Whether Howard and Sailing had any official or semiofficial sanction for their journey remains unknown, but skeptical French officials took no chances. They arrested the entire party. Sailing managed to escape and make his way back to Virginia. His journal probably provided much of the information on western Virginia used by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson in their famous map of 1751. Not so fortunate, Howard and the other men were sent to France and put on trial. The court cleared them of any criminal charges, whereupon they went to London and faded into obscurity.1
With her own claims to parts of the Ohio Valley at stake, Virginia took the lead in asserting the rights of England. Her contention that the Iroquois, or Six Nations, had ceded their right to territory west of the Allegheny Mountains in the Treaty of Lancaster of 1744 suggests that even then she was ready to embark upon an aggressive policy in the Ohio Valley. In the wake of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, which ended King George's War but proved no more than an armed truce, both Virginia and France stepped up their activities in the Ohio Valley.
The Virginia Land Companies. Convinced that settlements were essential to control of the Ohio Valley, Virginia as early as 1745 turned to the policy that had proved successful in peopling the Valley of Virginia. She offered speculators one thousand acres of land for each family they settled west of the Allegheny Mountains and allowed them four years instead of the customary two to meet their requirements. By the end of 1754, Virginia had granted more than 2,500,000 acres in the trans-Allegheny region, about 650,000 of them in West Virginia. Only three of the recipients, the Greenbrier, Loyal, and Ohio companies, however, achieved any noteworthy success.2
The Greenbrier Company came closest to fulfilling its agreement. Its members included John Robinson, Sr., the Speaker of the House of Burgesses, John Lewis, a prominent Valley landowner, and others with political influence and experience in settling frontier areas. In 1745 the company received one hundred thousand acres in the Greenbrier Valley. By 1754 Andrew Lewis, its surveyor, had laid off more than fifty thousand acres.3
The Loyal Company, with a grant of eight hundred thousand acres in 1748, consisted of forty prominent Virginians, including Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson. Its guiding spirit was Dr. Thomas Walker of Albemarle County, who moved to Wolf Hills, the present Abingdon, about 1748. On March 6, 1750, Walker and five companions undertook a search for lands for the company. They passed through Cumberland Gap and into central Kentucky and missed the rich Bluegrass region by only about a day's journey. Walker and his men returned home by way of southern West Virginia and the Bluestone, New, and Greenbrier rivers. By 1754 the Loyal Company had seated about two hundred families on its lands, mostly in southwestern Virginia, but a few apparently settled along the New and Bluestone rivers in West Virginia.
Much closer to the heart of the international conflict in the Ohio Valley was the Ohio Company of Virginia. Organized by Thomas Lee and including Thomas Cresap, Augustine Washington, and George Fairfax among its members, it sought a grant of five hundred thousand acres of land in 1747. Governor William Gooch declined to authorize the grant, but yielded after the company carried its case to the English Privy Council. The company received two hundred thousand acres with the stipulation that it settle one hundred families within seven years and build and garrison a fort for their protection. Once it had complied with these terms, it might have an additional three hundred thousand acres on similar conditions. The Ohio Company never specifically located its lands, and its only settlement, of eleven families, was in the vicinity of Redstone, Pennsylvania.
In its quest for land, the Ohio Company dispatched Christopher Gist, a competent North Carolina surveyor and explorer, on two expeditions. On the first, undertaken in 1750-1751, Gist proceeded from the residence of Thomas Cresap, at Oldtown, Maryland, to the Forks of the Ohio, now Pittsburgh. He then followed a circuitous route through Ohio, Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia to a point near his old home on the Yadkin River in North Carolina. On the second expedition, he explored both sides of the Ohio River from the present Pittsburgh to the mouth of the Kanawha. He moved up the Kanawha, where he found excellent lands, and then turned back toward the Ohio and proceeded northward by way of Mason, Jackson, Wood, Pleasants, and Tyler counties.
In the early summer of 1752 Virginia cemented her claims to trans-Allegheny lands by the Treaty of Logstown with Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo chiefs. Representing her at the conference, held about eighteen miles below the Forks of the Ohio, were Lunsford Lomax, Joshua Fry and Colonel James Patton, a prominent Valley of Virginia landowner. Gist was present to speak for the interests of the Ohio Company. In the Treaty of Logstown the Indians reluctantly accepted the interpretation of the Treaty of Lancaster of 1744 by which Virginia claimed trans-Allegheny lands south of the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
Early Trans-Allegheny Settlements. Following the end of King George's War in 1748, settlers began a cautious advance across the Alleghenies. Their most important moves were into the Greenbrier Valley. Among the first were Jacob Marlin and Stephen Sewell, who resided at Marlinton. According to tradition, they disagreed over religion, and decided that Marlin should remain at their cabin and Sewell should live in a hollow tree as a means of preserving their friendship. Indians later killed Sewell on Sewell Mountain, and Marlin returned to the Valley of Virginia. Sewell was one of eighteen persons who received a grant of land between the Greenbrier and Monongahela rivers in November 1752, and it seems likely that he and Marlin were land prospectors rather than bona fide settlers.
At the beginning of the French and Indian War, about fifty families evidently lived in the Greenbrier Valley. In 1750 Thomas Walker reported several “plantations” and asserted that prospective settlers had already purchased much of the land from the Greenbrier Company. Most of the settlements lay on Muddy, Howard, Anthony, Spring Lick, and Knapp creeks and in the area known as the Sinks rather than along the river itself. Prominent pioneer families included those of John Keeney, James Burnside, Thomas Campbell, Samuel Carroll, Archibald Clendenin, Andrew Lewis, Lemuel Howard, James Ewing, Patrick Davis, William Renick, Felty and Matthias Yocum, and George, Frederick, and John See.
Other pioneers crossed the Alleghenies to the headwaters of the Monongahela. In 1753 Robert Files and David Tygart, for whom Files Creek and the Tygart Valley River are named, settled near Beverly, either on or near the Seneca Trail. The following year Files, his wife, and five of their six children were killed by Indians. A surviving son warned the Tygart family, and together they escaped to settlements on the South Branch of the Potomac. Five years later Delaware and Mingo Indians killed Thomas Decker and other settlers at Morgantown. Meanwhile, in 1756, Gabriel and Israel Eckerlin, ascetic and pacifistic settlers at Dunkard Bottom, on the Cheat River, fell victim to Indian attacks. Settlements beyond the Alleghenies were clearly beyond the perimeter of safety in the 1750s.
French Countermoves. After King George's War, France also began to reinforce her claims to the Ohio Valley. Recognizing the Ohio Valley as a significant political and economic link between Canada and Louisiana, the Comte de la Galissoniere, governor general of Canada, took steps to gain the support of the Indians of the region. In 1748 he dispatched an expedition of about 230 Canadian militiamen and Indians to the Ohio under the leadership of Pierre-Joseph Celoron de Blainville. The expedition descended the Allegheny and Ohio rivers. At prominent points along the route, Blainville buried lead plates with inscriptions asserting the right of France to the Ohio Valley. One plate was later found at the mouth of Wheeling Creek and another at the mouth of the Kanawha. Blainville found numerous English traders but no inclination in the Indians to desert them.
Determined not to lose the Ohio Valley by default, a new governor-general, Marquis Duquesne, in 1753 sent about two thousand Troupes de la Marine and Canadian militiamen to build a road from Lake Erie to the headwaters of the Ohio and to construct forts at strategic places. Captain Pierre-Paul de la Malgué, sieur de Marin, whom Duquesne placed in charge of the work, pressed forward so relentlessly that he and nearly four hundred of his men died. The show of power by the French, however, impressed the Indians. They began to sever their relations with the English, with whom they had already become dissatisfied. By the end of 1753 no Virginia or Pennsylvania traders remained in the Ohio Valley. Moreover, Forts Presqu'Isle at Erie, LeBoeuf