Settlers v. Natives: The Yellow Creek Massacre, April 30, 1774

We've already come across Logan the Orator several times and covered Lord Dunmore's War.  Now it's time to take a look at the even which sparked the War, the Yellow Creek Massacre.

Logan's family was known to be friendly to the Settlers.  This tradition began with his father, Chief Shikellamy and continued to nearly all of his sons.  Logan had formed many friendships with Whites, and his family were known as traders, moving easily between Settlers and Natives and among Native tribes less receptive to Whites, such as the Shawnee.  As Settlers poured into the Ohio Valley, where so many tribes were cramped for hunting range, tensions increased.  The Greathouse brothers of Virginia, Jacob and Daniel, were looking for an incident to start a conflict with the tribes, hoping to use it as an excuse to drive them from the Ohio Valley. 

They came across a party of Mingo containing members of Logan's family, including his wife, Mellana, his brother, called John Petty by English speakers, John's son, and his and Logan's sister, Koonay, who had a two-year-old daughter and was pregnant by a White man, John Gibson.  On the night of April 30, 1774, the Greathouse brothers with their company of militia/frontiersmen camped near Logan's family near the mouth of the Yellow River on the upper Ohio River, near present-day Cumberland, West Virginia.  The Greathouse party sent word to Logan's relatives that they would like to trade and the Mingo came freely into their camp.  The trap was sprung.  In the ensuing melee, Logan's wife, his brother John, John's wife and son, their sister and her unborn child, as well as several other Mingo, were killed.  Only the two-year-old girl was spared.  She was first taken in by the family of William Crawford, whom we've already met, and later returned to the custody of her biological father, John Gibson.

Karma fell, not on Daniel Greathouse, who instigated and led the attack.  He died of measles in 1775.  However, his brother Jacob was killed in another of the Native/Settler conflicts on the frontier, the Foreman Massacre of 1777.  Another brother, Jonathan, who was not known to have been at Yellow Creek, was captured with his family in 1791 while trying to settle in the Ohio Valley.  He and his family were all killed.