Lord Dunmore's War

Lord Dunmore's War, also known as Dunmore's War, was a brief conflict in the fall of 1774 between the British Colony of Virginia and the Shawnee and Mingo in the trans-Appalachia region of the colony south of the Ohio River. Broadly, the war included events between May and October 1774. The governor of Virginia during the conflict was John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, who in May 1774, asked the House of Burgesses to declare a state of war with the Shawnee and Mingo and call out the Virginia militia.

The conflict resulted from escalating violence between white settlers, who, in accordance with previous treaties, especially the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768), were exploring and moving into land south of the Ohio River (modern West Virginia, southwestern Pennsylvania, and Kentucky), and the Ohio Country Shawnee who had historical hunting rights in the south of Ohio lands of the Iroquois Confederacy. Resulting cross-river attacks by the Shawnee caused war to be declared "to pacify the hostile Indian war bands". The war ended soon after Virginia's victory in the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774. In the ensuing Treaty of Camp Charlotte, the Native Americans surrendered their hunting rights south of the Ohio, and agreed to cease attacks upon travelers on the river and recognize the river, running nearly north–south at its eastern end, as the boundary between the Indigenous lands of the Ohio Country to the west, and the British colonies to the east. This was a major resetting of the Appalachian boundary defined by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which ended the French and Indian War.

Although the Indigenous leaders signed the treaty, conflict within the Indigenous tribes soon broke out. Some tribesmen felt the treaty sold out their claims and opposed it, and others believed that another war would mean only further losses of territory to the settlers. When the American Revolutionary War broke out between the American settlers and the British in 1775, the war factions of the Indian nations quickly gained power. They encouraged the various Indigenous nations to ally with the British during the war, initiating the Cherokee-American wars that lasted nearly two decades.