This is my third story of life and death on the trans-Appalachian frontier. It happened in western Pennsylvania nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago. It mirrors the written-down memory of Spencer Record, the young man who lived it. I republish it here because some of my readers will not have seen it. Fact is, our frontier days have long since been put mostly out of our minds, displaced by cowboy movies, football games and doom scrolling. Maybe this is because we are silently ashamed and sorry, not of what happened long ago, but of what we—or our ancestors—did to make it happen. We forget, too, that the past lives on in us, even when it is pad-locked in a forgotten attic room of our minds. Acknowledge it or not, the past offers pride as well as sorrow and shame. Remembering makes us more truthful people, and better.
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It is early May 1782. We are in a clearing in the woods near Dunbar's Creek, a stream that runs along the foot of Laurel Mountain in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania. We are alert, watching.
For the last 20 years, American families from beyond the mountains to the east, from Maryland, Virginia and eastern Pennsylvania, have been coming in here. They have been taking up land and clearing it for crops. They have been building their log houses in this beautiful wooded country of rolling hills and fertile creek bottoms. They have come despite the Indians.
The incoming Americans know it is dangerous to be here, know that the Indians still dispute their right to live on this land, which had belonged to the Red Man from time beyond memory. They know that awful things happen to settlers like them at the hands of the savages.
Sporadically, parties of Indian warriors from their towns in the Ohio country invade the still sparsely settled land. Sometimes they come to take revenge for the murders of Indian men, women, and children at the hands of Whites. Sometimes eager young braves come to prove themselves real men, to have the thrill and the honor that goes with having the red, blond or brown scalps of their enemies decorating their belts. Sometimes they come to drive captives off northwards, over the Ohio River, with halters around their necks. Lucky captives will be adopted into Indian families to replace a lost brother, daughter, or son. Or they will be sold to the British in Detroit to obtain trade goods, gunpowder, lead, cloth, or pots and knives, or many other things which only the Whites have, and Indians want. Unlucky captives will have their intestines pulled out and wrapped around a tree before they are put out of their misery with a tomahawk blow. Or they will be burnt at the stake while shrieking hell-hounds dance around them reveling in their agony.
One of the early settlers in the vicinity of Dunbar's Creek is Josiah Records. He came in 1766 when there were no whites there except the occasional hunter or passing trader. The area then was wilderness but has since become frontier. For some years Josiah operated a water mill and raised corn on his primitive farm. Recently he sold his millstones and machinery as well as his land and moved his family to a new farm 20 miles to the northwest, on Peter's Creek.
The Indians have been lurking here on Dunbar's Creek for the last few days and everyone has forted up, everyone, that is, except for a man named Clock. Mr. Clock and his wife and six children live here, where we are now standing, in the cabin at this clearing, a mile east of Josiah Records' old place; the Clocks and the Records had been close neighbors by the standards of the day. Mr. Clock doesn't think there is any real danger from the Indians, and he knows it is awfully inconvenient to take his whole family into the nearest fort. "Who will milk the cow? How will the land get plowed, and the corn planted? Who will keep the Indians from breaking into our house and carrying away everything that is loose?”
"No!" he decides “We'll stay here in this cabin. There's a powerful strong bar on the door, and the door is heavy oak puncheon. I've got a good rifle gun. We'll be safe."
As we watch, two young men, both about 16, appear at the edge of the clearing. The men – or more accurately – boys, are 16-year-old Spencer Records and his friend John Woods. Sent back to their old place by Spencer's father Josiah to collect some tools he left at their former cabin, they pass by the Clock homestead to greet their former neighbors. They hope to get a drink of fresh water and maybe have a bite to eat, too, if asked. They are wearing frontier garb, leggings of linsey-woolsey, and long leather hunting shirts. They have Indian moccasins on their feet, the native footwear, far better than heeled boots for walking through the forest. Both are carrying rifles. Before they enter the clearing, they check the locks of their guns to be sure their powder is dry.
When they step into the open, they stop, for the silence around them is unnatural, foreboding. All they hear is the breeze in the tender green leaves of the sprouting trees. They hear no talking, no laughter or chatter of children at play, no thock-thocking of a chopping ax splitting firewood, no rattle of pots at the cabin fireplace. Something is wrong, they gradually realize, maybe badly wrong.
They slowly raise their rifles. They scan the clearing and peer into the dark shadows of the woods that surround the cabin clearing.
A minute passes and the ominous silence continues. After more minutes creep by, emboldened, they move with great caution toward the cabin, senses at high alert. They see that the cabin door is ajar. As they pass the woodpile they freeze into statues when their eyes fasten on the Clock's milk cow. It lays there dead, its legs thrust stiffly out to the side, arrows sticking from it as from a pincushion. Indians!
The boys move now with extreme caution toward the cabin door, the way men move over thin, cracking ice. They see splotches of bright blood on the bare ground before them; it makes a crimson trail toward the cabin door. Their hearts are pounding now, their fears screaming inside their heads. Appalled at what they may find inside, afraid that their own deaths are hiding close by like poisonous spiders, they peer at the trees that circle the clearing, listen for any unnatural sound. They stare at the partly open door in front of them. Are there warriors inside waiting to surprise them, or maybe out here in the surrounding trees? Is more death hanging in the air still, watching down the barrels of Indian rifles, or sighting across bows at the ready?
The boys’ eyes meet and they come to an unspoken understanding. There is an awful thing they must do: Go into the cabin.
The door creaks as they slowly push it open. The light floods into the room and washes back over them like a blinding flash of red. They are transfixed. It is a scene of horror.
Sprawled on his back on the hearth is Mr. Clock, his dead eyes wide open and staring, a long hatchet wound smashed in his skull behind his right ear. There is another hole, in his chest, torn by a rifle ball. Blood oozes from the top of his head, from which his scalp has been ripped. His chest and his mouth and chin are covered with frothy crimson blood. The Indians must have surprised him in the yard outside and wounded him by a shot through his lungs. He then staggered into the cabin to reach his rifle, kept on pegs above the fireplace. They must have rushed after him, tomahawking him as he reached for his firearm. His rifle is no longer there; undoubtedly the war party took it away as a prize.
Across the cabin, in the corner, there is something more awful yet, making the boys gasp and recoil. In the corner bed are three children, about three, five, and seven years of age. Two of them are motionless and dead. Bloodstained white bone shows on the tops of their heads where once there was abundant brown hair. Their eyes are open and vacant, their bodies still warm. They have been tomahawked, but at least death came mercifully swift. The third child is still living, scalpless, with a bloody gash where the cruel tomahawk crashed into his skull. That child, unconscious but with open eyes, near death, is gaping and sighing.
But where is Mrs. Clock, who has a sucking child at her breast? Where are her nine-year-old daughter and her eleven-year-old son?
Spencer Records and John Woods, trembling at this awful carnage, hurry from the clearing, from this place of death, to find help. As they nervously now stride, now lope through the woods they glance apprehensively behind them again and again. Are they are being followed by Indians? They watch ahead, too, so that they don't blunder into an ambush. At Turner's fort, about three miles off, they learn the full story.
When the Indians attacked, the Clock's nine-year-old daughter is at the spring getting water. Instantly realizing what is happening, she hides in a patch of tall grass. She watches as the Indians lead away her eleven-year-old brother and her mother, her pitiful wailing babe cradled in her arms. When the hiding girl is sure the Indians have gone, she flees, sobbing as she runs, to Turner's fort to give the alarm.
A party of men from Turner's instantly takes up pursuit of the savages. After following them for about four miles, they find the infant child lying dead on the ground, tomahawked and scalped. Burdened by the baby, Mrs. Clock had been unable to keep up. The Indians, knowing the cause of her slow pace and knowing that they will be pursued by settlers bent on killing them, tear the babe from the anguished mother's arms and smash its head against a tree.
In a last act of love and gentleness, Mrs. Clock takes off her apron and lays it gently over the dead baby. After finding the dead Clock baby, unnerved, the men from Turner's give up the pursuit, fearing an ambush, and return to the safety of their fort.
Mrs. Clock and her eleven-year-old son are never heard from again.
— based on: N. M. Hougham (ed. D. F. Carmony). Spencer Records' Memoir of the Ohio Valley Frontier, 1766-1795. Ind. Mag. Hist. 55: 323-377. 1959.