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.

On July the 9th, 1776, less than seven days after we become a country, we see Lewis driving Dunmore out at Gwen's Island.

It's a big statement.

Lewis is driving the colonial governor of Virginia off the continent, and the person that Dunmore wouldn't let negotiate in the Treaty of Camp Charlotte is going to be the very man that's going to drive him off the North American continent.

Dunmore, of course, had been a popular governor up until everything goes south between relations between Great Britain and the colonies.

And Dunmore's popularity obviously goes down very, very quickly after this, and Dunmore and Lewis become very much at odds with one another from Camp Charlotte on.

That's when the relations with Lord Dunmore, with the Crown, start to turn.

Dunmore's forces he's got what is called the Ethiopian Regiment, which may have been a little over 1000, but they don't really have 1000 trained troops.

They go down to Norfolk and they briefly gain a foothold in Norfolk, Virginia.

And they win a skirmish against the Colonials at first.

Ultimately, he's going to have to flee.

Dunmore is forced onto a ship, a British ship, throughout at least the last year or two of the war because there's a bounty on his head.

Dunmore, who had been instrumental in securing rights for the settlers to have territory all the way to the Ohio River, you know, he leaves in disgrace.

Lewis, I think maybe even more than the Battle of Point Pleasant.

I think Lewis was extraordinarily gratified to be the one to drive Dunmore off the continent.

Patrick Henry then comes in as a supporter of the colonials and becomes the new governor of Virginia, on the side of the Continentals.

And then Fort Fincastle, in opposition to the actions of Lord Dunmore and the start of the war that the locals and the Virginia changed the name of it to Fort Henry to honor the now Governor Patrick Henry.

Originally, you had fought Blair.

That was built where the Kanawha River runs into the Ohio.

It was Dunmore who orders the abandonment of that fort.

As things begin to unravel between the colonies and the British government.

The Shawnee burn it down almost immediately after it's abandoned.

Patrick Henry then orders for a new fort to be built.

They name it Fort Randolph, after the first president of the First Continental Congress.

speaks to the fact that the Ohio River and the territory around it was A crucial cause and crucial issue for people on all sides during the Revolution itself.

Many Western colonists feel quite alienated from distant governments in places like Williamsburg and Wilmington and Charleston, for example.

So their loyalism and the ways that they sort of became loyalists was less ideological and more practical.

Many of whom are arrested or go into exile or otherwise are removed from the scene.

Very early on in the revolution, in the backcountry, in western counties where there are large number of loyalists.

Partizan warfare between loyalists and Patriot militias plays out.

At least a third of the American colonists were loyalists.

Probably the numbers were probably closer to 40%.

Loyalists in western Virginia play a major role.

There are the British recruit heavily, recruit loyalists to serve as diplomats and intermediaries, making connections, recruiting other loyalists.

Reaching out to the Ohio Indians, they become the intermediaries between the Ohio Indians and the Crown.

This is now, in 1777, at Fort Henry, where you've got loyalist militia fighting Patriot militia.

The loyalists are also fighting alongside native soldiers.

From the British perspective, this is a way of distracting the militia, keeping the frontiersmen away from the action that's going on in East as much as possible.

So they arm the tribes, and they encourage the tribes to partake in offensives that are simultaneous with what's going on in eastern Pennsylvania.

The attack on Virginia by the Ohio Indian that was going to happen in 1777, the so-called year of the Bloody Sevens.

So in the late summer of 1777, General Hand out of Fort Pitt does send an order to Fort Henry.

David Shepherd is the principal commander there and basically says you have our intelligence is telling us there is a large war party of indigenous people in the region.

And their goal was probably to sack Ford Henry, because it's the largest fortification south of Fort Pitt.

So you need to garrison the fortress.

Shepherd sends out a call to all the surrounding blockhouses and various militias.

Estimates are they have anywhere from like 9 to 11 companies and militia, maybe 300 plus soldiers.

And they will garrison at for Henry by the sort of early part of August.

Some letters and some documents that we do have available document that there was some restless energy in Fort Henry.

Many of these additional soldiers are depleting the crops.

They are depleting the livestock and the sort of food reserves.

They're upsetting kind of the natural order of things.

Shepherd basically dispatches them back to their home territories, says there's no activity here.

Also, we have to make sure we can keep garrison the families that are here.

So by the end of August, they have a couple companies left, basically under Captain Mason and Captain Ogle.

They both between them have maybe a couple dozen soldiers and scouts.

And then there are some militia amongst the Wheeling population that are there to garrison the forts.

The native warriors at this Battle of Fort Henry were led by a Wyandot chief, Chief Dunquat.

He had led a village of principally Wyandot and Mingo Indians, who kind of principally lived in the Ohio Country with the upper High Valley region into western Pennsylvania, but like many of the other tribal leaders in the region, many of their villages also included Shawnee, Delaware.

Other smaller tribes that had been decimated by war and disease by the time they were at this attack on Fort Henry.

And this is probably why there had been some intelligence from Fort Pitt about how dangerous this threat would be.

They had maybe 300, 400 warriors, so this was a sizable force.

They had been slowly encircling the area and they'd been hiding in this cornfield.

So when these few folks go out to try to get these horses in the cornfield, that's when they encounter a small party of these native warriors.

One is killed.

A couple escaped back to Warren David Shepherd.

Hey, there's a large party of warriors here.

So Shepherd decides to send a scouting expedition to figure out where the native warriors are.

So he sends Captain Mason, who has about 14 or so men.

They're ambushed.

They're thoroughly massacred.

In fact, really best estimates are Mason is the only person who returns alive from this expedition.

He's been wounded several times.

From the fort, Shepherd obviously sees that these men have been engaged, and he orders Captain Ogle, his other available company, go and rescue them.

They are likewise ambushed and almost entirely massacred.

Pretty much all the casualties from this first attack on Fort Henry aren't against people who are in the fort.

It's actually these two companies that are sent out to kind of scout the native's position.

The fighting really that takes place takes place outside of the fort in the early part of the siege.

There's a number of people that get killed in the early fighting, people trying to get in the fort, people trying to get out to try to warn others that something's going on.

And it was some pretty brutal, close quartered fighting.

At some point Shepard, knowing that there was something big happening, he sent out riders to call for support.

So he gets about 14 men with rifles to come from Holidays Cove.

They are led by Van Swearingen.

The other larger force, which is a little bit closer, is to the east at Van Meters Fort, and they're under the command of Samuel McCulloch.

Sam McCulloch is somebody who's been in the region for a while.

He's a prominent figure in Ohio County.

He had been set up to command Fort Van Meter even though he was in his 20s.

He comes with about 30 to 40 men or so.

And so when they arrived, they are accosted by a large group of Indian warriors.

Most of McCulloch's men are able to get inside the fort and set up a defense, but Sam McCulloch, in trying to order his men and directs them, he gets separated from it.

In this separation, he can't ride towards the fort.

He can't really ride back the way he came to get back to Fort Van Meter, because he's been kind of in circle.

And so really his only path of escape is to go to the north, which was a natural defense point around Fort Henry because it leads to a high hill known as Wheeling Hill.

Today, McCulloch on his horse rides to the top of this Wheeling hill to try to escape this war party.

When he gets there, he gets to a bluff that is overlooking about 150ft drop and according to the legends, with nowhere else to go.

He leads his horse over this steep embankment.

They did jump a significant distance and then sort of slid and rolled down the rest of the hill.

Gallop through Wheeling Creek, and then he went up the other side of the embankment.

Depending on perspective, the native warriors were either overly impressed by this or obviously did not want to continue their pursuit after him, but it is one of the most quintessential stories of frontier folklore and history in the region, and forever.

after that is referred to as McCulloch's leap.

It shows you how stories from the Revolution become a part of legend and folklore, and even that is a part of the fabric of who we are.

Even if some of these things aren't necessarily true.

So when they arrive, they're going to be the main support.

Now that Mason and Ogles commands have been routed, Shepherd is left to defend Fort Henry against several hundred very strategically placed Native Americans.

They are surrounding the fort and they will siege it for several days.

Obviously, the Native Americans don't have siege equipment, so they can't really destroy the fort.

The warriors tried to hit the fort or tried to set it on fire.

It didn't work.

And then they would just leave.

And their failure to take Fort Henry means that they cannot dislodge the settlements.

Then the colonials come back with reinforcement.

Captain William Foreman was from the Hampshire County region, kind of along the South Branch of the Potomac.

He led a sort of militia force of about 45 soldiers, and they were tasked to come to this region after this first major attack on Fort Henry.

They get to the four shortly after this major on the 1st of September, and their goal is to go to the South to kind of scout on a little further expedition, to try to get a sense of where there might be this presence of this large war party led by Chief Dunquat.

So they go south across Wheeling Creek and patrol to this area known as the Grave Creek Narrows, which is a narrow area where the hillside abuts the Ohio River.

And there's a very narrow path, almost with perpendicular slope to the top of the hillside.

They cross through there unabated.

They go further south.

Their goal is to look at the Grave Creek settlements near present day Townsville, and throughout all this scouting expedition they do not find any obvious presence of Dunquat's forces, so they perceive that they've maybe crossed back over the Ohio River and they're no longer in the area.

Foreman has a scout, William Lynn, who is with this party, and he had been in the region for a while afterwards, is critical of Foreman.

You know, there are some critics that say he he really did not have much experience fighting Native Americans, so he was unaware of certain things.

You would just not procedurally do.

So as they're getting ready to go back to Fort Henry, they basically decide to encamp before entering the narrows, and they set up camp and Lynn instructs him, don't set a big, large fire for all your men to kind of sit around.

That will make it easier, for if there is a native war party around to count your numbers.

Foreman disregards this advice and Lynn and actually about nine or so of his scouts, they kind of go off and disperse themselves, kind of sleeping in the dark to kind of hide themselves.

They're not too far away from the river.

During the night, Linn can hear what he clearly knows to be the sound of native warriors moving their canoes.

They're basically trying to get around them.

That next morning, he tells and reports that the Captain Foreman tells him, you know, the warriors are probably trying to get in front of us because they know we're trying to go back to Fort Henry.

So they're probably trying to find a place to ambush us.

And he advises Foreman not to go straight back the way they came to go through this in the narrows area, this would be a very easy place to get ambushed, he tells them.

We could go up the sort of steep slope it's not that hard to traverse and kind of come to Fort Henry by taking the hillside.

Foreman again disregards his advice, and Lynn takes his scouts with him and basically is going to scout on the hillside.

As Foreman's men are making their way back through the narrows, they get to a point in what's now present day McMechen, where they in the middle of the path, discover a bunch of Indian trinkets, and a couple of the men start calling out the others to come look at these.

It's clearly a plan to get them to stop.

Get them to be in one location where they are set upon by a large war party of Indians.

They cannot retreat back through the narrows because they could be even more massacred.

So they try to defend themselves.

Foreman is killed.

They would have all been probably wiped out if Lynn's men up on the hillside hadn't caught wind of what was coming, shouting and shooting their guns to kind of suggest that there's a bigger force coming to rescue Foreman and Foreman's Command.

The Indians depart.

21 of the party, basically almost half of Foreman's force is massacred in this engagement.

A force comes from the fort as either David Shepherd led this party.

Others say Ebenezer Zane led them, and they buried them not too far away from that spot.

This large war party, led by Chief Dunquat, obviously had a major victory there.

But there were a number of Ohio Indian chiefs that were prominent military leaders.

White Eyes.

Nonhelema.

Chief Logan.

Blackfish and Cornstalk.

The main warrior chief at that time people think of is Cornstalk, and he's involved even more to the south.

Cornstalk is one of these individuals who is initially an advocate for peace.

He's someone who's really trying to negotiate, basically de-escalate the situation, find a way other than war for Virginia, Pennsylvania, the Shawnees and the Lenape to and others to settle their differences.

Cornstalk begins to warn these western Virginians that most of his fellow Ohio Indians aren't looking for peace.

They're going to side with the British, and they're going to use the American Revolution as an opportunity once again to try to push Western settlements back east, to try to exact their revenge against those that had wronged him there in the Battle of Point Pleasant and earlier cycles of violence.

So Cornstalk basically wants to warn the, you know, I guess it's safe to call them Americans now that this is coming.

Cornstalk wants peace.

He also sees the handwriting on the wall.

He goes to Fort Randolph.

He meets with Matthew Arbuckle there.

Even though Arbuckle and Cornstalk have fought against one another, they appear to have a mutual respect for one another, and Cornstalk believes that he can deal with Arbuckle.

So he meets with Matthew Arbuckle and says, basically tells him what's going to happen.

My Ohio Indian neighbors are coming to attack you.

You need to prepare for it.

I mean, they basically provide tremendous amount of information.

Arbuckle welcomes Cornstalk and his entourage in, but at the same time, very similar to what happens to Logan's family building up to the battle Point Pleasant.

There's some violence surrounding Fort Randolph.

Of course.

Arbuckle then decides to keep Cornstalk captive in the fort, along with Red Hawk, another Native American who is accompanied Cornstalk, and then a few days later, Cornstalk's son, hoping that by keeping them hostage, that that will keep the Shawnee in check.

Now this plan backfires in a very tragic way, of course.

Right after Cornstalk, Red Hawk and his son are there imprisoned, a new group of militia arrives that is not under Arbuckle's direct command.

This new group of militia came from areas on the James River where Cornstalk had attacked during Pontiac's War.

So a lot of these militiamen had family members and friends that Cornstalk had killed a decade previous to this.

So they come in and they want Cornstalk dead right away, but the straw that breaks the camel's back happens a little bit later, when a couple of of the militia are out hunting and one of them gets attacked by a Native American party that's going around, the furious militiamen run back to the fort.

They're demanding Cornstalk's blood.

They want to kill him.

Even though Cornstalk had absolutely nothing to do with what happened.

They burst into the fort, and Arbuckle steps in front of the men and tries to stop them.

And basically, the militia tell Arbuckle, if you stand in our way, we're going to kill you, too.

So Arbuckle has no control over these new militias that are coming in.

They come towards Cornstalk's place, where he and Red Hawk and his son are there.

Cornstalk knows what's going to happen, and from the eyewitness accounts he stands up and meets his murderers head on, looks them in the eye, and meets his fate with extraordinary bravery.

And despite the fact that Cornstalk was absolutely providing incredible intelligence, had laid down his weapons.

The militiamen inside of Fort Randolph butcher Cornstalk and his son in cold blood, ending Cornstalk's diplomatic effort.

They riddle him with 6 to 7 bullets.

They shoot his son, and then they shoot and kill Red Hawk.

It's probably the most blatant, disgusting, barbarous acts that take place on the frontier during the American Revolution.

Everybody is appalled except for the people that murdered him.

Arbuckle is appalled with what happens.

He will leave Fort Randolph soon after this and never return.

Patrick Henry, the governor of Virginia, seeks to find some form of justice.

Several of these militiamen are going to be put on trial once they go back to Williamsburg, but they're all going to be acquitted because no one will condemn anyone who killed Native Americans in these hot blooded moments of the revolution.

And so they all get acquitted, and nobody is ever punished, and nobody ever sees justice for the tragic murder of Cornstalk.

One of the remarkable things about Cornstalk is we don't know the location of the burial remains of many Native American leaders, a lot of Native American leaders throughout American history.

We decimated their bodies after we killed them, or we lost their bodies or whatever.

Cornstalk was buried at a site just outside of Fort Randolph, and they knew where they buried him.

It was fairly well cataloged.

And after they began to construct the town of Point Pleasant and expand it, they actually dig up Cornstalk's remains.

They remove his remains one time, and then they construct a state park Tu-Endie-Wei, the land where the rivers meet, where the Kanawha and Ohio come together.

And then they reburied his remains underneath an obelisk with his name on it.

And that's where his remains lie today.

That murder of Cornstalk and the murder of like minded leaders who favor negotiation, accommodation, favor peace, the removal of those advocates of peace has now pushed people like Blackfish to the forefront.

Increasingly, there is no room to negotiate.

if you enter a colonial town, even under a white flag, you're at the risk of being murdered or assassinated.

After the death of Cornstalk.

Blackfish really has no one to place a check on what he believed, right?

Cornstalk dies.

Cornstalk was really the last of the major Shawnee leaders that believed there was a possibility of preserving any kind of peace between them and the settlers.

Now, Blackfish is the most important leader in the Shawnee nation, and Blackfish, of course, believes that the only recourse is to fight.

After the death of Cornstalk, Blackfish now is in firm control of the Shawnee forces, and he's going to use that control to wage war against Daniel Boone and the settlers in Kentucky.

And then, of course, the major raid into Fort Randolph and then the Greenbrier Valley in 1778.

The violence that occurs in 1778 is inspired by revenge for the murder of Cornstalk.

This has been a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.