S8 Ep277: THE MASSACRE AT YELLOW CREEK AND THE POWER VACUUM Colleague Professor Robert G. Parkinson. Following the British withdrawal from Fort Pitt, a power vacuum triggered a border civil war and increased tension with Native peoples. On April 30, 1774, Logan's f

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2026

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

THE MASSACRE AT YELLOW CREEK AND THE POWER VACUUM Colleague Professor Robert G. Parkinson. Following the British withdrawal from Fort Pitt, a power vacuum triggered a border civil war and increased tension with Native peoples. On April 30, 1774, Logan's family—including his mother, brother, and sister—were lured into a tavern at Baker's Bottom on the Ohio River under the guise of diplomacy. While they engaged in a shooting contest, men hiding in a back room, led by Daniel Greathouse, ambushed and murdered them. Although Michael Cresap was blamed, he was thirty miles away at Catfish Camp during the massacre, though he had been leading armed settlers nearby. NUMBER 3

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm John Batchewitt, Professor Robert G. Parkinson. The book is Heart of American Darkness,
0:05.0	bewilderment and horror on the early frontier. There is no easy sorting this out.
0:11.0	This isn't good guys, bad guys. This is everybody moving around in what one side regards as a wilderness.
0:18.0	The other side regards as very well settled and extremely tribal so that we have
0:24.2	the Shawnees and the Delawares and the Mingoes living side by side and there are Wyandots,
0:32.8	there are other tribes. They all know their tribes. We have the colonials, Pennsylvania,
0:37.3	Maryland and Virginia living side by side and at odds. And then we have land speculators who look to take advantage of land that belonged in the hunting grounds of the Native Americans or in Pennsylvania, or if you're a Pennsylvania in Virginia, you can understand everybody's armed.
0:55.7	And then there are rumors of the Native Americans being savages.
1:00.5	This word savages routine I learned from Rob.
1:03.3	So we come now to the events that we started with, the Logan's lament, losing his family by the Yellow Creek.
1:10.7	Please carefully, Bob, Rob, introduce us to that murder. Why? the logan's lament losing his family by the yellow creek please carefully bob
1:12.4	rob introduce us to that murder why did it take place what is the reason he wasn't
1:17.8	colonel tom cressip it was michael cressup who was michael at the time i believe he was
1:23.6	32 years old and why did it come to murder well the the operative word and what you just said is the word tribal.
1:31.3	And we have long thought of native peoples as tribal, but one of the things I like to do in this book is to consider
1:39.3	Pennsylvanians and Virginians and Marylanders as just as, acting just as tribal. They are tribes themselves.
1:46.0	And so what has gone on?
1:48.0	The British are broke, and we know this in reference to the imperial crisis, obviously,
1:53.0	and this is the reason we have taxes and tea being thrown overboard in Boston.
1:59.0	But one of the ways Britain tries to cut costs and save money is they take
2:02.6	all their troops out of Fort Pitt. And so Fort Pitt, which had become, which was during the
2:08.0	Seven Years' War, was this sort of bastion of English power over the mountains, now lays empty.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.