Lord Dunmore's Little War of 1774: His Captains and Their Men Who Opened Up Kentucky and the West to American Settlement

2017-08-06T15:59:38-04:00

Price: 41.00

Unique to this volume are the previously unpublished set of ledgers that include 3 broad categories of information: the names of the rangers called out to protect the Virginia frontier in 1773 and 1774 and the pay owed them, the militiamen that served soon after in Dunmore's War proper, and the sums due the farmers and merchants that put in claims for goods and services that supported this effort. These long lists, taken together, contain about 38,000 entries and caught the many of the men (and their occasional widows) living in western Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania in 1775. We have now a substitute for a kind of census of this time and place. The introduction corrects some popular myths about the war and the Battle of Point Pleasant, and taken together with Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg's Documentary History of Dunmore's War 1774, may be taken as the definitive history of the last colonial war in America. Useful biographies have been footnoted for all of the captains, including those who went (like many of their men) soon after to Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee and the west. A portrait of Lord Dunmore in his tartans, an old woodcut depicting the Battle of Point Pleasant, and 2 new maps enhance the text.

Warren Skidmore with Donna Kaminsky

(2002), 2022, paper, index, 304 pp.

ISBN: 9780788423987

101-S2396