ppi Valley in British Politics," vol.
II, pp. 191-94.

When summer came, its thick verdure proffering ambuscade, the air
hung tense along the border. Traders had sent in word that Shawanoes,
Delawares, Mingos, Wyandots, and Cherokees were refusing all other
exchange than rifles, ammunition, knives, and hatchets. White men were
shot down in their fields from ambush. Dead Indians lay among their own
young corn, their scalp locks taken. There were men of both races who
wanted war and meant to have it--and with it the land.

Lord Dunmore, the Governor, resolved that, if war were inevitable, it
should be fought out in the Indian country. With this intent, he wrote
to Colonel Andrew Lewis of Botetourt County, Commander of the Southwest
Militia, instructing him to raise a respectable body of troops and "join
me either at the mouth of the Great Kanawha or Wheeling, or such other
part of the Ohio as may be most convenient for you to meet me." The
Governor himself with a force of twelve hundred proceeded to Fort Pitt,
where Croghan, as we have seen, was extending his hospitality to eleven
hundred warriors from the disaffected tribes.

On receipt of the Governor's letter, Andrew Lewis sent out expresses to
his brother Colonel Charles Lewis, County Lieutenant of Augusta, and to
Colonel William Preston, County Lieutenant of Fincastle, to raise
men and bring them with all speed to the rendezvous at Camp Union
(Lewisburg) on the Big Levels of the Greenbrier (West Virginia).
Andrew Lewis summoned these officers to an expedition for "reducing our
inveterate enemies to reason." Preston called for volunteers to take
advantage of "the opportunity we have so long wished for... this useless
People may now at last be oblidged to abandon their country." These men
were among not only the bravest but the best of their time; but this
was their view of the Indian and his alleged rights. To eliminate this
"useless people," inveterate enemies of the white race, was, as they saw
it, a political necessity and a religious duty. And we today who profit
by their deeds dare not condemn them.

Fervor less solemn was aroused in other quarters by Dunmore's call to
arms. At Wheeling, some eighty or ninety young adventurers, in charge
of Captain Michael Cresap of Maryland, were waiting for the freshets to
sweep them down the Ohio into Kentucky. When the news reached them, they
greeted it with the wild monotone chant and the ceremonies preliminary
to Indi