Michael Cresap
Captain Michael Cresap was a noted frontiersman born in Maryland.Biography
Cresap was the son of the pioneer Colonel Thomas Cresap. He spent part of his adult years in the Ohio Country as a trader and land developer. He led several raids against Indians who were hostile to white settlement. The war leader Logan, of the Mingo Indians, accused Cresap of murdering his family. Logan's wife and pregnant sister were among those murdered. In fact, the killings were almost certainly perpetrated by Daniel Greathouse, yet Cresap was immortalized in Logan's speech — quoted in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia as the murderer of Logan's family.
As a result of the murders, Logan waged war on the settlements along the Ohio and in western Pennsylvania, killing, perhaps, nearly thirty men, women and children. Lord John Murray Dunmore, the British Royal Governor of Virginia, raised an army and appointed Cresap to the rank of Captain. The decisive battle of Lord Dunmore's War was the Battle of Point Pleasant in Virginia. Here Dunmore's forces defeated a band of Shawnee Indians led by Cornstalk.
After Lord Dunmore's War, Cresap returned to Maryland and subsequently raised a company of riflemen for the Continental Army during the American Revolution. He died from illness in New York City while in the service of the army; he is interred there in Trinity Church Cemetery.Legacy
