Dunmore’s objective was to compel the Ohio Indians to agree to allow Virginians to settle east and south of the Ohio River. The Virginia governor, who knew little about the Indians or warfare in the western woods, believed that his goal could be achieved by effective diplomacy supported by the threat of military action.
Dunmore modeled his campaign on a successful operation against the Ohio Indians ten years before. In 1764, Gen. John Bradstreet had led a British army across Lake Erie to Sandusky Bay. At the same time, Col. Henry Bouquet had marched with another to the forks of the Muskingum River. There, without offering battle, the Indians had agreed at a council with Bouquet to end Pontiac’s War and surrender their prisoners.
The groundwork for a similar success in 1774 had already been laid. The Seneca chief Guyasuta and the great Delaware chief White Eyes had secured the agreement of all of the Ohio tribes other than the Shawnees and the Mingos. All that remained, Dunmore believed, was to advance into Ohio with a force that would overawe the isolated Shawnees and Mingos.
To field such a force, Dunmore could summon the militia of Virginia’s frontier counties. Those counties extended across an area more than 300 miles long. Most of their populations, moreover, were east of the western range of the Appalachians, across which there were passable routes only in the northeast and southwest. Dunmore therefore decided to recruit separate armies in the northeast and southwest, which then would unite at a site west of the mountains, on the Ohio River.
This Ross Straight statue in Buckhannon, W. Va., depicts the Delaware commander Buckongahelas holding his dead son Mahonegon, killed by a Virginian in 1773. (Photograph by Ross Straight)
The Northern Army would form around men already west of the Appalachians, most of whom had participated in Maj. Angus McDonald’s expedition against Wakatomica. They were in Wheeling; Pittsburgh; and Redstone Old Fort, now Brownsville, Pa. Additional companies, to be recruited both west and east of the mountains. They would meet at Wheeling to form the Northern Army.
Bouquet’s 1,500-man army included 250 Virginia militiamen led by Andrew Lewis. Thomas Buford, John Field, Charles Lewis, and Alexander McClanahan, who would fight at Point Pleasant, were among Lewis’s company commanders. This hand-colored Pierre Canot engraving, which illustrated William Smith’s 1766 Account of the Expedition Against the Ohio Indians in the Year 1764, shows Indians returning captive children to Bouquet at what is now Coshocton, Ohio. The 278 released captives included John Gibson and Simon Girty. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
The Southern Army would consist of companies recruited in southwestern Virginia. It had an obvious route to an assembly point. The Kanawha Trail led directly from the Great Wagon Road to the mouth of the Kanawha River on the Ohio River. The companies forming the Southern Army would meet where the trail crossed the Greenbrier River, at a site at present-day Lewisburg, Va. that would be named Camp Union.
The Southern Army’s commander, Col. Andrew Lewis, had previously led a militia army against the Ohio Indians. In February 1756, he and 263 men had marched west from Ingles Ferry to join a force of 130 Cherokees. They had then moved together down the Big Sandy River. But by the time the Virginians had reached the Ohio, they had exhausted their food and been forced to abandon the campaign.
Then the Virginians had lacked the logistical capacity for such an ambitious mission. Now they would have adequate supplies. They would consume beef, provided by cattle herded forward as they advanced, and bread, made from flour carried by packhorses or watercraft.
The flour for the Northern Army would be carried by watercraft to Wheeling, and on to the place where it would meet the Southern Army. The animals would be collected at Redstone, herded to Wheeling, and then down the eastern bank of the Ohio to the place the two armies would join. The Southern Army’s flour and animals were to be carried to Camp Union by packhorses, and then to a supply base at the mouth of the Elk River, at present Charleston. A fleet of canoes built there would then carry the flour to the mouth of the Kanawha River on the Ohio, as advancing units of the army herded the cattle down the Kanawha Trail in stages.
Dunmore and Lewis initially agreed to unite the armies at the mouth of Kanawha. Effecting such a rendezvous at a distant location in the wilderness, however, would be a formidable challenge. The Virginia governor’s failure to recognize either its difficulty or importance would almost lead to disaster.
Confusion would arise because the two commanders did not judge the optimal location for their rendezvous by the same criteria. Lewis assumed that the purpose of joining the armies was to enhance the power with which the Virginians could overcome opposition as they advanced to the main concentration of Shawnee villages on the Pickaway Plains. It seemed obvious to him that the armies should combine at the mouth of the Kanawha, from which the Kanawha Trail and Scioto Trail led directly toward their objective.
Dunmore, however, believed that the mere appearance of the armies would compel the Indians to request a peace council, and that the site of the council was the proper site for the armies to meet. When he was told that the council would be at the mouth of the Hocking River, Dunmore decided to have the armies meet there. When he later learned that the Shawnees and Mingos had refused to attend the council, he concluded that they would attend if his army advanced toward the Pickaway Plains. The impatient Virginia governor, unwilling to delay such an advance by the additional two to three days needed to join Lewis at the mouth of the Kanawha, instead ordered Lewis to join his army at a site near the Pickaway Plains.
Because the Indians had attacked neither Bradstreet’s nor Bouquet’s army in 1764, Dunmore also believed that they were unlikely to attack either his or Lewis’s. He maintained that assumption even after receiving accurate intelligence that it was unfounded. Friendly Delawares, who informed him that the Mingos and Shawnees had decided on war, told him that that 700 Indians had left the Pickaway Plains to battle the Virginians.
Despite the spectacular successes of the Ohio Indians against British forces, Dunmore seems to have assumed as well that, if the Indians did attack, they would be unable to defeat either his or Lewis’s army. Lewis, who lacked the information available to Dunmore, camped at Point Pleasant with no knowledge of the Indians’ intentions or capacities. He and his commanders, however, also believed that the Southern Army would prevail if attacked. No Indian army had ever faced 1,100 frontier riflemen. If battle commenced, Lewis’s men would scatter and find cover behind trees and logs. Then, in a contest of firearms at a distance of about 100yd, they would demonstrate their superior skill with their weapons.
The refusal of the other Ohio Indians to join them left the Shawnees and Mingos in a difficult position. Even with sympathetic volunteers from other tribes, they could field an army of only 700 against the 2,400 Virginians in Dunmore’s and Lewis’s armies. Logistical constraints, moreover, limited their ability to conduct operations. They could send raiders in small parties to distant locations. But they could not offer battle by the whole Indian army far beyond the Ohio River.
The Indian commanders, who believed that their best chance of victory lay in attacking the separate Virginia armies in sequence, decided to go into battle as soon as one reached the Ohio. In deciding which to attack first, and when to offer battle, the Indians had good sources of conventional intelligence available. Indian scouts watched the two armies advance, and examined abandoned camps to determine their sizes.
Dunmore had maps by the cartographers John Mitchell and Lewis Evans to plan his campaign 1755. This detail from Evans’s map shows the area of operations. Pittsburgh was at the site marked “Ft. Du Quesne” in the upper right. Camp Union was opposite the mouth of “Howard C.” on the “Green Briar R.” in the lower right. The Pickaway Plains was to the right of the letter “G” above the center on the left. (Prints and Maps Division, Library of Congress)
The Indian commanders also relied on a very different kind of intelligence, which was provided by Indian shamans. American prisoners reported with astonishment the degree to which the Indians relied on such information. In 1756, James Smith was with encamped Mingos and Ojibwes when a woman reported seeing armed men in the nearby woods. Before investigating, the Indians asked the Ojibwe shaman Manetohca to determine whether they were enemies. After accurately determining from a burned bone that the intruders were only wolves, “he said we might all go to sleep for there was no danger, and we accordingly did... The Indians believed what he told them on this occasion as well as it had come from an infallible oracle.” In 1792, 12-year-old Oliver Spencer saw Blue Jacket ask the female Mingo shaman Coohcoocheh to foretell the fate of the Indian army that would fight at the battle of Fort St Clair on November 6, 1792. When she responded an hour later “in wild and nearly incoherent notes” that the Indians would be successful, the Indians became “as confident of victory as if the enemy already were in retreat.”
On the basis of their intelligence, the Indian commanders decided to attack the Southern Army first. When Lewis’s force reached the Ohio, the Northern Army was only two to three days away. The Indians then learned that Christian’s advancing Fincastle County Regiment would soon join Lewis’s army. They decided to attack the Southern Army’s camp at Point Pleasant before either Dunmore or Christian arrived.
Experience had taught the Indians that casualties were fewest when they fought dispersed against a surrounded enemy. If an enemy attacked a segment of their encircling line, the Indians fell back, and enlarged the circle or separately surrounded the attackers. The effectiveness of such tactics against British regulars had impressed Bouquet. A commander, he wrote, “cannot discover them tho from every tree, log or bush, he receives an incessant fire… He will find himself surrounded by a circle of fire, which, like an artificial horizon, follows him everywhere.”
Lewis’s camp, however, which was protected by wide rivers on two sides, could not be surrounded. The Indians therefore were forced to modify their usual tactics. An Indian line from the Ohio to the Kanawha, the commanders decided, would attack the Virginians and drive them back into a small area between the rivers. There, they anticipated, the trapped Virginians would suffer heavy casualties, break through the Indian line in panic, and flee back down the Kanawha Trail.
Because of the nature of the field, the size of Lewis’s army, and the compelling need to drive it back to Virginia, the Indians expected much higher casualties than they usually incurred in battle. They feared the effect of so many losses on their ability to defeat Dunmore’s army in a subsequent engagement. But few doubted that they could defeat Lewis’s army.