Lord Dunmore's War, also known as Dunmore's War, was a brief conflict in the fall of 1774 between the British Colony of Virginia and the Shawnee and Mingo in the trans-Appalachia region of the colony south of the Ohio River. The war lasted from May to October 1774. The governor of Virginia during the conflict was John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, who in May 1774, asked the House of Burgesses to declare a state of war with the Shawnee and Mingo and call out the Virginia militia.
The conflict resulted from escalating violence between white settlers, who, in accordance with previous treaties, especially the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768), were exploring and moving into land south of the Ohio River (modern West Virginia, southwestern Pennsylvania, and Kentucky), and the Ohio Country Shawnee who had historical hunting rights in the south of Ohio lands of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Resulting cross-river attacks by the Shawnee caused war to be declared "to pacify the hostile Indian war bands". The war ended soon after Virginia's victory in the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774. In the ensuing Treaty of Camp Charlotte, the Native Americans surrendered their hunting rights south of the Ohio, and agreed to cease attacks upon travelers on the river and recognize the river, running nearly north–south at its eastern end, as the boundary between the Indigenous lands of the Ohio Country to the west, and the British colonies to the east. This was a major resetting of the Appalachian boundary defined by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which ended the French and Indian War.
Although the Indigenous leaders signed the treaty, conflict within the Indigenous tribes soon broke out. Some tribesmen felt the treaty sold out their claims and opposed it, and others believed that another war would mean only further losses of territory to the settlers. When the American Revolutionary War broke out between the American settlers and the British in 1775, the war factions of the Indian nations quickly gained power. They encouraged the various Indigenous nations to ally with the British during the war, initiating the Cherokee-American wars that lasted nearly two decades.
Settlement and resistance in the Kentucke country
The area south of the Ohio River and west of the Kanawha River (long referred to as Kentucke country after a region around the namesake river in what is today eastern Kentucky) had been claimed by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy since their conquest in the 17th-century Beaver Wars. Although they were the most powerful Indian nation in the Northern Colonies, other tribes also made claims to the area and often hunted the region.
When, in accordance with the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768), British officials acquired the land south of the Ohio River from the Haudenosaunee, many other Ohio Indians who had hunted in these lands refused to accede to the treaty and prepared to defend their hunting rights."I likewise advised them to withdraw the Senecas of Ohio from thence and settle them nearer their natural friends as at present by their Connections with others they bring disgrace & suspicion on their own confederacy, and this I was the readier induced to do, as Kayashota the chief of those on Ohio, a man of universal influence was present & had privately assured me that it was agreeable to him." Sir William Johnson to the Earl of Dartmouth, (Johnson Hall, Nov. 4, 1772) Johnson, Sir William in: Documents, Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Lon.Docs.: XLIII), vol. VIII, pp. 314-317. 1996, Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology and The Trustees of Indiana University "Indian Business at present of most Moment is the Northern and Western Confederacies. The Northern Nations ceded Tracts of Land at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, inconvenient to the Indians of the Ohio, which exasperated them to a great Degree, but finding themselves too weak alone for the six Nations, they have been, and appear still to be endeavoring to form a general Union of all the Western & Southern Nations, and the Shawnese are supposed to be the Contrivers of the Scheme. The six Nations in Return have strengthened their Alliance with the Canada and other Tribes. The six Nations have by Deputy's sent to Scioto threatened much, but Nothing has been undertaken openly on either Side...It has very often been reported, that the French and Spaniards have excited the Nations against the English, and been the Authors of many Mischiefs, tho' it has not been discovered that the Spanish Government has had any Concern therein. But it is probable the Traders at the Illinois as well British, as Spanish Subjects have been guilty of such iniquitous Practices to keep the trade to themselves...", Gage to Haldimand, New York June 3rd 1773, Gage, Thomas in: Library of Congress; British Library, Add MS 21665, fols. 141-142. The Ohio Valley–Great Lakes Ethnohistory Archives: The Miami Collection, 1996, Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology and The Trustees of Indiana University
At the forefront of this resistance were the Shawnee, the most powerful among the allied Algonquin tribes of the Ohio Valley. They soon organized a large confederacy of Shawnee-Ohio Confederated Indians who were opposed to the British and the Haudenosaunee in order to enforce their claims.Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 42–43. British officials worked to isolate the Shawnee diplomatically from other Indian nations. When full-blown hostilities broke out within a few years, the Shawnee would find that they faced the Virginia militia with few allies.
Following the 1768 treaty, colonial explorers, surveyors, and settlers began pouring into the region.Letter to the Earl of Dartmouth, (Johnson Hall, Sept. 22, 1773), Johnson, Sir William in: Docs. Rel. to the Col. Hist. of the State N. Y. (London Docs.: XLIII): VIII, pp. 395-397 and in The Papers of Sir William Johnson, vol. 8, pp. 888-891. 1996, Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology and The Trustees of Indiana University "The Shawanese on the whole appear at present the most attentive to the Six Nations Councils of any to the Southward, but they are much alarmed at the numbers who go from Virginia &c in pursuit of new settlements leaving large Tracts of Country unsettled behind them, and who I am sorry to find an not be restrained being numerous, & remote from the influence and Seats of Government, and the old claims of Virginia conspiring to encourage them, so long as they confine themselves within the ceded Tract...I gave them of His Majestys Intentions to form a Colony on Ohio, and of the evacuating of Fort Pitt, that they were very thankfull for the whole they had thereof and hoped (page 890) that the person appointed to govern there would prove a wise man and restrain the abuses in Trade & irregularities committed by the Frontier Inhabitants,..." Sir Johnson Letter to the Earl of Dartmouth, (Johnson Hall, Sept. 22, 1773), Johnson, Sir William in: Docs. Rel. to the Col. Hist. of the State N. Y. (London Docs.: XLIII): VIII, pp. 395-397, and in The Papers of Sir William Johnson, vol. 8, pp. 888-891. 1996, Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology and The Trustees of Indiana University This immediately brought them into direct contact with Native Americans of the upper Ohio Valley, especially the Allegheny River. George Washington wrote in his journal for November 17, 1770, "The Indians who are very dexterous, even their women, in the Management of Canoes, have there Hunting Camps & Cabins all along the River for the convenience of Transporting their Skins by Water to Market."
The Boone incident In September 1773, noted frontiersman Daniel Boone led a group of about 50 emigrants up the Powell River valley in Tennessee in the first attempt by white colonists to establish a settlement in Kentucke. On October 9, 1773, just south of the Cumberland Gap, Boone's oldest son James, age 16, and a small group of men and boys who were retrieving supplies were attacked by a band of Lenape, Shawnees, and Cherokees. They had decided "to send a message of their opposition to settlement..."John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone James Boone and Henry Russell, a teenage son of future Revolutionary War officer William Russell, were captured and tortured to death. The brutality of the killings shocked the settlers along the frontier, and Boone's party abandoned their expedition. By December, the incident had been reported in Baltimore and Philadelphia newspapers.
The deaths among Boone's party were among the seminal events that culminated in Lord Dunmore's War. For the next several years, Indian nations opposed to the treaty continued to attack settlers, ritually mutilated and tortured to death the surviving men, and took the women and children into slavery.Faragher, Daniel Boone, 89–96, quote on 93; Lofaro, American Life, 44–49.
Boone's expedition was the first of several as part of a scheme with land speculator Richard Henderson to establish the Transylvania Colony in Kentucke.
Early Allegheny settlements
Starting in 1769, Ebenezer Zane, afterwards a famed "Indian fighter" and guide, known for Zane's trace, had established a settlement on Wheeling Creek just over the Pennsylvania border on the Allegheny he named "Zanesburg" (now Wheeling, West Virginia). Later, Fort Fincastle was sited there.
Among the early settlers of the Allegheny valley beyond Pennsylvania was Captain Michael Cresap, the owner of a trading post at Redstone Old Fort (now Brownsville, Pennsylvania) on the Monongahela River. Under authority of the colonial government of Virginia, Cresap had taken control of extensive tracts of land at and below the mouth of Middle Island Creek (now St. Marys, West Virginia.) He went there in the early spring of 1774 with a party of men to settle his holdings.
The Clark Expedition to Kentucky In spring of 1774, a group that included George Rogers Clark, who later became a general during the Revolutionary War, had gathered at the mouth of the Little Kanawha River (now Parkersburg, West Virginia). They were waiting there for the arrival of other Virginians expected to join them before they moved downriver to settle lands in Kentucky. Clark's group began to hear reports that hostile Indians were robbing and occasionally killing traders, surveyors and others traveling down the Ohio. So they invited another settler, Captain Michael Cresap, who also intended to go to Kentucky, and who had combat experience, to join the group.