Visitors to Pricketts Fort on July 4th were witness to a small-scale re-enactment of a recruiting officer from Fort Pitt calling on local farmers to volunteer as part of a company of militia being raised to join General Hand in a punitive expedition against Shawnee towns in Ohio in the summer of 1777.
The call from General Hand came down shortly after Captain William Haymond had turned over command of Pricketts Fort to Jacob Prickett’s nephew, Captain Zadock Springer. Springer’s company was seriously under-manned, composed of only six men when he took over command on July 15. Two weeks later his company had added an additional seven militiamen.
The situation at this time is described in John Boback’s history, Pricketts Fort: A Bastion in the Wilderness: “On 17 July, two scouts discovered the footprints of seven or eight Indians heading in the direction of Pricketts Fort. About that same time, settlers at the fort heard a strange whistling sound emanating from the forest. Fearing that it might be Indians signaling to one another, an alarm went out causing the settlers in the area to fort up. With danger seemingly all around him, Captain Springer recruited seven additional men into his company.
Less than two weeks later, on 2 August, Captain Springer received a dispatch alerting him that a war party of thirteen or fourteen Indians had just attacked the homestead of Charles Grigsby near presentday Clarksburg. fortunately for the Pricketts Fort community, the incursion of war parties bypassed them without incident.
Springer and his militia company remained at Pricketts Fort till at least 16 August. Shortly after the 16th, they most likely left Pricketts Fort and marched to Kern’s Fort at presentday Morgantown where the recently promoted Colonel Zackwell Morgan was assembling the Monongalia County militia. General Edward Hand at Fort Pitt needed every able-bodied militiaman to join him in an attack on the Indians in the Ohio country. Volunteers for the expedition had to enlist for a six month term of service, but were promised equal shares in any plunder taken from the Indians in addition to their regular militia pay. By 29 August, five hundred members of the Monongalia County militia had assembled and marched to Statler’s Fort near Dunkard Creek in presentday Greene County, Pennsylvania. One of Morgan’s companies was commanded by Captain Jacob Prickett.
While at Statler’s Fort, Morgan received word that ‘numbers of the [frontier] inhabitants’ had secretly sworn allegiance to the crown and were making preparations to join with the English and take over Fort Pitt. In light of this new threat, Morgan immediately turned his attention toward ridding the county of ‘this most horrid conspiracy’. Members of his militia clashed with a group of Loyalist Tories, dispersing them and capturing a leader by the name of Higgison. Although the Monongalia County militia put down the Tory uprising, it left General Hand with too few troops to carry out his expedition against the Shawnee.”
General Hand would finally carry out his expedition against the Shawnee five months later, in February 1778, but without the help of the Monongalia county militia and the men from Pricketts Fort. It was just as well for the western Virginians that they did not accompany General Hand on this particular mission. What ensued on Beaver Creek that winter was a shameful fiasco and became known derisively as Hand’s “Squaw Campaign”.
But that, as they say, is another story.
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Sources
Boback, John M. Pricketts Fort: A Bastion in the Wilderness. (Fairmont, WV: Pricketts Fort Memorial Foundation, 2005).
Craig, Michel Williams. Winter’s Doctor: General Edward Hand. (Rock Ford Foundation, 1984).
Militia at Pricketts Fort file. Pricketts Fort Memorial foundation Archives, Fairmont, West Virginia.
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, and Louise Phelps Kellogg (eds). Frontier Defense on the Upper Ohio, 1777-1778. (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1912).
