THE GREAT LOVE STORY OF ANN AND JOHN GIBSON

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There once lived a beautiful and gracious young Indian princess by the name of Koonay, though she was also known by the white people’s name of Ann. Konnay was the daughter of the great Haudenosaunee chief, Shikellamy. The tribes who lived in the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys and around the finger lakes called themselves the People of the Longhouse, the Dutch called them Mingo, and the English called them the Iroquois League. Chief Shikellamy was a great friend to the white man, and a true lover of peace. It was through his efforts, and those of his son Tah-Gah-Jute, aka Chief Logan, that the northern woodland Indians and the white settlers enjoyed a half century of peace between their peoples. For his great deeds Chief Shikellamy was awarded the King George I Peace Medal.

John Gibson, at age 17, was a soldier on the British side in the French and Indian War. He stayed on the frontier after the war, as a trader, but was captured by the Lenape Indians during Pontiac's Rebellion, and was sentenced to be burned at the stake. His life was saved by an old Indian woman who adopted him to replace a son killed in the recent war. He lived with the Indians for a year or two, learning their language and their ways. He was then freed by the Bouquet Expedition, but never lost his love of the Indian people. A few years later he fought in the American Revolution, and was made a colonel by General George Washington. After the war he was a Judge, a delegate to the state’s Constitution ratification convention and was appointed governor of Indiana by President John Adams.

The great chief's daughter, Ann, and the white trader, John fell in love and married. They had three children with a fourth on the way. Their first son they named Nicholas, second came John Jr., and they named their daughter Diana Ball. They were well on their way to a happily-ever-after life.

Then came some very bad men, and that was the end of their fairy tale little world. John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, done more to undo the Chief Shikellamy/King George I peace, than anyone other person alive, and he did it so he could kill Indians and steal their land. His chief helper was John the con man Connolly. As you can see, I’m throwing in a few mental hooks, mnemonics, and rhymes to help you remember the villain’s names. Then came the paid killers, Captain Michael Cresap who’s name rhymes with creepy, crappy, sappy, and his co-conspirator, the not-so-great Daniel Greathouse. I guess it was in the Cresap blood, because forty years earlier Daniel’s father Thomas had instigated a border war between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Marlyand that came to be known as Cresap's War. It took King George II of England to put a stop to that one, and it wasn’t finally settled until the Mason-Dixon line was surveyed.

On 26 April 1774, Captain Cresap called together his soldiers, the settlers, and the traders, and showed them a letter from Dunmore’s agent warning them about the Indians, so they declared war on them. The captain and his band then proceeded to ambush and murder peaceful Indians, women, and children on the Ohio River, at Fort Pitt, Pipe Creek, at Grove Creek, Captina, and went on to brag much about it.

Worse yet, for the Longhouse people was a decision by the Greathouse family to make war on them. Daniel Greathouse got his brothers, friends, settlers, and a few of Cresap's mob, to the number of about twenty, had them hide in the back room of Baker's trading post, and there they waited in ambush for some Indians to arrive.

On 30 April 1773, near the Indian settlement on Yellow Creek, Ann Koonay, her year old daughter, a brother, a nephew, her sister-in-law, and a few other Indians to the number of eight or ten, crossed the river to Baker’s trading post. On command, and without warning, the men stormed out of the back room and began their brutal murders. Murder didn't sate these evil men’s blood lust and fight as best she could, Ann couldn’t stop Jacob Greathouse from ripping open her stomach, and pulled out and scalped her unborn son. They then scalped all the dead, hanging their trophies on their belts, save one scalp which Daniel Greathouse’s men then presented to their commander Michael Cresap. They did spare one Indian there that day, John Gibson’s year old daughter Diana.

When Chief Logan learned of the atrocities, he did something he had never before done in his entire life, he went on the warpath, and turned Cresap's private little war into the much longer, larger, and bloodier Lord Dunmore's War. The story’s told that when John Gibson learned of those white men’s savagery he went looking for Michael Cresap, and when he caught up with him he did not kill him, but rather tried to arrest him, which sent Cresap skedaddling.

The first person to set the story of the Yellow Creek Massacre and Logan’s Lament to print was Thomas Jefferson. That was a decade after the fact, in Query VI in his book Notes on the State of Virginia. He wrote the book to refute the hypothesis of the Compte de Buffon the buffoon of France who theorized that all things American were inferior to all things European. Yet another decade passed and Luther Martin wrote a letter to the newspaper denying his father-in-law was in any way involved and accusing Jefferson of being both a liar and a coward, and Chief Logan of being an ignorant savage incapable of producing anything so eloquent. Another of his complaint was that but for Jefferson the whole thing would have soon been gone and forgotten. Jefferson then gathered evidence to get at the truth of the matter, and wrote an appendix relative to the murder of Logan’s family, which he added to his book. It seems that Martin the moron was the one who most shined the publicity spotlight on the family’s dirty little secret.

Today, there is Logan’s Spring in Mifflin County, Loganton, and Logan township in Clinton County, and Logan’s gap in the Nittany mountains of Pennsylvania; Logan state park, Logan town, and Logan county in West Virginia; Logan’s gap in Ripley, Logan High, Chief Logan Reservation Boy Scout Camp, Logan’s Elm on the Pickaway Plains, Logan Elm High School near Circleville, and the Chief Logan High School, in Mifflin County, Ohio, which ran from 1957 to 1989, all named after your great, great, great, great, great, great, great uncle Logan. There is a lake, a park, a high school, and a grade school in Pennsylvania named after your 7th Great Grandfather, Chief Shikellamy. Each chief also has a life sized statue standing in their respective parks. But best of all, if your name is Lauren, Leigh, Jeff, Bryan, Steven, Brynn, Chris, Dylan, Sammie, Nicole, Natalie, Kelly, Jack, Sophie, RJ, Mary Kate, Tommy, or Addison, then little Diana Ball is your 5th Great Grandmother, and you are Colonel John and Ann Koonay Gibson's living legacy to the world.

A more scholarly version of these historic events can be found in the files of James Gibson and Chief John Logan.