He could feel himself being drawn into the role of a fighting man now. He had sold his farm at Grave Creek for a good profit, then had traveled farther down the river to survey in the Cain-tuck-ee, for the Ohio Company. But the call for militia had interrupted his career as a surveyor, and he could already foresee a pattern of attacks and counterattacks, eye for eye and tooth for tooth, stretching into an indefinite future. He knew he could
avoid it only by retreating to seaboard Virginia, and that, he knew, he would never do. The frontier had its hold on him now. He had tasted the profound grandeur of virgin wilderness and had lived minute by minute in a world unprotected by law, where each man was his own king. He had idled in the buzzing, sunny hospitality of Indian villages, he had lain enwrapped in the musky embraces of chosen maidens, in cheerful liaisons sanctioned by villagers who liked him and wanted his blood in the tribes. First he had been enveloped by the Indians. But now an edge was forming between his race and this race he had come to love, and he could feel the edge now. He was becoming a part of the cutting edge of civilization. Any life behind that cutting edge would be insufferably tame and dull.
In her corner, Logan’s sister had blown out her lamp flame and lain down heavily to sleep. Logan had put sticks on the coals, and started the tobacco pipe in circulation again, and he studied George in the pungent smoke for a while, then said:
“Tell me this: You have now fought in a blood fight; you are a new soldier. How was it for you, in your heart? How was it for you, in your head?” He looked like his old self now; he was inquiring into the soul of a man, about the matters of deepest importance to men.
George leaned closer to look into the fire, as if the answer were there, and rested his arms on his knees. He spread his long, strong fingers and looked through them at the flames, thinking. The vast woodland night outside the glow of the lodge chirruped and shrieked with insects and night birds, and breathed with the sounds of running creekwater and breezes in the foliage.
“Ye said it well,” George began. “It was one thing in my heart and another thing in my head. A fire was in my heart, and I have never felt so strong. But then when it had ended and the fire left-my heart, it was my head that was full of ashes.”
He shrugged, out of words. “I’m not proud that I enjoyed it so much. I’d rather never do it again. I’ll have to think on it each time it happens.”
“Yes,” said Logan. “You must think on it. A man is a wolf, but he is meant to be more than a wolf. The glory of my people is in war, and my heart often has burned with that glory. But I too grew sick and full of ashes. I put away the blade long ago, and since have always talked for peace. I do not want that blaze in my heart again; I no longer need it.” He looked up from the fire, into which he, too, had been talking. “Did you take any life by your own hand when you rode with Cresap?”
“I don’t know. But when I struck I had the feeling of it.”
Logan nodded, again understanding. “Your God tells you not to kill. I hope you will always think of that. A warrior believes his courage is proven each time he makes blood flow. But there are some chiefs who understand further than that; they know greater courage sometime may be proven by preventing the flow of blood.”
“But most chiefs were warriors first.”
“Yes,” said Logan. “And sometimes they are forced to be warriors again.”
T
WO
WEEKS
LATER
, C
HIEF
L
OGAN
AND
HIS
BROTHER-IN-LAW
rode down into the valley of Yellow Creek toward their camp leading a pack horse with two small deer strapped across its back. They had been gone two days and their hunting trip had been easy. Morning sunlight dappled the forest floor. Through the fresh spring foliage, still glistening with droplets from a pre-dawn shower, Logan could now see a glimpse of his lodge. He raised his voice in a pleasant call of homecoming.
No voice came back. That was curious. He did not hear the music of the voices of his sister’s children. And there was no woodsmoke. The camp was deserted, except for two dogs. Under the kettle outside the lodge, the ashes were cold and wet. Logan sniffed the air. He scanned the ground. There were no new footprints since the rainshower, only those of the dogs. That meant his family had been gone overnight, or at least since before daybreak. He peered inside the lodge. It seemed undisturbed, but a string of cured peltries was gone from the roof-poles where they had hung. His father’s and brother’s muskets and powder horns and bullet bags were not in the lodge.
So the whole family had gone someplace. He could not imagine where, but he was not alarmed. The men had taken their weapons with them.
Then Logan saw something that made a needle of alarm prick at the base of his skull: in a patch of soft earth in the packed dirt at the center of the lodge there was a boot print; the heel and sole of a large white man’s foot.
Cresap
, Logan thought.
Yesterday on the hunt Logan had seen Cresap and a dozen Virginians riding along a bluff, two hours’ distance from here. Logan had recognized some of them. His friend Clark had not been with them. They had passed without seeing Logan.
Quickly now, Logan and his brother-in-law hung the deer carcasses from an oak limb, out of reach of dogs or wolves. Then they searched the ground more carefully.
Under the canopy of a dense maple they found the prints of
an iron-shod hoof heading toward the river. Walking, leading their horses, carrying primed guns, stooped low over the faint trail, peering ahead now and then into the foliage and listening intently, they followed the hoofprints. Logan came to a boggy place where the hoofprints were sunk deep and were full of water, and here they saw moccasin prints also. One was small, a woman’s print, but deep. He thought of his sister with her burden of child. The needle of alarm in his spine was burning and shining now as he pointed this out to his brother-in-law.
The trail was faint as they went down a slope toward the Ohio’s bank, but here was a piece of torn moss, there a broken may-apple stem. Logan was jolted by a strange noise, half cry, half gasp, behind him. He glanced back quickly at the awful sound, not realizing it was his brother-in-law’s voice until he saw him stopped there in his tracks, hand at throat, mouth agape, bulging eyes fixed on some high point ahead. Logan shot his gaze in that direction.
A bloody baby hung in a tree, upside down. It was impaled on the sharp end of a lopped-off limb, its skin strangely wrinkled by dried slime. From its belly hung a cord and placental sac. Flies swarmed over it.
Beyond and below it was a hazel shrub draped with intestines. At the base of the shrub lay Logan’s father, his abdomen cut open and alive with flies, his scalp gone, eyesockets shredded by buzzards. Something hung from another tree beyond the shrub.
It was Logan’s sister, strung up by her thumbs, naked, scalped, slit open from her ribs to her genitalia, both breasts gone. Logan and her husband saw her at the same moment.
Teeth bared and clenched, panting and whimpering, the two Indians darted about in the glade until they had found them all. They found the children, and Logan’s brother; all had been tomahawked and mutilated, partly skinned, and their carcasses had been gnawed by animals and pecked by buzzards. Under a bush there was an empty liquor jug. Fastened on a tree trunk nearby was a swatch of cloth with two bullet holes in it.
Ice-cold shivers had been racing from Logan’s temples down to his knees as he searched the glade, and a bubble of grief grew bigger and bigger in his chest; now his entire body was quaking and the veins distended in his neck. Every blood relative of Tah-gah-ju-te, whom the whites had called Chief Logan, lay or hung butchered in this bright green glade, over blood-darkened ground. No family was left but this whimpering brother-in-law who knelt, chest heaving and eyes bloodshot, under the eviscerated carcass of his wife.
The bubble in Tah-gah-ju-te’s chest was too big to contain. In the bright red whirlpool in his brain he saw the face of Cresap and then an endless line of Virginians. The bubble in Tah-gah-ju-te’s bosom burst. A long, throbbing howl poured out of his throat, once, twice, again and again. The other’s voice joined his.
Tah-gah-ju-te and his last of kin howled like wolves for a long time on the bank of the Beautiful River, and then became silent and began to collect the remains of their family. They took them back to the camp on the pack horse that had carried the deer from their hunt.
P
ANIC
SWEPT
THE
V
IRGINIA
FRONTIER
.
Tah-gah-ju-te, once peacemaker and friend of the white men, had renounced his English name of Logan. He had sent word to the white settlements that he had taken up his hatchet and would not put it down until he had killed ten whites for each slaughtered member of his family. He had called on other chiefs to help him avenge the massacre, and there were many in the mood to join him. Bands of painted warriors from many of the Algonquian tribes soon were flitting silently along their trails through the deep woods, going to the isolated cabins and the small settlements the Virginians had built in clearings beside creeks and springs and rivers throughout the Ohio Valley. There was much ground to cover; the cabins numbered in hundreds. But the Indians knew where each one was. Soon, white men were falling dead behind their plows, struck by arrows or musketballs from the woods. Mothers and their children, working or playing in sunny clearings outside their cabins, would look up and see the last sight they were to see: painted, copper-skinned forms running toward them with hatchets and knives. Babies were sliced to death screaming in their cradles. Dirty smoke rose from burning cabins. Vultures circled through the smoke and slowly settled through it to pick at the flesh of disemboweled women or throat-cut cattle. Then the long files of warriors, bloody-fresh scalps of auburn or white or brown hair tied to their belts or gun muzzles, would vanish into the sun-flecked woods again, to lope over a hill or down a ravine to the next cabin. Sometimes a sobbing survivor from one farm would have outrun them to the next and warned its inhabitants, and here the Indians would have to besiege the fortified cabin and burn the defenders out into the open where they could be killed. Thirty Virginians—men, women, and children—looked up into the fury-crazed eyes of Tah-gah-ju-te himself as their life leaked out
of them. He had thirty scalps by June, ten for his father’s, ten for his brother’s, and ten for his sister’s, and then he put down his tomahawk. But the war had started, and it went on.
All but the bravest or most foolhardy Virginians fled as the panic raced along the frontier. On one day, George Rogers Clark sat in his saddle among Cresap’s militiamen guarding a ford and counted a thousand settlers crossing the Monongahela eastward with their baggage and livestock. Cresap rode to and fro, bristling with weapons, his hatchet face gray and sullen. He had just learned from a survivor that the mad Mingo was blaming him for the slaughter of his family. George, who now had in his pocket a militia captain’s commission signed by Governor Lord Dunmore, rode alongside Cresap and put a hand on his arm.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “You must be a big man around here if the Indians palm everything that happens onto your shoulders.”
Cresap finally smiled, but it was a smile with a sneer in it. He said, “By th’ Eternal, if I could find Jake Greathouse, I’d cut his liver out and feed it to ’im on a plate!”
For it was Greathouse who had murdered Logan’s family. The Mingoes had traded with Greathouse often, and had had no reason to be wary of him, other than for his sharp trading practices. But on the last day of April, with a gang of ruffians, he had lured Logan’s relatives out with drink, proposed a target-shooting contest, and, after the Indian men had emptied their guns at a target of cloth on a tree, fallen upon them with knives and tomahawks. The story had been pieced together later when Cresap questioned two of the accomplices. Greathouse had fled, no one knew where. “Lord look th’ other way if I ever find that reeky villain,” Cresap muttered.
“Or if the Mingoes ever find him,” George said.
A
LONG
RANK
OF
MILITIAMEN
MOVED
SLOWLY
ON
FOOT
through a beanfield toward the Shawnee town. Behind them strode another rank. George was riding slightly behind the second rank, looking over their heads toward the silent village. The sky was overcast and the air was so close and sultry it was hard to breathe.
The rank kept moving forward, rifles at ready. George looked to his right and could see another company advancing through tall corn toward the north side of the town. There was not a voice anywhere, just the whispering tread of the militiamen through the field. Most were ragged, sweat-drenched, shirtless or in hunting shirts of gray homespun. The straps of their powder
horns and gun bags crisscrossed their backs. Joe Bowman from Dunmore County, a sinewy, straw-blond lieutenant of George’s age, his second in command of the company, looked up the line toward him, and their eyes met. George nodded. They had predicted this morning that this town, like all the others they had invaded, would prove abandoned, and it looked as if they had been right.
The column, under the command of Colonel Angus McDonald, had marched from Wheeling to the upper Muskingum River country, to carry the war into the heart of the Shawnees’ lands. Most of the warriors had gone to join the great Shawnee chief Cornstalk and his army of a thousand somewhere down on the Ohio, thus leaving their towns undefended. The militia had seen Shawnee scouts everywhere along the way, but the populations of the towns had simply melted away before their advance, taking with them everything portable. In each case, the column had formed ranks and marched cautiously into the village just this way, finding no one to shoot and nothing to plunder.
In ten minutes, the Virginians occupied the town. The captains sent their men out in squads to cut down and burn the crops and set wigwams and lodges to the torch. Soon the air was dense with sharp-smelling smoke; fires crackled and rushed. This was the last town. Now they would return to Wheeling. Bowman came up to George and yawned, his eyes reddened by smoke. “Sure is an exciting war, hain’t it?” he said.