It was on this date, in 1774, that a group of surveyors met at the mouth of the Kanawha River to establish military bounty claims for the area. The skirmishes that resulted with the local Indian populations marked the official beginning of Dunmore’s War.
For those non-history buffs among you; Dunmore’s War was a brief, but nasty conflict between the British Colony of Virginia and the Shawnee and Mingo Indians from May to October 1774. It’s named for the governor of Virginia at the time, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, who just days after the first conflict, asked the House of Burgesses to declare a state of war with the Shawnee and Mingo and call out the Virginia militia.
The conflict resulted from increasing violence between white settlers, who were quickly moving west into land that would later become West Virginia, along with southwestern Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. This land had historically belonged to the Shawnee. Dunmore’s War concludes with victory in the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774. It was one of the largest and most fiercely contested battles, featuring brutal hand-to-hand combat between settlers and Native Americans.
The Battle of Point Pleasant is sometimes considered to be the First Battle of the American Revolution. While it was technically a colonial war, the victory gave the colonies a year of frontier peace, allowing the growing American presence to organize their resistance against the British, without the prospect of fighting a’two-front’ war — against the Brits and the Indians at the same time.
Since we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of America this year, you could that say that Dunmore’s War was “Year Zero” for the American Revolution. It’s true that the Declaration of Independence wasn’t signed until 1776, but the events two years earlier in that land that would become West Virginia in less than a century later are increasingly recognized as the point where the fuse for the American Revolution was officially lit, especially in Appalachia.
Dunmore’s War served as a “dress rehearsal” for the Revolution. The coordination required to march thousands of men through the West Virginia wilderness proved that the new colonies could organize a sophisticated military force independent of direct British regular army support.
Dunmore’s War is significant in this year that we celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday, because it reminds us that the American Revolution didn’t start in a vacuum in 1776. Dunmore’s War was a byproduct of years of tension in the frontier, furious combat, and a growing sense of colonial identity that crystallized right here in the Ohio and Kanawha Valleys.
And today, we mark the anniversary of the skirmishes in the Kanawha Valley on April 14th, 1774 that led to Dunmore’s War; beginning the process which led to the American Revolution and eventually, to the freedoms we enjoy today nearly 250 years later.