Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768)

In Kentucky the deed ceded everything east of the Tennessee River to the Crown, for goods and money worth £10,460 7s 3d sterling. The Board of Trade had wanted the line to stop at the Kanawha; Johnson told London he could not refuse the Six Nations’ claim as far south as the Cherokee River, though he never found the Cherokee claiming land north of the Tennessee.

The Six Nations did not live in Kentucky. Their claim rested on conquest: they held that their 1600s wars against Ohio Valley peoples gave them rights over the region. The National Park Service notes that by 1768 the Six Nations had long "extended their influence over other Indian nations." The Shawnee, who hunted and lived in the region, rejected the sale, and the Cherokee claimed much of the same ground.

The Cherokee had signed their own Hard Labour line three weeks earlier (October 14), and Lochaber (1770) and Donelson’s 1771 survey later moved it west, so the Crown bought overlapping ground from both. The deed names the Shawanese, Delawares and Mingoes of Ohio among its parties and Shawnee and Delaware deputies attended, but one representative of each of the six nations signed it, and the Shawnee contested the cession until Camp Charlotte in 1774. The disputed cession helped set the fuse for Dunmore’s War and later Ohio Valley fighting.