FullReads

Wetzel had fought Indians nearly all his life. When he was a boy of fourteen they attacked his father’s cabin in Virginia, and Wetzel was wounded before he was taken prisoner, with a younger brother, and carried into the Ohio wilderness. One night the Indians forgot to tie their captives, and the two boys escaped. Lewis returned to the camp, after they had stolen away, for a pair of moccasins, and again for his father’s rifle, which the Indians had carried off. They followed the boys, but the young Wetzels got safely back to the Ohio, and crossed the river on a raft which they made of logs.

In 1786 the settlers of Wheeling, who had been troubled by Indians, offered a purse of a hundred dollars to the man who should first bring in a scalp. A party crossed the Ohio, but after some days turned back, leaving Wetzel alone in the woods, where he roamed about looking for Indians. The second morning he came upon one sleeping, and drove his knife through his heart. Then he went home with his scalp, and got the reward.

One of the tricks of the savages was to imitate the cry, or call, of the wild turkey and then to shoot the hunter who came looking for the bird. Wetzel was one day in the woods when this call came to his ear from the mouth of a cave, a place where several whites had been found scalped. He watched till the feathered tuft of an Indiana head appeared from the cave. The call of the wild turkey sounded, and at the same time the sharp crack of Wetzel’s rifle noted the Indian’s death.

It was Wetzel’s habit in the autumn to go on a long hunt into the Ohio country. Once he went as far as the Muskingum, some ninety miles from Wheeling, when he came on a camp of four Indians. He crept upon them with no weapon but his knife, which he drove through the skulls of two as they lay asleep. The two others struggled to their feet stupefied; Wetzel killed one of them, but the fourth escaped in the shadow of the woods. When Wetzel returned and was asked what his luck in hunting had been, he said, “Not much; I treed four Indians, but one got away.”

These were acts of war, but they were very like mere murders, and one of Wetzel’s exploits could hardly be called anything but murder. General Har-mar in 1779 had invited the Indians to come and make peace with him in the fort near where Marietta now stands. Wetzel and another Indian fighter lay in wait for the envoys who passed from the tribes to the general, and in pure wantonness, shot one. He then took refuge with his friends at Mingo Bottom, where the officer sent by Harmar to arrest him, dared not even attempt it. Wetzel was the hero and darling of the border, where the notion of punishing a man for shooting an Indian was laughed at. But after a while he was taken, and lodged, heavily ironed, in the fort. He sent for the general and asked him to give him up, with a tomahawk, to a large band of armed Indians present, and let him fight for his life with them. Of course Harmar could not do this, but Wetzel won upon him so far that the general had his fetters removed, leaving only the manacles on his wrists, and allowed him to walk about outside the fort. He made a sudden dash for the woods; the guards fired upon him, but Wetzel got safely away; and at a distant point he reached the Ohio. He could not swim, with his hands in irons, but by good luck he saw a friend on the Virginia shore, who came in answer to his signs and set him over in his canoe. Later the soldiers found him in a tavern at Marysville, and arrested him again. He was taken to the fort at Cincinnati, where Harmar was now in command, but he was released by a judge of the court just in time to save the fort from an attack by the backwoodsmen, who were furious that Wetzel should be so persecuted simply for killing an Indian.