CHAPTER XV.

THE GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA NULLIFIES THE QUEBEC ACT.

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER, 1774.

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THE attempt to extend the jurisdiction of Quebec to CHAP. the Ohio river had no sanction in English history, and was resisted by the older colonies, especially by 1774. Virginia. The interest of the crown offices in the adjacent provinces was also at variance with the policy of parliament.

No royal governor showed more rapacity in the use of official power than Lord Dunmore. He had reluctantly left New York, where, during his short career, he had acquired fifty thousand acres of land, and himself acting as chancellor, was preparing to decide in his own court in his own favor, a large and unfounded claim which he had preferred against the lieutenant governor. Upon entering on the government of Virginia, his passion for land and fees, outweighing the proclamation of the king and reiterated and most positive instructions from the secretary of state, he advocated the claims of the colony to the West; and was himself a partner in two immense purchases of

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CHAP. land from the Indians in southern Illinois. In 1773,

XV. his agents, the Bullets, made surveys at the falls of the 1774. Ohio; and a part of Louisville, and of the towns opsite Cincinnati, are now held under his warrant. The area of the Ancient Dominion expanded with his cupidity.

Pittsburg, and the country as far up the Monongahela as Redstone Old Fort, formed the rallying point for western emigration and Indian trade. It was a part of the county of Westmoreland, in Pennsylvania. Suddenly and without proper notice to the council of that province, Dunmore extended his own jurisdiction over the tempting and well-peopled region. He found a willing instrument in one John Conolly, a native of Pennsylvania, a physician, landjobber, and subservient political intriguer, who had travelled much in the Ohio valley, both by water and land. Commissioned by Dunmore as captaincommandant for Pittsburg and its dependencies, that is to say of all the western country, Conolly opened the year 1774 with a proclamation of his authority; and he directed a muster of the militia. The western people, especially the emigrants from Maryland and Virginia, spurned the meek tenets of the Quakers, and inclined to the usurpation. The governor and council of Pennsylvania took measures to support their indisputable right. This Dunmore passionately resented as a personal insult, and would neither listen to irrefragable arguments, nor to candid offers of settlement by joint commissioners, nor to the personal application of two of the council of Pennsylvania. Jurisdiction was opposed to jurisdiction; arrests were followed by counter arrests; the country on the Monongahela, then

XV.

the great avenue to the West, became a scene of con- CHAP. fusion.

The territory north and west of the Ohio, belonged 1774. by act of parliament to the province of Quebec; yet Dunmore professed to conduct the government and grant the lands on the Scioto, the Wabash and the Illinois. South of the Ohio river Franklin's inchoate province of Vandalia stretched from the Alleghanies to Kentucky river; the treaty at Fort Stanwix bounded Virginia by the Tennessee; the treaty at Lochaber carried its limit only to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. The king's instructions confined settlements to the east of the mountains. There was no one, therefore, having authority to give an undisputed title to any land west of the Alleghanies, or to restrain the restlessness of the American emigrants. With the love of wandering that formed a part of their nature, the hardy backwoodsman, clad in a hunting shirt and deerskin leggins, armed with a rifle, a powder horn, and a pouch for shot and bul lets, a hatchet and a hunter's knife, descended the mountains in quest of more distant lands which he forever imagined to be richer and lovelier than those which he knew. Wherever he fixed his halt, the hatchet hewed logs for his cabin, and blazed trees of the forest kept the record of his title deeds; nor did he conceive that a British government had any right to forbid the occupation of lands, which were either uninhabited or only broken by a few scattered villages of savages, whom he looked upon as but little removed above the brute creation.

The Indians themselves were regardless of treaties. Notwithstanding the agreement with Bouquet

CHAP. they still held young men and women of Virginia in XV. captivity; and the annals of the wilderness never

1774. ceased to record their barbarous murders. The wan

Oct.

1.

derer in search of a new home on the banks of the Mississippi, risked his life at every step; so that a system of independent defence and private war became the custom of the backwoods. The settler had every motive to preserve peace; yet he could not be turned from his purpose by fear, and trusted for security in the forest to his perpetual readiness for self-defence. Not a year passed away without a massacre of pioneers. Near the end of 1773, Daniel Boone would have taken his wife and children to Kentucky. At Powell's valley, he was joined by five families and forty men. On or near the tenth of October, as they approached Cumberland Gap, the young men who had charge of the pack-horses and cattle in the rear, were suddenly attacked by Indians; one only escaped; the remaining six, among whom was Boone's eldest son, were killed on the spot; so that the survivors of the party were forced to turn back to the settlements on Clinch river. When the Cherokees were summoned from Virginia to give up the offenders, they shifted the accusation from one tribe to another, and the application for redress had no effect; but one of those who had escaped, murdered an Indian at a horse race on the frontier, notwithstanding the interposition of all around. This was the first Indian blood shed by a white man from the time of the treaty of Bouquet.

In the beginning of February, 1774, the Indians killed six white men and two negroes; and near the end of the same month, they seized a trading canoe

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1774.

on the Ohio, killed the men on board, and carried CHAP. their goods to the Shawanese towns. In March, Michael Cresap, after a skirmish, and the loss of one man on each side, took from a party of Indians five loaded canoes. It became known that messages were passing between the tribes of the Ohio, the western Indians, and the Cherokees. In this state of affairs, Conolly, from Pittsburg, on the twenty-first of April, wrote to the inhabitants of Wheeling to be on the alert.

Incensed by the succession of murders, the backwoodsmen, who were hunters like the Indians and equally ungovernable, were forming war parties along the frontier from the Cherokee country to Pennsylvania. When the letter of Conolly fell into Cresap's hands, he and his party esteemed themselves authorized to engage in private war, and on the twenty-sixth of April, they fired upon two Indians who were with a white man in a canoe on the Ohio, and killed them both. Just before the end of April, five Delawares and Shawanese, with their women, among whom was one at least of the same blood with Logan, happening to encamp near Yellow Creek, on the site of the present town of Wellsville, were enticed across the river by a trader; and when they had become intoxicated, were murdered in cold blood. Two others, crossing the Ohio to look after their friends, were shot down as soon as they came ashore. At this five more, who were following, turned their course; but being immediately fired at, two were killed and two wounded. The day following, a hawanese was killed, and another man wounded. The whole number of Indians killed between the