Dunmore's War by Glenn F. Williams

Author:Glenn F. Williams [Williams, Glenn F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594166181
Publisher: Westholme Publishing

IN THE ENSUING WEEK, enemy warriors, including a party led by Logan, prowled about the New River settlements seeking targets. When scouts reported that “three or four Indians Visiting the Waste [ruined] plantations above us on the River” had set John Chapman’s vacant home and outbuildings on fire, it prompted Robertson to postpone his leave home. Instead, he remained at his post to coordinate the militia effort to counter the enemy before they could harm any inhabitants or cause more destruction in the neighborhood. Lieutenant Draper marched from Fort Byrd in command of a twenty-man detachment on Sunday morning, August 7. Major Robertson had ordered him to go to Clover Bottom on the Blue Stone to find and destroy the war party. The men seemed eager to take a scalp or two, and before they marched, he offered £5 to any man in the company who brought the first Indian prisoner into the fort.50 If they found no signs of the enemy there, Robertson instructed Draper to patrol near the Glades before going back into the garrison at Fort Byrd by way of the mouth of the Blue Stone.51 During the march, Draper’s men came across and followed tracks left by a party of four or five warriors. While they had headed in the direction of the New River settlements for some distance, the warriors had apparently scattered and foiled the attempts of the soldiers to track them. They did stop to investigate one of the ruined plantations for Indian signs. At a house the Indians had burned, one of the warriors “Left a War Club . . . well made and mark’d with two Letters I G,” which were later determined to be a misreading of “L G,” for Logan.52

Logan and three warriors, possibly the same ones who evaded Draper’s patrol, had scouted the area of the east bank of New River near the mouth of Sinking Creek and observed the farm belonging to Balthazar (also known as Balzer or Palser) and Catherine Lybrook and their children. Because of the emergency, the blockhouse on the property also sheltered the neighbor families of John Chapman, John McGriff, “Widow” Elizabeth Snidow, and someone whose last name was Scott. Despite the fortification, the farm offered the raiders a tempting and lucrative target. They knew that they only had to wait until some of the occupants came out to work in the fields, tend livestock, do other chores, or just enjoy the fresh air and thus become vulnerable.53

On Sunday, August 7, the marauders watched as the host family’s patriarch, “Old [Balthazar] Lybrook,” walked toward the mill located on the creek near the riverbank. Seven boys, ranging in age from a “suckling babe” of a few months to two adolescents of thirteen years, soon appeared from out of the blockhouse. The boys first headed for the spring, about one hundred yards away, but then followed the creek another one hundred yards or so to their swimming hole, where the bank dropped nearly ten feet below the plain to the New River.

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