USA > West Virginia > History of West Virginia > Part 8
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Four hundred men, rank and file, descended the Ohio, to the present site of Powhatan at the mouth of Captina creek, now in Belmont county, Ohio, whence the march into the wilderness began. A few days later
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the army encamped at the mouth of Wakatomika creek, near where the town of Dresden, in the present county of Muskingum, now stands. Six miles from the encampment a force of fifty Indians was discovered and an engagement took place in which the Virginians lost two killed and nine wounded, while the Indians, who retreated, lost three killed and several wounded. McDonald found the chief Wakatomika town de- serted ; this he burned, and destroyed the neighboring corn-fields. A march to the next village, a mile dis- tant, resulted in a skirmish with the savages and the burning of their wigwams. The work of destruction continued until all the towns and corn-fields in the vicinity were laid waste. The expedition returned to Wheeling, taking with it three captive chiefs who were sent as hostages to Williamsburg. Owing to the per- fidy of the Indians, but little was accomplished in the way of effecting a peace, but the object of the expedi- tion had been attained, for its design was the temporary protection of the frontier, and was a preliminary move- ment to the Dunmore expedition to the Pickaway Plains later in the year.
Colonel Angus McDonald, who commanded the ex- pedition, was born of Scotch parentage. He resided near Winchester, in Frederick county, Virginia, upon an estate early acquired by his ancestors, and which has been known locally for more than a century as " Glengary," so called from the ancestral clan to which the McDonalds belonged in the Highlands of Scotland. Some of his descendants yet reside in the valley of Virginia.
To meet this general uprising of the confederated tribes northwest of the Ohio, Virginia made ready for
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war, and the din of preparation resounded along her borders. Lord Dunmore left the gubernatorial resi- dence at Williamsburg and, passing over the Blue Ridge, assisted in mustering an army. A force of 2,300 . tried veterans was collected in two divisions called the northern and southern wing, the two to be reunited at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. The southern wing commanded by General Andrew Lewis, and numbering 800 men, consisted of two regiments commanded by Colonel William Fleming, of Botetourt county, and Colonel Charles Lewis, of Augusta. This force ren- dezvoused at Camp Union-afterward Fort Savannah and now Lewisburg, the county-seat of Greenbrier -- where it was joined by a volunteer company under Colonel John Field, of Culpeper county ; a company from Bedford county, commanded by Captain Buford, and a detachment from the Holstein settlement, now Washington county, at the head of which was Captain Evan Shelby. The force was thus augmented to eleven hundred men. A messenger arrived with orders from Governor Dunmore commanding General Lewis to meet him on the 2d of October at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. On the 11th of September the tents were struck and the army commenced its line of march through a trackless and unbroken wilderness. Cap- tain Matthew Arbuckle, who had traversed the Kana- wha valley in 1764, acted as guide and conducted the army to the Ohio river, which was reached on the Ist of October, after a dreary march of nineteen days. Bancroft thus describes their line of march from Camp Union to the mouth of Elk river :
" At that time there was not even a track over the rugged mountains, but the gallant young woodsmen
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who formed the advance party moved expeditiously with their pack-horses and droves of cattle through the home of the wolf, the deer and the panther. After a fortnight's struggle they left behind them the last rocky masses of the hilltops, and passing between the gigantic growth of primeval forests, where, in the au- tumnal season the golden hue of the linden, the sugar- tree and the hickory contrasted with the glistening green of the laurel, the crimson of the sumac, and the shadows of the sombre hemlock, they descended where the Elk widens into a plain." Having crossed Elk river, the march continued down the right hand bank of the Kanawha to the Ohio.
The site upon which the Virginia army encamped was one of awe-inspiring grandeur. Here were seen hills, valleys, plains and promontories, all covered with gigantic forests, the growth of centuries, standing in their native majesty unsubdued by the hand of man, wearing the livery of the season and raising aloft in mid-air their venerable trunks and branches, as if to defy the lightning of the sky and the fury of the whirl- wind. The broad reach of the Ohio closely resembled a lake with the mouth of the Kanawha as an arm or estuary, and both were, at that season of the year, so placid as scarcely to present motion to the eye. Over all, nature ruled supreme. There were no marks of industry, nor of the exercise of those arts which min- ister to the comforts and convenience of man. Here nature had for ages held undisputed sway over an empire inhabited only by the enemies of civilization.
The northern wing, commanded by Governor Dun- more in person and numbering 1,200 men, was prin- cipally collected in the counties of Dunmore-now
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Shenandoah-Frederick, Berkeley, and Hampshire. Three of the companies had served with McDonald, and upon their return home in July; at once re-enlisted in Dunmore's army. The westward march began, the long column proceeding in solid phalanx by way of " Potomac Gap." Later it was divided, and 500 men commanded by Colonel William Crawford proceeded overland with the cattle, while the Governor with 700 men descended the Monongahela by way of Fort Pitt. Both columns reached Wheeling-then Fort Fincastle -on the 30th day of September, and the combined force at once descended the Ohio to the mouth of the Big Hockhocking river, where it halted and erected a temporary fortification-"Fort Gower"-which was the first structure reared by Englishmen within the present limits of Ohio.
BATTLE OF POINT PLEASANT.
When General Lewis reached the mouth of the Great Kanawha, he was greatly disappointed in not meeting Governor Dunmore, and still more so at not hearing from him. In the absence of orders it was decided to go into camp, and accordingly the tents were pitched upon the triangular point of land between the right bank of the Kanawha and the left bank of the Ohio, accessible only from the rear. This place was called by the Indians Tu-Endic-wci, signifying in the Shawnee language "The Junction of Two Rivers." The ground thus occupied by the Virginia army is the same upon which the town of Point Pleasant has since been built. Little did that band of sturdy Virginians think that ere they left the place, they were to fight the most fiercely contested battle ever fought with the
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Indians in Virginia, if not on the continent. It was not until Sunday, October 9th, that a messenger reached General Lewis, informing him that the plan of the cam- paign had been changed, and ordering him to march directly to the Indian towns on the Scioto, at which place the northern division would join him.
Accordingly, arrangements were made preparatory to leaving on the following morning, Monday, 10th ; but early on that morning two soldiers, named Rob- ertson and Hickman, went up the Ohio in quest of deer, and having proceeded about three miles they discovered, near the mouth of Oldtown creek, a large body of Indians just arising from their encampment. The soldiers were fired upon and Hickman was killed, but Robertson escaped and ran into camp, halloo- ing as he ran that he had seen "a body of Indians covering four acres of ground." This force consisted of the flower of the confederated tribes, who had abandoned their towns on the Pickaway Plains to meet the Virginia troops and give them battle before the two wings of the army could be united. Within an hour after the presence of the Indians had been dis- covered, a general engagement began, extending from the bank of the Ohio to that of the Kanawha, and dis- tant half a mile from the point.
General Lewis, who had witnessed a similar scene at Braddock's defeat, acted with firmness and decision in this great emergency. He arranged his forces promptly and advanced to meet the enemy. Colonel Charles Lewis-brother of the General-with 300 men, formed the right line, met the Indians at sunrise and sustained the first attack. He fell, mortally wounded, in the first fire, and was carried to the rear, where he
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shortly after expired. His troops receiving almost the entire weight of the charge, the lines were broken and gave way. Colonel Fleming, commanding the left wing, advanced along the bank of the Ohio, and in a few minutes fell in with the right wing of the Indian line, which rested upon the river. The effect of the first shock was to stagger the left wing as it had the right, and its commander was severely wounded at an early hour of the conflict. But his men succeeded in reaching a piece of timber land, and maintained their position until the reserve under Colonel Field reached the ground. It will be seen by examining Lewis' plan of the engagement, and also the ground on which the battle was fought, that an advance on his part and a retreat on the part of his opponents necessarily weak- ened their lines by constantly increasing their length, and if it extended from river to river, he would be forced eventually to break his line or leave his flanks unprotected. Writers upon the subject of Indian tactics inform us that it was the great object of his generalship to preserve his flanks and overthrow those of his enemy. They continued therefore, contrary to their usual practice, to dispute with the pertinacity of veterans the ground along the whole line, retreating slowly from tree to tree until one o'clock P. M., when they reached a strong position. Here both armies rested within rifle range of each other until late in the evening, when General Lewis, seeing the impractica- bility of dislodging the Indians by the most vigorous attack, and sensible of the great danger which must arise to his army if the contest were not decided be- fore night, detached the three companies commanded by Captains Isaac Shelby, George Matthews and John
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BATTLE OF POINT PLEASANT.
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Stewart, with orders to proceed up the Kanawha river, and under cover of the banks of Crooked creek-a stream emptying into the Kanawha about half a mile from the point-attack the Indians in the rear. The manœuvre thus planned and executed had the desired effect, and gave to the colonial army a complete vic- tory. The Indians finding themselves suddenly encom- passed between two armies, attacked in front and rear, and doubtless believing that in the rear was the long expected reinforcement under Colonel Christian, soon gave way and about sundown commenced a precipitate retreat across the Ohio, toward their towns on the Scioto.
The desperate nature of this conflict may be inferred by the deep-seated animosity of the parties toward each other, the high courage which both possessed, and the consequences which hung upon the issue. The victory was indeed most decisive, and many were the advantages obtained by it; but they were dearly bought. One-half of the commissioned officers had fallen, seventy-five men lay dead upon the field, and one hundred and forty wounded. Among the slain were Colonels Lewis and Field, Captains Buford, Morrow, Wood, Cundiff, Wilson and McLanachan, and Lieu- tenants Allen, Goldsby and Dillon. The loss of the Indians could never be ascertained, nor could the number engaged be known. Their army was com- posed of warriors from the different nations north of the Ohio and comprised the flower of the Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, Wyandotte and Cayuga tribes, led on by their respective chiefs, at the head of whom was Cornstalk, Sachem of the Shawnees and King of the Northern Confederacy. Never, perhaps, did men ex-
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hibit a more conclusive evidence of bravery in making a charge, and fortitude in withstanding one, than did these undisciplined soldiers of the forest on the field at Point Pleasant. Says Colonel John Stewart in his Memoirs :
" None will suppose we had a contemptible enemy with whom to do, who has any knowledge of the ex- ploits performed by them. It was chiefly the Shaw- anees, who cut off the British army under General Braddock in the year 1756, and nineteen years before our battle, when the General himself and Sir Peter Hatchett, second in command, were both slain, and a mere remnant of the whole army only escaped; and they were they who defeated Major Grant and his Scotch Highlanders at Fort Pitt in 1758, when the whole of the troops were killed or taken prisoners. And after our battle they defeated the flower of the first bold and intrepid settlers of Kentucky at the bat- tle of Blue Licks. There fell Colonel John Todd and Colonel Stephen Trigg. The whole of their men were almost all cut to pieces. Afterwards they defeated the United States army over the Ohio, commanded by General Harmer, and lastly they defeated General Arthur St. Clair's great army with prodigious slaugh- ter.""
Such, too, was the heroic bravery displayed by those composing the Virginia army on that occasion that high hopes were entertained of their future distinction. Nor were these hopes disappointed, for in the various scenes through which they subsequently passed, the pledge of after eminence then given was fully redeemed, and the names of Shelby, Campbell, Lewis, Mathews, Moore and others, their compatriots in arms on the
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bloody field at the mouth of the Great Kanawha, have been inscribed in brilliant characters on the roll of fame.
General Andrew Lewis, the commander, and the son of John Lewis, the first settler of Augusta county, was born in Ulster, Ireland, in 1720. Early in life he en- tered the colonial service and rose rapidly in the scale of promotion. He was a major in Washington's reg- iment at the surrender of Fort Necessity, and a mem- ber of his brother Samuel's company in the campaign of General Braddock and was wounded at the battle of Monongahela. In 1756 he commanded the "Big Sandy expedition," which was the most important mil- itary operation of that year, and was with General Forbes at the reduction of Fort Du Quesne in 1758. In 1765 he was one of the commissioners on the part of Virginia to treat with the Six Nations at Fort Stan- wix, and arose to the rank of Brigadier-General in 1774. He represented Botetourt county in the Vir- ginia conventions of March and June, 1775, and en- tered the Revolutionary army in 1776, when he was placed in command of Lower Virginia. He drove Dunmore from Gwynn's island in Chesapeake bay, announcing his order of attack by placing the match to the first gun, an eighteen-pounder, himself. In 1781, stricken with fever, he started home, but in Campbell county, within forty miles of his destination, he died and was buried on an eminence overlooking the Roanoke, near Salem, Virginia.
The following gentlemen, with others of high repu- tation in private life, were officers in the battle of Point Pleasant: General Isaac Shelby, the first Gov- ernor of Kentucky, and whom Monroe desired as his
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Secretary of War; General William Campbell and Colonel John Campbell, heroes of King's Mountain and Long Island; General William Shelby, one of the most favored citizens of Tennessee, often honored with the confidence of that State; General Andrew Moore, of Rockbridge county, the only man, who, prior to the civil war, was elected by Virginia to the United States Senate from west of the Blue Ridge; Colonel John Stuart, of Greenbrier, distinguished for his lit- erary and scholarly attainments; General Tate, of Washington county, Virginia ; Colonel William McKee, of Lincoln county, Kentucky; Colonel John Steele, afterwards Governor of the Mississippi Territory; Colonel Charles Cameron, of Bath county, Virginia ; General Bazaleel Wells, of Ohio; General George Mathews, a distinguished officer in the War of the Revolution, the hero of Brandywine, Germantown and Guilford, a governor of Georgia, and a representative from that State in the Congress of the United States ; Captain William Clendenin, the first representative from Mason county in the Legislature of Virginia ; Colonel William Fleming, acting governor of Virginia, in 1781. Robertson, who gave the first alarm at Point Pleasant, afterward rose to the rank of Brigadier- General in Tennessee.
Colonel Charles Lewis, and those who fell with him, shed their blood in defence of pioneer homes and in an effort to plant civilization in the Chio valley and thereby reclaim it from the sway of savage men. It is worthy of remark that General Lewis fought the battle on lands which he had patented two years before, and which had been surveyed for him by George Washington.
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The day after the battle, Colonel Christian, at the head of three hundred Fincastle troops, arrived at Point Pleasant and at once proceeded to bury the dead. On the battle evening, as the October sun sank below the hills of the western wilderness, one hundred and forty wounded Virginians were carried by more fortunate companions within the encampment, and around them were hastily reared the walls of Fort Randolph. In it a garrison of one hundred men was left, and the Virginia army, made eager by success and maddened by the loss of so many brave men, crossed the Ohio and dashed away in pursuit of the beaten and disheartened enemy. Our next information of the Virginians is that a march of eighty miles through an untrodden wilderness has been completed, and on the 24th of October we find them encamped on Congo creek, in what is now Pickaway township, Pickaway county, Ohio, within striking distance of the Indian towns, but here again compelled to await the move- ments of the tory governor at the head of the left wing, who was then encamped farther north, at a point called Camp Charlotte, and from which place he sent a messenger to General Lewis forbidding his far- ther advance into the hostile country, as he, Dunmore, was now negotiating for peace with the Indians. The peace was concluded, a junction of the two divisions effected, and the army returned to Virginia, Dunmore's command by way of Fort Fincastle and Potomac Gap, that of General Lewis retracing its line of march by way of the Great Kanawha valley. Thus ended Dunmore's War.
John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, the com- mander of the northern wing of the army, and the last
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Royal Governor of Virginia, was born in 1732. He was descended on the maternal side from the royal house of Stuart and succeeded to the peerage in 1756. He was appointed Governor of New York - in 1770, and of Virginia in July, 1771, and arrived in the colony in 1772. On his return from his western cam- paign he found Virginia in a state of the wildest com- motion. Patrick Henry, by his matchless eloquence, had aroused throughout the colony a spirit of patriot- ism which was manifesting itself in opposition to the mother country. Dunmore adhered to the royal cause, and on the 20th of June, 1775, caused the powder to be removed from the magazine at Williamsburg to a British ship. Incensed at this, a body of armed men collected under Patrick Henry, and the governor was forced to compromise the affair by paying for the powder. On the 6th of June he fled with his family and found refuge on board the British man-of-war " Fowey." He collected a band of tories, runaway negroes and British soldiers, which was defeated by the Virginians at Great Bridge, near Norfolk, Decem- ber 9, 1775. January 6, 1776, he burned Norfolk, then the most flourishing town in Virginia. Soon after he established himself on Gwynn's island, in Chesapeake bay, where he was attacked by a force under General Andrew Lewis, then commanding in lower Virginia, and completely routed. He sailed away from Virginia never to return. He was ap- pointed Governor of Bermuda in 1786, and died at Randolph, England, in 1809.
Many others, whose names are prominent in frontier history, served in the northern wing of the army. The second in command was Colonel-afterward General
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-John Gibson, a man of talent and executive ability. He enjoyed the confidence of Washington, who, in 1781, appointed him to the command of the Western Military Department. He was Secretary of Indiana Territory from 1800 to 1813, a portion of which time he was acting governor of the same. He filled sev- eral other positions of trust and honor, and died near Pittsburg in 1822. The next in rank was Colonel William Crawford, whose sad fate is hereafter to be recorded. Others were Simon Kenton, prominent in the early annals of Kentucky, and the first white man to rear a cabin in the Great Kanawha Valley; Samuel McCulloch, 'conspicuous in the early history of the Valley of the Upper Ohio ; Benjamin Logan, afterward General Logan, of Kentucky, and the builder and de- fender of Logan's Fort in that State, and General George Rogers Clarke, whose achievements during his Illinois campaign won for him the title of the " Hannibal of the West."
To the student of history no truth is more patent than this, that the battle of Point Pleasant was the first in the series of the Revolution, the flames of which were then being kindled by the oppression of the mother country, and the resistance of the same by the feeble but determined colonies. It is a well-known fact that emissaries of Great Britain were then inciting the Indians to hostilities against the frontier for the purpose of distracting attention and thus preventing the consummation of the union which was then being formed to resist the tyranny of their armed oppressors. It is also well known that Lord Dunmore was an enemy to the colonists, by his rigid adherence to the royal cause and his efforts to induce the Indians to co-
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operate with the English, and thus assist in reducing Virginia to subjection. It has been asserted that he intentionally delayed the progress of the left wing of the army that the right might be destroyed at Point Pleasant. Then, at the mouth of the Great Kanawha river, on the 10th day of October, 1774, there went whizzing through the forest the first volley of a strug- gle for liberty which, in the grandeur and importance of its results, stands without a parallel in the history of the world. On that day the soil on which Point Pleasant now stands drank the first blood shed in de- fence of American liberty, and it was there decided that the decaying institutions of the Middle Ages should not prevail in America, but that just laws and priceless liberty should be planted forever in the domains of the New World.
Historians, becoming engrossed with the more stir- ring scenes of the Revolution, have failed to consider this sanguinary battle in its true import and bearing upon the destiny of our country, forgetting that the colonial army returned home only to enlist in the patriot army, and on almost every battle-field of the Revolution represented that little band who stood face to face with the savage allies of Great Britain at Point Pleasant. But all did not return. Many thus early paid the forfeit of their lives, but they were not for- gotten. Though no marble marks their place of rest, and no historian has inscribed their names on the roll of the honored dead, yet their memory lives in the re- hearsal around the cabin fires of the mountains of West Augusta, and in the rustic mountain ballads which were chanted many years after the storm of ·revolution had spent its force and died away.
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Belonging to General Lewis' army was a young man named Ellis Hughes. He was a native of Vir- ginia, and had been bred in the hot-bed of Indian war- fare. The Indians having murdered a young lady to whom he was very much attached, and subsequently his father, he vowed revenge, and the return of peace did not mitigate his hatred of the race. Shortly after Wayne's treaty with the Indians in 1795, he forsook his native mountains, and in company with one John Ratcliff removed north of the Ohio, where they be- came the first settlers in what is now Licking county, in that State. Hughes died near Utica, that county, in March, 1845, at an advanced age, in hope of a happy future, claiming, and accredited by all who knew him, to be the last survivor of the battle of Point Pleasant. He was buried with military honors and other demon- strations of respect.
CHAPTER X.
WEST VIRGINIA DURING THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR.
West Virginia at the Beginning of the War-The Quebec Act-Colonial Conven- tion of 1775-West Virginians in the Continental Army-Tory Insurrection Within the Limits of the State.
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