They Called Him “Death Wind”: Lewis Wetzel, the Ruthless Frontiersman of Western Virginia

They Called Him “Death Wind”: Lewis Wetzel, the Ruthless Frontiersman of Western Virginia On the Ohio frontier of the 1780s, warriors gave one lone rifleman a name they wouldn't say in an even voice. This is the story of Lewis Wetzel, taken from a Wheeling cabin at thirteen and shot through the chest, and what he became after he dragged himself back across the river. The account follows him from that captivity and escape into years of hunting alone, refusing every militia muster and walking into hostile country by himself. It covers the skill that set him apart, reloading a long rifle at a full run, the four warriors who set out to prove the name was just a name, and the death of his father John in a river ambush around 1787. It ends with the frontier turning against him: a peacetime killing near the Ohio, his arrest at Fort Harmar under General Josiah Harmar, his escape into the timber, and his drift down the Mississippi to Natchez, where yellow fever killed him around 1808. A look at how the border forged men for its violence and discarded them once peace arrived.