little discipline.
Foreman was a new arrival from Hampshire County, enlisted to go
on Hand's intended expedition. They intended crossing the Ohio
at Grave Creek, 12 miles below, and proceeding 8 miles farther
down to Captina. At Grave, however, they found that the
Tomlinson settlement (nucleus of the present Mound City, W.
Va.) had been abandoned, and sacked by Indians, and no canoes
were to be had. They camped for the night, and the next morning
(the 27th) started to return along the river bank, to Wheeling.
Linn, apprehensive of Indians, marched along the hill crest,
but Ogle and Foreman kept to the trail along the bottom. At a
point where the bottom narrows because of the close approach of
the hills to the river--a defile then known as McMechen's (or
McMahon's) Narrows--they were set upon by Half King's party,
awaiting them in ambush. Foreman and twenty others were killed,
and one captured. The story about Linn's gallant attack on the
Indians from his vantage point on the hilltop, is without
foundation. His party helped to secrete a wounded man who
escaped in the melee, and then put off in hot haste for home.
It was not until four days later, when reinforcements had
arrived from Fort Pitt, that Colonel Shepherd ventured from the
fort to bury the dead. In 1835, an inscribed stone was set up
at the Narrows, to commemorate the slain.--R. G. T.

[172] CHAPTER X.

After the winter became so severe as to prevent the Indians from
penetrating the country and committing farther aggression, the
inhabitants became assured of safety, and devoted much of their time
to the erection of new forts, the strengthening of those which had
been formerly established, and the making of other preparations,
deemed necessary to prevent the repetition of those distressing
occurrences, which had spread gloom and sorrow over almost every part
of North Western Virginia. That the savages would early renew their
exertions to destroy the frontier settlements, and harrass their
citizens, could not for an instant be doubted.--Revenge for the murder
of Cornstalk, and the other chiefs killed in the fort by the whites,
had operated to unite the warlike nation of the Shawanees in a league
with the other Indians, against them; and every circumstance seemed to
promise increased exertions on their