Source: WV History Film Project
WEST VIRGINIA ROLL 150, WEST VIRGINIA ROLL 150.
Q: Just a second. Put you diaper on, please.
ECKERT INTERVIEW, TAKE 1, CAMERA 319, SOUND 150.
Q: Allan, describe for me what life was like in a
small Shawnee village along the Ohio River prior to
the arrival of the white man.
JJKD 0058
AE: The Indians living along the Ohio River had,
what we would consider now, to be a rather idyllic
form of life. It was a life of taking the bounty of
nature and using it wisely and well. They never
destroyed anything without a good reason. They
never wasted any of nature's bounty. They used
everything they could. They hunted. They fished.
They farmed. Raised their small degree of crops.
They had a life that was predicated on the seasons.
They would have their hunting times, their
sugar-making times, their crop times, and so on.
These were all very stylized and very formalized type
of things that, gave a good picture of the Indian life as
it were.
JJKD 0127
Every event had a feast or a dance that was involved
with it. They had their own crop of "Gods," not
"Goddesses," just "Gods," who controlled nature,
who controlled their lives and so on. I say no
"Goddesses," but, of course, there was the Great
Spirit, was a "Goddess" was the only one. The Great
Spirit was a grandmother who would lower a net
when the time came and lift all the good people back
into the, the, as we call it, the Happy Hunting
Ground. They never, really, referred to it as
that.
Q: What was the Indian conception of land?
AE: The Indian believed that everybody owned the
land and nobody owned it. It was a gift of
Monetoe[?], the Great Spirit, or the Great God above
the Great Spirit.
Q: Why don't you say that over again.
JJKD 0216
AE: OK. the Indian concept of land ownership, was
not. Let's start it again. The Indians didn't realize
what the concept of land ownership was. The land
belonged to everyone and everyone could use it.
Wisely and well. There were no such things as
property lines to drive a stake into the earth would be
like driving a stake into the breast of their Mother. I
mean they considered the earth, the Mother. They
called it Mother Earth. And, so this concept of land
ownership was, was just very foreign to them. Now,
they did have territory. And they would fight among
themselves, the various tribes, in order to maintain
their territory, and keep it free from other tribes
incursioning into their areas and taking their game
and so on, or the, the materials that they needed.
JJKD 0302
But, not to own the land. Not to have land as the
White concept of land holding was. Thus, when the
Whites came in, and suddenly were building fences,
suddenly were building fences, suddenly were
claiming lands, cutting down the forests, burning the
prairies, destroying, almost always, destroying as they
came along. This was a concept so far beyond their
thinking, that it appalled them and they felt it was
very, very wrong.
Q: Describe for me what the territory that we
now refer to as West Virginia, but was western
Virginia, west of the mountains. How was that used
by Indian tribes?
JJKD 0358
AE: Well, the Indians in the upper Ohio River Valley,
in western Virginia, depends on how far back you go,
because you have Indians, the Mound Builders, who
were there many hundreds of years before our more
modern Indians came along. The Mound Builders
built very extensive and large mounds in the area of
Moundsville, West Virginia, present West Virginia.
All up and down the Ohio Valley and Ohio, itself, and
they lasted for quite a long while, they were prevalent
around 800 A.D. Eventually, they died out, we're not
sure exactly why, and, gradually, other tribes moved
into the area. They found in the upper Ohio area, a
very rich hunting ground. There was a lot of game,
lot of deer, bear, turkey, all sorts of animals. And,
they found it a very good living.
JJKD 0452
The river, itself, was a sort of highway for them
because they would trade, with the Indians to the
south using the Ohio River to go down to the, what
we now call the Cumberland River and the Tennessee
River and going up these rivers to trade with the
Cherokee and the other southern tribes. I'm. --
Q: That's OK. What I guess I'm confused
about. One thing I'm very confused about, is that
when this first explorers crested the mountain and
came into West Virginia, there were not large Indian
settlements in western Virginia.
JJKD 0508
AE: There were, actually, none at that time. Well, I
won't say exactly none, because there were a few
along the upper Kanawha.
Q: Why?
JJKD 0520
AE: Simply because the area south and eastward of
the Ohio River was, generally, considered by the
Indians to be a hunting ground. And, it was for the
use of all the tribes that surrounded it. The southern
tribes would come up from the south to hunt there
and, even though many of these tribes were bitter
enemies, and made incursions against each other and
fought vicious wars with one another, when, they
were in this hunting ground, it was a neutral ground.
It was where they could mingle, where they could
meet, they could talk, and nobody would kill each
other. And, this was a, a, not really a sacred land, but
a, sort of a sacrosanct land where all the enmities
between peoples were put aside. It was a place to
come and hunt and camp and get the meat and eat it
for the winter, and so on.
Q: Just fill that in a little bit with me with,
describe to me who the "they" were. Who was
coming from the north? Who was coming from the
south?
JJKD 0611
AE: Alright. Among the tribes that came into this
land, you had the Cherokees and the Creeks and the
Choctows and the Chickasaws from the south,
moving upward. From the Ohio country you had the
Miamis, the Shawnees, the Wyandots, the group
called the Mingos, which wasn't a tribe, it was a
confederation of disenfranchised Iroquois tribesmen.
These people all came into this area of Kentucky and
western Virginia to do their hunting because it was
such fruitful hunting ground. And, thus, when the
Whites moved in and began blandly slaughtering the
game, often for no good purpose other than for the
sport of shooting, this was another adjunct of the
white character that the Indians, simply, couldn't
fathom. They would see Whites come in, for
example, and go down around the Blue Licks in
Kentucky and there were great herds of woodland
buffalo at that time, woodland bison.
JJKD 0704
They would come in and they would kill seventy or
eighty or ninety, maybe a hundred buffalo at one time
and take nothing but the tongues. And, leave the rest
just to rot out in the fields. The Indian couldn't
understand this concept of wastefulness.
Q: How did it come to be that the Iroquois
started laying claim to, and making deals, about West
Virginia?
JJKD 0740
AE: Well, the Iroquois pulled a great hoax on the
English. The English wanted to believe that the
Indians owned land. They couldn't grasp the fact that
the land wasn't owned, that it was everybody's land.
And so, they needed, for their own consciousness, for
their own sense of honor, supposedly, to have an
owner of the land so that they could purchase, or take,
this land from its rightful owner. They convinced the
Iroquois League to claim all this land by right of
conquest. Well, the Iroquois were very strong fighters
and so on, but they never conquered the Shawnee and
they never conquered a number of other tribes. But,
they made everybody think they had. And, so they
claimed the whole Ohio River drainage as their
territory by right of conquest.
JJKD 0824
And, so then when they went to treaties with the
whites, the English, primarily, the whites said, "Well,
we want to buy some of your land." And, they said,
"Sure, we'll sell you whatever you want." It wasn't
their land, anyway. So, they would sell them these
great tracks of land, Virginia, for example, the
English in Virginia, extended their realm through
these contacts with the Iroquois all the way to the
Mississippi. Virginia ran from the east coast of the
Mississippi River. And, it was a vast tract of land.
This was, allegedly, sold to them by, or gotten
through treaty, by the Iroquois. They had no right to
sell it any more than an Indian boy would have the
right to sell his father's horse to another Indian. It
wasn't his to sell. It wasn't his belonging. But, this is
what caused all the great problems which came later,
because, then, having made this purchase, the whites
claimed it and said, "Hey, we bought it fair and
square and it's ours." So, this is where the wars
began.
Q: In 1749 the French Expedition comes down
the Ohio. Tell me about that expedition and why it
was important.
JJKD 0933
AE: Celoron de Blainville came down the Ohio, a lot
of people say Bienville, but it's Blainville, came
down the Ohio River with the avowed purpose from
the governor general of, of Canada at that time, to
re-instate the French claims to the Ohio River Valley
and all lands to the north and west of it. they had
staked out these lands many, many years earlier with
the advent of their early French settlers and the Jesuits
who came after them. But, with the English
beginning to spill over the mountains to the east, they
decided they had better really re-establish these claims
and so the sent Celoron de Blainville down with a
number of lead plaques that were engraved.
Q: Excuse me. We have to pick that up on our next camera roll. That was ten minutes. We are out of film.
151, WEST VIRGINIA ROLL 151.
ECKERT INTERVIEW, TAKE 2, CAMERA 320,
SOUND 151.
Q: Allan, excuse me. Describe to me Celoron
his lead plaques.
JJKD 1020
AE: Right. So Celoron was dispatched to come into
this county and reaffirm these boundaries of French
conquest or French habitation. And, he came down,
well, he started in Montreal, and came up the Great
Lakes to Lake Erie and then across Lake Chitauqua
to the Allegheny River. And, starting down the
Allegheny River, at every major stream, he planted
lead plates, which had been engraved and they said
that this, in essence, was the property of the King of
France and that nobody else had a right here and they
were here to protect the Indians and so on. And, they
planted such plates at the, the mouth of the various
streams. They did not plant one, for some reason, at
probably the greatest confluence of all right where the
Ohio River starts at the Monongahela and the
Allegheny confluence. But, they planted them at the
mouth of Wheeling Creek and they planted them at
the mouth of Grave Creek and at the Little Kanawha
and the Great Kanawha, the Muskingam, the Great
Miami.
JJKD 1126
Some of these plates were found, scores of years later,
by children who were out playing along the river
banks and found them. So, on one, in fact, that was
planted at the mouth of the Kanawha, was found by
some children who thought of it only as a chunk of
lead and had melted down about half of it before an
historian realized what it was and rescued the
remainder of it. But, he came all the way down the
Ohio River from the upper Allegheny to the Great
Miami River and then up the Great Miami River to its
headwaters, over portage to the Ahglaze?? River and
down that river to the Maumee and then to the Lake
Erie and finally up to Detroit encompassing this
whole great area that is largely the state of Ohio, at
this point. And, reclaiming this land for French
interests.
JJKD 1208
Well, this greatly bothered the English because their
territory was by charter from the English King went
all the way to the Mississippi and so, the
battlegrounds were formed. This was, really in
essence, kind of a declaration of war between the
French and the British over the territory in what is
now the United States.
Q: Describe for me how the French were
concerned about fur trading and how the English had
other concerns, in addition to that.
JJKD 1251
AE: There was a great difference in the Indian's mind
between the Frenchmen and the Englishmen. The
Frenchmen, they liked, they liked them very much
because they came in, they didn't try to change the
Indian ways, they didn't try to mold them. They
assimilated into the Indian tribes. Often, they married
Indian women and had children with them. Became
part of their culture, lived with that culture and
enjoyed it. So, they liked the French very much, but
when the British, the English, came they had
weaponry that was much better. They had tools that
were much better. They had all sorts of things,
manufactured items that were much better. And, the
Indians having now become more or less dependent in
their social life and their economy and their culture
depended upon these goods, went to the ones that
could provide them the most and the best and the
cheapest.
JJKD 1340
So, the wars, in the beginning, were trade wars for the
benefit of furs. That's what brought the French in to
begin with was not, it was exploration sure, but the
impetus for that exploration was here was a land that
was ripe with these most marvelous furs, especially
the beaver. And, the beaver became the real item of
economy for the Indians, because this, they could get
beaver all over and they could trade these for all these
wonderful things that the whites had that they needed.
So, the beaver trade was very important for many
years. Later, much later, was when the land wars
began and that was mostly from the English and
British side because they were more interested in
acquiring land, per se, land that was theirs rather than
furs.
Q: Describe to me this first wave of white men
coming over the mountains, English explorers and
surveyors, some working for large land companies
like the Ohio River. Who were these men and what
was their mission?
JJKD 1454
AE: The, the Proclamation of 1763, more or less,
prevented, the whites from crossing the Allegheny
Rivers, the Kings, or the Allegheny Mountains. The
King said, "You will not go behind the Appalachians,
you will not go beyond this point," the crest of the
Appalachians is the boundary line between the
western lands and, the English lands. Well, the
Treaty of Fort Stanwix came along and that, more or
less, wiped it out and left all these lands, that had been
open only to traders in the past, now open for
settlement. And, there was a tremendous land rush
started. People who were skimping out on an income
on a little plot of land in the east, suddenly, saw these
great vistas of land open to them, if they would just
go there and claim it. And, so they came, in droves,
they spilled over the mountains and rushed into these
lands and began claiming them as their own and it
was no difficulty, you just simple marked some trees
with a tomahawk at the four corners of your land, and
that was then, your land.
JJKD 1658
There were many who wanted to mass fortunes in this
land as they knew it would be very valuable in time to
come. George Washington was one, in particular,
who wanted to claim a good bit and he came down
the Ohio River several times, but, mostly, he sent
agents in. He would hire people, people like Cresap
and Crawford, William Crawford, and, these people
would come in as his agents, stake out lands and
survey and claim these lands for him and would do
this for a wage. There were, also, huge land
companies that formed. The Ohio Company, the
Virginia Company, the Illinois Company, they came
in and they began collecting these great bounties of
lands and establishing their settlements and their
rights to these lands. Also, by use of surveying teams,
people, teams led by, by people like Doctor Briscoe
and Hancock Lee and so on, many others who were
experienced surveyors and would come down and see
where the really good land was. And, of course, the
best land was the bottom lands where you could grow
good crops and you did not have to fight the hills to
drag your plows through it and so on. And, these
lands went very quickly.
JJKD 1691
And, so, just as quickly, this, this impetus for land
ownership moved down the Ohio River and,
especially, into the Kentucky country. Now, this
Kentucky country, as we know, was a very sacred
hunting ground to the Indians. So, when the whites
moved in and found this beautiful, fertile land, fairly
level, that was just wonderful, fairly treeless in some
areas which was a great boon, too, and filled with
game. The rushed down like crazy and began
claiming it all over and the Indians, of course,
strongly objected to this and this is the beginning of
the Indian Wars.
Q: What was, describe what it must have been
like for a family to move over into Appalachia and
settle along say, the Little Kanawha River and set-up
a homestead, with the threats of Indian warfare and
all that.
AE: In this time.
Q: Hold it just a second. We'll let this truck go
by. OK?
JJKD 1794
AE: In this day in age, I think we find it, probably, a
little difficult to understand the enormity of the move
that these people were making. They were leaving a
civilized culture in the east and moving into a
wilderness, a hidden land, a land that was really
frothed with all kinds of dangers and unexpected
happenings. This was a land populated by, what they
called, savages because these were a people who were
savage in defending what they felt was their own.
They came in and they built rude cabins, with very
rude tools. Sometimes, the cabins were only ten feet
square or fifteen or twenty feet square. Just enough to
house people and keep them relatively safe and
relatively warm. They existed with the, the very
barest of necessities and it was a very hard, rough and
difficult life for them.
JJKD 1885
But, going back again to the lands, they wanted lands
and they were willing to take almost any kind of risk.
Almost, any kind of hazard, almost any kind of
difficulty, simply to get those lands.
Q: This may be an unfair question. William
Preston has a register from 1755 where he is
recording the number of deaths due to Indian raids
and many of those descriptions on a particular day, a
whole family.
JJKD 1931
AE: Oh yea, absolutely, absolutely. The, when the
wars broke out in earnest, when the Indians decided
that they really had to fight the whites to keep them
out. Heretofore, they had tried through treaty, to keep
them back, they had made all kinds of agreements and
they were always broken and, almost, always by the
whites. When they finally decided they had to fight,
they fought with fantastic brutality and savagery.
They would spread out in small war parties, usually
anywhere from six to twenty or thirty warriors,
rushing through the land like a little red tide engulfing
any settler, especially the isolated settlers, who had no
defense except their own weapons, their own flintlock
rifles or whatever they had. And, wiping out whole
families. They would come in and there would be a
family, maybe of a husband.
Q: Pause. We're out of film.
AE: OK.
Q: Good. We'll pick it up "when they would wipe out whole families."
WEST VIRGINIA, ROLL 151, WEST
VIRGINIA, ROLL, SCRATCH THAT. WEST
VIRGINIA ROLL 152, WEST VIRGINIA ROLL
152, 152.
ECKERT INTERVIEW, TAKE 3, ROLL 321,
SOUND 152.
Q: Allan, pick-up that train of thought about the
war bands.
JJKD 2032
AE: The, we often hear of the terrible atrocities that
the Indians committed, the barbarities, and so on.
There were many of them. The Indians were savage
fighters. They were strong, they were ruthless. But,
in the research I've done, I have found that in the vast
preponderance of cases, almost every major massacre
the Indians committed was in direct retaliation for a
massacre that had been done by the whites, that we
haven't heard that much about. One good case in
point is the Gnadenhutten Massacre, when the whites
came in under Colonel David Williamson and went to
the Moravian villages on the Muskingam River and
took a bunch of peaceful Delaware Christianized
Indians, Moravian Indians, herded them into a
Church and bludgeoned them to death with a mallet.
Ninety-six people in a row. Men, women, children,
they didn't care. They just killed them.
JJKD 2122
Well, this sparked great fury among the other tribes
and, was part of the continuing war. And, then we
heard of the death of Colonel Crawford, at the stake,
well, this was in direct retaliation to the Gnadenhutten
Massacre. And, even when small families were
massacred, this was often in retaliation for white
parties that had gone into the Ohio lands and
destroyed Indian families in the same manner.
Q: What was the spiritual significance of, or
cause behind "scalping?"
JJKD 2180
AE: Well, actually, scalping, while it was done to a
certain extent, in this country, it did not come into
vogue until the Hessians came over with the
Revolutionary War. And, the Hessians took scalps,
that was part of their heritage. And, so it was a
trophy of war, it was a way of showing that they had
vested their enemy, and so on. And, it came into very
great vogue then, especially, when during the
Revolutionary War the British began paying a bounty
to the Indians for the American scalps that they
collected.
Q: Describe to me the sense, on the part of the
Indians, of the overwhelming numbers of whites as
warfare began.
JJKD 2254
AE: The Indians often said that they would, the ones
who were old and wise and knew the way things were
going, said that there was no way to defeat the whites
because the whites were like the leaves on the tree,
numberless. They were like the grass beneath their
feet, that, even when cut down, would spring back up
with more and more than there were before. They
were like the worm, which when cut in half, would
make not one dead worm, but two new worms. There
was no way for the Indians to match in numbers, these
numbers of whites that were coming at them, nor the
weaponry that the whites possessed. So, it was a, a
holding battle, at first, to try and hold the territory in
which they lived. And, when, gradually, they
couldn't hold it, to move back, fighting as they went
step by step, and gradually being forced off their
lands. And, the land was the important thing to be
taken by treaty or by treachery or by theft or by
warfare, it didn't matter how, get the land.
Q: Describe, tell me the Indian saying about
when an Indian dies.
JJKD 2362
AE: The Indians often said that when an Indian died it
was a great tragedy, a great loss to the people that
caused a sorrow in their heart, simply because, an
Indian was irreplaceable to them. Their birth rate was
not very great, and when an Indian was lost, it left a
gap in their people. But, when a white was killed or
shot, four or five or six others stepped up to take his
place and their numbers were limitless.
Q: OK. Describe an event, an atrocity, describe
what happened to the family of Logan, briefly, and
what impact that had on Logan, who was one of those
who was seeking to broker a peace.
JJKE 0026
AE: We have here a case where, where the whites are
flooding into this wide-open territory to take the land.
And, you had a lot of border-ruffian type of people
here at that time who hated the Indians because they
were in their way and wanted them out of their way.
And, one of the major ones, was the Greathouse
family, Daniel and Jacob Greathouse, especially, who
were large, uncouth, frontier-type people. And,
Greathouse, at the break-out of Dunmore's War,
actually caused the, Let's start that over. Jacob
Greathouse was a great Indian hater. And, as the
whites began coming down the river, sorry.
Q: We can stop, or we can.
AE: Stop for just a minute. Let me get my thought in
order here. Yea, I want.
TAKE 4.
JJKE 0125
AE: Many Indians were proponents of peace. They
did not want war with the whites, because they saw no
future in it. One of the great proponents of peace was
the Seneca Indian, or the Cauga Indian, rather, named
Logan who was named after a white man. He had an
Indian name but he was more familiar to the whites as
Logan. He and his family lived near the mouth of
Yellow Creek which is near Wellsburg, West
Virginia, now. And, at one point, his family was
lured to the Ohio side, or to the Virginia side of the
river, or the western Virginia side of the river by a
family called Greathouse. And, engaged in a sporting
competition and as soon as their guns were empty, the
Greathouse party fell on them and, terribly,
massacred them.
JJKE 0205
Shot all the men, bludgeoned and stabbed and
otherwise desecrated the women, disemboweled them,
hung them from trees; one was a pregnant woman,
they cut her unborn baby out and, even scalped this
little baby. So, it was just a terrible thing. We hear
so much about the atrocities of the Indians, but the
atrocities some of the whites did were just, almost,
beyond belief.
Q: What impact did it have on both the, on
Logan himself and those who were seeking to make
peace?
JJKE 0266
AE: When this happened, this great proponent of
peace, Logan, decided that, that, he, these were people
that he just couldn't have peace with. And, so here
after all these years of advocating peace with the
whites, welcoming them.
Q: Start again.
JJKE 0296
AE: After all these years of welcoming the whites into
his villages, into his home, feeding them, clothing
them, now he was suddenly their enemy and he swore
a terrible revenge that he was going to kill ten men for
every one of his relatives that had been killed in that
attack by Greathouse. And, he fulfilled that promise.
This was the outbreak of Dunmore's War. Bands of
the Mingos, of which Logan was a member, the
Shawnees, the Wyandots came streaming across the
Ohio River and attacking the isolated settlements.
And, this culminated, finally, in the Battle of Point
Pleasant at the mouth of the Great Kanawha River
when the forces, under Lewis, were attacked by the,
primarily, the Shawnees, but with some of the
Wyandots and Delawares and Miamis. And, we often
hear of it as being a great American victory, but it
really wasn't.
JJKE 0390
There was no real victor for the day. The losses were
slightly higher for the whites than they were for the
Indians; and the Indians withdrew, simply because
they heard that re-enforcements were coming and,
but, to show that he was never turning his back on the
white man and running in fear, Cornstalk walked
backward, all the way from the battle lines to where
his canoe was and then stood, facing backward as the
canoe was rowed back across the Ohio River.
Q: Let's go into that in some depth. Let, set up
for me the main characters. Describe who Cornstalk
was and what his participation in the border conflict
was.
JJKE 0459
AE: Cornstalk was the principal chief of the
Shawnees at this time. His name was Holkaleskwa??
his Indian name, and he had a large sister, a powerful
woman, called the Grenadier Squaw.
Q: Sorry. Battery.
ECKERT INTERVIEW, TAKE 5.
Q: Allan, who was Cornstalk?
JJKE 0491
AE: Cornstalk, or Holkaleskwa??, his real name, was
a giant of men among the Shawnees. He had been a
great warrior. He became, within the tribe, a great
political figure, a great leader of people. He was a
member of the Peace Clan of the Shawnees and, yet,
he still was a great fighter. He was able to, to bring
together other tribes under his banner to fight the
whites when it became necessary. In every respect, he
was truly a great Indian leader.
Q: What was his response to the massacre of
Logan's family?
JJKE 0563
AE: The massacre of Logan's family, more or less,
united almost all the tribes that were in the Ohio
country at that time, including the Shawnees. This
was to their benefit, at that time, because they had
been more or less fighting the whites on their own.
The other tribes were more removed from the Ohio
River and, as such, they were not so immediately
threatened as the Shawnees were. So, the Shawnees
had asked for help, but were not getting very much of
it. The attack on Logan's family, which precipitated
Dunmore's War, drew the tribes together under his
banner. And this was done deliberately by the other
tribes, so that if they lost, the blame would go to the
Shawnees and not to themselves.
Q: Good. OK. Cut. Sound.
WEST VIRGINIA, ROLL 153. WEST
VIRGINIA, ROLL 153. 153.
ECKERT INTERVIEW, TAKE 6, CAMERA 322,
SOUND 153.
Q: Stop. Hold it. Hold it.
TAKE 6, SECOND STICKS.
Q: Describe how the governor of West Virginia
decided to take the war to the Indians. Just a second.
OK.
JJKE 0670
AE: When the fighting broke out in earnest, Governor
Dunmore of Virginia decided that it was time to make
a punitive raid against the Indians and he established
a rather substantial army that was to attack in two
wings. He would lead the northern wing, which
would come down from Fort Pitt to the mouth of the
Great Kanawha River to rendezvous with the
southern wing of the army, under General Andrew
Lewis, which was coming down the Kanawha from
the, from Camp Union in the Greenbrier Valley, who
would rendezvous at the mouth of the Great Kanawha
with Dunmore. And, at that point they would then
join forces and march on the Siota towns of the
Shawnees. Well, as it turned out, Dunmore changed
his plans in mid-stride and, instead of going to the
rendezvous, he descended the Ohio River a little
distance and went up the Hocking River. In the
meantime, Andrew Lewis with his army came down
the Kanawha and found no one waiting for him at the
rendezvous point, at Point Pleasant. So, he camped
there, waiting.
JJKE 0771
The Indians were aware he was there and under
Holkaleskwa??, this force of almost a thousand
Indians came to attack. In the midst of the night, they
crossed the Ohio River about three miles above
Andrew Lewis' camp. Now, this was on a kind of a
point of land, a triangular point of land, where
Andrew Lewis had made his camp. And, during this
very dark night, a thousand Indians crossed the Ohio
River and spread themselves across the bottom of this
triangle, forming the base of the triangle with Lewis
having no where to go. They remained there,
planning their attack for dawn. Just before dawn, the
woods began filling up with a fog rising from the
Ohio River and soon visibility was almost
non-existent. Andrew Lewis was preparing to cross
the Ohio River that day, not going to wait any longer
for Dunmore and he had given orders that no one was
to leave the camp.
JJKE 0862
But, two men went out to hunt turkey, early in the
morning and they got about a mile away from the
main camp ground and the fog parted, momentarily,
and suddenly, here they saw before them, not turkeys,
but a vast line of Indians stretching all the way from
the Ohio River across this base of the triangle all the
way to the Kanawha River, completely blocking off,
thousands, it seemed to them, thousands of Indians.
Actually, just one thousand, but enough. One of the
men was shot, the survivor ran back and alerted the
camp and the battle began. This was a very terrible
battle, very closely fought because of the fog. The
Indians had planned on firing from a distance as soon
as the light was good enough, but when the light
became good enough, the fog was there and they
couldn't. So, it became more or less a hand-to-hand
battle from the dawning of day until mid-afternoon
and was very fierce and very tough and a terrible
fight.
JJKE 0956
There were many good leaders, white and Indian
both, that were killed during that fight.
Pucksinwha??, the father of Tecumseh and
Chicksicwha?? was one of those who was killed, as
was General Andrew Lewis' brother, Colonel Charles
Lewis. No one really won this fight. The whites
claimed they had because, in the end, the Indians
withdrew. But, this was only because Holkaleswka??
had been informed that a re-enforcement was coming
down the Kanawha to re-enforce the white army.
And, so they backed off, but Holkaleswka?? was a
very proud man and he was not going to have it ever
be said that he had turned his back on an enemy.
And, so as he vacated the battlefield, he walked
backward, all the way, the mile to where his canoe
was wedged, got in the canoe and then stood in it,
facing backward, while it was paddled across the
river.
JJKE 1042
After this, Lewis then crossed the river and
rendezvoused with, after this. Let me start again.
After the battle was fought the next day, the dead
were buried and then Andrew Lewis crossed the river
and went to meet and rendezvous with General
Dunmore at the Pickaway Plains, near the Shawnee
villages. He was intent on fighting to retaliate for the
losses he had suffered at the Battle of Point Pleasant,
but, by this time, Dunmore was having peace talks at
his Camp Charlotte with the Indians and made
Andrew Lewis back off. And, the treaty, the so-called
treaty, of Camp Charlotte was effected and with that,
the war essentially ended.
Q: I just want to pick-up a couple of other
details. There's a description from one of Lewis' men
of Cornstalk riding or running back and forth behind
his troops shouting above the dead?? and the other
graphic description is of the Indians pulling their own
dead off the field, pulling them into the Ohio or, as
one wife said, scalping them so that we could not take
their scalp. Tell me about some of these details.
AE: That I'm not really sure about because I think
that is.
Q: What about Cornstalk's voice?
AE: Yes, Cornstalk had a --
Q: What about his presence during ?? (clearing
throat and could not hear the rest of question).
JJKE 1182
AE: OK. Whenever you're ready. Alright. During
the battle, Cornstalk was very prominent, among his
men right in the very front lines. He was running
back and forth. He had a very deep and Centurion
voice that could be heard great distances and he kept
yelling "fight on, fight on," and every few steps he
would repeat this and then he would engage the
enemy himself, and then continue to yell "fight on,
fight on," to his men. A constant presence, constantly
egging them on into this battle.
Q: How did the Virginians fare? Did they fight
well under the circumstances?
JJKE 1243
AE: Under the circumstances, considering that they
were pretty much taken by surprise, the Virginians
fought very well in the Battle of Point Pleasant. They
would have made a better showing for themselves had
Andrew Lewis taken the precautions of building a
fortification while he waited ten days for Dunmore to
show up. But, he never really did. And, so this was
done during the course of the battle, that breastworks
were thrown up, trees were chopped down, to give
them a barrier behind which to fight. Lewis was a
good general, except for that one failing that he had in
making his lines properly. But, he sent out bands of
his men in different waves to try and force the Indians
back. And, all through the day was a see-saw type of
battle. The whites would force the Indians back a bit,
and then the Indians would force the whites back a
bit. And, of course, as the Indians forced the whites
back that they were confined to a closer and closer
area because they were going to the apex of a triangle.
So, it was a very tricky situation. And, one has to
hand it to the whites for holding out as they did under
such circumstances.
Q: What was the impact of Dunmore's
War?
JJKE 1360
AE: The impact of Dunmore's War was that, for a
while, there was a sort of a quasi peace in the Ohio
Valley. For the Indians, this meant that the whites
would stay back, they would not penetrate further into
the Indian territory. The whites, or the Indians
themselves promised that they would stay north of the
Ohio River, but the whites kept coming in, wanting
more and more land, going into the Kentucky lands
and setting themselves up there. Well, after four
years of this so-called peace, Cornstalk suddenly
realized that he could no longer hold his young men
in check because they were being killed, if they
showed themselves near the Ohio River.
JJKE 1423
They would be shot on the shoreline, sometimes, just
for sport and he could no longer hold them back from
counter-attacking so he went to Fort Randolph, which
was then at Point Pleasant and presented himself and
said "I just came here to give you a warning, as a
honorable man, that we will no longer hold the peace
because the whites have broken and now we're going
to break it." As a reward for this generosity of his in
coming to warn the whites, he was taken prisoner and
put into a cell with his son and another sub-chief and;
an hour or so later a mob of whites stormed this jail
cell and shot him down, all three of them. And, of
course, then this ignited a real fire of rage among the
Shawnees and the war burst into absolute fire at that
point; and from that time on, for the next eighteen
years, we had terrible Indian wars along the Ohio
River.
Q: You OK? What impact did the
Revolutionary War, the turning of Virginia into,
colonists against the British, have on the warfare with
the Indians?
JJKE 1553
AE: Probably the greatest impact, the greatest change
that came with the American Revolution was the fact
that prior to this point, the need for, for going into the
hinter land of America was to get furs because this
was the big economic impulse, impetus. The, get my
thoughts straight here a minute. Once the break
occurred, however, between the Americans.
Q: We just ran out of film.
AE: OK.
Q: You can get your thoughts.
WEST VIRGINIA ROLL 154. WEST
VIRGINIA ROLL 154.
ECKERT INTERVIEW, TAKE 7, CAMERA 323,
SOUND 154.
Q: Pick-up that train of thought.
JJKE 1626
AE: The Dunmore War was, was really a one-battle
war and when it ended, it, it changed the whole aspect
of the American frontier. Up until this point, the
whites had been coming into this great interior land
for the purpose of getting furs for trading with the
Indians for furs. Now that it changed, now all of the
sudden, this land was open to development, open to
claiming. And so, no longer were furs the big
impetus, the big impetus became claiming and
holding land that the Indians lived upon. Well, the
Indians didn't take very kindly to this, of course, and
the wars increased and grew hotter and hotter; and
you had bands of whites going into the Indian country
and killing the Indians where they lived and
retaliation of the same sort by the Indians coming
across the Ohio River against the whites. There were
a number of, of rather incredible Indian fighters
among the whites.
JJKE 1724
Samuel Brady was a very good one, who established
the Brady Rangers, who patrolled up and down the
Ohio River and made expeditions into the Ohio
country to fight the Indians and to spy upon them.
This was very hazardous undertaking. They would
go as far, sometimes, as upper Sandusky, which was a
long way away from, from the Ohio River. Just to
spy on what the Indians were doing. How much help
they were getting from the British and so on. And, the
British were, were promulgating this series of attacks
by the Indians against the Americans because they
saw a great threat here. They were going to lose this
continent to the Americans if they weren't careful.
So, they began, offering a bounty on American scalps
and so on to inspire the Indians to get more and more
and be more and more savage in their attacks.
JJKE 1805
There were some of the whites who were, were so
bitterly Indian-haters that it didn't make any
difference to them whether the Indians were friendly
Indians or not, they just killed them where ever they
found them. One of these was Lewis Wetzel, of the
very large Wetzel family, who was such an
Indian-hater that in his life span, he is estimated to
have killed over a hundred Indians, usually, in
hand-to-hand or very close combat. He was one of
the few men who could, while running at full tilt,
reload a flint-lock rifle and turn and shoot the person
who was chasing him. Well, he killed many Indians
this way because they did't think it could be done. It
was a very difficult undertaking and he practiced it a
great deal; but he would shoot, he would creep up on
an Indian camp, sometimes with five or six Indians in
the camp, and shoot one of them.
JJKE 1888
Well, the Indians knew, at that point, that his gun was
empty and so they would begin to chase him and he
would run and reload as he ran and then stop and fire
and kill another. And, then run again, with more
chasing him, and he kill as many, sometimes as many
as three or four Indians in a row in this respect.
Q: I just want to ask you a question about Betty
Zane. Before, you do, just take a big hump in your
chest. We're getting a little bit of hits on that.
AE: OK. Sorry about that.
Q: No, it's just developed. Describe to me how
women came to start to participate in the war.
AE: Are we ready?
Q: Yes. Just a second. Ready? OK.
JJKE 1949
AE: Very often we think of the frontier woman as
being a person who took care of the hearth and home
and when troubles developed, when the cabins, excuse
me, when troubles developed, when the cabins were
attacked by Indians and so on, that they were there to
dutifully load the guns and to feed the men who were
doing the fighting and so on. This is not entirely true.
Many of the women were very, very powerful fighters
themselves. They could handle weapons, they could
take their posts at the port holes and shoot the
attacking ports of Indians. there was a great deal of
heroism involved with the women on the
frontier.
JJKE 2012
One case in particular, of course, is the case of Betty
Zane in Wheeling. When Wheeling was under it's
first siege in, the first of September, 1777, part of the
people of the defenders of Wheeling were in the fort
that was there at the time, the rest were in Zane's
house which was about sixty yards away. Well, those
in Zane's house which included Betty Wheeling, or
Betty, which included Betty Zane. Those in the house
which included Betty Zane, were running out of gun
powder and the only other source was at the fort.
Well, it was sixty yards of "no man's land," because
the Indians had, were within full range of fire of that
gap of land. And, Betty Zane volunteered to go and
get the powder as she said "your lives are more
important than mine, and maybe they won't shoot
because I'm a woman." So, she gathered up her
skirts and took a running start and hit the ground
going as fast as she could and the Indians yelled out
"a squaw, a squaw," and didn't shoot.
JJKE 2121
She got to the fort, okay, and had no kind of a
container, or anything else, to carry the powder in, so
she gathered up the folds of her apron and they
poured a keg of gun powder into her apron and then
she ran back. And, by this time the Indians were
waiting. And, they started firing at her and spurts of
ground flew up all around her as she ran, but she
managed to get back with the gun powder and save
the day. So, the women really played a very
important part. They weren't just all docile
homebodies.
Q: Tell me how this fascinating chapter in
American History and this chapter, for our purposes,
in western Virginia drew to a close.
JJKE 2188
AE: Eventually, of course, all this came to an end
because of, of two powerful factors. One, the
Americans had greater and better weaponry and they
had greater and better numbers. And, neither of these
factors could the Indians combat forever. Attrition
took its toll. The Indians were being killed off. They
had less and less. This is one of the reasons why the
Indians kept capturing, young people, especially,
among the whites, young boys, young girls, to
repopulate their own numbers. To adopt them into
the tribes and repopulate themselves. Well, it worked
for awhile, but it didn't work that well for that long.
As a result, as more and more and more whites came
into this great Ohio Valley, the Indians were
gradually forced back. And, the war moved away
from the Ohio Valley and up into the upper Ohio
portion and, finally, up into the Great Lakes area.
And, for all intents and purposes, the war between the
Indians and the whites, in the upper Ohio Valley,
ended about 19, 1795.
Q: Would you say that last sentence, again?
JJKE 2301
AE: Yea. For all intents and purposes then, the war
in the upper Ohio Valley ended, roughly, about
1795.
Q: What's the lesson in this?
JJKE 2322
AE: I think, going back in retrospect, people say
"well, if the Indians had had better weaponry, if they
had had more men and so on, could they have won?"
Chances are, they couldn't have because this was a, a
ball that had begun rolling and was rolling under it's
own momentum and it just, simply, couldn't be
stopped. It could have been stalled for awhile, it
could have been halted for awhile, Tecumseh's
gathering of the tribes together, early in the 1800's,
had a chance to do so. He gathered together some
fifty thousand men who could have forced the whites
back, beyond the Allegheny and Appalachian chain.
But, it would have only been a stop-gap measure
because the whites were so well armed, they were so
well provided for, so well supplied, had so many men,
that it would have started again and come back. So, it
was, it was fate. The time had come for the Indian
Epic to end, east of the Mississippi.
Q: It was at a lost line. Would you say it
again.
JJKE 2434
AE: OK. So, it was fate that this should end; the time
had come for the, the whites to gain supremacy on the
east of the Mississippi.
Q: What's the tragedy in all this?
JJKE 2461
AE: The tragedy in all this I think is, is that, we lost a
great culture in the Indian culture. It never regained
itself to what it was before the advent of the whites,
nor will it ever. Even, I think, should the country
revert to the Indians. It couldn't happen because they
have become too dependent upon white men and
white ways. This in itself is a great tragedy. Another
great tragedy, is the manner we are experiencing still
these days, in the way we treat our environment. The
way we treat our natural resources. The wastefulness.
The destructiveness. We continue to do so, and I
don't think we are ever going to learn that
lesson.
Q: Cut. and HOLD THE ROOM TONE. 30
SECONDS OF QUIET, PLEASE.
THIS IS PRESENCE FOR ALLAN ECKERT
INTERVIEW.
JJKE 2550
THAT'S IT. TAIL OUT.
AE: Of course, just when you want. Whenever
this is available. Is there a possibility I can get a
cassette.
Q: Absolutely. Absolutely. We'll definitely send
you.
BLANK TO END OF TAPE.
AE: The tragedy in