Point Pleasant, where we arrived at seven o’clock in the evening, is beautifully situated on a bank, at least forty feet above the common level of the Ohio, at the conflux of the Great Kenhawa with that river. It contains twenty-one indifferent houses, including a court-house of square logs, this being the seat of justice of Mason county. The town does not thrive on account of the adjacent country not settling so fast as the opposite side in the state of Ohio, where lands can be bought in small tracts for farms, by real settlers, at a reasonable rate, whereas the Virginia lands belonging mostly to wealthy and great landholders, are held at four or five times the Ohio price.
The river Ohio is here six hundred yards wide, and the Kenhawa is two hundred and twenty-five, the latter navigable about eighty miles to the falls.
On the 10th of October, 1774, a battle was fought here by the Virginia and Pennsylvania militia under general Lewis, against the Indians, who had attacked them in great force, but were defeated and compelled to retreat across the Ohio, carrying their dead and wounded with them according to their invariable custom; as, like the ancient Greeks, they deem it an {124} irreparable disgrace, to leave the unburied bodies of their slain fellow warriours to the disposal of the victorious enemy. The Americans bought their victory at the expense of a number of their most active men, amongst whom was Col. Lewis, brother to the general, a brave and enterprizing officer. They were buried near the edge of the river bank, which has since mouldered away, occasionally discovering their remains to the present inhabitants, who have always re-interred them.
This was a military station above thirty years ago. It is twenty years since it was laid out for a town, but it had no houses erected in consequence until after Wayne’s Indian treaty, it being unsafe before to live outside the stoccado.
Lord Dunmore, who was then governour of Virginia, and commander-in-chief on the expedition against the Indians, at the time of the battle of Point Pleasant, had penetrated by the way of Wheeling across the Ohio, to within a short march of their principal settlement, near where Chilicothe now is; when, instead of following up Lewis’s success, while they were yet under the influence of the panick occasioned by it, and by his lordship’s approach with the main body of the militia, and of exterminating them, or of driving them out of the country, he received their submission and patched up a treaty with them, which they observed no longer than during the short time that he continued with a military force in their country, for which he was much blamed by the back settlers and hunters. Humanity, however, must plead his excuse with every thinking or philosophick mind; and volumes might be written to prove the justice of the Indian cause; but in all national concerns, it has never been controverted by the history of mankind from the earliest ages of which we have any record, but that interest and power always went hand in hand to serve the mighty against the {125} weak, and writers are never wanting to aid the cause of injustice, barbarity and oppression, with the sophistry of a distorted and unnatural philosophy; while the few who would be willing to espouse the rights of the feeble, have not enough of the spirit of chivalry, to expose themselves to an irreparable loss of time, and the general obloquy attending an unpopular theme: even in this so much boasted land of liberty and equality, where nothing is to be dreaded from the arbitrary acts of a king and council during a suspension of a habeas corpus law, or the mandate of an arbitrary hero in the full tide of victory.
Is not popular opinion frequently as tyrannical as star chambers, or lettres de cachets?
The Indians north of the Ohio, under the name of the Five Nations, and their dependants, had been gradually, but rapidly, forced back more and more remote from the country of their ancestors, by the irresistible and overswelling tide of population of Europeans and their descendants. They at last abandoned all the continent of America east of the great chain of the Allegheny mountains, to the enlightened intruders, and besides that natural barrier, they added an immense wilderness of nearly five hundred miles in breadth, west of those mountains, to the space which divided them; settling themselves in that country which has since become the state of Ohio, having Lake Erie for its northern boundary, and the river Ohio for its southern. The woods and savannahs to the southward of that river abounded in game, such as buffaloes, deer, elk, bears, and innumerable smaller animals, valuable for their flesh, skins, and furs. They were tempted to make hunting excursions into this country, during which they frequently met with parties of hunters of other Indian nations, called Chocktaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees, who resided far south of it, but who had been accustomed to consider it as their exclusive property {126} for hunting in, from time immemorial. Battles with various success were generally the consequence of those meetings. The southern Indians were the most numerous—the northern the most warlike.
Finding that they exhausted each other to no purpose, by such constant hostility, necessity at last obliged them to make a peace, the basis of which was, that the hunting country should be common to both as such, to the exclusion of all other people, and that neither would ever settle on it themselves, nor permit others to do so.
They enjoyed in quiet the uninterrupted use of this immense common forest, for many years after; but the Virginians having extended their settlements to the westward of the mountains, the frontier inhabitants, who, like the aborigines, supported themselves principally by hunting, were led in quest of game, as far west as the banks of Kentucky river, in the very centre of the Indian hunting country.
On their return to their settlements, the report spread from them to the colonial government, that they had discovered a country most abundant in game, and far exceeding in natural fertility any of the settled parts of Virginia.