Moluntha and Logan’s Raid, 1786

Moluntha (died 1786), also spelled Melonthe or Malunthy, was a civil chief of the Mekoche division of the Shawnee (opens in a new tab). The Shawnee lived in independent towns with no central government. From the 1760s they chose a Mekoche leader to speak for them with Europeans and Americans, who often mistook him for a Shawnee “king.” Moluntha took that role after his predecessor died in 1780.

After the Revolution, the United States claimed the land north of the Ohio by right of conquest. In January 1786 Moluntha and other Mekoche leaders reluctantly signed the Treaty of Fort Finney (opens in a new tab), which gave up most of Ohio. Most Shawnees rejected it, and afterward Moluntha and other Shawnees wrote to their former British allies that “we have been cheated by the Americans.”

Kentuckians saw it differently. After years of raids and counter-raids along the Ohio, they wanted the towns that sent war parties south destroyed, and some militiamen, veterans of Blue Licks among them, still wanted revenge.

In the fall of 1786 George Rogers Clark led one force up the Wabash while Col. Benjamin Logan led about 700 mounted Kentucky militia against the Shawnee towns on the Mad River and Little Miami. It was the first major frontier campaign since the Revolution.

Most warriors had gone to defend towns farther west, so Logan’s men found mostly old men, women and children. The Kentuckians burned the towns and their food stores, killed 10 warriors, and took prisoners, most of them women and children. Sources disagree on the details: Wikipedia’s Moluntha article says seven towns and 32 prisoners on October 6, while its Logan’s raid (opens in a new tab) article says thirteen villages.

Moluntha did not fight. He had raised an American flag over his house and came out holding his copy of the Fort Finney treaty to show he was at peace with the United States. He surrendered with his family.

Hugh McGary, still bitter about Blue Licks, asked the old chief whether he had been at that battle. Moluntha had not, but he seems to have misunderstood and said yes. McGary killed him with a hatchet and scalped him. A U.S. Army officer, Ensign Ebenezer Denny, wrote that the towns held “none but old men, women and children” who made no resistance, and that “the men were literally murdered.”

A court-martial found McGary guilty and suspended him from the militia for a year. Moluntha’s wife, Nonhelema, was among the captives. Historian Colin Calloway wrote that “any hope of real peace between the Shawnees and the Americans died with Moluntha,” and the Shawnee answered with more raids as the Northwest Indian War (opens in a new tab) widened.

Kentucky today

The towns Logan burned were in present Ohio, so this story has no Kentucky map pin. Kentucky remembers McGary in his own story and Logan at Logan’s Fort in Stanford. In 1810 Tecumseh (opens in a new tab) still pointed to Moluntha’s death as a reason the Shawnee could not trust the United States, and it remains one of the frontier killings Kentucky’s own officers condemned at the time.