
From Cornstalk's Raid on the Greenbrier - 1763 by A. E. Ewing. West Virginia Review, June 1936. pp. 266-268
We may sing about our Georgia, Colorado, Michigan and other moons, but the Pontiac moon of May, 1763, had blood on it. The Algonquin chieftains, in secret council near Detroit, summoned by king Pontiac April 27, 1763, agreed to attack all the English posts recently surrendered by the French. A certain phase of the moon in May was to be the signal for a concerted attack. This was the beginning of Pontiac's War. The plan was so successfully executed that nine or ten English posts from western New York and Pennsylvania to northern Michigan fell to the Algonquins practically without a struggle. Fort Pitt and Detroit alone held out. That fact changed the history of the American colonies. Had those strongholds fallen, Pontiac's warriors could easily have swept the country clean of palefaces from the Mississippi to the Allegheny front. As it turned out, Pontiac's army was engaged in besieging Fort Pitt and Detroit. Meantime, as a part of the original plan, the interior tribes fell savagely upon the trans-Allegheny settlers nearest to them.
These settlers, be it remembered, had no business in those parts at that time. Virginia lands west of the "front" were not then open to settlement and could not be purchased at any price. The Indians, particularly the Algonquin tribes of Ohio, had never ceased to claim them. The vast region constituted their prize "game preserve." They even regarded Virginia hunters as trespassers, and permanent settlers as outlaws to be shot down at sight. Moreover, all this was well known to Virginians.
By 1760, however, the French and Indian War was practically over. Frontiersmen east of the "front," anticipating that the Indian border would be pushed back to the Ohio, lost no time in heading their wagon trains for new pastures on the Greenbrier and by 1763 were raising fields pf wheat and corn, wholly ignorant of Pontiac's diabolical designs. Two or three years of quiet and safety had led them to regard Indian troubles as things of the past. The Indians well knew of these growing settlements, having visited them as hunters, while the palefaces had come to regard the redskins as harmless nuisances.
The business of scalping the Greenbrier settlements fell to Cornstalk, the Shawnee chieftain, who, with his warriors, resided on the Scioto, in Ohio, some sixty miles from the Virginia border. The two white settlements which gained historical fame were the Muddy Creek settlement lying north of the Greenbrier and west of Muddy Creek Mountain, and the Clendenin settlement on the Big Levels near Lewisburg. They were about twenty miles apart, and the people comprising them have been variously estimated at from one to two hundred. Both settlements probably took root in 1760 and 1761.
Authorities agree that Cornstalk's scalping band consisted of about sixty warriors. Crossing the Ohio in canoes, which they sank at the mouth of the Kanawha, they proceeded overland a distance of about 160 miles, to Muddy Creek, where several scattered families were living in imagined peace and security, Here they broke up into small parties and, under the guise of friendship, secured entrance into the various homes, where, according to Withers, "every civility and act of kindness which the new settlers could proffer were extended to them." Then, "in a moment of the most perfect confidence in the innocence of their intentions, the Indians rose on them and tomahawked and scalped all save a few women and children of whom they made prisoners."
Thus, in one short day, the Muddy Creek settlement was literally annihilated. No one but the captives was left to tell the story and they had no one but themselves to whom to tell it.