Near Glenwood, W. Va., Thursday, May 17th.—By eight o'clock this morning we were in Point Pleasant, W. Va., at the mouth of the Great Kanawha River (263 miles). Céloron was here, the eighteenth of August, 1749, and on the east bank of the river, the site of the present village, buried at the foot of an elm one of his leaden plates asserting the claim of France to the Ohio basin. Ninety-seven years later, a boy unearthed this interesting 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 the Logan tragedy been made a fierce enemy of the whites, and was now the leader of a thousand picked warriors, gathered from all parts of the Northwest. On the 10th of October, from dawn until dusk, was here waged in a gloomy forest one of the most bloody and stubborn hand-to-hand battles ever fought between Indians and whites—especially notable, too, because for the first time the rivals were about equal in number. The combatants stood behind trees, in Indian fashion, and it is hard to say who displayed the best generalship, Cornstalk or Lewis.[B] When the pall of night covered the hideous contest, the whites had lost one-fifth of their number, while the savages had sustained but half as many casualties. Cornstalk's followers had had enough, however, and withdrew before daylight, leaving the field to the Americans.

A few days later, General Lewis joined Lord Dunmore—who headed the other wing of the army, which had proceeded by the way of Forts Pitt and Gower—on the Pickaway plains, in Ohio; and there a treaty was made with the Indians, who assented to every proposition made them. They surrendered all claim to lands south of the Ohio River, returned their white prisoners and stolen horses, and gave hostages for future good behavior.

Here at Point Pleasant, a year later, Fort Randolph was built, and garrisoned by a hundred men; for, despite the treaty, the Indians were still troublesome. For a long time, Pittsburg, Redstone, and Randolph were the only garrisoned forts on the frontier. The Point Pleasant of to-day is a dull, sleepy town of twenty-five hundred inhabitants, with that unkempt air and preponderance of lounging negroes, so common to small Southern communities. The bottom is rolling, fringed with large hills, and on the Ohio side drops suddenly for fifty feet to a shelving beach of gravel and clay. Crooked Creek, in whose narrow, winding valley some of the severest fighting was had, empties into the Kanawha a half-mile up the stream, at the back of the town. It was painful to meet several men of intelligence, who had long been engaged in trade here, to whom the Battle of Point Pleasant was a shadowy event, whose date they could not fix, nor whose importance understand; it seemed to be little more a part of their lives, than an obscure contest between Matabeles and whites, in far-off Africa. It is time that our Western and Southern folk were awakened to an appreciation of the fact that they have a history at their doors, quite as significant in the annals of civilization as that which induces pilgrimages to Ticonderoga and Bunker Hill.

Four miles below, Pilgrim was beached for a time at Gallipolis, O. (267 miles), which has a story all its own. The district belonged, a century ago, to the Scioto Company, an offshoot of the Marietta enterprise. Joel Barlow, the "poet of the Revolution," was sent to Paris (May, 1788) as agent for the sale of lands. As the result of his personal popularity there, and his flaming immigration circulars and maps, he disposed of a hundred thousand acres; to settle on which, six hundred French emigrants sailed for America, in February, 1790. They were peculiarly unsuited for colonization, even under the most favorable conditions—being in the main physicians, jewelers and other artisans, a few mechanics, and noblemen's servants, while many were without trade or profession.

Upon arrival in Alexandria, Va., they found that their deeds were valueless, the land never having been paid for by the Scioto speculators; moreover, the tract was filled with hostile Indians. However, five hundred of them pushed on to the region, by way of Redstone, and reached here by flatboat, in a destitute condition. The Marietta neighbors were as kind as circumstances would allow, and cabins were built for them on what is now the Public Square of Gallipolis. But they were ignorant of the first principles of forestry or gardening; the initial winter was exceptionally severe, Indian forays sapped the life of the colony, yellow fever decimated the survivors; and, altogether, the little settlement suffered a series of disasters almost unparalleled in the story of American colonization.