ad
already tried to do so and failed. At last he perished in a drunken
brawl by the hand of another Indian.

Cornstalk died a grand death, but by an act of cowardly treachery on the
part of his American foes; it is one of the darkest stains on the
checkered pages of frontier history. Early in 1777 he came into the
garrison at Point Pleasant to explain that, while he was anxious to keep
at peace, his tribe were bent on going to war; and he frankly added that
of course if they did so he should have to join them. He and three other
Indians, among them his son and the chief Redhawk, who had also been at
the Kanawha battle, were detained as hostages. While they were thus
confined in the fort a member of a company of rangers was killed by the
Indians near by; whereupon his comrades, headed by their captain,[57]
rushed in furious anger into the fort to slay the hostages. Cornstalk
heard them rushing in, and knew that his hour had come; with unmoved
countenance he exhorted his son not to fear, for it was the will of the
Great Spirit that they should die there together; then, as the murderers
burst into the room, he quietly rose up to meet them, and fell dead
pierced by seven or eight bullets. His son and his comrades were
likewise butchered, and we have no record of any more infamous deed.

Though among the whites, the men who took prominent parts in the
struggle never afterwards made any mark, yet it is worth noting that all
the aftertime leaders of the west were engaged in some way in Lord
Dunmore's war. Their fates were various. Boon led the vanguard of the
white advance across the mountains, wandered his life long through the
wilderness, and ended his days, in extreme old age, beyond the
Mississippi, a backwoods hunter to the last. Shelby won laurels at
King's Mountain, became the first governor of Kentucky, and when an old
man revived the memories of his youth by again leading the western men
in battle against the British and Indians. Sevier and Robertson were for
a generation the honored chiefs of the southwestern people. Clark, the
ablest of all, led a short but brilliant career, during which he made
the whole nation his debtor. Then, like Logan, he sank under the curse
of drunkenness,--often hardly less dangerous to the white borderer than
to his red enemy,--and passed the remainder of his days in ignoble and
slothful retirement.

1. Stewart's Narrative.

2. "Am. Archiv." Col. Wm. Preston's letter, Sept. 28, 1774.