A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier Read online

  As a result, the first Europeans to arrive on the plateau could not help but see great potential in the land. One of those early arrivals, Joseph Doddridge, took note of the “fruitful soil”10 while others saw a great timberland begging for the axe and saw. Surveyor Thomas Lewis described the spruce, cherry, beech and maple trees as “the most and finest” he had ever seen.11 Given these many attributes, it was not long before settlers, explorers and, sadly, greedy, ambitious land speculators began to venture beyond the Alleghenies in search of their future in a new “promised land.”

  As these disparate groups endeavored to cross the mountains and then navigate the valleys and forests of the plateau, their greatest challenge was the absence of any roads, which would not arrive in this part of the world for decades. However, they quickly discovered the next best thing in a network of trails that crisscrossed the entire region. These trails, created over the centuries by migrating herds of buffalo and the foot traffic generated by local Indian tribes, were quickly adopted as natural roadways. By the time the first Europeans arrived on the scene, these buffalo paths took the form of deep gullies that followed the paths of the region’s major creeks and rivers. They generally passed east and west: “from rivers to and across mountains, they crossed, re-crossed, and were coterminous with one another.”12 The result was a vast, almost web-like network that, for many years, would become the sole means of communication between new settlements and the more established regions on the east side of the Blue Ridge. Further, these trails eventually determined the entire pattern and distribution of settlement on the Allegheny Plateau.

  This eighteenth-century French map shows the Allegheny Plateau region as “Indiana.” Library of Congress.

  One of the most important trails, as well as the one that would influence settlement along the Monongahela River, was the Shawnee Trail. This pathway began on the South Branch Potomac River somewhere below what is now Moorefield, West Virginia and continued up that river to its confluence with the North Fork South Branch Potomac River. It then followed that fork and turned up Seneca Creek, passing Seneca Rocks, and finally crossed the crest of the Allegheny Mountains above the mouth of Horse Camp Creek. The trail then entered the Tygart River Valley near what is now Elkins and proceeded up the Tygart past present-day Beverly to Huttonsville.13

  Once settlers used these trails to cross the mountains into the Allegheny Plateau, they encountered several major rivers, including the Monongahela, Cheat, West Fork, Tygart Valley, New and Greenbrier. Without the aid of maps and, since most of the trails followed the rivers, would-be settlers tended to follow these waterways, often meandering up a tributary. This practice, in turn, helped them find some of the most desirable farmland, which was located on these rivers’ broad, open flood plains.14

  By this means, settlers were able to move westward from the Shenandoah and Greenbrier Valleys via the New River to the Kanawha and Ohio Valleys, establishing new settlements there by 1773. In addition, other settlers followed the Monongahela north to Fort Pitt, where they procured rafts to take them down the Ohio. This led to new homesteads from above today’s Wheeling, West Virginia, to the mouth of the Little Kanawha River.15

  THE POLITICS OF EMPIRE

  Politics greatly influenced the settlement of the Allegheny Plateau, including the region along the Monongahela around Prickett’s Fort, and had a significant effect on both the lives of settlers, like Phebe and Thomas Cunningham, and those Native Americans who lived on the plateau and in the Ohio Country to the west. Moreover, these politics were not merely those of colonial governors and their assemblies, as the relationships of nations and of kings often dictated life and death on the eighteenth-century Virginia frontier.

  The Virginia frontier was just part of a battleground for empire, for political and economic domination among the powers of Europe. The battle for this empire began the day Columbus landed in 1492 to claim the New World for Spain’s king and continued for the greater part of the next three centuries. Eventually, the French, Dutch and British would essentially cede most of South America to Spain, but the eastern half of North America was quite another matter. France would claim ownership of North America with Giovanni da Verranzano’s exploration of the coast between Nova Scotia and the Carolinas in 1524, while Henry VIII sent John Rut to explore the east coast in 1527. Jacques Cartier added to the competition when he claimed the St. Lawrence watershed for France, and Britain countered with possession of Newfoundland by Humphrey Gilbert in 1583. In the meantime, Britain’s Sir Francis Drake successfully harassed Spanish forts and settlements on the Florida coast, and by 1604, the Spaniards were isolated to their Florida and Gulf Coast possessions.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, the battle for the North American wilderness between the Atlantic Ocean, Mississippi River, Gulf of Mexico and Hudson’s Bay had been going on between France and Great Britain for more than 150 years. During this era, the fighting was almost incessant as the two countries fought five wars for the conquest of North America: Huguenot (1627–1629); League of Augsburg, or King William’s (1689–1697); Spanish Succession, or Queen Anne’s (1702–1713); Austrian Succession, or King George’s (1745–1748); and Seven Years’, or French and Indian (1754–1763).16 Each of these wars would end via treaty, and each of those treaties would sow the seeds for future conflict.

  Another reason that French and British conflict lasted so long and was so bitterly contested is that the pattern of colonization and the very character of the respective French and British empires in North America were quite different. Although both nations’ interests were mercantile in nature, the French approach to the Native American occupants of the continent was more subtle and included a heavier dose of religion, provided initially by Recollet priests and then followed with greater success by the Jesuits. While the French did occasionally engage in battle with nations such as the Iroquois, Natchez and Fox, they never sought to “conquer” them or the land they would anoint as New France.

  Instead, the French elected simply to pay the Indians very high duties for exploiting the wilderness and allow the Jesuits to see to the less worldly task of saving souls and pacifying pagan “savages.” As a result, New France consisted primarily of isolated, primitive trading posts scattered across a broad wilderness, with only a narrow band of settlements between Quebec and Montreal, and New Orleans and Mobile. For the most part, the Indians tolerated the French but still resented their intrusion, although usually not enough to war with them. Further, none of the tribes who lived in New France considered themselves French subjects and would have been incensed had it been suggested that they were. They also did not see the goods dispensed by the French traders as “gifts.” Rather, the items received from the French were exchanged either as “rent” or in direct payment for furs. As for the French themselves, it did not matter if they were Jesuit missionaries, trappers (what the French called “voyageurs”) or government colonial officials—they clearly understood that their very survival relied on not only maintaining good relations with the Indians but also nurturing the greed and ever-growing demand by the Indians for European goods.17

  The French proved very adept at ingratiating themselves with the Indians at every opportunity and actually integrating themselves into tribal life. As a result, it was not uncommon for a Frenchman to speak one or more Indian languages and be thoroughly conversant in their customs. Further, marriage to an Indian was far more common and more readily accepted in New France’s colonial society than in the British colonies of North America. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, the French tended to be very knowledgeable regarding the various tribes’ ambitions and politics, allowing them to more easily negotiate with the Indians and maintain stable diplomatic and military relations. The British, however, were another matter entirely.

  Significant British colonization began shortly after the 1604 Treaty of London between Great Britain and Spain. In that treaty, James I recognized and accepted existing Spanish properties in the Western Hemispher
e but retained the right to take whatever remained “unoccupied,” despite the fact that thousands of Native Americans already occupied much of North America. Therefore, the British model for empire on the continent would be one of physical occupation and legal ownership based on European culture and custom. The very fact that the initial actions of James I in securing his new colonies was to charter two companies, the Virginia Company and Plymouth Company, is evidence of the British approach. The eastern portion of North America was thus divided between the two firms, with the Plymouth Company receiving charter to all the lands between the thirty-eighth and forty-fifth parallels of latitude and the Virginia Company holding rights to the region extending from the thirty-fourth to forty-first parallel.

  From the moment the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery arrived on what the British would name the James River, the British approach was one of conquest and, more often than not, of conquest in the most brutal and violent terms. Their methodology was to unleash a seemingly endless flood of settlers upon the lands between the Atlantic and the Appalachian Mountains. While small numbers of explorers, hunters, trappers and traders, who usually interacted with the Indians in the same manner as their French counterparts, often arrived first, unlike the French, these men were quickly followed by settlers armed with “muskets, diseases, and ploughs.”18 The British made little, if any, attempt to accommodate the various Indian nations, and as a result, they quickly earned the Indians’ utter hatred.

  However, as this process continued and the British moved farther west, their colonial governments soon learned that the “flood of settlers” would not be a naturally occurring event. Rather, potential settlers required encouragement from the government. After all, few were willing to take their families across the mountains to such a distant, remote and hostile place as the Allegheny Plateau without some inducement to do so. Therefore, between 1630 and 1750, as the French and British battled for greater control of the wilderness, colonial Virginia’s government created a series of policies that greatly influenced settlement beyond the Alleghenies, all of which were based on securing the colony’s frontier through encouragement of large-scale land speculation and the use of settlers as “human shields.”19 The first of these, the land law of 1630, was one of the most important pieces of legislation produced by the colonial Virginia General Assembly. Under this law, the colonial government made land grants available to groups of settlers willing to take possession of lands located at exposed strategic locations on the frontier. Importantly, possession was based on the English concept wherein “improvement” resulted in ownership. This idea was best expressed in 1750 by Henry Burwell, a member of the Virginia General Assembly, who stated, “That, notwithstanding the Grants of the Kings of England, France, or Spain, the Property of these uninhabited Parts of the World must be founded upon prior Occupancy according to the Law of Nature; and it is the Seating and Cultivating of the soil & not the bare travelling through a Territory that constitutes Right.”20

  This concept of ownership served two purposes. First, by being physically present, the settlers helped assert British dominion of the frontier, and second, they acted as a first line of defense against Indian uprisings, a “buffer zone” or human shield. At the time, few settlers chose to take advantage of these grants. Still, the law would become the foundation for Virginia’s land, settlement and frontier defense policies for the next 130 years.21

  The General Assembly decided to revise the original land law in 1701, and in this version, it added emphasis on the military aspects of settlement. Under the 1701 law, the colony invited groups of settlers to petition for grants of between ten thousand and thirty thousand acres of wilderness land at no cost. However, the key provision was the requirement that these groups of settlers include at least twenty “warlike Christian men.” From that wording, the military implications of the revision could not be clearer. In return, the new owners of these parcels of land would receive a twenty-year tax exemption, with each man awarded his own grant of two hundred acres of farmland and a smaller town lot within the overall tract of land. In return, the settlers were required to build a half-acre fort, organize themselves as a militia serving under a commander selected by the governor and equip themselves with a supply of basic military hardware, including a musket, pistol, sword, tomahawk, five pounds of powder and twenty pounds of lead.22

  When the 1701 land law proved to be almost as unpopular as its predecessor, the assembly decided to try revising the statute one more time. In 1730, it cleverly eliminated any direct military references or requirements in favor of a highly commercialized approach to settlement. Frontier defense and military service were deleted from the law, and land speculators were inserted between would-be settlers and the colonial government. As a result, in the absence of requirements for being “warlike,” building forts and creating militias, the General Assembly stipulated that one family had to be settled within their grant for every thousand acres received, speculators had a two-year time limit in which to settle the families and families had to come from somewhere outside of Virginia. The latter was inserted apparently out of a fear that the law would be so popular it might lead to the depopulation of the eastern part of the colony.23

  The 1730 law led to an explosive growth in settlement and speculation, as millions of acres of frontier land were gobbled up by land speculators during the twenty years that followed the code’s enactment. Some of these speculators were individuals, while others were incorporated companies, such as the Greenbrier Company, Ohio Company and Loyal Land Company. The ownership of these firms included many of the most influential and powerful men in the colony, men such as Thomas Lee, George Fairfax, George Mason, Thomas Cresap, Augustine Washington, Lawrence Washington, William Beverly and Charles Lewis, all from the “first families” of Virginia.24

  The influence these speculators had in creating a virtual wave of settlement should not be understated. In order to meet the law’s requirements and gain ownership, they actively promoted the benefits of settlement west of the Alleghenies and recruited potential settlers from outside Virginia’s borders by offering additional inducements to settle on the frontier. The heaviest recruiting targeted not only German, Swiss, Welsh, Scots-Irish and English families living in the Middle Atlantic colonies but also Scots-Irish in Ireland and Rhineland Germans. Incentives included legal services involving deeds and land surveys and even financial aid, such as offering generous lines of credit.25

  Virginia’s government further aided the settlement of the frontier by encouraging religious tolerance and recruiting non-Anglicans into the fold. In 1738, Virginia governor William Gooch sought out Presbyterians by approaching the Presbyterian Synod of Philadelphia and telling their ministers that, should they choose to serve on the frontier, they “may be assured that no interruption shall be given…so as they conform themselves to the rules prescribed by the Act of Toleration in England, by taking the oaths enjoined thereby, and registering the place of their meeting.”26 This promise was given despite the misgivings of many in the colony’s Anglican hierarchy. However, as one historian noted, “So long as they were largely confined to the back country and the Great Valley, the Church of England planters and their clergy were not seriously disturbed.”27 The General Assembly added to Gooch’s pronouncement in 1752 by enacting legislation that specifically exempted Protestant dissenters “from the payment of all public, county, and parish levies, for the term of ten years.” Then, in 1753, it further extended the tax exemption for all Protestants living west of the mountains to fifteen years. However, all these efforts by the General Assembly would presently be overcome by the final, decisive war for dominion over the North American wilderness.

  The French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years’ War, would be the most important of all the Anglo-French conflicts and was a historical watershed event in that it forever shifted the balance of power in North America and, with it, the course of American history. While the focus of the conflict would be in North A
merica, the war was a global one, with fighting in Europe, the Caribbean, West Africa, India, the East Indies, Argentina, the Philippines and all the seas in between. In the end, it would:

  determine for centuries to come, if not for all time, what civilization—what governmental institutions, what social and economic patterns—would be paramount in North America. It was to determine likewise whether Americans were to be securely confined…to a long but narrow ribbon of territory lying between the coastline and a not too distant mountain chain and whether their rivals, the French…were to remain a permanent and effective barrier to any enjoyment of the vast western interior of the continent.28

  In 1753 and 1754, both sides made preparatory moves for war, with the French importing regular army troops from France and pushing those forces deep into the Ohio Valley, establishing and garrisoning strong forts at Fort Presque Isle on the banks of Lake Erie, Fort Le Boeuf just to the south and Fort Duquesne at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. The latter was clearly the most direct affront to British and Virginian sovereignty, so Governor Dinwiddie dispatched a force of militia under twenty-four-year-old George Washington to expel the French from Duquesne. The expedition was driven back, and the bloodshed between the two sides escalated matters further.

  Despite the fact that Great Britain and France were still officially at peace, the British dispatched an army under General Edward Braddock to America in 1755. Braddock’s instructions were to add colonial militia to his strength, move to seize Fort Duquesne and then advance to capture Forts Le Boeuf and Presque Isle. Of course, Braddock’s army would meet with disaster along the trails to Fort Duquesne, and Braddock was killed in the fighting. Now, there would be no turning back, and war raged along the frontier for the next eight years.29