According to versions of the story preserved in West Virginia folklore, Crock Face was an Indigenous warrior who sought revenge against an early settler named Benjamin Coplin. Standing motionless in or near a field, Crock Face could supposedly watch the farm without immediately attracting attention. Crock Face is therefore best understood as a figure of West Virginia frontier legend rather than as a historical person whose complete story can be reconstructed from surviving records. The West Virginia frontier really was dangerousWhat is now West Virginia lay along a volatile frontier for much of the 18th century as European-American settlement expanded westward across the Allegheny Mountains and into lands used and contested by Indigenous peoples. Yet the Crock Face legend endured.