Note (return) — Chapter XIII

The country about the mouth of the Scioto has long figured in Western annals. Being a favorite rendezvous for the Shawanese, it naturally became a resort for French and English fur-traders. The principal part of the first Shawanese village—Shannoah Town, in the old journals—was below the Scioto's mouth, on the site of Alexandria; it was the chief town of this considerable tribe, and here Gist was warned back, when in March, 1751, he ventured thus far while inspecting lands for the Ohio Company. Two years later, there was a great—perhaps an unprecedented—flood in the Ohio, the water rising fifty feet above the ordinary level, and destroying the larger part of the Shawanese village. Some of the Indians moved to the Little Miami, and others up the Scioto, where they built, successively, Old and New Chillicothe; but the majority remained, and rebuilt their town on the higher land north of the Scioto, where Portsmouth now stands. An outlying band had had, from before Gist's day, a small town across the Ohio, the site of Springville; and it was here that George Croghan had his stone trading house, which was doubtless, after the manner of the times, a frontier fortress. In the French and Indian war (1758), the Shawanese, tiring of continual conflict, withdrew from their Ohio River settlements to Old (or Upper) Chillicothe, and thus closed the once important fur-trade at the mouth of the Scioto. It was while the Indian town at Portsmouth was still new (1755), that a party of Shawanese brought here a Mrs. Mary Inglis, whom they had captured while upon a scalping foray into Southwestern Virginia. The story of the remarkable escape of this woman, at Big Bone Lick, of her long and terrible flight through the wilderness along the southern bank of the Ohio and up the Great Kanawha Valley, and her final return to home and kindred, who viewed her as one delivered from the grave, is one of the most thrilling in Western history.A