Meanwhile, Cornstalk, the Shawnee chief, had watched the movements of Dunmore and Lewis carefully. Ascertaining their intentions, he decided to attack Lewis before he could join the governor and then strike at Dunmore as he advanced along the Hocking Valley. Cornstalk concealed between eight and eleven hundred warriors in a densely wooded area along the Ohio, opposite the mouth of the Kanawha. During the night of October 9 he crossed the river to the West Virginia side. About dawn on October 10 some of his warriors fired on Valentine Sevier and James Robinson, who had left Lewis's camp in search of wild turkeys. The two men rushed back to camp and informed Lewis that Indians were lurking about in the woods.
Lewis ordered two parties of about 150 men each, under his brother Charles and William Fleming, to reconnoiter along the Ohio and Kanawha rivers. About sunrise the Indians, consisting of Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, Ottawa, and others, attacked Charles Lewis's men in full force and mortally wounded Lewis. Realizing the magnitude of the assault, Andrew Lewis dispatched another force under Colonel John Field, who also met his death. By then Fleming's men had also given way, and Fleming had suffered severe but not mortal wounds.
From dawn until evening the battle raged, with Cornstalk calling upon his men to destroy the Virginians. Cornstalk, however, mistook a flanking movement by Isaac Shelby along Crooked Creek for the arrival of more Virginia troops and concluded that he could not win the battle. During the night, therefore, the Indians retired across the Ohio. Lewis lost forty-six men killed and eighty wounded. Indian losses could not be ascertained, since they placed the bodies of their slain in the Ohio River.
Cornstalk now faced one of the most crucial decisions in the history of his tribe. He hastened to his villages on the Pickaway Plains and proposed to his people that they either kill all their women and children and fight to the last warrior or that they sue for peace. The warriors favored the latter course. Cornstalk then sent Matthew Elliott, a white man, to Lord Dunmore to arrange a meeting with the governor.
Unaware of the battle of Point Pleasant and assuming that Lewis was in no danger, Dunmore had meanwhile left a garrison of a hundred men at Fort Gower, a small blockhouse he had thrown up at the mouth of the Hocking River, and moved with the remainder of his army toward the Indian towns. About fifteen miles from his destination, he was met by Cornstalk's emissaries. Dunmore agreed to meet with Cornstalk and the other chiefs and hastily set up quarters known as Camp Charlotte, where he quickly came to terms with the Indians. He sent a messenger to inform Lewis, who, with a hundred men, was en route to find Dunmore. Angry over the governor's action, Lewis's men insisted upon attacking the Indian villages. Dunmore, with about fifty militiamen, and John Gibson, a respected trader, arrived, however, and persuaded the men to return to Point Pleasant.
The Treaty of Camp Charlotte was a temporary agreement. By its terms the Indians gave up all captives; surrendered horses, slaves, and other property that they had taken; and promised to cease hunting south of the Ohio. They also assented to a general conference to be held at Fort Dunmore the following spring for the purpose of concluding a definitive treaty.
The defeat of the Indians and the Treaty of Camp Charlotte did not end the necessity for strong defenses in the trans-Allegheny region. Dunmore placed a garrison of seventy-five men under John Connolly at Fort Dunmore. He directed William Russell to replace the small stockade built by Andrew Lewis at Point Pleasant with Fort Blair, a rectangular structure with blockhouses at two corners. The forts at Pittsburgh and Point Pleasant, along with the one at Wheeling, remained the major bastions of West Virginia frontier defense throughout the Revolutionary War.
Significance of Dunmore's War. The claim made by some writers that Point Pleasant was the first battle of the Revolutionary War has no basis in fact. The defeat of the Indians in the battle and the agreements made at Camp Charlotte and Fort Pitt later had the effect of causing most western tribes to remain neutral in the Revolutionary War until 1777, a circumstance of no small importance.
To deny that Point Pleasant was the first battle of the American Revolution does not necessarily imply that there were no connections between them. As John Shy has pointed out, the long-term causes of Dunmore's War and the Revolutionary War were closely intertwined. Shy emphasizes confusion over western policy within the British government, which allowed Dunmore to pursue his own designs in the trans-Allegheny region. Moreover, the problems of frontier defense and efforts to make the Americans pay part of the costs led to troubles on the seaboard, which in turn accelerated withdrawal of British power from the West, “which predictably blew up in 1774. “6 When viewed in a larger context, the battle of Point Pleasant appears as a major event in the advance of the American frontier. Yet even in these larger dimensions, it has no great significance in Revolutionary War history. At the time it was considered frontier aggressiveness and was condemned rather than applauded by other colonies.
1Stanislaus Murray Hamilton, ed., Letters to Washington and Accompanying Papers, 5 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1898-1902), vol. 2, 159.
2Quoted in Jack M. Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760-1775 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 45-46.
3The only contemporary description of Kelly is in John Stuart, Memoir of Indian Wars, and Other Occurrences (Richmond: Viginia Historical and Philosophical Society, 1833; Parsons, W.Va.: McClain Printing Company, 1971), 8-9. The author of this account, a pioneer in the Greenbrier region, is not to be confused with John Stuart, Indian superintendent of the Southern District.
4For a summary of events surrounding the killing of Logan's family and responsibility for the murders, see the Introduction to John J. Jacob, A Biographical Sketch of the Life of the Late Captain Michael Cresap (Cumberland, Md., 1826; Parsons, W. Va.: McClain Printing Company, 1971), 1-48.
5Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, eds., Documentary History of Dunmore's War, 1774 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1905; Harrisonburg, Va.: C.J. Carrier, 1974), 97.
6John F. Shy, “Dunmore, the Upper Ohio Valley, and the American Revolution,” in Thomas H. Smith, ed., Ohio in the American Revolution, Ohio American Revolution Bicentennial Conference Series, no. 1 (Columbus, 1976), 13-16.
5
The Revolutionary Era
The Response to Revolution. Satisfaction with the intervention of Lord Dunmore in land affairs and the victory at Point Pleasant did not divert the attention of western Virginians from events in Boston and Philadelphia in 1774. On November 5, before they returned home from the campaign, officers and soldiers in Dunmore's War issued the Fort Gower Resolves. They coupled professions of loyalty to King George III and confidence in Lord Dunmore with a declaration that “the love of liberty, and attachment to the real interests and just rights of America outweigh[ed] every other consideration.” They pledged exertion of every power within them “for the defense of American liberty.”1 Adam Stephen, who probably convened the men at Fort Gower, declared that “before I would submit my life, liberty, and property to the arbitrary disposal of a corrupt, venal aristocracy,…I would set myself down with a few hundred friends upon some rich and healthy spot, six hundred miles to the westward, and there form a settlement, which, in a short time would command attention and respect.”2
Professions of support for the American cause from westerners, who had their own interests, were no idle boasts. Richard Henry Lee asserted that he could raise six thousand men from the counties of Hampshire, Berkeley, Frederick, Dunmore (now Shenandoah), Augusta, and Botetourt alone. These men had developed “amazing hardihood” from years spent in the woods and such “dexterity” with the Kentucky rifle that they scorned any target within two hundred yards and larger than an orange.3
Westerners reacted angrily to reports in April 1775 that Dunmore had removed the powder from the Williamsburg magazine to a British vessel at anchor in the James River. A thousand men from the frontier counties gathered at Fredericksburg to march against the governor, but