Preston County, West Virginia. They, and a few in the surrounding region, were soon forced to abandon their homesteads by hostile Indians and no further attempts at settlement were made until after the conclusion of the French and Indian War (1754-1763). In October 1767, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed their famous survey of the Maryland–Pennsylvania border shortly after extending it to a crossing of the Cheat River just above its confluence with the Monongahela. (The party was forced to stop a few miles west at Dunkard Creek near present-day Mount Morris, Pennsylvania. Their Iroquois guides had refused to go any further, having reached the border of their lands with the Lenape, with whom they were engaged in hostilities.) According to George W. Atkinson (1876), "From 1765 to 1774 there were comparatively few attacks made upon the white colonists by the Indians. The Treaty of Paris [1763] resulted in general peace along the frontiers, had been pretty generally adhered to by all the savage tribes. The peace, however, which had for nine years blessed and fostered the frontier settlements, was suddenly broken by the murder of several friendly Indians, in 1774, on the Monongahela and Cheat rivers. This unfortunate aggression on the part of these white men gave rise to a general raid by the Indians upon all the settlements of the frontier." The Cheat River Valley was part of a much larger area disputed in the 1770s by the Colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia. (This was before the parties agreed to extend the Mason–Dixon line westward from Maryland.) Virginia attempted to administer this vast region as the District of West Augusta between 1774 and 1776, after which it subdivided the District into three counties, the Cheat River becoming part of Monongalia County. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania tried to oversee it as part of the overlapping Westmoreland County. After additional surveys, and the resolution of the Virginia-Pennsylvania border dispute in the 1780s, it became established that all but the lowermost 3 miles of the Cheat were within the state of Virginia. The Cheat River country remained part of Monongalia County until 1791 when that county was divided into a smaller Monongalia County and Randolph County. 19th century The Virginia General Assembly authorized the first two ferries on the Cheat in 1806. On January 2, a ferry in Monongalia County was approved on Charles Stuart property to James Stafford property. On January 18,