In July of 1776 a small battle took place in Kentucky. A Shawnee and Chickamauga Cherokee war party captured 14-year-old Jemima Boone, daughter of Daniel Boone, and two of her friends. Boone and a posse chased them for three days. The girls were rescued after a heated contest.

   By this time Cornstalk had lost all control over the war faction of the Shawnee. In 1777, Cornstalk and his son went to Ft. Randolph at Point Pleasant to warn the Americans that the Shawnee were joining the British. The American response was to take Cornstalk and his son as hostages. Later, after a white man was killed, this imprisoned and unarmed old man and his son were murdered as an act of revenge.

   Chiungalla, or “Black Fish”, Daniel Boone’s adoptive father, became successor to Hokoleskwa or  "Cornstalk" as he was known to the whites. Now the Shawnee as a whole came into action, as Chiungalla hated the white man with a passion. Raids into Kentucky, western Maryland and Pennsylvania and even into Appalachian Virginia, intensified. Soon St. Asaph's, aka Logan's Fort, Harrodsburg and Boonesborough were the only American towns left in the Ohio River watershed. Those settlers that were left either had returned to the east or were holed up in the few remaining forts in the area. Even the forts were not necessarily safe.

   In September, Ft. Henry (Wheeling, WV.) was attacked by 400 Mingo, Wyandot and Shawnee. Approximately 21 of the 42 men manning this frontier outpost were killed outright, with several more wounded before re-enforcements arrived. Before the war party withdrew, they raised the nearby settlement to the ground.

  General Edward Hand and an army of Pennsylvanians marched out of Ft. Pitt on a raid to punish the Ohio tribes in February of 1778.  Hand never caught any of tribe’s warriors. He did destroy two villages of peaceful Lenape, including killing many women and children, in what became known as his “Squaw Campaign." This “campaign” almost brought the neutral Lenape into the fight within the British sphere. Hand was allowed to resigned and General Lachlan McIntosh took his place.
On May 26, 1778, General McIntosh was given command of the Western Department of the Continental Army. He restored order along the frontier and conceived a plan to attack the British stronghold of Fort Detroit. He established several new forts including Fort Laurens, named for his friend and mentor Henry Laurens, who had become President of the Continental Congress, and Fort McIntosh (near present-day Beaver, Pennsylvania) to prepare for the attack. The expedition against Fort Detroit was doomed however, and the troops were forced to turn back before reaching the fort.


   At Ft. Pitt, a scout named Simon Girty, defected to the British when he became convinced that the Americans would lose the war. Girty  was soon leading war parties of the Ohio tribes. He became one of the American’s most “savage” enemies. (It takes a white man to give the Indians a valid reputation as “savages.”)

   Ft. Randolph was attacked by 300 Shawnee and Wyandot warriors led by Blackfish and Tanacharison (known to the Whites as Half King), seeking to avenge the murder of Cornstalk. The soldiers at Ft. Randolph, under orders of their commander, refused to come out and fight. The Shawnee were accustomed to fighting out in the open and were frustrated by the fact that this enemy wouldn’t. They kept the fort under siege for a week, a long time by any Indian standards. Chiungalla and Tanacharison then decided to leave Ft. Randolph to raid settlements in the Greenbrier area up the Kanawha River.

   Daniel Boone had been captured by the Shawnee in February. Chiungalla had declined to deliver him to the British as was the custom. Normally the British would pay large bounties for officers and people as noteworthy as Boone. Chiungalla offered to adopt Boone. Boone accepted and became the son of a Shawnee chief. Boone learned of an attack on Boonesborough and ran away from his new family.