Dunmore’s War, Part III — The Battle Of Point Pleasant

Frontier Partisan warfare in the 18th century was a litany of raid and counter-raid, town-burning, attacks on isolated farmsteads and on river traffic. There were a few, usually ineffectual, sieges of fortified settlements. Most fights involved small forces, often mere handfuls of men.

An all-day pitched battle between substantial forces slugging it out in battle lines was almost unheard of. Yet that is what happened 250 years ago, on October 10, 1774, at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers in what is today West Virginia. This epic fight would go down in history as The Battle of Point Pleasant.

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Murder, atrocity and raid had ratcheted tensions between the Ohio tribes — particularly the Shawnee and Mingo (Ohio Iroquois) — and the colony of Virginia to the shatter point. Virginia Governor, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, persuaded Virginia’s legislature, the House of Burgesses, to declare war upon the Shawnee Nation and call out the militia of the western counties. Dunmore’s motives were surely mixed — like most men of wealth and position, he lusted for the lands of the Ohio Country. He may have thought war a welcome distraction from the brewing tempest of rebellion that was increasingly sweeping down the Atlantic seaboard from turbulent Boston. But in all fairness, the Governor seems to have been sincerely concerned for the security of the western counties of the colony for which he was responsible.

The security problem was real. Brutal attacks were becoming increasingly common. Indian raiders — prominent among them the aggrieved Mingo Logan — were killing settlers as far south as the Holston River.

Dunmore wasn’t going to run the war from behind a desk in Williamsburg. He took the field at the head of an army that planned to move out of Fort Pitt (recently renamed Fort Dunmore in a land dispute with Pennsylvania), proceeding down the Ohio River to a jumping-off point to penetrate the interior and attack the Shawnee towns. A second force, dubbed the Southern Army, was raised from the counties in the interior of western Virginia. They were to march to the northwest to Point Pleasant to rendezvous with the Dunmore. Their combined force of some 2,800 militiamen was formidable, an overwhelming threat to the homeland of the Ohio tribes.

In the face of this overwhelming force, the Shawnee Principal Chief Hokoleskwa, known to the Virginians as Cornstalk, urged his people to negotiate a peace. The Shawnee and their Mingo neighbors were having none of it. Too many warriors — and women and children, too — had been murdered on the river, and the Long Knives needed to be held to account. There must be war. Cornstalk sought peace, but he was no pacifist. If the will of his people was war, he would lead them into it — and he would lead with personal inspiration and remarkable tactical skill.

The roster of both armies is a roster of legends. Among Cornstalk’s warriors were Blue Jacket, who would be a primary militant leader of the native resistance for the next 30 years, and Pucksinwa, father of Tecumseh. Logan’s sister Nonhelema — so physically imposing that she was known as the Grenadier Squaw — was among the Shawnees, as was the well-known chief Silverheels. With Lord Dunmore was Daniel Morgan, who would become the most brilliant tactician of the American Revolution. George Rogers Clark, who would win the Northwest Territory for the United States, was another company commander.

Among the Southern Army, commanded by Col. Andrew Lewis, were men like Issac Shelby, who would lead the Overmountain Men at the critical Revolutionary War battle at King’s Mountain, and James Robertson and John Sevier, who would become the founding fathers of Tennessee.

Scouts maintained communications between Lewis and Dunmore — men like Simon Kenton (then going under the alias of Simon Butler) and Simon Girty, who would become an infamous renegade in 1778.

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Col. Andrew Lewis led about 1,100 militiamen from counties deep in the Virginia backcountry in the rugged march to Point Pleasant. Lewis had built a number of frontier defenses under the direction of George Washington during the French & Indian War, and had led a mixed militia and Cherokee force against the Shawnee during that conflict. He was a stern, rather humorless man, but well-respected by his captains and their men.

One of those captains was his brother Charles Lewis, an ace Frontier Partisan who had the rare distinction of several times actually catching up to Indian raiders and rescuing captives and recovering property during the war. He was a completely different character to his brother — jovial and cheerful, and much-beloved among the community members who made up his command.

Historian James K. Swisher describes the men of the Southern Army:

Lewis’s militia force was composed of landholding farmers from the backcountry Shenandoah Valley counties of Augusta, Fincastle, and Botetourt. These spacious, thinly populated counties provided their citizens with freedom from the bonds of authority, encouraging the development of Mr. Jefferson’s ideal “republic of farmers; the bedrock upon which the republic should be based.” Provincially absorbed in local and personal affairs, these stout backwoodsmen were only a few generations removed from their Celtic or Germanic roots. Yet already they were expert hunters, skilled in the use of their long rifles, and accustomed to living on the disordered borderlands of civilization where violence was a way of life. Most developed a rural individualistic lifestyle supported by their belief in a strong, evangelical, protestant God and an equally intense distrust of any authority figure. They were almost impossible to discipline, as armies were wont to attempt, but could prove terrible, violent, and effective soldiers if properly motivated. Uninhibited, they replied to the war-whoop of the Shawnee with the long-drawn hallo of the hunter.

Lewis’s force arrived at Point Pleasant on October 6, 1774. He was angered to discover from scouts that, instead of rendezvousing with him at Point Pleasant, Dunmore had decided to turn into the interior of Ohio to attack the Shawnee towns. Lewis was to follow on and link up the forces in Ohio.

Lewis made camp at the point of land where the Kanawha River met the Ohio to rest his men and await the arrival of several hundred militiamen trailing several days behind.

Meanwhile, Cornstalk’s scouts had been keeping careful track of both forces. The Shawnee leader determined to attack the Long Knife forces in detail, seeking to surprise and overwhelm the Southern Army. Cornstalk had approximately 800 warriors of the Shawnee and Mingo at his command. Only a few times during the war for the Ohio River frontier would the native resistance field such a substantial force.

On October 9, they made a nighttime crossing of the Ohio several miles above Point Pleasant, and began to move on Lewis’ encampment.

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6 a.m., October 10, 1774

Lewis’s militiamen were sick of stringy dried beef and bread. Two of the Southern Army’s scouts, Joseph Hughey and James Mooney, headed out to scare up a deer or a turkey or two. They ran into bigger game than they were ready for. Cornstalk’s force was moving into position to advance on Lewis’ camp. The Shawnee leader hoped to catch Lewis unawares, to overwhelm and  slaughter the Long Knives in their camp. A white man living among the Shawnee, Tavener Ross, raised his rifle and drilled Joseph Hughey. James Mooney took to his heels and ran back to camp, telling Lewis that he had run into “five acres of Indians.”

The militiamen were just turning out in the misty morning. Lewis dispatched the men who were ready to go in two parallel columns to conduct a reconnaissance in force.

Recognizing that he’d lost the element of surprise, and aware from his scouts that the Long Knives were advancing in his direction, Cornstalk deployed his warriors in a loose line of battle among the trees. As the columns advanced into range, the Shawnee and Mingo fighters fired a volley and then another. Many militiamen fell at this first fire — but the columns did not break and run. The men “treed” — dispersing into cover and concealment in the woods and firing back at the Indians.

The battle had commenced.

The mode of combat was anomalous for Frontier Partisan warfare. Under normal circumstances, having lost the element of surprise, but having inflicted casualties, a native force would break off the engagement. But the Shawnee and Mingo believed they were facing an existential threat to their homes, and they buckled down and slugged it out with the Long Knives. They attacked repeatedly and aggressively, into rifle fire, and pushed the  Virginians back. Some of the fighting was at extremely close range, and it was savage, with men furiously loading and firing point blank at their foes, while others grappled and hacked at each other with tomahawks.

Charles Lewis took a shot to the guts. He handed off his rifle and staggered back to camp, where he announced that he had dispatched at least one warrior to eternity before him, then died. Lewis was one of many captains felled by Indian fire, and their loss made it difficult for the militiamen to form and stabilize a line of battle. Gradually, they did so, and began to push the warriors back.

Realizing that his warriors could not break the Virginians’ line, nor turn its flanks anchored on the Ohio on one side and a ridgeline on the other, Cornstalk began an orderly retreat. Lt. Isaac Shelby led a contingent of militiamen up a steep ridge on the Indians’ left flank, and his militiamen poured enfilade fire into the woods below. The range was too long to do serious damage, but the fire gave impetus to the Shawnee retreat.

As night fell, the firing diminished, and the militiamen gradually realized that the Indians had slipped back across the Ohio. The Southern Army had won the field.

The cost was very heavy. Some 75 men were dead, and another 149 wounded — enough to theoretically render the force combat ineffective. The militiamen took 32 Indian scalps and displayed them on a pole along the river. There were probably more Indian dead who were carried off the battlefield. The Shawnee and Mingo had suffered heavily. They retreated to their towns, deeply afraid that the Long Knives would soon be upon them.

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The Southern Army buried their dead — among them many officers. Those men were settlement leaders, and their loss was a stunning blow not only to the force, but to the community that produced it. The wounded suffered horribly, with virtually no medical aid.

Despite their losses, the army prepared to cross the Ohio to link up with Dunmore’s force and move on the Shawnee towns.

Little did they know that the war was all but over on the dark & bloody river…