By 1774, the English colonies in North America were firmly established and the colonists, with a growing population bolstered by a steady stream of new arrivals from Europe, were seeking to obtain new lands for their farms. Obtain new lands, of course, meant intruding on lands which American Indians had used for thousands of years.
In the present-day states of West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky, the Shawnees were losing their traditional hunting grounds as the English invasion moved west. In the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, lands in Kentucky and Ohio had been guaranteed to the Shawnees. Just five years later, however, Lord John Murray Dunmore, the governor of the Virginia Colony, commissioned a survey of these lands. The Shawnees were angered by this intrusion. The Shawnees did not passively accept this invasion but defended their rights.
The conflicts between the Shawnees and the intruders, sometimes called Lord Dunmore’s War, started when Lord John Dunmore (1732-1809) constructed a fort in Shawnee territory. The British invited a group of Indians to the fort for a friendly meeting. After getting the Indians drunk, the British killed most of them. In his book Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley until 1795, historian Randolph Downes reports:
“All chronicles agree that most of the Indians were made drunk and were unable to return the fire when they were attacked by the whites, and in several accounts reference is made to the fact that they were disarmed by being invited to partake in a contest of shooting at a mark.”
Among the dead were the brother and the pregnant sister of Captain John Logan (1725-1780), a Mingochief. The Mingos were an Iroquois group which had settled on the upper Ohio River about 1750. Logan, whose Indian name was Tah-gah-jute, probably took his English name from James Logan, the governor of Pennsylvania, with whom he had been friendly.
Under Indian concepts of law, Logan (Tah-gah-jute) was then required to avenge these deaths and he led eight warriors on an attack against a small settlement. Under a tall elm tree south of Columbus, Ohio, Logan proclaimed:
“There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.”
Logan’s war party took exactly 13 scalps: one for each Indian killed by the colonists. Historian Randolph Downes reports:
“They avoided, however, any families known to reside in Pennsylvania, confining their attacks to the hated Virginians.”
Lord Dunmore then felt obligated to call out the militia to punish Logan and his warriors. In his book Encyclopedia of American Indian Wars, 1492-1890, Jerry Keenan writes:
“The strategy was not only to retaliate for Logan’s raids but also clear Indians out of the beckoning Ohio country, thereby raising land values.”
In West Virginia, Fort Arbuckle was established during Lord Dunsmore’s War. There were thirty non-Indian homesteads in the area. The fort was intended to protect non-Indians from Indian raids.
In Ohio, a war party of 300 Shawnee and Delaware warriors led by Cornstalk (ca. 1720-1777) and Blue Jacket, attacked an army of about 1,100 Virginians. In the Battle of Point Pleasant, about 20 Indians were killed as compared with about 70 Virginians. The Indians were the first to withdraw from the battlefield and the Virginians then marched north to the Shawnee villages at Chillicothe. In his chapter in The Impact of Indian History on the Teaching of United States History, David Edmunds reports:
“The Battle of Point Pleasant was fiercely fought, but the Shawnees finally were forced to withdraw across the Ohio.”
This battle marks the end of Lord Dunmore’s War. In his book The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace describes Lord Dunmore’s War as:
“…a brief orgy of irresponsibility, cruelty, and despair.”
In her book The Iroquois in the American Revolution, historian Barbara Graymont writes the following:
“Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, was vigorously aggressive in ignoring the proclamation line and encouraging western settlement. Neither was Dunmore averse to making money for himself on these restricted lands.”
Cornstock was forced to agree with the terms of Dunmore’s Treaty of Camp Charlotte and cede all Shawnee claims to Kentucky.
Following the Battle of Point Pleasant, most of the Thawegila Shawnees withdrew from Ohio and sought refuge among the Creeks in Alabama.
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