YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The Mahoning Valley by the mid-18th century was thick with forest and home to few permanent indigenous settlements.
Still, the region was well known among Native American communities (there is archeological evidence of peoples living in the area dating 12,000 years ago) for its rich natural resources, especially the salt licks that stretched along the Mahoning River, most notably in what is today Weathersfield Township in Trumbull County. Indeed, the name Mahoning is derived from “Mahonink,” the Lenape word that loosely translates to “a stream flowing near a lick.”
“Geographically, it was dense, virgin wilderness,” Bill Lawson, executive director of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society, says of the Valley. “There were a few exceptions along the flood plains where native people had settled permanently or migrated as groups.”
Among the most dominant tribes were the Algonquin-speaking Lenape, also commonly known by Europeans as the Delaware. These communities sought refuge in the Ohio and western Pennsylvania region during the mid-1770s, as white settlement and a nine-year war between England and France pushed these people further west.
“They were part of the Iroquois Confederacy, based in western New York, but whose influence spread all the way through western Pennsylvania, through Ohio, and even south of the Ohio River,” Lawson says. However, the Confederacy began to rupture after England’s victory over France in 1763, solidifying Britain’s North American empire that now included land west to the Mississippi River and all of Canada.
The Eve of Revolution
In the wake of that conflict, Britain’s colonial subjects leapt at the opportunity to expand their landholdings west, thereby threatening conflict with the Native American tribes who lived there, Lawson says. Fears of further white encroachment and anger over British governing practices in the newly acquired Great Lakes region, for example, triggered Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763, an expansive, sporadic Native American offensive that destroyed eight British forts and settlements as far east as Virginia, costing hundreds of lives on both sides.
Meanwhile, British policymakers in London hurried through Parliament the Royal Proclamation of 1763, a measure that was already under consideration before the rebellion broke out. The Proclamation declared that land west of the Appalachian Mountains – including northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania – was off-limits to permanent colonial settlement, reserving the region for the indigenous tribes.
“Of course, the Proclamation was impossible to enforce, because that would require tens of thousands of regulars and militia keeping people to the east,” Lawson says, and the British simply did not have the financial or military resources to manage such an undertaking. Colonials recognized this and opted to forgo security as many began the risky migration into western Pennsylvania and western New York unprotected. “People who were crossing the mountains and coming west were on their own for the most part, which led to skirmishes,” Lawson says.
Sparks in the West
The growing imperial crisis between the colonies and Great Britain only intensified this conflict. In 1768, Britain acquired territory south of the Ohio River, reaching a settlement under the Treaty of Fort Stanwix with several Iroquois tribes in what is today West Virginia and Kentucky. The treaty opened the floodgates for white settlement on the frontier.
However, other tribes, most significantly the Shawnee, resisted since they claimed this land for hunting privileges. Antagonized by colonial encroachment, the Shawnee stepped up attacks against white settlements along the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania, West Virginia (then the colony of Virginia), and Kentucky (also territory claimed by the Virginia colony). Virginia responded in April 1774 with what is today known as Lord Dunmore’s War, named for the colonial governor that raised militia forces totaling more than 2,500 troops to subdue the Shawnee and Mingo tribes.
The war ended in October of that year after the Battle of Point Pleasant along the Ohio River in modern-day West Virginia. Several days after the battle, a formal treaty was signed at Camp Charlotte on the Scioto River. The Virginia militia then retreated to Fort Gower, at the confluence of the Ohio and Hocking rivers just south of Marietta.
In November, they first learned of the Intolerable Acts – a series of punitive measures passed by Parliament to exact revenge on Boston as the result of the Boston Tea Party a year earlier. The breach with Britain was drawing closer to war in the east.
The Virginia contingent at Fort Gower professed its support for the patriot cause. According to the Fort Gower Resolves, the militia vowed that despite their loyalty to the crown, “we resolve that we will exert every power within us for the defence of American liberty, and for the support of her just rights and privileges.” Put simply, this was the first open declaration that colonials – in this case, Virginians bivouacked in Ohio – would take up arms against Britain if necessary. This was also nearly six months before the first shots at Lexington and Concord were fired, igniting the Revolution.
“Nobody west of the Appalachian Mountains and north of the Ohio River knows what to make of the fighting in the east,” says Eric Sterner, an author based in northern Virginia who has written extensively about Ohio’s role during the Revolutionary period. “There’s massive confusion at the beginning of the Revolution.”
Native American tribes were especially unsure of which side to support during the first years of the conflict, though diplomatic overtures from both the Americans and the British attempted to lobby for either alliances or at best neutrality should the war spread west, Sterner says.
By July 1777, that sentiment had shifted, as the British won the allegiance of all but two of the Iroquois nations in upstate New York, Sterner says. That strategy was also pursued in the west, as the British at Fort Detroit began to supply some of the tribes along the Great Lakes with weapons and supplies to harass American garrisons on the frontier, namely Fort Pitt, now Pittsburgh, which was under the control of Americans.
Fort Pitt was desperate for provisions, as most of the military resources were devoted to the war in the east, Sterner says. “In the west, they really rely on local militia,” he says.
Meantime, the Ohio frontier was under constant threat of attack. This sentiment was synthesized in a correspondence from Brig. Gen. Edward Hand, the commander at Fort Pitt, to George Washington on Sept. 15, 1777. “The western nations are united against us,” Hand wrote, explaining the challenges he faced in recruiting militia, scrounging for just about any available man of fighting age. “From the weakness of this garrison and almost constant alarms, I was induced to detain a detachment of the 13th Virginia Regiment also, a few stragglers and deserters from the 8th Pennsylvania & other regiments.” To make matters worse, small pox had swept through the fort, and approximately a third of those not infected would require inoculation and “thereby their service lost for some time.” These woes precluded any attempt of amassing a campaign against the western tribes or an assault on Fort Detroit this year, the general said.
War Comes to the Mahoning
That changed in early 1778, as Hand – acting on intelligence gathered in December – devised a plan to attack a British ammunition and supply depot along the Cuyahoga River in the dead of winter. Col. William Crawford was selected to recruit an expedition that would take 500 men in what would be the first significant military excursion into Ohio during the Revolution. Hand and his party set out in February.
The strategy was to move his troops in swift fashion up the Beaver River, west along the Mahoning into Ohio, portage to the Cuyahoga, and move north to the river’s mouth at present-day Cleveland.
“It’s a disaster,” Sterner says. Heavy rainfall, swollen rivers, and flooded swampland squandered the expedition from the very start. The core of Hand’s army made it some 40 miles north along the Beaver and west at its junction with the Mahoning near New Castle, Pa., before the general surmised that supplies would be exhausted before the units reached the mouth of the Cuyahoga. There, he decided to abandon the entire campaign.
Today, a plaque affixed to a large boulder stands at a clearing at the intersection of U.S. Route 224 and Jackson Street in Edinburg, Pa., along the southern banks of the Mahoning. The monument was erected in 1940 by the Lawrence Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, memorializing the “farthest point west reached by General Edward Hand in his expedition against the Indians.” The marker also identifies the site as one of the Kuskuskies Towns, one of four Native American settlements established on the Mahoning, Beaver and Allegheny rivers during the 18th century. It is now a small cemetery where 12 veterans of the American Revolution are buried.
Before Hand called off the mission, however, he dispatched several reconnaissance parties, one of which encountered a small Lenape village of between 50 and 60 people at the confluence of Neshannock Creek and the Shenango River at New Castle, Pa. The news reached Hand, who ascertained – without strong evidence – that the village was likely composed of warriors intent on launching raids along the frontier.
It was not. Instead, the Lenape had proclaimed neutrality in the conflict and, according to Sterner, those encamped in the village numbered far less than initial estimates.
Nevertheless, Hand ordered militia to surround the village. Troop discipline quickly broke down, and soldiers began firing in an act of indiscriminate violence, according to an account Sterner had written for the blog “Emerging Revolutionary War Era.” Hand would report a month later that “to my great mortification we found only one man with some women and children. The men were so impetuous that I could not prevent their killing the man and one of the women.” The unit also captured several other occupants of the village, one of which provided information that several Muncy tribe men were making salt approximately 10 miles west along the Mahoning River at an area known as the Salt Licks, probably in Weathersfield Township in Trumbull County. A small party was dispatched to the site, where they found only a group of women and children. Soldiers took one female prisoner. As they moved away from the camp, the unit encountered a small Native American boy who was out shooting birds. Zachariah Connell then fired a shot at the boy and killed him, according to Sterner’s research.
The entire mission was meaningless, and only served to mobilize more local tribes against the Americans. “Hand’s expedition returned to Fort Pitt, having taken two women prisoner and killed one man, one woman, and one boy, all from a neutral tribe,” Sterner writes.
This disaster is forever derisively known as the “Squaw Campaign.”
Legends and Myths Born
Sterner says that much of the western campaigns in Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania were similar to the Hand expedition. “During the Revolution, there weren’t these huge, organized battles where you have large armies clashing,” he says. “Rather, they’re skirmishes, or in some cases, atrocities. The violence is usually up close and real personal.”
It’s this dark, uneasy, hand-to-hand element of the Revolution that is often overlooked, Sterner says, obscured by the significance of the mighty military actions in the northeast and southeast theaters. Indeed, the war in northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania continued to flare as the campaigns in the east were winding down.
Among those on these front – but fluid – lines was Capt. Samuel Brady, Sterner says, an important figure in the west’s shadow war. “All of the efforts to and plans to invade the Ohio country involved scouting missions back and forth,” he says. “And Brady is one of the more successful scouts.”
In 1780, Fort Pitt had welcomed a new commander, Col. Daniel Brodhead. Securing the Ohio country was an important objective for Brodhead, and among his priorities was to launch a coordinated attack in conjunction with Brig. Gen. George Rogers Clark on Ohio Native American tribes that year. The plan was called off, but not before scouts like Brady had embarked on reconnaissance missions throughout the region.
Brady was already a seasoned veteran, joining the Pennsylvania Riflemen in 1775, and participated in the siege of Boston. By 1780, he was also well-known as an Indian fighter, fueled in part by personal vendetta (his father, Capt. John Brady, was killed in a Native American raid in Pennsylvania in April 1779). In a letter from Brodhead to Washington on June 25, 1779, Brodhead reported that Brady and a team of 20 during a recent mission in western Pennsylvania had retaliated against a Muncy tribe’s raid against American settlements. Brady killed the party’s leader and “mortally wounded most of them.” His squad also retook six horses, prisoners, scalps, six guns and “all their plunder.”
The Mahoning Valley played a role in some of his actions, as one of the more prominent trails north along the Mahoning River provided an east-west conduit for both American and Native American raiding and scouting parties to and from Ohio. In preparation for the Brodhead/Clark expedition, Brady led a team of scouts – all disguised as Native American warriors – along the Mahoning and reached a Wyandot village on the Sandusky River in late May or early June, 1780, Sterner says. The party seized two women prisoners whom Brady believed would serve as reliable sources of intelligence, and then headed back toward Fort Pitt, according to Sterner. Heavy rains along the return soiled most of the party’s gunpowder and provisions, and six days into the trek one of the prisoners escaped, he says. Fatigued and now vulnerable to retaliatory attack, Brady stepped up his pace.
According to Sterner, the events over the next several days served to create the legend of Samuel Brady, enshrining him as what many early 19th century writers dubbed the “Daniel Boone of Pennsylvania.”
In popular retelling, Sterner says that Brady parted ways with the company and its remaining prisoner along the Mahoning River to hunt with what remained of his gunpowder. Along the Mahoning trail approximately 2 miles downriver from what is today Lowellville, Ohio (probably into Lawrence County, Pa., approximately where the Stavich Bike Trail extends) he encountered eight Indian warriors with two white prisoners – Jane Stoops and her 4-year-old son, William, who had been taken captive outside of Pittsburgh sometime in late May or early June, Sterner says. Brady then single-handedly ambushed the raiders, killed its leader, rescued Mrs. Stoops, while the others scattered. Brady could not rescue her son, William. The company then repaired east to Fort McIntosh on the Ohio River near present-day Beaver, Pa.
However, Sterner says these accounts are from second-hand sources, and are mostly the work of 19th-century writers prone to hype singular acts of heroism on the frontier as American interests pushed westward. “These were sort of boys’ histories from the 1800s that were trying to make a point,” he says.
Sterner’s research, based on more contemporary accounts, shows that the story is more complicated. While it’s ascertained that Brady separated from his party to hunt, it’s also clear that he was not alone when the ambush occurred. An account related by Andrew Fowler, who likely heard the story firsthand from Brady, noted that the squad detected the Native raiding party along the trail first, and he and his men had enough time to conceal themselves in the brush. “According to Fowler, surprise lay in concealment for Brady and his entire party, who had time to hide,” Sterner writes. Once the Indian leader was within short range, Brady fired.
Nevertheless, Brady and his scouts made it to Fort McIntosh with Mrs. Stoops, Sterner says, though the prisoner they had captured along the Sandusky escaped as the party crossed the Mahoning. At Fort McIntosh, Brady, his team, and several Native American allies regrouped and returned to the Mahoning River to search for the missing boy to no avail. William would, however, be eventually reunited with his mother.
By the end of June, Brady and his scouts returned to Fort Pitt, and Brodhead briefly recounted the episode along the Mahoning River in a correspondence with Washington on June 29. “When Capt. Brady fired upon the Indian party he had but three white men and only two rounds of powder left – he was without provisions for six days but has brought his whole party safe to this place. His perseverance, zeal and good conduct certainly entitle him to promotion.”
Washington replied to Brodhead on Aug. 14, noting he was “pleased to hear of the success of the parties under Captains Brady and McIntire to whom you will be pleased to express my thanks for their conduct. These affairs, though apparently small, have considerable influence upon Indians.”
Sterner says that such engagements were commonplace along the frontier during the Revolution, as both Native Americans who sided with the British and Americans maneuvered to gain the upper hand in the west. “The parallels between Brady’s party and the Indians reveal several commonalities in the experience of war on the frontier,” Sterner writes. “A vast wilderness separated the two sides, its sheer size placing a premium on intelligence, which was hard to come by.”
Isolated communities – most of them noncombatants – were often left vulnerable during this turbulent period. Whether European or Native American, these small, remote settlements were drawn into a larger, global conflict that altered the course of world history, and the Mahoning Valley was not spared.
Pictured at top: Captain Samuel Brady (1756–1795) is the subject of many legends in the history of western Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio.
