The Shawnee-Dunmore War

A year before British colonists began their war for independence, a confederation of Native peoples fought for their own independence. In late 1774, a decade of tension and violence between white Virginians and the Indigenous people of the Ohio Valley erupted into open conflict.

In the war’s central battle, a group of Shawnee and Mingo warriors, who may have been joined by men from the Delaware and Wyandot nations, lost a hard-fought contest to the Virginia militia.¹ The treaty that followed ceded much of the land south of the Ohio River to white settlers.

The war is often known as Lord Dunmore’s War, named for the Virginia Governor John Murray, the earl of Dunmore, who led the settlers’ militia forces into the field. At the time, some called it “Cresap’s War,” after a violent white frontiersman named Michael Cresap, who was a captain in the Virginia militia.² Today, we call it the Shawnee-Dunmore War, recognizing that the diplomacy of Shawnee leaders built the Indigenous coalition involved in the war. Every war, after all, has more than one side, and more than one story.

Great Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War in 1763 led France to give up its claims to North America, including the rich lands of the Ohio Valley. Great Britain was the continent’s dominant European power. But the British empire was aware that Native nations were powerful allies and formidable foes. Sunk under the enormous debt they accrued during the war, British leaders were eager to avoid expensive wars with Native people. In 1763, King George III proclaimed that his subjects were not to settle in the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, which would belong to the Native inhabitants.

Virginia settlers were appalled. Many wealthy Virginians, including Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, George Washington, and George Mason, owned huge tracts of land west of the Appalachians. Or at least they claimed to. They generally “bought” this land, sight unseen, from companies that promised to increase the land’s value by attracting settlers and support from Parliament.³ These “speculators,” as they were known, hoped that the King would reverse his decision. George Washington, for one, wrote that the Proclamation of 1763 was nothing more than “a temporary expedien[t] to quiet the Minds of the Indians.” He predicted it would be gone in a few years.

Many white settlers ignored the King’s order and went west anyway, illegally squatting on land. This led to a decade of violence, as white settlers trespassed on lands that an array of Native nations considered to be their hunting grounds.⁴ When Daniel Boone led one incursion in 1769, he encountered a Shawnee group who cautioned them to “Go home and stay there” because “this is the Indians’ hunting ground.” Like the King’s proclamation, white settlers largely ignored warnings like this one.

White settlers’ migration into Native lands sparked numerous violent encounters, especially in the upper Ohio River region, near where the states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio meet today. Violence often ignited reprisals. By the 1770s, the Ohio Valley was locked in a violent cycle, held together by the frantic efforts to British officials and Indigenous leaders to settle disputes and limit violence. The descendants of an Oneida diplomat named Shickellamy, such as the renowned Mingo Logan, were among those seeking to defuse tensions with the invading settlers.⁵

But on April 30, 1774, a group of white settlers led by Jacob and Daniel Greathouse murdered much of Logan’s family at a settlement near the mouth of Yellow Creek in the upper Ohio River. This was a region hotly contested by settlers and Native people. There are numerous accounts of the attack. One of the more credible versions came from a local trader, who claimed that the Greathouses invited a party of people known as Mingos (an Iroquoian group, primarily Seneca and Cayuga, who had migrated to the Ohio Valley) to cross the river to drink with them, and then ambushed them in a tavern. Eight people died. We don’t know the names of all of those killed, but they included Logan’s brother John Petty, his mother Neanoma, his sister Koonay, and her infant child.⁶

These murders called forth vengeance. While settlers murdered his family at Yellow Creek, another son of Shickellamy was hunting. We know him today as Logan, though historians dispute which of Shickellamy’s sons he was. Was he Soyechtowa (also known as James Logan) or Tachendorus (known as John Logan)? We may never know for sure. But when Logan learned of the massacre of his family members, he later explained, he mourned that “There runs not a drop of the blood of Logan in the Veins of any human creature.” This pushed him to seek revenge.⁷

Logan blamed a white settler named Michael Cresap for the Yellow Creek Massacre. Cresap had indeed provoked much violence in the Ohio Valley, but he appears to have not been directly responsible for this attack. Nevertheless, Logan targeted Cresap in a series of raids that killed numerous white settlers.⁸ In response, Virginia Governor John Murray, the earl of Dunmore, mobilized the colony’s militia to march west. William Preston, a militia lieutenant and government land surveyor, called for volunteers to seize the chance presented by Logan’s raids: “The Oppertunty [opportunity] we hav[e] So long wished for, is now before us.”⁹ Logan’s attacks came just as the British government was signaling that Virginians would not realize their land claims anytime soon.¹⁰ For Edmund Pendleton, one of Virginia’s delegates to the First Continental Congress, it seemed that the war had been caused by those who “want a pretence for driving the Indians” from their “fine lands.”¹¹

One critical Pennsylvanian (another colony that claimed much of the Ohio Valley) suggested that wealthy speculators were seeking to seize land through conquest that they could not obtain legally: “the scheming party in Virginia are making a tool of their Governor, to execute the plans formed by them for their private emolument [profit], who, being mostly land-jobbers [speculators], would wish to have those lands.”¹² Some even suspected that Dunmore himself was hoping to profit from the war.¹³

In response to Logan’s raids in the summer of 1774, Virginia’s militia marched west. Governor Dunmore divided the invasion force in half. He sent a force commanded by Colonel Andrew Lewis north along the Kanawha River and led his own group of soldiers south from Pittsburgh.

Over the previous decade, Indigenous diplomats, especially among the Shawnee people, had worked to settle old wounds and build unity among the region’s Indigenous people. A coalition of about 700 to 800 Indigenous warriors gathered to meet the Virginia militia. As the two forces neared each other, Indigenous leaders held a council of war. The Shawnee leader Cornstalk argued for peace. But when the council agreed to strike, Cornstalk helped plan an attack on Lewis’s army before it could join Dunmore’s forces. A group of around 700 to 800 Indigenous warriors attacked the 1,100 Virginia militiamen at dawn on October 10, 1774.¹⁵

It was an unusually long, hard-fought battle. One Virginia militiaman recounted that it was “a Very hard day,” and “the Hidious Cries of the Enemy and the groans of our wound[ed] men lying around was Enough to shuder the stoutest h[e]art.” “Such a battle with the Indians,” one colonist concluded, “was never heard of before.”¹⁶

At a council, Cornstalk and other Indigenous leaders decided to seek peace. They met Dunmore at his camp, called Camp Charlotte. The treaty they agreed to ceded lands south of the Ohio River to Virginia. It also required, among other clauses, that the Shawnee people deliver several hostages to the colonists in Williamsburg.¹⁷ Soon Americans stormed into these western lands, and Cornstalk protested to the Continental Congress that “We never sold you our Lands . . . which you are settling without ever asking our leave . . . We live by Hunting and cannot subsist in any other way. That was our hunting Country and you have taken it from us. This is what sits heavy upon our Hearts and on the Hearts of all Nations.”¹⁸

Logan did not attend these peace negotiations. Instead, he met separately with Dunmore’s envoy John Gibson, who was Logan’s brother-in-law. According to Gibson’s later testimony, he and Logan sat together under the branches of an enormous elm tree. Gibson listened to Logan deliver a speech that has become known as Logan’s Lament. In it, he pointed out that even though he had been a friend to white settlers, he nevertheless lost his family to their attacks. His speech concluded with a haunting question that would be remembered long after these events faded from memory: “Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.”

Governor Dunmore arrived back at the Governor’s Palace in early December with four captives, as required by the Treaty of Camp Charlotte. Dunmore wrote he intended to keep them “untill we were convinced of their Sincere intention to adhere to” the agreement.¹⁹ The British diarist Nicholas Cresswell encountered these hostages and described them as “tall, manly, well-shaped men, of a Copper colour with black hair, quick piercing eyes, and good features.” His description of these hostages is one of the most detailed documentary accounts we have of the appearance and clothing of Shawnee men in the eighteenth century.²⁰

In the aftermath of his victory, Dunmore was as popular with white Virginians as he would ever be. Williamsburg’s town officers officially congratulated him “on the conclusion of a dangerous and fatiguing service.”²¹ When Dunmore arrived in Williamsburg, he met his new daughter, who had been born while he was away. He named her “Virginia.”

Yet even amid this triumph, Dunmore sensed that the ground was moving underneath him. While the Virginia and Native forces fought, the Continental Congress had been debating. On October 20, the same day that the Treaty of Camp Charlotte was agreed, the Congress adopted the Continental Association, a boycott to protest British policies. On November 5, some of Dunmore’s officers gathered at an outpost called Fort Gower. They passed a series of resolutions declaring loyalty to the King, but also insisted that they would “exert every power within us” to defend the “just rights and privileges” in America.²² Dunmore was witnessing a growing restlessness among the colonists. His experiences in the west convinced him that his government could not “restrain the Americans” from seizing Native lands.²³ A spirit of defiance was spreading.

By the next summer, Shawnee leaders complained that “there is no resting place for us” because the settlers seemed to be trying “to deprive us entirely of our whole Country.”²⁴ When tensions between the colonists and the British empire burst into violence in 1775, most Shawnee people attempted to remain neutral. But this proved impossible, especially after the American militia killed Cornstalk. Many Shawnee people allied with the British, while others remained neutral during the war.²⁵ In the coming years, the Shawnee helped to lead confederations that fought the United States in the Northwest Indian War and Tecumseh’s War. The Shawnee-Dunmore War resolved little in 1774. Rather, it was one battle in a lengthy, decades-long war for the future of the Ohio Valley.