Background
At the time of contact with European settlers, the Cherokee occupied the territory from today’s southern West Virginia through the Carolinas to Georgia. Initially, the Cherokee saw the European newcomers not as a threat but as an advantage. Considered a much-coveted ally by both England and France—very similar to the Haudenosaunee (the Six Nations of the Iroquois) to their north—the Cherokee became prominent in colonial-Native trade and as a military ally. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, English settlements increasingly threatened the eastern boundary of Cherokee Country, while to the south were the Creek and to their west were other Indigenous nations and the French.
At the start of the Seven Years’ War, the Cherokee allied with both Virginia and South Carolina to provide protection along these colonies’ western borders. They also supported Britain’s invasion in late 1758 of western Pennsylvania to capture Fort Duquesne from the French to secure the Forks of the Ohio. The British did not compensate the Cherokee fighters for their effort, and some departed in anger. While traveling through Virginia on their journey home, these warriors decided to reward themselves by taking horses from settlers. South Carolina officials responded with force to stop the Cherokee and prevent the violence from spreading into the Carolinas, without distinguishing between belligerents and non-belligerents. These events ignited open warfare that became known as the Cherokee War (1759-1761). Although this conflict was not exceptionally bloody for a frontier war, the Cherokee suffered great losses with the destruction of numerous villages along the frontier and in their territory.
Following the English victory over the French in the Seven Years’ War, Native nations, including the Cherokee, became less essential as an ally to the British and respect for them declined. British traders now exacted a high price for poor quality goods. White settlers ignored territorial boundaries and squatted and hunted on Cherokee lands.
The British government attempted to prevent future costly frontier wars and to create a permanent border between the territories of Native nations and the North American colonies of their empire with King George III’s Proclamation of 1763. This proclamation created a western boundary along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains that colonists were prohibited from crossing to settle and required traders to have a permit to travel to the western tribes. The hope was to bring order to the chaos of Trans-Appalachian geopolitics.
Despite the prohibition, settlers crossed into Native territory, including that of the Cherokee. Speculators and land companies also sent scouts to locate the best land with the expectation that treaties were soon to be negotiated to open up the Trans-Appalachian West to white settlers. The British regulars stationed in the colonies after the war had little success in turning back violators of the royal proclamation.
The Treaty of Hard Labor
By the late 1760s, British authorities began the process of negotiating with Native nations to demarcate the proclamation line as a permanent settlement boundary. The northern and southern boundaries were to meet at the confluence of the Ohio and Great Kanawha Rivers near present-day Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
The southern settlement border in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia needed to be negotiated with the Cherokee. North Carolina Governor William Tryon had been particularly aggressive in the pursuit of a new boundary with the Cherokee. For several years, he negotiated to move the boundary west of the proclamation line and scheduled a council to formalize the deal in 1767. Tryon’s plan fell through because the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern District John Stuart, who needed to participate as the representative of the Crown, was unable to attend Tryon’s carefully planned council.
Stuart formally treated with the Cherokee in a council near Hard Labor, South Carolina, during the fall of 1768 to settle the boundary between Virginia and the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee proposed that the Kanawha River serve as the boundary, but Virginia settlers and speculators had already settled along the Kanawha, so Virginia’s new governor, Norborne Berkeley, baron de Botetourt, rejected this proposed boundary. In a treaty signed on October 16, 1768, the Cherokee agreed that both sides of the Kanawha River would fall on the Virginia side of the boundary. The line negotiated in the Treaty of Hard Labor was to begin near the North Carolina–Virginia border at John Chiswell’s lead mine and run in a straight line north to the juncture of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers near present-day Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
The treaty identified the border using geographic features and settlements. Thus, Virginia’s western boundary became “at the marked Trees aforesaid, in a straight line about a N by E Course to Colo. Chiswell’s Mine on the Eastern bank of the great Conhoway [Kanawha] and from thence in a straight line to the Mouth of the great Conhoway, where it discharges itself into the Ohio River.” Rather vague in the GPS era, nonetheless, this line became the latest, but not the last, boundary between Native American and British territories.
Legacy
The Treaty of Hard Labor was a boon for Virginia. The colony now stretched across the mountains to the Ohio Valley and as far to the northwest as the mouth of the Kanawha River, which included roughly two-thirds of today’s northeastern West Virginia. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix, negotiated a month later with the Haudenosaunee, set the northern settlement border hundreds of miles downstream from the juncture of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers to the headwaters of the Tennessee River, a vast cession of land that included nearly all of present-day West Virginia and Kentucky along with southwestern Virginia and western Pennsylvania.
Two years later, at the Lochaber Congress in South Carolina, the Cherokee again faced demands for more land from Virginia. The revised line they agreed to veered sharply to the west for 100 miles when it reached the North Carolina–Virginia border before terminating at the same location as the Hard Labor line—the juncture of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers. This added hundreds of thousands of acres of Native land to Virginia’s territory. A subsequent survey of the land conducted by Colonel John Donelson and Indigenous representatives, including Cherokee leader Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter), diverged wildly from this line. The new northern terminus was hundreds of miles downriver, where the Louisa River joins the Ohio River, adding approximately 10 million acres of land to Virginia in what would prove to be a vain effort to keep white settlers from Cherokee lands.
In less than a century, the Cherokee would be dispossessed of the remainder of their traditional territory. The final loss occurred with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, when Georgia and the federal government forcibly relocated the Cherokee to Oklahoma, then known as the Indian Territory. A small group defied removal and, after a lengthy resistance, the government eventually established a reservation in the mountains of North Carolina, in traditional Cherokee territory.
