With a group of forty cavalrymen, Maj. Samuel McColloch rode to the aid of Fort Henry, near Wheeling, Virginia. It was September 1, 1777, and the fort was under attack by roughly 300 Native Americans: members of the Wyandot, Mingo, Shawnee, and Delaware tribes. Outnumbered, the fort’s commanding officer had called for more militiamen. McColloch […]
When the American Revolution began, the Virginia Colony faced not one military-territorial contest, but four. Its ousted Royal governor, Lord Dunmore, was in the Chesapeake actively plotting a forcible return to power. A longstanding dispute with Pennsylvania over the headwaters of the Ohio had turned violent. A formal peace with the Shawnee on the northwest […]
In 1774, as tensions between colonials and Native Americans living along the upper Ohio River grew, settlers either fled east of the mountains or forted up. During the summer, Maj. Angus McDonald of the Virginia militia marched over the Appalachians to Wheeling on the Ohio River and joined the locals like Ebenezer Zane, the town’s founder, […]
