Sherry Chandler

Battle of Point Pleasant

In the Proclamation of 1763, George III forbade surveys or land warrants west of the Appalachians. The Proclamation, in fact, did little to slow expansion westward. In April 1774, as Lord Dunmore’s War heated up, Col. William Preston, sheriff (among other things) of Fincastle County, Virginia sent John Floyd and a party of twenty-two men over into Kentucky to survey land for the likes of George Washington and Patrick Henry.

As Meredith Mason Brown explains in Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America (LSU Press, 2008):

The surveying trip itself increased the risk of Indian attack on whites living or hunting on the frontier. Hearing of the plans for the surveying expedition, the Shawnees, on March 8, 1774, complained . . . that the king’s orders forbade settlement west of the Great Kanawha River and that Shawnee hunting grounds were being overrun. They warned that young Shawnee warriors, if “the are disappointed in their hunting, and find the woods are covered with White People . . . are foolish enough to make reprisals.” [p. 58]

The stories we tell ourselves about settling Kentucky is of woodsmen and farmers coming over to homestead and having to fend off attacks from savage Indians. And there is some truth to that. But it is also true that the moneyed aristocracy saw land speculation in Kentucky as a way to get rich(er), and the whole thing was, as I’ve said before, a mad scramble for money into land that was not actually all that empty.

As George Washington stated it in 1767:

“I can never look upon that proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians” that “must fall in a few years . . . any Person therefore who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good Lands & in some Measure Marking & distinguishing them for their own (in order to keep others from settling them) will never regain it.” [quoted in Brown, p. 60]

And so Floyd surveyed out 2,000 acres for Washington along the Kanawha. The party also laid out thirty tracts around the Falls of the Ohio, the present site of Louisville, a total of 40,000 acres or 62 square miles. (They did all this in ten days.) These tracts were for the sheriff William Preston, William Christian, who was Patrick Henry’s brother-in-law, William Byrd, and Alexander Spottswood Dandridge, who was Martha Washington’s nephew. Then coming back toward central Kentucky, in the area of Lexington and Frankfort, Floyd laid out thousand-acre tracts for Preston, for himself, and 7,000 acres for Patrick Henry.

The Floyd party stayed in Kentucky until August when conditions became so dangerous they had to flee for their lives. Preston sent Daniel Boone and Michael Stoner to bring the party out of Kentucky, but Floyd’s party had already left and the rescuers never did find them.

Meanwhile, Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia who had an interest in a large tract of Kentucky land himself, ordered Preston to undertake an expedition against the Shawnee towns. In his recruiting letter, Preston wrote:

We may Perhaps never have so fair an Opportunity of reducing our old Inveterate Enemies to Reason . . . . The House of Burgesses will without all Doubt enable his Lordship to reward every Vollunteer in a handsome manner, over and above his Pay; as the plunder of the County will be valuable, & it is said the Shawnese have great Stock of Horses. . . . This useless People may now a[t] last be Oblidged to abandon thier County Theire Towns may be plundered & Burned, Their Cornfields Distroyed & they Distressed in such a manner as will prevent them giving us any future Trouble. [quoted in Brown, p. 61]

Sounds more like a mercenary force to me than a group of intrepid settlers protecting their families.

The upshot was the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774. Though the Shawnee put up a good fight, Cornstalk and some other Shawnee chiefs ultimately signed away their hunting rights to Kentucky om exchange for a promise from Lord Dunsmore to keep colonists south of the Ohio River.

We know how that worked out.

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Addendum, July 24:

From Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s “Squatters” in Blood Run (Salt, 2006)

We are farmers, settling.
We have right to work
lands in untamed wilderness
rife with beasts best done away
with blasphemous symbols—Snakes!

What good is this to savages
who have no learned appreciation
of possibility of a ripened, bountiful place?

They know no possibility, no progress, no personal greed!

They should be grateful we’ve brought
civilization onto this merciless barren flat. . . .