University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XIII

OPENING THE GATEWAY—DUNMORE'S WAR

IT was fortunate for the Watauga settlers
that the Indians and the whites were on
the most peaceful terms with each other at the
time the Watauga Valley was shown, by the
running of the boundary line, to lie within the
Indian reservation. With true American self-reliance,
the settlers met together for deliberation
and counsel, and deputed James Robertson
and John Been, as stated by Tennessee's
first historian, "to treat with their landlords,
and agree upon articles of accomodation and
friendship. The attempt succeeded. For
though the Indians refused to give up the land

gratuitously, they consented, for a stipulated
amount of merchandise, muskets, and other
articles of convenience, to lease all the country
on the waters of the Watauga."[1] In addition
to the land thus leased for ten years,
several other tracts were purchased from the
Indians by Jacob Brown, who reoccupied his
former location on the Nolichucky.

In taking this daring step, the Watauga
settlers moved into the spotlight of national
history. For the inevitable consequence of
leasing the territory was the organization of
a form of government for the infant settlement.
Through his familiarity with the North
Carolina type of "association," in which the
settlers had organized for the purpose of "regulating"
abuses, and his acquaintance with the
contents of the "Impartial Relation," in which
Husband fully expounded the principles and
practices of this association, Robertson was
peculiarly fitted for leadership in organizing
this new government. The convention at
which Articles of Association, unfortunately
lost, were drawn up, is noteworthy as the first

governmental assemblage of free-born American
citizens ever held west of the Alleghanies.
The government then established was the first
free and independent government, democratic
in spirit, representative in form, ever organized
upon the American continent. In describing
this mimic republic, the royal Governor
of Virginia says: "They appointed magistrates,
and framed laws for their present occasion,
and to all intents and purposes, erected
themselves into, though an inconsiderable, yet
a separate State."[2] The most daring spirit
in this little state was the young John Sevier, of
French Huguenot family (originally spelled
Xavier), born in Augusta County, Virginia,
on September 23, 1745. It was from Millerstown
in Shenandoah County where he was living
the uneventful life of a small farmer, that
he emigrated (December, 1773) to the Watauga
region. With his arrival there begins
one of the most fascinating and romantic careers
recorded in the varied and stirring annals
of the Old Southwest. In this daring and
impetuous young fellow, fair-haired, blue-eyed,
magnetic, debonair—of powerful build,
splendid proportions, and athletic skill—we
behold the gallant exemplar of the truly heroic
life of the border. The story of his life, thrilling
in the extreme, is rich in all the multicolored
elements which impart romance to the
arduous struggle of American civilization in
the opening years of the republic.

The creative impulses in the Watauga commonwealth
are hinted at by Dunmore, who
observes, in the letter above quoted, that Watauga
"sets a dangerous example to the people
of America, of forming governments distinct
from and independent of his Majesty's authority."
It is true that the experiment was
somewhat limited. The organization of the
Watauga association, which constituted a temporary
expedient to meet a crisis in the affairs
of a frontier community cut off by forest wilderness
and mountain barriers from the reach
of the arm of royal or provincial government,
is not to be compared with the revolutionary
assemblage at Boonesborough, May 23, 1775,
or with the extraordinary demands for independence

in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina,
during the same month. Nevertheless
the Watauga settlers defied both North Carolina
and the Crown, by adopting the laws of
Virginia and by ignoring Governor Josiah
Martin's proclamation (March 26, 1774) "requiring
the said settlers immediately to retire
from the Indian Territories."[3] Moreover,
Watauga really was the parent of a series of
mimic republics in the Old Southwest, gradually
tending toward higher forms of organization,
with a larger measure of individual liberty.
Watauga, Transylvania, Cumberland,
Franklin represent the evolving political genius
of a free people under the creative leadership
of three constructive minds—James Robertson,
John Sevier, and Richard Henderson.
Indeed, Watauga furnished to Judge Henderson
precisely the "dangerous example" of
which Dunmore prophetically speaks.[4]

Immediately upon his return in 1771 from
the extended exploration of Kentucky, Daniel
Boone as already noted was engaged as secret

agent, to treat with the Cherokees for the lease
or purchase of the trans-Alleghany region, on
behalf of Judge Henderson and his associates.
Embroiled in the exciting issues of the Regulation
and absorbed by his confining duties as
colonial judge, Henderson was unable to put
his bold design into execution until after the
expiration of the court itself which ceased to
exist in 1773. Disregarding the royal proclamation
of 1763 and Locke's Fundamental
Constitutions for the Carolinas, which forbade
private parties to purchase lands from the Indians,
Judge Henderson applied to the highest
judicial authorities in England to know if
there was any law in existence forbidding purchase
of lands from the Indian tribes. Lord
Mansfield gave Judge Henderson the "sanction
of his great authority in favor of the purchase."[5]
Lord Chancellor Camden and Mr.
Yorke had officially advised the King in 1757,
in regard to the petition of the East Indian
Company, "that in respect to such territories
as have been, or shall be acquired by treaty or
grant from the Great Mogul, or any of the
Indian princes or governments, your Majesty's
letters patent are not necessary; the
property of the soil vesting in the company by
the Indian grant subject only to your Majesties
right of sovereignty over the settlements,
as English settlements, and over the inhabitants,
as English subjects, who carry with them
your Majesties laws wherever they form colonies,
and receive your Majesties protection by
virtue of your royal charters."[6] This opinion,
with virtually no change, was rendered in
regard to the Indian tribes of North America
by the same two authorities, certainly as early
as 1769;[7] and a true copy, made in London,
April 1, 1772, was transmitted to Judge Henderson.[8]
Armed with the legal opinions received
from England, Judge Henderson was
fully persuaded that there was no legal bar
whatsoever to his seeking to acquire by purchase
from the Cherokees the vast domain of
the trans-Alleghany.[9] A golden dream of
empire, with its promise of an independent republic
in the form of a proprietary colony,

DANIEL BOONE LEADING COLONISTS FOR KENTUCKY—1773

From a lithograph in the North Carolina Hall of History

casts him under the spell of its alluring glamour.

In the meantime, the restless Boone, impatient
over the delay in the consummation of
Judge Henderson's plans, resolved to establish
himself in Kentucky upon his own responsibility.
Heedless of the question of title and
the certain hazards incident to invading the
territory of hostile savages, Boone designated
a rendezvous in Powell's Valley where he and
his party of five families were to be met by
a band under the leadership of his connections,
the Bryans, and another company led by Captain
William Russell, a daring pioneer of the
Clinch Valley. A small detachment of
Boone's party was fiercely attacked by Shawanoes
in Powell's Valley on October 10, 1773,
and almost all were killed, including sons of
Boone and Russell, and young John and Richard
Mendenhall of Guilford County, North
Carolina. As the result of this bloody repulse,
Boone's attempt to settle in Kentucky at this
time was definitely abandoned. His failure to
effect a settlement in Kentucky was due to that

characteristic disregard of the territorial rights
of the Indians which was all too common
among the borderers of that period.

This failure was portentous of the coming
storm. The reign of the Long Hunters
was over. Dawning upon the horizon was the
day of stern adventurers, fixed in the desperate
and lawless resolve to invade the trans-Alleghany
country and to battle savagely with the
red man for its possession. More successful
than Boone was the McAfee party, five in
number, from Botetourt County, Virginia,
who between May 10th and September 1, 1773,
safely accomplished a journey through Kentucky
and carefully marked well-chosen sites
for future location.[10] An ominous incident of
the time was the veiled warning which Cornstalk,
the great Shawanoe chieftain, gave to
Captain Thomas Bullitt, head of a party of
royal surveyors, sent out by Lord Dunmore,
Governor of Virginia. Cornstalk at Chillicothe,
June 7, 1773, warned Bullitt concerning
the encroachments of the whites, "designed
to deprive us," he said, "of the hunting of the

country, as usual . . . the hunting we stand in
need of to buy our clothing." During the
preceding summer, George Rogers Clark, an
aggressive young Virginian, with a small party,
had descended the Ohio as low as Fish Creek,
where he built a cabin; and in this region for
many months various parties of surveyors were
busily engaged in locating and surveying lands
covered by military grants. Most significant
of the ruthless determination of the pioneers
to occupy by force the Kentucky area was
the action of the large party from Monongahela,
some forty in number, led by Captain
James Harrod, who penetrated to the present
Miller County, where in June, 1774, they made
improvements and actually laid out a town.

A significant, secretly conducted movement,
of which historians have taken but little account,
was now in progress under the manipulation
of Virginia's royal governor. As early
as 1770 Dr. John Connolly proposed the establishment
of an extensive colony south of the
Ohio; and the design of securing such territory
from the Indians found lodgment in the mind

of Lord Dunmore. But this design was for
the moment thwarted when on October 28,
1773, an order was issued from the Privy
Council chamber in Whitehall granting an immense
territory, including all of the present
West Virginia and the land alienated to Virginia
by Donelson's agreement with the Cherokees
(1772), to a company including Thomas
Walpole, Samuel Wharton, Benjamin Franklin,
and others. This new colony, to be named
"Vandalia," seemed assured. A clash between
Dunmore and the royal authorities was imminent;
for Virginia under her sea-to-sea charter
claimed the vast middle region of the continent,
extending without known limit to west and
northwest. Moreover, Dunmore was interested
in great land speculations on his own account;
and while overtly vindicating Virginia's
claim to the trans-Alleghany by despatching
parties of surveyors to the western wilderness
to locate and survey lands covered by
military grants, he with the collusion of certain
members of the "Honourable Board,"
his council, as charged by Washington, was
more than "lukewarm," secretly restricting
as rigorously as he dared the extent and
number of the soldiers' allotments. According
to the famous Virginia Remonstrance, he
was in league with "men of great influence
in some of the neighboring states" to secure,
under cover of purchases from the Indians,
large tracts of country between the Ohio and
the Mississippi.[11] In shaping his plans Dunmore
had the shrewd legal counsel of Patrick
Henry, who was equally intent upon making
for himself a private purchase from the Cherokees.
It was Henry's legal opinion that the
Indiana purchase from the Six Nations by the
Pennsylvania traders at Fort Stanwix (November
5, 1768) was valid; and that purchase
by private individuals from the Indians gave
full and ample title.[12] In consequence of
these facts, William Murray, in behalf of himself
and his associates of the Illinois Land
Company, and on the strength of the Camden-Yorke
decision, purchased two large tracts, on
the Illinois and Ohio respectively, from the
Illinois Indians (July 5, 1773); and in order
to win the support of Dunmore, who was ambitious
to make a fortune in land speculation,
organized a second company, the Wabash
(Ouabache) Land Company, with the governor
as the chief share-holder. In response to
Murray's petition on behalf of the Illinois
Land Company, Dunmore (May, 1774) recommended
it to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary
of State for the Colonies, and urged that it be
granted; and in a later letter he disingenuously
disclaimed any personal interest in the Illinois
speculation.

The party of surveyors sent out under the
direction of Colonel William Preston, on the
request of Washington and other leading eastern
men, in 1774 located lands covered by
military grants on the Ohio and in the Kentucky
area for prominent Virginians, including
Washington, Patrick Henry, William
Byrd, William Preston, Arthur Campbell,
William Fleming, and Andrew Lewis, among
others, and also a large tract for Dr. Connolly.
Certain of these grants fell within
the Vandalia area; and in his reply (September

10, 1774) to Dunmore's letter, Lord
Dartmouth sternly censured Dunmore for
allowing these grants, and accused the white
settlers of having brought on, by such unwarrantable
aggressions, the war then raging
with the Indians. This charge lay at the
door of Dunmore himself; and there is strong
evidence that Dunmore personally fomented
the war, ostensibly in support of Virginia's
charter rights, but actually in order to further
his own speculative designs.[13] Dunmore's
agent, Dr. Connolly, heading a party posing
as Virginia militia, fired without provocation
upon a delegation of Shawanoe chiefs assembled
at Fort Pitt (January, 1774). Taking
advantage of the alarming situation created
by the conflict of the claims of Virginia and
Pennsylvania, Connolly, inspired by Dunmore
without doubt, then issued an incendiary circular
(April 21, 1774), declaring a state of war
to exist. Just two weeks before the Battle
of the Great Kanawha, Patrick Henry categorically
stated, in conversation with Thomas
Wharton:

At this very time, Patrick Henry, in conjunction
with William Byrd 3d and others, was
negotiating for a private purchase of lands
from the Cherokees; and when Wharton, after

LORD DUNMORE

From the portrait copied by W. L. Sheppard from an original in
England, in the Virginia State Library

answering Henry's inquiry as to where he
might buy Indian goods, remarked: "It 's
not possible you mean to enter the Indian trade
at this period," Henry laughingly replied:
"The wish-world is my hobby horse." "From
whence I conclude," adds Wharton, "he has
some prospect of making a purchase of the
natives, but where I know not."

The war, thus promulgated, we believe, at
Dunmore's secret instigation and heralded by
a series of ghastly atrocities, came on apace.
After the inhuman murder of the family of Logan,
the Indian chieftain, by one Greathouse
and his drunken companions (April 30th),
Logan, who contrary to romantic views was a
black-hearted and vengeful savage, harried the
Tennessee and Virginia borders, burning and
slaughtering. Unable to arouse the Cherokees,
owing to the opposition of Atta-kulla-kulla,
Logan as late as July 21st said in a letter
to the whites: "The Indians are not angry,
only myself," and not until then did Dunmore
begin to give full execution to his warlike
plans. The best woodsmen of the border,

Daniel Boone and the German scout Michael
Stoner, having been despatched on July 27th
by Colonel William Preston to warn the surveyors
of the trans-Alleghany, made a remarkable
journey on foot of eight hundred miles
in sixty-one days. Harrod's company at
Harrodsburg, a company of surveyors at Fontainebleau,
Floyd's party on the Kentucky,
and the surveyors at Mann's Lick, thus
warned, hurried in to the settlements and were
saved. Meanwhile, Dunmore, in command of
the Virginia forces, invaded territory guaranteed
to the Indians by the royal proclamation of
1763 and recently (1774) added to the province
of Quebec, a fact of which he was not
aware, conducted a vigorous campaign, and
fortified Camp Charlotte, near Old Chillicothe.
Andrew Lewis, however, in charge of the other
division of Dunmore's army, was the one destined
to bear the real brunt and burden of the
campaign. His division, recruited from the
very flower of the pioneers of the Old Southwest,
was the most representative body of borderers
of this region that up to this time had assembled
to measure strength with the red men.
It was an army of the true stalwarts of the
frontier, with fringed leggings and hunting-capes,
rifles and powder-horns, hunting-knives
and tomahawks.

The Battle of the Great Kanawha, at Point
Pleasant, was fought on October 10, 1774, between
Lewis's force, eleven hundred strong,
and the Indians, under Cornstalk, somewhat
inferior in numbers. It was a desultory action,
over a greatly extended front and in very
brushy country between Crooked Creek and
the Ohio. Throughout the long day, the Indians
fought with rare craft and stubborn bravery—loudly
cursing the white men, cleverly
picking off their leaders, and derisively inquiring,
in regard to the absence of the fifes:
"Where are your whistles now?" Slowly retreating,
they sought to draw the whites into
an ambuscade and at a favorable moment to
"drive the Long Knives like bullocks into the
river." No marked success was achieved on
either side until near sunset, when a flank
movement directed by young Isaac Shelby

alarmed the Indians, who mistook this party
for the expected reinforcement under Christian,
and retired across the Ohio. In the
morning the whites were amazed to discover
that the Indians, who the preceding day so
splendidly heeded the echoing call of Cornstalk,
"Be strong! Be strong!", had quit the
battle-field and left the victory with the
whites.[15]

The peace negotiated by Dunmore was durable.
The governor had accomplished his purpose,
defied the authority of the crown, and
vindicated the claim of Virginia, to the enthusiastic
satisfaction of the backwoodsmen.
While tendering their thanks to him and avowing
their allegiance to George III, at the close
of the campaign, the borderers proclaimed
their resolution to exert all their powers "for
the defense of American liberty, and for the
support of her just rights and privileges, not
in any precipitous, riotous or tumultuous manner,
but when regularly called forth by the
unanimous voice of our countrymen." Dunmore's
War is epochal, in that it procured for

the nonce a state of peace with the Indians,
which made possible the advance of Judge
Henderson over the Transylvania Trail in
1775, and, through his establishment of the
Transylvania Fort at Boonesborough, the ultimate
acquisition by the American Confederation
of the imperial domain of the trans-Alleghany.[16]