I.Letter of Col.Wm.Preston, Aug.

13, 1774.
16.

Many local historians, including Brantz Mayer (Logan and Cresap, p.
85), ascribe to the earl treacherous motives.

Brantz Mayer puts it thus: "It was probably Lord Dunmore's desire to incite a war which would arouse and band the savages of the west, so that in the anticipated struggle with the united colonies the British home-interest might ultimately avail itself of these children of the forest as ferocious and formidable allies in the onslaught on the Americans." This is much too futile a theory to need serious discussion.

The war was of the greatest advantage to the American cause; for it kept the northwestern Indians off our hands for the first two years of the Revolutionary struggle; and had Lord Dunmore been the far-seeing and malignant being that this theory supposes, it would have been impossible for him not also to foresee that such a result was absolutely inevitable.