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Episode: 398 The Shawnee-Dunmore War, 1774

Author: Liz Covart
Duration: 01:07:35

Episode Shownotes

After the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763), Great Britain instituted the Proclamation Line of 1763. The Line sought to create a lasting peace in British North America by limiting British colonial settlement east of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1768, colonists and British Indian agents negotiated the Treaties of Fort Stanwix and

Hard Labour to extend the boundary line further west. In 1774, the Shawnee-Dunmore War broke out as colonists attempted to push further west. Fallon Burner and Russell Reed, two of the three co-managers of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s American Indian Initiative, join us to investigate the Shawnee-Dunmore War and what this war can show us about Indigenous life, warfare, and sovereignty during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/398 Sponsor Links Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Colonial Williamsburg American Indian Initiative Complementary Episodes Episode 223: A Native American History of the Ohio River Valley & Great Lakes Region Episode 310: History of the Blackfeet Episode 353: Women and the Making of Catawba Identity Episode 367: Brafferton Indian School, Part 1 Episode 368: Brafferton Indian School, Part 2 Listen! Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Amazon Music Ben Franklin's World iOS App Ben Franklin's World Android App Helpful Links Join the Ben Franklin's World Facebook Group Ben Franklin’s World Twitter: @BFWorldPodcast Ben Franklin's World Facebook Page Sign-up for the Franklin Gazette Newsletter

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

00:00:09 Speaker_02
Dunmore's War is a really Eurocentric reading or reflection of this conflict. It only names the one European combatant. When we knew that this anniversary year was coming, we wanted a name that reflected the conflict itself.

00:00:24 Speaker_02
We wanted a more indigenous perspective on that conflict. And so putting the Shawnee in front of the name was the better way to go because this conflict is famous because of the Shawnee.

00:00:43 Speaker_01
Hello and welcome to episode 398 of Ben Franklin's World, the podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past have shaped the present day world we live in. And I'm your host, Liz Kovart.

00:00:59 Speaker_01
After the Seven Years' War, Great Britain instituted the Proclamation Line of 1763. This line sought to create a lasting peace in North America by limiting British colonial settlement east of the Appalachian Mountains.

00:01:12 Speaker_01
Now, while limiting colonial settlement and warfare between British colonists and Indigenous peoples west of the Appalachians was the intent of this proclamation line, it was not a boundary line that colonists or colonial governments seemed willing to uphold.

00:01:26 Speaker_01
Five years later, in 1768, colonists and British colonial agents went out into Indigenous territories and negotiated new boundary lines to push that official boundary of colonial settlement a bit further west.

00:01:38 Speaker_01
This came in the treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labour. But as with the Proclamation Line of 1763, these treaty-negotiated boundaries did not hold.

00:01:47 Speaker_01
By spring 1774, the colony of Virginia found itself embroiled in a war over land with the Shawnee and Mingo peoples of the Ohio River Valley.

00:01:57 Speaker_01
Fallon Berner and Russell Reed, two of the three co-managers of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's American Indian Initiative, join us to investigate the Shawnee-Dunmore War of 1774 and what this war can show us about Indigenous life and warfare in the eastern woodlands during the mid-to-late 18th century.

00:02:15 Speaker_01
Now, during our investigation, Fallon and Russell reveal the geography of the Shawnee-Dunmore War and information about the different Native nations involved in this war, the tensions, causes, and moving treaty lines that prompted the Shawnee-Dunmore War to break out.

00:02:30 Speaker_01
and details about the Shawnee-Dunmore War, the skirmishes and battles it entailed, and the resolution of the war in the Treaty of Camp Charlotte on October 19, 1774.

00:02:41 Speaker_01
But first, there are so many new people joining us in the Ben Franklin's World Listener community, and I'm enjoying seeing all of your faces and reading about your different perspectives, so thank you so much for joining us.

00:02:52 Speaker_01
Now, the Ben Franklin's World Listener community is a Facebook group,

00:02:55 Speaker_01
The community is a place where you can connect and interact with fellow listeners, stay up to date on some of the latest history news and resources, and post your episode requests and interview questions for our guests.

00:03:06 Speaker_01
The group is absolutely free to join. Just visit benfranklinsworld.com slash Facebook. That's benfranklinsworld.com slash Facebook. Okay, are you ready to investigate the Shawnee-Dunmore War of 1774? Allow me to introduce you to our expert guides.

00:03:37 Speaker_01
Our guests are two of the three co-managers of Colonial Williamsburg's American Indian Initiative.

00:03:42 Speaker_01
The Colonial Williamsburg American Indian Initiative develops and offers public educational programs and staff training highlighting Indigenous stories in the early American period.

00:03:51 Speaker_01
Now in his role as co-manager of the American Indian Initiative, Russell Reed is the American Indian Encampment site manager.

00:03:58 Speaker_01
Russell has many years of experience interpreting Eastern Woodlands Indigenous history, and he has expertise in Indigenous warfare. Fallon Berner is a historian of Indigenous history for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

00:04:10 Speaker_01
Her research focuses on language history in the Wendat and Wyandot communities. You may remember Fallon from episode 367, when we explored the history of the Brafferton Indian School. Welcome to Ben Franklin's World, Fallon Berner and Russell Reed.

00:04:25 Speaker_01
Hi, thank you.

00:04:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, thanks for having us.

00:04:28 Speaker_01
250 years ago, in 1774, the Shawnee-Dunmore War raged in what was then the western part of the colony of Virginia and what is today considered parts of the states of Ohio and West Virginia.

00:04:41 Speaker_01
Russell, would you help us better understand the geography that we'll be talking about, the geography of the Shawnee-Dunmore War, so that we can place this war on our mental maps of North America?

00:04:51 Speaker_00
I like talking about the geography of this conflict because it's a unique conflict on the frontier, as it were, and that it's framed very well geographically, almost in kind of an odd sense.

00:05:04 Speaker_00
And so you have indigenous North America, which is just, at least in the Eastern Woodlands here, is this endless expanse of old growth forest with towns and cities, sometimes cities of tremendous size, open farm fields, areas cleared for hunting and foraging and gathering.

00:05:21 Speaker_00
And you've got Hamlets, the smallest 60 or 80 people, seasonal hunting camps, all the way up to, in the earlier periods before European contact, cities of thousands and thousands along the Mississippi, mound builder kingdoms and so on.

00:05:35 Speaker_00
And there are somewhat rigid borders between a lot of the tribal nations, which is somewhat of a misconception that tribes didn't really view dominion or ownership as part of their relationship with the land.

00:05:49 Speaker_00
And although it functions in different terms, than, you know, walling it all off and living that way in perpetuity.

00:05:56 Speaker_00
Tribes did contest land against each other, more commonly using natural boundaries, riverbanks and mountain ranges and mountain passes and trails and all.

00:06:06 Speaker_00
But there's definitely a constant shifting of these tribal nations in the eastern woodlands, trying to extend or expand, some contracting, depending. It's not like there are entire endless swaths of unpeopled territory in the Eastern Woodlands.

00:06:23 Speaker_00
Some places were incredibly densely populated. By the time we get into the mid 18th century, 1750s and 60s, you have this growth of the colonists and the colonies largely on the British side from the Atlantic Ocean sort of creeping in slowly westward.

00:06:42 Speaker_00
And so Virginia considered their territorial claims all the way to the far ocean. But the interesting geographical framing here is that you have almost sort of a square order ring, and I'll try to put this in modern U.S.

00:06:56 Speaker_00
state mapping so that it's easy to translate. In the center, you have this contested territory, which is mostly what we think of today as the state of West Virginia.

00:07:05 Speaker_00
That's the bulk of sort of the heart of this contested territory, although it spreads around into Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and so on.

00:07:14 Speaker_00
On the right or the east side on most of our maps, you've got Virginia, large, prosperous, growing, attempting to grow colonies, spreading west into this territory across the mountains. So attempting to cross that proclamation line.

00:07:29 Speaker_00
And to the north of Virginia, you have Maryland, which doesn't feature too heavily in the conflict. But more commonly, we think of Pennsylvania sitting just above Virginia.

00:07:38 Speaker_00
And Pennsylvania and Virginia are having territorial disputes of their own in this time period. But Pennsylvania largely desires to stay out of this conflict. They have close relationships with the Delaware and arguably the Shawnee and the Mingo.

00:07:52 Speaker_00
And so you have this sort of voice of peace position just above Virginia, which is on the side of neutrality or even anti-Virginia. You could argue there's certainly some sympathies there for the native nations, including the Shawnee against Virginia.

00:08:07 Speaker_00
So you've got Virginia trying to spread West into the contested land. You have the Shawnee on the other side of this contested land trying to hold their territorial claims. And then

00:08:18 Speaker_00
above Virginia, you have Pennsylvania as sort of a neutral ground, one pushing for peace. You have the Delaware to the west of them, so sort of situated northeast-ish, if you will, of the Shawnee.

00:08:31 Speaker_00
So the Delaware and then the Haudenosaunee further northeast of them are doing their best not to be involved. So they're arguably considered mostly noncombatant.

00:08:41 Speaker_00
You go below the contested territory, let's say just below the Shawnee, and you have the Cherokee Below Virginia, you have the Carolinas and efforts are being made to ensure that the Cherokee do not take up in this fight.

00:08:55 Speaker_00
And there doesn't seem to be a strong push in the written record to do so. And the Carolinas do not have a dog in this fight necessarily.

00:09:03 Speaker_00
And so you have this interesting geographical framework where you've got the Shawnee on the west, the contested territory in the middle, Virginia on the east, and this almost boxing ring like

00:09:15 Speaker_00
area around them that's framing them on either side of this contested territory in the middle, with everyone on the north and south, for the most part, trying to stay out of it, trying to broker peace.

00:09:26 Speaker_01
Now that we know where the Shawnee-Dunmore War was fought and who was involved in this war and who wasn't involved because they were trying to stay out of it, what was the Shawnee-Dunmore War about?

00:09:37 Speaker_01
Phelan, would you give us an overview of the Shawnee-Dunmore War?

00:09:42 Speaker_02
Some previous scholars have pointed to this as the real start of the American Revolution. I think that there's bodies of scholarship in both directions that debate that. Normally, we start that with Lexington and Concord.

00:09:54 Speaker_02
But I do think that this particular war, which really centers around one battle and a series of skirmishes, really tells us a lot about the end of the previous era. and what the next era is going to look like.

00:10:07 Speaker_02
So to me, it's this real dividing line where we see the consequences of the Seven Years' War finally sort of come to a head. There's a lot of things that pool around this conflict.

00:10:17 Speaker_02
And then we see what is coming with settler colonialism and crossing the Appalachian Mountain Range.

00:10:21 Speaker_02
I think that this really sets up the tone for how settlers are looking at the move west and how the founders and the people who are sort of running the white or European government here see their angle to do that movement westward.

00:10:37 Speaker_00
Yeah, the Shawnee-Dunmore War is really kind of unique in that it's kind of the final colonial Indian war prosecuted here when the Eastern Woodlands are really on the continent, where it's just that it's a colonially driven war against Native people.

00:10:54 Speaker_00
before you have the revolution and France and Britain and all really ceased to be powers on the continent and it shifts over to what would be termed, you know, American prosecuted Indian wars.

00:11:07 Speaker_00
So this is kind of the last one of that era before there's that huge shift with revolution and independence and then how that impacts the tribes after that point.

00:11:17 Speaker_01
And what caused the Shawnee-Dunmore War? We know that colonial wars with indigenous people were often caused by colonial pressure on indigenous lands, as well as issues of trade and differences in religion.

00:11:29 Speaker_01
So what was the issue that was the root cause of the Shawnee-Dunmore War?

00:11:34 Speaker_00
Really, the key motivators behind it, which we can get a little more specifically into, is the Shawnee have returned to their homelands in this Ohio country not long before

00:11:46 Speaker_00
Iroquoian and Cherokee interests partnering with colonial interests through Virginia and through the Crown of England are carving it up.

00:11:55 Speaker_00
So the Shawnee are not home for a very long time before their homeland, the core of where they're living, is being sold out from under them.

00:12:03 Speaker_01
Now, one of the central figures in the Shawnee-Dunmore War, and he gets a lot of credit for this war, was John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore. Would you tell us about Lord Dunmore and how he became involved in the Shawnee-Dunmore War?

00:12:16 Speaker_02
John Murray, who is the Earl of Dunmore, is a Scottish nobleman. who seeks the opportunity to come and be the royal governor of the colony of Virginia.

00:12:26 Speaker_02
Part of his motivation for doing this is that he had some substantial debts and financial difficulties that he was trying to seek remedy for that. So coming here, he knew it was going to be economically lucrative for him.

00:12:37 Speaker_02
I think land plays into that as well. But he ends up coming here and right away, he's walking into a climate that already has a lot of native, non-native political dynamics happening. I mean,

00:12:50 Speaker_02
The Cherokee and other foreign or independent tribes have been coming here to make treaties for generations at this point.

00:12:56 Speaker_02
And so the city of Williamsburg, where Lord Dunmore is living in the governor's palace, has seen Native nations come and go as allies, as trade partners, to settle disagreements. So that's kind of the climate he's walking into.

00:13:09 Speaker_02
He's also inheriting things from the previous war, from the Seven Years' War.

00:13:15 Speaker_02
You've got that proclamation line that King George III signed in 1763, which lays down this imaginary boundary, this sort of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, you shall not pass if you are a settler, because everything beyond there is there be dragons.

00:13:30 Speaker_02
That's indigenous land, basically. By the time the proclamation is put down in 1763, though, there's already thousands of settlers living beyond that border. So that conflict already existed. That's something that he inherited as part of policy.

00:13:44 Speaker_02
And then you've got, well, even in 1754, honestly, you had Governor Dinwiddie who had set aside 200,000 acres of land around the forks of the Ohio River for the people who helped build Fort Pitt so that those volunteers who worked on that project would have something afterwards.

00:14:00 Speaker_02
And George Washington is one of the more prominent claimants of this, and he ends up helping to fight for that later in 1772 for those folks to get those lands. And there's also this rivalry happening between Virginia and Pennsylvania.

00:14:12 Speaker_02
These two colonies are bickering over some borderlands between them. And that's a problem that he has to solve. So the proclamation line that the king has put down is a law. It's a legal line that's there.

00:14:24 Speaker_02
And they are theoretically maintaining the legality of that line. And so I think Dunmore has to make this interesting switch in his own mindset of wanting to uphold this law and uphold the king's rule.

00:14:34 Speaker_02
And then at some point needing to make the decision for functionally on the ground, he's got very restless settlers who want access to these lands because they fought in wars, because they helped build Fort Pitt, and they feel like they need recompense for this.

00:14:46 Speaker_02
And they are just, quite frankly, seeking a more prosperous life for themselves and pushing westward beyond that legality. He has to decide how he's going to deal with that.

00:14:56 Speaker_02
Then we've got two treaties that come up in 1768, so five years after the proclamation line.

00:15:01 Speaker_02
You have the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which is negotiated with the Six Nations or the Haudenosaunee up north with the Indian agent for the north, who's William Johnson.

00:15:10 Speaker_02
And then you've got the treaty in the south negotiated by Britain's Indian agent for the south, John Stewart, which is the Treaty of Hard Labor, and that's negotiated with the Cherokee.

00:15:19 Speaker_02
Both of these move that 1763 proclamation line out in different directions. They kind of pushed the borders. Now, this is against the king's clear command.

00:15:29 Speaker_02
They didn't wait for this to get sent across the ocean for him to deliberate on it and then to send something back. In the case of Johnson in particular, like he just went ahead. And so he faced some sort of backlash recourse for that later on.

00:15:42 Speaker_02
But what was done was done. And they did not want to anger their agreements with the Six Nations because of the kind of power that they held, not only in that general area, but with European powers and with other native polities.

00:15:54 Speaker_02
they had these alliances and agreements that the British didn't want to mess with. And so once it was done, it was done.

00:16:00 Speaker_02
And then two years later, in 1770, you've got the Treaty of Lockerbie, which then essentially just pushes the proclamation line, just nudges it a little bit further.

00:16:07 Speaker_02
So when Dunmore arrives in Williamsburg, he is walking into a situation where settlers are restless.

00:16:14 Speaker_00
Yeah, I feel like in kind of short, simple terms, Dunmore inherits a mess.

00:16:20 Speaker_00
the competing treaties of hard labor in Fort Stanwix, colonial interests beyond the proclamation line, the proclamation line itself, the Shawnee and others defending this territory that they consider their hunting territory and their rightful land, and colonists aggressively encroaching upon that land are really kind of the driving factor in igniting the war, that frontier violence, the cycle along roughly the proclamation line carried out against indigenous people.

00:16:50 Speaker_00
And Dunmore and others in Virginia and Pennsylvania and other places do what they can to actually stifle the conflict, to make small concessions and keep everyone in check.

00:17:00 Speaker_00
But eventually, the violence perpetrated on the frontier spirals out of control. And it almost seems from the historical record that Dunmore is more dragged into prosecuting the war than he has a hand in really instigating it.

00:17:14 Speaker_00
He's caught in a hard place where he's expected to, as the King's representative, uphold the proclamation line, as the governor of Virginia, do what's best for the colony. which would, in their eyes, be going across the proclamation line.

00:17:28 Speaker_00
So he's definitely caught in a bad situation and eventually pushed into executing the war.

00:17:35 Speaker_01
Before we get into the particulars of how this war was executed, historians of the Shawnee-Dunmore War have often referred to this war simply as Lord Dunmore's War or Dunmore's War.

00:17:46 Speaker_01
But at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, we have actually made a concerted effort to refer to this war as the Shawnee-Dunmore War. Thawne and Russell, why have we added Shawnee to the name for this conflict?

00:17:58 Speaker_01
And why do you think the Shawnee-Dunmore War is actually a more historically accurate name for this conflict?

00:18:04 Speaker_02
Certainly. Dunmore's War is a really Eurocentric reading or reflection of this conflict. It only names the one European combatant, if you will, who was in charge of the forces on that side.

00:18:17 Speaker_02
But when we knew that this anniversary year was coming and we wanted to develop staff trainings for it and other tools for our staff on site here, we wanted a name that reflected the conflict itself.

00:18:29 Speaker_02
We wanted a more Indigenous perspective on that conflict.

00:18:32 Speaker_02
And so the two of us and our third co-manager of the American Indian Initiative, Chris Custolo, decided that putting the Shawnee in front of the name was probably the better way to go, because really this conflict is famous because of the Shawnee.

00:18:47 Speaker_02
It's famous because of Dunmore as well, but it is one of the most prominent pieces of Indigenous history that happens to this area.

00:18:54 Speaker_02
And the Shawnee are really the gravitational force around which all of the Native combatants on that side of the conflict gravitate to. It's all their alliances.

00:19:05 Speaker_02
And so that's why they kind of get pegged and or sometimes get the credit for a lot of this when it does include other tribes as well. But we thought that that was a more accurate reading of the history.

00:19:15 Speaker_00
Yeah, terming it just Dunmore's War is dismissive. It's a small piece of one of a million small pieces of erasure of Native people. You're just going to drop the Shawnee like they were magically not involved.

00:19:26 Speaker_00
But it's also ironic in the sense that Dunmore is really just the one forced to carry out the war. He's not an instigator. He's not even necessarily a party with a huge amount at stake. He's just the one forced to carry it out.

00:19:40 Speaker_01
Well, let's investigate the Indigenous side and history of this conflict. Would you tell us about the Shawnee who were, as you've mentioned, central to this war?

00:19:48 Speaker_00
Yeah. So the best people equipped to answer that question would be the Shawnee people themselves and then some of their community engaged historians like Dr. Stephen Warren, Dr. Colin Calloway, who've written books on the Shawnee people.

00:20:00 Speaker_00
But something I thought might be useful, at least for a slight bit of context,

00:20:06 Speaker_00
would be something that the Eastern Shawnee tribe have on their website as a small bit about their own history so that this is kind of in their words and it gives a little bit of scope. And so the Eastern Shawnee tribe on their website, right?

00:20:19 Speaker_00
The Eastern Shawnee tribe of Oklahoma is one of three federally recognized Shawnee tribes. The Eastern Shawnee on the Oklahoma-Missouri border near Wyandotte, Oklahoma, the Absentee Shawnee near Shawnee, Oklahoma, and the Shawnee tribe in Miami,

00:20:34 Speaker_00
These three tribes were recognized as autonomous nations during the Indian Removal Era.

00:20:39 Speaker_00
Prior to that, most archaeologists and historians agree their original homeland was the middle Ohio Valley, between modern Louisville, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The Shawnees once lived throughout the region east of the Mississippi River.

00:20:51 Speaker_00
The areas of their occupation centered around today's states of Alabama, the Carolinas, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia.

00:21:03 Speaker_00
Their historic geographical territories were mountainous regions, dense forests, and scattered prairies.

00:21:08 Speaker_00
Because of their geographic location and the focus of the subsistence pursuits, the Shawnee people are generally known as Eastern Woodlands Indians.

00:21:16 Speaker_00
Their loss of their homeland has given the Shawnee the reputation of being wanderers, but this was by necessity, not choice.

00:21:23 Speaker_00
They go on, the Eastern Shawnee tribe to say, they were a highly mobile, wide-ranging nomadic people who lived in traditional dwellings of the Shawnee called Wigiwa.

00:21:32 Speaker_00
Their men were known as hunters and warriors, and their women as planters and gatherers.

00:21:37 Speaker_00
During the summer, the Shawnee gathered into villages of bark-covered longhouses, with each village usually having a large council house for meetings and religious ceremonies. In the fall, they separated to small hunting camps of extended families.

00:21:50 Speaker_00
Many important Shawnee ceremonies were tied to the agricultural cycle, the spring bread dance at planting time, the green corn dance when crops ripened, and the autumn bread dance to celebrate harvest.

00:22:01 Speaker_00
So that's just a bit of what the Eastern Shawnee tribe have to say, at least on their website, about kind of just the basics of who they are to the public.

00:22:09 Speaker_01
At the heart of the Shawnee-Dunmore War lay an increasing competition for land in the Ohio River Valley. Would you tell us about the Ohio River Valley and about this specific competition for land that led to the Shawnee-Dunmore War?

00:22:23 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's a very interesting part of the Eastern Woodlands in that, of course, it houses the Fort Ancient culture as it's so termed, which is mostly agreed upon to be sort of the progenitors, the beginnings, the ancestors of the Shawnee people.

00:22:37 Speaker_00
But that Ohio country, as it's commonly referred to, becomes contested for a number of reasons. One, it's renowned as a great hunting territory in the period. Two, it's at a crossroads of several powerful nations.

00:22:51 Speaker_00
So you have the Haudenosaunee, the five, and then the six nations of the Iroquois, they become to the Northeast. You have the Cherokee who are a massive power in this time period, just south of this region.

00:23:02 Speaker_00
And you have the Mississippi River Valley just west of this, which is allowing tribes from the deep Gulf South all the way up into Canada to travel and traverse in this area. So it's a great hunting grounds. It's a crossroad.

00:23:16 Speaker_00
It's an in-between area for a lot of powerful native nations going well before European arrival.

00:23:23 Speaker_00
And when you bring colonial interest into the region of the French and the British, the French are incredibly serious about their pursuit and attempted domination of the Ohio country because they view it somewhat correctly as sort of the last stone connecting their southern colonies, Louisiana,

00:23:44 Speaker_00
and their northern colonies, Canada, and sort of the last stone in this wall that would shore up their perceived dominion from Louisiana up into Canada and keep English settlements from the East Coast from growing westward.

00:23:59 Speaker_00
And so the French are desperate to control this region. And the British, from the written record, appear to understand that the loss of the Ohio country to French interests could prevent them from growing westward and taking more indigenous lands.

00:24:14 Speaker_00
And so you have tribal nations deeply invested in it. You have the Shawnee who eventually returned to their homelands who are caught in the middle of much of this.

00:24:23 Speaker_00
And then you have colonial empires both struggling to sort of control this relatively small space.

00:24:30 Speaker_01
Russell, you mentioned earlier that the boundaries around Indigenous lands comprised more hardened borders than we might have imagined between the tribes.

00:24:39 Speaker_01
And yet we see the English negotiating all of these different treaty lines that Fallon told us about and ascribing those treaty lines to Indigenous lands.

00:24:48 Speaker_01
But it also sounds like perhaps that Native Nations were also hoping that these new treaty lines would create a strong boundary or perhaps a hardened boundary between their lands and ways of life and the colonists.

00:25:01 Speaker_01
Is this a good way to look at this situation?

00:25:04 Speaker_00
Yeah, you'll see that Native Nations across the East are not unaware of what's occurring in the time period. A big issue that allows colonization to really happen in the first place aside from disease and depopulation is division.

00:25:19 Speaker_00
Continents across the planet are divided since the dawn of time and conflicts still rage across the world and divided Europe and Africa and Asia and other places. And so tribal division

00:25:30 Speaker_00
means that as these colonies are growing, some of the tribes are intentionally getting away from colonial encroachment and influences, whereas some tribes are actively seeking them out, moving closer to French or British colonies and trade interests to accrue more firearms, more European goods, more allies.

00:25:49 Speaker_00
When you certainly see the use of physical barriers and boundaries imposed by the tribes, but you also see placing other tribes, if a nation is able to do this, placing other tribes in the way of colonial encroachment as a buffer.

00:26:04 Speaker_00
And the colonies are attempting to do this as well. The Virginia colony could be easily noted as using many of the original Virginia tribes as sort of buffers against other powerful native nations on their frontier.

00:26:20 Speaker_00
And so it's somewhat of a common practice between both the Native nations and the colonies to try and use other people as well as physical barriers and boundaries to buffer themselves against negative impacts and interactions.

00:26:33 Speaker_01
Now, we started our conversation by describing the Shawnee-Dunmore War as a series of skirmishes and a battle. And I wonder if we could talk about one of these skirmishes, the Yellow Creek Massacre.

00:26:43 Speaker_01
Would you tell us about the Yellow Creek Massacre, which took place on April 30th, 1774, and the impact that this massacre had on the Shawnee-Dunmore War?

00:26:53 Speaker_00
The Yellow Creek Massacre. occurs fairly near to what we would consider Hancock, West Virginia or Irondale, Ohio. It's where Yellow Creek actually empties out into the main river there.

00:27:04 Speaker_00
And at the time, there are some colonists living there and it's termed Baker's Bottom.

00:27:09 Speaker_00
And so end of April and early May of 1774, colonial agitators on the frontier view this close relationship between the colonists of Baker's Bottom and nearby Mingo communities as an opportunity to strike against indigenous people on the frontier as part of an escalating cycle of violence that really targeted indigenous people indiscriminately in this sort of escalation.

00:27:36 Speaker_00
And so a number of Mingo people are either lured across the river, depending on the account that you follow or read, or naturally are following their regular routine of visiting these people at Baker's Bottom, these colonists.

00:27:49 Speaker_00
And Daniel Greathouse and his men actually attack them there and kill a number of Mingo people. Many of them related to Logan, who was a noted Mingo leader.

00:28:03 Speaker_00
And the death of these men, women, and children is a huge sort of spark that ignites what was escalating frontier violence into what becomes a full-blown war. The news of this massacre sweeps the frontier on the native and colonial side and is

00:28:25 Speaker_00
heavily sensationalized and also varies depending on who's carrying the story.

00:28:29 Speaker_00
Most people attribute the murders to Michael Cressap, who was responsible for a number of killings of indigenous people on the frontier, but did not take part as far as we know.

00:28:40 Speaker_00
And so the murder of these men, women, and children so stirs many of the native communities into retribution for these losses.

00:28:49 Speaker_00
but it also stirs the colony of Virginia into mobilization because of the understanding that these murders, this level of violence will demand reaction by the tribes.

00:29:02 Speaker_00
And so they understand that once this has been carried out, there's more than likely no going back.

00:29:07 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think the sensationalization of the news coverage of it after the event really makes it spin into something even larger. And you get introduction of new facts in different newspaper accounts.

00:29:20 Speaker_02
I think Glenn Williams' book, Dunmore's War, did a really good job kind of peeling through those newspaper accounts and trying to see what matched and what didn't, to the point where Jefferson has to reissue a correction to his notes on the state of Virginia later on when he realizes, oh, actually, maybe it wasn't Michael Cressap's fault.

00:29:38 Speaker_02
because it did initially get pegged on Cressap.

00:29:41 Speaker_01
Why was the news about the Yellow Creek Massacre so unreliable? And how was it sensationalized? Would you tell us about the Mingo leader Logan's family and about the news that was reported about their deaths at the Yellow Creek Massacre?

00:29:54 Speaker_02
I guess I would issue a little bit of a listener warning for the next part, because it gets pretty gruesome. But his sister is there and has a young toddler with her, and she's also pregnant with another child.

00:30:06 Speaker_02
And in one of the accounts, they say that they put her up and she knows that they're meaning to kill her. And so her life and the life of her unborn child are going to be over. But she begs for them to save her toddler.

00:30:17 Speaker_02
And they end up, it says, cutting the baby from her belly and then killing her.

00:30:22 Speaker_02
It turns out, though, that this toddler, who is the only surviving member of this massacre, gets tossed from Englishman to Englishman to Englishman for the next several months because they know that her father is an Englishman by the name of John Gibson.

00:30:36 Speaker_02
And so they're basically tossing her from person to person to get her back to her father. And her name was Kune. And so there's all these newspaper accounts of what happened.

00:30:44 Speaker_02
It's hard to know exactly which of the more salacious details are part of the facts. But I think suffice to say it was gruesome and there were women and children killed.

00:30:56 Speaker_02
And this really leads to, I think, one of the major sparks of the war, which is all of Logan's revenge.

00:31:03 Speaker_01
Can you tell us more about Logan and what came next for him and the Mingo people after the Yellow Creek Massacre?

00:31:10 Speaker_00
Logan is a man of some serious note amongst the Mingo people. Some scholars put him forth as a Mingo chief or a war leader, others just as a man of respect and renown.

00:31:22 Speaker_00
So, this event drags what was small-scale frontier violence into a very serious offense. Virginians have murdered a number of Mingo people, including Logan's family members, This is going to call on Logan for retribution.

00:31:40 Speaker_00
So even if the Mingo and the Shawnee and the Delaware and whoever is not going to war as a nation, the way that most of your tribes in the East are functioning politically is fairly autonomous.

00:31:54 Speaker_00
And so, the traditional cultural rules around warfare and governance would allow Logan to take revenge upon Virginia, regardless of any endorsement from a chief or a council or anything like that, because it's not considered within the power of most of the leaders of the Native nations of the East to restrain a man from taking vengeance upon the murderers of his family.

00:32:20 Speaker_00
And so Logan, being a man of renown, would be able to draft warriors to his cause using both his war record and the atrocities committed against him and his people. He would be able to draft warriors. That's exactly what he does.

00:32:34 Speaker_00
And he begins a campaign of revenge throughout the summer, really, of 1774, arguably burning his way through the frontier of Virginia, which is now mostly what's West Virginia, but would include some of modern day Virginia.

00:32:49 Speaker_00
And so with the small bit of manpower afforded to him, since the nations are not at war, he's going to carry out a number of attacks up and down the frontier, focusing on small settlements

00:33:01 Speaker_00
people really trespassing onto native land across the proclamation line or who are in the path of his revenge along the frontier.

00:33:10 Speaker_00
But because of the fact that he's not likely going to carry the backing of any one nation or even his own nation, his war party in some cases may have been as small as two or three people. It may have swelled to 30 or 40 warriors at some points.

00:33:23 Speaker_00
We really don't know. But we know that with a small number of warriors, He makes several successful attacks along the Virginia frontier throughout the summer, which really forces Virginia to mobilize and to sort of shore up its frontier.

00:33:38 Speaker_00
And in Dunmore's words, he takes upwards of 40 scalps before retiring. So it's some debate on exactly how many Virginians are killed by Logan and his war party in revenge for the loss of his family. But he makes a number of successful raids.

00:33:54 Speaker_00
He lifts a number of Virginia scalps and he actually leaves a war club of his and a small note attached detailing the reason for his attack.

00:34:03 Speaker_01
I think we can see how the Mingo, especially under Logan's leadership, became involved with the Shawnee-Dunmore War. But what about the Shawnee?

00:34:12 Speaker_01
Let's take a moment for our episode sponsor and then let's find out when the Shawnee entered the Shawnee-Dunmore War. Each November, the United States celebrates National Native American Heritage Month.

00:34:24 Speaker_01
Native American Heritage Month acknowledges that American Indians were the original inhabitants of the lands that now constitute the United States of America, and that Native Americans have made an essential and unique contribution to our country.

00:34:37 Speaker_01
In honor of National Native American Heritage Month, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is offering digital and in-person programs that investigate the vibrant cultures and different contributions that Indigenous Americans have made and do make to the United States and its history.

00:34:52 Speaker_01
For more information about Colonial Williamsburg's programming, visit benfranklinsworld.com slash American Indian. That's benfranklinsworld.com slash American Indian.

00:35:03 Speaker_01
Russell, when did the Shawnee enter and become combatants in the Shawnee-Dunmore War?

00:35:09 Speaker_00
Yeah, so the Shawnee being positioned sort of in and on the other side of this contested territory, you know, largely West Virginia in modern terms, are not necessarily brushed right up against dense colonial settlement, whereas the Mingo and the Delaware to sort of the northeast of the Shawnee are fairly tightly situated against Pennsylvania and Virginia encroaching colonial interests.

00:35:34 Speaker_00
And so it's not to say that Shawnee warriors aren't on the frontier of Virginia, taking part in this escalating colonial violence, but their towns are not so immediately situated in danger necessarily.

00:35:47 Speaker_00
the way that the Mingo and the Delaware necessarily are.

00:35:50 Speaker_00
And so it seems that the Shawnee in a national sense, which is a loose term since the Shawnee people are functioning fairly autonomously without a king or a principal chief who just makes all of the rules without any consent required.

00:36:06 Speaker_00
But the Shawnee appear to largely be in a holding pattern. through this escalating colonial violence, even if some of their warriors may be involved in some of it, nationally, in a loose sense, the Shawnee people are watching and waiting.

00:36:22 Speaker_01
So during the Yellow Creek Massacre, white settlers kill a lot of Mingo people and almost the entirety of Logan's family.

00:36:28 Speaker_01
So Logan goes out and he kills white settlers, and he even leaves a war club with a note saying why he and his men, however many men those were, have ravaged colonial towns in retribution.

00:36:40 Speaker_01
The Shawnee are out there watching and waiting to see if this violence will come to their people and to see how Lord Dunmore is going to handle Virginia's response to Logan's violence. So Russell, what happened next?

00:36:53 Speaker_00
Really, on the other side of the line, as Logan is attacking these sort of small cabins and settlements, we don't know that he had the manpower under his control to attack a town or a full-on settlement like that.

00:37:05 Speaker_00
But on the other side of this divide, on the colonial side of things, you're seeing a mass mobilization. Glenn Williams in his book

00:37:13 Speaker_00
titled Dunmore's War, he actually does a great job of breaking down the day-to-day, the kind of nitty-gritty, chasing the paper trail of these military mobilizations on the Virginia frontier.

00:37:25 Speaker_00
And so Dunmore is sort of forced into leading this war effort as the leader of Virginia, but the people on the frontier of Virginia are preparing regardless. They are forming into companies and different commands.

00:37:40 Speaker_00
They are arming and trying to get everyone weapons and ammunition, powder and shot. They are fording up homes and things like that.

00:37:49 Speaker_00
And so while Logan is attacking along the frontier and taking his revenge, Virginia is, especially along the frontier, preparing for war.

00:37:58 Speaker_00
Whether it's a defensive war or an offensive war, they're preparing one way or another really across Virginia, especially on that frontier line. So what kind of war did the Virginians wage?

00:38:09 Speaker_00
There's this great fear along the Virginia frontier that the Shawnee, Domingo, and especially other tribal nations, let's say if the Cherokee or the Haudenosaunee threw in on the Shawnee side, that there could be this great ravaging and destruction of Virginia from the West.

00:38:26 Speaker_00
And so you'll see a large number of small fortifications put up, settlements and towns condensing into larger numbers for safety, and the drawing of men-at-arms and the provisioning of these men-at-arms.

00:38:39 Speaker_00
So they're expecting certainly a possibility of incursion, invasion, attacks along the frontier.

00:38:46 Speaker_00
But what happens is that Virginia mobilizes this militia army, essentially, which Dunmore rides out to lead and certainly helps in the organizing thereof.

00:38:55 Speaker_00
And they end up leading an offensive campaign or an invasion of Shawnee territory through West Virginia.

00:39:04 Speaker_01
As the Virginians muster and then they go out under Dunmore's command and they invade Shawnee territory, how did the Shawnee respond? Is this what prompts the Shawnee to enter the war? Is this Virginia invasion?

00:39:17 Speaker_00
So Dunmore, assuming control of this Virginia army, he has upwards of 2,300 men in his command.

00:39:27 Speaker_00
Their intent to prosecute the war is to go out there and attack the Shawnee directly, take the fight to the Shawnee, rather than fight a defensive war along the frontier, which is not an uninformed decision.

00:39:41 Speaker_00
The colonies and the different native nations allied on one side or the other are fairly well acquainted with how one or the other chooses to fight.

00:39:50 Speaker_00
And so the colonies would be aware, people like Dunmore and these experienced militiamen, some of them, would be well aware that allowing the Shawnee and other nations to begin raiding into Virginia could be sort of an endless flood of small-scale guerrilla-style warfare that they are not necessarily very well equipped to fight.

00:40:10 Speaker_00
And so a lot of the colonial forces, when possible, and the French and the British certainly understand this, find it effective to prosecute wars against the tribes by brute force.

00:40:20 Speaker_00
You may not be able to beat them in the woodlands at what the tribes are good at doing, this really advanced sort of fighting tactics, this guerrilla warfare. But if you march a sizable army into their homelands,

00:40:32 Speaker_00
and force a direct blow-for-blow kind of fight with superior numbers, there's a good chance that you'll come out on top, and that's exactly what they intend to do. So, Dunmore marches. He splits his army into sort of a southern and a northern portion.

00:40:47 Speaker_00
He takes about 1,200 men or so through the northern section of this territory, so northern West Virginia and just above there. And he issues 800 to 1,000 men under the command of

00:41:00 Speaker_00
Colonel Lewis, who is a veteran of wars in the back country, the French and Indian War. And they take a more southerly route, sort of what we would think through sort of middle West Virginia at this point.

00:41:11 Speaker_00
And their intention is to move almost in kind of a pincer through this contested territory of the Ohio country, cross the Ohio River uniting, and then take the fight right to the center of the Shawnee homelands on the other side and to almost central Ohio today.

00:41:29 Speaker_01
I wonder if you could describe the different military tactics you just mentioned in a bit more detail. You said Indigenous peoples were very adept and highly skilled in guerrilla warfare and that the British really excelled at brute force techniques.

00:41:44 Speaker_01
Could you tell us how these different fighting styles played out on the ground during the Shawnee-Dunmore War and what they looked like?

00:41:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, so to not get too down the rabbit hole, a lot of wars in Europe in this time period are prosecuted by just sheer force of number. And it comes with its own military tactics, certainly.

00:42:03 Speaker_00
Sheer population density in Europe in this time period and before means that for wars to be decisive, commonly massive armies are fielded and decisive battles are fought when possible to avoid constant, protracted, endless fighting.

00:42:19 Speaker_00
Whereas in the Eastern Woodlands,

00:42:21 Speaker_00
throughout the 1600s and 1700s, it's much more common to see small-scale raiding in guerrilla-style warfare, which would include small war parties of a handful to native forces of hundreds of warriors at a time, traveling light, traveling fast, hitting targets amongst their enemies,

00:42:42 Speaker_00
success, and then returning rapidly through different routes that were hard to track and follow, oftentimes with scalps, loot, prisoners, and other things.

00:42:52 Speaker_00
And so you see two sort of common modes of warfare that are definitely at odds with each other. And the colonists note the effectiveness of Eastern Woodland style warfare immediately.

00:43:04 Speaker_00
From the early days of Jamestown, the Jamestown colonists are losing the first Anglo-Palatine War by most modern metrics pretty handily. So you see that colonial powers do actually adapt to native warfare quite readily.

00:43:18 Speaker_00
Robert Rogers in the French and Indian War establishes Rogers Rangers on the British or colonial side.

00:43:24 Speaker_00
as a ranging unit to function in a style of Eastern Woodlands indigenous warfare to correct the weaknesses that the British are bringing onto the battlefield. And he functions with pretty great success.

00:43:37 Speaker_00
Lots of other ranging units are stood up to sort of emulate native warfare tactics. And oftentimes they include lots of native fighters on one side or the other.

00:43:46 Speaker_00
And they actually become the foundation for Roger's Rules of Ranging, which is just Eastern Woodlands warfare codified for his uses becomes the foundation for a lot of modern infantry tactics, including the U.S. Army Rangers.

00:43:59 Speaker_00
That's literally where that's drawn from. And on the Native side of things, the Native tribes have been fighting with and against colonial power since their arrival.

00:44:09 Speaker_00
So there are many early colonial armies that rely heavily on Native warriors as scouts, as advanced parties, as raiding parties, guards, or even the bulk of their military forces. And so

00:44:21 Speaker_00
It is still somewhat of a contest though between this more common, very effective, quick and fast guerrilla style warfare being practiced, which can last for years of sort of on and off cycles of establishing dominance versus this sort of more traditionally centered in the time period European style of warfare, which is draft as many men as possible through sheer numbers, force a decisive victory or a defeat.

00:44:46 Speaker_00
And so those two ideas are clashing in this period, and it is far from the first time that they've clashed.

00:44:53 Speaker_01
So throughout the summer and fall of 1774, there was a back and forth between the Virginians and the Shawnee and Mingo peoples.

00:45:00 Speaker_01
There were small-scale skirmishes featuring guerrilla warfare attacks, and there were a few battles where the brute force tactics of the Virginians played strong.

00:45:08 Speaker_01
This brings us to October 10, 1774 and the Battle of Point Pleasant, which took place about 30 miles from present-day Huntington, West Virginia. Russell, would you take us through this major battle and what transpired during it?

00:45:23 Speaker_00
Certainly. The kind of basics of it is that the southern command of Virginia's army under Lewis are marching through West Virginia, what would become West Virginia. to where the Ohio and Kanawha rivers meet.

00:45:35 Speaker_00
And they form this kind of L-shape with the Ohio running from north to south, as it were, and the Kanawha shooting off to sort of the southeast, right at what's now Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

00:45:48 Speaker_00
And the idea is that Lewis's army is going to camp here in this little crux at Point Pleasant, as it becomes known, and then march northward, unite with Dunmore's forces

00:45:59 Speaker_00
and then cross the Ohio into Shawnee heartland as a unified, hopefully in their eyes, uncontestable force.

00:46:08 Speaker_00
Cornstalk, who is in command of the native forces, primarily the Shawnee and other warriors who have joined in, appears from what we know to have roughly similar manpower or military fighting strength.

00:46:20 Speaker_00
So Lewis's army at Point Pleasant numbers around about a thousand.

00:46:25 Speaker_00
Cornstalk, having 800, maybe 1,000 warriors at his command, more than likely understood that a Virginia force of more than twice his numbers would not have been something feasible to defeat in the field.

00:46:38 Speaker_00
So using intelligence from his scouts who likely are observing the movements of Dunmore's armies and reporting back,

00:46:45 Speaker_00
He has a long military career on the frontier, understands that destroying Lewis's army, attacking the smaller force in a very vulnerable position and destroying it could end the war.

00:46:59 Speaker_00
In a single stroke, if he was able to cripple or defeat wholesale Lewis's army, the Southern Army of Virginia at this point, That could end the war.

00:47:07 Speaker_00
He might not have to bring his forces against Dunmore at all, because the sheer devastation, the blow to the morale and the fighting power of Virginia could have ended the war right then and there.

00:47:19 Speaker_00
And so the way he plans to execute this is pretty genius. Lewis's army camping in this little crux between the Ohio and the Kennewah to their northeast, which really north and east are the only directions they have free, not blocked in by the rivers.

00:47:33 Speaker_00
to their northeast, it's actually fairly hilly territory. So they've put themselves in low ground with water on their left and water below them and high ground on their northeast, their upright.

00:47:46 Speaker_00
And so they don't have really much for options if they were attacked. in this area except for to go forward through the attack or to go back the way they came. There's almost no other option. So they're actually camped in a fairly vulnerable position.

00:48:00 Speaker_00
Cornstalk's warriors cross the river the day before or the night before, depending, and they send a smaller advanced party of maybe 200 warriors south. So Cornstalk crosses the river north of Point Pleasant far enough to avoid detection.

00:48:15 Speaker_00
and then sends an advanced party of warriors through the cover of darkness in the very early morning, October 10, to ambush Lewis's army before they are awake, ready to fight, or marshaled, or some of them even armed.

00:48:28 Speaker_00
There is one hitch that ruins Cornstalk's plan and arguably changes the entire outcome of the war.

00:48:36 Speaker_00
And what foils Cornstalk's plan is that a number of men from the Southern Army, from Lewis's command, are actually out hunting in the pre-dawn hours for deer, turkey, and other things as fresh provisions.

00:48:48 Speaker_00
And these hunters, some of them run into Cornstalk's warriors working their way south towards the army. Some of them are killed. in the ensuing skirmish, but some of them escape and they run back to the main body of the army and they raise the alarm.

00:49:04 Speaker_00
That advance notice allows Lewis to send out his own advance party of whoever's armed and ready, form a defensive line to stop Cornstalk's warriors from pouring into their camp essentially and crushing them.

00:49:19 Speaker_00
there's actually accounts that they were so confident in this plan, and it was militarily a fantastic plan, that warriors were actually stationed across the Ohio and the Kanawha to be waiting for the Virginia soldiers to be swimming across and to pick them off.

00:49:35 Speaker_00
And so this advance party stalls Cornstalk's initial attack, which likely would have devastated the Southern Army. And what you end up with is essentially an all-day stalemate.

00:49:45 Speaker_00
with this sort of line drawn through the forest here of Cornstalk's warriors and Lewis's soldiers fighting for every inch of ground. And the Shawnee inflict pretty serious casualties throughout the day.

00:49:57 Speaker_00
So you're going to see about 75 of the Virginia soldiers killed, another 140 or so wounded, and a disproportionate number of their officers targeted and killed in the field.

00:50:09 Speaker_00
The Shawnee is not entirely known, but they lose maybe half the number that the Virginians do, but they leave the field.

00:50:16 Speaker_00
Cornstalk understands that this advantage that he had, this great shining moment to crush the southern army under Lewis and end the war decisively without protracted long fighting, it evaporates with that bit of advance warning that they're given.

00:50:32 Speaker_00
And so Cornstalk's warriors collect their dead and what they can and retreat back across the river.

00:50:37 Speaker_00
which eventually allows Lewis's command to regroup and to march northward to meet Dunwar's main body of the army, and then they can cross the river together, establish a fortified stronghold in Shawnee country, and then prosecute the war on their terms.

00:50:54 Speaker_01
Thanks to the hindsight we gain with history, we can see that the Battle of Point Pleasant turned out to be the penultimate battle of the Shawnee-Dunmore War.

00:51:02 Speaker_01
As nine days later, on October 19, 1774, the Shawnee and British agreed to the Treaty of Camp Charlotte.

00:51:09 Speaker_01
Would you tell us about this treaty, who sued who for peace, and what this treaty meant for all these tensions over land between the British and Indigenous nations?

00:51:19 Speaker_00
Yeah, Cornstalk is faced with a really tough dilemma. He has maybe half of the military might at his command by sheer numbers that Virginia has available. So he has maybe half the warriors to defend against a seriously numerically superior force.

00:51:36 Speaker_00
And that great stroke of military thought to attack at Point Pleasant once that plan is foiled by arguably almost pure chance.

00:51:45 Speaker_00
He's then driven into a position of defense with an enemy that is incredibly close and pretty challenging to defeat in the field since they have twice your numbers.

00:51:56 Speaker_00
And so once Dunmore and Lewis cross the river and they establish a fortified position in essentially the doorstep of the Shawnee homelands, there's not much for decisions to be made there.

00:52:07 Speaker_00
There's references to Cornstalk actually mentioning that if the younger warriors want to fight, they might as well just accept that all of the Shawnee people will die.

00:52:16 Speaker_00
Because their only option at this point is to either flee their territory, make peace, or go blow for blow with a fortified enemy in their towns, which is just not a winning game at all.

00:52:28 Speaker_00
And so Cornstalk and other leaders amongst the Shawnee sue for peace. And the really short of it is that

00:52:36 Speaker_00
Dunmore just requests the land that the Cherokee and the Haudenosaunee had sold to Virginia, which is what we think of mostly as West Virginia nowadays, and some small measures to ensure the peace, the four Shawnee princes are hostages, and really not much else.

00:52:54 Speaker_00
So Dunmore finds himself in a position of power in these negotiations because of the way that this war has played out so quickly, but he doesn't really seem to press the advantage.

00:53:04 Speaker_00
He really just demands what Virginia was believing to have bought already and no more. So the terms are pretty readily accepted by Cornstalk and the Shawnee to prevent further bloodshed and destruction.

00:53:18 Speaker_02
Yeah. So part of that peace agreement, because peace agreements take time and you need time to make sure that even though something's been put down on paper, that both sides are going to hold themselves to that agreement.

00:53:28 Speaker_02
So we see this agreement for Cornstalk and really the Shawnee to send four men as hostages to Williamsburg. They're the Shawnee princes. They arrive in December of 1774. So we're coming up on the 250th anniversary of that arrival here in Williamsburg.

00:53:46 Speaker_02
The four men's names are recorded as Wissakapoway, Katemwa, Chinusa, and Neowa. But Neowa is listed as possibly a younger man, but they're all listed as warriors.

00:53:57 Speaker_02
And so these men stay there from December of 1774 through the summer of 1775 is when the last of them leave, although they don't all leave at the same time.

00:54:06 Speaker_02
And just to plug a program we have coming up for the holiday season, it opens on Thanksgiving Day. We have a program about the Shawnee princes called the Shawnee Princes Arrive, 1774.

00:54:14 Speaker_02
That's going to encapsulate that moment of their arrival in the city and what their preliminary observations are. Shout out to the Shawnee tribe that's in Miami, Oklahoma, for helping us out with some of the language for that show.

00:54:28 Speaker_01
Felon and Russell, what do you think are the legacies of the Shawnee-Dunmore War and its Treaty of Camp Charlotte?

00:54:35 Speaker_00
A small part of it, I would say, is that what's now known as mostly West Virginia, this big chunk of the Ohio country is no longer frequented, hunted in, used by the tribal nations nearly so much.

00:54:48 Speaker_00
And so it allows this sort of easing of expansion or settlement pressure in Virginia. But it also creates further bad blood between the Shawnee and Virginia.

00:54:59 Speaker_00
And in an odd way, by having four of the Shawnee princes or hostages living in Virginia with Dunmore, living specifically in Williamsburg, as the colony deteriorates into revolution, gives the Shawnee an inside look on what's happening in the colonies that they would not have otherwise had.

00:55:18 Speaker_00
So it has a couple of peculiar effects. It's hard to say that it leads very directly to this policy change or that policy change.

00:55:26 Speaker_00
Although Cornstalk, in an effort to maintain some peace and neutrality that's achieved by Camp Charlotte in later years into the revolution, it actually costs him his life. He is later murdered not far from Point Pleasant at Fort Randolph.

00:55:42 Speaker_00
And he's really only there to try and maintain some semblance of neutrality between the Shawnee and the colonies. And he is murdered. It does interesting things for the colony and for Dunmore, certainly.

00:55:55 Speaker_00
Dunmore after dissolving the House of Burgesses had become pretty unpopular.

00:56:00 Speaker_00
But when he goes out there, assumes command of this growing Virginia army, prosecutes this war against the Shawnee effectively, and then returns to Williamsburg, although there's a lot of people lining up against Dunmore in Virginia,

00:56:14 Speaker_00
It's pretty hard to deny him his due and that he would have been seen by a lot of the people in Virginia as somewhat of a savior for a short period because the fact that he prevented what could have been an incredibly costly and devastating war waged against Virginia by going out there and fighting successfully and also arguably limiting his demands of the Shawnee

00:56:37 Speaker_00
So, you don't see other tribes get involved in a huge amount beyond the Mingo. The Haudenosaunee and the Cherokee don't throw their lot in with the Shawnee, which could have been complete disaster for Virginia.

00:56:48 Speaker_00
Virginia and Pennsylvania don't come into serious blows in the middle of this conflict. And so, yeah, it certainly would have likely given Dunmore a small breath of relief that he's no longer the target of public anger for a little while.

00:57:01 Speaker_00
He's now sort of the recipient of probably a lot of praise.

00:57:05 Speaker_02
part of the legacy of this is that these four Shawnee hostages who come to stay in Williamsburg to hold that peace accord, they get to be witnesses and bystanders to all of these dynamic happenings in the colony of Virginia as it shifts firmly into being a patriot colony.

00:57:22 Speaker_02
And then you've got things like the gunpowder incident and the flight of Lord Dunmore leaving. They're here to see all of that happening.

00:57:29 Speaker_02
And so here are these prominent indigenous players on the field here who are seeing firsthand the political dynamics at work between the patriots and the loyalists.

00:57:40 Speaker_02
It's also exciting to see all the experiences that the Shawnee princes or hostages got to have while they were here.

00:57:47 Speaker_02
that really states how much Dunmore felt like they were important and had high status, that they're riding around in carriages with him, that they're going to see plays. We know that they're entertained on his boat at one point in time.

00:58:01 Speaker_02
So they are really getting wined and dined while they're here, not hostages in the way that we think of a modern sense of a hostage, but more a diplomatic captive, if you will.

00:58:11 Speaker_02
So I just think their whole experience here and what they must have been witness to is fascinating. And I wish that they had journals left behind to know more of their mind about that.

00:58:19 Speaker_02
And then when they finally were able to return home to have been able to hear the exact words and how they would have described it would have been cool.

00:58:26 Speaker_01
That would have been really cool. OK, we should move into the time warp.

00:58:30 Speaker_01
This is a fun segment of the show where we ask you a hypothetical history question about what might have happened if something had occurred differently or if someone had acted differently.

00:59:00 Speaker_01
Imagine if Lord Dunmore had pursued a diplomatic approach rather than a military one to address Virginians tensions with the Shawnee and Mingo tribes in 1774.

00:59:10 Speaker_01
How might a peaceful resolution have altered the course of events and their impact on colonial expansion and the American Revolution?

00:59:18 Speaker_00
For there to have been a diplomatic solution that was even effective, the colony would have had to exercise control of

00:59:26 Speaker_00
frontier colonizers killing indigenous people somewhat indiscriminately, and they didn't necessarily have the administrative control in place, the networks in place to prosecute offenders, murderers on the frontier of indigenous people.

00:59:41 Speaker_00
But if they had been able to curtail aggressive colonists killing people on the frontier and pursued a diplomatic solution, Oh, it could have had very far reaching implications.

00:59:52 Speaker_00
If they had preserved more of the Shawnee homelands and territories there in the Ohio country, that could have gained them a powerful ally in the revolution to come that might have been pretty well committed to Virginia and the colonies because of the handling

01:00:09 Speaker_00
of a tricky situation. So it could have significantly impacted the revolution in the favor of the colonists to have helped grow a positive relationship with the Shawnee in this time instead of prosecuting the war against them.

01:00:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, I was going to say something along the same lines, just basically that the only way that a diplomatic resolution would have stuck would have been for the British to place more administrators out in those territories to make sure that that was not continuing to happen and to make sure that

01:00:39 Speaker_02
non-native settlers were not continuing to take advantage of while the cat's away, the mice will play vibe. And also, I think it would have made Dunmore immediately less popular.

01:00:49 Speaker_02
Dunmore's really considering his bottom line here and that the economic situation he's trying to recoup for himself. And so I think that's one of his primary motivators.

01:00:57 Speaker_02
But had he decided to pursue a diplomatic resolution that was in favor of the tribes and the original proclamation line being held, then

01:01:07 Speaker_02
Virginia settlers who were looking for opportunity out in quote-unquote new lands, new to them at least, would have been quite angry that that option was closed off to them.

01:01:18 Speaker_00
there is some political maneuvering by Virginia that is effective that I feel like shouldn't be overlooked by addressing attacks against the Cherokee and by not dealing with the Haudenosaunee in an aggressive manner following prior dealings.

01:01:33 Speaker_00
They do prevent the spreading of this war or powers like the Cherokee or the Haudenosaunee from throwing their lot in with the Shawnee, which could have been massively destructive to Virginia and the other colonies.

01:01:50 Speaker_00
to preserve Virginia and the colonies that's at play here.

01:01:55 Speaker_01
Fallon, you mentioned earlier that the American Indian Initiative at Colonial Williamsburg is hosting a special program starting on Thanksgiving Day to honor the 250th anniversary of the Shawnee-Dunmore War.

01:02:07 Speaker_01
Would you tell us more about this special program and how we can attend?

01:02:10 Speaker_02
Yeah, sure. It's called the Shawnee Princes Arrive 1774, and it is going to be every Tuesday and Saturday at 1 30 out in front of the Raleigh Tavern. Please come out and support. It's going to be an amazing, amazing program.

01:02:25 Speaker_02
We've got four Indigenous actors coming in from out of town to fill the shoes of those four Shawnee princes.

01:02:32 Speaker_01
And we don't need a special ticket to attend this program. We just need the standard Colonial Williamsburg admission ticket, right?

01:02:38 Speaker_02
No, you don't. It's right there on the street. It's Street Theatre.

01:02:41 Speaker_01
Now, if we have more questions about Colonial Williamsburg's American Indian Initiative or the Shawnee-Dunmore War, where is the best place for us to look for more information?

01:02:50 Speaker_00
For the Shawnee-Dunmore War, or at least initially starting off more specifically the Shawnee, there are three federally recognized Shawnee tribes in Oklahoma.

01:02:59 Speaker_00
I would certainly follow whatever resources they have, maybe reach out to them for more information. It's their history. And then there's a number of good readings as well on the subject.

01:03:10 Speaker_02
We can add it to the show notes. We really liked Dunmore's War by Glenn Williams.

01:03:15 Speaker_00
The Shawnees and the War for America by Colin G. Calloway is a good one. The World's the Shawnees Made by Dr. Stephen Warren is another great one.

01:03:26 Speaker_00
And there are also some firsthand accounts of the Battle of Point Pleasant and other things like that, which can be found in Documentary History of Dunmore's War, 1774, which is an adaptation of the Draper papers edited by

01:03:43 Speaker_00
and Louise Phillips Kellogg.

01:03:46 Speaker_01
Fallon Berner and Russell Reed, thank you for taking us through and helping us better understand the Shawnee-Dunmore War.

01:03:52 Speaker_02
Thanks, Liz, for having us on.

01:03:55 Speaker_00
Yeah, thanks so much.

01:03:56 Speaker_01
The Shawnee-Dunmore War of 1774 was a war about land and who owned and had a right to use that land. And it was a war about Indigenous sovereignty.

01:04:05 Speaker_01
As Russell noted, British colonists saw Shawnee homelands in the present-day states of West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia as vacated and unused, lands that could be put to the plow and used to generate a new livelihood and create new economic opportunities for their families.

01:04:22 Speaker_01
But as we've heard, and as we've heard in other episodes of this podcast, Native nations of the 18th century practiced indigenous ways of life and viewed land use quite differently from Europeans.

01:04:33 Speaker_01
Some indigenous nations, like the Shawnee, practiced a mobile way of life. It was a life that allowed them to follow different patterns of game hunting and to practice agriculture in a way that kept soil fertility intact.

01:04:45 Speaker_01
Sometimes they might be in one place for a number of years, and other years they might live in a different place. So the lands that the Virginians spied and wanted to live on were not, in fact, vacant and unused lands.

01:04:57 Speaker_01
The Shawnee just weren't on them at the time. By defending their homelands from British encroachment, the Shawnee and their allies asserted their sovereignty as Native nations and their right to govern their lands and occupy them as they saw fit.

01:05:10 Speaker_01
This seemed especially important as British colonists' desire for land and the opportunities that these new-to-them lands seemed to promise. This desire for land never ended.

01:05:20 Speaker_01
Now, we know from the descriptions that Fallon and Russell gave us that the Shawnee-Dunmore War ended with the Treaty of Camp Charlotte in October 1774.

01:05:27 Speaker_01
Now, although the treaty included a land cession from the Shawnee to the Virginians, the treaty also upheld Shawnee sovereignty. By asking for the land cession, the British acknowledged the lands of the Ohio River Valley as Shawnee lands.

01:05:41 Speaker_01
By engaging in treaty making with the Shawnee, the Shawnee won recognition as a sovereign native nation beyond British control. The study of history allows us a clearer view of past events than the people who lived through those events can see.

01:05:55 Speaker_01
This is why we can see that the importance of the Shawnee-Dunmore War is not just what in the conflict can show us about life in 1774 Virginia and the Ohio River Valley, but also in what it foreshadows.

01:06:06 Speaker_01
The Shawnee-Dunmore War and the treaties that came before it did not decisively limit colonists' expansion west.

01:06:13 Speaker_01
The tensions that caused the Shawnee-Dunmore War actually continued to exist well after the United States was born and achieved its independence.

01:06:22 Speaker_01
You'll find more information about Colonial Williamsburg's American Indian Initiative, plus notes, links, and a transcript for everything we talked about today, all on the show notes page, benfranklinsworld.com slash 398.

01:06:36 Speaker_01
Also on the show notes page, you'll find the links for all those different books that Fallon and Russell mentioned during our conversation. Friends tell friends about their favorite podcasts.

01:06:46 Speaker_01
So if you enjoy Ben Franklin's world, please tell your friends and family about it. Production assistance for this podcast comes from Morgan McCullough, Breakmaster Cylinder, composer custom theme music.

01:06:57 Speaker_01
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. To discover and listen to their other podcasts, visit airwavemedia.com. Finally, are there other events of the revolutionary era that you'd like to know about?

01:07:11 Speaker_01
Let me know, because with the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution underway, we're going to be having many more investigations about the revolution. So let me know what you'd like to explore. Liz at benfranklinsworld.com.

01:07:24 Speaker_01
Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.