Notes on a Conversation with Uriah Springer, 20 January 1798
Notes on a Conversation with Uriah Springer
Jan. 20. 1798. Cap Uriah Springer of Fayette county Pensva calls on me (with Judge Turner) and informs me he was on the Monongehela in 1774. he lived there. that Logan’s family was killed by one Greathouse & others. that they had been over yellow1 creek a water of the Ohio 60. miles below Pittsbg & 130. above Kanhaway to the Shawanee encampment in a friendly way. that the Indians came over in a canoe after the whites & on their coming to the shore were shot by Greathouse’s party2 Greathouse himself shot a woman who was ashore on the land, deliberately, after promising her not. that either a little before or after this, Michael Cressop (who was improving land on the Ohio) with others attacked a party of Shawanese & killed three. this brought on Dunmore’s war. Judge Turner says Govr. Howard informed him he saw Cresap at Baltimore soon after with the scalps
MS (DLC); entirely in TJ’s hand.
Uriah Springer (ca. 1755–1826), a native of New Jersey who migrated to the trans-Appalachian frontier at a young age, began his military career as an ensign of Virginia militia under Lord Dunmore in 1774, served as an officer in Virginia regiments of the Continental Line during the Revolutionary War, was a captain of United States infantry from 1792 to 1796, and was commissioned a brigade inspector during the War of 1812 (Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed., Frontier Retreat on the Upper Ohio 1779–1781, Collections 24, Draper Series 5, of Publications of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin [Madison, 1917], 278n; Heitman, Continental Army, 512).
From Philadelphia on 11 June 1798 George Turner, who had been a judge of the Northwest Territory, addressed a letter to TJ as the president of the American Philosophical Society. The letter, which TJ did not endorse or record in SJL, consisted of a description of an animal that Turner had observed at Vincennes in 1794 and called the prairie squirrel. Endorsed by an officer of the society as received on 16 June, Turner’s letter was actually presented at a meeting held the day before. It was referred to Benjamin Smith Barton for consideration, but the society considered it too preliminary an observation to merit publication (RC in PPAmP: Manuscript Communications, Natural History; , Proceedings, 22, pt. 3 [1884], 272–3). Another letter from Turner to TJ, dated 2 Mch. 1794 and recorded in SJL as received from Cincinnati on 21 May of that year, has not been found. Elected to the in 1790, Turner was an active member, had chaired some meetings in the president’s absence, and in January 1800 was elected one of three curators. The following month, however, the society learned that he had diverted most of a $500 gift. Turner resigned under threat of expulsion and had to give the a bond and a mortgage on land in Virginia to assure repayment of the missing funds (, Proceedings, 22, pt. 3 [1884], 179, 214, 221, 237, 251–2, 269–70, 286, 288, 290, 295–7, 312, 313; , Transactions, 4:334–5, 510–18; Vol. 24:604n).
1. TJ interlined the text from this word through “Kanhaway” in place of “the river.”
2. Word interlined in place of “family.”