With every nerve straining for
the fray, with thudding of feet and crooning of the blood song,
he wheeled with those other mad spirits round the war pole till
the set of sun closed the rites. "That evening two scalps were
brought into camp," so a letter of his reads. Does the bold
savage color of this picture affright us? Would we veil it? Then
we should lose something of the true lineaments of George Rogers
Clark, who, within four short years, was to lead a tiny army of
tattered and starving backwoodsmen, ashamed to quail where he
never flinched, through barrens and icy floods to the conquest of
Illinois for the United States.
Though Cresap had rejected the role of "white leader," he did not
escape the touch of infamy. "Cresap's War" was the name the
Indians gave to the bloody encounters between small parties of
whites and Indians, which followed on that war dance and
scalping, during the summer months. One of these encounters must
be detailed here because history has assigned it as the immediate
cause of Dunmore's War.
Greathouse, Sapperton, and King, three traders who had a post on
Yellow Creek, a tributary of the Ohio fifty miles below
Pittsburgh, invited several Indians from across the stream to
come and drink with them and their friends. Among the Indians
were two or three men of importance in the Mingo tribe.
Pages:
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123