Elizabeth "Betsy" Death...The Massacre in the Great Cove

Well, I promised this in the near future, uh, that didn't happen. But here is a newspaper article about her death:


November 1755

Pennsylvania



THE MASSACRE IN THE GREAT COVE

On Saturday, November 1, 1755, a party of about one hundred Indians, Shawnees and Delawares, among them Shingas, the Delaware king, entered the Great Cove and massacred most of the inhabitants. On November 5, 1755, Governor Robert Hunter Morris made this announcement to the Assembly at Philadelphia:

Gentlemen:

I this minute received intelligence the settlements at a place called the Great Cove in the County of Cumberland are destroyed, the houses burned, and such of the inhabitants as could not make their escape either slaughtered or made prisoners. This and other cruelties committed upon our frontiers have so alarmed the remaining inhabitants that they are quitting their habitations and crowding into the more settled parts of the Province which in their turn will become the frontier it some stop is not speedily put to the cruel ravages of these bloody invaders. In this melancholy situation, our affairs may be attended with the most fatal consequences. I must therefore again most heartily press upon you this further intelligence to strengthen my hands and make me speedily to draw forth the forces of the Province against his Majesty's enemies, and to afford the timely and necessary assistance to the back inhabitants. - Robert Hunter Morris.

The Pennsylvania Gazette of November 13, 1755, gives the names of several of the killed and captured as follows:

Hicks and a boy named Fleming were killed and scalped. Elizabeth Galway, Henry Gibson, Robert Peer, William Berryhill and David McClelland were murdered. The missing are John Martin, wife and five children, William Galway's wife and two children, David McClelland's wife and two children. William Fleming and wife were taken prisoners.

On November 14, Sheriff Potter was in Philadelphia, before the Provincial Authorities. He made the following statement as to the extent of the ravages of the Indians. He said that twenty-seven plantations were burnt and a great number of cattle was killed. That of the ninety-three families in the Cove and the Tonolloways, forty-seven were either killed or taken, and the rest had deserted.