More Shawnee Attacks on Settlers- West Virginia History

In my previous article, The Clover Bottom Massacre, 1783, I touched on the terrifying account of when Mitchell Clay’s homestead was attacked by Shawnee Indians, ultimately leaving three of his children dead. What many don’t realize is that this was a regular occurrence during these times. People today seem to look at things from a one-sided perspective most of the time, and that is not right. They often go on and on about how the “White Man” was so evil and destructive, stealing the land away from the Native-Americans. What many don’t talk about is the fact that from the very beginning of Europeans stepping foot on this “new land”, the natives were far from friendly. If you were to go back even farther in history you would also see that the native people were not originally from North America, but migrated here over the Bering Strait anyways, so technically this land was not their land originally either. They came here and settled, just as later on the Europeans came here and settled.

It’s fair to say that both sides should take blame for much of the bloodshed equally, but did you know that many of the people who came to America did not want to, nor were they even aware that they would have to face, let alone fight or kill the natives? Many of them felt they were in the middle of something they didn’t want to be in. They had to face the dangers of living in the wilderness of a new land, yet they also had to obey the authority of the Governor who was greedy and didn’t really care about his own people or the natives. I will go into that subject later on in this article. 

Indian Massacre of 1622

First, I will briefly discuss several accounts of families being brutally attacked by the Shawnee Indians during a specific time period in West Virginia and Virginia territory.  These accounts need to spoken, because in the end you need to see that it wasn’t just the European settlers who brought death and danger, but the natives also struck fear in the settlers hearts and left a trail of blood and tears behind as well.

Long before the Clover Bottom Massacre, there had been numerous accounts of brutal attacks on settlers by the natives in this country.  One to mention of course was the Indian Massacre of 1622. Looking into the history of it, you would see that the Powhatan tribe of Indians came to the Colony of Virginia, bearing gifts of food but once in the colony they began a vicious attack, killing over 347 settlers. They then traveled up and down the river, burning the settlements and homes and killing settlers.  As I stated above, the people in charge of the colonies really didn’t have the best interest of their settlers or their safety at heart, thus putting them all in danger.

During my research into specific areas in West Virginia history, I found several accounts of brutal attacks on settlers who were not seeking out the native people, not torturing them, and certainly not attacking their villages or burning their homes like the native people did to the settlers. One account that took place, happened in 1777 ( six years before the Clover Bottom Massacre).  Colonel James Graham and his family had retired for the evening in their cabin when Graham heard a knock on the door. When he approached the door, he heard a voice in broken English muttering, “Open Door!”

When Graham refused to comply with the request, the Indians outside grew very angry and started shooting at the door. Grahams two children had fled to a detached cabin where the Indians managed to break into. They shot through the clapboards, injuring the boy with the gunshot, shattering his leg. They then proceeded to enter the dwelling, kidnapping both children. While traveling to their village the young boy’s condition grew worse and he was not able to walk, so the Indians bashed his head against a tree, smashing his brain. They kept the young girl, who was only 8 years old at the time. They held her captive for nearly 8 more years until her father was able to later ransom her and secure her freedom.

During 1777, the dangers of continuous attacks and murders of white settlers by the Indians during the Summer months, prompted many families to flee to forts for safety and remain there sometimes for the entire Summer. You see, the area in which these attacks continued to occur was what the Shawnee considered their "Summer Hunting Ground"- although their villages were all the way in Ohio.  So during the Summer months the threat of attack was far more severe than at any other time of the year.

In 1778, a massacre was averted thanks to the help of Captain McKee and his men. Over 200 Indians attacked Fort Randolph, but thanks to the garrison of  21 men defending the fort, they were able to thwart off the attack. When the Indians headed away in the direction of the Greenbrier settlements, McKee sent off two of his men who actually made it to the settlements first to warn them of the impending attack. Due to their quick thinking and diligence, they saved numerous amounts of lives and averted a massacre.

In the Spring of 1778, another brutal attack on a family homestead occurred on the mouth of Wolf Creek, on New River. The attack was on the McKensey family who lived in a house on the property near the creek. Mr. McKensey, his wife, children (sons: Isaac, Henley & daughters: Sallie, Elizabeth, Margaret, Mary Anne, a baby) lived on the property with a housemaid/hired servant, Ms. Estridge. It was said that the settlers did not have land that had boundaries or fences in which to allow their stock (cows, horses, etc.) to wander and graze so they would put bells on the animals and let them roam. Well, the horses wandered off into the woods. Mr. McKensey figured the horses meant to head back to the place from which they had initially travelled from, Walker’s Creek. So Mr. McKensey took his older son, Isaac with him to search for their horses to bring them back home. When Mr. McKensey and his son had made it all the way to the top of Big Hill, they heard the sounds of gunfire in the valley below.  His younger son, Henley had been on the hill looking for a spot to plant sweet potatoes when the attack ensued. 

Woodcut of Indians Raiding a Fort

The Shawnee had waited until McKensey and his older son had left the area when they began their attack on the household. They first shot Henley, killing him. Then they made their way to the house and tried to enter. Sallie and Mrs. McKensey had tried to barricade the door, but the Indians still managed to push their way through. The first one, squeezed his head and arms through the door, trying to wiggle his way in, while Sallie reached for an axe and attacked him, severely wounding him. While that was taking place, another managed to push the door open and attempted to take Sallie as their prisoner. She gave up a good fight with him and in the end he drove a knife through her chest, killing her as well as Mrs. McKensey.

The hired servant, Ms. Estridge took the little girl Mary Anne and tried to hide in the shed. However, upon the little girls crying and whimpering, Estridge became fearful that the little girl’s noises would give up their hiding place. Trying to save herself, Estridge let the little girl go, who ran off scared and the Indians grabbed her, bashing her head into a door frame and crushing her skull. The saddest part of this story is the fact the Indians took the nursing infant, who was barely crawling, and attempted to scalp it alive. The record doesn’t state if it was a girl or boy, but that upon finding the bodies of his family, McKensey found his infant child alive, scalped and trying to nurse on it’s mother’s bloody corpse.

Two of McKensey’s daughters were unaccounted for, being that they had been kidnapped. During this ordeal the Indians managed to kill Philip Kavanah whom they had ran into on their way out of the area,  and they also captured Francis Denny. They brought their captives back with him to their village where the two girls Elizabeth and Margaret remained for nearly 18 years. After being traded between tribes and forcibly raped by the Chief, who wanted her to marry him, Margaret refused and kept the hope of one day escaping her captors. At one point Margaret was able to get a horse and attempted an escape. Her foster sister in the tribe told her she would defend her with her life, when she was caught by the Chief. Not willing to let Margaret go, the Chief told her that if she didn’t marry him, he would kill her. Margaret fought with him over a knife, when her foster sister attempted to intervene and told Margaret to hide. The fight between the girl and the Indian was brutal, although no one died from the incident. The Chief later left with other Indians and was killed in Wayne’s Battle. Later Margaret and Elizabeth managed to get free and returned home, never forgetting the trials and tribulations they faced in their early life.

There are so many more stories just like these that happened too often back then. I haven’t even touched on the incident at the Davidson-Bailey fort yet, which I will go into further in my next blog. Not only did the settlers have to face attacks and murders of their own families, but the settlers had to deal with the fact the Shawnee often stole their horses and ran them up to Canada and sold them as well.

You may wonder why I am so interested in telling these stories. Well, I must be honest, I am a truth seeker. I don’t like half-truths. I don’t like society blaming the European settlers on all the bad that took place in our history’s past, because that isn’t accurate. I read a letter that was addressed to the authorities of the time by the settlers in regards to the conditions in which they were living in, in the late 1700s.

The letter showed that these settlers did not come to this country with the idea they would have to deal with or fight off Indians. They left their native country with the promise of peace and freedom of practicing their Christian faith without fear of any sort of persecution. It was obvious that the settlers were thrown in the middle of the Governor and his authority and the anger the Natives felt towards the new visitors. Most of the settlers wanted nothing to do with any sort of fighting and even mentioned that they adhered to “rational, constitutional principles, pacific (meaning peaceful), steady and uniform conduct.” They go on to mention that when they  “crossed the Atlantic and explored wilderness”, starting their new lives in a new land, it only led them to experience “savages.. insistently…committing depredations” on them since their first settling in the Country. “These fatigues and dangers were patiently encountered, supported by the pleasing hope of enjoying these rights and liberties which had been granted to Virginians, and denied us in our Native Country.” 

 Basically, they stated that they fled their previous homeland with the hopes and false promises of a peaceful new life in a new land,  that they were told they would be allowed to live on in peace. The settlers came here, tricked on false pretenses of being “free” in every sense of the word, but the Government who built the colonies didn’t have their people’s best interest at heart at all. Nor did they care about the natives either, but it wasn’t the settlers fault. They were just as naïve about what was happening as much as the natives who didn’t understand why or where these new people were coming from.

Honestly, I feel badly for the people who came to America looking for a new life because they have been blamed for most of the atrocities that their Government was actually at fault for. Then in turn, the atrocities the Indians committed on the people was directed at settlers instead of the ones running the Government which is unfortunate as well. In the end, it seemed that the settlers received blows from both ends and received a very bad rap.   

In my next blog I will go into further detail of the Incident at the Davidson-Bailey Fort.

(Copyright 1/9/2014- Republished 3/28/2018) J'aime Rubio, www.jaimerubiowriter.com

Sources:
American Archives, 4th Series, 1st Volume, Page 1166

A History of Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory

By David Emmons Johnston

Clover Bottom Massacre, 1783 - West Virginia History

Bluestone River

In the next two articles I will speak of some of the atrocious events that took place in U.S. History near where my ancestors settled in the region along the borders of West Virginia and Virginia in the late 1700s. This first article will cover the infamous Clover Bottom Massacre of 1783.

Before I begin, I must tell you this event was not a random occurrence. In fact, it is quite the contrary. Upon my research into these stories I have found dozens of accounts in the general area and vicinity during that time period that showed the native people in the surrounding areas were vicious and brutal, often attacking women and children while they were alone, and showing absolutely no mercy whatsoever.  This particular story is to tell you a true historical account, so you can see for yourself what life must have been like for a white settler in the new land we now know as the United States, and all the dangers they faced, lurking literally around every corner. 

Massacre at Clover Bottom-

Mitchell Clay House

In April of 1774, Mitchell Clay obtained a Crown Grant from Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, for 803 acres of land which covered both sides of the Bluestone River (a tributary of New River) named Clover Bottom, West Virginia. Within the next year, he, his wife and children moved onto the land and started cultivating it and living off of it, creating their homestead which was the first white settlement within Mercer County. The Clay family made for themselves a prosperous farm, which contained a field for livestock, a tobacco field, wheat field, orchard and kitchen garden as well as their home which they built. 

In August of 1783, after Clay had harvested his grain crop, he and his sons had started to build fences around the stacks of grain to keep the livestock from reaching it while they wandered the fields. Clay delegated the job to build the fences to his teenage sons Ezekiel and Bartley.  On a day when Clay had gone hunting, he never imagined what he would find when he returned that evening.

While Bartley and Ezekiel were busy at work, building the fences, their sisters were washing on the banks of the river and their mom and younger children were inside the house. At some point, eleven Indians crept up on the two young men and suddenly the sound of a gunshot echoed through the area. Bartley had been shot and killed by one of the Shawnee encroaching on the farm. The girls heard the shot and immediately headed towards the house, literally running into the Shawnee on the property. One of the older daughters, Tabitha, saw one of the Indians attempting to scalp her brother Bartley, so she attacked him, attempting to reach for his knife. She struggled viciously, eventually losing the fight and succumbing to several stab wounds from the assailant. 

During the fight, a man whose name lived in infamy for many generations, Liggon Blankenship had called on the Clay household and witnessed the attack from the side of the house. Mrs. Clay begged him to get involved to save her children who were being attacked, but instead he turned around and fled to the nearest settlements at New River to report that the Clay family had all been attacked and killed by Indians. Needless to say, his name was tarnished for quite some time as a coward.

Indian Raid on Settlement Woodcut

The Shawnee scalped Tabitha and Bartley, while capturing Ezekiel and taking him alive as their prisoner back into the woods from which they came.  Mrs. Clay, distraught and in shock managed to pull her two children’s lifeless bodies from outside, into the home and then she and the younger children fled on foot, six miles to the Bailey settlement to seek assistance. When Mr. Clay made it home and discovered his two children’s lifeless bodies, he assumed that his entire family had been killed or captured. He fled off into the night through the woods, heading for the settlements at New River to get help. During his travel in the woods, he ascertained that the Shawnee were following him on horses they had stolen. He managed to evade them until the morning when he finally reached Captain Matthew Farley who rounded up a posse of men: Mitchell Clay, Charles Clay, Mitchell Clay, Jr., James Bailey (son of Richard Peyton Bailey), William Wiley, Edward Hale, Joseph Hare, Isaac Cole, John French and Captain James Moore who all went up to the Clay property to view the gory scene and plan their next move against the Shawnee.

Apparently, upon leaving the Clay property, the Shawnee broke off into two groups, both travelling two different paths. One group of Shawnee went down the west fork of the Coal River over Cherry Pond Mountain, while the other group travelled down the Pond fork of the river on the other side of the mountain. The posse of men followed the trail that led them to the group of Shawnee at the Pond fork where they were able to surround them in the night. The group decided to wait until the break of dawn’s first light to attack the natives, making sure they had the upper hand with men above and below them on the hill. As soon as one of the natives awoke in the morning, he spotted Edward Hale and before he could warn the rest of the Shawnee, Edward shot him dead, awaking the rest of them.

During the attack, two of the Indians were killed immediately while another was wounded. He begged for his life to be spared, but seeing that Ezekiel was not among the group, and realizing they had split up, Charles Clay (who was only about 12 years old at the time) killed the Indian for what happened to his siblings. According to author, David Emmons Johnston, he stated that the location in which this attack took place on the fork of the Pond River is in a location in Boone County, off the old property of L.D. Coon who found a pile of rocks with a piece of an Indian hatchet in the general area. Because of the brutality of the deaths of the Clay children, Edward Hale and William Wiley took from the dead Indian’s, strips of their hides, which they turned into razor straps and kept in their family possession for generations as a battle souvenir. 

Unfortunately, because the natives split up in two groups, the other group that evaded Mitchell Clay and his posse, made it all the way to Chillicothe, Ohio, with their prisoner, Ezekiel Clay whom they tortured and burned at the stake. Sadly, another one of the Clay children had perished at the hands of the native people who attacked them.

After the brutal attack on their homestead, Phoebe Belcher (who was the sister of Richard Peyton Bailey’s wife, Elizabeth Ann Belcher, who happens to be my gr-gr-gr-gr-gr grandmother), refused to return to the Clay farm and insisted to move to Pearisburg to be near her oldest daughter Rebecca. She never stepped foot on the property again for the rest of her life.

Agony In Stone (photo: Ed Elam)

This tale is just one of many tales of brutal attacks against defenseless families on their homestead by the Shawnee. Was this attack, in the Shawnees mind, a way of the native people getting back at the people for the “Dunmore’s War” that had taken place just years before? Well, even if that was their reasoning for justifying it, it wasn’t right they attacked innocent women and children, period. In history, there are brutal stories from both sides, and we need to be willing to see and accept that. The white man was not the only one to blame for vicious and blatant attacks on human beings. In fact, historical record worldwide shows that every single culture is guilty of violence in the name of spreading out over land. It was certainly not the first case, nor would it be the last.

It is a shame that stories like these are swept under the rug and erased from history, due to the fact that people are so afraid to offend the Native Americans of their imperfect past. They are just as guilty as the Europeans of violence and brutality, many times even to one another as well. Again my friends, as I always say “People hate the truth, luckily the truth doesn’t care.” When it comes to history, let us always remember the whole truths, not just half-truths of our Country’s past. Again, whether good or bad, the truth must always be told.

A statue in honor of Mitchell and Phoebe (Belcher) Clay was erected outside of the Mercer County Courthouse in West Virginia. The statue is called “Agony In Stone” and was dedicated to the memory of the three children the Clay family lost that August day in 1783.

Rest in Peace, Bartley Clay, Tabitha Clay and Ezekiel Clay, and the rest of the Clay family including Mitchell and his wife Phoebe. You are never forgotten!

(Copyright 1/9/2014 - Republished 3/28/2018)  J'aime Rubio, www.jaimerubiowriter.com  

Sources:

Kentucky Clay: Eleven Generations of a Southern Dynasty

By Katherine R Bateman

A History of Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory

By David Emmons Johnston

U.S. Government War Archives

Familypedia

Photos:

"Agony In Stone"-Findagrave , Ed Elam

Bluestone River, Wikipedia (Creative Commons License)

Indian Raid on Settlement Woodcut, U.S. History (Public Domain)

Mitchell Clay House, (from "A History of Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory)