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Updated: May 27, 2025
There has been much controversy over the genuineness of Logan's speech; but those who have questioned it have done so with singularly little reason. Cresap's defenders, with curious folly, have in consequence thought it necessary to show, not that Logan was mistaken, but that he never delivered the speech at all. This was an injustice to Cresap; but it was a very natural mistake on Logan's part.
He made Robinson write it several times before he thought the words strong enough. It was addressed to the man whom Logan thought guilty of the death of his kindred, but who was afterwards known to have been not even present at their murder. "Captain Cresap: What did you kill my people on Yellow Creek for?
At Wheeling, some eighty or ninety young adventurers, in charge of Captain Michael Cresap of Maryland, were waiting for the freshets to sweep them down the Ohio into Kentucky. When the news reached them, they greeted it with the wild monotone chant and the ceremonies preliminary to Indian warfare.
There were on the border at the moment three or four men whose names are so intimately bound up with the history of this war, that they deserve a brief mention. One was Michael Cresap, a Maryland frontiersman, who had come to the banks of the Ohio with the purpose of making a home for his family.
A Benjamin Tomlinson testifies that he believes that the speech was fabricated by Gibson; he hints, but does not frankly assert, that Gibson was not sent after Logan, but that Girty was; and swears that he heard the speech read three times and that the name of Cresap was not mentioned in it.
Maryland was also involved, along her western frontier, in border difficulties with her neighbors; the first we hear of the Cresap family is their having engaged in a real skirmish with the Pennsylvanian authorities. See also "Am. Arch.," IV., Vol. "Am. Arch.," IV., Vol. I., 394, 449, 469, etc. He was generally called Dr. Conolly. See do., 463, 471, etc., especially St. Clair's letters, passim.
On the very day after the commander at Fort Pitt had issued his notice to the border people to arm, from Wheeling, on the Ohio in West Virginia, Captain Michael Cresap led a party of militia and frontiersmen to hunt Indians. They promptly killed two friendly Shawnees at Pipe Creek, fourteen miles below Wheeling. The Shawnees had no time in which to make resistance.
The Mingos sent out runners to the other tribes, telling of the butchery, and calling on all the red men to join together for immediate and bloody vengeance. They confused the two massacres, attributing both to Cresap, whom they well knew as a warrior; and their women for long afterwards scared the children into silence by threatening them with Cresap's name as with that of a monster.
Even the unpardonable and hideous atrocity of the murder of Logan's family, was surpassed in horror by many of the massacres committed by the Indians about the same time. The annals of the border are dark and terrible. Among the characters who played the leaders' parts in this short and tragic drama of the backwoods few came to much afterwards. Cresap died a brave Revolutionary soldier.
The trader, Butler, spoken of above, in order to recover some of the peltries of which he had been robbed by the Cherokees, had sent a canoe with two friendly Shawnees towards the place of the massacre. On the 27th Cresap and his followers ambushed these men near Captina, and killed and scalped them.
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