The campaign directed against Fort Duquesne in the fall of 1758 had immediate effects on the West Virginia frontier. A British army of six thousand men led by Forbes far outmatched French forces at Fort Duquesne, which had been depleted to provide troops for other fighting fronts. Convinced that he could not withstand an assault by Forbes's army, the French commandant ordered his men to blow up Fort Duquesne and withdraw up the Allegheny River toward Canada. Forbes immediately occupied the strategic position taken from the Virginians four years earlier. Indian tribes of the Ohio Valley began to sever their ties to the French and to seek peace with the British. The fall of Fort Duquesne relieved the pressure on the West Virginia frontiers, and almost at once a few intrepid settlers began to cross the Alleghenies.
Wolfe's capture of Quebec, the great bastion of French military power, in 1759 and the fall of Montreal the following year sealed the French fate in North America. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 settled with finality the question of control of the Ohio Valley, where the nine-year conflict between England and France had begun. Trans-Allegheny West Virginia was to be English. But the Shawnee still claimed the land, and much blood would be shed before settlement could proceed with peace and safety.
1rhe background of the Howard and Sailing expedition is discussed in Fairfax Harrison, “The Virginians on the Ohio and Mississippi in 1742,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 30(April 1922):203-22.
2Descriptions of these grants are in H.R. McIlwaine, Wilmer Hall, and Benjamin J. Hillman, eds, Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, 6 vols. (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1925-1966): Vol. 5, 172-73, 195, 206, 231, 258, 282-83, 295-97, 377, 409, 426-27, 436-37, 454-55, 470. For a summary, see Otis K. Rice, The Allegheny Frontier: West Virginia Beginnings, 1730-1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 34-38.
3There is no single account of the Greenbrier Company, but useful information can be gleaned from several secondary works, including Patricia Givens Johnson, General Andrew Lewis of Roanoke and Greenbrier (Blacksburg, Va: Southern Printing Company, 1980), 16-19.
4Reston's Register of Persons Killed, Wounded, or Taken Prisoner…, Draper MSS, 1QQ83, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison (Microfilm in West Virginia Division of Archives and History, Charleston). See also Elizabeth Cometti and Festus P. Summers, eds., The Thirty-Fifth State: A Documentary History of West Virginia (Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1%6), 51-56.
5Albert H. Tillson, Jr., Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740-1789 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 68, 70-71, 72-73.
6Quoted in Louis K. Koontz, The Virginia Frontier, 1754-1763 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1925), 163.
4
Advance Across the Alleghenies
The Lure of Transmontane Lands. The English victory over the French in 1763 did not open the Ohio Valley to settlement. On the contrary, in the very year that Forbes occupied the Forks of the Ohio, Sir William Johnson, acting in behalf of Pennsylvania, promised the Iroquois in the Treaty of Easton to close the part of the colony west of the Alleghenies to settlement. Colonel Henry Bouquet, the commandant at Fort Pitt, later extended that commitment to include transmontane Maryland and Virginia.
Angered by the promises of Johnson and Bouquet, Virginia speculators fell back upon a proclamation of Governor Robert Dinwiddie in 1754 setting aside two hundred thousand acres of land west of the mountains for Virginia military officers in the French and Indian War. Several of the officers, including George Washington and George Mercer, declared that they would “leave no stone unturned” in order to acquire the forbidden lands.1 Governor Francis Fauquier later interceded with the English Board of Trade, but it refused to approve the military grant.
Fauquier achieved more success with respect to the claims of the Greenbrier and Loyal companies. Their lands had been “tolerably seated for some time” but had been vacated during the French and Indian War. The Board of Trade took refuge in ambivalence, declining to render “any explicit Opinion” and enjoining the governor from any action that might arouse the Indians.2 Both companies and prospective settlers took advantage of official uncertainty to reoccupy their lands. In 1762 Archibald Clendenin settled two miles west of Lewisburg, and Frederick See and Felty Yocum took up tracts on Muddy Creek. By the summer of 1763 more than fifty persons were again living in the Greenbrier region.
Pontiac's Uprising. The British victory in the French and Indian War produced great anxiety among the western Indians. Settlers, often in the guise of hunters, continued to move into the region around Fort Pitt and other parts of the Ohio Valley. Moreover, reports reached the Indians that Amherst had advocated infecting the tribes with smallpox and that Bouquet had urged the use of trained dogs to hunt and destroy them. When Amherst announced in 1762 that the customary presents to the tribes would not be distributed during the coming winter, unrest reached a head.
Led by Pontiac, an Ottawa chief, the western Indians laid plans for surprise military attacks that would undermine British power in the Ohio Valley and confine their settlements to areas east of the Allegheny Mountains. On May 7, 1763, Pontiac struck at Detroit, and later that month Shawnee and Delaware laid siege to Fort Pitt. Bands of Indians assaulted other posts, and by the end of July only Detroit, Fort Pitt, and Fort Niagara remained in British hands. An expedition under Captain James Dalyell relieved besieged Detroit, and another, under Bouquet, defeated the Indians at Bushy Run and raised the siege of Fort Pitt. By the summer of 1764 the British had broken the power of the Indian confederacy, but Pontiac did not make peace until the following year.
The Shawnee carried Pontiac's War to the West Virginia frontiers with attacks in the Greenbrier region and on the upper Potomac, particularly along the South Branch and the Cacapon. In the summer of 1763 about sixty Shawnee led by Cornstalk entered the Greenbrier region. Posing as friends, small parties visited the Muddy Creek settlements, including the homes of Frederick See and Felty Yocum, and killed or captured every person there. They moved on to the Big Levels, present Lewisburg, to the house of Archibald Clendenin, where about fifty persons had gathered to feast on three elk that Clendenin had killed. The unsuspecting settlers invited the Indians to join them. After they had eaten, the Shawnee sprang their attack. One man made his escape, but the Indians killed or captured all the other settlers. Governor Fauquier ordered a thousand militiamen under Colonel Adam Stephen and Major Andrew Lewis to man small forts, establish guards at mountain passes, and pursue Indians making forays into the settlements. Peace did not return to the West Virginia frontiers, however, until Bouquet defeated the Indians at Bushy Run and Sir William Johnson concluded peace with the tribes at Niagara.
The Prodamation of 1763. Stunned by Pontiac's uprising and groping for some policy that might mitigate the fury of the Indians, the British government on October 7, 1763, issued a sweeping proclamation forbidding settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains. Its actions angered both prospective settlers and land speculators. The only redeeming feature that they saw in the proclamation was a provision for later review and possible extension of the Indian boundary westward. Their pressures induced Lord Shelburne, the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, on January 5, 1768, to authorize the drawing of a new line of demarcation. On March 12 Lord Hillsborough, the new Secretary of State for the American Department, directed Sir William Johnson and John Stuart, the two Indian superintendents in the colonies, to arrange the necessary conferences with the Indians.
Hillsborough instructed Johnson and Stuart to negotiate a boundary running from the Susquehanna River westward to the Ohio, along the Ohio to the mouth of the Kanawha, and from there in a straight line to Chiswell's Mine, on the New River. The proposed boundary cleared the military grant promised by Dinwiddie in 1754 and most of the