Disaffection reached its greatest intensity in 1780 and 1781 east of the Alleghenies and centered in Hampshire County Angered by the arrival of a tax collector, John Claypool and five or six of his friends announced that they would provide no more beef, clothes, or men, and then obtained whiskey and drank to the health of King George III. Armed with warrants for Claypool and his associates, the sheriff and about fifty men set out to arrest the troublemakers. Claypool, meanwhile, had gathered sixty or seventy men of his own and prepared to resist arrest. In the face of this unexpected defiance, the sheriff accepted Claypool's promise to turn himself over to authorities later.
Armed resistance, largely to taxes and levies, flared up in other parts of Hampshire County. An attack upon militiamen at the mill of John Brake, a member of the insurgents, rumors that Claypool was gathering a thousand men in the Lost River area, and the fears that the lives and fortunes of supporters of the American cause were in jeopardy led to an appeal by Colonel Elias Poston, on May 22, 1781, for three hundred men from Frederick County to quell the disturbances. He pointed out that Claypool had so many friends and relatives that it would be impossible to form an army against him in Hampshire County.
Daniel Morgan, with four companies of infantrymen and other recruits, arrived in Hampshire County and dispersed the rioters. Several rebel leaders fled over the mountains, but Claypool and others sought pardons from the governor. They based their defense upon their isolation and ignorance of events outside their area, the effectiveness of the propaganda of British agents, and their conviction that the taxes and levies upon them were unduly burdensome. Claypool himself elicited considerable sympathy. Peter Hog pointed out that he had five sons who were connected with some of the most ardent supporters of the American cause in the South Branch area and that his prosecution would alienate many patriots. Others attested to his honesty, peaceableness, and good intentions. Morgan pointed out that he was the father of fourteen children, most of them small and dependent upon him. The governor pardoned Claypool and nearly all of his associates, and many of them served faithfully in American armies.
The End of the War. Some of the bloodiest episodes of the war west of the Alleghenies occurred after the battle of Yorktown on October 19, 1781. In retaliation for an attack upon settlements in Washington County, Pennsylvania, in February 1782, Colonel David Williamson led an expedition of about one hundred militiamen against the village of Gnadenhutten, where some of the guilty persons were visiting friendly Moravian Indians. The irate militia, with only eighteen dissenting, agreed to kill every Indian present, friendly or hostile. The following morning they slaughtered about one hundred, including men, women, and children, who had spent the night singing and praying, and destroyed their unharvested crops.
General William Irvine, the successor to Brodhead at Fort Pitt, expected massive reprisals for the atrocity at Gnadenhutten. To forestall additional attacks, which by then extended as far as the Tygart Valley and Greenbrier areas, he dispatched about five hundred mounted men under Colonel William Crawford to the Wyandot town of Sandusky. Crawford found the town deserted, but on June 4 he encountered a large body of Wyandot, and a battle ensued. The arrival of reinforcements for the Indians threw the militia into a panic, and it scattered in wild disorder. About three hundred reached home safely. Most of the others, including Crawford, were captured. Crawford was put to death by slow roasting.
On September 10 about two hundred Wyandot, Delaware, and British, led by Joseph Brant, laid siege to Fort Henry. John Linn, a scout, had discovered their approach and warned residents of the area, who hurriedly took shelter in the fort. Linn's warning did not allow time to remove all the military stores from the house of Ebenezer Zane, which stood about forty yards away. Some of the men were deployed there, with the result that the Indians were subjected to a hazardous crossfire.
During the attack, the Indians suddenly perceived what seemed a singular stroke of fortune. A small boat moving up the Ohio and laden with cannonballs and other supplies for Fort Pitt put ashore at Wheeling. The Indians promptly captured the boat and its cargo. Thereupon they fashioned a cannon by hollowing out a log and filled it with cannonballs. They aimed their new weapon at Fort Henry and fired. Much to their astonishment, the only casualties were Indians.
The defenders of Fort Henry also had problems. Gunpowder was running low, and none of the men could be spared to go to Zane's house, where supplies were ample. At this critical juncture, according to legend, Zane's sister, Elizabeth, or Betty, volunteered to obtain the powder. Braving the enemy fire, she ran to the house and obtained the precious gunpowder. Then, to the amazement of the already disbelieving Indians, she dashed back to the fort. Her feat enabled the fort to withstand the attack. After three days of failure, the frustrated Indians gave up the siege, and about half of their warriors retired across the Ohio.5
The remainder of the Indians, numbering about a hundred, moved northward to Rice's Fort at Bethany. Normally the little post gave protection to about a dozen families, but at the time of the assault there were only six defenders. The Indians killed one of them at the outset. The remaining five, in what was one of the most remarkable encounters in the annals of frontier warfare, held out against their attackers for twelve hours and killed several Indians without the loss of any additional men. Despairing of any success, the Indians withdrew.
The sieges of Fort Henry and Rice's Fort, which followed closely the disastrous battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky, marked the last large-scale attacks upon the West Virginia frontier during the Revolutionary War. A few weeks later Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander in chief, instructed officers at all of Britain's western posts to desist from further moves against the Americans. After six years of frightful warfare, peace returned. Yet it was a peace on paper only, and more than a decade of strife lay ahead before the Indian menace to West Virginia settlements was entirely removed.
1John E. Robbins, “The Fort Gower Resolves, November 5,1774,” in Thomas H. Smith, ed., Ohio in the American Revolution, Ohio American Revolution Bicentennial Conference Series, no. 1 (Columbus, 1976), 21-26.
2Quoted in Freeman H. Hart, The Valley of Virginia in the American Revolution, 1763-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 85.
3Don Higginbotham, Daniel Morgan, Revolutionary Rifleman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 19-20.
4Many of those who had sought shelter at the fort supported Dick Pointer in 1795, when he appealed to the Virginia General Assembly that he “in the decline of life shall be at public expense liberated, and enjoy by the bounty of the legislature that freedom he has long sighed for.” Greenbrier County Legislative Petition, November 12, 1795, Virginia State Library, Richmond.
5There are no contemporary accounts of the alleged action of Betty Zane in the defense of Fott Henry. The first stories appeared years later under circumstances that raise doubts about thew reliability, but they cannot be dismissed summarily.
6
Adapting to a New Nation
A New Immigrant Wave. With the end of the Revolutionary War, Americans, long since grown mobile by habit, resumed their course westward in search of new lands in trans-Allegheny West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Old Northwest. Each year thousands of immigrants gathered at Wheeling and Pittsburgh for the journey down the Ohio. Others followed the Valley of Virginia southward to headstreams of the Cumberland and Tennessee. In 1790 about 125,000 Virginians lived west of the Appalachians. More than 70,000 of them were in Kentucky, which experienced a dramatic population upsurge of nearly six hundred percent between 1783 and 1790.
West Virginia had a less spectacular growth. In 1790 her total population was 55,873, but only about 20,000 lived west of the mountains. Yet her subsequent increase was by