Lord Dunmore's War

[Keith]

Could anyone give me some information on Lord Dunmore's War? I thought it was only fought in Virginia/Kentucky, But some sources also say it fought in the whole old Northwest. Could someone please just give me an overview of the conflict, that would be great.

And why hasn't [glow=red,2,300]TEXT[/glow]

[Matthew S. Schweitzer]

Here is a fairly concise summary of the conflict from the Ohio Historical Society's website:

In 1768, the Iroquois Indians and the English signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768). In this agreement, the Iroquois gave the English all of their lands east and south of the Ohio River. While the Iroquois agreed to give up this land, most Ohio native peoples did not, including the Delaware, the Mingo, and the Shawnee.

White settlers immediately moved into the region. By the spring of 1774, violence erupted as these tribes, especially the Shawnee, tried to drive the English colonists back east of the Appalachian Mountains. On May 3, 1774, a group of English colonists, seeking vengeance, killed 11 Mingo Indians. At least two of them were relatives of Chief Logan, leader of the Mingos at Yellow Creek (near modern-day Steubenville). Upon hearing of the murders, many Mingos and Shawnees wanted revenge. Some, like Shawnee chief Cornstalk, did not want war. They promised to protect English fur traders in the Ohio Country since the traders had nothing to do with the murders. Logan, however, was not satisfied. Shawnee and Mingo chiefs let him attack the British colonists living south of the Ohio River who were responsible for his family's murders.

Logan took approximately two dozen warriors to take revenge on the colonists. He did not go into Kentucky, however, but marched into western Pennsylvania. There, his followers killed 13 settlers before returning west. Capt. John Connolly, commander of Fort Pitt, immediately prepared to attack the Ohio Country natives. Lord John Murray Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, offered his colony's help. Dunmore hoped to keep Pennsylvania from expanding into what are now West Virginia and Kentucky. He believed the best way to do this was to place Virginia militiamen in these regions. He also hoped to benefit by opening these lands to white settlement-in other words, the colonial version of real estate speculation.

In August 1774, Pennsylvania militia entered the Ohio Country and quickly destroyed seven Mingo villages that the Indians had recently abandoned. At the same time, Lord Dunmore sent 1,000 men to the Little Kanawha River in what is now West Virginia to build a fort and to attack the Shawnees. Cornstalk had a change of heart when the soldiers invaded the Ohio Country and dispatched nearly 1,000 Shawnee to drive them out.

The forces met on October 10, 1774, at what became known as the Battle of Point Pleasant. After several hours of intense fighting, the English drove Cornstalk's followers north of the Ohio River. Dunmore quickly followed the Shawnees across the river into the Ohio Country. Upon nearing the Shawnee villages on the Pickaway Plains, Dunmore stopped and asked the Shawnees to discuss a peace treaty. The Shawnees agreed, but during the peace talks, Col. Andrew Lewis and a detachment of Virginia militia that Dunmore had left behind at Point Pleasant crossed the Ohio River and destroyed several Shawnee villages. Fearing that Dunmore intended to kill them, the Shawnees made peace before more blood could be shed.

Under this treaty, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix - 1784 (aka "1784 Treaty with the Six Nations"), the Shawnee gave up all lands east and south of the Ohio River. This was the first time that natives who actually lived in the Ohio Country agreed to give up some of their land. They also had to promise to return all white captives and no longer attack English colonists travelling down the Ohio River.

Dunmore's War showed how weak and divided the Ohio Country Indians were. Even members of the same tribe could not agree on how to deal with white settlers moving into the area. They had managed to keep their lands north and west of the Ohio River, but as thousands more colonists came to the Ohio Country, it would be only a matter of time until the natives lost this land as well.

Lord Dunmore's War was a short but bloody conflict essentially between the Shawnee and Mingos and the Virginians moving into the Kentucky lands. The murder of Chief Logan's family by frontier ruffians lead to the open outbreak of a war that could have been avoided. But there were also subtle politcal issues at stake here as well as the Virginians were trying to keep Pennsylvania from claiming Ohio lands, and some believe that Virginians helped to deliberately instigate the fighting in order to claim Ohio for themselves. After the Battle of Point Pleasant, Lord Dunmore marched his army into Ohio and met with the Indians at Camp Charlotte near present Circleville, OH where the Indians essentially agreed to give up Kentucky to the whites, although this treaty was never made official due to the outbreak of the Revolution the following spring. Only Chief Logan refused to be party to the Treaty of Camp Charlotte and in response to the demand from Lord Dunmore that he attend the treaty council, he gave his famous speech
www.hup.harvard.edu/features/waljef/logan.html.

Some people consider Lord Dunmore's War a precursor to the American Revolution, but it really was the last of the colonial wars in the west.