Dunmore’s War — Part I — Tensions Rise Along The Dark & Bloody Ohio

Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago, a short, sharp frontier conflict along the Upper Ohio River shaped the fate of the continent. Yet the conflict — known as Lord Dunmore’s War after the title of the Royal Governor of the colony of Virginia — is little remembered today. It is overshadowed by the events in New England that were rapidly sliding toward confrontation between the American colonists and England that would explode into war in April 1775.

Virginia defeated the Shawnee Indians of the Ohio Country, who had taken up arms to resist increasing incursions, mostly by Virginia hunters, land surveyors, and settlers, into their hunting lands south of the Ohio River in what is now West Virginia and Kentucky. The defeat left the Shawnee wounded and politically divided in the crucial period of 1775-76, when settlers again began to penetrate into that rich country. Though there were sporadic raids on the nascent settlements, the Shawnee and other native peoples of the Ohio couldn’t mount a concerted resistance until 1777, when the British government decided to back them with military aid as part of a strategy to put pressure on the frontier in the American Revolution.

The outcome of Dunmore’s War opened a crucial window in which Trans-Appalachian settlements were able to gain a foothold that they would never give up — though it was a near run thing. As Lawrence J. Fleenor, Jr.wrote for the Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail Association:

It is quite likely that without Lord Dunmore’s War the United States of America would have found its western boundary to have been located along the Allegheny Mountains, with Kentucky and the Old Northwest Territory having remained British Indian Territory.

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War was looming in the spring of 1774. It wasn’t just tension between white land jobbers and hunters and Indians, either. The colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia were fixing to come to blows over the ownership of the Forks of the Ohio at the growing town 0f Pittsburg. The American colonists were looking westward with a speculative eye — and the British government was having a hard time containing westward expansion as they had promised the native peoples they would at the end of Pontiac’s War in 1763. In fact, the British determination to keep her colonies contained to the seaboard was a significant contributor to tensions between the colonies and the Mother Country.

John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, was playing a complex game as governor of Virginia, asserting his colony’s claims — which enhanced his own prestige — while simultaneously seeking to drain off rising assertiveness and rebelliousness among his own people. Meanwhile tensions were ratcheting up along he Ohio River. The Ohio Indians were increasingly alarmed by parties of hunters/surveyors on the river, and the encroachment of settler families further and further west, despite British government assurances.

Violence ensued. Parties of whites were attacked and robbed, and scattered settlers were raided and sometimes killed. An unidentified diarist at Redstone Old Fort not far from Pittsburg noted:

“The most recent murders committed by the Indians before the white people began to retaliate, were that of Captain Russell’s son, three more white men, and two of his negroes, on the fifteenth of October, 1773; that of a Dutch family on the Kenhawa, in June of the same year; and one Richard, in July following; and that of Mr. Hogg and three white men, on the Great Kenhawa, early in April 1774.”

A couple of  parties of white adventurers on the Ohio River — including a young Virginian, the athletic and ambitious George Rogers Clark — were planning that spring of 1774 to head far downriver to establish a “plantation” in Kentucky.  In the face of rising unrest, they determined to join together under the leadership of Captain Michael Cresap, a tough, charismatic Ranger from a prominent family of the Maryland frontier. They were ready to commence hostilities with the Indians.

Cresap was a hard, aggressive man, but he wasn’t a hothead. He determined to head back up the river to the settlement of Wheeling to take the temperature of the local tribes and assess the situation. Many years later, Clark remembered:

“We now thought our army, as we called it, complete and the destruction of the Indians sure. A council was called, and to our astonishment, our intended Commander-in-Chief was the person who dissuaded us from the enterprise. He said that appearances were very suspicious, but there was no certainty of a war. That if we made the attempt proposed, he had no doubt of success, but a war, at any rate, would be the result and that we would be blamed for it; and perhaps justly. But if we were determined to proceed, he would lay aside all considerations, send to his camp for his people, and share our fortunes.”

The frontiersmen agreed to hold off for the moment and gather intel. When they got to Wheeling, the settlers there were in an uproar of fear and trepidation, and begged Cresap and his men to cover the country with scouts and protect them from Indian attack.

I hammer on this point often, but it bears repeating: The frontier was not a hard line between “civilization & savagery.” The colonial Americans, British officialdom, and the native peoples were connected and intermingled through trade and sometimes through familial and marriage ties. Even as tensions and sporadic violence were escalating, there were Anglo-American traders out on the river, welcomed by the native peoples, who traded furs and deerskins for all sorts of necessities and luxuries. The Indians made a distinction between traders and potential settlers, and the traders themselves resented incursions that threatened to disrupt their economic interests.

But the impulse toward war was inexorably overriding the incentives to maintain the uneasy peace, and in April 1774, the balance tipped. When Cresap received a message from Dr. John Connolly, Lord Dunmore’s man in Pittsburg that war appeared inevitable, the frontiersmen looked to their priming.

Clark:

“The reception of this letter was the epoch of open hostilities with the Indians. A war post was planted, a conference was called, and the letter read by Cresap, all the Indian traders being summoned on so important an occasion. Action was hard, and war declared in the most solemn manner; and that same evening, two scalps were brought into camp.”

Those two scalps were almost certainly those of a pair of Indians waylaid in the company of two traders in canoes on the Ohio. Shortly thereafter, Cresap’s party chased down another party of Indians in canoes on the river, and engaged them in a short firefight, which left one of the frontiersmen gravely wounded and at least one tribesman killed and scalped. Clark reported that the frontiersmen recovered considerable ammunition and other “warlike stores.”

For the next operation in their self-declared war, Cresap’s men determined to strike the hunting camp of a Mingo leader named Talgayeeta, known to whites as Chief John Logan. The Mingo were Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) who had moved into the Ohio Country in the 1750s, creating multi-ethnic villages along the waterway that fed the Ohio. Logan’s camp was at the mouth of Yellow Creek where it spilled into the big river, northwest of Fort Pitt, where the borders of the modern states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia converge. He had remained neutral through the French & Indian War and Pontiac’s War, and had generally friendly relations with the English.

Logan’s well-established reputation as a friend to the English gave the frontiersmen pause. Clark:

“We did march about five miles, and then halted to take some refreshments. Here the impropriety of executing the proposed enterprise was argued. The conversation was brought froward by Cresap himself. It was generally agreed that these Indians had no hostile intentions, as they were hunting and their party was composed of men, women, and children, with all their stuff with them. This we knew as I, myself, and others present had been in their camp about four weeks past on our descending the river from Pittsburg. In short, every person seemed to detest the resolution we had set out with. We returned in the evening, decamped, and took the road to Redstone.”

This episode is fascinating to me. Cresap’s men had their blood up. They had “declared war,” and danced their war dance. The killing of the two Indians in the company of the traders was questionable, and could be taken as tantamount to murder. Yet they developed moral qualms about rubbing out what they knew to be a hunting camp that posed no threat. Cresap himself was a man of some stature in this world, and he cared about his reputation. He wanted to at least be able to justify his actions. And Cresap’s ad hoc company rangers were not merely bloodthirsty hooligans. In the absence of any rules of engagement, they democratically determined on some sort of blurry but discernible moral line.

But Cresap’s deviation from his men’s deadly intent would not save Logan’s people. A terrible deed was brewing along the dark and bloody river.

 

 

The post relies primarily on:
Heart of American Darkness: A Story of Murder and Revolution on the Early Frontier by Robert Parkinson
and
The Border Wars of the Upper Ohio Valley 1769-1794 by William Hintzen (the appendices of Hitnzen’s book contain a number of primary documents).