← catalogue

Pioneers of the Old Southwest: a chronicle of the dark and bloody ground

by Constance Lindsay Skinner · English · Gutenberg #3073 · 408,134 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pioneers of the Old Southwest: a chronicle of the dark and bloody ground
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Pioneers of the Old Southwest: a chronicle of the dark and bloody ground

Author: Constance Lindsay Skinner

Editor: Allen Johnson


        
Release date: February 1, 2002 [eBook #3073]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Original publication: S.l.: s.n., 1919

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3073

Credits: Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's University, Alev Akman, Doris Ringbloom, David Widger, and Robert J. Homa


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST: A CHRONICLE OF THE DARK AND BLOODY GROUND ***
Pioneers of the Old Southwest

By Constance Lindsay Skinner

A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground

Volume 18 of the
Chronicles of America Series
∴
Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys

Textbook Edition

New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1919


Copyright, 1919
by Yale University Press






Acknowledgment.

This narrative is founded largely on original sources--on the writings
and journals of pioneers and contemporary observers, such as Doddridge
and Adair, and on the public documents of the period as printed in the
Colonial Records and in the American Archives. But the author is,
nevertheless, greatly indebted to the researches of other writers, whose
works are cited in the Bibliographical Note. The author's thanks are
due, also, to Dr. Archibald Henderson, of the University of North
Carolina, for his kindness in reading the proofs of this book for
comparison with his own extended collection of unpublished manuscripts
relating to the period.

C. L. S.

April, 1919.



Contents.
Pioneers of the Old Southwest 
Chapter         Chapter Title                Page
        Preface                               vii
   I.   The Tread Of Pioneers                   1
  II.   Folkways                               31
 III.   The Trader                             52
  IV.   The Passing Of The French Peril        75
   V.   Boone, The Wanderer                    90
  VI.   The Fight For Kentucky                104
 VII.   The Dark And Bloody Ground            129
VIII.   Tennessee                             157
  IX.   King's Mountain                       195
   X.   Sevier, The Statemaker                226
  XI.   Boone's Last Days                     272
        Bibliographical Note                  287
        Index                                 293


PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST

∴
CHAPTER I.

The Tread Of Pioneers

The Ulster Presbyterians, or "Scotch-Irish," to whom history has
ascribed the dominant rôle among the pioneer folk of the Old Southwest,
began their migrations to America in the latter years of the seventeenth
century. It is not known with certainty precisely when or where the
first immigrants of their race arrived in this country, but soon after
1680 they were to be found in several of the colonies. It was not long,
indeed, before they were entering in numbers at the port of Philadelphia
and were making Pennsylvania the chief center of their activities in the
New World. By 1726 they had established settlements in several counties
behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they had begun their great trek
southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and on to the Yadkin
Valley of North Carolina. There they met others of their own race--bold
men like themselves, hungry after land--who were coming in through
Charleston and pushing their way up the rivers from the seacoast to the
"Back Country," in search of homes.

These Ulstermen did not come to the New World as novices in the shaping
of society; they had already made history. Their ostensible object in
America was to obtain land, but, like most external aims, it was
secondary to a deeper purpose. What had sent the Ulstermen to America
was a passion for a whole freedom. They were lusty men, shrewd and
courageous, zealous to the death for an ideal and withal so practical to
the moment in business that it soon came to be commonly reported of them
that "they kept the Sabbath and everything else they could lay their
hands on," though it is but fair to them to add that this phrase is
current wherever Scots dwell. They had contested in Parliament and with
arms for their own form of worship and for their civil rights. They were
already frontiersmen, trained in the hardihood and craft of border
warfare through years of guerrilla fighting with the Irish Celts. They
had pitted and proved their strength against a wilderness; they had
reclaimed the North of Ireland from desolation. For the time, many of
them were educated men; under the regulations of the Presbyterian Church
every child was taught to read at an early age, since no person could be
admitted to the privileges of the Church who did not both understand and
approve the Presbyterian constitution and discipline. They were brought
up on the Bible and on the writings of their famous pastors, one of
whom, as early as 1650, had given utterance to the democratic doctrine
that "men are called to the magistracy by the suffrage of the people
whom they govern, and for men to assume unto themselves power is mere
tyranny and unjust usurpation." In subscribing to this doctrine and in
resisting to the hilt all efforts of successive English kings to
interfere in the election of their pastors, the Scots of Ulster had
already declared for democracy.

It was shortly after James VI of Scotland became James I of England and
while the English were founding Jamestown that the Scots had first
occupied Ulster; but the true origin of the Ulster Plantation lies
further back, in the reign of Henry VIII, in the days of the English
Reformation. In Henry's Irish realm the Reformation, though proclaimed
by royal authority, had never been accomplished; and Henry's more famous
daughter, Elizabeth, had conceived the plan, later to be carried out by
James, of planting colonies of Protestants in Ireland to promote loyalty
in that rebellious land. Six counties, comprising half a million acres,
formed the Ulster Plantation. The great majority of the colonists sent
thither by James were Scotch Lowlanders, but among them were many
English and a smaller number of Highlanders. These three peoples from
the island of Britain brought forth, through intermarriage, the Ulster
Scots.

The reign of Charles I had inaugurated for the Ulstermen an era of
persecution. Charles practically suppressed the Presbyterian religion in
Ireland. His son, Charles II, struck at Ireland in 1666 through its
cattle trade, by prohibiting the exportation of beef to England and
Scotland. The Navigation Acts, excluding Ireland from direct trade with
the colonies, ruined Irish commerce, while Corporation Acts and Test
Acts requiring conformity with the practices of the Church of England
bore heavily on the Ulster Presbyterians.

It was largely by refugees from religious persecution that America in
the beginning was colonized. But religious persecution was only one of
the influences which shaped the course and formed the character of the
Ulster Scots. In Ulster, whither they had originally been transplanted
by James to found a loyal province in the midst of the King's enemies,
they had done their work too well and had waxed too powerful for the
comfort of later monarchs. The first attacks upon them struck at their
religion; but the subsequent legislative acts which successively ruined
the woolen trade, barred nonconformists from public office, stifled
Irish commerce, pronounced non-Episcopal marriages irregular, and
instituted heavy taxation and high rentals for the land their fathers
had made productive--these were blows dealt chiefly for the political
and commercial ends of favored classes in England.

These attacks, aimed through his religious conscience at the sources of
his livelihood, made the Ulster Scot perforce what he was--a zealot as a
citizen and a zealot as a merchant no less than as a Presbyterian.
Thanks to his persecutors, he made a religion of everything he undertook
and regarded his civil rights as divine rights. Thus out of persecution
emerged a type of man who was high-principled and narrow, strong and
violent, as tenacious of his own rights as he was blind often to the
rights of others, acquisitive yet self-sacrificing, but most of all
fearless, confident of his own power, determined to have and to hold.

Twenty thousand Ulstermen, it is estimated, left Ireland for America in
the first three decades of the eighteenth century. More than six
thousand of them are known to have entered Pennsylvania in 1729 alone,
and twenty years later they numbered one-quarter of that colony's
population. During the five years preceding the Revolutionary War more
than thirty thousand Ulstermen crossed the ocean and arrived in America
just in time and in just the right frame of mind to return King George's
compliment in kind, by helping to deprive him of his American estates, a
domain very much larger than the acres of Ulster. They fully justified
the fears of the good bishop who wrote Lord Dartmouth, Secretary for the
Colonies, that he trembled for the peace of the King's overseas realm,
since these thousands of "phanatical and hungry Republicans" had sailed
for America.

The Ulstermen who entered by Charleston were known to the inhabitants of
the tidewater regions as the "Scotch-Irish." Those who came from the
north, lured southward by the offer of cheap lands, were called the
"Pennsylvania Irish." Both were, however, of the same race--a race twice
expatriated, first from Scotland and then from Ireland, and stripped of
all that it had won throughout more than a century of persecution. To
these exiles the Back Country of North Carolina, with its cheap and even
free tracts lying far from the seat of government, must have seemed not
only the Land of Promise but the Land of Last Chance. Here they must
strike their roots into the sod with such interlocking strength that no
cataclysm of tyranny should ever dislodge them--or they must accept the
fate dealt out to them by their former persecutors and become a tribe of
nomads and serfs. But to these Ulster immigrants such a choice was no
choice at all. They knew themselves strong men, who had made the most of
opportunity despite almost superhuman obstacles. The drumming of their
feet along the banks of the Shenandoah, or up the rivers from
Charleston, and on through the broad sweep of the Yadkin Valley, was a
conquering people's challenge to the Wilderness which lay sleeping like
an unready sentinel at the gates of their Future.

It is maintained still by many, however often disputed, that the
Ulstermen were the first to declare for American Independence, as in the
Old Country they were the first to demand the separation of Church and
State. A Declaration of Independence is said to have been drawn up and
signed in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on May 20, 1775. ¹ However
that may be, it is certain that these Mecklenburg Protestants had
received special schooling in the doctrine of independence. They had in
their midst for eight years (1758-66) the Reverend Alexander Craighead,
a Presbyterian minister who, for his "republican doctrines" expressed in
a pamphlet, had been disowned by the Pennsylvania Synod acting on the
Governor's protest, and so persecuted in Virginia that he had at last
fled to the North Carolina Back Country. There, during the remaining
years of his life, as the sole preacher and teacher in the settlements
between the Yadkin and the Catawba rivers he found willing soil in which
to sow the seeds of Liberty.

¹ See Hoyt, The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence; and American
Archives, Fourth Series. vol. II, p. 855.

There was another branch of the Scottish race which helped to people the
Back Country. The Highlanders, whose loyalty to their oath made them
fight on the King's side in the Revolutionary War, have been somewhat
overlooked in history. Tradition, handed down among the transplanted
clans--who, for the most part, spoke only Gaelic for a generation and
wrote nothing--and latterly recorded by one or two of their descendants,
supplies us with all we are now able to learn of the early coming of the
Gaels to Carolina. It would seem that their first immigration to America
in small bands took place after the suppression of the Jacobite rising
in 1715--when Highlanders fled in numbers also to France--for by 1729
there was a settlement of them on the Cape Fear River. We know, too,
that in 1748 it was charged against Gabriel Johnston, Governor of North
Carolina from 1734 to 1752, that he had shown no joy over the King's
"glorious victory of Culloden" and that "he had appointed one William
McGregor, who had been in the Rebellion in the year 1715 a Justice of
the Peace during the last Rebellion [1745] and was not himself without
suspicion of disaffection to His Majesty's Government." It is indeed
possible that Gabriel Johnston, formerly a professor at St. Andrew's
University, had himself not always been a stranger to the kilt. He
induced large numbers of Highlanders to come to America and probably
influenced the second George to moderate his treatment of the vanquished
Gaels in the Old Country and permit their emigration to the New World.

In contrast with the Ulstermen, whose secular ideals were dictated by
the forms of their Church, these Scots adhered still to the tribal or
clan system, although they, too, in the majority, were Presbyterians,
with a minority of Roman Catholics and Episcopalians. In the Scotch
Highlands they had occupied small holdings on the land under the sway of
their chief, or Head of the Clan, to whom they were bound by blood and
fealty but to whom they paid no rentals. The position of the Head of the
Clan was hereditary, but no heir was bold enough to step forward into
that position until he had performed some deed of worth. They were
principally herders, their chief stock being the famous small black
cattle of the Highlands. Their wars with each other were cattle raids.
Only in war, however, did the Gael lay hands on his neighbor's goods.
There were no highwaymen and housebreakers in the Highlands. No Highland
mansion, cot, or barn was ever locked. Theft and the breaking of an
oath, sins against man's honor, were held in such abhorrence that no one
guilty of them could remain among his clansmen in the beloved glens.
These Highlanders were a race of tall, robust men, who lived simply and
frugally and slept on the heath among their flocks in all weathers, with
no other covering from rain and snow than their plaidies. It is reported
of the Laird of Keppoch, who was leading his clan to war in winter time,
that his men were divided as to the propriety of following him further
because he rolled a snowball to rest his head upon when he lay down.
"Now we despair of victory," they said, "since our leader has become so
effeminate he cannot sleep without a pillow!" ¹

¹ MacLean, An Historical Account of the Settlement of Scotch Highlanders
in America.

The "King's glorious victory of Culloden" was followed by a policy of
extermination carried on by the orders and under the personal direction
of the Duke of Cumberland. When King George at last restrained his son
from his orgy of blood, he offered the Gaels their lives and exile to
America on condition of their taking the full oath of allegiance. The
majority accepted his terms, for not only were their lives forfeit but
their crops and cattle had been destroyed and the holdings on which
their ancestors had lived for many centuries taken from them. The
descriptions of the scenes attending their leave-taking of the hills and
glens they loved with such passionate fervor are among the most pathetic
in history. Strong men who had met the ravage of a brutal sword without
weakening abandoned themselves to the agony of sorrow. They kissed the
walls of their houses. They flung themselves on the ground and embraced
the sod upon which they had walked in freedom. They called their broken
farewells to the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to
see; and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the passes,
their pipers played the dirge for the dead.

Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race which entered
North Carolina from the coast and pushed up into the wilderness about
the headwaters of Cape Fear River. Tradition indicates that these
hillsmen sought the interior because the grass and pea vine which
overgrew the inner country stretching towards the mountains provided
excellent fodder for the cattle which some of the chiefs are said to
have brought with them. These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible
numbers, were in the Yadkin Valley before 1730, possibly even ten years
earlier. In 1739 Neil MacNeill of Kintyre brought over a shipload of
Gaels to rejoin his kinsman, Hector MacNeill, called Bluff Hector from
his residence near the bluffs at Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. Some of
these immigrants went on to the Yadkin, we are told, to unite with
others of their clan who had been for some time in that district. The
exact time of the first Highlander on the Yadkin cannot be ascertained,
as there were no court records and the offices of the land companies
were not then open for the sale of these remote regions. But by 1753
there were not less than four thousand Gaels in Cumberland County, where
they occupied the chief magisterial posts; and they were already
spreading over the lands now comprised within Moore, Anson, Richmond,
Robeson, Bladen, and Sampson counties. In these counties Gaelic was as
commonly heard as English.

In the years immediately preceding the Revolution and even in 1776
itself they came in increasing numbers. They knew nothing of the
smoldering fire just about to break into flames in the country of their
choice, but the Royal Governor, Josiah Martin, knew that Highland arms
would soon be needed by His Majesty. He knew something of Highland
honor, too; for he would not let the Gaels proceed after their landing
until they had bound themselves by oath to support the Government of
King George. So it was that the unfortunate Highlanders found
themselves, according to their strict code of honor, forced to wield
arms against the very Americans who had received and befriended
them--and for the crowned brother of a prince whose name is execrated to
this day in Highland song and story!

They were led by Allan MacDonald of Kingsborough; and tradition gives us
a stirring picture of Allan's wife--the famous Flora MacDonald, who in
Scotland had protected the Young Pretender in his flight--making an
impassioned address in Gaelic to the Highland soldiers and urging them
on to die for honor's sake. When this Highland force was conquered by
the Americans, the large majority willingly bound themselves not to
fight further against the American cause and were set at liberty. Many
of them felt that, by offering their lives to the swords of the
Americans, they had canceled their obligation to King George and were
now free to draw their swords again and, this time, in accordance with
their sympathies; so they went over to the American side and fought
gallantly for independence.

Although the brave glory of this pioneer age shines so brightly on the
Lion Rampant of Caledonia, not to Scots alone does that whole glory
belong. The second largest racial stream which flowed into the Back
Country of Virginia and North Carolina was German. Most of these Germans
went down from Pennsylvania and were generally called "Pennsylvania
Dutch," an incorrect rendering of Pennsylvänische Deutsche. The upper
Shenandoah Valley was settled almost entirely by Germans. They were
members of the Lutheran, German Reformed, and Moravian churches. The
cause which sent vast numbers of this sturdy people across the ocean,
during the first years of the eighteenth century, was religious
persecution. By statute and by sword the Roman Catholic powers of
Austria sought to wipe out the Salzburg Lutherans and the Moravian
followers of John Huss. In that region of the Rhine country known in
those days as the German Palatinate, now a part of Bavaria, Protestants
were being massacred by the troops of Louis of France, then engaged in
the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) and in the zealous effort to
extirpate heretics from the soil of Europe. In 1708, by proclamation,
Good Queen Anne offered protection to the persecuted Palatines and
invited them to her dominions. Twelve thousand of them went to England,
where they were warmly received by the English. But it was no slight
task to settle twelve thousand immigrants of an alien speech in England
and enable them to become independent and self-supporting. A better
solution of their problem lay in the Western World. The Germans needed
homes and the Queen's overseas dominions needed colonists. They were
settled at first along the Hudson, and eventually many of them took up
lands in the fertile valley of the Mohawk.

For fifty years or more German and Austrian Protestants poured into
America. In Pennsylvania their influx averaged about fifteen hundred a
year, and that colony became the distributing center for the German race
in America. By 1727, Adam Müller and his little company had established
the first white settlement in the Valley of Virginia. In 1732 Joist
Heydt went south from York, Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opequan
Creek at or near the site of the present city of Winchester.

The life of Count Zinzendorf, called "the Apostle," one of the leaders
of the Moravian immigrants, glows like a star out of those dark and
troublous times. Of high birth and gentle nurture, he forsook whatever
of ease his station promised him and fitted himself for evangelical
work. In 1741 he visited the Wyoming Valley to bring his religion to the
Delawares and Shawanoes. He was not of those picturesque Captains of the
Lord who bore their muskets on their shoulders when they went forth to
preach. Armored only with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation,
and the sword of the spirit, his feet "shod with the preparation of the
gospel of peace," he went out into the country of these bloodthirsty
tribes and told them that he had come to them in their darkness to teach
the love of the Christ which lighteth the world. The Indians received
him suspiciously. One day while he sat in his tent writing, some
Delawares drew near to slay him and were about to strike when they saw
two deadly snakes crawl in from the opposite side of the tent, move
directly towards the Apostle, and pass harmlessly over his body.
Thereafter they regarded him as under spiritual protection. Indeed so
widespread was his good fame among the tribes that for some years all
Moravian settlements along the borders were unmolested. Painted savages
passed through on their way to war with enemy bands or to raid the
border, but for the sake of one consecrated spirit, whom they had seen
death avoid, they spared the lives and goods of his fellow believers.
When Zinzendorf departed a year later, his mantle fell on David
Zeisberger, who lived the love he taught for over fifty years and
converted many savages. Zeisberger was taken before the Governor and
army heads at Philadelphia, who had only too good reason to be
suspicious of priestly counsels in the tents of Shem: but he was able to
impress white men no less than simple savages with the nobility of the
doctrine he had learned from the Apostle.

In 1751 the Moravian Brotherhood purchased one hundred thousand acres in
North Carolina from Lord Granville. Bishop Spangenburg was commissioned
to survey this large acreage, which was situated in the present county
of Forsyth east of the Yadkin, and which is historically listed as the
Wachovia Tract. In 1753, twelve Brethren left the Moravian settlements
of Bethlehem and Nazareth, in Pennsylvania, and journeyed southward to
begin the founding of a colony on their new land. Brother Adam Grube,
one of the twelve, kept a diary of the events of this expedition. ¹

¹ This diary is printed in full in Travels in the American Colonies
edited by N. D. Mereness.

Honor to whom honor is due. We have paid it, in some measure, to the
primitive Gaels of the Highlands for their warrior strength and their
fealty, and to the enlightened Scots of Ulster for their enterprise and
for their sacrifice unto blood that free conscience and just laws might
promote the progress and safeguard the intercourse of their kind. Now
let us take up for a moment Brother Grube's Journal even as we welcome,
perhaps the more gratefully, the mild light of evening after the
flooding sun, or as our hearts, when too strongly stirred by the deeds
of men, turn for rest to the serene faith and the naïve speech of little
children.

The twelve, we learn, were under the leadership of one of their number,
Brother Gottlob. Their earliest alarms on the march were not caused, as
we might expect, by anticipations of the painted Cherokee, but by
encounters with the strenuous "Irish." One of these came and laid
himself to sleep beside the Brethren's camp fire on their first night
out, after they had sung their evening hymn and eleven had stretched
themselves on the earth for slumber, while Brother Gottlob, their
leader, hanging his hammock between two trees, ascended--not only in
spirit--a little higher than his charges, and "rested well in it."
Though the alarming Irishman did not disturb them, the Brethren's doubts
of that race continued, for Brother Grube wrote on the 14th of October:
"About four in the morning we set up our tent, going four miles beyond
Carl Isles [Carlisle, seventeen miles southwest of Harrisburg] so as not
to be too near the Irish Presbyterians. After breakfast the Brethren
shaved and then we rested under our tent.... People who were staying at
the Tavern came to see what kind of folk we were.... Br Gottlob held the
evening service and then we lay down around our cheerful fire, and Br
Gottlob in his hammock." Two other jottings give us a racial
kaleidoscope of the settlers and wayfarers of that time. On one day the
Brethren bought "some hay from a Swiss," later "some kraut from a German
which tasted very good to us"; and presently "an Englishman came by and
drank a cup of tea with us and was very grateful for it." Frequently the
little band paused while some of the Brethren went off to the farms
along the route to help "cut hay." These kindly acts were usually repaid
with gifts of food or produce.

One day while on the march they halted at a tavern and farm in
Shenandoah Valley kept by a man whose name Brother Grube wrote down as
"Severe." Since we know that Brother Grube's spelling of names other
than German requires editing, we venture to hazard a guess that the name
he attempted to set down as it sounded to him was Sevier. And we wonder
if, in his brief sojourn, he saw a lad of eight years, slim, tall, and
blond, with daring and mischievous blue eyes, and a certain curve of the
lips that threatened havoc in the hearts of both sexes when he should be
a man and reach out with swift hands and reckless will for his desires.
If he saw this lad, he beheld John Sevier, later to become one of the
most picturesque and beloved heroes of the Old Southwest.

Hardships abounded on the Brethren's journey, but faith and the
Christian's joy, which no man taketh from him, met and surmounted them.
"Three and a half miles beyond, the road forked.... We took the right
hand road but found no water for ten miles. It grew late and we had to
drive five miles into the night to find a stoppingplace." Two of the
Brethren went ahead "to seek out the road" through the darkened
wilderness. There were rough hills in the way; and, the horses being
exhausted, "Brethren had to help push." But, in due season, "Br
Nathanael held evening prayer and then we slept in the care of Jesus,"
with Brother Gottlob as usual in his hammock. Three days later the
record runs: "Toward evening we saw Jeams River, the road to it ran down
so very steep a hill that we fastened a small tree to the back of our
wagon, locked the wheels, and the Brethren held back by the tree with
all their might." Even then the wagon went down so fast that most of the
Brethren lost their footing and rolled and tumbled pell-mell. But Faith
makes little of such mishaps: "No harm was done and we thanked the Lord
that he had so graciously protected us, for it looked dangerous and we
thought at times that it could not possibly be done without accident but
we got down safely... we were all very tired and sleepy and let the
angels be our guard during the night." Rains fell in torrents, making
streams almost impassable and drenching the little band to the skin. The
hammock was empty one night, for they had to spend the dark hours
trench-digging about their tent to keep it from being washed away. Two
days later (the 10th of November) the weather cleared and "we spent most
of the day drying our blankets and mending and darning our stockings."
They also bought supplies from settlers who, as Brother Grube observed
without irony,

are glad we have to remain here so long and that it means money for
them. In the afternoon we held a little Lovefeast and rested our souls
in the loving sacrifice of Jesus, wishing for beloved Brethren in
Bethlehem and that they and we might live ever close to Him....
Nov. 16. We rose early to ford the river. The bank was so steep that we
hung a tree behind the wagon, fastening it in such a way that we could
quickly release it when the wagon reached the water. The current was
very swift and the lead horses were carried down a bit with it. The
water just missed running into the wagon but we came safely to the other
bank, which however we could not climb but had to take half the things
out of the wagon, tie ropes to the axle on which we could pull, help our
horses which were quite stiff, and so we brought our ark again to dry
land.

On the evening of the 17th of November the twelve arrived safely on
their land on the "Etkin" (Yadkin), having been six weeks on the march.
They found with joy that, as ever, the Lord had provided for them. This
time the gift was a deserted cabin, "large enough that we could all lie
down around the walls. We at once made preparation for a little
Lovefeast and rejoiced heartily with one another."

In the deserted log cabin, which, to their faith, seemed as one of those
mansions "not built with hands" and descended miraculously from the
heavens, they held their Lovefeast, while wolves padded and howled about
the walls; and in that Pentacostal hour the tongue of fire descended
upon Brother Gottlob, so that he made a new song unto the Lord. Who
shall venture to say it is not better worth preserving than many a
classic?

   We hold arrival Lovefeast here
      In Carolina land,
   A company of Brethren true,
      A little Pilgrim-Band,
   Called by the Lord to be of those
      Who through the whole world go,
   To bear Him witness everywhere
      And nought but Jesus know.

Then, we are told, the Brethren lay down to rest and "Br Gottlob hung
his hammock above our heads"--as was most fitting on this of all nights;
for is not the Poet's place always just a little nearer to the stars?

The pioneers did not always travel in groups. There were families who
set off alone. One of these now claims our attention, for there was a
lad in this family whose name and deeds were to sound like a ballad of
romance from out the dusty pages of history. This family's name was
Boone.

Neither Scots nor Germans can claim Daniel Boone; he was in blood a
blend of English and Welsh; in character wholly English. His grandfather
George Boone was born in 1666 in the hamlet of Stoak, near Exeter in
Devonshire. George Boone was a weaver by trade and a Quaker by religion.
In England in his time the Quakers were oppressed, and George Boone
therefore sought information of William Penn, his coreligionist,
regarding the colony which Penn had established in America. In 1712 he
sent his three elder children, George, Sarah, and Squire, to spy out the
land. Sarah and Squire remained in Pennsylvania, while their brother
returned to England with glowing reports. On August 17, 1717, George
Boone, his wife, and the rest of his children journeyed to Bristol and
sailed for Philadelphia, arriving there on the 10th of October. The
Boones went first to Abingdon, the Quaker farmers' community. Later they
moved to the northwestern frontier hamlet of North Wales, a Welsh
community which, a few years previously, had turned Quaker. Sarah Boone
married a German named Jacob Stover, who had settled in Oley Township,
Berks County. In 1718 George Boone took up four hundred acres in Oley,
or, to be exact, in the subdivision later called Exeter, and there he
lived in his log cabin until 1744, when he died at the age of
seventy-eight. He left eight children, fifty-two grandchildren, and ten
great-grandchildren, seventy descendants in all--English, German, Welsh,
and Scotch-Irish blended into one family of Americans. ¹

¹ R. G. Thwaites, Daniel Boone, p. 5.

Among the Welsh Quakers was a family of Morgans. In 1720 Squire Boone
married Sarah Morgan. Ten years later he obtained 250 acres in Oley on
Owatin Creek, eight miles southeast of the present city of Reading; and
here, in 1734, Daniel Boone was born, the fourth son and sixth child of
Squire and Sarah Morgan Boone. Daniel Boone therefore was a son of the
frontier. In his childhood he became familiar with hunters and with
Indians, for even the red men came often in friendly fashion to his
grandfather's house. Squire Boone enlarged his farm by thrift. He
continued at his trade of weaving and kept five or six looms going,
making homespun cloth for the market and his neighbors.

Daniel's father owned grazing grounds several miles north of the
homestead and each season he sent his stock to the range. Sarah Boone
and her little Daniel drove the cows. From early spring till late
autumn, mother and son lived in a rustic cabin alone on the frontier. A
rude dairy house stood over a cool spring, and here Sarah Boone made her
butter and cheese. Daniel, aged ten at this time, watched the herds; at
sunset he drove them to the cabin for milking, and locked them in the
cowpens at night.

He was not allowed firearms at that age, so he shaped for himself a
weapon that served him well. This was a slender smoothly shaved sapling
with a small bunch of gnarled roots at one end. So expert was he in the
launching of this primitive spear that he easily brought down birds and
small game. When he reached his twelfth year, his father bought him a
rifle; and he soon became a crack shot. A year later we find him setting
off on the autumn hunt--after driving the cattle in for the winter--with
all the keenness and courage of a man twice his thirteen years. His
rifle enabled him to return with meat for the family and skins to be
traded in Philadelphia. When he was fourteen his brother Sam married
Sarah Day, an intelligent young Quakeress who took a special interest in
her young brother-in-law and taught him "the rudiments of three R's."

The Boones were prosperous and happy in Oley and it may be wondered why
they left their farms and their looms, both of which were profitable,
and set their faces towards the Unknown. It is recorded that, though the
Boones were Quakers, they were of a high mettle and were not
infrequently dealt with by the Meeting. Two of Squire Boone's children
married "worldlings"--non-Quakers--and were in consequence "disowned" by
the Society. In defiance of his sect, which strove to make him sever all
connection with his unruly offspring, Squire Boone refused to shut his
doors on the son and the daughter who had scandalized local Quakerdom.
The Society of Friends thereupon expelled him. This occurred apparently
during the winter of 1748-49. In the spring of 1750 we see the whole
Boone family (save two sons) with their wives and children, their
household goods and their stock, on the great highway, bound for a land
where the hot heart and the belligerent spirit shall not be held amiss.

Southward through the Shenandoah goes the Boone caravan. The women and
children usually sit in the wagons. The men march ahead or alongside,
keeping a keen eye open for Indian or other enemy in the wild, their
rifles under arm or over the shoulder. Squire Boone, who has done with
Quakerdom and is leading all that he holds dear out to larger horizons,
is ahead of the line, as we picture him, ready to meet first whatever
danger may assail his tribe. He is a strong wiry man of rather small
stature, with ruddy complexion, red hair, and gray eyes. Somewhere in
the line, together, we think, are the mother and son who have herded
cattle and companioned each other through long months in the cabin on
the frontier. We do not think of this woman as riding in the wagon,
though she may have done so, but prefer to picture her, with her tall
robust body, her black hair, and her black eyes--with the s udden Welsh
snap in them--walking as sturdily as any of her sons.

If Daniel be beside her, what does she see when she looks at him? A lad
well set up but not overtall for his sixteen years, perhaps--for
"eye-witnesses" differ in their estimates of Daniel Boone's height--or
possibly taller than he looks, because his figure has the forest
hunter's natural slant forward and the droop of the neck of one who must
watch his path sometimes in order to tread silently. It is Squire
Boone's blood which shows in his ruddy face--which would be fair but for
its tan--and in the English cut of feature, the straw-colored eyebrows,
and the blue eyes. But his Welsh mother's legacy is seen in the black
hair that hangs long and loose in the hunter's fashion to his shoulders.
We can think of Daniel Boone only as exhilarated by this plunge into the
Wild. He sees ahead--the days of his great explorations and warfare, the
discovery of Kentucky? Not at all. This is a boy of sixteen in love with
his rifle. He looks ahead to vistas of forest filled with deer and to
skies clouded with flocks of wild turkeys. In that dream there is
happiness enough for Daniel Boone. Indeed, for himself, even in later
life, he asked little, if any more. He trudges on blithely, whistling.




CHAPTER II.

Folkways

These migrations into the inland valleys of the Old South mark the first
great westward thrust of the American frontier. Thus the beginnings of
the westward movement disclose to us a feature characteristic also of
the later migrations which flung the frontier over the Appalachians,
across the Mississippi, and finally to the shores of the Pacific. The
pioneers, instead of moving westward by slow degrees, subduing the
wilderness as they went, overleaped great spaces and planted themselves
beyond, out of contact with the life they had left behind. Thus
separated by hundreds of miles of intervening wilderness from the more
civilized communities, the conquerors of the first American "West,"
prototypes of the conquerors of succeeding "Wests," inevitably struck
out their own ways of life and developed their own customs. It would be
difficult, indeed, to find anywhere a more remarkable contrast in
contemporary folkways than that presented by the two great community
groups of the South--the inland or piedmont settlements, called the Back
Country, and the lowland towns and plantations along the seaboard.

The older society of the seaboard towns, as events were soon to prove,
was not less independent in its ideals than the frontier society of the
Back Country; but it was aristocratic in tone and feeling. Its leaders
were the landed gentry--men of elegance, and not far behind their
European contemporaries in the culture of the day. They were rich,
without effort, both from their plantations, where black slaves and
indentured servants labored, and from their coastwise and overseas
trade. Their battles with forest and red man were long past. They had
leisure for diversions such as the chase, the breeding and racing of
thoroughbred horses, the dance, high play with dice and card,
cockfighting, the gallantry of love, and the skill of the rapier. Law
and politics drew their soberer minds.

Very different were the conditions which confronted the pioneers in the
first American "West." There every jewel of promise was ringed round
with hostility. The cheap land the pioneer had purchased at a nominal
price, or the free land he had taken by "tomahawk claim"--that is by
cutting his name into the bark of a deadened tree, usually beside a
spring--supported a forest of tall trunks and interlacing leafage. The
long grass and weeds which covered the ground in a wealth of natural
pasturage harbored the poisonous copperhead and the rattlesnake and,
being shaded by the overhead foliage, they held the heavy dews and bred
swarms of mosquitoes, gnats, and big flies which tortured both men and
cattle. To protect the cattle and horses from the attacks of these pests
the settlers were obliged to build large "smudges"--fires of green
timber--against the wind. The animals soon learned to back up into the
dense smoke and to move from one grazing spot to another as the wind
changed. But useful as were the green timber fires that rolled their
smoke on the wind to save the stock, they were at the same time a menace
to the pioneer, for they proclaimed to roving bands of Cherokees that a
further encroachment on their territory had been made by their most
hated enemies--the men who felled the hunter's forest. Many an outpost
pioneer who had made the long hard journey by sea and land from the old
world of persecution to this new country of freedom, dropped from the
red man's shot ere he had hewn the threshold of his home, leaving his
wife and children to the unrecorded mercy of his slayer.

Those more fortunate pioneers who settled in groups won the first heat
in the battle with the wilderness through massed effort under wariness.
They made their clearings in the forest, built their cabins and
stockades, and planted their cornfields, while lookouts kept watch and
rifles were stacked within easy reach. Every special task, such as a
"raising," as cabin building was called, was undertaken by the community
chiefly because the Indian danger necessitated swift building and made
group action imperative. But the stanch heart is ever the glad heart.
Nothing in this frontier history impresses us more than the joy of the
pioneer at his labors. His determined optimism turned danger's dictation
into an occasion for jollity. On the appointed day for the "raising,"
the neighbors would come, riding or afoot, to the newcomer's
holding--the men with their rifles and axes, the women with their pots
and kettles. Every child toddled along, too, helping to carry the wooden
dishes and spoons. These free givers of labor had something of the
Oriental's notion of the sacred ratification of friendship by a feast.

The usual dimensions of a cabin were sixteen by twenty feet. The timber
for the building, having been already cut, lay at hand--logs of hickory,
oak, young pine, walnut, or persimmon. To make the foundations, the men
seized four of the thickest logs, laid them in place, and notched and
grooved and hammered them into as close a clinch as if they had grown
so. The wood must grip by its own substance alone to hold up the
pioneer's dwelling, for there was not an iron nail to be had in the
whole of the Back Country. Logs laid upon the foundation logs and
notched into each other at the four corners formed the walls; and, when
these stood at seven feet, the builders laid parallel timbers and
puncheons to make both flooring and ceiling. The ridgepole of the roof
was supported by two crotched trees and the roofing was made of logs and
wooden slabs. The crevices of the walls were packed close with red clay
and moss. Lastly, spaces for a door and windows were cut out. The door
was made thick and heavy to withstand the Indian's rush. And the
windowpanes? They were of paper treated with hog's fat or bear's grease.

When the sun stood overhead, the women would give the welcome call of
"Dinner!" Their morning had not been less busy than the men's. They had
baked corn cakes on hot stones, roasted bear or pork, or broiled venison
steaks; and--above all and first of all--they had concocted the great
"stew pie" without which a raising could hardly take place. This was a
disputatious mixture of deer, hog, and bear--animals which, in life,
would surely have companioned each other as ill! It was made in
sufficient quantity to last over for supper when the day's labor was
done. At supper the men took their ease on the ground, but with their
rifles always in reach. If the cabin just raised by their efforts stood
in the Yadkin, within sight of the great mountains the pioneers were one
day to cross, perhaps a sudden bird note warning from the lookout,
hidden in the brush, would bring the builders with a leap to their feet.
It might be only a hunting band of friendly Catawbas that passed, or a
lone Cherokee who knew that this was not his hour. If the latter, we
can, in imagination, see him look once at the new house on his hunting
pasture, slacken rein for a moment in front of the group of families,
lift his hand in sign of peace, and silently go his way hillward. As he
vanishes into the shadows, the crimson sun, sinking into the unknown
wilderness beyond the mountains, pours its last glow on the roof of the
cabin and on the group near its walls. With unfelt fingers, subtly, it
puts the red touch of the West in the faces of the men--who have just
declared, through the building of a cabin, that here is Journey's End
and their abiding place.

There were community holidays among these pioneers as well as labor
days, especially in the fruit season; and there were flower-picking
excursions in the warm spring days. Early in April the service berry
bush gleamed starrily along the watercourses, its hardy white blooms
defying winter's lingering look. This bush--or tree, indeed, since it is
not afraid to rear its slender trunk as high as cherry or crab
apple--might well be considered emblematic of the frontier spirit in
those regions where the white silence covers the earth for several
months and shuts the lonely homesteader in upon himself. From the
pioneer time of the Old Southwest to the last frontier of the Far North
today, the service berry is cherished alike by white men and Indians;
and the red men have woven about it some of their prettiest legends.
When June had ripened the tree's blue-black berries, the Back Country
folk went out in parties to gather them. Though the service berry was a
food staple on the frontier and its gathering a matter of household
economy, the folk made their berry-picking jaunt a gala occasion. The
women and children with pots and baskets--the young girls vying with
each other, under the eyes of the youths, as to who could strip boughs
the fastest--plucked gayly while the men, rifles in hand, kept guard.
For these happy summer days were also the red man's scalping days and,
at any moment, the chatter of the picnickers might be interrupted by the
chilling war whoop. When that sound was heard, the berry pickers raced
for the fort. The wild fruits--strawberries, service berries, cherries,
plums, crab apples--were, however, too necessary a part of the pioneer's
meager diet to be left unplucked out of fear of an Indian attack.
Another day would see the same group out again. The children would keep
closer to their mothers, no doubt; and the laughter of the young girls
would be more subdued, even if their coquetry lacked nothing of its
former effectiveness. Early marriages were the rule in the Back Country
and betrothals were frequently plighted at these berry pickings.

As we consider the descriptions of the frontiersman left for us by
travelers of his own day, we are not more interested in his battles with
wilderness and Indian than in the visible effects of both wilderness and
Indian upon him. His countenance and bearing still show the European,
but the European greatly altered by savage contact. The red peril,
indeed, influenced every side of frontier life. The bands of women and
children at the harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings,
were not there merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter and
love-making. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins, for, to
the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon his immemorial hunting
grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater evil was the white man's
family, bespeaking the increase of the dreaded palefaces. The Indian
peril trained the pioneers to alertness, shaped them as warriors and
hunters, suggested the fashion of their dress, knit their families into
clans and the clans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in the
protection of each and all and a unit of hate against their common
enemy.

Too often the fields which the pioneer planted with corn were harvested
by the Indian with fire. The hardest privations suffered by farmers and
stock were due to the settlers having to flee to the forts, leaving to
Indian devastation the crops on which their sustenance mainly depended.
Sometimes, fortunately, the warning came in time for the frontiersman to
collect his goods and chattels in his wagon and to round up his live
stock and drive them safely into the common fortified enclosure. At
others, the tap of the "express"--as the herald of Indian danger was
called--at night on the windowpane and the low word whispered hastily,
ere the "express" ran on to the next abode, meant that the Indians had
surprised the outlying cabins of the settlement.

The forts were built as centrally as possible in the scattered
settlements. They consisted of cabins, blockhouses, and stockades. A
range of cabins often formed one side of a fort. The walls on the
outside were ten or twelve feet high with roofs sloping inward. The
blockhouses built at the angles of the fort projected two feet or so
beyond the outer walls of the cabins and stockades, and were fitted with
portholes for the watchers and the marksmen. The entrance to the fort
was a large folding gate of thick slabs. It was always on the side
nearest the spring. The whole structure of the fort was bullet-proof and
was erected without an iron nail or spike. In the border wars these
forts withstood all attacks. The savages, having proved that they could
not storm them, generally laid siege and waited for thirst to compel a
sortie. But the crafty besieger was as often outwitted by the equally
cunning defender. Some daring soul, with silent feet and perhaps with
naked body painted in Indian fashion, would drop from the wall under
cover of the night, pass among the foemen to the spring, and return to
the fort with water.

Into the pioneer's phrase-making the Indian influence penetrated so that
he named seasons for his foe. So thoroughly has the term "Indian
Summer," now to us redolent of charm, become disassociated from its
origins that it gives us a shock to be reminded that to these Back
Country folk the balmy days following on the cold snap meant the season
when the red men would come back for a last murderous raid on the
settlements before winter should seal up the land. The "Powwowing Days"
were the mellow days in the latter part of February, when the red men in
council made their medicine and learned of their redder gods whether or
no they should take the warpath when the sap pulsed the trees into leaf.
Even the children at their play acknowledged the red-skinned
schoolmaster, for their chief games were a training in his woodcraft and
in the use of his weapons. Tomahawk-throwing was a favorite sport
because of its gruesome practical purposes. The boys must learn to gauge
the tomahawk's revolutions by the distance of the throw so as to bury
the blade in its objective. Swift running and high jumping through the
brush and fallen timber were sports that taught agility in escape. The
boys learned to shoot accurately the long rifles of their time, with a
log or a forked stick for a rest, and a moss pad under the barrel to
keep it from jerking and spoiling the aim. They wrestled with each
other, mastered the tricks of throwing an opponent, and learned the
scalp hold instead of the toe hold. It was part of their education to
imitate the noises of every bird and beast of the forest. So they
learned to lure the turkey within range, or by the bleat of a fawn to
bring her dam to the rifle. A well-simulated wolf's howl would call
forth a response and so inform the lone hunter of the vicinity of the
pack. This forest speech was not only the language of diplomacy in the
hunting season; it was the borderer's secret code in war. Stray Indians
put themselves in touch again with the band by turkey calls in the
daytime and by owl or wolf notes at night. The frontiersmen used the
same means to trick the Indian band into betraying the place of its
ambuscade, or to lure the strays, unwitting, within reach of the knife.

In that age, before the forests had given place to farms and cities and
when the sun had but slight acquaintance with the sod, the summers were
cool and the winters long and cold in the Back Country. Sometimes in
September severe frosts destroyed the corn. The first light powdering
called "hunting snows" fell in October, and then the men of the Back
Country set out on the chase. Their object was meat--buffalo, deer, elk,
bear--for the winter larder, and skins to send out in the spring by
pack-horses to the coast in trade for iron, steel, and salt. The
rainfall in North Carolina was much heavier than in Virginia and, from
autumn into early winter, the Yadkin forests were sheeted with rain; but
wet weather, so far from deterring the hunter, aided him to the kill. In
blowing rain, he knew he would find the deer herding in the sheltered
places on the hillsides. In windless rain, he knew that his quarry
ranged the open woods and the high places. The fair play of the pioneer
held it a great disgrace to kill a deer in winter when the heavy frost
had crusted the deep snow. On the crust men and wolves could travel with
ease, but the deer's sharp hoofs pierced through and made him
defenseless. Wolves and dogs destroyed great quantities of deer caught
in this way; and men who shot deer under these conditions were
considered no huntsmen. There was, indeed, a practical side to this
chivalry of the chase, for meat and pelt were both poor at this season;
but the true hunter also obeyed the finer tenet of his code, for he
would go to the rescue of deer caught in the crusts--and he killed many
a wolf sliding over the ice to an easy meal.

The community moral code of the frontier was brief and rigorous. What it
lacked of the "whereas" and "inasmuch" of legal ink it made up in sound
hickory. In fact, when we review the activities of this solid yet
elastic wood in the moral, social, and economic phases of Back Country
life, we are moved to wonder if the pioneers would have been the same
race of men had they been nurtured beneath a less strenuous and
adaptable vegetation! The hickory gave the frontiersman wood for all
implements and furnishings where the demand was equally for lightness,
strength, and elasticity. It provided his straight logs for building,
his block mortars--hollowed by fire and stone--for corn-grinding, his
solid plain furniture, his axles, rifle butts, ax handles, and so forth.
It supplied his magic wand for the searching out of iniquity in the
junior members of his household, and his most cogent argument, as a
citizen, in convincing the slothful, the blasphemous, or the dishonest
adult whose errors disturbed communal harmony. Its nuts fed his hogs.
Before he raised stock, the unripe hickory nuts, crushed for their white
liquid, supplied him with butter for his corn bread and helped out his
store of bear's fat. Both the name and the knowledge of the uses of this
tree came to the earliest pioneers through contact with the red man,
whose hunting bow and fishing spear and the hobbles for his horses were
fashioned of the "pohickory" tree. The Indian women first made pohickory
butter, and the wise old men of the Cherokee towns, so we are told,
first applied the pohickory rod to the vanity of youth!

A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country of Virginia
or North Carolina would show, in primitive design, what is, perhaps,
after all the perfect home--a place where the personal life and the work
life are united and where nothing futile finds space. Every object in
the cabin was practical and had been made by hand on the spot to answer
a need. Besides the chairs hewn from hickory blocks, there were others
made of slabs set on three legs. A large slab or two with four legs
served as a movable table; the permanent table was built against the
wall, its outer edge held up by two sticks. The low bed was built into
the wall in the same way and softened for slumber by a mattress of pine
needles, chaff, or dried moss. In the best light from the greased paper
windowpanes stood the spinning wheel and loom, on which the housewife
made cloth for the family's garments. Over the fireplace or beside the
doorway, and suspended usually on stags' antlers, hung the firearms and
the yellow powderhorns, the latter often carved in Indian fashion with
scenes of the hunt or war. On a shelf or on pegs were the wooden spoons,
plates, bowls, and noggins. Also near the fireplace, which was made of
large flat stones with a mud-plastered log chimney, stood the grinding
block for making hominy. If it were an evening in early spring, the men
of the household would be tanning and dressing deerskins to be sent out
with the trade caravan, while the women sewed, made moccasins or mended
them, in the light of pine knots or candles of bear's grease. The larger
children might be weaving cradles for the babies, Indian fashion, out of
hickory twigs; and there would surely be a sound of whetting steel, for
scalping knives and tomahawks must be kept keen-tempered now that the
days have come when the red gods whisper their chant of war through the
young leafage.

The Back Country folk, as they came from several countries, generally
settled in national groups, each preserving its own speech and its own
religion, each approaching frontier life through its own native
temperament. And the frontier met each and all alike, with the same need
and the same menace, and molded them after one general pattern. If the
cabin stood in a typical Virginian settlement where the folk were of
English stock, it may be that the dulcimer and some old love song of the
homeland enlivened the work--or perhaps chairs were pushed back and
young people danced the country dances of the homeland and the Virginia
Reel, for these Virginian English were merry folk, and their religion
did not frown upon the dance. In a cabin on the Shenandoah or the upper
Yadkin the German tongue clicked away over the evening dish of kraut or
sounded more sedately in a Lutheran hymn; while from some herder's hut
on the lower Yadkin the wild note of the bagpipes or of the ancient
four-stringed harp mingled with the Gaelic speech.

Among the homes in the Shenandoah where old England's ways prevailed,
none was gayer than the tavern kept by the man whom the good Moravian
Brother called "Severe." There perhaps the feasting celebrated the
nuptials of John Sevier, who was barely past his seventeenth birthday
when he took to himself a wife. Or perhaps the dancing, in moccasined
feet on the puncheon flooring, was a ceremonial to usher into Back
Country life the new municipality John had just organized, for John at
nineteen had taken his earliest step towards his larger career, which we
shall follow later on, as the architect of the first little governments
beyond the mountains.

In the Boone home on the Yadkin, we may guess that the talk was solely
of the hunt, unless young Daniel had already become possessed of his
first compass and was studying its ways. On such an evening, while the
red afterglow lingered, he might be mending a passing trader's firearms
by the fires of the primitive forge his father had set up near the
trading path running from Hillsborough to the Catawba towns. It was said
by the local nimrods that none could doctor a sick rifle better than
young Daniel Boone, already the master huntsman of them all. And perhaps
some trader's tale, told when the caravan halted for the night, kindled
the youth's first desire to penetrate the mountain-guarded wilderness,
for the tales of these Romanies of commerce were as the very badge of
their free-masonry, and entry money at the doors of strangers.

Out on the border's edge, heedless of the shadow of the mountains
looming between the newly built cabin and that western land where they
and their kind were to write the fame of the Ulster Scot in a shining
script that time cannot dull, there might sit a group of stern-faced
men, all deep in discussion of some point of spiritual doctrine or of
the temporal rights of men. Yet, in every cabin, whatever the national
differences, the setting was the same. The spirit of the frontier was
modeling out of old clay a new Adam to answer the needs of a new earth.

It would be far less than just to leave the Back Country folk without
further reference to the devoted labors of their clergy. In the earliest
days the settlers were cut off from their church systems; the pious had
to maintain their piety unaided, except in the rare cases where a pastor
accompanied a group of settlers of his denomination into the wilds. One
of the first ministers who fared into the Back Country to remind the
Ulster Presbyterians of their spiritual duties was the Reverend Hugh
McAden of Philadelphia. He made long itineraries under the greatest
hardships, in constant danger from Indians and wild beasts, carrying the
counsel of godliness to the far scattered flock. Among the Highland
settlements the Reverend James Campbell for thirty years traveled about,
preaching each Sunday at some gathering point a sermon in both English
and Gaelic. A little later, in the Yadkin Valley, after Craighead's day
there arose a small school of Presbyterian ministers whose zeal and
fearlessness in the cause of religion and of just government had an
influence on the frontiersmen that can hardly be overestimated.

But, in the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery of border
life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidance from other
mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the primal threefold
need--family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the day's work was done.
We who look back with thoughtful eyes upon the frontiersman--all links
of contact with his racial past severed, at grips with destruction in
the contenting of his needs--see something more, something larger, than
he saw in the log cabin raised by his hands, its structure held together
solely by his close grooving and fitting of its own strength. Though the
walls he built for himself have gone with his own dust back to the
earth, the symbol he erected for us stands.




CHAPTER III.

The Trader

The trader was the first pathfinder. His caravans began the change of
purpose that was to come to the Indian warrior's route, turning it
slowly into the beaten track of communication and commerce. The
settlers, the rangers, the surveyors, went westward over the trails
which he had blazed for them years before. Their enduring works are
commemorated in the cities and farms which today lie along every ancient
border line; but of their forerunner's hazardous Indian trade nothing
remains. Let us therefore pay a moment's homage here to the trader, who
first--to borrow a phrase from Indian speech--made white for peace the
red trails of war.

He was the first cattleman of the Old Southwest. Fifty years before John
Findlay, ¹ one of this class of pioneers, led Daniel Boone through
Cumberland Gap, the trader's bands of horses roamed the western slopes
of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattle grazed among the deer on the
green banks of the old Cherokee (Tennessee) River. He was the pioneer
settler beyond the high hills; for he built, in the center of the Indian
towns, the first white man's cabin--with its larger annex, the trading
house--and dwelt there during the greater part of the year. He was
America's first magnate of international commerce. His furs--for which
he paid in guns, knives, ammunition, vermilion paint, mirrors, and
cloth--lined kings' mantles, and hatted the Lords of Trade as they
strode to their council chamber in London to discuss his business and to
pass those regulations which might have seriously hampered him but for
his resourcefulness in circumventing them!

¹ The name is spelled in various ways: Findlay, Finlay, Findley.

He was the first frontier warrior, for he either fought off or fell
before small parties of hostile Indians who, in the interest of the
Spanish or French, raided his pack-horse caravans on the march. Often,
too, side by side with the red brothers of his adoption, he fought in
the intertribal wars. His was the first educative and civilizing
influence in the Indian towns. He endeavored to cure the Indians of
their favorite midsummer madness, war, by inducing them to raise stock
and poultry and improve their corn, squash, and pea gardens. It is not
necessary to impute to him philanthropic motives. He was a practical man
and he saw that war hurt his trade: it endangered his summer caravans
and hampered the autumn hunt for deerskins.

In the earliest days of the eighteenth century, when the colonists of
Virginia and the Carolinas were only a handful, it was the trader who
defeated each successive attempt of French and Spanish agents to weld
the tribes into a confederacy for the annihilation of the English
settlements. The English trader did his share to prevent what is now the
United States from becoming a part of a Latin empire and to save it for
a race having the Anglo-Saxon ideal and speaking the English tongue.

The colonial records of the period contain items which, taken singly,
make small impression on the casual reader but which, listed together,
throw a strong light on the past and bring that mercenary figure, the
trader, into so bold a relief that the design verges on the heroic. If
we wonder, for instance, why the Scotch Highlanders who settled in the
wilds at the headwaters of the Cape Fear River, about 1729, and were
later followed by Welsh and Huguenots, met with no opposition from the
Indians, the mystery is solved when we discover, almost by accident, a
few printed lines which record that, in 1700, the hostile natives on the
Cape Fear were subdued to the English and brought into friendly alliance
with them by Colonel William Bull, a trader. We read further and learn
that the Spaniards in Florida had long endeavored to unite the tribes in
Spanish and French territory against the English and that the influence
of traders prevented the consummation. The Spaniards, in 1702, had
prepared to invade English territory with nine hundred Indians. The plot
was discovered by Creek Indians and disclosed to their friends, the
traders, who immediately gathered together five hundred warriors,
marched swiftly to meet the invaders, and utterly routed them. Again,
when the Indians, incited by the Spanish at St. Augustine, rose against
the English in 1715, and the Yamasi Massacre occurred in South Carolina,
it was due to the traders that some of the settlements at least were not
wholly unprepared to defend themselves.

The early English trader was generally an intelligent man; sometimes
educated, nearly always fearless and resourceful. He knew the one sure
basis on which men of alien blood and far separated stages of moral and
intellectual development can meet in understanding--namely, the truth of
the spoken word. He recognized honor as the bond of trade and the warp
and woof of human intercourse. The uncorrupted savage also had his plain
interpretation of the true word in the mouths of men, and a name for it.
He called it the "Old Beloved Speech"; and he gave his confidence to the
man who spoke this speech even in the close barter for furs.

We shall find it worth while to refer to the map of America as it was in
the early days of the colonial fur trade, about the beginning of the
eighteenth century. A narrow strip of loosely strung English settlements
stretched from the north border of New England to the Florida line.
North Florida was Spanish territory. On the far distant southwestern
borders of the English colonies were the southern possessions of France.
The French sphere of influence extended up the Mississippi, and thence
by way of rivers and the Great Lakes to its base in Canada on the
borders of New England and New York. In South Carolina dwelt the Yamasi
tribe of about three thousand warriors, their chief towns only sixty or
eighty miles distant from the Spanish town of St. Augustine. On the
west, about the same distance northeast of New Orleans, in what is now
Alabama and Georgia, lay the Creek nation. There French garrisons held
Mobile and Fort Alabama. The Creeks at this time numbered over four
thousand warriors. The lands of the Choctaws, a tribe of even larger
fighting strength, began two hundred miles north of New Orleans and
extended along the Mississippi. A hundred and sixty miles northeast of
the Choctaw towns were the Chickasaws, the bravest and most successful
warriors of all the tribes south of the Iroquois. The Cherokees, in part
seated within the Carolinas, on the upper courses of the Savannah River,
mustered over six thousand men at arms. East of them were the Catawba
towns. North of them were the Shawanoes and Delawares, in easy
communication with the tribes of Canada. Still farther north, along the
Mohawk and other rivers joining with the Hudson and Lake Ontario stood
the "long houses" of the fiercest and most warlike of all the savages,
the Iroquois or Six Nations.

The Indians along the English borders outnumbered the colonists perhaps
ten to one. If the Spanish and the French had succeeded in the
conspiracy to unite on their side all the tribes, a red billow of
tomahawk wielders would have engulfed and extinguished the English
settlements. The French, it is true, made allies of the Shawanoes, the
Delawares, the Choctaws, and a strong faction of the Creeks; and they
finally won over the Cherokees after courting them for more than twenty
years. But the Creeks in part, the powerful Chickasaws, and the Iroquois
Confederacy, or Six Nations, remained loyal to the English. In both
North and South it was the influence of the traders that kept these red
tribes on the English side. The Iroquois were held loyal by Sir William
Johnson and his deputy, George Croghan, the "King of Traders." The
Chickasaws followed their "best-beloved" trader, James Adair; and among
the Creeks another trader, Lachlan McGillivray, wielded a potent
influence.

Lachlan McGillivray was a Highlander. He landed in Charleston in 1735 at
the age of sixteen and presently joined a trader's caravan as pack-horse
boy. A few years later he married a woman of the Creeks. On many
occasions he defeated French and Spanish plots with the Creeks for the
extermination of the colonists in Georgia and South Carolina. His action
in the final war with the French (1760), when the Indian terror was
raging, is typical. News came that four thousand Creek warriors,
reinforced by French Choctaws, were about to fall on the southern
settlements. At the risk of their lives, McGillivray and another trader
named Galphin hurried from Charleston to their trading house on the
Georgia frontier. Thither they invited several hundred Creek warriors,
feasted and housed them for several days, and finally won them from
their purpose. McGillivray had a brilliant son, Alexander, who about
this time became a chief in his mother's nation--perhaps on this very
occasion, as it was an Indian custom, in making a brotherhood pact, to
send a son to dwell in the brother's house. We shall meet that son again
as the Chief of the Creeks and the terrible scourge of Georgia and
Tennessee in the dark days of the Revolutionary War.

The bold deeds of the early traders, if all were to be told, would
require a book as long as the huge volume written by James Adair, the
"English Chickasaw." Adair was an Englishman who entered the Indian
trade in 1785 and launched upon the long and dangerous trail from
Charleston to the upper towns of the Cherokees, situated in the present
Monroe County, Tennessee. Thus he was one of the earliest pioneers of
the Old Southwest; and he was Tennessee's first author. "I am well
acquainted," he says, "with near two thousand miles of the American
continent"--a statement which gives one some idea of an early trader's
enterprise, hardihood, and peril. Adair's "two thousand miles" were
twisting Indian trails and paths he slashed out for himself through
uninhabited wilds, for when not engaged in trade, hunting, literature,
or war, it pleased him to make solitary trips of exploration. These seem
to have led him chiefly northward through the Appalachians, of which he
must have been one of the first white explorers.

A many-sided man was James Adair--cultured, for his style suffers not by
comparison with other writers of his day, no stranger to Latin and
Greek, and not ignorant of Hebrew, which he studied to assist him in
setting forth his ethnological theory that the American Indians were the
descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Before we dismiss his
theory with a smile, let us remember that he had not at his disposal the
data now available which reveal points of likeness in custom, language
formation, and symbolism among almost all primitive peoples. The
formidable title-page of his book in itself suggests an author keenly
observant, accurate as to detail, and possessed of a versatile and
substantial mind. Most of the pages were written in the towns of the
Chickasaws, with whom he lived "as a friend and brother," but from whose
"natural jealousy" and "prying disposition" he was obliged to conceal
his papers. "Never," he assures us, "was a literary work begun and
carried on with more disadvantages!"

Despite these disabilities the author wrote a book of absorbing
interest. His intimate sympathetic pictures of Indian life as it was
before the tribes had been conquered are richly valuable to the lover of
native lore and to the student of the history of white settlement. The
author believes, as he must, in the supremacy of his own race, but he
nevertheless presents the Indians' side of the argument as no man could
who had not made himself one of them. He thereby adds interest to those
fierce struggles which took place along the border; for he shows us the
red warrior not as a mere brute with a tomahawk but as a human creature
with an ideal of his own, albeit an ideal that must give place to a
better. Even in view of the red man's hideous methods of battle and
inhuman treatment of captives, we cannot ponder unmoved Adair's
description of his preparations for war--the fasting, the abstention
from all family intercourse, and the purification rites and prayers for
three days in the house set apart, while the women, who might not come
close to their men in this fateful hour, stood throughout the night till
dawn chanting before the door. Another poetic touch the author gives us,
from the Cherokee--or Cheerake as he spells it--explaining that the
root, chee-ra, means fire. A Cherokee never extinguished fire save on
the occasion of a death, when he thrust a burning torch into the water
and said, Neetah intahah--"the days appointed him were finished." The
warrior slain in battle was held to have been balanced by death and it
was said of him that "he was weighed on the path and made light." Adair
writes that the Cherokees, until corrupted by French agents and by the
later class of traders who poured rum among them like water, were
honest, industrious, and friendly. They were ready to meet the white man
with their customary phrase of good will: "I shall firmly shake hands
with your speech." He was intimately associated with this tribe from
1735 to 1744, when he diverted his activities to the Chickasaws.

It was from the Cherokees' chief town, Great Telliko, in the
Appalachians, that Adair explored the mountains. He describes the pass
through the chain which was used by the Indians and which, from his
outline of it, was probably the Cumberland Gap. He relates many
incidents of the struggle with the French--manifestations even in this
remote wilderness of the vast conflict that was being waged for the New
World by two imperial nations of the Old.

Adair undertook, at the solicitation of Governor Glen of South Carolina,
the dangerous task of opening up trade with the Choctaws, a tribe
mustering upwards of five thousand warriors who were wholly in the
French interest. Their country lay in what is now the State of
Mississippi along the great river, some seven hundred miles west and
southwest of Charleston. After passing the friendly Creek towns the
trail led on for 150 miles through what was practically the enemy's
country. Adair, owing to what he likes to term his "usual good fortune,"
reached the Choctaw country safely and by his adroitness and substantial
presents won the friendship of the influential chief, Red Shoe, whom he
found in a receptive mood, owing to a French agent's breach of
hospitality involving Red Shoe's favorite wife. Adair thus created a
large pro-English faction among the Choctaws, and his success seriously
impaired French prestige with all the southwestern tribes. Several times
French Choctaws bribed to murder him, waylaid Adair on the trail--twice
when he was alone--only to be baffled by the imperturbable
self-possession and alert wit which never failed him in emergencies.

Winning a Choctaw trade cost Adair, besides attacks on his life, £2200,
for which he was never reimbursed, notwithstanding Governor Glen's
agreement with him. And, on his return to Charleston, while the Governor
was detaining him "on one pretext or another," he found that a new
expedition, which the Governor was favoring for reasons of his own, had
set out to capture his Chickasaw trade and gather in "the expected great
crop of deerskins and beaver... before I could possibly return to the
Chikkasah Country." Nothing daunted, however, the hardy trader set out
alone.

In the severity of winter, frost, snow, hail and heavy rains succeed
each other in these climes, so that I partly rode and partly swam to the
Chikkasah country; for not expecting to stay long below [in Charleston]
I took no leathern canoe. Many of the broad, deep creeks... had now
overflowed their banks, ran at a rapid rate and were unpassable to any
but desperate people:... the rivers and swamps were dreadful by rafts of
timber driving down the former and the great fallen trees floating in
the latter.... Being forced to wade deep through cane swamps or woody
thickets, it proved very troublesome to keep my firearms dry on which,
as a second means, my life depended.

Nevertheless Adair defeated the Governor's attempt to steal his trade,
and later on published the whole story in the Charleston press and sent
in a statement of his claims to the Assembly, with frank observations on
His Excellency himself. We gather that his bold disregard of High
Personages set all Charleston in an uproar!

Adair is tantalizingly modest about his own deeds. He devotes pages to
prove that an Indian rite agrees with the Book of Leviticus but only a
paragraph to an exploit of courage and endurance such as that ride and
swim for the Indian trade. We have to read between the lines to find the
man; but he well repays the search. Briefly, incidentally, he mentions
that on one trip he was captured by the French, who were so,

well acquainted with the great damages I had done to them and feared
others I might occasion, as to confine me a close prisoner... in the
Alebahma garrison. They were fully resolved to have sent me down to
Mobile or New Orleans as a capital criminal to be hanged... but I
doubted not of being able to extricate myself some way or other. They
appointed double centries over me for some days before I was to be sent
down in the French King's large boat. They were strongly charged against
laying down their weapons or suffering any hostile thing to be in the
place where I was kept, as they deemed me capable of any mischief....
About an hour before we were to set off by water I escaped from them by
land.... I took through the middle of the low land covered with briers
at full speed. I heard the French clattering on horseback along the
path... and the howling savages pursuing..., but my usual good fortune
enabled me to leave them far enough behind....

One feels that a few of the pages given up to Leviticus might well have
been devoted to a detailed account of this escape from "double centries"
and a fortified garrison, and the plunge through the tangled wilds, by a
man without gun or knife or supplies, and who for days dared not show
himself upon the trail.

There is too much of "my usual good fortune" in Adair's narrative; such
luck as his argues for extraordinary resources in the man. Sometimes we
discover only through one phrase on a page that he must himself have
been the hero of an event he relates in the third person. This seems to
be the case in the affair of Priber, which was the worst of those
"damages" Adair did to the French. Priber was "a gentleman of curious
and speculative temper" sent by the French in 1736 to Great Telliko to
win the Cherokees to their interest. At this time Adair was trading with
the Cherokees. He relates that Priber,

more effectually to answer the design of his commission... ate, drank,
slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself with the Indians, so that it
was not easy to distinguish him from the natives,--he married also with
them, and being endued with a strong understanding and retentive memory
he soon learned their dialect, and by gradual advances impressed them
with a very ill opinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent,
avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflated the
artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their own importance
in the American scale of power.... Having thus infected them... he
easily formed them into a nominal republican government--crowned their
old Archi-magus emperor after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a
variety of high-sounding titles for all the members of his imperial
majesty's red court.

Priber cemented the Cherokee empire "by slow but sure degrees to the
very great danger of our southern colonies." His position was that of
Secretary of State and as such, with a studiedly provocative arrogance,
he carried on correspondence with the British authorities. The colonial
Government seems, on this occasion, to have listened to the traders and
to have realized that Priber was a danger, for soldiers were sent to
take him prisoner. The Cherokees, however, had so firmly "shaked hands"
with their Secretary's admired discourse that they threatened to take
the warpath if their beloved man were annoyed, and the soldiers went
home without him--to the great hurt of English prestige. The Cherokee
empire had now endured for five years and was about to rise "into a far
greater state of puissance by the acquisition of the Muskohge, Chocktaw
and the Western Mississippi Indians," when fortunately for the history
of British colonization in America, "an accident befell the Secretary."

It is in connection with this "accident" that the reader suspects the
modest but resourceful Adair of conniving with Fate. Since the military
had failed and the Government dared not again employ force, other means
must be found; the trader provided them. The Secretary with his Cherokee
bodyguard journeyed south on his mission to the Creeks. Secure, as he
supposed, he lodged overnight in an Indian town. But there a company of
English traders took him into custody, along with his bundle of
manuscripts presumably intended for the French commandant at Fort
Alabama, and handed him over to the Governor of Georgia, who imprisoned
him and kept him out of mischief till he died.

As a Briton, Adair contributed to Priber's fate; and as such he approves
it. As a scholar with philosophical and ethnological leanings, however,
he deplores it, and hopes that Priber's valuable manuscripts may "escape
the despoiling hands of military power." Priber had spent his leisure in
compiling a Cherokee dictionary; Adair's occupation, while domiciled in
his winter house in Great Telliko, was the writing of his Indian
Appendix to the Pentateuch. As became brothers in science, they had
exchanged notes, so we gather from Adair's references to conversations
and correspondence. Adair's difficulties as an author, however, had been
increased by a treacherous lapse from professional etiquette on the part
of the Secretary: "He told them [the Indians] that in the very same
manner as he was their great Secretary, I was the devil's clerk, or an
accursed one who marked on paper the bad speech of the evil ones of
darkness." On his own part Adair admits that his object in this
correspondence was to trap the Secretary into something more serious
than literary errata. That is, he admits it by implication; he says the
Secretary "feared" it. During the years of their duel, Adair apparently
knew that the scholarly compiler of the Cherokee dictionary was secretly
inciting members of this particular Lost Tribe to tomahawk the
discoverer of their biblical origin; and Priber, it would seem, knew
that he knew!

Adair shows, inferentially, that land encroachment was not the sole
cause of those Indian wars with which we shall deal in a later chapter.
The earliest causes were the instigations of the French and the rewards
which they offered for English scalps. But equally provocative of Indian
rancor were the acts of sometimes merely stupid, sometimes dishonest,
officials; the worst of these, Adair considered, was the cheapening of
the trade through the granting of general licenses.

Formerly each trader had a license for two [Indian] towns.... At my
first setting out among them, a number of traders... journeyed through
our various nations in different companies and were generally men of
worth; of course they would have a living price for their goods, which
they carried on horseback to the remote Indian countries at very great
expences.... [The Indians] were kept under proper restraint, were easy
in their minds and peaceable on account of the plain, honest lessons
daily inculcated on them... but according to the present unwise plan,
two and even three Arablike peddlars sculk about in one of those
villages... who are generally the dregs and offs-courings of our
climes... by inebriating the Indians with their nominally prohibited and
poisoning spirits, they purchase the necessaries of life at four and
five hundred per cent cheaper than the orderly traders.... Instead of
showing good examples of moral conduct, beside the other part of life,
they instruct the unknowing and imitating savages in many diabolical
lessons of obscenity and blasphemy.

In these statements, contemporary records bear him out. There is no
sadder reading than the many pleas addressed by the Indian chiefs to
various officials to stop the importation of liquor into their country,
alleging the debauchment of their young men and warning the white man,
with whom they desired to be friends, that in an Indian drink and blood
lust quickly combined.

Adair's book was published in London in 1775. He wrote it to be read by
Englishmen as well as Americans; and some of his reflections on liberty,
justice, and Anglo-Saxon unity would not sound unworthily today. His
sympathies were with "the principles of our Magna Charta Americana"; but
he thought the threatened division of the English-speaking peoples the
greatest evil that could befall civilization. His voluminous work
discloses a man not only of wide mental outlook but a practical man with
a sense of commercial values. Yet, instead of making a career for 
himself among his own caste, he made his home for over thirty years in
the Chickasaw towns; and it is plain that, with the exception of some of
his older brother traders, he preferred the Chickasaw to any other
society.

The complete explanation of such men as Adair we need not expect to find
stated anywhere--not even in and between the lines of his book. The
conventionalist would seek it in moral obliquity; the radical, in a
temperament that is irked by the superficialities that comprise so large
a part of conventional standards. The reason for his being what he was
is almost the only thing Adair did not analyze in his book. Perhaps, to
him, it was self evident. We may let it be so to us, and see it most
clearly presented in a picture composed from some of his brief sketches:
A land of grass and green shade inset with bright waters, where deer and
domestic cattle herded together along the banks; a circling group of
houses, their white-clayed walls sparkling under the sun's rays, and,
within and without, the movement of "a friendly and sagacious people,"
who "kindly treated and watchfully guarded" their white brother in peace
and war, and who conversed daily with him in the Old Beloved Speech
learned first of Nature. "Like towers in cities beyond the common size
of those of the Indians" rose the winter and summer houses and the huge
trading house which the tribe had built for their best beloved friend in
the town's center, because there he would be safest from attack. On the
rafters hung the smoked and barbecued delicacies taken in the hunt and
prepared for him by his red servants, who were also his comrades at home
and on the dangerous trail. "Beloved old women" kept an eye on his small
sons, put to drowse on panther skins so that they might grow up brave
warriors. Nothing was there of artifice or pretense, only "the needful
things to make a reasonable life happy." All was as primitive, naive,
and contented as the woman whose outline is given once in a few strokes,
proudly and gayly penciled: "I have the pleasure of writing this by the
side of a Chikkasah female, as great a princess as ever lived among the
ancient Peruvians or Mexicans, and she bids me be sure not to mark the
paper wrong after the manner of most of the traders; otherwise it will
spoil the making good bread or homony!"

His final chapter is the last news of James Adair, type of the earliest
trader. Did his bold attacks on corrupt officials and rum peddlers--made
publicly before Assemblies and in print--raise for him a dense cloud of
enmity that dropped oblivion on his memory? Perhaps. But, in truth, his
own book is all the history of him we need. It is the record of a man.
He lived a full life and served his day; and it matters not that a mist
envelops the place where unafraid he met the Last Enemy, was "weighed on
the path and made light."




CHAPTER IV.

The Passing Of The French Peril

The great pile of the Appalachian peaks was not the only barrier which
held back the settler with his plough and his rifle from following the
trader's tinkling caravans into the valleys beyond. Over the hills the
French were lords of the land. The frontiersman had already felt their
enmity through the torch and tomahawk of their savage allies. By his own
strength alone he could not cope with the power entrenched beyond the
hills; so he halted. But that power, by its unachievable desire to be
overlord of two hemispheres, was itself to precipitate events which
would open the westward road.

The recurring hour in the cycle of history, when the issue of Autocracy
against Democracy cleaves the world, struck for the men of the
eighteenth century as the second half of that century dawned. In our own
day, happily, that issue has been perceived by the rank and file of the
people. In those darker days, as France and England grappled in that
conflict of systems which culminated in the Seven Years' War, the
fundamental principles at stake were clear to only a handful of thinking
men.

But abstractions, whether clear or obscure, do not cause ambassadors to
demand their passports. The declaration of war awaits the overt act.
Behold, then, how great a matter is kindled by a little fire! The casus
belli between France and England in the Seven Years' War--the war which
humbled France in Europe and lost her India and Canada--had to do with a
small log fort built by a few Virginians in 1754 at the Forks of the
Ohio River and wrested from them in the same year by a company of
Frenchmen from Canada.

The French claimed the valley of the Ohio as their territory; the
English claimed it as theirs. The dispute was of long standing. The
French claim was based on discovery; the English claim, on the
sea-to-sea charters of Virginia and other colonies and on treaties with
the Six Nations. The French refused to admit the right of the Six
Nations to dispose of the territory. The English were inclined to
maintain the validity of their treaties with the Indians. Especially was
Virginia so inclined, for a large share of the Ohio lay within her
chartered domain.

The quarrel had entered its acute phase in 1749, when both the rival
claimants took action to assert their sovereignty. The Governor of
Canada sent an envoy, Céloron de Blainville, with soldiers, to take
formal possession of the Ohio for the King of France. In the same year
the English organized in Virginia the Ohio Company for the colonization
of the same country; and summoned Christopher Gist, explorer, trader,
and guide, from his home on the Yadkin and dispatched him to survey the
land.

Then appeared on the scene that extraordinary man, Robert Dinwiddie,
Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, erstwhile citizen of Glasgow. His
correspondence from Virginia during his seven years' tenure of office
(1751-58) depicts the man with a vividness surpassing paint. He was as
honest as the day--as honest as he was fearless and fussy. But he had no
patience; he wanted things done and done at once, and his way was the
way to do them. People who did not think as he thought didn't think at
all. On this drastic premise he went to work. There was of course
continuous friction between him and the House of Burgesses. Dinwiddie
had all a Scot's native talent for sarcasm. His letters, his addresses,
perhaps in particular his addresses to the House, bristled with
satirical thrusts at his opponents. If he had spelled out in full all
the words he was so eager to write, he would have been obliged to lessen
his output; so he used a shorthand system of his own, peculiar enough to
be remarkable even though abbreviations were the rule in that day. Even
the dignity of Kings he sacrificed to speed, and we find "His Majesty"
abbreviated to "H M'y"; yet a smaller luminary known as "His Honor"
fares better, losing only the last letter--"His Hono." "Ho." stands for
"house" and "yt" for "that," "what," "it," and "anything else," as
convenient. Many of his letters wind up with "I am ve'y much fatig'd."
We know that he must have been!

It was a formidable task that confronted Dinwiddie--to possess and
defend the Ohio. Christopher Gist returned in 1751, having surveyed the
valley for the Ohio Company as far as the Scioto and Miami rivers, and
in the following year the survey was ratified by the Indians. The
Company's men were busy blazing trails through the territory and
building fortified posts. But the French dominated the territory. They
had built and occupied with troops Fort Le Bœuf on French Creek, a
stream flowing into the Allegheny. We may imagine Dinwiddie's rage at
this violation of British soil by French soldiers and how he must have
sputtered to the young George Washington, when he summoned that officer
and made him the bearer of a letter to the French commander at Fort Le
Bœuf, to demand that French troops be at once withdrawn from the Ohio.

Washington made the journey to Fort Le Bœuf in December, 1753, but the
mission of course proved fruitless. Dinwiddie then wrote to London
urging that a force be sent over to help the colonies maintain their
rights and, under orders from the Crown, suggested by himself, he wrote
to the governors of all the other colonies to join with Virginia in
raising troops to settle the ownership of the disputed territory. From
Governor Dobbs of North Carolina he received an immediate response. By
means of logic, sarcasm, and the entire force of his prerogatives,
Dinwiddie secured from his own balking Assembly £10,000 with which to
raise troops. From Maryland he obtained nothing. There were three
prominent Marylanders in the Ohio Company, but--or because of this--the
Maryland Assembly voted down the measure for a military appropriation.
On June 18, 1754, Dinwiddie wrote, with unusually full spelling for him:

I am perswaded had His Majesty's Com'ds to the other Colonies been duely
obey'd, and the necessary Assistance given by them, the Fr. wou'd have
long ago have been oblig'd entirely to have evacuated their usurp'd
Possession of the King's Lands, instead of w'ch they are daily becoming
more formidable, whilst every Gov't except No. Caro. has amus'd me with
Expectations that have proved fruitless, and at length refuse to give
any Supply, unless in such a manner as must render it ineffectual.

This saddened mood with its deliberate penmanship did not last long.
Presently Dinwiddie was making a Round Robin of himself in another
series of letters to Governors, Councilors, and Assemblymen, frantically
beseeching them for "H. M'y's hono." and their own, and, if not, for
"post'r'ty," to rise against the cruel French whose Indians were
harrying the borders again and "Basely, like Virmin, stealing and
carrying off the helpless infant"--as nice a simile, by the way, as any
Sheridan ever put into the mouth of Mrs. Malaprop.

Dinwiddie saw his desires thwarted on every hand by the selfish spirit
of localism and jealousy which was more rife in America in those days
than it is today. Though the phrase "capitalistic war" had not yet been
coined, the great issues of English civilization on this continent were
befogged, for the majority in the colonies, by the trivial fact that the
shareholders in the Ohio Company stood to win by a vigorous prosecution
of the war and to lose if it were not prosecuted at all. The irascible
Governor, however, proceeded with such men and means as he could obtain.

And now in the summer of 1754 came the "overt act" which precipitated
the inevitable war. The key to the valley of the Ohio was the tongue of
land at the Forks, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela join their
waters in the Beautiful River. This site--today Pittsburgh--if occupied
and held by either nation would give that nation the command of the
Ohio. Occupied it was for a brief hour by a small party of Virginians,
under Captain William Trent; but no sooner had they erected on the spot
a crude fort than the French descended upon them. What happened then all
the world knows: how the French built on the captured site their great
Fort Duquesne; how George Washington with an armed force, sent by
Dinwiddie to recapture the place, encountered French and Indians at
Great Meadows and built Fort Necessity, which he was compelled to
surrender; how in the next year (1755) General Braddock arrived from
across the sea and set out to take Fort Duquesne, only to meet on the
way the disaster called "Braddock's Defeat"; and how, before another
year had passed, the Seven Years' War was raging in Europe, and England
was allied with the enemies of France.

From the midst of the debacle of Braddock's defeat rises the figure of
the young Washington. Twenty-three he was then, tall and spare and
hardbodied from a life spent largely in the open. When Braddock fell,
this Washington appeared. Reckless of the enemy's bullets, which spanged
about him and pierced his clothes, he dashed up and down the lines in an
effort to rally the panic-stricken redcoats. He was too late to save the
day, but not to save a remnant of the army and bring out his own
Virginians in good order. Whether among the stay-at-homes and voters of
credits there were some who would have ascribed Washington's conduct on
that day to the fact that his brothers were large shareholders in the
Ohio Company and that Fort Duquesne was their personal property or
"private interest," history does not say. We may suppose so.

North Carolina, the one colony which had not "amus'd" the Governor of
Virginia "with Expectations that proved fruitless," had voted £12,000
for the war and had raised two companies of troops. One of these, under
Edward Brice Dobbs, son of Governor Dobbs, marched with Braddock; and in
that company as wagoner went Daniel Boone, then in his twenty-second
year. Of Boone's part in Braddock's campaign nothing more is recorded
save that on the march he made friends with John Findlay, the trader,
his future guide into Kentucky; and that, on the day of the defeat, when
his wagons were surrounded, he escaped by slashing the harness, leaping
on the back of one of his horses, and dashing into the forest.

Meanwhile the southern tribes along the border were comparatively quiet.
That they well knew a colossal struggle between the two white races was
pending and were predisposed to ally themselves with the stronger is not
to be doubted. French influence had long been sifting through the
formidable Cherokee nation, which still, however, held true in the main
to its treaties with the English. It was the policy of the Governors of
Virginia and North Carolina to induce the Cherokees to enter strongly
into the war as allies of the English. Their efforts came to nothing
chiefly because of the purely local and suicidal Indian policy of
Governor Glen of South Carolina. There had been some dispute between
Glen and Dinwiddie as to the right of Virginia to trade with the
Cherokees; and Glen had sent to the tribes letters calculated to sow
distrust of all other aspirants for Indian favor, even promising that
certain settlers in the Back Country of North Carolina should be removed
and their holdings restored to the Indians. These letters caused great
indignation in North Carolina, when they came to light, and had the
worst possible effect upon Indian relations. The Indians now inclined
their ear to the French who, though fewer than the English, were at
least united in purpose.

Governor Glen took this inauspicious moment to hold high festival with
the Cherokees. It was the last year of his administration and apparently
he hoped to win promotion to some higher post by showing his
achievements for the fur trade and in the matter of new land acquired.
He plied the Cherokees with drink and induced them to make formal
submission and to cede all their lands to the Crown. When the chiefs
recovered their sobriety, they were filled with rage at what had been
done, and they remembered how the French had told them that the English
intended to make slaves of all the Indians and to steal their lands. The
situation was complicated by another incident. Several Cherokee warriors
returning from the Ohio, whither they had gone to fight for the British,
were slain by frontiersmen. The tribe, in accordance with existing
agreements, applied to Virginia for redress--but received none.

There was thus plenty of powder for an explosion. Governor Lyttleton,
Glen's successor, at last flung the torch into the magazine. He seized,
as hostages, a number of friendly chiefs who were coming to Charleston
to offer tokens of good will and forced them to march under guard on a
military tour which the Governor was making (1759) with intent to
overawe the savages. When this expedition reached Prince George, on the
upper waters of the Savannah, the Indian hostages were confined within
the fort; and the Governor, satisfied with the result of his maneuver
departed south for Charleston. Then followed a tragedy. Some Indian
friends of the imprisoned chiefs attacked the fort, and the commander, a
popular young officer, was treacherously killed during a parley. The
infuriated frontiersmen within the fort fell upon the hostages and slew
them all--twenty-six chiefs--and the Indian war was on.

If all were to be told of the struggle which followed in the Back
Country, the story could not be contained in this book. Many brave and
resourceful men went out against the savages. We can afford only a
passing glance at one of them. Hugh Waddell of North Carolina was the
most brilliant of all the frontier fighters in that war. He was a young
Ulsterman from County Down, a born soldier, with a special genius for
fighting Indians, although he did not grow up on the border, for he
arrived in North Carolina in 1753, at the age of nineteen. He was
appointed by Governor Dobbs to command the second company which North
Carolina had raised for the war, a force of 450 rangers to protect the
border counties; and he presently became the most conspicuous military
figure in the colony. As to his personality, we have only a few meager
details, with a portrait that suggests plainly enough those qualities of
boldness and craft which characterized his tactics. Governor Dobbs
appears to have had a special love towards Hugh, whose family he had
known in Ireland, for an undercurrent of almost fatherly pride is to be
found in the old Governor's reports to the Assembly concerning Waddell's
exploits.

The terror raged for nearly three years. Cabins and fields were burned,
and women and children were slaughtered or dragged away captives. Not
only did immigration cease but many hardy settlers fled from the
country. At length, after horrors indescribable and great toll of life,
the Cherokees gave up the struggle. Their towns were invaded and laid
waste by imperial and colonial troops, and they could do nothing but
make peace. In 1761 they signed a treaty with the English to hold "while
rivers flow and grasses grow and sun and moon endure."

In the previous year (1760) the imperial war had run its course in
America. New France lay prostrate, and the English were supreme not only
on the Ohio but on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Louisbourg,
Quebec, Montreal, Oswego, Niagara, Duquesne, Detroit--all were in
English hands.

Hugh Waddell and his rangers, besides serving with distinction in the
Indian war, had taken part in the capture of Fort Duquesne. This feat
had been accomplished in 1758 by an expedition under General Forbes. The
troops made a terrible march over a new route, cutting a road as they
went. It was November when they approached their objective. The wastes
of snow and their diminished supplies caused such depression among the
men that the officers called a halt to discuss whether or not to proceed
toward Fort Duquesne, where they believed the French to be concentrated
in force. Extravagant sums in guineas were named as suitable reward for
any man who would stalk and catch a French Indian and learn from him the
real conditions inside the fort. The honor, if not the guineas, fell to
John Rogers, one of Waddell's rangers. From the Indian it was learned
that the French had already gone, leaving behind only a few of their
number. As the English drew near, they found that the garrison had blown
up the magazine, set fire to the fort, and made off.

Thus, while New France was already tottering, but nearly two years
before the final capitulation at Montreal, the English again became
masters of the Ohio Company's land--masters of the Forks of the Ohio.
This time they were there to stay. Where the walls of Fort Duquesne had
crumbled in the fire Fort Pitt was to rise, proudly bearing the name of
England's Great Commoner who had directed English arms to victory on
three continents.

With France expelled and the Indians deprived of their white allies, the
westward path lay open to the pioneers, even though the red man himself
would rise again and again in vain endeavor to bar the way. So a new era
begins, the era of exploration for definite purpose, the era of
commonwealth building. In entering on it, we part with the earliest
pioneer--the trader, who first opened the road for both the lone home
seeker and the great land company. He dwindles now to the mere barterer
and so--save for a few chance glimpses--slips out of sight, for his
brave days as Imperial Scout are done.




CHAPTER V.

Boone, The Wanderer

What thoughts filled Daniel Boone's mind as he was returning from
Braddock's disastrous campaign in 1755 we may only conjecture. Perhaps
he was planning a career of soldiering, for in later years he was to
distinguish himself as a frontier commander in both defense and attack.
Or it may be that his heart was full of the wondrous tales told him by
the trader, John Findlay, of that Hunter's Canaan, Kentucky, where
buffalo and deer roamed in thousands. Perhaps he meant to set out ere
long in search of the great adventure of his dreams, despite the
terrible dangers of trail making across the zones of war into the
unknown.

However that may be, Boone straightway followed neither of these
possible plans on his return to the Yadkin but halted for a different
adventure. There, a rifle shot's distance from his threshold, was
offered him the oldest and sweetest of all hazards to the daring. He was
twenty-two, strong and comely and a whole man; and therefore he was in
no mind to refuse what life held out to him in the person of Rebecca
Bryan. Rebecca was the daughter of Joseph Bryan, who had come to the
Yadkin from Pennsylvania some time before the Boones; and she was in her
seventeenth year.

Writers of an earlier and more sentimental period than ours have
endeavored to supply, from the saccharine stores of their fancy, the
romantic episodes connected with Boone's wooing which history has
omitted to record. Hence the tale that the young hunter, walking abroad
in the spring gloaming, saw Mistress Rebecca's large dark eyes shining
in the dusk of the forest, mistook them for a deer's eyes and shot--his
aim on this occasion fortunately being bad! But if Boone's rifle was
missing its mark at ten paces, Cupid's dart was speeding home. So runs
the story concocted a hundred years later by some gentle scribe ignorant
alike of game seasons, the habits of hunters, and the way of a man with
a maid in a primitive world.

Daniel and Rebecca were married in the spring of 1756. Squire Boone, in
his capacity as justice of the peace, tied the knot; and in a smallcabin 
built upon his spacious lands the young couple set up housekeeping. Here
Daniel's first two sons were born. In the third year of his marriage,
when the second child was a babe in arms, Daniel removed with his wife
and their young and precious family to Culpeper County in eastern
Virginia, for the border was going through its darkest days of the
French and Indian War. During the next two or three years we find him in
Virginia engaged as a wagoner, hauling tobacco in season; but back on
the border with his rifle, after the harvest, aiding in defense against
the Indians. In 1759 he purchased from his father a lot on Sugar Tree
Creek, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek (Davie County, North Carolina)
and built thereon a cabin for himself. The date when he brought his wife
and children to live in their new abode on the border is not recorded.
It was probably some time after the close of the Indian War. Of Boone
himself during these years we have but scant information. We hear of him
again in Virginia and also as a member of the pack-horse caravan which
brought into the Back Country the various necessaries for the settlers.
We know, too, that in the fall of 1760 he was on a lone hunting trip in
the mountains west of the Yadkin; for until a few years ago there might
be seen, still standing on the banks of Boone's Creek (a small tributary
of the Watauga) in eastern Tennessee, a tree bearing the legend, "D Boon
cilled A BAR on this tree 1760." Boone was always fond of carving his
exploits on trees, and his wanderings have been traced largely by his
arboreal publications. In the next year (1761) he went with Waddell's
rangers when they marched with the army to the final subjugation of the
Cherokee.

That Boone and his family were back on the border in the new cabin
shortly after the end of the war, we gather from the fact that in 1764
he took his little son James, aged seven, on one of his long hunting
excursions. From this time dates the intimate comradeship of father and
son through all the perils of the wilderness, a comradeship to come to
its tragic end ten years later when, as we shall see, the
seventeen-year-old lad fell under the red man's tomahawk as his father
was leading the first settlers towards Kentucky. In the cold nights of
the open camp, as Daniel and James lay under the frosty stars, the
father kept the boy warm snuggled to his breast under the broad flap of
his hunting shirt. Sometimes the two were away from home for months
together, and Daniel declared little James to be as good a woodsman as
his father.

Meanwhile fascinating accounts of the new land of Florida, ceded to
Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, had leaked into the Back
Country; and in the winter of 1765 Boone set off southward on horseback
with seven companions. Colonel James Grant, with whose army Boone had
fought in 1761, had been appointed Governor of the new colony and was
offering generous inducements to settlers. The party traveled along the
borders of South Carolina and Georgia. No doubt they made the greater
part of their way over the old Traders' Trace, the "whitened" warpath;
and they suffered severe hardships. Game became scarcer as they
proceeded. Once they were nigh to perishing of starvation and were saved
from that fate only through chance meeting with a band of Indians who,
seeing their plight, made camp and shared their food with
them--according to the Indian code in time of peace.

Boone's party explored Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola, and
Daniel became sufficiently enamored of the tropical south to purchase
there land and a house. His wife, however, was unwilling to go to
Florida, and she was not long in convincing the hunter that he would
soon tire of a gameless country. A gameless country! Perhaps this was
the very thought which turned the wanderer's desires again towards the
land of Kentucky. ¹ The silencing of the enemy's whisper in the Cherokee
camps had opened the border forests once more to the nomadic rifleman.
Boone was not alone in the desire to seek out what lay beyond. His
brother-in-law, John Stewart, and a nephew by marriage, Benjamin
Cutbirth, or Cutbird, with two other young men, John Baker and James
Ward, in 1766 crossed the Appalachian Mountains, probably by stumbling
upon the Indian trail winding from base to summit and from peak to base
again over this part of the great hill barrier. They eventually reached
the Mississippi River and, having taken a good quantity of peltry on the
way, they launched upon the stream and came in time to New Orleans,
where they made a satisfactory trade of their furs.

¹ Kentucky, from Ken-ta-ke, an Iroquois word meaning "the place of old
fields." Adair calls the territory "the old fields." The Indians
apparently used the word "old," as we do, in a sense of endearment and
possession as well as relative to age.

Boone was fired anew by descriptions of this successful feat, in which
two of his kinsmen had participated. He could no longer be held back. He
must find the magic door that led through the vast mountain wall into
Kentucky--Kentucky, with its green prairies where the buffalo and deer
were as "ten thousand thousand cattle feeding" in the wilds, and where
the balmy air vibrated with the music of innumerable wings.

Accordingly, in the autumn of 1767, Boone began his quest of the
delectable country in the company of his friend, William Hill, who had
been with him in Florida. Autumn was the season of departure on all
forest excursions, because by that time the summer crops had been
gathered in and the day of the deer had come. By hunting, the explorers
must feed themselves on their travels and with deerskins and furs they
must on their return recompense those who had supplied their outfit.
Boone, the incessant but not always lucky wanderer, was in these years
ever in debt for an outfit.

Boone and Hill made their way over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies
and crossed the Holston and Clinch rivers. Then they came upon the west
fork of the Big Sandy and, believing that it would lead them to the
Ohio, they continued for at least a hundred miles to the westward. Here
they found a buffalo trace, one of the many beaten out by the herds in
their passage to the salt springs, and they followed it into what is now
Floyd County in eastern Kentucky. But this was not the prairie land
described by Findlay; it was rough and hilly and so overgrown with
laurel as to be almost impenetrable. They therefore wended their way
back towards the river, doubtless erected the usual hunter's camp of
skins or blankets and branches, and spent the winter in hunting and
trapping. Spring found them returning to their homes on the Yadkin with
a fair winter's haul.

Such urgent desire as Boone's, however, was not to be defeated. The next
year brought him his great opportunity. John Findlay came to the Yadkin
with a horse pack of needles and linen and peddler's wares to tempt the
slim purses of the Back Country folk. The two erstwhile comrades in arms
were overjoyed to encounter each other again, and Findlay spent the
winter of 1768-69 in Boone's cabin. While the snow lay deep outside and
good-smelling logs crackled on the hearth, they planned an expedition
into Kentucky through the Gap where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky
touch one another, which Findlay felt confident he could find. Findlay
had learned of this route from cross-mountain traders in 1753, when he
had descended the Ohio to the site of Louisville, whence he had gone
with some Shawanoes as a prisoner to their town of Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki
or Blue Licks. ¹

¹ Hanna, The Wilderness Trail, vol. II, pp. 215-16.

On the first day of May, 1769, Boone and Findlay, accompanied by John
Stewart and three other venturesome spirits, Joseph Holden, James
Mooney, and William Cooley, took horse for the fabled land. Passing
through the Cumberland Gap, they built their first camp in Kentucky on
the Red Lick fork of Station Camp Creek.

This camp was their base of operations. From it, usually in couples, we
infer, the explorers branched out to hunt and to take their observations
of the country. Here also they prepared the deer and buffalo meat for
the winter, dried or smoked the geese they shot in superabundance, made
the tallow and oil needed to keep their weapons in trim, their leather
soft, and their kits waterproof. Their first ill luck befell them in
December when Boone and Stewart were captured by a band of Shawanoes who
were returning from their autumn hunt on Green River. The Indians
compelled the two white men to show them the location of their camp,
took possession of all it contained in skins and furs and also helped
themselves to the horses. They left the explorers with just enough meat
and ammunition to provide for their journey homeward, and told them to
depart and not to intrude again on the red men's hunting grounds. Having
given this pointed warning, the Shawanoes rode on northward towards
their towns beyond the Ohio. On foot, swiftly and craftily, Boone and
his brother-in-law trailed the band for two days. They came upon the
camp in dead of night, recaptured their horses, and fled. But this was a
game in which the Indians themselves excelled, and at this date the
Shawanoes had an advantage over Boone in their thorough knowledge of the
territory; so that within forty-eight hours the white men were once more
prisoners. After they had amused themselves by making Boone caper about
with a horse bell on his neck, while they jeered at him in broken
English, "Steal horse, eh?" the Shawanoes turned north again, this time
taking the two unfortunate hunters with them. Boone and Stewart escaped,
one day on the march, by a plunge into the thick tall canebrake. Though
the Indians did not attempt to follow them through the mazes of the
cane, the situation of the two hunters, without weapons or food, was
serious enough. When they found Station Camp deserted and realized that
their four companions had given them up for dead or lost and had set off
on the trail for home, even such intrepid souls as theirs may have felt
fear. They raced on in pursuit and fortunately fell in not only with
their party but with Squire Boone, Daniel's brother, and Alexander
Neely, who had brought in fresh supplies of rifles, ammunition, flour,
and horses.

After this lucky encounter the group separated. Findlay was ill, and
Holden, Mooney, and Cooley had had their fill of Kentucky; but Squire,
Neely, Stewart, and Daniel were ready for more adventures. Daniel, too,
felt under the positive necessity of putting in another year at hunting
and trapping in order to discharge his debts and provide for his family.
Near the mouth of Red River the new party built their station camp.
Here, in idle hours, Neely read aloud from a copy of Gulliver's Travels
to entertain the hunters while they dressed their deerskins or tinkered
their weapons. In honor of the "Lorbrulgrud" of the book, though with a
pronunciation all their own, they christened the nearest creek; and as
"Lulbegrud Creek" it is still known.

Before the end of the winter the two Boones were alone in the
wilderness. Their brother-in-law, Stewart, had disappeared; and Neely,
discouraged by this tragic event, had returned to the Yadkin. In May,
Squire Boone fared forth, taking with him the season's catch of beaver,
otter, and deerskins to exchange in the North Carolinian trading houses
for more supplies; and Daniel was left solitary in Kentucky.

Now followed those lonely explorations which gave Daniel Boone his
special fame above all Kentucky's pioneers. He was by no means the first
white man to enter Kentucky; and when he did enter, it was as one of a
party, under another man's guidance--if we except his former
disappointing journey into the laurel thickets of Floyd County. But
these others, barring Stewart, who fell there, turned back when they met
with loss and hardship and measured the certain risks against the
possible gains. Boone, the man of imagination, turned to wild earth as
to his kin. His genius lay in the sense of oneness he felt with his
wilderness environment. An instinct he had which these other men, as
courageous perhaps as he, did not possess.

Never in all the times when he was alone in the woods and had no other
man's safety or counsel to consider, did he suffer ill fortune. The
nearest approach to trouble that befell him when alone occurred one day
during this summer when some Indians emerged from their green shelter
and found him, off guard for the moment, standing on a cliff gazing with
rapture over the vast rolling stretches of Kentucky. He was apparently
cut off from escape, for the savages were on three sides, advancing
without haste to take him, meanwhile greeting him with mock amity. Over
the cliff leaped Boone and into the outspread arms of a friendly maple,
whose top bloomed green about sixty feet below the cliff's rim, and left
his would-be captors on the height above, grunting their amazement.

During this summer Boone journeyed through the valleys of the Kentucky
and the Licking. He followed the buffalo traces to the two Blue Licks
and saw the enormous herds licking up the salt earth, a darkly ruddy
moving mass of beasts whose numbers could not be counted. For many miles
he wound along the Ohio, as far as the Falls. He also found the Big Bone
Lick with its mammoth fossils.

In July, 1770, Daniel returned to the Red River camp and there met
Squire Boone with another pack of supplies. The two brothers continued
their hunting and exploration together for some months, chiefly in
Jessamine County, where two caves still bear Boone's name. In that
winter they even braved the Green River ground, whence had come the
hunting Shawanoes who had taken Daniel's first fruits a year before. In
the same year (1770) there had come into Kentucky from the Yadkin
another party of hunters, called, from their lengthy sojourn in the
twilight zone, the Long Hunters. One of these, Gasper Mansker,
afterwards related how the Long Hunters were startled one day by hearing
sounds such as no buffalo or turkey ever made, and how Mansker himself
stole silently under cover of the trees towards the place whence the
strange noises came, and descried Daniel Boone prone on his back with a
deerskin under him, his famous tall black hat beside him and his mouth
opened wide in joyous but apparently none too tuneful song. This
incident gives a true character touch. It is not recorded of any of the
men who turned back that they sang alone in the wilderness.

In March, 1771, the two Boones started homeward, their horses bearing
the rich harvest of furs and deerskins which was to clear Daniel of debt
and to insure the comfort of the family he had not seen for two years.
But again evil fortune met them, this time in the very gates--for in the
Cumberland Gap they were suddenly surrounded by Indians who took
everything from them, leaving them neither guns nor horses.




CHAPTER VI.

The Fight For Kentucky

When Boone returned home he found the Back Country of North Carolina in
the throes of the Regulation Movement. This movement, which had arisen
first from the colonists' need to police their settlements, had more
recently assumed a political character. The Regulators were now in
conflict with the authorities, because the frontier folk were suffering
through excessive taxes, extortionate fees, dishonest land titles, and
the corruption of the courts. In May, 1771, the conflict lost its
quasi-civil nature. The Regulators resorted to arms and were defeated by
the forces under Governor Tryon in the Battle of the Alamance.

The Regulation Movement, which we shall follow in more detail further
on, was a culmination of those causes of unrest which turned men
westward. To escape from oppression and to acquire land beyond the
bounds of tyranny became the earnest desire of independent spirits
throughout the Back Country. But there was another and more potent
reason why the country east of the mountains no longer contented Boone.
Hunting and trapping were Boone's chief means of livelihood. In those
days, deerskins sold for a dollar a skin to the traders at the Forks or
in Hillsborough; beaver at about two dollars and a half, and otter at
from three to five dollars. A pack-horse could carry a load of one
hundred dressed deerskins, and, as currency was scarce, a hundred
dollars was wealth. Game was fast disappearing from the Yadkin. To Boone
above all men, then, Kentucky beckoned. When he returned in the spring
of 1771 from his explorations, it was with the resolve to take his
family at once into the great game country and to persuade some of his
friends to join in this hazard of new fortunes.

The perils of such a venture, only conjectural to us at this distance,
he knew well; but in him there was nothing that shrank from danger,
though he did not court it after the rash manner of many of his
compeers. Neither reckless nor riotous, Boone was never found among
those who opposed violence to authority, even unjust authority; nor was
he ever guilty of the savagery which characterized much of the
retaliatory warfare of that period when frenzied white men bettered the
red man's instruction. In him, courage was illumined with tenderness and
made equable by self-control. Yet, though he was no fiery zealot like
the Ulstermen who were to follow him along the path he had made and who
loved and revered him perhaps because he was so different from
themselves, Boone nevertheless had his own religion. It was a simple
faith best summed up perhaps by himself in his old age when he said that
he had been only an instrument in the hand of God to open the wilderness
to settlement.

Two years passed before Boone could muster a company of colonists for
the dangerous and delectable land. The dishonesty practiced by Lord
Granville's agents in the matter of deeds had made it difficult for
Daniel and his friends to dispose of their acreage. When at last in the
spring of 1773 the Wanderer was prepared to depart, he was again
delayed; this time by the arrival of a little son to whom was given the
name of John. By September, however, even this latest addition to the
party was ready for travel; and that month saw the Boones with a small
caravan of families journeying towards Powell's Valley, whence the
Warrior's Path took its way through Cumberland Gap. At this point on the
march they were to be joined by William Russell, a famous pioneer, from
the Clinch River, with his family and a few neighbors, and by some of
Rebecca Boone's kinsmen, the Bryans, from the lower Yadkin, with a
company of forty men.

Of Rebecca Boone history tells us too little--only that she was born a
Bryan, was of low stature and dark eyed, that she bore her husband ten
children, and lived beside him to old age. Except on his hunts and
explorations, she went with him from one cabined home to another, always
deeper into the wilds. There are no portraits of her. We can see her
only as a shadowy figure moving along the wilderness trails beside the
man who accepted his destiny of God to be a way-shower for those of
lesser faith.

He tires not forever on his leagues of march
Because her feet are set to his footprints,
And the gleam of her bare hand slants across his shoulder.

Boone halted his company on Walden Mountain over Powell's Valley to
await the Bryan contingent and dispatched two young men under the
leadership of his son James, then in his seventeenth year, to notify
Russell of the party's arrival. As the boys were returning with
Russell's son, also a stripling, two of his slaves, and some white
laborers, they missed the path and went into camp for the night. When
dawn broke, disclosing the sleepers, a small war band of Shawanoes, who
had been spying on Boone and his party, fell upon them and slaughtered
them. Only one of Russell's slaves and a laborer escaped. The tragedy
seems augmented by the fact that the point where the boys lost the trail
and made their night quarters was hardly three miles from the main
camp--to which an hour later came the two survivors with their gloomy
tidings. Terror now took hold of the little band of emigrants, and there
were loud outcries for turning back. The Bryans, who had arrived
meanwhile, also advised retreat, saying that the "signs" about the scene
of blood indicated an Indian uprising. Daniel carried the scalped body
of his son, the boy-comrade of his happy hunts, to the camp and buried
it there at the beginning of the trail. His voice alone urged that they
go on.

Fortunately indeed, as events turned out, Boone was overruled, and the
expedition was abandoned. The Bryan party and the others from North
Carolina went back to the Yadkin. Boone himself with his family
accompanied Russell to the Clinch settlement, where he erected a
temporary cabin on the farm of one of the settlers, and then set out
alone on the chase to earn provision for his wife and children through
the winter.

Those who prophesied an Indian war were not mistaken. When the snowy
hunting season had passed and the "Powwowing Days" were come, the Indian
war drum rattled in the medicine house from the borders of Pennsylvania
to those of Carolina. The causes of the strife for which the red men
were making ready must be briefly noted to help us form a just opinion
of the deeds that followed. Early writers have usually represented the
frontiersmen as saints in buckskin and the Indians as fiends without the
shadow of a claim on either the land or humanity. Many later writers
have merely reversed the shield. The truth is that the Indians and the
borderers reacted upon each other to the hurt of both. Paradoxically,
they grew like enough to hate one another with a savage hatred--and both
wanted the land.

Land! Land! was the slogan of all sorts and conditions of men. Tidewater
officials held solemn powwows with the chiefs, gave wampum strings, and
forthwith incorporated. ¹ Chiefs blessed their white brothers who had
"forever brightened the chain of friendship," departed home, and
proceeded to brighten the blades of their tomahawks and to await, not
long, the opportunity to use them on casual hunters who carried in their
kits the compass, the "land-stealer." Usually the surveying hunter was a
borderer; and on him the tomahawk descended with an accelerated gusto.
Private citizens also formed land companies and sent out surveyors,
regardless of treaties. Bold frontiersmen went into No Man's Land and
staked out their claims. In the very year when disaster turned the Boone
party back, James Harrod had entered Kentucky from Pennsylvania and had
marked the site of a settlement.

¹ The activities of the great land companies are described in Alvord's
exhaustive work, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics.

Ten years earlier (1763), the King had issued the famous and much
misunderstood Proclamation restricting his "loving subjects" from the
lands west of the mountains. The colonists interpreted this document as
a tyrannous curtailment of their liberties for the benefit of the fur
trade. We know now that the portion of this Proclamation relating to
western settlement was a wise provision designed to protect the settlers
on the frontier by allaying the suspicions of the Indians, who viewed
with apprehension the triumphal occupation of that vast territory from
Canada to the Gulf of Mexico by the colonizing English. By seeking to
compel all land purchase to be made through the Crown, it was designed
likewise to protect the Indians from "whisky purchase," and to make
impossible the transfer of their lands except with consent of the Indian
Council, or full quota of headmen, whose joint action alone conveyed
what the tribes considered to be legal title. Sales made according to
this form, Sir William Johnson declared to the Lords of Trade, he had
never known to be repudiated by the Indians. This paragraph of the
Proclamation was in substance an embodiment of Johnson's suggestions to
the Lords of Trade. Its purpose was square dealing and pacification; and
shrewd men such as Washington recognized that it was not intended as a
final check to expansion. "A temporary expedient to quiet the minds of
the Indians," Washington called it, and then himself went out along the
Great Kanawha and into Kentucky, surveying land.

It will be asked what had become of the Ohio Company of Virginia and
that fort at the Forks of the Ohio, once a bone of contention between
France and England. Fort Pitt, as it was now called, had fallen foul of
another dispute, this time between Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia
claimed that the far western corner of her boundary ascended just far
enough north to take in Fort Pitt. Pennsylvania asserted that it did
nothing of the sort. The Ohio Company had meanwhile been merged into the
Walpole Company. George Croghan, at Fort Pitt, was the Company's agent
and as such was accused by Pennsylvania of favoring from ulterior
motives the claims of Virginia. Hotheads in both colonies asseverated
that the Indians were secretly being stirred up in connection with the
boundary disputes. If it does not very clearly appear how an Indian
rising would have settled the ownership of Fort Pitt, it is evident
enough where the interests of Virginia and Pennsylvania clashed.
Virginia wanted land for settlement and speculation; Pennsylvania wanted
the Indians left in possession for the benefit of the fur trade. So far
from stirring up the Indians, as his enemies declared, Croghan was as
usual giving away all his substance to keep them quiet. ¹ Indeed, during
this summer of 1774, eleven hundred Indians were encamped about Fort
Pitt visiting him.

¹ The suspicion that Croghan and Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia,
were instigating the war appears to have arisen out of the conduct of
Dr. John Connolly, Dunmore's agent and Croghan's nephew. Croghan had
induced the Shawanoes to bring under escort to Fort Pitt certain English
traders resident in the Indian towns. The escort was fired on by
militiamen under command of Connolly, who also issued a proclamation
declaring a state of war to exist. Connolly, however, probably acted on
his own initiative. He was interested in land on his own behalf and was
by no means the only man at that time who was ready to commit outrages
on Indians in order to obtain it. As Croghan lamented, there was "too
great a spirit in the frontier people for killing Indians."

Two hundred thousand acres in the West--Kentucky and West Virginia--had
been promised to the colonial officers and soldiers who fought in the
Seven Years' War. But after making the Proclamation the British
Government had delayed issuing the patents. Washington interested
himself in trying to secure them; and Lord Dunmore, who also had caught
the "land-fever," ² prodded the British authorities but won only rebuke
for his inconvenient activities. Insistent, however, Dunmore sent out
parties of surveyors to fix the bounds of the soldiers' claims. James
Harrod, Captain Thomas Bullitt, Hancock Taylor, and three McAfee
brothers entered Kentucky, by the Ohio, under Dunmore's orders. John
Floyd went in by the Kanawha as Washington's agent. A bird's-eye view of
that period would disclose to us very few indeed of His Majesty's loving
subjects who were paying any attention to his proclamation. Early in
1774, Harrod began the building of cabins and a fort, and planted corn
on the site of Harrodsburg. Thus to him and not to Boone fell the honor
of founding the first permanent white settlement in Kentucky.

² See Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics, vol. II, pp.
191-94.

When summer came, its thick verdure proffering ambuscade, the air hung
tense along the border. Traders had sent in word that Shawanoes,
Delawares, Mingos, Wyandots, and Cherokees were refusing all other
exchange than rifles, ammunition, knives, and hatchets. White men were
shot down in their fields from ambush. Dead Indians lay among their own
young corn, their scalp locks taken. There were men of both races who
wanted war and meant to have it--and with it the land.

Lord Dunmore, the Governor, resolved that, if war were inevitable, it
should be fought out in the Indian country. With this intent, he wrote
to Colonel Andrew Lewis of Botetourt County, Commander of the Southwest
Militia, instructing him to raise a respectable body of troops and "join
me either at the mouth of the Great Kanawha or Wheeling, or such other
part of the Ohio as may be most convenient for you to meet me." The
Governor himself with a force of twelve hundred proceeded to Fort Pitt,
where Croghan, as we have seen, was extending his hospitality to eleven
hundred warriors from the disaffected tribes.

On receipt of the Governor's letter, Andrew Lewis sent out expresses to
his brother Colonel Charles Lewis, County Lieutenant of Augusta, and to
Colonel William Preston, County Lieutenant of Fincastle, to raise men
and bring them with all speed to the rendezvous at Camp Union
(Lewisburg) on the Big Levels of the Greenbrier (West Virginia). Andrew
Lewis summoned these officers to an expedition for "reducing our
inveterate enemies to reason." Preston called for volunteers to take
advantage of "the opportunity we have so long wished for... this useless
People may now at last be Oblidged to abandon their country." These men
were among not only the bravest but the best of their time; but this was
their view of the Indian and his alleged rights. To eliminate this
"useless people," inveterate enemies of the white race, was, as they saw
it, a political necessity and a religious duty. And we today who profit
by their deeds dare not condemn them.

Fervor less solemn was aroused in other quarters by Dunmore's call to
arms. At Wheeling, some eighty or ninety young adventurers, in charge of
Captain Michael Cresap of Maryland, were waiting for the freshets to
sweep them down the Ohio into Kentucky. When the news reached them, they
greeted it with the wild monotone chant and the ceremonies preliminary
to Indian warfare. They planted the war pole, stripped and painted
themselves, and starting the war dance called on Cresap to be their
"white leader." The captain, however, declined; but in that wild
circling line was one who was a white leader indeed. He was a
sandy-haired boy of twenty--one of the bold race of English Virginians,
rugged and of fiery countenance, with blue eyes intense of glance and
deep set under a high brow that, while modeled for power, seemed
threatened in its promise by the too sensitive chiseling of his lips.
With every nerve straining for the fray, with thudding of feet and
crooning of the blood song, he wheeled with those other mad spirits
round the war pole till the set of sun closed the rites. "That evening
two scalps were brought into camp," so a letter of his reads. Does the
bold savage color of this picture affright us? Would we veil it? Then we
should lose something of the true lineaments of George Rogers Clark,
who, within four short years, was to lead a tiny army of tattered and
starving backwoodsmen, ashamed to quail where he never flinched, through
barrens and icy floods to the conquest of Illinois for the United
States.

Though Cresap had rejected the rôle of "white leader," he did not escape
the touch of infamy. "Cresap's War" was the name the Indians gave to the
bloody encounters between small parties of whites and Indians, which
followed on that war dance and scalping, during the summer months. One
of these encounters must be detailed here because history has assigned
it as the immediate cause of Dunmore's War.

Greathouse, Sapperton, and King, three traders who had a post on Yellow
Creek, a tributary of the Ohio fifty miles below Pittsburgh, invited
several Indians from across the stream to come and drink with them and
their friends. Among the Indians were two or three men of importance in
the Mingo tribe. There were also some women, one of whom was the Indian
wife of Colonel John Gibson, an educated man who had distinguished
himself as a soldier with Forbes in 1758. That the Indians came in amity
and apprehended no treachery was proved by the presence of the women.
Gibson's wife carried her half-caste baby in her shawl. The disreputable
traders plied their guests with drink to the point of intoxication and
then murdered them. King shot the first man and, when he fell, cut his
throat, saying that he had served many a deer in that fashion. Gibson's
Indian wife fled and was shot down in the clearing. A man followed to
dispatch her and her baby. She held the child up to him pleading, with
her last breath, that he would spare it because it was not Indian but
"one of yours." The mother dead, the child was later sent to Gibson.
Twelve Indians in all were killed.

Meanwhile Croghan had persuaded the Iroquois to peace. With the help of
David Zeisberger, the Moravian missionary, and White Eyes, a Delaware
chief, he and Dunmore had won over the Delaware warriors. In the
Cherokee councils, Oconostota demanded that the treaty of peace signed
in 1761 be kept. The Shawanoes, however, led by Cornstalk, were
implacable; and they had as allies the Ottawas and Mingos, who had
entered the council with them.

A famous chief of the day and one of great influence over the Indians,
and also among the white officials who dealt with Indian affairs, was
Tach-nech-dor-us, or Branching Oak of the Forest, a Mingo who had taken
the name of Logan out of compliment to James Logan of Pennsylvania.
Chief Logan had recently met with so much reproach from his red brothers
for his loyalty to the whites that he had departed from the Mingo town
at Yellow Creek. But, learning that his tribe had determined to assist
the Shawanoes and had already taken some white scalps, he repaired to
the place where the Mingos were holding their war council to exert his
powers for peace. There, in presence of the warriors, after swaying them
from their purpose by those oratorical gifts which gave him his
influence and his renown, he took the war hatchet that had already
killed, and buried it in proof that vengeance was appeased. Upon this
scene there entered a Mingo from Yellow Creek with the news of the
murders committed there by the three traders. The Indian whose throat
had been slit as King had served deer was Logan's brother. Another man
slain was his kinsman. The woman with the baby was his sister. Logan
tore up from the earth the bloody tomahawk and, raising it above his
head, swore that he would not rest till he had taken ten white lives to
pay for each one of his kin. Again the Mingo warriors declared for war
and this time were not dissuaded. But Logan did not join this red army.
He went out alone to wreak his vengeance, slaying and scalping.

Meanwhile Dunmore prepared to push the war with the utmost vigor. His
first concern was to recall the surveying parties from Kentucky, and for
so hazardous an errand he needed the services of a man whose endurance,
speed, and woodcraft were equal to those of any Indian scout afoot.
Through Colonel Preston, his orders were conveyed to Daniel Boone, for
Boone's fame had now spread from the border to the tidewater regions. It
was stated that "Boone would lose no time," and "if they are alive, it
is indisputable but Boone must find them."

So Boone set out in company with Michael Stoner, another expert
woodsman. His general instructions were to go down the Kentucky River to
Preston's Salt Lick and across country to the Falls of the Ohio, and
thence home by Gaspar's Lick on the Cumberland River. Indian war parties
were moving under cover across "the Dark and Bloody Ground" to surround
the various groups of surveyors still at large and to exterminate them.
Boone made his journey successfully. He found John Floyd, who was
surveying for Washington; he sped up to where Harrod and his band were
building cabins and sent them out, just in time as it happened; he
reached all the outposts of Thomas Bullitt's party, only one of whom
fell a victim to the foe; ¹ and, undetected by the Indians, he brought
himself and Stoner home in safety, after covering eight hundred miles in
sixty-one days.

¹ Hancock Taylor, who delayed in getting out of the country and was cut
off.

Harrod and his homesteaders immediately enlisted in the army. How eager
Boone was to go with the forces under Lewis is seen in the official
correspondence relative to Dunmore's War. Floyd wanted Boone's help in
raising a company: "Captain Bledsoe says that Boone has more [influence]
than any man now disengaged; and you know what Boone has done for me...
for which reason I love the man." Even the border, it would seem, had
its species of pacifists who were willing to let others take risks for
them, for men hung back from recruiting, and desertions were the order
of the day. Major Arthur Campbell hit upon a solution of the
difficulties in West Fincastle. He was convinced that Boone could raise
a company and hold the men loyal. And Boone did.

For some reason, however, Daniel's desire to march with the army was
denied. Perhaps it was because just such a man as he--and, indeed, there
was no other--was needed to guard the settlement. Presently he was put
in command of Moore's Fort in Clinch Valley, and his "diligence"
received official approbation. A little later the inhabitants of the
valley sent out a petition to have Boone made a "captain" and given
supreme command of the lower forts. The settlers demanded Boone's
promotion for their own security.

The land it is good, it is just to our mind,
Each will have his part if his Lordship be kind,
The Ohio once ours, we'll live at our ease,
With a bottle and glass to drink when we please.

So sang the army poet, thus giving voice, as bards should ever do, to
the theme nearest the hearts of his hearers--in this case, Land!
Presumably his ditty was composed on the eve of the march from
Lewisburg, for it is found in a soldier's diary.

On the evening of October 9, 1774, Andrew Lewis with his force of eleven
hundred frontiersmen was encamped on Point Pleasant at the junction of
the Great Kanawha with the Ohio. Dunmore in the meantime had led his
forces into Ohio and had erected Fort Gower at the mouth of the
Hockhocking River, where he waited for word from Andrew Lewis. ¹

¹ It has been customary to ascribe to Lord Dunmore motives of treachery
in failing to make connections with Lewis; but no real evidence has been
advanced to support any of the charges made against him by local
historians. The charges were, as Theodore Roosevelt says, "an
afterthought." Dunmore was a King's man in the Revolution; and yet in
March, 1775, the Convention of the Colony of Virginia, assembled in
opposition to the royal party, resolved: "The most cordial thanks of the
people of this colony are a tribute justly due to our worthy Governor,
Lord Dunmore, for his truly noble, wise, and spirited conduct which at
once evinces his Excellency's attention to the true interests of this
colony, and a zeal in the executive department which no dangers can
divert, or difficulties hinder, from achieving the most important
services to the people who have the happiness to live under his
administration." (See American Archives, Fourth Series, vol. II, p.
170.) Similar resolutions were passed by his officers on the march home
from Ohio; at the same time, the officers passed resolutions in sympathy
with the American cause. Yet it was Andrew Lewis who later drove Dunmore
from Virginia. Well might Dunmore exclaim, "That it should ever come to
this!"

The movements of the two armies were being observed by scouts from the
force of red warriors gathered in Ohio under the great leader of the
Shawanoes. Cornstalk purposed to isolate the two armies of his enemy and
to crush them in turn before they could come together. His first move
was to launch an attack on Lewis at Point Pleasant. In the dark of
night, Cornstalk's Indians crossed the Ohio on rafts, intending to
surprise the white man's camp at dawn. They would have succeeded but for
the chance that three or four of the frontiersmen, who had risen before
daybreak to hunt, came upon the Indians creeping towards the camp. Shots
were exchanged. An Indian and a white man dropped. The firing roused the
camp. Three hundred men in two lines under Charles Lewis and William
Fleming sallied forth expecting to engage the vanguard of the enemy but
encountered almost the whole force of from eight hundred to a thousand
Indians before the rest of the army could come into action. Both
officers were wounded, Charles Lewis fatally. The battle, which
continued from dawn until an hour before sunset, was the bloodiest in
Virginia's long series of Indian wars. The frontiersmen fought as such
men ever fought--with the daring, bravery, swiftness of attack, and
skill in taking cover which were the tactics of their day, even as at a
later time many of these same men fought at King's Mountain and in
Illinois the battles that did so much to turn the tide in the
Revolution. ²

² With Andrew Lewis on this day were Isaac Shelby and William Campbell,
the victorious leaders at King's Mountain, James Robertson, the "father
of Tennessee," Valentine Sevier, Daniel Morgan, hero of the Cowpens,
Major Arthur Campbell, Benjamin Logan, Anthony Bledsoe, and Simon
Kenton. With Dunmore's force were Adam Stephen, who distinguished
himself at the Brandywine, George Rogers Clark, John Stuart, already
noted through the Cherokee wars, and John Montgomery, later one of
Clark's four captains in Illinois. The two last mentioned were
Highlanders. Clark's Illinois force was largely recruited from the
troops who fought at Point Pleasant.

Colonel Preston wrote to Patrick Henry that the enemy behaved with
"inconceivable bravery," the head men walking about in the time of
action exhorting their men to "lie close, shoot well, be strong, and
fight." The Shawanoes ran up to the muzzles of the English guns,
disputing every foot of ground. Both sides knew well what they were
fighting for--the rich land held in a semicircle by the Beautiful River.

Shortly before sundown the Indians, mistaking a flank movement by
Shelby's contingent for the arrival of reinforcements, retreated across
the Ohio. Many of their most noted warriors had fallen and among them
the Shawano chief, Puck-e-shin-wa, father of a famous son, Tecumseh. ¹
Yet they were unwilling to accept defeat. When they heard that Dunmore
was now marching overland to cut them off from their towns, their fury
blazed anew. "Shall we first kill all our women and children and then
fight till we ourselves are slain?" Cornstalk, in irony, demanded of
them; "No? Then I will go and make peace."

¹ Thwaites, Documentary History of Dunmore's War.

By the treaty compacted between the chiefs and Lord Dunmore, the Indians
gave up all claim to the lands south of the Ohio, even for hunting, and
agreed to allow boats to pass unmolested. In this treaty the Mingos
refused to join, and a detachment of Dunmore's troops made a punitive
expedition to their towns. Some discord arose between Dunmore and
Lewis's frontier forces because, since the Shawanoes had made peace, the
Governor would not allow the frontiersmen to destroy the Shawano towns.

Of all the chiefs, Logan alone still held aloof. Major Gibson undertook
to fetch him, but Logan refused to come to the treaty grounds. He sent
by Gibson the short speech which has lived as an example of the best
Indian oratory:

I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan's cabin hungry
and he gave him not meat: if ever he came cold and naked and he clothed
him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan
remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for
the whites that my countrymen pointed as they passed and said, "Logan is
the friend of the white men." I had even thought to have lived with you
but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in
cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not even
sparing my women and children. There remains not a drop of my blood in
the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have
sought it; I have killed many; I have fully glutted my vengeance: for my
country I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbor a thought
that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on
his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one. ¹

¹ Some writers have questioned the authenticity of Logan's speech,
inclining to think that Gibson himself composed it, partly because of
the biblical suggestion in the first few lines. That Gibson gave
biblical phraseology to these lines is apparent, though, as Adair points
out there are many examples of similitude in Indian and biblical
expression. But the thought is Indian and relates to the first article
of the Indian's creed, namely, to share his food with the needy. "There
remains not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature" is a
truly Indian lament. Evidently the final four lines of the speech are
the most literally translated, for they have the form and the primitive
rhythmic beat which a student of Indian poetry quickly recognizes. The
authenticity of the speech, as well as the innocence of Cresap, whom
Logan mistakenly accused, was vouched for by George Rogers Clark in a
letter to Dr. Samuel Brown dated June 17, 1798. See Jefferson papers,
Series 5, quoted by English, Conquest of the Country Northwest of the
River Ohio, vol. II. p. 1029.

By rivers and trails, in large and small companies, started home the
army that had won the land. The West Fincastle troops, from the lower
settlements of the Clinch and Holston valleys, were to return by the
Kentucky River, while those from the upper valley would take the shorter
way up Sandy Creek. To keep them in provisions during the journey it was
ordered that hunters be sent out along these routes to kill and barbecue
meat and place it on scaffolds at appropriate spots.

The way home by the Kentucky was a long road for weary and wounded men
with hunger gnawing under their belts. We know who swung out along the
trail to provide for that little band, "dressed in deerskins colored
black, and his hair plaited and bobbed up." It was Daniel Boone--now, by
popular demand, Captain Boone--just "discharged from Service," since the
valley forts needed him no longer. Once more only a hunter, he went his
way over Walden Mountain--past his son's grave marking the place where
he had been turned back--to serve the men who had opened the gates.




CHAPTER VII.

The Dark And Bloody Ground

With the coming of spring Daniel Boone's desire, so long cherished and
deferred, to make a way for his neighbors through the wilderness was to
be fulfilled at last. But ere his ax could slash the thickets from the
homeseekers' path, more than two hundred settlers had entered Kentucky
by the northern waterways. Eighty or more of these settled at
Harrodsburg, where Harrod was laying out his town on a generous plan,
with "in-lots" of half an acre and "out-lots" of larger size. Among
those associated with Harrod was George Rogers Clark, who had surveyed
claims for himself during the year before the war.

While over two hundred colonists were picking out home sites wherever
their pleasure or prudence dictated, a gigantic land promotion
scheme--involving the very tracts where they were sowing their first
corn--was being set afoot in North Carolina by a body of men who figure
in the early history of Kentucky as the Transylvania Company. The leader
of this organization was Judge Richard Henderson. ¹ Judge Henderson
dreamed a big dream. His castle in the air had imperial proportions. He
resolved, in short, to purchase from the Cherokee Indians the larger
part of Kentucky and to establish there a colony after the manner and
the economic form of the English Lords Proprietors, whose day in America
was so nearly done. Though in the light of history the plan loses none
of its dramatic features, it shows the practical defects that must
surely have prevented its realization. Like many another Cæsar hungering
for empire and staking all to win it, the prospective lord of Kentucky,
as we shall see, had left the human equation out of his calculations.

¹ Richard Henderson (1734-1785) was the son of the High Sheriff of
Granville County. At first an assistant to his father, he studied law
and soon achieved a reputation by the brilliance of his mind and the
magnetism of his personality. As presiding Judge at Hillsborough he had
come into conflict with the violent element among the Regulators, who
had driven him from the court and burned his house and barns. For some
time prior to his elevation to the bench, he had been engaged in land
speculations. One of Boone's biographers suggests that Boone may have
been secretly acting as Henderson's agent during his first lonely
explorations of Kentucky. However this may be, it does not appear that
Boone and his Yadkin neighbors were acting with Henderson when in
September, 1773, they made their first attempt to enter Kentucky as
settlers.

Richard Henderson had known Daniel Boone on the Yadkin; and it was
Boone's detailed reports of the marvelous richness and beauty of
Kentucky which had inspired him to formulate his gigantic scheme and had
enabled him also to win to his support several men of prominence in the
Back Country. To sound the Cherokees regarding the purchase and to
arrange, if possible, for a conference, Henderson dispatched Boone to
the Indian towns in the early days of 1775.

Since we have just learned that Dunmore's War compelled the Shawanoes
and their allies to relinquish their right to Kentucky, that, both
before and after that event, government surveyors were in the territory
surveying for the soldiers' claims, and that private individuals had
already laid out town sites and staked holdings, it may be asked what
right of ownership the Cherokees possessed in Kentucky, that Henderson
desired to purchase it of them. The Indian title to Kentucky seems to
have been hardly less vague to the red men than it was to the whites.
Several of the nations had laid claim to the territory. As late as 1753,
it will be remembered, the Shawanoes had occupied a town at Blue Licks,
for John Findlay had been taken there by some of them. But, before
Findlay guided Boone through the Gap in 1769, the Shawanoes had been
driven out by the Iroquois, who claimed suzerainty over them as well as
over the Cherokees. In 1768, the Iroquois had ceded Kentucky to the
British Crown by the treaty of Fort Stanwix; whereupon the Cherokees had
protested so vociferously that the Crown's Indian agent, to quiet them,
had signed a collateral agreement with them. Though claimed by many,
Kentucky was by common consent not inhabited by any of the tribes. It
was the great Middle Ground where the Indians hunted. It was the
Warriors' Path over which they rode from north and south to slaughter
and where many of their fiercest encounters took place. However shadowy
the title which Henderson purposed to buy, there was one all-sufficing
reason why he must come to terms with the Cherokees: their northernmost
towns in Tennessee lay only fifty or sixty miles below Cumberland Gap
and hence commanded the route over which he must lead colonists into his
empire beyond the hills.

The conference took place early in March, 1775, at the Sycamore Shoals
of the Watauga River. Twelve hundred Indians, led by their "town
chiefs"--among whom were the old warrior and the old statesman of their
nation, Oconostota and Attakullakulla--came to the treaty grounds and
were received by Henderson and his associates and several hundred white
men who were eager for a chance to settle on new lands. Though Boone was
now on his way into Kentucky for the Transylvania Company, other border
leaders of renown or with their fame still to win were present, and
among them James Robertson, of serious mien, and that blond gay knight
in buckskin, John Sevier.

It is a dramatic picture we evolve for ourselves from the meager
narratives of this event--a mass of painted Indians moving through the
sycamores by the bright water, to come presently into a tense, immobile
semicircle before the large group of armed frontiersmen seated or
standing about Richard Henderson, the man with the imperial dream, the
ready speaker whose flashing eyes and glowing oratory won the hearts of
all who came under their sway. What though the Cherokee title be a
flimsy one at best and the price offered for it a bagatelle! The spirit
of Forward March! is there in that great canvas framed by forest and
sky. The somber note that tones its lustrous color, as by a sweep of the
brush, is the figure of the Chickamaugan chief, Dragging Canoe, warrior
and seer and hater of white men, who urges his tribesmen against the
sale and, when they will not hearken, springs from their midst into the
clear space before Henderson and his band of pioneers and, pointing with
uplifted arm, warns them that a dark cloud hangs over the land the white
man covets which to the red man has long been a bloody ground. ¹

¹ This utterance of Dragging Canoe's is generally supposed to be the
origin of the descriptive phrase applied to Kentucky--"the Dark and
Bloody Ground." See Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. I, p.229.

The purchase, finally consummated, included the country lying between
the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers--almost all the present State of
Kentucky, with the adjacent land watered by the Cumberland River and its
tributaries, except certain lands previously leased by the Indians to
the Watauga Colony. The tract comprised about twenty million acres and
extended into Tennessee.

Daniel Boone's work was to cut out a road for the wagons of the
Transylvania Company's colonists to pass over. This was to be done by
slashing away the briers and underbrush hedging the narrow Warriors'
Path that made a direct northward line from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio
bank, opposite the mouth of the Scioto River. Just prior to the
conference Boone and "thirty guns" had set forth from the Holston to
prepare the road and to build a fort on whatever site he should select.

By April, Henderson and his first group of tenants were on the trail. In
Powell's Valley they came up with a party of Virginians Kentucky bound,
led by Benjamin Logan; and the two bands joined together for the march.
They had not gone far when they heard disquieting news. After leaving
Martin's Station, at the gates of his new domain, Henderson received a
letter from Boone telling of an attack by Indians, in which two of his
men had been killed, but "we stood on the ground and guarded our baggage
till the day and lost nothing." ¹ These tidings, indicating that despite
treaties and sales, the savages were again on the warpath, might well
alarm Henderson's colonists. While they halted, some indecisive, others
frankly for retreat, there appeared a company of men making all haste
out of Kentucky because of Indian unrest. Six of these Henderson
persuaded to turn again and go in with him; but this addition hardly
offset the loss of those members of his party who thought it too
perilous to proceed. Henderson's own courage did not falter. He had
staked his all on this stupendous venture and for him it was forward to
wealth and glory or retreat into poverty and eclipse. Boone, in the
heart of the danger, was making the same stand. "If we give way to them
[the Indians] now," he wrote, "it will ever be the case."

¹ Bogart, Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky, p. 121.

Signs of discord other than Indian opposition met Henderson as he
resolutely pushed on. His conversations with some of the fugitives from
Kentucky disclosed the first indications of the storm that was to blow
away the empire he was going in to found. He told them that the claims
they had staked in Kentucky would not hold good with the Transylvania
Company. Whereupon James McAfee, who was leading a group of returning
men, stated his opinion that the Transylvania Company's claim would not
hold good with Virginia. After the parley, three of McAfee's brothers
turned back and went with Henderson's party, but whether with intent to
join his colony or to make good their own claims is not apparent.
Benjamin Logan continued amicably with Henderson on the march but did
not recognize him as Lord Proprietor of Kentucky. He left the
Transylvania caravan shortly after entering the territory, branched off
in the direction of Harrodsburg, and founded St. Asaph's Station, in the
present Lincoln County, independently of Henderson though the site lay
within Henderson's purchase.

Notwithstanding delays and apprehensions, Henderson and his colonists
finally reached Boone's Fort, which Daniel and his "thirty
guns"--lacking two since the Indian encounter--had erected at the mouth
of Otter Creek.

An attractive buoyancy of temperament is revealed in Henderson's
description in his journal of a giant elm with tall straight trunk and
even foliage that shaded a space of one hundred feet. Instantly he chose
this "divine elm" as the council chamber of Transylvania. Under its
leafage he read the constitution of the new colony. It would be too
great a stretch of fancy to call it a democratic document, for it was
not that, except in deft phrases. Power was certainly declared to be
vested in the people; but the substance of power remained in the hands
of the Proprietors.

Terms for land grants were generous enough in the beginning, although
Henderson made the fatal mistake of demanding quitrents--one of the
causes of dissatisfaction which had led to the Regulators' rising in
North Carolina. In September he augmented this error by more than
doubling the price of land, adding a fee of eight shillings for
surveying, and reserving to the Proprietors one-half of all gold,
silver, lead, and sulphur found on the land. No land near sulphur
springs or showing evidences of metals was to be granted to settlers.
Moreover, at the Company's store the prices charged for lead were said
to be too high--lead being necessary for hunting, and hunting being the
only means of procuring food--while the wages of labor, as fixed by the
Company, were too low. These terms bore too heavily on poor men who were
risking their lives in the colony.

Hence newcomers passed by Boonesborough, as the Transylvania settlement
was presently called, and went elsewhere. They settled on Henderson's
land but refused his terms. They joined in their sympathies with James
Harrod, who, having established Harrodsburg in the previous year at the
invitation of Virginia, was not in the humor to acknowledge Henderson's
claim or to pay him tribute. All were willing to combine with the
Transylvania Company for defense, and to enforce law they would unite in
bonds of brotherhood in Kentucky, even as they had been one with each
other on the earlier frontier now left behind them. But they would call
no man master; they had done with feudalism. That Henderson should not
have foreseen this, especially after the upheaval in North Carolina,
proves him, in spite of all his brilliant gifts, to have been a man out
of touch with the spirit of the time.

The war of the Revolution broke forth and the Indians descended upon the
Kentucky stations. Defense was the one problem in all minds, and defense
required powder and lead in plenty. The Transylvania Company was not
able to provide the means of defense against the hordes of savages whom
Henry Hamilton, the British Governor at Detroit, was sending to make war
on the frontiers. Practical men like Harrod and George Rogers
Clark--who, if not a practical man in his own interests, was a most
practical soldier--saw that unification of interests within the
territory with the backing of either Virginia or Congress was necessary.
Clark personally would have preferred to see the settlers combine as a
freemen's state. It was plain that they would not combine and stake
their lives as a unit to hold Kentucky for the benefit of the
Transylvania Company, whose authority some of the most prominent men in
the territory had refused to recognize. The Proprietary of Transylvania
could continue to exist only to the danger of every life in Kentucky.

While the Proprietors sent a delegate to the Continental Congress to win
official recognition for Transylvania, eighty-four men at Harrodsburg
drew up a petition addressed to Virginia stating their doubts of the
legality of Henderson's title and requesting Virginia to assert her
authority according to the stipulations of her charter. That defense was
the primary and essential motive of the Harrodsburg Remonstrance seems
plain, for when George Rogers Clark set off on foot with one companion
to lay the document before the Virginian authorities, he also went to
plead for a load of powder. In his account of that hazardous journey, as
a matter of fact, he makes scant reference to Transylvania, except to
say that the greed of the Proprietors would soon bring the colony to its
end, but shows that his mind was seldom off the powder. It is a detail
of history that the Continental Congress refused to seat the delegate
from Transylvania. Henderson himself went to Virginia to make the fight
for his land before the Assembly. ¹

¹ In 1778 Virginia disallowed Henderson's title but granted him two
hundred thousand acres between the Green and Kentucky rivers for his
trouble and expense in opening up the country.

The magnetic center of Boonesborough's life was the lovable and
unassuming Daniel Boone. Soon after the building of the fort Daniel had
brought in his wife and family. He used often to state with a mild pride
that his wife and daughters were the first white women to stand on the
banks of the Kentucky River. That pride had not been unmixed with
anxiety; his daughter Jemima and two daughters of his friend, Richard
Galloway, while boating on the river had been captured by Shawanoes and
carried off. Boone, accompanied by the girls' lovers and by John Floyd
(eager to repay his debt of life-saving to Boone) had pursued them,
tracing the way the captors had taken by broken twigs and scraps of
dress goods which one of the girls had contrived to leave in their path,
had come on the Indians unawares, killed them, and recovered the three
girls unhurt.

In the summer of 1776, Virginia took official note of "Captain Boone of
Boonesborough," for she sent him a small supply of powder. The men of
the little colony, which had begun so pretentiously with its
constitution and assembly, were now obliged to put all other plans aside
and to concentrate on the question of food and defense. There was a
dangerous scarcity of powder and lead. The nearest points at which these
necessaries could be procured were the Watauga and Holston River
settlements, which were themselves none too well stocked. Harrod and
Logan, some time in 1777, reached the Watauga fort with three or four
pack-horses and filled their packs from Sevier's store; but, as they
neared home, they were detected by red scouts and Logan was badly
wounded before he and Harrod were able to drive their precious load
safely through the gates at Harrodsburg. In the autumn of 1777, Clark,
with a boatload of ammunition, reached Maysville on the Ohio, having
successfully run the gauntlet between banks in possession of the foe. He
had wrested the powder and lead from the Virginia Council by threats to
the effect that if Virginia was so willing to lose Kentucky--for of
course "a country not worth defending is not worth claiming"--he and his
fellows were quite ready to take Kentucky for themselves and to hold it
with their swords against all comers, Virginia included. By even such
cogent reasoning had he convinced the Council--which had tried to hedge
by expressing doubts that Virginia would receive the Kentucky settlers
as "citizens of the State"--that it would be cheaper to give him the
powder.

Because so many settlers had fled and the others had come closer
together for their common good, Harrodsburg and Boonesborough were now
the only occupied posts in Kentucky. Other settlements, once thriving,
were abandoned; and, under the terror, the Wild reclaimed them. In
April, 1777, Boonesborough underwent its first siege. Boone, leading a
sortie, was shot and he fell with a shattered ankle. An Indian rushed
upon him and was swinging the tomahawk over him when Simon Kenton, giant
frontiersman and hero of many daring deeds, rushed forward, shot the
Indian, threw Boone across his back, and fought his way desperately to
safety. It was some months ere Boone was his nimble self again. But
though he could not "stand up to the guns," he directed all operations
from his cabin.

The next year Boone was ready for new ventures growing from the
settlers' needs. Salt was necessary to preserve meat through the summer.
Accordingly Boone and twenty-seven men went up to the Blue Licks in
February, 1778, to replenish their supply by the simple process of
boiling the salt water of the Licks till the saline particles adhered to
the kettles. Boone was returning alone, with a pack-horse load of salt
and game, when a blinding snowstorm overtook him and hid from view four
stealthy Shawanoes on his trail. He was seized and carried to a camp of
120 warriors led by the French Canadian, Dequindre, and James and George
Girty, two white renegades. Among the Indians were some of those who had
captured him on his first exploring trip through Kentucky and whom he
had twice given the slip. Their hilarity was unbounded. Boone quickly
learned that this band was on its way to surprise Boonesborough. It was
a season when Indian attacks were not expected; nearly threescore of the
men were at the salt spring and, to make matters worse, the walls of the
new fort where the settlers and their families had gathered were as yet
completed on only three sides. Boonesborough was, in short, well-nigh
defenseless. To turn the Indians from their purpose, Boone conceived the
desperate scheme of offering to lead them to the salt makers' camp with
the assurance that he and his companions were willing to join the tribe.
He understood Indians well enough to feel sure that once possessed of
nearly thirty prisoners, the Shawanoes would not trouble further about
Boonesborough but would hasten to make a triumphal entry into their own
towns. That some, perhaps all, of the white men would assuredly die, he
knew well; but it was the only way to save the women and children in
Boonesborough. In spite of Dequindre and the Girtys, who were leading a
military expedition for the reduction of a fort, the Shawanoes fell in
with the suggestion. When they had taken their prisoners, the more
bloodthirsty warriors in the band wanted to tomahawk them all on the
spot. By his diplomatic discourse, however, Boone dissuaded them, for
the time being at least, and the whole company set off for the towns on
the Little Miami.

The weather became severe, very little game crossed their route, and for
days they subsisted on slippery elm bark. The lovers of blood did not
hold back their scalping knives and several of the prisoners perished;
but Black Fish, the chief then of most power in Shawanoe councils,
adopted Boone as his son, and gave him the name of Sheltowee, or Big
Turtle. Though watched zealously to prevent escape, Big Turtle was
treated with every consideration and honor; and, as we would say today,
he played the game. He entered into the Indian life with apparent zest,
took part in hunts and sports and the races and shooting matches in
which the Indians delighted, but he was always careful not to outrun or
outshoot his opponents. Black Fish took him to Detroit when some of the
tribe escorted the remainder of the prisoners to the British post. There
he met Governor Hamilton and, in the hope of obtaining his liberty, he
led that dignitary to believe that he and the other people of
Boonesborough were eager to move to Detroit and take refuge under the
British flag. ¹ It is said that Boone always carried in a wallet round
his neck the King's commission given him in Dunmore's War; and that he
exhibited it to Hamilton to bear out his story. Hamilton sought to
ransom him from the Indians, but Black Fish would not surrender his new
son. The Governor gave Boone a pony, with saddle and trappings, and
other presents, including trinkets to be used in procuring his needs and
possibly his liberty from the Shawanoes.

¹ So well did Boone play his part that he aroused suspicion even in
those who knew him best. After his return to Boonesborough his old
friend, Calloway, formally accused him of treachery on two counts: that
Boone had betrayed the salt makers to the Indians and had planned to
betray Boonesborough to the British. Boone was tried and acquitted. His
simple explanation of his acts satisfied the court-martial and made him
a greater hero than ever among the frontier folk.

Black Fish then took his son home to Chillicothe. Here Boone found
Delawares and Mingos assembling with the main body of the Shawanoe
warriors. The war belt was being carried through the Ohio country. Again
Boonesborough and Harrodsburg were to be the first settlements attacked.
To escape and give warning was now the one purpose that obsessed Boone.
He redoubled his efforts to throw the Indians off their guard. He sang
and whistled blithely about the camp at the mouth of the Scioto River,
whither he had accompanied his Indian father to help in the salt
boiling. In short, he seemed so very happy that one day Black Fish took
his eye off him for a few moments to watch the passing of a flock of
turkeys. Big Turtle passed with the flock, leaving no trace. To his
lamenting parent it must have seemed as though he had vanished into the
air. Daniel crossed the Ohio and ran the 160 miles to Boonesborough in
four days, during which time he had only one meal, from a buffalo he
shot at the Blue Licks. When he reached the fort after an absence of
nearly five months, he found that his wife had given him up for dead and
had returned to the Yadkin.

Boone now began with all speed to direct preparations to withstand a
siege. Owing to the Indian's leisurely system of councils and ceremonies
before taking the warpath, it was not until the first week in September
that Black Fish's painted warriors, with some Frenchmen under Dequindre,
appeared before Boonesborough. Nine days the siege lasted and was the
longest in border history. Dequindre, seeing that the fort might not be
taken, resorted to trickery. He requested Boone and a few of his men to
come out for a parley, saying that his orders from Hamilton were to
protect the lives of the Americans as far as possible. Boone's friend,
Calloway, urged against acceptance of the apparently benign proposal
which was made, so Dequindre averred, for "bienfaisance et humanité."
But the words were the words of a white man, and Boone hearkened to
them. With eight of the garrison he went out to the parley. After a long
talk in which good will was expressed on both sides, it was suggested by
Black Fish that they all shake hands and, as there were so many more
Indians than white men, two Indians should, of course, shake hands with
one white man, each grasping one of his hands. The moment that their
hands gripped, the trick was clear, for the Indians exerted their
strength to drag off the white men. Desperate scuffling ensued in which
the whites with difficulty freed themselves and ran for the fort.
Calloway had prepared for emergencies. The pursuing Indians were met
with a deadly fire. After a defeated attempt to mine the fort the enemy
withdrew.

The successful defense of Boonesborough was an achievement of national
importance, for had Boonesborough fallen, Harrodsburg alone could not
have stood. The Indians under the British would have overrun Kentucky;
and George Rogers Clark--whose base for his Illinois operations was the
Kentucky forts--could not have made the campaigns which wrested the
Northwest from the control of Great Britain.

Again Virginia took official note of Captain Boone when in 1779 the
Legislature established Boonesborough "a town for the reception of
traders" and appointed Boone himself one of the trustees to attend to
the sale and registration of lots. An odd office that was for Daniel,
who never learned to attend to the registration of his own; he declined
it. His name appears again, however, a little later when Virginia made
the whole of Kentucky one of her counties with the following officers:
Colonel David Robinson, County Lieutenant; George Rogers Clark, Anthony
Bledsoe, and John Bowman, Majors; Daniel Boone, James Harrod, Benjamin
Logan, and John Todd, Captains.

Boonesborough's successful resistance caused land speculators as well as
prospective settlers to take heart of grace. Parties made their way to
Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and even to the Falls of the Ohio, where
Clark's fort and blockhouses now stood. In the summer of 1779 Clark had
erected on the Kentucky side of the river a large fort which became the
nucleus of the town of Louisville. Here, while he was eating his heart
out with impatience for money and men to enable him to march to the
attack of Detroit, as he had planned, he amused himself by drawing up
plans for a city. He laid out private sections and public parks and
contemplated the bringing in of families only to inhabit his city, for,
oddly enough, he who never married was going to make short shift of mere
bachelors in his City Beautiful. Between pen scratches, no doubt, he
looked out frequently upon the river to descry if possible a boatload of
ammunition or the banners of the troops he had been promised.

When neither appeared, he gave up the idea of Detroit and set about
erecting defenses on the southern border, for the Choctaws and
Cherokees, united under a white leader named Colbert, were threatening
Kentucky by way of the Mississippi. He built in 1780 Fort Jefferson in
what is now Ballard County, and had barely completed the new post and
garrisoned it with about thirty men when it was besieged by Colbert and
his savages. The Indians, assaulting by night, were lured into a
position directly before a cannon which poured lead into a mass of them.
The remainder fled in terror from the vicinity of the fort; but Colbert
succeeded in rallying them and was returning to the attack when he
suddenly encountered Clark with a company of men and was forced to
abandon his enterprise.

Clark knew that the Ohio Indians would come down on the settlements
again during the summer and that to meet their onslaughts every man in
Kentucky would be required. He learned that there was a new influx of
land seekers over the Wilderness Road and that speculators were doing a
thriving business in Harrodsburg; so, leaving his company to protect
Fort Jefferson, he took two men with him and started across the wilds on
foot for Harrodsburg. To evade the notice of the Indian bands which were
moving about the country the three stripped and painted themselves as
warriors and donned the feathered headdress. So successful was their
disguise that they were fired on by a party of surveyors near the
outskirts of Harrodsburg.

The records do not state what were the sensations of certain speculators
in a land office in Harrodsburg when a blue-eyed savage in a war bonnet
sprang through the doorway and, with uplifted weapon, declared the
office closed; but we get a hint of the power of Clark's personality and
of his genius for dominating men from the terse report that he
"enrolled" the speculators. He was informed that another party of men,
more nervous than these, was now on its way out of Kentucky. In haste he
dispatched a dozen frontiersmen to cut the party off at Crab Orchard and
take away the gun of every man who refused to turn back and do his bit
for Kentucky. To Clark a man was a gun, and he meant that every gun
should do its duty.

The leaders and pioneers of the Dark and Bloody Ground were now
warriors, all under Clark's command, while for two years longer the Red
Terror ranged Kentucky, falling with savage force now here, now there.
In the first battle of 1780, at the Blue Licks, Daniel's brother, Edward
Boone, was killed and scalped. Later on in the war his second son,
Israel, suffered a like fate. The toll of life among the settlers was
heavy. Many of the best-known border leaders were slain. Food and powder
often ran short. Corn might be planted, but whether it would be
harvested or not the planters never knew; and the hunter's rifle shot,
necessary though it was, proved only too often an invitation to the
lurking foe. But sometimes, through all the dangers of forest and trail,
Daniel Boone slipped away silently to Harrodsburg to confer with Clark;
or Clark himself, in the Indian guise that suited the wild man in him
not ill, made his way to and from the garrisons which looked to him for
everything.

Twice Clark gathered together the "guns" of Kentucky and, marching north
into the enemy's country, swept down upon the Indian towns of Piqua and
Chillicothe and razed them. In 1782, in the second of these enterprises,
his cousin, Joseph Rogers, who had been taken prisoner and adopted by
the Indians and then wore Indian garb, was shot down by one of Clark's
men. On this expedition Boone and Harrod are said to have accompanied
Clark.

The ever present terror and horror of those days, especially of the two
years preceding this expedition, are vividly suggested by the quaint
remark of an old woman who had lived through them, as recorded for us by
a traveler. The most beautiful sight she had seen in Kentucky, she said,
was a young man dying a natural death in his bed. Dead but unmarred by
hatchet or scalping knife, he was so rare and comely a picture that the
women of the post sat up all night looking at him.

But, we ask, what golden emoluments were showered by a grateful country
on the men who thus held the land through those years of want and war,
and saved an empire for the Union? What practical recognition was there
of these brave and unselfish men who daily risked their lives and faced
the stealth and cruelty lurking in the wilderness ways? There is meager
eloquence in the records. Here, for instance, is a letter from George
Rogers Clark to the Governor of Virginia, dated May 27, 1783:

Sir. Nothing but necessity could induce me to make the following request
to Your Excellency, which is to grant me a small sum of money on
account; as I can assure you, Sir, that I am exceedingly distressed for
the want of necessary clothing etc and don't know any channel through
which I could procure any except of the Executive. The State I believe
will fall considerably in my debt. Any supplies which Your Excellency
favors me with might be deducted out of my accounts. ¹

¹ Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. III, p. 487.

Clark had spent all his own substance and all else he could beg,
borrow--or appropriate--in the conquest of Illinois and the defense of
Kentucky. His only reward from Virginia was a grant of land from which
he realized nothing, and dismissal from her service when she needed him
no longer.

All that Clark had asked for himself was a commission in the Continental
Army. This was denied him, as it appears now, not through his own
errors, which had not at that time taken hold on him, but through the
influence of powerful enemies. It is said that both Spain and England,
seeing a great soldier without service for his sword, made him offers,
which he refused. As long as any acreage remained to him on which to
raise money, he continued to pay the debts he had contracted to finance
his expeditions, and in this course he had the assistance of his
youngest brother, William, to whom he assigned his Indiana grant.

His health impaired by hardship and exposure and his heart broken by his
country's indifference, Clark sank into alcoholic excesses. In his
sixtieth year, just six years before his death, and when he was a
helpless paralytic, he was granted a pension of four hundred dollars.
There is a ring of bitter irony in the words with which he accepted the
sword sent him by Virginia in his crippled old age: "When Virginia
needed a sword I gave her one." He died near Louisville on February 13,
1818.

Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792. But even before Kentucky
became a State her affairs, particularly as to land, were arranged, let
us say, on a practical business basis. Then it was discovered that
Daniel Boone had no legal claim to any foot of ground in Kentucky.
Daniel owned nothing but the clothes he wore; and for those--as well as
for much powder, lead, food, and such trifles--he was heavily in debt.

So, in 1788, Daniel Boone put the list of his debts in his wallet,
gathered his wife and his younger sons about him, and, shouldering his
hunter's rifle, once more turned towards the wilds. The country of the
Great Kanawha in West Virginia was still a wilderness, and a hunter and
trapper might, in some years, earn enough to pay his debts. For others,
now, the paths he had hewn and made safe; for Boone once more the
wilderness road.





CHAPTER VIII.

Tennessee

Indian law, tradition, and even superstition had shaped the conditions
which the pioneers faced when they crossed the mountains. This savage
inheritance had decreed that Kentucky should be a dark and bloody
ground, fostering no life but that of four-footed beasts, its fertile
sod never to stir with the green push of the corn. And so the white men
who went into Kentucky to build and to plant went as warriors go, and
for every cabin they erected they battled as warriors to hold a fort. In
the first years they planted little corn and reaped less, for it may be
said that their rifles were never out of their hands. We have seen how
stations were built and abandoned until but two stood. Untiring
vigilance and ceaseless warfare were the price paid by the first
Kentuckians ere they turned the Indian's place of desolation and death
into a land productive and a living habitation.

Herein lies the difference, slight apparently, yet significant, between
the first Kentucky and the first Tennessee ¹ colonies. Within the memory
of the Indians only one tribe had ever attempted to make their home in
Kentucky--a tribe of the fighting Shawanoes--and they had been terribly
chastised for their temerity. But Tennessee was the home of the
Cherokees, and at Chickasaw Bluffs (Memphis) began the southward trail
to the principal towns of the Chickasaws. By the red man's fiat, then,
human life might abide in Tennessee, though not in Kentucky, and it
followed that in seasons of peace the frontiersmen might settle in
Tennessee. So it was that as early as 1757, before the great Cherokee
war, a company of Virginians under Andrew Lewis had, on an invitation
from the Indians, erected Fort Loudon near Great Telliko, the Cherokees'
principal town, and that, after the treaty of peace in 1761, Waddell and
his rangers of North Carolina had erected a fort on the Holston.

¹ Tennessee. The name, Ten-as-se, appears on Adair's map as one of the
old Cherokee towns. Apparently neither the meaning nor the reason why
the colonists called both state and river by this name has been handed
down to us.

Though Fort Loudon had fallen tragically during the war, and though
Waddell's fort had been abandoned, neither was without influence in the
colonization of Tennessee, for some of the men who built these forts
drifted back a year or two later and set up the first cabins on the
Holston. These earliest settlements, thin and scattered, did not
survive; but in 1768 the same settlers or others of their
kind--discharged militiamen from Back Country regiments--once more made
homes on the Holston. They were joined by a few families from near the
present Raleigh, North Carolina, who had despaired of seeing justice
done to the tenants on the mismanaged estates of Lord Granville. About
the same time there was erected the first cabin on the Watauga River, as
is generally believed, by a man of the name of William Bean (or Been),
hunter and frontier soldier from Pittsylvania County, Virginia. This
man, who had hunted on the Watauga with Daniel Boone in 1760, chose as
the site of his dwelling the place of the old hunting camp near the
mouth of Boone's Creek. He soon began to have neighbors.

Meanwhile the Regulation Movement stirred the Back Country of both the
Carolinas. In 1768, the year in which William Bean built his cabin on
the bank of the Watauga, five hundred armed Regulators in North
Carolina, aroused by irregularities in the conduct of public office,
gathered to assert their displeasure, but dispersed peaceably on receipt
of word from Governor Tryon that he had ordered the prosecution of any
officer found guilty of extortion. Edmund Fanning, the most hated of
Lord Granville's agents, though convicted, escaped punishment. Enraged
at this miscarriage of justice, the Regulators began a system of
terrorization by taking possession of the court, presided over by
Richard Henderson. The judge himself was obliged to slip out by a back
way to avoid personal injury. The Regulators burned his house and
stable. They meted out mob treatment likewise to William Hooper, later
one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Two elements, with antithetical aims, had been at work in the
Regulation; and the unfortunate failure of justice in the case of
Fanning had given the corrupt element its opportunity to seize control.
In the petitions addressed to Governor Tryon by the leaders of the
movement in its earlier stages the aims of liberty-loving thinkers are
traceable. It is worthy of note that they included in their demands
articles which are now constitutional. They desired that "suffrage be
given by ticket and ballot"; that the mode of taxation be altered, and
each person be taxed in proportion to the profits arising from his
estate; that judges and clerks be given salaries instead of perquisites
and fees. They likewise petitioned for repeal of the act prohibiting
dissenting ministers from celebrating the rites of matrimony. The
establishment of these reforms, the petitioners of the Regulation
concluded, would "conciliate" their minds to "every just measure of
government, and would make the laws what the Constitution ever designed
they should be, their protection and not their bane." Herein clearly
enough we can discern the thought and the phraseology of the Ulster
Presbyterians.

But a change took place in both leaders and methods. During the
Regulators' career of violence they were under the sway of an agitator
named Hermon Husband. This demagogue was reported to have been expelled
from the Quaker Society for cause; it is on record that he was expelled
from the North Carolina Assembly because a vicious anonymous letter was
traced to him. He deserted his dupes just before the shots cracked at
Alamance Creek and fled from the colony. He was afterwards apprehended
in Pennsylvania for complicity in the Whisky Insurrection.

Four of the leading Presbyterian ministers of the Back Country issued a
letter in condemnation of the Regulators. One of these ministers was the
famous David Caldwell, son-in-law of the Reverend Alexander Craighead,
and a man who knew the difference between liberty and license and who
proved himself the bravest of patriots in the War of Independence. The
records of the time contain sworn testimony against the Regulators by
Waightstill Avery, a signer of the Mecklenburg Resolves, who later
presided honorably over courts in the western circuit of Tennessee; and
there is evidence indicating Jacobite and French intrigue. That Governor
Tryon recognized a hidden hand at work seems clearly revealed in his
proclamation addressed to those "whose understandings have been run away
with and whose passions have been led in captivity by some evil
designing men who, actuated by cowardice and a sense of that Publick
Justice which is due to their Crimes, have obscured themselves from
Publick view." What the Assembly thought of the Regulators was expressed
in 1770 in a drastic bill which so shocked the authorities in England
that instructions were sent forbidding any Governor to approve such a
bill in future, declaring it "a disgrace to the British Statute Books."

On May 16, 1771, some two thousand Regulators were precipitated by
Husband into the Battle of Alamance, which took place in a district
settled largely by a rough and ignorant type of Germans, many of whom
Husband had lured to swell his mob. Opposed to him were eleven hundred
of Governor Tryon's troops, officered by such patriots as Griffith
Rutherford, Hugh Waddell, and Francis Nash. During an hour's engagement
about twenty Regulators were killed, while the Governor's troops had
nine killed and sixty-one wounded. Six of the leaders were han

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/3073