Of far greater importance to West Virginia history was the expedition dispatched from Fort Henry by Abraham Wood in the summer of 1671. Known for Thomas Batts, its leader, and Robert Fallam, who kept a journal of its progress, it proceeded to the junction of the Staunton and Dan rivers and continued westward until it reached a stream, which, unlike others of the Virginia Piedmont, flowed toward the west rather than into the Atlantic Ocean. The men called the stream Wood's River in honor of Abraham Wood, but it later became the New River. Along their route they saw markings, including the letters M A N I, on trees, evidence that other white men had already been there. Who their predecessors were remains unknown, but they may have been traders, some of whom they met, sent out by William Byrd from his post at the present Richmond. The Batts and Fallam expedition reached Peters Falls on the New River, near the present Virginia-West Virginia border, before turning homeward. Their journey later had international implications, when England used their discovery of the New River to assert her claim to the entire Ohio Valley.
Wood sent out another expedition from Fort Henry on May 17, 1673, for the purpose of opening a direct fur trade with tribes beyond the Blue Ridge and ending the exactions of Occaneechi middlemen. James Needham, its leader, and his companions visited a village of Tomahittan, now believed to have been Yuchi Indians on the Hiwassee River. They established friendly relations and left Gabriel Arthur, an intelligent youth, with the Indians to learn their customs and language. Arthur later accompanied a Tomahittan war party across southern West Virginia to the Kanawha River, probably by way of the Coal, to a village of Moneton Indians, possibly at either Saint Albans or Buffalo. Arthur thus became the first white person of record to visit the Kanawha Valley. Before he returned home he was captured by Saura, or Shawnee, in Ohio, but he managed a dramatic escape.
In about 1675 disruptive conditions began to impede the fur trade and exploration. In that year war broke out with the Susquehannocks on the frontiers, and an even more serious conflict known as Bacon's Rebellion, brought on by the Indian disturbances and autocratic policies of Governor Berkeley, threatened the Virginia government itself. Severe economic problems also undermined the tranquil atmosphere essential to trade and exploration. In 1680 Abraham Wood died, and during the ensuing decade unsettled conditions in England itself, which culminated in the Glorious Revolution, removed any solid support from the mother country.
Meanwhile, French explorers and traders had penetrated the Ohio Valley. French authorities claimed that the famous explorer La Salle was on branches of the Ohio in 1669, two years before Batts and Fallam reached the New River, and that on the basis of discovery, France had a stronger claim than England to the Ohio Valley. Their claim cannot be substantiated, but there seems little doubt that French traders visited the Ohio Valley during the late seventeenth century and that some of them ventured into the present West Virginia.
Traders from other colonies, who engaged in commerce with the Shawnee and Delaware, also visited West Virginia. In 1692 Arnout Viele, a Dutchman sent out by the governor of New York, followed the Ohio to Shawnee towns along the lower course of the river. By the early eighteenth century several Pennsylvania traders, among them Peter Bezalion, Martin Chattier, and James Le Tort, had become “familiar with parts of West Virginia. In 1725 John Van Meter, a New Jersey trader, visited the South Branch of the Potomac with a party of Delaware and was highly impressed with the excellence of its lands.
First Attempts at Settlement. In West Virginia, as elsewhere on the American frontier, the fur trader was usually the precursor of the settler. In 1703 Louis Michel, a resident of Bern, Switzerland, wrote from Germantown, Pennsylvania, that he and “eight experienced Englishmen” proposed to visit western regions described by the Indians as having high mountains, rich minerals, abundant game, and fertile lands. Michel became associated with George Ritter, a Bern druggist, who proposed to plant a Swiss colony in America with some four or five hundred merchants, artisans, manufacturers, traders, and farmers. The plan, however, led to no migrations.1
Michel remained interested in West Virginia. In 1706, accompanied by James Le Tort, Peter Bezalion, and Martin Chartier, he visited Harpers Ferry and sketched a map of the area. Upon his return to Switzerland, Michel joined Baron Christopher de Graffenried, another resident of Bern, in a plan to establish a Swiss colony in America. Once again, however, plans for a Swiss colony at the forks of the Potomac failed. The lands desired were claimed by the proprietors of Maryland and Pennsylvania, as well as by Virginia, and the Conestoga Indians warned the government of Pennsylvania against allowing settlers to take up land around Harpers Ferry. When the proprietors of North Carolina offered the Swiss promoters far more attractive terms, they abandoned plans for any settlement in West Virginia.
The Shenandoah Valley continued to beckon Virginians. By the time Alexander Spotswood arrived in the colony as governor in 1710, valuable plantations already covered much of the Piedmont, and buffer settlements west of the Blue Ridge were considered essential to their protection from the French and the Indians. In 1716 Spots wood led an expedition of fifty gentlemen, with servants and Indian guides, across the mountains by way of Swift Run Gap and into the Shenandoah Valley. The discovery of excellent farm and grazing lands by these “Knights of the Golden Horseshoe,” as Spotswood later dubbed his companions, clearly foreshadowed an imminent move of the frontier into the Shenandoah Valley.
There are some reasons to believe that settlements may have been made in the Shenandoah Valley section of West Virginia within a year after Spotswood's expedition. In 1717 the Conestoga Indians asked Pennsylvania authorities for information about persons who had taken up lands west of the Blue Ridge. Moreover, records of the Philadelphia Synod of the Presbyterian Church show that on September 19, 1717, residents of “Potomoke, in Virginia” requested a minister. These records further reveal that during the following year the Reverend Daniel McGill visited “Potomoke,” where he “remained for some months and put the people in church order.” The site of “Potomoke” remains a mystery, but there is reason to believe that it was at or near Shepherdstown.2
West Virginians have generally credited Morgan Morgan, a Welshman who settled on Mill Creek near Bunker Hill, Berkeley County, with the first settlement in the state. Assertions that he moved to West Virginia in 1726 are erroneous. Records show that he lived in Delaware in 1729 and did not acquire his West Virginia lands until November 1730. When he migrated to Bunker Hill about 1731, settlers had probably already begun to enter the lower Shenandoah Valley. In fact, Germans may have settled at Shepherdstown, then known as Mecklenburg, as early as 1727. The claim that Morgan Morgan was the first settler in West Virginia, therefore, must be considered tradition rather than established fact.
The Role of the Land Speculator. Concerns with the identity of the first settler or settlers obscure the fact that no substantial number of immigrants could have arrived in West Virginia before about 1730. Unlike migrating families in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions, pioneers west of the Blue Ridge had to cut themselves off from nearly all contacts with former friends and relatives. Only the boldest dared face single-handedly the perils of Indian hostilities, the chilling prospects of isolation in times of sorrow and distress, and the almost insuperable burdens of conquering a wilderness. Most families were willing to move only as part of larger migrations.
With French activity in the Ohio Valley becoming more ominous for her Piedmont settlements, Virginia in 1730 made changes in her land law designed to encourage migrations into the Valley of Virginia. They placed the land speculator between the settler and the wilderness. The law allowed speculators to receive one thousand acres for each family that they seated west of the Blue Ridge, provided they drew the families from outside Virginia and settled them within two years. Most speculators requested grants ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 acres. Some of the grants, including those to John and Isaac Van Meter between the Potomac and the Shenandoah, Alexander Ross and Morgan Bryan northwest of Opequon Creek, and Edward Barradall and John Lewis on the Cacapon River, were wholly or partly in West Virginia.
Most speculators obtained the necessary families from Pennsylvania and New Jersey