Stories of Old Kentucky Part 5

The boys and girls in the early days of Kentucky usually married very young; and a wedding was an event so important that every one in the entire community felt a personal interest in the affair. The ceremony was usually performed just before noon.

On the morning of the appointed day the groom and his attendants met at the home of his father and proceeded to the home of the bride. The gentlemen wore only clothes that were homemade; linsey shirts, leather breeches and leggins, moccasins or shoepacks, and caps of mink or racc.o.o.n skin with the tail hanging down the back completed their costume.

The ladies were beautiful in linsey-woolsey, coa.r.s.e shoes, or moccasins embroidered with beads and quills, and buckskin gloves. Just after the ceremony there was a feast of venison and bear, beef and pork, turkeys and geese, potatoes and cabbage, cornmeal mush with milk and maple sugar, ash cake and dodgers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "As soon as dinner was over, the dancing began."]

As soon as dinner was over the dancing began and lasted not only through the afternoon but through the night until dawn. The square dance, the reel, and the jig were the figures that gave most joy to their flying feet.

Either the next day, or very soon thereafter, the neighbors helped the newly married couple "settle." A party of choppers felled and trimmed the trees, others hauled them to the site, while others made the clapboards for the roof, and puncheons for floor and door. If any windows were made, they were covered with oiled doeskin and had thick shutters. No one had windows filled with gla.s.s in those days.[2]

The neighbors helped not only to raise and cover the house, but to make the furniture also. A table was made from a slab of wood with four legs driven into auger holes; some three-legged stools were made of like material. Sticks driven into auger holes in the wall supported clapboard shelves where various articles were kept. A few pegs were likewise driven in the wall where the wearing apparel of both men and women was hung. A pair of buck horns or two small forks fastened to the logs held the ever trusty rifle and shot pouch.

Nor did they stop here. Through a fork placed with its lower end in a hole in the floor and its upper end fastened to a joist, they placed poles with their ends through cracks in the walls. Over these, clapboards were laid. When the whole had been covered with skins of bear and deer, this made a most comfortable bed.

At these house raisings, log rollings, and harvest homes there was much merriment coupled with the hard labor. Any man who failed to perform his part of the work was dubbed "Lazy Lawrence" and was denied similar help when he needed it.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] There is a story of a little boy who, upon seeing a house with gla.s.s windows for the first time, rushed home crying, "O Ma, there is a house down town with specs on!"

PIONEER CHILDREN

The boys and girls of to-day with all the comforts and luxuries surrounding them often pity the pioneer children and wonder how they spent their time. However, they doubtless were as happy and ambitious as we are. The boys early learned to chop, to grub bushes up by the roots, maul rails, trap turkeys, tree c.o.o.ns, and shoot a rifle. When severe weather kept them in the fort, there were not only the duties of making brooms and brushes but also the wrestling, leaping, and shooting matches where each strove to excel the other. How proud was the youth when he could "bark a squirrel," that is, shoot off the bark so near the squirrel that the force killed it, without inflicting a wound.

The girls also had their work and play. They watched the cattle to keep them from straying too far away, they hunted flat rocks on which to bake "journey cakes," they helped to pound hominy, bring water, gather wild nettles, and a.s.sisted in soap making, sugaring, sewing, candle molding, and wool carding. There were likewise near-by excursions for hickory nuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, grapes, pawpaws, honey locusts, hackberries, huckleberries, blackberries, dewberries, and raspberries.

But you say, "All this sounds like fun. Boy Scouts and Camp-Fire Girls do many of these things and count them sport. The boys and girls of the early days in Kentucky must have had one long holiday with no thought of school or school work." There you are mistaken, for scarcely had the first women and children come to Harrodstown when Mrs. William Coomes taught in the fort, in 1776, the first school in Kentucky. In 1777, John May taught at McAfee's Station, and two years later Joseph Doniphan was teaching at Boonesborough.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "There were excursions for nuts and berries."]

So these boys and girls of those far-away days, although they had no well-warmed, well-lighted, well-ventilated schoolhouses; although their teachers were not always so scholarly and cultured as one could wish; although often in the earliest days they had no attractive textbooks, and their only means of learning to read, write, and calculate was from copies set by their teachers; although instead of paper they used smooth boards on which to write, with the juice of the oak b.a.l.l.s for ink; although when they could read there were no absorbing storybooks,--yet they made progress and perhaps studied as hard as some children of to-day.

HOW THE PIONEERS MADE CHANGE

We of to-day, with half dollars, quarter dollars, dimes, nickels, and pennies, often find it difficult to "make change." Still more difficult was it for the early settlers to do so.

As the Indians used wampum and the early settlers of Virginia, tobacco, so the pioneers of Kentucky used the skins of wild animals as their first currency. While immigrants continued to come to this region, Spanish silver dollars came gradually into circulation. Still there was no small change.

As "Necessity is the mother of invention," our forefathers actually made change by cutting the dollar into four equal parts, each worth twenty-five cents. These were again divided, each part worth twelve and one half cents, called bits. People sometimes became careless in the work of making change and often cut the dollar into five "quarters" or into ten "eighths." On account of the wedge shape of these pieces of cut money, they were called "sharp shins."

If change was needed for a smaller sum than twelve and one half cents, merchants gave pins, needles, writing paper, and such things.

This cut silver gradually found its way back to the mint for recoinage, usually to the loss of the last owner. As late as 1806, a business house in Philadelphia received over one hundred pounds of cut silver, brought on by a Kentucky merchant, which was sent on a dray to the United States Mint for recoinage.

A WOMAN'S WILL

"Where there is a will, there is a way" is an oft-quoted proverb, and the first white woman of whom we have any record of entering Kentucky proved it true. In 1756 Mrs. Mary Draper Inglis, her two small sons, and a sister-in-law, Mrs. Draper, were taken from their homes in Virginia by the Shawnee Indians and carried some distance down the Kanawha, where they halted a few days to make salt, thence to the Indian village at the mouth of the Scioto, which is the site now of Portsmouth, Ohio. Mrs.

Inglis won her way into the favor of the savages by making shirts of material that French traders had brought from Detroit. She was soon held in such high esteem by her captors that she was not subjected to the peril of running the gantlet, though a greater grief was put upon her,--that of being separated from her two sons at the division of the prisoners.

After spending a few weeks at the mouth of the Scioto, a number of the savages proceeded to Big Bone Lick, over a hundred miles away. With them they took Mrs. Inglis and an old Dutch lady who had been in captivity for a long while. Not being daunted by fear or distance from home, these pioneer women planned and effected an escape. On the pretext of gathering grapes they started from camp one afternoon with only a blanket, knife, and tomahawk.

With eager feet they reached the Ohio, and followed its windings, until after five days' journeying they found themselves opposite the mouth of the Scioto. Fortune favored them, for a horse was grazing there and also some corn was close at hand. Although near Indian villages, they loaded the horse with corn and pressed on to the mouth of the Big Sandy, but were compelled to go farther up that stream to effect a crossing. After going some distance, the women crossed on driftwood, but the horse, falling among the logs, was finally abandoned, and with only a scanty store of corn they pursued their dangerous journey.

[Ill.u.s.tration: They crossed the river on driftwood.]

Had it not been for walnuts, grapes, and pawpaws, hunger would have stayed their steps. Even with these the Dutch woman was not long satisfied and, driven to desperation, she threatened and attempted the life of Mrs. Inglis. But the latter succeeded in escaping from her frantic companion and, finding a canoe, took a broad splinter for a paddle and reached the Ohio sh.o.r.e. When morning dawned and the Dutch woman saw Mrs. Inglis on the other bank, she pleaded with her to return to her rescue. But fearing a repet.i.tion of her late fury, Mrs. Inglis turned a deaf ear to entreaties and hastened, as fast as her exhausted condition permitted, towards home. At last, after more than forty days of dire suffering and dest.i.tution, she reached a cabin where careful attention soon restored her to health and from there she was taken to a near-by fort and restored to her husband. A party went in search of the Dutch woman and brought her safely to the settlement. One of the little sons died soon after being separated from his mother, while thirteen years elapsed before the father found and rescued the other.

WHEN THE WOMEN BROUGHT THE WATER

The women of Kentucky have never been known to falter whatever demand duty might make upon them; yet at no period in the history of our commonwealth has there been any more severe test of the courage of her daughters than occurred on the morning of August 15, 1782, at a point about five miles northeast of Lexington on the present road from that city to Maysville.

This post had been settled in 1779 by four brothers from North Carolina, named Bryan, hence the name "Bryan's Station." About forty cabins had been "placed in parallel lines and connected by strong palisades." This fort and the station at Lexington had been selected as special places on which to visit the wrath and retaliation for ma.s.sacre of some Indians upon the Sandusky; and as the savages and their renegade allies had been successful, they were easily incited to a general attack and inspired with the idea of regaining their hunting grounds and driving the paleface across the Alleghenies.

Simon Girty, the notorious renegade, was at the height of his glory when, in response to requests of runners sent to various tribes, there began at Chillicothe, August 1, 1782, a gathering of Cherokees, Shawnees, Miamis, Wyandots, and Potawatamis.

Ere the march began, the party numbered nearly six hundred warriors.

With great secrecy and rapidity they descended the Little Miami, crossed the Ohio, and reached central Kentucky. In the hope of drawing away the fighting forces from the stations warned, Girty sent a party of Wyandots, who hara.s.sed Hoy's Station, and captured two boys. Captain Holder, gathering what men he could, pushed forward in pursuit, but was defeated August 12, at Upper Blue Licks. When runners spread the news to the various forts, the call to rally to Holder's a.s.sistance was as quickly responded to as if it had been imperative.

Girty knew of the common custom of rallying to the needs of neighboring settlements, so he expected to find a defenseless fort at Bryan's Station when he and his band of savages reached there on the night of the 14th. Instead, all within seemed awake and alert; lights were shining and fires burning brightly. Girty at once suspected that his coming had been heralded. The truth was that it was the preparation for the morrow's march that caused such activity; not one suspected that such a horde of murderous savages was so near. So when at the early dawn the men started from their fort, they were much surprised at a heavy fire from ambuscade, but they were so near the gates that they soon retreated within and prepared for a stormy siege. Couriers carried the news of the attack to Lexington, Todd's, St. Asaph's, and Boonesborough.

While awaiting reinforcements from these stations, the sixty backwoodsmen prepared to protect themselves and their families.

Knowing the siege would be severe and perhaps long, they began to consider seriously the question of securing water; for, by an oversight, the men who built the fort placed it at some distance from the spring which supplied their wants. As cunning as the Indians, and equally as strategic, were the men opposed to them. Instinctively they felt that the savages were ambushed near the spring expecting the men to come for a supply of water, when it would be the work of only a very few moments to fire upon them, and through the gateway gain admittance to the fort.

After talking over the matter the men within the fort called together all the women, disclosed their suspicions concerning the location of a part of the enemy, but told them they felt no violence would be offered women and urged them to go in a body to bring water. The women hesitated and said that they were not bullet-proof and that savages scalped alike the male and the female. In reply the men said that the women usually carried the water, and that if the men should go, the Indians would know that their ambuscade had been discovered and would at once rush upon the whites and gain admittance to the fort; but if the women went as usual, the savages would think their hiding secure and would longer delay the attack. The women knew that water they must have, if the garrison withstood the inevitable siege; they also knew that the views of the men were correct and that the request for them to bring the water arose from no desire on the part of their husbands and brothers, sons and fathers, to shirk duty or shift danger.

So when the Spartan-like mothers agreed to the plan, the younger women followed their example, and everyone, matron and maid, with pail in hand or piggin on head, marched down to the spring, while they "feared each bush" an Indian. Though vainly striving to appear calm, when returning

"The way seemed long before them, And their hearts outran their footsteps";

so the nearer the gate they came, the quicker was their walk until it finally ended in a very brisk run and very few entered the fort with full vessels. Tradition says that as the last entered so hastily and spilled the water so freely the Indians broke into a laugh. But the women had "been tried and not found wanting"; they had proved themselves to be true helpmates of those st.u.r.dy men who were striving to gain a home in the western wilds.