mathematicians, how many great inventors in arts or sciences, had Europe, North of the Alps, then produced? And it was sixteen centuries after this before a Newton could be formed. I

duty, as it was alleged that, by ascribing to an individual therein named, a participation in the murder of Logan's family, I had done an injury to his character, which it had not deserved. I had no knowledge personally of that individual.

I had no reason to aim an injury at him. I only repeated what I had heard from others, and what thousands had heard and believed as well as myself; and which no one indeed, till then, had been known to question. Twenty-three years had now elapsed, since the transaction took place. Many of those acquainted with it were dead, and the living dispersed to very distant parts of the earth. Few of them were even known to me. To those however of whom I knew, I made application by letter; and some others, moved by a regard for truth and justice, were kind enough to come forward, of themselves, with their testimony. These fragments of evidence, the small remains of a mighty mass which time has consumed, are here presented to the public, in the form of letters, certificates, or affidavits, as they came to me. I have rejected none of these forms, nor required other solemnities from those whose motives and characters were pledges of their truth. Historical transactions are deemed to be well vouched by the simple declarations of those who have borne a part in them; and especially of persons having no interest to falsify or disfigure them. The world will now see whether they, or I, have injured Cresap, by believing Logan's charge against him; and they will decide between Logan and Cresap, whether Cresap was innocent, and Logan a calumniator?

"In order that the reader may have a clear conception of the transactions, to which the different parts of the following declarations refer, he must take notice that they establish four different murders. 1. Of two Indians, a little above Wheeling. 2. Of others at Grave Creek, among whom were some of Logan's relations. 3. The massacre at Baker's bottom, on the Ohio, opposite the mouth of Yellow Creek, where were other relations of Logan. 4. Of those killed at the same place, coming in canoes to the relief of their friends. I place the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, against certain paragraphs of the evidence, to indicate the particular murder to which the paragraph relates, and present also a small sketch or map of the principal scenes of these butcheries, for their more ready comprehension."

The various documents are then printed, and the whole concluded by a summary as below:

"From this testimony the following historical statement results:

"In April or May, 1774, a number of people being engaged in looking out for settlements on the Ohio, information was spread among them, that the Indians had robbed some of the land-jobbers, as those adventurers were called. Alarmed for their safety, they collected together at Wheeling Creek. Hearing there that there were two Indians and some traders a little above Wheeling,

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do not mean to deny that there are varieties in the race of man, distinguished by their powers both of body and mind. I believe there are, as [118] I see to be the case in the races of other animals. I only mean to suggest a doubt, whether the bulk and

Captain Michael Cresap, one of the party, proposed to waylay and kill them. The proposition, though opposed, was adopted. A party went up the river, with Cresap at their head, and killed the two Indians.

"The same afternoon it was reported that there was a party of Indians on the Ohio, a little below Wheeling. Cresap and his party immediately proceeded down the river, and encamped on the bank. The Indians passed him peaceably, and encamped at the mouth of Grave Creek, a little below. Cresap and his party attacked them and killed several. The Indians returned the fire, and wounded one of Cresap's party. Among the slain of the Indians were some of Logan's family. Colonel Zane indeed expresses a doubt of it; but it is affirmed by Houston and Chambers. Smith, one of the murderers, said they were known and acknowledged to be Logan's friends, and the party themselves gen. erally said so; boasted of it in the presence of Cresap; pretended no provocation; and expressed their expectations that Logan would probably avenge their deaths.

"Pursuing these examples, Daniel Great-house, and one Tomlinson, who

faculties of animals depend on the side of the Atlantic on which their food happens to grow, or which furnishes the elements of which they are compounded? Whether nature has enlisted herself as a Cis- or Trans-Atlantic partisan? I am induced to suslived on the opposite side of the river from the Indians, and were in habits of friendship with them, collected, at the house of Polke, on Cross Creek, about 16 miles from Baker's Bottom, a party of 32 men. Their object was to attack a hunting encampment of Indians, consisting of men, women, and children, at the mouth of Yellow Creek, some distance above Wheeling. They proceeded, and when arrived near Baker's Bottom, they concealed themselves, and Greathouse crossed the river to the Indian camp. Being among them as a friend, he counted them, and found them too strong for an open attack with his force. While here, he was cautioned by one of the women not to stay, for that the Indian men were drinking, and having heard of Cresap's murder of their relations at Grave Creek, were angry, and she pressed him in a friendly manner, to go home; whereupon, after inviting them to come over and drink, he returned to Baker's, which was a tavern, and desired that when any of them should come to his house he would give them as much rum as they would drink. When his plot was ripe, and a sufficient number of them were collected at Baker's, and intoxicated, he and his party fell on them and massacred the whole, except a little girl, whom they preserved as a prisoner. Among these was the very woman who had saved his life, by pressing him to retire from the drunken wrath of her friends, when he was spying their camp at Yellow Creek. Either she herself, or some other of the murdered women, was the sister of Logan, very big with child, and inhumanly and indecently butchered; and there were others of his relations who fell here.

"The party on the other side of the river, alarmed for their friends at Baker's, on hearing the report of the guns, manned two canoes and sent them over. They were received, as they approached the shore, by a well-directed fire from Great-house's party, which killed some, wounded others, and obliged the rest to put back. Baker tells us there were twelve killed, and six or eight wounded.

"This commenced the war, of which Logan's war-club and note left in the house of a murdered family, was the notification. In the course of it, during the ensuing summer, a great number of innocent men, women, and children, fell victims to the tomahawk and scalping knife of the Indians, till it was arrested in the autumn following by the battle at Point Pleasant, and the pacification of Lord Dunmore, at which the speech of Logan was delivered.

"Of the genuineness of that speech nothing need be said. It was known to the camp where it was delivered; it was given out by Lord Dunmore and his officers; it ran through the public papers of these States; was rehearsed as an exercise at schools; published in the papers and periodical works of Europe; and all this, a dozen years before it was copied into the Notes on Virginia. In fine, General Gibson concludes the question for ever, by declaring that he

pect there has been more eloquence than sound reasoning displayed in support of this theory; that it is one of those cases where the judgment has been seduced by a glowing pen; and whilst I render every tribute of honor and esteem to the celereceived it from Logan's hand, delivered it to Lord Dunmore, translated it for him, and that the copy in the Notes on Virginia is a faithful copy.

The popular account of these transactions, as stated in the Notes on Virginia, appears, on collecting exact information, imperfect and erroneous in its details. It was the belief of the day; but how far its errors were to the prejudice of Cresap, the reader will now judge. That he, and those under him, murdered two Indians above Wheeling; that they murdered a large number at Grave Creek, among whom were a part of the family and relations of Logan, cannot be questioned; and as little that this led to the massacre of the rest of the family at Yellow Creek. Logan imputed the whole to Cresap, in his warnote and peace-speech: the Indians generally imputed it to Cresap : Lord Dunmore and his officers imputed it to Cresap: the country, with one accord, imputed it to him and whether he were innocent, let the universal verdict now declare."

The whole question was again very fully discussed in Brantz Mayer's Tah Gah Fute; or, Logan and Cresap, where certain evidence that had been suppressed by Jefferson is given. After a careful study of the controversy, it becomes evident that Jefferson's account, in implicating Cresap, was unfounded in fact, and had Jefferson confessed his error, he would have acquitted himself of any responsibility for the false statement, for he merely, as George Rogers Clark wrote, repeated what was popular rumor of the day "on a subject which I know he was not the Author of." But in subsequent editions the original version is unchanged, and by Jefferson's suppression of proof against his view, he became truly answerable for the statement. How far this deception was induced by the personal and political antipathy between himself and Martin cannot be decided, but the whole matter was used as political ammunition by both parties, and presumably produced the usual verity that political controversy is famous for. Even in the latest revision of the Notes on Virginia, Jefferson made no change in the statement; but Washington, in the text he printed in his edition of Jefferson's writings, took the liberty of changing the paragraph, to read:

"In the spring of the year 1774, a robbery was committed by some Indians on certain land-adventurers on the river Ohio. The whites in that quarter, according to their custom, undertook to punish this outrage in a summary way. Captain Michael Cresap, and a certain Daniel Greathouse, leading on these parties, surprised, at different times, travelling and hunting parties of the Indians, having their women and children with them, and murdered many. Among these were unfortunately the family of Logan, a chief celebrated in peace and war, and long distinguished as a friend of the whites."

Aside from the controversy over Cresap's implication in the death of Logan's

brated Zoologist, who has added, and is still adding, so many precious things to the treasures of science, I must doubt whether in this instance he has not cherished error also by lending her for a moment his vivid imagination and bewitching language.1

kin, were the questions of the authenticity of the speech as reported by Jefferson, and the nativity of the maker. The earliest known version of the speech is contained in a letter from James Madison to William Bradford, dated January 20, 1775. A slightly varying version was printed in the Virginia Gazette of February 4, 1775, and was extensively copied by other papers. There are slight verbal variations in both from that printed by Jefferson, but none such as discredit his text. It is thus evident that the speech is thoroughly authentic. As to the origin of Logan, the balance of positive evidence seems to indicate that he was a half-breed; even without the additional generalization that the holding of Indians as slaves in the early colony days, the frequent capture and adoption of white children by the savages, as well as the less obvious mixture of races caused by the character and condition of the frontiersman and the moral standards of the Indians, had left few full-blooded Indians in the regions of white settlement and exploration. The superiority of the Indian in combating with the whites in the last fifty years of the eighteenth century, over the earlier periods, though the relative proportion of numbers had been entirely reversed, proves the change the race had undergone, and possibly explains an eloquence nowheres mentioned by the early travellers in America.

"Monsieur Buffon has indeed given an afflicting picture of human nature in his description of the man of America. But sure I am there never was a picture more unlike the original. He grants indeed that his stature is the same as that of the man of Europe. He might have admitted, that the Iroquois were larger, and the Lenapi, or Delawares, taller than people in Europe generally are. But he says their organs of generation are smaller and weaker than those of Europeans. Is this a fact? I believe not; at least it is an observation I never heard before. They have no beard.' Had he known the pains and trouble it cost the men to pluck out by the roots the hair that grows on their faces, he would have seen that nature had not been deficient in that respect. Every nation has its customs. I have seen an Indian beau, with a lookingglass in his hand, examining his face for hours together, and plucking out by the roots every hair he could discover, with a kind of tweezer made of a piece of fine brass wire that had been twisted round a stick, and which he used with great dexterity. They have no ardor for their females.' It is true they do not indulge those excesses, nor discover that fondness which is customary in Europe; but this is not owing to a defect in nature but to manners. Their soul is wholly bent upon war. This is what procures them glory among the men, and makes them the admiration of the women. To this they are educated from their earliest youth. When they pursue game with ardor, when they bear the fatigues of the chase, when they sustain and suffer patiently hunger and