West Virginia. Otis K. Rice
the mouth of French Creek, and Venango at Franklin, Pennsylvania, prevented further English penetrations south of Lake Erie.
Virginia and the Burden of Empire. In Robert Dinwiddie, Virginia had a governor whose boldness and determination matched those of the governors-general of Canada. Believing that the time had come for a showdown in the Ohio Valley, Dinwiddie in October 1753 took imperial affairs into his own hands. He sent George Washington to Fort LeBoeuf with a message to Jacques le Gardeur de Saint-Pierre, the French commandant in the Ohio Valley, charging France with encroachment upon English territory and calling upon her to withdraw. The courtly Saint-Pierre received Washington with becoming dignity, but he denied that France had violated English territory. He declared that France intended to remain in the Ohio Valley.
With uncommon perception for a man only twenty-one years old, Washington concluded that the Forks of the Ohio, at the present Pittsburgh, held the key to control of the Ohio Valley. Convinced that Washington was right, Dinwiddie in January 1754 dispatched Captain William Trent and a work party of thirty-seven men to build a fort at the Forks of the Ohio. In April, Washington, with 150 men drawn largely from Frederick and Augusta counties, set out to provide a garrison for the fort On the way, Washington met the work party returning home. It reported that a large French force had come down the Allegheny River, taken possession of their partially completed structure, and begun building their own fortification, Fort Duquesne.
For reasons that remain obscure, Washington proceeded on to the Forks of the Ohio. Warned of his approach, Claude-Pierre Pecaudy de Contrecoeur, who was in charge of French forces there, ordered a detachment of thirty-three men under Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville to intercept the Virginians and warn them to leave. During the night, however, Washington, with about forty militiamen and Indians, surrounded Jumonville's camp. In an attack at daybreak, Jumonville was killed, and the surprised French surrendered. In anticipation of French retaliation, Washington hurriedly threw up a small defense known as Fort Necessity at Great Meadows, near Uniontown, Pennsylvania. On July 3,1754, the French assaulted the little fort and forced Washington to surrender. They allowed the Virginians to leave, but they made Washington promise not to attempt further fortifications in the Ohio Valley for at least a year.
The victorious Contrecoeur boasted that with Indian support he would drive the English from the trans-Allegheny country. Reports began to circulate among the Virginia settlements that France intended to establish her defense perimeter along the crests of the Alleghenies rather than the Ohio River. Rumors that four hundred Frenchmen were being assembled to construct forts on the Greenbrier, New, and Holston rivers produced alarm in border settlements.
The Braddock Campaign. Convinced that Virginia alone could no longer deal with the French threat in the Ohio Valley, Dinwiddie appealed to London for help. The British government responded by sending General Edward Braddock and two regiments of British regulars to Virginia. With 1,400 Redcoats and 450 Virginia militiamen, Braddock set out for the Forks of the Ohio by way of
Fort Cumberland and Nemacolin's Trail, a path marked out by the Indian guide who had accompanied Washington to Fort LeBoeuf nearly two years previously.
Braddock faced serious difficulties. He lacked Indian allies, and Virginia supplied a disappointingly small number of militiamen. He had to clear a road for transporting his artillery and moving heavy freight wagons. Moreover, his successes with European military tactics rendered him incapable of adapting to modes of fighting in the American wilderness. Worse still, his underestimation of the strength of French forces at the Forks of the Ohio and his reliance upon the element of surprise proved disastrous. On July 9, 1755, Braddock himself was surprised when he was less than ten miles from Fort Duquesne, and his army was cut to pieces. Braddock was mortally wounded in the attack.
The failure of the Braddock expedition laid border settlements of West Virginia wide open to attack by the French and Indians. In late August 1755, bands of Indians attacked the Greenbrier settlements. They killed twenty-five people, took two captives, burned eleven houses, and slaughtered or drove off about five hundred cattle.4 Survivors fled across the Alleghenies to the Valley of Virginia. They did not return until 1761, when the Greenbrier region once again seemed safe from attack. Similar conditions prevailed in the upper Potomac Valley. Scores of terrified residents on Patterson Creek, the South Branch, and even the Cacapon River, left for the Shenandoah Valley rather than face annihilation. In October 1755, George Washington, who had been placed in charge of all Virginia militia, visited the region. The scenes of desolation and bitterness of the people over the lack of adequate protection so discouraged him that he contemplated resigning his command.
The Sandy Creek Expedition. No abatement in the perils to the West Virginia frontiers could be expected until the French were driven from the Forks of the Ohio and their control over the Ohio Valley Indians was broken. Although the Virginia General Assembly appropriated forty thousand pounds for defense, Dinwiddie had no illusions that Virginia forces could dislodge the French from their position. After months of steadfast opposition to any expedition against Fort Duquesne or into the Indian country, he finally yielded to a popular clamor and authorized a strike against the Shawnee villages in Ohio. Upon the recommendation of George Washington, he named Major Andrew Lewis to lead the expedition. At Fort Frederick, near Ingles Ferry on the New River, Lewis assembled about 340 men, of whom between 80 and 130 were Cherokee warriors.
From the time that it left Fort Frederick on February 18, 1756, the Sandy Creek Expedition, as the move was known, encountered nothing but difficulty and disappointment. Rugged terrain and streams swollen by incessant rains impeded the march by way of the North Fork of the Holston River, Burkes Garden, the upper Clinch, and the Big Sandy River. On February 29, the men crossed the flooded Big Sandy sixty-six times within fifteen miles and had to abandon several packhorses. By March 3, rations had to be reduced to one-half pound of flour per man and whatever game could be killed. With most of the packhorses worn out, morale among the men gone, and desertions increasing, Lewis held a council of war on March 15. Despite his entreaties to continue, the officers voted to abandon the expedition and return home. Organized in haste, inadequately supplied, and dependent upon raw frontier militiamen averse to military discipline, the expedition did nothing to alleviate the distressing conditions on the frontiers.5
Grim Days on the Border. About the same time that remnants of the Sandy Creek Expedition began straggling back home, the General Assembly took steps to bolster defenses on the upper Potomac. It authorized a chain of twenty-two forts extending from the Cacapon River to the South Fork of the Mayo. It stipulated that nine of the posts should be built in present West Virginia, on the Cacapon, the South Branch of the Potomac, and Patterson Creek, and that 1,045 of the 2,000 men designated for garrison duty be assigned to them. Meanwhile, on April 18, Indians killed Captain John Mercer and sixteen men at Fort Edwards on the Cacapon River, and crumbling defenses there threatened to expose the Shenandoah Valley to attack. Militiamen ordered to the South Branch sometimes disappeared surreptitiously, and some companies fell apart before the time for departure. Before the summer ended, Indians had made several attacks in the vicinity of Fort George on the South Branch, assaulted Fort Neally on Opequon Creek, and engaged settlers and militia in the bloody battle of The Trough. Most of the attacks, however, involved isolated families, such as that of Samuel Bingaman, who killed eight of his assailants before he lost his own life.
In spite of fears that the upper Potomac frontier might collapse and expose the Shenandoah Valley to attack, settlers on the South Branch held their ground. In recognition of their fortitude, a council of war held at Fort Cumberland in April 1757 recommended that additional troops be posted on the South Branch “in order to preserve that valuable Settlement—to induce the people to plant a sufficiency of Corn; and to prevent by that means, the vale of Winchester from becoming the Frontier.”6 The South Branch residents remained even after Indians in the spring of 1758 killed Captain James Dunlap and twenty-two men at Fort Upper Tract, killed or captured thirty persons at Fort Seybert, and burned Fort Warden.
The Changing Fortunes of War. For the West Virginia frontiers, the storms of war subsided almost as quickly as they had gathered. The relief came partly as a result of the new and vigorous leadership that Prime Minister William Pitt instilled into the British war effort in 1757. In North America,