chapter 5._

See, also, CANADA: A. D. 1750-1753.

_O. H. Marshall, De Celoron's Expedition to the Ohio in 1749 (Historical Writings, pages 237-274)._

_N. B. Craig, The Olden Time, volume 1, pages 1-10._

OHIO: (Valley): A. D. 1754. The opening battle. Washington's first campaign.

The planting of the French at Forts Le Bœuf and Venango "put them during high water in easy communication by boat with the Alleghany River. French tact conciliated the Indians, and where that failed arrogance was sufficient, and the expedition would have pushed on to found new forts, but sickness weakened the men, and Marin, the commander, now dying, saw it was all he could do to hold the two forts, while he sent the rest of his force back to Montreal to recuperate. Late in the autumn Legardeur de Saint-Pierre arrived at Le Bœuf, as the successor of Marin. He had not been long there when on the 11th of December [1753] a messenger from Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, with a small escort, presented himself at the fort. The guide of the party was Christopher Gist; the messenger was George Washington, then adjutant-general of the Virginia militia. Their business was to inform the French commander that he was building forts on English territory, and that he would do well to depart peaceably. … At Le Bœuf Washington tarried three days, during which Saint-Pierre framed his reply, which was in effect that he must hold his post, while Dinwiddie's letter was sent to the French commander at Quebec. It was the middle of February, 1754, when Washington reached Williamsburg on his return, and made his report to Dinwiddie. The result was that Dinwiddie drafted 200 men from the Virginia militia, and despatched them under Washington to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio. The Virginia assembly, forgetting for the moment its quarrel with the governor, voted £10,000 to be expended, but only under the direction of a committee of its own. Dinwiddie found difficulty in getting the other colonies to assist, and the Quaker element in Pennsylvania prevented that colony from being the immediate helper which it might, from its position, have become. Meanwhile some backwoodsmen had been pushed over the mountains and had set to work on a fort at the forks. A much larger French force under Contrecœur soon summoned them, and the English retired. The French immediately began the erection of Fort Duquesne [on the site now covered by the city of Pittsburgh]. While this was doing, Dinwiddie was toiling with tardy assemblies and their agents to organize a regiment to support the backwoodsmen. Joshua Fry was to be its colonel, with Washington as second in command. The latter, with a portion of the men, had already pushed forward to Will's Creek, the present Cumberland. Later he advanced with 150 men to Great Meadows, where he learned that the French, who had been reinforced, had sent out a party from their new fort, marching towards him. Again he got word from an Indian —who, from his tributary character towards the Iroquois, was called Half-King, and who had been Washington's companion on his trip to Le Bœuf—that this chieftain with some followers had tracked two men to a dark glen, where he believed the French party were lurking. Washington started with forty men to join Half-King, and under his guidance they approached the glen and found the French. Shots were exchanged. The French leader, Jumonville, was killed, and all but one of his followers were taken or slain. The mission of Jumonville was to scour for English, by order of Contrecœur, now in command of Duquesne, and to bear a summons to any he could find, warning them to retire from French territory. The precipitancy of Washington's attack gave the French the chance to impute to Washington the crime of assassination; but it seems to have been a pretence on the part of the French to cover a purpose which Jumonville had of summoning aid from Duquesne, while his concealment was intended to shield him till its arrival. Rash or otherwise, this onset of the youthful Washington began the war. The English returned to Great Meadows, and while waiting for reinforcements from Fry, Washington threw up some entrenchments, which he called Fort Necessity. The men from Fry came without their leader, who had sickened and died, and Washington, succeeding to the command of the regiment, found himself at the head of 300 men, increased soon by an independent company from South Carolina. Washington again advanced toward Gist's settlement, when, fearing an attack, he sent back for Mackay, whom he had left with a company of regulars at Fort Necessity. Rumors thickening of an advance of the French, the English leader again fell back to Great Meadows, resolved to fight there. It was now the first of July, 1754. Coulon de Villiers, a brother of Jumonville, was now advancing from Duquesne. The attack was made on a rainy day, and for much of the time a thick mist hung between the combatants. After dark a parley resulted in Washington's accepting terms offered by the French, and the English marched out with the honors of war. The young Virginian now led his weary followers back to Will's Creek. … Thus they turned their backs upon the great valley, in which not an English flag now waved."

_J. Winsor, The Struggle for the Great Valleys of North America (Narrative and Critical History of America, volume 5, chapter 8)._

ALSO IN: _W. Irving, Life of Washington, volume 1, chapters 7-12._

_H. C. Lodge, George Washington, volume 1, chapter 3._

_N. B. Craig, The Olden Time, volume 1, pages 10-62._

OHIO: (Valley): A. D. 1755. Braddock's defeat. The French possess the West and devastate the English frontiers.

"Now the English Government awoke to the necessity of vigorous measures to rescue the endangered Valley of the Ohio. A campaign was planned which was to expel the French from Ohio, and wrest from them some portions of their Canadian territory. The execution of this great design was intrusted to General Braddock, with a force which it was deemed would overbear all resistance. {2395} Braddock was a veteran who had seen the wars of forty years. … He was a brave and experienced soldier, and a likely man, it was thought, to do the work assigned to him. But that proved a sad miscalculation. Braddock had learned the rules of war; but he had no capacity to comprehend its principles. In the pathless forests of America he could do nothing better than strive to give literal effect to those maxims which he had found applicable in the well-trodden battlegrounds of Europe. The failure of Washington in his first campaign had not deprived him of public confidence. Braddock heard such accounts of his efficiency that he invited him to join his staff. Washington, eager to efface the memory of his defeat, gladly accepted the offer. The troops disembarked at Alexandria. … After some delay, the army, with such reinforcements as the province afforded, began its march. Braddock's object was to reach Fort Du Quesne, the great centre of French influence on the Ohio. … Fort Du Quesne had been built [or begun] by the English, and taken from them by the French. It stood at the confluence of the Alleghany and Monongahela; which rivers, by their union at this point, form the Ohio. It was a rude piece of fortification, but the circumstances admitted of no better. … Braddock had no doubt that the fort would yield to him directly he showed himself before it. Benjamin Franklin looked at the project with his shrewd, cynical eye. He told Braddock that he would assuredly take the fort if he could only reach it; but that the long slender line which his army must form in its march 'would be cut like thread into several pieces' by the hostile Indians. Braddock 'smiled at his ignorance.' Benjamin offered no further opinion. It was his duty to collect horses and carriages for the use of the expedition, and he did what was required of him in silence. The expedition crept slowly forward, never achieving more than three or four miles in a day; stopping, as Washington said, 'to level every mole-hill, to erect a bridge over every brook.' It left Alexandria on the 20th April. On the 9th July Braddock, with half his army, was near the fort. There was yet no evidence that resistance was intended. No enemy had been seen; the troops marched on as to assured victory. So confident was their chief that he refused to employ scouts, and did not deign to inquire what enemy might be lurking near. The march was along a road twelve feet wide, in a ravine, with high ground in front and on both sides. Suddenly the Indian war-whoop burst from the woods. A murderous fire smote down the troops. The provincials, not unused to this description of warfare, sheltered themselves behind trees and fought with steady courage. Braddock, clinging to his old rules, strove to maintain his order of battle on the open ground. A carnage, most grim and lamentable, was the result. His undefended soldiers were shot down by an unseen foe. For three hours the struggle lasted; then the men broke and fled in utter rout and panic. Braddock, vainly fighting, fell mortally wounded, and was carried off the field by some of his soldiers. The poor pedantic man never got over his astonishment at a defeat so inconsistent with the established rules of war. 'Who would have thought it?' he murmured, as they bore him from the field. He scarcely spoke again, and died in two or three days. Nearly 800 men, killed and wounded, were lost in this disastrous encounter —about one-half of the entire force engaged. All the while England and France were nominally at peace. But now war was declared."

_R. Mackenzie, America: a history, book 2, chapter 3._

"The news of the defeat caused a great revulsion of feeling. The highest hopes had been built on Braddock's expedition. … From this height of expectation men were suddenly plunged into the yawning gulf of gloom and alarm. The whole frontier lay exposed to the hatchet and the torch of the remorseless red man. … The apprehensions of the border settlers were soon fully justified. Dumas, who shortly succeeded de Contrecœur in the command at Fort Duquesne, set vigorously to work to put the Indians on the war-path against the defenceless settlements. 'M. de Contrecœur had not been gone a week,' he writes, 'before I had six or seven different war parties in the field at once, always accompanied by Frenchmen. Thus far, we have lost only two officers and a few soldiers; but the Indian villages are full of prisoners of every age and sex. The enemy has lost far more since the battle than on the day of his defeat.' All along the frontier the murderous work went on."

_T. J. Chapman, The French in the Allegheny Valley, pages 71-73._

ALSO IN: _F. Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, volume 1, chapters 7 and 10._

_W. Sargent, History of Braddock's Expedition (Pennsylvania Historical Society Mem's, volume 5)._

_N. B. Craig, The Olden Time, volume 1, pages 64-133._

OHIO:(Valley): A. D. 1758. Retirement of the French. Abandonment of Fort Duquesne.

See CANADA: A. D. 1758.

OHIO:(Valley): A. D. 1763. Relinquishment to Great Britain by the Treaty of Paris.

See SEVEN YEARS WAR: THE TREATIES.

OHIO:(Valley): A. D. 1763. The king's proclamation excluding settlers.

See NORTHWEST TERRITORY: A. D. 1763.

OHIO:(Valley): A. D; 1763-1764. Pontiac's War.

See PONTIAC'S WAR

OHIO:(Valley): A. D. 1765-1768. Indian Treaties of German Flats and Fort Stanwix. Pretended cession of lands south of the Ohio. The Walpole Company and its proposed Vandalia settlement.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1765-1768.

OHIO:(Valley): A. D. 1772-1782. The Moravian settlement and mission on the Muskingum.

See MORAVIAN BRETHREN.

OHIO:(Valley): A. D. 1774. Lord Dunmore's War with the Indians. The territorial claims of Virginia. The wrongs of Logan and his famous speech.

"On the eve of the Revolution, in 1774, the frontiersmen had planted themselves firmly among the Alleghanies. Directly west of them lay the untenanted wilderness, traversed only by the war parties of the red men, and the hunting parties of both reds and whites. No settlers had yet penetrated it, and until they did so there could be within its borders no chance of race warfare. … But in the southwest and the northwest alike, the area of settlement already touched the home lands of the tribes. … It was in the northwest that the danger of collision was most imminent; for there the whites and Indians had wronged one another for a generation, and their interests were, at the time, clashing more directly than ever. Much the greater part of the western frontier was held or claimed by Virginia, whose royal governor was, at the time, Lord Dunmore. {2396} … The short but fierce and eventful struggle that now broke out was fought wholly by Virginians, and was generally known by the name of Lord Dunmore's war. Virginia, under her charter, claimed that her boundaries ran across to the South Seas, to the Pacific Ocean. The king of Britain had graciously granted her the right to take so much of the continent as lay within these lines, provided she could win it from the Indians, French, and Spaniards. … A number of grants had been made with the like large liberality, and it was found that they sometimes conflicted with one another. The consequence was that while the boundaries were well marked near the coast, where they separated Virginia from the long-settled regions of Maryland and North Carolina, they became exceeding vague and indefinite the moment they touched the mountains. Even at the south this produced confusion, … but at the north the effect was still more confusing, and nearly resulted in bringing about an inter-colonial war between Pennsylvania and Virginia. The Virginians claimed all of extreme western Pennsylvania, especially Fort Pitt and the valley of the Monongahela, and, in 1774, proceeded boldly to exercise jurisdiction therein. Indeed a strong party among the settlers favored the Virginian claim. … The interests of the Virginians and Pennsylvanians not only conflicted in respect to the ownership of the land, but also in respect to the policy to be pursued regarding the Indians. The former were armed colonists, whose interest it was to get actual possession of the soil; whereas in Pennsylvania the Indian trade was very important and lucrative. … The interests of the white trader from Pennsylvania and of the white settler from Virginia were so far from being identical that they were usually diametrically opposite. The northwestern Indians had been nominally at peace with the whites for ten years, since the close of Bouquet's campaign. … Each of the ten years of nominal peace saw plenty of bloodshed. Recently they had been seriously alarmed by the tendency of the whites to encroach on the great hunting-grounds south of the Ohio. … The cession by the Iroquois of the same hunting-grounds, at the treaty of Fort Stanwix [see UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1765-1768], while it gave the whites a colorable title, merely angered the northwestern Indians. Half a century earlier they would hardly have dared dispute the power of the Six Nations to do what they chose with any land that could be reached by their war parties; but in 1774 they felt quite able to hold their own against their old oppressors. … The savages grew continually more hostile, and in the fall of 1773 their attacks became so frequent that it was evident a general outbreak was at hand. … The Shawnees were the leaders in all these outrages; but the outlaw bands, such as the Mingos and Cherokees, were as bad, and parties of Wyandots and Delawares, as well as of the various Miami and Wabash tribes, joined them. Thus the spring of 1774 opened with everything ripe for an explosion. … The borderers were anxious for a war; and Lord Dunmore was not inclined to baulk them. … Unfortunately the first stroke fell on friendly Indians." Dunmore's agent or lieutenant in the country, one Dr. Conolly, issued an open letter in April which was received by the backwoodsmen as a declaration and authorization of war. One band of these, led by a Maryland borderer, Michael Cresap, proceeded to hostilities at once by ambushing and shooting down some friendly Shawnees who were engaged in trade. This same party then set out to attack the camp of the famous chief Logan, whose family and followers were then dwelling at Yellow Creek, some 50 miles away. Logan was "an Iroquois warrior, who lived at that time away from the bulk of his people, but who was a man of note … among the outlying parties of Senecas and Mingos, and the fragments of broken tribes that dwelt along the upper Ohio. … He was greatly liked and respected by all the white hunters and frontiersmen whose friendship and respect were worth having; they admired him for his dexterity and prowess, and they loved him for his straightforward honesty, and his noble loyalty to his friends." Cresap's party, after going some miles toward Logan's camp, "began to feel ashamed of their mission; calling a halt, they discussed the fact that the camp they were preparing to attack consisted exclusively of friendly Indians, and mainly of women and children; and forthwith abandoned their proposed trip and returned home. … But Logan's people did not profit by Cresap's change of heart. On the last day of April a small party of men, women, and children, including almost all of Logan's kin, left his camp and crossed the river to visit Greathouse [another borderer, of a more brutal type], as had been their custom; for he made a trade of selling rum to the savages, though Cresap had notified him to stop. The whole party were plied with liquor, and became helplessly drunk, in which condition Greathouse and his associated criminals fell on and massacred them, nine souls in all. … At once the frontier was in a blaze, and the Indians girded themselves for revenge. … They confused the two massacres, attributing both to Cresap, whom they well knew as a warrior. … Soon all the back country was involved in the unspeakable horrors of a bloody Indian war," which lasted, however, only till the following October. Governor Dunmore, during the summer, collected some 3,000 men, one division of which he led personally to Fort Pitt and thence down the Ohio, accomplishing nothing of importance. The other division, composed exclusively of backwoodsmen, under General Andrew Lewis, marched to the mouth of the Kanawha River, and there, at Point Pleasant, the cape of land jutting out between the Ohio and the Kanawha, they fought, on the 10th of October, a great battle with the Indians which practically ended the war. This is sometimes called the battle of Point Pleasant, and sometimes the battle of the Great Kanawha. "It was the most closely contested of any battle ever fought with the northwestern Indians; and it was the only victory gained over a large body of them by a force but slightly superior in numbers. … Its results were most important. It kept the northwestern tribes quiet for the first two years of the Revolutionary struggle; and above all it rendered possible the settlement of Kentucky, and therefore the winning of the West. Had it not been for Lord Dunmore's War, it is more than likely that when the colonies achieved their freedom they would have found their western boundary fixed at the Alleghany Mountains." {2397} For some time after peace had been made with the other chiefs Logan would not join in it. When he did yield a sullen assent, Lord Dunmore "was obliged to communicate with him through a messenger, a frontier veteran named John Gibson. … To this messenger Logan was willing to talk. Taking him aside, he suddenly addressed him in a speech that will always retain its place as perhaps the finest outburst of savage eloquence of which we have any authentic record. The messenger took it down in writing, translating it literally." The authenticity of this famous speech of Logan has been much questioned, but apparently with no good ground.

_T. Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, volume 1, chapters 8-9. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11941_

ALSO IN: _J. H. Perkins, Annals of the West,

_J. G. M. Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee, page 112._

_V. A. Lewis, History of West Virginia,

_J. R. Gilmore (E. Kirke), The Rear-guard of the Revolution,