Note 12 — CHRONICLES OF BORDER WARFARE (continued 5)

After the affair at Wheeling, September 1, the Indians returned home. But soon thereafter, Half King, head chief of the Wyandots, set out with forty of that tribe to again harry the Wheeling country. On the morning of the 26th, Capts. William Foreman with twenty-four men, Ogle with ten men, and William Linn with nine, started from Fort Henry on a scout. Linn was ranking officer, although there was 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.