This is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

This program features historical reenactment that include Native American characters and cultural representations.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting has made every effort to hire Native American performers to portray key historical figures.

However, not all participants appearing in these reenactments are Native American.

Every effort has been made to ensure that all portrayals are handled with accuracy, respect, and cultural sensitivity.

Through the use of Native American consultants.

We are taught in school certain places that have incredible meaning, whether it's Boston, Philadelphia, but we don't really know the whole story of the places around them.

The history of West Virginia, as it applies to the Civil War is pretty obvious.

But the events that unfolded in western Virginia in the Revolutionary War are worth knowing.

Fights are happening here.

That allows things in the East Coast to do what they're going to do without interference, without somebody showing up behind them and causing them a real, real problem.

And what you need to start with to tell the story is The French and Indian War.

That ends up making a better story I think.

the whole French and Indian War, which was a war that escalated into a conflict for the control of North America, began in Appalachia, and it began because they were trying to get control of the river systems, because if you control the river systems in Appalachia, you could control the trade in Appalachia, because that was the only way in and out.

In the mid 18th century what now is present day West Virginia is a very remote, mountainous, heavily forested with old growth forest.

It is covered by a system of Indian trails that have been utilized by native peoples to trade and sort of move goods.

It's important for several reasons.

First of all, the fur industry, the fur, the wampum trade that was just this kind of a gold mine of potential revenue for the French and British Empires.

So the Seven Years War, the French and Indian War, as it is called in North America, is a conflict that really started in conflicts of round control over the forks of the three rivers around where present day Pittsburgh is.

It is part of a larger conflict for sort of imperial control of North America between the Great Britain and France and their allied Native American tribes.

So they began to build a series of forts.

And of course, the big conflict happened after that and.. But if you can control the river systems in these mountains, then you could control this very lucrative fur, wampum, deerskin trade, which was a major moneymaker by the middle of the 1700s.

The initial engagement is really just a skirmish an one might also say like a small scale massacre, but of course involves a very important figure in American history.

And that's George Washington, who is l.. this detachment of troops into the Ohio Valley.

They're also accompanied by a detachment of Native American warriors led by a Mingo leader who is often called the Half-King.

His name is Tanacharison.

They end up ambushing a French patrol.

They pin them down with a small arms fire, and then the French leader is ultimately executed on the battlefield by Tanacharison.

French and Indian War has these really sort of local beginnings in which tensions between Virginians, French, Mingo, Shawnees and Delawares all sort of come to a head in this particular corner of what is later West Virginia and Ohio.

And this is what kind of sparks this global conflagration.

Many of the conflicts involve sort of large raids by the Shawnee, Delaware Indians against sort of the expanding settlements that had started to expand west from Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 1730s and 40s.

The war here in what's now West Virginia is actually one of depopulation, really, when the conflict starts in 1754 1755, after Braddock's defeat near Pittsburgh.

Much of the region is depopulated.

Settlers move back towards the eastern seaboard as the conflict raged.

As a result of the Seven Years War, the French and Indian War, there is a greater sense of solidarity and connection between the colonists.

So the war ends is a victory for the British, partly in the theater of Canada and here in the North American continent.

When they defeat the French army, the French vacate the largest fortification of the region at Fort Duquesne, which had been kind of the central point of sort of the escalation of the conflict.

It is renamed Fort Pitt.

So in the aftermath of the French and Indian War, many of the soldiers who fought got land grants for their service, often in what's now western Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Many of them maybe didn't eventually plan to settle, so these grants were often bought up by influential people in eastern Virginia, in the Philadelphia region.

And like any other sort of corporation of the time, they often are pulled together in either one person's interests or multiple people's interests.

So we have prominent Americans like George Washington, who had been the head of the Virginia militia, who over time acquires a large number of these land grants.

And in the years before the American Revolution, spends a lot of time surveying land, particularly in the Kanawha Valley in the upper Ohio Valley, trying to lay claim to the best bottomlands for himself and get formal deed to them.

You have folks like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson who are very involved in this type of land speculation as well.

And that process feeds into something that had been going on before the French and Indian War, where you had sort of rival land companies trying to lay claim to sort of various large tracts of land in what's now West Virginia.

They're like corporations, their land speculation corporations.

And they, you know, the goal of these land companies is obviously to buy as much land as possible and sell it at a profit, but they have to deal with a lot of bureaucracy and red tape.

They have to deal with colonial land offices.

They have all, you know, Pennsylvania, and you bo.. If you buy a whole bunch of land and the Ohio Indians are angry with you about it, it's not Pennsylvania or Virginia's responsibility to send them a militia out there to protect your land claim.

So you've got to be willing to protect your land claim on your own as a priva.. So all these land companies, they want to call the shots.

All of these efforts to create their own colonies is really all about political self-determination.

The most prominent of these efforts, this corporate sort of efforts, is with a company that is wanting to lay claim to territory called Vandalia.

Vandalia was this attempt by Ben Franklin and others in Pennsylvania to create a 14th colony.

They called it Vandalia because of the king's wife claimed lineage from the Vandals from back from Roman times.

And so they did it to flatter the Queen.

And they thought that that might get them some a good way for towards recognition.

But they wanted to create a 14th colony with Point Pleasant at its capital.

The interesting things about the colony or the proposed colony as it was, is that they didn't really plan to move out there and live there themselves You know, Ben Franklin didn't didn't plan to move to Point Pleasant.

And even Washington, who was not a part of the Vandalia effort, but he wanted lands ou.. He didn't want to live there.

He wanted he wanted lands out there.

It also galvanizes Lord Dunmore and Washington and other ones who thought, wait a minute.

This is this should be Virginia.

Needless to say, many settlers from the eastern part of Virginia are beginning to move further west.

So this is where, for the first time, we start seeing larger settlements starting to develop in throughout the 1760s into the 1770s, in what's now present day West Virginia.

So essentially, in 1763, you've got a powder keg on the western frontier with Native Americans still angry at the encroachment of whites on their land, and that violence that occurs, that natural violence that occurs, creates economic disruption for the political and economic power brokers, whether they're back in Williamsburg or whether they're in London.

King George the Third issues the proclamation of 1763.

The British have spent a lot of money on this war.

They need revenue to pay for the war.

They also want to stabilize the frontier because they want to establish commerce with the Native Americans.

They want to get the fur trade and everything going a.. So they want to bring about some form of stability on the frontier.

They don't want settlers moving further west and coming into conflict with the Native Americans.

So because they want there to be some kind of stability in the region, so they open up Canada and Florida to settlement the settlers who fought and bled and died in this war believed that they were fighting the war so that they could move west.

And now this proclamation is setting up a line through the Appalachian Mountains that you can't go west of.

And of course, then the tax.. revenue for the war is something that the settlers didn't bargain for.

And so they're saying, why did we fight this war in the first place if we're not going to get out of what we originally hoped?

And so this is what begins to galvanize public support against the British crown.

Not immediately.

People aren't talking about independence ri.. Of course, but they are beginning to have serious grievances with the British government in London.

The proclamation of 1763 is the first of a series of treaties, part of a larger effort to try to keep the peace on the Western frontier, but also subtly push the line of western settlement further west.

Certainly to the Ohio, is the ultimate goal.

And there's a series of these treaties.

Probably the one that has the most impact on western Virginia is the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

Fort Stanwix is a fort up in New York where the Six Nations meet with Pennsylvania, New York and Virginia officials.

And there's tremendous pressure to sell their Western land to these these colonial governments because Western land speculators, Western land companies want this land.

So the Treaty of Fort Stanwix essentially pushes the original proclamation line further west to the Ohio River.

Then you have the Treaty of Hard labor, right?

The Treaty of Hard Labor is further south, and that deals with the Cherokee and the Cherokee, and that ceded off lands, basically all lands that were in southern West Virginia.

The Cherokee at one time were claiming lands up to basically the Kanawha River, and they were claiming everything south that is in West Virginia.

And they gave up or conceded those lands, except for a couple areas in the corner of West Virginia to that.

So the Cherokee were kind of put out of the picture.

But what this does is it kind of clears their claims out of southern West Virginia and then opens up the way for a flood of new settlers and the settlers, because of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix and the Treaty of Hard Labor, believe now that they can go as far as the Ohio River and not get attacked.

They believe at first that they're going to be safe when they go out there.

Of course, that's not going to be the case.

I mean, it's an incredibly violent place.

So there's tremendous pressure on Virginia's colonial governor, Lord Dunmore, to do something about it.

John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, .. He was born in Scotland, and he actually had a lot of military background.

When he was 15, he and his father joined up with the Jacobite revolt of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and he was actually a page for Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden, which was the last pitched battle ever fought on British soil.

After the Jacobites were defeated, he was arrested as a teenager and spent a year in the Tower of London as a prisoner, and then he was later released and served, actually went into the military and actually served in the Seven Years War.

He served in France, actually with distinction, and kind of made a name for himself a bit in the British Army.

His father and his uncle both die, which suddenly makes him the big heir to the family fortune and the family lands.

And then later on, he's going to get appointed, of course, to New York.

And then when the governor of Virginia dies, he gets put down in Virginia.

So you've got prominent Virginians who own Western land, and they want to speculate in.. They want to break it up in a small parcels sell it.

That's how you get rich.

And then you've got Western settlers, some p.. this daily threat of death from the Ohio Indians.

And then you've got others in the Virginia colonial government who just want to deal with the Western Indian problem.

So Dunmore has got this tremendous amount of pressure on him to do something about it.

He doesn't want to the British government's basic idea is the western frontier is the backwater of the British Empire.

Why are we going to spend blood and treasure on it?

He begins to think about how are we going to handle it?

As he's preparing to address the problem of the Western frontier, violence kind of continues to escalate.

John Connally gets put in charge of Fort Pitt by Dunmore.

Connolly was another big land speculator, but he wanted to get that land through the Virginia colonies.

Connolly starts doing a number of things to provoke the Shawnee across the river.

He has militia fire across the river at Shawnee.

A couple of months before t.. However you want to call it.

He sends out letters to everybody in the region saying that there's a state of war existing between the tribes and the settlers, which was not the case.

But he was saying that there was a state of war that was so deeply involved in causing Chief Logan to go on the warpath and causing what would result in Dunmore's War.

Chief Logan was Cayuga chief from his earliest days in the region, was often someone who was encouraging peace, peaceful relationships, or trying to make peaceful relationships with the white settlers and land speculators in the region, and was often somebody who was seen in a very favorable light by other Native American leaders, by many white figures as well.

But Logan's family basically gets caught up in all the violence and fear and mayhem and terror that is sort of gripping white and native communities.

And his family is ultimately killed, murdered.

In what would have been common practice for a warrior leader like that of the time.

Logan sought retribution against white settlers throughout the region.

He sort of hits different settlements in what's now western Virginia into Pennsylvania.

He knows that this massacre could be utilized by the Virginians, by the colonial government, as recourse to engage in a much wider conflict.

Dunmore, he settles on doing something about it for a number of different reasons, but I think Western pressure to deal with the Ohio Indians is probably the most prominent one.

And his basic plan is to raise an army and march on the Ohio Indians, start with the northern Ohio Indian communities, and come down the Ohio River and tributaries and annihilate them, force them into submission, and make the western frontier safe for settlement and speculation.

I mean, that's the goal.

So what he does is Dunmore himself, raises an army, kind of the northern half of t.. And then they eventually rendezvous at Fort Pitt, which they call Fort Dunmore.

And they are going to be the northern part of the army, and they're going to travel north to south down the Ohio River.

The southern army is going to be led by a man by the name of Andrew Lewis.

Andrew Lewis is quite possibly the most significant individual in the Greenbrier Valley leading up to the American Revolution, He was a prominent militia leader during the French and Indian War.

Friend of George Washington from the Greenbrier Valley.

He will sort of bring together a variety of different sort of local regional militia groups, and they start up with Matthew Arbuckle leading them and guides them up through the Kanawha Valley towards towards Point Pleasant where they're eventually going to be meeting up with Dunmore's forces.

Now Dunmore is taking another group of milit... around Fort Pitt, and move south through Wheeling.

The two groups are going to meet up, and then they're going to go forward and advance towards Shawnee settlements in what is now Ohio.

Lewis, of course, he's got a thousand men marching through the wilderness.

He's being shadowed by Ohio Indian scouts.

They also know Dunmore's force has been delayed.

And they also very quickly realize if these two armies come together, they're going to have more warriors than we have.

And that leads us to Cornstalk this powerful and charismatic and great Shawnee warrior who is heavily influential among his people.

He's a fighter.

He had fought in Pontiac's War, so he was already familiar with conflict on the frontier.

He realizes that the Shawnee have to act, and they have to act in force, and they have to score a good victory here.

They're going to have to if they're going to have any chance against the settlers because they're outnumbered.

So when Lewis arrives a couple of days before Dunmore at Point Pleasant, and while they're set up in Camp, Cornstalk and a couple of other prominent Ohio Indian chiefs raise a force of about 1000 Ohio Indian warriors, and they fall upon Lewis' forces at Point Pleasant.

However, as fate would have it, a couple of scouts were sent out early that morning to hunt.

And what did they do?

The scouts or the hunters come across the advance guard of the Shawnee coming to them, and they're able to make their way back and raise the alarm.

Had it not been for those two hunters, the battle could have turned out quite differently.

Lewis doesn't really realize the full extent of the force about to bear down on them, and so he sends out two groups of believe 150 militia to go out and find out what's going on.

Both of the the commanders of the militia get shot down within the first few minutes and get taken back.

But the militia are able to hold their ground.

They're armed with long rifles, which weren't as fast loading as your standard issue British muskets, but they were way more accurate.

And the frontiersmen were really good shots, because you had to be because you had to hunt to live.

And so they were really good shots.

They were able to hold off the Shawnee.

The Shawnee they had guns to, but they were largely fight... It was a pretty bloody battle that was fought there, and some of the fighting was hand to hand, close quartered fighting, really brutal stuff, which was kind of the the way it went on the frontier.

Cornstalk is a big presence in this battle.

He is heard on the militia side, the militia hear him.

They hear him talking to his soldiers and exhorting them and telling them to be brave and telling them to be strong.

Even the militia comment on his extraordinary bravery and courage during this fight, and the fighting continues on throughout a good porti.. Ultimately, the Shawnee are driven back to a hilly area, and instead of trying to take the hill, they just kind of fire up at them.

But ultimately, the militia have enough numbers.

They hold their ground and the Shawnee aren't able to break them.

Even though the fight was kind of at a standstill.

The Shawnee are going to have to retreat because they can't fight to a stalemate.

The stalemate is no good for them.

They have to have kind of a resounding victory here in order to have any hope of dealing with Dunmore's forces further to the north.

Cornstalk makes the decision to retreat back across the river.

Ultimately, this battle kind of seals the fate for the Shawnee, at least for the first couple of years of the war.

Of course, Cornstalk goes back to their towns with the Shawnee, and they kind of have a council to figure out what to do.

And Cornstalks, says our options are this, we either kill our own women and children and go attack kind of a suicide charge and just fight to the last man, or we can try to come to peace terms.

Dunmore eventually arrives pretty much after the battle is over and Dunmore, then crosses the river with a delegation.

They meet with Cornstalk and they basically say, look, you know, you need to surrender or we're going to kill all of you.

We're going to annihilate you.

And Cornstalk, of course, was a pragmatic Indian lead.. The Treaty of Camp Charlotte essentially guarantees Virginia's safe settlement all the way to the Ohio River, which they supposedly had with the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

So the Treaty of Camp Charlotte was the sort of second treaty in which some of the Ohio Indians agreed to accept these terms.

So that's what's going on in 1774.

The Ohio Indians have been pushed back on their heels, and Western Virginians are pushing further west.

Now, it's important to note that Lewis and Arbuckle and the other leaders of the militia that actually fought at Point Pleasant were not a part of those negotiations at Camp Charlotte, something that they would really resent later on.

It was a significant victory.

And as one result of the battle of Point Pleasant, some have argued that this was the first battle of the Revolutionary War, Pretty much brought peace to the western frontier for about three years up until 1777, and allowed the Patriots to to form up their armies and militia, the Continental Army, to get started, and prevented an alliance between the British and the Indians which came It came after 1777.

The Ohio Indians then sort of retreat to their towns, and Lewis and Dunmore build a temporary fort.

He calls it Fort Gower.

Just as all this is happening, the First Continental Congress is meeting in Philadelphia, and the beginnings of the American Revolution are taking form.

And that starts the story.

They hear about the Continental Congress.

So they're seeing this as a part of them trying to gain control of their own destiny.

What do the Virginia militia do?

They don't quite declare independence just yet.

They issue a public proclamation, the Fort Gower Resolves, and it's one of the more important documents of this time period.

This has been a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.