Sometimes, after testing their strength, courage and stamina, they'd very ceremoniously adopt these captives into their own families. They could only hope that the boys could get themselves out of this dilemma. By the time they returned, the trail had gotten very cold and they lost it. They saw that the boys were being taken captive and decided to run to the fort for weapons and help. Their father and their brother George realized very quickly what was going on, but could do nothing without weapons. They then hurried off into the forest, pushing the boys ahead of them. Quickly they scooped up some metal pots and the guns the boys were taking out to the field. The Indians then charged in and captured the boys. As Lewis opened the door and stepped out, they fired a volley, grazing him across the chest and causing considerable pain and blood loss. The Indians hit when they were coming out of the cabin to return to the field. Va., circa 1782 Image Courtesy of Wheeling News-RegisterĪbout midmorning, John Wetzel sent the two younger boys back to the cabin to check on some venison that was drying by the fire and to bring his and George's guns back out with them. The Wetzel place was an exception.įort Henry, Wheeling, W. Whatever farming got done, the women and children did. Most 18th century frontiersmen were really commercial hunters and trappers, not farmers. Their father, John Wetzel, was a dedicated farmer for that place and time. Their father and brother had, uncharacteristically, left their guns back in the cabin when they had all gone out to the fields that morning to hoe crops. Wyandot raiders captured Lewis and his younger brother Jacob as they were working with their father and their older brother George. The Wetzels, along with most of their neighbors, were holed up at nearby Fort Henry waiting out that season's spate of Indian raids. It was 1777, the second year of the Revolutionary War. Indians captured Lewis from his home on Wheeling Creek when he was thirteen. The Ohio Indians had neither participated in nor agreed to this disposition of their land and, as a result, the Wheeling Creek settlers were frequent targets of Ohio country Indian attacks from about 1770 until 1795, when the Treaty of Greenville moved the Indian-White boundary far to the north. That was where the arrogant and self-serving Iroquois got back at their old enemies to the west by granting to the British all Shawnee, Miami and Delaware lands east and south of the Ohio as far downstream as the mouth of the Kanawha. The Wheeling Creek settlement was right on the edge of King George's Proclamation Line of 1763, as it had been redrawn at the conference held at Fort Stanwix in 1768. The Wetzels carved a farmstead out of the forest along Big Wheeling Creek, about fourteen miles from the Ohio River, converging from the Southeast.

Ultimately, the little group of families settled near present day Wheeling, West Virginia.

'Lewis Wetzel' Copyright 1991-97 Timothy Truman In 1764, the growing Wetzel family, along with some of the Bonnets, the Zanes, the Eberlys and the Rosencranzes, moved across the Alleghenies to occupy some of the 'free land' that had become available in 1768 after the first Treaty of Fort Stanwix. From there they moved to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Lewis was born in 1763. Lewis' mother was of the Bonnet family, Flemish Huguenots already several generations in American and very respected in Herford Township, Pennsylvania.Īfter marrying in 1756, his parents moved from Pennsylvania to Rockingham County, Virginia, where they stayed for several years. John Wetzel was a German Palatinate emigrant who had survived indentured servitude and had become successful enough to win the hand of Captain Bonnet's daughter in marriage. He was the fourth of seven children born to Mary Bonnet and John Wetzel. When his friends and family applauds and encourage him for acting on that hate, the effect can govern the boy's whole life. PierceĪ boy learns to hate when his society encourages it. Lewis Wetzel, Dark Hero of the Ohioby James P.

Hero of the kingdom 3 the hunters knife