The ground fog was thick off the Ohio; the air was chilly on that early October morning. Two groups of hunters moved north along the river in the pre-dawn darkness, hoping to shoot a deer for their breakfast. Instead, they stumbled across something unexpected: Shawnee warriors! The battle of Point Pleasant was on.
In the summer of 1774, exactly 250 years ago and on the very eve of the American Revolution, the Virginia Colony went to war, but not with the British. In fact, the colonists at this stage still considered themselves to be British. Virginia went to war that summer against the Shawnee, Mingo, Wyandot, and other Native American tribal nations west of the Appalachian Mountains. As wars go, this wasn’t much of one, lasting barely six months and with only one decisive battle.
It stemmed from what one side called emigration and what the other considered encroachment. Bodies of English settlers, in ever increasing numbers, were crossing the mountains in hopes of settling land in the Ohio River Valley. This was territory that had been claimed by the French and transferred over to the British at the end of the Seven Year’s War. To the tribal nations in the Ohio Valley, like the powerful Shawnee, it was an affront. The settlers were looked upon as invaders, encroaching upon ancestral hunting grounds. Inevitably, the stage was set for violent and bloody clashes between these two peoples.
Hoping to pacify the frontier and establish once and for all Virginia’s jurisdiction over the Ohio Valley, the colony’s royal governor, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, asked the House of Burgesses to declare war and he called out the Virginia militia. In the years to come, many of the men serving in these militia companies would go on to distinguish themselves as officers and soldiers in the Continental army during the Revolution. For them, the fighting on Virginia’s frontier, in what came to be called Dunmore’s War, would serve as a dress rehearsal. This would be the last time in our nation’s history that a colonial American militia would march to war under the banner of the British crown.
At the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, the Iroquois peoples of the powerful Six Nations sold lands south of the Ohio River to the British, from Fort Pitt (modern-day Pittsburgh) down to the Louisa River (now the Kentucky River). This was territory the Iroquois believed to be part of their domain. For money and gifts totaling around £10,000, the Six Nations ceded to the Crown lands making up the modern states of Kentucky and West Virginia. The Shawnee and other western tribes in the Ohio Valley were outraged as white hunters, surveyors, land agents and settlers began to pour over the mountains. A trade-off of terror began, with both sides viciously attacking the other.
In the late summer of 1773, the first planned emigration into the new territory of Kentucky was undertaken. A prominent leader of this enterprise was Captain William Russell, a substantial landowner in southwestern Virginia and a magistrate of the newly created Fincastle County. Another organizer and the man who would act as guide for this first emigration attempt, made up of his and several other families from the Yadkin River Valley in North Carolina, was an obscure hunter named Daniel Boone. Boone led a party of 50 men, women and children through Powell’s Valley in southwestern Virginia, hoping to pass through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. On October 10, just three miles behind Boone’s main party, his 17-year-old son James, 17-year-old Henry Russell, and a small group of young men, bringing up cattle and other supplies, were attacked by 19 Shawnee, Cherokee, and Delaware warriors. Both Boone and Russell were shot and hideously tortured to death. Word of the attack spread, causing the elder Boone’s party to turn back, abandoning all hopes of settling in Kentucky.
In late April of 1774, at a white trading post on the south bank of the Ohio River called Baker’s Bottom, several peaceful men and women of the Mingo tribe were murdered and scalped by white settlers believed to be under the leadership of a man named Daniel Greathouse. Among the victims were family members of a Mingo leader named Talgayeeta; he was known to the English as John Logan. As a result of the attack, the once peaceful Logan swore vengeance and, accepting help from the Shawnee, began indiscriminately attacking isolated white farmsteads along the Monongahela River throughout the summer.
With word of the atrocities reaching Williamsburg, Governor Dunmore sent out a circular letter to all county lieutenants to be on the alert, build small forts and blockhouses for more security and to send out rangers to watch the trails. He was growing frustrated with the Virginia House of Burgesses for not creating regular, provincial military units to defend the frontier. The burgesses were preoccupied with the political unrest in the east, mainly due to parliamentary taxation. They passed a resolution to observe a day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer in response to the Boston Port Bill, which had resulted from the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. On May 26, Lord Dunmore dissolved the House of Burgesses and under his authority as royal governor, mobilized the Virginia Militia.
In late July came the first action of the militia. An expedition against an important Shawnee village on the Muskingum River, Wakatomika, was led by Major Angus McDonald. At Fort Fincastle, near modern-day Wheeling, WVA, McDonald’s battalion of 400 men pushed off in canoes and small boats on the Ohio River. Among his company commanders were two future Patriot leaders of the Revolutionary War, George Rogers Clark and Daniel Morgan. Combat with the Shawnee was minimal, although McDonald’s force did suffer some casualties. Wakatomika was plundered and burned, along with several other villages before the militiamen returned to Fort Fincastle. On the whole, the expedition had accomplished very little and, instead of curbing the Native American attacks on settlers, actually caused the attacks to increase. Lord Dunmore now knew that overwhelming force would be needed.
In the late summer of 1774, Dunmore authorized the creation of two divisions of his militia, north and south. At Winchester, he mustered around 700 men from Virginia’s eastern counties. The Governor was disappointed, however, to learn that his invitation to join the division, made to a retired British army officer living in Berkeley County, was turned down. He was Horatio Gates, future major general in the Continental army, victor at the battle of Saratoga in 1777, and the man who suffered a devastating loss to the British at Camden in August 1780.
To the south, at Staunton, VA, militia Colonel Andrew Lewis, a future brigadier general during the Revolution, mustered ultimately around 1,100 men from the western counties of Augusta, Botetourt, Fincastle, Bedford, and Culpepper. With negotiations failing, by late August, Lord Dunmore put the Northern and Southern Divisions into motion. Their plan was to rendezvous on the Ohio River and march on the upper Shawnee villages on the Scioto River, in modern-day Ohio. Dunmore’s Northern Division marched west from Winchester to Fort Pitt, then down the Ohio to Fort Fincastle. There, 500 more men joined the division. Many of Dunmore’s troops had no weapons so he sent back to Williamsburg for 300 stands of arms. Dunmore’s second-in-command was Colonel Adam Stephen, another future major general in Washington’s Continental army. On October 2, the division moved farther south down the Ohio, to Fort Gower on Hockhocking Creek.
Colonel Andrew Lewis
From Staunton, Andrew Lewis marched his Southern Division west to a place called Great Levels, on the Greenbriar River. He named it Camp Union, on the site of modern-day Lewisburg, WVA. He then headed south, hitting the Kanawha River and following it west to where it empties into the Ohio at a place called Point Pleasant. Lewis’ lead elements arrived there on October 6 and began building barricades from the Ohio River on their left around to the Kanawha, which was at their backs. They also built pens and corrals for the livestock that would feed Lewis’ companies.
Leading the Shawnee and several other allied tribes as head war chief was a man named Hokoleskwa, also called Cornstalk. He commanded a force of around 1,000 warriors, which possibly included the future Shawnee war chief, Blue Jacket. Though his army was equal in size to both of the Virginia militia divisions individually, Cornstalk would be greatly outnumbered were those divisions to rendezvous, as planned. He decided, then, to attack each division separately and destroy them in detail. Being closer to the Southern Division, he chose to attack it first. On the night of October 9, Cornstalk rafted his army across the Ohio River at Old Town Creek, about five miles above Col. Lewis’ encampment. They then marched south to within two miles of the militia.
In camp, Lewis issued a rather unpopular order. Feeding his troops from the livestock he had brought along from Camp Union, Lewis ordered the oldest and poorest quality beeves butchered first. Not having a taste for stringy beef, two separate, two-man hunting parties set out before dawn on the foggy morning of October 10, moving north along different paths, looking for deer. After walking nearly two miles, both hunting parties stumbled upon Cornstalk’s warriors. Shots were fired and one of the hunters, Pvt. Joseph Hughey of Fincastle, was killed. The other three made their escape and brought news of the enemy presence back to Col. Lewis.
Thinking this was possibly a large scouting party, Lewis ordered two detachments of 150 men each to move up and reconnoiter. On the left, close to the Ohio River, were men from Botetourt County, commanded by Col. William Fleming. On the right, farther inland, were Augusta County militiamen commanded by Lewis’ own brother, Col. Charles Lewis. Around sunrise, Cornstalk’s warriors attacked, opening a brisk fire on the Virginians. Charles Lewis was hit almost immediately, in the abdomen. While being helped back to the encampment, he called to his men: “I am wounded, but go on and be brave.” Fleming’s Botetourt men also came under fire. The militiamen were outnumbered and the Shawnee attack was so fierce that both Virginia detachments faltered and were forced to fall back, ultimately around 200 yards. William Fleming was likewise hit, with wounds to the head and left arm. He continued to direct his men, though, until weakening from his wounds. Under his own power, he walked back to the encampment. A gap in the line separated the militia detachments. Warriors began rushing forward to exploit that breach. Directing the battle from the encampment, Andrew Lewis ordered Col. John Field of Culpepper forward with 200 men to assume command on the right, with orders to extend his left flank to link up with the Botetourt contingent. Lewis sent another 200 troops to join the Botetourt men, with orders for Captain Evan Shelby to assume command on the left. With more Virginia troops becoming engaged, Cornstalk’s initial superiority in manpower was starting to fade. The tide was turning.
Under sustained fire, the militia detachments were finally able to link up. With their flanks no longer in the air, the battle line now stretched from the Ohio River over to Crooked Creek, making a flanking maneuver by the warriors next to impossible. John Field was killed; Evan Shelby took command of the entire line of battle. The fight had turned hand-to-hand. For several hours the bloody contest continued. Those Virginians who understood the Shawnee dialect afterwards claimed they had heard the sound of Cornstalk’s voice over the din of battle encouraging his warriors to “Fight and be strong”. Hand-to-hand combat, by its very nature, can be brutal and bloody. Both sides were suffering severe losses as the contest continued but Cornstalk made the decision to stay in the fight at Point Pleasant in order to inflict more damage to Lewis’ men. Withdrawing from the battle in order to fight another day put Cornstalk’s forces under a decided disadvantage. It would allow the wings of the Virginia militia to combine, closer to the Shawnee villages. He had to continue to fight as long as possible. But after so many hours, the allied warriors were beginning to falter, falling back under the pressure from the militia. The long rifles of the Virginians were now taking a heavy toll.
Col. Lewis sent orders to Capt. Shelby to advance his troops. With this surge, Cornstalk’s braves began to give more ground. Lewis earlier had ordered three companies of Augusta militia to move to the right, along the heights above Crooked Creek in order to flank the enemy. Now they opened fire, surprising the warriors on Cornstalk’s left. With knowledge that more militiamen were coming up from Camp Union, Cornstalk had no choice but to disengage at this point. Close to sunset, after hours of bloody combat, Cornstalk’s army began to withdraw, hoping to get back across the Ohio. They largely carried off their dead, throwing some of the bodies into the river to hide their losses. They were successful, however, and made the north bank of the river but Chief Cornstalk’s attempt to destroy the Southern Division had failed.
The Virginia militia had won the field, but at a terrible cost. Andrew Lewis lost around 75 men killed in the engagement with 140 more wounded. It’s believed that Cornstalk’s casualties were similar. Just before the battle, Lord Dunmore had moved his division inland, closer to the Shawnee villages, and established Camp Charlotte at Pickaway Plains. With his allied warriors not willing to engage further, Cornstalk had no choice but to initiate peace talks. His decision did, however, save the upper Shawnee towns from destruction.
With the subsequent Treaty of Camp Charlotte, Lord Dunmore’s War came to an end, but peace on the frontier would be fleeting. Within six months, shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, plunging America into war with Great Britain. More settlements were established in Kentucky and Shawnee raids would continue throughout the next twenty years.
With the coming of the American Revolution, Lord Dunmore himself would eventually be forced out of Virginia, pursued by some of the same militia officers he had commanded in the war that took his name.
For more about Point Pleasant and Dunmore’s War, check out our Rev War Revelry with Dr. Glenn Williams on our Facebook page or You Tube Channel.
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