The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:
In the fall of 1776, the governor of Virginia had plenty to do. A revolution was underway and to say things weren’t going well was an understatement. The American army, under George Washington, was in the process of being pushed out of New York. Patrick Henry, the first revolutionary governor of Virginia after the British royal governor had been evicted, had to keep an eye on the north in case things went south.
However, Henry also had one in a more unlikely direction — west, across the mountains. On one particular day that autumn of 1776, he probably had both eyes looking straight ahead at the two men who stood before him.
They had been elected in June by some of those western settlers to go to the capital in Williamsburg to meet with the governor and legislators in the General Assembly. While Henry likely didn’t know these men personally, he knew them by reputation.
John Gabriel Jones was the son of Gabriel Jones, a longtime member of the House of Burgesses and a prominent attorney in counties up and down the Shenandoah Valley and even west of the mountains.
The other was George Rogers Clark; he had gone to school with James Madison and been trained as a surveyor. Both profession and ambition had taken him west.
However impressive their family connections might have been, names and reputations meant little on the frontier, so the fact that these men had been sent by their fellow settlers to represent them in the capital spoke to a certain hardiness that both must have possessed.
They had been entrusted with a special mission — to make the case for a new county of Virginia that they wanted to be called Kentucky County.
Both men had something else in common: They were each just 24 years old.
By the end of the year, one of them would be dead. And by the end of the war, the other would be responsible for enlarging the new nation on a scale later topped only by the Louisiana Purchase and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War.
Two 24-year-olds persuaded Virginia to create new counties in the west
While Virginia’s gentry was consumed by the coming confrontation with Great Britain over taxes and rights, other Virginians were focused on something else entirely: Pushing west beyond the mountains to settle new lands.
To be sure, Virginians had almost always been looking west. In 1716, Governor Alexander Spotswood led his famous expedition to cross the Blue Ridge to see what was in the Shenandoah Valley. That western push inevitably brought Virginians into conflict with the Native Americans who regarded those lands as theirs — and also the French, coming down from the north in Quebec, who felt the same way. At the end of the French and Indian War, King George III wanted to hold down the costs of defending his North American empire. He (or his ministers) drew a line through the mountains and told Colonists they shouldn’t go beyond that. He felt his Proclamation of 1763 was both a prudent military and fiscal measure; Virginians regarded the proclamation as just one in a long series of insults and injustices from the crown.
Virginia didn’t have money to pay soldiers during the French and Indian War, so it had paid them with promises of land, which in those days was even better than money. After the war, maybe 1,000 or so men felt they were entitled to land west of the mountains. Some intended to claim it; others were content to sell their claims to what today we’d call real estate developers. Many of those developers, or land speculators, were people with names like Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Now, with the king’s proclamation, none of them could make use of that land — not the gentry, not the common soldiers. This is what today we’d call a political coalition.
Both chafed at the king’s edict and generally ignored this invisible legal line. There are also settlers who by 1763 were already west of the king’s proclamation line. Colonists tried to move that line further west through treaties in 1768 with the Cherokee and the Iroquois that, in theory, extended settlement to the Ohio River. Other tribes, however, did not recognize these treaties and conflict was inevitable, but we’re getting ahead of the story.
In 1771, the 19-year-old Clark left his home in Caroline County for a surveying trip in these new lands along the Ohio River. He eventually ventured even farther west into the unsettled land known as Kentucky and fell in love with what he saw. He was not alone. The same year that Clark was headed west, a restless hunter and trapper from North Carolina named Daniel Boone was headed east — after two years of exploring that same Kentucky. He came back with such glorious accounts of what he had found that in 1773, a group of 50 people — Boone among them — packed up and headed through the Cumberland Gap into this wild country. They did not get far. They were ambushed by a band of Delawares, Shawnee and Cherokee. Among those killed were one of Boone’s sons. Boone abandoned the attempt. It should be noted that this attempted settlement of the Kentucky frontier was not an entirely white affair: At least two enslaved men were part of that group; one of them (known only as Charles) was killed, the other (known only as Adam) escaped and alerted the others.
Despite the Boone debacle, Lord Dunmore — Virginia’s royal governor — started issuing land grants in Kentucky in December 1773. The next year, the hunter James Harrod led a party of 31 men down the Ohio River from Pennsylvania and founded Harrodstown, the first official town in Kentucky. Clark, then just 22, aimed to lead another group into these new lands. He had arranged for 80 to 90 men to meet him at the mouth of the Little Kanawha River, what today is Parkersburg, West Virginia. From there, they intended to take a flatboat down the Ohio River and then follow a buffalo trail to the bluegrass country. The natives tribes took exception and attacked some of Clark’s surveying party. This was one of just many violent encounters between settlers and the indigenous tribes. What followed became known as Lord Dunmore’s War. The climactic battle, at Point Pleasant on the Ohio River, resulted in a Virginia victory that cleared the way for more settlement.
The following year, 1775, Boone made another attempt at settlement, founding Boonesborough. Meanwhile, Benjamin Logan of Augusta County led a party that established the community of St. Asaph, or sometimes simply, Logan’s Fort.
The point is that in the years leading up to the American Revolution, Virginians (and others, but mostly Virginians) were pushing into Kentucky, which they considered a western extension of Virginia. In June 1776, while delegates were meeting in Philadelphia to prepare a Declaration of Independence, Kentucky settlers met in Harrodstown and elected Clark and Jones to represent them in Williamsburg.
This election was somewhat unorthodox. At the time, Kentucky was a state of mind, not a legal entity. Legally, it was part of Virginia’s Fincastle County, which started in modern-day Montgomery County and went west. When Clark and Jones got to Williamsburg, they found the House of Burgesses had already adjourned, never to meet again. A newly constituted General Assembly convened that fall under the new revolutionary government, but did not recognize Clark and Jones as members. Nonetheless, the two young men were pretty good lobbyists, because the legislators voted to split Fincastle County into three new counties — Kentucky County, Montgomery County and Washington County. Clark also persuaded Governor Henry to spare 500 pounds of gunpowder for this new western county. That December, Jones was on his way to accept the powder, which had been shipped down the Ohio River, when he was ambushed by Mingo warriors and killed.
His war was over. Clark’s was just beginning.
The French had scattered settlements west of the mountains to the Mississippi (and beyond)
The lands west of the mountains weren’t entirely vacant. More than 250,000 Native Americans lived there. They weren’t the only ones. The French, who had a thing for fur-trapping and saw the natives as a people to do business with, founded a trading outpost at modern-day Detroit in 1701 and another on the Wabash River in modern-day Indiana in 1702 — long before the British had even explored the Shenandoah Valley. By the time they lost their North American empire in 1763, the French had a string of outposts from their main colony in Quebec all the way to New Orleans. The British took over those east of the Mississippi, the Spanish took the ones to the west. These settlements were isolated, but the populations of Vincennes, in modern-day Indiana, and Cahokia and Kaskaski, in modern-day Illinois, still numbered in the hundreds at the outbreak of the revolution. By contrast, the population of St. Louis, a French city that was now governed by the Spanish on the west side of the Mississippi, was a more impressive 1,297, according to the St. Louis Genealogical Society. While Americans considered the lands west of the mountains quite remote, the most prominent French families in St. Louis considered themselves rather cosmopolitan and often traveled back and forth to Montreal on business, according to the history “French Saint Louis.” The rivers and overland routes between the two French cities, one now owned by the British, the other the Spanish, were a surprisingly busy route for what some regarded as wilderness.
The Virginians who were starting to settle Kentucky County were well aware of this. They were also well aware that Virginia claimed land all the way to the Mississippi. And they were furious that the British government had in 1774 transferred those western lands to French-speaking Quebec. To some extent, that had no practical effect, since neither Virginia nor Quebec had any real control over any of it. Virginia, though, took the move badly; the transfer would deny Virginians the lands they claimed there. Britain, which was trying to minimize westward expansion, was quite fine with that. Britain also hadn’t granted the French-speaking Quebec an elected government, so having those lands officially under a government more firmly under British control was a side benefit. When war finally came, Colonists along the East Coast wanted to evict the British military from Boston and New York and Charleston and whatnot. However, those Virginia settlers in Kentucky County had a different objective — they wanted to evict the British from everything between the mountains and the Mississippi, however slight that presence might be.
The one who did the most to make this happen was George Rogers Clark, and many of the men who helped him were fellow Virginians.
George Rogers Clark presented Henry with an audacious plan to seize the west
Governor Henry had met this young visitor before. A little more than a year before, Clark had stood before him, making the case for a new county to the west. Now, in December 1777, he was back, with tales to tell, and an even more audacious plan.
Clark outlined the military situation as he saw it: The British pulled most of their troops out of the western territory but distributed weapons to Native American tribes they considered trustworthy. The Virginia settlers in Kentucky County spent a lot of time in 1777 dealing with hit-and-run attacks. Clark didn’t like playing defense. Native Americans tended not to venture out much during the winter, so Clark took advantage of the lull in fighting to travel back east to Williamsburg to present an audacious military plan to go on the offensive.
He thought he could float an armed force down the Ohio without being detected. Once at the Mississippi, he could surprise the two settlements at Cahokia and Kaskaski, which would never suspect an American force would range so far west. From there, he could circle back and take the British post at Vincennes. With luck, he might even be able to head on to Detroit and thereby claim the entire Northwest, as it was then known, for Virginia.
Governor Henry was skeptical. “At first he seemed to favor it, but to send a party off to so great a distance appeared daring and hazardous even though the service to be performed might be of great utility,” Clark later wrote in his autobiography, “The Conquest of the Illinois.” The governor quizzed Clark on his contingency plan if things went awry. Clark had that thought out: He’d escape across the Mississippi into Spanish territory.
Henry didn’t dare divulge the plan to the General Assembly; British spies were everywhere. He did share the details with his executive council: George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe. They were intrigued. The British defenses were thin and the risk to Virginia was low. Much hinged on how the French settlers who the British had inherited in many of those western outposts would react. Mason, Jefferson and Wythe promised to use their influence to persuade the legislature to give each man 300 acres if they succeeded. If the plan failed, the men would likely be dead.
Publicly, Henry commissioned Clark as a lieutenant colonel and authorized him to raise men for the defense of Kentucky County. Privately, he gave Clark secret orders to carry out the mission. Notice that this was the governor of Virginia authorizing military action, not George Washington or any Continental Army authority. The conquest of the Northwest would be a purely Virginia endeavor. Before Clark left Williamsburg, Henry apparently took him aside for a private chat. He told Clark that “he did not wish an implicit attention to his instructions should prevent my doing anything that would manifestly tend to the public advantage.” In other words: Do what you need to do. Clark was jubilant. “I set out on January 4 [1778], clothed with all the authority I could wish,” he wrote.
That jubilation did not last long.
“Clark soon discovered being authorized to raise an army was easier than actually doing so,” writes historian Tom Hand in “Americana Corner.” Clark’s initial base was in modern-day Pennsylvania, west of Fort Pitt on the Monongahela River. That was the standard starting point for a western journey when the Ohio River functioned as a highway. It was also still disputed territory between Virginia and Pennsylvania, which meant some of the locals who regarded themselves as Pennsylvanians refused to join. Why should they sign up to defend one of Virginia’s counties?
Those further west were also reluctant, but for different reasons. “After three years of war without much progress being made, enthusiasm for joining the army was fairly low,” Hand writes. “To make matters worse, the constant threat of Indian raids in Kentucky and Tennessee caused most men west of the Appalachians to feel they should remain close to home rather than venturing away from the area.”
Clark wanted 350 men. He had to settle for 178. “Most were untrained militiamen with little or no formal military training,” Hand writes. They were simply frontiersmen. Clark also hadn’t told them the full plan. They thought they were signing up to defend Kentucky County, not go farther west. Not until he was ready to depart — from a site known then simply as the Falls of the Ohio but that later became modern-day Louisville — did Clark reveal his secret instructions from Governor Henry.
“Almost every gentleman present warmly espoused the enterprise and plainly saw the utility of it, and supposed they saw the salvation of Kentucky almost within their reach,” Clark wrote. But many soldiers doubted whether there were enough of them to pull off the feat. “The soldiery in general debated the subject,” he wrote. “Some were alarmed” at the distances involved, and the lack of any reinforcements. In the end, though, the men agreed to follow Clark.
They set out on June 24, 1778.
Clark’s chief lieutenants were all Virginians — Joseph Bowman, his second-in-command, was born in Frederick County, the son of German immigrants who initially helped populate the Shenandoah Valley. Leonard Helm (or Helms) was born in modern-day Fauquier County. William Harrod was from the part of Pennsylvania claimed by both Colonies; he considered himself a Virginian and had previously served in the Virginia militia.
For four days, the men rowed down the Ohio. Clark feared to stay on the river much longer for fear of encountering travelers. Near present-day Metropolis, Illinois, he struck out overland for a six-day march through wilderness. “The band that emerged from the woods was a rough looking bunch, hungry, unshaven, and filthy with their clothes in tatters after walking for a week through brambles and branches,” Hand writes. The date was an auspicious one: July 4.
That night, they approached the fort at Kaskaskia. They were amazed to find the front gate open, with no sentry on duty. The Virginians simply walked in, took up positions, then shouted they had taken the fort. The acting lieutenant governor, Philippe de Rocheblave, a former French army officer, was still in bed when the Virginians burst in and woke him with the news.
“Rocheblave was defiant but the rest of the residents and local militia not so much,” Hand writes. “They were all Frenchmen who had no great love for their British masters and had no objection to their American liberators. Incredibly, Clark’s audacious plan to capture this distant British outpost had been achieved without firing a shot.” The French settlers promptly started ringing a church bell, which they dubbed their “liberty bell.”
While Clark stayed in Kaskaskia and made friends with the French, he sent his second-in-command north to Cahokia. Bowman led 30 men to Cahokia, accompanied by Father Pierre Gibault, the French priest in Kaskaskia. The people of Cahokia likewise welcomed the Virginians.
Well, mostly. The book “French St. Louis” says when one local French merchant expressed hesitation at supplying the militiamen, Clark posted soldiers around his home. Other merchants, though, “saw doing business with Clark as a potential financial windfall and volunteered to supply the Americans,” the book says. Unfortunately, the money that Clark paid with proved to be worthless.
Still, this small band of frontier fighters had extended Virginia’s reach all the way to the Mississippi. But could they keep it?
Next month: How Virginians sealed the deal.
