LORD DUNMORE'S WAR

(1774), Virginia-led attack on the Shawnee Indians of Kentucky, removing the last obstacle to colonial conquest of that area. During the early 1770s the Shawnee watched with growing distress the steady encroachment upon their rich Kentucky hunting grounds by white trappers, traders, speculators, and settlers. In early 1774 the Virginia militia seized Fort Pitt and renamed it Fort Dunmore for their royal governor, John Murray, 4th earl of Dunmore. Securing frontiersmen behind colonial forts, Lord Dunmore joined Colonel Andrew Lewis in carrying the aggression against the Indians, who they felt threatened white settlers. The Moravian-influenced Delaware Indians remained peaceful, but the inflamed Shawnee sprang to the defense of their homelands. The major confrontation occurred October 10 at the Battle of Point Pleasant, in which the Shawnee under Chief Cornstalk were decisively defeated. To protect their families from attack, Shawnee chiefs quickly agreed in the Treaty of Camp Charlotte to relinquish their hunting grounds to the white settlers. Lord Dunmore was widely accused of commencing the war to divert Virginians from differences with the royal administration of that colony, and for this reason the fighting at Point Pleasant has sometimes been called the first battle of the Revolution.