Known to history as “Dunmore’s War,” the 1774 campaign against a Shawnee-led Indian confederacy in the Ohio Country marked the final time an American colonial militia took to the field in His Majesty’s service and under royal command. Led by John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, a force of colo- nials including George Rogers Clark, Daniel Morgan, Michael Cresap, Adam Stephen, and Andrew Lewis success- fully enforced the western border established by treaties in parts of present-day West Virginia and Kentucky. The campaign is often neglected in histories, despite its major influ- ence on the conduct of the Revolutionary War that fol- lowed. In Dunmore’s War: The Last Conflict of America’s Colonial Era, award-winning historian Glenn F. Williams describes the course and importance of this campaign.

As an immediate result of Dunmore’s War, the frontier

remained quiet for two years, giving the colonies the critical time to debate and declare independence before Britain convinced its Indian allies to resume attacks on American settlements. Although he was hailed as a hero at the end of the war, Lord Dunmore’s attempt to maintain royal author- ity put him in direct opposition to many of the subordi- nates who followed him on the frontier, and in 1776 he was driven from Virginia and returned to England.