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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pioneers of the Old Southwest, by 
+Constance Lindsay Skinner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Pioneers of the Old Southwest
+       A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground
+
+Author: Constance Lindsay Skinner
+
+Posting Date: February 21, 2009 [EBook #3073]
+Release Date: February, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's
+University, Alev Akman, and Doris Ringbloom
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST,
+
+A CHRONICLE OF THE DARK AND BLOODY GROUND
+
+Volume 18 In The Chronicles Of America Series
+
+
+By Constance Lindsay Skinner
+
+
+Acknowledgment
+
+This narrative is founded largely on original sources--on the writings
+and journals of pioneers and contemporary observers, such as Doddridge
+and Adair, and on the public documents of the period as printed in
+the Colonial Records and in the American Archives. But the author is,
+nevertheless, greatly indebted to the researches of, other writers,
+whose works are cited in the Bibliographical Note. The author's thanks
+are due, also, to Dr. Archibald Henderson, of the University of North
+Carolina, for his kindness in reading the proofs of this book for
+comparison with his own extended collection of unpublished manuscripts
+relating to the period.
+
+C. L. S.
+
+April, 1919.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     I.    THE TREAD OF PIONEERS
+     II.   FOLKWAYS
+     III.  THE TRADER
+     IV.   THE PASSING OF THE FRENCH PERIL
+     V.    BOONE, THE WANDERER
+     VI.   THE FIGHT FOR KENTUCKY
+     VII.  THE DARK AND BLOODY GROUND
+     VIII. TENNESSEE
+     IX.   KING'S MOUNTAIN
+     X.    SEVIER, THE STATEMAKER
+     XI.   BOONE'S LAST DAYS
+
+     BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+
+
+PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST
+
+
+
+Chapter I. The Tread Of Pioneers
+
+The Ulster Presbyterians, or "Scotch-Irish," to whom history has
+ascribed the dominant role among the pioneer folk of the Old Southwest,
+began their migrations to America in the latter years of the seventeenth
+century. It is not known with certainty precisely when or where the
+first immigrants of their race arrived in this country, but soon after
+1680 they were to be found in several of the colonies. It was not long,
+indeed, before they were entering in numbers at the port of Philadelphia
+and were making Pennsylvania the chief center of their activities in the
+New World. By 1726 they had established settlements in several counties
+behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they had begun their great trek
+southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and on to the Yadkin
+Valley of North Carolina. There they met others of their own race--bold
+men like themselves, hungry after land--who were coming in through
+Charleston and pushing their way up the rivers from the seacoast to the
+"Back Country," in search of homes.
+
+These Ulstermen did not come to the New World as novices in the shaping
+of society; they had already made history. Their ostensible object
+in America was to obtain land, but, like most external aims, it was
+secondary to a deeper purpose. What had sent the Ulstermen to America
+was a passion for a whole freedom. They were lusty men, shrewd and
+courageous, zealous to the death for an ideal and withal so practical to
+the moment in business that it soon came to be commonly reported of them
+that "they kept the Sabbath and everything else they could lay their
+hands on," though it is but fair to them to add that this phrase is
+current wherever Scots dwell. They had contested in Parliament and with
+arms for their own form of worship and for their civil rights. They
+were already frontiersmen, trained in the hardihood and craft of border
+warfare through years of guerrilla fighting with the Irish Celts. They
+had pitted and proved their strength against a wilderness; they had
+reclaimed the North of Ireland from desolation. For the time, many of
+them were educated men; under the regulations of the Presbyterian Church
+every child was taught to read at an early age, since no person could be
+admitted to the privileges of the Church who did not both understand and
+approve the Presbyterian constitution and discipline. They were brought
+up on the Bible and on the writings of their famous pastors, one of
+whom, as early as 1650, had given utterance to the democratic doctrine
+that "men are called to the magistracy by the suffrage of the people
+whom they govern, and for men to assume unto themselves power is mere
+tyranny and unjust usurpation." In subscribing to this doctrine and
+in resisting to the hilt all efforts of successive English kings to
+interfere in the election of their pastors, the Scots of Ulster had
+already declared for democracy.
+
+It was shortly after James VI of Scotland became James I of England
+and while the English were founding Jamestown that the Scots had first
+occupied Ulster; but the true origin of the Ulster Plantation lies
+further back, in the reign of Henry VIII, in the days of the English
+Reformation. In Henry's Irish realm the Reformation, though proclaimed
+by royal authority, had never been accomplished; and Henry's more famous
+daughter, Elizabeth, had conceived the plan, later to be carried out by
+James, of planting colonies of Protestants in Ireland to promote loyalty
+in that rebellious land. Six counties, comprising half a million acres,
+formed the Ulster Plantation. The great majority of the colonists
+sent thither by James were Scotch Lowlanders, but among them were many
+English and a smaller number of Highlanders. These three peoples from
+the island of Britain brought forth, through intermarriage, the Ulster
+Scots.
+
+The reign of Charles I had inaugurated for the Ulstermen an era of
+persecution. Charles practically suppressed the Presbyterian religion
+in Ireland. His son, Charles II, struck at Ireland in 1666 through its
+cattle trade, by prohibiting the exportation of beef to England and
+Scotland. The Navigation Acts, excluding Ireland from direct trade with
+the colonies, ruined Irish commerce, while Corporation Acts and Test
+Acts requiring conformity with the practices of the Church of England
+bore heavily on the Ulster Presbyterians.
+
+It was largely by refugees from religious persecution that America in
+the beginning was colonized. But religious persecution was only one of
+the influences which shaped the course and formed the character of the
+Ulster Scots. In Ulster, whither they had originally been transplanted
+by James to found a loyal province in the midst of the King's enemies,
+they had done their work too well and had waxed too powerful for the
+comfort of later monarchs. The first attacks upon them struck at their
+religion; but the subsequent legislative acts which successively ruined
+the woolen trade, barred nonconformists from public office, stifled
+Irish commerce, pronounced non-Episcopal marriages irregular, and
+instituted heavy taxation and high rentals for the land their fathers
+had made productive--these were blows dealt chiefly for the political
+and commercial ends of favored classes in England.
+
+These attacks, aimed through his religious conscience at the sources of
+his livelihood, made the Ulster Scot perforce what he was--a zealot as
+a citizen and a zealot as a merchant no less than as a Presbyterian.
+Thanks to his persecutors, he made a religion of everything he undertook
+and regarded his civil rights as divine rights. Thus out of persecution
+emerged a type of man who was high-principled and narrow, strong and
+violent, as tenacious of his own rights as he was blind often to the
+rights of others, acquisitive yet self-sacrificing, but most of all
+fearless, confident of his own power, determined to have and to hold.
+
+Twenty thousand Ulstermen, it is estimated, left Ireland for America
+in the first three decades of the eighteenth century. More than six
+thousand of them are known to have entered Pennsylvania in 1729 alone,
+and twenty years later they numbered one-quarter of that colony's
+population. During the five years preceding the Revolutionary War more
+than thirty thousand Ulstermen crossed the ocean and arrived in America
+just in time and in just the right frame of mind to return King George's
+compliment in kind, by helping to deprive him of his American estates,
+a domain very much larger than the acres of Ulster. They fully justified
+the fears of the good bishop who wrote Lord Dartmouth, Secretary for the
+Colonies, that he trembled for the peace of the King's overseas realm,
+since these thousands of "phanatical and hungry Republicans" had sailed
+for America.
+
+The Ulstermen who entered by Charleston were known to the inhabitants
+of the tidewater regions as the "Scotch-Irish." Those who came from
+the north, lured southward by the offer of cheap lands, were called the
+"Pennsylvania Irish." Both were, however, of the same race--a race twice
+expatriated, first from Scotland and then from Ireland, and stripped of
+all that it had won throughout more than a century of persecution. To
+these exiles the Back Country of North Carolina, with its cheap and even
+free tracts lying far from the seat of government, must have seemed not
+only the Land of Promise but the Land of Last Chance. Here they must
+strike their roots into the sod with such interlocking strength that no
+cataclysm of tyranny should ever dislodge them--or they must accept the
+fate dealt out to them by their former persecutors and become a tribe
+of nomads and serfs. But to these Ulster immigrants such a choice was no
+choice at all. They knew themselves strong men, who had made the most of
+opportunity despite almost superhuman obstacles. The drumming of
+their feet along the banks of the Shenandoah, or up the rivers from
+Charleston, and on through the broad sweep of the Yadkin Valley, was a
+conquering people's challenge to the Wilderness which lay sleeping like
+an unready sentinel at the gates of their Future.
+
+It is maintained still by many, however often disputed, that the
+Ulstermen were the first to declare for American Independence, as in the
+Old Country they were the first to demand the separation of Church and
+State. A Declaration of Independence is said to have been drawn up and
+signed in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on May 20, 1775. *
+However that maybe, it is certain that these Mecklenburg Protestants had
+received special schooling in the doctrine of independence. They had in
+their midst for eight years (1758-66) the Reverend Alexander Craighead,
+a Presbyterian minister who, for his "republican doctrines" expressed
+in a pamphlet, had been disowned by the Pennsylvania Synod acting on the
+Governor's protest, and so persecuted in Virginia that he had at last
+fled to the North Carolina Back Country. There, during the remaining
+years of his life, as the sole preacher and teacher in the settlements
+between the Yadkin and the Catawba rivers he found willing soil in which
+to sow the seeds of Liberty.
+
+
+     * See Hoyt, "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence"; and
+"American Archives," Fourth Series. vol. II, p. 855.
+
+
+There was another branch of the Scottish race which helped to people
+the Back Country. The Highlanders, whose loyalty to their oath made them
+fight on the King's side in the Revolutionary War, have been somewhat
+overlooked in history. Tradition, handed down among the transplanted
+clans--who, for the most part, spoke only Gaelic for a generation and
+wrote nothing--and latterly recorded by one or two of their descendants,
+supplies us with all we are now able to learn of the early coming of the
+Gaels to Carolina. It would seem that their first immigration to America
+in small bands took place after the suppression of the Jacobite rising
+in 1715--when Highlanders fled in numbers also to France--for by 1729
+there was a settlement of them on the Cape Fear River. We know, too,
+that in 1748 it was charged against Gabriel Johnston, Governor of North
+Carolina from 1734 to 1752, that he had shown no joy over the King's
+"glorious victory of Culloden" and that "he had appointed one William
+McGregor, who had been in the Rebellion in the year 1715 a Justice of
+the Peace during the last Rebellion [1745] and was not himself without
+suspicion of disaffection to His Majesty's Government." It is indeed
+possible that Gabriel Johnston, formerly a professor at St. Andrew's
+University, had himself not always been a stranger to the kilt. He
+induced large numbers of highlanders to come to America and probably
+influenced the second George to moderate his treatment of the vanquished
+Gaels in the Old Country and permit their emigration to the New World.
+
+In contrast with the Ulstermen, whose secular ideals were dictated by
+the forms of their Church, these Scots adhered still to the tribal or
+clan system, although they, too, in the majority, were Presbyterians,
+with a minority of Roman Catholics and Episcopalians. In the Scotch
+Highlands they had occupied small holdings on the land under the sway of
+their chief, or Head of the Clan, to whom they were bound by blood and
+fealty but to whom they paid no rentals. The position of the Head of the
+Clan was hereditary, but no heir was bold enough to step forward into
+that position until he had performed some deed of worth. They were
+principally herders, their chief stock being the famous small black
+cattle of the Highlands. Their wars with each other were cattle raids.
+Only in war, however, did the Gael lay hands on his neighbor's goods.
+There were no highwaymen and housebreakers in the Highlands. No Highland
+mansion, cot, or barn was ever locked. Theft and the breaking of an
+oath, sins against man's honor, were held in such abhorrence that no
+one guilty of them could remain among his clansmen in the beloved glens.
+These Highlanders were a race of tall, robust men, who lived simply and
+frugally and slept on the heath among their flocks in all weathers, with
+no other covering from rain and snow than their plaidies. It is reported
+of the Laird of Keppoch, who was leading his clan to war in winter time,
+that his men were divided as to the propriety of following him further
+because he rolled a snowball to rest his head upon when he lay down.
+"Now we despair of victory," they said, "since our leader has become go
+effeminate he cannot sleep without a pillow!" *
+
+
+     * MacLean, "An Historical Account of the Settlement of Scotch
+Highlanders in America."
+
+
+The "King's glorious victory of Culloden" was followed by a policy of
+extermination carried on by the orders and under the personal direction
+of the Duke of Cumberland. When King George at last restrained his son
+from his orgy of blood, he offered the Gaels their lives and exile to
+America on condition of their taking the full oath of allegiance. The
+majority accepted his terms, for not only were their lives forfeit but
+their crops and cattle had been destroyed and the holdings on which
+their ancestors had lived for many centuries taken from them. The
+descriptions of the scenes attending their leave-taking of the hills and
+glens they loved with such passionate fervor are among the most pathetic
+in history. Strong men who had met the ravage of a brutal sword without
+weakening abandoned themselves to the agony of sorrow. They kissed the
+walls of their houses. They flung themselves on the ground and embraced
+the sod upon which they had walked in freedom. They called their broken
+farewells to the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to
+see; and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the passes,
+their pipers played the dirge for the dead.
+
+Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race which entered
+North Carolina from the coast and pushed up into the wilderness about
+the headwaters of Cape Fear River. Tradition indicates that these
+hillsmen sought the interior because the grass and pea vine which
+overgrew the innercountry stretching towards the mountains provided
+excellent fodder for the cattle which some of the chiefs are said to
+have brought with them. These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible
+numbers, were in the Yadkin Valley before 1730, possibly even ten years
+earlier. In 1739 Neil MacNeill of Kintyre brought over a shipload of
+Gaels to rejoin his kinsman, Hector MacNeill, called Bluff Hector from
+his residence near the bluffs at Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. Some
+of these immigrants went on to the Yadkin, we are told, to unite with
+others of their clan who had been for some time in that district. The
+exact time of the first Highlander on the Yadkin cannot be ascertained,
+as there were no court records and the offices of the land companies
+were not then open for the sale of these remote regions. But by 1753
+there were not less than four thousand Gaels in Cumberland County,
+where they occupied the chief magisterial posts; and they were already
+spreading over the lands now comprised within Moore, Anson, Richmond,
+Robeson, Bladen, and Sampson counties. In these counties Gaelic was as
+commonly heard as English.
+
+In the years immediately preceding the Revolution and even in 1776
+itself they came in increasing numbers. They knew nothing of the
+smoldering fire just about to break into flames in the country of their
+choice, but the Royal Governor, Josiah Martin, knew that Highland arms
+would soon be ceded by His Majesty. He knew something of Highland honor,
+too; for he would not let the Gaels proceed after their landing until
+they had bound themselves by oath to support the Government of King
+George. So it was that the unfortunate Highlanders found themselves,
+according too their strict code of honor, forced to wield arms against
+the very Americans who had received and befriended them--and for the
+crowned brother of a prince whose name is execrated to this day in
+Highland song and story!
+
+They were led by Allan MacDonald of Kingsborough; and tradition gives us
+a stirring picture of Allan's wife--the famous Flora MacDonald, who
+in Scotland had protected the Young Pretender in his flight--making an
+impassioned address in Gaelic to the Highland soldiers and urging them
+on to die for honor's sake. When this Highland force was conquered by
+the Americans, the large majority willingly bound themselves not to
+fight further against the American cause and were set at liberty.
+Many of them felt that, by offering their lives to the swords of the
+Americans, they had canceled their obligation to King George and were
+now free to draw their swords again and, this time, in accordance with
+their sympathies; so they went over to the American side and fought
+gallantly for independence.
+
+
+Although the brave glory of this pioneer age shines so brightly on the
+Lion Rampant of Caledonia, not to Scots alone does that whole glory
+belong. The second largest racial stream which flowed into the Back
+Country of Virginia and North Carolina was German. Most of these Germans
+went down from Pennsylvania and were generally called "Pennsylvania
+Dutch," an incorrect rendering of Pennsylvanische Deutsche. The upper
+Shenandoah Valley was settled almost entirely by Germans. They were
+members of the Lutheran, German Reformed, and Moravian churches. The
+cause which sent vast numbers of this sturdy people across the ocean,
+during the first years of the eighteenth century, was religious
+persecution. By statute and by word the Roman Catholic powers of Austria
+sought to wipe out the Salzburg Lutherans and the Moravian followers of
+John Huss. In that region of the Rhine country known in those days as
+the German Palatinate, now a part of Bavaria, Protestants were being
+massacred by the troops of Louis of France, then engaged in the War of
+the Spanish Succession (1701-13) and in the zealous effort to extirpate
+heretics from the soil of Europe. In 1708, by proclamation, Good Queen
+Anne offered protection to the persecuted Palatines and invited them to
+her dominions. Twelve thousand of them went to England, where they were
+warmly received by the English. But it was no slight task to settle
+twelve thousand immigrants of an alien speech in England and enable them
+to become independent and self-supporting. A better solution of their
+problem lay in the Western World: The Germans needed homes and the
+Queen's overseas dominions needed colonists. They were settled at first
+along the Hudson, and eventually many of them took up lands in the
+fertile valley of the Mohawk.
+
+For fifty years or more German and Austrian Protestants poured into
+America. In Pennsylvania their influx averaged about fifteen hundred a
+year, and that colony became the distributing center for the German race
+in America. By 1727, Adam Muller and his little company had established
+the first white settlement in the Valley of Virginia. In 1732 Joist
+Heydt went south from York, Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opequan
+Creek at or near the site of the present city of Winchester.
+
+The life of Count Zinzendorf, called "the Apostle," one of the leaders
+of the Moravian immigrants, glows like a star out of those dark and
+troublous times. Of high birth and gentle nurture, he forsook whatever
+of ease his station promised him and fitted himsclf for evangelical
+work. In 1741 he visited the Wyoming Valley to bring his religion to the
+Delawares and Shawanoes. He was not of those picturesque Captains of the
+Lord who bore their muskets on their shoulders when they went forth to
+preach. Armored only with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation,
+and the sword of the spirit, his feet "shod with the preparation of the
+gospel of peace," he went out into the country of these bloodthirsty
+tribes and told them that he had come to them in their darkness to teach
+the love of the Christ which lighteth the world. The Indians received
+him suspiciously. One day while he sat in his tent writing, some
+Delawares drew near to slay him and were about to strike when they saw
+two deadly snakes crawl in from the opposite side of the tent, move
+directly towards the Apostle, and pass harmlessly over his body.
+Thereafter they regarded him as under spiritual protection. Indeed so
+widespread was his good fame among the tribes that for some years all
+Moravian settlements along the borders were unmolested. Painted savages
+passed through on their way to war with enemy bands or to raid the
+border, but for the sake of one consecrated spirit, whom they had seen
+death avoid, they spared the lives and goods of his fellow believers.
+When Zinzendorf departed a year later, his mantle fell on David
+Zeisberger, who lived the love he taught for over fifty years and
+converted many savages. Zeisberger was taken before the Governor
+and army heads at Philadelphia, who had only too good reason to be
+suspicious of priestly counsels in the tents of Shem: but he was able to
+impress white men no less than simple savages with the nobility of the
+doctrine he had learned from the Apostle.
+
+In 1751 the Moravian Brotherhood purchased one hundred thousand acres in
+North Carolina from Lord Granville. Bishop Spangenburg was commissioned
+to survey this large acreage, which was situated in the present county
+of Forsyth east of the Yadkin, and which is historically listed as the
+Wachovia Tract. In 1753, twelve Brethren left the Moravian settlements
+of Bethlehem and Nazareth, in Pennsylvania, and journeyed southward to
+begin the founding of a colony on their new land. Brother Adam Grube,
+one of the twelve, kept a diary of the events of this expedition. *
+
+
+     * This diary is printed in full in "Travels in the American
+Colonies." edited by N. D. Mereness.
+
+
+Honor to whom honor is due. We have paid it, in some measure, to the
+primitive Gaels of the Highlands for their warrior strength and their
+fealty, and to the enlightened Scots of Ulster for their enterprise and
+for their sacrifice unto blood that free conscience and just laws might
+promote the progress and safeguard the intercourse of their kind.
+Now let us take up for a moment Brother Grube's "Journal" even as we
+welcome, perhaps the more gratefully, the mild light of evening after
+the flooding sun, or as our hearts, when too strongly stirred by the
+deeds of men, turn for rest to the serene faith and the naive speech of
+little children.
+
+The twelve, we learn, were under the leadership of one of their number,
+Brother Gottlob. Their earliest alarms on the march were not caused,
+as we might expect, by anticipations of the painted Cherokee, but
+by encounters with the strenuous "Irish." One of these came and laid
+himself to sleep beside the Brethren's camp fire on their first night
+out, after they had sung their evening hymn and eleven had stretched
+themselves on the earth for slumber, while Brother Gottlob, their
+leader, hanging his hammock between two trees, ascended--not only in
+spirit--a little higher than his charges, and "rested well in it."
+Though the alarming Irishman did not disturb them, the Brethren's doubts
+of that race continued, for Brother Grube wrote on the 14th of October:
+"About four in the morning we set up our tent, going four miles beyond
+Carl Isles [Carlisle, seventeen miles southwest of Harrisburg] so as
+not to be too near the Irish Presbyterians. After breakfast the Brethren
+shaved and then we rested under our tent.... People who were staying at
+the Tavern came to see what kind of folk we were.... Br Gottlob held the
+evening service and then we lay down around our cheerful fire, and
+Br Gottlob in his hammock." Two other jottings give us a racial
+kaleidoscope of the settlers and wayfarers of that time. On one day the
+Brethren bought "some hay from a Swiss," later "some kraut from a German
+which tasted very good to us"; and presently "an Englishman came by and
+drank a cup of tea with us and was very grateful for it." Frequently
+the little band paused while some of the Brethren went off to the farms
+along the route to help "cut hay." These kindly acts were usually repaid
+with gifts of food or produce.
+
+One day while on the march they halted at a tavern and farm in
+Shenandoah Valley kept by a man whose name Brother Grube wrote down as
+"Severe." Since we know that Brother Grube's spelling of names other
+than German requires editing, we venture to hazard a guess that the name
+he attempted to set down as it sounded to him was Sevier. And we wonder
+if, in his brief sojourn, he saw a lad of eight years, slim, tall, and
+blond, with daring and mischievous blue eyes, and a certain, curve
+of the lips that threatened havoc in the hearts of both sexes when he
+should be a man and reach out with swift hands and reckless will for his
+desires. If he saw this lad, he beheld John Sevier, later to become one
+of the most picturesque and beloved heroes of the Old Southwest.
+
+Hardships abounded on the Brethren's journey, but faith and the
+Christian's joy, which no man taketh from him, met and surmounted them.
+"Three and a half miles beyond, the road forked.... We took the right
+hand road but found no water for ten miles. It grew late and we had to
+drive five miles into the night to find a stoppingplace." Two of
+the Brethren went ahead "to seek out the road" through the darkened
+wilderness. There were rough hills in the way; and, the horses being
+exhausted, "Brethren had to help push." But, in due season, "Br
+Nathanael held evening prayer and then we slept in the care of Jesus,"
+with Brother Gottlob as usual in his hammock. Three days later the
+record runs: "Toward evening we saw Jeams River, the road to it ran down
+so very steep a hill that we fastened a small tree to the back of our
+wagon, locked the wheels, and the Brethren held back by the tree with
+all their might." Even then the wagon went down so fast that most of the
+Brethren lost their footing and rolled and tumbled pell-mell. But Faith
+makes little of such mishaps: "No harm was done and we thanked the Lord
+that he had so graciously protected us, for it looked dangerous and we
+thought at times that it could not possibly be done without accident
+but we got down safely... we were all very tired and sleepy and let the
+angels be our guard during the night." Rains fell in torrents, making
+streams almost impassable and drenching the little band to the skin.
+The hammock was empty one night, for they had to spend the dark hours
+trench-digging about their tent to keep it from being washed away. Two
+days later (the 10th of November) the weather cleared and "we spent most
+of the day drying our blankets and mending and darning our stockings."
+They also bought supplies from settlers who, as Brother Grube observed
+without irony,
+
+"are glad we have to remain here so long and that it means money for
+them. In the afternoon we held a little Lovefeast and rested our souls
+in the loving sacrifice of Jesus, wishing for beloved Brethren in
+Bethlehem and that they and we might live ever close to Him.... Nov. 16.
+We rose early to ford the river. The bank was so steep that we hung a
+tree behind the wagon, fastening it in such a way that we could quickly
+release it when the wagon reached the water. The current was very swift
+and the lead horses were carried down a bit with it. The water just
+missed running into the wagon but we came safely to the other bank,
+which however we could not climb but had to take half the things out of
+the wagon, tie ropes to the axle on which we could pull, help our horses
+which were quite stiff, and so we brought our ark again to dry land."
+
+On the evening of the 17th of November the twelve arrived safely on
+their land on the "Etkin" (Yadkin), having been six weeks on the march.
+They found with joy that, as ever, the Lord had provided for them. This
+time the gift was a deserted cabin, "large enough that we could all
+lie down around the walls. We at once made preparation for a little
+Lovefeast and rejoiced heartily with one another."
+
+In the deserted log cabin, which, to their faith, seemed as one of those
+mansions "not built with hands" and descended miraculously from the
+heavens, they held their Lovefeast, while wolves padded and howled about
+the walls; and in that Pentacostal hour the tongue of fire descended
+upon Brother Gottlob, so that he made a new song unto the Lord. Who
+shall venture to say it is not better worth preserving than many a
+classic?
+
+We hold arrival Lovefeast here In Carolina land,
+A company of Brethren true, A little Pilgrim-Band,
+Called by the Lord to be of those Who through the whole world go,
+To bear Him witness everywhere And nought but Jesus know.
+
+Then, we are told, the Brethren lay down to rest and "Br Gottlob hung
+his hammock above our heads"--as was most fitting on this of all nights;
+for is not the Poet's place always just a little nearer to the stars?
+
+The pioneers did not always travel in groups. There were families who
+set off alone. One of these now claims our attention, for there was a
+lad in this family whose name and deeds were to sound like a ballad
+of romance from out the dusty pages of history. This family's name was
+Boone.
+
+Neither Scots nor Germans can claim Daniel Boone; he was in blood a
+blend of English and Welsh; in character wholly English. His grandfather
+George Boone was born in 1666 in the hamlet of Stoak, near Exeter in
+Devonshire. George Boone was a weaver by trade and a Quaker by religion.
+In England in his time the Quakers were oppressed, and George Boone
+therefore sought information of William Penn, his co-religionist,
+regarding the colony which Penn had established in America. In 1712 he
+sent his three elder children, George, Sarah, and Squire, to spy out
+the land. Sarah and Squire remained in Pennsylvania, while their brother
+returned to England with glowing reports. On August 17, 1717, George
+Boone, his wife, and the rest of his children journeyed to Bristol and
+sailed for Philadelphia, arriving there on the 10th of October. The
+Boones went first to Abingdon, the Quaker farmers' community. Later
+they moved to the northwestern frontier hamlet of North Wales, a Welsh
+community which, a few years previously, had turned Quaker. Sarah Boone
+married a German named Jacob Stover, who had settled in Oley Township,
+Berks County. In 1718 George Boone took up four hundred acres in Oley,
+or, to be exact, in the subdivision later called Exeter, and there
+he lived in his log cabin until 1744, when he died at the age of
+seventy-eight. He left eight children, fifty-two grandchildren, and ten
+greatgrandchildren, seventy descendants in all--English, German, Welsh,
+and Scotch-Irish blended into one family of Americans. *
+
+
+     * R. G. Thwaites, "Daniel Boone", p. 5.
+
+
+Among the Welsh Quakers was a family of Morgans. In 1720 Squire Boone
+married Sarah Morgan. Ten years later he obtained 250 acres in Oley on
+Owatin Creek, eight miles southeast of the present city of Reading; and
+here, in 1734, Daniel Boone was born, the fourth son and sixth child of
+Squire and Sarah Morgan Boone. Daniel Boone therefore was a son of the
+frontier. In his childhood he became familiar with hunters and with
+Indians, for even the red men came often in friendly fashion to his
+grandfather's house. Squire Boone enlarged his farm by thrift. He
+continued at his trade of weaving and kept five or six looms going,
+making homespun cloth for the market and his neighbors.
+
+Daniel's father owned grazing grounds several miles north of the
+homestead and each season he sent his stock to the range. Sarah Boone
+and her little Daniel drove the cows. From early spring till late
+autumn, mother and son lived in a rustic cabin alone on the frontier. A
+rude dairy house stood over a cool spring, and here Sarah Boone made her
+butter and cheese. Daniel, aged ten at this time, watched the herds; at
+sunset he drove them to the cabin for milking, and locked them in the
+cowpens at night.
+
+He was not allowed firearms at that age, so he shaped for himself a
+weapon that served him well. This was a slender smoothly shaved sapling
+with a small bunch of gnarled roots at one end. So expert was he in the
+launching of this primitive spear that he easily brought down birds and
+small game. When he reached his twelfth year, his father bought him a
+rifle; and he soon became a crack shot. A year later we find him setting
+off on the autumn hunt--after driving the cattle in for the winter-with
+all the keenness and courage of a man twice his thirteen years. His
+rifle enabled him to return with meat for the family and skins to be
+traded in Philadelphia. When he was fourteen his brother Sam married
+Sarah Day, an intelligent young Quakeress who took a special interest in
+her young brother-in-law and taught him "the rudiments of three R's."
+
+The Boones were prosperous and happy in Oley and it may be wondered why
+they left their farms and their looms, both of which were profitable,
+and set their faces towards the Unknown. It is recorded that, though
+the Boones were Quakers, they were of a high mettle and were not
+infrequently dealt with by the Meeting. Two of Squire Boone's children
+married "worldlings"--non-Quakers--and were in consequence "disowned" by
+the Society. In defiance of his sect, which strove to make him sever all
+connection with his unruly offspring, Squire Boone refused to shut his
+doors on the son and the daughter who had scandalized local Quakerdom.
+The Society of Friends thereupon expelled him. This occurred apparently
+during the winter of 1748-49. In the spring of 1750 we see the whole
+Boone family (save two sons) with their wives and children, their
+household goods and their stock, on the great highway, bound for a land
+where the hot heart and the belligerent spirit shall not be held amiss.
+
+Southward through the Shenandoah goes the Boone caravan. The women and
+children usually sit in the wagons. The men march ahead or alongside,
+keeping a keen eye open for Indian or other enemy in the wild, their
+rifles under arm or over the shoulder. Squire Boone, who has done with
+Quakerdom and is leading all that he holds dear out to larger horizons,
+is ahead of the line, as we picture him, ready to meet first whatever
+danger may assail his tribe. He is a strong wiry man of rather small
+stature, with ruddy complexion, red hair, and gray eyes. Somewhere in
+the line, together, we think, are the mother and son who have herded
+cattle and companioned each other through long months in the cabin on
+the frontier. We do not think of this woman as riding in the wagon,
+though she may have done so, but prefer to picture her, with her tall
+robust body, her black hair, and her black eyes--with the sudden Welsh
+snap in them--walking as sturdily as any of her sons.
+
+If Daniel be beside her, what does she see when she looks at him? A
+lad well set up but not overtall for his sixteen years, perhaps--for
+"eye-witnesses" differ in their estimates of Daniel Boone's height--or
+possibly taller than he looks, because his figure has the forest
+hunter's natural slant forward and the droop of the neck of one who
+must watch his path sometimes in order to tread silently. It is Squire
+Boone's blood which shows in his ruddy face--which would be fair but for
+its tan--and in the English cut of feature, the straw-colored eyebrows,
+and the blue eyes. But his Welsh mother's legacy is seen in the black
+hair that hangs long and loose in the hunter's fashion to his shoulders.
+We can think of Daniel Boone only as exhilarated by this plunge into the
+Wild. He sees ahead--the days of his great explorations and warfare, the
+discovery of Kentucky? Not at all. This is a boy of sixteen in love with
+his rifle. He looks ahead to vistas of forest filled with deer and
+to skies clouded with flocks of wild turkeys. In that dream there is
+happiness enough for Daniel Boone. Indeed, for himself, even in later
+life, he asked little, if any, more. He trudges on blithely, whistling.
+
+
+
+Chapter II. Folkways
+
+These migrations into the inland valleys of the Old South mark the first
+great westward thrust of the American frontier. Thus the beginnings of
+the westward movement disclose to us a feature characteristic also of
+the later migrations which flung the frontier over the Appalachians,
+across the Mississippi, and finally to the shores of the Pacific. The
+pioneers, instead of moving westward by slow degrees, subduing the
+wilderness as they went, overleaped great spaces and planted themselves
+beyond, out of contact with the life they had left behind. Thus
+separated by hundreds of miles of intervening wilderness from the more
+civilized communities, the conquerors of the first American "West,"
+prototypes of the conquerors of succeeding "Wests," inevitably struck
+out their own ways of life and developed their own customs. It would
+be difficult, indeed, to find anywhere a more remarkable contrast in
+contemporary folkways than that presented by the two great community
+groups of the South--the inland or piedmont settlements, called the Back
+Country, and the lowland towns and plantations along the seaboard.
+
+The older society of the seaboard towns, as events were soon to prove,
+was not less independent in its ideals than the frontier society of the
+Back Country; but it was aristocratic in tone and feeling. Its leaders
+were the landed gentry--men of elegance, and not far behind their
+European contemporaries in the culture of the day. They were rich,
+without effort, both from their plantations, where black slaves and
+indentured servants labored, and from their coastwise and overseas
+trade. Their battles with forest and red man were long past. They had
+leisure for diversions such as the chase, the breeding and racing
+of thoroughbred horses, the dance, high play with dice and card,
+cockfighting, the gallantry of love, and the skill of the rapier. Law
+and politics drew their soberer minds.
+
+Very different were the conditions which confronted the pioneers in the
+first American "West." There every jewel of promise was ringed round
+with hostility. The cheap land the pioneer had purchased at a nominal
+price, or the free land he had taken by "tomahawk claim"--that is by
+cutting his name into the bark of a deadened tree, usually beside a
+spring--supported a forest of tall trunks and interlacing leafage. The
+long grass and weeds which covered the ground in a wealth of natural
+pasturage harbored the poisonous copperhead and the rattlesnake and,
+being shaded by the overhead foliage, they held the heavy dews and bred
+swarms of mosquitoes, gnats, and big flies which tortured both men and
+cattle. To protect the cattle and horses from the attacks of these
+pests the settlers were obliged to build large "smudges"--fires of green
+timber--against the wind. The animals soon learned to back up into the
+dense smoke and to move from one grazing spot to another as the wind
+changed. But useful as were the green timber fires that rolled their
+smoke on the wind to save the stock, they were at the same time a menace
+to the pioneer, for they proclaimed to roving bands of Cherokees that
+a further encroachment on their territory had been made by their most
+hated enemies--the men who felled the hunter's forest. Many an outpost
+pioneer who had made the long hard journey by sea and land from the old
+world of persecution to this new country of freedom, dropped from the
+red man's shot ere he had hewn the threshold of his home, leaving his
+wife and children to the unrecorded mercy of his slayer.
+
+Those more fortunate pioneers who settled in groups won the first heat
+in the battle with the wilderness through massed effort under wariness.
+They made their clearings in the forest, built their cabins and
+stockades, and planted their cornfields, while lookouts kept watch and
+rifles were stacked within easy reach. Every special task, such as a
+"raising," as cabin building was called, was undertaken by the community
+chiefly because the Indian danger necessitated swift building and made
+group action imperative. But the stanch heart is ever the glad heart.
+Nothing in this frontier history impresses us more than the joy of the
+pioneer at his labors. His determined optimism turned danger's dictation
+into an occasion for jollity. On the appointed day for the "raising,"
+the neighbors would come, riding or afoot, to the newcomer's
+holding--the men with their rifles and axes, the women with their pots
+and kettles. Every child toddled along, too, helping to carry the wooden
+dishes and spoons. These free givers of labor had something of the
+Oriental's notion of the sacred ratification of friendship by a feast.
+
+The usual dimensions of a cabin were sixteen by twenty feet. The timber
+for the building, having been already cut, lay at hand--logs of hickory,
+oak, young pine, walnut, or persimmon. To make the foundations, the men
+seized four of the thickest logs, laid them in place, and notched and
+grooved and hammered them into as close a clinch as if they had grown
+so. The wood must grip by its own substance alone to hold up the
+pioneer's dwelling, for there was not an iron nail to be had in the
+whole of the Back Country. Logs laid upon the foundation logs and
+notched into each other at the four corners formed the walls; and,
+when these stood at seven feet, the builders laid parallel timbers and
+puncheons to make both flooring and ceiling. The ridgepole of the roof
+was supported by two crotched trees and the roofing was made of logs and
+wooden slabs. The crevices of the walls were packed close with red clay
+and moss. Lastly, spaces for a door and windows were cut out. The
+door was made thick and heavy to withstand the Indian's rush. And the
+windowpanes? They were of paper treated with hog's fat or bear's grease.
+
+When the sun stood overhead, the women would give the welcome call of
+"Dinner!" Their morning had not been less busy than the men's. They had
+baked corn cakes on hot stones, roasted bear or pork, or broiled venison
+steaks; and--above all and first of all--they had concocted the great
+"stew pie" without which a raising could hardly take place. This was
+a disputatious mixture of deer, hog, and bear--animals which, in
+life, would surely have companioned each other as ill! It was made in
+sufficient quantity to last over for supper when the day's labor was
+done. At supper the men took their ease on the ground, but with their
+rifles always in reach. If the cabin just raised by their efforts stood
+in the Yadkin, within sight of the great mountains the pioneers were
+one day to cross, perhaps a sudden bird note warning from the lookout,
+hidden in the brush, would bring the builders with a leap to their feet.
+It might be only a hunting band of friendly Catawbas that passed, or
+a lone Cherokee who knew that this was not his hour. If the latter, we
+can, in imagination, see him look once at the new house on his hunting
+pasture, slacken rein for a moment in front of the group of families,
+lift his hand in sign of peace, and silently go his way hillward. As
+he vanishes into the shadows, the crimson sun, sinking into the unknown
+wilderness beyond the mountains, pours its last glow on the roof of the
+cabin and on the group near its walls. With unfelt fingers, subtly, it
+puts the red touch of the West in the faces of the men--who have just
+declared, through the building of a cabin, that here is Journey's End
+and their abiding place.
+
+
+There were community holidays among these pioneers as well as labor
+days, especially in the fruit season; and there were flower-picking
+excursions in the warm spring days. Early in April the service berry
+bush gleamed starrily along the watercourses, its hardy white blooms
+defying winter's lingering look. This bush--or tree, indeed, since it
+is not afraid to rear its slender trunk as high as cherry or crab
+apple--might well be considered emblematic of the frontier spirit in
+those regions where the white silence covers the earth for several
+months and shuts the lonely homesteader in upon himself. From the
+pioneer time of the Old Southwest to the last frontier of the Far North
+today, the service berry is cherished alike by white men and Indians;
+and the red men have woven about it some of their prettiest legends.
+When June had ripened the tree's blue-black berries, the Back Country
+folk went out in parties to gather them. Though the service berry was
+a food staple on the frontier and its gathering a matter of household
+economy, the folk made their berry-picking jaunt a gala occasion. The
+women and children with pots and baskets--the young girls vying with
+each other, under the eyes of the youths, as to who could strip boughs
+the fastest--plucked gayly while the men, rifles in hand, kept guard.
+For these happy summer days were also the red man's scalping days and,
+at any moment, the chatter of the picnickers might be interrupted by the
+chilling war whoop. When that sound was heard, the berry pickers raced
+for the fort. The wild fruits--strawberries, service berries, cherries,
+plums, crab apples--were, however, too necessary a part of the pioneer's
+meager diet to be left unplucked out of fear of an Indian attack.
+Another day would see the same group out again. The children would keep
+closer to their mothers, no doubt; and the laughter of the young girls
+would be more subdued, even if their coquetry lacked nothing of its
+former effectiveness. Early marriages were the rule in the Back Country
+and betrothals were frequently plighted at these berry pickings.
+
+As we consider the descriptions of the frontiersman left for us by
+travelers of his own day, we are not more interested in his battles with
+wilderness and Indian than in the visible effects of both wilderness and
+Indian upon him. His countenance and bearing still show the European,
+but the European greatly altered by savage contact. The red peril,
+indeed, influenced every side of frontier life. The bands of women and
+children at the harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings,
+were not there merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter and
+love-making. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins, for, to
+the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon his immemorial hunting
+grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater evil was the white man's
+family, bespeaking the increase of the dreaded palefaces. The Indian
+peril trained the pioneers to alertness, shaped them as warriors and
+hunters, suggested the fashion of their dress, knit their families into
+clans and the clans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in
+the protection of each and all and a unit of hate against their common
+enemy.
+
+Too often the fields which the pioneer planted with corn were harvested
+by the Indian with fire. The hardest privations suffered by farmers and
+stock were due to the settlers having to flee to the forts, leaving to
+Indian devastation the crops on which their sustenance mainly, depended.
+Sometimes, fortunately, the warning came in time for the frontiersman
+to collect his goods and chattels in his wagon and to round up his live
+stock and drive them safely into the common fortified enclosure. At
+others, the tap of the "express"--as the herald of Indian danger was
+called--at night on the windowpane and the low word whispered hastily,
+ere the "express" ran on to the next abode, meant that the Indians had
+surprised the outlying cabins of the settlement.
+
+The forts were built as centrally as possible in the scattered
+settlements. They consisted of cabins, blockhouses, and stockades.
+A range of cabins often formed one side of a fort. The walls on the
+outside were ten or twelve feet high with roofs sloping inward. The
+blockhouses built at the angles of the fort projected two feet or so
+beyond the outer walls of the cabins and stockades, and were fitted with
+portholes for the watchers and the marksmen. The entrance to the fort
+was a large folding gate of thick slabs. It was always on the side
+nearest the spring. The whole structure of the fort was bullet-proof
+and was erected without an iron nail or spike. In the border wars these
+forts withstood all attacks. The savages, having proved that they could
+not storm them, generally laid siege and waited for thirst to compel a
+sortie. But the crafty besieger was as often outwitted by the equally
+cunning defender. Some daring soul, with silent feet and perhaps with
+naked body painted in Indian fashion, would drop from the wall under
+cover of the night, pass among the foemen to the spring, and return to
+the fort with water.
+
+Into the pioneer's phrase-making the Indian influence penetrated so
+that he named seasons for his foe. So thoroughly has the term "Indian
+Summer," now to us redolent of charm, become disassociated from its
+origins that it gives us a shock to be reminded that to these Back
+Country folk the balmy days following on the cold snap meant the season
+when the red men would come back for a last murderous raid on the
+settlements before winter should seal up the land. The "Powwowing Days"
+were the mellow days in the latter part of February, when the red men in
+council made their medicine and learned of their redder gods whether or
+no they should take the warpath when the sap pulsed the trees into
+leaf. Even the children at their play acknowledged the red-skinned
+schoolmaster, for their chief games were a training in his woodcraft
+and in the use of his weapons. Tomahawk-throwing was a favorite sport
+because of its gruesome practical purposes. The boys must learn to gauge
+the tomahawk's revolutions by the distance of the throw so as to bury
+the blade in its objective. Swift running and high jumping through the
+brush and fallen timber were sports that taught agility in escape. The
+boys learned to shoot accurately the long rifles of their time, with
+a log or a forked stick for a rest, and a moss pad under the barrel
+to keep it from jerking and spoiling the aim. They wrestled with each
+other, mastered the tricks of throwing an opponent, and learned the
+scalp hold instead of the toe hold. It was part of their education
+to imitate the noises of every bird and beast of the forest. So they
+learned to lure the turkey within range, or by the bleat of a fawn to
+bring her dam to the rifle. A well-simulated wolf's howl would call
+forth a response and so inform the lone hunter of the vicinity of the
+pack. This forest speech was not only the language of diplomacy in the
+hunting season; it was the borderer's secret code in war. Stray Indians
+put themselves in touch again with the band by turkey calls in the
+daytime and by owl or wolf notes at night. The frontiersmen used the
+same means to trick the Indian band into betraying the place of its
+ambuscade, or to lure the strays, unwitting, within reach of the knife.
+
+In that age, before the forests had given place to farms and cities and
+when the sun had but slight acquaintance with the sod, the summers were
+cool and the winters long and cold in the Back Country. Sometimes in
+September severe frosts destroyed the corn. The first light powdering
+called "hunting snows" fell in October, and then the men of the Back
+Country set out on the chase. Their object was meat--buffalo, deer,
+elk, bear-for the winter larder, and skins to send out in the spring
+by pack-horses to the coast in trade for iron, steel, and salt. The
+rainfall in North Carolina was much heavier than in Virginia and, from
+autumn into early winter, the Yadkin forests were sheeted with rain; but
+wet weather, so far from deterring the hunter, aided him to the kill.
+In blowing rain, he knew he would find the deer herding in the sheltered
+places on the hillsides. In windless rain, he knew that his quarry
+ranged the open woods and the high places. The fair play of the pioneer
+held it a great disgrace to kill a deer in winter when the heavy frost
+had crusted the deep snow. On the crust men and wolves could travel
+with ease, but the deer's sharp hoofs pierced through and made him
+defenseless. Wolves and dogs destroyed great quantities of deer
+caught in this way; and men who shot deer under these conditions were
+considered no huntsmen. There was, indeed, a practical side to this
+chivalry of the chase, for meat and pelt were both poor at this season;
+but the true hunter also obeyed the finer tenet of his code, for he
+would go to the rescue of deer caught in the crusts--and he killed many
+a wolf sliding over the ice to an easy meal.
+
+The community moral code of the frontier was brief and rigorous. What it
+lacked of the "whereas" and "inasmuch" of legal ink it made up in
+sound hickory. In fact, when we review the activities of this solid yet
+elastic wood in the moral, social, and economic phases of Back Country
+life, we are moved to wonder if the pioneers would have been the
+same race of men had they been nurtured beneath a less strenuous and
+adaptable vegetation! The hickory gave the frontiersman wood for all
+implements and furnishings where the demand was equally for lightness,
+strength, and elasticity. It provided his straight logs for building,
+his block mortars hollowed--by fire and stone--for corn-grinding, his
+solid plain furniture, his axles, rifle butts, ax handles, and so forth.
+It supplied his magic wand for the searching out of iniquity in the
+junior members of his household, and his most cogent argument, as a
+citizen, in convincing the slothful, the blasphemous, or the dishonest
+adult whose errors disturbed communal harmony. Its nuts fed his hogs.
+Before he raised stock, the unripe hickory nuts, crushed for their white
+liquid, supplied him with butter for his corn bread and helped out his
+store of bear's fat. Both the name and the knowledge of the uses of this
+tree came to the earliest pioneers through contact with the red man,
+whose hunting bow and fishing spear and the hobbles for his horses were
+fashioned of the "pohickory" tree. The Indian women first made pohickory
+butter, and the wise old men of the Cherokee towns, so we are told,
+first applied the pohickory rod to the vanity of youth!
+
+A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country of Virginia
+or North Carolina would show, in primitive design, what is, perhaps,
+after all the perfect home--a place where the personal life and the work
+life are united and where nothing futile finds space. Every object in
+the cabin was practical and had been made by hand on the spot to answer
+a need. Besides the chairs hewn from hickory blocks, there were others
+made of slabs set on three legs. A large slab or two with four legs
+served as a movable table; the permanent table was built against the
+wall, its outer edge held up by two sticks. The low bed was built into
+the wall in the same way and softened for slumber by a mattress of pine
+needles, chaff, or dried moss. In the best light from the greased paper
+windowpanes stood the spinning wheel and loom, on which the housewife
+made cloth for the family's garments. Over the fireplace or beside the
+doorway, and suspended usually on stags' antlers, hung the firearms and
+the yellow powderhorns, the latter often carved in Indian fashion with
+scenes of the hunt or war. On a shelf or on pegs were the wooden spoons,
+plates, bowls, and noggins. Also near the fireplace, which was made of
+large flat stones with a mud-plastered log chimney, stood the grinding
+block for making hominy. If it were an evening in early spring, the men
+of the household would be tanning and dressing deerskins to be sent out
+with the trade caravan, while the women sewed, made moccasins or mended
+them, in the light of pine knots or candles of bear's grease. The larger
+children might be weaving cradles for the babies, Indian fashion, out of
+hickory twigs; and there would surely be a sound of whetting steel, for
+scalping knives and tomahawks must be kept keen-tempered now that the
+days have come when the red gods whisper their chant of war through the
+young leafage.
+
+The Back Country folk, as they came from several countries, generally
+settled in national groups, each preserving its own speech and its
+own religion, each approaching frontier life through its own native
+temperament. And the frontier met each and all alike, with the same need
+and the same menace, and molded them after one general pattern. If the
+cabin stood in a typical Virginian settlement where the folk were of
+English stock, it may be that the dulcimer and some old love song of
+the homeland enlivened the work--or perhaps chairs were pushed back and
+young people danced the country dances of the homeland and the Virginia
+Reel, for these Virginian English were merry folk, and their religion
+did not frown upon the dance. In a cabin on the Shenandoah or the upper
+Yadkin the German tongue clicked away over the evening dish of kraut or
+sounded more sedately in a Lutheran hymn; while from some herder's but
+on the lower Yadkin the wild note of the bagpipes or of the ancient
+four-stringed harp mingled with the Gaelic speech.
+
+Among the homes in the Shenandoah where old England's ways prevailed,
+none was gayer than the tavern kept by the man whom the good Moravian
+Brother called "Severe." There perhaps the feasting celebrated the
+nuptials of John Sevier, who was barely past his seventeenth birthday
+when he took to himself a wife. Or perhaps the dancing, in moccasined
+feet on the puncheon flooring, was a ceremonial to usher into Back
+Country life the new municipality John had just organized, for John at
+nineteen had taken his earliest step towards his larger career, which we
+shall follow later on, as the architect of the first little governments
+beyond the mountains.
+
+In the Boone home on the Yadkin, we may guess that the talk was solely
+of the hunt, unless young Daniel had already become possessed of his
+first compass and was studying its ways. On such an evening, while the
+red afterglow lingered, he might be mending a passing trader's firearms
+by the fires of the primitive forge his father had set up near the
+trading path running from Hillsborough to the Catawba towns. It was said
+by the local nimrods that none could doctor a sick rifle better than
+young Daniel Boone, already the master huntsman of them all. And perhaps
+some trader's tale, told when the caravan halted for the night, kindled
+the youth's first desire to penetrate the mountain-guarded wilderness,
+for the tales of these Romanies of commerce were as the very badge of
+their free-masonry, and entry money at the doors of strangers.
+
+Out on the border's edge, heedless of the shadow of the mountains
+looming between the newly built cabin and that western land where they
+and their kind were to write the fame of the Ulster Scot in a shining
+script that time cannot dull, there might sit a group of stern-faced
+men, all deep in discussion of some point of spiritual doctrine or of
+the temporal rights of men. Yet, in every cabin, whatever the national
+differences, the setting was the same The spirit of the frontier was
+modeling out of old clay a new Adam to answer the needs of a new earth.
+
+It would be far less than just to leave the Back Country folk without
+further reference to the devoted labors of their clergy. In the earliest
+days the settlers were cut off from their church systems; the pious had
+to maintain their piety unaided, except in the rare cases where a pastor
+accompanied a group of settlers of his denomination into the wilds. One
+of the first ministers who fared into the Back Country to remind the
+Ulster Presbyterians of their spiritual duties was the Reverend Hugh
+McAden of Philadelphia. He made long itineraries under the greatest
+hardships, in constant danger from Indians and wild beasts, carrying
+the counsel of godliness to the far scattered flock. Among the Highland
+settlements the Reverend James Campbell for thirty years traveled about,
+preaching each Sunday at some gathering point a sermon in both English
+and Gaelic. A little later, in the Yadkin Valley, after Craighead's
+day there arose a small school of Presbyterian ministers whose zeal
+and fearlessness in the cause of religion and of just government had an
+influence on the frontiersmen that can hardly be overestimated.
+
+But, in the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery of border
+life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidance from other
+mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the primal threefold
+need family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the day's work was done. We
+who look back with thoughtful eyes upon the frontiersman--all links of
+contact with his racial past severed, at grips with destruction in the
+contenting of his needs--see something more, something larger, than he
+saw in the log cabin raised by his hands, its structure held together
+solely by his close grooving and fitting of its own strength. Though
+the walls he built for himself have gone with his own dust back to the
+earth, the symbol he erected for us stands.
+
+
+
+Chapter III. The Trader
+
+The trader was the first pathfinder. His caravans began the change
+of purpose that was to come to the Indian warrior's route, turning
+it slowly into the beaten track of communication and commerce. The
+settlers, the rangers, the surveyors, went westward over the trails
+which he had blazed for them years before. Their enduring works are
+commemorated in the cities and farms which today lie along every ancient
+border line; but of their forerunner's hazardous Indian trade nothing
+remains. Let us therefore pay a moment's homage here to the trader, who
+first--to borrow a phrase from Indian speech--made white for peace the
+red trails of war.
+
+He was the first cattleman of the Old Southwest. Fifty years before
+John Findlay, * one of this class of pioneers, led Daniel Boone through
+Cumberland Gap, the trader's bands of horses roamed the western slopes
+of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattle grazed among the deer on the
+green banks of the old Cherokee (Tennessee) River. He was the pioneer
+settler beyond the high hills; for he built, in the center of the Indian
+towns, the first white man's cabin--with its larger annex, the trading
+house--and dwelt there during the greater part of the year. He was
+America's first magnate of international commerce. His furs--for which
+he paid in guns, knives, ammunition, vermilion paint, mirrors, and
+cloth--lined kings' mantles, and hatted the Lords of Trade as they
+strode to their council chamber in London to discuss his business and to
+pass those regulations which might have seriously hampered him but for
+his resourcefulness in circumventing them!
+
+
+     * The name is spelled in various ways: Findlay, Finlay, Findley.
+
+
+He was the first frontier warrior, for he either fought off or fell
+before small parties of hostile Indians who, in the interest of the
+Spanish or French, raided his pack-horse caravans on the march. Often,
+too, side by side with the red brothers of his adoption, he fought
+in the intertribal wars. His was the first educative and civilizing
+influence in the Indian towns. He endeavored to cure the Indians of
+their favorite midsummer madness, war, by inducing them to raise stock
+and poultry and improve their corn, squash, and pea gardens. It is not
+necessary to impute to him philanthropic motives. He was a practical man
+and he saw that war hurt his trade: it endangered his summer caravans
+and hampered the autumn hunt for deerskins.
+
+In the earliest days of the eighteenth century, when the colonists of
+Virginia and the Carolinas were only a handful, it was the trader who
+defeated each successive attempt of French and Spanish agents to weld
+the tribes into a confederacy for the annihilation of the English
+settlements. The English trader did his share to prevent what is now the
+United States from becoming a part of a Latin empire and to save it for
+a race having the Anglo-Saxon ideal and speaking the English tongue.
+
+The colonial records of the period contain items which, taken singly,
+make small impression on the casual reader but which, listed together,
+throw a strong light on the past and bring that mercenary figure, the
+trader, into so bold a relief that the design verges on the heroic. If
+we wonder, for instance, why the Scotch Highlanders who settled in the
+wilds at the headwaters of the Cape Fear River, about 1729, and were
+later followed by Welsh and Huguenots, met with no opposition from the
+Indians, the mystery is solved when we discover, almost by accident, a
+few printed lines which record that, in 1700, the hostile natives on the
+Cape Fear were subdued to the English and brought into friendly alliance
+with them by Colonel William Bull, a trader. We read further and learn
+that the Spaniards in Florida had long endeavored to unite the tribes in
+Spanish and French territory against the English and that the influence
+of traders prevented the consummation. The Spaniards, in 1702, had
+prepared to invade English territory with nine hundred Indians. The
+plot was discovered by Creek Indians and disclosed to their friends,
+the traders, who immediately gathered together five hundred warriors,
+marched swiftly to meet the invaders, and utterly routed them. Again,
+when the Indians, incited by the Spanish at St. Augustine, rose against
+the English in 1715, and the Yamasi Massacre occurred in South Carolina,
+it was due to the traders that some of the settlements at least were not
+wholly unprepared to defend themselves.
+
+The early English trader was generally an intelligent man; sometimes
+educated, nearly always fearless and resourceful. He knew the one sure
+basis on which men of alien blood and far separated stages of moral and
+intellectual development can meet in understanding--namely, the truth of
+the spoken word. He recognized honor as the bond of trade and the warp
+and woof of human intercourse. The uncorrupted savage also had his plain
+interpretation of the true word in the mouths of men, and a name for it.
+He called it the "Old Beloved Speech"; and he gave his confidence to the
+man who spoke this speech even in the close barter for furs.
+
+We shall find it worth while to refer to the map of America as it was
+in the early days of the colonial fur trade, about the beginning of the
+eighteenth century. A narrow strip of loosely strung English settlements
+stretched from the north border of New England to the Florida line.
+North Florida was Spanish territory. On the far distant southwestern
+borders of the English colonies were the southern possessions of France.
+The French sphere of influence extended up the Mississippi, and thence
+by way of rivers and the Great Lakes to its base in Canada on the
+borders of New England and New York. In South Carolina dwelt the Yamasi
+tribe of about three thousand warriors, their chief towns only sixty
+or eighty miles distant from the Spanish town of St. Augustine. On the
+west, about the same distance northeast of New Orleans, in what is now
+Alabama and Georgia, lay the Creek nation. There French garrisons held
+Mobile and Fort Alabama. The Creeks at this time numbered over four
+thousand warriors. The lands of the Choctaws, a tribe of even larger
+fighting strength, began two hundred miles north of New Orleans and
+extended along the Mississippi. A hundred and sixty miles northeast of
+the Choctaw towns were the Chickasaws, the bravest and most successful
+warriors of all the tribes south of the Iroquois. The Cherokees, in part
+seated within the Carolinas, on the upper courses of the Savannah River,
+mustered over six thousand men at arms. East of them were the Catawba
+towns. North of them were the Shawanoes and Delawares, in easy
+communication with the tribes of Canada. Still farther north, along the
+Mohawk and other rivers joining with the Hudson and Lake Ontario stood
+the "long houses" of the fiercest and most warlike of all the savages,
+the Iroquois or Six Nations.
+
+The Indians along the English borders outnumbered the colonists
+perhaps ten to one. If the Spanish and the French had succeeded in
+the conspiracy to unite on their side all the tribes, a red billow
+of tomahawk wielders would have engulfed and extinguished the English
+settlements. The French, it is true, made allies of the Shawanoes, the
+Delawares, the Choctaws, and a strong faction of the Creeks; and they
+finally won over the Cherokees after courting them for more than twenty
+years. But the Creeks in part, the powerful Chickasaws, and the Iroquois
+Confederacy, or Six Nations, remained loyal to the English. In both
+North and South it was the influence of the traders that kept these red
+tribes on the English side. The Iroquois were held loyal by Sir William
+Johnson and his deputy, George Croghan, the "King of Traders." The
+Chickasaws followed their "best-beloved" trader, James Adair; and
+among the Creeks another trader, Lachlan McGillivray, wielded a potent
+influence.
+
+Lachlan McGillivray was a Highlander. He landed in Charleston in 1735 at
+the age of sixteen and presently joined a trader's caravan as packhorse
+boy. A few years later he married a woman of the Creeks. On many
+occasions he defeated French and Spanish plots with the Creeks for the
+extermination of the colonists in Georgia and South Carolina. His action
+in the final war with the French (1760), when the Indian terror was
+raging, is typical. News came that four thousand Creek warriors,
+reinforced by French Choctaws, were about to fall on the southern
+settlements. At the risk of their lives, McGillivray and another trader
+named Galphin hurried from Charleston to their trading house on the
+Georgia frontier. Thither they invited several hundred Creek warriors,
+feasted and housed them for several days, and finally won them from
+their purpose. McGillivray had a brilliant son, Alexander, who about
+this time became a chief in his mother's nation perhaps on this very
+occasion, as it was an Indian custom, in making a brotherhood pact, to
+send a son to dwell in the brother's house. We shall meet that son
+again as the Chief of the Creeks and the terrible scourge of Georgia and
+Tennessee in the dark days of the Revolutionary War.
+
+The bold deeds of the early traders, if all were to be told, would
+require a book as long as the huge volume written by James Adair, the
+"English Chickasaw." Adair was an Englishman who entered the Indian
+trade in 1785 and launched upon the long and dangerous trail from
+Charleston to the upper towns of the Cherokees, situated in the present
+Monroe County, Tennessee. Thus he was one of the earliest pioneers
+of the Old Southwest; and he was Tennessee's first author. "I am well
+acquainted," he says, "with near two thousand miles of the American
+continent"--a statement which gives one some idea of an early trader's
+enterprise, hardihood, and peril. Adair's "two thousand miles" were
+twisting Indian trails and paths he slashed out for himself through
+uninhabited wilds, for when not engaged in trade, hunting, literature,
+or war, it pleased him to make solitary trips of exploration. These seem
+to have led him chiefly northward through the Appalachians, of which he
+must have been one of the first white explorers.
+
+A many-sided man was James Adair--cultured, for his style suffers not
+by comparison with other writers of his day, no stranger to Latin and
+Greek, and not ignorant of Hebrew, which he studied to assist him in
+setting forth his ethnological theory that the American Indians were
+the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Before we dismiss his
+theory with a smile, let us remember that he had not at his disposal the
+data now available which reveal points of likeness in custom, language
+formation, and symbolism among almost all primitive peoples. The
+formidable title-page of his book in itself suggests an author keenly
+observant, accurate as to detail, and possessed of a versatile and
+substantial mind. Most of the pages were written in the towns of the
+Chickasaws, with whom he lived "as a friend and brother," but from whose
+"natural jealousy" and "prying disposition" he was obliged to conceal
+his papers. "Never," he assures us, "was a literary work begun and
+carried on with more disadvantages!"
+
+Despite these disabilities the author wrote a book of absorbing
+interest. His intimate sympathetic pictures of Indian life as it was
+before the tribes had been conquered are richly valuable to the lover of
+native lore and to the student of the history of white settlement. The
+author believes, as he must, in the supremacy of his own race, but he
+nevertheless presents the Indians' side of the argument as no man could
+who had not made himself one of them. He thereby adds interest to those
+fierce struggles which took place along the border; for he shows us the
+red warrior not as a mere brute with a tomahawk but as a human creature
+with an ideal of his own, albeit an ideal that must give place to a
+better. Even in view of the red man's hideous methods of battle
+and inhuman treatment of captives, we cannot ponder unmoved Adair's
+description of his preparations for war--the fasting, the abstention
+from all family intercourse, and the purification rites and prayers for
+three days in the house set apart, while the women, who might not come
+close to their men in this fateful hour, stood throughout the night till
+dawn chanting before the door. Another poetic touch the author gives
+us, from the Cherokee--or Cheerake as he spells it--explaining that the
+root, chee-ra, means fire. A Cherokee never extinguished fire save on
+the occasion of a death, when he thrust a burning torch into the water
+and said, Neetah intahah--"the days appointed him were finished." The
+warrior slain in battle was held to have been balanced by death and it
+was said of him that "he was weighed on the path and made light." Adair
+writes that the Cherokees, until corrupted by French agents and by
+the later class of traders who poured rum among them like water, were
+honest, industrious, and friendly. They were ready to meet the white
+man with their customary phrase of good will "I shall firmly shake hands
+with your speech." He was intimately associated with this tribe from
+1735 to 1744, when he diverted his activities to the Chickasaws.
+
+It was from the Cherokees' chief town, Great Telliko, in the
+Appalachians, that Adair explored the mountains. He describes the pass
+through the chain which was used by the Indians and which, from
+his outline of it, was probably the Cumberland Gap. He relates many
+incidents of the struggle with the French--manifestations even in this
+remote wilderness of the vast conflict that was being waged for the New
+World by two imperial nations of the Old.
+
+Adair undertook, at the solicitation of Governor Glen of South Carolina,
+the dangerous task of opening up trade with the Choctaws; a tribe
+mustering upwards of five thousand warriors who were wholly in
+the French interest. Their country lay in what is now the State of
+Mississippi along the great river, some seven hundred miles west and
+southwest of Charleston. After passing the friendly Creek towns the
+trail led on for 150 miles through what was practically the enemy's
+country. Adair, owing to what he likes to term his "usual good fortune,"
+reached the Choctaw country safely and by his adroitness and substantial
+presents won the friendship of the influential chief, Red Shoe, whom
+he found in a receptive mood, owing to a French agent's breach of
+hospitality involving Red Shoe's favorite wife. Adair thus created a
+large proEnglish faction among the Choctaws, and his success seriously
+impaired French prestige with all the southwestern tribes. Several times
+French Choctaws bribed to murder him, waylaid Adair on the
+trail--twice when he was alone--only to be baffled by the imperturbable
+self-possession and alert wit which never failed him in emergencies.
+
+Winning a Choctaw trade cost Adair, besides attacks on his life, 2200
+pounds, for which he was never reimbursed, notwithstanding Governor
+Glen's agreement with him. And, on his return to Charleston, while the
+Governor was detaining him "on one pretext or another," he found that a
+new expedition, which the Governor was favoring for reasons of his own,
+had set out to capture his Chickasaw trade and gather in "the expected
+great crop of deerskins and beaver... before I could possibly return to
+the Chikkasah Country." Nothing daunted, however, the hardy trader set
+out alone.
+
+"In the severity of winter, frost, snow, hail and heavy rains succeed
+each other in these climes, so that I partly rode and partly swam to the
+Chikkasah country; for not expecting to stay long below [in Charleston]
+I took no leathern canoe. Many of the broad, deep creeks... had now
+overflowed their banks, ran at a rapid rate and were unpassable to any
+but DESPERATE PEOPLE... the rivers and swamps were dreadful by rafts of
+timber driving down the former and the great fallen trees floating in
+the latter.... Being forced to wade deep through cane swamps or woody
+thickets, it proved very troublesome to keep my firearms dry on which,
+as a second means, my life depended."
+
+Nevertheless Adair defeated the Governor's attempt to steal his trade,
+and later on published the whole story in the Charleston press and sent
+in a statement of his claims to the Assembly, with frank observations
+on His Excellency himself. We gather that his bold disregard of High
+Personages set all Charleston in an uproar!
+
+Adair is tantalizingly modest about his own deeds. He devotes pages to
+prove that an Indian rite agrees with the Book of Leviticus but only a
+paragraph to an exploit of courage and endurance such as that ride and
+swim for the Indian trade. We have to read between the lines to find the
+man; but he well repays the search. Briefly, incidentally, he mentions
+that on one trip he was captured by the French, who were so,
+
+"well acquainted with the great damages I had done to them and feared
+others I might occasion, as to confine me a close prisoner ... in the
+Alebahma garrison. They were fully resolved to have sent me down to
+Mobile or New Orleans as a capital criminal to be hanged... BUT I DOUBTED
+NOT OF BEING ABLE TO EXTRICATE MYSELF SOME WAY OR OTHER. They appointed
+double centries over me for some days before I was to be sent down in
+the French King's large boat. They were strongly charged against laying
+down their weapons or suffering any hostile thing to be in the place
+where I was kept, as they deemed me capable of any mischief.... About an
+hour before we were to set off by water I escaped from them by land....
+I took through the middle of the low land covered with briers at full
+speed. I heard the French clattering on horseback along the path... and
+the howling savages pursuing..., but MY USUAL GOOD FORTUNE enabled me to
+leave them far enough behind...."
+
+
+One feels that a few of the pages given up to Leviticus might well have
+been devoted to a detailed account of this escape from "double centries"
+and a fortified garrison, and the plunge through the tangled wilds, by
+a man without gun or knife or supplies, and who for days dared not show
+himself upon the trail.
+
+There is too much of "my usual good fortune" in Adair's narrative; such
+luck as his argues for extraordinary resources in the man. Sometimes
+we discover only through one phrase on a page that he must himself have
+been the hero of an event he relates in the third person. This seems
+to be the case in the affair of Priber, which was the worst of those
+"damages" Adair did to the French. Priber was "a gentleman of curious
+and speculative temper" sent by the French in 1786 to Great Telliko to
+win the Cherokees to their interest. At this time Adair was trading with
+the Cherokees. He relates that Priber,
+
+"more effectually to answer the design of his commission... ate, drank,
+slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself with the Indians, so that it
+was not easy to distinguish him from the natives,--he married also with
+them, and being endued with a strong understanding and retentive memory
+he soon learned their dialect, and by gradual advances impressed them
+with a very ill opinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent,
+avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflated the
+artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their own importance
+in the American scale of power.... Having thus infected them... he easily
+formed them into a nominal republican government--crowned their old
+Archimagus emperor after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a
+variety of high-sounding titles for all the members of his imperial
+majesty's red court."
+
+Priber cemented the Cherokee empire "by slow but sure degrees to the
+very great danger of our southern colonies." His position was that of
+Secretary of State and as such, with a studiedly provocative arrogance,
+he carried on correspondence with the British authorities. The colonial
+Government seems, on this occasion, to have listened to the traders and
+to have realized that Priber was a danger, for soldiers were sent to
+take him prisoner. The Cherokees, however, had so firmly "shaked hands"
+with their Secretary's admired discourse that they threatened to take
+the warpath if their beloved man were annoyed, and the soldiers went
+home without him--to the great hurt of English prestige. The Cherokee
+empire had now endured for five years and was about to rise "into a far
+greater state of puissance by the acquisition of the Muskohge, Chocktaw
+and the Western Mississippi Indians," when fortunately for the history
+of British colonization in America, "an accident befell the Secretary."
+
+It is in connection with this "accident" that the reader suspects the
+modest but resourceful Adair of conniving with Fate. Since the military
+had failed and the Government dared not again employ force, other means
+must be found; the trader provided them. The Secretary with his Cherokee
+bodyguard journeyed south on his mission to the Creeks. Secure, as he
+supposed, he lodged overnight in an Indian town. But there a company
+of English traders took him into custody, along with his bundle of
+manuscripts presumably intended for the French commandant at Fort
+Alabama, and handed him over to the Governor of Georgia, who imprisoned
+him and kept him out of mischief till he died.
+
+As a Briton, Adair contributed to Priber's fate; and as such he approves
+it. As a scholar with philosophical and ethnological leanings, however,
+he deplores it, and hopes that Priber's valuable manuscripts may "escape
+the despoiling hands of military power." Priber had spent his leisure in
+compiling a Cherokee dictionary; Adair's occupation, while domiciled
+in his winter house in Great Telliko, was the writing of his Indian
+Appendix to the Pentateuch. As became brothers in science, they had
+exchanged notes, so we gather from Adair's references to conversations
+and correspondence. Adair's difficulties as an author, however, had been
+increased by a treacherous lapse from professional etiquette on the
+part of the Secretary: "He told them [the Indians] that in the very same
+manner as he was their great Secretary, I was the devil's clerk, or
+an accursed one who marked on paper the bad speech of the evil ones
+of darkness." On his own part Adair admits that his object in this
+correspondence was to trap the Secretary into something more serious
+than literary errata. That is, he admits it by implication; he says the
+Secretary "feared" it. During the years of their duel, Adair apparently
+knew that the scholarly compiler of the Cherokee dictionary was
+secretly inciting members of this particular Lost Tribe to tomahawk the
+discoverer of their biblical origin; and Priber, it would seem, knew
+that he knew!
+
+Adair shows, inferentially, that land encroachment was not the sole
+cause of those Indian wars with which we shall deal in a later chapter.
+The earliest causes were the instigations of the French and the rewards
+which they offered for English scalps. But equally provocative of Indian
+rancor were the acts of sometimes merely stupid, sometimes dishonest,
+officials; the worst of these, Adair considered, was the cheapening of
+the trade through the granting of general licenses.
+
+
+"Formerly each trader had a license for two [Indian] towns.... At my
+first setting out among them, a number of traders... journeyed through
+our various nations in different companies and were generally men of
+worth; of course they would have a living price for their goods, which
+they carried on horseback to the remote Indian countries at very great
+expences.... [The Indians] were kept under proper restraint, were easy
+in their minds and peaceable on account of the plain, honest lessons
+daily inculcated on them... but according to the present unwise plan,
+two and even three Arablike peddlars sculk about in one of those
+villages... who are generally the dregs and offscourings of our
+climes... by inebriating the Indians with their nominally prohibited and
+poisoning spirits, they purchase the necessaries of life at four and
+five hundred per cent cheaper than the orderly traders.... Instead of
+showing good examples of moral conduct, beside the other part of life,
+they instruct the unknowing and imitating savages in many diabolical
+lessons of obscenity and blasphemy."
+
+
+In these statements, contemporary records bear him out. There is no
+sadder reading than the many pleas addressed by the Indian chiefs to
+various officials to stop the importation of liquor into their country,
+alleging the debauchment of their young men and warning the white man,
+with whom they desired to be friends, that in an Indian drink and blood
+lust quickly combined.
+
+Adair's book was published in London in 1775. He wrote it to be read by
+Englishmen as well as Americans; and some of his reflections on liberty,
+justice, and Anglo-Saxon unity would not sound unworthily today. His
+sympathies were with "the principles of our Magna Charta Americana"; but
+he thought the threatened division of the English-speaking peoples
+the greatest evil that could befall civilization. His voluminous work
+discloses a man not only of wide mental outlook but a practical man
+with a sense of commercial values. Yet, instead of making a career for
+himself among his own caste, he made his home for over thirty years in
+the Chickasaw towns; and it is plain that, with the exception of some
+of his older brother traders, he preferred the Chickasaw to any other
+society.
+
+The complete explanation of such men as Adair we need not expect to
+find stated anywhere--not even in and between the lines of his book.
+The conventionalist would seek it in moral obliquity; the radical, in a
+temperament that is irked by the superficialities that comprise so large
+a part of conventional standards. The reason for his being what he was
+is almost the only thing Adair did not analyze in his book. Perhaps,
+to him, it was self evident. We may let it be so to us, and see it most
+clearly presented in a picture composed from some of his brief sketches:
+A land of grass and green shade inset with bright waters, where deer
+and domestic cattle herded together along the banks; a circling group
+of houses, their white-clayed walls sparkling under the sun's rays, and,
+within and without, the movement of "a friendly and sagacious people,"
+who "kindly treated and watchfully guarded" their white brother in peace
+and war, and who conversed daily with him in the Old Beloved Speech
+learned first of Nature. "Like towers in cities beyond the common size
+of those of the Indians" rose the winter and summer houses and the huge
+trading house which the tribe had built for their best beloved friend in
+the town's center, because there he would be safest from attack. On the
+rafters hung the smoked and barbecued delicacies taken in the hunt and
+prepared for him by his red servants, who were also his comrades at home
+and on the dangerous trail. "Beloved old women" kept an eye on his small
+sons, put to drowse on panther skins so that they might grow up brave
+warriors. Nothing was there of artifice or pretense, only "the needful
+things to make a reasonable life happy." All was as primitive, naive,
+and contented as the woman whose outline is given once in a few strokes,
+proudly and gayly penciled: "I have the pleasure of writing this by the
+side of a Chikkasah female, as great a princess as ever lived among the
+ancient Peruvians or Mexicans, and she bids me be sure not to mark the
+paper wrong after the manner of most of the traders; otherwise it will
+spoil the making good bread or homony!"
+
+His final chapter is the last news of James Adair, type of the earliest
+trader. Did his bold attacks on corrupt officials and rum peddlers--made
+publicly before Assemblies and in print--raise for him a dense cloud of
+enmity that dropped oblivion on his memory? Perhaps. But, in truth, his
+own book is all the history of him we need. It is the record of a man.
+He lived a full life and served his day; and it matters not that a mist
+envelops the place where unafraid he met the Last Enemy, was "weighed on
+the path and made light."
+
+
+
+Chapter IV. The Passing Of The French Peril
+
+The great pile of the Appalachian peaks was not the only barrier which
+held back the settler with his plough and his rifle from following the
+trader's tinkling caravans into the valleys beyond. Over the hills the
+French were lords of the land. The frontiersman had already felt their
+enmity through the torch and tomahawk of their savage allies. By his own
+strength alone he could not cope with the power entrenched beyond the
+hills; so he halted. But that power, by its unachievable desire to be
+overlord of two hemispheres, was itself to precipitate events which
+would open the westward road.
+
+The recurring hour in the cycle of history, when the issue of Autocracy
+against Democracy cleaves the world, struck for the men of the
+eighteenth century as the second half of that century dawned. In our own
+day, happily, that issue has been perceived by the rank and file of the
+people. In those darker days, as France and England grappled in that
+conflict of systems which culminated in the Seven Years' War, the
+fundamental principles at stake were clear to only a handful of thinking
+men.
+
+But abstractions, whether clear or obscure, do not cause ambassadors
+to demand their passports. The declaration of war awaits the overt act.
+Behold, then, how great a matter is kindled by a little fire! The casus
+belli between France and England in the Seven Years' War--the war which
+humbled France in Europe and lost her India and Canada--had to do with
+a small log fort built by a few Virginians in 1754 at the Forks of
+the Ohio River and wrested from them in the same year by a company of
+Frenchmen from Canada.
+
+The French claimed the valley of the Ohio as their territory; the
+English claimed it as theirs. The dispute was of long standing. The
+French claim was based on discovery; the English claim, on the seato-sea
+charters of Virginia and other colonies and on treaties with the Six
+Nations. The French refused to admit the right of the Six Nations to
+dispose of the territory. The English were inclined to maintain the
+validity of their treaties with the Indians. Especially was Virginia so
+inclined, for a large share of the Ohio lay within her chartered domain.
+
+The quarrel had entered its acute phase in 1749, when both the rival
+claimants took action to assert their sovereignty. The Governor of
+Canada sent an envoy, Celoron de Blainville, with soldiers, to take
+formal possession of the Ohio for the King of France. In the same year
+the English organized in Virginia the Ohio Company for the colonization
+of the same country; and summoned Christopher Gist, explorer, trader,
+and guide, from his home on the Yadkin and dispatched him to survey the
+land.
+
+Then appeared on the scene that extraordinary man, Robert Dinwiddie,
+Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, erstwhile citizen of Glasgow. His
+correspondence from Virginia during his seven years' tenure of office
+(1751-58) depicts the man with a vividness surpassing paint. He was as
+honest as the day--as honest as he was fearless and fussy. But he had
+no patience; he wanted things done and done at once, and his way was THE
+way to do them. People who did not think as he thought didn't THINK
+at all. On this drastic premise he went to work. There was of course
+continuous friction between him and the House of Burgesses. Dinwiddie
+had all a Scot's native talent for sarcasm. His letters, his addresses,
+perhaps in particular his addresses to the House, bristled with
+satirical thrusts at his opponents. If he had spelled out in full all
+the words he was so eager to write, he would have been obliged to lessen
+his output; so he used a shorthand system of his own, peculiar enough to
+be remarkable even though abbreviations were the rule in that day. Even
+the dignity of Kings he sacrificed to speed, and we find "His Majesty"
+abbreviated to "H M'y"; yet a smaller luminary known as "His Honor"
+fares better, losing only the last letter--"His Hono." "Ho." stands
+for "house" and "yt" for "that," "what," "it," and "anything else," as
+convenient. Many of his letters wind up with "I am ve'y much fatig'd."
+We know that he must have been!
+
+It was a formidable task that confronted Dinwiddie--to possess and
+defend the Ohio. Christopher Gist returned in 1751, having surveyed the
+valley for the Ohio Company as far as the Scioto and Miami rivers,
+and in the following year the survey was ratified by the Indians.
+The Company's men were busy blazing trails through the territory and
+building fortified posts. But the French dominated the territory. They
+had built and occupied with troops Fort Le Boeuf on French Creek, a
+stream flowing into the Allegheny. We may imagine Dinwiddie's rage at
+this violation of British soil by French soldiers and how he must have
+sputtered to the young George Washington, when he summoned that officer
+and made him the bearer of a letter to the French commander at Fort Le
+Boeuf, to demand that French troops be at once withdrawn from the Ohio.
+
+Washington made the journey to Fort Le Boeuf in December, 1753, but
+the mission of course proved fruitless. Dinwiddie then wrote to London
+urging that a force be sent over to help the colonies maintain their
+rights and, under orders from the Crown, suggested by himself, he wrote
+to the governors of all the other colonies to join with Virginia in
+raising troops to settle the ownership of the disputed territory. From
+Governor Dobbs of North Carolina he received an immediate response.
+By means of logic, sarcasm, and the entire force of his prerogatives,
+Dinwiddie secured from his own balking Assembly 10,000 pounds with which
+to raise troops. From Maryland he obtained nothing. There were three
+prominent Marylanders in the Ohio Company, but--or because of this--the
+Maryland Assembly voted down the measure for a military appropriation.
+On June 18, 1754, Dinwiddie wrote, with unusually full spelling for him:
+
+"I am perswaded had His Majesty's Com'ds to the other Colonies been
+duely obey'd, and the necessary Assistance given by them, the Fr. wou'd
+have long ago have been oblig'd entirely to have evacuated their usurp'd
+Possession of the King's Lands, instead of w'ch they are daily becoming
+more formidable, whilst every Gov't except No. Caro. has amus'd me with
+Expectations that have proved fruitless, and at length refuse to give
+any Supply, unless in such a manner as must render it ineffectual."
+
+This saddened mood with its deliberate penmanship did not last long.
+Presently Dinwiddie was making a Round Robin of himself in another
+series of letters to Governors, Councilors, and Assemblymen, frantically
+beseeching them for "H. M'y's hono." and their own, and, if not,
+for "post'r'ty," to rise against the cruel French whose Indians were
+harrying the borders again and "Basely, like Virmin, stealing and
+carrying off the helpless infant"--as nice a simile, by the way, as any
+Sheridan ever put into the mouth of Mrs. Malaprop.
+
+Dinwiddie saw his desires thwarted on every hand by the selfish spirit
+of localism and jealousy which was more rife in America in those days
+than it is today. Though the phrase "capitalistic war" had not yet been
+coined, the great issues of English civilization on this continent were
+befogged, for the majority in the colonies, by the trivial fact that the
+shareholders in the Ohio Company stood to win by a vigorous prosecution
+of the war and to lose if it were not prosecuted at all. The irascible
+Governor, however, proceeded with such men and means as he could obtain.
+
+And now in the summer of 1754 came the "overt act" which precipitated
+the inevitable war. The key to the valley of the Ohio was the tongue of
+land at the Forks, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela join their
+waters in the Beautiful River. This site--today Pittsburgh--if occupied
+and held by either nation would give that nation the command of the
+Ohio. Occupied it was for a brief hour by a small party of Virginians,
+under Captain William Trent; but no sooner had they erected on the spot
+a crude fort than the French descended upon them. What happened then all
+the world knows: how the French built on the captured site their great
+Fort Duquesne; how George Washington with an armed force, sent by
+Dinwiddie to recapture the place, encountered French and Indians at
+Great Meadows and built Fort Necessity, which he was compelled to
+surrender; how in the next year (1755) General Braddock arrived from
+across the sea and set out to take Fort Duquesne, only to meet on the
+way the disaster called "Braddock's Defeat"; and how, before another
+year had passed, the Seven Years' War was raging in Europe, and England
+was allied with the enemies of France.
+
+>From the midst of the debacle of Braddock's defeat rises the figure
+of the young Washington. Twenty-three he was then, tall and spare and
+hardbodied from a life spent largely in the open. When Braddock fell,
+this Washington appeared. Reckless of the enemy's bullets, which spanged
+about him and pierced his clothes, he dashed up and down the lines in an
+effort to rally the panic-stricken redcoats. He was too late to save
+the day, but not to save a remnant of the army and bring out his own
+Virginians in good order. Whether among the stay-at-homes and voters of
+credits there were some who would have ascribed Washington's conduct on
+that day to the fact that his brothers were large shareholders in the
+Ohio Company and that Fort Duquesne was their personal property or
+"private interest," history does not say. We may suppose so.
+
+North Carolina, the one colony which had not "amus'd" the Governor of
+Virginia "with Expectations that proved fruitless," had voted 12,000
+pounds for the war and had raised two companies of troops. One of these,
+under Edward Brice Dobbs, son of Governor Dobbs, marched with
+Braddock; and in that company as wagoner went Daniel Boone, then in his
+twenty-second year. Of Boone's part in Braddock's campaign nothing more
+is recorded save that on the march he made friends with John Findlay,
+the trader, his future guide into Kentucky; and that, on the day of
+the defeat, when his wagons were surrounded, he escaped by slashing the
+harness, leaping on the back of one of his horses, and dashing into the
+forest.
+
+
+Meanwhile the southern tribes along the border were comparatively quiet.
+That they well knew a colossal struggle between the two white races was
+pending and were predisposed to ally themselves with the stronger is
+not to be doubted. French influence had long been sifting through the
+formidable Cherokee nation, which still, however, held true in the main
+to its treaties with the English. It was the policy of the Governors of
+Virginia and North Carolina to induce the Cherokees to enter strongly
+into the war as allies of the English. Their efforts came to nothing
+chiefly because of the purely local and suicidal Indian policy of
+Governor Glen of South Carolina. There had been some dispute between
+Glen and Dinwiddie as to the right of Virginia to trade with the
+Cherokees; and Glen had sent to the tribes letters calculated to sow
+distrust of all other aspirants for Indian favor, even promising that
+certain settlers in the Back Country of North Carolina should be removed
+and their holdings restored to the Indians. These letters caused great
+indignation in North Carolina, when they came to light, and had the
+worst possible effect upon Indian relations. The Indians now inclined
+their ear to the French who, though fewer than the English, were at
+least united in purpose.
+
+Governor Glen took this inauspicious moment to hold high festival with
+the Cherokees. It was the last year of his administration and
+apparently he hoped to win promotion to some higher post by showing his
+achievements for the fur trade and in the matter of new land acquired.
+He plied the Cherokees with drink and induced them to make formal
+submission and to cede all their lands to the Crown. When the chiefs
+recovered their sobriety, they were filled with rage at what had been
+done, and they remembered how the French had told them that the English
+intended to make slaves of all the Indians and to steal their lands. The
+situation was complicated by another incident. Several Cherokee warriors
+returning from the Ohio, whither they had gone to fight for the British,
+were slain by frontiersmen. The tribe, in accordance with existing
+agreements, applied to Virginia for redress--but received none.
+
+There was thus plenty of powder for an explosion. Governor Lyttleton,
+Glen's successor, at last flung the torch into the magazine. He seized,
+as hostages, a number of friendly chiefs who were coming to Charleston
+to offer tokens of good will and forced them to march under guard on
+a military tour which the Governor was making (1759) with intent to
+overawe the savages. When this expedition reached Prince George, on the
+upper waters of the Savannah, the Indian hostages were confined within
+the fort; and the Governor, satisfied with the result of his maneuver
+departed south for Charleston. Then followed a tragedy. Some Indian
+friends of the imprisoned chiefs attacked the fort, and the commander,
+a popular young officer, was treacherously killed during a parley. The
+infuriated frontiersmen within the fort fell upon the hostages and slew
+them all--twenty-six chiefs--and the Indian war was on.
+
+If all were to be told of the struggle which followed in the Back
+Country, the story could not be contained in this book. Many brave
+and resourceful men went out against the savages. We can afford only a
+passing glance at one of them. Hugh Waddell of North Carolina was the
+most brilliant of all the frontier fighters in that war. He was a young
+Ulsterman from County Down, a born soldier, with a special genius for
+fighting Indians, although he did not grow up on the border, for he
+arrived in North Carolina in 1753, at the age of nineteen. He was
+appointed by Governor Dobbs to command the second company which North
+Carolina had raised for the war, a force of 450 rangers to protect the
+border counties; and he presently became the most conspicuous military
+figure in the colony. As to his personality, we have only a few meager
+details, with a portrait that suggests plainly enough those qualities
+of boldness and craft which characterized his tactics. Governor Dobbs
+appears to have had a special love towards Hugh, whose family he had
+known in Ireland, for an undercurrent of almost fatherly pride is to be
+found in the old Governor's reports to the Assembly concerning Waddell's
+exploits.
+
+The terror raged for nearly three years. Cabins and fields were burned,
+and women and children were slaughtered or dragged away captives.
+Not only did immigration cease but many hardy settlers fled from the
+country. At length, after horrors indescribable and great toll of life,
+the Cherokees gave up the struggle. Their towns were invaded and laid
+waste by imperial and colonial troops, and they could do nothing but
+make peace. In 1761 they signed a treaty with the English to hold "while
+rivers flow and grasses grow and sun and moon endure."
+
+
+In the previous year (1760) the imperial war had run its course in
+America. New France lay prostrate, and the English were supreme not only
+on the Ohio but on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Louisbourg,
+Quebec, Montreal, Oswego, Niagara, Duquesne, Detroit--all were in
+English hands.
+
+Hugh Waddell and his rangers, besides serving with distinction in the
+Indian war, had taken part in the capture of Fort Duquesne. This feat
+had been accomplished in 1758 by an expedition under General Forbes. The
+troops made a terrible march over a new route, cutting a road as they
+went. It was November when they approached their objective. The wastes
+of snow and their diminished supplies caused such depression among the
+men that the officers called a halt to discuss whether or not to proceed
+toward Fort Duquesne, where they believed the French to be concentrated
+in force. Extravagant sums in guineas were named as suitable reward for
+any man who would stalk and catch a French Indian and learn from him the
+real conditions inside the fort. The honor, if not the guineas, fell to
+John Rogers, one of Waddell's rangers. From the Indian it was learned
+that the French had already gone, leaving behind only a few of their
+number. As the English drew near, they found that the garrison had blown
+up the magazine, set fire to the fort, and made off.
+
+Thus, while New France was already tottering, but nearly two years
+before the final capitulation at Montreal, the English again became
+masters of the Ohio Company's land--masters of the Forks of the Ohio.
+This time they were there to stay. Where the walls of Fort Duquesne had
+crumbled in the fire Fort Pitt was to rise, proudly bearing the name
+of England's Great Commoner who had directed English arms to victory on
+three continents.
+
+With France expelled and the Indians deprived of their white allies, the
+westward path lay open to the pioneers, even though the red man himself
+would rise again and again in vain endeavor to bar the way. So a new
+era begins, the era of exploration for definite purpose, the era of
+commonwealth building. In entering on it, we part with the earliest
+pioneer--the trader, who first opened the road for both the lone home
+seeker and the great land company. He dwindles now to the mere barterer
+and so--save for a few chance glimpses--slips out of sight, for his
+brave days as Imperial Scout are done.
+
+
+
+Chapter V. Boone, The Wanderer
+
+What thoughts filled Daniel Boone's mind as he was returning from
+Braddock's disastrous campaign in 1755 we may only conjecture. Perhaps
+he was planning a career of soldiering, for in later years he was to
+distinguish himself as a frontier commander in both defense and attack.
+Or it may be that his heart was full of the wondrous tales told him
+by the trader, John Findlay, of that Hunter's Canaan, Kentucky, where
+buffalo and deer roamed in thousands. Perhaps he meant to set out
+ere long in search of the great adventure of his dreams, despite the
+terrible dangers of trail making across the zones of war into the
+unknown.
+
+However that may be, Boone straightway followed neither of these
+possible plans on his return to the Yadkin but halted for a different
+adventure. There, a rifle shot's distance from his threshold, was
+offered him the oldest and sweetest of all hazards to the daring. He was
+twenty-two, strong and comely and a whole man; and therefore he was in
+no mind to refuse what life held out to him in the person of Rebecca
+Bryan. Rebecca was the daughter of Joseph Bryan, who had come to the
+Yadkin from Pennsylvania some time before the Boones; and she was in her
+seventeenth year.
+
+Writers of an earlier and more sentimental period than ours have
+endeavored to supply, from the saccharine stores of their fancy, the
+romantic episodes connected with Boone's wooing which history has
+omitted to record. Hence the tale that the young hunter, walking abroad
+in the spring gloaming, saw Mistress Rebecca's large dark eyes shining
+in the dusk of the forest, mistook them for a deer's eyes and shot--his
+aim on this occasion fortunately being bad! But if Boone's rifle was
+missing its mark at ten paces, Cupid's dart was speeding home. So runs
+the story concocted a hundred years later by some gentle scribe ignorant
+alike of game seasons, the habits of hunters, and the way of a man with
+a maid in a primitive world.
+
+Daniel and Rebecca were married in the spring of 1756. Squire Boone,
+in his capacity as justice of the peace, tied the knot; and in a
+small cabin built upon his spacious lands the young couple set up
+housekeeping. Here Daniel's first two sons were born. In the third
+year of his marriage, when the second child was a babe in arms, Daniel
+removed with his wife and their young and precious family to Culpeper
+County in eastern Virginia, for the border was going through its darkest
+days of the French and Indian War. During the next two or three years
+we find him in Virginia engaged as a wagoner, hauling tobacco in season;
+but back on the border with his rifle, after the harvest, aiding in
+defense against the Indians. In 1759 he purchased from his father a
+lot on Sugar Tree Creek, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek (Davie County,
+North Carolina) and built thereon a cabin for himself. The date when he
+brought his wife and children to live in their new abode on the border
+is not recorded. It was probably some time after the close of the Indian
+War. Of Boone himself during these years we have but scant information.
+We hear of him again in Virginia and also as a member of the pack-horse
+caravan which brought into the Back Country the various necessaries for
+the settlers. We know, too, that in the fall of 1760 he was on a lone
+hunting trip in the mountains west of the Yadkin; for until a few years
+ago there might be seen, still standing on the banks of Boone's Creek (a
+small tributary of the Watauga) in eastern Tennessee, a tree bearing the
+legend, "D Boon cilled A BAR on this tree 1760." Boone was always fond
+of carving his exploits on trees, and his wanderings have been traced
+largely by his arboreal publications. In the next year (1761) he went
+with Waddell's rangers when they marched with the army to the final
+subjugation of the Cherokee.
+
+That Boone and his family were back on the border in the new cabin
+shortly after the end of the war, we gather from the fact that in 1764
+he took his little son James, aged seven, on one of his long hunting
+excursions. From this time dates the intimate comradeship of father and
+son through all the perils of the wilderness, a comradeship to come
+to its tragic end ten years later when, as we shall see, the
+seventeen-year-old lad fell under the red man's tomahawk as his father
+was leading the first settlers towards Kentucky. In the cold nights
+of the open camp, as Daniel and James lay under the frosty stars, the
+father kept the boy warm snuggled to his breast under the broad flap
+of his hunting shirt. Sometimes the two were away from home for months
+together, and Daniel declared little James to be as good a woodsman as
+his father.
+
+Meanwhile fascinating accounts of the new land of Florida, ceded
+to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, had leaked into the Back
+Country; and in the winter of 1765 Boone set off southward on horseback
+with, seven companions. Colonel James Grant, with whose army Boone had
+fought in 1761, had been appointed Governor of the new colony and was
+offering generous inducements to settlers. The party traveled along the
+borders of South Carolina and Georgia. No doubt they made the greater
+part of their way over the old Traders' Trace, the "whitened" warpath;
+and they suffered severe hardships. Game became scarcer as they
+proceeded. Once they were nigh to perishing of starvation and were saved
+from that fate only through chance meeting with a band of Indians
+who, seeing their plight, made camp and shared their food with
+them--according to the Indian code in time of peace.
+
+Boone's party explored Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola, and
+Daniel became sufficiently enamored of the tropical south to purchase
+there land and a house. His wife, however, was unwilling to go to
+Florida, and she was not long in convincing the hunter that he would
+soon tire of a gameless country. A gameless country! Perhaps this was
+the very thought which turned the wanderer's desires again towards the
+land of Kentucky. * The silencing of the enemy's whisper in the Cherokee
+camps had opened the border forests once more to the nomadic rifleman.
+Boone was not alone in the desire to seek out what lay beyond. His
+brother-in-law, John Stewart, and a nephew by marriage, Benjamin
+Cutbirth, or Cutbird, with two other young men, John Baker and James
+Ward, in 1766 crossed the Appalachian Mountains, probably by stumbling
+upon the Indian trail winding from base to summit and from peak to base
+again over this part of the great hill barrier. They eventually reached
+the Mississippi River and, having taken a good quantity of peltry on
+the way, they launched upon the stream and came in time to New Orleans,
+where they made a satisfactory trade of their furs.
+
+
+     * Kentucky, from Ken-ta-ke, an Iroquois word meaning "the place
+of old fields." Adair calls the territory "the old fields." The Indians
+apparently used the word "old," as we do in a sense of endearment and
+possession as well as relative to age.
+
+
+Boone was fired anew by descriptions of this successful feat, in which
+two of his kinsmen had participated. He could no longer be held back.
+He must find the magic door that led through the vast mountain wall into
+Kentucky--Kentucky, with its green prairies where the buffalo and deer
+were as "ten thousand thousand cattle feeding" in the wilds, and where
+the balmy air vibrated with the music of innumerable wings.
+
+Accordingly, in the autumn of 1767, Boone began his quest of the
+delectable country in the company of his friend, William Hill, who had
+been with him in Florida. Autumn was the season of departure on all
+forest excursions, because by that time the summer crops had been
+gathered in and the day of the deer had come. By hunting, the explorers
+must feed themselves on their travels and with deerskins and furs they
+must on their return recompense those who had supplied their outfit.
+Boone, the incessant but not always lucky wanderer, was in these years
+ever in debt for an outfit.
+
+Boone and Hill made their way over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies
+and crossed the Holston and Clinch rivers. Then they came upon the west
+fork of the Big Sandy and, believing that it would lead them to the
+Ohio, they continued for at least a hundred miles to the westward. Here
+they found a buffalo trace, one of the many beaten out by the herds in
+their passage to the salt springs, and they followed it into what is
+now Floyd County in eastern Kentucky. But this was not the prairie
+land described by Findlay; it was rough and hilly and so overgrown with
+laurel as to be almost impenetrable. They therefore wended their way
+back towards the river, doubtless erected the usual hunter's camp of
+skins or blankets and branches, and spent the winter in hunting and
+trapping. Spring found them returning to their homes on the Yadkin with
+a fair winter's haul.
+
+Such urgent desire as Boone's, however, was not to be defeated. The next
+year brought him his great opportunity. John Findlay came to the Yadkin
+with a horse pack of needles and linen and peddler's wares to tempt the
+slim purses of the Back Country folk. The two erstwhile comrades in
+arms were overjoyed to encounter each other again, and Findlay spent the
+winter of 1768-69 in Boone's cabin. While the snow lay deep outside and
+good-smelling logs crackled on the hearth, they planned an expedition
+into Kentucky through the Gap where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky
+touch one another, which Findlay felt confident he could find. Findlay
+had learned of this route from cross-mountain traders in 1753, when he
+had descended the Ohio to the site of Louisville, whence he had gone
+with some Shawanoes as a prisoner to their town of Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki
+or Blue Licks. *
+
+
+     * Hanna, "The Wilderness Trail," vol. II, pp. 215-16.
+
+On the first day of May, 1769, Boone and Findlay, accompanied by John
+Stewart and three other venturesome spirits, Joseph Holden, James
+Mooney, and William Cooley, took horse for the fabled land. Passing
+through the Cumberland Gap, they built their first camp in Kentucky on
+the Red Lick fork of Station Camp Creek.
+
+This camp was their base of operations. From it, usually in couples, we
+infer, the explorers branched out to hunt and to take their observations
+of the country. Here also they prepared the deer and buffalo meat for
+the winter, dried or smoked the geese they shot in superabundance, made
+the tallow and oil needed to keep their weapons in trim, their leather
+soft, and their kits waterproof. Their first ill luck befell them in
+December when Boone and Stewart were captured by a band of Shawanoes
+who were returning from their autumn hunt on Green River. The Indians
+compelled the two white men to show them the location of their camp,
+took possession of all it contained in skins and furs and also helped
+themselves to the horses. They left the explorers with just enough meat
+and ammunition to provide for their journey homeward, and told them to
+depart and not to intrude again on the red men's hunting grounds. Having
+given this pointed warning, the Shawanoes rode on northward towards
+their towns beyond the Ohio. On foot, swiftly and craftily, Boone and
+his brother-in-law trailed the band for two days. They came upon the
+camp in dead of night, recaptured their horses, and fled. But this was
+a game in which the Indians themselves excelled, and at this date the
+Shawanoes had an advantage over Boone in their thorough knowledge of the
+territory; so that within forty-eight hours the white men were once more
+prisoners. After they had amused themselves by making Boone caper
+about with a horse bell on his neck, while they jeered at him in broken
+English, "Steal horse, eh?" the Shawanoes turned north again, this time
+taking the two unfortunate hunters with them. Boone and Stewart escaped,
+one day on the march, by a plunge into the thick tall canebrake. Though
+the Indians did not attempt to follow them through the mazes of the
+cane, the situation of the two hunters, without weapons or food, was
+serious enough. When they found Station Camp deserted and realized that
+their four companions had given them up for dead or lost and had set off
+on the trail for home, even such intrepid souls as theirs may have felt
+fear. They raced on in pursuit and fortunately fell in not only with
+their party but with Squire Boone, Daniel's brother, and Alexander
+Neely, who had brought in fresh supplies of rifles, ammunition, flour,
+and horses.
+
+After this lucky encounter the group separated. Findlay was ill, and
+Holden, Mooney, and Cooley had had their fill of Kentucky; but Squire,
+Neely, Stewart, and Daniel were ready for more adventures. Daniel, too,
+felt under the positive necessity of putting in another year at hunting
+and trapping in order to discharge his debts and provide for his family.
+Near the mouth of Red River the new party built their station camp.
+Here, in idle hours, Neely read aloud from a copy of "Gulliver's
+Travels" to entertain the hunters while they dressed their deerskins
+or tinkered their weapons. In honor of the "Lorbrulgrud" of the book,
+though with a pronunciation all their own, they christened the nearest
+creek; and as "Lulbegrud Creek" it is still known.
+
+Before the end of the winter the two Boones were alone in the
+wilderness. Their brother-in-law, Stewart, had disappeared; and Neely,
+discouraged by this tragic event, had returned to the Yadkin. In May,
+Squire Boone fared forth, taking with him the season's catch of beaver,
+otter, and deerskins to exchange in the North Carolinian trading houses
+for more supplies; and Daniel was left solitary in Kentucky.
+
+Now followed those lonely explorations which gave Daniel Boone his
+special fame above all Kentucky's pioneers. He was by no means the first
+white man to enter Kentucky; and when he did enter, it was as one of
+a party, under another man's guidance--if we except his former
+disappointing journey into the laurel thickets of Floyd County. But
+these others, barring Stewart, who fell there, turned back when they
+met with loss and hardship and measured the certain risks against the
+possible gains. Boone, the man of imagination, turned to wild earth
+as to his kin. His genius lay in the sense of oneness he felt with his
+wilderness environment. An instinct he had which these other men, as
+courageous perhaps as he, did not possess.
+
+Never in all the times when he was alone in the woods and had no other
+man's safety or counsel to consider, did he suffer ill fortune. The
+nearest approach to trouble that befell him when alone occurred one day
+during this summer when some Indians emerged from their green shelter
+and found him, off guard for the moment, standing on a cliff gazing with
+rapture over the vast rolling stretches of Kentucky. He was apparently
+cut off from escape, for the savages were on three sides, advancing
+without haste to take him, meanwhile greeting him with mock amity. Over
+the cliff leaped Boone and into the outspread arms of a friendly maple,
+whose top bloomed green about sixty feet below the cliff's rim, and left
+his would-be captors on the height above, grunting their amazement.
+
+During this summer Boone journeyed through the valleys of the Kentucky
+and the Licking. He followed the buffalo traces to the two Blue Licks
+and saw the enormous herds licking up the salt earth, a darkly ruddy
+moving mass of beasts whose numbers could not be counted. For many miles
+he wound along the Ohio, as far as the Falls. He also found the Big Bone
+Lick with its mammoth fossils.
+
+In July, 1770, Daniel returned to the Red River camp and there met
+Squire Boone with another pack of supplies. The two brothers continued
+their hunting and exploration together for some months, chiefly in
+Jessamine County, where two caves still bear Boone's name. In that
+winter they even braved the Green River ground, whence had come the
+hunting Shawanoes who had taken Daniel's first fruits a year before.
+In the same year (1770) there had come into Kentucky from the Yadkin
+another party of hunters, called, from their lengthy sojourn in
+the twilight zone, the Long Hunters. One of these, Gasper Mansker,
+afterwards related how the Long Hunters were startled one day by hearing
+sounds such as no buffalo or turkey ever made, and how Mansker himself
+stole silently under cover of the trees towards the place whence the
+strange noises came, and descried Daniel Boone prone on his back with a
+deerskin under him, his famous tall black hat beside him and his
+mouth opened wide in joyous but apparently none too tuneful song. This
+incident gives a true character touch. It is not recorded of any of the
+men who turned back that they sang alone in the wilderness.
+
+In March, 1771, the two Boones started homeward, their horses bearing
+the rich harvest of furs and deerskins which was to clear Daniel of debt
+and to insure the comfort of the family he had not seen for two years.
+But again evil fortune met them, this time in the very gates--for in
+the Cumberland Gap they were suddenly surrounded by Indians who took
+everything from them, leaving them neither guns nor horses.
+
+
+
+Chapter VI. The Fight For Kentucky
+
+When Boone returned home he found the Back Country of North Carolina in
+the throes of the Regulation Movement. This movement, which had arisen
+first from the colonists' need to police their settlements, had more
+recently assumed a political character. The Regulators were now in
+conflict with the authorities, because the frontier folk were suffering
+through excessive taxes, extortionate fees, dishonest land titles,
+and the corruption of the courts. In May, 1771, the conflict lost its
+quasi-civil nature. The Regulators resorted to arms and were defeated by
+the forces under Governor Tryon in the Battle of the Alamance.
+
+The Regulation Movement, which we shall follow in more detail further
+on, was a culmination of those causes of unrest which turned men
+westward. To escape from oppression and to acquire land beyond the
+bounds of tyranny became the earnest desire of independent spirits
+throughout the Back Country. But there was another and more potent
+reason why the country east of the mountains no longer contented Boone.
+Hunting and trapping were Boone's chief means of livelihood. In those
+days, deerskins sold for a dollar a skin to the traders at the Forks or
+in Hillsborough; beaver at about two dollars and a half, and otter
+at from three to five dollars. A pack-horse could carry a load of
+one hundred dressed deerskins, and, as currency was scarce, a hundred
+dollars was wealth. Game was fast disappearing from the Yadkin. To Boone
+above all men, then, Kentucky beckoned. When he returned in the spring
+of 1771 from his explorations, it was with the resolve to take his
+family at once into the great game country and to persuade some of his
+friends to join in this hazard of new fortunes.
+
+The perils of such a venture, only conjectural to us at this distance,
+he knew well; but in him there was nothing that shrank from danger,
+though he did not court it after the rash manner of many of his
+compeers. Neither reckless nor riotous, Boone was never found among
+those who opposed violence to authority, even unjust authority; nor
+was he ever guilty of the savagery which characterized much of the
+retaliatory warfare of that period when frenzied white men bettered the
+red man's instruction. In him, courage was illumined with tenderness and
+made equable by self-control. Yet, though he was no fiery zealot like
+the Ulstermen who were to follow him along the path he had made and
+who loved and revered him perhaps because he was so different from
+themselves, Boone nevertheless had his own religion. It was a simple
+faith best summed up perhaps by himself in his old age when he said that
+he had been only an instrument in the hand of God to open the wilderness
+to settlement.
+
+Two years passed before Boone could muster a company of colonists for
+the dangerous and delectable land. The dishonesty practiced by Lord
+Granville's agents in the matter of deeds had made it difficult for
+Daniel and his friends to dispose of their acreage. When at last in
+the spring of 1773 the Wanderer was prepared to depart, he was again
+delayed; this time by the arrival of a little son to whom was given the
+name of John. By September, however, even this latest addition to the
+party was ready for travel; and that month saw the Boones with a small
+caravan of families journeying towards Powell's Valley, whence the
+Warrior's Path took its way through Cumberland Gap. At this point on the
+march they were to be joined by William Russell, a famous pioneer, from
+the Clinch River, with his family and a few neighbors, and by some
+of Rebecca Boone's kinsmen, the Bryans, from the lower Yadkin, with a
+company of forty men.
+
+Of Rebecca Boone history tells us too little--only that she was born a
+Bryan, was of low stature and dark eyed, that she bore her husband
+ten children, and lived beside him to old age. Except on his hunts and
+explorations, she went with him from one cabined home to another, always
+deeper into the wilds. There are no portraits of her. We can see her
+only as a shadowy figure moving along the wilderness trails beside the
+man who accepted his destiny of God to be a way-shower for those of
+lesser faith.
+
+"He tires not forever on his leagues of march Because her feet are set
+to his footprints, And the gleam of her bare hand slants across his
+shoulder."
+
+Boone halted his company on Walden Mountain over Powell's Valley to
+await the Bryan contingent and dispatched two young men under the
+leadership of his son James, then in his seventeenth year, to notify
+Russell of the party's arrival. As the boys were returning with
+Russell's son, also a stripling, two of his slaves, and some white
+laborers, they missed the path and went into camp for the night. When
+dawn broke, disclosing the sleepers, a small war band of Shawanoes, who
+had been spying on Boone and his party, fell upon them and slaughtered
+them. Only one of Russell's slaves and a laborer escaped. The tragedy
+seems augmented by the fact that the point where the boys lost the
+trail and made their night quarters was hardly three miles from the main
+camp--to which an hour later came the two survivors with their gloomy
+tidings. Terror now took hold of the little band of emigrants, and
+there were loud outcries for turning back. The Bryans, who had arrived
+meanwhile, also advised retreat, saying that the "signs" about the scene
+of blood indicated an Indian uprising. Daniel carried the scalped body
+of his son, the boy-comrade of his happy hunts, to the camp and buried
+it there at the beginning of the trail. His voice alone urged that they
+go on.
+
+Fortunately indeed, as events turned out, Boone was overruled, and the
+expedition was abandoned. The Bryan party and the others from North
+Carolina went back to the Yadkin. Boone himself with his family
+accompanied Russell to the Clinch settlement, where he erected a
+temporary cabin on the farm of one of the settlers, and then set out
+alone on the chase to earn provision for his wife and children through
+the winter.
+
+
+Those who prophesied an Indian war were not mistaken. When the snowy
+hunting season had passed and the "Powwowing Days" were come, the Indian
+war drum rattled in the medicine house from the borders of Pennsylvania
+to those of Carolina. The causes of the strife for which the red men
+were making ready must be briefly noted to help us form a just opinion
+of the deeds that followed. Early writers have usually represented the
+frontiersmen as saints in buckskin and the Indians as fiends without
+the shadow of a claim on either the land or humanity. Many later writers
+have merely reversed the shield. The truth is that the Indians and the
+borderers reacted upon each other to the hurt of both. Paradoxically,
+they grew like enough to hate one another with a savage hatred--and both
+wanted the land.
+
+Land! Land! was the slogan of all sorts and conditions of men. Tidewater
+officials held solemn powwows with the chiefs, gave wampum strings, and
+forthwith incorporated. * Chiefs blessed their white brothers who
+had "forever brightened the chain of friendship," departed home, and
+proceeded to brighten the blades of their tomahawks and to await, not
+long, the opportunity to use them on casual hunters who carried in their
+kits the compass, the "land-stealer." Usually the surveying hunter was
+a borderer; and on him the tomahawk descended with an accelerated gusto.
+Private citizens also formed land companies and sent out surveyors,
+regardless of treaties. Bold frontiersmen went into No Man's Land and
+staked out their claims. In the very year when disaster turned the Boone
+party back, James Harrod had entered Kentucky from Pennsylvania and had
+marked the site of a settlement.
+
+
+     * The activities of the great land companies are described in
+Alvord's exhaustive work, "The Mississippi Valley in British Politics."
+
+
+Ten years earlier (1763), the King had issued the famous and much
+misunderstood Proclamation restricting his "loving subjects" from the
+lands west of the mountains. The colonists interpreted this document as
+a tyrannous curtailment of their liberties for the benefit of the fur
+trade. We know now that the portion of this Proclamation relating to
+western settlement was a wise provision designed to protect the settlers
+on the frontier by allaying the suspicions of the Indians, who viewed
+with apprehension the triumphal occupation of that vast territory from
+Canada to the Gulf of Mexico by the colonizing English. By seeking to
+compel all land purchase to be made through the Crown, it was designed
+likewise to protect the Indians from "whisky purchase," and to make
+impossible the transfer of their lands except with consent of the Indian
+Council, or full quota of headmen, whose joint action alone conveyed
+what the tribes considered to be legal title. Sales made according to
+this form, Sir William Johnson declared to the Lords of Trade, he had
+never known to be repudiated by the Indians. This paragraph of the
+Proclamation was in substance an embodiment of Johnson's suggestions to
+the Lords of Trade. Its purpose was square dealing and pacification; and
+shrewd men such as Washington recognized that it was not intended as a
+final check to expansion. "A temporary expedient to quiet the minds of
+the Indians," Washington called it, and then himself went out along the
+Great Kanawha and into Kentucky, surveying land.
+
+It will be asked what had become of the Ohio Company of Virginia and
+that fort at the Forks of the Ohio; once a bone of contention between
+France and England. Fort Pitt, as it was now called, had fallen foul of
+another dispute, this time between Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia
+claimed that the far western corner of her boundary ascended just far
+enough north to take in Fort Pitt. Pennsylvania asserted that it did
+nothing of the sort. The Ohio Company had meanwhile been merged into the
+Walpole Company. George Croghan, at Fort Pitt, was the Company's agent
+and as such was accused by Pennsylvania of favoring from ulterior
+motives the claims of Virginia. Hotheads in both colonies asseverated
+that the Indians were secretly being stirred up in connection with the
+boundary disputes. If it does not very clearly appear how an Indian
+rising would have settled the ownership of Fort Pitt, it is evident
+enough where the interests of Virginia and Pennsylvania clashed.
+Virginia wanted land for settlement and speculation; Pennsylvania wanted
+the Indians left in possession for the benefit of the fur trade. So far
+from stirring up the Indians, as his enemies declared, Croghan was as
+usual giving away all his substance to keep them quiet. * Indeed, during
+this summer of 1774, eleven hundred Indians were encamped about Fort
+Pitt visiting him.
+
+
+     * The suspicion that Croghan and Lord Dunmore, the Governor of
+Virginia, were instigating the war appears to have arisen out of the
+conduct of Dr. John Connolly, Dunmore's agent and Croghan's nephew.
+Croghan had induced the Shawanoes to bring under escort to Fort Pitt
+certain English traders resident in the Indian towns. The escort was
+fired on by militiamen under command of Connolly, who also issued a
+proclamation declaring a state of war to exist. Connolly, however,
+probably acted on his own initiative. He was interested in land on his
+own behalf and was by no means the only man at that time who was
+ready to commit outrages on Indians in order to obtain it. As Croghan
+lamented, there was "too great a spirit in the frontier people for
+killing Indians."
+
+
+Two hundred thousand acres in the West--Kentucky and West Virginia--had
+been promised to the colonial officers and soldiers who fought in
+the Seven Years' War. But after making the Proclamation the British
+Government had delayed issuing the patents. Washington interested
+himself in trying to secure them; and Lord Dunmore, who also had caught
+the "land-fever," * prodded the British authorities but won only rebuke
+for his inconvenient activities. Insistent, however, Dunmore sent out
+parties of surveyors to fix the bounds of the soldiers' claims. James
+Harrod, Captain Thomas Bullitt, Hancock Taylor, and three McAfee
+brothers entered Kentucky, by the Ohio, under Dunmore's orders. John
+Floyd went in by the Kanawha as Washington's agent. A bird's-eye view of
+that period would disclose to us very few indeed of His Majesty's loving
+subjects who were paying any attention to his proclamation. Early in
+1774, Harrod began the building of cabins and a fort, and planted corn
+on the site of Harrodsburg. Thus to him and not to Boone fell the honor
+of founding the first permanent white settlement in Kentucky.
+
+
+     * See Alvord, "The Mississippi Valley in British Politics," vol.
+II, pp. 191-94.
+
+
+When summer came, its thick verdure proffering ambuscade, the air
+hung tense along the border. Traders had sent in word that Shawanoes,
+Delawares, Mingos, Wyandots, and Cherokees were refusing all other
+exchange than rifles, ammunition, knives, and hatchets. White men were
+shot down in their fields from ambush. Dead Indians lay among their own
+young corn, their scalp locks taken. There were men of both races who
+wanted war and meant to have it--and with it the land.
+
+Lord Dunmore, the Governor, resolved that, if war were inevitable, it
+should be fought out in the Indian country. With this intent, he wrote
+to Colonel Andrew Lewis of Botetourt County, Commander of the Southwest
+Militia, instructing him to raise a respectable body of troops and "join
+me either at the mouth of the Great Kanawha or Wheeling, or such other
+part of the Ohio as may be most convenient for you to meet me." The
+Governor himself with a force of twelve hundred proceeded to Fort Pitt,
+where Croghan, as we have seen, was extending his hospitality to eleven
+hundred warriors from the disaffected tribes.
+
+On receipt of the Governor's letter, Andrew Lewis sent out expresses to
+his brother Colonel Charles Lewis, County Lieutenant of Augusta, and to
+Colonel William Preston, County Lieutenant of Fincastle, to raise
+men and bring them with all speed to the rendezvous at Camp Union
+(Lewisburg) on the Big Levels of the Greenbrier (West Virginia).
+Andrew Lewis summoned these officers to an expedition for "reducing our
+inveterate enemies to reason." Preston called for volunteers to take
+advantage of "the opportunity we have so long wished for... this useless
+People may now at last be oblidged to abandon their country." These men
+were among not only the bravest but the best of their time; but this
+was their view of the Indian and his alleged rights. To eliminate this
+"useless people," inveterate enemies of the white race, was, as they saw
+it, a political necessity and a religious duty. And we today who profit
+by their deeds dare not condemn them.
+
+Fervor less solemn was aroused in other quarters by Dunmore's call to
+arms. At Wheeling, some eighty or ninety young adventurers, in charge
+of Captain Michael Cresap of Maryland, were waiting for the freshets to
+sweep them down the Ohio into Kentucky. When the news reached them, they
+greeted it with the wild monotone chant and the ceremonies preliminary
+to Indian warfare. They planted the war pole, stripped and painted
+themselves, and starting the war dance called on Cresap to be their
+"white leader." The captain, however, declined; but in that wild
+circling line was one who was a white leader indeed. He was a
+sandy-haired boy of twenty--one of the bold race of English Virginians,
+rugged and of fiery countenance, with blue eyes intense of glance
+and deep set under a high brow that, while modeled for power, seemed
+threatened in its promise by the too sensitive chiseling of his lips.
+With every nerve straining for the fray, with thudding of feet and
+crooning of the blood song, he wheeled with those other mad spirits
+round the war pole till the set of sun closed the rites. "That evening
+two scalps were brought into camp," so a letter of his reads. Does the
+bold savage color of this picture affright us? Would we veil it? Then
+we should lose something of the true lineaments of George Rogers Clark,
+who, within four short years, was to lead a tiny army of tattered and
+starving backwoodsmen, ashamed to quail where he never flinched, through
+barrens and icy floods to the conquest of Illinois for the United
+States.
+
+Though Cresap had rejected the role of "white leader," he did not escape
+the touch of infamy. "Cresap's War" was the name the Indians gave to
+the bloody encounters between small parties of whites and Indians, which
+followed on that war dance and scalping, during the summer months. One
+of these encounters must be detailed here because history has assigned
+it as the immediate cause of Dunmore's War.
+
+Greathouse, Sapperton, and King, three traders who had a post on Yellow
+Creek, a tributary of the Ohio fifty miles below Pittsburgh, invited
+several Indians from across the stream to come and drink with them and
+their friends. Among the Indians were two or three men of importance in
+the Mingo tribe. There were also some women, one of whom was the Indian
+wife of Colonel John Gibson, an educated man who had distinguished
+himself as a soldier with Forbes in 1768. That the Indians came in amity
+and apprehended no treachery was proved by the presence of the women.
+Gibson's wife carried her halfcaste baby in her shawl. The disreputable
+traders plied their guests with drink to the point of intoxication and
+then murdered them. King shot the first man and, when he fell, cut his
+throat, saying that he had served many a deer in that fashion. Gibson's
+Indian wife fled and was shot down in the clearing. A man followed to
+dispatch her and her baby. She held the child up to him pleading, with
+her last breath, that he would spare it because it was not Indian but
+"one of yours." The mother dead, the child was later sent to Gibson.
+Twelve Indians in all were killed.
+
+Meanwhile Croghan had persuaded the Iroquois to peace. With the help of
+David Zeisberger, the Moravian missionary, and White Eyes, a Delaware
+chief, he and Dunmore had won over the Delaware warriors. In the
+Cherokee councils, Oconostota demanded that the treaty of peace
+signed in 1761 be kept. The Shawanoes, however, led by Cornstalk, were
+implacable; and they had as allies the Ottawas and Mingos, who had
+entered the council with them.
+
+A famous chief of the day and one of great influence over the Indians,
+and also among the white officials who dealt with Indian affairs, was
+Tachnech-dor-us, or Branching Oak of the Forest, a Mingo who had taken
+the name of Logan out of compliment to James Logan of Pennsylvania.
+Chief Logan had recently met with so much reproach from his red brothers
+for his loyalty to the whites that he had departed from the Mingo town
+at Yellow Creek. But, learning that his tribe had determined to assist
+the Shawanoes and had already taken some white scalps, he repaired to
+the place where the Mingos were holding their war council to exert his
+powers for peace. There, in presence of the warriors, after swaying
+them from their purpose by those oratorical gifts which gave him his
+influence and his renown, he took the war hatchet that had already
+killed, and buried it in proof that vengeance was appeased. Upon this
+scene there entered a Mingo from Yellow Creek with the news of the
+murders committed there by the three traders. The Indian whose throat
+had been slit as King had served deer was Logan's brother. Another man
+slain was his kinsman. The woman with the baby was his sister. Logan
+tore up from the earth the bloody tomahawk and, raising it above his
+head, swore that he would not rest till he had taken ten white lives to
+pay for each one of his kin. Again the Mingo warriors declared for war
+and this time were not dissuaded. But Logan did not join this red army.
+He went out alone to wreak his vengeance, slaying and scalping.
+
+
+Meanwhile Dunmore prepared to push the war with the utmost vigor. His
+first concern was to recall the surveying parties from Kentucky, and for
+so hazardous an errand he needed the services of a man whose endurance,
+speed, and woodcraft were equal to those of any Indian scout afoot.
+Through Colonel Preston, his orders were conveyed to Daniel Boone, for
+Boone's fame had now spread from the border to the tidewater regions. It
+was stated that "Boone would lose no time," and "if they are alive, it
+is indisputable but Boone must find them."
+
+So Boone set out in company with Michael Stoner, another expert
+woodsman. His general instructions were to go down the Kentucky River
+to Preston's Salt Lick and across country to the Falls of the Ohio, and
+thence home by Gaspar's Lick on the Cumberland River. Indian war parties
+were moving under cover across "the Dark and Bloody Ground" to surround
+the various groups of surveyors still at large and to exterminate
+them. Boone made his journey successfully. He found John Floyd, who was
+surveying for Washington; he sped up to where Harrod and his band were
+building cabins and sent them out, just in time as it happened; he
+reached all the outposts of Thomas Bullitt's party, only one of whom
+fell a victim to the foe *; and, undetected by the Indians, he brought
+himself and Stoner home in safety, after covering eight hundred miles in
+sixty-one days.
+
+
+     * Hancock Taylor, who delayed in getting out of the country and
+was cut off.
+
+
+Harrod and his homesteaders immediately enlisted in the army. How eager
+Boone was to go with the forces under Lewis is seen in the official
+correspondence relative to Dunmore's War. Floyd wanted Boone's help in
+raising a company: "Captain Bledsoe says that Boone has more [influence]
+than any man now disengaged; and you know what Boone has done for
+me... for which reason I love the man." Even the border, it would seem,
+had its species of pacifists who were willing to let others take risks
+for them, for men hung back from recruiting, and desertions were the
+order of the day. Major Arthur Campbell hit upon a solution of the
+difficulties in West Fincastle. He was convinced that Boone could raise
+a company and hold the men loyal. And Boone did.
+
+For some reason, however, Daniel's desire to march with the army was
+denied. Perhaps it was because just such a man as he--and, indeed, there
+was no other--was needed to guard the settlement. Presently he was
+put in command of Moore's Fort in Clinch Valley, and his "diligence"
+received official approbation. A little later the inhabitants of the
+valley sent out a petition to have Boone made a "captain" and given
+supreme command of the lower forts. The settlers demanded Boone's
+promotion for their own security.
+
+"The land it is good, it is just to our mind, Each will have his part if
+his Lordship be kind, The Ohio once ours, we'll live at our ease, With a
+bottle and glass to drink when we please."
+
+So sang the army poet, thus giving voice, as bards should ever do,
+to the theme nearest the hearts of his hearers--in this case, Land!
+Presumably his ditty was composed on the eve of the march from
+Lewisburg, for it is found in a soldier's diary.
+
+On the evening of October 9,1774, Andrew Lewis with his force of eleven
+hundred frontiersmen was encamped on Point Pleasant at the junction of
+the Great Kanawha with the Ohio. Dunmore in the meantime had led
+his forces into Ohio and had erected Fort Gower at the mouth of the
+Hockhocking River, where he waited for word from Andrew Lewis. *
+
+
+     * It has been customary to ascribe to Lord Dunmore motives of
+treachery in failing to make connections with Lewis; but no real
+evidence has been advanced to support any of the charges made against
+him by local historians. The charges were, as Theodore Roosevelt says,
+"an afterthought." Dunmore was a King's man in the Revolution; and yet
+in March, 1775, the Convention of the Colony of Virginia, assembled in
+opposition to the royal party, resolved: "The most cordial thanks of the
+people of this colony are a tribute justly due to our worthy Governor
+Lord Dunmore, for his truly noble, wise, and spirited conduct which at
+once evinces his Excellency's attention to the true interests of this
+colony, and a real in the executive department which no dangers can
+divert, or difficulties hinder, from achieving the most important
+services to the people who have the happiness to live under his
+administration." (See "American Archives," Fourth Series, vol. II, p.
+170.) Similar resolutions were passed by his officers on the march home
+from Ohio; at the same time, the officers passed resolutions in sympathy
+with the American cause. Yet it was Andrew Lewis who later drove Dunmore
+from Virginia. Well might Dunmore exclaim, "That it should ever come to
+this!"
+
+
+The movements of the two armies were being observed by scouts from the
+force of red warriors gathered in Ohio under the great leader of the
+Shawanoes. Cornstalk purposed to isolate the two armies of his enemy and
+to crush them in turn before they could come together. His first move
+was to launch an attack on Lewis at Point Pleasant. In the dark of
+night, Cornstalk's Indians crossed the Ohio on rafts, intending to
+surprise the white man's camp at dawn. They would have succeeded but for
+the chance that three or four of the frontiersmen, who had risen before
+daybreak to hunt, came upon the Indians creeping towards the camp. Shots
+were exchanged. An Indian and a white man dropped. The firing roused
+the camp. Three hundred men in two lines under Charles Lewis and William
+Fleming sallied forth expecting to engage the vanguard of the enemy but
+encountered almost the whole force of from eight hundred to a thousand
+Indians before the rest of the army could come into action. Both
+officers were wounded, Charles Lewis fatally. The battle, which
+continued from dawn until an hour before sunset, was the bloodiest in
+Virginia's long series of Indian wars. The frontiersmen fought as such
+men ever fought--with the daring, bravery, swiftness of attack, and
+skill in taking cover which were the tactics of their day, even as at
+a later time many of these same men fought at King's Mountain and
+in Illinois the battles that did so much to turn the tide in the
+Revolution. *
+
+
+     *  With Andrew Lewis on this day were Isaac Shelby and William
+Campbell, the victorious leaders at King's Mountain, James Robertson,
+the "father of Tennessee," Valentine Sevier, Daniel Morgan, hero of the
+Cowpens, Major Arthur Campbell, Benjamin Logan, Anthony Bledsoe, and
+Simon Kenton. With Dunmore's force were Adam Stephen, who distinguished
+himself at the Brandywine, George Rogers Clark, John Stuart, already
+noted through the Cherokee wars, and John Montgomery, later one
+of Clark's four captains in Illinois. The two last mentioned were
+Highlanders. Clark's Illinois force was largely recruited from the
+troops who fought at Point Pleasant.
+
+
+Colonel Preston wrote to Patrick Henry that the enemy behaved with
+"inconceivable bravery," the head men walking about in the time of
+action exhorting their men to "lie close, shoot well, be strong,
+and fight." The Shawanoes ran up to the muzzles of the English guns,
+disputing every foot of ground. Both sides knew well what they were
+fighting for--the rich land held in a semicircle by the Beautiful River.
+
+Shortly before sundown the Indians, mistaking a flank movement by
+Shelby's contingent for the arrival of reinforcements, retreated across
+the Ohio. Many of their most noted warriors had fallen and among them
+the Shawano chief, Puck-e-shin-wa, father of a famous son, Tecumseh. *
+Yet they were unwilling to accept defeat. When they heard that Dunmore
+was now marching overland to cut them off from their towns, their fury
+blazed anew. "Shall we first kill all our women and children and then
+fight till we ourselves are slain?" Cornstalk, in irony, demanded of
+them; "No? Then I will go and make peace."
+
+
+     *  Thwaites, "Documentary History of Dunmore's War."
+
+
+By the treaty compacted between the chiefs and Lord Dunmore, the Indians
+gave up all claim to the lands south of the Ohio, even for hunting,
+and agreed to allow boats to pass unmolested. In this treaty the Mingos
+refused to join, and a detachment of Dunmore's troops made a punitive
+expedition to their towns. Some discord arose between Dunmore and
+Lewis's frontier forces because, since the Shawanoes had made peace, the
+Governor would not allow the frontiersmen to destroy the Shawano towns.
+
+Of all the chiefs, Logan alone still held aloof. Major Gibson undertook
+to fetch him, but Logan refused to come to the treaty grounds. He sent
+by Gibson the short speech which has lived as an example of the best
+Indian oratory:
+
+"I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan's cabin
+hungry and he gave him not meat: if ever he came cold and naked and
+he clothed him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war,
+Logan remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my
+love for the whites that my countrymen pointed as they passed and said,
+'Logan is the friend of the white men.' I had even thought to have
+lived with you but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the
+last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of
+Logan, not even sparing my women and children. There remains not a drop
+of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for
+revenge. I have sought it; I have killed many; I have fully glutted my
+vengeance: for my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not
+harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear.
+He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for
+Logan? Not one." *
+
+
+     * Some writers have questioned the authenticity of Logan's
+speech, inclining to think that Gibson himself composed it, partly
+because of the biblical suggestion in the first few lines. That Gibson
+gave biblical phraseology to these lines is apparent, though, as Adair
+points out there are many examples of similitude in Indian and biblical
+expression. But the thought is Indian and relates to the first article
+of the Indian's creed, namely, to share his food with the needy. "There
+remains not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature" is
+a truly Indian lament. Evidently the final four lines of the speech are
+the most literally translated, for they have the form and the primitive
+rhythmic beat which a student of Indian poetry quickly recognizes. The
+authenticity of the speech, as well as the innocence of Cresap, whom
+Logan mistakenly accused, was vouched for by George Rogers Clark in a
+letter to Dr. Samuel Brown dated June 17, 1798. See Jefferson papers,
+Series 6, quoted by English, "Conquest of the Country Northwest of the
+River Ohio." vol. II. p. 1029.
+
+
+By rivers and trails, in large and small companies, started home the
+army that had won the land. The West Fincastle troops, from the lower
+settlements of the Clinch and Holston valleys, were to return by the
+Kentucky River, while those from the upper valley would take the shorter
+way up Sandy Creek. To keep them in provisions during the journey it was
+ordered that hunters be sent out along these routes to kill and barbecue
+meat and place it on scaffolds at appropriate spots.
+
+The way home by the Kentucky was a long road for weary and wounded men
+with hunger gnawing under their belts. We know who swung out along the
+trail to provide for that little band, "dressed in deerskins colored
+black, and his hair plaited and bobbed up." It was Daniel Boone--now, by
+popular demand, Captain Boone--just "discharged from Service," since the
+valley forts needed him no longer. Once more only a hunter, he went his
+way over Walden Mountain--past his son's grave marking the place where
+HE had been turned back--to serve the men who had opened the gates.
+
+
+
+Chapter VII. The Dark And Bloody Ground
+
+With the coming of spring Daniel Boone's desire, so long cherished and
+deferred, to make a way for his neighbors through the wilderness was to
+be fulfilled at last. But ere his ax could slash the thickets from the
+homeseekers' path, more than two hundred settlers had entered
+Kentucky by the northern waterways. Eighty or more of these settled at
+Harrodsburg, where Harrod was laying out his town on a generous plan,
+with "in-lots" of half an acre and "out-lots" of larger size. Among
+those associated with Harrod was George Rogers Clark, who had surveyed
+claims for himself during the year before the war.
+
+While over two hundred colonists were picking out home sites wherever
+their pleasure or prudence dictated, a gigantic land promotion
+scheme--involving the very tracts where they were sowing their first
+corn--was being set afoot in North Carolina by a body of men who figure
+in the early history of Kentucky as the Transylvania Company. The leader
+of this organization was Judge Richard Henderson. * Judge Henderson
+dreamed a big dream. His castle in the air had imperial proportions.
+He resolved, in short, to purchase from the Cherokee Indians the larger
+part of Kentucky and to establish there a colony after the manner and
+the economic form of the English Lords Proprietors, whose day in America
+was so nearly done. Though in the light of history the plan loses none
+of its dramatic features, it shows the practical defects that must
+surely have prevented its realization. Like many another Caesar
+hungering for empire and staking all to win it, the prospective lord
+of Kentucky, as we shall see, had left the human equation out of his
+calculations.
+
+
+     * Richard Henderson (1734-1785) was the son of the High Sheriff
+of Granville County. At first an assistant to his father, he studied
+law and soon achieved a reputation by the brilliance of his mind and the
+magnetism of his personality. As presiding Judge at Hillsborough he had
+come into conflict with the violent element among the Regulators, who
+had driven him from the court and burned his house and barns. For some
+time prior to his elevation to the bench, he had been engaged in land
+speculations. One of Boone's biographers suggests that Boone may have
+been secretly acting as Henderson's agent during his first lonely
+explorations of Kentucky. However this may be, it does not appear
+that Boone and his Yadkin neighbors were acting with Henderson when
+in September, 1773, they made their first attempt to enter Kentucky as
+settlers.
+
+
+Richard Henderson had known Daniel Boone on the Yadkin; and it was
+Boone's detailed reports of the marvelous richness and beauty of
+Kentucky which had inspired him to formulate his gigantic scheme and had
+enabled him also to win to his support several men of prominence in
+the Back Country. To sound the Cherokees regarding the purchase and to
+arrange, if possible, for a conference, Henderson dispatched Boone to
+the Indian towns in the early days of 1775.
+
+Since we have just learned that Dunmore's War compelled the Shawanoes
+and their allies to relinquish their right to Kentucky, that, both
+before and after that event, government surveyors were in the territory
+surveying for the soldiers' claims, and that private individuals had
+already laid out town sites and staked holdings, it may be asked what
+right of ownership the Cherokees possessed in Kentucky, that Henderson
+desired to purchase it of them. The Indian title to Kentucky seems to
+have been hardly less vague to the red men than it was to the whites.
+Several of the nations had laid claim to the territory. As late as 1753,
+it will be remembered, the Shawanoes had occupied a town at Blue Licks,
+for John Findlay had been taken there by some of them. But, before
+Findlay guided Boone through the Gap in 1769, the Shawanoes had been
+driven out by the Iroquois, who claimed suzerainty over them as well
+as over the Cherokees. In 1768, the Iroquois had ceded Kentucky to the
+British Crown by the treaty of Fort Stanwix; whereupon the Cherokees had
+protested so vociferously that the Crown's Indian agent, to quiet them,
+had signed a collateral agreement with them. Though claimed by many,
+Kentucky was by common consent not inhabited by any of the tribes.
+It was the great Middle Ground where the Indians hunted. It was the
+Warriors' Path over which they rode from north and south to slaughter
+and where many of their fiercest encounters took place. However shadowy
+the title which Henderson purposed to buy, there was one all-sufficing
+reason why he must come to terms with the Cherokees: their northernmost
+towns in Tennessee lay only fifty or sixty miles below Cumberland Gap
+and hence commanded the route over which he must lead colonists into his
+empire beyond the hills.
+
+The conference took place early in March, 1775, at the Sycamore Shoals
+of the Watauga River. Twelve hundred Indians, led by their "town
+chiefs"--among whom were the old warrior and the old statesman of their
+nation, Oconostota and Attakullakulla--came to the treaty grounds and
+were received by Henderson and his associates and several hundred white
+men who were eager for a chance to settle on new lands. Though Boone was
+now on his way into Kentucky for the Transylvania Company, other border
+leaders of renown or with their fame still to win were present, and
+among them James Robertson, of serious mien, and that blond gay knight
+in buckskin, John Sevier.
+
+It is a dramatic picture we evolve for ourselves from the meager
+narratives of this event--a mass of painted Indians moving through the
+sycamores by the bright water, to come presently into a tense, immobile
+semicircle before the large group of armed frontiersmen seated or
+standing about Richard Henderson, the man with the imperial dream, the
+ready speaker whose flashing eyes and glowing oratory won the hearts
+of all who came under their sway. What though the Cherokee title be a
+flimsy one at best and the price offered for it a bagatelle! The spirit
+of Forward March! is there in that great canvas framed by forest and
+sky. The somber note that tones its lustrous color, as by a sweep of the
+brush, is the figure of the Chickamaugan chief, Dragging Canoe, warrior
+and seer and hater of white men, who urges his tribesmen against the
+sale and, when they will not hearken, springs from their midst into the
+clear space before Henderson and his band of pioneers and, pointing with
+uplifted arm, warns them that a dark cloud hangs over the land the white
+man covets which to the red man has long been a bloody ground. *
+
+
+     * This utterance of Dragging Canoe's is generally supposed to be
+the origin of the descriptive phrase applied to Kentucky--"the Dark and
+Bloody Ground." See Roosevelt, "The Winning of the West," vol. I, p.229.
+
+
+The purchase, finally consummated, included the country lying between
+the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers almost all the present State of
+Kentucky, with the adjacent land watered by the Cumberland River and its
+tributaries, except certain lands previously leased by the Indians to
+the Watauga Colony. The tract comprised about twenty million acres and
+extended into Tennessee.
+
+Daniel Boone's work was to cut out a road for the wagons of the
+Transylvania Company's colonists to pass over. This was to be done by
+slashing away the briers and underbrush hedging the narrow Warriors'
+Path that made a direct northward line from Cumberland Gap to the
+Ohio bank, opposite the mouth of the Scioto River. Just prior to the
+conference Boone and "thirty guns" had set forth from the Holston to
+prepare the road and to build a fort on whatever site he should select.
+
+By April, Henderson and his first group of tenants were on the trail. In
+Powell's Valley they came up with a party of Virginians Kentucky bound,
+led by Benjamin Logan; and the two bands joined together for the march.
+They had not gone far when they heard disquieting news. After leaving
+Martin's Station, at the gates of his new domain, Henderson received a
+letter from Boone telling of an attack by Indians, in which two of his
+men had been killed, but "we stood on the ground and guarded our baggage
+till the day and lost nothing." * These tidings, indicating that despite
+treaties and sales, the savages were again on the warpath, might well
+alarm Henderson's colonists. While they halted, some indecisive, others
+frankly for retreat, there appeared a company of men making all haste
+out of Kentucky because of Indian unrest. Six of these Henderson
+persuaded to turn again and go in with him; but this addition hardly
+offset the loss of those members of his party who thought it too
+perilous to proceed. Henderson's own courage did not falter. He had
+staked his all on this stupendous venture and for him it was forward
+to wealth and glory or retreat into poverty and eclipse. Boone, in the
+heart of the danger, was making the same stand. "If we give way to them
+[the Indians] now," he wrote, "it will ever be the case."
+
+
+     * Bogart, "Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky." p. 121.
+
+
+Signs of discord other than Indian opposition met Henderson as he
+resolutely pushed on. His conversations with some of the fugitives from
+Kentucky disclosed the first indications of the storm that was to blow
+away the empire he was going in to found. He told them that the claims
+they had staked in Kentucky would not hold good with the Transylvania
+Company. Whereupon James McAfee, who was leading a group of returning
+men, stated his opinion that the Transylvania Company's claim would not
+hold good with Virginia. After the parley, three of McAfee's brothers
+turned back and went with Henderson's party, but whether with intent
+to join his colony or to make good their own claims is not apparent.
+Benjamin Logan continued amicably with Henderson on the march but
+did not recognize him as Lord Proprietor of Kentucky. He left the
+Transylvania caravan shortly after entering the territory, branched off
+in the direction of Harrodsburg, and founded St. Asaph's Station, in the
+present Lincoln County, independently of Henderson though the site lay
+within Henderson's purchase.
+
+Notwithstanding delays and apprehensions, Henderson and his
+colonists finally reached Boone's Fort, which Daniel and his "thirty
+guns"--lacking two since the Indian encounter--had erected at the mouth
+of Otter Creek.
+
+An attractive buoyancy of temperament is revealed in Henderson's
+description in his journal of a giant elm with tall straight trunk and
+even foliage that shaded a space of one hundred feet. Instantly he chose
+this "divine elm" as the council chamber of Transylvania. Under its
+leafage he read the constitution of the new colony. It would be too
+great a stretch of fancy to call it a democratic document, for it was
+not that, except in deft phrases. Power was certainly declared to be
+vested in the people; but the substance of power remained in the hands
+of the Proprietors.
+
+Terms for land grants were generous enough in the beginning, although
+Henderson made the fatal mistake of demanding quitrents--one of the
+causes of dissatisfaction which had led to the Regulators' rising
+in North Carolina. In September he augmented this error by more
+than doubling the price of land, adding a fee of eight shillings for
+surveying, and reserving to the Proprietors one-half of all gold,
+silver, lead, and sulphur found on the land. No land near sulphur
+springs or showing evidences of metals was to be granted to settlers.
+Moreover, at the Company's store the prices charged for lead were said
+to be too high--lead being necessary for hunting, and hunting being the
+only means of procuring food--while the wages of labor, as fixed by the
+Company, were too low. These terms bore too heavily on poor men who were
+risking their lives in the colony.
+
+Hence newcomers passed by Boonesborough, as the Transylvania settlement
+was presently called, and went elsewhere. They settled on Henderson's
+land but refused his terms. They joined in their sympathies with James
+Harrod, who, having established Harrodsburg in the previous year at the
+invitation of Virginia, was not in the humor to acknowledge Henderson's
+claim or to pay him tribute. All were willing to combine with the
+Transylvania Company for defense, and to enforce law they would unite
+in bonds of brotherhood in Kentucky, even as they had been one with each
+other on the earlier frontier now left behind them. But they would call
+no man master; they had done with feudalism. That Henderson should not
+have foreseen this, especially after the upheaval in North Carolina,
+proves him, in spite of all his brilliant gifts, to have been a man out
+of touch with the spirit of the time.
+
+The war of the Revolution broke forth and the Indians descended upon the
+Kentucky stations. Defense was the one problem in all minds, and defense
+required powder and lead in plenty. The Transylvania Company was not
+able to provide the means of defense against the hordes of savages whom
+Henry Hamilton, the British Governor at Detroit, was sending to make
+war on the frontiers. Practical men like Harrod and George Rogers
+Clark--who, if not a practical man in his own interests, was a most
+practical soldier--saw that unification of interests within the
+territory with the backing of either Virginia or Congress was necessary.
+Clark personally would have preferred to see the settlers combine as
+a freemen's state. It was plain that they would not combine and
+stake their lives as a unit to hold Kentucky for the benefit of the
+Transylvania Company, whose authority some of the most prominent men in
+the territory had refused to recognize. The Proprietary of Transylvania
+could continue to exist only to the danger of every life in Kentucky.
+
+While the Proprietors sent a delegate to the Continental Congress to win
+official recognition for Transylvania, eighty-four men at Harrodsburg
+drew up a petition addressed to Virginia stating their doubts of the
+legality of Henderson's title and requesting Virginia to assert her
+authority according to the stipulations of her charter. That defense was
+the primary and essential motive of the Harrodsburg Remonstrance seems
+plain, for when George Rogers Clark set off on foot with one companion
+to lay the document before the Virginian authorities, he also went to
+plead for a load of powder. In his account of that hazardous journey,
+as a matter of fact, he makes scant reference to Transylvania, except to
+say that the greed of the Proprietors would soon bring the colony to its
+end, but shows that his mind was seldom off the powder. It is a detail
+of history that the Continental Congress refused to seat the delegate
+from Transylvania. Henderson himself went to Virginia to make the fight
+for his land before the Assembly. *
+
+
+     * In 1778 Virginia disallowed Henderson's title but granted him
+two hundred thousand acres between the Green and Kentucky rivers for his
+trouble and expense in opening up the country.
+
+
+The magnetic center of Boonesborough's life was the lovable and
+unassuming Daniel Boone. Soon after the building of the fort Daniel had
+brought in his wife and family. He used often to state with a mild pride
+that his wife and daughters were the first white women to stand on
+the banks of the Kentucky River. That pride had not been unmixed with
+anxiety; his daughter Jemima and two daughters of his friend, Richard
+Galloway, while boating on the river had been captured by Shawanoes and
+carried off. Boone, accompanied by the girls' lovers and by John Floyd
+(eager to repay his debt of life-saving to Boone) had pursued them,
+tracing the way the captors had taken by broken twigs and scraps of
+dress goods which one of the girls had contrived to leave in their path,
+had come on the Indians unawares, killed them, and recovered the three
+girls unhurt.
+
+In the summer of 1776, Virginia took official note of "Captain Boone of
+Boonesborough," for she sent him a small supply of powder. The men
+of the little colony, which had begun so pretentiously with its
+constitution and assembly, were now obliged to put all other plans aside
+and to concentrate on the question of food and defense. There was a
+dangerous scarcity of powder and lead. The nearest points at which
+these necessaries could be procured were the Watauga and Holston River
+settlements, which were themselves none too well stocked. Harrod and
+Logan, some time in 1777, reached the Watauga fort with three or four
+packhorses and filled their packs from Sevier's store; but, as they
+neared home, they were detected by red scouts and Logan was badly
+wounded before he and Harrod were able to drive their precious load
+safely through the gates at Harrodsburg. In the autumn of 1777, Clark,
+with a boatload of ammunition, reached Maysville on the Ohio, having
+successfully run the gauntlet between banks in possession of the foe. He
+had wrested the powder and lead from the Virginia Council by threats
+to the effect that if Virginia was so willing to lose Kentucky--for of
+course "a country not worth defending is not worth claiming"--he and his
+fellows were quite ready to take Kentucky for themselves and to hold it
+with their swords against all comers, Virginia included. By even such
+cogent reasoning had he convinced the Council--which had tried to hedge
+by expressing doubts that Virginia would receive the Kentucky settlers
+as "citizens of the State"--that it would be cheaper to give him the
+powder.
+
+Because so many settlers had fled and the others had come closer
+together for their common good, Harrodsburg and Boonesborough were now
+the only occupied posts in Kentucky. Other settlements, once, thriving,
+were abandoned; and, under the terror, the Wild reclaimed them. In
+April, 1777, Boonesborough underwent its first siege. Boone, leading a
+sortie, was shot and he fell with a shattered ankle. An Indian rushed
+upon him and was swinging the tomahawk over him when Simon Kenton, giant
+frontiersman and hero of many daring deeds, rushed forward, shot the
+Indian, threw Boone across his back, and fought his way desperately
+to safety. It was some months ere Boone was his nimble self again. But
+though he could not "stand up to the guns," he directed all operations
+from his cabin.
+
+The next year Boone was ready for new ventures growing from the
+settlers' needs. Salt was necessary to preserve meat through the summer.
+Accordingly Boone and twenty-seven men went up to the Blue Licks in
+February, 1778, to replenish their supply by the simple process of
+boiling the salt water of the Licks till the saline particles adhered to
+the kettles. Boone was returning alone, with a pack-horse load of salt
+and game, when a blinding snowstorm overtook him and hid from view four
+stealthy Shawanoes on his trail. He was seized and carried to a camp of
+120 warriors led by the French Canadian, Dequindre, and James and George
+Girty, two white renegades. Among the Indians were some of those who had
+captured him on his first exploring trip through Kentucky and whom he
+had twice given the slip. Their hilarity was unbounded. Boone quickly
+learned that this band was on its way to surprise Boonesborough. It was
+a season when Indian attacks were not expected; nearly threescore of the
+men were at the salt spring and, to make matters worse, the walls of the
+new fort where the settlers and their families had gathered were as yet
+completed on only three sides. Boonesborough was, in short, well-nigh
+defenseless. To turn the Indians from their purpose, Boone conceived the
+desperate scheme of offering to lead them to the salt makers' camp with
+the assurance that he and his companions were willing to join the tribe.
+He understood Indians well enough to feel sure that once possessed of
+nearly thirty prisoners, the Shawanoes would not trouble further about
+Boonesborough but would hasten to make a triumphal entry into their own
+towns. That some, perhaps all, of the white men would assuredly die,
+he knew well; but it was the only way to save the women and children in
+Boonesborough. In spite of Dequindre and the Girtys, who were leading a
+military expedition for the reduction of a fort, the Shawanoes fell
+in with the suggestion. When they had taken their prisoners, the more
+bloodthirsty warriors in the band wanted to tomahawk them all on the
+spot. By his diplomatic discourse, however, Boone dissuaded them, for
+the time being at least, and the whole company set off for the towns on
+the Little Miami.
+
+The weather became severe, very little game crossed their route, and for
+days they subsisted on slippery elm bark. The lovers of blood did not
+hold back their scalping knives and several of the prisoners perished;
+but Black Fish, the chief then of most power in Shawanoe councils,
+adopted Boone as his son, and gave him the name of Sheltowee, or Big
+Turtle. Though watched zealously to prevent escape, Big Turtle was
+treated with every consideration and honor; and, as we would say today,
+he played the game. He entered into the Indian life with apparent zest,
+took part in hunts and sports and the races and shooting matches in
+which the Indians delighted, but he was always careful not to outrun or
+outshoot his opponents. Black Fish took him to Detroit when some of the
+tribe escorted the remainder of the prisoners to the British post. There
+he met Governor Hamilton and, in the hope of obtaining his liberty,
+he led that dignitary to believe that he and the other people of
+Boonesborough were eager to move to Detroit and take refuge under the
+British flag. * It is said that Boone always carried in a wallet round
+his neck the King's commission given him in Dunmore's War; and that
+he exhibited it to Hamilton to bear out his story. Hamilton sought to
+ransom him from the Indians, but Black Fish would not surrender his
+new son. The Governor gave Boone a pony, with saddle and trappings, and
+other presents, including trinkets to be used in procuring his needs and
+possibly his liberty from the Shawanoes.
+
+
+     * So well did Boone play his part that he aroused suspicion even
+in those who knew him best. After his return to Boonesborough his old
+friend, Calloway, formally accused him of treachery on two counts: that
+Boone had betrayed the salt makers to the Indians and had planned to
+betray Boonesborough to the British. Boone was tried and acquitted. His
+simple explanation of his acts satisfied the court-martial and made him
+a greater hero than ever among the frontier folk.
+
+
+Black Fish then took his son home to Chillicothe. Here Boone found
+Delawares and Mingos assembling with the main body of the Shawanoe
+warriors. The war belt was being carried through the Ohio country. Again
+Boonesborough and Harrodsburg were to be the first settlements attacked.
+To escape and give warning was now the one purpose that obsessed Boone.
+He redoubled his efforts to throw the Indians off their guard. He sang
+and whistled blithely about the camp at the mouth of the Scioto River,
+whither he had accompanied his Indian father to help in the salt
+boiling. In short, he seemed so very happy that one day Black Fish took
+his eye off him for a few moments to watch the passing of a flock of
+turkeys. Big Turtle passed with the flock, leaving no trace. To his
+lamenting parent it must have seemed as though he had vanished into the
+air. Daniel crossed the Ohio and ran the 160 miles to Boonesborough in
+four days, during which time he had only one meal, from a buffalo he
+shot at the Blue Licks. When he reached the fort after an absence of
+nearly five months, he found that his wife had given him up for dead and
+had returned to the Yadkin.
+
+Boone now began with all speed to direct preparations to withstand a
+siege. Owing to the Indian's leisurely system of councils and ceremonies
+before taking the warpath, it was not until the first week in September
+that Black Fish's painted warriors, with some Frenchmen under Dequindre,
+appeared before Boonesborough. Nine days the siege lasted and was the
+longest in border history. Dequindre, seeing that the fort might not be
+taken, resorted to trickery. He requested Boone and a few of his men
+to come out for a parley, saying that his orders from Hamilton were to
+protect the lives of the Americans as far as possible. Boone's friend,
+Calloway, urged against acceptance of the apparently benign proposal
+which was made, so Dequindre averred, for "bienfaisance et humanite."
+But the words were the words of a white man, and Boone hearkened to
+them. With eight of the garrison he went out to the parley. After a long
+talk in which good will was expressed on both sides, it was suggested
+by Black Fish that they all shake hands and, as there were so many more
+Indians than white men, two Indians should, of course, shake hands with
+one white man, each grasping one of his hands. The moment that their
+hands gripped, the trick was clear, for the Indians exerted their
+strength to drag off the white men. Desperate scuffling ensued in
+which the whites with difficulty freed themselves and ran for the fort.
+Calloway had prepared for emergencies. The pursuing Indians were met
+with a deadly fire. After a defeated attempt to mine the fort the enemy
+withdrew.
+
+The successful defense of Boonesborough was an achievement of national
+importance, for had Boonesborough fallen, Harrodsburg alone could not
+have stood. The Indians under the British would have overrun Kentucky;
+and George Rogers Clark--whose base for his Illinois operations was
+the Kentucky forts--could not have made the campaigns which wrested the
+Northwest from the control of Great Britain.
+
+Again Virginia took official note of Captain Boone when in 1779 the
+Legislature established Boonesborough "a town for the reception of
+traders" and appointed Boone himself one of the trustees to attend to
+the sale and registration of lots. An odd office that was for Daniel,
+who never learned to attend to the registration of his own; he declined
+it. His name appears again, however, a little later when Virginia made
+the whole of Kentucky one of her counties with the following officers:
+Colonel David Robinson, County Lieutenant; George Rogers Clark, Anthony
+Bledsoe, and John Bowman, Majors; Daniel Boone, James Harrod, Benjamin
+Logan, and John Todd, Captains.
+
+
+Boonesborough's successful resistance caused land speculators as well as
+prospective settlers to take heart of grace. Parties made their way to
+Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and even to the Falls of the Ohio, where
+Clark's fort and blockhouses now stood. In the summer of 1779 Clark had
+erected on the Kentucky side of the river a large fort which became the
+nucleus of the town of Louisville. Here, while he was eating his heart
+out with impatience for money and men to enable him to march to the
+attack of Detroit, as he had planned, he amused himself by drawing up
+plans for a city. He laid out private sections and public parks and
+contemplated the bringing in of families only to inhabit his city, for,
+oddly enough, he who never married was going to make short shift of mere
+bachelors in his City Beautiful. Between pen scratches, no doubt, he
+looked out frequently upon the river to descry if possible a boatload of
+ammunition or the banners of the troops he had been promised.
+
+When neither appeared, he gave up the idea of Detroit and set about
+erecting defenses on the southern border, for the Choctaws and
+Cherokees, united under a white leader named Colbert, were threatening
+Kentucky by way of the Mississippi. He built in 1780 Fort Jefferson in
+what is now Ballard County, and had barely completed the new post and
+garrisoned it with about thirty men when it was besieged by Colbert
+and his savages. The Indians, assaulting by night, were lured into a
+position directly before a cannon which poured lead into a mass of them.
+The remainder fled in terror from the vicinity of the fort; but Colbert
+succeeded in rallying them and was returning to the attack when he
+suddenly encountered Clark with a company of men and was forced to
+abandon his enterprise.
+
+Clark knew that the Ohio Indians would come down on the settlements
+again during the summer and that to meet their onslaughts every man in
+Kentucky would be required. He learned that there was a new influx of
+land seekers over the Wilderness Road and that speculators were doing
+a thriving business in Harrodsburg; so, leaving his company to protect
+Fort Jefferson, he took two men with him and started across the wilds on
+foot for Harrodsburg. To evade the notice of the Indian bands which were
+moving about the country the three stripped and painted themselves as
+warriors and donned the feathered headdress. So successful was their
+disguise that they were fired on by a party of surveyors near the
+outskirts of Harrodsburg.
+
+The records do not state what were the sensations of certain speculators
+in a land office in Harrodsburg when a blue-eyed savage in a war bonnet
+sprang through the doorway and, with uplifted weapon, declared the
+office closed; but we get a hint of the power of Clark's personality
+and of his genius for dominating men from the terse report that he
+"enrolled" the speculators. He was informed that another party of men,
+more nervous than these, was now on its way out of Kentucky. In haste he
+dispatched a dozen frontiersmen to cut the party off at Crab Orchard and
+take away the gun of every man who refused to turn back and do his bit
+for Kentucky. To Clark a man was a gun, and he meant that every gun
+should do its duty.
+
+The leaders and pioneers of the Dark and Bloody Ground were now
+warriors, all under Clark's command, while for two years longer the Red
+Terror ranged Kentucky, falling with savage force now here, now there.
+In the first battle of 1780, at the Blue Licks, Daniel's brother, Edward
+Boone, was killed and scalped. Later on in the war his second son,
+Israel, suffered a like fate. The toll of life among the settlers was
+heavy. Many of the best-known border leaders were slain. Food and
+powder often ran short. Corn might be planted, but whether it would be
+harvested or not the planters never knew; and the hunter's rifle shot,
+necessary though it was, proved only too often an invitation to the
+lurking foe. But sometimes, through all the dangers of forest and trail,
+Daniel Boone slipped away silently to Harrodsburg to confer with Clark;
+or Clark himself, in the Indian guise that suited the wild man in him
+not ill, made his way to and from the garrisons which looked to him for
+everything.
+
+Twice Clark gathered together the "guns" of Kentucky and, marching north
+into the enemy's country, swept down upon the Indian towns of Piqua and
+Chillicothe and razed them. In 1782, in the second of these enterprises,
+his cousin, Joseph Rogers, who had been taken prisoner and adopted by
+the Indians and then wore Indian garb, was shot down by one of Clark's
+men. On this expedition Boone and Harrod are said to have accompanied
+Clark.
+
+The ever present terror and horror of those days, especially of the two
+years preceding this expedition, are vividly suggested by the quaint
+remark of an old woman who had lived through them, as recorded for us by
+a traveler. The most beautiful sight she had seen in Kentucky, she said,
+was a young man dying a natural death in his bed. Dead but unmarred by
+hatchet or scalping knife, he was so rare and comely a picture that the
+women of the post sat up all night looking at him.
+
+
+But, we ask, what golden emoluments were showered by a grateful country
+on the men who thus held the land through those years of want and war,
+and saved an empire for the Union? What practical recognition was there
+of these brave and unselfish men who daily risked their lives and faced
+the stealth and cruelty lurking in the wilderness ways? There is meager
+eloquence in the records. Here, for instance, is a letter from George
+Rogers Clark to the Governor of Virginia, dated May 27, 1783:
+
+"Sir. Nothing but necessity could induce me to make the following
+request to Your Excellency, which is to grant me a small sum of money on
+account; as I can assure you, Sir, that I am exceedingly distressed for
+the want of necessary clothing etc and don't know any channel through
+which I could procure any except of the Executive. The State I believe
+will fall considerably in my debt. Any supplies which Your Excellency
+favors me with might be deducted out of my accounts." *
+
+
+     * "Calendar of Virginia State Papers," vol. III, p. 487.
+
+
+Clark had spent all his own substance and all else he could beg,
+borrow--or appropriate--in the conquest of Illinois and the defense of
+Kentucky. His only reward from Virginia was a grant of land from which
+he realized nothing, and dismissal from her service when she needed him
+no longer.
+
+All that Clark had asked for himself was a commission in the Continental
+Army. This was denied him, as it appears now, not through his own
+errors, which had not at that time taken hold on him, but through the
+influence of powerful enemies. It is said that both Spain and England,
+seeing a great soldier without service for his sword, made him offers,
+which he refused. As long as any acreage remained to him on which to
+raise money, he continued to pay the debts he had contracted to finance
+his expeditions, and in this course he had the assistance of his
+youngest brother, William, to whom he assigned his Indiana grant.
+
+His health impaired by hardship and exposure and his heart broken by
+his country's indifference, Clark sank into alcoholic excesses. In
+his sixtieth year, just six years before his death, and when he was a
+helpless paralytic, he was granted a pension of four hundred dollars.
+There is a ring of bitter irony in the words with which he accepted
+the sword sent him by Virginia in his crippled old age: "When Virginia
+needed a sword I gave her one." He died near Louisville on February 13,
+1818.
+
+Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792. But even before Kentucky
+became a State her affairs, particularly as to land, were arranged,
+let us say, on a practical business basis. Then it was discovered that
+Daniel Boone had no legal claim to any foot of ground in Kentucky.
+Daniel owned nothing but the clothes he wore; and for those--as well as
+for much powder, lead, food, and such trifles--he was heavily in debt.
+
+So, in 1788, Daniel Boone put the list of his debts in his wallet,
+gathered his wife and his younger sons about him, and, shouldering his
+hunter's rifle, once more turned towards the wilds. The country of the
+Great Kanawha in West Virginia was still a wilderness, and a hunter and
+trapper might, in some years, earn enough to pay his debts. For others,
+now, the paths he had hewn and made safe; for Boone once more the
+wilderness road.
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII. Tennessee
+
+Indian law, tradition, and even superstition had shaped the conditions
+which the pioneers faced when they crossed the mountains. This savage
+inheritance had decreed that Kentucky should be a dark and bloody
+ground, fostering no life but that of four-footed beasts, its fertile
+sod never to stir with the green push of the corn. And so the white men
+who went into Kentucky to build and to plant went as warriors go, and
+for every cabin they erected they battled as warriors to hold a fort. In
+the first years they planted little corn and reaped less, for it may be
+said that their rifles were never out of their hands. We have seen
+how stations were built and abandoned until but two stood. Untiring
+vigilance and ceaseless warfare were the price paid by the first
+Kentuckians ere they turned the Indian's place of desolation and death
+into a land productive and a living habitation.
+
+Herein lies the difference, slight apparently, yet significant, between
+the first Kentucky and the first Tennessee * colonies. Within the memory
+of the Indians only one tribe had ever attempted to make their home in
+Kentucky--a tribe of the fighting Shawanoes--and they had been terribly
+chastised for their temerity. But Tennessee was the home of the
+Cherokees, and at Chickasaw Bluffs (Memphis) began the southward trail
+to the principal towns of the Chickasaws. By the red man's fiat, then,
+human life might abide in Tennessee, though not in Kentucky, and it
+followed that in seasons of peace the frontiersmen might settle in
+Tennessee. So it was that as early as 1757, before the great Cherokee
+war, a company of Virginians under Andrew Lewis had, on an invitation
+from the Indians, erected Fort Loudon near Great Telliko, the Cherokees'
+principal town, and that, after the treaty of peace in 1761, Waddell and
+his rangers of North Carolina had erected a fort on the Holston.
+
+
+     * Tennessee. The name, Ten-as-se, appears on Adair's map as one
+of the old Cherokee towns. Apparently neither the meaning nor the reason
+why the colonists called both state and river by this name has been
+handed down to us.
+
+
+Though Fort Loudon had fallen tragically during the war, and though
+Waddell's fort had been abandoned, neither was without influence in the
+colonization of Tennessee, for some of the men who built these forts
+drifted back a year or two later and setup the first cabins on the
+Holston. These earliest settlements, thin and scattered, did
+not survive; but in 1768 the same settlers or others of their
+kind--discharged militiamen from Back Country regiments--once more made
+homes on the Holston. They were joined by a few families from near the
+present Raleigh, North Carolina, who had despaired of seeing justice
+done to the tenants on the mismanaged estates of Lord Granville. About
+the same time there was erected the first cabin on the Watauga River, as
+is generally believed, by a man of the name of William Bean (or Been),
+hunter and frontier soldier from Pittsylvania County, Virginia. This
+man, who had hunted on the Watauga with Daniel Boone in 1760, chose
+as the site of his dwelling the place of the old hunting camp near the
+mouth of Boone's Creek. He soon began to have neighbors.
+
+
+Meanwhile the Regulation Movement stirred the Back Country of both the
+Carolinas. In 1768, the year in which William Bean built his cabin
+on the bank of the Watauga, five hundred armed Regulators in North
+Carolina, aroused by irregularities in the conduct of public office,
+gathered to assert their displeasure, but dispersed peaceably on receipt
+of word from Governor Tryon that he had ordered the prosecution of any
+officer found guilty of extortion. Edmund Fanning, the most hated of
+Lord Granville's agents, though convicted, escaped punishment. Enraged
+at this miscarriage of justice, the Regulators began a system of
+terrorization by taking possession of the court, presided over by
+Richard Henderson. The judge himself was obliged to slip out by a
+back way to avoid personal injury. The Regulators burned his house and
+stable. They meted out mob treatment likewise to William Hooper, later
+one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
+
+Two elements, with antithetical aims, had been at work in the
+Regulation; and the unfortunate failure of justice in the case of
+Fanning had given the corrupt element its opportunity to seize control.
+In the petitions addressed to Governor Tryon by the leaders of the
+movement in its earlier stages the aims of liberty-loving thinkers are
+traceable. It is worthy of note that they included in their demands
+articles which are now constitutional. They desired that "suffrage be
+given by ticket and ballot"; that the mode of taxation be altered,
+and each person be taxed in proportion to the profits arising from his
+estate; that judges and clerks be given salaries instead of perquisites
+and fees. They likewise petitioned for repeal of the act prohibiting
+dissenting ministers from celebrating the rites of matrimony. The
+establishment of these reforms, the petitioners of the Regulation
+concluded, would "conciliate" their minds to "every just measure of
+government, and would make the laws what the Constitution ever designed
+they should be, their protection and not their bane." Herein clearly
+enough we can discern the thought and the phraseology of the Ulster
+Presbyterians.
+
+But a change took place in both leaders and methods. During the
+Regulators' career of violence they were under the sway of an agitator
+named Hermon Husband. This demagogue was reported to have been expelled
+from the Quaker Society for cause; it is on record that he was expelled
+from the North Carolina Assembly because a vicious anonymous letter was
+traced to him. He deserted his dupes just before the shots cracked at
+Alamance Creek and fled from the colony. He was afterwards apprehended
+in Pennsylvania for complicity in the Whisky Insurrection.
+
+Four of the leading Presbyterian ministers of the Back Country issued a
+letter in condemnation of the Regulators. One of these ministers was the
+famous David Caldwell, son-in-law of the Reverend Alexander Craighead,
+and a man who knew the difference between liberty and license and who
+proved himself the bravest of patriots in the War of Independence. The
+records of the time contain sworn testimony against the Regulators
+by Waightstill Avery, a signer of the Mecklenburg Resolves, who later
+presided honorably over courts in the western circuit of Tennessee; and
+there is evidence indicating Jacobite and French intrigue. That Governor
+Tryon recognized a hidden hand at work seems clearly revealed in his
+proclamation addressed to those "whose understandings have been run
+away with and whose passions have been led in captivity by some evil
+designing men who, actuated by cowardice and a sense of that Publick
+Justice which is due to their Crimes, have obscured themselves from
+Publick view." What the Assembly thought of the Regulators was expressed
+in 1770 in a drastic bill which so shocked the authorities in England
+that instructions were sent forbidding any Governor to approve such a
+bill in future, declaring it "a disgrace to the British Statute Books."
+
+On May 16, 1771, some two thousand Regulators were precipitated by
+Husband into the Battle of Alamance, which took place in a district
+settled largely by a rough and ignorant type of Germans, many of whom
+Husband had lured to swell his mob. Opposed to him, were eleven hundred
+of Governor Tryon's troops, officered by such patriots as Griffith
+Rutherford, Hugh Waddell, and Francis Nash. During an hour's engagement
+about twenty Regulators were killed, while the Governor's troops had
+nine killed and sixty-one wounded. Six of the leaders were hanged. The
+rest took the oath of allegiance which Tryon administered.
+
+It has been said about the Regulators that they were not cast down by
+their defeat at Alamance but "like the mammoth, they shook the bolt from
+their brow and crossed the mountains," but such flowery phrases do
+not seem to have been inspired by facts. Nor do the records show that
+"fifteen hundred Regulators" arrived at Watauga in 1771, as has also
+been stated. Nor are the names of the leaders of the Regulation to be
+found in the list of signatures affixed to the one "state paper" of
+Watauga which was preserved and written into historic annals. Nor yet do
+those names appear on the roster of the Watauga and Holston men who,
+in 1774, fought with Shelby under Andrew Lewis in the Battle of Point
+Pleasant. The Boones and the Bryans, the Robertsons, the Seviers, the
+Shelbys, the men who opened up the West and shaped the destiny of its
+inhabitants, were genuine freemen, with a sense of law and order as
+inseparable from liberty. They would follow a Washington but not a
+Hermon Husband.
+
+James Hunter, whose signature leads on all Regulation manifestoes just
+prior to the Battle of Alamance, was a sycophant of Husband, to whom he
+addressed fulsome letters; and in the real battle for democracy--the
+War of Independence--he was a Tory. The Colonial Records show that those
+who, "like the mammoth," shook from them the ethical restraints which
+make man superior to the giant beast, and who later bolted into the
+mountains, contributed chiefly the lawlessness that harassed the new
+settlements. They were the banditti and, in 1776, the Tories of the
+western hills; they pillaged the homes of the men who were fighting for
+the democratic ideal.
+
+It was not the Regulation Movement which turned westward the makers of
+the Old Southwest, but the free and enterprising spirit of the age. It
+was emphatically an age of doers; and if men who felt the constructive
+urge in them might not lay hold on conditions where they were and
+reshape them, then they must go forward seeking that environment which
+would give their genius its opportunity.
+
+Of such adventurous spirits was James Robertson, a Virginian born of
+Ulster Scot parentage, and a resident of (the present) Wake County,
+North Carolina, since his boyhood. Robertson was twenty-eight years old
+when, in 1770, he rode over the hills to Watauga. We can imagine him as
+he was then, for the portrait taken much later in life shows the type
+of face that does not change. It is a high type combining the best
+qualities of his race. Intelligence, strength of purpose, fortitude,
+and moral power are there; they impress us at the first glance. At
+twenty-eight he must have been a serious young man, little given to
+laughter; indeed, spontaneity is perhaps the only good trait we miss in
+studying his face. He was a thinker who had not yet found his purpose--a
+thinker in leash, for at this time James Robertson could neither read
+nor write.
+
+At Watauga, Robertson lived for a while in the cabin of a man named
+Honeycut. He chose land for himself and, in accordance with the custom
+of the time, sealed his right to it by planting corn. He remained to
+harvest his first crop and then set off to gather his family and some of
+his friends together and escort them to the new country. But on the way
+he missed the trail and wandered for a fortnight in the mountains. The
+heavy rains ruined his powder so that he could not hunt; for food he had
+only berries and nuts. At one place, where steep bluffs opposed him, he
+was obliged to abandon his horse and scale the mountain side on foot. He
+was in extremity when he chanced upon two huntsmen who gave him food and
+set him on the trail. If this experience proves his lack of the hunter's
+instinct and the woodsman's resourcefulness which Boone possessed, it
+proves also his special qualities of perseverance and endurance which
+were to reach their zenith in his successful struggle to colonize and
+hold western Tennessee. He returned to Watauga in the following spring
+(1771) with his family and a small group of colonists. Robertson's wife
+was an educated woman and under her instruction he now began to study.
+
+Next year a young Virginian from the Shenandoah Valley rode on down
+Holston Valley on a hunting and exploring trip, and loitered at Watauga.
+Here he found not only a new settlement but an independent government
+in the making; and forthwith he determined to have a part in both.
+This young Virginian had already shown the inclination of a political
+colonist, for in the Shenandoah Valley he had, at the age of nineteen,
+laid out the town of New Market (which exists to this day) and had
+directed its municipal affairs and invited and fostered its clergy. This
+young Virginian--born on September 23, 1745, and so in 1772 twenty-seven
+years of age--was John Sevier, that John Sevier whose monument now
+towers from its site in Knoxville to testify of both the wild and the
+great deeds of old Tennessee's beloved knight. Like Robertson, Sevier
+hastened home and removed his whole family, including his wife and
+children, his parents and his brothers and sisters, to this new haven of
+freedom at Watauga.
+
+The friendship formed between Robertson and Sevier in these first years
+of their work together was never broken, yet two more opposite types
+could hardly have been brought together. Robertson was a man of humble
+origin, unlettered, not a dour Scot but a solemn one. Sevier was
+cavalier as well as frontiersman. On his father's side he was of the
+patrician family of Xavier in France. His progenitors, having become
+Huguenots, had taken refuge in England, where the name Xavier was
+finally changed to Sevier. John Sevier's mother was an Englishwoman.
+Some years before his birth his parents had emigrated to the Shenandoah
+Valley. Thus it happened that John Sevier, who mingled good English
+blood with the blue blood of old France, was born an American and grew
+up a frontier hunter and soldier. He stood about five feet nine from his
+moccasins to his crown of light brown hair. He was well-proportioned and
+as graceful of body as he was hard-muscled and swift. His chin was firm,
+his nose of a Roman cast, his mouth well-shaped, its slightly full lips
+slanting in a smile that would not be repressed. Under the high, finely
+modeled brow, small keen dark blue eyes sparkled with health, with
+intelligence, and with the man's joy in life.
+
+John Sevier indeed cannot be listed as a type; he was individual. There
+is no other character like him in border annals. He was cavalier and
+prince in his leadership of men; he had their homage. Yet he knew how to
+be comrade and brother to the lowliest. He won and held the confidence
+and friendship of the serious-minded Robertson no less than the idolatry
+of the wildest spirits on the frontier throughout the forty-three years
+of the spectacular career which began for him on the day he brought
+his tribe to Watauga. In his time he wore the governor's purple; and
+a portrait painted of him shows how well this descendant of the noble
+Xaviers could fit himself to the dignity and formal habiliments of
+state; Yet in the fringed deerskin of frontier garb, he was fleeter on
+the warpath than the Indians who fled before him; and he could outride
+and outshoot--and, it is said, outswear--the best and the worst of the
+men who followed him. Perhaps the lurking smile on John Sevier's face
+was a flicker of mirth that there should be found any man, red or
+white, with temerity enough to try conclusions with him. None ever did,
+successfully.
+
+The historians of Tennessee state that the Wataugans formed their
+government in 1772 and that Sevier was one of its five commissioners.
+Yet, as Sevier did not settle in Tennessee before 1773, it is possible
+that the Watauga Association was not formed until then. Unhappily the
+written constitution of the little commonwealth was not preserved; but
+it is known that, following the Ulsterman's ideal, manhood suffrage and
+religious independence were two of its provisions. The commissioners
+enlisted a militia and they recorded deeds for land, issued marriage
+licenses, and tried offenders against the law. They believed themselves
+to be within the boundaries of Virginia and therefore adopted the laws
+of that State for their guidance. They had numerous offenders to deal
+with, for men fleeing from debt or from the consequence of crime sought
+the new settlements just across the mountains as a safe and adjacent
+harbor. The attempt of these men to pursue their lawlessness in Watauga
+was one reason why the Wataugans organized a government.
+
+When the line was run between Virginia and North Carolina beyond the
+mountains, Watauga was discovered to be south of Virginia's limits
+and hence on Indian lands. This was in conflict with the King's
+Proclamation, and Alexander Cameron, British agent to the Cherokees,
+accordingly ordered the encroaching settlers to depart. The Indians,
+however, desired them to remain. But since it was illegal to purchase
+Indian lands, Robertson negotiated a lease for ten years. In 1775, when
+Henderson made his purchase from the Cherokees, at Sycamore Shoals on
+the Watauga, Robertson and Sevier, who were present at the sale with
+other Watauga commissioners, followed Henderson's example and bought
+outright the lands they desired to include in Watauga's domain. In 1776
+they petitioned North Carolina for "annexation." As they were already
+within North Carolina's bounds, it was recognition rather than
+annexation which they sought. This petition, which is the only Wataugan
+document to survive, is undated but marked as received in August,
+1776. It is in Sevier's handwriting and its style suggests that it was
+composed by him, for in its manner of expression it has much in common
+with many later papers from his pen. That Wataugans were a law-loving
+community and had formed their government for the purpose of making law
+respected is reiterated throughout the document. As showing the quality
+of these first western statemakers, two paragraphs are quoted:
+
+"Finding ourselves on the frontiers, and being apprehensive that
+for want of proper legislature we might become a shelter for such as
+endeavored to defraud their creditors; considering also the necessity of
+recording deeds, wills, and doing other public business; we, by consent
+of the people, formed a court for the purposes above mentioned, taking,
+by desire of our constituents, the Virginia laws for our guide, so
+near as the situation of affairs would permit. This was intended for
+ourselves, and WAS DONE BY CONSENT OF EVERY INDIVIDUAL."
+
+The petition goes on to state that, among their measures for upholding
+law, the Wataugans had enlisted "a company of fine riflemen" and put
+them under command of "Captain James Robertson."
+
+"We... thought proper to station them on our frontiers in defense of the
+common cause, at the expense and risque of our own private fortunes,
+till farther public orders, which we flatter ourselves will give no
+offense.... We pray your mature and deliberate consideration in our
+behalf, that you may annex us to your Province (whether as county,
+district, or other division) in such manner as may enable us to share in
+the glorious cause of Liberty: enforce our laws under authority and in
+every respect become the best members of society; and for ourselves
+and our constituents we hope we may venture to assure you that we shall
+adhere strictly to your determinations, and that nothing will be lacking
+or anything neglected that may add weight (in the civil or military
+establishments) to the glorious cause in which we are now struggling, or
+contribute to the welfare of our own or ages yet to come."
+
+One hundred and thirteen names are signed to the document. In the
+following year (1777) North Carolina erected her overhill territory
+into Washington County. The Governor appointed justices of the peace and
+militia officers who in the following year organized the new county and
+its courts. And so Watauga's independent government, begun in the spirit
+of true liberty, came as lawfully to its end.
+
+But for nearly three years before their political status was thus
+determined, the Wataugans were sharing "in the glorious cause of
+Liberty" by defending their settlements against Indian attacks. While
+the majority of the young Cherokee warriors were among their enemies,
+their chief battles were fought with those from the Chickamaugan towns
+on the Tennessee River, under the leadership of Dragging Canoe. The
+Chickamaugans embraced the more vicious and bloodthirsty Cherokees, with
+a mixture of Creeks and bad whites, who, driven from every law-abiding
+community, had cast in their lot with this tribe. The exact number of
+white thieves and murderers who had found harbor in the Indian towns
+during a score or more of years is not known; but the letters of the
+Indian agents, preserved in the records, would indicate that there were
+a good many of them. They were fit allies for Dragging Canoe; their
+hatred of those from whom their own degeneracy had separated them was
+not less than his.
+
+In July, 1776, John Sevier wrote to the Virginia Committee as follows:
+
+"Dear Gentlemen: Isaac Thomas, William Falling, Jaret Williams and one
+more have this moment come in by making their escape from the Indians
+and say six hundred Indians and whites were to start for this fort and
+intend to drive the country up to New River before they return."
+
+Thus was heralded the beginning of a savage warfare which kept the
+borderers engaged for years.
+
+It has been a tradition of the chroniclers that Isaac Thomas received
+a timely warning from Nancy Ward, a half-caste Cherokee prophetess who
+often showed her good will towards the whites; and that the Indians
+were roused to battle by Alexander Cameron and John Stuart, the British
+agents or superintendents among the overhill tribes. There was a letter
+bearing Cameron's name stating that fifteen hundred savages from the
+Cherokee and Creek nations were to join with British troops landed at
+Pensacola in an expedition against the southern frontier colonies.
+This letter was brought to Watauga at dead of night by a masked man who
+slipped it through a window and rode away. Apparently John Sevier
+did not believe the military information contained in the mysterious
+missive, for he communicated nothing of it to the Virginia Committee.
+In recent years the facts have come to light. This mysterious letter
+and others of a similar tenor bearing forged signatures are cited in a
+report by the British Agent, John Stuart, to his Government. It appears
+that such inflammatory missives had been industriously scattered through
+the back settlements of both Carolinas. There are also letters from
+Stuart to Lord Dartmouth, dated a year earlier, urging that something be
+done immediately to counteract rumors set afloat that the British were
+endeavoring to instigate both the Indians and the negroes to attack the
+Americans.
+
+Now it is, of course, an established fact that both the British and the
+American armies used Indians in the War of Independence, even as both
+together had used them against the French and the Spanish and their
+allied Indians. It was inevitable that the Indians should participate
+in any severe conflict between the whites. They were a numerous and a
+warlike people and, from their point of view, they had more at stake
+than the alien whites who were contesting for control of the red man's
+continent. Both British and Americans have been blamed for "half-hearted
+attempts to keep the Indians neutral." The truth is that each side
+strove to enlist the Indians--to be used, if needed later, as
+warriors. Massacre was no part of this policy, though it may have been
+countenanced by individual officers in both camps. But it is obvious
+that, once the Indians took the warpath, they were to be restrained by
+no power and, no matter under whose nominal command, they would carry on
+warfare by their own methods. *
+
+
+     * "There is little doubt that either side, British or Americans,
+stood ready to enlist the Indians. Already before Boston the Americans
+had had the help of the Stockbridge tribe. Washington found the service
+committed to the practise when he arrived at Cambridge early in July.
+Dunmore had taken the initiative in securing such allies, at least
+is purpose; but the insurgent Virginians had had of late more direct
+contact with the tribes and were now striving to secure them but with
+little success." "The Westward Movement," by Justin Winsor, p. 87.
+
+General Ethan Allen of Vermont, as his letters show, sent emissaries
+into Canada in an endeavor to enlist the French Canadians and the
+Canadian Indians against the British in Canada. See "American Archives,"
+Fourth Series, vol. II, p. 714. The British General Gage wrote to Lord
+Dartmouth from Boston, June 18, 1775: "We need not be tender of calling
+on the Savages as the rebels have shown us the example, by bringing
+as many Indians down against us as they could collect." "American
+Archives." Fourth Series, vol. ii, p. 967.
+
+In a letter to Lord Germain, dated August 23, 1776, John Stuart wrote:
+"Although Mr. Cameron was in constant danger of assassination and the
+Indians were threatened with invasion should they dare to, protect him,
+yet he still found means to prevent their falling on the settlement."
+See North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X, pp. 608 and 763. Proof
+that the British agents had succeeded in keeping the Cherokee neutral
+till the summer of 1776 is found in the instructions, dated the 7th
+of July, to Major Winston from President Rutledge of South Carolina,
+regarding the Cherokees, that they must be forced to give up the British
+agents and "INSTEAD OF REMAINING IN A STATE OF NEUTRALITY with respect
+to British Forces they must take part with us against them." See North
+Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X, p. 658.
+
+
+Whatever may have been the case elsewhere, the attacks on the Watauga
+and Holston settlements were not instigated by British agents. It was
+not Nancy Ward but Henry Stuart, John Stuart's deputy, who sent Isaac
+Thomas to warn the settlers. In their efforts to keep the friendship
+of the red men, the British and the Americans were providing them with
+powder and lead. The Indians had run short of ammunition and, since
+hunting was their only means of livelihood, they must shoot or starve.
+South Carolina sent the Cherokees a large supply of powder and lead
+which was captured en route by Tories. About the same time Henry Stuart
+set out from Pensacola with another consignment from the British. His
+report to Lord Germain of his arrival in the Chickamaugan towns and
+of what took place there just prior to the raids on the Tennessee
+settlements is one of the most illuminating as well as one of the most
+dramatic papers in the collected records of that time. *
+
+
+     * North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X, pp. 763-785.
+
+
+Stuart's first act was secretly to send out Thomas, the trader, to warn
+the settlers of their peril, for a small war party of braves was even
+then concluding the preliminary war ceremonies. The reason for this
+Indian alarm and projected excursion was the fact that the settlers had
+built one fort at least on the Indian lands. Stuart finally persuaded
+the Indians to remain at peace until he could write to the settlers
+stating the grievances and asking for negotiations. The letters were to
+be carried by Thomas on his return.
+
+But no sooner was Thomas on his way again with the letters than there
+arrived a deputation of warriors from the Northern tribes--from "the
+Confederate nations, the Mohawks, Ottawas, Nantucas, Shawanoes and
+Delawares"--fourteen men in all, who entered the council hall of the Old
+Beloved Town of Chota with their faces painted black and the war belt
+carried before them. They said that they had been seventy days on their
+journey. Everywhere along their way they had seen houses and forts
+springing up like, weeds across the green sod of their hunting lands.
+Where once were great herds of deer and buffalo, they had watched
+thousands of men at arms preparing for war. So many now were the white
+warriors and their women and children that the red men had been obliged
+to travel a great way on the other side of the Ohio and to make a detour
+of nearly three hundred miles to avoid being seen. Even on this outlying
+route they had crossed the fresh tracks of a great body of people with
+horses and cattle going still further towards the setting sun. But their
+cries were not to be in vain; for "their fathers, the French" had heard
+them and had promised to aid them if they would now strike as one for
+their lands.
+
+After this preamble the deputy of the Mohawks rose. He said that some
+American people had made war on one of their towns and had seized the
+son of their Great Beloved Man, Sir William Johnson, imprisoned him, and
+put him to a cruel death; this crime demanded a great vengeance and they
+would not cease until they had taken it. One after another the fourteen
+delegates rose and made their "talks" and presented their wampum strings
+to Dragging Canoe. The last to speak was a chief of the Shawanoes. He
+also declared that "their fathers, the French," who had been so long
+dead, were "alive again," that they had supplied them plentifully with
+arms and ammunition and had promised to assist them in driving out the
+Americans and in reclaiming their country. Now all the Northern tribes
+were joined in one for this great purpose; and they themselves were on
+their way to all the Southern tribes and had resolved that, if any tribe
+refused to join, they would fall upon and extirpate that tribe, after
+having overcome the whites. At the conclusion of his oration the
+Shawanoe presented the war belt--nine feet of six-inch wide purple
+wampum spattered with vermilion--to Dragging Canoe, who held it extended
+between his two hands, in silence, and waited. Presently rose a headman
+whose wife had been a member of Sir William Johnson's household. He laid
+his hand on the belt and sang the war song. One by one, then, chiefs
+and warriors rose, laid hold of the great belt and chanted the war
+song. Only the older men, made wise by many defeats, sat still in their
+places, mute and dejected. "After that day every young fellow's face in
+the overhills towns appeared blackened and nothing was now talked of but
+war."
+
+Stuart reports that "all the white men" in the tribe also laid hands
+on the belt. Dragging Canoe then demanded that Cameron and Stuart come
+forward and take hold of the war belt--"which we refused." Despite the
+offense their refusal gave--and it would seem a dangerous time to give
+such offense--Cameron delivered a "strong talk" for peace, warning
+the Cherokees of what must surely be the end of the rashness they
+contemplated. Stuart informed the chief that if the Indians persisted in
+attacking the settlements with out waiting for answers to his letters,
+he would not remain with them any longer or bring them any more
+ammunition. He went to his house and made ready to leave on the
+following day. Early the next morning Dragging Canoe appeared at his
+door and told him that the Indians were now very angry about the letters
+he had written, which could only have put the settlers on their guard;
+and that if any white man attempted to leave the nation "they had
+determined to follow him but NOT TO BRING HIM BACK." Dragging Canoe had
+painted his face black to carry this message. Thomas now returned with
+an answer from "the West Fincastle men," which was so unsatisfactory to
+the tribe that war ceremonies were immediately begun. Stuart and Cameron
+could no longer influence the Indians. "All that could now be done was
+to give them strict charge not to pass the Boundary Line, not to
+injure any of the King's faithful subjects, not to kill any women and
+children"; and to threaten to "stop all ammunition" if they did not obey
+these orders.
+
+
+The major part of the Watauga militia went out to meet the Indians and
+defeated a large advance force at Long Island Flats on the Holston. The
+Watauga fort, where many of the settlers had taken refuge, contained
+forty fighting men under Robertson and Sevier. As Indians usually
+retreated and waited for a while after a defeat, those within the fort
+took it for granted that no immediate attack was to be expected; and the
+women went out at daybreak into the fields to milk the cows. Suddenly
+the war whoop shrilled from the edge of the clearing. Red warriors
+leaped from the green skirting of the forest. The women ran for the
+fort. Quickly the heavy gates swung to and the dropped bar secured them.
+Only then did the watchmen discover that one woman had been shut out.
+She was a young woman nearing her twenties and, if legend has reported
+her truly, "Bonnie Kate Sherrill" was a beauty. Through a porthole
+Sevier saw her running towards the shut gates, dodging and darting, her
+brown hair blowing from the wind of her race for life--and offering
+far too rich a prize to the yelling fiends who dashed after her. Sevier
+coolly shot the foremost of her pursuers, then sprang upon the wall,
+caught up Bonnie Kate, and tossed her inside to safety. And legend says
+further that when, after Sevier's brief widowerhood, she became his
+wife, four years later, Bonnie Kate was wont to say that she would
+be willing to run another such race any day to have another such
+introduction!
+
+There were no casualties within the fort and, after three hours, the foe
+withdrew, leaving several of their warriors slain.
+
+In the excursions against the Indians which followed this opening of
+hostilities Sevier won his first fame as an "Indian fighter"--the fame
+later crystallized in the phrase "thirty-five battles, thirty-five
+victories." His method was to take a very small company of the hardiest
+and swiftest horsemen--men who could keep their seat and endurance, and
+horses that could keep their feet and their speed, on any steep of the
+mountains no matter how tangled and rough the going might be--swoop down
+upon war camp, or town, and go through it with rifle and hatchet and
+fire, then dash homeward at the same pace before the enemy had begun to
+consider whether to follow him or not. In all his "thirty-five battles"
+it is said he lost not more than fifty men.
+
+The Cherokees made peace in 1777, after about a year of almost
+continuous warfare, the treaty being concluded on their side by the old
+chiefs who had never countenanced the war. Dragging Canoe refused to
+take part, but he was rendered innocuous for the time being by the
+destruction of several of the Chickamaugan villages. James Robertson now
+went to Chota as Indian agent for North Carolina. So fast was population
+growing, owing to the opening of a wagon road into Burke County, North
+Carolina, that Washington County was divided. John Sevier became Colonel
+of Washington and Isaac Shelby Colonel of the newly erected Sullivan
+County. Jonesborough, the oldest town in Tennessee, was laid out as the
+county seat of Washington; and in the same year (1778) Sevier moved to
+the bank of the Nolichucky River, so-called after the Indian name of
+this dashing sparkling stream, meaning rapid or precipitous. Thus the
+nickname given John Sevier by his devotees had a dual application. He
+was well called Nolichucky Jack.
+
+
+When Virginia annulled Richard Henderson's immense purchase but allowed
+him a large tract on the Cumberland, she by no means discouraged that
+intrepid pioneer. Henderson's tenure of Kentucky had been brief, but not
+unprofitable in experience. He had learned that colonies must be
+treated with less commercial pressure and with more regard to individual
+liberty, if they were to be held loyal either to a King beyond the water
+or to an uncrowned leader nearer at hand. He had been making his plans
+for colonization of that portion of the Transylvania purchase which lay
+within the bounds of North Carolina along the Cumberland and choosing
+his men to lay the foundations of his projected settlement in what was
+then a wholly uninhabited country; and he had decided on generous
+terms, such as ten dollars a thousand acres for land, the certificate of
+purchase to entitle the holder to further proceedings in the land office
+without extra fees. To head an enterprise of such danger and hardship
+Henderson required a man of more than mere courage; a man of resource,
+of stability, of proven powers, one whom other men would follow and obey
+with confidence. So it was that James Robertson was chosen to lead the
+first white settlers into middle Tennessee. He set out in February,
+1779, accompanied by his brother, Mark Robertson, several other white
+men, and a negro, to select a site for settlement and to plant corn.
+Meanwhile another small party led by Gaspar Mansker had arrived. As the
+boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina had not been run to
+this point, Robertson believed that the site he had chosen lay within
+Virginia and was in the disposal of General Clark. To protect the
+settlers, therefore, he journeyed into the Illinois country to purchase
+cabin rights from Clark, but there he was evidently convinced that the
+site on the Cumberland would be found to lie within North Carolina. He
+returned to Watauga to lead a party of settlers into the new territory,
+towards which they set out in October. After crossing the mountain chain
+through Cumberland Gap, the party followed Boone's road--the Warriors'
+Path--for some distance and then made their own trail southwestward
+through the wilderness to the bluffs on the Cumberland, where they built
+cabins to house them against one of the coldest winters ever experienced
+in that county. So were laid the first foundations of the present city
+of Nashville, at first named Nashborough by Robertson. * On the way,
+Robertson had fallen in with a party of men and families bound for
+Kentucky and had persuaded them to accompany his little band to the
+Cumberland. Robertson's own wife and children, as well as the families
+of his party, had been left to follow in the second expedition, which
+was to be made by water under the command of Captain John Donelson.
+
+
+     * In honor of General Francis Nash, of North Carolina, who was
+mortally wounded at Germantown, 1777.
+
+
+The little fleet of boats containing the settlers, their families, and
+all their household goods, was to start from Fort Patrick Henry, near
+Long Island in the Holston River, to float down into the Tennessee and
+along the 652 miles of that widely wandering stream to the Ohio, and
+then to proceed up the Ohio to the mouth of the Cumberland and up the
+Cumberland until Robertson's station should appear--a journey, as it
+turned out, of some nine hundred miles through unknown country and on
+waters at any rate for the greater part never before navigated by white
+men.
+
+"Journal of a voyage, intended by God's permission, in the good boat
+Adventure" is the title of the log book in which Captain Donelson
+entered the events of the four months' journey. Only a few pages endured
+to be put into print: but those few tell a tale of hazard and courage
+that seems complete. Could a lengthier narrative, even if enriched with
+literary art and fancy, bring before us more vividly than do the simple
+entries of Donelson's log the spirit of the men and the women who won
+the West? If so little personal detail is recorded of the pioneer men of
+that day that we must deduce what they were from what they did, what do
+we know of their unfailing comrades, the pioneer women? Only that they
+were there and that they shared in every test of courage and endurance,
+save the march of troops and the hunt. Donelson's "Journal" therefore
+has a special value, because in its terse account of Mrs. Jennings and
+Mrs. Peyton it depicts unforgettably the quality of pioneer womanhood. *
+
+
+     * This Journal is printed in Ramsey's "Annals of Tennessee."
+
+
+"December 22nd, 1779. Took our departure from the fort and fell down the
+river to the mouth of Reedy Creek where we were stopped by the fall of
+water and most excessive hard frost."
+
+
+Perhaps part of the "Journal" was lost, or perhaps the "excessive hard
+frost" of that severe winter, when it is said even droves of wild game
+perished, prevented the boats, from going on, for the next entry is
+dated the 27th of February. On this date the Adventure and two other
+boats grounded and lay on the shoals all that afternoon and the
+succeeding night "in much distress."
+
+
+"March 2nd. Rain about half the day.... Mr. Henry's boat being driven on
+the point of an island by the force of the current was sunk, the
+whole cargo much damaged and the crew's lives much endangered,
+which occasioned the whole fleet to put on shore and go to their
+assistance....
+
+"Monday 6th. Got under way before sunrise; the morning proving very
+foggy, many of the fleet were much bogged--about 10 o'clock lay by for
+them; when collected, proceeded down. Camped on the north shore, where
+Captain Hutching's negro man died, being much frosted in his feet and
+legs, of which he died.
+
+"Tuesday, 7th. Got under way very early; the day proving very windy, a
+S.S.W., and the river being wide occasioned a high sea, insomuch that
+some of the smaller crafts were in danger; therefore came to at the
+uppermost Chiccamauga town, which was then evacuated, where we lay by
+that afternoon and camped that night. The wife of Ephraim Peyton was
+here delivered of a child. Mr. Peyton has gone through by land with
+Captain Robertson.
+
+"Wednesday 8th... proceed down to an Indian village which was
+inhabited... they insisted on us to come ashore, called us brothers,
+and showed other signs of friendship.... And here we must regret the
+unfortunate death of young Mr. Payne, on board Captain Blakemore's boat,
+who was mortally wounded by reason of the boat running too near the
+northern shore opposite the town, where some of the enemy lay concealed;
+and the more tragical misfortune of poor Stuart, his family and friends,
+to the number of twenty-eight persons. This man had embarked with us for
+the Western country, but his family being diseased with the small pox,
+it was agreed upon between him and the company that he should keep at
+some distance in the rear, for fear of the infection spreading, and he
+was warned each night when the encampment should take place by the sound
+of a horn.... The Indians having now collected to a considerable number,
+observing his helpless situation singled off from the rest of the fleet,
+intercepted him and killed and took prisoners the whole crew...; their
+cries were distinctly heard...".
+
+
+After describing a running fight with Indians stationed on the bluffs
+on both shores where the river narrowed to half its width and boiled
+through a canyon, the entry for the day concludes: "Jennings's boat is
+missing."
+
+
+"Friday 10th. This morning about 4 o'clock we were surprised by the
+cries of "help poor Jennings" at some distance in the rear. He had
+discovered us by our fires and came up in the most wretched condition.
+He states that as soon as the Indians discovered his situation [his boat
+had run on a rock] they turned their whole attention to him and kept
+up a most galling fire at his boat. He ordered his wife, a son nearly
+grown, a young man who accompanies them and his negro man and woman, to
+throw all his goods into the river to lighten their boat for the purpose
+of getting her off; himself returning their fire as well as he could,
+being a good soldier and an excellent marksman. But before they had
+accomplished their object, his son, the young man and the negro, jumped
+out of the boat and left.... Mrs. Jennings, however, and the negro
+woman, succeeded in unloading the boat, but chiefly by the exertions of
+Mrs. Jennings who got out of the boat and shoved her off, but was near
+falling a victim to her own intrepidity on account of the boat starting
+so suddenly as soon as loosened from the rock. Upon examination he
+appears to have made a wonderful escape for his boat is pierced in
+numberless places with bullets. It is to be remarked that Mrs. Peyton,
+who was the night before delivered of an infant, which was unfortunately
+killed upon the hurry and confusion consequent upon such a disaster,
+assisted them, being frequently exposed to wet and cold.... Their
+clothes were very much cut with bullets, especially Mrs. Jennings's."
+
+
+Of the three men who deserted, while the women stood by under fire,
+the negro was drowned and Jennings's son and the other young man were
+captured by the Chickamaugans. The latter was burned at the stake. Young
+Jennings was to have shared the same fate; but a trader in the village,
+learning that the boy was known to John Sevier, ransomed him by a large
+payment of goods, as a return for an act of kindness Sevier had once
+done to him.
+
+
+"Sunday 12th.... After running until about 10 o'clock came in sight of
+the Muscle Shoals. Halted on the northern shore at the appearance of the
+shoals, in order to search for the signs Captain James Robertson was to
+make for us at that place... that it was practicable for us to go across
+by land... we can find none--from which we conclude that it would not
+be prudent to make the attempt and are determined, knowing ourselves in
+such imminent danger, to pursue our journey down the river.... When
+we approached them [the Shoals] they had a dreadful appearance.... The
+water being high made a terrible roaring, which could be heard at some
+distance, among the driftwood heaped frightfully upon the points of the
+islands, the current running in every possible direction. Here we did
+not know how soon we should be dashed to pieces and all our troubles
+ended at once... Our boats frequently dragged on the bottom and appeared
+constantly in danger of striking. They warped as much as in a rough
+sea. But by the hand of Providence we are now preserved from this
+danger also. I know not the length of this wonderful shoal; it had been
+represented to me to be twenty-five or thirty miles. If so, we must
+have descended very rapidly, as indeed we did, for we passed it in about
+three hours."
+
+
+On the twentieth the little fleet arrived at the mouth of the Tennessee
+and the voyagers landed on the bank of the Ohio.
+
+
+"Our situation here is truly disagreeable. The river is very high and
+the current rapid, our boats not constructed for the purpose of stemming
+a rapid stream, our provisions exhausted, the crews almost worn down
+with hunger and fatigue, and know not what distance we have to go or
+what time it will take us to our place of destination. The scene is
+rendered still more melancholy as several boats will not attempt to
+ascend the rapid current. Some intend to descend the Mississippi to
+Natchez; others are bound for the Illinois--among the rest my son-in-law
+and daughter. We now part, perhaps to meet no more, for I am determined
+to pursue my course, happen what will.
+
+"Tuesday 21st. Set out and on this day labored very hard and got but
+little way.... Passed the two following days as the former, suffering
+much from hunger and fatigue.
+
+"Friday 24th. About three o'clock came to the mouth of a river which I
+thought was the Cumberland. Some of the company declared it could not
+be--it was so much smaller than was expected.... We determined however
+to make the trial, pushed up some distance and encamped for the night.
+
+"Saturday 25th. Today we are much encouraged; the river grows
+wider;... we are now convinced it is the Cumberland....
+
+"Sunday 26th... procured some buffalo meat; though poor it was palatable.
+
+"Friday 31st... met with Colonel Richard Henderson, who is running the
+line between Virginia and North Carolina. At this meeting we were much
+rejoiced. He gave us every information we wished, and further informed
+us that he had purchased a quantity of corn in Kentucky, to be shipped
+at the Falls of Ohio for the use of the Cumberland settlement. We are
+now without bread and are compelled to hunt the buffalo to preserve
+life....
+
+"Monday, April 24th. This day we arrived at our journey's end at the Big
+Salt Lick, where we have the pleasure of finding Captain Robertson
+and his company. It is a source of satisfaction to us to be enabled to
+restore to him and others their families and friends, who were entrusted
+to our care, and who, sometime since, perhaps, despaired of ever meeting
+again...."
+
+
+Past the camps of the Chickamaugans--who were retreating farther and
+farther down the twisting flood, seeking a last standing ground in the
+giant caves by the Tennessee--these white voyagers had steered their
+pirogues. Near Robertson's station, where they landed after having
+traversed the triangle of the three great rivers which enclose the
+larger part of western Tennessee, stood a crumbling trading house
+marking the defeat of a Frenchman who had, one time, sailed in from the
+Ohio to establish an outpost of his nation there. At a little distance
+were the ruins of a rude fort cast up by the Cherokees in the days when
+the redoubtable Chickasaws had driven them from the pleasant shores of
+the western waters. Under the towering forest growth lay vast burial
+mounds and the sunken foundations of walled towns, telling of a departed
+race which had once flashed its rude paddles and had its dream of
+permanence along the courses of these great waterways. Now another
+tribe had come to dream that dream anew. Already its primitive keels had
+traced the opening lines of its history on the face of the immemorial
+rivers.
+
+
+
+Chapter IX. King's Mountain
+
+About the time when James Robertson went from Watauga to fling out the
+frontier line three hundred miles farther westward, the British took
+Savannah. In 1780 they took Charleston and Augusta, and overran Georgia.
+Augusta was the point where the old trading path forked north and west,
+and it was the key to the Back Country and the overhill domain. In
+Georgia and the Back Country of South Carolina there were many Tories
+ready to rally to the King's standard whenever a King's officer should
+carry it through their midst. A large number of these Tories were
+Scotch, chiefly from the Highlands. In fact, as we have seen, Scotch
+blood predominated among the racial streams in the Back Country from
+Georgia to Pennsylvania. Now, to insure a triumphant march northward for
+Cornwallis and his royal troops, these sons of Scotland must be gathered
+together, the loyal encouraged and those of rebellious tendencies
+converted, and they must be drilled and turned to account. This task, if
+it were to be accomplished successfully, must be entrusted to an officer
+with positive qualifications, one who would command respect, whose
+personal address would attract men and disarm opposition, and especially
+one who could go as a Scot among his own clan. Cornwallis found his man
+in Major. Patrick Ferguson.
+
+Ferguson was a Highlander, a son of Lord Pitfour of Aberdeen, and
+thirty-six years of age. He was of short stature for a Highlander--about
+five feet eight--lean and dark, with straight black hair. He had a
+serious unhandsome countenance which, at casual glance, might not
+arrest attention; but when he spoke he became magnetic, by reason of
+the intelligence and innate force that gleamed in his eyes and the
+convincing sincerity of his manner. He was admired and respected by his
+brother officers and by the commanders under whom he had served, and he
+was loved by his men.
+
+He had seen his first service in the Seven Years' War, having joined
+the British army in Flanders at the age of fifteen; and he had early
+distinguished himself for courage and coolness. In 1768, as a captain of
+infantry, he quelled an insurrection of the natives on the island of
+St. Vincent in the West Indies. Later, at Woolwich, he took up the
+scientific study of his profession of arms. He not only became a crack
+shot, but he invented a new type of rifle which he could load at the
+breach without ramrod and so quickly as to fire seven times in a minute.
+Generals and statesmen attended his exhibitions of shooting; and even
+the King rode over at the head of his guards to watch Ferguson rapidly
+loading and firing.
+
+In America under Cornwallis, Ferguson had the reputation of being the
+best shot in the army; and it was soon said that, in his quickness at
+loading and firing, he excelled the most expert American frontiersman.
+Eyewitnesses have left their testimony that, seeing a bird alight on a
+bough or rail, he would drop his bridle rein, draw his pistol, toss it
+in the air, catch and aim it as it fell, and shoot the bird's head off.
+He was given command of a corps of picked riflemen; and in the Battle of
+the Brandywine in 1777 he rendered services which won acclaim from the
+whole army. For the honor of that day's service to his King, Ferguson
+paid what from him, with his passion for the rifle, must have been
+the dearest price that could have been demanded. His right arm was
+shattered, and for the remaining three years of his short life it hung
+useless at his side. Yet he took up swordplay and attained a remarkable
+degree of skill as a left-handed swordsman.
+
+Such was Ferguson, the soldier. What of the man? For he has been
+pictured as a wolf and a fiend and a coward by early chroniclers, who
+evidently felt that they were adding to the virtue of those who fought
+in defense of liberty by representing all their foes as personally
+odious. We can read his quality of manhood in a few lines of the letter
+he sent to his kinsman, the noted Dr. Adam Ferguson, about an incident
+that occurred at Chads Ford. As he was lying with his men in the woods,
+in front of Knyphausen's army, so he relates, he saw two American
+officers ride out. He describes their dress minutely. One was in hussar
+uniform. The other was in a dark green and blue uniform with a high
+cocked hat and was mounted on a bay horse:
+
+"I ordered three good shots to steal near to and fire at them; but the
+idea disgusting me, I recalled the order. The hussar in retiring made a
+circuit, but the other passed within a hundred yards of us, upon which
+I advanced from the wood towards him. Upon my calling he stopped; but
+after looking at me he proceeded. I again drew his attention and made
+signs to him to stop; levelling my piece at him; but he slowly cantered
+away. As I was within that distance, at which, in the quickest firing,
+I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out
+of my reach, I had only to determine. But it was not pleasant to fire
+at the back of an unoffending individual who was acquitting himself
+very coolly of his duty--so I let him alone. The day after, I had been
+telling this story to some wounded officers, who lay in the same room
+with me, when one of the surgeons who had been dressing the wounded
+rebel officers came in and told us that they had been informing him that
+General Washington was all the morning with the light troops, and only
+attended by a French officer in hussar dress, he himself dressed and
+mounted in every point as above described. I AM NOT SORRY THAT I DID NOT
+KNOW AT THE TIME WHO IT WAS." *
+
+
+     *Doubt that the officer in question was Washington was expressed
+by James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper stated that Major De Lancey, his
+father-in-law, was binding Ferguson's arm at the time when the two
+officers were seen and Ferguson recalled the order to fire, and that De
+Lancey said he believed the officer was Count Pulaski. But, as Ferguson,
+according to his own account, "leveled his piece" at the officer, his
+arm evidently was not wounded until later in the day. The probability is
+that Ferguson's version, written in a private letter to his relative, is
+correct as to the facts, whatever may be conjectured as to the identity
+of the officer. See Draper's King's "Mountain and its Heroes," pp.
+52-54.
+
+
+Ferguson had his code towards the foe's women also. On one occasion when
+he was assisting in an action carried out by Hessians and Dragoons, he
+learned that some American women had been shamefully maltreated. He went
+in a white fury to the colonel in command, and demanded that the men who
+had so disgraced their uniforms instantly be put to death.
+
+In rallying the loyalists of the Back Country of Georgia and the
+Carolinas, Ferguson was very successful. He was presently in command of
+a thousand or more men, including small detachments of loyalists from
+New York and New Jersey, under American-born officers such as De Peyster
+and Allaire. There were good honest men among the loyalists and there
+were also rough and vicious men out for spoils--which was true as well
+of the Whigs or Patriots from the same counties. Among the rough element
+were Tory banditti from the overmountain region. It is to be gathered
+from Ferguson's records that he did not think any too highly of some
+of his new recruits, but he set to work with all energy to make them
+useful.
+
+The American Patriots hastily prepared to oppose him. Colonel Charles
+McDowell of Burke County, North Carolina, with a small force of militia
+was just south of the line at a point on the Broad River when he heard
+that Ferguson was sweeping on northward. In haste he sent a call for
+help across the mountains to Sevier and Shelby. Sevier had his hands
+full at Watauga, but he dispatched two hundred of his troops; and Isaac
+Shelby, with a similar force from Sullivan County crossed the mountains
+to McDowell's assistance. These "overmountain men" or "backwater men,"
+as they were called east of the hills, were trained in Sevier's method
+of Indian warfare--the secret approach through the dark, the swift dash,
+and the swifter flight. "Fight strong and run away fast" was the Indian
+motto, as their women had often been heard to call it after the red men
+as they ran yelling to fall on the whites. The frontiersmen had adapted
+the motto to fit their case, as they had also made their own the Indian
+tactics of ambuscade and surprise attacks at dawn. To sleep, or ride if
+needs must, by night, and to fight by day and make off, was to them a
+reasonable soldier's life.
+
+But Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which grew
+among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest legends about his
+ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a habit he had of pouncing on
+his foes in the middle of the night and pulling them out of bed to
+give fight or die. It was generally both fight and die, for these
+dark adventures of his were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no
+neutrals or conscientious objectors; any man who would not carry arms
+for the King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeit. A
+report of his reads: "The attack being made at night, no quarter could
+be given." Hence his wolfish fame. "Werewolf" would have been a fit name
+for him for, though he was a wolf at night, in the daylight he was a man
+and, as we have seen, a chivalrous one.
+
+In the guerrilla fighting that went on for a brief time between the
+overmountain men and various detachments of Ferguson's forces, sometimes
+one side, sometimes the other, won the heat. But the field remained
+open. Neither side could claim the mastery. In a minor engagement fought
+at Musgrove's Mill on the Enoree, Shelby's command came off victor and
+was about to pursue the enemy towards Ninety-Six when a messenger from
+McDowell galloped madly into camp with word of General Gates's crushing
+defeat at Camden. This was a warning for Shelby's guerrillas to flee as
+birds to their mountains, or Ferguson would cut them off from the north
+and wedge them in between his own force and the victorious Cornwallis.
+McDowell's men, also on the run for safety, joined them. For forty-eight
+hours without food or rest they rode a race with Ferguson, who kept hard
+on their trail until they disappeared into the mystery of the winding
+mountain paths they alone knew.
+
+Ferguson reached the gap where they had swerved into the towering hills
+only half an hour after their horses' hoofs had pounded across it. Here
+he turned back. His troops were exhausted from the all-night ride and,
+in any case, there were not enough of them to enable him to cross the
+mountains and give the Watauga men battle on their own ground with a
+fair promise of victory. So keeping east of the hills but still close to
+them, Ferguson turned into Burke County, North Carolina. He sat him down
+in Gilbert Town (present Lincolnton, Lincoln County) at the foot of the
+Blue Ridge and indited a letter to the "Back Water Men," telling them
+that if they did not lay down their arms and return to their rightful
+allegiance, he would come over their hills and raze their settlements
+and hang their leaders. He paroled a kinsman of Shelby's, whom he had
+taken prisoner in the chase, and sent him home with the letter. Then he
+set about his usual business of gathering up Tories and making soldiers
+of them, and of hunting down rebels.
+
+One of the "rebels" was a certain Captain Lytle. When Ferguson drew up
+at Lytle's door, Lytle had already made his escape; but Mrs. Lytle was
+there. She was a very handsome woman and she had dressed herself in her
+best to receive Ferguson, who was reported a gallant as well as a wolf.
+After a few spirited passages between the lady in the doorway and the
+officer on the white horse before it, the latter advised Mrs. Lytle
+to use her influence to bring her husband back to his duty. She became
+grave then and answered that her husband would never turn traitor to his
+country. Ferguson frowned at the word "traitor," but presently he
+said: "Madam, I admire you as the handsomest woman I have seen in North
+Carolina. I even half way admire your zeal in a bad cause. But take
+my word for it, the rebellion has had its day and is now virtually put
+down. Give my regards to Captain Lytle and tell him to come in. He will
+not be asked to compromise his honor. His verbal pledge not again to
+take up arms against the King is all that will be asked of him." *
+
+
+     * Draper,"King's Mountain and its Heroes," pp. 151-53.
+
+
+This was another phase of the character of the one-armed Highlander
+whose final challenge to the backwater men was now being considered in
+every log cabin beyond the hills. A man who would not shoot an enemy in
+the back, who was ready to put the same faith in another soldier's honor
+which he knew was due to his own, yet in battle a wolfish fighter who
+leaped through the dark to give no quarter and to take none--he was fit
+challenger to those other mountaineers who also had a chivalry of their
+own, albeit they too were wolves of war.
+
+When Shelby on the Holston received Ferguson's pungent letter, he flung
+himself on his horse and rode posthaste to Watauga to consult, with
+Sevier. He found the bank of the Nolichucky teeming with merrymakers.
+Nolichucky Jack was giving an immense barbecue and a horse race. Without
+letting the festival crowd have an inkling of the serious nature of
+Shelby's errand, the two men drew apart to confer. It is said to have
+been Sevier's idea that they should muster the forces of the western
+country and go in search of Ferguson ere the latter should be able
+to get sufficient reinforcements to cross the mountains. Sevier, like
+Ferguson, always preferred to seek his foe, knowing well the advantage
+of the offensive. Messengers were sent to Colonel William Campbell of
+the Virginia settlements on the Clinch, asking his aid. Campbell at
+first refused, thinking it better to fortify the positions they held and
+let Ferguson come and put the mountains between himself and Cornwallis.
+On receipt of a second message, however, he concurred. The call to arms
+was heard up and down the valleys, and the frontiersmen poured into
+Watauga. The overhill men were augmented by McDowell's troops from Burke
+County, who had dashed over the mountains a few weeks before in their
+escape from Ferguson.
+
+At daybreak on the 26th of September they mustered at the Sycamore
+Shoals on the Watauga, over a thousand strong. It was a different
+picture they made from that other great gathering at the same spot when
+Henderson had made his purchase in money of the Dark and Bloody Ground,
+and Sevier and Robertson had bought for the Wataugans this strip of
+Tennessee. There were no Indians in this picture. Dragging Canoe, who
+had uttered his bloody prophecy, had by these very men been driven far
+south into the caves of the Tennessee River. But the Indian prophecy
+still hung over them, and in this day with a heavier menace. Not with
+money, now, were they to seal their purchase of the free land by the
+western waters. There had been no women in that other picture, only the
+white men who were going forward to open the way and the red men
+who were retreating. But in this picture there were women--wives and
+children, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts. All the women of the
+settlement were there at this daybreak muster to cheer on their way the
+men who were going out to battle that they might keep the way of liberty
+open not for men only but for women and children also. And the battle to
+which the men were now going forth must be fought against Back Country
+men of their own stripe under a leader who, in other circumstances,
+might well have been one of themselves--a primitive spirit of hardy
+mountain stock, who, having once taken his stand, would not barter and
+would not retreat.
+
+"With the Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" cried their pastor, the
+Reverend Samuel Doak, with upraised hands, as the mountaineers swung
+into their saddles. And it is said that all the women took up his
+words and cried again and again, "With the sword of the Lord and of our
+Gideons!" To the shouts of their women, as bugles on the wind of dawn,
+the buckskin-shirted army dashed out upon the mountain trail.
+
+The warriors' equipment included rifles and ammunition, tomahawks,
+knives, shot pouches, a knapsack, and a blanket for each man. Their
+uniforms were leggings, breeches, and long loose shirts of gayly fringed
+deerskin, or of the linsey-woolsey spun by their women. Their hunting
+shirts were bound in at the waist by bright-colored linsey sashes tied
+behind in a bow. They wore moccasins for footgear, and on their heads
+high fur or deerskin caps trimmed with colored bands of raveled cloth.
+Around their necks hung their powderhorns ornamented with their own rude
+carvings.
+
+On the first day they drove along with them a number of beeves but,
+finding that the cattle impeded the march, they left them behind on the
+mountain side. Their provisions thereafter were wild game and the small
+supply each man carried of mixed corn meal and maple sugar. For drink,
+they had the hill streams.
+
+They passed upward between Roan and Yellow mountains to the top of
+the range. Here, on the bald summit, where the loose snow lay to their
+ankles, they halted for drill and rifle practice. When Sevier called up
+his men, he discovered that two were missing. He suspected at once that
+they had slipped away to carry warning to Ferguson, for Watauga was
+known to be infested with Tories. Two problems now confronted the
+mountaineers. They must increase the speed of their march, so that
+Ferguson should not have time to get reinforcements from Cornwallis; and
+they must make that extra speed by another trail than they had intended
+taking so that they themselves could not be intercepted before they had
+picked up the Back Country militia under Colonels Cleveland, Hampbright,
+Chronicle, and Williams, who were moving to join them. We are not told
+who took the lead when they left the known trail, but we may suppose it
+was Sevier and his Wataugans, for the making of new warpaths and wild
+riding were two of the things which distinguished Nolichucky Jack's
+leadership. Down the steep side of the mountain, finding their way as
+they plunged, went the overhill men. They crossed the Blue Ridge at
+Gillespie's Gap and pushed on to Quaker Meadows, where Colonel Cleveland
+with 350 men swung into their column. Along their route, the Back
+Country Patriots with their rifles came out from the little hamlets and
+the farms and joined them.
+
+They now had an army of perhaps fifteen hundred men but no commanding
+officer. Thus far, on the march, the four colonels had conferred
+together and agreed as to procedure; or, in reality, the influence of
+Sevier and Shelby, who had planned the enterprise and who seem always
+to have acted in unison, had swayed the others. It would be, however,
+manifestly improper to go into battle without a real general. Something
+must be done. McDowell volunteered to carry a letter explaining their
+need to General Gates, who had escaped with some of his staff into North
+Carolina and was not far off. It then occurred to Sevier and Shelby,
+evidently for the first time, that Gates, on receiving such a request,
+might well ask why the Governor of North Carolina, as the military head
+of the State, had not provided a commander. The truth is that Sevier
+and Shelby had been so busy drumming up the militia and planning their
+campaign that they had found no time to consult the Governor. Moreover,
+the means whereby the expedition had been financed might not have
+appealed to the chief executive. After finding it impossible to raise
+sufficient funds on his personal credit, Sevier had appropriated the
+entry money in the government land office to the business in hand--with
+the good will of the entry taker, who was a patriotic man, although,
+as he had pointed out, he could not, OFFICIALLY, hand over the money.
+Things being as they were, no doubt Nolichucky Jack felt that an
+interview with the Governor had better be deferred until after the
+capture of Ferguson. Hence the tenor of this communication to General
+Gates:
+
+"As we have at this time called out our militia without any orders from
+the Executive of our different States and with the view of expelling
+the Enemy out of this part of the Country, we think such a body of men
+worthy of your attention and would request you to send a General Officer
+immediately to take the command.... All our Troops being Militia and but
+little acquainted with discipline, we could wish him to be a Gentleman
+of address, and able to keep up a proper discipline WITHOUT DISGUSTING
+THE SOLDIERY."
+
+For some unknown reason--unless it might be the wording of this
+letter!--no officer was sent in reply. Shelby then suggested that, since
+all the officers but Campbell were North Carolinians and, therefore,
+no one of them could be promoted without arousing the jealousy of the
+others, Campbell, as the only Virginian, was the appropriate choice.
+The sweet reasonableness of selecting a commander from such a motive
+appealed to all, and Campbell became a general in fact if not in name!
+Shelby's principal aim, however, had been to get rid of McDowell,
+who, as their senior, would naturally expect to command and whom he
+considered "too far advanced in life and too inactive" for such an
+enterprise. At this time McDowell must have been nearly thirty-nine; and
+Shelby, who was just thirty, wisely refused to risk the campaign under a
+general who was in his dotage!
+
+News of the frontiersmen's approach, with their augmented force, now
+numbering between sixteen and eighteen hundred, had reached Ferguson by
+the two Tories who had deserted from Sevier's troops. Ferguson thereupon
+had made all haste out of Gilbert Town and was marching southward to get
+in touch with Cornwallis. His force was much reduced, as some of his
+men were in pursuit of Elijah Clarke towards Augusta and a number of his
+other Tories were on furlough. As he passed through the Back Country
+he posted a notice calling on the loyalists to join him. If the
+overmountain men felt that they were out on a wolf hunt, Ferguson's
+proclamation shows what the wolf thought of his hunters.
+
+"To the Inhabitants of North Carolina.
+
+"Gentlemen: Unless you wish to be eat up by an innundation of
+barbarians, who have begun by murdering an unarmed son before the aged
+father, and afterwards lopped off his arms, and who by their shocking
+cruelties and irregularities give the best proof of their cowardice
+and want of discipline: I say if you wish to be pinioned, robbed and
+murdered, and see your wives and daughters in four days, abused by the
+dregs of mankind--in short if you wish to deserve to live and bear the
+name of men, grasp your arms in a moment and run to camp.
+
+"The Back Water men have crossed the mountains: McDowell, Hampton,
+Shelby, and Cleveland are at their head, so that you know what you have
+to depend upon. If you choose to be degraded forever and ever by a set
+of mongrels, say so at once, and let your women turn their backs upon
+you, and look out for real men to protect them.
+
+"Pat. Ferguson, Major 71st Regiment." *
+
+
+     * Draper, "King's Mountain and its Heroes," p. 204.
+
+
+Ferguson's force has been estimated at about eleven hundred men, but
+it is likely that this estimate does not take the absentees into
+consideration. In the diary of Lieutenant Allaire, one of his officers,
+the number is given as only eight hundred. Because of the state of his
+army, chroniclers have found Ferguson's movements, after leaving Gilbert
+Town, difficult to explain. It has been pointed out that he could easily
+have escaped, for he had plenty of time, and Charlotte, Cornwallis's
+headquarters, was only sixty miles distant. We have seen something of
+Ferguson's quality, however, and we may simply take it that he did not
+want to escape. He had been planning to cross the high hills--to him,
+the Highlander, no barrier but a challenge--to fight these men. Now that
+they had taken the initiative he would not show them his back. He craved
+the battle. So he sent out runners to the main army and rode on along
+the eastern base of the mountains, seeking a favorable site to go into
+camp and wait for Cornwallis's aid. On the 6th of October he reached the
+southern end of the King's Mountain ridge, in South Carolina, about half
+a mile south of the northern boundary. Here a rocky, semi-isolated spur
+juts out from the ridge, its summit--a table-land about six hundred
+yards long and one hundred and twenty wide at its northern end--rising
+not more than sixty feet above the surrounding country. On the summit
+Ferguson pitched his camp.
+
+The hill was a natural fortress, its sides forested, its bald top
+protected by rocks and bowlders. All the approaches led through dense
+forest. An enemy force, passing through the immediate, wooded territory,
+might easily fail to discover a small army nesting sixty feet above the
+shrouding leafage. Word was evidently brought to Ferguson here, telling
+him the now augmented number of his foe, for he dispatched another
+emissary to Cornwallis with a letter stating the number of his own
+troops and urging full and immediate assistance.
+
+Meanwhile the frontiersmen had halted at the Cowpens. There they feasted
+royally off roasted cattle and corn belonging to the loyalist who owned
+the Cowpens. It is said that they mowed his fifty acres of corn in
+an hour. And here one of their spies, in the assumed role of a Tory,
+learned Ferguson's plans, his approximate force, his route, and his
+system of communication with Cornwallis. The officers now held council
+and determined to take a detachment of the hardiest and fleetest
+horsemen and sweep down on the enemy before aid could reach him. About
+nine o'clock that evening, according to Shelby's report, 910 mounted men
+set off at full speed, leaving the main body of horse and foot to follow
+after at their best pace.
+
+Rain poured down on them all that night as they rode. At daybreak they
+crossed the Broad at Cherokee Ford and dashed on in the drenching rain
+all the forenoon. They kept their firearms and powder dry by wrapping
+them in their knapsacks, blankets, and hunting shirts. The downpour
+had so churned up the soil that many of the horses mired, but they were
+pulled out and whipped forward again. The wild horsemen made no halt
+for food or rest. Within two miles of King's Mountain they captured
+Ferguson's messenger with the letter that told of his desperate
+situation. They asked this man how they should know Ferguson. He told
+them that Ferguson was in full uniform but wore a checkered shirt or
+dust cloak over it. This was not the only messenger of Ferguson's who
+failed to carry through. The men he had sent out previously had been
+followed and, to escape capture or death, they had been obliged to lie
+in hiding, so that they did not reach Cornwallis until the day of the
+battle.
+
+At three o'clock on the afternoon of the 7th of October, the
+overmountain men were in the forest at the base of the hill. The rain
+had ceased and the sun was shining. They dismounted and tethered their
+steaming horses. Orders were given that every man was to "throw the
+priming out of his pan, pick his touchhole, prime anew, examine bullets
+and see that everything was in readiness for battle." The plan of battle
+agreed on was to surround the hill, hold the enemy on the top and,
+themselves screened by the trees, keep pouring in their fire. There was
+a good chance that most of the answering fire would go over their heads.
+
+As Shelby's men crossed a gap in the woods, the outposts on the hill
+discovered their presence and sounded the alarm. Ferguson sprang
+to horse, blowing his silver whistle to call his men to attack. His
+riflemen poured fire into Shelby's contingent, but meanwhile the
+frontiersmen on the other sides were creeping up, and presently a circle
+of fire burst upon the hill. With fixed bayonets, some of Ferguson's men
+charged down the face of the slope, against the advancing foe, only
+to be shot in the back as they charged. Still time and time again
+they charged; the overhill men reeled and retreated; but always their
+comrades took toll with their rifles; Ferguson's men, preparing for a
+mounted charge, were shot even as they swung to their saddles. Ferguson,
+with his customary indifference to danger, rode up and down in front of
+his line blowing his whistle to encourage his men. "Huzza, brave boys!
+The day is our own!" Thus he was heard to shout above the triumphant war
+whoops of the circling foe, surging higher and higher about the hill.
+
+But there were others in his band who knew the fight was lost. The
+overmountain men saw two white handkerchiefs, axed to bayonets, raised
+above the rocks; and then they saw Ferguson dash by and slash them down
+with his sword. Two horses were shot under Ferguson in the latter part
+of the action; but he mounted a third and rode again into the thick of
+the fray. Suddenly the cry spread among the attacking troops that
+the British officer, Tarleton, had come to Ferguson's rescue; and the
+mountaineers began to give way. But it was only the galloping horses of
+their own comrades; Tarleton had not come. Nolichucky Jack spurred out
+in front of his men and rode along the line. Fired by his courage they
+sounded the war whoop again and renewed the attack with fury.
+
+"These are the same yelling devils that were at Musgrove's Mill," said
+Captain De Peyster to Ferguson.
+
+Now Shelby and Sevier, leading his Wataugans, had reached the summit.
+The firing circle pressed in. The buckskin-shirted warriors leaped the
+rocky barriers, swinging their tomahawks and long knives. Again the
+white handkerchiefs fluttered. Ferguson saw that the morale of his
+troops was shattered.
+
+"Surrender," De Peyster, his second in command, begged of him.
+
+"Surrender to those damned banditti? Never!"
+
+Ferguson turned his horse's head downhill and charged into the
+Wataugans, hacking right and left with his sword till it was broken at
+the hilt. A dozen rifles were leveled at him. An iron muzzle pushed at
+his breast, but the powder flashed in the pan. He swerved and struck
+at the rifleman with his broken hilt. But the other guns aimed at him
+spoke; and Ferguson's body jerked from the saddle pierced by eight
+bullets. Men seized the bridle of the frenzied horse, plunging on with
+his dead master dragging from the stirrup.
+
+The battle had lasted less than an hour. After Ferguson fell, De Peyster
+advanced with a white flag and surrendered his sword to Campbell. Other
+white flags waved along the hilltop. But the killing did not yet cease.
+It is said that many of the mountaineers did not know the significance
+of the white flag. Sevier's sixteen-year-old son, having heard that his
+father had fallen, kept on furiously loading and firing until presently
+he saw Sevier ride in among the troops and command them to stop shooting
+men who had surrendered and thrown down their arms.
+
+The victors made a bonfire of the enemy's baggage wagons and supplies.
+Then they killed some of his beeves and cooked them; they had had
+neither food nor sleep for eighteen hours. They dug shallow trenches
+for the dead and scattered the loose earth over them. Ferguson's body,
+stripped of its uniform and boots and wrapped in a beef hide, was thrown
+into one of these ditches by the men detailed to the burial work, while
+the officers divided his personal effects among themselves.
+
+The triumphant army turned homeward as the dusk descended. The uninjured
+prisoners and the wounded who were able to walk were marched off
+carrying their empty firearms. The badly wounded were left lying where
+they had fallen.
+
+At Bickerstaff's Old Fields in Rutherford County the frontiersmen
+halted; and here they selected thirty of their prisoners to be hanged.
+They swung them aloft, by torchlight, three at a time, until nine had
+gone to their last account. Then Sevier interposed; and, with Shelby's
+added authority, saved the other twenty-one. Among those who thus
+weighted the gallows tree were some of the Tory brigands from Watauga;
+but not all the victims were of this character. Some of the troops would
+have wreaked vengeance on the two Tories from Sevier's command who had
+betrayed their army plans to Ferguson; but Sevier claimed them as under
+his jurisdiction and refused consent. Nolichucky Jack dealt humanely by
+his foes. To the coarse and brutish Cleveland, now astride of Ferguson's
+horse and wearing his sash, and to the three hundred who followed him,
+may no doubt be laid the worst excesses of the battle's afterpiece.
+
+Victors and vanquished drove on in the dark, close to the great flank
+of hills. From where King's Mountain, strewn with dead and dying, reared
+its black shape like some rudely hewn tomb of a primordial age when
+titans strove together, perhaps to the ears of the marching men came
+faintly through the night's stillness the howl of a wolf and the
+answering chorus of the pack. For the wolves came down to King's
+Mountain from all the surrounding hills, following the scent of blood,
+and made their lair where the Werewolf had fallen. The scene of the
+mountaineers' victory, which marked the turn of the tide for the
+Revolution, became for years the chief resort of wolf hunters from both
+the Carolinas.
+
+The importance of the overmountain men's victory lay in what it achieved
+for the cause of Independence. King's Mountain was the prelude to
+Cornwallis's defeat. It heartened the Southern Patriots, until then cast
+down by Gates's disaster. To the British the death of Ferguson was an
+irreparable loss because of its depressing effect on the Back Country
+Tories. Ding's Mountain, indeed, broke the Tory spirit. Seven days after
+the battle General Nathanael Greene succeeded to the command of the
+Southern Patriot army which Gates had led to defeat. Greene's genius
+met the rising tide of the Patriots' courage and hope and took it at
+the flood. His strategy, in dividing his army and thereby compelling the
+division of Cornwallis's force, led to Daniel Morgan's victory at
+the Cowpens, in the Back Country of South Carolina, on January 17,
+1781--another frontiersmen's triumph. Though the British won the next
+engagement between Greene and Cornwallis--the battle of Guilford Court
+House in the North Carolina Back Country, on the 15th of March--Greene
+made them pay so dearly for their victory that Tarleton called it "the
+pledge of ultimate defeat"; and, three days later, Cornwallis was
+retreating towards Wilmington. In a sense, then, King's Mountain was the
+pivot of the war's revolving stage, which swung the British from their
+succession of victories towards the surrender at Yorktown.
+
+Shelby, Campbell, and Cleveland escorted the prisoners to Virginia.
+Sevier, with his men, rode home to Watauga. When the prisoners had been
+delivered to the authorities in Virginia, the Holston men also turned
+homeward through the hills. Their route lay down through the Clinch and
+Holston valleys to the settlement at the base of the mountains. Sevier
+and his Wataugans had gone by Gillespie's Gap, over the pathway that
+hung like a narrow ribbon about the breast of Roan Mountain, lifting its
+crest in dignified isolation sixty-three hundred feet above the levels.
+The "Unakas" was the name the Cherokees had given to those white men who
+first invaded their hills; and the Unakas is the name that white men at
+last gave to the mountain.
+
+Great companies of men were to come over the mountain paths on their way
+to the Mississippi country and beyond; and with them, as we know, were
+to go many of these mountain men, to pass away with their customs in the
+transformations that come with progress. But there were others who
+clung to these hills. They were of several stocks--English, Scotch,
+Highlanders, Ulstermen, who mingled by marriage and sometimes took their
+mates from among the handsome maids of the Cherokees. They spread from
+the Unakas of Tennessee into the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky; and
+they have remained to this day what they were then, a primitive folk
+of strong and fiery men and brave women living as their forefathers of
+Watauga and Holston lived. In the log cabins in those mountains today
+are heard the same ballads, sung still to the dulcimer, that entertained
+the earliest settlers. The women still turn the old-fashioned spinning
+wheels. The code of the men is still the code learned perhaps from
+the Gaels--the code of the oath and the feud and the open door to the
+stranger. Or were these, the ethical tenets of almost all uncorrupted
+primitive tribes, transmitted from the Indian strain and association?
+Their young people marry at boy and girl ages, as the pioneers did, and
+their wedding festivities are the same as those which made rejoicing at
+the first marriage in Watauga. Their common speech today contains words
+that have been obsolete in England for a hundred years.
+
+Thrice have the mountain men come down again from their fastnesses to
+war for America since the day of King's Mountain and thrice they
+have acquitted themselves so that their deeds are noted in history. A
+souvenir of their part in the War of 1812 at the Battle of the Thames
+is kept in one of the favorite names for mountain girls--"Lake Erie." In
+the Civil War many volunteers from the free, non-slaveholding mountain
+regions of Kentucky and Tennessee joined the Union Army, and it is said
+that they exceeded all others in stature and physical development. And
+in our own day their sons again came down from the mountains to carry
+the torch of Liberty overseas, and to show the white stars in their flag
+side by side with the ancient cross in the flag of England against which
+their forefathers fought.
+
+
+
+Chapter X. Sevier, The Statemaker
+
+After King's Mountain, Sevier reached home just in time to fend off a
+Cherokee attack on Watauga. Again warning had come to the settlements
+that the Indians were about to descend upon them. Sevier set out at once
+to meet the red invaders. Learning from his scouts that the Indians were
+near he went into ambush with his troops disposed in the figure of a
+half-moon, the favorite Indian formation. He then sent out a small body
+of men to fire on the Indians and make a scampering retreat, to lure the
+enemy on. The maneuver was so well planned and the ground so well chosen
+that the Indian war party would probably have been annihilated but for
+the delay of an officer at one horn of the half-moon in bringing his
+troops into play. Through the gap thus made the Indians escaped, with a
+loss of seventeen of their number. The delinquent officer was Jonathan
+Tipton, younger brother of Colonel John Tipton, of whom we shall hear
+later. It is possible that from this event dates the Tiptons' feud with
+Sevier, which supplies one of the breeziest pages in the story of early
+Tennessee.
+
+Not content with putting the marauders to flight, Sevier pressed on
+after them, burned several of the upper towns, and took prisoner a
+number of women and children, thus putting the red warriors to the depth
+of shame, for the Indians never deserted their women in battle. The
+chiefs at once sued for peace. But they had made peace often before.
+Sevier drove down upon the Hiwassee towns, meanwhile proclaiming that
+those among the tribe who were friendly might send their families to the
+white settlement, where they would be fed and cared for until a sound
+peace should be assured. He also threatened to continue to make war
+until his enemies were wiped out, their town sites a heap of blackened
+ruins, and their whole country in possession of the whites, unless they
+bound themselves to an enduring peace.
+
+Having compelled the submission of the Otari and Hiwassee towns, yet
+finding that depredations still continued, Sevier determined to invade
+the group of towns hidden in the mountain fastnesses near the headwaters
+of the Little Tennessee where, deeming themselves inaccessible except
+by their own trail, the Cherokees freely plotted mischief and sent out
+raiding parties. These hill towns lay in the high gorges of the Great
+Smoky Mountains, 150 miles distant. No one in Watauga had ever been in
+them except Thomas, the trader, who, however, had reached them from the
+eastern side of the mountains. With no knowledge of the Indians' path
+and without a guide, yet nothing daunted, Sevier, late in the summer
+of 1781 headed his force into the mountains. So steep were some of the
+slopes they scaled that the men were obliged to dismount and help
+their horses up. Unexpectedly to themselves perhaps, as well as to the
+Indians, they descended one morning on a group of villages and destroyed
+them. Before the fleeing savages could rally, the mountaineers had
+plunged up the steeps again. Sevier then turned southward into Georgia
+and inflicted a severe castigation on the tribes along the Coosa River.
+
+When, after thirty days of warfare and mad riding, Sevier arrived at his
+Bonnie Kate's door on the Nolichucky, he found a messenger from General
+Greene calling on him for immediate assistance to cut off Cornwallis
+from his expected retreat through North Carolina. Again he set out,
+and with two hundred men crossed the mountains and made all speed to
+Charlotte, in Mecklenburg County, where he learned that Cornwallis had
+surrendered at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. Under Greene's orders he
+turned south to the Santee to assist a fellow scion of the Huguenots,
+General Francis Marion, in the pursuit of Stuart's Britishers. Having
+driven Stuart into Charleston, Sevier and his active Wataugans returned
+home, now perhaps looking forward to a rest, which they had surely
+earned. Once more, however, they were hailed with alarming news.
+Dragging Canoe had come to life again and was emerging from the caves of
+the Tennessee with a substantial force of Chickamaugan warriors. Again
+the Wataugans, augmented by a detachment from Sullivan County, galloped
+forth, met the red warriors, chastised them heavily, put them to rout,
+burned their dwellings and provender, and drove them back into their
+hiding places. For some time after this, the Indians dipped not into
+the black paint pots of war but were content to streak their humbled
+countenances with the vermilion of beauty and innocence.
+
+
+It should be chronicled that Sevier, assisted possibly by other
+Wataugans, eventually returned to the State of North Carolina the
+money which he had forcibly borrowed to finance the King's Mountain
+expedition; and that neither he nor Shelby received any pay for their
+services, nor asked it. Before Shelby left the Holston in 1782 and moved
+to Kentucky, of which State he was to become the first Governor, the
+Assembly of North Carolina passed a resolution of gratitude to the
+overmountain men in general, and to Sevier and Shelby in particular,
+for their "very generous and patriotic services" with which the
+"General Assembly of this State are feelingly impressed." The resolution
+concluded by urging the recipients of the Assembly's acknowledgments
+to "continue" in their noble course. In view of what followed, this
+resolution is interesting!
+
+For some time the overhill pioneers had been growing dissatisfied with
+the treatment they were receiving from the State, which on the plea
+of poverty had refused to establish a Superior Court for them and to
+appoint a prosecutor. As a result, crime was on the increase, and
+the law-abiding were deprived of the proper legal means to check the
+lawless. In 1784 when the western soldiers' claims began to reach the
+Assembly, there to be scrutinized by unkindly eyes, the dissatisfaction
+increased. The breasts of the mountain men--the men who had made that
+spectacular ride to bring Ferguson to his end--were kindled with hot
+indignation when they heard that they had been publicly assailed as
+grasping persons who seized on every pretense to "fabricate demands
+against the Government." Nor were those fiery breasts cooled by further
+plaints to the effect that the "industry and property" of those east of
+the hills were "becoming the funds appropriated to discharge the debts"
+of the Westerners. They might with justice have asked what the industry
+and property of the Easterners were worth on that day when the overhill
+men drilled in the snows on the high peak of Yellow Mountain and looked
+down on Burke County overrun by Ferguson's Tories, and beyond, to
+Charlotte, where lay Cornwallis.
+
+The North Carolina Assembly did not confine itself to impolite remarks.
+It proceeded to get rid of what it deemed western rapacity by ceding the
+whole overmountain territory to the United States, with the proviso that
+Congress must accept the gift within twelve months. And after passing
+the Cession Act, North Carolina closed the land office in the undesired
+domain and nullified all entries made after May 25, 1784. The Cession
+Act also enabled the State to evade its obligations to the Cherokees in
+the matter of an expensive consignment of goods to pay for new lands.
+
+This clever stroke of the Assembly's brought about immediate
+consequences in the region beyond the hills. The Cherokees, who knew
+nothing about the Assembly's system of political economy but who found
+their own provokingly upset by the non-arrival of the promised goods,
+began again to darken the mixture in their paint pots; and they dug up
+the war hatchet, never indeed so deeply patted down under the dust that
+it could not be unearthed by a stub of the toe. Needless to say, it was
+not the thrifty and distant Easterners who felt their anger, but the
+nearby settlements.
+
+As for the white overhill dwellers, the last straw had been laid on
+their backs; and it felt like a hickory log. No sooner had the Assembly
+adjourned than the men of Washington, Sullivan, and Greene counties,
+which comprised the settled portion of what is now east Tennessee,
+elected delegates to convene for the purpose of discussing the formation
+of a new State. They could assert that they were not acting illegally,
+for in her first constitution North Carolina had made provision for a
+State beyond the mountains. And necessity compelled them to take steps
+for their protection. Some of them, and Sevier was of the number,
+doubted if Congress would accept the costly gift; and the majority
+realized that during the twelve months which were allowed for the
+decision they would have no protection from either North Carolina or
+Congress and would not be able to command their own resources.
+
+In August, 1784, the delegates met at Jonesborough and passed
+preliminary resolutions; and then adjourned to meet later in the year.
+The news was soon disseminated through North Carolina and the Assembly
+convened in October and hastily repealed the Cession Act, voted to
+establish the District of Washington out of the four counties, and sent
+word of the altered policy to Sevier, with a commission for himself as
+Brigadier General. From the steps of the improvised convention hall,
+before which the delegates had gathered, Sevier read the Assembly's
+message and advised his neighbors to proceed no further, since North
+Carolina had of her own accord redressed all their grievances. But for
+once Nolichucky Jack's followers refused to follow. The adventure too
+greatly appealed. Obliged to choose between North Carolina and his own
+people, Sevier's hesitation was short. The State of Frankland, or Land
+of the Free, was formed; and Nolichucky Jack was elevated to the office
+of Governor--with a yearly salary of two hundred mink skins.
+
+Perhaps John Tipton had hoped to head the new State, for he had been one
+of its prime movers and was a delegate to this convention. But when the
+man whom he hated--apparently for no reason except that other men loved
+him--assented to the people's will and was appointed to the highest
+post within their gift, Tipton withdrew, disavowing all connection with
+Frankland and affirming his loyalty to North Carolina. From this time
+on, the feud was an open one.
+
+That brief and now forgotten State, Frankland, the Land of the Free,
+which bequeathed its name as an appellation for America, was founded as
+Watauga had been founded--to meet the practical needs and aspirations
+of its people. It will be remembered that one of the things written by
+Sevier into the only Watauga document extant was that they desired to
+become "in every way the best members of society." Frankland's aims,
+as recorded, included the intent to "improve agriculture, perfect
+manufacturing, ENCOURAGE LITERATURE and every thing truly laudable."
+
+The constitution of Frankland, agreed to on the 14th of November,
+1785, appeals to us today rather by its spirit than by its practical
+provisions. "This State shall be called the Commonwealth of Frankland
+and shall be governed by a General Assembly of the representatives of
+the freemen of the same, a Governor and Council, and proper courts of
+justice.... The supreme legislative power shall be vested in a
+single House of Representatives of the freemen of the commonwealth of
+Frankland. The House of Representatives of the freemen of the State
+shall consist of persons most noted for wisdom and virtue."
+
+In these exalted desires of the primitive men who held by their rifles
+and hatchets the land by the western waters, we see the influence of the
+Reverend Samuel Doak, their pastor, who founded the first church and the
+first school beyond the great hills. Early in the life of Watauga he had
+come thither from Princeton, a zealous and broadminded young man, and
+a sturdy one, too, for he came on foot driving before him a mule
+laden with books. Legend credits another minister, the Reverend Samuel
+Houston, with suggesting the name of Frankland, after he had opened
+the Convention with prayer. It is not surprising to learn that this
+glorified constitution was presently put aside in favor of one modeled
+on that of North Carolina.
+
+Sevier persuaded the more radical members of the community to abandon
+their extreme views and to adopt the laws of North Carolina. However
+lawless his acts as Governor of a bolting colony may appear, Sevier was
+essentially a constructive force. His purposes were right, and small
+motives are not discernible in his record. He might reasonably urge that
+the Franklanders had only followed the example of North Carolina and the
+other American States in seceding from the parent body, and for similar
+causes, for the State's system of taxation had long borne heavily on the
+overhill men.
+
+The whole transmontane populace welcomed Frankland with enthusiasm.
+Major Arthur Campbell, of the Virginian settlements, on the Holston,
+was eager to join. Sevier and his Assembly took the necessary steps
+to receive the overhill Virginians, provided that the transfer of
+allegiance could be made with Virginia's consent. Meanwhile he replied
+in a dignified manner to the pained and menacing expostulations of North
+Carolina's Governor. North Carolina was bidden to remember the epithets
+her assemblymen had hurled at the Westerners, which they themselves had
+by no means forgotten. And was it any wonder that they now doubted the
+love the parent State professed to feel for them? As for the puerile
+threat of blood, had their quality really so soon become obliterated
+from the memory of North Carolina? At this sort of writing, Sevier, who
+always pulsed hot with emotion and who had a pretty knack in turning a
+phrase, was more than a match for the Governor of North Carolina, whose
+prerogatives he had usurped.
+
+The overmountain men no longer needed to complain bitterly of the lack
+of legal machinery to keep them "the best members of society." They
+now had courts to spare. Frankland had its courts, its judges, its
+legislative body, its land office--in fact, a full governmental
+equipment. North Carolina also performed all the natural functions of
+political organism, within the western territory. Sevier appointed one
+David Campbell a judge. Campbell held court in Jonesborough. Ten miles
+away, in Buffalo, Colonel John Tipton presided for North Carolina. It
+happened frequently that officers and attendants of the rival law courts
+met, as they pursued, their duties, and whenever they met they fought.
+The post of sheriff--or sheriffs, for of course there were two--was
+filled by the biggest and heaviest man and the hardest hitter in the
+ranks of the warring factions. A favorite game was raiding each other's
+courts and carrying off the records. Frankland sent William Cocke, later
+the first senator from Tennessee, to Congress with a memorial, asking
+Congress to accept the territory North Carolina had offered and to
+receive it into the Union as a separate State. Congress ignored the
+plea. It began to appear that North Carolina would be victor in the end;
+and so there were defections among the Franklanders. Sevier wrote
+to Benjamin Franklin asking his aid in establishing the status of
+Frankland; and, with a graceful flourish of his ready pen, changed the
+new State's name to Franklin by way of reinforcing his arguments. But
+the old philosopher, more expert than Sevier in diplomatic calligraphy,
+only acknowledged the compliment and advised the State of Franklin to
+make peace with North Carolina.
+
+Sevier then appealed for aid and recognition to the Governor of Georgia,
+who had previously appointed him Brigadier General of militia. But
+the Governor of Georgia also avoided giving the recognition requested,
+though he earnestly besought Sevier to come down and settle the Creeks
+for him. There were others who sent pleas to Sevier, the warrior, to
+save them from the savages. One of the writers who addressed him did not
+fear to say "Your Excellency," nor to accord Nolichucky Jack the whole
+dignity of the purple in appealing to him as the only man possessing the
+will and the power to prevent the isolated settlements on the Cumberland
+from being wiped out. That writer was his old friend, James Robertson.
+
+In 1787, while Sevier was on the frontier of Greene County, defending
+it from Indians, the legal forces of North Carolina swooped down on his
+estate and took possession of his negroes. It was Tipton who represented
+the law; and Tipton carried off the Governor's slaves to his own estate.
+When Nolichucky Jack came home and found that his enemy had stripped
+him, he was in a towering rage. With a body of his troops and one small
+cannon, he marched to Tipton's house and besieged it, threatening a
+bombardment. He did not, however, fire into the dwelling, though he
+placed some shots about it and in the extreme corners. This opera bouffe
+siege endured for several days, until Tipton was reinforced by some of
+his own clique. Then Tipton sallied forth and attacked the besiegers,
+who hastily scattered rather than engage in a sanguinary fight with
+their neighbors. Tipton captured Sevier's two elder sons and was only
+strained from hanging them on being informed that two of his own sons
+were at that moment in Sevier's hands.
+
+In March, 1788, the State of Franklin went into eclipse. Sevier was
+overthrown by the authorities of North Carolina. Most of the officials
+who had served under him were soothed by being reappointed to their old
+positions. Tipton's star was now in the ascendant, for his enemy was
+to be made the vicarious sacrifice for the sins of all whom he had "led
+astray." Presently David Campbell, still graciously permitted to preside
+over the Superior Court, received from the Governor of North Carolina
+the following letter:
+
+"Sir: It has been represented to the Executive that John Sevier, who
+style's himself Captain-General of the State of Franklin, has been
+guilty of high treason in levying troops to oppose the laws and
+government of the State.... You will issue your warrant to apprehend
+the said John Sevier, and in case he cannot be sufficiently secured for
+trial in the District of Washington, order him to be committed to the
+public gaol."
+
+
+The judge's authority was to be exercised after he had examined the
+"affidavits of credible persons." Campbell's judicial opinion seems to
+have been that any affidavit against "the said John Sevier" could not be
+made by a "credible person." He refused to issue the warrant. Tipton's
+friend, Spencer, who had been North Carolina's judge of the Superior
+Court in the West and who was sharing that honor now with Campbell,
+issued the warrant and sent Tipton to make the arrest.
+
+Sevier was at the Widow Brown's inn with some of his men when Tipton at
+last came up with him. It was early morning. Tipton and his posse were
+about to enter when the portly and dauntless widow, surmising their
+errand, drew her chair into the doorway, plumped herself down in it, and
+refused to budge for all the writs in North Carolina. Tipton blustered
+and the widow rocked. The altercation awakened Sevier. He dressed
+hurriedly and came down. As soon as he presented himself on the porch,
+Tipton thrust his pistol against his body, evidently with intent to fire
+if Sevier made signs of resistance. Sevier's furious followers were not
+disposed to let him be taken without a fight, but he admonished them to
+respect the law, and requested that they would inform Bonnie Kate of his
+predicament. Then, debonair as ever, with perhaps a tinge of contempt at
+the corners of his mouth, he held out his wrists for the manacles which
+Tipton insisted on fastening upon them.
+
+It was not likely that any jail in the western country could hold
+Nolichucky Jack overnight. Tipton feared a riot; and it was decided to
+send the prisoner for incarceration and trial to Morgantown in North
+Carolina, just over the hills.
+
+Tipton did not accompany the guards he sent with Sevier. It was stated
+and commonly believed that he had given instructions of which the
+honorable men among his friends were ignorant. When the party entered
+the mountains, two of the guards were to lag behind with the prisoner,
+till the others were out of sight on the twisting trail. Then one of the
+two was to kill Sevier and assert that he had done it because Sevier
+had attempted to escape. It fell out almost as planned, except that the
+other guard warned Sevier of the fate in store for him and gave him
+a chance to flee. In plunging down the mountain, Sevier's horse was
+entangled in a thicket. The would-be murderer overtook him and fired;
+but here again fate had interposed for her favorite. The ball had
+dropped out of the assassin's pistol. So Sevier reached Morgantown
+in safety and was deposited in care of the sheriff, who was doubtless
+cautioned to take a good look at the prisoner and know him for a
+dangerous and a daring man.
+
+There is a story to the effect that, when Sevier was arraigned in the
+courthouse at Morgantown and presently dashed through the door and away
+on a racer that had been brought up by some of his friends, among those
+who witnessed the proceedings was a young Ulster Scot named Andrew
+Jackson; and that on this occasion these two men, later to become foes,
+first saw each other. Jackson may have been in Morgantown at the
+time, though this is disputed; but the rest of the tale is pure legend
+invented by some one whose love of the spectacular led him far from the
+facts. The facts are less theatrical but much more dramatic. Sevier
+was not arraigned at all, for no court was sitting in Morgantown at the
+time. * The sheriff to whom he was delivered did not need to look twice
+at him to know him for a daring man. He had served with him at King's
+Mountain. He struck off his handcuffs and set him at liberty at once.
+Perhaps he also notified General Charles McDowell at his home in Quaker
+Meadows of the presence of a distinguished guest in Burke County, for
+McDowell and his brother Joseph, another officer of militia, quickly
+appeared and went on Sevier's bond. Nolichucky Jack was presently
+holding a court of his own in the tavern, with North Carolina's men at
+arms--as many as were within call--drinking his health. So his sons and
+a company of his Wataugans found him, when they rode into Morgantown to
+give evidence in his behalf--with their rifles. Since none now disputed
+the way with him, Sevier turned homeward with his cavalcade, McDowell
+and his men accompanying him as far as the pass in the hills.
+
+
+     * Statement by John Sevier, Junior, in the Draper MSS., quoted by
+Turner, "Life of General John Sevier," p. 182.
+
+
+No further attempt was made to try John Sevier for treason, either west
+or east of the mountains. In November, however, the Assembly passed the
+Pardon Act, and thereby granted absolution to every one who had been
+associated with the State of Franklin, EXCEPT JOHN SEVIER. In a clause
+said to have been introduced by Tipton, now a senator, or suggested by
+him, John Sevier was debarred forever from "the enjoyment of any office
+of profit or honor or trust in the State of North Carolina."
+
+The overhill men in Greene County took due note of the Assembly's fiat
+and at the next election sent Sevier to the North Carolina Senate.
+Nolichucky Jack, whose demeanor was never so decorous as when the
+ill-considered actions of those in authority had made him appear to have
+circumvented the law, considerately waited outside until the House had
+lifted the ban--which it did perforce and by a large majority, despite
+Tipton's opposition--and then took his seat on the senatorial bench
+beside his enemy. The records show that he was reinstated as Brigadier
+General of the Western Counties and also appointed at the head of the
+Committee on Indian Affairs.
+
+
+Not only in the region about Watauga did the pioneers of Tennessee
+endure the throes of danger and strife during these years. The little
+settlements on the Cumberland, which were scattered over a short
+distance of about twenty-five or thirty miles and had a frontier line
+of two hundred miles, were terribly afflicted. Their nearest white
+neighbors among the Kentucky settlers were one hundred and fifty miles
+away; and through the cruelest years these could render no aid--could
+not, indeed, hold their own stations. The Kentuckians, as we have
+seen, were bottled up in Harrodsburg and Boonesborough; and, while the
+northern Indians led by Girty and Dequindre darkened the Bloody Ground
+anew, the Cumberlanders were making a desperate stand against the
+Chickasaws and the Creeks. So terrible was their situation that panic
+took hold on them, and they would have fled but for the influence of
+Robertson. He may have put the question to them in the biblical words,
+"Whither shall I flee?" For they were surrounded, and those who did
+attempt to escape were "weighed on the path and made light." Robertson
+knew that their only chance of survival was to stand their ground. The
+greater risks he was willing to take in person, for it was he who made
+trips to Boonesborough and Harrodsburg for a share of the powder and
+lead which John Sevier was sending into Kentucky from time to time. In
+the stress of conflict Robertson bore his full share of grief, for his
+two elder sons and his brother fell. He himself was often near to death.
+One day he was cut off in the fields and was shot in the foot as he ran,
+yet he managed to reach shelter. There is a story that, in an attack
+during one of his absences, the Indians forced the outer gate of the
+fort and Mrs. Robertson went out of her cabin, firing, and let loose a
+band of the savage dogs which the settlers kept for their protection,
+and so drove out the invaders.
+
+The Chickasaws were loyal to the treaty they had made with the British
+in the early days of James Adair's association with them. They were
+friends to England's friends and foes to her foes. While they resented
+the new settlements made on land they considered theirs, they signed a
+peace with Robertson at the conclusion of the War of Independence.
+They kept their word with him as they had kept it with the British.
+Furthermore, their chief, Opimingo or the Mountain Leader, gave
+Robertson his assistance against the Creeks and the Choctaws and, in so
+far as he understood its workings, informed him of the new Spanish and
+French conspiracy, which we now come to consider. So once again the
+Chickasaws were servants of destiny to the English-speaking race, for
+again they drove the wedge of their honor into an Indian solidarity
+welded with European gold.
+
+Since it was generally believed at that date that the tribes were
+instigated to war by the British and supplied by them with their
+ammunition, savage inroads were expected to cease with the signing of
+peace. But Indian warfare not only continued; it increased. In the last
+two years of the Revolution, when the British were driven from the
+Back Country of the Carolinas and could no longer reach the tribes with
+consignments of firearms and powder, it should have been evident that
+the Indians had other sources of supply and other allies, for they
+lacked nothing which could aid them in their efforts to exterminate the
+settlers of Tennessee.
+
+Neither France nor Spain wished to see an English-speaking republic
+based on ideals of democracy successfully established in America. Though
+in the Revolutionary War, France was a close ally of the Americans and
+Spain something more than a nominal one, the secret diplomacy of the
+courts of the Bourbon cousins ill matched with their open professions.
+Both cousins hated England. The American colonies, smarting under
+injustice, had offered a field for their revenge. But hatred of England
+was not the only reason why activities had been set afoot to increase
+the discord which should finally separate the colonies from Great
+Britain and leave the destiny of the colonies to be decided by the House
+of Bourbon. Spain saw in the Americans, with their English modes of
+thought, a menace to her authority in her own colonies on both the
+northern and southern continents. This menace would not be stilled but
+augmented if the colonies should be established as a republic. Such an
+example might be too readily followed. Though France had, by a secret
+treaty in 1762, made over to Spain the province of Louisiana, she was
+not unmindful of the Bourbon motto, "He who attacks the Crown of one
+attacks the other." And she saw her chance to deal a crippling blow at
+England's prestige and commerce.
+
+In 1764, the French Minister, Choiseul, had sent a secret agent, named
+Pontleroy, to America to assist in making trouble and to watch for
+any signs that might be turned to the advantage of les duex couronnes.
+Evidently Pontleroy's reports were encouraging for, in 1768, Johann
+Kalb--the same Kalb who fell at Camden in 1780--arrived in Philadelphia
+to enlarge the good work. He was not only, like several of the foreign
+officers in the War of Independence, a spy for his Government, but he
+was also the special emissary of one Comte de Broglie who, after the
+colonies had broken with the mother country, was to put himself at the
+head of American affairs. This Broglie had been for years one of
+Louis XV's chief agents in subterranean diplomacy, and it is not to be
+supposed that he was going to attempt the stupendous task of controlling
+America's destiny without substantial backing. Spain had been advised
+meanwhile to rule her new Louisiana territory with great liberality--in
+fact, to let it shine as a republic before the yearning eyes of the
+oppressed Americans, so that the English colonists would arise and cast
+off their fetters. Once the colonies had freed themselves from England's
+protecting arm, it would be a simple matter for the Bourbons to
+gather them in like so many little lost chicks from a rainy yard. The
+intrigants of autocratic systems have never been able to understand that
+the urge of the spirit of independence in men is not primarily to break
+shackles but to STAND ALONE and that the breaking of bonds is incidental
+to the true demonstration of freedom. The Bourbons and their agents were
+no more nor less blind to the great principle stirring the hearts of men
+in their day than were the Prussianized hosts over a hundred years later
+who, having themselves no acquaintance with the law of liberty, could
+not foresee that half a world would rise in arms to maintain that law.
+
+When the War of Independence had ended, the French Minister, Vergennes,
+and the Spanish Minister, Floridablanca, secretly worked in unison to
+prevent England's recognition of the new republic; and Floridablanca in
+1782 even offered to assist England if she would make further efforts
+to subdue her "rebel subjects." Both Latin powers had their own axes
+to grind, and America was to tend the grindstone. France looked for
+recovery of her old prestige in Europe and expected to supersede England
+in commerce. She would do this, in the beginning, chiefly through
+control of America and of America's commerce. Vergennes therefore sought
+not only to dictate the final terms of peace but also to say what the
+American commissioners should and should not demand. Of the latter
+gentlemen he said that they possessed "caracteres peu maniables!" In
+writing to Luzerne, the French Ambassador in Philadelphia, on October
+14, 1782, Vergennes said: "it behooves us to leave them [the American
+commissioners] to their illusions, to do everything that can make them
+fancy that we share them, and undertake only to defeat any attempts to
+which those illusions might carry them if our cooperation is required."
+Among these "illusions" were America's desires in regard to the
+fisheries and to the western territory. Concerning the West, Vergennes
+had written to Luzerne, as early as July 18, 1780: "At the moment when
+the revolution broke out, the limits of the Thirteen States did not
+reach the River [Mississippi] and it would be absurd for them to claim
+the rights of England, a power whose rule they had abjured." By the
+secret treaty with Spain, furthermore, France had agreed to continue
+the war until Gibraltar should be taken, and--if the British should be
+driven from Newfoundland--to share the fisheries only with Spain, and
+to support Spain in demanding that the Thirteen States renounce all
+territory west of the Alleghanies. The American States must by no means
+achieve a genuine independence but must feel the need of sureties,
+allies, and protection. *
+
+
+     * See John Jay, "On the Peace Negotiations of 1782-1788 as
+Illustrated by the Secret Correspondence of France and England," New
+York, 1888.
+
+
+So intent was Vergennes on these aims that he sent a secret emissary to
+England to further them there. This act of his perhaps gave the first
+inkling to the English statesmen * that American and French desires
+were not identical and hastened England's recognition of American
+independence and her agreement to American demands in regard to the
+western territory. When, to his amazement, Vergennes learned that
+England had acceded to all America's demands, he said that England
+had "bought the peace" rather than made it. The policy of Vergennes
+in regard to America was not unjustly pronounced by a later French
+statesman "A VILE SPECULATION."
+
+
+     * "Your Lordship was well founded in your suspicion that the
+granting of independence to America as a previous measure is a point
+which the French have by no means at heart and perhaps are entirely
+averse from." Letter from Fitzherbert to Grantham, September 3, 1782.
+
+
+Through England's unexpected action, then, the Bourbon cousins had
+forever lost their opportunity to dominate the young but spent and
+war-weakened Republic, or to use America as a catspaw to snatch English
+commerce for France. It was plain, too, that any frank move of the
+sort would range the English alongside of their American kinsmen. Since
+American Independence was an accomplished fact and therefore could no
+longer be prevented, the present object of the Bourbon cousins was to
+restrict it. The Appalachian Mountains should be the western limits of
+the new nation. Therefore the settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee must
+be broken up, or the settlers must be induced to secede from the Union
+and raise the Spanish banner. The latter alternative was held to be
+preferable. To bring it about the same methods were to be continued
+which had been used prior to and during the war--namely, the use of
+agents provocateurs to corrupt the ignorant and incite the lawless, the
+instigation of Indian massacres to daunt the brave, and the distribution
+of gold to buy the avaricious.
+
+As her final and supreme means of coercion, Spain refused to America the
+right of navigation on the Mississippi and so deprived the Westerners of
+a market for their produce. The Northern States, having no immediate use
+for the Mississippi, were willing to placate Spain by acknowledging her
+monopoly of the great waterway. But Virginia and North Carolina
+were determined that America should not, by congressional enactment,
+surrender her "natural right"; and they cited the proposed legislation
+as their reason for refusing to ratify the Constitution. "The act which
+abandons it [the right of navigation] is an act of separation between
+the eastern and western country," Jefferson realized at last. "An act of
+separation"--that point had long been very clear to the Latin sachems of
+the Mississippi Valley!
+
+Bounded as they were on one side by the precipitous mountains and on the
+other by the southward flow of the Mississippi and its tributary, the
+Ohio, the trappers and growers of corn in Kentucky and western Tennessee
+regarded New Orleans as their logical market, as the wide waters were
+their natural route. If market and route were to be closed to them,
+their commercial advancement was something less than a dream.
+
+In 1785, Don Estevan Miro, a gentleman of artful and winning address,
+became Governor of Louisiana and fountainhead of the propaganda. He
+wrote benign and brotherly epistles to James Robertson of the Cumberland
+and to His Excellency of Franklin, suggesting that to be of service
+to them was his dearest aim in life; and at the same time he kept the
+southern Indians continually on the warpath. When Robertson wrote to
+him of the Creek and Cherokee depredations, with a hint that the Spanish
+might have some responsibility in the matter, Miro replied by offering
+the Cumberlander a safe home on Spanish territory with freedom of
+religion and no taxes. He disclaimed stirring up the Indians. He had,
+in fact, advised Mr McGillivray, chief of the Creeks, to make peace.
+He would try again what he could do with Mr. McGillivray. As to the
+Cherokees, they resided in a very distant territory and he was not
+acquainted with them; he might have added that he did not need to be:
+his friend McGillivray was the potent personality among the Southern
+tribes.
+
+In Alexander McGillivray, Miro found a weapon fashioned to his hand. If
+the Creek chieftain's figure might stand as the symbol of treachery, it
+is none the less one of the most picturesque and pathetic in our early
+annals. McGillivray, it will be remembered, was the son of Adair's
+friend Lachlan McGillivray, the trader, and a Creek woman whose sire had
+been a French officer. A brilliant and beautiful youth, he had given his
+father a pride in him which is generally denied to the fathers of sons
+with Indian blood in them. The Highland trader had spared nothing in
+his son's education and had placed him, after his school days, in the
+business office of the large trading establishment of which he himself
+was a member. At about the age of seventeen Alexander had become a
+chieftain in his mother's nation; and doubtless it is he who appears
+shortly afterwards in the Colonial Records as the White Leader whose
+influence is seen to have been at work for friendship between the
+colonists and the tribes. When the Revolutionary War broke out, Lachlan
+McGillivray, like many of the old traders who had served British
+interests so long and so faithfully, held to the British cause. Georgia
+confiscated all his property and Lachlan fled to Scotland. For this, his
+son hated the people of Georgia with a perfect hatred. He remembered how
+often his father's courage alone had stood between those same people and
+the warlike Creeks. He could recall the few days in 1760 when Lachlan
+and his fellow trader, Galphin, at the risk of their lives had braved
+the Creek warriors--already painted for war and on the march--and so had
+saved the settlements of the Back Country from extermination. He looked
+upon the men of Georgia as an Indian regards those who forget either
+a blood gift or a blood vengeance. And he embraced the whole American
+nation in his hatred for their sakes.
+
+In 1776 Alexander McGillivray was in his early thirties-the exact date
+of his birth is uncertain. * He had, we are told, the tall, sturdy, but
+spare physique of the Gael, with a countenance of Indian color though
+not of Indian cast. His overhanging brows made more striking his very
+large and luminous dark eyes. He bore himself with great dignity; his
+voice was soft, his manner gentle. He might have been supposed to be
+some Latin courtier but for the barbaric display of his dress and his
+ornaments. He possessed extraordinary personal magnetism, and his power
+extended beyond the Creek nation to the Choctaws and Chickasaws and the
+Southern Cherokees. He had long been wooed by the Louisiana authorities,
+but there is no evidence that he had made alliance with them prior to
+the Revolution.
+
+
+     * Probably about 1741 or 1742. Some writers give 1739 and others
+1746. His father landed in Charleston, Pickett ("History of Alabama")
+says, in 1735, and was then only sixteen.
+
+
+Early in the war he joined the British, received a colonel's commission,
+and led his formidable Creeks against the people of Georgia. When the
+British were driven from the Back Countries, McGillivray, in his British
+uniform, went on with the war. When the British made peace, McGillivray
+exchanged his British uniform for a Spanish one and went on with the
+war. In later days, when he had forced Congress to pay him for his
+father's confiscated property and had made peace, he wore the uniform
+of an American Brigadier General; but he did not keep the peace, never
+having intended to keep it. It was not until he had seen the Spanish
+plots collapse and had realized that the Americans were to dominate the
+land, that the White Leader ceased from war and urged the youths of his
+tribe to adopt American civilization.
+
+Spent from hate and wasted with dissipation, he retired at last to the
+spot where Lachlan had set up his first Creek home. Here he lived his
+few remaining days in a house which he built on the site of the old
+ruined cabin about which still stood the little grove of apple trees his
+father had planted. He died at the age of fifty of a fever contracted
+while he was on a business errand in Pensacola. Among those who
+visited him in his last years, one has left this description of him:
+"Dissipation has sapped a constitution originally delicate and feeble.
+He possesses an atticism of diction aided by a liberal education, a
+great fund of wit and humor meliorated by a perfect good nature and
+politeness." Set beside that kindly picture this rough etching by James
+Robertson: "The biggest devil among them [the Spaniards] is the half
+Spaniard, half Frenchman, half Scotchman and altogether Creek scoundrel,
+McGillivray."
+
+How indefatigably McGillivray did his work we know from the bloody
+annals of the years which followed the British-American peace, when the
+men of the Cumberland and of Franklin were on the defensive continually.
+How cleverly Mire played his personal role we discover in the letters
+addressed to him by Sevier and Robertson. These letters show that, as
+far as words go at any rate, the founders of Tennessee were willing
+to negotiate with Spain. In a letter dated September 12, 1788, Sevier
+offered himself and his tottering State of Franklin to the Spanish King.
+This offer may have been made to gain a respite, or it may have been
+genuine. The situation in the Tennessee settlements was truly desperate,
+for neither North Carolina nor Congress apparently cared in the least
+what befell them or how soon. North Carolina indeed was in an anomalous
+position, as she had not yet ratified the Federal Constitution. If
+Franklin went out of existence and the territory which it included
+became again part of North Carolina, Sevier knew that a large part of
+the newly settled country would, under North Carolina's treaties, revert
+to the Indians. That meant ruin to large numbers of those who had put
+their faith in his star, or else it meant renewed conflict either with
+the Indians or with the parent State. The probabilities aria that Sevier
+hoped to play the Spaniards against the Easterners who, even while
+denying the Westerners' contention that the mountains were a "natural"
+barrier between them, were making of them a barrier of indifference.
+It would seem so, because, although this was the very aim of all Miro's
+activities so that, had he been assured of the sincerity of the offer,
+he must have grasped at it, yet nothing definite was done. And Sevier
+was presently informing Shelby, now in Kentucky, that there was a
+Spanish plot afoot to seize the western country.
+
+Miro had other agents besides McGillivray--who, by the way, was costing
+Spain, for his own services and those of four tribes aggregating over
+six thousand warriors, a sum of fifty-five thousand dollars a year.
+McGillivray did very well as superintendent of massacres; but the
+Spaniard required a different type of man, an American who enjoyed his
+country's trust, to bring the larger plan to fruition. Miro found that
+man in General James Wilkinson, lately of the Continental Army and now a
+resident of Kentucky, which territory Wilkinson undertook to deliver
+to Spain, for a price. In 1787 Wilkinson secretly took the oath of
+allegiance to Spain and is listed in the files of the Spanish secret
+service, appropriately, as "Number Thirteen." He was indeed the
+thirteenth at table, the Judas at the feast. Somewhat under middle
+height, Wilkinson was handsome, graceful, and remarkably magnetic. Of a
+good, if rather impoverished, Maryland family, he was well educated
+and widely read for the times. With a brilliant and versatile
+intellectuality and ready gifts as a speaker, he swayed men easily. He
+was a bold soldier and was endowed with physical courage, though when
+engaged in personal contests he seldom exerted it--preferring the red
+tongue of slander or the hired assassin's shot from behind cover. His
+record fails to disclose one commendable trait. He was inordinately
+avaricious, but love of money was not his whole motive force: he had a
+spirit so jealous and malignant that he hated to the death another man's
+good. He seemed to divine instantly wherein other men were weak and to
+understand the speediest and best means of suborning them to his own
+interests--or of destroying them.
+
+Wilkinson was able to lure a number of Kentuckians into the separatist
+movement. George Rogers Clark seriously disturbed the arch plotter by
+seizing a Spanish trader's store wherewith to pay his soldiers, whom
+Virginia had omitted to recompense. This act aroused the suspicions of
+the Spanish, either as to Number Thirteen's perfect loyalty or as to
+his ability to deliver the western country. In 1786, when Clark led
+two thousand men against the Ohio Indians in his last and his only
+unsuccessful campaign, Wilkinson had already settled himself near the
+Falls (Louisville) and had looked about for mischief which he might do
+for profit. Whether his influence had anything to do with what amounted
+virtually to a mutiny among Clark's forces is not ascertainable; but,
+for a disinterested onlooker, he was overswift to spread the news of
+Clark's debacle and to declare gleefully that Clark's sun of military
+glory had now forever set. It is also known that he later served other
+generals treacherously in Indian expeditions and that he intrigued with
+Mad Anthony Wayne's Kentucky troops against their commander.
+
+Spain did not wish to see the Indians crushed; and Wilkinson himself
+both hated and feared any other officer's prestige. How long he had
+been in foreign pay we can only conjecture, for, several years before
+he transplanted his activities to Kentucky, he had been one of a
+cabal against Washington. Not only his ambitions but his nature must
+inevitably have brought him to the death-battle with George Rogers
+Clark. As a military leader, Clark had genius, and soldiering was his
+passion. In nature, he was open, frank, and bold to make foes if he
+scorned a man's way as ignoble or dishonest. Wilkinson suavely set about
+scheming for Clark's ruin. His communication or memorial to the Virginia
+Assembly--signed by himself and a number of his friends--villifying
+Clark, ended Clark's chances for the commission in the Continental
+Army which he craved. It was Wilkinson who made public an incriminating
+letter which had Clark's signature attached and which Clark said he had
+never seen. It is to be supposed that Number Thirteen was responsible
+also for the malevolent anonymous letter accusing Clark of drunkenness
+and scheming which, so strangely, found its way into the Calendar of
+State Papers of Virginia. * As a result, Clark was censured by Virginia.
+Thereupon he petitioned for a Court of Inquiry, but this was not
+granted. Wilkinson had to get rid of Clark; for if Clark, with his
+military gifts and his power over men, had been elevated to a position
+of command under the smile of the Government, there would have been
+small opportunity for James W Wilkinson to lead the Kentuckians and
+to gather in Spanish gold. So the machinations of one of the vilest
+traitors who ever sold his country were employed to bring about the
+stultification and hence the downfall of a great servant.
+
+
+     * See Thomas M. Greene's "The Spanish Conspiracy," p. 78,
+footnote. It is possible that Wilkinson's intrigues provide data for
+a new biography of Clark which may recast in some measure the accepted
+view of Clark at this period.
+
+
+Wilkinson's chief aids were the Irishmen, O'Fallon, Nolan, and Powers.
+Through Nolan, he also vended Spanish secrets. He sold, indeed, whatever
+and whomever he could get his price for. So clever was he that he
+escaped detection, though he was obliged to remove some suspicions. He
+succeeded Wayne as commander of the regular army in 1796. He was one of
+the commissioners to receive Louisiana when the Purchase was arranged
+in 1803. He was still on the Spanish pay roll at that time. Wilkinson's
+true record came to light only when the Spanish archives were opened to
+investigators.
+
+There were British agents also in the Old Southwest, for the
+dissatisfaction of the Western men inspired in Englishmen the hope of
+recovering the Mississippi Basin. Lord Dorchester, Governor of Canada,
+wrote to the British Government that he had been approached by important
+Westerners; but he received advice from England to move slowly. For
+complicity in the British schemes, William Blount, who was first
+territorial Governor of Tennessee and later a senator from that State,
+was expelled from the Senate.
+
+Surely there was never a more elaborate network of plots that came to
+nothing! The concession to Americans in 1796 of the right of navigation
+on the Mississippi brought an end to the scheming.
+
+In the same year Tennessee was admitted to the Union, and John Sevier
+was elected Governor Sevier's popularity was undiminished, though there
+were at this time some sixty thousand souls in Tennessee, many of whom
+were late comers who had not known him in his heyday. His old power to
+win men to him must have been as strong as ever, for it is recorded that
+he had only to enter a political meeting--no matter whose--for the crowd
+to cheer him and shout for him to "give them a talk."
+
+
+This adulation of Sevier still annoyed a few men who had ambitions of
+their own. Among these was Andrew Jackson, who had come to Jonesborough
+in 1788, just after the collapse of the State of Franklin. He was
+twenty-one at that time, and he is said to have entered Jonesborough
+riding a fine racer and leading another, with a pack of hunting dogs
+baying or nosing along after him. A court record dated May 12, 1788,
+avers that "Andrew Jackson, Esq. came into Court and produced a licence
+as an Attorney With A Certificate sufficiently Attested of his Taking
+the Oath Necessary to said office and Was admitted to Practiss as an
+Attorney in the County Courts." Jackson made no history in old Watauga
+during that year. Next year he moved to Nashville, and one year later,
+when the Superior Court was established (1790), he became prosecuting
+attorney.
+
+The feud between Jackson and Sevier began about the time that Tennessee
+entered the Union. Jackson, then twenty-nine, was defeated for the
+post of Major General of the Militia through the influence which Sevier
+exercised against him, and it seems that Jackson never forgave this
+opposition to his ambitions. By the close of Sevier's third term,
+however, in 1802, when Archibald Roane became Governor, the post
+of Major General was again vacant. Both Sevier and Jackson offered
+themselves for it, and Jackson was elected by the deciding vote of the
+Governor, the military vote having resulted in a tie. A strong current
+of influence had now set in against Sevier and involved charges against
+his honor. His old enemy Tipton was still active. The basis of the
+charges was a file of papers from the entry-taker's office which a
+friend of Tipton's had laid before the Governor; with an affidavit
+to the effect that the papers were fraudulent. Both the Governor and
+Jackson believed the charges. When we consider what system or lack
+of system of land laws and land entries obtained in Watauga and such:
+primitive communities--when a patch of corn sealed a right and claims
+were made by notching trees with tomahawks--we may imagine that a file
+from the land office might appear easily enough to smirch a landholder's
+integrity. The scandal was, of course, used in an attempt to ruin
+Sevier's candidacy for a fourth term as Governor and to make certain
+Roane's reflection. To this end Jackson bent all his energies but
+without success. Nolichucky Jack was elected, for the fourth time, as
+Governor of Tennessee.
+
+Not long after his inauguration, Sevier met Jackson in Knoxville, where
+Jackson was holding court. The charges against Sevier were then being
+made the subject of legislative investigation instituted by Tipton, and
+Jackson had published a letter in the Knoxville "Gazette" supporting
+them. At the sight of Jackson, Sevier flew into a rage, and a fiery
+altercation ensued. The two men were only restrained from leaping on
+each other by the intervention of friends. The next day Jackson sent
+Sevier a challenge which Sevier accepted, but with the stipulation that
+the duel take place outside the State. Jackson insisted on fighting in
+Knoxville, where the insult had been offered. Sevier refused. "I have
+some respect," he wrote, "for the laws of the State over which I have
+the honor to preside, although you, a judge, appear to have none." No
+duel followed; but, after some further billets-doux, Jackson published
+Sevier as "a base coward and poltroon. He will basely insult but has
+not the courage to repair the wound." Again they met, by accident, and
+Jackson rushed upon Sevier with his cane. Sevier dismounted and drew
+his pistol but made no move to fire. Jackson, thereupon, also drew his
+weapon. Once more friends interfered. It is presumable that neither
+really desired the duel. By killing Nolichucky Jack, Jackson would have
+ended his own career in Tennessee--if Sevier's tribe of sons had not, by
+a swifter means, ended it for him. At this date Jackson was thirty-six.
+Sevier was fifty-eight; and he had seventeen children.
+
+The charges against Sevier, though pressed with all the force that his
+enemies could bring to bear, came to nothing. He remained the Governor
+of Tennessee for another six years--the three terms in eight years
+allowed by the constitution. In 1811 he was sent to Congress for the
+second time, as he had represented the Territory there twenty years
+earlier. He was returned again in 1813. At the conclusion of his term
+in 1815 he went into the Creek country as commissioner to determine the
+Creek boundaries, and here, far from his Bonnie Kate and his tribe,
+he died of fever at the age of seventy. His body was buried with full
+military honors at Tuckabatchee, one of the Creek towns. In 1889,
+Sevier's remains were removed to Knoxville and a high marble spire was
+raised above them.
+
+His Indian enemies forgave the chastisement he had inflicted on them
+and honored him. In times of peace they would come to him frequently for
+advice. And in his latter days, the chiefs would make state visits
+to his home on the Nolichucky River. "John Sevier is a good man"--so
+declared the Cherokee, Old Tassel, making himself the spokesman of
+history. Sevier had survived his old friend, co-founder with him of
+Watauga, by one year. James Robertson had died in 1814 at the age of
+seventy-two, among the Chickasaws, and his body, like that of his fellow
+pioneer, was buried in an Indian town and lay there until 1825, when it
+was removed to Nashville.
+
+
+What of the red tribes who had fought these great pioneers for the wide
+land of the Old Southwest and who in the end had received their dust and
+treasured it with honor in the little soil remaining to them? Always the
+new boundary lines drew closer in, and the red men's foothold narrowed
+before the pushing tread of the whites. The day came soon when there was
+no longer room for them in the land of their fathers. But far off
+across the great river there was a land the white men did not covet
+yet. Thither at last the tribes--Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and
+Creek--took their way. With wives and children, maids and youths, the
+old and the young, with all their goods, their cattle and horses, in the
+company of a regiment of American troops, they--like the white men who
+had superseded them--turned westward. In their faces also was the red
+color of the west, but not newly there. From the beginning of their
+race, Destiny had painted them with the hue of the brief hour of the
+dying sun.
+
+
+
+Chapter XI. Boone's Last Days
+
+One spring day in 1799, there might have been observed a great stir
+through the valley of the Kanawha. With the dawn, men were ahorse, and
+women, too. Wagons crowded with human freight wheeled over the rough
+country, and boats, large and small, were afloat on the streams which
+pour into the Great Kanawha and at length mingle with the Ohio at
+Point Pleasant, where the battle was fought which opened the gates of
+Kentucky.
+
+Some of the travelers poured into the little settlement at the junction
+of the Elk and the Kanawha, where Charleston now lies. Others, who had
+been later in starting or had come from a greater distance, gathered
+along the banks of the Kanawha. At last shouts from those stationed
+farthest up the stream echoed down the valley and told the rest that
+what they had come out to see was at hand.
+
+Several pirogues drifted into view on the river, now brightening in the
+sunshine. In the vessels were men and their families; bales and bundles
+and pieces of household furnishings, heaped to the gunwale; a few cattle
+and horses standing patiently. But it was for one man above all that the
+eager eyes of the settlers were watching, and him they saw clearly as
+his boat swung by--a tall figure, erect and powerful, his keen friendly
+blue eyes undimmed and his ruddy face unlined by time, though sixty-five
+winters had frosted his black hair.
+
+For a decade these settlers had known Daniel Boone, as storekeeper, as
+surveyor, as guide and soldier. They had eaten of the game he killed and
+lavishly distributed. And they too--like the folk of Clinch Valley in
+the year of Dunmore's War--had petitioned Virginia to bestow military
+rank upon their protector. "Lieutenant Colonel" had been his title
+among them, by their demand. Once indeed he had represented them in the
+Virginia Assembly and, for that purpose, trudged to Richmond with rifle
+and hunting dog. Not interested in the Legislature's proceedings, he
+left early in the session and tramped home again.
+
+But not even the esteem of friends and neighbors could hold the great
+hunter when the deer had fled. So Daniel Boone was now on his way
+westward to Missouri, to a new land of fabled herds and wide spaces,
+where the hunter's gun might speak its one word with authority and
+where the soul of a silent and fearless man might find its true abode in
+Nature's solitude. Waving his last farewells, he floated past the little
+groups--till their shouts of good will were long silenced, and his fleet
+swung out upon the Ohio.
+
+As Boone sailed on down the Beautiful River which forms the northern
+boundary of Kentucky, old friends and newcomers who had only heard
+his fame rode from far and near to greet and godspeed him on his way.
+Sometimes he paused for a day with them. Once at least--this, was in
+Cincinnati where he was taking on supplies--some one asked him why, at
+his age, he was leaving the settled country to dare the frontier once
+more.
+
+"Too crowded," he answered; "I want more elbow-room!"
+
+Boone settled at the Femme Osage Creek on the Missouri River,
+twenty-five miles above St. Charles, where the Missouri flows into the
+Mississippi. There were four other Kentucky families at La Charette,
+as the French inhabitants called the post, but these were the only
+Americans. The Spanish authorities granted Boone 840 acres of land, and
+here Daniel built the last cabin home he was to erect for himself and
+his Rebecca.
+
+The region pleased him immensely. The governmental system, for instance,
+was wholly to his mind. Taxes were infinitesimal. There were no
+elections, assemblies, or the like. A single magistrate, or Syndic,
+decided all disputes and made the few regulations and enforced them.
+There were no land speculators, no dry-mouthed sons of the commercial
+Tantalus, athirst for profits. Boone used to say that his first years in
+Missouri were the happiest of his life, with the exception of his first
+long hunt in Kentucky.
+
+In 1800 he was appointed Syndic of the district of Femme Osage, which
+office he filled for four years, until Louisiana became American
+territory. He was held in high esteem as a magistrate because of his
+just and wise treatment of his flock, who brought him all their small
+bickerings to settle. He had no use for legal procedure, would not
+listen to any nice subtleties, saying that he did not care anything
+at all about the EVIDENCE, what he wanted was the TRUTH. His favorite
+penalty for offenders was the hickory rod "well laid on." Often he
+decided that both parties in a suit were equally to blame and chastised
+them both alike. When in March, 1804, the American Commissioner received
+Louisiana for the United States, Delassus, Lieutenant Governor of Upper
+Louisiana, reporting on the various officials in the territory, wrote
+of the Femme Osage Syndic: "Mr. Boone, a respectable old man, just
+and impartial, he has already, since I appointed him, offered his
+resignation owing to his infirmities. Believing I know his probity,
+I have induced him to remain, in view of my confidence in him for the
+public good." *
+
+
+     * Thwaites, "Daniel Boone." To this and other biographies of
+Boone, cited in the Bibliographical Note at the end of this volume, the
+author is indebted for the material contained in this chapter.
+
+
+Daniel, no doubt supposing that a Syndic's rights were inviolable, had
+neglected to apply to the Governor at New Orleans for a ratification of
+his grant. He was therefore dispossessed. Not until 1810, and after he
+had enlisted the Kentucky Legislature in his behalf, did he succeed
+in inducing Congress to restore his land. The Kentucky Legislature's
+resolution was adopted because of "the many eminent services rendered by
+Colonel Boone in exploring and settling the western country, from which
+great advantages have resulted not only to the State but to the country
+in general, and that from circumstances over which he had no control he
+is now reduced to poverty; not having so far as appears an acre of land
+out of the vast territory he has been a great instrument in peopling."
+Daniel was seventy-six then; so it was late in the day for him to
+have his first experience of justice in the matter of land. Perhaps it
+pleased him, however, to hear that, in confirming his grant, Congress
+had designated him as "the man who has opened the way for millions of
+his fellow-men."
+
+The "infirmities" which had caused the good Syndic to seek relief from
+political cares must have been purely magisterial. The hunter could have
+been very little affected by them, for as soon as he was freed from his
+duties Boone took up again the silent challenge of the forest. Usually
+one or two of his sons or his son-in-law, Flanders Calloway, accompanied
+him, but sometimes his only companions were an old Indian and his
+hunting dog. On one of his hunting trips he explored a part of Kansas;
+and in 1814, when he was eighty, he hunted big game in the Yellowstone
+where again his heart rejoiced over great herds as in the days of his
+first lone wanderings in the Blue Grass country. At last, with the
+proceeds of these expeditions he was able to pay the debts he had left
+behind in Kentucky thirty years before. The story runs that Daniel had
+only fifty cents remaining when all the claims had been settled, but so
+contented was he to be able to look an honest man in the face that he
+was in no disposition to murmur over his poverty.
+
+When after a long and happy life his wife died in 1813, Boone lived with
+one or other of his sons * and sometimes with Flanders Calloway. Nathan
+Boone, with whom Daniel chiefly made his home, built what is said to
+have been the first stone house in Missouri. Evidently the old pioneer
+disapproved of stone houses and of the "luxuries" in furnishings which
+were then becoming possible to the new generation, for one of his
+biographers speaks of visiting him in a log addition to his son's house;
+and when Chester Harding, the painter, visited him in 1819 for the
+purpose of doing his portrait, he found Boone dwelling in a small log
+cabin in Nathan's yard. When Harding entered, Boone was broiling a
+venison steak on the end of his ramrod. During the sitting, one day,
+Harding asked Boone if he had ever been lost in the woods when on his
+long hunts in the wilderness.
+
+
+     * Boone's son Nathan won distinction in the War of 1812 and
+entered the regular army, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
+Daniel Morgan Boone is said to have been the first settler in Kansas
+(1827). One of Daniel's grandsons, bearing the name of Albert Gallatin
+Boone, was a pioneer of Colorado and was to the forefront in Rocky
+Mountain exploration. Another grandson was the scout, Kit Carson, who
+led Fremont to California.
+
+
+"No, I never got lost," Boone replied reflectively, "but I was
+BEWILDERED once for three days." Though now having reached the age
+of eighty-five, Daniel was intensely interested in California and was
+enthusiastic to make the journey thither next spring and so to flee once
+more from the civilization which had crept westward along his path. The
+resolute opposition of his sons, however, prevented the attempt.
+
+A few men who sought out Boone in his old age have left us brief
+accounts of their impressions. Among these was Audubon. "The stature
+and general appearance of this wanderer of the western forests," the
+naturalist wrote, "approached the gigantic. His chest was broad, and
+prominent; his muscular powers displayed themselves in every limb;
+his countenance gave indication of his great courage, enterprise and
+perseverance; and, when he spoke, the very motion of his lips brought
+the impression that whatever he uttered could not be otherwise than
+strictly true."
+
+Audubon spent a night under Boone's roof. He related afterwards that the
+old hunter, having removed his hunting shirt, spread his blankets on
+the floor and lay down there to sleep, saying that he found it more
+comfortable than a bed. A striking sketch of Boone is contained in a
+few lines penned by one of his earliest biographers: "He had what
+phrenologists would have considered a model head--with a forehead
+peculiarly high, noble and bold, thin compressed lips, a mild clear blue
+eye, a large and prominent chin and a general expression of countenance
+in which fearlessness and courage sat enthroned and which told the
+beholder at a glance what he had been and was formed to be." In
+criticizing the various portraits of Daniel, the same writer says: "They
+want the high port and noble daring of his countenance.... Never was
+old age more green, or gray hairs more graceful. His high, calm, bold
+forehead seemed converted by years into iron."
+
+Although we are indebted to these and other early chroniclers for
+many details of Boone's life, there was one event which none of his
+biographers has related; yet we know that it must have taken place.
+Even the bare indication of it is found only in the narrative of the
+adventures of two other explorers.
+
+It was in the winter of 1803 that these two men came to Boone's
+Settlement, as La Charette was now generally called. They had planned to
+make their winter camp there, for in the spring, when the Missouri rose
+to the flood, they and their company of frontiersmen were to take their
+way up that uncharted stream and over plains and mountains in quest
+of the Pacific Ocean. They were refused permission by the Spanish
+authorities to camp at Boone's Settlement; so they lay through the
+winter some forty miles distant on the Illinois side of the Mississippi,
+across from the mouth of the Missouri. Since the records are silent, we
+are free to picture as we choose their coming to the settlement during
+the winter and again in the spring, for we know that they came.
+
+We can imagine, for instance, the stir they made in La Charette on some
+sparkling day when the frost bit and the crusty snow sent up a dancing
+haze of diamond points. We can see the friendly French habitants staring
+after the two young leaders and their men--all mere boys, though they
+were also husky, seasoned frontiersmen--with their bronzed faces of
+English cast, as in their gayly fringed deerskins they swaggered through
+the hamlet to pay their respects to the Syndic. We may think of that
+dignitary as smoking his pipe before his fireplace, perhaps; or making
+out, in his fantastic spelling, a record of his primitive court--for
+instance, that he had on that day given Pierre a dozen hickory thwacks,
+"well laid on," for starting a brawl with Antoine, and had bestowed the
+same upon Antoine for continuing the brawl with Pierre. A knock at the
+door would bring the amiable invitation to enter, and the two young men
+would step across his threshold, while their followers crowded about the
+open door and hailed the old pathfinder.
+
+One of the two leaders--the dark slender man with a subtle touch of the
+dreamer in his resolute face--was a stranger; but the other, with the
+more practical mien and the shock of hair that gave him the name of Red
+Head among the tribes, Boone had known as a lad in Kentucky. To Daniel
+and this young visitor the encounter would be a simple meeting of
+friends, heightened in pleasure and interest somewhat, naturally, by the
+adventure in prospect. But to us there is something vast in the thought
+of Daniel Boone, on his last frontier, grasping the hands of William
+Clark and Meriwether Lewis.
+
+As for the rough and hearty mob at the door, Daniel must have known not
+a few of them well; though they had been children in the days when he
+and William Clark's brother strove for Kentucky. It seems fitting that
+the soldiers with this expedition should have come from the garrison at
+Kaskaskia; since the taking of that fort in 1778 by George Rogers
+Clark had opened the western way from the boundaries of Kentucky to the
+Mississippi. And among the young Kentuckians enlisted by William Clark
+were sons of the sturdy fighters of still an earlier border line, Clinch
+and Holston Valley men who had adventured under another Lewis at Point
+Pleasant. Daniel would recognize in these--such as Charles Floyd--the
+young kinsmen of his old-time comrades whom he had preserved from
+starvation in the Kentucky wilderness by the kill from his rifle as they
+made their long march home after Dunmore's War.
+
+In May, Lewis and Clark's pirogues ascended the Missouri and the leaders
+and men of the expedition spent another day in La Charette. Once again,
+at least, Daniel was to watch the westward departure of pioneers. In
+1811, when the Astorians passed, one of their number pointed to the
+immobile figure of "an old man on the bank, who, he said, was Daniel
+Boone."
+
+Sometimes the aged pioneer's mind cast forward to his last journey, for
+which his advancing years were preparing him. He wrote on the subject
+to a sister, in 1816, revealing in a few simple lines that the faith
+whereby he had crossed, if not more literally removed, mountains was
+a fixed star, and that he looked ahead fearlessly to the dark trail he
+must tread by its single gleam. Autumn was tinting the forest and the
+tang he loved was in the air when the great hunter passed. The date of
+Boone's death is given as September 26, 1820. He was in his eighty-sixth
+year. Unburdened by the pangs of disease he went out serenely, by the
+gentle marches of sleep, into the new country.
+
+The convention for drafting the constitution of Missouri, in session
+at St. Louis, adjourned for the day, and for twenty days thereafter the
+members wore crape on their arms as a further mark of respect for the
+great pioneer. Daniel was laid by Rebecca's side, on the bank of Teugue
+Creek, about a mile from the Missouri River. In 1845, the Missouri
+legislators hearkened to oft-repeated pleas from Kentucky and
+surrendered the remains of the pioneer couple. Their bones lie now in
+Frankfort, the capital of the once Dark and Bloody Ground, and in 1880 a
+monument was raised over them.
+
+To us it seems rather that Kentucky itself is Boone's monument; even as
+those other great corn States, Illinois and Indiana, are Clark's. There,
+these two servants unafraid, who sacrificed without measure in the
+wintry winds of man's ingratitude, are each year memorialized anew; when
+the earth in summer--the season when the red man slaughtered--lifts up
+the full grain in the ear, the life giving corn; and when autumn smiles
+in golden peace over the stubble fields, where the reaping and binding
+machines have hummed a nation's harvest song.
+
+
+
+Bibliographical Note
+
+The Races And Their Migration
+
+C. A. Hanna, "The Scotch-Irish," 2 vols. New York, 1902. A very full if
+somewhat over-enthusiastic study.
+
+H. J. Ford, "The Scotch-Irish in America." Princeton, 1915. Excellent.
+
+A. G. Spangenberg, Extracts from his Journal of travels in North
+Carolina, 1752. Publication of the Southern History Association. Vol. I,
+1897.
+
+A. B. Faust, "The German Element in the United States," 2 vols. (1909).
+
+J. P. MacLean, "An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch
+Highlanders in America" (1900).
+
+S. H. Cobb, "The Story of the Palatines" (1897).
+
+N. D. Mereness (editor), "Travels in the American Colonies." New York,
+1916. This collection contains the diary of the Moravian Brethren cited
+in the first chapter of the present volume.
+
+Life In The Back Country
+
+Joseph Doddridge, "Notes on the Settlements and Indian Wars of the
+Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania," from 1763 to 1783. Albany,
+1876. An intimate description of the daily life of the early settlers
+in the Back Country by one of themselves. J. F. D. Smyth, "Tour in the
+United States of America," 2 vols. London, 1784. Minute descriptions of
+the Back Country and interesting pictures of the life of the settlers;
+biased as to political views by Royalist sympathies.
+
+William H. Foote, "Sketches of North Carolina," New York, 1846. See
+Foote also for history of the first Presbyterian ministers in the Back
+Country. As to political history, inaccurate.
+
+Early History And Exploration
+
+J. S. Bassett (editor), "The Writings of Colonel William Byrd of
+Westover." New York, 1901. A contemporary record of early Virginia.
+
+Thomas Walker, "Journal of an Exploration in the Spring of the Year
+1750." Boston, 1888. The record of his travels by the discoverer of
+Cumberland Gap.
+
+William M. Darlington (editor), "Christopher Gist's Journals."
+Pittsburgh, 1893. Contains Gist's account of his surveys for the Ohio
+Company, 1750.
+
+C. A. Hanna, "The Wilderness Trail," 2 vols. New York, 1911. An
+exhaustive work of research, with full accounts of Croghan and Findlay.
+See also Croghan's and Johnson's correspondence in vol. VII, New York
+Colonial Records.
+
+James Adair, "The History of the American Indians," etc. London, 1775.
+The personal record of a trader who was one of the earliest explorers
+of the Alleghanies and of the Mississippi region east of the river; a
+many-sided work, intensely interesting.
+
+C. W. Alvord, "The Genesis of the Proclamation of 1763." Reprinted from
+Canadian Archives Report, 1906. A new and authoritative interpretation.
+In this connection see also the correspondence between Sir William
+Johnson and the Lords of Trade in vol. VII of New York Colonial Records.
+
+Justin Winsor, "The Mississippi Basin. The Struggle in America between
+England and France." Cambridge, 1895. Presents the results of exhaustive
+research and the coordination of facts by an historian of broad
+intellect and vision.
+
+"Colonial and State Records of North Carolina." 30 vols. The chief
+fountain source of the early history of North Carolina and Tennessee.
+
+W. H. Hoyt, "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence." New York,
+1907. This book presents the view generally adopted by historians, that
+the alleged Declaration of May 20, 1775, is spurious.
+
+Justin Winsor (editor), "Narrative and Critical History of America." 8
+vols. (1884-1889). Also "The Westward Movement." Cambridge, 1897. Both
+works of incalculable value to the student.
+
+C. W. Alvord, "The Mississippi. Valley in British Politics." 2 vols.
+Cleveland, 1917. A profound work of great value to students.
+
+Kentucky
+
+R. G. Thwaites and L. P. Kellogg (editors), "Documentary History of
+Dunmore's War," 1774. Compiled from the Draper Manuscripts in the
+library of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Madison, 1905. A collection
+of interesting and valuable documents with a suggestive, introduction.
+
+R. G. Thwaites, "Daniel Boone." New York, 1902. A short and accurate
+narrative of Boone's life and adventures compiled from the Draper
+Manuscripts and from earlier printed biographies.
+
+John P. Hale, "Daniel Boone, Some Facts and Incidents not Hitherto
+Published." A pamphlet giving an account of Boone in West Virginia.
+Printed at Wheeling, West Virginia. Undated.
+
+Timothy Flint, "The First White Man of the West or the Life and Exploits
+of Colonel Dan'l Boone." Cincinnati, 1854. Valuable only as regards
+Boone's later years.
+
+John S. C. Abbott, "Daniel Boone, the Pioneer of Kentucky." New York,
+1872. Fairly accurate throughout.
+
+J. M. Peck, "Daniel Boone" (in Sparks, "Library of American Biography."
+Boston, 1847).
+
+William Henry Bogart. "Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky." New
+York, 1856.
+
+William Hayden English, "Conquest of the Country Northwest of the River
+Ohio, 1778-1783," and "Life of General George Rogers Clark," 2 vols.
+Indianapolis, 1896. An accurate and valuable work for which the author
+has made painstaking research among printed and unprinted documents.
+Contains Clark's own account of his campaigns, letters he wrote on
+public and personal matters, and also letters from contemporaries in
+defense of his reputation.
+
+Theodore Roosevelt, "The Winning of the West," 4 vols. New York,
+1889-1896. A vigorous and spirited narrative.
+
+Tennessee
+
+J. G. M. Ramsey, "The Annals of Tennessee." Charleston, 1853. John
+Haywood, "The Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee."
+Nashville, 1891.
+
+(Reprint from 1828.) These works, with the North Carolina "Colonial
+Records," are the source books of early Tennessee. In statistics, such
+as numbers of Indians and other foes defeated by Tennessee heroes, not
+reliable. Incorrect as to causes of Indian wars during the Revolution.
+On this subject see letters and reports by John and Henry Stuart in
+North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X; and letters by General
+Gage and letters and proclamation by General Ethan Allen in American
+Archives, Fourth Series, vol. II, and by President Rutledge of South
+Carolina in North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X. See also Justin
+Winsor, "The Westward Movement."
+
+J. Allison, "Dropped Stitches in Tennessee History." Nashville, 1897.
+Contains interesting matter relative to Andrew Jackson in his younger
+days as well as about other striking figures of the time.
+
+F. M. Turner, "The Life of General John Sevier." New York, 1910. A
+fairly accurate narrative of events in which Sevier participated,
+compiled from the "Draper Manuscripts."
+
+A. W. Putnam, "History of Middle Tennessee, or Life and Times of
+General James Robertson." Nashville, 1859. A rambling lengthy narrative
+containing some interesting material and much that is unreliable. Its
+worst fault is distortion through sentimentality, and indulgence in the
+habit of putting the author's rodomontades into the mouths of Robertson
+and other characters.
+
+J. S. Bassett, "Regulators of North Carolina," in Report of the American
+Historical Association, 1894.
+
+L. C. Draper, "King's Mountain and its Heroes." Cincinnati, 1881. The
+source book on this event. Contains interesting biographical material
+about the men engaged in the battle.
+
+
+French And Spanish Intrigues
+
+Henry Doniol, "Histoire de la participation de la France
+de l'etablissement des Etats-Unis d'Amerique," 5 vols. Paris, 1886-1892.
+A complete exposition of the French and Spanish policy towards America.
+during the Revolutionary Period.
+
+Manuel Serrano y Sanz, "El brigadier Jaime Wilkinson y sus tratos con
+Espana para la independencia del Kentucky, anos 1787 a 1797." Madrid,
+1915. A Spanish view of Wilkinson's intrigues with Spain, based on
+letters and reports in the Spanish Archives.
+
+Thomas Marshall Green, "The Spanish Conspiracy." Cincinnati, 1891. A
+good local account, from American sources. The best material on this
+subject is found in Justin Winsor's "The Westward Movement and Narrative
+and Critical History" because there viewed against a broad historical
+background. See Winsor also for the Latin intrigues in Tennessee. For
+material on Alexander McGillivray see the American Archives and the
+Colonial Records of Georgia.
+
+Edward S. Corwin, "French Policy and the American Alliance of 1778."
+Princeton, 1916. Deals chiefly with the commercial aspects of French
+policy and should be read in conjunction with Winsor, Jay, and
+Fitzmaurice's "Life of William, Earl of Shelburne." 3 vols. London,
+1875.
+
+John Jay, "On the Peace Negotiations of 1782-83 as Illustrated by the
+Secret Correspondence of France and England." New York, 1888. A paper
+read before the American Historical Association, May 23, 1887.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Pioneers of the Old Southwest, by 
+Constance Lindsay Skinner
+
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diff --git a/old/potsw10.txt b/old/potsw10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..57cf3ec
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+This etext was produced by Doris Ringbloom
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Pioneers of the Old Southwest,
+A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground
+
+Author: Constance Lindsay Skinner
+
+
+
+
+This Book, Volume 18 In The Chronicles Of America Series, Allen
+Johnson, Editor, Was Donated To Project Gutenberg By The James J.
+Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's University; Thanks To Alev Akman.
+
+
+
+
+Acknowledgment
+
+This narrative is founded largely on original sources--on the
+writings and journals of pioneers and contemporary observers,
+such as Doddridge and Adair, and on the public documents of the
+period as printed in the Colonial Records and in the American
+Archives. But the author is, nevertheless, greatly indebted to
+the researches of, other writers, whose works are cited in the
+Bibliographical Note. The author's thanks are due, also, to Dr.
+Archibald Henderson, of the University of North Carolina, for his
+kindness in reading the proofs of this book for comparison with
+his own extended collection of unpublished manuscripts relating
+to the period.
+
+C. L. S.
+
+April, 1919.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I. THE TREAD OF PIONEERS
+II. FOLKWAYS
+III. THE TRADER
+IV. THE PASSING OF THE FRENCH PERIL
+V. BOONE, THE WANDERER
+VI. THE FIGHT FOR KENTUCKY
+VII. THE DARK AND BLOODY GROUND VIII. TENNESSEE
+IX. KING'S MOUNTAIN
+X. SEVIER, THE STATEMAKER
+XI. BOONE'S LAST DAYS
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+Pioneers Of The Old Southwest
+
+Chapter I. The Tread Of Pioneers
+
+The Ulster Presbyterians, or "Scotch-Irish," to whom history has
+ascribed the dominant role among the pioneer folk of the Old
+Southwest, began their migrations to America in the latter years
+of the seventeenth century. It is not known with certainty
+precisely when or where the first immigrants of their race
+arrived in this country, but soon after 1680 they were to be
+found in several of the colonies. It was not long, indeed, before
+they were entering in numbers at the port of Philadelphia and
+were making Pennsylvania the chief center of their activities in
+the New World. By 1726 they had established settlements in
+several counties behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they had
+begun their great trek southward through the Shenandoah Valley of
+Virginia and on to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There
+they met others of their own race--bold men like themselves,
+hungry after land--who were coming in through Charleston and
+pushing their way up the rivers from the seacoast to the "Back
+Country," in search of homes.
+
+These Ulstermen did not come to the New World as novices in the
+shaping of society; they had already made history. Their
+ostensible object in America was to obtain land, but, like most
+external aims, it was secondary to a deeper purpose. What had
+sent the Ulstermen to America was a passion for a whole freedom.
+They were lusty men, shrewd and courageous, zealous to the death
+for an ideal and withal so practical to the moment in business
+that it soon came to be commonly reported of them that "they kept
+the Sabbath and everything else they could lay their hands on,"
+though it is but fair to them to add that this phrase is current
+wherever Scots dwell. They had contested in Parliament and with
+arms for their own form of worship and for their civil rights.
+They were already frontiersmen, trained in the hardihood and
+craft of border warfare through years of guerrilla fighting with
+the Irish Celts. They had pitted and proved their strength
+against a wilderness; they had reclaimed the North of Ireland
+from desolation. For the time, many of them were educated men;
+under the regulations of the Presbyterian Church every child was
+taught to read at an early age, since no person could be admitted
+to the privileges of the Church who did not both understand and
+approve the Presbyterian constitution and discipline. They were
+brought up on the Bible and on the writings of their famous
+pastors, one of whom, as early as 1650, had given utterance to
+the democratic doctrine that "men are called to the
+magistracy by the suffrage of the people whom they govern, and
+for men to assume unto themselves power is mere tyranny and
+unjust usurpation." In subscribing to this doctrine and in
+resisting to the hilt all efforts of successive English kings to
+interfere in the election of their pastors, the Scots of Ulster
+had already declared for democracy.
+
+It was shortly after James VI of Scotland became James I of
+England and while the English were founding Jamestown that the
+Scots had first occupied Ulster; but the true origin of the
+Ulster Plantation lies further back, in the reign of Henry VIII,
+in the days of the English Reformation. In Henry's Irish realm
+the Reformation, though proclaimed by royal authority, had never
+been accomplished; and Henry's more famous daughter, Elizabeth,
+had conceived the plan, later to be carried out by James, of
+planting colonies of Protestants in Ireland to promote loyalty in
+that rebellious land. Six counties, comprising half a million
+acres, formed the Ulster Plantation. The great majority of the
+colonists sent thither by James were Scotch Lowlanders, but among
+them were many English and a smaller number of Highlanders. These
+three peoples from the island of Britain brought forth, through
+intermarriage, the Ulster Scots.
+
+The reign of Charles I had inaugurated for the Ulstermen an era
+of persecution. Charles practically suppressed the Presbyterian
+religion in Ireland. His son, Charles II, struck at Ireland in
+1666 through its cattle trade, by prohibiting the exportation of
+beef to England and Scotland. The Navigation Acts, excluding
+Ireland from direct trade with the colonies, ruined Irish
+commerce, while Corporation Acts and Test Acts requiring
+conformity with the practices of the Church of England bore
+heavily on the Ulster Presbyterians.
+
+It was largely by refugees from religious persecution that
+America in the beginning was colonized. But religious persecution
+was only one of the influences which shaped the course and formed
+the character of the Ulster Scots. In Ulster, whither they had
+originally been transplanted by James to found a loyal province
+in the midst of the King's enemies, they had done their work too
+well and had waxed too powerful for the comfort of later
+monarchs. The first attacks upon them struck at their religion;
+but the subsequent legislative acts which successively ruined the
+woolen trade, barred nonconformists from public office, stifled
+Irish commerce, pronounced non-Episcopal marriages irregular, and
+instituted heavy taxation and high rentals for the land their
+fathers had made productive--these were blows dealt chiefly for
+the political and commercial ends of favored classes in England.
+
+These attacks, aimed through his religious conscience at the
+sources of his livelihood, made the Ulster Scot perforce what he
+was--a zealot as a citizen and a zealot as a merchant no less
+than as a Presbyterian. Thanks to his persecutors, he made a
+religion of everything he undertook and regarded his civil rights
+as divine rights. Thus out of persecution emerged a type of man
+who was high-principled and narrow, strong and violent, as
+tenacious of his own rights as he was blind often to the rights
+of others, acquisitive yet self-sacrificing, but most of all
+fearless, confident of his own power, determined to have and to
+hold.
+
+Twenty thousand Ulstermen, it is estimated, left Ireland for
+America in the first three decades of the eighteenth century.
+More than six thousand of them are known to have entered
+Pennsylvania in 1729 alone, and twenty years later they numbered
+one-quarter of that colony's population. During the five years
+preceding the Revolutionary War more than thirty thousand
+Ulstermen crossed the ocean and arrived in America just in time
+and in just the right frame of mind to return King George's
+compliment in kind, by helping to deprive him of his American
+estates, a domain very much larger than the acres of Ulster. They
+fully justified the fears of the good bishop who wrote Lord
+Dartmouth, Secretary for the Colonies, that he trembled for the
+peace of the King's overseas realm, since these thousands of
+"phanatical and hungry Republicans" had sailed for America.
+
+The Ulstermen who entered by Charleston were known to the
+inhabitants of the tidewater regions as the "Scotch-Irish." Those
+who came from the north, lured southward by the offer of cheap
+lands, were called the "Pennsylvania Irish." Both were, however,
+of the same race--a race twice expatriated, first from Scotland
+and then from Ireland, and stripped of all that it had won
+throughout more than a century of persecution. To these exiles
+the Back Country of North Carolina, with its cheap and even free
+tracts lying far from the seat of government, must have seemed
+not only the Land of Promise but the Land of Last Chance. Here
+they must strike their roots into the sod with such interlocking
+strength that no cataclysm of tyranny should ever dislodge
+them--or they must accept the fate dealt out to them by their
+former persecutors and become a tribe of nomads and serfs. But to
+these Ulster immigrants such a choice was no choice at all. They
+knew themselves strong men, who had made the most of opportunity
+despite almost superhuman obstacles. The drumming of their feet
+along the banks of the Shenandoah, or up the rivers from
+Charleston, and on through the broad sweep of the Yadkin Valley,
+was a conquering people's challenge to the Wilderness which lay
+sleeping like an unready sentinel at the gates of their Future.
+
+It is maintained still by many, however often disputed, that the
+Ulstermen were the first to declare for American Independence, as
+in the Old Country they were the first to demand the separation
+of Church and State. A Declaration of Independence is said to
+have been drawn up and signed in Mecklenburg County, North
+Carolina, on May 20, 1775.* However that maybe, it is certain
+that these Mecklenburg Protestants had received special schooling
+in the doctrine of independence. They had in their midst for
+eight years (1758-66) the Reverend Alexander Craighead, a
+Presbyterian minister who, for his "republican doctrines"
+expressed in a pamphlet, had been disowned by the Pennsylvania
+Synod acting on the Governor's protest, and so persecuted in
+Virginia that he had at last fled to the North Carolina Back
+Country. There, during the remaining years of his life, as the
+sole preacher and teacher in the settlements between the Yadkin
+and the Catawba rivers he found willing soil in which to sow the
+seeds of Liberty.
+
+* See Hoyt, "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence"; and
+"American Archives," Fourth Series. vol. II, p. 855.
+
+
+There was another branch of the Scottish race which helped to
+people the Back Country. The Highlanders, whose loyalty to their
+oath made them fight on the King's side in the Revolutionary War,
+have been somewhat overlooked in history. Tradition, handed down
+among the transplanted clans--who, for the most part, spoke only
+Gaelic for a generation and wrote nothing--and latterly recorded
+by one or two of their descendants, supplies us with all we are
+now able to learn of the early coming of the Gaels to Carolina.
+It would seem that their first immigration to America in small
+bands took place after the suppression of the Jacobite rising in
+1715--when Highlanders fled in numbers also to France--for by
+1729 there was a settlement of them on the Cape Fear River. We
+know, too, that in 1748 it was charged against Gabriel Johnston,
+Governor of North Carolina from 1734 to 1752, that he had shown
+no joy over the King's "glorious victory of Culloden" and that
+"he had appointed one William McGregor, who had been in the
+Rebellion in the year 1715 a Justice of the Peace during the last
+Rebellion [1745] and was not himself without suspicion of
+disaffection to His Majesty's Government." It is indeed possible
+that Gabriel Johnston, formerly a professor at St. Andrew's
+University, had himself not always been a stranger to the kilt.
+He induced large numbers of highlanders to come to America and
+probably influenced the second George to moderate his treatment
+of the vanquished Gaels in the Old Country and permit their
+emigration to the New World.
+
+In contrast with the Ulstermen, whose secular ideals were
+dictated by the forms of their Church, these Scots adhered still
+to the tribal or clan system, although they, too, in the
+majority, were Presbyterians, with a minority of Roman
+Catholics and Episcopalians. In the Scotch Highlands they had
+occupied small holdings on the land under the sway of their
+chief, or Head of the Clan, to whom they were bound by blood and
+fealty but to whom they paid no rentals. The position of the Head
+of the Clan was hereditary, but no heir was bold enough to step
+forward into that position until he had performed some deed of
+worth. They were principally herders, their chief stock being the
+famous small black cattle of the Highlands. Their wars with each
+other were cattle raids. Only in war, however, did the Gael lay
+hands on his neighbor's goods. There were no highwaymen and
+housebreakers in the Highlands. No Highland mansion, cot, or barn
+was ever locked. Theft and the breaking of an oath, sins against
+man's honor, were held in such abhorrence that no one guilty of
+them could remain among his clansmen in the beloved glens. These
+Highlanders were a race of tall, robust men, who lived simply and
+frugally and slept on the heath among their flocks in all
+weathers, with no other covering from rain and snow than their
+plaidies. It is reported of the Laird of Keppoch, who was leading
+his clan to war in winter time, that his men were divided as to
+the propriety of following him further because he rolled a
+snowball to rest his head upon when he lay down. "Now we despair
+of victory," they said, "since our leader has become go
+effeminate he cannot sleep without a pillow!"*
+
+* MacLean, "An Historical Account of the Settlement of Scotch
+High.landers in America."
+
+
+The "King's glorious victory of Culloden" was followed by a
+policy of extermination carried on by the orders and under the
+personal direction of the Duke of Cumberland. When King George at
+last restrained his son from his orgy of blood, he offered the
+Gaels their lives and exile to America on condition of their
+taking the full oath of allegiance. The majority accepted his
+terms, for not only were their lives forfeit but their crops and
+cattle had been destroyed and the holdings on which their
+ancestors had lived for many centuries taken from them. The
+descriptions of the scenes attending their leave-taking of the
+hills and glens they loved with such passionate fervor are among
+the most pathetic in history. Strong men who had met the ravage
+of a brutal sword without weakening abandoned themselves to the
+agony of sorrow. They kissed the walls of their houses. They
+flung themselves on the ground and embraced the sod upon which
+they had walked in freedom. They called their broken farewells to
+the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to see;
+and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the
+passes, their pipers played the dirge for the dead.
+
+Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race which
+entered North Carolina from the coast and pushed up into the
+wilderness about the headwaters of Cape Fear River. Tradition
+indicates that these hillsmen sought the interior because the
+grass and pea vine which overgrew the innercountry stretching
+towards the mountains provided excellent fodder for the cattle
+which some of the chiefs are said to have brought with them.
+These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible numbers, were in the
+Yadkin Valley before 1730, possibly even ten years earlier. In
+1739 Neil MacNeill of Kintyre brought over a shipload of Gaels to
+rejoin his kinsman, Hector MacNeill, called Bluff Hector from his
+residence near the bluffs at Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. Some
+of these immigrants went on to the Yadkin, we are told, to unite
+with others of their clan who had been for some time in that
+district. The exact time of the first Highlander on the Yadkin
+cannot be ascertained, as there were no court records and the
+offices of the land companies were not then open for the sale of
+these remote regions. But by 1753 there were not less than four
+thousand Gaels in Cumberland County, where they occupied the
+chief magisterial posts; and they were already spreading over the
+lands now comprised within Moore, Anson, Richmond, Robeson,
+Bladen, and Sampson counties. In these counties Gaelic was as
+commonly heard as English.
+
+In the years immediately preceding the Revolution and even in
+1776 itself they came in increasing numbers. They knew nothing of
+the smoldering fire just about to break into flames in the
+country of their choice, but the Royal Governor, Josiah Martin,
+knew that Highland arms would soon be ceded by His Majesty. He
+knew something of Highland honor, too; for he would not let the
+Gaels proceed after their landing until they had bound themselves
+by oath to support the Government of King George. So it was that
+the unfortunate Highlanders found themselves, according too their
+strict code of honor, forced to wield arms against the very
+Americans who had received and befriended them--and for the
+crowned brother of a prince whose name is execrated to this day
+in Highland song and story!
+
+They were led by Allan MacDonald of Kingsborough; and tradition
+gives us a stirring picture of Allan's wife--the famous Flora
+MacDonald, who in Scotland had protected the Young Pretender in
+his flight--making an impassioned address in Gaelic to the
+Highland soldiers and urging them on to die for honor's sake.
+When this Highland force was conquered by the Americans, the
+large majority willingly bound themselves not to fight further
+against the American cause and were set at liberty. Many of them
+felt that, by offering their lives to the swords of the
+Americans, they had canceled their obligation to King George and
+were now free to draw their swords again and, this time, in
+accordance with their sympathies; so they went over to the
+American side and fought gallantly for independence.
+
+
+Although the brave glory of this pioneer age shines so brightly
+on the Lion Rampant of Caledonia, not to Scots alone does that
+whole glory belong. The second largest racial stream which flowed
+into the Back Country of Virginia and North Carolina was German.
+Most of these Germans went down from Pennsylvania and were
+generally called "Pennsylvania Dutch," an incorrect rendering of
+Pennsylvanische Deutsche. The upper Shenandoah Valley was settled
+almost entirely by Germans. They were members of the Lutheran,
+German Reformed, and Moravian churches. The cause which sent vast
+numbers of this sturdy people across the ocean, during the first
+years of the eighteenth century, was religious persecution. By
+statute and by word the Roman Catholic powers of Austria sought
+to wipe out the Salzburg Lutherans and the Moravian followers of
+John Huss. In that region of the Rhine country known in those
+days as the German Palatinate, now a part of Bavaria, Protestants
+were being massacred by the troops of Louis of France, then
+engaged in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) and in the
+zealous effort to extirpate heretics from the soil of Europe. In
+1708, by proclamation, Good Queen Anne offered protection to the
+persecuted Palatines and invited them to her dominions. Twelve
+thousand of them went to England, where they were warmly received
+by the English. But it was no slight task to settle twelve
+thousand immigrants of an alien speech in England and enable them
+to become independent and self-supporting. A better solution of
+their problem lay in the Western World: The Germans needed homes
+and the Queen's overseas dominions needed colonists. They were
+settled at first along the Hudson, and eventually many of them
+took up lands in the fertile valley of the Mohawk.
+
+For fifty years or more German and Austrian Protestants poured
+into America. In Pennsylvania their influx averaged about fifteen
+hundred a year, and that colony became the distributing center
+for the German race in America. By 1727, Adam Muller and his
+little company had established the first white settlement in the
+Valley of Virginia. In 1732 Joist Heydt went south from York,
+Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opequan Creek at or near the
+site of the present city of Winchester.
+
+The life of Count Zinzendorf, called "the Apostle," one of the
+leaders of the Moravian immigrants, glows like a star out of
+those dark and troublous times. Of high birth and gentle nurture,
+he forsook whatever of ease his station promised him and fitted
+himsclf for evangelical work. In 1741 he visited the Wyoming
+Valley to bring his religion to the Delawares and Shawanoes. He
+was not of those picturesque Captains of the Lord who bore their
+muskets on their shoulders when they went forth to preach.
+Armored only with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation,
+and the sword of the spirit, his feet "shod with the preparation
+of the gospel of peace," he went out into the country of these
+bloodthirsty tribes and told them that he had come to them in
+their darkness to teach the love of the Christ which lighteth the
+world. The Indians received him suspiciously. One day while he
+sat in his tent writing, some Delawares drew near to slay him and
+were about to strike when they saw two deadly snakes crawl in
+from the opposite side of the tent, move directly towards the
+Apostle, and pass harmlessly over his body. Thereafter they
+regarded him as under spiritual protection. Indeed so widespread
+was his good fame among the tribes that for some years all
+Moravian settlements along the borders were unmolested. Painted
+savages passed through on their way to war with enemy bands or to
+raid the border, but for the sake of one consecrated spirit, whom
+they had seen death avoid, they spared the lives and goods of his
+fellow believers. When Zinzendorf departed a year later, his
+mantle fell on David Zeisberger, who lived the love he taught
+for over fifty years and converted many savages. Zeisberger was
+taken before the Governor and army heads at Philadelphia, who had
+only too good reason to be suspicious of priestly counsels in the
+tents of Shem: but he was able to impress white men no less than
+simple savages with the nobility of the doctrine he had learned
+from the Apostle.
+
+In 1751 the Moravian Brotherhood purchased one hundred thousand
+acres in North Carolina from Lord Granville. Bishop Spangenburg
+was commissioned to survey this large acreage, which was situated
+in the present county of Forsyth east of the Yadkin, and which is
+historically listed as the Wachovia Tract. In 1753, twelve
+Brethren left the Moravian settlements of Bethlehem and Nazareth,
+in Pennsylvania, and journeyed southward to begin the founding of
+a colony on their new land. Brother Adam Grube, one of the
+twelve, kept a diary of the events of this expedition.*
+
+* This diary is printed in full in "Travels in the American
+Colonies." edited by N. D. Mereness.
+
+
+Honor to whom honor is due. We have paid it, in some measure, to
+the primitive Gaels of the Highlands for their warrior strength
+and their fealty, and to the enlightened Scots of Ulster for
+their enterprise and for their sacrifice unto blood that free
+conscience and just laws might promote the progress and safeguard
+the intercourse of their kind. Now let us take up for a moment
+Brother Grube's "Journal" even as we welcome, perhaps the more
+gratefully, the mild light of evening after the flooding sun, or
+as our hearts, when too strongly stirred by the deeds of men,
+turn for rest to the serene faith and the naive speech of little
+children.
+
+The twelve, we learn, were under the leadership of one of their
+number, Brother Gottlob. Their earliest alarms on the march were
+not caused, as we might expect, by anticipations of the painted
+Cherokee, but by encounters with the strenuous "Irish." One of
+these came and laid himself to sleep beside the Brethren's camp
+fire on their first night out, after they had sung their evening
+hymn and eleven had stretched themselves on the earth for
+slumber, while Brother Gottlob, their leader, hanging his hammock
+between two trees, ascended--not only in spirit--a little higher
+than his charges, and "rested well in it." Though the alarming
+Irishman did not disturb them, the Brethren's doubts of that race
+continued, for Brother Grube wrote on the 14th of October: "About
+four in the morning we set up our tent, going four miles beyond
+Carl Isles [Carlisle, seventeen miles southwest of Harrisburg] so
+as not to be too near the Irish Presbyterians. After breakfast
+the Brethren shaved and then we rested under our tent....
+People who were staying at the Tavern came to see what kind of
+folk we were.... Br Gottlob held the evening service and then
+we lay down around our cheerful fire, and Br Gottlob in his
+hammock." Two other jottings give us a racial kaleidoscope of the
+settlers and wayfarers of that time. On one day the Brethren
+bought "some hay from a Swiss," later "some kraut from a German
+which tasted very good to us"; and presently "an Englishman came
+by and drank a cup of tea with us and was very grateful for it."
+Frequently the little band paused while some of the Brethren went
+off to the farms along the route to help "cut hay." These kindly
+acts were usually repaid with gifts of food or produce.
+
+One day while on the march they halted at a tavern and farm in
+Shenandoah Valley kept by a man whose name Brother Grube wrote
+down as "Severe." Since we know that Brother Grube's spelling of
+names other than German requires editing, we venture to hazard a
+guess that the name he attempted to set down as it sounded to him
+was Sevier. And we wonder if, in his brief sojourn, he saw a lad
+of eight years, slim, tall, and blond, with daring and
+mischievous blue eyes, and a certain, curve of the lips that
+threatened havoc in the hearts of both sexes when he should be a
+man and reach out with swift hands and reckless will for his
+desires. If he saw this lad, he beheld John Sevier, later to
+become one of the most picturesque and beloved heroes of the Old
+Southwest.
+
+Hardships abounded on the Brethren's journey, but faith and the
+Christian's joy, which no man taketh from him, met and surmounted
+them. "Three and a half miles beyond, the road forked.... We
+took the right hand road but found no water for ten miles. It
+grew late and we had to drive five miles into the night to find a
+stoppingplace." Two of the Brethren went ahead "to seek out the
+road" through the darkened wilderness. There were rough hills in
+the way; and, the horses being exhausted, "Brethren had to help
+push." But, in due season, "Br Nathanael held evening prayer and
+then we slept in the care of Jesus," with Brother Gottlob as
+usual in his hammock. Three days later the record runs: "Toward
+evening we saw Jeams River, the road to it ran down so very steep
+a hill that we fastened a small tree to the back of our wagon,
+locked the wheels, and the Brethren held back by the tree with
+all their might." Even then the wagon went down so fast that most
+of the Brethren lost their footing and rolled and tumbled
+pell-mell. But Faith makes little of such mishaps: "No harm was
+done and we thanked the Lord that he had so graciously protected
+us, for it looked dangerous and we thought at times that it could
+not possibly be done without accident but we got down safely...
+we were all very tired and sleepy and let the angels be our
+guard during the night." Rains fell in torrents, making streams
+almost impassable and drenching the little band to the skin. The
+hammock was empty one night, for they had to spend the dark hours
+trench-digging about their tent to keep it from being washed
+away. Two days later (the 10th of November) the weather cleared
+and "we spent most of the day drying our blankets and mending and
+darning our stockings." They also bought supplies from settlers
+who, as Brother Grube observed without irony,
+
+"are glad we have to remain here so long and that it means money
+for them. In the afternoon we held a little Lovefeast and rested
+our souls in the loving sacrifice of Jesus, wishing for beloved
+Brethren in Bethlehem and that they and we might live ever close
+to Him.... Nov. 16. We rose early to ford the river. The bank
+was so steep that we hung a tree behind the wagon, fastening it
+in such a way that we could quickly release it when the wagon
+reached the water. The current was very swift and the lead horses
+were carried down a bit with it. The water just missed running
+into the wagon but we came safely to the other bank, which
+however we could not climb but had to take half the things out of
+the wagon, tie ropes to the axle on which we could pull, help our
+horses which were quite stiff, and so we brought our ark again to
+dry land."
+
+On the evening of the 17th of November the twelve arrived safely
+on their land on the "Etkin" (Yadkin), having been six weeks on
+the march. They found with joy that, as ever, the Lord had
+provided for them. This time the gift was a deserted cabin,
+"large enough that we could all lie down around the walls. We at
+once made preparation for a little Lovefeast and rejoiced
+heartily with one another."
+
+In the deserted log cabin, which, to their faith, seemed as one
+of those mansions "not built with hands" and descended
+miraculously from the heavens, they held their Lovefeast, while
+wolves padded and howled about the walls; and in that Pentacostal
+hour the tongue of fire descended upon Brother Gottlob, so that
+he made a new song unto the Lord. Who shall venture to say it is
+not better worth preserving than many a classic?
+
+We hold arrival Lovefeast here
+ In Carolina land,
+A company of Brethren true,
+ A little Pilgrim-Band,
+Called by the Lord to be of those
+ Who through the whole world go,
+To bear Him witness everywhere
+ And nought but Jesus know.
+
+Then, we are told, the Brethren lay down to rest and "Br Gottlob
+hung his hammock above our heads"--as was most fitting on this of
+all nights; for is not the Poet's place always just a little
+nearer to the stars?
+
+The pioneers did not always travel in groups. There were families
+who set off alone. One of these now claims our attention, for
+there was a lad in this family whose name and deeds were to sound
+like a ballad of romance from out the dusty pages of history.
+This family's name was Boone.
+
+Neither Scots nor Germans can claim Daniel Boone; he was in blood
+a blend of English and Welsh; in character wholly English. His
+grandfather George Boone was born in 1666 in the hamlet of Stoak,
+near Exeter in Devonshire. George Boone was a weaver by trade and
+a Quaker by religion. In England in his time the Quakers were
+oppressed, and George Boone therefore sought information of
+William Penn, his co-religionist, regarding the colony which Penn
+had established in America. In 1712 he sent his three elder
+children, George, Sarah, and Squire, to spy out the land. Sarah
+and Squire remained in Pennsylvania, while their brother returned
+to England with glowing reports. On August 17, 1717, George
+Boone, his wife, and the rest of his children journeyed to
+Bristol and sailed for Philadelphia, arriving there on the 10th
+of October. The Boones went first to Abingdon, the Quaker
+farmers' community. Later they moved to the northwestern frontier
+hamlet of North Wales, a Welsh community which, a few years
+previously, had turned Quaker. Sarah Boone married a German named
+Jacob Stover, who had settled in Oley Township, Berks County. In
+1718 George Boone took up four hundred acres in Oley, or, to be
+exact, in the subdivision later called Exeter, and there he lived
+in his log cabin until 1744, when he died at the age of
+seventy-eight. He left eight children, fifty-two grandchildren,
+and ten greatgrandchildren, seventy descendants in all--English,
+German, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish blended into one family of
+Americans.*
+
+* R. G. Thwaites, "Daniel Boone", p. 5.
+
+
+Among the Welsh Quakers was a family of Morgans. In 1720 Squire
+Boone married Sarah Morgan. Ten years later he obtained 250 acres
+in Oley on Owatin Creek, eight miles southeast of the present
+city of Reading; and here, in 1734, Daniel Boone was born, the
+fourth son and sixth child of Squire and Sarah Morgan Boone.
+Daniel Boone therefore was a son of the frontier. In his
+childhood he became familiar with hunters and with Indians, for
+even the red men came often in friendly fashion to his
+grandfather's house. Squire Boone enlarged his farm by thrift. He
+continued at his trade of weaving and kept five or six looms
+going, making homespun cloth for the market and his neighbors.
+
+Daniel's father owned grazing grounds several miles north of the
+homestead and each season he sent his stock to the range. Sarah
+Boone and her little Daniel drove the cows. From early spring
+till late autumn, mother and son lived in a rustic cabin alone on
+the frontier. A rude dairy house stood over a cool spring, and
+here Sarah Boone made her butter and cheese. Daniel, aged ten at
+this time, watched the herds; at sunset he drove them to the
+cabin for milking, and locked them in the cowpens at night.
+
+He was not allowed firearms at that age, so he shaped for himself
+a weapon that served him well. This was a slender smoothly shaved
+sapling with a small bunch of gnarled roots at one end. So expert
+was he in the launching of this primitive spear that he easily
+brought down birds and small game. When he reached his twelfth
+year, his father bought him a rifle; and he soon became a crack
+shot. A year later we find him setting off on the autumn
+hunt--after driving the cattle in for the winter-with all the
+keenness and courage of a man twice his thirteen years. His rifle
+enabled him to return with meat for the family and skins to be
+traded in Philadelphia. When he was fourteen his brother Sam
+married Sarah Day, an intelligent young Quakeress who took a
+special interest in her young brother-in-law and taught him "the
+rudiments of three R's."
+
+The Boones were prosperous and happy in Oley and it may be
+wondered why they left their farms and their looms, both of which
+were profitable, and set their faces towards the Unknown. It is
+recorded that, though the Boones were Quakers, they were of a
+high mettle and were not infrequently dealt with by the Meeting.
+Two of Squire Boone's children married "worldlings"--non-
+Quakers--and were in consequence "disowned" by the Society. In
+defiance of his sect, which strove to make him sever all
+connection with his unruly offspring, Squire Boone refused to
+shut his doors on the son and the daughter who had scandalized
+local Quakerdom. The Society of Friends thereupon expelled him.
+This occurred apparently during the winter of 1748-49. In the
+spring of 1750 we see the whole Boone family (save two sons) with
+their wives and children, their household goods and their stock,
+on the great highway, bound for a land where the hot heart and
+the belligerent spirit shall not be held amiss.
+
+Southward through the Shenandoah goes the Boone caravan. The
+women and children usually sit in the wagons. The men march ahead
+or alongside, keeping a keen eye open for Indian or other enemy
+in the wild, their rifles under arm or over the shoulder. Squire
+Boone, who has done with Quakerdom and is leading all that he
+holds dear out to larger horizons, is ahead of the line, as we
+picture him, ready to meet first whatever danger may assail his
+tribe. He is a strong wiry man of rather small stature, with
+ruddy complexion, red hair, and gray eyes. Somewhere in the line,
+together, we think, are the mother and son who have herded cattle
+and companioned each other through long months in the cabin on
+the frontier. We do not think of this woman as riding in the
+wagon, though she may have done so, but prefer to picture her,
+with her tall robust body, her black hair, and her black
+eyes--with the sudden Welsh snap in them--walking as sturdily as
+any of her sons.
+
+If Daniel be beside her, what does she see when she looks at him?
+A lad well set up but not overtall for his sixteen years,
+perhaps--for "eye-witnesses" differ in their estimates of Daniel
+Boone's height--or possibly taller than he looks, because his
+figure has the forest hunter's natural slant forward and the
+droop of the neck of one who must watch his path sometimes in
+order to tread silently. It is Squire Boone's blood which shows
+in his ruddy face--which would be fair but for its tan--and in
+the English cut of feature, the straw-colored eyebrows, and the
+blue eyes. But his Welsh mother's legacy is seen in the black
+hair that hangs long and loose in the hunter's fashion to his
+shoulders. We can think of Daniel Boone only as exhilarated by
+this plunge into the Wild. He sees ahead--the days of his great
+explorations and warfare, the discovery of Kentucky? Not at all.
+This is a boy of sixteen in love with his rifle. He looks ahead
+to vistas of forest filled with deer and to skies clouded with
+flocks of wild turkeys. In that dream there is happiness enough
+for Daniel Boone. Indeed, for himself, even in later life, he
+asked little, if any, more. He trudges on blithely, whistling.
+
+
+
+Chapter II. Folkways
+
+These migrations into the inland valleys of the Old South mark
+the first great westward thrust of the American frontier. Thus
+the beginnings of the westward movement disclose to us a feature
+characteristic also of the later migrations which flung the
+frontier over the Appalachians, across the Mississippi, and
+finally to the shores of the Pacific. The pioneers, instead of
+moving westward by slow degrees, subduing the wilderness as they
+went, overleaped great spaces and planted themselves beyond, out
+of contact with the life they had left behind. Thus separated by
+hundreds of miles of intervening wilderness from the more
+civilized communities, the conquerors of the first American
+"West," prototypes of the conquerors of succeeding "Wests,"
+inevitably struck out their own ways of life and developed their
+own customs. It would be difficult, indeed, to find anywhere a
+more remarkable contrast in contemporary folkways than that
+presented by the two great community groups of the South--the
+inland or piedmont settlements, called the Back Country, and the
+lowland towns and plantations along the seaboard.
+
+The older society of the seaboard towns, as events were soon to
+prove, was not less independent in its ideals than the frontier
+society of the Back Country; but it was aristocratic in tone and
+feeling. Its leaders were the landed gentry--men of elegance, and
+not far behind their European contemporaries in the culture of
+the day. They were rich, without effort, both from their
+plantations, where black slaves and indentured servants labored,
+and from their coastwise and overseas trade. Their battles with
+forest and red man were long past. They had leisure for
+diversions such as the chase, the breeding and racing of
+thoroughbred horses, the dance, high play with dice and card,
+cockfighting, the gallantry of love, and the skill of the rapier.
+Law and politics drew their soberer minds.
+
+Very different were the conditions which confronted the pioneers
+in the first American "West." There every jewel of promise was
+ringed round with hostility. The cheap land the pioneer had
+purchased at a nominal price, or the free land he had taken by
+"tomahawk claim"--that is by cutting his name into the bark of a
+deadened tree, usually beside a spring--supported a forest of
+tall trunks and interlacing leafage. The long grass and weeds
+which covered the ground in a wealth of natural pasturage
+harbored the poisonous copperhead and the rattlesnake and, being
+shaded by the overhead foliage, they held the heavy dews and bred
+swarms of mosquitoes, gnats, and big flies which tortured both
+men and cattle. To protect the cattle and horses from the attacks
+of these pests the settlers were obliged to build large
+"smudges"--fires of green timber--against the wind. The animals
+soon learned to back up into the dense smoke and to move from one
+grazing spot to another as the wind changed. But useful as were
+the green timber fires that rolled their smoke on the wind to
+save the stock, they were at the same time a menace to the
+pioneer, for they proclaimed to roving bands of Cherokees that a
+further encroachment on their territory had been made by their
+most hated enemies--the men who felled the hunter's forest. Many
+an outpost pioneer who had made the long hard journey by sea and
+land from the old world of persecution to this new country of
+freedom, dropped from the red man's shot ere he had hewn the
+threshold of his home, leaving his wife and children to the
+unrecorded mercy of his slayer.
+
+Those more fortunate pioneers who settled in groups won the first
+heat in the battle with the wilderness through massed effort
+under wariness. They made their clearings in the forest, built
+their cabins and stockades, and planted their cornfields, while
+lookouts kept watch and rifles were stacked within easy reach.
+Every special task, such as a "raising," as cabin building was
+called, was undertaken by the community chiefly because the
+Indian danger necessitated swift building and made group action
+imperative. But the stanch heart is ever the glad heart. Nothing
+in this frontier history impresses us more than the joy of the
+pioneer at his labors. His determined optimism turned danger's
+dictation into an occasion for jollity. On the appointed day for
+the "raising," the neighbors would come, riding or afoot, to the
+newcomer's holding--the men with their rifles and axes, the women
+with their pots and kettles. Every child toddled along, too,
+helping to carry the wooden dishes and spoons. These free givers
+of labor had something of the Oriental's notion of the sacred
+ratification of friendship by a feast.
+
+The usual dimensions of a cabin were sixteen by twenty feet. The
+timber for the building, having been already cut, lay at
+hand--logs of hickory, oak, young pine, walnut, or persimmon. To
+make the foundations, the men seized four of the thickest logs,
+laid them in place, and notched and grooved and hammered them
+into as close a clinch as if they had grown so. The wood must
+grip by its own substance alone to hold up the pioneer's
+dwelling, for there was not an iron nail to be had in the whole
+of the Back Country. Logs laid upon the foundation logs and
+notched into each other at the four corners formed the walls;
+and, when these stood at seven feet, the builders laid parallel
+timbers and puncheons to make both flooring and ceiling. The
+ridgepole of the roof was supported by two crotched trees and the
+roofing was made of logs and wooden slabs. The crevices of the
+walls were packed close with red clay and moss. Lastly, spaces
+for a door and windows were cut out. The door was made thick and
+heavy to withstand the Indian's rush. And the windowpanes? They
+were of paper treated with hog's fat or bear's grease.
+
+When the sun stood overhead, the women would give the welcome
+call of "Dinner!" Their morning had not been less busy than the
+men's. They had baked corn cakes on hot stones, roasted bear or
+pork, or broiled venison steaks; and--above all and first of all
+--they had concocted the great "stew pie" without which a raising
+could hardly take place. This was a disputatious mixture of deer,
+hog, and bear--animals which, in life, would surely have
+companioned each other as ill! It was made in sufficient quantity
+to last over for supper when the day's labor was done. At supper
+the men took their ease on the ground, but with their rifles
+always in reach. If the cabin just raised by their efforts stood
+in the Yadkin, within sight of the great mountains the pioneers
+were one day to cross, perhaps a sudden bird note warning from
+the lookout, hidden in the brush, would bring the builders with a
+leap to their feet. It might be only a hunting band of friendly
+Catawbas that passed, or a lone Cherokee who knew that this was
+not his hour. If the latter, we can, in imagination, see him look
+once at the new house on his hunting pasture, slacken rein for a
+moment in front of the group of families, lift his hand in sign
+of peace, and silently go his way hillward. As he vanishes into
+the shadows, the crimson sun, sinking into the unknown wilderness
+beyond the mountains, pours its last glow on the roof of the
+cabin and on the group near its walls. With unfelt fingers,
+subtly, it puts the red touch of the West in the faces of the
+men--who have just declared, through the building of a cabin,
+that here is Journey's End and their abiding place.
+
+
+There were community holidays among these pioneers as well as
+labor days, especially in the fruit season; and there were
+flower-picking excursions in the warm spring days. Early in April
+the service berry bush gleamed starrily along the watercourses,
+its hardy white blooms defying winter's lingering look. This
+bush--or tree, indeed, since it is not afraid to rear its
+slender trunk as high as cherry or crab apple--might well be
+considered emblematic of the frontier spirit in those regions
+where the white silence covers the earth for several months and
+shuts the lonely homesteader in upon himself. From the pioneer
+time of the Old Southwest to the last frontier of the Far North
+today, the service berry is cherished alike by white men and
+Indians; and the red men have woven about it some of their
+prettiest legends. When June had ripened the tree's blue-black
+berries, the Back Country folk went out in parties to gather
+them. Though the service berry was a food staple on the frontier
+and its gathering a matter of household economy, the folk made
+their berry-picking jaunt a gala occasion. The women and children
+with pots and baskets--the young girls vying with each other,
+under the eyes of the youths, as to who could strip boughs the
+fastest--plucked gayly while the men, rifles in hand, kept guard.
+For these happy summer days were also the red man's scalping days
+and, at any moment, the chatter of the picnickers might be
+interrupted by the chilling war whoop. When that sound was heard,
+the berry pickers raced for the fort. The wild
+fruits--strawberries, service berries, cherries, plums, crab
+apples--were, however, too necessary a part of the pioneer's
+meager diet to be left unplucked out of fear of an Indian attack.
+Another day would see the same group out again. The children
+would keep closer to their mothers, no doubt; and the laughter of
+the young girls would be more subdued, even if their coquetry
+lacked nothing of its former effectiveness. Early marriages were
+the rule in the Back Country and betrothals were frequently
+plighted at these berry pickings.
+
+As we consider the descriptions of the frontiersman left for us
+by travelers of his own day, we are not more interested in his
+battles with wilderness and Indian than in the visible effects of
+both wilderness and Indian upon him. His countenance and bearing
+still show the European, but the European greatly altered by
+savage contact. The red peril, indeed, influenced every side of
+frontier life. The bands of women and children at the
+harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings, were not
+there merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter and
+love-making. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins,
+for, to the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon his
+immemorial hunting grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater
+evil was the white man's family, bespeaking the increase of the
+dreaded palefaces. The Indian peril trained the pioneers to
+alertness, shaped them as warriors and hunters, suggested the
+fashion of their dress, knit their families into clans and the
+clans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in the
+protection of each and all and a unit of hate against their
+common enemy.
+
+Too often the fields which the pioneer planted with corn were
+harvested by the Indian with fire. The hardest privations
+suffered by farmers and stock were due to the settlers having to
+flee to the forts, leaving to Indian devastation the crops on
+which their sustenance mainly, depended. Sometimes, fortunately,
+the warning came in time for the frontiersman to collect his
+goods and chattels in his wagon and to round up his live stock
+and drive them safely into the common fortified enclosure. At
+others, the tap of the "express"--as the herald of Indian danger
+was called--at night on the windowpane and the low word whispered
+hastily, ere the "express" ran on to the next abode, meant that
+the Indians had surprised the outlying cabins of the settlement.
+
+The forts were built as centrally as possible in the scattered
+settlements. They consisted of cabins, blockhouses, and
+stockades. A range of cabins often formed one side of a fort. The
+walls on the outside were ten or twelve feet high with roofs
+sloping inward. The blockhouses built at the angles of the fort
+projected two feet or so beyond the outer walls of the cabins and
+stockades, and were fitted with portholes for the watchers and
+the marksmen. The entrance to the fort was a large folding gate
+of thick slabs. It was always on the side nearest the spring. The
+whole structure of the fort was bullet-proof and was erected
+without an iron nail or spike. In the border wars these forts
+withstood all attacks. The savages, having proved that they could
+not storm them, generally laid siege and waited for thirst to
+compel a sortie. But the crafty besieger was as often outwitted
+by the equally cunning defender. Some daring soul, with silent
+feet and perhaps with naked body painted in Indian fashion, would
+drop from the wall under cover of the night, pass among the
+foemen to the spring, and return to the fort with water.
+
+Into the pioneer's phrase-making the Indian influence penetrated
+so that he named seasons for his foe. So thoroughly has the term
+"Indian Summer," now to us redolent of charm, become
+disassociated from its origins that it gives us a shock to be
+reminded that to these Back Country folk the balmy days following
+on the cold snap meant the season when the red men would come
+back for a last murderous raid on the settlements before winter
+should seal up the land. The "Powwowing Days" were the mellow
+days in the latter part of February, when the red men in council
+made their medicine and learned of their redder gods whether or
+no they should take the warpath when the sap pulsed the trees
+into leaf. Even the children at their play acknowledged the
+red-skinned schoolmaster, for their chief games were a training
+in his woodcraft and in the use of his weapons. Tomahawk-throwing
+was a favorite sport because of its gruesome practical purposes.
+The boys must learn to gauge the tomahawk's revolutions by the
+distance of the throw so as to bury the blade in its objective.
+Swift running and high jumping through the brush and fallen
+timber were sports that taught agility in escape. The boys
+learned to shoot accurately the long rifles of their time, with a
+log or a forked stick for a rest, and a moss pad under the barrel
+to keep it from jerking and spoiling the aim. They wrestled with
+each other, mastered the tricks of throwing an opponent, and
+learned the scalp hold instead of the toe hold. It was part of
+their education to imitate the noises of every bird and beast of
+the forest. So they learned to lure the turkey within range, or
+by the bleat of a fawn to bring her dam to the rifle. A
+well-simulated wolf's howl would call forth a response and so
+inform the lone hunter of the vicinity of the pack. This forest
+speech was not only the language of diplomacy in the hunting
+season; it was the borderer's secret code in war. Stray Indians
+put themselves in touch again with the band by turkey calls in
+the daytime and by owl or wolf notes at night. The frontiersmen
+used the same means to trick the Indian band into betraying the
+place of its ambuscade, or to lure the strays, unwitting, within
+reach of the knife.
+
+In that age, before the forests had given place to farms and
+cities and when the sun had but slight acquaintance with the sod,
+the summers were cool and the winters long and cold in the Back
+Country. Sometimes in September severe frosts destroyed the corn.
+The first light powdering called "hunting snows" fell in October,
+and then the men of the Back Country set out on the chase. Their
+object was meat--buffalo, deer, elk, bear-for the winter larder,
+and skins to send out in the spring by pack-horses to the coast
+in trade for iron, steel, and salt. The rainfall in North
+Carolina was much heavier than in Virginia and, from autumn into
+early winter, the Yadkin forests were sheeted with rain; but wet
+weather, so far from deterring the hunter, aided him to the kill.
+In blowing rain, he knew he would find the deer herding in the
+sheltered places on the hillsides. In windless rain, he knew that
+his quarry ranged the open woods and the high places. The fair
+play of the pioneer held it a great disgrace to kill a deer in
+winter when the heavy frost had crusted the deep snow. On the
+crust men and wolves could travel with ease, but the deer's sharp
+hoofs pierced through and made him defenseless. Wolves and dogs
+destroyed great quantities of deer caught in this way; and men
+who shot deer under these conditions were considered no huntsmen.
+There was, indeed, a practical side to this chivalry of the
+chase, for meat and pelt were both poor at this season; but the
+true hunter also obeyed the finer tenet of his code, for he would
+go to the rescue of deer caught in the crusts--and he killed many
+a wolf sliding over the ice to an easy meal.
+
+The community moral code of the frontier was brief and rigorous.
+What it lacked of the "whereas" and "inasmuch" of legal ink it
+made up in sound hickory. In fact, when we review the activities
+of this solid yet elastic wood in the moral, social, and economic
+phases of Back Country life, we are moved to wonder if the
+pioneers would have been the same race of men had they been
+nurtured beneath a less strenuous and adaptable vegetation! The
+hickory gave the frontiersman wood for all implements and
+furnishings where the demand was equally for lightness, strength,
+and elasticity. It provided his straight logs for building, his
+block mortars hollowed--by fire and stone--for corn-grinding, his
+solid plain furniture, his axles, rifle butts, ax handles, and so
+forth. It supplied his magic wand for the searching out of
+iniquity in the junior members of his household, and his most
+cogent argument, as a citizen, in convincing the slothful, the
+blasphemous, or the dishonest adult whose errors disturbed
+communal harmony. Its nuts fed his hogs. Before he raised stock,
+the unripe hickory nuts, crushed for their white liquid, supplied
+him with butter for his corn bread and helped out his store of
+bear's fat. Both the name and the knowledge of the uses of this
+tree came to the earliest pioneers through contact with the red
+man, whose hunting bow and fishing spear and the hobbles for his
+horses were fashioned of the "pohickory" tree. The Indian women
+first made pohickory butter, and the wise old men of the Cherokee
+towns, so we are told, first applied the pohickory rod to the
+vanity of youth!
+
+A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country of
+Virginia or North Carolina would show, in primitive design, what
+is, perhaps, after all the perfect home--a place where the
+personal life and the work life are united and where nothing
+futile finds space. Every object in the cabin was practical and
+had been made by hand on the spot to answer a need. Besides the
+chairs hewn from hickory blocks, there were others made of slabs
+set on three legs. A large slab or two with four legs served as a
+movable table; the permanent table was built against the wall,
+its outer edge held up by two sticks. The low bed was built into
+the wall in the same way and softened for slumber by a mattress
+of pine needles, chaff, or dried moss. In the best light from the
+greased paper windowpanes stood the spinning wheel and loom, on
+which the housewife made cloth for the family's garments. Over
+the fireplace or beside the doorway, and suspended usually on
+stags' antlers, hung the firearms and the yellow powderhorns, the
+latter often carved in Indian fashion with scenes of the hunt or
+war. On a shelf or on pegs were the wooden spoons, plates, bowls,
+and noggins. Also near the fireplace, which was made of large
+flat stones with a mud-plastered log chimney, stood the grinding
+block for making hominy. If it were an evening in early spring,
+the men of the household would be tanning and dressing deerskins
+to be sent out with the trade caravan, while the women sewed,
+made moccasins or mended them, in the light of pine knots or
+candles of bear's grease. The larger children might be weaving
+cradles for the babies, Indian fashion, out of hickory twigs; and
+there would surely be a sound of whetting steel, for scalping
+knives and tomahawks must be kept keen-tempered now that the days
+have come when the red gods whisper their chant of war through
+the young leafage.
+
+The Back Country folk, as they came from several countries,
+generally settled in national groups, each preserving its own
+speech and its own religion, each approaching frontier life
+through its own native temperament. And the frontier met each and
+all alike, with the same need and the same menace, and molded
+them after one general pattern. If the cabin stood in a typical
+Virginian settlement where the folk were of English stock, it may
+be that the dulcimer and some old love song of the homeland
+enlivened the work--or perhaps chairs were pushed back and young
+people danced the country dances of the homeland and the Virginia
+Reel, for these Virginian English were merry folk, and their
+religion did not frown upon the dance. In a cabin on the
+Shenandoah or the upper Yadkin the German tongue clicked away
+over the evening dish of kraut or sounded more sedately in a
+Lutheran hymn; while from some herder's but on the lower Yadkin
+the wild note of the bagpipes or of the ancient four-stringed
+harp mingled with the Gaelic speech.
+
+Among the homes in the Shenandoah where old England's ways
+prevailed, none was gayer than the tavern kept by the man whom
+the good Moravian Brother called "Severe." There perhaps the
+feasting celebrated the nuptials of John Sevier, who was barely
+past his seventeenth birthday when he took to himself a wife. Or
+perhaps the dancing, in moccasined feet on the puncheon flooring,
+was a ceremonial to usher into Back Country life the new
+municipality John had just organized, for John at nineteen had
+taken his earliest step towards his larger career, which we shall
+follow later on, as the architect of the first little governments
+beyond the mountains.
+
+In the Boone home on the Yadkin, we may guess that the talk was
+solely of the hunt, unless young Daniel had already become
+possessed of his first compass and was studying its ways. On such
+an evening, while the red afterglow lingered, he might be mending
+a passing trader's firearms by the fires of the primitive forge
+his father had set up near the trading path running from
+Hillsborough to the Catawba towns. It was said by the local
+nimrods that none could doctor a sick rifle better than young
+Daniel Boone, already the master huntsman of them all. And
+perhaps some trader's tale, told when the caravan halted for the
+night, kindled the youth's first desire to penetrate the
+mountain-guarded wilderness, for the tales of these Romanies of
+commerce were as the very badge of their free-masonry, and entry
+money at the doors of strangers.
+
+Out on the border's edge, heedless of the shadow of the mountains
+looming between the newly built cabin and that western land where
+they and their kind were to write the fame of the Ulster Scot in
+a shining script that time cannot dull, there might sit a group
+of stern-faced men, all deep in discussion of some point of
+spiritual doctrine or of the temporal rights of men. Yet, in
+every cabin, whatever the national differences, the setting was
+the same The spirit of the frontier was modeling out of old clay
+a new Adam to answer the needs of a new earth.
+
+It would be far less than just to leave the Back Country folk
+without further reference to the devoted labors of their clergy.
+In the earliest days the settlers were cut off from their church
+systems; the pious had to maintain their piety unaided, except in
+the rare cases where a pastor accompanied a group of settlers of
+his denomination into the wilds. One of the first ministers who
+fared into the Back Country to remind the Ulster Presbyterians of
+their spiritual duties was the Reverend Hugh McAden of
+Philadelphia. He made long itineraries under the greatest
+hardships, in constant danger from Indians and wild beasts,
+carrying the counsel of godliness to the far scattered flock.
+Among the Highland settlements the Reverend James Campbell for
+thirty years traveled about, preaching each Sunday at some
+gathering point a sermon in both English and Gaelic. A little
+later, in the Yadkin Valley, after Craighead's day there arose a
+small school of Presbyterian ministers whose zeal and
+fearlessness in the cause of religion and of just government had
+an influence on the frontiersmen that can hardly be
+overestimated.
+
+But, in the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery of
+border life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidance
+from other mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the
+primal threefold need family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the
+day's work was done. We who look back with thoughtful eyes upon
+the frontiersman--all links of contact with his racial past
+severed, at grips with destruction in the contenting of his
+needs--see something more, something larger, than he saw in the
+log cabin raised by his hands, its structure held together solely
+by his close grooving and fitting of its own strength. Though the
+walls he built for himself have gone with his own dust back to
+the earth, the symbol he erected for us stands.
+
+
+
+Chapter III. The Trader
+
+The trader was the first pathfinder. His caravans began the
+change of purpose that was to come to the Indian warrior's route,
+turning it slowly into the beaten track of communication and
+commerce. The settlers, the rangers, the surveyors, went westward
+over the trails which he had blazed for them years before. Their
+enduring works are commemorated in the cities and farms which
+today lie along every ancient border line; but of their
+forerunner's hazardous Indian trade nothing remains. Let us
+therefore pay a moment's homage here to the trader, who first--to
+borrow a phrase from Indian speech--made white for peace the red
+trails of war.
+
+He was the first cattleman of the Old Southwest. Fifty years
+before John Findlay,* one of this class of pioneers, led Daniel
+Boone through Cumberland Gap, the trader's bands of horses roamed
+the western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattle
+grazed among the deer on the green banks of the old Cherokee
+(Tennessee) River. He was the pioneer settler beyond the high
+hills; for he built, in the center of the Indian towns, the first
+white man's cabin--with its larger annex, the trading house--and
+dwelt there during the greater part of the year. He was America's
+first magnate of international commerce. His furs--for which he
+paid in guns, knives, ammunition, vermilion paint, mirrors, and
+cloth--lined kings' mantles, and hatted the Lords of Trade as
+they strode to their council chamber in London to discuss his
+business and to pass those regulations which might have seriously
+hampered him but for his resourcefulness in circumventing them!
+
+* The name is spelled in various ways: Findlay, Finlay, Findley.
+
+
+He was the first frontier warrior, for he either fought off or
+fell before small parties of hostile Indians who, in the interest
+of the Spanish or French, raided his pack-horse caravans on the
+march. Often, too, side by side with the red brothers of his
+adoption, he fought in the intertribal wars. His was the first
+educative and civilizing influence in the Indian towns. He
+endeavored to cure the Indians of their favorite midsummer
+madness, war, by inducing them to raise stock and poultry and
+improve their corn, squash, and pea gardens. It is not necessary
+to impute to him philanthropic motives. He was a practical man
+and he saw that war hurt his trade: it endangered his summer
+caravans and hampered the autumn hunt for deerskins.
+
+In the earliest days of the eighteenth century, when the
+colonists of Virginia and the Carolinas were only a handful, it
+was the trader who defeated each successive attempt of French and
+Spanish agents to weld the tribes into a confederacy for the
+annihilation of the English settlements. The English trader did
+his share to prevent what is now the United States from becoming
+a part of a Latin empire and to save it for a race having the
+Anglo-Saxon ideal and speaking the English tongue.
+
+The colonial records of the period contain items which, taken
+singly, make small impression on the casual reader but which,
+listed together, throw a strong light on the past and bring that
+mercenary figure, the trader, into so bold a relief that the
+design verges on the heroic. If we wonder, for instance, why the
+Scotch Highlanders who settled in the wilds at the headwaters of
+the Cape Fear River, about 1729, and were later followed by Welsh
+and Huguenots, met with no opposition from the Indians, the
+mystery is solved when we discover, almost by accident, a few
+printed lines which record that, in 1700, the hostile natives on
+the Cape Fear were subdued to the English and brought into
+friendly alliance with them by Colonel William Bull, a trader. We
+read further and learn that the Spaniards in Florida had long
+endeavored to unite the tribes in Spanish and French territory
+against the English and that the influence of traders prevented
+the consummation. The Spaniards, in 1702, had prepared to invade
+English territory with nine hundred Indians. The plot was
+discovered by Creek Indians and disclosed to their friends, the
+traders, who immediately gathered together five hundred warriors,
+marched swiftly to meet the invaders, and utterly routed them.
+Again, when the Indians, incited by the Spanish at St. Augustine,
+rose against the English in 1715, and the Yamasi Massacre
+occurred in South Carolina, it was due to the traders that some
+of the settlements at least were not wholly unprepared to defend
+themselves.
+
+The early English trader was generally an intelligent man;
+sometimes educated, nearly always fearless and resourceful. He
+knew the one sure basis on which men of alien blood and far
+separated stages of moral and intellectual development can meet
+in understanding--namely, the truth of the spoken word. He
+recognized honor as the bond of trade and the warp and woof of
+human intercourse. The uncorrupted savage also had his plain
+interpretation of the true word in the mouths of men, and a name
+for it. He called it the "Old Beloved Speech"; and he gave his
+confidence to the man who spoke this speech even in the close
+barter for furs.
+
+We shall find it worth while to refer to the map of America as it
+was in the early days of the colonial fur trade, about the
+beginning of the eighteenth century. A narrow strip of loosely
+strung English settlements stretched from the north border of New
+England to the Florida line. North Florida was Spanish territory.
+On the far distant southwestern borders of the English colonies
+were the southern possessions of France. The French sphere of
+influence extended up the Mississippi, and thence by way of
+rivers and the Great Lakes to its base in Canada on the borders
+of New England and New York. In South Carolina dwelt the Yamasi
+tribe of about three thousand warriors, their chief towns only
+sixty or eighty miles distant from the Spanish town of St.
+Augustine. On the west, about the same distance northeast of New
+Orleans, in what is now Alabama and Georgia, lay the Creek
+nation. There French garrisons held Mobile and Fort Alabama. The
+Creeks at this time numbered over four thousand warriors. The
+lands of the Choctaws, a tribe of even larger fighting strength,
+began two hundred miles north of New Orleans and extended along
+the Mississippi. A hundred and sixty miles northeast of the
+Choctaw towns were the Chickasaws, the bravest and most
+successful warriors of all the tribes south of the Iroquois. The
+Cherokees, in part seated within the Carolinas, on the upper
+courses of the Savannah River, mustered over six thousand men at
+arms. East of them were the Catawba towns. North of them were the
+Shawanoes and Delawares, in easy communication with the tribes of
+Canada. Still farther north, along the Mohawk and other rivers
+joining with the Hudson and Lake Ontario stood the "long houses"
+of the fiercest and most warlike of all the savages, the Iroquois
+or Six Nations.
+
+The Indians along the English borders outnumbered the colonists
+perhaps ten to one. If the Spanish and the French had succeeded
+in the conspiracy to unite on their side all the tribes, a red
+billow of tomahawk wielders would have engulfed and extinguished
+the English settlements. The French, it is true, made allies of
+the Shawanoes, the Delawares, the Choctaws, and a strong faction
+of the Creeks; and they finally won over the Cherokees after
+courting them for more than twenty years. But the Creeks in part,
+the powerful Chickasaws, and the Iroquois Confederacy, or Six
+Nations, remained loyal to the English. In both North and South
+it was the influence of the traders that kept these red tribes on
+the English side. The Iroquois were held loyal by Sir William
+Johnson and his deputy, George Croghan, the "King of Traders."
+The Chickasaws followed their "best-beloved" trader, James Adair;
+and among the Creeks another trader, Lachlan McGillivray, wielded
+a potent influence.
+
+Lachlan McGillivray was a Highlander. He landed in Charleston in
+1735 at the age of sixteen and presently joined a trader's
+caravan as packhorse boy. A few years later he married a woman of
+the Creeks. On many occasions he defeated French and Spanish
+plots with the Creeks for the extermination of the colonists in
+Georgia and South Carolina. His action in the final war with the
+French (1760), when the Indian terror was raging, is typical.
+News came that four thousand Creek warriors, reinforced by French
+Choctaws, were about to fall on the southern settlements. At the
+risk of their lives, McGillivray and another trader named Galphin
+hurried from Charleston to their trading house on the Georgia
+frontier. Thither they invited several hundred Creek warriors,
+feasted and housed them for several days, and finally won them
+from their purpose. McGillivray had a brilliant son, Alexander,
+who about this time became a chief in his mother's nation perhaps
+on this very occasion, as it was an Indian custom, in making a
+brotherhood pact, to send a son to dwell in the brother's house.
+We shall meet that son again as the Chief of the Creeks and the
+terrible scourge of Georgia and Tennessee in the dark days of the
+Revolutionary War.
+
+The bold deeds of the early traders, if all were to be told,
+would require a book as long as the huge volume written by James
+Adair, the "English Chickasaw." Adair was an Englishman who
+entered the Indian trade in 1785 and launched upon the long and
+dangerous trail from Charleston to the upper towns of the
+Cherokees, situated in the present Monroe County, Tennessee. Thus
+he was one of the earliest pioneers of the Old Southwest; and he
+was Tennessee's first author. "I am well acquainted," he says,
+"with near two thousand miles of the American continent"--a
+statement which gives one some idea of an early trader's
+enterprise, hardihood, and peril. Adair's "two thousand miles"
+were twisting Indian trails and paths he slashed out for himself
+through uninhabited wilds, for when not engaged in trade,
+hunting, literature, or war, it pleased him to make solitary
+trips of exploration. These seem to have led him chiefly
+northward through the Appalachians, of which he must have been
+one of the first white explorers.
+
+A many-sided man was James Adair--cultured, for his style suffers
+not by comparison with other writers of his day, no stranger to
+Latin and Greek, and not ignorant of Hebrew, which he studied to
+assist him in setting forth his ethnological theory that the
+American Indians were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of
+Israel. Before we dismiss his theory with a smile, let us
+remember that he had not at his disposal the data now available
+which reveal points of likeness in custom, language formation,
+and symbolism among almost all primitive peoples. The formidable
+title-page of his book in itself suggests an author keenly
+observant, accurate as to detail, and possessed of a versatile
+and substantial mind. Most of the pages were written in the towns
+of the Chickasaws, with whom he lived "as a friend and brother,"
+but from whose "natural jealousy" and "prying disposition" he was
+obliged to conceal his papers. "Never," he assures us, "was a
+literary work begun and carried on with more disadvantages!"
+
+Despite these disabilities the author wrote a book of absorbing
+interest. His intimate sympathetic pictures of Indian life as it
+was before the tribes had been conquered are richly valuable to
+the lover of native lore and to the student of the history of
+white settlement. The author believes, as he must, in the
+supremacy of his own race, but he nevertheless presents the
+Indians' side of the argument as no man could who had not made
+himself one of them. He thereby adds interest to those fierce
+struggles which took place along the border; for he shows us the
+red warrior not as a mere brute with a tomahawk but as a human
+creature with an ideal of his own, albeit an ideal that must give
+place to a better. Even in view of the red man's hideous methods
+of battle and inhuman treatment of captives, we cannot ponder
+unmoved Adair's description of his preparations for war--the
+fasting, the abstention from all family intercourse, and the
+purification rites and prayers for three days in the house set
+apart, while the women, who might not come close to their men in
+this fateful hour, stood throughout the night till dawn chanting
+before the door. Another poetic touch the author gives us, from
+the Cherokee--or Cheerake as he spells it--explaining that the
+root, chee-ra, means fire. A Cherokee never extinguished fire
+save on the occasion of a death, when he thrust a burning torch
+into the water and said, Neetah intahah--"the days appointed him
+were finished." The warrior slain in battle was held to have been
+balanced by death and it was said of him that "he was weighed on
+the path and made light." Adair writes that the Cherokees, until
+corrupted by French agents and by the later class of traders who
+poured rum among them like water, were honest, industrious, and
+friendly. They were ready to meet the white man with their
+customary phrase of good will "I shall firmly shake hands with
+your speech." He was intimately associated with this tribe from
+1735 to 1744, when he diverted his activities to the Chickasaws.
+
+It was from the Cherokees' chief town, Great Telliko, in the
+Appalachians, that Adair explored the mountains. He describes the
+pass through the chain which was used by the Indians and which,
+from his outline of it, was probably the Cumberland Gap. He
+relates many incidents of the struggle with the French--
+manifestations even in this remote wilderness of the vast
+conflict that was being waged for the New World by two imperial
+nations of the Old.
+
+Adair undertook, at the solicitation of Governor Glen of South
+Carolina, the dangerous task of opening up trade with the
+Choctaws; a tribe mustering upwards of five thousand warriors who
+were wholly in the French interest. Their country lay in what is
+now the State of Mississippi along the great river, some seven
+hundred miles west and southwest of Charleston. After passing the
+friendly Creek towns the trail led on for 150 miles through what
+was practically the enemy's country. Adair, owing to what he
+likes to term his "usual good fortune," reached the Choctaw
+country safely and by his adroitness and substantial presents won
+the friendship of the influential chief, Red Shoe, whom he found
+in a receptive mood, owing to a French agent's breach of
+hospitality involving Red Shoe's favorite wife. Adair thus
+created a large proEnglish faction among the Choctaws, and his
+success seriously impaired French prestige with all the
+southwestern tribes. Several times French Choctaws bribed to
+murder him, waylaid Adair on the trail--twice when he was
+alone--only to be baffled by the imperturbable self-possession
+and alert wit which never failed him in emergencies.
+
+Winning a Choctaw trade cost Adair, besides attacks on his life,
+2200 pounds, for which he was never reimbursed, notwithstanding
+Governor Glen's agreement with him. And, on his return to
+Charleston, while the Governor was detaining him "on one pretext
+or another," he found that a new expedition, which the Governor
+was favoring for reasons of his own, had set out to capture his
+Chickasaw trade and gather in "the expected great crop of
+deerskins and beaver...before I could possibly return to the
+Chikkasah Country." Nothing daunted, however, the hardy trader
+set out alone.
+
+"In the severity of winter, frost, snow, hail and heavy rains
+succeed each other in these climes, so that I partly rode and
+partly swam to the Chikkasah country; for not expecting to stay
+long below [in Charleston] I took no leathern canoe. Many of the
+broad, deep creeks...had now overflowed their banks, ran at a
+rapid rate and were unpassable to any but DESPERATE PEOPLE...
+the rivers and swamps were dreadful by rafts of timber driving
+down the former and the great fallen trees floating in the
+latter.... Being forced to wade deep through cane swamps or woody
+thickets, it proved very troublesome to keep my firearms dry on
+which, as a second means, my life depended."
+
+Nevertheless Adair defeated the Governor's attempt to steal his
+trade, and later on published the whole story in the Charleston
+press and sent in a statement of his claims to the Assembly, with
+frank observations on His Excellency himself. We gather that his
+bold disregard of High Personages set all Charleston in an
+uproar!
+
+Adair is tantalizingly modest about his own deeds. He devotes
+pages to prove that an Indian rite agrees with the Book of
+Leviticus but only a paragraph to an exploit of courage and
+endurance such as that ride and swim for the Indian trade. We
+have to read between the lines to find the man; but he well
+repays the search. Briefly, incidentally, he mentions that on one
+trip he was captured by the French, who were so
+
+"well acquainted with the great damages I had done to them and
+feared others I might occasion, as to confine me a close prisoner
+...in the Alebahma garrison. They were fully resolved to have
+sent me down to Mobile or New Orleans as a capital criminal to
+be hanged...BUT I DOUBTED NOT OF BEING ABLE TO EXTRICATE
+MYSELF SOME WAY OR OTHER. They appointed double centries over me
+for some days before I was to be sent down in the French King's
+large boat. They were strongly charged against laying down their
+weapons or suffering any hostile thing to be in the place where I
+was kept, as they deemed me capable of any mischief.... About an
+hour before we were to set off by water I escaped from them by
+land.... I took through the middle of the low land covered
+with briers at full speed. I heard the French clattering on
+horseback along the path...and the howling savages pursuing...,
+but MY USUAL GOOD FORTUNE enabled me to leave them far
+enough behind...."
+
+
+One feels that a few of the pages given up to Leviticus might
+well have been devoted to a detailed account of this escape from
+"double centries" and a fortified garrison, and the plunge
+through the tangled wilds, by a man without gun or knife or
+supplies, and who for days dared not show himself upon the trail.
+
+There is too much of "my usual good fortune" in Adair's
+narrative; such luck as his argues for extraordinary resources in
+the man. Sometimes we discover only through one phrase on a page
+that he must himself have been the hero of an event he relates in
+the third person. This seems to be the case in the affair of
+Priber, which was the worst of those "damages" Adair did to the
+French. Priber was "a gentleman of curious and speculative
+temper" sent by the French in 1786 to Great Telliko to win the
+Cherokees to their interest. At this time Adair was trading with
+the Cherokees. He relates that Priber,
+
+"more effectually to answer the design of his commission...ate,
+drank, slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself with the
+Indians, so that it was not easy to distinguish him from the
+natives,--he married also with them, and being endued with a
+strong understanding and retentive memory he soon learned their
+dialect, and by gradual advances impressed them with a very ill
+opinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent,
+avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflated
+the artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their own
+importance in the American scale of power.... Having thus
+infected them...he easily formed them into a nominal
+republican government--crowned their old Archimagus emperor after
+a pleasing new savage form, and invented a variety of
+high-sounding titles for all the members of his imperial
+majesty's red court."
+
+Priber cemented the Cherokee empire "by slow but sure degrees to
+the very great danger of our southern colonies." His position was
+that of Secretary of State and as such, with a studiedly
+provocative arrogance, he carried on correspondence with the
+British authorities. The colonial Government seems, on this
+occasion, to have listened to the traders and to have realized
+that Priber was a danger, for soldiers were sent to take him
+prisoner. The Cherokees, however, had so firmly "shaked hands"
+with their Secretary's admired discourse that they threatened to
+take the warpath if their beloved man were annoyed, and the
+soldiers went home without him--to the great hurt of English
+prestige. The Cherokee empire had now endured for five years and
+was about to rise "into a far greater state of puissance by the
+acquisition of the Muskohge, Chocktaw and the Western Mississippi
+Indians," when fortunately for the history of British
+colonization in America, "an accident befell the Secretary."
+
+It is in connection with this "accident" that the reader suspects
+the modest but resourceful Adair of conniving with Fate. Since
+the military had failed and the Government dared not again employ
+force, other means must be found; the trader provided them. The
+Secretary with his Cherokee bodyguard journeyed south on his
+mission to the Creeks. Secure, as he supposed, he lodged
+overnight in an Indian town. But there a company of English
+traders took him into custody, along with his bundle of
+manuscripts presumably intended for the French commandant at Fort
+Alabama, and handed him over to the Governor of Georgia, who
+imprisoned him and kept him out of mischief till he died.
+
+As a Briton, Adair contributed to Priber's fate; and as such he
+approves it. As a scholar with philosophical and ethnological
+leanings, however, he deplores it, and hopes that Priber's
+valuable manuscripts may "escape the despoiling hands of military
+power." Priber had spent his leisure in compiling a Cherokee
+dictionary; Adair's occupation, while domiciled in his winter
+house in Great Telliko, was the writing of his Indian Appendix to
+the Pentateuch. As became brothers in science, they had exchanged
+notes, so we gather from Adair's references to conversations and
+correspondence. Adair's difficulties as an author, however, had
+been increased by a treacherous lapse from professional etiquette
+on the part of the Secretary: "He told them [the Indians] that in
+the very same manner as he was their great Secretary, I was the
+devil's clerk, or an accursed one who marked on paper the bad
+speech of the evil ones of darkness." On his own part Adair
+admits that his object in this correspondence was to trap the
+Secretary into something more serious than literary errata. That
+is, he admits it by implication; he says the Secretary "feared"
+it. During the years of their duel, Adair apparently knew that the
+scholarly compiler of the Cherokee dictionary was secretly
+inciting members of this particular Lost Tribe to tomahawk the
+discoverer of their biblical origin; and Priber, it would seem,
+knew that he knew!
+
+Adair shows, inferentially, that land encroachment was not the
+sole cause of those Indian wars with which we shall deal in a
+later chapter. The earliest causes were the instigations of the
+French and the rewards which they offered for English scalps. But
+equally provocative of Indian rancor were the acts of sometimes
+merely stupid, sometimes dishonest, officials; the worst of
+these, Adair considered, was the cheapening of the trade through
+the granting of general licenses.
+
+
+"Formerly each trader had a license for two [Indian] towns....
+At my first setting out among them, a number of traders...
+journeyed through our various nations in different companies and
+were generally men of worth; of course they would have a living
+price for their goods, which they carried on horseback to the
+remote Indian countries at very great expences.... [The
+Indians] were kept under proper restraint, were easy in their
+minds and peaceable on account of the plain, honest lessons daily
+inculcated on them...but according to the present unwise
+plan, two and even three Arablike peddlars sculk about in one of
+those villages...who are generally the dregs and offscourings
+of our climes...by inebriating the Indians with their
+nominally prohibited and poisoning spirits, they purchase the
+necessaries of life at four and five hundred per cent cheaper
+than the orderly traders.... Instead of showing good examples
+of moral conduct, beside the other part of life, they instruct
+the unknowing and imitating savages in many diabolical lessons of
+obscenity and blasphemy."
+
+
+In these statements, contemporary records bear him out. There is
+no sadder reading than the many pleas addressed by the Indian
+chiefs to various officials to stop the importation of liquor
+into their country, alleging the debauchment of their young men
+and warning the white man, with whom they desired to be friends,
+that in an Indian drink and blood lust quickly combined.
+
+Adair's book was published in London in 1775. He wrote it to be
+read by Englishmen as well as Americans; and some of his
+reflections on liberty, justice, and Anglo-Saxon unity would not
+sound unworthily today. His sympathies were with "the principles
+of our Magna Charta Americana"; but he thought the threatened
+division of the English-speaking peoples the greatest evil that
+could befall civilization. His voluminous work discloses a man
+not only of wide mental outlook but a practical man with a sense
+of commercial values. Yet, instead of making a career for
+himself among his own caste, he made his home for over thirty
+years in the Chickasaw towns; and it is plain that, with the
+exception of some of his older brother traders, he preferred the
+Chickasaw to any other society.
+
+The complete explanation of such men as Adair we need not expect
+to find stated anywhere--not even in and between the lines of his
+book. The conventionalist would seek it in moral obliquity; the
+radical, in a temperament that is irked by the superficialities
+that comprise so large a part of conventional standards. The
+reason for his being what he was is almost the only thing Adair
+did not analyze in his book. Perhaps, to him, it was self evident.
+We may let it be so to us, and see it most clearly presented in a
+picture composed from some of his brief sketches: A land of grass
+and green shade inset with bright waters, where deer and domestic
+cattle herded together along the banks; a circling group of
+houses, their white-clayed walls sparkling under the sun's rays,
+and, within and without, the movement of "a friendly and
+sagacious people," who "kindly treated and watchfully guarded"
+their white brother in peace and war, and who conversed daily
+with him in the Old Beloved Speech learned first of Nature. "Like
+towers in cities beyond the common size of those of the Indians"
+rose the winter and summer houses and the huge trading house
+which the tribe had built for their best beloved friend in the
+town's center, because there he would be safest from attack. On
+the rafters hung the smoked and barbecued delicacies taken in the
+hunt and prepared for him by his red servants, who were also his
+comrades at home and on the dangerous trail. "Beloved old women"
+kept an eye on his small sons, put to drowse on panther skins so
+that they might grow up brave warriors. Nothing was there of
+artifice or pretense, only "the needful things to make a
+reasonable life happy." All was as primitive, naive, and
+contented as the woman whose outline is given once in a few
+strokes, proudly and gayly penciled: "I have the pleasure of
+writing this by the side of a Chikkasah female, as great a
+princess as ever lived among the ancient Peruvians or Mexicans,
+and she bids me be sure not to mark the paper wrong after the
+manner of most of the traders; otherwise it will spoil the making
+good bread or homony!"
+
+His final chapter is the last news of James Adair, type of the
+earliest trader. Did his bold attacks on corrupt officials and
+rum peddlers--made publicly before Assemblies and in print--raise
+for him a dense cloud of enmity that dropped oblivion on his
+memory? Perhaps. But, in truth, his own book is all the history
+of him we need. It is the record of a man. He lived a full life
+and served his day; and it matters not that a mist envelops the
+place where unafraid he met the Last Enemy, was "weighed on the
+path and made light."
+
+
+
+Chapter IV. The Passing Of The French Peril
+
+The great pile of the Appalachian peaks was not the only barrier
+which held back the settler with his plough and his rifle from
+following the trader's tinkling caravans into the valleys beyond.
+Over the hills the French were lords of the land. The
+frontiersman had already felt their enmity through the torch and
+tomahawk of their savage allies. By his own strength alone he
+could not cope with the power entrenched beyond the hills; so he
+halted. But that power, by its unachievable desire to be overlord
+of two hemispheres, was itself to precipitate events which would
+open the westward road.
+
+The recurring hour in the cycle of history, when the issue of
+Autocracy against Democracy cleaves the world, struck for the men
+of the eighteenth century as the second half of that century
+dawned. In our own day, happily, that issue has been perceived by
+the rank and file of the people. In those darker days, as France
+and England grappled in that conflict of systems which culminated
+in the Seven Years' War, the fundamental principles at stake were
+clear to only a handful of thinking men.
+
+But abstractions, whether clear or obscure, do not cause
+ambassadors to demand their passports. The declaration of war
+awaits the overt act. Behold, then, how great a matter is kindled
+by a little fire! The casus belli between France and England in
+the Seven Years' War--the war which humbled France in Europe and
+lost her India and Canada--had to do with a small log fort built
+by a few Virginians in 1754 at the Forks of the Ohio River and
+wrested from them in the same year by a company of Frenchmen from
+Canada.
+
+The French claimed the valley of the Ohio as their territory; the
+English claimed it as theirs. The dispute was of long standing.
+The French claim was based on discovery; the English claim, on
+the seato-sea charters of Virginia and other colonies and on
+treaties with the Six Nations. The French refused to admit the
+right of the Six Nations to dispose of the territory. The English
+were inclined to maintain the validity of their treaties with the
+Indians. Especially was Virginia so inclined, for a large share
+of the Ohio lay within her chartered domain.
+
+The quarrel had entered its acute phase in 1749, when both the
+rival claimants took action to assert their sovereignty. The
+Governor of Canada sent an envoy, Celoron de Blainville, with
+soldiers, to take formal possession of the Ohio for the King of
+France. In the same year the English organized in Virginia the
+Ohio Company for the colonization of the same country; and
+summoned Christopher Gist, explorer, trader, and guide, from his
+home on the Yadkin and dispatched him to survey the land.
+
+Then appeared on the scene that extraordinary man, Robert
+Dinwiddie, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, erstwhile citizen of
+Glasgow. His correspondence from Virginia during his seven years'
+tenure of office (1751-58) depicts the man with a vividness
+surpassing paint. He was as honest as the day--as honest as he
+was fearless and fussy. But he had no patience; he wanted things
+done and done at once, and his way was THE way to do them. People
+who did not think as he thought didn't THINK at all. On this
+drastic premise he went to work. There was of course continuous
+friction between him and the House of Burgesses. Dinwiddie had
+all a Scot's native talent for sarcasm. His letters, his
+addresses, perhaps in particular his addresses to the House,
+bristled with satirical thrusts at his opponents. If he had
+spelled out in full all the words he was so eager to write, he
+would have been obliged to lessen his output; so he used a
+shorthand system of his own, peculiar enough to be remarkable
+even though abbreviations were the rule in that day. Even the
+dignity of Kings he sacrificed to speed, and we find "His
+Majesty" abbreviated to "H M'y"; yet a smaller luminary known as
+"His Honor" fares better, losing only the last letter--"His
+Hono." "Ho." stands for "house" and "yt" for "that," "what,"
+"it," and "anything else," as convenient. Many of his letters
+wind up with "I am ve'y much fatig'd." We know that he must have
+been!
+
+It was a formidable task that confronted Dinwiddie--to possess
+and defend the Ohio. Christopher Gist returned in 1751, having
+surveyed the valley for the Ohio Company as far as the Scioto and
+Miami rivers, and in the following year the survey was ratified
+by the Indians. The Company's men were busy blazing trails
+through the territory and building fortified posts. But the
+French dominated the territory. They had built and occupied with
+troops Fort Le Boeuf on French Creek, a stream flowing into the
+Allegheny. We may imagine Dinwiddie's rage at this violation of
+British soil by French soldiers and how he must have sputtered to
+the young George Washington, when he summoned that officer and
+made him the bearer of a letter to the French commander at Fort
+Le Boeuf, to demand that French troops be at once withdrawn from
+the Ohio.
+
+Washington made the journey to Fort Le Boeuf in December, 1753,
+but the mission of course proved fruitless. Dinwiddie then wrote
+to London urging that a force be sent over to help the colonies
+maintain their rights and, under orders from the Crown, suggested
+by himself, he wrote to the governors of all the other colonies
+to join with Virginia in raising troops to settle the ownership
+of the disputed territory. From Governor Dobbs of North Carolina
+he received an immediate response. By means of logic, sarcasm,
+and the entire force of his prerogatives, Dinwiddie secured from
+his own balking Assembly 10,000 pounds with which to raise
+troops. From Maryland he obtained nothing. There were three
+prominent Marylanders in the Ohio Company, but--or because of
+this--the Maryland Assembly voted down the measure for a military
+appropriation. On June 18, 1754, Dinwiddie wrote, with unusually
+full spelling for him:
+
+"I am perswaded had His Majesty's Com'ds to the other Colonies
+been duely obey'd, and the necessary Assistance given by them,
+the Fr. wou'd have long ago have been oblig'd entirely to have
+evacuated their usurp'd Possession of the King's Lands, instead
+of w'ch they are daily becoming more formidable, whilst every
+Gov't except No. Caro. has amus'd me with Expectations that have
+proved fruitless, and at length refuse to give any Supply, unless
+in such a manner as must render it ineffectual."
+
+This saddened mood with its deliberate penmanship did not last
+long. Presently Dinwiddie was making a Round Robin of himself in
+another series of letters to Governors, Councilors, and
+Assemblymen, frantically beseeching them for "H. M'y's hono." and
+their own, and, if not, for "post'r'ty," to rise against the
+cruel French whose Indians were harrying the borders again and
+"Basely, like Virmin, stealing and carrying off the helpless
+infant"--as nice a simile, by the way, as any Sheridan ever put
+into the mouth of Mrs. Malaprop.
+
+Dinwiddie saw his desires thwarted on every hand by the selfish
+spirit of localism and jealousy which was more rife in America in
+those days than it is today. Though the phrase "capitalistic war"
+had not yet been coined, the great issues of English civilization
+on this continent were befogged, for the majority in the
+colonies, by the trivial fact that the shareholders in the Ohio
+Company stood to win by a vigorous prosecution of the war and to
+lose if it were not prosecuted at all. The irascible Governor,
+however, proceeded with such men and means as he could obtain.
+
+And now in the summer of 1754 came the "overt act" which
+precipitated the inevitable war. The key to the valley of the
+Ohio was the tongue of land at the Forks, where the Allegheny and
+the Monongahela join their waters in the Beautiful River. This
+site--today Pittsburgh--if occupied and held by either nation
+would give that nation the command of the Ohio. Occupied it was
+for a brief hour by a small party of Virginians, under Captain
+William Trent; but no sooner had they erected on the spot a crude
+fort than the French descended upon them. What happened then all
+the world knows: how the French built on the captured site their
+great Fort Duquesne; how George Washington with an armed force,
+sent by Dinwiddie to recapture the place, encountered French and
+Indians at Great Meadows and built Fort Necessity, which he was
+compelled to surrender; how in the next year (1755) General
+Braddock arrived from across the sea and set out to take Fort
+Duquesne, only to meet on the way the disaster called "Braddock's
+Defeat"; and how, before another year had passed, the Seven
+Years' War was raging in Europe, and England was allied with the
+enemies of France.
+
+>From the midst of the debacle of Braddock's defeat rises the
+figure of the young Washington. Twenty-three he was then, tall
+and spare and hardbodied from a life spent largely in the open.
+When Braddock fell, this Washington appeared. Reckless of the
+enemy's bullets, which spanged about him and pierced his clothes,
+he dashed up and down the lines in an effort to rally the
+panic-stricken redcoats. He was too late to save the day, but not
+to save a remnant of the army and bring out his own Virginians in
+good order. Whether among the stay-at-homes and voters of credits
+there were some who would have ascribed Washington's conduct on
+that day to the fact that his brothers were large shareholders in
+the Ohio Company and that Fort Duquesne was their personal
+property or "private interest," history does not say. We may
+suppose so.
+
+North Carolina, the one colony which had not "amus'd" the
+Governor of Virginia "with Expectations that proved fruitless,"
+had voted 12,000 pounds for the war and had raised two companies
+of troops. One of these, under Edward Brice Dobbs, son of
+Governor Dobbs, marched with Braddock; and in that company as
+wagoner went Daniel Boone, then in his twenty-second year. Of
+Boone's part in Braddock's campaign nothing more is recorded save
+that on the march he made friends with John Findlay, the trader,
+his future guide into Kentucky; and that, on the day of the
+defeat, when his wagons were surrounded, he escaped by slashing
+the harness, leaping on the back of one of his horses, and
+dashing into the forest.
+
+
+Meanwhile the southern tribes along the border were comparatively
+quiet. That they well knew a colossal struggle between the two
+white races was pending and were predisposed to ally themselves
+with the stronger is not to be doubted. French influence had long
+been sifting through the formidable Cherokee nation, which still,
+however, held true in the main to its treaties with the English.
+It was the policy of the Governors of Virginia and North Carolina
+to induce the Cherokees to enter strongly into the war as allies
+of the English. Their efforts came to nothing chiefly because of
+the purely local and suicidal Indian policy of Governor Glen of
+South Carolina. There had been some dispute between Glen and
+Dinwiddie as to the right of Virginia to trade with the
+Cherokees; and Glen had sent to the tribes letters calculated to
+sow distrust of all other aspirants for Indian favor, even
+promising that certain settlers in the Back Country of North
+Carolina should be removed and their holdings restored to the
+Indians. These letters caused great indignation in North
+Carolina, when they came to light, and had the worst possible
+effect upon Indian relations. The Indians now inclined their ear
+to the French who, though fewer than the English, were at least
+united in purpose.
+
+Governor Glen took this inauspicious moment to hold high festival
+with the Cherokees. It was the last year of his administration
+and apparently he hoped to win promotion to some higher post by
+showing his achievements for the fur trade and in the matter of
+new land acquired. He plied the Cherokees with drink and induced
+them to make formal submission and to cede all their lands to the
+Crown. When the chiefs recovered their sobriety, they were filled
+with rage at what had been done, and they remembered how the
+French had told them that the English intended to make slaves of
+all the Indians and to steal their lands. The situation was
+complicated by another incident. Several Cherokee warriors
+returning from the Ohio, whither they had gone to fight for the
+British, were slain by frontiersmen. The tribe, in accordance
+with existing agreements, applied to Virginia for redress--but
+received none.
+
+There was thus plenty of powder for an explosion. Governor
+Lyttleton, Glen's successor, at last flung the torch into the
+magazine. He seized, as hostages, a number of friendly chiefs who
+were coming to Charleston to offer tokens of good will and forced
+them to march under guard on a military tour which the Governor
+was making (1759) with intent to overawe the savages. When this
+expedition reached Prince George, on the upper waters of the
+Savannah, the Indian hostages were confined within the fort; and
+the Governor, satisfied with the result of his maneuver departed
+south for Charleston. Then followed a tragedy. Some Indian
+friends of the imprisoned chiefs attacked the fort, and the
+commander, a popular young officer, was treacherously killed
+during a parley. The infuriated frontiersmen within the fort fell
+upon the hostages and slew them all--twenty-six chiefs--and the
+Indian war was on.
+
+If all were to be told of the struggle which followed in the Back
+Country, the story could not be contained in this book. Many
+brave and resourceful men went out against the savages. We can
+afford only a passing glance at one of them. Hugh Waddell of
+North Carolina was the most brilliant of all the frontier
+fighters in that war. He was a young Ulsterman from County Down,
+a born soldier, with a special genius for fighting Indians,
+although he did not grow up on the border, for he arrived in
+North Carolina in 1753, at the age of nineteen. He was appointed
+by Governor Dobbs to command the second company which North
+Carolina had raised for the war, a force of 450 rangers to
+protect the border counties; and he presently became the most
+conspicuous military figure in the colony. As to his personality,
+we have only a few meager details, with a portrait that suggests
+plainly enough those qualities of boldness and craft which
+characterized his tactics. Governor Dobbs appears to have had a
+special love towards Hugh, whose family he had known in Ireland,
+for an undercurrent of almost fatherly pride is to be found in
+the old Governor's reports to the Assembly concerning Waddell's
+exploits.
+
+The terror raged for nearly three years. Cabins and fields were
+burned, and women and children were slaughtered or dragged away
+captives. Not only did immigration cease but many hardy settlers
+fled from the country. At length, after horrors indescribable and
+great toll of life, the Cherokees gave up the struggle. Their
+towns were invaded and laid waste by imperial and colonial
+troops, and they could do nothing but make peace. In 1761 they
+signed a treaty with the English to hold "while rivers flow and
+grasses grow and sun and moon endure."
+
+
+In the previous year (1760) the imperial war had run its course
+in America. New France lay prostrate, and the English were
+supreme not only on the Ohio but on the St. Lawrence and the
+Great Lakes. Louisbourg, Quebec, Montreal, Oswego, Niagara,
+Duquesne, Detroit--all were in English hands.
+
+Hugh Waddell and his rangers, besides serving with distinction in
+the Indian war, had taken part in the capture of Fort Duquesne.
+This feat had been accomplished in 1758 by an expedition under
+General Forbes. The troops made a terrible march over a new
+route, cutting a road as they went. It was November when they
+approached their objective. The wastes of snow and their
+diminished supplies caused such depression among the men that the
+officers called a halt to discuss whether or not to proceed
+toward Fort Duquesne, where they believed the French to be
+concentrated in force. Extravagant sums in guineas were named as
+suitable reward for any man who would stalk and catch a French
+Indian and learn from him the real conditions inside the fort.
+The honor, if not the guineas, fell to John Rogers, one of
+Waddell's rangers. From the Indian it was learned that the French
+had already gone, leaving behind only a few of their number. As
+the English drew near, they found that the garrison had blown up
+the magazine, set fire to the fort, and made off.
+
+Thus, while New France was already tottering, but nearly two
+years before the final capitulation at Montreal, the English
+again became masters of the Ohio Company's land--masters of the
+Forks of the Ohio. This time they were there to stay. Where the
+walls of Fort Duquesne had crumbled in the fire Fort Pitt was to
+rise, proudly bearing the name of England's Great Commoner who
+had directed English arms to victory on three continents.
+
+With France expelled and the Indians deprived of their white
+allies, the westward path lay open to the pioneers, even though
+the red man himself would rise again and again in vain endeavor
+to bar the way. So a new era begins, the era of exploration for
+definite purpose, the era of commonwealth building. In entering
+on it, we part with the earliest pioneer--the trader, who first
+opened the road for both the lone home seeker and the great land
+company. He dwindles now to the mere barterer and so--save for a
+few chance glimpses--slips out of sight, for his brave days as
+Imperial Scout are done.
+
+
+
+Chapter V. Boone, The Wanderer
+
+What thoughts filled Daniel Boone's mind as he was returning from
+Braddock's disastrous campaign in 1755 we may only conjecture.
+Perhaps he was planning a career of soldiering, for in later
+years he was to distinguish himself as a frontier commander in
+both defense and attack. Or it may be that his heart was full of
+the wondrous tales told him by the trader, John Findlay, of that
+Hunter's Canaan, Kentucky, where buffalo and deer roamed in
+thousands. Perhaps he meant to set out ere long in search of the
+great adventure of his dreams, despite the terrible dangers of
+trail making across the zones of war into the unknown.
+
+However that may be, Boone straightway followed neither of these
+possible plans on his return to the Yadkin but halted for a
+different adventure. There, a rifle shot's distance from his
+threshold, was offered him the oldest and sweetest of all hazards
+to the daring. He was twenty-two, strong and comely and a whole
+man; and therefore he was in no mind to refuse what life held out
+to him in the person of Rebecca Bryan. Rebecca was the daughter
+of Joseph Bryan, who had come to the Yadkin from Pennsylvania
+some time before the Boones; and she was in her seventeenth year.
+
+Writers of an earlier and more sentimental period than ours have
+endeavored to supply, from the saccharine stores of their fancy,
+the romantic episodes connected with Boone's wooing which history
+has omitted to record. Hence the tale that the young hunter,
+walking abroad in the spring gloaming, saw Mistress Rebecca's
+large dark eyes shining in the dusk of the forest, mistook them
+for a deer's eyes and shot--his aim on this occasion fortunately
+being bad! But if Boone's rifle was missing its mark at ten
+paces, Cupid's dart was speeding home. So runs the story
+concocted a hundred years later by some gentle scribe ignorant
+alike of game seasons, the habits of hunters, and the way of a
+man with a maid in a primitive world.
+
+Daniel and Rebecca were married in the spring of 1756. Squire
+Boone, in his capacity as justice of the peace, tied the knot;
+and in a small cabin built upon his spacious lands the young
+couple set up housekeeping. Here Daniel's first two sons were
+born. In the third year of his marriage, when the second child
+was a babe in arms, Daniel removed with his wife and their young
+and precious family to Culpeper County in eastern Virginia, for
+the border was going through its darkest days of the French and
+Indian War. During the next two or three years we find him in
+Virginia engaged as a wagoner, hauling tobacco in season; but
+back on the border with his rifle, after the harvest, aiding in
+defense against the Indians. In 1759 he purchased from his father
+a lot on Sugar Tree Creek, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek (Davie
+County, North Carolina) and built thereon a cabin for himself.
+The date when he brought his wife and children to live in their
+new abode on the border is not recorded. It was probably some
+time after the close of the Indian War. Of Boone himself during
+these years we have but scant information. We hear of him again
+in Virginia and also as a member of the pack-horse caravan which
+brought into the Back Country the various necessaries for the
+settlers. We know, too, that in the fall of 1760 he was on a lone
+hunting trip in the mountains west of the Yadkin; for until a few
+years ago there might be seen, still standing on the banks of
+Boone's Creek (a small tributary of the Watauga) in eastern
+Tennessee, a tree bearing the legend, "D Boon cilled A BAR on
+this tree 1760." Boone was always fond of carving his exploits on
+trees, and his wanderings have been traced largely by his
+arboreal publications. In the next year (1761) he went with
+Waddell's rangers when they marched with the army to the final
+subjugation of the Cherokee.
+
+That Boone and his family were back on the border in the new
+cabin shortly after the end of the war, we gather from the fact
+that in 1764 he took his little son James, aged seven, on one of
+his long hunting excursions. From this time dates the intimate
+comradeship of father and son through all the perils of the
+wilderness, a comradeship to come to its tragic end ten years
+later when, as we shall see, the seventeen-year-old lad fell
+under the red man's tomahawk as his father was leading the first
+settlers towards Kentucky. In the cold nights of the open camp,
+as Daniel and James lay under the frosty stars, the father kept
+the boy warm snuggled to his breast under the broad flap of his
+hunting shirt. Sometimes the two were away from home for months
+together, and Daniel declared little James to be as good a
+woodsman as his father.
+
+Meanwhile fascinating accounts of the new land of Florida, ceded
+to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, had leaked into the
+Back Country; and in the winter of 1765 Boone set off southward
+on horseback with, seven companions. Colonel James Grant, with
+whose army Boone had fought in 1761, had been appointed Governor
+of the new colony and was offering generous inducements to
+settlers. The party traveled along the borders of South Carolina
+and Georgia. No doubt they made the greater part of their way
+over the old Traders' Trace, the "whitened" warpath; and they
+suffered severe hardships. Game became scarcer as they proceeded.
+Once they were nigh to perishing of starvation and were saved
+from that fate only through chance meeting with a band of Indians
+who, seeing their plight, made camp and shared their food with
+them--according to the Indian code in time of peace.
+
+Boone's party explored Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola,
+and Daniel became sufficiently enamored of the tropical south to
+purchase there land and a house. His wife, however, was unwilling
+to go to Florida, and she was not long in convincing the hunter
+that he would soon tire of a gameless country. A gameless
+country! Perhaps this was the very thought which turned the
+wanderer's desires again towards the land of Kentucky.* The
+silencing of the enemy's whisper in the Cherokee camps had opened
+the border forests once more to the nomadic rifleman. Boone was
+not alone in the desire to seek out what lay beyond. His
+brother-in-law, John Stewart, and a nephew by marriage, Benjamin
+Cutbirth, or Cutbird, with two other young men, John Baker and
+James Ward, in 1766 crossed the Appalachian Mountains, probably
+by stumbling upon the Indian trail winding from base to summit
+and from peak to base again over this part of the great hill
+barrier. They eventually reached the Mississippi River and,
+having taken a good quantity of peltry on the way, they launched
+upon the stream and came in time to New Orleans, where they made
+a satisfactory trade of their furs.
+
+* Kentucky, from Ken-ta-ke, an Iroquois word meaning "the place
+of old fields." Adair calls the territory "the old fields." The
+Indians apparently used the word "old," as we do in a sense of
+endearment and possession as well as relative to age.
+
+
+Boone was fired anew by descriptions of this successful feat, in
+which two of his kinsmen had participated. He could no longer be
+held back. He must find the magic door that led through the vast
+mountain wall into Kentucky--Kentucky, with its green prairies
+where the buffalo and deer were as "ten thousand thousand cattle
+feeding" in the wilds, and where the balmy air vibrated with the
+music of innumerable wings.
+
+Accordingly, in the autumn of 1767, Boone began his quest of the
+delectable country in the company of his friend, William Hill,
+who had been with him in Florida. Autumn was the season of
+departure on all forest excursions, because by that time the
+summer crops had been gathered in and the day of the deer had
+come. By hunting, the explorers must feed themselves on their
+travels and with deerskins and furs they must on their return
+recompense those who had supplied their outfit. Boone, the
+incessant but not always lucky wanderer, was in these years ever
+in debt for an outfit.
+
+Boone and Hill made their way over the Blue Ridge and the
+Alleghanies and crossed the Holston and Clinch rivers. Then they
+came upon the west fork of the Big Sandy and, believing that it
+would lead them to the Ohio, they continued for at least a
+hundred miles to the westward. Here they found a buffalo trace,
+one of the many beaten out by the herds in their passage to the
+salt springs, and they followed it into what is now Floyd County
+in eastern Kentucky. But this was not the prairie land described
+by Findlay; it was rough and hilly and so overgrown with laurel
+as to be almost impenetrable. They therefore wended their way
+back towards the river, doubtless erected the usual hunter's camp
+of skins or blankets and branches, and spent the winter in
+hunting and trapping. Spring found them returning to their homes
+on the Yadkin with a fair winter's haul.
+
+Such urgent desire as Boone's, however, was not to be defeated.
+The next year brought him his great opportunity. John Findlay
+came to the Yadkin with a horse pack of needles and linen and
+peddler's wares to tempt the slim purses of the Back Country
+folk. The two erstwhile comrades in arms were overjoyed to
+encounter each other again, and Findlay spent the winter of
+1768-69 in Boone's cabin. While the snow lay deep outside and
+good-smelling logs crackled on the hearth, they planned an
+expedition into Kentucky through the Gap where Virginia,
+Tennessee, and Kentucky touch one another, which Findlay felt
+confident he could find. Findlay had learned of this route from
+cross-mountain traders in 1753, when he had descended the Ohio to
+the site of Louisville, whence he had gone with some Shawanoes as
+a prisoner to their town of Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki or Blue Licks.*
+
+* Hanna, "The Wilderness Trail," vol. II, pp. 215-16.
+
+On the first day of May, 1769, Boone and Findlay, accompanied by
+John Stewart and three other venturesome spirits, Joseph Holden,
+James Mooney, and William Cooley, took horse for the fabled land.
+Passing through the Cumberland Gap, they built their first camp
+in Kentucky on the Red Lick fork of Station Camp Creek.
+
+This camp was their base of operations. From it, usually in
+couples, we infer, the explorers branched out to hunt and to take
+their observations of the country. Here also they prepared the
+deer and buffalo meat for the winter, dried or smoked the geese
+they shot in superabundance, made the tallow and oil needed to
+keep their weapons in trim, their leather soft, and their kits
+waterproof. Their first ill luck befell them in December when
+Boone and Stewart were captured by a band of Shawanoes who were
+returning from their autumn hunt on Green River. The Indians
+compelled the two white men to show them the location of their
+camp, took possession of all it contained in skins and furs and
+also helped themselves to the horses. They left the explorers
+with just enough meat and ammunition to provide for their journey
+homeward, and told them to depart and not to intrude again on the
+red men's hunting grounds. Having given this pointed warning, the
+Shawanoes rode on northward towards their towns beyond the Ohio.
+On foot, swiftly and craftily, Boone and his brother-in-law
+trailed the band for two days. They came upon the camp in dead of
+night, recaptured their horses, and fled. But this was a game in
+which the Indians themselves excelled, and at this date the
+Shawanoes had an advantage over Boone in their thorough knowledge
+of the territory; so that within fortyeight hours the white men
+were once more prisoners. After they had amused themselves by
+making Boone caper about with a horse bell on his neck, while
+they jeered at him in broken English, "Steal horse, eh?" the
+Shawanoes turned north again, this time taking the two
+unfortunate hunters with them. Boone and Stewart escaped, one day
+on the march, by a plunge into the thick tall canebrake. Though
+the Indians did not attempt to follow them through the mazes of
+the cane, the situation of the two hunters, without weapons or
+food, was serious enough. When they found Station Camp deserted
+and realized that their four companions had given them up for
+dead or lost and had set off on the trail for home, even such
+intrepid souls as theirs may have felt fear. They raced on in
+pursuit and fortunately fell in not only with their party but
+with Squire Boone, Daniel's brother, and Alexander Neely, who had
+brought in fresh supplies of rifles, ammunition, flour, and
+horses.
+
+After this lucky encounter the group separated. Findlay was ill,
+and Holden, Mooney, and Cooley had had their fill of Kentucky;
+but Squire, Neely, Stewart, and Daniel were ready for more
+adventures. Daniel, too, felt under the positive necessity of
+putting in another year at hunting and trapping in order to
+discharge his debts and provide for his family. Near the mouth of
+Red River the new party built their station camp. Here, in idle
+hours, Neely read aloud from a copy of "Gulliver's Travels" to
+entertain the hunters while they dressed their deerskins or
+tinkered their weapons. In honor of the "Lorbrulgrud" of the
+book, though with a pronunciation all their own, they christened
+the nearest creek; and as "Lulbegrud Creek" it is still known.
+
+Before the end of the winter the two Boones were alone in the
+wilderness. Their brother-in-law, Stewart, had disappeared; and
+Neely, discouraged by this tragic event, had returned to the
+Yadkin. In May, Squire Boone fared forth, taking with him the
+season's catch of beaver, otter, and deerskins to exchange in the
+North Carolinian trading houses for more supplies; and Daniel was
+left solitary in Kentucky.
+
+Now followed those lonely explorations which gave Daniel Boone
+his special fame above all Kentucky's pioneers. He was by no
+means the first white man to enter Kentucky; and when he did
+enter, it was as one of a party, under another man's guidance--if
+we except his former disappointing journey into the laurel
+thickets of Floyd County. But these others, barring Stewart, who
+fell there, turned back when they met with loss and hardship and
+measured the certain risks against the possible gains. Boone, the
+man of imagination, turned to wild earth as to his kin. His
+genius lay in the sense of oneness he felt with his wilderness
+environment. An instinct he had which these other men, as
+courageous perhaps as he, did not possess.
+
+Never in all the times when he was alone in the woods and had no
+other man's safety or counsel to consider, did he suffer ill
+fortune. The nearest approach to trouble that befell him when
+alone occurred one day during this summer when some Indians
+emerged from their green shelter and found him, off guard for the
+moment, standing on a cliff gazing with rapture over the vast
+rolling stretches of Kentucky. He was apparently cut off from
+escape, for the savages were on three sides, advancing without
+haste to take him, meanwhile greeting him with mock amity. Over
+the cliff leaped Boone and into the outspread arms of a friendly
+maple, whose top bloomed green about sixty feet below the cliff's
+rim, and left his would-be captors on the height above, grunting
+their amazement.
+
+During this summer Boone journeyed through the valleys of the
+Kentucky and the Licking. He followed the buffalo traces to the
+two Blue Licks and saw the enormous herds licking up the salt
+earth, a darkly ruddy moving mass of beasts whose numbers could
+not be counted. For many miles he wound along the Ohio, as far as
+the Falls. He also found the Big Bone Lick with its mammoth
+fossils.
+
+In July, 1770, Daniel returned to the Red River camp and there
+met Squire Boone with another pack of supplies. The two brothers
+continued their hunting and exploration together for some months,
+chiefly in Jessamine County, where two caves still bear Boone's
+name. In that winter they even braved the Green River ground,
+whence had come the hunting Shawanoes who had taken Daniel's
+first fruits a year before. In the same year (1770) there had
+come into Kentucky from the Yadkin another party of hunters,
+called, from their lengthy sojourn in the twilight zone, the Long
+Hunters. One of these, Gasper Mansker, afterwards related how the
+Long Hunters were startled one day by hearing sounds such as no
+buffalo or turkey ever made, and how Mansker himself stole
+silently under cover of the trees towards the place whence the
+strange noises came, and descried Daniel Boone prone on his back
+with a deerskin under him, his famous tall black hat beside him
+and his mouth opened wide in joyous but apparently none too
+tuneful song. This incident gives a true character touch. It is
+not recorded of any of the men who turned back that they sang
+alone in the wilderness.
+
+In March, 1771, the two Boones started homeward, their horses
+bearing the rich harvest of furs and deerskins which was to clear
+Daniel of debt and to insure the comfort of the family he had not
+seen for two years. But again evil fortune met them, this time in
+the very gates--for in the Cumberland Gap they were suddenly
+surrounded by Indians who took everything from them, leaving them
+neither guns nor horses.
+
+
+
+Chapter VI. The Fight For Kentucky
+
+When Boone returned home he found the Back Country of North
+Carolina in the throes of the Regulation Movement. This movement,
+which had arisen first from the colonists' need to police their
+settlements, had more recently assumed a political character. The
+Regulators were now in conflict with the authorities, because the
+frontier folk were suffering through excessive taxes,
+extortionate fees, dishonest land titles, and the corruption of
+the courts. In May, 1771, the conflict lost its quasi-civil
+nature. The Regulators resorted to arms and were defeated by the
+forces under Governor Tryon in the Battle of the Alamance.
+
+The Regulation Movement, which we shall follow in more detail
+further on, was a culmination of those causes of unrest which
+turned men westward. To escape from oppression and to acquire
+land beyond the bounds of tyranny became the earnest desire of
+independent spirits throughout the Back Country. But there was
+another and more potent reason why the country east of the
+mountains no longer contented Boone. Hunting and trapping were
+Boone's chief means of livelihood. In those days, deerskins sold
+for a dollar a skin to the traders at the Forks or in
+Hillsborough; beaver at about two dollars and a half, and otter
+at from three to five dollars. A pack-horse could carry a load of
+one hundred dressed deerskins, and, as currency was scarce, a
+hundred dollars was wealth. Game was fast disappearing from the
+Yadkin. To Boone above all men, then, Kentucky beckoned. When he
+returned in the spring of 1771 from his explorations, it was with
+the resolve to take his family at once into the great game
+country and to persuade some of his friends to join in this
+hazard of new fortunes.
+
+The perils of such a venture, only conjectural to us at this
+distance, he knew well; but in him there was nothing that shrank
+from danger, though he did not court it after the rash manner of
+many of his compeers. Neither reckless nor riotous, Boone was
+never found among those who opposed violence to authority, even
+unjust authority; nor was he ever guilty of the savagery which
+characterized much of the retaliatory warfare of that period when
+frenzied white men bettered the red man's instruction. In him,
+courage was illumined with tenderness and made equable by
+self-control. Yet, though he was no fiery zealot like the
+Ulstermen who were to follow him along the path he had made and
+who loved and revered him perhaps because he was so different
+from themselves, Boone nevertheless had his own religion. It was
+a simple faith best summed up perhaps by himself in his old age
+when he said that he had been only an instrument in the hand of
+God to open the wilderness to settlement.
+
+Two years passed before Boone could muster a company of colonists
+for the dangerous and delectable land. The dishonesty practiced
+by Lord Granville's agents in the matter of deeds had made it
+difficult for Daniel and his friends to dispose of their acreage.
+When at last in the spring of 1773 the Wanderer was prepared to
+depart, he was again delayed; this time by the arrival of a
+little son to whom was given the name of John. By September,
+however, even this latest addition to the party was ready for
+travel; and that month saw the Boones with a small caravan of
+families journeying towards Powell's Valley, whence the Warrior's
+Path took its way through Cumberland Gap. At this point on the
+march they were to be joined by William Russell, a famous
+pioneer, from the Clinch River, with his family and a few
+neighbors, and by some of Rebecca Boone's kinsmen, the Bryans,
+from the lower Yadkin, with a company of forty men.
+
+Of Rebecca Boone history tells us too little--only that she was
+born a Bryan, was of low stature and dark eyed, that she bore her
+husband ten children, and lived beside him to old age. Except on
+his hunts and explorations, she went with him from one cabined
+home to another, always deeper into the wilds. There are no
+portraits of her. We can see her only as a shadowy figure moving
+along the wilderness trails beside the man who accepted his
+destiny of God to be a way-shower for those of lesser faith.
+
+"He tires not forever on his leagues of march
+Because her feet are set to his footprints,
+And the gleam of her bare hand slants across his shoulder."
+
+Boone halted his company on Walden Mountain over Powell's Valley
+to await the Bryan contingent and dispatched two young men under
+the leadership of his son James, then in his seventeenth year, to
+notify Russell of the party's arrival. As the boys were returning
+with Russell's son, also a stripling, two of his slaves, and some
+white laborers, they missed the path and went into camp for the
+night. When dawn broke, disclosing the sleepers, a small war band
+of Shawanoes, who had been spying on Boone and his party, fell
+upon them and slaughtered them. Only one of Russell's slaves and
+a laborer escaped. The tragedy seems augmented by the fact that
+the point where the boys lost the trail and made their night
+quarters was hardly three miles from the main camp--to which an
+hour later came the two survivors with their gloomy tidings.
+Terror now took hold of the little band of emigrants, and there
+were loud outcries for turning back. The Bryans, who had arrived
+meanwhile, also advised retreat, saying that the "signs" about
+the scene of blood indicated an Indian uprising. Daniel carried
+the scalped body of his son, the boy-comrade of his happy hunts,
+to the camp and buried it there at the beginning of the trail.
+His voice alone urged that they go on.
+
+Fortunately indeed, as events turned out, Boone was overruled,
+and the expedition was abandoned. The Bryan party and the others
+from North Carolina went back to the Yadkin. Boone himself with
+his family accompanied Russell to the Clinch settlement, where he
+erected a temporary cabin on the farm of one of the settlers, and
+then set out alone on the chase to earn provision for his wife
+and children through the winter.
+
+
+Those who prophesied an Indian war were not mistaken. When the
+snowy hunting season had passed and the "Powwowing Days" were
+come, the Indian war drum rattled in the medicine house from the
+borders of Pennsylvania to those of Carolina. The causes of the
+strife for which the red men were making ready must be briefly
+noted to help us form a just opinion of the deeds that followed.
+Early writers have usually represented the frontiersmen as saints
+in buckskin and the Indians as fiends without the shadow of a
+claim on either the land or humanity. Many later writers have
+merely reversed the shield. The truth is that the Indians and the
+borderers reacted upon each other to the hurt of both.
+Paradoxically, they grew like enough to hate one another with a
+savage hatred--and both wanted the land.
+
+Land! Land! was the slogan of all sorts and conditions of men.
+Tidewater officials held solemn powwows with the chiefs, gave
+wampum strings, and forthwith incorporated.* Chiefs blessed their
+white brothers who had "forever brightened the chain of
+friendship," departed home, and proceeded to brighten the blades
+of their tomahawks and to await, not long, the opportunity to use
+them on casual hunters who carried in their kits the compass, the
+"land-stealer." Usually the surveying hunter was a borderer; and
+on him the tomahawk descended with an accelerated gusto. Private
+citizens also formed land companies and sent out surveyors,
+regardless of treaties. Bold frontiersmen went into No Man's Land
+and staked out their claims. In the very year when disaster
+turned the Boone party back, James Harrod had entered Kentucky
+from Pennsylvania and had marked the site of a settlement.
+
+* The activities of the great land companies are described in
+Alvord's exhaustive work, "The Mississippi Valley in British
+Politics."
+
+
+Ten years earlier (1763), the King had issued the famous and much
+misunderstood Proclamation restricting his "loving subjects" from
+the lands west of the mountains. The colonists interpreted this
+document as a tyrannous curtailment of their liberties for the
+benefit of the fur trade. We know now that the portion of this
+Proclamation relating to western settlement was a wise provision
+designed to protect the settlers on the frontier by allaying the
+suspicions of the Indians, who viewed with apprehension the
+triumphal occupation of that vast territory from Canada to the
+Gulf of Mexico by the colonizing English. By seeking to compel
+all land purchase to be made through the Crown, it was designed
+likewise to protect the Indians from "whisky purchase," and to
+make impossible the transfer of their lands except with consent
+of the Indian Council, or full quota of headmen, whose joint
+action alone conveyed what the tribes considered to be legal
+title. Sales made according to this form, Sir William Johnson
+declared to the Lords of Trade, he had never known to be
+repudiated by the Indians. This paragraph of the Proclamation was
+in substance an embodiment of Johnson's suggestions to the Lords
+of Trade. Its purpose was square dealing and pacification; and
+shrewd men such as Washington recognized that it was not intended
+as a final check to expansion. "A temporary expedient to quiet
+the minds of the Indians," Washington called it, and then himself
+went out along the Great Kanawha and into Kentucky, surveying
+land.
+
+It will be asked what had become of the Ohio Company of Virginia
+and that fort at the Forks of the Ohio; once a bone of contention
+between France and England. Fort Pitt, as it was now called, had
+fallen foul of another dispute, this time between Virginia and
+Pennsylvania. Virginia claimed that the far western corner of her
+boundary ascended just far enough north to take in Fort Pitt.
+Pennsylvania asserted that it did nothing of the sort. The Ohio
+Company had meanwhile been merged into the Walpole Company.
+George Croghan, at Fort Pitt, was the Company's agent and as such
+was accused by Pennsylvania of favoring from ulterior motives the
+claims of Virginia. Hotheads in both colonies asseverated that
+the Indians were secretly being stirred up in connection with the
+boundary disputes. If it does not very clearly appear how an
+Indian rising would have settled the ownership of Fort Pitt, it
+is evident enough where the interests of Virginia and
+Pennsylvania clashed. Virginia wanted land for settlement and
+speculation; Pennsylvania wanted the Indians left in possession
+for the benefit of the fur trade. So far from stirring up the
+Indians, as his enemies declared, Croghan was as usual giving
+away all his substance to keep them quiet.* Indeed, during this
+summer of 1774, eleven hundred Indians were encamped about Fort
+Pitt visiting him.
+
+* The suspicion that Croghan and Lord Dunmore, the Governor of
+Virginia, were instigating the war appears to have arisen out of
+the conduct of Dr. John Connolly, Dunmore's agent and Croghan's
+nephew. Croghan had induced the Shawanoes to bring under escort
+to Fort Pitt certain English traders resident in the Indian
+towns. The escort was fired on by militiamen under command of
+Connolly, who also issued a proclamation declaring a state of war
+to exist. Connolly, however, probably acted on his own
+initiative. He was interested in land on his own behalf and was
+by no means the only man at that time who was ready to commit
+outrages on Indians in order to obtain it. As Croghan lamented,
+there was "too great a spirit in the frontier people for killing
+Indians."
+
+
+Two hundred thousand acres in the West--Kentucky and West
+Virginia--had been promised to the colonial officers and soldiers
+who fought in the Seven Years' War. But after making the
+Proclamation the British Government had delayed issuing the
+patents. Washington interested himself in trying to secure them;
+and Lord Dunmore, who also had caught the "land-fever,"* prodded
+the British authorities but won only rebuke for his inconvenient
+activities. Insistent, however, Dunmore sent out parties of
+surveyors to fix the bounds of the soldiers' claims. James
+Harrod, Captain Thomas Bullitt, Hancock Taylor, and three McAfee
+brothers entered Kentucky, by the Ohio, under Dunmore's orders.
+John Floyd went in by the Kanawha as Washington's agent. A
+bird's-eye view of that period would disclose to us very few
+indeed of His Majesty's loving subjects who were paying any
+attention to his proclamation. Early in 1774, Harrod began the
+building of cabins and a fort, and planted corn on the site of
+Harrodsburg. Thus to him and not to Boone fell the honor of
+founding the first permanent white settlement in Kentucky
+
+* See Alvord, "The Mississippi Valley in British Politics," vol.
+II, pp. 191-94.
+
+
+When summer came, its thick verdure proffering ambuscade, the air
+hung tense along the border. Traders had sent in word that
+Shawanoes, Delawares, Mingos, Wyandots, and Cherokees were
+refusing all other exchange than rifles, ammunition, knives, and
+hatchets. White men were shot down in their fields from ambush.
+Dead Indians lay among their own young corn, their scalp locks
+taken. There were men of both races who wanted war and meant to
+have it--and with it the land.
+
+Lord Dunmore, the Governor, resolved that, if war were
+inevitable, it should be fought out in the Indian country. With
+this intent, he wrote to Colonel Andrew Lewis of Botetourt
+County, Commander of the Southwest Militia, instructing him to
+raise a respectable body of troops and "join me either at the
+mouth of the Great Kanawha or Wheeling, or such other part of the
+Ohio as may be most convenient for you to meet me." The Governor
+himself with a force of twelve hundred proceeded to Fort Pitt,
+where Croghan, as we have seen, was extending his hospitality to
+eleven hundred warriors from the disaffected tribes.
+
+On receipt of the Governor's letter, Andrew Lewis sent out
+expresses to his brother Colonel Charles Lewis, County Lieutenant
+of Augusta, and to Colonel William Preston, County Lieutenant of
+Fincastle, to raise men and bring them with all speed to the
+rendezvous at Camp Union (Lewisburg) on the Big Levels of the
+Greenbrier (West Virginia). Andrew Lewis summoned these officers
+to an expedition for "reducing our inveterate enemies to reason."
+Preston called for volunteers to take advantage of "the
+opportunity we have so long wished for...this useless People
+may now at last be oblidged to abandon their country." These men
+were among not only the bravest but the best of their time; but
+this was their view of the Indian and his alleged rights. To
+eliminate this "useless people," inveterate enemies of the white
+race, was, as they saw it, a political necessity and a religious
+duty. And we today who profit by their deeds dare not condemn
+them.
+
+Fervor less solemn was aroused in other quarters by Dunmore's
+call to arms. At Wheeling, some eighty or ninety young
+adventurers, in charge of Captain Michael Cresap of Maryland,
+were waiting for the freshets to sweep them down the Ohio into
+Kentucky. When the news reached them, they greeted it with the
+wild monotone chant and the ceremonies preliminary to Indian
+warfare. They planted the war pole, stripped and painted
+themselves, and starting the war dance called on Cresap to be
+their "white leader." The captain, however, declined; but in that
+wild circling line was one who was a white leader indeed. He was
+a sandy-haired boy of twenty--one of the bold race of English
+Virginians, rugged and of fiery countenance, with blue eyes
+intense of glance and deep set under a high brow that, while
+modeled for power, seemed threatened in its promise by the too
+sensitive chiseling of his lips. With every nerve straining for
+the fray, with thudding of feet and crooning of the blood song,
+he wheeled with those other mad spirits round the war pole till
+the set of sun closed the rites. "That evening two scalps were
+brought into camp," so a letter of his reads. Does the bold
+savage color of this picture affright us? Would we veil it? Then
+we should lose something of the true lineaments of George Rogers
+Clark, who, within four short years, was to lead a tiny army of
+tattered and starving backwoodsmen, ashamed to quail where he
+never flinched, through barrens and icy floods to the conquest of
+Illinois for the United States.
+
+Though Cresap had rejected the role of "white leader," he did not
+escape the touch of infamy. "Cresap's War" was the name the
+Indians gave to the bloody encounters between small parties of
+whites and Indians, which followed on that war dance and
+scalping, during the summer months. One of these encounters must
+be detailed here because history has assigned it as the immediate
+cause of Dunmore's War.
+
+Greathouse, Sapperton, and King, three traders who had a post on
+Yellow Creek, a tributary of the Ohio fifty miles below
+Pittsburgh, invited several Indians from across the stream to
+come and drink with them and their friends. Among the Indians
+were two or three men of importance in the Mingo tribe. There
+were also some women, one of whom was the Indian wife of Colonel
+John Gibson, an educated man who had distinguished himself as a
+soldier with Forbes in 1768. That the Indians came in amity and
+apprehended no treachery was proved by the presence of the women.
+Gibson's wife carried her halfcaste baby in her shawl. The
+disreputable traders plied their guests with drink to the point
+of intoxication and then murdered them. King shot the first man
+and, when he fell, cut his throat, saying that he had served many
+a deer in that fashion. Gibson's Indian wife fled and was shot
+down in the clearing. A man followed to dispatch her and her
+baby. She held the child up to him pleading, with her last
+breath, that he would spare it because it was not Indian but "one
+of yours." The mother dead, the child was later sent to Gibson.
+Twelve Indians in all were killed.
+
+Meanwhile Croghan had persuaded the Iroquois to peace. With the
+help of David Zeisberger, the Moravian missionary, and White
+Eyes, a Delaware chief, he and Dunmore had won over the Delaware
+warriors. In the Cherokee councils, Oconostota demanded that the
+treaty of peace signed in 1761 be kept. The Shawanoes, however,
+led by Cornstalk, were implacable; and they had as allies the
+Ottawas and Mingos, who had entered the council with them.
+
+A famous chief of the day and one of great influence over the
+Indians, and also among the white officials who dealt with Indian
+affairs, was Tachnech-dor-us, or Branching Oak of the Forest, a
+Mingo who had taken the name of Logan out of compliment to James
+Logan of Pennsylvania. Chief Logan had recently met with so much
+reproach from his red brothers for his loyalty to the whites that
+he had departed from the Mingo town at Yellow Creek. But,
+learning that his tribe had determined to assist the Shawanoes
+and had already taken some white scalps, he repaired to the place
+where the Mingos were holding their war council to exert his
+powers for peace. There, in presence of the warriors, after
+swaying them from their purpose by those oratorical gifts which
+gave him his influence and his renown, he took the war hatchet
+that had already killed, and buried it in proof that vengeance
+was appeased. Upon this scene there entered a Mingo from Yellow
+Creek with the news of the murders committed there by the three
+traders. The Indian whose throat had been slit as King had served
+deer was Logan's brother. Another man slain was his kinsman. The
+woman with the baby was his sister. Logan tore up from the earth
+the bloody tomahawk and, raising it above his head, swore that he
+would not rest till he had taken ten white lives to pay for each
+one of his kin. Again the Mingo warriors declared for war and
+this time were not dissuaded. But Logan did not join this red
+army. He went out alone to wreak his vengeance, slaying and
+scalping.
+
+
+Meanwhile Dunmore prepared to push the war with the utmost vigor.
+His first concern was to recall the surveying parties from
+Kentucky, and for so hazardous an errand he needed the services
+of a man whose endurance, speed, and woodcraft were equal to
+those of any Indian scout afoot. Through Colonel Preston, his
+orders were conveyed to Daniel Boone, for Boone's fame had now
+spread from the border to the tidewater regions. It was stated
+that "Boone would lose no time," and "if they are alive, it is
+indisputable but Boone must find them."
+
+So Boone set out in company with Michael Stoner, another expert
+woodsman. His general instructions were to go down the Kentucky
+River to Preston's Salt Lick and across country to the Falls of
+the Ohio, and thence home by Gaspar's Lick on the Cumberland
+River. Indian war parties were moving under cover across "the
+Dark and Bloody Ground" to surround the various groups of
+surveyors still at large and to exterminate them. Boone made his
+journey successfully. He found John Floyd, who was surveying for
+Washington; he sped up to where Harrod and his band were building
+cabins and sent them out, just in time as it happened; he reached
+all the outposts of Thomas Bullitt's party, only one of whom fell
+a victim to the foe*; and, undetected by the Indians, he brought
+himself and Stoner home in safety, after covering eight hundred
+miles in sixty-one days.
+
+* Hancock Taylor, who delayed in getting out of the country and
+was cut off.
+
+
+Harrod and his homesteaders immediately enlisted in the army. How
+eager Boone was to go with the forces under Lewis is seen in the
+official correspondence relative to Dunmore's War. Floyd wanted
+Boone's help in raising a company: "Captain Bledsoe says that
+Boone has more [influence] than any man now disengaged; and you
+know what Boone has done for me...for which reason I love the
+man." Even the border, it would seem, had its species of
+pacifists who were willing to let others take risks for them, for
+men hung back from recruiting, and desertions were the order of
+the day. Major Arthur Campbell hit upon a solution of the
+difficulties in West Fincastle. He was convinced that Boone could
+raise a company and hold the men loyal. And Boone did.
+
+For some reason, however, Daniel's desire to march with the army
+was denied. Perhaps it was because just such a man as he--and,
+indeed, there was no other--was needed to guard the settlement.
+Presently he was put in command of Moore's Fort in Clinch Valley,
+and his "diligence" received official approbation. A little later
+the inhabitants of the valley sent out a petition to have Boone
+made a "captain" and given supreme command of the lower forts.
+The settlers demanded Boone's promotion for their own security.
+
+"The land it is good, it is just to our mind,
+Each will have his part if his Lordship be kind,
+The Ohio once ours, we'll live at our ease,
+With a bottle and glass to drink when we please."
+
+So sang the army poet, thus giving voice, as bards should ever
+do, to the theme nearest the hearts of his hearers--in this case,
+Land! Presumably his ditty was composed on the eve of the march
+from Lewisburg, for it is found in a soldier's diary.
+
+On the evening of October 9,1774, Andrew Lewis with his force of
+eleven hundred frontiersmen was encamped on Point Pleasant at the
+junction of the Great Kanawha with the Ohio. Dunmore in the
+meantime had led his forces into Ohio and had erected Fort Gower
+at the mouth of the Hockhocking River, where he waited for word
+from Andrew Lewis.*
+
+* It has been customary to ascribe to Lord Dunmore motives of
+treachery in failing to make connections with Lewis; but no real
+evidence has been advanced to support any of the charges made
+against him by local historians. The charges were, as Theodore
+Roosevelt says, "an afterthought." Dunmore was a King's man in
+the Revolution; and yet in March, 1775, the Convention of the
+Colony of Virginia, assembled in opposition to the royal party,
+resolved: "The most cordial thanks of the people of this colony
+are a tribute justly due to our worthy Governor Lord Dunmore, for
+his truly noble, wise, and spirited conduct which at once evinces
+his Excellency's attention to the true interests of this colony,
+and a real in the executive department which no dangers can
+divert, or difficulties hinder, from achieving the most important
+services to the people who have the happiness to live under his
+administration." (See "American Archives," Fourth Series, vol.
+II, p. 170.) Similar resolutions were passed by his officers on
+the march home from Ohio; at the same time, the officers passed
+resolutions in sympathy with the American cause. Yet it was
+Andrew Lewis who later drove Dunmore from Virginia. Well might
+Dunmore exclaim, "That it should ever come to this!"
+
+
+The movements of the two armies were being observed by scouts
+from the force of red warriors gathered in Ohio under the great
+leader of the Shawanoes. Cornstalk purposed to isolate the two
+armies of his enemy and to crush them in turn before they could
+come together. His first move was to launch an attack on Lewis at
+Point Pleasant. In the dark of night, Cornstalk's Indians crossed
+the Ohio on rafts, intending to surprise the white man's camp at
+dawn. They would have succeeded but for the chance that three or
+four of the frontiersmen, who had risen before daybreak to hunt,
+came upon the Indians creeping towards the camp. Shots were
+exchanged. An Indian and a white man dropped. The firing roused
+the camp. Three hundred men in two lines under Charles Lewis and
+William Fleming sallied forth expecting to engage the vanguard of
+the enemy but encountered almost the whole force of from eight
+hundred to a thousand Indians before the rest of the army could
+come into action. Both officers were wounded, Charles Lewis
+fatally. The battle, which continued from dawn until an hour
+before sunset, was the bloodiest in Virginia's long series of
+Indian wars. The frontiersmen fought as such men ever
+fought--with the daring, bravery, swiftness of attack, and skill
+in taking cover which were the tactics of their day, even as at a
+later time many of these same men fought at King's Mountain and
+in Illinois the battles that did so much to turn the tide in the
+Revolution.*
+
+*  With Andrew Lewis on this day were Isaac Shelby and William
+Campbell, the victorious leaders at King's Mountain, James
+Robertson, the "father of Tennessee," Valentine Sevier, Daniel
+Morgan, hero of the Cowpens, Major Arthur Campbell, Benjamin
+Logan, Anthony Bledsoe, and Simon Kenton. With Dunmore's force
+were Adam Stephen, who distinguished himself at the Brandywine,
+George Rogers Clark, John Stuart, already noted through the
+Cherokee wars, and John Montgomery, later one of Clark's four
+captains in Illinois. The two last mentioned were Highlanders.
+Clark's Illinois force was largely recruited from the troops who
+fought at Point Pleasant.
+
+
+Colonel Preston wrote to Patrick Henry that the enemy behaved
+with "inconceivable bravery," the head men walking about in the
+time of action exhorting their men to "lie close, shoot well, be
+strong, and fight." The Shawanoes ran up to the muzzles of the
+English guns, disputing every foot of ground. Both sides knew
+well what they were fighting for--the rich land held in a
+semicircle by the Beautiful River.
+
+Shortly before sundown the Indians, mistaking a flank movement by
+Shelby's contingent for the arrival of reinforcements, retreated
+across the Ohio. Many of their most noted warriors had fallen and
+among them the Shawano chief, Puck-e-shin-wa, father of a famous
+son, Tecumseh.* Yet they were unwilling to accept defeat. When
+they heard that Dunmore was now marching overland to cut them off
+from their towns, their fury blazed anew. "Shall we first kill
+all our women and children and then fight till we ourselves are
+slain?" Cornstalk, in irony, demanded of them; "No? Then I will
+go and make peace."
+
+*  Thwaites, "Documentary History of Dunmore's War."
+
+
+By the treaty compacted between the chiefs and Lord Dunmore, the
+Indians gave up all claim to the lands south of the Ohio, even
+for hunting, and agreed to allow boats to pass unmolested. In
+this treaty the Mingos refused to join, and a detachment of
+Dunmore's troops made a punitive expedition to their towns. Some
+discord arose between Dunmore and Lewis's frontier forces
+because, since the Shawanoes had made peace, the Governor would
+not allow the frontiersmen to destroy the Shawano towns.
+
+Of all the chiefs, Logan alone still held aloof. Major Gibson
+undertook to fetch him, but Logan refused to come to the treaty
+grounds. He sent by Gibson the short speech which has lived as an
+example of the best Indian oratory:
+
+"I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan's
+cabin hungry and he gave him not meat: if ever he came cold and
+naked and he clothed him not. During the course of the last long
+and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for
+peace. Such was my love for the whites that my countrymen pointed
+as they passed and said, 'Logan is the friend of the white men.'
+I had even thought to have lived with you but for the injuries of
+one man. Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood and
+unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not even sparing
+my women and children. There remains not a drop of my blood in
+the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge.
+I have sought it; I have killed many; I have fully glutted my
+vengeance: for my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do
+not harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never
+felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is
+there to mourn for Logan? Not one."*
+
+* Some writers have questioned the authenticity of Logan's
+speech, inclining to think that Gibson himself composed it,
+partly because of the biblical suggestion in the first few lines.
+That Gibson gave biblical phraseology to these lines is apparent,
+though, as Adair points out there are many examples of similitude
+in Indian and biblical expression. But the thought is Indian and
+relates to the first article of the Indian's creed, namely, to
+share his food with the needy. "There remains not a drop of my
+blood in the veins of any living creature" is a truly Indian
+lament. Evidently the final four lines of the speech are the most
+literally translated, for they have the form and the primitive
+rhythmic beat which a student of Indian poetry quickly recognizes.
+The authenticity of the speech, as well as the innocence
+of Cresap, whom Logan mistakenly accused, was vouched for by
+George Rogers Clark in a letter to Dr. Samuel Brown dated June
+17, 1798. See Jefferson papers, Series 6, quoted by English,
+"Conquest of the Country Northwest of the River Ohio." vol. II.
+p. 1029.
+
+
+By rivers and trails, in large and small companies, started home
+the army that had won the land. The West Fincastle troops, from
+the lower settlements of the Clinch and Holston valleys, were to
+return by the Kentucky River, while those from the upper valley
+would take the shorter way up Sandy Creek. To keep them in
+provisions during the journey it was ordered that hunters be sent
+out along these routes to kill and barbecue meat and place it on
+scaffolds at appropriate spots.
+
+The way home by the Kentucky was a long road for weary and
+wounded men with hunger gnawing under their belts. We know who
+swung out along the trail to provide for that little band,
+"dressed in deerskins colored black, and his hair plaited and
+bobbed up." It was Daniel Boone--now, by popular demand, Captain
+Boone--just "discharged from Service," since the valley forts
+needed him no longer. Once more only a hunter, he went his way
+over Walden Mountain--past his son's grave marking the place
+where HE had been turned back--to serve the men who had opened
+the gates.
+
+
+
+Chapter VII. The Dark And Bloody Ground
+
+With the coming of spring Daniel Boone's desire, so long
+cherished and deferred, to make a way for his neighbors through
+the wilderness was to be fulfilled at last. But ere his ax could
+slash the thickets from the homeseekers' path, more than two
+hundred settlers had entered Kentucky by the northern waterways.
+Eighty or more of these settled at Harrodsburg, where Harrod was
+laying out his town on a generous plan, with "in-lots" of half an
+acre and "out-lots" of larger size. Among those associated with
+Harrod was George Rogers Clark, who had surveyed claims for
+himself during the year before the war.
+
+While over two hundred colonists were picking out home sites
+wherever their pleasure or prudence dictated, a gigantic land
+promotion scheme--involving the very tracts where they were
+sowing their first corn--was being set afoot in North Carolina by
+a body of men who figure in the early history of Kentucky as the
+Transylvania Company. The leader of this organization was Judge
+Richard Henderson.* Judge Henderson dreamed a big dream. His
+castle in the air had imperial proportions. He resolved, in
+short, to purchase from the Cherokee Indians the larger part of
+Kentucky and to establish there a colony after the manner and the
+economic form of the English Lords Proprietors, whose day in
+America was so nearly done. Though in the light of history the
+plan loses none of its dramatic features, it shows the practical
+defects that must surely have prevented its realization. Like
+many another Caesar hungering for empire and staking all to win
+it, the prospective lord of Kentucky, as we shall see, had left
+the human equation out of his calculations.
+
+* Richard Henderson (1734-1785) was the son of the High Sheriff
+of Granville County. At first an assistant to his father, he
+studied law and soon achieved a reputation by the brilliance of
+his mind and the magnetism of his personality. As presiding Judge
+at Hillsborough he had come into conflict with the violent
+element among the Regulators, who had driven him from the court
+and burned his house and barns. For some time prior to his
+elevation to the bench, he had been engaged in land speculations.
+One of Boone's biographers suggests that Boone may have been
+secretly acting as Henderson's agent during his first lonely
+explorations of Kentucky. However this may be, it does not appear
+that Boone and his Yadkin neighbors were acting with Henderson
+when in September, 1773, they made their first attempt to enter
+Kentucky as settlers.
+
+
+Richard Henderson had known Daniel Boone on the Yadkin; and it
+was Boone's detailed reports of the marvelous richness and beauty
+of Kentucky which had inspired him to formulate his gigantic
+scheme and had enabled him also to win to his support several men
+of prominence in the Back Country. To sound the Cherokees
+regarding the purchase and to arrange, if possible, for a
+conference, Henderson dispatched Boone to the Indian towns in the
+early days of 1775.
+
+Since we have just learned that Dunmore's War compelled the
+Shawanoes and their allies to relinquish their right to Kentucky,
+that, both before and after that event, government surveyors were
+in the territory surveying for the soldiers' claims, and that
+private individuals had already laid out town sites and staked
+holdings, it may be asked what right of ownership the Cherokees
+possessed in Kentucky, that Henderson desired to purchase it of
+them. The Indian title to Kentucky seems to have been hardly less
+vague to the red men than it was to the whites. Several of the
+nations had laid claim to the territory. As late as 1753, it will
+be remembered, the Shawanoes had occupied a town at Blue Licks,
+for John Findlay had been taken there by some of them. But,
+before Findlay guided Boone through the Gap in 1769, the
+Shawanoes had been driven out by the Iroquois, who claimed
+suzerainty over them as well as over the Cherokees. In 1768, the
+Iroquois had ceded Kentucky to the British Crown by the treaty of
+Fort Stanwix; whereupon the Cherokees had protested so
+vociferously that the Crown's Indian agent, to quiet them, had
+signed a collateral agreement with them. Though claimed by many,
+Kentucky was by common consent not inhabited by any of the
+tribes. It was the great Middle Ground where the Indians hunted.
+It was the Warriors' Path over which they rode from north and
+south to slaughter and where many of their fiercest encounters
+took place. However shadowy the title which Henderson purposed to
+buy, there was one all-sufficing reason why he must come to terms
+with the Cherokees: their northernmost towns in Tennessee lay
+only fifty or sixty miles below Cumberland Gap and hence
+commanded the route over which he must lead colonists into his
+empire beyond the hills.
+
+The conference took place early in March, 1775, at the Sycamore
+Shoals of the Watauga River. Twelve hundred Indians, led by their
+"town chiefs"--among whom were the old warrior and the old
+statesman of their nation, Oconostota and Attakullakulla--came to
+the treaty grounds and were received by Henderson and his
+associates and several hundred white men who were eager for a
+chance to settle on new lands. Though Boone was now on his way
+into Kentucky for the Transylvania Company, other border leaders
+of renown or with their fame still to win were present, and among
+them James Robertson, of serious mien, and that blond gay knight
+in buckskin, John Sevier.
+
+It is a dramatic picture we evolve for ourselves from the meager
+narratives of this event--a mass of painted Indians moving
+through the sycamores by the bright water, to come presently into
+a tense, immobile semicircle before the large group of armed
+frontiersmen seated or standing about Richard Henderson, the man
+with the imperial dream, the ready speaker whose flashing eyes
+and glowing oratory won the hearts of all who came under their
+sway. What though the Cherokee title be a flimsy one at best and
+the price offered for it a bagatelle! The spirit of Forward
+March! is there in that great canvas framed by forest and sky.
+The somber note that tones its lustrous color, as by a sweep of
+the brush, is the figure of the Chickamaugan chief, Dragging
+Canoe, warrior and seer and hater of white men, who urges his
+tribesmen against the sale and, when they will not hearken,
+springs from their midst into the clear space before Henderson
+and his band of pioneers and, pointing with uplifted arm, warns
+them that a dark cloud hangs over the land the white man covets
+which to the red man has long been a bloody ground.*
+
+* This utterance of Dragging Canoe's is generally supposed to be
+the origin of the descriptive phrase applied to Kentucky--"the
+Dark and Bloody Ground." See Roosevelt, "The Winning of the
+West," vol. I, p.229.
+
+
+The purchase, finally consummated, included the country lying
+between the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers almost all the present
+State of Kentucky, with the adjacent land watered by the
+Cumberland River and its tributaries, except certain lands
+previously leased by the Indians to the Watauga Colony. The tract
+comprised about twenty million acres and extended into Tennessee.
+
+Daniel Boone's work was to cut out a road for the wagons of the
+Transylvania Company's colonists to pass over. This was to be
+done by slashing away the briers and underbrush hedging the
+narrow Warriors' Path that made a direct northward line from
+Cumberland Gap to the Ohio bank, opposite the mouth of the Scioto
+River. Just prior to the conference Boone and "thirty guns" had
+set forth from the Holston to prepare the road and to build a
+fort on whatever site he should select.
+
+By April, Henderson and his first group of tenants were on the
+trail. In Powell's Valley they came up with a party of Virginians
+Kentucky bound, led by Benjamin Logan; and the two bands joined
+together for the march. They had not gone far when they heard
+disquieting news. After leaving Martin's Station, at the gates of
+his new domain, Henderson received a letter from Boone telling of
+an attack by Indians, in which two of his men had been killed,
+but "we stood on the ground and guarded our baggage till the day
+and lost nothing."* These tidings, indicating that despite
+treaties and sales, the savages were again on the warpath, might
+well alarm Henderson's colonists. While they halted, some
+indecisive, others frankly for retreat, there appeared a company
+of men making all haste out of Kentucky because of Indian unrest.
+Six of these Henderson persuaded to turn again and go in with
+him; but this addition hardly offset the loss of those members of
+his party who thought it too perilous to proceed. Henderson's own
+courage did not falter. He had staked his all on this stupendous
+venture and for him it was forward to wealth and glory or retreat
+into poverty and eclipse. Boone, in the heart of the danger, was
+making the same stand. "If we give way to them [the Indians]
+now," he wrote, "it will ever be the case."
+
+* Bogart, "Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky." p. 121.
+
+
+Signs of discord other than Indian opposition met Henderson as he
+resolutely pushed on. His conversations with some of the
+fugitives from Kentucky disclosed the first indications of the
+storm that was to blow away the empire he was going in to found.
+He told them that the claims they had staked in Kentucky would
+not hold good with the Transylvania Company. Whereupon James
+McAfee, who was leading a group of returning men, stated his
+opinion that the Transylvania Company's claim would not hold good
+with Virginia. After the parley, three of McAfee's brothers
+turned back and went with Henderson's party, but whether with
+intent to join his colony or to make good their own claims is not
+apparent. Benjamin Logan continued amicably with Henderson on the
+march but did not recognize him as Lord Proprietor of Kentucky.
+He left the Transylvania caravan shortly after entering the
+territory, branched off in the direction of Harrodsburg, and
+founded St. Asaph's Station, in the present Lincoln County,
+independently of Henderson though the site lay within Henderson's
+purchase.
+
+Notwithstanding delays and apprehensions, Henderson and his
+colonists finally reached Boone's Fort, which Daniel and his
+"thirty guns"--lacking two since the Indian encounter--had
+erected at the mouth of Otter Creek.
+
+An attractive buoyancy of temperament is revealed in Henderson's
+description in his journal of a giant elm with tall straight
+trunk and even foliage that shaded a space of one hundred feet.
+Instantly he chose this "divine elm" as the council chamber of
+Transylvania. Under its leafage he read the constitution of the
+new colony. It would be too great a stretch of fancy to call it a
+democratic document, for it was not that, except in deft phrases.
+Power was certainly declared to be vested in the people; but the
+substance of power remained in the hands of the Proprietors.
+
+Terms for land grants were generous enough in the beginning,
+although Henderson made the fatal mistake of demanding
+quitrents--one of the causes of dissatisfaction which had led to
+the Regulators' rising in North Carolina. In September he
+augmented this error by more than doubling the price of land,
+adding a fee of eight shillings for surveying, and reserving to
+the Proprietors one-half of all gold, silver, lead, and sulphur
+found on the land. No land near sulphur springs or showing
+evidences of metals was to be granted to settlers. Moreover, at
+the Company's store the prices charged for lead were said to be
+too high--lead being necessary for hunting, and hunting being the
+only means of procuring food--while the wages of labor, as fixed
+by the Company, were too low. These terms bore too heavily on
+poor men who were risking their lives in the colony.
+
+Hence newcomers passed by Boonesborough, as the Transylvania
+settlement was presently called, and went elsewhere. They settled
+on Henderson's land but refused his terms. They joined in their
+sympathies with James Harrod, who, having established Harrodsburg
+in the previous year at the invitation of Virginia, was not in
+the humor to acknowledge Henderson's claim or to pay him tribute.
+All were willing to combine with the Transylvania Company for
+defense, and to enforce law they would unite in bonds of
+brotherhood in Kentucky, even as they had been one with each
+other on the earlier frontier now left behind them. But they
+would call no man master; they had done with feudalism. That
+Henderson should not have foreseen this, especially after the
+upheaval in North Carolina, proves him, in spite of all his
+brilliant gifts, to have been a man out of touch with the spirit
+of the time.
+
+The war of the Revolution broke forth and the Indians descended
+upon the Kentucky stations. Defense was the one problem in all
+minds, and defense required powder and lead in plenty. The
+Transylvania Company was not able to provide the means of defense
+against the hordes of savages whom Henry Hamilton, the British
+Governor at Detroit, was sending to make war on the frontiers.
+Practical men like Harrod and George Rogers Clark--who, if not a
+practical man in his own interests, was a most practical
+soldier--saw that unification of interests within the territory
+with the backing of either Virginia or Congress was necessary.
+Clark personally would have preferred to see the settlers combine
+as a freemen's state. It was plain that they would not combine
+and stake their lives as a unit to hold Kentucky for the benefit
+of the Transylvania Company, whose authority some of the most
+prominent men in the territory had refused to recognize. The
+Proprietary of Transylvania could continue to exist only to the
+danger of every life in Kentucky.
+
+While the Proprietors sent a delegate to the Continental Congress
+to win official recognition for Transylvania, eighty-four men at
+Harrodsburg drew up a petition addressed to Virginia stating
+their doubts of the legality of Henderson's title and requesting
+Virginia to assert her authority according to the stipulations of
+her charter. That defense was the primary and essential motive of
+the Harrodsburg Remonstrance seems plain, for when George Rogers
+Clark set off on foot with one companion to lay the document
+before the Virginian authorities, he also went to plead for a
+load of powder. In his account of that hazardous journey, as a
+matter of fact, he makes scant reference to Transylvania, except
+to say that the greed of the Proprietors would soon bring the
+colony to its end, but shows that his mind was seldom off the
+powder. It is a detail of history that the Continental Congress
+refused to seat the delegate from Transylvania. Henderson himself
+went to Virginia to make the fight for his land before the
+Assembly.*
+
+* In 1778 Virginia disallowed Henderson's title but granted him
+two hundred thousand acres between the Green and Kentucky rivers
+for his trouble and expense in opening up the country.
+
+
+The magnetic center of Boonesborough's life was the lovable and
+unassuming Daniel Boone. Soon after the building of the fort
+Daniel had brought in his wife and family. He used often to state
+with a mild pride that his wife and daughters were the first
+white women to stand on the banks of the Kentucky River. That
+pride had not been unmixed with anxiety; his daughter Jemima and
+two daughters of his friend, Richard Galloway, while boating on
+the river had been captured by Shawanoes and carried off. Boone,
+accompanied by the girls' lovers and by John Floyd (eager to
+repay his debt of life-saving to Boone) had pursued them, tracing
+the way the captors had taken by broken twigs and scraps of dress
+goods which one of the girls had contrived to leave in their
+path, had come on the Indians unawares, killed them, and
+recovered the three girls unhurt.
+
+In the summer of 1776, Virginia took official note of "Captain
+Boone of Boonesborough," for she sent him a small supply of
+powder. The men of the little colony, which had begun so
+pretentiously with its constitution and assembly, were now
+obliged to put all other plans aside and to concentrate on the
+question of food and defense. There was a dangerous scarcity of
+powder and lead. The nearest points at which these necessaries
+could be procured were the Watauga and Holston River settlements,
+which were themselves none too well stocked. Harrod and Logan,
+some time in 1777, reached the Watauga fort with three or four
+packhorses and filled their packs from Sevier's store; but, as
+they neared home, they were detected by red scouts and Logan was
+badly wounded before he and Harrod were able to drive their
+precious load safely through the gates at Harrodsburg. In the
+autumn of 1777, Clark, with a boatload of ammunition, reached
+Maysville on the Ohio, having successfully run the gauntlet
+between banks in possession of the foe. He had wrested the powder
+and lead from the Virginia Council by threats to the effect that
+if Virginia was so willing to lose Kentucky--for of course "a
+country not worth defending is not worth claiming"--he and his
+fellows were quite ready to take Kentucky for themselves and to
+hold it with their swords against all comers, Virginia included.
+By even such cogent reasoning had he convinced the Council--which
+had tried to hedge by expressing doubts that Virginia would
+receive the Kentucky settlers as "citizens of the State"--that it
+would be cheaper to give him the powder.
+
+Because so many settlers had fled and the others had come closer
+together for their common good, Harrodsburg and Boonesborough
+were now the only occupied posts in Kentucky. Other settlements,
+once, thriving, were abandoned; and, under the terror, the Wild
+reclaimed them. In April, 1777, Boonesborough underwent its first
+siege. Boone, leading a sortie, was shot and he fell with a
+shattered ankle. An Indian rushed upon him and was swinging the
+tomahawk over him when Simon Kenton, giant frontiersman and hero
+of many daring deeds, rushed forward, shot the Indian, threw
+Boone across his back, and fought his way desperately to safety.
+It was some months ere Boone was his nimble self again. But
+though he could not "stand up to the guns," he directed all
+operations from his cabin.
+
+The next year Boone was ready for new ventures growing from the
+settlers' needs. Salt was necessary to preserve meat through the
+summer. Accordingly Boone and twenty-seven men went up to the Blue
+Licks in February, 1778, to replenish their supply by the simple
+process of boiling the salt water of the Licks till the saline
+particles adhered to the kettles. Boone was returning alone, with
+a pack-horse load of salt and game, when a blinding snowstorm
+overtook him and hid from view four stealthy Shawanoes on his
+trail. He was seized and carried to a camp of 120 warriors led by
+the French Canadian, Dequindre, and James and George Girty, two
+white renegades. Among the Indians were some of those who had
+captured him on his first exploring trip through Kentucky and
+whom he had twice given the slip. Their hilarity was unbounded.
+Boone quickly learned that this band was on its way to surprise
+Boonesborough. It was a season when Indian attacks were not
+expected; nearly threescore of the men were at the salt spring
+and, to make matters worse, the walls of the new fort where the
+settlers and their families had gathered were as yet completed on
+only three sides. Boonesborough was, in short, well-nigh
+defenseless. To turn the Indians from their purpose, Boone
+conceived the desperate scheme of offering to lead them to the
+salt makers' camp with the assurance that he and his companions
+were willing to join the tribe. He understood Indians well enough
+to feel sure that once possessed of nearly thirty prisoners, the
+Shawanoes would not trouble further about Boonesborough but would
+hasten to make a triumphal entry into their own towns. That some,
+perhaps all, of the white men would assuredly die, he knew well;
+but it was the only way to save the women and children in
+Boonesborough. In spite of Dequindre and the Girtys, who were
+leading a military expedition for the reduction of a fort, the
+Shawanoes fell in with the suggestion. When they had taken their
+prisoners, the more bloodthirsty warriors in the band wanted to
+tomahawk them all on the spot. By his diplomatic discourse,
+however, Boone dissuaded them, for the time being at least, and
+the whole company set off for the towns on the Little Miami.
+
+The weather became severe, very little game crossed their route,
+and for days they subsisted on slippery elm bark. The lovers of
+blood did not hold back their scalping knives and several of the
+prisoners perished; but Black Fish, the chief then of most power
+in Shawanoe councils, adopted Boone as his son, and gave him the
+name of Sheltowee, or Big Turtle. Though watched zealously to
+prevent escape, Big Turtle was treated with every consideration
+and honor; and, as we would say today, he played the game. He
+entered into the Indian life with apparent zest, took part in
+hunts and sports and the races and shooting matches in which the
+Indians delighted, but he was always careful not to outrun or
+outshoot his opponents. Black Fish took him to Detroit when some
+of the tribe escorted the remainder of the prisoners to the
+British post. There he met Governor Hamilton and, in the hope of
+obtaining his liberty, he led that dignitary to believe that he
+and the other people of Boonesborough were eager to move to
+Detroit and take refuge under the British flag.* It is said that
+Boone always carried in a wallet round his neck the King's
+commission given him in Dunmore's War; and that he exhibited it
+to Hamilton to bear out his story. Hamilton sought to ransom him
+from the Indians, but Black Fish would not surrender his new son.
+The Governor gave Boone a pony, with saddle and trappings, and
+other presents, including trinkets to be used in procuring his
+needs and possibly his liberty from the Shawanoes.
+
+* So well did Boone play his part that he aroused suspicion even
+in those who knew him best. After his return to Boonesborough his
+old friend, Calloway, formally accused him of treachery on two
+counts: that Boone had betrayed the salt makers to the Indians
+and had planned to betray Boonesborough to the British. Boone was
+tried and acquitted. His simple explanation of his acts satisfied
+the court-martial and made him a greater hero than ever among the
+frontier folk.
+
+
+Black Fish then took his son home to Chillicothe. Here Boone
+found Delawares and Mingos assembling with the main body of the
+Shawanoe warriors. The war belt was being carried through the
+Ohio country. Again Boonesborough and Harrodsburg were to be the
+first settlements attacked. To escape and give warning was now
+the one purpose that obsessed Boone. He redoubled his efforts to
+throw the Indians off their guard. He sang and whistled blithely
+about the camp at the mouth of the Scioto River, whither he had
+accompanied his Indian father to help in the salt boiling. In
+short, he seemed so very happy that one day Black Fish took his
+eye off him for a few moments to watch the passing of a flock of
+turkeys. Big Turtle passed with the flock, leaving no trace. To
+his lamenting parent it must have seemed as though he had
+vanished into the air. Daniel crossed the Ohio and ran the 160
+miles to Boonesborough in four days, during which time he had
+only one meal, from a buffalo he shot at the Blue Licks. When he
+reached the fort after an absence of nearly five months, he found
+that his wife had given him up for dead and had returned to the
+Yadkin.
+
+Boone now began with all speed to direct preparations to
+withstand a siege. Owing to the Indian's leisurely system of
+councils and ceremonies before taking the warpath, it was not
+until the first week in September that Black Fish's painted
+warriors, with some Frenchmen under Dequindre, appeared before
+Boonesborough. Nine days the siege lasted and was the longest in
+border history. Dequindre, seeing that the fort might not be
+taken, resorted to trickery. He requested Boone and a few of his
+men to come out for a parley, saying that his orders from
+Hamilton were to protect the lives of the Americans as far as
+possible. Boone's friend, Calloway, urged against acceptance of
+the apparently benign proposal which was made, so Dequindre
+averred, for "bienfaisance et humanite." But the words were the
+words of a white man, and Boone hearkened to them. With eight of
+the garrison he went out to the parley. After a long talk in
+which good will was expressed on both sides, it was suggested by
+Black Fish that they all shake hands and, as there were so many
+more Indians than white men, two Indians should, of course, shake
+hands with one white man, each grasping one of his hands. The
+moment that their hands gripped, the trick was clear, for the
+Indians exerted their strength to drag off the white men.
+Desperate scuffling ensued in which the whites with difficulty
+freed themselves and ran for the fort. Calloway had prepared for
+emergencies. The pursuing Indians were met with a deadly fire.
+After a defeated attempt to mine the fort the enemy withdrew.
+
+The successful defense of Boonesborough was an achievement of
+national importance, for had Boonesborough fallen, Harrodsburg
+alone could not have stood. The Indians under the British would
+have overrun Kentucky; and George Rogers Clark--whose base for
+his Illinois operations was the Kentucky forts--could not have
+made the campaigns which wrested the Northwest from the control
+of Great Britain.
+
+Again Virginia took official note of Captain Boone when in 1779
+the Legislature established Boonesborough "a town for the
+reception of traders" and appointed Boone himself one of the
+trustees to attend to the sale and registration of lots. An odd
+office that was for Daniel, who never learned to attend to the
+registration of his own; he declined it. His name appears again,
+however, a little later when Virginia made the whole of Kentucky
+one of her counties with the following officers: Colonel David
+Robinson, County Lieutenant; George Rogers Clark, Anthony
+Bledsoe, and John Bowman, Majors; Daniel Boone, James Harrod,
+Benjamin Logan, and John Todd, Captains.
+
+
+Boonesborough's successful resistance caused land speculators as
+well as prospective settlers to take heart of grace. Parties made
+their way to Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and even to the Falls of
+the Ohio, where Clark's fort and blockhouses now stood. In the
+summer of 1779 Clark had erected on the Kentucky side of the
+river a large fort which became the nucleus of the town of
+Louisville. Here, while he was eating his heart out with
+impatience for money and men to enable him to march to the attack
+of Detroit, as he had planned, he amused himself by drawing up
+plans for a city. He laid out private sections and public parks
+and contemplated the bringing in of families only to inhabit his
+city, for, oddly enough, he who never married was going to make
+short shift of mere bachelors in his City Beautiful. Between pen
+scratches, no doubt, he looked out frequently upon the river to
+descry if possible a boatload of ammunition or the banners of the
+troops he had been promised.
+
+When neither appeared, he gave up the idea of Detroit and set
+about erecting defenses on the southern border, for the Choctaws
+and Cherokees, united under a white leader named Colbert, were
+threatening Kentucky by way of the Mississippi. He built in 1780
+Fort Jefferson in what is now Ballard County, and had barely
+completed the new post and garrisoned it with about thirty men
+when it was besieged by Colbert and his savages. The Indians,
+assaulting by night, were lured into a position directly before a
+cannon which poured lead into a mass of them. The remainder fled
+in terror from the vicinity of the fort; but Colbert succeeded in
+rallying them and was returning to the attack when he suddenly
+encountered Clark with a company of men and was forced to abandon
+his enterprise.
+
+Clark knew that the Ohio Indians would come down on the
+settlements again during the summer and that to meet their
+onslaughts every man in Kentucky would be required. He learned
+that there was a new influx of land seekers over the Wilderness
+Road and that speculators were doing a thriving business in
+Harrodsburg; so, leaving his company to protect Fort Jefferson,
+he took two men with him and started across the wilds on foot for
+Harrodsburg. To evade the notice of the Indian bands which were
+moving about the country the three stripped and painted
+themselves as warriors and donned the feathered headdress. So
+successful was their disguise that they were fired on by a party
+of surveyors near the outskirts of Harrodsburg.
+
+The records do not state what were the sensations of certain
+speculators in a land office in Harrodsburg when a blue-eyed
+savage in a war bonnet sprang through the doorway and, with
+uplifted weapon, declared the office closed; but we get a hint of
+the power of Clark's personality and of his genius for dominating
+men from the terse report that he "enrolled" the speculators. He
+was informed that another party of men, more nervous than these,
+was now on its way out of Kentucky. In haste he dispatched a
+dozen frontiersmen to cut the party off at Crab Orchard and take
+away the gun of every man who refused to turn back and do his bit
+for Kentucky. To Clark a man was a gun, and he meant that every
+gun should do its duty.
+
+The leaders and pioneers of the Dark and Bloody Ground were now
+warriors, all under Clark's command, while for two years longer
+the Red Terror ranged Kentucky, falling with savage force now
+here, now there. In the first battle of 1780, at the Blue Licks,
+Daniel's brother, Edward Boone, was killed and scalped. Later on
+in the war his second son, Israel, suffered a like fate. The toll
+of life among the settlers was heavy. Many of the best-known
+border leaders were slain. Food and powder often ran short. Corn
+might be planted, but whether it would be harvested or not the
+planters never knew; and the hunter's rifle shot, necessary
+though it was, proved only too often an invitation to the lurking
+foe. But sometimes, through all the dangers of forest and trail,
+Daniel Boone slipped away silently to Harrodsburg to confer with
+Clark; or Clark himself, in the Indian guise that suited the wild
+man in him not ill, made his way to and from the garrisons which
+looked to him for everything.
+
+Twice Clark gathered together the "guns" of Kentucky and,
+marching north into the enemy's country, swept down upon the
+Indian towns of Piqua and Chillicothe and razed them. In 1782, in
+the second of these enterprises, his cousin, Joseph Rogers, who
+had been taken prisoner and adopted by the Indians and then wore
+Indian garb, was shot down by one of Clark's men. On this
+expedition Boone and Harrod are said to have accompanied Clark.
+
+The ever present terror and horror of those days, especially of
+the two years preceding this expedition, are vividly suggested by
+the quaint remark of an old woman who had lived through them, as
+recorded for us by a traveler. The most beautiful sight she had
+seen in Kentucky, she said, was a young man dying a natural death
+in his bed. Dead but unmarred by hatchet or scalping knife, he
+was so rare and comely a picture that the women of the post sat
+up all night looking at him.
+
+
+But, we ask, what golden emoluments were showered by a grateful
+country on the men who thus held the land through those years of
+want and war, and saved an empire for the Union? What practical
+recognition was there of these brave and unselfish men who daily
+risked their lives and faced the stealth and cruelty lurking in
+the wilderness ways? There is meager eloquence in the records.
+Here, for instance, is a letter from George Rogers Clark to the
+Governor of Virginia, dated May 27, 1783:
+
+"Sir. Nothing but necessity could induce me to make the following
+request to Your Excellency, which is to grant me a small sum of
+money on account; as I can assure you, Sir, that I am exceedingly
+distressed for the want of necessary clothing etc and don't know
+any channel through which I could procure any except of the
+Executive. The State I believe will fall considerably in my debt.
+Any supplies which Your Excellency favors me with might be
+deducted out of my accounts."*
+
+* "Calendar of Virginia State Papers," vol. III, p. 487.
+
+
+Clark had spent all his own substance and all else he could beg,
+borrow--or appropriate--in the conquest of Illinois and the
+defense of Kentucky. His only reward from Virginia was a grant of
+land from which he realized nothing, and dismissal from her
+service when she needed him no longer.
+
+All that Clark had asked for himself was a commission in the
+Continental Army. This was denied him, as it appears now, not
+through his own errors, which had not at that time taken hold on
+him, but through the influence of powerful enemies. It is said
+that both Spain and England, seeing a great soldier without
+service for his sword, made him offers, which he refused. As long
+as any acreage remained to him on which to raise money, he
+continued to pay the debts he had contracted to finance his
+expeditions, and in this course he had the assistance of his
+youngest brother, William, to whom he assigned his Indiana grant.
+
+His health impaired by hardship and exposure and his heart broken
+by his country's indifference, Clark sank into alcoholic
+excesses. In his sixtieth year, just six years before his death,
+and when he was a helpless paralytic, he was granted a pension of
+four hundred dollars. There is a ring of bitter irony in the
+words with which he accepted the sword sent him by Virginia in
+his crippled old age: "When Virginia needed a sword I gave her
+one." He died near Louisville on February 13, 1818.
+
+Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792. But even before
+Kentucky became a State her affairs, particularly as to land,
+were arranged, let us say, on a practical business basis. Then it
+was discovered that Daniel Boone had no legal claim to any foot
+of ground in Kentucky. Daniel owned nothing but the clothes he
+wore; and for those--as well as for much powder, lead, food, and
+such trifles--he was heavily in debt.
+
+So, in 1788, Daniel Boone put the list of his debts in his
+wallet, gathered his wife and his younger sons about him, and,
+shouldering his hunter's rifle, once more turned towards the
+wilds. The country of the Great Kanawha in West Virginia was
+still a wilderness, and a hunter and trapper might, in some
+years, earn enough to pay his debts. For others, now, the paths
+he had hewn and made safe; for Boone once more the wilderness
+road.
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII. Tennessee
+
+Indian law, tradition, and even superstition had shaped the
+conditions which the pioneers faced when they crossed the
+mountains. This savage inheritance had decreed that Kentucky
+should be a dark and bloody ground, fostering no life but that of
+four-footed beasts, its fertile sod never to stir with the green
+push of the corn. And so the white men who went into Kentucky to
+build and to plant went as warriors go, and for every cabin they
+erected they battled as warriors to hold a fort. In the first
+years they planted little corn and reaped less, for it may be
+said that their rifles were never out of their hands. We have
+seen how stations were built and abandoned until but two stood.
+Untiring vigilance and ceaseless warfare were the price paid by
+the first Kentuckians ere they turned the Indian's place of
+desolation and death into a land productive and a living
+habitation.
+
+Herein lies the difference, slight apparently, yet significant,
+between the first Kentucky and the first Tennessee* colonies.
+Within the memory of the Indians only one tribe had ever
+attempted to make their home in Kentucky--a tribe of the fighting
+Shawanoes--and they had been terribly chastised for their
+temerity. But Tennessee was the home of the Cherokees, and at
+Chickasaw Bluffs (Memphis) began the southward trail to the
+principal towns of the Chickasaws. By the red man's fiat, then,
+human life might abide in Tennessee, though not in Kentucky, and
+it followed that in seasons of peace the frontiersmen might
+settle in Tennessee. So it was that as early as 1757, before the
+great Cherokee war, a company of Virginians under Andrew Lewis
+had, on an invitation from the Indians, erected Fort Loudon near
+Great Telliko, the Cherokees' principal town, and that, after the
+treaty of peace in 1761, Waddell and his rangers of North
+Carolina had erected a fort on the Holston.
+
+* Tennessee. The name, Ten-as-se, appears on Adair's map as one
+of the old Cherokee towns. Apparently neither the meaning nor the
+reason why the colonists called both state and river by this name
+has been handed down to us.
+
+
+Though Fort Loudon had fallen tragically during the war, and
+though Waddell's fort had been abandoned, neither was without
+influence in the colonization of Tennessee, for some of the men
+who built these forts drifted back a year or two later and setup
+the first cabins on the Holston. These earliest settlements, thin
+and scattered, did not survive; but in 1768 the same settlers or
+others of their kind--discharged militiamen from Back Country
+regiments--once more made homes on the Holston. They were joined
+by a few families from near the present Raleigh, North Carolina,
+who had despaired of seeing justice done to the tenants on the
+mismanaged estates of Lord Granville. About the same time there
+was erected the first cabin on the Watauga River, as is generally
+believed, by a man of the name of William Bean (or Been), hunter
+and frontier soldier from Pittsylvania County, Virginia. This
+man, who had hunted on the Watauga with Daniel Boone in 1760,
+chose as the site of his dwelling the place of the old hunting
+camp near the mouth of Boone's Creek. He soon began to have
+neighbors.
+
+
+Meanwhile the Regulation Movement stirred the Back Country of
+both the Carolinas. In 1768, the year in which William Bean built
+his cabin on the bank of the Watauga, five hundred armed
+Regulators in North Carolina, aroused by irregularities in the
+conduct of public office, gathered to assert their displeasure,
+but dispersed peaceably on receipt of word from Governor Tryon
+that he had ordered the prosecution of any officer found guilty
+of extortion. Edmund Fanning, the most hated of Lord Granville's
+agents, though convicted, escaped punishment. Enraged at this
+miscarriage of justice, the Regulators began a system of
+terrorization by taking possession of the court, presided over by
+Richard Henderson. The judge himself was obliged to slip out by a
+back way to avoid personal injury. The Regulators burned his
+house and stable. They meted out mob treatment likewise to
+William Hooper, later one of the signers of the Declaration of
+Independence.
+
+Two elements, with antithetical aims, had been at work in the
+Regulation; and the unfortunate failure of justice in the case of
+Fanning had given the corrupt element its opportunity to seize
+control. In the petitions addressed to Governor Tryon by the
+leaders of the movement in its earlier stages the aims of
+liberty-loving thinkers are traceable. It is worthy of note that
+they included in their demands articles which are now
+constitutional. They desired that "suffrage be given by ticket
+and ballot"; that the mode of taxation be altered, and each
+person be taxed in proportion to the profits arising from his
+estate; that judges and clerks be given salaries instead of
+perquisites and fees. They likewise petitioned for repeal of the
+act prohibiting dissenting ministers from celebrating the rites
+of matrimony. The establishment of these reforms, the petitioners
+of the Regulation concluded, would "conciliate" their minds to
+"every just measure of government, and would make the laws what
+the Constitution ever designed they should be, their protection
+and not their bane." Herein clearly enough we can discern the
+thought and the phraseology of the Ulster Presbyterians.
+
+But a change took place in both leaders and methods. During the
+Regulators' career of violence they were under the sway of an
+agitator named Hermon Husband. This demagogue was reported to
+have been expelled from the Quaker Society for cause; it is on
+record that he was expelled from the North Carolina Assembly
+because a vicious anonymous letter was traced to him. He deserted
+his dupes just before the shots cracked at Alamance Creek and
+fled from the colony. He was afterwards apprehended in
+Pennsylvania for complicity in the Whisky Insurrection.
+
+Four of the leading Presbyterian ministers of the Back Country
+issued a letter in condemnation of the Regulators. One of these
+ministers was the famous David Caldwell, son-in-law of the
+Reverend Alexander Craighead, and a man who knew the difference
+between liberty and license and who proved himself the bravest of
+patriots in the War of Independence. The records of the time
+contain sworn testimony against the Regulators by Waightstill
+Avery, a signer of the Mecklenburg Resolves, who later presided
+honorably over courts in the western circuit of Tennessee; and
+there is evidence indicating Jacobite and French intrigue. That
+Governor Tryon recognized a hidden hand at work seems clearly
+revealed in his proclamation addressed to those "whose
+understandings have been run away with and whose passions have
+been led in captivity by some evil designing men who, actuated by
+cowardice and a sense of that Publick Justice which is due to
+their Crimes, have obscured themselves from Publick view." What
+the Assembly thought of the Regulators was expressed in 1770 in a
+drastic bill which so shocked the authorities in England that
+instructions were sent forbidding any Governor to approve such a
+bill in future, declaring it "a disgrace to the British Statute
+Books."
+
+On May 16, 1771, some two thousand Regulators were precipitated
+by Husband into the Battle of Alamance, which took place in a
+district settled largely by a rough and ignorant type of Germans,
+many of whom Husband had lured to swell his mob. Opposed to him,
+were eleven hundred of Governor Tryon's troops, officered by such
+patriots as Griffith Rutherford, Hugh Waddell, and Francis Nash.
+During an hour's engagement about twenty Regulators were killed,
+while the Governor's troops had nine killed and sixty-one
+wounded. Six of the leaders were hanged. The rest took the oath
+of allegiance which Tryon administered.
+
+It has been said about the Regulators that they were not cast
+down by their defeat at Alamance but "like the mammoth, they
+shook the bolt from their brow and crossed the mountains," but
+such flowery phrases do not seem to have been inspired by facts.
+Nor do the records show that "fifteen hundred Regulators"
+arrived at Watauga in 1771, as has also been stated. Nor are the
+names of the leaders of the Regulation to be found in the list of
+signatures affixed to the one "state paper" of Watauga which was
+preserved and written into historic annals. Nor yet do those
+names appear on the roster of the Watauga and Holston men who, in
+1774, fought with Shelby under Andrew Lewis in the Battle of
+Point Pleasant. The Boones and the Bryans, the Robertsons, the
+Seviers, the Shelbys, the men who opened up the West and shaped
+the destiny of its inhabitants, were genuine freemen, with a
+sense of law and order as inseparable from liberty. They would
+follow a Washington but not a Hermon Husband.
+
+James Hunter, whose signature leads on all Regulation manifestoes
+just prior to the Battle of Alamance, was a sycophant of Husband,
+to whom he addressed fulsome letters; and in the real battle for
+democracy--the War of Independence--he was a Tory. The Colonial
+Records show that those who, "like the mammoth," shook from them
+the ethical restraints which make man superior to the giant
+beast, and who later bolted into the mountains, contributed
+chiefly the lawlessness that harassed the new settlements. They
+were the banditti and, in 1776, the Tories of the western hills;
+they pillaged the homes of the men who were fighting for the
+democratic ideal.
+
+It was not the Regulation Movement which turned westward the
+makers of the Old Southwest, but the free and enterprising spirit
+of the age. It was emphatically an age of doers; and if men who
+felt the constructive urge in them might not lay hold on
+conditions where they were and reshape them, then they must go
+forward seeking that environment which would give their genius
+its opportunity.
+
+Of such adventurous spirits was James Robertson, a Virginian born
+of Ulster Scot parentage, and a resident of (the present) Wake
+County, North Carolina, since his boyhood. Robertson was
+twenty-eight years old when, in 1770, he rode over the hills to
+Watauga. We can imagine him as he was then, for the portrait
+taken much later in life shows the type of face that does not
+change. It is a high type combining the best qualities of his
+race. Intelligence, strength of purpose, fortitude, and moral
+power are there; they impress us at the first glance. At
+twenty-eight he must have been a serious young man, little given
+to laughter; indeed, spontaneity is perhaps the only good trait
+we miss in studying his face. He was a thinker who had not yet
+found his purpose--a thinker in leash, for at this time James
+Robertson could neither read nor write.
+
+At Watauga, Robertson lived for a while in the cabin of a man
+named Honeycut. He chose land for himself and, in accordance with
+the custom of the time, sealed his right to it by planting corn.
+He remained to harvest his first crop and then set off to gather
+his family and some of his friends together and escort them to
+the new country. But on the way he missed the trail and wandered
+for a fortnight in the mountains. The heavy rains ruined his
+powder so that he could not hunt; for food he had only berries
+and nuts. At one place, where steep bluffs opposed him, he was
+obliged to abandon his horse and scale the mountain side on foot.
+He was in extremity when he chanced upon two huntsmen who gave
+him food and set him on the trail. If this experience proves his
+lack of the hunter's instinct and the woodsman's resourcefulness
+which Boone possessed, it proves also his special qualities of
+perseverance and endurance which were to reach their zenith in
+his successful struggle to colonize and hold western Tennessee.
+He returned to Watauga in the following spring (1771) with his
+family and a small group of colonists. Robertson's wife was an
+educated woman and under her instruction he now began to study.
+
+Next year a young Virginian from the Shenandoah Valley rode on
+down Holston Valley on a hunting and exploring trip, and loitered
+at Watauga. Here he found not only a new settlement but an
+independent government in the making; and forthwith he determined
+to have a part in both. This young Virginian had already shown
+the inclination of a political colonist, for in the Shenandoah
+Valley he had, at the age of nineteen, laid out the town of New
+Market (which exists to this day) and had directed its municipal
+affairs and invited and fostered its clergy. This young
+Virginian--born on September 23, 1745, and so in 1772
+twenty-seven years of age--was John Sevier, that John Sevier
+whose monument now towers from its site in Knoxville to testify
+of both the wild and the great deeds of old Tennessee's beloved
+knight. Like Robertson, Sevier hastened home and removed his
+whole family, including his wife and children, his parents and
+his brothers and sisters, to this new haven of freedom at
+Watauga.
+
+The friendship formed between Robertson and Sevier in these first
+years of their work together was never broken, yet two more
+opposite types could hardly have been brought together. Robertson
+was a man of humble origin, unlettered, not a dour Scot but a
+solemn one. Sevier was cavalier as well as frontiersman. On his
+father's side he was of the patrician family of Xavier in France.
+His progenitors, having become Huguenots, had taken refuge in
+England, where the name Xavier was finally changed to Sevier.
+John Sevier's mother was an Englishwoman. Some years before his
+birth his parents had emigrated to the Shenandoah Valley. Thus it
+happened that John Sevier, who mingled good English blood with
+the blue blood of old France, was born an American and grew up a
+frontier hunter and soldier. He stood about five feet nine from
+his moccasins to his crown of light brown hair. He was
+well-proportioned and as graceful of body as he was hard-muscled
+and swift. His chin was firm, his nose of a Roman cast, his mouth
+well-shaped, its slightly full lips slanting in a smile that
+would not be repressed. Under the high, finely modeled brow,
+small keen dark blue eyes sparkled with health, with
+intelligence, and with the man's joy in life.
+
+John Sevier indeed cannot be listed as a type; he was individual.
+There is no other character like him in border annals. He was
+cavalier and prince in his leadership of men; he had their
+homage. Yet he knew how to be comrade and brother to the
+lowliest. He won and held the confidence and friendship of the
+serious-minded Robertson no less than the idolatry of the wildest
+spirits on the frontier throughout the forty-three years of the
+spectacular career which began for him on the day he brought his
+tribe to Watauga. In his time he wore the governor's purple; and
+a portrait painted of him shows how well this descendant of the
+noble Xaviers could fit himself to the dignity and formal
+habiliments of state; Yet in the fringed deerskin of frontier
+garb, he was fleeter on the warpath than the Indians who fled
+before him; and he could outride and outshoot--and, it is said,
+outswear--the best and the worst of the men who followed him.
+Perhaps the lurking smile on John Sevier's face was a flicker of
+mirth that there should be found any man, red or white, with
+temerity enough to try conclusions with him. None ever did,
+successfully.
+
+The historians of Tennessee state that the Wataugans formed their
+government in 1772 and that Sevier was one of its five
+commissioners. Yet, as Sevier did not settle in Tennessee before
+1773, it is possible that the Watauga Association was not formed
+until then. Unhappily the written constitution of the little
+commonwealth was not preserved; but it is known that, following
+the Ulsterman's ideal, manhood suffrage and religious
+independence were two of its provisions. The commissioners
+enlisted a militia and they recorded deeds for land, issued
+marriage licenses, and tried offenders against the law. They
+believed themselves to be within the boundaries of Virginia and
+therefore adopted the laws of that State for their guidance. They
+had numerous offenders to deal with, for men fleeing from debt or
+from the consequence of crime sought the new settlements just
+across the mountains as a safe and adjacent harbor. The attempt
+of these men to pursue their lawlessness in Watauga was one
+reason why the Wataugans organized a government.
+
+When the line was run between Virginia and North Carolina beyond
+the mountains, Watauga was discovered to be south of Virginia's
+limits and hence on Indian lands. This was in conflict with the
+King's Proclamation, and Alexander Cameron, British agent to the
+Cherokees, accordingly ordered the encroaching settlers to
+depart. The Indians, however, desired them to remain. But since
+it was illegal to purchase Indian lands, Robertson negotiated a
+lease for ten years. In 1775, when Henderson made his purchase
+from the Cherokees, at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga, Robertson
+and Sevier, who were present at the sale with other Watauga
+commissioners, followed Henderson's example and bought outright
+the lands they desired to include in Watauga's domain. In 1776
+they petitioned North Carolina for "annexation." As they were
+already within North Carolina's bounds, it was recognition rather
+than annexation which they sought. This petition, which is the
+only Wataugan document to survive, is undated but marked as
+received in August, 1776. It is in Sevier's handwriting and its
+style suggests that it was composed by him, for in its manner of
+expression it has much in common with many later papers from his
+pen. That Wataugans were a law-loving community and had formed
+their government for the purpose of making law respected is
+reiterated throughout the document. As showing the quality of
+these first western statemakers, two paragraphs are quoted:
+
+"Finding ourselves on the frontiers, and being apprehensive that
+for want of proper legislature we might become a shelter for such
+as endeavored to defraud their creditors; considering also the
+necessity of recording deeds, wills, and doing other public
+business; we, by consent of the people, formed a court for the
+purposes above mentioned, taking, by desire of our constituents,
+the Virginia laws for our guide, so near as the situation of
+affairs would permit. This was intended for ourselves, and WAS
+DONE BY CONSENT OF EVERY INDIVIDUAL."
+
+The petition goes on to state that, among their measures for
+upholding law, the Wataugans had enlisted "a company of fine
+riflemen" and put them under command of "Captain James
+Robertson."
+
+"We...thought proper to station them on our frontiers in
+defense of the common cause, at the expense and risque of our own
+private fortunes, till farther public orders, which we flatter
+ourselves will give no offense.... We pray your mature and
+deliberate consideration in our behalf, that you may annex us to
+your Province (whether as county, district, or other division) in
+such manner as may enable us to share in the glorious cause of
+Liberty: enforce our laws under authority and in every respect
+become the best members of society; and for ourselves and our
+constituents we hope we may venture to assure you that we shall
+adhere strictly to your determinations, and that nothing will be
+lacking or anything neglected that may add weight (in the civil
+or military establishments) to the glorious cause in which we are
+now struggling, or contribute to the welfare of our own or ages
+yet to come."
+
+One hundred and thirteen names are signed to the document. In the
+following year (1777) North Carolina erected her overhill
+territory into Washington County. The Governor appointed justices
+of the peace and militia officers who in the following year
+organized the new county and its courts. And so Watauga's
+independent government, begun in the spirit of true liberty, came
+as lawfully to its end.
+
+But for nearly three years before their political status was thus
+determined, the Wataugans were sharing "in the glorious cause of
+Liberty" by defending their settlements against Indian attacks.
+While the majority of the young Cherokee warriors were among
+their enemies, their chief battles were fought with those from
+the Chickamaugan towns on the Tennessee River, under the
+leadership of Dragging Canoe. The Chickamaugans embraced the more
+vicious and bloodthirsty Cherokees, with a mixture of Creeks and
+bad whites, who, driven from every law-abiding community, had
+cast in their lot with this tribe. The exact number of white
+thieves and murderers who had found harbor in the Indian towns
+during a score or more of years is not known; but the letters of
+the Indian agents, preserved in the records, would indicate that
+there were a good many of them. They were fit allies for Dragging
+Canoe; their hatred of those from whom their own degeneracy had
+separated them was not less than his.
+
+In July, 1776, John Sevier wrote to the Virginia Committee as
+follows:
+
+"Dear Gentlemen: Isaac Thomas, William Falling, Jaret Williams
+and one more have this moment come in by making their escape from
+the Indians and say six hundred Indians and whites were to start
+for this fort and intend to drive the country up to New River
+before they return."
+
+Thus was heralded the beginning of a savage warfare which kept
+the borderers engaged for years.
+
+It has been a tradition of the chroniclers that Isaac Thomas
+received a timely warning from Nancy Ward, a half-caste Cherokee
+prophetess who often showed her good will towards the whites; and
+that the Indians were roused to battle by Alexander Cameron and
+John Stuart, the British agents or superintendents among the
+overhill tribes. There was a letter bearing Cameron's name
+stating that fifteen hundred savages from the Cherokee and
+Creek nations were to join with British troops landed at
+Pensacola in an expedition against the southern frontier
+colonies. This letter was brought to Watauga at dead of night by
+a masked man who slipped it through a window and rode away.
+Apparently John Sevier did not believe the military information
+contained in the mysterious missive, for he communicated nothing
+of it to the Virginia Committee. In recent years the facts have
+come to light. This mysterious letter and others of a similar
+tenor bearing forged signatures are cited in a report by the
+British Agent, John Stuart, to his Government. It appears that
+such inflammatory missives had been industriously scattered
+through the back settlements of both Carolinas. There are also
+letters from Stuart to Lord Dartmouth, dated a year earlier,
+urging that something be done immediately to counteract rumors
+set afloat that the British were endeavoring to instigate both
+the Indians and the negroes to attack the Americans.
+
+Now it is, of course, an established fact that both the British
+and the American armies used Indians in the War of Independence,
+even as both together had used them against the French and the
+Spanish and their allied Indians. It was inevitable that the
+Indians should participate in any severe conflict between the
+whites. They were a numerous and a warlike people and, from their
+point of view, they had more at stake than the alien whites who
+were contesting for control of the red man's continent. Both
+British and Americans have been blamed for "half-hearted attempts
+to keep the Indians neutral." The truth is that each side strove
+to enlist the Indians--to be used, if needed later, as warriors.
+Massacre was no part of this policy, though it may have been
+countenanced by individual officers in both camps. But it is
+obvious that, once the Indians took the warpath, they were to be
+restrained by no power and, no matter under whose nominal
+command, they would carry on warfare by their own methods.*
+
+* "There is little doubt that either side, British or Americans,
+stood ready to enlist the Indians. Already before Boston the
+Americans had had the help of the Stockbridge tribe. Washington
+found the service committed to the practise when he arrived at
+Cambridge early in July. Dunmore had taken the initiative in
+securing such allies, at least is purpose; but the insurgent
+Virginians had had of late more direct contact with the tribes
+and were now striving to secure them but with little success."
+"The Westward Movement," by Justin Winsor, p. 87.
+
+General Ethan Allen of Vermont, as his letters show, sent
+emissaries into Canada in an endeavor to enlist the French
+Canadians and the Canadian Indians against the British in Canada.
+See "American Archives," Fourth Series, vol. II, p. 714. The
+British General Gage wrote to Lord Dartmouth from Boston, June
+18, 1775: "We need not be tender of calling on the Savages as the
+rebels have shown us the example, by bringing as many Indians
+down against us as they could collect." "American Archives."
+Fourth Series, vol. ii, p. 967.
+
+In a letter to Lord Germain, dated August 23, 1776, John Stuart
+wrote: "Although Mr. Cameron was in constant danger of
+assassination and the Indians were threatened with invasion
+should they dare to, protect him, yet he still found means to
+prevent their falling on the settlement." See North Carolina
+"Colonial Records," vol. X, pp. 608 and 763. Proof that the
+British agents had succeeded in keeping the Cherokee neutral till
+the summer of 1776 is found in the instructions, dated the 7th of
+July, to Major Winston from President Rutledge of South Carolina,
+regarding the Cherokees, that they must be forced to give up the
+British agents and "INSTEAD OF REMAINING IN A STATE OF NEUTRALITY
+with respect to British Forces they must take part with us
+against them." See North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X, p.
+658.
+
+
+Whatever may have been the case elsewhere, the attacks on the
+Watauga and Holston settlements were not instigated by British
+agents. It was not Nancy Ward but Henry Stuart, John Stuart's
+deputy, who sent Isaac Thomas to warn the settlers. In their
+efforts to keep the friendship of the red men, the British and
+the Americans were providing them with powder and lead. The
+Indians had run short of ammunition and, since hunting was their
+only means of livelihood, they must shoot or starve. South
+Carolina sent the Cherokees a large supply of powder and lead
+which was captured en route by Tories. About the same time Henry
+Stuart set out from Pensacola with another consignment from the
+British. His report to Lord Germain of his arrival in the
+Chickamaugan towns and of what took place there just prior to the
+raids on the Tennessee settlements is one of the most
+illuminating as well as one of the most dramatic papers in the
+collected records of that time.*
+
+* North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X, pp. 763-785.
+
+
+Stuart's first act was secretly to send out Thomas, the trader,
+to warn the settlers of their peril, for a small war party of
+braves was even then concluding the preliminary war ceremonies.
+The reason for this Indian alarm and projected excursion was the
+fact that the settlers had built one fort at least on the Indian
+lands. Stuart finally persuaded the Indians to remain at peace
+until he could write to the settlers stating the grievances and
+asking for negotiations. The letters were to be carried by Thomas
+on his return.
+
+But no sooner was Thomas on his way again with the letters than
+there arrived a deputation of warriors from the Northern
+tribes--from "the Confederate nations, the Mohawks, Ottawas,
+Nantucas, Shawanoes and Delawares"--fourteen men in all, who
+entered the council hall of the Old Beloved Town of Chota with
+their faces painted black and the war belt carried before them.
+They said that they had been seventy days on their journey.
+Everywhere along their way they had seen houses and forts
+springing up like, weeds across the green sod of their hunting
+lands. Where once were great herds of deer and buffalo, they had
+watched thousands of men at arms preparing for war. So many now
+were the white warriors and their women and children that the red
+men had been obliged to travel a great way on the other side of
+the Ohio and to make a detour of nearly three hundred miles to
+avoid being seen. Even on this outlying route they had crossed
+the fresh tracks of a great body of people with horses and cattle
+going still further towards the setting sun. But their cries were
+not to be in vain; for "their fathers, the French" had heard them
+and had promised to aid them if they would now strike as one for
+their lands.
+
+After this preamble the deputy of the Mohawks rose. He said that
+some American people had made war on one of their towns and had
+seized the son of their Great Beloved Man, Sir William Johnson,
+imprisoned him, and put him to a cruel death; this crime demanded
+a great vengeance and they would not cease until they had taken
+it. One after another the fourteen delegates rose and made their
+"talks" and presented their wampum strings to Dragging Canoe. The
+last to speak was a chief of the Shawanoes. He also declared that
+"their fathers, the French," who had been so long dead, were
+"alive again," that they had supplied them plentifully with arms
+and ammunition and had promised to assist them in driving out the
+Americans and in reclaiming their country. Now all the Northern
+tribes were joined in one for this great purpose; and they
+themselves were on their way to all the Southern tribes and had
+resolved that, if any tribe refused to join, they would fall upon
+and extirpate that tribe, after having overcome the whites. At
+the conclusion of his oration the Shawanoe presented the war
+belt--nine feet of six-inch wide purple wampum spattered with
+vermilion--to Dragging Canoe, who held it extended between his
+two hands, in silence, and waited. Presently rose a headman whose
+wife had been a member of Sir William Johnson's household. He
+laid his hand on the belt and sang the war song. One by one,
+then, chiefs and warriors rose, laid hold of the great belt and
+chanted the war song. Only the older men, made wise by many
+defeats, sat still in their places, mute and dejected. "After
+that day every young fellow's face in the overhills towns
+appeared blackened and nothing was now talked of but war."
+
+Stuart reports that "all the white men" in the tribe also laid
+hands on the belt. Dragging Canoe then demanded that Cameron and
+Stuart come forward and take hold of the war belt--"which we
+refused." Despite the offense their refusal gave--and it would
+seem a dangerous time to give such offense--Cameron delivered a
+"strong talk" for peace, warning the Cherokees of what must
+surely be the end of the rashness they contemplated. Stuart
+informed the chief that if the Indians persisted in attacking the
+settlements with out waiting for answers to his letters, he would
+not remain with them any longer or bring them any more
+ammunition. He went to his house and made ready to leave on the
+following day. Early the next morning Dragging Canoe appeared at
+his door and told him that the Indians were now very angry about
+the letters he had written, which could only have put the
+settlers on their guard; and that if any white man attempted to
+leave the nation "they had determined to follow him but NOT TO
+BRING HIM BACK." Dragging Canoe had painted his face black to
+carry this message. Thomas now returned with an answer from "the
+West Fincastle men," which was so unsatisfactory to the tribe
+that war ceremonies were immediately begun. Stuart and Cameron
+could no longer influence the Indians. "All that could now be
+done was to give them strict charge not to pass the Boundary
+Line, not to injure any of the King's faithful subjects, not to
+kill any women and children"; and to threaten to "stop all
+ammunition" if they did not obey these orders.
+
+
+The major part of the Watauga militia went out to meet the
+Indians and defeated a large advance force at Long Island Flats
+on the Holston. The Watauga fort, where many of the settlers had
+taken refuge, contained forty fighting men under Robertson and
+Sevier. As Indians usually retreated and waited for a while after
+a defeat, those within the fort took it for granted that no
+immediate attack was to be expected; and the women went out at
+daybreak into the fields to milk the cows. Suddenly the war whoop
+shrilled from the edge of the clearing. Red warriors leaped from
+the green skirting of the forest. The women ran for the fort.
+Quickly the heavy gates swung to and the dropped bar secured
+them. Only then did the watchmen discover that one woman had been
+shut out. She was a young woman nearing her twenties and, if
+legend has reported her truly, "Bonnie Kate Sherrill" was a
+beauty. Through a porthole Sevier saw her running towards the
+shut gates, dodging and darting, her brown hair blowing from the
+wind of her race for life--and offering far too rich a prize to
+the yelling fiends who dashed after her. Sevier coolly shot the
+foremost of her pursuers, then sprang upon the wall, caught up
+Bonnie Kate, and tossed her inside to safety. And legend says
+further that when, after Sevier's brief widowerhood, she became
+his wife, four years later, Bonnie Kate was wont to say that she
+would be willing to run another such race any day to have another
+such introduction!
+
+There were no casualties within the fort and, after three hours,
+the foe withdrew, leaving several of their warriors slain.
+
+In the excursions against the Indians which followed this opening
+of hostilities Sevier won his first fame as an "Indian
+fighter"--the fame later crystallized in the phrase "thirty-five
+battles, thirty-five victories." His method was to take a very
+small company of the hardiest and swiftest horsemen--men who
+could keep their seat and endurance, and horses that could keep
+their feet and their speed, on any steep of the mountains no
+matter how tangled and rough the going might be--swoop down upon
+war camp, or town, and go through it with rifle and hatchet and
+fire, then dash homeward at the same pace before the enemy had
+begun to consider whether to follow him or not. In all his
+"thirty-five battles" it is said he lost not more than fifty men.
+
+The Cherokees made peace in 1777, after about a year of almost
+continuous warfare, the treaty being concluded on their side by
+the old chiefs who had never countenanced the war. Dragging Canoe
+refused to take part, but he was rendered innocuous for the time
+being by the destruction of several of the Chickamaugan villages.
+James Robertson now went to Chota as Indian agent for North
+Carolina. So fast was population growing, owing to the opening of
+a wagon road into Burke County, North Carolina, that Washington
+County was divided. John Sevier became Colonel of Washington and
+Isaac Shelby Colonel of the newly erected Sullivan County.
+Jonesborough, the oldest town in Tennessee, was laid out as the
+county seat of Washington; and in the same year (1778) Sevier
+moved to the bank of the Nolichucky River, so-called after the
+Indian name of this dashing sparkling stream, meaning rapid or
+precipitous. Thus the nickname given John Sevier by his devotees
+had a dual application. He was well called Nolichucky Jack.
+
+
+When Virginia annulled Richard Henderson's immense purchase but
+allowed him a large tract on the Cumberland, she by no means
+discouraged that intrepid pioneer. Henderson's tenure of Kentucky
+had been brief, but not unprofitable in experience. He had
+learned that colonies must be treated with less commercial
+pressure and with more regard to individual liberty, if they were
+to be held loyal either to a King beyond the water or to an
+uncrowned leader nearer at hand. He had been making his plans for
+colonization of that portion of the Transylvania purchase which
+lay within the bounds of North Carolina along the Cumberland and
+choosing his men to lay the foundations of his projected
+settlement in what was then a wholly uninhabited country; and he
+had decided on generous terms, such as ten dollars a thousand
+acres for land, the certificate of purchase to entitle the holder
+to further proceedings in the land office without extra fees.
+To head an enterprise of such danger and hardship Henderson
+required a man of more than mere courage; a man of resource, of
+stability, of proven powers, one whom other men would follow and
+obey with confidence. So it was that James Robertson was chosen
+to lead the first white settlers into middle Tennessee. He set
+out in February, 1779, accompanied by his brother, Mark
+Robertson, several other white men, and a negro, to select a site
+for settlement and to plant corn. Meanwhile another small party
+led by Gaspar Mansker had arrived. As the boundary line between
+Virginia and North Carolina had not been run to this point,
+Robertson believed that the site he had chosen lay within
+Virginia and was in the disposal of General Clark. To protect the
+settlers, therefore, he journeyed into the Illinois country to
+purchase cabin rights from Clark, but there he was evidently
+convinced that the site on the Cumberland would be found to lie
+within North Carolina. He returned to Watauga to lead a party of
+settlers into the new territory, towards which they set out in
+October. After crossing the mountain chain through Cumberland
+Gap, the party followed Boone's road--the Warriors' Path--for
+some distance and then made their own trail southwestward through
+the wilderness to the bluffs on the Cumberland, where they built
+cabins to house them against one of the coldest winters ever
+experienced in that county. So were laid the first foundations of
+the present city of Nashville, at first named Nashborough by
+Robertson.* On the way, Robertson had fallen in with a party of
+men and families bound for Kentucky and had persuaded them to
+accompany his little band to the Cumberland. Robertson's own wife
+and children, as well as the families of his party, had been left
+to follow in the second expedition, which was to be made by water
+under the command of Captain John Donelson.
+
+* In honor of General Francis Nash, of North Carolina, who was
+mortally wounded at Germantown, 1777.
+
+
+The little fleet of boats containing the settlers, their
+families, and all their household goods, was to start from Fort
+Patrick Henry, near Long Island in the Holston River, to float
+down into the Tennessee and along the 652 miles of that widely
+wandering stream to the Ohio, and then to proceed up the Ohio to
+the mouth of the Cumberland and up the Cumberland until
+Robertson's station should appear--a journey, as it turned out,
+of some nine hundred miles through unknown country and on waters
+at any rate for the greater part never before navigated by white
+men.
+
+"Journal of a voyage, intended by God's permission, in the good
+boat Adventure" is the title of the log book in which Captain
+Donelson entered the events of the four months' journey. Only a
+few pages endured to be put into print: but those few tell a tale
+of hazard and courage that seems complete. Could a lengthier
+narrative, even if enriched with literary art and fancy, bring
+before us more vividly than do the simple entries of Donelson's
+log the spirit of the men and the women who won the West? If so
+little personal detail is recorded of the pioneer men of that day
+that we must deduce what they were from what they did, what do we
+know of their unfailing comrades, the pioneer women? Only that
+they were there and that they shared in every test of courage and
+endurance, save the march of troops and the hunt. Donelson's
+"Journal" therefore has a special value, because in its terse
+account of Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Peyton it depicts unforgettably
+the quality of pioneer womanhood.*
+
+* This Journal is printed in Ramsey's "Annals of Tennessee."
+
+
+"December 22nd, 1779. Took our departure from the fort and fell
+down the river to the mouth of Reedy Creek where we were stopped
+by the fall of water and most excessive hard frost."
+
+
+Perhaps part of the "Journal" was lost, or perhaps the "excessive
+hard frost" of that severe winter, when it is said even droves of
+wild game perished, prevented the boats, from going on, for the
+next entry is dated the 27th of February. On this date the
+Adventure and two other boats grounded and lay on the shoals all
+that afternoon and the succeeding night "in much distress."
+
+
+"March 2nd. Rain about half the day.... Mr. Henry's boat being
+driven on the point of an island by the force of the current was
+sunk, the whole cargo much damaged and the crew's lives much
+endangered, which occasioned the whole fleet to put on shore and
+go to their assistance....
+
+"Monday 6th. Got under way before sunrise; the morning proving
+very foggy, many of the fleet were much bogged--about 10 o'clock
+lay by for them; when collected, proceeded down. Camped on the
+north shore, where Captain Hutching's negro man died, being much
+frosted in his feet and legs, of which he died.
+
+"Tuesday, 7th. Got under way very early; the day proving very
+windy, a S.S.W., and the river being wide occasioned a high sea,
+insomuch that some of the smaller crafts were in danger;
+therefore came to at the uppermost Chiccamauga town, which was
+then evacuated, where we lay by that afternoon and camped that
+night. The wife of Ephraim Peyton was here delivered of a child.
+Mr. Peyton has gone through by land with Captain Robertson.
+
+"Wednesday 8th...proceed down to an Indian village which was
+inhabited...they insisted on us to come ashore, called us
+brothers, and showed other signs of friendship.... And here
+we must regret the unfortunate death of young Mr. Payne, on board
+Captain Blakemore's boat, who was mortally wounded by reason of
+the boat running too near the northern shore opposite the town,
+where some of the enemy lay concealed; and the more tragical
+misfortune of poor Stuart, his family and friends, to the number
+of twenty-eight persons. This man had embarked with us for the
+Western country, but his family being diseased with the small
+pox, it was agreed upon between him and the company that he
+should keep at some distance in the rear, for fear of the
+infection spreading, and he was warned each night when the
+encampment should take place by the sound of a horn.... The
+Indians having now collected to a considerable number, observing
+his helpless situation singled off from the rest of the fleet,
+intercepted him and killed and took prisoners the whole crew...;
+their cries were distinctly heard...".
+
+
+After describing a running fight with Indians stationed on the
+bluffs on both shores where the river narrowed to half its width
+and boiled through a canyon, the entry for the day concludes:
+"Jennings's boat is missing."
+
+
+"Friday 10th. This morning about 4 o'clock we were surprised by
+the cries of "help poor Jennings" at some distance in the rear.
+He had discovered us by our fires and came up in the most
+wretched condition. He states that as soon as the Indians
+discovered his situation [his boat had run on a rock] they turned
+their whole attention to him and kept up a most galling fire at
+his boat. He ordered his wife, a son nearly grown, a young man
+who accompanies them and his negro man and woman, to throw all
+his goods into the river to lighten their boat for the purpose of
+getting her off; himself returning their fire as well as he
+could, being a good soldier and an excellent marksman. But before
+they had accomplished their object, his son, the young man and
+the negro, jumped out of the boat and left.... Mrs. Jennings,
+however, and the negro woman, succeeded in unloading the boat,
+but chiefly by the exertions of Mrs. Jennings who got out of the
+boat and shoved her off, but was near falling a victim to her own
+intrepidity on account of the boat starting so suddenly as soon
+as loosened from the rock. Upon examination he appears to have
+made a wonderful escape for his boat is pierced in numberless
+places with bullets. It is to be remarked that Mrs. Peyton, who
+was the night before delivered of an infant, which was
+unfortunately killed upon the hurry and confusion consequent upon
+such a disaster, assisted them, being frequently exposed to wet
+and cold.... Their clothes were very much cut with bullets,
+especially Mrs. Jennings's."
+
+
+Of the three men who deserted, while the women stood by under
+fire, the negro was drowned and Jennings's son and the other
+young man were captured by the Chickamaugans. The latter was
+burned at the stake. Young Jennings was to have shared the same
+fate; but a trader in the village, learning that the boy was
+known to John Sevier, ransomed him by a large payment of goods,
+as a return for an act of kindness Sevier had once done to him.
+
+
+"Sunday 12th.... After running until about 10 o'clock came in
+sight of the Muscle Shoals. Halted on the northern shore at the
+appearance of the shoals, in order to search for the signs
+Captain James Robertson was to make for us at that place...that
+it was practicable for us to go across by land...we can
+find none--from which we conclude that it would not be prudent to
+make the attempt and are determined, knowing ourselves in such
+imminent danger, to pursue our journey down the river....
+When we approached them [the Shoals] they had a dreadful
+appearance.... The water being high made a terrible roaring,
+which could be heard at some distance, among the driftwood heaped
+frightfully upon the points of the islands, the current running
+in every. possible direction. Here we did not know how soon we
+should be dashed to pieces and all our troubles ended at once...
+Our boats frequently dragged on the bottom and appeared
+constantly in danger of striking. They warped as much as in a
+rough sea. But by the hand of Providence we are now preserved
+from this danger also. I know not the length of this wonderful
+shoal; it had been represented to me to be twenty-five or thirty
+miles. If so, we must have descended very rapidly, as indeed we
+did, for we passed it in about three hours."
+
+
+On the twentieth the little fleet arrived at the mouth of the
+Tennessee and the voyagers landed on the bank of the Ohio.
+
+
+"Our situation here is truly disagreeable. The river is very high
+and the current rapid, our boats not constructed for the purpose
+of stemming a rapid stream, our provisions exhausted, the crews
+almost worn down with hunger and fatigue, and know not what
+distance we have to go or what time it will take us to our place
+of destination. The scene is rendered still more melancholy as
+several boats will not attempt to ascend the rapid current. Some
+intend to descend the Mississippi to Natchez; others are bound
+for the Illinois--among the rest my son-in-law and daughter. We
+now part, perhaps to meet no more, for I am determined to pursue
+my course, happen what will.
+
+"Tuesday 21st. Set out and on this day labored very hard and got
+but little way.... Passed the two following days as the
+former, suffering much from hunger and fatigue.
+
+"Friday 24th. About three o'clock came to the mouth of a river
+which I thought was the Cumberland. Some of the company declared
+it could not be--it was so much smaller than was expected....
+We determined however to make the trial, pushed up some distance
+and encamped for the night.
+
+"Saturday 25th. Today we are much encouraged; the river grows
+wider;...we are now convinced it is the Cumberland....
+
+"Sunday 26th...procured some buffalo meat; though poor it was
+palatable.
+
+"Friday 31st...met with Colonel Richard Henderson, who is
+running the line between Virginia and North Carolina. At this
+meeting we were much rejoiced. He gave us every information we
+wished, and further informed us that he had purchased a quantity
+of corn in Kentucky, to be shipped at the Falls of Ohio for the
+use of the Cumberland settlement. We are now without bread and
+are compelled to hunt the buffalo to preserve life....
+
+"Monday, April 24th. This day we arrived at our journey's end at
+the Big Salt Lick, where we have the pleasure of finding Captain
+Robertson and his company. It is a source of satisfaction to us
+to be enabled to restore to him and others their families and
+friends, who were entrusted to our care, and who, sometime since,
+perhaps, despaired of ever meeting again...."
+
+
+Past the camps of the Chickamaugans--who were retreating farther
+and farther down the twisting flood, seeking a last standing
+ground in the giant caves by the Tennessee--these white voyagers
+had steered their pirogues. Near Robertson's station, where they
+landed after having traversed the triangle of the three great
+rivers which enclose the larger part of western Tennessee, stood
+a crumbling trading house marking the defeat of a Frenchman who
+had, one time, sailed in from the Ohio to establish an outpost of
+his nation there. At a little distance were the ruins of a rude
+fort cast up by the Cherokees in the days when the redoubtable
+Chickasaws had driven them from the pleasant shores of the
+western waters. Under the towering forest growth lay vast burial
+mounds and the sunken foundations of walled towns, telling of a
+departed race which had once flashed its rude paddles and had its
+dream of permanence along the courses of these great waterways.
+Now another tribe had come to dream that dream anew. Already its
+primitive keels had traced the opening lines of its history on
+the face of the immemorial rivers.
+
+
+
+Chapter IX. King's Mountain
+
+About the time when James Robertson went from Watauga to fling
+out the frontier line three hundred miles farther westward, the
+British took Savannah. In 1780 they took Charleston and Augusta,
+and overran Georgia. Augusta was the point where the old trading
+path forked north and west, and it was the key to the Back
+Country and the overhill domain. In Georgia and the Back Country
+of South Carolina there were many Tories ready to rally to the
+King's standard whenever a King's officer should carry it through
+their midst. A large number of these Tories were Scotch, chiefly
+from the Highlands. In fact, as we have seen, Scotch blood
+predominated among the racial streams in the Back Country from
+Georgia to Pennsylvania. Now, to insure a triumphant march
+northward for Cornwallis and his royal troops, these sons of
+Scotland must be gathered together, the loyal encouraged and
+those of rebellious tendencies converted, and they must be
+drilled and turned to account. This task, if it were to be
+accomplished successfully, must be entrusted to an offcer with
+positive qualifications, one who would command respect, whose
+personal address would attract men and disarm opposition, and
+especially one who could go as a Scot among his own clan.
+Cornwallis found his man in Major. Patrick Ferguson.
+
+Ferguson was a Highlander, a son of Lord Pitfour of Aberdeen, and
+thirty-six years of age. He was of short stature for a
+Highlander--about five feet eight--lean and dark, with straight
+black hair. He had a serious unhandsome countenance which, at
+casual glance, might not arrest attention; but when he spoke he
+became magnetic, by reason of the intelligence and innate force
+that gleamed in his eyes and the convincing sincerity of his
+manner. He was admired and respected by his brother officers and
+by the commanders under whom he had served, and he was loved by
+his men.
+
+He had seen his first service in the Seven Years' War, having
+joined the British army in Flanders at the age of fifteen; and he
+had early distinguished himself for courage and coolness. In
+1768, as a captain of infantry, he quelled an insurrection of the
+natives on the island of St. Vincent in the West Indies. Later,
+at Woolwich, he took up the scientific study of his profession of
+arms. He not only became a crack shot, but he invented a new type
+of rifle which he could load at the breach without ramrod and so
+quickly as to fire seven times in a minute. Generals and
+statesmen attended his exhibitions of shooting; and even the King
+rode over at the head of his guards to watch Ferguson rapidly
+loading and firing.
+
+In America under Cornwallis, Ferguson had the reputation of being
+the best shot in the army; and it was soon said that, in his
+quickness at loading and firing, he excelled the most expert
+American frontiersman. Eyewitnesses have left their testimony
+that, seeing a bird alight on a bough or rail, he would drop his
+bridle rein, draw his pistol, toss it in the air, catch and aim
+it as it fell, and shoot the bird's head off. He was given
+command of a corps of picked riflemen; and in the Battle of the
+Brandywine in 1777 he rendered services which won acclaim from
+the whole army. For the honor of that day's service to his King,
+Ferguson paid what from him, with his passion for the rifle, must
+have been the dearest price that could have been demanded. His
+right arm was shattered, and for the remaining three years of his
+short life it hung useless at his side. Yet he took up swordplay
+and attained a remarkable degree of skill as a left-handed
+swordsman.
+
+Such was Ferguson, the soldier. What of the man? For he has been
+pictured as a wolf and a fiend and a coward by early chroniclers,
+who evidently felt that they were adding to the virtue of those
+who fought in defense of liberty by representing all their foes
+as personally odious. We can read his quality of manhood in a few
+lines of the letter he sent to his kinsman, the noted Dr. Adam
+Ferguson, about an incident that occurred at Chads Ford. As he
+was lying with his men in the woods, in front of Knyphausen's
+army, so he relates, he saw two American officers ride out. He
+describes their dress minutely. One was in hussar uniform. The
+other was in a dark green and blue uniform with a high cocked hat
+and was mounted on a bay horse:
+
+"I ordered three good shots to steal near to and fire at them;
+but the idea disgusting me, I recalled the order. The hussar in
+retiring made a circuit, but the other passed within a hundred
+yards of us, upon which I advanced from the wood towards him.
+Upon my calling he stopped; but after looking at me he proceeded.
+I again drew his attention and made signs to him to stop;
+levelling my piece at him; but he slowly cantered away. As I was
+within that distance, at which, in the quickest firing, I could
+have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out
+of my reach, I had only to determine. But it was not pleasant to
+fire at the back of an unoffending individual who was acquitting
+himself very coolly of his duty--so I let him alone. The day
+after, I had been telling this story to some wounded officers,
+who lay in the same room with me, when one of the surgeons who
+had been dressing the wounded rebel officers came in and told us
+that they had been informing him that General Washington was all
+the morning with the light troops, and only attended by a French
+officer in hussar dress, he himself dressed and mounted in every
+point as above described. I AM NOT SORRY THAT I DID NOT KNOW AT
+THE TIME WHO IT WAS.*
+
+*Doubt that the officer in question was Washington was expressed
+by James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper stated that Major De Lancey, his
+father-in-law, was binding Ferguson's arm at the time when the
+two officers were seen and Ferguson recalled the order to fire,
+and that De Lancey said he believed the officer was Count
+Pulaski. But, as Ferguson, according to his own account, "leveled
+his piece" at the officer, his arm evidently was not wounded
+until later in the day. The probability is that Ferguson's
+version, written in a private letter to his relative, is correct
+as to the facts, whatever may be conjectured as to the identity
+of the officer. See Draper's King's "Mountain and its Heroes,"
+pp. 52-54.
+
+
+Ferguson had his code towards the foe's women also. On one
+occasion when he was assisting in an action carried out by
+Hessians and Dragoons, he learned that some American women had
+been shamefully maltreated. He went in a white fury to the
+colonel in command, and demanded that the men who had so
+disgraced their uniforms instantly be put to death.
+
+In rallying the loyalists of the Back Country of Georgia and the
+Carolinas, Ferguson was very successful. He was presently in
+command of a thousand or more men, including small detachments of
+loyalists from New York and New Jersey, under American-born
+officers such as De Peyster and Allaire. There were good honest
+men among the loyalists and there were also rough and vicious men
+out for spoils--which was true as well of the Whigs or Patriots
+from the same counties. Among the rough element were Tory
+banditti from the overmountain region. It is to be gathered from
+Ferguson's records that he did not think any too highly of some
+of his new recruits, but he set to work with all energy to make
+them useful.
+
+The American Patriots hastily prepared to oppose him. Colonel
+Charles McDowell of Burke County, North Carolina, with a small
+force of militia was just south of the line at a point on the
+Broad River when he heard that Ferguson was sweeping on
+northward. In haste he sent a call for help across the mountains
+to Sevier and Shelby. Sevier had his hands full at Watauga, but
+he dispatched two hundred of his troops; and Isaac Shelby, with a
+similar force from Sullivan County crossed the mountains to
+McDowell's assistance. These "overmountain men" or "backwater
+men," as they were called east of the hills, were trained in
+Sevier's method of Indian warfare--the secret approach through
+the dark, the swift dash, and the swifter flight. "Fight strong
+and run away fast" was the Indian motto, as their women had often
+been heard to call it after the red men as they ran yelling to
+fall on the whites. The frontiersmen had adapted the motto to fit
+their case, as they had also made their own the Indian tactics of
+ambuscade and surprise attacks at dawn. To sleep, or ride if
+needs must, by night, and to fight by day and make off, was to
+them a reasonable soldier's life.
+
+But Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which
+grew among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest
+legends about his ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a
+habit he had of pouncing on his foes in the middle of the night
+and pulling them out of bed to give fight or die. It was
+generally both fight and die, for these dark adventures of his
+were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no neutrals or
+conscientious objectors; any man who would not carry arms for the
+King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeit. A report
+of his reads: "The attack being made at night, no quarter could
+be given." Hence his wolfish fame. "Werewolf " would have been a
+fit name for him for, though he was a wolf at night, in the
+daylight he was a man and, as we have seen, a chivalrous one.
+
+In the guerrilla fighting that went on for a brief time between
+the overmountain men and various detachments of Ferguson's
+forces, sometimes one side, sometimes the other, won the heat.
+But the field remained open. Neither side could claim the
+mastery. In a minor engagement fought at Musgrove's Mill on the
+Enoree, Shelby's command came off victor and was about to pursue
+the enemy towards Ninety-Six when a messenger from McDowell
+galloped madly into camp with word of General Gates's crushing
+defeat at Camden. This was a warning for Shelby's guerrillas to
+flee as birds to their mountains, or Ferguson would cut them off
+from the north and wedge them in between his own force and the
+victorious Cornwallis. McDowell's men, also on the run for
+safety, joined them. For forty-eight hours without food or rest
+they rode a race with Ferguson, who kept hard on their trail
+until they disappeared into the mystery of the winding mountain
+paths they alone knew.
+
+Ferguson reached the gap where they had swerved into the towering
+hills only half an hour after their horses' hoofs had pounded
+across it. Here he turned back. His troops were exhausted from
+the all-night ride and, in any case, there were not enough of
+them to enable him to cross the mountains and give the Watauga
+men battle on their own ground with a fair promise of victory. So
+keeping east of the hills but still close to them, Ferguson
+turned into Burke County, North Carolina. He sat him down in
+Gilbert Town (present Lincolnton, Lincoln County) at the foot of
+the Blue Ridge and indited a letter to the "Back Water Men,"
+telling them that if they did not lay down their arms and return
+to their rightful allegiance, he would come over their hills and
+raze their settlements and hang their leaders. He paroled a
+kinsman of Shelby's, whom he had taken prisoner in the chase, and
+sent him home with the letter. Then he set about his usual
+business of gathering up Tories and making soldiers of them, and
+of hunting down rebels.
+
+One of the "rebels" was a certain Captain Lytle. When Ferguson
+drew up at Lytle's door, Lytle had already made his escape; but
+Mrs. Lytle was there. She was a very handsome woman and she had
+dressed herself in her best to receive Ferguson, who was reported
+a gallant as well as a wolf. After a few spirited passages
+between the lady in the doorway and the officer on the white
+horse before it, the latter advised Mrs. Lytle to use her
+influence to bring her husband back to his duty. She became grave
+then and answered that her husband would never turn traitor to
+his country. Ferguson frowned at the word "traitor," but
+presently he said: "Madam, I admire you as the handsomest woman I
+have seen in North Carolina. I even half way admire your zeal in
+a bad cause. But take my word for it, the rebellion has had its
+day and is now virtually put down. Give my regards to Captain
+Lytle and tell him to come in. He wiil not be asked to compromise
+his honor. His verbal pledge not again to take up arms against
+the King is all that will be asked of him."*
+
+* Draper,"King's Mountain and its Heroes," pp. 151-53.
+
+
+This was another phase of the character of the one-armed
+Highlander whose final challenge to the backwater men was now
+being considered in every log cabin beyond the hills. A man who
+would not shoot an enemy in the back, who was ready to put the
+same faith in another soldier's honor which he knew was due to
+his own, yet in battle a wolfish fighter who leaped through the
+dark to give no quarter and to take none--he was fit challenger
+to those other mountaineers who also had a chivalry of their own,
+albeit they too were wolves of war.
+
+When Shelby on the Holston received Ferguson's pungent letter, he
+flung himself on his horse and rode posthaste to Watauga to
+consult, with Sevier. He found the bank of the Nolichucky teeming
+with merrymakers. Nolichucky ,Jack was giving an immense barbecue
+and a horse race. Without letting the festival crowd have an
+inkling of the serious nature of Shelby's errand, the two men
+drew apart to confer. It is said to have been Sevier's idea that
+they should muster the forces of the western country and go in
+search of Ferguson ere the latter should be able to get
+sufficient reinforcements to cross the mountains. Sevier, like
+Ferguson, always preferred to seek his foe, knowing well the
+advantage of the offensive. Messengers were sent to Colonel
+William Campbell of the Virginia settlements on the Clinch,
+asking his aid. Campbell at first refused, thinking it better to
+fortify the positions they held and let Ferguson come and put the
+mountains between himself and Cornwallis. On receipt of a second
+message, however, he concurred. The call to arms was heard up and
+down the valleys, and the frontiersmen poured into Watauga. The
+overhill men were augmented by McDowell's troops from Burke
+County, who had dashed over the mountains a few weeks before in
+their escape from Ferguson.
+
+At daybreak on the 26th of September they mustered at the
+Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga, over a thousand strong. It was a
+different picture they made from that other great gathering at
+the same spot when Henderson had made his purchase in money of
+the Dark and Bloody Ground, and Sevier and Robertson had bought
+for the Wataugans this strip of Tennessee. There were no Indians
+in this picture. Dragging Canoe, who had uttered his bloody
+prophecy, had by these very men been driven far south into the
+caves of the Tennessee River. But the Indian prophecy still hung
+over them, and in this day with a heavier menace. Not with money,
+now, were they to seal their purchase of the free land by the
+western waters. There had been no women in that other picture,
+only the white men who were going forward to open the way and the
+red men who were retreating. But in this picture there were
+women--wives and children, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts. All
+the women of the settlement were there at this daybreak muster to
+cheer on their way the men who were going out to battle that they
+might keep the way of liberty open not for men only but for women
+and children also. And the battle to which the men were now going
+forth must be fought against Back Country men of their own stripe
+under a leader who, in other circumstances, might well have been
+one of themselves--a primitive spirit of hardy mountain stock,
+who, having once taken his stand, would not barter and would not
+retreat.
+
+"With the Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" cried their pastor,
+the Reverend Samuel Doak, with upraised hands, as the
+mountaineers swung into their saddles. And it is said that all
+the women took up his words and cried again and again, "With the
+sword of the Lord and of our Gideons!" To the shouts of their
+women, as bugles on the wind of dawn, the buckskin-shirted army
+dashed out upon the mountain trail.
+
+The warriors' equipment included rifles and ammunition,
+tomahawks, knives, shot pouches, a knapsack, and a blanket for
+each man. Their uniforms were leggings, breeches, and long loose
+shirts of gayly fringed deerskin, or of the linsey-woolsey spun
+by their women. Their hunting shirts were bound in at the waist
+by bright-colored linsey sashes tied behind in a bow. They wore
+moccasins for footgear, and on their heads high fur or deerskin
+caps trimmed with colored bands of raveled cloth. Around their
+necks hung their powderhorns ornamented with their own rude
+carvings.
+
+On the first day they drove along with them a number of beeves
+but, finding that the cattle impeded the march, they left them
+behind on the mountain side. Their provisions thereafter were
+wild game and the small supply each man carried of mixed corn
+meal and maple sugar. For drink, they had the hill streams.
+
+They passed upward between Roan and Yellow mountains to the top
+of the range. Here, on the bald summit, where the loose snow lay
+to their ankles, they halted for drill and rifle practice. When
+Sevier called up his men, he discovered that two were missing. He
+suspected at once that they had slipped away to carry warning to
+Ferguson, for Watauga was known to be infested with Tories. Two
+problems now confronted the mountaineers. They must increase the
+speed of their march, so that Ferguson should not have time to
+get reinforcements from Cornwallis; and they must make that extra
+speed by another trail than they had intended taking so that they
+themselves could not be intercepted before they had picked up the
+Back Country militia under Colonels Cleveland, Hampbright,
+Chronicle, and Williams, who were moving to join them. We are not
+told who took the lead when they left the known trail, but we may
+suppose it was Sevier and his Wataugans, for the making of new
+warpaths and wild riding were two of the things which
+distinguished Nolichucky Jack's leadership. Down the steep side
+of the mountain, finding their way as they plunged, went the
+overhill men. They crossed the Blue Ridge at Gillespie's Gap and
+pushed on to Quaker Meadows, where Colonel Cleveland with 350 men
+swung into their column. Along their route, the Back Country
+Patriots with their rifles came out from the little hamlets and
+the farms and joined them.
+
+They now had an army of perhaps fifteen hundred men but no
+commanding officer. Thus far, on the march, the four colonels had
+conferred together and agreed as to procedure; or, in reality,
+the influence of Sevier and Shelby, who had planned the
+enterprise and who seem always to have acted in unison, had
+swayed the others. It would be, however, manifestly improper to
+go into battle without a real general. Something must be done.
+McDowell volunteered to carry a letter explaining their need to
+General Gates, who had escaped with some of his staff into North
+Carolina and was not far off. It then occurred to Sevier and
+Shelby, evidently for the first time, that Gates, on receiving
+such a request, might well ask why the Governor of North
+Carolina, as the military head of the State, had not provided a
+commander. The truth is that Sevier and Shelby had been so busy
+drumming up the militia and planning their campaign that they had
+found no time to consult the Governor. Moreover, the means
+whereby the expedition had been financed might not have appealed
+to the chief executive. After finding it impossible to raise
+sufficient funds on his personal credit, Sevier had appropriated
+the entry money in the government land office to the business in
+hand--with the good will of the entry taker, who was a patriotic
+man, although, as he had pointed out, he could not, OFFICIALLY,
+hand over the money. Things being as they were, no doubt
+Nolichucky Jack felt that an interview with the Governor had
+better be deferred until after the capture of Ferguson. Hence the
+tenor of this communication to General Gates:
+
+"As we have at this time called out our militia without any
+orders from the Executive of our different States and with the
+view of expelling the Enemy out of this part of the Country, we
+think such a body of men worthy of your attention and would
+request you to send a General Officer immediately to take the
+command.... All our Troops being Militia and but little
+acquainted with discipline, we could wish him to be a Gentleman
+of address, and able to keep up a proper discipline WITHOUT
+DISGUSTING THE SOLDIERY."
+
+For some unknown reason--unless it might be the wording of this
+letter!--no officer was sent in reply. Shelby then suggested
+that, since all the officers but Campbell were North Carolinians
+and, therefore, no one of them could be promoted without arousing
+the jealousy of the others, Campbell, as the only Virginian, was
+the appropriate choice. The sweet reasonableness of selecting a
+commander from such a motive appealed to all, and Campbell became
+a general in fact if not in name! Shelby's principal aim,
+however, had been to get rid of McDowell, who, as their senior,
+would naturally expect to command and whom he considered "too far
+advanced in life and too inactive" for such an enterprise. At
+this time McDowell must have been nearly thirty-nine; and Shelby,
+who was just thirty, wisely refused to risk the campaign under a
+general who was in his dotage!
+
+News of the frontiersmen's approach, with their augmented force,
+now numbering between sixteen and eighteen hundred, had reached
+Ferguson by the two Tories who had deserted from Sevier's troops.
+Ferguson thereupon had made all haste out of Gilbert Town and was
+marching southward to get in touch with Cornwallis. His force was
+much reduced, as some of his men were in pursuit of Elijah Clarke
+towards Augusta and a number of his other Tories were on
+furlough. As he passed through the Back Country he posted a
+notice calling on the loyalists to join him. If the overmountain
+men felt that they were out on a wolf hunt, Ferguson's
+proclamation shows what the wolf thought of his hunters.
+
+"To the Inhabitants of North Carolina.
+
+"Gentlemen: Unless you wish to be eat up by an innundation of
+barbarians, who have begun by murdering an unarmed son before the
+aged father, and afterwards lopped off his arms, and who by their
+shocking cruelties and irregularities give the best proof of
+their cowardice and want of discipline: I say if you wish to be
+pinioned, robbed and murdered, and see your wives and daughters
+in four days, abused by the dregs of mankind--in short if you
+wish to deserve to live and bear the name of men, grasp your arms
+in a moment and run to camp.
+
+"The Back Water men have crossed the mountains: McDowell,
+Hampton, Shelby, and Cleveland are at their head, so that you
+know what you have to depend upon. If you choose to be degraded
+forever and ever by a set of mongrels, say so at once, and let
+your women turn their backs upon you, and look out for real men
+to protect them.
+
+"Pat. Ferguson, Major 71st Regiment."*
+
+* Draper, "King's Mountain and its Heroes," p. 204.
+
+
+Ferguson's force has been estimated at about eleven hundred men,
+but it is likely that this estimate does not take the absentees
+into consideration. In the diary of Lieutenant Allaire, one of
+his officers, the number is given as only eight hundred. Because
+of the state of his army, chroniclers have found Ferguson's
+movements, after leaving Gilbert Town, difficult to explain. It
+has been pointed out that he could easily have escaped, for he
+had plenty of time, and Charlotte, Cornwallis's headquarters, was
+only sixty miles distant. We have seen something of Ferguson's
+quality, however, and we may simply take it that he did not want
+to escape. He had been planning to cross the high hills--to him,
+the Highlander, no barrier but a challenge--to fight these men.
+Now that they had taken the initiative he would not show them his
+back. He craved the battle. So he sent out runners to the main
+army and rode on along the eastern base of the mountains, seeking
+a favorable site to go into camp and wait for Cornwallis's aid.
+On the 6th of October he reached the southern end of the King's
+Mountain ridge, in South Carolina, about half a mile south of the
+northern boundary. Here a rocky, semi-isolated spur juts out from
+the ridge, its summit--a table-land about six hundred yards long
+and one hundred and twenty wide at its northern end--rising not
+more than sixty feet above the surrounding country. On the summit
+Ferguson pitched his camp.
+
+The hill was a natural fortress, its sides forested, its bald top
+protected by rocks and bowlders. All the approaches led through
+dense forest. An enemy force, passing through the immediate,
+wooded territory, might easily fail to discover a small army
+nesting sixty feet above the shrouding leafage. Word was
+evidently brought to Ferguson here, telling him the now augmented
+number of his foe, for he dispatched another emissary to
+Cornwallis with a letter stating the number of his own troops and
+urging full and immediate assistance.
+
+Meanwhile the frontiersmen had halted at the Cowpens. There they
+feasted royally off roasted cattle and corn belonging to the
+loyalist who owned the Cowpens. It is said that they mowed his
+fifty acres of corn in an hour. And here one of their spies, in
+the assumed role of a Tory, learned Ferguson's plans, his
+approximate force, his route, and his system of communication
+with Cornwallis. The officers now held council and determined to
+take a detachment of the hardiest and fleetest horsemen and sweep
+down on the enemy before aid could reach him. About nine o'clock
+that evening, according to Shelby's report, 910 mounted men set
+off at full speed, leaving the main body of horse and foot to
+follow after at their best pace.
+
+Rain poured down on them all that night as they rode. At daybreak
+they crossed the Broad at Cherokee Ford and dashed on in the
+drenching rain all the forenoon. They kept their firearms and
+powder dry by wrapping them in their knapsacks, blankets, and
+hunting shirts. The downpour had so churned up the soil that many
+of the horses mired, but they were pulled out and whipped forward
+again. The wild horsemen made no halt for food or rest. Within
+two miles of King's Mountain they captured Ferguson's messenger
+with the letter that told of his desperate situation. They asked
+this man how they should know Ferguson. He told them that
+Ferguson was in full uniform but wore a checkered shirt or dust
+cloak over it. This was not the only messenger of Ferguson's who
+failed to carry through. The men he had sent out previously had
+been followed and, to escape capture or death, they had been
+obliged to lie in hiding, so that they did not reach Cornwallis
+until the day of the battle.
+
+At three o'clock on the afternoon of the 7th of October, the
+overmountain men were in the forest at the base of the hill. The
+rain had ceased and the sun was shining. They dismounted and
+tethered their steaming horses. Orders were given that every man
+was to "throw the priming out of his pan, pick his touchhole,
+prime anew, examine bullets and see that everything was in
+readiness for battle." The plan of battle agreed on was to
+surround the hill, hold the enemy on the top and, themselves
+screened by the trees, keep pouring in their fire. There was a
+good chance that most of the answering fire would go over their
+heads.
+
+As Shelby's men crossed a gap in the woods, the outposts on the
+hill discovered their presence and sounded the alarm. Ferguson
+sprang to horse, blowing his silver whistle to call his men to
+attack. His riflemen poured fire into Shelby's contingent, but
+meanwhile the frontiersmen on the other sides were creeping up,
+and presently a circle of fire burst upon the hill. With fixed
+bayonets, some of Ferguson's men charged down the face of the
+slope, against the advancing foe, only to be shot in the back as
+they charged. Still time and time again they charged; the
+overhill men reeled and retreated; but always their comrades took
+toll with their rifles; Ferguson's men, preparing for a mounted
+charge, were shot even as they swung to their saddles. Ferguson,
+with his customary indifference to danger, rode up and down in
+front of his line blowing his whistle to encourage his men.
+"Huzza, brave boys! The day is our own!" Thus he was heard to
+shout above the triumphant war whoops of the circling foe,
+surging higher and higher about the hill.
+
+But there were others in his band who knew the fight was lost.
+The overmountain men saw two white handkerchiefs, axed to
+bayonets, raised above the rocks; and then they saw Ferguson dash
+by and slash them down with his sword. Two horses were shot under
+Ferguson in the latter part of the action; but he mounted a third
+and rode again into the thick of the fray. Suddenly the cry
+spread among the attacking troops that the British officer,
+Tarleton, had come to Ferguson's rescue; and the mountaineers
+began to give way. But it was only the galloping horses of their
+own comrades; Tarleton had not come. Nolichucky Jack spurred out
+in front of his men and rode along the line. Fired by his courage
+they sounded the war whoop again and renewed the attack with
+fury.
+
+"These are the same yelling devils that were at Musgrove's Mill,"
+said Captain De Peyster to Ferguson.
+
+Now Shelby and Sevier, leading his Wataugans, had reached the
+summit. The firing circle pressed in. The buckskin-shirted
+warriors leaped the rocky barriers, swinging their tomahawks and
+long knives. Again the white handkerchiefs fluttered. Ferguson
+saw that the morale of his troops was shattered.
+
+"Surrender," De Peyster, his second in command, begged of him.
+
+"Surrender to those damned banditti? Never!"
+
+Ferguson turned his horse's head downhill and charged into the
+Wataugans, hacking right and left with his sword till it was
+broken at the hilt. A dozen rifles were leveled at him. An iron
+muzzle pushed at his breast, but the powder flashed in the pan.
+He swerved and struck at the rifleman with his broken hilt. But
+the other guns aimed at him spoke; and Ferguson's body jerked
+from the saddle pierced by eight bullets. Men seized the bridle
+of the frenzied horse, plunging on with his dead master dragging
+from the stirrup.
+
+The battle had lasted less than an hour. After Ferguson fell, De
+Peyster advanced with a white flag and surrendered his sword to
+Campbell. Other white flags waved along the hilltop. But the
+killing did not yet cease. It is said that many of the
+mountaineers did not know the significance of the white flag.
+Sevier's sixteen-year-old son, having heard that his father had
+fallen, kept on furiously loading and firing until presently he
+saw Sevier ride in among the troops and command them to stop
+shooting men who had surrendered and thrown down their arms.
+
+The victors made a bonfire of the enemy's baggage wagons and
+supplies. Then they killed some of his beeves and cooked them;
+they had had neither food nor sleep for eighteen hours. They dug
+shallow trenches for the dead and scattered the loose earth over
+them. Ferguson's body, stripped of its uniform and boots and
+wrapped in a beef hide, was thrown into one of these ditches by
+the men detailed to the burial work, while the officers divided
+his personal effects among themselves.
+
+The triumphant army turned homeward as the dusk descended. The
+uninjured prisoners and the wounded who were able to walk were
+marched off carrying their empty firearms. The badly wounded were
+left lying where they had fallen.
+
+At Bickerstaff's Old Fields in Rutherford County the frontiersmen
+halted; and here they selected thirty of their prisoners to be
+hanged. They swung them aloft, by torchlight, three at a time,
+until nine had gone to their last account. Then Sevier
+interposed; and, with Shelby's added authority, saved the other
+twenty-one. Among those who thus weighted the gallows tree were
+some of the Tory brigands from Watauga; but not all the victims
+were of this character. Some of the troops would have wreaked
+vengeance on the two Tories from Sevier's command who had
+betrayed their army plans to Ferguson; but Sevier claimed them as
+under his jurisdiction and refused consent. Nolichucky Jack dealt
+humanely by his foes. To the coarse and brutish Cleveland, now
+astride of Ferguson's horse and wearing his sash, and to the
+three hundred who followed him, may no doubt be laid the worst
+excesses of the battle's afterpiece.
+
+Victors and vanquished drove on in the dark, close to the great
+flank of hills. From where King's Mountain, strewn with dead and
+dying, reared its black shape like some rudely hewn tomb of a
+primordial age when titans strove together, perhaps to the ears
+of the marching men came faintly through the night's stillness
+the howl of a wolf and the answering chorus of the pack. For the
+wolves came down to King's Mountain from all the surrounding
+hills, following the scent of blood, and made their lair where
+the Werewolf had fallen. The scene of the mountaineers' victory,
+which marked the turn of the tide for the Revolution, became for
+years the chief resort of wolf hunters from both the Carolinas.
+
+The importance of the overmountain men's victory lay in what it
+achieved for the cause of Independence. King's Mountain was the
+prelude to Cornwallis's defeat. It heartened the Southern
+Patriots, until then cast down by Gates's disaster. To the
+British the death of Ferguson was an irreparable loss because of
+its depressing effect on the Back Country Tories. Ding's
+Mountain, indeed, broke the Tory spirit. Seven days after the
+battle General Nathanael Greene succeeded to the command of the
+Southern Patriot army which Gates had led to defeat. Greene's
+genius met the rising tide of the Patriots' courage and hope and
+took it at the flood. His strategy, in dividing his army and
+thereby compelling the division of Cornwallis's force, led to
+Daniel Morgan's victory at the Cowpens, in the Back Country of
+South Carolina, on January 17, 1781--another frontiersmen's
+triumph. Though the British won the next engagement between
+Greene and Cornwallis--the battle of Guilford Court House in the
+North Carolina Back Country, on the 15th of March--Greene
+madethem pay so dearly for their victory that Tarleton called it
+"the pledge of ultimate defeat"; and, three days later,
+Cornwallis was retreating towards Wilmington. In a sense, then,
+King's Mountain was the pivot of the war's revolving stage, which
+swung the British from their succession of victories towards the
+surrender at Yorktown.
+
+Shelby, Campbell, and Cleveland escorted the prisoners to
+Virginia. Sevier, with his men, rode home to Watauga. When the
+prisoners had been delivered to the authorities in Virginia, the
+Holston men also turned homeward through the hills. Their route
+lay down through the Clinch and Holston valleys to the settlement
+at the base of the mountains. Sevier and his Wataugans had gone
+by Gillespie's Gap, over the pathway that hung like a narrow
+ribbon about the breast of Roan Mountain, lifting its crest in
+dignified isolation sixty-three hundred feet above the levels.
+The "Unakas" was the name the Cherokees had given to those white
+men who first invaded their hills; and the Unakas is the name
+that white men at last gave to the mountain.
+
+Great companies of men were to come over the mountain paths on
+their way to the Mississippi country and beyond; and with them,
+as we know, were to go many of these mountain men, to pass away
+with their customs in the transformations that come with
+progress. But there were others who clung to these hills. They
+were of several stocks--English, Scotch, Highlanders, Ulstermen,
+who mingled by marriage and sometimes took their mates from among
+the handsome maids of the Cherokees. They spread from the Unakas
+of Tennessee into the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky; and they
+have remained to this day what they were then, a primitive folk
+of strong and fiery men and brave women living as their
+forefathers of Watauga and Holston lived. In the log cabins in
+those mountains today are heard the same ballads, sung still to
+the dulcimer, that entertained the earliest settlers. The women
+still turn the old-fashioned spinning wheels. The code of the men
+is still the code learned perhaps from the Gaels--the code of the
+oath and the feud and the open door to the stranger. Or were
+these, the ethical tenets of almost all uncorrupted primitive
+tribes, transmitted from the Indian strain and association? Their
+young people marry at boy and girl ages, as the pioneers did, and
+their wedding festivities are the same as those which made
+rejoicing at the first marriage in Watauga. Their common speech
+today contains words that have been obsolete in England for a
+hundred years.
+
+Thrice have the mountain men come down again from their
+fastnesses to war for America since the day of King's Mountain
+and thrice they have acquitted themselves so that their deeds are
+noted in history. A souvenir of their part in the War of 1812 at
+the Battle of the Thames is kept in one of the favorite names for
+mountain girls--"Lake Erie." In the Civil War many volunteers
+from the free, non-slaveholding mountain regions of Kentucky and
+Tennessee joined the Union Army, and it is said that they
+exceeded all others in stature and physical development. And in
+our own day their sons again came down from the mountains to
+carry the torch of Liberty overseas, and to show the white stars
+in their flag side by side with the ancient cross in the flag of
+England against which their forefathers fought.
+
+
+
+Chapter X. Sevier, The Statemaker
+
+After King's Mountain, Sevier reached home just in time to fend
+off a Cherokee attack on Watauga. Again warning had come to the
+settlements that the Indians were about to descend upon them.
+Sevier set out at once to meet the red invaders. Learning from
+his scouts that the Indians were near he went into ambush with
+his troops disposed in the figure of a half-moon, the favorite
+Indian formation. He then sent out a small body of men to fire on
+the Indians and make a scampering retreat, to lure the enemy on.
+The maneuver was so well planned and the ground so well chosen
+that the Indian war party would probably have been annihilated
+but for the delay of an officer at one horn of the half-moon in
+bringing his troops into play. Through the gap thus made the
+Indians escaped, with a loss of seventeen of their number. The
+delinquent officer was Jonathan Tipton, younger brother of
+Colonel John Tipton, of whom we shall hear later. It is possible
+that from this event dates the Tiptons' feud with Sevier, which
+supplies one of the breeziest pages in the story of early
+Tennessee.
+
+Not content with putting the marauders to flight, Sevier pressed
+on after them, burned several of the upper towns, and took
+prisoner a number of women and children, thus putting the red
+warriors to the depth of shame, for the Indians never deserted
+their women in battle. The chiefs at once sued for peace. But
+they had made peace often before. Sevier drove down upon the
+Hiwassee towns, meanwhile proclaiming that those among the tribe
+who were friendly might send their families to the white
+settlement, where they would be fed and cared for until a sound
+peace should be assured. He also threatened to continue to make
+war until his enemies were wiped out, their town sites a heap of
+blackened ruins, and their whole country in possession of the
+whites, unless they bound themselves to an enduring peace.
+
+Having compelled the submission of the Otari and Hiwassee towns,
+yet finding that depredations still continued, Sevier determined
+to invade the group of towns hidden in the mountain fastnesses
+near the headwaters of the Little Tennessee where, deeming
+themselves inaccessible except by their own trail, the Cherokees
+freely plotted mischief and sent out raiding parties. These hill
+towns lay in the high gorges of the Great Smoky Mountains, 150
+miles distant. No one in Watauga had ever been in them except
+Thomas, the trader, who, however, had reached them from the
+eastern side of the mountains. With no knowledge of the Indians'
+path and without a guide, yet nothing daunted, Sevier, late in
+the summer of 1781 headed his force into the mountains. So steep
+were some of the slopes they scaled that the men were obliged to
+dismount and help their horses up. Unexpectedly to themselves
+perhaps, as well as to the Indians, they descended one morning on
+a group of villages and destroyed them. Before the fleeing
+savages could rally, the mountaineers had plunged up the steeps
+again. Sevier then turned southward into Georgia and inflicted a
+severe castigation on the tribes along the Coosa River.
+
+When, after thirty days of warfare and mad riding, Sevier arrived
+at his Bonnie Kate's door on the Nolichucky, he found a messenger
+from General Greene calling on him for immediate assistance to
+cut off Cornwallis from his expected retreat through North
+Carolina. Again he set out, and with two hundred men crossed the
+mountains and made all speed to Charlotte, in Mecklenburg County,
+where he learned that Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown on
+October 19, 1781. Under Greene's orders he turned south to the
+Santee to assist a fellow scion of the Huguenots, General Francis
+Marion, in the pursuit of Stuart's Britishers. Having driven
+Stuart into Charleston, Sevier and his active Wataugans returned
+home, now perhaps looking forward to a rest, which they had
+surely earned. Once more, however, they were hailed with alarming
+news. Dragging Canoe had come to life again and was emerging from
+the caves of the Tennessee with a substantial force of
+Chickamaugan warriors. Again the Wataugans, augmented by a
+detachment from Sullivan County, galloped forth, met the red
+warriors, chastised them heavily, put them to rout, burned their
+dwellings and provender, and drove them back into their hiding
+places. For some time after this, the Indians dipped not into the
+black paint pots of war but were content to streak their humbled
+countenances with the vermilion of beauty and innocence.
+
+
+It should be chronicled that Sevier, assisted possibly by other
+Wataugans, eventually returned to the State of North Carolina the
+money which he had forcibly borrowed to finance the King's
+Mountain expedition; and that neither he nor Shelby received any
+pay for their services, nor asked it. Before Shelby left the
+Holston in 1782 and moved to Kentucky, of which State he was to
+become the first Governor, the Assembly of North Carolina passed
+a resolution of gratitude to the overmountain men in general, and
+to Sevier and Shelby in particular, for their "very generous and
+patriotic services" with which the "General Assembly of this
+State are feelingly impressed." The resolution concluded by
+urging the recipients of the Assembly's acknowledgments to
+"continue" in their noble course. In view of what followed, this
+resolution is interesting!
+
+For some time the overhill pioneers had been growing dissatisfied
+with the treatment they were receiving from the State, which on
+the plea of poverty had refused to establish a Superior Court for
+them and to appoint a prosecutor. As a result, crime was on the
+increase, and the law-abiding were deprived of the proper legal
+means to check the lawless. In 1784 when the western soldiers'
+claims began to reach the Assembly, there to be scrutinized by
+unkindly eyes, the dissatisfaction increased. The breasts of the
+mountain men--the men who had made that spectacular ride to bring
+Ferguson to his end--were kindled with hot indignation when they
+heard that they had been publicly assailed as grasping persons
+who seized on every pretense to "fabricate demands against the
+Government." Nor were those fiery breasts cooled by further
+plaints to the effect that the "industry and property" of those
+east of the hills were "becoming the funds appropriated to
+discharge the debts" of the Westerners. They might with justice
+have asked what the industry and property of the Easterners were
+worth on that day when the overhill men drilled in the snows on
+the high peak of Yellow Mountain and looked down on Burke County
+overrun by Ferguson's Tories, and beyond, to Charlotte, where lay
+Cornwallis.
+
+The North Carolina Assembly did not confine itself to impolite
+remarks. It proceeded to get rid of what it deemed western
+rapacity by ceding the whole overmountain territory to the United
+States, with the proviso that Congress must accept the gift
+within twelve months. And after passing the Cession Act, North
+Carolina closed the land office in the undesired domain and
+nullified all entries made after May 25, 1784. The Cession Act
+also enabled the State to evade its obligations to the Cherokees
+in the matter of an expensive consignment of goods to pay for new
+lands.
+
+This clever stroke of the Assembly's brought about immediate
+consequences in the region beyond the hills. The Cherokees, who
+knew nothing about the Assembly's system of political economy but
+who found their own provokingly upset by the non-arrival of the
+promised goods, began again to darken the mixture in their paint
+pots; and they dug up the war hatchet, never indeed so deeply
+patted down under the dust that it could not be unearthed by a
+stub of the toe. Needless to say, it was not the thrifty and
+distant Easterners who felt their anger, but the nearby
+settlements.
+
+As for the white overhill dwellers, the last straw had been laid
+on their backs; and it felt like a hickory log. No sooner had the
+Assembly adjourned than the men of Washington, Sullivan, and
+Greene counties, which comprised the settled portion of what is
+now east Tennessee, elected delegates to convene for the purpose
+of discussing the formation of a new State. They could assert
+that they were not acting illegally, for in her first
+constitution North Carolina had made provision for a State beyond
+the mountains. And necessity compelled them to take steps for
+their protection. Some of them, and Sevier was of the number,
+doubted if Congress would accept the costly gift; and the
+majority realized that during the twelve months which were
+allowed for the decision they would have no protection from
+either North Carolina or Congress and would not be able to
+command their own resources.
+
+In August, 1784, the delegates met at Jonesborough and passed
+preliminary resolutions; and then adjourned to meet later in the
+year. The news was soon disseminated through North Carolina and
+the Assembly convened in October and hastily repealed the Cession
+Act, voted to establish the District of Washington out of the
+four counties, and sent word of the altered policy to Sevier,
+with a commission for himself as Brigadier General. From the
+steps of the improvised convention hall, before which the
+delegates had gathered, Sevier read the Assembly's message and
+advised his neighbors to proceed no further, since North Carolina
+had of her own accord redressed all their grievances. But for
+once Nolichucky Jack's followers refused to follow. The adventure
+too greatly appealed. Obliged to choose between North Carolina
+and his own people, Sevier's hesitation was short. The State of
+Frankland, or Land of the Free, was formed; and Nolichucky Jack
+was elevated to the office of Governor--with a yearly salary of
+two hundred mink skins.
+
+Perhaps John Tipton had hoped to head the new State, for he had
+been one of its prime movers and was a delegate to this
+convention. But when the man whom he hated--apparently for no
+reason except that other men loved him--assented to the people's
+will and was appointed to the highest post within their gift,
+Tipton withdrew, disavowing all connection with Frankland and
+affirming his loyalty to North Carolina. From this time on, the
+feud was an open one.
+
+That brief and now forgotten State, Frankland, the Land of the
+Free, which bequeathed its name as an appellation for America,
+was founded as Watauga had been founded--to meet the practical
+needs and aspirations of its people. It will be remembered that
+one of the things written by Sevier into the only Watauga
+document extant was that they desired to become "in every way the
+best members of society." Frankland's aims, as recorded, included
+the intent to "improve agriculture, perfect manufacturing,
+ENCOURAGE LITERATURE and every thing truly laudable."
+
+The constitution of Frankland, agreed to on the 14th of November,
+1785, appeals to us today rather by its spirit than by its
+practical provisions. "This State shall be called the
+Commonwealth of Frankland and shall be governed by a General
+Assembly of the representatives of the freemen of the same, a
+Governor and Council, and proper courts of justice.... The
+supreme legislative power shall be vested in a single House of
+Representatives of the freemen of the commonwealth of Frankland.
+The House of Representatives of the freemen of the State shall
+consist of persons most noted for wisdom and virtue."
+
+In these exalted desires of the primitive men who held by their
+rifles and hatchets the land by the western waters, we see the
+influence of the Reverend Samuel Doak, their pastor, who founded
+the first church and the first school beyond the great hills.
+Early in the life of Watauga he had come thither from Princeton,
+a zealous and broadminded young man, and a sturdy one, too, for
+he came on foot driving before him a mule laden with books.
+Legend credits another minister, the Reverend Samuel Houston,
+with suggesting the name of Frankland, after he had opened the
+Convention with prayer. It is not surprising to learn that this
+glorified constitution was presently put aside in favor of one
+modeled on that of North Carolina.
+
+Sevier persuaded the more radical members of the community to
+abandon their extreme views and to adopt the laws of North
+Carolina. However lawless his acts as Governor of a bolting
+colony may appear, Sevier was essentially a constructive force.
+His purposes were right, and small motives are not discernible in
+his record. He might reasonably urge that the Franklanders had
+only followed the example of North Carolina and the other
+American States in seceding from the parent body, and for similar
+causes, for the State's system of taxation had long borne heavily
+on the overhill men.
+
+The whole transmontane populace welcomed Frankland with
+enthusiasm. Major Arthur Campbell, of the Virginian settlements,
+on the Holston, was eager to join. Sevier and his Assembly took
+the necessary steps to receive the overhill Virginians, provided
+that the transfer of allegiance could be made with Virginia's
+consent. Meanwhile he replied in a dignified manner to the pained
+and menacing expostulations of North Carolina's Governor. North
+Carolina was bidden to remember the epithets her assemblymen had
+hurled at the Westerners, which they themselves had by no means
+forgotten. And was it any wonder that they now doubted the love
+the parent State professed to feel for them? As for the puerile
+threat of blood, had their quality really so soon become
+obliterated from the memory of North Carolina? At this sort of
+writing, Sevier, who always pulsed hot with emotion and who had a
+pretty knack in turning a phrase, was more than a match for the
+Governor of North Carolina, whose prerogatives he had usurped.
+
+The overmountain men no longer needed to complain bitterly of the
+lack of legal machinery to keep them "the best members of
+society." They now had courts to spare. Frankland had its courts,
+its judges, its legislative body, its land office--in fact, a
+full governmental equipment. North Carolina also performed all
+the natural functions of political organism, within the western
+territory. Sevier appointed one David Campbell a judge. Campbell
+held court in Jonesborough. Ten miles away, in Buffalo, Colonel
+John Tipton presided for North Carolina. It happened frequently
+that officers and attendants of the rival law courts met, as they
+pursued, their duties, and whenever they met they fought. The
+post of sheriff--or sheriffs, for of course there were two--was
+filled by the biggest and heaviest man and the hardest hitter in
+the ranks of the warring factions. A favorite game was raiding
+each other's courts and carrying off the records. Frankland sent
+William Cocke, later the first senator from Tennessee, to
+Congress with a memorial, asking Congress to accept the territory
+North Carolina had offered and to receive it into the Union as a
+separate State. Congress ignored the plea. It began to appear
+that North Carolina would be victor in the end; and so there were
+defections among the Franklanders. Sevier wrote to Benjamin
+Franklin asking his aid in establishing the status of Frankland;
+and, with a graceful flourish of his ready pen, changed the new
+State's name to Franklin by way of reinforcing his arguments. But
+the old philosopher, more expert than Sevier in diplomatic
+calligraphy, only acknowledged the compliment and advised the
+State of Franklin to make peace with North Carolina.
+
+Sevier then appealed for aid and recognition to the Governor of
+Georgia, who had previously appointed him Brigadier General of
+militia. But the Governor of Georgia also avoided giving the
+recognition requested, though he earnestly besought Sevier to
+come down and settle the Creeks for him. There were others who
+sent pleas to Sevier, the warrior, to save them from the savages.
+One of the writers who addressed him did not fear to say "Your
+Excellency," nor to accord Nolichucky Jack the whole dignity of
+the purple in appealing to him as the only man possessing the
+will and the power to prevent the isolated settlements on the
+Cumberland from being wiped out. That writer was his old friend,
+James Robertson.
+
+In 1787, while Sevier was on the frontier of Greene County,
+defending it from Indians, the legal forces of North Carolina
+swooped down on his estate and took possession of his negroes. It
+was Tipton who represented the law; and Tipton carried off the
+Governor's slaves to his own estate. When Nolichucky Jack came
+home and found that his enemy had stripped him, he was in a
+towering rage. With a body of his troops and one small cannon, he
+marched to Tipton's house and besieged it, threatening a
+bombardment. He did not, however, fire into the dwelling, though
+he placed some shots about it and in the extreme corners. This
+opera bouffe siege endured for several days, until Tipton was
+reinforced by some of his own clique. Then Tipton sallied forth
+and attacked the besiegers, who hastily scattered rather than
+engage in a sanguinary fight with their neighbors. Tipton
+captured Sevier's two elder sons and was only strained from
+hanging them on being informed that two of his own sons were at
+that moment in Sevier's hands.
+
+In March, 1788, the State of Franklin went into eclipse. Sevier
+was overthrown by the authorities of North Carolina. Most of the
+officials who had served under him were soothed by being
+reappointed to their old positions. Tipton's star was now in the
+ascendant, for his enemy was to be made the vicarious sacrifice
+for the sins of all whom he had "led astray." Presently David
+Campbell, still graciously permitted to preside over the Superior
+Court, received from the Governor of North Carolina the following
+letter:
+
+"Sir: It has been represented to the Executive that John Sevier,
+who style's himself Captain-General of the State of Franklin, has
+been guilty of high treason in levying troops to oppose the laws
+and government of the State.... You will issue your warrant to
+apprehend the said John Sevier, and in case he cannot be
+sufficiently secured for trial in the District of Washington,
+order him to be committed to the public gaol."
+
+
+The judge's authority was to be exercised after he had examined
+the "affidavits of credible persons." Campbell's judicial opinion
+seems to have been that any affidavit against "the said John
+Sevier" could not be made by a "credible person." He refused to
+issue the warrant. Tipton's friend, Spencer, who had been North
+Carolina's judge of the Superior Court in the West and who was
+sharing that honor now with Campbell, issued the warrant and sent
+Tipton to make the arrest.
+
+Sevier was at the Widow Brown's inn with some of his men when
+Tipton at last came up with him. It was early morning. Tipton and
+his posse were about to enter when the portly and dauntless
+widow, surmising their errand, drew her chair into the doorway,
+plumped herself down in it, and refused to budge for all the
+writs in North Carolina. Tipton blustered and the widow rocked.
+The altercation awakened Sevier. He dressed hurriedly and came
+down. As soon as he presented himself on the porch, Tipton
+thrust his pistol against his body, evidently with intent to fire
+if Sevier made signs of resistance. Sevier's furious followers
+were not disposed to let him be taken without a fight, but he
+admonished them to respect the law, and requested that they would
+inform Bonnie Kate of his predicament. Then, debonair as ever,
+with perhaps a tinge of contempt at the corners of his mouth, he
+held out his wrists for the manacles which Tipton insisted on
+fastening upon them.
+
+It was not likely that any jail in the western country could hold
+Nolichucky Jack overnight. Tipton feared a riot; and it was
+decided to send the prisoner for incarceration and trial to
+Morgantown in North Carolina, just over the hills.
+
+Tipton did not accompany the guards he sent with Sevier. It was
+stated and commonly believed that he had given instructions of
+which the honorable men among his friends were ignorant. When the
+party entered the mountains, two of the guards were to lag behind
+with the prisoner, till the others were out of sight on the
+twisting trail. Then one of the two was to kill Sevier and assert
+that he had done it because Sevier had attempted to escape. It
+fell out almost as planned, except that the other guard warned
+Sevier of the fate in store for him and gave him a chance to
+flee. In plunging down the mountain, Sevier's horse was entangled
+in a thicket. The would-be murderer overtook him and fired; but
+here again fate had interposed for her favorite. The ball had
+dropped out of the assassin's pistol. So Sevier reached
+Morgantown in safety and was deposited in care of the sheriff,
+who was doubtless cautioned to take a good look at the prisoner
+and know him for a dangerous and a daring man.
+
+There is a story to the effect that, when Sevier was arraigned in
+the courthouse at Morgantown and presently dashed through the
+door and away on a racer that had been brought up by some of his
+friends, among those who witnessed the proceedings was a young
+Ulster Scot named Andrew Jackson; and that on this occasion these
+two men, later to become foes, first saw each other. Jackson may
+have been in Morgantown at the time, though this is disputed; but
+the rest of the tale is pure legend invented by some one whose
+love of the spectacular led him far from the facts. The facts are
+less theatrical but much more dramatic. Sevier was not arraigned
+at all, for no court was sitting in Morgantown at the time.* The
+sheriff to whom he was delivered did not need to look twice at
+him to know him for a daring man. He had served with him at
+King's Mountain. He struck off his handcuffs and set him at
+liberty at once. Perhaps he also notified General Charles
+McDowell at his home in Quaker Meadows of the presence of a
+distinguished guest in Burke County, for McDowell and his brother
+Joseph, another officer of militia, quickly appeared and went on
+Sevier's bond. Nolichucky Jack was presently holding a court of
+his own in the tavern, with North Carolina's men at arms--as many
+as were within call--drinking his health. So his sons and a
+company of his Wataugans found him, when they rode into
+Morgantown to give evidence in his behalf--with their rifles.
+Since none now disputed the way with him, Sevier turned homeward
+with his cavalcade, McDowell and his men accompanying him as far
+as the pass in the hills.
+
+* Statement by John Sevier, Junior, in the Draper MSS., quoted by
+Turner, "Life of General John Sevier," p. 182.
+
+
+No further attempt was made to try John Sevier for treason,
+either west or east of the mountains. In November, however, the
+Assembly passed the Pardon Act, and thereby granted absolution to
+every one who had been associated with the State of Franklin,
+EXCEPT JOHN SEVIER. In a clause said to have been introduced by
+Tipton, now a senator, or suggested by him, John Sevier was
+debarred forever from "the enjoyment of any office of profit or
+honor or trust in the State of North Carolina."
+
+The overhill men in Greene County took due note of the Assembly's
+fiat and at the next election sent Sevier to the North Carolina
+Senate. Nolichucky Jack, whose demeanor was never so decorous as
+when the illconsidered actions of those in authority had made him
+appear to have circumvented the law, considerately waited outside
+until the House had lifted the ban--which it did perforce and by
+a large majority, despite Tipton's opposition--and then took his
+seat on the senatorial bench beside his enemy. The records show
+that he was reinstated as Brigadier General of the Western
+Counties and also appointed at the head of the Committee on
+Indian Affairs.
+
+
+Not only in the region about Watauga did the pioneers of
+Tennessee endure the throes of danger and strife during these
+years. The little settlements on the Cumberland, which were
+scattered over a short distance of about twenty-five or thirty
+miles and had a frontier line of two hundred miles, were terribly
+afflicted. Their nearest white neighbors among the Kentucky
+settlers were one hundred and fifty miles away; and through the
+cruelest years these could render no aid--could not, indeed, hold
+their own stations. The Kentuckians, as we have seen, were
+bottled up in Harrodsburg and Boonesborough; and, while the
+northern Indians led by Girty and Dequindre darkened the Bloody
+Ground anew, the Cumberlanders were making a desperate stand
+against the Chickasaws and the Creeks. So terrible was their
+situation that panic took hold on them, and they would have fled
+but for the influence of Robertson. He may have put the question
+to them in the biblical words, "Whither shall I flee?" For they
+were surrounded, and those who did attempt to escape were
+"weighed on the path and made light." Robertson knew that their
+only chance of survival was to stand their ground. The greater
+risks he was willing to take in person, for it was he who made
+trips to Boonesborough and Harrodsburg for a share of the powder
+and lead which John Sevier was sending into Kentucky from time to
+time. In the stress of conflict Robertson bore his full share of
+grief, for his two elder sons and his brother fell. He himself
+was often near to death. One day he was cut off in the fields and
+was shot in the foot as he ran, yet he managed to reach shelter.
+There is a story that, in an attack during one of his absences,
+the Indians forced the outer gate of the fort and Mrs. Robertson
+went out of her cabin, firing, and let loose a band of the savage
+dogs which the settlers kept for their protection, and so drove
+out the invaders.
+
+The Chickasaws were loyal to the treaty they had made with the
+British in the early days of James Adair's association with them.
+They were friends to England's friends and foes to her foes.
+While they resented the new settlements made on land they
+considered theirs, they signed a peace with Robertson at the
+conclusion of the War of Independence. They kept their word with
+him as they had kept it with the British. Furthermore, their
+chief, Opimingo or the Mountain Leader, gave Robertson his
+assistance against the Creeks and the Choctaws and, in so far as
+he understood its workings, informed him of the new Spanish and
+French conspiracy, which we now come to consider. So once again
+the Chickasaws were servants of destiny to the English-speaking
+race, for again they drove the wedge of their honor into an
+Indian solidarity welded with European gold.
+
+Since it was generally believed at that date that the tribes were
+instigated to war by the British and supplied by them with their
+ammunition, savage inroads were expected to cease with the
+signing of peace. But Indian warfare not only continued; it
+increased. In the last two years of the Revolution, when the
+British were driven from the Back Country of the Carolinas and
+could no longer reach the tribes with consignments of firearms
+and powder, it should have been evident that the Indians had
+other sources of supply and other allies, for they lacked nothing
+which could aid them in their efforts to exterminate the settlers
+of Tennessee.
+
+Neither France nor Spain wished to see an English-speaking
+republic based on ideals of democracy successfully established in
+America. Though in the Revolutionary War, France was a close ally
+of the Americans and Spain something more than a nominal one, the
+secret diplomacy of the courts of the Bourbon cousins ill matched
+with their open professions. Both cousins hated England. The
+American colonies, smarting under injustice, had offered a field
+for their revenge. But hatred of England was not the only reason
+why activities had been set afoot to increase the discord which
+should finally separate the colonies from Great Britain and leave
+the destiny of the colonies to be decided by the House of
+Bourbon. Spain saw in the Americans, with their English modes of
+thought, a menace to her authority in her own colonies on both
+the northern and southern continents. This menace would not be
+stilled but augmented if the colonies should be established as a
+republic. Such an example might be too readily followed. Though
+France had, by a secret treaty in 1762, made over to Spain the
+province of Louisiana, she was not unmindful of the Bourbon
+motto, "He who attacks the Crown of one attacks the other." And
+she saw her chance to deal a crippling blow at England's prestige
+and commerce.
+
+In 1764, the French Minister, Choiseul, had sent a secret agent,
+named Pontleroy, to America to assist in making trouble and to
+watch for any signs that might be turned to the advantage of les
+duex couronnes. Evidently Pontleroy's reports were encouraging
+for, in 1768, Johann Kalb--the same Kalb who fell at Camden in
+1780--arrived in Philadelphia to enlarge the good work. He was
+not only, like several of the foreign officers in the War of
+Independence, a spy for his Government, but he was also the
+special emissary of one Comte de Broglie who, after the colonies
+had broken with the mother country, was to put himself at the
+head of American affairs. This Broglie had been for years one of
+Louis XV's chief agents in subterranean diplomacy, and it is not
+to be supposed that he was going to attempt the stupendous task
+of controlling America's destiny without substantial backing.
+Spain had been advised meanwhile to rule her new Louisiana
+territory with great liberality--in fact, to let it shine as a
+republic before the yearning eyes of the oppressed Americans, so
+that the English colonists would arise and cast off their
+fetters. Once the colonies had freed themselves from England's
+protecting arm, it would be a simple matter for the Bourbons to
+gather them in like so many little lost chicks from a rainy yard.
+The intrigants of autocratic systems have never been able to
+understand that the urge of the spirit of independence in men is
+not primarily to break shackles but to STAND ALONE and that the
+breaking of bonds is incidental to the true demonstration of
+freedom. The Bourbons and their agents were no more nor less
+blind to the great principle stirring the hearts of men in their
+day than were the Prussianized hosts over a hundred years later
+who, having themselves no acquaintance with the law of liberty,
+could not foresee that half a world would rise in arms to
+maintain that law.
+
+When the War of Independence had ended, the French Minister,
+Vergennes, and the Spanish Minister, Floridablanca, secretly
+worked in unison to prevent England's recognition of the new
+republic; and Floridablanca in 1782 even offered to assist
+England if she would make further efforts to subdue her "rebel
+subjects." Both Latin powers had their own axes to grind, and
+America was to tend the grindstone. France looked for recovery of
+her old prestige in Europe and expected to supersede England in
+commerce. She would do this, in the beginning, chiefly through
+control of America and of America's commerce. Vergennes therefore
+sought not only to dictate the final terms of peace but also to
+say what the American commissioners should and should not demand.
+Of the latter gentlemen he said that they possessed "caracteres
+peu maniables!" In writing to Luzerne, the French Ambassador in
+Philadelphia, on October 14, 1782, Vergennes said: "it behooves
+us to leave them [the American commissioners] to their illusions,
+to do everything that can make them fancy that we share them, and
+undertake only to defeat any attempts to which those illusions
+might carry them if our cooperation is required." Among these
+"illusions" were America's desires in regard to the fisheries and
+to the western territory. Concerning the West, Vergennes had
+written to Luzerne, as early as July 18, 1780: "At the moment
+when the revolution broke out, the limits of the Thirteen States
+did not reach the River [Mississippi] and it would be absurd for
+them to claim the rights of England, a power whose rule they had
+abjured." By the secret treaty with Spain, furthermore, France
+had agreed to continue the war until Gibraltar should be taken,
+and--if the British should be driven from Newfoundland--to share
+the fisheries only with Spain, and to support Spain in demanding
+that the Thirteen States renounce all territory west of the
+Alleghanies. The American States must by no means achieve a
+genuine independence but must feel the need of sureties, allies,
+and protection.*
+
+* See John Jay, "On the Peace Negotiations of 1782-1788 as
+Illustrated by the Secret Correspondence of France and England,"
+New York, 1888.
+
+
+So intent was Vergennes on these aims that he sent a secret
+emissary to England to further them there. This act of his
+perhaps gave the first inkling to the English statesmen* that
+American and French desires were not identical and hastened
+England's recognition of American independence and her agreement
+to American demands in regard to the western territory. When, to
+his amazement, Vergennes learned that England had acceded to all
+America's demands, he said that England had "bought the peace"
+rather than made it. The policy of Vergennes in regard to America
+was not unjustly pronounced by a later French statesman "A VILE
+SPECULATION."
+
+* "Your Lordship was well founded in your suspicion that the
+granting of independence to America as a previous measure is a
+point which the French have by no means at heart and perhaps are
+entirely averse from." Letter from Fitzherbert to Grantham,
+September 3, 1782.
+
+
+Through England's unexpected action, then, the Bourbon cousins
+had forever lost their opportunity to dominate the young but
+spent and war-weakened Republic, or to use America as a catspaw
+to snatch English commerce for France. It was plain, too, that
+any frank move of the sort would range the English alongside of
+their American kinsmen. Since American Independence was an
+accomplished fact and therefore could no longer be prevented, the
+present object of the Bourbon cousins was to restrict it. The
+Appalachian Mountains should be the western limits of the new
+nation. Therefore the settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee must
+be broken up, or the settlers must be induced to secede from the
+Union and raise the Spanish banner. The latter alternative was
+held to be preferable. To bring it about the same methods were to
+be continued which had been used prior to and during the
+war--namely, the use of agents provocateurs to corrupt the
+ignorant and incite the lawless, the instigation of Indian
+massacres to daunt the brave, and the distribution of gold to buy
+the avaricious.
+
+As her final and supreme means of coercion, Spain refused to
+America the right of navigation on the Mississippi and so
+deprived the Westerners of a market for their produce. The
+Northern States, having no immediate use for the Mississippi,
+were willing to placate Spain by acknowledging her monopoly of
+the great waterway. But Virginia and North Carolina were
+determined that America should not, by congressional enactment,
+surrender her "natural right"; and they cited the proposed
+legislation as their reason for refusing to ratify the
+Constitution. "The act which abandons it [the right of
+navigation] is an act of separation between the eastern and
+western country," Jefferson realized at last. "An act of
+separation"--that point had long been very clear to the Latin
+sachems of the Mississippi Valley!
+
+Bounded as they were on one side by the precipitous mountains and
+on the other by the southward flow of the Mississippi and its
+tributary, the Ohio, the trappers and growers of corn in Kentucky
+and western Tennessee regarded New Orleans as their logical
+market, as the wide waters were their natural route. If market
+and route were to be closed to them, their commercial advancement
+was something less than a dream.
+
+In 1785, Don Estevan Miro, a gentleman of artful and winning
+address, became Governor of Louisiana and fountainhead of the
+propaganda. He wrote benign and brotherly epistles to James
+Robertson of the Cumberland and to His Excellency of Franklin,
+suggesting that to be of service to them was his dearest aim in
+life; and at the same time he kept the southern Indians
+continually on the warpath. When Robertson wrote to him of the
+Creek and Cherokee depredations, with a hint that the Spanish
+might have some responsibility in the matter, Miro replied by
+offering the Cumberlander a safe home on Spanish territory with
+freedom of religion and no taxes. He disclaimed stirring up the
+Indians. He had, in fact, advised Mr McGillivray, chief of the
+Creeks, to make peace. He would try again what he could do with
+Mr. McGillivray. As to the Cherokees, they resided in a very
+distant territory and he was not acquainted with them; he might
+have added that he did not need to be: his friend McGillivray was
+the potent personality among the Southern tribes.
+
+In Alexander McGillivray, Miro found a weapon fashioned to his
+hand. If the Creek chieftain's figure might stand as the symbol
+of treachery, it is none the less one of the most picturesque and
+pathetic in our early annals. McGillivray, it will be remembered,
+was the son of Adair's friend Lachlan McGillivray, the trader,
+and a Creek woman whose sire had been a French officer. A
+brilliant and beautiful youth, he had given his father a pride in
+him which is generally denied to the fathers of sons with Indian
+blood in them. The Highland trader had spared nothing in his
+son's education and had placed him, after his school days, in the
+business office of the large trading establishment of which he
+himself was a member. At about the age of seventeen Alexander had
+become a chieftain in his mother's nation; and doubtless it is he
+who appears shortly afterwards in the Colonial Records as the
+White Leader whose influence is seen to have been at work for
+friendship between the colonists and the tribes. When the
+Revolutionary War broke out, Lachlan McGillivray, like many of
+the old traders who had served British interests so long and so
+faithfully, held to the British cause. Georgia confiscated all
+his property and Lachlan fled to Scotland. For this, his son
+hated the people of Georgia with a perfect hatred. He remembered
+how often his father's courage alone had stood between those same
+people and the warlike Creeks. He could recall the few days in
+1760 when Lachlan and his fellow trader, Galphin, at the risk of
+their lives had braved the Creek warriors--already painted for
+war and on the march--and so had saved the settlements of the
+Back Country from extermination. He looked upon the men of
+Georgia as an Indian regards those who forget either a blood gift
+or a blood vengeance. And he embraced the whole American nation
+in his hatred for their sakes.
+
+In 1776 Alexander McGillivray was in his early thirties-the exact
+date of his birth is uncertain.* He had, we are told, the tall,
+sturdy, but spare physique of the Gael, with a countenance of
+Indian color though not of Indian cast. His overhanging brows
+made more striking his very large and luminous dark eyes. He bore
+himself with great dignity; his voice was soft, his manner
+gentle. He might have been supposed to be some Latin courtier but
+for the barbaric display of his dress and his ornaments. He
+possessed extraordinary personal magnetism, and his power
+extended beyond the Creek nation to the Choctaws and Chickasaws
+and the Southern Cherokees. He had long been wooed by the
+Louisiana authorities, but there is no evidence that he had made
+alliance with them prior to the Revolution.
+
+* Probably about 1741 or 1742. Some writers give 1739 and others
+1746. His father landed in Charleston, Pickett ("History of
+Alabama") says, in 1735, and was then only sixteen.
+
+
+Early in the war he joined the British, received a colonel's
+commission, and led his formidable Creeks against the people of
+Georgia. When the British were driven from the Back Countries,
+McGillivray, in his British uniform, went on with the war. When
+the British made peace, McGillivray exchanged his British uniform
+for a Spanish one and went on with the war. In later days, when
+he had forced Congress to pay him for his father's confiscated
+property and had made peace, he wore the uniform of an American
+Brigadier General; but he did not keep the peace, never having
+intended to keep it. It was not until he had seen the Spanish
+plots collapse and had realized that the Americans were to
+dominate the land, that the White Leader ceased from war and
+urged the youths of his tribe to adopt American civilization.
+
+Spent from hate and wasted with dissipation, he retired at last
+to the spot where Lachlan had set up his first Creek home. Here
+he lived his few remaining days in a house which he built on the
+site of the old ruined cabin about which still stood the little
+grove of apple trees his father had planted. He died at the age
+of fifty of a fever contracted while he was on a business errand
+in Pensacola. Among those who visited him in his last years, one
+has left this description of him: "Dissipation has sapped a
+constitution originally delicate and feeble. He possesses an
+atticism of diction aided by a liberal education, a great fund of
+wit and humor meliorated by a perfect good nature and
+politeness." Set beside that kindly picture this rough etching by
+James Robertson: "The biggest devil among them [the Spaniards] is
+the half Spaniard, half Frenchman, half Scotchman and altogether
+Creek scoundrel, McGillivray."
+
+How indefatigably McGillivray did his work we know from the
+bloody annals of the years which followed the British-American
+peace, when the men of the Cumberland and of Franklin were on the
+defensive continually. How cleverly Mire played his personal role
+we discover in the letters addressed to him by Sevier and
+Robertson. These letters show that, as far as words go at any
+rate, the founders of Tennessee were willing to negotiate with
+Spain. In a letter dated September 12, 1788, Sevier offered
+himself and his tottering State of Franklin to the Spanish King.
+This offer may have been made to gain a respite, or it may have
+been genuine. The situation in the Tennessee settlements was
+truly desperate, for neither North Carolina nor Congress
+apparently cared in the least what befell them or how soon. North
+Carolina indeed was in an anomalous position, as she had not yet
+ratified the Federal Constitution. If Franklin went out of
+existence and the territory which it included became again part
+of North Carolina, Sevier knew that a large part of the newly
+settled country would, under North Carolina's treaties, revert to
+the Indians. That meant ruin to large numbers of those who had
+put their faith in his star, or else it meant renewed conflict
+either with the Indians or with the parent State. The
+probabilities aria that Sevier hoped to play the Spaniards
+against the Easterners who, even while denying the Westerners'
+contention that the mountains were a "natural" barrier between
+them, were making of them a barrier of indifference. It would
+seem so, because, although this was the very aim of all Miro's
+activities so that, had he been assured of the sincerity of the
+offer, he must have grasped at it, yet nothing definite was done.
+And Sevier was presently informing Shelby, now in Kentucky, that
+there was a Spanish plot afoot to seize the western country.
+
+Miro had other agents besides McGillivray--who, by the way, was
+costing Spain, for his own services and those of four tribes
+aggregating over six thousand warriors, a sum of fifty-five
+thousand dollars a year. McGillivray did very well as
+superintendent of massacres; but the Spaniard required a
+different type of man, an American who enjoyed his country's
+trust, to bring the larger plan to fruition. Miro found that man
+in General James Wilkinson, lately of the Continental Army and
+now a resident of Kentucky, which territory Wilkinson undertook
+to deliver to Spain, for a price. In 1787 Wilkinson secretly took
+the oath of allegiance to Spain and is listed in the files of the
+Spanish secret service, appropriately, as "Number Thirteen." He
+was indeed the thirteenth at table, the Judas at the feast.
+Somewhat under middle height, Wilkinson was handsome, graceful,
+and remarkably magnetic. Of a good, if rather impoverished,
+Maryland family, he was well educated and widely read for the
+times. With a brilliant and versatile intellectuality and ready
+gifts as a speaker, he swayed men easily. He was a bold soldier
+and was endowed with physical courage, though when engaged in
+personal contests he seldom exerted it--preferring the red tongue
+of slander or the hired assassin's shot from behind cover. His
+record fails to disclose one commendable trait. He was
+inordinately avaricious, but love of money was not his whole
+motive force: he had a spirit so jealous and malignant that he
+hated to the death another man's good. He seemed to divine
+instantly wherein other men were weak and to understand the
+speediest and best means of suborning them to his own
+interests--or of destroying them.
+
+Wilkinson was able to lure a number of Kentuckians into the
+separatist movement. George Rogers Clark seriously disturbed the
+arch plotter by seizing a Spanish trader's store wherewith to pay
+his soldiers, whom Virginia had omitted to recompense. This act
+aroused the suspicions of the Spanish, either as to Number
+Thirteen's perfect loyalty or as to his ability to deliver the
+western country. In 1786, when Clark led two thousand men against
+the Ohio Indians in his last and his only unsuccessful campaign,
+Wilkinson had already settled himself near the Falls (Louisville)
+and had looked about for mischief which he might do for profit.
+Whether his influence had anything to do with what amounted
+virtually to a mutiny among Clark's forces is not ascertainable;
+but, for a disinterested onlooker, he was overswift to spread the
+news of Clark's debacle and to declare gleefully that Clark's sun
+of military glory had now forever set. It is also known that he
+later served other generals treacherously in Indian expeditions
+and that he intrigued with Mad Anthony Wayne's Kentucky troops
+against their commander.
+
+Spain did not wish to see the Indians crushed; and Wilkinson
+himself both hated and feared any other officer's prestige. How
+long he had been in foreign pay we can only conjecture, for,
+several years before he transplanted his activities to Kentucky,
+he had been one of a cabal against Washington. Not only his
+ambitions but his nature must inevitably have brought him to the
+death-battle with George Rogers Clark. As a military leader, Clark
+had genius, and soldiering was his passion. In nature, he was
+open, frank, and bold to make foes if he scorned a man's way as
+ignoble or dishonest. Wilkinson suavely set about scheming for
+Clark's ruin. His communication or memorial to the Virginia
+Assembly--signed by himself and a number of his friends
+--villifying Clark, ended Clark's chances for the commission in
+the Continental Army which he craved. It was Wilkinson who made
+public an incriminating letter which had Clark's signature
+attached and which Clark said he had never seen. It is to be
+supposed that Number Thirteen was responsible also for the
+malevolent anonymous letter accusing Clark of drunkenness and
+scheming which, so strangely, found its way into the Calendar of
+State Papers of Virginia.* As a result, Clark was censured by
+Virginia. Thereupon he petitioned for a Court of Inquiry, but
+this was not granted. Wilkinson had to get rid of Clark; for if
+Clark, with his military gifts and his power over men, had been
+elevated to a position of command under the smile of the
+Government, there would have been small opportunity for James W
+Wilkinson to lead the Kentuckians and to gather in Spanish gold.
+So the machinations of one of the vilest traitors who ever sold
+his country were employed to bring about the stultification and
+hence the downfall of a great servant.
+
+* See Thomas M. Greene's "The Spanish Conspiracy," p. 78,
+footnote. It is possible that Wilkinson's intrigues provide data
+for a new biography of Clark which may recast in some measure the
+accepted view of Clark at this period.
+
+
+Wilkinson's chief aids were the Irishmen, O'Fallon, Nolan, and
+Powers. Through Nolan, he also vended Spanish secrets. He sold,
+indeed, whatever and whomever he could get his price for. So
+clever was he that he escaped detection, though he was obliged to
+remove some suspicions. He succeeded Wayne as commander of the
+regular army in 1796. He was one of the commissioners to receive
+Louisiana when the Purchase was arranged in 1803. He was still on
+the Spanish pay roll at that time. Wilkinson's true record came
+to light only when the Spanish archives were opened to
+investigators.
+
+There were British agents also in the Old Southwest, for the
+dissatisfaction of the Western men inspired in Englishmen the
+hope of recovering the Mississippi Basin. Lord Dorchester,
+Governor of Canada, wrote to the British Government that he had
+been approached by important Westerners; but he received advice
+from England to move slowly. For complicity in the British
+schemes, William Blount, who was first territorial Governor of
+Tennessee and later a senator from that State, was expelled from
+the Senate.
+
+Surely there was never a more elaborate network of plots that
+came to nothing! The concession to Americans in 1796 of the right
+of navigation on the Mississippi brought an end to the scheming.
+
+In the same year Tennessee was admitted to the Union, and John
+Sevier was elected Governor Sevier's popularity was
+undiminished, though there were at this time some sixty thousand
+souls in Tennessee, many of whom were late comers who had not
+known him in his heyday. His old power to win men to him must
+have been as strong as ever, for it is recorded that he had only
+to enter a political meeting--no matter whose--for the crowd to
+cheer him and shout for him to "give them a talk."
+
+
+This adulation of Sevier still annoyed a few men who had
+ambitions of their own. Among these was Andrew Jackson, who had
+come to Jonesborough in 1788, just after the collapse of the
+State of Franklin. He was twenty-one at that time, and he is said
+to have entered Jonesborough riding a fine racer and leading
+another, with a pack of hunting dogs baying or nosing along after
+him. A court record dated May 12, 1788, avers that "Andrew
+Jackson, Esq. came into Court and produced a licence as an
+Attorney With A Certificate sufficiently Attested of his Taking
+the Oath Necessary to said office and Was admitted to Practiss as
+an Attorney in the County Courts." Jackson made no history in old
+Watauga during that year. Next year he moved to Nashville, and
+one year later, when the Superior Court was established (1790),
+he became prosecuting attorney.
+
+The feud between Jackson and Sevier began about the time that
+Tennessee entered the Union. Jackson, then twenty-nine, was
+defeated for the post of Major General of the Militia through the
+influence which Sevier exercised against him, and it seems that
+Jackson never forgave this opposition to his ambitions. By the
+close of Sevier's third term, however, in 1802, when Archibald
+Roane became Governor, the post of Major General was again vacant.
+Both Sevier and Jackson offered themselves for it, and Jackson
+was elected by the deciding vote of the Governor, the military
+vote having resulted in a tie. A strong current of influence had
+now set in against Sevier and involved charges against his honor.
+His old enemy Tipton was still active. The basis of the charges
+was a file of papers from the entry-taker's office which a friend
+of Tipton's had laid before the Governor; with an affidavit to
+the effect that the papers were fraudulent. Both the Governor and
+Jackson believed the charges. When we consider what system or
+lack of system of land laws and land entries obtained in Watauga
+and such: primitive communities--when a patch of corn sealed a
+right and claims were made by notching trees with tomahawks--we
+may imagine that a file from the land office might appear easily
+enough to smirch a landholder's integrity. The scandal was, of
+course, used in an attempt to ruin Sevier's candidacy for a
+fourth term as Governor and to make certain Roane's reflection.
+To this end Jackson bent all his energies but without success.
+Nolichucky Jack was elected, for the fourth time, as Governor of
+Tennessee.
+
+Not long after his inauguration, Sevier met Jackson in Knoxville,
+where Jackson was holding court. The charges against Sevier were
+then being made the subject of legislative investigation
+instituted by Tipton, and Jackson had published a letter in the
+Knoxville "Gazette" supporting them. At the sight of Jackson,
+Sevier flew into a rage, and a fiery altercation ensued. The two
+men were only restrained from leaping on each other by the
+intervention of friends. The next day Jackson sent Sevier a
+challenge which Sevier accepted, but with the stipulation that
+the duel take place outside the State. Jackson insisted on
+fighting in Knoxville, where the insult had been offered. Sevier
+refused. "I have some respect," he wrote, "for the laws of the
+State over which I have the honor to preside, although you, a
+judge, appear to have none." No duel followed; but, after some
+further billets-doux, Jackson published Sevier as "a base coward
+and poltroon. He will basely insult but has not the courage to
+repair the wound." Again they met, by accident, and Jackson
+rushed upon Sevier with his cane. Sevier dismounted and drew his
+pistol but made no move to fire. Jackson, thereupon, also drew
+his weapon. Once more friends interfered. It is presumable that
+neither really desired the duel. By killing Nolichucky Jack,
+Jackson would have ended his own career in Tennessee--if Sevier's
+tribe of sons had not, by a swifter means, ended it for him. At
+this date Jackson was thirty-six. Sevier was fifty-eight; and he
+had seventeen children.
+
+The charges against Sevier, though pressed with all the force
+that his enemies could bring to bear, came to nothing. He
+remained the Governor of Tennessee for another six years--the
+three terms in eight years allowed by the constitution. In 1811
+he was sent to Congress for the second time, as he had
+represented the Territory there twenty years earlier. He was
+returned again in 1813. At the conclusion of his term in 1815 he
+went into the Creek country as commissioner to determine the
+Creek boundaries, and here, far from his Bonnie Kate and his
+tribe, he died of fever at the age of seventy. His body was
+buried with full military honors at Tuckabatchee, one of the
+Creek towns. In 1889, Sevier's remains were removed to Knoxville
+and a high marble spire was raised above them.
+
+His Indian enemies forgave the chastisement he had inflicted on
+them and honored him. In times of peace they would come to him
+frequently for advice. And in his latter days, the chiefs would
+make state visits to his home on the Nolichucky River. "John
+Sevier is a good man"--so declared the Cherokee, Old Tassel,
+making himself the spokesman of history. Sevier had survived his
+old friend, co-founder with him of Watauga, by one year. James
+Robertson had died in 1814 at the age of seventy-two, among the
+Chickasaws, and his body, like that of his fellow pioneer, was
+buried in an Indian town and lay there until 1825, when it was
+removed to Nashville.
+
+
+What of the red tribes who had fought these great pioneers for
+the wide land of the Old Southwest and who in the end had
+received their dust and treasured it with honor in the little
+soil remaining to them? Always the new boundary lines drew closer
+in, and the red men's foothold narrowed before the pushing tread
+of the whites. The day came soon when there was no longer room
+for them in the land of their fathers. But far off across the
+great river there was a land the white men did not covet yet.
+Thither at last the tribes--Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and
+Creek--took their way. With wives and children, maids and youths,
+the old and the young, with all their goods, their cattle and
+horses, in the company of a regiment of American troops,
+they--like the white men who had superseded them--turned
+westward. In their faces also was the red color of the west, but
+not newly there. From the beginning of their race, Destiny had
+painted them with the hue of the brief hour of the dying sun.
+
+
+
+Chapter XI. Boone's Last Days
+
+One spring day in 1799, there might have been observed a great
+stir through the valley of the Kanawha. With the dawn, men were
+ahorse, and women, too. Wagons crowded with human freight wheeled
+over the rough country, and boats, large and small, were afloat
+on the streams which pour into the Great Kanawha and at length
+mingle with the Ohio at Point Pleasant, where the battle was
+fought which opened the gates of Kentucky.
+
+Some of the travelers poured into the little settlement at the
+junction of the Elk and the Kanawha, where Charleston now lies.
+Others, who had been later in starting or had come from a greater
+distance, gathered along the banks of the Kanawha. At last shouts
+from those stationed farthest up the stream echoed down the
+valley and told the rest that what they had come out to see was
+at hand.
+
+Several pirogues drifted into view on the river, now brightening
+in the sunshine. In the vessels were men and their families;
+bales and bundles and pieces of household furnishings, heaped to
+the gunwale; a few cattle and horses standing patiently. But it
+was for one man above all that the eager eyes of the settlers
+were watching, and him they saw clearly as his boat swung by--a
+tall figure, erect and powerful, his keen friendly blue eyes
+undimmed and his ruddy face unlined by time, though sixty-five
+winters had frosted his black hair.
+
+For a decade these settlers had known Daniel Boone, as
+storekeeper, as surveyor, as guide and soldier. They had eaten of
+the game he killed and lavishly distributed. And they too--like
+the folk of Clinch Valley in the year of Dunmore's War--had
+petitioned Virginia to bestow military rank upon their protector.
+"Lieutenant Colonel" had been his title among them, by their
+demand. Once indeed he had represented them in the Virginia
+Assembly and, for that purpose, trudged to Richmond with rifle
+and hunting dog. Not interested in the Legislature's proceedings,
+he left early in the session and tramped home again.
+
+But not even the esteem of friends and neighbors could hold the
+great hunter when the deer had fled. So Daniel Boone was now on
+his way westward to Missouri, to a new land of fabled herds and
+wide spaces, where the hunter's gun might speak its one word with
+authority and where the soul of a silent and fearless man might
+find its true abode in Nature's solitude. Waving his last
+farewells, he floated past the little groups--till their shouts
+of good will were long silenced, and his fleet swung out upon
+the Ohio.
+
+As Boone sailed on down the Beautiful River which forms the
+northern boundary of Kentucky, old friends and newcomers who had
+only heard his fame rode from far and near to greet and godspeed
+him on his way. Sometimes he paused for a day with them. Once at
+least--this, was in Cincinnati where he was taking on
+supplies--some one asked him why, at his age, he was leaving the
+settled country to dare the frontier once more.
+
+"Too crowded," he answered; "I want more elbow-room!"
+
+Boone settled at the Femme Osage Creek on the Missouri River,
+twenty-five miles above St. Charles, where the Missouri flows
+into the Mississippi. There were four other Kentucky families at
+La Charette, as the French inhabitants called the post, but these
+were the only Americans. The Spanish authorities granted Boone
+840 acres of land, and here Daniel built the last cabin home he
+was to erect for himself and his Rebecca.
+
+The region pleased him immensely. The governmental system, for
+instance, was wholly to his mind. Taxes were infinitesimal. There
+were no elections, assemblies, or the like. A single magistrate,
+or Syndic, decided all disputes and made the few regulations and
+enforced them. There were no land speculators, no dry-mouthed
+sons of the commercial Tantalus, athirst for profits. Boone used
+to say that his first years in Missouri were the happiest of his
+life, with the exception of his first long hunt in Kentucky.
+
+In 1800 he was appointed Syndic of the district of Femme Osage,
+which office he filled for four years, until Louisiana became
+American territory. He was held in high esteem as a magistrate
+because of his just and wise treatment of his flock, who brought
+him all their small bickerings to settle. He had no use for legal
+procedure, would not listen to any nice subtleties, saying that
+he did not care anything at all about the EVIDENCE, what he
+wanted was the TRUTH. His favorite penalty for offenders was the
+hickory rod "well laid on." Often he decided that both parties in
+a suit were equally to blame and chastised them both alike. When
+in March, 1804, the American Commissioner received Louisiana for
+the United States, Delassus, Lieutenant Governor of Upper
+Louisiana, reporting'on the various officials in the territory,
+wrote of the Femme Osage Syndic: "Mr. Boone, a respectable old
+man, just and impartial, he has already, since I appointed him,
+offered his resignation owing to his infirmities. Believing I
+know his probity, I have induced him to remain, in view of my
+confidence in him for the public good."*
+
+*Thwaites, "Daniel Boone. "To this and other biographies of
+Boone, cited in the Bibliographical Note at the end of this
+volume, the author is indebted for the material contained in this
+chapter.
+
+
+Daniel, no doubt supposing that a Syndic's rights were
+inviolable, had neglected to apply to the Governor at New Orleans
+for a ratification of his grant. He was therefore dispossessed.
+Not until 1810, and after he had enlisted the Kentucky
+Legislature in his behalf, did he succeed in inducing Congress to
+restore his land. The Kentucky Legislature's resolution was
+adopted because of "the many eminent services rendered by Colonel
+Boone in exploring and settling the western country, from which
+great advantages have resulted not only to the State but to the
+country in general, and that from circumstances over which he had
+no control he is now reduced to poverty; not having so far as
+appears an acre of land out of the vast territory he has been a
+great instrument in peopling." Daniel was seventy-six then; so it
+was late in the day for him to have his first experience of
+justice in the matter of land. Perhaps it pleased him, however,
+to hear that, in confirming his grant, Congress had designated
+him as "the man who has opened the way for millions of his
+fellow-men."
+
+The "infirmities" which had caused the good Syndic to seek relief
+from political cares must have been purely magisterial. The
+hunter could have been very little affected by them, for as soon
+as he was freed from his duties Boone took up again the silent
+challenge of the forest. Usually one or two of his sons or his
+son-in-law, Flanders Calloway, accompanied him, but sometimes his
+only companions were an old Indian and his hunting dog. On one of
+his hunting trips he explored a part of Kansas; and in 1814, when
+he was eighty, he hunted big game in the Yellowstone where again
+his heart rejoiced over great herds as in the days of his first
+lone wanderings in the Blue Grass country. At last, with the
+proceeds of these expeditions he was able to pay the debts he had
+left behind in Kentucky thirty years before. The story runs that
+Daniel had only fifty cents remaining when all the claims had
+been settled, but so contented was he to be able to look an
+honest man in the face that he was in no disposition to murmur
+over his poverty.
+
+When after a long and happy life his wife died in 1813, Boone
+lived with one or other of his sons* and sometimes with Flanders
+Calloway. Nathan Boone, with whom Daniel chiefly made his home,
+built what is said to have been the first stone house in
+Missouri. Evidently the old pioneer disapproved of stone houses
+and of the "luxuries" in furnishings which were then becoming
+possible to the new generation, for one of his biographers speaks
+of visiting him in a log addition to his son's house; and when
+Chester Harding, the painter, visited him in 1819 for the purpose
+of doing his portrait, he found Boone dwelling in a small log
+cabin in Nathan's yard. When Harding entered, Boone was broiling
+a venison steak on the end of his ramrod. During the sitting, one
+day, Harding asked Boone if he had ever been lost in the woods
+when on his long hunts in the wilderness.
+
+* Boone's son Nathan won distinction in the War of 1812 and
+entered the regular army, rising to the rank of Lieutenant
+Colonel. Daniel Morgan Boone is said to have been the first
+settler in Kansas (1827). One of Daniel's grandsons, bearing the
+name of Albert Gallatin Boone, was a pioneer of Colorado and was
+to the forefront in Rocky Mountain exploration. Another grandson
+was the scout, Kit Carson, who led Fremont to California.
+
+
+"No, I never got lost," Boone replied reflectively, "but I was
+BEWILDERED once for three days." Though now having reached the
+age of eighty-five, Daniel was intensely interested in California
+and was enthusiastic to make the journey thither next spring and
+so to flee once more from the civilization which had crept
+westward along his path. The resolute opposition of his sons,
+however, prevented the attempt.
+
+A few men who sought out Boone in his old age have left us brief
+accounts of their impressions. Among these was Audubon. "The
+stature and general appearance of this wanderer of the western
+forests," the naturalist wrote, "approached the gigantic. His
+chest was broad, and prominent; his muscular powers displayed
+themselves in every limb; his countenance gave indication of his
+great courage, enterprise and perseverance; and, when he spoke,
+the very motion of his lips brought the impression that whatever
+he uttered could not be otherwise than strictly true."
+
+Audubon spent a night under Boone's roof. He related afterwards
+that the old hunter, having removed his hunting shirt, spread his
+blankets on the floor and lay down there to sleep, saying that he
+found it more comfortable than a bed. A striking sketch of Boone
+is contained in a few lines penned by one of his earliest
+biographers: "He had what phrenologists would have considered a
+model head--with a forehead peculiarly high, noble and bold, thin
+compressed lips, a mild clear blue eye, a large and prominent
+chin and a general expression of countenance in which
+fearlessness and courage sat enthroned and which told the
+beholder at a glance what he had been and was formed to be." In
+criticizing the various portraits of Daniel, the same writer
+says: "They want the high port and noble daring of his
+countenance.... Never was old age more green, or gray hairs
+more graceful. His high, calm, bold forehead seemed converted by
+years into iron."
+
+Although we are indebted to these and other early chroniclers for
+many details of Boone's life, there was one event which none of
+his biographers has related; yet we know that it must have taken
+place. Even the bare indication of it is found only in the
+narrative of the adventures of two other explorers.
+
+It was in the winter of 1803 that these two men came to Boone's
+Settlement, as La Charette was now generally called. They had
+planned to make their winter camp there, for in the spring, when
+the Missouri rose to the flood, they and their company of
+frontiersmen were to take their way up that uncharted stream and
+over plains and mountains in quest of the Pacific Ocean. They
+were refused permission by the Spanish authorities to camp at
+Boone's Settlement; so they lay through the winter some forty
+miles distant on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, across
+from the mouth of the Missouri. Since the records are silent, we
+are free to picture as we choose their coming to the settlement
+during the winter and again in the spring, for we know that they
+came.
+
+We can imagine, for instance, the stir they made in La Charette
+on some sparkling day when the frost bit and the crusty snow sent
+up a dancing haze of diamond points. We can see the friendly
+French habitants staring after the two young leaders and their
+men--all mere boys, though they were also husky, seasoned
+frontiersmen--with their bronzed faces of English cast, as in
+their gayly fringed deerskins they swaggered through the hamlet
+to pay their respects to the Syndic. We may think of that
+dignitary as smoking his pipe before his fireplace, perhaps; or
+making out, in his fantastic spelling, a record of his primitive
+court--for instance, that he had on that day given Pierre a dozen
+hickory thwacks, "well laid on," for starting a brawl with
+Antoine, and had bestowed the same upon Antoine for continuing
+the brawl with Pierre. A knock at the door would bring the
+amiable invitation to enter, and the two young men would step
+across his threshold, while their followers crowded about the
+open door and hailed the old pathfinder.
+
+One of the two leaders--the dark slender man with a subtle touch
+of the dreamer in his resolute face--was a stranger; but the
+other, with the more practical mien and the shock of hair that
+gave him the name of Red Head among the tribes, Boone had known
+as a lad in Kentucky. To Daniel and this young visitor the
+encounter would be a simple meeting of friends, heightened in
+pleasure and interest somewhat, naturally, by the adventure in
+prospect. But to us there is something vast in the thought of
+Daniel Boone, on his last frontier, grasping the hands of William
+Clark and Meriwether Lewis.
+
+As for the rough and hearty mob at the door, Daniel must have
+known not a few of them well; though they had been children in
+the days when he and William Clark's brother strove for Kentucky.
+It seems fitting that the soldiers with this expedition should
+have come from the garrison at Kaskaskia; since the taking of
+that fort in 1778 by George Rogers Clark had opened the western
+way from the boundaries of Kentucky to the Mississippi. And among
+the young Kentuckians enlisted by William Clark were sons of the
+sturdy fighters of still an earlier border line, Clinch and
+Holston Valley men who had adventured under another Lewis at
+Point Pleasant. Daniel would recognize in these--such as Charles
+Floyd--the young kinsmen of his old-time comrades whom he had
+preserved from starvation in the Kentucky wilderness by the kill
+from his rifle as they made their long march home after Dunmore's
+War.
+
+In May, Lewis and Clark's pirogues ascended the Missouri and the
+leaders and men of the expedition spent another day in La
+Charette. Once again, at least, Daniel was to watch the westward
+departure of pioneers. In 1811, when the Astorians passed, one of
+their number pointed to the immobile figure of "an old man on the
+bank, who, he said, was Daniel Boone."
+
+Sometimes the aged pioneer's mind cast forward to his last
+journey, for which his advancing years were preparing him. He
+wrote on the subject to a sister, in 1816, revealing in a few
+simple lines that the faith whereby he had crossed, if not more
+literally removed, mountains was a fixed star, and that he looked
+ahead fearlessly to the dark trail he must tread by its single
+gleam. Autumn was tinting the forest and the tang he loved was in
+the air when the great hunter passed. The date of Boone's death
+is given as September 26, 1820. He was in his eighty-sixth year.
+Unburdened by the pangs of disease he went out serenely, by the
+gentle marches of sleep, into the new country.
+
+The convention for drafting the constitution of Missouri, in
+session at St. Louis, adjourned for the day, and for twenty days
+thereafter the members wore crape on their arms as a further mark
+of respect for the great pioneer. Daniel was laid by Rebecca's
+side, on the bank of Teugue Creek, about a mile from the Missouri
+River. In 1845, the Missouri legislators hearkened to
+oft-repeated pleas from Kentucky and surrendered the remains of
+the pioneer couple. Their bones lie now in Frankfort, the capital
+of the once Dark and Bloody Ground, and in 1880 a monument was
+raised over them.
+
+To us it seems rather that Kentucky itself is Boone's monument;
+even as those other great corn States, Illinois and Indiana, are
+Clark's. There, these two servants unafraid, who sacrificed
+without measure in the wintry winds of man's ingratitude, are
+each year memorialized anew; when the earth in summer--the season
+when the red man slaughtered--lifts up the full grain in the ear,
+the life giving corn; and when autumn smiles in golden peace over
+the stubble fields, where the reaping and binding machines have
+hummed a nation's harvest song.
+
+
+
+Bibliographical Note
+
+The Races And Their Migration
+
+C. A. Hanna, "The Scotch-Irish," 2 vols. New York, 1902. A very
+full if somewhat over-enthusiastic study.
+
+H. J. Ford, "The Scotch-Irish in America." Princeton, 1915.
+Excellent.
+
+A. G. Spangenberg, Extracts from his Journal of travels in North
+Carolina, 1752. Publication of the Southern History Association.
+Vol. I, 1897.
+
+A. B. Faust, "The German Element in the United States," 2 vols.
+(1909).
+
+J. P. MacLean, "An Historical Account of the Settlements of
+Scotch Highlanders in America" (1900).
+
+S. H. Cobb, "The Story of the Palatines" (1897).
+
+N. D. Mereness (editor), "Travels in the American Colonies." New
+York, 1916. This collection contains the diary of the Moravian
+Brethren cited in the first chapter of the present volume.
+
+Life In The Back Country
+
+Joseph Doddridge, "Notes on the Settlements and Indian Wars of
+the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania," from 1763 to
+1783. Albany, 1876. An intimate description of the daily life of
+the early settlers in the Back Country by one of themselves. J.
+F. D. Smyth, "Tour in the United States of America," 2 vols.
+London, 1784. Minute descriptions of the Back Country and
+interesting pictures of the life of the settlers; biased as to
+political views by Royalist sympathies.
+
+William H. Foote, "Sketches of North Carolina," New York, 1846.
+See Foote also for history of the first Presbyterian ministers in
+the Back Country. As to political history, inaccurate.
+
+Early History And Exploration
+
+J. S. Bassett (editor), "The Writings of Colonel William Byrd of
+Westover." New York, 1901. A contemporary record of early
+Virginia.
+
+Thomas Walker, "Journal of an Exploration in the Spring of the
+Year 1750." Boston, 1888. The record of his travels by the
+discoverer of Cumberland Gap.
+
+William M. Darlington (editor), "Christopher Gist's Journals."
+Pittsburgh, 1893. Contains Gist's account of his surveys for the
+Ohio Company, 1750.
+
+C. A. Hanna, "The Wilderness Trail," 2 vols. New York, 1911. An
+exhaustive work of research, with full accounts of Croghan and
+Findlay. See also Croghan's and Johnson's correspondence in vol.
+VII, New York Colonial Records.
+
+James Adair, "The History of the American Indians," etc. London,
+1775. The personal record of a trader who was one of the earliest
+explorers of the Alleghanies and of the Mississippi region east
+of the river; a many-sided work, intensely interesting.
+
+C. W. Alvord, "The Genesis of the Proclamation of 1763."
+Reprinted from Canadian Archives Report, 1906. A new and
+authoritative interpretation. In this connection see also the
+correspondence between Sir William Johnson and the Lords of Trade
+in vol. VII of New York Colonial Records.
+
+Justin Winsor, "The Mississippi Basin. The Struggle in America
+between England and France." Cambridge, 1895. Presents the
+results of exhaustive research and the coordination of facts by
+an historian of broad intellect and vision.
+
+"Colonial and State Records of North Carolina. 30 vols. The chief
+fountain source of the early history of North Carolina and
+Tennessee.
+
+W. H. Hoyt, "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence." New
+York, 1907. This book presents the view generally adopted by
+historians, that the alleged Declaration of May 20, 1775, is
+spurious.
+
+Justin Winsor (editor), "Narrative and Critical History of
+America." 8 vols. (1884-1889). Also "The Westward Movement.
+"Cambridge, 1897. Both works of incalculable value to the
+student.
+
+C. W. Alvord, "The Mississippi. Valley in British Politics." 2
+vols. Cleveland, 1917. A profound work of great value to
+students.
+
+Kentucky
+
+R. G. Thwaites and L. P. Kellogg (editors), "Documentary History
+of Dunmore's War," 1774. Compiled from the Draper Manuscripts in
+the library of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Madison, 1905. A
+collection of interesting and valuable documents with a
+suggestive, introduction.
+
+R. G. Thwaites, "Daniel Boone." New York, 1902. A short and
+accurate narrative of Boone's life and adventures compiled from
+the Draper Manuscripts and from earlier printed biographies.
+
+John P. Hale, "Daniel Boone, Some Facts and Incidents not
+Hitherto Published." A pamphlet giving an account of Boone in
+West Virginia. Printed at Wheeling, West Virginia. Undated.
+
+Timothy Flint, "The First White Man of the West or the Life and
+Exploits of Colonel Dan'l Boone." Cincinnati, 1854. Valuable only
+as regards Boone's later years.
+
+John S. C. Abbott, "Daniel Boone, the Pioneer of Kentucky." New
+York, 1872. Fairly accurate throughout.
+
+J. M. Peck, "Daniel Boone" (in Sparks, "Library of American
+Biography." Boston, 1847).
+
+William Henry Bogart. "Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky."
+New York, 1856.
+
+William Hayden English, "Conquest of the Country Northwest of the
+River Ohio, 1778-1783," and "Life of General George Rogers
+Clark," 2 vols. Indianapolis, 1896. An accurate and valuable work
+for which the author has made painstaking research among printed
+and unprinted documents. Contains Clark's own account of his
+campaigns, letters he wrote on public and personal matters, and
+also letters from contemporaries in defense of his reputation.
+
+Theodore Roosevelt, "The Winning of the West," 4 vols. New York,
+1889-1896. A vigorous and spirited narrative.
+
+Tennessee
+
+J. G. M. Ramsey, "The Annals of Tennessee." Charleston, 1853.
+John Haywood, "The Civil and Political History of the State of
+Tennessee." Nashville, 1891.
+
+(Reprint from 1828.) These works, with the North Carolina
+"Colonial Records," are the source books of early Tennessee. In
+statistics, such as numbers of Indians and other foes defeated by
+Tennessee heroes, not reliable. Incorrect as to causes of Indian
+wars during the Revolution. On this subject see letters and
+reports by John and Henry Stuart in North Carolina "Colonial
+Records," vol. X; and letters by General Gage and letters and
+proclamation by General Ethan Allen in American Archives, Fourth
+Series, vol. II, and by President Rutledge of South Carolina in
+North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X. See also Justin
+Winsor, "The Westward Movement."
+
+J. Allison, "Dropped Stitches in Tennessee History." Nashville,
+1897. Contains interesting matter relative to Andrew Jackson in
+his younger days as well as about other striking figures of the
+time.
+
+F. M. Turner, "The Life of General John Sevier." New York, 1910.
+A fairly accurate narrative of events in which Sevier
+participated, compiled from the "Draper Manuscripts."
+
+A. W. Putnam, "History of Middle Tennessee, or Life and Times of
+General James Robertson." Nashville, 1859. A rambling lengthy
+narrative containing some interesting material and much that is
+unreliable. Its worst fault is distortion through sentimentality,
+and indulgence in the habit of putting the author's rodomontades
+into the mouths of Robertson and other characters.
+
+J. S. Bassett, "Regulators of North Carolina," in Report of the
+American Historical Association, 1894.
+
+L. C. Draper, "King's Mountain and its Heroes." Cincinnati, 1881.
+The source book on this event. Contains interesting biographical
+material about the men engaged in the battle.
+
+
+French And Spanish Intrigues
+
+Henry Doniol, "Histoire de la participation de la France d
+l'etablissement des Etats-Unis d'Amerique," 5 vols. Paris,
+1886-1892. A complete exposition of the French and Spanish policy
+towards America. during the Revolutionary Period.
+
+Manuel Serrano y Sanz, "El brigadier Jaime Wilkinson y sus tratos
+con Espana para la independencia del Kentucky, anos 1787 a 1797."
+Madrid, 1915. A Spanish view of Wilkinson's intrigues with Spain,
+based on letters and reports in the Spanish Archives.
+
+Thomas Marshall Green, "The Spanish Conspiracy." Cincinnati,
+1891. A good local account, from American sources. The best
+material on this subject is found in Justin Winsor's "The
+Westward Movement and Narrative and Critical History" because
+there viewed against a broad historical background. See Winsor
+also for the Latin intrigues in Tennessee. For material on
+Alexander McGillivray see the American Archives and the Colonial
+Records of Georgia.
+
+Edward S. Corwin, "French Policy and the American Alliance of
+1778." Princeton, 1916. Deals chiefly with the commercial aspects
+of French policy and should be read in conjunction with Winsor,
+Jay, and Fitzmaurice's "Life of William, Earl of Shelburne." 3
+vols. London, 1875.
+
+John Jay, "On the Peace Negotiations of 1782-83 as Illustrated by
+the Secret Correspondence of France and England." New York, 1888.
+A paper read before the American Historical Association, May 23, 1887.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Gutenberg's Pioneers of the Old Southwest by Constance Skinner
+
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