A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier (2 page)

However, while little is known about Phebe’s family, the groom and his family have a better-defined history. Thomas Cunningham was born in 1756 in Fairfax County, Virginia, and was the youngest of thirteen children born to Hugh Cunningham and Nancy O’Neil Cunningham. His parents were born in Ireland, and both came to America sometime before their wedding in Fairfax County in 1728. The Cunningham family was part of the Scottish nobility and included men such as Robert Cunningham, the Second Earl of Glencairn, who sat in Parliament in 1489, as well as leaders who fought against the English kings at places such as Flodden Field and Linlithgow. As a result, like many Scots, the Crown eventually exiled the family to Ireland, and in the Cunningham’s case, that exile followed the defeat of the Scottish army during the Second Bishop’s War in 1640.
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By the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775, much of Hugh and Nancy Cunningham’s family had left their home in Shenandoah County, with five of their eight sons heading across the mountains to what was then the Virginia frontier. In 1772, Thomas, along with his older brother, Edward, and Edward’s wife, Sarah, arrived in Monongalia County on the Allegheny Plateau. Edward settled on land located along Shinn’s Run, and Thomas found land nearby along the right-hand fork of Ten Mile Creek. Like most local settlers of the time, both men were active in the militia. During Lord Dunmore’s War against the Shawnee in 1774, Edward was a member of Captain Zackwell Morgan’s company while Thomas enlisted with the company of Captain David Scott, with both units assigned to patrol the area around Fort Pitt. Then, in 1777, Thomas would enlist again, this time as a member of Captain James Booth’s company, where he would serve thirteen months as a “spy” searching the forests for signs of Indian activity.
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When Thomas and Phebe met is unknown, but their wedding seems to have been a notable occasion for those near Prickett’s Fort. William Haymond, the commander of the fort’s militia company and a justice of the peace for Monongalia County, officiated the wedding.
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Legend has it that the wedding was well attended, with music, dancing and much merriment. Following the ceremony and celebration, Thomas and Phebe returned to Thomas’s farm near Ten Mile Creek to begin their life together. Within a year, their first child, Henry, was born, and three more children soon followed. By 1785, they and Edward’s family had moved to a new farm near Bingamon Creek along Cunningham’s Run, west of the West Fork of the Monongahela, a few miles from the present-day town of Shinnston, West Virginia. There, they built a cabin a few yards from that of Edward and Sarah, worked the land together and supplemented their income by trapping furs.

This map depicts sites of major events in Phebe Tucker Cunningham’s story.
Drawn by the author
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Farm life on Virginia’s frontier was not easy, to be sure, but it certainly could have been a good one. However, forces created by events beyond Thomas and Phebe’s control would conspire to alter their lives forever. These forces, whose evolution began years before Thomas and Phebe were born, were the product of kings, parliaments, governors, assemblies, generals, soldiers, chiefs, explorers, Jesuit priests, land speculators, trappers, traders, greed, war, ambition and the inevitable collision of European and Native American cultures. Like so many people throughout time, Thomas and Phebe would suddenly become small, unwilling players on history’s stage. The result would be violent, bloody and tragic, as Phebe’s life intersected with the culture of another race and with two men considered by many to be among America’s most infamous traitors. Most of all, however, the events that would follow tell a story of survival, resilience, love and tremendous courage.

Chapter 1

Settlers on the Allegheny Plateau

T
HE
W
ILDERNESS

In eighteenth-century Virginia, the Allegheny Mountains stood like a gigantic wall along the Virginia frontier, blocking all but the hardiest trappers and explorers from venturing west of the Shenandoah Valley. This range, which runs roughly from northeast to southwest, consists of a series of steep, parallel ridges and, were it not for a few natural passes, must have seemed almost impenetrable. Rising as high as three thousand feet in places, the Alleghenies acted as a natural sentinel that guarded entry to the Allegheny Plateau beyond.

The plateau itself stretched northwestward beyond the Ohio River in a broad expanse that paralleled the mountain wall on its eastern boundary. It was a lush region characterized by rolling hills that created numerous narrow valleys, punctuated by hundreds of creeks and rivers. Teeming with fish, these waterways, which all flowed to the Ohio beyond, were also home to numerous species of mammals whose pelts were highly valued in the markets of the eastern seaboard and Europe. Combined with a temperate climate that provided a typical growing season of 153 days and approximately forty-two to sixty-two inches of rainfall per year, the Allegheny Plateau looked like a potential paradise, beckoning European settlers to come and take it.
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However, one the most remarkable features of the Allegheny Plateau, and one that made a marked first impression on many Europeans, was the forest. The abundant rainfall, temperate climate and fertile soil contributed to the existence of dense, mostly deciduous woodlands in the lower elevations, with great belts of spruce and hemlock in the mountains. This was a primeval landscape unlike anything Europeans had ever seen. Conrad Weiser, a colonial Indian agent who was one of the early whites to arrive on the plateau, wrote, “The wood was so thick, that for a mile at a time we could not find a place of the size of a hand, where the sunshine could penetrate, even in the clearest day.”
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Henry Bouquet, a Swiss-born British officer serving on the frontier, commented that a European “must have lived some time in the vast forest of America; otherwise he will hardly be able to conceive a continuity of woods without end.”
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The New River cuts through the rugged Allegheny Mountains, which once posed a daunting natural barrier between Virginia and the western frontier on the Allegheny Plateau.
Photo by the author
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Nevertheless, although the prospect of a forest without end might have appeared daunting, the land of the Allegheny Plateau was also capable of providing everything a settler might need in terms of the essentials of life. The forests of the plateau were filled with a wide variety of animal life, including white-tailed deer, elk, black bears, turkeys, mountain lions, beavers, gray wolves and small herds of buffalo. In addition, even without planting a single domestic crop, one could find a veritable bounty of native edible plants, with wild strawberries, chestnuts, walnuts, blackberries, hickory nuts, papaws, plums, grapes and cherries dotting the landscape, as well as a great supply of syrup-producing sugar maples.
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As a result, the first Europeans to arrive on the plateau could not help but see great potential in the land. One of those early arrivals, Joseph Doddridge, took note of the “fruitful soil”
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while others saw a great timberland begging for the axe and saw. Surveyor Thomas Lewis described the spruce, cherry, beech and maple trees as “the most and finest” he had ever seen.
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Given these many attributes, it was not long before settlers, explorers and, sadly, greedy, ambitious land speculators began to venture beyond the Alleghenies in search of their future in a new “promised land.”

As these disparate groups endeavored to cross the mountains and then navigate the valleys and forests of the plateau, their greatest challenge was the absence of any roads, which would not arrive in this part of the world for decades. However, they quickly discovered the next best thing in a network of trails that crisscrossed the entire region. These trails, created over the centuries by migrating herds of buffalo and the foot traffic generated by local Indian tribes, were quickly adopted as natural roadways. By the time the first Europeans arrived on the scene, these buffalo paths took the form of deep gullies that followed the paths of the region’s major creeks and rivers. They generally passed east and west: “from rivers to and across mountains, they crossed, re-crossed, and were coterminous with one another.”
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The result was a vast, almost web-like network that, for many years, would become the sole means of communication between new settlements and the more established regions on the east side of the Blue Ridge. Further, these trails eventually determined the entire pattern and distribution of settlement on the Allegheny Plateau.

This eighteenth-century French map shows the Allegheny Plateau region as “Indiana.”
Library of Congress
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One of the most important trails, as well as the one that would influence settlement along the Monongahela River, was the Shawnee Trail. This pathway began on the South Branch Potomac River somewhere below what is now Moorefield, West Virginia and continued up that river to its confluence with the North Fork South Branch Potomac River. It then followed that fork and turned up Seneca Creek, passing Seneca Rocks, and finally crossed the crest of the Allegheny Mountains above the mouth of Horse Camp Creek. The trail then entered the Tygart River Valley near what is now Elkins and proceeded up the Tygart past present-day Beverly to Huttonsville.
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Once settlers used these trails to cross the mountains into the Allegheny Plateau, they encountered several major rivers, including the Monongahela, Cheat, West Fork, Tygart Valley, New and Greenbrier. Without the aid of maps and, since most of the trails followed the rivers, would-be settlers tended to follow these waterways, often meandering up a tributary. This practice, in turn, helped them find some of the most desirable farmland, which was located on these rivers’ broad, open flood plains.
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By this means, settlers were able to move westward from the Shenandoah and Greenbrier Valleys via the New River to the Kanawha and Ohio Valleys, establishing new settlements there by 1773. In addition, other settlers followed the Monongahela north to Fort Pitt, where they procured rafts to take them down the Ohio. This led to new homesteads from above today’s Wheeling, West Virginia, to the mouth of the Little Kanawha River.
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T
HE
P
OLITICS OF
E
MPIRE

Politics greatly influenced the settlement of the Allegheny Plateau, including the region along the Monongahela around Prickett’s Fort, and had a significant effect on both the lives of settlers, like Phebe and Thomas Cunningham, and those Native Americans who lived on the plateau and in the Ohio Country to the west. Moreover, these politics were not merely those of colonial governors and their assemblies, as the relationships of nations and of kings often dictated life and death on the eighteenth-century Virginia frontier.

The Virginia frontier was just part of a battleground for empire, for political and economic domination among the powers of Europe. The battle for this empire began the day Columbus landed in 1492 to claim the New World for Spain’s king and continued for the greater part of the next three centuries. Eventually, the French, Dutch and British would essentially cede most of South America to Spain, but the eastern half of North America was quite another matter. France would claim ownership of North America with Giovanni da Verranzano’s exploration of the coast between Nova Scotia and the Carolinas in 1524, while Henry VIII sent John Rut to explore the east coast in 1527. Jacques Cartier added to the competition when he claimed the St. Lawrence watershed for France, and Britain countered with possession of Newfoundland by Humphrey Gilbert in 1583. In the meantime, Britain’s Sir Francis Drake successfully harassed Spanish forts and settlements on the Florida coast, and by 1604, the Spaniards were isolated to their Florida and Gulf Coast possessions.