The Winning of the American West. Theodore Roosevelt
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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; and provided also she could prevent herself from being ousted by the crown, or by some of the other colonies. 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, and induced the settlers of the upper Holston to consider themselves as Virginians, not Carolinians; but at the north the effect was still more confusing, and nearly resulted in bringing about an intercolonial 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.240 Indeed a strong Party among the settlers favored the Virginian claim; whereas it would have been quite impossible to arouse anywhere in Virginia the least feeling in support of a similar claim on behalf of Pennsylvania. The borderers had a great contempt for the sluggish and timid government of the Quaker province, which was very lukewarm in protecting them in their rights—or, indeed, in punishing them when they did wrong to others. In fact, it seems probable that they would have declared for Virginia even more strongly, had it not been for the very reason that their feeling of independence was so surly as to make them suspicious of all forms of control; and they therefore objected almost as much to Virginian as Pennsylvanian rule, and regarded the outcome of the dispute with a certain indifference.241
For a time in the early part of 1774 there seemed quite as much likelihood of the Virginians being drawn into a fight with the Pennsylvanians as with the Shawnees. While the Pennsylvanian commissioners were trying to come to an agreement concerning the boundaries with Lord Dunmore, the representatives of the two contesting parties at Fort Pitt were on the verge of actual collision. The Earl's agent in the disputed territory was a Captain John Conolly,242 a man of violent temper and bad character. He embodied the men favorable to his side as a sort of Virginian militia, with which he not only menaced both hostile and friendly Indians, but the adherents of the Pennsylvanian government as well. He destroyed their houses, killed their cattle and hogs, impressed their horses, and finally so angered them that they threatened to take refuge in the stockade at Fort Pitt, and defy him to open war,—although even in the midst of these quarrels with Conolly their loyalty to the Quaker State was somewhat doubtful.243
The Virginians were the only foes the western Indians really dreaded; for their backwoodsmen were of warlike temper, and had learned to fight effectively in the forest. The Indians styled them Long Knives; or, to be more exact, they called them collectively the "Big Knife."244 There have been many accounts given of the origin of this name, some ascribing it to the long knives worn by the hunters and backwoodsmen generally, others to the fact that some of the noted Virginian fighters in their early skirmishes were armed with swords. At any rate the title was accepted by all the Indians as applying to their most determined foes among the colonists; and finally, after we had become a nation, was extended so as to apply to Americans generally.
The war that now ensued was not general. The Six Nations, as a whole, took no part in it, while Pennsylvania also stood aloof; indeed at one time it was proposed that the Pennsylvanians and Iroquois should jointly endeavor to mediate between the combatants.245 The struggle was purely between the Virginians and the northwestern Indians.
The interests of the Virginians and Pennsylvanians conflicted not only 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;246 whereas in Pennsylvania the Indian trade was very important and lucrative, and the numerous traders to the Indian towns were anxious that the redskins should remain in undisturbed enjoyment of their forests, and that no white man should be allowed to come among them; moreover, so long as they were able to make heavy profits, they were utterly indifferent to the well-being of the white frontiersmen, and in return incurred the suspicion and hatred of the latter. The Virginians accused the traders of being the main cause of the difficulty,247 asserting that they sometimes incited the Indians to outrages, and always, even in the midst of hostilities, kept them supplied with guns and ammunition, and even bought from them the horses that they had stolen on their plundering expeditions against the Virginian border.248 These last accusations were undoubtedly justified, at least in great part, by the facts. 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. But Bouquet had inflicted a very slight punishment upon them, and in concluding an unsatisfactory peace had caused them to make but a partial reparation for the wrongs they had done.249 They remained haughty and insolent, irritated rather than awed by an ineffective chastisement, and their young men made frequent forays on the frontier. 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;250 for here and there hunters or settlers were already beginning to build cabins along the course of that stream. The cession by the Iroquois of these same hunting-grounds, at the treaty of Fort Stanwix, 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, and had no intention of acquiescing in any arrangement the latter might make, unless it was also clearly to their own advantage.
In the decade before Lord Dunmore's war there had been much mutual wrong-doing between the northwestern Indians and the Virginian borderers; but on the whole the latter had occupied the position of being sinned against more often than that of sinning. The chief offence of the whites was that they trespassed upon uninhabited lands, which they forthwith proceeded to cultivate, instead of merely roaming over them to hunt the game and butcher one another. Doubtless occasional white men would murder an Indian if they got a chance, and the traders almost invariably cheated the tribesmen. But as a whole the traders were Indian rather than white in their sympathies, and the whites rarely made forays against their foes avowedly for horses and plunder, while the Indians on their side were continually indulging in such inroads. Every year parties of young red warriors crossed the Ohio to plunder the outlying farms, burn down the buildings, scalp the inmates, and drive off the horses.251 Year by year the exasperation of the borderers grew greater and the tale of the wrongs they had to avenge longer.252 Occasionally they took a brutal and ill-judged vengeance, which usually fell on innocent Indians,253 and raised up new foes for the whites. 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; eleven people were murdered in the county of Fincastle alone.254 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 every thing ripe for an explosion. The Virginian borderers were fearfully exasperated, and ready to take vengeance upon any Indians, whether peaceful or hostile; while the Shawnees and Mingos, on their side, were arrogant and overbearing, and yet alarmed at the continual advance of the whites. The headstrong rashness of Conolly, who was acting as Lord Dunmore's lieutenant on the border, and who was equally willing to plunge into a war with Pennsylvania or the Shawnees, served as a firebrand to ignite this mass of tinder. The borderers were anxious for a war; and Lord Dunmore was not inclined to baulk them. He was ambitious of glory, and probably thought that in the midst of the growing difficulties between the mother country and the colonies, it would be good policy to distract the Virginians' minds by an Indian war, which, if he conducted it to a successful conclusion, might strengthen his own position.255
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