United States or Morocco ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His family was not of the landed gentry, but he received some education, and then, like Washington and many other adventuresome young men of the day, became a surveyor. At the age of twenty-two he was a member of Governor Dunmore's staff. During a surveying expedition he visited Kentucky, which so pleased him that in 1774 he decided to make that part of the back country his home.
Finally, on July 8-9, 1776, Colonel Andrew Lewis' land-based artillery badly damaged Dunmore's fleet at the Battle of Gwynn's Island, in Gloucester County, now Mathews County. With this Dunmore and his ships left Virginia, the Governor going to New York where he took an army command under General Howe. Not until 1779 did a British fleet return in force to the Chesapeake.
Poor Dunmore was terribly cut up at the premature death of his follower; Lizzie, having smothered her head with fluffy feathers from some cockatoos that had been roasted for supper, employed herself in chanting a most weird kind of dirge over the body, to which she beat a species of accompaniment on the bottom of a pint pot; while Ferdinand, by Dunmore's directions, had set to work to strip a sheet of bark off a tea-tree, to act as a rude coffin.
Save for Lord Dunmore's war we could not have settled beyond the mountains until after we had ended our quarrel with our kinsfolk across the sea. It so cowed the northern Indians that for two or three years they made no further organized effort to check the white advance.
* Hancock Taylor, who delayed in getting out of the country and was cut off. Harrod and his homesteaders immediately enlisted in the army. How eager Boone was to go with the forces under Lewis is seen in the official correspondence relative to Dunmore's War.
His face was painted black, the death color, and he was twice sentenced to be burned alive, at the Pickaway Plains and at Sandusky. But each time he was saved at the last moment, once through a sudden spasm of mercy on the part of the renegade Girty, his old companion in arms at the time of Lord Dunmore's war, and again by the powerful intercession of the great Mingo chief, Logan.
Notwithstanding Lord Dunmore's abrupt dissolution of the House of Burgesses, the members still continued on courteous terms with him, and the ball which they had decreed early in the session in honor of Lady Dunmore, was celebrated on the 27th with unwavering gallantry.
At this moment Joe saw two men approaching from the fort, and recognized one of them as Wetzel. He doubted not that the other was Lord Dunmore's famous guide and hunter, Jonathan Zane. In features he resembled the colonel, and was as tall as Wetzel, although not so muscular or wide of chest. Joe felt the same thrill he had experienced while watching the frontiersmen at Fort Pitt.
By this it appears that he has either fallen in with part of Dunmore's fleet, or picked up the remainder of his own, which had been separated, and were not in the action near Charlestown. Of the Hessians only 1300 or 1400 have arrived. The remainder, about 9000, are daily expected. They were left near the banks of Newfoundland. Those already here are not much esteemed as soldiers.
Dunmore's War is epochal, in that it procured for the nonce a state of peace with the Indians, which made possible the advance of Judge Henderson over the Transylvania Trail in 1775, and, through his establishment of the Transylvania Fort at Boonesborough, the ultimate acquisition by the American Confederation of the imperial domain of the trans-Alleghany.
Word Of The Day