The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson
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Title: The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson
Author: Emerson Hough
Illustrator: Frederic Remington
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[Illustration: RED RIVER CARTS FROM PEMBINA.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WAY TO THE WEST
AND THE LIVES
OF THREE EARLY AMERICANS
BOONE—CROCKETT—CARSON
BY
EMERSON HOUGH
AUTHOR OF
THE COVERED WAGON, Etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
FREDERIC REMINGTON
[Illustration]
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS—NEW YORK
Made in the United States of America
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1903
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
October
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
J. B. H.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
BOOK I
THE WAY ACROSS THE ALLEGHANIES
I. THE AMERICAN AX 7
II. THE AMERICAN RIFLE 11
III. THE AMERICAN BOAT 19
IV. THE AMERICAN HORSE 25
V. THE PATHWAY OF THE WATERS 32
VI. THE MISSISSIPPI, AND
INDEPENDENCE 58
VII. ORIGIN OF THE PIONEER 73
VIII. DANIEL BOONE 87
IX. A FRONTIER REPUBLIC 122
BOOK II
THE WAY TO THE ROCKIES
I. DAVY CROCKETT 143
II. AGAINST THE WATERS 185
BOOK III
THE WAY TO THE PACIFIC
I. KIT CARSON 223
II. THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL 260
III. THE OREGON TRAIL 287
IV. EARLY EXPLORERS OF THE
TRANS-MISSOURI 311
V. ACROSS THE WATERS 343
BOOK IV
THE WAY ACROSS THE PACIFIC
I. THE IRON TRAILS 381
II. THE PATHWAYS OF THE FUTURE 413
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1834
IN THE YEAR 1834 IT BECAME NO LONGER
PROFITABLE TO TRAP THE BEAVER
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
The customary method in writing history is to rely on chronological
sequence as the only connecting thread in the narrative. For this reason
many books of history are but little more than loosely bound masses of
dates and events that bear no philosophical connection with one another,
and therefore are not easily retained in the grasp of the average mind.
History, to be of service, must be remembered.
A merely circumstantial mind may grasp and retain for a time a series of
disconnected dates and events, but such facts do not appeal to that more
common yet not less able type of intellect that asks not only when, but
why, such and such a thing happened; that instinctively relates a given
event to some other event, and thus goes on to a certain solidity and
permanency in conclusions. Perhaps to this latter type of mind there may
be appeal in a series of loosely connected yet really interlocking
monographs upon certain phases of the splendid and stirring history of
the settlement of the American West.
Not concerned so much with a sequence of dates, or with a story of
martial or political triumphs, so called, the writer has sought to show
somewhat of the genesis of the Western man; that is to say, the American
man; for the history of America is but a history of the West.
Whence came this Western man, why came he, in what fashion, under what
limitations? What are the reasons for the American or Western type? Is
that type permanent? Have we actual cause for self-congratulation at the
present stage of our national development? These are some of the
questions that present themselves in this series of studies of the
manner in which the settlement of the West was brought about.
The history of the occupation of the West is the story of a great
pilgrimage. It is the record of a people always outstripping its leaders
in wisdom, in energy and in foresight. A slave of politics, the American
citizen has none the less always proved himself greater than politics or
politicians. The American, the Westerner, if you please, has been a
splendid individual. We shall have no hope as a nation when the day of
the individual shall be no more. Then ultimately we shall demand Magna
Charta over again; shall repeat in parallel the history of France in
’93; shall perhaps see the streets run red in our America. There are
those who believe that the day of the individual in America is passing
all too swiftly, that we are making history over-fast. There is scant
space for speculation when the facts come crowding down so rapidly on us
as is the case to-day. Yet there may perhaps be some interest attached
to conclusions herein, which appear logical as based upon a study of the
manner in which the American country was settled.
As to dates, we shall need but few. Indeed, it will suffice if the
reader shall remember but one date out of all given in this book—that
when it became no longer profitable to trap the beaver in the West. This
date, remembered and understood logically, may prove of considerable
service in the study of the movements of the American people.
As to the apparently disconnected nature of the studies here presented,
it is matter, as one may again indicate, not of accident. On the
contrary, the arrangement of the material is thought to constitute the
chief claim of the work for a tolerant consideration.
I shall ask my reader to consider the movements of the American
population as grouped under four great epochs. There was a time when the
west-bound men were crossing the Alleghanies; a time when they crossed
the Mississippi; a time when they crossed the Rocky Mountains. Now they
cross the Pacific Ocean. Roughly coincident with these great epochs we
may consider, first, the period of down-stream transportation; second,
of up-stream transportation; and lastly, of transportation not parallel
to the great watercourses, but directly across them on the way to the
West. These latter groupings were employed in a series of articles
printed in the Century Magazine in the year 1901-1902, the use of this
material herein being by courtesy of the Century Company.
I have not hesitated to employ the medium of biography where that seemed
the best vehicle for conveying the idea of a great and daring people led
by a few great and daring pilots, prophets of adventurings: hence the
sketches of the lives of the great frontiersmen, Boone, Crockett, and
Carson,—all great and significant lives, whose story is useful in
illustrative quality.
I am indebted for many facts obtained from special study by Mr. Horace
Kephart, an authority on early Western history, illustrating thoroughly
the part that the state of Pennsylvania played in the movement of the
early west-bound population. Mr. Warren S. Ely, a resident of historic
Bucks County, Pennsylvania, supplements Mr. Kephart’s material with
results of local investigations of his own. Mr. Alexander Hynds of
Tennessee assists in telling the story of that Frontier Republic whose
history blends itself so closely with Western affairs of a hundred years
ago. I have quoted freely from Mr. N. P. Langford, a man of the early
trans-Missouri, an Argonaut of the Rockies, who has placed at my
disposal much valuable material. Mr. Hiram M. Chittenden’s splendid work
on the history of the American fur trade has proved of great value.
I am indebted to many books and periodicals for data regarding the
modern American industrial development. I am indebted also to many early
authors who wrote of the old West, and am under obligations to very many
unknown friends, the unnamed but able writers of the daily press.
In regard to the classification of this material, varied and apparently
heterogeneous, yet really interdependent, under the four epochs or
volume-heads mentioned, I refer to the table given on another page.
As justification of what might be called presumption on the part of the
writer in undertaking a work of this nature, he has only to plead a
sincere interest in the West, which was his own native land; a love for
that free American life now all too rapidly fading away; and a deep
admiration for the accomplishments of that American civilization which
never was and never will be any better than the man that made it. It has
not been the intention herein to write a history of the American people,
but a history of the American man.
EMERSON HOUGH.
Chicago, Illinois, June, 1903.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WAY TO THE WEST
CHAPTER I
THE AMERICAN AX
I ask you to look at this splendid tool, the American ax, not more an
implement of labor than an instrument of civilization. If you can not
use it, you are not American. If you do not understand it, you can not
understand America.
This tool is so simple and so perfect that it has scarcely seen change
in the course of a hundred years. It lacks decoration, as do the tools
and the weapons of all strong peoples. It has no fantastic lines, no
deviations from simplicity of outline, no ornamentations, no
irregularities. It is simple, severe, perfect. Its beauty is the beauty
of utility.
In the shaft of the ax there is a curve. This curve is there for a
reason, a reason of usefulness. The simple swelling head is made thus
not for motives of beauty, but for the purpose of effectiveness. The
shaft, an even yard in length, polished, curved, of a formation that
shall give the greatest strength to a downright blow in combination with
the greatest security to the hand-grasp, has been made thus for a
century of American life. This shaft is made of hickory, the sternest of
American woods, the one most capable of withstanding the hardest use. It
has always been made thus and of this material.
The metal head or blade of the American ax is to-day as it has always
been. The makers of axes will tell you that they scarcely know of any
other model. The face of the blade is of the most highly tempered steel
for a third or half of its extent. The blade or bitt is about eight
inches in length, the cutting edge four and seven-eighths to five inches
in width. The curve of this edge could not, by the highest science, be
made more perfect for the purpose of biting deepest at the least outlay
of human strength. The poll or back of the ax is about four inches in
width, square or roughly rounded into such form that it is capable of
delivering a pounding, crushing or directing blow. The weight of the
ax-head is about four pounds, that is to say from three and one-half to
five pounds.
With the ax one can do many things. With it the early American blazed
his way through the trackless forests. With it he felled the wood
whereby was fed the home fire, or the blaze by which he kept his distant
and solitary bivouac. With it he built his home, framing a fortress
capable of withstanding all the weaponry of his time. With it he not
only made the walls, but fabricated the floors and roof for his little
castle. He built chairs, tables, beds, therewith. By its means he hewed
out his homestead from the heart of the primeval forest, and fenced it
round about. Without it he had been lost.
At times it served him not only as tool, but as weapon; nor did more
terrible weapon ever fit the hand of man. Against its downright blow
wielded by a sinewy arm the steel casques of the Crusaders had proved
indeed poor fending. Even the early womankind of America had
acquaintance with this weapon. There is record of a woman of early
Kentucky who with an ax once despatched five Indians, who assailed the
cabin where for the time she had been left alone.
It was a tremendous thing, this ax of the early American. It cleared
away paths over hundreds of miles, or marked the portages between the
heads of the Western waterways, which the early government declared
should be held as public pathways forever. In time it became an agent of
desolation and destruction, as well as an agent of upbuilding and
construction. Misguided, it leveled all too soon and wastefully the
magnificent forests of this country, whose superior was never seen on
any portion of the earth. Stern, simple, severe, tremendous,
wasteful—truly this was the typical American implement.
CHAPTER II
THE AMERICAN RIFLE
Witness this sweet ancient weapon of our fathers, the American rifle,
maker of states, empire builder. Useful as its cousin, the ax, it is in
design simple as the ax; in outline severe, practicable, purposeful in
every regard. It is devoid of ornamentation. The brass that binds the
foot of the stock is there to protect the wood. The metal guard below
the lock is to preserve from injury the light set-triggers. The serrated
edges of the lock plate may show rude file marks of a certain pattern,
but they are done more in careless strength than in cunning or in
delicacy. This is no belonging of a weak or savage man. It is the weapon
of the Anglo-Saxon; that is to say, the Anglo-Saxon in America, who
invented it because he had need for it.
This arm was born of the conditions that surrounded our forefathers in
the densely covered slopes of the Appalachian Divide, in whose virgin
forests there was for the most part small opportunity for extended
vision, hence little necessity for a weapon of long range. The game or
the enemy with which the early frontiersman was concerned was apt to be
met at distances of not more than a hundred or two hundred yards, and
the early rifle was perfect for such ranges.
Moreover, it was only with great difficulty that the frontiersman
transported any weighty articles on his Western pilgrimage. Lead was
heavy, powder was precious, the paths back to the land of such
commodities long and arduous. A marvel of adaptation, the American rifle
swiftly grew to a practical perfection. Never in the history of the arms
of nations has there been produced a weapon whose results have been more
tremendous in comparison to the visible expenditure of energy; never has
there been a more economical engine, or an environment where economy was
more imperative.
The ball of the American rifle was small, forty, sixty or perhaps one
hundred of them weighing scarcely more than a pound. The little, curving
horn, filled with the precious powder grains, carried enough to furnish
many shots. The stock of the rifle itself gave housing to the little
squares of linen or fine leather with which the bullet was patched in
loading. With this tiny store of powder and lead, easily portable food
for this providentially contrived weapon, the American frontiersman
passed on silently through the forest, a master, an arbiter, ruler of
savage beast or savage foeman, and in time master of the civilized
antagonist that said him nay.
We shall observe that the state of Pennsylvania was the starting point
of the westward movement of our frontiersmen. We shall find also that
the first American small-bore, muzzle-loading rifles were made in
Pennsylvania. The principle of the rifle, the twist in the bore, is
thought to have originated in the German states of the Palatinate, but
it was left for America to improve it and to perfect its use.
At Lancaster, Pennsylvania, there was a riflemaker, probably a German by
birth, by name Decherd or Dechert, who began to outline the type of the
American squirrel-rifle or hunting-arm. This man had an apprentice, one
Mills, with ideas of his own. We see this apprentice and his improved
rifle presently in North Carolina; and soon thereafter riflemakers
spring up all over the east slope of the Alleghanies, so that as though
by magic all our hunters and frontiersmen are equipped with this long
rifle, shooting the tiny ball, and shooting it with an accuracy hitherto
deemed impossible in the achievements of firearms.
Withal we may call this a Southern arm, since New England was later in
taking up its use, clinging to the Queen Anne musket when the men of
North Carolina and Virginia scorned to shoot a squirrel anywhere except
in the head. The first riflemen of the Revolutionary War were
Pennsylvanians, Virginians and Marylanders, all Southerners; and deadly
enough was their skill with what the English officers called their
“cursed widow and orphan makers.”
The barrel of the typical rifle of those days was about four feet in
length, the stock slender, short and strongly curved, so that the sights
came easily and directly up to the level of the eye in aiming. The
sights were low and close to the barrel, some pieces being provided with
two hind sights, a foot or so apart, so that the marksman might not draw
either too fine or too coarse a bead with the low silver or bone
crescent of the fore sight. Usually the rear sight was a simple, flat
bar, finely notched, and placed a foot or fifteen inches in front of the
breech of the barrel, so that the eye should focus easily and sharply at
the notch of the rear sight. Such was the care with which the sights
were adjusted that the rifleman sometimes put the finishing touches on
the notch with so soft a cutting tool as a common pin, working away
patiently, a little at a time, lest he should by too great haste go too
deep into the rear sight, and so cause the piece to shoot otherwise than
“true.”
The delicately arranged set-triggers made possible an instantaneous
discharge without any appreciable disturbance of the aim when once
obtained; and the long distance between the hind sight and fore sight,
the steadiness of the piece, owing to its length and weight, the
closeness of the line of sight to the line of the trajectory of a ball
driven with a relatively heavy powder charge, all conspired to render
extreme accuracy possible with this arm, and this accuracy became so
general throughout the American frontier that to be a poor rifle shot
was to be an object of contempt.
Each rifle was provided with its own bullet mold, which cast a round
ball of such size that when properly “patched” it fitted the bore of the
piece tightly, so tightly that in some cases a “starter” or section of
false barrel was used, into which the ball was forced, sometimes being
swaged in with a mallet and a short starting rod. The ramrod proper was
carried in pipes attached to the long wooden stock, which extended to
the muzzle of the barrel underneath the piece. One end of this rod was
protected with a brass ferrule, and the other was provided with a screw,
into which was twisted the “worm” used in cleaning the arm.
The pouch of the hunter always carried some flax or tow for use in
cleaning the piece. The rifleman would wind a wisp of this tow about the
end of the “worm,” moisten it by passing it between his lips, and then
pass the tightly fitting wad of tow up and down the barrel until the
latter was perfectly free from powder residue. Then the little ball,
nicely patched, was forced down on the powder charge by the slender
ramrod, made with great care from the toughest straight-grained hickory
wood.
Powder and ball were precious in those early days, and though strong men
ever love the sports of weapons, waste could not be tolerated even in
sport. Sometimes at night the frontiersmen would gather for the pastime
of “snuffing the candle,” and he was considered a clumsy rifleman who
but fanned the flame with his bullet, or cut too deeply into the base of
the candle-wick, and so extinguished the light. Again the riflemen would
engage in “driving the nail” with the rifle ball, or would shoot at a
tiny spot of black on a board or a blazed tree-trunk, firing a number of
balls into the same mark. In nearly all such cases the balls were dug
out of the tree or plank into which they had been fired, and were run
over again into fresh bullets for use at another time. Thus grew the
skill of the American rifleman, with whose weapon most of the feats of
latter day short-range marksmanship could be duplicated.[1]
The early American depended upon his rifle in supporting and defending
his family. Without it he had not dared to move across the Alleghanies.
With it he dared to go anywhere, knowing that it would furnish him food
and fending. When the deer and turkey became less numerous near him, he
moved his home farther westward, where game was more abundant.
His progress was bitterly contested by the Indian savages all the way
cross the American continent, but they perished before this engine of
civilization, which served its purpose across the timbered Appalachians,
down the watershed to the Mississippi, up the long and winding streams
of the western lands, over the Rockies, and down the slopes of the
Sierras to the farther sea. Had it never known change it had not been
American. An ax is an ax, because a tree is a tree, whether in the
Alleghanies or the Rockies; but the rifle met in time different
conditions. The great plains furnished larger game animals, and demanded
longer range in arms, so that in time the rifle shot a heavier ball.
When the feverish intensity of American life had asked yet more haste,
there came the repeating rifle, firing rapidly a number of shots, an
invention now used all over the earth. In time there came also the
revolving pistol, rapid, destructive, American. These things had not to
do with the early west-bound man, this wilderness traveler, himself
perforce almost savage, shod with moccasins, wearing the fringed hide
tunic that was never in the designs of Providence intended for any
unmanly man, and that fits ill to-day the figure of any round-paunched
city dweller. Feather or plume he did not wear in his hat, for such
things pertained rather to the hired voyager than to the independent
home builder. Ornamentation was foreign to his garb and to his weaponry.
He had much to do. The way was hard. No matter how he must travel, this
long rifle was with him. At his belt, in the little bag of buckskin,
were the bullets in their stoppered pouch, the cleaning worm, the extra
flint or two, the awl for mending shoon or clothing.
So were equipped the early Americans, gaunt, keen, tireless, that
marched to meet the invading forces at the battle of New Orleans; and
when the officers of the British army, on the day after that stricken
field, found half their dead shot between the eyes, they knew they could
lead their troops no more against such weaponry and such weapon bearers.
The rifle had won the West, and it would hold it fast.
-----
Footnote 1:
In a careful test an old squirrel-rifle, for three generations in the
author’s family, and now nearly one hundred years old, was fired five
times, at a distance of 60 yards, and the point of the finger would
cover all five of the balls, which made practically but one ragged
hole. The author’s father handled the old weapon on this occasion.
Again, in the author’s hands, it shot out in succession the spots or
pips of a playing card, the ten of clubs, at such distance as left the
spots only clearly distinguishable. This piece was altered from flint
lock to pill-percussion lock, and later to the percussion cap lock.
CHAPTER III
THE AMERICAN BOAT
Here is that fairy ship of the wilderness, the birch-bark canoe, the
first craft of America, antedating even the arrival of the white man. It
is the ship of risk and of adventure, belonging by right to him who goes
far and travels light, who is careless of his home coming. It is a boat
that now carries the voyager, and now is carried by him. It is a
great-hearted craft. You shall take it upon your shoulders, and carry it
a mile across the land trail, without needing to set it down; but when
you place it on the water it in turn will carry you and your fellow, and
yet another, and your household goods of the wilderness up to five times
your weight.
Freakish as a woman, as easily unsettled, yet if you be master it shall
take you over combing waves, and down yeasty rapids and against steady
current, until finally you shall find yourself utterly apart from the
familiar haunts of man, about you only the wilderness, the unadventured.
This is the ship of the wilderness, the fairy ship, the ship of heroes.
To-day it is passing away. With it goes great store of romance and
adventure.
The red man taught the white man how to build and how to use this boat.
He taught how to cut the long strips of toughest bark from the
birch-tree, prying it off with sharpened pole or driven wooden wedge. He
showed how to build the frame of the boat on the ground, or in a long
hole dug in the ground, where stakes hold fast the curves of the
gunwales, between which are later forced the steamed splints that serve
as ribs and as protection for the fragile skin, soaked soft and pliable,
which is presently laid on the frame of gunwale and rib and bottom
splint. This covering of bark is sewn together with the thread of the
forest, fiber of swamp conifers—“wautp,” the Indians of the North call
this thread.
Then over the seams is run the melted pitch and resin taken from the
woods. The edges of the bark skin are made fast at the gunwales, the
sharply bent bows are guarded carefully from cracks where the straining
comes, and the narrow thwarts, wide as your three fingers, are lashed
in, serving as brace and as all the seat you shall find when weary from
kneeling. The fresh bark is clean and sweet upon the new-made ship, the
smell of the resin is clean. Each line of the boat is full of spirit and
grace and beauty.
The builder turns it over, and where he finds a bubble in the pitching
of a seam he bends down and puts his lips to it, sucking in his breath,
to find if air comes through. So he tests it, well and thoroughly,
mending and patching slowly and carefully, until at last it pleases him
throughout. And then he places his new-made ship on the water, where it
sits high and light, spinning and turning at its tether, never still for
an instant, but shifting like a wild duck under the willows, responsive
to the least breath of the passing airs. It is eager to go on. It will
go far, in its life of a year or two. If it gets a wound from the rocks,
or from the clumsiness of the tyro that drives it upon the beach instead
of anchoring it free, then it is easily mended by a strip of bark and
some forest pitch. When at last it loses its youth, and cracks or soaks
in water so freely that it takes too long to dry it at the noonday
pipe-smoking, then it is not so difficult to build another in the
forest.
The canoe is as the ax and the rifle, an agent economical, capable of
great results in return for small expenditure of energy. It is American.
There was much to do, far to go. It was thus because America existed as
it did.
No craft has been found easier of propulsion to one knowing the art of
the paddle. The voyager makes his paddle about as long as his rifle, up
to his chin in length. He paddles with the blade always on one side of
the canoe. As the blade is withdrawn from the backward stroke, it is
turned slightly in the water, so that the course of the bow is still
held straight. If he would approach a landing sidewise with his boat, he
makes his paddle describe short half curves, back and forth, and the
little boat follows the paddle obediently. The advance of the canoe is
light, silent, spirit-like. It is full of mystery, this boat. Yet it is
kind to those who know it, as is the wilderness and as are all its
creatures.
This is the boat of the northern traveler, the voyager of the upper
ways. In the South, where the birch does not grow in proper dimensions,
the bark of the elm has on occasion served to make a small craft. In
different parts of the North, too, the birch canoe takes different
shapes. In the northeast the Abenakis made it long and with little rake,
with low bow and stern and with bottom swelling outward safely under the
tumble-home,—this stable model serving for the strong streams of the
forested regions of the North. Far to the west, where roll the great
inland lakes, the Ojibways made their boats higher at bow and stern,
wider of beam, shorter, rounder of bottom, all the better fitted for
short and choppy waves.
Then, under the white fur traders’ tutelage, there were made great ships
of birch-bark, the canot du Nord of the Hudson Bay trade, such as came
down with rich burdens of furs when the brigades started down-stream to
the markets; or yet the greater canot du maitre once used on the Great
Lakes, a craft that needed a dozen to a dozen and a half paddles for its
propulsion. Again, at the heads of the far off Northwestern streams
there were canoes so small as to carry but a single person, propelled by
a pair of sticks, one in each hand of the occupant, the points of these
hand-sticks pushing against the bottom of the stream. But ever this ship
of the wilderness was so contrived that its crew could drive it by water
or carry it by land.
Thus were the portages mastered, thus did the man with small gear to
hinder him get out from home, westward into the wilderness. Down stream
or up stream, this boat went far. Paddle or sail or shodden pole served
for the wanderer before the trails were made, and before the boats of
the white settlers followed where the savage red men and scarcely less
savage white adventurers had found the way.
There were other boats for the early traveler, and these were employed
by those that had crossed the Alleghanies on foot and would fare farther
westward. The dugout, made of the sycamore or sassafras log, ten to
twenty feet in length, narrow, unstable, thick-skinned and a bit clumsy,
was good enough for one pushing on down-stream, or prowling about in
sluggish, silent bayous. This was the boat of the South in the early
days. Soon the great flat-boat succeeded it for those that traveled with
family goods or in large parties. The wooden boats came later, the
flat-boat after the dugout, the keel-boat but following the far trail of
the birch-bark to the upper ways, or perchance passing, slipping
down-stream, the frail hide coracle of the hunter that had ventured
unaccompanied far into unknown lands.
Above all things in these early days must compactness and lightness be
studied. This American traveler was poor in the goods of this world; his
possessions made small bulk. This ax made him bivouac or castle, or
helped him make raft or canoe. This rifle gave him food and clothing. He
walked westward to the westward flowing streams, and there this light
craft, dancing, beckoning, alluring, invited him yet on and on,
proffering him carriage for his scanty store, offering obedience to him
who was the master of the wilderness, of its alluring secrets and its
immeasurable resources.
CHAPTER IV
THE AMERICAN HORSE
Observe here a creature, a dumb brute, that has saved some centuries of
time. Indeed, without this American horse, the American civilization
perhaps could never have been. Without the ax, the rifle, the boat and
the horse there could have been no West.
To-day we would in some measure dispense with the horse, but in the
early times no part of man’s possessions was more indispensable. This
animal was not then quite as we find him to-day in the older settled
portions of the country. In some of our wilder regions we can still see
him somewhat as he once was, rough, wiry, hardy, capable of great
endeavor, easily supported upon the country over which he passed.
Naturally the early west-bound traveler could not take with him food for
his horse, and the latter must be quite independent of grain. Corn,
exceedingly difficult to raise, was for the master alone. The horse must
live on grass food, and find it where he stopped at night. During the
day he must carry the traveler and his weapons, another horse perhaps
serving as transportation for food or household goods; or, if there was
a family with the traveler, perhaps one horse sufficed for the mother
and a child or two. The weak might ride, the strong could trudge
alongside. Many women have so traveled out into the West—women as sweet
as any of to-day.
We have here, then, one more simple, economical and effective factor in
the resources of the early American. Beauty, finish, elegance, were not
imperative. Strength, stamina, hardihood, these things must be
possessed. The horse must be durable; and so he was. The early settlers
on the Atlantic coast brought from over the seas horses of good blood.
Virginia was noted as a breeding ground before the yet more famous Blue
Grass Region of Kentucky began to produce horses of great quality. The
use of the horse in the New World went on as it did in the Old. The
French in the North, the English at the mid-continent, the Spanish in
the South, all brought over horses; and even to-day the types of the
three sections are distinct.
The horse with which we are concerned was the hardy animal, able to find
food in the forest glades or laurel thickets of the Appalachians; that
served as pack-horse in the hunt near home, as baggage horse in the
journey away from home. In those days the horse was rather a luxury than
a necessity. All earlier or Eastern America was at short range. The
rifle was short in range; the man himself was a footman, and did not
travel very far in actual leagues.
For a generation he could walk, or at least travel by boat. But when he
came to the edge of the open country of the plains, when he saw above
him the vast bow of the great River of the West, across whose arc he
needed to travel direct, then there stood waiting for him, as though by
providential appointment, this humble creature, this coward, this hero
of an animal, now afraid of its own shadow, now willing to face steel
and powder-smoke, patient, dauntless, capable of great exertion and
great accomplishment. So in the land of great distances the traveler
became a mounted man; the horse became part of him, no longer a luxury,
but a necessity.
The Spanish contributed most largely to the American holding of that
vast indefinite West of ours that they once claimed, when they allowed
to straggle northward across the plains, into the hand of Indian or
white man, this same lean and wiry horse, carrying to the deserts of
America the courage of his far-off Moorish blood, his African
adaptability to long journeys on short fare.[2] The man that followed
the Ohio and Missouri to the edge of the plains, the trapper, the
hunter, the adventurer of the fur trade, had been wholly helpless
without the horse. For a time the trading posts might cling to the
streams, but there was a call to a vast empire between the streams,
where one could not walk, where no boat could go, nor any wheeled
vehicle whatever. Here, then, came the horse, the thing needed.
The white adventurer may have brought his horse with him by certain slow
generations of advance, or he may have met him as he moved West; at
times he captured and tamed him for himself, again he bought him of the
Indian, or took him without purchase. Certainly in the great open
reaches of the farther West the horse became man’s most valuable
property, the unit of all recognized current values. The most serious,
the most unforgivable crime was that of horse stealing. To kill a man in
war, man to man, was a matter of man and man, and to be regarded at
times with philosophy; but to take away without quarrel and by stealth
what was most essential to man’s life or welfare was held equivalent to
murder unprovoked and of a despicable nature. To be “set afoot” was one
of the horrors long preserved in memory by the idiom of Western speech.
The food of this horse, then, was generally what he might gain by
forage. In furnishings, his bridle was sometimes a hide lariat, his
saddle the buckskin pad of the Indians. Stirrups the half-wild white man
sometimes discarded, after the fashion of the Indian, who rode by the
clinging of his legs turned back, or by purchase of his toes thrust in
between the foreleg and the body of his mount. A fleet horse, one much
valued in the chase or in war, might be his master’s pet, tied close to
his house of skin at night, or picketed near-by at the lonesome bivouac.
He might have braided in his forelock the eagle feather that his white
master himself would have disdained to wear as ornament. Of grooming the
horse knew nothing, neither did he ever know a day of shelter.
His stable was the heart of a willow thicket if the storm blew fierce.
In winter-time his hay was the bark of the cottonwood, under whose
gnarled arms the hunter had pitched his winter tepee or built his rough
war-house of crooked logs. When all the wide plain was a sheet of white,
covered again by the driven blinding snows of the prairie storm, then
this hardy animal must paw down through the snow and find his own food,
the dried grass curled close to the ground. Where the ox would perish
the horse could survive. He was simple, practicable, durable, even under
the hardest conditions. The horse of the American West ought to have
place on the American coat of arms.
The horse might be a riding animal, or at times a beast of burden. In
the earliest days he was packed simply, sometimes with hide pockets or
panniers after the Indian fashion, with a lash rope perhaps holding the
load together roughly. Later on in the story of the West there came a
day when it was necessary to utilize all energies more exactly, and then
the loading of the horse became an interesting and intricate science.
The carry-all or pannier was no longer essential, and the packs were
made up of all manner of things transported. The pack saddle, a pair of
X’s connected with side bars, the “saw buck” pack-saddle of the West,
which was an idea perhaps taken from the Indians, was the immediate aid
of the packer. The horse and the lash rope in combination were born of
necessity, the necessity of long trails across the mountains and the
plains.
Thus the horse trebled the independence of the Western man, made it
possible for him to travel as far as he liked across unknown lands, made
him soldier, settler, trader, merchant; enabled him indeed to build a
West that had grown into giant stature even before the day of steam.
-----
Footnote 2:
“Wherever pictographs of the horse appear the representations must
have been done subsequent to the advent of Coronado, or the
conquistadors of Florida. There are no horse portraits in Arizona and
vicinity, nor up the Pacific coast, but they are frequent in Texas and
in the trans-Mississippi region. The domestic horse (not Eohippus, the
diminutive quaternary animal which was indigenous) was introduced into
Florida from Santo Domingo by the Spaniards early in the 15th century,
as well as into South America, where it spread in fifteen years as far
south as Patagonia.”—Chas. Hallock, the “American Antiquarian,”
January, 1902.
CHAPTER V
THE PATHWAY OF THE WATERS[3]
On a busy street of a certain Western city there appeared, not long ago,
a figure whose peculiarities attracted the curious attention of the
throng through which he passed. It was a man, tall, thin, bronzed,
wide-hatted, long-haired, clad in the garb of a day gone by. How he came
to the city, whence he came, or why, it boots little to ask. There he
was, one of the old-time “long-haired men” of the West. His face,
furrowed with the winds of the high plains and of the mountains, and
bearing still the lines of boldness and confidence, had in these new
surroundings taken on a shade of timorous anxiety. His eye was
disturbed. At his temples the hair was gray, and the long locks that
dropped to his shoulders were thin and pitiful. A man of another day, of
a bygone country, he babbled of scoutings, of warfare with savages, of
the chase of the buffalo. None knew what he spoke. He babbled, grieved,
and vanished.
Into the same city there wandered, from a somewhat more recent West,
another man grown swiftly old. Ten years earlier this figure might have
been seen over all the farming-lands of the West, most numerous near the
boom towns and the land-offices. He was here transplanted, set down in
the greatest boom town of them all, but, alas! too old and too alien to
take root.
He wore the same long-tailed coat, the same white hat that marked him
years ago—tall-crowned, not wide-rimmed; the hat that swept across the
Missouri River in the early eighties. His beard was now grown gray, his
eye watery, his expression subdued, and no longer buoyantly and
irresistibly hopeful. His pencil, as ready as ever to explain the price
of lots or land, had lost its erstwhile convincing logic. From his soul
had departed that strange, irrational, adorable belief, birthright of
the American that was, by which he was once sure that the opportunities
of the land that bore him were perennial and inexhaustible. This man
sought now no greatness and no glory. He wanted only the chance to make
a living. And, think you, he came of a time when a man might be a
carpenter at dawn, merchant at noon, lawyer by night, and yet be
respected every hour of the day, if he deserved it as a man.
It was exceeding sweet to be a savage. It is pleasant to dwell upon the
independent character of Western life, and to go back to the glories of
that land and day when a man who had a rifle and a saddle-blanket was
sure of a living, and need ask neither advice nor permission of any
living soul. Those days, vivid, adventurous, heroic, will have no
counterpart on the earth again. Those early Americans, who raged and
roared across the West, how unspeakably swift was the play in which they
had their part! There, surely, was a drama done under the strictest law
of the unities, under the sun of a single day.
No fiction can ever surpass in vividness the vast, heroic drama of the
West. The clang of steel, the shoutings of the captains, the stimulus of
wild adventure—of these things, certainly, there has been no lack.
There has been close about us for two hundred years the sweeping action
of a story keyed higher than any fiction, more unbelievably bold, more
incredibly keen in spirit. And now we come upon the tame and tranquil
sequel of that vivid play of human action. “Anticlimax!” cries all that
humanity that cares to think, that dares to regret, that once dared to
hope. “Tell us of the West that was,” demands that humanity, and with
the best of warrant; “play for us again the glorious drama of the past,
and let us see again the America that once was ours.”
Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to
answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each
epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living
causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant
sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest
may attach to a quest that goes farther than a mere summons for the
spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West?
What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and
why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the
West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run wider
than the West, and, indeed, wider than America.
In the pursuit of this line of thought we need ask only a few broad
premises. These premises may leave us not so much of self-vaunting as we
might wish, and may tend to diminish our esteem of the importance of
individual as well as national accomplishment; for, after all and before
all, we are but flecks on the surface of the broad, moving ribbon of
fate. We are all,—Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World or
the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,—but the result of the
mandate that bade mankind to increase and multiply, that bade mankind to
take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken over temporarily
that portion of the earth and its fullness allotted or made possible to
us by that Providence to which all things belong. We have each of us
done this along the lines of the least possible resistance, for this is
the law of organic life.
The story of the taking over of the earth into possession has been but a
story of travel. Aryan, Cymri, Goth, Vandal, Westerner—they are all
one. The question of occupying the unoccupied world has been only a
question of transportation, of invasion, and of occupation along the
lines of least resistance. Hence we have at hand, in a study of
transportation of the West at different epochs, a clue that will take us
very near to the heart of things.
We read to-day of forgotten Phenicia and of ancient Britain. They were
unlike, because they were far apart. The ancient captains who directed
the ships that brought them approximately together were great men in
their day, fateful men. The captains of transportation that made all
America one land are still within our reach, great men, fateful men; and
they hold a romantic interest under their grim tale of material things.
You and I live where they said we must live. It was they who marked out
the very spot where the fire was to rise upon your hearth-stone. You
have married a certain Phenician because they said that this must be
your fate. Your children were born because some captain said they should
be. You are here not of your own volition. The day of volitions, let us
remember, is gone.
The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far
different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax, of
linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of
trolley-cars and self-binders, of purple and fine linen, it must be
observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work,
and back of all these causes were the original law and the original
mandate. The force of this primeval impulse was behind all those early
actors, and Roundhead Cavalier, praying man and fighting man, who had
this continent for a stage. It was behind the men that followed inland
from the sea the first prophets of adventure. It is behind us to-day.
The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.
When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the
upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was
the Alleghanies, how then did the west-bound adventurers travel, these
folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation? The answer
would seem easy. They traveled as did the Cimri, the Goths—in the
easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse
and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind
followed the pathways of the waters.
Bishop Berkeley, prophetic soul, wrote his line: “Westward the course of
empire takes its way.” The public has always edited it to read the
“star” of empire that “takes it way” to the West. If one will read this
poem in connection with a government census map, he can not fail to see
how excellent is the amendment. Excellent census map, that holds between
its covers the greatest poem, the greatest drama ever written! Excellent
census map, that marks the center of population of America with a
literal star, and, at the curtain of each act, the lapse of each ten
years, advances this star with the progress of the drama, westward,
westward, ever westward! Excellent scenario, its scheme done in red and
yellow and brown, patched each ten years, ragged, blurred, until, after
a hundred years, the scheme is finished, and the color is solid all
across the page, showing that the end has come, and that the land has
yielded to the law!
The first step of this star of empire, that concluded in 1800, barely
removed it from its initial point on the Chesapeake. The direction was
toward the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The government at
Washington, young as it was, knew that the Ohio River, reached from the
North by a dozen trails from the Great Lakes, and running out into that
West which even then was coveted by three nations, was of itself a
priceless possession. The restless tide of humanity spread from that
point according to principles as old as the world. Having a world before
them from which to choose their homes, the men of that time sought out
those homes along the easiest lines.
The first thrust of the out-bound population was not along the parallels
of latitude westward, as is supposed to be the rule, but to the south
and southeast, into the valleys of the Appalachians, where the hills
would raise corn, and the streams would carry it. The early emigrants
learned that a raft would eat nothing, that a boat runs well
down-stream. Men still clung to the seaboard region, though even then
they exemplified the great law of population that designates the river
valleys to be the earliest and most permanent centers of population. The
first trails of the Appalachians were the waterways.
Dear old New England, the land sought out as the home of religious
freedom, and really perhaps the most intolerant land the earth ever
knew, sometimes flatters herself that she is the mother of the West. Not
so. New England holds mortgages only on the future of the West, not on
its past. The first outshoots of the seaboard civilization to run forth
into the West did not trace back to the stern and rock-bound shore where
the tolerants were punishing those who did not agree with them.
New York, then, was perhaps the parent of the West? By no means, however
blandly pleasant that belief might be to many for whom New York must be
ever the first cause and center of the American civilization, not the
reflection-point of that civilization. The rabid Westerner may enjoy the
thought that neither New England nor New York was the actual ancestor.
Perhaps he may say that the West had no parent, but was born
Minerva-like. In this he would be wrong. The real mother of the West was
the South. It was she who bore this child, and it has been much at her
expense that it has grown so large and matured so swiftly. If you sing
“arms and the man” for the West, you must sing Southerner and not
Puritan, knight-errant and not psalmodist. The path of empire had its
head on the Chesapeake. There was the American Ararat.
* * * * *
“The great American journeyings were far under way before New England
appeared to realize that there was a greater America toward the West.
The musket bearers of the New England states, the fighting men of the
South, and the riflemen of what might already have been called the West,
had finished the Revolutionary War long before New England had turned
her eyes westward. The pilgrimage over the Appalachians was made, the
new provinces of Kentucky and Tennessee were fighting for a commerce and
a commercial highway of their own, while yet the most that New England,
huddled along her stern and rock-bound shore, could do was to talk of
shutting off these Westerners from their highway of the Mississippi, and
compelling them to trade back with the tidewater provinces of what was
not yet an America.
“Canny and cautious, New York and New England were ready to fear this
new country in which they refused to believe; were ready to cripple it,
although they declined to credit its future. The pioneers of the South
fought their way into the West. New England bought her way, and that
after all the serious problems of pioneering had been solved. The ‘Ohio
Land Company’ of Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tucker and their none too honest
associate, the New Bedford preacher, Manasseh Cutler, were engaged in
the first great land steal ever known in the West. They did not fight
the Indians for their holdings, but went to Congress, and with practical
methods secured five million acres of land at a price of about eight or
nine cents an acre; the first offer to Congress being a million dollars
for a million and a half acres of what is now the state of Ohio, the
payment to be in soldiers’ scrip, worth twelve cents on the dollar.
“The Ohio company took its settlers out to its new land as a railway
does its colonists to-day. Reaching the Ohio River, they descended it in
a bullet-proof barge, called ‘with strange irony’ the ‘Mayflower.’ They
entered the mouth of the Muskingum and anchored under the guns of a
United States fort.”[4]
This is how New England got into the West. There is no hero story there.
The men of the South, men of North Carolina and Virginia, most of whom
had come from Pennsylvania and dropped down along the east slope of the
Appalachians, as it were sparring these mountain ranges for an opening
until at length they had found the ways of the game trails and Indian
trails from headwater to headwater, and so had reached the west-bound
streams—these actual adventurers had built Harrodsburg and
Boonesborough seventeen years before the Ohio company entered the
Muskingum. Already there was a West; even a West far beyond
Boonesborough and its adjacent corn grounds.
This actual record of the upper states in the exploration of the West is
to-day not generally remembered nor understood. Sometimes an ardent New
Englander will explain that the Puritans would have earlier pressed out
westward had it not been for the barrier of the Iroquois on their
western borders. They read their history but ill who do not know that
the Iroquois trafficked always with the English as against the French;
whereas Kentucky, the land opened by the Southern pioneers, was occupied
by a more dangerous red population, made up of many tribes, having no
policy but that of war, and no friends outside of each separate motley
hunting party, sure to be at knife’s point with either white or red
strangers. The most difficult and most dangerous frontier was that of
the South; yet it was the South that won through.
There are two explanations of this incontrovertible historical fact. One
lies perhaps in the general truth that early pioneers nearly always
cling to the river valleys, perhaps not more for purposes of
transportation by water than in obedience to a certain instinct that
seems to hold the pathways of the streams as foreordained guidance. The
man that is lost in the wilderness hails with delight the appearance of
a stream. It will lead him somewhere; it will guide him back again. Near
it will be game, near it, too, rich soil. The man that enters the
wilderness deliberately does so along the waterways.
All the great initial explorations have been made in this way. The men
of Kentucky and Tennessee having reached the headwaters of the Kentucky,
the Tennessee, the Holston or kindred riverways, moved out into their
promised land along paths, as it were, foreordained. The rivers of the
North did not run out into the West, but pointed ever toward the sea.
This is one explanation of the somewhat inglorious part of New England
in the discovery of the West. It does not explain her narrowness of view
in regard to that West after it had been discovered by others; neither
does this geographical explanation, in the opinion of many, cover the
main phenomena of her timid attitude in regard to Western exploration.
The true reason, in the belief of these students, is to be found in the
character of the New England population, as compared to the bolder breed
of men who overran the western sections of Pennsylvania and for two
generations were in continuous touch with the wilderness and its
savagery. This subject is taken up interestingly by Horace Kephart, a
scholar of much acquaintance with early American history, in the course
of an able paper. It is very much worth while for any one who wishes an
actual picture of the march across the Appalachians to read his
conclusions.
“In a vague way we think of all the East as old,” says this writer, “and
all the West as new. We picture civilization as advancing westward from
the Atlantic in a long, straight front, like a wave or a line of battle.
But in point of fact it was not so. There was a permanent settlement of
Europeans a thousand miles to the west of us before the Pilgrims landed
at Plymouth. Cahokia and Kaskaskia were thriving villages before
Baltimore was founded; and our own city of St. Louis was building in the
same year that New Jersey became a British possession. At a time when
Daniel Boone was hunting beaver on the Osage and the Missouri, Fenimore
Cooper was drawing the types for future ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ from his
neighbors in a ‘wilderness’ only a hundred and fifty miles from New York
City.
“American settlement advanced toward the Mississippi in the shape of a
wedge, of which the entering edge was first Lancaster, in Pennsylvania,
then the Shenandoah valley, then Louisville, and finally St. Louis. When
the second census of the United States was taken, in 1800, nearly all
the white inhabitants of our country lived in a triangle formed by a
diagonal southwestward from Portland, Maine, to the mouth of the
Tennessee River, here meeting another diagonal running northwestward
from Savannah, with the Atlantic for a base. Central and western New
York, northern Pennsylvania, and all the territory north of the Ohio
River, save in its immediate vicinity, were almost uninhabited by
whites, and so were Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Yet the state of
Kentucky had half as many people as Massachusetts, and Tennessee had
already been admitted into the Union.
“As a rule, geographical expansion proceeds along the lines of least
resistance, following the natural highways afforded by navigable rivers
and open plains. It is easily turned aside by mountain chains, dense
forests, and hostile natives. Especially was this true in the days
before railroads. But the development of our older West shows a striking
exception to this rule; for the entering wedge was actually driven
through one of the most rugged, difficult, and inhospitable regions to
be found along the whole frontier of the British possessions.
“This fact is strange enough to fix our attention; but it is doubly
strange when we consider that there was no climatic, political nor
economic necessity for such defiance of nature’s laws. We can see why
the Mississippi should have been explored from the north, rather than
from its mouth, because Canada was settled before Louisiana, and it is
easier to float downstream than to pole or cordelle against the current.
But why was not the West entered and settled through the obviously easy
course of the Mohawk Valley?
“Beyond this valley were gentle slopes, and many a route practicable for
settlers into the rich country of Ohio. The central trail of the
Iroquois, beaten smoother than a wagon-road, ran straight west from
Albany, through the fairest portion of New York, to the present site of
Buffalo, and thence followed the southern shore of Lake Erie into Ohio.
Where it crossed the Genesee, the old war-trail of the Senecas branched
off to the south, passing behind the farthermost ramparts of the
Alleghanies, to the forks of the Ohio. Moccasined feet traveling over
these trails for centuries had worn them from three to twelve inches
into the ground, so that they were easy to follow on the darkest night.
These were only two of several well-marked routes from ancient Albany to
the new West. It was to this easy communication with the country beyond
the Appalachians that the Iroquois owed their commanding position on the
continent.
“These Iroquois were in the way, to be sure; but with them New York had
every advantage over her sister provinces. Her policy toward these
powerful Indians was conciliatory. She was allied with them against the
French. The Six Nations ravaged the frontiers of all the other colonies,
from Massachusetts to Carolina, and carried their conquests to the
Mississippi, but they spared New York and even invited her to build
forts on their border as outposts against the French. New York had the
most influential Indian agent of his time in Sir William Johnson, who
had married the sister of the Mohawk chief Brant, and by her had several
sons who were war-chiefs of the Iroquois. In 1745 the Iroquois even
ceded to New York a strip of land sixty miles wide, along the southern
shores of lakes Ontario and Erie, extending to the modern Cleveland. It
should have been easy for the Knickerbockers to secure passage for their
emigrants into the western country had they chosen to ask it.
“On the other hand, the southern colonies had no easy access to the
West. Nature herself had bidden these people to rest content in their
tidewater regions, and frowned upon any westward expansion by
interposing the mighty barriers of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies,
rising tier beyond tier in parallel chains from northern Pennsylvania to
Alabama. Few trails crossed these mountains. From base to summit they
were clad in dense forest, matted into jungle by luxuriant undergrowth.
No one knew what lay beyond them, nor how far through this ‘forest,
savage, harsh, impregnable,’ the traveler must bore until he reached
land fit for settlement.
“It was well known, however, that the trans-Alleghany region, whatever
might be its economic features, was dangerous ground. The Indians
themselves could not occupy it, for it had been for ages the common
battle-ground of opposing tribes. Any savage met within its confines was
sure to be on the war-path against any and all comers. He that entered
took his life in his hand.
“Thus the chances of success in any westward movement were in favor of
New York and New England, and against Pennsylvania. Yet it was the
latter that did the work. Central and western New York remained a
wilderness until Missouri was settling with Americans. New England took
little or no part in Western affairs until, the West having been won,
Massachusetts and Connecticut, calmly overstepping New York and
Pennsylvania, laid thrifty hand upon the public domain north of
Pittsburg and west to the Mississippi.
“We have seen that the West was actually entered by the most difficult
and hostile route, and this in spite of political and economic reasons
for choosing a more northerly and easier line of advance. I do not
remember that this has ever before been pointed out; but it is a fact of
deep significance, for it determined what should be the temper of the
great West, and what should be its course of development.
“The wedge of settlement was driven through the heart of the Alleghanies
because there dwelt at the foot of the mountains a people more
aggressive, more daring, and more independent than the tidewater stock.
This people acted on its own initiative, not only without government
aid, but sometimes in defiance of government. It won to the American
flag not only the central West, but the Northwest and Southwest as well;
and it was, for the most part, the lineal descendants of these men that
first, of Americans, explored the far West, and subdued it for future
settlement.
“This explains why Missouri, rather than the northern tier of new
states, became in its turn the vanguard and outpost of civilization, as
Kentucky and Tennessee had been before her, and Virginia and
Pennsylvania before them. It explains why, when mountain and forest
barriers had been left behind, and the vast Western plain offered
countless parallel routes of travel to the Rockies, such routes were not
used, but all the great transcontinental trails, whether to Santa Fé,
California, or Oregon, focused for half a century at St. Louis or
Independence. It explains why the majority of our famous scouts and
explorers and Indian fighters were men whose strain went back to the
Shenandoah valley or the Yadkin, and why most of them could trace their
descent still farther back to Pennsylvania, mother of Western pioneers.”
There is much that is convincing in this study of facts and motives; yet
perhaps the gentler and broader view is not that of personnel but of
geography. I myself am more disposed to believe that St. Louis became
great by reason of her situation on the great interior pathways of the
waters; though all this may be said with no jot of abatement in
admiration for the magnificent daring and determination of those men of
the lower slopes of the Appalachians who, as history shows simply and
unmistakably, were really the pioneers of the eastern, the middle and
the most western portions of the splendid empire of the West. Let us
reserve for a later chapter the more specific study of this typical
adventurer and his origin, and pass for the present to the general
consideration of the figure that we may call the American west-bound
man.
* * * * *
We must remember that there had been two or three full American
generations to produce him, this man that first dared turn away from the
seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the sun, toward the dark
and mysterious mountains and forests, which then encompassed the least
remote land fairly to be called the West. Two generations had produced a
man different from the Old-World type. Free air and good food had given
him abundant brawn. He was tall, with Anak in his frame. Little fat
cloyed the free play of his muscles, and there belonged to him the
heritage of the courage that comes of good heart and lungs. He was a
splendid man to have for an ancestor, this tall and florid athlete that
never heard of athletics. His face was thin and aquiline, his look high
and confident, his eye blue, his speech reserved. You may see this same
man yet in those restricted parts of this country which remain fit to be
called American. You may see him sometimes in the mountains of
Tennessee, the brakes of Arkansas or Missouri, where the old strain has
remained most pure. You might have seen him over all the West in the
generation preceding our own.
In time this early outbound man learned that there were rivers that ran,
not to the southwest and into the sea, but outward, beyond the mountains
and toward the setting sun. The winding trails of the Alleghanies led
one finally to rivers that ran toward Kentucky, Tennessee, even farther
out into that unknown, tempting land which still was called the West.
Thus it came that the American genius broke entirely away from
salt-water traditions, asked no longer “What cheer?” from the ships that
came from across the seas, clung no longer to the customs, the costumes,
the precedents or standards of the past.
There came the day of buckskin and woolsey, of rifle and ax, of men
curious for adventures, of homes built of logs and slabs, with puncheons
for floors, with little fields about them, and tiny paths that led out
into the immeasurable preserves of the primeval forests. A few things
held intrinsic value at that time—powder, lead, salt, maize, cow-bells,
women that dared. It was a simple but not an ill ancestry, this that
turned away from the sea-coast forever and began the making of another
world. It was the strong-limbed, the bold-hearted that traveled, the
weak that stayed at home.
Thus began the true American aristocracy, the aristocracy of ability.
The dashing Cavalier, your high-churchman from England, was not the
first over the Appalachians. It was the Protestant, the Quaker, the
dissenter, the independent who led the way into another world and into
another order of things.
Of this hardy folk who left home when yet there was no need of so doing,
and who purposed never to come back from the land they were to
discover,—types of that later proverb-making Western man who “came to
stay,”—let us seek out one where there were many, some distant
Phenician, some master of ways and means, some captain of his time. One
man and one community may serve as typical of this epoch.
In 1779 one James Robertson, of the Watauga settlements of North
Carolina, a steadfast man, heard certain voices that called him to the
West. James Robertson, the steadfast, forming his company for this
uncertain, perilous enterprise, said: “We are the advance guard of a
civilization, and our way is across the continent.” Simple words,—yet
that was in 1779!
Now, for the building of this one town, the town that is now the city of
Nashville, and the capital of Tennessee, this leader had gathered three
hundred and eighty persons, men, women, and children. All the women and
children, one hundred and thirty in number, in charge of a few men, went
by boat, scow, pirogue, and canoe, in the winter-time, down the bold
waters of the Holston and Tennessee rivers. The rest traveled as best
they might over the five hundred miles of “trace” across Kentucky. Of
this whole party two hundred and twenty-six got through alive.
The boat party had many hundreds of miles of unknown and dangerous
waters to travel, and the journey took them three months, a time longer
than it now requires to travel around the world. They ran thirty miles
of rapids on the shoals of the Tennessee, pursued and fired upon by
Cherokees. Of this division of the party only ninety-seven got through
alive, and nine of these were wounded. One was drowned, one died of
natural causes and was buried, and the rest were killed by the Indians.
[Illustration: THE DOWN-RIVER MEN.]
Their voyage was indeed “without a parallel in modern history.” Among
those who survived the hardships of the journey was Rachel Donelson,
later the wife of Andrew Jackson.
The path of empire in America, the path of corn and venison, was a
highway that never ran backward. These men would never leave this
country now that they had taken it. But what a tax was this that the
barbaric land demanded of them! In November of 1780, less than a year
after the party was first organized, there were only one hundred and
thirty-four persons left alive out of the original three hundred and
eighty, but in the settlement itself there had not been a natural death.
The Indians killed these settlers, and the settlers killed the Indians.
Death and wounds meant nothing to the adults. The very infants learned a
stoic hardihood. Out of two hundred and fifty-six survivors, thirty-nine
were killed in sixty days. Out of two hundred and seventeen survivors,
the next season saw but one hundred and thirty-four left.
The spring of 1781 found only seventy persons left alive. But when the
vote was cast whether to stay or return, not one man voted to give up
the fight. In that West corn was worth one hundred and sixty-five
dollars a bushel, and in its raising the rifle was as essential as the
plow. Powder and lead were priceless. Man and woman together, fearless,
changeless, they held the land, giving back not one inch of the
west-bound distance they had gained!
In 1791 there were only fifteen persons left alive out of the three
hundred and eighty that made this American migration. There had been
only one natural death among them. In such a settlement there was no
such thing as a hero, because all were heroes. Each man was a master of
weapons, and incapable of fear. No fiction ever painted a hero like to
any one of these. One man, after having been shot and stabbed many
times, was scalped alive, and jested at it. A little girl was scalped
alive, and lived to forget it. An army of Indians assaulted the
settlement, and fifteen men and thirty women beat them off. Mrs. Sally
Buchanan, a forgotten heroine, molded bullets all one night during an
Indian attack, and on the next morning gave birth to a son.
This was the ancestral fiber of the West. What time had folk like these
for powder-puff or ruffle, for fan or jeweled snuff-box? Their garb was
made from the skin of the deer, the fox, the wolf. Their shoes were of
hide, their beds were made of the robes of the bear and buffalo. They
laid the land under tribute. Yet, so far from mere savagery was the
spirit that animated these men that in ten years after they had first
cut away the forest they were founding a college and establishing a
court of law. Read this forgotten history, one chapter and a little one,
in the history of the West, and then turn, if you like, to the chapters
of fiction in an older world. You have your choice of lace or elkskin.
-----
Footnote 3:
The Century Magazine, November, 1901.
Footnote 4:
Kephart.
CHAPTER VI
THE MISSISSIPPI, AND INDEPENDENCE[5]
There was a generation of this down-stream transportation, and it built
up the first splendid, aggressive population of the West—a population
that continued to edge farther outward and farther down-stream. The
settlement at Nashville, the settlements of Kentucky, were at touch with
the Ohio River, the broad highway that led easily down to the yet
broader highway of the Mississippi, that great, mysterious stream so
intimately connected with American history and American progress. It was
easy to get to New Orleans, but hard to get back over the Alleghanies.
Therefore, out of the mere fact that water runs downhill, arose one of
the earliest and most dangerous political problems this country ever
knew.
The riflemen of Sevier and Robertson saved Tennessee and Kentucky to the
Union only that they might well-nigh be lost again to Spain. The Indian
fighters of the West knew little how the scales trembled in the balance
for the weak young government of the United States of America, lately
come into place as an independent power. The authorities at Washington
dared not be too firm with France or Spain, or even, with England.
Diplomacy juggled across seas, while the riflemen of the West fought for
the opening of that Great River which meant everything for them.
The league of Spain and the Cherokees kept up covert warfare against
these early Westerners. The stark, staunch men of Robertson and Sevier
hunted down the red fighters and killed them one by one over all the
Western hunting-grounds and corn-grounds; and then they rebelled against
Washington, and were for setting up a world of their own. They sent in a
petition, a veritable prayer from the wilderness, the first words of
complaint ever wrung from those hardy men.
“We endured almost unconquerable difficulties in settling this Western
country,” they said, “in full confidence that we should be enabled to
send our products to the market through the rivers that water the
country; but we have the mortification not only to be excluded from that
channel of commerce by a foreign nation, but the Indians are rendered
more hostile through the influence of that nation.”
To add to the intricacy of this situation, now came one General James
Wilkinson, late of a quasi-connection with the Continental army, who
early discovered the profit of the trade to the mouth of the
Mississippi. Discovering, likewise, the discontent of the West, which
was almost wholly dependent upon that river for its transportation, he
conceived the pretty idea of handing over this land to Spain, believing
that in the confusion consequent upon such change his own personal
fortunes must necessarily be largely bettered. The archives show the
double dealings of Wilkinson with Spain, Great Britain, and the United
States. He played fast and loose with friend and foe, until at length he
found his own level and met in part his just deserts.
Meantime the stout little government at Washington, knowing well enough
all the dangers that threatened it, continued to work out the problems
crowding upon it. Some breathless, trembling years passed by—years full
of wars and treaties in Europe as well as in America. Then came the end
of all doubts and tremblings. The lying intrigues at the mouth of
America’s great roadway ceased by virtue of that purchase of territory
which gave to America forever this mighty Mississippi, solemn, majestic,
and mysterious stream, perpetual highway, and henceforth to be included
wholly within the borders of the West.
The acquisition of this territory was due not so much to American
statesmanship or foresight as to either the freakishness or wisdom of
Napoleon Bonaparte, then much disturbed by the native revolts in the
West Indies, and harassed by the impending war with England. Whether
England or France would land troops at New Orleans was long a question.
The year that saw the Mississippi made wholly American was one mighty in
the history of America and of the world.
The date of the Louisiana Purchase is significant not more in virtue of
the vast domain added to the West than because of the fact that with
this territory came the means of building it up and holding it together.
It was now that for the first time the solidarity of this New World was
forever assured. We gained a million uninhabited miles—a million miles
of country that will one day support its thousands to the mile. But
still more important, we gained the right and the ability to travel into
it and across it and through it. France had failed to build roads into
that country, and thereafter neither France nor any other foreign power
might ever do so.
We who have the advantage of the retrospect understand the Mississippi
and its tributaries far better than did the statesmen of a hundred years
ago. Indeed, it was then the belief of many of the ablest minds that we
ought not to accept this Louisiana Purchase even as a gift. Josiah
Adams, in discussing the bill for the admission of Louisiana as a state,
said: “I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion that if
this bill passes, the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved; that
the states which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and
that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to
prepare definitely for a separation, amicably if they can, violently if
they must.”
This from Massachusetts, later to be the home of abolition and of
centralization! It may sit ill with the sons of Massachusetts to reflect
that their own state was the first one deliberately to propose
secession. Still more advanced was the attitude of James White, who
painted the following dismal picture of that West which was to be:
“Louisiana must and will be settled if we hold it, and with the very
population that would otherwise occupy part of our present territory.
Thus our citizens will be removed to the immense distance of two or
three thousand miles from the capital of the Union, where they will
scarcely ever feel the rays of the general government; their affections
will become alienated; they will gradually begin to view us as
strangers; they will form other commercial connections, and our
interests will become distinct. These, with other causes that human
wisdom may not now foresee, will in time effect a separation, and I fear
our bounds will be fixed nearer to our houses than the waters of the
Mississippi. We have already territory enough, and when I contemplate
the evils that may arise to these States from this intended
incorporation of Louisiana into the Union, I would rather see it given
to France, to Spain, or to any other nation of the earth, upon the mere
condition that no citizen of the United States should ever settle within
its limits, than to see the territory sold for a hundred million of
dollars and we retain the sovereignty. . . . And I do say that, under
existing circumstances, even supposing that this extent of territory was
a valuable acquisition, fifteen million dollars was a most enormous sum
to give.”
How feeble is our grasp upon the future may be seen from the last
utterance. The sum of fifteen million dollars seemed “enormous.” To-day,
less than a century from that time, one American citizen has in his
lifetime made from the raw resources of this land a fortune held to be
two hundred and sixty-six million dollars.
One Western city, located in that despised territory, during the year
just past showed sales of grain alone amounting to one hundred and
twenty-three million three hundred thousand dollars; of live stock
alone, two hundred and sixty-eight million dollars; of wholesale trade,
seven hundred and eighty-six million two hundred and five thousand
dollars; of manufactures—where manufactures were once held
impossible—the total of seven hundred and forty-one million and
ninety-seven thousand dollars.
It was once four weeks from Maine to Washington; it is now four days
from Oregon. The total wealth of all the cities, all the lands, all the
individuals of that once despised West, runs into figures that surpass
all belief and all comprehension. And this has grown up within less than
a hundred years. The people have outrun all the wisdom of their leaders.
What would Daniel Webster, famous New Englander, doubter and discreditor
of the West, say, were he to know the West to-day?
Yet the men of that day were not so much to blame, for they were in the
infancy of transportation, and as no army is better than its commissary
trains, so is no nation better than its transportation. We were still in
the crude, primitive, down-stream days. Steam had not yet come upon the
great interior waterways. The west-bound mountain roads across the
Alleghanies were still only narrow tracks worn by the feet of
pack-horses that carried mostly salt and bullets. The turnpikes fit for
wagon traffic were Eastern affairs only. The National Road, from
Wheeling to the westward, was restricted in its staging possibilities.
Between the hardy Western population and its earlier home there rose the
high barrier of the Appalachians, to ascend whose streams meant a long,
grievous and dangerous journey, a Journey commercially impracticable.
The first traffic of the old mountain road was in salt and bullets, and
it was a traffic that all went one way. The difficulties of even this
crude commerce led to the establishment, as the very first manufacture
ever begun in the West, of works for the production of salt. Bullitt’s
Lick, on Salt Creek, was one of the earliest, if not the earliest,
manufacturing community west of the Alleghanies, and part of the
downstream trade of the day was in carrying kettles from Louisville down
the Ohio and up Salt Creek to the lick. This route was in hostile Indian
country, and every voyage held its own terrors.
We may note, then, the beginning of the commercial West in the local
necessities of that West. For the first west-bound generation the
problem of transportation had been largely a personal one. The first
adventurers, with little baggage but the rifle and the ax, able to live
on parched corn and jerked venison, with women almost as hardy as men,
neither possessed nor cared for the surplus things of life. They
subsisted on what nature gave them, seeking but little to add to the
productiveness of nature in any way.
But now we must, presently, conceive of our Western man as already shorn
of a trifle of his fringes. His dress was not now so near a parallel to
that of the savage whom he had overcome. There was falling into his mien
somewhat more of staidness and sobriety. This man had so used the ax
that he had a farm, and on this farm he raised more than he himself
could use—first step in the great future of the West as storehouse for
the world. This extra produce could certainly not be taken back over the
Alleghanies, nor could it be traded on the spot for aught else than
merely similar commodities.
Here, then, was a turning-point in Western history. There is no need to
assign to it an exact date. We have the pleasant fashion of learning
history through dates of battles and assassinations. We might do better
in some cases did we learn the time of certain great and significant
happenings.
It was an important time when this first Western farmer, somewhat shorn
of fringe, sought to find market for his crude produce, and found that
the pack-horse would not serve him so well as the broad-horned flat-boat
that supplanted his canoe. The flat-boat ran altogether down-stream.
Hence it led altogether away from home and from the East. The Western
man was relying upon himself, cutting loose from traditions, asking help
of no man; sacrificing, perhaps, a little of sentiment, but doing so out
of necessity, and only because of the one great fact that the waters
would not run back uphill, would not carry him back to the East that was
once his home.
So the homes and the graves in the West grew, and there arose a
civilization distinct and different from that which kept hold upon the
sea and upon the Old World. The Westerner had forgotten the oysters and
shad, the duck and terrapin of the seaboard. He still lived on venison
and corn, the best portable food ever known for hard marching and hard
work. The more dainty Easterners, the timid ones, the stay-at-homes,
said that this new man of the Western territory was a creature “half
horse and half alligator.” It were perhaps more just to accord to him a
certain manhood, either then or now. He prevailed, he conquered, he
survived, and therefore he was right. There grew the aristocracy of
ability.
The government at Washington saw this growing up of a separate kingdom,
and sought to shorten the arc of this common but far-reaching sky; it
sought to mitigate the swiftness of these streams, to soften the
steepness of these eternal hills. Witness Washington’s forgotten canal
from the headwaters of the James River—a canal whose beginning or end
would puzzle the average American of to-day to define without special
study. Witness many other canal and turnpike schemes, feeble efforts at
the solution of the one imperishable problem of a land vast in its
geography.
Prior to the Louisiana Purchase no man could think of a civilization
west of the Mississippi; but there were certain weak attempts made by
the government to bind to itself that part of the new lands that lay in
the eastern half of the Mississippi valley. The “Ordinance of the
Northwest,” done by the hand of Thomas Jefferson himself, makes
interesting reading to-day. This ordinance sought to establish a number
of states in the great valley “as soon as the lands should have been
purchased from the Indians.”
It was proposed that each state should comprehend, from north to south,
“two degrees of latitude, beginning to count from the completion of
thirty-one degrees north of the equator, but any state northwardly of
the forty-seventh degree shall make part of that state next below; and
eastwardly and westwardly they shall be bounded, those on the
Mississippi by that river on one side, and the meridian of the lowest
point on the rapids of the Ohio on the other; those adjoining on the
east by the same meridian on their western side, and on their eastern by
the meridian of the western cape of the mouth of the Great Kanawha; and
the territory eastward of this last meridian between the Ohio, Lake
Erie, and Pennsylvania shall be one state.”
The Ordinance even went so far as to propose names for these future
states, and quaint enough were some of the names suggested for those
that are now Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. “Sylvania,”
“Cherronesus,” “Asenesipia,” “Metropotamia,” “Pelesipia”—these are
names of Western states that never were born, and in this there is proof
enough of the fact that, though the government at Washington had its eye
on the West, it had established no control over the West, and under the
existing nature of things had no right ever to expect such control. As a
matter of fact, the government never did catch this truant province
until the latter, in its own good time, saw fit to come back home. This
was after the West had solved its own problems of commercial
intercourse.
It may now prove of interest to take a glance at the crude geography of
this Western land at that time when it first began to produce a surplus,
and the time when it had permanently set its face away from the land
east of the Alleghanies. The census map (see Map No. 1) will prove of
the best service, and its little blotches of color will tell much in
brief regarding the West of 1800.
For forty years before this time the fur trade had had its depot at the
city of St. Louis. For a hundred years there had been a settlement on
the Great Lakes. For nearly a hundred years the town of New Orleans had
been established. Here and there, between these foci of adventurers,
there were odd, seemingly unaccountable little dots and specks of
population scattered over all the map, product of that first uncertain
hundred years. Ohio, directly west of the original Pennsylvania hotbed,
was left blank for a long time, and indeed received her first population
from the southward, and not from the East, though the New Englander,
Moses Cleveland, founded the town of Cleveland as early as 1796.
Lower down in the great valley of the Mississippi was a curious,
illogical, and now forgotten little band of settlers who had formed what
was known as the “Mississippi Territory.” Smaller yet, and more
inexplicable, did we not know the story of the old water-trail from
Green Bay to the Mississippi, there was a dot, a smear, a tiny speck of
population high up on the east bank of the Mississippi, where the
Wisconsin emptied.
These valley settlements far outnumbered all the population of the state
of Ohio, which had lain directly in the latitudinal path of the star.
The West was beginning to be the West. The seed sown by Marquette the
Good, by Hennepin the Bad, by La Salle the Bold, by Tonty the Faithful,
seed cultivated by Boone and Kenton, by Sevier and Robertson and scores
and hundreds of stalwart early Westerners—seed despised by an ancient
and corrupt monarchy—had now begun to grow.
Yet, beyond the farthest settlements of the West of that day, there was
still a land so great that no one tried to measure it, or sought to
include it in the plans of family or nation. It was all a matter for the
future, for generations much later. Compared with the movements of the
past, it must be centuries before the West—whatever that term might
mean—could ever be overrun. That it could ever be exhausted was, to be
sure, an utterly unthinkable thing.
There were vague stories among the hardy settlers about new lands
incredibly distant, mythically rich in interest. But who dreamed the
import of the journey of strong-legged Zebulon Pike into the lands of
the Sioux, and who believed all his story of a march from Santa Fé to
Chihuahua, and thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused
for the peaceful settler of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty
miles away, by that ancient saga, that heroically done, Homerically
misspelled story of Lewis and Clark? There was still to be room enough
and chance enough in the West for any and all men.
The progress of civilization, accelerated with the passing of each
century, was none the less slow at this epoch. There was an ictus here
in the pilgrimage of humanity. It was as though the Fates wished that
for a brief time the world might see the spectacle of a land of help and
hope, of personal initiative and personal ambition. The slow-moving star
of the West trembled and quivered with a new and unknown light, caught
from these noble lakes and rivers, reflected from these mountains and
these skies.
The stars of a new heaven looked down on another king, a king in
linsey-woolsey. France kicked him forth a peasant, and, born again, he
scorned the petty limitations of her seigniories, and stood on her
rejected empire, the emperor of himself. England rotted him in her mines
and ditches, but before the reversed flags of England were borne home
from her war which did not subjugate, this same man, under another sky,
was offering hospitality, and not obeisance, to her belted earls.
-----
Footnote 5:
The Century Magazine; Continued.
CHAPTER VII
ORIGIN OF THE PIONEER
“If we call the roll of American scouts, explorers, trappers, Indian
fighters of the Far West; of men like John Colter, Robert McClellan,
John Day, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, Joe Meek, Kit Carson and their
ilk, who trapped and fought over every nook and cranny of the Far West,
from the Canadian divide to the ‘starving Gila,’ we shall find that most
of them were of the old Shenandoah-Kentucky stock that made the first
devious trail from Pennsylvania along and across the Appalachians.”
This statement of a well-advised writer is curious and interesting to
any student of the real West. It applies, also, of course, and much more
closely, to those earlier pioneers that explored the first West, that of
the Mississippi valley; the Boones, Kentons, Harrods, Finleys, Bryans,
Stuarts and hundreds of others of the fighting breed of Virginia and
North Carolina, the families of nearly all of whom had made one or more
pilgrimages to the south or even to the southeastward before the great
trek westward over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies.
America owes much of her national character and a vast part of her
national territory to the individual initiative of these bold souls, who
waited for no policies, no purchases, no leaderships, but pressed on,
rifle and ax at hand, to find and hold our West for us. To-day we forget
these men. The names of the captains of enterprise are lost in the
tawdry modern lists of our so-called captains of industry. To-day, in a
time that is fast becoming one of American serfdom, we lose in the haze
of a national carelessness the figures of that earlier and more glorious
day when the magnificent American West offered free scope and
opportunity to a population wholly made up of men of daring, of
individuality, of initiative, of self-leadership.
That was the day of the founding of the American aristocracy, of the
birth of the American type, of the beginning of the American character.
If we would study an actual American history, we can not leave out the
American pioneer; and before, in our humble effort to approach the real
genius of our America, we follow the strong sweep of the west-bound
beyond the mighty Mississippi and toward the western sea, we shall do
best to pause for a space and to make some inquiry into the origin and
character of these early apostles of the creed of adventure.
If we ask chapter and verse in the study of the origin of this American
frontiersman, this pioneer whose ambition was an indisputable personal
independence, we shall not find the details of his ancestry among the
records of wealthy and aristocratic dwellers of the seaboard region. The
bone and brawn of the early frontier did not come from the Cavaliers,
properly so-called; though it were doing the Cavaliers, the aristocrats,
an injustice to say that they were deaf to the summons of adventure.
The man that dared life and fortune in moving to America would dare life
and fortune west of the Alleghanies; and the history of many a colony
and land grant in the early West is proof enough of this. The Cavalier
or aristocrat, however, was not our typical axman or rifleman. The man
of accomplished fortune, of stable social connections, dwelt farther
back in that East that offered the most settled society of the American
continent. The man in linsey-woolsey, the woodsman, the rifleman, was
the man at the front, and it is in regard to his origin that we may
profitably be somewhat curious. We shall, therefore, for a time be more
concerned with the mountains of Pennsylvania than with the shores of
Chesapeake Bay or the rich valleys of Maryland and the Old Dominion.
A student of the history of the early settlement of Pennsylvania[6]
furnishes data regarding the two great stems of the pioneer stock, the
Quaker and the Scotch-Irish, which were most prominent among the many
nationalities that flocked to the kindly kingdom of William Penn, where
each man was treated as a man, and where independence in thought and
action was the portion each claimed as his own.
“In the first half of the eighteenth century,” says this writer, “many
thousands of Scotch-Irish, Germans and Welsh landed at Philadelphia and
New Castle, and a large majority of them found homes in Pennsylvania. A
number of the former turned to the westward from New Castle and
established themselves in Maryland and Virginia. Among them were the
ancestors of Meriwether Lewis, whose grandfather was born in Ulster,
Ireland; and a number of other noted pathfinders of the West.
“A few isolated settlements were also formed in New Jersey and Delaware,
but as before stated, the majority of them found homes in Pennsylvania.
They swarmed up the valleys of the Delaware, Schuylkill and Susquehanna
and their tributaries, and became at once the vanguard of frontier
settlement; and they and their progeny continued to merit this
distinction until the descendants of the Atlantic seaboard settlements
looked down from the summit of the Rockies on the Pacific slope.
“In the last half of the eighteenth century many hundreds of families
migrated from Pennsylvania southward into the valleys of the Shenandoah
and the south branch of the Potomac, whence numbers of them continued
their journey into North and South Carolina. The records of the Society
of Friends in Bucks, Lancaster and Chester counties show that hundreds
of certificates of removal were granted their members during this
period, to remove to Virginia and the Carolinas; and many of these
sturdy Quakers eventually found homes west of the Alleghanies, though
not a few of them, like Daniel Boone, the great king of frontiersmen,
found the exigencies of life on the frontier incompatible with peace
principles, one of the cardinal tenets of their faith, and drifted out
of the Society.
“During the same period hordes of people of other religious
denominations removed from Pennsylvania over the same route. The
counties of Augusta and Rockingham, in Virginia, were settled almost
exclusively by Pennsylvanians from Bucks and Berks and the Cumberland
valley, many of whom found homes farther west or left their bones to
bleach in the savage-tenanted wilderness of the frontier.
“Boone himself was a native of Berks County and removed in 1750, when a
lad of sixteen, with his family and a host of others, among whom were
the Hankses, Hentons, Lincolns and many others whose names became
familiar in the drama of the West, first to Virginia and later to North
Carolina. William Stewart, a companion of Boone in Kentucky who was
killed at Blue Licks, in 1785, was a native of Bucks County, and, it is
claimed by relatives of both Boone and Stewart, was also a schoolmate of
Boone’s.
“If this be true, it must have been in Virginia, as Boone never lived in
Bucks County, though his father was a resident of New Britain township
prior to the birth of Daniel. Soon after the death of Stewart, his
sister, Hannah Harris, of Newtown, made an overland trip from Newtown,
Bucks County, to Danville, Kentucky, to look after the estate bequeathed
by Stewart to his sisters, Mary Hunter and Hannah Harris of Bucks
County, and after her return made a report of the cost of the trip,
which is on record at Doylestown.
“The power of attorney of Mary Hunter to Hannah Harris to proceed to
‘Kaintuckee’ to collect her share of the Estate of William Stewart is
dated May seventh, 1787; and the power of attorney given by Hannah
Harris to John Dormer Murray to transact her business in Bucks County,
dated July twenty-fifth, 1787, states that she is ‘about setting out for
Kaintuckee’ and therefore fixes approximately the date of the beginning
of her journey.
“Dr. Hugh Shiells, of Philadelphia, who had married Ann, the daughter of
Hannah Harris, May thirtieth, 1782, preceded her to Kentucky and took up
his residence near Frankfort. He died in 1785, leaving an infant
daughter Kitty, who on arriving at womanhood married Thomas Bodley, one
of the trustees of Transylvania University.
“Archibald Finley, who, we believe, was the emigrant ancestor of the
John Finley who led an exploring party into southern Kentucky from North
Carolina in 1767, died in New Britain township, Bucks County, in March,
1749, leaving at least three sons, Henry, John and Alexander, of whom
the two former removed to Virginia and later to Kentucky. They are
believed to have been members of a party of a score or more families who
left Bucks County about 1760 and journeyed to Loudoun County, Virginia,
whence a number of them removed soon after to Orange County, North
Carolina. Of this party were Robert Jamison and his family and the
Fergusons of Plumstead.
“William, James and Morgan Bryan, brothers-in-law of Daniel Boone, who
accompanied him from North Carolina to Kentucky, were also natives of
Pennsylvania. They were the sons of Morgan Bryan, who came from Ireland
prior to 1719, at which date his name appears on the tax list of
Birmingham township, Chester County, as a ‘single man.’ He married the
following year Martha Strode, and in the year 1734 with fifteen others
obtained a grant of a large tract of land on the Opeckon and Potomac
rivers near Winchester, Virginia, and removed thereon. From this point
he removed with his family to the Yadkin, where Daniel Boone met and
married his daughter, Rebecca, in 1755.
“There is an abundance of documentary evidence in Bucks County and in
possession of her sons elsewhere, showing that many of the pioneers of
Kentucky were natives of Bucks. The wills of many Bucks-countians devise
estates to brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, ‘now or late of
Virginia,’ or ‘in the county called Kaintuckee, Province of Virginia.’
“Rev. J. W. Wallace, of Independence, Missouri, has in his possession an
old account book and diary combined, kept by his great-grandfather, John
Wallace, who was born in Warrington, Bucks County, in 1748, and who
served with distinction as a lieutenant in the Continental Army during
the Revolutionary War, some of the entries having been made in this book
while the owner was in camp with Washington at Valley Forge in the dark
winter of 1777-8. Lieutenant John Wallace married into the Finley family
and joining them in Loudoun County, removed with them into Kentucky in
1788.
“This remarkable book contains the record of the birth of John Wallace
and his eight brothers and sisters, several of whom accompanied him to
Kentucky, as well as an account of the journey of the emigrants from
Virginia to Kentucky, which was made in wagons from Loudoun County to
the Ohio River; from which point a portion of the party went in boats
down the Ohio River to Limestone, now Maysville, then overland to
Frankfort, while the remainder crossed over the mountains on
pack-horses. They had doubtless been preceded by their relative, John
Finley, of North Carolina.
“A similar book is in possession of W. W. Flack, of Davenport, Iowa, the
great-great-grandson of the first owner. On the fly leaf is endorsed the
following: ‘Receipt Book of William Flack, May 20, 1789.’ This William
Flack was born in Buckingham township, Bucks County, on May eleventh,
1746, and died at Crab Orchard, Lincoln County, Kentucky, in 1824. He
was a son of James and Ann (Baxter) Flack, Scotch-Irish emigrants who
came to Bucks County about 1730 and settled near Bushington. William
Flack was captain of the Buckingham company of militia during the
Revolution, and is said to have been in active service at the battle of
Brandywine and at other points. After the close of the war, accompanied
by his brother Benjamin and a nephew of the same name, he removed to
Kentucky, by way of Virginia.
“One of the memoranda in the old book is as follows: ‘Benjamin Flack was
killed by the Indians at the Mouth of Salt River the 1st Day of March
1786.’ William Flack married Susannah Callison in Kentucky, March
twenty-first, 1797, and the ‘Receipt Book’ records that event and the
births of their six children, two of whom died in infancy. On hearing of
the death of his father, which occurred September second, 1802, Captain
Flack started for Bucks County, and it is related that his long absence
on this tedious journey led his family to believe that he had been
captured by the Indians.
“While these Pennsylvanians were wending their way southward, their
brethren in the Cumberland and Juniata valleys, augmented by recruits
from settlements farther east, were pushing their way westward into
Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland counties, whence they migrated to
Kentucky and the Northwest Territory.”[7]
As to that war-like breed, the Scotch-Irish, famous in American
frontiering, the same historian first quoted goes on in detailed
description from which we may take the following:
“History has touched lightly upon the home life of the little colony of
Ulster Scots, who settled on the banks of the Neshaminy in the townships
of Warwick, Warrington and New Britain, in Bucks County, Pa.; but these
people were none the less worthy of a prominent place in the records of
the past. Driven by religious persecution from their native Highlands in
the seventeenth century, the remnants of many a noble clan sought
temporary refuge in the province of Ulster, Ireland, whence, between the
years 1720 and 1740, thousands of them migrated to America, and peopled
the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania’s frontier with a sturdy, rugged
race that was destined to play an important part in the formation of our
national character.
“Clannish by nature and tradition, they clung together in small
communities of two score or more families, a majority of them related by
ties of blood or marriage. They took up the unsettled portions of the
new province. Accustomed for generations to the rugged mountain sides of
their own native land, the roughness of the new territory did not
discourage them. In fact, the steep hillsides on the banks of our rivers
and smaller streams, shunned or neglected by the early English settlers,
seem to have had an especial attraction for them.
“Possessed of a character as stern and uncompromising as the granite of
their native mountains, this little colony did not concern itself in the
affairs of its neighbors. Indeed there was no occasion to do so. They
had brought with them the things they needed, and had inherent in their
nature that which made them a people separate and apart from the
communities by which they were surrounded. In their lives and characters
was a declaration of independence that in itself nourished the spirit of
freedom, which was to carry these people into the thick of the fight
when the time arrived to bid defiance to the mother country.
“This spirit was further augmented by their independence and resources
in the development of the material affairs of the colony. As previously
stated, there were among the first settlers men of every trade and
calling calculated to make the colony self-sustaining. There were
husbandmen, weavers, smiths, masons, joiners, cord-wainers, millers and
tradesmen, whose industry and thrift made it possible for the
schoolmaster and preacher to devote himself exclusively to the
intellectual and spiritual needs of the community. But with true Scotch
economy, the teacher and preacher were often one and the same. As an
illustration may be cited the founding of Tennent’s famous Log College
as an adjunct to the Neshaminy Church, of which he was pastor.
“The stimulus given to civil and religious freedom by the uninterrupted
exercise of these liberties, in strong contrast to the repression and
persecution in the old country, cannot be overestimated. Princeton, as
well as like institutions elsewhere, had its inception in our own Log
College; and Finley, its first president, was akin to those of the same
name in Warrington.
“The sons of Bucks County’s sturdy pioneers were constantly pushing on
beyond our frontiers, carrying with them the lessons of frugality, piety
and independence learned in this primitive community. They formed new
colonies and engendered therein the love of freedom, which, when the
Revolutionary War broke out, easily made the Scotch-Irish element the
dominant party in the struggle for national independence in our state.
Independence accomplished, they returned to their homes and again took
up the business of self-government, broadened and refined by contact
with the outside world, the primitive characteristics of their early
life gone, but retaining the independence and courage of their forebears
which had developed in them the best elements of citizenship.”
-----
Footnote 6:
Warren S. Ely, of Doylestown, Pa.
Footnote 7:
The Pennsylvania historian might also have given us some word of that
Col. George Morgan, some of whose descendants reside even now at
Morganza, in Pennsylvania. Col. George Morgan had passed westward over
the Alleghanies some years in advance of Daniel Boone’s first visit to
Kentucky. Mr. James Morris Morgan, of Washington, D. C., in
correspondence has this to say in regard to certain early voyagings of
his ancestor, which were undertaken while the Quakers of Pennsylvania
were still quietly dropping down from the hills of Pennsylvania into
the eastern portions of Virginia and the Carolinas:
“Col. George Morgan embarked at the village of Kaskaskia, on the
Kaskaskia River, for his voyage down the Mississippi on the 21st of
November, 1766. Butler, in his history of Kentucky, gives the credit
of being the first American citizen to descend the Mississippi to Col.
Taylor, in 1769. Col. Morgan was the first American citizen to found a
colony in the Territory of Louisiana. Under a grant of King Carlos IV,
he built the city of New Madrid, March, 1789. The grant embraced some
15,000,000 acres of land. (Gayarré; ‘History of Louisiana.’) On June
20, 1788, Congress ordered the annulment of Col. Morgan’s Indian claim
to a greater portion of the state of Illinois, ‘claiming the land
bordering on the Mississippi, from the mouth of the Ohio to a
determined station on the Mississippi that shall be sixty or eighty
miles north from the mouth of the Illinois River, and extending from
the Mississippi as far eastward as may.’ The treaty meeting held under
the auspices of Sir William Johnson at Fort Stanwix, when the Indians
deeded the territory of Indiana to George Morgan, his father-in-law
John Boynton, and his partner Samuel Wharton, (Boynton, Wharton &
Morgan) and several other minor traders whose goods had been
despoiled, was held on November 3, 1768. The state of Virginia claimed
the territory after the Revolutionary War, and bullied the national
government into compliance with her claims, the United States
accepting the property as a present from Virginia, immediately after
deciding in her favor. (See Journal of Congress, 1784, Feb. 26.)”
CHAPTER VIII
DANIEL BOONE
In preceding chapters we have taken up in general and in particular the
origin, the purpose and the progress of the early American frontiersman.
We have seen how this man, impelled by one reason or another, began to
push outward on his way over the Appalachian range into the valley of
the Mississippi. We have seen that the course of west-bound civilization
was at first not wholly along the easiest way, but over barriers that
had apparently been established by nature as insurmountable.
From headwater to headwater, among these rugged hills, from one valley
into another, ever and ever westward, the early American had won his
way, until he struck the waters running into the lower Gulf by way of
that great highway of the interior floods, the Mississippi River. We
have seen that for a space the early population did not head directly
westward, but dropped down from Pennsylvania into Maryland and Virginia,
and from Maryland and Virginia into the Carolinas.
Many of the early adventurers seem to have made their halting and
rallying ground in North Carolina. Here were some of the men of Watauga,
men who were to people Tennessee, men who were to discover and settle
the grand state of Kentucky, that steadfast portion of our Western
empire whose fidelity was to thwart all of those early efforts at
Western sedition and secession that once threatened the unity of the
American people.
Having thus dealt in generalizations, we shall perhaps now do well to
study some type, some product, of this early civilization, some
character that shall indicate the general characteristics of the land
and people of that early time. In this desire we fall naturally on the
romantic yet pertinent story of that typical and historical
frontiersman, Daniel Boone.
Among the great sayings of great men there is one that rings like a
trumpet voice through all the press of years. “Here stand I,” said
Martin Luther. “Here I stand. I can not otherwise. God help me!” If we
should come to comparisons, we might perhaps call Daniel Boone the
Luther of frontiering, the evangel of adventure, the prophet of early
west-bound daring. Certainly he was the most forward, the most present,
the most instant man of his place and time.
If we endeavor to see Daniel Boone, the man, as he actually was, we find
ourselves at the outset dealing with a character already approaching the
mythical in quality. Thus, in regard to his personality, certain folk
imagine him as tall, thin, angular, uncouth. Others will portray to you
a man with voice like thunder in the hills, with gore ever in his eye,
in his voice perpetually the breathings of insatiate hate and rage. They
will insist that Boone was bloody minded, overbearing, a man delighting
in slaughters and riotings. Such pictures are utterly wrong; so much we
may discover to be absolutely sure from the scant record of Boone’s real
life.
He was Quaker-bred, as we have seen. A sweeter soul than his we shall
not find though we search all the pages of history. Meeting every
species of danger, he remained undaunted. Meeting every manner of
adversity, he remained unsoured. With every reason for conceit, he
remained unbitten of any personal vanity. To the end of his life it was
his belief that he was “an instrument ordained by Providence to settle
the wilderness;” yet he lost no time in posing himself in any
supposititious sainthood. Nor must we imagine him crude or ignorant in
his simplicity, for those who knew him best state that he was “a man of
ambition, shrewdness and energy, as well as of fine social qualities and
an extreme sagacity.”
He was learned in the knowledge useful at his time, although of books he
wist not at all. Deeply religious in the true sense of religion, a
worshiper of the Great Maker as evidenced in His works, he was not a
church member. There was no vaunting in his soul of his own
righteousness; yet never was he irritable even in old age, when the
blood grows cold, and the thwarted ambitions come trooping home to roost
in the lives of most of us. “God gave me a work to perform,” said he,
“and I have done my best.” With this feeling he lived and died content.
Regarding the Boone of early years, we find it difficult to frame a
clear picture, but there is more information obtainable regarding his
later life, and we can see him then clearly. A man reaching the ripe age
of eighty-six, with five generations of his family living at the same
time; a man snowy haired, yet still of ruddy complexion, of frame still
unbent, with kindly and gentle personal habits—this is the real Daniel
Boone: no swearer of oaths, no swashbuckler, no roisterer, but a
self-respecting, fearless gentleman, steadfast, immovable from his fixed
purpose, inalienable from the mission which he conceived to be his own.
A writer who knew him late in life says that on his introduction to
Colonel Boone his impressions were those of “surprise, admiration and
delight.” In boyhood he had read of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of
Kentucky, the celebrated hunter and Indian fighter, and in imagination
he portrayed a “rough, uncouth looking specimen of humanity, and, of
course, at this period of life, an irritable and intractable old man.
But in every respect,” says this biographer, “the reverse appeared. His
high bold forehead was slightly bald, and his silver locks were combed
smooth. His countenance was ruddy and fair, and exhibited the simplicity
of a child. His voice was soft and melodious, and a smile frequently
played over his face in conversation. His clothing was of the plain,
coarse manufacture of the family. Everything about him indicated that
kind of comfort that was congenial to his habits and feelings, and he
evinced a happy old age. Boone was a fair specimen of the better class
of Western pioneers, honest of heart and liberal—in short, one of
nature’s noblemen. He abhorred a mean action and delighted in honesty
and truth. He never delighted in the shedding of human blood, even that
of his enemies in war. His remarkable quality was an unwavering and
invincible fortitude.”
As to personal description, Boone was neither a tall nor a thin man. He
was not angular nor bony. His frame was covered not with cloying fat but
with firm and easily playing muscles, and he carried none of the useless
tissue of the man of civilization. His weight was “about one hundred and
seventy-five pounds.” Audubon, who met him late in his life, says: “He
approached the gigantic in stature. His chest was broad and prominent,
and his muscular powers were visible in every limb. His countenance gave
indication of his great courage, enterprise and perseverance.”
Yet in person Boone did not quite reach the six-foot mark, but was just
below five feet and ten inches in stature, some say five feet eight
inches, being therefore of exactly that build which good judges of men
esteem to be most desirable for combined strength, activity and
endurance. He was rather broad shouldered: that is to say, his shoulders
nicely overhung his hips. All agree that he was of “robust and powerful
proportions.” One historian speaks of his “piercing hazel eye”; yet this
is but romancing.
Most portraits of Daniel Boone are the products of imagination. The most
authentic, perhaps the only authentic portrait of him, is that painted
in 1820 by Chester Harding, “who,” says an early writer, “of American
artists is the one most celebrated for his likenesses.” When Harding
made his portrait of Boone, the latter was very feeble, and had to be
supported during the sittings. This portrait shows a face thin and pale,
with hair of snowy whiteness and eye “bright blue, mild and pleasant.”
This blue eye is of the best color in all the world for keenness of
vision, for quickness and accuracy with the rifle. The Harding portrait
does not show the square chin that some writers give to Boone; and
certainly it portrays no ferocious looking ruffian, but a man mild,
gentle and contemplative, “not frivolous, thoughtless or agitated.”
As to Boone’s appearance early in life, we must to some extent join the
others who imagine or presume. It is fair to suppose that in complexion
he was florid, with the clear skin, sometimes marked with freckles, that
you may see to-day in the mountains of the Cumberland, in parts of
Tennessee, Kentucky, sometimes in North Carolina and Mississippi. The
color of his hair was never that of “raven blackness.” Perhaps it was
brown, but not a finely filamented brown. It was more likely blond, and
perhaps indeed carried a shade of red. Certainly the ends of his hair
were bleached a tawny yellow, that splendid yellow that you may see even
to-day in the hair and beard and mustaches of the outdoor men of the
American West.
In his younger days he often wore the half savage garb of the early
American hunters—the buckskin or linsey hunting shirt, the fringed
leggings of the same material, with moccasins made of the skin of the
deer or buffalo. His hat was as chance would have it. Perhaps sometimes
he wore a cap of fur.
His weaponry we may know exactly, for his rifle can be seen to-day,
preserved by his descendants. It is the typical long-barreled,
crooked-stocked, small-bore American rifle, with the wooden stock or
fore end extending along the full length of the barrel. There are a few
rude attempts at ornamentation on this historic arm. The sights lie
close to the barrel, after the fashion of those deadly ancient weapons.
The wood is rotting a little bit where the oil of long-ago cleaning
operations has touched it. Perhaps the spring of the lock is a trifle
weak. Yet we may not doubt that, were Daniel Boone alive to-day, he
could teach the old piece to voice its music and could show again its
ancient deadly art.
In chronology Boone’s time runs back to that of Washington. He was born
November second, 1734, the date of Washington’s birth being 1732. His
older brother was called Squire Boone, after the first American Boone,
who was himself an Englishman, but who came to America early in the
history of the lower colonies. The Boone homestead was once located in
Bucks County, Pennsylvania, but Daniel was born after his parents had
moved into Berks County, Pennsylvania, near the town that is now
Reading. Some historians say he was born in Bucks County.
In his youth Daniel did not seek knowledge through the medium of
books.[8] His mind was “not of the most ardent nature.” Before him lay
the great book of the Wilderness. Thus he became well acquainted with
the habits of wild game animals, not ascribing to these creatures, we
may be sure, any of those fanciful qualities which are accorded them in
the silly fashion of these days, but knowing them as they actually were,
and betimes using them, as was planned in the scheme of nature.
When Boone was eighteen years of age his family heard many stories about
the Yadkin River country of North Carolina. Forthwith they moved through
the Shenandoah valley into what was then a yet wilder country than that
of Pennsylvania. Here we have mythical tales of a fire hunt at night in
which Daniel Boone “shined the eyes” of a certain maiden; of a deadly
aim miraculously stayed, and a subsequent marriage unceremoniously sped.
As to the fire hunt we may doubt, but as to the marriage there is no
question. Boone married Rebecca Bryan in 1755. Therefore Daniel must
move once more, this time farther up the Yadkin, where the forests were
yet more quiet, and neighbors still more distant.
Previously to his marriage Boone had been a hunter,—what we would now
call a professional hunter. He sometimes took hides and furs to the more
distant Eastern settlements, and so saw some of the Virginia towns. He
was, however, not merely a half-savage woods wanderer, although a past
master in all woodcraft. The year before his marriage he was with the
Pennsylvania militia, who fought the Indians along the border after the
French had defeated George Washington and his Virginians at Great
Meadows. In the fatal Braddock fight Daniel Boone was a wagoner in the
baggage train, and barely escaped with his life in the panic flight.
At twenty-one he was a man grown, matured, acquainted with all the
duties and dangers of frontier life, physically fit for feats of
strength, activity and endurance, and both mentally and physically a
perfect machine for the purposes of vanguard work in the wilderness. His
imagination painted him no gloomy picture of peril, but only scenes of
things delectable a little farther to the west, across the hills that
faced him. His emotions did not prevent his walking forthwith into what
might be peril; and having entered perils, he was content if each day
found him yet alive, nor did his mind entertain forebodings as to the
morrow. The creed of the wilderness, the creed of wild things had
entered into his soul.
They call Daniel Boone explorer, hunter, Indian fighter. Let us figure
him as philosopher. Temperament and training gave footing for that part
of his philosophy that embodied his permanent personal conviction that
“God had appointed him as an instrument for the settlement of the
wilderness.”
Boone, after his marriage, and after his edging out westward toward the
head of the Yadkin, lived much as he had done before. His cabin was no
better than his neighbor’s, his little corn farm was much as theirs,
albeit his table always had wild meat enough and to spare, and there
were hides and furs in abundance. By this time two generations of white
men had held this slope of the Appalachians. The buffalo had in all
likelihood crossed the mountains to the westward, though one writer says
they were “abundant” on the Yadkin at this time. Boone may perhaps have
seen an elk now and then along the Yadkin, but even this is not certain.
Bear, deer, turkey, small furred animals, he took in numbers. He was
content, nor did he differ much from his fellows. He must have been
about thirty years of age before he began to evince traits distinctly
different from those of his scattered wilderness neighbors; before he
began to hear the Voices, whispering yet irresistible, that called him
on; those Voices of the West, which for a hundred years called our best
and boldest to come out into the unknown and the alluring; those Voices
which to-day are perforce stilled forever.
It was in the year 1769, in the month of May, that Boone started out for
his first determined exploration of “the far-famed but little-known land
of Kentucky.” He had before this time been eager to cross the range and
see for himself; indeed, he had made one short hunting trip into what is
now the eastern edge of the state of Kentucky. Now, in the prime of
life, at thirty-five years of age, he felt that the time had come for
him to cross the range and make his abiding place in the West.
We are accustomed to think that Boone was the first explorer of
Kentucky, but such was by no means the case. Boone’s first trip across
the mountains, to the headwaters of the Holston, was in 1761. John Peter
Salling, a West Virginian, crossed Kentucky and Illinois as early as
1738. Doctor Thomas Walker and a party of Virginians had long before
deliberately explored a part of Kentucky; and in 1751 Boone’s Yadkin
neighbor, Christopher Gist,—the same Gist that accompanied Washington
in his dangerous winter trip to the French forts on the Ohio,—made yet
fuller explorations.
Some of these early voyagings were not made of intent. Salling crossed
Kentucky as a captive of the Indians, who took him as far west as
Kaskaskia; and Mary Draper Ingles, “the first American bride west of the
mountains,” whose father established the first actual settlement west of
the Alleghanies, was in 1755 taken captive by the savages, and carried
across Kentucky and parts of Ohio and Indiana, thus being an explorer
quite against her will.
Two hunters from Pittsburg, James Harrod and Michael Steiner or Stoner,
after pushing out into the Illinois country, crossed the Ohio and
traveled quite across Kentucky, as far south as the present city of
Nashville, Tennessee. Steiner and Harrod were friends of Boone’s, and
Harrod built his stockade of Harrodsburg a year before Boonesborough was
begun, his journey with Steiner having been made two years before Boone
made his pilgrimage across the Divide.
Kasper Mansker or Mansco, later a famous scout and Indian fighter, went
with the Virginian “Long Hunters” into Kentucky in 1769. John Finley or
Finlay had traded with the Indians on the Red River of Kentucky in 1752,
some years before Boone saw that region. Finley was an associate of
Boone’s in the border wars before Boone was married, and it was Finley,
in all likelihood, that first set Boone aflame with the desire to see
and settle in Kentucky. Yet he might have had the counsel of James
McBride, who in 1754 visited the mouth of the Kentucky River, and came
back to say that he “had found the best tract of land in North America,
and probably in the world.” Finley added to these stories, and clinched
it all by saying that game of all kinds was abundant, that the mountains
were beautiful beyond description, and that, moreover, salt could be
manufactured on the spot.
This last argument had very much to do with the settlement of Kentucky.
Salt and lead were essentials. Salt was very heavy. The transportation
across these grim mountains was very difficult. If one could have salt
in Kentucky, it would not be necessary for one to come back. To-day we
can scarcely understand this reasoning, once so cogent.
To strengthen the grasp upon historical facts and dates it is sometimes
well to begin at the time close at hand, and go backward. We may
therefore make a reversed recapitulation of the explorations of
Kentucky, this dark and bloody hunting and fighting ground of many
tribes of strong-legged and peppery-headed savages.
In 1770 the “Long Hunters” of Joseph Drake and Henry Skaggs were in
Kentucky—indeed, ran across Daniel Boone there; yet Kentucky was then
an oldish land. In 1766 James Smith and five others explored much of
west Tennessee, and worked north as far as Illinois. The Virginian, John
McCullough, with one white companion, saw Kentucky in the summer of
1769, pushed on northward as far as the point where Terre Haute,
Indiana, now stands, and later descended the Mississippi River to New
Orleans. Uriah Stone took a party of twenty hunters over the Cumberland
Gap into Kentucky in the month of June, 1769, one month later than
Boone’s journey thither; but Stone had been in Kentucky in 1766.
George Washington was on the Ohio River in 1770 and 1767; John Finley in
1752; Christopher Gist in 1750; Doctor Thomas Walker in 1748; John Peter
Salling and John Howard, in 1742, we have noted. Before all these was
the French expedition of 1735. Indeed, just one hundred years before
Boone’s journey into Kentucky, John Lederer, a Virginian, crossed the
Alleghanies and fared westward for some distance; and ninety-nine years
previous to Boone’s first glimpse of the delectable land, Thomas Batts
and party had “taken possession” of the headwaters of the Great Kanawha
in the name of Charles II.
We therefore see, with what will be a certain surprise to the average
reader of American history, that Kentucky and the trans-Appalachian land
was not wholly unknown but indeed fairly well understood and accurately
forecast in possibilities, more than a generation before Daniel Boone
ever saw it. Where, then, is Boone’s fame as an explorer? Upon what does
his reputation as an adventurer rest? What claim had he to hold himself
as an “instrument for the settlement of the wilderness”?
The answer to all these doubts is read in the record of the holding of
Kentucky. It is found in the inefficacy of a “taking possession” by
means of the temporary planting of a flag and the empty claiming of a
territory extending from sea to sea. The flag of Boonesborough was
planted never to come down. The stockade of the homebuilders was
defended by an “unwavering fortitude.” Kentucky discovered Daniel Boone,
not Daniel Boone discovered Kentucky. Read it in this way and all shall
be plain.
The birth of a new man in the world, the American, had now taken place.
The Old World explorers took possession with a flag, furled it and
carried it away again. The new man, the American, flung out a flag that
has never yet come down in all the world, and which, please God! never
shall so long as we remain like to the first Americans. John Finley
guided Daniel Boone across the Cumberland Gap; but he guided him into a
land now ready for a Daniel Boone—into a West now ready for the
American man.
It was, then, in the month of May, 1769, that Boone left the Yadkin
settlements and started westward. He had as companions John Finley,
Joseph Holden, James Monay or Mooney, William Coole or Cooley, and John
Stewart or Stuart. Of all the different expeditions into the region west
of the Appalachians this was the most important. Following its doings,
you shall see the long spur of the Anglo-Saxon civilization thrusting
out and out into the West—to the Mississippi, the Missouri, the
Rockies, the Pacific—and never setting backward foot.
The journey over the mountains was not rapid and not continuous, it
being necessary for the party to hunt as well as to explore. The rifle,
the ax, the horse, the boat, were their aids and agents, their argument
and answer to the wilderness. Evolution had gone on. The American was
born.
Boone and his friends seem to have camped on the east side of the
Cumberland Mountains, where they remained for “some days.” It was from
this camp that they made expeditions, and at length climbed to a certain
ridge whence they could see the glorious realm of Kentucky. On this day
they saw their first herd of buffalo, the first trail-makers over the
Appalachians, of which they killed some numbers. They saw, also, elk,
deer and other animals. Boone was delighted. There thrilled in his heart
all the joy of the hunter and explorer. Now the little party moved over
to the Red River, where Finley had formerly been located. “Here,” said
Boone, “both man and beast may grow to their full size.” That was good
American prophecy.
For six months this adventurous little party lived and hunted in their
new empire. Then, swiftly and without warning, there came a taste of
some of the disadvantages of this wild residence. Stewart and Boone were
taken captive by the Indians and were carried to the north, a march of
seven days. On the seventh night they made their escape and came back to
their bivouac on the Red River, only to find that their friends had left
them and returned to the settlements. As offset to this unpleasant news
came their present discovery by Squire Boone and one companion,
Alexander Neeley, who had followed the adventurers all the way into
Kentucky. Daniel’s older brother had brought with him some needful
supplies, chief of these powder and lead, worth far more than gold and
silver.
“Soon after this period,” goes on the simple and businesslike chronicle,
“John Stewart was killed by the Indians.” Hence the two Boone brothers
were left alone, Squire Boone’s companion having met his fate in some
mysterious manner, perhaps at the hands of the Indians, though others
state that he was devoured by wolves,—a very unlikely story. The two
brothers built themselves a rude cabin of poles and bark, and there they
spent the fall and summer of 1769. In May of the following year Squire
Boone returned to North Carolina.[9]
It is now that for the first time we may accord justice to the picture
that shows us the pioneer, Daniel Boone, alone in the wilderness of
Kentucky. He was at this time, so far as he knew, the only white man in
that entire section of country. Fearless, adventurous and self-reliant,
he extended his wanderings farther to the west, and visited the site of
what is now the city of Louisville. His life depended entirely upon his
own vigilance. He was without bread or salt, without even a dog to keep
him company or serve as guard. Naturally he met the savages. Once when
pursued by the Indians, he escaped by the clever artifice of swinging
himself far to one side of his trail by means of a depending
grape-vine—a stratagem not recorded of any other Western adventurer.
He seems to have been happy, alone in a solitude whose nature one can
not understand who has never found himself under conditions at least
mildly similar. His consolation came in his communings with the wild
things about him, in his readings in the great book of nature. His
gallery was the magnificent one of wood and stream and hill. “He stood
upon an eminence, whence, looking about in astonishment, he beheld the
ample plain and beauteous upland, and saw the river rolling in silent
dignity. The chirp of the birds solaced his cares with music. The
numerous deer and elk which passed him gave him assurance that he was in
the midst of plenty. Cheerfulness possessed his mind. He was a second
Adam—if the figure be not too strong—giving names to springs and
rivers and places all unknown to civilized man.” Such was the kingdom of
the West.
Now came again the faithful Squire Boone, all the way from the far-off
Yadkin. These two discovered country of such fertility and such
abundance in game that they no longer had any heart left for the more
barren region of North Carolina. They determined to bring thither their
families, and the fall of that year saw them both back at the old home,
making plans for the pilgrimage into the new world beyond the
Alleghanies. Restless and ill-content we may suppose Daniel to have
been, for it was not until the fall of 1773 that he was able to sell his
farm and get together his effects.
Five families left the Yadkin with him for Kentucky, these being joined
later by forty men, all of whom traveled under the guidance of Boone.
They proceeded westward in pastoral cavalcade, driving their herds and
carrying their effects with them. So far, very well, until the tenth of
October, when came the first ambuscade of the savage Indians. Six men of
the party were killed, among these a son of Daniel Boone. The cattle
were scattered or destroyed. No wonder that all lost heart except the
steadfast leader. He was content to remain with the retreating party in
the settlements of the Clinch River only until June of the following
year.
Now, biding his time, and longing for greater adventures, Boone receives
a message from the governor of Virginia. It seems there are certain
surveyors who have gone down the Ohio River and have lost themselves in
the wilderness. Could Daniel Boone discover these surveyors for the
governor? Assuredly. And hence he undertakes his first real mission of
independent leadership. He has but one companion, Michael Stoner or
Steiner, and before them lie many hundred miles of trackless forest,
with no road, no path, no trail. Yet the surveyors are found and led
safely back to their own.
This act seems to inspire confidence in Boone, and Colonel Henderson, a
famous land speculator, employs him as his agent for the purchase from
the Southern Indians of certain lands lying south of the Kentucky River.
Boone is successful in these negotiations. It is necessary now that
there should be a road established between these outlying lands and the
door of civilization. Who better than Boone to establish this wilderness
trail? He lays out the way from the Holston to the Kentucky River. We
are told, without unnecessary flourish, that “in this work four of his
party were killed and five wounded.”
It was in April, 1775, that Boone erected a station or palisade on the
Kentucky River near a salt lick. We are told that the stockade was built
“sixty yards from the south bank of the stream.” This was close to the
present site of the town of Frankfort, Kentucky. Another writer says the
date of the foundation of Boonesborough—as the station was called—was
June fourteenth, 1775. Dates are unimportant. The fact is that Boone
during that spring attained his immediate and most cherished ambition.
He established his home in the heart of this beautiful land of Kentucky.
Thither he moved his family, his wife and daughter being the first white
women willingly and of intent to set foot on the soil of Kentucky. Boone
was now in the heyday of life, strong, fearless, tireless, a keen
hunter, a cool-headed warrior. The ways of the wilderness were known to
him. The imprint on the moss, the discolored water at the fountain, the
broken bough, the abraded bark on the tree-trunk—all these things were
an open book. No Indian could imitate the chatter of the squirrel, the
calling of the crow, the gobbling of the wild turkey in his signals to
his fellow savage, so closely that the acute ear of this master hunter
did not detect the deceit. If savages crossed the country within a score
of miles of his station, Boone knew of them, knew how they were armed,
knew what was their purpose in that land. None could have been better
equipped than he as “an instrument for the settlement of the
wilderness.”
Life went on in Kentucky much as on the Yadkin, on the Clinch or on the
Holston. White men began to gather in at the station of Boonesborough,
or at one of the two or three other posts that now were established in
the land. These white men, shoulder to shoulder, fought the savages
cheerfully, continuously, never for a moment thinking of surrendering
their hold. The leader of this wild warfare was Daniel Boone, the man of
“unwavering fortitude.”
The war of the rebellion against the Old World was now going on apace.
Great Britain had given the red savages below the Great Lakes better
arms and had deliberately incited a more insatiate enmity against the
white man. Whereas the Indians had at first adopted prisoners into their
tribe, they now became more savage and implacable, in many more
instances killing such prisoners as fell into their hands.
Here we find ourselves again to some extent in the realms of imagination
as to the adventures of Daniel Boone. We meet the ancient anecdote of
the capture by the Indians of Boone’s daughter, in company with two
daughters of the neighboring Calloway family. Some say that the children
were out hunting up the cows, others that they were in a canoe on the
river, and that the canoe was taken away by a savage who swam out and
made them prisoners. We may be sure that Boone and Calloway raised a
party in pursuit, and it may be deemed historical fact that they rescued
their daughters; though some state that the rescue was effected within a
few miles of the post, whereas others place it after a long journey, and
state that Boone and Calloway were themselves taken prisoners by the
savages, and in turn rescued by their surviving companions only after a
bitter struggle. One may suit himself in these matters, yet he must
believe that the settlement of Boonesborough was the center of a most
savage and relentless warfare.
The civilized necessity for salt was one of the chief causes of danger
for these Kentuckians. In 1778 Boone, with twenty-seven companions, was
engaged in salt-making at the Blue Licks, when they were surrounded by a
large band of Indians. Boone was made captive, with others, and taken
north across the Ohio River. These savages were Shawanese, from the
Pickaway Plain. Eventually they took Boone as far north as Detroit,
where the commandant, Hamilton, pleased with Boone’s manly character,
undertook to ransom him from the savages. The latter, however, would not
hear to this, and after some parleying concluded to make Boone one of
their tribe.
He lived with them for some months, his fate meantime quite unknown to
his friends at Boonesborough. At length, discovering a war party of more
than four hundred savages preparing to invade the Kentucky frontier, he
escaped from his captors, journeyed two hundred miles to the southward,
and saved not only Boonesborough but all the infant posts of this new
commonwealth beyond the Alleghanies. This, were there naught else to
commend him, should establish Boone’s place as one of the great pillars
of the west-bound civilization.
After the savages were at last beaten away in this attack, Boone found
that he was a man not without a country, but without a family. His wife,
supposing him dead, had returned to the old home on the Yadkin. There is
a wide hiatus here in the Boone history, regarding which Boone himself
is reticent.
It is probable that at this time there began those legal difficulties
that later caused the pioneer to leave his chosen land. He had been
given a grant of land by the governor of Virginia, but the state of
Kentucky had never been surveyed, and it was the fashion and privilege
of every holder of one of these loose titles to locate his land as he
pleased, and to record it in the simplest and most primitive fashion.
Thus there came to be many claimants for the best of the lands, the
desirable tracts being sometimes deeply covered by these old-time
“shingle titles.”
The courts swiftly followed into these crude little Kentucky
communities. It may have been the legal complications in which Boone now
found himself that made him unwilling to speak of this period of his
career. It is also known that at one time he was custodian of some
twenty thousand dollars of money, which he intended to take eastward
across the Alleghanies for the purchase of lands. He was robbed, and
hence carried to his grave the bitter sense that he had, through no
fault of his own, been unable to carry out a trust that had been imposed
on him. Yet, be these things as they may, the fact remains that he did
again bring his family to his chosen settlement on the Kentucky River.
Meantime the Northern savages, under their own leaders, under the
leadership of British officers, under the leadership of the dangerous
renegades, Girty and McKee, came down time and again on the Kentucky
settlements. The salt parties must go out as before, and in one of these
excursions Squire Boone, Daniel’s beloved older brother, fell a victim
to the savages. In the celebrated and ill-fated McGary fight—the
blackest battle of all Kentucky—a son of Daniel Boone’s fell with the
flower of the frontier. Again and again the tribes came raging down, the
Cherokees, the Pottawatamies, the Shawanese, all joining hands to wipe
these settlements from the face of the earth. In the fight at Bryant’s
Station, little as it was, thirty of the savages were left on the field.
The year 1781 was one of wrath for the thin firing line on the western
side of the Divide. All the fights and the fighters centered about or
came from the “Dark and Bloody Ground.” Clark, Hardin, Harmar—all these
started from Kentucky, and by reason of Kentucky. It was General Scott
with one thousand Kentuckians that avenged the horrible defeat of St.
Clair, killed two hundred of the victorious savages, and took back from
them their booty. In the seven years from 1783 to 1790 there were
fifteen hundred whites killed or taken captive in the state of Kentucky.
In all these affairs, we may be sure, Daniel Boone held his full and
manly part. He had drunk the war-drink of the savages during his
captivity, and the spirit of the savage had entered into him.
Yet Boone was simple and unpretentious as any leader that ever lived.
Once Simon Kenton, himself a hardy soul, set out with some friends on a
little hunt from the station at Boonesborough. They were fired upon by
Indians from ambush. One man was shot down by the Indians within seventy
yards of the stockade. His murderer would have scalped him had not
Kenton dropped him, a corpse beside a corpse. Then it was general mêlée
until Daniel Boone and ten others came out from the stockade to assist
their fighting comrades. Kenton killed another Indian, and then there
came a rush. Boone directed a charge upon the savages, but was shot
down, a ball breaking his leg. Kenton, brave fellow that he was, shot
down Boone’s assailant and carried Boone safely into the fort. As he lay
on the couch receiving attention for the leg broken by the ball, Boone
sent for Kenton and said: “Well, Simon, you have behaved like a man
to-day. Indeed you are a fine fellow.” That was all there was to it.
They made no great parade in those days. There was no proclamation in
the public places. There were no illustrated newspapers, no gifted war
correspondents to describe the heroism of that time. A similar act
to-day would have made both participants famous, would perhaps have won
for both a Victoria Cross, and would have afforded imaginative
correspondents excellent opportunity. The West had no Victoria Crosses,
nor needed any.
In times of such continual excitement and danger it is small wonder that
there has been but scant record kept of individual deeds of daring.
Boone himself was not wont to boast of his own prowess, and regarding
his deeds of arms there are not many authentic anecdotes.
One of the best known of his adventures was that in which he met two
savages in the forest while he himself was alone. Those were flint-lock
days, and Boone was, according to the story, able, by watching the flash
of the first savage’s rifle, to throw himself out of the way of the
bullet. This manœuver he repeated with the second Indian. Then he calmly
shot one Indian dead with his rifle, closed with the other, received a
blow of his tomahawk on his own rifle barrel, and killed the savage with
his knife. A statue commemorating this feat was later placed above the
south door of the rotunda in the Capitol at Washington.
There was need in Boone’s case of fortitude, not only of the physical
but of the moral sort. In 1792 Kentucky, which had formerly been a
county of the state of Virginia, was set up as a state by itself, with
courts, jails, judges, lawyers and all the appurtenances of the
artificial civilization that Boone had hoped to leave forever behind
him.
Then came lawsuits regarding the lapping titles. Daniel Boone, his blue
eyes troubled and bewildered, found himself among the haggling officials
of the law courts. It broke his heart. Stunned but not protesting, he
gave up that beautiful land he had enabled all these others to find and
to hold. He was old now, and had fought the main fight of his life only
to find himself the loser.
He left now for the mouth of the great Kanawha, but found the hunting
poor. A son of his had crossed the Mississippi River and sent back word
that there was still a West, still a country where were buffalo and elk,
where were otter and beaver in the streams. There was to be one more
pilgrimage for Daniel Boone, a pilgrimage down the Ohio River, ending in
the region, still wilderness, not far from the point that is now the
city of St. Louis. Bear in mind that this latter point was not within
the United States. Daniel Boone was an emigrant from the land he had
founded. He was going now out from under the infant Stars and Stripes.
In token of his character, the Spanish governor of Louisiana gave Boone
some sort of trifling commission. He was made commandant or syndic, an
official with about the same importance as a country justice of the
peace to-day. By the terms of his settlement in that country Boone was
entitled to a tract of something like ten thousand acres of land. He was
wrongly informed that, as he was an officer of the state, he need not
settle nor improve his land. Once more a fatal mistake for the man who
knew the book of nature better than the printed page.
Late in his life we find the American government, now reaching its
control over this trans-Missouri country, taking up the question of
Boone’s tract of land and allowing him, with extreme generosity,
one-tenth of that which by every right and title of justice ought to
have been his own in fee simple in return for what he had done for the
civilization of America. This was the poor pittance that Daniel Boone,
one of the great Americans, was able to hand down to his posterity.
With this poor heritage go the few incidents of a meager and in some
cases uncertain personal history, the main facts of which have been
given above. There is even uncertainty, or rather discrepancy, regarding
the date of his death. One writer states that he died at the age of
eighty-four, in the year 1818. The date of his death was really
September twenty-sixth, 1820, he being at that time eighty-six years of
age.
In his later years Boone kept up those practices that had endeared
themselves to him in his earlier lifetime. In a mild way he was a
trapper, and always he was a hunter. Even when he had passed his
eightieth year he went regularly each fall in pursuit of the deer, the
turkey, the elk or the furred animals, or followed his simple pastime of
squirrel hunting, in which he was very expert. It was his custom on
these excursions to exact a promise from his attendant that, in case of
his death, his body should be properly cared for. He long kept his
coffin under his bed at his home, near Charette, Missouri. Once, taken
sick in camp, he marked out the place for his grave, and told his negro
servant (some say his Indian friend or servant) what should be done with
his body.
From this indisposition, however, he recovered, and went on several
other hunts later. Failing gradually, though not from any specific
disease, Boone met the great and final enemy with the same fortitude
that had been with him all his life. He had said farewell to all earthly
ambitions, and was ready to die when the time might come. He kept the
coffin under his bed not in any bravado, but in a simple wish for
complete preparedness. His personal habits remained sweet and simple as
of old.
Boone seems to have wandered a little farther to the West than his home
near St. Louis. It is said that he “saw the mouth of the Kansas River,”
and that he noted, with the impatient longing of an old man, the passing
up-stream, into the mysterious Northwest, of those early parties of fur
traders, the voyagers who were now heading the far Western American
migration. It was now too late in the closing years. It is said that he
trapped on the Kaw and the Osage, and he is said to have made one
journey “up the Missouri, and to have reached the mouth of the
Yellowstone”, whence he was driven back by savages.
His sons and grandsons were figures in Western history, always
frontiersmen, travelers. A granddaughter became the wife of a governor
of Oregon. His grandson, Kit Carson, was to hold fast the family
traditions on many a Western trail; but there were to be no more trails
for Daniel Boone. Overtaken once more by America, once more surrounded
by the civilization from which he had by choice always alienated
himself, he at length lay down peacefully to his final sleep beneath the
trees.
Some twenty-five years after his death, the legislature of Kentucky
awakened to a sense of the greatness of this man, and to the onerous
nature of that debt of gratitude under which he had placed his
commonwealth. By virtue of a special enactment, the bodies of Boone and
his faithful wife were moved from their Missouri home, eastward across
the Mississippi River, and laid at rest in the cemetery of Frankfort,
close to that original stockade where, supported by an “unwavering
fortitude”, there first flew the hard beset flag of the west-bound.
These coffins came garlanded with flowers, heralded with music,
surrounded with tardy honors. They were laid away on September
thirteenth, 1845. There were effusive speeches in abundance, the chief
oration being pronounced by Mr. Crittenden, “the leading orator of his
time,” as he is called in the chronicle. Thus at last this primeval
patriarch, this Father of the Frontier, this leader of the Western
home-builders, came home to sleep on the soil that was by right his own.
-----
Footnote 8:
There was long known a tree near the Cumberland which bore this quaint
inscription: “D. Boon Cilled A Bar on this tree, year 1760.”
Footnote 9:
There is continual discrepancy among the historians regarding these
incidents. Thus another writer states that Boone and Stewart were
twice taken prisoners by the savages, but that no northward journey
was made by the Indians, who simply kept the prisoners at their camps,
and at length dismissed them with a warning to leave Kentucky, as it
was their own hunting ground and belonged to the Indians only. Again
there seems confusion in the stories of the death of Neeley and
Stewart. One account is that Boone saw Stewart shot down and scalped;
another states that Stewart disappeared, and that no idea of his fate
was obtained until years afterward, when in a hollow tree Boone found
a skeleton, near which was Stewart’s powder horn, which had his name
inscribed upon it.
CHAPTER IX
A FRONTIER REPUBLIC
If we have been successful in the first of our undertakings, that of
investigating the first stage of the American transcontinental
pilgrimage, which brought the Anglo-Saxon civilization permanently into
the Mississippi valley, we must have gained in our earlier chapters some
knowledge of the characteristics of the west-bound men, and of the
motives that actuated them.
We shall also have noticed the beginning of a new type of man,—a man
born of new problems, new necessities. Obliged to think and act for
himself, it was natural that this man should learn to be restive when
others thought for him. It was not to be expected that the men of New
England and New York should understand this new man. We do not
understand the Asiatics to-day; and at the time Daniel Boone reached the
Mississippi it was farther from the Mississippi to New York than it is
from New York to the Philippines to-day.
The American pilgrimage, whether at times painful, halting, broken, or
at other times rapid, feverish, insane, has at the one time or the other
been no better than the transportation at hand. The long, hard roads,
the slow travel of those early trans-Appalachian days were at the bottom
of the greatest national problem of those days.
The men of the East could not believe that loyalty might be expected of
the men of the West; and the latter, feeling the force of their
geographical position, and feeling also their own ability to take care
of themselves, openly talked of all manner of schisms, sectionalisms and
governmental speculations. The West talked secession almost before it
was a West. Under the conditions of those days it was small crime that
it did so; the fact proved no disloyalty of the old type, but the
strength and vigor of the new type of American that had now been born,
which declared itself able to hold and govern its own new-found world.
It may profit us at this stage of our study to turn for a time from the
individual frontiersman and settler, and to take up in more concrete
form some of the things that these frontiersmen and settlers did in
combination—some of the phases of the Western civilization as affected
by the ever present problems of transportation.
The question of geography, which is the same as to say the question of
transportation, led to more than one attempt to set up entirely
independent governments west of the Allegheny Divide, just as it also
much affected the destinies of the unborn states of the Northwest
Territory—Asenesipia, Pelesipia, Cherronesus, and others. Of these
divers attempts at secession, some were honestly based upon a wish for
commercial development that did not seem possible in connection with a
government situated far to the east, at the end of impassable mountain
roads. Other attempts were mere personal intrigues, carried on with a
view to personal advantage, as was the effort of the unspeakable
Wilkinson to alienate the population of the Mississippi valley from the
standards of the government at Washington. There were other attempts,
honest attempts at secession, or more properly speaking, segregation, on
the part of considerable communities whose interests, under the
conditions of the time, seemed far from identical with those of the
tidewater population.
Chief among the records of these movements for an honest Western
secession stands the story of the famous Free State of Franklin—the
story of an enterprise that to-day we ignorantly call a chimera, an
absurdity or worse, though to the men concerned in it the project seemed
not less than necessary, just and right. The history of this state,
which was born of bad roads and populated by a new breed of Americans,
fits nicely with our theme at this stage of its progress.
As to the extent of this state that once was, but is no more, we
discover that it once included fifteen counties of Virginia, six of West
Virginia, one-third of the state of Kentucky, one-half of Tennessee,
two-thirds of Alabama and one-quarter of Georgia, as those states exist
to-day. Wherefore it may seem that John Sevier and his friends were
dealing with a considerable empire of their own, one much larger than
most folk of to-day realize or understand.
It was one of those first republics west of the Alleghanies, one of
those first instances of spontaneous self-government that have so often
proved the vital strength of the restless yet self-respecting and
law-abiding American character. How the men of the Free State of
Franklin loved their little empire, how they defended it against the
savages that pressed upon its borders, how they held the soil on which
they had set the standard of west-bound civilization—all that is a
legitimate part of the birth-history of the West.
Tennessee to-day honors John Sevier, founder of the Free State of
Franklin, with a shaft recording thirty-five battles and thirty-five
victories. This shaft perpetuates the memory of a population that “in
fifteen years engaged in three revolutions, organized and lived under
five different governments, established and administered the first
independent government in America, founded the first church and the
first college in the West, put in operation the first newspaper west of
the Alleghanies, met and fought the soldiers of King George in half a
dozen battles from King’s Mountain to the gates of Charleston, checked
and beat back four of the most powerful tribes of America, and left to
Tennessee the heritage of a fame founded upon courage and
steadfastness.”
In the times just preceding and following the Revolutionary War, the
American colonies, even though bold enough to encounter successfully the
forces of the mother country, were none the less timid and lacking in
self confidence. There was no strong centralized government, nor was the
loyalty of the different colonies or the different men of each colony a
thing grounded upon reason or even an imperative self interest.
In no thing was America so rich as in big men, by which I do not mean
“great” men as the term commonly goes. The characters of those early
days stand out clearly and distinctly before us now. It was still the
day of individualism. The men of the Free State were the boldest of
those bold individuals who headed out from the secure settlements of the
seaboard, through gloomy forests, into the unknown wilderness, west of
what was then the backbone of the United States, the rugged Alleghany
range.
These men made their own trails, and they were more careful with the
trails that led westward than with those that connected them with the
East that they had left behind. It was no act of disloyalty that caused
souls bold as these to cast about them in matters of organization and of
government. The day of kings was gone for them. The day of Liberty was
dawning. They carried with them, as have their west-bound fellows ever
since, the principles of self-government. Where the community was, there
arose the Law, there began the state.
With them the community was not the population they had left far behind,
but that population close at hand, banded together, experiencing a
common danger, and entertaining a common ambition,—the population that
had come West and intended to remain. The branches of the Law no longer
sheltered them. They were alone. There was no Law. What, then, was to be
done except to plant anew the seeds of the Law, and let it blossom here,
as it had done before, and has since, on the soil of America?
Yet, poor as was the hold that these people now retained upon the
country that bore them, they were not lacking in active loyalty. When
they heard of the first battles of the Revolution, the first thought of
the men of the “Washington District” was how they might best prove of
service in the conflict that was to ensue. So much might be expected,
for the name of Washington District was given by reason of Sevier’s
friendship with Washington, later to be the first president of the
States; and the District had sent from its scanty numbers fifty
riflemen, under Captain Evan Shelby, who took part on the Indian
battlefield of Point Pleasant, in Virginia, in the fall of 1774.
These men of Washington District were always in the front when the
fighting began, and had it seemed practicable to their leaders, they had
liked nothing better than to join their forces always with those of the
state of North Carolina. There was not one coward in the one hundred and
thirteen men that signed Sevier’s petition to the legislature of North
Carolina. Yet no formal annexation was made by North Carolina, though
John Sevier, Charles Robertson, John Carter and John Hall were seated as
delegates in the North Carolina legislature.
At this time North Carolina’s state constitution was formed (November,
1776), fixing the western boundary of the state as that named by King
Charles, which reached to “the South Seas.” No one knew what so
indefinite a description might mean, but John Sevier was wise enough to
know that so far from getting the benefit of a stable government and the
protection of the laws, his companions west of the Appalachians would be
in a land practically without law save of their own making. Therefore,
having in view all the time this possibility of a breaking away of a
considerable body of West-American population by its own sheer weight,
he succeeded in passing a resolution in the North Carolina legislature,
stating that the above mentioned limits should not operate as a bar to
the “later establishment of one or more governments west of North
Carolina, by consent of the legislature of that state.” We might call
Sevier another of those great prophets of the West, a prophet who
possessed not only personal courage and daring of his own, but a calm
and sober intellect that foresaw the growing up in the West of not only
one but many governments; albeit not his nor any other mind might at
that time see those changes that were to unite all these component parts
into one effective whole.
There may be interest in tracing from its inception the growth of this
little Western republic. We shall find its history lovingly written, and
as though to hand, by an inhabitant of the state of Tennessee who has
given care in research along those lines.[10] “This lovely mountain
section of the old Watauga settlements,” writes he, “being the cradle of
Tennessee and in some respects also, of the vast valley of the
Mississippi, is rich in historical interest. Here in the month of May,
1772, there was formulated by Sevier, Robertson and others the first
written compact of civil government on American soil. It was then they
drew up the celebrated Watauga Articles of Association, and set up a
government west of the long line of the Blue Ridge and apart from
colonial influence.
“These articles set on foot all the machinery of the new state, the
future Tennessee; they established courts to be presided over by five
commissioners, who had entire control in matters affecting the common
good; they provided a government, paternal but simple and moderate,
albeit summary and firm. This form of government proved satisfactory and
sufficient for a number of years, Sevier and Robertson continuing
leading spirits. At this time they probably believed themselves to be on
Virginia territory, for there was great question as to the location of
the northern boundary line of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes, thence
west to the South Seas—the vague demarcations of Charles II which were
accepted in the legislature of North Carolina.
“It was in 1776 that Sevier drew up his able petition to North Carolina
asking to be annexed thereto. Of the one hundred and thirteen signers,
all but two wrote their own names, which speaks not so badly for these
hardy frontiersmen. Their request was granted, and about April, 1777,
Watauga became a part of North Carolina. It still continued to be known
as the Washington District, largely on account of geographical
situation. At that time it embraced practically all of the present
Tennessee.
“To show the rapid progress of civilization in that remote region, it
may be stated that in 1778 or 1779 Reverend Samuel Doan, a young
graduate of Princeton, came into the Watauga country, organized Salem
Presbyterian church, and in 1780 erected a log cabin school-building,
the first literary institution in Tennessee, if not the first one in the
Mississippi valley, as has been frequently asserted. In the year 1783
this institution was chartered by North Carolina as Martin Academy, and
is known now as Washington College.
“The events leading to the formation of the state of Franklin grew out
of the effort of the state of North Carolina to pay her share of the
thirty-eight millions of the Revolutionary War debt. Congress proposed
to sell all the vacant lands in the several states, against the pro rata
indebtedness of such states. Therefore, in June, 1784, the (North
Carolina) legislature passed an act giving all of Washington District to
the United States. This gift was conditioned upon an acceptance within
two years, otherwise the act was to be null and void.”
This transfer of the sturdy population of the district brought up
questions somewhat in advance of those we argue to-day regarding
government without the consent of the governed, and the transfer of
territory without the consent of the inhabitants. At first the
frontiersmen seemed not to object to the change, but reflection showed
them that the act failed to give them any sort of civil or military
government during the two years Congress might elect to employ before
accepting the gift.
This contingency justly alarmed the population of Washington District.
They found themselves inhabitants of a No-Man’s-Land, an outlaw’s land,
living neither under a government of their own establishing, nor any
other whatsoever. In these unusual and perplexing circumstances it was
no wonder that the people of the District called a convention. This
meeting was held at Jonesboro, August, 1784, John Sevier himself
presiding. Witness now the wisdom of his proviso in the session of the
North Carolina legislature, which, in short, contemplated precisely the
act that was now taken. It was resolved to set up another government,
and these hardy citizens, so capable of self-government, greeted with
applause the establishment of a free and independent state. The
convention adjourned to meet again in November, to ratify the
constitution and further to complete the organization of the state
government.
“Meantime,” continues our historian, “North Carolina, becoming alarmed
at the state of affairs, repealed the act of cession of Washington
District, gave to the secessionists a superior court of their own, and
made Sevier brigadier-general of the organized militia. All of this was
most probably misunderstood by the people, who proceeded to elect
delegates to another convention, over which Sevier presided, though he
steadily protested against a separation. A constitution was, however,
adopted, an election for representatives was ordered, and when that body
met, Sevier was elected governor and all the machinery of the new state
set in motion.”
This little Western republic certainly seemed to have trouble in finding
itself. Its very name is even to-day a matter of discussion. One
writer[11] says: “The Washington District declared itself independent,
and organized a government under the name of Frankland. The name was
afterward changed to Franklin.” The writer just quoted[12] states:
“There was considerable discussion as to the spelling of the name, many
insisting in convention that ‘Frankland,’ that is to say ‘Freeland,’
should be the name. Others were for following the name of Benjamin
Franklin. The latter spelling carried by a very small majority in the
convention, as cited by Ramsey. There is, however, yet extant one letter
written by General William Cocke from Frankland.”
The name Franklin was the one officially accepted. Franklin himself did
not know of the honor he had received until some eighteen months after
it had been conferred. He declined to be caught by this compliment, did
not commit himself in favor of the new commonwealth, but advised the
citizens of this pseudo-state to submit their claims to Congress, and
indeed outlined to them the virtue of that centralized government which
was later to be felt on both sides of the Alleghanies.
This new population now had a government and a scheme of education, and
indeed a general plan of living and growth and progress, yet it lacked
many of the advantages of an older civilization. There must, of course,
be revenue, and hence taxes; and since a currency was not forthcoming,
the legislature passed an act authorizing the payment of taxes and
salaries in articles of trade. Legal tender were beaver, otter and deer
skins, each at six shillings; raccoon and fox skins, worth one shilling
and three pence each. Beeswax, at one shilling a pound, was also legal
tender; and, most remarkable of all, though there were those who
wondered not at the precedent, it was provided that taxes and official
salaries might also be paid in rye whisky, at three shillings six pence
a gallon, or in peach brandy at three shillings a gallon! As to the
extent of the reward of practical politics in that day, we may cite an
act passed by that same legislature.
“Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Franklin, and it
is hereby enacted by the authority of same, that from and after the
first day of January next, the salaries of this commonwealth shall be as
follows:
“His Excellency, the Governor, per annum, a hundred deer skins.
“His Honor, the Chief Justice, five hundred deer skins.
“The Secretary to His Excellency, the Governor, five hundred raccoon
skins.
“County Clerk, three hundred beaver skins.
“Clerk of the House of Commons, two hundred raccoon skins.
“Members of the Assembly, per diem, three raccoon skins.
“Justice fees for serving a warrant, one mink skin.”
Crude enough seem such devices to us to-day, yet we must remember that
we are in close chronological touch with those very times. Nor did the
new state seem to do ill with its self-established machinery of
government. Just as the people of America retained something of the
vital and useful customs and standards of old England, discarding the
ancient and outworn, so did the people of the state of Franklin cling to
the standards of their mother state of North Carolina. The constitution
of North Carolina was adopted without very great change.
“For some time,” goes on our writer, “the state of Franklin moved on
serenely, until Governor Sevier officially notified Governor Martin of
North Carolina that his people would no longer recognize the authority
of that state. Governor Martin replied explaining the cession act, and
threatening the ‘revolters’ with armed invasion unless they returned to
their allegiance. This letter, largely circulated, was not without
effect, though in the main the people adhered to the new state.
“North Carolina then passed an act of amnesty for those that cared to
avail themselves of it, which provided for the election of members to
her own legislature. The same act appointed civil and military officers
for the district. Thus there was to be seen the strange spectacle of two
sets of officers over one and the same set of people, ‘Hurrah for
Franklin!’ being the battle cry of one, and ‘Hurrah for North Carolina!’
the watchword of the other. Great confusion followed. Franklin held
courts at Jonesboro, and North Carolina held hers near by, each denying
the authority of the other. The rival officials quarreled and fought
over their supposed rights. The victors turned the vanquished neck and
crop out of doors, and retained possession of the records, such as they
were.
“Failing to obtain recognition from North Carolina and an admission of
the independence of the state of Franklin, Sevier laid the matter before
Congress. Here he failed. He turned to Georgia, and was told by that
state that Franklin and the old state of North Carolina must settle
their own affairs themselves. Day by day the Franklin party became
weaker, and on the expiration of Sevier’s term as governor no election
was held, and the state of Franklin therefore ceased to exist. Indeed it
is a matter of surprise that it survived four years of such constant and
irritating opposition. The explanation, lies in the fact that no other
man in Tennessee before or since has had so firm a hold upon the popular
heart as did John Sevier. In one instance at least the fickle multitude
was constant.
“Soon after Franklin’s downfall, Sevier was arrested by North Carolina
officers on the charge of treason, the warrant having been granted by
Judge Spencer of the old state, and he was taken over the mountains for
trial at Morganton. There he was at once surrounded by many of his old
King’s Mountain comrades, and after a short sojourn returned home
without trial and without interference. He was soon elected to the North
Carolina senate, where he took his seat, that section of the legislature
restoring to him all his old-time privileges. Almost immediately
thereafter he was elected to Congress (in 1789) from the ‘Washington
District of North Carolina,’ thus becoming the first member of that body
from the valley of the Mississippi.”
All this turmoil as to the bestowal of governmental allegiance was going
forward at the same time that the settlers of Kentucky were raising
their corn under rifle guard, and constantly fighting back the savage
population that hemmed them in. They too were clamoring for national
support, or individual independence. Meantime, too, the intrigues of
Wilkinson in the Mississippi valley were continuing, and the men of the
Free State of Franklin even looked southward for an alliance with the
nation holding control of the mouth of the great Mississippi highway.
The formation of the new state was a blow not so much at the government
at Washington as at the mother state of North Carolina; and the latter
was at first willing enough to have the separation take place, for she
was tired of paying war debts for fighting the Indians on her far-off
frontier.
The times being so far out of joint, we can scarcely wonder that the
hardy Indian fighters under Sevier at one time (September twelfth, 1788)
sent word to the Spanish minister Gardoquoi that they wished to put
themselves under the protection of Spain—a thing to-day difficult to
believe of any part of the American population, yet not wholly
irrational for those times and conditions. Nor is this all of the story
of these little splits and schisms and secessions, which for a time took
place on the Western slope of the Alleghanies.
Another writer[13] describes some of these early transactions. “The
settlers of the district of the Columbia River,” says he, “who were
under the jurisdiction of North Carolina, gave the name of Miro to the
district they had formed; this as evidence of their partiality for the
Spanish government. The promise of protection the inhabitants received
from Gardoquoi was so modified by Miro that the scheme, though
prosecuted for a time with vigor, finally failed from inability of the
secessionists to comply with the conditions of recognition. Yet another
center of sedition was located in the valley of the Mississippi. A
company composed of Alexander Moultrie, Isaac Huger, Major William
Snipes, Colonel Washington and other distinguished South Carolinians was
formed at Charleston in 1789, which purchased from the state of Georgia
fifty-two thousand nine hundred square miles of territory, extending
from the Yazoo to the banks of the Mississippi near Natchez, the
Choctaws, Chicasaws and Spain each claiming a portion of this territory.
The ulterior designs of the company in the purchase and settlement of
the country were carefully concealed for some time.”
The arch conspirator Wilkinson did his best to assume a position of
importance with this little body of malcontents, and freely promised
Miro that he would unite all this population under the flag of Spain. He
naïvely stirred up the Indian savages of the Mississippi valley to renew
their attacks on the Western frontier, in order that the Western
settlers might the more quickly realize the inefficiency of the
government at Washington to afford them the protection they needed.
Meantime also it was quite possible that Great Britain might make an
invasion of Louisiana, by way of the water trail from Canada to the
Mississippi valley. Assuredly the times were troublous, and fortunate
indeed was it that the government at Washington still lived, that good
fortune favored the minds and hands in control.
It was not the wisdom of the government, not the ability of the
political leaders that solved these perplexing problems. Presently they
went far toward solving themselves, as do most American problems to-day.
By this time all the mountain roads and water trails were becoming more
defined and more frequented; the fighting white men were slowly beating
off their savage foes.
Then at last came the time when the frontier, held fast by many braided
trails, looked back across the mountains, and resolved to pin fast its
allegiance then and forever to the government that had been left behind,
the government of Americans under principles established and fully
proved on the American soil. The threads that bound fast the new
settlements with the old, the threads that grew and strengthened into
indissoluble bonds, which in spite of the fears of those who dreaded the
accession of any more large territory, held firm the whole wide realm of
the West to the mother colonies on the East, were simply the natural and
artificial trails, later to be blended into a vast network,
intermingling and inextricable, weaving and making permanent the web of
a common and unsectionalized civilization.
Such was the still pure Anglo-Saxon civilization, changed, purified and
strengthened by some generations of tenure of the American soil, at the
time when it reached the great central highway, the mighty Mississippi,
there to pause for a time, facing new problems attendant upon the next
great journey onward and outward in the pathway of the sun.
-----
Footnote 10:
Alexander Hynds, of Dandridge, Tenn.
Footnote 11:
N. P. Langford.
Footnote 12:
Alexander Hynds.
Footnote 13:
N. P. Langford.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WAY TO THE ROCKIES
CHAPTER I
DAVY CROCKETT
There is no figure of speech that so exactly describes the westward
advance of the American population as that which compares it to the
feeding of a vast flock of wild pigeons. These, when they fall on a
forest rich with their chosen food, advance rapidly, rank after rank. As
those in the front pause for a moment to feed, others behind rise and
fly on beyond them, settling for a time to resume their own feeding
operations. Thus the progress of the hosts resembles a series of rolling
waves, one passing ever on beyond the other, each wave changing its own
relative position rapidly, yet ever going forward.
It was so with the American people. The Alleghanies could not stop them
in their west-bound march, nor the terrors of a relentless Indian
warfare, which endangered lives dearer to the rugged frontiersman than
his own. Nothing would do until the pathway of the waters had brought
the American settler to the Mississippi River, the great highway that,
whether by whim, chance, or design, had now become wholly the property
of the growing American government. Having arrived at the Mississippi
River, the population could not rest. Those behind pressed ever on.
Once across the Alleghanies the pathways had been pointed out by nature;
beyond the Mississippi these pathways were reversed. Man had not wings
like the wild bird. His pilgrimage must still be slow, his methods of
locomotion clumsy. The paths no longer lay even with the currents of the
streams. The adventurer into the West must, for the most part, follow
the reversed pathways of the waters. Briefly, the journey of the
frontiersman from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi was one of angles, the
first leg running to the southwest, thence northwest, thence southwest.
The pilgrimage profile from the Mississippi to the Rockies was equally
angular. The line of travel did not, for the most part, run directly to
the west. It angled out and upward, wherever water transportation led,
and where the streams showed the way.
In the story of Daniel Boone we have seen how he moved again and again,
seeking ever to edge a little farther to the west than his nearest
neighbors. Still another great frontiersman, Davy Crockett, beloved of
the American people, gives us instance of this patient progress of the
west-bound, halting, advancing, but never tiring. The life of Crockett
will afford in itself a good view of the profile of the population
movement, and will give as well a notion of the life and customs of
those early times.
Davy Crockett, backwoodsman and bear hunter, magistrate, legislator and
congressman; a man who at the time of his marriage scarcely knew one
letter of the alphabet from the other, yet at middle age was one of the
best-known figures of the American political world, and who was even
mentioned as a possibility for the presidency of the United States; a
man that lived like a savage and died like a hero—one of the uncouthest
gentlemen that ever breathed—such a man as this could have been the
product of none but an extraordinary day. We shall do well to note the
story of his life, for his is one of those colossal figures now rapidly
passing into the haze of forgetfulness or the mirage of mere conjecture.
In some fashion the names of Boone and Crockett are often loosely
connected. They were in part contemporaneous though not coincident.
Showing in common the rugged traits of the typical man of their time,
they were yet distinctly unlike in many qualities. A writer who knew
both men states that he considered Crockett the mental superior of
Boone. After weighing carefully all the evidence obtainable—and there
is much more information available concerning Crockett than in regard to
Boone—one would be disposed to differ from such an opinion.
Boone was the simpler and sincerer soul, the graver and more dignified
figure; Crockett the more magnetic personality, the more plausible, if
at times less candid, man. One man was practically as ignorant as the
other. Boone had no taste for political life, and his sole wish was to
live ever a little beyond that civilization of which he was the pioneer
and guide. Crockett, built also of good, common, human clay, for
two-thirds of his life seemed animated by no greater ambition.
Then all at once we see him turned politician. He succeeds, and his name
grows larger than his neighborhood and country. Not knowing the basis of
the tariff, ignorant of the text of the Constitution, master of the
practice, but unable to explain the theory, of a caucus or a town
meeting, he finds himself owner of a seat in the United States Congress,
fairly the central figure of that Congress, the cynosure not only of the
South but of the East and North.
He is at this time nothing but a great, good-humored boy, the very type
alike of an open-handed generosity, and an open-mouthed and sometimes
ill-timed levity. He is the product of political accident. Yet, wonder
of wonders, we find this man, quite past the time usually assigned as
the limit for the development and fixing of a man’s character, suddenly
blossoming out into a second development, a second manhood, more
thoughtful and more dignified than that of his early days. Without
education when he started for the halls of Congress, he gains that
education more rapidly than did ever man before.
Crockett returned to his home a graver and broader man. Even his speech
had gained freedom, ease and clarity, though still he delighted, perhaps
more in jest than otherwise, to bring in the crudities of expression,
the quips and quirks of that language through which he had, to his own
surprise and without his own plan, won his sudden notoriety—a notoriety
that was later to turn to fame.
There is not to be found in all the history of American statesmanship so
swift and sound a ripening into mature thought as that of this
backwoodsman, the first political “mugwump” or independent; who engaged
in politics for reasons of self-interest, and then all at once grew big
enough to set self-interest aside and to do what seemed to him wise and
right—a type of statesmanship now well-nigh defunct in America. And yet
we see him, in the pang of his first decisive political defeat, growing
bitter at his reverses, losing the genial philosophy of his earlier
years, even renouncing his country, and forthwith turning away from
family, friends and commonwealth to seek a new fortune in an alien land.
Some biographers of Crockett accord to him in this act the motives of
bold knight-errantry; yet impartial review of known facts leads one to
believe that Crockett’s abandonment of his family and his somewhat
erratic journey into Texas were most easily explicable by reasons of a
plausible self-interest. He was seeking political advancement along
lines of less resistance. Then, finding himself a member of a party of
souls as adventurous as himself, souls reckless and unrestrained,
ardent, eager, fearless, yet without a leader and without a definite
plan, Crockett the backwoodsman, Crockett the thinker, the orator, the
statesman, if you please, flings himself with the others into a needless
and fatal fight, rages with them in the most glorious struggle yet
chronicled in the pages of American history, fights like a Titan, dies
like a gallant gentleman, helps write the shining history of that
squalid hut in old San Antonio, and makes possible one of the most
burning sentences that ever adorned monument above hero’s grave:
“Thermopylæ had three messengers of defeat; the Alamo had not one!”
Here are contradictions that might be thought sufficient to give us
pause; yet not contradictions large or conclusive enough to rob Davy
Crockett of aught of the fame that has been accorded him by the American
people. In order to reconcile or explain these contrarieties, and hence
to understand this strange early American, we shall do well to review
the better known and most authentic incidents of his peculiar career.
Crockett does not go so far back in the history of the west-bound
American as does Daniel Boone. The latter died at the age of eighty-six.
Crockett, who died about ten years later than Boone, was but fifty years
of age. His life falls in the trans-Mississippi period of the Western
population movement. He was born August seventeenth, 1786, in Greene
County, Tennessee. His grandfather was an Irishman who came to
Pennsylvania, thence moved west in order to avail himself of the
settlers’ right of four hundred acres of land, which carried the
preemption right of an additional one thousand acres. A goodly portion
of a goodly earth lay ready to every man’s hand in that day of American
opportunity.
The second Crockett homestead, on the Holston River, was broken up by
the Indians, who killed the parents and several of the children, John
Crockett, David’s father, being one of the few that escaped. John
Crockett became a Revolutionary soldier, and after the Revolutionary War
moved to North Carolina, just as did the father of Daniel Boone.
Following the path of the earlier Argonaut, Boone, John Crockett in 1783
crossed the Alleghanies, but settled in eastern Tennessee, instead of
Kentucky. In this wilderness David was born. It was a land without
religion, without schools, without civilization. In such an environment
the weaker children died. Naked as a little Indian, David Crockett ran
about the rude cabin, and lived because he was fit to survive. One of
his earliest recollections is that of an incident in which his uncle,
Joseph Hawkins, figured. Hawkins accidentally shot one of the neighbors,
the ball passing through his body. There was no surgical skill possible,
and it was considered the proper thing in the treatment of this wound to
pass a silk handkerchief, carried on the end of a ramrod, from one end
to the other of the wound. Crockett appears to have seen his father pull
a silk handkerchief entirely through the body of this wounded neighbor.
It was a strong breed, that of Tennessee a hundred years ago!
Of course this settler must move west, and again west. At the fourth
move of his life he located on Cove Creek, the boy Davy being now about
eight years of age. About this time Crockett’s father lost his
grist-mill by fire. Naturally the remedy for this was to move, and he
again took up his journey, settling this time on the road between
Abingdon and Knowlton, where he opened a rude tavern, patronized mostly
by teamsters of the roughest sort,—certainly a hard enough environment
for the coming statesman.
The earliest description of Crockett represents him to be “a wiry little
fellow, athletic, with nerves of steel.” Even in childhood he was given
to fierce encounters, yet he was of an open and generous disposition. He
grew up practically without care, his father, if truth be told, being a
man of somewhat gross and drunken habits. Davy finally, at the mature
age of thirteen, forsook the paternal roof and set out in the world for
himself.
He chanced fortune with drovers, driving cattle to the eastward, and
learned to be hostler and general utility man, becoming acquainted with
the trail that ran between Abingdon, Witheville and Charlottesville,
Orange Court House and other points in Virginia. He worked for a few
months as a farm hand in Virginia. He wandered into Baltimore, with
wonder noticed the shipping there, and came near becoming a sailor, but
was rescued from that fate. Buffeted by fortune from pillar to post, he
worked one month for a farmer at a wage of five dollars. He went
apprentice to a hatter and worked for eighteen months for nothing, at
the end of which time the hatter unfortunately failed in business.
Poor Davy spent two years in these wanderings, and was fifteen years old
when all at once he again dawned upon the paternal grounds in eastern
Tennessee. These two years had been spent in considerable physical
discomfort and anguish of spirit, and the journey home was accomplished
only after many dangers and difficulties. Crockett admits that at this
time he did not know the letters of the alphabet. His father, shiftless
as ever, had been lavish with his promissory notes. He offered Davy his
“freedom” if he would work six months for a neighbor to whom he had
given a note for forty dollars. Davy generously did so, and capped it
off by working another six months and taking up another one of his
father’s notes, for thirty-six dollars. This last he was not obliged to
do, yet in spite of these bitter surroundings, there had flowered in the
young savage’s heart a certain feeling of family honor.
Now all at once the boy backwoodsman became conscious of his own
infirmities. He went to school six months, the only schooling he ever
had in his life. He learned to write his name, to spell to some extent,
to perform a few simple sums in arithmetic. Twice blighted in love at
eighteen years of age, he married a pretty little Irish girl, a daughter
of a neighboring family. “I know’d I would get her,” says he, “if no one
else did before next Thursday.”
Crockett was married in his moccasins, leggings and hunting shirt. His
bride was dressed in linsey-woolsey. There was no jewelry. The table on
which the wedding feast was spread was made of a single slab. The
platters were of wood, the spoons of pewter and of horn. In his own
abode, as he first entered it, there was no bed and not a chair, a knife
or a fork. Yet, after the expenditure of fifteen dollars, which he
borrowed, Crockett and his wife “fixed the place up pretty grand,” and
found it good enough for them for some years. Here two boys were born to
them.
At the ripe age of twenty years, that is to say in the year 1806,
Crockett considered it necessary for the betterment of his fortunes that
he should remove farther toward the West, this having been the universal
practice of his kind. He journeyed for four hundred miles through the
Western wilderness, taking his family and household goods with him.
Their transportation, as we are advised, consisted of one old horse and
two colts. These animals were packed with the household goods. In the
wild journey down the Holston the family, children and all, camped out,
enduring the weather as best they might. At last they came to a halt on
Mulberry Creek, in Lincoln County, in what they took to be the Promised
Land. The soil was generously rich, game and fish were abundant, the
climate was all that could be asked. Crockett built him a cabin, and
here he lived for two years, much as he had lived in eastern Tennessee.
Then, in the easy fashion of the time, he moved once more, this time
settling in Franklin County, on Bear Creek, still in the wilderness.
Here we find him living in 1813, at which time the call went out for
volunteers to serve in the Creek War under General Jackson. Without much
ado, Crockett said good-by to his family, joining those wild irregular
troops who, amid countless hardships, plodded up and down the region of
Alabama and Georgia, meeting the southern Indians, destroying them
wholesale or piecemeal as the case might be. Crockett marched,
counter-marched, acted as spy and hunter, doing his full share of the
work.
All the time he was rising in the esteem of his fellow men. He was now a
tall, large-boned, muscular man. His hair, we are told, was sandy, his
eyes blue, his nose straight, his mouth wide and merry; and so we see
Davy Crockett the grown man. Never having known anything but hardship
all his life, he has none the less never known anything but cheerfulness
and content. The apt jest and catching story are always ready on his
lips. He is the life of the camp-fire. Gradually he forges to the front.
The qualities of leadership begin to appear.
In all these rude military experiences, although Crockett does not fancy
the revolting scenes which in some instances he witnesses at the Indian
killings, he shows the ardent nature, the fighting soul. Hence he
respects the fighting man and pays his obedience to General Jackson.
There is no hint of that fatal falling out between the two men that
later is so suddenly
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