esting but futile proclamation, and
it rests to-day in the museum of the Virginia Historical Society.

The Great Kanawha Valley long had a romantic interest for Englishmen
concerned in Western lands. It was in the grant to the old Ohio
Company; but that corporation, handicapped in many ways, was
practically dead by the time of Lord Dunmore's war. It had many
rivals, more or less ephemeral, among them the scheme of George Mercer
(1773) to have the territory between the Alleghanies and the Ohio--the
West Virginia of to-day--erected into the "Province of Vandalia,"
with himself as governor, and his capital at the mouth of the Great
Kanawha. Washington owned a ten-thousand-acre tract on both sides
of the river, commencing a short distance above the mouth, which
he surveyed in person, in October, 1770; and in 1773 we find him
advertising to sell or lease it; among the inducements he offered was,
"the scheme for establishing a new government on the Ohio," and the
contiguity of his lands "to the seat of government, which, it is more
than probable, will be fixed at the mouth of the Great Kanawha."
Had not the Revolution broken out, and nipped this and many another
budding plan for Western colonization, there is little doubt that
what we call West Virginia would have been established as a state, a
century earlier than it was.[A]

A few days ago we were at Mingo Bottom, where lived Chief Logan, whose
family were treacherously slaughtered by border ruffians (1774).
The Mingos, ablaze with the fire of vengeance, carried the war-pipe
through the neighboring villages; runners were sent in every direction
to rouse the tribes; tomahawks were unearthed, war-posts were planted;
messages of defiance sent to the Virginians; and in a few days Lord
Dunmore's war was in full swing, from Cumberland Gap to Fort Pitt,
from the Alleghanies to the Wabash.

His lordship, then governor of Virginia, was full of energy, and
proved himself a competent military manager. The settlers were
organized; the rude log forts were garrisoned; forays were made
against the Indian villages as far away as Muskingum, and an army of
nearly three thousand backwoodsmen, armed with smooth-bores and clad
in fringed buckskin hunting-shirts, was put in the field.

One division of this army, eleven hundred strong, under Gen. Andrew
Lewis, descended the Great Kanawha River, and on Point Pleasant met
Cornstalk, a famous Shawnee chief, who, while at first peaceful, had
by