he saw, in the rich bottoms of the Ohio, an ample fund, if he succeeded in obtaining a title to those lands, not only to redeem his credit and extricate him from difficulty, but to afford a respectable competency for his rising family.

"Under this impression, and with every rational prospect of success, early in the year 1774, he engaged six or seven active young men at the rate of £2 10s. per month, and repairing to the wilderness of the Ohio, commenced the business of building houses and clearing lands; and, being among the first adventurers into this exposed and dangerous region, he was enabled to select some of the best and richest of the Ohio levels." 1

After the Indian and French wars and the treaty made by Bouquet, the attention of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania settlers, had been attracted to the great trans-Alleghanian region watered by the Monongahela, the Ohio, Kanawha, the Scioto, the Cheat and their afflu

1 Jacob's Life of Cresap, p. 49.

ents. Companies had been formed and lands granted. The outposts, the scouts and pickets of civilization, were fixed along the streams. Fort Du Quesne had become Fort Pitt, under the British flag. Wheeling was a station; and, all along the river, there were spots where traders and farmers had settled, or neighborhoods gathered for mutual protection around blockhouses, forts and stockades. In this society, laudably engaged in repairing his fortune and preparing for that of his young family, I shall leave Michael Cresap early in the year 1774, and carry you for a short time to another and perhaps more romantic scene among the hills and valleys of the Susquehannah.

Indian history and especially Indian biography must always resemble the pictorial sketches of the Indians themselves, who, by a few rude etchings on a rock, a few bold dashes on the skin of a buffalo or scratches on the bark of a birchtree, record the outlines which may serve to recall an event, though they can only commemorate a character by inferences. Their story is

but a skeleton; and hard, indeed, is the task which attempts to clothe the dry and dusty bones with flesh, or to make the restored being move with at least the semblance of real life. Their theatre is the forest; their home a camp; their only architecture a cabin or a perishable tent; their only permanent and consecrated resting place the grave! A solitary and dangerous people, almost without a record, they flit like shadows through the wilderness of wood, prairie and mountain; now here, now gone in the dim recesses of the valleys; free as the deer, or transient as phantoms of mingled romance and horror; but generally inscribing their wild, red marks in the memory of white men by deeds of cruelty and blood alone.

In the early days of Pennsylvania the valley of the Susquehannah was assigned by the Six Nations as a hunting ground for the Shawanese, Conoys, Nanticokes, Monseys, and Mohicans; and Shikellamy, or as he was called by the Moravians, Shikellemus, a chief sent by those nations to preside over a tribe, dwelt at Shamo

kin,' an Indian village of about fifty houses and nearly three hundred persons, built on the broad level banks of the Susquehannah, on a beautiful site, with high ranges of hills both above and

1 Compare Minutes of Council Aug. 12, 1731, Brainerd's Journal, and Loskiel, part 2d, p. 119. Speaking of his visit to Shamokin, Brainerd says, "about one half of its inhabitants are Delawares, the others called Senekas and Tutelas." Loskiel, part 2d, p. 119, speaks of Shikellemus as "the first magistrate and head chief of all the Iroquois Indians on the banks of the Susquehannah as far as Onondago." And in the same work, part 2d, p. 91: “Shamokin" is called, "a town belonging to the Iroquois." At the treaty of 1742, Shikellemus was present, but what tribe or place he represented is not stated; there were also in attendance, several Delawares of Shamokin." Gordon, History Pennsylvania, p. 250, alludes to the Delawares of Shamokin. In 1744, Conrad Weiser was sent to Shamokin to inquire into the murder of John Armstrong, an Indian trader and his two servants, Woodworth Arnold and James Smith, alleged to have been committed by some of the Shamokin band of Delawares. He delivered his message "to the Delaware chief Allumpoppies and the rest of the Delaware Indians, in the presence of Shikellamy and a few more of the Six Nations."-Rupp's History of Northumberland, Huntington, Mifflin, etc., etc., Counties, Pennsylvania, p. 86.

It is probable that Shikellamy presided over the Iroquois, only, who settled at Shamokin, and, perhaps, over the Tutelas, who seem to have been incorporated into the Six Nations. Gallatin's Synopsis, Trans. Am. Antq. Soc., vol. II, pp. 75, 81. Draper MSS.

below it, affording magnificent views of the picturesque valley in whose lap the modern Sunbury is quietly nestled. This Shikellamy, the father of Logan, is alleged by Bartram to have been a "Frenchman born in Montreal, Canada, but adopted by the Oneidas after being taken pri

soner." 1

When Count Zinzendorf, on the 28th of September, 1742, accompanied by Conrad Weiser, two Indians, brother Mack and his missionary wife, after a tedious transit through the wilderness on their journey of Christian love, entered this beautiful vale of Shamokin, Shikellamy was the first to step forth to welcome them, and, after the exchange of presents, to promise his aid as

There is some curious information in my possession in regard to the nativity of this Shikellamy, the father of Logan, showing that he was a Frenchman from Montreal, and consequently that the famous Logan was not a full blooded Indian. It is found in an excessively rare tract, entitled "Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers, Productions, Animals, and other Matters worthy of Notice, made by John Bartram, in his Travels from Pennsilvania to Onondago, Oswego and the Lake Ontario in Canada, to which is annex'd a curious Account of the Cataracts of Nigara by Peter Kalm, a Sweedish Gentleman who traveled there, London 1751." In this journey Bartram was accompanied