I haven’t had access to fast internet the past few days, so I’ve been spending a little more time reading. This morning I was reading “A history of Jonathan Alder : His captivity and life with the Indians” by Henry Clay Alder, edited by Larry L. Nelson (2002).

Which brings me to this monument in Zanesfield, Ohio. It was the final destination of a bike ride on September 2. It’s a monument to Simon Kenton and Isaac Zane.

Until today I hadn’t really known anything about Isaac Zane, even though I came across his name several times while on last year’s Ohio bike rides. Today I was looking for a photo to go with a post I wanted to write about Jonathan Alder. Alder told of having spent time at the present site of Zanesfield when he was living as an Indian among Shawnee and Mingo people, so I pulled up my Zanesfield photos from September 2, and learned that Isaac Zane had a life story somewhat like Alder’s.

Alder and Zane were contemporaries and both lived in this part of Ohio. They had both been captured by Ohio Indians when young and lived as Indians for many years. Both were caught between two cultures. Alder, though, eventually went back to live as a white farmer. (Here is a local history page a about the two. As a bonus, it has links to the work of Hal Sherman, who has commented in this blog a few times.)

As a historical tourist, I’ve often wondered about the young Indian men who travel led great distances to take part in wars. They didn’t have the benefit of paved roads and bicycles, but it was impressive the way they got around. IIRC, during the French and Indian War, Potawatomi men from Michigan took part not only in the defeat of Gen. Braddock near modern Pittsburg, but in the fighting around Lake Champlaign.

So what induced them to go so far from home? Certainly the desire to protect one’s family and friends played a role, as well as the desire to impress the young women with their war exploits. But was a part of it a desire to see the country, to be tourists of a sort? It’s a motivation I could certainly understand.

I thought I found a sort-of confirmation in Alder’s book where he tells of the time when he was Indian. In 1790 he went along on a raiding party to Kentucky. In one of the versions of his story it is told like this (on page 81):

I had never owned a horse, but was very desirous of doing so, and did not reflect upon the mode proposed to obtain them. To me, nothing seemed wrong so far as the whites were concerned. We had suffered so much at their hands that all seemed to be fair. I was assured the whites would steal our horses, or anything we had, if they had a chance to do so. They had several times taken or destroyed all we had, whereby we were almost reduced to a state of starvation. Hence, I felt somewhat like retaliating if I should have the opportunity. I knew I would like the trip, even if we failed in getting horses….

It was that last sentence that struck me as confirming that there was a bit of the adventuring tourist in these young men: “I knew I would like the trip, even if we failed in getting horses.”

And that first raid into Kentucky was not the only one for Alder. It sounds like it took a lot of planning and resources to undertake these raids. But Alder’s Indian father and mother were pleased with his efforts:

My Indian father and mother were greatly elated over my success. I had to give them a full history of all the little particulars that took place. They thought it was a great thing swimming the Ohio River. They seemed to be overjoyed that I had made the trip so safely and so successfully. They also seemed to set great store to the horses, not because they were so valuable, but because they had a son that could venture out and be so successful, and they were proud of this.

So it wasn’t quite like the social situation described in the song that went, “How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Paris?” For Alder, you might substitute Kentucky for Paris. But his parents’ reaction might help us understand Benjamin Franklin’s famous lament about white children who were brought up among Indians, in a letter written in 1753 :

When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

Not that Franklin was completely on the mark. He was right that a lot of whites came to prefer life among the Indians but that it hardly ever worked the other way around. But he seemed to think the attraction was a life that was easy and carefree. But John Tanner certainly didn’t think life as an Indian was easier. Far from it. And I haven’t got that impression from any other of the captivity stories. I would think that the attraction was partly in the more adventurous lifestyle, and partly in the interpersonal relationships, both of which are illustrated by Alder’s story.

I’ll be interested to hear what Alder has to say about the relative ease and comfort, though. So far I haven’t got to the part of his story where he went back to living as a white farmer.

I learned about it while getting carried away with my efforts to learn how to use Google Earth.

This is a screen shot of what I was working on. It’s a scene of most of Salem Township in Champaign County, Ohio, which I’ve been posting about lately. The light green line is my route for the day. Salem Township is bordered in red. I’ve also imported a tracing of King’s Creek and Mad River into the map, to make the water bodies stand out better. (You probably have to click on the map to see what I’m really talking about.) The first settlement in Salem Township was along King’s Creek, which flows from right to lower left through Kingston. Near the lower left it empties into Mad River, which flows to the north along the left edge of the image, and past the area where the county history writers said there had been a Shawnee settlement (towards the upper left of the image).

Urbana, which in 1812 was considered the outer edge of civilization by Hull’s army, is just below the lower right of the image. There were pockets of agricultural settlement to the north, though, and the army marched through them, first at the point marked “Hull’s Trace 3″, and then at the one marked “Hull’s Trace 5.” (Later I’ll post an up-to-date link for those people who have Google Earth loaded on their computers.)

The information about Hull’s route is from Joshua Antrim’s 1872 history of Champaign and Logan Counties. He got some of the information from the farmer who had settled at the place marked “Hull’s Trace 5,” who in his old age passed on his recollections to Antrim.

I got to thinking, why not go ahead and mark all of the known spots of Hull’s Trace to the north, as far to the north as Antrim told about them. It was while re-reading and re-checking the information that I realized I didn’t have it quite right back on September 2.

North of West Liberty (barely visible at the top of the Google Earth image above) I thought Hull’s Army had continued to follow the Mad River where the river had turned to the east, towards Zanesville, and then had curled around behind the big ridge that begins here on the other side of the road. That would have been a longer route than it actually took, though. It’s too bad, because I like the country in this direction. There is a road along the edge of the valley that’s marked as a bicycle route.

While here, I looked across the valley and tried to imagine Hull’s army somewhere between this point and the river bottom in the distance, the main body pulling cannon carriages, and lines of scouts patrolling off to either side of the main body. It was low ground, but it isn’t likely that the British would have crossed Lake Erie or the Detroit River and brought cannons all the way down here to use against them. Congress hadn’t even officially declared war yet when Hull left Urbana. And I was guessing that the valley was broad enough to give plenty of room to maneuver in case of enemy attack.

Alas, today I learned that Hull departed from the the Mad River valley before he got into the area shown in this scene.

This is a screen shot from the output of my Sony GPS, a GPS-CS1. It’s from the September 26 ride from Fort Loramie (in the upper left) to Urbana, OH (lower right).

I usually attach the device to the outside of the single pannier I carry with me, or else put it inside on days when there might be rain. At the end of the ride I throw the pannier in the back of the car and forget to turn it off, with the result that our car ride back to the motel is shown, too.

What I’d like to be able to do is edit those tracks, so I can at least omit the car ride portion, and make a regular Google map or Google Earth map out of my rides. Yes, the software uses Google maps, but it doesn’t provide any means to get the map into “My Maps” on Google, where I could then do other things with the pushpin markers and add other lines.

The device produces a log file which is very accessible on the computer. It looks to be some standard kind of file, and could be edited with a text editor. So it shouldn’t be much trouble to lop off the car ride.

Today I finally got around for looking around for information on the file format, and hopefully for tools to do further manipulations. So far I found this web page titled “Sony GPS-CS1 Review – Personal Opinion.” It identifies the data as “NMEA sentences” and gives a link to further information. That’s progress — more than I knew before.

But I’m linking it here because it also has a good summary of why this kind of GPS might be good for bicycle touring. As far as I know, it doesn’t do anything that other GPSs won’t do, and it’s lacking some features one would like. As the author, who identifies himself as arb, says:

The Sony GPS-CS1 is a very simple GPS device – it records your position everywhere you go. It has no screen display, no controls, and you can’t get it to tell you where you are right now. So why pay so much for such a seemingly less-than-useful device?

Arb then lists the reasons why — all reasons I agree with.

I think if I ever got a GPS device that -did- have a screen to tell me where I am, I’d still carry this one and use it for tagging my photos.

Usually when I’m in checkerboard country that has been surveyed into square mile sections, it isn’t hard for me to know where I am. On this particular ride, I did have some moments along the Great Miami River, where the usual section cues were missing, when I could have benefited from knowing more precisely where I was. And there are places like the Virginia Military Tract (shown in the above map to the upper right of a red line that I added to the screen shot) that are not surveyed into square mile sections. I could see where a GPS readout could be handy in that country, though on my rides up there this year the road intersections provided enough reference points for me to know where I was.

Now to go and follow up on some of those leads I found on arb’s web page.

It was dark by the time I left. About a half mile into the ride I noticed that when I put some oomph into the pedals to climb a small hill, that the wheel slipped without making much forward progress. That was something I had never had happen before. At a couple of points I stopped to get off the bike and test the road with my feet for slipperiness. It was hard to tell in the dark (my light goes out when the bike stops moving) but it seemed I could find a reasonably dry path near the center. I proceeded slowly. A couple of miles later I decided that the roads were icy enough to call for a rescue mission. A fall didn’t seem like the worst thing that could happen, as long as no cars were nearby, but I don’t bounce off the road as well as I used to. Myra agreed to meet me where C Avenue crosses Augusta Creek. But then I decided I didn’t even want to coast down the long side of the valley to the creek. I walked my bike much of the way, and it was slippery enough that even walking wasn’t a sure thing. I stayed upright, though.

So tonight I’ll have to settle for mere memories of rides. This photo shows more from September 26. At the point shown here, I was now headed east again — into the wind.

This hillside seemed like a pretty setting, so I stopped for a photo. A black pickup coming toward me seemed to want to stop for something, but kept going because of other traffic. I wondered if it was someone who wanted to yell at me for being on the road, or for not being far enough off of it. I don’t know why I wonder things like that, because usually the people I meet in places like this are friendly and genuinely curious. The ones who are nasty are the rare exceptions. A very few times people have objected to my taking photos. But even then they usually come around once I explain what I’m doing.

googlemap

If I had been more aware of the terrain, I would have realized (as I do now, thanks to the maps I have handy) that the low ground at the base of the hill is an occasional waterway that leads to Stony Creek to the north (to the left on the photo). If I can trust Eckert’s map to tell me, the 1806 encampment of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had been bounded on the northeast by Stony Creek, on the northwest by the occasional waterway I had photographed a couple miles back, and on the southeast by this one. So there may have been water on three sides, if there had been water flowing in these two now-temporary streams.

One could say there was a missionary center just to the north of this place. Eckert’s book presents the old viewpoint that Tecumseh was the political leader while his brother Tenskwatawa (”The Prophet”) was a religious fraud — a useful idiot at times but perhaps jealous of his brother’s glory. Recent scholarship, e.g. Gregory Dowd’s, “A Spirited Resistance,” takes the religious revival aspect of their movement much more seriously.

I took my photo and moved on. I hadn’t gone far, though, before that black pickup passed me from behind, then pulled into a farm field lane up ahead of me. The driver got out, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t my imagination — he really did want to talk to me.

His name was Phil. He wondered what I was photographing. He especially wondered if I was taking a photo of the cross on the hillside. I had to admit I hadn’t noticed it. We chatted for a while. The homestead I had passed was his, and the cross was something he and his wife had put up some years ago as part of their children’s Vacation Bible School. It was now somewhat of a local landmark, even though I hadn’t noticed it. He told me that the bridge I had crossed was due for replacement, and a new historic marker is planned. He offered to send me one of his own photos of the cross, taken in the light from the setting sun. If it hadn’t been getting late I might have gone back for another look and a photo of my own, but I needed to keep going. And later when we got back to our motel, I found the photograph waiting for me in my e-mail. I discovered that the cross can also be seen in my own photo, but Phil’s (below) is a much nicer one.

(September 26, continued) I continued on south on County Road 64 to the intersection of Township Highway 69. There is a small cemetery on the west side of the road, where I stopped for photos.

According to the 1880 history of Logan County, this area wasn’t settled until after the War of 1812. There was a church here, known at one time as Olive Chapel. There is no sign of it now. I enjoyed the following description from page 375. I hadn’t realized that log cabins would be built without erecting a chimney as soon as possible:

The first organized church was probably in the Newman neighborhood. Here a log church was erected in 1828… The building was arranged as was common in those days. The seats were principally of smooth rails supported on legs. To furnish the necessary warmth, a square box was placed in the centre of the room and filled with dirt; on this a wood fire was built, allowing the smoke to escape where it could. Fortunately for the comfort of the audience, the character of the early building offered little obstruction to the passage of smoke, and the people suffered no great inconvenience from this source. Later, charcoal was used, and the people were saved from more serious consequences by the free ventilation allowed in the construction of the cabin. About 1840 the present frame building was erected… (page 375)

There is a genealogy web that lists many more gravestones than I remembered seeing at this little cemetery. Then I remembered that there are actually two cemeteries. There was a larger one on the other side of the road, and a bit further north.

I had taken a photo of the larger one a few years earlier. Did the two cemeteries represent two factions in the congregation? Or was one the church cemetery and the other a family cemetery? I don’t know.

googlemap

(September 26, continued) This is looking north on County Road 63, a half mile or so south of the falling-down bridge across Stony Creek. The marker that used to be on the bridge seems to be saying that the Tecumseh-Tenskwatawa encampment was in this area. Their village is referred to as Old Town. I’m not sure where that name came from, but I believe one of the county histories refers to it by that name, too.

googlemap

Alan Eckert’s book, “A sorrow in our heart”, has a map that shows the location of Tecumseh’s village. I don’t know what information Eckert used to determine the location and extent of Tecumseh’s village, but I was curious to see how his map compared with the places where I had been. In the above, I overlaid Eckert’s map on top of a google map, and used the latter to help draw in the location of modern roads and to mark the places where I took photos, which I overlaid as the top layer.

The green lines are modern roads. The red dots are places where I took photos on this trip and on a previous one. The above photo was taken at the red dot south of the bridge that once had a historic marker. So I may have been standing toward the north-northwest end of the site of the encampment when I took it. The road in the photo leads down to the little stream shown crossing the road. I suppose that would have been a good place for people to get water, especially if their village was such a long walk from Stony Creek itself.

]]> http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/11/15/old-town/feed/ 0 http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/11/14/stony-creek-bridge-is-falling-down/ http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/11/14/stony-creek-bridge-is-falling-down/#comments Fri, 14 Nov 2008 08:34:14 +0000 Spokesrider http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/11/14/stony-creek-bridge-is-falling-down/

(September 26, continued.) From DeGraff I rode south of town to the bridge across Stony Creek on County Road 63.

In an old post I had told about my trip to this bridge in 2005. At that time Ken remarked on how badly deteriorated this bridge was. It was now three years later and the bridge was in much worse condition.

And the historical marker that was there in 2005 (above) was gone.

BTW, this marker had said the meeting of Kenton and Tecumseh took place a quarter mile north. Or maybe it was trying to say the sign was a quarter mile north of the meeting place. The second interpretation would be more accurate. According to the map in Alan Eckert’s book, “A sorrow in our heart,” the place where Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had a village was just upstream from this bridge, on the south side of the creek.

There are many stories of Indian war councils that we know about because white observers were welcome to attend and listen. But Tecumseh did not usually care to make such meetings so open. In Tuckabatchee in 1811 he tried to wait until the white observers were gone before explaining his mission. And according to Eckert, this place on Stony Creek was picked by Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa because it was away from the usual travel routes of the few white settlers that lived this far north on the Great Miami. There were guards posted to keep white people from entering.

The following is from a footnote in Eckert’s book:

The first Stony Creek Council had been accidentally discovered on the third or fourth day after it commenced by Kenton as he was passing through the area with a friend, Jim McPherson, of Urbana, 15 miles southeast. Kenton crept up and spied on it from hiding and observed the war dance and tomahawks being struck into the war posts, but was not close enough to hear what was being said. Kenton and McPherson warned all nearby residents, who forted up in the blockhouse at Springfield, waiting attack. When it had not occurred in four days, Kenton and McPherson returned to the site along with Charles McIlvain and Maj. Thomas Moore and approached openly under a white flag. They were at first turned away and then allowed a small council in a nearby cabin, at which the Indians stated that the council was a private Indian matter but there was no need for white residents to be alarmed. (One of the accounts, highly romanticized, states that at this point Kenton had a verbal altercation with Tecumseh which, if such altercation did occur, which is highly doubtful, could not have been with Tecumseh, since the quoted conversation indicates no recognition whatever of Kenton for Tecumseh or vice versa, and the same account has Kenton thrashing one of the warriors with a hickory stick and theatening others with his knife; the whole account, in the author’s opinion, is unbelievable.)

The Jim McPherson who was with Kenton is the same James McPherson I told about here, which led to a discussion of Shawnee pronunciation. One of my destinations on a ride a few days later was connected to this same McPherson.

But on September 26, my destination was to the southeast, on the other side of Urbana. I only made it as far as Urbana before I ran out of daylight, though. Eckert’s footnote says Urbana is 15 miles to the southeast of this bridge. I’m pretty sure it took me more miles than that to get there. Along the way I met someone who told me what was happening with the bridge and the historic marker.

(September 26, continued) Finally I had the wind at my back as I rode from the Vance Fort location back to Logansville and then to DeGraff. Just before I got to DeGraff I stopped at this windmill. There weren’t any No Trespassing signs, so I invited myself to go take a closer look.

My GPS says it was at a location identified on the 1875 atlas of Logan County as belonging to a John Murphy. (The base map above is courtesy of Historic Map Works. If you click on it, you’ll go to the page containing the map for the entire township.) He was the son of a James Murphy who happened to be one of the early settlers — one of those who came prior to the War of 1812. He may not have lived here at the time of the war, though. Here is what the 1880 county history (page 360) says about him in its chapter about Miami Township (i.e. the township just to the south, which is the township in which DeGraff is located):

In this year [1810] James Murphy came and settled on land just over the line, in Pleasant Township, He brought no family, but put up a cabin and made a deadening. This was a lonesome life, and he soon left, to return a few years later, however, with a family.

If this is the exact spot where he had his first cabin (and it’s the most likely guess available) it’s now a lonesome place again.

(September 26, continued)

This is another view looking north from the high ground a mile north of Logansville — ground on which the Vance fort may have stood during the war of 1812.

The Greenville Treaty line is a couple of miles north of here. The marker back in Logansville lists blockhouses, including this one, that were built along the treaty line, but I suppose a point a couple of miles away can still be considered to be along that line. The blockhouses would have been placed where they could best protect settlers, and here is where some of the very first settlers to the area had come by the time the war broke out.

In the last post I mentioned two places that have been given as the location of the fort. The black dot above is the location of the marker that says the blockhouse was a mile north. But the 1880 county history said it was on high ground a mile east. (The base map is courtesy of Historic Map Works. If you click on it, you’ll go to the original 1875 map from which I took a screen shot.)

One other source gives yet a 3rd location. A biography of Joseph Vance was written for Ohio History in 1910 (Volume 19). The author was Benjamin F. Prince, a professor at Wittenburg College in Springfield. The article is available online here. Page 230 contains this information:

In 1807 the murder of a white man near Urbana by a malicious Indian, as later investigation showed, caused a general alarm among the whites. In order to prepare themselves against any depredations from the Indians a military company was formed of which young Vance was made Captain. He was with a party that a little later built a block-house on the Great Miami River where Quincy, a village in Logan County, now stands. It was called Vance’s block-house. It was used as a post of observation and a depot of supplies for the army of the North west. Vance’s company was called out a number of times just prior to the War of 1812 to resist threatened outbreaks of Indians.

Quincy is 2.75 miles to the southwest. I suppose it’s possible that this was an earlier blockhouse. Prince speaks of this one as having been built before the war broke out. But he doesn’t make any mention of any other blockhouse where Vance operated later. Prince continues:

When the war broke out Urbana was still a border settlement, and became headquarters for the military operations of the Northwest. Through that place Hull passed with his army on his route to Detroit. From it he was piloted to the Maumee by Joseph Vance and his brother. Here for a short time Govrnor Shelby with his four thousand mounted Kentuckians encamped during their journey northward to join the army of General Harrison. Here supplies for the army were gathered and distributed, in which duty Vance had a share. Here were brought many wounded soldiers. To this place Colonel Richard M. Johnson, the reputed slayer of the celebrated Tecumseh, was brought to recover from his wounds before being carried to his home in Kentucky.

The part of Captain Vance in this war was to assist in guarding trains of quartermasters’ supplies and to look after the defense of the borders against incursion from the Indians.

So far I haven’t been able to find out whether the research materials that Prince used for his articles have been archived anywhere, but this family history page about him gives me an idea of where to start asking.

There is another place on the map above that might be good for a future bike ride. I like to collect stories of men who came to live on land that they had seen as soldiers during the War of 1812. William J. Smith (the name circled in blue in the lower right) was said to be the grandson of such a person. The following is from the 1880 history of Logan County, page 839:

WILLIAM J. SMITH, farmer; P. O., DeGraff; was born in Clarke Co., O., in 1830, and at 1 year of age came to Logan Co.; … in 1865 he moved from his farm and rented 178 acres of his father, at the same time keeping the stock on his own place; two years after he bought the farm he was renting, which, in 1832, was purchased by his grandfather, John Smith, who had seen it during the war of 1812, as he was a soldier in frontier service, stationed near the present site of Logansville.

The 1881 history of Clark County contains a roster of Joseph Vance’s company of riflemen. But John Smith is not listed in it. So there are loose ends to this story, too. Still, it gives me yet another reason to come back to this country sometime for more rides.

(September 26, continued)

I didn’t have any trouble finding the historic marker that Jeff had told me about.

Jeff had told me the marker used to be different. Once upon a time a marker had said the blockhouse was a mile east. This one says a mile north. This marker was placed in 1955, so that’s not just a recent change.

I think I know where the “mile east” came from, though. The 1880 county history says this on page 458:

During the war of 1812, the utmost alarm and uneasiness prevailed in the scattered settlements by reason of which the Government ordered a company of soldiers into the vicinity for protection. Immediately an their arrival they proceeded to the erection of a “blockhouse.” Its location was upon a high point of land, about one mile east of the present village of Logansville. The structure was composed of two buildings, some twenty feet square, connected at the second story and well provided with port-holes. It was of little importance, however, as the troops were withdrawn soon after its completion.

Henry Howe’s 1882 “Historical Collections of Ohio” (page 104) also says it was a mile east, and connects it to the name Vance:

…Vance’s, built by ex-Governor Vance, then captain of a rifle company, stood on a high bluff on the margin of a prairie, about a mile east of Logansville…

But the historical marker now says a mile north, and that was all I knew on September 26, so I rode to the north to take a look. This was on the road I had come on in August 2005, but I wasn’t looking for fort locations that time, so had had no idea. The map fragment above, from the 1875 county atlas, shows my route in a reddish color. (The base map is courtesy of Historic Map Works. If you click on it, you’ll go to the original from which I took a screen shot.) I went as far as what was the north edge of Pleasant Township, though I didn’t notice at the time that it was a township boundary. I was just watching my bicycle odometer, and the place where I stopped to take photos was about a mile from Logansville.

This is looking back to the south, towards Logansville. This location was the right distance away, and it was on high ground — a good place for a fort.

This is the view to the north-northwest. There was a good view in this direction, too. The Great Miami River is among the trees below, in the background.

So it seems like a good site for a blockhouse. And one of the very earliest settlers in the townshipo seems to have had a farmstead up here on the high ground, which also makes it a likely spot. But I wish I knew what information sources were used for the information on the historical marker.

In looking for more information about Joseph Vance, starting with his Wikipedia article, I learned about his father, Joseph C. Vance. There had been a Vance blockhouse named for him, too. It was in Washington County, Pennsylvania, about a mile north of a place on Cross Creek (at Avella) that I hope to make a destination for a Whiskey Rebellion tour I want to do sometime. That Vance blockhouse had been built during the Revolutionary War.

There is a legend, reported in one of the later editions of Joseph Doddridge’s book, “Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania from 1763 to 1783,” that Joseph C. Vance had once claimed that the plan for the infamous Gnadenhutten massacre had been hatched by the men who were forted up at his blockhouse. A footnote to a later edition lists Vance as one of the militiamen who went to Gnadenhutten to massacre the Indians. However, it’s hard to tell whether he was one of those who took part in the killing, or one of the 16 or 18 who voted against the massacre and then stood aside. Doddridge told that as a child he had known David Williamson, the leader of that expedition, but that “the names of the murderers shall not stain the pages of history, from my pen at least.” Here is the web page of a genealogist who seems to have looked into the matter. According to him we still don’t know which people were the murderers and which militiamen made at least some slight objection. We don’t know the exact role of Joseph C. Vance, father of the future governor of Ohio and commander of the blockhouse at this location in 1812. But Doddridge made this point (on page 200):

Should it be asked what sort of people composed the band of murderers of these unfortunate people, I answer. They were not miscreants or vagabonds; many of them were men of the first standing in the country.

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