New book tells an epic tale of vengeance and chaos on the American frontier

Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not even sparing my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge.

James Logan Shickellamy’s words marked the end of Dunmore’s War, a six-month conflict between native tribes and frontier colonists in the Ohio River Valley in 1774, just before the start of the Revolutionary War. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson featured the speech, known as “Logan’s Lament,” in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and it became a staple piece of oratory memorized by American schoolboys throughout the 1800s and early 1900s.

The story behind Logan’s fierce and mournful words is an epic tale of vengeance, greed and social chaos worthy of a Joseph Conrad novel.

“I always knew this was a really fantastic story. The fame of ‘Logan’s Lament’ and the drama surrounding the story, especially regarding Michael Cresap, made it a good one to narrate,” said Binghamton University Associate Professor of History Robert G. Parkinson. “But how to frame it? How to grasp the bewilderment, chaos, and violence of the story?”

His latest book, Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier, explores the complex and vengeance-filled tale of the Yellow Creek massacre and the war that followed. The frontier in question is near today’s Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet and form the source of the 1,500-mile-long Ohio River.

Border issues were rife throughout the 18th century, the Ohio River Valley included. While situated in today’s Pennsylvania, the region was part of a massive 1607 land grant to the Virginia Company that extended north to what is now Michigan and Wisconsin. The problem: When King Charles II gave Pennsylvania namesake William Penn his own grant, it was unclear where the borders were.

“Both Pennsylvania and Virginia claimed the Pittsburgh region as theirs going back to the 1740s. These tensions escalated into a quasi-civil war in Pittsburgh in the 1770s,” Parkinson said. “Armed mobs were roaming the streets of the small village of Pittsburgh, arresting, intimidating and beating up their opponents.”

Early in 1774, fighting broke out between the Pennsylvania and Virginia partisans. And it wasn’t just colonists; backcountry political controversies always swept up the Indigenous people who lived in the region, and who had their own scores to settle.

A tale of two families

Unlike most books about encounters between Natives and colonials, The Heart of American Darkness is an intertwined biography encompassing both sides of the conflict. It centers on two families: that of Shickellamy, an Oneida diplomat who came to the region in the 1730s to keep tabs on Indigenous politics, and Thomas Cresap, perhaps the first self-described “frontier man.”

Shickellamy established his headquarters in Shamokin, today’s Sunbury, Pa., and formed an alliance with James Logan, Pennsylvania’s chief land agent and native go-between, Parkinson said. In honor of this alliance, the diplomat — one of the most prominent Native leaders of his generation — gave his two oldest sons Logan as a second name.

The diplomat and his son James Logan — Soyechtowa, the Logan of lament fame — arranged the infamous 1737 “Walking Purchase,” which benefited the Haudenosaunee but amounted to a wholesale dispossession of Delaware lands in eastern Pennsylvania. The Delaware were left largely landless, and many migrated west to the upper Ohio Valley.

After his death in 1748, two of Shickellamy’s three sons — Logan and his brother John Logan, or Tachendorus — also became diplomats, serving at many treaty conferences in the 1750s and 1760s.

“Their father’s politics were unpopular and notorious; his cooperation with colonists made him lots of enemies among Indigenous peoples, none more than the Delawares,” Parkinson said.

Hunted during the Seven Years’ War, the sons went into hiding and dropped their surname. By the late 1760s, they aligned themselves with other renegade Haudenosaunee known as the Mingo. Tachnedorus stayed in the highlands of central Pennsylvania for the rest of his life. Soyechtowa headed to the region just outside of Pittsburgh with his mother, younger brother and sister around 1770.

Around the time of the Walking Purchase, Thomas Cresap and his family enter the story at the center of another quasi-civil war, this time between Pennsylvania and Maryland; a shootout at his house landed the Cresap patriarch in the Philadelphia jail for a year. Afterward, he headed to the western frontier of Hagerstown and eventually established an outpost in the wilds of Oldtown, Maryland.

Along with George Washington and other prominent Virginians, Cresap was an original partner in the Ohio Company, which sought to incorporate the Pittsburgh region for the English — an effort that sparked the Seven Years’ War. After that conflict ended, his son Michael — primarily a land scout — set up a store in an outpost south of Pittsburgh and, later, in what is now Wheeling, WV.

On April 30, 1774, four men, two women and a baby canoed down Yellow Creek to the Ohio River to meet settlers associated with the Cresap family in the hopes of keeping peace; half were members of Logan’s family. The colonists invited the Natives to participate in a shooting contest — and then turned their guns on them. They also fired on two more canoes crossing the river, killing eight people in all.

Yellow Creek

In response, Logan initiated revenge raids from June through September, taking captives and killing a dozen people, many of them children.

The Yellow Creek massacre became eclipsed by the greater conflict that followed: the American Revolution, which began the next summer. But these events interacted in complex and often unexpected ways.

Afflicted with malaria, Michael Cresap died a year after Dunmore’s War in New York City; he had been headed to join one of the first units of the Continental Army. Seeing his body as a symbol of American patriots, the city threw him the most elaborate funeral they could muster.

If the Revolution were to succeed, all 13 colonies needed to align; the backcountry was essential to this. If the British could rally the Native peoples to their cause, the Revolution could have been doomed — and they tried to do exactly that starting in the summer of 1775. It’s also not a coincidence that the Ohio Valley was among the bloodiest places in America during the Revolution, particularly from 1782 to 1783.

“We like to think that the ‘road to independence’ was a direct one, but it certainly was not,” Parkinson said.

Parkinson’s title directly references Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the chaos, horror and absurdity of the late 1880s “scramble for Africa.” The events of Yellow Creek and Dunmore’s War stand in contrast with the traditional idea of “taming” the American frontier popularized by Conrad’s contemporary, Frederick Jackson Turner.

Like the Conrad novel, certain actors take advantage of the confusion and chaos to advance their own interests, and not just in the American backcountry.

“Imperialism makes people do crazy things, say crazy things and take crazy actions — at least as far as how ‘civilized’ people are supposed to be,” Parkinson said.