese were divided into four tribes or bands the Maquichee, or Mequachake, the Chillicothe, the Kiskapocoke, and the Piqua. In the first tribe, to which the priesthood was confided, the office of chief was hereditary-in the others it was conferred according to merit. It is reasonable to suppose that the Shawanese living near Wappatomica, on the Muskingum, (if any remained there after it was destroyed by McDonald's party in the summer of 1774) and in the Scioto towns, which were only saved

from destruction by submission to Lord Dunmore on the approach of his army, were less prompt to renew hostilities than the inhabitants of the more remote towns on the Little Miami and the Mad River. Cornstalk himself resided east of the Scioto River, on the right bank of Sippo creek, just above the junction of Congo creek, (now Pickaway township and county) while on the opposite bank stood Grenadier Squaw Town, so called from the residence of his sister, a woman six feet high and well proportioned; and notwithstanding the injuries inflicted upon the family of Cornstalk by the whites, it is probable that the Shawanese on the Scioto sympathized, in some degree, with the peaceful dispositions of the neighboring Delawares. This opinion is corroborated by the fact that all the retaliatory expeditions from Kentucky, during and after the revolutionary period, passed by the mouth of Scioto, and were designed to chastise the Shawanese bands who were seated in the Miami and Mad River valleys, and within the present counties of Greene, Miami, Champaigne and Logan. The principal villages in the Miami region were Chillicothe, standing near the mouth of Massie's creek, three miles north of Xenia: Piqua, memorable as the birth-place of Tecumseh, and situated on the north bank of Mad River, seven miles west of Springfield, in Clark county: and Upper and Lower Piqua, in Miami county, where the tribe at length concentrated in great numbers.1

In the spring of 1778, while Clark was mustering his expedition to the Illinois, Daniel Boone, equally noted as the pioneer hunter of Kentucky, was a captive in the Shawnee town of Chillicothe. He and twenty-seven others had been seized in February, while making salt at Blue Licks, and his

1) See Appendix No. VII, for further particulars of the Shawanese villages.