The Winning of the West Volume I Part 19

16. Four hundred acres were gained at the price of $2.50 per 100 acres, by merely building a cabin and raising a crop of corn; and every settler with such a "cabin right" had likewise a preemption right to 1,000 acres adjoining, for a cost that generally approached forty dollars a hundred.

17. In Mr. Phelan's scholarly "History of Tennessee," pp. 202-204, etc., there is an admirably clear account of the way in which Tennessee inst.i.tutions (like those of the rest of the Southwest) have been directly and without a break derived from English inst.i.tutions; whereas many of those of New England are rather pre-Normanic revivals, curiously paralleled in England as it was before the Conquest.

18. Boon's deposition, July 29, 1795.

19. Mann Butler, p. 31.

20. Henderson's Journal. The beauty of the elm impressed him very greatly. According to the list of names eighteen, not seventeen, members were elected; but apparently only seventeen took part in the proceedings.

21. Henderson's Journal.

22. "Our game, the only support of life amongst many of us, and without which the country would be abandoned ere to-morrow." Henderson's address.

23. Journal of the Proceedings of the House of Delegates or Representatives of the Colony of Transylvania.

24. Possibly in 1775, certainly in 1776; MS. autobiography of Rev. Wm.

Hickman. In Durrett's library.

25. "Life of Rev. Charles Nerinckx," by Rev. Camillus P. Maes, Cincinnati, 1880, p. 67.

26. Smyth, p. 330.

27. Gov. James T. Morehead's "address" at Boonsborough, in 1840 (Frankfort, Ky., 1841).

28. _Do._, p. 51. Mrs. Boon, Mrs. Denton, Mrs. McGarry, Mrs. Hogan; all were from the North Carolina backwoods; their ancestry is shown by their names. They settled in Boonsborough and Harrodsburg.

29. Like Logan he was born in Pennsylvania, of Presbyterian Irish stock.

He had received a good education.

30. Morehead, p. 52.

31. Shelby's MS. autobiography, in Durrett's Library at Louisville.

32. These frontiersmen called a stream a "run," "branch," "creek," or "fork," but never a "brook," as in the northeast.

33. "History of Lexington," G. W. Ranck, Cincinnati, 1872, p. 19. The town was not permanently occupied till four years later.

CHAPTER XI.

IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION--THE SOUTHERN BACKWOODSMEN OVERWHELM THE CHEROKEES, 1776.

The great western drift of our people began almost at the moment when they became Americans, and ceased to be merely British colonists. They crossed the great divide which sundered the springs of the seaboard rivers from the sources of the western waters about the time that American citizens first publicly acted as American freemen, knit together by common ties, and with interests no longer akin to those of the mother country. The movement which was to make the future nation a continental power was begun immediately after the hitherto separate colonies had taken the first step towards solidification. While the communities of the sea-coast were yet in a fever heat from the uprising against the stamp tax, the first explorers were toiling painfully to Kentucky, and the first settlers were building their palisaded hamlets on the banks of the Watauga. The year that saw the first Continental Congress saw also the short, grim tragedy of Lord Dunmore's war. The early battles of the Revolution were fought while Boon's comrades were laying the foundations of their commonwealth.

Hitherto the two chains of events had been only remotely connected; but in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the struggle between the king and his rebellious subjects shook the whole land, and the men of the western border were drawn headlong into the full current of revolutionary warfare. From that moment our politics became national, and the fate of each portion of our country was thenceforth in some sort dependent upon the welfare of every other. Each section had its own work to do; the east won independence while the west began to conquer the continent. Yet the deeds of each were of vital consequence to the other.

Washington's Continentals gave the west its freedom; and took in return for themselves and their children a share of the land that had been conquered and held by the scanty bands of tall backwoodsmen.

The backwoodsmen, the men of the up-country, were, as a whole, ardent adherents of the patriot or American side. Yet there were among them many loyalists or tories; and these tories included in their ranks much the greatest portion of the vicious and the disorderly elements. This was the direct reverse of what obtained along portions of the seaboard, where large numbers of the peaceable, well-to-do people stood loyally by the king. In the up-country, however, the Presbyterian Irish, with their fellows of Calvinistic stock and faith, formed the back-bone of the moral and order-loving element; and the Presbyterian Irish[1] were almost to a man staunch and furious upholders of the Continental Congress. Naturally, the large bands of murderers, horse-thieves, and other wild outlaws, whom these grim friends of order hunted down with merciless severity, were glad to throw in their lot with any party that promised revenge upon their foes. But of course there were lawless characters on both sides; in certain localities where the crop of jealousies, always a rank backwoods growth, had been unusually large, and had therefore produced long-standing and bitter feuds,[2] the rival families espoused opposite sides from sheer vindictive hatred of one another. As a result, the struggle in the backwoods between tories and whigs, king's-men and congress-men,[3] did not merely turn upon the questions everywhere at stake between the American and British parties.

It was also in part a fight between the law-abiding and the lawless, and in part a slaking of savage personal animosities, wherein the borderers glutted their vengeance on one another. They exercised without restraint the right of private warfare, long abandoned in more civilized regions.

It was natural that such a contest should be waged with appalling ferocity.

Nevertheless this very ferocity was not only inevitable, but it was in a certain sense proper; or, at least, even if many of its manifestations were blamable, the spirit that lay behind them was right. The backwoodsmen were no sentimentalists; they were grim, hard, matter-of-fact men, engaged all their lives long in an unending struggle with hostile forces, both human and natural; men who in this struggle had acquired many unamiable qualities, but who had learned likewise to appreciate at their full value the inestimable virtues of courage and common-sense. The crisis demanded that they should be both strong and good; but, above all things, it demanded that they should be strong.

Weakness would have ruined them. It was needful that justice should stand before mercy; and they could no longer have held their homes, had they not put down their foes, of every kind, with an iron hand. They did not have many theories; but they were too genuinely liberty-loving not to keenly feel that their freedom was jeopardized as much by domestic disorder as by foreign aggression.

The tories were obnoxious under two heads: they were the allies of a tyrant who lived beyond the sea, and they were the friends of anarchy at home. They were felt by the frontiersmen to be criminals rather than ordinary foes. They included in their ranks the ma.s.s of men who had been guilty of the two worst frontier crimes--horse-stealing and murder; and their own feats were in the eyes of their neighbors in no way distinguishable from those of other horse-thieves and murderers.

Accordingly the backwoodsmen soon grew to regard toryism as merely another crime; and the courts sometimes executed equally summary justice on tory, desperado, and stock-thief, holding each as having forfeited his life.[4]

The backwoodsmen were engaged in a threefold contest. In the first place, they were occasionally, but not often, opposed to the hired British and German soldiers of a foreign king. Next, they were engaged in a fierce civil war with the tories of their own number. Finally, they were pitted against the Indians, in the ceaseless border struggle of a rude, vigorous civilization to overcome an inevitably hostile savagery.

The regular British armies, marching to and fro in the course of their long campaigns on the seaboard, rarely went far enough back to threaten the frontiersmen; the latter had to do chiefly with tories led by British chiefs, and with Indians instigated by British agents.

Soon after the conflict with the revolted colonists became one of arms as well as one of opinions the British began to rouse the Indian tribes to take their part. In the northwest they were at first unsuccessful; the memory of Lord Dunmore's war was still fresh in the minds of the tribes beyond the Ohio, and they remained for the most part neutral. The Shawnees continued even in 1776 to send in to the Americans white prisoners collected from among their outlying bands, in accordance with the terms of the treaty entered into on the Pickaway plains.[5]

But the southwestern Indians were not held in check by memories of recent defeat, and they were alarmed by the encroachments of the whites.

Although the Cherokees had regularly ceded to the Watauga settlers their land, they still continued jealous of them; and both Creeks and Cherokees were much irritated at the conduct of some of the lawless Georgian frontiersmen.[6] The colonial authorities tried to put a stop to this lawlessness, and one of the chief offenders was actually seized and hung in the presence of two Indians.[7] This had a momentary effect on the Creeks, and induced them for the time being to observe a kind of nominal neutrality, though they still furnished bodies of warriors to help the British and Cherokees.[8]

The latter, however, who were the nearest neighbors of the Americans, promptly took up the tomahawk at the bidding of the British. The royal agents among these southern Indians had so far successfully[9] followed the perfectly cold-blooded though perhaps necessary policy of exciting the tribes to war with one another, in order that they might leave the whites at peace; but now, as they officially reported to the British commander, General Gage, they deemed this course no longer wise, and, instead of fomenting, they endeavored to allay, the strife between the Chickasaws and Creeks, so as to allow the latter to turn their full strength against the Georgians.[10] At the same time every effort was made to induce the Cherokees to rise,[11] and they were promised gunpowder, blankets, and the like although some of the promised stores were seized by the Americans while being forwarded to the Indians.[12]

In short, the British were active and successful in rousing the war spirit among Creeks, Cherokees, Chocktaws, and Chickasaws, having numerous agents in all these tribes.[13] Their success, and the consequent ravages of the Indians, maddened the American frontiersmen upon whom the blow fell, and changed their resentment against the British king into a deadly and lasting hatred, which their sons and grandsons inherited. Indian warfare was of such peculiar atrocity that the employment of Indians as allies forbade any further hope of reconciliation. It is not necessary to accept the American estimate of the motives inspiring the act in order to sympathize fully with the horror and anger that it aroused among the frontiersmen. They saw their homes destroyed, their wives outraged, their children captured, their friends butchered and tortured wholesale by Indians armed with British weapons, bribed by British gold, and obeying the orders of British agents and commanders. Their stormy anger was not likely to be allayed by the consideration that Congress also had at first made some effort to enlist Indians in the patriot forces, nor were they apt to bear in mind the fact that the British, instead of being abnormally cruel, were in reality less so than our former French and Spanish opponents.[14]

Looking back it is easy to see that the Indians were the natural foes of the American people, and therefore the natural allies of the British Government. They had constantly to fear the advance of the Americans, while from the fur traders, Indian agents, and army officers who alone represented Britain, they had nothing but coveted treasures of every kind to expect. They seemed tools forged for the hands of the royal commanders, whose own people lay far beyond the reach of reprisals in kind; and it was perhaps too much to expect that in that age such tools should not be used.[15] We had less temptation to employ them, less means wherewith to pay them, and more cause to be hostile to and dread them; and moreover our skirts are not quite clear in the matter, after all, for we more than once showed a tendency to bid for their support.

But, after all is said, the fact remains that we have to deal, not with what, under other circ.u.mstances, the Americans _might_ have done, but with what the British actually _did;_ and for this there can be many apologies, but no sufficient excuse. When the commissioners to the southern Indians wrote to Lord George Germain, "we have been indefatigable in our endeavors to keep up a constant succession of parties of Indians to annoy the rebels," the writers must have well known, what the king's ministers should also have made it their business to know, that the war-parties whom they thus boasted of continually sending against the settlements directed their efforts mainly, indeed almost exclusively, not against bodies of armed men, but against the husbandmen as they unsuspectingly tilled the fields, and against the women and children who cowered helplessly in the log-cabins.[16] All men knew that the prisoners who fell into Indian hands, of whatever age or s.e.x, often suffered a fate hideous and revolting beyond belief and beyond description. Such a letter as that quoted above makes the advisers of King George the Third directly responsible for the manifold and frightful crimes of their red allies.

It is small wonder that such a contest should have roused in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the frontiersmen not only ruthless and undying abhorrence of the Indians, but also a bitterly vindictive feeling of hostility towards Great Britain; a feeling that was all-powerful for a generation afterwards, and traces of which linger even to the present day.

Moreover, the Indian forays, in some ways, damaged the loyalist cause.

The savages had received strict instructions not to molest any of the king's friends;[17] but they were far too intent on plunder and rapine to discriminate between whig and tory. Accordingly their ravages drove the best tories, who had at first hailed the Indian advance with joy, into the patriot ranks, making the frontier almost solidly whig; save for the refugees, who were willing to cast in their lot with the savages.[18]

While the Creeks were halting and considering, and while the Choctaws and Chickasaws were being visited by British emissaries, the Cherokees flung themselves on the frontier folk. They had been short of ammunition; but when the British agents sent them fifty horse-loads by a pack-train that was driven through the Creek towns, they no longer hesitated.[19] The agents showed very poor generalship in making them rise so early, when there were no British troops in the southern States, and when the Americans were consequently unhampered and free to deal with the Indians.[20] Had the rising been put off until a British army was in Georgia, it might well have proved successful.

The Cherokee villages stood in that cl.u.s.ter of high mountain chains which mark the ending of the present boundaries of Georgia and both Carolinas. These provinces lay east and southeast of them. Directly north were the forted villages of the Watauga pioneers, in the valley of the upper Tennessee, and beyond these again, in the same valley, the Virginian outpost settlements. Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia were alike threatened by the outbreak, while the Watauga people were certain to be the chief sufferers. The Cherokees were so near the settlements that their incursions were doubly dangerous. On the other hand, there was not nearly as much difficulty in dealing them a counter-blow as in the case of the northern Indians, for their towns lay thickly together and were comparatively easy of access. Moreover, they were not rated such formidable fighters. By comparing Lord Dunmore's war in 1774 with this struggle against the Cherokees in 1776, it is easy to see the difference between a contest against the northern and one against the southern tribes. In 1776 our Indian foes were more numerous than in 1774, for there were over two thousand Cherokee warriors--perhaps two thousand five hundred,--a.s.sisted by a few Creeks and tories; they were closer to the frontier, and so their ravages were more serious; but they did not prove such redoubtable foes as Cornstalk's warriors, their villages were easier reached, and a more telling punishment was inflicted.

The Cherokees had been showing signs of hostility for some time. They had murdered two Virginians the previous year;[21] and word was brought to the settlements, early in the summer of '76, that they were undoubtedly preparing for war, as they were mending guns, making moccasins and beating flour for the march.[22] In June their ravages began.[23] The Otari, or Overhill Cherokees, had sent runners to the valley towns, asking their people to wait until all were ready before marching, that the settlements might be struck simultaneously; but some of the young braves among the lower towns could not be restrained, and in consequence the outlying settlers of Georgia and the Carolinas were the first to be a.s.sailed.

The main attack was made early in July, the warriors rushing down from their upland fastnesses in fierce and headlong haste, the different bands marching north, east, and southeast at the same moment. From the Holston to the Tugelou, from southwestern Virginia to northwestern Georgia, the back-county settlements were instantly wrapped in the sudden horror of savage warfare.

The Watauga people, the most exposed of all, received timely warning from a friendly squaw,[24] to whom the whites ever after showed respect and grat.i.tude. They at once began to prepare for the stroke; and in all the western world of woodsmen there were no men better fitted for such a death grapple. They still formed a typical pioneer community; and their number had been swelled from time to time by the arrival of other bold and restless spirits. Their westernmost settlement this year was in Carter's valley; where four men had cleared a few acres of corn-land, and had hunted buffalo for their winter's meat.[25]

As soon as they learned definitely that the Otari warriors, some seven hundred in number, were marching against them, they took refuge in their wooden forts or stations. Among the most important of these were the one at Watauga, in which Sevier and Robertson held command, and another known as Baton's Station, placed just above the forks of the Holston.[26] Some six miles from the latter, near the Long Island or Big Island of the Holston, lay quite a large tract of level land, covered with an open growth of saplings, and known as the Island flats.

The Indians were divided into several bands; some of their number crossed over into Carter's valley, and after ravaging it, pa.s.sed on up the Clinch. The settlers at once gathered in the little stockades; those who delayed were surprised by the savages, and were slain as they fled, or else were captured, perhaps to die by torture,--men, women, and children alike. The cabins were burnt, the grain destroyed, the cattle and horses driven off, and the sheep and hogs shot down with arrows; the Indians carried bows and arrows for this express purpose, so as to avoid wasting powder and lead. The bolder war-parties, in their search for scalps and plunder, penetrated into Virginia a hundred miles beyond the frontier,[27] wasting the country with tomahawk and brand up to the Seven-Mile Ford. The roads leading to the wooden forts were crowded with settlers, who, in their mortal need of hurry, had barely time to s.n.a.t.c.h up a few of the household goods, and, if especially lucky, to mount the women and children on horses; as usual in such a flight, there occurred many deeds of cowardly selfishness, offset by many feats of courage and self-sacrifice. Once in the fort, the backwoodsmen often banded into parties, and sallied out to fall on the Indians. Sometimes these parties were worsted; at other times they overcame their foes either by ambush or in fair fight. One such party from the Wolf Hills fort killed eleven Indian warriors; and on their return they hung the scalps of their slain foes, as trophies of triumph, from a pole over the fort gate.[28] They were Bible-readers in this fort, and they had their Presbyterian minister with them, having organized a special party to bring in the books he had left in his cabin; they joined in prayer and thanksgiving for their successes; but this did not hinder them from scalping the men they killed. They were too well-read in the merciless wars of the Chosen People to feel the need of sparing the fallen; indeed they would have been most foolish had they done so; for they were battling with a heathen enemy more ruthless and terrible than ever was Canaanite or Philistine. The two largest of the invading Indian bands[29] moved, one by way of the mountains, to fall on the Watauga fort and its neighbors, and the other, led by the great war chief, Dragging Canoe, to lay waste the country guarded by Eaton's Station.

The white scouts--trained woodsmen, whose lives had been spent in the chase and in forest warfare--kept the commanders or headmen of the forts well informed of the Indian advance. As soon as it was known what part was really threatened, runners were sent to the settlements near by, calling on the riflemen to gather at Eaton's Station; whither they accordingly came in small bodies, under their respective militia captains.[30]

No man was really in command; the senior captain exercised a vague kind of right of advice over the others, and the latter in turn got from their men such obedience as their own personal influence was able to procure. But the levy, if disorderly, was composed of excellent marksmen and woodsmen, sinewy, hardy, full of fight, and accustomed to act together. A council was held, and it was decided not to stay cooped up in the fort, like turkeys in a pen, while the Indians ravaged the fields and burnt the homesteads, but to march out at once and break the shock by a counter-stroke.

Accordingly, on the morning of the twentieth of July, they filed out of the fort, one hundred and seventy strong, and bent their steps towards the Island Flats. Well versed in woodland warfare, the frontier riflemen marched as well as fought on a system of their own, much more effective for this purpose than the discipline of European regulars. The men of this little levy walked strung out in Indian file, in two parallel lines,[31] with scouts in front, and flankers on each side. Marching thus they could not be surprised, and were ready at any moment to do battle with the Indians, in open order and taking shelter behind the trees; while regulars, crowded together, were helpless before the savages whom the forest screened from view, and who esteemed it an easy task to overcome any number of foes if gathered in a huddle.[32]