West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies

Flora Beeler and Janette Bishop began their self-published family history, Morris & Jarretts of West Virginia, with their ancestors' arrival in the mountains of Virginia during Lord Dunmore's War.¹ Beeler and Bishop celebrated the resourcefulness and bravery of their ancestors when setting the scene for their book, arguing that they embodied traits that made the conquest of the frontier—and thus the later western expansion of the United States—possible. They claimed that their pioneer ancestor, William Morris, arrived in Virginia, specifically Camp Union, near present-day Lewisburg, at a perilous time. The "frontier was seething with the war spirit," they claimed, "as the harassed Virginians were about to take the 'warpath' against the Ohio Indians, who were scalping and burning along the frontier."² The authors reminded their readers that apart from the dangers of "lurking Indians," Morris and his kin faced other challenges due to the isolation of their settlements.³ These pioneers "had to depend on themselves for everything."⁴ Despite these challenges, Morris and his family found a site on the banks of the Kanawha and "began the erection of a stockade near the burned ruins" of a cabin.⁵ That these pioneers survived in such an environment was an achievement made more remarkable, according to Beeler and Bishop, because their sacrifices also contributed to the founding of a new country. They placed the struggles of their ancestor within the context of the American Revolution, connecting his trials in the West to the patriots' efforts to preserve American liberty in the face British exploitation. They repeated Livia Nye Simpson Poffenbarger's argument that Dunmore's expeditions to the Ohio Valley were a diversion meant to counter resistance to British measures in Virginia.⁶ Dunmore "was farsighted enough to foresee the coming war with England and inclined toward crushing the bold and independent pioneers before the struggle began." He therefore "did what he could to divert them from their plans of fighting the Indians."⁷ According to Beeler and [End Page 133] Bishop, the white pioneers of Appalachia were the guarantors of America's future success. They had cleared the way for further expansion once American independence was won while simultaneously resisting the ploys of the British, as their countrymen had done elsewhere, to subjugate the colonies. The pioneers of the eighteenth century, like William Morris, according to their descendant biographers, established white domination of the Appalachian frontier. Family histories of the colonial era rooted the descendants of those pioneers to the sites of their ancestors' conquest of Native lands. The traits of these frontier founders, so later genealogists argued, were worthy of emulation two hundred years after the Battle of Point Pleasant to maintain American greatness in the twentieth century.

The era of white settlement on the eighteenth-century frontier holds a privileged place in the genealogical imagination of central Appalachia. For the descendants of white colonizers, the arrival of their pioneer ancestors and the conquest and settlement of the region serve as a heroic origin story, rooting them to the land while simultaneously connecting them to the grand narrative of the nation's founding. Throughout the twentieth century family historians with a connection to the region, whether resident or not, published hundreds of family histories celebrating their families' colonial lineage. These genealogies mined a range of sources, including family lore, oral histories, and academic scholarship, to tell the stories of individual families. It is not surprising, then, that Beeler and Bishop repeated the "first battle" historiography in their history. The women self-published their genealogy in 1974, the year in which West Virginia celebrated the bicentennial of the Battle of Point Pleasant and, as Christopher Rizer demonstrates in his article "Lord Dunmore's War: The Final Colonial Conflict or the Beginnings of a Revolution?" in this volume, a celebratory vision of the battle received official sanction. Morris family genealogy, like the "first battle" historiography that underpinned the commemorations at Point Pleasant in 1974, speaks to a local desire to integrate the history of the Virginia frontier into the better-known narratives of the American Revolution. Those with deep family ties...