Wheeling

Wheeling's Revolutionary War: The Frontier That Fought Last

When the Continental Congress declared independence in July 1776, the delegates in Philadelphia could scarcely have imagined the world that existed three hundred miles to the west, beyond the Allegheny Mountains, along the upper reaches of the Ohio River. There, in what is now Wheeling, West Virginia, a small cluster of cabins and a rough-hewn stockade represented the outermost edge of American settlement—a place where the Revolution was not fought with massed infantry and Continental regulars but with flintlock rifles fired from loopholes, with desperate runs through open ground, and with a grinding, years-long struggle for survival against British-allied Native forces determined to drive the Americans back across the mountains. Wheeling's story is unlike any other in the Revolution. It is a story that began before independence was declared and did not end until months after the last major battle in the East. The siege that closed Wheeling's war, fought in September 1782—a full year after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown—has long carried the distinction of being the last recognized battle of the American Revolution.

Even the name of the place carried a dark foreboding. "Wheeling" is believed to derive from a Delaware (Lenape) Indian term meaning "head" or "skull."

The Delaware word Wihling—from Wih, meaning head, and ling, meaning place—designated it as the "place of the skull." Legend holds that Native Americans, angered by a white settler venturing onto their hunting grounds, decapitated him and set his skull on a pole near the mouth of Wheeling Creek as a warning to others who might follow. The name hinted at the violence that had already marked the confluence of creek and river long before American settlers arrived, and at the violence that would define the settlement's Revolutionary years.

The origins of Wheeling as an American settlement trace to 1769, when Ebenezer Zane, a bold and resourceful Virginian, crossed the mountains and claimed land at the confluence of Wheeling Creek and the Ohio River. Zane established his claim by "tomahawk right," the informal frontier practice in which a settler girdled trees with a tomahawk to outline the boundaries of his claim, marking the bark with his initials as evidence of prior occupation. Zane was not alone. He brought members of his extended family, including his brothers Silas and Jonathan, and the following spring they returned to build their first cabin and named the tiny settlement Zanesburg. They soon attracted a small community of settlers drawn by the rich bottomland and the strategic position along the Ohio—the great highway of western expansion. Among the families who joined them were the Shepherds, the Wetzels, and the McCollochs—names that would become legendary on the frontier. But the location that made Wheeling attractive for settlement also made it dangerously exposed. The Ohio River was not merely a boundary; it was a contested corridor. To the west and north lay the homelands of the Shawnee, Mingo, Wyandot, and Delaware peoples, nations that had already clashed with Virginian settlers during Lord Dunmore's War in 1774. That conflict, which culminated in the Battle of Point Pleasant in October 1774, temporarily stabilized the frontier but resolved nothing permanently. In its aftermath, Virginia's colonial government authorized the construction of a fortification at Wheeling.

The resulting stockade, Fort Fincastle, was built in the summer of 1774, its construction begun by Ebenezer Zane and a local settler named John Caldwell and completed under the supervision of Major William Crawford of the Virginia militia and Major Angus MacDonald of the British regulars, with some four hundred soldiers from Fort Pitt assisting in the work. The fort was named in honor of Governor Dunmore, who held the title Viscount Fincastle. After the outbreak of the Revolution, however, Dunmore became despised by Virginia patriots, and the fort was renamed Fort Henry in 1776 to recognize Patrick Henry, the firebrand orator who had become the first governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The West Virginia Encyclopedia notes that Fort Henry would serve as "a major defensive outpost in the upper Ohio Valley through the Indian Wars of the 1790s, second only to Fort Pitt at present Pittsburgh"—an extraordinary distinction for so remote a post.

In January 1777, the Revolutionary government of Virginia designated the Wheeling region as Ohio County, and Governor Patrick Henry appointed Colonel David Shepherd as its county lieutenant—effectively making Shepherd the chief military and civil authority on this vulnerable frontier. Shepherd would later lament to the governor that he had only 350 men to guard a frontier eighty miles long. The task was immense, and the year 1777 would test Wheeling's defenders as never before.

That year became one of the bloodiest in frontier memory. At Detroit, British Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton—who earned the grim American epithet "the Hair Buyer" for his alleged practice of paying bounties for American scalps—directed a systematic campaign of raids against the western settlements. According to the National Park Service, Hamilton "began to employ the help of the Native American tribes north of the Ohio River, arming the warriors and sending them on raids." By July 1777, Hamilton had dispatched at least fifteen distinct raiding parties against the American frontier. Settlers across the Ohio Valley and Kentucky would remember 1777 as "the year of the bloody sevens," a phrase that captured the unrelenting terror of that season.

The first siege of Fort Henry struck on the morning of September 1, 1777, when roughly two hundred Wyandot and Mingo warriors attacked the settlement. General Edward Hand, the Continental Army's commander at Fort Pitt, had warned Colonel Shepherd of the threat weeks earlier and ordered eleven militia companies to gather at Fort Henry. At least six companies arrived, totaling over 350 men. But rumors of attack had circulated for so long that when the assault failed to materialize immediately, most of the militia companies dispersed, leaving the fort dangerously undermanned when the blow finally fell. The warriors employed a devastating ruse: they lured a large number