George Rogers Clark

Abstract

George Rogers Clark, the son of middling Virginia gentry, escaped a short stint of education and fled to the eastern bank of the Ohio River at the age of nineteen. Trained as a surveyor, he made frequent trips to Fort Pitt, where he heard Croghan describe the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. Dunmore, Virginia’s last colonial governor and an investor in Croghan’s Illinois Land Company, began a series of skirmishes with trans-Appalachian American Indians to rid the territory of any cause that retarded settlement (and land sales). Clark, after riding with Dunmore against Cornstalk, moved to Kentucky and soon challenged the new Virginia Assembly to defend Kentucky from British and Indian raids or cede the territory to the people. He is credited with creating Kentucky County, Virginia.