Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/67

Rh fact the enterprise appealed to the imagination of a large community of born frontiersmen of kinship, by blood or spirit, dating back through seventy years of pioneer history comnieneinir with what is known as the Dunmore War in 1774.

From a historical pamphlet by E. O. Randall, secretary of the Ohio Antiquarian and Historical Society, largely published in the West Virginia Historical Magazine for January, 1903, the writer culls the names of officers who took part in the battle of Point Pleasant, deemed by some historical students to have been really the first battle of the Revolutionary War because fought by Virginia volunteers drawn from the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge in Virginia, many of whom had reason for opposition to a recently proclaimed policy of the British crown. Mr. Randall says: "The American colonists had fought the French and Indian War with the expectation that they were to be, in the event of success, the beneficiaries of the result and be permitted to occupy the Ohio Valley as a fertile and valuable addition to their Atlantic Coast lodgments. But, the war over and France vanquished, the royal greed of Britain asserted itself and the London Government most arbitrarily pre-empted the territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi River as the exclusive and particular dominion of the crown, directly administered upon from the provincial seat of authority at Quebec. The parliamentary power promulgated the arbitrary proclamation (1763) declaring the Ohio Valley and the great Northwest territory should be practically an Indian reservation, ordering the few settlers to remove therefrom, forbidding the settlers to move therein, and even prohibiting trading with the Indians save under licenses and restrictions so excessive as to amount to exclusion.

On June 22, 1774, Parliament passed the detestable Quebec Act. which not only affirmed the policy of the crown adopted in the proclamation of 1763, but added many obnoxious features by granting certain civil rights to the French Catholic Canadians.

This policy of the crown stultified the patents and charters granted the American colonies in which their proprietary