Battle of Great Cacapon was a Colonial and Pre-Columbian engagement fought in West Virginia, 1756. It was a Shawnee-Lenape victory.
On April 18, 1756, soldiers from Colonel George Washington's Virginia Regiment clashed with Shawnee and Lenape (Delaware) Indians allied with the French near Great Cacapon, an engagement sometimes called Mercer's Massacre. Captain Mercer had set out with a company of his men in pursuit of a group of Indians, only to fall into an ambush laid by a much larger force of Indian raiders. The fighting claimed the lives of Mercer and at least 16 of his soldiers.
When the French and Indian War began in 1754 and General Edward Braddock's campaign collapsed the following year, French officers stationed in the Ohio Country pushed their native allies to strike at British colonial settlements. The region of northwestern Virginia, encompassing territory that would later become West Virginia, endured repeated attacks of this kind. To counter the threat, Governor Robert Dinwiddie authorized the building of a chain of defensive forts across the area. Virginia's provincial militia staffed these outposts, all operating under the overall authority of Colonel George Washington.
Years afterward, a Lenape chief called Bemino by his own people but known to settlers as John Killbuck recounted the episode, telling how he and a party of warriors, likely a mix of Lenape and Shawnee, struck down two men close to Fort Edwards, near the Cacapon River in territory now part of Hampshire County, West Virginia. The war party scattered corn meal to mark a false trail, then took up hidden positions along a steep bank above a stream. Captain John Mercer, heading a militia force that accounts place anywhere between forty and one hundred strong, followed the trail in pursuit. Once the militiamen had moved past the hidden fighters, the ambush was triggered, and a deadly crossfire cut down Mercer along with sixteen of his men. The remaining soldiers were hunted down as they fled, and by Killbuck's account, no more than six managed to escape with their lives. Raiding by Indians in the region persisted for the remainder of the war.
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