Just why the English ministry tried to discourage immigration into the western country is not definitely known. Doubtless there were various reasons. England wanted peace with the savages. Only a few years before, her representative, Sir William Johnson, had made a treaty at Fort Stanwix with them and given them many presents. They had been told they should have, as their own, the country north of the Ohio. The laws which governed the province of Quebec, recently captured from the French, were to be applied to the western country, a plan which did not meet with the approval of the colonists who wanted laws of an English character. There were influential men in England who were interested in the fur trade with the Indians, which would be seriously injured if the country were opened up to settlers. Besides, the colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania made conflicting claims to the new land and each had friends in England. Many of the colonists declared that England feared to have the powerful colonies increase in power with new territory, and wished to confine them to the seaboard. Be that as it may, Dunmore resolved on establishing Virginia's claims by prompt and effectual warfare. Perhaps he thought to divert the colonists' minds from the increasing hostility to England. Instead he was to take the first step toward securing that rich land to the United States of America. This is but one of many instances when the plans of supposed wise men result in the opposite to that intended. The assembling for this war might be likened to a swarming of bees and hornets, the one for the sweets of fertile lands and adventure, the other for vengeance on account of wrongs received at the hands of the Indians. There came a British officer, pompous and resplendent in scarlet and gold; the British soldier for his first experience in border warfare; the trapper with his long rifle and frontier garb; the sturdy settler in homespun. Nor were the camp followers altogether absent, those who hang about for pickings and have little intention of fighting. One heard the polite accent of culture, the soft spoken Southerner, the dialects of Scotch and Irish and the gutturals of the German. About them were the green woods and filtering through the leaves overhead the hot sunshine of summer. Early in the season that already famous frontiersman, Daniel Boone, had been sent to the Falls of the Ohio to lead back to the settlements a party of surveyors. He did it, for in the ways of the wilderness no savage was his equal. Governor Dunmore, on July 12, 1774, ordered General Andrew Lewis, who twenty years before had been with Washington at Fort Necessity, to raise four regiments of volunteers and, going down the Great Kanawha River, to cross the Ohio River and march against the Shawnees on the Scioto. In this expedition was David Allison.