history is full
of daring adventure, cruel sufferings, and extraordinary turns of
fortune. He was eight times made to run the Indian gauntlet; three times
bound to the stake. He was with Clarke in his expedition against
Vincennes and Kaskaskia; and with Wayne in the campaign of 1794. He died
in Ohio, in poverty and neglect, his once giant frame bowed down with
age.[593:A] Girty, after playing for a time the spy on both sides in the
revolutionary contest, became at length an adherent of the enemy, and
proved, toward his countrymen, a cruel and barbarous miscreant, in whom
every sentiment of humanity appears to have been extinct. Kenton and
Girty are both good subjects for a novelist.

Suspicions were not wanting in the minds of many Virginians, especially
the inhabitants of the west, that the frontier had been embroiled in the
Indian war by Dunmore's machinations; and that his ultimate object was
to secure an alliance with the savages to aid England in the expected
contest with the colonies; and these suspicions were strengthened by his
equivocal conduct during the campaign. He was also accused of fomenting,
with the same sinister views, the boundary altercations between
Pennsylvania and Virginia on the northwestern frontier. These charges
and suspicions do not appear to be sustained by sufficient proof. It is
probable that in these proceedings his lordship was prompted rather by
motives of personal interest than of political manoeuvre. His agent,
Dr. Conolly, was locating large tracts of land on the borders of the
Ohio.

By the Quebec Act of 1774 Great Britain, with a view of holding the
colonies in check, established the Roman Catholic religion in Canada,
and enlarged its bounds so as to comprise all the territory northwest of
the Ohio to the head of Lake Superior and the Mississippi. This attempt
to extend the jurisdiction of Canada to the Ohio was especially
offensive to Virginia. Richard Henry Lee, in congress, denounced it as
the worst of all the acts complained of. In Virginia, Dunmore's avarice
getting the better of his loyalty, he espoused her claims to western
lands, and became a partner in enormous purchases in Southern Illinois.
In 1773 Thomas and Cuthbert Bullet, his agents, made surveys of lands at
the falls of the Ohio; and a part of Louisville and of towns opposite to
Cincinnati are yet held under his warrant.

Murray, a grandson of the Earl of Dunmore, and page to Queen Victoria,
visited the United St