ginia, North Carolina and soon from Tennessee the
American settlers were pushing on through Kentucky for the closed trail
of the broad Ohio River, farther north another out-post had been placed
at the river itself.

This was the Zane settlement away up in the panhandle of North-Western
Virginia; to-day the city of Wheeling, West Virginia.

The Zanes, first there, were three brothers: Colonel Ebenezer, Silas
and Jonathan. They all were of the roving "wild-turkey" breed, and
bolder spirits never wore buckskin or sighted a rifle. A fourth
brother, Isaac, had been taken by the Indians when nine years old, and
had chosen to stay with them. He married a sister of a Wyandot chief;
rose to be a chief, himself, but never lifted the hatchet against the
whites. On the contrary, he helped them when he might.

It was in the summer of 1769 that the three Zanes led a party from
present Moorfield, on the South Branch of the Potomac River in eastern
West Virginia, to explore northwest into a country where Ebenezer
already had spent a season. They reached the Ohio and looked down upon
the shining river, and the lovely vales surrounding, where Wheeling
up-sprang.

Ebenezer Zane, then twenty-three years old, built a cabin on a knoll
near the river above the mouth of Wheeling Creek. The Zane family home
was here long after Wheeling became a town. Jonathan lived with Eb;
Silas put up a cabin beside the creek. The next year they went back
for their wives and children; other settlers returned with them. Among
these were John Wetzel, whose five sons, Lewis, Jacob, Martin, John and
George grew to be such frontier fighters that Lewis was called the
Boone of West Virginia; there were the McCollochs--John, William and
Samuel--whose sister Elizabeth had married Eb Zane; and another of the
Zanes, Andrew.

Those were days of large families.

Up and down the east bank of the Ohio, north and south of Wheeling
Creek, the number of cabins gradually increased, until in the year of
the "three bloody sevens" they numbered some twenty-five or thirty.

They were scattered here and there under the protection of a fort that
had been built three years before by the Government. At first it was
named Fort Fincastle, after Fincastle County of Virginia; the name had
been changed to Fort Henry, in honor of the great Patrick Henry, orator
and governor of the State of Virginia; but it was known also as
Wheeling Fort.

And considerable of a fort it wa