an warfare. They planted the war pole, stripped and painted
themselves, and starting the war dance called on Cresap to be their
"white leader." The captain, however, declined; but in that wild
circling line was one who was a white leader indeed. He was a
sandy-haired boy of twenty--one of the bold race of English Virginians,
rugged and of fiery countenance, with blue eyes intense of glance
and deep set under a high brow that, while modeled for power, seemed
threatened in its promise by the too sensitive chiseling of his lips.
With every nerve straining for the fray, with thudding of feet and
crooning of the blood song, he wheeled with those other mad spirits
round the war pole till the set of sun closed the rites. "That evening
two scalps were brought into camp," so a letter of his reads. Does the
bold savage color of this picture affright us? Would we veil it? Then
we should lose something of the true lineaments of George Rogers Clark,
who, within four short years, was to lead a tiny army of tattered and
starving backwoodsmen, ashamed to quail where he never flinched, through
barrens and icy floods to the conquest of Illinois for the United
States.

Though Cresap had rejected the role of "white leader," he did not escape
the touch of infamy. "Cresap's War" was the name the Indians gave to
the bloody encounters between small parties of whites and Indians, which
followed on that war dance and scalping, during the summer months. One
of these encounters must be detailed here because history has assigned
it as the immediate cause of Dunmore's War.

Greathouse, Sapperton, and King, three traders who had a post on Yellow
Creek, a tributary of the Ohio fifty miles below Pittsburgh, invited
several Indians from across the stream to come and drink with them and
their friends. Among the Indians were two or three men of importance in
the Mingo tribe. There were also some women, one of whom was the Indian
wife of Colonel John Gibson, an educated man who had distinguished
himself as a soldier with Forbes in 1768. That the Indians came in amity
and apprehended no treachery was proved by the presence of the women.
Gibson's wife carried her halfcaste baby in her shawl. The disreputable
traders plied their guests with drink to the point of intoxication and
then murdered them. King shot the first man and, when he fell, cut his
throat, saying that he had served many a deer in that fashion. Gibson's
Indian wife fled and was shot down in t