He never really expected gunfire. They were only supposed to warn off Hopkins, the excise collector, but there were hotter heads than his in the group, a mob, actually, and now the demonstrations and disputes had finally come to gunfire and killing. Someone had warned Hopkins and he had barricaded himself and his slaves, with a few militia men, in his house, waiting for the angry mob to show up. He must have armed all his servants and slaves, to account for the number of muskets protruding from windows and chinks between the logs of the house.

Two days ago they'd warned Hopkins to tear down his sign and disavow himself of the excise collecting. He didn't listen, so the angry pioneers burned his barn that night. Now this, an assault on Arbor Hill, against the regular militia.

That was all there was to the shooting -- a volley apiece from the mob and from the inhabitants inside the cabin. More angry shouts continued as Hans knelt beside the still body of his friend and neighbor, James McFarlane. McFarlane had a wife and three small children, a widow and orphans now. MacFarlane, still clutching the only weapon he had brought with him, a corn knife, lay as though he merely slept, but for the dark blood stain over his groin.

For months in late 1793 into 1794 the battles had brewed, mostly angry talk as pioneers on Pennsylvania's southwestern frontier, Monongahela country, debated the propriety of the new whiskey excise tax. It wasn't fair, the settlers were nearly universal in that estimate of the tax, and it hit them harder than any other colony or group of settlers. At fifty cents on the barrel -- if they had any cash to pay the tax -- the excise cut heavily into any profits the frontiersmen made on their rye whiskey. It was merely one more example of how the rich men in Philadelphia got richer at the expense of the poor settlers on the frontier.

Hans knew there would be hell to pay, now that things had erupted into killing. Like the rest of the angry mob of Scots and Scots-Irish settlers, Hans felt that justice was swifter when directed at the poor settlers than at the injustices and insults to them from the wealthy aristocrats back east. Though retribution would come when it would come, Hans was all for burning the cabin immediately, after releasing the inhabitants.

A truce was called when a white handkerchief was waved from inside the cabin. Hans and two neighbors bore McFarlane's body to the rear as two or three others, leaders of their own "militia," bargained with the tax collector. Things had progressed far beyond the occasional tarring and feathering of tax collectors. Though there was talk of holding "court" right then and there, and then hanging Hopkins and his friends, it was agreed to let them all go to Pittsburgh, if they promised to show up for trial in Union City a week hence, to be tried for murder of McFarlane and others. Then the mob would burn the house and all the outbuildings, except for the slaves' quarters.

Hans took a wagon from Hopkins, and a horse, and took McFarlane's body home. Though filled with remorse for his friend, he mused on his sudden acquisition of a horse and wagon, something far beyond his means of purchase. That was thievery, he admitted to himself, but wasn't that was Hopkins was doing, stealing from the poor, and calling it an excise tax? Everyone knew that the tax men were corrupt, collecting not only taxes, which they often pocketed, but bribes as well. Fully half the registrations and collected fees never made it to Philadelphia. Maybe they should have hung Hopkins after all.

Sixteen years earlier, in 1778, Hans had been forced to leave County Down, Ireland. In the middle of a morning at market in Belfast the pressmen from the British navy scoured the market for young men, "arresting" them immediately and putting them in chains until they were locked below deck on a British man o' war.

Then, when his ship set anchor off-shore from Lewes, Delaware, Hans and several Scots-Irish shipmates had escaped the ship and had joined a train of emigrants from eastern Pennsylvania. Walking the muddy roads and trails, Hans and the other emigrants arrived safely to join uncles and aunts and cousins in western Pennsylvania.

Arriving in America as a nineteen-year old fugitive, penniless and without prospects, Hans's only hope was to find his way, somehow, to the western frontier where he hoped to find cousins and uncles who might help him. He'd heard, and read from letters received back home in Ireland, how the uncles had migrated west, to settle near a place named Fort Old Redstone, where land was free and work was plentiful. Despite the tales of the savage Indians, who scalped and butchered settlers, even women and babies, it must be a good place, to be near a grand fort.

What he found was less ideal. Families eked out livings on small, hilly plots of land, keeping one eye out all the time for marauding Indians. There was work in small mills, and coke and iron ore furnaces, but there was little work for a former weaver turned sailor. Still, Hans was happy after his long trek west, barefoot and hungry all the time, to find his uncles. They helped him get set up, by apprenticing him to farm work. For ten years he worked out his apprenticeship, saving a little money here and there to buy a cow, then two, and some pigs and chickens. He had no home of his own, but rented from his uncles, hoping someday to buy his own farm.

In 1790, finally free of his apprenticeship and thirty years old, Hans talked a young woman of the town into marrying him. Susanna Irwin was the daughter of a militia officer and niece of a prominent local farmer. They hoped for a nice dowry to buy their own farm. The actual bequest was much smaller than they hoped for, but enough to get them a loom, so Hans might return to his original trade as a weaver. Everyone always needed cloth and clothing, and not every home had a loom for making their own linens.

Hans and Susanna were married as soon as a preacher made it to their little village in the autumn of 1790, and within weeks Susanna was pregnant with their first child. The next Spring their first, little Joseph was born. A year and a half later, Archibald was born, and Susanna's father made them another gift, of a horse and plow, so they might easier work their crops.

Their gardens increased in size since they acquired the horse and a plow, and Hans put in a crop of rye, for making whiskey. The reputation of Monongahela country rye whiskey spread and brought a good price, far better than farmers could get for rye or corn alone, after transporting the grain across the mountains back to the east. In the cash-poor west, whiskey was a chief item of barter, too.

But there were all those taxes, and now a new liquor excise tax to deal with. Fifty cents on a barrel, levied at the still. That meant his uncle, who owned a still, had to charge Hans more to make the whiskey. He'd never be able to buy a farm at this rate. The situation was intolerable.

After McFarlane was buried, and after one or two more heated meetings of the distillers and farmers, Hans decided it was time to move. Some settlers had already moved on, before the invading armies arrived. Hans and Susanna had to act quickly if they were to avoid the armies and get to Ohio before winter. Some of Susanna's brothers and cousins had already moved west into Ohio country, to a place above the ferry crossing at Wheeling, Virginia. Word filtered back that the land was better than their present meager plots around Dunbar and Fort Old Redstone, and free for the taking. All you had to do was settle on it, improve it, and soon you could get patents for it.

There wasn't much of their belongings to sell, and they'd need whatever they could transport. Hans was able to collect most of the debts owed him for linen and for the occasional repair services he'd performed. With some of the money they bought a used wagon from a neighbor. The couple loaded their few belongings on the wagon, drawn by their two horses. Baby Joseph and baby Archibald were cradled in boxes on the wagon as Hans and Susanna drove their two cows and three pigs before them, south first, heading toward worn trails which would take them through mountain gaps northwest to the ferry at Wheeling.

Some of the neighbors had moved back south, to Maryland and others into the Shenandoah Valley before the whiskey troubles. But they had money to buy land, which also Hans lacked. Wild, untamed Ohio waited with free land, even if it did come with Indians. Some of the money from the sale of his loom bought a gun, lead, and powder. Hans bartered some of his remaining whiskey for more farming tools, an extra axe, and seeds. They'd all be needed in Ohio.

By late fall of 1794 Hans and Susanna reached Ohio, settling on a large, relatively flat plain above MacMahon's Creek. The place would later be named Glencoe, a few miles southwest of what would become St. Clairsville (after the unfortunate general) in Belmont County. They were able to clear many of the trees and build a rustic cabin, enough for minimal protection from that first winter.

Three years later Hans and Susanna had to flee back across the Ohio River, to the protection of the fort at Wheeling, when Indians attacked and murdered several settlers. Their growing family, now numbering six with the addition of baby Eleanor and the youngest, John, spent a nearly a year in Wheeling while they waited for the government to do something about the marauding Indians.

Finally, just before the turn of the century and the birth of son William, they returned to their homestead, rebuilding after it had been burnt to the ground by the Indians. Here they raised this family plus two more sons, James and Henry, and another daughter, Margaret. Hans bought another weaving loom, and from his weaving profits, he bought in 1805 another plot of land near Glencoe, for which he finally received legal patent some years later, signed by President Madison.

Hans and Susanna lived out the remainder of their days on their Ohio homestead, among their Scots and Scots-Irish and German neighbors. Hans died in 1835, at seventy-five years, and Susanna was buried beside him in the old Warnock Cemetery in three years later.

All their sons except William married and raised families in Belmont County. William lived into his old age with Henry, on the original family homestead. Henry inherited half of the homestead and continued to farm it into his old age, where he died in 1892. Hans's son James moved onto the other half of the original homestead in 1842, where he died in three months after his brother Henry, in May, 1892.

The first son, Joseph, may have moved to and died in Iowa, as all his children are found there by the 1850s. Oral family history had him moving west, and not being heard from again.

Second son, Archibald, died of in the autumn of 1830, just before the birth of his last son, Archibald James Wiley, in early 1831.

Son John and his wife raised a family of four children in Belmont County.

Of Hans and Susanna's two daughters, Margaret and Eleanor, little is known. It is said that Eleanor remained single and drowned at 56 years old. Margaret may have married, but she is not to be found in any of the old records.