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Lord Dunmore's War

The ending of one war often sets the stage for another. The roots of Lord Dunmore's War of 1774 trace their way to the end of the French and Indian War. As part of their agreement made with the French at the 1763 Peace of Paris, the British pledged that no English settlement would cross the Appalachian Mountains. Yet, settlement expanded unabated, and violent conflict escalated between settlers and natives. In the hope of stemming the violence while at the same time acquiring control over a vast trans-Appalachian region, in 1768, the British signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix with the Iroquois Confederacy. Also called the Iroquois League, its six nations included the Mohawk, Tuscarora, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga peoples.

The problem with the treaty was its disregard for the enemies of the Iroquois, Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo tribes, who claimed hunting rights to the same area. Believing that they now had every right to do so, white settlers began crossing the mountains in droves and settling in what was hoped to become a new English colony, called Vandalia. This area comprised most of modern West Virginia and parts of eastern Kentucky.

Native Raids and Settler Reprisals

What followed was a series of brutal, mainly vengeful native raids on the white settlers, and reprisals from the settlers. The level of violence became so horrific that the governor of Virginia, a Scottish nobleman named John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, launched a retaliatory campaign in May 1774. Six months later, Lord Dunmore's War ended with the colonists’ victory over the Indians at the Battle of Point Pleasant.

Logan, a Mingo chief who initially sought peace with the whites, lost several members of his family in a fight near Steubenville, Ohio, and his punitive raid into Pennsylvania took the lives of over a dozen colonists. The Yellow Creek Massacre references a series of back-and-forth atrocities. One of these included Logan's loss of more family members in an ambush at a cabin near Wheeling, West Virginia. Enraged, Logan and other natives sought out and killed nearly every white person that they encountered. For example, pioneering legend Daniel Boone's attempt to move his family into Kentucky was thwarted by the capture and torture of his son James near the Cumberland Gap. Terrified settlers moved into nearby forts for protection. These and other events sparked Lord Dunmore's War.

With the approval of Virginia's House of Burgesses, Lord Dunmore gathered a militia force and divided it into two columns. He personally led one toward Fort Pitt, in Pennsylvania, and then down the Ohio River. Meanwhile, Andrew Lewis led a force of approximately 1,100 men into the Little Kanawha Valley. Lord Dunmore sent word to Lewis to cross the Ohio River for a rendezvous. Before Lewis's force could cross the river, Chief Cornstalk's force of an equal number of Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo warriors ambushed his column on October 10, 1774, near modern-day Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The native force was defeated at the battle of the same name (also referred to as the Battle of Kanawha).

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