In 1774, John Murray, the 4th Earl of Dunmore and Royal Governor of Virginia, planned a two-pronged invasion of the Ohio Valley. Dunmore would march west from Fort Pitt - which he renamed Fort Dunmore for the occasion. Colonel Andrew Lewis would march a southern force down the Kanawha River from Virginia. The two columns would meet in Ohio and force the Shawnee to accept the Ohio River as the boundary that the 1768 treaty had drawn. The British Indian Department, led by Sir William Johnson until his death that July, worked to keep other tribes neutral, isolating the Shawnee diplomatically. Cornstalk and his warriors faced a colonial offensive with few allies beyond the small Mingo band that would fight with them.

Cornstalk understood the math. Lewis's force outnumbered him at least two to one. Dunmore's column was somewhere to the north, marching toward a planned junction. The Shawnee best chance was to strike Lewis before the two Virginian forces could combine. So Cornstalk crossed the Ohio and attacked Lewis's camp at the confluence point - the bluff where the Kanawha joins the Ohio, with the river on two sides and steep ground at the back. The geography that protected Lewis from being outflanked also made his camp possible to trap. Cornstalk's warriors hit the perimeter at dawn and the Virginia militia fought back across logs and brush. Future Shawnee war leader Blue Jacket likely fought in this battle. Pucksinwah - the father of the boy who would grow up to be Tecumseh - was among the warriors who would not survive it.

The fighting lasted for hours. Both sides took heavy casualties. Cornstalk's voice carried through the smoke, calling to his warriors. Lewis sent companies along the Kanawha River and up a nearby creek to flank the Shawnee position from behind. Captain George Mathews led the maneuver that finally pressured Cornstalk's line. At nightfall the Shawnee quietly withdrew across the Ohio, carrying their wounded with them. They had fought to a draw on the field but could not afford the losses they had taken against a force that could replace its dead. The Virginians counted about 75 killed and 140 wounded. Shawnee losses were harder to count - they had carried away their wounded and dropped some of their dead into the river. Colonel William Christian's men, arriving the next morning, found 21 dead warriors in the open and 12 more hidden under brush. Among the Virginia dead was Colonel John Field, an ancestor of Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

Lewis's force linked up with Dunmore's, and together they marched into the Ohio Valley to force the issue Cornstalk had tried to prevent. The Shawnee chief signed a treaty agreeing to give up hunting rights south of the Ohio - the Iroquois claim from 1768 finally enforced on the people whose land it actually was. Dunmore's War ended with Virginia controlling the Kentucky frontier. Within a year the American Revolution would begin, and the same militia officers who had fought at Point Pleasant would carry their experience into a new conflict. Some historians have argued that Point Pleasant should be considered the first battle of the Revolution, though the timing makes the claim hard to sustain. What is harder to dispute is what the battle meant for the Shawnee. Cornstalk himself would be killed by Virginia militiamen in 1777, and Tecumseh would spend his life trying to roll back the loss his father died defending. The point at the confluence is now Tu-Endie-Wei State Park, with a monument to the dead on both sides.