Bartley Clay, a 17-year-old White/Caucasian male, was killed during a Shawnee attack on his family’s frontier settlement at Clover Bottom, the area now associated with Lake Shawnee in present-day Mercer County, West Virginia. An online memorial records his death as August 1, 1783, while older historical accounts, grave markers, and institutional records generally identify the attack only as occurring in August 1783. The Clay family had established itself along the Bluestone River in 1775, eight years before the attack, in territory that was then part of Virginia.
The day began with ordinary work around the Clay homestead. Mitchell Clay had harvested a crop of small grain and wanted the stacks protected so livestock could use the surrounding pasture. While Mitchell was away hunting, Bartley and his brother Ezekiel were assigned to build fencing around the grain.
Their sister Tabitha and other family members were nearby, with the girls reportedly washing clothes along the river. During this work, a group described in historical accounts as eleven Shawnee attackers approached the edge of the field without being detected. Bartley was shot and killed. As the other children reacted to the gunfire, one of the attackers moved toward Bartley’s body and attempted to scalp him. Tabitha tried to defend her brother and became caught in a violent struggle with the attacker; she was killed as well. Ezekiel was seized alive.
The violence left the Clay household in chaos. Historical accounts say Phoebe Clay brought the bodies of Bartley and Tabitha back to the cabin, then gathered the smaller children and made her way through the woods to the home of James Bailey, reportedly about six miles away. Mitchell later returned from his hunting trip and discovered what had happened. The attackers had already withdrawn with Ezekiel as their captive. Word of the killings spread among nearby frontier settlements, and an armed group led by Captain Matthew Farley came to the Clay property. Bartley and Tabitha were buried, and the party then set out after the Shawnee group in an effort to recover Ezekiel and retaliate for the killings.
The pursuers eventually caught up with part of the group in territory identified by later accounts as present-day Boone County. Several of the Shawnee were killed during the confrontation. One historical version states that Charles Clay, Bartley’s brother, personally killed one of the attackers. The confrontation did not result in Ezekiel’s rescue. The Shawnee members who escaped continued toward Ohio with him, and later accounts state that Ezekiel was taken to Shawnee settlements there and killed by being burned at the stake. West Virginia University’s historical-marker collection similarly records that pursuers killed several members of the attacking party but were unable to prevent Ezekiel from being carried into Ohio and killed.
The available online historical accounts do not identify the individual who fired the shot that killed Bartley, nor do they provide the names of the eleven attackers. They identify the responsible group collectively as Shawnee attackers or a Shawnee raiding party. The sources reviewed contain no record of anyone being arrested, formally charged, prosecuted, tried, or convicted for Bartley’s killing. Instead, the immediate response took the form common to violent frontier conflicts of the period: local settlers organized an armed pursuit, overtook part of the fleeing group, and killed several of its members. There is therefore no documented criminal suspect in the modern sense and no known arrest or court case associated with Bartley’s death. The historical record preserves the event primarily as part of the Clay family tragedy or Clover Bottom massacre rather than as a formally investigated homicide.
Bartley and Tabitha were later memorialized together near the site of the Clay settlement. A grave marker erected in 1937 identifies them as children of Mitchell and Phoebe Clay who were massacred by Shawnee Indians in August 1783, and the Lake Shawnee property’s historical account continues to identify Bartley, Tabitha, and Ezekiel among the Clay children killed as a consequence of the attack. The events that began with Bartley working beside the family’s harvested grain thus became one of the enduring stories of the early settlement history of the Bluestone River valley and the land that would eventually become associated with Lake Shawnee.
