The Revolution reopened the long series of Indian wars along the western frontiers. Encouraged and financed by the same British agents who had once acted in behalf of the former colonists, the Cherokees and Shawnees, particularly, seized upon the unsettled conditions to strike back at the steadily advancing waves of settlers moving southwestward along the Clinch, Holston, French Broad, and Watauga Rivers. Throughout 1775 and 1776 Virginian, North Carolinian, and Georgian frontiersmen fought the Cherokee in a series of bloody battles. The culminating attack by 2,000 riflemen under Colonel William Christian destroyed the major Cherokee villages and compelled the Cherokees to sign "humiliating" treaties with the southern states in 1777. The determined Cherokee chieftain, Dragging Canoe, moved westward, regrouped his warriors at Chickamauga, and launched another series of frontier raids. North Carolina and Virginia riflemen under Colonel Evan Shelby in 1779 and Colonel Arthur Campbell in 1781 battled the undaunted Cherokees. Finally, in 1782, the Indians yielded their territory to the frontiersmen. Little noticed, this series of battles involved a high percentage of the western Virginians in nearly constant battle readiness.
George Rogers Clark and the Winning of the West
In the Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois country the Revolution was a continuation of the long series of bloody battles, ambushes, and deceptions which the Indians and whites had been perpetrating against each other since the settlers had pushed over the mountains in the early 1770's. The British had merely replaced the French as the European ally of the Indians. The principal opponents were the tough, well-organized Shawnees who had been the main targets of Dunmore and Colonel Andrew Lewis during Dunmore's War in 1774. The Shawnees were joined by the Miami, Delaware, and Ottawa Indians. These Ohio Indians needed little encouragement from Lieutenant Colonel Henry Hamilton, the British commander at Fort Detroit. Amply supplied with munitions, guns, and money for patriot scalps received from Hamilton, known among the frontiersmen as the "Hair Buyer", these Indians swarmed across the Ohio River in 1775, 1776, and 1777. No quarter was asked by either side; none was given. Conditions became especially critical in 1777 when the Indians were angered and embittered by the foolish and senseless murder of Cornstalk, the captured chief of the Shawnees.
Complicating any military solution to the western fighting were the old rivalries among the states for control of the western lands. Virginia had to establish county government in Kentucky in order to head off North Carolinian Richard Henderson's bid for that region in 1776. Pennsylvanians and Virginians still quarrelled over Pittsburgh and the Upper Ohio. Aid from the Continental Congress was obstructed by the claims of at least four states to Ohio and the jealousy of the landless states toward the landed states.
Then in 1777 a 23 year-old Virginian, George Rogers Clark, found the solution. Virginia should go it alone, raise and equip a small army of riflemen, and in a lightening move take the Indiana and Illinois region from the British. Clark reasoned that the British were trying to hold a vast tract of land with a few troops, a handful of Tories, and the Indians. The British posts at Kaskaskia, on the Mississippi, and Vincennes, on the Wabash, were former French forts manned by men with no allegiance to Britain. Clark's enthusiasm convinced Governor Henry and the Council of State that victory was possible if the operation was conducted secretly. Support from George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, and George Wythe was solicited and gained. The assembly, without knowing the purpose for the authorization, gave Clark permission to raise troops and released the needed gunpowder.
In June 1778 Clark with 175 riflemen, far short of his hoped-for complement, set out from the Falls of the Ohio (Louisville). The small number can be attributed to the fact that the men, like the assembly, had to sign-on without knowing their destiny. A few slipped away after they learned Clark's true plans. Those who stayed were dedicated warriors. On July 4, after floating down the Ohio, Clark's men appeared outside Kaskaskia. The fort surrendered without a shot being fired. As Clark suspected, the French inhabitants welcomed the Americans. On July 6 another former French town, Cahokia, 60 miles northward, capitulated. And on July 14 Frenchmen from Kaskaskia persuaded their fellow countrymen at Fort Sackville in Vincennes to surrender. On August 1 Clark occupied the fort.
Clark's plan had worked to perfection. But he was now faced with the same problem which had enabled him to seize the region—he could not hold three forts scattered over several hundred miles (Vincennes is 180 miles east of Kaskaskia). Therefore, when Governor Hamilton moved south from Detroit in December with his own make-shift army, Clark's men had to abandon Vincennes and flee west to Kaskaskia. All seemed lost.
Again the refusal of the Americans to follow European military conventions paid off. Clark, ignoring the tradition to go into winter quarters took Vincennes in the dead of winter with less than 130 men, many of them French. It was the most remarkable single military feat of the Revolution. Only men who had lived in the frontier wilderness could have endured the march. Despite wading waist-deep through flooding rivers and swamps in freezing February snowstorms, going days without warm food, poorly clothed, and carrying only the minimum supply of gunpowder and shot, Clark and his men reached Vincennes determined to fight. Learning that he had arrived undetected by the British, Clark ordered great bonfires lit, both to warm his frozen men and to deceive Hamilton. Watching dancing shadows of seemingly countless men whooping and shouting in front of the fires, Hamilton concluded he was hopelessly outnumbered. The next morning, February 24, 1779, the bold Clark demanded Hamilton's surrender. At first the governor refused, but a series of well placed rifle shots took the fight out of the defenders. Then Clark ordered several Indians, caught in the act of taking scalps into the fort, tomahawked in full view of the fort. Hamilton agreed to surrender. Clark sent Hamilton under heavy guard to Virginia, passing through the Kentucky settlements his Indians had harassed. Ignoring protests from the British, Governor Jefferson refused to exchange Hamilton, keeping him in irons in the Williamsburg jail until November 1780 when the prisoner finally agreed to sign a parole not to fight against the Americans or to go among the Indians.[43 ] Clark was treated shamefully by the Virginia Assembly after the war and was never fully reimbursed for his personal expenses in the west.
For Clark the capture of Vincennes was to be a prelude to taking Detroit. In both 1779 and 1780 he planned marches to the center of British western power. Neither time could he bring off a coordinated attack. The frontier was under too heavy pressure from the Ohio Indians led by Tory Henry Bird and the infamous renegade, Simon Girty. Instead, Clark concentrated on Indians closer to Kentucky. In August 1780 with 1,000 riflemen he destroyed the principal Shawnee towns of Chillocothe and Piqua, but could not break the Shawnee strength. The invasion of eastern Virginia in 1781 ended hopes for the Detroit project, drew men from the west, and opened the way for the Ohio Indians to go on the offensive. Bitter fighting continued in the west after Yorktown. Clark's troops finally broke the Shawnees in November 1782 when they again leveled Chillocothe and Piqua. Hostilities and the British presence in the Northwest Territory remained a contentious issue until after the War of 1812.