George Washington, who acquired the rights of numerous French and Indian War veterans, was a prominent beneficiary of Dunmore's policies. In the fall of 1770 Washington personally selected tracts totaling nearly thirty-five thousand acres in the Ohio and Kanawha valleys. On the largest of his tracts, situated on the Kanawha River above Point Pleasant, the proposed capital of Vandalia, he planned to settle immigrants from England, Scotland, Ireland, and the German states. He promised settlers passage money to America, suspension of quitrents for a period of years, and religious freedom. In 1775 he sent James Cleveland and a work party to the Kanawha tract, where it built dwellings, cabins, and a barn and planted a variety of crops and two thousand peach trees. The approach of the American Revolution and the increasing hostility of the Indians forced Washington to abandon his plans.
By the spring of 1773 the land fever in Virginia reached a new intensity. With the blessings of Dunmore, surveying parties led by Thomas Bullitt and James McAfee began to lay off lands in central Kentucky. Bullitt had previously gone to the Shawnee at Chillicothe and gained permission for surveying and settling of lands east of the Kentucky River if the Indians were paid for their claims and retained their hunting rights. Bullitt violated his pledge, however, by surveying tracts as far west as Louisville, some of which Dunmore granted to John Connolly, his agent at Fort Pitt, and to relatives and associates of George Croghan. The provocations in Kentucky did more than anything else to incite the hostilities that broke the peace on the upper Ohio in 1774. Dunmore also upheld the claims of the Greenbrier and Loyal companies by instructing law enforcement officials to evict trespassers on their lands.
The Virginia-Pennsylvania Boundary Dispute. Dunmore, as might have been expected, forcefully asserted Virginia's claim to land around the Forks of the Ohio. The territory had been in dispute between Virginia and Pennsylvania for years, but the influx of settlers after the Treaty of Fort Stanwix gave the problem a new urgency. The charter of Pennsylvania defined her western boundary as five degrees west of the Delaware River, without specifying whether it should follow the meanderings of the Delaware or run due north from a point five degrees west of its mouth. If the former were true, Virginia had a strong claim to the disputed territory; if the latter were the case, Pennsylvania's right was well nigh incontestable.
Pennsylvania made the first moves. In 1769 she opened a land office west of the Alleghenies. Two years later she created Bedford County but designated the town of Bedford, east of the mountains, as its seat. In 1772 she established Westmoreland County, which included all territory west of the Alleghenies. Some six hundred Virginians, led by young Michael Cresap, opposed her assertion of authority and appealed to Virginia to provide them with a government.
In the summer of 1773, Lord Dunmore visited Fort Pitt, ostensibly for a firsthand view of the situation. If he had not already formed that opinion, he now convinced himself that Virginia had jurisdiction over the lands and the right to make grants there. On October 11, after his return to Williamsburg, the council created the District of West Augusta to include all Virginia territory west of the Alleghenies. The Revolutionary War muted the Virginia-Pennsylvania dispute, and in 1784 it was resolved by a westward extension of the Mason-Dixon Line.
At Fort Pitt, Dunmore formed an alliance with George Croghan and John Connolly. Bitter over the refusal of Pennsylvania to recognize his grant from the Iroquois in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix and disappointed in the outcome of the Vandalia project, Croghan accepted the dominion of Virginia over the territory around the Forks of the Ohio in return for which Dunmore honored his title. The governor named Connolly, Croghan's nephew, his agent in charge of both civil and military affairs on the upper Ohio. Dunmore's alliance with Croghan placed at his disposal a man of unsurpassed influence with the Indians, but his liaison with Connolly, who lacked Croghan's tact and judgment, proved disastrous to peace in the Ohio Valley.
Hostilities on the Upper Ohio. The movement of settlers into the trans-Allegheny region and the activities of surveyors in Kentucky led to reprisals by the Shawnee, who had never relinquished their claims. In April 1773 Indians killed George Yeager, who with Adam Strader and sixteen-year-old Simon Kenton, had a hunting camp at the mouth of the Elk River. A band of Shawnee attacked a surveying party under John Floyd at the mouth of the Little Guyandotte and held several of the men for three days. Another party fired upon Kentucky-bound surveyors at the mouth of the Kanawha. The irate men chose Michael Cresap as their leader and urged him to move at once against the Shawnee towns. Cresap prevailed upon them to return to Wheeling until they could find out what steps Virginia authorities proposed to take with regard to the attacks. When Connolly issued an inflammatory circular calling upon residents of the trans-Allegheny region to be prepared to defend themselves, Cresap overcame his reluctance to act. During the ensuing weeks he and his followers participated in several small encounters, commonly known as “Cresap's War.”
The most serious and indefensible action on the upper Ohio was the killing of the family of Logan, a Mingo chief, at the mouth of Yellow Creek on April 30. Contemporary accounts vary, but it seems clear that the killing of two Mingoes on the north side of the Ohio River the previous day started the unfortunate chain of events. Four Indians, angry over the killings, crossed the Ohio to a tavern kept by Joshua Baker, where a band of whites led by Daniel Greathouse arrived and plied them with whiskey. While the Indians were in a semidrunken state, Greathouse and his companions killed them. They also killed four other Indians who came to make inquiries. The dead included a brother and a sister of Logan. Their loss turned Logan, an old friend, into an implacable enemy, and he took at least thirteen scalps in retaliation.4
Numerous attacks by both Indians and whites occurred during the spring and summer of 1774, and a general war appeared imminent. Responsible officials such as Guy Johnson, John Stuart, and George Croghan became convinced that Dunmore actually desired war with the Indians. Certainly Dunmore's close association with Connally and aggressive Virginia speculators did nothing to ease tensions. Stuart and Johnson used their influence with the Cherokee and Iroquois, respectively, to prevent their participation in a general war. Croghan worked with chiefs such as Kiasutha of the Seneca and Grey Eyes and The Pipe of the Delaware to help restrain most of the tribes northwest of the Ohio River. Isolated, the Shawnee and their friends were almost certain to lose any war with the Virginians.
Dunmore's War. In the summer of 1774 Dunmore took the initiative. In addition to Fort Pitt, now renamed Fort Dunmore, he proposed other defenses. At his direction, Major William Crawford began work on Fort Fincastle at Wheeling. There Colonel Angus McDonald assembled an army of about four hundred men for a strike against the Shawnee. McDonald proceeded without mishap until July 26, when, within six miles of its destination, his army was ambushed by some thirty Indians. Recovering from the surprise, it moved on to the Indian towns, but it found them deserted. McDonald succeeded only in destroying the Indian dwellings and supplies of corn that they had left.
Already, Dunmore had plans for a far larger expedition to “Breake the [Indian] Confederacy.”5 He gathered a force of more than a thousand men, mostly from Frederick, Berkeley, and Hampshire counties, and moved to Fort Dunmore and from there down the Ohio River. On his orders, Andrew Lewis assembled about eleven hundred men from Augusta, Botetourt, and Fincastle counties at Camp Union, at Lewisburg, and moved down the Kanawha Valley to Point Pleasant, with the expectation of continuing up the Ohio to join Dunmore. Their combined forces would then strike the Indian villages.
When Lewis arrived at Point Pleasant on October 6, he found awaiting him a message from Dunmore, who instructed him to join Dunmore's army about twenty-five miles from Chillicothe. Lewis's men opposed leaving