Owing to his Memoir of Indian Wars and Other Occurrences, written in 1799, he has been called "the most important chronicler of pioneer history in southern West Virginia".
At the age of twenty, John Stuart was a member of the 1769 survey by citizens of Augusta County, Virginia, which explored the wilderness of the Greenbrier Valley to the west in preparation for European settlement.
In 1774, he led a company of Greenbrier troops in the Battle of Point Pleasant at the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers.
In 1778, Stuart was commander of troops when the last Indian raid on Fort Donnally, near Lewis Spring (Lewisburg), occurred.
(With his publication of his commentary,[4] Jefferson is considered to have initiated the discipline of vertebrate paleontology in the United States.)