A History of Appalachia

4. The Wars for Appalachia

4 The Wars for Appalachia THE FRENCH AND THE BRITISH were continuously at war, or in preparation for it, from 1689 until well into the nineteenth century. Fought partly in North America between 1689 and 1764, this series of wars is known collectively by American historians as the French and Indian Wars. The separate wars in America generally took the names of the reigning British monarch-King William's War (16891697 ), QueenAnne's War (1702-1713), and King George's War (17441748 ). The most decisive war was called the French and Indian War (1754-1763). This Seven Years' War of Europe was actually begun in Appalachian Pennsylvania, was fought on three continents, and became the crucial war for empire in India as well as in North America. Both the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the Wars ofthe French Revolution and Napoleon (1792-1815)-inAmerica, the War of1812need also to be understood from this perspective ofthe British-French rivalry as a part of this continuing struggle. In the 1730s and 1740s, the French in Quebec and the Mississippi Valley were still very powerful, but were feeling threatened by the expansion of New England, both on the Maine coast and on the Bay of Fundy, and other British colonies inland in the Ohio Valley. Another concern for the French was the challenge posedby the Iroquois Confederacy and their allied British traders at Albany. The French fur trade system depended primarily upon their relations with the many Algonquin-speaking Indian nations, and these Algonquin Indian nations were seriously challenged by the British-backed IroqUOiS Confederacy. When the French wooed the Iroquois into neutrality, the French gladly left the New York frontier undisturbed. But when the Iroquois actively allied themselves with the British, both the New York and New England frontiers, as well as the Iroquois The Wars for Appalachia 41 themselves, bec.ame targets of Algonquin raids and frequent French operations. The major collision points between the French and the British in the eighty years during which the Appalachian forest was fiercely contested-from 1730 to 181O-were mostly in the northern Appalachians in New York and Pennsylvania. But French pressure upon Indians to the south, in the lands of the Creeks and the Cherokee, also caused the Carolina and Virginia authorities great concern. Virginia's Land Law of 1730, which encouraged the settlement of the Shenandoah Valley, was in fact largely a measure aimed at the southern threat of the French. In New York, the areas of tension were centered on the Albany-Saratoga area and in the Mohawk River valley, the homeland of the Iroquois. In Pennsylvania and in the large areas ofAppalachia claimed by Virginia, trade and land speculation interests pushed British interests into the Ohio Valley. It seemed as though wherever the English faced in North America, the French were there to contest with them. In fact, the specific flash point for the crucial war in the 1750s was in the upper Ohio Valley in Appalachian Pennsylvania . The climactic decade of collision between the French and the British came in the years between 1749 and 1759, when that area became one of the critical battlegrounds in a worldwide struggle for empire. In 1749, the French sent a force of 230 Canadian militia commanded by Celoron de Bienville from Fort Otsego down the Allegheny and the Ohio Rivers to the mouth of the Miami River. At every major river confluence, Bienville buried a lead plate proclaiming the lands thus drained as the possessions of the French king. By 1753, the French had also built three new forts on the upper Allegheny River-at Le Boeuf, Venango, and Presque Isle-intended to reinforce the Bienville claims and to guarantee French control of the upper Ohio Valley. Meanwhile, encouraged by Governor Dinwiddie, speculators in Virginia had developed land and settlement schemes also centering on the upper Ohio Valley. As she had done in the 1730s, Virginia during the mid-1740s turned to a policy of actively recruiting settlers to lands in the west. By 1754, Virginia had granted more than 2.5 million acres to various companies in and beyond the mountains. Three companies especially participated in these land schemes. The Greenbrier Company was the most modest, confining its activities to 100 thousand acres within the Greenbrier Valley. The Loyal Land Company, including among its investors Peter Jefferson, Joshua Fry, 42 The Contest for Appalachia and Dr. Thomas Walker, sent...