The Indian fighters were commoner in the southern and eastern parts of
Ohio than in the north, but there was at least one whose chief exploit
had the north for its scene. Captain Samuel Brady, in 1780, gathered a
number of his neighbors and pursued a retreating war party of Indians
from the Ohio as far as the Cuyahoga, near Ravenna. Here he found that
the savages far outnumbered his force, and he decided that it would be
better for him to retreat in his turn, and he bade each of his men look
out for himself. He discovered that the Indians were pressing him hard
with the purpose of taking him alive and glutting many an old grudge
against him by torture. But he knew his ground, for he had often hunted
there with them in friendlier days, and he saw a chance for his life at
a point where another man would have despaired. This was where the river
narrowed to a gorge twenty feet wide, with walls of precipitous rock. As
he neared this chasm in his flight, Brady gathered himself for the
leap and cleared it. He caught at some low bushes where he alighted and
pulled himself up the steep, while the Indians stood stupefied. They had
now no hope of taking him alive, and they all fired upon him. One bullet
wounded him badly in the hip, but he managed to swim a pond which he
came to, and to hide himself behind a log near the shore. When the
Indians came up and saw the blood on its surface, they decided that he
was drowned, and gave up the chase. Some of them stood on the very log
that hid him while they talked over his probable fate, and then they
left him to make his long way home unmolested.
Duncan McArthur, an early governor of Ohio, though not an Indian fighter
like these others, was in many fights with the Indians. In the summer of
1794 he was hunting deer in the hills near the mouth of the Scioto, when
two Indians fully armed came in sight. McArthur was waiting for the deer
behind a screen or blind near the salt lick which they frequented, and
he took aim at one of the Indians and shot him. The other did not stir
till McArthur broke from his covert and ran. He plunged heedlessly into
the top of a fallen tree, and before he could disentangle himself, he
heard the crack of the Indian’s rifle, and the bullet hissed close
to his ear. He freed himself and ran, followed now by several other
Indians, but he managed to distance them all and reached the Ohio River
in safety.
It was war to the death between the red and white borderers. Neither
spared the other, except in some rare mood of caprice or pity. A life
granted on either side meant perhaps many lives lost, and the foes vied
with one another in being the first to shed the blood which seems, as
you read their savage annals, to stain every acre of the beautiful Ohio
country.
XIV. LATER CAPTIVITIES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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