16. Many local historians, including Brantz Mayer (Logan and Cresap, p. 85), ascribe to the earl treacherous motives. Brantz Mayer puts it thus: "It was probably Lord Dunmore's desire to incite a war which would arouse and band the savages of the west, so that in the anticipated struggle with the united colonies the British home-interest might ultimately avail itself of these children of the forest as ferocious and formidable allies in the onslaught on the Americans." This is much too futile a theory to need serious discussion. The war was of the greatest advantage to the American cause; for it kept the northwestern Indians off our hands for the first two years of the Revolutionary struggle; and had Lord Dunmore been the far-seeing and malignant being that this theory supposes, it would have been impossible for him not also to foresee that such a result was absolutely inevitable. There is no reason whatever to suppose that he was not doing his best for the Virginians; he deserved their gratitude; and he got it for the time being. The accusations of treachery against him were afterthoughts, and must be set down to mere vulgar rancor, unless, at least, some faint shadow of proof is advanced. When the Revolutionary war broke out, however, the earl, undoubtedly, like so many other British officials, advocated the most outrageous measures to put down the insurgent colonists.
17. See Brantz Mayer, p. 86, for a very proper attack on those historians who stigmatize as land-jobbers and speculators the perfectly honest settlers, whose encroachments on the Indian hunting-grounds were so bitterly resented by the savages. Such attacks are mere pieces of sentimental injustice. The settlers were perfectly right in feeling that they had a right to settle on the vast stretches of unoccupied ground, however wrong some of their individual deeds may have been. But Mayer, following Jacob's "Life of Cresap," undoubtedly paints his hero in altogether too bright colors.
18. Sappington, Tomlinson, and Baker were the names of three of his fellow miscreants. See Jefferson MSS.
19. At Greenbriar. See "Narrative of Captain John Stewart," an actor in the war.—Magazine of American History, Vol. I., p. 671.
20. Loudon's "Indian Narratives," II., p. 223.
21. See "American Pioneer," I., p. 189.
22. Letter of George Rogers Clark, June 17. 1798. In Jefferson MSS., 5th Series, Vol. I. (preserved in Archives of State Department at Washington)
23. Witness the testimony of one of the most gallant Indian fighters of the border, who was in Wheeling at the time; letter of Col. Ebenezer Zane, February 4, 1800, in Jefferson MSS.
24. Jefferson MSS. Deposition of John Gibson, April 4, 1800.
25. Do. Deposition of Wm. Huston, April 19, 1798; also depositions of Samuel McKee, etc.