First Published in 1888

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Owen Corrigan

Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-384-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-193-5

Printed in the United States of America.

THIS BOOK

IS DEDICATED, WITH HIS PERMISSION

TO

FRANCIS PARKMAN

TO WHOM AMERICANS WHO FEEL A PRIDE IN THE

PIONEER HISTORY OF THEIR COUNTRY

ARE SO GREATLY INDEBTED

“O strange New World that yit wast never young,

Whose youth from thee by gripin’ need was wrung,

Brown foundlin’ o’ the woods, whose baby-bed

Was prowled roun’ by the Injun’s cracklin’ tread,

And who grew’st strong thru shifts an’ wants an’ pains,

Nursed by stern men with empires in their brains,

Who saw in vision their young Ishmel strain

With each hard hand a vassal ocean’s mane;

Thou skilled by Freedom and by gret events

To pitch new states ez Old World men pitch tents,

Thou taught by fate to know Jehovah’s plan,

Thet man’s devices can’t unmake a man.

… … … … …

Oh, my friends, thank your God, if you have one, that he

’Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea,

Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,

By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs.”

—LOWELL

THE WINNING OF THE WEST

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

THE SPREAD OF ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES

Preface

Introduction

I. The Spread of the English-Speaking Peoples

II. The French of the Ohio Valley, 1763–1775

III. The Appalachian Confederacies, 1765–1775

IV. The Algonquins of the Northwest, 1769–1774

V. The Backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies, 1769–1774

VI. Boone and the Long Hunters; and their Hunting in No-Man’s-Land, 1769–1774

VII. Sevier, Robertson, and the Watauga Commonwealth, 1769–1774

VIII. Lord Dunmore’s War, 1774

APPENDICES

Appendix A—To Chapter IV

Appendix B—To Chapter V

Appendix C—To Chapter VI

Appendix D—To Chapter VI

Appendix E—To Chapter VII

IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION

I. The Battle of the Great Kanawha; and Logan’s Speech, 1774

II. Boone and the Settlement of Kentucky, 1775

III. In the Current of the Revolution—The Southern Backwoodsmen Overwhelm the Cherokees, 1776

APPENDIX

Appendix A—To Chapter I

BOOK TWO

IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION (CONTINUED)

IV. Growth and Civil Organization of Kentucky, 1776

V. The War in the Northwest, 1777–1778

VI. Clark’s Conquest of the Illinois, 1778

VII. Clark’s Campaign Against Vincennes, 1779

VIII. Continuance of the Struggle in Kentucky and the Northwest, 1779–1781

APPENDICES

Appendix B—To Chapter V

Appendix C—To Chapter VII

Appendix D—To Chapter VIII

Appendix E—To Chapter VIII

THE WAR IN THE NORTHWEST

I. The Moravian Massacre, 1779-1782

II. The Administration of the Conquered French Settlements, 1779–1783

III. Kentucky Until the End of the Revolution, 1782–1783

IV. The Holston Settlements, 1777–1779

V. King’s Mountain, 1780

VI. The Holston Settlements to the End of the Revolution, 1781–1783

APPENDICES

Appendix A—To Chapter III

Appendix B—To Chapter III

Appendix C—To Chapter VI

BOOK 3

THE WAR IN THE NORTHWEST (CONTINUED)

VII. Robertson Founds the Cumberland Settlement, 1779–1780

VIII. The Cumberland Settlements to the Close of the Revolution, 1781–1783

IX. What the Westerners had Done During the Revolution, 1783

APPENDICES

Appendix D—To Chapter VIII

Appendix E—To Chapter IX

Appendix F—To Chapter X

THE INDIAN WARS, 1784–1787

Preface

I. The Inrush of Settlers, 1784–1787

II. The Indian Wars, 1784–1787

III. The Navigation of the Mississippi; Separatist Movements and Spanish Intrigues, 1784–1788

IV. The State of Franklin, 1784–1788

V. Kentucky’s Struggle for Statehood, 1784–1790

ST. CLAIR AND WAYNE

I. The Northwest Territory; Ohio, 1787–1790

II. The War in the Northwest, 1787–1790

BOOK FOUR

ST. CLAIR AND WAYNE (CONTINUED)

III. The Southwest Territory; Tennessee, 1788–1790

IV. St. Clair’s Defeat, 1791

V. Mad Anthony Wayne; and the Fight of the Fallen Timbers, 1792–1795

LOUISIANA AND AARON BURR

Preface

I. Tennessee Becomes a State, 1791–1796

II. Intrigues and Land Speculations—The Treaties of Jay and Pinckney, 1793–1797

III. The Men of the Western Waters, 1798–1802

IV. The Purchase of Louisiana; and Burr’s Conspiracy, 1803–1807

V. The Explorers of the Far West, 1804–1807

APPENDIX

THE WINNING OF THE WEST

PREFACE

MUCH OF the material on which this work is based is to be found in the archives of the American Government, which date back to 1774, when the first Continental Congress assembled. The earliest sets have been published complete up to 1777, under the title of “American Archives,” and will be hereafter designated by this name. These early volumes contain an immense amount of material, because in them are to be found memoranda of private individuals and many of the public papers of the various Colonial and State governments, as well as those of the Confederation. The documents from 1789 on—no longer containing any papers of the separate States—have also been gathered and printed under the heading of “American State Papers;” by which term they will be hereafter referred to.

The mass of public papers coming in between these two series, and covering the period extending from 1776 to 1789, have never been published, and in great part have either never been examined or else have been examined in the most cursory manner. The original documents are all in the Department of State at Washington, and for convenience will be referred to as “State Department MSS.” They are bound in two or three hundred large volumes; exactly how many I can not say, because, though they are numbered, yet several of the numbers themselves contain from two or three to ten or fifteen volumes apiece. The volumes to which reference will most often be made are the following:

No. 15. Letters of Huntington.

No. 16. Letters of the Presidents of Congress.

No. 18. Letter-Book B.

No. 20. Vol. 1. Reports of Committees on State Papers.

No. 27. Reports of Committees on the War Office. 1776 to 1778.

No. 30. Reports of Committees.

No. 32. Reports of Committees of the States and of the Week.

No. 41. Vol. 3. Memorials E. F. G. 1776-1788.

No. 41. Vol. 5. Memorials K. L. 1777-1789.

No. 50. Letters and papers of Oliver Pollock. 1777-1792.

No. 51. Vol. 2. Intercepted Letters. 1779-1782.

No. 56. Indian affairs.

No. 71. Vol. 1. Virginia State Papers.

No. 73. Georgia State Papers.

No. 81. Vol. 2. Reports of Secretary John Jay.

No. 120. Vol. 2. American Letters.

No. 124. Vol. 3. Reports of Jay.

No. 125. Negotiation Book.

No. 136. Vol. 1. Reports of Board of Treasury.

No. 136. Vol. 2. Reports of Board of Treasury.

No. 147. Vol. 2. Reports of Board of War.

No. 147. Vol. 5. Reports of Board of War.

No. 147. Vol. 6. Reports of Board of War.

No. 148. Vol. 1. Letters from Board of War.

No. 149. Vol. 1. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at War.

No. 149. Vol. 2. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at War.

No. 149. Vol. 3. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at War.

No. 150. Vol. 1. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War.

No. 150. Vol. 2. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War.

No. 150. Vol. 3. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War.

No. 152. Vol. 11. Letters of General Washington.

No. 163. Letters of Generals Clinton, Nixon, Nicola, Morgan, Harmar, Muhlenberg.

No. 169. Vol. 9. Washington’s Letters.

No. 180. Reports of Secretary of Congress.

Besides these numbered volumes, the State Department contains others, such as Washington’s letter-book, marked War Department 1792, ’3, ’4, ’5. There are also a series of numbered volumes of “Letters to Washington,” Nos. 33 and 49, containing reports from Geo. Rogers Clark. The Jefferson papers, which are likewise preserved here, are bound in several series, each containing a number of volumes. The Madison and Monroe papers, also kept here, are not yet bound; I quote them as the Madison MSS. and the Monroe MSS.

My thanks are due to Mr. W. C. Hamilton, Asst. Librarian, for giving me every facility to examine the material.

At Nashville, Tennessee, I had access to a mass of original matter in the shape of files of old newspapers, of unpublished letters, diaries, reports, and other manuscripts. I was given every opportunity to examine these at my leisure, and indeed to take such as were most valuable to my own home. For this my thanks are especially due to Judge John M. Lea, to whom, as well as to my many other friends in Nashville, I shall always feel under a debt on account of the unfailing courtesy with which I was treated. I must express my particular acknowledgments to Mr. Lemuel R. Campbell. The Nashville manuscripts, etc., of which I have made most use are the following:

The Robertson MSS., comprising two large volumes, entitled the “Correspondence, etc., of Gen’l James Robertson,” from 1784 to 1814. They belong to the library of Nashville University; I had some difficulty in finding the second volume, but finally succeeded.

The Campbell MSS., consisting of letters and memoranda to and from different members of the Campbell family who were prominent in the Revolution; dealing for the most part with Lord Dunmore’s war, the Cherokee wars, the battle of King’s Mountain, land speculations, etc. They are in the possession of Mr. Lemuel R. Campbell, who most kindly had copies of all the important ones sent me, at great personal trouble.

Some of the Sevier and Jackson papers, the original MS. diaries of Donelson on the famous voyage down the Tennessee and up the Cumberland, and of Benj. Hawkins while surveying the Tennessee boundary, memoranda of Thos. Washington, Overton, and Dunham, the earliest files of the Knoxville Gazette, from 1791 to 1795, etc. These are all in the library of the Tennessee Historical Society.

For original matter connected with Kentucky, I am greatly indebted to Col. Reuben T. Durrett, of Louisville, the founder of the “Filson Club,” which has done such admirable historical work of late years. He allowed me to work at my leisure in his library, the most complete in the world on all subjects connected with Kentucky history. Among other matter, he possesses the Shelby MSS., containing a number of letters to and from, and a dictated autobiography of, Isaac Shelby; MS. journals of Rev. James Smith, during two tours in the western country in 1785 and ’95; early files of the “Kentucke Gazette”; books owned by the early settlers; papers of Boone, and George Rogers Clark; MS. notes on Kentucky by George Bradford, who settled there in 1779; MS. copy of the record book of Col. John Todd, the first governor of the Illinois

country after Clark’s conquest; the McAfee MSS., consisting of an Account of the First Settlement of Salt River, the Autobiography of Robert McAfee, and a Brief Memorandum of the Civil and Natural History of Kentucky; MS. autobiography of Rev. William Hickman, who visited Kentucky in 1776, etc.

I am also under great obligations to Col. John Mason Brown of Louisville, another member of the Filson Club, for assistance rendered me; particularly for having sent me six bound volumes of MSS., containing the correspondence of the Spanish Minister Gardoqui, copied from the Spanish archives.

At Lexington I had access to the Breckenridge MSS., through the kindness of Mr. Ethelbert D. Warfield; and to the Clay MSS., through the kindness of Miss Lucretia Hart Clay. I am particularly indebted to Miss Clay for her courtesy in sending me many of the most valuable old Hart and Benton letters, depositions, accounts, and the like.

The Blount MSS. were sent to me from California by the Hon. W. D. Stephens of Los Angeles, although I was not personally known to him; an instance of courtesy and generosity, in return for which I could do nothing save express my sincere appreciation and gratitude, which I take this opportunity of publicly repeating.

The Gates MSS., from which I drew some important facts not hitherto known concerning the King’s Mountain campaign, are in the library of the New York Historical Society.

The Virginia State Papers have recently been published, and are now accessible to all.

Among the most valuable of the hitherto untouched manuscripts which I have obtained are the Haldimand papers, preserved in the Canadian archives at Ottawa. They give, for the first time, the British and Indian side of all the Northwestern fighting; including Clark’s campaigns, the siege of Boonesborough, the battle of the Blue Licks, Crawford’s defeat, etc. The Canadian archivist, Mr. Douglass Brymner, furnished me copies of all I needed with a prompt courtesy for which I am more indebted than I can well express.

I have been obliged to rely mainly on these collections of early documents as my authorities, especially for that portion of Western history prior to 1783. Excluding the valuable, but very brief, and often very inaccurate, sketch which Filson wrote down as coming from Boone, there are no printed histories of Kentucky earlier than Marshall’s in 1812; while the first Tennessee history was Haywood’s, in 1822. Both Marshall and Haywood did excellent work; the former was an able writer, the latter was a student, and (like the Kentucky historian Mann Butler) a sound political thinker, devoted to the Union, and prompt to stand up for the right. But both of them, in dealing with the early history of the country beyond the Alleghanies, wrote about matters that had happened from thirty to fifty years before, and were obliged to base most of their statements on tradition or on what the pioneers remembered in their old age. The later historians, for the most part, merely follow these two. In consequence, the mass of original material, in the shape of official reports and contemporary letters, contained in the Haldimand MSS., the Campbell MSS., the McAfee MSS., the Gardoqui MSS., the State Department MSS., the Virginia State Papers, etc., not only cast a flood of new light upon this early history, but necessitate its being entirely rewritten. For instance, they give an absolutely new aspect to, and in many cases completely reverse, the current accounts of all the Indian fighting, both against the Cherokees and the Northwestern tribes; they give for the first time a clear view of frontier diplomacy, of the intrigues with the Spaniards, and even of the mode of life in the backwoods, and of the workings of the civil government. It may be mentioned that the various proper names are spelt in so many different ways that it is difficult to know which to choose. Even Clark is sometimes spelt Clarke, while Boone was apparently indifferent as to whether his name should or should not contain the final silent e. As for the original Indian titles, it is often quite impossible to give them even approximately; the early writers often wrote the same Indian words in such different ways that they bear no resemblance whatever to one another.

In conclusion I would say that it has been to me emphatically a labor of love to write of the great deeds of the border people. I am not blind to their manifold shortcomings, nor yet am I ignorant of their many strong and good qualities. For a number of years I spent most of my time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other frontiersman. The wild country in which we dwelt and across which we wandered was in the far West; and there were of course many features in which the life of a cattleman on the Great Plains and among the Rockies differed from that led by a backwoodsman in the Alleghany forests a century before. Yet the points of resemblance were far more numerous and striking. We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, white and red, on the banks of the Little Missouri and among the wooded, precipitous foothills of the Bighorn, exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years previously built their log-cabins beside the Kentucky or in the valleys of the Great Smokies. The men who have shared in the fast vanishing frontier life of the present feel a peculiar sympathy with the already long-vanished frontier life of the past.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

SAGAMORE HILL, May, 1889

THE WINNING OF THE WEST

INTRODUCTION

I fear my “purpose” in writing The Winning of

the West must be gathered by the reader himself;

I can only say that it seemed to me well worth

while to write of the deeds of the frontiersmen,

and of their victories, sufferings and defeats, as

they conquered the continent which we inherit,

and laid broad and deep, the foundation of the

mightiest of all Republics.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

handwritten inscription in a first-edition copy

THE UNDERLYING premise of Theodore Roosevelt’s monumental four-volume narrative, The Winning of the West, is that for the American people, the direction of freedom has always been westward. Initially, because of religious persecution, economic hardship, or simply a desire to start life anew, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Englishmen journeyed west to inhabit the American colonies and create the new and unique political concept we now know as American freedom. Beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet another migration occurred, as large numbers of colonists traveled west from the Atlantic seaboard to occupy the vast western lands then sparsely occupied by Native Americans.

Roosevelt reasons that to come to a full and complete understanding of the development of American freedom, one should examine both these migrations along a timeline consisting of five principal cornerstones:

First, in the seventeenth century, the establishment of British colonies along America’s Atlantic coast.

Second, in the late eighteenth century, the colonists’ dissatisfaction with Great Britain’s colonial policies, leading to the American Revolution, victory over the British, and independence.

Third, the Founding Fathers’ formation of a republican government under the provisions of the U.S. Constitution in 1787.

Fourth, in the early 1860s, the Emancipation Proclamation, immediately followed by Union victory in the Civil War, which put an end to slavery and preserved the Union.

Fifth, the geographical circumstance that west of America’s Allegheny and Appalachian mountains there lay a huge expanse of relatively uninhabited and underdeveloped land, to which—beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,[1] whether through missionary fervor; to take advantage of the opportunity to homestead on free land; to begin a new career in hunting, trapping, mining, farming, or cattle raising; or simply to shake off the restraints of the structured society of the Atlantic seaboard—hundreds of thousands of colonists migrated.

For Roosevelt, the underpinnings of American freedom were therefore not only philosophical; they were geographical, in that only because of the existence of huge tracts of western land ripe for habitation and development could the unique concept of American freedom be nurtured and fully developed into political maturity. For Roosevelt, the frontier was freedom:

The Americans began their work of western conquest … at the moment when they sprang into national life. It has been their great work ever since. All other questions save those of the preservation of the Union itself and of the emancipation of the blacks have been of subordinate importance when compared with the great question of how rapidly and how completely they were to subjugate that part of their continent lying between the eastern mountains and the Pacific.

The Winning of the West is Theodore Roosevelt’s ambitious and compendious examination of the nation’s westward expansion from its trans-Appalachian frontier to the Pacific Ocean, from the beginnings of the French and Indian Wars through the end of the nineteenth century. He projects a sweeping drama, well documented and filled with accounts of Americans fighting Indian confederacies north and south while dealing with the machinations of the British, French, and Spanish and their sympathizers.

Long before and well after the Revolutionary War, English, French, and Spanish settlers and armed forces occupied frontier lands outside the American colonies. The province of Quebec, then called Canada, was initially settled by the French. Subsequently, England won from France the lands of Canada as well as America’s Ohio Valley. France ceded to its Spanish allies Louisiana, including the territory vaguely bounded by the Mississippi River all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Spain had itself lost to England both Floridas (as the coastal regions between Georgia and Louisiana were called).

This was a dynamic time, a time characterized by confusion and change. It was only after the American colonists’ increasing dominance over all these lands (with the exception of Canada) that the situation resolved itself into the simple task of conquering the Indians.

The focus of volume 1 is on early encounters between American colonists and Native Americans and between the colonists and British and French settlers along the western borders of the original colonies: in the north, those areas immediately west of the Alleghenies, and in the south, those areas immediately west of the Appalachians, as American colonists, moving southwest, west, and northwest, began occupying the land. Roosevelt wanted to show how backwoodsmen such as Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton, followed by hardy pioneer settlers, gave the United States eventual claim to land west of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Heroism and treachery among both the whites and the Indians can be seen in his story of a people on the move. By force and by treaty, the new nation was established.

Roosevelt wrote The Winning of the West after a series of political defeats and the loss of half his capital in a ranching venture in North Dakota. The work is primarily based on archival material documented by the United States government dating back to 1774. It clearly embodies Roosevelt’s attitudes toward expansion that he demonstrated after becoming president in 1901.

The Winning of the West is Roosevelt’s finest historical work. According to historian John Milton Cooper Jr., it “remains one of the greatest works of western history… . [It] reflects the character of its author. It is sometimes quirky and full of prejudices and blind spots, but it is cultivated and sweeping in its learning and encompassing in its judgments.”

The Winning of the West was immensely successful upon its first appearance, selling out within one month of publication, and it has since become a classic of American literature. Volume 1 is an exact facsimile of the 1904 edition.

Les Adams

Chairman, Editorial Board

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

MARCH 5, 2013

[1] These migrations became considerably larger after the American victory in the Revolutionary War and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, when Britain ceded to the United States control of lands west of the Appalachians (including the present-day states of Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and Mississippi); as well as after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, in which the United States acquired from France a vast area of 828,800 square miles of western land (today’s Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, plus large portions of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Louisiana); the acquisition of Texas in 1845; the acquisition of California, Nevada, and Utah and parts of Arizona and several other states in the Mexican Cession of 1848; and the acquisition of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming in the Oregon Treaty of 1846.

BOOK ONE

THE SPREAD OF ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES

CHAPTER I

THE SPREAD OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES

DURING THE past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance.

The tongue which Bacon feared to use in his writings, lest they should remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimportant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two continents. The Common Law which Coke jealously upheld in the southern half of a single European island, is now the law of the land throughout the vast regions of Australasia, and of America north of the Rio Grande. The names of the plays that Shakespeare wrote are household words in the mouths of mighty nations, whose wide domains were to him more unreal than the realm of Prester John. Over half the descendants of their fellow countrymen of that day now dwell in lands which, when these three Englishmen were born, held not a single white inhabitant; the race which, when they were in their prime, was hemmed in between the North and the Irish seas, to-day holds sway over worlds, whose endless coasts are washed by the waves of the three great oceans.

There have been many other races that at one time or another had their great periods of race expansion—as distinguished from mere conquest,—but there has never been another whose expansion has been either so broad or so rapid.

At one time, many centuries ago, it seemed as if the Germanic peoples, like their Celtic foes and neighbors, would be absorbed into the all-conquering Roman power, and, merging their identity in that of the victors, would accept their law, their speech, and their habits of thought. But this danger vanished forever on the day of the slaughter by the Teutoburger Wald, when the legions of Varus were broken by the rush of Hermann’s wild warriors.

Two or three hundred years later the Germans, no longer on the defensive, themselves went forth from their marshy forests conquering and to conquer. For century after century they swarmed out of the dark woodland east of the Rhine, and north of the Danube; and as their force spent itself, the movement was taken up by their brethren who dwelt along the coasts of the Baltic and the North Atlantic. From the Volga to the Pillars of Hercules, from Sicily to Britain, every land in turn bowed to the warlike prowess of the stalwart sons of Odin. Rome and Novgorod, the imperial city of Italy as well as the squalid capital of Muscovy, acknowledged the sway of kings of Teutonic or Scandinavian blood.

In most cases, however, the victorious invaders merely intruded themselves among the original and far more numerous owners of the land, ruled over them, and were absorbed by them. This happened to both Teuton and Scandinavian; to the descendants of Alaric, as well as to the children of Rurik. The Dane in Ireland became a Celt; the Goth of the Iberian peninsula became a Spaniard; Frank and Norwegian alike were merged into the mass of Romance-speaking Gauls, who themselves finally grew to be called by the names of their masters. Thus it came about that though the German tribes conquered Europe they did not extend the limits of Germany nor the sway of the German race. On the contrary, they strengthened the hands of the rivals of the people from whom they sprang. They gave rulers—kaisers, kings, barons, and knights—to all the lands they overran; here and there they imposed their own names on kingdoms and principalities—as in France, Normandy, Burgundy, and Lombardy; they grafted the feudal system on the Roman jurisprudence, and interpolated a few Teutonic words in the Latin dialects of the peoples they had conquered; but, hopelessly outnumbered, they were soon lost in the mass of their subjects, and adopted from them their laws, their culture, and their language. As a result, the mixed races of the south—the Latin nations as they are sometimes called—strengthened by the infusion of northern blood, sprang anew into vigorous life, and became for the time being the leaders of the European world.

There was but one land whereof the winning made a lasting addition to Germanic soil; but this land was destined to be of more importance in the future of the Germanic peoples than all their continental possessions, original and acquired, put together. The day when the keels of the low-Dutch sea-thieves first grated on the British coast was big with the doom of many nations. There sprang up in conquered southern Britain, when its name had been significantly changed to England, that branch of the Germanic stock which was in the end to grasp almost literally world-wide power, and by its overshadowing growth to dwarf into comparative insignificance all its kindred folk. At the time, in the general wreck of the civilized world, the making of England attracted but little attention. Men’s eyes were riveted on the empires conquered by the hosts of Alaric, Theodoric, and Clovis, not on the swarm of little kingdoms and earldoms founded by the nameless chiefs who led each his band of hard-rowing, hard-fighting henchmen across the stormy waters of the German Ocean. Yet the rule and the race of Goth, Frank, and Burgund have vanished from off the earth; while the sons of the unknown Saxon, Anglian, and Friesic warriors now hold in their hands the fate of the coming years.

After the great Teutonic wanderings were over, there came a long lull, until, with the discovery of America, a new period of even vaster race expansion began. During this lull the nations of Europe took on their present shapes. Indeed, the so-called Latin nations—the French and Spaniards, for instance—may be said to have been born after the first set of migrations ceased. Their national history, as such, does not really begin until about that time, whereas that of the Germanic peoples stretches back unbroken to the days when we first hear of their existence. It would be hard to say which one of half a dozen races that existed in Europe during the early centuries of the present era should be considered as especially the ancestor of the modern Frenchman or Spaniard. When the Romans conquered Gaul and Iberia they did not in any place drive out the ancient owners of the soil; they simply Romanized them, and left them as the base of the population. By the Frankish and Visigothic invasions another strain of blood was added, to be speedily absorbed; while the invaders took the language of the conquered people, and established themselves as the ruling class. Thus the modern nations who sprang from this mixture derive portions of their governmental system and general policy from one race, most of their blood from another, and their language, law, and culture from a third.

The English race, on the contrary, has a perfectly continuous history. When Alfred reigned, the English already had a distinct national being; when Charlemagne reigned; the French, as we use the term to-day, had no national being whatever. The Germans of the mainland merely overran the countries that lay in their path; but the sea-rovers who won England to a great extent actually displaced the native Britons. The former were absorbed by the subject-races; the latter, on the contrary, slew or drove off or assimilated the original inhabitants. Unlike all the other Germanic swarms, the English took neither creed nor custom, neither law nor speech, from their beaten foes. At the time when the dynasty of the Capets had become firmly established at Paris, France was merely part of a country where Latinized Gauls and Basques were ruled by Latinized Franks, Goths, Burgunds, and Normans; but the people across the Channel then showed little trace of Celtic or Romance influence. It would be hard to say whether Vercingetorix or Caesar, Clovis or Syagrius, has the better right to stand as the prototype of a modern French general. There is no such doubt in the other case. The average Englishman, American, or Australian of to-day who wishes to recall the feats of power with which his race should be credited in the shadowy dawn of its history, may go back to the half-mythical glories of Hengist and Horsa, perhaps to the deeds of Civilis the Batavian, or to those of the hero of the Teutoburger fight, but certainly to the wars neither of the Silurian chief Caractacus nor of his conqueror, the after-time Emperor Vespasian.

Nevertheless, when, in the sixteenth century, the European peoples began to extend their dominions beyond Europe, England had grown to differ profoundly from the Germanic countries of the mainland. A very large Celtic element had been introduced into the English blood, and, in addition, there had been a considerable Scandinavian admixture. More important still were the radical changes brought by the Norman conquest; chief among them the transformation of the old English tongue into the magnificent language which is now the common inheritance of so many widespread peoples. England’s insular position, moreover, permitted it to work out its own fate comparatively unhampered by the presence of outside powers; so that it developed a type of nationality totally distinct from the types of the European mainland.

And this is not foreign to American history. The vast movement by which this continent was conquered and peopled can not be rightly understood if considered solely by itself. It was the crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements, and it must be taken in connection with them. Its true significance will be lost unless we grasp, however roughly, the past race-history of the nations who took part therein.

When, with the voyages of Columbus and his successors, the great period of extra-European colonization began, various nations strove to share in the work. Most of them had to plant their colonies in lands across the sea; Russia alone was by her geographical position enabled to extend her frontiers by land, and in consequence her comparatively recent colonization of Siberia bears some resemblance to our own work in the western United States. The other countries of Europe were forced to find their outlets for conquest and emigration beyond the ocean, and, until the colonists had taken firm root in their new homes the mastery of the seas thus became a matter of vital consequence.

Among the lands beyond the ocean America was the first reached and the most important. It was conquered by different European races, and shoals of European settlers were thrust forth upon its shores. These sometimes displaced and sometimes merely overcame and lived among the natives. They also, to their own lasting harm, committed a crime whose shortsighted folly was worse than guilt, for they brought hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form immense populations in certain portions of the land. Throughout the continent we therefore find the white, red, and black races in every stage of purity and intermixture. One result of this great turmoil of conquest and immigration has been that, in certain parts of America, the lines of cleavage of race are so far from coinciding with the lines of cleavage of speech that they run at right angles to them—as in the four communities of Ontario, Quebec, Hayti, and Jamaica.

Each intruding European power, in winning for itself new realms beyond the seas, had to wage a two-fold war, overcoming the original inhabitants with one hand, and with the other warding off the assaults of the kindred nations that were bent on the same schemes. Generally the contests of the latter kind were much the most important. The victories by which the struggles between the European conquerors themselves were ended deserve lasting commemoration. Yet, sometimes, even the most important of them, sweeping though they were, were in parts less sweeping than they seemed. It would be impossible to overestimate the far-reaching effects of the overthrow of the French power in America; but Lower Canada, where the fatal blow was given, itself suffered nothing but a political conquest, which did not interfere in the least with the growth of the French state along both sides of the lower St. Lawrence. In a somewhat similar way Dutch communities have held their own, and indeed have sprung up in South Africa.

All the European nations touching on the Atlantic seaboard took part in the new work, with very varying success; Germany alone, then rent by many feuds, having no share therein. Portugal founded a single state, Brazil. The Scandinavian nations did little; their chief colony fell under the control of the Dutch. The English and the Spaniards were the two nations to whom the bulk of the new lands fell; the former getting much the greater portion. The conquests of the Spanards took place in the sixteenth century. The West Indies and Mexico, Peru and the limitless grass plains of what is now the Argentine Confederation,—all these and the lands lying between them had been conquered and colonized by the Spaniards before there was a single settlement in the New World, and while the fleets of the Catholic king still held for him the lordship of the ocean. Then the cumbrous Spanish vessels succumbed to the attacks of the swift warships of Holland and England, and the sun of the Spanish world-dominion set as quickly as it had risen. Spain at once came to a standstill; it was only here and there that she even extended her rule over a few neighboring Indian tribes, while she was utterly unable to take the offensive against the French, Dutch, and English. But it is a singular thing that these vigorous and powerful new-comers, who had so quickly put a stop to her further growth, yet wrested from her very little of what was already hers. They plundered a great many Spanish cities and captured a great many Spanish galleons, but they made no great lasting conquests of Spanish territory. Their mutual jealousies, and the fear each felt of the others, were among the main causes of this state of things; and hence it came about that after the opening of the seventeenth century the wars they waged against one another were of far more ultimate consequence than the wars they waged against the former mistress of the Western world. England in the end drove both France and Holland from the field; but it was under the banner of the American Republic, not under that of the British Monarchy, that the English-speaking people first won vast stretches of land from the descendants of the Spanish conquerors.

The three most powerful of Spain’s rivals waged many a long war with one another to decide which should grasp the sceptre that had slipped from Spanish hands. The fleets of Holland fought with stubborn obstinacy to wrest from England her naval supremacy; but they failed, and in the end the greater portion of the Dutch domains fell to their foes. The French likewise began a course of conquest and colonization at the same time the English did, and after a couple of centuries of rivalry, ending in prolonged warfare, they also succumbed. The close of the most important colonial contest ever waged left the French without a foot of soil on the North American mainland; while their victorious foes had not only obtained the lead in the race for supremacy on that continent, but had also won the command of the ocean. They thenceforth found themselves free to work their will in all seagirt lands, unchecked by hostile European influence.

Most fortunately, when England began her career as a colonizing power in America, Spain had already taken possession of the populous tropical and subtropical regions, and the northern power was thus forced to form her settlements in the sparsely peopled temperate zone.

It is of vital importance to remember that the English and Spanish conquests in America differed from each other very much as did the original conquests which gave rise to the English and the Spanish nations. The English had exterminated or assimilated the Celts of Britain, and they substantially repeated the process with the Indians of America; although of course in America there was very little, instead of very much, assimilation. The Germanic strain is dominant in the blood of the average Englishman, exactly as the English strain is dominant in the blood of the average American. Twice a portion of the race has shifted its home, in each case undergoing a marked change due both to outside influence and to internal development; but in the main retaining, especially in the last instance, the general race characteristics.

It was quite otherwise in the countries conquered by Cortes, Pizarro, and their successors. Instead of killing or driving off the natives as the English did, the Spaniards simply sat down in the midst of a much more numerous aboriginal population. The process by which Central and South America became Spanish bore very close resemblance to the process by which the lands of southeastern Europe were turned into Romance-speaking countries. The bulk of the original inhabitants remained unchanged in each case. There was little displacement of population. Roman soldiers and magistrates, Roman merchants and handicraftsmen were thrust in among the Celtic and Iberian peoples, exactly as the Spanish military and civil rulers, priests, traders, land-owners, and mine-owners settled down among the Indians of Peru and Mexico. By degrees, in each case, the many learnt the language and adopted the laws, religion, and governmental system of the few, although keeping certain of their own customs and habits of thought. Though the ordinary Spaniard of to-day speaks a Romance dialect, he is mainly of Celto-Iberian blood; and though most Mexicans and Peruvians speak Spanish, yet the great majority of them trace their descent back to the subjects of Montezuma and the Incas. Moreover, exactly as in Europe little ethnic islands of Breton and Basque stock have remained unaffected by the Romance flood, so in America there are large communities where the inhabitants keep unchanged the speech and the customs of their Indian forefathers.

The English-speaking peoples now hold more and better land than any other American nationality or set of nationalities. They have in their veins less aboriginal American blood than any of their neighbors. Yet it is noteworthy that the latter have tacitly allowed them to arrogate to themselves the title of “Americans,” whereby to designate their distinctive and individual nationality.

So much for the difference between the way in which the English and the way in which other European nations have conquered and colonized. But there have been likewise very great differences in the methods and courses of the English-speaking peoples themselves, at different times and in different places.

The settlement of the United States and Canada, throughout most of their extent, bears much resemblance to the later settlement of Australia and New Zealand. The English conquest of India and even the English conquest of South Africa come in an entirely different category. The first was a mere political conquest, like the Dutch conquest of Java or the extension of the Roman Empire over parts of Asia. South Africa in some respects stands by itself, because there the English are confronted by another white race which it is as yet uncertain whether they can assimilate, and, what is infinitely more important, because they are thus confronted by a very large native population with which they can not mingle, and which neither dies out nor recedes before their advance. It is not likely, but it is at least within the bounds of possibility, that in the course of centuries the whites of South Africa will suffer a fate akin to that which befell the Greek colonists in the Tauric Chersonese, and be swallowed up in the overwhelming mass of black barbarism.

On the other hand, it may fairly be said that in America and Australia the English race has already entered into and begun the enjoyment of its great inheritance. When these continents were settled they contained the largest tracts of fertile, temperate, thinly peopled country on the face of the globe. We can not rate too highly the importance of their acquisition. Their successful settlement was a feat which by comparison utterly dwarfs all the European wars of the last two centuries; just as the importance of the issues at stake in the wars of Rome and Carthage completely overshadowed the interests for which the various contemporary Greek kingdoms were at the same time striving.

Australia, which was much less important than America, was also won and settled with far less difficulty. The natives were so few in number and of such a low type, that they practically offered no resistance at all, being but little more hindrance than an equal number of ferocious beasts. There was no rivalry whatever by any European power, because the actual settlement—not the mere expatriation of convicts—only began when England, as a result of her struggle with Republican and Imperial France, had won the absolute control of the seas. Unknown to themselves, Nelson and his fellow admirals settled the fate of Australia, upon which they probably never wasted a thought. Trafalgar decided much more than the mere question whether Great Britain should temporarily share the fate that so soon befell Prussia; for in all probability it decided the destiny of the island-continent that lay in the South Seas.

The history of the English-speaking race in America has been widely different. In Australia there was no fighting whatever, whether with natives or with other foreigners. In America for the past two centuries and a half there has been a constant succession of contests with powerful and warlike native tribes, with rival European nations, and with American nations of European origin. But even in America there have been wide differences in the way the work has had to be done in different parts of the country, since the close of the great colonial contests between England, France, and Spain.

The extension of the English westward through Canada since the war of the Revolution has been in its essential features merely a less important repetition of what has gone on in the northern United States. The gold miner, the trans-continental railway, and the soldier have been the pioneers of civilization. The chief point of difference, which was but small, arose from the fact that the whole of western Canada was for a long time under the control of the most powerful of all the fur companies, in whose employ were very many French voyageurs and coureurs des bois. From these there sprang up in the valleys of the Red River and the Saskatchewan a singular race of half-breeds, with a unique semi-civilization of their own. It was with these half-breeds, and not, as in the United States, with the Indians, that the settlers of northwestern Canada had their main difficulties.

In what now forms the United States, taking the country as a whole, the foes who had to be met and overcome were very much more formidable. The ground had to be not only settled but conquered, sometimes at the expense of the natives, often at the expense of rival European races. As already pointed out the Indians themselves formed one of the main factors in deciding the fate of the continent. They were never able in the end to avert the white conquest, but they could often delay its advance for a long spell of years. The Iroquois, for instance, held their own against all comers for two centuries. Many other tribes stayed for a time the oncoming white flood, or even drove it back; in Maine the settlers were for a hundred years confined to a narrow strip of sea-coast. Against the Spaniards, there were even here and there Indian nations who definitely recovered the ground they had lost.

When the whites first landed, the superiority and, above all, the novelty of their arms gave them a very great advantage. But the Indians soon became accustomed to the new-comers’ weapons and style of warfare. By the time the English had consolidated the Atlantic colonies under their rule, the Indians had become what they have remained ever since, the most formidable savage foes ever encountered by colonists of European stock. Relatively to their numbers, they have shown themselves far more to be dreaded than the Zulus or even the Maoris.

Their presence has caused the process of settlement to go on at unequal rates of speed in different places; the flood has been hemmed in at one point, or has been forced to flow round an island of native population at another. Had the Indians been as helpless as the native Australians were, the continent of North America would have had an altogether different history. It would not only have been settled far more rapidly, but also on very different lines. Not only have the red men themselves kept back the settlements, but they have also had a very great effect upon the outcome of the struggles between the different intrusive European peoples. Had the original inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley been as numerous and unwarlike as the Aztecs, de Soto would have repeated the work of Cortes, and we would very possibly have been barred out of the greater portion of our present domain. Had it not been for their Indian allies, it would have been impossible for the French to prolong, as they did, their struggle with their much more numerous English neighbors.

The Indians have shrunk back before our advance only after fierce and dogged resistance. They were never numerous in the land, but exactly what their numbers were when the whites first appeared is impossible to tell. Probably an estimate of half a million for those within the limits of the present United States is not far wrong; but in any such calculation there is of necessity a large element of mere rough guess-work. Formerly writers greatly over-estimated their original numbers, counting them by millions. Now it is the fashion to go to the other extreme, and even to maintain that they have not decreased at all. This last is a theory that can only be upheld on the supposition that the whole does not consist of the sum of the parts; for whereas we can check off on our fingers the tribes that have slightly increased, we can enumerate scores that have died out almost before our eyes. Speaking broadly, they have mixed but little with the English (as distinguished from the French and Spanish) invaders. They are driven back, or die out, or retire to their own reservations; but they are not often assimilated. Still, on every frontier, there is always a certain amount of assimilation going on, much more than is commonly admitted[1]; and whenever a French or Spanish community has been absorbed by the energetic Americans, a certain amount of Indian blood has been absorbed also. There seems to be a chance that in one part of our country, the Indian Territory, the Indians, who are continually advancing in civilization, will remain as the ground element of the population, like the Creoles in Louisiana, or the Mexicans in New Mexico.

The Americans when they became a nation continued even more successfully the work which they had begun as citizens of the several English colonies. At the outbreak of the Revolution they still all dwelt on the seaboard, either on the coast itself or along the banks of the streams flowing into the Atlantic. When the fight at Lexington took place they had no settlements beyond the mountain chain on our western border. It had taken them over a century and a half to spread from the Atlantic to the Alleghanies. In the next three quarters of a century they spread from the Alleghanies to the Pacific. In doing this they not only dispossessed the Indian tribes, but they also won the land from its European owners. Britain had to yield the territory between the Ohio and the Great Lakes. By a purchase, of which we frankly announced that the alternative would be war, we acquired from France the vast, ill-defined region known as Louisiana. From the Spaniards, or from their descendants, we won the lands of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California.

All these lands were conquered after we had become a power, independent of every other, and one within our own borders; when we were no longer a loose assemblage of petty seaboard communities, each with only such relationship to its neighbor as was implied in their common subjection to a foreign king and a foreign people. Moreover, it is well always to remember that at the day when we began our career as a nation we already differed from our kinsmen of Britain in blood as well as in name; the word American already had more than a merely geographical signification. Americans belong to the English race only in the sense in which Englishmen belong to the German. The fact that no change of language has accompanied the second wandering of our people, from Britain to America, as it accompanied their first, from Germany to Britain, is due to the further fact that when the second wandering took place the race possessed a fixed literary language, and, thanks to the ease of communication, was kept in touch with the parent stock. The change of blood was probably as great in one case as in the other. The modern Englishman is descended from a Low-Dutch stock, which, when it went to Britain, received into itself an enormous infusion of Celtic, a much smaller infusion of Norse and Danish, and also a certain infusion of Norman-French blood. When this new English stock came to America it mingled with and absorbed into itself immigrants from many European lands, and the process has gone on ever since. It is to be noted that, of the new blood thus acquired, the greatest proportion has come from Dutch and German sources, and the next greatest from Irish, while the Scandinavian element comes third, and the only other of much consequence is French Huguenot. Thus it appears that no new element of importance has been added to the blood. Additions have been made to the elemental race-strains in much the same proportion as these were originally combined.

Some latter-day writers deplore the enormous immigration to our shores as making us a heterogeneous instead of a homogeneous people; but as a matter of fact we are less heterogeneous at the present day than we were at the outbreak of the Revolution. Our blood was as much mixed a century ago as it is now. No State now has a smaller proportion of English blood than New York or Pennsylvania had in 1775. Even in New England, where the English stock was purest, there was a certain French and Irish mixture; in Virginia there were Germans in addition. In the other colonies, taken as a whole, it is not probable that much over half of the blood was English; Dutch, French, German, and Gaelic communities abounded.

But all were being rapidly fused into one people. As the Celt of Cornwall and the Saxon of Wessex are now alike Englishmen, so in 1775 Hollander and Huguenot, whether in New York or South Carolina, had become Americans, undistinguishable from the New Englanders and Virginians, the descendants of men who followed Cromwell or charged behind Rupert. When the great western movement began we were already a people by ourselves. Moreover, the immense immigration from Europe that has taken place since, had little or no effect on the way in which we extended our boundaries; it only began to be important about the time that we acquired our present limits. These limits would in all probability be what they now are even if we had not received a single European colonist since the Revolution.

Thus the Americans began their work of western conquest as a separate and individual people, at the moment when they sprang into national life. It has been their great work ever since. All other questions save those of the preservation of the Union itself and of the emancipation of the blacks have been of subordinate importance when compared with the great question of how rapidly and how completely they were to subjugate that part of their continent lying between the eastern mountains and the Pacific. Yet the statesmen of the Atlantic seaboard were often unable to perceive this, and indeed frequently showed the same narrow jealousy of the communities beyond the Alleghanies that England felt for all America. Even if they were too broad-minded and far-seeing to feel thus, they yet were unable to fully appreciate the magnitude of the interests at stake in the West. They thought more of our right to the North Atlantic fisheries than of our ownership of the Mississippi Valley; they were more interested in the fate of a bank or a tariff than in the settlement of the Oregon boundary. Most contemporary writers showed similar shortcomings in their sense of historic perspective. The names of Ethan Allen and Marion are probably better known than is that of George Rogers Clark; yet their deeds, as regards their effects, could no more be compared to his, than his could be compared to Washington’s. So it was with Houston. During his lifetime there were probably fifty men who, east of the Mississippi, were deemed far greater than he was. Yet in most cases their names have already almost faded from remembrance, while his fame will grow steadily brighter as the importance of his deeds is more thoroughly realized. Fortunately, in the long run, the mass of Easterners always backed up their Western brethren.

The kind of colonizing conquest, whereby the people of the United States have extended their borders, has much in common with the similar movements in Canada and Australia, all of them standing in sharp contrast to what has gone on in Spanish-American lands. But of course each is marked out in addition by certain peculiarities of its own. Moreover, even in the United States, the movement falls naturally into two divisions, which on several points differ widely from each other.

The way in which the southern part of our western country—that is, all the land south of the Ohio, and from thence on to the Rio Grande and the Pacific—was won and settled, stands quite alone. The region north of it was filled up in a very different manner. The Southwest, including therein what was once called simply the West, and afterward the Middle West, was won by the people themselves, acting as individuals, or as groups of individuals, who hewed out their own fortunes in advance of any governmental action. On the other hand, the Northwest, speaking broadly, was acquired by the government, the settlers merely taking possession of what the whole country guaranteed them. The Northwest is essentially a national domain; it is fitting that it should be, as it is, not only by position but by feeling, the heart of the nation.

North of the Ohio the regular army went first. The settlements grew up behind the shelter of the federal troops of Harmar, St. Claire, and Wayne, and of their successors even to our own day. The wars in which the borderers themselves bore any part were few and trifling compared to the contests waged by the adventurers who won Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas.

In the Southwest the early settlers acted as their own army, and supplied both leaders and men. Sevier, Robertson, Clark, and Boone led their fellow pioneers to battle, as Jackson did afterward, and as Houston did later still. Indeed the South-westerners not only won their own soil for themselves, but they were the chief instruments in the original acquisition of the Northwest also. Had it not been for the conquest of the Illinois towns in 1779 we would probably never have had any Northwest to settle; and the huge tract between the upper Mississippi and the Columbia, then called Upper Louisiana, fell into our hands, only because the Kentuckians and Tennesseeans were resolutely bent on taking possession of New Orleans, either by bargain or battle. All of our territory lying beyond the Alleghanies, north and south, was first won for us by the Southwesterners, fighting for their own hand. The northern part was afterward filled up by the thrifty, vigorous men of the Northeast, whose sons became the real rulers as well as the preservers of the Union; but these settlements of Northerners were rendered possible only by the deeds of the nation as a whole. They entered on land that the Southerners had won, and they were kept there by the strong arm of the Federal Government; whereas the Southerners owed most of their victories only to themselves.

The first-comers around Marietta did, it is true, share to a certain extent in the dangers of the existing Indian wars; but their trials are not to be mentioned beside those endured by the early settlers of Tennessee and Kentucky, and whereas these latter themselves subdued and drove out their foes, the former took but an insignificant part in the contest by which the possession of their land was secured. Besides, the strongest and most numerous Indian tribes were in the Southwest.

The Southwest developed its civilization on its own lines, for good and for ill; the Northwest was settled under the national ordinance of 1787, which absolutely determined its destiny, and thereby in the end also determined the destiny of the whole nation. Moreover, the gulf coast, as well as the interior, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, was held by foreign powers; while in the north this was only true of the country between the Ohio and the Great Lakes during the first years of the Revolution, until the Kentucky backwoodsmen conquered it. Our rivals of European race had dwelt for generations along the lower Mississippi and the Rio Grande, in Florida, and in California, when we made them ours. Detroit, Vincennes, St. Louis, and New Orleans, St. Augustine, San Antonio, Santa Fe, and San Francisco are cities that were built by Frenchmen or Spaniards; we did not found them, but conquered them. All but the first two are in the Southwest, and of these two one was first taken and governed by Southwesterners. On the other hand, the Northwestern cities, from Cincinnati and Chicago to Helena and Portland, were founded by our own people, by the people who now have possession of them.

The Southwest was conquered only after years of hard fighting with the original owners. The way in which this was done bears much less resemblance to the sudden filling up of Australia and California by the practically unopposed overflow from a teeming and civilized mother country, than it does to the original English lone quest of Britain itself. The warlike borderers who thronged across the Alleghanies, the restless and reckless hunters, the hard, dogged, frontier farmers, by dint of grim tenacity overcame and displaced Indians, French, and Spaniards alike, exactly as, fourteen hundred years before, Saxon and Angle had overcome and displaced the Cymric and Gaelic Celts. They were led by no one commander; they acted under orders from neither king nor congress; they were not carrying out the plans of any far-sighted leader. In obedience to the instincts working half blindly within their breasts, spurred ever onward by the fierce desires of their eager hearts, they made in the wilderness homes for their children, and by so doing wrought out the destinies of a continental nation. They warred and settled from the high hill-valleys of the French Broad and the Upper Cumberland to the half-tropical basin of the Rio Grande, and to where the Golden Gate lets through the long-heaving waters of the Pacific. The story of how this was done forms a compact and continuous whole. The fathers followed Boone or fought at King’s Mountain; the sons marched south with Jackson to overcome the Creeks and beat back the British; the grandsons died at the Alamo or charged to victory at San Jacinto. They were doing their share of a work that began with the conquest of Britain, that entered on its second and wider period after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, that culminated in the marvelous growth of the United States. The winning of the West and Southwest is a stage in the conquest of a continent.

[1] To this I can testify of my own knowledge as regards Montana, Dakota, and Minnesota. The mixture usually takes place in the ranks of the population where individuals lose all trace of their ancestry after two or three generations; so it is often honestly ignored, and sometimes mention of it is suppressed, the man regarding it as a taint. But I also know many very wealthy old frontiersmen whose half-breed children are now being educated, generally at convent schools, while in the Northwestern cities I could point out some very charming men and women, in the best society with a strain of Indian blood in their veins.

CHAPTER II

THE FRENCH OF THE OHIO VALLEY, 1763–1775

THE RESULT of England’s last great colonial struggle with France was to sever from the latter all her American dependencies, her colonists becoming the subjects of alien and rival powers. England won Canada and the Ohio Valley; while France ceded to her Spanish allies Louisiana, including therein all the territory vaguely bounded by the Mississippi and the Pacific. As an offset to this gain Spain had herself lost to England both Floridas, as the coast regions between Georgia and Louisiana were then called.

Thus the thirteen colonies, at the outset of their struggle for independence, saw themselves surrounded, north, south, and west, by lands where the rulers and the ruled were of different races, but where rulers and ruled alike were hostile to the new people that was destined in the end to master them all.

The present province of Quebec, then called Canada, was already, what she has to this day remained, a French state acknowledging the English king as her over-lord. Her interests did not conflict with those of our people, nor touch them in any way, and she has had little to do with our national history, and nothing whatever to do with the history of the West.

In the peninsula of East Florida, in the land of the cypress, palmetto, and live oak, of open savannas, of sandy pine forests, and impenetrable, interminable morasses, a European civilization more ancient than any in the English colonies was mouldering in slow decay. Its capital city was quaint St. Augustine, the old walled town that was founded by the Spaniards long years before the keel of the Half-Moon furrowed the broad Hudson, or the ships of the Puritans sighted the New England coast. In times past St. Augustine had once and again seen her harbor filled with the huge, cumbrous hulls, and whitened by the bellying sails, of the Spanish war vessels, when the fleets of the Catholic king gathered there, before setting out against the seaboard towns of Georgia and the Carolinas; and she had to suffer from and repulse the retaliatory inroads of the English colonists. Once her priests and soldiers had brought the Indian tribes, far and near, under subjection, and had dotted the wilderness with fort and church and plantation, the outposts of her dominion; but that was long ago, and the tide of Spanish success had turned and begun to ebb many years before the English took possession of Florida. The Seminoles, fierce and warlike, whose warriors fought on foot and on horseback, had avenged in countless bloody forays their fellow-Indian tribes, whose very names had perished under Spanish rule. The churches and forts had crumbled into nothing: only the cannon and the brazen bells, half buried in the rotting mould, remained to mark the place where once stood spire and citadel. The deserted plantations, the untraveled causeways, no longer marred the face of the tree-clad land, for even their sites had ceased to be distinguishable; the great high-road that led to Pensacola had faded away, overgrown by the rank luxuriance of the semi-tropical forest. Throughout the interior the painted savages roved at will, uncontrolled by Spaniard or Englishman, owing allegiance only to the White Chief of Tallasotchee.[1] St. Augustine, with its British garrison and its Spanish and Minorcan townsfolk,[2] was still a gathering place for a few Indian traders, and for the scattered fishermen of the coast; elsewhere there were in all not more than a hundred families.[3]

Beyond the Chattahooche and the Appalachicola, stretching thence to the Mississippi and its delta, lay the more prosperous region of West Florida.[4] Although taken by the English from Spain, there were few Spaniards among the people, who were controlled by the scanty British garrisons at Pensacola, Mobile, and Natchez. On the Gulf coast the inhabitants were mainly French Creoles. They were an indolent, pleasure-loving race, fond of dancing and merriment, living at ease in their low, square, roomy houses on the straggling, rudely farmed plantations that lay along the river banks. Their black slaves worked for them; they themselves spent much of their time in fishing and fowling. Their favorite arm was the light fowling-piece, for they were expert wing shots[5]; unlike the American backwoodsmen, who knew nothing of shooting on the wing, and looked down on smoothbores, caring only for the rifle, the true weapon of the freeman. In winter the creoles took their negroes to the hills, where they made tar from the pitch pine, and this they exported, as well as indigo, rice, tobacco, bear’s oil, peltry, oranges, and squared timber. Cotton was grown, but only for home use. The British soldiers dwelt in stockaded forts, mounting light cannon; the governor lived in the high stone castle built of old by the Spaniards at Pensacola.[6]

In the part of West Florida lying along the east bank of the Mississippi, there were also some French Creoles and a few Spaniards, with of course negroes and Indians to boot. But the population consisted mainly of Americans from the old colonies, who had come thither by sea in small sailing-vessels, or had descended the Ohio and the Tennessee in flat-boats, or, perchance, had crossed the Creek country with pack ponies, following the narrow trails of the Indian traders. With them were some English and Scotch, and the Americans themselves had little sympathy with the colonies, feeling instead a certain dread and dislike of the rough Carolinian mountaineers, who were their nearest white neighbors on the east.[7] They therefore, for the most part, remained loyal to the crown in the Revolutionary struggle, and suffered accordingly.

When Louisiana was ceded to Spain, most of the French Creoles who formed her population were clustered together in the delta of the Mississippi; the rest were scattered out here and there, in a thin, dotted line, up the left bank of the river to the Missouri, near the mouth of which there were several small villages,—St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve, St. Charles.[8] A strong Spanish garrison held New Orleans, where the creoles, discontented with their new masters, had once risen in a revolt that was speedily quelled and severely punished. Small garrisons were also placed in the different villages.

Our people had little to do with either Florida or Louisiana until after the close of the Revolutionary War; but very early in that struggle, and soon after the movement west of the mountains began, we were thrown into contact with the French of the Northwestern Territory, and the result was of the utmost importance to the future welfare of the whole nation.

This northwestern land lay between the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Great Lakes. It now constitutes five of our large States and part of a sixth. But when independence was declared it was quite as much a foreign territory, considered from the standpoint of the old thirteen colonies, as Florida or Canada; the difference was that, whereas during the war we failed in our attempts to conquer Florida and Canada, we succeeded in conquering the Northwest. The Northwest formed no part of our country as it originally stood; it had no portion in the Declaration of Independence. It did not revolt; it was conquered. Its inhabitants, at the outset of the Revolution, no more sympathized with us, and felt no greater inclination to share our fate, than did their kinsmen in Quebec or the Spaniards in St. Augustine. We made our first important conquest during the Revolution itself,—beginning thus early what was to be our distinguishing work for the next seventy years.

These French settlements, which had been founded about the beginning of the century, when the English still clung to the estuaries of the seaboard, were grouped in three clusters, separated by hundreds of miles of wilderness. One of these clusters, containing something like a third of the total population, was at the straits, around Detroit.[9] It was the seat of the British power in that section, and remained in British hands for twenty years after we had become a nation.

The other two were linked together by their subsequent history, and it is only with them that we have to deal. The village of Vincennes lay on the eastern bank of the Wabash, with two or three smaller villages tributary to it in the country round about; and to the west, beside the Mississippi, far above where it is joined by the Ohio, lay the so-called Illinois towns, the villages of Kaskaskia and Cahokia, with between them the little settlements of Prairie du Rocher and St. Philip.[10]

This only refers to the settlers of Detroit proper, and the farms adjoining. Of the numerous other farms, and the small villages on both sides of the straits, and of the many families and individuals living as traders or trappers with the Indians, I can get no good record. Perhaps the total population tributary to Detroit was 2,000. It may have been over this. Any attempt to estimate this Creole population perforce contains much guess-work.

Both these groups of old French hamlets were in the fertile prairie region of what is now southern Indiana and Illinois. We have taken into our language the word prairie because when our backwoodsmen first reached the land and saw the great natural meadows of long grass—sights unknown to the gloomy forests wherein they had always dwelt—they knew not what to call them, and borrowed the term already in use among the French inhabitants.

The great prairies, level or rolling, stretched from north to south, separated by broad belts of high timber. Here and there copses of woodland lay like islands in the sunny seas of tall, waving grass. Where the rivers ran, their alluvial bottoms were densely covered with trees and underbrush, and were often overflowed in the spring freshets. Sometimes the prairies were long, narrow strips of meadow land; again they were so broad as to be a day’s journey across, and to the American, bred in a wooded country where the largest openings were the beaver meadows and the clearings of the frontier settlers, the stretches of grass land seemed limitless. They abounded in game. The buffalo crossed and recrossed them, wandering to and fro in long files, beating narrow trails that they followed year in and year out; while bear, elk, and deer dwelt in the groves around the borders.[11]

There were perhaps some four thousand inhabitants in these French villages, divided almost equally between those in the Illinois and those along the Wabash.[12]

This letter is to be found in the Haldimand MSS., Series B. Vol. 123, p. 53; it is the “brief account” of his ill-starred expedition against Vincennes. He says: “On taking an account of the Inhabitants at this place [Vincennes], of all ages and sexes, we found their number to amount to 621; of this 217 fit to bear arms on the spot, several being absent hunting Buffaloe for their winter provision.” But elsewhere in the same letter he alludes to the adult arms-bearing men as being three hundred in number, and of course the outlying farms and small tributary villages are not counted in. This was in December, 1778. Possibly some families had left for the Spanish possessions after the war broke out, and returned after it was ended. But as all observers seem to unite in stating that the settlements either stood still or went backward during the Revolutionary struggle, it is somewhat difficult to reconcile the figures of Hamilton and Carbonneaux.

The country came into the possession of the British—not of the colonial English or Americans—at the close of Pontiac’s war, the aftermath of the struggle which decided against the French the ownership of America. It was held as a new British province, not as an extension of any of the old colonies; and finally in 1774, by the famous Quebec Act, it was rendered an appanage of Canada, governed from the latter. It is a curious fact that England immediately adopted toward her own colonists the policy of the very nationality she had ousted. From the date of the triumphant peace won by Wolfe’s victory, the British Government became the most active foe of the spread of the English race in America. This position Britain maintained for many years after the failure of her attempt to bar her colonists out of the Ohio Valley. It was the position she occupied when at Ghent in 1814 her commissioners tried to hem in the natural progress of her colonists’ children by the erection of a great “neutral belt” of Indian territory, guaranteed by the British king. It was the role which her statesmen endeavored to make her play when at a later date they strove to keep Oregon a waste rather than see it peopled by Americans.

In the Northwest she succeeded to the French policy as well as the French position. She wished the land to remain a wilderness, the home of the trapper and the fur trader, of the Indian hunter and the French voyageur. She desired it to be kept as a barrier against the growth of the seaboard colonies toward the interior. She regarded the new lands across the Atlantic as being won and settled, not for the benefit of the men who won and settled them, but for the benefit of the merchants and traders who stayed at home. It was this that rendered the Revolution inevitable; the struggle was a revolt against the whole mental attitude of Britain in regard to America, rather than against any one special act or set of acts. The sins and shortcomings of the colonists had been many, and it would be easy to make out a formidable catalogue of grievances against them, on behalf of the mother country; but on the great underlying question they were wholly in the right, and their success was of vital consequence to the well-being of the race on this continent.

Several of the old colonies urged vague claims to parts of the Northwestern Territory, basing them on ancient charters and Indian treaties; but the British heeded them no more than the French had, and they were very little nearer fulfilment after the defeat of Montcalm and Pontiac than before. The French had held adverse possession in spite of them for sixty years; the British held similar possession for fifteen more. The mere statement of the facts is enough to show the intrinsic worthlessness of the titles. The Northwest was acquired from France by Great Britain through conquest and treaty; in a precisely similar way—Clark taking the place of Wolfe—it was afterward won from Britain by the United States. We gained it exactly as we afterward gained Louisiana, Florida, Oregon, California, New Mexico, and Texas: partly by arms, partly by diplomacy, partly by the sheer growth and pressure of our spreading population. The fact that the conquest took place just after we had declared ourselves a free nation, and while we were still battling to maintain our independence, does not alter its character in the least; but it has sufficed to render the whole transaction very hazy in the minds of most subsequent historians, who generally speak as if the Northwest Territory had been part of our original possessions.

The French who dwelt in the land were at the time little affected by the change which transferred their allegiance from one European king to another. They were accustomed to obey, without question, the orders of their superiors. They accepted the results of the war submissively, and yielded a passive obedience to their new rulers.[13] Some became rather attached to the officers who came among them; others grew rather to dislike them; most felt merely a vague sentiment of distrust and repulsion, alike for the haughty British officer in his scarlet uniform, and for the reckless backwoodsman clad in tattered homespun or buckskin. They remained the owners of the villages, the tillers of the soil. At first few English or American immigrants, save an occasional fur trader, came to live among them. But their doom was assured; their rule was at an end forever. For a while they were still to compose the bulk of the scanty population; but nowhere were they again to sway their own destinies. In after years they fought for and against both whites and Indians; they faced each other, ranged beneath the rival banners of Spain, England, and the insurgent colonists; but they never again fought for their old flag or for their own sovereignty.

From the overthrow of Pontiac to the outbreak of the Revolution the settlers in the Illinois and round Vincennes lived in peace under their old laws and customs, which were continued by the British commandants.[14] They had been originally governed, in the same way that Canada was, by the laws of France, adapted, however, to the circumstances of the new country. Moreover, they had local customs which were as binding as the laws. After the conquest the British commandants who came in acted as civil judges also. All public transactions were recorded in French by notaries public. Orders issued in English were translated into French so that they might be understood. Criminal cases were referred to England. Before the conquest the procureur du roi gave sentence by his own personal decision in civil cases; if the matters were important it was the custom for each party to name two arbitrators, and the procureur du roi a fifth; while an appeal might be made to the council supérieur at New Orleans. The British commandant assumed the place of the procureur du roi, although there were one or two half-hearted efforts made to introduce the Common Law.

The original French commandants had exercised the power of granting to every person who petitioned as much land as the petitioner chose to ask for, subject to the condition that part of it should be cultivated within a year, under penalty of its reversion to “the king’s demesnes.”[15] The English followed the same custom. A large quantity of land was reserved in the neighborhood of each village for the common use, and a very small quantity for religious purposes. The common was generally a large patch of inclosed prairie, part of it being cultivated, and the remainder serving as a pasture for the cattle of the inhabitants.[16] The portion of the common set aside for agriculture was divided into strips of one arpent in front by forty in depth, and one or more allotted to each inhabitant according to his skill and industry as a cultivator.[17] The arpent, as used by the western French, was a rather rough measure of surface, less in size than an acre.[18] The farms held by private ownership likewise ran back in long strips from a narrow front that usually lay along some stream.[19] Several of them generally lay parallel to one another, each including something like a hundred acres, but occasionally much exceeding this amount.

The French inhabitants were in very many cases not of pure blood. The early settlements had been made by men only, by soldiers, traders, and trappers, who took Indian wives. They were not trammeled by the queer pride which makes a man of English stock unwilling to make a red-skinned woman his wife, though anxious enough to make her his concubine. Their children were baptized in the little parish churches by the black-robed priests, and grew up holding the same position in the community as was held by their fellows both of whose parents were white. But, in addition to those free citizens, the richer inhabitants owned both red and black slaves; negroes imported from Africa, or Indians overcome and taken in battle.[20] There were many freedmen and freedwomen of both colors, and in consequence much mixture of blood.

They were tillers of the soil, and some followed, in addition, the trades of blacksmith and carpenter. Very many of them were trappers or fur traders. Their money was composed of furs and peltries, rated at a fixed price per pound[21]; none other was used unless expressly so stated in the contract. Like the French of Europe, their unit of value was the livre, nearly equivalent to the modern franc. They were not very industrious, nor very thrifty husbandmen. Their farming implements were rude, their methods of cultivation simple and primitive, and they themselves were often lazy and improvident. Near their town they had great orchards of gnarled apple-trees, planted by their forefathers when they came from France, and old pear-trees, of a kind unknown to the Americans; but their fields often lay untilled, while the owners lolled in the sunshine smoking their pipes. In consequence they were sometimes brought to sore distress for food, being obliged to pluck their corn while it was still green.[22]

The pursuits of the fur trader and fur trapper were far more congenial to them, and it was upon these that they chiefly depended. The half-savage life of toil, hardship, excitement, and long intervals of idleness attracted them strongly. This was perhaps one among the reasons why they got on so much better with the Indians than did the Americans, who, wherever they went, made clearings and settlements, cut down the trees, and drove off the game.

But even these pursuits were followed under the ancient customs and usages of the country, leave to travel and trade being first obtained from the commandant[23]; for the rule of the commandant was almost patriarchal. The inhabitants were utterly unacquainted with what the Americans called liberty. When they passed under our rule, it was soon found that it was impossible to make them understand such an institution as trial by jury; they throve best under the form of government to which they had been immemorially accustomed—a commandant to give them orders, with a few troops to back him up.[24] They often sought to escape from these orders, but rarely to defy them; their lawlessness was like the lawlessness of children and savages; any disobedience was always to a particular ordinance, not to the system.

The trader having obtained his permit, built his boats,—whether light, roomy, bateaux made of boards, or birch-bark canoes, or pirogues, which were simply hollowed out logs. He loaded them with paint, powder, bullets, blankets, beads, and rum, manned them with hardy voyageurs, trained all their lives in the use of pole and paddle, and started off up or down the Mississippi,[25] the Ohio, or the Wabash, perhaps making a long carry or portage over into the Great Lakes. It took him weeks, often months, to get to the first trading-point, usually some large winter encampment of Indians. He might visit several of these, or stay the whole winter through at one, buying the furs.[26]Many of the French coureurs des bois, whose duty it was to traverse the wilderness, and who were expert trappers, took up their abode with the Indians, taught them how to catch the sable, fisher, otter, and beaver, and lived among them as members of the tribe, marrying copper-colored squaws, and rearing dusky children. When the trader had exchanged his goods for the peltries of these red and white skin-hunters, he returned to his home, having been absent perhaps a year or eighteen months. It was a hard life; many a trader perished in the wilderness by cold or starvation, by an upset where the icy current ran down the rapids like a mill-race, by the attack of a hostile tribe, or even in a drunken brawl with the friendly Indians, when voyageur, half-breed, and Indian alike had been frenzied by draughts of fiery liquor.[27]

Next to the commandant in power came the priest. He bore unquestioned rule over his congregation, but only within certain limits; for the French of the backwoods, leavened by the presence among them of so many wild and bold spirits, could not be treated quite in the same way as the more peaceful habitants of Lower Canada. The duty of the priest was to look after the souls of his sovereign’s subjects, to baptize, marry, and bury them, to confess and absolve them, and keep them from backsliding, to say mass, and to receive the salary due him for celebrating divine service; but, though his personal influence was of course very great, he had no temporal authority, and could not order his people either to fight or to work. Still less could he dispose of their land, a privilege inhering only in the commandant and in the commissaries of the villages, where they were expressly authorized so to do by the sovereign.[28]

The average inhabitant, though often loose in his morals, was very religious. He was superstitious also, for he firmly believed in omens, charms, and witchcraft, and when worked upon by his dread of the unseen and the unknown he sometimes did terrible deeds, as will be related further on.

Under ordinary circumstances he was a good-humored, kindly man, always polite—his manners offering an agreeable contrast to those of some of our own frontiersmen,—with a ready smile and laugh, and ever eager to join in any merrymaking. On Sundays and fast-days he was summoned to the little parish church by the tolling of the old bell in the small wooden belfry. The church was a rude oblong building, the walls made out of peeled logs, thrust upright in the ground, chinked with moss and coated with clay or cement. Thither every man went, clad in a capote or blanket coat, a bright silk handkerchief knotted round his head, and his feet shod with moccasins or strong rawhide sandals. If young, he walked or rode a shaggy pony; if older, he drove his creaking, springless wooden cart, untired and unironed, in which his family sat on stools.[29]

The grades of society were much more clearly marked than in similar communities of our own people. The gentry, although not numerous, possessed unquestioned social and political headship and were the military leaders; although of course they did not have anything like such marked preeminence of position as in Quebec or New Orleans, where the conditions were more like those obtaining in the Old World. There was very little education. The common people were rarely versed in the mysteries of reading and writing, and even the wives of the gentry were often only able to make their marks instead of signing their names.[30]

The little villages in which they dwelt were pretty places,[31] with wide, shaded streets. The houses lay far apart, often a couple of hundred feet from one another. They were built of heavy hewn timbers; those of the better sort were furnished with broad verandas, and contained large, low-ceilinged rooms, the high mantel-pieces and the moldings of the doors and windows being made of curiously carved wood. Each village was defended by a palisaded fort and block-houses, and was occasionally itself surrounded by a high wooden stockade. The inhabitants were extravagantly fond of music and dancing[32]; marriages and christenings were seasons of merriment, when the fiddles were scraped all night long, while the moccasined feet danced deftly in time to the music.

Three generations of isolated life in the wilderness had greatly changed the characters of these groups of traders, trappers, bateau-men, and adventurous warriors. It was inevitable that they should borrow many traits from their savage friends and neighbors. Hospitable, but bigoted to their old customs, ignorant, indolent, and given to drunkenness, they spoke a corrupt jargon of the French tongue; the common people were even beginning to give up reckoning time by months and years, and dated events, as the Indians did, with reference to the phenomena of nature, such as the time of the floods, the maturing of the green corn, or the ripening of the strawberries.[33] All their attributes seemed alien to the polished army officers of old France[34]; they had but little more in common with the latter than with the American backwoodsmen. But they had kept many valuable qualities, and, in especial, they were brave and hardy, and, after their own fashion, good soldiers. They had fought valiantly beside King Louis’ musketeers, and in alliance with the painted warriors of the forest; later on they served, though perhaps with less heart, under the gloomy ensign of Spain, shared the fate of the red-coated grenadiers of King George, or followed the lead of the tall Kentucky riflemen.

[1] “Travels by William Bartram,” Philadelphia, 1791, pp. 184, 231, 232, etc. The various Indian names are spelt in a dozen different ways.

[2] Reise, etc. (in 1783 and ‘84), by Johann David Schöpf, 1788, II. 362. The Minorcans were the most numerous and prosperous; then came the Spaniards, with a few Creoles, English, and Germans.

[3] J. D. P. Smyth, “Tour in the United States” (1775). London, 1784, II. 35.

[4] Do.

[5] “Mémoire ou Coup-d’Œil Rapide sur més différentes voyages et mon sejour dans la nation Crëck, par Le Gal. Milfort, Tastanégy ou grand chef de guerre de la nation Crëck et Géneral de Brigade au service de la Republique Francaise.” Paris, 1802. Writing in 1781, he said Mobile contained about forty proprietary families, and was “un petit paradis terrestre.”

[6] Bartram, 407.

[7] “Magazine of American History,” IV., 388. Letter of a New England settler in 1773.

[8] “Annals of St. Louis.” Frederic L. Billon. St. Louis, 1886. A valuable book.

[9] In the Haldimand MSS., Series B, vol. 122, p. 2, is a census of Detroit itself, taken in 1773 by Philip Dejean, justice of the peace. According to this there were 1,367 souls, of whom 85 were slaves; they dwelt in 280 houses, with 157 barns, and owned 1,494 horned cattle, 628 sheep, and 1,067 hogs. Acre is used as a measure of length; their united farms had a frontage of 512, and went back from 40 to 80. Some of the people, it is specified, were not enumerated because they were out hunting or trading at the Indian villages. Besides the slaves, there were 93 servants.

[10] State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol. III., p. 89.

[11] Do. Harmar’s letter.

[12] State Department MSS., No. 30, p. 453. Memorial of François Carbonneaux, agent for the inhabitants of the Illinois country. Dec. 8, 1784. “Four hundred families [in the Illinois] exclusive of a like number at Post Vincent” [Vincennes]. Americans had then just begun to come in, but this enumeration did not refer to them. The population had decreased during the Revolutionary War; so that at its outbreak there were probably altogether a thousand families. They were very prolific, and four to a family is probably not too great an allowance, even when we consider that in such a community on the frontier there are always plenty of solitary adventurers. Moreover, there were a number of negro slaves. Harmar’s letter of Nov. 24, 1787, states the adult males of Kaskaskia and Cahokia at four hundred and forty, not counting those at St. Philip or Prairie du Rocher. This tallies very well with the preceding. But of course the number given can only be considered approximately accurate, and a passage in a letter of Lt.-Gov. Hamilton would indicate that it was considerably smaller.

[13] In the Haldimand MSS., Series B, Vol. 122, p. 3, the letter of M. Ste. Marie from Vincennes, May 3, 1774, gives utterance to the general feeling of the Creoles, when he announces, in promising in their behalf to carry out the orders of the British commandant, that he is “remplie de respect pour tout ce qui porte l’emprinte de l’otorité.” [sic]

[14] State Department MSS., No. 48, p. 51. Statement of M. Cerré (or Carré), July, 1786, translated by John Pintard.

[15] Do.

[16] State Department MSS., No. 48, p. 41. Petition of J. B. La Croix, A. Girardin, etc., dated “at Cohoe in the Illinois 15th July, 1786.”

[17] Billon, 91.

[18] An arpent of land was 180 French feet square, MS. copy of Journal of Matthew Clarkson in 1766. In Durrett collection.

[19] American State Papers, Public Lands, I., 11.

[20] Fergus Historical Series, No. 12, “Illinois in the 18th Century.” Edward G. Mason, Chicago, 1881. A most excellent number of an excellent series. The old parish registers of Kaskaskia, going back to 1695, contain some remarkable names of the Indian mothers—such as Maria Aramipinchicoue and Domitilla Tehuigouanakigaboucoue. Sometimes the man is only distinguished by some such title as “The Parisian,” or “The Bohemian.”]

[21] Billon, 90.

[22] Letter of P. A. Laforge, Dec. 31, 1786. Billon, 268.

[23] State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol. III., p. 519. Letter of Joseph St. Marin, Aug. 23, 1788.

[24] Do., p. 89, Harmar’s letter.

[25] Do., p. 519. Letter of Joseph St. Marin.

[26] Do., p. 89.

[27] Journal of Jean Baptiste Perrault, in 1783; in “Indian Tribes,” by Henry R. Schoolcraft, Part III., Philadelphia, 1855. See also Billon, 484, for an interesting account of the adventures of Gratiot, who afterward, under American rule, built up a great fur business, and drove a flourishing trade with Europe, as well as the towns of the American seaboard.

[28] State Department MSS., No. 48, p. 25. A petition concerning a case in point, affecting the Priest Gibault.

[29] “History of Vincennes,” by Judge John Law, Vincennes, 1858, pp. 18 and 140. They are just such carts as I have seen myself in the valley of the Red River, and in the big bend of the Missouri, carrying all the worldly goods of their owners, the French Métis. These Métis—ex-trappers, ex-buffalo runners, and small farmers—are the best representatives of the old French of the West; they are a little less civilized, they have somewhat more Indian blood in their veins, but they are substantially the same people. It may be noted that the herds of buffaloes that during the last century thronged the plains of what are now the States of Illinois and Indiana furnished to the French of Kaskaskia and Vincennes their winter meat; exactly as during the present century the Saskatchewan Métis lived on the wild herds until they were exterminated.

[30] See the lists of signatures in the State Department MSS., also Mason’s Kaskaskia Parish Records and Law’s Vincennes. As an example; the wife of the Chevalier Vinsenne (who gave his name to Vincennes, and afterward fell in the battle where the Chickasaws routed the Northern French and their Indian allies), was only able to make her mark.

Clark in his letters several times mentions the “gentry,” in terms that imply their standing above the rest of the people.

[31] State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol. III., p. 89.

[32] “Journal of Jean Baptiste Perrault,” 1783.

[33] “Voyage en Amérique” (1796), Général Victor Collot, Paris, 1804, p. 318.

[34] Do. Collot calls them “un composé de traiteurs, d’aven turiers, de coureurs de bois, rameurs, et de guerriers; igno rans, superstitieux et entetés, qu’aucunes fatigues, aucunes privations, aucunes dangers ne peuvent arreter dans leurs enterprises, qu’ils mettent toujours fin; ils n’ont conservé des vertus françaises que le courage.”

CHAPTER III

THE APPALACHIAN CONFEDERACIES, 1765–1775

WHEN WE declared ourselves an independent nation there were on our borders three groups of Indian peoples. The northernmost were the Iroquois or Six Nations, who dwelt in New York, and stretched down into Pennsylvania. They had been for two centuries the terror of every other Indian tribe east of the Mississippi, as well as of the whites; but their strength had already departed. They numbered only some ten or twelve thousand all told, and though they played a bloody part in the Revolutionary struggle, it was merely as subordinate allies of the British. It did not lie in their power to strike a really decisive blow. Their chastisement did not result in our gaining new territory; nor would a failure to chastise them have affected the outcome of the war nor the terms of peace. Their fate was bound up with that of the king’s cause in America and was decided wholly by events unconnected with their own success or defeat.

The very reverse was the case with the Indians, tenfold more numerous, who lived along our western frontier. There they were themselves our main opponents, the British simply acting as their supporters; and instead of their fate being settled by the treaty of peace with Britain, they continued an active warfare for twelve years after it had been signed. Had they defeated us in the early years of the contest, it is more than probable that the Alleghanies would have been made our western boundary at the peace. We won from them vast stretches of territory because we had beaten their warriors, and we could not have won it otherwise; whereas the territory of the Iroquois was lost, not because of their defeat, but because of the defeat of the British.

There were two great groups of these Indians, the ethnic corresponding roughly with the geographic division. In the northwest, between the Ohio and the Lakes, were the Algonquin tribes, generally banded loosely together; in the southwest, between the Tennessee—then called the Cherokee—and the Gulf, the so-called Appalachians lived. Between them lay a vast and beautiful region where no tribe dared dwell, but into which all ventured now and then for war and hunting.

The southwestern Indians were called Appalachians by the olden writers, because this was the name then given to the southern Alleghanies. It is doubtful if the term has any exact racial significance; but it serves very well to indicate a number of Indian nations whose system of government, ways of life, customs, and general culture were much alike, and whose civilization was much higher than was that of most other American tribes.

The Appalachians were in the barbarous rather than in the merely savage state. They were divided into five lax confederacies: the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. The latter were merely a southern offshoot of the Creeks or Muscogees. They were far more numerous than the northwestern Indians, were less nomadic, and in consequence had more definite possession of particular localities; so that their lands were more densely peopled.

In all they amounted to perhaps seventy thousand souls.[1] It is more difficult to tell the numbers of the different tribes; for the division lines between them were very ill defined, and were subject to wide fluctuations. Thus the Creeks, the most formidable of all, were made up of many bands, differing from each other both in race and speech. The languages of the Chickasaws and Choctaws did not differ more from the tongue of the Cherokees, than the two divisions of the latter did from each other. The Cherokees of the hills, the Otari, spoke a dialect that could not be understood by the Cherokees of the lowlands, or Erati. Towns or bands continually broke up and split off from their former associations, while ambitious and warlike chiefs kept forming new settlements, and if successful drew large numbers of young warriors from the older communities. Thus the boundary lines between the confederacies were ever shifting.[2] Judging from a careful comparison of the different authorities, the following estimate of the numbers of the southern tribes at the outbreak of the Revolution may be considered as probably approximately correct.

The Cherokees, some twelve thousand strong,[3] were the mountaineers of their race. They dwelt among the blue-topped ridges and lofty peaks of the southern Alleghanies,[4] in the wild and picturesque region where the present States of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas join one another.

To the west of the Cherokees, on the banks of the Mississippi, were the Chickasaws, the smallest of the southern nations, numbering at the outside but four thousand souls;[5] but they were also the bravest and most warlike, and of all these tribal confederacies theirs was the only one which was at all closely knit together. The whole tribe acted in unison. In consequence, though engaged in incessant warfare with the far more numerous Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees, they more than held their own against them all; besides having inflicted on the French two of the bloodiest defeats they ever suffered from Indians. Most of the remnants of the Natchez, the strange sun-worshipers, had taken refuge with the Chickasaws and become completely identified with them, when their own nationality was destroyed by the arms of New Orleans.

The Choctaws, the rudest and historically the least important of these Indians, lived south of the Chickasaws. They were probably rather less numerous than the Creeks.[6] Though accounted brave they were treacherous and thievish, and were not as well armed as the others. They rarely made war or peace as a unit, parties frequently acting in conjunction with some of the rival European powers, or else joining in the plundering inroads made by the other Indians upon the white settlements. Beyond thus furnishing auxiliaries to our other Indian foes, they had little to do with our history.

The Muscogees or Creeks were the strongest of all. Their southern bands, living in Florida, were generally considered as a separate confederacy, under the name of Seminoles. They numbered between twenty-five and thirty thousand souls,[7] three-fourths of them being the Muscogees proper, and the remainder Seminoles. They dwelt south of the Cherokees and east of the Choctaws, adjoining the Georgians.

The Creeks and Cherokees were thus by their position the barrier tribes of the South, who had to stand the brunt of our advance, and who acted as a buffer between us and the French and Spaniards of the Gulf and the lower Mississippi. Their fate once decided, that of the Chickasaws and Choctaws inevitably followed.

The customs and the political and social systems of these two tribes were very similar; and those of their two western neighbors were merely ruder copies thereof. They were very much further advanced than were the Algonquin nations of the North.

Unlike most mountaineers the Cherokees were not held to be very formidable fighters, when compared with their fellows of the lowlands.[8] In 1760 and 1761 they had waged a fierce war with the whites, had ravaged the Carolina borders, had captured British forts, and successfully withstood British armies; but though they had held their own in the field, it had been at the cost of ruinous losses. Since that period they had been engaged in long wars with the Chickasaws and Creeks, and had been worsted by both. Moreover, they had been much harassed by the northern Indians. So they were steadily declining in power and numbers.[9]

Though divided linguistically into two races, speaking different dialects, the Otari and Erati, the political divisions did not follow the lines of language. There were three groups of towns, the Upper, Lower, and Middle; and these groups often acted independently of one another. The Upper towns lay for the most part on the Western Waters, as they were called by the Americans,—the streams running into the Tennessee. Their inhabitants were known as Overhill Cherokees and were chiefly Otari; but the towns were none of them permanent, and sometimes shifted their positions, even changing from one group to another. The Lower towns, inhabited by the Erati, lay in the flat lands of upper Georgia and South Carolina, and were the least important. The third group, larger than either of the others and lying among the hills and mountains between them, consisted of the Middle towns. Its borders were ill-marked and were ever shifting.

Thus the towns of the Cherokees stretched from the high upland region, where rise the loftiest mountains of eastern America, to the warm, level, low country, the land of the cypress and the long-leaved pine. Each village stood by itself, in some fertile river-bottom, with around it apple orchards and fields of maze. Like the other southern Indians, the Cherokees were more industrious than their northern neighbors, lived by tillage and agriculture as much as by hunting, and kept horses, hogs, and poultry. The oblong, story-high houses were made of peeled logs, mortised into one another and plastered with clay; while the roof was of chestnut bark or of big shingles. Near to each stood a small cabin, partly dug out of the ground, and in consequence very warm; to this the inmates retired in winter, for they were sensitive to cold. In the centre of each village stood the great council-house or rotunda, capable of containing the whole population; it was often thirty feet high, and sometimes stood on a raised mound of earth.[10]

The Cherokees were a bright, intelligent race, better fitted “to follow the white man’s road” than any other Indians. Like their neighbors, they were exceedingly fond of games of chance and skill, as well as of athletic sports. One of the most striking of their national amusements was the kind of ball-play from which we derive the game of lacrosse. The implements consisted of ball sticks or rackets, two feet long, strung with raw-hide webbing, and of a deer-skin ball, stuffed with hair, so as to be very solid, and about the size of a base-ball. Sometimes the game was played by fixed numbers, sometimes by all the young men of a village; and there were often tournaments between different towns and even different tribes. The contests excited the most intense interest, were waged with desperate resolution, and were preceded by solemn dances and religious ceremonies; they were tests of tremendous physical endurance, and were often very rough, legs and arms being occasionally broken. The Choctaws were considered to be the best players.[11]

The Cherokees were likewise fond of dances. Sometimes these were comic or lascivious, sometimes they were religious in their nature, or were undertaken prior to starting on the war-trail. Often the dances of the young men and maidens were very picturesque. The girls, dressed in white, with silver bracelets and gorgets, and a profusion of gay ribbons, danced in a circle in two ranks; the young warriors, clad in their battle finery, danced in a ring around them; all moving in rhythmic step, as they kept time to the antiphonal chanting[12] and singing, the young men and girls responding alternately to each other.

The great confederacy of the Muscogees or Creeks, consisting of numerous tribes, speaking at least five distinct languages, lay in a well-watered land of small timber.[13] The rapid streams were bordered by narrow flats of rich soil, and were margined by canebrakes and reed beds. There were fine open pastures, varied by sandy pine barrens, by groves of palmetto and magnolia, and by great swamps and cypress ponds. The game had been largely killed out, the elk and buffalo having been exterminated and even the deer much thinned, and in consequence the hunting parties were obliged to travel far into the uninhabited region to the northward in order to kill their winter supply of meat. But panthers, wolves, and bears still lurked in the gloomy fastnesses of the swamps and canebrakes, whence they emerged at night to prey on the hogs and cattle. The bears had been exceedingly abundant at one time, so much so as to become one of the main props of the Creek larder, furnishing flesh, fat, and especially oil for cooking and other purposes; and so valued were they that the Indians hit upon the novel plan of preserving them, exactly as Europeans preserve deer and pheasants. Each town put aside a great tract of land which was known as “the beloved bear ground,”[14] where the persimmons, haws, chestnuts, muscadines, and fox grapes abounded, and let the bears dwell there unmolested, except at certain seasons, when they were killed in large numbers. However, cattle were found to be more profitable than bears, and the “beloved bear grounds” were by degrees changed into stock ranges.[15]

The Creeks had developed a very curious semi-civilization of their own. They lived in many towns, of which the larger, or old towns, bore rule over the smaller,[16] and alone sent representatives to the general councils. Many of these were as large as any in the back counties of the colonies[17]; but they were shifted from time to time, as the game was totally killed off and the land exhausted by the crops.[18] The soil then became covered by a growth of pines, and a so-called “old field” was formed. This method of cultivation was, after all, much like that of the Southern whites, and the “old fields,” or abandoned plantations grown up with pines, were common in the colonies.

Many of the chiefs owned droves of horses and horned cattle, sometimes as many as five hundred head,[19] besides hogs and poultry; and some of them, in addition, had negro slaves. But the tillage of the land was accomplished by communal labor; and, indeed, the government, as well as the system of life, was in many respects a singular compound of communism and extreme individualism. The fields of rice, corn, tobacco, beans, and potatoes were sometimes rudely fenced in with split hickory poles, and were sometimes left unfenced, with huts or high scaffolds, where watchers kept guard. They were planted when the wild fruit was so ripe as to draw off the birds, and while ripening the swine were kept penned up and the horses were tethered with tough bark ropes. Pumpkins, melons, marsh-mallows, and sun-flowers were often grown between the rows of corn. The planting was done on a given day, the whole town being summoned; no man was expected or was allowed to go out hunting. The under-headman supervised the work.[20]

For food they used all these vegetables, as well as beef and pork, and venison stewed in bear’s oil; they had hominy and corncakes, and a cool drink made from honey and water,[21] besides another made from fermented corn, which tasted much like cider.[22] They sifted their flour in wicker-work sieves, and baked bread in kettles or on broad, thin stones. Moreover, they gathered the wild fruits, strawberries, grapes, and plums, in their season, and out of the hickory-nuts they made a thick, oily paste, called the hickory milk.

Each town was built round a square, in which the old men lounged all day long, gossiping and wrangling. Fronting the square, and surrounding it, were the four long, low communal houses, eight feet high, sixteen feet deep, and forty to sixty in length. They were wooden frames, supported on pine posts, with roof-tree and rafters of hickory. Their fronts were open piazzas, their sides were lathed and plastered, sometimes with white marl, sometimes with reddish clay, and they had plank doors and were roofed neatly with cypress bark or clapboards. The eave boards were of soft poplar. The barrier towns, near white or Indian enemies, had log houses, with portholes cut in the walls.

The communal houses were each divided into three rooms. The House of the Micos, or Chiefs and Headmen, was painted red and fronted the rising sun; it was highest in rank. The Houses of the Warriors and the Beloved Men—this last being painted white—fronted south and north respectively, while the House of the Young People stood opposite that of the Micos. Each room was divided into two terraces; the one in front being covered with red mats, while that in the rear, a kind of raised dais or great couch, was strewn with skins. They contained stools hewed out of poplar logs, and chests made of clapboards sewed together with buffalo thongs.[23]

The rotunda or council-house stood near the square on the highest spot in the village. It was round, and fifty or sixty feet across, with a high peaked roof; the rafters were fastened with splints and covered with bark. A raised dais ran around the wall, strewed with mats and skins. Sometimes in the larger council-houses there were painted eagles, carved out of poplar wood, placed close to the red and white seats where the chiefs and warriors sat; or in front of the broad dais were great images of the full and the half moon, colored white or black; or rudely carved and painted figures of the panther, and of men with buffalo horns. The tribes held in reverence both the panther and the rattlesnake.

The corn-cribs, fowl-houses, and hot-houses or dug-outs for winter use were clustered near the other cabins.

Although in tillage they used only the hoe, they had made much progress in some useful arts. They spun the coarse wool of the buffalo into blankets, which they trimmed with beads. They wove the wild hemp in frames and shuttles. They made their own saddles. They made beautiful baskets of fine cane splints, and very handsome blankets of turkey feathers; while out of glazed clay they manufactured bowls, pitchers, platters, and other pottery.

In summer they wore buckskin shirts and breech-clouts; in winter they were clad in the fur of the bear and wolf or of the shaggy buffalo. They had moccasins of elk or buffalo hide, and high thigh-boots of thin deerskin, ornamented with fawns’ trotters, or turkey spurs that tinkled as they walked. In their hair they braided eagle plumes, hawk wings, or the brilliant plumage of the tanager and red-bird. Trousers or breeches of any sort they despised as marks of effeminacy.

Vermilion was their war emblem; white was only worn at the time of the Green-Corn Dance. In each town stood the war pole or painted post, a small peeled tree-trunk colored red. Some of their villages were called white or peace towns; others red or bloody towns. The white towns were sacred to peace; no blood could be spilt within their borders. They were towns of refuge, where not even an enemy taken in war could be slain; and a murderer who fled thither was safe from vengeance. The captives were tortured to death in the red towns, and it was in these that the chiefs and warriors gathered when they were planning or preparing for war.

They held great marriage-feasts; the dead were burned with the goods they had owned in their lifetime.

Every night all the people of a town gathered in the council-house to dance and sing and talk. Besides this, they held there on stated occasions the ceremonial dances: such were the dances of war and of triumph, when the warriors, painted red and black, returned, carrying the scalps of their slain foes on branches of evergreen pine, while they chanted the sonorous song of victory; and such was the Dance of the Serpent, the dance of lawless love, where the women and young girls were allowed to do whatsoever they listed.

Once a year, when the fruits ripened, they held the Green-Corn Dance, a religious festival that lasted eight days in the larger towns and four in the smaller. Then they fasted and feasted alternately. They drank out of conch-shells the Black Drink, a bitter beverage brewed from the crushed leaves of a small shrub. On the third day the high priest or fire-maker, the man who sat in the white seat, clad in snowy tunic and moccasins, kindled the holy fire, fanning it into flames with the unsullied wing of a swan, and burning therein offerings of the first-fruits of the year. Dance followed dance. The beloved men and beloved women, the priest and priestesses, danced in three rings, singing the solemn song of which the words were never uttered at any other time; and at the end the warriors, in their wild war-gear, with white-plume head-dresses, took part, and also the women and girls, decked in their best, with ear-rings and armlets, and terrapin shells filled with pebbles fastened to the outside of their legs. They kept time with foot and voice; the men in deep tones, with short accents, the women in a shrill falsetto; while the clay drums, with heads of taut deer-hide, were beaten, the whistles blown, and the gourds and calabashes rattled, until the air resounded with the deafening noise.[24]

Though they sometimes burnt their prisoners or violated captive women, they generally were more merciful than the northern tribes.[25]

But their political and military systems could not compare with those of the Algonquins, still less with those of the Iroquois. Their confederacy was of the loosest kind. There was no central authority. Every town acted just as it pleased, making war or peace with the other towns, or with whites, Choctaws or Cherokees. In each there was a nominal head for peace and war, the high chief and the head warrior; the former was supposed to be supreme, and was elected for life from some one powerful family—as, for instance, the families having for their totems the wind or the eagle. But these chiefs had little control, and could not do much more than influence or advise their subjects; they were dependent on the will of the majority. Each town was a little hotbed of party spirit; the inhabitants divided on almost every question. If the head-chief was for peace, but the war-chief nevertheless went on the war-path, there was no way of restraining him. It was said that never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, had half the nation “taken the war talk” at the same time.[26] As a consequence, war parties of Creeks were generally merely small bands of marauders, in search of scalps and plunder. In proportion to its numbers, the nation never, until 1813, undertook such formidable military enterprises as were undertaken by the Wyandots, Shawnees, and Delawares; and, thougn very formidable individual fighters, even in this respect it may be questioned if the Creeks equaled the prowess of their northern kinsmen.

Yet when the Revolutionary war broke out the Creeks were under a chieftain whose consummate craft and utterly selfish but cool and masterly diplomacy enabled them for a generation to hold their own better than any other native race against the restless Americans. This was the half-breed Alexander McGillivray, perhaps the most gifted man who was ever born on the soil of Alabama.[27]

His father was a Scotch trader, Lachlan McGillivray by name, who came when a boy to Charleston, then the headquarters of the commerce carried on by the British with the Southern Indians. On visiting the traders’ quarter of the town, the young Scot was strongly attracted by the sight of the weather-beaten packers, with their gaudy, half-Indian finery, their hundreds of pack-horses, their curious pack-saddles, and their bales of merchandise. Taking service with them, he was soon helping to drive a pack-train along one of the narrow trails that crossed the lonely pine wilderness. To strong, coarse spirits, that were both shrewd and daring, and willing to balance the great risks incident to their mode of life against its great gains, the business was most alluring. Young Lachlan rose rapidly, and soon became one of the richest and most influential traders in the Creek country.

Like most traders, he married into the tribe, wooing and wedding, at the Hickory Ground, beside the Coosa River, a beautiful half-breed girl, Sehoy Marchand, whose father had been a French officer, and whose mother belonged to the powerful Creek family of the Wind. There were born to them two daughters and one son, Alexander. All the traders, though facing danger at every moment, from the fickle and jealous temper of the savages, wielded immense influence over them, and none more than the elder McGillivray, a far-sighted, unscrupulous Scotchman, who sided alternately with the French and English interests, as best suited his own policy and fortunes.

His son was felt by the Creek to be one of themselves. He was born about 1746, at Little Tallasee, on the banks of the clear-flowing Coosa, where he lived till he was fourteen years old, playing, fishing, hunting, and bathing with the other Indian boys, and listening to the tales of the old chiefs and warriors. He was then taken to Charleston, where he was well educated, being taught Greek and Latin, as well as English history and literature. Tall, dark, slender, with commanding figure and immovable face, of cool, crafty temper, with great ambition and a keen intellect, he felt himself called to play no common part. He disliked trade, and at the first opportunity returned to his Indian home. He had neither the moral nor the physical gifts requisite for a warrior; but he was a consummate diplomat, a born leader, and perhaps the only man who could have used aright such a rope of sand as was the Creek confederacy.

The Creeks claimed him as their own blood, and instinctively felt that he was their only possible ruler. He was forthwith chosen to be their head chief. From that time on he remained among them, at one or the other of his plantations, his largest and his real home being at Little Tallasee, where he lived in barbaric comfort, in a great roomy log-house with a stone chimney, surrounded by the cabins of his sixty negro slaves. He was supported by many able warriors, both of the half and the full blood. One of them is worthy of passing mention. This was a young French adventurer, Milfort, who in 1776 journeyed through the insurgent colonies and became an adopted son of the Creek nation. He first met McGillivray, then in his early manhood, at the town of Coweta, the great wartown on the Chattahoochee, where the half-breed chief, seated on a bear-skin in the council-house, surrounded by his wise men and warriors, was planning to give aid to the British. Afterward he married one of McGillivray’s sisters, whom he met at a great dance—a pretty girl, clad in a short silk petticoat, her chemise of fine linen clasped with silver, her ear-rings and bracelets of the same metal, and with bright-colored ribbons in her hair.[28]

The task set to the son of Sehoy was one of incredible difficulty, for he was head of a loose array of towns and tribes from whom no man could get perfect, and none but himself even imperfect, obedience. The nation could not stop a town from going to war, nor, in turn, could a town stop its own young men from committing ravages. Thus the whites were always being provoked, and the frontiersmen were molested as often when they were quiet and peaceful as when they were encroaching on Indian land. The Creeks owed the land which they possessed to murder and rapine; they mercilessly destroyed all weaker communities, red or white; they had no idea of showing justice or generosity toward their fellows who lacked their strength, and now the measure they had meted so often to others was at last to be meted to them. If the whites treated them well, it was set down to weakness. It was utterly impossible to restrain the young men from murdering and plundering, either the neighboring Indians or the white settlements. Their one ideal of glory was to get scalps, and these the young braves were sure to seek, no matter how much the older and cooler men might try to prevent them. Whether war was declared or not, made no difference. At one time the English exerted themselves successfully to bring about a peace between the Creeks and Cherokees. At its conclusion a Creek chief taunted the mediators as follows: “You have sweated yourselves poor in our smoky houses to make peace between us and the Cherokees, and thereby enable our young people to give you in a short time a far worse sweat than you have yet had.”[29] The result justified his predictions; the young men, having no other foe, at once took to ravaging the settlements. It soon became evident that it was hopeless to expect the Creeks to behave well to the whites merely because they were themselves well treated, and from that time on the English fomented, instead of striving to put a stop to, their quarrels with the Choctaws and Chickasaws.

The record of our dealings with them must in many places be unpleasant reading to us, for it shows grave wrong-doing on our part; yet the Creeks themselves lacked only the power, but not the will, to treat us worse than we treated them, and the darkest pages of their history recite the wrongs that we ourselves suffered at their hands.

[1] Letters of Commissioners Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and Mcintosh, to the President of the Continental Congress, Dec. 2, 1785. (Given in Senate Documents, 33d Congress, 2d session, Boundary between Ga. and Fla.) They give 14,200 “gun-men,” and say that “at a moderate calculation” there are four times as many old men, women, and children as there are gun-men. The estimates of the numbers are very numerous and very conflicting. After carefully consulting all accessible authorities, I have come to the conclusion that the above is probably pretty near the truth. It is the deliberate official opinion of four trained experts, who had ample opportunities for investigation, and who examined the matter with care. But it is very possible that in allotting the several tribes their numbers they err now and then, as the boundaries between the tribes shifted continually, and there were always large communities of renegades, such as the Chickamaugas, who were drawn from the ranks of all.

[2] This is one of the main reasons why the estimates of their numbers vary so hopelessly. As a specimen case, among many others, compare the estimate of Professor Benj. Smith Barton (“Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America,” Phila., 1798) with the report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1827. Barton estimated that in 1793 the Appalachian nations numbered in all 13,000 warriors; considering these as one-fifth of the total population, makes it 65,000. In 1837 the Commissioner reports their numbers at 65,304—almost exactly the same. Probably both statements are nearly correct, the natural rate of increase having just about offset the loss in consequence of a partial change of home, and of Jackson’s slaughtering wars against the Creeks and Seminoles. But where they agree in the total, they vary hopelessly in the details. By Barton’s estimate, the Cherokees numbered but 7,500, the Choctaws 30,000; by the Commissioner’s census the Cherokees numbered 21,911, the Choctaws 15,000. It is of course out of the question to believe that while in 44 years the Cherokees had increased threefold, the Choctaws had diminished one-half. The terms themselves must have altered their significance or else there was extensive inter-tribal migration. Similarly, according to the reports, the Creeks had increased by 4,000—the Seminoles and Choctaws had diminished by 3,000.

[3] “Am. Archives,” 4th Series, III., 790. Drayton’s account, Sept. 23, ‘75. This was a carefully taken census, made by the Indian traders. Apart from the outside communities, such as the Chickamaugas at a later date, there were:

a total of 2,001 warriors. The outlying towns, who had cast off their allegiance for the time being, would increase the amount by three or four hundred more.

[4] “History of the American Indians, Particularly Those Nations Adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia.” By James Adair (an Indian trader and resident in the country for forty years), London, 1775. A very valuable book, but a good deal marred by the author’s irrepressible desire to twist every Indian utterance, habit, and ceremony into a proof that they are descended from the Ten Lost Tribes. He gives the number of Cherokee warriors at 2,300.

[5] Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and McIntosh, in their letter, give them 800 warriors; most other estimates make the number smaller.

[6] Almost all the early writers make them more numerous. Adair gives them 4,500 warriors, Hawkins 6,000. But much less seems to have been known about them than about the Creeks, Cherokees, and Chickasaws; and most early estimates of Indians were largest when made of the least-known tribes. Adair’s statement is probably the most trust worthy. The first accurate census showed the Creeks to be more numerous.

[7] Hawkins, Pickens, etc, make them “at least” 27,000 in 1789; the Indian report for 1837 makes them 26,844. During the half century they had suffered from devastating wars and forced removals, and had probably slightly decreased in number. In Adair’s time their population was increasing.

[8] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, I., 95. Letter of Charles Lee.

[9] Adair, 227. Bartram, 390.

[10] Bartram, 365.

[11] Adair, Bartram.

[12] Bartram.

[13] “A Sketch of the Creek Country,” Benjamin Hawkins. In coll. Ga. Hist. Soc. Written in 1798, but not published till fifty years afterward.

[14] Do., p. 33.

[15] The use of the word “beloved” by the Creeks was quite peculiar. It is evidently correctly translated, for Milfort likewise gives it as “bien aimé.” It was the title used for anything held in especial regard, whether for economic or supernatural reasons; and sometimes it was used as Western tribes use the word “medicine” at the present day. The old chiefs and conjurers were called the “beloved old men”; what in the West we would now call the “medicine squaws,” were named the “beloved old women.” It was often conferred upon the chief dignitaries of the whites in writing to them.]

[16] Hawkins, 37.

[17] Bartram, 386. The Uchee town contained at least 1,500 people.

[18] Do.

[19] Hawkins, 30.

[20] Hawkins, 39; Adair, 408.

[21] Bartram, 184.

[22] Milfort, 212.

[23] Hawkins, 67. Milfort, 203. Bartram, 386. Adair, 418.

[24] Hawkins and Adair, passim.

[25] Do. Also vide Bartram.

[26] Hawkins, 29, 70. Adair, 428.

[27] “History of Alabama,” by Albert James Pickett, Charleston, 1851, II., 30. A valuable work.

[28] Milfort, 23, 326. Milfort’s book is very interesting, but as the man himself was evidently a hopeless liar and braggart, it can only be trusted where it was not for his interest to tell a falsehood. His book was written after McGillivray’s death, the object being to claim for himself the glory belonging to the half-breed chief. He insisted that he was the war-chief, the arm, and McGillivray merely the head, and boasts of his numerous successful war enterprises. But the fact is, that during this whole time the Creeks performed no important stroke in war; the successful resistance to American encroachments was due to the diplomacy of the son of Sehoy. Moreover, Milfort’s accounts of his own war deeds are mainly sheer romancing. He appears simply to have been one of a score of war chiefs, and there were certainly a dozen other Creek chiefs, both half-breeds and natives, who were far more formidable to the frontier than he was; all their names were dreaded by the settlers, but his was hardly known.

[29] Adair, 279.

CHAPTER IV

THE ALGONQUINS OF THE NORTHWEST, 1769–1774

BETWEEN THE Ohio and the Great Lakes, directly north of the Appalachian confederacies and separated from them by the unpeopled wilderness now forming the States of Tennessee and Kentucky, dwelt another set of Indian tribes, ruder in life and manners than their Southern kinsmen, less advanced toward civilization, but also far more warlike; they depended more on the chase and fishing, and much less on agriculture; they were savages, not merely barbarians; and they were fewer in numbers and scattered over wider expanse of territory. But they were further advanced than the almost purely nomadic tribes of horse Indians whom we afterward encountered west of the Mississippi. Some of their villages were permanent, at any rate for a term of years, and near them they cultivated small crops of corn and melons. Their usual dwelling was the conical wigwam covered with bark, skins, or mats of plaited reeds, but in some of the villages of the tribes nearest the border there were regular blockhouses, copied from their white neighbors. They went clad in skins or blankets; the men were hunters and warriors, who painted their bodies and shaved from their crowns all the hair except the long scalplock, while the squaws were the drudges who did all the work.

Their relations with the Iroquois, who lay east of them, were rarely very close, and in fact were generally hostile. They were also usually at odds with the Southern Indians, but among themselves they were frequently united in time of war into a sort of lax league, and were collectively designated by the Americans as the Northwestern Indians. All the tribes belonged to the great Algonquin family, with two exceptions, the Winnebagos and the Wyandots. The former, a branch of the Dakotahs, dwelt west of Lake Michigan; they came but little in contact with us, although many of their young men and warriors joined their neighbors in all the wars against us. The Wyandots or Hurons lived near Detroit and along the south shore of Lake Erie, and were in battle our most redoubtable foes. They were close kin to the Iroquois, though bitter enemies to them, and they shared the desperate valor of these, their hostile kinsfolk, holding themselves above the surrounding Algonquins, with whom, nevertheless, they lived in peace and friendship.

The Algonquins were divided into many tribes, of ever shifting size. It would be impossible to place them all, or indeed to enumerate them, with any degree of accuracy; for the tribes were continually splitting up, absorbing others, being absorbed in turn, or changing their abode, and, in addition, there were numerous small sub-tribes or bands of renegades, which sometimes were and sometimes were not considered as portions of their larger neighbors. Often, also, separate bands, which would vaguely regard themselves as all one nation in one generation, would in the next have lost even this sense of loose tribal unity.

The chief tribes, however, were well known and occupied tolerably definite locations. The Delawares or Leni-Lenappe, dwelt furthest east, lying-northwest of the upper Ohio, their lands adjoining those of the Senecas, the largest and most westernmost of the Six Nations. The Iroquois had been their most relentless foes and oppressors in time gone by; but on the eve of the Revolution all the border tribes were forgetting their past differences and were drawing together to make a stand against the common foe. Thus it came about that parties of young Seneca braves fought with the Delawares in all their wars against us.

Westward of the Delawares lay the Shawnee villages, along the Scioto and on the Pickaway plains; but it must be remembered that the Shawnees, Delawares, and Wyandots were closely united and their villages were often mixed in together. Still further to the west, the Miamis or Twigtees, lived between the Miami and the Wabash, together with other associated tribes, the Piankeshaws and the Weas or Ouatinous. Further still, around the French villages, dwelt those scattered survivors of the Illinois who had escaped the dire fate which befell their fellow-tribesmen because they murdered Pontiac. Northward of this scanty people lived the Sacs and Foxes, and around the upper Great Lakes the numerous and powerful Pottawattamies, Ottawas, and Chippewas; fierce and treacherous warriors, who did not till the soil, and were hunters and fishers only, more savage even than the tribes that lay southeast of them.[1] In the works of the early travelers we read the names of many other Indian nations; but whether these were indeed separate peoples, or branches of some of those already mentioned, or whether the different travelers spelled the Indian names in widely different ways, we can not say. All that is certain is that there were many tribes and sub-tribes, who roamed and warred and hunted over the fair lands now forming the heart of our mighty nation, that to some of these tribes the whites gave names and to some they did not, and that the named and the nameless alike were swept down to the same inevitable doom.

Moreover, there were bands of renegades or discontented Indians, who for some cause had severed their tribal connections. Two of the most prominent of these bands were the Cherokees and Mingos, both being noted for their predatory and murderous nature and their incessant raids on the frontier settlers. The Cherokees were fugitives from the rest of their nation, who had fled north, beyond the Ohio, and dwelt in the land shared by the Delawares and Shawnees, drawing to themselves many of the lawless young warriors, not only of these tribes, but of the others still further off. The Mingos were likewise a mongrel banditti, made up of outlaws and wild spirits from among the Wyandots and Miamis, as well as from the Iroquois and the Munceys (a sub-tribe of the Delawares).

All these Northwestern nations had at one time been conquered by the Iroquois, or at least they had been defeated, their lands overrun, and they themselves forced to acknowledge a vague over-lordship on the part of their foes. But the power of the Iroquois was now passing away; when our national history began, with the assembling of the first Continental Congress, they had ceased to be a menace to the Western tribes, and the latter no longer feared or obeyed them, regarding them merely as allies or neutrals. Yet not only the Iroquois, but their kindred folk, notably the Wyandots, still claimed, and received, for the sake of their ancient superiority, marks of formal respect from the surrounding Algonquins. Thus, among the latter, the Leni-Le-nappe possessed the titular headship, and were called “grandfathers” at all the solemn councils as well as in the ceremonious communications that passed among the tribes; yet in turn they had to use similar titles of respect in addressing not only their former oppressors, but also their Huron allies, who had suffered under the same galling yoke.[2]

The Northwestern nations had gradually come to equal the Iroquois as warriors; but among themselves the palm was still held by the Wyandots, who, although no more formidable than the others as regards skill, hardihood, and endurance, nevertheless stood alone in being willing to suffer heavy punishment in order to win a victory.[3]

The Wyandots had been under the influence of the French Jesuits, and were nominally Christians;[4] and though the attempt to civilize them had not been very successful, and they remained in most respects precisely like the Indians around them, there had been at least one point gained, for they were not, as a rule, nearly so cruel to their prisoners. Thus they surpassed their neighbors in mercifulness as well as valor. All the Algonquin tribes stood, in this respect, much on the same plane. The Delawares, whose fate it had been to be ever buffeted about by both the whites and the reds, had long cowered under the Iroquois terror, but they had at last shaken it off, had reasserted the superiority which tradition says they once before held, and had become a formidable and warlike race. Indeed it is curious to study how the Delawares have changed in respect to their martial prowess since the days when the whites first came in contact with them. They were then not accounted a formidable people, and were not feared by any of their neighbors. By the time the Revolution broke out they had become better warriors, and during the twenty years’ Indian warfare that ensued were as formidable as most of the other redskins. But when moved west of the Mississippi, instead of their spirit being broken, they became more warlike than ever, and throughout the present century they have been the most renowned fighters of all the Indian peoples, and, moreover, they have been celebrated for their roving, adventurous nature. Their numbers have steadily dwindled, owing to their incessant wars and to the dangerous nature of their long roamings.[5]

It is impossible to make any but the roughest guess at the numbers of these Northwestern Indians. It seems probable that there were considerably over fifty thousand of them in all; but no definite assertion can be made even as to the different tribes. As with the Southern Indians, old-time writers certainly greatly exaggerated their numbers, and their modern followers show a tendency to fall into the opposite fault, the truth being that any number of isolated observations to support either position can be culled from the works of the contemporary travelers and statisticians.[6] No two independent observers give the same figures. One main reason for this is doubtless the exceedingly loose way in which the word “tribe” was used. If a man speaks of the Miamis and the Delawares, for instance, before we can understand him we must know whether he includes therein the Weas and the Munceys, for he may or may not. By quoting the numbers attributed by the old writers to the various sub-tribes, and then comparing them with the numbers given later on by writers using the same names, but speaking of entire confederacies, it is easy to work out an apparent increase, while a reversal of the process shows an appalling decrease. Moreover, as the bands broke up, wandered apart, and then rejoined each other or not as events fell out, two successive observers might make widely different estimates. Many tribes that have disappeared were undoubtedly actually destroyed; many more have simply changed their names or have been absorbed by other tribes. Similarly, those that have apparently held their own have done so at the expense of their neighbors. This was made all the easier by the fact that the Algonquins were so closely related in customs and language; indeed, there was constant intermarriage between the different tribes. On the whole, however, there is no question that, in striking contrast to the Southern or Appalachian Indians, these Northwestern tribes have suffered a terrible diminution in numbers.

With many of them we did not come into direct contact for long years after our birth as a nation. Perhaps those tribes with all or part of whose warriors we were brought into collision at some time during or immediately succeeding the Revolutionary War may have amounted to thirty thousand souls.[7] But though they acknowledged kinship with one another, and though they all alike hated the Americans, and though, moreover, all at times met in the great councils, to smoke the calumet of peace and brighten the chain of friendship[8] among themselves, and to take up the tomahawk[9] against the white foes, yet the tie that bound them together was so loose, and they were so fickle and so split up by jarring interests and small jealousies, that never more than half of them went to war at the same time. Very frequently even the members of a tribe would fail to act together.

Thus it came about that during the forty years intervening between Braddock’s defeat and Wayne’s victory, though these Northwestern tribes waged incessant, unending, relentless warfare against our borders, yet they never at any one time had more than three thousand warriors in the field, and frequently not half that number[10]; and in all the battles they fought with British and American troops there was not one in which they were eleven hundred strong.[11]

But they were superb individual fighters, beautifully drilled in their own discipline[12]; and they were favored beyond measure by the nature of their ground, of which their whole system of warfare enabled them to take the utmost possible benefit. Much has been written and sung of the advantages possessed by the mountaineer when striving in his own home against invaders from the plains; but these advantages are as nothing when weighed with those which make the warlike dweller in forests unconquerable by men who have not his training. A hardy soldier, accustomed only to war in the open, will become a good cragsman in fewer weeks than it will take him years to learn to be so much as a fair woodsman; for it is beyond all comparison more difficult to attain proficiency in woodcraft than in mountaineering.[13]

The Wyandots, and the Algonquins who surrounded them, dwelt in a region of sunless, tangled forests; and all the wars we waged for the possession of the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi were carried on in the never-ending stretches of gloomy woodland. It was not an open forest. The underbrush grew, dense and rank, between the boles of the tall trees, making a cover so thick that it was in many places impenetrable, so thick that it nowhere gave a chance for human eye to see even as far as a bow could carry. No horse could penetrate it save by following the game trails or paths chopped with the axe; and a stranger venturing a hundred yards from a beaten road would be so helplessly lost that he could not, except by the merest chance, even find his way back to the spot he had just left. Here and there it was broken by a rare hillside glade or by a meadow in a stream valley; but elsewhere a man might travel for weeks as if in a perpetual twilight, never once able to see the sun through the interlacing twigs that formed a dark canopy above his head.

This dense forest was to the Indians a home in which they had lived from childhood, and where they were as much at ease as a farmer on his own acres. To their keen eyes, trained for generations to more than a wild beast’s watchfulness, the wilderness was an open book; nothing at rest or in motion escaped them. They had begun to track game as soon as they could walk; a scrape on a tree trunk, a bruised leaf, a faint indentation of the soil, which the eye of no white man could see, all told them a tale as plainly as if it had been shouted in their ears.[14] With moccasined feet they trod among brittle twigs, dried leaves, and dead branches as silently as the cougar, and they equaled the great wood-cat in stealth and far surpassed it in cunning and ferocity. They could no more get lost in the trackless wilderness than a civilized man could get lost on a highway. Moreover, no knight of the Middle Ages was so surely protected by his armor as they were by their skill in hiding; the whole forest was to the whites one vast ambush, and to them a sure and ever-present shield. Every tree trunk was a breastwork ready prepared for battle; every bush, every moss-covered bowlder, was a defence against assault, from behind which, themselves unseen, they watched with fierce derision the movements of their clumsy white enemy. Lurking, skulking, traveling with noiseless rapidity, they left a trail that only a master in woodcraft could follow, while, on the other hand, they could dog a white man’s footsteps as a hound runs a fox. Their silence, their cunning and stealth, their terrible prowess and merciless cruelty, makes it no figure of speech to call them the tigers of the human race.

Unlike the Southern Indians, the villages of the Northwestern tribes were usually far from the frontier. Tireless, and careless of all hardship, they came silently out of unknown forests, robbed and murdered, and then disappeared again into the fathomless depths of the woods. Half of the terror they caused was due to the extreme difficulty of following them, and the absolute impossibility of forecasting their attacks. Without warning, and unseen until the moment they dealt the death stroke, they emerged from their forest fastnesses, the horror they caused being heightened no less by the mystery that shrouded them than by the dreadful nature of their ravages. Wrapped in the mantle of the unknown, appalling by their craft, their ferocity, their fiendish cruelty, they seemed to the white settlers devils and not men; no one could say with certainty whence they came nor of what tribe they were; and when they had finished their dreadful work they retired into a wilderness that closed over their trail as the waves of the ocean close in the wake of a ship.

They were trained to the use of arms from their youth up, and war and hunting were their two chief occupations, the business as well as the pleasure of their lives. They were not as skilful as the white hunters with the rifle[15]—though more so than the average regular soldier,—nor could they equal the frontiersman in feats of physical prowess, such as boxing and wrestling; but their superior endurance and the ease with which they stood fatigue and exposure made amends for this. A white might outrun them for eight or ten miles; but on a long journey they could tire out any man, and any beast except a wolf. Like most barbarians they were fickle and inconstant, not to be relied on for pushing through a long campaign, and after a great victory apt to go off to their homes, because each man desired to secure his own plunder and tell his own tale of glory. They are often spoken of as undisciplined; but in reality their discipline in the battle itself was very high. They attacked, retreated, rallied or repelled a charge at the signal of command; and they were able to fight in open order in thick covers without losing touch of each other—a feat that no European regiment was then able to perform.

On their own ground they were far more formidable than the best European troops. The British grenadiers throughout the eighteenth century showed themselves superior, in the actual shock of battle, to any infantry of continental Europe; if they ever met an over-match, it was when pitted against the Scotch highlanders. Yet both grenadier and highlander, the heroes of Minden, the heirs to the glory of Marlborough’s campaigns, as well as the sinewy soldiers who shared in the charges of Prestonpans and Culloden, proved helpless when led against the dark tribesmen of the forest. On the march they could not be trusted thirty yards from the column without getting lost in the woods[16]—the mountain training of the highlanders apparently standing them in no stead whatever,—and were only-able to get around at all when convoyed by backwoodsmen. In fight they fared even worse. The British regulars at Braddock’s battle, and the high-landers at Grant’s defeat a few years later, suffered the same fate. Both battles were fair fights; neither was a surprise; yet the stubborn valor of the red-coated grenadier and the headlong courage of the kilted Scot proved of less than no avail. Not only were they utterly routed and destroyed in each case by an inferior force of Indians (the French taking little part in the conflict), but they were able to make no effective resistance whatever; it is to this day doubtful whether these superb regulars were able in the battles where they were destroyed to so much as kill one Indian for every hundred of their own men who fell. The provincials who were with the regulars were the only troops who caused any loss to the foe; and this was true in but a less degree of Bouquet’s fight at Bushy Run. Here Bouquet, by a clever stratagem, gained the victory over an enemy inferior in numbers to himself; but only after a two days’ struggle in which he suffered a fourfold greater loss than he inflicted.[17]

When hemmed in so that they had no hope of escape, the Indians fought to the death; but when a way of retreat was open they would not stand cutting like British, French, or American regulars, and so, though with a nearly equal force, would retire if they were suffering heavily, even if they were causing their foes to suffer still more. This was not due to lack of courage; it was their system, for they were few in numbers, and they did not believe in losing their men.[18] The Wyandots were exceptions to this rule, for with them it was a point of honor not to yield, and so they were of all the tribes the most dangerous in an actual pitched battle.[19]

But making the attack, as they usually did, with the expectation of success, all were equally dangerous. If their foes were clustered together in a huddle they attacked them without hesitation, no matter what the difference in numbers, and shot them down as if they had been elk or buffalo, they themselves being almost absolutely safe from harm, as they flitted from cover to cover. It was this capacity for hiding, or taking advantage of cover, that gave them their great superiority; and it is because of this that the wood tribes were so much more formidable foes in actual battle than the horse Indians of the plains afterward proved themselves. In dense woodland a body of regular soldiers are almost as useless against Indians as they would be if at night they had to fight foes who could see in the dark; it needs special and long-continued training to fit them in any degree for wood-fighting against such foes. Out on the plains the white hunter’s skill with the rifle and his cool resolution give him an immense advantage; a few determined men can withstand a host of Indians in the open, although helpless if they meet them in thick cover: and our defeats by the Sioux and other plains tribes have generally taken the form of a small force being overwhelmed by a large one.

Not only were the Indians very terrible in battle, but they were cruel beyond all belief in victory; and the gloomy annals of border warfare are stained with their darkest hues because it was a war in which helpless women and children suffered the same hideous fate that so often befell their husbands and fathers. It was a war waged by savages against armed settlers, whose families followed them into the wilderness. Such a war is inevitably bloody and cruel; but the inhuman love of cruelty for cruelty’s sake,[20] which marks the red Indian above all other savages, rendered these wars more terrible than any others. For the hideous, unnamable, unthinkable tortures practiced by the red men on their captured foes, and on their foes’ tender women and helpless children, were such as we read of in no other struggle, hardly even in the revolting pages that tell the deeds of the Holy Inquisition. It was inevitable—indeed it was in many instances proper—that such deeds should awake in the breasts of the whites the grimmest, wildest spirit of revenge and hatred.

The history of the border wars, both in the ways they were begun and in the ways they were waged, makes a long tale of injuries inflicted, suffered, and mercilessly revenged. It could not be otherwise when brutal, reckless, lawless borderers, despising all men not of their own color, were thrown in contact with savages who esteemed cruelty and treachery as the highest of virtues, and rapine and murder as the worthiest of pursuits. Moreover, it was sadly inevitable that the law-abiding borderer as well as the white ruffian, the peaceful Indian as well as the painted marauder, should be plunged into the struggle to suffer the punishment that should only have fallen on their evil-minded fellows.

Looking back, it is easy to say that much of the wrong-doing could have been prevented; but if we examine the facts to find out the truth, not to establish a theory, we are bound to admit that the struggle was really one that could not possibly have been avoided. The sentimental historians speak as if the blame had been all ours, and the wrong all done to our foes, and as if it would, have been possible by any exercise of wisdom to reconcile claims that were in their very essence conflicting; but their utterances are as shallow as they are untruthful.[21] Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of the Alleghanies should remain an unpeopled waste, the hunting-ground of savages, war was inevitable; and even had we been willing, and had we refrained from encroaching on the Indians’ lands, the war would have come nevertheless, for then the Indians themselves would have encroached on ours. Undoubtedly we have wronged many tribes; but equally undoubtedly our first definite knowledge of many others has been derived from their unprovoked outrages upon our people. The Chippe was, Ottawas, and Pottawatomies furnished hundreds of young warriors to the parties that devastated our frontiers generations before we in any way encroached upon or wronged them.

Mere outrages could be atoned for or settled; the question which lay at the root of our difficulties was that of the occupation of the land itself, and to this there could be no solution save war. The Indians had no ownership of the land in the way in which we understand the term. The tribes lived far apart; each had for its hunting-grounds all the territory from which it was not barred by rivals. Each looked with jealousy upon all interlopers, but each was prompt to act as an interloper when occasion offered. Every good hunting-ground was claimed by many nations. It was rare, indeed, that any tribe had an uncontested title to a large tract of land; where such title existed, it rested not on actual occupancy and cultivation, but on the recent butchery of weaker rivals. For instance, there were a dozen tribes, all of whom hunted in Kentucky, and fought each other there, all of whom had equally good titles to the soil, and not one of whom acknowledged the right of any other; as a matter of fact they had therein no right, save the right of the strongest. The land no more belonged to them than it belonged to Boone and the white hunters who first visited it.

On the borders there are perpetual complaints of the encroachments of whites upon Indian lands; and naturally the central government at Washington, and before it was at Washington, has usually been inclined to sympathize with the feeling that considers the whites the aggressors, for the government does not wish a war, does not itself feel any land hunger, hears of not a tenth of the Indian outrages, and knows by experience that the white borderers are not easy to rule. As a consequence, the official reports of the people who are not on the ground are apt to paint the Indian side in its most favorable light, and are often completely untrustworthy, this being particularly the case if the author of the report is an Eastern man, utterly unacquainted with the actual condition of affairs on the frontier.

Such a man, though both honest and intelligent, when he hears that the whites have settled on Indian lands, can not realize that the act has no resemblance whatever to the forcible occupation of land already cultivated. The white settler has merely moved into an uninhabited waste; he does not feel that he is committing a wrong, for he knows perfectly well that the land is really owned by no one. It is never even visited, except perhaps for a week or two every year, and then the visitors are likely at any moment to be driven off by a rival hunting-party of greater strength. The settler ousts no one from the land; if he did not chop down the trees, hew out the logs for a building, and clear the ground for tillage, no one else would do so. He drives out the game, however, and of course the Indians who live thereon sink their mutual animosities and turn against the intruder. The truth is, the Indians never had any real title to the soil; they had not half as good a claim to it, for instance, as the cattlemen now have to all eastern Montana, yet no one would assert that the cattlemen have a right to keep immigrants off their vast unfenced ranges. Settier and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages. Moreover, to the most oppressed Indian nations the whites often acted as a protection, or, at least, they deferred instead of hastening their fate. But for the interposition of the whites it is probable that the Iroquois would have exterminated every Algonquin tribe before the end of the eighteenth century; exactly as in recent time the Crows and Pawnees would have been destroyed by the Sioux, had it not been for the wars which we have waged against the latter.

Again, the loose governmental system of the Indians made it as difficult to secure a permanent peace with them as it was to negotiate the purchase of the lands. The sachem, or hereditary peace chief, and the elective war chief, who wielded only the influence that he could secure by his personal prowess and his tact, were equally unable to control all of their tribesmen, and were powerless with their confederated nations. If peace was made with the Shawnees, the war was continued by the Miamis; if peace was made with the latter, nevertheless perhaps one small band was dissatisfied, and continued the contest on its own account; and even if all the recognized bands were dealt with, the parties of renegades or outlaws had to be considered; and in the last resort the full recognition accorded by the Indians to the right of private warfare, made it possible for any individual warrior who possessed any influence to go on raiding and murdering unchecked. Every tribe, every sub-tribe, every band of a dozen souls ruled over by a petty chief, almost every individual warrior of the least importance, had to be met and pacified. Even if peace were declared, the Indians could not exist long without breaking it. There was to them no temptation to trespass on the white man’s ground for the purpose of settling; but every young brave was brought up to regard scalps taken and horses stolen, in war or peace, as the highest proofs and tokens of skill and courage, the sure means of attaining glory and honor, the admiration of men and the love of women. Where the young men thought thus, and the chiefs had so little real control, it was inevitable that there should be many unprovoked forays for scalps, slaves, and horses made upon the white borderers.[22]

As for the whites themselves, they, too, have many and grievous sins against their red neighbors for which to answer. They can not be severely blamed for trespassing upon what was called the Indians’ land; for let sentimentalists say what they will, the man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not, or the world will come to a standstill; but for many of their other deeds there can be no pardon. On the border each man was a law unto himself, and good and bad alike were left in perfect freedom to follow out to the uttermost limits their own desires; for the spirit of individualism so characteristic of American life reached its extreme of development in the backwoods. The whites who wished peace, the magistrates and leaders, had little more power over their evil and unruly fellows than the Indian sachems had over the turbulent young braves. Each man did what seemed best in his own eyes, almost without let or hindrance; unless, indeed, he trespassed upon the rights of his neighbors, who were ready enough to band together in their own defence, though slow to interfere in the affairs of others.

Thus the men of lawless, brutal spirit who are found in every community and who flock to places where the reign of order is lax, were able to follow the bent of their inclinations unchecked. They utterly despised the red man; they held it no crime whatever to cheat him in trading, to rob him of his peltries or horses, to murder him if the fit seized them. Criminals who generally preyed on their own neighbors, found it easier, and perhaps hardly as dangerous, to pursue their calling at the expense of the redskins, for the latter, when they discovered that they had been wronged, were quite as apt to vent their wrath on some outsider as on the original offender. If they injured a white, all the whites might make common cause against them; but if they injured a red man, though there was sure to be plenty of whites who disapproved of it, there were apt to be very few indeed whose disapproval took any active shape.

Each race stood by its own members, and each held all of the other race responsible for the misdeeds of a few uncontrollable spirits; and this clannishness among those of one color, and the refusal or the inability to discriminate between the good and the bad of the other color, were the two most fruitful causes of border strife.[23] When, even if he sought to prevent them, the innocent man was sure to suffer for the misdeeds of the guilty, unless both joined together for defence, the former had no alternative save to make common cause with the latter. Moreover, in a sparse backwoods settlement, where the presence of a strong, vigorous fighter was a source of safety to the whole community, it was impossible to expect that he would be punished with severity for offences which, in their hearts, his fellow townsmen could not help regarding as in some sort a revenge for the injuries they had themselves suffered. Every quiet, peaceable settler had either himself been grievously wronged, or had been an eye-witness to wrongs done to his friends; and while these were vivid in his mind, the corresponding wrongs done the Indians were never brought home to him at all. If his son was scalped or his cattle driven off, he could not be expected to remember that perhaps the Indians who did the deed had themselves been cheated by a white trader, or had lost a relative at the hands of some border ruffian, or felt aggrieved because a hundred miles off some settler had built a cabin on lands they considered their own. When he joined with other exasperated and injured men to make a retaliatory inroad, his vengeance might or might not fall on the heads of the real offenders; and, in any case, he was often not in the frame of mind to put a stop to the outrages sure to be committed by the brutal spirits among his allies—though these brutal spirits were probably in a small minority.

The excesses so often committed by the whites, when, after many checks and failures, they at last grasped victory, are causes for shame and regret; yet it is only fair to keep in mind the terrible provocations they had endured. Mercy, pity, magnanimity to the fallen, could not be expected from the frontiersmen gathered together to war against an Indian tribe. Almost every man of such a band had bitter personal wrongs to avenge. He was not taking part in a war against a civilized foe; he was fighting in a contest where women and children suffered the fate of the strong men, and instead of enthusiasm for his country’s flag and a general national animosity toward his enemies, he was actuated by a furious flame of hot anger, and was goaded on by memories of which merely to think was madness. His friends had been treacherously slain while on messages of peace; his house had been burned, his cattle driven off, and all he had in the world destroyed before he knew that war existed and when he felt quite guiltless of all offence; his sweetheart or wife had been carried off, ravished, and was at the moment the slave and concubine of some dirty and brutal Indian warrior; his son, the stay of his house, had been burned at the stake with torments too horrible to mention[24]; his sister, when ransomed and returned to him, had told of the weary journey through the woods, when she carried around her neck as a horrible necklace the bloody scalps of her husband and children[25]; seared into his eyeballs, into his very brain, he bore ever with him, waking or sleeping, the sight of the skinned, mutilated, hideous body of the baby who had just grown old enough to recognize him and to crow and laugh when taken in his arms. Such incidents as these were not exceptional; one or more, and often all of them, were the invariable attendants of every one of the countless Indian inroads that took place during the long generations of forest warfare. It was small wonder that men who had thus lost everything should sometimes be fairly crazed by their wrongs. Again and again on the frontier we hear of some such unfortunate who has devoted all the remainder of his wretched life to the one object of taking vengeance on the whole race of the men who had darkened his days forever. Too often the squaws and pappooses fell victims of the vengeance that should have come only on the warriors; for the whites regarded their foes as beasts rather than men, and knew that the squaws were more cruel than others in torturing the prisoner, and that the very children took their full part therein, being held up by their fathers to tomahawk the dying victims at the stake.[26]

Thus it is that there are so many dark and bloody-pages in the book of border warfare, that grim and iron-bound volume, wherein we read how our forefathers won the wide lands that we inherit. It contains many a tale of fierce heroism and adventurous ambition, of the daring and resolute courage of men and the patient endurance of women; it shows us a stern race of freemen who toiled hard, endured greatly, and fronted adversity bravely, who prized strength and courage and good faith, whose wives were chaste, who were generous and loyal to their friends. But it shows us also how they spurned at restraint and fretted under it, how they would brook no wrong to themselves, and yet too often inflicted wrong on others; their feats of terrible prowess are interspersed with deeds of the foulest and most wanton aggression, the darkest treachery, the most revolting cruelty; and though we meet with plenty of the rough, strong, coarse virtues, we see but little of such qualities as mercy for the fallen, the weak, and the helpless, or pity for a gallant and vanquished foe.

Among the Indians of the Northwest, generally so much alike that we need pay little heed to tribal distinctions, there was one body deserving especial and separate mention. Among the turbulent and jarring elements tossed into wild confusion by the shock of the contact between savages and the rude vanguard of civilization, surrounded and threatened by the painted warriors of the woods no less than by the lawless white riflemen who lived on the stump-dotted clearings, there dwelt a group of peaceful beings who were destined to suffer a dire fate in the most lamentable and pitiable of all the tragedies which were played out in the heart of this great wilderness. These were the Moravian Indians.[27] They were mostly Delawares, and had been converted by the indefatigable German missionaries, who taught the tranquil, Quaker-like creed of Count Zinzendorf. The zeal and success of the missionaries were attested by the marvelous change they had wrought in these converts; for they had transformed them in one generation from a restless, idle, bloodthirsty people of hunters and fishers, into an orderly, thrifty, industrious folk, believing with all their hearts the Christian religion in the form in which their teachers both preached and practiced it. At first the missionaries, surrounded by their Indian converts, dwelt in Pennsylvania; but, harried and oppressed by their white neighbors, the submissive and patient Moravians left their homes and their cherished belongings, and, in 1771, moved out into the wilderness northwest of the Ohio. It is a bitter and unanswerable commentary on the workings of a non-resistant creed when reduced to practice, that such outrages and massacres as those committed on these helpless Indians were more numerous and flagrant in the colony the Quakers governed than in any other; their vaunted policy of peace, which forbade them to play a true man’s part and put down wrong-doing, caused the utmost possible evil to fall both on the white man and the red. An avowed policy of force and fraud carried out in the most cynical manner could hardly have worked more terrible injustice; their system was a direct incentive to crime and wrong-doing between the races, for they punished the aggressions of neither, and hence allowed any blow to always fall heaviest on those least deserving to suffer. No other colony made such futile, contemptible efforts to deal with the Indian problem; no other colony showed such supine, selfish helplessness in allowing her own border citizens to be mercilessly harried; none other betrayed such inability to master the hostile Indians, while, nevertheless, utterly failing to protect those who were peaceful and friendly.

When the Moravians removed beyond the Ohio, they settled on the banks of the Muskingum, made clearings in the forest, and built themselves little towns, which they christened by such quaint names as Salem and Gnadenhtitten; names that were pathetic symbols of the peace which the harmless and sadly submissive wanderers so vainly sought. Here, in the forest, they worked and toiled, surrounded their clean, neatly kept villages with orchards and grain-fields, bred horses and cattle, and tried to do wrong to no man; all of each community meeting every day to worship and praise their Creator. But the missionaries who had done so much for them had also done one thing which more than offset it all; for they had taught them not to defend themselves, and had thus exposed the poor beings who trusted their teaching to certain destruction. No greater wrong can ever be done than to put a good man at the mercy of a bad, while telling him not to defend himself or his fellows; in no way can the success of evil be made surer and quicker; but the wrong was peculiarly great when at such a time and in such a place the defenceless Indians were thrust between the anvil of their savage red brethren and the hammer of the lawless and brutal white borderers. The awful harvest which the poor converts reaped had in reality been sown for them by their own friends and would-be benefactors.

So the Moravians, seeking to deal honestly with Indians and whites alike, but in return suspected and despised by both, worked patiently year in and year out, as they dwelt in their lonely homes, meekly awaiting the stroke of the terrible doom which hung over them.

[1] See papers by Stephen D. Peet, on the northwestern tribes, read before the State Archaeological Society of Ohio, 1878.

[2] Barton, xxv.

[3] General W. H. Harrison, “Aborigines of the Ohio Valley.” Old “Tippecanoe” was the best possible authority for their courage.

[4] “Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Col. James Smith,” etc., written by himself, Lexington, Ky., 1799-Smith is our best contemporary authority on Indian warfare; he lived with them for several years, and fought them in many campaigns. Besides several editions of the above, he also published in 1812, at Paris, Ky., a “Treatise” on Indian warfare, which holds much the same matter.

[5] See Parkman’s “Oregon Trail.” In 1884 I myself met two Delawares hunting alone, just north of the Black Hills. They were returning from a trip to the Rocky Mountains. I could not but admire their strong, manly forms, and the disdainful resolution with which they had hunted and travelled for so many hundred miles, in defiance of the white frontiersmen and of the wild native tribes as well. I think they were in more danger from the latter than the former; but they seemed perfectly confident of their ability to hold their own against both.

[6] See Barton, the Madison MSS., Schoolcraft, Thos. Hutch-ins (who accompanied Bouquet), Smythe, Pike, various reports of the U. S. Indian Commissioners, etc., etc.

[7] I base this number on a careful examination of the tribes named above, discarding such of the northern bands of the Chippewas, for instance, as were unlikely at that time to have been drawn into war with us.

[8] The expressions generally used by them in sending their war talks and peace talks to one another or the whites. Hundreds of copies of these “talks” are preserved at Washington.

[9] Do.

[10] Smith, “Remarkable Occurrences,” etc., p. 154. Smith gives a very impartial account of the Indian discipline and of their effectiveness, and is one of the few men who warred against them who did not greatly overestimate their numbers and losses. He was a successful Indian fighter himself. For the British regulars he had the true backwoods contempt, although having more than the average backwoods sense in acknowledging their effectiveness in the open. He had lived so long among the Indians, and estimated so highly their personal prowess, that his opinion must be accepted with caution where dealing with matters of discipline and command.

[11] The accounts of the Indian numbers in any battle given by British or Americans, soldiers or civilians, are ludicrously exaggerated as a rule; even now it seems a common belief of historians that the whites were generally outnumbered in battles, while in reality they were generally much more numerous than their foes.

[12] Harrison (loc. cit.) calls them “the finest light troops in the world”; and he had had full experience in serving with American and against British infantry.

[13] Any one who is fond of the chase can test the truth of this proposition for himself, by trying how long it will take him to learn to kill a bighorn on the mountains, and how long it will take him to learn to kill white-tail deer in a dense forest, by fair still-hunting, the game being equally plenty. I have known many novices learn to equal the best old hunters, red or white, in killing mountain game; I have never met one who could begin to do as well as an Indian in the dense forest, unless brought up to it—and rarely even then. Yet, though woodcraft is harder to learn, it does not imply the possession of such valuable qualities as mountaineering; and when cragsman and woodman meet on neutral ground, the former is apt to be the better man.

[14] To this day the wild—not the half-tame—Indians remain unequaled as trackers. Even among the old hunters not one white in a hundred can come near them. In my experience I have known a very few whites who had spent all their lives in the wilderness who equaled the Indian average; but I never met any white who came up to the very best Indian. But, because of their better shooting and their better nerve, the whites often make the better hunters.

[15] It is curious how to this day the wild Indians retain the same traits. I have seen and taken part in many matches between frontiersmen and the Sioux, Cheyennes, Grosventres, and Mandans, and the Indians were beaten in almost every one. On the other hand the Indians will stand fatigue, hunger, and privation better, but they seem more susceptible to cold.

[16] See Parkman’s “Conspiracy of Pontiac”; also “Mont calm and Wolfe.”

[17] Bouquet, like so many of his predecessors, and successors, greatly exaggerated the numbers and loss of the Indians in this fight. Smith, who derived his information both from the Indians and from the American rangers, states that but eighteen Indians were killed at Bushy Run.

[18] Most of the plains Indians feel in the same way at present. I was once hunting with a Sioux half-breed who illustrated the Indian view of the matter in a rather striking way, saying: “If there were a dozen of you white hunters and you found six or eight bears in the brush, and you knew you could go in and kill them all, but that in the fight you would certainly lose three or four men yourselves, you wouldn’t go in, would you? You’d wait until you got a better chance, and could kill them without so much risk. Well, Indians feel the same way about attacking whites that you would feel about attacking those bears.”

[19] All the authorities from Smith to Harrison are unanimous on this point.

[20] Any one who has ever been in an encampment of wild Indians, and has had the misfortune to witness the delight the children take in torturing little animals, will admit that the Indian’s love of cruelty for cruelty’s sake can not possibly be exaggerated. The young are so trained that when old they shall find their keenest pleasure in inflicting pain in its most appalling form. Among the most brutal white borderers a man would be instantly lynched if he practiced on any creature the fiendish torture which in an Indian camp either attracts no notice at all, or else excites merely laughter.

[21] See Appendix A.

[22] Similarly the Crows, who have always been treated well by us, have murdered and robbed any number of peaceful, unprotected travelers during the past three decades, as I know personally.

[23] It is precisely the same at the present day. I have known a party of Sioux to steal the horses of a buffalo-hunting outfit, whereupon the latter retaliated by stealing the horses of a party of harmless Grosventres: and I knew a party of Cheyennes, whose horses had been taken by white thieves, to, in revenge, assail a camp of perfectly orderly cowboys. Most of the ranchmen along the Little Missouri in 1884 were pretty good fellows, who would not wrong Indians, yet they tolerated for a long time the presence of men who did not scruple to boast that they stole horses from the latter; while our peaceful neighbors, the Grosventres, likewise permitted two notorious red-skinned horse-thieves to use their reservation as a harbor of refuge, and a starting-point from which to make forays against the cattlemen.

[24] The expression “too horrible to mention” is to be taken literally, not figuratively. It applies equally to the fate that has befallen every white man or woman who has fallen into the power of hostile plains Indians during the last ten or fifteen years. The nature of the wild Indian has not changed. Not one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes torments which a civilized man can not look another in the face and so much as speak of. Impalement on charred stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out—these tortures can be mentioned, but there are others equally normal and customary which can not even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims.

[25] For the particular incident see M’Ferrin’s “History of Methodism in Tennessee,” p. 145.

[26] As was done to the father of Simon Girty. Any history of any Indian inroad will give examples such as I have mentioned above. See McAfee MSS., John P. Hale’s “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” De Haas’ “Indian Wars,” Wither’s “Border War,” etc. In one respect, however, the Indians east of the Mississippi were better than the tribes of the plains from whom our borders have suffered during the present century; their female captives were not invariably ravished by every member of the band capturing them, as has ever been the custom among the horse Indians. Still, they were often made the concubines of their captors.

[27] The missionaries called themselves United Brethren; to outsiders they were known as Moravians. Loskiel, “History of the Mission of the United Brethren,” London, 1794. Heckewelder, “Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren,” Phil., 1820.

CHAPTER V

THE BACKWOODSMEN OF THE ALLEGHANIES, 1769–1774

ALONG THE western frontier of the colonies that were so soon to be the United States, among the foothills of the Alleghanies, on the slopes of the wooded mountains, and in the long trough-like valleys that lay between the ranges, dwelt a peculiar and characteristically American people.

These frontier folk, the people of the up-country, or back-country, who lived near and among the forest-clad mountains, far away from the long-settled districts of flat coast plain and sluggish tidal river, were known to themselves and to others as backwoodsmen. They all bore a strong likeness to one another in their habits of thought and ways of living, and differed markedly from the people of the older and more civilized communities to the eastward. The Western border of our country was then formed by the great barrier-chains of the Alleghanies, which ran north and south from Pennsylvania through Maryland, Virgina, and the Carolinas,[1] the trend of the valleys being parallel to the seacoast, and the mountains rising highest to the southward. It was difficult to cross the ranges from east to west, but it was both easy and natural to follow the valleys between. From Fort Pitt to the high hill-homes of the Cherokees this great tract of wooded and mountainous country possessed nearly the same features and characteristics, differing utterly in physical aspect from the alluvial plains bordering the ocean.

So, likewise, the backwoods mountaineers who dwelt near the great watershed that separates the Atlantic streams from the springs of the Watauga, the Kanawha, and the Monongahela, were all cast in the same mold, and resembled each other much more than any of them did their immediate neighbors of the plains. The backwoodsmen of Pennsylvania had little in common with the peaceful population of Quakers and Germans who lived between the Delaware and the Susquehanna; and their near kinsmen of the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains were separated by an equally wide gulf from the aristocratic planter communities that flourished in the tide-water regions of Virginia and the Carolinas. Near the coast the lines of division between the colonies corresponded fairly well with the differences between the populations; but after striking the foothills, though the political boundaries continued to go east and west, those both of ethnic and of physical significance began to run north and south.

The backwoodsmen were Americans by birth and parentage, and of mixed race; but the dominant strain in their blood was that of the Presbyterian Irish—the Scotch-Irish as they were often called. Full credit has been awarded the Roundhead and the Cavalier for their leadership in our history; nor have we been altogether blind to the deeds of the Hollander and the Huguenot; but it is doubtful if we have wholly realized the importance of the part played by that stern and virile people, the Irish, whose preachers taught the creed of Knox and Calvin. These Irish representatives of the Covenanters were in the West almost what the Puritans were in the Northeast, and more than the Cavaliers were in the South. Mingled with the descendants of many other races, they, nevertheless, formed the kernel of the distinctively and intensely American stock who were the pioneers of our people in their march westward, the vanguard of the army of fighting settlers, who with axe and rifle won their way from the Alleghanies to the Rio Grande and the Pacific.[2]

The Presbyterian Irish were themselves already a mixed people. Though mainly descended from Scotch ancestors—who came originally from both lowlands and highlands, from among both the Scotch Saxons and the Scotch Celts,[3]—many of them were of English, a few of French Huguenot,[4] and quite a number of true old Milesian Irish[5] extraction. They were the Protestants of the Protestants; they detested and despised the Catholics, whom their ancestors had conquered, and regarded the Episcopalians, by whom they themselves had been oppressed, with a more sullen, but scarcely less intense, hatred.[6] They were a truculent and obstinate people, and gloried in the warlike renown of their forefathers, the men who had followed Cromwell, and who had shared in the defence of Derry and in the victories of the Boyne and Aughrim.[7]

They did not begin to come to America in any numbers till after the opening of the eighteenth century; by 1730 they were fairly swarming across the ocean, for the most part in two streams, the larger going to the port of Philadelphia, the smaller to the port of Charleston.[8] Pushing through the long settled lowlands of the seacoast, they at once made their abode at the foot of the mountains, and became the outposts of civilization. From Pennsylvania, whither the great majority had come, they drifted south along the foothills, and down the long valleys, till they met their brethren from Charleston who had pushed up into the Carolina back-country. In this land of hills, covered by unbroken forest, they took root and flourished, stretching in a broad belt from north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of the seaboard and the red warriors of the wilderness. All through this region they were alike; they had as little kinship with the Cavalier as with the Quaker; the West was won by those who have been rightly called the Roundheads of the South, the same men who, before any others, declared for American independence.[9]

The two facts of most importance to remember in dealing with our pioneer history are, first, that the western portions of Virginia and the Carolinas were peopled by an entirely different stock from that which had long existed in the tide-water regions of those colonies; and, secondly, that, except for those in the Carolinas who came from Charleston, the immigrants of this stock were mostly from the north, from their great breeding-ground and nursery in western Pennsylvania.[10]

That these Irish Presbyterians were a bold and hardy race is proved by their at once pushing past the settled regions, and plunging into the wilderness as the leaders of the white advance. They were the first and last set of immigrants to do this; all others have merely followed in the wake of their predecessors. But, indeed, they were fitted to be Americans from the very start; they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters; they deemed it a religious duty to interpret their own Bible, and held for a divine right the election of their own clergy. For generations their whole ecclesiastic and scholastic systems had been fundamentally democratic. In the hard life of the frontier they lost much of their religion, and they had but scant opportunity to give their children the schooling in which they believed; but what few meetinghouses and school-houses there were on the border were theirs.[11] The numerous families of colonial English who came among them adopted their religion if they adopted any. The creed of the backwoodsman who had a creed at all was Presbyterian-ism; for the Episcopacy of the tide-water lands obtained no foothold in the mountains, and the Methodists and Baptists had but just begun to appear in the West when the Revolution broke out.[12]

These Presbyterian Irish were, however, far from being the only settlers on the border, although more than any others they impressed the stamp of their peculiar character on the pioneer civilization of the West and Southwest. Great numbers of immigrants of English descent came among them from the settled districts on the east; and though these later arrivals soon became indistinguishable from the people among whom they settled, yet they certainly sometimes added a tone of their own to backwoods society, giving it here and there a slight dash of what we are accustomed to consider the distinctively Southern or Cavalier spirit.[13] There was likewise a large German admixture, not only from the Germans of Pennsylvania, but also from those of the Carolinas.[14] A good many Huguenots like-wise came,[15] and a few Hollanders[16] and even Swedes,[17] from the banks of the Delaware, or perhaps from further off still.

A single generation, passed under the hard conditions of life in the wilderness, was enough to weld together into one people the representatives of these numerous and widely different races; and the children of the next generation became indistinguishable from one another. Long before the first Continental Congress assembled, the backwoodsmen, whatever their blood, had become Americans, one in speech, thought, and character, clutching firmly the land in which their fathers and grandfathers had lived before them. They had lost all remembrance of Europe and all sympathy with things European; they had become as emphatically products native to the soil as were the tough and supple hickories out of which they fashioned the handles of their long, light axes. Their grim, harsh, narrow lives were yet strangely fascinating and full of adventurous toil and danger; none but natures as strong, as freedom-loving, and as full of bold defiance as theirs could have endured existence on the terms which these men found pleasurable. Their iron surroundings made a mold which turned out all alike in the same shape. They resembled one another, and they differed from the rest of the world—even the world of America, and infinitely more the world of Europe—in dress, in customs, and in mode of life.

Where their lands abutted on the more settled districts to the eastward, the population was of course thickest, and their peculiarities least. Here and there at such points they built small backwoods burgs or towns, rude, straggling, unkempt villages, with a store or two, a tavern,—sometimes good, often a “scandalous hog-sty,” where travelers were devoured by fleas, and every one slept and ate in one room,[18]—a small log school-house, and a little church, presided over by a hard-featured Presbyterian preacher, gloomy, earnest, and zealous, probably bigoted and narrow-minded, but nevertheless a great power for good in the community.[19]

However, the backwoodsmen as a class neither built towns nor loved to dwell therein. They were to be seen at their best in the vast, interminable forests that formed their chosen home. They won and kept their lands by force, and ever lived either at war or in dread of war. Hence they settled always in groups of several families each, all banded together for mutual protection. Their red foes were strong and terrible, cunning in council, dreadful in battle, merciless beyond belief in victory. The men of the border did not overcome and dispossess cowards and weaklings; they marched forth to spoil the stout-hearted and to take for a prey the possessions of the men of might. Every acre, every rood of ground which they claimed had to be cleared by the axe and held with the rifle. Not only was the chopping down of the forests the first preliminary to cultivation, but it was also the surest means of subduing the Indians, to whom the unending stretches of choked woodland were an impenetrable cover behind which to move unseen, a shield in making assaults, and a strong tower of defence in repelling counter-attacks. In the conquest of the West the backwoods axe, shapely, well-poised, with long haft and light head, was a servant hardly standing second even to the rifle; the two were the national weapons of the American backwoodsman, and in their use he has never been excelled.

When a group of families moved out into the wilderness they built themselves a station or stockade fort; a square palisade of upright logs, loop-holed, with strong block-houses as bastions at the corners. One side at least was generally formed by the backs of the cabins themselves, all standing in a row; and there was a great door or gate, that could be strongly barred in case of need. Often no iron whatever was employed in any of the buildings. The square inside contained the provision sheds and frequently a strong central blockhouse as well. These forts, of course, could not stand against cannon, and they were always in danger when attacked with fire; but save for this risk of burning they were very effectual defences against men without artillery, and were rarely taken, whether by whites or Indians, except by surprise. Few other buildings have played so important a part in our history as the rough stockade fort of the backwoods.

The families only lived in the fort when there was war with the Indians, and even then not in the winter. At other times they all separated out to their own farms, universally called clearings, as they were always made by first cutting off the timber. The stumps were left to dot the fields of grain and Indian corn. The corn in especial was the standby and invariable resource of the Western settler; it was the crop on which he relied to feed his family, and when hunting or on a war trail the parched grains were carried in his leather wallet to serve often as his only food. But he planted orchards and raised melons, potatoes, and many other fruits and vegetables as well; and he had usually a horse or two, cows, and perhaps hogs and sheep, if the wolves and bears did not interfere. If he was poor his cabin was made of unhewn logs, and held but a single room; if well-to-do, the logs were neatly-hewed, and besides the large living and eating-room with its huge stone fireplace, there was also a small bedroom and a kitchen, while a ladder led to the loft above, in which the boys slept. The floor was made of puncheons, great slabs of wood hewed carefully out, and the roof of clapboards. Pegs of wood were thrust into the sides of the house, to serve instead of a wardrobe; and buck antlers, thrust into joists, held the ever-ready rifles. The table was a great clapboard set on four wooden legs; there were three-legged stools, and in the better sort of houses old-fashioned rocking-chairs.[20] The couch or bed was warmly covered with blankets, bear-skins, and deer-hides.[21]

These clearings lay far apart from one another in the wilderness. Up to the door-sills of the log-huts stretched the solemn and mysterious forest. There were no openings to break its continuity; nothing but endless leagues on leagues of shadowy, wolf-haunted woodland. The great trees towered aloft till their separate heads were lost in the mass of foliage above, and the rank underbrush choked the spaces between the trunks. On the higher peaks and ridge-crests of the mountains there were straggling birches and pines, hemlocks and balsam firs;[22] elsewhere, oaks, chestnuts, hickories, maples, beeches, walnuts, and great tulip trees grew side by-side with many other kinds. The sunlight could not penetrate the roofed archway of murmuring leaves; through the gray aisles of the forest men walked always in a kind of midday gloaming. Those who had lived in the open plains felt when they came to the backwoods as if their heads were hooded. Save on the border of a lake, from a cliff top, or on a bald knob—that is, a bare hill-shoulder,—they could not anywhere look out for any distance.

All the land was shrouded in one vast forest. It covered the mountains from crest to river-bed, filled the plains, and stretched in sombre and melancholy wastes toward the Mississippi. All that it contained, all that lay hid within it and beyond it, none could tell; men only knew that their boldest hunters, however deeply they had penetrated, had not yet gone through it, that it was the home of the game they followed and the wild beasts that preyed on their flocks, and that deep in its tangled depths lurked their red foes, hawk-eyed and wolf-hearted.

Backwoods society was simple, and the duties and rights of each member of the family were plain and clear. The man was the armed protector and provider, the bread-winner; the woman was the housewife and child-bearer. They married young and their families were large, for they were strong and healthy, and their success in life depended on their own stout arms and willing hearts. There was everywhere great equality of conditions. Land was plenty and all else scarce; so courage, thrift, and industry were sure of their reward. All had small farms, with the few stock necessary to cultivate them; the farms being generally placed in the hollows, the division lines between them, if they were close together, being the tops of the ridges and the watercourses, especially the former. The buildings of each farm were usually at its lowest point, as if in the centre of an amphitheatre.[23] Each was on an average of about 400 acres,[24] but sometimes more.[25] Tracts of low, swampy grounds, possibly some miles from the cabin, were cleared for meadows, the fodder being stacked, and hauled home in winter.

Each backwoodsman was not only a small farmer but also a hunter; for his wife and children depended for their meat upon the venison and bear’s flesh procured by his rifle. The people were restless and always on the move. After being a little while in a place, some of the men would settle down permanently, while others would again drift off, farming and hunting alternately to support their families.[26] The backwoodsman’s dress was in great part borrowed from his Indian foes. He wore a fur cap or felt hat, moccasins, and either loose, thin trousers, or else simply leggings of buckskin or elk-hide, and the Indian breech-clout. He was always clad in the fringed hunting-shirt, of homespun or buckskin, the most picturesque and distinctively national dress ever worn in America. It was a loose smock or tunic, reaching nearly to the knees, and held in at the waist by a broad belt, from which hung the tomahawk and scalping - knife.[27] His weapon was the long, small-bore, flint-lock rifle, clumsy, and ill-balanced, but exceedingly accurate. It was very heavy, and when upright, reached to the chin of a tall man; for the barrel of thick, soft iron, was four feet in length, while the’ stock was short, and the butt scooped out. Sometimes it was plain, sometimes ornamented. It was generally bored out—or, as the expression then was, “sawed out”—to carry a ball of seventy, more rarely of thirty or forty, to the pound; and was usually of backwoods manufacture.[28] The marksman almost always fired from a rest, and rarely at a very long range; and the shooting was marvelously accurate.[29]

In the backwoods there was very little money; barter was the common form of exchange, and peltries were often used as a circulating medium, a beaver, otter, fisher, dressed buckskin or large bearskin being reckoned as equal to two foxes or wildcats, four coons, or eight minks.[30] A young man inherited nothing from his father but his strong frame and eager heart; but before him lay a whole continent wherein to pitch his farm, and he felt ready to marry as soon as he became of age, even though he had nothing but his clothes, his horses, his axe, and his rifle.[31] If a girl was well off, and had been careful and industrious, she might herself bring a dowry, of a cow and a calf, a brood mare, a bed well stocked with blankets, and a chest containing her clothes[32]—the latter not very elaborate, for a woman’s dress consisted of a hat or poke bonnet, a “bed gown,” perhaps a jacket, and a linsey petticoat, while her feet were thrust into coarse shoe-packs or moccasins. Fine clothes were rare; a suit of such cost more than 200 acres of good land.[33]

The first lesson the backwoodsmen learnt was the necessity of self-help; the next, that such a community could only thrive if all joined in helping one another. Log-rollings, house-raisings, house-warmings, corn-shuckings, quiltings, and the like were occasions when all the neighbors came together to do what the family itself could hardly accomplish alone. Every such meeting was the occasion of a frolic and dance for the young people, whiskey and rum being plentiful, and the host exerting his utmost power to spread the table with backwoods delicacies—bear-meat and venison, vegetables from the “truck patch,” where squashes, melons, beans, and the like were grown, wild fruits, bowls of milk, and apple pies, which were the acknowledged standard of luxury. At the better houses there was metheglin or small beer, cider, cheese, and biscuits.[34] Tea was so little known that many of the backwoods people were not aware it was a beverage, and at first attempted to eat the leaves with salt or butter.[35]

The young men prided themselves on their bodily strength, and were always eager to contend against one another in athletic games, such as wrestling, racing, jumping, and lifting flour-barrels; and they also sought distinction in vying with one another at their work. Sometimes they strove against one another singly, sometimes they divided into parties, each bending all its energies to be first in shucking a given heap of corn or cutting (with sickles) an allotted patch of wheat. Among the men the bravos or bullies often were dandies also in the backwoods fashions, wearing their hair long and delighting in the rude finery of hunting-shirts embroidered with porcupine quills; they were loud, boastful, and profane, given to coarsely bantering one another. Brutally savage fights were frequent; the combatants, who were surrounded by rings of interested spectators, striking, kicking, biting, and gouging. The fall of one of them did not stop the fight, for the man who was down was maltreated without mercy until he called “enough.” The victor always bragged savagely of his prowess, often leaping on a stump, crowing and flapping his arms. This last was a thoroughly American touch; but otherwise one of these contests was less a boxing match than a kind of backwoods pankrátion, no less revolting than its ancient prototype of Olympic fame. Yet, if the uncouth borderers were as brutal as the highly polished Greeks, they were more manly; defeat was not necessarily considered disgrace, a man often fighting when he was certain to be beaten, while the onlookers neither hooted nor pelted the conquered. We first hear of the noted scout and Indian fighter, Simon Kenton, as leaving a rival for dead after one of these ferocious duels, and fleeing from his home in terror of the punishment that might follow the deed.[36] Such fights were specially frequent when the backwoodsmen went into the little frontier towns to see horse races or fairs.

A wedding was always a time of festival. If there was a church anywhere near, the bride rode thither on horseback behind her father, and after the service her pillion was shifted to the bridegroom’s steed.[37] If, as generally happened, there was no church, the groom and his friends, all armed, rode to the house of the bride’s father, plenty of whiskey being drunk, and the men racing recklessly along the narrow bridle-paths, for there were few roads or wheeled vehicles in the backwoods. At the bride’s house the ceremony was performed, and then a huge dinner was eaten; after which the fiddling and dancing began, and were continued all the afternoon, and most of the night as well. A party of girls stole off the bride and put her to bed in the loft above; and a party of young men then performed the like service for the groom. The fun was hearty and coarse, and the toasts always included one to the young couple, with the wish that they might have many big children; for as long as they could remember the backwoodsmen had lived at war, while looking ahead they saw no chance of its ever stopping, and so each son was regarded as a future warrior, a help to the whole community.[38] The neighbors all joined again in chopping and rolling the logs for the young couple’s future house, then in raising the house itself, and finally in feasting and dancing at the house-warming.

Funerals were simple, the dead body being carried to the grave in a coffin slung on poles and borne by four men.

There was not much schooling, and few boys or girls learnt much more than reading, writing, and ciphering up to the rule of three.[39] Where the school-houses existed they were only dark, mean log-huts, and if in the southern colonies, were generally placed in the so-called “old fields,” or abandoned farms grown up with pines. The schoolmaster boarded about with the families; his learning was rarely great, nor was his discipline good, in spite of the frequency and severity of the canings. The price for such tuition was at the rate of twenty shillings a year, in Pennsylvania currency.[40]

Each family did everything that could be done for itself. The father and sons worked with axe, hoe, and sickle. Almost every house contained a loom, and almost every woman was a weaver. Linsey-woolsey, made from flax grown near the cabin, and of wool from the backs of the few sheep, was the warmest and most substantial cloth; and when the flax crop failed and the flocks were destroyed by wolves, the children had but scanty covering to hide their nakedness. The man tanned the buckskin, the woman was tailor and shoemaker, and made the deer-skin sifters to be used instead of bolting-cloths. There were a few pewter spoons in use; but the table furniture consisted mainly of handmade trenchers, platters, noggins, and bowls. The cradle was of peeled hickory bark.[41] Plowshares had to be imported, but harrows and sleds were made without difficulty; and the cooper work was well done. Chaff beds were thrown on the floor of the loft, if the house-owner was well off. Each cabin had a hand-mill and a hominy block; the last was borrowed from the Indians, and was only a large block of wood, with a hole burned in the top, as a mortar, where the pestle was worked. If there were any sugar maples accessible, they were tapped every year.

But some articles, especially salt and iron, could not be produced in the backwoods. In order to get them each family collected during the year all the furs possible, these being valuable and yet easily carried on pack-horses, the sole means of transport. Then, after seeding time, in the fall, the people of a neighborhood ordinarily joined in sending down a train of peltry-laden pack-horses to some large sea-coast or tidal-river trading town, where their burdens were bartered for the needed iron and salt. The unshod horses all had bells hung round their neck; the clappers were stopped during the day, but when the train was halted for the night, and the horses were hobbled and turned loose, the bells were once more unstopped.[42] Several men accompanied each little caravan, and sometimes they drove with them steers and hogs to sell on the seacoast. A bushel of alum salt was worth a good cow and calf, and as each of the poorly fed, undersized pack animals could carry but two bushels, the mountaineers prized it greatly, and instead of salting or pickling their venison, they jerked it, by drying it in the sun or smoking it over a fire.

The life of the backwoodsmen was one long struggle. The forest had to be felled, droughts, deep snows, freshets, cloudbursts, forest fires, and all the other dangers of a wilderness life faced. Swarms of deer-flies, mosquitoes, and midges rendered life a torment in the weeks of hot weather. Rattlesnakes and copperheads were very plentiful, and, the former especially, constant sources of danger and death. Wolves and bears were incessant and inveterate foes of the live stock, and the cougar or panther occasionally attacked man as well.[43] More terrible still, the wolves sometimes went mad, and the men who then encountered them were almost certain to be bitten and to die of hydrophobia.[44]

Every true backwoodsman was a hunter. Wild turkeys were plentiful. The pigeons at times filled the woods with clouds that hid the sun and broke down the branches on their roosting grounds as if a whirlwind had passed. The black and gray squirrels swarmed, devastating the cornfields, and at times gathering in immense companies and migrating across mountain and river. The hunters’ ordinary game was the deer, and after that the bear; the elk was already growing uncommon. No form of labor is harder than the chase, and none is so fascinating or so excellent as a training-school for war. The successful still-hunter of necessity possessed skill in hiding and in creeping noiselessly upon the wary quarry, as well as in imitating the notes and calls of the different beasts and birds; skill in the use of the rifle and in throwing the tomahawk he already had; and he perforce acquired keenness of eye, thorough acquaintance with woodcraft, and the power of standing the severest strains of fatigue, hardship, and exposure. He lived out in the woods for many months with no food but meat, and no shelter whatever, unless he made a lean-to of brush or crawled into a hollow sycamore.

Such training stood the frontier folk in good stead when they were pitted against the Indians; without it they could not even have held their own, and the white advance would have been absolutely checked. Our frontiers were pushed westward by the warlike skill and adventurous personal prowess of the individual settlers; regular armies by themselves could have done little. For one square mile the regular armies added to our domain the settlers added ten,—a hundred would probably be nearer the truth. A race of peaceful, unwarlike farmers would have been helpless before such foes as the red Indians, and no auxiliary military force would have protected them or enabled them to move westward. Colonists fresh from the Old World, no matter how thrifty, steady-going, and industrious, could not hold their own on the frontier; they had to settle where they were protected from the Indians by a living barrier of bold and self-reliant American borderers.[45] The West would never have been settled save for the fierce courage and the eager desire to brave danger so characteristic of the stalwart backwoodsmen.

These armed hunters, woodchoppers, and farmers were their own soldiers. They built and manned their own forts; they did their own fighting under their own commanders. There were no regiments of regular troops along the frontier.[46] In the event of an Indian inroad each borderer had to defend himself until there was time for them all to gather together to repel or avenge it. Every man was accustomed to the use of arms from his childhood; when a boy was twelve years old he was given a rifle and made a fort-soldier, with a loophole where he was to stand if the station was attacked. The war was never-ending, for even the times of so-called peace were broken by forays and murders; a man might grow from babyhood to middle age on the border, and yet never remember a year in which some one of his neighbors did not fall a victim to the Indians.

There was everywhere a rude military organization, which included all the able-bodied men of the community. Every settlement had its colonels and captains; but these officers, both in their training and in the authority they exercised, corresponded much more nearly to Indian chiefs than to the regular army men whose titles they bore. They had no means whatever of enforcing their orders, and their tumultuous and disorderly levies of sinewy riflemen were hardly as well disciplined as the Indians themselves.[47] The superior officer could advise, entreat, lead, and influence his men, but he could not command them, or, if he did, the men obeyed him only just so far as it suited them. If an officer planned a scout or campaign, those who thought proper accompanied him, and the others stayed at home, and even those who went out came back if the fit seized them, or perchance followed the lead of an insubordinate junior officer whom they liked better than they did his superior.[48] There was no compulsion to perform military duties beyond dread of being disgraced in the eyes of the neighbors, and there was no pecuniary reward for performing them; nevertheless the moral sentiment of a backwoods community was too robust to tolerate habitual remissness in military affairs, and the coward and laggard were treated with utter scorn, and were generally in the end either laughed out, or “hated out,” of the neighborhood, or else got rid of in a still more summary manner. Among a people naturally brave and reckless, this public opinion acted fairly effectively, and there was generally but little shrinking from military service.[49]

A backwoods levy was formidable because of the high average courage and prowess of the individuals composing it; it was on its own ground much more effective than a like force of regular soldiers, but of course it could not be trusted on a long campaign. The backwoodsmen used their rifles better than the Indians, and also stood punishment better, but they never matched them in surprises nor in skill in taking advantage of cover, and very rarely equaled their discipline in the battle itself. After all, the pioneer was primarily a husbandman; the time spent in chopping trees and tilling the soil his foe spent in preparing for or practicing forest warfare, and so the former, thanks to the exercise of the very qualities which in the end gave him the possession of the soil, could not, as a rule, hope to rival his antagonist in the actual conflict itself. When large bodies of the red men and white borderers were pitted against each other, the former were if anything the more likely to have the advantage.[50] But the whites soon copied from the Indians their system of individual and private warfare, and they probably caused their foes far more damage and loss in this way than in the large expeditions. Many noted border scouts and Indian fighters—such men as Boone, Kenton, Wetzel, Brady, McCulloch, Mansker[51]—grew to overmatch their Indian foes at their own game, and held themselves above the most renowned warriors. But these men carried the spirit of defiant self-reliance to such an extreme that their best work was always done when they were alone or in small parties of but four or five. They made long forays after scalps and horses, going a wonderful distance, enduring extreme hardship, risking the most terrible of deaths, and harrying the hostile tribes into a madness of terror and revengeful hatred.

As it was in military matters, so it was with the administration of justice by the frontiersmen; they had few courts, and knew but little law, and yet they contrived to preserve order and morality with rough effectiveness, by combining to frown down on the grosser misdeeds, and to punish the more flagrant misdoers. Perhaps the spirit in which they acted can be best shown by the recital of an incident in the career of the three McAfee brothers, who were among the pioneer hunters of Kentucky.[52] Previous to trying to move their families out to the new country, they made a cache of clothing, implements, and provisions, which in their absence was broken into and plundered. They caught the thief, “a little diminutive, red-headed white man,” a runaway convict servant from one of the tide-water counties of Virginia. In the first impulse of anger at finding that he was the criminal, one of the McAfees rushed at him to kill him with his tomahawk; but the weapon turned, the man was only knocked down, and his assailant’s gusty anger subsided as quickly as it had risen, giving way to a desire to do stern but fair justice. So the three captors formed themselves into a court, examined into the case, heard the man in his own defence, and after due consultation decided that “according to their opinion of the laws he had forfeited his life, and ought to be hung”; but none of them was willing to execute the sentence in cold blood, and they ended by taking their prisoner back to his master.

The incident was characteristic in more than one way. The prompt desire of the backwoodsman to avenge his own wrong; his momentary furious anger, speedily quelled and replaced by a dogged determination to be fair but to exact full retribution; the acting entirely without regard to legal forms or legal officials, but yet in a spirit which spoke well for the doer’s determination to uphold the essentials that make honest men law-abiding; together with the good faith of the whole proceeding, and the amusing ignorance that it would have been in the least unlawful to execute their own rather harsh sentence—all these were typical frontier traits. Some of the same traits appear in the treatment commonly adopted in the backwoods to meet the case—of painfully frequent occurrence in the times of Indian wars—where a man taken prisoner by the savages, and supposed to be murdered, returned after two or three years’ captivity, only to find his wife married again. In the wilderness a husband was almost a necessity to a woman; her surroundings made the loss of the protector and provider an appalling calamity; and the widow, no matter how sincere her sorrow, soon remarried—for there were many suitors where women were not over-plenty. If in such a case the one thought dead returned, the neighbors and the parties interested seem frequently to have held a sort of informal court, and to have decided that the woman should choose either of the two men she wished to be her husband, the other being pledged to submit to the decision and leave the settlement. Evidently no one had the least idea that there was any legal irregularity in such proceedings.[53]

The McAfees themselves and the escaped convict-servant whom they captured typify the two prominent classes of the backwoods people. The frontier, in spite of the outward uniformity of means and manners, is pre-eminently the place of sharp contrasts. The two extremes of society, the strongest, best, and most adventurous, and the weakest, most shiftless, and vicious, are those which seem naturally to drift to the border. Most of the men who came to the backwoods to hew out homes and rear families were stern, manly, and honest; but there was also a large influx of people drawn from the worst immigrants that perhaps ever were brought to America—the mass of convict-servants, redemptioners, and the like, who formed such an excessively undesirable substratum to the otherwise excellent population of the tide-water regions in Virginia and the Carolinas.[54] Many of the Southern Crackers or poor whites spring from this class, which also in the backwoods gave birth to generations of violent and hardened criminals, and to an even greater number of shiftless, lazy, cowardly cumberers of the earth’s surface. They had in many places a permanently bad effect upon the tone of the whole community.

Moreover, the influence of heredity was no more plainly perceptible than was the extent of individual variation. If a member of a bad family wished to reform, he had every opportunity to do so; if a member of a good family had vicious propensities, there was nothing to check them. All qualities, good and bad, are intensified and accentuated in the life of the wilderness. The man who in civilization is merely sullen and bad-tempered becomes a murderous, treacherous ruffian when transplanted to the wilds; while, on the other hand, his cheery, quiet neighbor develops into a hero, ready uncomplainingly to lay down his life for his friend. One who in an Eastern city is merely a backbiter and slanderer, in the Western woods lies in wait for his foe with a rifle; sharp practice in the East becomes highway robbery in the West; but at the same time negative good-nature becomes active self-sacrifice, and a general belief in virtue is translated into a prompt and determined war upon vice. The ne’er-do-well of a family who in one place has his debts paid a couple of times and is then forced to resign from his clubs and lead a cloudy but innocuous existence on a small pension, in the other abruptly finishes his career by being hanged for horsestealing.

In the backwoods the lawless led lives of abandoned wickedness; they hated good for good’s sake, and did their utmost to destroy it. Where the bad element was large, gangs of horse-thieves, highwaymen, and other criminals often united with the uncontrollable young men of vicious tastes who were given to gambling, fighting, and the like. They then formed half-secret organizations, often of great extent and with wide ramifications; and if they could control a community they established a reign of terror, driving out both ministers and magistrates, and killing without scruple those who interfered with them. The good men in such a case banded themselves together as regulators and put down the wicked with ruthless severity, by the exercise of lynch law, shooting and hanging the worst offhand.[55]

Jails were scarce in the wilderness, and often were entirely wanting in a district, which, indeed, was quite likely to lack legal officers also. If punishment was inflicted at all it was apt to be severe, and took the form of death or whipping. An impromptu jury of neighbors decided with a rough and ready sense of fair play and justice what punishment the crime demanded, and then saw to the execution of their own decree. Whipping was the usual reward of theft. Occasionally torture was resorted to, but not often; but to their honor be it said, the backwoodsmen were horrified at the treatment accorded both to black slaves and to white convict servants in the lowlands.[56]

They were superstitious, of course, believing in witchcraft, and signs and omens; and it may be noted that their superstition showed a singular mixture of Old-World survivals and of practices borrowed from the savages or evolved by the very force of their strange surroundings. At the bottom they were deeply religious in their tendencies; and although ministers and meeting-houses were rare, yet the backwoods cabins often contained Bibles, and the mothers used to instil into the minds of their children reverence for Sunday,[57] while many even of the hunters refused to hunt on that day.[58] Those of them who knew the right honestly tried to live up to it, in spite of the manifold temptations to backsliding offered by their lives of hard and fierce contention.[59] But Calvinism, though more congenial to them than Episcopacy, and infinitely more so than Catholicism, was too cold for the fiery hearts of the borderers; they were not stirred to the depths of their natures till other creeds, and, above all, Methodism, worked their way to the wilderness.

Thus the backwoodsmen lived on the clearings they had hewed out of the everlasting forest; a grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion, the love of freedom rooted in their very hearts’ core. Their lives were harsh and narrow, they gained their bread by their blood and sweat, in the unending struggle with the wild ruggedness of nature. They suffered terrible injuries at the hands of the red men, and on their foes they waged a terrible warfare in return. They were relentless, revengeful, suspicious, knowing neither ruth nor pity; they were also upright, resolute, and fearless, loyal to their friends, and devoted to their country. In spite of their many failings, they were of all men the best fitted to conquer the wilderness and hold it against all comers.

[1] Georgia was then too weak and small to contribute much to the backwoods stock; her frontier was still in the low country

[2] Among the dozen or so most prominent backwoods pioneers of the West and Southwest, the men who were the leaders in exploring and settling the lands, and in fighting the Indians, British, and Mexicans, the Presbyterian Irish stock furnished Andrew Jackson, Samuel Houston, David Crockett, James Robertson; Lewis, the leader of the backwoods hosts in their first great victory over the Northwestern Indians; and Campbell, their commander in their first great victory over the British. The other pioneers who stand beside the above were such men as Sevier, a Shenandoah Huguenot; Shelby, of Welsh blood; and Boone and Clark, both of English stock, the former from Pennsylvania, the latter from Virginia.

[3] Of course, generations before they ever came to America, the McAfees, McClungs, Campbells, McCoches, etc., had become indistinguishable from the Todds, Armstrongs, Elliotts, and the like.

[4] A notable instance being that of the Lewis family, of Great Kanawha fame.

[5] The Blount MSS. contain many muster-rolls and pay-rolls of the frontier forces of North Carolina during the year 1788. In these, and in the lists of names of settlers preserved in the Am. State Papers, Public Lands, II., etc., we find numerous names such as Shea, Drennan, O’Neil, O’Brien, Mahoney, Sullivan, O’Connell, Maguire, O’Donohue—in fact hardly a single Irish name is unrepresented. Of course, many of these were the descendants of imported Irish bondservants; but many also were free immigrants, belonging to the Pres byterian Congregations, and sometimes appearing as pastors thereof. For the numerous Irish names of prominent pioneers (such as Donelly, Hogan, etc.) see McClung’s “West ern Adventures” (Louisville, 1879), 52, 167, 207, 308, etc.; also De Haas, 236, 289, etc.; Doddridge, 16, 288, 301, etc., etc.

[6] “Sketches of North Carolina,” William Henry Foote, New York, 1846. An excellent book, written after much research.

[7] For a few among many instances: Houston (see Lane’s “Life of Houston”) had ancestors at Derry and Aughrim the McAfees (see McAfee MSS.) and Irvine, one of the commanders on Crawford’s expedition, were descendants of men who fought at the Boyne (“Crawford’s Campaign,” G. W. Butterfield, Cincinnati, 1873, P. 26); so with Lewis, Camp bell, etc.

[8] Foote, 78.

[9] Witness the Mecklenburg Declaration

[10] McAfee MSS. “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers” (John P. Hale), 17. Foote, 188. See also “Columbian Magazine,” I., 122, and Schöpf, 406. Boone, Crockett, Houston, Campbell, Lewis, were among the Southwestern pioneers whose families originally came from Pennsylvania. See “Annals of Augusta County, Va.,” by Joseph A. Waddell, Richmond, 1888 (an excellent book), pp. 4, 276, 278, for a clear showing of the Pres byterian Irish origin of the West Virginians, and of the large German admixture.

[11] The Irish schoolmaster was everywhere a feature of early Western society.

[12] McAfee MSS. MS. Autobiography of Rev. Wm. Hick man, born in Virginia in 1747 (in Col. R. T. Durrett’s library). “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” 147. “History of Kentucky Baptists.” J. H. Spencer (Cincinnati, 1885).

[13] Boone, though of English descent, had no Virginia blood in his veins; he was an exact type of the regular backwoodsman; but in Clark, and still more in Blount, we see strong traces of the “cavalier spirit.” Of course, the Cavaliers no more formed the bulk of the Virginia people than they did of Rupert’s armies; but the squires and yeomen who went to make up the mass took their tone from their leaders.

[14] Many of the most noted hunters and Indian fighters were of German origin. (See “Early Times in Middle Tennessee,” John Carr, Nashville, 1859, pp. 54 and 56, for Steiner and Mansker—or Stoner and Mansco.) Such were the Wetzels, famous in border annals, who lived near Wheeling; Michael Steiner, the Steiners being the forefathers of many of the numerous Kentucky Stoners of to-day; and Kasper Mansker, the “Mr. Mansco” of Tennessee writers. Every old Western narrative contains many allusions to “Dutchmen,” as Americans very properly call the Germans. Their names abound on the muster-rolls, pay-rolls, lists of settlers, etc., of the day (Blount MSS., State Department MSS., McAfee MSS., Am. State Papers, etc.); but it must be remembered that they are often Anglicized, when nothing remains to show the origin of the owners. We could not recognize in Custer and Herkomer, Kuster and Herckheimer, were not the ancestral history of the two generals already known; and in the backwoods, a man often loses sight of his ancestors in a couple of generations. In the Carolinas the Germans seem to have been almost as plentiful on the frontiers as the Irish (see Adair, 245, and Smyth’s “Tour,” I., 236). In Pennsylvania they lived nearer civilization (Schoolcraft, 3, 335; “Journey in the West in 1785,” by Lewis Brantz), although also mixed with the borderers; the more adventurous among them naturally seeking the frontier.

[15] Giving to the backwoods society such families as the Seviers and Lenoirs. The Huguenots, like the Germans, frequently had their names Anglicized. The best known and most often quoted example is that of the Blancpied family, part of whom have become Whitefoots, while the others, living on the coast, have suffered a marvelous sea-change, the name reappearing as “Blumpy.”

[16] To the Western American, who was not given to nice ethnic distinctions, both German and Hollander were simply Dutchmen; but occasionally we find names like Van Meter, Van Buskirk, Van Swearingen, which carry their origin on their faces (De Haas, 317, 319; Doddridge, 307).

[17] The Scandinavian names, in an unlettered community, soon become indistinguishable from those of the surrounding Americans—Jansen, Petersen, etc., being readily Americanized. It is therefore rarely that they show their parentage. Still we now and then come across one that is unmistakable, as Erickson, for instance (see p. 51 of Col. Reuben T. Durrett’s admirable “Life and Writings of John Filson,” Louisville and Cincinnati, 1884).

[18] MS. Journal of Matthew Clarkson, 1766. See also “Voyage dans les Etats-Unis,” La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Paris, L’an, VII., I., 104.

[19] The borderers had the true Calvinistic taste in preaching. Clarkson, in his journal of his Western trip, mentions with approval a sermon he heard as being “a very judicious and alarming discourse.”

[20] McAfee MSS.

[21] In the McAfee MSS. there is an amusing mention of the skin of a huge bull elk, killed by the father, which the young sters christened “old ellick”; they used to quarrel for the possession of it on cold nights, as it was very warm, though if the hairside was turned in it became slippery and apt to slide off the bed.

[22] On the mountains the climate, flora, and fauna were all those of the north, not of the adjacent southern lowlands. The ruffed grouse, red squirrel, snow bird, various Canadian warblers, and a peculiar species of boreal field-mouse, the evotomys, are all found as far south as the Great Smokies.

[23] Doddridge’s “Settlements and Indian Wars,” (133) written by an eye-witness; it is the most valuable book we have on old-time frontier ways and customs.

[24] The land laws differed at different times in different colonies; but this was the usual size at the outbreak of the Revolution, of the farms along the western frontier, as, under the laws of Virginia, then obtaining from the Holston to the Alleghany, this amount was allotted every settler who built a cabin or raised a crop of corn.

[25] Beside the right to 400 acres, there was also a preemption right to 1,000 acres more adjoining to be secured by a land-office warrant. As between themselves the settlers had what they called “tomahawk rights,” made by simply deadening a certain number of trees with a hatchet. They were similar to the rights conferred in the West now by what is called a “claim shack” or hut built to hold some good piece of land; that is, they conferred no title whatever, except that sometimes men would pay for them rather than have trouble with the claimant.

[26] McAfee MSS. (particularly Autobiography of Robert McAfee).

[27] To this day it is worn in parts of the Rocky Mountains, and even occasionally, here and there, in the Alleghanies.

[28] The above is the description of one of Boone’s rifles, now in the possession of Col. Durrett. According to the inscription on the barrel it was made at Louisville (Ky.), in 1782, by M. Humble. It is perfectly plain; whereas one of Floyd’s rifles, which I have also seen, is much more highly finished, and with some ornamentation.

[29] For the opinion of a foreign military observer on the phenomenal accuracy of backwoods marksmanship, see General Victor Collot’s “Voyage en Amérique,” p. 242.

[30] MS. copy of Matthew Clarkson’s Journal in 1766.

[31] McAfee MSS. (Autobiography of Robert R. McAfee).

[32] Do.

[33] Memoirs of the Hist. Soc. of Pernn., 1826. Account of first settlements, etc., by John Watson (1804).

[34] Do. An admirable account of what such a frolic was some thirty-five years later is to be found in Edward Eggleston’s “Circuit Rider.”

[35] Such incidents are mentioned again and again by Watson, Milfort, Doddridge, Carr, and other writers.

[36] McClung’s “Western Adventures.” All Eastern and European observers comment with horror on the border brawls, especially the eye-gouging. Englishmen, of course, in true provincial spirit, complacently contrasted them with their own boxing fights; Frenchmen, equally of course, were more struck by the resemblances than the differences between the two forms of. combat. Milfort gives a very amusing account of the “Anglo-Américains d’une espèce particulière,” whom he calls “crakeurs ou gaugeurs,” (crackers or gougers). He remarks that he found them “tous borgnes,” (as a result of their pleasant fashion of eye-gouging—a backwoods bully in speaking of another would often threaten to “measure the length of his eye-strings,”) and that he doubts if there can exist in the world “des hommes plus méchants que ces habitants.”

These fights were among the numerous backwoods habits that showed Scotch rather than English ancestry. “I attempted to keep him down, in order to improve my success, after the manner of my own country” (“Roderick Random”).

[37] Watson.

[38] Doddridge.

[39] McAfee MSS.

[40] Watson.

[41] McAfee MSS. See also Doddridge and Watson.

[42] Doddridge, 156. He gives an interesting anecdote of one man engaged in helping such a pack-train, the bell of whose horse was stolen. The thief was recovered, and whipped as a punishment, the owner exclaiming as he laid the strokes lustily on: “Think what a rascally figure I should make in the streets of Baltimore without a bell on my horse.” He had never been out of the woods before; he naturally wished to look well on his first appearance in civilized life, and it never occurred to him that a good horse was left without a bell anywhere.

[43] An instance of this, which happened in my mother’s family, has been mentioned elsewhere (Hunting Trips of a Ranchman). Even the wolves occasionally attacked man; Audubon gives an example.

[44] Doddridge, 194. Dodge, in his “Hunting Grounds of the Great West,” gives some recent instances. Bears were some times dangerous to human life. Doddridge, 64. A slave on the plantation of my great-grandfather in Georgia was once regularly scalped by a she-bear whom he had tried to rob of her cubs, and ever after he was called, both by the other negroes and by the children on the plantation, “Bear Bob.”

[45] Schöpf, I., 404.

[46] The insignificant garrisons at one or two places need not be taken into account, as they were of absolutely no effect.

[47] Brantz Mayer, in “Tah-Gah-Jute, or Logan and Cresap” (Albany, 1867), ix., speaks of the pioneers as “comparatively few in numbers,” and of the Indians as “numerous, and fearing not only the superior weapons of his foe, but the organization and discipline which together made the comparatively few equal to the greater number.” This sentence embodies a variety of popular misconceptions. The pioneers were more numerous than the Indians; the Indians were generally, at least in the Northwest, as well armed as the whites, and in military matters the Indians were actually (see Smith’s narrative, and almost all competent authorities) superior in organization and discipline to their pioneer foes. Most of our battles against the Indians of the Western woods, whether won or lost, were fought by superior numbers on our side. Individually, or in small parties, the frontiersmen gradually grew to be a match for the Indians, man for man, at least in many cases, but this was only true of large bodies of them if they were commanded by some one naturally able to control their unruly spirits.

[48] As examples take Clark’s last Indian campaign and the battle of Blue Licks.

[49] Doddridge, 161, 185.

[50] At the best such a frontier levy was composed of men of the type of Leatherstocking, Ishmael Bush, Tom Hunter, Harry March, Bill Kirby, and Aaron Thousandacres. When animated by a common and overmastering passion, such a body would be almost irresistible; but it could not hold together long, and there was generally a plentiful mixture of men less trained in woodcraft, and therefore useless in forest fighting, while if, as must generally be the case in any body, there were a number of cowards in the ranks, the total lack of discipline not only permitted them to flinch from their work with impunity, but also allowed them, by their example, to infect and demoralize their braver companions.

[51] Haywood, De Haas, Withers, McClung, and other border annalists, give innumerable anecdotes about these and many other men, illustrating their feats of fierce prowess and, too often, of brutal ferocity.

[52] McAfee MSS. The story is told both in the “Autobiography of Robert McAfee,” and in the “History of the First Settlement on Salt River.”

[53] Incidents of this sort are frequently mentioned. Generally the woman went back to her first husband. “Early Times in Middle Tennessee,” John Carr, Nashville, 1859, p. 231.

[54] See “A Short History of the English Colonies in America,” by Henry Cabot Lodge (New York, 1886), for an account of these people.

[55] The regulators of backwoods society corresponded exactly to the vigilantes of the Western border to-day. In many of the cases of lynch law which have come to my knowledge the effect has been healthy for the community; but sometimes great injustice is done. Generally the vigi lantes, by a series of summary executions, do really good work; but I have rarely known them fail, among the men whom they killed for good reason, to also kill one or two either by mistake or to gratify private malice.

[56] See Doddridge.

[57] McAfee MSS.

[58] Doddridge.

[59] Said one old Indian fighter, a Col. Joseph Brown, of Tennessee, with quaint truthfulness, “I have tried also to be a religious man, but have not always, in a life of so much adventure and strife, been able to act consistently.”—”Southwestern Monthly,” Nashville, 1851, I., 80.

CHAPTER VI

BOONE AND THE LONG HUNTERS; AND THEIR HUNTING IN NO-MAN’S-LAND, 1769–1774

THE AMERICAN backwoodsmen had surged up, wave upon wave, till their mass trembled in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready to flood the continent beyond. The people threatened by them were dimly conscious of the danger which as yet only loomed in the distance. Far off, among their quiet adobe villages, in the sun-scorched lands by the Rio Grande, the slow Indo-Iberian peons and their monkish masters still walked in the tranquil steps of their fathers, ignorant of the growth of the power that was to overwhelm their children and successors; but nearer by, Spaniard and Creole Frenchman, Algonquin and Appalachian, were all uneasy as they began to feel the first faint pressure of the American advance.

As yet they had been shielded by the forest which lay over the land like an unrent mantle. All through the mountains, and far beyond, it stretched without a break; but toward the mouth of the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers the landscape became varied with open groves of woodland, with flower-strewn glades and great barrens or prairies of long grass. This region, one of the fairest in the world, was the debatable ground between the Northern and the Southern Indians. Neither dared dwell therein,[1] but both used it as their hunting-grounds; and it was traversed from end to end by the well marked war traces[2] which they followed when they invaded each other’s territory. The whites, on trying to break through the barrier which hemmed them in from the western lands, naturally succeeded best when pressing along the line of least resistance; and so their first great advance was made in this debatable land, where the uncertainly defined hunting-grounds of the Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw marched upon those of Northern Algonquin and Wyandot.

Unknown and unnamed hunters and Indian traders had from time to time pushed some little way into the wilderness; and they had been followed by others of whom we do indeed know the names, but little more. One explorer had found and named the Cumberland river and mountains, and the great pass called Cumberland Gap.[3] Others had gone far beyond the utmost limits this man had reached, and had hunted in the great bend of the Cumberland and in the woodland region of Kentucky, famed among the Indians for the abundance of the game.[4] But their accounts excited no more than a passing interest; they came and went without comment, as lonely stragglers had come and gone for nearly a century. The backwoods civilization crept slowly westward without being influenced in its movements by their explorations.[5]

Finally, however, among these hunters one arose whose wanderings were to bear fruit; who was destined to lead through the wilderness the first body of settlers that ever established a community in the far West, completely cut off from the seaboard colonies. This was Daniel Boone. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1734,[6] but when only a boy had been brought with the rest of his family to the banks of the Yadkin in North Carolina. Here he grew up, and as soon as he came of age he married, built a log hut, and made a clearing, whereon to farm like the rest of his backwoods neighbors. They all tilled their own clearings, guiding the plow among the charred stumps left when the trees were chopped down and the land burned over, and they were all, as a matter of course, hunters. With Boone hunting and exploration were passions, and the lonely life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild freedom, the only existence for which he really cared. He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle’s, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind; and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, and indomitable resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved adverse. His self-command and patience, his daring, restless love of adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and resources, all combined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond.

Boone hunted on the Western waters at an early date. In the valley of Boone’s Creek, a tributary of the Watauga, there is a beech tree still standing, on which can be faintly traced an inscription setting forth that “D. Boone cilled a bar on (this) tree in the year 1760.”[7] On the expeditions of which this is the earliest record he was partly hunting on his own account, and partly exploring on behalf of another, Richard Henderson. Henderson was a prominent citizen of North Carolina,[8] a speculative man of great ambition and energy. He stood high in the colony, was extravagant and fond of display, and his fortune being jeopardized he hoped to more than retrieve it by going into speculations in Western lands on an unheard-of scale; for he intended to try to establish on his own account a great proprietary colony beyond the mountains. He had great confidence in Boone; and it was his backing which enabled the latter to turn his discoveries to such good account. Boone’s claim to distinction rests not so much on his wide wanderings in unknown lands, for in this respect he did little more than was done by a hundred other backwoods hunters of his generation, but on the fact that he was able to turn his daring woodcraft to the advantage of his fellows. As he himself said, he was an instrument “ordained of God to settle the wilderness,” He inspired confidence in all who met him,[9] so that the men of means and influence were willing to trust adventurous enterprises to his care; and his success as an explorer, his skill as a hunter, and his prowess as an Indian fighter enabled him to bring these enterprises to a successful conclusion, and in some degree to control the wild spirits associated with him.

Boone’s expeditions into the edges of the wilderness whetted his appetite for the unknown. He had heard of great hunting-grounds in the far interior from a stray hunter and Indian trader,[10] who had himself seen them, and on May I, 1769, he left his home on the Yadkin “to wander through the wilderness of America in quest of the country of Kentucky.”[11] He was accompanied by five other men, including his informant, and struck out toward the Northwest, through the tangled mass of rugged mountains and gloomy forests. During five weeks of severe toil the little band journeyed through vast solitudes, whose utter loneliness can with difficulty be understood by those who have not themselves dwelt and hunted in primaeval mountain forests. Then, early in June, the adventurers broke through the interminable wastes of dim woodland, and stood on the threshold of the beautiful blue-grass region of Kentucky; a land of running waters, of groves and glades, of prairies, cane-brakes, and stretches of lofty forests. It was teeming with game. The shaggy-maned herds of unwieldy buffalo—the bison as they should be called—had beaten out broad roads through the forest, and had furrowed the prairies with trails along which they had traveled for countless generations. The round-horned elk, with spreading, massive antlers, the lordliest of the deer tribe throughout the world, abounded, and like the buffalo traveled in bands not only through the woods, but also across the reaches of waving grass land. The deer were extraordinarily numerous, and so were bears, while wolves and panthers were plentiful. Wherever there was a salt spring the country was fairly thronged with wild beasts of many kinds. For six months Boone and his companions enjoyed such hunting as had hardly fallen to men of their race since the Germans came out of the Hercynian forest.[12]

In December, however, they were attacked by Indians. Boone and a companion were captured; and when they escaped they found their camp broken up, and the rest of the party scattered and gone home. About this time they were joined by Squire Boone, the brother of the great hunter, and himself a woodsman of but little less skill, together with another adventurer; the two had traveled through the immense wilderness, partly to explore it and partly with the hope of finding the original adventurers, which they finally succeeded in doing more by good luck than design. Soon afterward Boone’s companion in his first short captivity was again surprised by the Indians, and this time was slain[13]—the first of the thousands of human beings with whose life-blood Kentucky was bought. The attack was entirely unprovoked. The Indians had wantonly shed the first blood. The land belonged to no one tribe, but was hunted over by all, each feeling jealous of every other intruder; they attacked the whites, not because the whites had wronged them, but because their invariable policy was to kill any strangers on any grounds over which they themselves ever hunted, no matter what man had the best right thereto. The Kentucky hunters were promptly taught that in this no-man’s-land, teeming with game and lacking even a solitary human habitation, every Indian must be regarded as a foe.

The man who had accompanied Squire Boone was terrified by the presence of the Indians, and now returned to the settlements. The two brothers remained alone on their hunting-grounds throughout the winter, living in a little cabin. About the first of May Squire set off alone to the settlements to procure horses and ammunition. For three months Daniel Boone remained absolutely alone in the wilderness, without salt, sugar, or flour, and without the companionship of so much as a horse or a dog.[14] But the solitude-loving hunter, dauntless and self-reliant, enjoyed to the full his wild, lonely life; he passed his days hunting and exploring, wandering hither and thither over the country, while at night he lay off in the canebrakes or thickets, without a fire, so as not to attract the Indians. Of the latter he saw many signs, and they sometimes came to his camp, but his sleepless wariness enabled him to avoid capture.

Late in July his brother returned, and met him according to appointment at the old camp. Other hunters also now came into the Kentucky wilderness, and Boone joined a small party of them for a short time. Such a party of hunters is always glad to have anything wherewith to break the irksome monotony of the long evenings passed round the camp fire; and a book or a greasy pack of cards was as welcome in a camp of Kentucky riflemen in 1770 as it is to a party of Rocky Mountain hunters in 1888. Boone has recorded in his own quaint phraseology an incident of his life during this summer, which shows how eagerly such a little band of frontiersmen read a book, and how real its characters became to their minds. He was encamped with five other men on Red River, and they had with them for their “amusement the history of Samuel Gulliver’s travels, wherein he gave an account of his young master, Glumdelick, careing [sic] him on a market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud.” In the party who, amid such strange surroundings, read and listened to Dean Swift’s writings was a young man named Alexander Neely. One night he came into camp with two Indian scalps, taken from a Shawnee village he had found on a creek running into the river; and he announced to the circle of grim wilderness veterans that “he had been that day to Lulbegrud, and had killed two Brobdignags in their capital.” To this day the creek by which the two luckless Shawnees lost their lives is known as Lulbegrud Creek.[15]

Frontiersmen are often content with the merest printed trash; but the better men among them appreciate really good literature quite as much as any other class of people. In the long winter evenings they study to good purpose books as varied as Dante, Josephus, Macaulay, Longfellow, Parton’s “Life of Jackson,” and the Rollo stories—to mention only volumes that have been especial favorites with my own cowboys and hunters.

Soon after this encounter the increasing danger from the Indians drove Boone back to the valley of the Cumberland River, and in the spring of 1771 he returned to his home on the Yadkin.

A couple of years before Boone went to Kentucky, Steiner, or Stoner, and Harrod, two hunters from Pittsburg, who had passed through the Illinois, came down to hunt in the bend of the Cumberland, where Nashville now stands; they found vast numbers of buffalo, and killed a great many, especially around the licks, where the huge clumsy beasts had fairly destroyed most of the forest, treading down the young trees and bushes till the ground was left bare or covered with a rich growth of clover. The bottoms and the hollows between the hills were thickset with cane. Sycamore grew in the low ground, and toward the Mississippi were to be found the persimmon and Cottonwood. Sometimes the forest was open and composed of huge trees; elsewhere it was of thicker, smaller growth.[16] Everywhere game abounded, and it was nowhere very wary.

Other hunters of whom we know even the names of only a few had been through many parts of the wilderness before Boone, and earlier still Frenchmen had built forts and smelting furnaces on the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and the head tributaries of the Kentucky.[17] Boone is interesting as a leader and explorer; but he is still more interesting as a type. The West was neither discovered, won, nor settled by any single man. No keen-eyed statesman planned the movement, nor was it carried out by any great military leader; it was the work of a whole people, of whom each man was impelled mainly by sheer love of adventure; it was the outcome of the ceaseless strivings of all the dauntless, restless backwoods folk to win homes for their descendants and to each penetrate deeper than his neighbors into the remote forest hunting-grounds where the perilous pleasures of the chase and of war could be best enjoyed. We owe the conquest of the West to all the backwoodsmen, not to any solitary individual among them; where all alike were strong and daring there was no chance for any single man to rise to unquestioned pre-eminence.

In the summer of 1769 a large band of hunters[18] crossed the mountains to make a long hunt in the Western wilderness, the men clad in hunting-shirts, moccasins, and leggings, with traps, rifles, and dogs, and each bringing with him two or three horses. They made their way over the mountains, forded or swam the rapid, timber-choked streams, and went down the Cumberland, till at last they broke out of the forest and came upon great barrens of tall grass. One of their number was killed by a small party of Indians; but they saw no signs of human habitations. Yet they came across mounds and graves and other remains of an ancient people who had once lived in the land, but had died out of it long ages before the incoming of the white men.[19]

The hunters made a permanent camp in one place, and returned to it at intervals to deposit their skins and peltries. Between times they scattered out singly or in small bands. They hunted all through the year, killing vast quantities of every kind of game. Most of it they got by fair still-hunting, but some by methods we do not now consider legitimate, such as calling up a doe by imitating the bleat of a fawn, and shooting deer from a scaffold when they came to the salt licks at night. Nevertheless, most of the hunters did not approve of “crusting” the game—that is, of running it down on snowshoes in the deep midwinter snows.

At the end of the year some of the adventurers returned home; others[20] went north into the Kentucky country, where they hunted for several months before recrossing the mountains; while the remainder, led by an old hunter named Kasper Mansker,[21] built two boats and hollowed out of logs two pirogues or dugouts—clumsier but tougher craft than the light birch-bark canoes—and started down the Cumberland. At the French Lick, where Nashville now stands, they saw enormous quantities of buffalo, elk, and other game, more than they had ever seen before in any one place. Some of their goods were taken by a party of Indians they met, but some French traders whom they likewise encountered treated them well and gave them salt, flour, tobacco, and taffia, the last being especially prized, as they had had no spirits for a year. They went down to Natchez, sold their furs, hides, oil, and tallow, and some returned by sea, while others, including Mansker, came overland with a drove of horses that was being taken through the Indian nations to Georgia. From the length of time all these men, as well as Boone and his companions, were absent, they were known as the Long Hunters, and the fame of their hunting and exploring spread all along the border and greatly excited the young men.[22]

In 1771 many hunters crossed over the mountains and penetrated far into the wilderness, to work huge havoc among the herds of game. Some of them came in bands, and others singly, and many of the mountains, lakes, rivers, and creeks of Tennessee are either called after the leaders among these old hunters and wanderers, or else by their names perpetuate the memory of some incident of their hunting trips.[23]

Mansker himself came back, a leader among his comrades, and hunted many years in the woods alone or with others of his kind, and saw and did many strange things. One winter he and those who were with him built a skin house from the hides of game, and when their ammunition gave out they left three of their number and all of their dogs at the skin house and went to the settlements for powder and lead. When they returned they found that two of the men had been killed and the other chased away by the Indians, who, however, had not found the camp. The dogs, having seen no human face for three months, were very wild, yet in a few days became as tame and well trained as ever. They killed such enormous quantities of buffalo, elk, and especially deer, that they could not pack the hides into camp, and one of the party, during an idle moment and in a spirit of protest against fate,[24] carved on the peeled trunk of a fallen poplar, where it long remained, the sentence, “2300 deer skins lost; ruination by God!” The soul of this thrifty hunter must have been further grieved when a party of Cherokees visited their camp and took away all the camp utensils and five hundred hides. The whites found the broad track they made in coming in, but could not find where they had gone out, each wily redskin then covering his own trail, and the whole number apparently breaking up into several parties. Sometimes the Indians not only plundered the hunting camps but killed the hunters as well, and the hunters retaliated in kind. Often the white men and red fought one another whenever they met, and displayed in their conflicts all the cunning and merciless ferocity that made forest warfare so dreadful. Terrible deeds of prowess were done by the mighty men on either side. It was a war of stealth and cruelty, and ceaseless, sleepless watchfulness. The contestants had sinewy frames and iron wills, keen eyes and steady hands, hearts as bold as they were ruthless. Their moccasined feet made no sound as they stole softly on the camp of a sleeping enemy or crept to ambush him while he himself still-hunted or waylaid the deer. A favorite stratagem was to imitate the call of game, especially the gobble of the wild turkey, and thus to lure the would-be hunter to his fate. If the deceit was guessed at, the caller was himself stalked. The men grew wonderfully expert in detecting imitation. One old hunter, Castleman by name, was in after years fond of describing how an Indian nearly lured him to his death. It was in the dusk of the evening, when he heard the cries of two great wood owls near him. Listening attentively, he became convinced that all was not right. “The woo-woo call and the woo-woo answer were not well timed and toned, and the babel-chatter was a failure. More than this, they seemed to be on the ground.” Creeping cautiously up, and peering through the brush, he saw something the height, of a stump between two forked trees. It did not look natural; he aimed, pulled trigger, and killed an Indian.

Each party of Indians or whites was ever on the watch to guard against danger or to get the chance of taking vengeance for former wrongs. The dark woods saw a myriad lonely fights where red warrior or white hunter fell and no friend of the fallen ever knew his fate, where his sole memorial was the scalp that hung in the smoky cabin or squalid wigwam of the victor.

The rude and fragmentary annals of the frontier are filled with the deeds of men, of whom Mansker can be taken as a type. He was a wonderful marksman and woodsman, and was afterward made a colonel of the frontier militia, though, being of German descent, he spoke only broken English.[25] Like most of the hunters he became specially proud of his rifle, calling it “Nancy”; for they were very apt to know each his favorite weapon by some homely or endearing nickname. Every forest sight or sound was familiar to him. He knew the cries of the birds and beasts so well that no imitation could deceive him. Once he was nearly taken in by an unusually perfect imitation of a wild gobbler; but he finally became suspicious, and “placed” his adversary behind a large tree. Having perfect confidence in his rifle, and knowing that the Indians rarely fired except at close range—partly because they were poor shots, partly because they loaded their guns too lightly—he made no attempt to hide. Feigning to pass to the Indian’s right, the latter, as he expected, tried to follow him; reaching an opening in a glade, Mansker suddenly wheeled and killed his foe. When hunting he made his home sometimes in a hollow tree, sometimes in a hut of buffalo hides; for the buffalo were so plenty that once when a lick was discovered by himself and a companion,[26] the latter, though on horseback, was nearly trampled to death by the mad rush of a herd they surprised and stampeded.

He was a famous Indian fighter; one of the earliest of his recorded deeds has to do with an Indian adventure. He and three other men were trapping on Sulphur Fork and Red River, in the great bend of the Cumberland. Moving their camp, they came on recent traces of Indians; deer-carcasses and wicker frames for stretching hides. They feared to tarry longer unless they knew something of their foes, and Mansker set forth to explore, and turned toward Red River, where, from the sign, he thought to find the camp. Traveling some twenty miles, he perceived by the sycamore trees in view that he was near the river. Advancing a few steps further he suddenly found himself within eighty or ninety yards of the camp. He instantly slipped behind a tree to watch. There were only two Indians in camp; the rest he supposed were hunting at a distance. Just as he was about to retire, one of the Indians took up a tomahawk and strolled off in the opposite direction; while the other picked up his gun, put it on his shoulder, and walked directly toward Mansker’s hiding-place. Mansker lay close, hoping that he would not be noticed; but the Indian advanced directly toward him until not fifteen paces off. There being no alternative, Mansker cocked his piece, and shot the Indian through the body. The Indian screamed, threw down his gun, and ran toward camp; passing it he pitched headlong down the bluff, dead, into the river. The other likewise ran to camp at the sound of the shot; but Mansker outran him, reached the camp first, and picked up an old gun that was on the ground; but the gun would not go off, and the Indian turned and escaped. Mansker broke the old gun, and returned speedily to his comrades. The next day they all went to the spot, where they found the dead Indian and took away his tomahawk, knife, and bullet-bag; but they never found his gun. The other Indian had come back, had loaded his horses with furs, and was gone. They followed him all that day and all night with a torch of dry cane, and could never overtake him. Finding that there were other bands of Indians about, they then left their hunting grounds. Toward the close of his life old Mansker, like many another fearless and ignorant backwoods fighter, became so much impressed by the fiery earnestness and zeal of the Methodists that he joined himself to them and became a strong and helpful prop of the community whose first foundations he had helped to lay.

Sometimes the hunters met creole trappers, who sent their tallow, hides, and furs in pirogues and bateaux down the Mississippi to Natchez or Orleans, insted of having to transport them on pack-horses through the perilous forest-tracks across the mountains. They had to encounter dangers from beasts as well as men. More than once we hear of one who, in a cane-brake or tangled thicket, was mangled to death by the horns and hoofs of a wounded buffalo.[27] All of the wild beasts were then comparatively unused to contact with rifle-bearing hunters; they were, in consequence, much more ferocious and ready to attack man than at present. The bear were the most numerous of all, after the deer; their chase was a favorite sport. There was just enough danger in it to make it exciting, for though hunters were frequently bitten or clawed, they were hardly ever killed. The wolves were generally very wary; yet in rare instances they, too, were dangerous. The panther was a much more dreaded foe, and lives were sometimes lost in hunting him; but even with the panther, the cases where the hunter was killed were very exceptional.

The hunters were in their lives sometimes clean and straight, and sometimes immoral, with a gross and uncouth viciousness. We read of one party of six men and a woman, who were encountered on the Cumberland River; the woman acted as the wife of a man named Big John, but deserted him for one of his companions, and when he fell sick persuaded the whole party to leave him in the wilderness to die of disease and starvation. Yet those who left him did not in the end fare better, for they were ambushed and cut off, when they had gone down to Natchez, apparently by Indians.

At first the hunters, with their small-bore rifles, were unsuccessful in killing buffalo. Once, when George Rogers Clark had long resided in Kentucky, he and two companions discovered a camp of some forty new-comers actually starving, though buffalo were plenty. Clark and his friends speedily relieved their necessities by killing fourteen of the great beasts; for when once the hunters had found out the knack, the buffalo were easier slaughtered than any other game.[28]

The hunters were the pioneers; but close behind them came another set of explorers quite as hardy and resolute. These were the surveyors. The men of chain and compass played a part in the exploration of the West scarcely inferior to that of the heroes of axe and rifle. Often, indeed, the parts were combined; Boone himself was a surveyor.[29] Vast tracts of Western land were continually being allotted either to actual settlers or as bounties to soldiers who had served against the French and Indians. These had to be explored and mapped and as there was much risk as well as reward in the task, it naturally proved attractive to all adventurous young men who had some education, a good deal of ambition, and not too much fortune. A great number of young men of good families, like Washington and Clark, went into the business. Soon after the return of Boone and the Long Hunters, parties of surveyors came down the Ohio,[30] mapping out its course and exploring the Kentucky lands that lay beside it.[31]

Among the hunters, surveyors, and explorers who came into the wilderness in 1773 was a band led by three young men named McAfee,—typical backwoodsmen, hardy, adventurous, their frontier recklessness and license tempered by the Calvinism they had learned in their rough log home. They were fond of hunting, but they came to spy out the land and see if it could be made into homes for their children; and in their party were several surveyors. They descended the Ohio in dugout canoes, with their rifles, blankets, tomahawks, and fishing-tackle. They met some Shawnees and got on well with them; but while their leader was visiting the chief, Cornstalk, and listening to his fair speeches at his town of Old Chilicothe, the rest of the party were startled to see a band of young Shawnee braves returning from a successful foray on the settlements, driving before them the laden pack-horses they had stolen.[32]

They explored part of Kentucky, and visited the different licks. One, long named Big Bone Lick, was famous because there were scattered about it in incredible quantity the gigantic remains of the extinct mastodon; the McAfees made a tent by stretching their blankets over the huge fossil ribs, and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which to sit. Game of many kinds thronged the spaces round the licks; herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, as well as bears and wolves, were all in sight at once. The ground round about some of them was trodden down so that there was not as much grass left as would feed a sheep; and the game trails were like streets, or the beaten roads round a city. A little village to this day recalls by its name the fact that it stands on a former “stamping ground” of the buffalo. At one lick the explorers met with what might have proved a serious adventure. One of the McAfees and a companion were passing round its outskirts, when some others of the party fired at a gang of buffaloes, which stampeded directly toward the two. While his companion scampered up a leaning mulberry bush, McAfee, less agile, leaped behind a tree trunk, where he stood sidewise till the buffalo passed, their horns scraping off the bark on either side; then he looked round to see his friend “hanging in the mulberry bush like a coon.”[33]

When the party left this lick they followed a buffalo trail, beaten out in the forest, “the size of the wagon road leading out of Williamsburg,” then the capital of Virginia. It crossed the Kentucky River at a riffle below where Frankfort now stands. Thence they started homeward across the Cumberland Mountains, and suffered terribly while making their way through the “desolate and voiceless solitudes”; mere wastes of cliffs, crags, caverns, and steep hillsides covered with pine, laurel, and underbrush. Twice they were literally starving and were saved in the nick of time by the killing, on the first occasion, of a big bull elk, on the next, of a small spike buck. At last, sun-scorched and rain-beaten, foot-sore and leg-weary, their thighs torn to pieces by the stout briars,[34] and their feet and hands blistered and scalded, they came out in Powell’s Valley, and followed the well-worn hunter’s trail across it. Thence it was easy to reach home, where the tale of their adventures excited still more the young frontiersmen.

Their troubles were ended for the time being; but in Powell’s Valley they met other wanderers whose toil and peril had just begun. There they encountered the company[35] which Daniel Boone was just leading across the mountains, with the hope of making a permanent settlement in the far distant Kentucky.[36] Boone had sold his farm on the Yadkin and all the goods he could not carry with him, and in September, 1773, he started for Kentucky with his wife and his children; five families and forty men besides went with him, driving their horses and cattle. It was the first attempt that was made to settle a region separated by long stretches of wilderness from the already inhabited districts; and it was doomed to failure. On approaching the gloomy and forbidding defiles of the Cumberland Mountains the party was attacked by Indians.[37] Six of the men, including Boone’s eldest son, were slain, and the cattle scattered; and though the backwoodsmen rallied and repulsed their assailants, yet they had suffered such loss and damage that they retreated and took up their abode temporarily on the Clinch River.

In the same year Simon Kenton, afterward famous as a scout and Indian fighter, in company with other hunters, wandered through Kentucky. Kenton, like every one else, was astounded at the beauty and fertility of the land and the innumerable herds of buffalo, elk, and other game that thronged the trampled ground around the licks. One of his companions was taken by the Indians, who burned him alive.

In the following year numerous parties of surveyors visited the land. One of these was headed by John Floyd, who was among the ablest of the Kentucky pioneers, and afterward played a prominent part in the young commonwealth, until his death at the hands of the savages. Floyd was at the time assistant surveyor of Fincastle County; and his party went out for the purpose of making surveys “by virtue of the Governor’s warrant for officers and soldiers on the Ohio and its waters.”[38]

They started on April 9, 1774,—eight men in all,—from their homes in Fincastle County.[39] They went down the Kanawha in a canoe, shooting bear and deer, and catching great pike and catfish. The first survey they made was one of two thousand acres for “Colo. Washington”; and they made another for Patrick Henry. On the way they encountered other parties of surveyors, and learned that an Indian war was threatened; for a party of thirteen would-be settlers on the upper Ohio had been attacked, but had repelled their assailants, and in consequence the Shawnees had declared for war, and threatened thereafter to kill the Virginians and rob the Pennsylvanians wherever they found them.[40] The reason for this discrimination in favor of the citizens of the Quaker State was that the Virginians with whom the Indians came chiefly in contact were settlers, whereas the Pennsylvanians were traders. The marked difference in the way the savages looked at the two classes received additional emphasis in Lord Dunmore’s war.

At the mouth of the Kanawha[41] the adventurers found twenty or thirty men gathered together; some had come to settle, but most wished to explore or survey the lands. All were in high spirits, and resolute to go to Kentucky, in spite of Indian hostilities. Some of them joined Floyd, and raised his party to eighteen men, who started down the Ohio in four canoes.[42] They found “a battoe loaded with corn,” apparently abandoned, and took about three bushels with them. Other parties joined them from time to time, as they paddled and drifted down stream; and one or two of their own number, alarmed by further news of Indian hostilities, went back. Once they met a party of Delawares, by whom they were not molested; and again two or three of their number encountered a couple of hostile savages; and though no one was hurt, the party kept on the watch all the time. They marveled much at the great trees—one sycamore was thirty-seven feet in circumference,—and on a Sunday, which they kept as a day of rest, they examined with interest the forest-covered embankments of a fort at the mouth of the Scioto, a memorial of the mound-builders who had vanished some centuries before.

When they reached the mouth of the Kentucky[43] they found two Delawares and a squaw, to whom they gave corn and salt. Here they split up, and Floyd and his original party spent a week in the neighborhood, surveying land, going some distance up the Kentucky to a salt lick, where they saw a herd of three hundred buffalo.[44] They then again embarked, and drifted down the Ohio. On May 26th they met two Delawares in a canoe flying a red flag; they had been sent down the river with a pass from the commandant at Fort Pitt to gather their hunters and get them home, in view of the threatened hostilities between the Shawnees and Virginians.[45] The actions of the two Indians were so suspicious, and the news they brought was so alarming, that some of Floyd’s companions became greatly alarmed, and wished to go straight on down the Mississippi; but Floyd swore that he would finish his work unless actually forced off. Three days afterward they reached the Falls.

Here Floyd spent a fortnight, making surveys in every direction, and then started off to explore the land between the Salt River and the Kentucky. Like the others, he carried his own pack, which consisted of little but his blanket and his instruments. He sometimes had difficulties with his men; one of them refused to carry the chain one day, and went off to hunt, got lost, and was not found for thirty-six hours. Another time it was noticed that two of the hunters had become sullen, and seemed anxious to leave camp. The following morning, while on the march, the party killed an elk and halted for breakfast; but the two hunters walked on, and, says the journal, “we never saw them more”; but whether they got back to the settlements or perished in the wilderness, none could tell.

The party suffered much hardship. Floyd fell sick, and for three days could not travel. . They gave him an “Indian sweat,” probably building just such a little sweat-house as the Indians use to this day. Others of their number at different times fell ill; and they were ever on the watch for Indians. In the vast forests, every sign of a human being was the sign of a probable enemy. Once they heard a gun, and another time a sound as of a man calling to another; and on each occasion they redoubled their caution, keeping guard as they rested, and at night extinguishing their camp-fire and sleeping a mile or two from it.

They built a bark canoe in which to cross the Kentucky, and on the 1st of July they met another party of surveyors on the banks of that stream.[46] Two or three days afterward, Floyd and three companions left the others, agreeing to meet them on August 1st, at a cabin built by a man named Harwood, on the south side of the Kentucky, a few miles from the mouth of the Elkhorn. For three weeks they surveyed and hunted, enchanted with the beauty of the country.[47] They then went to the cabin, several days before the appointed time; but to their surprise found everything scattered over the ground, and two fires burning, while on a tree near the landing was written, “Alarmed by finding some people killed and we are gone down.” This left the four adventurers in a bad plight, as they had but fifteen rounds of powder left, and none of them knew the way home. However, there was no help for it, and they started off.[48] When they came to the mountains they found it such hard going that they were obliged to throw away their blankets and everything else except their rifles, hunting-shirts, leggings, and moccasins. Like the other parties of returning explorers, they found this portion of their journey extremely distressing; and they suffered much from sore feet, and also from want of food, until they came on a gang of buffaloes, and killed two. At last they struck Cumberland Gap, followed a blazed trail across it to Powell’s Valley, and on August 9th came to the outlying settlements on Clinch River, where they found the settlers all in their wooden forts, because of the war with the Shawnees.[49]

There were three different kinds of explorers: Boone represents the hunters; the McAfees represent the would-be settlers; and Floyd’s party the surveyors who mapped out the land for owners of land grants. In 1774, there were parties of each kind in Kentucky. Floyd’s experience shows that these parties were continually meeting others and splitting up; he started out with eight men, at one time was in a body with thirty-seven, and returned home with four.

The journal is written in a singularly clear and legible hand, evidently by a man of good education.

In this same year many different bodies of hunters and surveyors came into the country, drifting down the Ohio in pirogues. Some forty men led by Harrod and Sowdowsky[50] founded Harrodsburg, where they built cabins and sowed corn; but the Indians killed one of their number, and the rest dispersed. Some returned across the mountains; but Sowdowsky and another went through the woods to the Cumberland River, where they built a canoe, paddled down the muddy Mississippi between unending reaches of lonely marsh and forest, and from New Orleans took ship to Virginia.

At that time, among other parties of surveyors there was one which had been sent by Lord Dunmore to the Falls of the Ohio. When the war broke out between the Shawnees and the Virginians, Lord Dunmore, being very anxious for the fate of these surveyors, sent Boone and Stoner to pilot them in; which the two bush veterans accordingly did, making the round trip of 800 miles in 64 days. The outbreak of the Indian war caused all the hunters and surveyors to leave Kentucky; and at the end of 1774 there were no whites left, either there or in what is now middle Tennessee. But on the frontier all men’s eyes were turned toward these new and fertile regions. The pioneer work of the hunter was over, and that of the axe-bearing settler was about to begin.

[1] This is true as a whole; but along the Mississippi, in the extreme west of the present Kentucky and Tennessee, the Chickasaws held possession. There was a Shawnee town south of the Ohio, and Cherokee villages in southeastern Tennessee.

[2] The backwoodsmen generally used “trace,” where Western frontiersmen would now say “trail.”

[3] Dr. Thomas Walker, of Virginia. He named them after the Duke of Cumberland. Walker was a genuine explorer and surveyor, a man of mark as a pioneer. The journal of his trip across the Cumberland to the headwaters of the Kentucky in 1750 has been preserved, and has just been published by William Cabell Rives (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.). It is very interesting, and Mr. Rives has done a real service in publishing it. Walker and five companions were absent six months. He found traces of earlier wanderers—probably hunters. One of his companions was bitten by a bear; three of the dogs were wounded by bears, and one killed by an elk; the horses were frequently bitten by rattlesnakes; once a bull-buffalo threatened the whole party. They killed 13 buffaloes, 8 elks, 53 bears, 20 deer, 150 turkeys, and some other game.

[4] Hunters and Indian traders visited portions of Kentucky and Tennessee years before the country became generally known even on the border. (Not to speak of the French, who had long known something of the country, where they had even made trading posts and built furnaces, as see Haywood, etc.). We know the names of a few. Those who went down the Ohio, merely landing on the Kentucky shore, do not deserve mention; the French had done as much for a century. Whites who had been captured by the Indians, were sometimes taken through Tennessee or Kentucky, as John Sailing in 1730, and Mrs. Mary Inglis in 1756 (see “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” Collins, etc.). In 1654 a certain Colonel Wood was in Kentucky. The next real explorer was nearly a century later, though Doherty in 1690, and Adair in 1730, traded with the Cherokees in what is now Tennessee. Walker struck the headwaters of the Kentucky in 1750; he had been to the Cumberland in 1748. He made other exploring trips. Christopher Gist went up the Kentucky in 1751. In 1756 and 1758 Forts Loudon and Chissel were built on the Tennessee headwaters, but were soon afterward destroyed by the Cherokees. In 1761, ’62, ’63, and for a year or two afterward, a party of hunters under the lead of one Wallen, hunted on the western waters, going continually further west. In 1765 Croghan made a sketch of the Ohio River. In 1766 James Smith and others explored Tennessee. Stoner, Harrod, and Lindsay, and a party from South Carolina were near the present site of Nashville in 1767; in the same year John Finley and others were in Kentucky; and it was Finley who first told Boone about it and led him thither.

[5] The attempt to find out the names of the men who first saw the different portions of the western country is not very profitable. The first visitors were hunters, simply wandering in search of game, not with any settled purpose of exploration. Who the individual first-comers were, has generally been forgotten. At the most it is only possible to find out the name of some one of several who went to a given locality. The hunters were wandering everywhere. By chance some went to places we now consider important. By chance the names of a few of these have been preserved. But the credit belongs to the whole backwoods race, not to the individual backwoodsman.

[6] August 22, 1734 (according to James Parton, in his sketch of Boone). His grandfather was an English immigrant; his father had married a Quakeress. When he lived on the banks of the Delaware, the country was still a wilderness. He was born in Berks Co.

[7] The inscription is first mentioned by Ramsey, p. 67. See Appendix C, for a letter from the Hon. John Allison, at present (1888) Secretary of State for Tennessee, which goes to prove that the inscription has been on the tree as long as the district has been settled. Of course it can not be proved that the inscription is by Boone; but there is much reason for supposing that such is the case, and little for doubting it.

[8] He was by birth a Virginian, of mixed Scotch and Welsh descent. See Collins, II., 336; also Ramsey. For Boone’s early connection with Henderson, in 1764, see Haywood, 35.

[9] Even among his foes; he is almost the only American praised by Lt.-Gov. Henry Hamilton of Detroit, for instance (see “Royal Gazette,” July 15, 1780).

[10] John Finley.

[11] “The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone, formerly a hunter”; nominally written by Boone himself, in 1784, but in reality by John Filson, the first Kentucky historian—a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old pioneer’s own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter’s composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett’s admirable “Life” in the Filson Club Publications.

[12] The Nibelung Lied tells of Siegfried’s feats with bear, buffalo, elk, wolf, and deer:

“Danach schlug er wieder einen Büffel und einen Elk

Vier starkes Auer nieder und einen grimmen Schelk,

So schnell trug ihn die Mähre, dasz ihm nichts entsprang;

Hinden und Hirsche wurden viele sein Fang.

… … . . ein Waldthier fürchterlich,

Einen wilden Bären.”

Siegfried’s elk was our moose; and like the American frontiersmen of to-day, the old German singer calls the Wissent or Bison a buffalo—European sportsmen now committing an equally bad blunder by giving it the name of the extinct aurochs. Be it observed also that the hard fighting, hard drinking, boastful hero of Nibelung fame used a “spür hund,” just as his representative of Kentucky or Tennessee used a track-hound a thousand years later.

[13] His name was John Stewart.

[14] His remaining absolutely alone in the wilderness for such a length of time is often spoken of with wonder; but here again Boone stands merely as the backwoods type, not as an exception. To this day many hunters in the Rockies do the same. In 1880, two men whom I knew wintered to the west of the Bighorns, 150 miles from any human beings. They had salt and flour, however; but they were nine months without seeing a white face. They killed elk, buffalo, and a moose; and had a narrow escape from a small Indian war party. Last winter (1887-88) an old trapper, a friend of mine in the days when he hunted buffalo, spent five months entirely alone in the mountains north of the Flathead country.

[15] Deposition of Daniel Boone, September 15, 1796. Certified copy from Deposition Book No. 1, page 156, Clark County Court, Ky. First published by Col. John Mason Brown, in “Battle of the Blue Licks,” p. 40 (Frankfort, 1882). The book which these old hunters read around their camp-fire in the Indian-haunted primaeval forest a century and a quarter ago has by great good-luck been preserved, and is in Col. Durrett’s library at Louisville. It is entitled the “Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, London, MDCCLXV,” and is in two small volumes. On the title-page is written “A Neelly, 1770.”

[16] MS. diary of Benj. Hawkins, 1796. Preserved in Nash. Historical Soc. In 1796 buffalo were scarce; but some fresh signs of them were still seen at licks.

[17] Haywood, p. 75, etc. It is a waste of time to quarrel over who first discovered a particular tract of this wilderness. A great many hunters traversed different parts at different times, from 1760 on, each practically exploring on his own account. We do not know the names of most of them; those we do know are only worth preserving in county histories and the like; the credit belongs to the race, not the individual.

[18] From twenty to forty. Compare Haywood and Mar shall, both of whom are speaking of the same bodies of men; Ramsey makes the mistake of supposing they are speaking of different parties; Haywood dwells on the feats of those who descended the Cumberland; Marshall of those who went to Kentucky.

[19] The so-called mound builders; now generally considered to have been simply the ancestors of the present Indian races.

[20] Led by one James Knox.

[21] His real name was Kasper Mansker, as his signature shows, but he was always spoken of as Mansco.

[22] McAfee MSS. (“Autobiography of Robt. McAfee”). Sometimes the term Long Hunters was used as including Boone, Finley, and their companions, sometimes not; in the McAfee MSS. it is explicitly used in the former sense.

[23] See Haywood for Clinch River, Drake’s Pond, Mansco’s Lick, Greasy Rock, etc., etc.

[24] A hunter named Bledsoe; Collins, II., 418.

[25] Carr’s “Early Times in Middle Tennessee,” pp. 52, 54.

[26] The hunter Bledsoe mentioned in a previous note.

[27] As Haywood, 81.

[28] This continued to be the case until the buffalo were all destroyed. When my cattle came to the Little Missouri, in 1882, buffalo were plenty; my men killed nearly a hundred that winter, though tending the cattle; yet an inexperienced hunter not far from us, though a hardy plainsman, killed only three in the whole time. See also Parkman’s “Oregon Trail” for an instance of a party of Missouri backwoodsmen who made a characteristic failure in an attempt on a buffalo band.

[29] See Appendix.

[30] An English engineer made a rude survey or table of distances of the Ohio in 1766.

[31] Collins states that in 1770 and 1772 Washington surveyed small tracts in what is now northeastern Kentucky; but this is more than doubtful.

[32] All of this is taken from the McAfee MSS., in Colonel Durrett’s library.

[33] McAfee MSS. A similar adventure befell my brother Elliott and my cousin John Roosevelt while they were hunting buffalo on the staked plains of Texas in 1877.

[34] They evidently wore breech-clouts and leggings, not trousers.

[35] McAfee MSS.

[36] Filson’s “Boone.”

[37] October 10, 1773, Filson’s “Boone.” The McAfee MSS. speak of meeting Boone in Powell’s Valley and getting home in September; if so, it must have been the very end of the month.

[38] The account of this journey of Floyd and his companions is taken from a very interesting MS. journal, kept by one of the party—Thomas Hanson. It was furnished me, together with other valuable papers, through the courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Trigg, of Abingdon, Va., and of Dr. George Ben. Johnston, of Richmond, to whom I take this opportunity of returning my warm thanks.

[39] From the house of Col. William Preston, “at one o’clock, in high spirits.” They took the canoe at the mouth of Elk River, on the 16th. Most of the diary is, of course, taken up with notes on the character and fertility of the lands, and memoranda of the surveys made. Especial comment is made on a burning spring by the Kanawha, which is dubbed “one of the wonders of the world.”

[40] They received this news on April 17th, and confirmation thereof on the 19th. The dates should be kept in mind, as they show that the Shawnees had begun hostilities from a fortnight to a month before Cresap’s attack and the murder of Logan’s family, which will be described hereafter.

[41] Which they reached on the 20th.

[42] On the 22d.

[43] On May 13th.

[44] There were quarrels among the surveyors. The entry for May 13th runs: “Our company divided, eleven men went up to Harrad’s company one hundred miles up the Cantucky or Louisa river (n. b. one Capt. Harrad has been there many months building a kind of Town &c.) in order to make improvements. This day a quarrel arose between Mr. Lee and Mr. Hyte; Lee cut a Stick and gave Hyte a Whiping with it, upon which Mr. Floyd demanded the King’s Peace which stopt it sooner than it would have ended if he had not been there.”

[45] They said that in a skirmish the whites had killed thirteen Shawnees, two Mingos, and one Delaware (this may or may not mean the massacres by Cresap and Greathouse; see, post, chapter on Lord Dunmore’s War).

[46] Where the journal says the land “is like a paradise, it is so good and beautiful.”

[47] The journal for July 8th says: “The Land is so good that I can not give it its due Praise. The undergrowth is Clover, Pea-vine, Cane & Nettles; intermingled with Rich Weed. It’s timber is Honey Locust, Black Walnut, Sugar Tree, Hickory, Iron-Wood, Hoop Wood, Mulberry, Ash and Elm and some Oak.” And later it dwells on the high limestone cliffs faring the river on both sides.

[48] On July 25th.

[49] I have given the account of Floyd’s journey at some length as illustrating the experience of a typical party of surveyors. The journal has never hitherto been alluded to, and my getting hold of it was almost accidental.

[50] The latter, from his name presumably of Sclavonic ancestry, came originally from New York, always a centre of mixed nationalities. He founded a most respectable family, some of whom have changed their name to Sandusky; but there seems to be no justification for their claim that they gave Sandusky its name, for this is almost certainly a corruption of its old Algonquin title. “American Pioneer” (Cincinnati, 1843), H., p. 325.

CHAPTER VII

SEVIER, ROBERTSON, AND THE WATAUGA COMMONWEALTH, 1769–1774

SOON AFTER the successful ending of the last colonial struggle with France, and the conquest of Canada, the British king issued a proclamation forbidding the English colonists from trespassing on Indian grounds, or moving west of the mountains. But in 1768, at the treaty of Fort Stanwix, the Six Nations agreed to surrender to the English all the lands lying between the Ohio and the Tennessee[1]; and this treaty was at once seized upon by the backwoodsmen as offering an excuse for settling beyond the mountains. However, the Iroquois had ceded lands to which they had no more right than a score or more other Indian tribes; and these latter, not having been consulted, felt at perfect liberty to make war on the intruders. In point of fact, no one tribe or set of tribes could cede Kentucky or Tennessee, because no one tribe or set of tribes owned either. The great hunting-grounds between the Ohio and the Tennessee formed a debatable land, claimed by every tribe that could hold its own against its rivals.[2]

The eastern part of what is now Tennessee consists of a great hill-strewn, forest-clad valley, running from northeast to southwest, bounded on one side by the Cumberland, and on the other by the Great Smoky and Unaka Mountains; the latter separating it from North Carolina. In this valley arise and end the Clinch, the Holston, the Watauga, the Nolichucky, the French Broad, and the other streams, whose combined volume makes the Tennessee River. The upper end of the valley lies in southwestern Virginia, the headwaters of some of the rivers being well within that State; and though the province was really part of North Carolina, it was separated therefrom by high mountain chains, while from Virginia it was easy to follow the watercourses down the valley. Thus, as elsewhere among the mountains forming the western frontier, the first movements of population went parallel with, rather than across, the ranges. As in western Virginia the first settlers came, for the most part, from Pennsylvania, so, in turn, in what was then western North Carolina, and is now eastern Tennessee, the first settlers came mainly from Virginia, and, indeed, in great part, from this same Pennsylvanian stock.[3] Of course, in each case there was also a very considerable movement directly westward.[4]

They were a sturdy race, enterprising and intelligent, fond of the strong excitement inherent in the adventurous frontier life. Their untamed and turbulent passions, and the lawless freedom of their lives made them a population very productive of wild, headstrong characters; yet, as a whole, they were a God-fearing race, as was but natural in those who sprang from the loins of the Irish Calvinists. Their preachers, all Presbyterians, followed close behind the first settlers, and shared their toil and dangers; they tilled their fields rifle in hand, and fought the Indians valorously. They felt that they were dispossessing the Canaanites, and were thus working the Lord’s will in preparing the land for a race which they believed was more truly His chosen people than was that nation which Joshua led across the Jordan. They exhorted no less earnestly in the bare meeting-houses on Sunday, because their hands were roughened with guiding the plow and wielding the axe on week-days; for they did not believe that being called to preach the word of God absolved them from earning their living by the sweat of their brows. The women, the wives of the settlers, were of the same iron temper. They fearlessly fronted every danger the men did, and they worked quite as hard. They prized the knowledge and learning they themselves had been forced to do without; and many a backwoods woman by thrift and industry, by the sale of her butter and cheese, and the calves from her cows, enabled her husband to give his sons good schooling, and perhaps to provide for some favored member of the family the opportunity to secure a really first-class education.[5]

The valley in which these splendid pioneers of our people settled, lay directly in the track of the Indian marauding parties, for the great war trail used by the Cherokees and by their northern foes ran along its whole length. This war trail, or war trace as it was then called, was in places very distinct, although apparently never as well marked as were some of the buffalo trails. It sent off a branch to Cumberland Gap, whence it ran directly north through Kentucky to the Ohio, being there known as the warriors’ path. Along these trails the Northern and Southern Indians passed and repassed when they went to war against each other; and of course they were ready and eager to attack any white man who might settle down along their course.

In 1769, the year that Boone first went to Kentucky, the first permanent settlers came to the banks of the Watauga,[6] the settlement being merely an enlargement of the Virginia settlement, which had for a short time existed on the head-waters of the Holston, especially near Wolf Hills.[7] At first the settlers thought they were still in the domain of Virginia, for at that time the line marking her southern boundary had not been run so far west.[8] Indeed, had they not considered the land as belonging to Virginia, they would probably not at the moment have dared to intrude farther on territory claimed by the Indians. But while the treaty between the crown and the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix[9] had resulted in the cession of whatever right the Six Nations had to the southwestern territory, another treaty was concluded about the same time[10] with the Cherokees, by which the latter agreed to surrender their claims to a small portion of this country, though as a matter of fact before the treaty was signed white settlers had crowded beyond the limits allowed them. These two treaties, in the first of which one set of tribes surrendered a small portion of land, while in the second an entirely different confederacy surrendered a larger tract, which, however, included part of the first cession, are sufficient to show the absolute confusion of the Indian land titles.

But in 1771, one of the new-comers,[11] who was a practical surveyor, ran out the Virginia boundary line some distance to the westward, and discovered that the Watauga settlement came within the limits of North Carolina. Hitherto the settlers had supposed that they themselves were governed by the Virginian law, and that their rights as against the Indians were guaranteed by the Virginian government; but this discovery threw them back upon their own resources. They suddenly found themselves obliged to organize a civil government, under which they themselves should live, and at the same time to enter into a treaty on their own account with the neighboring Indians, to whom the land they were on apparently belonged.

The first need was even more pressing than the second. North Carolina was always a turbulent and disorderly colony, unable to enforce law and justice even in the long-settled districts; so that it was wholly out of the question to appeal to her for aid in governing a remote and outlying community. Moreover, about the time that the Watauga commonwealth was founded, the troubles in North Carolina came to a head. Open war ensued between the adherents of the royal governor, Tryon, on the one hand, and the Regulators, as the insurgents styled themselves, on the other, the struggle ending with the overthrow of the Regulators at the battle of the Alamance.[12]

As a consequence of these troubles, many people from the back counties of North Carolina crossed the mountains, and took up their abode among the pioneers on the Watauga[13] and upper Holston; the beautiful valley of the Nolichucky soon receiving its share of this stream of immigration. Among the first comers were many members of the class of desperate adventurers always to be found hanging round the outskirts of frontier civilization. Horse-thieves, murderers, escaped bond-servants, runaway debtors—all, in fleeing from the law, sought to find a secure asylum in the wilderness. The brutal and lawless wickedness of these men, whose uncouth and raw savagery was almost more repulsive than that of city criminals, made it imperative upon the decent members of the community to unite for self-protection. The desperadoes were often mere human beasts of prey; they plundered whites and Indians impartially. They not only by their thefts and murders exasperated the Indians into retaliating on innocent whites, but, on the other hand, they also often deserted their own color and went to live among the redskins, becoming their leaders in the worst outrages.[14]

But the bulk of the settlers were men of sterling worth; fit to be the pioneer fathers of a mighty and beautiful state. They possessed the courage that enabled them to defy outside foes, together with the rough, practical common-sense that allowed them to establish a simple but effective form of government, so as to preserve order among themselves. To succeed in the wilderness, it was necessary to possess not only daring, but also patience and the capacity to endure grinding toil. The pioneers were hunters and husbandmen. Each, by the aid of axe and brand, cleared his patch of corn land in the forest, close to some clear, swift-flowing stream, and by his skill with the rifle won from canebrake and woodland the game on which his family lived until the first crop was grown.

A few of the more reckless and foolhardy, and more especially of those who were either merely hunters and not farmers, or else who were of doubtful character, lived entirely by themselves; but, as a rule, each knot of settlers was gathered together into a little stockaded hamlet, called a fort or station. This system of defensive villages was very distinctive of pioneer backwoods life, and was unique of its kind; without it the settlement of the West and Southwest would have been indefinitely postponed. In no other way could the settlers have combined for defence, while yet retaining their individual ownership of the land. The Watauga forts or palisaded villages were of the usual kind, the cabins and block-houses connected by a heavy loop-holed picket. They were admirably adapted for defence with the rifle. As there was no moat, there was a certain danger from an attack with fire unless water was stored within; and it was of course necessary to guard carefully against surprise. But to open assault they were practically impregnable, and they therefore offered a sure haven of refuge to the settlers in case of an Indian inroad. In time of peace, the inhabitants moved out, to live in their isolated log-cabins and till the stump-dotted clearings. Trails led through the dark forests from one station to another, as well as to the settled districts beyond the mountains; and at long intervals men drove along them bands of pack-horses, laden with the few indispensable necessaries the settlers could not procure by their own labor. The pack-horse was the first, and for a long time the only, method of carrying on trade in the backwoods; and the business of the packer was one of the leading frontier industries.

The settlers worked hard and hunted hard, and lived both plainly and roughly. Their cabins were roofed with the clapboards, or huge shingles, split from the log with maul and wedge, and held in place by heavy stones, or by poles; the floors were made of rived puncheons, hewn smooth on one surface; the chimney was outside the hut, made of rock when possible, otherwise of logs thickly plastered with clay that was strengthened with hogs’ bristles or deer hair; in the great fire-place was a tongue on which to hang pot-hooks and kettle; the unglazed window had a wooden shutter, and the door was made of great clapboards.[15] The men made their own harness, farming implements, and domestic utensils; and, as in every other community still living in the heroic age, the smith was a person of the utmost importance. There was but one thing that all could have in any quantity, and that was land; each had all of this he wanted for the taking,—or if it was known to belong to the Indians, he got its use for a few trinkets or a flask of whiskey. A few of the settlers still kept some of the Presbyterian austerity of character, as regards amusements; but, as a rule, they were fond of horse-racing, drinking, dancing, and fiddling. The corn-shuckings, flax-pullings, log-rollings (when the felled timber was rolled off the clearings), house-raisings, maple-sugar-boilings, and the like were scenes of boisterous and light-hearted merriment, to which the whole neighborhood came, for it was accounted an insult if a man was not asked in to help on such occasions, and none but a base churl would refuse his assistance. The backwoods people had to front peril and hardship without stint, and they loved for the moment to leap out of the bounds of their narrow lives and taste the coarse pleasures that are always dear to a strong, simple, and primitive race. Yet underneath their moodiness and their fitful light-heartedness lay a spirit that when roused was terrible in its ruthless and stern intensity of purpose.

Such were the settlers of the Watauga, the founders of the commonwealth that grew into the State of Tennessee, who early in 1772 decided that they must form some kind of government that would put down wrong-doing and work equity between man and man. Two of their number already towered head and shoulders above the rest in importance and merit especial mention; for they were destined for the next thirty years to play the chief parts in the history of that portion of the Southwest which largely through their own efforts became the State of Tennessee. These two men, neither of them yet thirty years of age, were John Sevier and James Robertson.[16]

Robertson first came to the Watauga early in 1770.[17] He had then been married for two years, and had been “learning his letters and to spell” from his well-educated wife; for he belonged to a backwoods family, even poorer than the average, and he had not so much as received the rudimentary education that could be acquired at an “old-field” school. But he was a man of remarkable natural powers, above the medium height,[18] with wiry, robust form, light-blue eyes, fair complexion, and dark hair; his somewhat sombre face had in it a look of self-contained strength that made it impressive; and his taciturn, quiet, masterful way of dealing with men and affairs, together with his singular mixture of cool caution and most adventurous daring, gave him an immediate hold even upon such lawless spirits as those of the border. He was a mighty hunter; but, unlike Boone, hunting and exploration were to him secondary affairs, and he came to examine the lands with the eye of a pioneer settler. He intended to have a home where he could bring up his family, and, if possible, he wished to find rich lands, with good springs, whereto he might lead those of his neighbors who, like himself, eagerly desired to rise in the world, and to provide for the well-being of their children.

To find such a country Robertson, then dwelling in North Carolina, decided to go across the mountains. He started off alone on his exploring expedition, rifle in hand, and a good horse under him. He crossed the ranges that continue northward the Great Smokies, and spent the summer in the beautiful hill country where the springs of the western waters flowed from the ground. He had never seen so lovely a land. The high valleys, through which the currents ran, were hemmed in by towering mountain walls, with cloud-capped peaks. The fertile loam forming the bottoms was densely covered with the growth of the primeval forest, broken here and there by glade-like openings, where herds of game grazed on the tall, thick grass.

Robertson was well treated by the few settlers, and stayed long enough to raise a crop of corn, the stand-by of the backwoods pioneer; like every other hunter, explorer, Indian fighter, and wilderness wanderer, he lived on the game he shot, and the small quantity of maize he was able to carry with him.[19] In the late fall, however, when recrossing the mountain on his way home through the trackless forests, both game and corn failed him. He lost his way, was forced to abandon his horse among impassable precipices, and finally found his rifle useless owing to the powder having become soaked. For fourteen days he lived almost wholly on nuts and wild berries, and was on the point of death from starvation, when he met two hunters on horseback, who fed him and let him ride their horses by turns, and brought him safely to his home.

Such hardships were little more than matter-of-course incidents in a life like his; and he at once prepared to set out with his family for the new land. His accounts greatly excited his neighbors, and sixteen families made ready to accompany him. The little caravan started, under Robertson’s guidance, as soon as the ground had dried after the winter rains in the spring of 1771.[20] They traveled in the usual style of backwoods emigrants; the men on foot, rifle on shoulder, the elder children driving the lean cows, while the women, the young children, and the few household goods, and implements of husbandry, were carried on the backs of the pack-horses; for in settling the backwoods during the last century, the pack-horse played the same part that in the present century was taken by the canvas-covered emigrant wagon, the white-topped “prairie schooner.”

Once arrived at the Watauga, the Carolina newcomers mixed readily with the few Virginians already on the ground; and Robertson speedily became one of the leading men in the little settlement. On an island in the river he built a house of logs with the bark still on them on the outside, though hewed smooth within; tradition says that it was the largest in the settlement. Certainly it belonged to the better class of backwoods cabins, with a loft and several rooms, a roof of split saplings, held down by weighty poles, a log veranda in front, and a huge fire-place, of sticks or stones laid in clay, wherein the pile of blazing logs roared loudly in cool weather. The furniture was probably precisely like that in other houses of the class; a rude bed, table, settee, and chest of drawers, a spinning-jenny, and either three-legged stools or else chairs with backs and seats of undressed deer hides. Robertson’s energy and his remarkable natural ability brought him to the front at once, in every way; although, as already said, he had much less than even the average backwoods education, for he could not read when he was married, while most of the frontiersmen could not only read but also write, or at least sign their names.[21]

Sevier, who came to the Watauga early in 1772, nearly a year after Robertson and his little colony had arrived, differed widely from his friend in almost every respect save highmindedness and dauntless, invincible courage. He was a gentleman by birth and breeding, the son of a Huguenot who had settled in the Shenandoah Valley. He had received a fair education, and though never fond of books, he was to the end of his days an interested and intelligent observer of men and things, both in America and Europe. He corresponded on intimate and equal terms with Madison, Franklin, and others of our most polished statesmen; while Robertson’s letters, when he had finally learned to write them himself, were almost as remarkable for their phenomenally bad spelling as for their shrewd common-sense and homely, straightforward honesty. Sevier was a very handsome man; during his lifetime he was reputed the handsomest in Tennessee. He was tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, brown-haired, of slender build, with erect, military carriage and commanding bearing, his lithe, finely proportioned figure being well set off by the hunting-shirt which he almost invariably wore. From his French fore-fathers he inherited a gay, pleasure-loving temperament, that made him the most charming of companions. His manners were polished and easy, and he had great natural dignity. Over the backwoodsmen he exercised an almost unbounded influence, due as much to his ready tact, invariable courtesy, and lavish, generous hospitality, as to the skill and dashing prowess which made him the most renowned Indian fighter of the Southwest. He had an eager, impetuous nature, and was very ambitious, being almost as fond of popularity as of Indian-fighting.[22] He was already married, and the father of two children, when he came to the Watauga, and, like Robertson, was seeking a new and better home for his family in the West. So far, his life had been as uneventful as that of any other spirited young borderer; his business had been that of a frontier Indian trader; he had taken part in one or two unimportant Indian skirmishes.[23] Later he was commissioned by Lord Dunmore as a captain in the Virginia line.

Such were Sevier and Robertson, the leaders in the little frontier outpost of civilization that was struggling to maintain itself on the Watauga; and these two men afterward proved themselves to be, with the exception of George Rogers Clark, the greatest of the first generation of Trans-Alleghany pioneers.

Their followers were worthy of them. All alike were keenly alive to the disadvantages of living in a community where there was neither law nor officer to enforce it. Accordingly, with their characteristic capacity for combination, so striking as existing together with the equally characteristic capacity for individual self-help, the settlers determined to organize a government of their own. They promptly put their resolution into effect early in the spring of 1772, Robertson being apparently the leader in the movement.

They decided to adopt written articles of agreement, by which their conduct should be governed; and these were known as the Articles of the Watauga Association. They formed a written constitution, the first ever adopted west of the mountains, or by a community composed of American-born freemen. It is this fact of the early independence and self-government of the settlers along the headwaters of the Tennessee that gives to their history its peculiar importance. They were the first men of American birth to establish a free and independent community on the continent. Even before this date, there had been straggling settlements of Pennsylvanians and Virginians along the head-waters of the Ohio; but these settlements remained mere parts of the colonies behind them, and neither grew into a separate community, nor played a distinctive part in the growth of the West.

The first step taken by the Watauga settlers, when they had determined to organize,[24] was to meet in general convention, holding a kind of folk-thing, akin to the New England town-meeting. They then elected a representative assembly, a small parliament or “witanagemot,” which met at Robertson’s station. Apparently the freemen of each little fort or palisaded village, each blockhouse that was the centre of a group of detached cabins and clearings, sent a member to this first frontier legislature.[25] It consisted of thirteen representatives, who proceeded to elect from their number five—among them Sevier and Robertson—to form a committee or court, which should carry on the actual business of government, and should exercise both judicial and executive functions. This court had a clerk and a sheriff, or executive officer, who respectively recorded and enforced their decrees.

The five members of this court, who are sometimes referred to as arbitrators and sometimes as commissioners, had entire control of all matters affecting the common weal; and all affairs in controversy were settled by the decision of a majority. They elected one of their number as chairman, he being also ex-officio chairman of the committee of thirteen; and all their proceedings were noted for the prudence and moderation with which they behaved in their somewhat anomalous position. They were careful to avoid embroiling themselves with the neighboring colonial legislatures; and in dealing with non-residents they made them give bonds to abide by their decision, thus avoiding any necessity of proceeding against their persons. On behalf of the community itself, they were not only permitted to control its internal affairs, but also to secure lands by making treaties with a foreign power, the Indians; a distinct exercise of the right of sovereignty.

They heard and adjudicated all cases of difference between the settlers themselves; and took measures for the common safety. In fact the dwellers, in this little out-lying frontier commonwealth, exercised . the rights of full statehood for a number of years; establishing in true American style a purely democratic government with representative institutions, in which, under certain restrictions, the will of the majority was supreme, while, nevertheless, the largest individual freedom, and the utmost liberty of individual initiative were retained. The framers showed the American predilection for a written constitution or civil compact; and, what was more important, they also showed the common-sense American spirit that led them to adopt the scheme of government which should in the simplest way best serve their needs, without bothering their heads over mere high-sounding abstractions.[26]

The court or committee held their sessions at stated and regular times, and took the law of Virginia as their standard for decisions. They saw to the recording of deeds and wills, settled all questions of debate, issued marriage licenses, and carried on a most vigorous warfare against law-breakers, especially horse-thieves.[27] For six years their government continued in full vigor; then, in February, 1778, North Carolina having organized Washington County, which included all of what is now Tennessee, the governor of that State appointed justices of the peace and militia officers for the new county, and the old system came to an end. But Sevier, Robertson, and their fellow-committee-men were all members of the new court, and continued almost without change their former simple system of procedure and direct and expeditious methods of administering justice; as justices of the peace they merely continued to act as they acted while arbitrators of the Watauga Association, and in their summary mode of dealing with evil-doers paid a good deal more heed to the essence than to the forms of law. One record shows that a horse-thief was arrested on Monday, tried on Wednesday, and hanged on Friday of the same week. Another deals with a claimant who, by his attorney, moved to be sworn into his office of clerk, “but the court swore in James Sevier, well knowing that said Sevier had been elected,” and being evidently unwilling to waste their time hearing a contested election case when their minds were already made up as to the equity of the matter. They exercised the right of making suspicious individuals leave the county.[28] They also at times became censors of morals, and interfered with straightforward effectiveness to right wrongs for which a more refined and elaborate system of jurisprudence would have provided only cumbersome and inadequate remedies. Thus one of their entries is to the effect that a certain man is ordered “to return to his family and demean himself as a good citizen, he having admitted in open court that he had left his wife and took up with another woman.” From the character of the judges who made the decision, it is safe to presume that the delinquent either obeyed it or else promptly fled to the Indians for safety.[29] This fleeing to the Indians, by the way, was a feat often performed by the worst criminals—for the renegade, the man who had “painted his face” and deserted those of his own color, was a being as well known as he was abhorred and despised on the border, where such a deed was held to be the one unpardonable crime.

So much for the way in which the whites kept order among themselves. The second part of their task, the adjustment of their relations with their red neighbors, was scarcely less important. Early in 1772 Virginia made a treaty with the Cherokee Nation, which established as the boundary between them a line running west from White Top Mountain in latitude 36° 30´[30] Immediately afterward the agent[31] of the “British Government among the Cherokees ordered the Watauga settlers to instantly leave their lands. They defied him, and refused to move; but feeling the insecurity of their tenure they deputed two commissioners, of whom Robertson was one, to make a treaty with the Cherokees. This was successfully accomplished, the Indians leasing to the associated settlers all the lands on the Watauga waters for the space of eight years, in consideration of about six thousand dollars’ worth of blankets, paint, muskets, and the like.[32] The amount advanced was reimbursed to the men advancing it by the sale of the lands in small parcels to new setlers,[33] for the time of the lease.[34]

After the lease was signed, a day was appointed on which to hold a great race, as well as wrestling-matches and other sports, at Watauga. Not only many whites from the various settlements, but also a number of Indians, came to see or take part in the sports; and all went well until the evening, when some lawless men from Wolf Hills, who had been lurking in the woods round about,[35] killed an Indian, whereat his fellows left the spot in great anger.

The settlers now saw themselves threatened with a bloody and vindictive Indian war, and were plunged into terror and despair; yet they were rescued by the address and daring of Robertson. Leaving the others to build a formidable palisaded fort, under the leadership of Sevier, Robertson set off alone through the woods and followed the great war trace down to the Cherokee towns. His mission was one of the greatest peril, for there was imminent danger that the justly angered savages would take his life. But he was a man who never rushed heedlessly into purposeless peril, and never flinched from a danger which there was an object in encountering. His quiet, resolute fearlessness doubtless impressed the savages to whom he went, and helped to save his life; moreover, the Cherokees knew him, trusted his word, and were probably a little overawed by a certain air of command to which all men that were thrown in contact with him bore witness. His ready tact and knowledge of Indian character did the rest. He persuaded the chiefs and warriors to meet him in council, assured them of the anger and sorrow with which all the Watauga people viewed the murder, which had undoubtedly been committed by some outsider, and wound up by declaring his determination to try to have the wrong-doer arrested and punished according to his crime. The Indians, already pleased with his embassy, finally consented to pass the affair over and not take vengeance upon innocent men. Then the daring backwoods diplomatist, well pleased with the success of his mission, returned to the anxious little community.

The incident, taken in connection with the plundering of a store kept by two whites in Holston Valley at the same time, and the unprovoked assault on Boone’s party in Powell’s Valley a year later, shows the extreme difficulty of preventing the worst men of each color from wantonly attacking the innocent. There was hardly a peaceable red or law-abiding white who could not recite injuries he had received from members of the opposite race; and his sense of the wrongs he had suffered, as well as the general frontier indifference to crimes committed against others, made him slow in punishing similar outrages by his own people. The Watauga settlers discountenanced wrong being done the Indians, and tried to atone for it, but they never hunted the offenders down with the necessary mercilessness that alone could have prevented a repetition of their offences. Similarly, but to an even greater degree, the good Indians shielded the bad.[36]

For several years after they made their lease with the Cherokees the men of the Watauga were not troubled by their Indian neighbors. They had to fear nothing more than a drought, a freshet, a forest fire, or an unusually deep snow-fall if hunting on the mountains in mid-winter. They lived in peace, hunting and farming, marrying, giving in marriage, and rearing many healthy children. By degrees they wrought out of the stubborn wilderness comfortable homes, filled with plenty. The stumps were drawn out of the clearings, and other grains were sown besides corn. Beef, pork, and mutton were sometimes placed on the table, besides the more common venison, bear meat, and wild turkey. The women wove good clothing, the men procured good food, the log-cabins, if homely and rough, yet gave ample warmth and shelter. The families throve, and life was happy, even though varied with toil, danger, and hardship. Books were few, and it was some years before the first church,—Presbyterian, of course,—was started in the region.[37] The backwoods Presbyterians managed their church affairs much as they did their civil government: each congregation appointed a committee to choose ground, to build a meeting-house, to collect the minister’s salary, and to pay all charges, by taxing the members proportionately for the same, the committee being required to turn in a full account, and receive instructions, at a general session or meeting held twice every year.[38]

Thus the Watauga folk were the first Americans who, as a separate body, moved into the wilderness to hew out dwellings for themselves and their children, trusting only to their own shrewd heads, stout hearts, and strong arms, unhelped and unhampered by the power nominally their sovereign.[39] They built up a commonwealth which had many successors; they showed that the frontiersmen could do their work unassisted; for they not only proved that they were made of stuff stern enough to hold its own against outside pressure of any sort, but they also made it evident that having won the land they were competent to govern both it and themselves. They were the first to do what the whole nation has since done. It has often been said that we owe all our success to our surroundings; that any race with our opportunities could have done as well as we have done. Undoubtedly our opportunities have been great; undoubtedly we have often and lamentably failed in taking advantage of them. But what nation ever has done all that was possible with the chances offered it? The Spaniards, the Portuguese, and the French, not to speak of the Russians in Siberia, have all enjoyed, and yet have failed to make good use of, the same advantages which we have turned to good account. The truth is, that in starting a new nation in a new country, as we have done, while there are exceptional chances to be taken advantage of, there are also exceptional dangers and difficulties to be overcome. None but heroes can succeed wholly in the work. It is a good thing for us at times to compare what we have done with what we could have done, had we been better and wiser; it may make us try in the future to raise our abilities to the level of our opportunities. Looked at absolutely, we must frankly acknowledge that we have fallen very far short indeed of the high ideal we should have reached. Looked at relatively, it must also be said that we have done better than any other nation or race working under our conditions.

The Watauga settlers outlined in advance the nation’s work. They tamed the rugged and shaggy wilderness, they bid defiance to outside foes, and they successfully solved the difficult problem of self-government.

[1] Then called the Cherokee.

[2] Volumes could be filled—and indeed it is hardly too much to say, have been filled—with worthless “proofs” of the ownership of Iroquois, Shawnees, or Cherokees, as the case might be. In truth, it would probably have been difficult to get any two members of the same tribe to have pointed out with precision the tribal limits. Each tribe’s country was elastic, for it included all lands from which it was deemed possible to drive out the possessors. In 1773 the various parties of Long Hunters had just the same right to the whole of the territory in question that the Indians themselves had.

[3] Campbell MSS.

“The first settlers on Holston River were a remarkable race of people for their intelligence, enterprise, and hardy adventure. The greater portion of them had emigrated from the counties of Botetourt, Augusta, and Frederick, and others along the same valley, and from the upper counties of Maryland and Pennsylvania; were mostly descendants of Irish stock and generally, where they had any religious opinions, were Presbyterians. A very large proportion were religious, and many were members of the church. There were some families, however, and among the most wealthy, that were extremely wild and dissipated in their habits.

“The first clergyman that came among them was the Rev. Charles Cummings, an Irishman by birth, but educated in Pennsylvania. This gentleman was one of the first settlers, defended his domicile for years with his rifle in hand, and built his first meeting-house on the very spot where he and two or three neighbors and one of his servants had had a severe skirmish with the Indians, in which one of his party was killed and another wounded. Here he preached to a very large and most respectable congregation for twenty or thirty years. He was a zealous whig, and contributed much to kindle the patriotic fire which blazed forth among these people in the Revolutionary struggle.”

This is from a MS. sketch of the Holston Pioneers, by the Hon. David Campbell, a son of one of the first settlers. . The Campbell family, of Presbyterian Irish stock, first came to Pennsylvania, and drifted south. In the Revolutionary war it produced good soldiers and commanders, such as William and Arthur Campbell. The Campbells intermarried with the Prestons, Breckenridges, and other historic families; and their blood now runs in the veins of many of the noted men of the States south of the Potomac and Ohio.

[4] The first settlers on the Watauga included both Virginians (as “Captain” William Bean, whose child was the first born in what is now Tennessee; Ramsey, 94) and Carolinians (Haywood, 37). But many of these Carolina hill people were, like Boone and Henderson, members of families who had drifted down from the north. The position of the Presbyterian churches in all this western hill country shows the origin of that portion of the people which gave the tone to the rest; and, as we have already seen, while some of the Presbyterians penetrated to the hills from Charleston, most came down from the north. The Presbyterian blood was, of course, Irish or Scotch; and the numerous English from the coast regions also mingled with the two former kindred stocks, and adopted their faith. The Huguenots, Hollanders, and many of the Germans, being of Calvinistic creed, readily assimilated themselves to the Presbyterians. The absence of Episcopacy on the western border, while in part indicating merely the lack of religion in the backwoods, and the natural growth of dissent in such a society, also indicates that the people were not of pure English descent, and were of different stock from those east of them.

[5] Campbell MSS.

[6] For this settlement see especially “Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee,” John Haywood (Knoxville, 1823), p. 37; also “Annals of Tennessee,” J. G. M. Ramsey (Charleston, 1853), p. 92; “History of Middle Tennessee,” A. W. Putnam (Nashville, 1859), p. 21; the “Address” of the Hon. John Allison to the Tennessee Press Association (Nashville, 1887); and the “History of Tennessee,” by James Phelan (Boston, 1888).

[7] Now Abingdon.

[8] It only went to Steep Rock.

[9] November 5, 1768.

[10] October 14, 1768, at Hard Labor, S. C., confirmed by the treaty of October 18, 1770, at Lockabar, S. C. Both of these treaties acknowledged the rights of the Cherokees to the major part of these northwestern hunting-grounds.

[11] Anthony Bledsoe.

[12] May 16, 1771.

[13] It is said that the greatest proportion of the early settlers came from Wake County, N. C., as did Robertson; but many of them, like Robertson, were of Virginian birth; and the great majority were of the same stock as the Virginian and Pennsylvanian mountaineers. Of the five members of the “court” or governing committee of Watauga, three were of Virginian birth, one came from South Carolina, and the origin of the other is not specified. Ramsey, 107.

[14] In Collins, II., 345, is an account of what may be termed a type family of these frontier barbarians. They were named Harpe; and there is something revoltingly bestial in the record of their crimes; of how they traveled through the country, the elder brother, Micajah Harpe, with two wives, the younger with only one; of the appalling number of murders they committed, for even small sums of money; of their unnatural proposal to kill all their children, so that they should not be hampered in their flight; of their life in the woods, like wild beasts, and the ignoble ferocity of their ends. Scarcely less sombre reading is the account of how they were hunted down, and of the wolfish eagerness the borderers showed to massacre the women and children as well as the men.

[15] In “American Pioneers,” II., 445, is a full description of the better sort of backwoods log-cabin.

[16] Both were born in Virginia; Sevier in Rockingham County, September 23, 1745, and Robertson in Brunswick County, June 28, 1742.

[17] Putnam, p. 21; who, however, is evidently in error in thinking he was accompanied by Boone, as the latter was then in Kentucky. A recent writer revives this error in another form, stating that Robertson accompanied Boone to the Watauga in 1769. Boone, however, left on his travels on May 1, 1769, and in June was in Kentucky; whereas Putnam not only informs us definitely that Robertson went to the Watauga for the first time in 1770, but also mentions that when he went his eldest son was already born, and this event took place in June, 1769, so that it is certain Boone and Robertson were not together.

[18] The description of his looks is taken from the statements of his descendants, and of the grandchildren of his contemporaries.

[19] The importance of maize to the Western settler is shown by the fact that in our tongue it has now monopolized the title of corn.

[20] Putnam, p. 24, says it was after the battle of the Great Alamance, which took place May 16, 1771. An untrustworthy tradition says March.

[21] In examining numerous original drafts of petitions and the like, signed by hundreds of the original settlers of Tennessee and Kentucky, I have been struck by the small proportion—not much over three or four per cent at the outside—of men who made their mark instead of signing.

[22] See, in the collection of the Tenn. Hist. Soc., at Nashville, the MS. notes containing an account of Sevier, given by one of the old settlers named Hillsman. Hillsman especially dwells on the skill with which Sevier could persuade the backwoodsmen to come round to his own way of thinking, while at the same time making them believe that they were acting on their own ideas, and adds—“ whatever he had was at the service of his friends and for the promotion of the Sevier party, which sometimes embraced nearly all the population.”

[23] Mr. James Gilmore (Edmund Kirke), in his “John Sevier,” makes some assertions, totally unbacked by proof, about his hero’s alleged feats when only a boy, in the wars between the Virginians and the Indians. He gives no dates but can only refer to Pontiac’s war. Sevier was then eighteen years old, but nevertheless is portrayed, among other things, as leading “a hundred hardy borderers” into the Indian country, burning their villages and “often defeating bodies of five times his own numbers.” These statements are supported by no better authority than traditions gathered a century and a quarter after the event, and must be dismissed as mere fable. They show a total and rather amusing ignorance not only of the conditions of Indian warfare, but also of the history of the particular contest referred to. Mr. Gilmore forgets that we have numerous histories of the war in which Sevier is supposed to have distinguished himself, and that in not one of them is there a syllable hinting at what he says. Neither Sevier nor any one else ever with a hundred men defeated “five times his number” of Northwestern Indians in the woods; and during Sevier’s life in Virginia, the only defeat ever suffered by such a body of Indians was at Bushy Run, when Bouquet gained a hard-fought victory. After the end of Pontiac’s war there was no expedition of importance undertaken by Virginians against the Indians until 1774, and of Pontiac’s war itself we have full knowledge. Sevier was neither leader nor participant in any such marvellous feats as Mr. Gilmore describes; on the contrary, the skirmishes in which he may have been engaged were of such small importance that no record remains concerning them. Had Sevier done any such deeds all the colonies would have rung with his exploits, instead of their remaining utterly unknown for a hundred and twenty-five years. It is extraordinary that any author should be willing to put his name to such reckless misstatements, in what purports to be a history and not a book of fiction.

[24] The Watauga settlers and those of Carter’s Valley were the first to organize; the Nolichucky people came in later.

[25] Putnam, 30.

[26] The original articles of the Watauga Association have been lost, and no copies are extant. All we know of the matter is derived from Haywood, Ramsey, and Putnam, three historians to whose praiseworthy industry Tennessee owes as much as Kentucky does to Marshall, Butler, and Collins. Ramsey, by the way, chooses rather inappropriate adjectives when he calls the government “paternal and patriarchal.”

[27] A very good account of this government is given in Allison’s Address, pp. 5-8, and from it the following examples are taken.

[28] A right the exercise of which is of course susceptible to great abuse, but, nevertheless, is often absolutely necessary to the well-being of a frontier community. In almost every case where I have personally known it exercised, the character of the individual ordered off justified the act.

[29] Allison’s Address.

[30] Ramsey, 109. Putnam says 36° 35´.

[31] Alexander Cameron.

[32] Haywood, 43.

[33] Meanwhile Carter’s Valley, then believed to lie in Virginia, had been settled by Virginians; the Indians robbed a trader’s store, and indemnified the owners by giving them land, at the treaty of Sycamore Shoals. This land was leased in job lots to settlers, who, however, kept possession without paying when they found it lay in North Carolina.

[34] A similar but separate lease was made by the settlers on the Nolichucky, who acquired a beautiful and fertile valley in exchange for the merchandise carried on the back of a single pack-horse. Among the whites themselves transfers of land were made in very simple forms, and conveyed not the fee simple but merely the grantor’s claim.

[35] Haywood says they were named Crabtree; Putnam hints that they had lost a brother when Boone’s party was attacked and his son killed; but the attack on Boone did not take place till over a year after this time.

[36] Even La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (8, 95), who loathed the backwoodsmen—few polished Europeans being able to see any but the repulsive side of frontier character, a side certainly very often prominent—also speaks of the tendency of the worst Indians to go to the frontier to rob and murder.

[37] Salem Church was founded (Allison, 8) in 1777, by Sam uel Doak, a Princeton graduate, and a man of sound learning, who also at the same time started Washington College, the first real institution of learning south of the Alleghanies.

[38] “Annals of Augusta,” 21.

[39] See Appendix.

CHAPTER VIII

LORD DUNMORE’S WAR, 1774

ON THE eve of the Revolution, in 1774, the frontiersmen had planted themselves firmly among the Alleghanies. Directly west of them lay the untenanted wilderness, traversed only by the war parties of the red men, and the hunting parties of both reds and whites. No settlers had yet penetrated it, and until they did so there could be within its borders no chance of race warfare, unless we call by that name the unchronicled and unending contest in which, now and then, some solitary white woodsman slew, or was lain by, his painted foe. But in the Southwest and the Northwest alike, the area of settlement already touched the home lands of the tribes, and hence the horizon was never quite free from the cloud of threatening Indian war; yet for the moment the Southwest was at peace, for the Cherokees were still friendly.

It was in the Northwest that the danger of collision was most imminent; for there the whites and Indians had wronged one another for a generation, and their interests were, at the time, clashing more directly than ever. Much the greater part of the western frontier was held or claimed by Virginia, whose royal governor was, at the time, Lord Dunmore. He was an ambitious, energetic man, who held his allegiance as being due first to the crown, but who, nevertheless, was always eager to champion the cause of Virginia as against either the Indians or her sister colonies. The short but fierce and eventful struggle that now broke out was fought wholly by Virginians, and was generally known by the name of Lord Dunmore’s war.

Virginia, under her charter, claimed that her boundaries ran across to the South Seas, to the Pacific Ocean. The king of Britain had graciously granted her the right to take so much of the continent as lay within these lines, provided she could win it from the Indians, French, and Spaniards; and provided also she could prevent herself from being ousted by the crown, or by some of the other colonies. A number of grants had been made with the like large liberality, and it was found that they sometimes conflicted with one another. The consequence was that while the boundaries were well marked near the coast, where they separated Virginia from the long-settled regions of Maryland and North Carolina, they became exceeding vague and indefinite the moment they touched the mountains. Even at the South this produced confusion, and induced the settlers of the upper Holston to consider themselves as Virginians, not Carolinians; but at the North the effect was still more confusing, and nearly resulted in bringing about an intercolonial war between Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The Virginians claimed all of extreme western Pennsylvania, especially Fort Pitt and the valley of the Monongahela, and, in 1774, proceeded boldly to exercise jurisdiction therein.[1] Indeed a strong party among the settlers favored the Virginian claim; whereas it would have been quite impossible to arouse anywhere in Virginia the least feeling in support of a similar claim on behalf of Pennsylvania. The borderers had a great contempt for the sluggish and timid government of the Quaker province, which was very lukewarm in protecting them in their rights—or, indeed, in punishing them when they did wrong to others. In fact, it seems probable that they would have declared for Virginia even more strongly, had it not been for the very reason that their feeling of independence was so surly as to make them suspicious of all forms of control; and they therefore objected almost as much to Virginian as Pennsylvanian rule, and regarded the outcome of the dispute with a certain indifference.[2] For a time in the early part of 1774 there seemed quite as much likelihood of the Virginians being drawn into a fight with the Pennsylvanians as with the Shawnees. While the Pennsylvanian commissioners were trying to come to an agreement concerning the boundaries with Lord Dunmore, the representatives of the two contesting parties at Fort Pitt were on the verge of actual collision. The Earl’s agent in the disputed territory was a Captain John Conolly,[3] a man of violent temper and bad character. He embodied the men favorable to his side as a sort of Virginian militia, with which he not only menaced both hostile and friendly Indians, but the adherents of the Pennsylvanian Government as well. He destroyed their houses, killed their cattle and hogs, impressed their horses, and finally so angered them that they threatened to take refuge in the stockade at Fort Pitt, and defy him to open war,—although even in the midst of these quarrels with Conolly their loyalty to the Quaker State was somewhat doubtful.[4]

The Virginians were the only foes the Western Indians really dreaded; for their backwoodsmen were of warlike temper, and had learned to fight effectively in the forest. The Indians styled them Long Knives; or, to be more exact, they called them collectively the “Big Knife.”[5] There have been many accounts given of the origin of this name, some ascribing it to the long knives worn by the hunters and backwoodsmen generally, others to the fact that some of the noted Virginian fighters in their early skirmishes were armed with swords. At any rate the title was accepted by all the Indians as applying to their most determined foes among the colonists; and finally, after we had become a nation, was extended so as to apply to Americans generally.

The war that now ensued was not general. The Six Nations, as a whole, took no part in it, while Pennsylvania also stood aloof; indeed at one time it was proposed that the Pennsylvanians and Iroquois should jointly endeavor to mediate between the combatants.[6] The struggle was purely between the Virginians and the Northwestern Indians.

The interests of the Virginians and Pennsylvanians conflicted not only in respect to the ownership of the line, but also in respect to the policy to be pursued regarding the Indians. The former were armed colonists, whose interest it was to get actual possession of the soil;[7] whereas in Pennsylvania the Indian trade was very important and lucrative, and the numerous traders to the Indian towns were anxious that the redskins should remain in undisturbed enjoyment of their forests, and that no white man should be allowed to come among them; moreover, so long as they were able to make heavy profits, they were utterly indifferent to the well-being of the white frontiersmen, and in return incurred the suspicion and hatred of the latter. The Virginians accused the traders of being the main cause of the difficulty,[8] asserting that they sometimes incited the Indians to outrages, and always, even in the midst of hostilities, kept them supplied with guns and ammunition, and even bought from them the horses that they had stolen on their plundering expeditions against the Virginian border.[9] These last accusations were undoubtedly justified, at least in great part, by the facts. The interests of the white trader from Pennsylvania and of the white settler from Virginia were so far from being identical that they were usually diametrically opposite. The Northwestern Indians had been nominally at peace with the whites for ten years, since the close of Bouquet’s campaign. But Bouquet had inflicted a very slight punishment upon them, and in concluding an unsatisfactory peace had caused them to make but a partial reparation for the wrongs they had done.[10] They remained haughty and insolent, irritated rather than awed by an ineffective chastisement, and their young men made frequent forays on the frontier. Each of the ten years of nominal peace saw plenty of bloodshed. Recently they had been seriously alarmed by the tendency of the whites to encroach on the great hunting-grounds south of the Ohio;[11] for here and there hunters or settlers were already beginning to build cabins along the course of that stream. The cession by the Iroquois of these same hunting-grounds, at the treaty of Fort Stanwix, while it gave the whites a colorable title, merely angered the Northwestern Indians. Half a century earlier they would hardly have dared dispute the power of the Six Nations to do what they chose with any land that could be reached by their war parties; but in 1774 they felt quite able to hold their own against their old oppressors, and had no intention of acquiescing in any arrangement the latter might make, unless it was also clearly to their own advantage.

In the decade before Lord Dunmore’s war there had been much mutual wrong-doing between the Northwestern Indians and the Virginian borderers; but on the whole the latter had occupied the position of being sinned against more often than that of sinning. The chief offence of the whites was that they trespassed upon uninhabited lands, which they forthwith proceeded to cultivate, instead of merely roaming over them to hunt the game and butcher one another. Doubtless occasional white men would murder an Indian if they got a chance, and the traders almost invariably cheated the tribesmen. But as a whole the traders were Indian rather than white in their sympathies, and the whites rarely made forays against their foes avowedly for horses and plunder, while the Indians on their side were continually indulging in such inroads. Every year parties of young red warriors crossed the Ohio to plunder the outlying farms, burn down the buildings, scalp the inmates, and drive off the horses.[12] Year by year the exasperation of the borderers grew greater and the tale of the wrongs they had to avenge longer.[13] Occasionally they took a brutal and ill-judged vengeance, which usually fell on innocent Indians,[14] and raised up new foes for the whites. The savages grew continually more hostile, and in the fall of 1773 their attacks became so frequent that it was evident a general outbreak was at hand; eleven people were murdered in the county of Fincastle alone.[15] The Shawnees were the leaders in all these outrages; but the outlaw bands, such as the Mingos and Cherokees, were as bad, and parties of Wyandots and Delawares, as well as of the various Miami and Wabash tribes, joined them.

Thus the spring of 1774 opened with everything ripe for an explosion. The Virginian borderers were fearfully exasperated, and ready to take vengeance upon any Indians, whether peaceful or hostile; while the Shawnees and Mingos, on their side, were arrogant and overbearing, and yet alarmed at the continual advance of the whites. The headstrong rashness of Conolly, who was acting as Lord Dunmore’s lieutenant on the border, and who was equally willing to plunge into a war with Pennsylvania or the Shawnees, served as a firebrand to ignite this mass of tinder. The borderers were anxious for a war; and Lord Dunmore was not inclined to balk them. He was ambitious of glory, and probably thought that in the midst of the growing difficulties between the mother country and the colonies, it would be good policy to distract the Virginians’ minds by an Indian war, which, if he conducted it to a successful conclusion, might strengthen his own position.[16]

There were on the border at the moment three or four men whose names are so intimately bound up with the history of this war, that they deserve a brief mention. One was Michael Cresap, a Maryland frontiersman, who had come to the banks of the Ohio with the purpose of making a home for his family.[17] He was of the regular pioneer type; a good woodsman, sturdy and brave, a fearless fighter, devoted to his friends and his country; but also, when his blood was heated, and his savage instincts fairly roused, inclined to regard any red man, whether hostile or friendly, as a being who should be slain on sight. Nor did he condemn the brutal deeds done by others on innocent Indians.

The next was a man named Greathouse, of whom it is enough to know that, together with certain other men whose names have for the most part, by a merciful chance, been forgotten,[18] he did a deed such as could only be committed by inhuman and cowardly scoundrels.

The other two actors in this tragedy were both Indians, and were both men of much higher stamp. One was Cornstalk, the Shawnee chief; a far-sighted seer, gloomily conscious of the impending ruin of his race, a great orator, a mighty warrior, a man who knew the value of his word and prized his honor, and who fronted death with quiet, disdainful heroism; and yet a fierce, cruel, and treacherous savage to those with whom he was at enmity, a killer of women and children, whom we first hear of, in Pontiac’s War, as joining in the massacre of unarmed and peaceful settlers who had done him no wrong, and who thought that he was friendly.[19] The other was Logan, an Iroquois warrior, who lived at that time away from the bulk of his people, but who was a man of note—in the loose phraseology of the border, a chief or headman—among the outlying parties of Senecas and Mingos, and the fragments of broken tribes that dwelt along the upper Ohio. He was a man of splendid appearance; over six feet high, straight as a pear-shaft, with a countenance as open as it was brave and manly,[20] until the wrongs he endured stamped on it an expression of gloomy ferocity. He had always been the friend of the white man, and had been noted particularly for his kindness and gentleness to children. Up to this time he had lived at peace with the borderers, for though some of his kin had been massacred by them years before, he had forgiven the deed—perhaps not unmindful of the fact that others of his kin had been concerned in still more bloody massacres of the whites. A skilled marksman and mighty hunter, of commanding dignity, who treated all men with a grave courtesy that exacted the same treatment in return, he was greatly liked and respected by all the white hunters and frontiersmen whose friendship and respect were worth having; they admired him for his dexterity and prowess, and they loved him for his straightforward honesty, and his noble loyalty to his friends. One of these old pioneer hunters has left on record[21] the statement that he deemed “Logan the best specimen of humanity he ever met with, either white or red.” Such was Logan before the evil days came upon him.

Early in the spring the outlying settlers began again to suffer from the deeds of straggling Indians. Horses were stolen, one or two murders were committed, the inhabitants of the more lonely cabins fled to the forts, and the backwoodsmen began to threaten fierce vengeance. On April 16th, three traders in the employ of a man named Butler were attacked by some of the outlaw Cherokees, one killed, another wounded, and their goods plundered. Immediately after this Conolly issued an open letter, commanding the backwoodsmen to hold themselves in readiness to repel any attack by the Indians, as the Shawnees were hostile. Such a letter from Lord Dunmore’s lieutenant amounted to a declaration of war, and there were sure to be plenty of backwoodsmen who would put a very liberal interpretation upon the order given them to repel an attack. Its effects were seen instantly. All the borderers prepared for war. Cresap was near Wheeling at the time, with a band of hunters and scouts, fearless men, who had adopted many of the ways of the redskins, in addition to their method of fighting. As soon as they received Conolly’s letter they proceeded to declare war in the regular Indian style, calling a council, planting the warpost, and going through other savage ceremonies,[22] and eagerly waited for a change to attack their foes. Unfortunately the first stroke fell on friendly Indians. The trader, Butler, spoken of above, in order to recover some of the peltries of which he had been robbed by the Cherokees, had sent a canoe with two friendly Shawnees toward the place of the massacre. On the 27th Cresap and his followers ambushed these men near Captina, and killed and scalped them. Some of the better backwoodsmen strongly protested against this outrage;[23] but the mass of them were excited and angered by the rumor of Indian hostilities, and the brutal and disorderly side of frontier character was for the moment uppermost. They threatened to kill whoever interfered with them, cursing the “damned traders” as being worse than the Indians,[24] while Cresap boasted of the murder, and never said a word in condemnation of the still worse deeds that followed it.[25] The next day he again led out his men and attacked another party of Shawnees, who had been trading near Pittsburg, killed one and wounded two others, one of the whites being also hurt.[26]

Among the men who were with Cresap at this time was a young Virginian, who afterward played a brilliant part in the history of the West, who was for ten years the leader of the bold spirits of Kentucky, and who rendered the whole United States signal and effective service by one of his deeds in the Revolutionary war. This was George Rogers Clark, then twenty-one years old.[27] He was of good family, and had been fairly well educated, as education went in colonial days; but from his childhood he had been passionately fond of the wild roving life of the woods. He was a great hunter; and, like so many other young colonial gentlemen of good birth and bringing up, and adventurous temper, he followed the hazardous profession of a backwoods surveyor. With chain and compass, as well as axe and rifle, he penetrated the far places of the wilderness, the lonely, dangerous regions where every weak man inevitably succumbed to the manifold perils encountered, but where the strong and far-seeing were able to lay the foundations of fame and fortune. He possessed high daring, unflinching courage, passions which he could not control, and a frame fitted to stand any strain of fatigue or hardship. He was a square-built thick-set man, with high broad forehead, sandy hair, and unquailing blue eyes that looked out from under heavy, shaggy brows.[28]

Clark had taken part with Cresap in his assault upon the second party of Shawnees. On the following day the whole band of whites prepared to march off and attack Logan’s camp at Yellow Creek, some fifty miles distant. After going some miles they began to feel ashamed of their mission; calling a halt, they discussed the fact that the camp they were preparing to attack, consisted exclusively of friendly Indians, and mainly of women and children; and forthwith abandoned their proposed trip and returned home. They were true borderers—brave, self-reliant, loyal to their friends, and good-hearted when their worst instincts were not suddenly aroused; but the sight of bloodshed maddened them as if they had been so many wolves. Wrongs stirred to the depths their moody tempers, and filled them with a brutal longing for indiscriminate revenge. When goaded by memories of evil, or when swayed by swift, fitful gusts of fury, the uncontrolled violence of their passions led them to commit deeds whose inhuman barbarity almost equaled, though it could never surpass, that shown by the Indians themselves.[29]

But Logan’s people did not profit by Cresap’s change of heart. On the last day of April a small party of men, women, and children, including almost all of Logan’s kin, left his camp and crossed the river to visit Greathouse, as had been their custom; for he made a trade of selling rum to the savages, though Cresap had notified him to stop. The whole party were plied with liquor, and became helplessly drunk, in which condition Greathouse and his associated criminals fell on and massacred them, nine souls in all.[30] It was an inhuman and revolting deed, which should consign the names of the perpetrators to eternal infamy.

At once the frontier was in a blaze, and the Indians girded themselves for revenge. The Mingos sent out runners to the other tribes, telling of the butchery, and calling on all the red men to join together for immediate and bloody vengeance.[31] They confused the two massacres, attributing both to Cresap, whom they well knew as a warrior;[32] and their women for long afterward scared the children into silence by threatening them with Cresap’s name as with that of a monster.[33] They had indeed been brutally wronged; yet it must be remembered that they themselves were the first aggressors. They had causelessly murdered and robbed many whites, and now their sins had recoiled on the heads of the innocent of their own race. The conflict could not in any event have been delayed long; the frontiersmen were too deeply and too justly irritated. These particular massacres, however discreditable to those taking part in them, were the occasions, not the causes, of the war; and though they cast a dark shade on the conduct of the whites, they do not relieve the red men from the charges of having committed earlier, more cruel, and quite as wanton outrages.

Conolly, an irritable but irresolute man, was appalled by the storm he had helped raise. He meanly disclaimed all responsibility for Cresap’s action,[34] and deposed him from his command of rangers; to which, however, he was soon restored by Lord Dunmore. Both the earl and his lieutenant, however, united in censuring severely Greathouse’s deed.[35] Conolly, throughout May, held a series of councils with the Delawares and Iroquois, in which he disclaimed and regretted the outrages, and sought for peace.[36] To one of these councils the Delaware chief, Killbuck, with other warriors, sent a “talk” or “speech in writing”[37] disavowing the deeds of one of their own parties of young braves, who had gone on the warpath; and another Delaware chief made a very sensible speech, saying that it was unfortunately inevitable that bad men on both sides should commit wrongs, and that the cooler heads should not be led away by acts due to the rashness and folly of a few. But the Shawnees showed no such spirit. On the contrary they declared for war outright, and sent a bold defiance to the Virginians, at the same time telling Conolly plainly that he lied. Their message is noteworthy, because, after expressing a firm belief that the Virginian leader could control his warriors, and stop the outrages if he wished, it added that the Shawnee headmen were able to do the like with their own men when they required it. This last allegation took away all shadow of excuse from the Shawnees for not having stopped the excesses of which their young braves had been guilty during the past few years.

Though Conolly showed signs of flinching, his master the earl had evidently no thought of shrinking from the contest. He at once began actively to prepare to attack his foes, and the Virginians backed him up heartily, though the Royal Government, instead of supporting him, censured him in strong terms, and accused the whites of being the real aggressors and the authors of the war.[38]

In any event, it would have been out of the question to avoid a contest at so late a date. Immediately after the murders in the end of April, the savages crossed the frontier in small bands. Soon all the back country was involved in the unspeakable horrors of a bloody Indian war, with its usual accompaniments of burning houses, tortured prisoners, and ruined families, the men being killed and the women and children driven off to a horrible captivity.[39] The Indians declared that they were not at war with Pennsylvania,[40] and the latter in return adopted an attitude of neutrality, openly disclaiming any share in the wrong that had been done, and assuring the Indians that it rested solely on the shoulders of the Virginians.[41] Indeed the Shawnees protected the Pennsylvania traders from some hostile Mingos, while the Pennsylvania militia shielded a party of Shawnees from some of Conolly’s men;[42] and the Virginians, irritated by what they considered an abandonment of the white cause, were bent on destroying the Pennsylvania fur trade with the Indians.[43] Nevertheless, some of the bands of young braves who were out on the warpath failed to discriminate between white friends and foes, and a number of Pennsylvanians fell victims to their desire for scalps and their ignorance or indifference as to whom they were at war with.[44]

The panic along the Pennsylvania frontier was terrible; the out-settlers fled back to the interior across the mountains, or gathered in numbers to defend themselves.[45] On the Virginian frontier, where the real attack was delivered, the panic was more justifiable; for terrible ravages were committed, and the inhabitants were forced to gather together in their forted villages, and could no longer cultivate their farms, except by stealth.[46] Instead of being cowed, however, the backwoodsmen clamored to be led against their foes, and made most urgent appeals for powder and lead, of which there was a great scarcity.[47]

The confusion was heightened by the anarchy in which the government of the Northwestern district had been thrown in consequence of the quarrel concerning the jurisdiction. The inhabitants were doubtful as to which colony really had a right to their allegiance, and many of the frontier officials were known to be double-faced, professing allegiance to both governments.[48] When the Pennsylvanians raised a corps of a hundred rangers there almost ensued a civil war among the whites, for the Virginians were fearful that the movement was really aimed against them.[49] Of course the march of events gradually forced most, even of the neutral Indians, to join their brethren who had gone on the warpath, and as an example of the utter confusion that reigned, the very Indians that were at war with one British colony, Virginia, were still drawing supplies from the British post of Detroit.[50]

Logan’s rage had been terrible. He had changed and not for the better, as he grew older, becoming a sombre, moody man; worse than all, he had succumbed to the fire-water, the curse of his race. The horrible treachery and brutality of the assault wherein his kinsfolk were slain made him mad for revenge; every wolfish instinct in him came to the surface. He wreaked a terrible vengeance for his wrongs; but in true Indian fashion it fell, not on those who had caused them, but on others who were entirely innocent. Indeed he did not know who had caused them. The massacres at Captina and Yellow Creek occurred so near together that they were confounded with each other; and not only the Indians but many whites as well[51] credited Cresap and Greathouse with being jointly responsible for both, and as Cresap was the most prominent, he was the one especially singled out for hatred.

Logan instantly fell on the settlement with a small band of Mingo warriors. On his first foray he took thirteen scalps, among them those of six children.[52] A party of Virginians, under a man named McClure, followed him; but he ambushed and defeated them, slaying their leader.[53] He repeated these forays at least three times. Yet, in spite of his fierce craving for revenge, he still showed many of the traits that had made him beloved of his white friends. Having taken a prisoner, he refused to allow him to be tortured, and saved his life at the risk of his own. A few days afterward he suddenly appeared to this prisoner with some gunpowder ink, and dictated to him a note. On his next expedition this note, tied to a war-club, was left in the house of a settler, whose entire family was murdered. It was a short document, written with ferocious directness, as a kind of public challenge or taunt to the man whom he wrongly deemed to be the author of his misfortunes. It ran as follows:

“CAPTAIN CRESAP:

“What did you kill my people on Yellow Creek for? The white people killed my kin at Conestoga, a great while ago, and I thought nothing of that. But you killed my kin again on Yellow Creek, and took my cousin prisoner. Then I thought I must kill too; and I have been three times to war since; but the Indians are not angry, only myself.

“CAPTAIN JOHN LOGAN.[54]

“July 21, 1774.”

There is a certain deliberate and bloodthirsty earnestness about this letter which must have shown the whites clearly, if they still needed to be shown, what bitter cause they had to rue the wrongs that had been done to Logan.

The Shawnees and Mingos were soon joined by many of the Delawares and outlying Iroquois, especially Senecas; as well as by the Wyandots and large bands of ardent young warriors from among the Algonquin tribes along the Miami, the Wabash, and the Lakes. Their inroads on the settlements were characterized, as usual, by extreme stealth and merciless ferocity. They stole out of the woods with the silent cunning of wild beasts, and ravaged with a cruelty ten times greater. They burned down the lonely log-huts, ambushed travelers, shot the men as they hunted or tilled the soil, ripped open the women with child, and burned many of their captives at the stake. Their noiseless approach enabled them to fall on the settlers before their presence was suspected; and they disappeared as suddenly as they had come, leaving no trail that could be followed. The charred huts and scalped and mangled bodies of their victims were left as ghastly reminders of their visit, the sight stirring the backwoodsmen to a frenzy of rage all the more terrible in the end, because it was impotent for the time being. Generally they made their escape successfully; occasionally they were beaten off or overtaken and killed or scattered.

When they met armed woodsmen the fight was always desperate. In May a party of hunters and surveyors, being suddenly attacked in the forest, beat off their assailants and took eight scalps, though with a loss of nine of their own number.[55] Moreover, the settlers began to band together to make retaliatory inroads; and while Lord Dunmore was busily preparing to strike a really effective blow, he directed the frontiersmen of the Northwest to undertake a foray, so as to keep the Indians employed. Accordingly, they gathered together, four hundred strong,[56] crossed the Ohio, in the end of July, and marched against a Shawnee town on the Muskingum. They had a brisk skirmish with the Shawnees, drove them back, and took five scalps, losing two men killed and five wounded. Then the Shawnees tried to ambush them, but their ambush was discovered, and they promptly fled, after a slight skirmish, in which no one was killed but one Indian, whom Cresap, a very active and vigorous man, ran down and slew with his tomahawk.[57] The Shawnee village was burned, seventy acres of standing corn were cut down, and the settlers returned in triumph. On the march back they passed through the towns of the peaceful Moravian Delawares, to whom they did no harm.

[1] “American Archives,” 4th series, Vol. I, p. 454. Report of Penn. Commissioners, June 27, 1774.

[2] Maryland was also involved, along her western frontier, in border difficulties with her neighbors; the first we hear of the Cresap family is their having engaged in a real skirmish with the Pennsylvanian authorities. See also “Am. Arch.,” IV, Vol. I., 547.

[3] “Am. Arch.,” IV, Vol. I, 394, 449, 469, etc. He was generally called Dr. Conolly.

[4] See do., 463, 471, etc., especially St. Clair’s letters, passim]

[5] In most of the original treaties, “talks,” etc., preserved in the Archives of the State Department, where the translation is exact, the word “Big Knife” is used.

[6] Letter of John Penn, June 28, 1774. “Am. Arch.,” IV, Vol. IV.

[7] “Am. Archives,” do., 465.

[8] Do., 722.

[9] Do., 872.

[10] “Am. Arch.,” IV., Vol. I, p. 1015.

[11] McAfee MSS. This is the point especially insisted on by Cornstalk in his speech to the adventurers in 1773; he would fight before seeing the whites drive off the game.

[12] In the McAfee MSS., as already quoted, there is an account of the Shawnee war party, whom the McAfees en countered in 1773 returning from a successful horse-stealing expedition.

[13] “Am. Archives,” IV, Vol. I, 872. Dunmore in his speech enumerates 19 men, women, and children who had been killed by the Indians in 1771, ‘72, and ‘73, and these were but a small fraction of the whole. “This was before a drop of Shawnee blood was shed.”

[14] “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” p. 262, gives an example that happened in 1772.

[15] “Am. Archives,” IV, Vol. I. Letter of Col. Wm. Preston, Aug. 13, 1774.

[16] Many local historians, including Brantz Mayer (Logan and Cresap, p. 85), ascribe to the earl treacherous motives. Brantz Mayer puts it thus: “It was probably Lord Dunmore’s desire to incite a war which would arouse and band the savages of the West, so that in the anticipated struggle with the united colonies the British home-interest might ultimately avail itself of these children of the forest as ferocious and formidable allies in the onslaught on the Americans.” This is much too futile a theory to need serious discussion. The war was of the greatest advantage to the American cause; for it kept the Northwestern Indians off our hands for the first two years of the Revolutionary struggle; and had Lord Dunmore been the far-seeing and malignant being that this theory supposes, it would have been impossible for him not also to foresee that such a result was absolutely inevitable. There is no reason whatever to suppose that he was not doing his best for the Virginians: he deserved their gratitude; and he got it for the time being. The accusations of treachery against him were afterthoughts, and must be set down to mere vulgar rancor, unless, at least, some faint shadow of proof is advanced. When the Revolutionary war broke out, however, the earl, undoubtedly, like so many other British officials, advocated the most outrageous measures to put down the insurgent colonists.

[17] See Brantz Mayer, p. 86, for a very proper attack on those historians who stigmatize as land-jobbers and speculators the perfectly honest settlers, whose encroachments on the Indian hunting-grounds were so bitterly resented by the savages. Such attacks are mere pieces of sentimental injustice. The settlers were perfectly right in feeling that they had a right to settle on the vast stretches of unoccupied ground, however wrong some of their individual deeds may have been. But Mayer, following Jacobs, “Life of Cresap,” undoubtedly paints his hero in altogether too bright colors.

[18] Sappington, Tomlinson, and Baker were the names of three of his fellow-miscreants. See Jefferson MSS.

[19] At Greenbriar. See “Narrative of Captain John Stew art,” an actor in the war.—”Magazine of American History,” Vol. I, p. 671.

[20] Loudon’s “Indian Narratives,” II, p. 223.

[21] See “American Pioneer”, I, p. 189.

[22] Letter of George Rogers Clark, June 17, 1798. In Jefferson MSS., 5th Series, Vol. I. (preserved in Archives of State Department at Washington).

[23] Witness the testimony of one of the most gallant Indian fighters of the border, who was in Wheeling at the time; letter of Col. Ebenezer Zane, February 4, 1800, in Jefferson MSS.

[24] Jefferson MSS. Deposition of John Gibson. April 4, 1800.

[25] Do. Deposition of Wm. Huston, April 19, 1798; also depositions of Samuel McKee, etc.

[26] “Am. Archives,” IV, Vol. I, p. 468. Letter of Devereux Smith, June 10, 1774. Gibson’s letter. Also Jefferson MSS.

[27] “Historical Magazine,” I, p. 168. Born in Albemarle County, Va., November 19, 1752.

[28] Military Journal of Major Ebenezer Denny, with an introductory memoir by William H. Denny (Publication of the Hist. Soc. of Penn.). Phil., 1860, p. 216.

[29] The Cresap apologists, including even Brantz Mayer, dwell on Cresap’s nobleness in not massacring Logan’s family! It was certainly to his credit that he did not do so, but it does not speak very well for him that he should even have entertained the thought. He was doubtless, on the whole, a brave, good-hearted man—quite as good as the average borderer; but nevertheless apt to be drawn into deeds that were the reverse of creditable. Mayer’s book has merit; but he certainly paints Logan too black and Cresap too white, and (see Appendix) is utterly wrong as to Logan’s speech. He is right in recognizing the fact that in the war, as a whole, justice was on the side of the frontiersmen.

[30] Devereux Smith’s letter. Some of the evil-doers afterward tried to palliate their misdeeds by stating that Logan’s brother, when drunk, insulted a white man, and that the other Indians were at the time on the point of executing an attack upon them. The last statement is self-evidently false; for had such been the case, the Indians would, of course, never have let some of their women and children put themselves in the power of the whites, and get helplessly drunk; and, anyhow, the allegations of such brutal and cowardly murderers are entirely unworthy of acceptance, unless backed up by outside evidence.

[31] Jefferson MSS., 5th Series, Vol. I, Heckewelder’s letter.

[32] Jefferson MSS. Deposition of Col. James Smith, May 25, 1798.

[33] Do., Heckewelder’s letter.

[34] “Am. Archives,” IV, Vol. I, p. 475.

[35] Do., p. 1015.

[36] Do., p. 475.

[37] Do., p. 418.

[38] Do., p. 774. Letter of the Earl of Dartmouth, Sept. 10, 1774. A sufficient answer, by the way, to the absurd charge that Dunmore brought on the war in consequence of some mysterious plan of the Home Government to embroil the Americans with the savages. It is not at all improbable that the Crown advisers were not particularly displeased at seeing the attention of the Americans distracted by a war with the Indians; but this is the utmost that can be alleged.

[39] Do., p. 808.

[40] Do., p. 478.

[41] Do., p. 506.

[42] Do., p. 474.

[43] Do., p. 549.

[44] Do., p. 471.

[45] Do., pp. 435, 467, 602.

[46] Do., pp. 405, 707.

[47] Do., p. 808.

[48] Do, p. 677.

[49] Do., pp. 463, 467.

[50] Do., p. 684.

[51] Do., p. 435.

[52] Do., pp. 468. 546.

[53] Do., p. 470.

[54] Jefferson MSS. Deposition of William Robinson, February 28, 1800, and letter from Harry Innes, March 2, 1799, with a copy of Logan’s letter as made in hs note-book at the time.

[55] “Am. Archives,” p. 373.

[56] Under a certain Angus MacDonald, do., p. 722. They crossed the Ohio at Fish Creek, 120 miles below Pittsburg.

[57] “Am. Archives,” IV, Vol. I, pp. 682, 684.]

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A—TO CHAPTER IV

IT IS greatly to be wished that some competent person would write a full and true history of our national dealings with the Indians. Undoubtedly the latter have often suffered terrible injustice at our hands. A number of instances, such as the conduct of the Georgians to the Cherokees in the early part of the present century, or the whole treatment of Chief Joseph and his Nez Perçés, might be mentioned, which are indelible blots on our fair fame; and yet, in describing our dealings with the red men as a whole, historians do us much less than justice.

It was wholly impossible to avoid conflicts with the weaker race, unless we were willing to see the American continent fall into the hands of some other strong power; and even had we adopted such a ludicrous policy, the Indians themselves would have made war upon us. It can not be too often insisted that they did not own the land; or, at least, that their ownership was merely such as that claimed often by our own white hunters. If the Indians really owned Kentucky in 1775, then in 1776 it was the property of Boone and his associates; and to dispossess one party was as great a wrong as to dispossess the other. To recognize the Indian ownership of the limitless prairies and forests of this continent—that is, to consider the dozen squalid savages who hunted at long intervals over a territory of a thousand square miles as owning it outright—necessarily implies a similar recognition of the claims of every white hunter, squatter, horse-thief, or wandering cattleman. Take as an example the country round the Little Missouri. When the cattlemen, the first actual settlers, came into this land in 1882, it was already scantily peopled by a few white hunters and trappers. The latter were extremely jealous of intrusion; they had held their own in spite of the Indians, and, like the Indians, the inrush of settlers and the consequent destruction of the game meant their own undoing; also, again like the Indians, they felt that their having hunted over the soil gave them a vague prescriptive right to its sole occupation, and they did their best to keep actual settlers out. In some cases, to avoid difficulty, their nominal claims were bought up; generally, and rightly, they were disregarded. Yet they certainly had as good a right to the Little Missouri country as the Sioux have to most of the land on their present reservations. In fact, the mere statement of the case is sufficient to show the absurdity of asserting that the land really belonged to the Indians. The different tribes have always been utterly unable to define their own boundaries. Thus the Delawares and Wyandots, in 1785, though entirely separate nations, claimed and, in a certain sense, occupied almost exactly the same territory.

Moreover, it was wholly impossible for our policy to be always consistent. Nowadays we undoubtedly ought to break up the great Indian reservations, disregard the tribal governments, allot the land in severalty (with, however, only a limited power of alienation), and treat the Indians as we do other citizens, with certain exceptions, for their sakes as well as ours. But this policy, which it would be wise to follow now, would have been wholly impracticable a century since. Our central government was then too weak either effectively to control its own members or adequately to punish aggressions made upon them; and even if it had been strong, it would probably have proved impossible to keep entire order over such a vast, sparsely peopled frontier, with such turbulent elements on both sides. The Indians could not be treated as individuals at that time. There was no possible alternative, therefore, to treating their tribes as nations, exactly as the French and English had done before us. Our difficulties were partly inherited from these, our predecessors, were partly caused by our own misdeeds, but were mainly the inevitable result of the conditions under which the problem had to be solved; no human wisdom or virtue could have worked out a peaceable solution. As a nation, our Indian policy is to be blamed, because of the weakness it displayed, because of its shortsightedness, and its occasional leaning to the policy of the sentimental humanitarians; and we have often promised what was impossible to perform; but there has been little wilful wrong-doing. Our government almost always tries to act fairly by the tribes; the governmental agents (some of whom have been dishonest, and others foolish, but who, as a class, have been greatly traduced), in their reports, are far more apt to be unjust to the whites than to the reds; and the Federal authorities, though unable to prevent much of the injustice, still did check and control the white borderers very much more effectually than the Indian sachems and war-chiefs controlled their young braves. The tribes were warlike and blood-thirsty, jealous of each other and of the whites; they claimed the land for their hunting grounds, but their claims all conflicted with one another; their knowledge of their own boundaries was so indefinite that they were always willing, for inadequate compensation, to sell land to which they had merely the vaguest title; and yet, when once they had received the goods, were generally reluctant to make over even what they could; they coveted the goods and scalps of the whites, and the young warriors were always on the alert to commit outrages when they could do it with impunity. On the other hand, the evil-disposed whites regarded the Indians as fair game for robbery and violence of any kind; and the far larger number of well-disposed men, who would not willingly wrong any Indian, were themselves maddened by the memories of hideous injuries received. They bitterly resented the action of the government, which, in their eyes, failed to properly protect them, and yet sought to keep them out of waste, uncultivated lands which they did not regard as being any more the property of the Indians than of their own hunters. With the best intentions, it was wholly impossible for any government to evolve order out of such a chaos without resort to the ultimate arbitrator—the sword.

The purely sentimental historians take no account of the difficulties under which we labored, nor of the countless wrongs and provocations we endured, while grossly magnifying the already lamentably large number of injuries for which we really deserve to be held responsible. To get a fair idea of the Indians of the present day, and of our dealings with them, we have fortunately one or two excellent books, notably “Hunting Grounds of the Great West,” and “Our Wild Indians,” by Col. Richard I. Dodge (Hartford, 1882), and “Massacres of the Mountains,” by J. P. Dunn (New York, 1886). As types of the opposite class, which are worse than valueless, and which nevertheless might cause some hasty future historian, unacquainted with the facts, to fall into grievous error, I may mention, “A Century of Dishonor,” by H. H. (Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson), and “Our Indian Wards,” (Geo. W. Manypenny). The latter is a mere spiteful diatribe against various army officers, and neither its manner nor its matter warrants more than an allusion. Mrs. Jackson’s book is capable of doing more harm because it is written in good English, and because the author, who had lived a pure and noble life, was intensely in earnest in what she wrote, and had the most praiseworthy purpose—to prevent our committing any more injustice to the Indians. This was all most proper; every good man or woman should do whatever is possible to make the government treat the Indians of the present time in the fairest and most generous spirit, and to provide against any repetition of such outrages as were inflicted upon the Nez Perçés and upon part of the Cheyennes, or the wrongs with which the civilized nations of the Indian Territory are sometimes threatened. The purpose of the book is excellent, but the spirit in which it is written can not be called even technically honest. As a polemic, it is possible that it did not do harm (though the effect of even a polemic is marred by hysterical indifference to facts). As a history it would be beneath criticism, were it not that the high character of the author and her excellent literary work in other directions have given it a fictitious value and made it much quoted by the large class of amiable but maudlin fanatics concerning whom it may be said that the excellence of their intentions but indifferently atones for the invariable folly and ill effect of their actions. It is not too much to say that the book is thoroughly untrustworthy from cover to cover, and that not a single statement it contains should be accepted without independent proof; for even those that are not absolutely false, are often as bad on account of so much of the truth having been suppressed. One effect of this is of course that the author’s recitals of the many real wrongs of Indian tribes utterly fail to impress us, because she lays quite as much stress on those that are non-existent, and on the equally numerous cases where the wrong-doing was wholly the other way. To get an idea of the value of the work, it is only necessary to compare her statements about almost any tribe with the real facts, choosing at random; for instance, compare her accounts of the Sioux and the plains tribes generally, with those given by Col. Dodge in his two books; or her recital of the Sandy Creek massacre with the facts as stated by Mr. Dunn—who is apt, if anything, to lean to the Indian’s side.

These foolish sentimentalists not only write foul slanders about their own countrymen, but are themselves the worst possible advisers on any point touching Indian management. They would do well to heed General Sheridan’s bitter words, written when many Easteners were clamoring against the army authorities because they took partial vengeance for a series of brutal outrages: “I do not know how far these humanitarians should be excused on account of their ignorance; but surely it is the only excuse that can give a shadow of justification for aiding and abetting such horrid crimes.”

APPENDIX B—TO CHAPTER V

IN MR. SHALER’S entertaining “History of Kentucky,” there is an account of the population of the Western frontiers, and Kentucky, interesting because it illustrates some of the popular delusions on the subject. He speaks (pp. 9, 11, 23) of Kentucky as containing “nearly pure English blood, mainly derived through the old Dominion, and altogether from districts that shared the Virginian conditions.” As much of the blood was Pennsylvanian or North Carolinian, his last sentence means nothing, unless all the “districts” outside of New England are held to have shared the Virginian conditions. Turning to Marshall (I., 441) we see that in 1780 about half the people were from Virginia, Pennsylvania furnishing the next greatest number; and of the Virginians most were from a population much more like that of Pennsylvania than like that of tide-water Virginia; as we learn from twenty sources, such as Waddell’s “Annals of Augusta County.” Mr. Shaler speaks of the Huguenots and of the Scotch immigrants, who came over after 1745, but actually makes no mention of the Presbyterian Irish or Scotch Irish, much the most important element in all the West; in fact, on p. 10, he impliedly excludes any such immigration at all. He greatly underestimates the German element, which was important in West Virginia. He sums up by stating that the Kentuckians come from the “truly British people,” quite a different thing from his statement that they are “English.” The “truly British people” consists of a conglomerate of as distinct races as exist anywhere in Aryan Europe. The Erse, Welsh, and Gaelic immigrants to America are just as distinct from the English, just as “foreign” to them, as are the Scandinavians, Germans, Hollanders, and Huguenots—often more so. Such early families as the Welsh Shelbys and Gaelic McAfees are no more English than are the Huguenot Seviers or the German Stoners. Even including merely the immigrants from the British Isles, the very fact that the Welsh, Irish, and Scotch, in a few generations, fuse with the English instead of each element remaining separate, makes the American population widely different from that of Britain; exactly as a flask of water is different from two cans of hydrogen and oxygen gas. Mr. Shaler also seems inclined to look down a little on the Tennesseeans, and to consider their population as composed in part of inferior elements; but in reality, though there are very marked differences between the two commonwealths of Kentucky and Tennessee, yet they resemble one another more closely, in blood and manners, than either does any other American State; and both have too just cause for pride to make it necessary for either to sneer at the other, or indeed at any State of our mighty Federal Union. In their origin they were precisely alike; but whereas the original pioneers, the hunters and Indian fighters, kept possession of Tennessee as long as they lived,—Jackson, at Sevier’s death, taking the latter’s place with even more than his power,—in Kentucky, on the other hand, after twenty years’ rule, the first settlers were swamped by the great inrush of immigration, and with the defeat of Logan for governor the control passed into the hands of the same class of men that then ruled Virginia. After that date the “tidewater” stock assumed an importance in Kentucky it never had in Tennessee; and of course the influence of the Scotch-Irish blood was greatly diminished.

Mr. Shaler’s error is trivial compared to that made by another and even more brilliant writer. In the “History of the People of the United States,” by Professor McMaster (New York, 1887), p. 70, there is a mistake so glaring that it would not need notice, were it not for the many excellences and wide repute of Professor McMaster’s book. He says that of the immigrants to Kentucky, most had come “from the neighboring States of Carolina and Georgia,” and shows that this is not a mere slip of the pen, by elaborating the statement in the following paragraphs, again speaking of North and South Carolina and Georgia as furnishing the colonists to Kentucky. This shows a complete misapprehension not only of the feeding-grounds of the Western emigration, but of the routes it followed, and of the conditions of the Southern States. South Carolina furnished very few emigrants to Kentucky, and Georgia practically none; combined they probably did not furnish as many as New Jersey or Maryland. Georgia was herself a frontier community; she received instead of sending out immigrants. The bulk of the South Carolina emigration went to Georgia.

APPENDIX C—TO CHAPTER VI

OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF STATE,

NASHVILLE, TENN., JUNE 12, 1888.

Hon. THEODORE ROOSEVELT,

SAGAMORE HILL,

LONG ISLAND, N. Y.

DEAR SIR:

I was born, “raised,” and have always lived in Washington County, E. Tenn. Was born on the “head-waters” of “Boone’s Creek,” in said county. I resided for several years in the “Boone Creek Civil District,” in Washington County (this some “twenty years ago”), within two miles of the historic tree in question, on which is carved, “D. Boon cilled bar &c”; having visited and examined the tree more than once. The tree is a beech, still standing, though fast decaying. It is located some eight miles northeast of Jonesboro, the county seat of Washington, on the “waters of Boone’s Creek,” which creek was named after Daniel Boone, and on which (creek) it is certain Daniel Boone “camped” during a winter or two. The tree stands about two miles from the spring, where it has always been understood Boone’s camp was. More than twenty years ago, I have heard old gentlemen (living in the neighborhood of the tree), who were then from fifty to seventy years old, assert that the carving was on the tree when they were boys, and that the tradition in the community was that the inscription was on the tree when discovered by the first permanent settlers. The posture of the tree is “leaning,” so that a “bar,” or other animal, could ascend it without difficulty.

While the letters could be clearly traced when I last looked at them, still because of the expansion of the bark, it was difficult, and I heard old gentlemen years ago remark upon the changed appearance of the inscription from what it was when they first knew it.

Boone certainly camped for a time under the tree; the creek is named after him (has always been known as Boone’s Creek); the Civil District is named after him, and the post-office also. True, the story as to the carving is traditionary, but a man had as well question in that community the authenticity of “Holy Writ,” as the fact that Boone carved the inscription on that tree.

I am very respectfully

JOHN ALLISON.

APPENDIX D—TO CHAPTER VI

THE FOLLOWING copy of an original note of Boone’s was sent me by Judge John N. Lea:

July the 20”, 1786. Sir, The Land has Been Long Survayd and Not Knowing When the Money would be Rady Was the Reason of my not Returning the Works however the may be Returned when you pleas. But I must have Nother Copy of the Entry as I have lost that I had when I lost my plating instruments and only have the Short Field Notes. Just the Corse Distance and Corner trees pray send me Nother Copy that I may know how to give it the proper bounderry agreeable to the Location and I Will send the plat to the offis medetly if you chose it, the expense is as follows

You will also Send a Copy of the agreement betwixt Mr. [illegible] overton and myself Where I Red the warrants.

I am, sir, your omble servant,

DANIEL BOONE.

APPENDIX E—TO CHAPTER VII

RECENTLY ONE or two histories of the times and careers of Robertson and Sevier have been published by “Edmund Kirke,” Mr. James R. Gilmore. They are charmingly written, and are of real service as calling the attention to a neglected portion of our history and making it interesting. But they entirely fail to discriminate between the provinces of history and fiction. It is greatly to be regretted that Mr. Gilmore did not employ his powers in writing an avowed historical novel treating of the events he discusses; such a work from him would have a permanent value, like Robert L. Kennedy’s “Horseshoe Robinson.” In their present form his works can not be accepted even as offering material on which to form a judgment, except in so far as they contain repetitions of statements given by Ramsey or Putnam. I say this with real reluctance, for my relations with Mr. Gilmore personally have been pleasant. I was at the outset prepossessed in favor of his books; but as soon as I came to study them I found that (except for what was drawn from the printed Tennessee State histories) they were extremely untrustworthy. Oral tradition has a certain value of its own, if used with great discretion and intelligence; but it is rather startling to find any one blandly accepting as gospel alleged oral traditions gathered one hundred and twenty-five years after the event, especially when they relate to such subjects as the losses and numbers of Indian war parties. No man with the slightest knowledge of frontiersmen or frontier life could commit such a mistake. If any one wishes to get at the value of oral tradition of an Indian fight a century old, let him go out West and collect the stories of Custer’s battle, which took place only a dozen years ago. I think I have met or heard of fifty “solitary survivors” of Custer’s defeat; and I could collect certainly a dozen complete accounts of both it and Reno’s fight, each believed by a goodly number of men, and no two relating the story in an even approximately similar fashion. Mr. Gilmore apparently accepts all such accounts indiscriminately, and embodies them in his narrative without even a reference to his authorities. I particularize one or two out of very many instances in the chapters dealing with the Cherokee wars.

Books founded upon an indiscriminate acceptance of any and all such traditions or alleged traditions are a little absurd, unless, as already said, they are avowedly merely historic novels, when they may be both useful and interesting. I am obliged to say with genuine regret, after careful examination of Mr. Gilmore’s books, that I can not accept any single unsupported statement they contain as even requiring an examination into its probability. I would willingly pass them by without comment, did I not fear that my silence might be construed into an acceptance of their truth. Moreover, I notice that some writers, like the editors of the “Cyclopedia of American Biography,” seem inclined to take the volumes seriously.

IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION

CHAPTER I

THE BATTLE OF THE GREAT KANAWHA; AND LOGAN’S SPEECH, 1774

MEANWHILE LORD Dunmore, having garrisoned the frontier forts, three of which were put under the orders of Daniel Boone, was making ready a formidable army with which to overwhelm the hostile Indians. It was to be raised, and to march, in two wings or divisions, each fifteen hundred strong, which were to join at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. One wing, the right or northernmost, was to be commanded by the earl in person; while the other, composed exclusively of frontiersmen living among the mountains west and southwest of the Blue Ridge, was intrusted to General Andrew Lewis. Lewis was a stalwart backwoods soldier, belonging to a family of famous frontier fighters, but though a sternly just and fearless man,[1] he does not appear to have had more than average qualifications to act as a commander of border troops when pitted against Indians.

The backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies felt that the quarrel was their own; in their hearts the desire for revenge burned like a sullen flame. The old men had passed their manhood with nerves tense from the strain of unending watchfulness, and souls embittered by terrible and repeated disasters; the young men had been cradled in stockaded forts, round which there prowled a foe whose comings and goings were unknown, and who was unseen till the moment when the weight of his hand was felt. They had been helpless to avenge their wrongs, and now that there was at last a chance to do so, they thronged eagerly to Lewis’ standard. The left wing or army assembled at the Great Levels of Green-briar, and thither came the heroes of long rifle, tomahawk, and hunting-shirt, gathering from every stockaded hamlet, every lonely clearing and smoky hunter’s camp that lay along the ridges from whose hollows sprang the sources of the Eastern and the Western Waters. They were not uniformed, save that they all wore the garb of the frontier hunter; but most of them were armed with good rifles, and were skilful woodsmen, and though utterly undisciplined, they were magnificent individual fighters.[2] The officers were clad and armed almost precisely like the rank and file, save that some of them had long swords girded to their waist-belts; they carried rifles, for, where the result of the contest depended mainly on the personal prowess of the individual fighter, the leader was expected literally to stand in the forefront of the battle, and to inspirit his followers by deeds as well as words.

Among these troops was a company of rangers who came from the scattered wooden forts of the Watauga and the Nolichucky. Both Sevier and Robertson took part in this war, and though the former saw no fighting, the latter, who had the rank of sergeant, was more fortunate.

While the backwoods general was mustering his unruly and turbulent host of skilled riflemen, the English earl led his own levies, some fifteen hundred strong, to Fort Pitt.[3] Here he changed his plans, and decided not to try to join the other division, as he had agreed to do. This sudden abandonment of a scheme already agreed to and acted on by his colleague was certainly improper, and, indeed, none of the earl’s movements indicated very much military capacity. However, he descended the Ohio River with a flotilla of a hundred canoes, besides keel-boats and pirogues,[4] to the mouth of the Hockhocking, where he built and garrisoned a small stockade. Then he went up the Hockhocking to the falls, whence he marched to the Scioto, and there entrenched himself in a fortified camp, with breastworks of fallen trees, on the edge of the Pickaway plains, not far from the Indian town of Old Chillicothe. Thence he sent out detachments that destroyed certain of the hostile towns. He had with him as scouts many men famous in frontier story, among them George Rogers Clark, Cresap, and Simon Kenton—afterward the bane of every neighboring Indian tribe, and renowned all along the border for his deeds of desperate prowess, his wonderful adventures, and his hairbreadth escapes. Another, of a very different stamp, was Simon Girty, of evil fame, whom the whole West grew to loathe, with bitter hatred, as “the white renegade.” He was the son of a vicious Irish trader, who was killed by the Indians; he was adopted by the latter, and grew up among them, and his daring ferocity and unscrupulous cunning early made him one of their leaders.[5] At the moment he was serving Lord Dun-more and the whites; but he was by tastes, habits, and education a red man, who felt ill at ease among those of his own color. He soon returned to the Indians, and dwelt among them ever afterward, the most inveterate foe of the whites that was to be found in all the tribes. He lived to be a very old man, and is said to have died fighting his ancient foes and kinsmen, the Americans, in our second war against the British.

But Lord Dunmore’s army was not destined to strike the decisive blow in the contest. The great Shawnee chief, Cornstalk, was as wary and able as he was brave. He had from the first opposed the war with the whites[6]; but as he had been unable to prevent it, he was now bent on bringing it to a successful issue. He was greatly outnumbered; but he had at his command over a thousand painted and plumed warriors, the pick of the young men of the Western tribes, the most daring braves to be found between the Ohio and the Great Lakes. His foes were divided, and he determined to strike first at the one who would least suspect a blow, but whose ruin, nevertheless, would involve that of the other. If Lewis’ army could be surprised and overwhelmed, the fate of Lord Dunmore’s would be merely a question of days. So without delay, Cornstalk, crafty in counsel, mighty in battle, and swift to carry out what he had planned, led his long files of warriors, with noiseless speed, through leagues of trackless woodland to the banks of the Ohio.

The backwoodsmen who were to form the army of Lewis had begun to gather at the Levels of Greenbriar before the 1st of September, and by the 7th most of them were assembled. Altogether the force under Lewis consisted of four commands, as follows: a body of Augusta troops, under Col. Charles Lewis, a brother of the general[7]; a body of Botetourt troops, under Col. William Fleming[8]; a small independent company, under Col. John Field; and finally the Fincastle men, from the Holston, Clinch, Watauga, and New River[9] settlements, under Col. William Christian.[10] One of Christian’s captains was a stout old Marylander, of Welsh blood, named Evan Shelby; and Shelby’s son Isaac,[11] a stalwart, stern-visaged young man, who afterward played a very prominent part on the border, was a subaltern in his company, in which Robertson likewise served as a sergeant. Although without experience of drill, it may be doubted if a braver or physically finer set of men were ever got together on this continent.[12]

Among such undisciplined troops it was inevitable that there should be both delay and insubordination. Nevertheless they behaved a good deal better than their commander had expected; and he was much pleased with their cheerfulness and their eagerness for action. The Fincastle men, being from the remote settlements, were unable to get together in time to start with the others; and Col. Field grew jealous of his commander and decided to march his little company alone. The Indians were hovering around the camp, and occasionally shot at and wounded stragglers, or attempted to drive off the pack-horses.

The army started in three divisions. The bulk, consisting of Augusta men, under Col. Charles Lewis, marched on September 8th, closely followed by the Botetourt troops under Andrew Lewis himself.[13] Field, with his small company, started off on his own account; but after being out a couple of days, two of his scouts met two Indians, with the result that a man was killed on each side; after which, profiting by the loss, he swallowed his pride and made haste to join the first division. The Fin-castle troops were delayed so long that most of them, with their commander, were still fifteen miles from the main body the day the battle was fought; but Captains Shelby and Russell, with parts of their companies, went on ahead of the others, and, as will be seen, joined Lewis in time to do their full share of the fighting. Col. Christian himself only reached the Levels on the afternoon of the day the Augusta men had marched. He was burning with the desire to distinguish himself, and his men were also very eager to have a share in the battle, and he besought Lewis to let him go along with what troops he had. But he was refused permission, whereat he was greatly put out.

Lewis found he had more men than he expected, and so left some of the worst troops to garrison the small forts. Just before starting he received a letter from the Earl advising, but not commanding, a change in their plans; to this he refused to accede, and was rather displeased at the proposal, attributing it to the influence of Conolly, whom the backwoods leaders were growing to distrust. There is not the slightest reason to suppose, however, that he then, or at any time during the campaign, suspected the Earl of treachery; nor did the latter’s conduct give any good ground for such a belief. Nevertheless, this view gained credit among the Virginians in later years, when they were greatly angered by the folly and ferocity of Lord Dunmore’s conduct during the early part of the Revolutionary War, and looked at all his past acts with jaundiced eyes.[14]

Lewis’ troops formed a typical backwoods army, both officers and soldiers. They wore fringed hunting-shirts, dyed yellow, brown, white, and even red; quaintly carved shot-bags and powder-horns hung from their broad ornamented belts; they had fur caps or soft hats, moccasins, and coarse woolen leggings reaching half-way up the thigh.[15] Each carried his flint-lock, his tomahawk, and scalping-knife. They marched in long files with scouts or spies thrown out in front and on the flanks, while axemen went in advance to clear a trail over which they could drive the beef cattle, and the pack-horses, laden with provisions, blankets, and ammunition. They struck out straight through the trackless wilderness, making their road as they went, until on the 21st of the month[16] they reached the Kanawha, at the mouth of Elk Creek. Here they halted to build dug-out canoes; and about this time were overtaken by the companies of Russell and Shelby. On October 1st[17] they started to descend the river in twenty-seven canoes, a portion of the army marching down along the Indian trail, which followed the base of the hills, instead of the river bank, as it was thus easier to cross the heads of the creeks and ravines.[18]

They reached the mouth of the river on the 6th,[19] and camped on Point Pleasant, the cape of land jutting out between the Ohio and the Kanawha. As a consequence the bloody fight that ensued is sometimes called the battle of Point Pleasant, and sometimes the battle of the Great Kanawha. Hitherto the Indians had not seriously molested Lewis’ men, though they killed a settler right on their line of march, and managed to drive off some of the bullocks and pack-horses.[20]

The troops, though tired from their journey, were in good spirits, and eager to fight. But they were impatient of control, and were murmuring angrily that there was favoritism shown in the issue of beef. Hearing this, Lewis ordered all the poorest beeves to be killed first; but this merely produced an explosion of discontent, and large numbers of the men in mutinous defiance of the orders of their officers began to range the woods, in couples, to kill game. There was little order in the camp,[21] and small attention was paid to picket and sentinel duty; the army, like a body of Indian warriors, relying for safety mainly upon the sharp-sighted watchfulness of the individual members and the activity of the hunting parties.

On the 9th Simon Girty[22] arrived in camp bringing a message from Lord Dunmore, which bade Lewis meet him at the Indian towns near the Pickaway plains. Lewis was by no means pleased at the change, but nevertheless prepared to break camp and march next morning. He had with him at this time about eleven hundred men.[23]

His plans, however, were destined to be rudely forestalled, for Cornstalk, coming rapidly through the forest, had reached the Ohio. That very night the Indian chief ferried his men across the river on rafts, six or eight miles above the forks,[24] and by dawn was on the point of hurling his whole force, of nearly a thousand warriors,[25] on the camp of his slumbering foes.

Before daylight on the 10th small parties of hunters had, as usual, left Lewis’ camp. Two of these men, from Russell’s company, after having gone somewhat over a mile, came upon a large party of Indians; one was killed, and the survivor ran back at full speed to give the alarm, telling those in camp that he had seen five acres of ground covered with Indians as thick as they could stand.[26]

Almost immediately afterward two men of Shelby’s company, one being no less a person than Robertson himself, and the other Valentine, a brother of John Sevier, also stumbled upon the advancing Indians; being very wary and active men, they both escaped, and reached camp almost as soon as the other.

Instantly the drums beat to arms,[27] and the backwoodsmen,—lying out in the open, rolled in their blankets,—started from the ground, looked to their flints and priming, and were ready on the moment. The general, thinking he had only a scouting party to deal with, ordered out Col. Charles Lewis and Col. Fleming, each with one hundred and fifty men. Fleming had the left, and marched up the bank of the Ohio, while Lewis, on the right, kept some little distance inland. They went about half a mile.[28] Then, just before sunrise, while it was still dusk, the men in camp, eagerly listening, heard the reports of three guns, immediately succeeded by a clash like a peal of thin thunder, as hundreds of rifles rang out together. It was evident that the attack was serious and Col. Field was at once despatched to the front with two hundred men.[29]

He came only just in time. At the first fire both of the scouts in front of the white line had been killed. The attack fell first, and with especial fury, on the division of Charles Lewis, who himself was mortally wounded at the very outset; he had not taken a tree,[30] but was in an open piece of ground, cheering his men on, when he was shot. He stayed with them until the line was formed, and then walked back to camp unassisted, giving his gun to a man who was near him. His men, who were drawn up on the high ground skirting Crooked Run,[31] began to waver, but were rallied by Fleming, whose division had been attacked almost simultaneously, until he too was struck down by a bullet. The line then gave way, except that some of Fleming’s men still held their own on the left in a patch of rugged ground near the Ohio. At this moment, however, Colonel Field came up and restored the battle, while the backwoodsmen who had been left in camp also began to hurry up to take part in the fight. General Lewis at last, fully awake to the danger, began to fortify the camp by felling timber so as to form a breastwork running across the point from the Ohio to the Kanawha. This work should have been done before; and through attending to it Lewis was unable to take any personal part in the battle.

Meanwhile the frontiersmen began to push back their foes, led by Col. Field. The latter himself, however, was soon slain; he was at the time behind a great tree, and was shot by two Indians on his right, while he was trying to get a shot at another on his left, who was distracting his attention by mocking and jeering at him.[32] The command then fell on Captain Evan Shelby, who turned his company over to the charge of his son, Isaac. The troops fought on steadily, undaunted by the fall of their leaders, while the Indians attacked with the utmost skill, caution, and bravery. The fight was a succession of single combats, each man sheltering himself behind a stump, or rock, or tree-trunk, the superiority of the backwoodsmen in the use of the rifle being offset by the superiority of their foes in the art of hiding and of shielding themselves from harm. The hostile lines, though about a mile and a quarter in length, were so close together, being never more than twenty yards apart, that many of the combatants grappled in hand-to-hand fighting, and tomahawked or stabbed each other[33] to death. The clatter of the rifles was incessant, while above the din could be heard the cries and groans of the wounded, and the shouts of the combatants, as each encouraged his own side, or jeered savagely at his adversaries. The cheers of the whites mingled with the appalling war-whoops and yells of their foes. The Indians also called out to the Americans in broken English, taunting them, and asking them why their fifes were no longer whistling—for the fight was far too close to permit of any such music. Their headmen walked up and down behind their warriors, exhorting them to go in close, to shoot straight, and to bear themselves well in the fight;[34] while throughout the action the whites opposite Cornstalk could hear his deep, sonorous voice as he cheered on his braves, and bade them “be strong, be strong.”[35]

About noon the Indians tried to get round the flank of the whites, into their camp; but this movement was repulsed, and a party of the Americans[36] followed up their advantage, and running along the banks of the Kanawha out-flanked the enemy in turn. The Indians being pushed very hard now began to fall back, the best fighters covering the retreat, while the wounded were being carried off; although—a rare thing in Indian battles—they were pressed so close that they were able to bear away but a portion of their dead. The whites were forced to pursue with the greatest caution; for those of them who advanced heedlessly were certain to be ambushed and receive a smart check. Finally, about one o’clock, the Indians, in their retreat, reached a very strong position, where the underbrush was very close and there were many fallen logs and steep banks. Here they stood resolutely at bay, and the whites did not dare attack them in such a stronghold. So the action came almost to an end; though skirmishing went on until about an hour before sunset, the Indians still at times taunting their foes and calling out to them that they had eleven hundred men as well as the whites, and that to-morrow they were going to be two thousand strong.[37]

This was only bravado, however; they had suffered too heavily to renew the attack, and under cover of darkness they slipped away, and made a most skilful retreat, carrying all their wounded in safety across the Ohio. The exhausted Americans, having taken a number of scalps, as well as forty guns, and many tomahawks[38] and some other plunder,[39] returned to their camp.

The battle had been bloody as well as stubborn. The whites, though the victors, had suffered more than their foes, and indeed had won only because it was against the entire policy of Indian warfare to suffer a severe loss, even if a victory could be gained thereby. Of the whites, some seventy-five men had been killed or mortally wounded, and one hundred and forty severely or slightly wounded,[40] so that they lost a fifth of their whole number. The Indians had not lost much more than half as many; about forty warriors were killed outright or died of their wounds.[41] Among the Indians no chief of importance was slain; whereas the Americans had seventeen officers killed or wounded, and lost in succession their second, third, and fourth in command. The victors buried their own dead and left the bodies of the vanquished to the wolves and ravens. At midnight, after the battle, Col. Christian and his Fincastle men reached the ground.

The battle of the Great Kanawha was a purely American victory, for it was fought solely by the backwoodsmen themselves. Their immense superiority over regular troops in such contests can be readily seen when their triumph on this occasion is compared with the defeats previously suffered by Braddock’s grenadiers and Grant’s highlanders, at the hands of the same foes. It was purely a soldiers’ battle, won by hard individual fighting; there was no display of generalship, except on Cornstalk’s part.[42] It was the most closely contested of any battle ever fought with the Northwestern Indians; and it was the only victory gained over a large body of them by a force but slightly superior in numbers.[43] Both because of the character of the fight itself, and because of the results that flowed from it, it is worthy of being held in especial remembrance.

Lewis left his sick and wounded in the camp at the Point, protected by a rude breastwork, and with an edequate guard. With the remainder of his forces, over a thousand strong, he crossed the Ohio, and pushed on to the Pickaway plains. When but a few miles from the earl’s encampment he was met by a messenger informing him that a treaty of peace was being negotiated with the Indians.[44] The backwoodsmen, flushed with success, and angry at their losses, were eager for more bloodshed; and it was only with difficulty that they were restrained, and were finally induced to march homeward, the earl riding down to them and giving his orders in person. They grumbled angrily against the earl for sending them back, and in later days accused him of treachery for having done so; but his course was undoubtedly proper, for it would have been very difficult to conclude peace in the presence of such fierce and unruly auxiliaries.

The spirit of the Indians had been broken by their defeat. Their stern old chief, Cornstalk, alone remained with unshaken heart, resolute to bid defiance to his foes and to fight the war out to the bitter end. But when the council of the headmen and war-chiefs was called it became evident that his tribesmen would not fight, and even his burning eloquence could not goad the warriors into again trying the hazard of battle. They listened unmoved and in sullen silence to the thrilling and impassioned words with which he urged them to once more march against the Long Knives, and if necessary to kill their women and children, and then themselves die fighting to the last man. At last, when he saw he could not stir the hearts of his hearers he struck his tomahawk into the war-post and announced that he himself would go and make peace. At that the warriors broke silence, and all grunted out approvingly, ough! ough! ough! and then they instantly sent runners to the earl’s army to demand a truce.[45]

Accordingly, with all his fellow-chiefs, he went to Lord Dunmore’s camp, and there entered into a treaty. The crestfallen Indians assented to all the terms the conquerors proposed. They agreed to give up all the white prisoners and stolen horses in their possession, and to surrender all claim to the lands south of the Ohio, and they gave hostages as an earnest of their good-faith.[46] But their chief spokesman, Cornstalk, while obliged to assent to these conditions, yet preserved through all the proceedings a bearing of proud defiance that showed how little the fear of personal consequences influenced his own actions. At the talks he addressed the white leader with vehement denunciation and reproach, in a tone that seemed rather that of a conqueror than one of the conquered. Indeed, he himself was not conquered; he felt that his tribesmen were craven, but he knew that his own soul feared nothing. The Virginians, who, like their Indian antagonists, prized skill in oratory only less than skill in warfare, were greatly impressed by the chieftain’s eloquence, by his command of words, his clear, distinct voice, his peculiar emphasis, and his singularly grand and majestic, and yet graceful, bearing; they afterward said that his oratory fully equaled that of Patrick Henry himself.[47]

Every prominent chief but one came to the council. The exception was Logan, who remained apart in the Mingo village, brooding over his wrongs and the vengeance he had taken. His fellows, when questioned about his absence, answered that he was like a mad dog, whose bristles were still up, but that they were gradually falling; and when he was entreated to be present at the meeting he responded that he was a warrior, not a councilor, and would not come. The Mingos, because they failed to appear at the treaty, had their camp destroyed and were forced to give hostages, as the Delawares and Shawnees had done,[48] and Logan himself finally sullenly acquiesced in, or at least ceased openly to oppose, the peace.

But he would not come in person to Lord Dun-more; so the earl was obliged to communicate with him through a messenger, a frontier veteran[49] named John Gibson, who had long lived among the Indians and knew thoroughly both their speech and their manners.[50] To this messenger Logan was willing to talk. Taking him aside, he suddenly addressed him in a speech that will always retain its place as perhaps the finest outburst of savage eloquence of which we have any authentic record. The messenger took it down in writing, translating it literally,[51] and returning to camp, gave it to Lord Dunmore. The earl then read it, in open council, to the whole backwoods army, including Cresap, Clark, and the other scouts. The speech, when read, proved to be no message of peace, nor an acknowledgment of defeat, but, instead, a strangely pathetic recital of his wrongs, and a fierce and exulting justification of the vengeance he had taken. It ran as follows:

“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 camp, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites that my countrymen pointed as I passed and said, ‘Logan is the friend of the white man.’ 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 runs 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.”

The tall frontiersmen, lounging in a circle round about, listened to the reading of the speech with eager interest; rough Indian haters though they were, they were so much impressed by it that in the evening it was a common topic of conversation over their camp fires, and they continually attempted to rehearse it to one another.[52] But they knew that Greathouse, not Cresap, had been the chief offender in the murder of Logan’s family; and when the speech was read, Clark, turning round, jeered at and rallied Cresap as being so great a man that the Indians put everything on his shoulders; whereat, Cresap, much angered, swore that he had a good mind to tomahawk Greathouse for the murder.[53]

The speech could not have been very satisfactory to the earl; but at least it made it evident that Logan did not intend to remain on the warpath; and so Lord Dunmore marched home with his hostages. On the homeward march, near the mouth of the river Hockhocking, the officers of the army held a notable meeting. They had followed the British earl to battle; but they were Americans, in warm sympathy with the Continental Congress, which was then in session. Fearful lest their countrymen might not know that they were at one with them in the struggle of which the shadow was looming up with ever increasing blackness, they passed resolutions which were afterward published. Their speakers told how they had lived in the woods for three months, without hearing from the Congress at Philadelphia, nor yet from Boston, where the disturbances seemed most likely to come to a head. They spoke of their fear lest their countrymen might be misled into the belief that this numerous body of armed men was hostile or indifferent to the cause of America; and proudly alluded to the fact that they had lived so long without bread or salt, or shelter at night, and that the troops they led could march and fight as well as any in the world. In their resolutions they professed their devotion to their king, to the honor of his crown, and to the dignity of the British empire; but they added that this devotion would only last while the king deigned to rule over a free people, for their love for the liberty of America outweighed all other considerations, and they would exert every power for its defence, not riotously, but when regularly called forth by the voice of their countrymen.

They ended by tendering their thanks to Lord Dunmore for his conduct. He was also warmly thanked by the Virginia Legislature, as well as by the frontiersmen of Fincastle,[54] and he fully deserved their gratitude.

The war had been ended in less than six months’ time; and its results were of the utmost importance. It had been very successful. In Braddock’s war, the borderers are estimated to have suffered a loss of fifty souls for every Indian slain; in Pontiac’s war, they had learned to defend themselves better, and yet the ratio was probably as ten to one;[55] whereas in this war, if we consider only males of fighting age, it is probable that a good deal more than half as many Indians as whites were killed, and even including women and children, the ratio would not rise to more than three to one. Certainly, in all the contests waged against the Northwestern Indians during the last half of the eighteenth century there was no other where the whites inflicted so great a relative loss on their foes. Its results were most important. It kept the Northwestern tribes quiet for the first two years of the Revolutionary struggle; and above all it rendered possible the settlement of Kentucky, and therefore the winning of the West. Had it not been for Lord Dunmore’s war, it is more than likely that when the colonies achieved their freedom they would have found their western boundary fixed at the Alleghany Mountains.[56]

Nor must we permit our sympathy for the foul wrongs of the two great Indian heroes of the contest to blind us to the fact that the struggle was precipitated, in the first place, by the outrages of the red men, not the whites; and that the war was not only inevitable, but was also in its essence just and righteous on the part of the borderers. Even the unpardonable and hideous atrocity of the murder of Logan’s family was surpassed in horror by many of the massacres committed by the Indians about the same time. The annals of the border are dark and terrible.

Among the characters who played the leaders’ parts in this short and tragic drama of the backwoods few came to much afterward. Cresap died a brave Revolutionary soldier. Of Greathouse we know nothing; we can only hope that eventually the Indians scalped him. Conolly became a virulent tory, who yet lacked the power to do the evil that he wished. Lewis served creditably in the Revolution; while at its outbreak Lord Dunmore was driven from Virginia and disappears from our ken. Proud, gloomy Logan never recovered from the blow that had been dealt him; he drank deeper and deeper, and became more and more an implacable, moody, and bloodthirsty savage, yet with noble qualities that came to the surface now and then. Again and again he wrought havoc among the frontier settlers; yet we several times hear of his saving the lives of prisoners. Once he saved Simon Kenton from torture and death, when Girty, moved by a rare spark of compassion for his former comrade, had already tried to do so and failed. At last he perished in a drunken brawl by the hand of another Indian.

Cornstalk died a grand death, but by an act of cowardly treachery on the part of his American foes; it is one of the darkest stains on the checkered pages of frontier history. Early in 1777 he came into the garrison at Point Pleasant to explain that, while he was anxious to keep at peace, his tribe were bent on going to war; and he frankly added that of course if they did so he should have to join them. He and three other Indians, among them his son and the chief Redhawk, who had also been at the Kanawha battle, were detained as hostages. While they were thus confined in the fort a member of a company of rangers was killed by the Indians near by; whereupon his comrades, headed by their captain,[57] rushed in furious anger into the fort to slay the hostages. Cornstalk heard them rushing in, and knew that his hour had come; with unmoved countenance he exhorted his son not to fear, for it was the will of the Great Spirit that they should die there together; then, as the murderers burst into the room, he quietly rose up to meet them, and fell dead pierced by seven or eight bullets. His son and his comrades were likewise butchered, and we have no record of any more infamous deeds.

Though among the whites, the men who took prominent parts in the struggle never afterward made any mark, yet it is worth noting that all the aftertime leaders of the West were engaged in some way in Lord Dunmore’s war. Their fates were various. Boone led the vanguard of the white advance across the mountains, wandered his life long through the wilderness, and ended his days, in extreme old age, beyond the Mississippi, a backwoods hunter to the last. Shelby won laurels at King’s Mountain, became the first Governor of Kentucky, and when an old man revived the memories of his youth by again leading the Western men in battle against the British and Indians. Sevier and Robertson were for a generation the honored chiefs of the southwestern people. Clark, the ablest of all, led a short but brilliant career, during which he made the whole nation his debtor. Then, like Logan, he sank under the curse of drunkenness,—often hardly less dangerous to the white borderer than to his red enemy,—and passed the remainder of his days in ignoble and slothful retirement.

[1] Stewart’s Narrative.

[2] “Am. Archiv.” Col. Wm. Preston’s letter, Sept. 28, 1774.

[3] Do., p. 872.

[4] Doddridge, 235.

[5] See Mag. of Am. Hist., XV, 256.

[6] De Haas, p. 161. He is a very fair and trustworthy writer; in particular, as regards Logan’s speech and Cresap’s conduct. It is to be regretted that Brantz Mayer, in dealing with these latter subjects, could not have approached them with the same desire to be absolutely impartial, instead of appearing to act solely as an advocate.

[7] His eight captains were George Matthews, Alexander Mc Clannahan, John Dickinson, John Lewis (son of William), Benjamin Harrison, William Paul, Joseph Haynes, and Samuel Wilson. Hale, “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” p. 181.\

[8] His seven captains were Matthew Arbuckle, John Murray, John Lewis (son of Andrew), James Robertson, Robert Mc Clannahan, James Ward, and John Stewart (author of the Narrative).

[9] As the Kanawha was sometimes called.

[10] Whose five captains were Evan Shelby, Russell, Herbert, Draper, and Buford.

[11] Born December 11, 1750, near Hagerstown, Md.

[12] Letter of Col. Wm. Preston, September 28, 1774. “Am. Archives.”

[13] Letter of one of Lord Dunmore’s officers, November 21, 1774. “Am. Archives,” IV, Vol. I, p. 1017. Hale gives a minute account of the route followed; Stewart says they started on the 11th.

With the journal of Floyd’s expedition, mentioned on a previous page, I received MS. copies of two letters to Col. William Preston, both dated at Camp Union, at the Great Levels; one, of September 8th from Col. Andrew Lewis, and one of September 7th (9th?) from Col. William Christian.

Col. Lewis’ letter runs in part: “From Augusta we have 600; of this county [Botetourt] about 400; Major Field is joined with 40… . I have had less Trouble with the Troops than I expected… . I received a letter from his Lordship last Sunday morning which was dated the 30th of August at Old Towns, which I take to be Chresops; he then I am told had Col. Stephens and Major Conolly at his Elbow as might easily be discovered by the Contents of his Letter which expressed his Lordship’s warmest wishes that I would with all the troops from this Quarter join him at the mouth of the little Kanaway; I wrote his Lordship that it was not in my power to alter our route… . The Indians wounded a man within two miles of us … and wounded another; from this we may expect they will be picking about us all the March.” He states that he has more men than he expected, and will therefore need more provisions, and that he will leave some of his poorest troops to garrison the small fort.

Col. Christian’s letter states that the Augusta men took with them 400 pack-horses, carrying 54,000 pounds of flour, and 108 beeves; they started “yesterday”; Field marched “this evening”; Fleming and his 450 Botetourt men, with 200 pack-horses, “are going next Monday.” Field had brought word that Dunmore expected to be at the mouth of the Great Kanawha “some days after the 20th.” Some Indians had tried to steal a number of pack-horses, but had been discovered and frightened off.

Christian was very much discontented at being bidden to stay behind until he could gather 300 men, and bring up the rear; he expresses his fear that his men will be much exasperated when they learn that they are to stay behind, and reiterates: “I would not for all I am worth be behind crossing the Ohio and that we should miss lending our assistance.” Field brought an account of McDonald’s fight (see ante, p. 216); he said the whites were 400 and the Indians but 30 strong, that the former had four men killed and six wounded; the Indians but three or four killed and one captured, and their town was burnt. The number of the Shawnees and their allies was estimated at 1,200 warriors that could be put into one battle. The 400 horses that had started with the Augusta men were to return as fast as they could (after reaching the embarkment point, whence the flour was carried in canoes).

[14] When the Revolutionary war broke out the Earl not only fought the revolted colonists with all legitimate weapons, but tried to incite the blacks to servile insurrection, and sent agents to bring his old foes, the red men of the forest, down on his old friends, the settlers. He encouraged piratical and plundering raids, and on the other hand failed to show the courage and daring that are sometimes partial offsets to ferocity. But in this war, in 1774, he conducted himself with great energy in making preparations, and showed considerable skill as a negotiator in concluding the peace, and apparently went into the conflict with hearty zest and good-will. He was evidently much influenced by Conolly, a very weak adviser, however; and his whole course betrayed much vacillation and no generalship.

[15] Smyth’s “Tour,” II, p. 179.

[16] “Am. Archives,” p. 1017.

[17] Do. Stewart says they reached the mouth of the Kanawha on Oct. 1st; another account says Sept. 30th; but this is an error, as shown both by the “Am. Archives” and by the Campbell MSS.

[18] Hale, 182.

[19] Campbell MSS. Letter of Isaac Shelby to John Shelby, Oct. 16, 1774. A portion of this letter, unsigned, was printed in “Am. Archives,” p. 1016, and in various newspapers (even at Belfast; see Hale, p. 187, who thinks it was written by Captain Arbuckle). As it is worth preserving and has never been printed in full I give it in the Appendix.

[20] Stewart’s Narrative.

[21] Smyth, II, p. 158. He claims to have played a prominent part in the battle. This is certainly not so, and he may not have been present at all; at least Col. Stewart, who was there and was acquainted with every one of note in the army, asserts positively that there was no such man along; nor has any other American account ever mentioned him. His military knowledge was nil, as may be gathered from his remark, made when the defeats of Braddock and Grant were still recent, that British regulars with the bayonet were best fitted to oppose Indians.

[22] Some accounts say that he was accompanied by Kenton and McCulloch; others state that no messenger arrived until after the battle. But this is certainly wrong. Shelby’s letter shows that the troops learned the governor’s change of plans before the battle.

[23] “Am. Archives,” IV, Vol. I, p. 1017; and was joined by Col. Christian’s three hundred the day after the battle.

[24] Campbell MSS. Letter of Col. William Preston (presumably to Patrick Henry), Oct. 31, 1774. As it is interesting and has never been published, I give it in the Appendix.

[25] Many of the white accounts make their number much greater, without any authority; Shelby estimates ft at between eight hundred and one thousand. Smith, who generally gives the Indian side, says that on this occasion they were nearly as numerous as the whites. Smyth, who bitterly hates the Americans, and always belittles their deeds, puts the number of Indians at nine hundred; he would certainly make it as small as possible. So the above estimate is probably pretty near the truth, though it is of course impossible to be accurate. At any rate, it was the only important engagement fought by the English or American against the Northwestern Indians in which there was a near approach to equality of force.

[26] Campbell MSS. Shelby’s letter. Their names were Mooney and Hickman; the latter was killed. Most historians have confused these two men with the two others who discovered the Indians at almost the same time.

[27] “Am. Archives,” IV, Vol. I, p. 1017.

[28] Do., p. 1017. Letter from Stanton, Virginia, Nov. 4, 1774, says 3/4 of a mile; Shelby says 1/4 of a mile.

[29] Do., Letter of Nov. 17th.

[30] The frontier expression for covering one’s self behind a tree-trunk.

[31] A small stream running into the Kanawha near its mouth. De Haas, p. 151

[32] Campbell MSS. Preston’s letter.

[33] “Am. Archives.” Letter of November 4, 1774.

[34] Campbell MSS. Preston’s letter.

[35] Stewart’s Narrative.

[36] Led by Isaac Shelby, James Stewart, and George Matthews.

[37] Campbell MSS. Preston’s letter.

[38] “Am. Archives.” Letter of November 4, 1774. It is doubtful if Logan was in this fight; the story about Cornstalk killing one of his men who flinched may or may not be true.

[39] Hale, 199; the plunder was afterward Sold at auction for £74 4s. 6d.

[40] These are the numbers given by Stewart; but the accounts vary greatly. Monette (“Valley of the Mississippi,”) says 87 killed and 141 wounded. The letters written at the time evidently take no account of any but the badly wounded. Shelby thus makes the killed 45, and the wounded (including the mortally hurt) 68. Another account (“Am. Archives,” p. 1617) says 40 men killed and 96 wounded, 20 odd of whom were since dead; while a foot-note to this letter enumerates 53 dead outright, and 87 wounded, “some of whom have since died.” It is evidently impossible that the slightly wounded are included in these lists; and in all probability Stewart’s account is correct, as he was an eye-witness and participant.

[41] Twenty-one were scalped on the field; the bodies of 12 more were afterward found behind logs or in holes where they had been lain, and 8 eventually died of their wounds. (See “American Archives,” Smith, Hale, De Haas, etc.) Smith, who wrote from the Indian side, makes their loss only 28; but this apparently does not include the loss of the Western Indians, the allies of the Shawnees, Mingos, and Delawares.

[42] Smyth, the Englishman, accuses Lewis of cowardice, an accusation which deserves no more attention than do the similar accusations of treachery brought against Dunmore. Brantz Mayer speaks in very hyperbolic terms of the “relent-less Lewis,” and the “great slaughter” of the Indians.

[43] Wayne won an equally decisive victory, but he outnum bered his foes three to one. Bouquet, who was almost beaten, and was saved by the provincial rangers, was greatly the superior in force, and suffered four times the loss he inflicted. In both cases, especially that of Bouquet, the account of the victor must be received with caution where it deals with the force and loss of the vanquished. In the same way Shelby and the other reporters of the Kanawha fight stated that the Indians lost more heavily than the whites.

[44] The stories of how Lewis suspected the earl of treachery, and of how the backwoodsmen were so exasperated that they wished to kill the latter, may have some foundation; but are quite as likely to be pure inventions, made up after the Revolutionary war. In De Haas, “The American Pioneer,” etc., can be found all kinds of stories, some even told be members of the Clark and Lewis families, which are meant to criminate Dunmore, but which make such mistakes in chronology—placing the Battle of Lexington in the year of the Kanawha fight, asserting that peace was not made till the following spring, etc.—that they must be dismissed offhand as entirely untrustworthy.

[45] Stewart’s Narrative.

[46] “Am. Archives,” IV. St. Clair’s letter, Dec. 4, 1774. Also Jefferson MSS. Dep. of Wm. Robinson, etc.

[47] See De Haas, 162.

[48] “Am. Archives,” IV, Vol. I, pp. 1013, 1226.

[49] John Gibson, afterward a general in the army of the United States. See Appendix.

[50] Jefferson MSS. Statements of John Gibson, etc.; there is some uncertainty as to whether Logan came up to Gibson at the treaty and drew him aside, or whether the latter went to seek the former in his wigwam.

[51] Jefferson Papers (State Department MSS.), 5-1-4. Statement of Col. John Gibson to John Anderson, an Indian trader at Pittsburg, in 1774. Anderson had asked him if he had not himself added somewhat to the speech; he responded that he had not, that it was a literal translation or transcription of Logan’s words.

[52] Jefferson MSS. Affidavits of Andrew Rogers, Wm. Russell, and others who were present.

[53] Clark’s letter.

[54] See De Haas, 167.

[55] These are Smith’s estimates, derived largely from Indian sources. They are probably excessive, but not very greatly so.

[56] It is difficult to understand why some minor historians consider this war as fruitless.

[57] John Hall; it is worth while preserving the name of the ringleader in so brutal and cowardly a butchery. See Stewart’s Narrative.

CHAPTER II

BOONE AND THE SETTLEMENT OF KENTUCKY, 1775

LORD DUNMORE’S war, waged by Americans for the good of America, was the opening act in the drama whereof the closing scene was played at Yorktown. It made possible the twofold character of the Revolutionary War, wherein on the one hand the Americans won by conquest and colonization new lands for their children, and on the other wrought out their national independence of the British king. Save for Lord Dunmore’s war we could not have settled beyond the mountains until after we had ended our quarrel with our kinsfolk across the sea. It so cowed the Northern Indians that for two or three years they made no further organized effort to check the white advance. In consequence, the Kentucky pioneers had only to contend with small parties of enemies until time had been given them to become so firmly rooted in the land that it proved impossible to oust them. Had Cornstalk and his fellow-chiefs kept their hosts unbroken, they would undoubtedly have swept Kentucky clear of settlers in 1775,—as was done by the mere rumor of their hostility the preceding sum mer. Their defeat gave the opportunity for Boone to settle Kentucky, and therefore for Robertson to settle Middle Tennessee, and for Clark to conquer Illinois and the Northwest; it was the first in the chain of causes that gave us for our Western frontier in 1783 the Mississippi and not the Alleghanies. As already mentioned, the speculative North Carolinian Henderson had for some time been planning the establishment of a proprietary colony beyond the mountains, as a bold stroke to re-establish his ruined fortunes; and early in 1775, as the time seemed favorable, he proceeded to put his venturous scheme into execution. For years he had been in close business relations with Boone; and the latter had attempted to lead a band of actual settlers to Kentucky in 1773. Naturally, when Henderson wished to fix on a place wherein to plant his colony, he chose the beautiful land which the rumor of Boone’s discovery had rendered famous all along the border; and equally naturally he chose the pioneer hunter himself to act as his lieutenant and as the real leader of the expedition. The result of the joint efforts of these two men was to plant in Kentucky a colony of picked settlers, backed by such moral and material support as enabled them to maintain themselves permanently in the land. Boone had not been the first to discover Kentucky, nor was he the first to found a settlement therein;[1] but it was his exploration of the land that alone bore lasting fruit, and the settlement he founded was the first that contained within itself the elements of permanence and growth.

Of course, as in every other settlement of inland America, the especial point to be noticed is the individual initiative of the different settlers. Neither the royal nor the provincial governments had anything to do with the various colonies that were planted almost simultaneously on the soil of Kentucky. Each little band of pioneers had its own leaders, and was stirred by its own motives. All had heard, from different sources, of the beauty and fertility of the land, and as the great danger from the Indians was temporarily past, all alike went in to take possession, not only acting without previous agreement, but for the most part being even in ignorance of one another’s designs. Yet the dangers surrounding these new-formed and far-off settlements were so numerous, and of such grave nature, that they could hardly have proved permanent had it not been for the comparatively well-organized settlement of Boone, and for the temporary immunity which Henderson’s treaty purchased from the Southern Indians.

The settlement of Kentucky was a much more adventurous and hazardous proceeding than had been the case with any previous westward extension of population from the old colonies; because Kentucky, instead of abutting on already settled districts, was an island in the wilderness, separated by two hundred miles of unpeopled and almost impassable forest from even the extreme outposts of the seacoast commonwealths. Hitherto every new settlement had been made by the simple process of a portion of the backwoods pioneers being thrust out in advance of the others, while, nevertheless, keeping in touch with them, and having their rear covered, as it were, by the already colonized country. Now, for the first time, a new community of pioneers sprang up, isolated in the heart of the wildernes, and thrust far beyond the uttermost limits of the old colonies, whose solid mass lay along the Atlantic seaboard. The vast belt of mountainous woodland that lay between was as complete a barrier as if it had been a broad arm of the ocean. The first American incomers to Kentucky were for several years almost cut off from the bulk of their fellows beyond the forest-clad mountains; much as, thirteen centuries before, their forbears, the first English settlers in Britain, had been cut off from the rest of the low Dutch-folk who continued to dwell on the eastern coast of the German Ocean.

Henderson and those associated with him in his scheme of land speculation began to open negotiations with the Cherokees as soon as the victory of the Great Kanawha for the moment lessened the danger to be apprehended from the Northwestern Indians. In October, 1774, he and Nathaniel Hart, one of his partners in the scheme, journeyed to the Otari towns, and made their proposals. The Indians proceeded very cautiously, deputing one of their number, a chief called the Carpenter, to return with the two white envoys, and examine the goods they proposed to give in exchange. To this Henderson made no objection; on the contrary, it pleased him, for he was anxious to get an indisputable Indian title to the proposed new colony. The Indian delegate made a favorable report in January, 1775; and then the Overhill Cherokees were bidden to assemble at the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga. The order was issued by the head-chief, Oconostota, a very old man, renowned for the prowess he had shown in former years when warring against the English. On the 17th of March, Oconostota and two other chiefs, the Raven and the Carpenter, signed the Treaty of the Sycamore Shoals, in the presence and with the assent of some twelve hundred of their tribe, half of them warriors; for all who could had come to the treaty grounds. Henderson thus obtained a grant of all the lands lying along and between the Kentucky and the Cumberland rivers. He promptly named the new colony Transylvania. The purchase money was 10,000 pounds of lawful English money; but, of course, the payment was made mainly in merchandise and not specie. It took a number of days before the treaty was finally concluded; no rum was allowed to be sold, and there was little drunkenness, but herds of beeves were driven in, that the Indians might make a feast.

The main opposition to the treaty was made by a chief named Dragging Canoe, who continued for years to be the most inveterate foe of the white race to be found among the Cherokees. On the second day of the talk he spoke strongly against granting the Americans what they asked, pointing out, in words of glowing eloquence, how the Cherokees, who had once owned the land down to the sea, had been steadily driven back by the whites until they had reached the mountains, and warning his comrades that they must now put a stop at all hazards to further encroachments, under penalty of seeing the loss of their last hunting-grounds, by which alone their children could live. When he had finished his speech he abruptly left the ring of speakers, and the council broke up in confusion. The Indian onlookers were much impressed by what he said; and for some hours the whites were in dismay lest all further negotiations should prove fruitless. It was proposed to get the deed privately; but to this the treaty-makers would not consent, answering that they cared nothing for the treaty unless it was concluded in open council, with the full assent of all the Indians. By much exertion Dragging Canoe was finally persuaded to come back; the council was resumed next day, and finally the grant was made without further opposition. The Indians chose their own interpreter; and the treaty was read aloud and translated, sentence by sentence, before it was signed, on the fourth day of the formal talking.

The chiefs undoubtedly knew that they could transfer only a very imperfect title to the land they thus deeded away. Both Oconostota and Dragging Canoe told the white treaty-makers that the land beyond the mountains, whither they were going, was a “dark ground.” a “bloody ground”; and warned them that they must go at their own risk, and not hold the Cherokees responsible, for the latter could no longer hold them by the hand. Dragging Canoe especially told Henderson that there was a black cloud hanging over the land, for it lay in the path of the Northwestern Indians—who were already at war with the Cherokees, and would surely show as little mercy to the white men as to the red. Another old chief said to Boone: “Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it.” What he said was true, and the whites were taught by years of long warfare that Kentucky was indeed what the Cherokees called it, a dark and bloody ground.[2]

Haywood gives a long speech made by Oconostota against the treaty; but this original report shows that Oconostota favored the treaty from the outset, and that it was Dragging Canoe who spoke against it. Haywood wrote fifty years after the event, and gathered many of his facts from tradition; probably tradition had become confused, and reversed the position of the two chiefs. Haywood purports to give almost the exact language Oconostota used; but when he is in error even as to who made the speech, he is exceedingly unlikely to be correct in anything more than its general tenor.

After Henderson’s main treaty was concluded, the Watauga Association entered into another, by which they secured from the Cherokees, for 2,000 pounds sterling, the lands they had already leased.

As soon as it became evident that the Indians would consent to the treaty, Henderson sent Boone ahead with a company of thirty men to clear a trail from the Holston to the Kentucky.[3] This, the first regular path opened into the wilderness, was long called Boone’s trace, and became forever famous in Kentucky history as the Wilderness Road, the track along which so many tens of thousands traveled while journeying to their hoped for homes in the bountiful West. Boone started on March 10th with his sturdy band of rifle-bearing axemen, and chopped out a narrow bridle-path—a pony trail, as it would now be called in the West. It led over Cumberland Gap, and crossed Cumberland, Laurel, and Rockcastle rivers at fords that were swimming deep in the time of freshets. Where it went through tall, open timber, it was marked by blazes on the tree trunks, while a regular path was cut and trodden out through the thickets of underbrush and the dense canebrakes and reed-beds.

After a fortnight’s hard work the party had almost reached the banks of the Kentucky River, and deemed that their chief trials were over. But half an hour before daybreak on the morning of the 25th, as they lay round their smouldering camp-fires, they were attacked by some Indians, who killed two of them and wounded a third; the others sprang to arms at once, and stood their ground without suffering further loss or damage till it grew light, when the Indians silently drew off.[4] Continuing his course, Boone reached the Kentucky River, and on April 1st began to build Boonesborough, on an open plain where there was a lick with two sulphur springs.

Meanwhile other pioneers, as hardy and enterprising as Boone’s companions, had likewise made up their minds that they would come in to possess the land; and in bands or small parties they had crossed the mountains or floated down the Ohio, under the leadership of such men as Harrod, Logan,[5] and the McAfees.[6] But hardly had they built their slight log-cabins, covered with brush or bark, and broken ground for the corn-planting, when some small Indian war-parties, including that which had attacked Boone’s company, appeared among them. Several men were “killed and sculped,” as Boone phrased it; and the panic among the rest was very great, insomuch that many forthwith set out to return. Boone was not so easily daunted; and he at once sent a special messenger to hurry forward the main body under Henderson, writing to the latter with quiet resolution and much good sense:

“My advice to you, sir, is to come or send as soon as possible. Your company is desired greatly, for the people are very uneasy, but are willing to stay and venture their lives with you, and now is the time to flusterate [frustrate?] the intentions of the Indians, and keep the country whilst we are in it. If we give way to them now, it will ever be the case.”[7]

Henderson had started off as soon as he had finished the treaty. He took wagons with him, but was obliged to halt and leave them in Powell’s Valley, for beyond that even so skilful a pathfinder and road-maker as Boone had not been able to find or make a way passable for wheels.[8] Accordingly, their goods and implements were placed on pack-horses, and the company started again.[9] Most fortunately a full account of their journey has been kept; for among Henderson’s followers at this time was a man named William Calk, who jotted down in his diary the events of each day.[10] It is a short record, but as amusing as it is instructive; for the writer’s mind was evidently as vigorous as his language was terse and untrammeled. He was with a small party, who were going out as partners; and his journal is a faithful record of all things, great or small, that at the time impressed him. The opening entry contains the information that “Abram’s dog’s leg got broke by Drake’s dog.” The owner of the latter beast, by the way, could not have been a pleasant companion on a trip of this sort, for elsewhere the writer, who, like most backwoodsmen, appreciated cleanliness in essentials, records with evident disfavor the fact that “Mr. Drake Bakes bread without washing his hands.” Every man who has had the misfortune to drive a pack-train in thick timber, or along a bad trail, will appreciate keenly the following incident, which occurred soon after the party had set out for home:

“I turned my hors to drive before me and he got scard ran away threw Down the Saddel Bags and broke three of our powder goards and Abram’s beast Burst open a walet of corn and lost a good Deal and made a turrabel flustration amongst the Reast of the Horses Drake’s mair run against a sapling and noct it down we cacht them all again and went on and lodged at John Duncan’s.”

Another entry records the satisfaction of the party when at a log fort (before getting into the wilderness) they procured some good loaf-bread and good whiskey.

They carried with them seed-corn[11] and “Irish tators” to plant, and for use on the journey had bacon, and corn-meal which was made either into baked corn-dodgers or else into johnny-cakes, which were simply cooked on a board beside the fire, or else perhaps on a hot stone or in the ashes. The meal had to be used very sparingly; occasionally a beef was killed, out of the herd of cattle that accompanied the emigrants; but generally they lived on the game they shot—deer, turkeys, and, when they got to Kentucky, buffaloes. Sometimes this was killed as they traveled; more often the hunters got it by going out in the evening after they had pitched camp.

The journey was hard and tiresome. At times it rained; and again there were heavy snow-storms, in one of which an emigrant got lost, and only found his way to camp by the help of a pocket-compass. The mountains were very steep, and it was painfully laborious work to climb them, while chopping out a way for the pack-train. At night a watch had to be kept for Indians. It was only here and there that the beasts got good grazing. Sometimes the horses had their saddles turned while struggling through the woods. But the great difficulty came in crossing the creeks, where the banks were rotten, the bottom bad, or the water deep; then the horses would get mired down and wet their packs, or they would have to be swum across while their loads were ferried over on logs. One day, in going along a creek, they had to cross it no less than fifty times, by “very bad foards.”

On the seventh of April they were met by Boone’s runner, bearing tidings of the loss occasioned by the Indians; and from that time on they met parties of would-be settlers, who, panic-struck by the sudden forays, were fleeing from the country. Henderson’s party kept on with good courage, and persuaded quite a number of the fugitives to turn back with them. Some of these men who were thus leaving the country were not doing so because of fright; for many, among them the McAfees, had not brought out their families, but had simply come to clear the ground, build cabins, plant corn, and turn some branded cattle loose in the woods, where they were certain to thrive well, winter and summer, on the nourishing cane and wild-pea vine. The men then intended to go back to the settlements and bring out their wives and children, perhaps not till the following year; so that things were in a measure prepared for them, though they were very apt to find that the cattle had been stolen by the Indians, or had strayed too far to be recovered.[12] The bulk of those fleeing, however, were simply frightened out of the country. There seems no reason to doubt[13] that the establishment of the strong, well-backed settlement of Boonesborough was all that prevented the abandonment of Kentucky at this time; and when such was the effect of a foray by small and scattered war parties of Indians from tribes nominally at peace with us,[14] it can easily be imagined how hopeless it would have been to have tried to settle the land had there still been in existence a strong hostile confederacy such as that presided over by Cornstalk. Beyond doubt the restless and vigorous frontiersmen would ultimately have won their way into the coveted Western lands; yet had it not been for the battle of the Great Kanawha, Boone and Henderson could not, in 1775, have planted their colony in Kentucky; and had it not been for Boone and Henderson, it is most unlikely that the land would have been settled at all until after the Revolutionary War, when perhaps it might have been British soil. Boone was essentially a type, and possesses his greatest interest for us because he represents so well the characteristics as well as the life-work of his fellow backwoodsmen; still, it is unfair not to bear in mind also the leading part he played and the great services he rendered to the nation.

The incomers soon recovered from the fright into which they had been thrown by the totally unexpected Indian attack; but the revengeful anger it excited in their breasts did not pass away. They came from a class already imbittered by long warfare with their forest foes; they hoarded up their new wrongs in minds burdened with the memories of countless other outrages; and it is small wonder that repeated and often unprovoked treachery at last excited in them a fierce and indiscriminate hostility to all the red-skinned race. They had come to settle on ground to which, as far as it was possible, the Indian title had been by fair treaty extinguished. They ousted no Indians from the lands they took; they had had neither the chance nor the wish themselves to do wrong; in their eyes the attack on the part of the Indians was as wanton as it was cruel; and in all probability this view was correct, and their assailants were actuated more by the desire for scalps and plunder than by resentment at the occupation of hunting grounds to which they could have had little claim. In fact, throughout the history of the discovery and first settlement of Kentucky, the original outrages and murders were committed by the Indians on the whites, and not by the whites on the Indians. In the gloomy and ferocious wars that ensued, the wrongs done by each side were many and great.

Henderson’s company came into the beautiful Kentucky country in mid-April, when it looked its best: the trees were in leaf, the air heavy with fragrance, the snowy flowers of the dogwood whitened the woods, and the banks of the streams burned dull crimson with the wealth of red-bud blossoms. The travelers reached the fort that Boone was building on the 20th of the month, being welcomed to the protection of its wooden walls by a volley from twenty or thirty rifles. They at once set to with a will to finish it, and to make it a strong place of refuge against Indian attacks. It was a typical forted village, such as the frontiersmen built everywhere in the West and Southwest during the years that they were pushing their way across the continent in the teeth of fierce and harassing warfare; in some features it was not unlike the hamlet-like “tun” in which the forefathers of these same pioneers dwelt, long centuries before, when they still lived by the sluggish waters of the lower Rhine, or had just crossed to the eastern coast of Britain.[15]

The fort was in shape a parallelogram, some two hundred and fifty feet long and half as wide. It was more completely finished than the majority of its kind, though little or no iron was used in its construction. At each corner was a two-storied loop-holed block-house to act as a bastion. The stout log-cabins were arranged in straight lines, so that their outer sides formed part of the wall, the spaces between them being filled with a high stockade, made of heavy squared timbers thrust upright into the ground, and bound together within by a horizontal stringer near the top. They were loop-holed like the block-houses. The heavy wooden gates, closed with stout bars, were flanked without by the block-houses and within by small windows cut in the nearest cabins. The houses had sharp sloping roofs, made of huge clapboards, and these great wooden slabs were kept in place by long poles, bound with withes to the rafters. In case of dire need each cabin was separately defensible. When danger threatened, the cattle were kept in the open space in the middle.

Three other similar forts or stations were built about the same time as Boonesborough, namely: Harrodstown, Boiling Springs, and St. Asaphs, better known as Logan’s Station, from its founder’s name. These all lay to the southwest, some thirty-odd miles from Boonesborough. Every such fort or station served as the rallying-place for the country round about, the stronghold in which the people dwelt during time of danger; and later on, when all danger had long ceased, it often remained in changed form, growing into the chief town of the district. Each settler had his own farm besides, often a long way from the fort, and it was on this that he usually intended to make his permanent home. This system enabled the inhabitants to combine for defence, and yet to take up the large tracts of four to fourteen hundred acres,[16] to which they were by law entitled. It permitted them in time of peace to live well apart, with plenty of room between, so that they did not crowd one another—a fact much appreciated by men in whose hearts the spirit of extreme independence and self-reliance was deeply ingrained. Thus the settlers were scattered over large areas, and, as elsewhere in the Southwest, the county and not the town became the governmental unit. The citizens even of the smaller governmental divisions acted through representatives, instead of directly, as in the New England town-meetings.[17] The centre of county government was of course the county court-house.

Henderson, having established a land agency at Boonesborough, at once proceeded to deed to the Transylvania colonists entry certificates of surveys of many hundred thousand acres. Most of the colonists were rather doubtful whether these certificates would ultimately prove of any value, and preferred to rest their claims on their original cabin rights; a wise move on their part, though in the end the Virginia Legislature confirmed Henderson’s sales in so far as they had been made to actual settlers. All the surveying was of course of the very rudest kind. Only a skilled woodsman could undertake the work in such a country; and accordingly much of it devolved on Boone, who ran the lines as well as he could, and marked the trees with his own initials, either by powder or else with knife.[18] The State could not undertake to make the surveys itself, so it authorized the individual settler to do so. This greatly promoted the rapid settlement of the country, making it possible to deal with land as a commodity, and outlining the various claims, but the inevitable result was that the sons of the settlers reaped a crop of endless confusion and litigation.

It is worth mentioning that the Transylvania company opened a store at Bonesborough. Powder and lead, the two commodities most in demand, were sold respectively for $2.66 2-3 and 16 2-3 cents per pound. The payment was rarely made in coin; and how high the above prices were may be gathered from the fact that ordinary labor was credited at 33 1-3 cents per day, while fifty cents a day was paid for ranging, hunting, and working on the roads.[19]

Henderson immediately proceeded to organize the government of his colony, and accordingly issued a call for an election of delegates to the Legislature of Transylvania, each of the four stations mentioned above sending members. The delegates, seventeen in all, met at Boonesborough and organized the convention on the 23d of May. Their meetings were held without the walls of the fort, on a level plain of white clover, under a grand old elm. Beneath its mighty branches a hundred people could without crowding find refuge from the noon-day sun; it was a fit council-house for this pioneer legislature of game hunters and Indian fighters.[20]

These weather-beaten backwoods warriors, who held their deliberations in the open air, showed that they had in them good stuff out of which to build a free government. They were men of genuine force of character, and they behaved with a dignity and wisdom that would have well become any legislative body. Henderson, on behalf of the proprietors of Transylvania, addressed them, much as a crown governor would have done. The portion of his address dealing with the destruction of game is worth noting. Buffalo, elk, and deer had abounded immediately round Boonesborough when the settlers first arrived, but the slaughter had been so great that even after the first six weeks the hunters began to find some difficulty in getting anything without going off some fifteen or twenty miles. However, stray buffaloes were still killed near the fort once or twice a week.[21] Calk in his journal quoted above, in the midst of entries about his domestic work—such as, on April 29th, “we git our house kivered with bark and move our things into it at Night and Begin housekeeping,” and on May 2d, “went and sot in to cleaning for corn,”—mentions occasionally killing deer and turkey; and once, while looking for a strayed mare, he saw four “bofelos.” He wounded one, but failed to get it, with the luck that generally attended backwoods hunters when they for the first time tried their small-bore rifles against these huge, shaggy-maned wild cattle.

As Henderson pointed out, the game was the sole dependence of the first settlers, who, most of the time, lived solely on wild meat, even the parched corn having been exhausted; and without game the new-comers could not have stayed in the land a week.[22] Accordingly he advised the enactment of game-laws; and he was especially severe in his comments upon the “foreignors” who came into the country merely to hunt, killing off the wild beasts, and taking their skins and furs away, for the benefit of persons not concerned in the settlement. This last point is curious as showing how instantly and naturally the colonists succeeded not only to the lands of the Indians, but also to their habits of thought; regarding intrusion by outsiders upon their hunting-grounds with the same jealous dislike so often shown by their red-skinned predecessors.

Henderson also outlined some of the laws he thought it advisable to enact, and the Legislature followed his advice. They provided for courts of law, for regulating the militia, for punishing criminals, fixing sheriffs’ and clerks’ fees, and issuing writs of attachment.[23] One of the members was a clergyman: owing to him a law was passed forbidding profane swearing or Sabbath-breaking; a puritanic touch which showed the mountain rather than the seaboard origin of the men settling Kentucky. The three remaining laws the Legislature enacted were much more characteristic, and were all introduced by the two Boones—for Squire Boone was still the companion of his brother. As was fit and proper, it fell to the lot of the greatest of backwoods hunters to propose a scheme for game protection, which the Legislature immediately adopted; and his was likewise the “act for preserving the breed of horses,”—for from the very outset the Kentuckians showed the love for fine horses and for horse-racing which has ever since distinguished them. Squire Boone was the author of a law “to protect the range”; for the preservation of the range or natural pasture over which the branded horses and cattle of the pioneers ranged at will, was as necessary to the welfare of the stock as the preservation of the game was to the welfare of the men. In Kentucky the range was excellent, abounding not only in fine grass, but in cane and wild peas, and the animals grazed on it throughout the year. Fires sometimes utterly destroyed immense tracts of this pasture, causing heavy loss to the settlers; and one of the first cares of pioneer legislative bodies was to guard against such accidents.

It was likewise stipulated that there should be complete religious freedom and toleration for all sects. This seems natural enough, now, but in the eighteenth century the precedents were the other way. Kentucky showed its essentially American character in nothing more than the diversity of religious belief among the settlers from the very start. They came almost entirely from the backwoods mountaineers of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, among whom the predominant faith had been Presbyterianism; but from the beginning they were occasionally visited by Baptist preachers,[24] whose creed spread to the borders sooner than Methodism; and among the original settlers of Harrodsburg were some Catholic Mary-landers.[25] The first service ever held in Kentucky was by a clergyman of the Church of England, soon after Henderson’s arrival; but this was merely owing to the presence of Henderson himself, who, it must be remembered, was not in the least a backwoods product. He stood completely isolated from the other immigrants during his brief existence as a pioneer, and had his real relationship with the old English founders of the proprietary colonies, and with the more modern American land speculators, whose schemes are so often mentioned during the last half of the eighteenth century. Episcopacy was an exotic in the backwoods; it did not take real root in Kentucky till long after that commonwealth had emerged from the pioneer stage.

When the Transylvania Legislature dissolved, never to meet again, Henderson had nearly finished playing his short but important part in the founding of Kentucky. He was a man of the seacoast regions, who had little in common with the backwoodsmen by whom he was surrounded; he came from a comparatively old and sober community, and he could not grapple with his new associates; in his journal he alludes to them as a set of scoundrels who scarcely believed in God or feared the devil. A British friend[26] of his, who at this time visited the settlement, also described the pioneers as being a lawless, narrow-minded, unpolished, and utterly insubordinate set, impatient of all restraint, and relying in every difficulty upon their individual might; though he grudgingly admitted that they were frank, hospitable, energetic, daring, and possessed of much common-sense. Of course it was hopeless to expect that such bold spirits, as they who conquered the wilderness, would be content to hold it even at a small quit-rent from Henderson. But the latter’s colony was toppled over by a thrust from without before it had time to be rent in sunder by violence from within.

Transylvania was between two millstones. The settlers revolted against its authority, and appealed to Virginia; and meanwhile Virginia, claiming the Kentucky country, and North Carolina as mistress of the lands round the Cumberland, proclaimed the purchase of the Transylvanian proprietors null and void as regards themselves, though valid as against the Indians. The title conveyed by the latter thus inured to the benefit of the colonies; it having been our policy, both before and since the Revolution, not to permit any of our citizens to individually purchase lands from the savages.

Lord Dunmore denounced Henderson and his acts; and it was in vain that the Transylvanians appealed to the Continental Congress, asking leave to send a delegate thereto, and asserting their devotion to the American cause; for Jefferson and Patrick Henry were members of that body, and though they agreed with Lord Dunmore in nothing else, were quite as determined as he that Kentucky should remain part of Virginia. So Transylvania’s fitful life flickered out of existence; the Virginia Legislature in 1778 solemnly annulling the title of the company, but very properly recompensing the originators by the gift of two hundred thousand acres.[27] North Carolina pursued a precisely similar course; and Henderson, after the collapse of his colony, drifts out of history.

Boone remained to be for some years one of the Kentucky leaders. Soon after the fort at Boones-borough was built, he went back to North Carolina for his family, and in the fall returned, bringing out a band of new settlers, including twenty-seven “guns”—that is, rifle-bearing men—and four women, with their families, the first who came to Kentucky, though others shortly followed in their steps.[28] A few roving hunters and daring pioneer settlers also came to his fort in the fall; among them, the famous scout, Simon Kenton, and John Todd,[29] a man of high and noble character and well-trained mind, who afterward fell by Boone’s side when in command at the fatal battle of Blue Licks. In this year also Clark[30] and Shelby[31] first came to Kentucky; and many other men whose names became famous in frontier story, and whose sufferings and long wanderings, whose strength, hardihood, and fierce daring, whose prowess as Indian fighters and killers of big game, were told by the firesides of Kentucky to generations born when the elk and the buffalo had vanished from her borders as completely as the red Indian himself. Each leader gathered round him a little party of men, who helped him build the fort which was to be the stronghold of the district. Among the earliest of these town builders were Hugh McGarry, James Harrod, and Benjamin Logan. The first named was a coarse, bold, brutal man, always clashing with his associates (he once nearly shot Harrod in a dispute over work). He was as revengeful and foolhardy as he was daring, but a natural leader in spite of all. Soon after he came to Kentucky his son was slain by Indians while out boiling sugar from maples; and he mercilessly persecuted all redskins for ever after. Harrod and Logan were of far higher character, and superior to him in every respect. Like so many other backwoodsmen, they were tall, spare, athletic men, with dark hair and grave faces. They were as fearless as they were tireless, and were beloved by their followers. Harrod finally died alone in the wilderness, nor was it ever certainly known whether he was killed by Indian or white man, or perchance by some hunted beast. The old settlers always held up his memory as that of a man ever ready to do a good deed, whether it was to run to the rescue of some one attacked by Indians, or to hunt up the strayed plow-horse of a brother settler less skilful as a woodsman; yet he could hardly read or write. Logan was almost as good a woodsman and individual fighter, and in addition was far better suited to lead men. He was both just and generous. His father had died intestate, so that all of his property by law came to Logan, who was the eldest son; but the latter at once divided it equally with his brothers and sisters. As soon as he came to Kentucky he rose to leadership, and remained for many years among the foremost of the commonwealth founders.

All this time there penetrated through the sombre forests faint echoes of the strife the men of the sea-coast had just begun against the British king. The rumors woke to passionate loyalty the hearts of the pioneers; and a roaming party of hunters, when camped on a branch[32] of the Elkhorn, by the hut of one of their number, named McConnell, called the spot Lexington, in honor of the memory of the Massachusetts minute-men, about whose death and victory they had just heard.[33]

By the end of 1775 the Americans had gained firm foothold in Kentucky. Cabins had been built and clearings made; there were women and children in the wooden forts, cattle grazed on the range, and two or three hundred acres of corn had been sown and reaped. There were perhaps some three hundred men in Kentucky, a hardy, resolute, strenuous band. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the wilderness, far from all help, surrounded by an overwhelming number of foes. Each day’s work was fraught with danger as they warred with the wild forces from which they wrung their living. Around them on every side lowered the clouds of the impending death struggle with the savage lords of the neighboring lands.

These backwoodsmen greatly resembled one another; their leaders were but types of the rank and file, and did not differ so very widely from them; yet two men stand out clearly from their fellows. Above the throng of wood-choppers, game-hunters, and Indian fighters loom the sinewy figures of Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark.

[1] The first permanent settlement was Harrodsburg, then called Harrodstown, founded in 1774, but soon abandoned, and only permanently occupied on March 18, 1775, a fortnight before Boone began the erection of his fort.

[2] The whole account of this treaty is taken from the Jefferson MSS., 5th Series, Vol. VIII; “a copy of the proceedings of the Virginia Convention, from June 15 to November 19, 1777, in relation to the Memorial of Richard Henderson, and others;” especially from the depositions of James Robertson, Isaac Shelby, Charles Robertson, Nathaniel Gist, and Thomas Price, who were all present. There is much interesting matter aside from the treaty; Simon Girty makes depositions as to Braddock’s defeat and Bouquet’s fight; Lewis, Croghan, and others show the utter vagueness and conflict of the Indian titles to Kentucky, etc., etc. Though the Cherokees spoke of the land as a “dark” or “bloody” place or ground, it does not seem that by either of these terms they referred to the actual meaning of the name Kentucky. One or two of the witnesses tried to make out that the treaty was unfairly made; but the bulk of the evidence is overwhelmingly the other way.

[3] Then sometimes called the Louisa; a name given it at first by the English explorers, but by great good-fortune not retained.

[4] Collins, II, 498. Letter of Daniel Boone, April 1, 1775. Collins has done good work for Kentucky history, having collected a perfect mass of materials of every sort. But he does not discriminate between facts of undoubted authenticity, and tales resting on the idlest legend; so that he must be used with caution, and he is, of course, not to be trusted where he is biased by the extreme rancor of his political prejudices. Of the Kentucky historians, Marshall is by far the most brilliant, and Mann Butler the most trustworthy and impartial. Both are much better than Collins.

[5] Benjamin Logan; there were many of the family in Kentucky. It was a common name along the border; the Indian chief Logan had been named after one of the Pennsylvania branch.

[6] McAfee MSS.

[7] Boone’s letter.

[8] Richard Henderson’s “Journal of an Expedition to Cantucky in 1775” (Collins).

[9] April 5th.

[10] It is printed in the Filson Club publications; see “The Wilderness Road,” by Thomas Speed, Louisville, Ky., 1886; one of the best of an excellent series.

[11] It is not necessary to say that “corn” means maize; Americans do not use the word in the sense in which it is employed in Britain.

[12] McAfee MSS. Some of the McAfees returned with Henderson.

[13] Boone’s letter, Henderson’s journal, Calk’s diary, Mc Afee’s autobiography all mention the way in which the early settlers began to swarm out of the country in April, 1775. To judge from their accounts, if the movement had not been checked instantly the country would have been depopulated in a fortnight, exactly as in 1774.

[14] It must be remembered that the outrages of the Indians this year in Kentucky were totally unprovoked; they were on lands where they did not themselves dwell, and which had been regularly ceded to the whites by all the tribes—Iroquois, Shawnees, Cherokees, etc.—whom the whites could possibly consider as having any claim to them. The wrath of the Kentuckians against all Indians is easily understood.

[15] When the block-house and palisade inclosed the farm of a single settler the “tun,” in its still earlier sense, was even more nearly reproduced.

[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 pre-emption 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 institutions (like those of the rest of the Southwest) have been directly and without a break derived from English institutions; whereas many of those of New England are rather pre-Normanic revivals, curiously paralleled in England as it was before the Conquest.

[18] Boone’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 among many of us, and without which the country would be abandoned ere tomorrow.” 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 Boonesborough, in 1840 (Frankfort, Ky., 1841).

[28] Do., p. 51. Mrs. Boone, Mrs. Denton, Mrs. McGarry, Mrs. Hogan; all were from the North Carolina backwoods; their ancestry is shown by their names. They settled in Boonesborough 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 III

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 toward solidification. While the communities of the seacoast 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 Boone’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 greater 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 backbone of the moral and order-loving element; and the Presbyterian Irish[1] were almost to a man stanch 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 mass 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 hanged 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,[12] although some of the promised stores were seized by the Americans while being forwarded to the Indians.[13]

In short, the British were active and successful in rousing the war spirit among Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, having numerous agents in all these tribes.[14] 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.[15]

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.[16] 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 circumstances, 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,”[17] 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. All men knew that the prisoners who fell into Indian hands, of whatever age or sex, 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 breasts of the frontiersmen not only ruthless and undying abhorrence of the Indians, but also a bitterly vindictive feeling of hostility toward Great Britain; a feeling that was all-powerful for a generation afterward, 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;[18] 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,[19] making the frontier almost solidly whig; save for the refugees, who were willing to cast in their lot with the savages.

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[20] sent them fifty horse-loads[21] by a pack-train that was driven through the Creek towns, they no longer hesitated. The agents showed very poor generalship in making them rise so early, when there were no British troops in the Southern States,[22] and when the Americans were consequently unhampered and free to deal with the Indians. 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 cluster 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,—assisted 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;[23] 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.[24] In June their ravages began.[25] 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 assailed.

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-country 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,[26] to whom the whites ever after showed respect and gratitude. 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.[27]

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 Eaton’s Station,[28] placed just above the forks of the Holston. 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, passed 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,[29] 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 snatch 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.[30] 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[31] 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.[32]

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 toward 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,[33] with scouts in front, and flankers on either 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.[34]

When near the Flats the whites, walking silently with moccasined feet, came suddenly on a party of twenty Indians, who, on being attacked, fled in the utmost haste, leaving behind ten of their bundles—for the Southern warriors carried with them, when on the warpath, small bundles containing their few necessaries.

After this trifling success a council was held, and, as the day was drawing to a close, it was decided to a return to the fort. Some of the men were dissatisfied with the decision, and there followed an incident as characteristic in its way as was the bravery with which the battle was subsequently fought. The discontented soldiers expressed their feelings freely, commenting especially upon the supposed lack of courage on the part of one of the captains. The latter, after brooding over the matter until the men had begun to march off the ground toward home, suddenly halted the line in which he was walking, and proceeded to harangue the troops in defence of his own reputation. Apparently no one interfered to prevent this remarkable piece of military self-justification; the soldiers were evidently accustomed openly to criticise the conduct of their commanders, while the latter responded in any manner they saw fit. As soon as the address was over, and the lines once more straightened out, the march was renewed in the original order; and immediately afterward the scouts brought news that a considerable body of Indians, misled by their retreat, was running rapidly up to assail their rear.[35]

The right file was promptly wheeled to the right and the left to the left, forming a line of battle a quarter of a mile long, the men taking advantage of the cover when possible. There was at first some confusion and a momentary panic, which was instantly quelled, the officers and many of the men joining to encourage and rally the few whom the suddenness of the attack rendered faint-hearted. The Otari warriors, instead of showing the usual Indian caution, came running on at headlong speed, believing that the whites were fleeing in terror; while still some three hundred yards off[36] they raised the war-whoop and charged without halting, the foremost chiefs hallooing out that the white men were running, and to come on and scalp them. They were led by Dragging Canoe himself, and were formed very curiously, their centre being cone-shaped, while their wings were curved outward; apparently they believed the white line to be wavering and hoped to break through its middle at the same time that they outflanked it, trusting to a single furious onset instead of to their usual tactics.[37] The result showed their folly. The frontiersmen on the right and left scattered out still further, so that their line could not be outflanked; and waiting coolly till the Otari were close up, the whites fired into them. The long rifles cracked like four-horse whips; they were held in skilful hands, many of the assailants fell, and the rush was checked at once. A short fight at close quarters ensued here and there along the line, Dragging Canoe was struck down and severely wounded, and then the Indians fled in the utmost confusion, every man for himself. Yet they carried off their wounded and perhaps some of their dead. The whites took thirteen scalps, and of their own number but four were seriously hurt; they also took many guns and much plunder.

In this battle of the Island Flats[38] the whites were slightly superior[39] in number to their foes; and they won without difficulty, inflicting a far heavier loss than they received. In this respect it differs markedly from most other Indian fights of the same time; and many of its particulars render it noteworthy. Moreover, it had a very good effect, cheering the frontiersmen greatly, and enabling them to make head against the discouraged Indians.

On the same day the Watauga fort[40] was attacked by a large force at sunrise. It was crowded with women and children,[41] but contained only forty or fifty men. The latter, however, were not only resolute and well-armed, but were also on the alert to guard against surprise; the Indians were discovered as they advanced in the gray light, and were at once beaten back with loss from the loop-holed stockade. Robertson commanded in the fort, Sevier acting as his lieutenant. Of course, the only hope of assistance was from Virginia, North Carolina being separated from the Watauga people by great mountain chains; and Sevier had already notified the officers of Fincastle that the Indians were advancing. His letter was of laconic brevity, and contained no demand for help; it was merely a warning that the Indians were undoubtedly about to start, and that “they intended to drive the country up to New River before they returned”—so that it behooved the Fincastle men to look to their own hearthsides. Sevier was a very fearless, self-reliant man, and doubtless felt confident that the settlers themselves could beat back their assailants. His forecast proved correct; for the Indians, after maintaining an irregular siege of the fort for some three weeks, retired, almost at the moment that parties of frontiersmen came to the rescue from some of the neighboring forts.[42]

While the foe was still lurking about the fort the people within were forced to subsist solely on parched corn; and from time to time some of them became so irritated by the irksome monotony of their confinement, that they ventured out heedless of the danger. Three or four of them were killed by the Indians, and one boy was carried off to one of their towns, where he was burnt at the stake; while a woman who was also captured at this time was only saved from a like fate by the exertions of the same Cherokee squaw already mentioned as warning the settlers. Tradition relates that during the siege, Sevier, now a young widower, fell in love with the woman he soon afterward married. Her name was Kate Sherrill. She was a tall girl, brown-haired, comely, lithe and supple “as a hickory sapling.” One day while without the fort she was almost surprised by some Indians. Running like a deer, she reached the stockade, sprang up so as to catch the top with her hands, and, drawing herself over, was caught in Sevier’s arms on the other side; through a loop-hole he had already shot the headmost of her pursuers.

Soon after the baffled Otari retreated from Robertson’s fort the other war parties likewise left the settlements. The Watauga men together with the immediately adjoining Virginian frontiersmen had beaten back their foes unaided, save for some powder and lead they had received from the older settlements; and moreover had inflicted more loss than they suffered.[43] They had made an exceedingly vigorous and successful fight.

The outlying settlements scattered along the western border of the Carolinas and Georgia had been attacked somewhat earlier; the Cherokees from the lower towns, accompanied by some Creeks and tories, beginning their ravages in the last days of June.[44] A small party of Georgians had, just previously, made a sudden march into the Cherokee country. They were trying to capture the British agent Cameron, who, being married to an Indian wife, dwelt in her town, and owned many negroes, horses, and cattle. The Cherokees, who had agreed not to interfere, broke faith and surprised the party, killing some and capturing others who were tortured to death.[45]

The frontiers were soon in a state of wild panic; for the Cherokee inroad was marked by the usual features. Cattle were driven off, houses burned, plantations laid waste, while the women and children were massacred indiscriminately with the men.[46] The people fled from their homes and crowded into the stockade forts; they were greatly hampered by the scarcity of guns and ammunition, as much had been given to the troops called down to the coast by the war with Britain. All the Southern colonies were maddened by the outbreak; and prepared for immediate revenge, knowing that if they were quick they would have time to give the Cherokees a good drubbing before the British could interfere.[47] The plan was that they should act together, the Virginians invading the Overhill country at the same time that the forces from North and South Carolina and Georgia destroyed the valley and lower towns. Thus the Cherokees would be crushed with little danger. It proved impossible, however, to get the attacks made quite simultaneously.

The back districts of North Carolina suffered heavily at the outset; however, the inhabitants showed that they were able to take care of themselves. The Cherokees came down the Catawba murdering many people; but most of the whites took refuge in the little forts, where they easily withstood the Indian assaults. General Griffith Rutherford raised a frontier levy and soon relieved the besieged stations. He sent word to the provincial authorities that if they could only get powder and lead the men of the Salisbury district were alone quite capable of beating off the Indians, but that if it was intended to invade the Cherokee country he must also have help from the Hillsborough men.[48] He was promised assistance, and was told to prepare a force to act on the offensive with the Virginians and South Carolinians.

Before he could get ready the first counter-blow had been struck by Georgia and South Carolina. Georgia was the weakest of all the colonies, and the part she played in this war was but trifling. She was threatened by British cruisers along the coast, and by the tories of Florida; and there was constant danger of an uprising of the black slaves, who outnumbered the whites. The vast herds of cattle and great rice plantations of the South offered a tempting bait to every foe. Tories were numerous in the population, while there were incessant bickerings with the Creeks, frequently resulting in small local wars, brought on as often by the faithlessness and brutality of the white borderers as by the treachery and cruelty of the red. Indeed the Indians were only kept quiet by presents, it being an unhappy feature of the frontier troubles that while lawless whites could not be prevented from encroaching on the Indian lands, the Indians in turn could only be kept at peace with the law-abiding by being bribed.[49]

Only a small number of warriors invaded Georgia. Nevertheless they greatly harassed the settlers, capturing several families and fighting two or three skirmishes with varying results.[50] By the middle of July, Colonel Samuel Jack[51] took the field with a force of two hundred rangers, all young men, the old and infirm being left to guard the forts. The Indians fled as soon as he had embodied his troops, and toward the end of the month he marched against one or two of their small lower towns, which he burned, destroying the grain and driving off the cattle. No resistance was offered, and he did not lose a man.

The heaviest blow fell on South Carolina, where the Cherokees were led by Cameron himself, accompanied by most of his tories. Some of his warriors came from the lower towns that lay along the Tugelou and Keowee, but most were from the middle towns, in the neighborhood of the Tellico, and from the valley towns that lay well to the westward of these, among the mountains, along the branches of the Hiawassee and Chattahoochee rivers. Falling furiously on the scattered settlers, they killed them or drove them into the wooden forts, ravaging, burning, and murdering as elsewhere, and sparing neither age nor sex. Colonel Andrew Williamson was in command of the western districts, and he at once began to gather together a force, taking his station at Picken’s Fort, with forty men, on July 3.[52] It was with the utmost difficulty that he could get troops, guns, or ammunition; but his strenuous and unceasing efforts were successful, and his force increased day by day. It is worth noting that these lowland troops were for the most part armed with smooth-bores, unlike the rifle-bearing mountaineers. As soon as he could muster a couple of hundred men,[53] he left the fort and advanced toward the Indians, making continual halts,[54] so as to allow the numerous volunteers that were flocking to his standard to reach him. At the same time the Americans were much encouraged by the repulse of an assault made just before daylight on one of the forts.[55] The attacking party was some two hundred strong, half of them being white men, naked and painted like the Indians; but after dark, on the evening before the attack, a band of one hundred and fifty American militia, on their way to join Williamson, entered the fort. The assault was made before dawn; it was promptly repulsed, and at daybreak the enemy fled, having suffered some loss; thirteen of the tories were captured, but the more nimble Indians escaped.

By the end of July, Williamson had gathered over eleven hundred militia[56] (including two small rifle companies, and advanced against the Indian towns, sending his spies and scouts before him. On the last day of the month he made a rapid night march, with three hundred and fifty horsemen, to surprise Cameron, who lay with a party of tories and Indians, encamped at Oconoree Creek, beyond the Cherokee town of Eseneka, which commanded the ford of the river Keowee. The cabins and fenced gardens of the town lay on both sides of the river. Williamson had been told by his prisoners that the hither bank was deserted, and advanced heedlessly, without scouts or flankers. In consequence he fell into an ambush, for when he reached the first houses, hidden Indians suddenly fired on him from front and flank. Many horses, including that of the commander, were shot down, and the startled troops began a disorderly retreat, firing at random. Col. Hammond rallied about twenty of the coolest, and, ordering them to reserve their fire, he charged the fence from behind which the heaviest hostile fire came. When up to it they shot into the dark figures crouching behind it, and jumping over charged home. The Indians immediately fled, leaving one dead and three wounded in the hands of the whites. The action was over; but the by-no-means-reassured victors had lost five men mortally and thirteen severely wounded, and were still rather nervous. At daybreak Williamson destroyed the houses near by, and started to cross the ford. But his men, in true militia style, had become sulky and mutinous, and refused to cross, until Col. Hammond swore he would go alone, and plunged into the river, followed by three volunteers, whereupon the whole army crowded after. The revulsion in their feelings was instantaneous; once across they seemed to have left all fear as well as all prudence behind. On the hither side there had been no getting them to advance; on the further there was no keeping them together, and they scattered everywhere. Luckily the Indians were too few to retaliate; and besides the Cherokees were not good marksmen, using so little powder in their guns that they made very ineffective weapons. After all the houses had been burned, and some six thousand bushels of corn, besides peas and beans, destroyed, Williamson returned to his camp. Next day he renewed his advance, and sent out detachments against all the other lower towns, utterly destroying every one by the middle of August, although not without one or two smart skirmishes.[57] His troops were very much elated, and only the lack of provisions prevented his marching against the middle towns. As it was, he retired to refit, leaving a garrison of six hundred men at Eseneka, which he christened Fort Rutledge. This ended the first stage of the retaliatory campaign, undertaken by the whites in revenge for the outbreak. The South Carolinians, assisted slightly by a small independent command of Georgians, who acted separately, had destroyed the lower Cherokee towns, at the same time that the Watauga people repulsed the attack of the Overhill warriors.

The second and most important movement was to be made by South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia jointly, each sending a column of two thousand men,[58] the two former against the middle and valley, the latter against the Overhill towns. If the columns acted together the Cherokees would be overwhelmed by a force three times the number of all their warriors. The plan succeeded well, although the Virginia division was delayed so that its action, though no less effective, was much later than that of the others, and though the latter likewise failed to act in perfect unison.

Rutherford and his North Carolinians were the first to take the field.[59] He had an army of two thousand gunmen, besides pack-horsemen and men to tend the drove of bullocks, together with a few Catawba Indians—a total of twenty-four hundred.[60] On September 1st he left the head of the Catawba,[61] and the route he followed was long known by the name of Rutherford’s trace. There was not a tent in his army, and but very few blankets; the pack-horses carried the flour, while the beef was driven along on the hoof. Officers and men alike wore homespun hunting shirts trimmed with colored cotton; the cloth was made from hemp, tow, and wild-nettle bark.

He passed over the Blue Ridge at Swananoa Gap, crossed the French Broad at the Warrior’s Ford. and then went through the mountains[62] to the middle towns, a detachment of a thousand men making a forced march in advance. This detachment was fired at by a small band of Indians from an ambush, and one man was wounded in the foot; but no further resistance was made, the towns being abandoned.[63] The main body coming up, parties of troops were sent out in every direction, and all the middle towns were destroyed. Rutherford had expected to meet Williamson at this place, but the latter did not appear, and so the North Carolina commander determined to proceed alone against the valley towns along the Hiawassee. Taking with him only nine hundred picked men, he attempted to cross the rugged mountain chains which separated him from his destination; but he had no guide, and missed the regular pass—a fortunate thing for him, as it afterward turned out, for he thus escaped falling into an ambush of five hundred Cherokees who were encamped along it.[64] After in vain trying to penetrate the tangle of gloomy defiles and wooded peaks, he returned to the middle towns at Canucca on September 18th. Here he met Williamson, who had just arrived, having been delayed so that he could not leave Fort Rutledge until the 13th.[65] The South Carolinians, two thousand strong, had crossed the Blue Ridge near the sources of the Little Tennessee.

While Rutherford rested[66] Williamson, on the 19th, pushed on through Noewee pass, and fell into the ambush which had been laid for the former. The pass was a narrow, open valley, walled in by steep and lofty mountains. The Indians waited until the troops were struggling up to the outlet, and then assailed them with a close and deadly fire. The surprised soldiers recoiled and fell into confusion; and they were for the second time saved from disaster by the gallantry of Colonel Hammond, who with voice and action rallied them, endeavoring to keep them firm while a detachment was sent to clamber up the rocks and outflank the Indians. At the same time Lieutenant Hampton got twenty men together, out of the rout, and ran forward, calling out: “Loaded guns advance, empty guns fall down and load.” Being joined by some thirty men more he pushed desperately upward. The Indians fled from the shock; and the army thus owed its safety solely to two gallant officers. Of the whites seventeen were killed and twenty-nine wounded[67]; they took fourteen scalps.[68]

Although the distance was but twenty odd miles, it took Williamson five days of incredible toil before he reached the valley towns. The troops showed the utmost patience, clearing a path for the pack-train along the sheer mountain sides and through the dense, untrodden forests in the valleys. The trail often wound along cliffs where a single misstep of a pack-animal resulted in its being dashed to pieces. But the work, though fatiguing, was healthy; it was noticed that during the whole expedition not a man was laid up for any length of time by sickness.

Rutherford joined Williamson immediately afterward, and together they utterly laid waste the valley towns; and then, in the last week of September, started homeward. All the Cherokee settlements west of the Appalachians had been destroyed from the face of the earth, neither crops nor cattle being left; and most of the inhabitants were obliged to take refuge with the Creeks.

Rutherford reached home in safety, never having experienced any real resistance; he had lost but three men in all. He had killed twelve Indians, and had captured nine more, besides seven whites and four negroes. He had also taken piles of deerskins, a hundredweight of gunpowder and twenty-five hundred pounds of lead; and, moreover, had wasted and destroyed to his hearts content.[69]

Williamson, too, reached home without suffering further damage, entering Fort Rutledge on October 7th. In his two expeditions he had had ninety-four men killed and wounded, but he had done much more harm than any one else to the Indians. It was said the South Carolinians had taken seventy-five scalps[70]; at any rate the South Carolina Legislalture had offered a reward of £75 for every warrior’s scalp, as well as £100 for every Indian, and £80 for every tory or negro, taken prisoner.[71] But the troops were forbidden to sell their prisoners as slaves—not a needless injunction, as is shown by the fact that when it was issued there had already been at least one case in Williamson’s own army where a captured Indian was sold into bondage.

The Virginian troops had meanwhile been slowly gathering at the Great Island of the Holston, under Colonel William Christian, preparatory to assaulting the Overhill Cherokees. While they were assembling the Indians threatened them from time to) time; once a small party of braves crossed the river and killed a soldier near the main post of the army, and also killed a settler; a day or two later another war-party slipped by toward the settlements, but on being pursued by a detachment of militia faced about and returned to their town.[72] On the first of October the army started, two thousand strong,[73] including some troops from North Carolina, and all the gunmen who could be spared from the little stockaded hamlets scattered along the Watauga, the Holston, and the Clinch. Except a small force of horse-riflemen the men were on foot, each with tomahawk, scalping-knife, and long, grooved flint-lock; all were healthy, well-equipped, and in fine spirits, driving their pack-horses and bullocks with them. Characteristically enough a Presbyterian clergyman, following his backwoods flock, went along with this expedition as chaplain. The army moved very cautiously, the night encampments being made behind breastworks of felled timbers. There was therefore no chance for a surprise; and their great inferiority in number made it hopeless for the Cherokees to try a fair fight. In their despair they asked help from the Creeks; but the latter replied that they had plucked the thorn of warfare from their (the Creeks’) foot, and were welcome to keep it.[74]

The Virginians came steadily on[75] until they reached the Big Island of the French Broad.[76] Here the Cherokees had gathered their warriors, and they sent a tory trader across with a flag of truce. Christian well knowing that the Virginians greatly outnumbered the Indians, let the man go through his camp at will,[77] and sent him back with word that the Cherokee towns were doomed, for that he would surely march to them and destroy them. That night he left half of his men in camp, lying on their arms by the watch-fires, while with the others he forded the river below and came round to surprise the Indian encampment from behind; but he found that the Indians had fled, for their hearts had become as water, nor did they venture at any time, during this expedition, to molest the white forces. Following them up, Christian reached the towns early in November,[78] and remained two weeks, sending out parties to burn the cabins and destroy the stores of corn and potatoes. The Indians[79] sent in a flag to treat for peace, surrendering the horses and prisoners they had taken, and agreeing to fix a boundary and give up to the settlers the land they already had, as well as some additional territory. Christian made peace on these terms and ceased his ravages, but he excepted the town of Tuskega, whose people had burned alive the boy taken captive at Watauga. This town he reduced to ashes.

Nor would the chief Dragging Canoe accept peace at all; but gathering round him the fiercest and most unruly of the young men, he left the rest of the tribe and retired to the Chickamauga fastnesses.

When the preliminary truce had been made Christian marched his forces homeward, and disbanded them a fortnight before Christmas, leaving a garrison at Holston, Great Island. During the ensuing spring and summer peace treaties were definitely concluded between the Upper Cherokees and Virginia and North Carolina at the Great Island of the Holston,[80] and between the Lower Cherokees and South Carolina and Georgia at De Witt’s Corners. The Cherokees gave up some of their lands; of the four seacoast provinces South Carolina gained most, as was proper, for she had done and suffered most.[81]

The Watauga people and the Westerners generally were the real gainers by the war. Had the Watauga settlements been destroyed, they would no longer have covered the Wilderness Road to Kentucky; and so Kentucky must perforce have been abandoned. But the followers of Robertson and Sevier stood stoutly for their homes; not one of them fled over the mountains. The Cherokees had been so roughly handled that for several years they did not again go to war as a body; and this not only gave the settlers a breathing time, but also enabled them to make themselves so strong that when the struggle was renewed they could easily hold their own. The war was thus another and important link in the chain of events by which the West was won; and had any link in the chain snapped during these early years, the peace of 1783 would probably have seen the trans-Alleghany country in the hands of a non-American power.

[1] Mr. Phelan, in his “History of Tennessee,” deserves especial praise for having so clearly understood the part played by the Scotch-Irish.

[2] The Campbell MSS. contain allusions to various such feuds, and accounts of the jealousies existing not only between families, but between prominent members of the same family.

[3] See Milfort, Smyth, etc., as well as the native writers.

[4] Executions for “treason,” murder, and horse-stealing were very common. For an instance where the three crimes were treated alike as deserving the death penalty the perpetrators being hanged, see Calendar of Virginia State Papers, Vol. III, p. 361.

[5] “American Archives,” 4th Series, Vol. VI, p. 541. But parties of young braves went on the warpath from time to time.

[6] Do., Vol. III, p. 790.

[7] Do., Vol. VI, p. 1228.

[8] See Milfort, pp. 46, 134, etc.

[9] “American Archives,” 4th Series, Vol. I, p. 1094, for example of fight between Choctaws and Creeks.

[10] Do., Vol. IV, p. 317. Letter of Agent John Stuart to General Gage, St. Augustine, Oct. 3, 1775.

[11] State Department MSS. No. 71, Vol. II, p. 189. Letter of David Taitt, Deputy Superintendent (of British) in Creek Nation.

[12] “American Archives,” Vol. III, p. 218, August 21, 1775.

[13] Do., p. 790, September 25, 1775.

[14] State Department MSS., No. 51, Vol. II, p. 17 (volume of “Intercepted Letters”). Letters of Andrew Rainsford, John Mitchell, and Alex. McCullough, to Rt. Hon. Lord George Germain.

[15] No body of British troops in the Revolution bore such a dark stain on its laurels as the massacre at Fort William Henry left on the banners of Montcalm; even the French, not to speak of the Spaniards and Mexicans, were to us far more cruel foes than the British, though generally less formidable. In fact the British, as conquerors and rulers in America, though very disagreeable, have not usually been either needlessly cruel nor (relatively speaking) unjust, and compare rather favorably with most other European nations.

[16] Though it must be remembered that in our own war with Mexico we declined the proffered—and valuable—aid of the Comanches.

[17] State Department MSS. “Intercepted Letters,” Pensacola, July 12, 1779.

[18] Do.

[19] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, I, 610.

[20] Stuart and Cameron; the latter dwelt among them, and incited them to war.

[21] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, III, 649.

[22] The only British attempt made at that time against the Southern colonies was in too small force and failed.

[23] “American Archives,” 4th Series, Vol. III, p. 1112.

[24] Do., 5th Series, Vol. I, p. III.

[25] Do., 4th Series, Vol. VI, p. 1229.

[26] Her name was Nancy Ward. Campbell MSS., Haywood, etc.

[27] Ramsey, 144. The buffalo were killed (winter of 1775-1776) twelve miles northeast of Carter’s Valley.

[28] Haywood and his followers erroneously call it Heaton’s; in the Campbell MSS, as well as the “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, I, p. 464, it is called Eaton’s or Amos Eaton’s. This is contemporary authority. Other forts were Evan Shelby’s, John Shelby’s, Campbell’s, the Wommack Fort, etc.

[29] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, I, 973.

[30] “American Pioneers,” I, 534. Letter of Benjamin Sharp, who was in the fort at the time as a boy fourteen years old.

[31] Many writers speak as if all the Indians were in these two bands, which was not so. It is impossible to give their numbers exactly; probably each contained from 150 to 300 warriors.

[32] James Thompson, James Shelby, William Buchanan, John Campbell, William Cocke, and Thomas Madison. See their letter of August 2, 1776, “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, I, 464. Haywood, relying on tradition, says five companies gathered; he is invaluable as an authority, but it must be kept in mind that he often relies on traditional statement.

[33] The report of the six captains says “two divisions”; from Haywood we learn that the two divisions were two lines, evidently marching side by side, there being a right line and a left line.

[34] See James Smith, passim.

[35] Among the later Campbell MSS. are a number of copies of papers containing traditional accounts of this battle. They are mostly very incorrect, both as to the numbers and losses of the Indians and whites, and as to the battle itself very little help can be derived from them.

[36] Campbell MSS.

[37] Do.

[38] Tennessee historians sometimes call it the battle of Long Island; which confuses it with Washington’s defeat of about the same date.

[39] The captains’ report says the Indians were “not inferior” in numbers; they probably put them at a maximum. Hay wood and all later writers greatly exaggerate the Indian numbers; as also their losses, which are commonly placed at “over 40,” “26 being left dead on the ground.” In reality only 13 were so left; but in the various skirmishes on the Watauga about this time, from the middle of July to the middle of August, the backwoodsmen took in all 26 scalps, and one prisoner (“American Archives,” 5th Series, I, 973). This is probably the origin of the “26 dead” story; the “over 40” being merely a flourish. Ramsey gives a story about Isaac Shelby rallying the whites to victory, and later writers of course follow and embellish this; but Shelby’s MS. autobiography (see copy in Col. Durrett’s library at Louisville) not only makes no mention of the battle, but states that Shelby was at this time in Kentucky; he came back in August or September, and so was hundreds of miles from the place when the battle occurred. Ramsey gives a number of anec dotes of ferocious personal encounters that took place during the battle. Some of them are of very doubtful value—for instance that of the man who killed six of the most daring Indians himself (the total number killed being only thirteen), and the account of the Indians all retreating when they saw another of their champions vanquished. The climax of absurdity is reached by a recent writer, Mr. Kirke, who, after embodying in his account all the errors of his predecessors and adding several others on his own responsibility, winds up by stating that “two hundred and ten men under Sevier and [Isaac] Shelby … beat back … fifteen thousand Indians.” These numbers can only be reached by comparing an exaggerated estimate of all the Cherokees, men, women, and children, with the white men encountered by a very small proportion of the red warriors in the first two skirmishes. Moreover, as already shown, Shelby was nowhere near the scene of conflict, and Sevier was acting as Robertson’s subaltern.

[40] Another fort, called Fort Lee, had been previously held by Sevier but had been abandoned; see Phelan, p. 42.

[41] “American Archives,” 5th Series, I, 973; 500 women and children.

[42] Campbell MSS. Haywood says that the first help came from Evan Shelby; Col. Russell at Eaton’s Station proving dilatory. In the Campbell MSS. are some late letters written by sons of the Captain Campbell who took part in the Island Flats fight, denying this statement.

[43] “American Archives,” 5th Series, I, 973. Of the Watauga settlers eighteen men, two women, and several children had been killed; two or three were taken captive. Of the Indians twenty-six were scalped; doubtless several others were slain. Of course these figures only apply to the Watauga neighborhood.

[44] Do., p. 611.

[45] “History of Georgia,” Hugh McCall, Savannah, 1816, p. 76.

[46] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, I, 610.

[47] Do., 4th Series, VI, 1228.

[48] Do., 5th Series, I, 613.

[49] Do., 5th Series, I, 7, and III, 649. The Georgia frontiers men seem to have been peculiarly brutal in their conduct to the Creeks; but the latter were themselves very little, if at all, better.

[50] McCall; five families captured; in three skirmishes eight whites were killed and six Indian scalps taken.

[51] McCall; the Tennessee historians erroneously assign the command to Col. McBury.

[52] “View of South Carolina,” John Drayton, Charleston, 1802, p. 231. A very good book.

[53] More exactly two hundred and twenty-two, on the 8th of July.

[54] E. g., at Hogskin Creek and Barker’s Creek.

[55] Lyndley’s Fort, on Rayborn Creek.

[56] Eleven hundred and fifty-one, of whom one hundred and thirty were riflemen. He was camped at Twenty-three Mile Creek.

[57] At Tomassee, where he put to flight a body of two or three hundred warriors, he lost eight killed and fifteen wounded, and at Tugelou, four wounded. Besides these two towns, he also destroyed Soconee, Keowee, Ostatay, Cheho-kee, Eustustie, Sugaw Town, and Brass Town.

[58] All militia, of course, with only the training they had received on the rare muster days; but a warlike set, utterly unlike ordinary militia, and for woodland work against savages in many respects much superior to European regulars. This campaign against the Cherokees was infinitely more successful than that waged in 1760 against the same foe by armies of grenadiers and highlanders.

[59] That is, after the return of the South Carolinians from their destruction of the lower towns.

[60] “Historical Sketches of North Carolina,” John H. Wheeler, Phil., 1851, p. 383.

[61] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, Vol. II, p. 1235.

[62] Up Hominy Creek, across the Pigeon, up Richland Creek, across Tuckaseigee River, over Cowee Mount.

[63] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, II, p. 1235.

[64] Do.

[65] Drayton. There was a good deal of jealousy between the two armies, and their reports conflict on some points.

[66] There is some conflict in the accounts of the destruction of the valley towns; after carefully comparing the accounts in the “American Archives,” Drayton, White, Ramsey, etc., I believe that the above is substantially accurate. However, it is impossible to reconcile all of the accounts of the relative order of Rutherford’s and Williamson’s marches.

[67] Drayton; the “Am. Archives” say only twelve killed and twenty wounded. In another skirmish at Cheowee three South Carolinians were killed.

[68] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, II, p. 1235.

[69] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, II, p. 1235.

[70] Do., p. 990; Drayton puts the total Cherokee loss at two hundred.

[71] Do., Vol. III, p. 33.

[72] These two events took place on September 26th and 29th; “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, Vol. II, p. 540. Ramsey is thus wrong in saying no white was killed on this expedition.

[73] McAfee MSS.; one of the McAfees went along and preserved a rough diary of dates.

[74] “History of Virginia,” John Burke (continued by L. H. Girardin), Petersburg, 1816, p. 176.

[75] After camping a few days at Double Springs, the head waters of Lick Creek, to let all the Watauga men come up.

[76] They sent spies in advance. The trail led through for ests and marshy canebrakes; across Nolichucky, up Long Creek and down Dunplin Creek to the French Broad. Hay wood and Ramsey.

[77] McAfee MSS.

[78] Nov. 5th. Do.

[79] Nov. 8th. Do.

[80] The boundary then established between the Cherokees and Watauga people was known as Brown’s Line.

[81] As a very rough guess after a careful examination of all the authorities, it may be said that in this war somewhat less than two hundred Indians were slain, all warriors. The loss of the whites in war was probably no greater; but it included about-as many more women and children. So that perhaps two or three times as many whites as Indians were killed, counting in every one.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX A—TO CHAPTER I

I

(Campbell MSS.; this letter and the one following are from copies, and the spelling, etc., may not be quite as in the originals.)

CAMP OPPOSITE THE MOUTH OF THE GREAT KENAWAY,

October 16—1774

DEAR UNCLE,

I gladly embrace this opportunity to acquaint you that we are all here yet alive through God’s mercies, & I sincerely wish that this may find you and your family in the station of health that we left you. I never had anything worth notice to acquaint you with since I left you till now—the express seems to be hurrying, that I can not write you with the same coolness and deliberation as I would. We arrived at the mouth of the Canaway, thursday 6th. Octo. and encamped on a fine piece of ground, with an intent to wait for the Governor and his party but hearing that he was going another way we contented ourselves to stay there a few days to rest the troops, &c. where we looked upon ourselves to be in safety till Monday morning the 10th. instant when two of our company went out before day to hunt—to wit Val. Sevier and James Robinson and discovered a party of Indians. As I expect you will hear something of our battle before you get this, I have here stated the affair nearly to you:

For the satisfaction of the people in your parts in this they have a true state of the memorable battle fought at the mouth of the Great Canaway on the 10th. instant. Monday morning about half an hour before sunrise, two of Capt. Russells company discovered a large party of Indians about a mile from camp, one of which men was killed, the other made his escape & brought in his intelligence. In two or three minutes after, two of Capt. Shelby’s Company came in & confirmed the account, Col. Andrew Lewis being informed thereof immediately ordered Col. Charles Lewis to take the command of 150 men from Augusta and with him went Capt. Dickison, Capt. Harrison, Capt. Wilson, Capt. John Lewis, from Augusta and Capt. Sockridge which made the first division. Col. Fleming was also ordered to take the command of one hundred and fifty more, consisting of Battertout, Fincastle & Bedford troops,—viz., Capt. Buford of Bedford, Capt. Lewis of Battertout, Capt. Shelby & Capt. Russell of Fincastle which made the second division. Col. Lewis marched with his division to the right some distance from the Ohio. Col. Fleming with his division up the bank of the Ohio to the left. Col. Lewis’ division had not marched little more than a quarter of a mile from camp when about sunrise, an attack was made on the front of his division in a most vigorous manner by the united tribes Indians,—Shawnees, Delawares, Mingoes, Taways, and of several other nations, in number not less than eight hundred, and by many thought to be a thousand. In this heavy attack Col. Charles Lewis received a wound which soon after caused his death, and several of his men fell on the spot,—in fact the Augusta division was forced to give way to the heavy fire of the enemy. In about the second of a minute after the attack on Col. Lewis’ division, the enemy engaged of Col. Fleming’s division on the ohio and in a short time Col. Fleming received two balls thro’ his left arm and one thro’ his breast; and after animating the Captains & soldiers in a calm manner to the pursuit of victory returned to the camp. The loss of the brave Col’s was severely felt by the officers in particular. But the Augusta troops being shortly reinforced from camp by Col. Field with his company, together with Capt. M’Dowers, Capt. Matthew’s and Capt. Stewart’s from Augusta; Capt. John Lewis, Capt. Paulins, Capt. Arbuckle’s, and Capt. M’Clannahan’s from Battertout. The enemy no longer able to maintain their ground was forced to give way till they were in a line with the troops left in action on branches of ohio by Col. Fleming. In this precipitate retreat Col. Field was killed; after which Capt. Shelby was ordered to take the command. During this time which was till after twelve of the clock, the action continued extremely hot, the close underwood, many steep banks and logs greatly favored their retreat, and the bravest of their men made the best use of themselves, while others were throwing their dead into the ohio, and carrying off the wounded. After twelve the action in a small degree abated, but continued sharp enough till after one o’clock. Their long retreat gave them a most advantageous spot of ground; from which it appeared to the officers so difficult to dislodge them, that it was thought most advisable, to stand as the line was then formed, which was about a mile and a quarter in length, and had till then sustained a constant and equal weight of fire from wing to wing. It was till half an hour of sunset they continued firing on us, which we returned to their disadvantage, at length night coming on they found a safe retreat. They had not the satisfaction of scalping any of our men save one or two stragglers, whom they killed before the engagement. Many of their dead they scalped rather than we should have them, but our troops scalped upward of twenty of those who were first killed. Its beyond a doubt, their loss in numbers far exceeds ours which is considerable.

Field officers killed—Col. Charles Lewis, & Col. John Fields. Field officers wounded—Col. William Fleming;—Capts. killed, John Murray, Capt. Samuel Wilson, Capt. Robert M’Clannahan, Capt. James Ward. Capts. wounded—Thomas Buford, John Dickison & John Scidmore. Subalterns killed, Lieutenant Hugh Allen, Ensign Matthew Brackin & Ensign Cundiff; Subalterns wounded, Lieut. Lane, Lieut. Vance, Lieut. Goldman, Lieut. James Robertson; and about 46 killed and 60 wounded. From this sir you may judge that we had a very hard day; its really impossible for me to express or you to conceive the acclamations that we were under,—sometimes the hideous cries of the enemy, and the groans of our wounded men lying around, was enough to shudder the stoutest heart. Its the general opinion of the officers that we shall soon have another engagement, as we have now got over into the enemy’s country. We expect to meet the Governor about forty or fifty miles from here. Nothing will save us from another battle, unless they attack the Governors party. Five men that came in dadys (daddy’s) company were killed, I don’t know that you were acquainted with any of them, except Mark Williams who lived with Roger Top. Acquaint Mr. Carmack that his son was slightly wounded through the shoulder and arm and that he is in a likely way of recovery. We leave him at the mouth of the Canaway and one very careful hand to take care of him. There is a garrison and three hundred men left at that place, with a surgeon to heal the wounded. We expect to return to the garrison in about 16 days from the Shawny towns.

I have nothing more particular to acquaint you with concerning the battle. As to the country I can not say much in praise of any that I have yet seen. Dady intended writing you, but did not know of the express until the time was too short. I have wrote to mammy tho’ not so fully to you, as I then expected the express was just going. We seem to be all in a moving posture, just going from this place, so that I must conclude, wishing you health and prosperity until I see you and your family. In the meantime I am your truly affectionate friend and humble servant,

ISAAC SHELBY.

To MR. JOHN SHELBY,

Holston River,

Fincastle County.

Favd. by Mr. Benj. Gray.

II

(Campbell MSS.)

October ye 31st. 1774.

DEAR SIR,

Being on my way home to Fincastle court, was overtaken this evening by letters from Colo. Christian and other gentlemen on the expedition, giving an account of a battle which was fought between our troops & the enemy Indians, on the 10th instant, in the Fork of the Ohio & the Great Kanhawa.

The particulars of the action, drawn up by Colo. Andr. Lewis I have sent you enclosed, also a return of the killed and wounded, by which you will see that we have lost many brave and valiant officers & soldiers, whose loss to their families, as well as to the community, is very great.

Colo. Christian with the Fincastle troops (except the companies commanded by Capts. Russell & Shelby, who were in the action) were on their march; and on the evening of that day, about 15 miles from the field of battle, heard that the action began in the morning. They marched hard, and got to the camp about midnight. The cries of the wounded, without any persons of skill or any thing to nourish people in their unhappy situation, was striking. The Indians had crossed the river on rafts, 6 or 8 miles above the Forks, in the night, and it is believed, intended to attack the camp, had they not been prevented by our men marching to meet them at the distance of half a mile. It is said the enemy behaved with bravery and great caution, that they frequently damned our men for white sons of bitches. Why did they not whistle now? (alluding to the fifes) & that they would learn them to shoot. The Governor was then at Hockhocking, about 12 or 15 miles below the mouth of the Little Kanhawa, from whence he intended to march his party to a place called Chillicoffee, about 20 miles farther than the towns where it was said the Shawneese had assembled with their families and allies, to make a stand, as they had good houses and plenty of ammunition & provisions & had cleared the woods to a great distance from the place. His party who were to march from the camp was about 1200, and to join Colo. Lewis’ party about 28 miles from Chillicoffee. But whether the action above mentioned would disconcert this plan or not, I think appears a little uncertain, as there is a probability that his excellency on hearing the news might, with his party, fall down the river and join Colo. Lewis’ party and march together against the enemy.

They were about building a breastwork at the Forks, & after leaving a proper party to take care of the wounded & the provisions there, that Colo. Lewis could march upwards of a thousand men to join his Lordship, so that the whole when they meet will be about 2200 choice men. What may be their success God only knows, but it is highly probable the matter is decided before this time.

Colo. Christian says, from the accounts he had the enemy behaved with inconceivable bravery. The head men walked about in the time of action, exhorting their men “to be close, shoot well, be strong of fight.” They had parties planted on the opposite side of both rivers to shoot our men as they swam over, not doubting, as is supposed, but they would gain a complete victory. In the evening late they called to our men “that they had 2200 men for them to-morrow, and that they had 1100 men now as well as they.” They also made very merry about a treaty.

Poor Colo. Charles Lewis was shot on a clear piece of ground, as he had not taken a tree, encouraging his men to advance. On being wounded he handed his gun to a person nigh him and retired to the camp, telling his men as he passed “I am wounded but go on and be brave.” If the loss of a good man a sincere friend, and a brave officer, claims a tear, he certainly is entitled to it.

Colo. Fields was shot at a, great tree by two Indians on his right, while one on his left was amusing him with talk and the Colo. Endeavoring to get a shot at him.

Besides the loss the troops met with in action by Colo. Fleming who was obliged to retire from the field, which was very great, the wounded met with the most irreparable loss in an able and skilful surgeon. Colo. Christian says that his (Flemings) lungs or part of them came out of the wound in his breast but were pushed back; and by the last part of his letter, which was dated the 16th. instant, he has some hopes of his recovery.

Thus, sir, I have given you an account of the action from the several letters I recd., and have only to add, that Colo. Christian desires me to inform Mrs. Christian of his welfare, which with great pleasure I do through this channel, and should any further news come, which I much expect soon, I shall take the earliest oppy. of communicating the same to you. It is believed the troops will surely return in Nov.

I write in a hurry and amidst a crowd of inquisitive people, therefore hope you will excuse the inaccuracy of, D’r. Sir,

Your sincere well wisher & most obedt. Servt.,

WM, PRESTON.

P. S. If you please you may give Mr. Purdie a copy of the enclosed papers, & anything else you may think worthy the notice of the Public.

III

LOGAN’S SPEECH

There has been much controversy over the genuineness of Logan’s speech; but those who have questioned it have done so with singularly little reason. In fact its authenticity would never have been impugned at all had it not (wrongly) blamed Cresap with killing Logan’s family. Cresap’s defenders, with curious folly, have in consequence thought it necessary to show, not that Logan was mistaken, but that he never delivered the speech at all.

The truth seems to be that Cresap, without provocation, but after being incited to war by Conolly’s letter, murdered some peaceful Indians, among whom there were certainly some friends and possibly some relations of Logan (see testimony of Col. Ebenezer Zane, in Jefferson’s Notes, and “American Pioneer,” I, 12; also Clark’s letter in the Jefferson Papers); but that he had no share in the massacre of Logan’s family at Yellow Creek by Greathouse and his crew two or three days afterward. The two massacres occurring so near together, however, produced the impression not only among the Indians but among many whites (as shown in the body of this work), that Cresap had been guilty of both; and this Logan undoubtedly believed, as can be seen by the letter he wrote and left tied to a war club in a murdered settler’s house. This was an injustice to Cresap; but it was a very natural mistake on Logan’s part.

After the speech was recited it attracted much attention; was published in newspapers, periodicals, etc., and was extensively quoted. Jefferson, as we learn from his Papers at Washington, took it down in 1775, getting it from Lord Dunmore’s officers and published it in his “Notes,” in 1784; unfortunately he took for granted that its allegations as regards Cresap were true, and accordingly prefaced it by a very unjust attack on the reputed murderer. Until thirteen years after this publication, and until twenty-three years after the speech had been published for the first time, no one thought of questioning it. Then Luther Martin, of Maryland, attacked its authenticity, partly because he was Cresap’s son-in-law, and partly because he was a Federalist and a bitter opponent of Jefferson. Like all of his successors in the same line, he confused two entirely distinct things, viz., the justice of the charge against Cresap, and the authenticity of Logan’s speech. His controversy with Jefferson grew very bitter. He succeeded in showing clearly that Cresap was wrongly accused by Logan; he utterly failed to impugn the authenticity of the latter’s speech. Jefferson, thanks to a letter he received from Clark, must have known that Cresap had been accused wrongly; but he was irritated by the controversy, and characteristically refrained in any of his publications from doing justice to the slandered man’s memory.

A Mr. Jacobs soon afterward wrote a life of Cresap, in which he attempted both of the feats aimed at by Martin; it is quite an interesting production, but exceedingly weak in its arguments. Neville B. Craig, in the February, 1847, number of “The Olden Time,” a historical magazine, followed on the same lines. Finally Brantz Mayer, in his very interesting little book, “Logan and Cresap,” went over the whole matter in a much fairer manner than his predecessors, but still distinctly as an advocate; for though he collected with great industry and gave impartially all the original facts (so that from what he gives alone it is quite possible to prove that the speech is certainly genuine), yet his own conclusions show great bias. Thus he severely rules out any testimony against Cresap that is not absolutely unquestioned; but admits without hesitation any and every sort of evidence leaning against poor Logan’s character or the authenticity of his speech. He even goes so far (pp. 122, 123) as to say it is not a “speech” at all,—although it would puzzle a man to know what else to call it, as he also declares it is not a message,—and shows the animus of his work by making the gratuitous suggestion that if Logan made it at all he was probably at the time excited “as well by the cruelties he had committed as by liquor.”

It is necessary, therefore, to give a brief summary of a portion of the evidence in its favor, as well as of all the evidence against it. Jefferson’s Notes and Mr. Mayer’s book go fully into the matter.

The evidence in its favor is as follows:

(1) Gibson’s statement. This is the keystone of the arch. John Gibson was a man of note and of unblemished character; he was made a general by Washington, and held high appointive positions under Madison and Jefferson; he was also an Associate Judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Pennsylvania. Throughout his life he bore a reputation for absolute truthfulness. He was the messenger who went to Logan, heard the speech, took it down, and gave it to Lord Dunmore. We have his deposition, delivered under oath, that “Logan delivered to him the speech nearly as related by Mr. Jefferson in his Notes,” when the two were alone together, and that he “on his return to camp delivered the speech to Lord Dunmore,” and that he also at the time told Logan he was mistaken about Cresap. Brantz Mayer, who accepts his statement as substantially true, thinks that he probably only reported the substance of Logan’s speech, or so much of it as he could recollect; but in the State Department at Washington, among the Jefferson Papers (5-1-4), is a statement by John Anderson, a merchant in Fredericksburg, who was an Indian trader at Pittsburg in 1774; he says that he questioned Gibson as to whether he had not himself added something to the speech, to which Gibson replied that he had not changed it in any way, but had translated it literally, as well as he could, though he was unable to come up to the force of the expressions in the original.

This evidence itself is absolutely conclusive except on the supposition that Gibson was a malicious and infamous liar. The men who argue that the speech was fictitious are also obliged to explain what motive there could possibly have been for the deception; they accordingly advance the theory that it was part of Dunmore’s (imaginary) treacherous conduct, as he wished to discredit Cresap, because he knew—apparently by divination—that the latter was going to be a whig. Even granting the Earl corrupt motives and a prophetic soul, it remains to be explained why he should wish to injure an obscure borderer, whom nobody has ever heard of except in connection with Logan; it would have served the purpose quite as well to have used the equally unknown name of the real offender, Greathouse. The fabrication of the speech would have been an absolutely motiveless and foolish transaction; to which Gibson, a pronounced whig, must needs have been a party. This last fact shows that there could have been no intention of using the speech in the British interest.

(2) The statement of General George Rogers Clark. (Like the preceding, this can be seen in the Jefferson Papers.) Clark was present in Dunmore’s camp at the time. He says: “Logan’s speech to Dunmore now came forward as related by Mr. Jefferson and was generally believed and indeed not doubted to have been genuine and dictated by Logan—The Army knew it was wrong so far as it respected Cresap, and afforded an opportunity of rallying that Gentleman on the subject—I discovered that Cresap was displeased and told him that he must be a very great Man, that the Indians shouldered him with everything that had happened… . Logan is the author of the speech as related by Mr. Jefferson.” Clark’s remembrance of his rallying Cresap shows that the speech contained Cresap’s name and that it was read before the army; several other witnesses, whose names are not necessary to mention, simply corroborate Clark’s statements, and a large amount of indirect evidence to the same effect could be produced, were there the least necessity. (See Jefferson’s Notes, “The American Pioneer,” etc., etc.)

The evidence against the authenticity of the speech, outside of mere conjectures and inuendoes, is as follows:

(1) Logan called Cresap a colonel when he was really a captain. This inability of an Indian to discriminate accurately between these two titles of frontier militia officers is actually solemnly brought forward as telling against the speech.

(2) Logan accused Cresap of committing a murder which he had not committed. But, as we have already seen, Logan had made the same accusation in his unquestionably authentic letter, written previously; and many whites, as well as Indians, thought as Logan did.

(3) A Col. Benj. Wilson, who was with Dunmore’s army, says that “he did not hear the charge preferred in Logan’s speech against Cresap.” This is mere negative evidence, valueless in any event, and doubly so in view of Clark’s statement.

(4) Mr. Neville B. Craig, in “Olden Time,” says in 1847 that “many years before a Mr. James McKee, the brother of Mr. William Johnson’s deputy, had told him that he had seen the speech in the handwriting of one of the Johnsons … before it was seen by Logan.” This is a hearsay statement delivered just seventy-three years after the event, and it is on its face so wildly improbable as not to need further comment, at least until there is some explanation as to why the Johnsons should have written the speech, how they could possibly have gotten it to Logan, and why Gibson should have entered into the conspiracy.

(5) A Benjamin Tomlinson testifies that he believes that the speech was fabricated by Gibson; he hints, but does not frankly assert, that Gibson was not sent after Logan, but that Girty was; and swears that he heard the speech read three times and that the name of Cresap was not mentioned in it.

He was said in later life to bear a good reputation; but in his deposition he admits under oath that he was present at the Yellow Creek murder (“Olden Time,” II, 61; the editor, by the way, seems to call him alternately Joseph and Benjamin); and he was therefore an unconvicted criminal, who connived at or participated in one of the most brutal and cowardly deeds ever done on the frontier. His statement as against Gibson’s would be worthless anyhow; fortunately his testimony as to the omission of Cresap’s name from the speech is also flatly contradicted by Clark. With the words of two such men against his, and bearing in mind that all that he says against the authenticity of the speech itself is confessedly mere supposition on his part, his statement must be promptly set aside as worthless. If true, by the way, it would conflict with (4) Craig’s statement.

This is literally all the “evidence” against the speech. It scarcely needs serious discussion; it may be divided into two parts—one containing allegations that are silly, and the other those that are discredited.

There is probably very little additional evidence to be obtained, on one side or the other; it is all in, and Logan’s speech can be unhesitatingly pronounced authentic. Doubtless there have been verbal alterations in it; there is not extant a report of any famous speech which does not probably differ in some way from the words as they were actually spoken. There is also a good deal of confusion as to whether the council took place in the Indian town, or in Dunmore’s camp; whether Logan was sought out alone in his hut by Gibson, or came up and drew the latter aside while he was at the council, etc. In the same way, we have excellent authority for stating that, prior to the battle of the Great Kanawha, Lewis reached the mouth of that river on October 1st, and that he reached it on October 6th; that on the day of the attack the troops marched from camp a quarter of a mile, and that they marched three-quarters; that the Indians lost more men than the whites, and that they lost fewer; that Lewis behaved well, and that he behaved badly; that the whites lost 140 men, and that they lost 215, etc., etc. The conflict of evidence as to the dates and accessory details of Logan’s speech is no greater than it is as to the dates and accessory details of the murder by Greathouse, or as to all the preliminaries of the main battle of the campaign. Coming from backwoods sources, it is inevitable that we should have confusion on points of detail; but as to the main question there seems almost as little reason for doubting the authenticity of Logan’s speech, as for doubting the reality of the battle of! the Great Kanawha.

BOOK TWO

IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION (CONTINUED)

CHAPTER IV

GROWTH AND CIVIL ORGANIZATION OF KENTUCKY, 1776

BY THE end of 1775 Kentucky had been occupied by those who were permanently to hold it. Stout-hearted men, able to keep what they had grasped, moved in, and took with them their wives and children. There was also of course a large shifting element, composing, indeed, the bulk of the population: hunters who came out for the season; “cabinners,” or men who merely came out to build a cabin and partially clear a spot of ground, so as to gain a right to it under the law; surveyors, and those adventurers always to be found in a new country, who are too restless, or too timid, or too irresolute to remain.

The men with families and the young men who intended to make permanent homes formed the heart of the community, the only part worth taking into account. There was a steady though thin stream of such immigrants, and they rapidly built up around them a life not very unlike that which they had left behind with their old homes. Even in 1776 there was marrying and giving in marriage, and children were born in Kentucky. The newcomers had to settle in forts, where the young men and maidens had many chances for courtship. They married early, and were as fruitful as they were hardy.[1] Most of these marriages were civil contracts, but some may have been solemnized by clergymen, for the commonwealth received from the outset occasional visits from ministers.

These ministers belonged to different denominations, but were all sure of a hearing. The backwoodsmen were forced by their surroundings to exercise a grudging charity toward the various forms of religious belief entertained among themselves—though they hated and despised French and Spanish Catholics. When off in the wilderness they were obliged to take a man for what he did, not for what he thought. Of course there were instances to the contrary, and there is an amusing and authentic story of two hunters, living alone and far from any settlement, who quarreled because one was a Catholic and the other a Protestant. The seceder took up his abode in a hollow tree within speaking distance of his companion’s cabin. Every day on arising they bade each other good-morning; but not another word passed between them for the many months during which they saw no other white face.[2] There was a single serious and important, albeit only partial, exception to this general rule of charity. After the outbreak of the Revolution, the Kentuckians, in common with other backwoodsmen, grew to thoroughly dislike one religious body which they already distrusted; this was the Church of England, the Episcopal Church. They long regarded it as merely the persecuting ecclesiastical arm of the British Government. Such of them as had been brought up in any faith at all had, for the most part, originally professed some form of Calvinism; they had very probably learnt their letters from a primer which in one of its rude cuts represented John Rogers at the stake, surrounded by his wife and seven children, and in their after lives they were more familiar with the “Pilgrim’s Progress” than with any other book save the Bible; so that it was natural for them to distrust the successors of those who had persecuted Rogers and Bunyan.[3] Still, the border communities were, as times then went, very tolerant in religious matters; and of course most of the men had no chance to display, or indeed to feel, sectarianism of any kind, for they had no issue to join, and rarely a church about which to rally.

By the time Kentucky was settled the Baptists had begun to make headway on the frontier, at the expense of the Presbyterians. The rough democracy of the border welcomed a sect which was itself essentially democratic. To many of the backwoodsmen’s prejudices, notably their sullen and narrow hostility toward all rank, whether or not based on merit and learning, the Baptists’ creed appealed strongly. Where their preachers obtained foothold, it was made a matter of reproach to the Presbyterian clergymen that they had been educated in early life for the ministry as for a profession. The love of liberty, and the defiant assertion of equality, so universal in the backwoods, and so excellent in themselves, sometimes took very warped and twisted forms, notably when they betrayed the backwoodsmen into the belief that the true democratic spirit forbade any exclusive and special training for the professions that produce soldiers, statesmen, or ministers.

The fact that the Baptist preachers were men exactly similar to their fellows in all their habits of life, not only gave them a good standing at once, but likewise enabled them very early to visit the furthest settlements, traveling precisely like other backwoodsmen; and once there, each preacher, each earnest professor, doing bold and fearless missionary work, became the nucleus round which a little knot of true believers gathered. Two or three of them made short visits to Kentucky during the first few years of its existence. One, who went thither in the early spring of 1776, kept a journal[4] of his trip. He traveled over the Wilderness Road with eight other men. Three of them were Baptists like himself, who prayed every night; and their companions, though they did not take part in the praying, did not interrupt it Their journey through the melancholy and silent wilderness resembled in its incidents the countless other similar journeys that were made at that time and later. They suffered from cold and hunger and lack of shelter; they became footsore and weary, and worn out with driving the pack-horses. On the top of the lonely Cumberland Mountains they came upon the wolf-eaten remains of a previous traveler, who had recently been killed by Indians. At another place they met four men returning—cowards, whose hearts had failed them when in sight of the promised land. While on the great Indian war-trail they killed a buffalo, and henceforth lived on its jerked meat. One night the wolves smelt the flesh, and came up to the camp-fire; the strong hunting-dogs rushed out with clamorous barking to drive them away, and the sudden alarm for a moment made the sleepy wayfarers think that roving Indians had attacked them. When they reached Crab Orchard their dangers were for the moment past; all travelers grew to regard with affection the station by this little grove of wild apple-trees. It is worthy of note that the early settlers loved to build their homes near these natural orchards, moved by the fragrance and beauty of the bloom in spring.[5]

The tired Baptist was not overpleased with Harrodstown, though he there listened to the preaching of one of his own sect.[6] He remarked “a poor town it was in those days,” a couple of rows of smoky cabins, tenanted by dirty women and ragged children, while the tall, unkempt frontiersmen lounged about in greasy hunting-shirts, breech-clouts, leggings, and moccasins. There was little or no corn until the crops were gathered, and, like the rest, he had to learn to eat wild meat without salt. The settlers,—as is always the case in frontier towns where the people are wrapped up in their own pursuits and rivalries, and are obliged to talk of one another for lack of outside interests,—were divided by bickering, gossiping jealousies; and at this time they were quarreling as to whether the Virginian cabin-rights or Henderson’s land-grants would prove valid. As usual, the zealous Baptist preacher found that the women were the first to “get religion,” as he phrased it. Sometimes their husbands likewise came in with them; at other times they remained indifferent. Often they savagely resented their wives and daughtres being converted, visiting on the head of the preacher an anger that did not always find vent in mere words; for the backwoodsmen had strong, simple natures, powerfully excited for good or evil, and those who were not God-fearing usually became active and furious opponents of all religion.

It is curious to compare the description of life in a frontier fort as given by this undoubtedly prejudiced observer with the equally prejudiced, but golden instead of sombre hued, reminiscences of frontier life, over which the pioneers lovingly lingered in their old age. To these old men the long-vanished stockades seemed to have held a band of brothers, who were ever generous, hospitable, courteous, and fearless, always ready to help one another, never envious, never flinching from any foe.[7] Neither account is accurate; but the last is quite as near the truth as the first. On the border, as elsewhere, but with the different qualities in even bolder contrast, there was much both of good and bad, of shiftless viciousness and resolute honesty. Many of the hunters were mere restless wanderers, who soon surrendered their clearings to small farming squatters, but a degree less shiftless than themselves; the latter brought the ground a little more under cultivation, and then likewise left it and wandered onward, giving place to the third set of frontiersmen, the steady men who had come to stay. But often the first hunters themselves stayed and grew up as farmers and landed proprietors.[8] Many of the earliest pioneers, including most of their leaders, founded families, which took root in the land and flourish to this day, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the old-time Indian fighters becoming Congressmen and judges, and officers in the regular army and in the Federal and Confederate forces during the Civil War.[9] In fact, the very first comers to a wild and dangerous country are apt to be men with fine qualities of heart and head; it is not until they have partly tamed the land that the scum of the frontier drifts into it.[10]

In 1776, as in after years, there were three routes that were taken by immigrants to Kentucky. One led by backwoods trails to the Greenbriar settlements, and thence down the Kanawha to the Ohio[11]; but the travel over this was insignificant compared to that along the others. The two really important routes were the Wilderness Road, and that by water, from Fort Pitt down the Ohio River. Those who chose the latter way embarked in roughly built little flat-boats at Fort Pitt, if they came from Pennsylvania, or else at the old Red-stone Fort on the Monongahela, if from Maryland or Virginia, and drifted down with the current. Though this was the easiest method, yet the danger from Indians was so very great that most immigrants, the Pennsylvanians as well as the Marylanders, Virginians, and North Carolinians,[12] usually went overland by the Wilderness Road. This was the trace marked out by Boone, which to the present day remains a monument to his skill as a practical surveyor and engineer. Those going along it went on foot, driving their horses and cattle. At the last important frontier town they fitted themselves out with pack-saddles; for in such places two of the leading industries were always those of the pack-saddle maker and the artisan in deer leather. When there was need, the pioneer could of course make a rough pack-saddle for himself, working it up from two forked branches of a tree. If several families were together, they moved slowly in true patriarchal style. The elder boys drove the cattle, which usually headed the caravan; while the younger children were packed in crates of hickory withes and slung across the backs of the old, quiet horses, or else were seated safely between the great rolls of bedding that were carried in similar fashion. The women sometimes rode and sometimes walked, carrying the babies. The men, rifle on shoulder, drove the pack-train, while some of them walked spread out in front, flank, and rear, to guard against the savages.[13] A tent or brush lean-to gave cover at night. Each morning the men packed the animals while the women cooked breakfast and made ready the children. Special care had to be taken not to let the loaded animals brush against the yellow-jacket nests, which were always plentiful along the trail in the fall of the year; for in such a case the vicious swarms attacked man and beast, producing an immediate stampede, to the great detriment of the packs.[14] In winter the fords and mountains often became impassable, and trains were kept in one place for weeks at a time, escaping starvation only by killing the lean cattle; for few deer at that season remained in the mountains.

Both the water route and the Wilderness Road were infested by the savages at all times, and whenever there was open war the sparsely settled regions from which they started were likewise harried. When the Northwestern tribes threatened Fort Pitt and Fort Henry—or Pittsburg and Wheeling, as they were getting to be called,—they threatened one of the two localities which served to cover the communications with Kentucky; but it was far more serious when the Holston region was menaced; because the land travel was at first much the more important.

The early settlers of course had to suffer great hardship even when they reached Kentucky. The only two implements the men invariably carried were the axe and rifle, for they were almost equally proud of their skill as warriors, hunters, and woodchoppers. Next in importance came the sickle or scythe. The first three tasks of the pioneer farmer were to build a cabin, to make a clearing—burning the brush, cutting down the small trees, and girdling the large—and to plant corn. Until the crop ripened he hunted steadily, and his family lived on the abundant game, save for which it would have been wholly impossible to have settled Kentucky so early. If it was winter time, however, all the wild meat was very lean and poor eating, unless by chance a bear was found in a hollow tree, when there was a royal feast, the breast of the wild turkey serving as a substitute for bread.[15] If the men were suddenly called away by an Indian inroad, their families sometimes had to live for days on boiled tops of green nettles.[16] Naturally the children watched the growth of the tasseled corn with hungry eagerness until the milky ears were fit for roasting. When they hardened, the grains were pounded into hominy in the hominy-block, or else ground into meal in the rough hand-mill, made of two limestones in a hollow sycamore log. Until flax could be grown the women were obliged to be content with lint made from the bark of dead nettles. This was gathered in the springtime by all the people of a station acting together, a portion of the men standing guard while the rest, with the women and children, plucked the dead stalks. The smart girls of Irish ancestry spun many dozen cuts of linen from this lint, which was as fine as flax but not so strong.[17]

Neither hardship nor danger could render the young people downhearted, especially when several families, each containing grown-up sons and daughters, were living together in almost every fort. The chief amusements were hunting and dancing. There being no permanent ministers, even the gloomy Calvinism of some of the pioneers was relaxed. Long afterward one of them wrote, in a spirit of quaint apology, that “dancing was not then considered criminal,”[18] and that it kept up the spirits of the young people, and made them more healthy and happy; and recalling somewhat uneasily the merriment in the stations, in spite of the terrible and interminable Indian warfare, the old moralist felt obliged to condemn it, remarking that, owing to the lack of ministers of the gospel, the impressions made by misfortune were not improved.

Though obliged to be very careful and to keep their families in forts, and in spite of a number of them being killed by the savages,[19] the settlers in 1776 were able to wander about and explore the country thoroughly,[20] making little clearings as the basis of “cabin claims,” and now and then gathering into stations which were for the most part broken up by the Indians and abandoned.[21] What was much more important, the permanent settlers in the well-established stations proceeded to organize a civil government.

They by this time felt little but contempt for the Henderson or Transylvania government. Having sent a petition against it to the provincial authorities, they were confident that what faint shadow of power it still retained would soon vanish; so they turned their attention to securing a representation in the Virginia convention. All Kentucky was still considered as a part of Fincastle County, and the inhabitants were therefore unrepresented at the capital. They determined to remedy this; and after due proclamation, gathered together at Harrodstown early in June, 1776. During five days an election was held, and two delegates were chosen to go to Williamsburg, then the seat of government.

This was done at the suggestion of Clark, who, having spent the winter in Virginia, had returned to Kentucky in the spring. He came out alone and on foot, and by his sudden appearance surprised the settlers not a little. The first to meet him was a young lad,[22] who had gone a few miles out of Harrodstown to turn some horses on the range. The boy had killed a teal duck that was feeding in a spring, and was roasting it nicely at a small fire, when he was startled by the approach of a fine soldierly man, who hailed him: “How do you do, my little fellow? What is your name? Ar’n’t you afraid of being in the woods by yourself?” The stranger was evidently hungry, for on being invited to eat he speedily finished the entire duck; and when the boy asked his name he answered that it was Clark, and that he had come out to see what the brave fellows in Kentucky were doing, and to help them if there was need. He took up his temporary abode at Harrodstown—visiting all the forts, however, and being much in the woods by himself,—and his commanding mind and daring, adventurous temper speedily made him, what for ten critical years he remained, the leader among all the bold “hunters of Kentucky”—as the early settlers loved to call themselves.

He had advised against delegates to the convention being chosen, thinking that instead the Kentuckians should send accredited agents to treat with the Virginian Government. If their terms were not agreed to, he declared that they ought to establish forthwith an independent State; an interesting example of how early the separatist spirit showed itself in Kentucky. But the rest of the people were unwilling to go quite as far. They elected two delegates, Clark of course being one. With them they sent a petition for admission as a separate county. They were primarily farmers, hunters, Indian fighters—not scholars; and their petition was couched in English that was at times a little crooked; but the idea at any rate was perfectly straight, and could not be misunderstood. They announced that if they were admitted they would cheerfully co-operate in every measure to secure the public peace and safety, and at the same time pointed out with marked emphasis “how impolitical it would be to suffer such a Respectable Body of Prime Riflemen to remain in a state of neutrality” during the then existing revolutionary struggle.[23]

Armed with this document and their credentials, Clark and his companion set off across the desolate and Indian-haunted mountains. They traveled very fast, the season was extremely wet, and they did not dare to kindle fires for fear of the Indians; in consequence they suffered torments from cold, hunger, and especially from “scalded” feet. Yet they hurried on, and presented their petition to the Governor[24] and Council—the Legislature having adjourned. Clark also asked for five hundredweight of gunpowder, of which the Kentucky settlement stood in sore and pressing need. This the Council at first refused to give; whereupon Clark informed them that if the country was not worth defending, it was not worth claiming, making it plain that if the request was not granted, and if Kentucky was forced to assume the burdens of independence, she would likewise assume its privileges. After this plain statement the Council yielded. Clark took the powder down the Ohio River, and got it safely through to Kentucky; though a party sent under John Todd to convey it overland from the Limestone Creek was met at the Licking and defeated by the Indians, Clark’s fellow delegate being among the killed.

Before returning Clark had attended the fall meeting of the Virginia Legislature, and in spite of the opposition of Henderson, who was likewise present, he procured the admission of Kentucky as a separate county, with boundaries corresponding to those of the present State. Early in the ensuing year, 1777, the county was accordingly organized; Harrods-town, or Harrodsburg, as it was now beginning to be called, was made the county-seat, having by this time supplanted Boonesborough in importance. The court was composed of the six or eight men whom the Governor of Virginia had commissioned as justices of the peace; they were empowered to meet monthly to transact necessary business, and had a sheriff and clerk.[25] These took care of the internal concerns of the settlers. To provide for their defence a county lieutenant was created, with the rank of colonel,[26] who forthwith organized a militia regiment, placing all the citizens, whether permanent residents or not, into companies and battalions. Finally, two burgesses were chosen to represent the county in the General Assembly of Virginia.[27] In later years Daniel Boone himself served as a Kentucky burgess in the Virginia Legislature;[28] a very different body from the little Transylvanian Parliament in which he began his career as a law-maker. The old backwoods hero led a strange life: varying his long wanderings and explorations, his endless campaigns against savage men and savage beasts, by serving as road-maker, town-builder, and commonwealth-founder, sometimes organizing the frontiersmen for foreign war, and again doing his share in devising the laws under which they were to live and prosper.

But the pioneers were speedily drawn into a life-and-death struggle which engrossed their whole attention to the exclusion of all merely civil matters; a struggle in which their land became in truth what the Indians called it—a dark and bloody ground, a land with blood-stained rivers.[29]

It was impossible long to keep peace on the border between the ever-encroaching whites and their fickle and bloodthirsty foes. The hard, reckless, often brutalized frontiersmen, greedy of land and embittered by the memories of untold injuries, regarded all Indians with sullen enmity, and could not be persuaded to distinguish between the good and the bad.[30] The central government was as powerless to restrain as to protect these far-off and unruly citizens. On the other hand, the Indians were as treacherous as they were ferocious; Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots, and all.[31] While deceiving the commandants of the posts by peaceful protestations, they would steadily continue their ravages and murders; and while it was easy to persuade a number of the chiefs and warriors of a tribe to enter into a treaty, it was impossible to make the remainder respect it.[32] The chiefs might be for peace, but the young braves were always for war, and could not be kept back.[33]

In July, 1776, the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingo chiefs assembled at Fort Pitt and declared for neutrality[34]; the Iroquois ambassadors, who were likewise present, haughtily announced that their tribes would permit neither the British nor the Americans to march an army through their territory. They disclaimed any responsibility for what might be done by a few wayward young men; and requested the Dela wares and Shawnees to do as they had promised, and to distribute the Iroquois “talk” among their people. After the Indian fashion, they emphasized each point which they wished kept in mind by the presentation of a string of wampum.[35]

Yet at this very time a party of Mingos tried to kill the American Indian agents, and were only prevented by Cornstalk, whose noble and faithful conduct was so soon to be rewarded by his own brutal murder. Moreover, while the Shawnee chief was doing this, some of his warriors journeyed down to the Cherokees and gave them the war belt, assuring them that the Wyandots and Mingos would support them, and that they themselves had been promised ammunition by the French traders of Detroit and the Illinois.[36] On their return home this party of Shawnees scalped two men in Kentucky near the Big Bone Lick, and captured a woman; but they were pursued by the Kentucky settlers, two were killed and the woman retaken.[37]

Throughout the year the outlook continued to grow more and more threatening. Parties of young men kept making inroads on the settlements, especially in Kentucky; not only did the Shawnees, Wyandots, Mingos, and Iroquois[38] act thus, but they were even joined by bands of Ottawas, Pottawat-omies, and Chippewas from the lakes, who thus attacked the white settlers long ere the latter had either the will or the chance to hurt them.

Until the spring of 1777[39] the outbreak was not general, and it was supposed that only some three or four hundred warriors had taken up the tomahawk.[40] Yet the outlying settlers were all the time obliged to keep as sharp a lookout as if engaged in open war. Throughout the summer of 1776 the Kentucky settlers were continually harassed. Small parties of Indians were constantly lurking round the forts, to shoot down the men as they hunted or worked in the fields, and to carry off the women. There was a constant and monotonous succession of unimportant forays and skirmishes.

One band of painted marauders carried off Boone’s daughter. She was in a canoe with two other girls on the river near Boonesborough when they were pounced on by five Indians.[41] As soon as he heard the news, Boone went in pursuit with a party of seven men from the fort, including the three lovers of the captured girls. After following the trail all of one day and the greater part of two nights, the pursuers came up with the savages, and, rushing in, scattered or slew them before they could either make resistance or kill their captives. The rescuing party then returned in triumph to the fort.

The names of the lovers, in their order, were Samuel Henderson (a brother of Richard), John Holder, and Flanders Callaway. Three weeks after the return to the fort Squire Boone united in marriage the eldest pair of lovers, Samuel Henderson and Betsy Callaway. It was the first wedding that ever took place in Kentucky. Both the other couples were likewise married a year or two later.

The whole story reads like a page out of one of Cooper’s novels. The two younger girls gave way to despair when captured; but Betsy Callaway was sure they would be followed and rescued. To mark the line of their flight she broke off twigs from the bushes, and when threatened with the tomahawk for doing this, she tore off strips of her dress. The Indians carefully covered their trail, compelling the girls to walk apart, as their captors did, in the thick cane, and to wade up and down the little brooks.

Boone started in pursuit the same evening. All next day he followed the tangled trail like a bloodhound, and early the following morning came on the Indians, camped by a buffalo calf which they had just killed and were about to cook. The rescue was managed very adroitly; for had any warning been given the Indians would have instantly killed their captives, according to their invariable custom. Boone and Floyd each shot one of the savages, and the remaining three escaped almost naked, without gun, tomahawk, or scalping-knife. The girls were unharmed; for the Indians rarely molested their captives on the journey to the home towns, unless their strength gave out, when they were tomahawked without mercy.

Thus for two years the pioneers worked in the wilderness, harassed by unending individual warfare, but not threatened by any formidable attempt to oust them from the lands that they had won. During this breathing spell they established civil government, explored the country, planted crops, and built strongholds. Then came the inevitable struggle. When in 1777 the snows began to melt before the lengthening spring days, the riflemen who guarded the log forts were called on to make head against a series of resolute efforts to drive them from Kentucky.

[1] Imlay, p. 55, estimated that from natural increase the population of Kentucky doubled every fifteen years,—probably an exaggeration.

[2] Hale’s “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” p. 251.

[3] “Pioneer Life in Kentucky,” Daniel Drake, Cincinnati, 1870, p. 196 (an invaluable work).

[4] MS. autobiography of Rev. William Hickman. He was born in Virginia, February 4, 1747. A copy in Col. Durrett’s library at Louisville, Ky.

[5] There were at least three such “Crab-Orchard” stations in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The settlers used the word “crab” precisely as Shakespeare does.

[6] A Mr. Finley. Hickman MS.

[7] McAfee MSS.

[8] Do.

[9] Such was the case with the Clarks, Boones, Seviers, Shelbys, Robertsons, Logans, Cockes, Crocketts, etc.; many of whose descendants it has been my good-fortune personally to know.

[10] This is as true to-day in the Far West as it was formerly in Kentucky and Tennessee; at least to judge by my own experience in the Little Missouri region, and in portions of the Kootenai, Cœur d’Alêne, and Bighorn countries.

[11] McAfee MSS. See also “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” p. III. As Mr. Hale points out, this route, which was traveled by Floyd, Bullitt, the McAfees, and many others, has not received due attention, even in Colonel Speed’s invaluable and interesting “Wilderness Road.”

[12] Up to 1783 the Kentucky immigrants came from the backwoods of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, and were of almost precisely the same character as those that went to Tennessee. See Imlay, p. 168. At the close of the Revolutionary war, Tennessee and Kentucky were almost alike in population. But after that time the population of Kentucky rapidly grew varied, and the great immigration of upper-class Virginians gave it a peculiar stamp of its own. By 1796, when Logan was defeated for governor, the control of Kentucky had passed out of the hands of the pioneers; whereas in Tennessee the old Indian fighters continued to give the tone to the social life of the State, and remained in control until they died.

[13] McAfee MSS. Just as the McAfee family started for Kentucky, the wife of one of their number, George, was con fined. The others had to leave her; but at the first long halt the husband hurried back, only to meet his wife on the way; for she had ridden after them just three days after her con finement, taking her baby along.

[14] “Pioneer Biography,” James McBride (son of a pioneer who was killed by the Indians in 1789 in Kentucky), p. 183, Cincinnati, 1869. One of the excellent series published by Robert Clarke & Co., to whom American historians owe a special and unique debt of gratitude.

[15] McAfee MSS.

[16] McBride, II, 197.

[17] McAfee MSS.

[18] Do.

[19] Morehead, App. Floyd’s letter.

[20] They retained few Indian names; Kentucky in this respect differing from most other sections of the Union. The names were either taken from the explorers, as Floyd’s Fork; or from some natural peculiarity, as the Licking, so called from the number of game licks along its borders; or else they commemorated some incident. On Dreaming Creek Boone fell asleep and dreamed he was stung by yellow-jackets. The Eikhorn was so named because a hunter, having slain a monstrous bull elk, stuck up its horns on a pole at the mouth. At Bloody Run several men were slain. Eagle Branch was so called because of the many bald eagles round it. See McAfee MSS.

[21] Marshall, 45.

[22] Afterward General William Ray. Butler, p. 37.

[23] Petition of the committee of West Fincastle, dated June 20, 1776. It is printed in Col. John Mason Brown’s “Cattle of the Blue Licks” pamphlet.

[24] Patrick Henry.

[25] Among their number were John Todd (likewise chosen burgess—in these early days a man of mark often filled sev eral distinct positions at the same time), Benj. Logan, Rich ard Calloway, John Bowman, and John Floyd; the latter was an educated Virginian, who was slain by the Indians before his fine natural qualities had time to give him the place he would otherwise assuredly have reached.

[26] The first Colonel was John Bowman.

[27] John Dodd and Richard Calloway. See Diary of Geo. Rogers Clark, in 1776. Given by Morehead, p. 161.

[28] Butler, 166.

[29] The Iroquois, as well as the Cherokees, used these expressions concerning portions of the Ohio Valley. Hecke-welder, 118.

[30] State Department MSS., No. 147, Vol. VI, March 15, 1781.

[31] As one instance among many see Haldimand MSS., letter of Lt.-Col. Hamilton, August 17, 1778, where Girty reported, on behalf of the Delawares, the tribe least treacherous to the Americans, that even these Indians were only going in to Port Pitt and keeping up friendly relations with its garrison so as to deceive the whites, and that as soon as their corn was ripe they would move off to the hostile tribes.

[32] State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol. I, p. 107. Letter of Captain John Doughty.

[33] State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol. I, p. 115. Examination of John Leith.

[34] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, Vol. I, p. 36.

[35] “The Olden Time,” Neville B. Craig, II, p. 115.

[36] “Am. Archives,” 5th Series, Vol. I, p. III.

[37] Do., p. 137.

[38] Do., Vol. II, pp. 516, 1236.

[39] When Cornstalk was so foully murdered by the whites; although the outbreak was then already started.

[40] Madison MSS. But both the American statesmen and the Continental officers were so deceived by the treacherous misrepresentations of the Indians that they often greatly un derestimated the numbers of the Indians on the war-path; curiously enough, their figures are frequently much more erroneous than those of the frontiersmen. Thus the Madison MSS. and State Department MSS. contain statements that only a few hundred Northwestern warriors were in the field at the very time that two thousand had been fitted out at Detroit to act along the Ohio and Wabash; as we learn from De Peyster’s letter to Haldimand of May 17, 1780 (in the Haldimand MSS.).

[41] On July 14, 1776. The names of the three girls were Betsy and Fanny Callaway and Jemima Boone; See Boone’s Narrative, and Butler, who gives the letter of July 21, 1776, written by Col. John Floyd, one of the pursuing party.

CHAPTER V

THE WAR IN THE NORTHWEST, 1777–1778

IN THE fall of 1776 it became evident that a formidable Indian war was impending. At Detroit great councils were held by all the Northwestern tribes, to whom the Six Nations sent the white belt of peace, that they might cease their feuds and join against the Americans. The later councils were summoned by Henry Hamilton, the British Lieutenant-Governor of the Northwestern region, whose headquarters were at Detroit. He was an ambitious, energetic, unscrupulous man, of bold character, who wielded great influence over the Indians; and the conduct of the war in the West, as well as the entire management of frontier affairs, was intrusted to him by the British Government.[1] He had been ordered to enlist the Indians on the British side, and have them ready to act against the Americans in the spring[2]; and accordingly he gathered the tribes together. He himself took part in the war-talks, plying the Indians with presents and fire-water no less than with speeches and promises. The headmen of the different tribes, as they grew excited, passed one another black, red or bloody, and tomahawk belts, as tokens of the vengeance to be taken on their white foes. One Delaware chief still held out for neutrality, announcing that if he had to side with either set of combatants it would be with the “buckskins,” or backwoodsmen, and not with the red-coats; but the bulk of the warriors sympathized with the Half King of the Wyandots when he said that the Long Knives had for years interfered with the Indians’ hunting, and that now at last it was the Indians’ turn to threaten revenge.[3]

Hamilton was for the next two years the mainspring of Indian hostility to the Americans in the Northwest. From the beginning he had been anxious to employ the savages against the settlers, and when the home government bade him hire them he soon proved himself very expert, as well as very ruthless, in their use.[4] He rapidly acquired the venomous hatred of the backwoodsmen, who held him in peculiar abhorrence, and nicknamed him the “hair-buyer” general, asserting that he put a price on the scalps of the Americans. This allegation may have been untrue as affecting Hamilton personally; he always endeavored to get the war parties to bring in prisoners, and behaved well to the captives when they were in his power; nor is there any direct evidence that he himself paid out money for scalps. But scalps were certainly bought and paid for at Detroit[5]; and the commandant himself was accustomed to receive them with formal solemnity at the councils held to greet the war parties when they returned from successful raids.[6] The only way to keep the friendship of the Indians was continually to give them presents; these presents were naturally given to the most successful warriors; and the scalps were the only safe proofs of a warrior’s success. Doubtless the commandant and the higher British officers generally treated the Americans humanely when they were brought into contact with them; and it is not likely that they knew, or were willing to know, exactly what the savages did in all cases. But they at least connived at the measures of their subordinates. These were hardened, imbittered, men who paid for the zeal of their Indian allies accordingly as they received tangible proofs thereof; in other words, they hired them to murder non-combatants as well as soldiers, and paid for each life, of any sort, that was taken. The fault lay primarily with the British Government, and with those of its advisers who, like Hamilton, advocated the employment of the savages. They thereby became participants in the crimes committed; and it was idle folly for them to prate about having bidden the savages be merciful. The sin consisted in having let them loose on the borders; once they were let loose it was absolutely impossible to control them. Moreover, the British sinned against knowledge; for some of their highest and most trusted officers on the frontier had written those in supreme command, relating the cruelties practiced by the Indians upon the defenceless, and urging that they should not be made allies, but rather that their neutrality only should be secured.[7] The average American backwoodsman was quite as brutal and inconsiderate a victor as the average British officer; in fact, he was in all likelihood the less humane of the two; but the Englishman deliberately made the deeds of the savage his own. Making all allowance for the strait in which the British found themselves, and admitting that much can be said against their accusers, the fact remains that they urged on hordes of savages to slaughter men, women, and children along the entire frontier; and for this there must ever rest a dark stain on their national history.

Hamilton organized a troop of white rangers from among the French, British, and tories at Detroit. They acted as allies of the Indians, and furnished leaders to them. Three of these leaders were the tories McKee, Elliot, and Girty, who had fled together from Pittsburg[8]; they all three warred against their countrymen with determined ferocity. Girty won the widest fame on the border by his cunning and cruelty; but he was really a less able foe than the two others. McKee in particular showed himself a fairly good commander of Indians and irregular troops; as did likewise an Englishman named Caldwell, and two French partisans, De-Quindre and Lamothe, who were hearty supporters of the British.

Hamilton and his subordinates, both red and white, were engaged in what was essentially an effort to exterminate the borderers. They were not endeavoring merely to defeat the armed bodies of the enemy. They were explicitly bidden by those in supreme command to push back the frontier, to expel the settlers from the country. Hamilton himself had been ordered by his immediate official superior to assail the borders of Pennsylvania and Virginia with his savages, to destroy the crops and buildings of the settlers who had advanced beyond the mountains, and to give to his Indian allies,—the Hurons, Shawnees, and other tribes,—all the land of which they thus took possession.[9] With such allies as Hamilton had this order was tantamount to proclaiming a war of extermination, waged with appalling and horrible cruelty against the settlers, of all ages and sexes. It brings out in bold relief the fact that in the West the war of the Revolution was an effort on the part of Great Britain to stop the Westward growth of the English race in America, and to keep the region beyond the Alleghanies as a region where only savages should dwell.

All through the winter of ‘76’77 the Northwestern Indians were preparing to take up the tomahawk. Runners were sent through the leafless, frozen woods from one to another of their winter camps. In each bleak, frail village, each snow-hidden cluster of bark wigwams, the painted, half-naked warriors danced the war dance, and sang the war song, beating the ground with their war clubs and keeping time with their feet to the rhythmic chant as they moved in rings round the peeled post into which they struck their hatchets. The hereditary sachems, the peace chiefs, could no longer control the young men. The braves made ready their weapons and battle gear; their bodies were painted red and black, the plumes of the war eagle were braided into their long scalp locks, and some put on necklaces of bears’ claws, and headdresses made of panther skin, or of the shaggy and horned frontlet of the buffalo.[10] Before the snow was off the ground the war parties crossed the Ohio and fell on the frontiers from the Monongahela and Kanawha to the Kentucky.[11]

On the Pennsylvanian and Virginian frontiers the panic was tremendous. The people fled into the already existing forts, or hastily built others; where there were but two or three families in a place, they merely gathered into block-houses—stout log-cabins two stories high, with loop-holed walls, and the upper story projecting a little over the lower. The savages, well armed with weapons supplied them from the British arsenals on the Great Lakes, spread over the country; and there ensued all the horrors incident to a war waged as relentlessly against the most helpless non-combatants as against the armed soldiers in the field. Block-houses were surprised and burned; bodies of militia were ambushed and destroyed. The settlers were shot down as they sat by their hearthstones in the evening, or plowed the ground during the day; the lurking Indians crept up and killed them while they still-hunted the deer, or while they lay in wait for the elk beside the well-beaten game trails.

The captured women and little ones were driven off to the far interior. The weak among them, the young children, and the women heavy with child, were tomahawked and scalped as soon as their steps faltered. The able-bodied, who could stand the terrible fatigue, and reached their journey’s end, suffered various fates. Some were burned at the stake, others were sold to the French or British traders, and long afterward made their escape, or were ransomed by the relatives. Still others were kept in the Indian camps, the women becoming the slaves or wives of the warriors,[12] while the children were adopted into the tribe, and grew up precisely like their little red-skinned playmates. Sometimes, when they had come to full growth, they rejoined the whites; but generally they were enthralled by the wild freedom and fascination of their forest life, and never forsook their adopted tribesmen, remaining inveterate foes of their own color. Among the ever-recurring tragedies of the frontier, not the least sorrowful was the recovery of these long-missing children by their parents, only to find that they had lost all remembrance of and love for their father and mother, and had become irreclaimable savages, who eagerly grasped the first chance to flee from the intolerable irksomeness and restraint of civilized life.[13]

Among others, the stockade at Wheeling[14] was attacked by two or three hundred Indians; with them came a party of Detroit Rangers, marshaled by drum and fife, and carrying the British colors.[15] Most of the men inside the fort were drawn out by a stratagem, fell into an ambuscade, and were slain; but the remainder made good the defence, helped by the women, who ran the lead into bullets, cooled and loaded the guns, and even, when the rush was made, assisted to repel it by firing through the loop-holes. After making a determined effort to storm the stockade, in which some of the boldest warriors were slain while trying in vain to batter down the gates with heavy timbers, the baffled Indians were obliged to retire discomfited. The siege was chiefly memorable because of an incident which is to this day a staple theme for story-telling in the cabins of the mountaineers. One of the leading men of the neighborhood was Major Samuel McColloch, renowned along the border as the chief in a family famous for its Indian fighters, the dread and terror of the savages, many of whose most noted warriors he slew, and at whose hands he himself, in the end, met his death. When Wheeling was invested he tried to break into it, riding a favorite old white horse. But the Indians intercepted him, and hemmed him in on the brink of an almost perpendicular slope,[16] some three hundred feet high. So sheer was the descent that they did not dream any horse could go down it, and instead of shooting they advanced to capture the man whom they hated. McColloch had no thought of surrendering, to die by fire at the stake, and he had as little hope of resistance against so many foes. Wheeling short round, he sat back in the saddle, shifted his rifle into his right hand, reined in his steed, and spurred him over the brink. The old horse never faltered, but plunged headlong down the steep, bowlder-covered cliff-broken slope. Good luck, aided by the wonderful skill of the rider and the marvelous strength and surefootedness of his steed, rewarded, as it deserved, one of the most daring feats of horsemanship of which we have any authentic record. There was a crash, the shock of a heavy body, half springing, half falling, a scramble among loose rocks, and the snapping of saplings and bushes; and in another moment the awe-struck Indians above saw their unharmed foe, galloping his gallant white horse in safety across the plain. To this day the place is known by the name of McColloch’s leap.[17]

In Virginia and Pennsylvania the Indian outrages meant only the harassing of the borderers; in Kentucky they threatened the complete destruction of the vanguard of the white advance and, therefore, the stoppage of all settlement west of the Alleghanies until after the Revolutionary War, when very possibly the soil might not have been ours to settle. Fortunately Hamilton did not yet realize the importance of the Kentucky settlements, nor the necessity of crushing them, and during 1777 the war bands organized at Detroit were sent against the country round Pittsburg; while the feeble forts in the far Western wilderness were only troubled by smaller war parties raised among the tribes on their own account. A strong expedition, led by Hamilton in person, would doubtless at this time have crushed them.

As it was, there were still so few whites in Kentucky that they were greatly outnumbered by the invading Indians. They were, in consequence, unable to meet the enemy in the open field, and gathered in their stations or forted villages. Therefore the early conflicts, for the most part, took the form of sieges of these wooden forts. Such sieges had little in common with the corresponding operations of civilized armies. The Indians usually tried to surprise a fort; if they failed, they occasionally tried to carry it by open assault, or by setting fire to it, but very rarely, indeed, beleaguered it in form. For this they lacked both the discipline and the commissariat. Accordingly, if their first rush miscarried, they usually dispersed in the woods to hunt, or look for small parties of whites; always, however, leaving some of their number to hover round the fort and watch anything that took place. Masters in the art of hiding, and able to conceal themselves behind a bush, a stone, or a tuft of weeds, they skulked round the gate before dawn, to shoot the white sentinels; or they ambushed the springs, and killed those who came for water; they slaughtered all of the cattle that had not been driven in, and any one venturing incautiously beyond the walls was certain to be waylaid and murdered. Those who were thus hemmed in in the fort were obliged to get game on which to live; the hunters accordingly were accustomed to leave before daybreak, travel eight or ten miles, hunt all day at the risk of their lives, and return after dark. Being of course the picked men of the garrison, they often eluded the Indians, or slew them if an encounter took place, but very frequently indeed they were themselves slain. The Indians always trusted greatly to wiles and feints to draw their foes into their power. As ever in this woodland fighting, their superiority in hiding, or taking advantage of cover, counterbalanced the superiority of the whites as marksmen; and their war parties were thus at least a match, man against man, for the Kentuckians, though the latter, together with the Watauga men, were the best woodsmen and fighters of the frontier. Only a very few of the whites became, like Boone and Kenton, able to beat the best of the savages at their own game.

The innumerable sieges that took place during the long years of Indian warfare differed in detail, but generally closely resembled one another as regards the main points. Those that occurred in 1777 may be considered as samples of the rest; and accounts of these have been preserved by the two chief actors, Boone and Clark.[18] Boonesborough, which was held by twenty-two riflemen, was attacked twice, once in April and again in July, on each occasion by a party of fifty or a hundred warriors.[19] The first time the garrison was taken by surprise; one man lost his scalp, and four were wounded, including Boone himself, who had been commissioned as captain in the county militia.[20] The Indians promptly withdrew when they found they could not carry the fort by a sudden assault. On the second occasion the whites were on their guard, and though they had one man killed and two wounded (leaving but thirteen unhurt men in the fort), they easily beat off the assailants, and slew half a dozen of them. This time the Indians stayed round two days, keeping up a heavy fire, under cover of which they several times tried to burn the fort.[21]

Logan’s[22] station at St. Asaphs was likewise attacked; it was held by only fifteen gunmen. When the attack was made the women, guarded by part of the men, were milking the cows outside the fort. The Indians fired at them from the thick cane that still stood nearby, killing one man and wounding two others, one mortally.[23] The party, of course, fled to the fort, and on looking back they saw their mortally wounded friend weltering on the ground. His wife and family were within the walls; through the loopholes they could see him yet alive, and exposed every moment to death. So great was the danger that the men refused to go out to his rescue, whereupon Logan alone opened the gate, bounded out, and seizing the wounded man in his arms, carried him back unharmed through a shower of bullets. The Indians continued to lurk around the neighborhood, and the ammunition grew very scarce. Thereupon Logan took two companions and left the fort at night to go to the distant settlements on the Holston, where he might get powder and lead. He knew that the Indians were watching the Wilderness Road, and trusting to his own hardiness and consummate woodcraft, he struck straight out across the cliff-broken, wood-covered mountains, sleeping wherever night overtook him, and traveling all day long with the tireless speed of a wolf.[24] He returned with the needed stores in ten days from the time he set out. These tided the people over the warm months.

In the fall, when the hickories had turned yellow and the oaks deep red, during the weeks of still, hazy weather that mark the Indian summer, their favorite hunting season,[25] the savages again filled the land, and Logan was obliged to repeat his perilous journey.[26] He also continually led small bands of his followers against the Indian war and hunting parties, sometimes surprising and dispersing them, and harassing them greatly. Moreover he hunted steadily through the year to keep the station in meat, for the most skilful hunters were, in those days of scarcity, obliged to spend much of their time in the chase. Once, while at a noted game lick,[27] waiting for deer, he was surprised by the Indians, and by their fire was wounded in the breast and had his right arm broken. Nevertheless he sprang on his horse and escaped, though the savages were so close that one, leaping at him, for a moment grasped the tail of the horse. Every one of these pioneer leaders, from Clark and Boone to Sevier and Robertson, was required constantly to expose his life; each lost sons or brothers at the hands of the Indians, and each thinned the ranks of the enemy with his own rifle. In such a primitive state of society the man who led others was expected to show strength of body no less than strength of mind and heart; he depended upon his physical prowess almost as much as upon craft, courage, and headwork. The founder and head of each little community needed not only a shrewd brain and commanding temper, but also the thews and training to make him excel as woodsman and hunter, and the heart and eye to enable him to stand foremost in every Indian battle.

Clark spent most of the year at Harrodstown, taking part in the defence of Kentucky. All the while he was revolving in his bold, ambitious heart a scheme for the conquest of the Illinois country, and he sent scouts thither to spy out the land and report to him what they saw. The Indians lurked round Harrodstown throughout the summer; and Clark and his companions were engaged in constant skirmishes with them. Once, warned by the uneasy restlessness of the cattle (who were sure to betray the presence of Indians if they got sight or smell of them), they were able to surround a party of ten or twelve, who were hidden in a tall clump of weeds. The savages were intent on cutting off some whites who were working in a turnip patch two hundred yards from the fort; Clark’s party killed three—he himself killing one,—wounded another, and sold the plunder they took, at auction, for seventy pounds. At other times the skirmishes resulted differently, as on the occasion chronicled by Clark in his diary, when they “went out to hunt Indians; one wounded Squire Boone and escaped.”[28]

The corn was brought in from the cribs under guard; one day while shelling a quantity, a body of thirty-seven whites were attacked, and seven were killed or wounded, though the Indians were beaten off and two scalps taken. In spite of this constant warfare the fields near the forts were gradually cleared, and planted with corn, pumpkins, and melons; and marrying and mirth-making went on within the walls. One of Clark’s scouts, shortly after returning from the Illinois, got married, doubtless feeling he deserved some reward for the hardships he had suffered; on the wedding night Clark remarks that there was “great merriment.” The rare and infrequent expresses from Pittsburg or Williamsburg brought letters telling of Washington’s campaigns, which Clark read with absorbed interest. On the first of October, having matured his plans for the Illinois campaign, he left for Virginia, to see if he could get the government to help him put them into execution.

During the summer parties of backswoods militia from the Holston settlements—both Virginians and Carolinians—came out to help the Kentuckians in their struggle against the Indians; but they only stayed a few weeks, and then returned home. In the fall, however, several companies of immigrants came out across the mountains; and at the same time the small parties of hunters succeeded in pretty well clearing the woods of Indians. Many of the lesser camps and stations had been broken up and at the end of the year there remained only four—Boonesborough, Harrodstown, Logan’s station at St. Asaphs, and McGarry’s, at the Shawnee Springs. They contained in all some five or six hundred permanent settlers, nearly half of them being able-bodied riflemen.[29]

Early in 1778 a severe calamity befell the settlements. In January Boone went, with twenty-nine other men, to the Blue Licks to make salt for the different garrisons—for hitherto this necessary of life had been brought in, at great trouble and expense, from the settlements.[30] The following month, having sent three men back with loads of salt, he and all the others were surprised and captured by a party of eighty or ninety Miamis, led by two Frenchmen, named Baubin and Lorimer.[31] When surrounded, so that there was no hope of escape, Boone agreed that all should surrender on condition of being well treated. The Indians on this occasion loyally kept faith. The two Frenchmen were anxious to improve their capture by attacking Boonesborough; but the fickle savages were satisfied with their success, and insisted on returning to their villages. Boone was taken, first to Old Chillicothe, the chief Shawnee town on the Little Miami, and then to Detroit, where Hamilton and the other Englishmen treated him well, and tried to ransom him for a hundred pounds sterling. However, the Indians had become very much attached to him, and refused the ransom, taking their prisoner back to Chillicothe. Here he was adopted into the tribe, and remained for two months, winning the goodwill of the Shawnees by his cheerfulness and his skill as a hunter, and being careful not to rouse their jealousy by any too great display of skill at the shooting-matches.

Hamilton was urging the Indians to repeat their ravages of the preceding year; Mingos, Shawnees, Delawares, and Miamis came to Detroit, bringing scalps and prisoners. A great council was held at that post early in June.[32] All the Northwestern tribes took part, and they received war-belts from the Iroquois and messages calling on them to rise as one man. They determined forthwith to fall on the frontier in force. By their war parties, and the accompanying bands of tories, Hamilton sent placards to be distributed among the frontiersmen, endeavoring both by threat and by promise of reward to make them desert the patriot cause.[33]

In June a large war party gathered at Chillicothe to march against Boonesborough, and Boone determined to escape at all hazards, so that he might warn his friends. One morning before sunrise he eluded the vigilance of his Indian companions and started straight through the woods for his home, where he arrived in four days, having had but one meal during the whole journey of a hundred and sixty miles.[34]

On reaching Boonesborough he at once set about putting the fort in good condition; and being tried by court-martial for the capture at the Blue Licks, he was not only acquitted but was raised to the rank of major. His escape had probably disconcerted the Indian war party, for no immediate attack was made on the fort. After waiting until August he got tired of the inaction, and made a foray into the Indian country himself with nineteen men, defeating a small party of his foes on the Scioto. At the same time he learned that the main body of the Miamis had at last marched against Boonesborough. Instantly he retraced his steps with all possible speed, passed by the Indians, and reached the threatened fort a day before they did.

On the eighth day of the month the savages appeared before the stockade. They were between three and four hundred in number, Shawnees and Miamis, and were led by Captain Daigniau de Quindre, a noted Detroit partisan[35]; with him were eleven other Frenchmen, besides the Indian chiefs. They marched into view with British and French colors flying, and formally summoned the little wooden fort to surrender in the name of his Britannic Majesty. The negotiations that followed showed on the part of both whites and reds, a curious mixture of barbarian cunning and barbarian childishness; the account reads as if it were a page of Grseco-Trojan diplomacy.[36] Boone first got a respite of two days to consider De Quindre’s request, and occupied the time in getting the horses and cattle into the fort. At the end of the two days the Frenchman came in person to the walls to hear the answer to his proposition; whereupon Boone jeered at him for his simplicity, thanking him in the name of the defenders for having given them time to prepare for defence, and telling him that now they laughed at his attack. De Quindre, mortified at being so easily outwitted, set a trap in his turn for Boone. He assured the latter that his orders from Detroit were to capture, not to destroy, the garrison, and proposed that nine of their number should come out and hold a treaty. The terms of the treaty are not mentioned; apparently it was to be one of neutrality, Boonesborough acting as if it were a little independent and sovereign commonwealth, making peace on its own account with a particular set of foes. At any rate, De Quindre agreed to march his forces peaceably off when it was concluded.

Boone accepted the proposition, but being suspicious of the good-faith of his opponents, insisted upon the conference being held within sixty yards of the fort. After the treaty was concluded the Indians proposed to shake hands with the nine white treaty-makers, and promptly grappled them.[37] However, the borderers wrested themselves free, and fled to the fort under a heavy fire, which wounded one of their number.

The Indians then attacked the fort, surrounding it on every side and keeping up a constant fire at the loopholes. The whites replied in kind, but the combatants were so well covered that little damage was done. At night the Indians pitched torches of cane and hickory bark against the stockade, in the vain effort to set it on fire,[38] and De Quindre tried to undermine the walls, starting from the water mark. But Boone discovered the attempt, and sunk a trench as a countermine. Then De Quindre gave up and retreated on August 20th, after nine days’ fighting, in which the whites had but two killed and four wounded; nor was the loss of the Indians much heavier.[39]

This was the last siege of Boonesborough. Had De Quindre succeeded he might very probably have swept the whites from Kentucky; but he failed, and Boone’s successful resistance, taken together with the outcome of Clark’s operations at the same time, ensured the permanency of the American occupation. The old-settled region lying around the original stations, or forts, was never afterward seriously endangered by Indian invasion.

The savages continued to annoy the border throughout the year 1778. The extent of their ravages can be seen from the fact that, during the summer months those around Detroit alone brought in to Hamilton eighty-one scalps and thirty-four prisoners,[40] seventeen of whom they surrendered to the British, keeping the others either to make them slaves or else to put them to death with torture. During the fall they confined themselves mainly to watching the Ohio and the Wilderness Road, and harassing the immigrants who passed along them.[41]

Boone, as usual, roamed restlessly over the country, spying out and harrying the Indian war parties, and often making it his business to meet the incoming bands of settlers, and to protect and guide them on the way to their intended homes.[42] When not on other duty he hunted steadily, for game was still plentiful in Kentucky, though fast diminishing owing to the wanton slaughter made by some of the more reckless hunters.[43] He met with many adventures, still handed down by tradition, in the chase of panther, wolf, and bear, of buffalo, elk, and deer. The latter he killed only when their hides and meat were needed, while he followed unceasingly the dangerous beasts of prey, as being enemies of the settlers.

Throughout these years the obscure strife, made up of the individual contests of frontiersman and Indian, went on almost without a break. The sieges, surprises, and skirmishes in which large bands took part were chronicled; but there is little reference in the books to the countless conflicts wherein only one or two men on a side were engaged. The West could never have been conquered, in the teeth of so formidable and ruthless a foe, had it not been for the personal prowess of the pioneers themselves. Their natural courage and hardihood, and their long training in forest warfare,[44] made them able to hold their own and to advance step by step, where a peaceable population would have been instantly butchered or driven off. No regular army could have done what they did. Only trained woodsmen could have led the white advance into the vast forest-clad regions, out of which so many fair States have been hewn. The ordinary regular soldier was almost as helpless before the Indians in the woods as he would have been if blindfolded and opposed to an antagonist whose eyes were left uncovered.

Much the greatest loss, both to Indians and whites, was caused by this unending personal warfare. Every hunter, almost every settler, was always in imminent danger of Indian attack, and in return was ever ready, either alone or with one or two companions, to make excursions against the tribes for scalps and horses. One or two of Simon Kenton’s experiences during this year may be mentioned, less for their own sake than as examples of innumerable similar deeds that were done, and woes that were suffered, in the course of the ceaseless struggle.

Kenton was a tall, fair-haired man of wonderful strength and agility; famous as a runner and wrestler, an unerring shot, and a perfect woodsman. Like so many of these early Indian fighters, he was not at all bloodthirsty. He was a pleasant, friendly, and obliging companion; and it was hard to rouse him to wrath. When once aroused, however, few were so hardy as not to quail before the terrible fury of his anger. He was so honest and unsuspecting that he was very easily cheated by sharpers; and he died a poor man. He was a stanch friend and follower of Boone’s.[45] Once, in a fight outside the stockade at Boonesborough, he saved the life of his leader by shooting an Indian who was on the point of tomahawking him. Boone was a man of few words, cold and grave, accustomed to every kind of risk and hairbreadth escape, and as little apt to praise the deeds of others as he was to mention his own; but on this occasion he broke through his usual taciturnity to express his thanks for Kenton’s help and his admiration for Kenton himself.

Kenton went with his captain on the expedition to the Scioto. Pushing ahead of the rest, he was attracted by the sound of laughter in a canebrake. Hiding himself, he soon saw two Indians approach, both riding on one small pony, and chanting and laughing together in great good-humor. Aiming carefully, he brought down both at once, one dead and the other severely wounded. As he rushed up to finish his work, his quick ears caught a rustle in the cane, and looking around he saw two more Indians aiming at him. A rapid spring to one side on his part made both balls miss. Other Indians came up; but, at the same time, Boone and his companions appeared, running as fast as they could while still keeping sheltered. A brisk skirmish followed, the Indians retreated, and Kenton got the coveted scalp. When Boone returned to the fort, Kenton stayed behind with another man and succeeded in stealing four good horses, which he brought back in triumph.

Much pleased with his success he shortly made another raid into the Indian country, this time with two companions. They succeeded in driving off a whole band of one hundred and sixty horses, which they brought in safety to the banks of the Ohio. But a strong wind was blowing, and the river was so rough that in spite of all their efforts they could not get the horses to cross; as soon as they were beyond their depth the beasts would turn round and swim back. The reckless adventurers could not make up their minds to leave the booty; and stayed so long, waiting for a lull in the gale, and wasting their time in trying to get the horses to take to the water in spite of the waves, that the pursuing Indians came up and surprised them. Their guns had become wet and useless; and no resistance could be made. One of them was killed, another escaped, and Kenton himself was captured.

The Indians asked him if “Captain Boone” had sent him to steal horses; and when he answered frankly that the stealing was his own idea, they forthwith proceeded to beat him l’ustily with their ramrods, at the same time showering on him epithets that showed they had at least learned the profanity of the traders. They staked him out at night, tied so that he could move neither hand nor foot; and during the day he was bound on an unbroken horse, with his hands tied behind him so that he could not protect his face from the trees and bushes. This was repeated every day. After three days he reached the town of Chillicothe, stiff, sore, and bleeding.

Next morning he was led out to run the gantlet. A row of men, women, and boys, a quarter of a mile long, was formed, each with a tomahawk, switch, or club; at the end of the line was an Indian with a big drum, and beyond this was the council-house, which if he reached, would for the time being protect him. The moment for starting arrived; the big drum was beaten; and Kenton sprang forward in the race.[46] Keeping his wits about him he suddenly turned to one side and darted off with the whole tribe after him. His wonderful speed and activity enabled him to keep ahead, and to dodge those who got in his way, and by a sudden double he rushed through an opening in the crowd, and reached the council-house, having been struck but three or four blows.

He was no further molested that evening. Next morning a council was held to decide whether he should be immediately burnt at the stake, or should first be led round to the different villages. The warriors sat in a ring to pass judgment, passing the war club from one to another; those who pass it in silence thereby voted in favor of sparing the prisoner for the moment, while those who struck it violently on the ground thus indicated their belief that he should be immediately put to death. The former prevailed, and Kenton was led from town to town. At each place he was tied to the stake, to be switched and beaten by the women and boys; or else was forced to run the gantlet, while sand was thrown in his eyes and guns loaded with powder fired against his body to burn his flesh.

Once, while on the march, he made a bold rush for liberty, all unarmed though he was; breaking out of the line and running into the forest. His speed was so great and his wind so good that he fairly outran his pursuers; but by ill-luck, when almost exhausted, he came against another party of Indians. After this he abandoned himself to despair. He was often terribly abused by his captors; once one of them cut his shoulder open with an axe, breaking the bone.

His face was painted black, the death color, and he was twice sentenced to be burned alive, at the Pickaway Plains and at Sandusky. But each time he was saved at the last moment, once through a sudden spasm of mercy on the part of the renegade Girty, his old companion in arms at the time of Lord Dunmore’s war, and again by the powerful intercession of the great Mingo chief, Logan. At last, after having run the gantlet eight times and being thrice tied to the stake, he was ransomed by some traders. They hoped to get valuable information from him about the border forts, and took him to Detroit. Here he stayed until his battered, wounded body was healed. Then he determined to escape, and formed his plan in concert with two other Kentuckians, who had been in Boone’s party that was captured at the Blue Licks. They managed to secure some guns, got safely off, and came straight down through the great forests to the Ohio, reaching their homes in safety.[47]

Boone and Kenton have always been favorite heroes of frontier story,—as much so as ever were Robin Hood and Little John in England. Both lived to a great age, and did and saw many strange things, and in the backwoods cabins the tale of their deeds has been handed down in traditional form from father to son and to son’s son. They were known to be honest, fearless, adventurous, mighty men of their hands; fond of long, lonely wanderings; renowned as woodsmen and riflemen, as hunters and Indian fighters. In course of time it naturally came about that all notable incidents of the chase and woodland warfare were incorporated into their lives by the story-tellers. The facts were altered and added to by tradition year after year; so that the two old frontier warriors already stand in that misty group of heroes whose rightful title to fame has been partly overclouded by the haze of their mythical glories and achievements.

[1] Haldimand MSS. Sir Guy Carleton to Hamilton, September 26, 1777.

[2] Do., Carleton to Hamilton, October 6, 1776.

[3] “Am. Archives,” 1st Series, Vol. II, p. 517. There were several councils held at Detroit during this fall, and it is difficult—and not very important—to separate the incidents that occurred at each. Some took place before Hamilton arrived, which, according to his “brief account,” was November 9th. He asserts that he did not send out war parties until the following June; but the testimony seems conclusive that he was active in instigating hostility from the time of his arrival.

[4] Haldimand MSS. Germaine to Carleton, March 26, 1777.

[5] See the “American Pioneer,” I, 292, for a very curious account of an Indian, who by dividing a large scalp into two got fifty dollars for each half at Detroit.

[6] Haldimand MSS., passim; also Heckewelder, etc.

[7] E.g. in Haldimand MSS. Lieut.-Gov. Abbott to General Carleton, June 8, 1778.

[8] Haldimand MSS. Hamilton’s letter, April 25, 1778.

“April the 20th—Edward Hayle (who had undertaken to carry a letter from me to the Moravian Minister at Kushayh-king) returned, having executed his commission—he brought me a letter & newspapers from Mr. McKee who was Indian agent for the Crown and has been a long time in the hands of the Rebels at Port Pitt, at length has found means to make his escape with three other men, two of the name of Girty (mentioned in Lord Dunmore’s list) interpreters & Matthew Elliott the young man who was last summer sent down from this place a prisoner.—This last person I am informed has been at New York since he left Quebec, and probably finding the change in affairs unfavorable to the Rebels, has slipp’d away to make his peace here.

‘‘23d—Hayle went off again to conduct them all safe through the Villages having a letter & Wampum for that purpose. Alexander McKee is a man of good character, and has great influence with the Shawanese is well acquainted with the country & can probably give some useful intelligence, he will probably reach this place in a few days.”

[9] Haldimand MSS. Haldimand to Hamilton, August 6, 1778.

[10] For instances of an Indian wearing this buffalo cap, with the horns on, see Kercheval and De Haas.

[11] State Department MSS. for 1777, passim. So successful were the Indian chiefs in hoodwinking the officers at Fort Pitt that some of the latter continued to believe that only three or four hundred Indians had gone on the warpath.

[12] Occasionally we come across records of the women afterward making their escape; very rarely they took their half-breed babies with them. De Haas mentions one such case where the husband, though he received his wife well, always hated the copper-colored addition to his family; the latter, by the way, grew up a thorough Indian, could not be educated, and finally ran away, joined the Revolutionary army, and was never heard of afterward.

[13] For an instance where a boy finally returned, see “Trans- Alleghany Pioneers,” p. 119; see also pp. 126, 132, 133, for in stances of the capture and treatment of whites by Indians.

[14] Fort Henry. For an account of the siege, see De Haas, pp. 223-340. It took place in the early days of September.

[15] The accounts of the different sieges of Wheeling were first written down from the statements of the pioneers when they had grown very aged. In consequence, there is much uncertainty as to the various incidents. Thus there seems to be a doubt whether Girty did or did not command the Indians in this first siege. The frontiersmen hated Girty as they did no other man, and he was credited with numerous actions done by other white leaders of the Indians; the British accounts say comparatively little about him. He seems to have often fought with the Indians as one of their own number, while his associates led organized bands of rangers; he was thus more often brought into contact with the frontiersmen, but was really hardly as dangerous a foe to them as were one or two of history companions.

[16] The hill overlooks Wheeling; the slope has now much crumbled away, and in consequence has lost its steepness.

[17] In the West this feat is as well known as is Putnam’s similar deed in the North.

[18] In Boone’s narrative, written down by Filson, and in Clark’s diary, as given by Morehead. The McAfee MSS. and Butler’s history give some valuable information. Boone asserts that at this time the “Long Knives” proved themselves superior to their foe in almost every battle; but the facts do not seem to sustain him, though the statement was doubtless true as regards a few picked men. His estimate of the Indian numbers and losses must be received with great caution.

[19] Boone says April 15th and July 4th. Clark’s diary makes the first date April 24th, Boone says one hundred Indians, Clark “40 or 50.” Clark’s account of the loss on both sides agrees tolerably well with Boone’s. Clark’s diary makes the second attack take place on May 23d. His dates are probably correct, as Boone must have written only from memory.

[20] Two of the other wounded men were Captain John Todd and Boone’s old hunting companion, Stoner.

[21] Clark’s diary.

[22] Boone says July 19th, Clark’s diary makes it May 30th: Clark is undoubtedly right; he gives the names of the man who was killed and of the two who were wounded.

[23] The name of the latter was Burr Harrison; he died a fortnight afterward.—Clark.

[24] Not a fanciful comparison; the wolf is the only animal that an Indian or a trained frontiersman can not tire out in several days’ travel. Following a deer two days in light snow, I have myself gotten near enough to shoot it without difficulty.’

[25] Usually early in November.—McAfee MSS.

[26] Marshall, 50.

[27] These game licks were common, and were of enormous extent. Multitudes of game, through countless generations, had tramped the ground bare of vegetation, and had made deep pits and channels with their hoofs and tongues. See McAfee MSS. Sometimes the licks covered acres of ground, while the game trails leading toward them through the wood were as broad as streets, even 100 feet wide. I have myself seen small game licks, the largest not a hundred feet across, in the Selkirks, Cœur d’Alenes, and Bighorns, the ground all tramped up by the hoofs of elk, deer, wild sheep, and white goats, with deep furrows and hollows where the saline deposits existed. In the Little Missouri Bad Lands there is so much mineral matter that no regular licks are needed. As the game is killed off the licks become overgrown and lost.

[28] Clark’s diary, entry for July 9th.

[29] The McAfee MSS. give these four stations; Boone says there were but three. He was writing from memory, however, and was probably mistaken; thus he says there were at that time settlers at the Falls, an evident mistake, as there were none there till the following year. Collins, following Marshall, says there were at the end of the year only one hundred and two men in Kentucky,—sixty-five at Harrodstown, twenty-two at Boonesborough, fifteen at Logan’s. This is a mistake based on a hasty reading of Boone’s narrative, which gives this number for July, and particularly adds that after that date they began to strengthen. In the McAfee MSS. is a census of Harrodstown for the fall of 1777, which sums up: Men in service, 81; men not in service, 4; women, 24; children above ten, 12; children under ten, 58; slaves above ten, 12; slaves under ten, 7; total, 198. In October Clark in his diary records meeting fifty men with their families (therefore permanent settlers), on their way to Boone, and thirty-eight men on their way to Logan’s. At the end of the year, therefore, Boonesborough and Harrodstown must have held about two hundred souls apiece: Logan’s and McGarry’s were considerably smaller. The large proportion of young children testifies to the prolific nature of the Kentucky women, and also shows the permanent nature of the settlements. Two years previously, in 1775, there had been, perhaps, three hundred people in Kentucky, but very many of them were not permanent residents.

[30] See Clark’s Diary, entry for October 25, 1777.

[31] Haldimand MSS. B, 122, p. 35. Hamilton to Carleton, April 25, 1778. He says fourscore Miamis.

[32] Do., June 14, 1778.

[33] Do., April 25, 1778.

[34] Boone’s narrative.

[35] Haldimand MSS. Aug. 17, 1778, Girty reports that four hundred Indians have gone to attack “ Fort Kentuck.” Hamilton’s letter of Sept. 16th speaks of there being three hundred Shawnees with de Quindre (whom Boone calls Duquesne).

[36] See Boone’s narrative.

[37] Apparently there were eighteen Indians on the treaty-ground, but these were probably, like the whites, unarmed.

[38] McAfee MSS.

[39] De Quindre reported to Hamilton that, though foiled, he had but two men killed and three wounded. In Haldimand MSS., Hamilton to Haldimand, October 15, 1778. Often, however, these partisan leaders merely reported the loss in their own particular party of savages, taking no account of the losses in the other bands that had joined them—as the Miamis joined the Shawnees in this instance. But it is certain that Boone (or Filson, who really wrote the Narrative) greatly exaggerated the facts in stating that thirty- seven Indians were killed, and that the settlers picked up 125 pounds’ weight of bullets which had been fired into the fort.

[40] Haldimand MSS. Letter of Hamilton, September 16, 1778. Hamilton was continually sending out small war parties; thus he mentions that on August 25th a party of fifteen Miamis went out; on September 5th, thirty-one Miamis; on September 9th, one Frenchman, five Chippewas, and fifteen Miamis, etc.

[41] McAfee MSS.

[42] Marshall, 55.

[43] McAfee MSS.

[44] The last point is important. No Europeans could have held their own for a fortnight in Kentucky; nor is it likely that the Western men twenty years before, at the time of Braddock’s war, could have successfully colonized such a far-off country.

[45] See McClung’s “Sketches of Western Adventure,” pp. 86-117; the author had received from Kenton, and other pioneers, when very old, the tales of their adventures as young men. McClung’s volume contains very valuable incidental information about the customs of life among the borderers, and about Indian warfare; but he is a very inaccurate and untrustworthy writer; he could not even copy a printed narrative correctly (see his account of Slover’s and McKnight’s adventures), and his tales about Kenton must be accepted rather as showing the adventures incident to the life of a peculiarly daring Indian fighter than as being specifically and chronologically correct in Kenton’s individual case.

[46] For this part of Kenton’s adventures compare the “Last of the Mohicans.”

[47] McClung gives the exact conversations that took place between Kenton, Logan, Girty, and the Indian chiefs. They are very dramatic, and may possibly be true; the old pioneer would probably always remember even the words used on such occasions; but I hesitate to give them because McClung is so loose in his statements. In the account of this very incident he places it in ‘77, and says Kenton then accompanied Clark to the Illinois. But in reality—as we know from Boone—it took place in ‘78, and Kenton must have gone with Clark first.

CHAPTER VI

CLARK’S CONQUEST OF THE ILLINOIS, 1778

KENTUCKY HAD been settled, chiefly through Boone’s instrumentality, in the year that saw the first fighting of the Revolution, and it had been held ever since, Boone still playing the greatest part in the defence. Clark’s more far-seeing and ambitious soul now prompted him to try and use it as a base from which to conquer the vast region northwest of the Ohio.

The country beyond the Ohio was not, like Kentucky, a tenantless and debatable hunting-ground. It was the seat of powerful and warlike Indian confederacies, and of clusters of ancient French hamlets which had been founded generations before the Kentucky pioneers were born; and it also contained posts that were garrisoned and held by the soldiers of the British king. Virginia, and other colonies as well, made, it is true, vague claims to some of this territory.[1] But their titles were as unreal and shadowy as those acquired by the Spanish and Portuguese kings when the Pope, with empty munificence, divided between them the Eastern and the Western hemispheres. For a century the French had held adverse possession; for a decade and a half the British, not the colonial authorities, had acted as their unchallenged heirs; to the Americans the country was as much a foreign land as was Canada. It could only be acquired by force, and Clark’s teeming brain and bold heart had long been busy in planning its conquest. He knew that the French villages, the only settlements in the land, were the seats of the British power, the headquarters whence their commanders stirred up, armed, and guided the hostile Indians. If these settled French districts were conquered, and the British posts that guarded them captured, the whole territory would thereby be won for the Federal Republic, and added to the heritage of its citizens; while the problem of checking and subduing the Northwestern Indians would be greatly simplified, because the source of much of both their power and hostility would be cut off at the springs. The friendship of the French was invaluable, for they had more influence than any other people with the Indians.

In 1777, Clark sent two young hunters as spies to the Illinois country and to the neighborhood of Vincennes, though neither to them nor to any one else did he breathe a hint of the plan that was in his mind. They brought back word that, though some of the adventurous young men often joined either the British or the Indian war parties, yet that the bulk of the French population took but little interest in the struggle, were lukewarm in their allegiance to the British flag, and were somewhat awed by what they heard of the backwoodsmen.[2] Clark judged from this report that it would not be difficult to keep the French neutral if a bold policy, strong as well as conciliatory, was pursued toward them; and that but a small force would be needed to enable a resolute and capable leader to conquer at least the southern part of the country. It was impossible to raise such a body among the scantily garrisoned forted villages of Kentucky. The pioneers, though warlike and fond of fighting, were primarily settlers; their soldiering came in as a purely secondary occupation. They were not a band of mere adventurers, living by the sword and bent on nothing but conquest. They were a group of hard-working, hard-fighting freemen, who had come in with their wives and children to possess the land. They were obliged to use all their wit and courage to defend what they had already won without wasting their strength by grasping at that which lay beyond. The very conditions that enabled so small a number to make a permanent settlement forbade their trying unduly to extend its bounds.

Clark knew he could get from among his fellow-settlers some men peculiarly suited for his purpose, but he also realized that he would have to bring the body of his force from Virginia. Accordingly he decided to lay the case before Patrick Henry, then Governor of the State of which Kentucky was only a frontier county.

On October 1, 1777, he started from Harrods-burg,[3] to go over the Wilderness Road. The brief entries of his diary for this trip are very interesting and sometimes very amusing. Before starting he made a rather shrewd and thoroughly characteristic speculation in horseflesh, buying a horse for £12, and then “swapping’’ it with Isaac Shelby and getting £10 to boot. He evidently knew how to make a good bargain, and had the true backwoods passion for barter. He was detained a couple of days by that commonest of frontier mischances, his horses straying; a natural incident when the animals were simply turned loose on the range and looked up when required.[4] He traveled in company with a large party of men, women, and children who, disheartened by the Indian ravages, were going back to the settlements. They marched from fifteen to twenty miles a day, driving beeves along for food. In addition, the scouts at different times killed three buffalo[5] and a few deer, so that they were not stinted for fresh meat.

When they got out of the wilderness he parted from his companions and rode off alone. He now stayed at the settler’s house that was nearest when night overtook him. At a large house, such as that of the Campbells, near Abingdon, he was of course welcomed to the best, and treated with a generous hospitality, for which it would have been an insult to offer money in return. At the small cabins he paid his way; usually a shilling and threepence or a shilling and sixpence for breakfast, bed, and feed for the horse; but sometimes four or five shillings. He fell in with a Captain Campbell, with whom he journeyed a week, finding him “an agreeable companion.” They had to wait over one stormy day, at a little tavern, and probably whiled away the time by as much of a carouse as circumstances allowed; at any rate, Clark’s share of the bill when he left was £1 4s.[6] Finally, a month after leaving Harrods burg, having traveled six hundred and twenty miles, he reached his father’s house.[7]

After staying only a day at his old home, he set out for Williamsburg, where he was detained a fortnight before the State auditors would settle the accounts of the Kentucky militia, which he had brought with him. The two things which he deemed especially worthy of mention during this time were his purchase of a ticket in the State lottery, for three pounds, and his going to church on Sunday—the first chance he had had to do so during the year.[8] He was overjoyed at the news of Burgoyne’s surrender; and with a light heart he returned to his father’s house, to get a glimpse of his people before again plunging into the wilds.

After a week’s rest he went back to the capital, laid his plans before Patrick Henry, and urged their adoption with fiery enthusiasm.[9] Henry’s ardent soul quickly caught flame; but the peril of sending an expedition to such a wild and distant country was so great, and Virginia’s resources were so exhausted, that he could do little beyond lending Clark the weight of his name and influence. The matter could not be laid before the Assembly, nor made public in any way; for the hazard would be increased tenfold if the strictest secrecy were not preserved. Finally, Henry authorized Clark to raise seven companies, each of fifty men, who were to act as militia and to be paid as such.[10] He also advanced him the sum of twelve hundred pounds (presumably in depreciated paper), and gave him an order on the authorities at Pittsburg for boats, supplies, and ammunition; while three of the most prominent Virginia gentlemen[11] agreed in writing to do their best to induce the Virginia Legislature to grant to each of the adventurers three hundred acres of the conquered land, if they were successful. He was likewise given the commission of colonel, with instructions to raise his men solely from the frontier counties west of the Blue Ridge,[12] so as not to weaken the people of the seacoast region in their struggle against the British.

Thus the whole burden of making ready the expedition was laid on Clark’s shoulders. The hampered Virginian authorities were able to give him little beyond their goodwill. He is rightfully entitled to the whole glory; the plan and execution were both his. It was an individual rather than a State or national enterprise.

Governor Henry’s open letter of instructions merely ordered Clark to go to the relief of Kentucky. He carried with him also the secret letter which bade him attack the Illinois regions; for he had decided to assail this first, because, if defeated, he would then be able to take refuge in the Spanish dominions beyond the Mississippi. He met with the utmost difficulty in raising men. Some were to be sent to him from the Holston overland, to meet him in Kentucky; but a combination of accidents resulted in his getting only a dozen or so from this source.[13] Around Pittsburg the jealousy between the Virginians and Pennsylvanians hampered him greatly. Moreover, many people were strongly opposed to sending any men to Kentucky at all, deeming the drain on their strength more serious than the value of the new land warranted; for they were too short-sighted rightly to estimate what the frontiersmen had really done. When he had finally raised his troops he was bothered by requests from the different forts to aid detachments of the local militia in expeditions against bands of marauding Indians.

But Clark never for a moment wavered or lost sight of his main object. He worked steadily on, heedless of difficulty and disappointment, and late in the spring at last got together four small companies of frontiersmen from the clearings and the scattered hunters’ camps. In May, 1778, he left the Redstone settlements, taking not only his troops—one hundred and fifty in all[14]—but also a considerable number of private adventurers and settlers with their families. He touched at Pittsburg and Wheeling to get his stores. Then the flotilla of clumsy flat-boats, manned by tall riflemen, rowed and drifted cautiously down the Ohio between the melancholy and unbroken reaches of Indian-haunted forest. The presence of the families shows that even this expedition had the usual peculiar Western character of being undertaken half for conquest, half for settlement.

He landed at the mouth of the Kentucky, but rightly concluded that as a starting-point against the British posts it would be better to choose a place further West, so he drifted on down the stream, and on the 27th of May[15] reached the Falls of the Ohio, where the river broke into great rapids or riffles of swift water. This spot he chose, both because from it he could threaten and hold in check the different Indian tribes, and because he deemed it wise to have some fort to protect in the future the craft that might engage in the river trade, when they stopped to prepare for the passage of the rapids. Most of the families that had come with him had gone off to the interior of Kentucky, but several were left, and these settled on an island near the falls where they raised a crop of corn; and in the autumn they moved to the mainland. On the site thus chosen by the clear-eyed frontier leader there afterward grew up a great city, named in honor of the French king, who was then our ally. Clark may fairly be called its founder.[16]

Here Clark received news of the alliance with France, which he hoped would render easier his task of winning over the habitants of the Illinois. He was also joined by a few daring Kentuckians, including Kenton, and by the only Holston company that had yet arrived. He now disclosed to his men the real object of his expedition. The Kentuckians, and those who had come down the river with him, hailed the adventure with eager enthusiasm, pledged him their hearty support, and followed him with stanch and unflinching loyalty. But the Holston recruits, who had not come under the spell of his personal influence, murmured against him. They had not reckoned on an expedition so long and so dangerous, and in the night most of them left the camp and fled into the woods. The Kentuckians, who had horses, pursued the deserters, with orders to kill any who resisted; but all save six or eight escaped.

Yet they suffered greatly for their crime, and endured every degree of hardship and fatigue, for the Kentuckians spurned them from the gates of the wooden forts, and would not for a long time suffer them to enter, hounding them back to the homes they had dishonored. They came from among a bold and adventurous people, and their action was due rather to wayward and sullen disregard of authority than to cowardice.

When the pursuing horsemen came back a day of mirth and rejoicing was spent between the troops who were to stay behind to guard Kentucky and those who were to go onward to conquer Illinois. On the 24th of June Clark’s boats put out from shore, and shot the falls at the very moment that there was a great eclipse of the sun, at which the frontiersmen wondered greatly, but for the most part held it to be a good omen.

Clark had weeded out all those whom he deemed unable to stand fatigue and hardship; his four little companies were of picked men, each with a good captain.[17] His equipment was as light as that of an Indian war party, for he knew better than to take a pound of baggage that could possibly be spared.

He intended to land some three leagues below the entrance of the Tennessee River,[18] thence to march on foot against the Illinois towns; for he feared discovery if he should attempt to ascend the Mississippi, the usual highway by which the fur traders went up to the quaint French hamlets that lay between the Kaskaskia and the Illinois rivers. Accordingly he double-manned his oars and rowed night and day until he reached a small island off the mouth of the Tennessee, where he halted to make his final preparations, and was there joined by a little party of American hunters,[19] who had recently been in the French settlements. The meeting was most fortunate. The hunters entered eagerly into Clark’s plans, joining him for the campaign; and they gave him some very valuable information. They told him that the royal commandant was a Frenchman, Rocheblave, whose headquarters were at the town of Kaskaskia; that the fort was in good repair, the militia were well drilled and in constant readiness to repel attack, while spies were continually watching the Mississippi, and the Indians and the coureurs des bois were warned to be on the lookout for any American force. If the party were discovered in time the hunters believed the French would undoubtedly gather together instantly to repel them, having been taught to hate and dread the backwoodsmen as more brutal and terrible than any Indians; and in such an event the strength of the works and the superiority of the French in numbers would render the attack very hazardous. But they thought that a surprise would enable Clark to do as he wished, and they undertook to guide him by the quickest and shortest route to the towns.

Clark was rather pleased than otherwise to learn of the horror with which the French regarded the backwoodsmen. He thought it would render them more apt to be panic-struck when surprised, and also more likely to feel a strong revulsion of gratitude when they found that the Americans meant them well and not ill. Taking their new allies for guides, the little body of less than two hundred men started north across the wilderness, scouts being scattered out well ahead of them, both to kill game for their subsistence and to see that their march was not discovered by any straggling Frenchman or Indian. The first fifty miles led through tangled and pathless forest, the toil of traveling being very great. After that the work was less difficult as they got out among the prairies, but on these great level meadows they had to take extra precautions to avoid being seen. Once the chief guide got bewildered and lost himself; he could no longer tell the route, nor whither it was best to march.[20] The whole party was at once cast into the utmost confusion; but Clark soon made the guide understand that he was himself in greater jeopardy than any one else, and would forfeit his life if he did not guide them straight. Not knowing the man, Clark thought he might be treacherous; and, as he wrote an old friend, he was never in his life in such a rage as when he found his troops wandering at random in a country where, at any moment, they might blunder on several times their number of hostile Indians; while, if they were discovered by any one at all, the whole expedition was sure to miscarry. However, the guide proved to be faithful; after a couple of hours he found his bearings once more, and guided the party straight to their destination.

On the evening of the fourth of July[21] they reached the river Kaskaskia, within three miles of the town, which lay on the further bank. They kept in the woods until after it grew dusk, and then marched silently to a little farm on the hither side of the river, a mile from the town. The family were taken prisoners, and from them Clark learned that some days before the townspeople had been alarmed at the rumor of a possible attack; but that their suspicions had been lulled, and they were then off their guard. There were a great many men in the town, but almost all French, the Indians having for the most part left. The account proved correct. Rocheblave, the Creole commandant, was sincerely attached to the British interest. He had been much alarmed early in the year by the reports brought to him by Indians that the Americans were in Kentucky and elsewhere beyond the Alleghanies. He had written repeatedly to Detroit, asking that regulars should be sent him, and that he might himself be replaced by a commandant of English birth; for though the French were well-disposed toward the crown, they had been frightened by the reports of the ferocity of the backwoodsmen, and the Indians were fickle. In his letters he mentioned that the French were much more loyal than the men of English parentage. Hamilton found it impossible to send him reinforcements, however, and he was forced to do the best he could without them; but he succeeded well in his endeavors to organize troops, as he found the Creole militia very willing to serve, and the Indians extremely anxious to attack the Americans.[22] He had under his orders two or three times as many men as Clark, and he would certainly have made a good fight if he had not been surprised. It was only Clark’s audacity and the noiseless speed of his movements that gave him a chance of success with the odds so heavily against him.

Getting boats the American leader ferried his men across the stream under cover of the darkness and in profound silence; the work occupying about two hours. He then approached Kaskaskia under cover of the night, dividing his force into two divisions, one being spread out to surround the town so that none might escape, while he himself led the other up to the walls of the fort.

Inside the fort the lights were lit, and through the windows came the sounds of violins. The officers of the post had given a ball, and the mirth-loving Creoles, young men and girls, were dancing and reveling within, while the sentinels had left their posts. One of his captives showed Clark a postern-gate by the river-side, and through this he entered the fort, having placed his men round about at the entrance. Advancing to the great hall where the revel was held, he leaned silently with folded arms against the door-post, looking at the dancers. An Indian, lying on the floor of the entry, gazed intently on the stranger’s face as the light from the torches within flickered across it, and suddenly sprang to his feet uttering the unearthly war-whoop. Instantly the dancing ceased; the women screamed, while the men ran toward the door. But Clark, standing unmoved and with unchanged face, grimly bade them continue their dancing, but to remember that they now danced under Virginia and not Great Britain.[23] At the same time his men burst into the fort, and seized the French officers, including the commandant, Rocheblave.[24]

Immediately Clark had every street secured, and sent runners through the town ordering the people to keep close to their houses on pain of death; and by daylight he had them all disarmed. The backwoodsmen patrolled the town in little squads, while the French in silent terror cowered within their low-roofed houses. Clark was quite willing that they should fear the worst; and their panic was very great. The unlooked-for and mysterious approach and sudden onslaught of the backwoodsmen, their wild and uncouth appearance, and the ominous silence of their commander, all combined to fill the French with fearful forebodings for their future fate.[25]

Next morning a deputation of the chief men waited upon Clark; and thinking themselves in the hands of mere brutal barbarians, all they dared to do was to beg for their lives, which they did, says Clark, “with the greatest servancy [saying] they were willing to be slaves to save their families,” though the bolder spirits could not refrain from cursing their fortune that they had not been warned in time to defend themselves. Now came Clark’s chance for his winning stroke. He knew it was hopeless to expect his little band permanently to hold down a much more numerous hostile population, that was closely allied to many surrounding tribes of warlike Indians; he wished above all things to convert the inhabitants into ardent adherents of the American Government.

So he explained at length that, though the Americans came as conquerors, who by the laws of war could treat the defeated as they wished, yet it was ever their principle to free, not to enslave, the people with whom they came in contact. If the French chose to become loyal citizens, and to take the oath of fidelity to the Republic, they should be welcomed to all the privileges of Americans; those who did not so choose should be allowed to depart from the land in peace with their families.

The mercurial Creoles who listened to his speech passed rapidly from the depth of despair to the height of joy. Instead of bewailing their fate they now could not congratulate themselves enough on their good fortune. The crowning touch to their happiness was given by Clark when he told the priest, Pierre Gibault, in answer to a question as to whether the Catholic Church could be opened, that an American commander had nothing to do with any church save to defend it from insult, and that by the laws of the Republic his religion had as great privileges as any other. With that they all returned in noisy joy to their families, while the priest, a man of ability and influence, became thenceforth a devoted and effective champion of the American cause.

The only person whom Clark treated harshly was M. Rocheblave, the commandant, who when asked to dinner, responded in very insulting terms. Thereupon Clark promptly sent him as a prisoner to Virginia (where he broke his parole and escaped), and sold his slaves for five hundred pounds, which was distributed among the troops as prize-money.

A small detachment of the Americans, accompanied by a volunteer company of French militia, at once marched rapidly on Cahokia. The account of what had happened in Kaskaskia, and the news of the alliance between France and America, and the enthusiastic advocacy of Clark’s new friends, soon converted Cahokia; and all of its inhabitants, like those of Kaskaskia, took the oath of allegiance to America. Almost at the same time the priest Gibault volunteered to go, with a few of his compatriots, to Vincennes, and there endeavor to get the people to join the Americans, as being their natural friends and allies. He started on his mission at once, and on the first of August returned to Clark with the news that he had been completely successful, that the entire population, after having gathered in the church to hear him, had taken the oath of allegiance, and that the American flag floated over their fort.[26] No garrison could be spared to go to Vincennes; so one of the captains[27] was sent thither alone to take command.

The priest Gibault had given convincing proof of his loyalty. He remarked to Clark rather dryly that he had, properly speaking, nothing to do with the temporal affairs of his flock, but that now and then he was able to give them such hints in a spiritual way as would tend to increase their devotion to their new friends.

Clark now found himself in a position of the utmost difficulty. With a handful of unruly backwoodsmen, imperfectly disciplined and kept under control only by his own personal influence, he had to protect and govern a region as large as any European kingdom. Moreover, he had to keep content and loyal a population of alien race, creed, and language, while he held his own against the British and against numerous tribes of Indians, deeply imbittered against all Americans and as bloodthirsty and treacherous as they were warlike. It may be doubted if there was another man in the West who possessed the daring and resolution, the tact, energy, and executive ability necessary for the solution of so knotty a series of problems.

He was hundreds of miles from the nearest post containing any American troops; he was still further from the seat of government. He had no hope whatever of getting reinforcements or even advice and instruction for many months, probably not for a year; and he was thrown entirely on his own resources and obliged to act in every respect purely on his own responsibility.

Governor Patrick Henry, although leaving everything in the last resort to Clark’s discretion, had evidently been very doubtful whether a permanent occupation of the territory was feasible,[28] though both he, and especially Jefferson, recognized the important bearing that its acquisition would have upon the settlement of the Northwestern boundary, when the time came to treat for peace. Probably Clark himself had not at first appreciated all the possibilities that lay within his conquest, but he was fully alive to them now and saw that, provided he could hold on to it, he added a vast and fertile territory to the domain of the Union. To the task of keeping it he now bent all his energies.

The time of service of his troops had expired, and they were anxious to go home. By presents and promises he managed to enlist one hundred of them for eight months longer. Then, to color his staying with so few men, he made a feint of returning to the Falls, alleging as a reason his entire confidence in the loyalty of his French friends and his trust in their capacity to defend themselves. He hoped that this would bring out a remonstrance from the inhabitants, who, by becoming American citizens, had definitely committed themselves against the British. The result was such as he expected. On the rumor of his departure, the inhabitants in great alarm urged him to stay, saying that otherwise the British would surely retake the post. He made a show of reluctantly yielding to their request, and consented to stay with two companies; and then finding that many of the more adventurous young Creoles were anxious to take service, he enlisted enough of them to fill up all four companies to their original strength. His whole leisure was spent in drilling the men, Americans and French alike, and in a short time he turned them into as orderly and well disciplined a body as could be found in any garrison of regulars.

He also established very friendly relations with the Spanish captains of the scattered creole villages across the Mississippi, for the Spaniards were very hostile to the British, and had not yet begun to realize that they had even more to dread from the Americans. Clark has recorded his frank surprise at finding the Spanish commandant, who lived at St. Louis, a very pleasant and easy companion, instead of haughty and reserved, as he had supposed all Spaniards were.

The most difficult, and among the most important, of his tasks, was dealing with the swarm of fickle and treacherous savage tribes that surrounded him. They had hitherto been hostile to the Americans; but being great friends of the Spaniards and French they were much confused by the change in the sentiments of the latter, and by the sudden turn affairs had taken.

Some volunteers—Americans, French, and friendly Indians—were sent to the aid of the American captain at Vincennes, and the latter, by threats and promises, and a mixture of diplomatic speech-making with a show of force, contrived, for the time being, to pacify the immediately neighboring tribes.

Clark took upon himself the greater task of dealing with a huge horde of savages, representing every tribe between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, who had come to Illinois, some from a distance of five hundred miles, to learn accurately all that had happened, and to hear for themselves what the Long Knives had to say. They gathered to meet him at Cahokia, chiefs and warriors of every grade; among them were Ottawas and Chippewas, Pottawatomies, Sacs, and Foxes, and others belonging to tribes whose very names have perished. The straggling streets of the dismayed little town were thronged with many hundreds of dark-browed, sullen-looking savages, grotesque in look and terrible in possibility. They strutted to and fro in their dirty finery, or lounged round the houses, inquisitive, importunate, and insolent, hardly concealing a lust for bloodshed and plunder that the slightest mishap was certain to render ungovernable.

Fortunately Clark knew exactly how to treat them. He thoroughly understood their natures, and was always on his guard, while seemingly perfectly confident; and he combined conciliation with firmness and decision, and above all with prompt rapidity of action.

For the first two or three days no conclusion was reached, though there was plenty of speech-making. But on the night of the third a party of turbulent warriors[29] endeavored to force their way into the house where he was lodging, and to carry him off. Clark, who, as he records, had been “under some apprehensions among such a number of Devils,” was anticipating treachery. His guards were at hand, and promptly seized the savages; while the townspeople took the alarm and were under arms in a couple of minutes, thus convincing the Indians that their friendship for the Americans was not feigned.

Clark instantly ordered the French militia to put the captives, both chiefs and warriors, in irons. He had treated the Indians well, and had not angered them by the harshness and brutality that so often made them side against the English or Americans and in favor of the French; but he knew that any signs of timidity would be fatal. His boldness and decision were crowned with complete success. The crestfallen prisoners humbly protested that they were only trying to find out if the French were really friendly to Clark, and begged that they might be released. He answered with haughty indifference, and refused to release them, even when the chiefs of the other tribes came up to intercede. Indians and whites alike were in the utmost confusion, every man distrusting what the moment might bring forth. Clark continued seemingly wholly unmoved, and did not even shift his lodgings to the fort, remaining in a house in the town, but he took good care to secretly fill a large room adjoining his own with armed men, while the guards were kept ready for instant action. To make his show of indifference complete, he “assembled a Number of Gentlemen and Ladies and danced nearly the whole Night.” The perplexed savages, on the other hand, spent the hours of darkness in a series of councils among themselves.

Next morning he summoned all the tribes to a grand council, releasing the captive chiefs, that he might speak to them in the presence of their friends and allies. The preliminary ceremonies were carefully executed in accordance with the rigid Indian etiquette. Then Clark stood up in the midst of the rings of squatted warriors, while his riflemen clustered behind him in their tasseled hunting-shirts, travel-torn and weather-beaten. He produced the bloody war-belt of wampum, and handed it to the chiefs whom he had taken captive, telling the assembled tribes that he scorned alike their treachery and their hostility; that he would be thoroughly justified in putting them to death, but that instead he would have them escorted safely from the town, and after three days would begin war upon them. He warned them that if they did not wish their own women and children massacred, they must stop killing those of the Americans. Pointing to the war-belt, he challenged them, on behalf of his people, to see which would make it the most bloody; and he finished by telling them that while they stayed in his camp they should be given food and strong drink,[30] and that now he had ended his talk to them, and he wished them to speedily depart.

Not only the prisoners, but all the other chiefs in turn forthwith rose, and in language of dignified submission protested their regret at having been led astray by the British, and their determination thenceforth to be friendly with the Americans.

In response Clark again told them that he came not as a counselor but as a warrior, not begging for a truce but carrying in his right hand peace and in his left hand war; save only that to a few of their worst men he intended to grant no terms whatever. To those who were friendly he, too, would be a friend, but if they chose war, he would call from the Thirteen Council Fires[31] warriors so numerous that they would darken the land, and from that time on the red people would hear no sound but that of the birds that lived on blood. He went on to tell them that there had been a mist before their eyes, but that he would clear away the cloud and would show them the right of the quarrel between the Long Knives and the King who dwelt across the great sea; and then he told them about the revolt in terms which would almost have applied to a rising of Hurons or Wyandots against the Iroquois. At the end of his speech he offered them the two belts of peace and war.

They eagerly took the peace belt, but he declined to smoke the calumet, and told them he would not enter into the solemn ceremonies of the peace treaty with them until the following day. He likewise declined to release all his prisoners, and insisted that two of them should be put to death. They even yielded to this, and surrendered to him two young men, who advanced and sat down before him on the floor, covering their heads with their blankets, to receive the tomahawk.[32] Then he granted them full peace and forgave the young men their doom, and the next day, after the peace council, there was a feast, and the friendship of the Indians was won. Clark ever after had great influence over them; they admired his personal prowess, his oratory, his address as a treaty-maker, and the skill with which he led his troops. Long afterward, when the United States authorities were endeavoring to make treaties with the red men, it was noticed that the latter would never speak to any other white general or commissioner while Clark was present.

After this treaty there was peace in the Illinois country; the Indians remained for some time friendly, and the French were kept well satisfied.

[1] Some of the numerous land speculation companies, which were so prominent about this time, both before and after the Revolution, made claims to vast tracts of territory in this region, having bought them for various trinkets from the Indian chiefs. Such were the “Illinois Land Company” and “Wabash Land Company,” that, in 1773 and 1775, made purchases from the Kaskaskias and Piankeshaws. The companies were composed of British, American, and Canadian merchants and traders, of London, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Quebec, etc. Lord Dunmore was in the Wabash Company. The agents of the companies, in after years, made repeated but unsuccessful efforts to get Congress to confirm their grants. Although these various companies made much noise at the time, they introduced no new settlers into the land, and, in fact, did nothing of lasting effect; so that it is mere waste of time to allude to most of them. See, however, the “History of Indiana,” by John B. Dillon (Indianapolis, 1859), pp. 102-109, etc.

[2] The correctness of this account is amply confirmed by the Haldimand MSS., letters of Hamilton, passim; also Rocheblave to Carleton, July 4, 1778; and to Hamilton, April 12, 1778.

[3] In the earlier MSS. it is called sometimes Harrodstown and sometimes Harrodsburg; but from this time on the latter name is in general use.

[4] This, like so many other incidents in the everyday his tory of the old pioneers, is among the ordinary experiences of the present sojourner in the far West.

[5] One at Rockcastle River, two at Cumberland Ford.

[6] The items of expense jotted down in the diary are curious. For a night’s lodging and board they range from 1s. 3d. to 13s. In Williamsburg, the capital, they were for a fortnight £9 18s.

[7] Seventy miles beyond Charlottesville; he gives an itinerary of his journey, making it six hundred and twenty miles in all, by the route he traveled. On the way he had his horse shod and bought a pair of shoes for himself; apparently he kept the rest of his backwoods apparel. He sold his gun for £15 and swapped his horses again—this time giving £7 10s. to boot.

[8] When his accounts were settled he immediately bought “a piece of cloth for a jacket; price £4 15s.; buttons etc., 3s.”

[9] Clark has left a full MS. memoir of the events of 1777, 1778, and 1779. It was used extensively by Mann Butler, the first historian who gave the campaign its proper prominence, and is printed almost complete by Dillon, on pp. 115-167 of his “Indiana.” It was written at the desire of Presidents Jefferson and Madison; and therefore some thirty or forty years after the events of which it speaks. Valuable though it is, as the narrative of the chief actor, it would be still more valuable had it been written earlier: it undoubtedly contains some rather serious errors.

[10] Henry’s private letter of instructions, January 2, 1778.

[11] Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and George Wythe.

[12] Butler, p. 48; but Henry’s public instructions authorized Clark to raise his men in any county.

[13] Four companies were to be raised on the Holston; but only one actually went to Kentucky; and most of its members deserted when they found out about the true nature of the expedition.

[14] Clark’s letter to George Mason, Nov. 19, 1779. Given in “Clark’s Campaign in the Illinois” (Cincinnati, 1869), for the first time; one of Robert Clarke’s excellent Ohio Valley His torical Series.

[15] This is the date given in the deposition, in the case of Floyd’s heirs, in 1815; see MSS. in Col. Durrett’s library at Louisville. Clark’s dates, given from memory, are often a day or two out. His “Memoir” is of course less accurate than the letter to Mason.

[16] It was named Louisville in 1780, but was long known only as the Falls. Many other men had previously recognized the advantages of the place; hunters and surveyors had gone there, but Clark led thither the first permanent settlers. Conolly had laid out at the Falls a grant of two thousand acres, of which he afterward surrendered half. His grant, covering much of the present site of the city, was, on July 1, 1780, declared to be forfeited by a jury consisting of Daniel Boone and eleven other good men and true, empaneled by the sheriff of the county. See Durrett MSS. in “Papers Relating to Louisville, Ky.”

[17] The names of the four captains were John Montgomery, Joseph Bowman, Leonard Helm, and William Harrod. Each company nominally consisted of fifty men, but none of them was of full strength.

[18] At the old Fort Massac, then deserted. The name is taken from that of an old French commander; it is not a corruption of Fort Massacre, as has been asserted.

[19] In his “Memoir” he says “from the States”; in his letter to Mason he calls them “Englishmen,” probably to show that they were not French, as they had just come from Kaskaskia. He almost always spoke of the English proper as British.

[20] Even experienced woodsmen or plainsmen sometimes thus become lost or “turned round,” if in a country of few landmarks, where they have rarely been before.

[21] So says Clark; and the Haldimand MSS. contain a letter of Rocheblave of July 4th. For these campaigns of 1778 I follow where possible Clark’s letter to Mason as being nearly contemporary; his “Memoir,” as given by Dillon, comes next in authority; while Butler, who was very accurate and painstaking, also got hold of original information from men who had taken part in the expedition, or from their descendants, besides making full use of the ‘‘ Memoir.’’

[22] Haldimand MSS., Carleton to Hamilton, May 16, 1777; Rocheblave to Carleton, February 8, 1778; Rocheblave to Hamilton, April 12, 1778; Rocheblave to Carleton, July 4, 1778.

[23] Memoir of Major E. Denny, by Wm. H. Denny, p. 217. In “Record of the Court of Upland and Military Journal of Major E. Denny,” Philadelphia, 1860 (Historical Society of Penn.). The story was told to Major Denny by Clark himself, sometime in ‘87 or ‘88; in process of repetition it evidently became twisted, and, as related by Denny, there are some very manifest inaccuracies, but there seems no reason to reject it entirely.

[24] It is worth noting that these Illinois French, and most of the Indians with whom the French fur traders came in contact, called the Americans “Bostonnais.” (In fact the fur traders have taught this name to the northern tribes right across to the Pacific. While hunting in the Selkirk Mountains last fall, the Kootenai Indian who was with me always described me as a “Boston man.”) Similarly the Indians round the upper Ohio and thence southward often called the backwoodsmen “Virginians.” In each case the French and Indians adopted the name of their leading and most inveterate enemies as the title by which to call all of them.

[25] In his “Memoir” Clark dwells at length on the artifices by which he heightened the terror of the French; and Butler enlarges still further upon them. I follow the letter to Mason, which is much safer authority, the writer having then no thought of trying to increase the dramatic effect of the situation—which in Butler, and indeed in the “Memoir” also, is strained till it comes dangerously near bathos.

[26] Judge John Law’s “Address on the Colonial History of Vincennes,” p. 25.

[27] Leonard Helm.

[28] In his secret letter of instructions he orders Clark to be especially careful to secure the artillery and military stores at Kaskaskia, laying such stress upon this as to show that he regarded the place itself as of comparatively little value. In fact, all Henry’s order contemplated was an attack on “the British post at Kaskasky.” However, he adds, that if the French are willing to become American citizens, they shall be fully protected against their foes. The letter earnestly commands Clark to treat not only the inhabitants, but also all British prisoners, with the utmost humanity.

[29] “A party of Puans and others.”—Clark’s letter to Mason.

[30] “Provisions and Rum.” Letter to Mason. This is much the best authority for these proceedings. The “Memoir,” written by an old man who had squandered his energies and sunk into deserved obscurity, is tedious and magniloquent, and sometimes inaccurate. Moreover, Dillon has not always chosen the extracts judiciously. Clark’s decidedly prolix speeches to the Indians are given with intolerable repetition. They were well suited to the savages, drawing the causes of the quarrel between the British and Americans in phrases that could be understood by the Indian mind; but their inflated hyperbole is not now interesting. They describe the Americans as lighting a great council-fire, sharpening tomahawks, striking the war-post, declining to give “two bucks for a blanket,” as the British wanted them to, etc.; with incessant allusions to the Great Spirit being angry, the roads being made smooth, refusing to listen to the bad birds who flew through the woods, and the like. Occasional passages are fine; but it all belongs to the study of Indians and Indian oratory, rather than to the history of the Americans.

[31] In his speeches, as in those of his successors in treaty-making, the United States were sometimes spoken of as the Thirteen Fires, and sometimes as the Great Fire.

[32] I have followed the contemporary letter to Mason rather than the more elaborate and slightly different account of the “Memoir.” The account written by Clark in his old age, like Shelby’s similar autobiography, is, in many respects, not very trustworthy. It can not be accepted for a moment where it conflicts with any contemporary accounts.

CHAPTER VII

CLARK’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST VINCENNES, 1779

HAMILTON, AT Detroit, had been so encouraged by the successes of his war parties that, in 1778, he began to plan an attack on Fort Pitt[1]; but his plans were forestalled by Clark’s movements, and he, of course, abandoned them when the astounding news reached him that the rebels had themselves invaded the Illinois country, captured the British commandant, Rocheblave, and administered to the inhabitants the oath of allegiance to Congress.[2] Shortly afterward he learned that Vincennes likewise was in the hands of the Americans. He was a man of great energy, and he immediately began to prepare an expedition for the reconquest of the country. French emissaries who were loyal to the British crown were sent to the Wabash to stir up the Indians against the Americans; and though the Piankeshaws remained friendly to the latter, the Kickapoos and Weas, who were more powerful, announced their readiness to espouse the British cause if they received support, while the neighboring Miamis were already on the warpath. The commandants at the small posts of Mackinaw and St. Josephs were also notified to incite the Lake Indians to harass the Illinois country.[3]

He led the main body in person, and throughout September every soul in Detroit was busy from morning till night in mending boats, baking biscuit, packing provisions in kegs and bags, preparing artillery stores, and in every way making ready for the expedition. Fifteen large bateaux and pirogues were procured, each capable of carrying from 1,800 to 3,000 pounds; these were to carry the ammunition, food, clothing, tents, and especially the presents for the Indians. Cattle and wheels were sent ahead to the most important portages on the route that would be traversed; a six-pounder gun was also forwarded. Hamilton had been deeply exasperated by what he regarded as the treachery of most of the Illinois and Wabash Creoles in joining the Americans; but he was in high spirits and very confident of success. He wrote to his superior officer that the British were sure to succeed if they acted promptly, for the Indians were favorable to them, knowing they alone could give them supplies; and he added “the Spaniards are feeble and hated by the French, the French are fickle and have no man of capacity to advise or lead them, and the Rebels are enterprising and brave, but want resources.” The bulk of the Detroit French, including all their leaders, remained stanch supporters of the crown, and the militia eagerly volunteered to go on the expedition. Feasts were held with the Ottawas, Chippewas, and Pottawatomies, at which oxen were roasted whole, while Hamilton and the chiefs of the French rangers sang the war-song in solemn council, and received pledges of armed assistance and support from the savages.[4]

On October 7th the expedition left Detroit; before starting the venerable Jesuit missionary gave the Catholic French who went along his solemn blessing and approval, conditionally upon their strictly keeping the oath they had taken to be loyal and obedient servants of the crown.[5] It is worthy of note that, while the priest at Kaskaskia proved so potent an ally of the Americans, the priest at Detroit was one of the stanchest supporters of the British. Hamilton started with thirty-six British regulars, under two lieutenants, forty-five Detroit volunteers (chiefly French), who had been carefully drilled for over a year, under Captain Lamothe; seventy-nine Detroit militia, under a major and two captains; and seventeen members of the Indian Department (including three captains and four lieutenants) who acted with the Indians. There were thus in all one hundred and seventy-seven whites.[6] Sixty Indians started with the troops from Detroit, but so many bands joined him on the route that when he reached Vincennes his entire force amounted to five hundred men.[7]

Having embarked, the troops and Indians paddled down stream to Lake Erie, reaching it in a snow-storm, and when a lull came they struck boldly across the lake, making what bateau men still call a “traverse” of thirty-six miles to the mouth of the Maumee. Darkness overtook them while on the lake, and the head boats hung out lights for the guidance of those astern; but about midnight a gale came up, and the whole flotilla was nearly swamped, being beached with great difficulty on an oozy flat close to the mouth of the Maumee. The waters of the Maumee were low, and the boats were poled slowly up against the current, reaching the portage point, where there was a large Indian village, on the 24th of the month. Here a nine miles’ carry was made to one of the sources of the Wabash, called by the voyageurs “la petite rivière.” This stream was so low that the boats could not have gone down it had it not been for a beaver dam four miles below the landing-place, which backed up the current. An opening was made in the dam to let the boats pass. The traders and Indians thoroughly appreciated the help given them at this difficult part of the course by the engineering skill of the beavers—for Hamilton was following the regular route of the hunting, trading, and war parties,—and none of the beavers of this particular dam were ever molested, being left to keep their dam in order, and repair it, which they always speedily did whenever it was damaged.[8] It proved as difficult to go down the Wabash as to go up the Maumee. The water was shallow, and once or twice in great swamps dikes had to be built that the boats might be floated across. Frost set in heavily, and the ice cut the men as they worked in the water to haul the boats over shoals or rocks. The bateaux often needed to be beached and caulked, while both whites and Indians had to help carry the loads round the shoal places. At every Indian village it was necessary to stop, hold a conference, and give presents. At last the Wea village—or Ouiatanon, as Hamilton called it—was reached. Here the Wabash chiefs, who had made peace with the Americans, promptly came in and tendered their allegiance to the British, and a reconnoitring party seized a lieutenant and three men of the Vincennes militia, who were themselves on a scouting expedition, but who nevertheless were surprised and captured without difficulty.[9] They had been sent out by Captain Leonard Helm, then acting as commandant at Vincennes. He had but a couple of Americans with him, and was forced to trust to the creole militia, who had all embodied themselves with great eagerness, having taken the oath of allegiance to Congress. Having heard rumors of the British advance, he had despatched a little party to keep watch, and in consequence of their capture he was taken by surprise.

From Ouiatanon Hamilton despatched Indian parties to surround Vincennes and intercept any messages sent either to the Falls or to the Illinois; they were completely successful, capturing a messenger who carried a hurried note written by Helm to Clark to announce what had happened. An advance guard, under Major Hay, was sent forward to take possession, but Helm showed so good a front that nothing was attempted until the next day, the 17th of December, just seventy-one days after the expedition had left Detroit, when Hamilton came up at the head of his whole force and entered Vincennes. Poor Helm was promptly deserted by all the creole militia. The latter had been loud in their boasts until the enemy came in view, but as soon as they caught sight of the red-coats they began to slip away and ran up to the British to surrender their arms.[10] He was finally left with only one or two men, Americans. Nevertheless he refused the first summons to surrender; but Hamilton, who knew that Helm’s troops had deserted him, marched up to the fort at the head of his soldiers, and the American was obliged to surrender, with no terms granted save that he and his associates should be treated with humanity.[11] The instant the fort was surrendered the Indians broke in and plundered it; but they committed no act of cruelty, and only plundered a single private house.

The French inhabitants had shown pretty clearly that they did not take a keen interest in the struggle, on either side. They were now summoned to the church and offered the chance—which they for the most part eagerly embraced—of purging themselves of their past misconduct by taking a most humiliating oath of repentance, acknowledging that they had sinned against God and man by siding with the rebels, and promising to be loyal in the future. Two hundred and fifty of the militia, being given back their arms, appeared with their officers, and took service again under the British king, swearing a solemn oath of allegiance. They certainly showed throughout the most light-hearted indifference to chronic perjury and treachery; nor did they in other respects appear to very good advantage. Clark was not in the least surprised at the news of their conduct; for he had all along realized that the attachment of the French would prove but a slender reed on which to lean in the moment of trial.

Hamilton had no fear of the inhabitants themselves, for the fort completely commanded the town. To keep them in good order he confiscated all their spirituous liquors, and in a rather amusing burst of Puritan feeling destroyed two billiard tables, which he announced were “sources of immorality and dissipation in such a settlement.”[12] He had no idea that he was in danger of attack from without, for his spies brought him word that Clark had only a hundred and ten men in the Illinois country[13]; and the route between was in winter one of extraordinary difficulty.

He had five hundred men and Clark but little over one hundred. He was not only far nearer his base of supplies and reinforcements at Detroit, than Clark was to his at Fort Pitt, but he was also actually across Clark’s line of communications. Had he pushed forward at once to attack the Americans, and had he been able to overcome the difficulties of the march, he would almost certainly have conquered. But he was daunted by the immense risk and danger of the movement. The way was long and the country flooded, and he feared the journey might occupy so much time that his stock of provisions would be exhausted before he got half-way. In such a case the party might starve to death or perish from exposure. Besides he did not know what he should do for carriages; and he dreaded the rigor of the winter weather.[14] There were undoubtedly appalling difficulties in the way of a mid-winter march and attack; and the fact that Clark attempted and performed the feat which Hamilton dared not try, marks just the difference between a man of genius and a good, brave, ordinary commander.

Having decided to suspend active operations during the cold weather, he allowed the Indians to scatter back to their villages for the winter, and sent most of the Detroit militia home, retaining in garrison only thirty-four British regulars, forty French volunteers, and a dozen white leaders of the Indians[15]; in all eighty or ninety whites, and a probably larger number of red auxiliaries. The latter were continually kept out on scouting expeditions; Miamis and Shawnees were sent down to watch the Ohio, and take scalps in the settlements, while bands of Kickapoos, the most warlike of the Wabash Indians, and of Ottawas, often accompanied by French partisans; went toward the Illinois country.[16] Hamilton intended to undertake a formidable campaign in the spring. He had sent messages to Stuart, the British Indian agent in the south, directing him to give war-belts to the Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creeks, that a combined attack on the frontier might take place as soon as the weather opened. He himself was to be joined by reinforcements from Detroit, while the Indians were to gather round him as soon as the winter broke. He would then have had probably over a thousand men, and light cannon with which to batter down the stockades. He rightly judged that with this force he could not only reconquer the Illinois, but also sweep Kentucky, where the outnumbered riflemen could not have met him in the field, nor the wooden forts have withstood his artillery. Undoubtedly he would have carried out his plan, and have destroyed all the settlements west of the Alleghanies, had he been allowed to wait until the mild weather brought him his host of Indian allies and his reinforcements of regulars and militia from Detroit.

But in Clark he had an antagonist whose far-sighted daring and indomitable energy raised him head and shoulders above every other frontier leader. This backwoods colonel was perhaps the one man able in such a crisis to keep the land his people had gained. When the news of the loss of Vincennes reached the Illinois towns, and especially when there followed a rumor that Hamilton himself was on his march thither to attack them,[17] the panic became tremendous among the French. They frankly announced that though they much preferred the Americans, yet it would be folly to oppose armed resistance to the British; and one or two of their number were found to be in communication with Hamilton and the Detroit authorities. Clark promptly made ready for resistance, tearing down the buildings near the fort at Kaskaskia—his head-quarters—and sending out scouts and runners; but he knew that it was hopeless to try to withstand such a force as Hamilton could gather. He narrowly escaped being taken prisoner by a party of Ottawas and Canadians, who had come from Vincennes early in January, when the weather was severe and the traveling fairly good.[18] He was at the time on his way to Cahokia, to arrange for the defence; several of the wealthier Frenchmen were with him in “chairs”—presumably creaking wooden carts,—and one of them “swampt,” or mired down, only a hundred yards from the ambush. Clark and his guards were so on the alert that no attack was made.

In the midst of his doubt and uncertainty he received some news that enabled him immediately to decide on the proper course to follow. He had secured great influence over the bolder, and therefore the leading, spirits among the French. One of these was a certain Francis Vigo, a trader in St. Louis. He was by birth an Italian, who had come to New Orleans in a Spanish regiment, and having procured his discharge, had drifted to the Creole villages of the frontier, being fascinated by the profitable adventures of the Indian trade. Journeying to Vincennes, he was thrown into prison by Hamilton; on being released, he returned to St. Louis. Thence he instantly crossed over to Kaskaskia, on January 27, 1779,[19] and told Clark that Hamilton had at the time only eighty men in garrison, with three pieces of cannon and some swivels mounted, but that as soon as the winter broke, he intended to gather a very large force and take the offensive.[20]

Clark instantly decided to forestall his foe, and to make the attack himself, heedless of the almost impassable nature of the ground and of the icy severity of the weather. Not only had he received no reinforcements from Virginia but he had not had so much as a “scrip of a pen” from Governor Henry since he had left him, nearly twelve months before.[21] So he was forced to trust entirely to his own energy and power. He first equipped a row-galley with two four-pounders and four swivels, and sent her off with a crew of forty men, having named her the Willing.[22] She was to patrol the Ohio, and then to station herself in the Wabash so as to stop all boats from descending it. She was the first gunboat ever afloat on the Western waters.

Then he hastily drew together his little garrisons of backwoodsmen from the French towns, and prepared for the march overland against Vincennes. His bold front and confident bearing, and the prompt decision of his measures, had once more restored confidence among the French, whose spirits rose as readily as they were cast down; and he was especially helped by the creole girls, whose enthusiasm for the expedition roused many of the more daring young men to volunteer under Clark’s banner. By these means he gathered together a band of one hundred and seventy men, at whose head he marched out of Kaskaskia on the 7th of February.[23] All the inhabitants escorted them out of the village, and the Jesuit priest, Gibault, gave them absolution at parting.

The route by which they had to go was two hundred and forty miles in length. It lay through a beautiful and well watered country, of groves and prairies; but at that season the march was necessarily attended with the utmost degree of hardship and fatigue. The weather had grown mild, so that there was no suffering from cold; but in the thaw the ice on the rivers melted, great freshets followed, and all the lowlands and meadows were flooded. Clark’s great object was to keep his troops in good spirits. Of course he and the other officers shared every hardship and led in every labor. He encouraged the men to hunt game; and to “feast on it like Indian war-dancers,”[24] each company in turn inviting the others to the smoking and plentiful banquets. One day they saw great herds of buffaloes and killed many of them. They had no tents;[25] but at nightfall they kindled huge camp-fires, and spent the evenings merrily round the piles of blazing logs, in hunter fashion, feasting on bear’s ham and buffalo hump, elk saddle, venison haunch, and the breast of the wild turkey, some singing of love and the chase and war, and others dancing after the manner of the French trappers and wood-runners.

Thus they kept on, marching hard but gleefully and in good spirits until after a week they came to the drowned lands of the Wabash. They first struck the two branches of the Little Wabash. Their channels were a league apart, but the flood was so high that they now made one great river five miles in width, the overflow of water being three feet deep in the shallowest part of the plains between and alongside them.

Clark instantly started to build a pirogue; then crossing over the first channel he put up a scaffold on the edge of the flooded plain. He ferried his men over, and brought the baggage across and placed it on the scaffold; then he swam the pack-horses over, loaded them as they stood belly-deep in the water beside the scaffold, and marched his men on through the water until they came to the second channel, which was crossed as the first had been. The building of the pirogue and the ferrying took three days in all.

They had by this time come so near Vincennes that they dared not fire a gun for fear of being discovered; besides, the floods had driven the game all away; so that they soon began to feel hunger, while their progress was very slow, and they suffered much from the fatigue of traveling all day long through deep mud or breast-high water. On the 17th they reached the Embarras River, but could not cross, nor could they find a dry spot on which to camp; at last they found the water falling off a small, almost submerged hillock, and on this they huddled through the night. At daybreak they heard Hamilton’s morning gun from the fort, that was but three leagues distant; and as they could not find a ford across the Embarras, they followed it down and camped by the Wabash. There Clark set his drenched, hungry, and dispirited followers to building some pirogues; while two or three unsuccessful attempts were made to get men across the river that they might steal boats. He determined to leave his horses at this camp; for it was almost impossible to get them further.[26]

On the morning of the 20th the men had been without food for nearly two days. Many of the creole volunteers began to despair, and talked of returning. Clark knew that his Americans, veterans who had been with him for over a year, had no idea of abandoning the enterprise, nor yet of suffering the last extremities of hunger while they had horses along. He paid no heed to the request of the creoles, nor did he even forbid their going back; he only laughed at them and told them to go out and try to kill a deer. He knew that without any violence he could yet easily detain the volunteers for a few days longer; and he kept up the spirits of the whole command by his undaunted and confident mien. The canoes were nearly finished; and about noon a small boat with five Frenchmen from Vincennes was captured. From these Clark gleamed the welcome intelligence that the condition of affairs was unchanged at the fort, and that there was no suspicion of any impending danger. In the evening the men were put in still better heart by one of the hunters killing a deer.

It rained all the next day. By dawn Clark began to ferry the troops over the Wabash in the canoes he had built, and they were soon on the eastern bank of the river, the side on which Vincennes stood. They now hoped to get to town by nightfall; but there was no dry land for leagues round about, save where a few hillocks rose island-like above the flood. The Frenchmen whom they had captured said they could not possibly get along; but Clark led the men in person, and they waded with infinite toil for about three miles, the water often up to their chins; and they then camped on a hillock for the night. Clark kept the troops cheered up by every possible means, and records that he was much assisted by “a little antic drummer,” a young boy who did good service by making the men laugh with his pranks and jokes.[27]

Next morning they resumed their march, the strongest wading painfully through the water, while the weak and famished were carried in the canoes, which were so hampered by the bushes that they could hardly go even as fast as the toiling footmen. The evening and morning guns of the fort were heard plainly by the men as they plodded onward, numbed and weary. Clark, as usual, led them in person. Once they came to a place so deep that there seemed no crossing, for the canoes could find no ford. It was hopeless to go back or stay still, and the men huddled together, apparently about to despair. But Clark suddenly blackened his face with gunpowder, gave the war-whoop, and sprang forward boldly into the ice-cold water, wading out straight toward the point at which they were aiming; and the men followed him, one after another, without a word. Then he ordered those nearest him to begin one of their favorite songs; and soon the whole line took it up, and marched cheerfully onward. He intended to have the canoes ferry them over the deepest part, but before they came to it one of the men felt that his feet were in a path, and by carefully following it they got to a sugar camp, a hillock covered with maples, which once had been tapped for sugar. Here they camped for the night, still six miles from the town, without food, and drenched through. The prisoners from Vincennes, sullen and weary, insisted that they could not possibly get to the town through the deep water; the prospect seemed almost hopeless even to the iron-willed, steel-sinewed backwoodsmen[28]; but their leader never lost courage for a moment.

That night was bitterly cold, for there was a heavy frost, and the ice formed half an inch thick round the edges and in the smooth water. But the sun rose bright and glorious, and Clark, in burning words, told his stiffened, famished, half-frozen followers that the evening would surely see them at the goal of their hopes. Without waiting for an answer, he plunged into the water, and they followed him with a cheer, in Indian file. Before the third man had entered the water he halted and told one of his officers[29] to close the rear with twenty-five men, and to put to death any man who refused to march; and the whole line cheered him again.

Then came the most trying time of the whole march. Before them lay a broad sheet of water, covering what was known as the Horse Shoe Plain; the floods had made it a shallow lake four miles across, unbroken by so much as a hand’s-breadth of dry land. On its further side was a dense wood. Clark led breast high in the water with fifteen or twenty of the strongest men next him. About the middle of the plain the cold and exhaustion told so on the weaker men that the canoes had to take them aboard and carry them on to the land; and from that time on the little dug-outs plied frantically to and fro to save the more helpless from drowning. Those who, though weak, could still move onward, clung to the stronger, and struggled ahead, Clark animating them in every possible way. When they at last reached the woods the water became so deep that it was to the shoulders of the tallest, but the weak and those of low stature could now cling to the bushes and old logs, until the canoes were able to ferry them to a spot of dry land, some ten acres in extent, that lay nearby. The strong and tall got ashore and built fires. Many on reaching the shore fell flat on their faces, half in the water, and could not move further. It was found that the fires did not help the very weak, so every such a one was put between two strong men, who ran him up and down by the arms, and thus soon made him recover.[30]

Fortunately at this time an Indian canoe, paddled by some squaws, was discovered and overtaken by one of the dug-outs. In it was half a quarter of a buffalo, with some corn, tallow, and kettles. This was an invaluable prize. Broth was immediately made, and was served out to the most weakly with great care; almost all of the men got some, but very many gave their shares to the weakly, rallying and joking them to put them in good heart. The little refreshment, together with the fires and the bright weather, gave new life to all. They set out again in the afternoon, crossed a deep, narrow lake in their canoes, and after marching a short distance came to a copse of timber from which they saw the fort and town not two miles away. Here they halted, and looked to their rifles and ammunition, making ready for the fight. Every man now feasted his eyes with the sight of what he had so long labored to reach, and forthwith forgot that he had suffered anything; making light of what had been gone through, and passing from dogged despair to the most exultant self-confidence.

Between the party and the town lay a plain, the hollows being filled with little pools, on which were many water-fowl, and some of the townspeople were in sight, on horseback, shooting ducks. Clark sent out a few active young creoles, who succeeded in taking prisoner one of these fowling horsemen. From him it was learned that neither Hamilton nor any one else had the least suspicion that any attack could possibly be made at that season, but that a couple of hundred Indian warriors had just come to town.

Clark was rather annoyed at the last bit of information. The number of armed men in town, including British, French, and Indians, about quadrupled his own force. This made heavy odds to face, even with the advantage of a surprise, and in spite of the fact that his own men were sure to fight to the last, since failure meant death by torture. Moreover, if he made the attack without warning, some of the Indians and Vincennes people would certainly be slain, and the rest would be thereby made his bitter enemies, even if he succeeded. On the other hand, he found out from the prisoner that the French were very lukewarm to the British, and would certainly not fight if they could avoid it; and that half of the Indians were ready to side with the Americans. Finally, there was a good chance that before dark some one would discover the approach of the troops and would warn the British, thereby doing away with all chance of a surprise.

After thinking it over Clark decided, as the less of two evils, to follow the hazardous course of himself announcing his approach. He trusted that the boldness of such a course, together with the shock of his utterly unexpected appearance, would paralyze his opponents and incline the wavering to favor him. So he released the prisoner and sent him in ahead, with a letter to the people of Vincennes. By this letter he proclaimed to the French that he was that moment about to attack the town; that those townspeople who were friends to the Americans were to remain in their houses, where they would not be molested; that the friends of the king should repair to the fort, join the “hair-buyer general,” and fight like men; and that those who did neither of these two things, but remained armed and in the streets, must expect to be treated as enemies.[31]

Having sent the messenger in advance, he waited until his men were rested and their rifles and powder dry, and then at sundown marched straight against the town. He divided his force into two divisions, leading in person the first, which consisted of two companies of Americans and of the Kaskaskia creoles; while the second, led by Bowman, contained Bowman’s own company and the Cahokians. His final orders to the men were to march with the greatest regularity, to obey the orders of their officers, and, above all, to keep perfect silence.[32] The rapidly gathering dusk prevented any discovery of his real numbers.

In sending in the messenger he had builded even better than he knew; luck which had long been against him now at last favored him. Hamilton’s runners had seen Clark’s camp-fires the night before; and a small scouting party of British regulars, Detroit volunteers, and Indians had in consequence been sent to find out what had caused them.[33] These men were not made of such stern stuff as Clark’s followers, nor had they such a commander; and after going some miles they were stopped by the floods, and started to return. Before they got back, Vincennes was assailed. Hamilton trusted so completely to the scouting party, and to the seemingly impassable state of the country, that his watch was very lax. The creoles in the town, when Clark’s proclamation was read to them, gathered eagerly to discuss it; but so great was the terror of his name, and so impressed and appalled were they by the mysterious approach of an unknown army, and the confident and menacing language with which its coming was heralded, that none of them dared show themselves partisans of the British by giving warning to the garrison. The Indians likewise heard vague rumors of what had occurred and left the town; a number of the inhabitants who were favorable to the British followed the same course.[34] Hamilton, attracted by the commotion, sent down his soldiers to find out what had happened; but before they succeeded, the Americans were upon them.

About seven o’clock[35] Clark entered the town, and at once pushed his men on to attack the fort. Had he charged he could probably have taken it at once; for so unprepared were the garrison that the first rifle shots were deemed by them to come from drunken Indians. But of course he had not counted on such a state of things. He had so few men that he dared not run the risk of suffering a heavy loss. Moreover, the backwoodsmen had neither swords nor bayonets.

Most of the creole townspeople received Clark joyfully, and rendered him much assistance, especially by supplying him with powder and ball, his own stock of ammunition being scanty. One of the Indian chiefs[36] offered to bring his tribe to the support of the Americans, but Clark answered that all he asked of the red men was that they should for the moment remain neutral. A few of the young creoles were allowed to join in the attack, however, it being deemed good policy to commit them definitely to the American side.

Fifty of the American troops were detached to guard against any relief from without, while the rest attacked the fort; yet Hamilton’s scouting party crept up, lay hid all night in an old barn, and at daybreak rushed into the fort.[37] Firing was kept up with very little intermission throughout the night. At one o’clock the moon set, and Clark took advantage of the darkness to throw up an intrenchment within rifle-shot of the strongest battery, which consisted of two guns. All of the cannon and swivels in the fort were placed about eleven feet above the ground, on the upper floors of the strong block-houses that formed the angles of the palisaded walls. At sunrise on the 24th the riflemen from the intrenchment opened a hot fire into the port-holes of the battery, and speedily silenced both guns.[38] The artillery and musketry of the defenders did very little damage to the assailants, who lost but one man wounded, though some of the houses in the town were destroyed by the cannon-balls. In return, the backwoodsmen, by firing into the ports, soon rendered it impossible for the guns to be run out and served, and killed or severely wounded six or eight of the garrison; for the Americans showed themselves much superior, both in marksmanship and in the art of sheltering themselves, to the British regulars and French-Canadians against whom they were pitted.

Early in the forenoon Clark summoned the fort to surrender, and while waiting for the return of the flag his men took the opportunity of getting breakfast, the first regular meal they had had for six days. Hamilton declined to surrender, but proposed a three days’ truce instead. This proposition Clark instantly rejected, and the firing again began, the backwoodsmen beseeching Clark to let them storm the fort; he refused. While the negotiations were going on a singular incident occurred. A party of Hamilton’s Indians returned from a successful scalping expedition against the frontier, and being ignorant of what had taken place, marched straight into the town. Some of Clark’s backwoodsmen instantly fell on them and killed or captured nine, besides two Franch partisans who had been out with them.[39] One of the latter was the son of a creole lieutenant in Clark’s troops, and after much pleading his father and friends procured the release of himself and his comrade.[40] Clark determined to make a signal example of the six captured Indians, both to strike terror into the rest and to show them how powerless the British were to protect them; so he had them led within sight of the fort and there tomahawked and thrown into the river.[41] The sight did not encourage the garrison. The English troops remained firm and eager for the fight, though they had suffered the chief loss; but the Detroit volunteers showed evident signs of panic.

In the afternoon Hamilton sent out another flag, and he and Clark met in the old French church to arrange for the capitulation. Helm, who was still a prisoner on parole, and was told by Clark that he was to remain such until recaptured, was present; so were the British Major Hay and the American Captain Bowman. There was some bickering and recrimination between the leaders, Clark reproaching Hamilton with having his hands dyed in the blood of the women and children slain by his savage allies; while the former answered that he was not to blame for obeying the orders of his superiors, and that he himself had done all he could to make the savages act mercifully. It was finally agreed that the garrison, seventy-nine men in all,[42] should surrender as prisoners of war. The British commander has left on record his bitter mortification at having to yield the fort “to a set of uncivilized Virginia woodsmen armed with rifles.” In truth, it was a most notable achievement. Clark had taken, without artillery, a heavy stockade, protected by cannon and swivels, and garrisoned by trained soldiers. His superiority in numbers was very far from being in itself sufficient to bring about the result, as witness the almost invariable success with which the similar but smaller Kentucky forts, unprovided with artillery and held by fewer men, were defended against much larger forces than Clark’s. Much credit belongs to Clark’s men, but most belongs to their leader. The boldness of his plan and the resolute skill with which he followed it out, his perseverance through the intense hardships of the midwinter march, the address with which he kept the French and Indians neutral, and the masterful way in which he controlled his own troops, together with the ability and courage he displayed in the actual attack, combined to make his feat the most memorable of all the deeds done west of the Alleghanies in the Revolutionary War.[43] It was likewise the most important in its results, for had he been defeated we would not only have lost the Illinois, but in all probability Kentucky also.

Immediately after taking the fort Clark sent Helm and fifty men, in boats armed with swivels, up the Wabash to intercept a party of forty French volunteers from Detroit, who were bringing to Vincennes bateaux heavily laden with goods of all kinds, to the value of ten thousand pounds sterling.[44]

In a few days Helm returned successful, and the spoils, together with the goods taken at Vincennes, were distributed among the soldiers, who “got almost rich.”[45] The officers kept nothing save a few needed articles of clothing. The gunboat Willing appeared shortly after the taking of the fort, the crew bitterly disappointed that they were not in time for the fighting. The long-looked-for messenger from the Governor of Virginia also arrived, bearing to the soldiers the warm thanks of the Legislature of that State for their capture of Kaskaskia and the promise of more substantial reward.[46]

Clark was forced to parole most of his prisoners, but twenty-seven, including Hamilton himself, were sent to Virginia. The backwoodsmen regarded Hamilton with revengeful hatred, and he was not well treated while among them,[47] save only by Boone—for the kind-hearted, fearless old pioneer never felt anything but pity for a fallen enemy. All the borderers, including Clark,[48] believed that the British commander himself gave rewards to the Indians for the American scalps they brought in; and because of his alleged behavior in this regard he was kept in close confinement by the Virginia government until, through the intercession of Washington, he was at last released and exchanged. Exactly how much he was to blame it is difficult to say. Certainly the blame rests even more with the crown, and the ruling class in Britain, than with Hamilton, who merely carried out the orders of his superiors; and though he undoubtedly heartily approved of these orders, and executed them with eager zest, yet it seems that he did what he could—which was very little—to prevent unnecessary atrocities.

The crime consisted in employing the savages at all in a war waged against men, women, and children alike. Undoubtedly the British at Detroit followed the example of the French[49] in paying money to the Indians for the scalps of their foes. It is equally beyond question that the British acted with much more humanity than their French predecessors had shown. Apparently the best officers utterly disapproved of the whole business of scalp buying; but it was eagerly followed by many of the reckless agents and partisan leaders, British, tories, and Canadians, who themselves often accompanied the Indians against the frontier and witnessed or shared in their unmentionable atrocities. It is impossible to acquit either the British home government or its foremost representatives at Detroit of a large share in the responsibility for the appalling brutality of these men and their red allies; but the heaviest blame rests on the home government.

Clark soon received some small reinforcements, and was able to establish permanent garrisons at Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia. With the Indian tribes who lived round about he made firm peace; against some hunting bands of Delawares who came in and began to commit ravages, he waged ruthless and untiring war, sparing the women and children, but killing all the males capable of bearing arms, and he harried most of them out of the territory, while the rest humbly sued for peace. His own men worshiped him; the French loved and stood in awe of him, while the Indians respected and feared him greatly. During the remainder of the Revolutionary War the British were not able to make any serious effort to shake the hold he had given the Americans on the region lying around and between Vincennes and the Illinois. Moreover, he so effectually pacified the tribes between the Wabash and the Mississippi that they did not become open and formidable foes of the whites until, with the close of the war against Britain, Kentucky passed out of the stage when Indian hostilities threatened her very life.

The fame of Clark’s deeds and the terror of his prowess spread to the Southern Indians, and the British at Natchez trembled lest they should share the fate that had come on Kaskaskia and Vincennes.[50] Flatboats from the Illinois went down to New Orleans, and keel-boats returned from that city with arms and munitions, or were sent up to Pittsburg[51]; and the following spring Clark built a fort on the east bank of the Mississippi below the Ohio.[52] It was in the Chickasaw territory, and these warlike Indians soon assaulted it, making a determined effort to take it by storm, and though they were repulsed with very heavy slaughter, yet, to purchase their neutrality, the Americans were glad to abandon the fort.

Clark himself, toward the end of 1779, took up his abode at the Falls of the Ohio, where he served in some sort as a shield both for the Illinois and for Kentucky, and from whence he hoped some day to march against Detroit. This was his darling scheme, which he never ceased to cherish. Through no fault of his own, the day never came when he could put it in execution.

He was ultimately made a brigadier-general of the Virginia militia, and to the harassed settlers in Kentucky his mere name was a tower of strength. He was the sole originator of the plan for the conquest of the Northwestern lands, and, almost unaided, he had executed his own scheme. For a year he had been wholly cut off from all communication with the home authorities, and had received no help of any kind. Alone, and with the very slenderest means, he had conquered and held a vast and beautiful region, which but for him would have formed part of a foreign and hostile empire[53]; he had clothed and paid his soldiers with the spoils of his enemies; he had spent his own fortune as carelessly as he had risked his life, and the only reward that he was destined for many years to receive was the sword voted him by the Legislature of Virginia.[54]

[1] Haldimand MSS. Hamilton to Carleton, January, 1778.

[2] Do. Hamilton’s letter of August 8th.

[3] Hamilton to Haldimand, September 17, 1778.

[4] Do. Hamilton to Haldimand, September 23, October 3, 1778.

[5] Haldimand MSS., Series B, Vol. 123, p. 53. Hamilton’s letter of July 6, 1781, containing a “brief account” of the whole expedition, taken from what he calls a “diary of trans actions” that he had preserved.

[6] Do., Series B, Vol. 122, p. 253, return of forces on Dec. 24th.

[7] Do. Hamilton’s letter of July 6, 1781, the “brief account.” Clark’s estimate was very close to the truth; he gave Hamilton six hundred men, four hundred of them Indians. See State Department MSS., No. 71, Vol. I, p. 247. Papers Continental Congress. Letter of G. R. Clark to Gov. Henry, April 29, 1779. This letter was written seven months before that to Mason, and many years before the “Memoir,” so I have, where possible, followed it as being better authority than either.

[8] Haldimand MSS. Hamilton’s “brief account.”

[9] Do. The French officer had in his pocket one British and one American commission; Hamilton debated in his mind for some time the advisability of hanging him.

[10] Do. Intercepted letter of Captain Helm, Series B, Vol. 122, p. 280.

[11] Letter of Hamilton, Dec. 18-30, 1778. The story of Helm’s marching out with the honors of war is apparently a mere invention. Even Mann Butler, usually so careful, permits himself to be led off into all sorts of errors when describing the incidents of the Illinois and Vincennes expeditions, and the writers who have followed him have generally been less accurate. The story of Helm drinking toddy by the fireplace when Clark retook the fort, and of the latter ordering riflemen to fire at the chimney, so as to knock the mortar into the toddy, may safely be set down as pure—and very weak—fiction. When Clark wrote his memoirs, in his old age, he took delight in writing down among his exploits all sorts of childish stratagems; the marvel is that any sane historian should not have seen that these were on their face as untrue as they were ridiculous.

[12] Do.

[13] Do. “Fourscore at Kaskaskia and thirty at Cahokia.”

[14] Haldimand MSS.; in his various letters Hamilton sets forth the difficulties at length.

[15] Do. B, Vol. 122, p. 287. Return of Vincennes garrison for Jan. 30, 1779.

[16] Hamilton’s “brief account,” and his letter of December 18th.

[17] The rumor came when Clark was attending a dance given by the people of the little village of La Prairie du Rocher. The Creoles were passionately fond of dancing and the Kentuckians entered into the amusement with the utmost zest.

[18] Haldimand MSS. Hamilton’s letter, January 24, 1779.

[19] State Department MSS. Letters to Washington, 33, p. 90.

[20] State Department MSS. Papers of Continental Congress, No. 71, Vol. I, p. 267.

[21] Do.

[22] Under the command of Clark’s couisn, Lt. John Rogers.

[23] Letter to Henry. The letter to Mason says it was the 5th.

[24] Clark’s “Memoir.”

[25] State Department MSS. Letters to Washington, Vol. 33, p. 90. “A Journal of Col. G. R. Clark. Proceedings from the 29th Jan’y 1779 to the 26th March Inst,” (by Captain Bowman). This journal has been known for a long time. The original is supposed to have been lost; but either this is it or else it is a contemporary MS. copy. In the “Campaign in the Illinois” (Cincinnati, Robert Clarke and Co., 1869), p. 99, there is a printed copy of the original. The Washington MS. differs from it in one or two particulars. Thus, the printed diary in the “Campaign,” on p. 99, line 3, says “fifty volunteers”; the MS. copy says “50 French volunteers.” Line 5 in the printed copy says “and such other Americans”; in the MS. it says “and several other Americans.” Lines 6 and 7 of the printed copy read as follows in the MS. (but only make doubtful sense): “These with a number of horses designed for the settlement of Kantuck &c. Jan. 30th, on which Col. Clark,” etc. Lines 10 and 11 of the printed copy read in the MS.: “was let alone till spring that he with his Indians would undoubtedly cut us all off.” Lines 13 and 14, of the printed copy read in the MS. “Jan. 31st, sent an express to Cahokia for volunteers. Nothing extraordinary this day.”]

[26] This is not exactly stated in the “Memoir”; but it speaks of the horses as being with the troops on the 20th; and after they left camp, on the evening of the 21st, states that he “would have given a good deal … for one of the horses.”

[27] Law, in his “Vincennes” (p. 32), makes the deeds of the drummer the basis for a traditional story that is somewhat too highly colored. Thus he makes Clark’s men at one time mutiny, and refuse to go forward. This they never did; the creoles once got dejected and wished to return, but the Americans, by Clark’s own statement, never faltered at all. Law’s “Vincennes” is an excellent little book, but he puts altogether too much confidence in mere tradition. For another instance besides this, see page 68, where he describes Clark as entrapping and killing “upward of fifty Indians,” instead of only eight or nine, as was actually the case.

[28] Bowman ends his entry for the day with: “No provisions yet. Lord help us!”

[29] Bowman.

[30] Clark’s “Memoir.”

[31] Clark’s “Memoir.”

[32] In the Haldimand MSS., Series B, Vol. 122, p. 289, there is a long extract from what is called “Col. Clark’s Journal.” This is the official report which he speaks of as being carried by William Moires, his express, who was taken by the Indians (see his letter to Henry of April 29th; there seems, by the way, to be some doubt whether this letter was not written to Jefferson; there is a copy in the Jefferson MSS., Series I, Vol. I). This is not only the official report, but also the earliest letter Clark wrote on the subject and therefore the most authoritative. The paragraph relating to the final march against Vincennes is as follows:

“I order’d the march in the first division Capt. Williams, Capt. Worthingtons Company & the Cascaskia Volunteers in the 2d commanded by Capt. Bowman his own Company & the Cohos Volunteers. At sun down I put the divisions in motion to march in the greatest order & regularity & observe the orders of their officers. Above all to be silent—the 5 men we took in the canoes were our guides. We entered the town on the upper part leaving detached Lt. Bayley & 15 rifle men to attack the Fort & keep up a fire to harrass them untill we took possession of the town & they were to remain on that duty till relieved by another party, the two divisions marched into the town & took possession of the main street, put guards &c without the least molestation.”

This effectually disposes of the account, which was accepted by Clark himself in his old age, that he ostentatiously paraded his men and marched them to and fro with many flags flying, so as to impress the British with his numbers. Instead of indulging in any such childishness (which would merely have warned the British, and put them on their guard), he in reality made as silent an approach as possible, under cover of the darkness.

Hamilton in his narrative, speaks of the attack as being made on the 22d of February, not the 23d as Clark says.

[33] Hamilton’s “brief account” in the Haldimand MSS. The party was led by Lt. Schieffelin of the regulars and the French captains Lamothe and Maisonville.

[34] Haldimand MSS. Series B, Vol. 122, p, 337. Account brought to the people of Detroit of the loss of Vincennes, by a Captain Chene, who was then living in the village. As the Virginians entered it he fled to the woods with some Huron and Ottawa warriors; next day he was joined by some French families and some Miamis and Pottawatomies.

[35] Clark’s letter to Henry.

[36] A son of the Piankeshaw head-chief Tabac.

[37] Hamilton’s Narrative. Clark in his “Memoir” asserts that he designedly let them through, and could have shot them down as they tried to clamber over the stockade if he had wished. Bowman corroborates Hamilton, saying: “We sent a party to intercept them, but missed them. However, we took one of their men, … the rest making their escape under the cover of the night into the fort.” Bowman’s journal is for this siege much more trustworthy than Clark’s “Memoir.” In the latter, Clark makes not a few direct misstatements, and many details are colored so as to give them an altered aspect. As an instance of the different ways in which he told an event at the time, and thirty years later, take the following accounts of the same incident. The first is from the letter to Henry (State Department MSS.), the second from the “Memoir.” 1. “A few days ago I received certain inteligence of Wm. Moires my express to you being killed near the Falls of Ohio, news truly disagreeable to me, as I fear many of my letters will fall into the hands of the enemy at Detroit.” 2. “Poor Myres the express, who set out on the 15th, got killed on his passage, and his packet fell into the hands of the enemy; but I had been so much on my guard that there was not a sentence in it that could be of any disadvantage to us for the enemy to know; and there were private letters from soldiers to their friends designedly wrote to deceive in cases of such accidents.” His whole account of the night attack and of his treating with Hamilton is bombastic. If his account of the incessant “blaze of fire” of the Americans is true, they must have wasted any amount of ammunition perfectly uselessly. Unfortunately, most of the small western historians who have written about Clark have really damaged his reputation by the absurd inflation of their language. They were adepts in the forcible-feeble style of writing, a sample of which is their rendering him ludicrous by calling him “the Hannibal of the West,” and “the Washington of the West.” Moreover, they base his claims to greatness not on his really great deeds, but on the half-imaginary feats of childish cunning he related in his old age.

[38] Clark’s letter to Henry.

[39] Do. In the letter to Mason he says two scalped, six cap tured and afterward tomahawked. Bowman says two killed, three wounded, six captured; and calls the two partisans “prisoners.” Hamilton and Clark say they were French allies of the British, the former saying there were two, the latter mentioning only one. Hamilton says there were fifteen Indians.

[40] The incident is noteworthy as showing how the French were divided; throughout the Revolutionary war in the west they furnished troops to help in turn whites and Indians. British and Americans. The Illinois French, however, generally remained faithful to the Republic, and the Detroit French to the crown.

[41] Hamilton, who bore the most vindictive hatred to Clark, implies that the latter tomahawked the prisoners himself; but Bowman explicitly says that it was done while Clark and Hamilton were meeting at the church. Be it noticed in passing, that both Clark and Hamilton agree that though the Vincennes people favored the Americans, only a few of them took active part on Clark’s side.

[42] Letter to Henry. Hamilton’s letter says sixty rank and file of the 8th regiment and Detroit volunteers; the other nineteen were officers and under-officers, artillerymen, and French partisan leaders. The return of the garrison already quoted shows he had between eighty and ninety white troops.

[43] Hamilton himself, at the conclusion of his “brief account,” speaks as follows in addressing his superiors: “The difficulties and dangers of Colonel Clark’s march from the Illinois were such as required great courage to encounter and great perseverance to overcome. In trusting to traitors he was more fortunate than myself; whether, on the whole, he was entitled to success is not for me to determine.” Both Clark and Hamilton give minute accounts of various interviews that took place between them; the accounts do not agree, and it is needless to say that in the narration of each the other appears to disadvantage, being quoted as practically admitting various acts of barbarity, etc.

[44] Letter to Henry.

[45] “Memoir.”

[46] One hundred and fifty thousand acres of land opposite Louisville were finally allotted them. Some of the Pianke- shaw Indians ceded Clark a tract of land for his own use, but the Virginia Legislature very properly disallowed the grant.

[47] In Hamilton’s “brief account,” he says that their lives were often threatened by the borderers, but that “our guard behaved very well, protected us, and hunted for us.” At the Falls he found “a number of settlers who lived in log-houses, in eternal apprehension from the Indians,” and he adds: “The people at the forts are in a wretched state, obliged to enclose the cattle every night within the fort, and carry their rifles to the field when they go to plow or cut wood.” He speaks of Boone’s kindness in his short printed narrative in the “Royal Gazette.”

[48] Clark, in his letter to Mason, alludes to Hamilton’s “known barbarity”; but in his memoir he speaks very well of Hamilton, and attributes the murderous forays to his subordinates, one of whom, Major Hay, he particularly specifies.

[49] See Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe,” II, 421, for examples of French payments, some of a peculiarly flagrant sort. A certain kind of American pseudo-historian is especially fond of painting the British as behaving to us with unexampled barbarity; yet nothing is more sure than that the French were far more cruel and less humane in their contests with us than were the British.

[50] State Department MSS. [Intercepted Letters], No. 51, Vol. II, pp. 17 and 45. Letter of James Colbert, a half-breed in the British interest, resident at that time among the Chicka saws, May 25, 1779, etc.

[51] The history of the early navigation of the Ohio and Mis sissippi begins many years before the birth of any of our Western pioneers, when the French went up and down them. Long before the Revolutionary War occasional hunters, in dugouts, or settlers going to Natchez in flat-boats, descended these rivers, and from Pittsburg craft were sent to New Or leans to open negotiations with the Spaniards as soon as hos tilities broke out; and ammunition was procured from New Orleans as soon as Independence was declared.

[52] In Lat. 36° 30'; it was named Port Jefferson. Jefferson MSS., 1st Series, Vol. 19. Clark’s letter.

[53] It is of course impossible to prove that but for Clark’s conquest the Ohio would have been made our boundary in 1783, exactly as it is impossible to prove that but for Wolfe the English would not have taken Quebec. But when we take into account the determined efforts of Spain and France to confine us to the land east of the Alleghanies, and then to the land southeast of the Ohio, the slavishness of Congress in instructing our commissioners to do whatever France wished, and the readiness shown by one of the commissioners, Franklin, to follow these instructions, it certainly looks as if there would not even have been an effort made by us to get the Northwestern territory had we not already possessed it, thanks to Clark. As it was, it was only owing to Jay’s broad patriotism and stern determination that our Western boundaries were finally made so far-reaching. None of our early diplomats did as much for the West as Jay, whom at one time the whole West hated and reviled; Mann Butler, whose politics are generally very sound, deserves especial credit for the justice he does the New Yorker.

It is idle to talk of the conquest as being purely a Virginian affair. It was conquered by Clark, a Virginian, with some scant help from Virginia, but it was retained only owing to the power of the United States and the patriotism of such Northern statesmen as Jay, Adams, and Franklin, the negotiators of the final treaty. Had Virginia alone been in interest, Great Britain would not have even paid her claims the compliment of listening to them. Virginia’s share in the history of the nation has ever been gallant and leading; but the Revolutionary War was emphatically fought by Americans for America; no part could have won without the help of the whole, and every victory was thus a victory for all, in which all alike can take pride.

[54] A probably truthful tradition reports that when the Virginian commissioners offered Clark the sword, the grim old fighter, smarting under the sense of his wrongs, threw it indignantly from him, telling the envoys that he demanded from Virginia his just rights and the promised reward of his services, not an empty compliment.

CHAPTER VIII

CONTINUANCE OF THE STRUGGLE IN KENTUCKY AND THE NORTHWEST, 1779–1781

CLARK’S SUCCESSFUL campaigns against the Illinois towns and Vincennes, besides giving the Americans a foothold north of the Ohio, were of the utmost importance to Kentucky. Until this time, the Kentucky settlers had been literally fighting for life and home, and again and again their strait had been so bad that it seemed—and was—almost an even chance whether they would be driven from the land. The successful outcome of Clark’s expedition temporarily overawed the Indians, and, moreover, made the French towns outposts for the protection of the settlers; so that for several years thereafter the tribes west of the Wabash did but little against the Americans. The confidence of the back woodsmen in their own ultimate triumph was like wise very much increased; while the fame of the Western region was greatly spread abroad. From all these causes it resulted that there was an immediate and great increase of immigration thither, the bulk of the immigrants of course stopping in Kentucky, though a very few, even thus early, went to Illinois. Every settlement in Kentucky was still in jeopardy, and there came moments of dejection, when some of her bravest leaders spoke gloomily of the possibility of the Americans being driven from the land. But these were merely words such as even strong men utter when sore from fresh disaster. After the spring of 1779, there was never any real danger that the whites would be forced to abandon Kentucky.

The land laws which the Virginia Legislature enacted about this time[1] were partly a cause, partly a consequence, of the increased emigration to Kentucky, and of the consequent rise in the value of its wild lands. Long before the Revolution, shrewd and far-seeing speculators had organized land companies to acquire grants of vast stretches of Western territory; but the land only acquired an actual value for private individuals after the incoming of settlers. In addition to the companies, many private individuals had acquired rights to tracts of land; some, under the royal proclamation, giving bounties to the officers and soldiers in the French war; others by actual payment into the public treasury.[2] The Virginia Legislature now ratified all titles to regularly surveyed ground claimed under charter, military bounty, and old treasury rights, to the extent of four hundred acres each. Tracts of land were reserved as bounties for the Virginia troops, both Continentals and militia. Each family of actual settlers was allowed a settlement right to four hundred acres for the small sum of nine dollars, and, if very poor, the land was given them on credit. Every such settler also acquired a pre-emptive right to purchase a thousand acres adjoining, at the regulation State price. which was forty pounds, paper money, or forty dollars in specie, for every hundred acres. One peculiar provision was made necessary by the system of settling in forted villages. Every such village was allowed six hundred and forty acres, which no outsider could have surveyed or claim, for it was considered the property of the townsmen, to be held in common until an equitable division could be made; while each family likewise had a settlement right to four hundred acres adjoining the village. The vacant lands were sold, warrants for a hundred acres costing forty dollars in specie; but later on, toward the close of the war, Virginia tried to buoy up her mass of depreciated paper currency by accepting it nearly at par for land warrants, thereby reducing the cost of these to less than fifty cents for a hundred acres. No warrant applied to a particular spot; it was surveyed on any vacant or presumably vacant ground. Each individual had the surveying done wherever he pleased, the county surveyor usually appointing some skilled woodsman to act as his deputy.

In the end the natural result of all this was to involve half the people of Kentucky in lawsuits over their land, as there were often two or three titles to each patch,[3] and the surveys crossed each other in hopeless tangles. Immediately, the system gave a great stimulus to immigration, for it made it easy for any incoming settler to get title to his farm, and it also strongly attracted all land speculators. Many well-to-do merchants or planters of the seaboard sent agents out to buy lands in Kentucky; and these agents either hired the old pioneers, such as Boone and Kenton, to locate and survey the lands, or else purchased their claims from them outright. The advantages of following the latter plan were of course obvious; for the pioneers were sure to have chosen fertile, well-watered spots; and though they asked more than the State, yet, ready money was so scarce, and the depreciation of the currency so great, that even thus the land only cost a few cents an acre.[4]

Thus it came about that with the fall of 1779 a strong stream of emigration set toward Kentucky, from the backwoods districts of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. In company with the real settlers came many land speculators, and also many families of weak, irresolute, or shiftless people, who soon tired of the ceaseless and grinding frontier strife for life, and drifted back to the place whence they had come.[5] Thus there were ever two tides—the larger setting toward Kentucky, the lesser toward the old States; so that the two streams passed each other on the Wilderness road—for the people who came down the Ohio could not return against the current. Very many who did not return nevertheless found they were not fitted to grapple with the stern trials of existence on the border. Some of these succumbed outright; others unfortunately survived, and clung with feeble and vicious helplessness to the skirts of their manlier fellows; and from them have descended the shiftless squatters, the “mean whites,” the listless, uncouth men who half-till their patches of poor soil, and still cumber the earth in out-of-the-way nooks from the crannies of the Alleghanies to the canyons of the southern Rocky Mountains.

In April, before this great rush of immigration began, but when it was clearly foreseen that it would immediately take place, the county court of Kentucky issued a proclamation to the new settlers, recommending them to keep as united and compact as possible, settling in “stations” or forted towns; and likewise advising each settlement to choose three or more trustees to take charge of their public affairs.[6] Their recommendations and advice were generally followed.

During 1779 the Indian war dragged on much as usual. The only expedition of importance was that undertaken in May by one hundred and sixty Kentuckians, commanded by the county lieutenant, John Bowman,[7] against the Indian town of Chillicothe. Logan, Harrod, and other famous frontier fighters went along. The town was surprised, several cabins burned, and a number of horses captured. But the Indians rallied, and took refuge in a central block-house and a number of strongly built cabins surrounding it, from which they fairly beat off the whites. They then followed to harass the rear of their retreating foes, but were beaten off in turn. Of the whites, nine were killed and two or three wounded; the Indians’ loss was two killed and five or six wounded.

The defeat caused intense mortification to the whites; but in reality the expedition was of great service to Kentucky, though the Kentuckians never knew it. The Detroit people had been busily organizing expeditions against Kentucky. Captain Henry Bird had been given charge of one, and he had just collected two hundred Indians at the Mingo town when news of the attack on Chillicothe arrived. Instantly the Indians dissolved in a panic, some returning to defend their towns; others were inclined to beg peace of the Americans. So great was their terror that it was found impossible to persuade them to make any inroad as long as they deemed themselves menaced by a counter attack of the Kentuckians.[8]

It is true that bands of Mingos, Hurons, Delawares, and Shawnees made occasional successful raids against the frontier, and brought their scalps and prisoners in triumph to Detroit,[9] where they drank such astonishing quantities of rum as to incite the indignation of the British commander-in-chief.[10] But instead of being able to undertake any formidable expedition against the settlers, the Detroit authorities were during this year much concerned for their own safety, taking every possible means to provide for the defence, and keeping a sharp lookout for any hostile movement of the Americans.[11]

The incoming settlers were therefore left in comparative peace. They built many small palisaded towns, some of which proved permanent, while others vanished utterly when the fear of the Indians was removed and the families were able to scatter out on their farms. At the Falls of the Ohio a regular fort was built, armed with cannon and garrisoned by Virginia troops,[12] who were sent down the river expressly to reinforce Clark. The Indians never dared assail this fort; but they ravaged up to its walls, destroying the small stations on Bear Grass Creek and scalping settlers and soldiers when they wandered far from the protection of the stockade.

The new-comers of 1779 were destined to begin with a grim experience, for the ensuing winter[13] was the most severe ever known in the West, and was long recalled by the pioneers as the “hard winter.” Cold weather set in toward the end of November, the storms following one another in unbroken succession, while the snow lay deep until the spring. Most of the cattle, and very many of the horses, perished; and deer and elk were likewise found dead in the woods, or so weak and starved that they would hardly move out of the way, while the buffalo often came up at nightfall to the yards, seeking to associate with the starving herds of the settlers.[14] The scanty supply of corn gave out, until there was not enough left to bake into johnny-cakes on the long boards in front of the fire.[15] Even at the Falls, where there were stores for the troops, the price of corn went up nearly fourfold,[16] while elsewhere among the stations of the interior it could not be had at any price, and there was an absolute dearth both of salt and of vegetable food, the settlers living for weeks on the flesh of the lean wild game,[17] especially of the buffalo.[18] The hunters searched with especial eagerness for the bears in the hollow trees, for they alone among the animals kept fat; and the breast of the wild turkey served for bread.[19] Nevertheless, even in the midst of this season of cold and famine, the settlers began to take the first steps for the education of their children. In this year Joseph Doniphan, whose son long afterward won fame in the Mexican war, opened the first regular school at Boonesborough,[20] and one of the McAfees likewise served as a teacher through the winter.[21] But from the beginning some of the settlers’ wives had now and then given the children in the forts a few weeks’ schooling.

Through the long, irksome winter, the frontiersmen remained crowded within the stockades. The men hunted, while the woman made the clothes, of tanned deer-hides, buffalo-wool cloth, and nettle-bark linen. In stormy weather, when none could stir abroad, they turned or coopered the wooden vessels; for tin cups were as rare as iron forks, and the “noggin” was either hollowed out of the knot of a tree, or else made with small staves and hoops.[22] Everything was of home manufacture—for there was not a store in Kentucky,—and the most expensive domestic products seem to have been the hats, made of native fur, mink, coon, fox, wolf, and beaver. If exceptionally fine and of valuable fur, they cost five hundred dollars in paper money, which had not at that time depreciated a quarter as much in outlying Kentucky as at the seat of government.[23]

As soon as the great snow-drifts began to melt, and thereby to produce freshets of unexampled height, the gaunt settlers struggled out to their clearings, glad to leave the forts. They planted corn, and eagerly watched the growth of the crop; and those who hungered after oatmeal or wheaten bread planted other grains as well, and apple-seeds and peach-stones.[24]

As soon as the spring of 1780 opened, the immigrants began to arrive more numerously than ever. Some came over the Wilderness road; among these there were not a few haggard, half-famished beings, who, having started too late the previous fall, had been overtaken by the deep snows, and forced to pass the winter in the iron-bound and desolate valleys of the Alleghanies, subsisting on the carcasses of their stricken cattle, and seeing their weaker friends starve or freeze before their eyes. Very many came down the Ohio, in flat-boats. A good-sized specimen of these huge unwieldy scows was fifty-five feet long, twelve broad, and six deep, drawing three feet of water[25]; but the demand was greater than the supply, and a couple of dozen people, with half as many horses, and all their effects, might be forced to embark on a flat-boat not twenty-four feet in length.[26] Usually several families came together, being bound by some tie of neighborhood or purpose. Not infrequently this tie was religious, for in the back settlements the few churches were almost as much social as religious centres. Thus this spring, a third of the congregation of a Low Dutch Reformed Church came to Kentucky bodily, to the number of fifty heads of families, with their wives and children, their beasts of burden and pasture, and their household goods; like most bands of new immigrants, they suffered greatly from the Indians, much more than did the old settlers.[27] The following year a Baptist congregation came out from Virginia, keeping up its organization even while on the road, the preacher holding services at every long halt.

Soon after the rush of spring immigration was at its height, the old settlers and the new-comers alike were thrown into the utmost alarm by a formidable inroad of Indians, accompanied by French partisans, and led by a British officer. De Peyster, a New York tory of old Knickerbocker family, had taken command at Detroit. He gathered the Indians around him from far and near, until the expense of subsidizing these savages became so enormous as to call forth serious complaints from headquarters.[28] He constantly endeavored to equip and send out different bands, not only to retake the Illinois and Vincennes, but to dislodge Clark from the Falls[29]; he was continually receiving scalps and prisoners, and by May he had fitted out two thousand warriors to act along the Ohio and the Wabash.[30] The rapid growth of Kentucky especially excited his apprehension,[31] and his main stroke was directed against the clusters of wooden forts that were springing up south of the Ohio.[32]

Late in May, some six hundred Indians and a few Canadians, with a couple of pieces of light field artillery, were gathered and put under the command of Captain Henry Bird. Following the rivers where practicable, that he might the easier carry his guns, he went down the Miami, and on the 22d. of June, surprised and captured without resistance Ruddle’s and Martin’s stations, two small stockades on the South Fork of the Licking.[33] But Bird was not one of the few men fitted to command such a force as that which followed him; and contenting himself with the slight success he had won, he rapidly retreated to Detroit, over the same path by which he had advanced. The Indians carried off many horses, and loaded their prisoners with the plunder, tomahawking those, chiefly women and children, who could not keep up with the rest; and Bird could not control them nor force them to show mercy to their captives.[34] He did not even get his cannon back to Detroit, leaving them at the British store in one of the upper Miami towns, in charge of a bombardier. The bombardier did not prove a very valorous personage, and on the alarm of Clark’s advance, soon afterward, he permitted the Indians to steal his horses, and was forced to bury his ordnance in the woods.[35]

Before this inroad took place Clark had been planning a foray into the Indian country, and the news only made him hasten his preparations. In May this adventurous leader had performed one of the feats which made him the darling of the backwoodsmen. Painted and dressed like an Indian so as to deceive the lurking bands of savages, he and two companions left the fort he had built on the bank of the Mississippi, and came through the wilderness to Harrodsburg. They lived on the buffaloes they shot, and when they came to the Tennessee River, which was then in flood, they crossed the swift torrent on a raft of logs bound together with grapevines. At Harrodsburg they found the land court open, and thronged with an eager, jostling crowd of settlers and speculators, who were waiting to enter lands in the surveyor’s office. Even the dread of the Indians could not overcome in these men’s hearts the keen and selfish greed for gain. Clark instantly grasped the situation. Seeing that while the court remained open he could get no volunteers, he on his own responsibility closed it off-hand, and proclaimed that it would not be opened until after he came back from his expedition. The speculators grumbled and clamored, but this troubled Clark not at all, for he was able to get as many volunteers as he wished. The discontent, and still more the panic over Bird’s inroad, made many of the settlers determine to flee from the country, but Clark sent a small force to Crab Orchard, at the mouth of the Wilderness road, the only outlet from Kentucky, with instructions to stop all men from leaving the country, and to take away their arms if they persisted; while four-fifths of all the grown men were drafted, and were bidden to gather instantly for a campaign.[36] He appointed the mouth of the Licking as the place of meeting. Thither he brought the troops from the Falls in light skiffs he had built for the purpose, leaving behind scarce a handful of men to garrison the stockade. Logan went with him as second in command. He carried with him a light three-pounder gun; and those of the men who had horses marched along the bank beside the flotilla. The only mishap that befell the troops happened to McGarry, who had a subordinate command. He showed his usual foolhardy obstinacy by persisting in landing with a small squad of men on the north bank of the river, where he was in consequence surprised and roughly handled by a few Indians. Nothing was done to him because of his disobedience, for the chief of such a backwoods levy was the leader, rather than the commander, of his men.

At the mouth of the Licking Clark met the riflemen from the interior stations, among them being Kenton, Harrod, and Floyd, and others of equal note. They had turned out almost to a man, leaving the women and boys to guard the wooden forts until they came back, and had come to the appointed place, some on foot or on horseback, others floating and paddling down the Licking in canoes. They left scanty provisions with their families, who had to subsist during their absence on what game the boys shot, on nettle tops, and a few early vegetables; and they took with them still less. Dividing up their stock, each man had a couple of pounds of meal and some jerked venison or buffalo meat.[37]

All his troops having gathered, to the number of nine hundred and seventy, Clark started up the Ohio on the second of August.[38] The skiffs, laden with men, were poled against the current, while bodies of footmen and horsemen marched along the bank. After going a short distance up stream the horses and men were ferried to the further bank, the boats were drawn up on the shore and left, with a guard of forty men, and the rest of the troops started overland against the town of Old Chillicothe, fifty or sixty miles distant. The three-pounder was carried along on a pack-horse. The march was hard, for it rained so incessantly that it was difficult to keep the rifles dry. Every night they encamped in a hollow square, with the baggage and horses in the middle.

Chillicothe, when reached, was found to be deserted. It was burned, and the army pushed on to Piqua, a town a few miles distant, on the banks of the Little Miami,[39] reaching it about ten in the morning of the 8th of August.[40] Piqua was substantially built, and was laid out in the manner of the French villages. The stoutly built log-houses stood far apart, surrounded by strips of corn-land, and fronting the stream; while a strong block-house with loop-holed walls stood in the middle. Thick woods, broken by small prairies, covered the rolling country that lay around the town.

Clark divided his army into four divisions, taking the command of two in person. Giving the others to Logan, he ordered him to cross the river above the town[41] and take it in the rear, while he himself crossed directly below it and assailed it in front. Logan did his best to obey the orders, but he could not find a ford, and he marched by degrees nearly three miles up stream, making repeated and vain attempts to cross; when he finally succeeded the day was almost done, and the fighting was over.

Meanwhile Clark plunged into the river, and crossed at the head of one of his own two divisions; the other was delayed for a short time. Both Simon Girty and his brother were in the town, together with several hundred Indian warriors; exactly how many cannot be said, but they were certainly fewer in number than the troops composing either wing of Clark’s army.[42] They were surprised by Clark’s swift advance just as a scouting party of warriors, who had been sent out to watch the whites, were returning to the village. The warning was so short that the squaws and children had barely time to retreat out of the way. As Clark crossed the stream, the warriors left their cabins and formed in some thick timber behind them. At the same moment a cousin of Clark’s, who had been captured by the Indians, and was held prisoner in the town, made his escape and ran toward the Americans, throwing up his hands, and calling out that he was a white man. He was shot, whether by the Americans or the Indians none could say. Clark came up and spoke a few words with him before he died.[43] A long-range skirmish ensued with the warriors in the timber; but on the approach of Clark’s second division the Indians fell back. The two divisions followed in pursuit, becoming mingled in disorder. After a slight running fight of two hours the whites lost sight of their foes, and, wondering what had become of Logan’s wing, they gathered together and marched back toward the river. One of the McAfees, captain over a company of riflemen from Salt River, was leading, when he discovered an Indian in a treetop. He and one of his men sought shelter behind the same tree; whereupon he tried to glide behind another, but was shot and mortally wounded by the Indian, who was himself instantly killed. The scattered detachments now sat down to listen for the missing wing. After half an hour’s silent waiting, they suddenly became aware of the presence of a body of Indians, who had slipped in between them and the town. The backwoodsmen rushed up to the attack, while the Indians whooped and yelled defiance. There was a moment’s heavy firing; but as on both sides the combatants carefully sheltered themselves behind trees, there was very little loss; and the Indians steadily gave way until they reached the town, about two miles distant from the spot where the whites had halted. They then made a stand, and, for the first time, there occurred some real fighting. The Indians stood stoutly behind the loop-holed walls of the cabins, and in the blockhouse; the Americans, advancing cautiously and gaining ground inch by inch, suffered much more loss than they inflicted. Late in the afternoon Clark managed to bring the three-pounder into action, from a point below the town; while the riflemen fired at the red warriors as they were occasionally seen running from the cabins to take refuge behind the steep bank of the river. A few shots from the three-pounder dislodged the defenders of the blockhouse; and about sunset the Americans closed in, but only to find that their foes had escaped under cover of a noisy fire from a few of the hindmost warriors. They had run up stream, behind the banks, until they came to a small “branch” or brook, by means of which they gained the shelter of the forest, where they at once scattered and disappeared. A few of their stragglers exchanged shots with the advance guard of Logan’s wing as it at last came down the bank; this was the only part Logan was able to take in the battle. Of the Indians six or eight were slain, whereas the whites lost seventeen killed, and a large number wounded.[44] Clark destroyed all the houses and a very large quantity of corn; and he sent out detachments which destroyed another village, and the stores of some British and French Canadian traders. Then the army marched back to the mouth of the Licking and disbanded, most of the volunteers having been out just twenty-five days.[45]

The Indians were temporarily cowed by their loss and the damage they had suffered,[46] and especially by the moral effect of so formidable a retaliatory-foray following immediately on the heels of Bird’s inroad. Therefore, thanks to Clark, the settlements south of the Ohio were but little molested for the remainder of the year.[47] The bulk of the savages remained north of the river, hovering about their burned towns, planning to take vengeance in the spring.[48]

Nevertheless small straggling bands of young braves occasionally came down through the woods; and though they did not attack any fort or any large body of men, they were ever on the watch to steal horses, burn lonely cabins, and waylay travelers between the stations. They shot the solitary settlers who had gone out to till their clearings by stealth, or ambushed the boys who were driving in the milk cows or visiting their lines of traps. It was well for the victim if he was killed at once; otherwise he was bound with hickory withes and driven to the distant Indian towns, there to be tortured with hideous cruelty and burned to death at the stake.[49] Boone himself suffered at the hands of one of these parties. He had gone with his brother to the Blue Licks, to him a spot always fruitful of evil; and being ambushed by the Indians, his brother was killed, and he himself was only saved by his woodcraft and speed of foot. The Indians had with them a tracking dog, by the aid of which they followed his trail for three miles; until he halted, shot the dog, and thus escaped.[50]

During this comparatively peaceful fall the settlers fared well; though the men were ever on the watch for Indian war parties, while the mothers, if their children were naughty, frightened them into quiet with the threat that the Shawnees would catch them. The widows and the fatherless were cared for by the other families of the different stations. The season of want and scarcity had passed forever; from thenceforth on there was abundance in Kentucky. The crops did not fail; not only was there plenty of corn, the one essential, but there was also wheat, as well as potatoes, melons, pumpkins, turnips, and the like. Sugar was made by tapping the maple trees; but salt was bought at a very exorbitant price at the Falls, being carried down in boats from the old Redstone Fort. Flax had been generally sown (though in the poorer settlements nettle bark still served as a substitute), and the young men and girls formed parties to pick it, often ending their labor by an hour or two’s search for wild plums. The men killed all the game they wished, and so there was no lack of meat. They also surveyed the land and tended the stock—cattle, horses, and hogs, which throve and multiplied out on the range, fattening on the cane and large white buffalo-clover. At odd times the men and boys visited their lines of traps. Furs formed almost the only currency, except a little paper money; but as there were no stores west of the mountains, this was all that was needed, and each settlement raised most things for itself, and procured the rest by barter.

The law courts were as yet very little troubled, each small community usually enforcing a rough- and-ready justice of its own. On a few of the streams log-dams were built, and tub-mills started. In Harrodsburg a toll mill was built in 1779. The owner used to start it grinding, and then go about his other business; once on returning he found a large wild turkey-gobbler so busily breakfasting out of the hopper that he was able to creep quietly up and catch him with his hands. The people all worked together in cultivating their respective lands; coming back to the fort before dusk for supper. They would then call on any man who owned a fiddle and spend the evening, with interludes of singing and story-telling, in dancing—an amusement they considered as only below hunting. On Sundays the stricter parents taught their children the catechism; but in spite of the presence of not a few devout Baptists and Presbyterians there was little chance for general observance of religious forms. Ordinary conversation was limited to such subjects as bore on the day’s doings; the game that had been killed, the condition of the crops, the plans of the settlers for the immediate future, the accounts of the last massacre by the savages, or the rumor that Indian sign had been seen in the neighborhood; all interspersed with much banter, practical joking, and rough, good- humored fun. The scope of conversation was of necessity narrowly limited even for the backwoods; for there was little chance to discuss religion and politics, the two subjects that the average backwoodsman regards as the staples of deep conversation. The deeds of the Indians of course formed the one absorbing topic.[51]

An abortive separatist movement was the chief political sensation of this summer. Many hundreds and even thousands of settlers from the backwoods districts of various States, had come to Kentucky, and some even to Illinois, and a number of them were greatly discontented with the Virginian rule. They deemed it too difficult to get justice when they were so far from the seat of government; they objected to the land being granted to any but actual settlers; and they protested against being taxed, asserting that they did not know whether the country really belonged to Virginia or the United States. Accordingly they petitioned the Continental Congress that Kentucky and Illinois combined might be made into a separate State;[52] but no heed was paid to their request, nor did their leading men join in making it.

In November the Virginia Legislature divided Kentucky into three counties of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Fayette, appointing for each a colonel, a lieutenant-colonel, and a surveyor. The three colonels, who were also justices of the counties,[53] were, in their order, John Floyd—whom Clark described as “a soldier, a gentleman, and a scholar,”[54]—Benjamin Logan, and John Todd. Clark, whose station was at the Falls of the Ohio, was brigadier-general and commander over all. Boone was lieutenant-colonel under Todd; and their county of Fayette had for its surveyor Thomas Marshall,[55] the father of the great chief-justice, whose services to the United States stand on a plane with those of Alexander Hamilton.[56]

The winter passed quietly away, but as soon as the snow was off the ground in 1781, the Indians renewed their ravages. Early in the winter Clark went to Virginia to try to get an army for an expedition against Detroit. He likewise applied to Washington for assistance. Washington fully entered into his plans, and saw their importance. He would gladly have rendered him every aid. But he could do nothing, because of the impotence to which the central authority, the Continental Congress, had been reduced by the selfishness and supine indifference of the various States—Virginia among the number. He wrote Clark: “It is out of my power to send any reinforcements to the westward. If the States would fill their continental battalions we should be able to oppose a regular and permanent force to the enemy in every quarter. If they will not, they must certainly take measures to defend themselves by their militia, however expensive and ruinous the system.” [57] It was impossible to state with more straightforward clearness the fact that Kentucky owed the unprotected condition in which she was left, to the divided or States-rights system of government that then existed; and that she would have had ample protection—and incidentally greater liberty—had the central authority been stronger.

At last Clark was empowered to raise the men he wished, and he passed and repassed from Fort Pitt to the Falls of the Ohio and thence to the Illinois in the vain effort to get troops. The inertness and shortsightedness of the frontiersmen, above all the exhaustion of the States, and their timid selfishness and inability to enforce their commands, baffled all of Clark’s efforts. In his letters to Washington he bitterly laments his enforced dependence upon “persuasive arguments to draw the inhabitants of the country into the field.”[58] The Kentuckians were anxious to do all in their power, but of course only a comparatively small number could be spared for so long a campaign from their scattered stockades. Around Pittsburg, where he hoped to raise the bulk of his forces, the frontiersmen were split into little factions by their petty local rivalries, the envy their leaders felt of Clark himself, and the never-ending jealousies and bickerings between the Virginians and Pennsylvanians.[59]

The fort at the Falls, where Clark already had some troops, was appointed as a gathering-place for the different detachments that were to join him; but from one cause or another, all save one or two failed to appear. Most of them did not even start, and one body of Pennsylvanians that did go met with an untoward fate. This was a party of a hundred Westmoreland men under their county-lieutenant, Col. Archibald Loughry, They started down the Ohio in flat-boats, but having landed on a sand-bar to butcher and cook a buffalo that they had killed, they were surprised by an equal number of Indians under Joseph Brant, and being huddled together, were all slain or captured with small loss to their assailants.[60] Many of the prisoners, including Loughry himself, were afterward murdered in cold blood by the Indians.

During this year the Indians continually harassed the whole frontier, from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, ravaging the settlements and assailing the forts in great bands of five or six hundred warriors.[61] The Continental troops stationed at Fort Pitt were reduced to try every expedient to procure supplies. Though it was evident that the numbers of the hostile Indians had largely increased, and that even such tribes as the Delawares, who had been divided, were now united against the Americans, nevertheless, because of the scarcity of food, a party of soldiers had to be sent into the Indian country to kill buffalo, that the garrison might have meat.[62] The Indians threatened to attack the fort itself, as well as the villages it protected; passing around and on each side, their war parties ravaged the country in its rear, distressing greatly the people; and from this time until peace was declared with Great Britain, and indeed until long after that event, the westernmost Pennsylvanians knew neither rest nor safety.[63] Among many others the forted village at Wheeling was again attacked. But its most noteworthy siege occurred during the succeeding summer, when Simon Girty, with fife and drum, led a large band of Indians and Detroit rangers against it, only to be beaten off. The siege was rendered memorable by the heroism of a girl, who carried powder from the stockade to an outlying log-house, defended by four men; she escaped unscathed because of her very boldness, in spite of the fire from so many rifles, and to this day the mountaineers speak of her deed.[64]

It would be tiresome and profitless to so much as name the many different stations that were attacked. In their main incidents all the various assaults were alike, and that made this summer on McAfee’s station may be taken as an illustration.

The McAfees brought their wives and children to Kentucky in the fall of ‘79, and built a little stockaded hamlet on the banks of Salt River, six or seven miles from Harrodsburg. Some relatives and friends joined them, but their station was small and weak. The stockade, on the south side, was very feeble, and there were but thirteen men, besides the women and children, in garrison; but they were strong and active, good woodsmen, and excellent marksmen. The attack was made on May 4, 1781.[65]

The Indians lay all night at a corn-crib three-quarters of a mile distant from the stockade. The settlers, though one of their number had been carried off two months before, still continued their usual occupations. But they were very watchful and always kept a sharp lookout, driving the stock inside the yard at night. On the day in question, at dawn, it was noticed that the dogs and cattle betrayed symptoms of uneasiness; for all tame animals dreaded the sight or smell of an Indian as they did that of a wild beast, and by their alarm often warned the settlers and thus saved their lives.

In this case the warning was unheeded. At daybreak the stock were turned loose and four of the men went outside the fort. Two began to clear a patch of turnip-land about a hundred and fifty yards off, leaving their guns against a tree close at hand. The other two started toward the corn-crib, with a horse and bag. After going a quarter of a mile, the path dipped into a hollow, and here they suddenly came on the Indians, advancing stealthily toward the fort. At the first fire one of the men was killed, and the horse, breaking loose, galloped back to the fort. The other man likewise turned and ran toward home, but was confronted by an Indian who leaped into the path directly ahead of him. The two were so close together that the muzzles of their guns crossed, and both pulled trigger at once; the Indian’s gun missed fire and he fell dead in his tracks. Continuing his flight, the survivor reached the fort in safety.

When the two men in the turnip-patch heard the firing they seized their guns and ran toward the point of attack, but seeing the number of the assailants they turned back to the fort, trying to drive the frightened stock before them. The Indians coming up close, they had to abandon the attempt, although most of the horses and some of the cattle got safely home. One of the men reached the gate ahead of the Indians; the other was cut off, and took a roundabout route through the woods. He speedily distanced all of his pursuers but one; several times he turned to shoot the latter, but the Indian always took prompt refuge behind a tree, and the white man then renewed his flight. At last he reached a fenced orchard, on the border of the cleared ground round the fort. Throwing himself over the fence he lay still among the weeds on the other side. In a minute or two the pursuer, running up, cautiously peered over the fence, and was instantly killed; he proved to be a Shawnee chief, painted, and decked with many silver armlets, rings, and brooches. The fugitive then succeeded in making his way into the fort.

The settlers inside the stockade had sprung to arms the moment the first guns were heard. The men fired on the advancing Indians, while the women and children ran bullets and made ready the rifle-patches. Every one displayed the coolest determination and courage except one man who hid under a bed, until found by his wife; whereupon he was ignominiously dragged out and made to run bullets with the women.

As the Indians advanced they shot down most of the cattle and hogs and some of the horses that were running frantically round the stockade; and they likewise shot several dogs that had sallied out to help their masters. They then made a rush on the fort, but were driven off at once, one of their number being killed and several badly hurt, while but one of the defenders was wounded, and he but slightly. After this they withdrew to cover and began a desultory firing, which lasted for some time.

Suddenly a noise like distant thunder came to the ears of the men in the fort. It was the beat of horsehoofs. In a minute or two forty-five horsemen, headed by McGarry, appeared on the road leading from Harrodsburg, shouting and brandishing their rifles as they galloped up. The morning was so still that the firing had been heard a very long way; and a band of mounted riflemen had gathered in hot haste to go to the relief of the beleaguered stockade.

The Indians, whooping defiance, retired; while McGarry halted a moment to allow the rescued settlers to bridle their horses—saddles were not thought of. The pursuit was then begun at full speed. At the ford of a small creek nearby, the rearmost Indians turned and fired at the horsemen, killing one and wounding another, while a third had his horse mired down, and was left behind. The main body was overtaken at the corn-crib, and a running fight followed; the whites leaving their horses and both sides taking shelter behind the tree-trunks. Soon two Indians were killed, and the others scattered in every direction, while the victors returned in triumph to the station.

It is worthy of notice that though the Indians were defeated, and though they were pitted against first-class rifle shots, they yet had but five men killed and a very few wounded. They rarely suffered a heavy loss in battle with the whites, even when beaten in the open or repulsed from a fort. They would not stand heavy punishment, and in attacking a fort generally relied upon a single headlong rush, made under cover of darkness or as a surprise; they tried to unnerve their antagonists by the sudden fury of their onslaught and the deafening accompaniment of whoops and yells. If they began to suffer much loss they gave up at once, and if pursued scattered in every direction, each man for himself, and owing to their endurance, woodcraft, and skill in hiding, usually got off with marvelously little damage. At the outside a dozen of their men might be killed in the pursuit by such of the vengeful backwoodsmen as were exceptionally fleet of foot. The Northwestern tribes at this time appreciated thoroughly that their marvelous fighting qualities were shown to best advantage in the woods, and neither in the defence nor in the assault of fortified places. They never cooped themselves in stockades to receive an attack from the whites, as was done by the Massachusetts Algonquins in the seventeenth century, and by the Creeks at the beginning of the nineteenth; and it was only when behind defensive works, from which they could not retreat, that the forest Indians ever suffered heavily when defeated by the whites. On the other hand, the defeat of the average white force was usually followed by a merciless slaughter. Skilled backwoodsmen scattered out, Indian fashion, but their less skilful or more panic-struck brethren, and all regulars or ordinary militia, kept together from a kind of blind feeling of safety in companionship, and in consequence their nimble and ruthless antagonists destroyed them at their ease.

Still, the Indian war parties were often checked or scattered; and occasionally one of them received some signal discomfiture. Such was the case with a band that went up the Kanawha valley just as Clark was descending the Ohio on his way to the Illinois.

Finding the fort at the mouth of the Kanawha too strong to be carried, they moved on up the river toward the Greenbriar settlements, the chiefs shouting threateningly to the people in the fort, and taunting them with impending destruction of their friends and kindred. But two young men in the stockade forthwith dressed and painted themselves like Indians, that they might escape notice even if seen, and speeding through the woods reached the settlements first and gave warning. The settlers took refuge on a farm where there was a blockhouse with a stockaded yard. The Indians attacked in a body at daybreak when the door was opened, thinking to rush into the house; but they were beaten off, and paid dear for their boldness, for seventeen of them were left dead in the yard, besides the killed and wounded whom they carried away.[66] In the same year a blockhouse was attacked while the children were playing outside. The Indians in their sudden rush killed one settler, wounded four, and actually got inside the house; yet three were killed or disabled, and they were driven out by the despairing fury of the remaining whites, the women fighting together with the men. Then the savages instantly fled, but they had killed and scalped, or carried off, ten of the children. Be it remembered that these instances are taken at random from among hundreds of others, extending over a series of years longer than the average life.

The Indians warred with the odds immeasurably in their favor. The Ohio was the boundary between their remaining hunting - grounds and the lands where the whites had settled. In Kentucky alone this frontier was already seventy miles in length.[67] Beyond the river stretched the frowning forest, to the Indians a sure shield in battle, a secure haven in disaster, an impenetrable mask from behind which to plan attack. Clark, from his post at the Falls, sent out spies and scouts along the banks of the river, and patrolled its waters with his gunboat; but it was absolutely impossible to stop all the forays or to tell the point likely to be next struck. A war party starting from the wigwam-towns would move silently down through the woods, cross the Ohio at any point, and stealthily and rapidly traverse the settlements, its presence undiscovered until the deeds of murder and rapine were done, and its track marked by charred cabins and the ghastly, mutilated bodies of men, women, and children.

If themselves assailed, the warriors fought desperately and effectively. They sometimes attacked bodies of troops, but always by ambush or surprise; and they much preferred to pounce on unprepared and unsuspecting surveyors, farmers, or wayfarers, or to creep up to solitary, outlying cabins. They valued the scalps of women and children as highly as those of men. Striking a sudden blow, where there was hardly any possibility of loss to themselves, they instantly moved on to the next settlement, repeating the process again and again. Tireless, watchful, cautious, and rapid, they covered great distances, and their stealth and the mystery of their coming and going added to the terror produced by the horrible nature of their ravages. When pursued they dextrously covered their trail, and tarted homeward across a hundred leagues of trackless wilderness. The pursuers almost of necessity-went slower, for they had to puzzle out the tracks; and after a certain number of days either their food gave out or they found themselves too far from home, and were obliged to return. In most instances the pursuit was vain. Thus a party of twenty savages might make a war-trail some hundreds of miles in length, taking forty or fifty scalps, carrying off a dozen women and children, and throwing a number of settlements, with perhaps a total population of a thousand souls, into a rage of terror and fury, with a loss to themselves of but one or two men killed and wounded.

Throughout the summer of 1781 the settlers were scourged by an unbroken series of raids of this kind. In August McKee, Brant, and other tory and Indian leaders assembled on the Miami an army of perhaps a thousand warriors. They were collected to oppose Clark’s intended march to Detroit; for the British leaders were well aware of Clark’s intention, and trusted to the savages to frustrate it if he attempted to put it into execution. Brant went off for a scout with a hundred warriors, and destroyed Loughry’s party of Westmoreland men, as already related, returning to the main body after having done so. The fickle savages were much elated by this stroke, but instead of being inspired to greater efforts, took the view that the danger of invasion was now over. After much persuasion Brant, McKee, and the captain of the Detroit rangers, Thompson, persuaded them to march toward the Falls. On September 9th they were within thirty miles of their destination, and halted to send out scouts. Two prisoners were captured, from whom it was learned that Clark had abandoned his proposed expedition.[68] Instantly the Indians began to disband, some returning to their homes, and others scattering out to steal horses and burn isolated cabins. Nor could the utmost efforts of their leaders keep them together. They had no wish to fight Clark unless it was absolutely necessary, in order to save their villages and crops from destruction; and they much preferred plundering on their own account. However, a couple of hundred Hurons and Miamis, under Brant and McKee, were kept together, and moved southward between the Kentucky and Salt rivers, intending “to attack some of the small forts and infest the roads.”[69] About the middle of the month they fell in with a party of settlers led by Squire Boone.

Squire Boone had built a fort, some distance from any other, and when rumors of a great Indian invasion reached him, he determined to leave it and join the stations on Bear Grass Creek. When he reached Long Run, with his men, women, and children, cattle, and household goods, he stumbled against the two hundred warriors of McKee and Brant. His people were scattered to the four winds, with the loss of many scalps and all their goods and cattle. The victors camped on the ground with the intention of ambushing any party that arrived to bury the dead; for they were confident some of the settlers would come for this purpose. Nor were they disappointed; for next morning Floyd, the county lieutenant, with twenty-five men, made his appearance. Floyd marched so quickly that he came on the Indians before they were prepared to receive him. A smart skirmish ensued; but the whites were hopelessly outnumbered, and were soon beaten and scattered, with a loss of twelve or thirteen men. Floyd himself, exhausted and with his horse shot, would have been captured had not another man, one Samuel Wells, who was excellently mounted, seen his plight. Wells reined in, leaped off his horse, and making Floyd ride, he ran beside him, and both escaped. The deed was doubly noble, because the men had previously been enemies.[70] The frontiersmen had made a good defence in spite of the tremendous odds against them, and had slain four of their opponents, three Hurons and a Miami.[71] Among the former was the head chief, a famous warrior; his death so discouraged the Indians that they straightway returned home with their scalps and plunder, resisting McKee’s entreaty that they would first attack Boonesborough.

One war party carried off Logan’s family; but, Logan, following swiftly after, came on the savages so suddenly that he killed several of their number, and rescued all his own people unhurt.[72]

Often French Canadians, and more rarely tories, accompanied these little bands of murderous plunderers[73]—besides the companies of Detroit rangers who went with the large war parties,—and they were all armed and urged on by the British at Detroit. One of the official British reports to Lord George Germaine, made on October 23d of this year, deals with the Indian war parties employed against the Northwestern frontier. “Many smaller Indian parties have been very successful… . It would be endless and difficult to enumerate to your Lordship the parties that are continually employed upon the back settlements. From the Illinois country to the frontiers of New York there is a continual succession … the perpetual terror and losses of the inhabitants will I hope operate powerfully in our favor”[74] ;—so runs the letter. At the same time the British commander in Canada was pointing out to his subordinate at Detroit that the real danger to British rule arose from the extension of the settlements westward, and that this the Indians could prevent[75]; in other words, the savages were expressly directed to make war on non-combatants, for it was impossible to attack a settlement without attacking the women and children therein. In return, the frontiersmen speedily grew to regard both British and Indians with the same venomous and indiscriminate anger.

In the writings of the early annalists of these Indian wars are to be found the records of countless deeds of individual valor and cowardice, prowess, and suffering, of terrible woe in time of disaster and defeat, and of the glutting of ferocious vengeance in the days of triumphant reprisal. They contain tales of the most heroic courage and of the vilest poltroonery; for the iron times brought out all that was best and all that was basest in the human breast. We read of husbands leaving their wives, and women their children, to the most dreadful of fates, on the chance that they themselves might thereby escape; and, on the other hand, we read again and again of the noblest acts of self-sacrifice, where the man freely gave his life for that of his wife or child, his brother or his friend. Many deeds of unflinching loyalty are recorded, but very, very few where magnanimity was shown to a fallen foe. The women shared the stern qualities of the men; often it happened that, when the house-owner had been shot down, his wife made good the defence of the cabin with rifle or with axe, hewing valiantly at the savages who tried to break through the door, or dig under the puncheon floor, or, perhaps, burst down through the roof or wide chimney. Many hundreds of these tales could be gathered together; one or two are worth giving, not as being unique, but rather as samples of innumerable others of the same kind.

In those days[76] there lived beside the Ohio, in extreme Northwestern Virginia, two tall brothers, famed for their strength, agility, and courage. They were named Adam and Andrew Poe. In the summer of ‘81 a party of seven Wyandots or Hurons came into their settlement, burned some cabins, and killed one of the settlers. Immediately eight backwoodsmen started in chase of the marauders; among them were the two Poes.

The Wyandots were the bravest of all the Indian tribes, the most dangerous in battle, and the most merciful in victory, rarely torturing their prisoners; the backwoodsmen respected them for their prowess more than they did any other tribe, and if captured esteemed themselves fortunate to fall into Wyandot hands. These seven warriors were the most famous and dreaded of the whole tribe. They included four brothers, one being the chief Bigfoot, who was of gigantic strength and stature, the champion of all, their most fearless and redoubtable fighter, yet their very confidence ruined them, for they retreated in a leisurely manner, caring little whether they were overtaken or not, as they had many times worsted the whites, and did not deem them their equals in battle.

The backwoodsmen followed the trail swiftly all day long, and, by the help of the moon, late into the night. Early next morning they again started and found themselves so near the Wyandots that Andrew Poe turned aside and went down to the bed of a neighboring stream, thinking to come up behind the Indians while they were menaced by his comrades in front. Hearing a low murmur, he crept up through the bushes to a jutting rock on the brink of the watercourse, and, peering cautiously over, he saw two Indians beneath him. They were sitting under a willow, talking in deep whispers; one was an ordinary warrior, the other, by his gigantic size, was evidently the famous chief himself. Andrew took steady aim at the big chief’s breast and pulled trigger. The rifle flashed in the pan; and the two Indians sprang to their feet with a deep grunt of surprise. For a second all three stared at one another. Then Andrew sprang over the rock, striking the big Indian’s breast with a shock that bore him to the earth; while at the moment of alighting, he threw his arm round the small Indian’s neck, and all three rolled on the ground together.

At this instant they heard sharp firing in the woods above them. The rest of the whites and Indians had discovered one another at the same time. A furious but momentary fight ensued; three backwoodsmen and four Indians were killed outright, no other white being hurt, while the single remaining red warrior made his escape, though badly wounded. But the three men who were struggling for life and death in the ravine had no time to pay heed to outside matters. For a moment Andrew kept down both his antagonists, who were stunned by the shock; but before he could use his knife the big Indian wrapped him in his arms and held him as if in a vise. This enabled the small Indian to wrest himself loose, when the big chief ordered him to run for his tomahawk, which lay on the sand ten feet away, and to kill the white man as he lay powerless in the chief’s arms. Andrew could not break loose, but watching his chance, as the small Indian came up, he kicked him so violently in the chest that he knocked the tomahawk out of his hand and sent him staggering into the water. Thereat the big chief grunted out his contempt, and thundered at the small Indian a few words that Andrew could not understand. The small Indian again approached, and, after making several feints, struck with the tomahawk, but Andrew dodged and received the blow on his wrist instead of his head; and the wound though deep was not disabling. By a sudden and mighty effort he now shook himself free from the giant, and snatching up a loaded rifle from the sand, shot the small Indian as he rushed on him. But at that moment the larger Indian, rising up, seized him and hurled him to the ground. He was on his feet in a second, and the two grappled furiously, their knives being lost; Andrew’s activity and skill as a wrestler and boxer making amends for his lack of strength. Locked in each other’s arms they rolled into the water. Here each tried to drown the other, and Andrew catching the chief by the scalp lock held his head under the water until his faint struggles ceased. Thinking his foe dead, he loosed his grip to try to get at his knife, but, as Andrew afterward said, the Indian had only been “playing possum,” and in a second the struggle was renewed. Both combatants rolled into deep water, when they separated and struck out for the shore. The Indian proved the better swimmer, and ran up to the rifle that lay on the sand, whereupon Andrew turned to swim out into the stream, hoping to save his life by diving. At this moment his brother Adam appeared on the bank, and seeing Andrew covered with blood and swimming rapidly away, mistook him for an Indian, and shot him in the shoulder. Immediately afterward he saw his real antagonist. Both had empty guns, and the contest became one as to who could beat the other in loading, the Indian exclaiming: “Who load first, shoot first!” The chief got his powder down first, but, in hurriedly drawing out his ramrod, it slipped through his fingers and fell in the river. Seeing that it was all over, he instantly faced his foe, pulled open the bosom of his shirt, and the next moment received the ball fair in his breast. Adam, alarmed for his brother, who by this time could barely keep himself afloat, rushed into the river to save him, not heeding Andrew’s repeated cries to take the big Indian’s scalp. Meanwhile, the dying chief, resolute to save the long locks his enemies coveted—always a point of honor among the red men,—painfully rolled himself into the stream. Before he died he reached the deep water, and the swift current bore his body away.

About this time a hunter named McConnell was captured near Lexington by five Indians. At night he wriggled out of his bonds and slew four of his sleeping captors, while the fifth, who escaped, was so bewildered that, on reaching the Indian town, he reported that his party had been attacked at night by a number of whites, who had not only killed his companions but the prisoner likewise.

A still more remarkable event had occurred a couple of summers previously. Some keel boats, manned by a hundred men under Lieutenant Rogers, and carrying arms and provisions procured from the Spaniards at New Orleans, were set upon by an Indian war party under Girty and Elliott,[77] while drawn up on a sand beach of the Ohio. The boats were captured and plundered, and most of the men were killed; several escaped, two under very extraordinary circumstances. One had both his arms, the other both his legs, broken. They lay hid till the Indians disappeared, and then accidentally discovered each other. For weeks the two crippled beings lived in the lonely spot where the battle had been fought, unable to leave it, each supplementing what the other could do. The man who could walk kicked wood to him who could not, that he might make a fire, and making long circuits, chased the game toward him for him to shoot it. At last they were taken off by a passing flat-boat.

The backwoodsmen, wonted to vigorous athletic pastimes, and to fierce brawls among themselves, were generally overmatches for the Indians in hand-to-hand struggles. One such fight, that took place some years before this time, deserves mention. A man of herculean strength and of fierce, bold nature, named Bingaman, lived on the frontier in a lonely log-house. The cabin had but a single room below, in which Bingaman slept, as well as his mother, wife, and child; a hired man slep in the loft. One night eight Indians assailed the house. As they burst in the door Bingaman thrust the women and the child under the bed, his wife being wounded by a shot in the breast. Then having discharged his piece he began to beat about at random with the long, heavy rifle. The door swung partially to, and in the darkness nothing could be seen. The numbers of the Indians helped them but little, for Bingaman’s tremendous strength enabled him to shake himself free whenever grappled. One after another his foes sank under his crushing blows, killed or crippled; it is said that at last but one was left to flee from the house in terror. The hired man had not dared to come down from the loft, and when Bingaman found his wife wounded he became so enraged that it was with difficulty he could be kept from killing him.[78]

Incidents such as these followed one another in quick succession. They deserve notice less for their own sakes than as examples of the way the West was won; for the land was really conquered not so much by the actual shock of battle between bodies of soldiers, as by the continuous westward movement of the armed settlers and the unceasing individual warfare waged between them and their red foes.

For the same reason one or two of the more noted hunters and Indian scouts deserve mention, as types of hundreds of their fellows, who spent their lives and met their deaths in the forest. It was their warfare that really did most to diminish the fighting force of the tribes. They battled exactly as their foes did, making forays, alone or in small parties, for scalps and horses, and in their skirmishes inflicted as much loss as they received; in striking contrast to what occurred in conflicts between the savages and regular troops.

One of the most formidable of these hunters was Lewis Wetzel.[79] Boone, Kenton, and Harrod illustrate by their lives the nobler, kindlier traits of the dauntless border-folk; Wetzel, like McGarry, shows the dark side of the picture. He was a good friend to his white neighbors, or at least to such of them as he liked, and as a hunter and fighter there was not in all the land his superior. But he was of brutal and violent temper, and for the Indians he knew no pity and felt no generosity. They had killed many of his friends and relations, among others his father; and he hunted them in peace or war like wolves. His admirers denied that he ever showed “unwonted cruelty”[80] to Indian women and children; that he sometimes killed them can not be gainsaid. Some of his feats were cold-blooded murders, as when he killed an Indian who came in to treat with General Harmar, under pledge of safe conduct; one of his brothers slew in like fashion a chief who came to see Colonel Brodhead. But the frontiersmen loved him, for his mere presence was a protection, so great was the terror he inspired among the red men. His hardihood and address were only equaled by his daring and courage. He was literally a man without fear; in his few days of peace his chief amusements were wrestling, footracing, and shooting at a mark. He was a dandy, too, after the fashion of the backwoods, especially proud of his name of long hair, which, when he let it down, hung to his knees. He often hunted alone in the Indian country, a hundred miles beyond the Ohio. As he dared not light a bright fire on these trips, he would, on cold nights, make a small coalpit, and cower over it, drawing his blanket over his head, when, to use his own words, he soon became as hot as in a “stove room” Once he surprised four Indians sleeping in their camp; falling on them he killed three. Another time, when pursued by the same number of foes, he loaded his rifle as he ran, and killed in succession the three foremost, whereat the other fled. In all, he took over thirty scalps of warriors, thus killing more Indians than were slain by either one of the two large armies of Braddock and St. Clair during their disastrous campaigns. Wetzel’s frame, like his heart, was of steel. But his temper was too sullen and unruly for him ever to submit to command or to bear rule over others. His feats were performed when he was either alone or with two or three associates. An army of such men would have been wholly valueless.

Another man, of a far higher type, was Captain Samuel Brady, already a noted Indian fighter on the Alleghany. For many years after the close of the Revolutionary War he was the chief reliance of the frontiersmen of his own neighborhood. He had lost a father and a brother by the Indians; and in return he followed the red men with relentless hatred. But he never killed peaceful Indians nor those who came in under flags of truce. The tale of his wanderings, his captivities, his hairbreadth escapes, and deeds of individual prowess would fill a book. He frequently went on scouts alone, either to procure information or to get scalps. On these trips he was not only often reduced to the last extremity by hunger, fatigue, and exposure, but was in hourly peril of his life from the Indians he was hunting. Once he was captured; but when about to be bound to the stake for burning he suddenly flung an Indian boy into the fire, and in the confusion burst through the warriors, and actually made his escape, though the whole pack of yelling savages followed at his heels with rifle and tomahawk. He raised a small company of scouts or rangers, and was one of the very few captains able to reduce the unruly frontiersmen to order. In consequence his company on several occasions fairly whipped superior numbers of Indians in the woods; a feat that no regulars could perform, and to which the backwoodsmen themselves were generally unequal, even though an overmatch for their foes singly, because of their disregard of discipline.[81]

So, with foray and reprisal, and fierce private war, with all the border in a flame, the year 1781 came to an end. At its close there were in Kentucky seven hundred and sixty able-bodied militia, fit for an offensive campaign.[82] As this did not include the troops at the Falls, nor the large shifting population, nor the “fort soldiers,” the weaker men, gray-beards, and boys, who could handle a rifle behind a stockade, it is probable that there were then somewhere between four and five thousand souls in Kentucky.

[1] May, 1779; they did not take effect nor was a land court established until the following fall, when the land office was opened at St. Asaphs, Oct. 13th. Isaac Shelby’s claim was the first one considered and granted. He had raised a crop of corn in the country in 1776.

[2] The Ohio Company was the greatest of the companies. There were “also, among private rights, the ancient importation rights, the Henderson Company rights,” etc. See Marshall, I, 82.

[3] McAfee MSS.

[4] Prom the Clay MSS. “Virginia, Frederick Co. to wit: This day came William Smith of [illegible] before me John A. Woodcock, a Justice of the Peace of the same county, who being of full age deposeth and saith that about the first of June, 1780, being in Kentucky and empowered to purchase Land, for Mr. James Ware, he the deponent agreed with a certain Simon Kenton of Kentucky for 1000 Acres of Land about 2 or 3 miles from the big salt spring on Licking, that the sd. Kenton on condition that the sd. Smith would pay him £100 in hand and £100 more when sd. Land was surveyed, … sd. Kenton on his part wou’d have the land surveyed, and a fee Simple made there to… . sd. Land was first rate Land and had a good Spring thereon… . he agreed to warrant and defend the same … against all persons whatsoever sworn too before me this 17th day of Nov. 1789.” Later on, the purchaser, who did not take possession of the land for eight or nine years, feared it would not prove as fertile as Kenton had said, and threatened to sue Kenton; but Kenton evidently had the whip-hand in the controversy, for the land being out in the wilderness, the purchaser did not know its exact location, and when he threatened suit, and asked to be shown it, Kenton “swore that he would not shoe it at all.” Letter of James Ware, Nov. 29, 1789.

[5] Thus the increase of population is to be measured by the net gain of immigration over emigration, not by immigration alone. It is probably partly neglect of this fact, and partly simple exaggeration, that make the early statements of the additions to the Kentucky population so very untrustworthy. In 1783, at the end of the Revolution, the population of Kentucky was probably nearer 12,000 than 20,000, and it had grown steadily each year. Yet Butler quotes Floyd as saying that in the spring of 1780 three hundred large family boats arrived at the Falls, which would mean an increase of perhaps four or five thousand people; and in the McAfee MSS. occurs the statement that in 1779 and 1780 nearly 20,000 people came to Kentucky. Both of these statements are probably mere estimates, greatly exaggerated; any Westerner of to-day can instance similar reports of movements to Western localities, which under a strict census dwindled woefully.

[6] Durrett MSS., in the bound volume of “Papers Relating to Louisville and Kentucky.” On May 1, 1780, the people living at the Falls, having established a town, forty-six of them signed a petition to have their title made good against Conolly. On Feb. 7, 1781, John Todd and five other trustees of Louisville met; they passed resolutions to erect a grist mill and make surveys.

[7] MS. “Notes on Kentucky,” by George Bradford, who went there in 1779; in the Durrett collection. Haldimand MSS., Letter of Henry Bird, June 9, 1779. As this letter is very important, and gives for the first time the Indian side, I print it in the Appendix almost in full. The accounts of course conflict somewhat; chiefly as to the number of cabins burnt—from five to forty, and of horses captured—from thirty to three hundred. They agree in all essential points. But as among the whites themselves there is one serious question, Logan’s admirers, and most Kentucky historians, hold Bowman responsible for the defeat; but in reality (see Butler. p. 110) there seems strong reason to believe that it was simply due to the unexpectedly strong resistance of the Indians. Bird’s letter shows, what the Kentuckians never suspected, that the attack was a great benefit to them in frightening the Indians and stopping a serious inroad. It undoubtedly accomplished more than Clark’s attack on Piqua next year, for instance.

[8] Haldimand MSS. De Peyster to Haldimand, Nov. 20, 1779.

[9] Do., Oct. 20, 1779.

[10] Haldimand MSS. Haldimand’s letter, July 23, 1779.

[11] Haldimand MSS., April 8, 1779.

[12] One hundred and fifty strong, under Col. George Slaughter.

[13] Boone, in his Narrative, makes a mistake in putting this hard winter a year later; all the other authorities are unani mous against him.

[14] McAfee MSS. Of the McAfees’ horses ten died, and only two survived, a brown mare and “a yellow horse called Chickasaw.” Exactly a hundred years later, in the hard winter of 1879-80, and the still worse winter of 1880-81, the settlers on the Yellowstone and the few hunters who wintered on the Little Missouri had a similar experience. The buffalo crowded with the few tame cattle round the hayricks and log-stables; the starving deer and antelope gathered in immense bands in sheltered places. Riding from my ranch to a neighbor’s I have, in deep snows, passed through herds of antelope that would barely move fifty or a hundred feet out of my way.

[15] Do.

[16] From fifty dollars (Continental money) a bushel in the fall to one hundred and seventy-five in the spring.

[17] McAfee MSS.

[18] Boone’s Narrative.

[19] McAfee MSS.

[20] “Historical Magazine,” Second Series, Vol. VIII.

[21] McAfee MSS.

[22] Do.

[23] Marshall, p. 124.

[24] McAfee MSS.

[25] Lettres d’un Cultivateur Américain, St. John de Creve Cœur, Paris, 1787, p. 407. He visited Kentucky in 1784.

[26] MS. Journals of Rev. James Smith. Tours in Western country in 1785-1795 (in Col. Durrett’s library).

[27] State Department MSS. No. 41, Vol. V, Memorials K, L, 1777-1787, pp. 95-97, Petition of Low Dutch Reformed Church, etc.

[28] Haldimand MSS. Haldimand to Guy Johnson, June 30, 1780.

[29] Do. Haldimand to De Peyster, Feb. 12 and July 6, 1780.

[30] Do. De Peyster to Haldimand, June 1, 1780.

[31] Do. March 8, 1780.

[32] Do. May 17 to July 19, 1780.

[33] He marched overland from the forks of the Licking. Marshall says the season was dry and the waters low; but the Bradford MSS. particularly declare that Bird only went up the Licking at all because the watercourses were so full, and that he had originally intended to attack the settlements at the Falls.

[34] Collins, Butler, etc. Marshall thinks that if the forces could have been held together it would have depopulated Kentucky; but this is nonsense, for within a week Clark had gathered a very much larger and more efficient body of troops.

[35] Haldimand MSS. Letter of Bombardier Wm. Homan, Aug. 18, 1780. He speaks of “the gun” and “the smaller ordnance,” presumably swivels. It is impossible to give Bird’s numbers correctly, for various bands of Indians kept joining and leaving him.

[36] Bradford MSS.

[37] McAfee MSS.; the Bradford MS. says six quarts of parched corn.

[38] This date and number are those given in the Bradford MS. The McAfee MSS. say July 1st; but it is impossible that the expedition should have started so soon after Bird’s inroad. On July 1st, Bird himself was probably at the mouth of the Licking.

[39] The Indians so frequently shifted their abode that it is hardly possible to identify the exact location of the succes sive towns called Piqua or Pickaway.

[40] “Papers relating to G. R. Clark.” In the Durrett MSS. at Louisville. The account of the death of Joseph Rogers. This settles, by the way, that the march was made in August, and not in July.

[41] There is some conflict as to whether Logan went up or down stream.

[42] Haldimand MSS. McKee to De Peyster, Aug. 22, 1780. He was told of the battle by the Indians a couple of days after it took place. He gives the force of the whites correctly as nine hundred and seventy, forty of whom had been left to guard the boats. He says the Indians were surprised, and that most of the warriors fled, so that all the fighting was done by about seventy, with the two Girtys. This was doubtless not the case; the beaten party in all these encounters was fond of relating the valorous deeds of some of its members, who invariably state that they would have conquered, had they not been deserted by their associates. McKee reported that the Indians could find no trace of the gun-wheels—the gun was carried on a pack-horse,—and so he thought that the Kentuckians were forced to leave it behind on their retreat. He put the killed of the Kentuckians at the modest number of forty-eight; and reported the belief of Girty and the Indians that “three hundred [of them] would have given [Clark’s men] a total rout.” A very common feat of the small frontier historian was to put high praise of his own side in the mouth of a foe. Withers, in his “Chronicles of Border Warfare,” in speaking of this very action, makes Girty withdraw his three hundred warriors on account of the valor of Clark’s men, remarking that it was “useless to fight with fools or madmen.” This offers a comical contrast to Girty’s real opinion, as shown in McKee’s letter.

[43] Durrett MSS. Volume: “Papers referring to G. R. Clark.” The cousin’s name was Joseph Rogers, a brother of the commander of the galley.

[44] Bradford MS.; the McAfee MSS. make the loss “15 or 20 Indians” in the last assault, and “nearly as many” whites. Boone’s Narrative says seventeen on each side. But McKee says only six Indians were killed and three wounded; and Bombardier Homan, in the letter already quoted, says six were killed and two captured, who were afterward slain. The latter adds from hearsay that the Americans cruelly slew an Indian woman; but there is not a syllable in any of the other accounts to confirm this, and it may be set down as a fiction of the by-no-means-valorous bombardier. The bombardier mentions that the Indians in their alarm and anger immediately burnt all the male prisoners in their villages. The Kentucky historians give very scanty accounts of this expedition; but as it was of a typical character it is worth while giving in full. The McAfee MSS. contain most information about it.

[45] Bradford MS.

[46] See Haldimand MSS. De Peyster to Haldimand, Aug. 30, 1780.

[47] McAfee MSS.

[48] Virginia State Papers, I, 451.

[49] McAfee MSS. The last was an incident that happened to a young man named McCoun on March 8, 1781.

[50] Boone’s Narrative.

[51] For all this see McAfee MSS.

[52] State Department MSS. No. 48. See Appendix E. As containing an account of the first, and hitherto entirely unnoticed, separatist movement in Kentucky, I give the petition entire.

[53] Calendar of Virginia State Papers, Vol. II, p. 47.

[54] Do., Vol. I, p. 452.

[55] Collins, I, 20.

[56] Roughly, Payette embraced the territory north and northeast of the Kentucky River, Jefferson that between Green River and the lower Kentucky, and Lincoln the rest of the present State.

[57] State Department MSS., No. 147, Vol. V. Reports of Board of War. Letter of Washington, June 8, 1781. It is impossible to study any part of the Revolutionary struggle without coming to the conclusion that Washington would have ended it in half the time it actually lasted, had the jangling States and their governments, as well as the Continental Congress, backed him up half as effectively as the Confederate people and government backed up Lee, or as the Northerners and the Washington administration backed up McClellan—still more as they backed up Grant. The whole of our Revolutionary history is a running commentary on the anarchic weakness of disunion, and the utter lack of liberty that follows in its train.

[58] State Department MSS. Letters to Washington, Vol. 49, p. 235, May 21, 1781. The entire history of the Western operations shows the harm done by the weak and divided system of government that obtained at the time of the Revolution, and emphasizes our good fortune in replacing it by a strong and permanent Union.

[59] Calendar of Virginia State Papers, I, pp. 502, 597, etc.; II, pp. 108, 116, 264, 345. The Kentuckians were far more eager for action than the Pennsylvanians.

[60] As Loughry’s Creek, some ten miles below the mouth of the Miami, on August 24, 1781. Diary of Captain Isaac An derson, quoted in “Indiana Hist. Soc. Pamphlets, No. 4,” by Charles Martindale, Indianapolis, 1888. Collins, whose ac curacy by no means equals his thirst for pure detail, puts this occurrence just a year too late. Brant’s force was part of a body of several hundred Indians gathered to resist Clark.

[61] It is most difficult to get at the number of the Indian parties; they were sometimes grossly exaggerated and sometimes hopelessly underestimated. The commanders at the unmolested forts and the statesmen who stayed at home only saw those members of the tribes who claimed to be peaceful, and invariably put the number of warriors on the warpath at far too low a figure. Madison’s estimates, for instance, were very much out of the way, yet many modern critics follow him.

[62] State Department MSS., No. 147, Vol. VI. Reports of Board of War. March 15, 1781.

[63] Do., No. 148, Vol. I, January 4, 1781; No. 149, Vol. I, August 6, 1782; No. 149, Vol. 11, p. 461; No. 149, Vol. 111, p. 183. Federal garrisons were occasionally established at, or withdrawn from, other posts on the upper Ohio besides Fort Pitt; but their movements had no permanent value, and only require chronicling by the local, State, or county historians. In 1778 Fort McIntosh was built at Beaver Creek, on the north bank of the Ohio, and Fort Laurens seventy miles toward the interior. The latter was soon abandoned; the former was in Pennsylvania, and a garrison was kept there.

[64] See De Haas, 263-281, for the fullest, and probably most accurate, account of the siege; as already explained he is the most trustworthy of the border historians. But it is absolutely impossible to find out the real facts concerning the sieges of Wheeling; it is not quite certain even whether there were two or three. The testimony as to whether the heroine of the powder feat was Betty Zane or Molly Scott is hopelessly conflicting; we do not know which of the two brothers Girty was in command, nor whether either was present at the first attack. Much even of De Haas’ account is, to put it mildly, greatly embellished; as for instance his statement about the cannon (a small French gun, thrown into the Monongahela when Fort Du Quesne was abandoned, and fished up by a man named Naly, who was in swimming), which he asserts cut “a wide passage” through the “deep columns” of the savages. There is no reason to suppose that the Indians suffered a serious loss. Wheeling was a place of little strategic importance, and its fall would not have produced any far-reaching effects.

[65] McAfee MSS. This is the date given in the MS. “Autobiography of Robert McAfee”; the MS. “History of First Settlement on Salt River” says May 6th. I draw my account from these two sources; the discrepancies are trivial.

[66] McKee was the commander at the fort; the blockhouse was owned by Col. Andrew Donelly; Hanlon and Prior were the names of the two young men. This happened in May, 1778. For the anecdotes of personal prowess in this chapter see De Haas, or else Kercheval, McClung, Doddridge, and the fifty other annalists of those Western wars, who repeat many of the same stories. All relate facts of undoubted authenticity and wildly improbable tales, resting solely on tradition, with exactly the same faith. The chronological order of these anecdotes being unimportant, I have grouped them here. It must always be remembered that both the men and the incidents described are interesting chiefly as examples; the old annalists give many hundreds of such anecdotes, and there must have been thousands more that they did not relate.

[67] Virginia State Papers, I, 437. Letter of Col. John Floyd. The Kentuckians, he notices, trust militia more than they do regulars.

[68] Haldimand MSS. Captain A. Thompson to De Peyster, September 26, 1781.

[69] Do. Captain A. McKee to De Peyster, September 26, 1781.

[70] Marshall, I, 116. Floyd had previously written Jefferson (Virginia State Papers, I, 47) that in his country there were but three hundred and fifty-four militia between sixteen and fifty-four years old; that all people were living in forts, and that forty-seven of the settlers of all ages had been killed, and many wounded, since January; so his defeat was a serious blow.

[71] Haldimand MSS. Thompson’s letter; McKee only mentions the three Hurons. As already explained, the partisan leaders were apt, in enumerating the Indian losses, only to give such as had occurred in their own particular bands. Marshall makes the fight take place in April; the Haldimand MSS. show that it was in September. Marshall is as valuable for early Kentucky history as Haywood for the corresponding periods in Tennessee; but both one and the other write largely from tradition, and can never be followed when they contradict contemporary reports.

[72] Bradford MSS.

[73] At this very time a small band that had captured a family in the Kanawha valley were pursued fifty miles, overtaken, several killed and wounded, and the prisoners recaptured, by Col. Andrew Donelly, mentioned in a previous note; it consisted of two French and eight Indians, Virginia State Papers I, 601.

[74] See full copy of the letter in Mr. Martindale’s excellent pamphlet, above quoted.

[75] Haldimand MSS. Haldimand to De Peyster, June 24, 1781. Throughout the letters of the British officers at and near Detroit there are constant allusions to scalps being brought in; but not one word, as far as I have seen, to show that the Indians were ever reproved because many of the scalps were those of women and children. It is only fair to say, however, that there are several instances of the commanders exhorting the Indians to be merciful—which was a waste of breath—and several other instances where successful efforts were made to stop the use of torture. The British officers were generally personally humane to their prisoners.

[76] 1781, De Haas; Doddridge, whom the other compilers follow, gives a wrong date (1782), and reverses the parts the two brothers played.

[77] Haldimand MSS. De Peyster to Haldimand, November 1, 1779.

[78] It is curious how faithfully, as well as vividly, Cooper has reproduced these incidents. His pictures of the white frontiersmen are generally true to life; in his most noted Indian characters he is much less fortunate. But his “Indian John,” in the “Pioneers” is one of his best portraits; almost equal praise can be given to Susquesus in the “Chain-bearers.”

[79] The name is variously spelt; in the original German records of the family it appears as Watzel, or Watzel.

[80] De Haas, 345.

[81] In the open plain the comparative prowess of these forest Indians, of the backwoodsmen, and of trained regulars was exactly the reverse of what it was in the woods.

[82] Letter of John Todd, October 21, 1781. Virginia State Papers, II, 562. The troops at the Falls were in a very destitute condition, with neither supplies nor money, and their credit worn threadbare, able to get nothing from the surrounding country (do., p. 313.) In Clark’s absence the colonel let his garrison be insulted by the townspeople, and so brought the soldiers into contempt, while some of the demoralized officers tampered with the public stores. It was said that much dissipation prevailed in the garrison, to which accusation Clark answered sarcastically: “However agreeable such conduct might have been to their sentiments, I believe they seldom had the means in their power, for they were generally in a starving condition” (do., Vol. VIII, pp. 347 and 359).

APPENDICES

APPENDIX B—TO CHAPTER V

DURING THE early part of this century our more pretentious historians who really did pay some heed to facts and wrote books that—in addition to their mortal dulness—were quite accurate, felt it undignified and beneath them to notice the deeds of mere ignorant Indian fighters. They had lost all power of doing the best work; for they passed their lives in a circle of small literary men, who shrank from any departure from conventional European standards.

On the other hand, the men who wrote history for the mass of our people, not for the scholars, although they preserved much important matter, had not been educated up to the point of appreciating the value of evidence, and accepted undoubted facts and absurd traditions with equal good faith. Some of them (notably Flint and one or two of Boone’s other biographers) evidently scarcely regarded truthfulness and accuracy of statement as being even desirable qualities in a history. Others wished to tell the facts, but lacked all power of discrimination. Certain of their books had a very wide circulation. In some out-of-the-way places they formed, with the almanac, the staple of secular literature. But they did not come under the consideration of trained scholars, so their errors remained uncorrected; and at this day it is a difficult, and often an impossible task, to tell which of the statements to accept and which to reject.

Many of the earliest writers lived when young among the old companions of the leading pioneers, and long afterward wrote down from memory the stories the old men had told them. They were themselves often clergymen, and were usually utterly inexperienced in backwoods life, in spite of their early surroundings—exactly as to-day any town in the Rocky Mountains is sure to contain some half-educated men as ignorant of mountain and plains life, of Indians and wild beasts, as the veriest lout on an Eastern farm. Accordingly they accepted the wildest stories of frontier warfare with a faith that forcibly reminds one of the equally simple credulity displayed by the average classical scholar concerning early Greek and Roman prowess. Many of these primitive historians give accounts of overwhelming Indian numbers and enormous Indian losses, that read as if taken from the books that tell of the Gaulish hosts the Romans conquered, and the Persian hordes the Greeks repelled; and they are almost as untrustworthy.

Some of the anecdotes they relate are not far removed from the Chinese-like tale—given, if my memory is correct, in Herodotus—of the Athenian soldier, who went into action with a small grapnel or anchor attached by a chain to his waist, that he might tether himself out to resist the shock of the charging foe. A flagrant example is the story which describes how the white man sees an Indian very far off making insulting gestures; how he forthwith loads his rifle with two bullets—which the narrator evidently thinks will go twice as far and twice as straight as one,—and, taking careful aim, slays his enemy. Like other similar anecdotes, this is told of a good many different frontier heroes; the historian usually showing a delightful lack of knowledge of what is and what is not possible in hunting, tracking, and fighting. However, the utter ignorance of even the elementary principles of rifle-shooting may not have been absolutely confined to the historians. Any one accustomed to old hunters knows that their theories concerning their own weapons are often rather startling. A year ago last fall I was hunting some miles below my ranch (on the Little Missouri) to lay in the winter stock of meat, and was encamped for a week with an old hunter. We both had 45-75 Winchester rifles; and I was much amused at his insisting that his gun “shot level” up to two hundred yards—a distance at which the ball really drops considerably over a foot. Yet he killed a good deal of game; so he must either in practice have disregarded his theories, or else he must have always overestimated the distances at which he fired.

The old writers of the simpler sort not only delighted in impossible feats with the rifle, but in equally impossible deeds of strength, tracking and the like; and they were very fond of attributing all the wonderful feats of which they had heard to a single favorite hero, not to speak of composing speeches for him.

It seems—though it ought not to be—necessary to point out to some recent collectors of backwoods anecdotes the very obvious truths: that with the best intentions in the world the average backwoodsman often has difficulty in describing a confused chain of events exactly as they took place; that when the events are described after a long lapse of years many errors are apt to creep in; and that when they are reported from tradition it is the rarest thing imaginable for the report to be correct.

APPENDIX C—TO CHAPTER VII

(THE FOLLOWING account of the first negotiations of the Americans with the Indians near Vincennes is curious as being the report of one of the Indians; but it was evidently-colored to suit his hearer, for as a matter of fact the Indians of the Wabash were for the time being awed into quiet, the Piankeshaws sided with the Americans, and none of them dared rise until the British approached. Haldimand MSS., Series B, Vol. 122, p. 219.)

Proceedings of the Rebels at St. Vincennes as related to Lieut. Govr. Hamilton by Neegik an Ottawa War Chief sent forward to gain intelligence. Camp at Rocher de Bout 14th Octr. 1778—

On the Rebels first arrival at St. Vincennes they took down the English Flag left there by Lieut. Gen. Abbott, wrapped a large stone in it, and threw it into the Ouabash, saying to the Indians, thus we mean to treat your Father—

Having called the Indians together they laid a War Belt colored red, & a belt colored green before them, telling them that if they delighted in mischief and had no compassion on their wives & children they might take up the red one, if on the contrary they were wise & preferred peace, the green one—

The old Tobacco a chief of the [Piankeshaws] spoke as follows—My brothers—you speak in a manner not to be understood, I never yet saw, nor have I heard from my ancestors that it was customary to place good & bad things in the same dish—You talk to us as if you meant us well, yet you speak of War & peace in the same minute, thus I treat the speeches of such men—on which with a violent kick he spurned their belts from him.

The son of Lagesse, a young Chief of the Pontconattamis of St. Joseph spoke next to them.

My Brothers—’Tis because I have listened to the voice of our old men, & because I have regard to our women & children that I have not before now struck my tomahawk into some of your heads—attend to what I say, I will only go to see in what condition our wives & children are (meaning I will first place them in security) and then you may depend on seeing me again—

The Rebel speaker then said—

You are young men & your youth excuses your ignorances, you would not else talk as you do—Our design is to march thro’ your country, & if we find any fires in our way, we shall just tread them out as we walk along and if we meet with any obstacle or barrier we shall remove it with all ease, but the bystanders must take care lest the splinters should scar their faces.

We shall then proceed to Detroit where your father is whom we consider as a Hog put to fatten in a penn, we shall enclose him in his penn, till he be fat, & then we will throw him into the river—We shall draw a reinforcement from the Falls on the Ohio & from thence & the Illinois send six hundred men to Chicagou—

To this the Indians replied—You that are so brave, what need have you to be reinforced, go to Detroit, you that can put out our fires & so easyly remove our barriers.—This we say to you, take care that in attempting to extinguish our fires you do not burn yourselves, & that in breaking down our barriers you do not run splinters into your hands. You may also expect that we shall not suffer a single Frenchman to accompany you to Detroit.

End of the Conference.

APPENDIX D—TO CHAPTER VIII

(From Canadian Archives. Haldimand MSS., Series B, Vol. 122, p. 351.)

(Copy.)

UPPER St. Duski, June 9, 1779.

Dear Sir,

After much running about, some presents to Chiefs, we had collected at the Mingo Town near 200 Savages chiefly Shawanese—When lo! a runner arrived with accounts of the Shawanese towns being attacked by a body from Kentuck, they burnt five houses, killed one Indian & wounded the Chief badly—lost their own Commander Heron or Herington—they carried off 30 Horses, were pursued by fifty Shawanese, the Shawanese were beat back with loss of five & six wounded—News flew that all the Towns were to be attack’d & our little body separated in an instant past reassembling—confusion still prevails—much counseling—no resolves—many are removing—more for peace.

The Delawares make it dangerous traveling. By this opportunity Davison & Cook return sick—Girty is flying about—McCarty stays with me with some Ottawas—these unsteady Rogues put me out of all patience—I will go with him in a few days if nothing material occurs—See the Enemy that I may not be laugh’d at then return.—The Rebels mean I believe to destroy the Villages & corn now up—the method they bring their little armies into the field as follows: Every Family on the Borders receive orders to send according to their strength (one or two men) to the place of Rendezvous at a time appointed (on pain of fine or imprisonment) with fifteen or twenty days Provisions, they immediately receive their ammunition & proceed quickly to action—I am credibly inform’d by various means, that they can raise in that manner three or four thousand in a few days for such excursions—I was obliged to Kill four more Cattle for the Indians at the Mingo Town—they are always Cooking or Counseling.

I have nothing more to inform you off if anything material occurs, which I really expect in a day or two, I will inform you by Express.

I am &c

Henry Bird.

To Capt. Lernoult.

(Copy.)

June 12th, Upper St. Duski.

Sir,

Couriers after Couriers arrive with accounts of the Rebels advancing to destroy the Savage Villages now all their corn is planted—

APPENDIX E—TO CHAPTER VIII

(State Department MSS.; No. 48, Vol. “Memorials &c. Inhabitants of Illinois, Kaskaskias and Kentucky.”)

The Petition and prayr. of the people of that Part of Contry [sic] now Claim’d. by the State of Virginia in the Countys of Kaintuckey and Ilinois Humbly Sheweth—That we the leige Subjects of the United States Labour under many Greivences on acount of not being formd. into Seperate State or the Mind and Will of Congress more fully known respecting us—And we Humbly beg leave to Present to the Honorable Continental Congress our Humble Petition seting forth the Grievences and oppressions we labour under and Pray Congress may Consider Such our greivances and grant us redress.

We your Petitioners being situate in a wide Extencive Uncultivated Contry and Exposd. on every side to incursions of the Savage Indians humbly Conceive Ourselves approssed by several acts of the general assembly of Virginia for granting large Grants for waist and unapropriated lands on the Western Waters without Reservation for Cultivating and Settling the same whereby Setling the Contry is Discouraged and the inhabitants are greatly Exposd. to the Saviges by whome our wives and Childring are daly Cruily murdered notwithstanding our most Humble Petitions Canot Obtain Redress—By an act we are Taxd. which in our Present Situation we Conceive to be oppresive and unjust being Taxd. with money and grain whilst Enrold and in actual Pay residing in Garrisons. We are Situate from Six Hundred to one Thousand Miles from our Present Seite of Government, Whereby Criminals are Suffered to Escape with impunity, Great numbers who were Ocationaly absent are Deprived of an . Opertunity of their Just Rights and Emprovements and here we are Obliged to Prosecute all Apeals, and whillst we remain uncertain whether the unbounded Claim of This Extencive Contry Ought of right to belong to the United States or the State of Virginia, They have by another late act required of us to Sware alegince to the State of Virginia in Particular Notwithstanding we have aredy taken the Oath of alegance to the united States. These are Greivences too Heavy to be born, and we do Humbly Pray that the Continental Congress will Take Proper Methods to form us into a Seperate State or grant us Such Rules and regulations as they in their Wisdoms shall think most Proper, During the Continuance of the Present War and your Petitioners shall ever Pray

May 15th, 1780.

[Signed]

Robert Tyler

Richard Connor

Thomas Hughes

Archibald McDonald

Abraham

Van Meter

(and others to the number of 640).

THE WAR IN THE NORTHWEST

CHAPTER I

THE MORAVIAN MASSACRE, 1779–1782

AFTER THE Moravian Indians were led by their missionary pastors to the banks of the Muskingum they dwelt peacefully and unharmed for several years. In Lord Dunmore’s war special care was taken by the white leaders that these Quaker Indians should not be harmed; and their villages of Salem, Gnadenhutten, and Schönbrunn received no damage whatever. During the early years of the Revolutionary struggle they were not molested, but dwelt in peace and comfort in their roomy cabins of squared timbers, cleanly and quiet, industriously tilling the soil, abstaining from all strong drink, schooling their children, and keeping the Seventh Day as a day of rest. They sought to observe strict neutrality, harming neither the Americans nor the Indians, nor yet the allies of the latter, the British and French at Detroit. They hoped thereby to offend neither side, and to escape unhurt themselves. But this was wholly impossible. They occupied an utterly untenable position. Their villages lay mid-way between the white settlements southeast of the Ohio, and the towns of the Indians round Sandusky, the bitterest foes of the Americans, and those most completely under British influence. They were on the trail that the war-parties followed whether they struck at Kentucky or at the valleys of the Alleghany and Monongahela. Consequently the Sandusky Indians used the Moravian villages as half-way houses, at which to halt and refresh themselves whether starting on a foray or returning with scalps and plunder.

By the time the war had lasted four or five years both the wild or heathen Indians and the backwoodsmen had become fearfully exasperated with the unlucky Moravians. The Sandusky Indians were largely Wyandots, Shawnees, and Delawares, the latter being fellow-tribesmen of the Christian Indians; and so they regarded the Moravians as traitors to the cause of their kinsfolk, because they would not take up the hatchet against the whites. As they could not goad them into declaring war, they took malicious pleasure in trying to embroil them against their will, and on returning from raids against the settlements often passed through their towns solely to cast suspicion on them and to draw down the wrath of the backwoodsmen on their heads. The British at Detroit feared lest the Americans might use the Moravian villages as a basis from which to attack the lake posts; they also coveted their men as allies; and so the baser among their officers urged the Sandusky tribes to break up the villages and drive off the missionaries. The other Indian tribes likewise regarded them with angry contempt and hostility; the Iroquois once sent word to the Chippewas and Ottawas that they gave them the Christian Indians “to make broth of.”

The Americans became even more exasperated. The war parties that plundered and destroyed their homes, killing their wives, children, and friends with torments too appalling to mention, got shelter and refreshment from the Moravians,[1]—who, indeed, dared not refuse it. The backwoodsmen, roused to a mad frenzy of rage by the awful nature of their wrongs, saw that the Moravians rendered valuable help to their cruel and inveterate foes, and refused to see that the help was given with the utmost reluctance. Moreover, some of the young Christian Indians backslid, and joined their savage brethren, accompanying them on their war parties and ravaging with as much cruelty as any of their number.[2] Soon the frontiersmen began to clamor for the destruction of the Moravian towns; yet for a little while they were restrained by the Continental officers of the few border forts, who always treated these harmless Indians with the utmost kindness.

On either side were foes, who grew less governable day by day, and the fate of the hapless and peaceful Moravians, if they continued to dwell on the Muskingum, was absolutely inevitable. With blind fatuity their leaders, the missionaries, refused to see the impending doom; and the poor, simple Indians clung to their homes till destroyed. The American commander at Pittsburg, Col. Gibson, endeavored to get them to come into the American lines, where he would have the power, as he already had the wish, to protect them; he pointed out that where they were they served in some sort as a shield to the wild Indians, whom he had to spare so as not to harm the Moravians.[3] The Half King of the Wyandots, from the other side, likewise tried to persuade them to abandon their dangerous position, and to come well within the Indian and British lines, saying: “Two mighty and angry gods stand opposite to each other with their mouths wide open, and you are between them, and are in danger of being crushed by one or the other, or by both.”[4] But in spite of these warnings, and heedless of the safety that would have followed the adoption of either course, the Moravians followed the advice of their missionaries and continued where they were. They suffered greatly from the wanton cruelty of their red brethren; and their fate remains a monument to the cold-blooded and cowardly brutality of the borderers, a stain on frontier character that the lapse of time can not wash away; but it is singular that historians have not yet pointed out the obvious truth, that no small share of the blame for their sad end should be put to the credit of the blind folly of their missionary leaders. Their only hope in such a conflict as was then raging was to be removed from their fatally dangerous position; and this the missionaries would not see. As long as they stayed where they were, it was a mere question of chance and time whether they would be destroyed by the Indians or the whites; for their destruction at the hands of either one party or the other was inevitable.

Their fate was not due to the fact that they were Indians; it resulted from their occupying an absolutely false position. This is clearly shown by what happened twenty years previously to a small community of non-resistant Christian whites. They were Dunkards—Quaker-like Germans—who had built a settlement on the Monongahela. As they helped neither side, both distrusted and hated them. The whites harassed them in every way, and the Indians finally fell upon and massacred them.[5] The fates of these two communities, of white Dunkards and red Moravians, were exactly parallel. Each became hateful to both sets of combatants, was persecuted by both, and finally fell a victim to the ferocity of the race to which it did not belong.

The conduct of the backwoodsmen toward these peaceful and harmless Christian Indians was utterly abhorrent, and will ever be a subject of just reproach and condemnation; and at first sight it seems incredible that the perpetrators of so vile a deed should have gone unpunished and almost un-blamed. It is a dark blot on the character of a people that otherwise had many fine and manly qualities to its credit. But the extraordinary conditions of life on the frontier must be kept in mind before passing too severe a judgment. In the turmoil of the harassing and long-continued Indian war, and the consequent loosening of social bonds, it was inevitable that, as regards outside matters, each man should do what seemed right in his own eyes. The bad and the good alike were left free and untrammeled to follow the bent of their desires. The people had all they could do to beat off their savage enemies, and to keep order among themselves. They were able to impose but slight checks on ruffianism that was aimed at outsiders. There were plenty of good and upright men who would not harm any Indians wrongfully, and who treated kindly those who were peaceable. On the other hand, there were many of violent and murderous temper. These knew that their neighbors would actively resent any wrong done to themselves, but knew, also, that, under the existing conditions, they would at the worst do nothing more than openly disapprove of an outrage perpetrated on Indians.

The violence of the bad is easily understood. The indifference displayed toward their actions by the better men of the community, who were certainly greatly in the majority, is harder to explain. It rose from varying causes. In the first place, the long continuance of Indian warfare, and the unspeakable horrors that were its invariable accompaniments had gradually wrought up many even of the best of the backwoodsmen to the point where they barely considered an Indian as a human being. The warrior was not to them a creature of romance. They knew him for what he was—filthy, cruel, lecherous, and faithless. He sometimes had excellent qualities, but these they seldom had a chance to see. They always met him at his worst. To them he was in peace a lazy, dirty, drunken beggar, whom they despised, and yet whom they feared; for the squalid, contemptible creature might at any moment be transformed into a foe whose like there was not to be found in all the wide world for ferocity, cunning, and bloodthirsty cruelty. The greatest Indians, chiefs like Logan and Cornstalk, who were capable of deeds of the loftiest and most sublime heroism, were also at times cruel monsters or drunken good-for-nothings. Their meaner followers had only such virtues as belong to the human wolf—stealth, craft, tireless endurance, and the courage that prefers to prey on the helpless, but will fight to the death without flinching if cornered.

Moreover, the backwoodsmen were a hard people; a people who still lived in an iron age. They did not spare themselves, nor those who were dear to them; far less would they spare their real or possible foes. Their lives were often stern and grim; they were wonted to hardship and suffering. In the histories or traditions of the different families there are recorded many tales of how they sacrificed themselves, and, in time of need, sacrificed others. The mother who was a captive among the Indians might lay down her life for her child; but if she could not save it, and to stay with it forbade her own escape, it was possible that she would kiss it good-by and leave it to its certain fate, while she herself, facing death at every step, fled homeward through hundreds of miles of wilderness.[6] The man who daily imperiled his own life would, if water was needed in the fort, send his wife and daughter to draw it from the spring round which he knew Indians lurked, trusting that the appearance of the women would make the savages think themselves undiscovered, and that they would therefore defer their attack.[7] Such people were not likely to spare their red-skinned foes. Many of their friends, who had never hurt the savages in any way, had perished the victims of wanton aggression. They themselves had seen innumerable instances of Indian treachery. They had often known the chiefs of a tribe to profess warm friendship at the very moment that their young men were stealing and murdering. They grew to think of even the most peaceful Indians as merely sleeping wild beasts, and while their own wrongs were ever vividly before them, they rarely heard of or heeded those done to their foes. In a community where every strong courageous man was a bulwark to the rest, he was sure to be censured lightly for merely killing a member of a loathed and hated race.

Many of the best of the backwoodsmen were Bible-readers, but they were brought up in a creed that made much of the Old Testament, and laid slight stress on pity, truth, or mercy. They looked at their foes as the Hebrew prophets looked at the enemies of Israel. What were the abominations because of which the Canaanites were destroyed before Joshua, when compared with the abominations of the red savages whose lands they, another chosen people, should in their turn inherit? They believed that the Lord was king for ever and ever, and they believed no less that they were but obeying His commandment as they strove mightily to bring about the day when the heathen should have perished out of the land; for they had read in The Book that he was accursed who did the work of the Lord deceitfully, or kept his sword back from blood. There was many a stern frontier zealot who deemed all the red men, good and bad, corn ripe for the reaping. Such a one rejoiced to see his followers do to the harmless Moravians as the Danites once did to the people of Laish, who lived quiet and secure, after the manner of the Sidonians, and had no business with any man, and who yet were smitten with the edge of the sword, and the city burned with fire.

Finally, it must not be forgotten that there were men on the frontier who did do their best to save the peaceful Indians, and that there were also many circumstances connected with the latter that justly laid them open to suspicion. When young backsliding Moravians appeared in the war parties, as cruel and murderous as their associates, the whites were warranted in feeling doubtful as to whether their example might not infect the remainder of their people. War parties, whose members in dreadful derision left women and children impaled by their trail to greet the sight of the pursuing husbands and fathers, found food and lodging at the Moravian towns. No matter how reluctant the aid thus given, the pursuers were right in feeling enraged, and in demanding that the towns should be removed to where they could no longer give comfort to the enemy. When the missionaries refused to consent to this removal, they thereby became helpers of the hostile Indians; they wronged the frontiersmen, and they still more grievously wronged their own flocks.

They certainly had ample warning of the temper of the whites. Col. Brodhead was in command at Fort Pitt until the end of 1781. At the time that General Sullivan ravaged the country of the Six Nations, he had led a force up the Alleghany and created a diversion by burning one or two Iroquois towns. In 1781 he led a successful expedition against a town of hostile Delawares on the Muskingum, taking it by surprise and surrounding it so completely that all within were captured. Sixteen noted warriors and marauders were singled out and put to death. The remainder fared but little better, for, while marching back to Fort Pitt, the militia fell on them and murdered all the men, leaving only the women and children. The militia also started to attack the Moravians, and were only prevented by the strenuous exertions of Brodhead. Even this proof of the brutality of their neighbors was wasted on the missionaries.

The first blow the Moravians received was from the wild Indians. In the fall of this same year (1781) their towns were suddenly visited by a horde of armed warriors, horsemen and footmen, from Sandusky and Detroit. Conspicuous among them were the Wyandots, under the Half King; the Delawares, also led by a famous chief, Captain Pipe; and a body of white rangers from Detroit, including British, French and tories, commanded by the British Captain Elliott, and flying the British flag.[8] With them came also Shawnees, Chippewas, and Ottawas. All were acting in pursuance of the express orders of the commandant at Detroit.[9] These warriors insisted on the Christian Indians abandoning their villages and accompanying them back to Sandusky and Detroit; and they destroyed many of the houses, and much of the food for the men and the fodder for the horses and cattle. The Moravians begged humbly to be left where they were, but without avail. They were forced away to Lake Erie, the missionaries being taken to Detroit, while the Indians were left on the plains of Sandusky. The wild Indians were very savage against them, but the British commandant would not let them be seriously maltreated,[10] though they were kept in great want and almost starved.

A few Moravians escaped, and remained in their villages; but these, three or four weeks later, were captured by a small detachment of American militia, under Colonel David Williamson, who had gone out to make the Moravians either move further off or else come in under the protection of Fort Pitt. Williamson accordingly took the Indians to the fort, where the Continental commander, Colonel John Gibson, at once released them, and sent them back to the villages unharmed.[11] Gibson had all along been a firm friend of the Moravians. He had protected them against the violence of the borderers, and had written repeated and urgent letters to Congress and to his superior officers, asking that some steps might be taken to protect the friendly Christian Indians.[12] In the general weakness and exhaustion, however, nothing was done; and as neither the State nor Federal governments took any steps to protect them, and as their missionaries refused to learn wisdom, it was evident that the days of the Moravians were numbered. The failure of the government to protect them was perhaps inevitable, but was certainly discreditable.

The very day after Gibson sent the Christian Indians back to their homes, several murders were committed near Pittsburg, and many of the frontiersmen insisted that they were done with the good will or connivance of the Moravians. The settlements had suffered greatly all summer long, and the people clamored savagely against all the Indians, blaming both Gibson and Williamson for not having killed or kept captive their prisoners. The ruffianly and vicious of course clamored louder than any; the mass of people who are always led by others, chimed in, in a somewhat lower key; and many good men were silent for the reasons given already. In a frontier democracy, military and civil officers are directly dependent upon popular approval, not only for their offices, but for what they are able to accomplish while filling them. They are therefore generally extremely sensitive to either praise or blame. Ambitious men flatter and bow to popular prejudice or opinion, and only those of genuine power and self-reliance dare to withstand it. Williamson was physically a fairly brave officer and not naturally cruel; but he was weak and ambitious, ready to yield to any popular demand, and, if it would advance his own interests, to connive at any act of barbarity.[13] Gibson, however, who was a very different man, paid no heed to the cry raised against him.

With incredible folly the Moravians refused to heed even such rough warnings as they had received. During the long winter they suffered greatly from cold and hunger, at Sandusky, and before the spring of 1782 opened, a hundred and fifty of them returned to their deserted villages.

That year the Indian Outrages on the frontiers began very early. In February there was some fine weather; and while it listed, several families of settlers were butchered, some under circumstances of peculiar atrocity. In particular, four Sandusky Indians having taken some prisoners, impaled two of them, a woman and a child, while on their way to the Moravian towns, where they rested and ate, prior to continuing their journey with their remaining captives. When they left they warned the Moravians that white men were on their trail.[14] A white man, who had just escaped this same impaling party, also warned the Moravians that the exasperated borderers were preparing a party to kill them; and Gibson, from Fort Pitt, sent a messenger to them, who, however, arrived too late. But the poor Christian Indians, usually very timid, now, in the presence of a real danger, showed a curious apathy; their senses were numbed and dulled by their misfortunes, and they quietly awaited their doom.[15]

It was not long deferred. Eighty or ninety frontiersmen, under Williamson, hastily gathered together to destroy the Moravian towns. It was, of course, just such an expedition as most attracted the brutal, the vicious, and the ruffianly; but a few decent men, to their shame, went along. They started in March, and on the third day reached the fated villages. That no circumstance might be wanting to fill the measure of their infamy, they spoke the Indians fair, assured them that they meant well, and spent an hour or two in gathering together those who were in Salem and Gnadenhutten, putting them all in two houses at the latter place. Those at the third town of Schonbrunn got warning and made their escape.

As soon as the unsuspecting Indians were gathered in the two houses, the men in one, the women, and children in the other, the whites held a council as to what should be done with them. The great majority were for putting them instantly to death. Eighteen men protested, and asked that the lives of the poor creatures should be spared; and then withdrew, calling God to witness that they were innocent of the crime about to be committed. By rights they should have protected the victims at any hazard. One of them took off with him a small Indian boy, whose life was thus spared. With this exception only two lads escaped.

When the murderers told the doomed Moravians their fate, they merely requested a short delay in which to prepare themselves for death. They asked one another’s pardon for whatever wrongs they might have done, knelt down and prayed, kissed one another farewell, “and began to sing hymns of hope and of praise to the Most High.” Then the white butchers entered the houses and put to death the ninety-six men, women, and children that were within their walls. More than a hundred years have passed since this deed of revolting brutality; but even now a just man’s blood boils in his veins at the remembrance. It is impossible not to regret that fate failed to send some strong war party of savages across the path of these inhuman cowards, to inflict on them the punishment they so richly deserved. We know that a few of them were afterward killed by the Indians; it is a matter of keen regret that any escaped.

When the full particulars of the affair were known all the best leaders of the border, almost all the most famous Indian fighters, joined in denouncing it.[16] Nor is it right that the whole of the frontier folk should bear the blame for the deed. It is a fact, honorable and worthy of mention, that the Kentuckians were never implicated in this or any similar massacre.[17]

But at the time, and in their own neighborhood—the corner of the Upper Ohio valley where Pennsylvania and Virginia touch,—the conduct of the murderers of the Moravians roused no condemnation. The borderers at first felt about it as the English Whigs originally felt about the massacre of Glencoe. For some time the true circumstances of the affair were not widely known among them. They were hot with wrath against all the red-skinned race; and they rejoiced to hear of the death of a number of treacherous Indians who pretended to be peaceful, while harboring and giving aid and comfort to, and occasionally letting their own young men join, bands of avowed murderers. Of course, the large wicked and disorderly element was loud in praise of the deed. The decent people, by their silence, acquiesced.

A terrible day of reckoning was at hand; the retribution fell on but part of the real criminals, and bore most heavily on those who were innocent of any actual complicity in the deed of evil. Nevertheless it is impossible to grieve overmuch for the misfortune that befell men who freely forgave and condoned such treacherous barbarity.

In May a body of four hundred and eighty Pennsylvania and Virginia militia gathered at Mingo Bottom, on the Ohio, with the purpose of marching against and destroying the towns of the hostile Wyandots and Delawares in the neighborhood of the Sandusky River. The Sandusky Indians were those whose attacks were most severely felt by that portion of the frontier; and for their repeated and merciless ravages they deserved the severest chastisement. The expedition against them was from every point of view just; and it was undertaken to punish them, and without any definite idea of attacking the remnant of the Moravians who were settled among them. On the other hand, the militia included in their ranks most of those who had taken part in the murderous expedition of two months before; this fact, and their general character, made it certain that the peaceable and inoffensive Indians would, if encountered, be slaughtered as pitilessly as their hostile brethren.

How little the militia volunteers disapproved of the Moravian massacre was shown when, as was the custom, they met to choose a leader. There were two competitors for the place, Williamson, who commanded at the massacre, being one; and he was beaten by only five votes. His successful opponent, Colonel William Crawford, was a fairly good officer, a just and upright man, but with no special fitness for such a task as that he had undertaken. Nor were the troops he led of very good stuff[18]; though they included a few veteran Indian fighters. The party left Mingo Bottom on the 25th of May. After nine days’ steady marching through the unbroken forests they came out on the Sandusky plains; billowy stretches of prairie, covered with high coarse grass and dotted with islands of timber. As the men marched across them they roused quantities of prairie fowl, and saw many geese and sand-hill cranes, which circled about in the air, making a strange clamor.

On the other hand, Mr. Butterfield is drawn into grave errors by his excessive partisanship of the borderers. He passes lightly over their atrocious outrages, colors favorably many of their acts, and praises the generalship of Crawford and the soldiership of his men; when in reality the campaign was badly conducted from beginning to end, and reflected discredit on most who took part in it; Crawford did poorly, and the bulk of his men acted like unruly cowards.

Crawford hoped to surprise the Indian towns; but his progress was slow and the militia every now and then fired off their guns. The spies of the savages dogged his march and knew all his movements[19]; and runners were sent to Detroit asking help. This the British commandant at once granted. He sent to the assistance of the threatened tribes a number of lake Indians and a body of rangers and Canadian volunteers, under Captain Caldwell.[20]

On the fourth of June Crawford’s troops reached one of the Wyandot towns. It was found to be deserted; and the army marched on to try and find the others. Late in the afternoon, in the midst of the plains, near a cranberry marsh, they encountered Caldwell and his Detroit rangers, together with about two hundred Delawares, Wyandots, and lake Indians.[21] The British and Indians united certainly did not much exceed three hundred men; but they were hourly expecting reinforcements, and decided to give battle. They were posted in a grove of trees, from which they were driven by the first charge of the Americans. A hot skirmish ensued, in which, in spite of Crawford’s superiority in force, and of the exceptionally favorable nature of the country, he failed to gain any marked advantage. His troops, containing so large a leaven of the murderers of the Moravians, certainly showed small fighting capacity when matched against armed men who could defend themselves. After the first few minutes neither side gained nor lost ground.

Of the Americans five were killed and nineteen wounded—in all twenty-four. Of their opponents the rangers lost two men killed and three wounded, Caldwell being one of the latter; and the Indians four killed and eight wounded—in all seventeen.[22]

That night Crawford’s men slept by their watch-fires in the grove, their foes camping round about in the open prairie. Next morning the British and Indians were not inclined to renew the attack; they wished to wait until their numbers were increased. The only chance of the American militia was to crush their enemies before reinforcements arrived, yet they lay supine and idle all day long, save for an occasional harmless skirmish. Crawford’s generalship was as poor as the soldiership of his men.

In the afternoon the Indians were joined by one hundred and forty Shawnees. At sight of this accession of strength the dispirited militia gave up all thought of anything but flight, though they were still equal in numbers to their foes. That night they began a hurried and disorderly retreat. The Shawnees and Delawares attacked them in the darkness, causing some loss and great confusion, and a few of the troops got into the marsh. Many thus became scattered, and next morning there were only about three hundred men left together in a body. Crawford himself was among the missing, so Williamson took command, and hastily continued the retreat. The savages did not make a very hot pursuit; nevertheless, in the afternoon of that day a small number of Indians and Detroit rangers overtook the Americans. They were all mounted. A slight skirmish followed, and the Americans lost eleven men, but repulsed their pursuers.[23] After this they suffered little molestation, and reached Mingo Bottom on the 13th of the month.[24]

Many of the stragglers came in afterward. In all about seventy either died of their wounds, were killed outright, or were captured. Of the latter, those who were made prisoners by the Wyandots were tomahawked and their heads stuck on poles; but if they fell into the hands of the Shawnees or Delawares they were tortured to death with fiendish cruelty. Among them was Crawford himself, who had become separated from the main body when it began its disorderly night retreat. After abandoning his jaded horse he started homeward on foot, but fell into the hands of a small party of Delawares, together with a companion named Knight.

These two prisoners were taken to one of the Delaware villages. The Indians were fearfully exasperated by the Moravian massacre[25]; and some of the former Moravians, who had rejoined their wild tribesmen, told the prisoners that from that time on not a single captive should escape torture. Nevertheless it is likely that Crawford would have been burned in any event, and that most of the prisoners would have been tortured to death even had the Moravians never been harmed; for such had always been the custom of the Delawares.

The British, who had cared for the remnants of the Moravians, now did their best to stop the cruelties of the Indians,[26] but could accomplish little or nothing. Even the Mingos and Hurons told them that though they would not torture any Americans, they intended thenceforth to put all their prisoners to death.[27]

Crawford was tied to the stake in the presence of a hundred Indians. Among them were Simon Girty, the white renegade, and a few Wyandots. Knight, Crawford’s fellow-captive, was a horrified spectator of the awful sufferings which he knew he was destined by his captors ultimately to share. Crawford, stripped naked, and with his hands bound behind him, was fastened to a high stake by a strong rope; the rope was long enough for him to walk once or twice round the stake. The fire, of small hickory poles, was several yards from the post, so as only to roast and scorch him. Powder was shot into his body, and burning fagots shoved against him, while red embers were strewn beneath his feet. For two hours he bore his torments with manly fortitude, speaking low, and beseeching the Almighty to have mercy on his soul. Then he fell down, and his torturers scalped him, and threw burning coals on his bare skull. Rising, he walked about the post once or twice again and then died. Girty and the Wyandots looked on, laughing at his agony, but taking no part in the torture. When the news of his dreadful fate was brought to the settlements, it excited the greatest horror, not only along the whole frontier, but elsewhere in the country; for he was widely known, was a valued friend of Washington and was everywhere beloved and respected.

Knight, a small and weak-looking man, was sent to be burned at the Shawnee towns, under the care of a burly savage. Making friends with the latter, he lulled his suspicions, the more easily because the Indian evidently regarded so small a man with contempt; and then, watching his opportunity, he knocked his guard down and ran off into the woods, eventually making his way to the settlements.

Another of the captives, Slover by name, made a more remarkable escape. Slover’s life history had been curious. When a boy eight years old, living near the springs of the Kanawha, his family was captured by Indians, his brother alone escaping. His father was killed, and his two little sisters died of fatigue on the road to the Indian villages; his mother was afterward ransomed. He lived twelve years with the savages, at first in the Miami towns, and then with the Shawnees. When twenty years old he went to Fort Pitt, where, by accident, he was made known to some of his relations. They pressed him to rejoin his people, but he had become so wedded to savage life that he at first refused. At last he yielded, however, and took up his abode with the men of his own color, and became a good citizen, and a worthy member of the Presbyterian Church. At the outbreak of the Revolution he served fifteen months as a Continental soldier, and when Crawford started against the Sandusky Indians, he went along as a scout.

Slover, when captured, was taken round to various Indian towns, and saw a number of his companions, as well as other white prisoners, tomahawked or tortured to death. He was examined publicly about many matters at several Great Councils—for he spoke two or three different Indian languages fluently. At one of the councils he heard the Indians solemnly resolve to take no more prisoners thereafter, but to kill all Americans, of whatever sex and age; some of the British agents from Detroit signifying their approval of the resolution.[28]

At last he was condemned to be burned, and was actually tied to the stake. But a heavy shower came on, so wetting the wood that it was determined to reprieve him till the morrow. That night he was bound and put in a wigwam under the care of three warriors. They laughed and chatted with the prisoner, mocking him, and describing to him with relish all the torments that he was to suffer. At last they fell asleep, and, just before daybreak, he managed to slip out of his rope and escape, entirely naked.

Catching a horse, he galloped away sitting on a piece of old rug, and guiding the animal with the halter. He rode steadily and at speed for seventy miles, until his horse dropped dead under him late in the afternoon. Springing off, he continued the race on foot. At last he halted, sick and weary; but, when he had rested an hour or two, he heard afar off the halloo of his pursuers. Struggling to his feet he continued his flight, and ran until after dark. He then threw himself down and snatched a few hours’ restless sleep, but, as soon as the moon rose, he renewed his run for life, carefully covering his trail whenever possible. At last he distanced his enemies. For five days he went straight through the woods, naked, bruised, and torn, living on a few berries and a couple of small crawfish he caught in a stream. He could not sleep nor sometimes even lie down at night because of the mosquitoes. On the morning of the sixth day he reached Wheeling, after experiencing such hardship and suffering as none but an iron will and frame could have withstood.

Until near the close of the year 1782 the frontiers suffered heavily. A terrible and deserved retribution fell on the borderers for their crime in failing to punish the dastardly deed of Williamson and his associates. The Indians were roused to savage anger by the murder of the Moravians, and were greatly encouraged by their easy defeat of Crawford’s troops. They harassed the settlements all along the Upper Ohio, the Alleghany and the Monongahela, and far into the interior,[29] burning, ravaging, and murdering, and bringing dire dismay to every lonely clearing, and every palisaded hamlet of rough log-cabins.

[1] Heckewelder’s “Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren,” Philadelphia, 1820 p. 166.

[2] “Pennsylvania Packet” (Philadelphia, April 16, 1782); Heckewelder, 180; Loskiel’s “History of the Mission of the United Brethren” (London, 1794), p. 172.

[3] Loskiel, p. 137.

[4] State Department MSS., No. 41, Vol. 111, pp. 78, 79; ex tract from diary of Rev. David Zeisburger.

[5] Withers, 59.

[6] See Hale’s “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” the adventures of Mrs. Inglis. She was captured on the head-waters of the Kanawha, at the time of Braddock’s defeat. The other in habitants of the settlement were also taken prisoners or massacred by the savages, whom they had never wronged in any way. She was taken to the Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. On the way her baby was born, but she was not allowed to halt a day on account of this incident. She left it in the Indian camp, and made her escape in company with “an old Dutch woman.” They lived on berries and nuts for forty days, while they made their way homeward. Both got in safely, though they separated after the old Dutch woman, in the extremity of hunger, had tried to kill her companion that she might eat her. When Cornstalk’s party perpetrated the massacre of the Clendennins during Pontiac’s war (see Stewart’s Narrative), Mrs. Clendennin likewise left her baby to its death, and made her escape; her husband had previously been killed and his bloody scalp tied across her jaws as a gag.

[7] As at the siege of Bryan’s Station.

[8] State Department MSS., No. 41, Vol. 111, p. 77.

[9] Haldimand MSS. De Peyster to Haldimand, October 5th and 21st, 1781; McKee to De Peyster, October 18th.

[10] Do. December 11, 1781.

[11] Gibson was the old friend of the chief Logan. It is only just to remember that the Continental officers at Fort Pitt treated the Moravians even better than did the British officers at Detroit.

[12] Haldimand MSS. Jan. 22, 1780 (intercepted letters).

[13] This is the most favorable estimate of his character, based on what Doddridge says (p. 260). He was a very despicable person, but not the natural brute the missionaries painted him.

[14] Heckewelder, 311.

[15] Loskiel, 176.

[16] Col. James Smith, then of Kentucky, in 1799 calls it “an act of barbarity equal to any thing I ever knew to be committed by the savages themselves, except the burning of prisoners.”

[17] The Germans of up-country North Carolina were guilty of as brutal massacres as the Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen of Pennsylvania. See Adair, 245. There are two or three individual instances of the barbarity of Kentuckians—one being to the credit of McGarry—but they are singularly few, when the length and the dreadful nature of their Indian wars are taken into account. Throughout their history the Kentucky pioneers had the right on their side in their dealings with the Indians. They were not wanton aggressors; they entered upon vacant hunting-grounds, to which no tribe had a clear title, and to which most even of the doubtful titles had been fairly extinguished. They fought their foes fiercely, with varying fortune, and eventually wrested the land from them; but they very rarely wronged them; and for the numerous deeds of fearful cruelty that were done on Kentucky soil, the Indians were in almost every case to blame.

[18] A minute and exhaustive account of Crawford’s campaign is given by Mr. C. W. Butterfield in his “ Expedition against Sandusky,” (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1873). Mr. Butterfield shows conclusively that the accepted accounts are wholly inaccurate, being derived from the reports of the Moravian missionaries, whose untruthfulness (especially Heckewelder’s) is clearly demonstrated. He shows the apocryphal nature of some of the pretended narratives of the expedition, such as two in “The American Pioneer,” etc. He also shows how inaccurate McClung’s “sketches” are—for McClung was like a host of other early Western annalists, preserving some valuable facts in a good deal of rubbish, and having very little appreciation indeed of the necessity of so much as approximate accuracy. Only a few of these early Western historians had the least conception of the value of evidence or of the necessity of sifting it, or of weighing testimony.

[19] Heckewelder, 336. Butterfield shows conclusively that there is not the slightest ground to accept Heckewelder’s assertion that Crawford’s people openly declared that “no Indian was to be spared, friend or foe.”

[20] Haldimand MSS. May 14, 1782. De Peyster to Haldimand.

[21] Do. Official report of Lt. John Turney of the rangers, June 7, 1782.

[22] Do. Probably some of this loss occurred on the following day. I rely on Butterfield for the American loss, as he quotes Irvine’s official report, etc. He of course wrote without knowledge of the British reports; and his account of the Indian losses and numbers is all wrong. He fails signally in his effort to prove that the Americans behaved bravely.

[23] Who were probably at this point much fewer in number than the Americans; Butterfield says the reverse, but his account is untrustworthy on these matters.

[24] As Butterfield shows, Heckewelder’s account of Craw ford’s whole expedition is a piece of sheer romancing.

[25] Haldimand MSS. De Peyster to Haldimand, June 23, 1782.

[26] Do. Aug. 18, 1782.

[27] Do. Dec. 1, 1782.

[28] Slover asserts that it was taken in consequence of a message sent advising it by the commandant at Detroit. This is doubtless untrue; the commandant at Detroit did what he could to stop such outrages, although many of his more reckless and uncontrollable subordinates very probably pursued an opposite course. The ignorant and violently prejudiced backwoodsmen naturally believed all manner of evil of their British foes; but it is singular that writers who ought to be well informed should even now continue to accept all their wild assertions as unquestioned facts. The conduct of the British was very bad; but it is silly to describe it in the terms often used. The year after their escape Slover dictated, and Knight wrote, narratives of their adventures, which were together published in book form at Philadelphia in 1783. They are very interesting.

[29] Va. State Papers, III, 235.

CHAPTER II

THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE CONQUERED FRENCH SETTLEMENTS, 1779–1783

THE VIRGINIAN Government took immediate steps to provide for the civil administration of the country Clark had conquered. In the fall of 1778 the entire region northwest of the Ohio was constituted the county of Illinois, with John Todd as county-lieutenant or commandant.

Todd was a firm friend and follower of Clark’s, and had gone with him on his campaign against Vincennes. It therefore happened that he received his commission while at the latter town, early in the spring of ‘79. In May he went to Kaskaskia, to organize the county; and Clark, who remained military commandant of the Virginia State troops that were quartered in the district, was glad to turn over the civil government to the charge of his old friend.

Together with his commission, Todd received a long and excellent letter of instructions from Governor Patrick Henry. He was empowered to choose a deputy-commandant, and officers for the militia; but the judges and officers of the court were to be elected by the people themselves. He was given large discretionary power, Henry impressing upon him with especial earnestness the necessity to “cultivate and conciliate the French and Indians.”[1] With this end in view, he was bidden to pay special heed to the customs of the Creoles, to avoid shocking their prejudices, and to continually consult with their most intelligent and upright men. He was to co-operate in every way with Clark and his troops, while at the same time the militia were to be exclusively under his own control. The inhabitants were to have strict justice done them if wronged by the troops; and Clark was to put down rigorously any licentiousness on the part of his soldiers. The wife and children of the former British commandant—the creole Rocheblave—were to be treated with particular respect, and not suffered to want for anything. He was exhorted to use all his diligence and ability to accomplish the difficult task set him. Finally Henry advised him to lose no opportunity of inculcating in the minds of the French the value of the liberty the Americans brought them, as contrasted with “the slavery to which the Illinois was destined” by the British.

This last sentence was proved by subsequent events to be a touch of wholly unconscious but very grim humor. The French were utterly unsuited for liberty, as the Americans understood the term, and to most of them the destruction of British rule was a misfortune. The bold, self-reliant, and energetic spirits among them, who were able to become Americanized, and to adapt themselves to the new conditions, undoubtedly profited immensely by the change. As soon as they adopted American ways, they were received by the Americans on terms of perfect and cordial equality, and they enjoyed a far higher kind of life than could possibly have been theirs formerly, and achieved a much greater measure of success. But most of the Creoles were helplessly unable to grapple with the new life. They had been accustomed to the paternal rule of priest and military commandant, and they were quite unable to govern themselves, or to hold their own with the pushing, eager, and often unscrupulous, newcomers. So little able were they to understand precisely what the new form of government was, that when they went down to receive Todd as commandant, it is said that some of them, joining in the cheering, from force of habit cried “Vive le roi.”

For the first year of Todd’s administration, while Clark still remained in the county as commandant of the State troops, matters went fairly well. Clark kept the Indians completely in check, and when some of them finally broke out, and started on a marauding expedition against Cahokia, he promptly repulsed them, and by a quick march burned their towns on Rock River, and forced them to sue for peace.[2]

Todd appointed a Virginian, Richard Winston, as commandant at Kaskaskia; all his other appointees were Frenchmen. An election was forthwith held for justices; to the no small astonishment of the Creoles, unaccustomed as they were to American methods of self-government. Among those whom they elected as judges and court-officers were some of the previously appointed militia captains and lieutenants, who thus held two positions. The judges governed their decisions solely by the old French laws and customs.[3] Todd at once made the court proceed to business. On its recommendation he granted licenses to trade to men of assured loyalty.

Todd also issued a proclamation in reference to new settlers taking up lands. Being a shrewd man, he clearly foresaw the ruin that was sure to arise from the new Virginia land laws as applied to Kentucky, and he feared the inrush of a horde of speculators, who would buy land with no immediate intention of settling thereon. Besides, the land was so fertile in the river bottoms, that he deemed the amount Virginia allotted to each person excessive. So he decreed that each settler should take up his land in the shape of one of the long narrow French farms, that stretched back from the waterfront; and that no claim should contain a greater number of acres than did one of these same farms. This proclamation undoubtedly had a very good effect.

He next wrestled steadily, but much less successfully, with the financial question. He attempted to establish a land bank, as it were, setting aside a great tract of land to secure certain issues of Continental money. The scheme failed, and in spite of his public assurance that the Continental currency would shortly be equal in value to gold and silver, it swiftly sank until it was not worth two cents on the dollar.

This wretched and worthless paper-money, which the Americans brought with them, was a perfect curse to the country. Its rapid depreciation made it almost impossible to pay the troops, or to secure them supplies, and as a consequence they became disorderly and mutinous. Two or three prominent Creoles, who were devoted adherents of the American cause, made loans of silver to the Virginian Government, as represented by Clark, thereby helping him materially in the prosecution of his campaign. Chief among these public-spirited patriots were Francis Vigo, and the priest Gibault, both of them already honorably mentioned. Vigo advanced nearly nine thousand dollars in specie,—piastres or Spanish milled dollars,—receiving in return bills on the “Agent of Virginia,” which came back protested for want of funds; and neither he nor his heirs ever got a dollar of what was due them. He did even more. The Creoles at first refused to receive anything but peltries or silver for their goods; they would have nothing to do with the paper, and to all explanations as to its uses, simply answered “that their commandants never made money”[4] Finally they were persuaded to take it on Vigo’s personal guaranty, and his receiving it in his store. Even he, however, could not buoy it up long.

Gibault likewise[5] advanced a large sum of money, parted with his titles and beasts, so as to set a good example to his parishioners, and, with the same purpose, furnished goods to the troops at ordinary prices, taking the paper in exchange as if it had been silver. In consequence he lost over fifteen hundred dollars, was forced to sell his only two slaves, and became almost destitute; though in the end he received from the government a tract of land which partially reimbursed him. Being driven to desperate straits, the priest tried a rather doubtful shift. He sold, or pretended to sell, a great natural meadow, known as la prairie du pont, which the people of Cahokia claimed as a common pasture for their cattle. His conduct drew forth a sharp remonstrance from the Cahokians, in the course of which they frankly announced that they believed the priest should confine himself to ecclesiastical matters, and should not meddle with land grants, especially when the land he granted did not belong to him.[6]

It grew steadily more difficult to get the Creoles to furnish supplies; Todd had to forbid the exportation of any provisions whatever, and, finally, the soldiers were compelled to levy on all that they needed. Todd paid for these impressed goods, as well as for what the contractors furnished, at the regulation prices—one-third in paper-money and two-thirds in peltries; and thus the garrisons at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes were supplied with powder, lead, sugar, flour, and, above all, hogsheads of taffia, of which they drank an inordinate quantity.

The justices did not have very much work; in most of the cases that came before them the plaintiff and defendant were both of the same race. One piece of recorded testimony is rather amusing, being to the effect that “Monsieur Smith est un grand vilain coquin”[7]

Yet there are two entries in the proceedings of the Creole courts for the summer of 1779, as preserved in Todd’s “Record Book,” which are of startling significance. To understand them it must be remembered that the Creoles were very ignorant and superstitious, and that they one and all, including, apparently, even their priests, firmly believed in witchcraft and sorcery. Some of their negro slaves had been born in Africa, the others had come from the Lower Mississippi or the West Indies; they practiced the strange rites of voudooism, and a few were adepts in the art of poisoning. Accordingly the French were always on the look-out lest their slaves should, by spell or poison, take their lives. It must also be kept in mind that the pardoning power of the commandant did not extend to cases of treason or murder—a witchcraft trial being generally one for murder,—and that he was expressly forbidden to interfere with the customs and laws, or go counter to the prejudices, of the inhabitants.

At this time the Creoles were smitten by a sudden epidemic of fear that their negro slaves were trying to bewitch and poison them. Several of the negroes were seized and tried, and in June two were condemned to death. One, named Moreau, was sentenced to be hanged outside Cahokia. The other, a Kaskaskian slave named Manuel, suffered a worse fate. He was sentenced “to be chained to a post at the water-side, and there to be burnt alive and his ashes scattered”[8] These two sentences, and the directions for their immediate execution, reveal a dark chapter in the early history of Illinois. It seems a strange thing that, in the United States, three years after the Declaration of Independence, men should have been burnt and hanged for witchcraft, in accordance with the laws and with the decision of the proper court. The fact that the victim, before being burned, was forced to make “honorable fine” at the door of the Catholic church, shows that the priest at least acquiesced in the decision. The blame justly resting on the Puritans of seventeenth-century New England must likewise fall on the Catholic French of eighteenth-century Illinois.

Early in the spring of 1780 Clark left the country; he did not again return to take command, for after visiting the fort on the Mississippi, and spending the summer in the defence of Kentucky, he went to Virginia to try to arrange for an expedition against Detroit. Todd also left about the same time, having been elected a Kentucky delegate to the Virginia Legislature. He afterward made one or two flying visits to Illinois, but exerted little influence over her destiny, leaving the management of affairs entirely in the hands of his deputy, or lieutenant-commandant for the time being. He usually chose for this position either Richard Winston, the Virginian, or else a Creole named Thimothé Demunbrunt.

Todd’s departure was a blow to the country; but Clark’s was a far more serious calamity. By his personal influence he had kept the Indians in check, the Creoles contented, and the troops well fed and fairly disciplined. As soon as he went, trouble broke out. The officers did not know how to support their authority; they were very improvident, and one or two became implicated in serious scandals. The soldiers soon grew turbulent, and there was constant clashing between the civil and military rulers. Gradually the mass of the Creoles became so angered with the Americans that they wished to lay their grievances before the French Minister at Philadelphia; and many of them crossed the Mississippi and settled under the Spanish flag. The courts rapidly lost their power, and the worst people, both Americans and Creoles, practiced every kind of rascality with impunity. All decent men joined in clamoring for Clark’s return; but it was impossible for him to come back. The freshets and the maladministration combined to produce a dearth, almost a famine, in the land. The evils were felt most severely in Vincennes, where Helm, the captain of the post, though a brave and capable man, was utterly unable to procure supplies of any kind. He did not hear of Clark’s success against Piqua and Chillicothe until October. Then he wrote to one of the officers at the Falls, saying that he was “sitting by the fire with a piece of lightwood and two ribs of an old buflloe, which is all the meat we have seen this many days. I congratulate your success against the Shawanohs, but there’s never doubts where that brave Col. Clark commands; we well know the loss of him in Illinois… . Excuse Haste as the Lightwood’s Just out and mouth watering for part of the two ribs.”[9]

In the fall of 1780 a Frenchman, named la Balme, led an expedition composed purely of Creoles against Detroit. He believed that he could win over the French at that place to his side, and thus capture the fort as Clark had captured Vincennes. He raised some fifty volunteers round Cahokia and Kaskaskia, perhaps as many more on the Wabash, and marched to the Maumee River. Here he stopped to plunder some British traders; and in November the neighboring Indians fell on his camp, killed him and thirty or forty of his men, and scattered the rest.[10] His march had been so quick and unexpected that it rendered the British very uneasy, and they were much rejoiced at his discomfiture and death.

The following year a new element of confusion was added. In 1779 Spain declared war on Great Britain. The Spanish commandant at New Orleans was Don Bernard de Galvez, one of the very few strikingly able men Spain has sent to the Western Hemisphere during the past two centuries. He was bold, resolute, and ambitious; there is reason to believe that at one time he meditated a separation from Spain, the establishment of a Spanish-American empire, and the founding of a new imperial house. However this may be, he threw himself heart and soul into the war against Britain; and attacked British West Florida with a fiery energy worthy of Wolfe or Montcalm. He favored the Americans; but it was patent to all that he favored them only the better to harass the British.[11]

Besides the Creoles and the British garrisons, there were quite a number of American settlers in West Florida. In the immediate presence of Spanish and Indian foes, these, for the most part, remained royalists. In 1778 a party of armed Americans, coming down the Ohio and Mississippi, tried to persuade them to turn whig, but, becoming embroiled with them, the militant missionaries were scattered and driven off. Afterward the royalists fought among themselves; but this was a mere faction quarrel, and was soon healed. Toward the end of 1779, Galvez, with an army of Spanish and French Creole troops, attacked the forts along the Mississippi—Manchac, Baton Rouge, Natchez, and one or two smaller places,—speedily carrying them and capturing their garrisons of British regulars and royalist militia. During the next eighteen months he laid siege to and took Mobile and Pensacola. While he was away on his expedition against the latter place, the royalist Americans around Natchez rose and retook the fort from the Spaniards; but at the approach of Galvez they fled in terror, marching overland toward Georgia, then in the hands of the tories. On the way they suffered great loss and damage from the Creeks and Choc-taws.

The Spanish commander at St. Louis was inspired by the news of these brilliant victories to try if he, too, could not gain a small wreath at the expense of Spain’s enemies. Clark had already become thoroughly convinced of the duplicity of the Spaniards on the upper Mississippi; he believed that they were anxious to have the British retake Illinois, so that they, in their turn, might conquer and keep it.[12] They never had the chance to execute this plan; but, on January 2, 1781, a Spanish captain, Don Eugénio Pierro, led a hundred and twenty men, chiefly Indians and Creoles, against the little French village, or fur post, of St. Joseph, where they burned the houses of one or two British traders, claimed the country round the Illinois River as conquered for the Spanish king, and forthwith returned to St. Louis, not daring to leave a garrison of any sort behind them, and being harassed on their retreat by the Indians. On the strength of this exploit Spain afterward claimed a large stretch of country to the east of the Mississippi. In reality it was a mere plundering foray. The British at once retook possession of the place, and, indeed, were for some time ignorant whether the raiders had been Americans or Spaniards.[13] Soon after the recapture, the Detroit authorities sent a scouting party to dislodge some Illinois people who had attempted to make a settlement at Chicago.[14]

At the end of the year 1781 the unpaid troops in Vincennes were on the verge of mutiny, and it was impossible longer even to feed them, for the inhabitants themselves were almost starving. The garrison was therefore withdrawn; and immediately the Wabash Indians joined those of the Miami, the Sandusky, and the Lakes in their raids on the settlements.[15] By this time, however, Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, and the British were even more exhausted than the Americans. Some of the French partisans of the British at Detroit, such as Rocheblave and Lamothe, who had been captured by Clark, were eager for revenge, and desired to be allowed to try and retake Vincennes and the Illinois; they saw that the Americans must either be exterminated or else the land abandoned to them.[16] But the British commandant was in no condition to comply with their request, or to begin offensive operations. Clark had not only conquered the land, but he had held it firmly while he dwelt therein; and even when his hand was no longer felt, the order he had established took some little time before crumbling. Meanwhile, his presence at the Falls, his raids into the Indian country, and his preparations for an onslaught on Detroit kept the British authorities at the latter place fully occupied, and prevented their making any attempt to recover what they had lost. By the beginning of 1782 the active operations of the Revolutionary war were at an end, and the worn-out British had abandoned all thought of taking the offensive anywhere, though the Indian hostilities continued with unabated vigor. Thus the grasp with which the Americans held the conquered country was not relaxed until all danger that it would be taken from them had ceased.

In 1782 the whole Illinois region lapsed into anarchy and confusion. It was perhaps worst at Vincennes, where the departure of the troops had left the French free to do as they wished. Accustomed for generations to a master, they could do nothing with their new-found liberty beyond making it a curse to themselves and their neighbors. They had been provided with their own civil government in the shape of their elective court, but the judges had literally no idea of their proper functions as a governing body to administer justice. At first they did nothing whatever beyond meet and adjourn. Finally it occurred to them that perhaps their official position could be turned to their own advantage. Their townsmen were much too poor to be plundered; but there were vast tracts of fertile wild land on every side, to which, as far as they knew, there was no title, and which speculators assured them would ultimately be of great value. Vaguely remembering Todd’s opinion, that he had power to interfere under certain conditions with the settlement of the lands, and concluding that he had delegated this power, as well as others, to themselves, the justices of the court proceeded to make immense grants of territory, reciting that they did so under “les pouvoirs donnés a Mons’rs Les Magistrats de la cour de Vincennes par le Snr.. Jean Todd, colonel et Grand Judge civil pour les Etats Unis”; Todd’s title having suffered a change and exaltation in their memories. They granted one another about fifteen thousand square miles of land round the Wabash; each member of the court in turn absenting himself for the day on which his associates granted him his share.

This vast mass of virgin soil they sold to speculators at nominal prices, sometimes receiving a horse or a gun for a thousand acres. The speculators of course knew that their titles were worthless, and made haste to dispose of different lots at very low prices to intending settlers. These small buyers were those who ultimately suffered by the transaction, as they found they had paid for worthless claims. The speculators reaped the richest harvest; and it is hard to decide whether to be amused or annoyed at the childish and transparent rascality of the French creoles.[17]

In the Illinois country proper the troops, the American settlers, speculators, and civil officials, and the creole inhabitants all quarreled together indiscriminately. The more lawless new-comers stole horses from the quieter creoles; the worst among the French, the idle coureurs-des-bois, voyageurs, and trappers plundered and sometimes killed the peaceable citizens of either nationality. The soldiers became little better than an unruly mob; some deserted, or else in company with other ruffians, both French and American, indulged in furious and sometimes murderous orgies, to the terror of the creoles who had property. The civil authorities, growing day by day weaker, were finally shorn of all power by the military. This, however, was in nowise a quarrel between the French and the Americans. As already explained, in Todd’s absence the position of deputy was sometimes filled by a creole and sometimes by an American. He had been particular to caution them in writing to keep up a good understanding with the officers and troops, adding, as a final warning: “If this is not the case you will be unhappy.” Unfortunately for one of the deputies, Richard Winston, he failed to keep up the good understanding, and, as Todd had laconically foretold, he in consequence speedily became very “unhappy.” We have only his own account of the matter. According to this, in April, 1782, he was taken out of his house “in despite of the civil authority, disregarding the laws and on the malitious alugation of Jno. Williams and Michel Pevante.” Thus a Frenchman and an American joined in the accusation, for some of the French supported the civil, others the military, authorities. The soldiers had the upper hand, however, and Winston records that he was forthwith “confined by tyrannick military force.” From that time the authority of the laws was at an end, and as the officers of the troops had but little control, every man did what pleased him best.

In January, 1781, the Virginia Legislature passed an act ceding to Congress, for the benefit of the United States, all of Virginia’s claim to the territory northwest of the Ohio; but the cession was not consummated until after the close of the war with Great Britain, and the only immediate effect of the act was to still further derange affairs in Illinois. The whole subject of the land cessions of the various States, by which the Northwest Territory became Federal property, and the heart of the Union, can best be considered in treating of post-Revolutionary times.

The French creoles had been plunged in chaos. In their deep distress they sent to the powers that the chances of war had set above them petition after petition, reciting their wrongs and praying that they might be righted. There is one striking difference between these petitions and the similar requests and complaints made from time to time by the different groups of American settlers west of the Alleghanies. Both alike set forth the evils from which the petitioners suffered, and the necessity of governmental remedy. But whereas the Americans invariably asked that they be allowed to govern themselves, being delighted to undertake the betterment of their condition on their own account, the French, on the contrary, habituated through generations to paternal rule, were more inclined to request that somebody fitted for the task should be sent to govern them. They humbly asked Congress either to “immediately establish some form of government among them, and appoint officers to execute the same,” or else “to nominate commissioners to repair to the Illinois and inquire into the situation”[18]

One of the petitions is pathetic in its showing of the bewilderment into which the poor creoles were thrown as to who their governors really were. It requests “their Sovereign Lords,”[19] whether of the Congress of the United States or of the Province of Virginia, whichever might be the owner of the country, to nominate “a lieutenant or a governor, whomever it may please our Lords to send us.” [20] The letter goes on to ask that this governor may speak French, so that he may preside over the court; and it earnestly beseeches that the laws may be enforced and crime and wrong-doing put down with a strong hand.

The conquest of the Illinois Territory was fraught with the deepest and most far-reaching benefits to all the American people; it likewise benefited, in at least an equal degree, the boldest and most energetic among the French inhabitants, those who could hold their own among freemen, who could swim in troubled waters; but it may well be doubted whether to the mass of the ignorant and simple creoles it was not a curse rather than a blessing.

[1] See Col. John Todd’s “Record Book,” while County Lieutenant of Illinois. There is a MS. copy in Col. Durrett’s library at Louisville. It is our best authority for these years in Illinois. The substance of it is given on pp. 49-68 of Mr. Edward G. Mason’s interesting and valuable pamphlet on “Illinois in the 18th Century” (Chicago, Fergus Printing Co., 1881).

[2] In the beginning of 1780. Bradford MS.

[3] State Department MSS., No. 48, p. 51.

[4] Law’s “Vincennes,” pp. 49, 126. For some inscrutable reason, by the way, the Americans for a long time persisted in speaking of the place as St. Vincennes.

[5] See his letter to Governor St. Clair, May 1, 1790.

[6] State Department MSS., No. 48, p. 41. Petition of J. B. La Croix and A. Girardin.

[7] This and most of the other statements for which no authority is quoted, are based on Todd’s MS. “Record Book.”

[8] The entries merely record the sentences, with directions that they be immediately executed. But there seems very little doubt that they were for witchcraft, or voudooism, probably with poisoning at the bottom—and that they were actually carried out. See Mason’s pamphlet, p. 59.

[9] Calendar of Va. State Papers, I, pp. 380, 382, 383, Oct 24-29, 1780.

[10] Haldimand MSS. De Peyster to Haldimand, No. 16, 1780.

[11] State Department MSS., No. 50, p. 109.

[12] Clark to Todd, March, 1780. Va. State Papers, I, 338.

[13] Haldimand MSS. Haldimand to De Peyster, April 10, 1781. Report of Council at St. Joseph, March 11, 1781.

[14] Do. Haldimand to De Peyster, May 19, 1782. This is the first record of an effort to make a permanent settlement at Chicago.

[15] Va. State Papers, III, 502.

[16] Haldimand MSS. Letter of Rocheblave, Oct. 7, 1781; of Lamothe, April 24, 1782.

[17] State Department MSS., Nos. 30 and 48. Law’s “Vincennes.”

[18] State Department MSS., No. 30, p. 453. Memorial of Françis Carbonneaux, agent for the inhabitants of Illinois.

[19] “Nos. Souverains Seigneurs.” The letter is ill-written and worse spelt, in an extraordinary French patois. State Department MSS., No. 30, page 459. It is dated December 3, 1782. Many of the surnames attached are marked with a cross; others are signed. Two are given respectively as “Bienvenus fils” and “Blouin fils.”

[20] State Department MSS., No. 30, p. 459, “de nomer un lieutenant ou un gouverneur tel qu’il plaira a nos Seigneurs de nous l’envoyer.”

CHAPTER III

KENTUCKY UNTIL THE END OF THE REVOLUTION, 1782–1783

SEVENTEEN HUNDRED and eighty-two proved to be Kentucky’s year of blood. The British at Detroit had strained every nerve to drag into the war the entire Indian population of the Northwest. They had finally succeeded in arousing even the most distant tribes—not to speak of the twelve thousand savages immediately tributary to Detroit.[1] So lavish had been the expenditure of money and presents to secure the good-will of the savages and enlist their active services against the Americans, that it had caused serious complaint at headquarters.[2]

Early in the spring the Indians renewed their forays; horses were stolen, cabins burned, and women and children carried off captive. The people were confined closely to their stockaded forts, from which small bands of riflemen sallied to patrol the country. From time to time these encountered marauding parties, and in the fights that followed sometimes the whites, sometimes the reds, were victorious.

One of these conflicts attracted wide attention on the border because of the obstinacy with which it was waged and the bloodshed that accompanied it. In March a party of twenty-five Wyandots came into the settlements, passed Boonesborough, and killed and scalped a girl within sight of Estill’s Station. The men from the latter, also to the number of twenty-five, hastily gathered under Captain Estill, and after two days’ hot pursuit overtook the Wyandots. A fair stand-up fight followed, the better marksmanship of the whites being offset, as so often before, by the superiority their foes showed in sheltering themselves. At last victory declared for the Indians. Estill had despatched a lieutenant and seven men to get round the Wyandots and assail them in the rear; but either the lieutenant’s heart or his judgment failed him, he took too long, and meanwhile the Wyandots closed in on the others, killing nine, including Estill, and wounding four, who, with their unhurt comrades, escaped. It is said that the Wyandots themselves suffered heavily.[3]

These various ravages and skirmishes were but the prelude to a far more serious attack. In July the British captains Caldwell and McKee came down from Detroit with a party of rangers, and gathered together a great army of over a thousand Indians[4]—the largest body of either red men or white that was ever mustered west of the Alleghanies during the Revolution. They meant to strike at Wheeling; but while on their march thither were suddenly alarmed by the rumor that Clark intended to attack the Shawnee towns.[5] They at once countermarched, but on reaching the threatened towns found that the alarm had been groundless. Most of the savages, with characteristic fickleness of temper, then declined to go further; but a body of somewhat over three hundred Hurons and lake Indians remained. With these, and their Detroit rangers, Caldwell and McKee crossed the Ohio and marched into Kentucky, to attack the small forts of Fayette County.

Fayette lay between the Kentucky and the Ohio rivers, and was then the least populous and most exposed of the three counties into which the growing young commonwealth was divided. In 1782 it contained but five of the small stockaded towns in which all the early settlers were obliged to gather. The best defended and most central was Lexington, round which were grouped the other four—Bryan’s (which was the largest), McGee’s, McConnell’s, and Boone’s. Boone’s Station, sometimes called Boone’s new station, where the tranquil, resolute old pioneer at that time dwelt, must not be confounded with his former fort of Boonesborough, from which it was several miles distant, north of the Kentucky. Since the destruction of Martin’s and Ruddle’s stations on the Licking, Bryan’s on the south bank of the Elkhorn was left as the northernmost outpost of the settlers. Its stout, loopholed palisades inclosed some forty cabins, there were strong block-houses at the corners, and it was garrisoned by fifty good riflemen.

These five stations were held by backwoodsmen of the usual Kentucky stamp, from the up-country of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. Generations of frontier life had made them with their fellows the most distinctive and typical Americans on the continent, utterly different from their old-world kinsfolk. Yet they still showed strong traces of the covenanting spirit, which they drew from the Irish-Presbyterian, the master strain in their mixed blood. For years they had not seen the inside of a church; nevertheless, mingled with men who were loose of tongue and life, there still remained many Sabbath-keepers and Bible-readers, who studied their catechisms on Sundays, and disliked almost equally profane language and debauchery.[6]

An incident that occurred at this time illustrates well their feelings. In June a fourth of the active militia of the county was ordered on duty, to scout and patrol the country. Accordingly forty men turned out under Captain Robert Patterson. They were give ammunition, as well as two pack-horses, by the Commissary Department. Every man was entitled to pay for the time he was out. Whether he would ever get it was problematical; at the best it was certain to be given him in worthless paper-money. Their hunters kept them supplied with game, and each man carried a small quantity of parched corn.

The company was ordered to the mouth of the Kentucky to meet the armed row-boat, sent by Clark from the Falls. On the way Patterson was much annoyed by a “very profane, swearing man” from Bryan’s Station, named Aaron Reynolds. Reynolds was a good-hearted, active young fellow, with a biting tongue, not only given to many oaths, but likewise skilled in the rough, coarse banter so popular with the backwoodsmen. After having borne with him four days Patterson made up his mind that he would have to reprove him, and if no amendment took place, send him home. He waited until, at a halt, Reynolds got a crowd round him, and began to entertain them “with oaths and wicked expressions,” whereupon he promptly stepped in “and observed to him that he was a very wicked and profane man,” and that both the company as well as he, the Captain, would thank him to desist. On the next day, however, Reynolds began to swear again; this time Patterson not only reproved him severely, but also tried the effect of judicious gentleness, promising to give him a quart of spirits on reaching the boat if he immediately “quit his profanity and swearing.” Four days afterward they reached the boat, and Aaron Reynolds demanded the quart of spirits. Patterson suggested a doubt as to whether he had kept his promise, whereupon he appealed to the company, then on parade, and they pronounced in his favor, saying that they had not heard him swear since he was reproved. Patterson, who himself records the incident, concludes with the remark: “The spirits were drank.”[7] Evidently the company, who had so impartially acted as judges between their fellow-soldier and their superior officer, viewed with the same equanimity the zeal of the latter and the mixed system of command, entreaty, and reward by which he carried his point. As will be seen, the event had a striking sequel at the battle of the Blue Licks.

Throughout June and July the gunboat patrolled the Ohio, going up to the Licking. Parties of backwoods riflemen, embodied as militia, likewise patrolled the woods, always keeping their scouts and spies well spread out, and exercising the greatest care to avoid being surprised. They greatly hampered the Indian war bands, but now and then the latter slipped by and fell on the people they protected. Early in August such a band committed some ravages south of the Kentucky, beating back with loss a few militia who followed it. Some of the Fayette men were about setting forth to try and cut off its retreat, when the sudden and unlooked-for approach of Caldwell and McKee’s great war party obliged them to bend all their energies to their own defence.

The blow fell on Bryan’s Station. The rangers and warriors moved down through the forest with the utmost speed and stealth, hoping to take this, the northernmost of the stockades, by surprise. If they had succeeded, Lexington and the three smaller stations north of the Kentucky would probably likewise have fallen.

The attack was made early on the morning of the 16th of August. Some of the settlers were in the corn-fields, and the rest inside the palisade of standing logs; they were preparing to follow the band of marauders who had gone south of the Kentucky. A few outlying Indian spies were discovered, owing to their eagerness; and the whites being put on their guard, the attempt to carry the fort by the first rush was, of course, foiled. Like so many other stations—but unlike Lexington,—Bryan’s had no spring within its walls; and as soon as there was reason to dread an attack, it became a matter of vital importance to lay in a supply of water. It was feared that to send the men to the spring would arouse suspicion in the minds of the hiding savages; and, accordingly, the women went down with their pails and buckets as usual. The younger girls showed some nervousness, but the old housewives marshaled them as coolly as possible, talking and laughing together, and by their unconcern completely deceived the few Indians who were lurking near by—for the main body had not yet come up.[8] This advance guard of the savages feared that, if they attacked the women, all chance of surprising the fort would be lost; and so the water-carriers were suffered to go back unharmed.[9] Hardly were they within the fort, however, when some of the Indians found that they had been discovered, and the attack began so quickly that one or two of the men who had lingered in the corn-fields were killed, or else were cut off and fled to Lexington; while, at the same time, swift-footed runners were sent out to carry the alarm to the different stockades, and summon their riflemen to the rescue.

At first but a few Indians appeared, on the side of the Lexington road; they whooped and danced defiance to the fort, evidently inviting an attack. Their purpose was to lure the defenders into sallying out after them, when their main body was to rush at the stockade from the other side. But they did not succeed in deceiving the veteran Indian fighters who manned the heavy gates of the fort, stood behind the loopholed walls, or scanned the country round about from the high block-houses at the corners. A dozen active young men were sent out on the Lexington road to carry on a mock skirmish with the decoy party, while the rest of the defenders gathered behind the wall on the opposite side. As soon as a noisy but harmless skirmish had been begun by the sallying party, the main body of warriors burst out of the woods and rushed toward the western gate. A single volley from the loopholes drove them back, while the sallying party returned at a run and entered the Lexington gate unharmed, laughing at the success of their counterstrategem.

The Indians surrounded the fort, each crawling up as close as he could find shelter behind some stump, tree, or fence. An irregular fire began, the whites, who were better covered, having slightly the advantage, but neither side suffering much. This lasted for several hours, until early in the afternoon a party from Lexington suddenly appeared and tried to force its way into the fort.

The runners who slipped out of the fort at the first alarm went straight to Lexington. There they found that the men had just started out to cut off the retreat of the marauding savages who were ravaging south of the Kentucky. Following their trail they speedily overtook the troops, and told of the attack on Bryan’s. Instantly forty men under Major Levi Todd countermarched to the rescue. Being ignorant of the strength of the Indians they did not wait for the others, but pushed boldly forward, seventeen being mounted and the others on foot.[10]

The road from Lexington to Bryan’s for the last few hundred yards led beside a field of growing corn taller than a man. Some of the Indians were lying in this field when they were surprised by the sudden appearance of the rescuers, and promptly fired on them. Levi Todd and the horsemen, who were marching in advance, struck spurs into their steeds, and galloping hard through the dust and smoke reached the fort in safety. The footmen were quickly forced to retreat toward Lexington; but the Indians were too surprised by the unlooked-for approach to follow, and they escaped with the loss of one man killed and three wounded.[11]

That night the Indians tried to burn the fort, shooting flaming arrows onto the roofs of the cabins and rushing up to the wooden wall with lighted torches. But they were beaten off at each attempt. When day broke they realized that it was hopeless to make any further effort, though they still kept up a desultory fire on the fort’s defenders; they had killed most of the cattle and pigs, and some of the horses, and had driven away the rest.

Girty, who was among the assailants, as a last shift, tried to get the garrison to surrender, assuring them that the Indians were hourly expecting reinforcements, including the artillery brought against Ruddle’s and Martin’s stations two years previously; and that if forced to batter down the walls no quarter would be given to any one. Among the fort’s defenders was young Aaron Reynolds, the man whose profanity had formerly roused Captain Patterson’s ire; and he now undertook to be spokesman for the rest. Springing up into sight he answered Girty in the tone of rough banter so dear to the backwoodsmen, telling the renegade that he knew him well, and despised him, that the men in the fort feared neither cannon nor reinforcements, and if need be, could drive Girty’s tawny followers back from the walls with switches; and he ended by assuring him that the whites, too, were expecting help, for the country was roused, and if the renegade and his followers dared to linger where they were for another twenty-four hours, their scalps would surely be sun-dried on the roofs of the cabins. The Indians knew well that the riflemen were mustering at all the neighboring forts; and, as soon as their effort to treat failed, they withdrew during the forenoon of the 17th.[12] They were angry and sullen at their discomfiture. Five of their number had been killed and several wounded. Of the fort’s defenders four had been killed and three wounded. Among the children within its walls during the siege there was one, the youngest, a Kentucky-born baby, named Richard Johnson; over thirty years later he led the Kentucky mounted riflemen at the victory of the Thames, when they killed not only the great Indian chief Tecumseh, but also, it is said, the implacable renegade Simon Girty himself, then in extreme old age.

McClung and Marshall make the siege last three or four days instead of less than two.

All the accounts of the battle of the Blue Licks, so far, have been very inaccurate, because the British reports have never been even known to exist, and the reports of the American commanders, printed in the Virginia State Papers, have but recently seen the light. Mr. Whitsitt in his recent excellent “Life of Judge Wallace,” uses the latter, but makes the great mistake of incorporating into his narrative some of the most glaring errors of McClung and Marshall.

All this time the runners sent out from Bryan’s had been speeding through the woods, summoning help from each of the little walled towns. The Fayette troops quickly gathered. As soon as Boone heard the news he marched at the head of the men of his station, among them his youngest son Israel, destined shortly to be slain before his eyes. The men from Lexington, McConnell’s, and McGee’s rallied under John Todd, who was County Lieutenant, and, by virtue of his commission in the Virginia line, the ranking officer of Kentucky, second only to Clark. Troops also came from south of the Kentucky River; Lieutenant-Colonel Trigg and Majors McGarry and Harlan led the men from Harrodsburg, who were soonest ready to march, and likewise brought the news that Logan, their County Lieutenant, was raising the whole force of Lincoln in hot haste, and would follow in a couple of days.

These bands of rescuers reached Bryan’s Station on the afternoon of the day the Indians had left. The men thus gathered were the very pick of the Kentucky pioneers; sinewy veterans of border strife, skilled hunters and woodsmen, long wonted to every kind of hardship and danger. They were men of the most dauntless courage, but unruly and impatient of all control. Only a few of the cooler heads were willing to look before they leaped; and even their chosen and trusted leaders were forced to advise and exhort rather than to command them. All were eager for battle and vengeance, and were excited and elated by the repulse that had just been inflicted on the savages; and they feared to wait for Logan lest the foe should escape. Next morning they rode out in pursuit, one hundred and eighty-two strong, all on horseback, and all carrying long rifles. There was but one sword among them, which Todd had borrowed from Boone—a rough weapon, with short steel blade and buckhorn hilt. As with most frontier levies, the officers were in large proportion; for, owing to the system of armed settlement and half-military organization, each wooden fort, each little group of hunters or hard-fighting backwoods farmers, was forced to have its own captain, lieutenant, ensign, and sergeant.[13]

The Indians, in their unhurried retreat, followed the great buffalo trace that led to the Blue Licks, a broad road, beaten out through the forest by the passing and repassing of the mighty herds through countless generations. They camped on the further side of the river; some of the savages had left, but there were still nearly three hundred men in all—Hurons and lake Indians, with the small party of rangers.[14]

Levi Todd put the number of the Indians at three hundred, which was pretty near the truth; Boone thought it four hundred; later writers exaggerate wildly, putting it even at one thousand.

The backwoods horsemen rode swiftly on the trail of their foes, and before evening came to where they had camped the night before. A careful examination of the camp-fires convinced the leaders that they were heavily outnumbered; nevertheless they continued the pursuit, and overtook the savages early the following morning, the 19th of August.

As they reached the Blue Licks, they saw a few Indians retreating up a rocky ridge that led from the north bank of the river. The backwoodsmen halted on the south bank, and a short council was held. All turned naturally to Boone, the most experienced Indian fighter present, in whose cool courage and tranquil self-possession all confided. The wary old pioneer strongly urged that no attack be made at the moment, but that they should await the troops coming up under Logan. The Indians were certainly much superior in numbers to the whites; they were aware that they were being followed by a small force, and from the confident, leisurely way in which they had managed their retreat, were undoubtedly anxious to be overtaken and attacked. The hurried pursuit had been quite proper in the first place, for if the Indians had fled rapidly they would surely have broken up into different bands, which could have been attacked on even terms, while delay would have permitted them to go off unscathed. But, as it was, the attack would be very dangerous; while the delay of waiting for Logan would be a small matter, for the Indians could still be overtaken after he had arrived.

Well would it have been for the frontiersmen had they followed Boone’s advice.[15] Todd and Trigg both agreed with him, and so did many of the cooler riflemen—among others a man named Netherland, whose caution caused the young hotheads to jeer at him as a coward. But the decision was not suffered to rest with the three colonels who nominally commanded. Doubtless the council was hasty and tumultuous, being held by the officers in the open, closely pressed upon and surrounded by a throng of eager, unruly soldiers, who did not hesitate to offer advice or express dissatisfaction. Many of the more headlong and impatient among the bold spirits looking on desired instant action; and these found a sudden leader in Major Hugh McGarry. He was a man utterly unsuited to command of any kind; and his retention in office after repeated acts of violence and insubordination shows the inherent weakness of the frontier militia system. He not only chafed at control, but he absolutely refused to submit to it; and his courage was of a kind better fitted to lead him into a fight than to make him bear himself well after it was begun. He wished no delay, and was greatly angered at the decision of the council; nor did he hesitate to at once appeal therefrom. Turning to the crowd of backwoodsmen he suddenly raised the thrilling warcry, and spurred his horse into the stream, waving his hat over his head and calling on all who were not cowards to follow him. The effect was electrical. In an instant all the hunter-soldiers plunged in after him with a shout, and splashed across the ford of the shallow river in huddled confusion.

Boone and Todd had nothing to do but follow. On the other side they got the men into order, and led them on, the only thing that was possible under the circumstances. These two leaders acted excellently throughout; and they now did their best to bring the men with honor through the disaster into which they had been plunged by their own headstrong folly.

As the Indians were immediately ahead, the array of battle was at once formed. The troops spread out into a single line. The right was led by Trigg, the centre by Colonel-Commandant Todd in person, with McGarry under him, and an advance guard of twenty-five men under Harlan in front; while the left was under Boone. The ground was equally favorable to both parties, the timber being open and good.[16] But the Indians had the advantage in numbers, and were able to outflank the whites.

In a minute the spies brought word that the enemy were close in front.[17] The Kentuckians galloped up at speed to within sixty yards of their foes, leaped from their horses, and instantly gave and received a heavy fire.[18] Boone was the first to open the combat; and under his command the left wing pushed the Indians opposite them back for a hundred yards. The old hunter of course led in person; his men stoutly backed him up, and their resolute bearing and skilful marksmanship gave to the whites in this part of the line a momentary victory. But on the right of the Kentucky advance, affairs went badly from the start. The Indians were thrown out so as to completely surround Trigg’s wing. Almost as soon as the firing became heavy in front, crowds of painted warriors rose from some hollows of long grass that lay on Trigg’s right and poured in a close and deadly volley. Rushing forward, they took his men in rear and flank, and rolled them up on the centre, killing Trigg himself. Harlan’s advance guard was cut down almost to a man, their commander being among the slain. The centre was then assailed from both sides by overwhelming numbers. Todd did all he could by voice and example to keep his men firm, and cover Boone’s successful advance, but in vain. Riding to and fro on his white horse, he was shot through the body, and mortally wounded. He leaped on his horse again, but his strength failed him; the blood gushed from his mouth; he leaned forward, and fell heavily from the saddle. Some say that his horse carried him to the river, and that he fell into its current. With his death the centre gave way; and of course Boone and the men of the left wing, thrust in advance, were surrounded on three sides. A wild rout followed, every one pushing in headlong haste for the ford. “He that could remount a horse was well off; he that could not, had no time for delay,” wrote Levi Todd. The actual fighting had only occupied five minutes.[19]

In a mad and panic race the Kentuckians reached the ford, which was fortunately but a few hundred yards from the battle-field, the Indians being mixed in with them. Among the first to cross was Netherland, whose cautious advice had been laughed at before the battle. No sooner had he reached the south bank, than he reined up his horse and leaped off, calling on his comrades to stop and cover the flight of the others; and most of them obeyed him. The ford was choked with a struggling mass of horsemen and footmen, fleeing whites and following Indians. Netherland and his companions opened a brisk fire upon the latter, forcing them to withdraw for a moment and let the remainder of the fugitives cross in safety. Then the flight began again. The check that had been given the Indians allowed the whites time to recover heart and breath. Retreating in groups or singly through the forest, with their weapons reloaded, their speed of foot and woodcraft enabled such as had crossed the river to escape without further serious loss.

Boone was among the last to leave the field. His son Israel was slain, and he himself was cut off from the river; but turning abruptly to one side, he broke through the ranks of the pursuers, outran them, swam the river, and returned unharmed to Bryan’s Station.

Among the men in the battle were Capt. Robert Patterson and young Aaron Reynolds. When the retreat began Patterson could not get a horse. He was suffering from some old and unhealed wounds received in a former Indian fight, and he speedily became exhausted. As he was on the point of sinking, Reynolds suddenly rode up beside him, jumped off his horse, and without asking Patterson whether he would accept, bade him mount the horse and flee. Patterson did so, and was the last man over the ford. He escaped unhurt, though the Indians were running alongside and firing at him. Meanwhile Reynolds, who possessed extraordinary activity, reached the river in safety and swam across. He then sat down to take off his buckskin trousers, which, being soaked through, hampered him much; and two Indians suddenly pounced on and captured him. He was disarmed and left in charge of one. Watching his chance, he knocked the savage down, and running off into the woods escaped with safety. When Patterson thanked him for saving his life, and asked him why he had done it, he answered, that ever since Patterson had reproved him for swearing, he had felt a strong and continued attachment for him. The effect of the reproof, combined with his narrow escape, changed him completely, and he became a devout member of the Baptist Church. Patterson, to show the gratitude he felt, gave him a horse and saddle, and a hundred acres of pine land, the first he had ever owned.

The loss of the defeated Kentuckians had been very great. Seventy were killed outright, including Colonel Todd and Lieutenant-Colonel Trigg, the first and third in command. Seven were captured, and twelve of those who escaped were badly wounded.[20] The victors lost one of the Detroit rangers (a Frenchman), and six Indians killed and ten Indians wounded.[21] Almost their whole loss was caused by the successful advance of Boone’s troops, save what was due to Netherland when he rallied the flying backwoodsmen at the ford.

Of the seven white captives four were put to death with torture; three eventually rejoined their people. One of them owed his being spared to a singular and amusing feat of strength and daring. When forced to run the gantlet, he, by his activity, actually succeeded in reaching the council-house unharmed; when almost to it, he turned, seized a powerful Indian and hurled him violently to the ground, and then, thrusting his head between the legs of another pursuer, he tossed him clean over his back, after which he sprang on a log, leaped up and knocked his heels together, crowed in the fashion of backwoods victors, and rallied the Indians as a pack of cowards. One of the old chiefs immediately adopted him into the tribe as his son.

All the little forted villages north of the Kentucky, and those lying near its southern bank, were plunged into woe and mourning by the defeat.[22] In every stockade, in almost every cabin, there was weeping for husband or father, son, brother, or lover. The best and bravest blood in the land had been shed like water. There was no one who had not lost some close and dear friend, and the heads of all the people were bowed and their hearts sore stricken.

The bodies of the dead lay where they had fallen, on the hill-slope, and in the shallow river; torn by wolf, vulture, and raven, or eaten by fishes. In a day or two Logan came up with four hundred men from south of the Kentucky, tall Simon Kenton marching at the head of the troops, as captain of a company.[23] They buried the bodies of the slain on the battle-field, in long trenches, and heaped over them stones and logs. Meanwhile the victorious Indians, glutted with vengeance, recrossed the Ohio and vanished into the northern forests.

The Indian ravages continued throughout the early fall months; all the outlying cabins were destroyed, the settlers were harried from the clearings, and a station on Salt River was taken by surprise, thirty-seven people being captured. Stunned by the crushing disaster at the Blue Licks, and utterly disheartened and cast down by the continued ravages, many of the settlers threatened to leave the country. The county officers sent long petitions to the Virginia Legislature, complaining that the troops posted at the Falls were of no assistance in checking the raids of the Indians, and asserting that the operations carried on by order of the Executive for the past eighteen months had been a detriment rather than a help. The utmost confusion and discouragement prevailed everywhere.[24]

At last the news of repeated disaster roused Clark into his old-time energy. He sent out runners through the settlements, summoning all the able-bodied men to make ready for a blow at the Indians. The pioneers turned with eager relief toward the man who had so often led them to success. They answered his call with quick enthusiasm; beeves, pack-horses, and supplies were offered in abundance, and every man who could shoot and ride marched to the appointed meeting-places. The men from the eastern stations gathered at Bryan’s, under Logan; those from the western, at the Falls, under Floyd. The two divisions met at the mouth of the Licking, where Clark took supreme command. On the 4th of November, he left the banks of the Ohio and struck off northward through the forest, at the head of one thousand and fifty mounted riflemen. On the 10th he attacked the Miami towns. His approach was discovered just in time to prevent a surprise. The Indians hurriedly fled to the woods, those first discovered raising the alarm-cry, which could be heard an incredible distance, and thus warning their fellows. In consequence no fight followed, though there was sharp skirmishing between the advance guard and the hindermost Indians. Ten scalps were taken and seven prisoners, besides two whites being recaptured. Of Clark’s men, one was killed and one wounded. The flight of the Indians was too hasty to permit them to save any of their belongings. All the cabins were burned, together with an immense quantity of corn and provisions—a severe loss at the opening of winter. McKee, the Detroit partisan, attempted to come to the rescue with what Indians he could gather, but was met and his force promptly scattered.[25] Logan led a detachment to the head of the Miami, and burned the stores of the British traders. The loss to the savages at the beginning of cold weather was very great; they were utterly cast down and panic-stricken at such a proof of the power of the whites, coming as it did so soon after the battle of the Blue Licks. The expedition returned in triumph, and the Kentuckians completely regained their self-confidence; and though for ten years longer Kentucky suffered from the inroads of small parties of savages, it was never again threatened by a serious invasion.[26]

At the beginning of 1783, when the news of peace was spread abroad, immigration began to flow to Kentucky down the Ohio, and over the Wilderness Road, in a flood of which the volume dwarfed all former streams into rivulets. Indian hostilities continued at intervals throughout this year,[27] but they were not of a serious nature. Most of the tribes concluded at least a nominal peace, and liberated over two hundred white prisoners, though they retained nearly as many more.[28] Nevertheless in the spring one man of note fell victim to the savages, for John Floyd was waylaid and slain as he was riding out with his brother. Thus within the space of eight months, two of the three county lieutenants had been killed, in battle or ambush.

The inrush of new settlers was enormous,[29] and Kentucky fairly entered on its second stage of growth. The days of the first game hunters and Indian fighters were over. By this year the herds of the buffalo, of which the flesh and hides had been so important to the earlier pioneers, were nearly exterminated; though bands still lingered in the remote recesses of the mountains, and they were plentiful in Illinois. The land claims began to clash, and interminable litigation followed. This rendered very important the improvement in the judiciary system which was begun in March by the erection of the three counties into the “District of Kentucky,” with a court of common law and chancery jurisdiction coextensive with its limits. The name of Kentucky, which had been dropped when the original county was divided into three, was thus permanently revived. The first court sat at Harrodsburg, but as there was no building where it could properly be held, it adjourned to the Dutch Reformed Meeting-house six miles off. The first grand jury empaneled presented nine persons for selling liquor without license, eight for adultery and fornication, and the clerk of Lincoln County for not keeping a table of fees; besides several for smaller offences.[30] A log court-house and a log jail were immediately built.

Manufactories of salt were started at the licks, where it was sold at from three to five silver dollars a bushel.[31] This was not only used by the settlers for themselves, but for their stock, which ranged freely in the woods; to provide for the latter a tree was chopped down and the salt placed in notches or small troughs cut in the trunk, making it what was called a lick-log. Large grist-mills were erected at some of the stations; wheat crops were raised; and small distilleries were built. The gigantic system of river commerce of the Mississippi had been begun the preceding year by one Jacob Yoder, who loaded a flat-boat at the Old Redstone Fort, on the Monongahela, and drifted down to New Orleans, where he sold his goods, and returned to the Falls of the Ohio by a roundabout course leading through Havana, Philadelphia, and Pittsburg. Several regular schools were started. There were already meeting-houses of the Baptist and Dutch Reformed congregations, the preachers spending the week-days in clearing and tilling the fields, splitting rails, and raising hogs; in 1783 a permanent Presbyterian minister arrived, and a log church was speedily built for him. The sport-loving Kentuckians this year laid out a race track at Shallowford Station. It was a straight quarter of a mile course, within two hundred yards of the stockade; at its further end was a canebrake, wherein an Indian once lay hid and shot a rider, who was pulling up his horse at the close of a race. There was still but one ferry, that over the Kentucky River at Boonesborough; the price of ferriage was three shillings for either man or horse. The surveying was still chiefly done by hunters, and much of it was in consequence very loose indeed.[32]

The first retail store Kentucky had seen since Henderson’s, at Boonesborough, was closed in 1775, was established this year at the Falls; the goods were brought in wagons from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, and thence down the Ohio in flat-boats. The game had been all killed off in the immediate neighborhood of the town at the Falls, and Clark undertook to supply the inhabitants with meat, as a commercial speculation. Accordingly he made a contract with John Saunders, the hunter who had guided him on his march to the Illinois towns; the latter had presumably forgiven his chief for having threatened him with death when he lost the way. Clark was to furnish Saunders with three men, a pack-horse, salt, and ammunition; while Saunders agreed to do his best and be “assiduously industrious” in hunting. Buffalo beef, bear’s meat, deer hams, and bear oil were the commodities most sought after. The meat was to be properly cured and salted in camp, and sent from time to time to the Falls, where Clark was to dispose of it in market, a third of the price going to Saunders. The hunting season was to last from November 1st to January 15th.[33]

Thus the settlers could no longer always kill their own game; and there were churches, schools, mills, stores, race tracks, and markets in Kentucky.

[1] Haldimand MSS. Census for 1782, 11,402.

[2] Do. Haldimand to De Peyster, April 10, October 6, 1781.

[3] Of course not as much as their foes. The backwoodsmen (like the regular officers of both the British and American armies in similar cases, as at Grant’s and St. Clair’s defeats) were fond of consoling themselves for their defeats by snatching at any wild tale of the losses of the victors. In the present instance it is even possible that the loss of the Wyandots was very light instead of very heavy.

[4] Haldimand MSS. Letter from Capt. Caldwell, August 26, 1782; and letter of Captain McKee, August 28, 1782. These two letters are very important as they give for the first time the British and Indian accounts of the battle of the Blue Licks; I print them in the Appendix.

[5] This rumor was caused by Clark’s gunboat, which, as will be hereafter mentioned, had been sent up to the mouth of the Licking; some Shawnees saw it, and thought Clark was preparing for an inroad.

[6] McAfee MSS.

[7] Patterson’s paper, given by Col. John Mason Brown, in his excellent pamphlet on the “Battle of the Blue Licks” (Franklin, Ky., 1882). I cannot forbear again commenting on the really admirable historic work now being done by Messrs. Brown, Durrett, Speed, and the other members of the Louisville “Filson Club.”

[8] Caldwell’s letter says that a small party of Indians was sent ahead first; the watering incident apparently took place immediately on this small party being discovered.

[9] This account rests on tradition; it is recorded by McClung, a most untrustworthy writer; his account of the battle of the Blue Licks is wrong from beginning to end. But a number of gentlemen in Kentucky have informed me that old pioneers whom they knew in their youth had told them that they had themselves seen the incident, and that, as written down, it was substantially true. So with Reynolds’ speech to Girty. Of course, his exact words, as given by McClung, are incorrect; but Mr. L. C. Draper informs me that, in his youth, he knew several old men who had been in Bryan’s Station, and had themselves heard the speech. If it were not for this I should reject it, for the British accounts do not even mention that Girty was along, and do not hint at the incident. It was probably an unauthorized ruse of Girty’s. The account of the decoy party of Indians is partially confirmed by the British letters. Both Marshall and McClung get this siege and battle very much twisted in their narratives; they make so many mistakes that it is difficult to know what portion of their accounts to accept. Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to neglect all, even of McClung’s statements. Thus Boone and Levi Todd in their reports make no mention of McGarry’s conduct; and it might be supposed to be a traditional myth, but McClung’s account is unexpectedly corroborated by Arthur Campbell’s letter, hereafter to be quoted, which was written at the time. Marshall is the authority for Netherland’s feat at the ford. Boone’s description in the Filson narrative differs on several points from his earlier official letter, one or two grave errors being made; it is one of the incidents which shows how cautiously the Filson sketch must be used, though it is usually accepted as unquestionable authority.

[10] Va. State Papers, III, p. 300. McClung’s and Collins’ accounts of this incident are pure romance.

[11] Va. State Papers, III, p. 300.

[12] There are four contemporary official reports of this battle: two American, those of Boone and Levi Todd; and two British, those of McKee and Caldwell. All four agree that the fort was attacked on one day, the siege abandoned on the next, pursuit made on the third, and the battle fought on the fourth. Boone and Todd make the siege begin on August 16th, and the battle take place on the 19th; Caldwell makes the dates the 15th and 18th; McKee makes them the 18th and 21st. I therefore take Boone’s and Todd’s dates.

[13] For the American side of the battle of Blue Licks I take the contemporary reports of Boone, Levi Todd, and Logan, Va. State Papers, Vol. III, pp. 276, 280, 300,333. Boone and Todd both are explicit that there were one hundred and eighty-two riflemen all on horseback, and substantially agree as to the loss of the frontiersmen. Later reports underestimate both the numbers and loss of the whites. Boone’s Narrative, written two years after the event from memory, conflicts in one or two particulars with his earlier report. Patterson, writing long afterward, and from memory, falls into gross errors, both as to the number of troops and as to some of them being on foot; his account must be relied on chiefly for his own adventures. Most of the historians of Kentucky give the affair very incorrectly. Butler follows Marshall; but from the Clark papers he got the right number of men engaged. Marshall gives a few valuable facts; but he is all wrong on certain important points. For instance, he says Todd hurried into action for fear Logan would supersede him in the command; but in reality Todd ranked Logan. McClung’s ornate narrative, that usually followed, hangs on the very slenderest thread of truth; it is mainly sheer fiction. Prolix, tedious Collins follows the plan he usually does when his rancorous prejudices do not influence him, and presents half a dozen utterly inconsistent accounts, with no effort whatever to reconcile them. He was an industrious collector of information, and gathered an enormous quantity, some of it very useful; he recorded with the like complacency authentic incidents of the highest importance and palpable fabrications or irrelevant trivialities; and it never entered his head to sift evidence or to exercise a little critical power and judgment.

[14] Caldwell says that he had at first “three hundred Indians and Rangers,” but that before the battle “nigh 100 Indians left.” McKee says that there were at first “upwards of three hundred Hurons and Lake Indians,” besides the rangers and a very few Mingoes, Delawares, and Shawnees. Later he says of the battle: “We were not much superior to them in numbers, they being about two hundred.”

[15] Va. State Papers, III, 337. Col. Campbell’s letter of Oct. 3, 1782. The letter is interesting as showing by contemporary authority that Boone’s advice and McGarry’s misbehavior are not mere matters of tradition. It is possible that there was some jealousy between the troops from Lincoln and those from Fayette; the latter had suffered much from the Indians, and were less rash in consequence; while many of the Lincoln men were hot for instant battle.

[16] Levi Todd’s letter, Aug. 26, 1782.

[17] It is absolutely erroneous to paint the battle as in any way a surprise. Boone says: “We discovered the enemy lying in wait for us; on this discovery we formed our columns into a single line, and marched up in their front.” There was no ambush, except that of course the Indians, as usual, sheltered themselves behind trees or in the long grass. From what Boone and Levi Todd say, it is evident that the firing began on both sides at the same time. Calcwell says the Indians fired one gun whereupon the Kentuckians fired a volley.

[18] Levi Todd’s letter.

[19] Levi Todd’s letter.

[20] Those are the figures of Boone’s official report, and must be nearly accurate. The later accounts give all sorts of numbers.

[21] Caldwell’s letter. But there are some slight discrepancies between the letters of McKee and Caldwell. Caldwell makes the loss at Bryan’s Station and the Blue Licks together twelve killed and twelve wounded; McKee says eleven killed and fourteen wounded. Both exaggerate the American loss, but not as much as the Americans exaggerated that of the Indians, Boone in his narrative giving the wildest of all the estimates.

[22] Arthur Campbell, in the letter already quoted, comments with intense bitterness on the defeat, which, he says, was due largely to McGarry’s “vain and seditious expressions.” He adds that Todd and Trigg had capacity but no experience, and Boone experience but no capacity, while Logan was “a dull and narrow body,” and Clark “a sot, if nothing worse.” Campbell was a Holston Virginian, an able but very jealous man, who disliked the Kentucky leaders and indeed had no love for Kentucky itself; he had strenuously opposed its first erection as a separate county.

[23] McBride’s “Pioneer Biography,” I, 210.

[24] Va. State Papers, III, pp. 301, 331. Letter of William Christian, September 28th. Petition of Boone, Todd, Nether-land, etc., September 11th. In Morehead’s “address” is a letter from Nathaniel Hart. He was himself, as a boy, witness of what he describes. His father, who had been Henderson’s partner and bore the same name as himself, was from North Carolina. He founded in Kentucky a station known as White Oak Springs; and was slain by the savages during this year. The letter runs: “It is impossible at this day to make a just impression of the sufferings of the pioneers about the period spoken of. The White Oak Springs fort in 1782, with perhaps one hundred souls in it was reduced in August to three fighting white men—and I can say with truth that for two or three weeks my mother’s family never unclothed themselves to sleep, nor were all of them within that time at their meals together, nor was any household business attempted. Food was prepared and placed where those who chose could eat. It was the period when Bryan’s station was besieged, and for many days before and after that gloomy event we were in constant expectation of being made prisoners. We made application to Col. Logan for a guard and obtained one, but not until the danger was measureably over. It then consisted of two men only. Col. Logan did everything in his power, as County Lieutenant, to sustain the different forts—but it was not a very easy matter to order a married man from a fort where his family was to defend some other when his own was in imminent danger.

“I went with my mother in January, 1783, to Logan’s station to prove my father’s will. He had fallen in the preceding July. Twenty armed men were of the party. Twenty-three widows were in attendance upon the court to obtain letters of administration on the estates of their husbands who had been killed during the past year.”

The letter also mentions that most of the original settlers of the fort were from Pennsylvania, “orderly respectable people and the men good soldiers. But they were unaccustomed to Indian warfare, and the consequence was that of some ten or twelve men all were killed but two or three.” This incident illustrates the folly of the hope, at one time entertained, that the Continental troops, by settling in the West on lands granted them, would prove a good barrier against the Indians; the best Continentals in Washington’s army would have been almost as helpless as British grenadiers in the woods.

[25] Haldimand MSS. Letter of Alex. McKee, November 15, 1782. He makes no attempt to hide the severity of the blow; his letter shows a curious contrast in tone to the one he wrote after the Blue Licks. He states that the victory has opened the road to Detroit to the Americans.

[26] Va. State Papers, p. 381. Clark’s letter of November 27, 1782.

[27] Do., p. 522. Letter of Benjamin Logan, August 11, 1783.

[28] “Pennsylvania Packet,” No. 1,079. August 12, 1783.

[29] McAfee MSS.

[30] Marshall, I, 159.

[31] McAfee MSS.

[32] McAfee MSS. Marshall, Collins, Brown’s pamphlets.

[33] Original agreement in Durrett MSS.; bound volume of “Papers Relating to G. R. Clark.” This particular agreement is for 1784; but apparently he entered into several such in different years.

CHAPTER IV

THE HOLSTON SETTLEMENTS, 1777–1779

THE HISTORY of Kentucky and the Northwest has now been traced from the date of the Cherokee war to the close of the Revolution. Those portions of the southwestern lands that were afterward made into the State of Tennessee had meanwhile developed with almost equal rapidity. Both Kentucky and Tennessee grew into existence and power at the same time, and were originally settled and built up by precisely the same class of American backwoodsmen. But there were one or two points of difference in their methods of growth. Kentucky sprang up afar off in the wilderness, and as a separate entity from the beginning. The present State has grown steadily from a single centre, which was the part first settled; and the popular name of the commonwealth has always been Kentucky. Tennessee, on the other hand, did not assume her present name until a quarter of a century after the first exploration and settlement had begun; and the State grew from two entirely distinct centres. The first settlements, known as the Watauga, or afterward more generally as the Holston, settlements, grew up while keeping close touch with the Virginians, who lived round the Tennessee head-waters, and also in direct communication with North Carolina, to which State they belonged. It was not until 1779 that a portion of these Holston people moved to the bend of the Cumberland River and started a new community, exactly as Kentucky had been started before. At first this new community, known as the Cumberland settlement, was connected by only the loosest tie with the Holston settlements. The people of the two places were not grouped together; they did not even have a common name. The three clusters of Holston, Cumberland, and Kentucky settlements developed independently of one another, and though their founders were in each case of the same kind, they were at first only knit one to another by a lax bond of comradeship. In 1776 the Watauga pioneers probably numbered some six hundred souls in all. Having at last found out the State in which they lived, they petitioned North Carolina to be annexed thereto as a district or county. The older settlements had evidently been jealous of them, for they found it necessary to deny that they were, as had been asserted, “a lawless mob”; it may be remarked that the Transylvanian colonists had been obliged to come out with a similar statement. In their petition they christened their country “Washington District,” in honor of the great chief whose name already stood first in the hearts of all Americans. The document was written by Sevier. It set forth the history of the settlers, their land purchases from the Indians, their successful effort at self-government, their military organization, with Robertson as captain, and finally their devotion to the Revolutionary cause; and recited their lack of proper authority to deal promptly with felons, murderers, and the like, who came in from the neighboring States, as the reason why they wished to become a self-governing portion of North Carolina.[1] The Legislature of the State granted the prayer of the petitioners, Washington District was annexed, and four representatives therefrom, one of them Sevier, took their seats that fall in the Provincial Congress at Halifax. But no change whatever was made in the government of the Watauga people until 1777. In the spring of that year laws were passed providing for the establishment of courts of pleas and quarter sessions in the district, as well as for the appointment of justices of the peace, sheriffs, and militia officers; and in the fall the district was made a county, under the same name. The boundaries of Washington County were the same as those of the present State of Tennessee, and seem to have been outlined by Sevier, the only man who at that time had a clear idea as to what should be the logical and definite limits of the future State.

The nominal change of government worked little real alteration in the way the Holston people managed their affairs. The members of the old committee became the justices of the new court, and, with a slight difference in forms, proceeded against all offenders with their former vigor. Being eminently-practical men, and not learned in legal technicalities, their decisions seem to have been governed mainly by their own ideas of justice, which, though genuine, were rough. As the war progressed and the Southern States fell into the hands of the British, the disorderly men who had streamed across the mountains became openly defiant toward the law. The tories gathered in bands, and every man who was impatient of legal restraint, every murderer, horse-thief, and highway robber in the community flocked to join them. The militia who hunted them down soon ceased to discriminate between tories and other criminals, and the courts rendered decisions to the same effect. The caption of one indictment that has been preserved reads against the defendant “in toryism.” He was condemned to imprisonment during the war, half his goods were confiscated to the use of the State, and the other half was turned over for the support of his family. In another case the court granted a still more remarkable order, upon the motion of the State attorney, which set forth that fifteen hundred pounds, due to a certain H., should be retained in the hands of the debtor, because “there is sufficient reason to believe that the said H’s estate will be confiscated to the use of the State for his misdemeanours.”

There is something refreshing in the solemnity with which these decisions are recorded, and the evident lack of perception on the part of the judges that their records would, to their grandchildren, have a distinctly humorous side. To tories, and evil-doers generally, the humor was doubtless very grim; but, as a matter of fact, the decisions, though certainly of unusual character, were needful and just. The friends of order had to do their work with rough weapons, and they used them most efficiently. Under the stress of so dire an emergency as that they confronted they were quite right in attending only to the spirit of law and justice, and refusing to be hampered by the letter. They would have discredited their own energy and hard common-sense had they acted otherwise, and, moreover, would have inevitably failed to accomplish their purpose.

In the summer of ‘78, when Indian hostilities almost entirely ceased, most of the militia were disbanded, and, in consequence, the parties of tories and horse-thieves sprang into renewed strength, and threatened to overawe the courts and government officers. Immediately the leaders among the whigs, the friends of order and liberty, gathered together and organized a vigilance committee. The committee raised two companies of mounted riflemen, who were to patrol the country and put to death all suspicious characters who resisted them or who refused to give security to appear before the committee in December. The proceedings of the committee were thus perfectly open; the members had no idea of acting secretly or against order. It was merely that in a time of general confusion they consolidated themselves into a body which was a most effective, though irregular, supporter of the cause of law. The mounted riflemen scoured the country and broke up the gangs of evil-doers, hanging six or seven of the leaders, while a number of the less prominent were brought before the committee, who fined some and condemned others to be whipped or branded. All of doubtful loyalty were compelled to take the test oath.[2]

Such drastic measures soon brought about peace; but it was broken again and again by similar risings and disturbances. By degrees most of the worst characters fled to the Cherokees, or joined the British as their forces approached the up-country. Until the battle of King’s Mountain, the pioneers had to watch the tories as closely as they did the Indians; there was a constant succession of murders, thefts, and savage retaliations. Once a number of tories attempted to surprise and murder Sevier in his own house; but the plot was revealed by the wife of the leader, to whom Sevier’s wife had shown great kindness in her time of trouble. In consequence the tories were themselves surprised and their ringleaders slain. Every man in the country was obliged to bear arms the whole time, not only because of the Indian warfare, but also on account of the inveterate hatred and constant collisions between the whigs and the loyalists. Many dark deeds were done, and though the tories, with whom the criminal classes were in close alliance, were generally the first and chief offenders, yet the patriots can not be held guiltless of murderous and ferocious reprisals. They often completely failed to distinguish between the offenders against civil order, and those whose only crime was an honest, if mistaken, devotion to the cause of the king.

Early in ’78 a land office was opened in the Holston settlements, and the settlers were required to make entries according to the North Carolina land laws. Hitherto they had lived on their clearings undisturbed, resting their title upon purchase from the Indians and upon their own mutual agreements. The old settlers were given the prior right to the locations, and until the beginning of ’79 in which to pay for them. Each head of a family was allowed to take up six hundred and forty acres for himself, one hundred for his wife, and one hundred for each of his children, at the price of forty shillings per hundred acres, while any additional amount cost at the rate of one hundred shillings, instead of forty. All of the men of the Holston settlements were at the time in the service of the State as militia, in the campaign against the Indians; and when the land office was opened, the money that was due them sufficed to pay for their claims. They thus had no difficulty in keeping possession of their lands, much to the disappointment of the land speculators, many of whom had come out at the opening of the office. Afterward large tracts were given as bounty, or in lieu of pay, to the Revolutionary soldiers. All the struggling colonies used their wild land as a sort of military chest; it was often the only security of value in their possession.

The same year that the land office was opened, it was enacted that the bridle path across the mountains should be chopped out and made into a rough wagon road.[3] The following spring the successful expedition against the Chickamaugas temporarily put a stop to Indian troubles. The growing security, the opening of the land office, and the increase of knowledge concerning the country, produced a great inflow of settlers in 1779, and from that time onward the volume of immigration steadily increased.

Many of these new-comers were “poor whites,” or crackers; lank, sallow, ragged creatures, living in poverty, ignorance, and dirt, who regarded all strangers with suspicion as “outlandish folks:”[4] With every chance to rise, these people remained mere squalid cumberers of the earth’s surface, a rank, up-country growth, containing within itself the seeds of vicious, idle pauperism, and semi-criminality. They clustered in little groups, scattered throughout the backwoods settlements, in strong contrast to the vigorous and manly people around them.

By far the largest number of the new-comers were of the true, hardy backwoods stock, fitted to grapple with the wilderness and to hew out of a prosperous commonwealth. The leading settlers began, by thrift and industry, to acquire what in the backwoods passed for wealth. Their horses, cattle and hogs throve and multiplied. The stumps were grubbed out of the clearings, and different kinds of grains and roots were planted. Wings were added to the houses, and sometimes they were roofed with shingles. The little town of Jonesboro, the first that was not a mere stockaded fort, was laid off midway between the Watauga and the Nolichucky.

As soon as the region grew at all well settled, clergymen began to come in. Here, as elsewhere, most of the frontiersmen who had any religion at all professed the faith of the Scotch-Irish; and the first regular church in this cradle-spot of Tennessee was a Presbyterian log meeting-house built near Jonesboro in 1777, and christened Salem Church. Its pastor was a pioneer preacher, who worked with fiery and successful energy to spread learning and religion among the early settlers of the Southwest. His name was Samuel Doak. He came from New Jersey, and had been educated in Princeton. Possessed of the vigorous energy that marks the true pioneer spirit, he determined to cast in his lot with the frontier folk. He walked through Maryland and Virginia, driving before him an old “flea-bitten grey” horse, loaded with a sackful of books; crossed the Alleghanies, and came down along blazed trails to the Holston settlements. The hardy people among whom he took up his abode were able to appreciate his learning and religion as much as they admired his adventurous and indomitable temper; and the stern, hard, God-fearing man became a most powerful influence for good throughout the whole formative period of the Southwest.[5]

Not only did he found a church, but near it he built a log high-school, which soon became Washington College, the first institution of the kind west of the Alleghanies. Other churches, and many other schools, were soon built. Any young man or woman who could read, write, and chipher felt competent to teach an ordinary school; higher education, as elsewhere at this time in the West, was in the hands of the clergy.

As elsewhere, the settlers were predominantly of Calvinistic stock; for of all the then prominent faiths Calvinism was nearest to their feelings and ways of thought. Of the great recognized creeds it was the most republican in its tendencies, and so the best suited to the backwoodsmen. They disliked Anglicanism as much as they abhorred and despised Romanism—theoretically at least, for practically then as now frontiersmen were liberal to one another’s religions opinions, and the stanch friend and good hunter might follow whatever creed he wished, provided he did not intrude it on others. But backwoods Calvinism differed widely from the creed as first taught. It was professed by thoroughgoing Americans, essentially free and liberty-loving, who would not for a moment have tolerated a theocracy in their midst. Their social, religious, and political systems were such as naturally flourished in a country remarkable for its temper of rough and self-asserting equality. Nevertheless the old Calvinistic spirit left a peculiar stamp on this wild border democracy. More than anything else, it gave the backwoodsmen their code of right and wrong. Though they were a hard, narrow, dogged people, yet they intensely believed in their own standards and ideals. Often warped and twisted, mentally and morally, by the strain of their existence, they at least always retained the fundamental virtues of hardihood and manliness.

Presbyterianism was not, however, destined even here to remain the leading frontier creed. Other sects still more democratic, still more in keeping with backwoods life and thought, largely supplanted it. Methodism did not become a power until after the close of the Revolution; but the Baptists followed close on the heels of the Presbyterians. They, too, soon built log meeting-houses here and there, while their preachers cleared the forest and hunted elk and buffalo like the other pioneer settlers.[6]

To all the churches the preacher and congregation alike went armed, the latter leaning their rifles in their pews or near their seats, while the pastor let his stand beside the pulpit. On week-days the clergymen usually worked in the fields in company with the rest of the settlers; all with their rifles close at hand and a guard stationed. In more than one instance when such a party was attacked by Indians the servant of the Lord showed himself as skilled in the use of carnal weapons as were any of his warlike parishioners.

The leaders of the frontiersmen were drawn from among several families, which, having taken firm root, were growing into the position of backwoods gentry. Of course the use of this term does not imply any sharp social distinctions in backwoods life, for there were none such. The poorest and richest met on terms of perfect equality, slept in one another’s houses and dined at one another’s tables. But certain families, by dint of their thrift, the ability they showed in civil affairs, or the prowess of some of their members in time of war, had risen to acknowledged headship.

The part of Washington County northwest of the Holston was cut off and made into the county of Sullivan by the North Carolina Legislature in 1779. In this part the Shelbys were the leading family; and Isaac Shelby was made county lieutenant. It had been the debatable ground between Virginia and North Carolina, the inhabitants not knowing to which province they belonged, and sometimes serving the two governments alternately. When the line was finally drawn, old Evan Shelby’s estate was found to lie on both sides of it; and as he derived his title from Virginia, he continued to consider himself a Virginian, and held office as such.[7] In Washington County Sevier was treated as practically commander of the militia some time before he received his commission as county lieutenant. He was rapidly becoming the leader of the whole district. He lived in a great, rambling one-story log house on the Nolichucky, a rude, irregular building with broad verandas and great stone fire-places. The rooms were in two groups, which were connected by a covered porch—a “dog alley,” as old settlers still call it, because the dogs are apt to sleep there at night. Here he kept open house to all comers, for he was lavishly hospitable, and every one was welcome to bed and board, to apple-jack and cider, hominy and cornbread, beef, venison, bear meat, and wild fowl. When there was a wedding or a merry-making of any kind he feasted the neighborhood, barbecuing oxen—that is, roasting them whole on great spits—and spreading board tables out under the trees. He was ever on the alert to lead his mounted riflemen against the small parties of marauding Indians that came into the country. He soon became the best commander against Indians that there was on this part of the border, moving with a rapidity that enabled him again and again to overtake and scatter their roving parties, recovering the plunder and captives, and now and then taking a scalp or two himself. His skill and daring, together with his unfailing courtesy, ready tact, and hospitality, gained him unbounded influence with the frontiersmen, among whom he was universally known as “Nolichucky Jack.”[8]

The Virginian settlements on the Holston, adjoining those of North Carolina, were in 1777 likewise made into a county of Washington. The people were exactly the same in character as those across the line; and for some years the fates of all these districts were bound up together. Their inhabitants were still of the usual backwoods type, living by tilling their clearings and hunting; the elk and buffalo had become very scarce, but there were plenty of deer and bear, and in winter countless wild swans settled down on the small lakes and ponds. The boys followed these eagerly; one of them, when an old man, used to relate how his mother gave him a pint of cream for every swan he shot, with the result that he got the pint almost every day.[9]

The leading family among these Holston Virginians was that of the Campbells, who lived near Abingdon. They were frontier farmers, who chopped down the forest and tilled the soil with their own hands. They used the axe and guided the plow as skilfully as they handled their rifles; they were also mighty hunters, and accustomed from boyhood to Indian warfare. The children received the best schooling the back country could afford, for they were a book-loving race, fond of reading and study as well as of out-door sports. The two chief members were cousins, Arthur and William. Arthur was captured by the Northern Indians when sixteen, and was kept a prisoner among them several years; when Lord Dunmore’s war broke out he made his escape, and acted as scout to the earl’s army. He served as militia colonel in different Indian campaigns, and was for thirty years a magistrate of the county; he was a man of fine presence, but of jealous, ambitious, overbearing temper. He combined with his fondness for Indian and hunter life a strong taste for books, and gradually collected a large library. So keen were the jealousies, bred of ambition, between himself and his cousin William Campbell, they being the two ranking officers of the local forces, that they finally agreed to go alternately on the different military expeditions; and thus it happened that Arthur missed the battle of King’s Mountain, though he was at the time County Lieutenant.

William Campbell stood next in rank. He was a man of giant strength, standing six feet two inches in height, and straight as a spear-shaft, with fair complexion, red hair, and piercing, light blue eyes. A firm friend and stanch patriot, a tender and loving husband and father, gentle and courteous in ordinary intercourse with his fellows, he was nevertheless, if angered, subject to fits of raging wrath that impelled him to any deed of violence.[10] He was a true type of the Roundheads of the frontier, the earnest, eager men who pushed the border ever further westward across the Continent. He followed Indians and tories with relentless and undying hatred; for the long list of backwoods virtues did not include pity for either public or private foes. The tories threatened his life and the lives of his friends and families; they were hand in glove with the outlaws who infested the borders, the murderers, horse-thieves, and passers of counterfeit money. He hunted them down with a furious zest, and did his work with merciless thoroughness, firm in the belief that he thus best served the Lord and the nation. One or two of his deeds illustrate admirably the grimness of the times, and the harsh contrast between the kindly relations of the border folks with their friends, and their ferocity toward their foes. They show how the better backwoodsmen, the upright church-going men, who loved their families, did justice to their neighbors, and sincerely tried to serve God, not only waged an unceasing war on the red and white foes of the State and of order, but carried it on with a certain ruthlessness that indicated less a disbelief in, than an utter lack of knowledge of, such a virtue as leniency to enemies.

One Sunday Campbell was returning from church with his wife and some friends, carrying his baby on a pillow in front of his saddle, for they were all mounted. Suddenly a horseman crossed the road close in front of them, and was recognized by one of the party as a noted tory. Upon being challenged, he rode off at full speed. Instantly Campbell handed the baby to a negro slave, struck spur into his horse, and galloping after the fugitive, overtook and captured him. The other men of the party came up a minute later. Several recognized the prisoner as a well-known tory; he was riding a stolen horse; he had on him letters to the British agents among the Cherokees, arranging for an Indian rising. The party of returning church-goers were accustomed to the quick and summary justice of lynch law. With stern gravity they organized themselves into a court. The prisoner was adjudged guilty, and was given but a short shrift; for the horsemen hanged him to a sycamore tree before they returned to the road where they had left their families.

On another occasion, while Campbell was in command of a camp of militia, at the time of a Cherokee outbreak, he wrote a letter to his wife, a sister of Patrick Henry, that gives us a glimpse of the way in which he looked at Indians. His letter began, “My dearest Betsy”; in it he spoke of his joy at receiving her “sweet and affectionate letter”; he told how he had finally got the needles and pins she wished, and how pleased a friend had been with the apples she had sent him. He urged her to buy a saddle-horse, of which she had spoken, but to be careful that it did not start or stumble, which were bad faults, “especially in a woman’s hackney.” In terms of endearment that showed he had not sunk the lover in the husband, he spoke of his delight at being again in the house where he had for the first time seen her loved face, “from which happy moment he dated the hour of all his bliss,” and besought her not to trouble herself too much about him, quoting to her Solomon’s account of a good wife, as reminding him always of her; and he ended by commending her to the peculiar care of Heaven. It was a letter that it was an honor to a true man to have written; such a letter as the best of women and wives might be proud to have received. Yet in the middle of it he promised to bring a strange trophy to show his tender and God-fearing spouse. He was speaking of the Indians; how they had murdered men, women, and children near-by, and how they had been beaten back; and he added: “I have now the scalp of one who was killed eight or nine miles from my house about three weeks ago. The first time I go up I shall take it along to let you see it.” Evidently it was as natural for him to bring home to his wife and children the scalp of a slain Indian as the skin of a slain deer.[11]

The times were hard, and they called for men of flinty fibre. Those of softer, gentler mold would have failed in the midst of such surroundings. The iron men of the border had a harsh and terrible task allotted them; and though they did it roughly, they did it thoroughly and on the whole well. They may have failed to learn that it is good to be merciful, but at least they knew that it is still better to be just and strong and brave; to see clearly one’s rights, and to guard them with a ready hand.

These frontier leaders were generally very jealous of one another. The ordinary backwoodsmen vied together as hunters, axemen, or wrestlers; as they rose to leadership their rivalries grew likewise, and the more ambitious, who desired to become the civil and military chiefs of the community, were sure to find their interests clash. Thus old Evan Shelby distrusted Sevier; Arthur Campbell was jealous of both Sevier and Isaac Shelby; and the two latter bore similar feelings to William Campbell. When a great crisis occurred all these petty envies were sunk; the nobler natures of the men came uppermost; and they joined with unselfish courage, heart and hand, to defend their country in the hour of her extreme need. But when the danger was over the old jealousies cropped out again.

Some one or other of the leaders was almost always employed against the Indians. The Cherokees and Creeks were never absolutely quiet and at peace. After the chastisement inflicted upon the former by the united forces of all the Southern backwoodsmen, treaties were held with them,[12] in the spring and summer of 1777. The negotiations consumed much time, the delegates from both sides meeting again and again to complete the preliminaries. The credit of the State being low, Isaac Shelby furnished on his own responsibility the goods and provisions needed by the Virginians and Holston people in coming to an agreement with the Otari, or upper Cherokees[13]; and some land was formally ceded to the whites.

But the chief Dragging Canoe would not make peace. Gathering the boldest and most turbulent of the young braves about him, he withdrew to the great whirl in the Tennessee[14] at the crossing-place of the Creek war parties, when they followed the trail that led to the bend of the Cumberland River. Here he was joined by many Creeks, and also by adventurous and unruly members from almost all the Western tribes[15]—Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Indians from the Ohio. He soon had a great band of red outlaws round him. These freebooters were generally known as the Chickamaugas, and they were the most dangerous and least controllable of all the foes who menaced the Western settlements. Many tories and white refugees from border justice joined them, and shared in their misdeeds. Their shifting villages stretched from Chickamauga Creek to Running Water. Between these places the Tennessee twists down through the sombre gorges by which the chains of the Cumberland ranges are riven in sunder. Some miles below Chickamauga Creek, near Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain towers aloft into the clouds; at its base the river bends round Moccasin Point, and then rushes through a gap between Walden’s Ridge and the Raccoon Hills. Then for several miles it foams through the winding Narrows between jutting cliffs and sheer rock walls, while in its bowlder-strewn bed the swift torrent is churned into whirlpools, cataracts, and rapids. Near the Great Crossing, where the war parties and hunting parties were ferried over the river, lies Nick-a-jack Cave, a vast cavern in the mountain side. Out of it flows a stream, up which a canoe can paddle two or three miles into the heart of the mountain. In these high fastnesses, inaccessible ravines, and gloomy caverns the Chickamaugas built their towns, and to them they retired with their prisoners and booty after every raid on the settlements.

No sooner had the preliminary treaty been agreed to in the spring of ’77 than the Indians again began their ravages. In fact, there never was any real peace. After each treaty the settlers would usually press forward into the Indian lands, and if they failed to do this the young braves were sure themselves to give offence by making forays against the whites. On this occasion the first truce or treaty was promptly broken by the red men. The young warriors refused to be bound by the promises of the chiefs and headmen, and they continued their raids for scalps, horses, and plunder. Within a week of the departure of the Indian delegates from the treaty ground in April, twelve whites were murdered and many horses stolen. Robertson, with nine men, followed one of these marauding parties, killed one Indian, and retook ten horses; on his return he was attacked by a large band of Creeks and Cherokees, and two of his men were wounded; but he kept hold of the recaptured horses and brought them safely in.[16] On the other hand, a white scoundrel killed an Indian on the treaty ground, in July, the month in which the treaties were finally completed in due form. By act of the Legislature the Holston militia were kept under arms throughout most of the year, companies of rangers, under Sevier’s command, scouring the woods and canebrakes, and causing such loss to the small Indian war parties that they finally almost ceased their forays. Bands of these Holston rangers likewise crossed the mountains by Boone’s trail, and went to the relief of Boonesborough and St. Asaphs, in Kentucky, then much harassed by the Northwestern warriors,[17] Though they did little or no fighting, and stayed but a few days, they yet by their presence brought welcome relief to the hard-pressed Kentuckians.[18] Kentucky during her earliest and most trying years received comparatively little help from sorely beset Virginia; but the backwoodsmen of the upper Tennessee valley—on both sides of the boundary—did her real and lasting service.

In 1778 the militia were disbanded, as the settlements were very little harried; but as soon as the vigilance of the whites was relaxed the depredations and massacres began again, and soon became worse than ever. Robertson had been made superintendent of Indian affairs for North Carolina; and he had taken up his abode among the Cherokees at the town of Chota in the latter half of the year 1777. He succeeded in keeping them comparatively quiet and peaceable during 1778, and until his departure, which took place the following year, when he went to found the settlements on the Cumberland River.

But the Chickamaugas refused to make peace, and in their frequent and harassing forays they were from time to time joined by parties of young braves from all the Cherokee towns that were beyond the reach of Robertson’s influence—that is, by all save those in the neighborhood of Chota. The Chickasaws and Choctaws likewise gave active support to the king’s cause; the former scouted along the Ohio, the latter sent bands of young warriors to aid the Creeks and Cherokees in their raids against the settlements.[19]

The British agents among the Southern Indians had received the letters Hamilton sent them after he took Vincennes; in these they were urged at once to send out parties against the frontier, and to make ready for a grand stroke in the spring. In response the chief agent, who was the Scotch captain Cameron, a noted royalist leader, wrote to his official superior that the instant he heard of any movement of the Northwestern Indians he would see that it was backed up, for the Creeks were eager for war, and the Cherokees likewise were ardently attached to the British cause; as a proof of the devotion of the latter, he added: “They keep continually killing and scalping in Virginia, North Carolina, and the frontier of Georgia, although the rebels are daily threatening to send in armies from all quarters and extirpate the whole tribe.”[20] It would certainly be impossible to desire better proof than that thus furnished by this royal officer, both of the ferocity of the British policy toward the frontiersmen, and of the treachery of the Indians, who so richly deserved the fate that afterward befell them.

While waiting for the signal from Hamilton, Cameron organized two Indian expeditions against the frontier, to aid the movements of the British army that had already conquered Georgia. A great body of Creeks, accompanied by the British commissaries and most of the white traders (who were, of course, tories), set out in March to join the king’s forces at Savannah; but when they reached the frontier they scattered out to plunder and ravage. A body of Americans fell on one of their parties and crushed it; whereupon the rest returned home in a fright, save about seventy, who went on and joined the British. At the same time three hundred Chickamaugas, likewise led by the resident British commissaries, started out against the Carolina frontier. But Robertson, at Chota, received news of the march, and promptly sent warning to the Holston settlements[21]; and the Holston men, both of Virginia and North Carolina, decided immediately to send an expedition against the homes of the war party. This would not only at once recall them from the frontier, but would give them a salutary lesson.

Accordingly the backwoods levies gathered on Clinch River, at the mouth of Big Creek, April 10th, and embarked in pirogues and canoes to descend the Tennessee. There were several hundred of them[22] under the command of Evan Shelby; Isaac Shelby having collected the supplies for the expedition by his individual activity and on his personal credit. The backwoodsmen went down the river so swiftly that they took the Chickamaugas completely by surprise, and the few warriors who were left in the villages fled to the wooded mountains without offering any resistance. Several Indians were killed[23] and a number of their towns were burnt, together with a great deal of corn; many horses and cattle were recaptured, and among the spoils were large piles of deer hides, owned by a tory trader. The troops then destroyed their canoes and returned home on foot killing game for their food; and they spread among the settlements many stories of the beauty of the lands through which they had passed, so that the pioneers became eager to possess them. The Chickamaugas were alarmed and confounded by this sudden stroke; their great war band returned at once to the burned towns, on being informed by swift runners of the destruction that had befallen them. All thoughts of an immediate expedition against the frontier were given up; peace talks were sent to Evan Shelby[24]; and throughout the summer the settlements were but little molested.

Yet all the while they were planning further attacks; at the same time that they sent peace talks to Shelby they sent war talks to the Northwestern Indians, inviting them to join in a great combined movement against the Americans.[25] When the news of Hamilton’s capture was brought it wrought a momentary discouragement; but the efforts of the British agents were unceasing, and by the end of the year most of the Southwestern Indians were again ready to take up the hatchet. The rapid successes of the royal armies in the Southern States had turned the Creeks into open antagonists of the Americans, and their war parties were sent out in quick succession, the British agents keeping alive the alliance by a continued series of gifts—for the Creeks were a venal, fickle race whose friendship could not otherwise be permanently kept.[26]

As for the Cherokees, they had not confined themselves to sending the war belt to the Northwestern tribes, while professing friendship for the Americans; they had continued in close communication with the British Indian agents, assuring them that their peace negotiations were only shams, intended to blind the settlers, and that they would be soon ready to take up the hatchet.[27] This time Cameron himself marched into the Cherokee country with his company of fifty tories, brutal outlaws, accustomed to savage warfare, and ready to take part in the worst Indian outrages.[28]. The ensuing Cherokee war was due not to the misdeeds of the settlers—though doubtless a few lawless whites occasionally did wrong to their red neighbors—but to the short-sighted treachery and ferocity of the savages themselves, and especially to the machinations of the tories and British agents. The latter unceasingly incited the Indians to ravage the frontier with torch and scalping knife. They deliberately made the deeds of the torturers and woman-killers their own, and this they did with the approbation of the British Government, and to its merited and lasting shame.

Yet by the end of 1779 the inrush of settlers to the Holston regions had been so great that, as with Kentucky, there was never any real danger after this year that the whites would be driven from the land by the red tribes whose hunting-ground it once had been.

[1] The petition, drawn up in the summer of ’76, was signed by 112 men. It is given in full by Ramsey, p. 138. See also Phelan, p. 40.

[2] Haywood, p. 58. As Haywood’s narrative is based largely on what the pioneers in their old age told him, his dates, and especially his accounts of the numbers and losses of the Indians in their battles, are often very inaccurate. In this very chapter he gives, with gross inaccuracy of detail, an account of one of Sevier’s campaigns as taking place in 1779, whereas it really occurred after his return from King’s Mountain. There is therefore need to be cautious in using them.

[3] However this was not actually done until some years later.

[4] Smythe’s Tours, I, 103, describes the up-country crackers of North Carolina and Virginia.

[5] See “East Tennessee a Hundred Years Ago,” by the Hon. John Allison, Nashville, 1887, p. 8.

[6] Ramsey, 144.

[7] Campbell MSS. Notes by Gov. David Campbell.

[8] MSS. “Notes of Conversations with Old Pioneers,” by Ramsey, in Tenn. Hist. Soc. Campbell MSS.

[9] “Sketch of Mrs. Elizabeth Russell,” by her grandson, Thomas L. Preston, Nashville, 1888, p. 29. An interesting pamphlet.

[10] Campbell MSS. Notes, by Gov. David Campbell.

[11] See Preston’s pamphlet on Mrs. Russell, pp. 11-18.

[12] See ante, Chapter III of “In the Current of the Revolution.”

[13] Shelby’s MS. autobiography, copy in Col. Durrett’s library.

[14] Va. State Papers, III, 271; the settlers always spoke of it as the “suck” or “whirl.”

[15] Shelby MS.

[16] Chas. Robertson to Captain-General of North Carolina, April 27, 1777.

[17] See ante, Chap. V, “In the Current of the Revolution.”

[18] Monette (followed by Ramsey and others) hopelessly confuses these small relief expeditions; he portrays Logan as a messenger from Boone’s Station, is in error as to the siege of the latter, etc.

[19] Haldimand MSS. Letter of Rainsford and Tait to Hamilton, April 9, 1779.

[20] Haldimand MSS. Series B, Vol. 117, p. 131. Letter of Alexander Cameron, July 15, 1779.

[21] Do. “A rebel commissioner in Chote being informed of their movments here sent express into Holston River.” This “rebel commissioner” was in all probability Robertson.

[22] State Department MSS. No. 51, Vol. II, p. 17, a letter from the British agents among the Creeks to Lord George Germaine, of July 12, 1779. It says “near 300 rebels”; Hay wood, whose accounts are derived from oral tradition, says one thousand. Cameron’s letter of July 15th in the Haldimand MSS. says seven hundred. Some of them were Virginians who had been designed for Clark’s assistance in his Illinois campaign, but who were not sent him. Shelby made a very clever stroke, but it had no permanent effect, and it is nonsense to couple it, as has been recently done, with Clark’s campaigns.

[23] Cameron in his letter says four, which is probably near the truth. Haywood says forty, which merely represents the backwoods tradition on the subject, and is doubtless a great exaggeration.

[24] State Department MSS. No. 71, Vol. I, p. 255, letter of Evan Shelby, June 4, 1779.

[25] Haldimand MSS. Series B, Vol. 117, p. 157. A talk from the Cherokees to the envoy from the Wabash and other Indians, July 12, 1779. One paragraph is interesting: “We can not forget the talk you brought us some years ago into this Nation, which was to take up the hatchet against the Virginians. We heard and listened to it with great attention, and before the time that was appointed to lift it we took it up and struck the Virginians. Our Nation was alone and surrounded by them. They were numerous and their hatchets were sharp; and after we had lost some of our best warriors, we were forced to leave our towns and corn to be burnt by them, and now we live in the grass as you see us. But we are not yet conquered, and to convince you that we have not thrown away your talk here are 4 strands of wham pums we received from you when you came before as a messenger to our Nation.”

[26] State Department MSS. Papers Continental Congress. Intercepted Letters, No. 51, Vol. II. Letter of British Agents Messrs. Rainsford, Mitchell, and Macullagh, of July 12, 1779. “The present unanimity of the Creek Nation is no doubt greatly owing to the rapid successes of His Majesty’s forces in the Southern provinces, as they have now no cause to apprehend the least danger from the Rebels … we have found by experience that without presents the Indians are not to be depended on.”

[27] Do., No. 71, Vol. II, p. 189. Letter of David Tait to Oconostota. “I believe what you say about telling lies to the Virginians to be very right.”

[28] Do., No. 51, Vol. II. Letter of the three agents. “The Cherokees are now exceedingly well disposed. Mr. Cameron is now among them… . Captain Cameron has his company of Loyal Refugees with him, who are well qualified for the service they are engaged in… . He carried up with him a considerable quantity of presents and ammunition which are absolutely necessary to engage the Indians to go upon service.”

CHAPTER V

KING’S MOUNTAIN, 1780

DURING THE Revolutionary War the men of the West for the most part took no share in the actual campaigning against the British and Hessians. Their duty was to conquer and hold the wooded wilderness that stretched westward to the Mississippi; and to lay therein the foundations of many future commonwealths. Yet at a crisis in the great struggle for liberty, at one of the darkest hours for the patriot cause, it was given to a band of Western men to come to the relief of their brethren of the seaboard and to strike a telling and decisive blow for all America. When the three Southern provinces lay crushed and helpless at the feet of Cornwallis, the Holston backwoodsmen suddenly gathered to assail the triumphant conqueror. Crossing the mountains that divided them from the beaten and despairing people of the tidewater region, they killed the ablest lieutenant of the British commander, and at a single stroke undid all that he had done.

By the end of 1779 the British had reconquered Georgia. In May, 1780, they captured Charleston, speedily reduced all South Carolina to submission, and then marched into the old North State. Cornwallis, much the ablest of the British generals, was in command over a mixed force of British, Hessian, and loyal American regulars, aided by Irish volunteers and bodies of refugees from Florida. In addition, the friends to the king’s cause, who were very numerous in the southernmost States, rose at once on the news of the British successes, and thronged to the royal standards; so that a number of regiments of tory militia were soon embodied. McGillivray, the Creek chief, sent bands of his warriors to assist the British and tories on the frontier, and the Cherokees likewise came to their help. The patriots for the moment abandoned hope, and bowed before their victorious foes.

Cornwallis himself led the main army northward against the American forces. Meanwhile he intrusted to two of his most redoubtable officers the task of scouring the country, raising the loyalists, scattering the patriot troops that were still embodied, and finally crushing out all remaining opposition. These two men were Tarleton the dashing cavalryman, and Ferguson the rifleman, the skilled partisan leader.

Patrick Ferguson, the son of Lord Pitfour, was a Scotch soldier, at this time about thirty-six years old, who had been twenty years in the British army. He had served with distinction against the French in Germany, had quelled a Carib uprising in the West Indies, and in 1777 was given the command of a company of riflemen in the army opposed to Washington.[1] He played a good part at Brandywine and Monmouth. At the former battle he was wounded by an American sharpshooter, and had an opportunity, of which he forbore taking advantage, to himself shoot an American officer of high rank, who unsuspectingly approached the place where he lay hid; he always insisted that the man he thus spared was no less a person than Washington. While suffering from his wound, Sir William Howe disbanded his rifle corps, distributing it among the light companies of the different regiments; and its commander in consequence became an unattached volunteer in the army. But he was too able to be allowed to remain long unemployed. When the British moved to New York he was given the command of several small independent expeditions, and was successful in each case; once, in particular, he surprised and routed Pulaski’s legion, committing great havoc with the bayonet, which was always with him a favorite weapon. His energy and valor attracted much attention; and when a British army was sent against Charleston and the South he went along, as a lieutenant-colonel of a recently raised regular regiment, known as the American Volunteers.[2]

Cornwallis speedily found him to be peculiarly fitted for just such service as was needed; for he possessed rare personal qualities. He was of middle height and slender build, with a quiet, serious face and a singularly winning manner; and withal, he was of literally dauntless courage, of hopeful, eager temper, and remarkably fertile in shifts and expedients. He was particularly fond of night attacks, surprises, and swift, sudden movements generally, and was unwearied in drilling and disciplining his men. Not only was he an able leader, but he was also a finished horseman, and the best marksman with both pistol and rifle in the British army. Being of quick, inventive mind, he constructed a breech-loading rifle, which he used in battle with deadly effect. This invention had been one of the chief causes of his being brought into prominence in the war against America, for the British officers especially dreaded the American sharpshooters.[3] It would be difficult to imagine a better partisan leader, or one more fitted by his feats of prowess and individual skill, to impress the minds of his followers. Moreover, his courtesy stood him in good stead with the people of the country; he was always kind and civil, and would spend hours in talking affairs over with them and pointing out the mischief of rebelling against their lawful sovereign. He soon became a potent force in winning the doubtful to the British side, and exerted a great influence over the tories; they gathered eagerly to his standard, and he drilled them with patient perseverance.

After the taking of Charleston Ferguson’s volunteers and Tarleton’s legion acting separately or together speedily destroyed the different bodies of patriot soldiers. Their activity and energy was such that the opposing commanders seemed for the time being quite unable to cope with them, and the American detachments were routed and scattered in quick succession.[4] On one of these occasions, the surprise at Monk’s Corners, where the American commander, Huger, was slain, Ferguson’s troops again had a chance to show their skill in the use of the bayonet.

Tarleton did his work with brutal ruthlessness; his men plundered and ravaged, maltreated prisoners, outraged women, and hanged without mercy all who were suspected of turning from the loyalist to the whig side. His victories were almost always followed by massacres; in particular, when he routed with small loss a certain Captain Buford, his soldiers refused to grant quarter, and mercilessly butchered the beaten Americans.[5]

Ferguson, on the contrary, while quite as valiant and successful a commander, showed a generous heart, and treated the inhabitants of the country fairly well. He was especially incensed at any outrage upon women, punishing the offender with the utmost severity, and as far as possible he spared his conquered foes. Yet even Ferguson’s tender mercies must have seemed cruel to the whigs, as may be judged by the following extract from a diary kept by one of his lieutenants[6]: “This day Col. Ferguson got the rear guard in order to do his King and country justice, by protecting friends and widows, and destroying rebel property; also to collect live stock for the use of the army. All of which we effect as we go by destroying furniture, breaking windows, etc., taking all their horned cattle, horses, mules, sheep, etc., and their negroes to drive them.” When such were the authorized proceedings of troops under even the most merciful of the British commanders, it is easy to guess what deeds were done by uncontrolled bodies of stragglers bent on plunder.

When Ferguson moved into the back country of the two Carolinas still worse outrages followed. In the three southernmost of the thirteen rebellious colonies there was a very large tory party.[7] In consequence the struggle in the Carolinas and Georgia took the form of a ferocious civil war. Each side in turn followed up its successes by a series of hangings and confiscations, while the lawless and violent characters fairly reveled in the confusion. Neither side can be held guiltless of many and grave misdeeds; but for reasons already given the bulk—but by no means the whole—of the criminal and disorderly classes espoused the king’s cause in the regions where the struggle was fiercest. They murdered, robbed, or drove off the whigs in their hour of triumph; and in turn brought down ferocious reprisals on their own heads and on those of their luckless associates.

Moreover, Cornwallis and his under-officers tried to cow and overawe the inhabitants by executing some of the men whom they deemed the chief and most criminal leaders of the rebellion, especially such as had sworn allegiance and then again taken up arms [8]; of course retaliation in kind followed. Ferguson himself hanged some men; and though he did his best to spare the country people, there was much plundering and murdering by his militia.

In June he marched to upper South Carolina, moving to and fro, calling out the loyal militia. They responded enthusiastically, and three or four thousand tories were embodied in different bands. Those who came to Ferguson’s own standard were divided into companies and regiments, and taught the rudiments of discipline by himself and his subalterns. He soon had a large but fluctuating force under him, in part composed of good men, loyal adherents of the king (these being very frequently recent arrivals from England, or else Scotch high-landers), in part also of cut-throats, horse-thieves, and desperadoes of all kinds who wished for revenge on the whigs and were eager to plunder them. His own regular force was also mainly composed of Americans, although it contained many Englishmen. His chief subordinates were Lieutenant-Colonels De Peyster [9] and Cruger; the former usually serving under him, the latter commanding at Ninety-Six. They were both New York loyalists, members of old Knickerbocker families; for in New York many of the gentry and merchants stood by the king.

Ferguson moved rapidly from place to place, breaking up the bodies of armed whigs; and the latter now and then skirmished fiercely with similar bands of tories, sometimes one side winning, sometimes the other. Having reduced South Carolina to submission the British commander then threatened North Carolina; and Col. McDowell, the commander of the whig militia in that district, sent across the mountains to the Holston men praying that they would come to his help. Though suffering continually from Indian ravages, and momentarily expecting a formidable inroad, they responded nobly to the call. Sevier remained to patrol the border and watch the Cherokees, while Isaac Shelby crossed the mountains with a couple of hundred mounted riflemen, early in July. The mountain men were joined by McDowell, with whom they found also a handful of Georgians and some South Carolinans; who when their States were subdued had fled northward, resolute to fight their oppressors to the last.

The arrival of the mountain men put new life into the dispirited whigs. On July 30th a mixed force, under Shelby and two or three local militia colonels, captured Thickett’s fort, with ninety tories, near the Pacolet. They then camped at the Cherokee ford of Broad River, and sent out parties of mounted men to carry on a guerilla or partisan warfare against detachments, not choosing to face Ferguson’s main body. After a while they moved south to Cedar Spring. Here, on the 8th of August, they were set upon by Ferguson’s advanced guard, of dragoons and mounted riflemen. These they repulsed, handling the British rather roughly; but, as Ferguson himself came up, they fled, and though he pursued them vigorously he could not overtake them.[10]

On the 18th of the month the mountain men, assisted as usual by some parties of local militia, all under their various colonels, performed another feat; one of those swift, sudden strokes so dear to the hearts of these rifle-bearing horsemen. It was of a kind peculiarly suited to their powers; for they were brave and hardy, able to thread their way unerringly through the forests, and fond of surprises; and though they always fought on foot, they moved on horseback, and therefore with great celerity. Their operations should be carefully studied by all who wish to learn the possibilities of mounted riflemen. Yet they were impatient of discipline or of regular service, and they really had no one commander. The different militia officers combined to perform some definite piece of work, but, like their troops, they were incapable of long-continued campaigns; and there were frequent and bitter quarrels between the several commanders, as well as between the bodies of men they led.

It seems certain that the mountaineers were, as a rule, more formidable fighters than the lowland militia, beside or against whom they battled; and they formed the main strength of the attacking party that left the camp at the Cherokee ford before sunset on the 17th. Ferguson’s army was encamped southwest of them, at Fair Forest Shoals; they marched round him, and went straight on, leaving him in their rear. Sometimes they rode through open forest, more often they followed the dim wood roads; their horses pacing or cantering steadily through the night. As the day dawned they reached Musgrove’s Ford, on the Enoree, having gone forty miles. Here they hoped to find a detachment of tory militia; but it had been joined by a body of provincial regulars, the united force being probably somewhat more numerous than that of the Americans. The latter were discovered by a patrol, and the British after a short delay marched out to attack them. The Americans in the meantime made good use of their axes, felling trees for a breastwork, and when assailed they beat back and finally completely routed their assailants.[11]

I have used the word “British”; but though there were some Englishmen and Scotchmen among the tories and provincials, they were mainly loyalist Americans.

However, the victory was of little effect, for just as it was won word was brought to Shelby that the day before Cornwallis had met Gates at Camden, and had not only defeated but practically destroyed the American army; and on the very day of the fight on the Enoree, Tarleton surprised Sumter, and scattered his forces to the four winds. The panic among the whigs was tremendous, and the mountaineers shared it. They knew that Ferguson, angered at the loss of his detachment, would soon be in hot pursuit, and there was no time for delay. The local militia made off in various directions; while Shelby and his men pushed straight for the mountains, crossed them, and returned each man to his own home. Ferguson speedily stamped out the few remaining sparks of rebellion in South Carolina, and crossing the boundary into the North State he there repeated the process. On September 12th he caught McDowell and the only remaining body of militia at Cane Creek, of the Catawba, and beat them thoroughly,[12] the survivors, including their commander, fleeing over the mountains to take refuge with the Holston men. Except for an occasional small guerilla party there was not a single organized body of American troops left south of Gates’s broken and dispirited army.

All the Southern lands lay at the feet of the conquerors. The British leaders, overbearing and arrogant, held almost unchecked sway throughout the Carolinas and Georgia; and looking northward they made ready for the conquest of Virginia.[13] Their right flank was covered by the waters of the ocean, their left by the high mountain barrier-chains, beyond which stretched the interminable forest; and they had as little thought of danger from one side as from the other.

Suddenly and without warning, the wilderness sent forth a swarm of stalwart and hardy riflemen, of whose very existence the British had hitherto been ignorant.[14] Riders spurring in hot haste brought word to the king’s commanders that the backwater men had come over the mountains. The Indian fighters of the frontier, leaving unguarded their homes on the western waters, had crossed by wooded and precipitous defiles, and were pouring down to the help of their brethren of the plains.

Ferguson had pushed his victories to the foot of the Smoky and the Yellow mountains. Here he learned, perhaps for the first time, that there were a few small settlements beyond the high ranges he saw in his front; and he heard that some of these backwoods mountaineers had already borne arms against him, and were now harboring men who had fled from before his advance. By a prisoner whom he had taken he at once sent them warning to cease their hostilities, and threatened that if they did not desist he would march across the mountains, hang their leaders, put their fighting men to the sword, and waste their settlements with fire. He had been joined by refugee tories from the Watauga, who could have piloted him thither; and perhaps he intended to make his threats good. It seems more likely that he paid little heed to the mountaineers, scorning their power to do him hurt; though he did not regard them with the haughty and ignorant disdain usually felt for such irregulars by the British army officers.

When the Holston men learned that Ferguson had come to the other side of the mountains, and threatened their chiefs with the halter and their homes with the torch, a flame of passionate anger was kindled in all their hearts. They did not wait for his attack; they sallied from their strongholds to meet him. Their crops were garnered, their young men were ready for the march; and though the Otari war bands lowered like thunderclouds on their southern border, they determined to leave only enough men to keep the savages at bay for the moment, and with the rest to overwhelm Ferguson before he could retreat out of their reach. Hitherto the war with the British had been something afar off; now it had come to their thresholds and their spirits rose to the danger.

Shelby was the first to hear the news. He at once rode down to Sevier’s home on the Nolichucky; for they were the two county lieutenants,[15] who had control of all the militia of the district. At Sevier’s log-house there was feasting and merry-making, for he had given a barbecue, and a great horse race was to be run, while the backwoods champions tried their skill as marksmen and wrestlers. In the midst of the merry-making Shelby appeared, hot with hard riding, to tell of the British advance, and to urge that the time was ripe for fighting, not feasting. Sevier at once entered heartily into his friend’s plan, and agreed to raise his rifle-rangers, and gather the broken and disorganized refugees who had fled across the mountains under McDowell. While this was being done Shelby returned to his home to call out his own militia and to summon the Holston Virginians to his aid. With the latter purpose he sent one of his brothers to Arthur Campbell, the county lieutenant of his neighbors across the border. Arthur at once proceeded to urge the adoption of the plan on his cousin, William Campbell, who had just returned from a short and successful campaign against the tories round the head of the Kanawha, where he had speedily quelled an attempted uprising.

Gates had already sent William Campbell an earnest request to march down with his troops and join the main army. This he could not do, as his militia had only been called out to put down their own internal foes, and their time of service had expired.[16] But the continued advance of the British at last thoroughly alarmed the Virginians of the mountain region. They promptly set about raising a corps of riflemen,[17] and as soon as this course of action was determined on Campbell was foremost in embodying all the Holston men who could be spared, intending to march westward and join any Virginia army that might be raised to oppose Cornwallis. While thus employed he received Shelby’s request, and, for answer, at first sent word that he could not change his plans; but on receiving a second and more urgent message he agreed to come as desired.[18]

The appointed meeting-place was at the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga. There the riflemen gathered on the 25th of September, Campbell bringing four hundred men, Sevier and Shelby two hundred and forty each, while the refugees under McDowell amounted to about one hundred and sixty. With Shelby came his two brothers, one of whom was afterward slightly wounded at King’s Mountain; while Sevier had in his regiment no less than six relations of his own name, his two sons being privates, and his two brothers captains. One of the latter was mortally wounded in the battle.

To raise money for provisions Sevier and Shelby were obliged to take, on their individual guaranties, the funds in the entry-taker’s offices that had been received from the sale of lands. They amounted in all to nearly thirteen thousand dollars, every dollar of which they afterward refunded.

On the 26th[19] they began the march, over a thousand strong, most of them mounted on swift, wiry-horses. They were led by leaders they trusted, they were wonted to Indian warfare, they were skilled as horsemen and marksmen, they knew how to face every kind of danger, hardship, and privation. Their fringed and tasseled hunting-shirts were girded in by bead-worked belts, and the trappings of their horses were stained red and yellow. On their heads they wore caps of coon-skin or mink-skin, with the tails hanging down, or else felt hats, in each of which was thrust a buck-tail or a sprig of evergreen. Every man carried a small-bore rifle, a tomahawk, and a scalping-knife. A very few of the officers had swords, and there was not a bayonet or a tent in the army.[20] Before leaving their camping-ground at the Sycamore Shoals they gathered in an open grove to hear a stern old Presbyterian preacher[21] invoke on the enterprise the blessing of Jehovah. Leaning on their long rifles, they stood in rings round the black-frocked minister, a grim and wild congregation, who listened in silence to his words of burning zeal as he called on them to stand stoutly in the battle and to smite their foes with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.

The army marched along Doe River, driving their beef cattle with them, and camped that night at the “Resting-Place,” under Shelving Rock, beyond Crab Orchard. Next morning they started late, and went up the pass between Roan and Yellow mountains. The table-land on the top was deep in snow.[22] Here two tories who were in Sevier’s band deserted and fled to warn Ferguson; and the troops, on learning of the desertion, abandoned their purpose of following the direct route, and turned to the left, taking a more northerly trail. It was of so difficult a character that Shelby afterward described it as “the worst route ever followed by an army of horsemen.”[23] That afternoon they partly descended the east side of the range, camping in Elk Hollow, near Roaring Run. The following day they went down through the ravines and across the spurs by a stony and precipitous path, in the midst of magnificent scenery, and camped at the mouth of Grassy Creek. On the 29th they crossed the Blue Ridge at Gillespie’s Gap, and saw afar off, in the mountain coves and rich valleys of the upper Catawba, the advanced settlements of the Carolina pioneers,—for hitherto they had gone through an uninhabited waste. The mountaineers, fresh from their bleak and rugged hills, gazed with delight on the soft and fertile beauty of the landscape. That night they camped on the North Fork of the Catawba, and next day they went down the river to Quaker Meadows, McDowell’s home.

At this point they were joined by three hundred and fifty North Carolina militia from the counties of Wilkes and Surrey, who were creeping along through the woods hoping to fall in with some party going to harass the enemy.[24] They were under Col. Benjamin Cleavland, a mighty hunter and Indian fighter, and an adventurous wanderer in the wilderness. He was an uneducated backwoodsman, famous for his great size, and his skill with the rifle, no less than for the curious mixture of courage, rough good-humor, and brutality in his character. He bore a ferocious hatred to the royalists, and in the course of the vindictive civil war carried on between the whigs and tories in North Carolina he suffered much. In return he persecuted his public and private foes with ruthless ferocity, hanging and mutilating any tories against whom the neighboring whigs chose to bear evidence. As the fortunes of the war veered about he himself received many injuries. His goods were destroyed, and his friends and relations were killed or had their ears cropped off. Such deeds often repeated roused to a fury of revenge his fierce and passionate nature, to which every principle of self-control was foreign. He had no hope of redress, save in his own strength and courage, and on every favorable opportunity he hastened to take more than ample vengeance. Admitting all the wrongs he suffered, it still remains true that many of his acts of brutality were past excuse. His wife was a worthy helpmeet. Once, in his absence, a tory horse-thief was brought to their home, and after some discussion the captors, Cleavland’s sons, turned to their mother, who was placidly going on with her ordinary domestic avocations, to know what they should do with the prisoner. Taking from her mouth the corn-cob pipe she had been smoking, she coolly sentenced him to be hanged, and hanged he was without further delay or scruple.[25] Yet Cleavland was a good friend and neighbor, devoted to his country, and also a stanch Presbyterian.[26]

The tories were already on the alert. Some of them had been harassing Cleavland, and they had ambushed his advance guard, and shot his brother, crippling him for life. But they did not dare try to arrest the progress of so formidable a body of men as had been gathered together at Quaker Meadows; and contented themselves with sending repeated warnings to Ferguson.

On October 1st the combined forces marched past Pilot Mountain, and camped near the heads of Cane and Silver creeks. Hitherto each colonel had commanded his own men, there being no general head, and every morning and evening the colonels had met in concert to decide the day’s movements. The whole expedition was one of volunteers, the agreement between the officers and the obedience rendered them by the soldiers simply depending on their own free-will; there was no legal authority on which to go, for the commanders had called out the militia without any instructions from the executives of their several States.[27] Disorders had naturally broken out. The men of the different companies felt some rivalry toward one another; and those of bad character, sure to be found in any such gathering, could not be properly controlled. Some of Cleavland’s and McDowell’s people were very unruly; and a few of the Watauga troops also behaved badly, plundering both whigs and tories, and even starting to drive the stolen stock back across the mountains.[28]

At so important a crisis the good sense and sincere patriotism of the men in command made them sink all personal and local rivalries. On the 2d of October they all gathered to see what could be done to stop the disorders and give the army a single head; for it was thought that in a day or two they would close in with Ferguson. They were in Col. Charles McDowell’s district, and he was the senior officer; but the others distrusted his activity and judgment, and were not willing that he should command. To solve the difficulty Shelby proposed that supreme command should be given to Col. Campbell, who had brought the largest body of men with him, and who was a Virginian, whereas the other four colonels were North Carolinians.[29] Meanwhile McDowell should go to Gates’ army to get a general to command them, leaving his men under the charge of his brother Joseph, who was a major. This proposition was at once agreed to; and its adoption did much to ensure the subsequent success. Shelby not only acted wisely, but magnanimously; for he was himself of superior rank to Campbell, and moreover was a proud, ambitious man, desirous of military glory.

The army had been joined by two or three squads of partisans, including some refugee Georgians. They were about to receive a larger reinforcement; for at this time several small guerilla bands of North and South Carolina whigs were encamped at Flint Hill, some distance west of the encampment of the mountain men. These Flint Hill bands numbered about four hundred men all told, under the leadership of various militia colonels—Hill, Lacey, Williams, Graham, and Hambright.[30] Hill and Lacey were two of Sumter’s lieutenants, and had under them some of his men; Williams,[31] who was also a South Carolinian, claimed command of them because he had just been commissioned a brigadier-general of militia. His own force was very small, and he did not wish to attack Ferguson, but to march southward to Ninety-Six. Sumter’s men, who were more numerous, were eager to join the mountaineers, and entirely refused to submit to Williams. A hot quarrel, almost resulting in a fight, ensued; Hill and Lacey accusing Williams of being bent merely on plundering the wealthy tories and of desiring to avoid a battle with the British. Their imputation on his courage was certainly unjust; but they were probably quite right when they accused him of a desire to rob and plunder the tories. A succession of such quarrels speedily turned this assemblage of militia into an armed and warlike rabble. Fortunately Hill and Lacey prevailed, word was sent to the mountaineers, and the Flint Hill bands marched in loose order to join them at the Cowpens.[32]

The mountain army had again begun its march on the afternoon of the third day of the month. Before starting the colonels summoned their men, told them the nature and danger of the service, and asked such as were unwilling to go further to step to the rear; but not a man did so. Then Shelby made them a short speech, well adapted to such a levy. He told them when they encountered the enemy not to wait for the word of command, but each to “be his own officer,” and do all he could, sheltering himself as far as possible, and not to throw away a chance; if they came on the British in the woods they were “to give them Indian play,” and advance from tree to tree, pressing the enemy unceasingly. He ended by promising them that their officers would shrink from no danger, but would lead them everywhere, and, in their turn, they must be on the alert and obey orders.

When they set out their uncertainty as to Ferguson’s movements caused them to go slowly, their scouts sometimes skirmishing with lurking tories. They reached the mouth of Cane Creek, near Gilbert Town, on October 4th. With the partisans that had joined them they then numbered fifteen hundred men. McDowell left them at this point to go to Gates with the request for the appointment of a general to command them.[33] For some days the men had been living on the ears of green corn which they plucked from the fields, but at this camping-place they slaughtered some beeves and made a feast.

The mountaineers had hoped to catch Ferguson at Gilbert Town, but they found that he had fled toward the northeast, so they followed after him. Many of their horses were crippled and exhausted, and many of the footmen footsore and weary; and the next day they were able to go but a dozen miles to the ford of Green River.

That evening Campbell and his fellow-officers held a council to decide what course was best to follow. Lacey, riding over from the militia companies who were marching from Flint Hill, had just reached their camp; he told them the direction in which Ferguson had fled, and at the same time appointed the Cowpens as the meeting-place for their respective forces. Their whole army was so jaded that the leaders knew they could not possibly urge it on fast enough to overtake Ferguson, and the flight of the latter made them feel all the more confident that they could beat him, and extremely reluctant that he should get away. In consequence they determined to take seven or eight hundred of the least tired, best armed, and best mounted men, and push rapidly after their foe, picking up on the way any militia they met, and leaving the other half of their army to follow as fast as it could.

At daybreak on the morning of the sixth the picked men set out, about seven hundred and fifty in number.[34] In the afternoon they passed by several large bands of tories, who had assembled to join Ferguson; but the Holston men were resolute in their determination to strike at the latter, and would not be diverted from it, nor waste time by following their lesser enemies.

Riding all day they reached the Cowpens when the sun had already set, a few minutes after the arrival of the Flint Hill militia under Lacey, Hill, and Williams. The tired troops were speedily engaged in skinning beeves for their supper, roasting them by the blazing camp-fires; and fifty acres of corn, belonging to the rich tory who owned the Cowpens, materially helped the meal. Meanwhile a council was held, in which all the leading officers, save Williams, took part. Campbell was confirmed as commander-in-chief, and it was decided to once more choose the freshest soldiers, and fall on Ferguson before he could either retreat or be reinforced. The officers went round, picking out the best men, the best rifles, and the best horses. Shortly after nine o’clock the choice had been made, and nine hundred and ten[35] picked riflemen, well mounted, rode out of the circle of flickering firelight, and began their night journey. A few determined footmen followed, going almost as fast as the horse, and actually reached the battlefield in season to do their share of the fighting.

All this time Ferguson had not been idle. He first heard of the advance of the backwoodsmen on September 30th, from the two tories who had deserted Sevier on Yellow Mountain. He had furloughed many of his loyalists, as all formidable resistance seemed at an end; and he now sent out messengers in every direction to recall them to his standard. Meanwhile he fell slowly back from the foot-hills, so that he might not have to face the mountaineers until he had time to gather his own troops. He instantly wrote for reinforcements to Cruger, at Ninety-Six. Cruger had just returned from routing the Georgian Colonel Clark, who was besieging Augusta. In the chase a number of Americans were captured, and thirteen were hanged. The British and tories interpreted the already sufficiently severe instructions of their commander-in-chief with the utmost liberality, even the officers chronicling the hanging with exultant pleasure, as pointing out the true way by which to end the war.[36]

Cruger, in his answer to Ferguson, explained that he did not have the number of militia regiments with which he was credited; and he did not seem to quite take in the gravity of the situation,[37] expressing his pleasure at hearing how strongly the loyalists of North Carolina had rallied to Ferguson’s support, and speaking of the hope he had felt that the North Carolina tories would by themselves have proved “equal to the mountain lads.” However, he promptly set about forwarding the reinforcements that were demanded; but before they could reach the scene of action the fate of the campaign had been decided.

Ferguson had not waited for outside help. He threw himself into the work of rallying the people of the plains, who were largely loyalists,[38] against the over-mountain men, appealing not only to their royalist sentiments, but to their strong local prejudices, and to the dread many of them felt for the wild border fighters. On the 1st of October he sent out a proclamation, of which copies were scattered broadcast among the loyalists. It was instinct with the fiery energy of the writer, and well suited to goad into action the rough tories, and the doubtful men, to whom it was addressed. He told them that the Back Water men had crossed the mountains, with chieftains at their head who would surely grant mercy to none who had been loyal to the king. He called on them to grasp their arms on the moment and run to his standard, if they desired to live and bear the name of men; to rally without delay, unless they wished to be eaten up by the incoming horde of cruel barbarians, to be themselves robbed and murdered, and to see their daughters and wives abused by the dregs of mankind. In ending, he told them scornfully that if they chose to be spat[39] upon and degraded forever by a set of mongrels, to say so at once, that their women might turn their backs on them and look out for real men to protect them

Hoping to be joined by Cruger’s regiments, as well as by his own furloughed men, and the neighboring tories, he gradually drew off from the mountains, doubling and turning, so as to hide his route and puzzle his pursuers. Exaggerated reports of the increase in the number of his foes were brought to him, and, as he saw how slowly they marched, he sent repeated messages to Cornwallis, asking for reinforcements; promising speedily to “finish the business,” if three or four hundred soldiers, part dragoons, were given him, for the Americans were certainly making their “last push in this quarter.” [40] He was not willing to leave the many loyal inhabitants of the district to the vengeance of the whigs[41]; and his hopes of reinforcements were well founded. Every day furloughed men rejoined him, and bands of loyalists came into camp; and he was in momentary expectation of help from Cornwallis or Cruger. It will be remembered that the mountaineers on their last march passed several tory bands. One of these alone, near the Cowpens, was said to have contained six hundred men; and in a day or two they would all have joined Ferguson. If the whigs had come on in a body, as there was every reason to expect, Ferguson would have been given the one thing he needed—time; and he would certainly have been too strong for his opponents. His defeat was due to the sudden push of the mountain chieftains; to their long, swift ride from the ford of Green River, at the head of their picked horse-riflemen.

The British were still in the dark as to the exact neighborhood from which their foes—the “swarm of backwoodsmen,” as Tarleton called them[42]—really came. It was generally supposed that they were in part from Kentucky, and that Boone himself was among the number.[43] However, Ferguson probably cared very little who they were; and keeping, as he supposed, a safe distance away from them, he halted at King’s Mountain in South Carolina on the evening of October 6th, pitching his camp on a steep, narrow hill just south of the North Carolina boundary. The King’s Mountain range itself is about sixteen miles in length, extending in a southwesterly course from one State into the other. The stony, half isolated ridge on which Ferguson camped was some six or seven hundred yards long and half as broad from base to base, or two-thirds that distance on top. The steep sides were clad with a growth of open woods, including both saplings and big timber. Ferguson packed his baggage wagons along the northeastern part of the mountain. The next day he did not move; he was as near to the army of Cornwallis at Charlotte as to the mountaineers, and he thought it safe to remain where he was. He deemed the position one of great strength, as indeed it would have been, if assailed in the ordinary European fashion; and he was confident that even if the rebels attacked him, he could readily beat them back. But as General Lee, “Light-Horse Harry,” afterward remarked, the hill was much easier assaulted with the rifle than defended with the bayonet.

The backwoodsmen, on leaving the camp at the Cowpens, marched slowly through the night, which was dark and drizzly; many of the men got scattered in the woods, but joined their commands in the morning—the morning of October 7th. The troops bore down to the southward, a little out of the straight route, to avoid any patrol parties; and at sunrise they splashed across the Cherokee Ford.[44] Throughout the forenoon the rain continued but the troops pushed steadily onward without halting,[45] wrapping their blankets and the skirts of their hunting-shirts round their gun-locks, to keep them dry. Some horses gave out, but their riders, like the thirty or forty footmen who had followed from the Cowpens, struggled onward and were in time for the battle. When near King’s Mountain they captured two tories, and from them learned Ferguson’s exact position; that “he was on a ridge between two branches”[46] where some deer hunters had camped the previous fall. These deer hunters were now with the oncoming backwoodsmen, and declared that they knew the ground well. Without halting, Campbell and the other colonels rode forward together, and agreed to surround the hill, so that their men might fire upward without risk of hurting one another. It was a bold plan; for they knew their foes probably outnumbered them; but they were very confident of their own prowess, and were anxious to strike a crippling blow. From one or two other captured tories, and from a stanch whig friend, they learned the exact disposition of the British and loyalist force, and were told that their noted leader wore a light party-colored hunting-shirt; and he was forthwith doomed to be a special target for the backwoods rifles. When within a mile of the hill a halt was called, and after a hasty council of the different colonels—in which Williams did not take part,—the final arrangements were made and the men, who had been marching in loose order, were formed in line of battle. They then rode forward in absolute silence, and when close to the west slope of the battle-hill, beyond King’s Creek, drew rein and dismounted. They tied their horses to trees, and fastened their great coats and blankets to the saddles, for the rain had cleared away. A few of the officers remained mounted. The countersign of the day was “Buford,” the name of the colonel whose troops Tarleton had defeated and butchered. The final order was for each man to look carefully at the priming of his rifle, and then to go into battle and fight till he died.

The foes were now face to face. On the one side were the American backwoodsmen, under their own leaders, armed in their own manner, and fighting after their own fashion, for the freedom and the future of America; on the opposite side were other Americans—the loyalists, led by British officers, armed and trained in the British fashion, and fighting on behalf of the empire of Britain and the majesty of the monarchy. The Americans numbered, all told, about nine hundred and fifty men.[47] The British forces were composed in bulk of the Carolina loyalists—troops similar to the Americans who joined the mountaineers at Quaker Meadows and the Cowpens;[48] the difference being that besides these lowland militia, there were arrayed on one side the men from the Holston, Watauga, and Nolichucky, and on the other the loyalist regulars. Ferguson had, all told, between nine hundred and a thousand troops, a hundred and twenty or thirty of them being the regulars or “American Volunteers,” the remainder tory militia.[49] The forces were very nearly equal in number. What difference there was, was probably in favor of the British and tories. There was not a bayonet in the American army, whereas Ferguson trusted much to this weapon. All his volunteers and regulars were expert in its use, and with his usual ingenuity he had trained several of his loyalist companies in a similar manner, improvising bayonets out of their hunting-knives. The loyalists whom he had had with him for some time were well drilled. The North Carolina regiment was weaker on this point, as it was composed of recruits who had joined him but recently.[50]

The Americans were discovered by their foes when only a quarter of a mile away. They had formed their forces as they marched. The right centre was composed of Campbell’s troops; the left centre of Shelby’s. These two bodies separated slightly so as to come up opposite sides of the narrow southwestern spur of the mountain. The right wing was led by Sevier, with his own and McDowell’s troops. On the extreme right Major Winston, splitting off from the main body a few minutes before, had led a portion of Cleavland’s men by a roundabout route to take the mountain in the rear, and cut off all retreat. He and his followers “rode like fox-hunters,” as was afterward reported by one of their number who was accustomed to following the buck and the gray fox with horn and hound. They did not dismount until they reached the foot of the mountain, galloping at full speed through the rock-strewn woods; and they struck exactly the right place, closing up the only gap by which the enemy could have retreated. The left wing was led by Cleavland. It contained not only the bulk of his own Wilkes and Surrey men, but also the North and South Carolinians who had joined the army at the Cowpens under the command of Williams, Lacey, Hambright, Chronicle, and others.[51] The different leaders cheered on their troops by a few last words as they went into the fight; being especially careful to warn them how to deal with the British bayonet charges. Campbell had visited each separate band, again requesting every man who felt like flinching not to go into the battle. He bade them hold on to every inch of ground as long as possible, and when forced back to rally and return at once to the fight. Cleavland gave much the same advice; telling his men that when once engaged they were not to wait for the word of command, but to do as he did, for he would show them by his example how to fight, and they must then act as their own officers. The men were to fire quickly, and stand their ground as long as possible, if necessary sheltering themselves behind trees. If they could do no better they were to retreat, but not to run quite off; but to return and renew the struggle, for they might have better luck at the next attempt.[52]

So rapid were the movements of the Americans, and so unexpected the attack, that a loyalist officer, who had been out reconnoitring, had just brought word to the British commander that there was no sign of danger, when the first shots were heard; and by the time the officer had paraded and posted his men, the assault had begun, his horse had been killed, and he himself wounded.[53]

When Ferguson learned that his foes were on him, he sprang on his horse, his drums beat to arms, and he instantly made ready for the fight. Though surprised by the unexpected approach of the Americans, he exerted himself with such energy that his troops were in battle array when the attack began. The outcrops of slaty rock on the hillsides made ledges which, together with the bowlders strewn on top, served as breastworks for the less disciplined tories; while he in person led his regulars and such of the loyalist companies as were furnished with the hunting-knife bayonets. He hoped to be able to repulse his enemies by himself taking the offensive, with a succession of bayonet charges; a form of attack in which his experience with Pulaski and Huger had given him great confidence.

At three o’clock in the afternoon the firing began, as the Americans drove in the British pickets. The brunt of the battle fell on the American centre, composed of Campbell’s and Shelby’s men, who sustained the whole fight for nearly ten minutes[54] until the two wings had had time to get into place and surround the enemy. Campbell began the assault, riding on horseback along the line of his riflemen. He ordered them to raise the Indian war-whoop, which they did with a will, and made the woods ring.[55] They then rushed upward and began to fire, each on his own account; while their war cries echoed along the hillside. Ferguson’s men on the summit responded with heavy volley firing, and then charged, cheering lustily. The mountain was covered with smoke and flame, and seemed to thunder.[56] Ferguson’s troops advanced steadily, their officers riding at their head, with their swords flashing; and the mountaineers, who had no bayonets, could not withstand the shock. They fled down the hillside, and being sinewy, nimble men, swift of foot, they were not overtaken, save a few of sullen temper, who would not retreat and were bayoneted. One of their officers, a tall backwoodsman, six feet in height, was cut down by Lieutenant Allaire, a New York loyalist, as the latter rode at the head of his platoon. No sooner had the British charge spent itself than Campbell, who was riding midway between the enemy and his own men, called out to the latter in a voice of thunder to rally and return to the fight, and in a minute or two they were all climbing the hill again, going from tree to tree, and shooting at the soldiers on the summit. Campbell’s horse, exhausted by the breakneck galloping hither and thither over the slope, gave out; he then led the men on foot, his voice hoarse with shouting, his face blackened with powder; for he was always in the front of the battle and nearest the enemy.

No sooner had Ferguson returned from his charge on Campbell than he found Shelby’s men swarming up to the attack on the other side. Shelby himself was at their head. He had refused to let his people return the dropping fire of the tory skirmishers until they were close up. Ferguson promptly charged his new foes and drove them down the hillside; but the instant he stopped, Shelby, who had been in the thick of the fight, closest to the British, brought his marksmen back, and they came up nearer than ever, and with a deadlier fire.[57] While Ferguson’s bayonet-men—both regulars and militia—charged to and fro, the rest of the loyalists kept up a heavy fire from behind the rocks on the hilltop. The battle raged in every part, for the Americans had by this time surrounded their foes, and they advanced rapidly under cover of the woods. They inflicted much more damage than they suffered, for they were scattered out while the royalist troops were close together, and, moreover, were continually taken in flank. Ferguson, conspicuous from his hunting-shirt,[58] rode hither and thither with reckless bravery, his sword in his left hand—for he had never entirely regained the use of his wounded right—while he made his presence known by the shrill, ear-piercing notes of a silver whistle which he always carried. Whenever the British and tories charged with the bayonet, under Ferguson, De Peyster, or some of their lieutenants, the mountaineers were forced back down the hill; but the instant the red lines halted and returned to the summit, the stubborn riflemen followed close behind, and from every tree and bowlder continued their irregular and destructive fire. The peculiar feature of the battle was the success with which, after every retreat, Campbell, Shelby, Sevier, and Cleavland rallied their followers on the instant; the great point was to prevent the men from becoming panic-stricken when forced to flee. The pealing volleys of musketry at short intervals drowned the incessant clatter of the less noisy but more deadly backwoods rifles. The wild whoops of the mountain men, the cheering of the loyalists, the shouts of the officers, and the cries of the wounded mingled with the reports of the firearms, and shrill above the din rose the calling of the silver whistle. Wherever its notes were heard the wavering British line came on, and the Americans were forced back. Ferguson dashed from point to point, to repel the attacks of his foes, which were made with ever-increasing fury. Two horses were killed under him;[59] but he continued to lead the charging parties; slashing and hewing with his sword until it was broken off at the hilt. At last, as he rode full speed against a part of Sevier’s men, who had almost gained the hill crest, he became a fair mark for the vengeful backwoods riflemen. Several of them fired together and he fell suddenly from his horse, pierced by half a dozen bullets almost at the same instant. The gallant British leader was dead, while his foot yet hung in the stirrup.[60]

The silver whistle was now silent, but the disheartened loyalists were rallied by De Peyster, who bravely continued the fight.[61] It is said that he himself led one of the charges which were at this time made on Cleavland’s line; the “South Fork” men from the Catawba, under Hambright and Chronicle being forced back, Chronicle being killed and Hambright wounded. When the Americans fled they were scarcely a gun’s length ahead of their foes; and the instant the latter faced about, the former were rallied by their officers, and again went up the hill. One of the backwoodsmen was in the act of cocking his rifle when a loyalist, dashing at him with the bayonet, pinned his hand to his thigh; the rifle went off, the ball going through the loyalist’s body, and the two men fell together. Hambright, though wounded, was able to sit in the saddle, and continued in the battle. Cleavland had his horse shot under him, and then led his men on foot. As the lines came close together, many of the whigs recognized in the tory ranks their former neighbors, friends, or relatives; and the men taunted and jeered one another with bitter hatred. In more than one instance brother was slain by brother or cousin by cousin. The lowland tories felt an especial dread of the mountaineers; looking with awe and hatred on their tall, gaunt, rawboned figures, their long, matted hair and wild faces. One wounded tory, as he lay watching them, noticed their deadly accuracy of aim, and saw also that the loyalists, firing from the summit, continually overshot their foes.

The British regulars had lost half their number; the remainder had been scattered and exhausted in their successive charges. The bayonet companies of the loyalist militia were in the same plight; and the North Carolina tories, the least disciplined, could no longer he held to their work. Sevier’s men gained the summit at the same time with Campbell’s and part of Shelby’s. The three colonels were heading their troops; and as Sevier saw Shelby, he swore, by God, the British had burned off part of his hair; for it was singed on one side of his head. When the Holston and Watauga men gained the crest the loyalists broke and fled to the east end of the mountain, among the tents and baggage wagons, where they again formed. But they were huddled together, while their foes surrounded them on every hand. The fighting had lasted an hour; all hope was gone; and De Peyster hoisted a white flag. In the confusion the firing continued in parts of the lines on both sides. Some of the backwoodsmen did not know what a white flag meant; others disregarded it, savagely calling out, “Give them Buford’s play,” in allusion to Tarleton’s having refused quarter to Buford’s troops.[62] Others of the men as they came up began shooting before they learned what had happened; and some tories who had been out foraging returned at this moment, and also opened fire. A number of the loyalists escaped in the turmoil, putting badges in their hats like those worn by certain of the American militia, and thus passing in safety through the whig lines.[63] It was at this time, after the white flag had been displayed, that Colonel Williams was shot, as he charged a few of the tories who were still firing. The flag was hoisted again, and white handkerchiefs were also waved, from guns and ramrods. Shelby, spurring up to part of their line, ordered the tories to lay down their arms, which they did.[64] Campbell, at the same moment, running among his men with his sword pointed to the ground, called on them for God’s sake to cease firing; and turning to the prisoners he bade the officers rank by themselves, and the men to take off their hats and sit down. He then ordered De Peyster to dismount; which the latter did, and handed his sword to Campbell.[65] The various British officers likewise surrendered their swords, to different Americans; many of the militia commanders who had hitherto only possessed a tomahawk or scalping-knife thus for the first time getting possession of one of the coveted weapons.

Almost the entire British and tory force was killed or captured; the only men who escaped were the few who got through the American lines by adopting the whig badges. About three hundred of the loyalists were killed or disabled; the slightly wounded do not seem to have been counted.[66] The colonel-commandant was among the slain; of the four militia colonels present, two were killed, one wounded,[67] and the other captured—a sufficient proof of the obstinacy of the resistance. The American loss in killed and wounded amounted to less than half, perhaps only a third, that of their foes.[68] Campbell’s command suffered more than any other, the loss among the officers being especially great: for it bore the chief part in withstanding the successive bayonet charges of the regulars, and the officers had been forced to expose themselves with the utmost freedom, in order to rally their men when beaten back.[69]

RETURN OF KILLED AND WOUNDED

It will be seen that these returns are imperfect. They do not include Shelby’s loss; yet his regiment was alongside of Campbell’s, did its full share of the work, and probably sufered as much as Sevier’s, for instance. But it is certain that in the hurry not all the killed and wounded were enumerated (compare Draper, pp. 302-304). Hayes’, Thomas’, and “Brannon’s” (Brandon’s) commands were some of those joining at the Cowpens. Winston’s loss is doubtless included under Cleavland’s. It will be seen that Williams’ troops could have taken very little part in the action.

The mountain-men had done a most notable deed. They had shown in perfection the best qualities of horse-riflemen. Their hardihood and perseverance had enabled them to bear up well under fatigue, exposure, and scanty food. Their long, swift ride, and the suddenness of the attack, took their foes completely by surprise. Then, leaving their horses, they had shown in the actual battle such courage, marksmanship, and skill in woodland fighting, that they had not only defeated but captured an equal number of well-armed, well-led, resolute men, in a strong position. The victory was of far-reaching importance, and ranks among the decisive battles of the Revolution. It was the first great success of the Americans in the south, the turning-point in the Southern campaign, and it brought cheer to the patriots throughout the Union. The loyalists of the Carolinas were utterly cast down, and never recovered from the blow; and its immediate effect was to cause Cornwallis to retreat from North Carolina, abandoning his first invasion of that State.[70]

The expedition offered a striking example of the individual initiative so characteristic of the backwoodsmen. It was not ordered by any one authority; it was not even sanctioned by the central or State governments. Shelby and Sevier were the two prime movers in getting it up; Campbell exercised the chief command; and the various other leaders, with their men, simply joined the mountaineers, as they happened to hear of them and come across their path. The ties of discipline were of the slightest. The commanders elected their own chief without regard to rank or seniority; in fact, the officer[71] who was by rank entitled to the place was hardly given any share in the conduct of the campaign. The authority of the commandant over the other officers, and of the various colonels over their troops, resembled rather the control exercised by Indian chiefs over their warriors than the discipline obtaining in a regular army. But the men were splendid individual fighters, who liked and trusted their leaders; and the latter were bold, resolute, energetic, and intelligent.

Cornwallis feared that the mountain men would push on and attack his flank; but there was no such danger. By themselves they were as little likely to assail him in force in the open as Andreas Hofer’s Tyrolese—with whom they had many points in common—were to threaten Napoleon on the Danubian plains. Had they been Continental troops, the British would have had to deal with a permanent army. But they were only militia[72] after all, however formidable from their patriotic purpose and personal prowess. The backwoods armies were not unlike the armies of the Scotch Highlanders; tumultuous gatherings of hardy and warlike men, greatly to be dreaded under certain circumstances, but incapable of a long campaign, and almost as much demoralized by a victory as by a defeat. Individually or in small groups they were perhaps even more formidable than the Highlanders; but in one important respect they were inferior, for they totally lacked the regimental organization which the clan system gave the Scotch Celts.

The mountaineers had come out to do a certain thing—to kill Ferguson and scatter his troops. They had done it, and now they wished to go home. The little log-huts in which their families lived were in daily danger of Indian attack; and it was absolutely necessary that they should be on hand to protect them. They were, for the most part, very poor men, whose sole sources of livelihood were the stock they kept beyond the mountains. They loved their country greatly, and had shown the sincerity of their patriotism by the spontaneous way in which they risked their lives on this expedition. They had no hope of reward; for they neither expected nor received any pay, except in liquidated certificates, worth two cents on the dollar. Shelby’s share of these, for his services as colonel throughout ’80 and ’81, was sold by him for “six yards of middling broadcloth”;[73] so it can be readily imagined how little each private got for the King’s Mountain expedition.[74]

The day after the battle the Americans fell back toward the mountains, fearing lest, while cumbered by prisoners and wounded, they should be struck by Tarleton or perhaps Cruger. The prisoners were marched along on foot, each carrying one or two muskets, for twelve hundred stand of arms had been captured. The Americans had little to eat, and were very tired; but the plight of the prisoners was pitiable. Hungry, footsore, and heartbroken, they were hurried along by the fierce and boastful victors, who gloried in the vengeance they had taken, and recked little of such a virtue as magnanimity to the fallen. The only surgeon in either force was Ferguson’s. He did what he could for the wounded; but that was little enough, for, of course, there were no medical stores whatever. The Americans buried their dead in graves, and carried their wounded along on horse-litters. The wounded loyalists were left on the field, to be cared for by the neighboring people. The conquerors showed neither respect nor sympathy for the leader who had so gallantly fought them.[75] His body and the bodies of his slain followers were cast into two shallow trenches, and loosely covered with stones and earth. The wolves, coming to the carnage, speedily dug up the carcasses, and grew so bold from feasting at will on the dead that they no longer feared the living. For months afterward King’s Mountain was a favorite resort for wolf hunters.

The victory once gained, the bonds of discipline over the troops were forthwith loosened; they had been lax at the best, and only the strain of the imminent battle with the British had kept them tense for the fortnight the mountaineers had been away from their homes. All the men of the different commands were bragging as to their respective merits in the battle, and the feats performed by the different commanders.[76] The general break up of authority, of course, allowed full play to the vicious and criminal characters. Even before the mountaineers came down the unfortunate Carolinas had suffered from the misdeeds of different bodies of ill-disciplined patriot troops,[77] almost as much as from the British and tories. The case was worse now. Many men deserted from the returning army for the especial purpose of plundering the people of the neighborhood, paying small heed which cause the victims had espoused; and parties continually left camp avowedly with this object. Campbell’s control was of the slightest; he was forced to entreat rather than command the troops, complaining that they left their friends in “almost a worse situation than the enemy would have done,” and expressing what was certainly a moderate “wish,” that the soldiers would commit no “unnecessary injury” on the inhabitants of the country.[78] Naturally such very mild measures produced little effect in stopping the plundering. However, Campbell spoke in stronger terms of an even worse set of outrages. The backwoodsmen had little notion of mercy to beaten enemies, and many of them treated the captured loyalists with great brutality, even on the march,[79] Colonel Cleavland himself being one of the offenders.[80] Those of their friends and relatives who had fallen into the hands of the tories, or of Cornwallis’ regulars, had fared even worse; yet this can not palliate their conduct. Campbell himself, when in a fit of gusty anger, often did things he must have regretted afterward; but he was essentially manly, and his soul revolted at the continued persecution of helpless enemies. He issued a sharp manifesto in reference to the way the prisoners were “slaughtered and disturbed,” assuring the troops that if it could not be prevented by moderate measures, he would put a stop to it by taking summary vengeance on the offenders.[81] After this the prisoners were, on the whole, well treated. When they met a couple of Continental officers, the latter were very polite, expressing their sympathy for their fate in falling into such hands; for from Washington and Greene down, the Continental troops disliked and distrusted the militia almost as much as the British regulars did the tories.

There was one dark deed of vengeance. It had come to be common for the victors on both sides to hang those whom they regarded as the chief offenders among their conquered opponents. As the different districts were alternately overrun, the unfortunate inhabitants were compelled to swear allegiance in succession to Congress and to king; and then, on whichever side they bore arms, they were branded as traitors. Moreover, the different leaders, both British and American, from Tarleton and Ferguson to Sumter and Marion, often embodied in their own ranks some of their prisoners, and these were of course regarded as deserters by their former comrades. Cornwallis, seconded by Rawdon, had set the example of ordering all men found in the rebel ranks after having sworn allegiance to the king, to be hanged; his under-officers executed the command with zeal, and the Americans, of course, retaliated. Ferguson’s troops themselves had hanged some of their prisoners.[82]

All this was fresh in the minds of the Americans who had just won so decisive a victory. They were accustomed to give full vent to the unbridled fury of their passions; they with difficulty brooked control; they brooded long over their own wrongs, which were many and real, and they were but little impressed by the misdeeds committed in return by their friends. Inflamed by hatred and the thirst for vengeance, they would probably have put to death some of their prisoners in any event; but all doubt was at an end when on their return march they were joined by an officer who had escaped from before Augusta, and who brought word that Cruger’s victorious loyalists had hanged a dozen of the captured patriots.[83] This news settled the doom of some of the tory prisoners. A week after the battle a number of them were tried. Thirty were condemned to death. Nine, including the only tory colonel who had survived the battle, were hanged; then Sevier and Shelby, men of bold, frank nature, could no longer stand the butchery, and peremptorily interfered, saving the remainder.[84] Of the men who were hanged, doubtless some were murderers and marauders, who deserved their fate; others, including the unfortunate colonel, were honorable men, executed only because they had taken arms for the cause they deemed right.

Leaving the prisoners in the hands of the lowland militia, the mountaineers returned to their secure fastnesses in the high hill-valleys of the Holston, the Watauga, and the Nolichucky. They had marched well and fought valiantly, and they had gained a great victory; all the little stockaded forts, all the rough log-cabins on the scattered clearings, were jubilant over the triumph. From that moment their three leaders were men of renown. The legislatures of their respective States thanked them publicly and voted them swords for their services. Campbell, next year, went down to join Greene’s army, did gallant work at Guilford Court-house, and then died of camp-fever. Sevier and Shelby had long lives before them.[85]

Shelby and Sevier rest their case:

1st, on their memory thirty years after the event, of some remarks of Campbell to them in private after the close of the battle, which they construed as acknowledgments of bad conduct. Against these memories of old men it is safe to set Shelby’s explicit testimony, in a letter written six days after the battle (see “Virginia Argus,” Oct. 26, 1810), to the good-conduct of the “gallant commander” (Campbell).

2d, on the fact that Campbell was seen on a black horse in the rear during the fighting; but a number of men of his regiment swore that he had given his black horse to a servant who sat in the rear, while he himself rode a bay horse in the battle. See their affidavits in the “Enquirer.”

3d, on the testimony of one of Shelby’s brothers, who said he saw him in the rear. This is the only piece of positive testimony in the case. Some of Campbell’s witnesses (as Matthew Willoughby) swore that this brother of Shelby was a man of bad character, engaged at the time in stealing cattle from both whigs and tories.

4th, on the testimony of a number of soldiers who swore they did not see Campbell in the latter part of the battle, nor until some moments after the surrender. Of course, this negative testimony is simply valueless; in such a hurly burly it would be impossible for the men in each part of the line to see all the commanders, and Campbell very likely did not reach the places where these men were until some time after the surrender. On the other hand, forty officers and soldiers of Campbell’s, Sevier’s, and Shelby’s regiments, headed by General Rutledge, swore that they had seen Campbell valiantly leading throughout the whole battle, and foremost at the surrender. This positive testimony conclusively settles the matter; it outweighs that of Shelby’s brother, the only affirmative witness on the other side. But it is a fair question as to whether Campbell or another of Shelby’s brothers received De Peyster’s sword.

[1] “Biographical Sketch or Memoir of Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Ferguson,” by Adam Ferguson, LL.D., Edinburgh, 1817, p. 11. The copy was kindly lent me by Mr. Geo. H. Moore of the Lenox Library.

[2] Though called volunteers they were simply a regular regiment raised in America instead of England; Ferguson’s “Memoir,” p. 30, etc. always speaks of them as regulars. The British gave an absurd number of titles to their various officers; thus Ferguson was a brigadier-general of militia, lieutenant-colonel of volunteers, a major in the army, etc.

[3] Ferguson’s “Memoir,” p. 11.

[4] “History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781,” Lt.-Col. Tarleton, London (1787). See also the “Strictures” thereon, by Roderick Mackenzie, London, same date.

[5] It is worth while remembering that it was not merely the tories who were guilty of gross crimes; the British regulars, including even some of their officers, often behaved with abhorrent brutality.

[6] Diary of Lt. Anthony Allaire, entry for March 24, 1780.

[7] Gates M.SS., passim, for July-October, 1780. E.g., letter of Mr. Ramsey, August 9, 1780, describes how “the Scotch are all lying out” the number of tories in the “Drowning Creek region,” their resistance to the levy of cattle, etc. In these colonies, as in the middle colonies, the tory party was very strong.

[8] Gates MSS. See Letter from Sumter, August 12th and passim, for instances of hanging by express command of the British officers.

[9] A relative of the Detroit commander.

[10] Shelby’s MS. Autobiography, and the various accounts he wrote of these affairs in his old age (which Haywood and most of the other local American historians follow or amplify), certainly greatly exaggerate the British force and loss, as well as the part Shelby himself played, compared to the Georgia and Carolina leaders. The Americans seemed to have outnumbered Ferguson’s advance guard, which was less than two hundred strong, about three to one. Shelby’s account of the Musgrove affair is especially erroneous. See p. 120 of L. C. Draper’s “King’s Mountain and Its Heroes” (Cincinnati, 1881). Mr. Draper has with infinite industry and research gathered all the published and unpublished accounts and all the traditions concerning the battle; his book is a mine of information on the subject. He is generally quite impartial, but some of his conclusions are certainly biased; and the many traditional statements, as well as those made by very old men concerning events that took place fifty or sixty years previously, must be received with extreme caution. A great many of them should never have been put in the book at all. When they take the shape of anecdotes, telling how the British are overawed by the mere appearance of the Americans on some occasion (as pp. 94, 95, etc.), they must be discarded at once as absolutely worthless, as well as ridiculous. The British and tory accounts, being forced to explain ultimate defeat, are, if possible, even more untrustworthy, when taken solely by themselves, than the American.

[11] Shelby’s account of this action, written in his old age, is completely at fault; he not only exaggerates the British force and loss, but he likewise greatly overestimates the number of the Americans—always a favorite trick of his. Each of the militia colonels of course claimed the chief share of the glory of the day, Haywood, Ramsey, and even Phelan simply follow Shelby. Draper gives all the different accounts; it is quite impossible to reconcile them; but all admit that the British were defeated.

[12] Draper apparently indorses the absurd tradition that makes this a whig victory instead of a defeat. It seems certain (see Draper), contrary to the statements of the Tennessee historians, that Sevier had no part in these preliminary operations.

[13] The northern portion of North Carolina was still in pos session of the remainder of Gates’s army, but they could have been brushed aside without an effort.

[14] “A numerous army now appeared on the frontier drawn from Nolichucky and other settlements beyond the mountains, whose very names had been unknown to us.” Lord Raw- don’s letter of October 24, 1780. Clarke of Georgia had plundered a convoy of presents intended for the Indians, at Augusta, and the British wrongly supposed this to be likewise the aim of the mountaineers.

[15] Shelby was regularly commissioned as county lieutenant. Sevier’s commission was not sent him until several weeks later; but he had long acted as such by the agreement of the settlers, who paid very little heed to the weak and disorganized North Carolina government.

[16] Gates MSS. Letter of William Campbell, Sept. 6, 1780. He evidently at the time failed to appreciate the pressing danger; but he ended by saying that “if the Indians were not harassing their frontier,” and a corps of riflemen were formed, he would do all in his power to forward them to Gates.

[17] Gates MSS. Letter of William Preston, Sept. 18, 1780. The corps was destined to join Gates, as Preston says; hence Campbell’s reluctance to go with Shelby and Sevier. There were to be from five hundred to one thousand men. See letter of Wm. Davidson, Sept. 18, 1780.

[18] Shelby’s MS. Autobiography. Campbell MSS., especially MS. letters of Col. Arthur Campbell of Sept. 3, 1810, Oct. 18, 1810, etc.; MS. notes on Sevier in Tenn. Hist. Soc. The latter consist of memoranda by his old soldiers, who were with him in the battle; many of their statements are to be received cautiously, but there seems no reason to doubt their account of his receiving the news while giving a great barbecue. Shelby is certainly entitled to the credit of plan ning and starting the campaign against Ferguson.

[19] “State of the proceedings of the Western army from Sept. 25, 1780, to the reduction of Major Ferguson and the army under his command,” signed by Campbell, Shelby, and Cleavland. The official report: it is in the Gates MSS. in the N. Y. Hist. Society. It was published complete at the time, except the tabulated statement of loss, which has never been printed; I give it further on.

[20] Gen. Wm. Lenoir’s account, prepared for Judge A. D. Murphy’s intended history of North Carolina. Lenoir was a private in the battle.

[21] Rev. Samuel Doak. Draper, 176. A tradition, but probably truthful, being based on the statements of Sevier and Shelby’s soldiers in their old age. It is the kind of an incident that tradition will often faithfully preserve.

[22] Diary of Ensign Robert Campbell.

[23] Shelby MS.

[24] Shelby MS. Autobiography. See also Gates MSS. Letter of Wm. Davidson, Sept. 14, 1780. Davidson had foreseen that there would be a fight between the Western militia and Ferguson, and he had sent word to his militia subordinates to join any force—as McDowell’s—that might go against the British leader. The alarm caused by the latter had prevented the militia from joining Davidson himself.

[25] Draper, 448.

[26] Allaire’s Diary, entry for October 29th.

[27] Gates MSS. Letter of Campbell, Shelby, Cleavland, etc., Oct. 4, 1780.

[28] Deposition of Col. Matthew Willoughby (who was in the fight), April 30, 1823, “Richmond Enquirer,” May 9, 1823.

[29] Though by birth three were Virginians, and one, Shelby, a Marylander. All were Presbyterians. McDowell, like Campbell, was of Irish descent; Cleavland of English, Shelby of Welsh, and Sevier of French Huguenot. The families of the first two had originally settled in Pennsylvania.

[30] Hambright was a Pennsylvania German, the father of eighteen children. Hill, who was suffering from a severe wound, was unfit to take an active part in the King’s Mountain fight. His MS. narrative of the campaign is largely quoted by Draper.

[31] Bancroft gives Williams an altogether undeserved prominence. As he had a commission as brigadier-general, some of the British thought he was in supreme command at King’s Mountain; in a recent magazine article Gen. De Peyster again sets forth his claims. In reality he only had a small subordinate or independent command, and had no share whatever in conducting the campaign, and very little in the actual battle, though he behaved with much courage and was killed.

[32] Gates MSS. Letter of Gen. Wm. Davidson, Oct. 3, 1780. Also Hill’s Narrative.

[33] Gates MSS. (in New York Hist. Soc.). It is possible that Campbell was not chosen chief commander until this time; Ensign Robert Campbell’s account (MSS. in Tenn. Hist. Soc.) explicitly states this to be the case. The Shelby MS. and the official report make the date the 1st or 2d. One letter in the Gates MSS. has apparently escaped all notice from historians and investigators; it is the document which McDowell bore with him to Gates. It is dated “Oct. 4th, 1780, near Gilbert town,” and is signed by Cleavland, Shelby, Sevier, Campbell, Andrew Hampton, and J. Winston. It begins: “We have collected at this place 1500 good men drawn from the counties of Surrey, Wilkes, Burk, Washington, and Sullivan counties (sic) in this State and Washington County in Virginia.” It says that they expect to be joined in a few days by Clark of Ga. and Williams of S. C. with one thousand men (in reality Clark, who had nearly six hundred troops, never met them); asks for a general; says they have great need of ammunition, and remarks on the fact of their “troops being all militia, and but little acquainted with discipline.” It was this document that gave the first impression to contemporaries that the battle was fought by fifteen hundred Americans. Thus General Davidson’s letter of Oct. 10th to Gates, giving him the news of the victory, has served as a basis for most subsequent writers about the numbers. He got his particulars from one of Sumter’s men, who was in the fight; but he evidently mixed them up in his mind, for he speaks of Williams, Lacey, and their companions as joining the others at Gilbert Town, instead of the Cowpens; makes the total number three thousand, whereas, by the official report of October 4th, Campbell’s party only numbered fifteen hundred, and Williams, Lacey, etc., had but four hundred, or nineteen hundred in all; says that sixteen hundred good horses were chosen out, evidently confusing this with the number at Gilbert Town; credits Ferguson with fourteen hundred men, and puts the American loss at only twenty killed.

[34] MS. narrative of Ensign Robert Campbell (see also Draper, 221) says seven hundred; and about fifty of the footmen who were in good training followed so quickly after them that they were able to take part in the battle. Lenoir says the number was only five or six hundred. The modern accounts generally fail to notice this Green River weeding out of the weak men, or confuse it with what took place at the Cowpens; hence many of them greatly exaggerate the number of Americans who fought in the battle.

[35] The official report says nine hundred; Shelby, in all his earlier narratives, nine hundred and ten; Hill, nine hundred and thirty-three. The last authority is important because he was one of the four hundred men who joined the mountaineers at the Cowpens, and his testimony confirms the explicit declaration of the official report that the nine hundred men who fought in the battle were chosen after the junction with Williams, Lacey, and Hill. A few late narratives, including that of Shelby in his old age, make the choice take place before the junction, and the total number then amount to thirteen hundred; evidently the choice at the Cowpens is by these authors confused with the choice at Green River. Shelby’s memory when he was old was certainly very treacherous; in similar fashion he, as has been seen, exaggerated greatly his numbers at the Enoree. On the other hand, Robert Campbell puts the number at only seven hundred, and Lenoir between six and seven hundred. Both of these thus err in the opposite direction.

[36] Draper, p. 201, quotes a printed letter from a British officer to this effect.

[37] Probably Ferguson himself failed to do so at this time.

[38] Gates MSS. Letter of Davidson, September 14th, speaks of the large number of tories in the counties where Ferguson was operating.

[39] The word actually used was still stronger.

[40] See letter quoted by Tarleton.

[41] Ferguson’s “Memoir,” p. 32.

[42] “Tarleton’s Campaigns,” p. 169.

[43] British historians to the present day repeat this. Even Lecky, in his “History of England,” speaks of the back woodsmen as in part from Kentucky. Having pointed out this trivial fault in Lecky’s work, it would be ungracious not to allude to the general justice and impartiality of its accounts of these Revolutionary campaigns—they are very much more trustworthy than Bancroft’s, for instance. Lecky scarcely gives the right color to the struggle in the South; but when Bancroft treats of it, it is not too much to say that he puts the contest between the whigs and the British and tories in a decidedly false light. Lecky fails to do justice to Washington’s military ability, however; and overrates the French assistance.

[44] “Am. Pioneer,” II, 67. An account of one of the sol diers, Benj. Sharp, written in his old age; full of contradic tions of every kind (he for instance forgets they joined Williams at the Cowpens); it can not be taken as an author ity, but supplies some interesting details.

[45] Late in life Shelby asserted that this steadiness in push ing on was due to his own influence. The other accounts do not bear him out.

[46] I. e., brooks.

[47] Nine hundred and ten horsemen (possibly nine hundred, or perhaps nine hundred and thirty-three) started out; and the footmen who kept up were certainly less than fifty in number. There is really no question as to the American numbers; yet a variety of reasons have conspired to cause them to be generally greatly overstated, even by American historians. Even Phelan gives them fifteen hundred men, following the ordinary accounts. At the time, many outsiders supposed that all the militia who were at the Cowpens fought in the battle; but this is not asserted by any one who knew the facts. General J. Watts De Peyster, in the “Mag. of Am. Hist.” for 1880.—”The Affair at King’s Mountain”—gives the extreme tory view. He puts the number of the Americans at from thirteen hundred to nineteen hundred. His account, however, is only based on Shelby’s later narratives, told thirty years after the event, and these are all that need be considered. When Shelby grew old, he greatly exaggerated the numbers on both sides in all the fights in which he had taken part. In his account of King’s Mountain, he speaks of Williams and the four hundred Flint Hill men joining the attacking body after, not before, the nine hundred and ten picked men started. But his earlier accounts, including the official report which he signed, explicitly contradict this. The question is thus purely as to the time of the junction: as to whether it was after or before this that the body of nine hundred actual fighters was picked out. Shelby’s later report contains the grossest self-contradictions. Thus it enumerates the companies which fought the battle in detail, the result running up several hundred more than the total he gives. The early and official accounts are in every way more worthy of credence; but the point is settled beyond dispute by Hill’s narrative. Hill was one of the four hundred men with Williams, and he expressly states that after the junction at the Cowpens the force, from both commands, that started out numbered nine hundred and thirty-three. The question is thus definitely settled. Most of the later accounts simply follow the statements Shelby made in his old age.

[48] There were many instances of brothers and cousins in the opposing ranks at King’s Mountain; a proof of the simi larity in the character of the forces.

[49] The American official account says that they captured the British provision returns, according to which their force amounted to eleven hundred and twenty-five men. It further reports, of the regulars nineteen killed, thirty-five wounded and left on the ground as unable to march, and seventy-eight captured; of the tories two hundred and six killed, one hundred and twenty-eight wounded and left on the ground unable to march, and six hundred and forty-eight captured. The number of tories killed must be greatly exaggerated. Allaire, in his diary, says Ferguson had only eight hundred men, but almost in the same sentence enumerates nine hundred and six, giving of the regulars nineteen killed, thirty-three wounded, and sixty-four captured (one hundred and sixteen in all, instead of one hundred and thirty-two, as in the American account), and of the tories one hundred killed, ninety wounded, and “about” six hundred captured. This does not take account of those who escaped. Prom Ramsey and De Peyster down most writers assert that every single individual on the defeated side was killed or taken; but in Colonel Chesney’s admirable “Military Biography” there is given the autobiography or memoir of a South Carolina loyalist who was in the battle. His account of the battle is meagre and unimportant, but he expressly states that at the close he and a number of others escaped through the American lines by putting sprigs of white paper in their caps, as some of the whig militia did—for the militia had no uniforms, and were dressed alike on both sides. A certain number of men who escaped must thus be added.

[50] There were undoubtedly very many horse - thieves, murderers, and rogues of every kind with Ferguson, but equally undoubtedly the bulk of his troops were loyalists from principle, and men of good standing, especially those from the seaboard. Many of the worst tory bandits did not rally to him, preferring to plunder on their own account. The American army itself was by no means free from scoundrels. Most American writers belittle the character of Ferguson’s force, and sneer at the courage of the tories, although entirely unable to adduce any proof of their statements, the evidence being the other way. Apparently they are unconscious of the fact that they thus wofully diminish the credit to be given to the victors. It may be questioned if there ever was a braver or finer body of riflemen than the nine hundred who surrounded and killed or captured a superior body of well posted, well led, and courageous men, in part also well drilled, on King’s Mountain. The whole world now recognizes how completely the patriots were in the right; but it is especially incumbent on American historians to fairly portray the acts and character of the tories, doing justice to them as well as to the whigs, and condemning them only when they deserve it. In studying the Revolutionary war in the Southern States, I have been struck by the way in which the American historians alter the facts by relying purely on partisan accounts, suppressing the innumerable whig excesses and outrages, or else palliating them. They thus really destroy the force of the many grave accusations which may be truthfully brought against the British and tories. I regret to say that Bancroft is among the offenders. Hildreth is an honorable exception. Most of the British historians of the same events are even more rancorous and less trustworthy than the American writers; and while fully admitting the many indefensible outrages committed by the whigs, a long-continued and impartial examination of accessible records has given me the belief that in the districts where the civil war was most ferocious, much the largest number of the criminal class joined the tories, and the misdeeds of the latter were more numerous than those of the whigs. But the frequency with which both whigs and tories hanged men for changing sides, shows that quite a number of the people shifted from one party to the other; and so there must have been many men of exactly the same stamp in both armies. Much of the nominal changing of sides, however, was due to the needless and excessive severity of Cornwallis and his lieutenants.

[51] Draper gives a good plan of the battle. He also gives some pictures of the fighting, in which the backwoodsmen are depicted in full Continental uniform, which probably not a man—certainly very few of them—wore.

[52] Ramsey (“Revolution in South Carolina”), writing in 1785, gives the speech verbatim, apparently from Cleavland himself. It is very improbable that it is verbally correct, but doubtless it represents the spirit of his remarks.

[53] “Essays in Military Biography,” Col. Charles Cornwallis Chesney. London, 1874. On p. 323 begins a memoir of “A Carolina Loyalist in the Revolutionary War.” It is written by the loyalist himself, who was presumably a relation of Col. Chesney’s. It was evidently written after the event, and there are some lapses. Thus he makes the war with the Cherokees take place in 1777, instead of ’76. His explanation of Tarleton’s defeat at the Cowpens must be accepted with much reserve. At King’s Mountain he says the Americans had fifteen hundred men, instead of twenty-five hundred, of which Allaire speaks. Allaire probably consciously exaggerated the number.

[54] Campbell MSS. Letter of Col. Wm. Campbell, Oct. 10, 1780, says 10 minutes: the official report (Gates MSS.) says 5 minutes.

[55] “Richmond Enquirer” (Nov. 12, 1822 and May 9, 1823) certificates of King’s Mountain survivors—of James Crow, May 6, 1813; David Beattie, May 4, 1813, etc., etc. All the different commanders claimed the honor of beginning the battle in after-life; the official report decides it in favor of Campbell and Shelby, the former being the first actually engaged, as is acknowledged by Shelby in his letter to Arthur Campbell on October 12, 1780.

[56] Haywood, 71; doubtless he uses the language of one of the actors.

[57] Shelby MS.

[58] The “Carolina Loyalist” speaks as if the hunting-shirt were put on for disguise; he says Ferguson was recognized, “although wearing a hunting-shirt.”

[59] Ferguson’s “Memoir,” p. 32.

[60] The “South Carolina Loyalist” says he was killed just as he had slain Col. Williams “with his left hand.” Ramsey, on the other side, represents Col. Williams as being shot while dashing forward to kill Ferguson. Williams certainly was not killed by Ferguson himself; and in all probability the latter was slain earlier in the action and in an entirely different part of the line. The “Loyalist” is also in error as to Cleavland’s regiment being the first that was charged. There is no ground whatever for the statement that Fergu son was trying to escape when shot; nor was there any at tempt at a charge of horsemen, made in due form. The battle was purely one of footmen and the attempt to show an effort at a cavalry charge at the end is a simple absurdity.

[61] In his “Hist. Mag.” article Gen. Watts De Peyster clears his namesake’s reputation from all charge of cowardice; but his account of how De Peyster counseled and planned all sorts of expedients that might have saved the loyalists is decidedly mythical.

[62] Deposition of John Long, in “Enquirer,” as quoted.

[63] Chesney, p. 333.

[64] Shelby MS.

[65] Campbell MSS. Letter of General George Rutledge (who was in the battle, an eye-witness of what he describes), May 27, 1813. But there is an irreconcilable conflict of testimony as to whether Campbell or Evan Shelby received De Peyster’s sword.

[66] For the loyalist losses, see ante, note discussing their numbers. The “South Carolina Loyalist” says they lost about a third of their number. It is worthy of note that the actual fighting at King’s Mountain bore much resemblance to that at Majuba Hill a century later; a backwoods levy was much like a boer commando.

[67] In some accounts this officer is represented as a major, in some as a colonel; at any rate he was in command of a small regiment, or fragment of a regiment.

[68] The official report as published gave the American loss as twenty-eight killed and sixty wounded. The original document (in the Gates MSS., N. Y., Hist. Soc.) gives the loss in tabulated form in an appendix, which has not heretofore been published. It is as follows:

[69] It would be quite impossible to take notice of the countless wild absurdities of the various writers who have given “histories” so-called, of the battle. One of the most recent of them, Mr. Kirke, having accepted as the number of the British dead two hundred and twenty-five, and the wounded one hundred and eighty-five, says that the disproportion shows “the wonderful accuracy of the backwoods rifle”—the beauty of the argument being that it necessarily implies that the backwoodsmen only fired some four hundred and ten shots. Mr. Kirke’s account of the battle having been “won” owing to a remarkable ride taken by Sevier to rally the men at the critical moment is, of course, without any historic basis whatever.

[70] “Tarleton’s Campaigns,” p. 166.

[71] Williams.

[72] The striking nature of the victory and its important consequences must not blind us to the manifold shortcomings of the Revolutionary militia. The mountaineers did well in spite of being militia; but they would have done far better under another system. The numerous failures of the militia as a whole must be balanced against the few successes of a portion of them. If the States had possessed wisdom enough to back Washington with Continentals, or with volunteers such as those who fought in the Civil War, the Revolutionary contest would have been over in three years. The trust in militia was a perfect curse. Many of the backwoods leaders knew this. The old Indian fighter, Andrew Lewis, about this time wrote to Gates (see Gates MSS., Sept. 30, 1780), speaking of “the dastardly conduct of the militia,” calling them “a set of poltroons,” and longing for Continentals.

[73] Shelby’s MS. autobiography.

[74] Among these privates was the father of Davy Crockett.

[75] But the accounts of indignity being shown him are not corroborated by Allaire and Ryerson, the two contemporary British authorities, and are probably untrue.

[76] Certificate of Matthew Willoughby, in “Richmond En quirer,” as quoted.

[77] Gates MSS. Deposition of John Satty, and others, Sept. 7, 1780; of Wm. Hamilton, Sept. 12th, etc., etc., etc.

[78] Campbell’s General Orders, Oct. 14th, and Oct. 26th.

[79] “Our captors … cutting and striking us in a most savage manner.”—”South Carolina Loyalist.”

[80] Allaire’s diary, entry of Nov. 1st.

[81] Campbell’s General Orders, Oct. 11th.

[82] Allaire’s diary, entry for Aug. 20th; also see Aug. 2d. He chronicles these hangings with much complacency, but is, of course, shocked at the “infamous” conduct of the Americans when they do likewise.

[83] Shelby MS.

[84] Shelby MS.

[85] Thirty years after the battle, when Campbell had long been dead, Shelby and Sevier started a most unfortunate controversy as to his conduct in the battle. They insisted that he had flinched, and that victory was mainly due to them. Doubtless they firmly believed what they said; for as already stated, the jealousies and rivalries among the backwoods leaders were very strong; but the burden of proof, after thirty years’ silence, rested on them, and they failed to make their statements good—nor was their act a very gracious one. Shelby bore the chief part in the quarrel, Campbell’s surviving relatives, of course, defending the dead chieftain. I have carefully examined all the papers in the case, in the Tenn. Historical Society, the Shelby MSS., and the Campbell MSS., besides the files of the “Richmond Enquirer,” etc.; and it is evident that the accusation was wholly groundless.

CHAPTER VI

THE HOLSTON SETTLEMENTS TO THE END OF THE REVOLUTION, 1781–1783

JOHN SEVIER had no sooner returned from doing his share in defeating foes who were of his own race, than he was called on to face another set of enemies, quite as formidable and much more cruel. These were the red warriors, the ancient owners of the soil, who were ever ready to take advantage of any momentary disaster that befell their hereditary and victorious opponents, the invading settlers.

For many years Sevier was the best Indian fighter on the border. He was far more successful than Clark, for instance, inflicting greater loss on his foes and suffering much less himself, though he never had anything like Clark’s number of soldiers. His mere name was a word of dread to the Cherokees, the Chickamaugas, and the upper Creeks. His success was due to several causes. He wielded great influence over his own followers, whose love for and trust in “Chucky Jack” were absolutely unbounded; for he possessed in the highest degree the virtues most prized on the frontier. He was open-hearted and hospitable, with winning ways toward all, and combined a cool head with a dauntless heart; he loved a battle for its own sake, and was never so much at his ease as when under fire; he was a first-class marksman, and as good a horseman as was to be found on the border. In his campaigns against the Indians he adopted the tactics of his foes, and grafted on them some important improvements of his own. Much of his success was due to his adroit use of scouts or spies. He always chose for these the best woodsmen of the district, men who could endure as much, see as much, and pass through the woods as silently, as the red men themselves. By keeping these scouts well ahead of him, he learned accurately where the war parties were. In the attack itself he invariably used mounted riflemen, men skilled in forest warfare, who rode tough little horses, on which they galloped at speed through the forest. Once in position they did the actual fighting on foot, sheltering themselves carefully behind the tree-trunks He moved with extreme rapidity and attacked with instantaneous suddenness, using ambushes and surprises wherever practicable. His knowledge of the whereabout and size of the hostile parties, and the speed of his own movements, generally enabled him to attack with the advantage of numbers greatly on his side.[1] He could then out-flank or partially surround the Indians, while his sudden rush demoralized them; so that, in striking contrast to most other Indian fighters, he inflicted a far greater loss than he received. He never fought a big pitched battle, but, by incessantly harrying and scattering the different war bands, he struck such terror to the hearts of the Indians that he again and again, in a succession of wars, forced them into truces, and for the moment freed the settlements from their ravages. He was almost the only commander on the frontier who ever brought an Indian war, of whatever length, to an end, doing a good deal of damage to his foes and suffering very little himself. Still, he never struck a crushing blow, nor conquered a permanent peace. He never did anything to equal Clark’s campaigns in the Illinois and against Vincennes, and, of course, he can not for a moment be compared to his rival and successor, grim Old Hickory, the destroyer of the Creeks and the hero of New Orleans.

When the men of the Holston or upper Tennessee valley settlements reached their homes after the King’s Mountain expedition, they found them menaced by the Cherokees. Congress had endeavored in vain to persuade the chiefs of this tribe to make a treaty of peace, or at least to remain neutral. The efforts of the British agents to embroil them with the whites were completely successful; and in November the Otari or Overhill warriors began making inroads along the frontier. They did not attack in large bands. A constant succession of small parties moved swiftly through the country, burning cabins, taking scalps, and, above all, stealing horses. As the most effectual way of stopping such inroads, the alarmed and angered settlers resolved to send a formidable retaliatory expedition against the Overhill towns.[2] All the Holston settlements both north and south of the Virginia line joined in sending troops. By the first week in December, 1780, seven hundred mounted riflemen were ready to march, under the joint leadership of Colonel Arthur Campbell and of Sevier, the former being the senior officer. They were to meet at an appointed place on the French Broad.

Sevier started first, with between two and three hundred of his Watauga and Nolichucky followers. He marched down to the French Broad, but could hear nothing of Campbell. He was on the great war trace of the Southern Indians, and his scouts speedily brought him word that they had exchanged shots with a Cherokee war party, on its way to the settlements, and not far distant on the other side of the river. He instantly crossed, and made a swift march toward the would-be marauders, camping on Boyd’s Creek. The scouts were out by sunrise next morning—December 16th,—and speedily found the Indian encampment, which the warriors had just left. On receipt of the news Sevier ordered the scouts to run on, attack the Indians, and then instantly retreat, so as to draw them into an ambuscade. Meanwhile the main body followed cautiously after, the men spread out in a long line, with the wings advanced; the left wing under Major Jesse Walton, the right under Major Jonathan Tipton, while Sevier himself commanded the centre, which advanced along the trail by which the scouts were to retreat. When the Indians were drawn into the middle, the two wings were to close in, when the whole party would be killed or captured.

The plan worked well. The scouts soon came up with the warriors, and, after a moment’s firing, ran back, with the Indians in hot pursuit. Sevier’s men lay hid, and, when the leading warriors were close up, they rose and fired. Walton’s wing closed in promptly; but Tipton was too slow, and the startled Cherokees ran off through the opening he had left, rushed into a swamp impassable for horsemen, and scattered out, each man for himself, being soon beyond pursuit. Nevertheless, Sevier took thirteen scalps, many weapons, and all their plunder. In some of their bundles there were proclamations from Sir Henry Clinton and other British commanders. The Indians were too surprised and panic-struck to offer any serious resistance, and not a man of Sevier’s force was even wounded.[3]

Forty years afterward Haywood writes of the affair, trying to tell simply the truth, but obliged to rely mainly on oral tradition. He speaks of Sevier’s troops as only two hundred in number; and says twenty-eight Indians were killed. He does not speak of the number of the Indians, but from the way he describes Sevier’s troops as encircling them, he evidently knew that the white men were more numerous than their foes. His mistake as to the number of Indian dead is easily explicable. The official report gives twenty-nine as the number killed in the entire campaign, and Haywood, as in the Island Flats battle, simply puts the total of several skirmishes into one.

Thirty years later comes Ramsey. He relies on traditions that have grown more circumstantial and less accurate. He gives two accounts of what he calls “one of the best fought battles in the border war of Tennessee”; one of these accounts is mainly true; the other entirely false; he does not try to reconcile them. He says three whites were wounded although the official report says that in the whole campaign but one man was killed and two wounded. He reduces Sevier’s force to one hundred and seventy men, and calls the Indians “a large body.”

Thirty-four years later comes Mr. Kirke, with the “Rearguard of the Revolution.” Out of his inner consciousness he evolves the fact that there were “not less than a thousand” Indians, whom Sevier, at the head of one hundred and seventy men, vanquishes, after a heroic combat, in which Sevier and some others perform a variety of purely imaginary feats. By diminishing the number of the whites, and increasing that of the Indians, he thus makes the relative force of the latter about twenty-five times as great as it really was, and converts a clever ambuscade, whereby the whites gave a smart drubbing to a body of Indians one-fourth their own number, into a Homeric victory over a host six times as numerous as the conquerors.

This is not a solitary instance; on the contrary it is typical of almost all that is gravely set forth as history by a number of writers on these Western border wars, whose books are filled from cover to cover with just such matter, almost all their statements are partly, and very many are wholly, without foundation.

Having thus made a very pretty stroke, Sevier returned to the French Broad, where Campbell joined him on the 22d, with four hundred troops. Among them were a large number of Shelby’s men, under the command of Major Joseph Martin. The next day the seven hundred horsemen made a forced march to the Little Tennessee; and on the 24th crossed it unopposed, making a feint at one ford, while the main body passed rapidly over another. The Indians did not have the numbers to oppose so formidable a body of good fighters, and only ventured on a little very long range and harmless skirmishing with the vanguard. Dividing into two bodies, the troops destroyed Chota and the other towns up and down the stream, finding in them a welcome supply of provisions. The next day Martin, with a detachment, fell on a party of flying Indians, killed one, and captured seventeen horses loaded with clothing, skins, and the scanty household furniture of the cabins; while another detachment destroyed the part of Chilhowee that was on the nearer side of the river. On the 26th the rest of Chilhowee was burned, three Indians killed, and nine captured. Tipton, with one hundred and fifty men, was sent to attack another town beyond the river; but owing to the fault of their commander,[4] this body failed to get across. The Indian woman, Nancy Ward, who in ’76 had given the settlers timely warning of the intended attack by her tribesmen here came into camp. She brought overtures of peace from the chiefs; but to these Campbell and Sevier would not listen, as they wished first to demolish the Hiawassee towns, where the warriors had been especially hostile. Accordingly, they marched thither. On their way there were a couple of skirmishes, in which several Indians were killed and one white man. The latter, whose name was Elliot, was buried in the Tellico town, a cabin being burned down over his grave, that the Indians might not know where it was. The Indians watched the army from the hills. At one point a warrior was seen stationed on a ridge to beat a drum and give signals to the rest; but the spies of the whites stole on him unawares, and shot him. The Hiawassee towns and all the stores of provisions they contained were destroyed, the work being finished on the last day of the year.

On January 1, 1781, the army broke up into detachments which went home by different routes, some additional towns being destroyed. The Indians never ventured to offer the invaders a pitched battle. Many of the war parties were absent on the frontier, and, at the very time their own country was being invaded, they committed ravages in Powell’s Valley, along the Upper Holston, and on the Kentucky road, near Cumberland Gap. The remaining warriors were cowed by Sevier’s first success, and were puzzled by the rapidity with which the troops moved; for the mounted riflemen went at speed wherever they wished, and were not encumbered by baggage, each man taking only his blanket and a wallet of parched corn.

All the country of the Overhill Cherokees was laid waste, a thousand cabins were burned, and fifty-thousand bushels of corn destroyed. Twenty-nine warriors in all were killed, and seventeen women and children captured, not including the family of Nancy Ward, who were treated as friends, not prisoners. But one white man was killed and two wounded.[5]

Mr. Kirke merely follows Ramsey, and adds a few flourishes of his own, such as that at the Chickamauga towns “the blood of the slaughtered cattle dyed red the Tennessee” for some twenty miles, and that “the homes of over forty thousand people were laid in ashes.” This last estimate is just about ten times too strong, for the only country visited was that of the Overhill Cherokees, and the outside limit for the population of the devastated territory would be some four thousand souls, or a third of the Cherokee tribe, which all told numbered perhaps twelve thousand people.

In the burnt towns, and on the dead warriors, were found many letters and proclamations from the British agents and commanders, showing that almost every chief in the nation had been carrying on a double game; for the letters covered the periods at which they had been treating with the Americans and earnestly professing their friendship for the latter and their determination to be neutral in the contest then waging. As Campbell wrote in his report to the Virginia Governor, no people had ever acted with more foolish duplicity.

Before returning, the three commanders, Campbell, Sevier, and Martin, issued an address to the Otari chiefs and warriors, and sent it by one of their captured braves, who was to deliver it to the headmen.[6] The address set forth what the white troops had done, telling the Indians it was a just punishment for their folly and perfidy in consenting to carry out the wishes of the British agents; it warned them shortly to come in and treat for peace, lest their country should again be visited, and not only laid waste, but conquered and held for all time. Some chiefs came in to talk, and were met at Chota;[7] but though they were anxious for peace they could not restrain the vindictive spirit of the young braves, nor prevent them from harassing the settlements. Nor could the white commanders keep the frontiersmen from themselves settling within the acknowledged boundaries of the Indian territory. They were constantly pressing against the lines, and eagerly burst through at every opening. When the army marched back from burning the Overhill towns, they found that adventurous settlers had followed in its wake, and had already made clearings and built cabins near all the best springs down to the French Broad. People of every rank showed keen desire to encroach on the Indian lands.[8]

The success of this expedition gave much relief to the border, and was hailed with pleasure throughout Virginia[9] and North Carolina. Nevertheless the war continued without a break, bands of warriors from the middle towns coming to the help of their disheartened Overhill brethren. Sevier determined to try one of his swift, sudden strokes against these new foes. Early in March he rode off at the head of a hundred and fifty picked horsemen, resolute to penetrate the hitherto untrodden wilds that shielded the far-off fastnesses where dwelt the Erati. Nothing shows his daring, adventurous nature more clearly than his starting on such an expedition; and only a man of strong will and much power could have carried it to a successful conclusion. For a hundred and fifty miles he led his horsemen through a mountainous wilderness where there was not so much as a hunter’s trail. They wound their way through the deep defiles and among the towering peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains, descending by passes so precipitous that it was with difficulty the men led down them even such surefooted beasts as their hardy hill-horses. At last they burst out of the woods and fell like a thunderbolt on the towns of the Erati, nestling in their high gorges. The Indians were completely taken by surprise; they had never dreamed that they could be attacked in their innermost strongholds, cut off, as they were, from the nearest settlements by vast trackless wastes of woodland and lofty, bald-topped mountain chains. They had warriors enough to overwhelm Sevier’s band by sheer force of numbers, but he gave them no time to gather. Falling on their main town, he took it by surprise and stormed it, killing thirty warriors and capturing a large number of women and children. Of these, however, he was able to bring in but twenty, who were especially valuable because they could be exchanged for white captives. He burnt two other towns and three small villages, destroying much provision and capturing two hundred horses. He himself had but one man killed and one wounded. Before the startled warriors could gather to attack him he plunged once more into the wilderness, carrying his prisoners and plunder, and driving the captured horses before him; and so swift were his motions that he got back in safety to the settlements.[10] The length of the journey, the absolutely untraveled nature of the country, which no white man, save perhaps an occasional wandering hunter, had ever before traversed, the extreme difficulty of the route over the wooded, cliff-scarred mountains, and the strength of the Cherokee towns that were to be attacked, all combined to render the feat most difficult. For its successful performance there was need of courage, hardihood, woodcraft, good judgment, stealth, and great rapidity of motion. It was one of the most brilliant exploits of the border war.

Even after his return Sevier was kept busy pursuing and defeating small bands of plundering savages. In the early summer he made a quick inroad south of the French Broad. At the head of over a hundred hard riders he fell suddenly on the camp of a war party, took a dozen scalps, and scattered the rest of the Indians in every direction. A succession of these blows completely humbled the Cherokees, and they sued for peace; thanks to Sevier’s tactics, they had suffered more loss than they had inflicted, an almost unknown thing in these wars with the forest Indians. In midsummer peace was made by a treaty at the Great Island of the Holston.

During the latter half of the year, when danger from the Indians had temporarily ceased, Sevier and Shelby led down bands of mounted riflemen to assist the American forces in the Carolinas and Georgia. They took an honorable share under Marion in some skirmishes against the British and Hessians;[11] but they did not render any special service, and Greene found he could place no reliance on them for the actual stubborn campaigns that broke the strength of the king’s armies. They enlisted for very short periods, and when their time was up promptly returned to their mountains, for they were sure to get homesick and uneasy about their families; and neither the officers nor the soldiers had any proper idea of the value of obedience. Among their own hills and forests and for their own work, they were literally unequaled; and they were ready enough to swoop down from their strongholds, strike some definite blow, or do some single piece of valiant fighting in the low country, and then fall back as quickly as they had come. But they were not particularly suited for a pitched battle in the open, and were quite unfitted to carry on a long campaign.

In one respect the mountain men deserve great credit for their conduct in the Carolinas. As a general thing they held aloof from the plundering. The frightful character of the civil war between the whigs and tories, and the excesses of the British armies, had utterly demoralized the Southern States; they were cast into a condition of anarchic disorder and the conflicts between the patriots and loyalists degenerated into a bloody scramble for murder and plunder wherein the whigs behaved as badly as ever the tories had done.[12] Men were shot, houses burned, horses stolen, and negroes kidnapped; even the unfortunate freedmen of color were hurried off and sold into slavery. It was with the utmost difficulty that a few wise and good commanders, earnest lovers of their country, like the gallant General Pickens, were able to put a partial stop to these outrages, and gather a few brave men to help in overcoming the foreign foe. To the honor of the troops under Sevier and Shelby be it said that they took little part in these misdeeds. There were doubtless some men among them who shared in all the evil of that turbulent time; but most of these frontier riflemen, though poor and ignorant, were sincerely patriotic; they marched to fight the oppressor, to drive out the stranger, not to ill-treat their own friends and countrymen.

Toward the end of these campaigns, which marked the close of the Revolutionary struggle, Shelby was sent to the North Carolina Legislature, where he served for a couple of terms. Then, when peace was formally declared, he removed to Kentucky, where he lived ever afterward. Sevier stayed in his home on the Nolichucky, to be thenceforth, while his life lasted, the leader in peace and war of his beloved mountaineers.

Early in 1782 fresh difficulties arose with the Indians. In the war just ended the Cherokees themselves had been chiefly to blame. The whites were now in their turn the aggressors, the trouble being, as usual, that they encroached on lands secured to the red men by solemn treaty. The Watauga settlements had been kept compact by the presence of the neighboring Indians. They had grown steadily but slowly. They extended their domain slightly after every treaty, such treaty being usually though not always the sequel to a successful war; but they never gained any large stretch of territory at once. Had it not been for the presence of the hostile tribes they would have scattered far and wide over the country, and could not have formed any government.

The preceding spring (1781) the land office had been closed, not to be opened until after peace with Great Britain was definitely declared, the utter demoralization of the government bringing the work to a standstill. The rage for land speculation, however, which had continued, even in the stormiest days of the Revolution, grew tenfold in strength after Yorktown, when peace at no distant day was assured. The wealthy land speculators of the seaboard counties made agreements of various sorts with the more prominent frontier leaders in the effort to secure large tracts of good country. The system of surveying was much better than in Kentucky, but it was still by no means perfect, as each man placed his plot wherever he chose, first describing the boundary marks rather vaguely, and leaving an illiterate old hunter to run the lines. Moreover, the intending settler frequently absented himself for several months, or was temporarily chased away by the Indians, while the official record books were most imperfect. In consequence, many conflicts ensued. The frontiersmen settled on any spot of good land they saw fit, and clung to it with defiant tenacity, whether or not it afterward proved to be on a tract previously granted to some land company or rich private individual who had never been a hundred miles from the seacoast. Public officials went into these speculations. Thus Major Joseph Martin, while an Indian agent, tried to speculate in Cherokee lands.[13] Of course the officer’s public influence was speedily destroyed when he once undertook such operations; he could no longer do justice to outsiders. Occasionally the falseness of his position made him unjust to the Indians; more often it forced him into league with the latter, and made him hostile to the borderers.[14]

Before the end of the Revolution the trouble between the actual settlers and the land speculators became so great that a small subsidiary civil war was threatened. The rough riflemen resolutely declined to leave their clearings, while the titular owners appealed to the authority of the loose land laws, and wished them to be backed up by the armed force of the State.[15]

The government of North Carolina was far too weak to turn out the frontiersmen in favor of the speculators to whom the land had been granted,—often by fraudulent means, or at least for a ridiculously small sum of money. Still less could it prevent its unruly subjects from trespassing on the Indian country, or protect them if they were themselves threatened by the savages. It could not do justice as between its own citizens, and it was quite incompetent to preserve the peace between them and outsiders.[16] The borderers were left to work out their own salvation.

By the beginning of 1782 settlements were being made south of the French Broad. This alarmed and irritated the Indians, and they sent repeated remonstrances to Major Martin, who was Indian agent, and also to the governor of North Carolina. The latter wrote Sevier, directing him to drive off the intruding settlers, and pull down their cabins. Sevier did not obey. He took purely the frontier view of the question, and he had no intention of harassing his own stanch adherents for the sake of the savages whom he had so often fought. Nevertheless, the Cherokees always liked him personally, for he was as open-handed and free-hearted to them as to every one else, and treated them to the best he had whenever they came to his house. He had much justification for his refusal, too, in the fact that the Indians themselves were always committing outrages. When the Americans reconquered the Southern States many tories fled to the Cherokee towns, and incited the savages to hostility; and the outlying settlements of the borderers were being burned and plundered by members of the very tribes whose chiefs were at the same time writing to the Governor to complain of the white encroachments.[17]

When in April the Cherokees held a friendly talk with Evan Shelby they admitted that the tories among them and their own evil-disposed young men committed ravages on the whites, but asserted that most of them greatly desired peace, for they were weak and distressed, and had shrunk much in numbers.[18] The trouble was that when they were so absolutely unable to control their own bad characters, it was inevitable that they should become embroiled with the whites.

The worst members of each race committed crimes against the other, and not only did the retaliation often fall on the innocent, but, unfortunately, even the good men were apt to make common cause with the criminals of their own color. Thus in July the Chickamaugas sent in a talk for peace; but at that very time a band of their young braves made a foray into Powell’s valley, killing two settlers and driving off some stock. They were pursued, one of their number killed, and most of the stock retaken. In the same month, on the other hand, two friendly Indians, who had a canoe laden with peltry, were murdered on the Holston by a couple of white ruffians, who then attempted to sell the furs. They were discovered, and the furs taken from them; but to their disgrace be it said, the people round about would not suffer the criminals to be brought to justice.[19]

The mutual outrages continued throughout the summer, and in September they came to a head. The great majority of the Otari of the Overhill towns were still desirous of peace, and after a council of their head-men the chief Old Tassel, of the town of Chota, sent on their behalf a strong appeal to the Governors of both Virginia and North Carolina. The document is written with such dignity, and yet in a tone of such curious pathos, that it is worth giving in full, as putting in strongest possible form the Indian side of the case, and as a sample of the best of these Indian “talks.”

“A talk to Colonel Joseph Martin, by the Old Tassell, in Chota, the 25th of September, 1782, in favor of the whole nation. For His Excellency, the Governor of North Carolina. Present, all the chiefs of the friendly towns and a number of young men.

“Brother: I am now going to speak to you. I hope you will listen to me. A string. I intended to come this fall and see you, but there was such confusion in our country, I thought it best for me to stay at home and send my Talks by our friend Colonel Martin, who promised to deliver them safe to you. We are a poor distressed people, that is in great trouble, and we hope our elder brother will take pity on us and do us justice. Your people from Nolichucky are daily pushing us out of our lands. We have no place to hunt on. Your people have built houses within one day’s walk of our towns. We don’t want to quarrel with our elder brother; we, therefore, hope our elder brother will not take our lands from us, that the Great Man above gave us. He made you and he made us; we are all his children, and we hope our elder brother will take pity on us, and not take our lands from us that our father gave us, because he is stronger than we are. We are the first people that ever lived on this land; it is ours, and why will our elder brother take it from us? It is true, some time past, the people over the great water persuaded some of our young men to do some mischief to our elder brother, which our principal men were sorry for. But you our elder brothers came to our towns and took satisfaction, and then sent for us to come and treat with you, which we did. Then our elder brother promised to have the line run between us agreeable to the first treaty, and all that should be found over the line should be moved off. But it is not done yet. We have done nothing to offend our elder brother since the last treaty, and why should our elder brother want to quarrel with us? We have sent to the Governor of Virginia on the same subject. We hope that between you both, you will take pity on your younger brother, and send Col. Sevier, who is a good man, to have all your people moved off our land. I should say a great deal more, but our friend, Colonel Martin, knows all our grievances, and he can inform you. A string.” [20]

The speech is interesting because it shows that the Indians both liked and respected Sevier, their most redoubtable foe; and because it acknowledges that in the previous war the Cherokees themselves had been the wrongdoers. Even Old Tassel had been implicated in the treacherous conduct of the chiefs at that period; but he generally acted very well, and belonged with the large number of his tribesmen who, for no fault of their own, were shamefully misused by the whites.

The white intruders were not removed. No immediate collision followed on this account; but when Old Tassel’s talk was forwarded to the governor, small parties of Chickamaugas, assisted by young braves from among the Creeks and Erati, had already begun to commit ravages on the outlying settlements. Two weeks before Old Tassel spoke, on the 11th of September, a family of whites was butchered on Moccasin Creek. The neighbors gathered, pursued the Indians, and recaptured the survivors.[21] Other outrages followed, throughout the month. Sevier as usual came to the rescue of the angered settlers. He gathered a couple of hundred mounted riflemen, and made one of his swift retaliatory inroads. His men were simply volunteers, for there was no money in the country treasury with which to pay them or provide them with food and provisions; it was their own quarrel, and they furnished their own services free, each bringing his horse, rifle, ammunition, blanket, and wallet of parched corn. Naturally such troops made war purely according to their own ideas, and cared nothing whatever for the commands of those governmental bodies who were theoretically their superiors. They were poor men, stanch patriots, who had suffered much and done all they could during the Revolution;[22] now, when threatened by the savages they were left to protect themselves, and they did it in their own way. Sevier led his force down through the Overhill towns, doing their people no injury and holding a peace talk with them. They gave him a half-breed, John Watts, afterward one of their chiefs, as guide; and he marched quickly against some of the Chickamauga towns, where he destroyed the cabins and provision hoards. Afterward he penetrated to the Coosa, where he burned one or two Creek villages. The inhabitants fled from the towns before he could reach them; and his own motions were so rapid that they could never gather in force strong enough to assail him.[23] Very few Indians were killed, and apparently none of Sevier’s people; a tory, an ex-British sergeant, then living with an Indian squaw, was among the slain.

This foray brought but a short relief to the settlements. On Christmas Day three men were killed on the Clinch; and it was so unusual a season for the war parties to be abroad that the attack caused widespread alarm.[24] Early in the spring of 1783 the ravages began again.[25] Some time before General Wayne had addressed the Creeks and Choc-taws, reproaching them with the aid they had given the British, and threatening them with a bloody chastisement if they would not keep the peace.[26] A threat from Mad Anthony meant something, and the Indians paid at least momentary heed. Georgia enjoyed a short respite, which, as usual, the more reckless borderers strove to bring to an end by encroaching on the Indian lands, while the State authorities, on the other hand, did their best to stop not only such encroachments, but also all traveling and hunting in the Indian country, and especially the marking of trees. This last operation, as Governor Lyman Hall remarked in his proclamation, gave “Great Offence to the Indians,”[27] who thoroughly understood that the surveys indicated the approaching confiscation of their territory.

Toward the end of 1783 a definite peace was concluded with the Chickasaws, who ever afterward remained friendly;[28] but the Creeks, while amusing the Georgians by pretending to treat, let their parties of young braves find an outlet for their energies by assailing the Holston and Cumberland settlements.[29] The North Carolina Legislature, becoming impatient, passed a law summarily appropriating certain lands that were claimed by the unfortunate Cherokees. The troubled peace was continually threatened by the actions either of ungovernable frontiersmen or of bloodthirsty and vindictive Indians.[30] Small parties of scouts were incessantly employed in patrolling the southern border.

Nevertheless, all pressing danger from the Indians was over. The Holston settlements throve lustily. Wagon roads were made, leading into both Virginia and North Carolina. Settlers thronged into the country, the roads were well traveled, and the clearings became very numerous. The villages began to feel safe without stockades, save those on the extreme border, which were still built in the usual frontier style. The scattering log school-houses and meeting-houses increased steadily in numbers, and in 1783, Methodism, destined to become the leading and typical creed of the West, first gained a foothold along the Holston, with a congregation of seventy-six members.[31]

These people of the upper Tennessee valleys long continued one in interest as in blood. Whether they lived north or south of the Virginia or North Carolina boundary, they were more closely united to one another than they were to the seaboard governments of which they formed part. Their history is not generally studied as a whole, because one portion of their territory continued part of Virginia, while the remainder was cut off from North Carolina as the nucleus of a separate State. But in the time of their importance, in the first formative period of the young West, all these Holston settlements must be treated together, or else their real place in our history will be totally misunderstood.[32]

The two towns of Abingdon and Jonesboro, respectively north and south of the line, were the centres of activity. In Jonesboro the log courthouse, with its clapboard roof, was abandoned, and in its place a twenty-four-foot-square building of hewn logs was put up; it had a shingled roof and plank floors, and contained a justice’s bench, a lawyers’ and clerks’ bar, and a sheriff’s box to sit in. The county of Washington was now further subdivided, its southwest portion being erected into the county of Greene, so that there were three counties of North Carolina west of the mountains. The court of the new county consisted of several justices, who appointed their own clerk, sheriff, attorney for the State, entry-taker, surveyor, and registrar. They appropriated money to pay for the use of the log-house where they held sessions, laid a tax of a shilling specie on every hundred pounds for the purpose of erecting public buildings, laid out roads, issued licenses to build mills, and bench warrants to take suspected persons.[33]

Abingdon was a typical little frontier town of the class that immediately succeeded the stockaded hamlets. A public square had been laid out, round which, and down the straggling main street, the few buildings were scattered; all were of logs, from the court-house and small jail down. There were three or four taverns. The two best were respectively houses of entertainment for those who were fond of their brandy, and for the temperate. There were a blacksmith shop and a couple of stores.[34] The traders brought their goods from Alexandria, Baltimore, or even Philadelphia, and made a handsome profit. The lower taverns were scenes of drunken frolic, often ending in free fights. There was no constable, and the sheriff, when called to quell a disturbance, summoned as a posse those of the bystanders whom he deemed friendly to the cause of law and order. There were many strangers passing through; and the better class of these were welcome at the rambling log-houses of the neighboring backwoods gentry, who often themselves rode into the taverns to learn from the travelers what was happening in the great world beyond the mountains. Court-day was a great occasion; all the neighborhood flocked in to gossip, lounge, race horses, and fight. Of course in such gatherings there were always certain privileged characters. At Abingdon these were to be found in the persons of a hunter named Edward Callahan, and his wife Sukey. As regularly as court-day came round they appeared, Sukey driving a cart laden with pies, cakes, and drinkables, while Edward, whose rolls of furs and deer hides were also in the cart, stalked at its tail on foot, in full hunter’s dress, with rifle, powder-horn, and bullet-bag, while his fine, well-taught hunting-dog followed at his heels. Sukey would halt in the middle of the street, make an awning for herself and begin business, while Edward strolled off to see about selling his peltries. Sukey never would take out a license, and so was often in trouble for selling liquor. The judges were strict in proceeding against offenders—and even stricter against the unfortunate tories—but they had a humorous liking for Sukey, which was shared by the various grand juries. By means of some excuse or other she was always let off, and in return showed great gratitude to such of her benefactors as came near her mountain cabin.[35]

Court-day was apt to close with much hard drinking; for the backwoodsmen of every degree dearly loved whiskey.

[1] The old Tennessee historians, headed by Haywood, base their accounts of the actions on statements made by the pioneers, or some of the pioneers, forty or fifty years after the event; and they do a great deal of bragging about the prowess of the old Indian fighters. The latter did most certainly perform mighty deeds; but often in an entirely different way from that generally recorded; for they faced a foe who on his own ground was infinitely more to be dreaded than the best trained European regulars. Thus Haywood says that after the battle of the Island Flats, the whites were so encouraged that thenceforward they never asked concerning their enemies, “How many are they?” but “Where are they?” Of course, this is a mere piece of barbaric boasting. If the whites had really acted on any such theory there would have been a constant succession of disasters like that at the Blue Licks. Sevier’s latest biographer, Mr. Kirke, in the “Rearguard of the Revolution,” goes far beyond even the old writers. For instance, on p. 141, he speaks of Sevier’s victories being “often” gained over “twenty times his own number” of Indians. As a matter of fact, one of the proofs of Sevier’s skill as a commander is that he almost always fought with the advantage of numbers on his side. Not a single instance can be produced where either he or any one else during his lifetime gained a victory over twenty times his number of Indians, unless the sieges are counted. It is necessary to keep in mind the limitations under which Haywood did his work, in order to write truthfully; but a debt of gratitude will always be due him for the history he wrote. Like Marshall’s, it is the book of one who himself knew the pioneers, and it has preserved very much of value which would otherwise have been lost. The same holds true of Ramsey.

[2] Campbell MSS. Letter of Gov. Thos, Jefferson, Feb. 17, 1781.

[3] Campbell MSS. Copy of the official report of Col. Arthur Campbell, Jan. 15, 1781. The accounts of this battle of Boyd’s Creek illustrate well the growth of such an affair under the hands of writers who place confidence in all kinds of tradition, especially if they care more for picturesqueness than for accuracy. The contemporary official report is explicit. There were three hundred whites and seventy Indians. Of the latter thirteen were slain. Campbell’s whole report shows a jealousy of Sevier, whom he probably knew well enough was a man of superior ability to himself; but this jealousy appears mainly in the coloring. He does not charge any material fact, and there is no reason for questioning the substantial truth of his statements.

[4] His “unmilitary behavior,” says Campbell. Ramsey makes him one of the (imaginary) wounded at Boyd’s Creek. Kirke improves on this by describing him as falling “badly wounded” just as he was about to move his wing forward, and ascribes to his fall the failure of the wing to advance.

[5] Campbell MSS. Arthur Campbell’s official report. The figures of the cabins and corn destroyed are probably exaggerated. All the Tennessee historians, down to Phelan, are hopelessly in the dark over this campaign. Haywood actually duplicates it (pp. 63 and 99) recounting it first as occurring in ’79, and then with widely changed incidents as happening in ’81—making two expeditions. When he falls into such a tremendous initial error, it is not to be wondered at that the details he gives are very untrustworthy. Ramsey corrects Haywood as far as the two separate expeditions are concerned, but he makes a number of reckless statements apparently on no better authority than the traditions current among the border people, sixty or seventy years after the event. These stand on the same foundation with the baseless tale that makes Isaac Shelby take part in the battle of Island Flats. The Tennessee historians treat Sevier as being the chief commander; but he was certainly under Campbell; the address they sent out to the Indians is signed by Campbell first, Sevier second, and Martin third. Haywood, followed by Ramsey, says that Sevier marched to the Chickamauga towns, which he destroyed, and then marched down the Coosa to the region of the Cypress Swamps. But Campbell’s official report says that the towns “in the neighborhood of Chickamauga and the Town of Cologn, situated on the sources of the Mobile” were not destroyed, nor visited, and he carefully enumerates all the towns that the troops burned and the regions they went through. They did not go near Chickamauga nor the Coosa. Unless there is some documentary evidence in favor of the assertions of Haywood and Ramsey they can not for a moment be taken against the explicit declaration of the official report.

[6] Campbell MSS. Issued at Kai-a-tee, Jan. 4, 1781; the copy sent to Governor Jefferson is dated Feb. 28th.

[7] The Tennessee historians all speak of this as a treaty; and probably a meeting did take place as described; but it led to nothing, and no actual treaty was made until some months later.

[8] Calendar of Va. State Papers, II, letter of Col. Wm. Chris tian to Governor of Virginia, April 10, 1781.

[9] State Department MSS., No. 15, Feb. 25, 1781.

[10] Do. Letters of Col. Wm. Christian, April 10, 1781; of Joseph Martin, March 1st; and of Arthur Campbell, March 28th. The accounts vary slightly; for instance, Christian gives him one hundred and eighty, Campbell only one hundred and fifty men. One account says he killed thirty, another twenty Indians. Martin, by the way, speaks bitterly of the militia as men “who do duty at times as their inclination leads them.” The incident, brilliant enough anyhow, of course grows a little under Ramsey and Haywood; and Mr. Kirke fairly surpasses himself when he comes to it.

[11] Shelby MSS. Of course Shelby paints these skirmishes in very strong colors. Haywood and Ramsey base their accounts purely on his papers. Ramsey and his followers endeavor to prove that the mountain men did excellently in these 1781 campaigns; but the endeavor is futile. They were good for some one definite stroke, but their shortcomings were manifest the instant a long campaign was attempted; and the comments of the South Carolina historians upon their willingness to leave at unfortunate moments are on the whole just. They behaved somewhat as Stark and the victors at Bennington did when they left the American army before Saratoga; although their conduct was on the whole better than that of Stark’s men. They were a brave, hardy, warlike band of irregulars, probably better fighters than any similar force on this continent or elsewhere; but occasional brilliant exceptions must not blind us to the general inefficiency of the Revolutionary militia, and their great inferiority to the Continentals of Washington, Greene, and Wayne. See Appendix.

[12] In the Clay MSS. there is a letter from Jesse Benton (the father of the great Missouri Senator) to Col. Thos. Hart, of March 23d, 1783, which gives a glimpse of the way in which the tories were treated even after the British had been driven out; it also shows how soon maltreatment of royalists was turned into general misrule and rioting. The letter runs, in part, as follows:

“I can not help mentioning to You an Evil which seems intaild upon the upper part of this State, to wit, Mobbs and commotions amongst the People. I shall give you the particulars of the last Work of this kind which lately happend, & which is not yet settled; Plunder being the first cause. The Scoundrels, under the cloak of great Whigs cannot bear the thought of paying the unfortunate Wretches whom Fame and ill will call Tories (though many of them perhaps honest, industrious and useful men) for plunderd property; but on the other Hand think they together with their Wives and Children (who are now beging for Mercy) ought to be punished to the utmost extremity. I am sorry that Col. O Neal and his Brother Peter, who have been useful men and whom I am in hopes are pretty clear of plundering, should have a hand in Arbitrary measures at this Day when the Civil Laws might take place.

“One Jacob Graves son of old John of Stinking Quarter, went off & was taken with the British Army, escaped from the Guards, came & surrendered himself to Gen’l Butler, about the middle of Last month & went to his Family upon Parole. Col. O Neal being informed of this, armed himself with Gun and sword, went to Graves’s in a passion, Graves shut the Door, O Neal broke it down, Graves I believe thinking his own Life at stake, took his Brothers Gun which happened to be in the house & shot O Neal through the Breast.

“O Neal has suffered much but is now recovering. This accident has inflamed and set to work those who were afraid of suffering for their unjust and unwarrantable Deeds, the Ignorant honest men are also willing to take part against their Rulers & I don’t know when nor where it is to end, but I wish it was over. At the Guilford Feb’y Court Peter O Neal & others armed with clubs in the Face of the Court then sitting and in the Court house too, beat some men called Tories so much that their Lives were despaired of, broke up the Court and finally have stopd the civil Laws in that County. Your old Friend Col. Dunn got out at Window, fled in a Fright, took cold and died immediately. Rowan County Court I am told was also broke up.

“If O Neal should die I fear that a number of the unhappy wretches called Tories will be Murdered, and that a man disposed to do justice dare not interfere, indeed the times seem to imitate the commencement of the Regulators.”

[13] See Va. State Papers, III, 560.

[14] This is a chief reason why the reports of the Indian agents are so often bitterly hostile toward those of their own color.

[15] See in Durrett MSS. papers relating to Isaac Shelby; letter of John Taylor to Isaac Shelby, June 8, 1782.

[16] Calendar of Va. State Papers, III, p. 213.

[17] Do., p. 4.

[18] Do., p. 171, April 29, 1782.

[19] Do., pp. 213, 248.

[20] Ramsey, 271. The “strings” of wampum were used to mark periods and to indicate, and act as reminders of, special points in the speech.

[21] Calendar of Va. State Papers, III, p. 317.

[22] Do.

[23] The authority for this expedition is Haywood (p. 106); Ramsey simply alters one or two unimportant details. Haywood commits so many blunders concerning the early Indian wars that it is only safe to regard his accounts as true in out line; and even for this outline it is to be wished we had additional authority. Mr. Kirke, in the “Rear-guard,” p. 313, puts in an account of a battle on Lookout Mountain, wherein Sevier and his two hundred men defeat “five hundred tories and savages.” He does not even hint at his authority for this, unless in a sentence of the preface where he says, “a large part of my material I have derived from what may be termed ‘original sources’—old settlers.” Of course the statement of an old settler is worthless when it relates to an alleged important event which took place a hundred and five years before, and yet escaped the notice of all contemporary and subsequent historians. In plain truth unless Mr. Kirke can produce something like contemporary—or approximately contemporary—documentary evidence for this mythical battle, it must be set down as pure invention. It is with real reluctance that I speak thus of Mr. Kirke’s books. He has done good service in popularizing the study of early Western history, and especially in calling attention to the wonderful careers of Sevier and Robertson. Had he laid no claim to historic accuracy I should have been tempted to let his books pass unnoticed; but in the preface to his “John Sevier” he especially asserts that his writings “may be safely accepted as authentic history.” On first reading his book I was surprised and pleased at the information it contained; when I came to study the subject I was still more surprised and much less pleased at discovering such wholesale inaccuracy—to be perfectly just I should be obliged to use a stronger term. Even a popular history ought to pay at least some little regard to truth.

[24] Calendar of Va. State Papers, III, p. 424.

[25] Do., p. 479.

[26] State Department MSS. Letters of Washington, No. 152, Vol. XI, Feb. 1, 1782.

[27] Gazette of the State of Georgia, July 10, 1783.

[28] Va. State Papers, III, p. 548.

[29] Do., p. 532.

[30] Do., p. 560.

[31] “History of Methodism in Tennessee,” John B. M’Ferrin (Nashville, 1873), I, 26.

[32] Nothing gives a more fragmentary and twisted view of our history than to treat it purely by States; this is the rea son that a State history is generally of so little importance when taken by itself. On the other hand it is of course true that the fundamental features in our history can only be shown by giving proper prominence to the individual State life.

[33] Ramsey, 277. The North Carolina Legislature, in 1783, passed an act giving Henderson two hundred thousand acres, and appointed Joseph Martin Indian agent, arranged for a treaty with the Cherokees, and provided that any good men should be allowed to trade with the Indians.

[34] One was “kept by two Irishmen named Daniel and Manasses Freil” (sic; the names look very much more German than Irish).

[35] Campbell MSS.; an account of the “Town of Abingdon,” by David Campbell, who “first saw it in 1782.”

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A—TO CHAPTER III

(Haldimand MSS. Series B, Vol, 123, p. 302.)

Sir,

My Letter of the 22nd & 23rd of July informed you of the reports brought us of the Enemy’s motions at that time which was delivered by the Chiefs of the standing Stone Village & confirmed by Belts & Strings of Wampum in so earnest a manner that could not but gain Credit with us. We had upon this occasion the greatest Body of Indians collected to an advantageous peice of ground near the Pica-wee Village that have been assembled in this Quarter since the commencement of the War & perhaps may never be in higher spirits to engage the Enemy, when the return of Scouts from the Ohio informed us that the account we had received was false; this disappointment notwithstanding all our endeavours to keep them together occasioned them to disperse in disgust with each other, the inhabitants of this Country who were the most immediately interested in keeping in a Body ware the first that broke off & though we advanced towards the Ohio with upwards of three hundred Hurons & Lake Indians few of the Delawares, Shawanese or Mingoes followed us. On our arrival at the Ohio we remain’d still in uncertainty with respect to the Enemys motions, & it was thought best from hence to send Scouts to the Falls & that the main Body should advance into the Enemys Country and endeavour to lead out a party from some of their Forts by which we might be able to gain some certain Intelligence accordingly we crossed the Ohio and arrived the 18th Inst, at one of the Enemys settlements—call’d Bryans Station, but the Indians discovering their numbers prevented their coming out and the Lake Indians finding this rush’d up to the Fort and set several out Houses on fire but at too great a distance to touch the Fort the Wind blowing the Contrary way. the firing continued this day during which time a Party of about twenty of the Enemy approached a part that happened not to be Guarded & about one half of them reached it the rest being drove back by a few Indians who ware near the place, the next morning finding it to no purpose to keep up a fire longer upon the Fort as we were getting men killed, & had already several men wounded which ware to be carried, the Indians determined to retreat & the 20th reached the Blue Licks where we encamp’d near an advantageous Hill and expecting the enemy would pursue determined here to wait for them keeping spies at the Lick who in the morning of the 21st discovered them & at half past 7 o’clock we engaged them & in a short time totally defeated them, we ware not much superior to them in Numbers they being about two hundred picked men from the settlement of Kentucky. Commanded by the Colonels Todd, Trigg, Boone & Todd, with the Majors Harlin, and McGary most of whom fell in the action, from the best inquiry I could make upon the spot there was upwards of one hundred & forty killed & taken with near an hundred rifles several being thrown into a deep River that ware not recovered. It was said by the Prisoners that a Colonel Logan was expected to join them with one hundred men more we waited upon the ground to-day for him, but seeing there was not much probability of his coming we set off & crossed the ohio the second day after the action. Captain Caldwell & I arrived at this place last night with a design of sending some assistance to those who are bring on the wounded people who are fourteen in number, we had Ten Indians kill’d with Mr. La Bute of the Indian Department who by sparing the life of one of the Enemy & endeavouring to take him Prisoner loss’d his own, to our disappointment we find no Provisions brought forward to this place or likely hood of any for some time, and we have entirely subsisted since we left this on what we got in the Woods, and took from the Enemy. The Prisoners all agree in their account that there is no talk of an Expedition from that Quarter, nor indeed are they able without assistance from the Colonies, & that the Militia of the Country have been employed during the summer in Building the Fort at the Falls, & what they call a Row Galley which has made one trip up the River to the Mouth of the big Miamis & occasioned that alarm that created us so much trouble, she carries one six pounder, six four pounders & two two pounders & Row’s eighty oars, she had at the big Bone Lick one hundred men but being chiefly draughts from the Militia many of them left her on different parts of the River. One of the Prisoners mentions the arrival of Boats lately from Fort Pitt & that Letters has pass’d between the Commanding officer of that place & Mr. Clark intimating that preparation is making there for another Expedition into the Indian Country, we have since our arrival heard some thing of this matter and that the particulars has been forwarded to you, a Detachment of Rangers with a large party of Delawares, & Shawanese are gone that way who will be able to discover the truth of this matter.

I am this day favored with yours of the 6th Augt. containing the report of Isaac Gians concerning the Cruelties of the Indians. It is true they have made sacrifices to their revenge after the massacre of their women & children some being known to them to be perpetrators of it, but it was done in my absence or before I could reach any of the places to interfere. And I can assure you Sir that there is not a white person here wanting in their duty to represent to the Indians in the strongest terms the highest abhorrence of such conduct as well as the bad consequences that may attend it to both them & us being contrary to the rule of carrying on war by Civilized nations, however it is not improbable that Gians may have exaggerated matters greatly being notoriously known for a disaffected person and concerned in sending Prisoners away with Intelligence to the Enemy at the time Captain Bird came out as we ware then informed. I flatter myself that I may by this time have an answer to the Letter I had the honor of writing to the Commandr. in Chief on leaving Detroit. Mr. Elliot is to be the Bearer of this who will be able to give you any farther information necessary respecting matters here.

I am with respect Sir your most obedient & Very Humble Servant

A. McKee.

Shawanese Country,

August 28th, 1782.

Major De Peyster.

APPENDIX B—TO CHAPTER III

(Haldimand MSS., Series B, Vol. 123, p. 297.)

Extract of a letter from Captain Caldwell, dated at Wakitamiki, August 26, 1782.

“When I last had the pleasure of writing you, I expected to have struck at Wheeling as I was on my march for that place, but was overtaken by a Messenger from the Shawnese, who informed me that the Enemy was on their march for their Country, which obliged me to turn their way, and to my great mortification found the alarm false & that it was owing to a Gondals coming up to the mouth of Licking Creek, and landing some men upon the South side of the Ohio which when the Indians saw supposed it must be Clark. It would have been a lucky circumstance if they had come on, as I had eleven hundred Indians on the ground, and three hundred within a days march of me. When the Report was contradicted They mostly left us, many of them had left their Towns no way equipped for War, as they expected as well as myself to fight in a few days, notwithstanding I was determined to pay the Enemy a visit with as many Indians as would follow me: accordingly I crossed the Ohio with three hundred Indians & Rangers, and Marched for Bryants Station on Kentuck, and surrounded the Fort the 15th in the morning, & tried to draw ’em out by sending up a small party to try to take a Prisoner and shew themselves, but the Indians were in too great a hurry and the whole shewed too soon—I then saw it was in vain to wait any longer and so drew nigh the Fort, burnt 3 Houses which are part of the Fort but the wind being contrary prevented it having the desired effect Killed upward of 300 Hogs, 150 Head of Cattle, and a number of Sheep, took a number of Horses, pull’d up and destroy’d their Potatoes, cut down a great deal of their Corn, burn’t their Hemp and did other considerable damage—by the Indians exposing themselves too much we had 5 Killed & 2 Wounded.

We retreated the 16th and came as far as Bid-die’s former Station, when nigh 100 Indians left me, as they went after their things they left at the Forks of Licking, and I took the Road by the blue Licks as it was nigher and the ground more advantageous in case the Enemy should pursue us—got to the Licks on the 17th and encamped.

On the 18th in the morning, one of my party that was watching the Road came in and told me the Enemy was within a mile of us, upon which I drew up to fight them—at 1/2 past seven they advanced in three Divisions in good order, they had spied some of us and it was the very place they expected to overtake us.—We had but fired one Gun till they gave us a Volley and stood to it very well for some time, ’till we rushed in upon them, when they broke immediately.—We pursued for about two miles, and as the enemy was mostly on horseback, it was in vain to follow further.

We killed and took one hundred and Forty-six. Amongst the killed is Col. Todd the Commandr. Col. Boon, Lt. Col. Trigg, Major Harlin who commanded their Infantry, Major Magara and a number more of their officers. Our loss is Monsr. La Bute killed, he died like a warrior fighting Arm to Arm, six Indians killed and ten wounded—The Indians behaved extremely well, and no people could behave better than both Officers & men in general—The Indians I had with me were the Wyandots and Lake Indians—The Wyandots furnished me with what provisions I wanted, and behaved extremely well.”

APPENDIX C—TO CHAPTER VI

IT HAS been so habitual among American writers to praise all the deeds, good, bad, and indifferent, of our Revolutionary ancestors, and to belittle and make light of what we have recently done, that most men seem not to know that the Union and Confederate troops in the Civil War fought far more stubbornly and skilfully than did their forefathers at the time of the Revolution. It is impossible to estimate too highly the devoted patriotism and statesmanship of the founders of our national life; and however high we rank Washington, I am confident that we err, if anything, in not ranking him high enough, for on the whole the world has never seen a man deserving to be placed above him; but we certainly have overestimated the actual fighting qualities of the Revolutionary troops, and have never laid enough stress on the folly and jealousy with which the States behaved during the contest. In 1776 the Americans were still in the gristle; and the feats of arms they then performed do not bear comparison with what they did in the prime of their lusty youth, eighty or ninety years later. The Continentals who had been long drilled by Washington and Greene were most excellent troops; but they never had a chance to show at their best, because they were always mixed in with a mass of poor soldiers, either militia or just-enlisted regulars.

The resolute determination of the Americans to win, their trust in the justice of their cause, their refusal to be cast down by defeat, the success with which they overran and conquered the West at the very time they were struggling for life or death in the East, the heroic grandeur of their great leader—for all this they deserve full credit. But the militia who formed the bulk of the Revolutionary armies did not generally fight well. Sometimes, as at Bunker’s Hill and King’s Mountain, they did excellently, and they did better, as a rule, than similar European bodies—than the Spanish and Portuguese peasants in 1807-12, for instance. At that time it was believed that the American militia could not fight at all; this was a mistake, and the British paid dearly for making it; but the opposite belief, that militia could be generally depended upon, led to quite as bad blunders, and the politicians of the Jeffersonian school who encouraged the idea made us in our turn pay dearly for our folly in after years, as at Bladensburg and along the Niagara frontier in 1812. The Revolutionary War proved that hastily gathered militia, justly angered and strung to high purpose, could sometimes whip regulars, a feat then deemed impossible; but it lacked very much of proving that they would usually do this. Moreover, even the stalwart fighters who followed Clark and Sevier, and who did most important and valorous service, can not point to any one such desperate deed of fierce courage as that of the doomed Texans under Bowie and Davy Crockett in the Alamo.

A very slight comparison of the losses suffered in the battles of the Revolution with those suffered in the battles of the Civil War is sufficient to show the superiority of the soldiers who fought in the latter (and a comparison of the tactics and other features of the conflicts will make the fact even clearer). No Revolutionary regiment or brigade suffered such a loss as befell the 1st Minnesota at Gettysburg, where it lost 215 out of 263 men, 82 per cent; the 9th Illinois at Shiloh, where it lost 366 out of 578 men, 63 per cent; the 1st Maine at Petersburg, which lost 632 out of 950 men, 67 per cent; or Caldwell’s brigade of New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania troops, which, in Hancock’s attack at Fredericksburg, lost 949 out of 1,947 men, 48 per cent; or, turning to the Southern soldiers, such a loss as that of the 1st Texas at Antietam, when 186 out of 226 men fell, 82 per cent; or of the 26th North Carolina, which, at Gettysburg, lost 588 out of 820 men, 72 per cent; or the 8th Tennessee, at Murfreesboro, which lost 306 out of 444 men, or 68 per cent; or Garnett’s brigade of Virginians, which, in Pickett’s charge, lost 941 men out of 1,427, or 65 per cent.

There were over a hundred regiments, and not a few brigades, in the Union and Confederate armies, each of which in some one action suffered losses averaging as heavy as the above. The Revolutionary armies can not show such a roll of honor as this. Still, it is hardly fair to judge them by this comparison, for the Civil War saw the most bloody and desperate fighting that has occurred of late years. None of the European contests since the close of the Napoleonic struggles can be compared to it. Thus the Light Brigade at Balaclava lost only 37 per cent, or 247 men out of 673, while the Guards at Inkermann lost but 45 per cent, or 594 out of 1,331; and the heaviest German losses in the Franco-Prussian war were but 49 and 46 per cent, occurring respectively to the Third Westphalian Regiment at Mars-le-Tours, and the Garde-Schutzen battalion at Metz.

These figures are taken from “Regimental Losses in the American Civil War,” by Col. Wm. F. Fox, Albany, 1881; the loss in each instance includes few or no prisoners save in the cases of Garnett’s brigade and of the Third Westphalian Regiment.

BOOK THREE

THE WAR IN THE NORTHWEST (CONTINUED)

CHAPTER VII

ROBERTSON FOUNDS THE CUMBERLAND SETTLEMENT, 1779–1780

ROBERTSON HAD no share in the glory of King’s Mountain, and no part in the subsequent career of the men who won it; for, at the time, he was doing his allotted work, a work of at least equal importance, in a different field. The year before the mountaineers faced Ferguson, the man who had done more than any one in founding the settlements from which the victors came, had once more gone into the wilderness to build a new and even more typical frontier commonwealth, the westernmost of any yet founded by the backwoodsmen.

Robertson had been for ten years a leader among the Holston and Watauga people. He had at different times played the foremost part in organizing the civil government and in repelling outside attack. He had been particularly successful in his dealings with the Indians, and by his missions to them had managed to keep the peace unbroken on more than one occasion when a war would have been disastrous to the whites. He was prosperous and successful in his private affairs; nevertheless, in 1779, the restless craving for change and adventure surged so strongly in his breast that it once more drove him forth to wander in the forest. In the true border temper he determined to abandon the home he had made, and to seek out a new one hundreds of miles further in the heart of the hunting-grounds of the red warriors.

The point pitched upon was the beautiful country lying along the great bend of the Cumberland. Many adventurous settlers were anxious to accompany Robertson, and, like him, to take their wives and children with them into the new land. It was agreed that a small party of explorers should go first in the early spring to plant corn, that the families might have it to eat when they followed in the fall.

The spot was already well known to hunters. Who had first visited it can not be said; though tradition has kept the names of several among the many who at times halted there while on their wanderings.[1] Old Kasper Mansker and others had made hunting trips thither for ten years past; and they had sometimes met the creole trappers from the Illinois. When Mansker first went to the Bluffs,[2] in 1769, the buffaloes were more numerous than he had ever seen them before; the ground literally shook under the gallop of the mighty herds, they crowded in dense throngs round the licks, and the forest resounded with their grunting bellows. He and other woodsmen came back there off and on, hunting and trapping, and living in huts made of buffalo hides; just such huts as the hunters dwelt in on the Little Missouri and Powder Rivers as late as 1883, except that the plainsmen generally made dug-outs in the sides of the buttes and used the hides only for the roofs and fronts. So the place was well known, and the reports of the hunters had made many settlers eager to visit it, though as yet no regular path led thither. In 1778 the first permanent settler arrived in the person of a hunter named Spencer, who spent the following winter entirely alone in this remote wilderness, living in a hollow sycamore-tree. Spencer was a giant in his day, a man huge in body and limb, all whose life had been spent in the wilderness. He came to the bend of the Cumberland from Kentucky in the early spring, being in search of good land on which to settle. Other hunters were with him, and they stayed some time. A creole trapper from the Wabash was then living in a cabin on the south side of the river. He did not meet the new-comers; but one day he saw the huge moccasin tracks of Spencer, and on the following morning the party passed close by his cabin in chase of a wounded buffalo, halloing and shouting as they dashed through the underwood. Whether he thought them Indians, or whether, as is more likely, he shared the fear and dislike felt by most of the Creoles for the American backwoodsmen, can not be said; but certainly he left his cabin, swam the river, and plunging into the forest, straightway fled to his kinsfolk on the banks of the Wabash. Spencer was soon left by his companions; though one of them stayed with him a short time, helping him to plant a field of corn. Then this man, too, wished to return. He had lost his hunting-knife; so Spencer went with him to the barrens of Kentucky, put him on the right path, and breaking his own knife, gave his departing friend a piece of the metal. The undaunted old hunter himself returned to the banks of the Cumberland, and sojourned throughout the fall and winter in the neighborhood of the little clearing on which he had raised the corn crop; a strange, huge, solitary man, self-reliant, unflinching, cut off from all his fellows by endless leagues of shadowy forest. Thus he dwelt alone in the vast dim wastes, wandering whithersoever he listed through the depths of the melancholy and wintry woods, sleeping by his camp-fire or in the hollow tree-trunk, ever ready to do battle against brute or human foe—a stark and sombre harbinger of the oncoming civilization.

Spencer’s figure, seen through the mist that shrouds early Western history, is striking and picturesque in itself; yet its chief interest lies in the fact that he was but a type of many other men whose lives were no less lonely and dangerous. He had no qualities to make him a leader when settlements sprang up around him. To the end of his days he remained a solitary hunter and Indian fighter, spurning restraint and comfort, and seeking the strong excitement of danger to give zest to his life. Even in the time of the greatest peril from the savages he would not stay shut up in the forts, but continued his roving, wandering life, trusting to his own quick senses, wonderful strength, and iron nerves. He even continued to lie out at night, kindling a fire, and then lying down to sleep far from it.[3]

Early in the year 1779 a leader of men came to the place where the old hunter had roamed and killed game; and with the new-comer came those who were to possess the land. Robertson left the Watauga settlements soon after the spring opened,[4] with eight companions, one of them a negro. He followed Boone’s trace,—the Wilderness Road,—through Cumberland Gap, and across the Cumberland River. Then he struck off southwest through the wilderness, lightening his labor by taking the broad, well-beaten buffalo trails whenever they led in his direction; they were very distinct near the pools and springs, and especially going to and from the licks. The adventurers reached the bend of the Cumberland without mishap, and fixed on the neighborhood of the Bluff, the ground near the French Lick, as that best suited for their purpose; and they planted a field of corn on the site of the future forted village of Nashborough. A few days after their arrival they were joined by another batch of hunter-settlers, who had come out under the leadership of Kasper Mansker.

As soon as the corn was planted and cabins put up, most of the intending settlers returned to their old homes to bring out their families, leaving three of their number “to keep the buffaloes out of the corn.” [5] Robertson himself first went north through the wilderness to see George Rogers Clark in Illinois, to purchase cabin-rights from him. This act gives an insight into at least some of the motives that influenced the adventurers. Doubtless they were impelled largely by sheer restlessness and love of change and excitement;[6] and these motives would probably have induced them to act as they did, even had there been no others. But another and most powerful spring of action was the desire to gain land—not merely land for settlement, but land for speculative purposes. Wild land was then so abundant that the quantity literally seemed inexhaustible; and it was absolutely valueless until settled. Our forefathers may well be pardoned for failing to see that it was of more importance to have it owned in small lots by actual settlers than to have it filled up quickly under a system of huge grants to individuals or corporations. Many wise and good men honestly believed that they would benefit the country at the same time that they enriched themselves by acquiring vast tracts of virgin wilderness, and then proceeding to people them. There was a rage for land speculation and land companies of every kind. The private correspondence of almost all the public men of the period, from Washington, Madison, and Gouverneur Morris down, is full of the subject. Innumerable people of position and influence dreamed of acquiring untold wealth in this manner. Almost every man of note was actually or potentially a land speculator; and in turn almost every prominent pioneer from Clark and Boone to Shelby and Robertson was either himself one of the speculators or an agent for those who were. Many people did not understand the laws on the subject, or hoped to evade them; and the hope was as strong in the breast of the hunter, who made a “tomahawk claim” by blazing a few trees, and sold it for a small sum to a new-comer, as in that of the well-to-do-schemer, who bought an Indian title for a song, and then got what he could from all outsiders who came in to dwell on the land.

This speculative spirit was a powerful stimulus to the settlement not only of Kentucky, but of middle Tennessee. Henderson’s claim included the Cumberland country, and when North Carolina annulled his rights, she promised him a large but indefinitely located piece of land in their place. He tried to undersell the State in the land market, and undoubtedly his offers had been among the main causes that induced Robertson and his associates to go to the Cumberland when they did. But at the time it was uncertain whether Cumberland lay in Virginia or North Carolina, as the line was not run by the surveyors until the following spring; and Robertson went up to see Clark, because it was rumored that the latter had the disposal of Virginia “cabin-rights”; under which each man could, for a small sum, purchase a thousand acres, on condition of building a cabin and raising a crop. However, as it turned out, he might have spared himself the journey, for the settlement proved to be well within the Carolina boundary.

In the fall very many men came out to the new settlement, guided thither by Robertson and Mansker; the former persuading a number who were bound to Kentucky to come to the Cumberland instead. Among them were two or three of the Long Hunters, whose wanderings had done so much to make the country known. Robertson’s special partner was a man named John Donelson. The latter went by water and took a large party of immigrants, including all the women and children, down the Tennessee, and thence up the Ohio and Cumberland to the Bluff or French Lick.[7] Among them were Robertson’s entire family, and Donelson’s daughter Rachel, the future wife of Andrew Jackson, who missed by so narrow a margin being mistress of the White House. Robertson, meanwhile, was to lead the rest of the men by land, so that they should get there first and make ready for the coming of their families.

Robertson’s party started in the fall, being both preceded and followed by other companies of settlers, some of whom were accompanied by their wives and children. Cold weather of extraordinary severity set in during November; for this was the famous “hard winter” of ’79-80, during which the Kentucky settlers suffered so much. They were not molested by Indians, and reached the Bluff about Christmas. The river was frozen solid, and they all crossed the ice in a body; when in mid-stream the ice jarred, and—judging from the report—the jar or crack must have gone miles up and down the stream; but the ice only settled a little and did not break. By January first there were over two hundred people scattered on both sides of the river. In Robertson’s company was a man named John Rains, who brought with him twenty-one horned cattle and seventeen horses; the only cattle and horses which any of the immigrants succeeded in bringing to the Cumberland. But he was not the only man who had made the attempt. One of the immigrants who went in Donelson’s flotilla, Daniel Dunham by name, offered his brother John, who went by land, £100 to drive along his horses and cattle. John accepted, and tried his best to fulfil his share of the bargain; but he was seemingly neither a very expert woodsman nor yet a good stock hand. There is no form of labor more arduous and dispiriting than driving unruly and unbroken stock along a faint forest or mountain trail, especially in bad weather; and this the would-be drover speedily found out. The animals would not follow the trail; they incessantly broke away from it, got lost, scattered in the brush, and stampeded at night. Finally the unfortunate John, being, as he expressed it, nearly “driven mad by the drove,” abandoned them all in the wilderness.[8]

The settlers who came by water passed through much greater peril and hardship. By a stroke of good fortune the journal kept by Donelson, the leader of the expedition, has been preserved.[9] As with all the other recorded wanderings and explorations of these backwoods adventurers, it must be remembered that while this trip was remarkable in itself, it is especially noteworthy because, out of many such, it is the only one of which we have a full account. The adventures that befell Donelson’s company differed in degree, but not in kind, from those that befell the many similar flotillas that followed or preceded him. From the time that settlers first came to the upper Tennessee valley occasional hardy hunters had floated down the stream in pirogues, or hollowed out tree-trunks. Before the Revolution a few restless emigrants had adopted this method of reaching Natchez; some of them made the long and perilous trip in safety, others were killed by the Chickamaugas or else foundered in the whirlpools, or on the shoals. The spring before Donelson started, a party of men, women and children, in forty canoes or pirogues, went down the Tennessee to settle in the newly conquered Illinois country, and skirmished with the Cherokees on their way.[10]

It is curious that none of the Tennessee annalists have noticed the departure of this expedition; very, very few of the deeds and wanderings of the old frontiersmen have been recorded; and in consequence historians are apt to regard these few as being exceptional, instead of typical. Donelson was merely one of a hundred leaders of flotillas that went down the Western rivers at this time.

Donelson’s flotilla, after being joined by a number of other boats, especially at the mouth of the Clinch, consisted of some thirty craft, all told—flat-boats, dug-outs, and canoes. There were probably two or three hundred people, perhaps many more, in the company; among them, as the journal records, “James Robertson’s lady and children,” the latter to the number of five. The chief boat, the flagship of the flotilla, was the Adventure, a great scow, in which there were over thirty men, besides the families of some of them.

They embarked at Holston, Long Island, on December 22d, but falling water and heavy frosts detained them two months, and the voyage did not really begin until they left Cloud Creek on February 27, 1780. The first ten days were uneventful. The Adventure spent an afternoon and night on a shoal, until the water fortunately rose, and, all the men getting out, the clumsy scow was floated off. Another boat was driven on the point of an island and sunk, her crew being nearly drowned; whereupon the rest of the flotilla put to shore, the sunken boat was raised and bailed out, and most of her cargo recovered. At one landing-place a man went out to hunt, and got lost, not being taken up again for three days, though “many guns were fired to fetch him in,” and the four-pounder on the Adventure was discharged for the same purpose. A negro became “much frosted in his feet and legs, of which he died.” Where the river was wide a strong wind and high sea forced the whole flotilla to lay to, for the sake of the smaller craft. This happened on March 7th, just before coming to the uppermost Chickamauga town; and that night, the wife of one Ephraim Peyton, who had himself gone with Robertson overland, was delivered of a child. She was in a boat whose owner was named Jonathan Jennings.

The next morning they soon came to an Indian village on the south shore. The Indians made signs of friendliness, and two men started toward them in a canoe which the Adventure had in tow, while the flotilla drew up on the opposite side of the river. But a half-breed and some Indians jumped into a pirogue, paddled out to meet the two messengers, and advised them to return to their comrades, which they did. Several canoes then came off from the shore to the flotilla. The Indians who were in them seemed friendly and were pleased with the presents they received; but while these were being distributed the whites saw a number of other canoes putting off, loaded with armed warriors, painted black and red. The half-breed instantly told the Indians round about to paddle to the shore, and warned the whites to push off at once, at the same time giving them some instructions about the river. The armed Indians went down along the shore for some time as if to intercept them; but at last they were seemingly left behind.

In a short time another Indian village was reached, where the warriors tried in vain to lure the whites ashore; and as the boats were hugging the opposite bank, they were suddenly fired at by a party in ambush, and one man slain. Immediately afterward a much more serious tragedy occurred. There was with the flotilla a boat containing twenty-eight men, women, and children, among whom small-pox had broken out. To guard against infection, it was agreed that it should keep well in the rear; being warned each night by the sound of a horn when it was time to go into camp.

As this forlorn boat-load of unfortunates came along, far behind the others, the Indians, seeing its defenceless position, sallied out in their canoes, and butchered or captured all who were aboard. Their cries were distinctly heard by the rearmost of the other craft, who could not stem the current and come to their rescue. But a dreadful retribution fell on the Indians; for they were infected with the disease of their victims, and for some months virulent small-pox raged among many of the bands of Creeks and Cherokees. When stricken by the disease, the savages first went into the sweat-houses, and when heated to madness, plunged into the cool streams, and so perished in multitudes.

When the boats entered the Narrows they had lost sight of the Indians on shore, and thought they had left them behind. A man, who was in a canoe, had gone aboard one of the larger boats with his family, for the sake of safety while passing through the rough water. His canoe was towed alongside, and in the rapids it was overturned, and the cargo lost. The rest of the company, pitying his distress over the loss of all his worldly goods, landed, to see if they could not help him recover some of his property. Just as they got out on the shore to walk back, the Indians suddenly appeared almost over them, on the high cliffs opposite, and began to fire, causing a hurried retreat to the boats. For some distance the Indians lined the bluffs, firing from the heights into the boats below. Yet only four people were wounded, and they not dangerously. One of them was a girl named Nancy Gower. When, by the sudden onslaught of the Indians, the crew of the boat in which she was were thrown into dismay, she took the helm and steered, exposed to the fire of the savages. A ball went through the upper part of one of her thighs, but she neither flinched nor uttered any cry; and it was not known that she was wounded until, after the danger was past, her mother saw the blood soaking through her clothes. She recovered, married one of the frontiersmen, and lived for fifty years afterward, long enough to see all the wilderness filled with flourishing and populous States.

One of the clumsy craft, however, did not share the good fortune that befell the rest, in escaping with so little loss and damage. Jonathan Jennings’ boat, in which was Mrs. Peyton, with her new-born baby, struck on a rock at the upper end of the whirl, the swift current rendering it impossible for the others to go to his assistance; and they drifted by, leaving him to his fate. The Indians soon turned their whole attention to him, and from the bluffs opened a most galling fire upon the disabled boat. He returned it as well as he could, keeping them somewhat in check, for he was a most excellent marksman. At the same time he directed his two negroes, a man and woman, his nearly grown son, and a young man who was with him, to lighten the boat by throwing his goods into the river. Before this was done, the negro man, the son, and the other young man most basely jumped into the river, and swam ashore. It is satisfactory to record that at least two of the three dastards met the fate they deserved. The negro was killed in the water, and the other two captured, one of them being afterward burned at the stake, while the other, it is said, was ultimately released. Meanwhile Mrs. Jennings, assisted by the negro woman and Mrs. Peyton, actually succeeded in shoving the lightened boat off the rock, though their clothes were cut in many places by the bullets; and they rapidly drifted out of danger. The poor little baby was killed in the hurry and confusion; but its mother, not eighteen hours from child-bed, in spite of the cold, wet, and exertion, kept in good health. Sailing by night as well as day, they caught up with the rest of the flotilla before dawn on the second morning afterward, the men being roused from their watch-fires by the cries of “help poor Jennings,” as the wretched and worn-out survivors in the disabled boat caught the first glimpse of the lights on shore.

Having successfully run the gauntlet of the Chickamauga banditti, the flotilla was not again molested by the Indians, save once when the boats that drifted near shore were fired on by a roving war party, and five men wounded. They ran over the great Muscle Shoals in about three hours without accident, though the boats scraped on the bottom here and there. The swift, broken water surged into high waves, and roared through the piles of driftwood that covered the points of the small islands, round which the currents ran in every direction; and those among the men who were unused to river-work were much relieved when they found themselves in safety. One night, after the fires had been kindled, the tired travelers were alarmed by the barking of the dogs. Fearing that Indians were near by, they hastily got into the boats and crossed to camp on the opposite shore. In the morning two of them returned to pick up some things that had been left; they found that the alarm had been false, for the utensils that had been overlooked in the confusion were undisturbed, and a negro who had been left behind in the hurry was still sleeping quietly by the camp-fires.

On the 20th of the month they reached the Ohio. Some of the boats then left for Natchez, and others for the Illinois country; while the remainder turned their prows up stream, to stem the rapid current—a task for which they were but ill-suited. The work was very hard, the provisions were nearly gone, and the crews were almost worn out by hunger and fatigue. On the 24th they entered the mouth of the Cumberland. The Adventure, the heaviest of all the craft, got much help from a small square-sail that was set in the bow.

Two days afterward the hungry party killed some buffalo, and feasted on the lean meat, and the next day they shot a swan “which was very delicious,” as Donelson recorded. Their meal was exhausted and they could make no more bread; but buffalo were plenty and they hunted them steadily for their meat; and they also made what some of them called “Shawnee salad” from a kind of green herb that grew in the bottoms.

On the last day of the month they met Col. Richard Henderson, who had just come out and was running the line between Virginia and North Carolina. The crews were so exhausted that the progress of the boats became very slow, and it was not until April 24th that they reached the Big Salt Lick, and found Robertson awaiting them. The long, toilsome, and perilous voyage had been brought to a safe end.

There were then probably nearly five hundred settlers on the Cumberland, one half of them being able-bodied men in the prime of life.[11] The central station, the capital of the little community, was that at the Bluff, where Robertson built a little stockaded hamlet and called it Nashborough;[12] it was of the usual type of small frontier forted town. Other stations were scattered along both sides of the river; some were stockades, others merely block-houses, with the yard and garden inclosed by stout palings. As with all similar border forts or stations, these were sometimes called by the name of the founder; more rarely they were named with reference to some natural object, such as the river, ford, or hill by which they were, or commemorated some deed, or the name of a man the frontiersmen held in honor; and occasionally they afforded true instances of clan-settlement and clan-nomenclature, several kindred families of the same name building a village which grew to be called after them. Among these Cumberland stations was Mansker’s (usually called Kasper’s or Gaspers—he was not particular how his name was spelled), Stone River, Bledsoe’s, Freedland’s, Eatons’, Clover-Bottom, and Fort Union.

As the country where they had settled belonged to no tribe of Indians, some of the people thought they would not be molested, and, being eager to take up the best lands, scattered out to live on separate claims. Robertson warned them that they would soon suffer from the savages; and his words speedily came true—whereupon the outlying cabins were deserted and all gathered within the stockades. In April roving parties of Delawares, Chickasaws, and Choctaws began to harass the settlement. As in Kentucky, so on the banks of the Cumberland, the Indians were the first to begin the conflict. The lands on which the whites settled were uninhabited, and were claimed as hunting-grounds by many hostile tribes; so that it is certain that no one tribe had any real title to them.

True to their customs and traditions, and to their race-capacity for self-rule, the settlers determined forthwith to organize some kind of government under which justice might be done among themselves, and protection afforded against outside attack. Not only had the Indians begun their ravages, but turbulent and disorderly whites were also causing trouble. Robertson, who had been so largely instrumental in founding the Watauga settlement, and giving it laws, naturally took the lead in organizing this, the second community which he had caused to spring up in the wilderness. He summoned a meeting of delegates from the various stations, to be held at Nashborough;[13] Henderson being foremost in advocating the adoption of the plan.

In fact, Henderson, the treaty-maker and land-speculator, whose purchase first gave the whites clear color of title to the valleys of the Kentucky and Cumberland, played somewhat the same part, though on a smaller scale, in the settlement made by Robertson as in that made by Boone. He and the Virginian commissioner, Walker, had surveyed the boundary line and found that the Cumberland settlements were well to the south of it. He then claimed the soil as his under the Cherokee deed; and disposed of it to the settlers who contracted to pay ten dollars a thousand acres. This was but a fraction of the State price, so the settlers were all eager to hold under Henderson’s deed; one of the causes of their coming out had been the chance of getting land so cheap. But Henderson’s claim was annulled by the legislature, and the satisfaction-piece of 200,000 acres allotted him was laid off elsewhere; so his contracts with the settlers came to nothing, and they eventually got title in the usual way from North Carolina. They suffered no loss in the matter, for they had merely given Henderson promises to pay when his title was made good.

The settlers, by their representatives, met together at Nashborough, and on May 1, 1780, entered into articles of agreement or a compact of government. It was doubtless drawn up by Robertson, with perhaps the help of Henderson, and was modeled upon what may be called the “constitution” of Watauga, with some hints from that of Transylvania.[14] The settlers ratified the deeds of their delegates on May 13th, when they signed the articles, binding themselves to obey them to the number of two hundred and fifty-six men. The signers practically guaranteed one another their rights in the land, and their personal security against wrong-doers; those who did not sign were treated as having no rights whatever—a proper and necessary measure as it was essential that the naturally lawless elements should be forced to acknowledge some kind of authority.

The compact provided that the affairs of the community should be administered by a Court or Committee of twelve Judges, Triers or General Arbitrators, to be elected in the different stations by vote of all the freemen in them who were over twenty-one years of age. Three of the Triers were to come from Nashborough, two from Mansker’s, two from Bledsoe’s, and one from each of five other named stations.[15] Whenever the freemen of any station were dissatisfied with their Triers, they could at once call a new election, at which others might be chosen in their stead. The Triers had no salaries, but the Clerk of the Court was allowed some very small fees, just enough to pay for the pens, ink, and paper, all of them scarce commodities.[16] The Court had jurisdiction in all cases of conflict over land titles; a land office being established and an entry taker appointed. Over half of the compact was devoted to the rules of the land office. The Court, acting by a majority of its members, was to have jurisdiction for the recovery of debt or damages, and to be allowed to tax costs. Three Triers were competent to make a Court to decide a case where the debt or damage was a hundred dollars or less; and there was no appeal from their decision. For a larger sum an appeal lay to the whole Court. The Court appointed whomsoever it pleased to see decisions executed. It had power to punish all offences against the peace of the community, all misdemeanors and criminal acts, provided only that its decisions did not go so far as to affect the life of the criminal. If the misdeed of the accused was such as to be dangerous to the State, or one “for which the benefit of clergy was taken away by law,” he was to be bound and sent under guard to some place where he could be legally dealt with. The Court levied fines, payable in money or provisions, entered up judgments and awarded executions, and granted letters of administration upon estates of deceased persons, and took bonds “payable to the chairman of the Committee.” The expenses were to be paid proportionately by the various settlers. It was provided, in view of the Indian incursions, that the militia officers elected at the various stations should have power to call out the militia when they deemed it necessary to repel or pursue the enemy. They were also given power to fine such men as disobeyed them, and to impress horses if need be; if damaged, the horses were to be paid for by the people of the station in the proportion the Court might direct. It was expressly declared that the compact was designed as a “temporary method of restraining the licentious”; that the settlement did not desire to be exempt from the ratable share of the expense for the Revolutionary War, and earnestly asked that North Carolina would immediately make it part of the State, erecting it into a county. Robertson was elected chairman of the Court, and colonel of the militia, being thus made both civil and military commandant of the settlement. In common with the other Triers he undertook the solemnization of marriages; and these were always held legal, which was fortunate, as it was a young and vigorous community, of which the members were much given to early wedlock.

Thus a little commonwealth, a self-governing state, was created. It was an absolute democracy, the majority of freemen of full age in each stockade having power in every respect, and being able not only to elect, but to dismiss their delegates at any moment. Their own good sense and a feeling of fair play could be depended upon to protect the rights of the minority, especially as a minority of such men would certainly not tolerate anything even remotely resembling tyranny. They had formed a representative government in which the legislative and judicial functions were not separated, and were even to a large extent combined with the executive. They had proceeded in an eminently practical manner, having modeled their system on what was to them the familiar governmental unit of the county with its county court and county militia officers. They made the changes that their peculiar position required, grafting the elective and representative systems on the one they adopted, and of course enlarging the scope of the court’s action. Their compact was thus in some sort an unconscious reproduction of the laws and customs of the old-time court-leet, profoundly modified to suit the peculiar needs of backwoods life, the intensely democratic temper of the pioneers and above all the military necessities of their existence. They had certain theories of liberty and justice; but they were too shrewd and hard-headed to try to build up a government on an entirely new foundation, when they had ready to hand materials with which they were familiar. They knew by experience the workings of the county system; all they did was to alter the immediate channel from which the court drew its powers, and to adapt the representation to the needs of a community where constant warfare obliged the settlers to gather in little groups, which served as natural units.

When the settlers first came to the country they found no Indians living in it, no signs of cultivation or cleared land, and nothing to show that for ages past it had been inhabited. It was a vast plain, covered with woods and canebrakes, through which the wild herds had beaten out broad trails. The only open places were the licks, sometimes as large as corn-fields, where the hoofs of the game had trodden the ground bare of vegetation, and channeled its surface with winding seams and gullies. It is even doubtful if the spot of bare ground which Mansker called an “old field” or sometimes a “Chickasaw old field” was not merely one of these licks. Buffalo, deer, and bear abounded; elk, wolves, and panthers were plentiful.

Yet there were many signs that in long bygone times a numerous population had dwelt in the land. Round every spring were many graves, built in a peculiar way, and covered eight or ten inches deep by mould. In some places there were earth-covered foundations of ancient walls and embankments that inclosed spaces of eight or ten acres. The Indians knew as little as the whites about these long-vanished mound-builders, and were utterly ignorant of the race to which they had belonged.[17]

For some months the whites who first arrived dwelt in peace. But in the spring, hunting and war parties from various tribes began to harass the settlers. Unquestionably the savages felt jealous of the white hunters, who were killing and driving away the game, precisely as they all felt jealous of one another, and for the same reason. The Chickasaws in particular were much irritated by the fort Clark had built at Iron Bank, on the Mississippi. But the most powerful motive for the attacks was doubtless simply the desire for scalps and plunder. They gathered from different quarters to assail the colonists, just as the wild beasts gathered to prey on the tame herds.

The Indians began to commit murders, kill the stock, and drive off the horses in April, and their ravages continued unceasingly throughout the year. Among the slain was a son of Robertson, and also the unfortunate Jonathan Jennings, the man who had suffered such loss when his boat was passing the whirl of the Tennessee River. The settlers were shot as they worked on their clearings, gathered the corn crops, or ventured outside the walls of the stockades. Hunters were killed as they stooped to drink at the springs, or lay in wait at the licks. They were lured up to the Indians by imitations of the gobbling of a turkey or the cries of wild beasts. They were regularly stalked as they still-hunted the game, or were ambushed as they returned with their horses laden with meat. The inhabitants of one station were all either killed or captured. Robertson led pursuing parties after one or two of the bands, and recovered some plunder; and once or twice small marauding parties were met and scattered, with some loss, by the hunters. But, on the whole, very little could be done at first to parry or revenge the strokes of the Indians.[18]

Horses and cattle had been brought into the new settlement in some number during the year; but the savages killed or drove off most of them, shooting the hogs and horned stock, and stealing the riding animals. The loss of the milch cows in particular, was severely felt by the women. Moreover, there were heavy freshets, flooding the low bottoms on which the corn had been planted, and destroying most of the crop.

These accumulated disasters wrought the greatest discouragement among the settlers. Many left the country, and most of the remainder, when midsummer was past, began to urge that they should all go back in a body to the old settlements. The panic became very great. One by one the stockades were deserted, until finally all the settlers who remained were gathered in Nashborough and Freelands.[19] The Cumberland country would have been abandoned to the Indians, had Robertson not shown himself to be exactly the man for whom the crisis called.

Robertson was not a dashing, brilliant Indian fighter and popular frontier leader, like Sevier. He had rather the qualities of Boone, with the difference that he was less a wandering hunter and explorer, and better fitted to be head of a settled community. He was far-seeing, tranquil, resolute, unshaken by misfortune and disaster; a most trustworthy man, with a certain severe fortitude of temper. All people naturally turned to him in time of panic, when the ordinarily bold and daring became cowed and confused. The straits to which the settlers were reduced, and their wild clamor for immediate flight, the danger from the Indians, the death of his own son all combined failed to make him waver one instant in his purpose. He strongly urged on the settlers the danger of flight through the wilderness. He did not attempt to make light of the perils that confronted them if they remained, but he asked them to ponder well if the beauty and fertility of the land did not warrant some risk being run to hold it, now that it was won. They were at last in a fair country fitted for the homes of their children. Now was the time to keep it. If they abandoned it, they would lose all the advantages they had gained, and would be forced to suffer the like losses and privations if they ever wished to retake possession of it or of any similar tract of land. He, at least, would not turn back, but would stay to the bitter end.

His words and his steadfast bearing gave heart to the settlers, and they no longer thought of flight. As their corn had failed them they got their food from the woods. Some gathered quantities of walnuts, hickory-nuts, and shellbarks, and the hunters wrought havoc among the vast herds of game. During the early winter one party of twenty men that went up Caney Fork on a short trip, killed one hundred and five bears, seventy-five buffaloes, and eighty-seven deer, and brought the flesh and hides back to the stockades in canoes; so that through the winter there was no lack of jerked and smoke-dried meat.

The hunters were very accurate marksmen; game was plenty, and not shy, and so they got up close and rarely wasted a shot. Moreover, their smallbore rifles took very little powder; in fact the need of excessive economy in the use of ammunition when on their long hunting-trips was one of the chief reasons for the use of small bores. They therefore used comparatively little ammunition. Nevertheless, by the beginning of winter both powder and bullets began to fail. In this emergency Robertson again came to the front to rescue the settlement he had founded and preserved. He was accustomed to making long, solitary journeys through the forest, unmindful of the Indians; he had been one of the first to come from North Carolina to Watauga; he had repeatedly been on perilous missions to the Cherokees; he had the previous year gone north to the Illinois country to meet Clark. He now announced that he would himself go to Kentucky and bring back the needed ammunition; and at once set forth on his journey, across the long stretches of snow-powdered barrens, and desolate, Indian-haunted woodland.

[1] One Stone or Stoner, perhaps Boone’s old associate, is the first whose name is given in the books. But in both Kentucky and Tennessee it is idle to try to find out exactly who the first explorers were. They were unlettered woodsmen; it is only by chance that some of their names have been kept and others lost; the point to be remembered is that many hunters were wandering over the land at the same time, that they drifted to many different places, and that now and then an accident preserved the name of some hunter and of some place he visited.

[2] The locality where Nashborough was built, was sometimes spoken of as the Bluffs, and sometimes as the French Lick.

[3] “Southwestern Monthly,” Nashville, 1852, Vol. II. General Hall’s narrative.

[4] It is very difficult to reconcile the dates of these earlymovements; even the contemporary documents are often a little vague, while Haywood, Ramsey, and Putnam are frequently months out of the way. Apparently Robertson stayed as commissioner in Chota until February or March, 1779, when he gave warning of the intended raid of the Chickamaugas, and immediately afterward came back to the settlements and started out for the Cumberland, before Shelby left on his Chickamauga expedition. But it is possible that he had left Chota before, and that another man was there as commissioner at the time of the Chickamauga raid which was followed by Shelby’s counter-stroke.

[5] Haywood, 83.

[6] Phelan, p. in, fails to do justice to these motives, while very properly insisting on what earlier historians ignored, the intense desire for land speculation.

[7] The plan was that Robertson should meet this party at the Muscle Shoals, and that they should go from thence overland; but owing to the severity of the winter, Robertson could not get to the shoals.

[8] MSS. on “Dunham Pioneers,” in Nashville Hist. Society. Daniel, a veteran stockman, was very angry when he heard what had happened.

[9] Original MS. “Journal of Voyage intended by God’s permission in the good boat Adventure from Fort Patrick Henry of Holston River to the French Salt Springs on Cumberland River, kept by John Donelson.” An abstract, with some traditional statements interwoven, is given by Haywood; the journal itself, with some inaccuracies, and the name of the writer misspelt by Ramsey; and in much better and fuller shape by A. N. Putnam in his “History of Middle Tennessee.” I follow the original, in the Nash. Hist. Soc.

[10] State Department MSS., No. 51, Vol. II, p. 45:

“James Colbert to Chas. Stuart

“Chickasaw Nation, May 25, 1779.

“Sir,—I was this day informed that there is forty large Cannoes loaded with men women and children passed by here down the Cherokee River who on their way down they took a Dellaway Indian prisoner & kept him till they found out what Nation he was of—they told him they had come from Long Island and were on their way to Illinois with an intent to settle—Sir I have some reason to think they are a party of Rebels My reason is this after they left the Dellaway Indian at liberty they met with some Cherokees whom they endeavoured to decoy, but finding they would not be decoyed they fired on them but they all made their Escape with the Loss of their arms and ammunition and one fellow wounded, who arrived yesterday. The Dellaway informs me that Lieut. Governor Hamilton is defeated and himself taken prisoner,” etc.

[11] Two hundred and fifty-six names are subscribed to the compact of government; and in addition there were the women, children, the few slaves, and such men as did not sign.

[12] After A. Nash; he was the Governor of North Carolina; where he did all he could on the patriot side. See Gates MSS. Sept. 7, 1780.

[13] It is to Putnam that we owe the publication of the compact of government, and the full details of the methods and proceedings by which it was organized and carried on. See “History of Middle Tennessee,” pp. 84-103.

[14] Phelan, the first historian who really grasped what this movement meant, and to what it was due, gives rather too much weight to the part Henderson played. Henderson certainly at this time did not aspire to form a new State on the Cumberland; the compact especially provided for the speedy admission of Cumberland as a county of North Carolina. The marked difference between the Transylvania and the Cumberland “constitutions,” and the close agreement of the latter with the Watauga articles, assuredly point to Robertson as the chief author.

[15] Putnam speaks of these men as “notables”; apparently they called themselves as above. Putnam’s book contains much very valuable information; but it is written in most curious style and he interlards it with outside matter; much that he puts in quotation marks is apparently his own material. It is difficult to make out whether his “tribunal of notables” is his own expression or a quotation, but apparently it is the former.

[16] Haywood, 126.

[17] Haywood. At present it is believed that the mound-builders were Indians. Haywood is the authority for the early Indian wars of the Cumberland settlement, Putnam supplying some information.

[18] Putnam, p. 107, talks as if the settlers were utterly unused to Indian warfare, saying that until the first murder occurred, in this spring, “few, if any” of them had ever gazed on the victim of scalping-knife and tomahawk. This is a curiously absurd statement. Many of the settlers were veteran Indian fighters. Almost all of them had been born and brought up on the frontier, amid a succession of Indian wars. It is, unfortunately, exceedingly difficult in Putnam’s book to distinguish the really valuable authentic information it contains from the interwoven tissue of matter written solely to suit his theory of dramatic effect. He puts in with equal gravity the “Articles of Agreement” and purely fictitious conversation, jokes, and the like. (See pp. 126, 144, and passim.)

[19] By some accounts there were also a few settlers left in Eaton’s Station; and Mansker’s was rarely entirely deserted for any length of time.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CUMBERLAND SETTLEMENTS TO THE CLOSE OF THE REVOLUTION, 1781–1783

ROBERTSON PASSED unharmed through the wilderness to Kentucky. There he procured plenty of powder, and without delay set out on his return journey to the Cumberland. As before, he traveled alone through the frozen woods, trusting solely to his own sharp senses for his safety.

In the evening of January 15, 1781, he reached Freeland’s Station, and was joyfully received by the inmates. They supped late, and then sat up for some time, talking over many matters. When they went to bed all were tired, and neglected to take the usual precautions against surprise; moreover, at that season they did not fear molestation. They slept heavily, none keeping watch. Robertson alone was wakeful and suspicious; and even during his light slumbers his keen and long-trained senses were on the alert.

At midnight all was still. The moon shone brightly down on the square block-houses and stockaded yard of the lonely little frontier fort; its rays lit up the clearing, and by contrast darkened the black shadows of the surrounding forest. None of the sleepers within the log-walls dreamed of danger. Yet their peril was imminent. An Indian war band was lurking near by, and was on the point of making an effort to carry Freeland’s Station by an attack in the darkness. In the dead of the night the attempt was made. One by one the warriors left the protection of the tangled wood-growth, slipped silently across the open space, and crouched under the heavy timber pickets of the palisades, until all had gathered together. Though the gate was fastened with a strong bar and chain, the dexterous savages finally contrived to open it.

In so doing they made a slight noise, which caught Robertson’s quick ear, as he lay on his buffalo-hide pallet. Jumping up he saw the gate open, and dusky figures gliding into the yard with stealthy swiftness. At his cry of “Indians,” and the report of his piece, the settlers sprang up, every man grasping the loaded arm by which he slept. From each log cabin the rifles cracked and flashed; and though the Indians were actually in the yard they had no cover, and the sudden and unexpected resistance caused them to hurry out much faster than they had come in. Robertson shot one of their number, and they in return killed a white man who sprang out-of-doors at the first alarm. When they were driven out the gate was closed after them; but they fired through the loopholes; especially into one of the block-houses, where the chinks had not been filled with mud, as in the others. They thus killed a negro, and wounded one or two other men; yet they were soon driven off. Robertson’s return had been at a most opportune moment. As so often before and afterward, he had saved the settlement from destruction.

Other bands of Indians joined the war party, and they continued to hover about the stations, daily inflicting loss and damage on the settlers. They burned down the cabins and fences, drove off the stock and killed the hunters, the women and children who ventured outside the walls, and the men who had gone back to their deserted stockades.[1]

On the 2d day of April another effort was made by a formidable war party to get possession of one of the two remaining stations—Freeland’s and Nashborough—and thus, at a stroke, drive the whites from the Cumberland district. This time Nashborough was the point aimed at.

A large body[2] of Cherokees approached the fort in the night, lying hid in the bushes, divided into two parties. In the morning three of them came near, fired at the fort, and ran off toward where the smaller party lay ambushed, in a thicket through which ran a little “branch.” Instantly twenty men mounted their horses and galloped after the decoys. As they overtook the fugitives they saw the Indians hid in the creek-bottom, and dismounted to fight, turning their horses loose. A smart interchange of shots followed, the whites having, if anything, rather the best of it, when the other and larger body of Indians rose from their hiding-place, in a clump of cedars, and, running down, formed between the combatants and the fort, intending to run into the latter, mixed with the fleeing riflemen. The only chance of the hemmed-in whites was to turn and try to force their way back through their far more numerous foes. This was a desperate venture, for their pieces were all discharged, and there was no time to reload them; but they were helped by two unexpected circumstances. Their horses had taken flight at the firing, and ran off toward the fort, passing to one side of the intervening line of Indians; and many of the latter, eager for such booty, ran off to catch them. Meanwhile, the remaining men in the fort saw what had happened, and made ready for defence, while all the women likewise snatched up guns or axes, and stood by loopholes and gate. The dogs in the fort were also taking a keen interest in what was going on. They were stout, powerful animals, some being hounds and others watch-dogs, but all accustomed to contests with wild beasts; and by instinct and training they mortally hated Indians. Seeing the line of savages drawn up between the fort and their masters, they promptly sallied out and made a most furious onset upon their astonished foes. Taking advantage of this most opportune diversion, the whites ran through the lines and got into the fort, the Indians being completely occupied in defending themselves from the dogs. Five of the whites were killed, and they carried two wounded men into the fort. Another man, when almost in safety, was shot, and fell with a broken thigh; but he had reloaded his gun as he ran, and he killed his assailant as the latter ran up to scalp him. The people from the fort then, by firing their rifles, kept his foes at bay until he could be rescued; and he soon recovered from his hurt. Yet another man was overtaken almost under the walls, the Indian punching him in the shoulder with the gun as he pulled the trigger; but the gun snapped, and a hunter ran out of the fort and shot the Indian. The gates were closed, and the whites all ready; so the Indians abandoned their effort and drew off. They had taken five scalps and a number of horses; but they had failed in their main object, and the whites had taken two scalps, besides killing and wounding others of the red men, who were carried off by their comrades.

After the failure of this attempt the Indians did not, for some years, make any formidable attack on any of the larger stations. Though the most dangerous of all foes on their own ground, their extreme caution, and dislike of suffering punishment prevented them from ever making really determined efforts to carry a fort openly by storm; moreover, these stockades were really very defensible against men unprovided with artillery, and there is no reason for supposing that any troops could have carried them by fair charging, without suffering altogether disproportionate loss. The red tribes acted in relation to the Cumberland settlements exactly as they had previously done toward those on the Kentucky and Watauga. They harassed the settlers from the outset; but they did not wake up to the necessity for a formidable and combined campaign against them until it was too late for such a campaign to succeed. If, at the first, any one of these communities had been forced to withstand the shock of such Indian armies as were afterward brought against it, it would, of necessity, have been abandoned.

Throughout ’81 and ’82 the Cumberland settlers were worried beyond description by a succession of small war parties. In the first of these years they raised no corn; in the second they made a few crops on fields they had cleared in 1780. No man’s life was safe for an hour, whether he hunted, looked up strayed stock, went to the spring for water, or tilled the fields. If two men were together, one always watched while the other worked, ate, or drank; and they sat down back to back, or, if there were several, in a ring, facing outward, like a covey of quail. The Indians were especially fond of stealing the horses; the whites pursued them in bands, and occasionally pitched battles were fought, with loss on both sides, and apparently as often resulting in the favor of one party as of the other. The most expert Indian fighters naturally became the leaders, being made colonels and captains of the local militia. The position and influence of the officers depended largely on their individual prowess; they were the actual, not titular, leaders of their men. Old Kasper Mansker, one of the most successful, may be taken as a type of the rest. He was ultimately made a colonel, and shared in many expeditions; but he always acted as his own scout, and never would let any of his men ride ahead or abreast of him, preferring to trust to his own eyes and ears and knowledge of forest warfare. The hunters, who were especially exposed to danger, were also the men who inflicted most loss on the Indians, and though many more of the settlers than of their foes were slain, yet the tables were often turned on the latter, even by those who seemed their helpless victims. Thus, once, two lads were watching at a deer lick, when some Indians came to it; each of the boys chose his man, fired, and then fled homeward; coming back with some men they found they had killed two Indians, whose scalps they took.

The eagerness of the Indians to get scalps caused them frequently to scalp their victims before life was extinct; and, as a result, there were numerous instances in which the scalped unfortunate, whether man, woman, or child, was rescued and recovered, living many years. One of these instances is worth giving in the quaint language of the old Tennessee historian, Haywood:

“In the spring of the year 1782 a party of Indians fired upon three persons at French Lick, and broke the arms of John Tucker and Joseph Hendricks, and shot down David Hood, whom they scalped and stamped, as he said, and followed the others toward the fort; the people of the fort came out and repulsed them and saved the wounded men. Supposing the Indians gone, Hood got up softly, wounded and scalped as he was, and began to walk toward the fort on the bluff, when, to his mortification, he saw, standing upon the bank of the creek, a number of Indians, the same who had wounded him before, making sport of his misfortune and mistake. They then fell upon him again, and having given him, in several places, new wounds that were apparently mortal, then left him. He fell into a brush heap in the mow, and next morning was tracked and found by his blood, and was placed as a dead man in one of the outhouses, and was left alone; after some time he recovered, and lived many years.”

Many of the settlers were killed, many others left for Kentucky, Illinois, or Natchez, or returned to their old homes among the Alleghanies; and in 1782 the inhabitants, who had steadily dwindled in numbers, became so discouraged that they again mooted the question of abandoning the Cumberland district in a body. Only Robertson’s great influence prevented this being done; but by word and example he finally persuaded them to remain. The following spring brought the news of peace with Great Britain. A large inflow of new settlers began with the new year, and though the Indian hostilities still continued, the Cumberland country throve apace, and by the end of 1783 the old stations had been rebuilt and many new ones founded. Some of the settlers began to live out on their clearings. Rude little corn-mills and “hominy pounders” were built beside some of the streams. The piles of furs and hides that had accumulated in the stockades were sent back to the coast country on pack-horses. After this year there was never any danger that the settlements would be abandoned.

During the two years of petty but disastrous Indian warfare that followed the attack on Freelands, the harassed and diminishing settlers had been so absorbed in the contest with the outside foe that they had done little toward keeping up their own internal government. When 1783 opened new settlers began to flock in, the Indian hostilities abated, and commissioners arrived from North Carolina under a strong guard, with the purpose of settling the claim of the various settlers[3] and laying off the bounty lands promised to the Continental troops.[4] It therefore became necessary that the Committee or Court of Triers should again be convened, to see that justice was done as between man and man.

The ten men elected from the different stations met at Nashborough on January 7th, Robertson being again made chairman, as well as colonel of the militia, while a proper clerk and sheriff were chosen. Each member took a solemn oath to do equal justice according to the best of his skill and ability. A number of suits between the settlers themselves were disposed of. These related to a variety of subjects. A kettle had been “detained” from Humphry Hogan; he brought suit, and it was awarded him, the defendant “and his mother-in-law” being made to pay the cost of the suit. A hog case, a horse used in hunting, a piece of cleared ground, a bed which had not been made according to contract, the ownership of a canoe, and of a heifer, a “clevis lent and delayed to be returned”—such were some of the cases on which the judges had to decide. There were occasional slander suits; for in a small backwoods community there is always much jealousy and bitter gossip. When suit was brought for “cattle won at cards,” the committee promptly dismissed the claim as illegal; they evidently had clear ideas as to what was good public policy. A man making oath that another had threatened his life, the latter was taken and put under bonds. Another man produced a note of hand for the payment of two good cows, “against John Sadler”; he “proved his accompt,” and procured an attachment against the estate of “Sd. Sadler.” When possible, the Committee compromised the cases, or advised the parties to adjust matters between themselves. The sheriff executed the various decrees, in due form; he arrested the men who refused to pay heed to the judgments of the court, and when necessary took out of their “goods and chatties, lands and tenements,” the damages awarded, and also the costs and fees. The government was in the hands of men who were not only law-abiding themselves but also resolute to see that the law was respected by others.

The committee took cognizance of all affairs concerning the general welfare of the community. They ordered roads to be built between the different stations, appointing overseers who had power to “call out hands to work on the same.” Besides the embodiment of all the full-grown men as militia,—those of each station under their own captain, lieutenant, and ensign,—a diminutive force of paid regulars was organized; that is, six spies were “kept out to discover the motions of the enemy so long as we shall be able to pay them; each to receive seventy-five bushels of Indian corn per month.” They were under the direction of Colonel Robertson, who was head of all the branches of the government. One of the committee’s regulations followed an economic principle of doubtful value. Some enterprising individuals, taking advantage of the armed escort accompanying the Carolina commissioners, brought out casks of liquors. The settlers had drunk nothing but water for many months, and they eagerly purchased the liquor, the merchants naturally charging all that the traffic would bear. This struck the committee as a grievance, and they forthwith passed a decree that any person bringing in liquor “from foreign ports,” before selling the same, must give bond that he would charge no more than one silver dollar, or its value in merchandise, per quart.

Some of the settlers would not enter the association, preferring a condition of absolute freedom from law. The committee, however, after waiting a proper time, forced these men in by simply serving notice that thereafter they would be treated as beyond the pale of the law, not entitled to its protection, but amenable to its penalties. A petition was sent to the North Carolina Legislature, asking that the protection of government should be extended to the Cumberland people, and showing that the latter were loyal and orderly, prompt to suppress sedition and lawlessness, faithful to the United States, and hostile to its enemies.[5] To show their good feeling the committee made every member of the community, who had not already done so, take the oath of abjuration and fidelity.

Until full governmental protection could be secured the commonwealth was forced to act as a little sovereign state, bent on keeping the peace, and yet on protecting itself against aggression from the surrounding powers, both red and white. It was forced to restrain its own citizens, and to enter into quasi-diplomatic relations with its neighbors. Thus early this year fifteen men, under one Colbert, left the settlements and went down the river in boats, ostensibly to trade with the Indians, but really to plunder the Spaniards on the Mississippi. They were joined by some Chickasaws, and at first met with some success in their piratical attacks, not only on the Spanish trading-boats, but on those of the French creoles, and even the Americans, as well. Finally they were repulsed in an attempt against the Spaniards at Ozark; some were killed, and the rest scattered.[6] Immediately upon learning of these deeds, the Committee of Triers passed stringent resolutions forbidding all persons trading with the Indians until granted a license by the committee, and until they had furnished ample security for their good behavior. The committee also wrote a letter to the Spanish governor at New Orleans, disclaiming all responsibility for the piratical misdeeds of Colbert and his gang, and announcing the measures they had taken to prevent any repetition of the same in the future. They laid aside the sum of twenty pounds to pay the expenses of the messengers who carried this letter to the Virginian “agent” at the Illinois, whence it was forwarded to the Spanish Governor.[7]

One of the most difficult questions with which the committee had to deal was that of holding a treaty with the Indians. Commissioners came out from Virginia and North Carolina especially to hold such a treaty [8]; but the settlers declined to allow it until they had themselves decided on its advisability. They feared to bring so many savages together, lest they might commit some outrage, or be themselves subjected to such at the hands of one of the many wronged and reckless whites; and they knew that the Indians would expect many presents, while there was very little indeed to give them. Finally, the committee decided to put the question of treaty or no treaty to the vote of the freemen in the several stations; and by a rather narrow majority it was decided in the affirmative. The committee then made arrangements for holding the treaty in June, some four miles from Nashborough; and strictly prohibited the selling of liquor to the savages. At the appointed time many chiefs and warriors of the Chickasaws, Cherokees, and even Creeks appeared. There were various sports, such as ball-games and foot-races; and the treaty was brought to a satisfactory conclusion.[9] It did not put a complete stop to the Indian outrages, but it greatly diminished them. The Chickasaws thereafter remained friendly; but, as usual, the Cherokee and Creek chiefs who chose to attend were unable to bind those of their fellows who did not. The whole treaty was, in fact, on both sides, of a merely preliminary nature. The boundaries it arranged were not considered final until confirmed by the treaty of Hopewell a couple of years later.

Robertson meanwhile was delegated by the unanimous vote of the settlers to go to the Assembly of North Carolina, and there petition for the establishment of a regular land office at Nashborough, and in other ways advance the interests of the settlers. He was completely successful in his mission. The Cumberland settlements were included in a new county, called Davidson;[10] and an Inferior Court of Pleas and Common Sessions, vested by the act with extraordinary powers, was established at Nashborough. The four justices of the new court had all been Triers of the old committee, and the scheme of government was practically not very greatly changed, although now resting on an indisputably legal basis. The Cumberland settlers had for years acted as an independent, law-abiding, and orderly commonwealth, and the Court of Triers had shown great firmness and wisdom. It spoke well for the people that they had been able to establish such a government, in which the majority ruled, while the rights of each individual were secured. Robertson deserves the chief credit as both civil and military leader. The committee of which he was a member, had seen that justice was done between man and man, had provided for defence against the outside foe, and had striven to prevent any wrongs being done to neutral or allied powers. When they became magistrates of a county of North Carolina they continued to act on the lines they had already marked out. The increase of population had brought an increase of wealth. The settlers were still frontiersmen, clad in buckskin or homespun, with rawhide moccasins, living in log-cabins, and sleeping under bearskins on beds made of buffalo hides; but as soon as they ventured to live on their clearings the ground was better tilled, corn became abundant and cattle and hogs increased as the game diminished. Nashborough began to look more like an ordinary little border town.[11]

During this year Robertson carried on some correspondence with the Spanish governor at New Orleans, Don Estevan Miro. This was the beginning of intercourse between the Western settlers and the Spanish officers, an intercourse which was absolutely necessary, though it afterward led to many intrigues and complications. Robertson was obliged to write to Miro not only to disclaim responsibility for the piratical deeds of men like Colbert, but also to protest against the conduct of certain of the Spanish agents among the Creeks and Chickamaugas. No sooner had hostilities ceased with the British than the Spaniards began to incite the savages to take up once more the hatchet they had just dropped,[12] for Spain already recognized in the restless borderers possible and formidable foes.

Miro in answering Robertson assured him that the Spaniards were very friendly to the Western settlers, and denied that the Spanish agents were stirring up trouble. He also told him that the harassed Cherokees, weary of ceaseless warfare, had asked permission to settle west of the Mississippi—although they did not carry out their intention. He ended by pressing Robertson and his friends to come down and settle in Spanish territory, guaranteeing them good treatment.[13]

In spite of Miro’s fair words the Spanish agents continued to intrigue against the Americans, and especially against the Cumberland people. Yet there was no open break. The Spanish governor was felt to be powerful for both good and evil, and at least a possible friend of the settlers. To many of their leaders he showed much favor, and the people as a whole were well impressed by him; and as a compliment to him they ultimately, when the Cumberland counties were separated from those lying to the eastward, united the former under the name of Mero [14] District.

[1] Haywood says they burned “immense quantities of corn”; as Putnam points out, the settlers could have had very little corn to burn. Haywood is the best authority for the Indian fighting in the Cumberland district during ‘80, ‘81, and ‘82. Putnam supplies some details learned from Mrs. Robertson in her old age. The accounts are derived mainly from the statements of old settlers; but the Robertsons seem always to have kept papers, which served to check off the oral statements. For all the important facts there is good authority. The annals are filled with name after name of men who were killed by the Indians. The dates, and even the names, may be misplaced in many of these instances; but this is really a matter of no consequence, for their only interest is to show the nature of the harassing Indian warfare, and the kind of adventure then common.

[2] How large it is impossible to say. One or two recent accounts make wild guesses, calling it 1,000; but this is sheer nonsense; it is more likely to have been 100.

[3] Haywood. Six hundred and forty acres were allowed by pre-emption claim to each family settled before June 1, 1780; after that date they had to make proper entries in the courts. The salt-licks were to be held as public property.

[4] Isaac Shelby was one of these commissioners.

[5] This whole account is taken from Putnam, who has rendered such inestimable service by preserving these records.

[6] Calendar Va. State Papers, III, pp. 469, 527.

[7] Putnam, pp. 185, 189, 191.

[8] Donelson, who was one of the men who became discouraged and went to Kentucky, was the Virginian commissioner. Martin was the commissioner from North Carolina. He is sometimes spoken of as if he likewise represented Virginia.

[9] Putnam, 196.

[10] in honor of General Wm. Davidson, a very gallant and patriotic soldier of North Carolina during the Revolutionary war. The county government was established in October, 1783.

[11] The justices built a court-house and jail of hewed logs, the former eighteen feet square, with a lean-to or shed of twelve feet on one side. The contracts for building were let out at vendue to the lowest bidder.

[12] Calendar of Va. State Papers, III., 584, 608, etc.

[13] Robertson MSS. As the letter is important I give it in full in the Appendix.

[14] So spelt; but apparently his true name was Miro.

CHAPTER IX

WHAT THE WESTERNERS HAD DONE DURING THE REVOLUTION, 1783

WHEN THE first Continental Congress began its sittings the only frontiersmen west of the mountains, and beyond the limits of continuous settlement within the old Thirteen Colonies,[1] were the two or three hundred citizens of the little Watauga commonwealth. When peace was declared with Great Britain the backwoodsmen had spread westward, in groups, almost to the Mississippi, and they had increased in number to some twenty-five thousand souls,[2] of whom a few hundred dwelt in the bend of the Cumberland, while the rest were about equally divided between Kentucky and Holston.

This great westward movement of armed settlers was essentially one of conquest, no less than of colonization. Thronging in with their wives and children, their cattle, and their few household goods, they won and held the land in the teeth of fierce resistance, both from the Indian claimants of the soil and from the representatives of a mighty and arrogant European power. The chain of events by which the winning was achieved is perfect; had any link therein snapped it is likely that the final result would have been failure. The wide wanderings of Boone and his fellow hunters made the country known and awakened in the minds of the frontiersmen a keen desire to possess it. The building of the Watauga commonwealth by Robertson and Sevier gave a base of operations, and furnished a model for similar communities to follow. Lord Dunmore’s war made the actual settlement possible, for it cowed the northern Indians, and restrained them from seriously molesting Kentucky during its most feeble years. Henderson and Boone made their great treaty with the Cherokees in 1775, and then established a permanent colony far beyond all previous settlements, entering into final possession of the new country. The victory over the Cherokees in 1776 made safe the line of communication along the Wilderness Road, and secured the chance for further expansion. Clark’s campaigns gained the Illinois, or northwestern regions. The growth of Kentucky then became very rapid; and in its turn this, and the steady progress of the Watauga settlements, rendered possible Robertson’s successful effort to plant a new community still further west, on the Cumberland.

The backwoodsmen pressed in on the line of least resistance, first taking possessipn of the debatable hunting-grounds laying between the Algonquins of the north and the Appalachian confederacies of the south. Then they began to encroach on the actual tribal territories. Every step was accompanied by stubborn and bloody fighting with the Indians. The forest tribes were exceedingly formidable opponents; it is not too much to say that they formed a far more serious obstacle to the American advance than would have been offered by an equal number of the best European troops. Their victories over Braddock, Grant, and St. Clair, gained in each case with a smaller force, conclusively proved their superiority, on their own ground, over the best regulars, disciplined and commanded in the ordinary manner. Almost all of the victories, even of the backwoodsmen, were won against inferior numbers of Indians.3 The red men were fickle of temper, and large bodies could not be kept together for a long campaign, nor indeed, for more than one special stroke; the only piece of strategy any of their chiefs showed was Cornstalk’s march past Dunmore to attack Lewis; but their tactics and discipline in the battle itself were admirably adapted to the very peculiar conditions of forest warfare. Writers who speak of them as undisciplined, or as any but most redoubtable antagonists, fall into an absurd error. An old Indian fighter, who, at the close of the last century, wrote, from experience, a good book on the subject, summed up the case very justly when he said: “I apprehend that the Indian discipline is as well calculated to answer the purpose in the woods of America as the British discipline is in Flanders; and British discipline in the woods is the way to have men slaughtered, with scarcely any chance of defending themselves.”[3] A comparison of the two victories gained by the backwoodsmen, at the Great Kanawha, over the Indians, and at King’s Mountain over Ferguson’s British and tories, brings out clearly the formidable fighting capacity of the red men. At the Kanawha the Americans outnumbered their foes, at King’s Mountain they were no more than equal; yet in the former battle they suffered twice the loss they did in the latter, inflicted much less damage in return, and did not gain nearly so decisive a victory.

That the contrary impression prevails is due to the boastful vanity which the backwoodsmen often shared with the Indians, and to the gross ignorance of the average writer concerning these border wars. Many of the accounts in the popular histories are sheer inventions. Thus, in the “Chronicles of Border Warfare,” by Alex. S. Withers (Clarksburg, Va., 1831, p. 301), there is an absolutely fictitious account of a feat of the Kentucky Colonel Scott, who is alleged to have avenged St. Clair’s defeat by falling on the victorious Indians while they were drunk, and killing two hundred of them. This story has not even a foundation in fact; there was not so much as a skirmish of the sort described. As Mann Butler—a most painstaking and truthful writer—points out, it is made up out of the whole cloth, thirty years after the event; it is a mere invention to soothe the mortified pride of the whites. Gross exaggeration of the Indian numbers and losses prevails even to this day. Mr. Edmund Kirke, for instance, usually makes the absolute or relative numbers of the Indians from five to twenty-five times as great as they really were. Still, it is hard to blame backwoods writers for such slips in the face of the worse misdeeds of the average historian of the Greek and Roman wars with barbarians.

The Indians were urged on by the British, who furnished them with arms, ammunition, and provisions, and sometimes also with leaders and with bands of auxiliary white troops, French, British, and tories. It was this that gave to the Revolutionary contest its twofold character, making it on the part of the Americans a struggle for independence in the East, and in the West a war of conquest, or rather a war to establish, on behalf of all our people, the right of entry into the fertile and vacant regions beyond the Alleghanies. The grievances of the backwoodsmen were not the same as the grievances of the men of the seacoast. The Ohio Valley and the other western lands of the French had been conquered by the British, not the Americans. Great Britain had succeeded to the policy as well as the possessions of her predecessor, and, strange to say, had become almost equally hostile to the colonists of her own stock. As France had striven for half a century, so England now in her turn strove, to bar out the settlers of English race from the country beyond the Alleghanies. The British Crown, Parliament, and people were a unit in wishing to keep woodland and prairie for the sole use of their own merchants, as regions tenanted only by Indian hunters and French trappers and traders. They became the guardians and allies of all the Indian tribes. On the other hand, the American backwoodsmen were resolute in their determination to go in and possess the land. The aims of the two sides thus clashed hopelessly. Under all temporary and apparent grounds of quarrel lay this deep-rooted jealousy and incompatibility of interests. Beyond the Alleghanies the Revolution was fundamentally a struggle between England, bent on restricting the growth of the English race, and the Americans, triumphantly determined to acquire the right to conquer the continent.

Had not the backwoodsmen been successful in the various phases of the struggle, we would certainly have been cooped up between the sea and the mountains. If in 1774 and ’76 they had been beaten by the Ohio tribes and the Cherokees, the border ravaged, and the settlements stopped or forced back as during what the colonists called Braddock’s War,[4] there is every reason to believe that the Alleghanies would have become our western frontier. Similarly, if Clark had failed in his efforts to conquer and hold the Illinois and Vincennes, it is overwhelmingly probable that the Ohio would have been the boundary between the Americans and the British. Before the Revolution began, in 1774, the British Parliament had, by the Quebec Act, declared the country between the Great Lakes and the Ohio to be part of Canada; and under the provisions of this act the British officers continued to do as they had already done—that is, to hold adverse possession of the land, scornfully heedless of the claims of the different colonies. The country was de facto part of Canada; the Americans tried to conquer it exactly as they tried to conquer the rest of Canada; the only difference was that Clark succeeded, whereas Arnold and Montgomery failed.

Of course the conquest by the backwoodsmen was by no means the sole cause of our acquisition of the West. The sufferings and victories of the westerners would have counted for nothing, had it not been for the success of the American arms in the East, and for the skill of our three treaty-makers at Paris—Jay, Adams, and Franklin, but above all the two former, and especially Jay. On the other hand, it was the actual occupation and holding of the country that gave our diplomats their vantage-ground. When the treaty was made, in 1782, the commissioners of the United States represented a people already holding the whole Ohio Valley, as well as the Illinois. The circumstances of the treaty were peculiar; but here they need to be touched but briefly, and only so far as they affected the western boundaries. The United States, acting together with France and Spain, had just closed a successful war with England; but when the peace negotiations were begun, they speedily found that their allies were, if anything, more anxious than their enemy to hamper their growth. England, having conceded the grand point of independence, was disposed to be generous, and not to haggle about lesser matters. Spain, on the contrary, was quite as hostile to the new nation as to England. Through her representative, Count Aranda, she predicted the future enormous expansion of the Federal Republic at the expense of Florida, Louisiana, and Mexico, unless it was effectually curbed in its youth. The prophecy has been strikingly fulfilled, and the event has thoroughly justified Spain’s fear; for the major part of the present territory of the United States was under Spanish dominion at the close of the Revolutionary War. Spain, therefore, proposed to hem in our growth by giving us the Alleghanies for our western boundary.[5] France was the ally of America; but as between America and Spain, she favored the latter. Moreover, she wished us to remain weak enough to be dependent upon her further good graces. The French court, therefore, proposed that the United States should content themselves with so much of the trans-Alleghany territory as lay round the head-waters of the Tennessee and between the Cumberland and Ohio. This area contained the bulk of the land that was already settled[6]; and the proposal showed how important the French court deemed the fact of actual settlement.

Thus the two allies of America were hostile to her interests. The open foe, England, on the contrary was anxious to conclude a separate treaty, so that she might herself be in better condition to carry on negotiations with France and Spain; she cared much less to keep the West than she did to keep Gibraltar, and an agreement with the United States about the former left her free to insist on the retention of the latter. Congress, in a spirit of slavish subserviency, had instructed the American commissioners to take no steps without the knowledge and advice of France. Franklin was inclined to obey these instructions; but Jay, supported by Adams, boldly insisted on disregarding them; and accordingly a separate treaty was negotiated with England. In settling the claims to the western territory, much stress was laid on the old colonial charters; but underneath all the verbiage it was practically admitted that these charters conferred merely inchoate rights, which became complete only after conquest and settlement. The States themselves had already by their actions shown that they admitted this to be the case. Thus North Carolina, when by the creation of Washington County—now the State of Tennessee—she rounded out her boundaries, specified them as running to the Mississippi. As a matter of fact the royal grant, under which alone she could claim the land in question, extended to the Pacific; and the only difference between her rights to the regions east and west of the river was that her people were settling in one, and could not settle in the other. The same was true of Kentucky, and of the West generally; if the States could rightfully claim to run to the Mississippi, they could also rightfully claim to run to the Pacific. The colonial charters were all very well as furnishing color of title; but at bottom the American claim rested on the peculiar kind of colonizing conquest so successfully carried on by the backwoodsmen. When the English took New Amsterdam they claimed it under old charters; but they very well knew that their real right was only that of the strong hand. It was precisely so with the Americans and the Ohio Valley. They produced old charters to support their title; but in reality it rested on Clark’s conquests and above all on the advance of the backwoods settlements.[7]

This view of the case is amply confirmed by a consideration of what was actually acquired under the treaty of peace which closed the Revolutionary struggle. Map-makers down to the present day have almost invariably misrepresented the territorial limits we gained by this treaty. They represent our limits in the West in 1783 as being the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the 31st parallel of latitude from the Mississippi to the Chattahoochee;[8] but in reality we did not acquire these limits until a dozen years later, by the treaties of Jay and Pinckney. Two points must be kept in mind: first, that during the war our ally, Spain, had conquered from England that portion of the Gulf coast known as West Florida; and second, that when the treaty was made the United States and Great Britain mutually covenanted to do certain things, some of which were never done. Great Britain agreed to recognize the lakes as our northern boundary, but, on the alleged ground that we did not fulfil certain of our promises, she declined to fulfil this agreement, and the lake posts remained in her hands until the Jay treaty was ratified. She likewise consented to recognize the 31st parallel as our southern boundary, but by a secret article it was agreed that if by the negotiations she recovered West Florida, then the boundary should run about a hundred miles further north, ending at the mouth of the Yazoo. The discovery of this secret article aroused great indignation in Spain. As a matter of fact, the disputed territory, the land drained by the Gulf rivers, was not England’s to grant, for it had been conquered and was then held by Spain. Nor was it given up to us until we acquired it by Pinckney’s masterly diplomacy. The treaty represented a mere promise which in part was not and in part could not be fulfilled. All that it really did was to guarantee what we already possessed—that is, the Ohio Valley and the Illinois, which we settled and conquered during the years of warfare. Our boundary lines were in reality left very vague. On the north the basin of the Great Lakes remained British; on the south the lands draining into the Gulf remained Spanish, or under Spanish influence. The actual boundaries we acquired can be roughly stated in the north to have followed the divide between the waters of the lake and the waters of the Ohio, and in the south to have run across the heads of the Gulf rivers. Had we remained a loose confederation these boundaries would more probably have shrunk than advanced; we did not overleap them until some years after Washington had become the head of a real, not merely a titular, nation. The peace of 1783, as far as our western limits were affected, did nothing more than secure us undisturbed possession of lands from which it had proved impossible to oust us. We were in reality given nothing more than we had by our own prowess gained; the inference is strong that we got what we did get only because we had won and held it.

The first duty of the backwoodsmen who thus conquered the West was to institute civil government. Their efforts to overcome and beat back the Indians went hand in hand with their efforts to introduce law and order in the primitive communities they founded; and exactly as they relied purely on themselves in withstanding outside foes, so they likewise built up their social life and their first systems of government with reference simply to their special needs, and without any outside help or direction. The whole character of the westward movement, the methods of warfare, of settlement, and government, were determined by the extreme and defiant individualism of the backwoodsmen, their inborn independence and self-reliance, and their intensely democratic spirit. The West was won and settled by a number of groups of men, all acting independently of one another, but with a common object, and at about the same time. There was no one controlling spirit; it was essentially the movement of a whole free people, not of a single mastermind. There were strong and able leaders, who showed themselves fearless soldiers and just lawgivers, undaunted by danger, resolute to persevere in the teeth of disaster; but even these leaders are most deeply interesting because they stand foremost among a host of others like them. There were hundreds of hunters and Indian fighters like Mansker, Wetzel, Kenton, and Brady; there were scores of commonwealth founders like Logan, Todd, Floyd, and Harrod; there were many adventurous land speculators like Henderson; there were even plenty of commanders like Shelby and Campbell. These were all men of mark; some of them exercised a powerful and honorable influence on the course of events in the West. Above them rise four greater figures, fit to be called not merely State or local, but national heroes. Clark, Sevier, Robertson, and Boone are emphatically American worthies. They were men of might in their day, born to sway the minds of others, helpful in shaping the destiny of the continent. Yet of Clark alone can it be said that he did a particular piece of work which without him would have remained undone. Sevier, Robertson, and Boone only hastened, and did more perfectly, a work which would have been done by others had they themselves fallen by the wayside.[9] Important though they are for their own sakes, they are still more important as types of the men who surrounded them.

The individualism of the backwoodsmen, however, was tempered by a sound common-sense, and capacity for combination. The first hunters might come alone or in couples, but the actual colonization was done not by individuals, but by groups of individuals. The settlers brought their families and belongings either on pack-horses along the forest trails, or in scows down the streams; they settled in palisaded villages, and immediately took steps to provide both a civil and military organization. They were men of facts, not theories; and they showed their usual hard common-sense in making a government. They did not try to invent a new system; they simply took that under which they had grown up, and applied it to their altered conditions. They were most familiar with the government of the county; and therefore they adopted this for the frame-work of their little independent, self-governing commonwealths of Watauga, Cumberland, and Transylvania.[10]

They were also familiar with the representative system; and accordingly they introduced it into the new communities, the little forted villages serving as natural units of representation. They were already thoroughly democratic, in instinct and principle, and as a matter of course they made the offices elective, and gave full play to the majority. In organizing the militia they kept the old system of county lieutenants, making them elective, not appointive; and they organized the men on the basis of a regiment, the companies representing territorial divisions, each commanded by its own officers, who were thus chosen by the fighting men of the fort or forts in their respective districts. Thus each of the backwoods commonwealths, during its short-lived term of absolute freedom, reproduced as its governmental system that of the old colonial county, increasing the powers of the court, and changing the justices into the elective representatives of an absolute democracy. The civil head, the chairman of the court or committee, was also usually the military head, the colonel-commandant. In fact the military side of the organization rapidly became the most conspicuous, and, at least, in certain crises, the most important. There were always some years of desperate warfare during which the entire strength of the little commonwealth was drawn on to resist outside aggression, and during these years the chief function of government was to provide for the griping military needs of the community, and the one pressing duty of its chief was to lead his followers with valor and wisdom in the struggle with the stranger.[11]

These little communities were extremely independent in feeling, not only of the Federal Government, but of their parent States, and even of one another. They had won their positions by their own courage and hardihood; very few State troops and hardly a Continental soldier had appeared West of the Alleghanies. They had heartily sympathized with their several mother colonies when they became the United States, and had manfully played their part in the Revolutionary War. Moreover they were united among themselves by ties of good-will and of services mutually rendered. Kentucky, for instance, had been succored more than once by troops raised among the Watauga Carolinians or the Holston Virginians, and in her turn she had sent needed supplies to the Cumberland. But when the strain of the war was over the separatist spirit asserted itself very strongly. The groups of Western settlements not only looked on the Union itself very coldly, but they were also more or less actively hostile to their parent States, and regarded even one another as foreign communities;[12] they considered the Confederation as being literally only a lax league of friendship.

Up to the close of the Revolutionary contest the settlers who were building homes and States beyond the Alleghanies formed a homogeneous backwoods population. The wood-choppers, game hunters, and Indian fighters, who dressed and lived alike, were the typical pioneers. They were a shifting people. In every settlement the tide ebbed and flowed. Some of the new-comers would be beaten in the hard struggle for existence, and would drift back to whence they had come. Of those who succeeded some would take root in the land, and others would move still further into the wilderness. Thus each generation rolled westward, leaving its children at the point where the wave stopped no less than at that where it started. The descendants of the victors of King’s Mountain are as likely to be found in the Rockies as in the Alleghanies.

With the close of the war came an enormous increase in the tide of immigration; and many of the new-comers were of a very different stamp from their predecessors. The main current flowed toward Kentucky, and gave an entirely different character to its population. The two typical figures in Kentucky so far had been Clark and Boone, but after the close of the Revolution both of them sank into unimportance, whereas the careers of Sevier and Robertson had only begun. The disappearance of the two former from active life was partly accidental and partly a resultant of the forces that assimilated Kentucky so much more rapidly than Tennessee to the conditions prevailing in the old States. Kentucky was the best known and the most accessible of the western regions; within her own borders she was now comparatively safe from serious Indian invasion, and the tide of immigration naturally flowed thither. So strong was the current that, within a dozen years, it had completely swamped the original settlers, and had changed Kentucky from a peculiar pioneer and backwoods commonwealth into a State differing no more from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina than these differed from one another.

The men who gave the tone to this great flood of new-comers were the gentry from the sea-coast country, the planters, the young lawyers, the men of means who had been impoverished by the long-continued and harassing civil war. Straitened in circumstances, desirous of winning back wealth and position, they cast longing eyes toward the beautiful and fertile country beyond the mountains, deeming it a place that afforded unusual opportunities to the man with capital, no less than to him whose sole trust was in his own adventurous energy.

Most of the gentle folks in Virginia and the Carolinas, the men who lived in great roomy houses on their well-stocked and slave-tilled plantations, had been forced to struggle hard to keep their heads above water during the Revolution. They loyally supported the government, with blood and money; and at the same time they endeavored to save some of their property from the general wreck, and to fittingly educate their girls, and those of their boys who were too young to be in the army. The men of this stamp who now prepared to cast in their lot with the new communities formed an exceptionally valuable class of immigrants; they contributed the very qualities of which the raw settlements stood most in need. They had suffered for no fault of their own; fate had gone hard with them. The fathers had been in the Federal or Provincial congresses, the older sons had served in the Continental line or in the militia. The plantations were occasionally overrun by the enemy; and the general disorder had completed their ruin. Nevertheless, the heads of the families had striven to send the younger sons to school or college. For their daughters they did even more; and throughout the contest, even in its darkest hours, they sent them down to receive the final touches of a lady-like education at some one of the State capitals not at the moment in the hands of the enemy—such as Charleston or Philadelphia. There the young ladies were taught dancing and music, for which, as well as for their frocks and “pink calamanco shoes,” their fathers paid enormous sums in depreciated Continental currency.[13]

Even the close of active hostilities, when the British were driven from the Southern States, brought at first but a slight betterment of condition to the struggling people. There was no cash in the land, the paper currency was nearly worthless, every one was heavily in debt, and no one was able to collect what was owing to him. There was much mob violence, and a general relaxation of the bonds of law and order. Even nature turned hostile; a terrible drought shrunk up all the streams until they could not turn the gristmills, while from the same cause the crops failed almost completely. A hard winter followed, and many cattle and hogs died; so that the well-to-do were brought to the verge of bankruptcy and the poor suffered extreme privations, being forced to go fifty or sixty miles to purchase small quantities of meal and grain at exorbitant prices.[14]

This distress at home inclined many people of means and ambition to try their fortunes in the West: while another and equally powerful motive was the desire to secure great tracts of virgin lands, for possession or speculation. Many distinguished soldiers had been rewarded by successive warrants for unoccupied land, which they entered wherever they choose, until they could claim thousands upon thousands of acres.[15] Sometimes they sold these warrants to outsiders; but whether they remained in the hands of the original owners or not, they served as a great stimulus to the westward movement, and drew many of the representatives of the wealthiest and most influential families in the parent States to the lands on the farther side of the mountains.

At the close of the Revolution, however, the men from the sea-coast region formed but an insignificant portion of the western pioneers, The country beyond the Alleghanies was first won and settled by the backwoodsmen themselves, acting under their own leaders, obeying their own desires, and following their own methods. They were a marked and peculiar people. The good and evil traits in their character were such as naturally belonged to a strong, harsh, and homely race, which, with all its shortcomings, was nevertheless bringing a tremendous work to a triumphant conclusion. The backwoodsmen were above all things characteristically American; and it is fitting that the two greatest and most typical of all Americans should have been respectively a sharer and an outcome of their work. Washington himself passed the most important years of his youth heading the westward movement of his people; clad in the traditional dress of the backwoodsmen, in tasseled hunting-shirt and fringed leggings, he led them to battle against the French and Indians, and helped to clear the way for the American advance. The only other man who in the American roll of honor stands by the side of Washington, was born when the distinctive work of the pioneers had ended; and yet he was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh; for from the loins of this gaunt frontier folk sprang mighty Abraham Lincoln.

[1] This qualification is put in because there were already a few families on the Monongahela, the head of the Kanawha, and the upper Holston; but they were in close touch with the people behind them.

[2] These figures are simply estimates; but they are based on careful study and comparison, and though they must be some hundreds, and maybe some thousands, out of the way, are quite near enough for practical purposes.

[3] Col. Jas. Smith, “An Account,” etc., Lexington, Ky., 1799.

[4] During this Indian war, covering the period from Brad-dock’s to Grant’s defeat, Smith, a good authority, estimates that the frontiers were laid waste, and population driven back, over an area nearly three hundred miles long by thirty broad.

[5] At the north this boundary was to follow the upper Ohio, and end toward the foot of Lake Erie.

[6] Excluding only so much of Robertson’s settlement as lay south of the Cumberland, and Clark’s conquest.

[7] Mr. R. A. Hinsdale, in his excellent work on the “Old Northwest” (New York, 1888), seems to me to lay too much stress on the weight which our charter-claims gave us, and too little on the right we had acquired by actual possession. The charter-claims were elaborated with the most wearisome prolixity at the time; but so were the English claims to New Amsterdam a century earlier. Conquest gave the true title in each case; the importance of a claim is often in inverse order to the length at which it is set forth in a diplomatic document. The West was gained by: (1) the westward movement of the backwoodsmen during the Revolution; (2) the final success of the Continental armies in the East; (3) the skill of our diplomats at Paris; failure on any one of these three points would have lost us the West.

Mr. Hinsdale seems to think that Clark’s conquest prevented the Illinois from being conquered from the British by the Spaniards; but this is very doubtful. The British at Detroit would have been far more likely to have conquered the Spaniards at St. Louis; at any rate there is small probability that they would have been seriously troubled by the latter. The so-called Spanish conquest of St. Joseph was not a conquest at all, but an unimportant plundering raid.

The peace negotiations are best discussed in John Jay’s chapter thereon, in the seventh volume of Winsor’s ‘‘Narrative and Critical History of North America.” Sparks’ account is fundamentally wrong on several points. Bancroft largely follows him, and therefore repeats and shares his errors.

[8] The map in Mr. Hinsdale’s book may be given as a late instance.

[9] Sevier’s place would certainly have been taken by some such man as his chief rival, Tipton. Robertson led his colony to the Cumberland but a few days before old Mansker led another; and though without Robertson the settlements would have been temporarily abandoned, they would surely have been reoccupied. If Henderson had not helped Boone found Kentucky, then Hart or some other of Henderson’s associates would doubtless have done so; and if Boone had been lacking, his place would probably have been taken by some such man as Logan. The loss of these men would have been very serious, but of no one of them can it be said, as of Clark, that he alone could have done the work he actually did.

[10] The last of these was the most pretentious and short-lived and least characteristic of the three, as Henderson made an abortive effort to graft on it the utterly foreign idea of a proprietary colony.

[11] My friend, Professor Alexander Johnson, of Princeton, is inclined to regard these frontier county organizations as reproductions of a very primitive type of government indeed, deeming that they were formed primarily for war against outsiders, that their military organization was the essential feature, the real reason for their existence. I can hardly accept this view in its entirety; though fully recognizing the extreme importance of the military side of the little governments, it seems to me that the preservation of order, and especially the necessity for regulating the disposition of the land, were quite as powerful factors in impelling the settlers to act together. It is important to keep in mind the territorial organization of the militia companies and regiments; a county and a regiment, a forted village and a company, were usually co-extensive.

[12] See in Gardoqui. MSS. the letters of George Rogers Clark to Gardoqui, March 15, 1788; and of John Sevier to Gardoqui, September 12, 1788; and in the Robertson MS. the letter of Robertson to McGillivray, August 3, 1788. It is necessary to allude to the feeling here; but the separatist and disunion movements did not gather full force until later, and are properly to be considered in connection with post-Revolutionary events.

[13] Clay MSS. Account of Robert Morris with Miss Elizabeth Hart, during her residence in Philadelphia in 1780-81. The account is so curious that I give it in full in the Appendix.

[14] Clay MSS. Letters of Jesse Benton, 1782 and ’83. See Appendix.

[15] Thus Col. Wm. Christian, for his services in Braddock’s and Dunmore’s wars and against the Cherokees, received many warrants; he visited Kentucky to enter them, 9,000 acres in all. See “Life of Caleb Wallace,” by Wm. H. Whitsitt, Louisville, 1888.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX D—TO CHAPTER VIII

(From the Robertson MSS., Vol. I., Letter of Don Miro.)

New Orleans, the 20th April, 1783.

Sir

I received yours of 29th January last, & am highly pleased in seeing the good intentions of the People of that District, & knowing the falsehood of the report we have heard they are willing to attack their Province. You ought to make the same account of the news you had that the Indians have been excited in their Province against you, since I wrote quite the contrary at different times to Alexander McGillevray to induce him to make peace, & lastly he answered me that he gave his word to the Governor of North Carolina that the Creeks would not trouble again those settlements: notwithstanding after the letter received from you, and other from Brigadier general Daniel Smith Esqr I will writte to him engaging him to be not more troublesome to you.

I have not any connection with Cheroquis & Marcuten, but as they go now & then to Illinois I will give advice to that Commander to induce them to be quiet: in respect to the former in the month of May of last year they asked the permission of settling themselves on the west side of the Mississippi River which is granted & they act accordingly, you plainly see you are quite free from their incursions

I will give the Passport you asked for your son-in-law, & I will be highly pleased with his coming down to setle in this Province & much more if you, & your family should come along with him, since I can assure you that you will find here your welfare, without being either molested on religious matters or paying any duty & under the circumstances of finding allwais market for your crops which makes every one of the planters settled at Natchez or elsewhere to improve every day, much more so than if they were to purchase the Lands, as they are granted gratis

I wish to be usefull to you being with regard sir

Your most obt. hi. servant

(Dupte.)

Estevan Miro.

Colonel James Robertson, Esqr.

The duplicity of the Spaniards is well illustrated by the fact that the Gardoqui MSS. give clear proof that they were assisting the Creeks with arms and ammunition at the very time Miro was writing these letters. See the Gardoqui MSS., passim, especially Miro’s letter of June 28, 1786.

APPENDIX E—TO CHAPTER IX

Account of Robert Morris with Miss Betsey Hart,

Dr.   Miss Harte

in account

(Oldest daughter of Col. Thomas Hart.

CHAPTER IX

Philadelphia, 1780-81. From the Clay MSS.

CURRENT WITH

ROBERT MORRIS

Cr.

She married Dr. Richard Pendell.

Received Philad. April 7th 1781 the One hundred and Seventy two Pounds 17s State Specie being in full the amount of the annexed account

for Robt. Morris

£172. 17. State Specie

J. Swannick

APPENDIX F—TO CHAPTER X

IN THE Clay MSS. the letters of Jesse Benton to Col. Hart, of December 4, 1782, and March 22, 1783, paint vividly the general distress in the Carolinas. They are taken up mostly with accounts of bad debts and of endeavors to proceed against various debtors; they also touch on other subjects.

In the first, of December 4, 1782, Benton writes: “It seems the powers above are combined against us this year. Such a Drouth was never known here [in the upper Carolinas] before; Corn sells from the stack at 4 & 5| p. Bushel, Wheat 6 & 8|, Rye the same, Oats, 3|6 &c &c … I have not had Water to keep the Grist Mill Fuling Mill and Oyl Mill at Work before this Week… . Johny Rice has gone to Kentuck with his goods to buy Furs, but before he went we talked of your debts and he did not like to be concerned, saying he should gain ill will for no profit; However I will immediately enforce the Law to recover your Debts … the Lands which You had of me would sell as soon as any but this hard year makes many settlers and few buyers. I have heard nothing more of Major Hay woods desire of purchasing & all I ever heard upon the subject was from his son-in-law who now appears very sick of his late purchase of Elegant Buildings… . Your Brother Capt. Nat Hart, our worthy and respectable Friend, I doubt is cut off by the Savages at the time and in the manner as first represented, to wit, that he went out to hunt his horses in the month of July or August it is supposed the Indians in Ambuscade between Boonsboro and Knock-buckle, intended to take him prisonner but killd his horse and at the same time broke his Thigh, that the savages finding their Prisonner with his Thigh broken was under the necessity of puting him to Death by shooting him through the Heart at so small a Distance as to Powder burn his Flesh. He was Tomahawkd, scalped & lay two days before he was found and buried. This Account has come by difrent hands & confirmd to Col. Henderson by a Letter from an intimate Friend of his at Kentuck.”

This last bit of information is sandwiched in between lamentations over bad debts, concerning which the writer manifested considerable more emotion than over the rather startling fate of Captain Hart.

The second letter contains an account of the “trafficking off” of a wagon and fine pair of Pennsylvania horses, the news that a debt had been partially liquidated by the payment of sixty pounds’ worth of rum and sugar, which in turn went to pay workmen, and continues: “The common people are and will be much distressed for want of Bread. I have often heard talk of Famine, but never thought of seeing any thing so much like it as the present times in this part of the Country. Three fourths of the Inhabitants of this country are obliged to purchase their Bread at 50 & 60 miles distance at the common price of 16 and upwards per barrel. The winter has been very hard upon the live stock & I am convinced that abundance of Hogs and Cattle will die this Spring for want of Food… . Cash is now scarcer here than it ever was before… . I have been industrious to get the Mills in good repair and have succeeded well, but have red. very little benefit from them yet owing intirely to the general failure of a Crop. We have done no Merchant work in the Grist Mill, & she only supplies my Family and workmen with Bread. Rye, the people are glad to eat. Flaxseed the cattle have chiefly eaten though I have got as much of that article as made 180 Gallons of Oyl at 4| per bushel. The Oyl is in great demand; I expect two dollars p. Gallon for it at Halifax or Edenton, & perhaps a better price. We were very late in beginning with the Fulling Business; for want of water….. [there are many] Mobbs and commotions among the People.”

THE INDIAN WARS, 1784–1787

FRANKLIN, KENTUCKY, OHIO, AND TENNESSEE

PREFACE

THE MATERIAL used herein is that mentioned in the preface to the first volume, save that I have also drawn freely on the Draper Manuscripts, in the Library of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, at Madison. For the privilege of examining these valuable manuscripts I am indebted to the generous courtesy of the State Librarian, Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites; I take this opportunity of extending to him my hearty thanks.

The period covered in this volume includes the seven years immediately succeeding the close of the Revolutionary War. It was during these seven years that the Constitution was adopted, and actually went into effect; an event if possible even more momentous for the West than the East. The time was one of vital importance to the whole nation; alike to the people of the inland frontier and to those of the seaboard. The course of events during these years determined whether we should become a mighty nation, or a mere snarl of weak and quarrelsome little commonwealths, with a history as bloody and meaningless as that of the Spanish-American States.

At the close of the Revolution the West was peopled by a few thousand settlers, knit by but the slenderest ties to the Federal Government. A remarkable inflow of population followed. The warfare with the Indians, and the quarrels with the British and Spaniards over boundary questions, reached no decided issue. But the rifle-bearing freemen who founded their little republics on the Western waters gradually solved the question of combining personal liberty with national union. For years there was much wavering. There were violent separatist movements, and attempts to establish complete independence of the Eastern States. There were corrupt conspiracies between some of the Western leaders and various high Spanish officials, to bring about a disruption of the Confederation. The extraordinary little backwoods State of Franklin began and ended a career unique in our annals. But the current, though eddying and sluggish, set toward Union. By 1790 a firm government had been established west of the mountains, and the trans-Alleghany commonwealths had become parts of the Federal Union.

Theodore Roosevelt

Sagamore Hill, Long Island, October, 1894

THE INDIAN WARS, 1784–1787

CHAPTER I

THE INRUSH OF SETTLERS, 1784–1787

AT THE beginning of 1784 peace was a definite fact, and the United States had become one among the nations of the earth; a nation young and lusty in her youth, but as yet loosely knit, and formidable in promise rather than in actual capacity for performance.

On the Western frontier lay vast and fertile vacant spaces; for the Americans had barely passed the threshold of the continent predestined to be the inheritance of their children and their children’s children. For generations the great feature in the nation’s history, next only to the preservation of its national life, was to be its westward growth; and its distinguishing work was to be the settlement of the immense wilderness which stretched across to the Pacific. But before the land could be settled it had to be won.

The valley of the Ohio already belonged to the Americans by right of conquest and of armed possession; it was held by rifle-bearing backwoods farmers, hard and tenacious men, who never lightly yielded what once they had grasped. North and south of the valley lay warlike and powerful Indian confederacies, now at last thoroughly alarmed and angered by the white advance; while behind these warrior tribes, urging them to hostility, and furnishing them the weapons and means wherewith to fight, stood the representatives of two great European nations, both bitterly hostile to the new America, and both anxious to help in every way the red savages who strove to stem the tide of settlement. The close alliance between the soldiers and diplomatic agents of polished old-world powers and the wild and squalid warriors of the wilderness was an alliance against which the American settlers had always to make head in the course of their long march westward. The kings and the peoples of the old world ever showed themselves the inveterate enemies of their blood-kin in the new; they always strove to delay the time when their own race should rise to wellnigh universal supremacy. In mere blind selfishness, or in a spirit of jealousy still blinder, the Europeans refused to regard their kinsmen who had crossed the ocean to found new realms in new continents as entitled to what they had won by their own toil and hardihood. They persisted in treating the bold adventurers who went abroad as having done so simply for the benefit of the men who stayed at home; and they shaped their transatlantic policy in accordance with this idea. The Briton and the Spaniard opposed the American settler precisely as the Frenchman had done before them, in the interest of their own merchants and fur-traders. They endeavored in vain to bar him from the solitudes through which only the Indians roved.

All the ports around the Great Lakes were held by the British;[1] their officers, military and civil, still kept possession, administering the government of the scattered French hamlets, and preserving their old-time relations with the Indian tribes, whom they continued to treat as allies or feudatories. To the south and west the Spaniards played the same part. They scornfully refused to heed the boundary established to the southward by the treaty between England and the United States, alleging that the former had ceded what it did not possess. They claimed the land as theirs by right of conquest. The territory which they controlled stretched from Florida along a vaguely defined boundary to the Mississippi, up the east bank of the latter at least to the Chickasaw Bluffs, and thence up the west bank; while the Creeks and Choctaws were under their influence. The Spaniards dreaded and hated the Americans even more than did the British, and they were right; for three-fourths of the present territory of the United States then lay within the limits of the Spanish possessions.[2]

Thus there were foes, both white and red, to be overcome, either by force of arms or by diplomacy, before the northernmost and the southernmost portions of the wilderness lying on our Western border could be thrown open to settlement. The lands lying between had already been conquered, and yet were so sparsely settled as to seem almost vacant. While they offered every advantage of soil and climate to the farmer and cultivator, they also held out peculiar attractions to ambitious men of hardy and adventurous temper.

With the ending of the Revolutionary War the rush of settlers to these Western lands assumed striking proportions. The peace relieved the pressure which had hitherto restrained this movement, on the one hand, while on the other it tended to divert into the new channel of pioneer work those bold spirits whose spare energies had thus far found an outlet on stricken fields. To push the frontier westward in the teeth of the forces of the wilderness was fighting work, such as suited well enough many a stout soldier who had worn the blue and buff of the Continental line, or who, with his fellow rough-riders, had followed in the train of some grim partisan leader.

The people of the New England States and of New York, for the most part, spread northward and westward within their own boundaries; and Georgia likewise had room for all her growth within her borders; but in the States between there was a stir of eager unrest over the tales told of the beautiful and fertile lands lying along the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee. The days of the early pioneers, of the men who did the hardest and roughest work, were over; farms were being laid out and towns were growing up among the felled forest from which the game and the Indians had alike been driven. There was still plenty of room for the rude cabin and stump-dotted clearing of the ordinary frontier settler, the wood-chopper and game hunter. Folk of the common backwoods type were as yet more numerous than any others among the settlers. In addition there were planters from among the gentry of the sea-coast; there were men of means who had bought great tracts of wild land; there were traders with more energy than capital; there were young lawyers; there were gentlemen with a taste for an unfettered life of great opportunity; in short there were adventurers of every kind.

All men who deemed that they could swim in troubled waters were drawn toward the new country. The more turbulent and ambitious spirits saw roads to distinction in frontier warfare, politics, and diplomacy. Merchants dreamed of many fortunate ventures, in connection with the river trade or the overland commerce by pack-train. Lawyers not only expected to make their living by their proper calling, but also to rise to the first places in the commonwealths, for in these new communities, as in the older States, the law was then the most honored of the professions, and that which most surely led to high social and political standing. But the one great attraction for all classes was the chance of procuring large quantities of fertile land at low prices.

To the average settler the land was the prime source of livelihood. A man of hardihood, thrift, perseverance, and bodily strength could surely make a comfortable living for himself and his family, if only he could settle on a good tract of rich soil; and this he could do if he went to the new country. As a matter of course, therefore, vigorous young frontiersmen swarmed into the region so recently won.

These men merely wanted so much land as they could till. Others, however, looked at it from a very different standpoint. The land was the real treasury-chest of the country. It was the one commodity which appealed to the ambitious and adventurous side of the industrial character at that time and in that place. It was the one commodity the management of which opened chances of procuring vast wealth, and especially vast speculative wealth. To the American of the end of the eighteenth century the roads leading to great riches were as few as those leading to competency were many. He could not prospect for mines of gold and of silver, of iron, copper, and coal; he could not discover and work wells of petroleum and natural gas; he could not build up, sell, and speculate in railroad systems and steamship companies; he could not gamble in the stock market; he could not build huge manufactories of steel, of cottons, of woolens; he could not be a banker or a merchant on a scale which is dwarfed when called princely; he could not sit still and see an already great income double and quadruple because of the mere growth in the value of real estate in some teeming city. The chances offered him by the fur trade were very uncertain. If he lived in a sea-coast town, he might do something with the clipper ships that ran to Europe and China. If he lived elsewhere, his one chance of acquiring great wealth, and his best chance to acquire even moderate wealth without long and plodding labor, was to speculate in wild land.

Accordingly the audacious and enterprising business men who would nowadays go into speculation in stocks, were then forced into speculation in land. Sometimes as individuals, sometimes as large companies, they sought to procure wild lands on the Wabash, the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Yazoo. In addition to the ordinary methods of settlement by, or purchase from private persons, they endeavored to procure grants on favorable terms from the national and State Legislatures, or even from the Spanish government. They often made a regular practice of buying the land rights which had accrued in lieu of arrears of pay to different bodies of Continental troops. They even at times purchased a vague and clouded title from some Indian tribe. As with most other speculative business investments, the great land companies rarely realized for the originators and investors anything like what was expected; and the majority were absolute failures in every sense. Nevertheless, a number of men made money out of them, often on quite a large scale; and in many instances, where the people who planned and carried out the scheme made nothing for themselves, they yet left their mark in the shape of settlers who had come in to purchase their lands, or even in the shape of a town built under their auspices.

Land speculation was by no means confined to those who went into it on a large scale. The settler without money might content himself with staking out an ordinary-sized farm; but the newcomer of any means was sure not only to try to get a large estate for his own use, but also to procure land beyond any immediate need, so that he might hold on to it until it rose in value. He was apt to hold commissions to purchase land for his friends who remained east of the mountains. The land was turned to use by private individuals and by corporations; it was held for speculative purposes; it was used for the liquidation of debts of every kind. The official surveyors, when created, did most of their work by deputy; Boone was deputy surveyor of Fayette County, in Kentucky.[3] Some men surveyed and staked out their own claims; the others employed professional surveyors, or else hired old hunters like Boone and Kenton, whose knowledge of woodcraft and acquaintance with the most fertile grounds enabled them not only to survey the land, but to choose the portions best fit for settlement. The lack of proper government surveys, and the looseness with which the records were kept in the land office, put a premium on fraud and encouraged carelessness. People could make and record entries in secret, and have the land surveyed in secret, if they feared a dispute over a title; no one save the particular deputy surveyor employed needed to know.[4] The litigation over these confused titles dragged on with interminable tediousness. Titles were often several deep on one “location,” as it was called; and whoever purchased land too often purchased also an expensive and uncertain lawsuit.

The two chief topics of thought and conversation, the two subjects which beyond all others engrossed and absorbed the minds of the settlers, were the land and the Indians. We have already seen how on one occasion Clark could raise no men for an expedition against the Indians until he closed the land offices round which the settlers were thronging. Every hunter kept a sharp lookout for some fertile bottom on which to build a cabin. The volunteers who rode against the Indian towns also spied out the land and chose the best spots whereon to build their blockhouses and palisaded villages as soon as a truce might be made, or the foe driven for the moment further from the border. Sometimes settlers squatted on land already held but not occupied under a good title; sometimes a man who claimed the land under a defective title, or under pretence of original occupation, attempted to oust or to blackmail him who had cleared and tilled the soil in good faith; and these were both fruitful causes not only of lawsuits but of bloody affrays. Among themselves, the settlers’ talk ran ever on land titles and land litigation, and schemes for securing vast tracts of rich and well watered country. These were the subjects with which they filled their letters to one another and to their friends at home, and the subjects upon which these same friends chiefly dwelt when they sent letters in return.[5] Often well-to-do men visited the new country by themselves first, chose good sites for their farms and plantations, surveyed and purchased them, and then returned to their old homes, whence they sent out their field hands to break the soil and put up buildings before bringing out their families.

The westward movement of settlers took place along several different lines. The dwellers in what is now Eastern Tennessee were in close touch with the old settled country; their farms and little towns formed part of the chain of forest clearings which stretched unbroken from the border of Virginia down the valleys of the Watauga and the Holston. Though they were sundered by mountain ranges from the peopled regions in the State to which they belonged, North Carolina, yet these ranges were pierced by many trails, and were no longer haunted by Indians. There were no great obstacles to be overcome in moving in to this valley of the upper Tennessee. On the other hand, by this time it held no very great prizes in the shape of vast tracts of rich and unclaimed land. In consequence there was less temptation to speculation among those who went to this part of the Western country. It grew rapidly, the population being composed chiefly of actual settlers who had taken holdings with the purpose of cultivating them, and of building homes thereon. The entire frontier of this region was continually harassed by Indians; and it was steadily extended by the home-planting of the rifle-bearing backwoodsmen.

The danger from Indian invasion and outrage was, however, far greater in the distant communities which were growing up in the great bend of the Cumberland, cut off, as they were, by immense reaches of forest from the sea-board States. The settlers who went to this region for the most part followed two routes, either descending the Tennessee and ascending the Cumberland in flotillas of flat-boats and canoes, or else striking out in large bodies through the wilderness, following the trails that led westward from the settlements on the Holston. The population on the Cumberland did not increase very fast for some years after the close of the Revolutionary War; and the settlers were, as a rule, harsh, sturdy backwoodsmen, who lived lives of toil and poverty. Nevertheless, there was a good deal of speculation in Cumberland lands; great tracts of tens of thousands of acres were purchased by men of means in the old districts of North Carolina, who sometimes came out to live on their estates. The looseness of the system of surveying in vogue is shown by the fact that where possible these lands were entered and paid for under a law which allowed a warrant to be shifted to new soil if it was discovered that the first entry was made on what was already claimed by someone else.[6]

Hamlets and homesteads were springing up on the left bank of the upper Ohio, in what is now West Virginia; and along the streams flowing into it from the East. A few reckless adventurers were building cabins on the right bank of this great river. Others, almost as adventurous, were pushing into the neighborhood of the French villages on the Wabash and in the Illinois. At Louisville men were already planning to colonize the country just opposite on the Ohio, under the law of the State of Virginia, which rewarded the victorious soldiers of Clark’s famous campaign with grants in the region they had conquered.

The great growth of the West took place in Kentucky. The Kentucky country was by far the most widely renowned for its fertility; it was much more accessible and more firmly held, and its government was on a more permanent footing than was the case in the Wabash, Illinois, and Cumberland regions. In consequence the majority of the men who went West to build homes fixed their eyes on the vigorous young community which lay north of the Ohio, and which already aspired to the honors of Statehood.

The immigrants came into Kentucky in two streams, following two different routes—the Ohio River, and Boone’s old Wilderness Trail. Those who came overland, along the latter road, were much fewer in number than those who came by water; and yet they were so numerous that the trail at times was almost thronged, and much care had to be taken in order to find camping places where there was enough feed for the horses. The people who traveled this wilderness road went in the usual backwoods manner, on horseback, with laden pack-trains, and often with their herds and flocks. Young men went out alone or in parties; and groups of families from the same neighborhood often journeyed together. They struggled over the narrow, ill-made roads which led from the different back settlements, until they came to the last outposts of civilization east of the Cumberland Mountains; scattered block-houses, whose owners were by turns farmers, tavern-keepers, hunters, and Indian fighters. Here they usually waited until a sufficient number had gathered together to furnish a band of riflemen large enough to beat off any prowling party of red marauders; and then set off to traverse by slow stages the mountains and vast forests which lay between them and the nearest Kentucky station. The time of the journey depended, of course, upon the composition of the traveling party, and upon the mishaps encountered; a party of young men on good horses might do it in three days, while a large band of immigrants, who were hampered by women, children, and cattle, and dogged by ill-luck, might take three weeks. Ordinarily six or eight days were sufficient. Before starting each man laid in a store of provisions for himself and his horse; perhaps thirty pounds of flour, half a bushel of corn meal, and three bushels of oats. There was no meat unless game was shot. Occasionally several travelers clubbed together and carried a tent; otherwise they slept in the open. The trail was very bad, especially at first, where it climbed between the gloomy and forbidding cliffs that walled in Cumberland Gap. Even when undisturbed by Indians, the trip was accompanied by much fatigue and exposure; and, as always in frontier traveling, one of the perpetual annoyances was the necessity for hunting up strayed horses.[7]

The chief highway was the Ohio River; for to drift down stream in a scow was easier and quicker, and no more dangerous than to plod through thick mountain forests. Moreover, it was much easier for the settler who went by water to carry with him his household goods and implements of husbandry; and even such cumbrous articles as wagons, or, if he was rich and ambitious, the lumber wherewith to build a frame house. All kinds of craft were used, even bark canoes and pirogues, or dugouts; but the keel-boat, and especially the flat-bottomed scow with square ends, were the ordinary means of conveyance. They were of all sizes. The passengers and their live stock were of course huddled together so as to take up as little room as possible. Sometimes the immigrants built or bought their own boat, navigated it themselves, and sold it or broke it up on reaching their destination. At other times they merely hired a passage. A few of the more enterprising boat owners speedily introduced a regular emigrant service, making trips at stated times from Pittsburg or perhaps Limestone, and advertising the carriage capacity of their boats and the times of starting. The trip from Pittsburg to Louisville took a week or ten days; but in low water it might last a month.

The number of boats passing down the Ohio, laden with would-be settlers and their belongings, speedily became very great. An eye-witness stated that between November 13th and December 22d, of 1785, thirty-nine boats, with an average of ten souls in each, went down the Ohio to the Falls; and there were others which stopped at some of the settlements further up the river.[8] As time went on the number of immigrants who adopted this method of travel increased; larger boats were used, and the immigrants took more property with them. In the last half of the year 1787 there passed by Fort Harmar 146 boats, with 3,196 souls, 1,371 horses, 165 wagons, 191 cattle, 245 sheep, and 24 hogs.[9] In the year ending in November, 1788, 967 boats, carrying 18,370 souls, with 7,986 horses, 2,372 cows, 1,110 sheep, and 646 wagons,[10] went down the Ohio. For many years this great river was the main artery through which the fresh blood of the pioneers was pumped into the West

There are no means of procuring similar figures for the number of immigrants who went over the Wilderness Road; but probably there were not half as many as went down the Ohio. Perhaps from ten to twenty thousand people a year came into Kentucky during the period immediately succeeding the close of the Revolution; but the net gain to the population was much less, because there was always a smaller, but almost equally steady, counter-flow of men who, having failed as pioneers, were struggling wearily back toward their deserted Eastern homes.

The inrush being so great Kentucky grew apace. In 1785 the population was estimated at from twenty[11] to thirty thousand; and the leading towns, Louisville, Lexington, Harrodsburg, Booneboro, St. Asaph’s, were thriving little hamlets, with stores and horse grist-mills, and no longer mere clusters of stockaded cabins. At Louisville, for instance, there were already a number of two-story frame houses, neatly painted, with verandas running the full length of each house, and fenced vegetable gardens alongside;[12] while at the same time Nashville was a town of logs, with but two houses that deserved the name, the others being mere huts.[13] The population of Louisville amounted to about 300 souls, of whom 116 were fighting men;[14] between it and Lexington the whole country was well settled; but fear of the Indians kept settlers back from the Ohio.

The new-comers were mainly Americans from all the States of the Union; but there were also a few people from nearly every country in Europe, and even from Asia.[15] The industrious and the adventurous, the homestead winners and the land speculators, the criminal fleeing from justice, and the honest men seeking a livelihood or a fortune, all alike prized the wild freedom and absence of restraint so essentially characteristic of their new life; a life in many ways very pleasant, but one which on the border of the Indian country sank into mere savagery.

Kentucky was “a good poor man’s country’’[16] provided the poor man was hardy and vigorous. The settlers were no longer in danger of starvation, for they already raised more flour than they could consume. Neither was there as yet anything approaching to luxury. But between these two extremes there was almost every grade of misery and well-being, according to the varying capacity shown by the different settlers in grappling with the conditions of their new life. Among the foreign-born immigrants success depended in part upon race; a contemporary Kentucky observer estimated that, of twelve families of each nationality, nine German, seven Scotch, and four Irish prospered, while the others failed.[17] The German women worked just as hard as the men, even in the fields, and both sexes were equally saving. Naturally such thrifty immigrants did well materially; but they never took any position of leadership or influence in the community until they had assimilated themselves in speech and customs to their American neighbors. The Scotch were frugal and industrious; for good or for bad they speedily became indistinguishable from the native-born. The greater proportion of failures among the Irish, brave and vigorous though they were, was due to their quarrelsomeness, and their fondness for drink and litigation; besides, remarks this Kentucky critic, “they soon took to the gun, which is the ruin of everything.” None of these foreign-born elements were of any very great importance in the development of Kentucky; its destiny was shaped and controlled by its men of native stock.

In such a population there was of course much loosening of the bands, social, political, moral, and religious, which knit a society together. A great many of the restraints of their old life were thrown off, and there was much social adjustment and readjustment before their relations to one another under the new conditions became definitely settled. But there came early into the land many men of high purpose and pure life whose influence upon their fellows, though quiet, was very great. Moreover, the clergyman and the school-teacher, the two beings who had done so much for colonial civilization on the seaboard, were already becoming important factors in the life of the frontier communities. Austere Presbyterian ministers were people of mark in many of the towns. The Baptist preachers lived and worked exactly as did their flocks; their dwellings were little cabins with dirt floors and, instead of bedsteads, skin-covered pole-bunks; they cleared the ground, split rails, planted corn, and raised hogs on equal terms with their parishioners.[18] After Methodism cut loose from its British connections in 1785, the time of its great advance began, and the circuit-riders were speedily eating bear meat and buffalo tongues on the frontier.[19]

Rough log schools were springing up everywhere, beside the rough log meeting-houses, the same building often serving for both purposes. The school-teacher might be a young surveyor out of work for the moment, a New Englander fresh from some academy in the Northeast, an Irishman with a smattering of learning, or perhaps an English immigrant of the upper class, unfit for and broken down by the work of a new country.[20] The boys and girls were taught together, and at recess played together—tag, pawns, and various kissing games. The rod was used unsparingly, for the elder boys proved boisterous pupils. A favorite mutinous frolic was to “bar out” the teacher, taking possession of the school-house and holding it against the master with sticks and stones until he had either forced an en trance or agreed to the terms of the defenders. Sometimes this barring out represented a revolt against tyranny; often it was a conventional, and half-acquiesced-in, method of showing exuberance of spirit, just before the Christmas holidays. In most of the schools the teaching was necessarily of the simplest, for the only books might be a Testament, a primer, a spelling book, and a small arithmetic.

In such a society, simple, strong, and rude, both the good features and the bad were nakedly prominent; and the views of observers in reference thereto varied accordingly as they were struck by one set of characteristics or another. One traveler would paint the frontiersmen as little better than the Indians against whom they warred, and their life as wild, squalid, and lawless; while the next would lay especial and admiring stress on their enterprise, audacity, and hospitable openhandedness. Though much alike, different portions of the frontier stock were beginning to develop along different lines. The Holston people, both in Virginia and North Carolina, were by this time comparatively little affected by immigration from without those States, and were on the whole homogeneous; but the Virginians and Carolinians of the seaboard considered them rough, unlettered, and not of very good character. One traveling clergyman spoke of them with particular disfavor; he was probably prejudiced by their indifference to his preaching, for he mentions with much dissatisfaction that the congregations he addressed “though small, behaved extremely bad.” [21] The Kentuckians showed a mental breadth that was due largely to the many different sources from which even the predominating American elements in the population sprang. The Cumberland people seemed to travelers the wildest and rudest of all, as was but natural, for these fierce and stalwart settlers were still in the midst of a warfare as savage

The opinion of any mere passer through a country is always less valuable than that of an intelligent man who dwells and works among the people, and who possesses both insight and sympathy. At this time one of the recently created Kentucky judges, an educated Virginian, in writing to his friend Madison, said: “We are as harmonious amongst ourselves as can be expected of a mixture of people from various States and of various Sentiments and Manners not yet assimilated. In point of Morals the bulk of the inhabitants are far superior to what I expected to find in any new settled country. We have not had a single instance of Murder, and but one Criminal for Felony of any kind has yet been before the Supreme Court. I wish I could say as much to vindicate the character of our Land-jobbers. This business has been attended with much villainy in other parts. Here it is reduced to a system, and to take the advantage of the ignorance or of the poverty of a neighbor is almost grown into reputation.” [22]

Of course, when the fever for land speculation raged so violently, many who had embarked too eagerly in the purchase of large tracts became land poor; Clark being among those who found that though they owned great reaches of fertile wild land they had no means whatever of getting money.[23] In Kentucky, while much land was taken up under Treasury warrants, much was also allotted to the officers of the Continental army; and the retired officers of the Continental line were the best of all possible immigrants. A class of gentle-folks soon sprang up in the land, whose members were not so separated from other citizens as to be in any way alien to them, and who yet stood sufficiently above the mass to be recognized as the natural leaders, social and political, of their sturdy fellow-freemen. These men by degrees built themselves comfortable, roomy houses, and their lives were very pleasant; at a little later period Clark, having abandoned war and politics, describes himself as living a retired life with, as his chief amusements, reading, hunting, fishing, fowling, and corresponding with a few chosen friends.[24] Game was still very plentiful: buffalo and elk abounded north of the Ohio, while bear and deer, turkey, swans, and geese,[25] not to speak of ducks and prairie fowl, swarmed in the immediate neighborhood of the settlements.

The gentry offered to strangers the usual open-handed hospitality characteristic of the frontier, with much more than the average frontier refinement; a hospitality, moreover, which was never marred or interfered with by the frontier suspiciousness of strangers which sometimes made the humbler people of the border seem churlish to travelers. When Federal garrisons were established along the Ohio the officers were largely dependent for their social pleasures on the gentle-folk of the neighborhood. One of them in his journal gives several rather curious glimpses of the life of the time.[26] He mentions being entertained by Clark at “a very elegant dinner,” [27] a number of gentlemen being present. After dinner the guests adjourned to the dancing school, “where there were twelve or fifteen young misses, some of whom had made considerable improvement in that polite accomplishment, and indeed were middling neatly dressed considering the distance from where luxuries are to be bought and the expense attending the purchase of them here”—for though beef and flour were cheap, all imported goods sold for at least five times as much as they cost in Philadelphia or New York. The officers sometimes gave dances in the forts, the ladies and their escorts coming in to spend the night; and they attended the great barbecues to which the people rode from far and near, many of the men carrying their wives or sweethearts behind them on the saddle. At such a barbecue an ox or a sheep, a bear, an elk, or a deer, was split in two and roasted over the coals; dinner was eaten under the trees; and there was every kind of amusement from horse-racing to dancing.

Though the relations of the officers of the regular troops with the gentry were so pleasant there was always much friction between them and the ordinary frontiersmen; a friction which continued to exist as long as the frontier itself, and which survives to this day in the wilder parts of the country. The regular army officer and the frontiersman are trained in fashions so diametrically opposite that, though the two men be brothers, they must yet necessarily, in all their thoughts and instincts and ways of looking at life, be as alien as if they belonged to two different races of mankind. The borderer, rude, suspicious, and impatient of discipline, looks with distrust and with a mixture of sneering envy and of hostility upon the officer; while the latter, with his rigid training and his fixed ideals, feels little sympathy for the other’s good points, and is contemptuously aware of his numerous failings. The only link between the two is the scout, the man who, though one of the frontiersmen, is accustomed to act and fight in company with the soldiers. In Kentucky, at the close of the Revolution, this link was generally lacking; and there was no tie of habitual, even though half-hostile, intercourse to unite the two parties. In consequence the ill-will often showed itself by acts of violence. The backwoods bullies were prone to browbeat and insult the officers if they found them alone, trying to provoke them to rough-and-tumble fighting; and in such a combat, carried on with the revolting brutality necessarily attendant upon a contest where gouging and biting were considered legitimate, the officers, who were accustomed only to use their fists, generally had the worst of it; so that at last they made a practice of carrying their side-arms—which secured them from molestation.

Besides raising more than enough flour and beef to keep themselves in plenty, the settlers turned their attention to many other forms of produce. Indian corn was still the leading crop; but melons, pumpkins, and the like were grown, and there were many thriving orchards; while tobacco cultivation was becoming of much importance. Great droves of hogs and flocks of sheep flourished in every locality whence the bears and wolves had been driven; the hogs running free in the woods with the branded cattle and horses. Except in the most densely settled parts much of the beef was still obtained from buffaloes, and much of the bacon from bears. Venison was a staple commodity. The fur trade, largely carried on by French trappers, was still of great importance in Kentucky and Tennessee. North of the Ohio it was the attraction which tempted white men into the wilderness. Its profitable nature was the chief reason why the British persistently clung to the posts on the Lakes, and stirred up the Indians to keep the American settlers out of all lands that were tributary to the British fur merchants. From Kentucky and the Cumberland country the peltries were sometimes sent east by pack-train, and sometimes up the Ohio in bateaus or canoes.

In addition to furs, quantities of ginseng were often carried to the Eastern settlements at this period when the commerce of the West was in its first infancy, and was as yet only struggling for an outlet down the Mississippi. One of those who went into this trade was Boone. Although no longer a real leader in Kentucky life he still occupied quite a prominent position, and served as a Representative in the Virginia Legislature,[28] while his fame as a hunter and explorer was now spread abroad in the United States, and even in Europe. To travelers and new-comers generally, he was always pointed out as the first discoverer of Kentucky; and being modest, self-contained, and self-reliant, he always impressed them favorably. He spent most of his time in hunting, trapping, and surveying land warrants for men of means, being paid, for instance, two shillings current money per acre for all the good land he could enter on a ten-thousand acre Treasury warrant.[29] He also traded up and down the Ohio River at various places, such as Point Pleasant and Limestone; and at times combined keeping a tavern with keeping a store. His accounts contain much quaint information. Evidently his guests drank as generously as they ate; he charges one four pounds sixteen shillings for two months’ board and two pounds four shillings for liquor. He takes the note of another for ninety-three gallons of cheap corn whiskey. Whiskey cost sixpence a pint, and rum one shilling; while corn was three shillings a bushel, and salt twenty-four shillings, flour, thirty-six shillings a barrel, bacon sixpence and fresh pork and buffalo beef threepence a pound. Boone procured for his customers or for himself such articles as linen, cloth, flannel, corduroy, chintz, calico, broadcloth, and velvet at prices varying according to the quality, from three to thirty shillings a yard; and there was also evidently a ready market for “tea ware,” knives and forks, scissors, buttons, nails, and all kinds of hardware. Furs and skins usually appear on the debit sides of the various accounts, ranging in value from the skin of a beaver, worth eighteen shillings, or that of a bear worth ten, to those of deer, wolves, coons, wildcats, and foxes, costing two to four shillings apiece. Boone procured his goods from merchants in Hagerstown and Williamsport, in Maryland, whither he and his sons guided their own pack-trains, laden with peltries and with kegs of ginseng, and accompanied by droves of loose horses. He either followed some well-beaten mountain trail or opened a new road through the wilderness as seemed to him best at the moment.[30]

Boone’s creed in matters of morality and religion was as simple and straightforward as his own character. Late in life he wrote to one of his kinsfolk: “All the religion I have is to love and fear God, believe in Jesus Christ, do all the good to my neighbors and myself that I can, and do as little harm as I can help, and trust on God’s mercy for the rest.” The old pioneer always kept the respect of red men and white, of friend and foe, for he acted according to his belief. Yet there was one evil to which he was no more sensitive than the other men of his time.

Among his accounts there is an entry recording his purchase, for another man, of a negro woman for the sum of ninety pounds.[31] There was already a strong feeling in the Western settlements against negro slavery,[32] because of its moral evil, and of its inconsistency with all true standards of humanity and Christianity, a feeling which continued to exist and which later led to resolute efforts to forbid or abolish slave-holding. But the consciences of the majority were too dull, and, from the standpoint of the white race, they were too shortsighted to take action in the right direction. The selfishness and mental obliquity which imperil the future of a race for the sake of the lazy pleasure of two or three generations prevailed; and in consequence the white people of the middle West, and therefore eventually of the Southwest, clutched the one burden under which they ever staggered, the one evil which has ever warped their development, the one danger which has ever seriously threatened their very existence. Slavery must of necessity exercise the most baleful influence upon any slave-holding people, and especially upon those members of the dominant caste who do not themselves own slaves. Moreover, the negro, unlike so many of the inferior races, does not dwindle away in the presence of the white man. He holds his own; indeed, under the conditions of American slavery he increased faster than the white, threatening to supplant him. He actually has supplanted him in certain of the West Indian Islands, where the sin of the white in enslaving the black has been visited upon the head of the wrongdoer by his victim with a dramatically terrible completeness of revenge.

What has occurred in Hayti is what would eventually have occurred in our own semi-tropical States if the slave-trade and slavery had continued to flourish as their short-sighted advocates wished. Slavery is ethically abhorrent to all right-minded men; and it is to be condemned without stint on this ground alone. From the standpoint of the master caste it is to be condemned even more strongly because it invariably in the end threatens the very existence of that master caste. From this point of view the presence of the negro is the real problem; slavery is merely the worst possible method of solving the problem. In their earlier stages the problem and its solution, in America, were one. There may be differences of opinion as to how to solve the problem; but there can be none whatever as to the evil wrought by those who brought about that problem; and it was only the slave-holders and the slave-traders who were guilty on this last count. The worst foes, not only of humanity and civilization, but especially of the white race in America, were those white men who brought slaves from Africa, and who fostered the spread of slavery in the States and territories of the American Republic.

[1] State Dep. MSS., No. 150, Vol. II, March, 1788. Report of Secretary Knox.

[2] State Dep. MSS., No. 81, Vol. II, pp. 189, 217. No. 120, vol. ii, June 30, 1786.

[3] Draper MSS.; Boone MSS. Entry of August court for 1783.

[4] Draper MSS. in Wisconsin State Hist. Ass. Clark papers. Walter Darrell to Col. William Fleming, St. Asaphs, April 14, 1783. These valuable Draper MSS. have been opened to me by Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, the State Librarian; I take this opportunity of thanking him for his generous courtesy to which I am so greatly indebted.

[5] Clay MSS. and Draper MSS., passim: e. g,, in former, J. Mercer to George Nicholas, Nov. 28, 1789; J. Ware to George Nicholas, Nov. 29, 1789; letter to Mrs. Byrd, Jan. 16, 1786, etc., etc., etc.

[6] Clay MSS., Jesse Benton to Thos. Hart, April 3, 1786.

[7] Durrett MSS. Journal of Rev. James Smith, 1785.

[8] Draper MSS., “Massachusetts Gazette,” March 13, 1786; letter from Kentucky, December 22, 1785. Vol. VII.—5

[9] Harmar Papers, December 9, 1787.

[10] “Columbian Magazine,” January 1789. Letter from Fort Harmar, November 26, 1788. By what is evidently a clerical error the time is put down as one month instead of one year.

[11] “Journey in the West in 1785,” by Lewis Brantz.

[12] Lettres d’un eultivateur Américan,” St. John de Crève Cœur. Summer of 1784.

[13] Brantz.

[14] State Department MSS. Papers Continental Congress, No. 150, Vol. II, p. 21. Letter from Major W. North, August 23, 1786.

[15] Letter in “Massachusetts Gazette,” above quoted.

[16] State Department MSS. Madison Papers. Caleb Wallace to Madison, July 12, 1785.

[17] “Description of Kentucky,” 1792, by Harry Toulmin, Secretary of State.

[18] “History of Kentucky Baptists,” by J. H. Spencer.

[19] “History of Methodism in Kentucky,” by John B. Mo Ferrier.

[20] Durrett MSS. “Autobiography of Robert McAfee.”

[21] Durrett MSS. Rev. James Smith, “Tour in Western Country,” 1785.

[22] Wallace’s letter, above quoted.

[23] Draper MSS. G. R. Clark to Jonathan Clark, April 20, 1788.

[24] Do., letter of Sept 2, 1791.

[25] “Magazine of American History,” I. Letters of Laurence Butler from Kentucky, Nov. 20, 1786, etc.

[26] Major Erkuries Beattie. In the “Magazine of Am. Hist.,” I, p. 175.

[27] Aug. 25, 1786.

[28] Draper’s MSS., Boone MSS., from Bourbon Co. The papers cover the years from 1784 on to ‘95.

[29] Do., certificate of G. Imlay, 1784.

[30] Do., passim.

[31] Do., March 7, 1786.

[32] See Journals of Rev. James Smith.

CHAPTER II

THE INDIAN WARS, 1784–1787

AFTER THE close of the Revolution there was a short, uneasy lull in the eternal border warfare between the white men and the red. The Indians were for the moment daunted by a peace which left them without allies; and the feeble Federal Government attempted for the first time to aid and control the West by making treaties with the most powerful frontier tribes. Congress raised a tiny regular army, and several companies were sent to the upper Ohio to garrison two or three small forts which were built upon its banks. Commissioners (one of whom was Clark himself) were appointed to treat with both the Northern and Southern Indians. Councils were held in various places. In 1785 and early in 1786 utterly fruitless treaties were concluded with Shawnees, Wyandots, and Delawares at one or other of the little forts.[1] About the same time, in the late fall of 1785, another treaty somewhat more noteworthy, but equally fruitless, was concluded with the Cherokees at Hopewell, on Keowee, in South Carolina. In this treaty the Commissioners promised altogether too much. They paid little heed to the rights and needs of the settlers. Neither did they keep in mind the powerlessness of the Federal Government to enforce against these settlers what their treaty promised the Indians. The pioneers along the upper Tennessee and the Cumberland had made various arrangements with bands of the Cherokees, sometimes acting on their own initiative and sometimes on behalf of the State of North Carolina. Many of these different agreements were entered into by the whites with honesty and good faith, but were violated at will by the Indians. Others were violated by the whites, or were repudiated by the Indians as well, because of some real or fancied unfairness in the making. Under them large quantities of land had been sold or allotted, and hundreds of homes had been built on the lands thus won by the whites or ceded by the Indians. As with all Indian treaties, it was next to impossible to say exactly how far these agreements were binding, because no persons, not even the Indians themselves, could tell exactly who had authority to represent the tribes.[2] The Commissioners paid little heed to these treaties, and drew the boundary so that quantities of land which had been entered under regular grants, and were covered by the homesteads of the frontiersmen, were declared to fall within the Cherokee line. Moreover, they even undertook to drive all settlers off these lands.

Of course, such a treaty excited the bitter anger of the frontiersmen, and they scornfully refused to obey its provisions. They hated the Indians, and, as a rule, were brutally indifferent to their rights, while they looked down on the Federal Government as impotent. Nor was the ill-will to the treaty confined to the rough borderers. Many men of means found that land grants which they had obtained in good faith and for good money were declared void. Not only did they denounce the treaty, and decline to abide by it, but they denounced the motives of the Commissioners, declaring, seemingly without justification, that they had ingratiated themselves with the Indians to further land speculations of their own.[3]

As the settlers declined to pay any heed to the treaty the Indians naturally became as discontented with it as the whites. In the following summer the Cherokee chiefs made solemn complaint that, instead of retiring from the disputed ground, the settlers had encroached yet further upon it, and had come to within five miles of the beloved town of Chota. The chiefs added that they had now made several such treaties, each of which established boundaries that were immediately broken, and that indeed it had been their experience that after a treaty the whites settled even faster on their lands than before.[4] Just before this complaint was sent to Congress the same chiefs had been engaged in negotiations with the settlers themselves, who advanced radically different claims. The fact was that in this unsettled time the bond of Governmental authority was almost as lax among the whites as among the Indians, and the leaders on each side who wished for peace were hopelessly unable to restrain their fellows who did not. Under such circumstances, the sword, or rather the tomahawk, was ultimately the only possible arbiter.

The treaties entered into with the Northwestern Indians failed for precisely the opposite reason. The treaty at Hopewell promised so much to the Indians that the whites refused to abide by its terms. In the councils on the Ohio the Americans promised no more than they could and did perform; but the Indians themselves broke the treaties at once, and in all probability never for a moment intended to keep them, merely signing from a greedy desire to get the goods they were given as an earnest. They were especially anxious for spirits, for they far surpassed even the white borderers in their crazy thirst for strong drink. “We have smelled your liquor and it is very good; we hope you will give us some little kegs to carry home,” said the spokesmen of a party of Chippewas, who had come from the upper Great Lakes.[5] These frank savages, speaking thus in behalf of their far northern brethren, uttered what was in the minds of most of the Indians who attended the councils held by the United States Commissioners. They came to see what they could get by begging, or by promising what they had neither the will nor the power to perform. Many of them, as in the case of the Chippewas, were from lands so remote that they felt no anxiety about white encroachments, and were lured into hostile encounter with the Americans chiefly by their own overmastering love of plunder and bloodshed.

Nevertheless, there were a few chiefs and men of note in the tribes who sincerely wished peace. One of these was Cornplanter, the Iroquois. The power of the Six Nations had steadily dwindled; moreover, they did not, like the more western tribes, lie directly athwart the path which the white advance was at the moment taking. Thus they were not drawn into open warfare, but their continual uneasiness, and the influence they still possessed with the other Indians, made it an object to keep on friendly terms with them. Cornplanter, a valiant and able warrior, who had both taken and given hard blows in warring against the Americans, was among the chiefs and ambassadors who visited Fort Pitt during the troubled lull in frontier war which succeeded the news of the peace of 1783. His speeches showed, as his deeds had already shown, in a high degree, that loftiness of courage, and stern, uncomplaining acceptance of the decrees of a hostile fate, which so often ennobled the otherwise gloomy and repellent traits of the Indian character. He raised no plaint over what had befallen his race; “The Great Spirit above directs us so that whatever hath been said or done must be good and right,” he said in a spirit of strange fatalism well known to certain creeds, both Christian and heathen. He was careful to dwell on the fact that in addressing the representatives of “the Great Council who watch the Thirteen Fires and keep them bright,” he was anxious only to ward off woe from the women and little ones of his people and was defiantly indifferent to what might personally be before him. “As for me my life is short, ‘tis already sold to the Great King over the water,” he said. But it soon appeared that the British agents had deceived him, telling him that the peace was a mere temporary truce, and keeping concealed the fact that under the treaty the British had ceded to the Americans all rights over the Iroquois and Western Indians, and over their land. Great was his indignation when the actual text of the treaty was read him, and he discovered the double-dealing of his far-off royal paymaster. In commenting on it he showed that, like the rest of his race, he had been much impressed by the striking uniforms of the British officers. He evidently took it for granted that the head of these officers must own a yet more striking uniform; and treachery seemed doubly odious in one who possessed so much. “I assisted the great King,” he said, “I fought his battles, while he sat quietly in his forts; nor did I ever suspect that so great a person, one too who wore a red coat sufficient of itself to tempt one, could be guilty of such glaring falsehoods.”[6] After this Corn-planter remained on good terms with the Americans and helped to keep the Iroquois from joining openly in the war. The Western tribes taunted them because of this attitude. They sent them word in the fall of 1785 that once the Six Nations were a great people, but that now they had let the Long Knife throw them; but that the Western Indians would set them on their feet again if they would join them; for “the Western Indians were determined to wrestle with Long Knife in the spring.”[7]

Some of the Algonquin chiefs, notably Molunthee the Shawnee, likewise sincerely endeavored to bring about a peace. But the Western tribes as a whole were bent on war. They were constantly excited and urged on by the British partisan leaders, such as Simon Girty, Elliot, and Caldwell. These leaders took part in the great Indian councils, at which even tribes west of the Mississippi were represented; and though they spoke without direct authority from the British commanders at the lake posts, yet their words carried weight when they told the young red warriors that it was better to run the risk of dying like men than of starving like dogs. Many of the old men among the Wyandots and Delawares spoke against strife; but the young men were for war, and among the Shawnees, the Wabash Indians, and the Miamis the hostile party was still stronger. A few Indians would come to one of the forts and make a treaty on behalf of their tribe, at the very moment that the other members of the same tribe were murdering and ravaging among the exposed settlements or were harrying the boats that went down the Ohio. All the tribes that entered into the treaties of peace were represented among the different parties of marauders. Over the outlaw bands there was no pretence of control; and their successes, and the numerous scalps and quantities of plunder they obtained, made them very dangerous examples to the hot-blooded young warriors everywhere. Perhaps the most serious of all obstacles to peace was the fact that the British still kept the lake posts.[8]

The Indians who did come in to treat were sullen, and at first always insisted on impossible terms. They would finally agree to mutual concessions, would promise to keep their young men from marauding, and to allow surveys to be made, provided the settlers were driven off all lands which the Indians had not yielded; and, after receiving many gifts, would depart. The representatives of the Federal Government would then at once set about performing their share of the agreement, the most important part of which was the removal of the settlers who had built cabins on the Indian lands west of the Ohio. The Federal authorities, both military and civil, disliked the intruders as much as they did the Indians, stigmatizing them as “a banditti who were a disgrace to human nature.” There was no unnecessary harshness exercised by the troops in removing the trespassers; but the cabins were torn down and the sullen settlers themselves were driven back across the river, though they protested and threatened resistance. Again and again this was done; not alone in the interest of the Indians, but in part also because Congress wished to reserve the lands for sale, with the purpose of paying off the public debt. At the same time surveying parties were sent out. But in each case, no sooner had the Federal Commissioners and their subordinates begun to perform their part of the agreement, than they were stopped by tidings of fresh outrages on the part of the very Indians with whom they had made the treaty; while the surveying parties were driven in and forced to abandon their work.[9]

The truth was that while the Federal Government sincerely desired peace, and strove to bring it about, the Northwestern tribes were resolutely bent on war; and the frontiersmen themselves showed nearly as much inclination for hostilities as the Indians.[10] They were equally anxious to intrude on the Government and on the Indian lands; for they were adventurous, the lands were valuable, and they hated the Indians and looked down on the weak Federal authority.[11] They often made what were legally worthless “tomahawk claims,” and objected almost as much as the Indians to the work of the regular Government surveyors.[12] Even the men of note, men like George Rogers Clark, were often engaged in schemes to encroach on the land north of the Ohio, drawing on themselves the bitter reproaches not only of the Federal authorities, but also of the Virginia Government, for their cruel readiness to jeopardize the country by incurring the wrath of the Indians.[13] The more lawless whites were as little amenable to authority as the Indians themselves; and at the very moment when a peace was being negotiated one side or the other would commit some brutal murder. While the chiefs and old Indians were delivering long-winded speeches to the Peace Commissioners, bands of young braves committed horrible ravages among the lonely settlements.[14] Now a drunken Indian at Fort Pitt murdered an innocent white man, the local garrison of regular troops saving him with difficulty from being lynched;[15] now a band of white ruffians gathered to attack some peaceable Indians who had come in to treat;[16] again a white man murdered an unoffending Indian, and was seized by a Federal officer, and thrown into chains, to the great indignation of his brutal companions;[17] and yet again another white man murdered an Indian, and escaped to the woods before he could be arrested.[18]

Under such conditions the peace negotiations were doomed from the outset. The truce on the border was of the most imperfect description; murders and robberies by the Indians, and acts of vindictive retaliation or aggression by the whites, occurred continually and steadily increased in number. In 1784 a Cherokee of note, when sent to warn the intruding settlers on the French Broad that they must move out of the land, was shot and slain in a fight with a local militia captain. Cherokee war bands had already begun to harry the frontier and infest the Kentucky Wilderness Road.[19] At the same time the Northwestern Indians likewise committed depredations, and were only prevented from making a general league against the whites by their own internal dissensions—the Chickasaws and Kickapoos being engaged in a desperate war.[20] The Wabash Indians were always threatening hostilities. The Shawnees for some time observed a precarious peace, and even, in accordance with their agreement, brought in and surrendered a few white prisoners; and among the Delawares and Wyandots there was also a strong friendly party; but in all three tribes the turbulent element was never under real control, and it gradually got the upper hand. Meanwhile the Georgians and Creeks in the South were having experiences of precisely the same kind—treaties fraudulently procured by the whites, or fraudulently entered into and violated by the Indians; encroachments by white settlers on Indian lands, and bloody Indian forays among the peaceful settlements.[21]

The more far-sighted and resolute among all the Indians, Northern and Southern, began to strive for a general union against the Americans.[22] In 1786 the Northwestern Indians almost formed such a union. Two thousand warriors gathered at the Shawnee towns and agreed to take up the hatchet against the Americans; British agents were present at the council; and even before the council was held, war parties were bringing into the Shawnee towns the scalps of American settlers, and prisoners, both men and women, who were burned at the stake.[23] But the jealousy and irresolution of the tribes prevented the actual formation of a league.

The Federal Government still feebly hoped for peace; and in the vain endeavors to avoid irritating the Indians forbade all hostile expeditions into the Indian country—though these expeditions offered the one hope of subduing the savages and preventing their inroads. By 1786 the settlers generally, including all their leaders, such as Clark,[24] had become convinced that the treaties were utterly futile, and that the only right policy was one of resolute war.

In truth the war was unavoidable. The claims and desires of the two parties were irreconcilable. Treaties and truces were palliatives which did not touch the real underlying trouble. The white settlers were unflinchingly bent on seizing the land over which the Indians roamed but which they did not in any true sense own or occupy. In return the Indians were determined at all costs and hazards to keep the men of chain and compass, and of axe and rifle, and the forest-felling settlers who followed them, out of their vast and lonely hunting-grounds. Nothing but the actual shock of battle could decide the quarrel. The display of overmastering, overwhelming force might have cowed the Indians; but it was not possible for the United States, or for any European power, ever to exert or display such force far beyond the limits of the settled country. In consequence the warlike tribes were not then, and never have been since, quelled save by actual hard fighting, until they were overawed by the settlement of all the neighboring lands.

Nor was there any alternative to these Indian wars. It is idle folly to speak of them as being the fault of the United States Government; and it is even more idle to say that they could have been averted by treaty. Here and there, under exceptional circumstances or when a given tribe was feeble and unwarlike, the whites might gain the ground by a treaty entered into of their own free will by the Indians, without the least duress; but this was not possible with warlike and powerful tribes when once they realized that they were threatened with serious encroachment on their hunting-grounds. Moreover, looked at from the standpoint of the ultimate result, there was little real difference to the Indian whether the land was taken by treaty or by war. In the end the Delaware fared no better at the hands of the Quaker than the Wampanoag at the hands of the Puritan; the methods were far more humane in the one case than in the other, but the outcome was the same in both. No treaty could be satisfactory to the whites, no treaty served the needs of humanity and civilization, unless it gave the land to the Americans as unreservedly as any successful war.

As a matter of fact, the lands we have won from the Indians have been won as much by treaty as by war; but it was almost always war, or else the menace and possibility of war, that secured the treaty. In these treaties we have been more than just to the Indians; we have been abundantly generous, for we have paid them many times what they were entitled to; many times what we would have paid any civilized people whose claim was as vague and shadowy as theirs. By war or threat of war, or purchase we have won from great civilized nations, from France, Spain, Russia, and Mexico, immense tracts of country already peopled by many tens of thousands of families; we have paid many millions of dollars to these nations for the land we took; but for every dollar thus paid to these great and powerful civilized commonwealths, we have paid ten, for lands less valuable, to the chiefs and warriors of the red tribes. No other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States. Nor is the charge that the treaties with the Indians have been broken, of weight in itself; it depends always on the individual case. Many of the treaties were kept by the whites and broken by the Indians; others were broken by the whites themselves; and sometimes those who broke them did very wrong indeed, and sometimes they did right. No treaties, whether between civilized nations or not, can ever be regarded as binding in perpetuity; with changing conditions, circumstances may arise which render it not only expedient, but imperative and honorable, to abrogate them.

Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership. It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities, as it would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the standards of to-day. Most fortunately, the hard, energetic, practical men who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands, are not prone to false sentimentality. The people who are, are the people who stay at home. Often these stay-at-homes are too selfish and indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand the race-importance of the work which is done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands; and they judge them by standards which would only be applicable to quarrels in their own townships and parishes. Moreover, as each new land grows old, it misjudges the yet newer lands, as once it was itself misjudged. The home-staying Englishman of Britain grudges to the Africander his conquest of Matabeleland; and so the home-staying American of the Atlantic States dislikes to see the Western miners and cattlemen win for the use of their people the Sioux hunting-grounds. Nevertheless, it is the men actually on the borders of the longed-for ground, the men actually in contact with the savages, who in the end shape their own destinies.

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,—in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the Northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian kaiser or Italian king; but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

Yet the very causes which render this struggle between savagery and the rough front rank of civilization so vast and elemental in its consequence to the future of the world, also tend to render it in certain ways peculiarly revolting and barbarous. It is primeval warfare, and it is waged as war was waged in the ages of bronze and of iron. All the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last two thousand years is lost. It is a warfare where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak are harried without ruth, and the vanquished maltreated with merciless ferocity. A sad and evil feature of such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes, in point of hideous brutality. The armies are neither led by trained officers nor made up of regular troops—they are composed of armed settlers, fierce and wayward men, whose ungovernable passions are unrestrained by discipline, who have many grievous wrongs to redress, and who look on their enemies with a mixture of contempt and loathing, of dread and intense hatred. When the clash comes between these men and their sombre foes, too often there follow deeds of enormous, of incredible, of indescribable horror. It is impossible to dwell without a shudder on the monstrous woe and misery of such a contest.

The men of Kentucky and of the infant Northwest would have found their struggle with the Indians dangerous enough in itself; but there was an added element of menace in the fact that back of the Indians stood the British. It was for this reason that the frontiersmen grew to regard as essential to their well-being the possession of the lake posts; so that it became with them a prime object to wrest from the British, whether by force of arms or by diplomacy, the forts they held at Niagara, Detroit, and Michilimakinac, Detroit was the most important, for it served as the headquarters of the Western Indians, who formed for the time being the chief bar to American advance. The British held the posts with a strong grip, in the interest of their traders and merchants. To them the land derived its chief importance from the fur trade. This was extremely valuable, and, as it steadily increased in extent and importance, the consequence of Detroit, the fitting-out town for the fur traders, grew in like measure. It was the centre of a population of several thousand Canadians, who lived by the chase and by the rude cultivation of their long, narrow farms; and it was held by a garrison of three or four hundred British regulars, with auxiliary bands of American loyalist and French Canadian rangers, and, above all, with a formidable but fluctuating reserve force of Indian allies.[25]

It was to the interest of the British to keep the American settlers out of the land; and therefore their aims were at one with those of the Indians. All the tribes between the Ohio and the Missouri were subsidized by them, and paid them a precarious allegiance. Fickle, treacherous, and ferocious, the Indians at times committed acts of outrage even on their allies, so that these allies had to be ever on their guard; and the tribes were often at war with one another. War interrupted trade and cut down profits, and the British endeavored to keep the different tribes at peace among themselves, and even with the Americans. Moreover they always discouraged barbarities, and showed what kindness was in their power to any unfortunate prisoners whom the Indians happened to bring to their posts. But they helped the Indians in all ways save by open military aid to keep back the American settlers. They wished a monopoly of the fur trade; and they endeavored to prevent the Americans from coming into their settlements.[26] English officers and agents attended the Indian councils, endeavored to attach the tribes to the British interests, and encouraged them to stand firm against the Americans and to insist upon the Ohio as the boundary between the white man and the red.[27] The Indians received counsel and advice from the British, and drew from them both arms and munitions of war, and while the higher British officers were usually careful to avoid committing any overt breach of neutrality, the reckless partisan leaders sought to inflame the Indians against the Americans, and even at times accompanied their war parties.

The life led at a frontier post like Detroit was marked by sharp contrasts. The forest round about was cleared away, though blackened stumps still dotted the pastures, orchards, and tilled fields. The town itself was composed mainly of the dwellings of the French habitans; some of them were mere hovels, others pretty log cottages, all swarming with black-eyed children; while the stoutly-made, swarthy men, at once lazy and excitable, strolled about the streets in their picturesque and bright-colored blanket suits. There were also a few houses of loyalist refugees; implacable tories, stalwart men, revengeful, and goaded by the memory of many wrongs done and many suffered, who proved the worst enemies of their American kinsfolk. The few big roomy buildings, which served as storehouses and residences for the merchants, were built not only for the storage of goods and peltries, but also as strongholds in case of attack. The heads of the mercantile houses were generally Englishmen; but the hardy men who traversed the woods for months and for seasons, to procure furs from the Indians, were for the most part French. The sailors, both English and French, who manned the vessels on the lakes formed another class. The rough earthworks and stockades of the fort were guarded by a few light guns. Within, the red-coated regulars held sway, their bright uniforms varied here and there by the dingy hunting-shirt, leggings and fur cap of some tory ranger or French partisan leader. Indians lounged about the fort, the stores, and the houses, begging, or gazing stolidly at the troops as they drilled, at the creaking carts from the outlying farms as they plied through the streets, at the driving to and fro from pasture of the horses and milch cows, or at the arrival of a vessel from Niagara or a brigade of fur-laden bateaux from the upper lakes.

In their paint and their cheap, dirty finery, these savages did not look very important; yet it was because of them that the British kept up their posts in these far-off forests, beside these great lonely waters; it was for their sakes that they tried to stem the inrush of the settlers of their own blood and tongue; for it was their presence alone which served to keep the wilderness as a game preserve for the fur merchants; it was their prowess in war which prevented French village and British garrison from being lapped up like drops of water before the fiery rush of the American advance. The British themselves, though fighting with and for them, loved them but little; like all frontiersmen, they soon grew to look down on their mean and trivial lives,—lives which nevertheless strongly attracted white men of evil and shiftless, but adventurous, natures, and to which white children, torn from their homes and brought up in the wigwams, became passionately attached. Yet back of the lazy and drunken squalor lay an element of the terrible, all the more terrible because it could not be reckoned with. Dangerous and treacherous allies, upon whom no real dependence could ever be placed, the Indians were nevertheless the most redoubtable of all foes when the war was waged in their own gloomy woodlands.

At such a post those standing high in authority were partly civil officials, partly army officers. Of the former, some represented the provincial government, and others acted for the fur companies. They had much to do both in governing the French townsfolk and countryfolk, in keeping the Indians friendly, and in furthering the peculiar commerce on which the settlements subsisted. But the important people were the army officers. These were imperious, able, resolute men, well drilled, and with a high military standard of honor. They upheld with jealous pride the reputation of an army which in that century proved again and again that on stricken fields no soldiery of continental Europe could stand against it. They wore a uniform which for the last two hundred years has been better known than any other wherever the pioneers of civilization tread the world’s waste spaces or fight their way to the overlordship of barbarous empires; a uniform known to the southern and the northern hemispheres, the eastern and the western continents, and all the islands of the sea. Subalterns wearing this uniform have fronted dangers and responsibilities such as in most other services only gray-headed generals are called upon to face; and at the head of handfuls of troops have won for the British crown realms as large, and often as populous, as European kingdoms. The scarlet-clad officers who served the monarchy of Great Britain have conquered many a barbarous people in all the ends of the earth, and hold for their sovereign the lands of Moslem and Hindoo, of Tartar and Arab and Pathan, of Malay, Negro, and Polynesian. In many a war they have overcome every European rival against whom they have been pitted. Again and again they have marched to victory against Frenchman and Spaniard through the sweltering heat of the tropics; and now, from the stupendous mountain masses of mid Asia, they look northward through the wintry air, ready to bar the advance of the legions of the Czar. Hitherto they have never gone back save once; they have failed only when they sought to stop the westward march of a mighty nation, a nation kin to theirs, a nation of their own tongue and law, and mainly of their own blood.

The British officers and the American border leaders found themselves face to face in the wilderness as rivals of one another. Sundered by interest and ambition, by education and habits of thought, trained to widely different ways of looking at life, and with the memories of the hostile past fresh in their minds, they were in no humor to do justice to one another. Each side regarded the other with jealousy and dislike, and often with bitter hatred. Each often unwisely scorned the other. Each kept green in mind the wrongs suffered at the other’s hands, and remembered every discreditable fact in the other’s recent history—every failure, every act of cruelty or stupidity, every deed that could be held as the consequence of the worst moral and mental shortcomings. Neither could appreciate the other’s many and real virtues. The policies for which they warred were hostile and irreconcilable; the interests of the nations they represented were, as regards the Northwestern wilderness, not only incompatible but diametrically opposed. The commanders of the British posts, and the men who served under them, were moved by a spirit of stern loyalty to the empire, the honor of whose flag they upheld, and endeavored faithfully to carry out the behests of those who shaped that empire’s destinies; in obedience to the will of their leaders at home they warred to keep the Northwest a wilderness, tenanted only by the Indian hunter and the white fur trader. The American frontiersmen warred to make this wilderness the heart of the greatest of all Republics; they obeyed the will of no superior, they were not urged onward by any action of the supreme authorities of the land; they were moved only by the stirring ambition of a masterful people, who saw before them a continent which they claimed as their heritage. The Americans succeeded, the British failed; for the British fought against the stars in their courses, while the Americans battled on behalf of the destiny of the race.

Between the two sets of rivals lay leagues on leagues of forest, in which the active enemies of the Americans lived and hunted and marched to war. The British held the posts on the lakes; the frontiersmen held the land south of the Ohio. In the wilderness between dwelt the Shawnees, Wyandots, and Delawares, the Wabash Indians, the Miamis, and many others; and they had as allies all the fiercest and most adventurous of the tribes further off, the Chippewas, the Winnebagos, the Sacs and Foxes. On the side of the whites the war was still urged by irregular levies of armed frontiersmen. The Federal garrisons on the Ohio were as yet too few and feeble to be of much account; and in the South, where the conflict was against Creek and Cherokee, there were no regular troops whatever.

The struggle was at first one of aggression on the part of the Northwestern Indians. They were angered and alarmed at the surveyors and the few reckless would-be settlers, who had penetrated their country; but there was no serious encroachment on their lands, and Congress for some time forbade any expedition being carried on against them in their home. They themselves made no one formidable attack, sent no one overmastering force against the whites. But bands of young braves from all the tribes began to cross the Ohio and ravage the settlements, from the Pennsylvania frontier to Kentucky. They stole horses, burned houses, and killed or carried into a dreadful captivity men, women, and children. The inroads were as usual marked by stealth, rapine, and horrible cruelty. It is hard for those accustomed only to treat of civilized warfare to realize the intolerable nature of these ravages—the fact that the loss and damage to the whites was out of all proportion to the strength of the Indian war parties, and the extreme difficulty in dealing an effective counter stroke. The immense tangled forest increased beyond measure the difficulties of the problem. Under their shelter the Indians were able to attack at will and without warning, and though they would fight to the death against any odds when cornered, they in variably strove to make their attacks on the most helpless, on those who were powerless to resist It was not the armed frontier levies, it was the immigrants coming in by pack train or by flatboat,—it was the unsuspecting settlers with their wives and little ones who had most to fear from an Indian fray; while, when once the blow was delivered, the savages vanished as smoke vanishes in the open. A small war party could thus work untold harm in a district precisely as a couple of man-eating jaguars may depopulate a forest village in tropical America; and many men and much time had to be spent before they could be beaten into submission, exactly as it needs a great hunting party to drive from their fastness and slay the big man-eating cats, though, I if they came to bay in the open, they could readily be killed by a single skilful and resolute hunter.

Each settlement or group of settlements had to rely on the prowess of its own hunter-soldiers for safety. The real war, the war in which by far the greatest loss was suffered by both sides, was that thus waged, man against man. These innumerable and infinitely varied skirmishes, as petty as they were bloody, were not so decisive at the moment as the campaigns against the gathered tribes, but were often more important in their ultimate results. Under the incessant strain of the incessant warfare there arose here and there Indian fighters of special note, men who warred alone, or at the head of small parties of rangers, and who not only defended the settlements, but kept the Indian villages and the Indian war parties in constant dread by their vengeful retaliatory inroads. These men became the peculiar heroes of the frontier, and their names were household words in the log cabins of the children, and children’s children, of their contemporaries. They were warriors of the type of the rude champions who in the ages long past hunted the mammoth and the aurochs, and smote one another with stone-headed axes; their feats of ferocious personal prowess were of the kind that gave honor and glory to the mighty men of the time primeval. Their deeds were not put into books while the men themselves lived; they were handed down by tradition, and grew dim and vague in the recital. What one fierce partisan leader had done might dwindle or might grow in the telling or might finally be ascribed to some other; or else the same feat was twisted into such varying shapes that it became impossible to recognize which was nearest the truth, or what man had performed it.

Often in dealing with the adventures of one of these old-time border warriors—Kenton, Wetzel, Brady, Mansker, Castleman,—all we can say is that some given feat was commonly attributed to him, but may have been performed by somebody else, or indeed may only have been the kind of feat which might at any time have been performed by men of his stamp. Thus one set of traditions ascribe to Brady an adventure in which when bound to a stake, he escaped by suddenly throwing an Indian child into the fire, and dashing off unhurt in the confusion, but other traditions ascribe the feat not to Brady, but to some other wild hunter of the day. Again one of the favorite tales of Brady is his escape from a band of pursuing Indians, by an extraordinary leap across a deep ravine, at the bottom of which flowed a rapid stream; but in some traditions this leap appears as made by another frontier hero, or even by an Indian whom Brady himself was pursuing. It is therefore a satisfaction to come across, now and then, some feat which is attested by contemporaneous testimony. There is such contemporary record for one of Brady’s deeds, which took place toward the close of the Revolutionary War.

Brady had been on a raid in the Indian country and was returning. His party had used all their powder and had scattered, each man going toward his own home, as they had nearly reached the settlements. Only three men were left with Brady, the four had but one charge of powder apiece, and even this had been wet in crossing a stream, though it had been carefully dried afterward. They had with them a squaw whom they had captured. When not far from home they ran into a party of seven Indians, likewise returning from a raid, and carrying with them as prisoners a woman and her child. Brady spied the Indians first and instantly resolved to attack them, trusting that they would be panic-struck and flee; though after a single discharge of their rifles he and his men would be left helpless. Slipping ahead he lay in ambush until the Indians were close up. He then fired, killing the leader, whereat the others fled in terror, leaving the woman and child. In the confusion, however, the captive squaw also escaped and succeeded in joining the fleeing savages, to whom she told the small number and woeful plight of their assailants; and they at once turned to pursue them. Brady, however, had made good use of the time gained, and was in full flight with his two rescued prisoners; and before he was overtaken he encountered a party of whites who were themselves following the trail of the marauders. He at once turned and in company with them hurried after the Indians; but the latter were wary, and, seeing the danger, scattered and vanished in the gloomy woodland. The mother and child, thus rescued from a fearful fate, reached home in safety. The letter containing the account of this deed continues: “This young officer, Captain Brady, has great merit as a partizan in the woods. He has had the address to surprise and beat the Indians three different times since I came to the Department—he is brave, vigilant, and successful.”[28]

For a dozen years after the close of the Revolution Brady continued to be a tower of strength to the frontier settlers of Pennsylvania and Virginia. At the head of his rangers he harassed the Indians greatly, interfering with and assailing their war parties, and raiding their villages and home camps. Like his foes, he warred by ambush and surprise. Among the many daring backwoodsmen who were his followers and companions the traditions pay particular heed to one Phouts, “a stout thick Dutchman of uncommon strength and activity.”

In spite of the counter strokes of the wild wood-rangers, the Indian ravages speedily wrapped the frontier in fire and blood. In such a war the small parties were really the most dangerous, and in the aggregate caused most damage. It is less of a paradox than it seems, to say that one reason why the Indians were so formidable in warfare was because they were so few in numbers. Had they been more numerous they would perforce have been tillers of the soil, and it would have been far easier for the whites to get at them. They were able to wage a war so protracted and murderous, only because of their extreme elusiveness. There was little chance to deliver a telling blow at enemies who had hardly anything of value to destroy, who were so comparatively few in number that they could subsist year in and year out on game, and whose mode of life rendered them as active, stealthy, cautious, and ferocious as so many beasts of prey.

Though the frontiers of Pennsylvania and of Virginia proper suffered much, Kentucky suffered more. The murderous inroads of the Indians at about the close of the Revolutionary war caused a mortality such as could not be paralleled save in a community struck down by some awful pestilence; and though from thence on our affairs mended, yet for many years the most common form of death was death at the hands of the Indians. A resident in Kentucky, writing to a friend, dwelt on the need of a system of vestries to take care of the orphans, who, as things were, were left solely to private charity; though, continues the writer, “of all countries I am acquainted with this abounds most with these unhappy objects.” [29]

The roving war bands infested the two routes by which the immigrants came into the country; for the companies of immigrants could usually be taken at a disadvantage, and yielded valuable plunder. The parties who traveled the Wilderness Road were in danger of ambush by day and of onslaught by night. But there was often some protection for them, for whenever the savages became very bold, bodies of Kentucky militia were sent to patrol the trail, and these not only guarded the trains of incomers, but kept a sharp look-out for Indian signs, and, if any were found, always followed and, if possible, fought and scattered the marauders.

The Indians who watched the river-route down the Ohio had much less to fear in the way of pursuit by, or interference from, the frontier militia; although they too were now and then followed, overtaken, and vanquished. While in midstream the boats were generally safe, though occasionally the savages grew so bold that they manned flotillas of canoes and attacked the laden flat-boats in open day. But when any party landed, or wherever the current swept a boat inshore, within rifle range of the tangled forest on the banks, there was always danger. The white riflemen, huddled together with their women, children, and animals on the scows, were utterly unable to oppose successful resistance to foes who shot them down at leisure, while themselves crouching in the security of their hiding-places. The Indians practiced all kinds of tricks and stratagems to lure their victims within reach. A favorite device was to force some miserable wretch whom they had already captured to appear alone on the bank when a boat came in sight, signal to it, and implore those on board to come to his rescue and take him off; the decoy inventing some tale of wreck or of escape from Indians to account for his presence. If the men in the boat suffered themselves to be overcome by compassion and drew inshore, they were sure to fall victims to their sympathy.

The boat once assailed and captured, the first action of the Indians was to butcher all the wounded. If there was any rum or whiskey on board they drank it, feasted on the provisions, and took whatever goods they could carry off. They then set off through the woods with their prisoners for distant Indian villages near the lakes. They traveled fast, and mercilessly tomahawked the old people, the young children, and the women with child, as soon as their strength failed under the strain of the toil and hardship and terror. When they had reached their villages they usually burned some of their captives and made slaves of the others, the women being treated as the concubines of their captors, and the children adopted by the families who wished them. Of the captives a few might fall into the hands of friendly traders, or of the British officers at Detroit; a few might escape, or be ransomed by their kinsfolk, or be surrendered in consequence of some treaty. The others succumbed to the perils of their new life, or gradually sank into a state of stolid savagery.

Naturally the ordinary Indian foray was directed against the settlements themselves; and of course the settlements of the frontier, as it continually shifted westward, were those which bore the brunt of the attack and served as a shield for the more thickly peopled and peaceful region behind. Occasionally a big war party of a hundred warriors or over would come prepared for a stroke against some good-sized village or fort; but, as a rule, the Indians came in small bands, numbering from a couple to a dozen or score of individuals. Entirely unencumbered by baggage or by impediments of any kind, such a band lurked through the woods, leaving no trail, camping wherever night happened to overtake it, and traveling whithersoever it wished. The ravages committed by those skulking parties of murderous braves were monotonous in their horror. All along the frontier the people on the outlying farms were ever in danger, and there was risk for the small hamlets and block-houses. In their essentials the attacks were alike: the stealthy approach, the sudden rush, with its accompaniment of yelling war-whoops, the butchery of men, women, and children, and the hasty flight with whatever prisoners were for the moment spared, before the armed neighbors could gather for rescue and revenge.

In most cases there was no record of the outrage; it was not put into any book; and save among the survivors, all remembrance of it vanished as the logs of the forsaken cabin rotted and crumbled.

Yet tradition, or some chance written record kept alive the memory of some of these incidents, and a few such are worth reciting, if only to show what this warfare of savage and settler really was. Most of the tales deal merely with some piece of unavenged butchery.

In 1785, on June 29th, the house of a settler named Scott, in Washington County, Virginia, was attacked. The Indians, thirteen in number, burst in the door just as the family were going to bed. Scott was shot; his wife was seized and held motionless, while all her four children were tomahawked, and their throats cut, the blood spouting over her clothes. The Indians loaded themselves with plunder, and, taking with them the wretched woman, moved off, and traveled all night. Next morning each man took his share and nine of the party went down to steal horses on the Clinch. The remaining four roamed off through the woods, and ten days later the woman succeeded in making her escape. For a month she wandered alone in the forest, living on the young cane and sassafras, until, spent and haggard with the horror and the hardship, she at last reached a small frontier settlement.

At about the same time three girls, sisters, walking together near Wheeling Creek, were pounced upon by a small party of Indians. After going a short distance the Indians halted, talked together for a few moments, and then without any warning a warrior turned and tomahawked one of the girls. The second instantly shared the same fate; the third jerked away from the Indian who held her, darted up a bank, and, extraordinary to relate, eluded her pursuer, and reached her home in safety. Another family named Doolin suffered in the same year; and there was one singular circumstance connected with their fate. The Indians came to the door of the cabin in the early morning; as the man rose from bed the Indians fired through the door and shot him in the thigh. They then burst in, and tomahawked him and two children; yet for reasons unknown they did not harm the woman, nor the child in her arms.

No such mercy was shown by a band of six Indians who attacked the log houses of two settlers, brothers, named Edward and Thomas Cunningham. The two cabins stood side by side, the chinks between the logs allowing those in one to see what was happening in the other. One June evening, in 1785, both families were at supper. Thomas was away. His wife and four children were sitting at the table when a huge savage slipped in through the open door. Edward in the adjoining cabin, saw him enter, and seized his rifle. The Indian fired at him through a chink in the wall, but missed him, and, being afraid to retreat through the door, which would have brought him within range of Edward’s rifle, he seized an axe and began to chop out an opening in the rear wall. Another Indian made a dash for the door, but was shot down by Edward; however, he managed to get over the fence and out of range. Meanwhile the mother and her four children remained paralyzed with fear until the Indian inside the room had cut a hole through the wall. He then turned, brained one of the children with his tomahawk, threw the body out into the yard through the opening, and motioned to her to follow it. In mortal fear she obeyed, stepping out over the body of one of her children, with two others screaming beside her, and her baby in her arms. Once outside he scalped the murdered boy and set fire to the house, and then drove the woman and the remaining children to a knoll where the wounded Indian lay with the others around him. The Indians hoped the flames would destroy both cabins; but Edward Cunningham and his son went into their loft, and threw off the boards of the roof as they kindled, escaping unharmed from the shots fired at them; and so, though scorched by the flame and choked by the smoke, they saved their house and their lives. Seeing the failure of their efforts the savages then left, first tomahawking and scalping the two elder children. The shuddering mother, with her baby, was taken along with them to a cave, in which they hid her and the wounded Indian; and then with untold fatigue, hardship, and suffering, for her brutal captors gave her for food only a few papaw nuts and the head of a wild turkey, she was taken to the Indian towns. Some months afterward Simon Girty ransomed her and sent her home. Edward Cunningham raised a body of men and tried to follow the trail; but the crafty forest warriors had concealed it with such care that no effective pursuit could be made.

In none of the above-mentioned raids did the Indians suffer any loss of life, and in none was there any successful pursuit. But in one instance in this same year and same neighborhood the assailed settlers retaliated with effect. It was near Wheeling. A lad named John Wetzel, one of a noted border family of coarse, powerful, illiterate Indian fighters, had gone out from the fortified village in which his kinsfolk were living to hunt horses. Another boy went with him. There were several stray horses, one being a mare which belonged to Wetzel’s sister, with a colt, and the girl had promised him the colt if he would bring the mare back. The two boys were vigorous young fellows, accustomed to life in the forest, and they hunted high and low, and finally heard the sound of horse-bells in a thicket. Running joyfully forward they fell into the hands of four Indians, who had caught the horses and tied them in the thicket, so that by the tinkling of their bells they might lure into the ambush any man who came out to hunt them up. Young Wetzel made a dash for liberty, but received a shot which broke his arm, and then surrendered and cheerfully accompanied his captors; while his companion, totally unnerved, hung back crying, and was promptly tomahawked. Early next morning the party struck the Ohio, at a point where there was a clearing. The cabins on this clearing were deserted, the settlers having taken refuge in a fort because of the Indian ravages; but the stock had been left running in the woods. One of the Indians shot a hog and tossed it into a canoe they had hidden under the bank. The captive was told to enter the canoe and lie down; three Indians then got in, while the fourth started to swim the stolen horses across the river.

Fortunately for the captured boy three of the settlers had chosen this day to return to the abandoned clearing and look after the loose stock. They reached the place shortly after the Indians, and just in time to hear the report of the rifle when the hog was shot. The owner of the hogs, instead of suspecting that there were Indians near by, jumped to the conclusion that a Kentucky boat had landed, and that the immigrants were shooting his hogs—for the people who drifted down the Ohio in boats were not, when hungry, over-scrupulous concerning the right to stray live stock. Running forward, the three men had almost reached the river, when they heard the loud snorting of one of the horses as it was forced into the water. As they came out on the bank they saw the canoe, with three Indians in it, and in the bottom four rifles, the dead hog, and young Wetzel stretched at full length; the Indian in the stern was just pushing off from the shore with his paddle; the fourth Indian was swimming the horses a few yards from shore. Immediately the foremost white man threw up his rifle and shot the paddler dead; and a second later one of his companions coming up, killed in like fashion the Indian in the bow of the canoe. The third Indian, stunned by the sudden onslaught, sat as if numb, never so much as lifting one of the rifles that lay at his feet, and in a minute he too was shot and fell over the side of the canoe, but grasped the gunwale with one hand, keeping himself afloat. Young Wetzel, in the bottom of the canoe, would have shared the same fate, had he not cried out that he was white and a prisoner; wherupon they bade him knock loose the Indian’s hand from the side of the canoe. This he did, and the Indian sank. The current carried the canoe on a rocky spit of land, and Wetzel jumped out and waded ashore, while the little craft spun off and again drifted toward midstream. One of the men on shore now fired at the only remaining Indian, who was still swimming his horse for the opposite bank. The bullet splashed the water on his naked skin, whereat he slipped off his horse, swam to the empty canoe, and got into it. Unhurt he reached the further shore, where he leaped out and caught the horse as it swam to land, mounted it, rifle in hand, turned to yell defiance at his foes, and then vanished in the forest-shrouded wilderness. He left behind him the dead bodies of his three friends, to be washed on the shallows by the turbid flood of the great river,[30]

These are merely some of the recorded incidents which occurred in the single year 1785, in one comparatively small portion of the vast stretch of territory which then formed the Indian frontier. Many such occurred on all parts of this frontier in each of the terrible years of Indian warfare. They varied infinitely in detail, but they were monotonously alike in their characteristics of stealthy approach, of sudden onfall, and of butcherly cruelty; and there was also a terrible sameness in the brutality and ruthlessness with which the whites, as occasion offered, wreaked their revenge. Generally the Indian war parties were successful, and suffered comparatively little, making their attacks by surprise, and by preference on unarmed men cumbered with women and children. Occasionally they were beaten back; occasionally parties of settlers or hunters stumbled across and scattered the prowling bands; occasionally the Indian villages suffered from retaliatory inroads.

One attack, simple enough in its incidents, deserves notice for other reasons. In 1784 a family of “poor white” immigrants who had just settled in Kentucky were attacked in the daytime, while in the immediate neighborhood of their squalid cabin. The father was shot, and one Indian was in the act of tomahawking the six-year-old son, when an elder brother, from the doorway of the cabin, shot the savage. The Indians then fled. The boy thus rescued grew up to become the father of Abraham Lincoln.[31]

Now and then the monstrous uniformity of horror in assault and reprisal was broken by some deed out of the common; some instance where despair nerved the frame of woman or of half-grown boy; some strange incident in the career of a backwoods hunter, whose profession perpetually exposed him to Indian attack, but also trained him as naught else could to evade and repel it. The wild turkey was always much hunted by the settlers; and one of the common Indian tricks was to imitate the turkey call and shoot the hunter when thus tolled to his foe’s ambush; but it was only less common for a skilled Indian fighter to detect the ruse and himself creep up and slay the would-be slayer. More than once, when a cabin was attacked in the absence or after the death of the men, some brawny frontierswoman, accustomed to danger and violent physical exertion, and favored by peculiar circumstances, herself beat off the assailants.

In one such case, two or three families were living together in a block-house. One spring day, when there were in the house but two men and one woman, a Mrs. Bozarth, the children who had been playing in the yard suddenly screamed that Indians were coming. One of the men sprang to the door only to fall back with a bullet in his breast, and in another moment an Indian leaped over the threshold and attacked the remaining man before he could grasp a weapon. Holding his antagonist the latter called out to Mrs. Bozarth to hand him a knife; but instead she snatched up an axe and killed the savage on the spot. But that instant another leaped into the doorway, and firing, killed the white man who had been struggling with his companion; but the woman instantly turned on him, as he stood with his smoking gun, and ripped open his body with a stroke of her axe. Yelling for help he sank on the threshold, and his comrades rushed to his rescue; the woman, with her bloody weapon, cleft open the skull of the first, and the others fell back, so that she was able to shut and bar the door. Then the savages moved off, but they had already killed the children in the yard.

A similar incident took place in Kentucky, where the cabin of a man named John Merrill was attacked at night. He was shot in several places, and one arm and one thigh broken, as he stood by the open door, and fell calling out to his wife to close it. This she did; but the Indians chopped a hole in the stout planks with their tomahawks, and tried to crawl through. The woman, however, stood to one side and struck at the head of each as it appeared, maiming or killing the first two or three. Enraged at being thus baffled by a woman, two of the Indians clambered on the roof of the cabin, and prepared to drop down the wide chimney; for at night the fire in such a cabin was allowed to smoulder, the coals being kept alive in the ashes. But Mrs. Merrill seized a feather-bed and, tearing it open, threw it on the embers; the flame and stifling smoke leaped up the chimney, and in a moment both Indians came down, blinded and half smothered, and were killed by the big resolute woman before they could recover themselves. No further attempt was made to molest the cabin or its inmates.

One of the incidents which became most widely noised along the borders was the escape of the two Johnson boys, in the fall of 1788. Their father was one of the restless pioneers along the upper Ohio, who were always striving to take up claims across the river, heedless of the Indian treaties. The two boys, John and Henry, were at the time thirteen and eleven years old respectively. One Sunday, about noon, they went to find a hat which they had lost the day before at the spot where they had been working, three quarters of a mile from the house. Having found the hat they sat down by the roadside to crack nuts, and were surprised by two Indians; they were not harmed, but were forced to go with their captors, who kept traveling slowly through the woods on the outskirts of the settlements, looking for horses. The elder boy soon made friends with the Indians, telling them that he and his brother were ill-treated at home, and would be glad to get a chance to try Indian life. By degrees they grew to believe he was in earnest, and plied him with all kinds of questions concerning the neighbors, their live stock, their guns, the number of men in the different families, to all of which he replied with seeming eagerness and frankness. At night they stopped to camp, one Indian scouting through the woods, while the other kindled a fire by flashing powder in the pan of his rifle. For supper they had parched corn and pork roasted over the coals; there was then some further talk, and the Indians lay down to sleep, one on each side of the boys. After a while, supposing that their captives were asleep, and anticipating no trouble from two unarmed boys, one Indian got up and lay down on the other side of the fire, where he was soon snoring heavily. Then the lads, who had been wide awake, biding their time, whispered to one another, and noiselessly rose. The elder took one of the guns, silently cocked it, and, pointing it at the head of one Indian, directed the younger boy to take it and pull trigger, while, he himself stood over the head of the other Indian with drawn tomahawk. The one boy then fired, his Indian never moving after receiving the shot, while the other boy struck at the same moment; but the tomahawk went too far back on the neck, and the savage tried to spring to his feet, yelling loudly. However the boy struck him again and again as he strove to rise, and he fell back and was soon dead. Then the two boys hurried off through the darkness, fearing lest other Indians might be in the neighborhood. Not very far away they struck a path which they recognized, and the elder hung up his hat, that they might find the scene of their feat when they came back. Continuing their course they reached a block-house shortly before daybreak. On the following day a party of men went out with the elder boy and found the two dead Indians.[32]

After any Indian stroke the men of the neighborhood would gather under their local militia officers, and, unless the Indians had too long a start, would endeavor to overtake them, and either avenge the slain or rescue the prisoners. In the more exposed settlements bands of rangers were kept continually patrolling the woods. Every man of note in the Cumberland county took part in this duty. In Kentucky the county lieutenants and their subordinates were always on the lookout. Logan paid especial heed to the protection of the immigrants who came in over the Wilderness Road. Kenton’s spy company watched the Ohio, and continually crossed it on the track of marauding parties, and, though very often baffled, yet Kenton and his men succeeded again and again in rescuing hapless women and children, or in scattering—although usually with small loss—war parties bound against the settlements.

One of the best known Indian fighters in Kentucky was William Whitley, who lived at Walnut Flat, some five miles from Crab Orchard. He had come to Kentucky soon after its settlement, and by his energy and ability had acquired property and leadership, though of unknown ancestry and without education. He was a stalwart man, skilled in the use of arms, jovial and fearless; the backwoods fighters followed him readily, and he loved battle; he took part in innumerable Indian expeditions, and in his old age was killed fighting against Tecumseh at the battle of the Thames. In 1786 or ’87 he built the first brick house ever built in Kentucky. It was a very handsome house for those days, every step in the hall stairway having carved upon it the head of an eagle bearing in its beak an olive branch. Each story was high, and the windows were placed very high from the ground, to prevent the Indians from shooting through them at the occupants. The glass was brought from Virginia by pack train. He feasted royally the hands who put up the house; and to pay for the whiskey they drank he had to sell one of his farms.

In 1785 (the year of the above recited ravages on the upper Ohio in the neighborhood of Wheeling), Colonel Whitley led his rangers, once and again, against marauding Indians. In January he followed a war party, rescued a captive white man, and took prisoner an Indian who was afterward killed by one of the militia—”a cowardly fellow,” says Whitley. In October a party of immigrants, led by a man named McClure, who had just come over the Wilderness trace, were set upon at dawn by Indians, not far from Whitley’s house; two of the men were killed. Mrs. McClure got away at first, and ran two hundred yards, taking her four children with her; in the gloom they would all have escaped had not the smallest child kept crying. This led the Indians to them. Three of the children were tomahawked at once; next morning the fourth shared the same fate. The mother was forced to cook breakfast for her captors at the fire before which the scalps were drying. She was then placed on a half-broken horse and led off with them. When word of the disaster was brought to Whitley’s, he was not at home, but his wife, a worthy helpmeet, immediately sent for him, and meanwhile sent word to his company. On his return he was able to take the trail at once with twenty-one riflemen, as true as steel. Following hard, but with stealth equal to their own, he overtook the Indians at sundown on the second day, and fell on them in their camp. Most of them escaped through the thick forest, but he killed two, rescued six prisoners, and captured sixteen horses and much plunder.

Ten days after this another party of immigrants, led by a man named Moore, were attacked on the Wilderness Road and nine persons killed. Whitley raised thirty of his horse-riflemen, and, guessing from the movements of the Indians that they were following the war trace northward, he marched with all speed to reach it at some point ahead of them, and succeeded. Finding they had not passed he turned and went south, and in a thick canebrake met his foes face to face. The whites were spread out in line, while the Indians, twenty in number, came on in single file, all on horseback. The cane was so dense that the two parties were not ten steps apart when they saw one another. At the first fire the Indians, taken utterly unaware, broke and fled, leaving eight of their number dead; and the victors also took twenty-eight horses.[33]

In the following spring another noted Indian fighter, less lucky than Whitley, was killed while leading one of these scouting parties. Early in 1786, the Indians began to commit numerous depredations in Kentucky, and the alarm and anger of the inhabitants became great.[34] In April, a large party of savages, under a chief named Black Wolf, made a raid along Beargrass. Col. William Christian, a gallant and honorable man, was in command of the neighboring militia. At once, as was his wont, he raised a band of twenty men, and followed the plunderers across the Ohio. Riding well in advance of his followers, with but three men in company with him, he overtook the three rearmost Indians, among whom was Black Wolf. The struggle was momentary but bloody. All three Indians were killed, but Colonel Christian and one of his captains were also slain.[35]

The Kentuckians were by this time thoroughly roused, and were bent on making a retaliatory expedition in force. They felt that the efforts made by Congress to preserve peace by treaties, at which the Indians were loaded with presents, merely resulted in making them think that the whites were afraid of them, and that if they wished gifts all they had to do was to go to war.[36] The only effective way to deal with the Indians was to strike them in their own country, not to try to parry the strokes they themselves dealt. Clark, who knew the savages well, scoffed at the idea that a vigorous blow, driven well home, would rouse them to desperation; he realized that, formidable though they were in actual battle, and still more in plundering raid, they were not of the temper to hazard all on the fate of war, or to stand heavy punishment, and that they would yield very quickly, when once they were convinced that unless they did so they and their families would perish by famine or the sword.[37] At this time he estimated that some fifteen hundred warriors were on the war-path and that they were likely to be joined by many others.

The condition of affairs at the French towns of the Illinois and Wabash afforded another strong reason for war, or at least for decided measures of some kind. Almost absolute anarchy reigned in these towns. The French inhabitants had become profoundly discontented with the United States Government. This was natural, for they were neither kept in order nor protected, in spite of their petitions to Congress that some stable government might be established.[38] The quarrels between the French and the intruding American settlers had very nearly reached the point of a race war; and the Americans were further menaced by the Indians. These latter were on fairly good terms with the French, many of whom had intermarried with them, and lived as they did; although the French families of the better class were numerous, and had attained to what was for the frontier a high standard of comfort and refinement.

The French complained with reason of the lawless and violent character of many of the American newcomers, and also of the fact that already speculators were trying by fraud and foul means to purchase large tracts of land, not for settlement, but to hold until it should rise in value. On the other hand, the Americans complained no less bitterly of the French as a fickle, treacherous, undisciplined race, in close alliance with the Indians, and needing to be ruled with a rod of iron.[39] It is impossible to reconcile the accounts the two parties gave of one another’s deeds; doubtless neither side was guiltless of grave wrongdoing. So great was Clark’s reputation for probity and leadership that both sides wrote him urgently, requesting that he would come to them and relieve their distress.[40] One of the most fruitful sources of broils and quarrels was the liquor trade with the Indians. The rougher among the new-comers embarked eagerly in this harmful and disreputable business, and the low-class French followed their example. The commandant, Monsieur J. M. P. Legrace, and the creole court forbade this trade; a decision which was just and righteous, but excited much indignation, as the other inhabitants believed that the members of the court themselves followed it in secret.[41]

In 1786 the ravages of the Indians grew so serious, and the losses of the Americans near Vincennes became so great, that they abandoned their outlying farms, and came into the town.[42] Vincennes then consisted of upward of three hundred houses. The Americans numbered some sixty families, and had built an American quarter, with a strong blockhouse. They only ventured out to till their cornfields in bodies of armed men, while the French worked their lands singly and unarmed.

The Indians came freely into the French quarter of the town, and even sold to the inhabitants plunder taken from the Americans; and when complaint of this was made to the creole magistrates, they paid no heed. One of the men who suffered at the hands of the savages was a wandering schoolmaster, named John Filson,[43] the first historian of Kentucky, and the man who took down, and put into his own quaint and absurdly stilted English, Boone’s so-called “autobiography.” Filson, having drifted West, had traveled up and down the Ohio and Wabash by canoe and boat. He was much struck with the abundance of game of all kinds which he saw on the northwestern side of the Ohio, and especially by the herds of buffaloes which lay on the sand-bars; his party lived on the flesh of bears, deer, wild turkeys, coons, and water-turtles. In 1785 the Indians whom he met seemed friendly; but on June 2, 1786, while on the Wabash, his canoe was attacked by the savages, and two of his men were slain. He himself escaped with difficulty, and reached Vincennes after an exhausting journey, but having kept possession of his “two small trunks.” [44]

Two or three weeks after this misadventure of the unlucky historian, a party of twenty-five Americans, under a captain named Daniel Sullivan,[45] were attacked while working in their cornfields at Vincennes.[46] They rallied and drove back the Indians, but two of their number were wounded. One of the wounded fell for a moment into the hands of the Indians and was scalped; and though he afterward recovered, his companions at the time expected him to die. They marched back to Vincennes in furious anger, and finding an Indian in the house of a Frenchman, they seized and dragged him to their block-house, where the wife of the scalped man, whose name was Donelly, shot and scalped him.

This greatly exasperated the French, who kept a guard over the other Indians who were in town, and next day sent them to the woods. Then their head men, magistrates, and officers of the militia, summoned the Americans before a council, and ordered all who had not regular passports from the local court to leave at once, “bag and baggage.” This created the utmost consternation among the Americans, whom the French outnumbered five to one, while the savages certainly would have destroyed them had they tried to go back to Kentucky. Their leaders again wrote urgent appeals for help to Clark, asking that a general guard might be sent them if only to take them out of the country. Filson had already gone overland to Louisville and told the authorities of the straits of their brethren at Vincennes, and immediately an expedition was sent to their relief under Captains Hardin and Patton.

Meanwhile, on July 15th, a large band of several hundred Indians, bearing red and white flags, came down the river in forty-seven canoes to attack the Americans at Vincennes, sending word to the French that if they remained neutral they would not be molested. The French sent envoys to dissuade them from their purpose, but the war chiefs and sachems answered that the red people were at last united in opposition to “the men wearing hats,” and gave a belt of black wampum to the wavering Piankeshaws, warning them that all Indians who refused to join against the whites would thenceforth be treated as foes. However, their deeds by no means corresponded with their threats. Next day they assailed the American block-house or stockaded fort, but found they could make no impression and drew off. They burned a few outlying cabins and slaughtered many head of cattle, belonging both to the Americans and the French; and then, seeing the French under arms, held further parley with them, and retreated, to the relief of all the inhabitants.

At the same time the Kentuckians, under Hardin and Patton, stumbled by accident on a party of Indians, some of whom were friendly Piankeshaws and some hostile Miamis. They attacked them without making any discrimination between friend and foe, killed six, wounded seven, and drove off the remainder. But they themselves lost one man killed and four wounded, including Hardin, and fell back to Louisville without doing anything more.[47]

These troubles on the Wabash merely hardened the determination of the Kentuckians no longer to wait until the Federal Government acted. With the approval of Governor Patrick Henry, they took the initiative themselves. Early in August the field officers of the district of Kentucky met at Harrodsburg, Benjamin Logan presiding, and resolved on an expedition, to be commanded by Clark, against the hostile Indians on the Wabash. Half of the militia of the district were to go; the men were to assemble, on foot or on horseback, as they pleased, at Clarksville, on September 10th.[48] Besides pack-horses, salt, flour, powder, and lead were impressed,[49] not always in strict compliance with law, for some of the officers impressed quantities of spirituous liquors also.[50] The troops themselves, however, came in slowly.[51] Late in September, when twelve hundred men had been gathered, Clark moved forward. But he was no longer the man he had been. He failed to get any hold on his army. His followers, on their side, displayed all that unruly fickleness which made the militia of the Revolutionary period a weapon which might at times be put to good use in the absence of any other, but which was really trusted only by men whose military judgment was as fatuous as Jefferson’s.

After reaching Vincennes the troops became mutinous, and at last flatly refused longer to obey orders, and marched home as a disorderly mob, to the disgrace of themselves and their leader. Nevertheless, the expedition had really accomplished something, for it overawed the Wabash and Illinois Indians, and effectively put a stop to any active expressions of disloyalty or disaffection on the part of the French. Clark sent officers to the Illinois towns, and established a garrison of one hundred and fifty men at Vincennes,[52] besides seizing the goods of a Spanish merchant in retaliation for wrongs committed on American merchants by the Spaniards.

This failure was in small part offset by a successful expedition led by Logan at the same time against the Shawnee towns.[53] On October 5th, he attacked them with seven hundred and ninety men. There was little or no resistance, most of the warriors having gone to oppose Clark. Logan took ten scalps and thirty-two prisoners, burned two hundred cabins and quantities of corn, and returned in triumph after a fortnight’s absence. One deed of infamy sullied his success. Among his colonels was the scoundrel McGarry, who, in cold blood, murdered the old Shawnee chief, Molunthee, several hours after he had been captured; the shame of the barbarous deed being aggravated by the fact that the old chief had always been friendly to the Americans.[54] Other murders would probably have followed, had it not been for the prompt and honorable action of Colonels Robert Patterson and Robert Trotter, who ordered their men to shoot down any one who molested another prisoner. McGarry then threatened them, and they in return demanded that he be court-martialled for murder.[55] Logan, to his discredit, refused the court-martial, for fear of creating further trouble. The bane of the frontier military organization was the helplessness of the elected commanders, their dependence on their followers, and the inability of the decent men to punish the atrocious misdeeds of their associates.

These expeditions were followed by others on a smaller scale, but of like character. They did enough damage to provoke, but not to overawe, the Indians. With the spring of 1787 the ravages began on an enlarged scale, with all their dreadful accompaniments of rapine, murder, and torture. All along the Ohio frontier, from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, the settlers were harried; and in some places they abandoned their clearings and hamlets, so that the frontier shrank back.[56] Logan, Kenton, and many other leaders headed counter expeditions, and now and then broke up a war party or destroyed an Indian town;[57] but nothing decisive was accomplished, and Virginia paralyzed the efforts of the Kentuckians and waked them to anger by forbidding them to follow the Indian parties beyond the frontier.[58]

The most important stroke given to the hostile Indians in 1787 was dealt by the Cumberland people. During the preceding three or four years, some scores of the settlers on the Cumberland had been slain by small predatory parties of Indians, mostly Cherokees and Creeks. No large war band attacked the settlements; but no hunter, surveyor, or traveler, no woodchopper or farmer, no woman alone in the cabin with her children, could ever feel safe from attack. Now and then a savage was killed in such an attack, or in a skirmish with some body of scouts; but nothing effectual could be thus accomplished.

The most dangerous marauders were some Creek and Cherokee warriors who had built a town on the Coldwater, a tributary of the Tennessee near the Muscle Shoals, within easy striking distance of the Cumberland settlements. This town was a favorite resort of French traders from the Illinois and Wabash, who came up the Tennessee in bateaux. They provided the Indians with guns and ammunition, and in return often received goods plundered from the Americans; and they at least indirectly and in some cases directly encouraged the savages in their warfare against the settlers.59

Early in June, Robertson gathered one hundred and thirty men and marched against the Coldwater town, with two Chickasaws as guides. Another small party started at the same time by water, but fell into an ambush, and then came back. Robertson and his force followed the trail of a marauding party which had just visited the settlements. They marched through the woods toward the Tennessee until they heard the voice of the great river as it roared over the shoals. For a day they lurked in the cane on the north side, waiting until they were certain no spies were watching them. In the night some of the men swam over and stole a big canoe, with which they returned. At daylight the troops crossed, a few in this canoe, the others swimming with their horses. After landing, they marched seven miles and fell on the town, which was in a ravine, with cornfields round about. Taken by surprise, the warriors, with no effective resistance, fled to their canoes. The white riflemen thronged after them. Most of the warriors escaped, but over twenty were slain; as were also four or five French traders, while half a dozen Frenchmen and one Indian squaw were captured. All the cabins were destroyed, the live stock was slain, and much plunder taken. The prisoners were well treated and released; but on the way home another party of French traders were encountered, and their goods were taken from them. The two Chickasaws were given their full share of all the plunder.

59 Robertson MSS., Robertson to some Frenchman of note in Illinois, June, 1787. This is apparently a copy, probably by Robertson’s wife, of the original letter. In Robertson’s own original letters, the spelling and handwriting are as rough as they are vigorous.

This blow gave a breathing spell to the Cumberland settlements. Robertson at once wrote to the French in the Illinois country, and also to some Delawares, who had recently come to the neighborhood, and were preserving a dubious neutrality. He explained the necessity of their expedition, and remarked that if any innocent people, whether Frenchmen or Indians, had suffered in the attack, they had to blame themselves; they were in evil company, and the assailants could not tell the good from the bad. If any Americans had been there, they would have suffered just the same. In conclusion he warned the French that if their traders continued to furnish the hostile Indians with powder and lead, they would “render themselves very insecure”; and to the Indians he wrote that, in the event of a war, “you will compell ous to retaliate, which will be a grate pridgedes to your nation.” [59] He did not spell well; but his meaning was plain, and his hand was known to be heavy.

[1] State Department MSS., No. 56, p. 333, Letter of G. Clark, Nov. 10, 1785; p. 337, Letter of G. Clark to R. Butler, etc.; No. 16, p. 293; No. 32, p. 39. (114)

[2] American State Papers, Public Lands, I, p. 40, vi.

[3] Clay MSS. Jesse Benton to Thos. Hart, April 3, 1786.

[4] State Department MSS., No. 56. Address of Corn Tassel and Hanging Maw, Sept. 5, 1786.

[5] Do., Letters of H. Knox, No. 150, Vol. I, p. 445.

[6] State Dept. MSS., No. 56, March 7, 1786, p. 345, also p. 395.

[7] Do., No. 150, Vol. !, Major Finley’s Statement, Dec. 6, 1785.

[8] Do., Letters of H. Knox, No. 150, Vol. I, pp. 107, 112, 115, 123, 149, 243, 269, etc.

[9] State Department MSS., No. 30, p. 265; No. 56, p. 327; No. 163, pp. 416, 418, 422, 426.

[10] Do., Indian Affairs. Letter of P. Muhlenberg, July 5, 1784.

[11] Do., Report of H. Knox, April, 1787.

[12] Do., 150, Vol. II, p. 548.

[13] Draper MSS. Benj. Harrison to G. R. Clark, August 19, 1784.

[14] State Dept. MSS., No. 56, pp. 279 and 333; No. 60, p. 297, etc.

[15] Denny’s Journal, p. 259.

[16] State Dept. MSS., No. 56, p. 255.

[17] Do., No. 150, Vol. 11, p. 296.

[18] Draper MSS. Clark, Croghan, and Others to Delawares, August 28, 1785.

[19] State Dept. MSS., No. 48, p. 277.

[20] Do., Muhlenberg’s Letter.

[21] Do., No. 73, pp. 7, 343. Gazette of the State of Georgia, Aug. 5, 1784. May 25, June 1, Nov. 2, Nov. 30, 1786.

[22] Do., No. 20, pp. 321 and 459; No. 18, p. 140; No. 12, Vol. II, June 30, 1786.

[23] Do., No. 60, p. 277, Sept. 13, 1786.

[24] Do., No. 50, p. 279. Clark to R. H. Lee.

[25] Haldimand Papers, 1784, 5, 6.

[26] Do., John Hay to Haldimand, Aug. 13, 1784; James McNeil, Aug. 1, 1785.

[27] Do. Letter of A McKee, Dec. 24, 1786; McKee to Sir John Johnson, Feb. 25, 1786; Major Ancrum, May 8, 1786.

[28] Draper MSS. Alex. Fowler to Edward Hand, Pittsburgh, July 22, 1780.

[29] Draper MSS., Clark MSS. Darrell to Fleming, April 14, 1783.

[30] De Haas, pp. 283-292. De Haas gathered the facts of these and numerous similar incidents from the pioneers themselves in their old age; doubtless they are often inaccurate in detail, but on the whole De Haas has more judgment and may be better trusted than the other compilers. In the Draper MSS, are volumes of such traditional stories, gathered with no discrimination whatever.

[31] Hay and Nicolay.

[32] De Haas.

[33] Draper MSS. Whitley’s MSS. Narrative, apparently dictated some time after the events described. It differs somewhat from the printed account in Collins.

[34] Draper MSS. Clark Papers, passim for 1786. Wm. Finney to G. R. Clark, March 24 and 26, 1786. Also Wm. Croghan to G. R. Clark, Nov. 3, and Nov. 16, 1785.

[35] State Department MSS. Papers Continental Congress. Sam McDowell to Governor of Virginia, April 18, 1786. John May to Do., April 19, 1786. Clark MSS. Bradford’s Notes on Kentucky. John Clark to Jonathan Clark, April 21, 1786.

[36] Draper MSS. Jon. Clark Papers. John Clark to Jonathan Clark, March 29, 1786. Also, G. R. Clark to J. Clark, April 20, 1788.

[37] State Department MSS., No. 56, p. 282. G. R. Clark to R. H. Lee.

[38] State Department MSS., No. 30, p. 453, Dec. 8, 1784. Also p. 443, Nov. 10, 1784. Draper MSS. J. Edgar to G. R. Clark, Oct. 23, 1786.

[39] State Department MSS., No. 56. J. Edgar to G. R. Clark, Nov. 7, 1785. Draper MSS. Petition of Americans of Vincennes to Congress, June 1, 1786.

[40] Draper MSS. Petition to G. R. Clark from Inhabitants of Vincennes, March 16 1786.

[41] Do., John Filson; MS. Journey of Two Voyages, etc.

[42] Do., Moses Henry to G. R. Clark, June 7, 1786.

[43] Do., John Small to G. R. Clark, June 23, 1786.

[44] Do., Filson’s Journal.

[45] Do., Daniel Sullivan to G. R. Clark, June 23, 1786. Small’s letter says June 21st.

[46] State Dept. MSS. Papers Continental Congress, No. 150, Vol. II, Letter of J. M. P. Legrace. “Au Général George Rogé Clarck—a la Chûte” (at the Fails—Louisville), July 22, 1786.

[47] Letter of Legrace and Filson’s Journal. The two contradict one another as to which side was to blame. Legrace blames the Americans heavily for wronging both the French and the Indians; and condemns in the strongest terms, and probably with justice, many of their number, and especially Sullivan. He speaks, however, in high terms of Henry and Small; and both of these, in their letters referred to above, paint the conduct of the French and Indians in very dark colors, throwing the blame on them. Legrace is certainly disingenuous in suppressing all mention of the wrongs done to the Americans. For Filson’s career and death in the woods, see the excellent Life of Filson, by Durrett, in the Filson Club publications.

[48] Draper MSS. Minutes of meetings of the officers of the district of Kentucky, Aug. 2, 1786. State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. II. Letter of P. Henry, May 16, 1786.

[49] Draper MSS. J. Cox to George Clark, Aug. 8, 1786.

[50] State Dept. MSS., Madison papers. Letter of Caleb Wallace, Nov. 20, 1786.

[51] State Dept. MSS., Papers Continental Congress. No. 150, Vol. II. Letter of Major Wm. North, Sept. 15, 1786.

[52] Do. Virginia State Papers. G. R. Clark to Patrick Henry. Draper MSS., Proceedings of Committee of Kentucky Convention, Dec. 19, 1786.

[53] State Department MSS., Virginia State Papers, Logan to Patrick Henry, December 17, 1786.

[54] Draper MSS., Caleb Wallace to Wm. Fleming, October 23, 1786. State Department MSS., No. 15, Vol. II, Harmar’s Letter, November 15, 1786.

[55] Virginia State Papers, Vol. IV, p. 212.

[56] Durrett MSS., Daniel Dawson to John Campbell, Pittsburg, June 17, 1787. Virginia State Papers, Vol. IV, p. 419.

[57] Draper MSS., T. Brown to T. Preston, Danville, June 13, 1787. Virginia State Papers, Vol. IV, pp. 254, 287, etc.

[58] Virginia State Papers, Vol. IV, p. 344.

[59] Robertson MSS. His letter above referred to, and another, in his own hand, to the Delawares, of about the same date.

CHAPTER III

THE NAVIGATION OF THE MISSISSIPPI; SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS AND SPANISH INTRIGUES, 1784–1788

IT WAS important for the frontiersmen to take the Lake Posts from the British; but it was even more important to wrest from the Spaniards the free navigation of the Mississippi. While the Lake Posts were held by the garrisons of a foreign power, the work of settling the Northwestern territory was bound to go forward slowly and painfully; but while the navigation of the Mississippi was barred, even the settlements already founded could not attain to their proper prosperity and importance.

The lusty young commonwealths which were springing into life on the Ohio and its tributaries knew that commerce with the outside world was essential to their full and proper growth. The high, forest-clad ranges of the Appalachians restricted and hampered their mercantile relations with the older States, and therefore with the Europe which lay beyond; while the giant river offered itself as a huge trade artery to bring them close to all the outer world, if only they were allowed its free use.

Navigable rivers are of great importance to a country’s trade now; but a hundred years ago their importance was relatively far greater. Steam, railroads, electricity, have worked a revolution so stupendous, that we find it difficult to realize the facts of the life which our forefathers lived. The conditions of commerce have changed much more in the last hundred years than in the preceding two thousand. The Kentuckians and Tennesseans knew only the pack train, the wagon train, the river craft and the deep-sea ship; that is, they knew only such means of carrying on commerce as were known to Greek and Carthaginian, Roman and Persian, and the nations of mediaeval Europe. Beasts of draught and of burden, and oars and sails,—these, and these only,—were at the service of their merchants, as they had been at the service of all merchants from time immemorial. Where trade was thus limited the advantages conferred by water carriage, compared to land carriage, were incalculable. The Westerners were right in regarding as indispensable the free navigation of the Mississippi. They were right also in their determination ultimately to acquire the control of the whole river, from the source to the mouth.

However, the Westerners wished more than the privilege of sending down stream the products of their woods and pastures and tilled farms. They had already begun to cast longing eyes on the fair Spanish possessions. Spain was still the greatest of colonial powers. In wealth, in extent, and in population both native and European—her colonies surpassed even those of England; and by far the most important of her possessions were in the New World. For two centuries her European rivals, English, French, and Dutch, had warred against her in America, with the net result of taking from her a few islands in the West Indies. On the American mainland her possessions were even larger than they had been in the age of the great Conquisadores; the age of Cortes, Pizarro, De Soto, and Coronado. Yet it was evident that her grasp had grown feeble. Every bold, lawless, ambitious leader among the frontier folk dreamed of wresting from the Spaniard some portion of his rich and ill-guarded domain.

It was not alone the attitude of the frontiersmen toward Spain that was novel, and based upon a situation for which there was little precedent. Their relations with one another, with their brethren of the seaboard, and with the Federal Government likewise had to be adjusted without much chance of profiting by antecedent experience. Many phases of these relations between the people who stayed at home and those who wandered off to make homes, between the frontiersmen as they formed young States and the central government representing the old States, were entirely new, and were ill-understood by both parties. Truths which all citizens have now grown to accept as axiomatic were then seen clearly only by the very greatest men, and by most others were seen dimly, if at all. What is now regarded as inevitable and proper was then held as something abnormal, unnatural, and greatly to be dreaded. The men engaged in building new commonwealths did not, as yet, understand that they owed the Union as much as did the dwellers in the old States. They were apt to let liberty become mere anarchy and license, to talk extravagantly about their rights while ignoring their duties, and to rail at the weakness of the Central Government while at the same time opposing with foolish violence every effort to make it stronger. On the other hand, the people of the long-settled country found difficulty in heartily accepting the idea that the new communities, as they sprang up in the forest, were entitled to stand exactly on a level with the old, not only as regards their own rights, but as regards the right to shape the destiny of the Union itself.

The Union was as yet imperfect. The jangling colonies had been welded together, after a fashion, in the slow fire of the Revolutionary War; but the old lines of cleavage were still distinctly marked. The great struggle had been of incalculable benefit to all Americans. Under its stress they had begun to develop a national type of thought and character. Americans now held in common memories which they shared with no one else; for they held ever in mind the facts of a dozen crowded years. Theirs was the history of all that had been done by the Continental Congress and the Continental armies; theirs the memory of the toil and the suffering and the splendid ultimate triumph. They cherished in common the winged words of their statesmen, the edged deeds of their soldiers; they yielded to the spell of mighty names which sounded alien to all men save themselves. But though the successful struggle had laid deep the foundations of a new nation, it had also of necessity stirred and developed many of the traits most hostile to assured national life. All civil wars loosen the bands of orderly liberty, and leave in their train disorder and evil. Hence those who cause them must rightly be held guilty of the gravest wrongdoing unless they are not only pure of purpose, but sound of judgment, and unless the result shows their wisdom. The Revolution had left behind it among many men love of liberty, mingled with lofty national feeling and broad patriotism; but to other men it seemed that the chief lessons taught had been successful resistance to authority, jealousy of the central Government, and intolerance of all restraint. According as one or the other of these mutually hostile sets of sentiments prevailed, the acts of the Revolutionary leaders were to stand justified or condemned in the light of the coming years. As yet the success had only been in tearing down; there remained the harder and all-important task of building up.

This task of building up was accomplished, and the acts of the men of the Revolution were thus justified. It was the after result of the Revolution, not the Revolution itself, which gave to the governmental experiment inaugurated by the Second Continental Congress its unique and lasting value. It was this result which marks most clearly the difference between the careers of the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking peoples on this continent. The wise statesmanship typified by such men as Washington and Marshall, Hamilton, Jay, John Adams, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, prevailed over the spirit of separatism and anarchy. Seven years after the war ended, the Constitution went into effect, and the United States became in truth a nation. Had we not thus become a nation, had the separatists won the day, and our country become the seat of various antagonistic States and confederacies, then the Revolution by which we won liberty and independence would have been scarcely more memorable or noteworthy than the wars which culminated in the separation of the Spanish-American colonies from Spain; for we would thereby have proved that we did not deserve either liberty or independence.

The Revolutionary War itself had certain points of similarity with the struggles of which men like Bolivar were the heroes; where the parallel totally fails is in what followed. There were features in which the campaigns of the Mexican and South American insurgent leaders resembled at least the partisan warfare so often waged by American Revolutionary generals; but with the deeds of the great constructive statesmen of the United States there is nothing in the career of any Spanish-American community to compare. It was the power to build a solid and permanent Union, the power to construct a mighty nation out of the wreck of a crumbling confederacy, which drew a sharp line between the Americans of the North and the Spanish-speaking races of the South.

In their purposes and in the popular sentiment to which they have appealed, our separatist leaders of every generation have borne an ominous likeness to the horde of dictators and half-military, half-political adventurers who for three-quarters of a century have wrought such harm in the lands between the Argentine and Mexico; but the men who brought into being and preserved the Union have had no compeers in Southern America. The North American colonies wrested their independence from Great Britain as the colonies of South America wrested theirs from Spain; but whereas the United States grew with giant strides into a strong and orderly nation, Spanish-America has remained split into a dozen turbulent States, and has become a byword for anarchy and weakness.

The separatist feeling has at times been strong in almost every section of the Union, although in some regions it has been much stronger than in others. Calhoun and Pickering, Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris, Wendell Phillips and William Taney, Aaron Burr and Jefferson Davis—these and many other leaders of thought and action, East and West, North and South, at different periods of the nation’s growth, and at different stages of their own careers, have, for various reasons, and with widely varying purity of motive, headed or joined in separatist movements. Many of these men were actuated by high-minded, though narrow, patriotism; and those who, in the culminating catastrophe of all the separatist agitations, appealed to the sword, proved the sincerity of their convictions by their resolute courage and self-sacrifice. Nevertheless they warred against the right, and strove mightily to bring about the downfall and undoing of the nation.

The men who brought on and took part in the disunion movements were moved sometimes by good and sometimes by bad motives; but even when their motives were disinterested and their purposes pure, and even when they had received much provocation, they must be adjudged as lacking the wisdom, the foresight, and the broad devotion to all the land over which the flag floats, without which no statesman can rank as really great. The enemies of the Union were the enemies of America and of mankind, whose success would have plunged their country into an abyss of shame and misery, and would have arrested for generations the upward movement of their race.

Yet, evil though the separatist movements were, they were at times imperfectly justified by the spirit of sectional distrust and bitterness rife in portions of the country which at the moment were themselves loyal to the Union. This was especially true of the early separatist movements in the West. Unfortunately the attitude toward the Westerners of certain portions of the population in the older States, and especially in the Northeastern States, was one of unreasoning jealousy and suspicion; and though this mental attitude rarely crystallized into hostile deeds, its very existence, and the knowledge that it did exist, imbittered the men of the West. Moreover the people among whom these feelings were strongest were, unfortunately, precisely those who on the questions of the Union and the Constitution showed the broadest and most far-seeing statesmanship. New England, the towns of the middle States and Maryland, the tidewater region of South Carolina, and certain parts of Virginia were the seats of the soundest political thought of the day. The men who did this sane, wholesome political thinking were quite right in scorning and condemning the crude unreason, often silly, often vicious, which characterized so much of the political thought of their opponents. The strength of these opponents was largely derived from the ignorance and suspicion of the raw country districts, and from the sour jealousy with which the backwoodsmen regarded the settled regions of the seaboard.

But when these sound political thinkers permitted their distrust of certain sections of the country to lead them into doing injustice to those sections, they in their turn deserved the same condemnation which should be meted to so many of their political foes. When they allowed their judgment to become so warped by their dissatisfaction with the traits inevitably characteristic of the earlier stages of frontier development that they became opposed to all extension of the frontier; when they allowed their liking for the well-ordered society of their own districts to degenerate into indifference to or dislike of the growth of the United States toward continental greatness; then they themselves sank into the position of men who in cold selfishness sought to mar the magnificent destiny of their own people.

In the Northeastern States, and in New England especially, this feeling showed itself for two generations after the close of the Revolutionary War. On the whole, the New Englanders have exerted a more profound and wholesome influence upon the development of our common country than has ever been exerted by any other equally numerous body of our people. They have led the nation in the path of civil liberty and sound governmental administration. But too often they have viewed the nation’s growth and greatness from a narrow and provincial standpoint, and have grudgingly acquiesced in, rather than led the march toward, continental supremacy. In shaping the nation’s policy for the future their sense of historic perspective seemed imperfect. They could not see the all-importance of the valley of the Ohio, or of the valley of the Columbia, to the Republic of the years to come. The value of a county in Maine offset in their eyes the value of these vast, empty regions. Indeed, in the days immediately succeeding the Revolution, their attitude toward the growing West was worse than one of mere indifference; it was one of alarm and dislike. They for the moment adopted toward the West a position not wholly unlike that which England had held toward the American colonies as a whole. They came dangerously near repeating, in their feeling toward their younger brethren on the Ohio, the very blunder committed in reference to themselves by their elder brethren in Britain. For some time they seemed, like the British, unable to grasp the grandeur of their race’s imperial destiny. They hesitated to throw themselves with hearty enthusiasm into the task of building a nation with a continent as its base. They rather shrank from the idea as implying a lesser weight of their own section in the nation; not yet understanding that to an American the essential thing was the growth and well-being of America, while the relative importance of the locality where he dwelt was a matter of small moment.

The extreme representatives of this Northeastern sectionalism not only objected to the growth of the West at the time now under consideration, but even avowed a desire to work it harm, by shutting the Mississippi, so as to benefit the commerce of the Atlantic States—a manifestation of cynical and selfish disregard of the rights of their fellow-countrymen quite as flagrant as any piece of tyranny committed or proposed by King George’s ministers in reference to America. These intolerant extremists not only opposed the admission of the young Western States into the Union, but at a later date actually announced that the annexation by the United States of vast territories beyond the Mississippi offered just cause for the secession of the Northeastern States. Even those who did not take such an advanced ground felt an unreasonable dread lest the West might grow to overtop the East in power. In their desire to prevent this (which has long since happened without a particle of damage resulting to the East), they proposed to establish in the Constitution that the representatives from the West should never exceed in number those from the East,—a proviso which would not have been merely futile, for it would quite properly have been regarded by the West as unforgivable.

A curious feature of the way many honest men looked at the West was their inability to see how essentially transient were some of the characteristics to which they objected. Thus they were alarmed at the turbulence and the lawless shortcomings of various kinds which grew out of the conditions of frontier settlement and sparse population. They looked with anxious foreboding to the time when the turbulent and lawless people would be very numerous, and would form a dense and powerful population; failing to see that in exact proportion as the population became dense, the conditions which caused the qualities to which they objected would disappear. Even the men who had too much good sense to share these fears, even men as broadly patriotic as Jay, could not realize the extreme rapidity of Western growth. Kentucky and Tennessee grew much faster than any of the old frontier colonies had ever grown; and from sheer lack of experience, Eastern statesmen could not realize that this rapidity of growth made the navigation of the Mississippi a matter of immediate and not of future interest to the West.

In short, these good people were learning with reluctance and difficulty to accept as necessary certain facts which we regard as part of the order of our political nature. We look at territorial expansion, and the admission of new States, as part of a process as natural as it is desirable. To our forefathers the process was novel, and, in some of its features, repugnant. Many of them could not divest themselves of the feeling that the old States ought to receive more consideration than the new; whereas nowadays it would never occur to any one that Pennsylvania and Georgia ought to stand either above or below California and Montana. It is an inestimable boon to all four States to be in the Union, but this is because the citizens of all of them are on a common footing. If the new commonwealths in the Rocky Mountains and on the Pacific slope were not cordially accepted by the original Thirteen States as having exactly the same rights and privileges of every kind, it would be better for them to stand alone. As a matter of fact, we have become so accustomed to the idea of the equality of the different States, that it never enters our heads to conceive of the possibility of its being otherwise. The feeling in its favor is so genuine and universal that we are not even conscious that it exists. Nobody dreams of treating the fact that the new commonwealths are offshoots of the old as furnishing grounds for any discrimination in reference to them, one way or the other. There still exist dying jealousies between different States and sections, but this particular feeling does not enter into them in any way whatsoever.

At the time when Kentucky was struggling for Statehood, this feeling, though it had been given its death-blow by the success of the Revolution, still lingered here and there on the Atlantic coast. It was manifest in the attitude of many prominent people—the leaders in their communities—toward the new commonwealths growing up beyond the Alleghanies. Had this intolerant sectional feeling ever prevailed and been adopted as the policy of the Atlantic States, the West would have revolted, and would have been right in revolting. But the manifestations of this sectionalism proved abortive; the broad patriotism of leaders like Washington prevailed. In the actual event the East did full and free justice to the West. In consequence we are now one nation.

While many of the people on the Eastern seaboard thus took an indefensible position in reference to the trans-Alleghany settlements, in the period immediately succeeding the Revolution, there were large bodies of the population of these same settlements, including very many of their popular leaders, whose own attitude toward the Union was, if anything, even more blameworthy. They were clamorous about their rights, and were not unready to use veiled threats of disunion when they deemed these rights infringed; but they showed little appreciation of their own duties to the Union. For certain of the positions which they assumed no excuse can be offered. They harped continually on the feebleness of the Federal authorities, and the inability of these authorities to do them justice or offer them adequate protection against the Indian and the Spaniard; yet they bitterly opposed the adoption of the very Constitution which provided a strong and stable Federal Government, and turned the weak confederacy, despised at home and abroad, into one of the great nations of the earth. They showed little self-control, little willingness to wait with patience until it was possible to remedy any of the real or fancied wrongs of which they complained. They made no allowance for the difficulties so plentifully strewn in the path of the Federal authorities. They clamored for prompt and effective action, and yet clamored just as loudly against the men who sought to create a national executive with power to take this prompt and effective action. They demanded that the United States wrest from the British the Lake Posts, and from the Spaniards the navigation of the Mississippi. Yet they seemed incapable of understanding that if they separated from the Union they would thereby forfeit all chance of achieving the very purposes they had in view, because they would then certainly be at the mercy of Britain, and probably, at least for some time, at the mercy of Spain also. They opposed giving the United States the necessary civil and military power, although it was only by the possession and exercise of such power that it would be possible to secure for the Westerners what they wished. In all human probability, the whole country round the Great Lakes would still be British territory, and the mouth of the Mississippi still in the hands of some European power, had the folly of the separatists won the day and had the West been broken up into independent States.

These shortcomings were not special or peculiar to the frontiersmen of the Ohio Valley at the close of the eighteenth century. All our frontiersmen have betrayed a tendency toward them at times, though the exhibitions of this tendency have grown steadily less and less decided. In Vermont, during the years between the close of the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution, the state of affairs was very much what it was in Kentucky at the same time.[1] In each territory there was acute friction with a neighboring State. In each there was a small knot of men who wished the community to keep out of the new American nation, and to enter into some sort of alliance with a European nation, England in one case, Spain in the other. In each there was a considerable but fluctuating separatist party, desirous that the territory should become an independent nation on its own account. In each case the separatist movements failed, and the final triumph lay with the men of broadly national ideas, so that both Kentucky and Vermont became States of one indissoluble Union.

This final triumph of the Union party in these first-formed frontier States was fraught with immeasurable good for them and for the whole nation of which they became parts. It established a precedent for the action of all the other States that sprang into being as the frontier rolled westward. It decided that the interior of North America should form part of one great Republic, and should not be parceled out among a crowd of English-speaking Uruguays and Ecquadors, powerful only to damage one another, and helpless to exact respect from alien foes or to keep order in their own households. It vastly increased the significance of the outcome of the Revolution, for it decided that its after-effects should be felt throughout the entire continent, not merely in the way of example, but by direct impress. The creation of a nation stretching along the Atlantic seaboard was of importance in itself, but the importance was immensely increased when once it was decided that the nation should cover a region larger than all Europe.

While giving unlimited praise to the men so clearsighted, and of such high thought, that from the beginning they foresaw the importance of the Union, and strove to include all the West therein, we must beware of blaming overmuch those whose vision was less acute. The experiment of the Union was as yet inchoate; its benefits were prospective; and loyalty to it was loyalty to a splendid idea the realization of which lay in the future rather than in the present. All honor must be awarded to the men who under such conditions could be loyal to so high an ideal; but we must not refuse to see the many strong and admirable qualities in some of the men who looked less keenly into the future. It would be mere folly[2] to judge a man who, in 1787, was lukewarm or even hostile to the Union by the same standard we should use in testing his son’s grandson a century later. Finally, where a man’s general course was one of devotion to the Union, it is easy to forgive him some momentary lapse, due to a misconception on his part of the real needs of the hour, or to passing but intense irritation at some display of narrow indifference to the rights of his section by the people of some other section. Patrick Henry himself made one slip when he opposed the adoption of the Federal Constitution; but this does not at all offset the services he rendered our common country both before and afterward. Every statesmen makes occasional errors; and the leniency of judgment needed by Patrick Henry, and needed far more by Ethan Allen, Samuel Adams, and George Clinton, must be extended to frontier leaders for whose temporary coldness to the Union there was much greater excuse.

When we deal, not with the leading statesmen of the frontier communities, but with the ordinary frontier folk themselves, there is need to apply the same tests used in dealing with the rude, strong peoples of bygone ages. The standard by which international, and even domestic, morality is judged, must vary for different countries under widely different conditions, for exactly the same reasons that it must vary for different periods of the world’s history. We can not expect the refined virtues of a highly artificial civilization from frontiersmen who for generations have been roughened and hardened by the same kind of ferocious wilderness toil that once fell to the lot of their remote barbarian ancestors.

The Kentuckian, from his clearing in the great forest, looked with bold and greedy eyes at the Spanish possessions, much as Markman, Goth, and Frank had once peered through their marshy woods at the Roman dominions. He possessed the virtues proper to a young and vigorous race; he was trammeled by few misgivings as to the rights of the men whose lands he coveted; he felt that the future was for the stout-hearted, and not for the weakling. He was continually hampered by the advancing civilization of which he was the vanguard, and of which his own sons were destined to form an important part. He rebelled against the restraints imposed by his own people behind him exactly as he felt impelled to attack the alien* peoples in front of him. He did not care very much what form the attack took. On the whole he preferred that it should be avowed war, whether waged under the stars and stripes or under some flag new-raised by himself and his fellow-adventurers of the border. In default of such a struggle, he was ready to serve under alien banners, either those of some nation at the moment hostile to Spain, or else those of some insurgent Spanish leader. But he was also perfectly willing to obtain by diplomacy what was denied by force of arms; and if the United States could not or would not gain his ends for him in this manner, then he wished to make use of his own power. He was eager to enter in and take the land, even at the cost of becoming for the time being a more or less nominal vassal of Spain; and he was ready to promise, in return for this privilege of settlement, to form a barrier State against the further encroachment of his fellows. When fettered by the checks imposed by the Central Government, he not only threatened to revolt and establish an independent government of his own, but even now and then darkly hinted that he would put this government under the protection of the very Spanish power at whose cost he always firmly intended to take his own strides toward greatness. As a matter of fact, whether he first established himself in the Spanish possessions as an outright enemy, or as a nominal friend and subject, the result was sure to be the same in the end. The only difference was that it took place sooner in one event than in the other. In both cases alike the province thus acquired was certain finally to be wrested from Spain.

The Spaniards speedily recognized in the Americans the real menace to their power in Florida, Louisiana, and Mexico. They did not, however, despair of keeping them at bay. The victories won by Galvez over both the British regulars and the Tory American settlers were fresh in their minds; and they felt they had a chance of success even in a contest of arms. But the weapons upon which they relied most were craft and intrigue. If the Union could be broken up, or the jealousies between the States and sections fanned into flame, there would be little chance of a successful aggressive movement by the Americans of any one commonwealth. The Spanish authorities sought to achieve these ends by every species of bribery and corrupt diplomacy. They placed even more reliance upon the warlike confederacies of the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, thrust in between themselves and the frontier settlements; and while protesting to the Americans with smooth treachery that they were striving to keep the Indians at peace, they secretly incited them to hostilities, and furnished them with arms and munitions of war. The British held the Lake Posts by open exhibition of strength, though they, too, were not above conniving at treachery and allowing their agents covertly to urge the red tribes to resist the American advance; but the Spaniards, by preference, trusted to fraud rather than to force.

In the last resort the question of the navigation of the Mississippi had to be decided between the Governments of Spain and the United States; and it was chiefly through the latter that the Westerners could, indirectly, but most powerfully, make their influence felt. In the long and intricate negotiations carried on toward the close of the Revolutionary War between the representatives of Spain, France, and the United States, Spain had taken high ground in reference to this and to all other Western questions, and France had supported her in her desire to exclude the Americans from all rights in the vast regions beyond the Alleghanies. At that time the delegates from the Southern, no less than from the Northern, States, in the Continental Congress, showed much weakness in yielding to this attitude of France and Spain. On the motion of those from Virginia all the delegates with the exception of those from North Carolina voted to instruct Jay, then Minister to Spain, to surrender outright the free navigation of the Mississippi. Later, when he was one of the Commissioners to treat for peace, they practically repeated the blunder by instructing Jay and his colleagues to assent to whatever France proposed. With rare wisdom and courage Jay repudiated these instructions. The chief credit for the resulting diplomatic triumph, almost as essential as the victory at Yorktown itself to our national well-being, belongs to him, and by his conduct he laid the men of the West under an obligation which they never acknowledged during his lifetime.[3]

Shortly after his return to America he was made Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and was serving as such when, in the spring of 1785, Don Diego Gardoqui arrived in Philadelphia, bearing a commission from his Catholic Majesty to Congress. At this time the brilliant and restless soldier Galvez had left Louisiana and become Viceroy of Mexico, thus removing from Louisiana the one Spaniard whose energy and military capacity would have rendered him formidable to the Americans in the event of war. He was succeeded in the government of the Creole province by Don Estevan Miro, already colonel of the Louisiana regiment.

Gardoqui was not an able man, although with some capacity for a certain kind of intrigue. He was a fit representative of the Spanish court, with its fundamental weakness and its impossible pretensions. He entirely misunderstood the people with whom he had to deal, and whether he was or was not himself personally honest, he based his chief hopes of success in dealing with others upon their supposed susceptibility to the influence of corruption and dishonorable intrigue. He and Jay could come to no agreement, and the negotiations were finally broken off. Before this happened, in the fall of 1786, Jay in entire good faith had taken a step which aroused furious anger in the West.[4] Like so many other statesmen of the day, he did not realize how fast Kentucky had grown, and deemed the navigation question one which would not be of real importance to the West for two decades to come. He absolutely refused to surrender our right to navigate the Mississippi; but, not regarding it as of immediate consequence, he proposed both to Congress and Gardoqui that in consideration of certain concessions by Spain we should agree to forbear to exercise this right for twenty or twenty-five years. The delegates from the Northern States assented to Jay’s views; those from the Southern States strongly opposed them. In 1787, after a series of conferences between Jay and Gardoqui, which came to naught, the Spaniard definitely refused to entertain Jay’s proposition. Even had he not refused nothing could have been done, for under the confederation a treaty had to be ratified by the votes of nine States, and there were but seven which supported the policy of Jay.

Unquestionably Jay showed less than his usual far-sightedness in this matter, but it is only fair to remember that his views were shared by some of the greatest of American statesmen, even from Virginia. “Lighthorse Harry” Lee substantially agreed with them. Washington, with his customary broad vision and keen insight, realized the danger of exciting the turbulent Westerners by any actual treaty which might seem to cut off their hope of traffic down the Mississippi; but he advocated pursuing what was, except for defining the time limit, substantially the same policy under a different name, recommending that the United States should await events and for the moment neither relinquish nor push their claim to free navigation of the great river.[5] Even in Kentucky itself a few of the leading men were of the opinion that the right of free navigation would be of little real benefit during the lifetime of the existing generation.[6] It was no discredit to Jay to hold the views he did when they were shared by intelligent men of affairs who were actually in the district most concerned. He was merely somewhat slow in abandoning opinions which half a dozen years before were held generally throughout the Union. Nevertheless it was fortunate for the country that the Southern States, headed by Virginia, were so resolute in their opposition, and that Gardoqui, a fit representative of his government, declined to agree to a treaty which if ratified would have benefited Spain, and would have brought undreamed of evil upon the United States. Jefferson, to his credit, was very hostile to the proposition. As a statesman Jefferson stood for many ideas which in their actual working have proved pernicious to our country, but he deserves well of all Americans, in the first place because of his services to science, and in the next place, what was of far more importance, because of his steadfast friendship for the great West, and his appreciation of its magnificent future.

As soon as the Revolutionary War came to an end adventurers in Kentucky began to trade down the Mississippi. Often these men were merchants by profession, but this was not necessary, for on the frontier men shifted from one business to another very readily. A farmer of bold heart and money-making temper might, after selling his crop, build a flatboat, load it with flour, bacon, salt, beef, and tobacco, and start for New Orleans.[7] He faced dangers from the waters, from the Indians, from lawless whites of his own race, and from the Spaniards themselves. The New Orleans customs officials were corrupt,[8] and the regulations very absurd and oppressive. The policy of the Spanish home government in reference to the trade was unsettled and wavering, and the attitude toward it of the Governors of Louisiana changed with their varying interests, beliefs, caprices, and apprehensions. In consequence, the conditions of the trade were so uncertain that to follow it was like indulging in a lottery venture. Special privileges were allowed certain individuals who had made private treaties with, or had bribed, the Spanish officials; and others were enabled to smuggle their goods in under various pretences, and by various devices; while the traders who were without such corrupt influence or knowledge found this river commerce hazardous in the extreme. It was small wonder that the Kentuckians should chafe under such arbitrary and unequal restraints, and should threaten to break through them by force.[9]

The most successful traders were of course those who contrived to establish relations with some one in New Orleans, or perhaps in Natchez, who would act as their agent or correspondent. The profits from a successful trip made amends for much disaster, and enabled the trader to repeat his adventure on a larger scale. Thus, among the papers of George Rogers Clark there is a letter from one of his friends who was living in Kaskaskia in 1784, and was engaged in the river trade.[10] The letter was evidently to the writer’s father, beginning “My dear daddy.” It describes how he had started on one trip to New Orleans, but had been wrecked; how, nothing daunted, he had tried again with a cargo of forty-two beeves, which he sold in New Orleans for what he deemed the good sum of $738; and how he was about to try his luck once more, buying a bateau and thirty bushels of salt, enough to pickle two hundred beeves.

The traders never could be certain when their boats would be seized and their goods confiscated by some Spanish officer; nor when they started could they tell whether they would or would not find when they reached New Orleans that the Spanish authorities had declared the navigation closed. In 1783 and the early part of 1784 traders were descending the Mississippi without overt resistance from the Spaniards, and were selling their goods at a profit in New Orleans. In midsummer of 1784 the navigation of the river was suddenly and rigorously closed. In 1785 it was again partially opened; so that we find traders purchasing flour in Louisville at twenty-four shillings a hundredweight, and carrying it down stream to sell in New Orleans at thirty dollars a barrel. By summer of the same year the Spaniards were again shutting off traffic, being in great panic over a rumored piratical advance by the frontiersmen, to oppose which they were mustering their troops and making ready their artillery.[11]

Among the articles the frontier traders received for their goods horses held a high place.[12] The horse trade was risky, as in driving them up to Kentucky many were drowned, or played out, or were stolen by the Indians; but as picked horses and mares cost but twenty dollars a head in Louisiana and were sold at a hundred dollars a head in the United States, the losses had to be very large to eat up the profits.

The French Creoles, who carried on much of the river trade and who lived some under the American and some under the Spanish flag, of course suffered as much as either Americans or Spaniards. Often these Creoles loaded their canoes with a view to trading with the Indians, rather than at New Orleans. Whether this was so or not, those officially in the service of the two powers soon grew as zealous in oppressing one another as in oppressing men of different nationalities. Thus in 1787 a Vincennes creole, having loaded his pirogue with goods to the value of two thousand dollars, sent it down to trade with the Indians near the Chickasaw Bluffs. Here it was seized by the Creole commandant of the Spanish post at the Arkansas. The goods were confiscated and the men imprisoned. The owner appealed in vain to the commandant, who told him that he was ordered by the Spanish authorities to seize all persons who trafficked on the Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio, inasmuch as Spain claimed both banks of the river; and when he made his way to New Orleans and appealed to Miro he was summarily dismissed with a warning that a repetition of the offence would ensure his being sent to the mines of Brazil.[13]

Outrages of this kind, continually happening alike to Americans and to Creoles under American protection, could not have been tamely borne by any self-respecting people. The fierce and hardy frontiersmen were goaded to anger by them, and were ready to take part in, or at least to connive at, any piece of lawless retaliation. Such an act of revenge was committed by Clark at Vincennes, as one result of his ill-starred expedition against the Wabash Indians in 1786. As already said, when his men mutinied and refused to march against the Indians, most of them returned home; but he kept enough to garrison the Vincennes fort. Unpaid, and under no regular authority, these men plundered the French inhabitants and were a terror to the peaceable, as well as to the lawless, Indians. Doubtless Clark desired to hold them in readiness as much for a raid on the Spanish possessions as for a defence against the Indians. Nevertheless they did some service in preventing any actual assault on the place by the latter, while they prevented any possible uprising by the French, though the harassed Creoles, under this added burden of military lawlessness, in many instances accepted the offers made them by the Spaniards and passed over to the French villages on the west side of the Mississippi.

Before Clark left Vincennes, he summoned a court of his militia officers, and got them to sanction the seizure of a boat loaded with valuable goods, the property of a Creole trader from the Spanish possessions. The avowed reason for this act was revenge for the wrongs perpetrated in like manner by the Spaniards on the American traders; and this doubtless was the controlling motive in Clark’s mind; but it was also true that the goods thus confiscated were of great service to Clark in paying his mutinous and irregularly employed troops, and that this fact, too, had influence with him.

The more violent and lawless among the backwoodsmen of Kentucky were loud in exultation over this deed. They openly declared that it was not merely an act of retaliation on the Spaniards, but also a warning that, if they did not let the Americans trade down the river, they would not be allowed to trade up it; and that the troops who garrisoned Vincennes offered an earnest of what the frontiersmen would do in the way of raising an army of conquest if the Spaniards continued to wrong them.[14] They defied the Continental Congress and the seaboard States to interfere with them. They threatened to form an independent government, if the United States did not succor and countenance them. They taunted the Eastern men with knowing as little of the West as Great Britain knew of America. They even threatened that they would, if necessary, rejoin the British dominions, and boasted that, if united to Canada, they would some day be able themselves to conquer the Atlantic Commonwealth.[15]

Both the Federal and the Virginia authorities were much alarmed and angered, less at the insult to Spain than at the threat of establishing a separate government in the West.

From the close of the Revolution the Virginian government had been worried by the separatist movements in Kentucky. In 1784 two “stirrers-up of sedition” had been fined and imprisoned, and an adherent of the Virginian government, writing from Kentucky, mentioned that one of the worst effects of the Indian inroads was to confine the settlers to the stations, which were hot-beds of sedition and discord, besides excuses for indolence and rags.[16] The people who distrusted the frontiersmen complained that among them were many knaves and outlaws from every State in the Union, who flew to the frontier as to a refuge; while even those who did not share this distrust admitted that the fact that the people in Kentucky came from many different States helped to make them discontented with Virginia.[17]

In Georgia the conditions were much as they were on the Ohio. Georgia was a frontier State, with the ambitions and the lawlessness of the frontier; and the backwoodsmen felt toward her as they did toward no other member of the old Thirteen. Soon after Clark established his garrison in Vincennes, various inflammatory letters were circulated in the Western country, calling for action against both the central government and the Spaniards, and appealing for sympathy and aid both to the Georgians and to Sevier’s insurrectionary State of Franklin. Among others, a Kentuckian wrote from Louisville to Georgia, bitterly complaining about the failure of the United States to open the Mississippi; denouncing the Federal Government in extravagant language, and threatening hostilities against the Spaniards, and a revolt against the Continental Congress.[18] This letter was intercepted, and, of course, increased still more the suspicion felt about Clark’s motives, for though Clark denied that he had actually seen the letter, he was certainly cognizant of its purport, and approved the movement which lay behind it.[19] One of his fellow Kentuckians, writing about him at this time, remarks: “Clark is playing hell … eternally drunk and yet full of design. I told him he would be hanged. He laughed, and said he would take refuge among the Indians.” [20]

The Governor of Virginia issued a proclamation disavowing all Clark’s acts.[21] A committee of the Kentucky Convention, which included the leaders of Kentucky’s political thought and life, examined into the matter,[22] and gave Clark’s version of the facts, but reprobated and disowned his course. Some of the members of this Convention were afterward identified with various separatist movements, and skirted the field of perilous intrigue with a foreign power; but they recognized the impossibility of countenancing such mere buccaneering lawlessness as Clark’s; and not only joined with their colleagues in denouncing it to the Virginian Government, but warned the latter that Clark’s habits were such as to render him unfit longer to be trusted with work of importance.[23]

The rougher spirits all along the border of course sympathized with Clark. In this same year 1786, the goods and boats of a trader from the Cumberland district were seized and confiscated by the Spanish commandant at Natchez.[24] At first the Cumberland Indian-fighters determined to retaliate in kind, at no matter what cost; but the wiser among their leaders finally “persuaded them not to imitate their friends of Kentucky, and to wait patiently until some advice could be received from Congress.” One of these wise leaders, a representative from the Cumberland district in the North Carolina Legislature, in writing to the North Carolina delegates to the Continental Congress, after dwelling on the necessity of acquiring the right to the navigation of the Mississippi, added with sound common-sense: “You may depend on our exertions to keep all things quiet, and we agree entirely with you that if our people are once let loose there will be no stopping them, and that acts of retaliation poison the mind and give a licentiousness to manners that can with great difficulty be restrained.” Washington was right in his belief that in this business there was as much to be feared from the impetuous turbulence of the backwoodsmen as from the hostility of the Spaniards.

The news of Jay’s attempted negotiations with Gardoqui, distorted and twisted, arrived right on top of these troubles, and threw the already excited backwoodsmen into a frenzy. There was never any-real danger that Jay’s proposition would be adopted; but the Westerners did not know this. In all the considerable settlements on the Western waters, committees of correspondence were elected to remonstrate and petition Congress against any agreement to close the Mississippi.[25] Even those who had no sympathy with the separatist movement warned Congress that if any such agreement were entered into it would probably entail the loss of the Western country.[26]

There was justification for the original excitement; there was none whatever for its continuance after Jay’s final report to Congress, in April, 1787, [27] and after the publication by Congress of its resolve never to abandon its claim to the Mississippi. Jay in this report took what was unquestionably the rational position. He urged that the United States was undoubtedly in the right; and that it should either insist upon a treaty with Spain, by which all conflicting claims would be reconciled, or else simply claim the right, and if Spain refused to grant it promptly declare war.

So far he was emphatically right. His cool and steadfast insistence on our rights, and his clearsighted recognition of the proper way to obtain them, contrasted well with the mixed turbulence and foolishness of the Westerners who denounced him. They refused to give up the Mississippi; and yet they also refused to support the party to which Jay belonged, and therefore refused to establish a government strong enough to obtain their rights by open force.

But Jay erred when he added, as he did, that there was no middle course possible; that we must either treat or make war. It was undoubtedly to our discredit, and to our temporary harm, that we refused to follow either course; it showed the existence of very undesirable national qualities, for it showed that we were loud in claiming rights which we lacked the resolution and foresight to enforce. Nevertheless, as these undesirable qualities existed, it was the part of a wise statesman to recognize their existence and do the best he could in spite of them. The best course to follow under such circumstances was to do nothing until the national fibre hardened, and this was the course which Washington advocated.

In this summer of 1787 there rose to public prominence in the Western country a man whose influence upon it was destined to be malign in intention rather than in actual fact. James Wilkinson, by birth a Marylander, came to Kentucky in 1784. He had done his duty respectably as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, for he possessed sufficient courage and capacity to render average service in subordinate positions, though at a later date he showed abject inefficiency as commander of an army. He was a good-looking, plausible, energetic man, gifted with a taste for adventure, with much proficiency in low intrigue, and with a certain address in influencing and managing bodies of men. He also spoke and wrote well, according to the rather florid canons of the day. In character he can only be compared to Benedict Arnold, though he entirely lacked Arnold’s ability and brilliant courage. He had no conscience and no scruples; he had not the slightest idea of the meaning of the word honor; he betrayed his trust from the basest motives, and he was too inefficient to make his betrayal effective. He was treacherous to the Union while it was being formed and after it had been formed; and his crime was aggravated by the sordid meanness of his motives, for he eagerly sought opportunities to barter his own infamy for money. In all our history there is no more despicable character.

Wilkinson was a man of broken fortune when he came to the West. In three years he made a good position for himself, in matters commercial and political, and his restless, adventurous nature, and thirst for excitement and intrigue, prompted him to try the river trade, with its hazards and its chances of great gain. In June, 1787, he went down the Mississippi to New Orleans with a loaded flat-boat, and sold his cargo at a high profit, thanks to the understanding he immediately established with Miro.[28] Doubtless he started with the full intention of entering into some kind of corrupt arrangement with the Louisiana authorities, leaving the precise nature of the arrangement to be decided by events.

The relations that he so promptly established with the Spaniards were both corrupt and treacherous; that is, he undoubtedly gave and took bribes, and promised to intrigue against his own country for pecuniary reward; but exactly what the different agreements were, and exactly how far he tried or intended to fulfil them, is, and must always remain, uncertain. He was so ingrainedly venal, treacherous, and mendacious that nothing he said or wrote can be accepted as true, and no sentiments which he at any time professed can be accepted as those he really felt. He and the leading Louisiana Spaniards had close mercantile relations, in which the governments of neither were interested, and by which the governments of both were in all probability defrauded. He persuaded the Spaniards to give him money for using his influence to separate the West from the Union, which was one of the chief objects of Spanish diplomacy.[29] He was obliged to try to earn the money by leading the separatist intrigues in Kentucky, but it is doubtful if he ever had enough straightforwardness in him to be a thoroughgoing villain. All he cared for was the money; if he could not get it otherwise, he was quite willing to do any damage he could to his country, even when he was serving it in a high military position. But if it was easier, he was perfectly willing to betray the people who had bribed him.

However, he was an adept in low intrigue; and though he speedily became suspected by all honest men, he covered his tracks so well that it was not until after his death, and after the Spanish archives had been explored, that his guilt was established.

He returned to Kentucky after some months’ absence. He had greatly increased his reputation, and as substantial results of his voyage he showed permits to trade, and some special and exclusive commercial privileges, such as supplying the Mexican market with tobacco, and depositing it in the King’s store at New Orleans. The Kentuckians were much excited by what he had accomplished. He bought goods himself and received goods from other merchants on commission; and a year after his first venture he sent a flotilla of heavy-laden flat-boats down the Mississippi, and disposed of their contents at a high profit in New Orleans.

The power this gave Wilkinson, the way he had obtained it, and the use he made of it, gave an impetus to the separatist party in Kentucky. He was by no means the only man, however, who was at this time engaged in the river trade to Louisiana; nor were his advantages over his commercial rivals as marked as he alleged. They, too, had discovered that the Spanish officials could be bribed to shut their eyes to smuggling, and that citizens of Natchez could be hired to receive property shipped thither as being theirs, so that it might be admitted on payment of twenty-five per cent duty. Merchants gathered quantities of flour and bacon, but especially of tobacco, at Louisville, and thence shipped it in flat-boats to Natchez, where it was received by their correspondents; and keel boats sometimes made the return journey, though the horses, cattle, and negro slaves were generally taken to Kentucky overland.[30] All these traders naturally felt the Spanish control of the navigation, and the intermittent but always possible hostility of the Spanish officials, to be peculiarly irksome. They were, as a rule, too shortsighted to see that the only permanent remedy for their troubles was their own absorption into a solid and powerful Union. Therefore they were always ready either to join a movement against Spain, or else to join one which seemed to promise the acquisition of special privileges from Spain.

The separatist feeling, and the desire to sunder the West from the East, and join hands with Spain or Britain, were not confined to Kentucky. In one shape or another, and with varying intensity, separatist agitations took place in all portions of the West. In Cumberland, on the Holston, among the western mountains of Virginia proper, and in Georgia—which was practically a frontier community—there occurred manifestations of the separatist spirit. A curious feature of these various agitations was the slight extent to which a separatist movement in any one of these localities depended upon or sympathized with a similar movement in any other. The national feeling among the separatists was so slight that the very communities which wished to break off from the Atlantic States were also quite indifferent to the deeds and fates of one another. The only bond among them was their tendency to break loose from the central government. The settlers on the banks of the Cumberland felt no particular interest in the struggle of those on the head-waters of the Tennessee to establish the State of Franklin; and the Kentuckians were indifferent to the deeds of both. In a letter written in 1788 to the Creek Chief McGillivray, Robertson alludes to the Holston men and the Georgians in precisely the language he might have used in speaking of foreign nations. He evidently took as a matter of course their waging war on their own account against, and making peace with, the Cherokees and Creeks, and betrayed little concern as to the outcome, one way or the other.

In this same letter,[31] Robertson frankly set forth his belief that the West should separate from the Union and join some foreign power, writing: “In all probability we can not long remain in our present state, and if the British, or any commercial nation which may be in possession of the Mississippi, would furnish us with trade and receive our produce, there can not be a doubt but the people on the west side of the Appalachian Mountains will open their eyes to their real interests/’ At the same time Sevier was writing to Gardoqui, offering to put his insurrectionary State of Franklin, then at its last gasp, under the protection of Spain.[32]

Robertson spoke with indifference as to whether the nation with which the Southerners allied themselves should happen to be Spain or Britain. As a matter of fact, most of the intrigues carried on were with or against Spain; but in the fall of 1788 an abortive effort was made by a British agent to arouse the Kentuckians against both the Spaniards and the National Government, in the interest of Great Britain. This agent was Conolly, the unsavory hero of Lord Dunmore’s war. He went to Louisville, visited two or three prominent men, and laid bare to them his plans. As he met with no encouragement whatever, he speedily abandoned his efforts, and when the people got wind of his design they threatened to mob him, while the officers of the Continental troops made ready to arrest him if his plans bore fruit, so that he was glad to leave the country.[33]

These movements all aimed at a complete independence, but there were others which aimed merely at separation from the parent States. The efforts of Kentucky and Franklin in this direction must be treated by themselves; but those that were less important may be glanced at in passing. The people in western Virginia, as early as the spring of 1785, wished to erect themselves into a separate State, under Federal authority. Their desire was to separate from Virginia in peace and friendship, and to remain in close connection with the Union. A curious feature of the petition which they forwarded to the Continental Congress was their proposition to include in the new State the inhabitants of the Holston territory, so that it would have taken in what is now West Virginia proper,[34] and also eastern Tennessee and Kentucky.

The originators of this particular movement meant to be friendly with Virginia, but of course friction was bound to follow. The later stages of the agitation, or perhaps it would be more correct to say the agitations, that sprang out of it, were marked by bitter feelings between the leaders of the movement and the Virginia authorities. Finding no heed paid to their requests for separation, some of the more extreme separatists threatened to refuse to pay taxes to Virginia; while the Franklin people proposed to unite with them into a new State, without regard to the wishes of Virginia or of North Carolina. Restless Arthur Campbell was one of the leaders of the separatists, and went so far as to acknowledge the authorship of the “State of Franklin,” and to become one of its privy councilors, casting off his allegiance to the Virginian Government.[35] However, the whole movement soon collapsed, the collapse being inevitable when once it became evident that the Franklin experiment was doomed to failure.

The West was thus seething with separatist agitations throughout the time of Gardoqui’s residence as Spanish Envoy in America; and both Gardoqui and Miro, who was Governor of Louisiana all through these years, entered actively into intrigues with the more prominent separatist leaders.

Miro was a man of some ability, and Martin Navarro, the Spanish Intendant of Louisiana, possessed more; but they served a government almost imbecile in its fatuity. They both realized that Louisiana could be kept in possession of Spain only by making it a flourishing and populous province, and they begged that the Spanish authorities would remove the absurd commercial restrictions which kept it poor. But no heed was paid to their requests, and when they ventured to relax the severity of the regulations, as regards both the trade down the Mississippi and the sea-trade to Philadelphia, they were reprimanded and forced to reverse their policy. This was done at the instance of Gardoqui, who was jealous of the Louisiana authorities, and showed a spirit of rivalry toward them. Each side believed, probably with justice, that the other was influenced by corrupt motives.

Miro and Navarro were right in urging a liberal commercial policy. They were right also in recognizing the Americans as the enemies of the Spanish power. They dwelt on the peril, not only to Louisiana but to New Mexico, certain to arise from the neighborhood of the backwoodsmen, whom they described as dangerous alike because of their poverty, their ambition, their restlessness, and their recklessness.[36] They were at their wit’s end to know how to check these energetic foes. They urgently asked for additional regular troops to increase the strength of the Spanish garrison. They kept the creole militia organized. But they relied mainly on keeping the Southern Indians hostile to the Americans, on inviting the Americans to settle in Louisiana and become subjects of Spain, and on intriguing with the Western settlements for the dissolution of the Union. The Kentuckians, the settlers on the Holston and Cumberland, and the Georgians were the Americans with whom they had most friction and closest connection. The Georgians, it is true, were only indirectly interested in the navigation question; but they claimed that the boundaries of Georgia ran west to the Mississippi, and that much of the eastern bank of the great river, including the fertile Yazoo lands, was theirs.

The Indians naturally sided with the Spaniards against the Americans; for the Americans were as eager to seize the possessions of Creek and Cherokee as they were to invade the dominions of the Catholic King. Their friendship was sedulously fostered by the Spaniards. Great councils were held with them, and their chiefs were bribed and flattered. Every effort was made to prevent them from dealing with any traders who were not in the Spanish interest; New Orleans, Natchez, Mobile, and Pensacola were all centres for the Indian trade. They were liberally furnished with arms and munitions of war. Finally the Spaniards deliberately and treacherously incited the Indians to war against the Americans, while protesting to the latter that they were striving to keep the savages at peace. In answer to protests of Robertson, setting forth that the Spaniards were inciting the Indians to harry the Cumberland settlers, both Miro and Gardoqui made him solemn denials. Miro wrote him, in 1783, that so far from assisting the Indians to war, he had been doing what he could to induce McGillivray and the Creeks to make peace, and that he would continue to urge them not to trouble the settlers.[37] Gardoqui, in 1788, wrote even more explicitly, saying that he was much concerned over the reported outrages of the savages, but was greatly surprised to learn that the settlers suspected the Government of Spain of fomenting the warfare, which, he assured Robertson, was so far from the truth that the King was really bent on treating the United States in general, and the West in particular, with all possible benevolence and generosity.[38] Yet in 1786, midway between the dates when these two letters were written, Miro, in a letter to the Captain-General of the Floridas, set forth that the Creeks, being desirous of driving back the American frontiersmen by force of arms, and knowing that this could be done only after bloodshed, had petitioned him for fifty barrels of gunpowder and bullets to correspond, and that he had ordered the Governor of Pensacola to furnish McGillivray, their chief, these munitions of war, with all possible secrecy and caution, so that it should not become known.[39] The Governor of Pensacola shortly afterward related the satisfaction the Creeks felt at receiving the powder and lead, and added that he would have to furnish them additional supplies from time to time, as the war progressed, and that he would exercise every precaution so that the Americans might have no “just cause of complaint.” [40] There is an unconscious and somewhat gruesome humor in this official belief that the Americans could have “no just cause” for anger so long as the Spaniards’ treachery was concealed.

Throughout these years the Spaniards thus secretly supplied the Creeks with the means of waging war on the Americans, claiming all the time that the Creeks were their vassals and that the land occupied by the Southern Indians generally belonged to Spain and not to the United States.[41] They also kept their envoys busy among the Chickasaws, Choctaws, and even the Cherokees.

In fact, until the conclusion of Pinckney’s treaty, the Spaniards of Louisiana pursued as a settled policy this plan of inciting the Indians to war against the Americans. Generally they confined themselves to secretly furnishing the savages with guns, powder, and lead, and endeavoring to unite the tribes in a league; but on several occasions they openly gave them arms, when they were forced to act hurriedly. As late as 1794 the Flemish Baron de Carondelet, a devoted servant of Spain, and one of the most determined enemies of the Americans, instructed his lieutenants to fit out war parties of Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees, to harass a fort the Americans had built near the mouth of the Ohio. Carondelet wrote to the Home Government that the Indians formed the best defence on which Louisiana could rely. By this time the Spaniards and English realized that, instead of showing hostility to one another, it behooved them to unite against the common foe; and their agents in Canada and Louisiana were beginning to come to an understanding. In another letter Carondelet explained that the system adopted by Lord Dorchester and the English officials in Canada in dealing with the savages was the same as that which he had employed, both the Spaniards and the British having found them the most powerful means with which to oppose the American advance. By the expenditure of a few thousand dollars, wrote the Spanish Governor,[42] he could always rouse the Southern tribes to harry the settlers, while at the same time covering his deeds so effectually that the Americans could not point to any specific act of which to complain.

There was much turbulence and some treachery exhibited by individual frontiersmen in their dealings with Spain, and the Americans of the Mississippi Valley showed a strong tendency to win their way to the mouth of the river and to win the right to settle on its banks by sheer force of arms; but the American Government and its authorized representatives behaved with a straightforward and honorable good faith which offered a striking contrast to the systematic and deliberate duplicity and treachery of the Spanish Crown and the Spanish Governors. In truth, the Spaniards were the weakest, and were driven to use the pet weapons of weakness in opposing their stalwart and masterful foes. They were fighting against their doom, and they knew it. Already they had begun to fear, not only for Louisiana and Florida, but even for sultry Mexico and far-away golden California. It was hard, wrote one of the ablest of the Spanish Governors, to gather forces enough to ward off attacks from adventurers so hardy that they could go two hundred leagues at a stretch, or live six months in the wilderness, needing to carry nothing save some corn-meal, and” trusting for everything solely to their own long rifles.

Next to secretly rousing the Indians, the Spaniards placed most reliance on intriguing with the Westerners, in the effort to sunder them from the seaboard Americans. They also at times thought to bar the American advance by allowing the frontiersmen to come into their territory and settle on condition of becoming Spanish subjects. They hoped to make of these favored settlers a barrier against the rest of their kinsfolk. It was a foolish hope. A wild and hardy race of rifle-bearing freemen, so intolerant of restraint that they fretted under the slight bands which held them to their brethren, were sure to throw off the lightest yoke the Catholic King could lay upon them, when once they gathered strength. Under no circumstances, even had they profited by Spanish aid against their own people, would the Westerners have remained allied or subject to the Spaniards longer than the immediate needs of the moment demanded. At the bottom the Spaniards knew this, and their encouragement of American immigration was fitful and fainthearted.

Many Americans, however, were themselves eager to enter into some arrangement of the kind, whether as individual settlers, or, more often, as companies who wished to form little colonies. Their eagerness in this matter caused much concern to many of the Federalists of the Eastern States, who commented with bitterness upon the light-hearted manner in which these settlers forsook their native land, and not only forswore their allegiance to it, but bound themselves to take up arms against it in event of war. These critics failed to understand that the wilderness dwellers of that day, to whom the National Government was little more than a name, and the Union but a new idea, could not be expected to pay much heed to the imaginary line dividing one waste space from another, and that, after all, their patriotism was dormant, not dead. Moreover, some of the Easterners were as blind as the Spaniards themselves to the inevitable outcome of such settlements as those proposed, and were also alarmed at the mere natural movement of the population, fearing lest it might result in crippling the old States, and in laying the foundation of a new and possibly hostile country. They themselves had not yet grasped the national idea, and could not see that the increase in power of any one quarter of the land, or the addition to it of any new unsettled territory, really raised by so much the greatness of every American. However, there was one point on which the more far-seeing of these critics were right. They urged that it would be better for the country not to try to sell the public land speedily in large tracts, but to grant it to actual settlers in such quantity as they could use.[43]

The different propositions to settle large colonies in the Spanish possessions came to naught, although quite a number of backwoodsmen settled there individually or in small bands. One great obstacle to the success of any such movement was the religious intolerance of the Spaniards. Not only were they bigoted adherents of the Church of Rome, but their ecclesiastical authorities were cautioned to exercise over all laymen a supervision and control to which the few Catholics among the American backwoodsmen would have objected quite as strenuously as the Protestants. It is true that in trying to induce immigration they often promised religious freedom, but when they came to execute this promise they explained that it merely meant that the newcomers would not be compelled to profess the Roman Catholic faith, but that they would not be allowed the free exercise of their own religion, nor permitted to build churches nor pay ministers. This was done with the express purpose of weakening their faith, and rendering it easy to turn them from it, and the Spaniards brought Irish priests into the country and placed them among the American settlers with the avowed object of converting them.[44] Such toleration naturally appealed very little to men who were accustomed to a liberty as complete in matters ecclesiastical as in matters civil. When the Spanish authorities, at Natchez, or elsewhere, published edicts interfering with the free exercise of the Protestant religion, many of the settlers left,[45] while in regions remote from the Spanish centres of government the edicts were quietly disobeyed or ignored.

One of the many proposed colonies ultimately resulted in the founding of a town which to this day bears the name of New Madrid. This particular scheme originated in the fertile brain of one Col. George Morgan, a native of New Jersey, but long engaged in trading on the Mississippi. He originally organized a company to acquire lands under the United States, but meeting with little response to his proposition from the Continental Congress, in 1788 he turned to Spain. With Gardoqui, who was then in New York, he was soon on a footing of intimacy, as their letters show; for these include invitations to dinner, to attend commencement at Princeton, to visit one another, and the like. The Spaniard, a cultivated man, was pleased at being thrown in with an adventurer who was a college graduate and a gentleman; for many of the would-be colonizers were needy ne’er-do-wells, who were anxious either to borrow money, or else to secure a promise of freedom from arrest for debt when they should move to the new country. Morgan’s plans were on a magnificent scale. He wished a tract of land as large as a principality on the west bank of the Mississippi. This he proposed to people with tens of thousands of settlers, whom he should govern under the commission of the King of Spain. Gardoqui entered into the plan with enthusiasm, but obstacles and delays of all kinds were encountered, and the dwindling outcome was the emigration of a few families of frontiersmen, and the founding of a squalid hamlet named after the Iberian capital.[46]

Another adventurer who at this time proposed to found a colony in Spanish territory was no less a person than George Rogers Clark. Clark had indulged in something very like piracy at the expense of Spanish subjects but eighteen months previously. He was ready at any time to lead the Westerners to the conquest of Louisiana; and a few years later he did his best to organize a freebooting expedition against New Orleans in the name of the French Revolutionary Government. But he was quite willing to do his fighting on behalf of Spain, instead of against her; for by this time he was savage with anger and chagrin at the indifference and neglect with which the Virginian and Federal Governments had rewarded his really great services. He wrote to Gardoqui in the spring of 1788, boasting of his feats of arms in the past, bitterly complaining of the way he had been treated, and offering to lead a large colony to settle in the Spanish dominions; for, he said, he had become convinced that neither property nor character was safe under a government so weak as that of the United States, and he therefore wished to put himself at the disposal of the King of Spain.[47] Nothing came of this proposal.

Another proposal which likewise came to nothing is noteworthy because of the men who made it, and because of its peculiar nature. The proposers were all Kentuckians. Among them were Wilkinson, one Benjamin Sebastian, whom the Spaniards pensioned in the same manner they did Wilkinson, John Brown, the Kentucky delegate in Congress, and Harry Innes, the Attorney-General of Kentucky. All were more or less identified both with the obscure separatist movements in that commonwealth, and with the legitimate agitation for Statehood into which some of these movements insensibly merged. In the spring of 1789 they proposed to Gardoqui to enter into an agreement somewhat similar to the one he had made with Morgan. But they named as the spot where they wished to settle the lands on the east bank of the Mississippi, in the neighborhood of the Yazoo, and they urged as a reason for granting the lands that they were part of the territory in dispute between Spain and the United States, and that the new settlers would hold them under the Spanish King, and would defend them against the Americans.[48]

This country was claimed by, and finally awarded to, the United States, and claimed by the State of Georgia in particular. It was here that the adventurers proposed to erect a barrier State which should be vassal to Spain, one of the chief purposes of the settlement being to arrest the Americans’ advance. They thus deliberately offered to do all the damage they could to their own country, if the foreign country would give them certain advantages. The apologists for these separatist leaders often advance the excuse—itself not a weighty one—that they at least deserved well of their own section; but Wilkinson and his associates proposed a plan which was not only hostile to the interests of the American nation as a whole, but which was especially hostile to the interests of Kentucky, Georgia, and the other frontier communities. The men who proposed to enter into the scheme were certainly not loyal to their country, although the adventurers were not actuated by hostile designs against it, engaging in the adventure simply from motives of private gain. The only palliation—there is no full excuse—for their offence is the fact that the Union was then so loose and weak, and its benefits so problematical, that it received the hearty and unswerving loyalty of only the most far-seeing and broadly patriotic men; and that many men of the highest standing and of the most undoubted probity shared the views on which Brown and Innes acted.

Wilkinson was bitterly hostile to all these schemes in which he himself did not have a share, and protested again and again to Miro against their adoption. He protested no less strongly whenever the Spanish court or the Spanish authorities at New Orleans either relaxed their vigilant severity against the river smugglers, or for the time being lowered the duties; whether this was done to encourage the Westerners in their hostilities to the East, or to placate them when their exasperation reached a pitch that threatened actual invasion. Wilkinson, in his protests, insisted that to show favors to the Westerners was merely to make them contented with the Union; and that the only way to force them to break the Union was to deny them all privileges until they broke it.[49] He did his best to persuade the Spaniards to adopt measures which would damage both the East and West and would increase the friction between them. He vociferously insisted that in going to such extremes of foul treachery to his country he was actuated only by his desire to see the Spanish intrigues attain their purpose; but he was probably influenced to a much greater degree by the desire to retain as long as might be the monopoly of the trade with New Orleans.

The Intendant Navarro, writing to Spain in 1788, dwelt upon the necessity of securing the separation of the Westerners from the old thirteen States; and to this end he urged that commercial privileges be granted to the West, and pensions and honors showered on its leaders. Spain readily adopted this policy of bribery. Wilkinson and Sebastian were at different times given sums of money, small portions of which were doubtless handed over to their own agents and subordinates and to the Spanish spies; and Wilkinson asked for additional sums, nominally to bribe leading Kentuckians, but very possibly merely with the purpose of pocketing them himself. In other words, Wilkinson, Sebastian, and their intimate associates on the one hand, and the Spanish officials on the other, entered into a corrupt conspiracy to dismember the Union.

Wilkinson took a leading part in the political agitations by which Kentucky was shaken throughout these years. He devoted himself to working for separation from both Virginia and the United States, and for an alliance with Spain. Of course he did not dare to avow his schemes with entire frankness, only venturing to advocate them more or less openly accordingly as the wind of popular opinion veered toward or away from disunion. Being a sanguine man, of bad judgment, he at first wrote glowing letters to his Spanish employers, assuring them that the Kentucky leaders enthusiastically favored his plans, and that the people at large were tending toward them. As time went on, he was obliged to change the tone of his letters, and to admit that he had been over-hopeful; he reluctantly acknowledged that Kentucky would certainly refuse to become a Spanish province, and that all that was possible to hope for was separation and an alliance with Spain. He was on intimate terms with the separatist leaders of all shades, and broached his views to them as far as he thought fit. His turgid oratory was admired in the backwoods, and he was much helped by his skill in the baser kinds of political management. He speedily showed all the familiar traits of the demagogue—he was lavish in his hospitality, and treated young and old, rich and poor, with jovial good-fellowship; so that all the men of loose habits, the idle men who were ready for any venture, and the men of weak character and fickle temper, swore by him, and followed his lead; while not a few straightforward, honest citizens were blinded by his showy ability and professions of disinterestedness.[50]

It is impossible to say exactly how far his different allies among the separatist leaders knew his real designs or sympathized with them. Their loosely knit party was at the moment united for one ostensible purpose—that of separation from Virginia. The measures they championed were in effect revolutionary, as they wished to pay no regard to the action either of Virginia herself, or of the Federal Government. They openly advocated Kentucky’s entering into a treaty with Spain on her own account. Their leaders must certainly have known Wilkinson’s real purposes, even though vaguely. The probability is that they did not, either to him or in their own minds, define their plans with clearness, but awaited events before deciding on a definite policy. Meantime by word and act they pursued a course which might be held to mean, as occasion demanded, either mere insistence upon Kentucky’s admission to the Union as a separate State, or else a movement for complete independence with a Spanish alliance in the background.

It was impossible to pursue a course so equivocal without arousing suspicion. In after years many who had been committed to it became ashamed of their actions, and loudly proclaimed that they had really been devoted to the Union; to which it was sufficient to answer that if this had been the case, and if they had been really loyal, no such deep suspicion could have been excited. A course of straightforward loyalty could not have been misunderstood. As it was, all kinds of rumors as to proposed disunion movements, and as to the intrigues with Spain, got afloat; and there was no satisfactory contradiction. The stanch Union men, the men who “thought continentally,” as the phrase went, took the alarm and organized a counter-movement. One of those who took prominent part in this counter-movement was a man to whom Kentucky and the Union both owe much: Humphrey Marshall, afterward a Federalist Senator from Kentucky, and the author of an interesting and amusing and fundamentally sound, albeit somewhat rancorous, history of his State. This loyal counter-movement hindered and hampered the separatists greatly, and made them cautious about advocating outright disunion. It was one of the causes which combined to render abortive both the separatist agitations, and the Spanish intrigues of the period.

While Miro was corresponding with Wilkinson and arranging for pensioning both him and Sebastian, Gardoqui was busy at New York. His efforts at negotiation were fruitless; for his instructions positively forbade him to yield the navigation of the Mississippi, or to allow the rectification of the boundary lines as claimed by the United States;[51] while the representatives of the latter refused to treat at all unless both of these points were conceded.[52] Jay he found to be particularly intractable, and in one of his letters he expressed the hope that he would be replaced by Richard Henry Lee, whom Gardoqui considered to be in the Spanish interest. He was much interested in the case of Vermont,[53] which at that time was in doubt whether to remain an independent State, to join the Union, or even possibly to form some kind of alliance with the British; and what he saw occurring in this New England State made him for the moment hopeful about the result of the Spanish designs on Kentucky.

Gardoqui was an over-hopeful man, accustomed to that diplomacy which acts on the supposition that every one has his price. After the manner of his kind, he was prone to ascribe absurdly evil motives to all men, and to be duped himself in consequence.[54] He never understood the people with whom he was dealing. He was sure that they could all be reached by underhand and corrupt influences of some kind, if he could only find out where to put on the pressure. The perfect freedom with which many loyal men talked to and before him puzzled him; and their characteristically American habit of indulging in gloomy forebodings as to the nation’s future—when they were not insisting that the said future would be one of unparalleled magnificence—gave him wild hopes that it might prove possible to corrupt them. He was confirmed in his belief by the undoubted corruption and disloyalty to their country shown by a few of the men he met, the most important of those who were in his pay being an alleged Catholic, James White, once a North Carolina delegate and afterward Indian agent. Moreover, others who never indulged in overt disloyalty to the Union undoubtedly consulted and questioned Gardoqui about his proposals, while reserving their own decision, being men who let their loyalty be determined by events. Finally some men of entire purity committed grave indiscretions in dealing with him. Henry Lee, for instance, was so foolish as to borrow five thousand dollars from this representative of a foreign and unfriendly power; Gardoqui, of course, lending the money under the impression that its receipt would bind Lee to the Spanish interest.[55]

Madison, Knox, Clinton, and other men of position under the Continental Congress, including Brown, the delegate from Kentucky, were among those who conferred freely with Gardoqui. In speaking with several of them, including Madison and Brown, he broached the subject of Kentucky’s possible separation from the Union and alliance with Spain; and Madison and Brown discussed his statements between themselves. So far there was nothing out of the way in Brown’s conduct; but after one of these conferences he wrote to Kentucky in terms which showed that he was willing to entertain Gardoqui’s proposition if it seemed advisable to do so.

His letter, which was intended to be private, but which was soon published, was dated July 10, 1788. It advocated immediate separation from Virginia without regard to constitutional methods, and also ran in part as follows: “In private conferences which I have had with Mr. Gardoqui, the Spanish Minister, I have been assured by him in the most explicit terms that if Kentucky will declare her independence and empower some proper person to negotiate with him, that he has authority and will engage to open the navigation of the Mississippi for the exportation of their produce on terms of mutual advantage. But this privilege never can be extended to them while part of the United States… . I have thought proper to communicate (this) to a few confidential friends in this district, with his permission, not doubting but that they will make a prudent use of the information.”

At the outset of any movement which, whatever may be its form, is in its essence revolutionary, and only to be justified on grounds that justify a revolution, the leaders, though loud in declamation about the wrongs to be remedied, always hesitate to speak in plain terms concerning the remedies which they really have in mind. They are often reluctant to admit their purposes unequivocally, even to themselves, and may indeed blind themselves to the necessary results of their policy. They often choose their language with care, so that it may not commit them beyond all hope of explanation or retraction. Brown, Innes, and the other separatist leaders in Kentucky were not actuated by the motives of personal corruption which influenced Wilkinson, Sebastian, and White to conspire with Gardoqui and Miro for the break-up of the Union. Their position, as far as the mere separatist feeling itself was concerned, was not essentially different from that of George Clinton in New York or Sumter in South Carolina. Of course, however, their connection with a foreign power unpleasantly tainted their course, exactly as a similar connection, with Great Britain instead of with Spain, tainted the similar course of action Ethan Allen was pursuing at this very time in Vermont.[56] In after years they and their apologists endeavored to explain away their deeds and words, and tried to show that they were not disunionists; precisely as the authors of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798 and of the resolutions of the Hartford Convention in 1814 tried in later years to show that these also were not disunion movements. The effort is as vain in one case as in the other. Brown’s letter shows that he and the party with which he was identified were ready to bring about Kentucky’s separation from the Union, if it could safely be done; the prospect of a commercial alliance with Spain being one of their chief objects, and affording one of their chief arguments.

The publication of Brown’s letter and the boldness of the separatist party spurred to renewed effort the Union men, one of whom, Col. Thomas Marshall, an uncle of Humphrey Marshall and father of the great Chief-Justice, sent a full account of the situation to Washington. The more timid and wavering among the disunionists drew back; and the agitation was dropped when the new National Government began to show that it was thoroughly able to keep order at home and enforce respect abroad.[57]

These separatist movements were general in the West, on the Holston and Cumberland, as well as on the Ohio, during the troubled years immediately succeeding the Revolution; and they were furthered by the intrigues of the Spaniards. But the antipathy of the backwoodsmen to the Spaniards was too deep-rooted for them ever to effect a real combination. Ultimately the good sense and patriotism of the Westerners triumphed; and the American people continued to move forward with unbroken front toward their mighty future.

[1] “Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography,” XI, No. 2, pp. 160-165, Letters of Levi Allen, Ethan Allen, and others, from 1787 to 1790.

[2] R. T. Durrett, “Centenary of Kentucky,” 64.

[3] It is not the least of Mann Butler’s good points that in his “History” he does full justice to Jay. Another Kentuck-ian, Mr. Thomas Marshall Green, has recently done the same in his “Spanish Conspiracy.”

[4] State Dept. MSS., No. 81, Vol. II, 193, 241, 285, etc.; Reports of Sec’y John Jay.

[5] “The Spanish Conspiracy,” Thos. Marshall Green, p. 31.

[6] State Dept MSS., Madison Papers, Caleb Wallace to Madison, Nov. 21, 1787. Wallace himself shared this view.

[7] McAfee MSS.

[8] Do.

[9] Va. State Papers, IV, 630.

[10] Draper MSS. Letter of John Williams, June 20, 1784.

[11] Draper MSS. J. Girault to William Clark, July 22, 1784; May 23, 1785; July 2, 1785; certificate of French merchants testified to by Miro in 1785.

[12] Do. Girault to Clark, July 9, 1784.

[13] State Dept. MSS.. No. 150, Vol. III, p. 519. Letter of Joseph St. Mary, Vincennes, August 23, 1788.

[14] Draper MSS. Minutes of Court-Martial, Summoned by George Rogers Clark, at Vincennes, October 18, 1786.

[15] State Dept. MSS. Reports of John Jay, No. 124, Vol. III, pp. 31, 37, 44, 48, 53, 56, etc.

[16] Va. State Papers, III, pp. 585, 589.

[17] Draper MSS. Clark Papers, Walter Darrell to William Fleming, April 14, 1783.

[18] Do., Letter of Thomas Green to the Governor of Georgia, December 23, 1786.

[19] Green’s “Spanish Conspiracy,” p. 74.

[20] Va. State Papers, IV, 202, condensed.

[21] Draper MSS. Proclamation of Edmund Randolph, March 4, 1787.

[22] State Dept. MSS., No. 71, Vol. II, p. 503. Report of Dec. 19, 1786.

[23] Green, p. 78.

[24] State Dept. MSS., No. 124, Vol. III. Papers transmitted by Blount, Hawkins, and Ashe, March 29, 1787, including deposition of Thomas Amis, Nov. 13, 1786. Letter from Fayetteville, Dec. 29, 1786, etc.

[25] Madison MSS. Letter of Caleb Wallace, Nov. 12, 1787.

[26] State Dept. MSS., No. 56. Symmes to the President of Congress, May 3, 1787.

[27] W. H. Trescott, “Diplomatic History of the Administrations of Washington and Adams,” p. 46.

[28] “Wilkinson’s Memoirs,” II, 112.

[29] “History of Louisiana,” Charles Gayarré, III, 198.

[30] Draper MSS. John Williams to William Clark, New-Orleans, Feb. 11, 1789; Girault to Do., July 26, 1788, from Natchez; Do. to Do., Dec. 5, 1788; receipt of D. Brashear at Louisville, May 23, 1785.

[31] Robertson MSS., James Robertson to Alexander McGillivray, Nashville, Aug. 3, 1788.

[32] Gardoqui MSS., Sevier to Gardoqui, Sept. 12, 1788.

[33] Do., Gardoqui to Florida Blanca, Jan. 12, 1789, inclosing a letter from Col. George Moreau. See Green, p. 300. Also State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. III, St. Clair to John Jay, Dec. 15, 1788. This letter and many others of St. Clair are given in W. H. Smith’s “St. Clair Papers.”

[34] State Dept. MSS., Memorials, etc., No. 48, Thos. Cumings, on behalf of the deputies of Washington County, to the President of Congress, April 7, 1785.

[35] Va. State Papers, IV., pp. 5, 31, 32, 75, etc.

[36] Gayarré, p. 190. He was the first author who gave a full account of the relations between Miro and Wilkinson, and of the Spanish intrigues to dissever the West from the Union.

[37] Robertson MSS., Miro to Robertson, New Orleans, April 20, 1783.

[38] Gardoqui MSS., Gardoqui to “Col. Elisha Robeson” of Cumberland, April 18, 1788.

[39] Do., Miro to Galvez, June 28, 1786, “que summistrase estas municiones à McGillivray Jefe principal to las Tala puches con toda la reserve y cantata posible de modo que ne se transiendiese la mano de este socorro.”

[40] Do., “sera necessaria la mayor precaucion, y maña para contenerle ciñendose à la suministracion de polvora, balas y efectos de treta con la cantata posible para no dar a los Americanos justos motivos de gueya.”

[41] Do.

[42] Draper Collection, Spanish MSS. State Documents. Baron de Carondelet to Manuel Gayrso de Lemos, Aug. 20, 1794; Carondelet to Duke Alcudia, Sept. 25, 1795; Carondelet’s Letter of July 9, 1795; Carondelet’s Letter of Sept. 27, 1793. These Spanish documents form a very important part of the manuscripts in the Library of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. I was able to get translations of them through the great courtesy of Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, the Secretary of the Society, to whom I must again render my acknowledgments for the generosity with which he has helped me.

[43] St. Clair to Jay, Dec. 13, 1788.

[44] Gayarré, III., 181, 200, 202.

[45] Va. State Papers, IV, 30.

[46] Gardoqui MSS., Gardoqui to Morgan, Sept. 2, 1788. Morgan to Gardoqui, Aug. 30, 1788. Letters of Sept. 9, 1788, Sept. 12, 1788; Gardoqui to Miro, Oct. 4, 1788, to Florida Blanca, June 28, 1789. Letter to Gardoqui, Jan. 22, 1788.

[47] Gardoqui MSS., Clark to Gardoqui, Falls of the Ohio, March 15, 1788.

[48] Gardoqui MSS., Gardoqui to Florida Blanca, June 29, 1789.

[49] “Gayarré,” III, 30, 232, etc. Wilkinson’s treachery dates from his first visit to New Orleans. Exactly when he was first pensioned outright is not certain; but doubtless he was the corrupt recipient of money from the beginning.

[50] Marshall, I, 245.

[51] Gardoqui MSS., Instructions, July 25 and October 2, 1784.

[52] Do., Gardoqui’s Letters, June 19, 1786, October 28, 1786, December 5, 1787, July 25, 1788, etc.

[53] Do., May 11, 1787.

[54] John Mason Brown, “Political Beginnings of Kentucky,” 138.

[55] Gardoqui MSS., Gardoqui to Florida Blanca, December 5, 1787; August 27, 1786; October 25, 1786; October 2, 1789, etc. In these letters White is frequently alluded to as “ Don Jaime.’’

[56] “Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography,” XI, No. 2, p. 165. Ethan Allen’s letter to Lord Dorchester.

[57] Letter of Col. T. Marshall, September 11, 1790.

CHAPTER IV

THE STATE OF FRANKLIN, 1784–1788

THE SEPARATIST spirit was strong throughout the West. Different causes, such as the unchecked ravages of the Indians, or the refusal of the right to navigate the Mississippi, produced or accentuated different manifestations; but the feeling itself was latent everywhere. Its most striking manifestations occurred not in Kentucky, but in what is now the State of Tennessee; and was aimed not at the United States, but at the parent State of North Carolina.

In Kentucky the old frontiersmen were losing their grip on the governmental machinery of the district. The great flood of immigration tended to swamp the pioneers; and the leading parts in the struggle for Statehood were played by men who had come to the country about the close of the Revolutionary War, and who were often related by ties of kinship to the leaders of the Virginia legislatures and conventions.

On the waters of the upper Tennessee matters were entirely different. Immigration had been slower, and the people who did come in were usually of the type of those who had first built their stockaded hamlets on the banks of the Watauga. The leaders of the early pioneers were still the leaders of the community, in legislation as in warfare. Moreover, North Carolina was a much weaker and more turbulent State than Virginia, so that a separatist movement ran less risk of interference. Chains of forest-clad mountains severed the State proper from its Western outposts. Many of the pioneer leaders were from Virginia—backwoodsmen who had drifted south along the trough-like valleys. These of course felt little loyalty to North Carolina. The others, who were North Carolinians by birth, had cast in their lot, for good or for evil, with the frontier communities, and were inclined to side with them in any contest with the parent State.

North Carolina herself was at first quite as anxious to get rid of the frontiersmen as they were to go. Not only was the central authority much weaker than in Virginia, but the people were less proud of their State and less jealously anxious to see it grow in power and influence. The over-mountain settlers had increased in numbers so rapidly that four counties had been erected for them; one, Davidson, taking in the Cumberland district, and the other three, Washington, Sullivan, and Greene, including what is now eastern Tennessee. All these counties sent representatives to the North Carolina legislature, at Hillsborough; but they found that body little disposed to consider the needs of the remote Western colonists.

The State was very poor, and regarded the Western settlements as mere burdensome sources of expense. In the innumerable Indian wars debts were contracted by the little pioneer communities with the faith that the State would pay them; but the payment was made grudgingly or not at all, and no measures were taken to provide for the protection of the frontier in the future. No provisions were made for the extension of the jurisdiction of the State courts over the western counties, and they became a refuge for outlaws, who could be dealt with only as they were—that is, by the settlers acting on their own initiative, without the sanction of law. In short the settlers were left to themselves, to work out their own salvation as they best might, in peace or war; and as they bore most of the burdens of independence, they began to long for the privileges.

In June, 1784, the State Legislature passed an act ceding to the Continental Congress all the western lands, that is, all of what is now Tennessee. It was provided that the sovereignty of North Carolina over the ceded lands should continue in full effect until the United States accepted the gift; and that the act should lapse and become void unless Congress accepted within two years.[1]

The western members were present and voted in favor of the cession, and immediately afterward they returned to their homes and told the frontier people what had been done. There was a general feeling that some step should be taken forthwith to prevent the whole district from lapsing into anarchy. The frontiersmen did not believe that Congress, hampered as it was and powerless to undertake new responsibilities, could accept the gift until the two years were nearly gone; and meanwhile North Carolina would in all likelihood pay them little heed, so that they would be left a prey to the Indians without and to their own wrongdoers within. It was incumbent on them to organize for their own defence and preservation. The three counties on the upper Tennessee proceeded to take measures accordingly. The Cumberland people, however, took no part in the movement, and showed hardly any interest in it; for they felt as alien to the men of the Holston valley as to those of North Carolina proper, and watched the conflict with a tepid absence of friendship for, or hostility toward, either side. They had long practically managed their own affairs, and though they suffered from the lack of a strong central authority on which to rely, they did not understand their own wants, and were inclined to be hostile to any effort for the betterment of the national government.

The first step taken by the frontiersmen in the direction of setting up a new State was very characteristic, as showing the military structure of the frontier settlements. To guard against Indian inroad and foray, and to punish them by reprisals, all the able-bodied, rifle-bearing males were enrolled in the militia; and the divisions of this militia were territorial. The soldiers of each company represented one cluster of rough little hamlets or one group of scattered log houses. The company therefore formed a natural division for purposes of representation. It was accordingly agreed that “each captain’s company” in the counties of Washington, Sullivan, and Greene should choose two delegates, who should all assemble as committees in their respective counties to deliberate upon some general plan of action. The committees met and recommended the election of deputies with full powers to a convention held at Jonesboro.

This convention, of forty deputies or thereabout, met at Jonesboro, on August 23, 1784, and appointed John Sevier President. The delegates were unanimous that the three counties represented should declare themselves independent of North Carolina, and passed a resolution to this effect. They also resolved that the three counties should form themselves into an Association, and should enforce all the laws of North Carolina not incompatible with beginning the career of a separate State, and that Congress should be petitioned to countenance them, and advise them in the matter of their constitution. In addition, they made provision for admitting to their State the neighboring portions of Virginia, should they apply, and should the application be sanctioned by the State of Virginia, “or other power having cognizance thereof.” This last reference was, of course, to Congress, and was significant. Evidently the mountaineers ignored the doctrine of State Sovereignty. The power which they regarded as paramount was that of the Nation. The adhesion they gave to any government was somewhat shadowy; but such as it was, it was yielded to the United States, and not to any one State. They wished to submit their claim for independence to the judgment of Congress, not to the judgment of North Carolina; and they were ready to admit into their new State the western part of Virginia, on the assent, not of both Congress and Virginia, but of either Congress or Virginia.

So far the convention had been unanimous; but a split came on the question whether their declaration of independence should take effect at once. The majority held that it should, and so voted; while a strong minority, amounting to one-third of the members, followed the lead of John Tipton, and voted in the negative. During the session a crowd of people, partly from the straggling little frontier village itself, but partly from the neighboring country, had assembled, and were waiting in the street to learn what the convention had decided. A member, stepping to the door of the building, announced the birth of the new State. The crowd, of course, believed in strong measures, and expressed its hearty approval. Soon afterward the convention adjourned, after providing for the calling of a new convention, to consist of five delegates from each county, who should give a name to the State, and prepare for it a constitution. The members of this constitutional convention were to be chosen by counties, and not by captain’s companies.

There was much quarreling over the choice of members for the constitutional convention, the parties dividing on the lines indicated in the vote on the question of immediate independence. When the convention did meet, in November, it broke up in confusion. At the same time North Carolina, becoming alarmed, repealed her cession act; and thereupon Sevier himself counseled his fellow-citizens to abandon the movement for a new State. However, they felt they had gone too far to back out. The convention came together again in December, and took measures looking toward the assumption of ful Statehood. In the constitution they drew up they provided, among other things, for a Senate and a House of Commons, to form the legislative body, which should itself choose the Governor.[2] By an extraordinary resolution they further provided that the government should go into effect, and elections be held, at once; and yet that in the fall of 1785 a new convention should convene at which the very constitution under which the government had been carried on would be submitted for revision, rejection, or adoption.

Elections for the Legislature were accordingly held, and in March, 1785, the two houses of the new State of Franklin met, and chose Sevier as Governor. Courts were organized, and military and civil officials of every grade were provided, those holding commissions under North Carolina being continued in office in almost all cases. The friction caused by the change of government was thus minimized. Four new counties were created, taxes were levied, and a number of laws enacted. One of the acts was “for the promotion of learning in the county of Washington.” Under it the first academy west of the mountains was started; for some years it was the only high school anywhere in the neighborhood where Latin, or indeed any branch of learning beyond the simplest rudiments, was taught. It is no small credit to the backwoodsmen that in this their first attempt at State-making they should have done what they could to furnish their sons the opportunity of obtaining a higher education.

One of the serious problems with which they had to grapple was the money question. All through the United States the finances were in utter disorder, the medium of exchange being a jumble of almost worthless paper currency, and of foreign coin of every kind, while the standard value varied from State to State. But in the backwoods conditions were even worse, for there was hardly any money at all. Transactions were accomplished chiefly by the primeval method of barter. Accordingly, this backwoods Legislature legalized the payment of taxes and salaries in kind, and set a standard of values. The dollar was declared equal to six shillings, and a scale of prices was established. Among the articles which were enumerated as being lawfully payable for taxes were bacon at six pence a pound, rye whiskey at two shillings and six pence a gallon, peach or apple brandy at three shillings per gallon, and country-made sugar at one shilling per pound. Skins, however, formed the ordinary currency; otter, beaver, and deer being worth six shillings apiece, and raccoon and fox one shilling and three pence. The Governor’s salary was set at two hundred pounds, and that of the highest judge at one hundred and fifty.

The new Governor sent a formal communication to Governor Alexander Martin of North Carolina, announcing that the three counties beyond the mountains had declared their independence, and erected themselves into a separate State, and setting forth their reasons for the step. Governor Martin answered Sevier in a public letter, in which he went over his arguments one by one, and sought to refute them. He announced the willingness of the parent State to accede to the separation when the proper time came; but he pointed out that North Carolina could not consent to such irregular and unauthorized separation, and that Congress would certainly not countenance it against her wishes. In answering an argument drawn from the condition of affairs in Vermont, Martin showed that the Green Mountain State should not be treated as an example in point, because she had asserted her independence, as a separate commonwealth, before the Revolution, and yet had joined in the war against the British.

One of the subjects on which he dwelt was the relations with the Indians. The mountain men accused North Carolina of not giving to the Cherokees a quantity of goods promised them, and asserted that this disappointment had caused the Indians to commit several murders. In his answer the Governor admitted that the goods had not been given, but explained that this was because at the time the land had been ceded to Congress, and the authorities were waiting to see what Congress would do; and after the Cession Act was repealed the goods would have been given forthwith, had it not been for the upsetting of all legal authority west of the mountains, which brought matters to a standstill. Moreover, the Governor in his turn made counter accusations, setting forth that the mountaineers had held unauthorized treaties with the Indians, and had trespassed on their lands, and even murdered them. He closed by drawing a strong picture of the evils sure to be brought about by such lawless secession and usurpation of authority. He besought and commanded the revolted counties to return to their allegiance, and warned them that if they did not, and if peaceable measures proved of no avail, then the State of North Carolina would put down the rebellion by dint of arms.

At the same time, in the early spring of 1785, the authorities of the new State sent a memorial to the Continental Congress.[3] Having found their natural civil chief and military leader in Sevier, the backwoodsmen now developed a diplomat in the person of one William Cocke. To him they intrusted the memorial, together with a certificate, testifying, in the name of the State of Franklin, that he was delegated to present the memorial to Congress and to make what further representations he might find “conducive to the interest and independence of this country.” The memorial set forth the earnest desire of the people of Franklin to be admitted as a State of the Federal Union, together with the wrongs sure to be brought about by such lawless secession with particular bitterness upon the harm which had resulted from her failure to give the Cherokees the goods which they had been promised. It further recited how North Carolina’s original cession of the western lands had moved the Westerners to declare their independence, and contended that her subsequent repeal of the act making this cession was void, and that Congress should treat the cession as an accomplished fact. However, Congress took no action either for or against the insurrectionary commonwealth.

The new State wished to stand well with Virginia, no less than with Congress. In July, 1785, Sevier wrote to Governor Patrick Henry, unsuccessfully appealing to him for sympathy. In this letter he insisted that he was doing all he could to restrain the people from encroaching on the Indian lands, though he admitted he found the task difficult. He assured Henry that he would on no account encourage the Southwestern Virginians to join the new State, as some of them had proposed; and he added, what he evidently felt to be a needed explanation, “we hope to convince every one that we are not a banditti, but a people who mean to do right, as far as our knowledge will lead us.” [4]

At the outset of its stormy career the new State had been named Franklin, in honor of Benjamin Franklin; but a large minority had wished to call it Frankland instead, and outsiders knew it as often by one title as the other. Benjamin Franklin himself did not know that it was named after him until it had been in existence eighteen months.[5] The State was then in straits, and Cocke wrote Franklin, in the hope of some advice or assistance. The prudent philosopher replied in conveniently vague and guarded terms. He remarked that this was the first time he had been informed that the new State was named after him, he having always supposed that it was called Frankland. He then expressed his high appreciation of the honor conferred upon him, and his regret that he could not show his appreciation by anything more substantial than good wishes. He declined to commit himself as to the quarrel between Franklin and North Carolina, explaining that he could know nothing of its merits, as he had but just come home from abroad; but he warmly commended the proposition to submit the question to Congress, and urged that the disputants should abide by its decision. He wound up his letter by some general remarks on the benefits of having a Congress which could act as a judge in such matters.

While the memorial was being presented to Congress, Sevier was publishing his counter-manifesto to Governor Martin’s in the shape of a letter to Martin’s successor in the chair of the chief executive of North Carolina. In this letter Sevier justified at some length the stand the Franklin people had taken, and commented with lofty severity on Governor Martin’s efforts “to stir up sedition and insurrection” in Franklin, and thus destroy the “tranquillity” of its “peaceful citizens.” Sevier evidently shared to the full the horror generally felt by the leaders of a rebellion for those who rebel against themselves.

The new Governor of North Carolina adopted a much more pacific tone than his predecessor, and he and Sevier exchanged some further letters, but without result.

One of the main reasons for discontent with the parent State was the delay in striking an advantageous treaty with the Indians, and the Franklin people hastened to make up for this delay by summoning the Cherokees to a council.[6] Many of the chiefs, who were already under solemn agreement with the United States and North Carolina, refused to attend; but, as usual with Indians, they could not control all their people, some of whom were present at the time appointed. With the Indians who were thus present the whites went through the form of a treaty under which they received large cessions of Cherokee lands. The ordinary results of such a treaty followed. The Indians who had not signed promptly repudiated as unauthorized and ineffective the action of the few who had; and the latter asserted that they had been tricked into signing, and were not aware of the true nature of the document to which they had affixed their marks.[7] The whites heeded these protests not at all, but kept the land they had settled.

In fact the attitude of the Franklin people toward the Cherokees was one of mere piracy. In the August session of their Legislature they passed a law to encourage an expedition to go down the Tennessee on the west side and take possession of the country in the great bend of that river under titles derived from the State of Georgia. The eighty or ninety men composing this expedition actually descended the river, and made a settlement by the Muscle Shoals, in what the Georgians called the county of Houston. They opened a land office, organized a county government, and elected John Sevier’s brother, Valentine, to represent them in the Georgia Legislature; but that body refused to allow him a seat. After a fortnight’s existence the attitude of the Indians became so menacing that the settlement broke up and was abandoned.

In November, 1785, the convention to provide a permanent constitution for the State met at Greeneville. There was already much discontent with the Franklin Government. The differences between its adherents and those of the old North Carolina Government were accentuated by bitter faction fights among the rivals for popular leadership, backed by their families and followers. Bad feeling showed itself at this convention, the rivalry between Sevier and Tipton being pronounced. Tipton was one of the mountain leaders, second in influence only to Sevier, and his bitter personal enemy. At the convention a brand new constitution was submitted by a delegate named Samuel Houston. The adoption of the new constitution was urged by a strong minority. The most influential man of the minority party was Tipton.

This written constitution, with its bill of rights prefixed, was a curious document. It provided that the new State should be called the Commonwealth of Frankland. Full religious liberty was established, so far as rites of worship went; but no one was to hold office unless he was a Christian who believed in the Bible, in Heaven, in Hell, and in the Trinity. There were other classes prohibited from holding office,—immoral men and sabbath breakers, for instance, and clergymen, doctors, and lawyers. The exclusion of lawyers from law-making bodies was one of the darling plans of the ordinary sincere rural demagogue of the day. At that time lawyers, as a class, furnished the most prominent and influential political leaders; and they were, on the whole, the men of most mark in the communities. A narrow, uneducated, honest countryman, especially in the backwoods, then looked upon a lawyer usually with smothered envy and admiration, but always with jealousy, suspicion, and dislike; much as his successors to this day look upon bankers and railroad men. It seemed to him a praiseworthy thing to prevent any man whose business it was to study the law from having a share in making the law.

The proposed constitution showed the extreme suspicion felt by the common people for even their own elected lawmakers. It made various futile provisions to restrain them, such as providing that “except on occasions of sudden necessity,” laws should only become such after being enacted by two successive Legislatures, and that a Council of Safety should be elected to look after the conduct of all the other public officials. Universal suffrage for all freemen was provided; the Legislature was to consist of but one body; and almost all offices were made elective. Taxes were laid to provide a State university. The constitution was tediously elaborate and minute in its provisions.

However, its only interest is its showing the spirit of the local “reformers” of the day and place in the matters of constitution-making and legislation. After a hot debate and some tumultuous scenes, it was rejected by the majority of the convention, and in its stead, on Sevier’s motion, the North Carolina constitution was adopted as the groundwork of the new government. This gave umbrage to Tipton and his party, who for some time had been discontented with the course of affairs in Franklin, and had been grumbling about them.

The new constitution—which was in effect simply the old constitution with unimportant alterations—went into being, and under it the Franklin Legislature convened at Greeneville, which was made the permanent capital of the new State. The Commons met in the court-house, a clapboarded building of unhewn logs, without windows, the light coming in through the door and through the chinks between the timbers. The Senate met in one of the rooms of the town tavern. The backwoods legislators lodged at this tavern or at some other, at the cost of four-pence a day, the board being a shilling for the man, and sixpence for his horse, if the horse only ate hay; a half pint of liquor or a gallon of oats cost sixpence.[8] Life was very rude and simple; no luxuries, and only the commonest comforts, were obtainable.

The State of Franklin had now been in existence over a year, and during this period the officers holding under it had exercised complete control in the three insurrectionary counties. They had passed laws, made treaties, levied taxes, recorded deeds, and solemnized marriages. In short, they had performed all the functions of civil government, and Franklin had assumed in all respects the position of an independent commonwealth.

But in the spring of 1786 the discontent which had smouldered burst into a flame. Tipton and his followers openly espoused the cause of North Carolina, and were joined, as time waned, by the men who for various reasons were dissatisfied with the results of the trial of independent Statehood. They held elections, at the Sycamore Shoals and elsewhere, to choose representatives to the North Carolina Legislature, John Tipton being elected Senator. They organized the entire local government over again in the interest of the old State.

The two rival governments clashed in every way. County courts of both were held in the same counties; the militia were called out by both sets of officers; taxes were levied by both Legislatures.[9] The Franklin courts were held at Jonesboro, the North Carolina courts at Buffalo, ten miles distant; and each court in turn was broken up by armed bands of the opposite party. Criminals throve in the confusion, and the people refused to pay taxes to either party. Brawls, with their brutal accompaniments of gouging and biting, were common. Sevier and Tipton themselves, on one occasion when they by chance met, indulged in a rough-and-tumble fight before their friends could interfere.

Throughout the year ’86 the confusion gradually grew worse. A few days after the Greeneville convention met, the Legislature of North Carolina passed an act in reference to the revolt. It declared that, at the proper time, the western counties would be erected into an independent State, but that this time had not yet come; until it did, they would be well cared for, but must return to their ancient allegiance, and appoint and elect their officers under the laws of North Carolina. A free pardon and oblivion of all offences were promised. Following this act came a long and tedious series of negotiations. Franklin sent ambassadors to argue her case before the Legislature of the mother State; the Governors and high officials exchanged long-winded letters and proclamations, and the rival Legislatures passed laws intended to undermine each other’s influence. The Franklin Assembly tried menace, and threatened to fine any one who acted under a commission from North Carolina. The Legislature of the latter State achieved more by promises, having wisely offered to remit all taxes for the two troubled years to any one who would forthwith submit to her rule.

Neither side was willing to force the issue to trial by arms if it could be helped; and there was a certain pointlessness about the struggle, inasmuch as the differences between the contending parties were really so trifling. The North Carolinians kept protesting that they would be delighted to see Franklin set up as an independent State, as soon as her territory contained enough people; and the Franklin leaders in return were loud in their assurances of respect for North Carolina and of desire to follow her wishes. But neither would yield the points immediately at issue.

A somewhat comic incident of the affair occurred in connection with an effort made by Sevier and his friends to persuade old Evan Shelby to act as umpire. After a conference they signed a joint manifesto which aimed to preserve peace for the moment by the novel expedient of allowing the citizens of the disputed territory to determine, every man for himself, the government which he wished to own, and to pay his taxes to it accordingly. Nothing came of this manifesto.

During this time of confusion each party rallied by turns, but the general drift was all in favor of North Carolina. One by one the adherents of Franklin dropped away. The revolt was essentially a frontier revolt, and Sevier was essentially a frontier leader. The older and longer-settled counties and parts of counties were the first to fall away from him, while the settlers on the very edge of the Indian country clung to him to the last.

The neighboring States were more or less excited over the birth of the little insurgent commonwealth. Virginia looked upon it with extreme disfavor, largely because her own western counties showed signs of desiring to throw in their fortunes with the Franklin people.[10] Governor Patrick Henry issued a very energetic address on the subject, and the authorities took effective means to prevent the movement from gaining head.

Georgia, on the contrary, showed the utmost friendliness toward the new State, and gladly entered into an alliance with her.[11] Georgia had no self-assertive communities of her own children on her western border, as Virginia and North Carolina had, in Kentucky and Franklin. She was herself a frontier commonwealth, challenging as her own lands that were occupied by the Indians and claimed by the Spaniards. Her interests were identical with those of Franklin. The Governors of the two communities exchanged complimentary addresses, and sent their rough ambassadors one to the other. Georgia made Sevier a brigadier-general in her militia, for the district she claimed in the bend of the Tennessee; and her branch of the Society of the Cincinnati elected him to membership. In return Sevier, hoping to tighten the loosening bonds of his authority by a successful Indian war, entered into arrangements with Georgia for a combined campaign against the Creeks. For various reasons the proposed campaign fell through, but the mere planning of it shows the feeling that was, at the bottom, the strongest of those which knit together the Franklin men and the Georgians.[12] They both greedily coveted the Indians’ land, and were bent on driving the Indians off it.[13]

One of the Franklin judges, in sending a plea for the independence of his State to the Governor of North Carolina, expressed with unusual frankness the attitude of the Holston backwoodsmen toward the Indians. He remarked that he supposed the Governor would be astonished to learn that there were many settlers on the land which North Carolina had by treaty guaranteed to the Cherokees; and brushed aside all remonstrances by simply saying that it was vain to talk of keeping the frontiersmen from encroaching on Indian territory. All that could be done, he said, was to extend the laws over each locality as rapidly as it was settled by the intruding pioneers; otherwise they would become utterly lawless, and dangerous to their neighbors. As for laws and proclamations to restrain the white advance, he asked if all the settlements in America had not been extended in defiance of such. And now that the Indians were cowed, the advance was certain to be faster, and the savages were certain to be pushed back more rapidly, and the limits of tribal territory more narrowly circumscribed.[14]

This letter possessed at least the merit of expressing with blunt truthfulness the real attitude of the Franklin people, and of the backwoodsmen generally, toward the Indians. They never swerved from their intention of seizing the Indian lands. They preferred to gain their ends by treaty, and with the consent of the Indians; but if this proved impossible, then they intended to gain them by force.

In its essence, and viewed from the standpoint of abstract morality, their attitude was that of the freebooter. The backwoodsmen lusted for the possessions of the Indian, as the buccaneers of the Spanish Main had once lusted for the possessions of the Spaniard. There was but little more heed paid to the rights of the assailed in one case than in the other.

Yet in its results, and viewed from the standpoint of applied ethics, the conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind. It was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable. Huge tomes might be filled with arguments as to the morality or immorality of such conquests. But these arguments appeal chiefly to the cultivated men in highly civilized communities who have neither the wish nor the power to lead warlike expeditions into savage lands. Such conquests are commonly undertaken by those reckless and daring adventurers who shape and guide each race’s territorial growth. They are sure to come when a masterful people, still in its raw, barbarian prime, finds itself face to face with the weaker and wholly alien race which holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp.

Many good persons seem prone to speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil. This is, of course, a shortsighted view. In its after affects a conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples. It is useless to try to generalize about conquests simply as such in the abstract; each case or set of cases must be judged by itself. The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian have always proved a curse in the end. Nothing but sheer evil has come from the victories of Turk and Tartar. This is true generally of the victories of barbarians of low racial characteristics over gentler, more moral, and more refined peoples, even though these people have, to their shame and discredit, lost the vigorous fighting virtues. Yet it remains no less true that the world would probably have gone forward very little, indeed would probably not have gone forward at all, had it not been for the displacement or submersion of savage and barbaric peoples as a consequence of the armed settlement in strange lands of the races who hold in their hands the fate of the years. Every such submersion or displacement of an inferior race, every such armed settlement or conquest by a superior race, means the infliction and suffering of hideous woe and misery. It is a sad and dreadful thing that there should of necessity be such throes of agony; and yet they are the birth-pangs of a new and vigorous people. That they are in truth birth-pangs does not lessen the grim and hopeless woe of the race supplanted; of the race outworn or overthrown. The wrongs done and suffered can not be blinked. Neither can they be allowed to hide the results to mankind of what has been achieved.

It is not possible to justify the backwoodsmen by appeal to principles which we would accept as binding on their descendants, or on the mighty nation which has sprung up and flourished in the soil they first won and tilled. All that can be asked is that they shall be judged as other wilderness conquerors, as other slayers and quellers of savage peoples, are judged. The same standards must be applied to Sevier and his hard-faced horse-riflemen that we apply to the Greek colonists of Sicily and the Roman colonist of the valley of the Po; to the Cossack rough-rider who won for Russia the vast and melancholy Siberian steppes, and to the Boer who guided his ox-drawn wagon-trains to the hot grazing lands of the Transvaal; to the founders of Massachusetts and Virginia, of Oregon and icy Saskatchewan; and to the men who built up those far-off commonwealths whose coasts are lapped by the waters of the great South Sea.

The aggressions by the Franklin men on the Cherokee lands bore bloody fruit in 1786.[15] The young warriors, growing ever more alarmed and angered at the pressure of the settlers, could not be restrained. They shook off the control of the old men, who had seen the tribe flogged once and again by the whites, and knew how hopeless such a struggle was. The Chickamauga banditti watched from their eyries to pounce upon all boats that passed down the Tennessee, and their war bands harried the settlements far and wide, being joined in their work by parties from the Cherokee towns proper. Stock was stolen, cabins were burned, and settlers murdered. The stark riflemen gathered for revenge, carrying their long rifles and riding their rough mountain horses. Counter-inroads were carried into the Indian country. On one, when Sevier himself led, two or three of the Indian towns were burned and a score or so of warriors killed. As always, it proved comparatively easy to deal a damaging blow to these Southern Indians, who dwelt in well-built log-towns; while the widely scattered, shifting, wigwam-villages of the forest-nomads of the North rarely offered a tangible mark at which to strike. Of course, the retaliatory blows of the whites, like the strokes of the Indians, fell as often on the innocent as on the guilty. During this summer, to revenge the death of a couple of settlers, a backwoods Colonel, with the appropriate name of Outlaw, fell on a friendly Cherokee town and killed two or three Indians, besides plundering a white man, a North Carolina trader, who happened to be in the town. Nevertheless, throughout 1786 the great majority of the Cherokees remained quiet.[16]

Early in 1787, however, they felt the strain so severely that they gathered in a great council and deliberated whether they should not abandon their homes and move far out into the Western wilderness; but they could not yet make up their minds to leave their beloved mountains. The North Carolina authorities wished to see them receive justice, but all they could do was to gather the few Indian prisoners who had been captured in the late wars and return them to the Cherokees. The Franklin Government had opened a land office and disposed of all the lands between the French Broad and the Tennessee,[17] which territory North Carolina had guaranteed the Cherokees; and when, on the authority of the Governor of North Carolina, his representative ordered the settlers off the invaded land, they treated his command with utter defiance. Not only the Creeks but even the distant Choctaws and Chickasaws became uneasy and irritated over the American encroachments, while the French traders who came up the Tennessee preached war to the Indians, and the Spanish Government ordered all the American traders to be expelled from among the Southern tribes unless they would agree to take commissions from Spain and throw off their allegiance to the United States.

In the same year the Cherokees became embroiled, not only with the Franklin people but with the Kentuckians. The Chickamaugas, who were mainly renegade Cherokees, were always ravaging in Kentucky. Colonel John Logan had gathered a force to attack one of their war bands, but he happened instead to stumble on a Cherokee party, which he scattered to the winds with loss. The Kentuckians wrote to the Cherokee chiefs explaining that the attack was an accident, but that they did not regret it greatly, inasmuch as they found in the Cherokee camp several horses which had been stolen from the settlers. They then warned the Cherokees that the outrages by the Chickamaugas must be stopped; and if the Cherokees failed to stop them they would have only themselves to thank for the woes that would follow, as the Kentuckians could not always tell the hostile from the friendly Indians, and were bent on taking an exemplary, even if indiscriminate revenge. The Council of Virginia, on hearing of this announced intention of the Kentuckians “highly disapproved of it,” [18] but they could do nothing except disapprove. The governmental authorities of the eastern States possessed but little more power to restrain the backwoodsmen than the sachems had to restrain the young braves. Virginia and North Carolina could no more control Kentucky and Franklin than the Cherokees could control the Chickamaugas.

In 1787 the State of Franklin began to totter to its fall. In April[19] Sevier, hungering for help or friendly advice, wrote to the gray statesman after whom his State was named. The answer did not come for several months, and when it did come it was not very satisfactory. The old sage repeated that he knew too little of the circumstances to express an opinion but he urged a friendly understanding with North Carolina, and he spoke with unpalatable frankness on the subject of the Indians. At that very time he was writing to a Cherokee chief[20] who had come to Congress in the vain hope that the Federal authorities might save the Cherokees from the reckless backwoodsmen; he had promised to try to obtain justice for the Indians, and he was in no friendly mood toward the backwoods aggressors.

Prevent encroachments on Indian lands, Franklin wrote to Sevier,—Sevier, who, in a last effort to rally his followers, was seeking a general Indian war to further these very encroachments,—and remember that they are the more unjustifiable because the Indians usually give good bargains in the way of purchase, while a war with them costs more than any possible price they may ask. This advice was based on Franklin’s usual principle of merely mercantile morality; but he was writing to a people who stood in sore need of just the teaching he could furnish and who would have done well to heed it. They were slow to learn that while sober, debt-paying thrift, love of order, and industry, are perhaps not the loftiest virtues and are certainly not in themselves all sufficient, they yet form an indispensable foundation, the lack of which is but ill supplied by other qualities even of a very noble kind.

Sevier, also in the year 1787, carried on a long correspondence with Evan Shelby, whose adherence to the State of Franklin he much desired, as the stout old fellow was a power not only among the frontiersmen but with the Virginian and North Carolinian authorities likewise. Sevier persuaded the Legislature to offer Shelby the position of chief magistrate of Franklin, and pressed him to accept it, and throw in his lot with the Westerners, instead of trying to serve men at a distance. Shelby refused; but Sevier was bent upon being pleasant, and thanked Shelby for at least being neutral, even though not actively friendly. In another letter, however, when he had begun to suspect Shelby of positive hostility, he warned him that no unfriendly interference would be tolerated.[21]

Shelby could neither be placated nor intimidated. He regarded with equal alarm and anger the loosening of the bands of authority and order among the Franklin frontiersmen. He bitterly disapproved of their lawless encroachments on the Indian lands, which he feared would cause a general war with the savages.[22] At the very time that Sevier was writing to him, he was himself writing to the North Carolina Government, urging them to send forward troops who would put down the rebellion by force, and was requesting the Virginians to back up any such government with their militia. He urged that the insurrection threatened not only North Carolina, but Virginia and the Federal Government itself; and in phrases like those of the most advanced Federalist statesman, he urged the Federal Government to interfere. The Governor of Virginia was inclined to share his views, and forwarded his complaints and requests to the Continental Congress.

However, no action was necessary. The Franklin Government collapsed of itself. In September, 1787, the Legislature met for the last time, at Greeneville. There was a contested election case for Senator from the county of Hawkins, which shows the difficulties under which the members had labored in carrying their elections, and gives a hint of the anarchy produced by the two contending Governments. In this case the sheriff of the county of Hawkins granted the certificate of election to one man, and the three inspectors of the poll granted it to another. On investigation by a committee of the Senate, it appeared that the poll was opened by the sheriff “on the third Friday and Saturday in August,” as provided by law, but that in addition to the advertisement of the election which was published by the sheriff of Hawkins, who held under the Franklin Government, another proclamation, advertising the same election, was issued by the sheriff of the North Carolina county of Spencer, which had been recently created by North Carolina out of a portion of the territory of Hawkins County. The North Carolina sheriff merely wished to embarrass his Franklin rival, and he succeeded admirably. The Franklin man proclaimed that he would allow no one to vote who had not paid taxes to Franklin; but after three or four votes had been taken the approach of a body of armed adherents of the North Carolina interest caused the shutting of the polls. The Franklin authorities then dispersed, the North Carolina sheriff having told them plainly that the matter would have to be settled by seeing which party was strongest. One or two efforts were made to have an adjourned election elsewhere in the neighborhood, with the result that in the confusion certificates were given to two different men.[23] Such disorders showed that the time had arrived when the authorities of Franklin either had to begin a bloody civil war or else abandon the attempt to create a new State; and in their feebleness and uncertainty they adopted the latter alternative.

When in March, 1788, the term of Sevier as Governor came to an end, there was no one to take his place, and the officers of North Carolina were left in undisputed possession of whatever governmental authority there was.

The North Carolina Assembly which met in November, 1787, had been attended by regularly elected members from all the western counties, Tipton being among them; while the far-off log hamlets on the banks of the Cumberland sent Robertson himself.[24] This assembly once more offered full pardon and oblivion of past offences to all who would again become citizens; and the last adherents of the insurrectionary Government reluctantly accepted the terms. Franklin had been in existence for three years, during which time she had exercised all the powers and functions of independent Statehood. During the first year her sway in the district was complete; during the next she was forced to hold possession in common with North Carolina; and then, by degrees her authority lapsed altogether.

Sevier was left in dire straits by the falling of the State he had founded; for not only were the North Carolina authorities naturally bitter against him, but he had to count on the personal hostility of Tipton. In his distress he wrote to one of the opposing party, not personally unfriendly to him, that he had been dragged into the Franklin movement by the people of the county; that he wished to suspend hostilities, and was ready to abide by the decision of the North Carolina Legislature, but that he was determined to share the fate of those who had stood by him, whatever it might be.[25] About the time that his term as Governor expired, a writ, issued by the North Carolina courts, was executed against his estate. The sheriff seized all his negro slaves, as they worked on his Nolichucky farm, and bore them for safe-keeping to Tipton’s house, a rambling cluster of stout log buildings, on Sinking Creek of the Watauga. Sevier raised a hundred and fifty men and marched to take them back, carrying a light fieldpiece. Tipton’s friends gathered, thirty or forty strong, and a siege began. Sevier hesitated to push matters to extremity by charging home. For a couple of days there was some skirmishing and two or three men were killed or wounded. Then the county-lieutenant of Sullivan, with a hundred and eighty militia, came to Tipton’s rescue. They surprised Sevier’s camp at dawn on the last day of February,[26] while the snow was falling heavily; and the Franklin men fled in mad panic, only one or two being slain. Two of Sevier’s sons were taken prisoners, and Tipton was with difficulty dissuaded from hanging them. This scrambling fight marked the ignoble end of the State of Franklin. Sevier fled to the uttermost part of the frontier, where no writs ran, and the rough settlers were devoted to him. Here he speedily became engaged in the Indian war.

Early in the spring of 1788, the Indians renewed their ravages.[27] The Chickamaugas were the leaders, but there were among them a few Creeks, and they were also joined by some of the Cherokees proper, goaded to anger by the encroachments of the whites on their lands. Many of the settlers were killed, and the people on the frontier began to gather into their stockades and block-houses. The alarm was great. One murder was of peculiar treachery and atrocity. A man named John Kirk[28] lived on a clearing on Little River, seven miles south of Knoxville. One day when he was away from home, an Indian named Slim Tom, well known to the family, and believed to be friendly, came to the cabin and asked for food. The food was given him and he withdrew. But he had come merely as a spy; and seeing that he had to deal only with helpless women and children, he returned with a party of Indians who had been hiding in the woods. They fell on the wretched creatures, and butchered them all, eleven in number, leaving the mangled bodies in the court-yard. The father and eldest boy were absent and thus escaped. It would have been well had the lad been among the slain, for his coarse and brutal nature was roused to a thirst for indiscriminate revenge, and shortly afterward he figured as chief actor in a deed of retaliation as revolting and inhuman as the original crime.

At the news of the massacres the frontiersmen gathered, as was their custom, mounted and armed, and ready either to follow the marauding parties or to make retaliatory inroads on their own account. Sevier, their darling leader, was among them, and to him they gave the command.

Another frontier leader and Indian fighter of note was at this time living among the Cherokees. He was Joseph Martin, who had dwelt much among the Indians, and had great influence over them, as he always treated them justly; though he had shown in more than one campaign that he could handle them in war as well as in peace. Early in 1778, he had been appointed by North Carolina Brigadier-General of the western counties lying beyond the mountains. In the military organization, which was really the most important side of the Government to the frontiersmen, this was the chief position; and Martin’s duties were not only to protect the border against Indian raids, but also to stamp out any smouldering embers of insurrection, and see that the laws of the State were again put in operation.

In April he took command, and on the 24th of the month reached the lower settlements on the Holston River.[29] Here he found that a couple of settlers had been killed by Indians a few days before, and he met a party or riflemen who had gathered to avenge the death of their friends by a foray on the Cherokee towns. Martin did not believe that the Cherokees were responsible for the murder. After some talk he persuaded the angry whites to choose four of their trusted men to accompany him as ambassadors to the Cherokee towns in order to find out the truth.

Accordingly they all went forward together. Martin sent runners ahead to the Cherokees and their chiefs and young warriors gathered to meet him. The Indians assured him that they were guiltless of the recent murder; that it should doubtless be laid at the door of some Creek war party. The Creeks, they said, kept passing through their villages to war on the whites, and they had often turned them back. The frontier envoys at this professed themselves satisfied, and returned to their homes, after begging Martin to stay among the Cherokees; and he stayed, his presence giving confidence to the Indians, who forthwith began to plant their crops.

Unfortunately, about the middle of May, the murders again began, and again parties of riflemen gathered for vengeance. Martin intercepted one of these parties ten miles from a friendly Cherokee town; but another attacked and burned a neighboring town, the inhabitants escaping with slight loss. For a time Martin’s life was jeopardized by this attack; the Cherokees, who swore they were innocent of the murders, being incensed at the counter attack. They told Martin that they thought he had been trying to gentle them, so that the whites might take them unawares. After a while they cooled down; and explained to Martin that the outrages were the work of the Creeks and Chickamaugas, whom they could not control, and whom they hoped the whites would punish; but that they themselves were innocent and friendly. Then the whites sent messages to express their regret; and though Martin declined longer to be responsible for the deeds of men of his own color, the Indians consented to patch up another truce.[30]

The outrages, however, continued; among others, a big boat was captured by the Chickamaugas, and all but three of the forty souls on board were killed. The settlers drew no fine distinctions between indifferent Indians; they knew that their friends were being murdered by savages who came from the direction of the Cherokee towns; and they vented their wrath on the Indians who dwelt in these towns because they were nearest to hand.

On May 24th Martin left the Indian town of Chota, the beloved town, where he had been staying, and rode to the French Broad. There he found that a big levy of frontier militia, with Sevier at their head, were preparing to march against the Indians; Sevier having been chosen general, as mentioned above. Realizing that it was now hopeless to try to prevent a war, Martin hurried back to Chota, and removed his negroes, horses and goods.

Sevier, heedless of Martin’s remonstrances, hurried forward on his raid, with a hundred riders. He struck a town on Hiawassee and destroyed it, killing a number of the warriors. This feat, and two or three others like it, made the frontiersmen flock to his standard;[31] but before any great number were embodied under him, he headed a small party on a raid which was sullied by a deed of atrocious treachery and cruelty. He led some forty men to Chilhowa[32] on the Tennessee; opposite a small town of Cherokees, who were well known to have been friendly to the whites. Among them were several chiefs, including an old man named the Corn Tassel, who for years had been foremost in the endeavor to keep the peace, and to prevent raids on the settlers. They put out a white flag; and the whites then hoisted one themselves. On the strength of this, one of the Indians crossed the river, and on demand of the whites ferried them over.[33] Sevier put the Indians in a hut, and then a horrible deed of infamy was perpetrated. Among Sevier’s troops was young John Kirk, whose mother, sisters, and brothers had been so foully butchered by the Cherokee Slim Tom and his associates. Young Kirk’s brutal soul was parched with longing for revenge, and he was, both in mind and heart, too nearly kin to his Indian foes greatly to care whether his vengeance fell on the wrongdoers or on the innocent. He entered the hut where the Cherokee chiefs were confined and brained them with his tomahawk, while his comrades looked on without interfering. Sevier’s friends asserted that at the moment he was absent; but this is no excuse. He knew well the fierce blood lust of his followers, and it was criminal negligence on his part to leave to their mercy the friendly Indians who had trusted to his good faith; and, moreover, he made no effort to punish the murderer.

As if to show the futility of the plea that Sevier was powerless, a certain Captain Gillespie successfully protected a captive Indian from militia violence at this very time. He had come into the Indian country with one of the parties which intended to join Sevier, and while alone he captured a Cherokee. When his troops came up they immediately proposed to kill the Indian, and told him they cared nothing for his remonstrances; whereupon he sprang from his horse, cocked his rifle, and told them he would shoot dead the first man who raised a hand to molest the captive. They shrank back, and the Indian remained unharmed.[34]

As for young Kirk all that need be said is that he stands in the same category with Slim Tom, the Indian murderer. He was a fair type of the low-class, brutal white borderer, whose inhumanity almost equaled that of the savage. But Sevier must be judged by another standard. He was a member of the Cincinnati, a correspondent of Franklin, a follower of Washington. He sinned against the light, and must be condemned accordingly. He sank to the level of a lieutenant of Alva, Guise, or Tilly, to the level of a crusading noble of the Middle Ages. It would be unfair to couple even this crime with those habitually committed by Sidney and Sir Peter Carew, Shan O’Neil and Fitzgerald, and the other dismal heroes of the hideous wars waged between the Elizabethan English and the Irish. But it is not unfair to compare this border warfare in the Tennessee Mountains with the border warfare of England and Scotland two centuries earlier. There is no blinking the fact that in this instance Sevier and his followers stood on the same level of brutality with “keen Lord Evers,” and on the same level of treachery with the “assured” Scots at the battle of Ancrum Muir.

Even on the frontier, and at that time, the better class of backwoodsmen expressed much horror at the murder of the friendly chiefs. Sevier had planned to march against the Chickamaugas with the levies that were thronging to his banner; but the news of the murder provoked such discussion and hesitation that his forces melted away. He was obliged to abandon his plan, partly owing to this disaffection among the whites, and partly owing to what one of the backwoodsmen in writing to General Martin termed “the severity of the Indians,”[35]—a queer use of the word severity which obtains to this day in out-of-the-way places through the Alleghanies, where people style a man with a record for desperate fighting a “severe man,” and speak of big, fierce dogs, able to tackle a wolf, as “severe” dogs.

Elsewhere throughout the country the news of the murder excited great indignation. The Continental Congress passed resolutions condemning acts which they had been powerless to prevent and were powerless to punish.[36] The Justices of the Court of Abbeville County, South Carolina, with Andrew Pickens at their head, wrote “to the people living on Nolechucke, French Broad, and Holstein,” denouncing in unmeasured terms the encroachments and outrages of which Sevier and his backwoods troopers had been guilty. In their zeal the Justices went a little too far, painting the Cherokees as a harmless people, who had always been friendly to the Americans,—a statement which General Martin, although he too condemned the outrages openly and with the utmost emphasis, felt obliged to correct, pointing out that the Cherokees had been the inveterate and bloody foes of the settlers throughout the Revolution.[37] The Governor of North Carolina, as soon as he heard the news, ordered the arrest of Sevier and his associates—doubtless as much because of their revolt against the State as because of the atrocities they had committed against the Indians.[38]

In their panic many of the Indians fled across the mountains and threw themselves on the mercy of the North and South Carolinians, by whom they were fed and protected. Others immediately joined the Chickamaugas in force, and the frontier districts of the Franklin region were harried with vindictive ferocity. The strokes fell most often and most heavily on the innocent. Half of the militia were called out, and those who most condemned the original acts of aggression committed by their neighbors were obliged to make common cause with these neighbors, so as to save their own lives and the lives of their families.[39] The officers of the district ordered a general levy of the militia to march against the Indian towns, and in each county the backwoodsmen began to muster.[40]

Before the troops assembled many outrages were committed by the savages. Horses were stolen, people were killed in their cabins, in their fields, on the roads, and at the ferries; and the settlers nearest the Indian country gathered in their forted stations, and sent earnest appeals for help to their unmolested brethren. The stations were attacked, and at one or two the Indians were successful; but generally they were beaten off, the militia marching promptly to the relief of each beleaguered garrison. Severe skirmishing took place between the war parties and the bands of militia who first reached the frontier; and the whites were not always successful. Once, for instance, a party of militia, greedy for fruit, scattered through an orchard, close to an Indian town which they supposed to be deserted; but the Indians were hiding near by and fell upon them, killing seventeen. The savages mutilated the dead bodies in fantastic ways, with ferocious derision, and left them for their friends to find and bury.[41] Sevier led parties against the Indians without ceasing; and he and his men by their conduct showed that they waged the war very largely for profit. On a second incursion, which he made with canoes, into the Hiawassee country, his followers made numerous tomahawk claims, or “improvements,” as they were termed, in the lands from which the Indians fled; hoping thus to establish a right of ownership to the country they had overrun.[42]

The whites speedily got the upper hand, ceasing to stand on the defensive; and the panic disappeared. When the North Carolina Legislature met, the members, and the people of the seaboard generally, were rather surprised to find that the over-hill men talked of the Indian war as troublesome rather than formidable.[43]

The militia officers holding commissions from North Carolina wished Martin to take command of the retaliatory expeditions against the Cherokees; but Martin, though a good fighter on occasions, preferred the arts of peace, and liked best treating with and managing the Indians. He had already acted as agent to different tribes on behalf of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia; and at this time he accepted an offer from the Continental Congress to serve in the same capacity for all the Southern Indians.[44] Nevertheless he led a body of militia against the Chickamauga towns. He burnt a couple, but one of his detachments was driven back in a fight on Lookout Mountain; his men became discontented, and he was forced to withdraw, followed and harassed by the Indians. On his retreat the Indians attacked the settlements in force, and captured Gillespie’s station.

Sevier was the natural leader of the Holston riflemen in such a war; and the bands of frontiersmen insisted that he should take the command whenever it was possible. Sevier swam well in troubled waters, and he profited by the storm he had done so much to raise. Again and again during the summer of 1788 he led his bands of wild horsemen on forays against the Cherokee towns, and always with success. He followed his usual tactics, riding hard and long, pouncing on the Indians in their homes before they suspected his presence, or intercepting and scattering their war parties; and he moved with such rapidity that they could not gather in force sufficient to do him harm. Not only was the fame of his triumphs spread along the frontier, but vague rumors reached even the old settled States of the seaboard,[45] rumors that told of the slight loss suffered by his followers, of the headlong hurry of his marches, of the fury with which his horsemen charged in the skirmishes, of his successful ambuscades and surprises, and of the heavy toll he took in slain warriors and captive women and children, who were borne homeward to exchange for the wives and little ones of the settlers who had themselves been taken prisoners.

Sevier’s dashing and successful leadership wiped out in the minds of the backwoodsmen the memory of all his shortcomings and misdeeds, even the memory of that unpunished murder of friendly Indians which had so largely provoked the war. The representatives of the North Carolina Government and his own personal enemies were less forgetful. The Governor of the State had given orders to seize him because of his violation of the laws and treaties in committing wanton murder on friendly Indians; and a warrant to arrest him for high treason was issued by the courts.

As long as “Nolichucky Jack’’ remained on the border, among the rough Indian fighters whom he had so often led to victory, he was in no danger. But in the fall, late in October, he ventured back to the longer settled districts. A council of officers, with Martin presiding and Tipton present as one of the leading members, had been held at Jonesboro, and had just broken up when Sevier and a dozen of his followers rode into the squalid little town.[46] He drank freely and caroused with his friends; and he soon quarreled with one of the other side who denounced him freely and justly for the murder of Corn Tassel and the other peaceful chiefs. Finally they all rode away, but when some miles out of town Sevier got into a quarrel with another man; and after more drinking and brawling he went to pass the night at a house, the owner of which was his friend. Meanwhile one of the men with whom he had quarreled informed Tipton that his foe was in his grasp. Tipton gathered eight or ten men and early next morning surprised Sevier in his lodgings.

Sevier could do nothing but surrender, and Tipton put him in irons and sent him across the mountains to Morgantown, in North Carolina, where he was kindly treated and allowed much liberty. Most of the inhabitants sympathized with him, having no special repugnance to disorder, and no special sympathy even for friendly Indians. Meanwhile a dozen of his friends, with his two sons at their head, crossed the mountains to rescue their beloved leader. They came into Morgantown while court was sitting and went unnoticed in the crowds. In the evening, when the court adjourned and the crowds broke up, Sevier’s friends managed to get near him with a spare horse; he mounted and they all rode off at speed. By daybreak they were out of danger.[47] Nothing further was attempted against him. A year later he was elected a member of the North Carolina Legislature; after some hesitation he was allowed to take his seat, and the last trace of the old hostility disappeared.

Fie then adds a picturesque alternative account—followed by later writers—in which Sevier escapes in open court on a celebrated race mare. The basis for the last account, so far as it has any basis at all, lies on statements made nearly half a century after the event, and entirely unknown to Haywood. There is no evidence of any kind as to its truthfulness. It must be set down as mere fable.

Neither the North Carolinians, nor any one else, knew that there was better ground for the charge of treason against Sevier than had appeared in his overt actions. He was one of those who had been in correspondence with Gardoqui on the subject of an alliance between the Westerners and Spain.

The year before this Congress had been much worked up over the discovery of a supposed movement in Franklin to organize for the armed conquest of Louisiana. In September, 1787, a letter was sent by an ex-officer of the Continental line named John Sullivan, writing from Charleston, to a former comrade in arms; and this letter in some way became public. Sullivan had an unpleasant reputation. He had been involved in one of the mutinies of the underpaid Continental troops, and was a plotting, shifty, violent fellow. In his letter he urged his friend to come West forthwith and secure lands on the Tennessee; as there would soon be work cut out for the men of that country; and, he added: “I want you much—by God—take my word for it we will speedily be in possession of New Orleans.”[48]

The Secretary of War at once directed General Harmar to interfere, by force if necessary, with the execution of any such plan, and an officer of the regular army was sent to Franklin to find out the truth of the matter. This officer visited the Holston country in April, 1788, and after careful inquiry came to the conclusion that Sullivan had no backing, and that no movement against Spain was contemplated; the settlers being absorbed in the strife between the followers of Sevier and of Tipton.[49]

The real danger for the moment lay, not in a movement by the backwoodsmen against Spain, but in a conspiracy of some of the backwoods leaders with the Spanish authorities. Just at this time the unrest in the West had taken the form, not of attempting the capture of Louisiana by force, but of obtaining concessions from the Spaniards in return for favors to be rendered them. Clark and Robertson, Morgan, Brown and Innes, Wilkinson and Sebastian, were all in correspondence with Gardoqui and Miro, in the endeavor to come to some profitable agreement with them. Sevier now joined the number. His newborn State had died; he was being prosecuted for high treason; he was ready to go to any lengths against North Carolina; and he clutched at the chance of help from the Spaniard. At the time North Carolina was out of the Union, so that Sevier committed no offence against the Federal Government.

Garcloqui was much interested in the progress of affairs in Franklin; and in the effort to turn them to the advantage of Spain he made use of James White, the Indian agent who was in his pay. He wrote[50] home that he did not believe Spain could force the backwoodsmen out of Franklin (which he actually claimed as Spanish territory), but that he had secret advices that they could easily be brought over to the Spanish interest by proper treatment. When the news came of the fight between Sevier’s and Tipton’s men, he judged the time to be ripe, and sent White to Franklin to sound Sevier and bring him over; but he did not trust White enough to give him any written directions, merely telling him what to do and furnishing him with three hundred dollars for his expenses. The mission was performed with such guarded caution that only Sevier and a few of his friends ever knew of the negotiations, and these kept their counsel well.

Sevier was in the mood to grasp a helping hand stretched out from no matter what quarter. He had no organized government back of him; but he was in the midst of his successful Cherokee campaigns, and he knew the reckless Indian fighters would gladly follow him in any movement, if he had a chance of success. He felt that if he were given money and arms, and the promise of outside assistance, he could yet win the day. He jumped at Gardoqui’s cautious offers; though careful not to promise to subject himself to Spain, and doubtless with no idea of playing the part of Spanish vassal longer than the needs of the moment required.

In July he wrote to Gardoqui, eager to strike a bargain with him; and in September sent him two letters by the hand of his son James Sevier, who accompanied White when the latter made his return journey to the Federal capital.[51] One letter, which was not intended to be private, formally set forth the status of Franklin with reference to the Indians, and requested the representatives of the Catholic king to help keep the peace with the Southern tribes. The other letter was the one of importance. In it he assured Gardoqui that the Western people had grown to know that their hopes of prosperity rested on Spain, and that the principal people of Franklin were anxious to enter into an alliance with, and obtain commercial concessions from, the Spaniards. He importuned Gardoqui for money and for military aid, assuring him that the Spaniards could best accomplish their ends by furnishing these supplies immediately, especially as the struggle over the adoption of the Federal Constitution made the time opportune for revolt.

Gardoqui received White and James Sevier with much courtesy, and was profuse, though vague, in his promises. He sent them both to New Orleans that Miro might hear and judge of their plans.[52] Nevertheless nothing came of the project, and doubtless only a few people in Franklin ever knew that it existed. As for Sevier, when he saw that he was baffled he suddenly became a Federalist and an advocate of a strong central government; and this, doubtless, not because of love for Federalism, but to show his hostility to North Carolina, which had at first refused to enter the new Union.[53] This particular move was fairly comic in its abrupt unexpectedness.

Thus the last spark of independent life flickered out in Franklin proper. The people who had settled on the Indian borders were left without government, North Carolina regarding them as trespassers on the Indian territory.[54] They accordingly met and organized a rude governmental machine, on the model of the Commonwealth of Franklin; and the wild little State existed as a separate and independent republic until the new Federal Government included it in the territory south of the Ohio.[55]

[1] Ramsey, 283. He is the best authority for the history of the curious State of Franklin.

[2] Haywood, 142; although Ramsey writes more in full about the Franklin government, it ought not to be forgotten that the ground-work of his history is from Haywood. Haywood is the original, and by far the most valuable, authority on Tennessee matters, and he writes in a quaint style that is very attractive.

[3] State Dept. MSS., Papers Continental Congress, Memorials, etc., No. 48. State of Franklin, March 12, 1785. Certificate that William Cocke is agent; and memorial of the freemen, etc.

[4] Va. State Papers, IV, 42, Sevier to Henry, July 19, 1785.

[5] State Dept. MSS., Franklin Papers, Miscellaneous, Vol. VII, Benj. Franklin to William Cocke, Philadelphia, Aug. 12, 1786.

[6] Virginia State Papers, IV, 25, 37, etc.

[7] Talk of Old Tassel, September 19, 1785, Ramsey, 319.

[8] Ramsey, 334.

[9] Haywood, 160.

[10] Va. State Papers IV, 53.

[11] Stevens’ “Georgia,” II, 380.

[12] State Dept. MSS., No. 125, p. 163.

[13] Va. State Papers, IV, pp. 256, 353. Many of the rumors of defeats and victories given in these papers were without foundation.

[14] Ramsey, 350.

[15] State Dept. MSS., Vol. II, No. 71, Arthur Campbell to Joseph Martin, June 16, 1786; Martin to the Governor of Virginia, June 25, 1786, etc.

[16] Va. State Papers, IV, pp. 162, 164, 176.

[17] State Dept. MSS., Vol. II, No. 71. Letter to Edmund Randolph, Feb. 10, 1787; Letter of Joseph Martin, of March 25, 1787; Talk from Piominigo, the Chickasaw Chief, Feb. 15, 1787.

[18] State Dept. MSS., No. 71. Resolutions of Kentucky Committee, June 5, 1787.

[19] State Dept. MSS. Franklin Papers, VIII, Benjamin Franklin to His Excellency Governor Sevier, Philadelphia, June 30, 1787.

[20] Do. Letter to the Chief “Cornstalk” (Corntassel?), same date and place.

[21] Tennessee Hist. Soc. MSS. Letters of Sevier to Evan Shelby, Feb. 11, May 20, May 30, and Aug. 12, 1787.

[22] State Dept. MSS., No. 71. Evan Shelby to General Russell, April 27, 1787. Beverly Randolph to Virginia Delegates, June 2, 1787.

[23] Tennessee Hist. Soc. MSS. Report of “Committee of Privileges and Elections” of Senate of Franklin, Nov. 23, 1787.

[24] Haywood, 174.

[25] Va. State Papers, IV, 416, 421. Sevier to Martin, April 3 and May 27, 1788.

[26] State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. III. Armstrong to Wyllys, April 28, 1788.

[27] Va. State Papers. IV, 396, 432.

[28] State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. II, p. 435. Proclamation of Thos. Hutchings, June 3, 1788.

[29] State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. II. Joseph Martin to H. Knox, July 15, 1788.

[30] State Dept. MSS., No. 71, Vol. II. Martin to Randolph, June 11, 1788.

[31] State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. III. Geo. Maxwell to Martin, July 9, 1788.

[32] State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. III. Thos. Hutchings to Martin, July 11, 1788.

[33] State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. III. Hutchings to Max well, June 20, 1788. Hutchings to Martin, July 11, 1788.

[34] Haywood, p. 183.

[35] State Department MSS., 150, III, Maxwell to Martin, July 7, 1788.

[36] Do., No. 27, p. 359, and No. 151, p. 351. Do., No. 56, Andrew Pickens to Thos. Pinckney, July 11, 1788; No. 150, Vol. III, Letter of Justices, July 9th.

[37] Do., No. 150, Vol. III, Martin to Knox, Aug. 23, 1788.

[38] Do., No. 72, Samuel Johnston to Sec’y of Congress, Sept. 29, 1788.

[39] Do., Hutchings to Maxwell, June 20th, and to Martin, July nth.

[40] Do., No. 150, Vol. II, Daniel Kennedy to Martin, June 6, 1788; Maxwell to Martin, July 9th, etc. No. 150, Vol. III, p. 357: Result of Council of Officers of Washington District, August 19, 1788.

[41] Do., Martin to Knox, August 23, 1788.

[42] Do., Hutchings to Martin, July 11, 1788.

[43] “Columbian Magazine,” II, 472.

[44] State Dept. MSS., No. 50, Vol. II, p. 505, etc.

[45] “Columbian Magazine” for 1789, p. 204. Also letter from French Broad, December 18, 1788.

[46] Haywood, 190.

[47] Ramsey first copies Haywood and gives the account correctly.

[48] State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. III. John Sullivan to Major Wm. Brown, September 24, 1787.

[49] Do., Lieutenant John Armstrong to Major John P. Wyllys, April 28, 1788.

[50] Gardoqui MSS., Gardoqui to Florida Blanca, April 18, 1788.

[51] Gardoqui MSS., Sevier to Gardoqui, Sept. 12, 1788.

[52] Gardoqui MSS., Gardoqui to Miro, Oct. 10, 1788.

[53] “Columbian Magazine,” Aug. 27, 1788, Vol. II, 542.

[54] Haywood, 195.

[55] In my first two volumes I have discussed, once for all, the worth of Gilmore’s “histories” of Sevier and Robertson and their times. It is unnecessary further to consider a single statement they contain.

CHAPTER V

KENTUCKY’S STRUGGLE FOR STATEHOOD, 1784–1790

WHILE THE social condition of the communities on the Cumberland and the Tennessee had changed very slowly, in Kentucky the changes had been rapid.

Col. William Fleming, one of the heroes of the battle of the Great Kanawha, and a man of note on the border, visited Kentucky on surveying business in the winter of 1779-80. His journal shows the state of the new settlements as seen by an unusually competent observer; for he was an intelligent, well-bred, thinking man. Away from the immediate neighborhood of the few scattered log hamlets, he found the wilderness absolutely virgin. The easiest way to penetrate the forest was to follow the “buffalo paths,” which the settlers usually adopted for their own bridle trails, and finally cut out and made into roads. Game swarmed. There were multitudes of swans, geese, and ducks on the river; turkeys and the small furred beasts, such as coons, abounded. Big game was almost as plentiful. Colonel Fleming shot, for the subsistence of himself and his party, many buffalo, bear, and deer, and some elk. His attention was drawn by the great flocks of paroquets, which appeared even in winter, and by the big, boldly colored, ivory-billed woodpeckers—birds which have long drawn back to the most remote swamps of the hot Gulf-coast, fleeing before man precisely as the buffalo and elk had fled.

Like all similar parties, he suffered annoyance from the horses straying. He lost much time in hunting up the strayed beasts, and frequently had to pay the settlers for helping find them. There were no luxuries to be had for any money, and even such common necessaries as corn and salt were scarce and dear. Half a peck of salt cost a little less than eight pounds, and a bushel of corn the same. The surveying party, when not in the woods, stayed at the cabins of the more prominent settlers, and had to pay well for board and lodging, and for washing, too.

Fleming was much struck by the misery of the settlers. At the Falls they were sickly, suffering with fever and ague; many of the children were dying. Boonesboro and Harrodsburg were very dirty, the inhabitants were sickly, and the offal and dead beasts lay about, poisoning the air and the water. During the winter no more corn could be procured than was enough to furnish an occasional hoe-cake. The people sickened on a steady diet of buffalo-bull beef, cured in smoke without salt, and prepared for the table by boiling. The buffalo was the stand-by of the settlers; they used his flesh as their common food, and his robe for covering; they made moccasins of his hide and fiddle-strings of his sinews, and combs of his horns. They spun his winter coat into yarn, and out of it they made coarse cloth, like wool. They made a harsh linen from the bark of the rotted nettles. They got sugar from the maples. There were then, Fleming estimated, about three thousand souls in Kentucky. The Indians were everywhere, and all men lived in mortal terror of their lives; no settlement was free from the dread of the savages.[1]

Half a dozen years later all this was changed. The settlers had fairly swarmed into the Kentucky country, and the population was so dense that the true frontiersmen, the real pioneers, were already wandering off to Illinois and elsewhere; every man of them desiring to live on his own land, by his own labor, and scorning to work for wages. The unexampled growth had wrought many changes; not the least was the way in which it lessened the importance of the first hunter-settlers and hunter-soldiers. The great herds of game had been wofully thinned, and certain species of the buffalo practically destroyed. The killing of game was no longer the chief industry, and the flesh and hides of wild beasts were no longer the staples of food and clothing. The settlers already raised crops so large that they were anxious to export the surplus. They no longer clustered together in palisaded hamlets. They had cut out trails and roads in every direction from one to another of the many settlements. The scattered clearings on which they generally lived dotted the forest everywhere, and the towns, each with its straggling array of log cabins, and its occasional frame houses, did not differ materially from those in the remote parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The gentry were building handsome houses, and their amusements and occupations were those of the up-country planters of the sea-board.

The Indians were still a scourge to the settlements;[2] but, though they caused much loss of life, there was not the slightest danger of their imperiling the existence of the settlements as a whole, or even of any considerable town or group of clearings. Kentucky was no longer all a frontier. In the thickly peopled districts life was reasonably safe, though the frontier proper was harried and the remote farms jeopardized and occasionally abandoned,[3] while the river route and the Wilderness Road were beset by the savages. Where the country was at all well settled, the Indians did not attack in formidable war bands, like those that had assailed the forted villages in the early years of their existence; they skulked through the woods by twos and threes, and pounced only upon the helpless or the unsuspecting.

Nevertheless, if the warfare was not dangerous to the life and growth of the Commonwealth, it was fraught with undreamed-of woe and hardship to individual settlers and their families. On the outlying farms no man could tell when the blow would fall Thus, in one backwoodsman’s written reminiscences, there is a brief mention of a settler named Israel Hart, who, during one May night, in 1787, suffered much from a toothache. In the morning he went to a neighbor’s, some miles away through the forest, to have his tooth pulled, and when he returned he found his wife and his five children dead and cut to pieces.[4] Incidents of this kind are related in every contemporary account of Kentucky; and though they commonly occurred in the thinly peopled districts, this was not always the case. Teamsters and travelers were killed on the highroads near the towns—even in the neighborhood of the very town where the constitutional convention was sitting.

In all new-settled regions in the United States, so long as there was a frontier at all, the changes in the pioneer population proceeded in a certain definite order, and Kentucky furnished an example of the process. Throughout our history as a nation the frontiersmen have always been mainly native Americans, and those of European birth have been speedily beaten into the usual frontier type by the wild forces against which they waged unending war. As the frontiersmen conquered and transformed the wilderness, so the wilderness in its turn created and preserved the type of man who overcame it. Nowhere else on the continent has so sharply defined and distinctively American a type been produced as on the frontier, and a single generation has always been more than enough for its production. The influence of the wild country upon the man is almost as great as the effect of the man upon the country. The frontiersman destroys the wilderness, and yet its destruction means his own. He passes away before the coming of the very civilization whose advance guard he has been. Nevertheless, much of his blood remains, and his striking characteristics have great weight in shaping the development of the land. The varying peculiarities of the different groups of men who have pushed the frontier westward at different times and places remain stamped with greater or less clearness on the people of the communities that grow up in the frontier’s stead.[5]

In Kentucky, as in Tennessee and the western portions of the seaboard States, and as later in the great West, different types of settlers appeared successively on the frontier. The hunter or trapper came first. Sometimes he combined with hunting and trapping the functions of an Indian trader, but ordinarily the American, as distinguished from the French or Spanish frontiersman, treated the Indian trade as something purely secondary to his more regular pursuits. In Kentucky and Tennessee the first-comers from the East were not traders at all, and were hunters rather than trappers. Boone was a type of this class, and Boone’s descendants went westward generation by generation until they reached the Pacific.

Close behind the mere hunter came the rude hunter-settler. He pastured his stock on the wild range, and lived largely by his skill with the rifle. He worked with simple tools and he did his work roughly. His squalid cabin was destitute of the commonest comforts; the blackened stumps and dead, girdled trees stood thick in his small and badly tilled field. He was adventurous, restless, shiftless, and he felt ill at ease and cramped by the presence of more industrious neighbors. As they pressed in round about him he would sell his claim, gather his cattle and his scanty store of tools and household goods, and again wander forth to seek uncleared land. The Lincolns, the forbears of the great President, were a typical family of this class.

Most of the frontiersmen of these two types moved fitfully westward with the frontier itself, or near it, but in each place where they halted, or where the advance of the frontier was for the moment stayed, some of their people remained to grow up and mix with the rest of the settlers.

The third class consisted of the men who were thrifty, as well as adventurous, the men who were even more industrious than restless. These were they who entered in to hold the land, and who handed it on as an inheritance to their children and their children’s children. Often, of course, these settlers of a higher grade found that for some reason they did not prosper, or heard of better chances still further in the wilderness, and so moved onward, like their less thrifty and more uneasy brethren, the men who half-cleared their lands and half-built their cabins. But, as a rule, these better-class settlers were not mere life-long pioneers. They wished to find good land on which to build, and plant, and raise their big families of healthy children, and when they found such land they wished to make thereon their permanent homes. They did not share the impulse which kept their squalid, roving fellows of the backwoods ever headed for the vague beyond. They had no sympathy with the feeling which drove these humbler wilderness-wanderers always onward, and made them believe, wherever they were, that they would be better off somewhere else, and that they would be better off in that somewhere which lay in the unknown and untried. On the contrary, these thriftier settlers meant to keep whatever they had once grasped. They got clear title to their lands. Though they first built cabins, as soon as might be they replaced them with substantial houses and barns. Though they at first girdled and burnt the standing timber, to clear the land, later they tilled it as carefully as any farmer of the seaboard States. They composed the bulk of the population, and formed the backbone and body of the State. The McAfees may be taken as a typical family of this class.

Yet a fourth class was composed of the men of means, of the well-to-do planters, merchants, and lawyers, of the men whose families already stood high on the Atlantic slope. The Marshalls were such men; and there were many other families of the kind in Kentucky. Among them were an unusually large proportion of the families who came from the fertile limestone region of Botetourt County in Virginia, leaving behind them, in the hands of their kinsmen, their roomy, comfortable houses, which stand to this day. These men soon grew to take the leading places in the new commonwealth. They were of good blood—using the words as they should be used, as meaning blood that has flowed through the veins of generations of self-restraint and courage and hard work, and careful training in mind and in the manly virtues. Their inheritance of sturdy and self-reliant manhood helped them greatly; their blood told in their favor as blood generally does tell when other things are equal. If they prized intellect they prized character more; they were strong in body and mind, stout of heart, and resolute of will. They felt that pride of race which spurs a man to effort, instead of making him feel that he is excused from effort. They realized that the qualities they inherited from their forefathers ought to be further developed by them as their forefathers had originally developed them. They knew that their blood and breeding, though making it probable that they would with proper effort succeed, yet entitled them to no success which they could not fairly earn in open contest with their rivals.

Such were the different classes of settlers who successively came into Kentucky, as into other Western lands. There were of course no sharp lines of cleavage between the classes. They merged insensibly into one another, and the same individual might at different times stand in two or three. As a rule the individuals composing the first two were crowded out by their successors, and, after doing the roughest of the pioneer work, moved westward with the frontier; but some families were of course continually turning into permanent abodes what were merely temporary halting places of the greater number.

With the change in population came the corresponding change in intellectual interests and in material pursuits. The axe was the tool, and the rifle the weapon, of the early settlers; their business was to kill the wild beasts, to fight the savages, and to clear the soil; and the inthralling topics of conversation were the game and the Indians, and, as the settlements grew, the land itself. As the farms became thick, and towns throve, the life became more complex, the chances for variety in work and thought increased likewise. The men of law sprang into great prominence, owing in part to the interminable litigation over the land titles. The more serious settlers took about as much interest in matters theological as in matters legal; and the congregations of the different churches were at times deeply stirred by quarrels over questions of church discipline and doctrine.[6] Most of the books were either text-books of the simpler kinds or else theological.

Except when there was an Indian campaign, politics and the river commerce formed the two chief interests for all Kentuckians, but especially for the well-to-do.

In spite of all the efforts of the Spanish officials the volume of trade on the Mississippi grew steadily. Six or eight years after the close of the Revolution the vast stretches of brown water, swirling ceaselessly between the melancholy forests, were already furrowed everywhere by the keeled and keelless craft. The hollowed log in which the Indian paddled; the same craft, the pirogue, only a little more carefully made, and on a little larger model, in which the creole trader carried his load of paints and whiskey and beads and bright cloths to trade for the peltries of the savage; the rude little scow in which some backwoods farmer drifted down stream with his cargo, the produce of his own toil; the keel boats which, with square-sails and oars, plied up as well as down the river; the flotilla of huge flat boats, the property of some rich merchant, laden deep with tobacco and flour, and manned by crews who were counted rough and lawless even in the rough and lawless backwoods—all these, and others too, were familiar sights to every traveler who descended the Mississippi from Pittsburg to New Orleans,[7] or who Was led by business to journey from Louisville to St. Louis or to Natchez or New Madrid.

The fact that the river commerce throve was partly the cause and partly the consequence of the general prosperity of Kentucky. The pioneer days, with their fierce and squalid struggle for bare life, were over. If men were willing to work, and escaped the Indians, they were sure to succeed in earning a comfortable livelihood in a country so rich. “The neighbors are doing well in every sense of the word,” wrote one Kentuckian to another, “they get children and raise crops.”[8] Like all other successful and masterful people the Kentuckians fought well and bred well, and they showed by their actions their practical knowledge of the truth that no race can ever hold its own unless its members are able and willing to work hard with their hands.

The general prosperity meant rude comfort everywhere; and it meant a good deal more than rude comfort for the men of greatest ability. By the time the river commerce had become really considerable, the rich merchants, planters, and lawyers had begun to build two-story houses of brick or stone, like those in which they had lived in Virginia. They were very fond of fishing, shooting, and riding, and were lavishly hospitable. They sought to have their children well taught, not only in letters but in social accomplishments like dancing; and at the proper season they liked to visit the Virginian watering-places, where they met “genteel company” from the older States, and lodged in good taverns in which “a man could have a room and a bed to himself.”[9]

An agreement entered into about this time between one of the Clarks and a friend shows that Kentuckians were already beginning to appreciate the merits of neat surroundings even for a rather humble town-house. This particular house, together with the stable and lot, was rented for “one cow” for the first eight months, and two dollars a month after that—certainly not an excessive rate; and it was covenanted that everything should be kept in good repairs, and particularly that the grass plots around the house should not be “trod on or tore up,”[10]

All Kentuckians took a great interest in politics, as is the wont of self-asserting, independent freemen, living under a democratic government. But the gentry and men of means and the lawyers very soon took the lead in political affairs. A larger proportion of these classes came from Virginia than was the case with the rest of the population, and they shared the eagerness and aptitude for political life generally shown by the leading families of Virginia. In many cases they were kin to these families; not, however, as a rule, to the families of the tidewater region, the aristocrats of colonial days, but to the families—so often of Presbyterian Irish stock—who rose to prominence in western Virginia at the time of the Revolution. In Kentucky all were mixed together, no matter from what State they came, the wrench of the break from their home ties having shaken them so that they readily adapted themselves to new conditions, and easily assimilated with one another. As for their differences of race origin, these had ceased to influence their lives even before they came to Kentucky. They were all Americans, in feeling as well as in name, by habit as well as by birth; and the positions they took in the political life of the West was determined partly by the new conditions surrounding them, and partly by the habits bred in them through generations of life on American soil.

One man, who would naturally have played a prominent part in Kentucky politics, failed to do so from a variety of causes. This was George Rogers Clark. He was by preference a military rather than a civil leader; he belonged by choice and habit to the class of pioneers and Indian fighters whose influence was waning; his remarkable successes had excited much envy and jealousy, while his subsequent ignominious failure had aroused contempt; and, finally, he was undone by his fondness for strong drink. He drew himself to one side, though he chafed at the need, and in his private letters he spoke with bitterness of the “big little men,” the ambitious nobodies, whose jealousy had prompted them to destroy him by ten thousand lies; and, making a virtue of necessity, he plumed himself on the fact that he did not meddle with politics, and sneered at the baseness of his fellow-citizens, whom he styled “a swarm of hungry persons gaping for bread.”[11]

Benjamin Logan, who was senior colonel and county lieutenant of the District of Kentucky, stood second to Clark in the estimation of the early settlers, the men who, riding their own horses and carrying their own rifles, had so often followed both commanders on their swift raids against the Indian towns. Logan naturally took the lead in the first serious movement to make Kentucky an independent State. In its beginnings this movement showed a curious parallelism to what was occurring in Franklin at the same time, though when once fairly under way the difference between the cases became very strongly marked. In each case the prime cause in starting the movement was trouble with the Indians. In each, the first steps were taken by the commanders of the local militia, and the first convention was summoned on the same plan, a member being elected by every militia company. The companies were territorial as well as military units, and the early settlers were all, in practice as well as in theory, embodied in the militia. Thus in both Kentucky and Franklin the movements were begun in the same way by the same class of Indian-fighting pioneers; and the method of organization chosen shows clearly the rough military form which at that period settlement in the wilderness, in the teeth of a hostile savagery, always assumed.

In 1784 fear of a formidable Indian invasion—an unwarranted fear, as the result showed—became general in Kentucky, and in the fall Logan summoned a meeting of the field officers to discuss the danger and to provide against it. When the officers gathered and tried to evolve some plan of operations, they found that they were helpless. They were merely the officers of one of the districts of Virginia; they could take no proper steps of their own motion, and Virginia was too far away and her interests had too little in common with theirs, for the Virginian authorities to prove satisfactory substitutes for their own.[12] No officials in Kentucky were authorized to order an expedition against the Indians, or to pay the militia who took part in it, or to pay for their provisions and munitions of war. Any expedition of the kind had to be wholly voluntary, and could of course only be undertaken under the strain of a great emergency; as a matter of fact the expeditions of Clark and Logan in 1786 were unauthorized by law, and were carried out by bodies of mere volunteers, who gathered only because they were forced to do so by bitter need. Confronted by such a condition of affairs, the militia officers issued a circular-letter to the people of the district, recommending that on December 24, 1784, a convention should be held at Danville further to consider the subject, and that this convention should consist of delegates elected one from each militia company.

The recommendation was well received by the people of the district; and on the appointed date the convention met at Danville. Col. William Fleming, the old Indian fighter and surveyor, was again visiting Kentucky, and he was chosen President of the convention. After some discussion the members concluded that, while some of the disadvantages under which they labored could be remedied by the action of the Virginia Legislature, the real trouble was deep-rooted, and could only be met by separation from Virginia and the erection of Kentucky into a State. There was, however, much opposition to this plan, and the convention wisely decided to dissolve, after recommending to the people to elect, by counties, members who should meet in convention at Danville in May for the express purpose of deciding on the question of addressing to the Virginia Assembly a request for separation.[13]

The convention assembled accordingly, Logan being one of the members, while it was presided over by Col. Samuel McDowell, who, like Fleming, was a veteran Indian fighter and hero of the Great Kanawha. Up to this point the phases through which the movement for Statehood in Kentucky had passed were almost exactly the same as the phases of the similar movement in Franklin. But the two now entered upon diverging lines of progression. In each case the home government was willing to grant the request for separation, but wished to affix a definite date to their consent, and to make the fulfilment of certain conditions a prerequisite.

In each case there were two parties in the district desiring separation, one of them favoring immediate and revolutionary action, while the other, with much greater wisdom and propriety, wished to act through the forms of law and with the consent of the parent State. In Kentucky the latter party triumphed. Moreover, while up to the time of this meeting of the May convention the leaders in the movement had been the old Indian fighters, after this date the lead was taken by men who had come to Kentucky only after the great rush of immigrants began. The new men were not backwoods hunter-warriors, like Clark and Logan, Sevier, Robertson, and Tipton. They were politicians of the Virginia stamp. They founded political clubs, one of which, the Danville Club, became prominent, and in them they discussed with fervid eagerness the public questions of the day, the members showing a decided tendency toward the Jeffersonian school of political thought.

The convention, which met at Danville, in May, 1785, decided unanimously that it was desirable to separate, by constitutional methods, from Virginia, and to secure admission as a separate State into the Federal Union.

Accordingly, it directed the preparation of a petition to this effect, to be sent to the Virginia Legislature, and prepared an address to the people in favor of the proposed course of action. Then, in a queer spirit of hesitancy, instead of acting on its own responsibility, as it had both the right and power to do, the convention decided that the issuing of the address, and the ratification of its own actions generally, should be submitted to another convention, which was summoned to meet at the same place in August of the same year. The people of the district were as yet by no means a unit in favor of separation, and this made the convention hesitate to take any irrevocable step.

One of the members of this convention was Judge Caleb Wallace, a recent arrival in Kentucky, and a representative of the new school of Kentucky politicians. He was a friend and ally of Brown and Innes. He was also a friend of Madison, and to him he wrote a full account of the reasons which actuated the Kentuckians in the step they had taken.[14] He explained that he and the people of the district generally felt that they did not “enjoy a greater portion of liberty than an American colony might have done a few years ago had she been allowed a representation in the British Parliament.” He complained bitterly that some of the taxes were burdensome and unjust, and that the money raised for the expenses of government all went to the East, to Virginia proper, while no corresponding benefits were received; and insisted that the seat of government was too remote for Kentucky ever to get justice from the rest of the State. Therefore, he said, he thought it would be wiser to part in peace rather than remain together in discontented and jealous union. But he frankly admitted that he was by no means sure that the people of the district possessed sufficient wisdom and virtue to fit them for successful self-government, and he anxiously asked Madison’s advice as to several provisions which it was thought might be embodied in the constitution of the new State.

In the August convention Wilkinson sat as a member, and he succeeded in committing his colleagues to a more radical course of action than that of the preceding convention. The resolutions they forwarded to the Virginia Legislature, asked the immediate erection of Kentucky into an independent State, and expressed the conviction that the new commonwealth would undoubtedly be admitted into the Union. This, of course, meant that Kentucky would first become a power outside and independent of the Union; and no provision was made for entry into the Union beyond the expression of a hopeful belief that it would be allowed.

Such a course would have been in the highest degree unwise; and the Virginians refused to allow it to be followed. Their Legislature, in January, 1786, provided that a new convention should be held in Kentucky in September, 1786, and that, if it declared for independence, the State should come into being after the 1st of September, 1787, provided, however, that Congress, before June 1, 1787, consented to the erection of the new State, and agreed to its admission into the Union. It was also provided that another convention should be held in the summer of 1787 to draw up a constitution for the new State.[15]

Virginia thus, with great propriety, made the acquiescence of Congress a condition precedent for the formation of the new State. Wilkinson immediately denounced this condition and demanded that Kentucky declare herself an independent State forthwith, no matter what Congress or Virginia might say. All the disorderly, unthinking, and separatist elements followed his lead. Had his policy been adopted the result would probably have been a civil war; and at the least there would have followed a period of anarchy and confusion, and a condition of things similar to that obtaining at this very time in the territory of Franklin. The most enlightened and farseeing men of the district were alarmed at the outlook; and a vigorous campaign in favor of orderly action was begun, under the lead of men like the Marshalls. These men were themselves uncompromisingly in favor of Statehood for Kentucky; but they insisted that it should come in an orderly way, and not by a silly and needless revolution, which could serve no good purpose and was certain to entail much disorder and suffering upon the community. They insisted, furthermore, that there should be no room for doubt in regard to the new State’s entering the Union.

There were thus two well-defined parties, and there were hot contests for seats in the convention. One unforeseen event delayed the organization of that body. When the time that it should have convened arrived, Clark and Logan were making their raids against the Shawnees and the Wabash Indians. So many members-elect were absent in command of their respective militia companies that the convention merely met to adjourn, no quorum to transact business being obtained until January, 1787. The convention then sent to the Virginian Legislature explaining the reason for the delay, and requesting that the terms of the act of separation already passed should be changed to suit the new conditions.

Virginia had so far acted wisely; but now she in her turn showed unwisdom, for her Legislature passed a new act, providing for another convention, to be held in August, 1787, the separation from Virginia only to be consummated if Congress, prior to July 4th, 1788, should agree to the erection of the State and provide for its admission to the Union. When news of this act, with its requirement of needless and tedious delay, reached the Kentucky convention, it adjourned for good, with much chagrin.

Wilkinson and the other separatist leaders took advantage of this very natural chagrin to inflame the minds of the people against both Virginia and Congress. It was at this time that the Westerners became deeply stirred by exaggerated reports of the willingness of Congress to yield the right to navigate the Mississippi; and the separatist chiefs fanned their discontent by painting the danger as real and imminent, although they must speedily have learned that it had already ceased to exist. Moreover, there was much friction between the Federal and Virginian authorities and the Kentucky militia officers in reference to the Indian raids. The Kentuckians showed a disposition to include all Indians, good and bad alike, in the category of foes. On the other hand the home authorities were inclined to forbid the Kentuckians to make the offensive return-forays which could alone render successful their defensive warfare against the savages. All these causes combined to produce much irritation, and the separatists began to talk rebellion. One of their leaders, Innes, in a letter to the Governor of Virginia, threatened that Kentucky would revolt not only from the parent State but from the Union, if heed were not paid to her wishes and needs.[16]

However, at this time Wilkinson started on his first trading voyage to New Orleans, and the district was freed from his very undesirable presence. He was the mainspring of the movement in favor of lawless separation; for the furtive, restless, unscrupulous man had a talent for intrigue which rendered him dangerous at a crisis of such a kind. In his absence the feeling cooled. The convention met in September, 1787, and acted with order and propriety, passing an act which provided for Statehood upon the terms and conditions laid down by Virginia. The act went through by a nearly unanimous vote, only two members dissenting, while three or four refused to vote either way. Both Virginia and the Continental Congress were notified of the action taken.

The only adverse comment that could be made on the proceedings was that in the address to Congress there was expressed a doubt, which was almost equivalent to a threat, as to what the district would do if it was not given full life as a State. But this fear as to the possible consequences was real, and many persons who did not wish for even a constitutional separation, nevertheless favored it because they dreaded lest the turbulent and disorderly elements might break out in open violence if they saw themselves chained indefinitely to those whose interests were, as they believed, hostile to theirs. The lawless and shiftless folk, and the extreme separatists, as a whole, wished for complete and absolute independence of both State and Nation, because it would enable them to escape paying their share of the Federal and State debts, would permit them to confiscate the lands of those whom they called “non-resident monopolizers,” and would allow of their treating with the Indians according to their own desires. The honest, hardworking, forehanded, and farsighted people thought that the best way to defeat these mischievous agitators was to take the matter into their own hands, and provide for Kentucky’s being put on an exact level with the older States.[17]

With Wilkinson’s return to Kentucky, after his successful trading trip to New Orleans, the disunion agitation once more took formidable form. The news of his success excited the cupidity of every mercantile adventurer, and the whole district became inflamed with desire to reap the benefits of the rich river-trade; and naturally the people formed the most exaggerated estimate of what these benefits would be. Chafing at the way the restrictions imposed by the Spanish officials hampered their commerce, the people were readily led by Wilkinson and his associates to consider the Federal authorities as somehow to blame because these restrictions were not removed.

The discontent was much increased by the growing fury of the Indian ravages. There had been a lull in the murderous woodland warfare during the years immediately succeeding the close of the Revolution, but the storm had again gathered. The hostility of the savages had grown steadily. By the summer of 1787 the Kentucky frontier was suffering much. The growth of the district was not stopped, nor were there any attempts made against it by large war bands; and in the thickly settled regions life went on as usual. But the outlying neighborhoods were badly punished, and the county lieutenants were clamorous in their appeals for aid to the Governor of Virginia. They wrote that so many settlers had been killed on the frontier that the others had either left their clearings and fled to the interior for safety; or else had gathered in the log forts, and so were unable to raise crops for the support of their families. Militia guards and small companies of picked scouts were kept continually patrolling the exposed regions near the Ohio, but the forays grew fiercer, and the harm done was great.[18] In their anger the Kentuckians denounced the Federal Government for not aiding them, the men who were loudest in their denunciations being the very men who were most strenuously bent on refusing to adopt the new Constitution, which alone could give the National Government the power to act effectually in the interest of the people.

While the spirit of unrest and discontent was high, the question of ratifying or rejecting this new Federal Constitution came up for decision. The Wilkinson party, and all the men who believed in a weak central government, or who wished the Federal tie dissolved outright, were, of course, violently opposed to ratification. Many weak or short-sighted men, and the doctrinaires and theorists—most of the members of the Danville political club, for instance—announced that they wished to ratify the Constitution, but only after it had been amended. As such prior amendment was impossible, this amounted merely to playing into the hands of the separatists; and the men who followed it were responsible for the by no means creditable fact that most of the Kentucky members in the Virginia convention voted against ratification. Three of them, however, had the patriotism and foresight to vote in favor of the Constitution.

Another irritating delay in the march toward Statehood now occurred. In June, 1788, the Continental Congress declared that it was expedient to erect Kentucky into a State.[19] But immediately afterward news came that the Constitution had been ratified by the necessary nine States, and that the new government was, therefore, practically in being. This meant the dissolution of the old Confederation, so that there was no longer any object in admitting Kentucky to membership, and Congress thereupon very wisely refused to act further in the matter. Unfortunately, Brown, who was the Kentucky delegate in Congress, was one of the separatist leaders. He wrote home an account of the matter, in which he painted the refusal as due to the jealousy felt by the East for the West. As a matter of fact the delegates from all the States, except Virginia, had concurred in the action taken. Brown suppressed this fact, and used language carefully calculated to render the Kentuckians hostile to the Union.

Naturally all this gave an impetus to the separatist movement. The district held two conventions, in July and again in November, during the year 1788; and in both of them the separatist leaders made determined efforts to have Kentucky forthwith erect herself into an independent State. In uttering their opinions and desires they used vague language as to what they would do when once separated from Virginia. It is certain that they bore in mind at the time at least the possibility of separating outright from the Union and entering into a close alliance with Spain. The moderate men, headed by those who were devoted to the national idea, strenuously opposed this plan; they triumphed and Kentucky merely sent a request to Virginia for an act of separation in accordance with the recommendations of Congress.[20]

It was in connection with these conventions that there appeared the first newspaper ever printed in this new West; the west which lay no longer among the Alleghanies, but beyond them. It was a small weekly sheet called the “Kentucke Gazette,” and the first number appeared in August, 1787. The editor and publisher was one John Bradford, who brought his printing press down the river on a flat-boat; and some of the type were cut out of dogwood. In politics the paper sided with the separatists and clamored for revolutionary action by Kentucky.[21]

The purpose of the extreme separatists was, unquestionably to keep Kentucky out of the Union and turn her into a little independent nation,—a nation without a present or a future, an English-speaking Uruguay or Ecuador. The back of this separatist movement was broken by the action of the fall convention of 1788, which settled definitely that Kentucky should become a State of the Union. All that remained was to decide on the precise terms of the separation from Virginia. There was at first a hitch over these, the Virginia Legislature making terms to which the district convention of 1789 would not consent; but Virginia then yielded the points in dispute, and the Kentucky convention of 1790 provided for the admission of the State to the Union in 1792, and for holding a constitutional convention to decide upon the form of government, just before the admission.[22]

Thus Kentucky was saved from the career of ignoble dishonor to which she would have been doomed by the success of the disunion faction. She was saved from the day of small things. Her interests became those of a nation which was bound to succeed greatly or to fail greatly. Her fate was linked for weal or for woe with the fate of the mighty Republic.

[1] Draper MSS., Colonel Wm. Fleming, “MS. Journal in Kentucky,” Nov. 12, 1779, to May 27, 1780.

[2] State Department MSS., No. 151, p. 259, Report of Secretary of War, July 10, 1787; also, No. 60, p, 277.

[3] Virginia State Papers, IV, 149, State Department MSS., No. 56, p. 271.

[4] Draper MSS., Whitley MS. Narrative.

[5] Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” A suggestive pamphlet, published by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

[6] Durrett Collection; see various theological writings, e.g., “A Progress,” etc., by Adam Rankin, Pastor at Lexington. Printed “at the Sign of the Buffalo,” Jan. 1, 1793.

[7] John Pope’s “Tour,” in 1790. Printed at Richmond in 1792.

[8] Draper MSS., Jonathan Clark Papers, O’Fallen to Clark, Isles of Ohio, May 30, 1791.

[9] Letter of a young Virginian, L. Butler, April 13, 1790. “Magazine of Amer. Hist.,” I, 113.

[10] Draper MSS. Wm, Clark Papers. Agreement between Clark and Bagley, April 1, 1790.

[11] Draper MSS., G. R. Clark to J. Clark, April 20, 1788, and September 2, 1791.

[12] Marshall, himself an actor in these events, is the best authority for this portion of Kentucky history; see also Green; and compare Collins, Butler, and Brown.

[13] State Dept. MSS. Madison Papers, Wallace to Madison, Sept. 25, 1785.

[14] State Department MSS. Madison Papers, Caleb Wallace to Madison, July 12, 1785.

[15] Marshall, 1, 224.

[16] Green, 83.

[17] State Dept. MSS. Madison Papers, Wallace to Madison, Nov. 12, 1787.

[18] State Dept. MSS., No. 71, Vol. II, pp. 561, 563.

[19] State Dept. MSS., No. 20, Vol. I, p. 341, etc.

[20] See Marshall and Green for this year.

[21] Durrett Collection, “Kentucke Gazette,” September 20, 1788.

[22] Marshall, 1, 342, etc.

ST. CLAIR AND WAYNE

CHAPTER I

THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY; OHIO, 1787–1790

SO FAR the work of the backwoodsmen in exploring, conquering, and holding the West had been work undertaken solely on individual initiative. The nation as a whole had not directly shared in it. The frontiersmen who chopped the first trails across the Alleghanies, who earliest wandered through the lonely Western lands, and who first built stockaded hamlets on the banks of the Watauga, the Kentucky, and the Cumberland, acted each in consequence of his own restless eagerness for adventure and possible gain. The nation neither encouraged them to undertake the enterprises on which they embarked, nor protected them for the first few years of uncertain foothold in the new-won country. Only the backwoodsmen themselves felt the thirst for exploration of the unknown, the desire to try the untried, which drove them hither and thither through the dim wilderness. The men who controlled the immediate destinies of the confederated commonwealths knew little of what lay in the forest-shrouded country beyond the mountains, until the backwoods explorers of their own motion penetrated its hidden and inmost fastnesses. Singly or in groups, the daring hunters roved through the vast reaches of sombre woodland, and pitched their camps on the banks of rushing rivers, nameless and unknown. In bands of varying size the hunter-settlers followed close behind, and built their cabins and block-houses here and there in the great forest land. They elected their own military leaders, and waged war on their own account against their Indian foes. They constructed their own governmental systems, on their own motion, without assistance or interference from the parent States, until the settlements were firmly established, and the work of civic organization well under way.

Of course some help was ultimately given by the parent States; and the indirect assistance rendered by the nation had been great. The West could neither have been won nor held by the frontiersmen, save for the backing given by the Thirteen States. England and Spain would have made short work of the men whose advance into the lands of their Indian allies they viewed with such jealous hatred, had they not also been forced to deal with the generals and soldiers of the Continental army, and the statesmen and diplomats of the Continental Congress. But the real work was done by the settlers themselves. The distinguishing feature in the exploration, settlement, and up-building of Kentucky and Tennessee was the individual initiative of the backwoodsmen.

The direct reverse of this was true of the settlement of the country northwest of the Ohio. Here, also, the enterprise, daring, and energy of the individual settlers were of the utmost consequence; the land could never have been won had not the incomers possessed these qualities in a very high degree. But the settlements sprang directly from the action of the Federal Government, and the first and most important of them would not have been undertaken save for that action. The settlers were not the first comers in the wilderness they cleared and tilled. They did not themselves form the armies which met and overthrew the Indians. The regular forces led the way in the country north of the Ohio. The Federal forts were built first; it was only afterward that the small towns sprang up in their shadow. The Federal troops formed the vanguard of the white advance. They were the mainstay of the force behind which, as behind a shield, the founders of the commonwealths did their work.

Unquestionably many of the settlers did their full share in the fighting; and they and their descendants, on many a stricken field, and through many a long campaign, proved that no people stood above them in hardihood and courage; but the land on which they settled was won less by themselves than by the statesmen who met in the national capital and the scarred soldiers who on the frontier upbore the national colors. Moreover, instead of being absolutely free to choose their own form of government, and shape their own laws and social conditions untrammeled by restrictions, the Northwesterners were allowed to take the land only upon certain definite conditions. The National Government ceded to settlers part of its own domain, and provided the terms upon which States of the Union should afterward be made out of this domain; and with a wisdom and love of righteousness which have been of incalculable consequence to the whole nation, it stipulated that slavery should never exist in the States thus formed. This condition alone profoundly affected the whole development of the Northwest, and sundered it by a sharp line from those portions of the new country which, for their own ill fortune, were left free from all restriction of the kind. The Northwest owes its life and owes its abounding strength and vigorous growth to the action of the nation as a whole. It was founded not by individual Americans, but by the United States of America. The mighty and populous commonwealths that lie north of the Ohio and in the valley of the upper Mississippi are in a peculiar sense the children of the National Government, and it is no mere accident that has made them in return the especial guardians and protectors of that government; for they form the heart of the nation.

Before the Continental Congress took definite action concerning the Northwest, there had been settlements within its borders, but these settlements were unauthorized and illegal, and had little or no effect upon the aftergrowth of the region. Wild and lawless adventurers had built cabins and made tomahawk claims on the west bank of the upper Ohio. They lived in angry terror of the Indians, and they also had cause to dread the regular army; for wherever the troops discovered their cabins, they tore them down, destroyed the improvements, and drove off the sullen and threatening squatters. As the tide of settlement increased in the neighboring country these trespassers on the Indian lands and on the national domain became more numerous. Many were driven off, again and again; but here and there one kept his foothold. It was these scattered few successful ones who were the first permanent settlers in the present State of Ohio, coming in about the same time that the forts of the regular troops were built. They formed no organized society, and their presence was of no importance whatever in the history of the State.

The American settlers who had come in round the French villages on the Wabash and the Illinois were of more consequence. In 1787 the adult males among these American settlers numbered 240, as against 1,040 French of the same class.[1] They had followed in the track of Clark’s victorious march. They had taken up land, sometimes as mere squatters, sometimes under color of title obtained from the French courts which Clark and Todd had organized under what they conceived to be the authority of Virginia. They were for the most part rough, enterprising men; and while some of them behaved well, others proved very disorderly and gave much trouble to the French; so that both the creoles and the Indians became exasperated with them and put them in serious jeopardy just before Clark undertook his expedition in the fall of 1786.

The creoles had suffered much from the general misrule and anarchy in their country, and from the disorderly conduct of some of the American settlers, and of not a few of the ragged volunteer soldiery as well. They hailed with sincere joy the advent of the disciplined Continental troops, commanded by officers who behaved with rigid justice toward all men and put down disorder with a strong hand. They were much relieved to find themselves under the authority of Congress, and both to that body and to the local Regular Army officers they sent petitions setting forth their grievances and hopes. In one petition to Congress they recited at length the wrongs done them, dwelling especially upon the fact that they had gladly furnished the garrison established among them with poultries and provisions of every kind, for which they had never received a dollar’s payment. They remarked that the stores seemed to disappear in a way truly marvelous, leaving the backwoods soldiers who were to have benefited by them “as ragged as ever.” The petitioners complained that the undisciplined militia quartered among them, who on their arrival were “in the most shabby and wretched state,” and who had “rioted in abundance and unaccustomed luxury” at the expense of the creoles, had also maltreated and insulted them; as for instance they had at times wantonly shot the cattle merely to try their rifles. “Ours was the task of hewing and carting them firewood to the barracks,” continued the petition, complaining of the way the Virginians had imposed on the submissiveness and docility of the inhabitants, “ours the drudgery of raising vegetables which we did not eat, poultry for their kitchen, cattle for the diversion of their marksmen.”

The petitioners further asked that every man among them should be granted five hundred acres. They explained that formerly they had set no value on the land, occupying themselves chiefly with the Indian trade, and raising only the crops they absolutely needed for food; but that now they realized the worth of the soil, and inasmuch as they had various titles to it, under lost or forgotten charters from the French kings, they would surrender all the rights these titles conveyed, save only what belonged to the Church of Cahokia, in return for the above named grant of five hundred acres to each individual.[2]

The memorialists alluded to their explanation of the fact that they had lost all the title-deeds to the land, that is all the old charters granted them, as “ingenuous and candid”; and so it was. The immense importance of having lost all proof of their rights did not strike them. There was an almost pathetic childishness in the request that the United States authorities should accept oral tradition in lieu of the testimony of the lost charters, and in the way they dwelt with a kind of humble pride upon their own “submissiveness and docility.” In the same spirit the inhabitants of Vincennes surrendered their charter, remarking, “Accustomed to mediocrity, we do not wish for wealth but for mere competency.”[3] Of course the “submissiveness” and the lightheartedness of the French did not prevent their being also fickle; and their “docility” was varied by fits of violent quarreling with their American neighbors and among themselves. But the quarrels of the creoles were those of children, compared with the ferocious feuds of the Americans.

Sometimes the trouble was of a religious nature. The priest at Vincennes, for instance, bitterly assailed the priest at Cahokia, because he married a Catholic to a Protestant; while all the people of the Cahokia church stoutly supported their pastor in what he had done.[4] This Catholic priest was Clark’s old friend Gibault. He was suffering from poverty, due to his loyal friendship to the Americans; for he had advanced Clark’s troops both goods and peltries, for which he had never received payment. In a petition to Congress he showed how this failure to repay him had reduced him to want, and had forced him to sell his two slaves, who otherwise would have kept and tended him in his old age.[5]

The Federal General Harmar, in the fall of 1787, took formal possession, in person, of Vincennes and the Illinois towns; and he commented upon the good behavior of the creoles, and their respect for the United States Government, and laid stress upon the fact that they were entirely unacquainted with what the Americans called liberty, and could best be governed in the manner to which they were accustomed—”by a commandant with a few troops.”[6]

The American pioneers, on the contrary, were of all people the least suited to be governed by a commandant with troops. They were much better stuff out of which to make a free, self-governing nation, and they were much better able to hold their own in the world, and to shape their own destiny; but they were far less pleasant people to govern. To this day the very virtues of the pioneers—not to speak of their faults—make it almost impossible for them to get on with an ordinary army officer, accustomed as he is to rule absolutely, though justly and with a sort of severe kindness. Army officers on the frontier—especially when put in charge of Indian reservations or of French or Spanish communities—have almost always been more or less at swords-points with the stubborn, cross-grained pioneers. The borderers are usually as suspicious as they are independent, and their self-sufficiency and self-reliance often degenerate into mere lawlessness and defiance of all restraint.

The Federal officers in the backwoods north of the Ohio got on badly with the backwoodsmen. Harmar took the side of the French creoles, and warmly denounced the acts of the frontiersmen who had come in among them.[7] In his letter to the creoles he alluded to Clark’s Vincennes garrison as “a set of lawless banditti,” and explained that his own troops were regulars, who would treat with justice both the French and Indians. Harmar never made much effort to conceal his dislike of the borderers. In one letter he alludes to a Delaware chief as “a manly old fellow, and much more of a gentleman than the generality of these frontier people.”[8] Naturally, there was little love lost between the bitterly prejudiced old army officer, fixed and rigid in all his ideas, and the equally prejudiced backwoodsmen, whose ways of looking at almost all questions were antipodal to his.

The creoles of the Illinois and Vincennes sent warm letters of welcome to Harmar. The American settlers addressed him in an equally respectful but very different tone, for, they said, their hearts were filled with “anxiety, gloominess, and dismay.” They explained the alarm they felt at the report that they were to be driven out of the country, and protested—what was doubtless true—that they had settled on the land in entire good faith, and with the assent of the French inhabitants. The latter themselves bore testimony to the good faith and good behavior of many of the settlers, and petitioned that these should not be molested,[9] explaining that the French had been benefited by their industry, and had preserved a peaceable and friendly intercourse with them. In the end, while the French villagers were left undisturbed in their ancient privileges, and while they were granted or were confirmed in the possession of the land immediately around them, the Americans and the French who chose to go outside the village grants were given merely the rights of other settlers.

The Continental officers exchanged courtesies with the Spanish commandants of the creole villages on the west bank of the Mississippi, but kept a sharp eye on them, as these commandants endeavored to persuade all the French inhabitants to move west of the river by offering them free grants of land.[10]

But all these matters were really of small consequence. The woes of the creoles, the trials of the American squatters, the friction between the regular officers and the backwoodsmen, and jealousy felt by both for the Spaniards,—all these were of little real moment at this period of the history of the Northwest. The vital point in its history was the passage by Congress of the Ordinance of 1787, and the doings of the various land companies under and in consequence of this ordinance.

The wide gap between the ways in which the Northwest and the Southwest were settled is made plain by such a statement. In the Northwest, it was the action of Congress, the action of the representatives of the nation acting as a whole, which was all-important. In the Southwest, no action of Congress was of any importance when compared with the voluntary movements of the backwoodsmen themselves. In the Northwest, it was the nation which acted. In the Southwest, the determining factor was the individual initiative of the pioneers. The most striking feature in the settlement of the Southwest was the free play given to the workings of extreme individualism. The settlement of the Northwest represented the triumph of an intelligent collectivism, which yet allowed to each man a full measure of personal liberty.

Another difference of note was the difference in stock of the settlers. The Southwest was settled by the true backwoodsmen, the men who lived on their small clearings among the mountains of western Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. The first settlement in Ohio, the settlement which had most effect upon the history of the Northwest, and which largely gave it its peculiar trend, was the work of New Englanders. There was already a considerable population in New England; but the rugged farmers with their swarming families had to fill up large waste spaces in Maine and in Northern New Hampshire and Vermont, and there was a very marked movement among them toward New York, and especially into the Mohawk valley, all west of which was yet a wilderness. In consequence, during the years immediately succeeding the close of the Revolutionary War, the New England emigrants made their homes in those stretches of wilderness which were nearby, and did not appear on the western border. But there had always been enterprising individuals among them desirous of seeking a more fertile soil in the far West or South, and even before the Revolution some of these men ventured to Louisiana itself, to pick out a good country in which to form a colony. After the close of the war the fame of the lands along the Ohio was spread abroad; and the men who wished to form companies for the purposes of adventurous settlement began to turn their eyes thither.

The first question to decide was the ownership of the wished-for country. This decision had to be made in Congress by agreement among the representatives of the different States. Seven States—Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, Georgia, and both Carolinas—claimed portions of the western lands. New York’s claim was based with entire solemnity on the ground that she was the heir of the Iroquois tribes, and therefore inherited all the wide regions overrun by their terrible war-bands. The other six States based their claims on various charters, which in reality conferred rights not one whit more substantial.

These different claims were not of a kind to which any outside power would have paid heed. Their usefulness came in when the States bargained among themselves. In the bargaining, both among the claimant States, and between the claimant and the non-claimant States, the charter titles were treated as of importance, and substantial concessions were exacted in return for their surrender. But their value was really inchoate until the land was reduced to possession by some act of the States or the Nation.

At the close of the Revolutionary War there existed wide differences between the various States as to the actual ownership and possession of the lands they claimed. Virginia and North Carolina were the only two who had reduced to some kind of occupation a large part of the territory to which they asserted title. Their backwoodsmen had settled in the lands so that they already held a certain population. Moreover, these same backwoodsmen, organized as part of the militia of the parent States, had made good their claim by successful warfare. The laws of the two States were executed by State officials in communities scattered over much of the country claimed. The soldier-settlers of Virginia and North Carolina had actually built houses and forts, tilled the soil, and exercised the functions of civil government, on the banks of the Wabash and the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee. Counties and districts had been erected by the two States on the western waters; and representatives of the civil divisions thus constituted sat in the State Legislatures. The claims of Virginia and North Carolina to much of the territory had behind them the substantial element of armed possession. The settlement and conquest of the lands had been achieved without direct intervention by the Federal Government; though of course it was only the ultimate success of the nation in its contest with the foreign foe that gave the settlement and conquest any value.

As much could not be said for the claims of the other States. South Carolina’s claim was to a mere ribbon of land south of the North Carolina territory, and need not be considered; it was ceded to the Government about the time the Northwest was organized.[11] Georgia asserted that her boundaries extended due west to the Mississippi, and that all between was hers. But the entire western portion of the territory was actually held by the Spaniards and by the Indian tribes tributary to the Spaniards. No subjects of Georgia lived on it, or were allowed to live on it. The few white inhabitants were subjects of the King of Spain, and lived under Spanish law; the Creeks and Choctaws were his subsidized allies; and he held the country by right of conquest. Georgia, a weak and turbulent, through a growing, State, was powerless to enforce her claims. Most of the territory to which she asserted title did not in truth become part of the United States until Pinckney’s treaty went into effect. It was the United States and not Georgia that actually won and held the land in dispute; and it was a discredit to Georgia’s patriotism that she so long wrangled about it, and ultimately drove so hard a bargain concerning it with the National Government.

There was a similar state of affairs in the far Northwest. No New Yorkers lived in the region bounded by the shadowy and wavering lines of the Iroquois conquests. The lands claimed under ancient charters by Massachusetts and Connecticut were occupied by the British and their Indian allies, who held adverse possession. Not a single New England settler lived in them; no New England law had any force in them; no New England soldier had gone or could go thither. They were won by the victory of Wayne and the treaty of Jay. If Massachusetts and Connecticut had stood alone, the lands would never have been yielded to them at all; they could not have enforced their claim, and it would have been scornfully disregarded. The region was won for the United States by the arms and diplomacy of the United States. Whatever of reality there was in the titles of Massachusetts and Connecticut came from the existence and actions of the Federal Union.[12]

All the States that did not claim lands beyond the mountains were strenuous in belittling the claims of those that did, and insisted that the title to the Western territory should be vested in the Union. Not even the danger from the British armies could keep this question in abeyance, and while the war was at its height the States were engaged in bitter wrangles over the subject; for the weakness of the Federal tie rendered it always probable that the different members of the Union would sulk or quarrel with one another rather than oppose an energetic resistance to the foreign foe. At different times different non-claimant States took the lead in pushing the various schemes for nationalizing the Western lands; but Maryland was the first to take action in this direction, and was the most determined in pressing the matter to a successful issue. She showed the greatest hesitation in joining the Confederation at all while the matter was allowed to rest unsettled; and insisted that the titles of the claimant States were void, that there was no need of asking them to cede what they did not possess, and that the West should be declared outright to be part of the Federal domain.

Maryland was largely actuated by fear of her neighbor Virginia. Virginia’s claims were the most considerable, and if they had all been allowed, hers would have been indeed an empire Maryland’s fears were twofold. She dreaded the mere growth of Virginia in wealth, power, and population in the first place; and in the second she feared lest her own population might be drained into these vacant lands, thereby at once diminishing her own, and building up her neighbor’s, importance. Each State at that time had to look upon its neighbors as probable commercial rivals and possible armed enemies. This is a feeling which we now find difficulty in understanding. At present no State in the Union fears the growth of a neighbor, or would ever dream of trying to check that growth. The direct reverse was the case during and after the Revolution; for the jealousy and distrust which the different States felt for one another were bitter to a degree.

The Continental Congress was more than once at its wits’ ends in striving to prevent an open break over the land question between the more extreme States on the two sides. The wisest and coolest leaders saw that the matter could never be determined on a mere consideration of the abstract rights, or even of the equities, of the case. They saw that it would have to be decided, as almost all political questions of great importance must be decided, by compromise and concession. The foremost statesmen of the Revolution were eminently practical politicians. They had high ideals, and they strove to realize them, as near as might be; otherwise they would have been neither patriots nor statesmen. But they were not theorists. They were men of affairs, accustomed to deal with other men; and they understood that few questions of real moment can be decided on their merits alone. Such questions must be dealt with on the principle of getting the greatest possible amount of ultimate good, and of surrendering in return whatever must be surrendered in order to attain this good. There was no use in learned arguments to show that Maryland’s position was the proper one for a far-sighted American patriot, or that Virginia and North Carolina had more basis for their claims than Connecticut or Georgia. What had to be done was to appeal to the love of country and shrewd common-sense of the people in the different States, and persuade them each to surrender on certain points, so that all could come to a common agreement.

New York’s claim was the least defensible of all, but, on the other hand, New York led the way investing whatever title she might have in the Federal Government. In 1780 she gave proof of the growth of the national idea among her citizens by abandoning all her claim to western lands in favor of the Union. Congress used this surrender as an argument by which to move the other States to action. It issued an earnest appeal to them to follow New York’s example without regard to the value of their titles, so that the Federal Union might be put on a firm basis. Congress did not discuss its own rights, nor the rights of the States; it simply asked that the concessions be made as a matter of expediency and patriotism; and announced that the policy of the Government would be to divide this new territory into districts of suitable size, which should be admitted as States as soon as they became well settled. This last proposition was important, as it outlined the future policy of the Government, which was to admit the new communities as States, with all the rights of the old States, instead of treating them as subordinates and dependent, after the manner of the European colonial systems.

Maryland then joined the Confederation, in 1781. Virginia and Connecticut had offered to cede their claims but under such conditions that it was impossible to close with the offers. Congress accepted the New York cession gratefully, with an eye to the effect on the other States; but for some time no progress was made in the negotiations with the latter. Finally, early in 1784, the bargain with Virginia was consummated. She ceded to Congress her rights to the territory northwest of the Ohio, except a certain amount retained as a military reserve for the use of her soldiers, while Congress tacitly agreed not to question her right to Kentucky. A year later Massachusetts followed suit, and ceded to Congress her title to all the lands lying west of the present western boundary of New York State. Finally, in 1786, a similar cession was made by Connecticut. But Connecticut’s action was not much more patriotic or less selfish than Georgia’s. Throughout the controversy she showed a keen desire to extract from Congress all that could possibly be obtained, and to delay action as long as might be; though, like Georgia, Connecticut could by rights claim nothing that was not in reality obtained for the Union by the Union itself. She made her grant conditionally upon being allowed to reserve for her own profit about five thousand square miles in what is now northern Ohio. This tract was afterward known as the Western Reserve. Congress was very reluctant to accept such a cession, with its greedy offset, but there was no wise alternative, and the bargain was finally struck.

The non-claimant States had attained their object, and yet it had been obtained in a manner that left the claimant States satisfied. The project for which Maryland had contended was realized, with the difference that Congress accepted the Northwest as a gift coupled with conditions, instead of taking it as an unconditional right. The lands became part of the Federal domain, and were nationalized so far as they could be under the Confederation; but there was no national treasury into which to turn the proceeds from the sale until the Constitution was adopted.[13]

Having got possession of the land, Congress proceeded to arrange for its disposition, even before providing the outline of the governmental system for the States that might grow up therein. Congress regarded the territory as forming a treasury chest, and was anxious to sell the land in lots, whether to individuals or to companies. In 1785 it passed an ordinance of singular wisdom, which has been the basis of all our subsequent legislation on the subject.

This ordinance was another proof of the way in which the nation applied its collective power to the sub-dual government of the Northwest, instead of leaving the whole matter to the working of unrestricted individualism, as in the Southwest. The pernicious system of acquiring title to public lands in vogue among the Virginians and North Carolinians was abandoned. Instead of making each man survey his own land, and allowing him to survey it when, how, and where he pleased, with the certainty of producing endless litigation and trouble, Congress provided for a corps of government surveyors, who were to go about this work systematically. It provided further for a known base line, and then for division of the country into ranges of townships six miles square, and for the subdivision of these townships into lots (“sections”) of one square mile—six hundred and forty acres—each. The ranges, townships, and sections were duly numbered. The basis for the whole system of public education in the Northwest was laid by providing that in every township lot No. 16 should be reserved for the maintenance of public schools therein. A minimum price of a dollar an acre was put on the land.

Congress hoped to find in these Western lands a source of great wealth. The hope was disappointed. The task of subduing the wilderness is not very remunerative. It yields a little more than a livelihood to men of energy, resolution, and bodily strength and address; but it does not yield enough for men to be able to pay heavily for the privilege of undertaking the labor. Throughout our history the pioneer has found that by taking up wild land at a low cost he can make a rough living, and keep his family fed, clothed, and housed; but it is only by very hard work that he can lay anything by, or materially better his condition. Of course, the few very successful do much more, and the unsuccessful do even less; but the average pioneer can just manage to keep continually forging a little ahead, in matters material and financial. Under such conditions a high price can not be obtained for public lands; and when they are sold, as they must be, at a low price, the receipts do little more than offset the necessary outlay. The truth is that people have a very misty idea as to the worth of wild lands. Even when the soil is rich they only possess the capacity of acquiring value under labor. All their value arises from the labor done on them or in their neighborhood, except that it depends also upon the amount of labor which must necessarily be expended in transportation.

It is the fashion to speak of the immense opportunity offered to any race by a virgin continent. In one sense the opportunity is indeed great; but in another sense it is not, for the chance of failure is very great also. It is an opportunity of which advantage can be taken only at the cost of much hardship and much grinding toil.

It remained for Congress to determine the conditions under which the settlers could enter the new land, and under which new States should spring up therein. These conditions were fixed by the famous Ordinance of 1787; one of the two or three most important acts ever passed by an American legislative body, for it determined that the new Northwestern States, the children, and the ultimate leaders, of the Union, should get their growth as free commonwealths, untainted by the horrible curse of negro slavery.

Several ordinances for the government of the Northwest were introduced and carried through Congress in 1784-86, but they were never put into operation. In 1784, Jefferson put into his draft of the ordinance of that year a clause prohibiting slavery in all the Western territory, South as well as North of the Ohio River, after the beginning of the year 1801. This clause was struck out; and even if adopted it would probably have amounted to nothing, for if slavery had been permitted to take firm root it could hardly have been torn up. In 1785, Rufus King advanced a proposition to prohibit all slavery in the Northwest immediately, but Congress never acted on the proposal.

The next movement in the same direction was successful, because when it was made it was pushed by a body of well-known men who were anxious to buy the lands that Congress was anxious to sell, but who would not buy them until they had some assurance that the governmental system under which they were to live would meet their ideas. This body was composed of New Englanders, mostly veterans of the Revolutionary War, and led by officers who had stood well in the Continental army.

When, in the fall of 1783, the Continental army was disbanded, the war-worn and victorious soldiers, who had at last wrung victory from the reluctant years of defeat, found themselves fronting grim penury. Some were worn with wounds and sickness; all were poor and unpaid; and Congress had no means to pay them. Many among them felt that they had small chance to repair their broken fortunes if they returned to the homes they had abandoned seven weary years before, when the guns of the minute-men first called them to battle.

These heroes of the blue and buff turned their eyes westward to the fertile lands lying beyond the mountains. They petitioned Congress to mark out a territory, in what is now the State of Ohio, as the seat of a distinct colony, in time to become one of the confederated States; and they asked that their bounty lands should be set off for them in this territory. Two hundred and eighty-five officers of the Continental line joined in this petition; one hundred and fifty-five, over half, were from Massachusetts, the State which had furnished more troops than any other to the Revolutionary armies. The remainder were from Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Maryland.

The signers of this petition desired to change the paper obligations of Congress, which they held, into fertile wild lands which they should themselves subdue by their labor; and out of these wild lands they proposed to make a new State. These two germ ideas remained in their minds, even though their petition bore no fruit. They kept before their eyes the plan of a company to undertake the work, after getting the proper cession from Congress. Finally, in the early spring of 1786, some of the New England officers met at the “Bunch of Grapes” tavern in Boston, and organized the Ohio Company of Associates. They at once sent one of their number as a delegate to New York, where the Continental Congress was in session, to lay their memorial before that body.

Congress was considering another ordinance for the government of the Northwest when the memorial was presented, and the former was delayed until the latter could be considered by the committee to which it had been referred. In July, Dr. Manasseh Cutler, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, arrived as a second delegate to look after the interests of the company. He and they were as much concerned in the terms of the governmental ordinance, as in the conditions on which the land grant was to be made. The orderly, liberty-loving, keen-minded New Englanders who formed the company, would not go to a land where the form of government was hostile to their ideas of righteousness and sound public policy.

The one point of difficulty was the slavery question. Only eight States were at the time represented in the Congress, these were Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia—thus five of the eight States were Southern. But the Federal Congress rose in this, almost its last act, to a lofty pitch of patriotism; and the Southern States showed a marked absence of sectional feeling in the matter. Indeed, Cutler found that though he was a New England man, with a New England company behind him, many of the Eastern people looked rather coldly at his scheme, fearing lest the settlement of the West might mean a rapid drainage of population from the East. Nathan Dane, a Massachusetts delegate, favored it, in part because he hoped that planting such a colony in the West might keep at least that part of it true to “Eastern politics.’’ The Southern members, on the other hand, heartily supported the plan. The committee that brought in the ordinance, the majority being Southern men, also reported an article prohibiting slavery. Dane was the mover, while the rough draft may have been written by Cutler; and the report was vigorously pushed by the two Virginians on the committee, William Grayson and Richard Henry Lee. The article was adopted by a vote unanimous, except for the dissent of one delegate, a nobody from New York.

The ordinance established a territorial government, with a governor, secretary, and judges. A General Assembly was authorized as soon as there should be five thousand free male inhabitants in the district. The lower house was elective, the upper house, or council, was appointive. The Legislature was to elect a territorial delegate to Congress. The governor was required to own a freehold of one thousand acres in the district, a judge five hundred, and a representative two hundred; and no man was allowed to vote unless he possessed a freehold of fifty acres.[14] These provisions would seem strangely undemocratic if applied to a similar territory in our own day.

The all-important features of the ordinance were contained in the six articles of compact between the confederated States and the people and States of the territory, to be forever unalterable, save by the consent of both parties. The first guaranteed complete freedom of worship and religious belief to all peaceable and orderly persons. The second provided for trial by jury, the writ of habeas corpus, the privileges of the common law, and the right of proportional legislative representation. The third enjoined that faith should be kept with the Indians, and provided that “schools and the means of education” should forever be encouraged, inasmuch as “religion, morality, and knowledge” were necessary to good government. The fourth ordained that the new States formed in the Northwest should forever form part of the United States, and be subject to the laws, as were the others. The fifth provided for the formation and admission of not less than three or more than five States, formed out of this Northwestern territory, whenever such a putative State should contain sixty thousand inhabitants; the form of government to be republican, and the State, when created, to stand on an equal footing with all the other States.

The sixth and most important article declared that there should never be slavery or involuntary servitude in the Northwest, otherwise than for the punishment of convicted criminals, provided, however, that fugitive slaves from the older States might lawfully be reclaimed by their owners. This was the greatest blow struck for freedom and against slavery in all our history save only Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation, for it determined that in the final struggle the mighty West should side with the right against the wrong. It was in its results a deadly stroke against the traffic in and ownership of human beings, and the blow was dealt by Southern men, to whom all honor should ever be given.

This anti-slavery compact was the most important feature of the ordinance, yet there were many other features only less important.

In truth the ordinance of 1787 was so wide-reaching in its effects, was drawn in accordance with so lofty a morality and such far-seeing statesmanship, and was fraught with such weal for the nation, that it will ever rank among the foremost of American State papers, coming in that little group which includes the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Washington’s Farewell Address, and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Second Inaugural. It marked out a definite line of orderly freedom along which the new States were to advance. It laid deep the foundation for that system of widespread public education so characteristic of the Republic and so essential to its healthy growth. It provided that complete religious freedom and equality which we now accept as part of the order of nature, but which were then unknown in any important European nation. It guaranteed the civil liberty of all citizens. It provided for an indissoluble Union, a Union which should grow until it could relentlessly crush nullification and secession; for the States founded under it were the creatures of the Nation, and were by the compact declared forever inseparable from it.

In one respect the ordinance marked a new departure of the most radical kind. The adoption of the policy therein outlined has worked a complete revolution in the way of looking at new communities formed by colonization from the parent country. Yet the very completeness of this revolution to a certain extent veils from us its importance. We can not realize the greatness of the change because of the fact that the change was so great; for we can not now put ourselves in the mental attitude which regarded the old course as natural. The Ordinance of 1787 decreed that the new States should stand in every respect on an equal footing with the old; and yet should be individually bound together with them. This was something entirely new in the history of colonization. Hitherto every new colony had either been subject to the parent State, or independent of it. England, Holland, France, and Spain, when they founded colonies beyond the sea, founded them for the good of the parent State, and governed them as dependencies. The home country might treat her colonies well or ill, she might cherish and guard them, or oppress them with harshness and severity, but she never treated them as equals. Russia, in pushing her obscure and barbarous conquest and colonization of Siberia,—a conquest destined to be of such lasting importance in the history of Asia,—pursued precisely the same course.

In fact, this had been the only kind of colonization known to modern Europe. In the ancient world it had also been known, and it was only through it that great empires grew. Each Roman colony that settled in Gaul or Iberia founded a city or established a province which was tributary to Rome, instead of standing on a footing of equality in the same nation with Rome. But the other great colonizing peoples of antiquity, the Greeks and Phoenicians, spread in an entirely different way. Each of their colonies became absolutely independent of the country whence it sprang. Carthage and Syracuse were as free as Tyre or Sidon, as Corinth or Athens. Thus under the Roman method the empire grew, at the cost of the colonies losing their independence. Under the Greek and Carthaginian method the colonies acquired the same freedom that was enjoyed by the mother cities; but there was no extension of empire, no growth of a great and enduring nationality. The modern European nations had followed the Roman system. Until the United States sprang into being every great colonizing people followed one system or the other.

The American Republic, taking advantage of its fortunate federal features and of its strong central government, boldly struck out on a new path, which secured the freedom-giving properties of the Greek method, while preserving national Union as carefully as it was preserved by the Roman Empire. New States were created, which stood on exactly the same footing as the old; and yet these new States formed integral and inseparable parts of a great and rapidly growing nation. This movement was original with the American Republic; she was dealing with new conditions, and on this point the history of England merely taught her what to avoid. The English colonies were subject to the British Crown, and therefore to Great Britain. The new American States, themselves colonies in the old Greek sense, were subject only to a government which they helped administer on equal terms with the old States. No State was subject to another, new or old. All paid a common allegiance to a central power which was identical with none.

The absolute novelty of this feature, as the world then stood, fails to impress us now because we are so used to it. But it was at that time without precedent; and though since then the idea has made rapid progress, there seems in most cases to have been very great difficulty in applying it in practice. The Spanish-American States proved wholly unable to apply it at all. In Australia and South Africa all that can be said is that events now apparently show a trend in the direction of adopting this system. At present all these British colonies, as regards one another, are independent but disunited; as regards the mother country, they remain united with her, but in the condition of dependencies.

The vital feature of the ordinance was the prohibition of slavery. This prohibition was not retroactive; the slaves of the French villagers, and of the few American slaveholders who had already settled round them, were not disturbed in their condition. But all further importation of slaves, and the holding in slavery of any not already slaves, were prohibited. The prohibition was brought about by the action of the Ohio Company. Without the prohibition the company would probably not have undertaken its experiment in colonization; and save for the pressure of the company slavery would hardly have been abolished. Congress wished to sell the lands, and was much impressed by the solid worth of the founders of the association. The New Englanders were anxious to buy the lands, but were earnest in their determination to exclude slavery from the new territory. The slave question was not at the time a burning issue between North and South; for no Northerner thought of crusading to destroy the evil, while most enlightened Southerners were fond of planning how to do away with it. The tact of the company’s representative before Congress, Dr. Cutler, did the rest. A compromise was agreed to; for, like so many other great political triumphs, the passage of the Ordinance of 1787 was a compromise. Slavery was prohibited, on the one hand; and on the other, that the territory might not become a refuge for runaway negroes, provision was made for the return of such fugitives. The popular conscience was yet too dull about slavery to be stirred by the thought of returning fugitive slaves into bondage.

A fortnight after the passage of the ordinance, the transaction was completed by the sale of a million and a half acres, north of the Ohio, to the Ohio Company. Three million and a half more, known as the Sciato purchase, were authorized to be sold to a purely speculative company, but the speculation ended in nothing save financial disaster. The price was nominally seventy cents an acre; but as payment was made in depreciated public securities, the real price was only eight or nine cents an acre. The sale illustrated the tendency of Congress at that time to sell the land in large tracts; a most unwholesome tendency, fruitful of evil to the whole community. It was only by degrees that the wisdom of selling the land in small plots, and to actual occupiers, was recognized.

Together with the many wise and tolerant measures included in the famous Ordinance of 1787, and in the land Ordinance of 1785, there were one or two which represented the feelings of the past, not the future. One of them was a regulation which reserved a lot in every township to be given for the purposes of religion. Nowadays, and rightfully, we regard as peculiarly American the complete severance of Church and State, and refuse to allow the State to contribute in any way toward the support of any sect.

A regulation of a very different kind provided that two townships should be set apart to endow a university. These two townships now endow the University of Ohio, placed in a town which, with queer poverty of imagination, and fatuous absence of humor, has been given the name of Athens.

The company was well organized, the founders showing the invaluable New England aptitude for business, and there was no delay in getting the settlement started. After some deliberation the lands lying along the Ohio on both sides of, but mainly below, the Muskingum, were chosen for the site of the new colony. There was some delay in making the payments subsequent to the first, and only a million and some odd acres were patented. One of the reasons for choosing the mouth of the Muskingum as the site for the town was the neighborhood of Fort Harmar, with its strong Federal garrison, and the spot was but a short distance beyond the line of already existing settlement.

As soon as enough of the would-be settlers were ready, they pushed forward in parties toward the headwaters of the Ohio, struggling along the winter-bound roads of western Pennsylvania. In January and February they began to reach the banks of the Youghiogheny, and set about building boats to launch when the river opened. There were forty-eight settlers in all who started down stream, their leader being General Rufus Putnam. He was a tried and gallant soldier, who had served with honor not only in the Revolutionary armies, but in the war which crushed the French power in America. On April 7, 1788, he stepped from his boat, which he had very appropriately named the Mayflower, on to the bank of the Muskingum. The settlers immediately set to work felling trees, building log houses and a stockade, clearing fields, and laying out the ground-plan of Marietta; for they christened the new town after the French Queen, Marie Antoinette.[15] It was laid out in the untenanted wilderness; yet near by was the proof that ages ago the wilderness had been tenanted, for close at hand were huge embankments, marking the site of a town of the long-vanished mound-builders. Giant trees grew on the mounds; all vestiges of the builders had vanished, and the solemn forest had closed above every remembrance of their fate.

The day of the landing of these new pilgrims was a day big with fate not only for the Northwest but for the Nation. It marked the beginning of the orderly and national conquest of the lands that now form the heart of the Republic. It marked the advent among the pioneers of a new element, which was to leave the impress of its strong personality deeply graven on the institutions and the people of the great States north of the Ohio; an element which in the end turned their development in the direction toward which the parent stock inclined in its home on the North Atlantic seaboard. The new settlers were almost all soldiers of the Revolutionary armies; they were hard-working, orderly men of trained courage and of keen intellect. An outside observer speaks of them as being the best informed, the most courteous and industrious, and the most law-abiding of all the settlers who had come to the frontier, while their leaders were men of a higher type than was elsewhere to be found in the West.[16] No better material for founding a new State existed anywhere. With such a foundation the State was little likely to plunge into the perilous abysses of anarchic license or of separatism and disunion. Moreover, to plant a settlement of this kind on the edge of the Indian-haunted wilderness showed that the founders possessed both hardihood and resolution.

Yet it must not be forgotten that the daring needed for the performance of this particular deed can in no way be compared with that shown by the real pioneers, the early explorers and Indian fighters. The very fact that the settlement around Marietta was national in its character, that it was the outcome of national legislation, and was undertaken under national protection, made the work of the individual settler count for less in the scale. The founders and managers of the Ohio Company and the statesman of the Federal Congress deserve much of the praise that in the Southwest would have fallen to the individual settlers only. The credit to be given to the nation in its collective capacity was greatly increased, and that due to the individual was correspondingly diminished.

Rufus Putnam and his fellow New Englanders built their new town under the guns of a Federal fort, only just beyond the existing boundary of settlement, and on land guaranteed them by the Federal Government. The dangers they ran and the hardships they suffered in no wise approached those undergone and overcome by the iron-willed, iron-limbed hunters who first built their lonely cabins on the Cumberland and Kentucky. The founders of Marietta trusted largely to the Federal troops for protection, and were within easy reach of the settled country; but the wild wood-wanderers who first roamed through the fair lands south of the Ohio built their little towns in the heart of the wilderness, many scores of leagues from all assistance, and trusted solely to their own long rifles in time of trouble. The settler of 1788 journeyed at ease over paths worn smooth by the feet of many thousands of predecessors; but the early pioneers cut their own trails in the untrodden wilderness, and warred single-handed against wild nature and wild man.

In the summer of 1788 Dr. Manasseh Cutler visited the colony he had helped to found, and kept a diary of his journey. His trip through Pennsylvania was marked merely by such incidents as were common at that time on every journey in the United States away from the larger towns. He traveled with various companions, stopping at taverns and private houses; and both guests and hosts were fond of trying their skill with the rifle, either at a mark or at squirrels. In mid-August he reached Coxe’s fort, on the Ohio, and came for the first time to the frontier proper. Here he embarked on a big flat-boat, with on board forty-eight souls all told, besides cattle. They drifted and paddled down stream, and on the evening of the second day reached the Muskingum. Here and there along the Virginian shore the boat passed settlements, with grain fields and orchards; the houses were sometimes squalid cabins, and sometimes roomy, comfortable buildings. When he reached the newly built town he was greeted by General Putnam, who invited Cutler to share the marquee in which he lived; and that afternoon he drank tea with another New England general, one of the original founders.

The next three weeks he passed very comfortably with his friends, taking part in the various social entertainments, walking through the woods, and visiting one or two camps of friendly Indians with all the curiosity of a pleasure-tourist. He greatly admired the large cornfields, proof of the industry of the settlers. Some of the cabins were already comfortable; and many families of women and children had come out to join their husbands and fathers.

The newly appointed Governor of the territory, Arthur St. Clair, had reached the place in July, and formally assumed his task of government. Both Governor St. Clair and General Harmar were men of the old Federalist school, utterly unlike the ordinary borderers; and even in the wilderness they strove to keep a certain stateliness and formality in their surroundings. They speedily grew to feel at home with the New England leaders, who were gentlemen of much the same type as themselves, and had but little more in common with the ordinary frontier folk. Dr. Cutler frequently dined with one or other of them. After dining with the Governor at Fort Harmar, he pronounced it in his diary a “genteel dinner’’; and he dwelt on the grapes, the beautiful garden, and the good looks of Mrs. Harmar. Sometimes the leading citizens gave a dinner to “His Excellency,” as Dr. Cutler was careful to style the Governor, and to “General Harmar and his Lady.” On such occasions the visitors were rowed from the fort to the town in a twelve-oared barge with an awning; the drilled crew rowed well, while a sergeant stood in the stern to steer. On each oar blade was painted the word “Congress”; all the regular army men were devout believers in the Union. The dinners were handsomely served, with punch and wine; and at one Dr. Cutler records that fifty-five gentlemen sat down, together with three ladies. The fort itself was a square, with block-houses, curtains, barracks, and artillery.

After three weeks’ stay the Doctor started back, up stream, in the boat of a well-to-do creole trader from the Illinois. This trader was no less a person than Francis Vigo, who had welcomed Clark when he took Kaskaskia, and who at that time rendered signal service to the Americans, advancing them peltries and goods. To the discredit of the nation be it said, he was never repaid what he had advanced. When Cutler joined him he was making his way up the Ohio in a big keel-boat, propelled by ten oars and a square sail. The Doctor found his quarters pleasant; for there was an awning and a cabin, and Vigo was well equipped with comforts and even luxuries. In his traveling-chest he carried his silver-handled knives and forks, and flasks of spirits. The beds were luxurious for the frontier; in his journal the Doctor mentions that one night he had to sleep in “wet sheets.” The average pioneer knew nothing whatever of sheets, wet or dry. Often the voyagers would get out and walk along shore, shooting pigeons or squirrels and plucking bunches of grapes. On such occasions if they had time they would light a fire and have “a good dish of tea and a French fricassee.” Once they saw some Indians; but the latter were merely chasing a bear, which they killed, giving the travelers some of the meat.

Cutler and his companions caught huge catfish in the river; they killed game of all kinds in the forest; and they lived very well indeed. In the morning they got under way early, after a “bitter and a biscuit,” and a little later breakfasted on cold meat, pickles, cabbage, and pork. Between eleven and twelve they stopped for dinner; usually of hot venison or wild turkey, with a strong “dish of coffee” and loaf-sugar. At supper they had cold meat and tea. Here and there on the shore they passed settlers’ cabins, where they obtained corn and milk, and sometimes eggs, butter, and veal. Cutler landed at his starting-point less than a month after he had left it to go down stream.[17]

Another Massachusetts man, Col. John May, had made the same trip just previously. His experiences were very like those of Dr. Cutler; but in his journal he told them more entertainingly, being a man of considerable humor and sharp observation. He traveled on horseback from Boston. In Philadelphia he put up “at the sign of the Connastago Wagon”—the kind of wagon then used in the up country, and afterward for two generations the wheeled-house with which the pioneers moved westward across plain and prairie. He halted for some days in the log-built town of Pittsburg, and, like many other travelers of the day, took a dislike to the place and to its inhabitants, who were largely Pennsylvania Germans. He mentioned that he had reached it in thirty days from Boston, and had not lost a pound of his baggage, which had accompanied him in a wagon under the care of some of his hired men. At Pittsburg he was much struck by the beauty of the mountains and the river, and also by the numbers of flat-boats, loaded with immigrants, which were constantly drifting and rowing past on their way to Kentucky. From the time of reaching the river his journal is filled with comments on the extraordinary abundance and great size of the various kinds of food fishes.

At last, late in May, he started in a crowded flat-boat down the Ohio, and was enchanted with the wild and beautiful scenery. He was equally pleased with the settlement at the mouth of the Muskingum; and he was speedily on good terms with the officers of the fort, who dined and wined him to his heart’s content. There were rumors of savage warfare from below; but around Marietta the Indians were friendly. May and his people set to work to clear land and put up buildings; and they lived sumptuously, for game swarmed. The hunters supplied them with quantities of deer and wild turkeys, and occasionally elk and buffalo were also killed; while quantities of fish could be caught without effort, and the gardens and fields yielded plenty of vegetables. On July 4th the members of the Ohio Company entertained the officers from Fort Harmar and the ladies of the garrison at an abundant dinner, and drank thirteen toasts,—to the United States, to Congress, to Washington, to the King of France, to the new Constitution, to the Society of the Cincinnati, and various others.

Colonel May built him a fine “mansion house,” thirty-six feet by eighteen, and fifteen feet high, with a good cellar underneath, and in the windows panes of glass he had brought all the way from Boston. He continued to enjoy the life in all its phases, from hunting in the woods to watching the sun rise, and making friends with the robins, which, in the wilderness, always followed the settlements. In August he went up the river, without adventure, and returned to his home.[18]

Such a trip as either of these was a mere holiday picnic. It offers as striking a contrast as well could be offered to the wild and lonely journeyings of the stark wilderness-hunters and Indian fighters who first went west of the mountains. General Rufus Putnam and his associates did a deed the consequences of which were of vital importance. They showed that they possessed the highest attributes of good citizenships—resolution and sagacity, stern morality, and the capacity to govern others as well as themselves. But they performed no pioneer feat of any note as such, and they were not called upon to display a tithe of the reckless daring and iron endurance of hardship which characterized the conquerors of the Illinois and the founders of Kentucky and Tennessee. This is in no sense a reflection upon them. They did not need to give proof of a courage they had shown time and again in bloody battles against the best troops of Europe. In this particular enterprise, in which they showed so many admirable qualities, they had little chance to show the quality of adventurous bravery. They drifted comfortably down stream, from the log fort whence they started, past many settlers’ houses, until they came to the post of a small Federal garrison, where they built their town. Such a trip is not to be mentioned in the same breath with the long wanderings of Clark and Boone and Robertson, when they went forth unassisted to subdue the savage and make tame the shaggy wilderness.

St. Clair, the first Governor, was a Scotchman of good family. He had been a patriotic but unsuccessful general in the Revolutionary army. He was a friend of Washington, and in politics a firm Federalist; he was devoted to the cause of Union and Liberty, and was a conscientious, high-minded man. But he had no aptitude for the incredibly difficult task of subduing the formidable forest Indians, with their peculiar and dangerous system of warfare; and he possessed no capacity for getting on with the frontiersmen, being without sympathy for their virtues while keenly alive to their very unattractive faults.

In the fall of 1787 another purchase of public lands was negotiated, by the Miami Company. The chief personage in this company was John Cleves Symmes, one of the first judges of the Northwestern Territory.

Rights were acquired to take up one million acres, and under these rights three small settlements were made toward the close of the year 1788. One of them was chosen by St. Clair to be the seat of government. This little town had been called Losantiville in its first infancy, but St. Clair re-christened it Cincinnati, in honor of the Society of the officers of the Continental army.

The men who formed these Miami Company colonies came largely from the Middle States. Like the New England founders of Marietta, very many of them, if not most, had served in the Continental army. They were good settlers; they made good material out of which to build up a great state. Their movement was modeled on that of Putnam and his associates. It was a triumph of collectivism rather than of individualism. The settlers were marshaled in a company, instead of moving freely by themselves, and they took a territory granted them by Congress, under certain conditions, and defended for them by the officers and troops of the regular army.

Civil government was speedily organized. St. Clair and the judges formed the first legislature; in theory they were only permitted to adopt laws already in existence in the old States, but as a matter of fact they tried any legislative experiments they saw fit. St. Clair was an autocrat both by military training and by political principles. He was a man of rigid honor, and he guarded the interests of the territory with jealous integrity, but he exercised such a rigorous supervision over the acts of his subordinate colleagues, the judges, that he became involved in wrangles at the very beginning of his administration. To prevent the incoming of unauthorized intruders, he issued a proclamation summoning all newly arrived persons to report at once to the local commandants, and, with a view of keeping the game for the use of the actual settlers, and also to prevent as far as possible fresh irritation being given the Indians, he forbade all hunting in the territory for hides or flesh save by the inhabitants proper.[19] Only an imperfect obedience was rendered either proclamation.

Thus the settlement of the Northwest was fairly begun, on a system hitherto untried. The fates and the careers of all the mighty States which yet lay formless in the forest were in great measure determined by what was at this time done. The nation had decreed that they should have equal rights with the older States and with one another, and yet that they should remain forever inseparable from the Union; and above all, it had been settled that the bondman should be unknown within their borders. Their founding represented the triumph of the principle of collective national action over the spirit of intense individualism displayed so commonly on the frontier. The uncontrolled initiative of the individual, which was the chief force in the settlement of the Southwest, was given comparatively little play in the settlement of the Northwest. The Northwest owed its existence to the action of the nation as a whole.

[1] State Dept. MSS., No. 48, p. 165. Of adult males there were among the French 520 at Vincennes, 191 at Kaskaskia, 239 at Cahokia, 11 at St. Phillippe, and 78 at Prairie du Rocher. The American adult males numbered 103 at Vincennes and 137 in the Illinois.

[2] State Department MSS., No. 48, “Memorial of the French Inhabitants of Post Vincennes, Kaskaskia, La Prairie du Rocher, Cahokia, and Village of St. Philip to Congress.” By Bartholomew Tardiveau, agent. New York, February 26, 1788. Tardiveau was a French mercantile adventurer, who had relations with Gardoqui and the Kentucky separatists, and in a petition presented by him it is not easy to discriminate between the views that are really those of the Creoles, and the views which he deemed it for his own advantage to have expressed.

[3] Do., July 26, 1787.

[4] Do., p. 85.

[5] American State Papers, Public Lands, I, Gibault’s Memo rial, May 1, 1790.

[6] St. Clair Papers, Harmar’s Letters, August 7th and No vember 24th, 1787.

[7] State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. II, Harmar to Le Grasse and Busseron, June 29, 1787.

[8] Do., Harmar to the Secretary of War, March 9, 1788.

[9] Do., Address of American Inhabitants of Vincennes, August 4, 1787; Recommendation by French Inhabitants in Favor of American Inhabitants, August 2d; Letter of Le Chamy and others, Kaskaskia, August 25th: Letter of J. M. P. LeGras, June 25th.

[10] Hamtranck to Harmar, October 13, 1788.

[11] For an account of this cession see Mr. Garrett’s excellent paper in the publications of the Tennessee Historical Society.

[12] For this Northwestern history see “The Life, Journal, and Correspondence of Manasseh Cutler,” by Wm. Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler; “The St. Clair Papers,” by W. H. Smith; “The Old Northwest,” by B. A. Hinsdale; “Maryland’s Influence upon Land Cessions,” by Herbert Adams. See also Donaldson’s “Public Domain,” Hildreth’s “History of Washington County,” and the various articles by Poole and others. In Prof. Hinsdale’s excellent book, on p. 200, is a map of the Territory of the Thirteen Original States in 1783. This map is accurate enough for Virginia and North Carolina; but the lands in the West put down as belonging to Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Georgia, did not really belong to them at all in 1783; they were held by the British and Spaniards, and were ultimately surrendered to the United States, not to individual States. These States did not surrender the land they merely surrendered a disputed title to the lands.

[13] Hinsdale, 250.

[14] “St. Clair Papers,” II, 603.

[15] “St. Clair Papers,” I, 139. It was at the beginning of the dreadful pseudo-classic cult in our intellectual history, and these honest soldiers and yeomen, with much self-complacency, gave to portions of their little raw town such ludicrously inappropriate names as the Campus Martius and Via Sacra.

[16] “Denny’s Military Journal,” May 28 and June 15, 1789.

[17] Cutler, p. 420.

[18] Journal and Letters of Colonel John May; one of the many valuable historical publications of Robert Clarke & Co., of Cincinnati.

[19] Draper MSS. Wm. Clark Papers. Proclamation, Vincennes, June 28, 1790.

CHAPTER II

THE WAR IN THE NORTHWEST, 1787–1790

THE FEDERAL troops were camped in the Federal territory north of the Ohio. They garrisoned the fort and patrolled between the little log-towns. They were commanded by the Federal General Harmar, and the territory was ruled by the Federal Governor St. Clair. Thenceforth the national authorities and the regular troops played the chief parts in the struggle for the Northwest. The frontier militia became a mere adjunct—often necessary, but always untrustworthy—of the regular forces.

For some time the regulars fared ill in the warfare with the savages; and a succession of mortifying failures closed with a defeat more ruinous than any which had been experienced since the days of the “iron-tempered general with the pipe-clay brain,”—for the disaster which befell St. Clair was as overwhelming as that wherein Braddock met his death. The continued checks excited the anger of the Eastern people, and the dismay and derision of the Westerners. They were keenly felt by the officers of the army; and they furnished an excuse for those who wished to jeer at regular troops, and exalt the militia. Jefferson, who never understood anything about warfare, being a timid man, and who belonged to the visionary school which always denounced the army and navy, was given a legitimate excuse to criticise the tactics of the regulars;[1] and of course he never sought occasion to comment on the even worse failings of the militia.

The truth was that the American military authorities fell into much the same series of errors as their predecessors, the British, untaught by the dreary and mortifying experience of the latter in fighting these forest foes. The War Department at Washington, and the Federal generals who first came to the Northwest, did not seem able to realize the formidable character of the Indian armies, and were certainly unable to teach their own troops how to fight them. Harmar and St. Clair were both fair officers, and in open country were able to acquit themselves respectably in the face of civilized foes. But they did not have the peculiar genius necessary to the successful Indian fighter, and they never learned how to carry on a campaign in the woods.

They had the justifiable distrust of the militia felt by all the officers of the Continental Army. In the long campaigns waged against Howe, Clinton, and Cornwallis they had learned the immense superiority of the Continental troops to the local militia. They knew that the Revolution would have failed had it not been for the Continental troops. They knew also, by the bitter experience common to all officers who had been through the war, that, though the militia might on occasion do well, yet they could never be trusted; they were certain to desert or grow sulky and mutinous if exposed to the fatigue and hardship of a long campaign, while in a pitched battle in the open they never fought as stubbornly as the regulars, and often would not fight at all.

All this was true; yet the officers of the regular army failed to understand that it did not imply the capacity of the regular troops to fight savages on their own ground. They showed little real comprehension of the extraordinary difficulty of such warfare against such foes, and of the reasons which made it so hazardous. They could not help assigning other causes than the real ones for every defeat and failure. They attributed each in turn to the effects of ambuscade or surprise, instead of realizing that in each the prime factor was the formidable fighting power of. the individual Indian warrior, when in the thick forest which was to him a home, and when acting under that species of wilderness discipline which was so effective for a single crisis in his peculiar warfare. The Indian has rarely shown any marked excellence as a fighter in mass in the open; though of course there have been one or two brilliant exceptions. At times in our wars we have tried the experiment of drilling bodies of Indians as if they were whites, and using them in the ordinary way in battle. Under such conditions, as a rule, they have shown themselves inferior to the white troops against whom they were pitted. In the same way they failed to show themselves a match for the white hunters of the great plains when on equal terms. But their marvelous faculty for taking advantage of cover, and for fighting in concert when under cover, has always made the warlike tribes foes to be dreaded beyond all others when in the woods, or among wild broken mountains.

The history of our warfare with the Indians during the century following the close of the Revolution is marked by curiously sharp contrasts in the efficiency shown by the regular troops in campaigns carried on at different times and under varying conditions. These contrasts are due much more to the difference in the conditions under which the campaigns were waged than to the difference in the bodily prowess of the Indians. When we had been in existence as a nation for a century the Modocs in their lava-beds and the Apaches amid their waterless mountains were still waging against the regulars of the day the same tedious and dangerous warfare waged against Harmar and St. Clair by the forest Indians. There were the same weary, long-continued campaigns; the same difficulty in bringing the savages to battle; the same blind fighting against hidden antagonists shielded by the peculiar nature of their fastnesses; and, finally, the same great disparity of loss against the white troops. During the intervening hundred years there had been many similar struggles; as, for instance, that against the Seminoles. Yet there had also been many struggles, against Indians naturally more formidable, in which the troops again and again worsted their Indian foes even when the odds in numbers were two or three to one against the whites. The difference between these different classes of wars was partly accounted for by change in weapons and methods of fighting; partly by the change in the character of the battle grounds. The horse Indians of the plains were as elusive and difficult to bring to battle as the Indians of the mountains and forests; but in the actual fighting they had no chance to take advantage of cover in the way which rendered so formidable their brethren of the hills and the deep woods. In consequence their occasional slaughtering victories, including the most famous of all, the battle of the Rosebud, in which Custer fell, took the form of the overwhelming of a comparatively small number of whites by immense masses of mounted horsemen. When their weapons were inferior, as on the first occasions when they were brought into contact with troops carrying breech-loading arms of precision, or when they tried the tactics of downright fighting, and of charging fairly in the open, they were often themselves beaten or repulsed with fearful slaughter by mere handfuls of whites. In the years 1867-68, all the horse Indians of the plains were at war with us, and many battles were fought with varying fortune. Two were especially noteworthy. In each a small body of troops and frontier scouts, under the command of a regular army officer who was also a veteran Indian fighter, beat back an overwhelming Indian force, which attempted to storm by open onslaught the position held by the white riflemen. In one instance fifty men under Major Geo. H. Forsyth beat back nine hundred warriors, killing or wounding double their own number. In the other a still more remarkable defence was made by thirty-one men under Major James Powell against an even larger force which charged again and again, and did not accept their repulse as final until they had lost three hundred of their foremost braves. For years the Sioux spoke with bated breath of this battle as the “medicine fight,” the defeat so overwhelming that it could be accounted for only by supernatural interference.[2]

But no such victory was ever gained over mountain or forest Indians who had become accustomed to fighting the white men. Every officer who has ever faced these foes has had to spend years in learning his work, and has then been forced to see a bitterly inadequate reward for his labors. The officers of the regular army who served in the forests north of the Ohio just after the Revolution had to undergo a strange and painful training; and were obliged to content themselves with scanty and hard-won triumphs even after this training had been undergone.

The officers took some time to learn their duties as Indian fighters, but the case was much worse with the rank and file who served under them. From the beginning of our history it often proved difficult to get the best type of native American to go into the regular army save in time of war with a powerful enemy, for the low rate of pay was not attractive, while the disciplined subordination of the soldiers to their officers seemed irksome to people with an exaggerated idea of individual freedom and no proper conception of the value of obedience. Very many of the regular soldiers have always been of foreign birth; and in 1787, on the Ohio, the percentage of Irish and Germans in the ranks was probably fully as large as it was on the Great Plains a century later.[3] They, as others, at that early date, were, to a great extent, drawn from the least desirable classes of the Eastern seaboard.[4] Three or four years latter an unfriendly observer wrote of St. Clair’s soldiers that they were a wretched set of men, weak and feeble, many of them mere boys, while others were rotten with drink and debauchery. He remarked that men “purchased from the prisons, wheel-barrows, and brothels of the nation at foolishly low wages, would never do to fight Indians”; and that against such foes, who were terrible enemies in the woods, there was need of first-class, specially trained troops, instead of trying to use “a set of men who enlisted because they could no longer live unhung any other way.”[5]

Doubtless this estimate, made under the sting of defeat, was too harsh; and it was even more applicable to the forced levies of militia than to the Federal soldiers; but the shortcomings of the regular troops were sufficiently serious to need no exaggeration. Their own officers were far from pleased with the recruits they got.

To the younger officers, with a taste for sport, the life beyond the Ohio was delightful. The climate was pleasant, the country beautiful, the water was clear as crystal, and game abounded. In hard weather the troops lived on salt beef; but at other times their daily rations were two pounds of turkey or venison, or a pound and a half of bear meat or buffalo beef. Yet this game was supplied by hired hunters, not by the soldiers themselves. One of the officers wrote that he had to keep his troops practicing steadily at a target, for they were incompetent to meet an enemy with the musket; they could not kill in a week enough game to last them a day.[6] It was almost impossible to train such troops, in a limited number of months or years, so as to enable them to meet their forest foes on equal terms. The discipline to which they were accustomed was admirably fitted for warfare in the open; but it was not suited for warfare in the woods. They had to learn even the use of their firearms with painful labor. It was merely hopeless to try to teach them to fight Indian fashion, all scattering out for themselves, and each taking a tree trunk, and trying to slay an individual enemy. They were too clumsy; they utterly lacked the wild-creature qualities proper to the men of the wilderness, the men who inherited wolf-cunning and panther-stealth from countless generations, who bought bare life itself only at the price of never-ceasing watchfulness, craft, and ferocity.

The regulars were certainly not ideal troops with which to oppose such foes; but they were the best attainable at that time. They possessed traits which were lacking in even the best of the frontier militia; and most of the militia fell far short of the best. When properly trained the regulars could be trusted to persevere through a campaign; whereas the militia were sure to disband if kept out for any length of time. Moreover, a regular army formed a weapon with a temper tried and known; whereas a militia force was the most brittle of swords which might give one true stroke, or might fly into splinters at the first slight blow. Regulars were the only troops who could be trusted to wear out their foes in a succession of weary and hard-fought campaigns.

The best backwoods fighters, however, such men as Kenton and Brady had in their scout companies, were much superior to the regulars, and were able to meet the Indians on at least equal terms. But there were only a very few such men; and they were too impatient of discipline to be embodied in an army. The bulk of the frontier militia consisted of men who were better riflemen than the regulars and often physically abler, but who were otherwise in every military sense inferior, possessing their defects, sometimes in an accentuated form, and not possessing their compensating virtues. Like the regulars, these militia fought the Indians at a terrible disadvantage. A defeat for either meant murderous slaughter; for whereas the trained Indian fighters fought or fled each for himself, the ordinary troops huddled together in a mass, an easy mark for their savage foes.

The task set the leaders of the army in the Northwest was one of extreme difficulty and danger. They had to overcome a foe trained through untold ages how to fight most effectively on the very battle-ground where the contest was to be waged. To the whites a march through the wilderness was fraught with incredible toil; whereas the Indians moved without baggage, and scattered and came together as they wished, so that it was impossible to bring them to battle against their will. All that could be done was to try to beat them when they chose to receive or deliver an attack. With ordinary militia it was hopeless to attempt to accomplish anything needing prolonged and sustained effort, and, as already said, the thoroughly trained Indian fighters who were able to beat the savages at their own game were too few in numbers, and too unaccustomed to control and restraint, to permit of their forming the main body of the army in an offensive campaign. There remained only the regulars; and the raw recruits had to undergo a long and special training, and be put under the command of a thoroughly capable leader, like old Mad Anthony Wayne, before they could be employed to advantage.

The feeling between the regular troops and the frontiersmen was often very bitter, and on several occasions violent brawls resulted. One such occurred at Limestone, where the brutal Indian-fighter Wetzel lived. Wetzel had murdered a friendly Indian, and the soldiers bore him a grudge. When they were sent to arrest him the townspeople sallied to his support. Wetzel himself resisted, and was, very properly, roughly handled in consequence. The interference of the townspeople was vigorously repaid in kind; they soon gave up the attempt, and afterward one or two of them were ill-treated or plundered by the soldiers. They made complaint to the civil authorities, and a court-martial was then ordered by the Federal commanders. This court-martial acquitted the soldiers. Wetzel soon afterward made his escape, and the incident ended.[7]

By 1787 the Indian war had begun with all its old fury. The thickly settled districts were not much troubled, and the towns which, like Marietta in the following year, grew up under the shadow of a Federal fort, were comparatively safe. But the frontier of Kentucky, and of Virginia proper along the Ohio, suffered severely. There was great scarcity of powder and lead, and even of guns, and there was difficulty in procuring provisions for those militia who consented to leave their work and turn out when summoned. The settlers were harried, and the surveyors feared to go out to their work on the range. There were the usual horrible incidents of Indian warfare. A glimpse of one of the innumerable dreadful tragedies is afforded by the statement of one party of scouts, who, in following the trail of an Indian war band, found at the crossing of the river “the small tracks of a number of children,” prisoners from a raid made on the Monongahela settlements.[8]

The settlers in the harried territory sent urgent appeals for help to the Governor of Virginia and to Congress. In these appeals stress was laid upon the poverty of the frontiersmen, and their lack of ammunition. The writers pointed out that the men of the border should receive support, if only from motives of policy; for it was of great importance to the people in the thickly settled districts that the war should be kept on the frontier, and that the men who lived there should remain as a barrier against the Indians. If the latter broke through and got among the less hardy and warlike people of the interior, they would work much greater havoc; for in Indian warfare the borderers were as much superior to the more peaceful people behind them as a veteran to a raw recruit.[9]

These appeals did not go unheeded; but there was embarrassment in affording the frontier adequate protection, both because the party to which the borderers themselves belonged foolishly objected to the employment of a fair-sized regular army, and because Congress still clung to the belief that war could be averted by treaty, and so forbade the taking of proper offensive measures. In the years 1787, ’88, and ’89, the ravages continued; many settlers were slain, with their families, and many bodies of immigrants destroyed; while the scouting and rescue parties of whites killed a few Indians in return.[10] All the Indians were not yet at war, however; and curious agreements were entered into by individuals on both sides. In the absence on either side of any government with full authority and power, the leaders would often negotiate some special or temporary truce, referring only to certain limited localities, or to certain people; and would agree between themselves for the interchange or ransom of prisoners. There is a letter of Boone’s extant in which he notifies a leading Kentucky colonel that a certain captive woman must be given up, in accordance with an agreement he has made with one of the noted Indian chiefs; and he insists upon the immediate surrender of the woman, to clear his “promise and obligation.”[11]

The Indians watched the Ohio with especial care, and took their toll from the immense numbers of immigrants who went down it. After passing the Muskingum no boat was safe. If the war parties, lurking along the banks, came on a boat moored to the shore, or swept thither by wind or current, the crew was at their mercy; and grown bold by success, they sometimes launched small flotillas of canoes and attacked the scows on the water. In such attacks they were often successful, for they always made the assault with the odds in their favor; though they were sometimes beaten back with heavy loss.

When the war was at its height, the boats going down the Ohio preferred to move in brigades. An army officer has left a description[12] of one such flotilla, over which he had assumed command. It contained sixteen flat-boats, then usually called “Kentuck boats,” and two keels. The flat-boats were lashed three together and kept in one line. The women, children, and cattle were put in the middle scows, while the outside were manned and worked by the men. The keel boats kept on either flank. This particular flotilla was unmolested by the Indians, but was almost wrecked in a furious storm of wind and rain.

The Federal authorities were still hopelessly endeavoring to come to some understanding with the Indians; they were holding treaties with some of the tribes, sending addresses and making speeches to others, and keeping envoys in the neighborhood of Detroit. These envoys watched the Indians who were there, and tried to influence the great gatherings of different tribes who came together at Sandusky to consult as to the white advance.[13]

These efforts to negotiate were as disheartening as was usually the case under such circumstances. There were many different tribes, and some were for peace, while others were for war; and even the peaceful ones could not restrain their turbulent young men. Far off nations of Indians who had never been harmed by the whites, and were in no danger from them, sent war parties to the Ohio; and the friendly tribes let them pass without interference. The Iroquois were eagerly consulted by the Western Indians, and in the summer of 1788 a great party of them came to Sandusky to meet in council all the tribes of the Lakes and the Ohio Valley, and even some from the upper Mississippi. With the Iroquois came the famous chief Joseph Brant, a mighty warrior, and a man of education, who in his letters to the United States officials showed much polished diplomacy.[14]

The tribes who gathered at this great council met on the soil which, by treaty with England, had been declared American, and came from regions which the same treaty had defined as lying within the boundaries of the United States. But these provisions of the treaty had never been executed, owing largely to a failure on the part of the Americans themselves to execute certain other provisions. The land was really as much British as ever, and was so treated by the British Governor of Canada, Lord Dorchester, who had just made a tour of the Lake Posts. The tribes were feudatory to the British, and in their talks spoke of the King of Great Britain as “father,” and Brant was a British pensioner. British agents were in constant communication with the Indians at the councils, and they distributed gifts among them with a hitherto unheard-of lavishness. In every way they showed their resolution to remain in full touch with their red allies.[15]

Nevertheless, they were anxious that peace should be made. The Wyandots, too, seconded them, and addressed the Wabash Indians at one of the councils, urging them to cease their outrages on the Americans.[16] These Wyandots had long been converted, and in addressing their heathen brethren, said proudly: “We are not as other nations are—we, the Wyandots—we are Christians.” They certainly showed themselves the better for their religion, and they were still the bravest of the brave. But though the Wabash Indians in answering spake them fair, they had no wish to go to peace; and the Wyandots were the only tribes who strove earnestly to prevent war. The American agents who had gone to the Detroit River were forced to report that there was little hope of putting an end to hostilities.[17] The councils accomplished nothing toward averting a war; on the contrary, they tended to band all the Northwestern Indians together in a loose confederacy, so that active hostilities against some were sure in the end to involve all.

While the councils were sitting and while the Americans were preparing for the treaties, outrages of the most flagrant kind occurred. One, out of many, was noteworthy as showing both the treachery of the Indians, and the further fact that some tribes went to war, not because they had been in any way maltreated, but from mere lust of blood and plunder. In July of this year, 1788, Governor St. Clair was making ready for a treaty to which he had invited some of the tribes. It was to be held on the Muskingum, and he sent to the appointed place provisions for the Indians with a guard of men. One day a party of Indians, whose tribe was then unknown, though later they turned out to be Chippewas from the Upper Lakes, suddenly fell on the guard. They charged home with great spirit, using their sharp spears well, and killed, wounded, or captured several soldiers; but they were repulsed, and retreated, carrying with them their dead, save one warrior.[18] A few days afterward they imprudently ventured back, pretending innocence, and six were seized, and sent to one of the forts as prisoners. Their act of treacherous violence had, of course, caused the immediate abandonment of the proposed treaty.

The remaining Chippewas marched toward home, with the scalps of the men they had slain, and with one captured soldier. They passed by Detroit, telling the French villagers that “their father [the British Commandant] was a dog,” because he had given them no arms or ammunition, and that in consequence they would not deliver him their prisoner, but would take the poor wretch with them to their Mackinaw home. Accordingly they carried him on to the far-off island at the mouth of Lake Michigan; but just as they were preparing to make him run the gantlet the British commander of the lonely little post interfered. This subaltern with his party of a dozen soldiers was surrounded by many times his number of ferocious savages, and was completely isolated in the wilderness; but his courage stood as high as his humanity, and he broke through the Indians, threatening them with death if they interfered, rescued the captive American, and sent him home in safety.[19]

The other Indians made no attempt to check the Chippewas; on the contrary, the envoys of the Iroquois and Delawares made vain efforts to secure the release of the Chippewa prisoners. On the other hand, the generous gallantry of the British commander at Mackinaw was in some sort equaled by the action of the traders on the Maumee, who went to great expense in buying from the Shawnees Americans whom they had doomed to the terrible torture of death at the stake.[20]

Under such circumstances the treaties of course came to naught. After interminable delays the Indians either refused to treat at all, or else the acts of those who did were promptly repudiated by those who did not. In consequence throughout this period even the treaties that were made were quite worthless, for they bound nobody. Moreover, there were the usual clashes between the National and State authorities. While Harmar was trying to treat, the Kentuckians were organizing retaliatory inroads; and while the United States Commissioners were trying to hold big peace councils on the Ohio, the New York and Massachusetts Commissioners were conducting independent negotiations at what is now Buffalo, to determine the western boundary of New York.[21]

All the while the ravages grew steadily more severe. The Federal officers at the little widely scattered forts were at their wits’ ends in trying to protect the outlying settlers and retaliate on the Indians; and as the latter grew bolder they menaced the forts themselves and harried the troops who convoyed provisions to them. Of the innumerable tragedies which occurred, the record of a few has by chance been preserved. One may be worth giving merely as a sample of many others. On the Virginian side of the Ohio lived a pioneer farmer of some note, named Van Swearingen.[22] One day his son crossed the river to hunt with a party of strangers. Near a “waste cabbin,” the deserted log hut of some reckless adventurer, an Indian war-band came on them unawares, slew three, and carried off the young man. His father did not know whether they had killed him or not. He could find no trace of him, and he wrote to the commander of the nearest fort, begging him to try to get news from the Indian villages as to whether his son were alive or dead, and to employ for the purpose any friendly Indian or white scout, at whatever price was set—he would pay it “to the utmost farthing.” He could give no clew to the Indians who had done the deed; all he could say was that a few days before, one of these war parties, while driving off a number of horses, was overtaken by the riflemen of the neighborhood and scattered, after a fight in which one white man and two red men were killed.

The old frontiersman never found his son; doubtless the boy was slain; but his fate, like the fate of hundreds of others, was swallowed up in the gloomy mystery of the wilderness. So far from being unusual, the incident attracted no comment, for it was one of every-day occurrence. Its only interest lies in the fact that it was of a kind that befell the family of almost every dweller in the wilds. Danger and death were so common that the particular expression which each might take made small impress on the minds of the old pioneers. Every one of them had a long score of slain friends and kinsfolk to avenge upon his savage foes.

The subalterns in command of the little detachments which moved between the posts, whether they went by land or water, were forced to be ever on the watch against surprise and ambush. This was particularly the case with the garrison at Vincennes. The Wabash Indians were all the time out in parties to murder and plunder; and yet these same thieves and murderers were continually coming into town and strolling innocently about the fort; for it was impossible to tell the peaceful Indians from the hostile. They were ever in communication with the equally treacherous and ferocious Miami tribes, to whose towns the war parties often brought five or six scalps in a day, and prisoners, too, doomed to a death of awful torture at the stake. There is no need to waste sympathy on the Northwestern Indians for their final fate; never were defeat and subjection more richly deserved.

The bands of fierce and crafty braves who lounged about the wooden fort at Vincennes watched eagerly the outgoing and incoming of the troops, and were prompt to dog and waylay any party they thought they could overcome. They took advantage of the unwillingness of the Federal commander to harass Indians who might be friendly; and plotted at ease the destruction of the very troops who spent much of the time in keeping intruders off their lands. In the summer of 1788 they twice followed parties of soldiers from the town, when they went down the Wabash, and attacked them by surprise, from the river-banks, as they sat in their boats. In one instance, the lieutenant in command got off with the loss of but two or three men. In the other, of the thirty-six soldiers who composed the party ten were killed, eight wounded, and the greater part of the provisions and goods they were conveying were captured; while the survivors, pushing down-stream, ultimately made their way to the Illinois towns.[23] This last tragedy was avenged by a band of thirty mounted riflemen from Kentucky, led by the noted backwoods fighter Hardin. They had crossed the Ohio on a retaliatory foray, many of their horses having been stolen by the Indians. When near Vincennes they happened to stumble on the war party that had attacked the soldiers, slew ten, and scattered the others to the winds, capturing thirty horses.[24]

The war bands who harried the settlements, or lurked along the banks of the Ohio, bent on theft and murder, did terrible deeds, and at times suffered terrible fates in return, when some untoward chance threw them in the way of the grim border vengeance. The books of the old annalists are filled with tales of disaster and retribution, of horrible suffering and of fierce prowess. Countless stories are told of heroic fight and panic rout; of midnight assault on lonely cabins, and ambush of heavy-laden immigrant scows; of the deaths of brave men and cowards, and the dreadful butchery of women and children; of bloody raid and revengeful counter stroke. Sometimes a band of painted marauders would kill family after family, without suffering any loss, would capture boat after boat without effective resistance from the immigrants, paralyzed by panic fright, and would finally escape unmolested, or beat off with ease a possibly larger party of pursuers, who happened to be ill led, or to be men with little training in wilderness warfare.

At other times all this might be reversed. A cabin might be defended with such maddened courage by some stout rifleman, fighting for his cowering wife and children, that a score of savages would recoil baffled, leaving many of their number dead. A boat’s crew of resolute men might beat back, with heavy loss, an over-eager onslaught of Indians in canoes, or push their slow, unwieldy craft from shore under a rain of rifle-balls, while the wounded oarsmen strained at the bloody handles of the sweeps, and the men who did not row gave shot for shot, firing at the flame tongues in the dark woods. A party of scouts, true wilderness veterans, equal to their foes in woodcraft and cunning, and superior in marksmanship and reckless courage, might follow and scatter some war band and return in triumph with scalps and retaken captives and horses.

A volume could readily be filled with adventures of this kind, all varying infinitely in detail, but all alike in their bloody ferocity. During the years 1789 and 1790 scores of Indian war parties went on such trips, to meet every kind of success and failure. The deeds of one such, which happen to be recorded, may be given merely to serve as a sample of what happened in countless other cases. In the early spring of 1790 a band of fifty-four Indians of various tribes, but chiefly Cherokees and Shawnees, established a camp near the mouth of the Scioto.[25] They first attacked a small new-built station, on one of the bottoms of the Ohio, some twenty miles from Limestone, and killed or captured all its fifteen inhabitants. They spared the lives of two of the captives, but forced the wretches to act as decoys so as to try to lure passing boats within reach.

Their first success was with a boat going downriver, and containing four men and two unmarried girls, besides a quantity of goods intended for the stores in the Kentucky towns. The two decoys appeared on the right bank, begging piteously to be taken on board, and stating that they had just escaped from the savages. Three of the voyagers, not liking the looks of the men, refused to land, but the fourth, a reckless fellow named Flynn, and the two girls, who were coarse, foolish, good-natured frontier women of the lower sort, took pity upon the seeming fugitives, and insisted on taking them aboard. Accordingly the scow was shoved inshore, and Flynn jumped on the bank, only to be immediately seized by the Indians, who then opened fire on the others. They tried to put off, and fired back, but they were helpless; one man and a girl were shot, another wounded, and the savages then swarmed aboard, seized everything, and got very drunk on a keg of whiskey. The fates of the captives were various, each falling to some different group of savages. Flynn, the cause of the trouble, fell to the Cherokees, who took him to the Miami town, and burned him alive, with dreadful torments. The remaining girl, after suffering outrage and hardship, was bound to the stake, but saved by a merciful Indian, who sent her home. Of the two remaining men, one ran the gantlet successfully, and afterward escaped and reached home through the woods, while the other was ransomed by a French trader at Sandusky.

Before thus disposing of their captives the Indians hung about the mouth of the Scioto for some time. They captured a pirogue going up-stream, and killed all six paddlers. Soon afterward three heavily laden scows passed, drifting down with the current. Aboard these were twenty-eight men, with their women and children, together with many horses and bales of merchandise. They had but sixteen guns among them, and many were immigrants, unaccustomed to savage warfare, and therefore they made no effort to repel the attack, which could easily have been done by resolute, well-armed veterans. The Indians crowded into the craft they had captured, and paddled and rowed after the scows, whooping and firing. They nearly overtook the last scow, whereupon its people shifted to the second, and abandoned it. When further pressed the people shifted into the headmost scow, cut holes in its sides so as to work all the oars, and escaped down-stream, leaving the Indians to plunder the two abandoned boats, which contained twenty-eight horses and fifteen hundred pounds’ worth of goods.

The Kentuckians of the neighborhood sent word to General Harmar, begging him to break up this nest of plunderers. Accordingly he started after them, with his regular troops. He was joined by a number of Kentucky mounted riflemen, under the command of Col. Charles Scott, a rough Indian fighter, and veteran of the Revolutionary War, who afterward became Governor of the State. Scott had moved to Kentucky not long after the close of the war with England; he had lost a son at the hands of the savages,[26] and he delighted in war against them.

Harmar made a circuit and came down along the Scioto, hoping to surprise the Indian camp; but he might as well have hoped to surprise a party of timber wolves. His foes scattered and disappeared in the dense forest. Nevertheless, coming across some moccasin tracks, Scott’s horsemen followed the trail, killed four Indians, and carried in the scalps to Limestone. The chastisement proved of little avail. A month later five immigrant boats, while moored to the bank a few miles from Limestone, were rushed by the Indians at night; one boat was taken, all the thirteen souls aboard being killed or captured.

Among the men who suffered about this time was the Italian Vigo; a fine, manly, generous fellow, of whom St. Clair spoke as having put the United States under heavy obligations, and as being “in truth the most disinterested person” he had ever known.[27] While taking his trading boat up the Wabash, Vigo was attacked by an Indian war party, three of his men were killed, and he was forced to drop down-stream. Meeting another trading boat manned by Americans, he again essayed to force a passage in company with it, but they were both attacked with fury. The other boat got off; but Vigo’s was captured. However, the Indians, when they found the crew consisted of creoles, molested none of them, telling them that they only warred against the Americans; though they plundered the boat.

By the summer of 1790 the raids of the Indians had become unbearable. Fresh robberies and murders were committed every day in Kentucky, or along the Wabash and Ohio. Writing to the Secretary of War, a prominent Kentuckian, well knowing all the facts, estimated that during the seven years which had elapsed since the close of the Revolutionary War the Indians had slain fifteen hundred people in Kentucky itself, or on the immigrant routes leading thither, and had stolen twenty thousand horses, besides destroying immense quantities of other property.[28] The Federal generals were also urgent in asserting the folly of carrying on a merely defensive war against such foes. All the efforts of the Federal authorities to make treaties with the Indians and persuade them to be peaceful had failed. The Indians themselves had renewed hostilities, and the different tribes had one by one joined in the war, behaving with a treachery only equaled by their ferocity. With great reluctance the National Government concluded that an effort to chastise the hostile savages could no longer be delayed; and those on the Maumee, or Miami of the Lakes, and on the Wabash, whose guilt had been peculiarly heinous, were singled out as the objects of attack.

The expedition against the Wabash towns was led by the Federal commander at Vincennes, Major Hamtranck. No resistance was encountered; and after burning a few villages of bark huts and destroying some corn he returned to Vincennes.

The main expedition was that against the Miami Indians, and was led by General Harmar himself. It was arranged that there should be a nucleus of regular troops, but that the force should consist mainly of militia from Kentucky and Pennsylvania, the former furnishing twice as many as the latter. The troops were to gather on the 15th of September at Fort Washington, on the north bank of the Ohio, a day’s journey down-stream from Limestone.

At the appointed time the militia began to straggle in; the regular officers had long been busy getting their own troops, artillery, and military stores in readiness. The regulars felt the utmost disappointment at the appearance of the militia. They numbered but few of the trained Indian fighters of the frontier; many of them were hired substitutes; most of them were entirely unacquainted with Indian warfare, and were new to the life of the wilderness; and they were badly armed.[29] The Pennsylvanians were of even poorer stuff than the Kentuckians, numbering many infirm old men, and many mere boys. They were undisciplined, with little regard for authority, and inclined to be disorderly and mutinous.

By the end of September one battalion of Pennsylvania, and three battalions of Kentucky, militia had arrived, and the troops began their march to the Miami. All told there were 1,453 men, 320 being Federal troops and 1,133 militia, many of whom were mounted; and there were three light brass field-pieces.[30] In point of numbers the force was amply sufficient for its work; but Harmar, though a gallant man, was not fitted to command even a small army against Indians, and the bulk of the militia, who composed nearly four-fifths of his force, were worthless. A difficulty immediately occurred in choosing a commander for the militia. Undoubtedly the best one among their officers was Colonel John Hardin, who (like his fellow Kentuckian, Colonel Scott), was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, and a man of experience in the innumerable deadly Indian skirmishes of the time. He had no special qualifications for the command of more than a handful of troops, but he was a brave and honorable man, who had done well in leading small parties of rangers against their red foes. Nevertheless, the militia threatened mutiny unless they were allowed to choose their own leader, and they chose a mere incompetent, a Colonel Trotter. Harmar yielded, for the home authorities had dwelt much on the necessity of his preventing friction between the regulars and the militia; and he had so little control over the latter, that he was very anxious to keep them good-humored. Moreover, the commissariat arrangements were poor. Under such circumstances the keenest observers on the frontier foretold failure from the start.[31]

For several days the army marched slowly forward. The regular officers had endless difficulty with the pack horsemen, who allowed their charges to stray or be stolen, and they strove to instruct the militia in the rudiments of their duties on the march, in camp, and in battle. A fortnight’s halting progress through the wilderness brought the army to a small branch of the Miami of the Lakes. Here a horse patrol captured a Maumee Indian, who informed his captors that the Indians knew of their approach and were leaving their towns. On hearing this an effort was made to hurry forward; but when the army reached the Miami towns, on October 17th, they had been deserted. They stood at the junction of two branches of the Miami, the St. Mary and the St. Joseph, about one hundred and seventy miles from Fort Washington. The troops had marched about ten miles a day. The towns consisted of a couple of hundred wigwams, with some good log huts; and there were gardens, orchards, and immense fields of corn. All these the soldiers destroyed, and the militia loaded themselves with plunder.

On the 18th Colonel Trotter was ordered out with three hundred men to spend a couple of days exploring the country, and finding out where the Indians were. After marching a few miles, they came across two Indians. Both were killed by the advanced horsemen. All four of the field officers of the militia—two colonels and two majors—joined helter-skelter in the chase, leaving their troops for half an hour without a leader. Apparently satisfied with this feat, Trotter marched home, having accomplished nothing.

Much angered, Harmar gave the command to Hardin, who left the camp next morning with two hundred men, including thirty regulars. But the militia had turned sulky. They did not wish to go, and they began to desert and return to camp immediately after leaving it. At least half of them had thus left him, when he stumbled on a body of about a hundred Indians. The Indians advanced firing, and the militia fled with abject cowardice, many not even discharging their guns. The thirty regulars stood to their work, and about ten of the militia stayed with them. This small detachment fought bravely, and was cut to pieces, but six or seven men escaping. Their captain, after valiant fighting, broke through the savages, and got into a swamp near by. Here he hid, and returned to camp next day; he was so near the place of the fight that he had seen the victory dance of the Indians over their slain and mutilated foes.

This defeat took the heart out of the militia. The army left the Miami towns, and moved back a couple of miles to the Shawnee town of Chillicothe. A few Indians began to lurk about, stealing horses, and two of the militia captains determined to try to kill one of the thieves. Accordingly, at nightfall, they hobbled a horse with a bell, near a hazel thicket in which they hid. Soon an Indian stalked up to the horse, whereupon they killed him, and brought his head into camp, proclaiming that it should at least be worth the price of a wolf scalp.

Next day was spent by the army in completing the destruction of all the corn, the huts, and the belongings of the Indians. A band of a dozen warriors tried to harass one of the burning parties; but some of the mounted troops got on their flank, killed two and drove the others off, they themselves suffering no loss.

The following day, the 21st, the army took up the line of march for Fort Washington, having destroyed six Indian towns and an immense quantity of corn. But Hardin was very anxious to redeem himself by trying another stroke at the Indians, who, he rightly judged, would gather at their towns as soon as the troops left. Harmar also wished to revenge his losses, and to forestall any attempt of the Indians to harass his shaken and retreating forces. Accordingly that night he sent back against the towns a detachment of four hundred men, sixty of whom were regulars, and the rest picked militia. They were commanded by Major Wyllys, of the regulars. It was a capital mistake of Harmar’s to send off a mere detachment on such a business. He should have taken a force composed of all his regulars and the best of the militia, and led it in person.

The detachment marched soon after midnight, and reached the Miami at daybreak on October 22d. It was divided into three columns, which marched a few hundred yards apart, and were supposed to keep in touch with one another. The middle column was led by Wyllys in person, and included the regulars and a few militia. The rest of the militia composed the flank columns and marched under their own officers.

Immediately after crossing the Miami, and reaching the neighborhood of the town, Indians were seen. The columns were out of touch, and both of those on the flanks pressed forward against small parties of braves, whom they drove before them up the St. Joseph. Heedless of the orders they had received, the militia thus pressed forward, killing and scattering the small parties in their front and losing all connection with the middle column of regulars. Meanwhile the main body of the Indians gathered to assail this column, and overwhelmed it by numbers; whether they had led the militia away by accident or by design is not known. The regulars fought well and died hard, but they were completely cut off, and most of them, including their commander, were slain. A few escaped, and either fled back to camp or up the St. Joseph. Those who took the latter course met the militia returning and informed them of what had happened. Soon afterward the victorious Indians themselves appeared, on the opposite side of the St. Joseph, and attempted to force their way across. But the militia were flushed by the easy triumph of the morning and fought well, repulsing the Indians, and finally forcing them to withdraw. They then marched slowly back to the Miami towns, gathered their wounded, arrayed their ranks, and rejoined the main army. The Indians had suffered heavily, and were too dispirited, both by their loss and by their last repulse, to attempt further to harass either this detachment or the main army itself on its retreat.

Nevertheless, the net result was a mortifying failure. In all, the regulars had lost 75 men killed and 3 wounded, while of the militia 28 had been wounded and 108 had been killed or were missing. The march back was very dreary; and the militia became nearly ungovernable, so that at one time Harmar reduced them to order only by threatening to fire on them with the artillery.

The loss of all their provisions and dwellings exposed the Miami tribes to severe suffering and want during the following winter; and they had also lost many of their warriors. But the blow was only severe enough to anger and unite them, not to cripple or crush them. All the other Western tribes made common cause with them. They banded together and warred openly; and their vengeful forays on the frontier increased in number, so that the suffering of the settlers was great. Along the Ohio people lived in hourly dread of tomahawk and scalping knife; the attacks fell unceasingly on all the settlements from Marietta to Louisville.

[1] Draper MSS., G. R. Clark Papers. Jefferson to Innes, March 7, 1791.

[2] For all this see Dodge’s admirable “Our Wild Indians.”

[3] Denny’s Journal, passim.

[4] For fear of misunderstanding, I wish to add that at many periods the rank and file have been composed of excellent material; of recent years their character has steadily risen, and the stuff itself has always proved good when handled for a sufficient length of time by good commanders.

[5] Draper collection. Letter of John Cleves Symmes to Elias Boudinot, January 12, 1792.

[6] State Dept. MSS., No. 150; Doughty’s Letter March 15, 1786; also, November 30, 1785.

[7] Draper MSS. Harmar’s letter to Henry Lee, Sept. 27, 1789, Also depositions of McCurdy, Lawler, Caldwell, and others, and proceedings of court-martial. The depositions conflict.

[8] State Dept. MSS., No. 71, Vol. II. Letters of David Shepherd to Governor Randolph, April 30, and May 24, 1787.

[9] Draper MSS. Lt. Marshall to Franklin, Nov. 6, 1787.

[10] Va. State Papers, IV, 357.

[11] Draper MSS., Boone Papers. Boone to Robert Patterson, March 16, 1787.

[12] Denny’s Military Journal, April 19, 1790.

[13] State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol. III, Harmar’s speech to the Indians at Vincennes, September 17, 1787. Richard Butler to the Secretary of War, May 4, 1788, etc.

[14] Do., pp. 47 and 51.

[15] Do., St. Clair to Knox, September 14, 1788; St. Clair to Jay, December 13, 1788.

[16] Do., p. 267, Detroit River’s Mouth, July 23, 1788.

[17] Do., James Rinkin to Richard Butler, July 20, 1788.

[18] St. Clair Papers, II, 50.

[19] State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. III. William Wilson and James Rinkin to Richard Butler, August 4, 1788; Wilson and Rinkin to St. Clair, August 31, 1788.

[20] Do., Rinkin to Butler, July 2, 1788; St. Clair to Knox, September 4, 1788.

[21] Do., Wilson and Rinkin to St. Clair, July 29, 1788. These treaties made at the Ohio forts are quite unworthy of presservation, save for mere curiosity; they really settled nothing whatever and conferred no rights that were not taken with the strong hand; yet they are solemnly quoted in some books as if they were the real sources of title to parts of the Northwest.

[22] State Dept MSS., No. 150, Vol. II, Van Swearingen to William Butler, Washington County, Sept. 29, 1787.

[23] State Dept. MSS., No. 150, Vol. III. Lt. Spear to Harmar, June 2, 1788; Hamtranck to Harmar, Aug. 12, 1788.

[24] Draper MSS. Wm. Clark Papers. N. T. Dalton to W. Clark, Vincennes, Aug. 23, 1788; also Denny, p. 528.

[25] American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. I, pp. 87, 88, 91.

[26] State Dept. MSS., No. 71, Vol. II, p. 563.

[27] American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. I, Sept. 19, 1790.

[28] American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. I. Innes to Sec. of War, July 7, 1790.

[29] American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. 1, pp. 104, 105; Military Affairs, I, 20.

[30] Do., Indian Affairs, I, p. 104; also p. 105. For this expedition see also Military Affairs, I, pp. 20, 28, and Denny’s Military Journal, pp. 343, 354.

[31] Am. State Papers, Indian Affairs, I. Jno. O’Fallan to the President, Lexington, Ky., Sept. 25, 1790.

BOOK FOUR

ST. CLAIR AND WAYNE (CONTINUED)

CHAPTER III

THE SOUTHWEST TERRITORY; TENNESSEE, 1788–1790

DURING THE years 1788 and 1789 there was much disquiet and restlessness throughout the Southwestern territory, the land lying between Kentucky and the Southern Indians. The disturbances caused by the erection of the State of Franklin were subsiding, the authority of North Carolina was reestablished over the whole territory, and by degrees a more assured and healthy feeling began to prevail among the settlers; but as yet their future was by no means certain, nor was their lot irrevocably cast in with that of their fellows in the other portions of the Union.

As already said, the sense of national unity among the frontiersmen was small. The men of the Cumberland in writing to the Creeks spoke of the Franklin people as if they belonged to an entirely distinct nation, and as if a war with or by one community concerned in no way the other;[1] while the leaders of Franklin were carrying on with the Spaniards negotiations quite incompatible with the continued sovereignty of the United States. Indeed it was some time before the Southwestern people realized that after the Constitution went into effect they had no authority to negotiate commercial treaties on their own account. Andrew Jackson, who had recently taken up his abode in the Cumberland country, was one of the many men who endeavored to convince the Spanish agents that it would be a good thing for both parties if the Cumberland people were allowed to trade with the Spaniards; in which event the latter would of course put a stop to the Indian hostilities.[2]

This dangerous loosening of the Federal tie shows that it would certainly have given way entirely had the population at this time been scattered over a wider territory. The obstinate and bloody warfare waged by the Indians against the frontiersmen was in one way of great service to the nation, for it kept back the frontier and forced the settlements to remain more or less compact and in touch with the country behind them. If the red men had been as weak as, for instance, the black-fellows of Australia, the settlers would have roamed hither and thither without regard to them, and would have settled, each man wherever he liked, across to the Pacific. Moreover, the Indians formed the bulwarks which defended the British and Spanish possessions from the adventurers of the border; save for the shield thus offered by the fighting tribes it would have been impossible to bar the frontiersmen from the territory either to the north or to the south of the boundaries of the United States.

Congress had tried hard to bring about peace with the Southern Indians, both by sending commissioners to them and by trying to persuade the three Southern States to enter into mutually beneficial treaties with them. A successful effort was also made to detach the Chickasaws from the others, and keep them friendly with the United States. Congress as usual sympathized with the Indians against the intruding whites, although it was plain that only by warfare could the red men be permanently subdued.[3]

The Cumberland people felt the full weight of the warfare, the Creeks being their special enemies. Robertson himself lost a son and a brother in the various Indian attacks. To him fell the task of trying to put a stop to the ravages. He was the leader of his people in every way, their commander in war and their spokesman when they sought peace; and early in 1788 he wrote a long letter on their behalf to the Creek chief McGillivray. After disclaiming all responsibility for or connection with the Franklin men, he said that the settlers for whom he spoke had not had the most distant idea that any Indians would object to their settling on the Cumberland, in a country that had been purchased outright at the Henderson treaty. He further stated that he had believed the Creek chief would approve of the expedition to punish the marauders at the Muscle Shell Shoals, inasmuch as the Creeks had repeatedly assured him that these marauders were refractory people who would pay no heed to their laws and commands. Robertson knew this to be a good point, for as a matter of fact the Creeks, though pretending to be peaceful, had made no effort to suppress these banditti, and had resented by force of arms the destruction of their strongholds.[4]

Robertson then came to his personal wrongs. His quaintly worded letter runs in part: “I had the mortification to see one of my children Killed and uncommonly Massacred … from my earliest youth I have endeavored to arm myself with a sufficient share of Fortitude to meet anything that Nature might have intended, but to see an innocent child so Uncommonly Massacred by people who ought to have both sense and bravery has in a measure unmanned me… . I have always striven to do justice to the red people; last fall, trusting in Cherokee friendship, I with utmost difficulty prevented a great army from marching against them. The return is very inadequate to the services I have rendered them as last summer they killed an affectionate brother and three days ago an innocent child.” The letter concludes with an emphatic warning that the Indians must expect heavy chastisement if they do not stop their depredations.

Robertson looked on his own woes and losses with much of the stoicism for which his Indian foes were famed. He accepted the fate of his son with a kind of grim stolidity; and did not let it interfere with his efforts to bring about a peace. Writing to his friend General Martin, he said: “On my return home [from the North Carolina Legislature to which he was a delegate] I found distressing times in the country. A number of persons have been killed since; among those unfortunate persons were my third son… . We sent Captains Hackett and Ewing to the Creeks who have brought very favorable accounts, and we do not doubt but a lasting peace will be shortly concluded between us and that nation. The Cherokees we shall flog, if they do not behave well.”[5] He wished to make peace if he could; but if that was impossible, he was ready to make war with the same steady acceptance of fate.

The letter then goes on to express the opinion that, if Congress does not take action to bring about a peace, the Creeks will undoubtedly invade Georgia with some five thousand warriors, for McGillivray has announced that he will consent to settle the boundary question with Congress, but will do nothing with Georgia, The letter shows with rather startling clearness how little Robertson regarded the Cumberland people and the Georgians as being both in the same nation; he saw nothing strange in one portion of the country concluding a firm peace with an enemy who was about to devastate another portion.

Robertson was anxious to encourage immigration, and for this purpose he had done his best to hurry forward the construction of a road between the Holston and the Cumberland settlements. In his letter to Martin he urged him to proclaim to possible settlers the likelihood of peace, and guaranteed that the road would be ready before winter. It was opened in the fall; and parties of settlers began to come in over it. To protect them, the district from time to time raised strong guards of mounted riflemen to patrol the road, as well as the neighborhood of the settlements, and to convoy the immigrant companies. To defray the expenses of the troops, the Cumberland court raised taxes. Exactly as the Franklin people had taken peltries as the basis for their currency, so those of the Cumberland, in arranging for payment in kind, chose the necessaries of life as the best medium of exchange. They enacted that the tax should be paid one-quarter in corn, one-half in beef, pork, bear meat, and venison, one-eighth in salt, and one-eighth in money.[6] It was still as easy to shoot bear and deer as to raise hogs and oxen.

Robertson wrote several times to McGillivray, alone or in conjunction with another veteran frontier leader, Col. Anthony Bledsoe. Various other men of note on the border, both from Virginia and North Carolina, wrote likewise. To these letters McGillivray responded promptly in a style rather more polished though less frank than that of his correspondents. His tone was distinctly more warlike and less conciliatory than theirs. He avowed, without hesitation, that the Creeks and not the Americans had been the original aggressors, saying that “my nation has waged war against your people for several years past; but that we had no motive of revenge, nor did it proceed from any sense of injuries sustained from your people, but being warmly attached to the British and being under their influence our operations were directed by them against you in common with other Americans.” He then acknowledged that after the close of the war the Americans had sent overtures of peace, which he had accepted—although as a matter of fact the Creeks never ceased their ravages,—but complained that Robertson’s expedition against the Muscle Shoals again brought on war.[7]

There was, of course, nothing in this complaint of the injustice of Robertson’s expedition, for the Muscle Shoals Indians had been constantly plundering and murdering before it was planned, and it was undertaken merely to put a stop to their ravages. However, McGillivray made adroit use of it. He stated that the expedition itself, carried on, as he understood it, mainly against the French traders, “was no concern of ours and would have been entirely disregarded by us; but in the execution of it some of our people were there, who went as well from motives of curiosity as to traffic in silverware; and six of whom were rashly killed by your men”;[8] and inasmuch as these slain men were prominent in different Creek towns, the deed led to retaliatory raids. But now that vengeance had been taken, McGillivray declared that a stable peace would be secured, and he expressed “considerable concern” over the “tragical end” of Robertson’s slain kinsfolk. As for the Georgians, he announced that if they were wise and would agree to an honorable peace he would bury the red hatchet, and if not then he would march against them whenever he saw fit.[9] Writing again at the end of the year, he reiterated his assurances of the peaceful inclinations of the Creeks, though their troubles with Georgia were still unsettled.[10]

Nevertheless these peaceful protestations produced absolutely no effect upon the Indian ravages, which continued with unabated fury. Many instances of revolting brutality and aggression by the whites against the Cherokees took place in Tennessee, both earlier and later than this, and in eastern Tennessee at this very time; but the Cumberland people, from the earliest days of their settlement, had not sinned against the red men, while as regards all the Tennesseeans, the Creeks throughout this period appeared always, and the Cherokees appeared sometimes, as the wrongdoers, the men who began the long and ferocious wars of reprisal.

Robertson’s companion, Bledsoe, was among the many settlers who suffered death in the summer of 1788. He was roused from sleep by the sound of his cattle running across the yard in front of the twin log-houses occupied by himself and his brother and their families. As he opened the door he was shot by Indians, who were lurking behind the fence, and one of his hired men was also shot down.[11] The savages fled, and Bledsoe lived through the night, while the other inmates of the house kept watch at the loopholes until day broke and the fear was passed. Under the laws of North Carolina at that time, all the lands went to the sons of a man dying intestate, and Bledsoe’s wealth consisted almost exclusively in great tracts of land. As he lay dying in his cabin, his sister suggested to him that unless he made a will he would leave his seven daughters penniless; and so the will was drawn, and the old frontiersman signed it just before he drew his last breath, leaving each of his children provided with a share of his land.

In the following year, 1789, Robertson himself had a narrow escape. He was at work with some of his field hands in a clearing. One man was on guard and became alarmed at some sound; Robertson snatched up his gun, and, while he was peering into the woods, the Indians fired on him. He ran toward the station and escaped, but only at the cost of a bullet through the foot. Immediately sixty mounted riflemen gathered at Robertson’s station, and set out after the fleeing Indians; but finding that in the thick wood they did not gain on their foes, and were hampered by their horses, twenty picked men were sent ahead. Among these twenty men was fierce, moody young Andrew Jackson. They found the Indians in camp, at daybreak, but fired from too great a distance; they killed one, wounded others, and scattered the rest, who left sixteen guns behind them in their flight.[12]

During these two years many people were killed, both in the settlements, on the trail through the woods, and on the Tennessee River, as they drifted down-stream in their boats. As always in these contests, the innocent suffered with the guilty. The hideous border ruffians, the brutal men who murdered peaceful Indians in times of truce and butchered squaws and children in time of war, fared no worse than unoffending settlers or men of mark who had been stanch friends of the Indian peoples. The Legislatures of the seaboard States, and Congress itself, passed laws to punish men who committed outrages on the Indians, but they could not be executed. Often the border people themselves interfered to prevent such outrages, or expressed disapproval of them, and rescued the victims; but they never visited the criminals with the stern and ruthless punishment which alone would have availed to check the crimes. For this failure they must receive hearty condemnation, and be adjudged to have forfeited much of the respect to which they were otherwise entitled by their strong traits and their deeds of daring. In the same way, but to an even greater degree, the peaceful Indians always failed to punish or restrain their brethren who were bent on murder and plunder; and the braves who went on the warpath made no discrimination between good and bad, strong and weak, man and woman, young and old.

One of the sufferers was General Joseph Martin, who had always been a firm friend of the red race, and had earnestly striven to secure justice for them.[13] He had gone for a few days to his plantation on the borders of Georgia, and during his visit the place was attacked by a Creek war party. They drove away his horses and wounded his overseer; but he managed to get into his house and stood at bay, shooting one warrior and beating off the others.

Among many attacks on the boats that went down the Tennessee it happens that a full record has been kept of one. A North Carolinian, named Brown, had served in the Revolutionary War with the troop of Light-Horse Harry Lee, and had received in payment a land certificate. Under this certificate he entered several tracts of Western land, including some on the Cumberland; and in the spring of 1788 he started by boat down the Tennessee, to take possession of his claims. He took with him his wife and his seven children; and three or four young men also went along. When they reached the Chickamauga towns the Indians swarmed out toward them in canoes. On Brown’s boat was a swivel, and with this and the rifles of the men they might have made good their defence; but as soon as the Indians saw them preparing for resistance they halted and hailed the crew, shouting out that they were peaceful and that in consequence of the recent Holston treaties war had ceased between the white men and the red. Brown was not used to Indians; he was deceived, and before he made up his mind what to do, the Indians were alongside, and many of them came aboard.[14] They then seized the boat and massacred the men, while the mother and children were taken ashore and hurried off in various directions by the Indians who claimed to have captured them. One of the boys, Joseph, long afterward wrote an account of his captivity. He was not treated with deliberate cruelty, though he suffered now and then from the casual barbarity of some of his captors, and toiled like an ordinary slave. Once he was doomed to death by a party of Indians, who made him undress so as to avoid bloodying his clothes; but they abandoned this purpose through fear of his owner, a half-breed and a dreaded warrior, who had killed many whites.

After about a year’s captivity, Joseph and his mother and sisters were all released, though at different times. Their release was brought about by Sevier. When in the fall of 1788 a big band of Creeks and Cherokees took Gillespie’s station, on Little River, a branch of the upper Tennessee, they carried off over a score of women and children. The four highest chiefs, headed by one with the appropriate name of Bloody Fellow, left behind a note addressed to Sevier and Martin, in which they taunted the whites with their barbarities, and especially with the murder of the friendly Cherokee chief Tassel, and warned them to move off the Indian land.[15] In response Sevier made one of his swift raids, destroyed an Indian town on the Coosa River, and took prisoner a large number of Indian women and children. These were well treated, but were carefully guarded, and were exchanged for the white women and children who were in captivity among the Indians. The Browns were among the fortunate people who were thus rescued from the horrors of Indian slavery. It is small wonder that the rough frontier people, whose wives and little ones, friends and neighbors, were in such manner rescued by No-lichucky Jack, should have looked with leniency on their darling leader’s shortcomings, even when these shortcomings took the form of failure to prevent or punish the massacre of friendly Indians.

The ravages of the Indians were precisely the same in character that they had always been, and always were until peace was won. There was the usual endless succession of dwellings burned, horses driven off, settlers slain while hunting or working, and immigrant parties ambushed and destroyed; and there was the same ferocious retaliation when opportunity offered. When Robertson’s hopes of peace gave out he took steps to keep the militia in constant readiness to meet the foe; for he was the military commander of the district. The county lieutenants—there were now several counties on the Cumberland—were ordered to see that their men were well mounted and ready to march at a moment’s notice; and were warned that this was a duty to which they must attend themselves, and not delegate it to their subalterns. The laws were to be strictly enforced; and the subalterns were promptly to notify their men of the time and place to meet. Those who failed to attend would be fined by court-martial. Frequent private musters were to be held; and each man was to keep ready a good gun, nine charges of powder and ball, and a spare flint. It was especially ordered that every marauding band should be followed; for thus some would be overtaken and signally punished, which would be a warning to the others.[16]

The wrath of the Creeks was directed chiefly against the Georgians. The Georgians were pushing steadily westward, and were grasping the Creek hunting-grounds with ferocious greed. They had repeatedly endeavored to hold treaties with the Creeks. On each occasion the chiefs and warriors of a few towns met them, and either declined to do anything, or else signed an agreement which they had no power to enforce. A sample treaty of this kind was that entered into at Galphinton in 1785. The Creeks had been solemnly summoned to meet representatives both of the Federal Congress and of Georgia; but on the appointed day only two towns out of a hundred were represented. The Federal Commissioners thereupon declined to enter into negotiations ; but those from Georgia persevered. By presents and strong drink they procured, and their government eagerly accepted, a large cession of land to which the two towns in question had no more title than was vested in all the others. The treaty was fraudulent. The Georgians knew that the Creeks who signed it were giving away what they did not possess; while the Indian signers cared only to get the goods they were offered, and were perfectly willing to make all kinds of promises, inasmuch as they had no intention whatever of keeping any of them. The other Creeks immediately repudiated the transaction, and the war dragged on its course of dismal savagery, growing fiercer year by year, and being waged on nearly even terms.[17]

Soon after the Constitution went into effect the National Government made a vigorous effort to conclude peace on a stable basis. Commissioners were sent to the Southern Indians. Under their persuasion McGillivray and the leading kings and chiefs of the Muscogee confederacy came to New York and there entered into a solemn treaty. In this treaty the Creeks acknowledged the United States, to the exclusion of Spain, as the sole power with which they could treat; they covenanted to keep faith and friendship with the Americans; and in return for substantial payments and guarantees they agreed to cede some land to the Georgians, though less than was claimed under the treaty of Galphinton.

This treaty was solemnly entered into by the recognized chiefs and leaders of the Creeks; and the Americans fondly hoped that it would end hostilities. It did nothing of the kind. Though the terms were very favorable to the Indians, so much so as to make the frontiersmen grumble, the Creeks scornfully repudiated the promises made on their behalf by their authorized representatives. Their motive in going to war, and keeping up the war, was not so much anger at the encroachments of the whites, as the eager thirst for glory, scalps, and plunder, to be won at the expense of the settlers. The war parties raided the frontier as freely as ever.[18] The simple truth was that the Creeks could be kept quiet only when cowed by physical fear. If the white men did not break the treaties, then the red men did. It is idle to dispute about the rights or wrongs of the contests. Two peoples, in two stages of culture which were separated by untold ages, stood face to face; one or the other had to perish; and the whites went forward from sheer necessity.

Throughout these years of Indian warfare the influx of settlers into the Holston and Cumberland regions steadily continued. Men in search of homes, or seeking to acquire fortunes by the purchase of wild lands, came more and more freely to the Cumberland country as the settlers therein increased in number and became better able to cope with and repel their savage foes. The settlements on the Holston grew with great rapidity as soon as the Franklin disturbances were at an end. As the people increased in military power, they increased also in material comfort and political stability. The crude social life deepened and broadened. Comfortable homes began to appear among the huts and hovels of the little towns. The outlying settlers still lived in wooden forts or stations; but where the population was thicker the terror of the Indians diminished, and the people lived in the ordinary style of frontier farmers.

Early in 1790 North Carolina finally ceded, and the National Government finally accepted, what is now Tennessee; and in May Congress passed a law for the government of this Territory Southwest of the River Ohio, as they chose to call it. This law followed on the general lines of the Ordinance of 1787 for the government of the Northwest; but there was one important difference. North Carolina had made her cession conditional upon the non-passage of any law tending to emancipate slaves. At that time such a condition was inevitable; but it doomed the Southwest to suffer under the curse of negro bondage.

William Blount of North Carolina was appointed Governor of the Territory, and at once proceeded to his new home to organize the civil government.[19] He laid out Knoxville as his capital, where he built a good house with a lawn in front. On his recommendation Sevier was appointed Brigadier-General for the Eastern District and Robertson for the Western; the two districts known as Washington and Miro respectively.

Blount was the first man of leadership in the West who was of Cavalier ancestry; for though so much is said of the Cavalier type in the Southern States it was everywhere insignificant in numbers, and comparatively few of the Southern men of mark have belonged to it. Blount was really of Cavalier blood. He was descended from a Royalist baronet, who was roughly handled by the Cromwellians, and whose three sons came to America. One of them settled in North Carolina, near Albemarle Sound, and from him came the new governor of the southwestern territory. Blount was a good-looking, well-bred man, with cultivated tastes; but he was also a man of force and energy, who knew well how to get on with the backwoodsmen, so that he soon became popular among them.

The West had grown with astonishing rapidity during the seven years following the close of the Revolutionary War. In 1790 there were in Kentucky nearly seventy-four thousand, and in the Southwest Territory nearly thirty-six thousand, souls. In the Northwest Territory the period of rapid growth had not begun, the old French inhabitants still forming the majority of the population.

The changes during these seven years had been vital. In the West, as elsewhere through the Union, the years succeeding the triumphant close of the Revolution were those which determined whether the victory was or was not worth winning. To throw off the yoke of the stranger was useless and worse than useless if we showed ourselves unable to turn to good account the freedom we had gained. Unless we could build up a great nation, and unless we possessed the power and self-restraint to frame an orderly and stable government, and to live under its laws when framed, the long years of warfare against the armies of the king were wasted and went for naught.

At the close of the Revolution the West was seething with sedition. There were three tasks before the Westerners; all three had to be accomplished, under pain of utter failure. It was their duty to invade and tame the shaggy wilderness; to drive back the Indians and their European allies; and to erect free governments which should form parts of the indissoluble Union. If the spirit of sedition, of lawlessness, and of wild individualism and separatism had conquered, then our history would merely have anticipated the dismal tale of the Spanish-American republics.

Viewed from this standpoint the history of the West during these eventful years has a special and peculiar interest. The inflow of the teeming throng of settlers was the most striking feature; but it was no more important than the half-seen struggle in which the Union party finally triumphed over the restless strivers for disunion. The extent and reality of the danger are shown by the numerous separatist movements. The intrigues in which so many of the leaders engaged with Spain, for the purpose of setting up barrier States, in some degree feudatory to the Spaniards; the movement in Kentucky for violent separation from Virginia, and the more secret movement for separation from the United States; the turbulent career of the commonwealth of Franklin; the attitude of isolation of interest from all their neighbors assumed by the Cumberland settlers:—all these various movements and attitudes were significant of the looseness of the Federal tie, and were ominous of the anarchic violence, weakness and misrule which would have followed the breaking of that tie.

The career of Franklin gave the clearest glimpse of what might have been; for it showed the gradual breaking down of law and order, the rise of factions ready to appeal to arms for success, the bitter broils with neighboring States, the reckless readiness to provoke war with the Indians, unheeding their rights or the woes such wars caused other frontier communities, and finally the entire willingness of the leaders to seek foreign aid when their cause was declining.

Had not the Constitution been adopted, and a more perfect union been thus called into being, the history of the State of Franklin would have been repeated in fifty communities from the Alleghanies to the Pacific coast; only these little States, instead of dying in the bud, would have gone through a rank flowering period of bloody and aimless revolutions, of silly and ferocious warfare against their neighbors, and of degrading alliance with the foreigner. From these and a hundred other woes the West no less than the East was saved by the knitting together of the States into a Nation.

This knitting process passed through its first and most critical stage in the West during the period intervening between the close of the war for independence and the year which saw the organization of the Southwest into a territory, ruled under the laws, and by the agent, of the National Government. During this time no step was taken toward settling the question of boundary lines with our British and Spanish neighbors; that remained as it had been, the Americans never abandoning claims which they had not yet the power to enforce, and which their antagonists declined to yield. Neither were the Indian wars settled; on the contrary, they had become steadily more serious, though for the first time a definite solution was promised by the active interference of the National Government. But a vast change had been made by the inflow of population; and an even vaster by the growing solidarity of the Western settlements with one another and with the Central Government. The settlement of the Northwest, so different in some of its characteristics from the settlement of the Southwest, had begun. Kentucky was about to become a State of the Union. The territories north and south of it were organized as part of the domain of the United States. The West was no longer a mere wilderness dotted with cabins and hamlets, whose backwoods builders were held by but the loosest tie of allegiance to any government, even their own. It had become an integral part of the mighty American Republic.

[1] Robertson MSS. Robertson to McGillivray, Nashville, 1788. “Those aggressors live in a different state and are governed by different laws, consequently we are not culpable for their misconduct.”

[2] Tennessee Hist. Soc. MSS. Andrew Jackson to D. Smith, introducing the Spanish agent, Captain Fargo, Feb. 13, 1789.

[3] State Dept. MSS., No. 180, p. 66; No. 151, p. 275. Also letters of Richard Winn to Knox, June 25, 1788; James White to Knox, Aug. 1, 1788; Joseph Martin to Knox, July 25, 1788.

[4] Robertson MSS. Robertson to McGillivray. Letters already cited.

[5] State Department MSS., No. 71, Vol. II. Robertson to Martin, Pleasant Grove, May 7, 1788.

[6] Ramsey, p. 504.

[7] State Department MSS., No. 71, Vol. II, p. 620. McGillivray to Bledsoe and Robertson; no date.

[8] McGillivray’s Letter of April 17, 1788, p. 521.

[9] Do., p. 625; McGillivray’s Letter of April 15, 1788.

[10] Robertson MSS. McGillivray to Robertson, December 1, 1788. This letter contains the cautious, non-committal answer to Robertson’s letter in which the latter proposed that Cumberland should be put under Spanish protection; the letter itself McGillivray had forwarded to the Spaniards.

[11] Putnam, 298.

[12] Haywood, 244.

[13] American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. 1. Martin to Knox, Jan. 15, 1789.

[14] Narrative of Col. Joseph Brown, “Southwestern Monthly,” Nashville, 1851, I, p. 14. The story was told when Brown was a very old man, and doubtless some of the details are inaccurate.

[15] Ramsey, 519.

[16] Robertson MSS., General Orders, April 5, 1789.

[17] American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. I, p. 15.

[18] Robertson MSS., Williamson to Robertson, Aug. 2, 1789, and Aug. 7, 1790. American State Papers, Indian Affairs, I, 81. Milfort, 131, 142.

[19] Blount MSS. Biography of Blount, in manuscript, compiled by one of his descendants from the family papers.

CHAPTER IV

ST. CLAIR’S DEFEAT, 1791

THE BACKWOODS folk, the stark hunters and tree-fellers, and the war-worn regulars who fought beside them in the forest, pushed ever westward the frontier of the Republic. Year after year each group of rough settlers and rough soldiers wrought its part in the great epic of wilderness conquest.

The people that for one or more generations finds its allotted task in the conquest of a continent has before it the possibility of splendid victory, and the certainty of incredible toil, suffering, and hardship. The opportunity is great indeed; but the chance of disaster is even greater. Success is for a mighty race, in its vigorous and masterful prime. It is an opportunity such as is offered to an army by a struggle against a powerful foe; only by great effort can defeat be avoided, but triumph means lasting honor and renown.

As it is in the battle, so it is in the infinitely greater contests where the fields of fight are continents and the ages form the measure of time. In actual life the victors win in spite of brutal blunders and repeated checks. Watched nearby, while the fight stamps to and fro, the doers and the deeds stand out naked and ugly. We see all too clearly the blood and sweat, the craft and cunning and blind luck, the raw cruelty and stupidity, the shortcomings of heart and hand, the mad abuse of victory. Strands of meanness and cowardice are everywhere shot through the warp of lofty and generous daring. There are failures bitter and shameful side by side with feats of triumphant prowess. Of those who venture in the contest some achieve success; others strive feebly and fail ignobly.

If a race is weak, if it is lacking in the physical and moral traits which go to the makeup of a conquering* people, it can not succeed. For three hundred years the Portuguese possessed footholds in South Africa; but they left to the English and Dutch the task of building free communities able to hold in fact as well as in name the country south of the Zambesi. Temperate South America is as fertile and healthy for the white man as temperate North America, and is so much less in extent as to offer a far simpler problem of conquest and settlement; yet the Spaniard, who came to the Plata two centuries before the American backwoodsman reached the Mississippi, scarcely made as much progress in a decade as his Northern rival did in a year.

The task must be given the race just at the time when it is ready for the undertaking. The whole future of the world would have been changed had the period of trans-oceanic expansion among the nations of Europe begun at a time when the Scandinavians or Germans were foremost in sea-trade and sea-war; if it had begun when the fleets of the Norsemen threatened all coasts, or when the Hanseatic League was in its prime. But in the actual event the days of Scandinavian supremacy at sea resulted in no spread of the Scandinavian tongue or culture; and the temporary maritime prosperity of the North German cities bore no permanent fruit of conquest for the German people. The only nations that profited by the expansion beyond the seas, and that built up in alien continents vast commonwealths with the law, the language, the creed, and the culture, no less than the blood, of the parent stocks, were those that during the centuries of expansion, possessed power on the ocean,—Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and, above all, England.

Even a strong race, in its prime, and given the task at the right moment, usually fails to perform it; for at the moment the immense importance of the opportunity is hardly ever understood, while the selfish interests of the individual and the generation are opposed to the interest of the race as a whole. Only the most far-seeing and high-minded statesmen can grasp the real weight, from the race-standpoint, of the possibilities which to the men of their day seem so trivial. The conquest and settlement rarely take place save under seldom-occurring conditions which happen to bring about identity of interest between the individual and the race. Dutch seamen knew the coasts of Australia and New Zealand generations before they were settled by the English, and had the people of Holland willed to take possession of them, the Dutch would now be one of the leading races of mankind; but they preferred the immediate gains to be derived from the ownership of the trade with the Spice Islands; and so for the unimportant over-lordship of a few patches of tropical soil, they bartered the chance of building a giant Dutch Republic in the South Seas. Had the Swedish successors of Gustavus Adolphus devoted their energies to colonization in America, instead of squabbling with Slavs and Germans for one or two wretched Baltic provinces, they could undoubtedly have built up in the new world a Sweden tenfold greater than that in the old. If France had sent to her possessions in America as many colonists as she sent soldiers to war for petty townships in Germany and Italy, the French would now be masters of half the territory north of the Rio Grande. England alone, because of a combination of causes, was able to use aright the chances given her for the conquest and settlement of the world’s waste spaces; and in consequence the English-speaking peoples now have before them a future more important than that of all the continental European peoples combined.

It is natural that most nations should be thus blind to the possibilities of the future. Few indeed are the men who can look a score of years into the future, and fewer still those who will make great sacrifices for the real, not the fancied, good of their children’s children; but in questions of race supremacy the look-ahead should be for centuries rather than decades, and the self-sacrifice of the individual must be for the good not of the next generation but perchance of the fourth or fifth in line of descent. The Frenchman and the Hollander of the seventeenth century could not even dimly see the possibilities that loomed vast and vague in the colonization of America and Australia; they did not have, and it was hardly possible that they should have, the remotest idea that it would be well for them to surrender, one the glory gained by his German conquests, the other the riches reaped from his East Indian trade, in order that three hundred years later huge unknown continents should be filled with French and Dutch commonwealths. No nation, taken as a whole, can ever see so far into the future; no nation, even if it could see such a future, would ever sacrifice so much to win it. Hitherto each race in turn has expanded only because the interests of a certain number of individuals of many succeeding generations have made them active and vigorous agents in the work of expansion.

This indifference on the part of individuals to the growth of the race is often nearly as marked in new as in old communities, although the very existence of these new communities depends upon that growth. It is strange to see how the new settlers in the new land tend to turn their faces, not toward the world before them, but toward the world they have left behind. Many of them, perhaps, wish rather to take parts in the struggles of the old civilized powers, than to do their share in laying the obscure but gigantic foundations of the empires of the future. The New Englander who was not personally interested in the lands beyond the Alleghanies often felt indifferent or hostile to the growth of the trans-montane America; and in their turn these over-mountain men, these Kentuckians and Tennesseeans, were concerned to obtain a port at the mouth of the Mississippi rather than the right to move westward to the Pacific. There were more men in the new communities than in the old who saw, however imperfectly, the grandeur of the opportunity and of the race-destiny; but there were always very many who did their share in working out their destiny grudgingly and under protest. The race as a whole, in its old homes and its new, learns the lesson with such difficulty that it can scarcely be said to be learnt at all until success or failure has done away with the need of learning it. But in the case of our own people, it has fortunately happened that the concurrence of the interests of the individual and of the whole organism has been normal throughout most of its history.

The attitude of the United States and Great Britain, as they faced one another in the Western wilderness at the beginning of the year 1791, is but another illustration of the truth of this fact. The British held the lake posts, and more or less actively supported the Indians in their efforts to bar the Americans from the Northwest. Nominally, they held the posts because the Americans had themselves left unfulfilled some of the conditions of the treaty of peace; but this was felt not to be the real reason, and the Americans loudly protested that their conduct was due to sheer hatred of the young Republic. The explanation was simpler. The British had no far-reaching design to prevent the spread and growth of the English-speaking people on the American continent. They cared nothing, one way or the other, for that spread and growth, and it is unlikely that they wasted a moment’s thought on the ultimate future of the race. All that they desired was to preserve the very valuable fur-trade of the region round the Great Lakes for their own benefit. They were acting from the motives of self-interest that usually control nations; and it never entered their heads to balance against these immediate interests the future of a nation many of whose members were to them mere foreigners.

The majority of the Americans, on their side, were exceedingly loth to enter into aggressive war with the Indians; but were reluctantly forced into the contest by the necessity of supporting the backwoodsmen. The frontier was pushed westward, not because the leading statesmen of America, or the bulk of the American people, foresaw the continental greatness of this country or strove for such greatness; but because the bordermen of the West, and the adventurous land-speculators of the East, were personally interested in acquiring new territory, and because, against their will, the governmental representatives of the nation were finally forced to make the interests of the Westerners their own. The people of the seaboard, the leaders of opinion in the coast towns and old-settled districts, were inclined to look eastward, rather than westward. They were interested in the quarrels of the Old-World nations; they were immediately concerned in the rights of the fisheries they jealously shared with England, or the trade they sought to secure with Spain. They did not covet the Indian lands. They had never heard of the Rocky Mountains—nobody had as yet,—they cared as little for the Missouri as for the Congo, and they thought of the Pacific Slope as a savage country, only to be reached by an ocean voyage longer than the voyage to India. They believed that they were entitled, under the treaty, to the country between the Alleghanies and the Great Lakes; but they were quite content to see the Indians remain in actual occupancy, and they had no desire to spend men and money in driving them out. Nevertheless, they were even less disposed to proceed to extremities against their own people, who in very fact were driving out the Indians; and this was the only alternative, for in the end they had to side with one or the other set of combatants.

The governmental authorities of the newly created Republic shared these feelings. They felt no hunger for the Indian lands; they felt no desire to stretch their boundaries and thereby add to their already heavy burdens and responsibilities. They wished to do strict justice to the Indians; the treaties they held with them were carried on with scrupulous fairness and were honorably lived up to by the United States officials. They strove to keep peace, and made many efforts to persuade the frontiersmen to observe the Indian boundary lines, and not to intrude on the territory in dispute; and they were quite unable to foresee the rapidity of the nation’s westward growth. Like the people of the Eastern seaboard, the men high in govermental authority were apt to look upon the frontiersmen with feelings dangerously akin to dislike and suspicion. Nor were these feelings wholly unjustifiable. The men who settle in a new country, and begin subduing the wilderness, plunge back into the very conditions from which the race has raised itself by the slow toil of ages. The conditions can not but tell upon them. Inevitably, and for more than one lifetime—perhaps for several generations—they tend to retrograde, instead of advancing. They drop away from the standard which highly civilized nations have reached. As with harsh and dangerous labor they bring the new lands up toward the level of the old, they themselves partly revert to their ancestral conditions; they sink back toward the state of their ages-dead barbarian forefathers. Few observers can see beyond this temporary retrogression into the future for which it is a preparation. There is small cause for wonder in the fact that so many of the leaders of Eastern thought looked with coldness upon the effort of the Westerners to push north of the Ohio.

Yet it was these Western frontiersmen who were the real and vital factors in the solution of the problems which so annoyed the British Monarchy and the American Republic. They eagerly craved the Indian lands; they would not be denied entrance to the thinly-peopled territory wherein they intended to make homes for themselves and their children. Rough, masterful, lawless, they were neither daunted by the prowess of the red warriors whose wrath they braved, nor awed by the displeasure of the Government whose solemn engagements they violated. The enormous extent of the frontier dividing the white settler from the savage, and the tangled inaccessibility of the country in which it everywhere lay, rendered it as difficult for the national authorities to control the frontiersmen as it was to chastise the Indians.

If the separation of interests between the thickly settled East and the sparsely settled West had been complete it may be that the East would have refused outright to support the West, in which case the advance would have been very slow and halting. But the separation was not complete. The frontiersmen were numerically important in some of the States, as in Virginia, Georgia, and even Pennsylvania and New York; and under a democratic system of government this meant that these States were more or less responsive to their demands. It was greatly to the interest of the frontiersmen that their demands should be gratified, while other citizens had no very concrete concern in the matter one way or the other. In addition to this, and even more important, was the fact that there were large classes of the population everywhere who felt much sense of identity with the frontiersmen, and sympathized with them. The fathers or grandfathers of these peoples had themselves been frontiersmen, and they were still under the influences of the traditions which told of a constant march westward through the vast forests, and a no less constant warfare with a hostile savagery. Moreover, in many of the communities there were people whose kinsmen or friends had gone to the border; and the welfare of these adventurers was a matter of more or less interest to those who had stayed behind. Finally, and most important of all, though the nation might be lukewarm originally, and might wish to prevent the settlers from trespassing on the Indian lands or entering into an Indian war, yet when the war had become of real moment and when victory was doubtful, the national power was sure to be used in favor of the hard-pressed pioneers. At first the authorities at the national capital would blame the whites, and try to temporize and make new treaties, or even threaten to drive back the settlers with a strong hand; but when the ravages of the Indians had become serious, when the bloody details were sent to homes in every part of the Union by letter after letter from the border, when the little newspapers began to publish accounts of the worst atrocities, when the county lieutenants of the frontier counties were clamoring for help, when the Congressmen from the frontier districts were appealing to Congress, and the governors of the States whose frontiers were molested were appealing to the President—then the feeling of race and national kinship rose, and the Government no longer hesitated to support in every way the hard-pressed wilderness vanguard of the American people.

The situation had reached this point by the year 1791. For seven years the Federal authorities had been vainly endeavoring to make some final settlement of the question by entering into treaties with the Northwestern and Southwestern tribes. In the earlier treaties the delegates from the Continental Congress asserted that the United States were invested with the fee of all the land claimed by the Indians. In the later treaties the Indian proprietorship of the lands was conceded.[1] This concession at the time seemed important to the whites; but the Indians probably never understood that there had been any change of attitude; nor did it make any practical difference, for, whatever the theory might be, the lands had eventually to be won, partly by whipping the savages in fight, partly by making it better worth their while to remain at peace than to go to war.

The Federal officials under whose authority these treaties were made had no idea of the complexity of the problem. In 1789, the Secretary of War, the New Englander Knox, solemnly reported to the President that, if the treaties were only observed and the Indians conciliated, they would become attached to the United States, and the expense of managing them, for the next half century, would be only some fifteen thousand dollars a year.[2] He probably represented, not unfairly, the ordinary Eastern view of the matter. He had not the slightest idea of the rate at which the settlements were increasing, though he expected that tracts of Indian territory would from time to time be acquired. He made no allowance for a growth so rapid that within the half-century six or eight populous States were to stand within the Indian-owned wilderness of his day. He utterly failed to grasp the central features of the situation, which were that the settlers needed the land, and were bound to have it, within a few years; and that the Indians would not give it up, under no matter what treaty, without an appeal to arms.

In the South the United States Commissioners, in endeavoring to conclude treaties with the Creeks and Cherokees, had been continually hampered by the attitude of Georgia and the Franklin frontiersmen. The Franklin men made war and peace with the Cherokees just as they chose, and utterly refused to be bound by the treaties concluded on behalf of the United States. Georgia played the same part with regard to the Creeks. The Georgian authorities paid no heed whatever to the desires of Congress, and negotiated on their own account a series of treaties with the Creeks at Augusta, Galphinton, and Shoulderbone, in 1783, 1785, and 1786. But these treaties amounted to nothing, for nobody could tell exactly which towns or tribes owned a given tract of land, or what individuals were competent to speak for the Indians as a whole; the Creeks and Cherokees went through the form of surrendering the same territory on the Oconee.[3] The Georgians knew that the Indians with whom they treated had no power to surrender the lands; but all they wished was some shadowy color of title, that might serve as an excuse for their seizing the coveted territory. On the other hand, the Creeks, loudly though they declaimed against the methods of the Georgian treaty-makers, themselves shamelessly disregarded the solemn engagements which their authorized representatives made with the United States. Moreover their murderous forays on the Georgian settlers were often as unprovoked as were the aggressions of the brutal Georgia borderers.

The Creeks were prompt to seize every advantage given by the impossibility of defining the rights of the various component parts of their loosely knit confederacy. They claimed or disclaimed responsibility as best suited their plans for the moment. When at Galphinton two of the Creek towns signed away a large tract of territory, McGillivray, the famous half-breed, and the other chiefs, loudly protested that the land belonged to the whole confederacy, and that the separate towns could do nothing save by consent of all. But in May, 1787, a party of Creeks from the upper towns made an unprovoked foray into Georgia, killed two settlers, and carried off a negro and fourteen horses; the militia who followed them attacked the first Indians they fell in with, who happened to be from the lower towns, and killed twelve; whereupon the same chiefs disavowed all responsibility for the deeds of the Upper Town warriors, and demanded the immediate surrender of the militia who had killed the Lower Town people—to the huge indignation of the Governor of Georgia.[4]

The United States Commissioners were angered by the lawless greed with which the Georgians grasped at the Indian lands; and they soon found that though the Georgians were always ready to clamor for help from the United States against the Indians, in the event of hostilities, they were equally prompt to defy the United States authorities if the latter strove to obtain justice for the Indians, or if the treaties concluded by the Federal and the State authorities seemed likely to conflict.[5] The Commissioners were at first much impressed by the letters sent them by McGillivray, and the “talks” they received through the Scotch, French, and English half-breed interpreters[6] from the outlandishly named Muscogee chiefs—the Hallowing King of the War Towns, the Fat King of the White or Peace Towns, the White Bird King, the Mad Dog King, and many more. But they soon found that the Creeks were quite as much to blame as the Georgians, and were playing fast and loose with the United States, promising to enter into treaties, and then refusing to attend; their flagrant and unprovoked breaches of faith causing intense anger and mortification to the Commissioners, whose patient efforts to serve them were so ill rewarded.[7] Moreover, to offset the Indian complaints of lands taken from them under fraudulent treaties, the Georgians submitted lists[8] of hundreds of whites and blacks killed, wounded, or captured, and of thousands of horses, horned cattle, and hogs butchered or driven off by Indian war parties. The puzzled Commissioners having at first been inclined to place the blame of the failure of peace negotiations on the Georgians, next shifted the responsibility to McGillivray, reporting that the Creeks were strongly in favor of peace. The event proved that they were in error; for after McGillivray and his fellow chiefs had come to New York, in the summer of 1790, and concluded a solemn treaty of peace, the Indians whom they nominally represented refused to be bound by it in any way, and continued without a change their war of rapine and murder.

In truth the red men were as little disposed as the white to accept a peace on any terms that were possible. The Secretary of War, who knew nothing of Indians by actual contact, wrote that it would be indeed pleasing “to a philosophic mind to reflect that, instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population … we had imparted our knowledge of cultivation and the arts to the aboriginals of the country,” thus preserving and civilizing them;[9] and the public men who represented districts remote from the frontier shared these views of large, though vague, beneficence. But neither the white frontiersmen nor their red antagonists possessed “philosophic minds.” They represented two stages of progress, ages apart; and it would have needed many centuries to bring the lower to the level of the higher. Both sides recognized the fact that their interests were incompatible; and that the question of their clashing rights had to be settled by the strong hand.

In the Northwest matters culminated sooner than in the Southwest. The Georgians, and the settlers along the Tennessee and Cumberland, were harassed rather than seriously menaced by the Creek war parties; but in the North the more dangerous Indians of the Miami, the Wabash, and the Lakes gathered in bodies so large as fairly to deserve the name of armies. Moreover, the pressure of the white advance was far heavier in the North. The pioneers who settled in the Ohio basin were many times as numerous as those who settled on the lands west of the Oconee and north of the Cumberland, and were fed from States much more populous. The advance was stronger, the resistance more desperate; naturally the open break occurred where the strain was most intense.

There was fierce border warfare in the South. In the North there were regular campaigns carried on, and pitched battles fought, between Federal armies as large as those commanded by Washington at Trenton or Greene at Eutaw Springs, and bodies of Indian warriors more numerous than had ever yet appeared on any single field.

The newly created Government of the United States was very reluctant to make formal war on the Northwestern Indians. Not only were President Washington and the National Congress honorably desirous of peace, but they were hampered for funds, and dreaded any extra expense. Nevertheless they were forced into war. Throughout the years 1789 and 1790 an increasing volume of appeals for help came from the frontier countries. The governor of the Northwestern Territory, the brigadier-general of the troops on the Ohio, the members of the Kentucky Convention, and all the county lieutenants of Kentucky, the lieutenants of the frontier counties of Virginia proper, the representatives from the counties, the field officers of the different districts, the General Assembly of Virginia, all sent bitter complaints and long catalogues of injuries to the President, the Secretary of War, and the two Houses of Congress; complaints which were re-doubled after Harmar’s failure. With heavy hearts the national authorities prepared for war.[10]

Their decision was justified by the redoubled fury of the Indian raids during the early part of 1791. Among others the settlements near Marietta were attacked, a day or two after the new year began, in bitter winter weather. A dozen persons, including a woman and two children, were killed, and five men were taken prisoners. The New England settlers, though brave and hardy, were unused to Indian warfare. They were taken completely by surprise, and made no effective resistance; the only Indian hurt was wounded with a hatchet by the wife of a frontier hunter in the employ of the company.[11] There were some twenty-five Indians in the attacking party; they were Wyandots and Delawares, who had been mixing on friendly terms with the settlers throughout the preceding summer, and so knew how best to deliver the assault. The settlers had not only treated these Indians with much kindness, but had never wronged any of the red race; and had been lulled into a foolish feeling of security by the apparent good-will of the treacherous foes. The assault was made in the twilight, on the 2d of January, the Indians crossing the frozen Muskingum and stealthily approaching a blockhouse and two or three cabins. The inmates were frying meat for supper, and did not suspect harm, offering food to the Indians; but the latter, once they were within doors, dropped the garb of friendliness, and shot or tomahawked all save a couple of men who escaped and the five who were made prisoners. The captives were all taken to the Miami, or Detroit, and as usual were treated with much kindness and humanity by the British officers and traders with whom they came in contact. McKee, the British Indian agent, who was always ready to incite the savages to war against the Americans as a nation, but who was quite as ready to treat them kindly as individuals, ransomed one prisoner; the latter went to his Massachusetts home to raise the amount of his ransom, and returned to Detroit to refund it to his generous rescuer. Another prisoner was ransomed by a Detroit trader, and worked out his ransom in Detroit itself. Yet another was redeemed from captivity by the famous Iroquois chief Brant, who was ever a terrible and implacable foe, but a great-hearted and kindly victor. The fourth prisoner died; while the Indians took so great a liking to the fifth that they would not let him go, but adopted him into the tribe, made him dress as they did, and, in a spirit of pure friendliness, pierced his ears and nose. After Wayne’s treaty he was released, and returned to Marietta to work at his trade as a stone mason, his bored nose and slit ears serving as mementos of his captivity.

The squalid little town of Cincinnati also suffered from the Indian war parties in the spring of this year,[12] several of the townsmen being killed by the savages, who grew so bold that they lurked through the streets at nights, and lay in ambush in the gardens where the garrison of Fort Washington raised their vegetables. One of the Indian attacks, made upon a little palisaded “station” which had been founded by a man named Dunlop, some seventeen miles from Cincinnati, was noteworthy because of an act of not uncommon cruelty by the Indians. In the station there were some regulars. Aided by the settlers they beat back their foes; whereupon the enraged savages brought one of their prisoners within earshot of the walls and tortured him to death. The torture began at midnight, and the screams of the wretched victim were heard until daylight.[13]

Until this year the war was not general. One of the most bewildering problems to be solved by the Federal officers on the Ohio was to find out which tribes were friendly and which hostile. Many of the inveterate enemies of the Americans were as forward in professions of friendship as the peaceful Indians, and were just as apt to be found at the treaties, or lounging about the settlements; and this widespread treachery and deceit made the task of the army officers puzzling to a degree. As for the frontiersmen, who had no means whatever of telling a hostile from a friendly tribe, they followed their usual custom and lumped all the Indians, good and bad, together; for which they could hardly be blamed. Even St. Clair, who had small sympathy with the backwoodsmen, acknowledged[14] that they could not and ought not to submit patiently to the cruelties and depredations of the savages; “they are in the habit of retaliation, perhaps without attending percisely to the nations from which the injuries are received,” said he. A long course of such aggressions and retaliations resulted, by the year 1791, in all the Northwestern Indians going on the warpath. The hostile tribes had murdered and plundered the frontiersmen; the vengeance of the latter, as often as not, had fallen on friendly tribes; and these justly angered friendly tribes usually signalized their taking the red hatchet by some act of treacherous hostility directed against the settlers who had not molested them.

In the late winter of 1791 the hitherto friendly Delawares who hunted or traded along the western frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia proper took this manner of showing that they had joined the open foes of the Americans. A big band of warriors spread up and down the Alleghany for about forty miles, and on the 9th of February attacked all the outlying settlements. The Indians who delivered this attack had long been on intimate terms with the Alleghany settlers, who were accustomed to see them in and about their houses; and as the savages acted with seeming friendship to the last moment, they were able to take the settlers completely unawares, so that no effective resistance was made.[15] Some settlers were killed and some captured. Among the captives was a lad named John Brickell, who, though at first maltreated, and forced to run the gantlet, was afterward adopted into the tribe, and was not released until after Wayne’s victory. After his adoption, he was treated with the utmost kindness, and conceived a great liking for his captors, admiring their many good qualities, especially their courage and their kindness to their children. Long afterward he wrote down his experiences, which possess a certain value as giving, from the Indian standpoint, an account of some of the incidents of the forest warfare of the day.

The warriors who had engaged in this raid on their former friends, the settlers along the Alleghany, retreated two or three days’ journey into the wilderness to an appointed place, where they found their families. One of the Girtys was with the Indians. No sooner had the last of the warriors come in, with their scalps and prisoners, including the boy Brickell, than ten of their number deliberately started back to Pittsburg, to pass themselves as friendly Indians, and trade. In a fortnight they returned laden with goods of various kinds, including whiskey. Some of the inhabitants, sore from disaster, suspected that these Indians were only masquerading as friendly, and prepared to attack them; but one of the citizens warned them of their danger and they escaped. Their effrontery was as remarkable as their treachery and duplicity. They had suddenly attacked and massacred settlers by whom they had never been harmed, and with whom they preserved an appearance of entire friendship up to the very moment of the assault. Then, their hands red with the blood of their murdered friends, they came boldly into Pittsburg, among the near neighbors of these same murdered men, and stayed there several days to trade, pretending to be peaceful allies of the whites. With savages so treacherous and so ferocious it was a mere impossibility for the borderers to distinguish the hostile from the friendly, as they hit out blindly to revenge the blows that fell upon them from unknown hands. Brutal though the frontiersmen often were, they never employed the systematic and deliberate bad faith which was a favorite weapon with even the best of the red tribes.

The people who were out of reach of the Indian tomahawk, and especially the Federal officers, were often unduly severe in judging the borderers for their deeds of retaliation. Brickell’s narrative shows that the parties of seemingly friendly Indians who came in to trade were sometimes—and indeed in this year 1791 it was probable they were generally—composed of Indians who were engaged in active hostilities against the settlers, and who were always watching for a chance to murder and plunder. On March 9th, a month after the Delawares had begun their attacks, the grim backwoods captain Brady, with some of his Virginian rangers, fell on a party of them who had come to a block-house to trade, and killed four. The Indians asserted that they were friendly, and both the Federal Secretary of War and the Governor of Pennsylvania denounced the deed, and threatened the offenders; but the frontiersmen stood by them.[16] Soon afterward a delegation of chiefs from the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois arrived at Fort Pitt, and sent a message to the President, complaining of the murder of these alleged friendly Indians.[17] On the very day these Seneca chiefs started on their journey home another Delaware war party killed nine settlers, men, women, and children, within twenty miles of Fort Pitt; which so enraged the people of the neighborhood that the lives of the Senecas were jeopardized. The United States authorities were particularly anxious to keep at peace with the Six Nations, and made repeated efforts to treat with them; but the Six Nations stood sullenly aloof, afraid to enter openly into the struggle, and yet reluctant to make a firm peace or cede any of their lands.[18] The intimate relations between the Indians and the British at the Lake Posts continued to perplex and anger the Americans. While the frontiers were being mercilessly ravaged, the same Indians who were committing the ravages met in council with the British agent, Alexander McKee, at the Miami Rapids; the council being held in this neighborhood for the special benefit of the very towns which were most hostile to the Americans, and which had been partially destroyed by Harmar the preceding fall. The Indian war was at its height, and the murderous forays never ceased throughout the spring and summer. McKee came to Miami in April, and was forced to wait nearly three months, because of the absence of the Indian war parties, before the principal chiefs and headmen gathered to meet him. At last, on July 1st, they were all assembled; not only the Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, Ottawas, Pottawatomies and others who had openly taken the hatchet against the Americans, but also representatives of the Six Nations, and tribes of savages from lands so remote that they carried no guns; but warred with bows, spears, and tomahawks, and were clad in buffalo-robes instead of blankets. McKee in his speech to them did not incite them to war. On the contrary, he advised them, in guarded language, to make peace with the United States; but only upon terms consistent with their “honor and interest.” He assured them that, whatever they did, he wished to know what they desired; and that the sole purpose of the British was to promote the welfare of the confederated Indians. Such very cautious advice was not of a kind to promote peace; and the goods furnished the savages at the council included not only cattle, corn, and tobacco, but also quantities of powder and balls.[19]

The chief interest of the British was to preserve the fur trade for their merchants, and it was mainly for this reason that they clung so tenaciously to the Lake Posts. For their purposes it was essential that the Indians should remain lords of the soil. They preferred to see the savages at peace with the Americans, provided that in this way they could keep their lands; but, whether through peace or war, they wished the lands to remain Indian, and the Americans to be barred from them. While they did not at the moment advise war, their advice to make peace was so faintly uttered, and so hedged round with conditions as to be of no weight; and they furnished the Indians not only with provisions but with munitions of war. While McKee, and other British officers, were at the Miami Rapids, holding councils with the Indians, and issuing to them goods and weapons, bands of braves were continually returning from forays against the American frontier, bringing in scalps and prisoners; and the wilder subjects of the British King, like the Girtys, and some of the French from Detroit, went off with the war parties on their forays.[20] The authorities at the capital of the new Republic were deceived by the warmth with which the British insisted that they were striving to bring about a peace; but the frontiersmen were not deceived, and they were right in their belief that the British were really the mainstay and support of the Indians in their warfare.

Peace could only be won by the unsheathed sword. Even the National Government was reluctantly driven to this view. As all the Northwestern tribes were banded in open war, it was useless to let the conflict remain a succession of raids and counter-raids. Only a severe stroke, delivered by a formidable army, could cow the tribes. It was hopeless to try to deliver such a crippling blow with militia alone, and it was very difficult for the infant Government to find enough money or men to equip an army composed exclusively of regulars. Accordingly preparations were made for a campaign with a mixed force of regulars, special levies, and militia; and St. Clair, already Governor of the Northwestern Territory, was put in command of the army as Major-General.

Before the army was ready the Federal Government was obliged to take other measures for the defence of the border. Small bodies of rangers were raised from among the frontier militia, being paid at the usual rate for soldiers in the army, a net sum of about two dollars a month while in service. In addition, on the repeated and urgent request of the frontiersmen, a few of the most active hunters and best woodsmen, men like Brady, were enlisted as scouts, being paid six or eight times the ordinary rate. These men, because of their skill in woodcraft and their thorough knowledge of Indian fighting, were beyond comparison more valuable than ordinary militia or regulars, and were prized very highly by the frontiersmen.[21]

Besides thus organizing the local militia for defence, the President authorized the Kentuckians to undertake two offensive expeditions against the Wabash Indians so as to prevent them from giving aid to the Miami tribes, whom St. Clair was to attack. Both expeditions were carried on by bands of mounted volunteers, such as had followed Clark on his various raids. The first was commanded by Brigadier-General Charles Scott; Colonel John Hardin led his advance guard, and Wilkinson was second in command. Toward the end of May, Scott crossed the Ohio, at the head of eight hundred horse-riflemen, and marched rapidly and secretly toward the Wabash towns. A mounted Indian discovered the advance of the Americans and gave the alarm; and so most of the Indians escaped just as the Kentucky riders fell on the town. But little resistance was offered by the surprised and outnumbered savages. Only five Americans were wounded, while of the Indians thirty-two were slain, as they fought or fled, and forty-one prisoners, chiefly women and children, were brought in, either by Scott himself or by his detachments under Hardin and Wilkinson. Several towns were destroyed, and the growing corn cut down. There were not a few French living in the town, in well-finished log-houses, which were burned with the wigwams.[22] The second expedition was under the command of Wilkinson, and consisted of over five hundred men. He marched in August, and repeated Scott’s feats, again burning down two or three of the towns, and destroying the goods and the crops. He lost three or four men killed or wounded, but killed ten Indians and captured thirty.[23] In both expeditions the volunteers behaved well and committed no barbarous act, except that in the confusion of the actual onslaught two or three non-combatants were slain. The Wabash Indians were cowed and disheartened by their punishment, and in consequence gave no aid to the Miami tribes; but beyond this the raids accomplished nothing, and brought no nearer the wished-for time of peace.

Meanwhile St. Clair was striving vainly to hasten the preparations for his own far more formidable task. There was much delay in forwarding him the men and the provisions and munitions. Congress hesitated and debated; the Secretary of War, hampered by a newly created office and insufficient means, did not show to advantage in organizing the campaign, and was slow in carrying out his plans; while there was positive dereliction of duty on the part of the quartermaster, and the contractors proved both corrupt and inefficient. The army was often on short commons, lacking alike food for the men and fodder for the horses; the powder was poor, the axes useless, the tents and clothing nearly worthless; while the delays were so extraordinary that the troops did not make the final move from Fort Washington until mid-September.[24]

St. Clair himself was broken in health; he was a sick, weak, elderly man, high minded, and zealous to do his duty, but totally unfit for the terrible responsibilities of such an expedition against such foes. The troops were of wretched stuff. There were two small regiments of regular infantry, the rest of the army being composed of six months’ levies and of militia ordered out for this particular campaign. The pay was contemptible. Each private was given three dollars a month, from which ninety cents was deducted, leaving a net payment of two dollars and ten cents a month.[25] Sergeants netted three dollars and sixty cents; while the lieutenants received twenty-two, the captains thirty, and the colonels sixty dollars. The mean parsimony of the nation in paying such low wages to men about to be sent on duties at once very arduous and very dangerous met its fit and natural reward. Men of good bodily powers, and in the prime of life, and especially men able to do the rough work of frontier farmers, could not be hired to fight Indians in unknown forests for two dollars a month. Most of the recruits were from the streets and prisons of the seaboard cities. They were hurried into a campaign against peculiarly formidable foes before they had acquired the rudiments of a soldier’s training, and, of course, they never even understood what woodcraft meant.[26] The officers were men of courage, as in the end most of them showed by dying bravely on the field of battle; but they were utterly untrained themselves, and had no time in which to train their men. Under such conditions it did not need keen vision to foretell disaster. Harmar had learned a bitter lesson the preceding year; he knew well what Indians could do, and what raw troops could not; and he insisted with emphasis that the only possible outcome to St. Clair’s expedition was defeat.

As the raw troops straggled to Pittsburg they were shipped down the Ohio to Fort Washington; and St. Clair made the headquarters of his army at a new fort some twenty-five miles northward, which he christened Fort Hamilton. During September the army slowly assembled; two small regiments of regulars, two of six months’ levies, a number of Kentucky militia, a few cavalry, and a couple of small batteries of light guns. After wearisome delays, due mainly to the utter inefficiency of the quartermaster and contractor, the start for the Indian towns was made on October 4th.

The army trudged slowly through the deep woods and across the wet prairies, cutting out its own road, and making but five or six miles a day. It was in a wilderness which abounded with game; both deer and bear frequently ran into the very camps; and venison was a common food.[27] On October 13th a halt was made to build another little fort, christened in honor of Jefferson. There were further delays, caused by the wretched management of the commissariat department, and the march was not resumed until the 24th, the numerous sick being left in Fort Jefferson. Then the army once more stumbled northward through the wilderness. The regulars, though mostly raw recruits, had been reduced to some kind of discipline; but the six months’ levies were almost worse than the militia.[28] Owing to the long delays, and to the fact that they had been enlisted at various times, their terms of service were expiring day by day; and they wished to go home, and tried to, while the militia deserted in squads and bands. Those that remained were very disorderly. Two who attempted to desert were hanged; and another, who shot a comrade, was hanged also; but even this severity in punishment failed to stop the demoralization.

With such soldiers there would have been grave risk of disaster under any commander; but St. Clair’s leadership made the risk a certainty. There was Indian sign, old and new, all through the woods; and the scouts and stragglers occasionally interchanged shots with small parties of braves, and now and then lost a man, killed or captured. It was, therefore, certain that the savages knew every movement of the army, which, as it slowly neared the Miami towns, was putting* itself within easy striking range of the most formidable Indian confederacy in the Northwest. The density of the forest was such that only the utmost watchfulness could prevent the foe from approaching within arm’s length unperceived. It behooved St. Clair to be on his guard, and he had been warned by Washington, who had never forgotten the scenes of Braddock’s defeat, of the danger of a surprise. But St. Clair was broken down by the worry and by continued sickness; time and again it was doubtful whether he could so much as stay with the army. The second in command, Major-General Richard Butler, was also sick most of the time; and, like St. Clair, he possessed none of the qualities of leadership save courage. The whole burden fell on the Adjutant-General, Colonel Winthrop Sargent, an old Revolutionary officer; without him the expedition would probably have failed in ignominy even before the Indians were reached, and he showed not only cool courage but ability of a good order; yet in the actual arrangements for battle he was, of course, unable to remedy the blunders of his superiors.

St. Clair should have covered his front and flanks for miles around with scouting parties; but he rarely sent any out, and, thanks to letting the management of those that did go devolve on his subordinates, and to not having their reports made to him in person, he derived no benefit from what they saw. He had twenty Chickasaws with him; but he sent these off on an extended trip, lost touch of them entirely, and never saw them again until after the battle. He did not seem to realize that he was himself in danger of attack. When some fifty miles or so from the Miami towns, on the last day of October, sixty of the militia deserted; and he actually sent back after them one of his two regular regiments, thus weakening by one half the only trustworthy portion of his force.[29]

On November 3d the doomed army, now reduced to a total of about fourteen hundred men, camped on the eastern fork of the Wabash, high up, where it was but twenty yards wide. There was snow on the ground and the little pools were skimmed with ice. The camp was on a narrow rise of ground, where the troops were cramped together, the artillery and most of the horse in the middle. On both flanks, and along most of the rear, the ground was low and wet. All around, the wintry woods lay in frozen silence. In front the militia were thrown across the creek, and nearly a quarter of a mile beyond the rest of the troops.[30] Parties of Indians were seen during the afternoon, and they skulked around the lines at night, so that the sentinels frequently fired at them; yet neither St. Clair nor Butler took any adequate measures to ward off the impending blow. It is improbable that, as things actually were at this time, they could have won a victory over their terrible foes; but they might have avoided overwhelming disaster.

On November 4th the men were under arms, as usual, by dawn, St. Clair intending to throw up intrenchments and then make a forced march in light order against the Indian towns. But he was forestalled. Soon after sunrise, just as the men were dismissed from parade, a sudden assault was made upon the militia, who lay unprotected beyond the creek. The unexpectedness and fury of the onset and heavy firing, and the appalling whoops and yells of the throngs of painted savages threw the militia into disorder. After a few minutes’ resistance they broke and fled in wild panic to the camp of the regulars, among whom they drove in a frightened herd, spreading dismay and confusion.

The drums beat, and the troops sprang to arms, as soon as they heard the heavy firing at the front; and their volleys for a moment checked the onrush of the plumed woodland warriors. But the check availed nothing. The braves filed off to one side and the other, completely surrounded the camp, killed or drove in the guards and pickets, and then advanced close to the main lines.[31]

A furious battle followed. After the first onset the Indians fought in silence, no sound coming from them save the incessant rattle of their fire, as they crept from log to log, from tree to tree, ever closer and closer. The soldiers stood in close order, in the open; their musketry and artillery fire made a tremendous noise, but did little damage to a foe they could hardly see. Now and then through the hanging smoke terrible figures flitted, painted black and red, the feathers of the hawk and eagle braided in their long scalp-locks; but save for these glimpses, the soldiers knew the presence of their sombre enemy only from the fearful rapidity with which their comrades fell dead and wounded in the ranks. They never even knew the numbers or leaders of the Indians. At the time it was supposed that they outnumbered the whites; but it is probable that the reverse was the case, and it may even be that they were not more than half as numerous. It is said that the chief who led them, both in council and battle, was Little Turtle, the Miami. At any rate, there were present all the chiefs and picked warriors of the Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots, and Miamis, and all the most reckless and adventurous young braves from among the Iroquois and the Indians of the Upper Lakes, as well as many of the ferocious whites and half-breeds who dwelt in the Indian villages.

The Indians fought with the utmost boldness and ferocity, and with the utmost skill and caution. Under cover of the smoke of the heavy but harmless fire from the army they came up so close that they shot the troops down as hunters slaughter a herd of standing buffalo. Watching their chance, they charged again and again with the tomahawk, gliding into close quarters while their bewildered foes were still blindly firing into the smoke-shrouded woods. The men saw no enemy as they stood in the ranks to load and shoot; in a moment, without warning, dark faces frowned through the haze, the war-axes gleamed, and on the frozen ground the weapons clattered as the soldiers fell. As the comrades of the fallen sprang forward to avenge them, the lithe warriors vanished as rapidly as they had appeared; and once more the soldiers saw before them only the dim forest and the shifting smoke wreaths, with vague half glimpses of the hidden foe, while the steady singing of the Indian bullets never ceased, and on every hand the bravest and steadiest fell one by one.

At first the army as a whole fought firmly; indeed there was no choice, for it was ringed by a wall of flame. The officers behaved very well, cheering and encouraging their men; but they were the special targets of the Indians, and fell rapidly. St. Clair and Butler by their cool fearlessness in the hour of extreme peril made some amends for their shortcomings as commanders. They walked up and down the lines from flank to flank, passing and repassing one another; for the two lines of battle were facing outward, and each general was busy trying to keep his wing from falling back. St. Clair’s clothes were pierced by eight bullets, but he was himself untouched. He wore a blanket coat with a hood; he had a long queue, and his thick gray hair flowed from under his three-cornered hat; a lock of his hair was carried off by a bullet.[32] Several times he headed the charges, sword in hand. General Butler had his arm broken early in the fight, but he continued to walk to and fro along the line, his coat off and the wounded arm in a sling. Another bullet struck him in the side, inflicting a mortal wound; and he was carried to the middle of the camp, where he sat propped up by knapsacks. Men and horses were falling around him at every moment. St. Clair sent an aid, Lieutenant Ebenezer Denny, to ask how he was; he displayed no anxiety, and answered that he felt well. While speaking, a young cadet, who stood nearby, was hit on the kneecap by a spent ball and at the shock cried aloud; whereat the General laughed so that his wounded side shook. The aid left him; and there is no further certain record of his fate except that he was slain; but it is said that in one of the Indian rushes a warrior bounded toward him and sunk the tomahawk in his brain before any one could interfere.

Instead of being awed by the bellowing artillery, the Indians made the gunners a special object of attack. Man after man was picked off, until every officer was killed but one, who was wounded; and most of the privates also were slain or disabled. The artillery was thus almost silenced, and the Indians emboldened by success swarmed forward and seized the guns, while at the same time a part of the left wing of the army began to shrink back. But the Indians were now on comparatively open ground, where the regulars could see them and get at them; and under St. Clair’s own leadership the troops rushed fiercely at the savages, with fixed bayonets, and drove them back to cover. By this time the confusion and disorder were great; while from every hollow and grass patch, from behind every stump and tree and fallen log, the Indians continued their fire. Again and again the officers led forward the troops in bayonet charges; and at first the men followed them with a will. Each charge seemed for a moment to be successful, the Indians rising in swarms and running in headlong flight from the bayonets. In one of the earliest, in which Colonel Darke led his battalion, the Indians were driven several hundred yards across the branch of the Wabash; but when the Colonel halted and rallied his men, he found that the savages had closed in behind him, and he had to fight his way back, while the foe he had been driving at once turned and harassed his rear. He was himself wounded, and lost most of his command. On re-entering camp he found the Indians again in possession of the artillery and baggage, from which they were again driven; they had already scalped the slain who lay about the guns. Major Thomas Butler had his thigh broken by a bullet; but he continued on horseback, in command of his battalion, until the end of the fight, and led his men in one of the momentarily successful bayonet charges. The only regular regiment present lost every officer killed or wounded. The commander of the Kentucky militia, Colonel Oldham, was killed early in the action, while trying to rally his men and damning them for cowards.

The charging troops could accomplish nothing permanent. The men were too clumsy and ill-trained in forest warfare to overtake their fleet, half-naked antagonists. The latter never received the shock; but though they fled they were nothing daunted, for they turned the instant the battalion did, and followed firing. They skipped out of reach of the bayonets, and came back as they pleased; and they were only visible when raised by a charge.

Among the pack-horsemen were some who were accustomed to the use of the rifle and to life in the woods; and these fought well. One, named Benjamin Van Cleve, kept a journal, in which he described what he saw of the fight.[33] He had no gun, but five minutes after the firing began he saw a soldier near him with his arm swinging useless; and he borrowed the wounded man’s musket and cartridges. The smoke had settled to within three feet of the ground, so he knelt, covering himself behind a tree, and only fired when he saw an Indian’s head, or noticed one running from cover to cover. He fired away all his ammunition, and the bands of his musket flew off; he picked up another just as two levy officers ordered a charge, and followed the charging party at a run. By this time the battalions were broken, and only some thirty men followed the officers. The Indians fled before the bayonets until they reached a ravine filled with down timber; whereupon they halted behind the impenetrable tangle of fallen logs. The soldiers also halted, and were speedily swept away by the fire of the Indians, whom they could not reach; but Van Cleve, showing his skill as a woodsman, covered himself behind a small tree, and gave back shot for shot until his ammunition was gone. Before this happened his less skilful companions had been slain or driven off, and he ran at full speed back to camp. Here he found that the artillery had been taken and re-taken again and again. Stricken men lay in heaps everywhere, and the charging troops were once more driving the Indians across the creek in front of the camp. Van Cleve noticed that the dead officers and soldiers who were lying about the guns had all been scalped and that “the Indians had not been in a hurry, for their hair was all skinned off.” Another of the packers who took part in the fight, one Thomas Irwin, was struck with the spectacle offered by the slaughtered artillerymen, and with grewsome homeliness compared the reeking heads to pumpkins in a December cornfield.

As the officers fell the soldiers, who at first stood up bravely enough, gradually grew disheartened. No words can paint the hopelessness and horror of such a struggle as that in which they were engaged. They were hemmed in by foes who showed no mercy and whose blows they could in no way return. If they charged they could not overtake the Indians; and the instant the charge stopped the Indians came back. If they stood they were shot down by an unseen enemy; and there was no stronghold, no refuge to which to flee. The Indian attack was relentless, and could neither be avoided, parried, nor met by counter assault. For two hours or so the troops kept up a slowly lessening resistance; but by degrees their hearts failed. The wounded had been brought toward the middle of the lines, where the baggage and tents were, and an ever growing proportion of tin wounded men joined them. In vain the officers tried, by encouragement, by jeers, by blows, to drive them back to the fight. They were unnerved. As in all cases where large bodies of men are put in imminent peril of death, whether by shipwreck, plague, fire, or violence, numbers were swayed by a mad panic of utterly selfish fear, and others became numbed and callous, or snatched at any animal gratification during their last moments. Many soldiers crowded round the fires and stood stunned and confounded by the awful calamity; many broke into the officers’ marquees and sought for drink, or devoured the food which the rightful owners had left when the drums beat to arms.

There was but one thing to do. If possible the remnant of the army must be saved, and it could only be saved by instant flight, even at the cost of abandoning the wounded. The broad road by which the army had advanced was the only line of retreat. The artillery had already been spiked and abandoned. Most of the horses had been killed, but a few were still left, and on one of these St. Clair mounted. He gathered together those fragments of the different battalions which contained the few men who still kept heart and head, and ordered them to charge and regain the road from which the savages had cut them off. Repeated orders were necessary before some of the men could be roused from their stupor sufficiently to follow the charging party; and they were only induced to move when told that it was to retreat.

Colonel Darke and a few officers placed themselves at the head of the column, the coolest and boldest men drew up behind them, and they fell on the Indians with such fury as to force them back well beyond the road. This made an opening through which, said Van Cleve the packer, the rest of the troops “pressed like a drove of bullocks.” The Indians were surprised by the vigor of the charge, and puzzled as to its object. They opened out on both sides and half the men had gone through before they fired more than a chance shot or two. They then fell on the rear, and began a hot pursuit. St. Clair sent his aid, Denny, to the front to try to keep order, but neither he nor any one else could check the flight. Major Clark tried to rally his battalion to cover the retreat, but he was killed and the effort abandoned.

There never was a wilder rout. As soon as the men began to run, and realized that in flight there lay some hope of safety, they broke into a stampede which soon became uncontrollable. Horses, soldiers, and the few camp followers and women who had accompanied the army were all mixed together. Neither command nor example had the slightest weight; the men were abandoned to the terrible selfishness of utter fear. They threw away their weapons as they ran. They thought of nothing but escape, and fled in a huddle, the stronger and the few who had horses trampling their way to the front through the old, the weak, and the wounded; while behind them raged the Indian tomahawk. Fortunately the attraction of plundering the camp was so overpowering that the savages only followed the army about four miles; otherwise hardly a man would have escaped.

St. Clair was himself in much danger, for he tried to stay behind and stem the torrent of fugitives; but he failed, being swept forward by the crowd, and when he attempted to ride to the front to rally them, he failed again, for his horse could not be pricked out of a walk. The packer, Van Cleve, in his journal, gives a picture of the flight. He was himself one of the few who lost neither courage nor generosity in the rout.

Among his fellow packers were his uncle and a young man named Bonham, who was his close and dear friend. The uncle was shot in the wrist, the ball lodging near his shoulder; but he escaped. Bonham, just before the retreat began, was shot through both hips, so that he could not walk. Young Van Cleve got him a horse, on which he was with difficulty mounted; then, as the flight began, Bonham bade Van Cleve look to his safety, as he was on foot, and the two separated. Bonham rode until the pursuit had almost ceased; then, weak and crippled, he was thrown off his horse and slain. Meanwhile Van Cleve ran steadily on foot. By the time he had gone two miles most of the mounted men had passed him. A boy, on the point of falling from exhaustion, now begged his help; and the kind-hearted backwoodsman seized the lad and pulled him along nearly two miles further, when he himself became so worn-out that he nearly fell. There were still two horses in the rear, one carrying three men, and one two; and behind the latter Van Cleve, summoning his strength, threw the boy, who escaped. Nor did Van Cleve’s pity for his fellows cease with this; for he stopped to tie his handkerchief around the knee of a wounded man. His violent exertions gave him a cramp in both thighs, so that he could barely walk; and in consequence the strong and active passed him until he was within a hundred yards of the rear, where the Indians were tomahawking the old and wounded men. So close were they that for a moment his heart sunk in despair; but he threw off his shoes, the touch of the cold ground seemed to revive him, and he again began to trot forward. He got around a bend in the road, passing half a dozen other fugitives; and long afterward he told how well he remembered thinking that it would be some time before they would all be massacred and his own turn come. However, at this point the pursuit ceased, and a few miles further on he had gained the middle of the flying troops, and like them came to a walk. He fell in with a queer group, consisting of the sole remaining officer of the artillery, an infantry corporal, and a woman called Red-headed Nance. Both of the latter were crying, the corporal for the loss of his wife, the woman for the loss of her child. The worn-out officer hung on the corporal’s arm, while Van Cleve “carried his fusee and accoutrements and led Nance; and in this sociable way arrived at Fort Jefferson a little after sunset.”

Before reaching Fort Jefferson the wretched army encountered the regular regiment which had been so unfortunately detached a couple of days before the battle. The most severely wounded were left in the fort;[34] and then the flight was renewed, until the disorganized and half-armed rabble reached Fort Washington, and the mean log huts of Cincinnati. Six hundred and thirty men had been killed and over two hundred and eighty wounded; less than five hundred, only about a third of the whole number engaged in the battle, remained unhurt. But one or two were taken prisoners, for the Indians butchered everybody, wounded or unwounded, who fell into their hands. There is no record of the torture of any of the captives, but there was one single instance of cannibalism. The savage Chippewas from the far-off north devoured one of the slain soldiers, probably in a spirit of ferocious bravado; the other tribes expressed horror at the deed.[35] The Indians were rich with the spoil. They got horses, tents, guns, axes, powder, clothing, and blankets—in short everything their hearts prized. Their loss was comparatively slight; it may not have been one-twentieth that of the whites. They did not at the moment follow up their victory, each band going off with its own share of the booty. But the triumph was so overwhelming, and the reward so great, that the war spirit received a great impetus in all the tribes. The bands of warriors that marched against the frontier were more numerous, more formidable, and bolder than ever.

In the following January Wilkinson with a hundred and fifty mounted volunteers marched to the battle-field to bury the slain. The weather was bitterly cold, snow lay deep on the ground, and some of the volunteers were frost bitten.[36] Four miles from the scene of the battle, where the pursuit had ended, they began to find the bodies on the road, and close alongside, in the woods, whither some of the hunted creatures had turned at the last, to snatch one more moment of life. Many had been dragged from under the snow and devoured by wolves. The others lay where they had fallen, showing as mounds through the smooth white mantle that covered them. On the battle-field itself the slain lay thick, scalped, and striped of all their clothing which the conquerors deemed worth taking. The bodies, blackened by frost and exposure, could not be identified; and they were buried in a shallow trench in the frozen ground. The volunteers then marched home.

When the remnant of the defeated army reached the banks of the Ohio, St. Clair sent his aid, Denny, to carry the news to Philadelphia, at that time the national capital. The river was swollen, there were incessant snowstorms, and ice formed heavily, so that it took twenty days of toil and cold before Denny reached Wheeling and got horses. For ten days more he rode over the bad winter roads, reaching Philadelphia with the evil tidings on the evening of December 19th. It was thus six weeks after the defeat of the army before the news was brought to the anxious Federal authorities.

The young officer called first on the Secretary of War; but as soon as the Secretary realized the importance of the information he had it conveyed to the President. Washington was at dinner, with some guests, and was called from the table to listen to the tidings of ill fortune. He returned with unmoved face, and at the dinner, and at the reception which followed he behaved with his usual stately courtesy to those whom he was entertaining, not so much as hinting at what he had heard. But when the last guest had gone, his pent-up wrath broke forth in one of those fits of volcanic fury which sometimes shattered his iron outward calm. Walking up and down the room he burst out in wild regret for the rout and disaster, and bitter invective against St. Clair, reciting how, in that very room, he had wished the unfortunate commander success and honor and had bidden him above all things beware of a surprise.[37] “He went off with that last solemn warning thrown into his ears,” spoke Washington, as he strode to and fro, “and yet to suffer that army to be cut to pieces, hacked, butchered, tomahawked, by a surprise, the very thing I guarded him against! O God, O God, he’s worse than a murderer! How can he answer it to his country!” Then, calming himself by a mighty effort: “General St. Clair shall have justice … he shall have full justice.” And St. Clair did receive full justice, and mercy too, from both Washington and Congress. For the sake of his courage and honorable character they held him guiltless of the disaster for which his lack of capacity as a general was so largely accountable.

Washington and his administration were not free from blame. It was foolish to attempt the campaign against the Northwestern Indians with men who had only been trained for six months and who were enlisted at the absurd price of two dollars a month. Moreover, there were needless delays in forwarding the troops to Fort Washington; and the commissary department was badly managed. Washington was not directly responsible for any of these shortcomings; he very wisely left to the Secretary of War, Knox, the immediate control of the whole matter, seeking to avoid all interference with him, so that there might be no clashing or conflict of authority;[38] but he was of course ultimately responsible for the little evil, no less than for the great good, done by his administration.

The chief blunder was the selection of St. Clair. As a commander he erred in many ways. He did not, or could not, train his troops; and he had no business to challenge a death fight with raw levies. It was unpardonable of him to send back one of his two regular regiments, the only trustworthy portion of his force, on the eve of the battle. He should never have posted the militia, his poorest troops, in the most exposed situation. Above all he should have seen that the patrols and pickets were so numerous and performed their duty so faithfully as to preclude the possibility of surprise. With the kind of army furnished him he could hardly have won a victory under any circumstances; but the overwhelming nature of the defeat was mainly due to his incompetence.

[1] American State Papers, Vol. IV, Indian Affairs, I, p. 13. Letter of H. Knox, June 15, 1789. This is the lettering on the back of the volume, and for convenience it will be used in referring to it.

[2] American State Papers, Vol. IV, Indian Affairs, I, p. 13.

[3] American State Papers, IV, 15. Letter of Knox, July 6, 1789.

[4] American State Papers, Vol. IV, 31, 32, 33. Letter of Governor Matthews, August 4, 1787, etc.

[5] Do., p. 49. Letter of Benjamin Hawkins and Andrew Pickens, December 30, 1785.

[6] Do., e. g., the letter of Galphin and Douzeazeaux, June 14, 1787.

[7] American State Papers, Vol. IV, p. 74, September 26, 1789.

[8] Do., p. 77, October 5, 1789.

[9] American State Papers, Vol. IV, pp. 53, 57, 60, 77, 79, 81, etc.

[10] American State Papers, IV, pp. 83, 94, 109, and 111.

[11] “American Pioneer,” II, no. American State Papers, IV, 122.

[12] American Pioneer,” II, 149.

[13] McBride, I, 88.

[14] American State Papers, IV, 58.

[15] “American Pioneer,” I, 44; Narrative of John Brickell.

[16] State Department MSS., Washington Papers, Ex. C, p. 11, etc. Presly Neville to Richard Butler, March 19, 1791; Isaac Craig to Secretary of War, March 16, 1791; Secretary of War to President, March 31, 1791.

[17] American State Papers, IV, 145, Corn planter and others to the President, March 17, 1791.

[18] State Department MSS., Washington Papers, Knox to the President, April 10, 1791; American State Papers, IV, pp. 139-170, 225-233, 477-432, etc.

[19] Canadian Archives, McKee’s speech to the Indians, July 1, 1791; and Francis Lafontaine’s account of sundries to Indians.

[20] American State Papers, IV, 196. Narrative of Thomas Rhea, July 2, 1791. This narrative was distrusted; but it is fully borne out by McKee’s letter, and the narrative of Brickell. He saw Brickell, whom he calls “Brittle,” at the Miami.

[21] American State Papers, IV, 107, Jan. 5, 1791.

[22] American State Papers, IV, 131, Scott’s Report, June 28, 1791.

[23] Do., Wilkinson’s Letter, August 24, 1791.

[24] St. Clair Papers, II, 286, Report of Special Committee of Congress, March 27, 1792.

[25] American State Papers, IV, 118, Report of Secy. of War. January 22, 1791.

[26] Denny’s Journal, 374.

[27] Bradley MSS. The journal and letters of Captain Daniel Bradley; shown me by the courtesy of his descendants, Mr. Daniel B. Bradley of Southport, Conn., and Mr. Arthur W. Bradley of Cincinnati, Ohio.

[28] Denny, October 29, 1791, etc.

[29] Bradley MSS. In his journal Captain Bradley expresses his astonishment at seeing the regiment and his in ability to understand the object in sending it back. Captain Bradley was not over-pleased with his life at the fort; as one of the minor ills he mentions in one of his letters to Ebenezer Banks: “Please deliver the enclosed letter to my wife. Not a drop of cider have I drinked this twelve month.”

[30] St. Clair’s Letter to the Secretary of War, Nov. 9, 1791.

[31] Denny, November 4th; also p. 221.

[32] McBride’s “Pioneer Biography,” I, 165. Narrative of Thomas Irwin, a packer, who was in the fight. There are of course discrepancies between the various accounts; in the confusion of such a battle even the most honest eye-witnesses could not see all things alike.

[33] “American Pioneer,” II, 150; Van Cleve’s memoranda.

[34] Bradley MSS. The addition of two hundred sick and wounded brought the garrison to such short commons that they had to slaughter the pack-horses for food.

[35] Brickell’s Narrative.

[36] McBride’s “Pioneer Biography,” John Reily’s Narrative. This expedition, in which not a single hostile Indian was encountered, has been transmuted by Withers and one or two other border historians into a purely fictitious expedition of revenge in which hundreds of Indians were slain on the field of St. Clair’s disaster.

[37] Tobias Lear, Washington’s Private Secretary as quoted by both Custis and Rush. The report of an eye-witness. See also Lodge’s “Washington,” p. 94. Denny, in his journal, merely mentions that he went at once to the Secretary of War’s office on the evening of the 19th, and does not speak ‘ of seeing Washington until the following morning. On the strength of this omission one or two of St. Clair’s apologists have striven to represent the whole account of Washington’s wrath as apocryphal; but the attempt is puerile; the relation comes from an eye-witness who had no possible motive to distort the facts. The Secretary of War, Knox, was certain to inform Washington of the disaster the very evening he heard of it; and whether he sent Denny, or another messenger, or went himself, is unimportant. Lear might very well have been mistaken as to the messenger who brought the news; but he could not have been mistaken about Washington’s speech.

[38] State Dept. MSS., Washington Papers. War Dept. Ex. C, Washington to Knox, April i, 1791. Vol. VIIL—4

CHAPTER V

MAD ANTHONY WAYNE; AND THE FIGHT OF THE FALLEN TIMBERS, 1792–1795

THE UNITED States Government was almost as much demoralized by St. Clair’s defeat as was St. Clair’s own army. The loosely-knit nation was very poor, and very loth to undertake any work which involved sustained effort and pecuniary sacrifice; while each section was jealous of every other and was unwilling to embark in any enterprise unlikely to inure to its own immediate benefit. There was little national glory or reputation to be won by even a successful Indian war; while another defeat might prove a serious disaster to a government which was as yet far from firm in its seat. The Eastern people were lukewarm about a war in which they had no direct interest; and the foolish frontiersmen, instead of backing up the administration, railed at it and persistently supported the party which desired so to limit the powers and energies of the National Government as to produce mere paralysis. Under such conditions the national administration, instead of at once redoubling its efforts to ensure success by shock of arms, was driven to the ignoble necessity of yet again striving for a hopeless peace.

It would be impossible to paint in too vivid colors the extreme reluctance of the Government to enter into, or to carry on, war with the Indians. It was only after every other shift had been vainly tried that resort was had to the edge of the sword. The United States would gladly have made a stable peace on honorable terms, and strove with weary patience to bring about a friendly understanding. But all such efforts were rendered abortive, partly by the treachery and truculence of the savages, who could only be cowed by a thorough beating, and partly by the desire of the settlers for lands which the red men claimed as their hunting grounds.

In pursuance of their timidly futile policy of friendliness, the representatives of the National Government, in the spring of 1792, sent peace envoys, with a flag of truce, to the hostile tribes. The unfortunate ambassadors thus chosen for sacrifice were Colonel John Hardin, the gallant but ill-starred leader of Kentucky horse, who had so often and with such various success encountered the Indians on the field of battle; and a Federal officer, Major Alexander Trueman. In June they started toward the hostile towns, with one or two companions, and soon fell in with some Indians, who on being shown the white flag, and informed of the object of their visit, received them with every appearance of good will. But this was merely a mask. A few hours later the treacherous savages suddenly fell upon and slew the messengers of peace.[1] It was never learned whether the deed was the mere wanton outrage of some bloodthirsty young braves, or the result of orders given by one of the Indian councils. At any rate, the Indians never punished the treachery; and when the chiefs wrote to Washington they mentioned with cool indifference that “you sent us at different times different speeches, the bearers whereof our foolish young men killed on their way”;[2] not even expressing regret for the occurrence.

The truculent violence and bad faith of the savages merited severe chastisement; but the United States Government was long-suffering and forbearing to a degree. There was no attempt to avenge the murder of the flag-of-truce men. On the contrary, renewed efforts were made to secure a peace by treaty. In the fall of 1792 Rufus Putnam, on behalf of the United States, succeeded in concluding a treaty with the Wabash and Illinois tribes,[3] which at least served to keep many of their young braves out of actual hostilities. In the following spring three commissioners—Benjamin Lincoln, Beverly Randolph, and Timothy Pickering, all men of note,—were sent to persuade the Miami tribes and their allies to agree to a peace. In his letter of instructions the Secretary of War impressed upon them the desire of the people of the United States for peace in terms that were almost humiliating, and even directed them if necessary to cede some of the lands already granted by the Indians at previous treaties.

In May, 1793, the Commissioners went to Niagara, where they held meetings with various Iroquois chiefs and exchanged friendly letters with the British officers of the posts, who assured them that they would help in the effort to conclude a peace. Captain Brant, the Iroquois chief, acted as spokesman for a deputation of the hostile Indians from the Miami, where a great council was being held, at which not only the Northwestern tribes, but the Five Nations, were in attendance. The commissioners then sailed to the Detroit River, having first sent home a strong remonstrance against the activity displayed by the new commander on the Ohio, Wayne, whose vigorous measures, they said, had angered the Indians, and were considered by the British “unfair and unwarrantable.” This was a preposterous complaint; throughout our history, whether in dealing with Indians or with other foes, our Peace Commissioners have invariably shown to disadvantage when compared with the military commandants, for whom they always betray such jealousy. Wayne’s conduct was eminently proper; and it is difficult to understand the mental attitude of the commissioners who criticised it because the British considered it “unwarrantable.” However, a few weeks later they learned to take a more just view of Wayne, and to thank him for the care with which he had kept the peace while they were vainly trying to treat; for at the Detroit they found they could do nothing. Brant and the Iroquois urged the Northwestern tribes not to yield any point, and promised them help, telling the British agent, McKee, evidently to his satisfaction, “we came here not only to assist with our advice, but other ways, … we came here with arms in our hands”; and they insisted that the country belonged to the confederated tribes in common, and so could not be surrendered save by all.[4] Brant was the inveterate foe of the Americans and the pensioner of the British; and his advice to the tribes was sound, and was adopted by them—though he misled them by his never-fulfilled promise of support. They refused to consider any proposition which did not acknowledge the Ohio as the boundary between them and the United States; and so, toward the end of August, the commissioners returned to report their failure.[5] The final solution of the problem was thus left to the sword of Wayne.

The attitude of the British gradually changed from passive to active hostility. In 1792 and 1793 they still wished the Indians to make peace with the Americans, provided always there were no such concessions made to the latter as would endanger the British control of the fur trade. But by the beginning of 1794 the relations between Great Britain and the United States had become so strained that open war was threatened; for the advisers of the King, relying on the weakness of the young Federal Republic, had begun to adopt that tone of brutal insolence which reflected well the general attitude of the British people toward the Americans, and which finally brought on the second war between the two nations.

The British officials in Canada were quick to reflect the tone of the home government, and, as always in such cases, the more zealous and belligerent went a little further than they were authorized. On February 10th Lord Dorchester, Governor of Canada, in an address of welcome to some of the chiefs from the tribes of the north and west said, speaking of the boundary: “Children, since my return I find no appearance of a line remains; and from the manner in which the people of the United States push on and act and talk … I shall not be surprised if we are at war with them in the course of the present year; and if so a line must then be drawn by the warriors … we have acted in the most peaceable manner and borne the language and conduct of the people of the United States with patience; but I believe our patience is almost exhausted.”[6] Of course such a speech, delivered to such an audience, was more than a mere incitement to war; it was a direct appeal to arms. Nor did the encouragement given the Indians end with words; for in April, Simcoe, the Lieutenant-Governor, himself built a fort at the Miami Rapids, in the very heart of the hostile tribes, and garrisoned it with British regulars, infantry and artillery; which, wrote one of the British officials to another, had “put all the Indians here in great spirits”[7] to resist the Americans.

The same officials further reported that the Spaniards also were exciting the Indians to war, and were in communication with Simcoe, their messengers coming to him at his post on the Miami. At this time the Spanish Governor, Carondelet, was alarmed over Clark’s threatened invasion of Louisiana on behalf of the French Republic. He wrote to Simcoe asking for English help in the event of such invasion. Simcoe, in return, wrote expressing his good will, and inclosing a copy of Dorchester’s speech to the Northern Indians; which, Carondelet reported to the Court of Spain, showed that the English were following the same system adopted by the Spaniards in reference to the Indians, whom they were employing with great success against the Americans.[8] Moreover, the Spaniards, besides communicating with the British, sent messages to the Indians at the Miami, urging them to attack the Americans, and promising help;[9] a promise which they never fulfilled, save that in a covert way they furnished the savages with arms and munitions of war.

The Canadians themselves were excited and alarmed by Dorchester’s speech,[10] copies of which were distributed broadcast; for the general feeling was that it meant that war was about to be declared between Great Britain and the United States. The Indians took the same view as to what the speech meant; but to them it gave unmixed pleasure and encouragement. The British officials circulated it everywhere among the tribes, reading it aloud to the gathered chiefs and fighting men. “His Excellency Governor Simcoe has just now left my house on his way to Detroit with Lord Dorchester’s speech to the Seven Nations,” wrote Brant the Iroquois chief to the Secretary of Indian Affairs for Canada, “and I have every reason to believe when it is delivered that matters will take an immediate change to the westward, as it will undoubtedly give those Nations high spirits and enable them by a perfect union to check General Wayne.”[11] In April, Lieutenant-Colonel John Butler, of the British Army, addressed a great council of chiefs near Buffalo, beginning, “I have now a speech to deliver to you from your father Lord Dorchester, which is of the utmost consequence, therefore desire you will pay strict attention to it.”[12] He then delivered the speech, to the delight of the Indians, and continued: “You have heard the great talk of our going to war with the United States, and by the speech of your Father just now delivered to you, you can not help seeing there is a great prospect of it, I have therefore to recommend you to be all unanimous as one man, and to call in all your people that may be scattered about the Territories of the United States.” McKee, the British Indian agent among the Northwestern tribes who were at war with the Americans, reported with joy the rapid growth of warlike spirit among the savages in consequence of Dorchester’s speech, and of the building of the British fort on the Miami. He wrote, “The face of the Indian affairs in this country, I have the greatest satisfaction in informing you, seems considerably altered for the better. His Excellency Lord Dorchester’s speech and the arrival here of speeches from the Spaniards induce me to believe that a very extensive union of the Indian Nations will be the immediate consequence. The Lieutenant-Governor has ordered a strong detachment of the 24th Regt. to take post a mile & a half below this place, this step has given great spirits to the Indians and impressed them with a hope of our ultimately acting with them and affording a security for their families, should the enemy penetrate to their villages.”[13]

Nor did the British confine their encouragement to words. The Canadian authorities forwarded to the Miami tribes, through the agent McKee, quantities of guns, rifles, and gunlocks, besides vermilion paint and tobacco.[14] McKee was careful to get from the home authorities the best firearms he could, explaining that his red proteges preferred the long to the short rifles, and considered the common trade guns makeshifts, to be used only until they could get better ones.

The Indians made good use of the weapons thus furnished them by the “neutral” British. A party of Delawares and Shawnees, after a successful skirmish with the Americans, brought to McKee six of the scalps they had taken; and part of the speech of presentation at the solemn council where they were received by McKee, ran: “We had two actions with [some of Wayne’s troops who were guarding convoys] in which a great many of our enemies were killed. Part of their flesh we have brought here with us to convince our friend of the truth of their being now in great force on their march against us; therefore, Father [addressing McKee], we desire you to be strong and bid your children make haste to our assistance as was promised by them.” The speaker, a Delaware chief, afterward handed the six scalps to a Huron chief, that he might distribute them among the tribes. McKee sent to the home authorities a full account of this council, where he had assisted at the reception and distribution of the scalps the savages had taken from the soldiers of a nation with which the British still pretended to be at peace; and a few days later he reported that the Lake Indians were at last gathering, and that when the fighting men of the various tribes joined forces, as he had reason to believe they shortly would, the British posts would be tolerably secure from any attacks by Wayne.[15]

The Indians served the British not only as a barrier against the Americans, but as a police for their own soldiers, to prevent their deserting. An Englishman who visited the Lake Posts at this time recorded with a good deal of horror the fate that befell one of a party of deserters from the British garrison at Detroit. The commander, on discovering that they had gone, ordered the Indians to bring them back dead or alive. When overtaken one resisted, and was killed and scalped. The Indians brought in his scalp and hung it outside the fort, where it was suffered to remain, that the ominous sight might strike terror to other discontented soldiers.[16]

The publication of Lord Dorchester’s speech caused angry excitement in the United States. Many thought it spurious; but Washington, then President, with his usual clear-sightedness, at once recognized that it was genuine, and accepted it as proof of Great Britain’s hostile feeling toward his country. Through the Secretary of State he wrote to the British Minister, calling him to sharp account, not only for Dorchester’s speech but for the act of building a fort on the Miami, and for the double-dealing of his government, which protested friendship, with smooth duplicity, while their agents urged the savages to war. “At the very moment when the British Ministry were forwarding assurances of good will, does Lord Dorchester foster and encourage in the Indians hostile dispositions toward the United States,” ran the letter, “but this speech only forebodes hostility; the intelligence which has been received this morning is, if true, hostility itself … Governor Simcoe has gone to the foot of the Rapids of the Miami, followed by three companies of a British regiment, in order to build a fort there.” The British Minister, Hammond, in his answer said he was “willing to admit the authenticity of the speech,” and even the building of the fort; but sought to excuse both by recrimination, asserting that the Americans had themselves in various ways shown hostility to Great Britain.[17] In spite of this explicit admission, however, the British statesmen generally, both in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, disavowed the speech, though in guarded terms;[18] and many Americans were actually convinced by their denials.

Throughout this period, whatever the negotiators might say or do, the ravages of the Indian war parties never ceased. In the spring following St. Clair’s defeat the frontiers of Pennsylvania suffered as severely as those of Virginia, from bands of savages who were seeking for scalps, prisoners, and horses. Boats were waylaid and attacked as they descended the Ohio; and the remote settlements were mercilessly scourged. The spies or scouts, the trained Indian fighters, were out all the while, watching for the war bands; and when they discovered one, a strong party of rangers or militia was immediately gathered to assail it, if it could be overtaken. Every variety of good and bad fortune attended these expeditions. Thus, in August, 1792, the spies discovered an Indian party in the lower settlements of Kentucky. Thirty militia gathered, followed the trail, and overtook the marauders at Rolling Fork, killing four, while the others scattered; of the whites one was killed and two wounded. About the same time Kenton found a strong Indian camp which he attacked at dawn, killing three warriors; but when they turned out in force, and one of his own scouts was killed, he promptly drew back out of danger. Neither the Indians nor the wild white Indian fighters made any point of honor about retreating. They wished to do as much damage as possible to their foes, and if the fight seemed doubtful they at once withdrew to await a more favorable opportunity. As for the individual adventures, their name was legion. All the old annalists, all the old frontiersmen who in after life recorded their memories of the Indian wars, tell with interminable repetition stories, grew-some in their blood-thirstiness, and as monotonous in theme as they are varied in detail:—how such and such a settler was captured by two Indians, and, watching his chance, fell on his captors when they sat down to dinner and slew them “with a squaw-axe”; how another man was treacherously attacked by two Indians who had pretended to be peaceful traders, and how, though wounded, he killed them both; how two or three cabins were surprised by the savages and all the inhabitants slain; or how a flotilla of flatboats was taken and destroyed while moored to the bank of the Ohio; and so on without end.[19]

The United States authorities vainly sought peace; while the British instigated the tribes to war, and the savages themselves never thought of ceasing their hostilities. The frontiersmen also wished war, and regarded the British and Indians with an equal hatred. They knew that the presence of the British in the Lake Posts meant Indian war; they knew that the Indians would war on them, whether they behaved well or ill, until the tribes suffered some signal overthrow; and they coveted the Indian lands with a desire as simple as it was brutal. Nor were land hunger and revenge the only motives that stirred them to aggression; meaner feelings were mixed with the greed for untilled prairie and unfelled forest, and the fierce longing for blood. Throughout our history as a nation, as long as we had a frontier, there was always a class of frontiersmen for whom an Indian war meant the chance to acquire wealth at the expense of the government: and on the Ohio in 1792 and ‘93 there were plenty of men who, in the event of a campaign, hoped to make profit out of the goods, horses, and cattle they supplied the soldiers. One of Madison’s Kentucky friends wrote him with rather startling frankness that the welfare of the new State hinged on the advent of an army to assail the Indians, first, because of the defence it would give the settlers, and, secondly, because it would be the chief means for introducing into the country a sufficient quantity of money for circulation.[20] Madison himself evidently saw nothing out of the way in this twofold motive of the frontiersmen for wishing the presence of an army. In all the border communities there was a lack of circulating medium, and an earnest desire to obtain more by any expedient.

Like many other frontiersmen, Madison’s correspondent indulged almost equally in complaints of the Indian ravages, and in denunciations of the regular army which alone could put an end to them and of the national party which sustained the army.[21]

Major-General Anthony Wayne, a Pennsylvanian, had been chosen to succeed St. Clair in the command of the army; and on him devolved the task of wresting victory from the formidable forest tribes, fighting as the latter were in the almost impenetrable wilderness of their own country. The tribes were aided by the support covertly, and often openly, yielded them by the British. They had even more effective allies in the suspicion with which the backwoodsmen regarded the regular army, and the supine indifference of the people at large, which forced the administration to try every means to obtain peace before adopting the only manly and honorable course, a vigorous war.

Of all men, Wayne was the best fitted for the work. In the Revolutionary War no other general, American, British, or French, won such a reputation for hard fighting, and for daring energy and dogged courage. He felt very keenly that delight in the actual shock of battle which the most famous fighting generals have possessed. He gloried in the excitement and danger, and shone at his best when the stress was sorest; and because of his magnificent courage his soldiers had affectionately christened him “Mad Anthony,” But his head was as cool as his heart was stout. He was taught in a rough school; for the early campaigns in which he took part were waged against the gallant generals and splendid soldiery of the British King. By experience he had grown to add caution to his dauntless energy. Once, after the battle of Brandywine, when he had pushed close to the enemy, with his usual fearless self-confidence, he was surprised in a night attack by the equally daring British general Grey, and his brigade was severely punished with the bayonet. It was a lesson he never forgot; it did not in any way abate his self-reliance or his fiery ardor, but it taught him the necessity of forethought, of thorough preparation, and of ceaseless watchfulness. A few days later he led the assault at Germantcwn, driving the Hessians before him with the bayonet. This was always his favorite weapon; he had the utmost faith in coming to close quarters, and he trained his soldiers to trust the steel. At Monmouth he turned the fortunes of the day by his stubborn and successful resistance to the repeated bayonet charges of the Guards and Grenadiers. His greatest stroke was the storming of Stony Point, where in person he led the midnight rush of his troops over the walls of the British fort. He fought with his usual hardihood against Cornwallis; and at the close of the Revolutionary War he made a successful campaign against the Creeks in Georgia. During this campaign the Creeks one night tried to surprise his camp, and attacked with resolute ferocity, putting to flight some of the troops; but Wayne rallied them and sword in hand he led them against the savages, who were overthrown and driven from the field. In one of the charges he cut down an Indian chief; and the dying man, as he fell, killed Wayne’s horse with a pistol shot.

As soon as Wayne reached the Ohio, in June, 1792, he set about reorganizing the army. He had as a nucleus the remnant of St. Clair’s beaten forces; and to this were speedily added hundreds of recruits enlisted under new legislation by Congress, and shipped to him as fast as the recruiting officers could send them. The men were of precisely the same general character as those who had failed so dismally under St. Clair and it was even more difficult to turn them into good soldiers, for the repeated disasters, crowned by the final crushing horror, had unnerved them and made them feel that their task was hopeless, and that they were foredoomed to defeat.[22] The mortality among the officers had been great, and the new officers, though full of zeal, needed careful training. Among the men desertions were very common; and on the occasion of a sudden alarm Wayne found that many of his sentries left their posts and fled.[23] Only rigorous and long continued discipline and exercise under a commander both stern and capable could turn such men into soldiers fit for the work Wayne had before him. He saw this at once, and realized that a premature movement meant nothing but another defeat; and he began by careful and patient labor to turn his horde of raw recruits into a compact and efficient army, which he might use with his customary energy and decision. When he took command of the army—or “Legion,” as he preferred to call it—the one stipulation he made was that the campaign should not begin until his ranks were full and his men thoroughly disciplined.

Toward the end of the summer of ‘92 he established his camp on the Ohio about twenty-seven miles below Pittsburg. He drilled both officers and men with unwearied patience, and gradually the officers became able to do the drilling themselves, while the men acquired the soldierly self-confidence of veterans. As the new recruits came in they found themselves with an army which was rapidly learning how to manoeuvre with precision, to obey orders unhesitatingly, and to look forward eagerly to a battle with the foe. Throughout the winter Wayne kept at work, and by the spring he had under him twenty-five hundred regular soldiers who were already worthy to be trusted in a campaign.

Wayne never relaxed his efforts to improve them, though a man of weaker stuff might well have been discouraged by the timid and hesitating policy of the National Government. The Secretary of War, in writing to him, laid stress chiefly on the fact that the American people desired at every hazard to avert an Indian war, and that on no account should offensive operations be undertaken against the tribes. Such orders tied Wayne’s hands, for offensive operations offered the only means of ending the war, but he patiently bided his time, and made ready his army against the day when his superiors should allow him to use the weapon he had tempered.

In May, ‘93, he brought his army down the Ohio to Fort Washington, and near it established a camp which he christened Hobson’s Choice. Here he was forced to wait the results of the fruitless negotiations carried on by the United States Peace Commissioners, and it was not until about the 1st of October that he was given permission to begin the campaign. Even when he was allowed to move his army forward he was fettered by injunctions not to run any risks—and of course a really good fighting general ought to be prepared to run risks. The Secretary of War wrote him that above all things he was to remember to hazard nothing, for a defeat would be fraught with ruinous consequences to the country. Wayne knew very well that if such was the temper of the country and the Government, it behooved him to be cautious, and he answered that, though he would at once advance toward the Indian towns, to threaten the tribes, he would not run the least unnecessary risk. Accordingly he shifted his army to a place some eighty miles north of Cincinnati, where he encamped for the winter, building a place of strength which he named Greeneville in honor of his old comrade in arms, General Greene. He sent forward a strong detachment of his troops to the site of St. Clair’s defeat, where they built a post which was named Fort Recovery. The discipline of the army steadily improved, though now and then a soldier deserted, usually fleeing to Kentucky, but in one or two cases striking through the woods to Detroit. The bands of auxiliary militia that served now and then for short periods with the regulars, were of course much less well trained and less dependable.

The Indians were always lurking about the forts, and threatening the convoys of provisions and munitions as they marched slowly from one to the other. Any party that left a fort was in imminent danger. On one occasion the commander of Fort Jefferson and his orderly were killed and scalped but three hundred yards from the fort. A previous commander of this fort while hunting in this neighborhood had been attacked in similar fashion, and though he escaped, his son and a soldier were slain. On another occasion a dozen men, near the same fort, were surprised while haying; four were killed and the other eight captured, four of whom were burned at the stake.[24] Before Wayne moved down the Ohio a band of Kentucky mounted riflemen, under Major John Adair, were attacked under the walls of one of the log forts—Fort St. Clair—as they were convoying a large number of pack-horses. The riflemen were in camp at the time, the Indians making the assault at dawn. Most of the horses were driven off or killed, and the men fled to the fort, which, Adair dryly remarked, proved “a place of safety for the bashful”; but he rallied fifty, who drove off the Indians, killing two and wounding others. Of his own men six were killed and five wounded.[25]

Wayne’s own detachments occasionally fared as badly. In the fall of 1793, just after he had advanced to Greeneville, a party of ninety regulars, who were escorting twenty heavily laden wagons, were surprised and scattered, a few miles from the scene of Adair’s misadventure.[26] The lieutenant and ensign who were in command and five or six of their men were slain, fighting bravely; half a dozen were captured; the rest were panic struck and fled without resistance. The Indians took off about seventy horses, leaving the wagons standing in the middle of the road, with their contents uninjured; and a rescue party brought them safely to Wayne. The victors were a party of Wyandots and Ottawas under the chief Little Otter. On October 24th the British agent at the Miami towns met in solemn council with these Indians and with another successful war party. The Indians had with them ten scalps and two prisoners. Seven of the scalps they sent off, by an Indian runner, a special ally friend of the British agent, to be distributed among the different Lake Indians, to rouse them to war. One of their prisoners, an Irishman, they refused to surrender; but the other they gave to the agent. He proved to be a German, a mercenary who had originally been in Burgoyne’s army.[27] Later one of the remaining captives made his escape, killing his two Indian owners, a man and a woman, both of whom had been leaders of war parties.

In the spring of 1794, as soon as the ground was dry, Wayne prepared to advance toward the hostile towns and force a decisive battle. He was delayed for a long time by lack of provisions, the soldiers being on such short rations that they could not move. The mounted riflemen of Kentucky, who had been sent home at the beginning of winter, again joined him. Among the regulars, in the rifle company, was a young Kentuckian, Captain William Clark, brother of George Rogers Clark, and afterward one of the two famous explorers who first crossed the continent to the Pacific. In his letters home Clark dwelt much on the laborious nature of his duties, and mentioned that he was “like to have starved,” and had to depend on his rifle for subsistence.[28] In May he was sent from Fort Washington with twenty dragoons and sixty infantry to escort 700 packhorses to Greeneville. When eighteen miles from Fort Washington Indians attacked his van, driving off a few packhorses; but Clark brought up his men from the rear and after a smart skirmish put the savages to flight. They left behind one of their number dead, two wounded, and seven rifles; Clark lost two men killed and two wounded.[29]

On the last day of June a determined assault was made by the Indians on Fort Recovery, which was garrisoned by about two hundred men. Thanks to the efforts of the British agents, and of the runners from the allied tribes of the Lower Lakes, the Chippewas and all the tribes of the Upper Lakes had taken the tomahawk, and in June they gathered at the Miami. Over two thousand warriors, all told,[30] assembled; a larger body than had ever before marched against the Americans.[31] They were eager for war, and wished to make a stroke of note against their foes; and they resolved to try to carry Fort Recovery, built on the scene of their victory over St. Clair. They streamed down through the woods in long columns, and silently neared the fort. With them went a number of English and French rangers, most of whom were painted and dressed like the Indians.

He says they probably numbered from 1500 to 2000 men, which was apparently about the truth. Throughout this campaign the estimate of the Americans as to the Indian forces and losses were usually close to the facts, and were often under rather than over statements.

When they reached the fort they found camped close to the walls a party of fifty dragoons and ninety riflemen. These dragoons and riflemen had escorted a brigade of packhorses from Greeneville the day before, and having left the supplies in the fort were about to return with the unladen pack-horses. But soon after daybreak the Indians rushed their camp. Against such overwhelming numbers no effective resistance could be made. After a few moments’ fight the men broke and ran to the fort. The officers, as usual, showed no fear, and were the last to retreat, half of them being killed or wounded,—one of the honorably noteworthy features of all these Indian fights was the large relative loss among the officers. Most of the dragoons and riflemen reached the fort, including nineteen who were wounded; nineteen officers and privates were killed, and two of the packhorse men were killed and three captured. Two hundred packhorses were captured. The Indians, flushed with success and rendered over-confident by their immense superiority in numbers, made a rush at the fort, hoping to carry it by storm. They were beaten back at once with severe loss; for in such work they were no match for their foes. They then surrounded the fort, kept up a harmless fire all day, and renewed it the following morning. In the night they bore off their dead, finding them with the help of torches; eight or ten of those nearest the fort they could not get. They then drew off and marched back to the Miami towns. At least twenty-five[32] of them had been killed, and a great number wounded; whereas they had only succeeded in killing one and wounding eleven of the garrison. They were much disheartened at the check, and the Upper Lake Indians began to go home. The savages were as fickle as they were ferocious; and though terrible antagonists when fighting on their own ground and in their own manner, they lacked the stability necessary for undertaking a formidable offensive movement in mass. This army of two thousand warriors, the largest they had ever assembled, was repulsed with loss in an attack on a wooden fort with a garrison not one-sixth their strength, and then dissolved without accomplishing anything at all.

Three weeks after the successful defence of Fort Recovery, Wayne was joined by a large force of mounted volunteers from Kentucky, under General Scott; and on July 27th he set out toward the Miami towns. The Indians who watched his march brought word to the British that his army went twice as far in a day as St. Clair’s, that he kept his scouts well out and his troops always in open order and ready for battle; that he exercised the greatest precaution to avoid an ambush or surprise, and that every night the camps of the different regiments were surrounded by breastworks of fallen trees so as to render a sudden assault hopeless. Wayne was determined to avoid the fates of Braddock and St. Clair. His “legion” of regular troops, was over two thousand strong. His discipline was very severe, yet he kept the loyal affection of his men. He had made the officers devote much of their time to training the infantry in marksmanship and the use of the bayonet and the cavalry in the use of the sabre. He impressed upon the cavalry and infantry alike that their safety lay in charging home with the utmost resolution. By steady drill he had turned his force, which was originally not of a promising character, into as fine an army, for its size, as a general could wish to command.

The perfection of fighting capacity to which he had brought his forces caused much talk among the frontiersmen themselves. One of the contingent of Tennessee militia wrote home in the highest praise of the horsemanship and swordsmanship of the cavalry, who galloped their horses at speed over any ground, and leaped them over formidable obstacles, and of the bayonet practice, and especially of the marksmanship, of the infantry. He remarked that hunters were apt to undervalue the soldiers as marksmen, but that Wayne’s riflemen were as good shots as any hunters he had ever seen at any of the many matches he had attended in the backwoods.[33]

Wayne showed his capacity as a commander by the use he made of his spies or scouts. A few of these were Chickasaw or Choctaw Indians; the rest, twenty or thirty in number, were drawn from the ranks of the wild white Indian-fighters, the men who plied their trade of warfare and the chase right on the hunting grounds of the hostile tribes. They were far more dangerous to the Indians, and far more useful to the army, than the like number of regular soldiers or ordinary rangers.

It was on these fierce backwoods riflemen that Wayne chiefly relied for news of the Indians, and they served him well. In small parties, or singly, they threaded the forest scores of miles in advance or to one side of the marching army, and kept close watch on the Indians’ movements. As skilful and hardy as the red warriors, much better marksmen, and even more daring, they took many scalps, harrying the hunting parties, and hanging on the outskirts of the big wigwam villages. They captured and brought in Indian after Indian; from whom Wayne got valuable information. The use of scouts, and the consequent knowledge gained by the examination of Indian prisoners, emphasized the difference between St. Clair and Wayne. Wayne’s reports are accompanied by many examinations of Indian captives.[34]

Among these wilderness warriors who served under Wayne were some who became known far and wide along the border for their feats of reckless personal prowess and their strange adventures. They were of course all men of remarkable bodily strength and agility, with almost unlimited power of endurance, and the keenest eyesight; and they were masters in the use of their weapons. Several had been captured by the Indians when children, and had lived for years with them before rejoining the whites; so that they knew well the speech and customs of the different tribes.

One of these men was the captain of the spies, William Wells. When a boy of twelve he had been captured by the Miamis, and had grown to manhood among them, living like any other young warrior; his Indian name was Black Snake, and he married a sister of the great war-chief, Little Turtle. He fought with the rest of the Miamis, and by the side of Little Turtle, in the victories the Northwestern Indians gained over Harmar and St. Clair, and during the last battle he killed several soldiers with his own hand. Afterward, by some wayward freak of mind, he became harassed by the thought that perhaps he had slain some of his own kinsmen; dim memories of his childhood came back to him; and he resolved to leave his Indian wife and half-breed children and rejoin the people of his own color. Tradition relates that on the eve of his departure he made his purpose known to Little Turtle, and added, “We have long been friends; we are friends yet, until the sun stands so high [indicating the place] in the heavens; from that time we are enemies and may kill one another.” Be this as it may, he came to Wayne, was taken into high favor, and made chief of scouts, and served loyally and with signal success until the end of the campaign. After the campaign he was joined by his Indian wife and his children; the latter grew up and married well in the community, so that their blood now flows in the veins of many of the descendants of the old pioneers. Wells himself was slain by the Indians long afterward, in 1812, at the Chicago massacre.

One of Wells’ fellow spies was William Miller. Miller, like Wells, had been captured by the Indians when a boy, together with his brother Christopher. When he grew to manhood he longed to rejoin his own people, and finally did so, but he could not persuade his brother to come with him, for Christopher had become an Indian at heart. In June, 1794, Wells, Miller, and a third spy, Robert McClellan, were sent out by Wayne with special instructions to bring in a live Indian. McClellan, who a number of years afterward became a famous plainsman and Rocky Mountain man, was remarkably swift of foot. Near the Glaize River they found three Indians roasting venison by a fire, on a high open piece of ground, clear of brushwood. By taking advantage of the cover yielded by a fallen treetop the three scouts crawled within seventy yards of the camp-fire; and Wells and Miller agreed to fire at the two outermost Indians, while McClellan, as soon as they had fired, was to dash in and run down the third. As the rifles cracked the two doomed warriors fell dead in their tracks; while McClellan bounded forward at full speed, tomahawk in hand. The Indian had no time to pick up his gun; fleeing for his life he reached the bank of the river, where the bluffs were twenty feet high, and sprang over into the stream-bed. He struck a miry place, and while he was floundering McClellan came to the top of the bluff and instantly sprang down full on him, and overpowered him. The others came up and secured the prisoner, whom they found to be a white man; and to Miller’s astonishment it proved to be his brother Christopher. The scouts brought their prisoner, and the scalps of the two slain warriors, back to Wayne. At first Christopher was sulky and refused to join the whites; so at Greeneville he was put in the guard house. After a few days he grew more cheerful, and said he had changed his mind. Wayne set him at liberty, and he not only served valiantly as a scout through the campaign, but acted as Wayne’s interpreter. Early in July he showed his good faith by assisting McClellan in the capture of a Pottawatomie chief.

On one of Wells’ scouts he and his companions came across a family of Indians in a canoe by the river bank. The white wood rangers were as ruthless as their red foes, sparing neither sex nor age; and the scouts were cocking their rifles when Wells recognized the Indians as being the family into which he had been adopted and by which he had been treated as a son and brother. Springing forward he swore immediate death to the first man who fired, and then told his companions who the Indians were. The scouts at once dropped their weapons, shook hands with the Miamis, and sent them off unharmed.

Wells’ last scouting trip was made just before the final battle of the campaign. As it was the eve of the decisive struggle, Wayne was anxious to get a prisoner. Wells went off with three companions—McClellan, a man named Mahaffy, and a man named May. May, like Wells and Miller, had lived long with the Indians, first as a prisoner, and afterward as an adopted member of their tribe, but had finally made his escape. The four scouts succeeded in capturing an Indian man and woman, whom they bound securely. Instead of returning at once with their captives, the champions, in sheer daredevil, ferocious love of adventure, determined, as it was already nightfall, to leave the two bound Indians where they could find them again, and go into one of the Indian camps to do some killing. The camp they selected was but a couple of miles from the British fort. They were dressed and painted like Indians, and spoke the Indian tongues; so, riding boldly forward, they came right among the warriors who stood grouped around the camp-fires. They were at arm’s-length before their disguise was discovered. Immediately each of them, choosing his man, fired into an Indian, and then they fled, pursued by a hail of bullets. May’s horse slipped and fell in the bed of a stream, and he was captured. The other three, spurring hard and leaning forward in their saddles to avoid the bullets, escaped, though both Wells and McClellan were wounded; and they brought their Indian prisoners into Wayne’s camp that night. May was recognized by the Indians as their former prisoner; and next day they tied him up, made a mark on his breast for a target, and shot him to death.[35]

With his advance effectually covered by his scouts, and his army guarded by his own ceaseless vigilance, Wayne marched without opposition to the confluence of the Glaize and the Maumee, where the hostile Indian villages began, and whence they stretched to below the British fort. The savages were taken by surprise and fled without offering opposition; while Wayne halted, on August 8th, and spent a week in building a strong log stockade, with four good block-houses as bastions; he christened the work Fort Defiance.[36] The Indians had cleared and tilled immense fields, and the troops reveled in the fresh vegetables and ears of roasted corn, and enjoyed the rest;[37] for during the march the labor of cutting a road through the thick forest had been very severe, while the water was bad and the mosquitoes were exceedingly troublesome. At one place a tree fell on Wayne and nearly killed him; but though somewhat crippled he continued as active and vigilant as ever.[38]

From Fort Defiance Wayne sent a final offer of peace to the Indians, summoning them at once to send deputies to meet him. The letter was carried by Christopher Miller and a Shawnee prisoner; and in it Wayne explained that Miller was a Shawnee by adoption, whom his soldiers had captured “six months since,” while the Shawnee warrior had been taken but a couple of days before; and he warned the Indians that he had seven Indian prisoners, who had been well treated, but who would be put to death if Miller was harmed. The Indians did not molest Miller, but sought to obtain delay, and would give no definite answer; whereupon Wayne advanced against them, having laid waste and destroyed all their villages and fields.

His army marched on the 15th, and on the 18th reached Roche du Bout, by the Maumee Rapids, only a few miles from the British fort. Next day was spent in building a rough breastwork to protect the stores and baggage, and in reconnoitring the Indian position.[39]

The Indians—Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, Ottawas, Miamis, Pottawatomies, Chippewas, and Iroquois—were camped close to the British. There were between fifteen hundred and two thousand warriors; and in addition there were seventy rangers from Detroit, French, English, and refugee Americans, under Captain Caldwell, who fought with them in the battle. The British agent McKee was with them; and so was Simon Girty, the “white renegade,” and another partisan leader, Elliott. But McKee, Girty, and Elliott did not actually fight in the battle.[40]

On August 20, 1794, Wayne marched to battle against the Indians.[41] They lay about six miles down the river, near the British fort, in a place known as the Fallen Timbers, because there the thick forest had been overturned by a whirlwind, and the dead trees lay piled across one another in rows. All the baggage was left behind in the breastwork, with a sufficient guard. The army numbered about three thousand men; two thousand were regulars, and there were a thousand mounted volunteers from Kentucky under General Scott.

The army marched down the left or north branch of the Maumee. A small force of mounted volunteers—Kentucky militia—were in front. On the right flank the squadron of dragoons, the regular cavalry, marched next to the river. The infantry, armed with musket and bayonet, were formed in two long lines, the second some little distance behind the first; the left of the first line being continued by the companies of regular riflemen and light troops. Scott, with the body of the mounted volunteers, was thrown out on the left with instructions to turn the flank of the Indians, thus effectually preventing them from performing a similar feat at the expense of the Americans. There could be no greater contrast than that between Wayne’s carefully trained troops, marching in open order to the attack, and St Clair’s huddled mass of raw soldiers receiving an assault they were powerless to repel.

The Indians stretched in a line nearly two miles long at right angles to the river, and began the battle confidently enough. They attacked and drove in the volunteers who were in advance and the firing then began along the entire front. But their success was momentary. Wayne ordered the first line of the infantry to advance with trailed arms, so as to rouse the savages from their cover, then to fire into their backs at close range, and to follow them hard with the bayonet, so as to give them no time to load. The regular cavalry were directed to charge the left flank of the enemy; for Wayne had determined “to put the horse hoof on the moccasin.” Both orders were executed with spirit and vigor.

It would have been difficult to find more unfavorable ground for cavalry; nevertheless the dragoons rode against their foes at a gallop, with broadswords swinging, the horses dodging in and out among the trees and jumping the fallen logs. They received a fire at close quarters which emptied a dozen saddles, both captains being shot down. One, the commander of the squadron, Captain Mis Campbell,[42] was killed; the other, Captain Van Rensselaer, a representative of one of the old Knickerbocker families of New York, who had joined the army from pure love of adventure, was wounded. The command devolved on Lieutenant Covington, who led forward the troopers, with Lieutenant Webb alongside him; and the dragoons burst among the savages at full speed, and routed them in a moment. Covington cut down two of the Indians with his own hand, and Webb one.

At the same time the first line of the infantry-charged with equal impetuosity and success. The Indians delivered one volley and were then roused from their hiding places with the bayonet; as they fled they were shot down, and if they attempted to halt they were at once assailed and again driven with the bayonet. They could make no stand at all, and the battle was won with ease. So complete was the success that only the first line of regulars was able to take part in the fighting; the second line, and Scott’s horse-riflemen, on the left, in spite of their exertions were unable to reach the battle-field until the Indians were driven from it; “there not being a sufficiency of the enemy for the Legion to play on,” wrote Clark. The entire action lasted under forty minutes.[43] Less than a thousand of the Americans were actually engaged. They pursued the beaten and fleeing Indians for two miles, the cavalry halting only when under the walls of the British fort.

Thirty-three of the Americans were killed and one hundred wounded.[44] It was an easy victory. The Indians suffered much more heavily than the Americans; in killed they probably lost two or three times as many. Among the dead were white men from Caldwell’s company; and one white ranger was captured. It was the most complete and important victory ever gained over the Northwestern Indians during the forty years’ warfare, to which it put an end; and it was the only considerable pitched battle in which they lost more than their foes. They suffered heavily among their leaders; no less than eight Wyandot chiefs were slain.

From the fort the British had seen, with shame and anger, the rout of their Indian allies. Their commander wrote to Wayne to demand his intentions; Wayne responded that he thought they were made sufficiently evident by his successful battle with the savages. The Englishman wrote in resentment of this curt reply, complaining that Wayne’s soldiers had approached within pistol shot of the fort, and threatening to fire upon them if the offence were repeated. Wayne responded by summoning him to abandon the fort; a summons which he of course refused to heed. Wayne then gave orders to destroy everything up to the very walls of the fort, and his commands were carried out to the letter; not only were the Indian villages burned and their crops cut down, but all the houses and buildings of the British agents and traders, including McKee’s, were leveled to the ground. The British commander did not dare to interfere or make good his threats; nor, on the other hand, did Wayne dare to storm the fort, which was well built and heavily armed.

After completing his work of destruction Wayne marched his army back to Fort Defiance. Here he was obliged to halt for over a fortnight while he sent back to Fort Recovery for provisions. He employed the time in work on the fort, which he strengthened so that it would stand an attack by a regular army. The mounted volunteers were turned to account in a new manner, being employed not only to escort the pack-animals but themselves to transport the flour on their horses. There was much sickness among the soldiers, especially from fever and ague, and but for the corn and vegetables they obtained from the Indian towns which were scattered thickly along the Maumee they would have suffered from hunger. They were especially disturbed because all the whiskey was used up.[45]

On September 14th the Legion started westward toward the Miami towns at the junction of the St. Mary’s and St. Joseph’s rivers, the scene of Harmar’s disaster. In four days the towns were reached, the Indians being too cowed to offer resistance. Here the army spent six weeks, burned the towns and destroyed the fields and stores of the hostile tribes, and built a fort which was christened Fort Wayne. British deserters came in from time to time; some of the Canadian traders made overtures to the army and agreed to furnish provisions at a moderate price; and of the savages only straggling parties were seen. The mounted volunteers grew mutinous, but were kept in order by their commander Scott, a rough, capable backwoods soldier. Their term of service at length expired and they were sent home; and the regulars of the Legion, leaving a garrison at Fort Wayne, marched back to Greeneville, and reached it on November 2d, just three months and six days after they started from it on their memorable and successful expedition.

Wayne had shown himself the best general ever sent to war with the Northwestern Indians; and his victorious campaign was the most noteworthy ever carried on against them, for it brought about the first lasting peace on the border and put an end to the bloody turmoil of forty years’ fighting. It was one of the most striking and weighty feats in the winning of the West.

The army went into winter quarters at Greeneville. There was sickness among the troops, and there were occasional desertions; the discipline was severe, and the work so hard and dangerous that the men generally refused to re-enlist.[46] The officers were uneasy lest there should be need of a further campaign. But their fears were groundless. Before winter set in heralds arrived from the hostile tribes to say that they wished peace.

The Indians were utterly downcast over their defeat.[47] The destruction of their crops, homes, and stores of provisions was complete, and they were put to sore shifts to live through the winter. Their few cattle, and many even of their dogs, died; they could not get much food from the British; and as winter wore on they sent envoy after envoy to the Americans, exchanged prisoners, and agreed to make a permanent peace in the spring. They were exasperated with the British, who, they said, had not fulfilled a single promise they had made.[48]

The anger of the Indians against the British was as just as it was general. They had been lured and goaded into war by direct material aid, and by indirect promises of armed assistance; and they were abandoned as soon as the fortune of war went against them. Brant, the Iroquois chief, was sorely angered by the action of the British in deserting the Indians whom they had encouraged by such delusive hopes;[49] and in his letter to the British officials he reminded them of the fact that but for their interference the Indians would have concluded “an equitable and honorable peace in June, 1793”—thus offering conclusive proof that the American commissioners, in their efforts to make peace with the Indians in that year, had been foiled by the secret machinations of the British agents, as Wayne had always thought. Brant blamed the British agent McKee for ever having interfered in the Indian councils, and misled the tribes to their hurt; and in writing to the Secretary of the Indian Office for Canada he reminded him in plain terms of the treachery with which the British had behaved to the Indians at the close of the Revolutionary War, and expressed the hope that it would not be repeated; saying:[50] “If there is a treaty between Great Britain and the Yankees I hope our Father the King will not forget the Indians as he did in the year ‘83.” When his forebodings came true and the British, in assenting to Jay’s treaty, abandoned their Indian allies, Brant again wrote to the Secretary of the Indian Office, in repressed but bitter anger at the conduct of the King’s agents in preventing the Indians from making peace with the Americans while they could have made it on advantageous terms, and then in deserting them. He wrote: “This is the second time the poor Indians have been left in the lurch & I cannot avoid lamenting that they were prevented at a time when they had it in their power to make an Honorable and Advantageous Peace.”[51]

McKee, the British Indian agent, was nearly as frank as Brant in expressing his views of the conduct of the British toward their allies; he doubtless felt peculiar bitterness as he had been made the active instrument in carrying out the policy of his chiefs, and had then seen that policy abandoned and even disavowed. In fact he suffered the usual fate of those who are chosen to do some piece of work which unscrupulous men in power wish to have done, but wish also to avoid the responsibility of doing. He foretold evil results from the policy adopted, a policy under which, as he put it, “the distressed situation of the poor Indians who have long fought for us and bled farely for us [is] no bar to a Peaceable accomodation with America and … they [are] left to shift for themselves.”[52] That a sentence of this kind could be truthfully written by one British official to another was a sufficiently biting comment on the conduct of the British Government.

The battle of the Fallen Timbers opened the eyes of the Indians to more facts than one. They saw that they could not stand against the Americans unassisted. Furthermore, they saw that though the British would urge them to fight, and would secretly aid them, yet that in the last resort the King’s troops would not come to their help by proceeding to actual war. All their leaders recognized that it was time to make peace. The Americans found an active ally in the French Canadian, Antoine Lasselle, whom they had captured in the battle. He worked hard to bring about a peace, inducing the Canadian traders to come over to the American side, and making every effort to get the Indians to agree to terms. Being a thrifty soul, he drove a good trade with the savages at the councils, selling them quantities of liquor.

In November the Wyandots from Sandusky sent ambassadors to Wayne at Greeneville. Wayne spoke to them with his usual force and frankness. He told them he pitied them for their folly in listening to the British, who were very glad to urge them to fight and to give them ammunition, but who had neither the power nor the inclination to help them when the time of trial came; that hitherto the Indians had felt only the weight of his little finger, but that he would surely destroy all the tribes in the near future if they did not make peace.[53]

The Hurons went away much surprised, and resolved on peace; and the other tribes followed their example. In January, 1795, the Miamis, Chippewas, Sacs, Delawares, Pottawatomies, and Ottawas sent ambassadors to Greeneville and agreed to treat.[54] The Shawnees were bent on continuing the war; but when their allies deserted them they too sent to Greeneville and asked to be included in the peace.[55] On February 11th the Shawnees, Delawares, and Miamis formally entered into a preliminary treaty.

This was followed in the summer of 1795 by the formal Treaty of Greeneville, at which Wayne, on behalf of the United States, made a definite peace with all the Northwestern tribes. The Sachems, war chiefs, and warriors of the different tribes began to gather early in June; and formal proceedings for a treaty were opened on June 17th. But many of the tribes were slow in coming to the treaty ground, others vacillated in their course, and unforeseen delays arose; so that it was not until August 7th that it was possible to come to a unanimous agreement and ratify the treaty. No less than eleven hundred and thirty Indians were present at the treaty grounds, including a full delegation from every hostile tribe. All solemnly covenanted to keep the peace; and they agreed to surrender to the whites all of what is now southern Ohio and southeastern Indiana, and various reservations elsewhere, as at Fort Wayne, Fort Defiance, Detroit, and Michilimackinac, the lands around the French towns, and the hundred and fifty thousand acres near the Falls of the Ohio which had been allotted to Clark and his soldiers. The Government, in its turn, acknowledged the Indian title to the remaining territory, and agreed to pay the tribes annuities aggregating nine thousand five hundred dollars. All prisoners on both sides were restored. There were interminable harangues and councils while the treaty was pending, the Indians invariably addressing Wayne as Elder Brother, and Wayne in response styling them Younger Brothers.

In one speech a Chippewa chief put into terse form the reasons for making the treaty and for giving the Americans title to the land, saying, “Elder Brother, you asked who were the true owners of the land now ceded to the United States. In answer I tell you, if any nations should call themselves the owners of it they would be guilty of falsehood; our claim to it is equal; our Elder Brother has conquered it.”[56]

Wayne had brought peace by the sword. It was the first time the border had been quiet for over a generation; and for fifteen years the quiet lasted unbroken. The credit belongs to Wayne and his army, and to the Government which stood behind both. Because it thus finally stood behind them we can forgive its manifold shortcomings and vacillations, its futile efforts to beg a peace, and its reluctance to go to war. We can forgive all this; but we should not forget it. Americans need to keep in mind the fact that as a nation they have erred far more often in not being willing enough to fight than in being too willing. Once roused, they have always been dangerous and hard-fighting foes; but they have been over-difficult to rouse. Their educated classes, in particular, need to be perpetually reminded that, though it is an evil thing to brave a conflict needlessly, or to bully and bluster, it is an even worse thing to flinch from a fight for which there is legitimate provocation, or to live in supine, slothful, unprepared ease, helpless to avenge an injury.

The conduct of the Americans in the years which closed with Wayne’s treaty did not shine very brightly; but the conduct of the British was black, indeed. On the Northwestern frontier they behaved in a way which can scarcely be too harshly stigmatized. This does not apply to the British civil and military officers at the Lake Posts; for they were merely doing their duty as they saw it, and were fronting their foes bravely, while with loyal zeal they strove to carry out what they understood to be the policy of their superiors. The ultimate responsibility rested with these superiors, the Crown’s high advisers, and the King and Parliament they represented. Their treatment both of the Indians, whom they professed to protect, and of the Americans, with whom they professed to be friendly, forms one of the darkest pages in the annals of the British in America. Yet they have been much less severely blamed for their behavior in this matter than for far more excusable offences. American historians, for example usually condemn them without stint because in 1814 the army of Ross and Cockburn burned and looted the public buildings of Washington; but by rights they should keep all their condemnation for their own country, so far as the taking of Washington is concerned; for the sin of burning a few public buildings is as nothing compared with the cowardly infamy of which the politicians of the stripe of Jefferson, and Madison, and the people whom they represented, were guilty in not making ready, by sea and land, to protect their Capital and in not exacting full revenge for its destruction.

These facts may with advantage be pondered by those men of the present day who are either so ignorant or of such lukewarm patriotism that they do not wish to see the United States keep prepared for war and show herself willing and able to adopt a vigorous foreign policy whenever there is need of furthering American interests or upholding the honor of the American flag. America is bound scrupulously to respect the rights of the weak; but she is no less bound to make stalwart insistence on her own rights as against the strong.

The count against the British on the Northwestern frontier is, not that they insisted on their rights, but that they were guilty of treachery to both friend and foe. The success of the British was incompatible with the good of mankind in general, and of the English-speaking races in particular; for they strove to prop up savagery, and to bar the westward march of the settler-folk whose destiny it was to make ready the continent for civilization. But the British cannot be seriously blamed because they failed to see this. Their fault lay in their aiding and encouraging savages in a warfare which was necessarily horrible; and still more in their repeated breaches of faith. The horror and the treachery were the inevitable outcome of the policy on which they had embarked; it can never be otherwise when a civilized government endeavors to use, as allies in war, savages whose acts it can not control and for whose welfare it has no real concern.

Doubtless the statesmen who shaped the policy of Great Britain never deliberately intended to break faith, and never fully realized the awful nature of the Indian warfare for which they were in part responsible; they thought very little of the matter at all in the years which saw the beginning of their stupendous struggle with France. But the acts of their obscure agents on the far interior frontier were rendered necessary and inevitable by their policy. To encourage the Indians to hold their own against the Americans, and to keep back the settlers, meant to encourage a war of savagery against the border vanguard of white civilization; and such a war was sure to teem with fearful deeds. Moreover, where the interests of the British Crown were so manifold it was idle to expect that the Crown’s advisers would treat as of much weight the welfare of the scarcely-known tribes whom their agents had urged to enter a contest which was hopeless except for British assistance. The British statesmen were engaged in gigantic schemes of warfare and diplomacy; and to them the Indians and the frontiersmen alike were pawns on a great chessboard, to be sacrificed whenever necessary. When the British authorities deemed it likely that there would be war with America, the tribes were incited to take up the hatchet; when there seemed a chance of peace with America the deeds of the tribes were disowned; and peace was finally assured by a cynical abandonment of their red allies. In short, the British, while professing peace with the Americans, treacherously incited the Indians to war against them; and, when it suited their own interests, they treacherously abandoned their Indian allies to the impending ruin.[57]

[1] American State Papers, IV, 238, 239, etc.; also Marshall.

[2] Canadian Archives, Indian affairs, M. 2, p. 224. The Michigan and Wisconsin Historical Societies have performed a great service by publishing so many of these papers.

[3] American State Papers, IV, 338.

[4] Draper MSS., Brant to McKee, Aug. 4, 1793.

[5] American State Papers, IV, 340-360.

[6] Rives’ “Life and Times of James Madison,” III, 418. A verified copy of the speech from the archives of the London foreign office. The authenticity of the speech was admitted at the time by the British Minister; yet, extraordinary to say, not only British, but American historians, have spoken of it as spurious.

[7] Canadian Archives, Thomas Duggan to Joseph Chew, Detroit, April 16, 1794.

[8] Draper MSS., Spanish Documents, letter of Carondelet, July 9, 1794.

[9] Canadian Archives, letter of McKee, May 7, 1794.

[10] Canadian Archives, Joseph Chew to Thomas Aston Coffin, Montreal, February 27, 1794.

[11] Canadian Archives, Brant to Chew, April 21, 1794.

[12] Canadian Archives, Butler to Chew, April 27, 1794.

[13] Canadian Archives, McKee to Chew, May 8, 1794.

[14] Canadian Archives, Chew to Coffin, June 23, 1794.

[15] FOOTNOTES: [ Canadian Archives, McKee’s letters May 25 and May 30, 1794.

[16] Draper MSS. From Parliament Library in Canada, MS. “Canadian Letters,’’ descriptive of a tour in Canada in 1792-93.

[17] Wait’s State Papers and Publick Documents, I, 449, 451. Letters of Randolph, May 20, 1794, and Hammond, May 22, 1794.

[18] Am. State Papers, Foreign Relations, I, Randolph to Jay, Aug. 18, 1794.

[19] Draper MSS., Major McCully to Captain Biddle, Pittsburg, May 5, 1792; B. Netherland to Evan Shelby, July 5, 1793, etc., etc. Also Kentucky “Gazette,” Sept. 1, 1792; Charleston “Gazette,” July 22, 1791, etc.

[20] State Dept. MSS., Madison Papers, Hubbard Taylor to Madison, Jan. 3, 1782.

[21] Do., Taylor to Madison, April 16, 1792; May 8 and 17, 1792; May 23, 1793, etc.

[22] Bradley MSS. Letters and Journal of Captain Daniel Bradley; see entry of May 7, 1793, etc.

[23] “Major General Anthony Wayne,” by Charles J. Stille, P- 323.

[24] Bradley MSS., Journal, entries of Feb. 11, Feb. 24, June 24, July 12, 1792.

[25] Am. State Papers, IV., 335. Adair to Wilkinson. Nov. 6, 1792.

[26] Bradley MSS., Journal, entry of October 17, 1793.

[27] Canadian Archives, Duggan to Chew, February 3, 1794, inclosing his journal for the fall of 1793. American State Papers, IV, 361, Wayne to Knox, October 23, 1793. The Americans lost 13 men; the Indian reports of course exaggerated this.

[28] Draper MSS., William Clark to Jonathan Clark, May 25, 1794.

[29] Do. Also Canadian Archives, Duggan to Chew, May 30, 1794. As an instance of the utter untrustworthiness of these Indian or British accounts of the American losses, it may be mentioned that Duggan says the Indians brought off forty scalps, and killed an unknown number of Americans in addition; whereas in reality only two were slain. Even Duggan admits that the Indians were beaten off.

[30] Canadian Archives, McKee to Chew, July 7, 1794.

[31] Am. State Papers, IV, 488, Wayne to the Secretary of War, 1794.

[32] Canadian Archives, G. La Mothe to Joseph Chew, Michilimackinac, July 19, 1794. McKee says, “17 men killed”; evidently he either wilfully understated the truth, or else referred only to the particular tribes with which he was associated. La Mothe says, “they have lost twenty-five people amongst different nations,” but as he was only speaking of the Upper Lake Indians, it may be that the total Indian loss was 25 plus 17, or 42. McKee always understates the British force and loss, and greatly overstates the loss and force of the Americans. In this letter he says that the Americans had 50 men killed, instead of 22; and that 60 “drivers” (pack-horsemen) were taken and killed; whereas in reality 3 were taken and 2 killed.

[33] “Knoxville Gazette,” August 27, 1793.

[34] American State Papers, IV, 48r, 94. Examination of two Pottawatomies captured on the 5th of June; of two Shawnees captured on the 226. of June; of a Shawnee captured on Aug. nth, etc., etc.

[35] McBride collects or reprints a number of narratives dealing with these border heroes; some of them are by contemporaries who took part in their deeds. Brickell’s narrative corroborates these stories; the differences are such as would naturally be explained by the fact that different observers were writing of the same facts from memory after a lapse of several years. In their essentials the narratives are undoubtedly trustworthy. In the Draper collection there are scores of MS. narratives of similar kind, written down from what the pioneers said in their old age; unfortunately it is difficult to sift out the true from the false, unless the stories are corroborated from outside sources; and most of the tales in the Draper MSS. are evidently hopelessly distorted. Wells’ daring attack on the Indian camp is alluded to in the Bradley MSS.; the journal, under date of August 12th, recites how four white spies went down almost to Lake Erie, captured two Indians, and then attacked the Indians in their tents, three of the spies being wounded.

[36] American State Papers, IV, 490, Wayne to Secretary of War, Aug. 14, 1794.

[37] Bradley MSS. Letter of Captain Daniel Bradley to Ebenezer Banks, Grand Glaize, August 28, 1794.

[38] “American Pioneer,” 1, 317, Daily journal of Wayne’s Campaign. By Lieutenant Boyer. Reprinted separately in Cincinnati in 1866.

[39] American State Papers, 491, Wayne’s Report to Secretary of War, August 28, 1794.

[40] Canadian Archives, McKee to Chew, August 27, 1794. McKee says there were 1,300 Indians, and omits all allusion to Caldwell’s rangers. He always underestimates the Indian numbers and loss. In the battle one of Caldwell’s rangers, Antoine Lasselle, was captured. He gave in detail the numbers of the Indians engaged; they footed up to over 1,500. A deserter from the fort, a British drummer of the 24th Regiment, named John Bevin, testified that he had heard both McKee and Elliott report the number of Indians as 2,000, in talking to Major Campbell, the commandant of the fort, after the battle. He and Lasselle agree as to Caldwell’s rangers. See their depositions, American State Papers, IV, 494.

[41] Draper MSS., William Clark to Jonathan Clark, August 28, 1794. McBride, II, 129; “Life of Paxton.” Many of the regulars and volunteers were left in Fort Defiance and the breastworks on the Maumee as garrisons.

[42] A curious name, but so given in all the reports.

[43] Bradley MSS., entry in the journal for August 20th.

[44] Wayne’s report; of the wounded 11 afterward died. He gives an itemized statement. Clark in his letter makes the dead 34 (including 8 militia instead of 7) and the wounded only 70. Wayne reports the Indian loss as twice as great as that of the whites; and says the woods were strewn with their dead bodies and those of their white auxiliaries. Clark says 100 Indians were killed. The Englishman, Thomas Duggan, writing from Detroit to Joseph Chew, Secretary of the Indian Office, says officially that “great numbers” of the Indians were slain. The journal of Wayne’s campaign says 40 dead were left on the field, and that there was considerable additional, but unascertained, loss in the rapid two miles pursuit. The member of Caldwell’s company who was captured was a French Canadian; his deposition is given by Wayne. McKee says the Indians lost but 19 men, and that but 400 were engaged, specifying the Wyandots and Ottawas as being those who did the fighting and suffered the loss; and he puts the loss of the Americans, although he admits that they won, at between 300 and 400. He was furious at the defeat, and was endeavoring to minimize it in every way. He does not mention the presence of Caldwell’s white company; he makes the mistake of putting the American cavalry on the wrong wing, in trying to show that only the Ottawas and Wyandots were engaged; and if his figures, 19 dead, have any value at all, they refer only to those two tribes; above I have repeatedly shown that he invariably underestimated the Indian losses, usually giving the losses suffered by the band he was with as being the entire loss. In this case he speaks of the fighting and loss as being confined to the Ottawas and Wyandots; but Brickell, who was with the Delawares, states that “many of the Delawares were killed and wounded.” All the Indians were engaged; and doubtless all the tribes suffered proportionately, and much more than the Americans. Captain Daniel Bradley in his above quoted letter of Aug. 28th to Ebenezer Banks (Bradley MSS.) says that between 50 and 100 Indians were killed.

[45] Daily Journal of Wayne’s Campaign “American Pioneer,” I, 351.

[46] Draper MSS., William Clark to Jonathan Clark, November 23, 1794.

[47] Canadian Archives, William Johnson Chew to Joseph Chew, December 7, 1794.

[48] Brickell’s Narrative.

[49] Canadian Archives, Joseph Brant to Joseph Chew, Oct. 22, 1794; William J. Chew to J. Chew, Oct. 24, 1794.

[50] Canadian Archives, Brant to Joseph Chew, Feb. 24, and March 17, 1795.

[51] Do., Brant to Chew, Jan. 19, 1796.

[52] Canadian Archives, McKee to Chew, March 27, 1795.

[53] Canadian Archives, Geo. Ironside to McKee, Dec. 13, 1794.

[54] Do., Antoine Lasselle to Jacques Lasselle, Jan. 31, 1795.

[55] Do., Letter of Lt.-Col. England, Jan. 30, 1795; also copy of treaty of peace of Feb. nth.

[56] American State Papers, IV, 562-583.

[57] The ordinary American histories, often so absurdly unjust to England, are right in their treatment of the British actions on the frontier in 1793-94. The ordinary British historians simply ignore the whole affair. As a type of their class, Mr. Percy Gregg may be instanced. His “History of the United States” is a silly book; he is often intentionally untruthful, but his chief fault is his complete ignorance of the facts about which he is writing. It is, of course, needless to criticise such writers as Mr. Gregg and his fellows. But it is worth while calling attention to Mr. Goldwin Smith’s “The United States,” for Mr. Goldwin Smith is a student, and must be taken seriously. He says: “That the British government or anybody by its authority was intriguing with the Indians against the Americans is an assertion of which there seems to be no proof.” If he will examine the Canadian Archives, from which I have quoted, and the authorities which I cite, he will find the proof ready to hand. Prof. A. C. McLaughlin has made a capital study of this question in his pamphlet on “The Western Posts and the British Debts.” What he says can not well be controverted.

LOUISIANA AND AARON BURR

PREFACE

THIS VOLUME covers the period which followed the checkered but finally successful war waged by the United States Government against the Northwestern Indians, and deals with the acquisition and exploration of the vast region that lay beyond the Mississippi. It was during this period that the West rose to real power in the Union. The boundaries of the old West were at last made certain, and the new West, the Far West, the country between the Mississippi and the Pacific, was added to the national domain. The steady stream of incoming settlers broadened and deepened year by year; Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio became States, Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi Territories. The population in the newly settled regions increased with a rapidity hitherto unexampled; and this rapidity, alike in growth of population and in territorial expansion, gave the West full weight in the national councils.

The victorious campaigns of Wayne in the North, and the innumerable obscure forays and reprisals of the Tennesseeans and Georgians in the South, so cowed the Indians that they all, North and South alike, made peace; the first peace the border had known for fifty years. At the same time the treaties of Jay and Pinckney gave us in fact the boundaries which the peace of 1783 had only given us in name. The execution of these treaties put an end in the North to the intrigues of the British, who had stirred the Indians to hostility against the Americans; and in the South to the far more treacherous intrigues of the Spaniards, who showed astounding duplicity, and whose intrigues extended not only to the Indians but also to the baser separatist leaders among the Westerners themselves.

The cession of Louisiana followed. Its true history is to be found, not in the doings of the diplomats who determined merely the terms upon which it was made, but in the Western growth of the people of the United States from 1769 to 1803, which made it inevitable. The men who settled and peopled the Western wilderness were the men who won Louisiana; for it was surrendered by France merely because it was impossible to hold it against the American advance. Jefferson, through his agents at Paris, asked only for New Orleans; but Napoleon thrust upon him the great West, because Napoleon saw, what the American statesmen and diplomats did not see, but what the Westerners felt; for he saw that no European power could hold the country beyond the Mississippi when the Americans had made good their foothold upon the hither bank.

It remained to explore the unknown land; and this task fell, not to mere wild hunters, such as those who had first penetrated the wooded wilderness beyond the Alleghanies, but to officers of the regular army, who obeyed the orders of the National Government. Lewis, Clark, and Pike were the pioneers in the exploration of the vast territory the United States had just gained.

The names of the Indian fighters, the treaty-makers, the wilderness wanderers, who took the lead in winning and exploring the West, are memorable. More memorable still are the lives and deeds of the settler folk for whom they fought and toiled; for the feats of the leaders were rendered possible only by the lusty and vigorous growth of the young commonwealths built up by the throng of westward-pushing pioneers. The raw, strenuous, eager social life of these early dwellers on the Western waters must be studied before it is possible to understand the conditions that determined the continual westward extension of the frontier. Tennessee, during the years immediately preceding her admission to Statehood, is especially well worth study, both as a typical frontier community, and because of the opportunity afforded to examine in detail the causes and course of the Indian wars.

In this volume I have made use of the material to which reference was made in the first; besides the American State Papers I have drawn on the Canadian Archives, the Draper Collection, including especially the papers from the Spanish Archives, the Robertson MSS., and the Clay MSS. for hitherto unused matter. I have derived much assistance from the various studies and monographs on special phases of Western history; I refer to each in its proper place. I regret that Mr. Stephen B. Weeks’ valuable study of the Martin family did not appear in time for me to use it while writing about the little State of Franklin, in my third volume.

Theodore Roosevelt

Sagamore Hill, Long Island,

May, 1896

LOUISIANA AND AARON BURR

CHAPTER I

TENNESSEE BECOMES A STATE, 1791–1796

THE TERRITORY of the United States of America South of the River Ohio” was the official title of the tract of land which had been ceded by North Carolina to the United States, and which soon after became the State of Tennessee. William Blount, the newly appointed Governor, took charge late in 1790. He made a tour of the various counties, as laid out under authority of the State of North Carolina, rechristening them as counties of the Territory, and summoning before him the persons in each county holding commissions from North Carolina, at the respective court-houses, where he formally notified them of the change. He read to them the act of Congress accepting the cessions of the claims of North Carolina; then he read his own commission from President Washington; and informed them of the provision by North Carolina that Congress should assume and execute the government of the new Territory “in a manner similar to that which they support northwest of the River Ohio.” Following this he formally read the ordinance for the government of the Northwestern Territory. He commented upon and explained this proclamation, stating that under it the President had appointed the Governor, the Judges, and the Secretary of the new Territory, and that he himself, as Governor, would now appoint the necessary county officers.

The remarkable feature of this address was that he read to the assembled officers in each county, as part of the law apparently binding upon them, Article 6 of the Ordinance of 1787, which provided that there should be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the Northwestern Territory.[1] It had been expressly stipulated that this particular provision as regards slavery should not apply to the Southwestern Territory, and of course Blount’s omission to mention this fact did not in any way alter the case; but it is a singular thing that he should without comment have read, and his listeners without comment have heard, a recital that slavery was abolished in their territory. It emphasizes the fact that at this time there was throughout the West no very strong feeling on the subject of slavery, and what feeling there was, was if anything hostile. The adventurous backwoods farmers who composed the great mass of the population in Tennessee, as elsewhere among and west of the Alleghanies, were not a slave-owning people, in the sense that the planters of the seaboard were. They were pre-eminently folk who did their work with their own hands. Master and man chopped and plowed and reaped and builded side by side, and even the leaders of the community, the militia generals, the legislators, and the judges, often did their share of farm work, and prided themselves upon their capacity to do it well. They had none of that feeling which makes slave-owners look upon manual labor as a badge of servitude. They were often lazy and shiftless, but they never deified laziness and shiftlessness or made them into a cult. The one thing they prized beyond all others was their personal freedom, the right of the individual to do whatsoever he saw fit. Indeed they often carried this feeling so far as to make them condone gross excesses, rather than insist upon the exercise of even needful authority. They were by no means entirely logical, but they did see and feel that slavery was abhorrent, and that it was utterly inconsistent with the theories of their own social and governmental life. As yet there was no thought of treating slavery as a sacred institution, the righteousness of which must not be questioned. At the Fourth of July celebrations toasts such as “The total abolition of slavery” were not uncommon.[2] It was this feeling which prevented any manifestation of surprise at Blount’s apparent acquiescence in a section of the ordinance for the government of the Territory which prohibited slavery.

Nevertheless, though slaves were not numerous, they were far from uncommon, and the moral conscience of the community was not really roused upon the subject. It was hardly possible that it should be roused, for no civilized people who owned African slaves had as yet abolished slavery, and it was too much to hope that the path toward abolition would be pointed out by poor frontiersmen engaged in a life and death struggle with hostile savages. The slaveholders were not interfered with until they gradually grew numerous enough and powerful enough to set the tone of thought, and make it impossible to root out slavery save by outside action.

Blount recommended the appointment of Sevier and Robertson as brigadier-generals of militia of the Eastern and Western districts of the Territory, and issued a large number of commissions to the justices of the peace, militia officers, sheriffs, and clerks of the county courts in the different counties.[3] In his appointments he shrewdly and properly identified himself with the natural leaders of the frontiersmen. He made Sevier and Robertson his right-hand men, and strove always to act in harmony with them, while for the minor military and civil officers he chose the persons whom the frontiersmen themselves desired. In consequence he speedily became a man of great influence for good. The Secretary of the Territory reported to the Federal Government that the effect of Blount’s character on the frontiersmen was far greater than was the case with any other man, and that he was able to get them to adhere to the principles of order and to support the laws by his influence in a way which it was hopeless to expect from their own respect for governmental authority. Blount was felt by the frontiersmen to be thoroughly in sympathy with them, to understand and appreciate them, and to be heartily anxious for their welfare; and yet at the same time his influence could be counted upon on the side of order, while the majority of the frontier officials in any time of commotion were apt to remain silent and inactive, or even to express their sympathy with the disorderly element.[4]

No one but a man of great tact and firmness could have preserved as much order among the frontiersmen as Blount preserved. He was always under fire from both sides. The settlers were continually complaining that they were deserted by the Federal authorities, who favored the Indians, and that Blount himself did not take sufficiently active steps to subdue the savages; while on the other hand the National Administration was continually upbraiding him for being too active against the Indians, and for not keeping the frontiersmen sufficiently peaceable. Under much temptations, and in a situation that would have bewildered any one, Blount steadfastly followed his course of, on the one hand, striving his best to protect the people over whom he was placed as governor and to repel the savages, while, on the other hand, he suppressed so far as lay in his power, any outbreak against the authorities, and tried to inculcate a feeling of loyalty and respect for the National Government.[5] He did much in creating a strong feeling of attachment to the Union among the rough backwoodsmen with whom he had thrown in his lot.

Early in 1791 Blount entered into negotiations with the Cherokees, and when the weather grew warm he summoned them to a treaty. They met on the Holston, all of the noted Cherokee chiefs and hundreds of their warriors being present, and concluded the treaty of Holston, by which, in consideration of numerous gifts and of an annuity of a thousand (afterward increased to fifteen hundred) dollars, the Cherokees at last definitely abandoned their disputed claims to the various tracts of land which the whites claimed under various former treaties. By this treaty with the Cherokees, and by the treaty with the Creeks entered into at New York the previous summer, the Indian title to most of the present State of Tennessee was fairly and legally extinguished. However, the westernmost part was still held by the Chickasaws, and certain tracts in the southeast by the Cherokees; while the Indian hunting grounds in the middle of the Territory were thrust in between the groups of settlements on the Cumberland and the Holston.

On the ground where the treaty was held Blount proceeded to build a little town, which he made the capital of the Territory, and christened Knoxville, in honor of Washington’s Secretary of War. At this town there was started, in 1791, under his own supervision, the first newspaper of Tennessee, known as the “Knoxville Gazette.” It was four or five years younger than the only other newspaper of the then Far West, the “Kentucky Gazette.” The paper gives an interesting glimpse of many of the social and political conditions of the day. In political tone it showed Blount’s influence very strongly, and was markedly in advance of most of the similar papers of the time, including the “Kentucky Gazette”; for it took a firm stand in favor of the National Government, and against every form of disorder, of separatism, or of mob law. As with all of the American papers of the day, even in the backwoods, there was much interest taken in European news, and a prominent position was given to long letters, or extracts from seaboard papers, containing accounts of the operation of the English fleets and the French armies, or of the attitude of the European Governments. Like most Americans, the editorial writers of the paper originally sympathized strongly with the French Revolution; but the news of the beheading of Marie Antoinette, and of the recital of the atrocities committed in Paris, worked a reaction among those who loved order, and the “Knoxville Gazette” ranged itself with them, taking for the time being strong grounds against the French, and even incidentally alluding to the Indians as being more bloodthirsty than any man “not a Jacobin.” The people largely shared these sentiments. In 1793, at the Fourth of July celebration at Jonesborough there was a public dinner and ball, as there was also at Knoxville; Federal troops were paraded and toasts were drunk to the President, to the Judges of the Supreme Court, to Blount, to General Wayne, to the friendly Chickasaw Indians, to Sevier, to the ladies of the Southwestern Territory, to the American arms, and, finally, “to the true liberties of France and a speedy and just punishment of the murderers of Louis XVI.” The word “Jacobin” was used as a term of reproach for some time.

The paper was at first decidedly Federalist in sentiment. No sympathy was expressed with Genet or with the efforts undertaken by the Western allies of the French Minister to organize a force for the conquest of Louisiana; and the Tennessee settlers generally took the side of law and order in the earlier disturbances in which the Federal Government was concerned. At the Fourth of July celebration in Knoxville in 1795, one of the toasts was “The four Western counties of Pennsylvania; may they repent their folly, and sin no more”; the Tennesseeans sympathizing as little with the Pennsylvania whiskey revolutionists as four years later they sympathized with the Kentuckians and Virginians in their nullification agitation against the alien and sedition laws. Gradually, however, the tone of the paper changed, as did the tone of the community, at least to the extent of becoming Democratic and anti-Federal; for the people felt that the Easterners did not sympathize with them either in their contests with the Indians or in their desire to control the Mississippi and the further West. They grew to regard with particular vindictiveness the Federalists,—the aristocrats, as they styled them,—of the Southern seaboard States, notably of Virginia and South Carolina.[6]

One pathetic feature of the paper was the recurrence of advertisements by persons whose friends and kinsfolk had been carried off by the Indians, and who anxiously sought any trace of them.

But the “Gazette” was used for the expression of opinions not only by the whites, but occasionally even by an Indian. One of the Cherokee chiefs, the Red Bird, put into the “Gazette,” for two buckskins, a talk to the Cherokee chief of the Upper Towns, in which he especially warned him to leave alone one William Cocke, “the white man who lived among the mulberry trees,” for, said Red Bird, “the mulberry man talks very strong and runs very fast”; this same Cocke being afterward one of the first two Senators from Tennessee. The Red Bird ended his letter by the expression of the rather quaint wish, “that all the bad people on both sides were laid in- the ground, for then there would not be so many mush men trying to make people to believe they were warriors.”[7]

Blount brought his family to Tennessee at once, and took the lead in trying to build up institutions for higher education. After a good deal of difficulty an academy was organized under the title of Blount College, and was opened as soon as a sufficient number of pupils could be gotten together; there were already two other colleges in the Territory, Greeneville and Washington, the latter being the academy founded by Doak. Like almost all other institutions of learning of the day these three were under clerical control; but Blount College was chartered as a non-denominational institution, the first of its kind in the United States.[8] The clergyman and the lawyer, with the school-master, were still the typical men of letters in all the frontier communities. The doctor was not yet a prominent feature of life in the backwoods, though there is in the “Gazette” an advertisement of one who announces that he intends to come to practice “with a large stock of genuine medicines.”[9]

The ordinary books were still school books, books of law, and sermons or theological writings. The first books, or pamphlets, published in Eastern Tennessee were brought out about this time at the “Gazette” office, and bore such titles as “A Sermon on Psalmody, by Rev. Hezekiah Balch”; “A Discourse by the Rev. Samuel Carrick”; and a legal essay called “Western Justice.”[10] There was also a slight effort now and then at literature of a lighter kind. The little Western papers, like those in the East, had their poets’ corners, often with the heading of “Sacred to the Muses,” the poems ranging from “Lines to Myra” and “Epitaph on John Topham” to “The Pernicious Consequences of Smoking Cigars.” In one of the issues of the “Knoxville Gazette” there is advertised for sale a new song by a “gentleman of Col. McPherson’s Blues, on a late expedition against the Pennsylvania Insurgents”; and also, in rather incongruous juxtaposition, “Toplady’s Translation of Zanchi on Predestination.”

Settlers were thronging into East Tennessee, and many penetrated even to the Indian-harassed western district. In traveling to the western parts the immigrants generally banded together in large parties, led by some man of note. Among those who arrived in 1792 was the old North Carolina Indian fighter, General Griffith Rutherford. He wished to settle on the Cumberland, and to take thither all his company, with a large number of wagons, and he sent to Blount begging that a road might be cut through the wilderness for the wagons; or, if this could not be done, that some man would blaze the route, “in which case,” said he, “there would be hands of our own that could cut as fast as wagons could march.”[11]

In 1794, there being five thousand free male inhabitants, as provided by law, Tennessee became entitled to a Territorial Legislature, and the Governor summoned the Assembly to meet at Knoxville on August 17th. So great was the danger from the Indians that a military company had to accompany the Cumberland legislators to and from the seat of government. For the same reason the judges on their circuits had to go accompanied by a military guard.

Among the first acts of this Territorial Legislature was that to establish higher institutions of learning; John Sevier was made a trustee in both Blount and Greeneville Colleges. A lottery was established for the purpose of building the Cumberland road to Nashville, and another one to build a jail and stocks in Nashville. A pension act was passed for disabled soldiers and for widows and orphans, who were to be given an adequate allowance at the discretion of the county court. A poll tax of twenty-five cents on all taxable white polls was laid, and on every taxable negro poll fifty cents. Land was taxed at the rate of twenty-five cents a hundred acres, town lots one dollar; while a stud horse was taxed four dollars. Thus, taxes were laid exclusively upon free males, upon slaves, lands, town lots and stud horses, a rather queer combination.[12]

Various industries were started, as the people began to demand not only the necessaries of life but the comforts, and even occasionally the luxuries. There were plenty of blacksmith shops; and a goldsmith and jeweler set up his establishment. In his advertisement he shows that he was prepared to do some work which would be alien to his modern representative, for he notifies the citizens that he makes “rifle guns in the neatest and most approved fashion.”[13]

Ferries were established at the important crossings, and taverns in the county-seats and small towns. One of the Knoxville taverns advertises its rates, which were one shilling for breakfast, one shilling for supper, and one and sixpence for dinner; board and lodging for a week two dollars, and board only for the same space of time nine shillings. Ferriage was three pence for a man and horse and two shillings for a wagon and team.

Various stores were established in the towns, the merchants obtaining most of their goods in the great trade centres of Philadelphia and Baltimore, and thence hauling them by wagon to the frontier. Most of the trade was carried on by barter. There was very little coin in the country and but few bank-notes. Often the advertisement specified the kind of goods that would be taken and the different values at which they would be received. Thus, the salt works at Washington, Virginia, in advertising their salt, stated that they would sell it per bushel for seven shillings and sixpence if paid in cash or prime furs; at ten shillings if paid in bear or deer skins, beeswax, hemp, bacon, butter or beef cattle; and at twelve shillings if in other trade and country produce as was usual.[14] The prime furs were mink, coon, muskrat, wildcat, and beaver. Besides this the stores advertised that they would take for their articles cash, beeswax, and country produce or tallow, hogs’ lard in white walnut kegs, butter, pork, new feathers, good horses, and also corn, rye, oats, flax, and “old Congress money,” the old Congress money being that issued by the Continental Congress, which had depreciated wonderfully in value. They also took certificates of indebtedness either from the State or the nation because of services performed against the Indians, and certificates of land claimed under various rights. The value of some of these commodities was evidently mainly speculative. The storekeepers often felt that where they had to accept such dubious substitutes for cash they desired to give no credit, and some of the advertisements run: “Cheap, ready money store, where no credit whatever will be given,” and then proceed to describe what ready money was,—cash, furs, bacon, etc. The stores sold salt, iron-mongery, pewterware, corduroys, rum, brandy, whiskey, wine, ribbons, linen, calamancos, and in fact generally what would be found at that day in any store in the smaller towns of the older States. The best eight by ten crown glass “was regularly imported,” and also “beautiful assortments of fashionable coat and vest buttons,” as well as “brown and loaf sugar, coffee, chocolate, tea, and spices.” In the towns the families had ceased to kill their own meat, and beef markets were established where fresh meat could be had twice a week.

Houses and lots were advertised for sale, and one result of the method of allowing the branded stock to range at large in the woods was that there were numerous advertisements for strayed horses, and even cattle, with descriptions of the brands and earmarks. The people were already beginning to pay attention to the breeding of their horses, and fine stallions with pedigrees were advertised, though some of the advertisements show a certain indifference to purity of strain, one stallion being quoted as of “mixed fox-hunting and dray” breed. Rather curiously the Chickasaw horses were continually mentioned as of special merit, together with those of imported stock. Attention was paid both to pacers and trotters.

The lottery was still a recognized method of raising money for every purpose, including the advancement of education and religion. One of the advertisements gives as one of the prizes a negro, valued at one hundred and thirty pounds, a horse at ten pounds, and five hundred acres of fine land without improvements at twelve hundred pounds.

Journeying to the long-settled districts of the East, persons went as they wished, in their own wagons or on their own horses; but to go from East Tennessee either to Kentucky, or to the Cumberland district, or to New Orleans, was a serious matter because of the Indians. The Territorial authorities provided annually an escort for immigrants from the Holston country to the Cumberland a distance of one hundred and ten miles through the wilderness, and the departure of this annual escort was advertised for weeks in advance.

Sometimes the escort was thus provided by the authorities. More often adventurers simply banded together, or else some enterprising man advertised that on a given date he should start and would provide protection for those who chose to accompany him. Thus, in the “Knoxville Gazette” for February 6, 1795, a boat captain gives public notice to all persons who wish to sail from the Holston country to New Orleans, that on March 1st, if the waters answer, his two boats will start, the Mary of twenty-five tons, and the Little Polly of fifteen tons. Those who had contracted for freight and passage are desired to attend previous to that period.

There was of course a good deal of lawlessness and a strong tendency to settle assault and battery cases in particular out of court. The officers of justice at times had to subdue criminals by open force. Andrew Jackson, who was District Attorney for the Western District, early acquired fame by the energy and success with which he put down any criminal who resisted the law. The worst offenders fled to the Mississippi Territory, there to live among Spaniards, Creoles, Indians, and lawless Americans. Lawyers drove a thriving business; but they had their own difficulties, to judge by one advertisement, which appears in the issue of the “Gazette” for March 23, 1793, where six of them give notice that hereafter they will give no legal advice unless it is legally paid for.

All the settlers, or at least all the settlers who had any ambition to rise in the world, were absorbed in land speculations; Blount, Robertson, and the other leaders as much so as anybody. They were continually in correspondence with one another about the purchase of land warrants, and about laying them out in the best localities. Of course there was much jealousy and rivalry in the effort to get the best sites. Robertson, being furthest on the frontier, where there was most wild land, had peculiar advantages. Very soon after he settled in the Cumberland district at the close of the Revolutionary War, Blount had entered into an agreement with him for a joint land speculation. Blount was to purchase land claims from both officers and soldiers amounting in all to fifty thousand acres and enter them for the Western Territory, while Robertson was to survey and locate the claims, receiving one-fourth of the whole for his reward.[15] Their connection continued during Blount’s term as Governor, and Blount’s letters to Robertson contain much advice as to how the warrants shall be laid out. Wherever possible they were of course laid outside the Indian boundaries; but, like every one else, Blount and Robertson knew that eventually the Indian lands would come into the possession of the United States, and in view of the utter confusion of the titles, and especially in view of the way the Indians as well as the whites continually broke the treaties and rendered it necessary to make new ones, both Blount and Robertson were willing to place claims on the Indian lands and trust to luck to make the claims good if ever a cession was made. The lands thus located were not lands upon which any Indian village stood. Generally they were tracts of wilderness through which the Indians occasionally hunted, but as to which there was a question whether they had yet been formally ceded to the government.[16]

Blount also corresponded with many other men on the question of these land speculations, and it is amusing to read the expressions of horror of his correspondents when they, read that Tennessee had imposed a land tax.[17] By his activity he became a very large landed proprietor, and when Tennessee was made a State he was taxed on 73,252 acres in all. The tax was not excessive, being but $179.72.[18] It was of course entirely proper for Blount to get possession of the land in this way. The theory of government on the frontier was that each man should be paid a small salary, and be allowed to exercise his private business just so long as it did not interfere with his public duties. Blount’s land speculations were similar to those in which almost every other prominent American, in public or private life, was engaged. Neither Congress nor the States had as yet seen the wisdom of allowing the land to be sold only in small parcels to actual occupants, and the favorite kind of speculation was the organization of land companies. Of course there were other kinds of business in which prominent men took part. Sevier was interested not only in land, but in various mercantile ventures of a more or less speculative kind; he acted as an intermediary with the big importers, who were willing to furnish some of the stores with six months’ credit if they could be guaranteed a settlement at the end of that time.[19]

One of the characteristics of all the leading frontiersmen was not only the way in which they combined business enterprises with their work as Government officials and as Indian fighters, but the readiness with which they turned from one business enterprise to another. One of Blount’s Kentucky correspondents, Thomas Hart, the grandfather of Benton, in his letter to Blount shows these traits in typical fashion. He was engaged in various land speculations with Blount,[20] and was always writing to him about locating land warrants, advertising the same as required by law, and the like. He and Blount held some tens of thousands of acres of the Henderson claim, and Hart proposed that they should lay it out in five-hundred-acre tracts, to be rented to farmers, with the idea that each farmer should receive ten cows and calves to start with; a proposition which was of course helpless, as the pioneers would not lease lands when it was so easy to obtain freeholds. In his letters, Hart mentioned cheerfully that though he was sixty-three years old he was just as well able to carry on his manufacturing business, and, on occasion, to leave it, and play pioneer, as he ever had been, remarking that he “never would be satisfied in the world while new countries could be found,” and that his intention, now that he had moved to Kentucky, was to push the mercantile business as long as the Indian war continued and money was plenty, and when that failed, to turn his attention to farming and to divide up those of his lands he could not till himself, to be rented by others.[21]

This letter to Blount shows, by the way, as was shown by Madison’s correspondent from Kentucky, that the Indian war, scourge though it was to the frontiersmen as a whole, brought some attendant benefits in its wake by putting a stimulus on the trade of the merchants and bringing ready money into the country. It must not be forgotten, however, that men like Hart and Blount, though in some ways they were benefited by the war, were in other ways very much injured, and that, moreover, they consistently strove to do justice to the Indians and to put a stop to hostilities.

In his letters Colonel Hart betrays a hearty, healthy love of life, and capacity to enjoy it, and make the best of it, which fortunately exist in many Kentucky and Tennessee families to this day. He wanted money, but the reason he wanted it was to use it in having a good time for himself and his friends, writing: “I feel all the ardor and spirit for business I did forty years ago, and see myself more capable to conduct it. Oh, if my old friend Uncle Jacob was but living and in this country, what pleasure we should have in raking up money and spending it with our friends!” and he closed by earnestly entreating Blount and his family to come to Kentucky, which he assured him was the finest country in the world, with, moreover, “a very pleasant society, for,” said he, “I can say with truth that the society of this place is equal, if not superior, to any that can be found in any inland town in the United States, for there is not a day that passes over our heads but I can have half a dozen strange gentlemen to dine with us, and they are from all parts of the Union.”[22]

The one overshadowing fact in the history of Tennessee during Blount’s term as governor was the Indian warfare. Hostilities with the Indians were never ceasing, and, so far as Tennessee was concerned, during these six years it was the Indians, and not the whites who were habitually the aggressors and wrongdoers. The Indian warfare in the Territory during these years deserves some study because it was typical of what occurred elsewhere. It illustrates forcibly the fact that under the actual conditions of settlement wars were inevitable; for if it is admitted that the land of the Indians had to be taken and that the continent had to be settled by white men, it must be further admitted that the settlement could not have taken place save after war. The whites might be to blame in some cases, and the Indians in others; but under no combination of circumstances was it possible to obtain possession of the country save as the result of war, or of a peace obtained by the fear of war. Any peace which did not surrender the land was sure in the end to be broken by the whites; and a peace which did surrender the land would be broken by the Indians. The history of Tennessee during the dozen years from 1785 to 1796 offers an admirable case in point. In 1785 the United States Commissioners concluded the treaty of Hopewell with the Indians, and solemnly guaranteed them certain lands. The whites contemptuously disregarded this treaty and seized the lands which it guaranteed to the Indians, being themselves the aggressors, and paying no heed to the plighted word of the Government, while the Government itself was too weak to make the frontiersmen keep faith. The treaties of New York and of Holston with the Creeks and Cherokees in 1790 and 1791 were fairly entered into by fully authorized representatives of the tribes. Under them, for a valuable consideration, and of their own motion, the Creeks and Cherokees solemnly surrendered all title to what is now the territory of Tennessee, save to a few tracts mostly in the west and southeast; and much of the land which was thus ceded they had ceded before. Nevertheless, the peace thus solemnly made was immediately violated by the Indians themselves. The whites were not the aggressors in any way, and, on the contrary, thanks to the wish of the United States authorities for peace, and to the care with which Blount strove to carry out the will of the Federal Government, they for a long time refrained even from retaliating when injured; yet the Indians robbed and plundered them even more freely than when the whites themselves had been the aggressors and had broken the treaty.

Before making the treaty of Holston Blount had been in correspondence with Benjamin Hawkins, a man who had always been greatly interested in Indian affairs. He was a prominent politician in North Carolina, and afterward for many years agent among the Southern Indians. He had been concerned in several of the treaties. He warned Blount that since the treaty of Hopewell the whites, and not the Indians, had been the aggressors; and also warned him not to try to get too much land from the Indians, or to take away too great an extent of their hunting grounds, which would only help the great land companies, but to be content with the thirty-fifth parallel for a southern boundary.[23] Blount paid much heed to this advice, and by the treaty of Holston he obtained from the Indians little more than what the tribes had previously granted, except that they confirmed to the whites the country upon which the pioneers were already settled. The Cumberland district had already been granted over and over again by the Indians in special treaties, to Henderson, to the North Carolinians and to the United States. The Creeks in particular never had had any claim to this Cumberland country, which was a hundred miles and over from any of their towns. All the use they had ever made of it was to visit it with their hunting parties, as did the Cherokees, Choc-taws, Chickasaws, Shawnees, Delawares, and many others. Yet the Creeks and other Indians had the effrontery afterward to assert that the Cumberland country had never been ceded at all, and that as the settlers in it were thus outside of the territory properly belonging to the United States, they were not entitled to protection under the treaty entered into with the latter.

Blount was vigilant and active in seeing that none of the frontiersmen trespassed on the Indian lands, and when a party of men, claiming authority under Georgia, started to settle at the Muscle Shoals, he co-operated actively with the Indians in having them brought back, and did his best, though in vain, to persuade the Grand Jury to indict the offenders.[24] He was explicit in his orders to Sevier, to Robertson, and to District-Attorney Jackson that they should promptly punish any white man who violated the provisions of the treaty; and over a year after it had been entered into he was able to write in explicit terms that “not a single settler had built a house, or made a settlement of any kind, on the Cherokee lands, and that no Indians had been killed by the whites excepting in defence of their lives and property.”[25] Robertson heartily co-operated with Blount, as did Sevier, in the effort to keep peace, Robertson showing much good sense and self-control, and acquiescing in Blount’s desire that nothing should be done “inconsistent with the good of the nation as a whole,” and that “the faith of the nation should be kept.”[26]

The Indians as a body showed no appreciation whatever of these efforts to keep the peace, and plundered and murdered quite as freely as before the treaties, or as when the whites themselves were the aggressors. The Creek Confederacy was in a condition of utter disorganization, McGillivray’s authority was repudiated, and most of the towns scornfully refused to obey the treaty into which their representatives had entered at New York. A tory adventurer named Bowles, who claimed to have the backing of the English Government, landed in the nation and set himself in opposition to McGil-livray. The latter, who was no fighter, and whose tools were treachery and craft, fled to the protection of the Spaniards. Bowles, among other feats, plundered the stores of Panton, a white trader in the Spanish interest, and for a moment his authority seemed supreme; but the Spaniards, by a trick, got possession of him and put him in prison.

The Spaniards still claimed as their own the Southwestern country, and were untiring in their efforts to keep the Indians united among themselves and hostile to the Americans. They concluded a formal treaty of friendship and of reciprocal guarantee with the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees at Nogales, in the Choctaw country, on May 14, 1792.[27] The Indians entered into this treaty at the very time they had concluded wholly inconsistent treaties with the Americans. On the place of the treaty the Spaniards built a fort, which they named Fort Confederation, to perpetuate, as they hoped, the memory of the confederation they had thus established among the Southern Indians. By means of this fort they intended to control all the territory inclosed between the rivers Mississippi, Yazoo, Chickasaw, and Mobile. The Spaniards also expended large sums of money in arming the Creeks, and in bribing them to do, what they were willing to do of their own accord,—that is, to prevent the demarcation of the boundary line as provided in the New York treaty; a treaty which Carondelet reported to his Court as “insulting and pernicious to Spain, the abrogation of which has lately been brought about by the intrigues with the Indians.”[28]

At the same time that the bill for these expenses was submitted for audit to the home government the Spanish Governor also submitted his accounts for the expenses in organizing the expedition against the “English adventurer Bowles,” and in negotiating with Wilkinson and. other Kentucky separatists, and also in establishing a Spanish post at the Chickasaw Bluffs, for which he had finally obtained the permission of the Chickasaws. The Americans of course regarded the establishment both of the fort at the Chickasaw Bluffs and the fort at Nogales as direct challenges; and Carondelet’s accounts show that the frontiersmen were entirely justified in their belief that the Spaniards not only supplied the Creeks with arms and munitions of war, but actively interfered to prevent them from keeping faith and carrying out the treaties which they had signed. The Spaniards did not wish the Indians to go to war unless it was necessary as a last resort. They preferred that they should be peaceful, provided always they could prevent the intrusion of the Americans. Carondelet wrote: “We have inspired the Creeks with pacific intentions toward the United States, but with the precise restriction that there shall be no change of the boundarie,”[29] and he added that “to sustain our allied nations [of Indians] in the possession of their lands becomes therefore indispensable, both to preserve Louisiana to Spain, and in order to keep the Americans from the navigation of the Gulf.” He expressed great uneasiness at the efforts of Robertson to foment war between the Chickasaws and Choctaws and the Creeks, and exerted all his powers to keep the Indian nations at peace with one another and united against the settler-folk.[30]

The Spaniards, though with far more infamous and deliberate deceit and far grosser treachery, were pursuing toward the United States and the Southwestern Indians the policy pursued by the British toward the United States and the Northwestern Indians; with the difference that the Spanish Governor and his agents acted under the orders of the Court of Spain, while the English authorities connived at and profited by, rather than directly commanded, what was done by their subordinates. Carondelet expressly states that Colonel Gayoso and his other subordinates had been directed to unite the Indian nations in a defensive alliance, under the protection of Spain, with the object of opposing Blount, Robertson, and the frontiersmen, and of establishing the Cumberland River as the boundary between the Americans and the Indians. The reciprocal guarantee of their lands by the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws was, said Carondelet, the only way by which the Americans could be retained within their own boundaries.[31] The Spaniards devoted much attention to supporting those traders among the Indians who were faithful to the cause of Spain and could be relied upon to intrigue against the Americans.[32]

The divided condition of the Creeks, some of whom wished to carry out in good faith the treaty of New York, while the others threatened to attack whoever made any move toward putting the treaty into effect, puzzled Carondelet nearly as much as it did the United States authorities; and he endeavored to force the Creeks to abstain from warfare with the Chickasaws by refusing to supply them with munitions of war for any such purpose, or for any other except to oppose the frontiersmen. He put great faith in the endeavor to treat the Americans not as one nation, but as an assemblage of different communities. The Spaniards sought to placate the Kentuckians by promising to reduce the duties on the goods that came down stream to New Orleans by six per cent, and thus to prevent an outbreak on their part; at the same time the United States Government was kept occupied by idle negotiations. Carondelet further hoped to restrain the Cumberland people by fear of the Creek and Cherokee nations, who, he remarked, “had never ceased to commit hostilities upon them and to profess implacable hatred for them.”[33] He reported to the Spanish Court that Spain had no means of molesting the Americans save through the Indians, as it would not be possible with an army to make a serious impression on the “ferocious and well-armed” frontier people, favored as they would be by their knowledge of the country; whereas the Indians, if properly supported, offered an excellent defence, supplying from the Southwestern tribes fifteen thousand warriors, whose keep in time of peace cost Spain not more than fifty thousand dollars a year, and even in time of war not more than a hundred and fifty thousand.[34]

The Spaniards in this manner actively fomented hostilities among the Creeks and Cherokees. Their support explained much in the attitude of these peoples, but doubtless the war would have gone on anyhow until the savages were thoroughly cowed by force of arms. The chief causes for the incessantly renewed hostilities were the desire of the young braves for blood and glory, a vague but well-founded belief among the Indians that the white advance meant their ruin unless stayed by an appeal to arms, and, more important still, the absolute lack of any central authority among the tribesmen which could compel them all to war together effectively on the one hand, or all to make peace on the other.

Blount was Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern Indians as well as Governor of the Territory; and in addition the Federal authorities established an Indian agent, directly responsible to themselves, among the Creeks. His name was James Seagrove. He did his best to bring about a peace, and, like all Indian agents, he was apt to take an unduly harsh view of the deeds of the frontiersmen, and to consider them the real aggressors in any trouble. Of necessity his point of view was wholly different from that of the border settlers. He was promptly informed of all the outrages and aggressions committed by the whites, while he heard little or nothing of the parties of young braves, bent on rapine, who continually fell on the frontiers; whereas the frontiersmen came in contact only with these war bands, and when their kinsfolk had been murdered and their cattle driven off, they were generally ready to take vengeance on the first Indians they could find. Even Seagrove, however, was at times hopelessly puzzled by the attitude of the Indians. He was obliged to admit that they were the first offenders, after the conclusion of the treaties of New York and Holston, and that for a long time the settlers behaved with great moderation in refraining from revenging the outrages committed on them by the Indians, which, he remarked, would have to be stopped if peace was to be preserved.[35]

As the Government took no efficient steps to preserve the peace, either by chastising the Indians or by bribing the ill-judged vengeance of the frontier inhabitants, many of the latter soon grew to hate and despise those by whom they were neither protected nor restrained. The disorderly element got the upper hand on the Georgia frontier, where the backwoodsmen did all they could to involve the nation in a general Indian war, and displayed the most defiant and mutinous spirit toward the officers, civil and military, of the United States Government.[36] As for the Creeks, Seagrove found it exceedingly hard to tell who of them were traitors and who were not; and indeed the chiefs would probably themselves have found the task difficult, for they were obliged to waver more or less in their course as the fickle tribesmen were swayed by impulses toward peace or war. One of the men whom Sea-grove finally grew to regard as a confirmed traitor was the chief, McGillivray. He was probably quite right in his estimate of the half-breed’s character; and, on the other hand, McGillivray doubtless had as an excuse the fact that the perpetual intrigues of Spanish officers, American traders, British adventurers, Creek chiefs who wished peace and Creek warriors who wished war, made it out of the question for him to follow any settled policy. He wrote to Seagrove: “It is no wonder the Indians are distracted, when they are tampered with on every side. I am myself in the situation of a keeper of Bedlam, and nearly fit for an inhabitant.”[37] However, what he did amounted to but little, for his influence had greatly waned, and in 1793 he died.

On the Georgia frontier the backwoodsmen were very rough and lawless, and were always prone to make aggressions on the red men; nevertheless, even in the case of Georgia in 1791 and ‘92, the chief fault lay with the Indians. They refused to make good the land cession which they had solemnly guaranteed at the treaty of New York, and which certain of their towns had previously covenanted to make in the various more or less fraudulent treaties entered into with the State of Georgia separately. In addition to this their plundering parties continually went among the Georgians. The latter, in their efforts to retaliate, struck the hostile and the peaceful alike; and as time went on they made ready to take forcible possession of the lands they coveted, without regard to whether or not these lands had been ceded in fair treaty.

In the Tennessee country the wrong was wholly with the Indians. Some of the chiefs of the Chero-kees went to Philadelphia at the beginning of the year 1792 to request certain modifications of the treaty of Holston, notably an increase in their annuity, which was granted.[38] The General Government had conducted the treaties in good faith and had given the Indians what they asked. The frontiersmen did not molest them in any way or trespass upon their lands; yet their ravages continued without cessation. The authorities at Washington made but feeble efforts to check these outrages, and protect the Southwestern settlers. Yet at this time Tennessee was doing her full part in sustaining the National Government in the war against the Northwestern tribes; a company of Tennessee militia, under Captain Jacob Tipton, joined St. Clair’s army, and Tipton was slain at the defeat, where he fought with the utmost bravery.[39] Not unnaturally the Tennesseeans, and especially the settlers on the far-off Cumberland, felt it a hardship for the United States to neglect their defence at the very time that they were furnishing their quota of soldiers for an offensive war against nations in whose subdual they had but an indirect interest. Robertson wrote to Blount that their silence and remoteness was the cause why the interests of the Cumberland settlers were thus neglected, while the Kentuckians were amply protected.[40]

Naturally the Tennesseeans, conscious that they had not wronged the Indians, and had scrupulously observed the treaty, grew imbittered over the wanton Indian outrages. They were entirely at a loss to explain the reason why the warfare against them was waged with such ferocity. Sevier wrote to Madison, with whom he frequently corresponded: “This country is wholly involved in a war with the Creek and Cherokee Indians, and I am not able to suggest the reasons or the pretended cause of their depredations. The successes of the Northern tribes over our late unfortunate armies have created great exultation throughout the whole Southern Indians, and the probabilities may be they expect to be equally successful. The Spaniards are making use of all their art to draw over the Southern tribes, and I fear may have stimulated them to commence their hostilities. Governor Blount has indefatigably labored to keep these people in a pacific humor, but in vain. War is unavoidable, however ruinous and calamitous it may be.”[41] The Federal Government was most reluctant to look facts in the face and acknowledge that the hostilities were serious, and that they were unprovoked by the whites. The Secretary of War reported to the President that the offenders were doubtless merely a small banditti of Creeks and Cherokees, with a few Shawnees who possessed no fixed residence, and in groping for a remedy he weakly suggested that inasmuch as many of the Cherokees seemed to be dissatisfied with the boundary line they had established by treaty it would perhaps be well to alter it.[42] Of course the adoption of such a measure would have amounted to putting a premium on murder and treachery.

If the Easterners were insensible to the Western need for a vigorous Indian war, many of the Westerners showed as little appreciation of the necessity for any Indian war which did not immediately concern themselves. Individual Kentuckians, individual colonels and captains of the Kentucky militia, were always ready to march to the help of the Tennesseeans against the Southern Indians; but the highest officials of Kentucky were almost as anxious as the Federal authorities to prevent any war save that with the tribes northwest of the Ohio. One of the Kentucky Senators, Brown, in writing to the Governor, Isaac Shelby, laid particular stress upon the fact that nothing but the most urgent necessity could justify a war with the Southern Indians.[43] Shelby himself sympathized with this feeling. He knew what an Indian war was, for he had owed his election largely to his record as an Indian fighter and to the confidence the Kentuckians felt in his power to protect them from their red foes.[44] His correspondence is filled with letters in relation to Indian affairs, requests to authorize the use of spies, requests to establish guards along the Wilderness Road and to garrison block-houses on the frontier; and sometimes there are more pathetic letters, from a husband who had lost a wife, or from an “old, frail woman,” who wished to know if the Governor could not by some means get news of her little granddaughter who had been captured in the wilderness two years before by a party of Indians.[45] He realized fully what hostilities meant, and had no desire to see his State plunged into any Indian war which could be avoided.

Yet, in spite of this cautious attitude, Shelby had much influence with the people of the Tennessee territory. They confided to him their indignation with Blount for stopping Logan’s march to the aid of Robertson; while on the other hand the Virginians, when anxious to prevent the Cumberland settlers from breaking the peace, besought him to use his influence with them in order to make them do what was right.[46] When such a man as Shelby was reluctant to see the United States enter into open hostilities with the Southern Indians, there is small cause for wonder in the fact that the authorities at the National capital did their best to deceive themselves into the belief that there was no real cause for war.

Inability to look facts in the face did not alter the facts. The Indian ravages in the Southern Territory grew steadily more and more serious. The difficulties of the settlers were enormously increased because the United States strictly forbade any offensive measures. The militia were allowed to drive off any war bands found among the settlements with evidently hostile intent; but, acting under the explicit, often repeated, and emphatic commands of the General Government, Blount was obliged to order the militia under no circumstances to assume the offensive, or to cross into the Indian hunting grounds beyond the boundaries established by the treaty of Holston.[47] The inhabitants of the Cumberland region, and of the frontier counties generally, petitioned strongly against this, stating that “the frontiers will break if the inroads of the savages are not checked by counter expeditions.”[48] It was a very disagreeable situation, for Blount, who, in carrying out the orders of the Federal authorities, had to incur the ill-will of the people whom he had been appointed to govern; but even at the cost of being supposed to be lukewarm in the cause of the settlers, he loyally endeavored to execute the commands of his superiors. Yet like every other man acquainted by actual experience with frontier life and Indian warfare, he knew the folly of defensive war against Indians. At this very time the officers on the frontier of South Carolina, which was not a State that at all inclined to unjust aggression against the Indians, notified the Governor that the defensive war was “expensive, hazardous, and distressing” to the settlers, because the Indians “had such advantages, being so wolfish in their manner and so savage in their nature,” that it was impossible to make war upon them on equal terms if the settlers were confined to defending themselves in their own country, whereas a speedy and spirited counter-attack upon them in their homes would probably reduce them to peace, as their mode of warfare fitted them much less to oppose such an attack than to “take skulking, wolfish advantages of the defenceless” settlers.[49]

The difficulties of Blount and the Tennessee frontiersmen were increased by the very fact that the Cherokees and Creeks still nominally remained at peace. The Indian towns nearest the frontier knew that they were jeopardized by the acts of their wilder brethren, and generally strove to avoid committing any offence themselves. The war parties from the remote towns were the chief offenders. Band after band came up from among the Creeks or from among the lower Cherokees, and, passing through the peaceful villages of the upper Cherokees, fell on the frontier, stole horses, ambushed men, killed or captured women and children, and returned whence they had come. In most cases it was quite impossible to determine even the tribe of the offenders with any certainty; and all that the frontiersmen knew was that their bloody trails led back toward the very villages where the Indians loudly professed that they were at peace. They soon grew to regard all the Indians with equal suspicion, and they were so goaded by the blows which they could not return that they were ready to take vengeance upon any one with a red skin, or at least to condone such vengeance when taken. The peaceful Cherokees, though they regretted these actions and were alarmed and disquieted at the probable consequences, were unwilling or unable to punish the aggressors.

Blount was soon at his wits’ ends to prevent the outbreak of a general war. In November, 1792, he furnished the War Department with a list of scores of people—men, women, and children—who had been killed in Tennessee, chiefly in the Cumberland district, since the signing of the treaty of Holston. Many others had been carried off, and were kept in slavery. Among the wounded were General Robertson and one of his sons, who were shot, although not fatally, in May, 1792, while working on their farm. Both Creeks and Cherokees took part in the outrages, and the Chickamauga towns on the Tennessee, at Running Water, Nickajack, and in the neighborhood, ultimately supplied the most persistent wrongdoers.[50]

As Sevier remarked, the Southern, no less than the Northern, Indians were much excited and encouraged by the defeat of St. Clair, coming as it did so close upon the defeat of Harmar. The double disaster to the American arms made the young braves very bold, and it became impossible for the elder men to restrain them.[51] The Creeks harassed the frontiers of Georgia somewhat, but devoted their main attention to the Tennesseeans, and especially to the isolated settlements on the Cumberland. The Chickamauga towns were right at the crossing place both for the Northern Indians when they came south and for the Creeks when they went north. Bands of Shawnees, who were at this time the most inveterate of the enemies of the frontiersmen, passed much time among them; and the Creek war parties, when they journeyed north to steal horses and get scalps, invariably stopped among them, and on their return stopped again to exhibit their trophies and hold scalp dances. The natural effect was that the Chickamaugas, who were mainly Lower Town Cherokees, seeing the impunity with which the ravages were committed, and appreciating the fact that under the orders of the Government they could not be molested in their own homes by the whites, began to join in the raids; and their nearness to the settlements soon made them the worst offenders. One of their leading chiefs was John Watts, who was of mixed blood. Among all these Southern Indians, half-breeds were far more numerous than among the Northerners, and when the half-breeds lived with their mothers’ people they usually became the deadliest enemies of their fathers’ race. Yet, they generally preserved the father’s name. In consequence, among the extraordinary Indian titles borne by the chiefs of the Creeks, Cherokees, and Choctaws—the Bloody Fellow, the Middle Striker, the Mad Dog, the Glass, the Breath—there were also many names like John Watts, Alexander Cornell, and James Colbert, which were common among the frontiersmen themselves.

These Chickamaugas and Lower Cherokees had solemnly entered into treaties of peace, and Blount had been taken in by their professions of friendship, and for some time was loath to believe that their warriors were among the war parties who ravaged the settlements. By the spring of 1792, however, the fact of their hostility could no longer be concealed. Nevertheless, in May of that year the chiefs of the Lower Cherokee towns joined with those of the Upper Towns in pressing Governor Blount to come to a council at Coyatee, where he was met by two thousand Cherokees, including all their principal chiefs and warriors.[52] The head men, not only from the Upper Towns, but from Nickajack and Running Water, including John Watts, solemnly assured Blount of their peaceful intentions, and expressed their regret at the outrages which they admitted had been committed by their young men. Blount told them plainly that he had the utmost difficulty in restraining the whites from taking vengeance for the numerous murders committed on the settlers, and warned them that if they wished to avert a war which would fall upon both the innocent and the guilty they must themselves keep the peace. The chiefs answered, with seeming earnestness, that they were most desirous of being at peace, and would certainly restrain their men; and they begged for the treaty goods which Blount had in his possession. So sincere did they seem that he gave them the goods.[53]

This meeting began on the 17th of May, yet on the 16th, within twelve miles of Knoxville, two boys were killed and scalped while picking strawberries, and on the 13th a girl had been scalped within four miles of Nashville; and on the 17th itself, while Judge Campbell of the Territorial Court was returning from the Cumberland Circuit his party was attacked and one killed.[54]

When such outrages were committed at the very time the treaty was being held, it was hopeless to expect peace. In September the Chickamaugas threw off the mask and made open war. When the news was received Blount called out the militia and sent word to Robertson that some friendly Chero-kees had given warning that a big war party was about to fall on the settlements round Nashville.[55] Finding that the warning had been given, the Chickamauga chiefs sought to lull their foes into security by a rather adroit piece of treachery. Two of their chiefs, The Glass and The Bloody Fellow, wrote to Blount complaining that they had assembled their warriors because they were alarmed over rumors of a desire on the part of the whites to maltreat them; and on the receipt of assurances from Blount that they were mistaken, they announced their pleasure and stated that no hostilities would be undertaken. Blount was much relieved at this, and thought that the danger of an outbreak was past. Accordingly he wrote to Robertson telling him that he could disband his troops, as there was no longer need of them. Robertson, however, knew the Indian character as few men did know it, and, moreover, he had received confidential information about the impending raid from a half-breed and a Frenchman who were among the Indians. He did not disband his troops, and wrote to Blount that The Glass and The Bloody Fellow had undoubtedly written as they did simply to deceive him and to secure their villages from a counter-attack while they were off on their raid against the Cumberland people. Accordingly three hundred militia were put under arms.[56]

It was well that the whites were on their guard. Toward the end of September a big war party, under the command of John Watts, and including some two hundred Cherokees, eighty Creeks, and some Shawnees, left the Chickamauga Towns and marched swiftly and silently to the Cumberland district. They attempted to surprise one of the more considerable of the lonely little forted towns. It was known as Buchanan’s Station, and in it there were several families, including fifteen “gun-men.” Two spies went out from it to scour the country and give warning of any Indian advance; but with the Cherokees were two very white half-breeds, whose Indian blood was scarcely noticeable, and these two men met the spies and decoyed them to their death. The Indians then, soon after midnight on the 30th of September, sought to rush the station by surprise. The alarm was given by the running of the frightened cattle, and when the sentinel fired at the assailants they were not ten yards from the gate of the block-house. The barred door withstood the shock and the flame-flashes lighted up the night as the gun-men fired through the loop-holes. The Indians tried to burn the fort, one of the chiefs, a half-breed, leaping on the roof; he was shot through the thigh and rolled off; but he stayed close to the logs trying to light them with his torch, alternately blowing it into a blaze and hallooing to the Indians to keep on with the attack. However, he was slain, as was the Shawnee head chief, and several warriors, while John Watts, leader of the expedition, was shot through both thighs. The log walls of the grim little block-house stood out black in the fitful glare of the cane torches; and tongues of red fire streamed into the night as the rifles rang. The attack had failed, and the throng of dark, flitting forms faded into the gloom as the baffled Indians retreated. So disheartened were they by the check, and by the loss they had suffered, that they did not further molest the settlements, but fell back to their strongholds across the Tennessee. Among the Cherokee chiefs who led the raid were two signers of the treaty of Holston.[57]

After this the war was open, so far as the Indians of the Lower Cherokee Towns and of many of the Creek Towns were concerned; but the whites were still restrained by strict orders from the United States authorities, who refused to allow them to retaliate. Outrage followed outrage in monotonously bloody succession. The Creeks were the worst offenders in point of numbers, but the Lower Cherokees from the Chickamauga towns did most harm according to their power. Sometimes the bands that entered the settlements were several hundred strong; but their chief object was plunder, and they rarely attacked the strong places of the white frontiersmen, though they forced them to keep huddled in the stockaded stations; nor did they often fight a pitched battle with the larger bodies of militia. There is no reason for reciting in full the countless deeds of rapine and murder. The incidents, though with infinite variety of detail, were in substance the same as in all the Indian wars of the backwoods. Men, women, and children were killed or captured; outlying cabins were attacked and burned; the husbandman was shot as he worked in the field, and the housewife as she went for water. The victim was now a militiaman on his way to join his company, now one of the party of immigrants, now a settler on his lonely farm, and now a justice of the peace going to Court, or a Baptist preacher striving to reach the Cumberland country that he might preach the word of God to the people who had among them no religious instructor. The express messengers and post riders, who went through the wilderness from one commander to the other, always rode at hazard of their lives. In one of Blount’s letters to Robertson he remarks: “Your letter of the 6th of February sent express by James Russell was handed to me, much stained with his blood, by Mr. Shannon, who accompanied him.” Russell had been wounded in an ambuscade, and his fifty dollars were dearly earned.[58]

The Indians were even more fond of horse-stealing than of murder, and they found a ready market for their horses, not only in their own nations and among the Spaniards, but among the American frontiersmen themselves. Many of the unscrupulous white scoundrels who lived on the borders of the Indian country made a regular practice of receiving the stolen horses. As soon as a horse was driven from the Tennessee or Cumberland it was hurried through the Indian country to the Carolina or Georgia frontiers, where the red thieves delivered it to the foul white receivers, who took it to some town on the seaboard, so as effectually to prevent a recovery. At Swannanoa in North Carolina, among the lawless settlements at the foot of the Oconee Mountain in South Carolina, and at Tugaloo in Georgia, there were regular markets for these stolen horses.[59] There were then, and continued to exist as long as the frontier lasted, plenty of white men who, though ready enough to wrong the Indians, were equally ready to profit by the wrongs they inflicted on the white settlers, and to encourage their misdeeds if profit was thereby to be made. Very little evildoing of this kind took place in Tennessee, for Blount, backed by Sevier and Robertson, was vigilant to put it down; but as yet the Federal Government was not firm in its seat, and its arm was not long enough to reach into the remote frontier districts, where lawlessness of every kind throve, and the whites wronged one another as recklessly as they wronged the Indians.

The white scoundrels throve in the confusion of a nominal peace which the savages broke at will; but the honest frontiersmen really suffered more than if there had been open war, as the Federal Governmen refused to allow raids to be carried into the Indian territory, and in consequence the marauding Indians could at any time reach a place of safety. The block-houses were of little consequence in putting a stop to Indian attacks. The most efficient means of defence was the employment of the hardiest and best hunters as scouts or spies, for they traveled hither and thither through the woods and continually harried the war parties.[60] The militia hands also traveled to and fro, marching to the rescue of some threatened settlement, or seeking to intercept the attacking bands or to overtake those who had delivered their stroke and were returning to the Indian country. Generally they failed in the pursuit. Occasionally they were themselves ambushed, attacked, and dispersed; sometimes they overtook and scattered their foes. In such a case they were as little apt to show mercy to the defeated as were the Indians themselves. Blount issued strict orders that squaws and children were not to be slain, and the frontiersmen did generally refuse to copy their antagonists in butchering the women and children in cold blood. When an attack was made on a camp, however, it was no uncommon thing to have the squaws killed while the fight was hot. Blount, in one of his letters to Robertson, after the Cumberland militia had attacked and destroyed a Creek war party which had murdered a settler, expressed his pleasure at the perseverance with which the militia captain had followed the Indians to the banks of the Tennessee, where he had been lucky enough to overtake them in a position where not one was able to escape. Blount especially complimented him upon having spared the two squaws, “as all civilized people should”; and he added that in so doing the captain’s conduct offered a most agreeable contrast to the behavior of some of his fellow citizens under like circumstances.[61]

Repeated efforts were made to secure peace with the Indians. Andrew Pickens, of South Carolina, was sent to the exposed frontier in 1792 to act as Peace Commissioner. Pickens was a high-minded and honorable man, who never hesitated to condemn the frontiersmen when they wronged the Indians, and he was a champion of the latter wherever possible. He came out with every hope and belief that he could make a permanent treaty; but after having been some time on the border he was obliged to admit that there was no chance of bringing about even a truce, and that the nominal peace that obtained was worse for the settlers than actual war. He wrote to Blount that though he earnestly hoped the people of the border would observe the treaty, yet that the Cherokees had done more damage, especially in the way of horse stealing, since the treaty was signed than ever before, and that it was not possible to say what the frontier inhabitants might be provoked to do. He continued: “While a part, and that the ostensible ruling part, of a nation affect to be at, and I believe really are for, peace, and the more active young men are frequently killing people and stealing horses, it is extremely difficult to know how to act. The people, even the most exposed, would prefer an open war to such a situation. The reason is obvious. A man would then know when he saw an Indian he saw an enemy, and would be prepared to act accordingly.”[62]

The people of Tennessee were the wronged, and not the wrongdoers, and it was upon them that the heaviest strokes of the Indians fell. The Georgia frontiers were also harried continually, although much less severely; but the Georgians were themselves far from blameless. Georgia was the youngest, weakest, and most lawless of the original thirteen States, and on the whole her dealings with the Indians were far from creditable. More than once she inflicted shameful wrong on the Cherokees. The Creeks, however, generally wronged her more than she wronged them, and at this particular period even the Georgia frontiersmen were much less to blame than were their Indian foes. By fair treaty the Indians had agreed to cede to the whites lands upon which they now refused to allow them to settle. They continually plundered and murdered the outlying Georgia settlers; and the militia, in their retaliatory expeditions, having no knowledge of who the murderers actually were, quite as often killed the innocent as the guilty. One of the complaints of the Indians was that the Georgians came in parties to hunt on the neutral ground, and slew quantities of deer and turkeys by fire hunting at night and by still-hunting with the rifle in the daytime, while they killed many bears by the aid of their “great gangs of dogs.”[63] This could hardly be called a legitimate objection on the part of the Creeks, however, for their own hunting parties ranged freely through the lands they had ceded to the whites and killed game wherever they could find it.

Evil and fearful deeds were done by both sides. Peaceful Indians, even envoys, going to the treaty grounds were slain in cold blood; and all that the Georgians could allege by way of offset was that the savages themselves had killed many peaceful whites. The Georgia frontiersmen openly showed their sullen hatred of the United States authorities. The Georgia State Government was too weak to enforce order. It could neither keep the peace among its own frontiersmen, nor wage effective war on the Indians; for when the militia did gather to invade the Creek country they were so mutinous and disorderly that the expeditions generally broke up without accomplishing anything. At one period a militia general, Elijah Clark, actually led a large party of frontiersmen into the unceded Creek hunting grounds with the purpose of setting up an independent government; but the Georgia authorities for once summoned energy sufficient to break up this lawless community.[64]

The Georgians were thus far from guiltless themselves, though at this time they were more sinned against than sinning; but in the Tennessee Territory the white settlers behaved very well throughout these years, and showed both patience and fairness in their treatment of the Indians. Blount did his best to prevent outrages, and Sevier and Robertson heartily seconded him. In spite of the grumbling of the frontiersmen, and in spite of repeated and almost intolerable provocation in the way of Indian forays, Blount steadily refused to allow counter-expeditions into the Indian territory, and stopped both the Tennesseeans and Kentuckians when they prepared to make such expeditions.[65] Judge Campbell, the same man who was himself attacked by the Indians when returning from his circuit, in his charge to the Grand Jury at the end of 1791, particularly warned them to stop any lawless attack upon the Indians. In November, 1792, when five Creeks, headed by a Scotch half-breed, retreated to the Cherokee town of Chiloa with stolen horses, a band of fifty whites gathered to march after them and destroy the Cherokee town; but Sevier dispersed them and made them go to their own homes. The following February a still larger band gathered to attack the Cherokee towns and were dispersed by Blount himself. Robertson, in the summer of 1793, prevented militia parties from crossing the Tennessee in retaliation. In October, 1794, the Grand Jury of Hamilton County entreated and adjured the people, in spite of the Indian outrages to stand firmly by the law, and not to try to be their own avengers; and when some whites settled in Powell’s Valley, on Cherokee lands, Governor Blount promptly turned them off.[66]

The unfortunate Indian agent among the Creeks, Seagrove, speedily became an object of special detestation to the frontiersmen generally, and the inhabitants of the Tennessee country in particular, because he persistently reported that he thought the Creeks peaceable, and deemed their behavior less blamable than that of the whites. His attitude was natural, for probably most of the Creek chiefs with whom he came in contact were friendly, and many of those who were not professed to be so when in his company, if only for the sake of getting the goods he had to distribute; and of course they brought him word whenever the Georgians killed a Creek, either innocent or guilty, without telling him of the offence which the Georgians were blindly trying to revenge. Seagrove himself had some rude awakenings. After reporting to the Central Government at Philadelphia that the Creeks were warm in professing the most sincere friendship, he would suddenly find, to his horror, that they were sending off war parties and acting in concert with the Shawnees; and at one time they actually, without any provocation, attacked a trading store kept by his own brother, and killed the two men who were managing it.[67] Most of the Creeks, however, professed, and doubtless felt, regret at these outrages, and Seagrove continued to represent their conduct in a favorable light to the Central Government, though he was forced to admit that certain of the towns were undoubtedly hostile and could not be controlled by the party which was for peace.

Blount was much put out at the fact that Sea-grove was believed at Philadelphia when he reported the Creeks to be at peace. In a letter to Seagrove, at the beginning of 1794, Blount told him sharply that as far as the Cumberland district was concerned the Creeks had been the only ones to blame since the treaty of New York, for they had killed or enslaved over two hundred whites, attacking them in their houses, fields, or on the public roads, and had driven off over a thousand horses, while the Americans had done the Creeks no injuries whatever except in defence of their homes and lives, or in pursuing war parties. It was possible of course that occasionally an innocent hunter suffered with the guilty marauders, but this was because he was off his own hunting grounds; and the treaty explicitly showed that the Creeks had no claim to the Cumberland region, while there was not a particle of truth in their assertion that since the treaty had been entered into there had been intrusion on their hunting grounds. Seagrove, in response, wrote that he believed the Creeks and Cherokees sincerely desired peace. This was followed forthwith by new outrages, and Blount wrote to Robertson: “It does really seem as if assurances from Mr. Seagrove of the peaceful disposition of the Creeks was the prelude to their murdering and plundering the inhabitants of your district.”[68] The “Knoxville Gazette” called attention to the fact that Seagrove had written a letter to the effect that the Creeks were well disposed, just four days before the attack on Buchanan Station, On September 22d. Seagrove wrote stating that the Creeks were peaceable, that all their chief men ardently wished for the cessation of hostilities, and that they had refused the request of the Cherokees to go to war with the United States; and his deputy agent, Barnard, reiterated the assertions and stated that the Upper Creeks had remained quiet, although six of their people had been killed at the mouth of the Tennessee. The “Gazette” thereupon published a list of twenty-one men, women, and children who at that very time were held in slavery in the Creek towns, and enumerated scores of murders which had been committed by the Creeks during precisely the period when Seagrove and Barnard described them as so desirous of peace.[69]

Under such circumstances the settlers naturally grew indignant with the United States because they were not protected, and were not even allowed to defend themselves by punishing their foes. The Creeks and Cherokees were receiving their annuities regularly, and many presents in addition, while their outrages continued unceasingly. The Nashville people complained that the Creeks were “as busy in killing and scalping as if they had been paid three thousand dollars for doing so, in the room of fifteen hundred dollars to keep the peace.”[70] A public address was issued in the “Knoxville Gazette” by the Tennesseeans on the subjects of their wrongs. In respectful and loyal language, but firmly, the Tennesseeans called the attention of the Government authorities to their sufferings. They avowed the utmost devotion to the Union and a determination to stand by the laws, but insisted that it would be absolutely necessary for them to take measures to defend themselves by retaliating on the Indians.

A feature of the address was its vivid picture of the nature of the ordinary Indian inroad and of the lack of any definite system of defence on the frontier. It stated that the Indian raid or outbreak was usually first made known either by the murder of some defenceless farmer, the escape of some Indian trader, or the warning of some friendly Indian who wished to avoid mischief. The first man who received the news, not having made any agreement with the other members of the community as to his course in such an emergency, ran away to his kinsfolk as fast as he could. Every neighbor caught the alarm, thought himself the only person left to fight, and got off on the same route as speedily as possible, until, luckily for all, the meeting of the roads on the general retreat, the difficulty of the way, the straying of horses, and sometimes the halting to drink whiskey, put a stop to “the hurly-burly of the flight” and reminded the fugitives that by this time they were in sufficient force to rally; and then they would return “to explore the plundered country and to bury the unfortunate scalped heads in the fag-end of the retreat”; whereas if there had been an appointed rendezvous where all could rally it would have prevented such a flight from what might possibly have been a body of Indians far inferior in numbers to the armed men of the settlements attacked.[71]

The convention of Mero district early petitioned Congress for the right to retaliate on the Indians and to follow them to their towns, stating that they had refrained from doing so hitherto not from cowardice, but only from regard to government, and that they regretted that their “rulers” (the Federal authorities at Philadelphia) did not enter into their feelings or seem to sympathize with them.[72] When the Territorial Legislature met in 1794 it petitioned Congress for war against the Creeks and Cherokees, reciting the numerous outrages committed by them upon the whites; stating that since 1792 the frontiersmen had been huddled together two or three hundred to the station, anxiously expecting peace, or a legally authorized war from which they would soon wring peace; and adding that they were afraid of war in no shape, but that they asked that their hands be unbound and they be allowed to defend themselves in the only possible manner, by offensive war. They went on to say that, as members of the Nation, they heartily approved of the hostilities which were then being carried on against the Algerines for the protection of the seafaring men of the coast-towns, and concluded: “The citizens who live in poverty on the extreme frontier are as much entitled to be protected in their lives, their families, and their little properties, as those who roll in luxury, ease, and affluence in the great and opulent Atlantic cities,”—for in frontier eyes the little seaboard trading-towns assumed a rather comical aspect of magnificence. The address was on the whole dignified in tone, and it undoubtedly set forth both the wrong and the remedy with entire accuracy. The Tennesseeans felt bitterly that the Federal Government did everything for Kentucky and nothing for themselves, and they were rather inclined to sneer at the difficulty experienced by the Kentuckians and the Federal army in subduing the Northwestern Indians, while they themselves were left single-handed to contend with the more numerous tribes of the South. They were also inclined to laugh at the continual complaints the Georgians made over the comparatively trivial wrongs they suffered from the Indians, and at their inability either to control their own people or to make war effectively.[73]

Such a state of things as that which existed in the Tennessee territory could not endure. The failure of the United States authorities to undertake active offensive warfare and to protect the frontiersmen rendered it inevitable that the frontiersmen should protect themselves; and under the circumstances, when retaliation began it was certain sometimes to fall upon the blameless. The rude militia officers began to lead their retaliatory parties into the Indian lands, and soon the innocent Indians suffered with the guilty, for the frontiersmen had no means of distinguishing between them. The Indians who visited the settlements with peaceful intent were of course at any time liable to be mistaken for their brethren who were hostile, or else to be attacked by scoundrels who were bent upon killing all red men alike. Thus, on one day, as Blount reported, a friendly Indian passing the home of one of the settlers was fired upon and wounded; while in the same region five hostile Indians killed the wife and three children of a settler in his sight; and another party stole a number of horses from a station; and yet another party, composed of peaceful Indian hunters, was attacked at night by some white militia, one man being killed and another wounded.[74]

One of the firm friends of the whites was Scolacutta, the chief of the Upper Cherokees. He tried to keep his people at peace, and repeatedly warned the whites of impending attacks. Nevertheless, he was unwilling or unable to stop by force the war parties of Creeks and Lower Cherokees who came through his towns to raid against the settlements and who retreated to them again when the raids were ended. Many of his young men joined the bands of horse-thieves and scalp-hunters. The marauders wished to embroil him with the whites, and were glad that the latter should see the bloody trails leading back to his towns. For two years after the signing of the treaty of Holston the war parties thus passed and repassed through his country, and received aid and comfort from his people, and yet the whites refrained from taking vengeance; but the vengeance was certain to come in the end.

In March, 1793, Scolacutta’s nearest neighbor, an Indian living next door to him in his own town, and other Indians of the nearest towns, joined one of the war parties which attacked the settlements and killed two unarmed lads.[75] The Indians did nothing to the murderers, and the whites forbore to attack them; but their patience was nearly exhausted. In June following a captain, John Beard, with fifty mounted riflemen, fell in with a small party of Indians who had killed several settlers. He followed their trail to Scolacutta’s town, where he slew eight or nine Indians, most of whom were friendly.[76] The Indians clamored for justice and the surrender of the militia who had attacked them. Blount warmly sympathized with them, but when he summoned a court-martial to try Beard it promptly acquitted him, and the general frontier feeling was strongly in his favor. Other militia commanders followed his example. Again and again they trailed the war parties, laden with scalps and plunder, and attacked the towns to which they went, killing the warriors and capturing squaws and children.[77]

The following January another party of red marauders was tracked by a band of riflemen to Scolacutta’s camp. The militia promptly fell on the camp and killed several Indians, both the hostile and the friendly. Other Cherokee towns were attacked and partially destroyed. In but one instance were the whites beaten off. When once the whites fairly began to make retaliatory inroads they troubled themselves but little as to whether the Indians they assailed were or were not those who had wronged them. In one case, four frontiersmen dressed and painted themselves like Indians prior to starting on a foray to avenge the murder of a neighbor. They could not find the trail of the murderers, and so went at random to a Cherokee town, killed four warriors who were asleep on the ground, and returned to the settlements. Scolacutta at first was very angry with Blount, and taunted him with his inability to punish the whites, asserting that the frontiersmen were “making fun” of their well-meaning governor; but the old chief soon made up his mind that as long as he allowed the war parties to go through his towns he would have to expect to suffer at the hands of the injured settlers. He wrote to Blount enumerating the different murders that had been committed by both sides, and stating that his people were willing to let the misdeeds stand as offsetting one another. He closed his letter by stating that the Upper Towns were for peace, and added: “I want my mate, General Sevier, to see my talk … We have often told lies, but now you may depend on hearing the truth,” which was a refreshingly frank admission.[78]

When, toward the close of 1792, the ravages became very serious, Sevier, the man whom the Indians feared more than any other, was called to take command of the militia. For a year he confined himself to acting on the defensive, and even thus he was able to give much protection to the settlements. In September, 1793, however, several hundred Indians, mostly Cherokees, crossed the Tennessee not thirty miles from Knoxville. They attacked a small station, within which there were but thirteen souls, who, after some resistance, surrendered on condition that their lives should be spared; but they were butchered with obscene cruelty. Sevier immediately marched toward the assailants, who fled back to the Cherokee towns. Thither Sevier followed them, and went entirely through the Cherokee country to the land of the Creeks, burning the towns and destroying the stores of provisions. He marched with his usual quickness, and the Indians were never able to get together in sufficient numbers to oppose him. When he crossed High Tower River there was a skirmish, but he soon routed the Indians, killing several of their warriors, and losing himself but three men killed and three wounded. He utterly destroyed a hostile Creek town, the chief of which was named Buffalo Horn. He returned late in October, and after his return the frontiers of Eastern Tennessee had a respite from the Indian ravages. Yet Congress refused to pay his militia for the time they were out, because they had invaded the Indian country instead of acting on the defensive.[79]

To chastise the Upper Cherokee Towns gave relief to the settlements on the Holston, but the chief sinners were the Chickamaugas of the Lower Cherokee Towns, and the chief sufferers were the Cumberland settlers. The Cumberland people were irritated beyond endurance, alike by the ravages of these Indians and by the conduct of the United States in forbidding them to retaliate. In September, 1794, they acted for themselves. Early in the month Robertson received certain information that a large body of Creeks and Lower Cherokees had gathered at the towns and were preparing to invade the Cumberland settlements. The best way to meet them was by a stroke in advance, and he determined to send an expedition against them in their strongholds. There was no question whatever as to the hostility of the Indians, for at this very time settlers were being killed by Avar parties throughout the Cumberland country. Some Kentuckians, under Colonel Whitley, had joined the Tennesseeans, who were nominally led by a Major Ore; but various frontier fighters, including Kaspar Mansker, were really as much in command as was Ore. Over five hundred mounted riflemen, bold of heart and strong of hand, marched toward the Chickamauga towns, which contained some three hundred warriors. When they came to the Tennessee they spent the entire night in ferrying the arms across and swimming the horses: they used bundles of dry cane for rafts, and made four “bull-boats” out of the hides of steers. They passed over unobserved and fell on the towns of Nickajack and Running Water, taking the Indians completely by surprise; they killed fifty-five warriors and captured nineteen squaws and children. In the entire expedition but one white man was killed and three wounded.[80]

Not only the Federal authorities, but Blount himself, very much disapproved of this expedition; nevertheless, it was right and proper, and produced excellent effects. In no other way could the hostile towns have been brought to reason. It was followed by a general conference with the Cherokees at Tellico Block-house. Scolacutta appeared for the Upper, and Watts for the Lower, Cherokee Towns. Watts admitted that “for their folly” the Lower Cherokees had hitherto refused to make peace, and remarked frankly, “I do not say they did not deserve the chastisement they received.” Scolacutta stated that he could not sympathize much with the Lower Towns, saying, “their own conduct brought destruction upon them. The trails of murderers and thieves was followed to those towns … Their bad conduct drew the white people on me, who injured me nearly unto death… . All last winter I was compelled to lay in the woods by the bad conduct of my own people drawing war on me.” At last the Cherokees seemed sincere in their desire for peace.[81]

These counter-attacks served a double purpose. They awed the hostile Cherokees; and they forced the friendly Cherokees, for the sake of their own safety, actively to interfere against the bands of hostile Creeks. A Cherokee chief, The Stallion, and a number of warriors, joined with the Federal soldiers and Tennessee militia in repulsing the Creek war parties. They acted under Blount’s directions, and put a complete stop to the passage of hostile Indians through their towns.[82] The Chickasaws also had become embroiled with the Creeks.[83] For over three years they carried on an intermittent warfare with them, and were heartily supported by the frontiersmen, who were prompt to recognize the value of their services. At the same time the hostile Indians were much cowed at the news of Wayne’s victory in the North.

All these causes combined to make the Creeks sue for peace. To its shame and discredit the United States Government at first proposed to repeat toward the Chickasaws the treachery of which the British had just been guilty to the Northern Indians; for it refused to defend them from the Creeks, against whom they had been acting, partly, it is true, for their own ends, but partly in the interest of the settlers. The frontiersmen, however, took a much more just and generous view of the affair. Mansker and a number of the best fighters in the Cumberland district marched to the assistance of the Chickasaws; and the frontier militia generally showed grateful appreciation of the way both the Upper Cherokees and the Chickasaws helped them put a stop to the hostilities of the Chickamaugas and Creeks. Robertson got the Choctaws to interfere on behalf of the Chickasaws and to threaten war with the Creeks if the latter persisted in their hostilities. Moreover, the United States agents, when the treaty was actually made, behaved better than their superiors had promised, for they persuaded the Creeks to declare peace with the Chickasaws as well as with the whites.[84] Many of the peaceful Creeks had become so alarmed at the outbreak that they began to exert pressure on their warlike brethren; and at last the hostile element yielded, though not until bitter feeling had arisen between the factions. The fact was, that the Creeks were divided much as they were twenty years later, when the Red Sticks went to war under the inspiration of the Prophet; and it would have been well if Wayne had been sent South, to invade their country and anticipate by twenty years Jackson’s feats. But the nation was not yet ready for such strong measures. The Creeks were met half way in their desire for peace; and the entire tribe concluded a treaty the provisions of which were substantially those of the treaty of New York. They ceased hostilities, together with the Cherokees.

The concluding stage of the negotiations was marked by an incident which plainly betrayed the faulty attitude of the National Government toward Southwestern frontiersmen. With incredible folly, Timothy Pickering, at this time Secretary of War, blindly refused to see the necessity of what had been done by Blount and the Tennessee frontiersmen. In behalf of the administration he wrote a letter to Blount which was as offensive as it was fatuous. In it he actually blamed Blount for getting the Cherokees and Chickasaws to help protect the frontier against the hostile Indians. He forbade him to give any assistance to the Chickasaws. He announced that he disapproved of The Stallion’s deeds, and that the Cherokees must not destroy Creeks passing through their country on the way to the frontier. He even intimated that the surrender of The Stallion to the Creeks would be a good thing. As for protecting the frontier from the ravages of the Creeks, he merely vouchsafed the statement that he would instruct Seagrove to make “some pointed declarations” to the Creeks on the subject! He explained that the United States Government was resolved not to have a direct or indirect war with the Creeks; and he closed by reiterating, with futile insistency, that the instruction to the Cherokees not to permit Creek war parties against the whites to come through their country, did not warrant their using force to stop them.[85] He failed to point out how it was possible, without force, to carry out these instructions.

A more shameful letter was never written, and it was sufficient of itself to show Pickering’s conspicuous incapacity for the position he held. The trouble was that he represented not very unfairly the sentiment of a large portion of the Eastern, and especially the Northeastern, people. When Blount visited Philadelphia in the summer of 1793 to urge a vigorous national war as the only thing which could bring the Indians to behave themselves,[86] he reported that Washington had an entirely just idea of the whole Indian business, but that Congress generally knew little of the matter and was not disposed to act.[87] His report was correct; and he might have added that the Congressmen were no more ignorant, and no more reluctant to do right, than their constituents.

The truth is that the United States Government during the six years from 1791 to 1796 behaved shamefully to the people who were settled along the Cumberland and Holston. This was the more inexcusable in view of the fact that, thanks to the example of Blount, Sevier, and Robertson, the Tennesseeans, alone among the frontiersmen, showed an intelligent appreciation of the benefits of the Union and a readiness to render it loyal support. The Kentuckians acted far less rationally; yet the Government tolerated much misconduct on their part, and largely for their benefit carried on a great national war against the Northwestern Indians. In the Southwest almost all that the Administration did was to prohibit the frontiersmen from protecting themselves. Peace was finally brought about largely through the effect of Wayne’s victory, and the knowledge of the Creeks that they would have to stand alone in any further warfare; but it would not have been obtained at all if Sevier and the other frontier leaders had not carried on their destructive counter-inroads into the Cherokee and Upper Creek country, and if under Robertson’s orders Nickajack and Running Water had not been destroyed; while the support of the Chickasaws and friendly Cherokees in stopping the Creek war parties was essential. The Southwesterners owed thanks to General Wayne and his army and to their own strong right hands; but they had small cause for gratitude to the Federal Government. They owed still less to the North-easterners, or indeed to any of the men of the Eastern seaboard; the benefits arising from Pinckney’s treaty form the only exception. This neglect brought its own punishment. Blount and Sevier were naturally inclined to Federalism, and it was probably only the supineness of the Federal Government in failing to support the Southwesterners against the Indians which threw Tennessee, when it became a State, into the arms of the Democratic party.

However, peace was finally wrung from the Indians, and by the beginning of 1796 the outrages ceased. The frontiers, north and south alike, enjoyed a respite from Indian warfare for the first time in a generation; nor was the peace interrupted until fifteen years afterward.

Throngs of emigrants had come into Tennessee. A wagon road had been chopped to the Cumberland District, and as the Indians gradually ceased their ravages, the settlements about Nashville began to grow as rapidly as the settlements along the Holston. In 1796 the required limit of population had been reached, and Tennessee with over seventy-six thousand inhabitants was formally admitted as a State of the Federal Union; Sevier was elected Governor, Blount was made one of the Senators, and Andrew Jackson was chosen Representative in Congress. In their State Constitution the hardworking backwoods farmers showed a conservative spirit which would seem strange to the radical Democracy of new Western States to-day. An elective Governor and two legislative houses were provided; and the representation was proportioned, not to the population at large, but to the citizen who paid taxes; for persons with some little property were still considered to be the rightful depositaries of political power. The Constitution established freedom of the press, and complete religious liberty—a liberty then denied in the parent State of North Carolina; but it contained some unwise and unjust provisions. The Judges were appointed by the Legislature, and were completely subservient to it; and, through the influence of the land speculators all lands except town lots were taxed alike, so that the men who had obtained possession of the best tracts shifted to other shoulders much of their own proper burden.[88]

[1] Blount MSS., Journal of Proceedings of William Blount, Esq., Governor in and over the Territory of the United States of America South of the River Ohio, in his executive department, October 23, 1790.

[2] “Knoxville Gazette,” July 17, 1795, etc. See also issue Jan. 28, 1792.

[3] Blount MSS., Journal of the Proceedings, etc.

[4] American State Papers, IV; Daniel Smith to the Secretary of War, Knoxville, July 19, 1793.

[5] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Feb. 13, 1793.

[6] “Knoxville Gazette,” March 27, 1794.

[7] “Knoxviile Gazette,” November 3, 1792.

[8] See Edward T. Sanford’s “ Blount College and the University of Tennessee,” p. 13.

[9] “Knoxville Gazette,” June 19, 1794.

[10] “Knoxville Gazette,” Jan. 30 and May 8, 1794.

[11] Blount MSS., Rutherford to Blount, May 25, 1792.

[12] Laws of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1803. First Session of Territorial Legislature, 1794.

[13] “Knoxville Gazette,” Oct. 20, 1792.

[14] “Knoxville Gazette,” June 1, 1793.

[15] Blount MSS., Agreement between William Blount and James Robertson, Oct. 30, 1783.

[16] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, April 29, 1792.

[17] Blount MSS., Thomas Hart to Blount, Lexington, Ky., March 29, 1795.

[18] Do., Return of taxable property of Blount, Nashville, Sept. 9, 1796.

[19] Do., David Alison to Blount, Oct. 16, 1791.

[20] Clay MSS., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, February 9, 1794. This was just as Hart was moving to Kentucky.

[21] Blount MSS., Thomas Hart to Blount, Dec. 23, 1793-

[22] Blount MSS., Hart to Blount, Lexington, Feb. 15, 1795.

[23] Blount MSS., Hawkins to Blount, March 10, 1791.

[24] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Sept. 3, I791.

[25] Do., Blount to Robertson, Jan. 2, 1792; to Bloody Fellow Sept. 13, 1792.

[26] Blount MSS., Robertson to Blount, Jan. 17, 1793.

[27] Draper MSS., Spanish Documents; Letter of Carondelet to Duke of Alcudia, Nov. 24, 1794.

[28] Draper MSS., Letter of Carondelet, New Orleans, Sept. 25, 1795-

[29] Draper MSS., Spanish Docs.; Carondelet’s Report, Oct. 23, 1793.

[30] Do., Carondelet to Don Louis De Las Casas, June 13, 1795, inclosing letters from Don M. G. De Lemos, Governor of Natchez.

[31] Carondelet to Alcudia, Aug. 17, 1793.

[32] Do., Manuel Gayoso De Lamos to Carondelet, Nogales, July 25, 1793.

[33] Carondelet to De Lemos, Aug. 15, 1793.

[34] Carondelet to Alcudia, Sept. 27, 1793.

[35] American State Papers, IV, Seagrove to the Secretary of War, St. Mary’s, June 14, 1792.

[36] Do., Seagrove to the President, Rock Landing, on the Oconee, in Georgia, July 17, 1792.

[37] American State Papers, IV, McGillivray to Seagrove, May 18, 1793.

[38] Do., Secretary of War to Governor Blount, Jan. 31, 1792.

[39] “Knoxville Gazette,’’ Dec. 17, 1791. I use the word “Ten nessee” for convenience; it was not at this time used in this sense.

[40] Robertson MSS., Robertson’s letter, Nashville, Aug. 25, 1791.

[41] State Dept. MSS., Madison Papers, Sevier’s letter, Oct. 30, 1792.

[42] State Dept. MSS., Washington Papers, Secretary of War to the President, July 28, and Aug. 5, 1792.

[43] Shelby MSS., J. Brown to Isaac Shelby, Philadelphia, June 2, 1793.

[44] Do., M. D. Hardin to Isaac Shelby, April 10, 1792, etc., etc.

[45] Do., Letter of Mary Mitchell to Isaac Shelby, May 1, 1793.

[46] Shelby MSS., Arthur Campbell to Shelby, January 6, 1790; letter from Cumberland to Shelby, May 11, 1793; John Logan to Shelby, June 19, 1794; petition of inhabitants of Nelson County, May 9, 1793.

[47] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, April 1, 1792.

[48] Do., Feb. 1, 1792.

[49] American State Papers, IV, Robert Anderson to the Governor of South Carolina, Sept. 20, 1792.

[50] American State Papers, IV, Blount to Secretary of War, Nov. 8, 1792; also page 330, etc. Many of these facts will be found recited not only in the correspondence of Blount, but in the Robertson MSS., in the “Knoxville Gazette,” and in Haywood, Ramsey, and Putnam.

[51] American State Papers, IV, pp. 263, 439, etc.

[52] Robertson’s MSS., Blount to Robertson, May 20, 1792.

[53] “Knoxville Gazette,” March 24, 1792; American State Papers, IV, Blount to Secretary of War, June 2, 1792, with minutes of conference at Coyatee.

[54] “Knoxville Gazette,” June 2, 1792.

[55] American State Papers, IV, Blount to Secretary of War, Sept. 11, 1792.

[56] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Sept. 6, 1792; Blount to The Bloody Fellow, Sept. 10, 1792; to Robertson, Sept. 12; to The Glass, Sept. 13; to The Bloody Fellow, Sept. 13; to Robertson, Sept. 14; Robertson to Blount, Sept. 26, 1792.

[57] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Oct. 17, 1792; “Knoxville Gazette,” Oct. 10, and Oct. 20, 1792; Brown’s Narrative, in “Southwestern Monthly.”

[58] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, March 8, 1794. The files of the “Knoxville Gazette” are full of details of these outrages, and so are the letters of Blount to the Secretary of War given in the American State Papers, as well as the letters of Blount and Robertson in the two bound volumes of Robertson MSS. Many of them are quoted in more accessible form in Haywood.

[59] Blount to the Secretary of War, May 5, 1792, and Nov. 10, 1794. As before, 1 use the word “Tennessee” instead of “Southwestern Territory” for convenience; it was not regularly employed until 1796.

[60] American State Papers, IV, p. 364; letter of Secretary of War, May 30, 1793.

[61] Robertson MSS., Blount’s letter. March 8, 1794.

[62] American State Papers, Pickens to Blount, Hopewell, April 28, 1792.

[63] American State Papers, Timothy Barnard to James Sea- grove, March 26, 1793.

[64] American State Papers, IV, pp. 260, 295, 365, 394, 397, 410, 412, 417, 427, 473, etc.; “Knoxville Gazette,” Sept. 26, 1794. For further allusion to Clark’s settlement, see next chapter.

[65] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Jan. 8, 1793; to Benjamin Logan, Nov. 1, 1794, etc.

[66] “Knoxville Gazette,” Dec. 31, 1791; Nov. 17, 1792; Jan. 25, 1793; Feb. 9, Mar. 23, July 13, Sept. 14, 1793; Nov. 1 and 15, 1794; May 8, 1795.

[67] American State Papers, Seagrove to James Holmes, Feb. 24, 1793; to Mr. Payne, April 14, 1793.

[68] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Feb. 13, 1793; Blount to James Seagrove, Jan. 9, 1794; Seagrove to Blount, Feb. 10, 1794; Blount to Robertson, March 8, 1794.

[69] “Knoxville Gazette,” Dec. 29; 1792; Dec. 19, 1793.

[70] “Knoxville Gazette,” March 23, 1793.

[71] “Knoxville Gazette,” April 6, 1793.

[72] “Knoxville Gazette,” August 13, 1792.

[73] “Knoxville Gazette,” Feb. 26, 1794, March 27, 1794, etc.

[74] State Department MSS., Washington Papers, War Department, Ex. C, page 19, extract of letter from Blount to Williamson April 14, 1792.

[75] American State Papers, Blount’s letter, March 20, 1793. Scolacutta was usually known to the whites as Hanging Maw. Vol. VIII.—9

[76] Robertson MSS., Smith to Robertson, June 19, 1793, etc.; “Knoxville Gazette,” June 15 and July 13, 1793, etc.

[77] “Knoxville Gazette,” July 13, July 27, 1793, etc., etc.

[78] American State Papers, IV, pp. 459, 460, etc.; “Knoxville Gazette,” Jan, 16 and June 5, 1794.

[79] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Oct. 29, 1793; “Knoxville Gazette,” Oct. 12 and Nov. 23, 1793.

[80] Robertson MSS., Robertson to Blount, Oct. 8, 1794; Blount to Robertson, Oct. 1, 1794, Sept. 9, 1794 (in which Blount expresses the utmost disapproval of Robertson’s conduct, and says he will not send on Robertson’s original letter to Philadelphia, for fear it will get him into a scrape; and requests him to send a formal report which can be forwarded); “Knoxville Gazette,” Sept. 26, 1794; Brown’s Narrative.

[81] Robertson MSS., Blount’s Minutes of Conference held with Cherokees, Nov. 7 and 8, 1794, at Tellico Block-house.

[82] Robertson MSS., Ecooe to John McKee, Tellico, Feb. 1, 1795, etc.

[83] Blount MSS., James Colbert to Robertson, Feb. 10, 1792.

[84] Robertson MSS., Robertson to Blount, Jan. 13, 1795; Blount to Robertson, Jan. 20, 1795, and April 26, 1795; Robertson to Blount, April 20, 1795; “Knoxville Gazette,” Aug, 25, 1792, Oct. 12, 1793, June 19, 1794, July 17, Aug. 4, and Aug. 15, 1794; American State Papers, pp. 284, 285, etc., etc.

[85] Robertson MSS., Pickering to Blount, March 23, 1795.

[86] Blount MSS., Blount to Smith, June 17, 1793.

[87] Robertson MSS., Blount to gentleman in Cumberland, Philadelphia, Aug. 28, 1793.

[88] “Constitutional History of Tennessee,” by Joshua W. Caldwell, p. 101, another of Robert Clarke’s publications; an admirable study of institutional development in Tennessee.

CHAPTER II

INTRIGUES AND LAND SPECULATIONS—THE TREATIES OF JAY AND PINCKNEY, 1793–1797

THROUGHOUT THE history of the winning of of the West what is noteworthy is the current of tendency rather than the mere succession of individual events. The general movement, and the general spirit behind the movement, became evident in many different forms, and if attention is paid only to some particular manifestation we lose sight of its true import and of its explanation. Particular obstacles retarded or diverted, particular causes accelerated, the current; but the set was always in one direction. The peculiar circumstances of each case must always be taken into account, but it is also necessary to understand that it was but one link in the chain of causation.

Such events as Burr’s conspiracy or the conquest of Texas can not be properly understood if we fail to remember that they were but the most spectacular or most important manifestations of what occurred many times. The Texans won a striking victory and performed a feat of the utmost importance in our history; and, moreover, it happened that at the moment the accession of Texas was warmly favored by the party of the slave-holders. Burr had been Vice-President of the United States, and was a brilliant and able man, of imposing personality, whose intrigues in the West attracted an attention altogether disproportionate to their real weight. In consequence each event is often treated as if it were isolated and stood apart from the general current of Western history; whereas in truth each was but the most striking or important among a host of others. The feats performed by Austin and Houston and the other founders of the Texan Republic were identical in kind with the feats merely attempted, or but partially performed, by the men who, like Morgan, Elijah Clark, and George Rogers Clark, at different times either sought to found colonies in the Spanish-speaking lands under Spanish authority, on else strove to conquer these lands outright by force of arms. Boone settled in Missouri when it was still under the Spanish Government, and himself accepted a Spanish commission. Whether Missouri had or had not been ceded first by Spain to France and then by France to the United States early in the present century, really would not have altered its final destiny, so far at least as concerns the fact that it would ultimately have been independent of both France and Spain, and would have been dominated by an English-speaking people; for when once the backwoodsmen, of whom Boone was the forerunner, became sufficiently numerous in the land they were certain to throw off the yoke of the foreigner; and the fact that they had voluntarily entered the land and put themselves under this yoke would have made no more difference to them than it afterward made to the Texans. So it was with Aaron Burr. His conspiracy was merely one, and by no means the most dangerous, of the various conspiracies in which men like Wilkinson, Sebastian, and many of the members of the early Democratic societies in Kentucky, bore a part. It was rendered possible only by the temper of the people and by the peculiar circumstances which also rendered the earlier conspiracies possible; and it came to naught for the same reasons that they came to naught, and was even more hopeless, because it was undertaken later, when the conditions were less favorable.

The movement deliberately entered into by many of the Kentuckians in the years 1793 and 1794, to conquer Louisiana on behalf of France, must be treated in this way. The leader in this movement was George Rogers Clark. His chance of success arose from the fact that there were on the frontier many men of restless, adventurous, warlike type, who felt a spirit of unruly defiance toward the home government, and who greedily eyed the rich Spanish lands. Whether they got the lands by conquest or by colonization, and whether they warred under one flag or another, was to them a matter of little moment. Clark’s career is of itself sufficient to prove the truth of this. He had already been at the head of a movement to make war against the Spaniards, in defiance of the Central Government, on behalf of the Western settlements. On another occasion he had offered his sword to the Spanish Government, and had requested permission to found in Spanish territory a State, which should be tributary to Spain and a barrier against the American advance. He had thus already sought to lead the Westerners against Spain in a warfare undertaken purely by themselves and for their own objects, and had also offered to form by the help of some of these Westerners a State which should be a constituent portion of the Spanish dominion. He now readily undertook the task of raising an army of Westerners to overrun Louisiana in the interests of the French Republic. The conditions which rendered possible these various movements were substantially the same, although the immediate causes, or occasions, were different. In any event the result would ultimately have been the conquest of the Spanish dominions by the armed frontiersmen, and the upbuilding of English-speaking States on Spanish territory.

The expedition which at the moment Clark proposed to head took its peculiar shape from outside causes. At this period Genet was in the midst of his preposterous career as Minister from the French Republic to the United States. The various bodies of men who afterward coalesced into the Democratic-Republican party were frantically in favor of the French Revolution, regarding it with a fatuous admiration quite as foolish as the horror with which it affected most of the Federalists. They were already looking to Jefferson as their leader, and Jefferson, though at the time Secretary of State under Washington, was secretly encouraging them, and was playing a very discreditable part toward his chief. The ultra-admirers of the French Revolution not only lost their own heads, but turned Genet’s as well, and persuaded him that the people were with him and were ready to oppose Washington and the Central Government in the interests of revolutionary France. Genet wished to embroil America with England, and sought to fit out American privateers on the seacoast towns to prey on the English commerce, and to organize on the Ohio River an armed expedition to conquer Louisiana, as Spain was then an ally of England and at war with France. All over the country Genet’s admirers formed Democratic societies on the model of the Jacobin Clubs of France. They were of course either useless or noxious in such a country and under such a government as that of the United States, and exercised a very mischievous effect. Kentucky was already under the influence of the same forces that were at work in Virginia and elsewhere, and the class of her people who were politically dominant were saturated with the ideas of those doctrinaire politicians of whom Jefferson was chief. These Jeffersonian doctrinaires were men who at certain crises, in certain countries, might have rendered great service to the cause of liberty and humanity; but their influence in America was on the whole distinctly evil, save that, by a series of accidents, they became the especial champions of the westward extension of the nation, and in consequence were identified with a movement which was all-essential to the national well-being.

Kentucky was ripe for Genet’s intrigues, and he found the available leader for the movement in the person of George Rogers Clark. Clark was deeply imbittered, not only with the United States Government but with Virginia, for the Virginia Assembly had refused to pay any of the debts he had contracted on account of the State, and had not even reimbursed him for what he had spent.[1] He had a right to feel aggrieved at the State’s penuriousness and her indifference to her moral obligations; and just at the time when he was most angered came the news that Genet was agitating throughout the United States for a war with England, in open defiance of Washington, and that among his plans he included a Western movement against Louisiana. Clark at once wrote to him expressing intense sympathy with the French objects and offering to undertake an expedition for the conquest of St. Louis and upper Louisiana if he was provided with the means to obtain provisions and stores. Clark further informed Genet that his country had been utterly ungrateful to him, and that as soon as he received Genet’s approbation of what he proposed to do he would get himself “expatriated.” He asked for commissions for officers, and stated his belief that the Creoles would rise, that the adventurous Westerners would gladly throng to the contest, and that the army would soon be at the gates of New Orleans.[2]

Genet immediately commissioned Clark as a Major-General in the service of the French Republic, and sent out various Frenchmen—Michaux, La Chaise, and others—with civil and military titles, to co-operate with him, to fit out his force as well as possible, and to promise him pay for his expenses. Brown, now one of Kentucky’s representatives at Philadelphia, gave these men letters of introduction to merchants in Lexington and elsewhere, from whom they got some supplies; but they found they would have to get most from Philadelphia.[3] Michaux was the agent for the French Minister, though nominally his visit was undertaken on purely scientific grounds. Jefferson’s course in the matter was characteristic. Openly, he was endeavoring in a perfunctory manner to carry out Washington’s policy of strict neutrality in the contest between France and England, but secretly he was engaged in tortuous intrigues against Washington and was thwarting his wishes, so far as he dared, in regard to Genet. It is impossible that he could have been really misled as to Michaux’s character and the object of his visits; nevertheless, he actually gave him a letter of introduction to the Kentucky Governor, Isaac Shelby.[4] Shelby had shown himself a gallant and capable officer in warfare against both the Indians and the tories, but he possessed no marked political ability, and was entirely lacking in the strength of character which would have fitted him to put a stop to rebellion and lawlessness. He hated England, sympathized with France, and did not possess sufficient political good sense to appreciate either the benefits of the Central Government or the need of preserving order.

Clark at once proceeded to raise what troops he could, and issued a proclamation signed by himself as Major-General of the Armies of France, Commander-in-Chief of the French Revolutionary Legions on the Mississippi. He announced that he proposed to raise volunteers for the reduction of the Spanish posts on the Mississippi and to open the trade of that river, and promised all who would join him from one to three thousand acres of any unappropriated land in the conquered regions, the officers to receive proportionately more. All lawful plunder was to be equally divided according to the customs of war.[5] The proclamation thus frankly put the revolutionary legions on the footing of a gang of freebooters. Each man was to receive a commission proportioned in grade to the number of soldiers he brought to Clark’s band. In short, it was a piece of sheer filibustering, not differing materially from one of Walker’s filibustering attempts in Central America sixty years later, save that at this time Clark had utterly lost his splendid vigor of body and mind and was unfit for the task he had set himself. At first, however, he met with promises of support from various Kentuckians of prominence, including Benjamin Logan.[6] His agents gathered flat-boats and pirogues for the troops and laid in stores of powder, lead, and beef. The nature of some of the provisions shows what a characteristic backwoods expedition it was; for Clark’s agent notified him that he had ready “upward of eleven hundred weight of Bear Meat and about seventy or seventy-four pair of Veneson Hams.”[7]

The Democratic Societies in Kentucky entered into Clark’s plans with the utmost enthusiasm, and issued manifestoes against the Central Government which were, in style, of hysterical violence, and, in matter, treasonable. The preparations were made openly, and speedily attracted the attention of the Spanish agents, besides giving alarm to the representatives of the Federal Government and to all sober citizens who had sense enough to see that the proposed expedition was merely another step toward anarchy. St. Clair, the Governor of the Northwestern Territory, wrote to Shelby to warn him of what was being done, and Wayne, who was a much more formidable person than Shelby or Clark or any of their backers, took prompt steps to prevent the expedition from starting, by building a fort near the mouth of the Ohio, and ordering his lieutenants to hold themselves in readiness for any action he might direct. At the same time the Administration wrote to Shelby telling him what was on foot, and requesting him to see that no expedition of the kind was allowed to march against the domains of a friendly power. Shelby, in response, entered into a long argument to show that he could not interfere with the expedition, and that he doubted his constitutional power to do anything in the matter; his reasons being of the familiar kind usually advanced in such cases, where a government officer, from timidity or any other cause, refuses to do his duty. If his contention as to his own powers and the powers of the General Government had been sound, it would logically have followed that there was no power anywhere to back up the law. Innes, the Federal Judge, showed himself equally lukewarm in obeying the Federal authorities.[8]

Blount, the Governor of the Southwestern Territory, acted as vigorously and patriotically as St. Clair and Wayne, and his conduct showed in marked contrast to Shelby’s. He possessed far too much political good sense not to be disgusted with the conduct of Genet, which he denounced in unmeasured terms. He expressed great pleasure when Washington summarily rebuked the blatant French envoy. He explained to the Tennesseeans that Genet had as his chief backers the disappointed office-hunters and other unsavory characters in New York and in the seacoast cities, but that the people at large were beginning to realize what the truth was, and to show a proper feeling for the President and his government.[9] Some of the Cumberland people, becoming excited by the news of Clark’s preparation, prepared to join him, or to undertake a separate filibustering attack on their own account. Blount immediately wrote to Robertson directing him to explain to these “inconsiderate persons” that all they could possibly do was to attempt the conquest of West Florida, and that they would “lay themselves liable to heavy Pains and Penalties, both pecuniary and corporal, in case they ever returned to their injured country.” He warned Robertson that it was his duty to prevent the attempt, and that the legal officers of the district must proceed against any of the men having French commissions, and must do their best to stop the movement; which, he said, proceeded “from the Machenations no doubt of that Jacobin Incendiary, Genet, which is reason sufficient to make every honest mind revolt at the Idea.” Robertson warmly supported him, and notified the Spanish commander at New Madrid of the steps which he was taking; at which the Spaniards expressed great gratification.[10]

However, the whole movement collapsed when Genet was recalled early in 1794, Clark being forced at once to abandon his expedition.[11] Clark found himself out of pocket as the result of what he had done; and as there was no hope of reimbursing himself by Spanish plunder, he sought to obtain from the French Government reimbursement for the expenses, forwarding to the French Assembly, through an agent in France, his bill for the “Expenses of Expedition ordered by Citizen Genet.” The agent answered that he would try to secure the payment; and after he got to Paris he first announced himself as hopeful; but later he wrote that he had discovered that the French agents were really engaged in a dangerous conspiracy against the Western country, and he finally had to admit that the claim was disallowed.[12] With this squabble between the French and Americans the history of the abortive expedition ends.

The attempt, of course, excited and alarmed the Spaniards, and gave a new turn to their tortuous diplomacy. In reading the correspondence of the Spanish Governor, Baron Carondelet, both with his subordinates and with his superiors, it is almost amusing to note the frankness with which he avows his treachery. It evidently did not occur to him that there was such a thing as national good faith, or that there was the slightest impropriety in any form of mendacity when exercised in dealing with the ministers or inhabitants of a foreign State. In this he was a faithful reflex of his superiors at the Spanish Court. At the same time that they were solemnly covenanting for a definite treaty of peace with the United States they were secretly intriguing to bring about a rebellion in the Western States; and while they were assuring the Americans that they were trying their best to keep the Indians peaceful, they were urging the savages to war.

As for any gratitude to the National Government for stopping the piratical expeditions of the Westerners, the Spaniards did not feel a trace. They had early received news of Clark’s projected expedition through a Frenchman who came to the Spanish agents at Philadelphia;[13] and when the army began to gather they received from time to time from their agents in Kentucky reports which, though exaggerated, gave them a fairly accurate view of what was happening. No overt act of hostility was committed by Clark’s people, except by some of those who started to join him from the Cumberland district, under the lead of a man named Montgomery. These men built a wooden fort at the mouth of the Cumberland River, and held the boats that passed to trade with Spain; one of the boats that they took being a scow loaded with flour and biscuit sent up stream by the Spanish Government itself. When Wayne heard of the founding of this fort he acted with his usual promptness, and sent an expedition which broke it up and released the various boats. Then, to stop any repetition of the offence, and more effectually to curb the overbearing truculence of the frontiersmen, he himself built, as already mentioned, a fort at Massac, not far from the Mississippi. All this of course was done in the interests of the Spaniards themselves and in accordance with the earnest desire of the United States authorities to prevent any unlawful attack on Louisiana; yet Carondelet actually sent word to Gayoso de Lemos, the Governor of Natchez and the upper part of the river, to persuade the Chickasaws secretly to attack this fort and destroy it. Carondelet always had an exaggerated idea of the warlike capacity of the Indian nations, and never understood the power of the Americans, nor appreciated the desire of their Government to act in good faith. Gayoso was in this respect a much more intelligent man, and he positively refused to carry out the orders of his superior, remonstrating directly to the Court of Spain, by which he was sustained. He pointed out that the destruction of the fort would merely encourage the worst enemies of the Spaniards, even if accomplished ; and he further pointed out that it was quite impossible to destroy it; for he understood fully the difference between a fort garrisoned by Wayne’s regulars and one held by a mob of buccaneering militia.[14]

It was not the first time that Gayoso’s superior knowledge of the Indians and of their American foes had prevented his carrying out the orders of his superior officer. On one occasion Carondelet had directed Gayoso to convene the Southern Indians, and to persuade them to send deputies to the United States authorities with proposals to settle the boundaries in accordance with the wishes of Spain, and to threaten open war as an alternative. Gayoso refused to adopt this policy, and persuaded Carondelet to alter it, showing that it was necessary above all things to temporize, that such a course as the one proposed would provoke immediate hostilities, and that the worst possible line for the Spaniards to follow would be one of open war with the entire power of the United States.[15]

Of course the action of the American Government in procuring the recall of Genet and putting a stop to Clark’s operations lightened for a moment the pressure of the backwoodsmen upon the Spanish dominions; but it was only for a moment. The Westerners were bent on seizing the Spanish territory; and they were certain to persist in their efforts until they were either successful or were definitely beaten in actual war. The acts of aggression were sure to recur; it was only the form that varied. When the chance of armed conquest under the banner of the French Republic vanished, there was an immediate revival of plans for getting possession of some part of the Spanish domain through the instrumentality of the great land companies.

These land companies possessed on paper a weight which they did not have in actual history. They occasionally enriched, and more often impoverished, the individual speculators; but in the actual peopling of the waste lands they counted for little in comparison with the steady stream of pioneer farmers who poured in, each to hold and till the ground he in fact occupied. However, the contemporary documents of the day were full of details concerning the companies; and they did possess considerable importance at certain times in the settlement of the West, both because they in places stimulated that settlement, and because in other places they retarded it, inasmuch as they kept out actual settlers, who could not pre-empt land which had been purchased at low rates from some legislative body by the speculators. The companies were sometimes formed by men who wished themselves to lead emigrants into the longed-for region, but more often they were purely speculative in character, and those who founded them wished only to dispose of them at an advantage to third parties. Their history is inextricably mixed with the history of the intrigues with and against the Spaniards and British in the West. The men who organized them wished to make money. Their object was to obtain title to or possession of the lands, and it was quite a secondary matter with them whether their title came from the United States, England, or Spain. They were willing to form colonies on Spanish or British territory, and they were even willing to work for the dismemberment of the Western Territory from the Union, if by so doing they could increase the value of the lands which they sought to acquire. American adventurers had been in correspondence with Lord Dorchester, the Governor-General of Canada, looking to the possibility of securing British aid for those desirous of embarking in great land speculations in the West. These men proposed to try to get the Westerners to join with the British in an attack upon Louisiana, or even to conduct this attack themselves in the British interests, believing that with New Orleans in British hands the entire province would be thrown open to trade with the outside world and to settlement; with the result that the lands would increase enormously in value, and the speculators and organizers of the companies, and of the movements generally, grow rich in consequence.[16] They assured the British agents that the Western country would speedily separate from the Eastern States, and would have to put itself under the protection of some foreign State. Dorchester considered these plans of sufficient weight to warrant inquiry by his agents, but nothing ever came of them.

Much the most famous, or, it would be more correct to say, infamous, of these companies were those organized in connection with the Yazoo lands.[17] The country in what is now middle and northern Mississippi and Alabama possessed, from its great fertility, peculiar fascinations in the eyes of the adventurous land speculators. It was unoccupied by settlers, because as a matter of fact it was held in adverse possession by the Indians, under Spanish protection. It was claimed by the Georgians, and its cession was sought by the United States Government, so that there was much uncertainty as to the title, which could in consequence be cheaply secured. Wilkinson, Brown, Innes, and other Kentuckians, had applied to the Spaniards to be allowed to take these lands and hold them, in their own interests, but on behalf of Spain, and against the United States. The application had not been granted, and the next effort was of a directly opposite character, the adventurers this time proposing, as they could not hold the territory as armed subjects of Spain, to wrest it from Spain by armed entry after getting title from Georgia. In other words, they were going to carry on war as a syndicate, the military operations for the occupation of the ceded territory being part of the business for which the company was organized. Their relations with the Union were doubtless to be determined by the course of events.

This company was the South Carolina Yazoo Company. In 1789, several companies were formed to obtain from the Georgia Legislature grants of the Western territory which Georgia asserted to be hers. One, the Virginia Company, had among its incorporators Patrick Henry, and received a grant of nearly 20,000 square miles, but accomplished nothing. Another, the Tennessee Company, received a grant of what is now most of northern Alabama, and organized a body of men under the leadership of an adventurer named Zachariah Cox, who drifted down the Tennessee in flat-boats to take possession, and repeated the attempt more than once. They were, however, stopped, partly by Blount, and partly by the Indians. The South Carolina Yazoo Company made the most serious effort to get possession of the coveted territory. Its grant included about 15,000 square miles in what is now middle Mississippi and Alabama; the nominal price being $67,000. One of the prime movers in this company was a man named Walsh, who called himself Washington, a person of unsavory character, who, a couple of years later, was hanged at Charleston for passing forged paper money in South Carolina. All these companies had hoped to pay the very small prices they were asked for the lands in the depreciated currency of Georgia; but they never did make the full payments or comply with the conditions of the grants, which therefore lapsed.

Before this occurred the South Carolina Yazoo Company had striven to take possession of its purchase by organizing a military expedition to go down the Mississippi from Kentucky. For commander of this expedition choice was made of a Revolutionary soldier named James O’Fallon, who went to Kentucky, where he married Clark’s sister. He entered into relations with Wilkinson, who drew him into the tangled web of Spanish intrigue. He raised soldiers, and drew up a formal contract, entered into between the South Carolina Yazoo Company and their troops of the Yazoo Battalion—over five hundred men in all, cavalry, artillery and infantry. Each private was to receive two hundred and fifty acres of “stipendiary” lands and the officers in proportion, up to the Lieutenant-Colonel, who was to receive six thousand. Commissions were formally issued, and the positions of all the regular officers were filled, so that the invasion was on the point of taking place.[18] However, the Spanish authorities called the matter to the attention of the United States, and the Federal Government put a prompt stop to the movement.[19] O’Fallon was himself threatened with arrest by the Federal officers, and had to abandon his project.[20] He afterward re-established his relations with the Government, and became one of Wayne’s correspondents;[21] but he entered heartily into Clark’s plans for the expedition under Genet and, like all the other participators in that wretched affair, became involved in broils with Clark and every one else.[22]

In 1795 the land companies, encouraged by the certainty that the United States would speedily take possession of the Yazoo territory, again sprang into life. In that year four, the Georgia, the Georgia-Mississippi, the Tennessee, and the Upper Mississippi, companies obtained grants from the Georgia Legislature to a territory of over thirty millions of acres, for which they paid but five hundred thousand dollars, or less than two cents an acre. Among the grantees were many men of note, Congressmen, Senators, even judges. The grants were secured by the grossest corruption, every member of the Legislature who voted for them, with one exception, being a stockholder in some one of the companies, while the procuring of the cessions was undertaken by James Gunn, one of the two Georgia Senators. The outcry against the transaction was so universal throughout the State that at the next session of the Legislature, in 1796, the acts were repealed and the grants rescinded. This caused great confusion, as most of the original grantees had hastily sold out to third parties; the purchases being largely made in South Carolina and Massachusetts. Efforts were made by the original South Carolina Yazoo Company to sue Georgia in the Federal Courts, which led to the adoption of the Constitutional provision forbidding such action. When, in 1802, Georgia ceded the territory in question, including all of what is now middle and northern Alabama and Mississippi, to the United States for the sum of twelve hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the National Government became heir to these Yazoo difficulties. It was not until 1814 that the matter was settled by a compromise, after interminable litigation and legislation.[23] The land companies were more important to the speculators than to the actual settlers of the Mississippi; nevertheless, they did stimulate settlement, in certain regions, and therefore increased by just so much the Western pressure upon Spain.

Some of the aggressive movements undertaken by the Americans were of so loose a nature that it is hard to know what to call them. This was true of Elijah Clark’s company of Georgia freebooters in 1794. Accompanied by large bodies of armed men, he on several occasions penetrated into the territory southwest of the Oconee. He asserted at one time that he was acting for Georgia and in defence of her rights to the lands which the Georgians claimed under the various State treaties with the Indians, but which by the treaty of New York had been confirmed to the Creeks by the United States. On another occasion he entitled his motley force the Sans Culottes, and masqueraded as a major-general of the French army, though the French Consul denied having any connection with him. He established for the time being a little independent government, with block-houses and small wooden towns, in the middle of the unceded hunting grounds, and caused great alarm to the Spaniards. The frontiersmen sympathized with him, and when he was arrested in Wilkes County the Grand Jury of the county ordered his discharge, and solemnly declared that the treaty of New York was inoperative and the proclamation of the Governor of Georgia against Clark, illegal. This was too much for the patience of the Governor. He ordered out the State troops to co-operate with the small Federal force, and Clark and his men were ignominiously expelled from their new government and forced to return to Georgia.[24]

In such a welter of intrigue, of land speculation, and of more or less piratical aggression, there was imminent danger that the West would relapse into anarchy unless a firm government were established, and unless the boundaries with England and Spain were definitely established. As Washington’s administration grew steadily in strength and in the confidence of the people the first condition was met. The necessary fixity of boundary was finally obtained by the treaties negotiated through John Jay with England, and through Thomas Pinckney with Spain.

Jay’s treaty aroused a perfect torrent of wrath throughout the country, and nowhere more than in the West. A few of the coolest and most intelligent men approved it, and rugged old Humphrey Marshall, the Federalist Senator from Kentucky, voted for its ratification; but the general feeling against it was intense. Even Blount, who by this time was pretty well disgusted with the way he had been treated by the Central Government, denounced it, and expressed his belief that Washington would have hard work to explain his conduct in procuring its ratification.[25]

Yet the Westerners were the very people who had no cause whatever to complain of the treaty. It was not an entirely satisfactory treaty; perhaps a man like Hamilton might have procured rather better terms; but, taken as a whole, it worked an immense improvement upon the condition of things already existing. Washington’s position was undoubtedly right. He would have preferred a better treaty, but he regarded the Jay treaty as very much better than none at all. Moreover, the last people who had a right to complain of it were those who were most vociferous in their opposition. The anti-Federalist party was on the whole the party of weakness and disorder, the party that was clamorous and unruly, but ineffective in carrying out a sustained policy, whether of offence or of defence, in foreign affairs. The people who afterward became known as Jeffersonian Republicans numbered in their ranks the extremists who had been active as the founders of Democratic societies in the French interest, and they were ferocious in their wordy hostility to Great Britain; but they were not dangerous foes to any foreign government which did not fear words. Had they possessed the foresight and intelligence to strengthen the Federal Government the Jay treaty would not have been necessary. Only a strong, efficient central government, backed by a good fleet and a well organized army, could hope to wring from England what the French party, the forerunners of the Jeffersonian Democracy, demanded. But the Jeffersonians were separatists and State rights men. They believed in a government so weak as to be ineffective, and showed a folly literally astounding in their unwillingness to provide for the wars which they were ready to provoke. They resolutely refused to provide an army or a navy, or to give the Central Government the power necessary for waging war. They were quite right in their feeling of hostility to England, and one of the fundamental and fatal weaknesses of the Federalists was the Federalist willingness to submit to England’s aggressions without retaliation; but the Jeffersonians had no gift for government, and were singularly deficient in masterful statesmen of the kind imperatively needed by any nation which wishes to hold an honorable place among other nations. They showed their governmental inaptitude clearly enough later on when they came into power, for they at once stopped building the fleet which the Federalists had begun, and allowed the military forces of the nation to fall into utter disorganization, with, as a consequence, the shameful humiliations of the War of 1812. This war was in itself eminently necessary and proper, and was excellent in its results, but it was attended by incidents of shame and disgrace to America for which Jefferson and Madison and their political friends and supporters among the politicians and the people have never received a sufficiently severe condemnation.

Jay’s treaty was signed late in 1794 and was ratified in 1795.[26] The indignation of the Kentuckians almost amounted to mania. They denounced the treaty with frantic intemperance, and even threatened violence to those of their own number, headed by Humphrey Marshall, who supported it; yet they benefited much by it, for it got them what they would have been absolutely powerless to obtain for themselves, that is, the possession of the British posts on the Lakes. In 1796, the Americans took formal possession of these posts, and the boundary line in the Northwest as nominally established by the treaty of Versailles became in fact the actual line of demarcation between the American and the British possessions. The work of Jay capped the work of Wayne. Federal garrisons were established at Detroit and elsewhere, and the Indians, who had already entered into the treaty of Greeneville, were prevented from breaking it by this intervention of the American military posts between themselves and their British allies. Peace was firmly established for the time being in the Northwest, and our boundaries in that direction took the fixed form they still retain.[27]

In dealing with the British the Americans sometimes had to encounter bad faith, but more often a mere rough disregard for the rights of others, of which they could themselves scarcely complain with a good grace, as they showed precisely the same quality in their own actions. In dealing with the Spaniards, on the other hand, they had to encounter deliberate and systematic treachery and intrigue. The open negotiations between the two governments over the boundary ran side by side with a current of muddy intrigue between the Spanish Government on the one hand, and certain traitorous Americans on the other; the leader of these traitors being, as usual, the arch scoundrel Wilkinson.

The Spaniards trusted almost as much to Indian intrigue as to bribery of American leaders; indeed they trusted to it more for momentary effect, though the far-sighted among them realized that in the long run the safety of the Spanish possessions depended upon the growth of divisional jealousies among the Americans themselves. The Spanish forts were built as much to keep the Indians under command as to check the Americans. The Governor of Natchez, De Lemos, had already established a fort at the Chickasaw Bluffs, where there was danger of armed collision between the Spaniards and either the Cumberland settlers under Robertson or the Federal troops. Among the latter, by the way, the officer for whose ability the Spaniards seemed to feel an especial respect was Lieutenant William Clark.[28]

The Chickasaws were nearly drawn into a war with the Spaniards, who were intensely irritated over their antagonism to the Creeks, for which the Spaniards insisted that the Americans were responsible.[29] The Americans, however, were able to prove conclusively that the struggle was due, not to their advice, but to the outrages of marauders from the villages of the Muscogee confederacy. They showed by the letter of the Chickasaw chief, James Colbert, that the Creeks had themselves begun hostilities early in 1792 by killing a Chickasaw, and that the Chickasaws, because of this spilling of blood, made war on the Creeks, and sent word to the Americans to join in the war. The letter ran: “I hope you will exert yourselves and join us so that we might give the lads a Drubbeen for they have encroached on us this great while not us alone you likewise for you have suffered a good dale by them I hope you will think of your wounds.”[30] The Americans had “thought of their wounds” and had aided the Chickasaws in every way, as was proper; but the original aggressors were the Creeks. The Chickasaws had entered into what was a mere war of retaliation; though when once in they had fought hard, under the lead of Opiamingo, their most noted war chief, who was always friendly to the Americans and hostile to the Spaniards.

At the Chickasaw Bluffs, and at Natchez, there was always danger of a clash; for at these places the Spanish soldiers were in direct contact with the foremost of the restless backwoods host, and with the Indians who were most friendly or hostile to them. Open collision was averted, but the Spaniards were kept uneasy and alert. There were plenty of American settlers around Natchez, who were naturally friendly to the American Government; and an agent from the State of Georgia, to the horror of the Spaniards, came out to the country with the especial purpose of looking over the Yazoo lands, at the time when Georgia was about to grant them to the various land companies. What with the land speculators, the frontiersmen, and the Federal troops, the situation grew steadily more harassing for the Spaniards; and Carondelet kept the advisers of the Spanish Crown well informed of the growing stress.

The Spanish Government knew it would be beaten if the issue once came to open war, and, true to the instincts of a weak and corrupt power, it chose as its weapons delay, treachery, and intrigue. To individual Americans the Spaniards often behaved with arrogance and brutality; but they feared to give too serious offence to the American people as a whole. Like all other enemies of the American Republic, from the days of the Revolution to those of the Civil War, they saw clearly that their best allies were the separatists, the disunionists, and they sought to encourage in every way the party which, in a spirit of sectionalism, wished to bring about a secession of one part of the country and the erection of a separate government. The secessionists then, as always, played into the hands of the men who wished the new republic ill. In the last decade of the eighteenth century the acute friction was not between North and South, but between East and West. The men who, from various motives, wished to see a new republic created, hoped that this republic would take in all the people of the Western waters. These men never actually succeeded in carrying the West with them. At the pinch the majority of the Westerners remained loyal to the idea of national unity; but there was a very strong separatist party, and there were very many men who, though not separatists, were disposed to grumble loudly about the shortcomings of the Federal Government.

These men were especially numerous and powerful in Kentucky, and they had as their organ the sole newspaper of the State, the “Kentucky Gazette.” It was filled with fierce attacks, not only upon the General Government, but upon Washington himself. Sometimes these attacks were made on the authority of the “Gazette”; at other times they appeared in the form of letters from outsiders, or of resolutions by the various Democratic societies and political clubs. They were written with a violence which, in striving after forcefulness, became feeble. They described the people of Kentucky as having been “degraded and insulted,” and as having borne these insults with “submissive patience.” The writers insisted that Kentucky had nothing to hope from the Federal Government, and that it was nonsense to chatter about the infraction of treaties, for it was necessary, at any cost, to take Louisiana, which was “groaning under tyranny.” They threatened the United States with what the Kentuckians would do if their wishes were not granted, announcing that they would make the conquest of Louisiana an ultimatum, and warning the Government that they owed no eternal allegiance to it and might have to separate, and that if they did there would be small reason to deplore the separation. The separatist agitators failed to see that they could obtain the objects they sought, the opening of the Mississippi and the acquisition of Louisiana, only through the Federal Government, and only by giving that Government full powers. Standing alone the Kentuckians would have been laughed to scorn not only by England and France, but even by Spain. Yet with silly fatuity they vigorously opposed every effort to make the Government stronger or to increase national feeling, railing even at the attempt to erect a great Federal city as “unwise, impolitic, unjust,” and “a monument to American folly.”[31] The men who wrote these articles, and the leaders of the societies and clubs which inspired them, certainly made a pitiable showing; they proved that they themselves were only learning, and had not yet completely mastered, the difficult art of self-government.

It was the existence of these Western separatists, nominally the fiercest foes of Spain, that in reality gave Spain the one real hope of staying the Western advance. In 1794, the American agents in Spain were carrying on an interminable correspondence with the Spanish Court in the effort to come to some understanding about the boundaries.[32] The Spanish authorities were solemnly corresponding with the American envoys, as if they meant peace; yet at the same time they had authorized Carondelet to do his best to treat directly with the American States of the West so as to bring about their separation from the Union. In 1794, Wilkinson, who was quite incapable of understanding that his infamy was heightened by the fact that he wore the uniform of a Brigadier-General of the United States, entered into negotiations for a treaty, the base of which should be the separation of the Western States from the Atlantic States.[33] He had sent two confidential envoys to Carondelet. Carondelet jumped at the chance of once more trying to separate the West from the East; and under Wilkinson’s directions he renewed his efforts to try by purchase and pension to attach some of the leading Kentuckians to Spain. As a beginning he decided to grant Wilkinson’s request and send him twelve thousand dollars for himself.[34] De Lemos was sent to New Madrid in October to begin the direct negotiations with Wilkinson and his allies. The funds to further the treasonable conspiracy were also forwarded, as the need arose.

Carondelet was much encouraged as to the outcome by the fact that De Lemos had not been dispossessed by force from the Chickasaw Bluffs. This shows conclusively that Washington’s administration was in error in not acting with greater decision about the Spanish posts. Wayne should have been ordered to use the sword, and to dispossess the Spaniards from the east bank of the Mississippi. As so often in our history, we erred, not through a spirit of over-aggressiveness, but through a willingness to trust to peaceful measures instead of proceeding to assert our rights by force.

The first active step taken by Carondelet and De Lemos was to send the twelve thousand dollars to Wilkinson, as the foundation and earnest of the bribery fund. But the effort miscarried. The money was sent by two men, Collins and Owen, each of whom bore cipher letters to Wilkinson, including some that were sewed into the collars of their coats. Collins reached Wilkinson in safety, but Owen was murdered, for the sake of the money he bore, by his boat’s crew while on the Ohio River.[35] The murderers were arrested and were brought before the Federal judge, Harry Innes. Owen was a friend of Innes, and had been by him recommended to Wilkinson as a trustworthy man for any secret and perilous service. Nevertheless, although it was his own friend who had been murdered, Innes refused to try the murderers, on the ground that they were Spanish subjects; a reason which was simply nonsensical. He forwarded them to Wilkinson at Fort Warren. The latter sent them back to New Madrid. On their way they were stopped by the officer at Fort Massac, a thoroughly loyal man, who had not been engaged in the intrigues of Wilkinson and Innes. He sent to the Spanish commander at New Madrid for an interpreter to interrogate the men. Of course the Spaniards were as reluctant as Wilkinson and Innes that the facts as to the relations between Carondelet and Wilkinson should be developed, and, like Wilkinson and Innes, they preferred that the murderers should escape rather than that these facts should some to light. Accordingly the interpreter did not divulge the confession of the villains; all evidence as to their guilt was withheld, and they were finally discharged. The Spaniards were very nervous about the affair, and were even afraid lest travelers might dig up Owen’s body and find the despatches hidden in his collar; which, said De Lemos, they might send to the President of the United States, who would of course take measures to find out what the money and the ciphers meant.[36]

Wilkinson’s motives in acting as he did were of course simple. He could not afford to have the murderers of his friend and agent tried lest they should disclose his own black infamy. The conduct of Judge Innes is difficult to explain on any ground consistent with his integrity and with the official propriety of his actions. He may not have been a party to Wilkinson’s conspiracy, but he must certainly have known that Wilkinson was engaged in negotiations with the Spaniards so corrupt that they would not bear the light of exposure, or else he would never have behaved toward the murderers in the way that he did behave.[37]

Carondelet, through De Lemos, entered into correspondence with Wayne about the fort built by his orders at the Chickasaw Bluffs. He refused to give up this fort; and as Wayne became more urgent in his demands, he continually responded with new excuses for delay. He was enabled to tell exactly what Wayne was doing, as Wilkinson, who was serving under Wayne, punctually informed the Spaniard of all that took place in the American army.[38] Carondelet saw that the fate of the Spanish-American province which he ruled, hung on the separation of the Western States from the Union.[39] As long as he thought it possible to bring about the separation, he refused to pay heed even to the orders of the Court of Spain, or to the treaty engagements by which he was nominally bound. He was forced to make constant demands upon the Spanish Court for money to be used in the negotiations; that is, to bribe Wilkinson and his fellows in Kentucky. He succeeded in placating the Chickasaws, and got from them a formal cession of the Chickasaw Bluffs, which was a direct blow at the American pretensions. As with all Indian tribes, the Chickasaws were not capable of any settled policy, and were not under any responsible authority. While some of them were in close alliance with the Americans and were warring on the Creeks, the others formed a treaty with the Spaniards and gave them the territory they so earnestly wished.[40]

However, neither Carondelet’s energy and devotion to the Spanish Government nor his unscrupulous intrigues were able for long to defer the fate which hung over the Spanish possessions. In 1795, Washington nominated as Minister to Spain Thomas Pinckney, a member of a distinguished family of South Carolina statesmen, and a man of the utmost energy and intelligence. Pinckney finally wrung from the Spaniards a treaty which was as beneficial to the West as Jay’s treaty, and was attended by none of the drawbacks which marred Jay’s work. The Spaniards at the outset met his demands by a policy of delay and evasion. Finally, he determined to stand this no longer, and, on October 24, 1795, demanded his passports, in a letter to Godoy, the “Prince of Peace.” The demand came at an opportune moment; for Godoy had just heard of Jay’s treaty. He misunderstood the way in which this was looked at in the United States, and feared lest, if not counteracted, it might throw the Americans into the arms of Great Britain, with which country Spain was on the verge of war. It is not a little singular that Jay should have thus rendered an involuntary but important additional service to the Westerners who so hated him.

The Spaniards now promptly came to terms. They were in no condition to fight the Americans; they knew that war would be the result if the conflicting claims of the two peoples were not at once definitely settled, one way or the other; and they concluded the treaty forthwith.[41] Its two most important provisions were the settlement of the Southern boundary on the lines claimed by the United States, and the granting of the right of deposit to the Westerners. The boundary followed the thirty-first degree of latitude from the Mississippi to the Chattahoochee, down it to the Flint, thence to the head of the St. Mary’s, and down it to the ocean. The Spanish troops were to be withdrawn from this territory within the space of six months. The Westerners were granted for three years the right of deposit at New Orleans; after three years either the right was to be continued, or another equivalent port of deposit was to be granted somewhere on the banks of the Mississippi. The right of deposit carried with it the right to export goods from the place of deposit free from any but an inconsiderable duty.[42]

The treaty was ratified in 1796, but with astonishing bad faith the Spaniards refused to carry out its provisions. At this time Carondelet was in the midst of his negotiations with Wilkinson for the secession of the West, and had high hopes that he could bring it about. He had chosen as his agent an Englishman, named Thomas Power, who was a naturalized Spanish subject, and very zealous in the service of Spain.[43] Power went to Kentucky, where he communicated with Wilkinson, Sebastian, Innes, and one or two others, and submitted to them a letter from Carondelet. This letter proposed a treaty, of which the first article was that Wilkinson and his associates should exert themselves to bring about a separation of the Western country and its formation into an independent government wholly unconnected with that of the Atlantic States; and Carondelet in his letter assured the men to whom he was writing that, because of what had occurred in Europe since Spain had ratified the treaty of October 27, the treaty would not be executed by his Catholic Majesty. Promises of favor to the Western people were held out, and Wilkinson was given a more substantial bribe, in the shape of ten thousand dollars, by Power. Sebastian, Innes, and their friends were also promised a hundred thousand dollars for their good offices; and Carondelet, who had no more hesitation in betraying red men than white, also offered to help the Westerners subdue their Indian foes, these Indian foes being at the moment the devoted allies of Spain.

The time had gone by, however, when it was possible to hope for success in such an intrigue. The treaty with Spain had caused much satisfaction in the West, and the Kentuckians generally were growing more and more loyal to the Central Government. Innes and his friends, in a written communication, rejected the offer of Carondelet. They declared that they were devoted to the Union and would not consent to break it up; but they betrayed curiously little surprise or indignation at the offer, nor did they in rejecting it use the vigorous language which beseemed men who, while holding the commissions of a government, were proffered a hundred thousand dollars to betray that government.[44] Power, at the close of 1797, reported to his superiors that nothing could be done.

Meanwhile Carondelet and De Lemos had persisted in declining to surrender the posts at the Chickasaw Bluffs and Natchez, on pretexts which were utterly frivolous.[45] At this time the Spanish Court was completely subservient to France, which was hostile to the United States; and the Spaniards would not carry out the treaty they had made until they had exhausted every device of delay and evasion. Andrew Ellicott was appointed by Washington Surveyor-General to run the boundary; but when, early in 1797, he reached Natchez, the Spanish representative refused point blank to run the boundary or evacuate the territory. Meanwhile the Spanish Minister at Philadelphia, Yrujo, in his correspondence with the Secretary of State, was pursuing precisely the same course of subterfuge and delay. But these tactics could only avail for a time. Neither the Government of the United States, nor the Western people would consent to be balked much longer. The negotiations with Wilkinson and his associates had come to nothing. A detachment of American regular soldiers came down the river to support Ellicott. The settlers around Natchez arose in revolt against the Spaniards and established a Committee of Safety, under protection of the Americans. The population of Mississippi was very mixed, including criminals fleeing from justice, land speculators, old settlers, well-to-do planters, small pioneer farmers, and adventurers of every kind; and, thanks to the large tory element, there was a British, and a smaller Spanish party; but the general feeling was overwhelmingly for the United States. The Spanish Government made a virtue of necessity and withdrew its garrison, after for some time preserving a kind of joint occupancy with the Americans.[46] Captain Isaac Guyon, with a body of United States troops, took formal possession of both the Chickasaw Bluffs and Natchez in 1797. In 1798, the Spaniards finally evacuated the country,[47] their course being due neither to the wisdom nor the good faith of their rulers, but to the fear and worry caused by the unceasing pressure of the Americans. Spain yielded, because she felt that not to do so would involve the loss of all Louisiana.[48] The country was organized as the Mississippi Territory in June, 1798.[49]

There was one incident, curious rather than important, but characteristic in its way, which marked the close of the transactions of the Western Americans with Spain at this time. During the very years when Carondelet, under the orders of his Government, was seeking to delay the execution of the boundary treaty, and to seduce the Westerners from their allegiance to the United States, a Senator of the United States, entirely without the knowledge of his Government, was engaged in an intrigue for the conquest of a part of the Spanish dominion. This Senator was no less a person than William Blount. Enterprising and ambitious, he was even more deeply engaged in land speculations than were the other prominent men of his time.[50] He felt that he had not been well treated by the United States authorities, and, like all other Westerners, he also felt that the misconduct of the Spaniards had been so great that they were not entitled to the slightest consideration. Moreover, he feared lest the territory should be transferred to France, which would be a much more dangerous neighbor than Spain; and he had a strong liking for Great Britain. If he could not see the territory taken by the Americans under the flag of the United States, then he wished to see them enter into possession of it under the standard of the British King.

In 1797 he entered into a scheme which was in part one of land speculation and in part one of armed aggression against Spain. He tried to organize an association with the purpose of seizing the Spanish territory west of the Mississippi, and putting it under the control of Great Britain, in the interests of the seizers. The scheme came to nothing. No definite steps were taken, and the British Government refused to take any share in the movement. Finally the plot was discovered by the President, who brought it to the attention of the Senate, and Blount was properly expelled from the Upper House for entering into a conspiracy to conquer the lands of one neighboring power in the interest of another. The Tennesseeans, however, who cared little for the niceties of international law, and sympathized warmly with any act of territorial aggression against the Spaniards, were not in the least affected by his expulsion. They greeted him with enthusiasm, and elected him to high office, and he lived among them the remainder of his days, honored and respected.[51] Nevertheless, his conduct in this instance was indefensible. It was an unfortunate interlude in an otherwise honorable and useful public career.[52]

[1] Draper MSS., J. Clark to G. R. Clark, Dec. 27, 1792.

[2] Do., Letter of George Rogers Clark, Feb. 5, 1793; also Feb. 2d and Feb. 3d.

[3] Draper MSS., Michaux to George Rogers Clark, undated, but early in 1793.

[4] State Department MSS., Jefferson Papers, Series I, Vol. V, p. 163.

[5] Marshall, II, page 103.

[6] Draper MSS., Benjamin Logan to George Rogers Clark, Dec. 31, 1793.

[7] Draper MSS., John Montgomery to Geo. Rogers Clark, Jan. 12, 1794.

[8] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, I, pp. 454, 460; Marshall, II, 93.

[9] Robertson MSS., Blount’s letter, Philadelphia, Aug. 28, 1793.

[10] Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Jan. 18, 1794; let ter from Portello, New Madrid, Jan. 17, 1794.

[11] Blount MSS., Blount to Smith, April 3, 1794.

[12] Draper MSS., Clark’s accounts, Aug. 23, 1794; Fulton to Clark, Nantes, Nov. 16, 1794; Do., Paris, April 9 and 12, 1795.

[13] Draper MSS., Spanish Documents, Carondelet to Alcudia, March 20, 1794.

[14] Draper MSS., Spanish Documents, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos to the Duke de Alcudia, Natchez, Sept. 19, 1794.

[15] Do., De Lemos to Carondelet, Dec. 6, 1793.

[16] Canadian Archives, Dorchester to Sydney, June 7, 1789; Grenville to Dorchester, May 6, 1790; Dorchester to Beck with, June 17, 1790; Dorchester to Grenville, Sept. 25, 1790. See Brown’s “Political Beginnings,” 187.

[17] The best and most thorough account of these is to be found in Charles H. Haskin’s “The Yazoo Land Companies.”

[18] American State Papers, Indian Affairs, I, James O’Fallon to the President of the United States, Lexington, Sept. 25, 1790, etc., etc.

[19] Draper MSS., Spanish Documents, Carondelet to Alcudia, Jan. 1, 1794, and May 31, 1794.

[20] Draper MSS., Clark and O’Fallon Papers, anonymous letter to James O’Fallon, Lexington, March 30, 1791, etc., etc.

[21] Draper MSS., Wayne to O’Fallon, Sept. 16, 1793.

[22] Draper MSS., De Lemos to Carondelet, Dec. 23, 1793.

[23] American State Papers, Public Lands, I, pp. 99, 101, 111, 165, 172, 188; Haskin’s “Yazoo Land Companies.” In Congress, Randolph, on behalf of the ultra State rights people, led the opposition to the claimants, whose special champions were Madison and the Northern Democrats. Chief-Justice Marshall, in the case of Fletcher vs. Peck, decided that the rescinding act impaired the obligation of contracts, and was therefore in violation of the Constitution of the United States; a decision further amplified in the Dartmouth case, which has determined the national policy in regard to public contracts. This decision was followed by the passage of the Compromise Act by Congress in 1814, which distributed a large sum of money obtained from the land sales in the territory, in specified proportions among the various claimants.

[24] Stevens’ “Georgia,” II, 401.

[25] Blount MSS., Blount to Smith, Aug. 24, 1795.

[26] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, I, pp. 479, 484, 489, 502, 519, etc.

[27] American State Papers, Indian Affairs, I, p. 573; Foreign Relations, I, passim, etc., etc.

[28] Draper MSS., Spanish Documents, Carondelet to Don Louis de Las Casas, June 13, 1795; De Lemos to Carondelet, July 25, 1793.

[29] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, I, p. 305, etc.

[30] Blount MSS., James Colbert to Robertson, Feb. 10, 1792.

[31] “Kentucky Gazette,” Feb. 8, 1794; Sept. 16, 1797, etc.

[32] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, I, p. 443, etc.; letters of Carmiehael and Short to Gardoqui, Oct. 1, 1793; to Alcudia, Jan. 7, 1794, etc., etc.

[33] Draper MSS., Spanish Documents, Carondelet to Al cudia, July 30, 1794.

[34] Do., De Lemos to Alcudia, Sept. 19, 1794.

[35] Do., letters of Carondelet to Alcudia, Oct. 4, 1794, and of De Lemos to Carondelet, Aug. 28, 1791.

[36] Do., letter of De Lemos.

[37] Marshall, II, 155; Green, p. 328. Even recently defenders of Wilkinson and Innes have asserted, in accordance with Wilkinson’s explanations, that the money forwarded him was due him from tobacco contracts entered into some years previously with Miro. Carondelet in his letters above quoted, however, declares outright that the money was advanced to begin negotiations in Kentucky, through Wilkinson and others, for the pensioning of Kentuckians in the interests of Spain and the severance of the Western States from the Union.

[38] Draper MSS., Spanish Documents, Carondelet to Al cudia, Nov. 1, 1793.

[39] Do., Carondelet to Alcudia, Sept. 25, 1795.

[40] Do., De Lemos to Carondelet, inclosed in Carondelet’s letter of Sept. 26, 1795.

[41] Pinckney receives justice from Lodge, in his “Washington,” II, 160. For Pinckney’s life, see the biography by Rev. C. C. Pinckney, p. 129, etc.

[42] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, I, p. 533, etc.; Pinckney to Secretary of State, Aug. 11, 1795; to Godoy (Alcudia), Oct. 24, 1795; copy of treaty, Oct. 27th, etc.

[43] Gayarré, III, 345. Wilkinson’s Memoirs, II, 225.

[44] American State Papers, Miscellaneous, I, 928; deposition of Harry Innes, etc.

[45] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, II, pp. 20, 70, 78, 79; report of Timothy Pickering, January 22, 1798, etc.

[46] B. A. Hinsdale: “The Establishment of the First South ern Boundary of the United States.” Largely based upon Ellicott’s Journal. Both Ellicott and the leaders among the settlers were warned of Blount’s scheme of conquest and land speculation, and were hostile to it.

[47] Claiborne’s “Mississippi,” p. 176. He is a writer of poor judgment; his verdicts on Ellicott and Wilkinson are astounding.

[48] Gayarré, 413, 418; Pontalba’s Memoir, Sept. 15, 1800.

[49] American State Papers, Public Lands, I, p. 209.

[50] Clay MSS., Blount to Hart, March 13, 1799, etc., etc.

[51] Blount MSS., letter of Hugh Williamson, March 3, 1808, etc., etc.

[52] General Marcus J. Wright, in his “Life and Services of William Blount,” gives the most favorable view possible of Blount’s conduct.

CHAPTER III

THE MEN OF THE WESTERN WATERS, I798–1802

THE GROWTH of the West was very rapid in the years immediately succeeding the peace with the Indians and the treaties with England and Spain. As the settlers poured into what had been the Indian-haunted wilderness it speedily became necessary to cut it into political divisions. Kentucky had already been admitted as a State in 1792; Tennessee likewise became a State in 1796. The Territory of Mississippi was organized in 1798, to include the country west of Georgia and south of Tennessee, which had been ceded by the Spaniards under Pinckney’s treaty.[1] In 1800 the Connecticut Reserve, in what is now northeastern Ohio, was taken by the United States. The Northwestern Territory was divided into two parts; the eastern was composed mainly of what is now the State of Ohio, while the western portion was called Indian Territory, and was organized with W. H. Harrison as Governor, his capital being at Vincennes.[2] Harrison had been Wayne’s aid-de-camp at the fight of the Fallen Timbers, and had been singled out by Wayne for mention because of his coolness and gallantry. Afterward he had succeeded Sargent as Secretary of the Northwestern Territory when Sargent had been made Governor of Mississippi, and he had gone as a Territorial delegate to Congress.[3]

In 1802 Ohio was admitted as a State. St. Clair and St. Clair’s supporters struggled to keep the Territory from Statehood, and proposed to cut it down in size, nominally because they deemed the extent of territory too great for governmental purposes, but really, doubtless, because they distrusted the people, and did not wish to see them take the government into their own hands. The effort failed, however. and the State was admitted by Congress, beginning its existence in 1803.[4] Congress made the proviso that the State Constitution should accord with the Constitution of the United States, and should embody the doctrines contained in the Ordinance of 1787.[5] The rapid settlement of southeastern Ohio was hindered by the fact that the speculative land companies, the Ohio and Scioto associations, held great tracts of territory which the pioneers passed by in their desire to get to lands which they could acquire in their own right. This was one of the many bad effects which resulted from the Government’s policy of disposing of its land in large blocks to the highest bidder, instead of allotting it, as has since been done, in quarter sections to actual settlers.[6]

Harrison was thoroughly in sympathy with the Westerners. He had thrown in his lot with theirs; he deemed himself one of them, and was accepted by them as a fit representative. Accordingly he was very popular as Governor of Indiana. St. Clair in Ohio and Sargent in Mississippi were both extremely unpopular. They were appointed by Federalist administrations, and were entirely out of sympathy with the Western people among whom they lived. One was a Scotchman, and one a New Englander. They were both high-minded men, with sound ideas on governmental policy, though Sargent was the abler of the two; but they were out of touch with the Westerners. They distrusted the frontier folk, and were bitterly disliked in return. Each committed the fundamental fault of trying to govern the Territory over which he had been put in accordance with his own ideas, and heedless of the wishes and prejudices of those under him. Doubtless each was conscientious in what he did, and each of course considered the difficulties under which he labored to be due solely to the lawlessness and the many shortcomings of the settlers. But this was an error. The experience of Blount when he occupied the exceedingly difficult position of Territorial Governor of Tennessee showed that it was quite possible for a man of firm belief in the Union to get into touch with the frontiersmen and to be accepted by them as a worthy representative; but the virtues of St. Clair and Sargent were so different from the backwoods virtues, and their habits of thought were so alien, that they could not possibly get on with the people among whom their lot had been cast. Neither of them in the end took up his abode in the Territory of which he had been Governor, both returning to the East. The codes of laws which they enacted prior to the Territories possessing a sufficient number of inhabitants to become entitled to Territorial legislatures were deemed by the settlers to be arbitrary and unsuited to their needs. There was much popular feeling against them. On one occasion St. Clair was mobbed in Chillicothe, the then capital of Ohio, with no other effect than to procure a change of capital to Cincinnati. Finally both Sargent and St. Clair were removed by Jefferson, early in his administration.

The Jeffersonian Republican party did very much that was evil, and it advocated governmental principles of such utter folly that the party itself was obliged immediately to abandon them when it undertook to carry on the government of the United States, and only clung to them long enough to cause serious and lasting damage to the country; but on the vital question of the West, and its territorial expansion, the Jeffersonian party was, on the whole, emphatically right, and its opponents, the Federalists, emphatically wrong. The Jeffersonians believed in the acquisition of territory in the West, and the Federalists did not. The Jeffersonians believed that the Westerners should be allowed to govern themselves precisely as other citizens of the United States did, and should be given their full share in the management of national affairs. Too many Federalists failed to see that these positions were the only proper ones to take. In consequence, notwithstanding all their manifold shortcomings, the Jeffersonians, and not the Federalists, were those to whom the West owed most.

Whether the Westerners governed themselves as wisely as they should have mattered little. The essential point was that they had to be given the right of self-government. They could not be kept in pupilage. Like other Americans, they had to be left to strike out for themselves and to sink or swim according to the measure of their own capacities. When this was done it was certain that they would commit many blunders, and that some of these blunders would work harm not only to themselves but to the whole nation. Nevertheless, all this had to be accepted as part of the penalty paid for free government. It was wise to accept it in the first place, and in the second place, whether wise or not, it was inevitable. Many of the Federalists saw this; and to many of them, the Adamses, for instance, and Jay and Pinckney, the West owed more than it did to most of the Republican statesmen; but as a whole, the attitude of the Federalists, especially in the Northeast, toward the West was ungenerous and improper, while the Jeffersonians, with all their unwisdom and demagogy, were nevertheless the Western champions.

Mississippi and Ohio had squabbled with their Territorial governors much as the Old Thirteen Colonies had squabbled with the governors appointed by the Crown. One curious consequence of this was common to both cases. When the old Colonies became States, they in their constitutions usually imposed the same checks upon the executive they themselves elected as they had desired to see imposed upon the executive appointed by an outside power. The new Territories followed the same course. When Ohio became a State it adopted a very foolish constitution. This constitution deprived the executive of almost all power, and provided a feeble, short-term judiciary, throwing the control of affairs into the hands of the legislative body, in accordance with what were then deemed Democratic ideas. The people were entirely unable to realize that, so far as their discontent with the Governor’s actions was reasonable, it arose from the fact that he was appointed, not by themselves, but by some body or person not in sympathy with them. They failed to grasp the seemingly self-evident truth that a governor, one man elected by the people, is just as much their representative and is just as certain to carry out their ideas as is a Legislature, a body of men elected by the people. They provided a government which accentuated, instead of softening, the defects in their own social system. They were in no danger of suffering from tyranny; they were in no danger of losing the liberty which they so jealously guarded. The perils that threatened them were lawlessness, lack of order, and lack of capacity to concentrate their efforts in time of danger from within or from an external enemy; and against these perils they made no provision whatever.

The inhabitants of Ohio Territory were just as bitter against St. Clair as the inhabitants of Mississippi Territory were against Sargent. The Mississippians did not object to Sargent as a Northern man, but, in common with the men of Ohio, they objected to governors who were Eastern men and out of touch with the West. At the end of the eighteenth century, and during the early years of the nineteenth, the important fact to be remembered in treating of the Westerners was their fundamental unity, in blood, in ways of life, and in habits of thought.[7] They were predominantly of Southern, not of Northern blood; though it was the blood of the Southerners of the uplands, not of the low coast regions, so that they were far more closely kin to the Northerners than were the seaboard planters. In Kentucky and Tennessee, in Indiana and Mississippi, the settlers were of the same quality. They possessed the same virtues and the same shortcomings, the same ideals and the same practices. There was already a considerable Eastern emigration to the West, but it went as much to Kentucky as to Ohio, and almost as much to Tennessee and Mississippi as to Indiana. As yet the Northeasterners were chiefly engaged in filling the vacant spaces in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. The great flood of Eastern emigration to the West, the flood which followed the parallels of latitude, and made the Northwest like the Northeast, did not begin until after the War of 1812. It was no accident that made Harrison, the first Governor of Indiana and long the typical representative of the Northwest, by birth a Virginian and the son of one of the Virginian signers of the Declaration of Independence. The Northwest was at this time in closer touch with Virginia than with New England.

There was as yet no hard and fast line drawn between North and South among the men of the Western waters. Their sense of political cohesion was not fully developed, and the same qualities that at times made them loose in their ideas of allegiance to the Union at times also prevented a vivid realization on their part of their own political and social solidarity; but they were always more or less conscious of this solidarity, and, as a rule, they acted together.

Most important of all, the slavery question, which afterward rived in sunder the men west of the Alleghanies as it rived in sunder those east of them, was of small importance in the early years. West of the Alleghanies slaves were still to be found almost everywhere, while almost everywhere there were also frequent and open expressions of hostility to slavery. The Southerners still rather disliked slavery, while the Northerners did not as yet feel any very violent antagonism to it. In the Indiana Territory there were hundreds of slaves, the property of the old French inhabitants and of the American settlers who had come there prior to 1787; and the majority of the population of this Territory actually wished to reintroduce slavery, and repeatedly petitioned Congress to be allowed the reintroduction. Congress, with equal patriotism and wisdom, always refused the petition; but it was not until the new century was well under way that the anti-slavery element obtained control in Indiana and Illinois. Even in Ohio there was a considerable party which favored the introduction of slavery, and though the majority was against this, the people had small sympathy with the negroes, and passed very severe laws against the introduction of free blacks into the State, and even against those already in residence therein.[8] On the other hand, when Kentucky’s first constitutional convention sat, a resolute effort was made to abolish slavery within the State, and this effort was only defeated after a hard struggle and a close vote. To their honor be it said that all of the clergymen—three Baptists, one Methodist, one Dutch Reformed, and one Presbyterian—who were members of the constitutional convention voted in favor of the abolition of slavery.[9] In Tennessee no such effort was made, but the leaders of thought did not hesitate to express their horror of slavery and their desire that it might be abolished. There was no sharp difference between the attitudes of the Northwestern and the Southwestern States toward slavery.

North and South alike, the ways of life were substantially the same, though there were differences, of course, and these differences tended to become accentuated. Thus, in the Mississippi Territory the planters, in the closing years of the century, began to turn their attention to cotton instead of devoting themselves to the crops of their brethren further north; and cotton soon became their staple product. But as yet the typical settler everywhere was the man of the axe and rifle, the small pioneer farmer who lived by himself, with his wife and his swarming children, on a big tract of wooded land, perhaps three or four hundred acres in extent. Of this three or four hundred acres he rarely cleared more than eight or ten; and these were cleared imperfectly. On this clearing he tilled the soil, and there he lived in his rough log house with but one room, or at most two and a loft.[10]

The man of the Western waters was essentially a man who dwelt alone in the midst of the forest on his rude little farm, and who eked out his living by hunting. Game still abounded everywhere, save in the immediate neighborhood of the towns; so that many of the inhabitants lived almost exclusively by hunting and fishing, and, with their return to the pursuits of savagery, adopted not a little of the savage idleness and thriftlessness. Bear, deer, and turkey were staple foods. Elk had ceased to be common, though they hung on here and there in out of the way localities for many years; and by the close of the century the herds of bison had been driven west of the Mississippi.[11] Smaller forms of wild life swarmed. Gray squirrels existed in such incredible numbers that they caused very serious damage to the crops, and at one time the Kentucky Legislature passed a law imposing upon every male over sixteen years of age the duty of killing a certain number of squirrels and crows every year.[12] The settlers possessed horses and horned cattle, but only a few sheep, which were not fitted to fight for their own existence in the woods, as the stock had to. On the other hand, slab-sided, long-legged hogs were the most plentiful of domestic animals, ranging in great, half-wild droves through the forest.

All observers were struck by the intense fondness of the frontiersmen for the woods and for a restless, lonely life.[13] They pushed independence to an extreme; they did not wish to work for others or to rent land from others. Each was himself a small landed proprietor, who cleared only the ground that he could himself cultivate. Workmen were scarce and labor dear. It was almost impossible to get men fit to work as mill hands, or to do high-class labor in forges even by importing them from Pennsylvania or Maryland.[14] Even in the few towns the inhabitants preferred that their children should follow agriculture rather than become handicraftsmen; and skilled workmen such as carpenters and smiths made a great deal of money, so much so that they could live a week on one day’s wage.[15]

In addition to farming there was a big trade along the river. Land transportation was very difficult indeed, and the frontiersman’s whole life was one long struggle with the forest and with poor roads. The waterways were consequently of very great importance, and the flatboatmen on the Mississippi and Ohio became a numerous and noteworthy class. The rivers were covered with their craft. There was a driving trade between Pittsburg and New Orleans, the goods being drawn to Pittsburg from the seacoast cities by great four-horse wagons, and being exported in ships from New Orleans to all parts of the earth. Not only did the Westerners build river craft, but they even went into shipbuilding; and on the upper Ohio, at Pittsburg, and near Marietta, at the beginning of the present century, seagoing ships were built and launched to go down the Ohio and Mississippi, and thence across the ocean to any foreign port.[16] There was, however, much risk in this trade; for the demand for commodities at Natchez and New Orleans was uncertain, while the waters of the Gulf swarmed with British and French cruisers, always ready to pounce like pirates on the ships of neutral powers.[17]

Yet the river trade was but the handmaid of frontier agriculture. The Westerners were a farmer folk who lived on the clearings their own hands had made in the great woods, and who owned the land they tilled. Towns were few and small. At the end of the century there were some four hundred thousand people in the West; yet the largest town was Lexington, which contained less than three thousand people.[18] Lexington was a neatly built little burg, with fine houses and good stores. The leading people lived well and possessed much cultivation. Louisville and Nashville were each about half its size. In Nashville, of the one hundred and twenty houses but eight were of brick, and most of them were mere log huts. Cincinnati was a poor little village. Cleveland consisted of but two or three log cabins, at a time when there were already a thousand settlers in its neighborhood on the Connecticut Reserve, scattered out on their farms.[19] Natchez was a very important town, nearly as large as Lexington. It derived its importance from the river traffic on the Mississippi. All the boatmen stopped there, and sometimes as many as one hundred and fifty craft were moored to the bank at the same time. The men who did this laborious river work were rude, powerful, and lawless, and when they halted for a rest their idea of enjoyment was the coarsest and most savage dissipation. At Natchez there speedily gathered every species of purveyor to their vicious pleasures, and the part of the town known as “Natchez under the Hill” became a byword for crime and debauchery.[20]

Kentucky had grown so in population, possessing over two hundred thousand inhabitants, that she had begun to resemble an Eastern State. When, in 1796, Benjamin Logan, the representative of the old woodchoppers and Indian fighters, ran for governor and was beaten, it was evident that Kentucky had passed out of the mere pioneer days. It was more than a mere coincidence that in the following year Henry Clay should have taken up his residence in Lexington. It showed that the State was already attracting to live within her borders men like those who were fitted for social and political leadership in Virginia.

Though the typical inhabitant of Kentucky was still the small frontier farmer, the class of well-to-do gentry had already attained good proportions. Elsewhere throughout the West, in Tennessee, and even here and there in Ohio and the Territories of Indiana and Mississippi, there were to be found occasional houses that were well built and well furnished, and surrounded by pleasant grounds, fairly well kept; houses to which the owners had brought their stores of silver and linen and heavy, old-fashioned furniture from their homes in the Eastern States. Blount, for instance, had a handsome house in Knoxville, well fitted, as beseemed that of a man one of whose brothers still lived at Blount Hall, in the coast region of North Carolina, the ancestral seat of his forefathers for generations.[21] But by far the greatest number of these fine houses, and the largest class of gentry to dwell in them, were in Kentucky. Not only were Lexington and Louisville important towns, but Danville, the first capital of Kentucky, also possessed importance, and, indeed, had been the first of the Western towns to develop an active and distinctive social and political life. It was in Danville that, in the years immediately preceding Kentucky’s admission as a State, the Political Club met. The membership of this club included many of the leaders of Kentucky’s intellectual life, and the record of its debates shows the keenness with which they watched the course of social and political development not only in Kentucky but in the United States. They were men of good intelligence and trained minds, and their meetings and debates undoubtedly had a stimulating effect upon Kentucky life, though they were tainted, as were a very large number of the leading men of the same stamp elsewhere throughout the country, with the doctrinaire political notions common among those who followed the French political theorists of the day.[22]

Of the gentry many were lawyers, and the law led naturally to political life; but even among the gentry the typical man was still emphatically the big landowner. The leaders of Kentucky life were men who owned large estates, on which they lived in their great roomy houses. Even when they practiced law they also supervised their estates; and if they were not lawyers, in addition to tilling the land they were always ready to try their hand at some kind of manufacture. They were willing to turn their attention to any new business in which there was a chance to make money, whether it was to put up a mill, to build a forge, to undertake a contract for the delivery of wheat to some big flour merchant, or to build a flotilla of flatboats, and take the produce of a given neighborhood down to New Orleans for shipment to the West Indies.[23] They were also always engaged in efforts to improve the breed of their horses and cattle, and to introduce new kinds of agriculture, notably the culture of the vine.[24] They speedily settled themselves definitely in the new country, and began to make ready for their children to inherit their homes after them; though they retained enough of the restless spirit which had made them cross the Alleghanies to be always on the lookout for any fresh region of exceptional advantages, such as many of them considered the lands along the lower Mississippi. They led a life which appealed to them strongly, for it was passed much in the open air, in a beautiful region and lovely climate, with horses and hounds, and the management of their estates and their interest in politics to occupy their time; while their neighbors were men of cultivation, at least by their own standards, so that they had the society for which they most cared.[25] In spite of their willingness to embark in commercial ventures and to build mills, rope-walks, and similar manufactures,—for which they had the greatest difficulty in procuring skilled laborers, whether foreign or native, from the Northeastern States[26]—and in spite of their liking for the law, they retained the deep-settled belief that the cultivation of the earth was the best of all possible pursuits for men of every station, high or low.[27]

In many ways the life of the Kentuckians was most like that of the Virginia gentry, though it had peculiar features of its own. Judged by Puritan standards, it seemed free enough; and it is rather curious to find Virginia fathers anxious to send their sons out to Kentucky so that they could get away from what they termed “the constant round of dissipation, the scenes of idleness which boys are perpetually engaged in” in Virginia. One Virginia gentleman of note, in writing to a prominent Kentuckian to whom he wished to send his son, dwelt upon his desire to get him away from a place where boys of his age spent most of the time galloping wherever they wished, mounted on blooded horses. Kentucky hardly seemed a place to which a parent would send a son if he wished him to avoid the temptations of horse flesh; but this particular Virginian at least tried to provide against this, as he informed his correspondent that he should send his son out to Kentucky mounted on an “indifferent Nag,” which was to be used only as a means of locomotion for the journey, and was then immediately to be sold.[28]

The gentry strove hard to secure a good education for their children, and in Kentucky, as in Tennessee, made every effort to bring about the building of academies where their boys and girls could be well taught. If this was not possible, they strove to find some teacher capable of taking a class to which he could teach Latin and mathematics; a teacher who should also “prepare his pupils for becoming useful members of society and patriotic citizens.[29] Where possible the leading families sent their sons to some Eastern college, Princeton being naturally the favorite institution of learning with people who dwelt in communities where the Presbyterians took the lead in social standing and cultivation.[30]

All through the West there was much difficulty in getting money. In Tennessee particularly money was so scarce that the only way to get cash in hand was by selling provisions to the few Federal garrisons.[31] Credits were long, and payment made largely in kind; and the price at which an article could be sold under such conditions was twice as large as that which it would command for cash down. In the accounts kept by the landowners with the merchants who sold them goods, and the artisans who worked for them, there usually appear credit accounts in which the amounts due on account of produce of various kinds are deducted from the debt, leaving a balance to be settled by cash and by orders. Owing to the fluctuating currency, and to the wide difference in charges when immediate cash payments were received as compared with charges when the payments were made on credit and in kind, it is difficult to know exactly what the prices represent. In Kentucky currency mutton and beef were four pence a pound, in the summer of 1796, while four beef tongues cost three shillings, and a quarter of lamb three and sixpence. In 1798, on the same account, beef was down to three pence a pound.[32] Linen cost two and four pence, or three shillings a yard; flannel, four to six shillings; calico and chintz about the same; baize, three shillings and nine pence. A dozen knives and forks were eighteen shillings, and ten pocket handkerchiefs two pounds. Worsted shoes were eight shillings a pair, and buttons were a shilling a dozen. A pair of gloves was three and ninepence; a pair of kid slippers, thirteen and sixpence; ribbons were one and sixpence.[33] The blacksmith charged six shillings and nine pence for a pair of shoes, and a shilling and sixpence for taking off an old pair; and he did all the iron work for the farm and the house alike, from repairing bridle bits and sharpening coulters to mounting “wafil irons”[34]—for the housewives excelled in preparing delicious waffles and hot cakes. The gentry were fond of taking holidays, going to some mountain resort, where they met friends from other parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, and from Virginia and elsewhere. They carried their negro servants with them, and at a good tavern the board would be three shillings a day for the master and a little over a shilling for the man. They lived in comfort and they enjoyed themselves; but they did not have much ready money. From the sales of their crops and stock and from their mercantile ventures they got enough to pay the blacksmith and carpenter, who did odd jobs for them, and the Eastern merchants from whom they got gloves, bonnets, hats, and shoes, and the cloth which was made into dresses by the womankind on their plantations. But most of their wants were supplied on their own places. Their abundant tables were furnished mainly with what their own farms yielded. When they traveled they went in their own carriages. The rich men, whose wants were comparatively many, usually had on their estates white hired men or black slaves whose labor could gratify them; while the ordinary farmer, of the class that formed the great majority of the population, was capable of supplying almost all his needs himself, or with the assistance of his family.

The immense preponderance of the agricultural, land-holding, and land-tilling element, and the comparative utter insignificance of town development, was highly characteristic of the Western settlement of this time, and offers a very marked contrast to what goes on to-day in the settlement of new countries. At the end of the eighteenth century the population of the Western country was about as great as the population of the State of Washington at the end of the nineteenth, and Washington is distinctly a pastoral and agricultural State, a State of men who chop trees, herd cattle, and till the soil, as well as trade; but in Washington great cities, like Tacoma, Seattle, and Spokane, have sprung up with a rapidity which was utterly unknown in the West a century ago. Nowadays when new States are formed the urban population in them tends to grow as rapidly as in the old. A hundred years ago there was practically no urban population at all in a new country. Colorado even during its first decade of Statehood had a third of its population in its capital city. Kentucky during its first decade did not have much more than one per cent of its population in its capital city. Kentucky grew as rapidly as Colorado grew, a hundred years later; but Denver grew thirty or forty times as fast as Lexington had ever grown.

In the strongly marked frontier character no traits were more pronounced than the dislike of crowding and the tendency to roam to and fro, hither and thither, always with a westward trend. Boone, the typical frontiersman, embodied in his own person the spirit of loneliness and restlessness which marked the first venturers into the wilderness. He had wandered in his youth from Pennsylvania to Carolina, and, in the prime of his strength, from North Carolina to Kentucky. When Kentucky became well settled in the closing years of the century, he crossed into Missouri, that he might once more take up his life where he could see the game come out of the woods at nightfall, and could wander among trees untouched by the axe of the pioneer. An English traveler of note who happened to encounter him about this time has left an interesting account of the meeting. It was on the Ohio, and Boone was in a canoe, alone with his dog and gun, setting forth on a solitary trip into the wilderness to trap beaver. He would not even join himself to the other travelers for a night, preferring to plunge at once into the wild, lonely life he so loved. His strong character and keen mind struck the Englishman, who yet saw that the old hunter belonged to the class of pioneers who could never themselves civilize the land, because they ever fled from the face of the very civilization for which they had made ready the land. In Boone’s soul the fierce impatience of all restraint burned like a fire. He told the Englishman that he no longer cared for Kentucky, because its people had grown too easy of life; and that he wished to move to some place where men still lived untrammeled and unshackled, and enjoyed uncontrolled the free blessings of nature.[35] The isolation of his life and the frequency with which he changed his abode brought out the frontiersman’s wonderful capacity to shift for himself, but it hindered the development of his power of acting in combination with others of his kind. The first comers to the new country were so restless and so intolerant of the presence of their kind, that as neighbors came in they moved ever westward. They could not act with their fellows.

Of course in the men who succeeded the first pioneers, and who were the first permanent settlers, the restlessness and the desire for a lonely life were much less developed. These men wandered only until they found a good piece of land, not because the country was lonely, but because it was fertile. They hailed with joy the advent of new settlers and the upbuilding of a little market town in the neighborhood. They joined together eagerly in the effort to obtain schools for their children. As yet there were no public schools supported by the government in any part of the West, but all the settlers of any pretension to respectability were anxious to give their children a decent education. Even the poorer people, who were still engaged in the hardest and roughest struggle for a livelihood, showed appreciation of the need of schooling for their children; and wherever the clearings of the settlers were within reasonable distance of one another a log school-house was sure to spring up. The school-teacher boarded around among the different families, and was quite as apt to be paid in produce as in cash. Sometimes he was a teacher by profession; more often he took up teaching simply as an interlude to some of his other occupations. School-books were more common than any others in the scanty libraries of the pioneers.

The settlers who became firmly established in the land gave definite shape to its political career. The county was throughout the West the unit of division, though in the North it became somewhat mixed with the township system. It is a pity that the township could not have been the unit, as it would have rendered the social and political development in many respects easier, by giving to each little community responsibility for, and power in, matters concerning its own welfare; but the backwoodsmen lived so scattered out, and the thinly-settled regions covered so large an extent of territory, that the county was at first in some ways more suited to their needs. Moreover, it was the unit of organization in Virginia, to which State more than to any other the pioneers owed their social and governmental system. The people were ordinarily brought but little in contact with the Government. They were exceedingly jealous of their individual liberty, and wished to be interfered with as little as possible. Nevertheless, they were fond of litigation. One observer remarks that horses and lawsuits were their great subjects of conversation.[36]

The vast extent of the territory and the scantiness of the population forced the men of law, like the religious leaders, to travel about rather than stay permanently fixed in any one place. In the few towns there were lawyers and clergymen who had permanent homes; but as a rule both rode circuits. The judges and the lawyers traveled together on the circuits to hold court. At the Shire-town all might sleep in one room, or at least under one roof; and it was far from an unusual thing to see both the grand and petty juries sitting under trees in the open.[37]

The fact that the Government did so little for the individual and left so much to be done by him rendered it necessary for the individuals voluntarily to combine. Huskings and house-raisings were times when all joined freely to work for the man whose corn was to be shucked or whose log cabin was to be built, and turned their labor into a frolic and merry-making, where the men drank much whiskey and the young people danced vigorously to the sound of the fiddle. Such merry-makings were attended from far and near, offering a most welcome break to the dreariness of life on the lonely clearings in the midst of the forest. Ordinarily the frontiersman at his home only drank milk or water; but at the taverns and social gatherings there was much drunkenness, for the men craved whiskey, drinking the fiery liquor in huge draughts. Often the orgies ended with brutal brawls. To outsiders the craving of the backwoodsman for whiskey was one of his least attractive traits.[38] It must always be remembered, however, that even the most friendly outsider is apt to apply to others his own standards in matters of judgment. The average traveler overstated the drunkenness of the backwoodsman, exactly as he overstated his misery.

The frontiersman was very poor. He worked hard and lived roughly, and he and his family had little beyond coarse food, coarse clothing, and a rude shelter. In the severe winters they suffered both from cold and hunger. In the summers there was sickness everywhere, fevers of various kinds scourging all the new settlements. The difficulty of communication was so great that it took three months for the emigrants to travel from Connecticut to the Western Reserve near Cleveland, and a journey from a clearing, over the forest roads, to a little town not fifty miles off was an affair of moment to be undertaken but once a year.[39] Yet to the frontiersmen themselves the life was far from unattractive. It gratified their intense love of independence; the lack of refinement did not grate on their rough, bold natures; and they prized the entire quality of a life where there were no social distinctions, and few social restraints. Game was still a staple, being sought after for the flesh and the hide, and of course all the men and boys were enthralled by the delights of the chase. The life was as free as it was rude, and it possessed great fascinations, not only for the wilder spirits, but even for many men who, when they had the chance, showed that they possessed ability to acquire cultivation.

One old pioneer has left a pleasant account of the beginning of an ordinary day’s work in a log cabin:[40] “I know of no scene in civilized life more primitive than such a cabin hearth as that of my mother. In the morning, a buckeye back-log, a hickory forestick, resting on stone and irons, with a johnny-cake, on a clean ash board, set before the fire to bake; a frying pan, with its long handle resting on a split-bottom turner’s chair, sending out its peculiar music, and the tea-kettle swung from a wooden lug pole, with myself setting the table or turning the meat, or watching the johnny-cake, while she sat nursing the baby in the corner and telling the little ones to hold still and let their sister Lizzie dress them. Then came blowing the conch-shell for father in the field, the howling of old Lion, the gathering round the table, the blessing, the dull clatter of pewter spoons and pewler basins, the talk about the crop and stock, the inquiry whether Dan’l (the boy) could be spared from the house, and the general arrangements for the day. Breakfast over, my function was to provide the sauce for dinner; in winter, to open the potato or turnip hole, and wash what I took out; in spring, to go into the field and collect the greens; in summer and fall, to explore the truck patch, our little garden. If I afterward went to the field my household labors ceased until night; if not, they continued through the day. As often as possible mother would engage in making pumpkin pies, in which I generally bore a part, and one of these more commonly graced the supper than the dinner table. My pride was in the labors of the field. Mother did the spinning. The standing dye-stuff was the inner bark of the white walnut, from which we obtained that peculiar and permanent shade of dull yellow, the butternut [so common and typical in the clothing of the backwoods farmer]. Oak bark, with copperas as a mordant, when father had money to purchase it, supplied the ink with which I learned to write. I drove the horses to and from the range, and salted them. I tended the sheep, and hunted up the cattle in the woods.”[41] This was the life of the thrifty pioneers, whose children more than held their own in the world. The shiftless men without ambition and without thrift, lived in laziness and filth; their eating and sleeping arrangements were as unattractive as those of an Indian wigwam.

The pleasures and the toils of the life were alike peculiar. In the wilder parts the loneliness and the fierce struggle with squalid poverty, and with the tendency to revert to savage conditions, inevitably produced for a generation or two a certain falling off from the standard of civilized communities. It needed peculiar qualities to ensure success, and the pioneers were almost exclusively native Americans. The Germans were more thrifty and prosperous, but they could not go first into the wilderness.[42] Men fresh from England rarely succeeded.[43] The most pitiable group of emigrants that reached the West at this time was formed by the French who came to found the town of Gallipolis, on the Ohio. These were mostly refugees from the Revolution, who had been taken in by a swindling land company. They were utterly unsuited to life in the wilderness, being gentlemen, small tradesmen, lawyers, and the like. Unable to grapple with the wild life into which they found themselves plunged, they sank into shiftless poverty, not one in fifty showing industry and capacity to succeed. Congress took pity upon them and granted them twenty-four thousand acres in Scioto County, the tract being known as the French grant; but no gift of wild land was able to ensure their prosperity. By degrees they were absorbed into the neighboring communities, a few succeeding, most ending their lives in abject failure.[44]

Americans. A curious example of how differently the same facts will affect different observers may be gained by contrasting his observations with those of his fellow Englishman, John Davis, whose trip covered precisely the same period; but Parkinson’s observations as to the extreme difficulty of an Old Country farmer getting on in the backwoods regions are doubtless mainly true.

The trouble these poor French settlers had with their lands was far from unique. The early system of land sales in the West was most unwise. In Kentucky and Tennessee the grants were made under the laws of Virginia and North Carolina, and each man purchased or pre-empted whatever he could, and surveyed it where he liked, with a consequent endless confusion of titles. The National Government possessed the disposal of the land in the Northwest and in Mississippi; and it avoided the pitfall of unlimited private surveying; but it made little effort to prevent swindling by land companies, and none whatever to people the country with actual settlers. Congress granted great tracts of lands to companies and to individuals, selling to the highest bidder, whether or not he intended personally to occupy the country. Public sales were thus conducted by competition, and Congress even declined to grant to the men in actual possession the right of pre-emption at the average rate of sale, refusing the request of settlers in both Mississippi and Indiana that they should be given the first choice to the lands which they had already partially cleared.[45] It was not until many years later that we adopted the wise policy of selling the National domain in small lots to actual occupants.

The pioneer in his constant struggle with poverty was prone to look with puzzled anger at those who made more money than he did, and whose lives were easier. The backwoods farmer or planter of that day looked upon the merchant with much the same suspicion and hostility now felt by his successor for the banker or the railroad magnate. He did not quite understand how it was that the merchant, who seemed to work less hard than he did, should make more money; and being ignorant and suspicious, he usually followed some hopelessly wrong-headed course when he tried to remedy his wrongs. Sometimes these efforts to obtain relief took the form of resolutions not to purchase from merchants or traders such articles as woolens, linens, cottons, hats, or shoes, unless the same could be paid for in articles grown or manufactured by the farmers themselves. This particular move was taken because of the alarming scarcity of money, and was aimed particularly at the inhabitants of the Atlantic States. It was of course utterly ineffective.[46] A much less wise and less honest course was that sometimes followed of refusing to pay debts when the latter became inconvenient and pressing.[47]

The frontier virtue of independence and of impatience of outside direction found a particularly vicious expression in the frontier abhorrence of regular troops, and advocacy of a hopelessly feeble militia system. The people were foolishly convinced of the efficacy of their militia system, which they loudly proclaimed to be the only proper mode of National defence,[48] while in the actual presence of the Indians the stern necessities of border warfare forced the frontiersmen into a certain semblance of discipline. As soon as the immediate pressure was relieved, however, the whole militia system sank into a mere farce. At certain stated occasions there were musters for company or regimental drill. These training days were treated as occasions for frolic and merry-making. There were pony races and wrestling matches, with unlimited fighting, drunkenness, and general uproar. Such musters were often called, in derision, cornstalk drills, because many of the men, either having no guns or neglecting to bring them, drilled with cornstalks instead. The officers were elected by the men and when there was no immediate danger of war they were chosen purely for their social qualities. For a few years after the close of the long Indian struggle there were here and there officers who had seen actual service and who knew the rudiments of drill; but in the days of peace the men who had taken part in Indian fighting cared but little to attend the musters, and left them more and more to be turned into mere scenes of horseplay.

The frontier people of the second generation in the West thus had no military training whatever, and though they possessed a skeleton militia organization, they derived no benefit from it, because their officers were worthless, and the men had no idea of practicing self-restraint or of obeying orders longer than they saw fit. The frontiersmen were personally brave, but their courage was entirely untrained, and being unsupported by discipline, they were sure to be disheartened at a repulse, to be distrustful of themselves and their leaders, and to be unwilling to persevere in the face of danger and discouragement. They were hardy, and physically strong, and they were good marksmen; but here the list of their soldierly qualities was exhausted. They had to be put through a severe course of training by some man like Jackson before they became fit to contend on equal terms with regulars in the open or with Indians in the woods. Their utter lack of discipline was decisive against them at first in any contest with regulars. In warfare with the Indians there were a very few of their number, men of exceptional qualities as woodsmen, who could hold their own; but the average frontiersman, though he did a good deal of hunting and possessed much knowledge of woodcraft, was primarily a tiller of the soil and a feller of trees, and he was necessarily at a disadvantage when pitted against an antagonist whose entire life was passed in woodland chase and woodland warfare. These facts must all be remembered if we wish to get an intelligent explanation of the utter failure of the frontiersmen when, in 1812, they were again pitted against the British and the forest tribes. They must also be taken into account when we seek to explain why it was possible but a little later to develop out of the frontiersmen fighting armies which under competent generals could overmatch the red coat and the Indian alike. The extreme individualism of the frontier, which found expression for good and for evil both in its governmental system in time of peace and in its military system in time of war, was also shown in religious matters. In 1799 and 1800 a great revival of religion swept over the West. Up to that time the Presbyterian had been the leading creed beyond the mountains. There were a few Episcopalians here and there, and there were Lutherans, Catholics, and adherents of the reformed Dutch and German Churches; but, aside from the Presbyterians, the Methodists and Baptists were the only sects powerfully represented. The great revival of 1799 was mainly carried on by Methodists and Baptists, and under their guidance the Methodist and Baptist churches at once sprang to the front and became the most important religious forces in the frontier communities.[49] The Presbyterian Church remained the most prominent as regards the wealth and social standing of its adherents, but the typical frontiersman who professed religion at all became either a Methodist or a Baptist, adopting a creed which was intensely democratic and individualistic, which made nothing of social distinctions, which distrusted educated preachers, and worked under a republican form of ecclesiastical government.

The great revival was accompanied by scenes of intense excitement. Under the conditions of a vast wooded wilderness and a scanty population the camp-meeting was evolved as the typical religious festival. To the great camp-meetings the frontiersmen flocked from far and near, on foot, on horseback, and in wagons. Every morning at daylight the multitude was summoned to prayer by sound of trumpet. No preacher or exhorter was suffered to speak unless he had the power of stirring the souls of his hearers. The preaching, the praying, and the singing went on without intermission, and under the tremendous emotional stress whole communities became fervent professors of religion. Many of the scenes at these camp-meetings were very distasteful to men whose religion was not emotional and who shrank from the fury of excitement into which the great masses were thrown, for under the strain many individuals literally became like men possessed, whether of good or evil spirits, falling into ecstasies of joy or agony, dancing, shouting, jumping, fainting, while there were widespread and curious manifestations of a hysterical character, both among the believers and among the scoffers; but though this might seem distasteful to an observer of education and self-restraint, it thrilled the heart of the rude and simple backwoodsman and reached him as he could not possibly have been reached in any other manner. Often the preachers of the different denominations worked in hearty unison; but often they were sundered by bitter jealousy and distrust. The fiery zeal of the Methodists made them the leaders; and in their war on the forces of evil they at times showed a tendency to include all non-Methodists—whether Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, or infidels—in a common damnation. Of course, as always in such a movement, many even of the earnest leaders at times confounded the essential and the non-essential, and railed as bitterly against dancing as against drunkenness and lewdness, or anathematized the wearing of jewelry as fiercely as the commission of crime.[50] More than one hearty, rugged old preacher, who did stalwart service for decency and morality, hated Calvinism as heartily as Catholicism, and yet yielded to no Puritan in his austere condemnation of amusement and luxury.

Often men backslid, and to a period of intense emotional religion succeeded one of utter unbelief and of reversion to the worst practices which had been given up. Nevertheless, on the whole there was an immense gain for good. The people received a new light, and were given a sense of moral responsibility such as they had not previously possessed. Much of the work was done badly or was afterward undone, but very much was really accomplished. The whole West owes an immense debt to the hard-working frontier preachers, sometimes Presbyterian, generally Methodist or Baptist, who so gladly gave their lives to their labors and who struggled with such fiery zeal for the moral well-being of the communities to which they penetrated. Wherever there was a group of log cabins, thither some Methodist circuit-rider made his way or there some Baptist preacher took up his abode. Their prejudices and narrow dislikes, their raw vanity and sullen distrust of all who were better schooled than they, count for little when weighed against their intense earnestness and heroic self-sacrifice. They proved their truth by their endeavor. They yielded scores of martyrs, nameless and unknown men who perished at the hands of the savages, or by sickness or in flood or storm. They had to face no little danger from the white inhabitants themselves. In some of the communities most of the men might heartily support them, but in others, where the vicious and lawless elements were in control, they were in constant danger of mobs. The godless and lawless people hated the religious with a bitter hatred, and gathered in great crowds to break up their meetings. On the other hand, those who had experienced religion were no believers in the doctrine of non-resistance. At the core, they were thoroughly healthy men, and they fought as valiantly against the powers of evil in matters physical as in matters moral. Some of the successful frontier preachers were men of weak frame, whose intensity of conviction and fervor of religious belief supplied the lack of bodily powers; but as a rule the preacher who did most was a stalwart man, as strong in body as in faith. One of the continually recurring incidents in the biographies of the famous frontier preachers is that of some particularly hardened sinner who was never converted until, tempted to assault the preacher of the Word, he was soundly thrashed by the latter, and his eyes thereby rudely opened through his sense of physical shortcomings to an appreciation of his moral iniquity.

Throughout these years, as the frontiersmen pressed into the West, they continued to fret and strain against the Spanish boundaries. There was no temptation to them to take possession of Canada. The lands south of the Lakes were more fertile than those north of the Lakes, and the climate was better. The few American settlers who did care to go into Canada found people speaking their own tongue, and with much the same ways of life; so that they readily assimilated with them, as they could not assimilate with the French and Spanish Creoles. Canada lay north, and the tendency of the backwoodsman was to thrust west; among the Southern backwoodsmen, the tendency was south and southwest. The Mississippi formed no natural barrier whatever. Boone, when he moved into Missouri, was but a forerunner among the pioneers; many others followed him. He himself became an official under the Spanish Government, and received a grant of lands. Of the other frontiersmen who went into the Spanish territory, some, like Boone, continued to live as hunters and backwoods farmers.[51] Others settled in St. Louis, or some other of the little creole towns, and joined the parties of French traders who ascended the Missouri and the Mississippi to barter paint, beads, powder, and blankets for the furs of the Indians.

The Spanish authorities were greatly alarmed at the incoming of the American settlers. Gayoso de Lemos had succeeded Carondelet as Governor, and he issued to the commandants of the different posts throughout the colonies a series of orders in reference to the terms on which land grants were to be given to immigrants; he particularly emphasized the fact that liberty of conscience was not to be extended beyond the first generation, and that the children of the immigrant would either have to become Catholics or else be expelled, and that this should be explained to settlers who did not profess the Catholic faith. He ordered, moreover, that no preacher of any religion but the Catholic should be allowed to come into the provinces.[52] The Bishop of Louisiana complained bitterly of the American immigration and of the measure of religious toleration accorded the settlers, which, he said, had introduced into the colony a gang of adventurers who acknowledged no religion. He stated that the Americans had scattered themselves over the country almost as far as Texas and corrupted the Indians and Creoles by the example of their own restless and ambitious temper; for they came from among people who were in the habit of saying to their stalwart boys, “You will go to Mexico.” Already the frontiersmen had penetrated even into New Mexico from the district round the mouth of the Missouri, in which they had become very numerous; and the Bishop earnestly advised that the places where the Americans were allowed to settle should be rigidly restricted.[53]

When the Spaniards held such views it was absolutely inevitable that a conflict should come. Whether the frontiersman did or did not possess deep religious convictions, he was absolutely certain to refuse to he coerced into becoming a Catholic; and his children were sure to fight as soon as they were given the choice of changing their faith or abandoning their country. The minute that the American settlers were sufficiently numerous to stand a chance of success in the conflict it was certain that they would try to throw off the yoke of the fanatical and corrupt Spanish Government. As early as 1801 bands of armed Americans had penetrated here and there into the Spanish provinces in defiance of the commands of the authorities, and were striving to set up little bandit governments of their own.[54]

The frontiersmen possessed every advantage of position, of numbers, and of temper. In any contest that might arise with Spain they were sure to take possession at once of all of what was then called Upper Louisiana. The immediate object of interest to most of them was the commerce of the Mississippi River and the possession of New Orleans; but this was only part of what they wished, and were certain to get, for they demanded all the Spanish territory that lay across the line of their westward march. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the settlers on the Western waters recognized in Spain their natural enemy, because she was the power who held the mouth and the west bank of the Mississippi. They would have transferred their hostility to any other power which fell heir to her possessions, for these possessions they were bound one day to make their own.

A thin range of settlement extended from the shores of Lake Erie on the north to the boundary of Florida on the south; and there were out-posts here and there beyond this range, as at Fort Dear- born, on the site of what is now Chicago; but the only fairly well-settled regions were in Kentucky and Tennessee. These two States were the oldest, and long remained the most populous and influential, communities in the West. They shared qualities both of the Northerners and of the Southerners, and they gave the tone to the thought and the life in the settlements north of them no less than the settlements south of them. This fact of itself tended to make the West homogeneous and to keep it a unit with a peculiar character of its own, neither Northern or Southern in political and social tendency.

It was the middle West which was first settled, and the middle West stamped its peculiar characteristics on all the growing communities beyond the Alleghanies. Inasmuch as west of the mountains the Northern communities were less distinctively Northern and the Southern communities less distinctively Southern than was the case with the Eastern States on the seaboard, it followed naturally that, considered with reference to other sections of the Union, the West formed a unit, possessing marked characteristics of its own. A distinctive type of character was developed west of the Alleghanies, and for the first generation the typical representatives of this Western type were to be found in Kentucky and Tennessee.

The settlement of the Northwest had been begun under influences which in the end were to separate It radically from the Southwest. It was settled under governmental supervision, and because of and in accordance with governmental action; and it was destined ultimately to receive the great mass of its immigrants from the Northwest; but as yet these two influences had not become strong enough to sunder the frontiersmen north of the Ohio by any sharp line from those south of the Ohio. The settlers on the Western waters were substantially the same in character north and south.

In sum, the Western frontier folk, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, possessed in common marked and peculiar characteristics, which the people of the rest of the country shared to a much less extent. They were backwoods farmers, each man preferring to live alone on his own freehold, which he himself tilled and from which he himself had cleared the timber. The towns were few and small; the people were poor, and often ignorant, but hardy in body and in temper. They joined hospitality to strangers with suspicion of them. They were essentially warlike in spirit, and yet utterly unmilitary in all their training and habits of thought. They prized beyond measure their individual liberty and their collective freedom, and were so jealous of governmental control that they often, to their own great harm, fatally weakened the very authorities whom they chose to act over them. The peculiar circumstances of their lives forced them often to act in advance of action by the law, and this bred a lawlessness in certain matters which their children inherited for generations; yet they knew and appreciated the need of obedience to the law, and they thoroughly respected the law.

The separatist agitations had largely died out. In 1798 and 1799 Kentucky divided with Virginia the leadership of the attack on the Alien and Sedition laws; but her extreme feelings were not shared by the other Westerners, and she acted not as a representative of the West, but on a footing of equality with Virginia. Tennessee sympathized as little with the nullification movement of these two States at this time as she sympathized with South Carolina in her nullification movement a generation later. With the election of Jefferson the dominant political party in the West became in sympathy with the party in control of the nation, and the West became stoutly loyal to the National Government.

The West had thus achieved a greater degree of political solidarity, both as within itself and with the nation as a whole, than ever before. Its wishes were more powerful with the East. The pioneers stood for an extreme Americanism, in social, political, and religious matters alike. The trend of American thought was toward them, not away from them. More than ever before, the Westerners were able to make their demands felt at home and to make their force felt in the event of a struggle with a foreign power.

[1] Claiborne’s “Mississippi,” p. 220, etc.

[2] “Annals of the West,” by Thomas H. Perkins, p. 473- A valuable book, showing much scholarship and research. The author has never received proper credit. Very few in deed of the Western historians of his date showed either his painstaking care or his breadth of view.

[3] Jacob Burnett in “Ohio Historical Transactions,” Part II., Vol. I, p. 69.

[4] Atwater, “History of Ohio,” p. 169.

[5] The question of the boundaries of the Northwestern States is well treated in “The Boundaries of Wisconsin,” by- Reuben G. Thwaites, the Secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

[6] Mr. Eli Thayer, in his various writings, has rightly laid especial stress on this point.

[7] Prof. Frederick A. Turner, of the University of Michigan, deserves especial credit for the stress he has laid upon this point.

[8] “Ohio,” by Rufus King, pp. 290, 364, etc.

[9] John Mason Brown, “Political Beginnings of Kentucky,” 229. Among the men who deserve honor for thus voting against slavery was Harry Innes. One of the Baptist preachers, Gerrard, was elected Governor over Logan, four years later; a proof that Kentucky sentiment was very tolerant of attacks on slavery. All the clergymen, by the way, also voted to disqualify clergymen for service in the legislatures.

[10] F. A. Michaux, “Voyages” (in 1802), pp. 132, 214, etc.

[11] Henry Ker, “Travels,” p. 22.

[12] Michaux, 215, 236; Collins, I, 24.

[13] Crèvecœur, “Voyage dans la Haute Pennsylvanie,” etc., p. 265.

[14] Clay MSS., Letter to George Nicholas, Baltimore, Sept. 3, 1796.

[15] Michaux, pp. 96, 152.

[16] Thompson Mason Harris, “Journal of Tour,” etc., 1803, p. 140; Michaux, p. 77.

[17] Clay MSS., W. H. Turner to Thomas Hart, Natchez, May 27, 1797.

[18] Perrin Du Lac, “Voyage,” etc., 1801, 1803, p, 153; Michaux, 150.

[19] “Historical Collections of Ohio,” p. 120.

[20] Henry Ker, “Travels,” p. 41.

[21] Clay MSS., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, Feb. 9, 1794.

[22] “The Political Club,” by Thomas Speed, Pilson Club Publications.

[23] Clay MSS., Seitz & Lowan to Garret Darling, Lexington, January 23, 1797; agreement of George Nicholas, October 10, 1796, etc. This was an agreement on the part of Nicholas to furnish Seitz & Lowan with all the flour manufactured at his mill during the season of 1797 for exportation, the flour to be delivered by him in Kentucky. He was to receive $5.50 a barrel up to the receipt of $1,500; after that it was to depend upon the price of wheat. Six bushels of wheat were reckoned to a barrel of flour, and the price of a bushel was put at four shillings; in reality it ranged from three to six.

[24] Do., “Minutes of meeting of the Directors of the Vine yard Society,” June 27, 1800.

[25] Do., James Brown to Thomas Hart, Lexington, April 3, 1804.

[26] Do., J. Brown to Thomas Hart, Philadelphia, February 11, 1797. This letter was brought out to Hart by a work man, David Dodge, whom Brown had at last succeeded in engaging. Dodge had been working in New York at a rope- walk, where he received $500 a year without board. From Hart he bargained to receive $350 with board. It proved impossible to engage other journeymen workers, Brown expressing his belief that any whom he chose would desert a week after they got to Kentucky, and Dodge saying that he would rather take raw hands and train them to the business than take out such hands as offered to go.

[27] Do., William Nelson to Col. George Nicholas, Caroline, Va., December 29, 1794.

[28] Do., William Nelson to Nicholas, November 9, 1792.

[29] Shelby MSS., letter of Toulmin, January 7, 1794; Blount MSS., January 6, 1792, etc.

[30] Clay MSS., passim; letter to Thomas Hart, October 19, 1794; October 13, 1797, etc. In the last letter, by the way, written by one John Umstead, occurs the following sentence: “I have lately heard a piece of news, if true, must be a valuable acquisition to the Western World, viz., a boat of a considerable burden making four miles and a half an hour against the strongest current in the Mississippi River, and worked by horses.”

[31] Do., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, March 13, 1799.

[32] Do., Account of James Morrison and Melchia Myer, October 12, 1798.

[33] Do., Account of Mrs. Marion Nicholas with Tilford, 1802. On this bill appears also a charge for Hyson tea, for straw- bonnets, at eighteen shillings; for black silk gloves, and for one “Æsop’s Fables,” at a cost of three shillings and nine- pence.

[34] Do., Account of Morrison and Hickey, 1798.

[35] Francis Bailey’s “Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797,” p. 234.

[36] Michaux, p. 240.

[37] Atwater, p. 177.

[38] Perrin Du Lac, p. 131; Michaux, 95, etc.

[39] “Historical Collections of Ohio,” p. 120; Perrin Du Lac, p. 143.

[40] Drake’s “Pioneer Life in Kentucky.” This gives an excellent description of life in a family of pioneers, representing what might be called the average frontiersman of the best type. Drake’s father and mother were poor and illiterate, but hardworking, honest, God-fearing folk, with an ear nest desire to do their duty by their neighbors and to see their children rise in the world.

[41] Do., pp. 90, 111, etc., condensed.

[42] Michaux, p. 63, etc.

[43] Parkinson’s “Tour in America, 1798-1800,” pp. 504, 588, etc. Parkinson loathed the

[44] Atwater, p. 159; Michaux, p. 122, etc.

[45] American State Papers, Public Lands, I, 261; also pp. 71, 74, 99, etc.

[46] Marshall, II, p. 325.

[47] The inhabitants of Natchez, in the last days of the Spanish dominion, became inflamed with hostility to their creditors, the merchants, and insisted upon what were practically stay laws being enacted in their favor. Gayarrè and Claiborne.

[48] Marshall, 11, p. 279.

[49] McFerrin’s “History of Methodism in Tennessee,” 338c etc.; Spencer’s “History of Kentucky Baptists,” 69, etc.

[50] Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, the Backwoods Preacher.

[51] American State Papers, Public Lands, II, pp. 10, 872.

[52] Gayarré, III, p. 387.

[53] Do., p. 408.

[54] Do., p. 447.

CHAPTER IV

THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA; AND BURR’S CONSPIRACY, 1803–1807

A GREAT AND growing race may acquire vast stretches of scantily peopled territory in any one of several ways. Often the statesman, no less than the soldier, plays an all-important part in winning the new land; nevertheless, it is usually true that the diplomatists who by treaty ratify the acquisition usurp a prominence in history to which they are in no way entitled by the real worth of their labors.

The territory may be gained by the armed forces of the nation, and retained by treaty. It was in this way that England won the Cape of Good Hope from Holland; it was in this way that the United States won New Mexico. Such a conquest is due, not to the individual action of members of the winning race, but to the nation as a whole, acting through her soldiers and statesmen. It was the English Navy which conquered the Cape of Good Hope for England; it was the English diplomats that secured its retention. So it was the American Army which added New Mexico to the United States; and its retention was due to the will of the politicians who had set that army in motion. In neither case was there any previous settlement of moment by the conquerors in the conquered territory. In neither case was there much direct pressure by the people of the conquering races upon the soil which was won for them by their soldiers and statesmen. The acquisition of the territory must be set down to the credit of these soldiers and statesmen, representing the nation in its collective capacity; though in the case of New Mexico there would of course ultimately have been a direct pressure of rifle-bearing settlers upon the people of the ranches and the mud-walled towns.

In such cases it is the government itself, rather than any individual or aggregate of individuals, which wins the new land for the race. When it is won without appeal to arms, the credit, which would otherwise be divided between soldiers and statesmen, of course accrues solely to the latter. Alaska, for instance, was acquired by mere diplomacy. No American settlers were thronging into Alaska. The desire to acquire it among the people at large was vague, and was fanned into sluggish activity only by the genius of the far-seeing statesmen who purchased it. The credit of such an acquisition really does belong to the men who secured the adoption of the treaty by which it was acquired. The honor of adding Alaska to the national domain belongs to the statesmen who at the time controlled the Washington Government. They were not figureheads in the transaction. They were the vital, moving forces.

Just the contrary is true of cases like that of the conquest of Texas. The Government of the United States had nothing to do with winning Texas for the English-speaking people of North America. The American frontiersmen won Texas for themselves, unaided either by the statesmen who controlled the politics of the Republic, or by the soldiers who took their orders from Washington.

In yet other cases the action is more mixed. Statesmen and diplomats have some share in shaping the conditions under which a country is finally taken; in the eye of history they often usurp much more than their proper share; but in reality they are able to bring matters to a conclusion only because adventurous settlers, in defiance or disregard of governmental action, have pressed forward into the longed-for land. In such cases the function of the diplomats is one of some importance, because they lay down the conditions under which the land is taken; but the vital question as to whether the land shall be taken at all, upon no matter what terms, is answered not by the diplomats, but by the people themselves.

It was in this way that the Northwest was won from the British and the boundaries of the Southwest established by treaty with the Spaniards. Adams, Jay, and Pinckney deserve much credit for the way they conducted their several negotiations; but there would have been nothing for them to negotiate about had not the settlers already thronged into the disputed territories or strenuously pressed forward against their boundaries.

So it was with the acquisition of Louisiana. Jefferson, Livingston, and their fellow-statesmen and diplomats concluded the treaty which determined the manner in which it came into our possession; but they did not really have much to do with fixing the terms even of this treaty; and the part which they played in the acquisition of Louisiana in no way resembles, even remotely, the part which was played by Seward, for instance, in acquiring Alaska. If it had not been for Seward and the political leaders who thought as he did, Alaska might never have been acquired at all; but the Americans would have won Louisiana in any event, even if the treaty of Livingston and Monroe had not been signed. The real history of the acquisition must tell of the great westward movement begun in 1769, and not merely of the feeble diplomacy of Jefferson’s administration. In 1802 American settlers were already clustered here and there on the eastern fringe of the vast region which then went by the name of Louisiana. All the stalwart freemen, who had made their rude clearings and built their rude towns on the hither side of the mighty Mississippi, were straining with eager desire against the forces which withheld them from seizing with strong hand the coveted province. They did not themselves know, and far less did the public men of the day realize, the full import and meaning of the conquest upon which they were about to enter. For the moment the navigation of the mouth of the Mississippi seemed to them of the first importance. Even the frontiersmen themselves put second to this the right to people the vast continent which lay between the Pacific and the Mississippi. The statesmen at Washington viewed this last proposition with positive alarm, and cared only to acquire New Orleans. The winning of Louisiana was due to no one man, and least of all to any statesman or set of statesmen. It followed inevitably upon the great westward thrust of the settler-folk; a thrust which was delivered blindly, but which no rival race could parry, until it was stopped by the ocean itself.

Louisiana was added to the United States because the hardy backwoods settlers had swarmed into the valleys of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio by hundreds of thousands; and had hardly begun to build their raw hamlets on the banks of the Mississippi, and to cover its waters with their flat-bottomed craft. Restless, adventurous, hardy, they looked eagerly across the Mississippi to the fertile solitudes where the Spaniard was the nominal, and the Indian the real, master; and with a more immediate longing they fiercely coveted the creole province at the mouth of the river.

The Mississippi formed no barrier whatsoever to the march of the backwoodsmen. It could be crossed at any point; and the same rapid current which made it a matter of extreme difficulty for any power at the mouth of the stream to send reinforcements up against the current would have greatly facilitated the movements of the Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee levies down-stream to attack the Spanish provinces. In the days of sails and oars a great river with rapid current might vitally affect military operations if these depended upon sending flotillas up or down stream. But such a river has never proved a serious barrier against a vigorous and aggressive race, where it lies between two peoples, so that the aggressors have merely to cross it. It offers no such shield as is afforded by a high mountain range. The Mississippi served as a convenient line of demarcation between the Americans and the Spaniards; but it offered no protection whatever to the Spaniards against the Americans.

Therefore the frontiersmen found nothing serious to bar their further march westward; the diminutive Spanish garrisons in the little creole towns near the Missouri were far less capable of effective resistance than were most of the Indian tribes whom the Americans were brushing out of their path. Toward the South the situation was different. The Floridas were shielded by the great Indian confederacies of the Creeks and Choctaws, whose strength was as yet unbroken. What was much more important, the mouth of the Mississippi was commanded by the important seaport of New Orleans, which was accessible to fleets, which could readily be garrisoned by water, and which was the capital of a region that by backwoods standards passed for well settled. New Orleans by its position was absolute master of the foreign trade of the Mississippi valley; and any power in command of the seas could easily keep it strongly garrisoned. The vast region that was then known as Upper Louisiana—the territory stretching from the Mississippi to the Pacific—was owned by the Spaniards, but only in shadowy fashion, and could not have been held by any European power against the sturdy westward pressure of the rifle-bearing settlers. But New Orleans and its neighborhood were held even by the Spaniards in good earnest; while a stronger power, once in possession, could with difficulty have been dislodged. It naturally followed that for the moment the attention of the backwoodsmen was directed much more to New Orleans than to the trans-Mississippi territory. A few wilderness lovers like Boone, a few reckless adventurers of the type of Philip Nolan, were settling around and beyond the creole towns of the North, or were endeavoring to found small buccaneering colonies in dangerous proximity to the Spanish commanderies in the Southwest. But the bulk of the Western settlers as yet found all the vacant territory they wished east of the Mississippi. What they needed at the moment was, not more wild land, but an outlet for the products yielded by the land they already possessed. The vital importance to the Westerners of the free navigation of the Mississippi has already been shown. Suffice it to say that the control of the mouth of the great Father of Waters was of direct personal consequence to almost every tree feller, every backwoods farmer, every land owner, every townsman, who dwelt beyond the Alleghanies. These men did not worry much over the fact that the country on the further bank of the Mississippi was still under the Spanish Flag. For the moment they did not need it, and when they did, they knew they could take it without the smallest difficulty. But the ownership of the mouth of the Mississippi was a matter of immediate importance; and though none of the settlers doubted that it would ultimately be theirs, it was yet a matter of much consequence to them to get possession of it as quickly as possible, and with as little trouble as possible, rather than to see it held, perhaps for years, by a powerful hostile nation, and then to see it acquired only at the cost of bloody, and perchance checkered, warfare.

This was the attitude of the backwoods people as with sinewy, strenuous shoulder they pressed against the Spanish boundaries. The Spanish attitude on the other hand was one of apprehension so intense that it overcame even anger against the American nation. For mere diplomacy, the Spaniards cared little or nothing; but they feared the Westerners. Their surrender of Louisiana was due primarily to the steady pushing and crowding of the frontiersmen, and the continuous growth of the Western commonwealths. In spite of Pinckney’s treaty the Spaniards did not leave Natchez until fairly drowned out by the American settlers and soldiers. They now felt the same pressure upon them in New Orleans; it was growing steadily and was fast becoming intolerable. Year by year, almost month by month, they saw the numbers of their foes increase, and saw them settle more and more thickly in places from which it would be easy to strike New Orleans. Year by year the offensive power of the Americans increased in more than arithmetical ratio as against Louisiana.

The more reckless and lawless adventurers from time to time pushed southwest, even toward the borders of Texas and New Mexico, and strove to form little settlements, keeping the Spanish Governors and Intendants in a constant fume of anxiety. One of these settlements was founded by Philip Nolan, a man whom rumor had connected with Wilkinson’s intrigues, and who, like many another lawless trader of the day, was always dreaming of empires to be carved from, or wealth to be won in, the golden Spanish realms. In the fall of 1800, he pushed beyond the Mississippi with a score or so of companions, and settled on the Brazos. The party built pens or corrals, and began to catch wild horses, for the neighborhood swarmed not only with game but with immense droves of mustangs. The handsomest animals they kept and trained, letting the others loose again. The following March these tamers of wild horses were suddenly set upon by a body of Spaniards, three hundred strong, with one field-piece. The assailants made their attack at daybreak, slew Nolan, and captured his comrades, who for many years afterward lived as prisoners in the Mexican towns.[1] The menace of such buccaneering movements kept the Spaniards alive to the imminent danger of the general American attack which they heralded.

Spain watched her boundaries with the most jealous care. Her colonial system was evil in its suspicious exclusiveness toward strangers; and her religious system was marked by an intolerance still almost as fierce as in the days of Torquemada. The Holy Inquisition was a recognized feature of Spanish political life; and the rulers of the Spanish-American colonies put the stranger and the heretic under a common ban. The reports of the Spanish ecclesiastics of Louisiana dwelt continually upon the dangers with which the oncoming of the backwoodsmen threatened the Church no less than the State.[2] All the men in power, civil, military, and religious alike, showed toward strangers, and especially toward American strangers, a spirit which was doubly unwise; for by their jealousy they created the impression that the lands they so carefully guarded must hold treasures of great price; and by their severity they created an anger which when fully aroused they could not well quell. The frontiersmen, as they tried to peer into the Spanish dominions, were lured on by the attraction they felt for what was hidden and forbidden; and there was enough danger in the path to madden them, while there was no exhibition of a strength sufficient to cow them.

The Spanish rulers realized fully that they were too weak effectively to cope with the Americans, and as the pressure upon them grew ever heavier and more menacing they began to fear not only for Louisiana but also for Mexico. They clung tenaciously to all their possessions; but they were willing to sacrifice a part, if by so doing they could erect a barrier for the defence of the remainder. Such a chance was now seemingly offered them by France.

At the beginning of the century Napoleon was First Consul; and the France over which he ruled was already the mightiest nation in Europe, and yet had not reached the zenith of her power. It was at this time that the French influence over Spain was most complete. Both the Spanish King and the Spanish people were dazzled and awed by the splendor of Napoleon’s victories. Napoleon’s magnificent and wayward genius was always striving after more than merely European empire. As throne after throne went down before him he planned conquests which should include the interminable wastes of snowy Russia, and the sea-girt fields of England; and he always dreamed of yet vaster, more shadowy triumphs, won in the realms lying eastward of the Mediterranean, or among the islands and along the coasts of the Spanish Main. In 1800 his dream of Eastern conquest was over, but his lofty ambition was planning for France the re-establishment in America of that colonial empire which a generation before had been wrested from her by England.

The need of the Spaniards seemed to Napoleon his opportunity. By the bribe of a petty Italian principality he persuaded the Bourbon King of Spain to cede Louisiana to the French, at the treaty of San Ildefonso, concluded in October, 1800. The cession was agreed to by the Spaniards on the express pledge that the territory should not be transferred to any other power; and chiefly for the purpose of erecting a barrier which might stay the American advance, and protect the rest of the Spanish possessions.

Every effort was made to keep the cession from being made public, and owing to various political complications it was not consummated for a couple of years; but meanwhile it was impossible to prevent rumors from going abroad, and the mere hint of such a project was enough to throw the West into a fever of excitement. Moreover, at this moment, before the treaty between France and Spain had been consummated, Morales, the Intendant of New Orleans, deliberately threw down the gage of battle to the Westerners.[3] On October 16, 1802, he proclaimed that the Americans had forfeited their right of deposit in New Orleans. By Pinckney’s treaty this right had been granted for three years, with the stipulation that it should then be extended for a longer period, and that if the Spaniards chose to revoke the permit so far as New Orleans was concerned, they should make some other spot on the river a port of free entry. The Americans had taken for granted that the privilege when once conferred would never be withdrawn; but Morales, under pretence that the Americans had slept on their rights by failing to discover some other spot as a treaty port, declared that the right of deposit had lapsed, and would not be renewed. The Governor, Salcedo—who had succeeded Gayoso, when the latter died of yellow fever, complicated by a drinking-bout with Wilkinson—was not in sympathy with the movement; but this mattered little. Under the cumbrous Spanish colonial system, the Governor, though he disapproved of the actions of the Intendant, could not reverse them, and Morales paid no heed to the angry protests of the Spanish Minister at Washington, who saw that the Americans were certain in the end to fight rather than to lose the only outlet for the commerce of the West.[4] It seems probable that the Intendant’s action was due to the fact that he deemed the days of Spanish dominion numbered, and, in his jealousy of the Americans, wished to place the new French authorities in the strongest possible position; but the act was not done with the knowledge of France.

Of this, however, the Westerners were ignorant. They felt sure that any alteration in policy so fatal to their interests must be merely a foreshadowing of the course the French intended thereafter to follow. They believed that their worst fears were justified. Kentucky and Tennessee clamored for instant action, and Claiborne offered to raise in the Mississippi territory alone a force of volunteer riflemen sufficient to seize New Orleans before its transfer into French hands could be effected.

Jefferson was President, and Madison Secretary of State. Both were men of high and fine qualities who rendered, at one time or another, real and great service to the country. Jefferson in particular played in our political life a part of immense importance. But the country has never had two statesmen less capable of upholding the honor and dignity of the nation, or even of preserving its material well-being, when menaced by foreign foes. They were peaceful men, quite unfitted to grapple with an enemy who expressed himself through deeds rather than words. When stunned by the din of arms they showed themselves utterly inefficient rulers.

It was these two timid, well-meaning statesmen who now found themselves pitted against Napoleon, and Napoleon’s Minister, Talleyrand; against the greatest warrior and lawgiver, and against one of the greatest diplomats, of modern times; against two men, moreover, whose sodden lack of conscience was but heightened by the contrast with their brilliant genius and lofty force of character; two men who were unable to so much as appreciate that there was shame in the practice of venality, dishonesty, mendacity, cruelty, and treachery.

Jefferson was the least warlike of presidents, and he loved the French with a servile devotion. But his party was strongest in precisely those parts of the country where the mouth of the Mississippi was held to be of right the property of the United States; and the pressure of public opinion was too strong for Jefferson to think of resisting it. The South and the West were a unit in demanding that France should not be allowed to establish herself on the lower Mississippi. Jefferson was forced to tell his French friends that if their nation persisted in its purpose America would be obliged to marry itself to the navy and army of England. Even he could see that for the French to take Louisiana meant war with the United States sooner or later; and as above all things else he wished peace, he made every effort to secure the coveted territory by purchase.

Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York represented American interests in Paris; but at the very close of the negotiation he was succeeded by Monroe, whom Jefferson sent over as a special envoy. The course of the negotiations was at first most baffling to the Americans.[5] Talleyrand lied with such unmoved calm that it was impossible to put the least weight upon anything he said; moreover, the Americans soon found that Napoleon was the sole and absolute master, so that it was of no use attempting to influence any of his subordinates, save in so far as these subordinates might in their turn influence him. For some time it appeared that Napoleon was bent upon occupying Louisiana in force and using it as a basis for the rebuilding of the French colonial power. The time seemed ripe for such a project. After a decade of war with all the rest of Europe, France in 1802 concluded the Peace of Amiens, which left her absolutely free to do as she liked in the New World. Napoleon thoroughly despised a republic, and especially a republic without an army or navy. After the Peace of Amiens he began to treat the Americans with contemptuous disregard; and he planned to throw into Louisiana one of his generals with a force of veteran troops sufficient to hold the country against any attack.

His hopes were in reality chimerical. At the moment France was at peace with her European foes, and could send her ships of war and her transports across the ocean without fear of the British navy. It would therefore have been possible for Napoleon without molestation to throw a large body of French soldiers into New Orleans. Had there been no European war such an army might have held New Orleans for some years against American attack, and might even have captured one or two of the American posts on the Mississippi, such as Natchez; but the instant it had landed in New Orleans the entire American people would have accepted France as their deadliest enemy, and all American foreign policy would have been determined by the one consideration of ousting the French from the mouth of the Mississippi. To the United States, France was by no means as formidable as Great Britain, because of her inferiority as a naval power. Even if unsupported by any outside alliance the Americans would doubtless in the end have driven a French army from New Orleans, though very probably at the cost of one or two preliminary rebuffs. The West was stanch in support of Jefferson and Madison; but in time of stress it was sure to develop leaders of more congenial temper, exactly as it actually did develop Andrew Jackson a few years later. At this very time the French failed to conquer the negro republic which Toussaint L’Ouverture had founded in Hayti. What they thus failed to accomplish in one island, against insurgent negroes, it was folly to think they could accomplish on the American continent, against the power of the American people. This struggle with the revolutionary slaves in Hayti hindered Napoleon from immediately throwing an army into Louisiana; but it did more, for it helped to teach him the folly of trying to carry out such a plan at all.

A very able and faithful French agent in the meanwhile sent a report to Napoleon plainly pointing out the impossibility of permanently holding Louisiana against the Americans. He showed that on the western waters alone it would be possible to gather armies amounting in the aggregate to twenty or thirty thousand men, all of them inflamed with the eager desire to take New Orleans.[6] The Mississippi ran so as to facilitate the movement of any expedition against New Orleans, while it offered formidable obstacles to counter-expeditions from New Orleans against the American commonwealths lying further up stream. An expeditionary force sent from the mouth of the Mississippi, whether to assail the towns and settlements along the Ohio, or to defend the creole villages near the Missouri, could at the utmost hope for only transient success, while its ultimate failure was certain. On the other hand, a backwoods army could move down stream with comparative ease; and even though such an expedition were defeated, it was certain that the attempt would be repeated again and again, until by degrees the mob of hardy riflemen changed into a veteran army, and brought forth some general like “Old Hickory,” able to lead to victory.

The most intelligent French agents on the ground saw this. Some of Napoleon’s ministers were equally far-sighted. One of them, Barbé Marbois, represented to him in the strongest terms the hopelessness of the undertaking on which he proposed to embark. He pointed out that the United States was sure to go to war with France if France took New Orleans, and that in the end such a war could only result in victory for the Americans.

We can now readily see that this victory was certain to come even had the Americans been left without allies. France could never have defended the vast region known as Upper Louisiana, and sooner or later New Orleans itself would have fallen, though it may well be only after humiliating defeats for the Americans and much expenditure of life and treasure. But as things actually were the Americans would have had plenty of powerful allies. The Peace of Amiens lasted but a couple of years before England again went to war. Napoleon knew, and the American statesmen knew, that the British intended to attack New Orleans upon the outbreak of hostilities, if it were in French hands. In such event Louisiana would have soon fallen; for any French force stationed there would have found its reinforcements cut off by the English navy, and would have dwindled away until unable to offer resistance.

Nevertheless, European wars, and the schemes and fancies of European statesmen, could determine merely the conditions under which the catastrophe was to take place, but not the catastrophe itself. The fate of Louisiana was already fixed. It was not the diplomats who decided its destiny, but the settlers of the Western States. The growth of the teeming folk who had crossed the Alleghanies and were building their rude, vigorous commonwealths in the northeastern portion of the Mississippi basin, decided the destiny of all the lands that were drained by that mighty river. The steady westward movement of the Americans was the all-important factor in determining the ultimate ownership of New Orleans. Livingston, the American minister, saw plainly the inevitable outcome of the struggle. He expressed his wonder that other Americans should be uneasy in the matter, saying that for his part it seemed as clear as day that no matter what trouble might temporarily be caused, in the end Louisiana was certain to fall into the grasp of the United States.[7]

There were many Americans and many Frenchmen of note who were less clear-sighted. Livingston encountered rebuff after rebuff, and delay after delay. Talleyrand met him with his usual front of impenetrable duplicity. He calmly denied everything connected with the cession of Louisiana until even the details became public property, and then admitted them with unblushing equanimity. His delays were so tantalizing that they might well have revived unpleasant memories of the famous X. Y. Z. negotiations, in which he tried in vain to extort bribe-money from the American negotiators;[8] but Livingston, and those he represented, soon realized that it was Napoleon himself who alone deserved serious consideration. Through Napoleon’s character, and helping to make it great, there ran an imaginative vein which at times bordered on the fantastic; and this joined with his imperious self-will, brutality, and energy to make him eager to embark on a scheme which, when he had thought it over in cold blood, he was equally eager to abandon. For some time he seemed obstinately bent on taking possession of Louisiana, heedless of the attitude which this might cause the Americans to assume. He designated as commander of his army of occupation Victor, a general as capable and brave as he was insolent, who took no pains to conceal from the American representatives his intention to treat their people with a high hand.

Jefferson took various means, official and unofficial, of impressing upon Napoleon the strength of the feeling in the United States over the matter; and his utterances came as near menace as his pacific nature would permit. To the great French Conqueror, however, accustomed to violence and to the strife of giants, Jefferson’s somewhat vacillating attitude did not seem impressive; and the one course which would have impressed Napoleon was not followed by the American President. Jefferson refused to countenance any proposal to take prompt possession of Louisiana by force or to assemble an army which would act with immediate vigor in time of need; and as he was the idol of the South westerners, who were bitterly anti-federalist in sympathy, he was able to prevent any violent action on their part until events rendered this violence unnecessary. At the same time, Jefferson himself never for a moment ceased to feel the strong pressure of Southern and Western public sentiment; and so he continued resolute in his purpose to obtain Louisiana.

It was no argument of Jefferson’s or of the American diplomats, but the inevitable trend of events that finally brought about a change in Napoleon’s mind. The army he sent to Hayti wasted away by disease and in combat with the blacks, and thereby not only diminished the forces he intended to throw into Louisiana, but also gave him a terrible object lesson as to what the fate of these forces was certain ultimately to be. The attitude of England and Austria grew steadily more hostile, and his most trustworthy advisers impressed on Napoleon’s mind the steady growth of the Western-American communities, and the implacable hostility with which they were certain to regard any power that seized or attempted to hold New Orleans. Napoleon could not afford to hamper himself with the difficult defence of a distant province, and to incur the hostility of a new foe, at the very moment when he was entering on another struggle with his old European enemies. Moreover, he needed money in order to carry on the struggle. To be sure he had promised Spain not to turn over Louisiana to another power; but he was quite as incapable as any Spanish statesman, or as Talleyrand himself, of so much as considering the question of breach of faith or loss of honor, if he could gain any advantage by sacrificing either. Livingston was astonished to find that Napoleon had suddenly changed front, and that there was every prospect of gaining what for months had seemed impossible. For some time there was haggling over the terms. Napoleon at first demanded an exorbitant sum; but having once made up his mind to part with Louisiana his impatient disposition made him anxious to conclude the bargain. He rapidly abated his demands, and the cession was finally made for fifteen millions of dollars.

The treaty was signed in May, 1803. The definition of the exact boundaries of the ceded territory was purposely left very loose by Napoleon. On the East, the Spanish Government of the Floridas still kept possession of what are now several parishes in the State of Louisiana. In the far West the boundary lines which divided upper Louisiana from the possessions of Britain on the North and of Spain on the South led through a wilderness where no white man had ever trod, and they were of course unmapped, and only vaguely guessed at.

There was one singular feature of this bargain, which showed, as nothing else could have shown, how little American diplomacy had to do with obtaining Louisiana, and how impossible it was for any European power, even the greatest, to hold the territory in the face of the steady westward growth of the American people. Napoleon forced Livingston and Monroe to become the reluctant purchasers not merely of New Orleans, but of all the immense territory which stretched vaguely northwestward to the Pacific. Jefferson at moments felt a desire to get all this western territory; but he was too timid and too vacillating to insist strenuously upon anything which he feared Napoleon would not grant. Madison felt a strong disinclination to see the national domain extended west of the Mississippi; and he so instructed Monroe and Livingston. In their turn the American envoys, with solemn fatuity, believed it might impress Napoleon favorably if they made much show of moderation, and they spent no small part of their time in explaining that they only wished a little bit of Louisiana, including New Orleans and the east bank of the lower Mississippi. Livingston indeed went so far as to express a very positive disinclination to take the territory west of the Mississippi at any price, stating that he should much prefer to see it remain in the hands of France or Spain, and suggesting, by way of apology for its acquisition, that it might be re-sold to some European power! But Napoleon saw clearly that if the French ceded New Orleans it was a simple physical impossibility for them to hold the rest of the Louisiana territory. If his fierce and irritable vanity had been touched he might, through mere wayward anger, have dared the Americans to a contest which, however disastrous to them, would ultimately have been more so to him; but he was a great statesman and a still greater soldier, and he did not need to be told that it would be worse than folly to try to keep a country when he had given up the key-position.

The region west of the Mississippi could become the heritage of no other people save that which had planted its populous communities along the eastern bank of the river. It was quite possible for a powerful European nation to hold New Orleans for some time, even though all upper Louisiana fell into the hands of the Americans; but it was entirely impossible for any “European nation to hold upper Louisiana if New Orleans became a city of the United States. The Westerners, wiser than their rulers, but no wiser than Napoleon at the last, felt this, and were not in the least disturbed over the fate of Louisiana, provided they; were given the control of the mouth of the Mississippi. As a matter of fact, it is improbable that the fate of the great territory lying west of the upper Mississippi would even have been seriously delayed had it been nominally under the control of France or Spain. With the mouth of the Mississippi once in American hands it was a physical impossibility in any way to retard the westward movement of the men who were settling the Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

The ratification of the treaty brought on some sharp debates in Congress. Jefferson had led his party into power as the special champion of State Rights and the special opponent of national sovereignty. He and they rendered a very great service to the nation by acquiring Louisiana; but it was at the cost of violating every precept which they had professed to hold dear, and of showing that their warfare on the Federalists had been waged on behalf of principles which they were obliged to confess were shams the moment they were put to the test. But the Federalists of the Northeast, both in the Middle States and in New England, at this juncture behaved far worse than the Jeffersonian Republicans. These Jeffersonian Republicans did indeed by their performance give the lie to their past promise, and thereby emphasize the unworthiness of their conduct in years gone by; nevertheless, at this juncture they were right, which was far more important than being logical or consistent. But the Northeastern Federalists, though with many exceptions, did as a whole stand as the opponents of national growth. They had very properly, though vainly, urged Jefferson to take prompt and effective steps to sustain the national honor, when it seemed probable that the country could be won from France only at the cost of war; but when the time actually came to incorporate Louisiana into the national domain, they showed that jealous fear of Western growth which was the most marked defect in Northeastern public sentiment until past the middle of the present century. It proved that the Federalists were rightly distrusted by the West; and it proved that at this crisis the Jeffersonian Republicans, in spite of their follies, weaknesses, and crimes, were the safest guardians of the country, because they believed in its future, and strove to make it greater. The jeremiads of the Federalist leaders in Congress were the same in kind as those in which many cultivated men of the East always indulged whenever we enlarged our territory, and in which many persons like them would now indulge were we at the present day to make a similar extension. The people of the United States were warned that they were incorporating into their number men who were wholly alien in every respect, and who could never be assimilated. They were warned that when they thus added to their empire, they merely rendered it unwieldy and assured its being split into two or more confederacies at no distant day. Some of the extremists, under the lead of Quincy, went so far as to threaten dissolution of the Union because of what was done, insisting that the Northeast ought by rights to secede because of the injury done it by adding strength to the South and West. Fortunately, however, talk of this kind did not affect the majority; the treaty was ratified and Louisiana became part of the United States.

Meanwhile the Creoles themselves accepted their very rapidly changing fates with something much like apathy. In March, 1803, the French Prefect Laussat arrived to make preparations to take possession of the country. He had no idea that Napoleon intended to cede it to the United States. On the contrary, he showed that he regarded the French as the heirs, not only to the Spanish territory, but of the Spanish hostility to the Americans. He openly regretted that the Spanish Government had reversed Morales’ act taking away from the Americans the right of deposit; and he made all his preparations as if on the theory that New Orleans was to become the centre of an aggressive military government.

His dislikes, however, were broad, and included the Spaniards as well as the Americans. There was much friction between him and the Spanish officials; he complained bitterly to the home government of the insolence and intrigues of the Spanish party. He also portrayed in scathing terms the gross corruption of the Spanish authorities. As to this corruption he was borne out by the American observers. Almost every high Spanish official was guilty of peculation at the expense of the government, and of bribe-taking at the expense of the citizens.

Nevertheless the creoles were far from ill-satisfied with Spanish rule. They were not accustomed to self-government, and did not demand it; and they cared very little for the fact that their superiors made money improperly. If they paid due deference to their lay and clerical rulers they were little interfered with; and they were in full accord with the governing classes concerning most questions, both of principle or lack of principle, and of prejudice. The creoles felt that they were protected, rather than oppressed, by people who shared their tastes, and who did not interfere with the things they held dear. On the whole they showed only a tepid joy at the prospect of again becoming French citizens.

Laussat soon discovered that they were to remain French citizens for a very short time indeed; and he prepared faithfully to carry out his instructions, and to turn the country over to the Americans. The change in the French attitude greatly increased the friction with the Spaniards. The Spanish home government was furious with indignation at Napoleon for having violated his word, and only the weakness of Spain prevented war between it and France. The Spanish party in New Orleans muttered its discontent so loud that Laussat grew alarmed. He feared some outbreak on the part of the Spanish sympathizers, and, to prevent such a mischance, he not only embodied the comparatively small portion of the creole militia whom he could trust, but also a number of American volunteers, concerning whose fidelity in such a crisis as that he anticipated there could be no question. It was not until December first, 1803, that he took final possession of the provinces. Twenty days afterward he turned it over to the American authorities. Wilkinson, now commander of the American army,—the most disgraceful head it has ever had—was intrusted with the governorship of all of Upper Louisiana. Claiborne was made governor of Lower Louisiana, officially styled the Territory of Orleans. He was an honest man, loyal to the Union, but had no special qualifications for getting on well with the Creoles. He could not speak French, and he regarded the people whom he governed with a kindly contempt which they bitterly resented. The Americans, pushing and masterful, were inclined to look down on their neighbors, and to treat them overbearingly; while the Creoles in their turn disliked the Americans as rude and uncultivated barbarians. For some time they felt much discontent with the United States, nor was this discontent allayed when in 1804 the Territory of Orleans was reorganized with a government much less liberal than that enjoyed by Indiana or Mississippi; nor even when in 1805 an ordinary territorial government was provided. A number of years were to pass before Louisiana felt itself, in fact no less than in name, part of the Union.

Naturally there was a fertile field for seditious agitation in New Orleans, a city of mixed population, where the numerically predominant race felt a puzzled distrust for the nation of which it suddenly found itself an integral part, and from past experience firmly believed in the evanescent nature of any political connection it might have, whether with Spain, France, or the United States. The Creoles murmured because they were not given the same privileges as American citizens in the old States, and yet showed themselves indifferent to such privileges as they were given. They were indignant because the National Government prohibited the importation of slaves into Louisiana, and for the moment even the transfer thither of slaves from the old States—a circumstance, by the way, which curiously illustrated the general dislike and disapproval of slavery then felt, even by an administration under Southern control. The Creoles further complained of Claiborne’s indifference to their wishes; and as he possessed little tact he also became embroiled with the American inhabitants, who were men of adventurous and often lawless temper, impatient of restraint. Representatives of the French and Spanish governments still remained in Louisiana, and by their presence and their words tended to keep alive a disaffection for the United States Government. It followed from these various causes that among all classes there was a willingness to talk freely of their wrongs and to hint at righting them by methods outlined with such looseness as to make it uncertain whether they did or did not comport with entire loyalty to the United States Government.

Furthermore, there already existed in New Orleans a very peculiar class, representatives of which are still to be found in almost every Gulf city of importance. There were in the city a number of men ready at any time to enter into any plot for armed conquest of one of the Spanish-American countries.[9] Spanish America was feeling the stir of unrest that preceded the revolutionary outbreak against Spain. Already insurrectionary leaders like Miranda were seeking assistance from the Americans. There were in New Orleans a number of exiled Mexicans who were very anxious to raise some force with which to invade Mexico, and there erect the banner of an independent sovereignty. The bolder spirits among the Creoles found much that was attractive in such a prospect; and reckless American adventurers by the score and the hundred were anxious to join in any filibustering expedition of the kind. They did not care in the least what form the expedition took. They were willing to join the Mexican exiles in an effort to rouse Mexico to throw off the yoke of Spain, or to aid any province of Mexico to revolt from the rest, or to help the leaders of any defeated faction who wished to try an appeal to arms, in which they should receive aid from the sword of the stranger. Incidentally they were even more willing to attempt the conquest on their own account; but they did not find it necessary to dwell on this aspect of the case when nominally supporting some faction which chose to make use of such watchwords as liberty and independence.

Under such conditions New Orleans, even more than the rest of the West, seemed to offer an inviting field for adventurers whose aim was both revolutionary and piratical. A particularly spectacular adventurer of this type now appeared in the person of Aaron Burr. Burr’s conspiracy attracted an amount of attention, both at home and in the pages of history, altogether disproportioned to its real consequence. His career had been striking. He had been Vice-President of the United States. He had lacked but one vote of being made President, when the election of 1800 was thrown into the House of Representatives. As friend or as enemy he had been thrown intimately and on equal terms with the greatest political leaders of the day. He had supplied almost the only feeling which Jefferson, the chief of the Democratic party, and Hamilton, the greatest Federalist, ever possessed in common; for bitterly though Hamilton and Jefferson had hated each other, there was one man whom each of them had hated more, and that was Aaron Burr. There was not a man in the country who did not know about the brilliant and unscrupulous party leader who had killed Hamilton in the most famous duel that ever took place on American soil, and who by a nearly successful intrigue had come within one vote of supplanting Jefferson in the presidency.

In New York Aaron Burr had led a political career as stormy and checkered as the careers of New York politicians have generally been. He had shown himself as adroit as he was unscrupulous in the use of all the arts of the machine manager. The fitful and gusty breath of popular favor made him at one time the most prominent and successful politician in the State, and one of the two or three most prominent and successful in the nation. In the State he was the leader of the Democratic party, which under his lead crushed the Federalists; and as a reward he was given the second highest office in the nation. Then his open enemies and secret rivals all combined against him. The other Democratic leaders in New York, and in the nation as well, turned upon the man whose brilliant abilities made them afraid, and whose utter untrustworthiness forbade their entering into alliance with him. Shifty and fertile in expedients, Burr made an obstinate fight to hold his own. Without hesitation, he turned for support to his old enemies, the Federalists; but he was hopelessly beaten. Both his fortune and his local political prestige were ruined; he realized that his chance for a career in New York was over.

He was no mere New York politician, however. He was a statesman of national reputation; and he turned his restless eyes toward the West, which for a score of years had seethed in a turmoil out of which it seemed that a bold spirit might make its own profit. He had already been obscurely connected with separatist intrigues in the Northeast; and he determined to embark in similar intrigues on an infinitely grander scale in the West and Southwest. He was a cultivated man, of polished manners and pleasing address, and of great audacity and physical courage; and he had shown himself skilled in all the baser arts of political management.

It is small wonder that the conspiracy of which such a man was head should make a noise out of all proportion to its real weight. The conditions were such that if Burr journeyed West he was certain to attract universal attention, and to be received with marked enthusiasm. No man of his prominence in national affairs had ever traveled through the wild new commonwealths on the Mississippi. The men who were founding States and building towns on the wreck of the conquered wilderness were sure to be flattered by the appearance of so notable a man among them, and to be impressed not only by his reputation, but by his charm of manner and brilliancy of intellect. Moreover they were quite ready to talk vaguely of all kinds of dubious plans for increasing the importance of the West. Very many, perhaps most, of them had dabbled at one time or another in the various saparatist schemes of the preceding two decades; and they felt strongly that much of the Spanish domain would and should ultimately fall into their hands—and the sooner the better.

There was thus every chance that Burr would be favorably received by the West, and would find plenty of men of high standing who would profess friendship for him and would show a cordial interest in his plans so long as he refrained from making them too definite; but there was in reality no chance whatever for anything more than this to happen. In spite of Burr’s personal courage he lacked entirely the great military qualities necessary to successful revolutionary leadership of the kind to which he aspired. Though in some ways the most practical of politicians he had a strong element of the visionary in his character; it was perhaps this, joined to his striking moral defects, which brought about and made complete his downfall in New York. Great political and revolutionary leaders may, and often must, have in them something of the visionary; but it must never cause them to get out of touch with the practical. Burr was capable of conceiving revolutionary plans on so vast a scale as to be fairly appalling, not only from their daring but from their magnitude. But when he tried to put his plans into practice, it at once became evident that they were even more unsubstantial than they were audacious. His wild schemes had in them too strong an element of the unreal and the grotesque to be in very fact dangerous,

Besides, the time for separatist movements in the West had passed, while the time for arousing the West to the conquest of part of Spanish-America had hardly yet come. A man of Burr’s character might perhaps have accomplished something mischievous in Kentucky when Wilkinson was in the first flush of his Spanish intrigues; or when the political societies were raving over Jay’s treaty; or when the Kentucky Legislature was passing its nullification resolutions. But the West had grown loyal as the Nineteenth Century came in. The Westerners were hearty supporters of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican party; Jefferson was their idol; they were strongly attached to the Washington administration, and strongly opposed to the chief opponents of that administration, the Northeastern Federalists. With the purchase of Louisiana all deeply-lying causes of Western discontent had vanished. The West was prosperous, and was attached to the National Government. Its leaders might still enjoy a discussion with Burr or among themselves concerning separatist principles in the abstract, but such a discussion was at this time purely academic. Nobody of any weight in the community would allow such plans as those of Burr to be put into effect. There was, it is true, a strong buccaneering spirit, and there were plenty of men ready to enlist in an invasion of the Spanish dominions under no matter what pretext; but even those men of note who were willing to lead such a movement were not willing to enter into it if it was complicated with open disloyalty to the United States.

Burr began his treasonable scheming before he ceased to be Vice-President. He was an old friend and crony of Wilkinson; and he knew much about the disloyal agitations which had convulsed the West during the previous two decades. These agitations always took one or the other of two forms that at first sight would seem diametrically opposed. Their end was always either to bring about secession of the West from the East by the aid of Spain or some other foreign power; or else a conquest of the Spanish dominions by the West, in defiance of the wishes of the East and of the Central Government. Burr proposed to carry out both of these plans.

The exact shape which his proposals took would be difficult to tell. Seemingly they remained nebulous even in his own mind. They certainly so remained in the minds of those to whom he confided them. At any rate, his schemes, though in reality less dangerous than those of his predecessors in Western treason, were in theory much more comprehensive. He planned the seizure of Washington, the kidnapping of the President, and the corruption of the United States Navy. He also endeavored to enlist foreign powers on his side. His first advances were made to the British. He proposed to put the new empire, no matter what shape it might assume, under British protection, in return for the assistance of the British fleet in taking New Orleans. He gave to the British ministers full—and false—accounts of the intended uprising, and besought the aid of the British Government on the ground that the secession of the West would so cripple the Union as to make it no longer a formidable enemy of Great Britain. Burr’s audacity and plausibility were such that he quite dazzled the British minister, who detailed the plans at length to his home government, putting them in as favorable a light as he could. The statesmen at London, however, although at this time almost inconceivably stupid in their dealings with America, were not sunk in such abject folly as to think Burr’s schemes practicable, and they refused to have anything to do with them.

In April, 1805, Burr started on his tour to the West. One of his first stoppages was at an island on the Ohio near Parkersburg, where an Irish gentleman named Blennerhassett had built what was, for the West, an unusually fine house. Only Mrs. Blennerhassett was at home at the time; but Blennerhassett later became a mainstay of the “conspiracy.” He was a warm-hearted man, with no judgment and a natural tendency toward sedition, who speedily fell under Burr’s influence, and entered into his plans with eager zeal. With him Burr did not have to be on his guard, and to him he confided freely his plans; but elsewhere, and in dealing with less emotional people, he had to be more guarded.

It is always difficult to find out exactly what a conspirator of Burr’s type really intended, and exactly how guilty his various temporary friends and allies were. Part of the conspirator’s business is to dissemble the truth, and in after-time it is nearly impossible to differentiate it from the false, even by the most elaborate sifting of the various untruths he has uttered. Burr told every kind of story, at one time or another, and to different classes of auditors. It would be unsafe to deny his having told a particular falsehood in any given case or to any given man. On the other hand, when once the plot was unmasked those persons to whom he had confided his plans were certain to insist that he had really kept them in ignorance of his true intention. In consequence it is quite impossible to say exactly how much guilty knowledge his various companions possessed. When it comes to treating of his relationship with Wilkinson all that can be said is that no single statement ever made by either man, whether during the conspiracy or after it, whether to the other or to an outsider, can be considered as either presumptively true or presumptively false. It is therefore impossible to say exactly how far the Westerners with whom Burr was intimate were privy to his plans. It is certain that the great mass of the Westerners never seriously considered entering into any seditious movement under him. It is equally certain that a number of their leaders were more or less compromised by their associations with him. It seems probable that to each of these leaders he revealed what he thought would most attract him in the scheme; but that to very few did he reveal an outright proposition to break up the Union. Many of them were very willing to hear the distinguished Easterner make vague proposals for increasing the power of the West by means which were hinted at with sinister elusiveness; and many others were delighted to go into any movement which promised an attack upon the Spanish territory; but it seems likely that there were only a few men—Wilkinson, for instance, and Adair of Kentucky—who were willing to discuss a proposition to commit downright treason.

Burr stopped at Cincinnati, in Ohio, and at one or two places in Kentucky. In both States many prominent politicians, even United States Senators, received him with enthusiasm. He then visited Nashville, where he became the guest of Andrew Jackson. Jackson was now Major-General of the Tennessee militia; and the possibility of war, especially of war with the Spaniards, roused his hot nature to uncontrollable eagerness.[10] Burr probably saw through Jackson’s character at once, and realized that with him it was important to dwell solely upon that part of the plan which contemplated an attack upon the Spaniards.

The United States was at this time on the verge of war with Spain. The Spanish Governor and Intendant remained in New Orleans after the cession. and by their conduct gave such offence that it finally became necessary to order them to leave. Jefferson claimed, as part of Louisiana, portions of both West Florida and Texas. The Spaniards refused to admit the justice of the claim and gathered in the disputed territories armies which, although small, outnumbered the few regular troops that Wilkinson had at his disposal. More than once a collision seemed imminent. The Westerners clamored for war, desiring above all things to drive the Spaniards by force from the debatable lands. For some time Jefferson showed symptoms of yielding to their wishes; but he was too timid and irresolute to play a high part, and in the end he simply did nothing. However, though he declined to make actual war on the Spaniards, he also refused to recognize their claims as just, and his peculiar, hesitating course, tended to inflame the Westerners, and to make them believe that their government would not call them to account for acts of aggression. To Jackson doubtless Burr’s proposals seemed quite in keeping with what he hoped from the United States Government. He readily fell in with views so like his own, and began to make preparations for an expedition against the Spanish dominions; an expedition which in fact would not have differed essentially from the expeditions he actually did make into the Spanish Floridas six or eight years afterward, or from the movement which still later his fellow-Tennessee an, Houston, headed in Texas.

From Nashville Burr drifted down the Cumberland, and at Fort Massac, on the Ohio, he met Wilkinson, a kindred spirit, who possessed neither honor nor conscience, and could not be shocked by any proposal. Moreover, Wilkinson much enjoyed the early stages of a seditious agitation, when the risk to himself seemed slight; and as he was at this time both the highest military officer of the United States, and also secretly in the pay of Spain, the chance to commit a double treachery gave an added zest to his action. He entered cordially into Burr’s plans, and as soon as he returned to his headquarters, at St. Louis, he set about trying to corrupt his subordinates, and seduce them from their allegiance.

Meanwhile Burr passed down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where he found himself in the society of persons who seemed more willing than others he had encountered to fall in with his plans. Even here he did not clearly specify his purposes, but he did say enough to show that they bordered on the treasonable; and he was much gratified at the acquiescence of his listeners. His gratification, however, was over-hasty. The creoles, and some of the Americans, were delighted to talk of their wrongs and to threaten any course of action which they thought might yield vengeance; but they had little intention of proceeding from words to deeds. Claiborne, a straightforward and honest man, set his face like a flint against all of Burr’s doings.

From New Orleans Burr retraced his steps and visited Wilkinson at St. Louis. But Wilkinson was no longer in the same frame of mind as at Fort Massac. He had tested his officers, to see if they could be drawn into any disloyal movement, and had found that they were honorable men, firm in their attachment to the Union; and he was beginning to perceive that the people generally were quite unmoved by Burr’s intrigues. Accordingly, when Burr reached him he threw cold water on his plans, and though he did not denounce or oppose them, he refrained from taking further active part in the seditious propaganda.

After visiting Harrison, the Governor of the Indiana territory, Burr returned to Washington. If he had possessed the type of character which would have made him really dangerous as a revolutionist, he would have seen how slight was his hope of stirring up revolt in the West; but he would not face facts, and he still believed he could bring about an uprising against the Union in the Mississippi Valley. His immediate need was money. This he hoped to obtain from some foreign government. He found that nothing could be done with Great Britain; and then, incredible though it may seem, he turned to Spain, and sought to obtain from the Spaniards themselves the funds with which to conquer their own territories.

This was the last touch necessary to complete the grotesque fantasy which his brain had evolved. He approached the Spanish Minister first through one of his fellow conspirators and then in his own person. At one time he made his request on the pretence that he wished to desert the other filibusterers, and save Spain by committing a double treachery, and betraying the treasonable movement into which he had entered; and again he asked funds on the ground that all he wished to do was to establish a separate government in the West, and thus destroy the power of the United States to molest Spain. However, his efforts came to naught, and he was obliged to try what he could do unaided in the West.

In August, 1806, he again crossed the Alleghanies. His first stop of importance was at Blennerhassett’s. Blennerhassett was the one person of any importance who took his schemes so seriously as to be willing to stake his fortune on their success. Burr took with him to Blennerhassett’s his daughter, Theodosia, a charming woman, the wife of a South Carolinian, Allston. The attractions of the daughter, and Burr’s own address and magnetism, completely overcame both Blennerhassett and his wife. They gave the adventurer all the money they could raise, with the understanding that they would receive it back a hundred-fold as the result of a land speculation which was to go hand in hand with the expected revolution. Then Blennerhassett began, in a very noisy and ineffective way, to make what preparations were possible in the way of rousing the Ohio settlers, and of gathering a body of armed men to serve under Burr when the time came. It was all done in a way that savored of farce rather than of treason.

There was much less comedy, however, in what went on in Kentucky and Tennessee, where Burr next went. At Nashville he was received with open arms by Jackson and Jackson’s friends. This was not much to Jackson’s credit, for by this time he should have known Burr’s character; but the temptation of an attack on the Spaniards proved irresistible. As Major-General, he called out the militia of West Tennessee, and began to make ready in good earnest to invade Florida or Mexico. At public dinners he and his friends and Burr made speeches in which they threatened immediate war against Spain, with which country the United States was at peace; but they did not threaten any attack on the Union, and indeed Jackson exacted from Burr a guarantee of his loyalty to the Union. From Nashville the restless conspirator returned to Kentucky to see if he could persuade the most powerful of the Western States to take some decided step in his favor. Senator John Adair, former companion-in-arms of Wilkinson in the wars against the Northwestern Indians, enlisted in support of Burr with heart and soul. Kentucky society generally received him with enthusiasm. But there was in the State a remnant of the old Federalist party, which although not formidable in numbers, possessed weight because of the vigor and ability of its leaders. The chief among them were Humphrey Marshall, former United States Senator, and Joseph H. Daviess, who was still District Attorney, not having, as yet, been turned out by Jefferson.[11] These men saw—what Eastern politicians could not see—the connection between Burr’s conspiracy and the former Spanish intrigues of men like Wilkinson, Sebastian, and Innes. They were loyal to the Union; and they felt a bitter factional hatred for their victorious foes in whose ranks were to be found all the old-time offenders; so they attacked the new conspiracy with a double zest. They not only began a violent newspaper war upon Burr and all the former conspirators, but also proceeded to invoke the aid of the courts and the Legislature against them. Their exposure of the former Spanish intrigues, as well as of Burr’s plots, attracted widespread attention in the West, even at New Orleans;[12] but the Kentuckians, though angry and ashamed, were at first reluctant to be convinced. Twice Daviess presented Burr for treason before the Grand Jury; twice the Grand Jury declared in his favor; and the leaders of the Kentucky Democracy gave him their countenance, while Henry Clay acted as his counsel. Daviess, by a constant succession of letters, kept Jefferson fully informed of all that was done. Though his attacks on Burr for the moment seemed failures, they really accomplished their object. They created such uneasiness that the prominent Kentuckians made haste to clear themselves of all possible connection with any treasonable scheme. Henry Clay demanded and received from Burr a formal pledge that his plans were in no wise hostile to the Union; and the other people upon whom Burr counted most, both in Ohio and Kentucky, hastily followed this example. This immediate defection showed how hopeless Burr’s plans were. The moment he attempted to put them into execution, their utter futility was certain to be exposed.

Meanwhile Jefferson’s policy with the Spaniards, which neither secured peace nor made ready for war, kept up constant irritation on the border. Both the Spanish Governor Folch, in West Florida, and the Spanish General Herrera, in Texas, menaced the Americans.[13] Wilkinson hurried with his little army toward Herrera, until the two stood face to face, each asserting that the other was on ground that belonged to his own nation. Just at this time Burr’s envoys, containing his final propositions, reached Wilkinson. But Wilkinson now saw as clearly as any one that Burr’s scheme was foredoomed to fail; and he at once determined to make use of the only weapon in which he was skilled,—treachery. At this very time he, the commander of the United States Army, was in the pay of Spain, and was in secret negotiation with the Spanish officials against whom he was supposed to be acting; he had striven to corrupt his own army and had failed; he had found out that the people of the West were not disloyal. He saw that there was no hope of success for the conspirators; and he resolved to play the part of defender of the nation, and to act with vigor against Burr. Having warned Jefferson, in language of violent alarm, about Burr’s plans, he prepared to prevent their execution. He first made a truce with Herrera in accordance with which each was to retire to his former position, and then he started for the Mississippi.

When Burr found that he could do nothing in Kentucky and Tennessee, he prepared to go to New Orleans. The few boats that Blennerhassett had been able to gather were sent hurriedly down stream lest they should be interfered with by the Ohio authorities. Burr had made another visit to Nashville. Slipping down the Cumberland, he joined his little flotilla, passed Fort Massac, and began the descent of the Mississippi.

The plot was probably most dangerous at New Orleans, if it could be said to be dangerous anywhere. Claiborne grew very much alarmed about it, chiefly because of the elusive mystery in which it was shrouded. But when the pinch came it proved as unsubstantial there as elsewhere. The leaders who had talked most loosely about revolutionary proceedings grew alarmed, as the crisis approached, lest they might be called on to make good their words; and they hastened to repudiate all connection with Burr, and to avow themselves loyal to the Union. Even the Creole militia,—a body which Claiborne regarded with just suspicion,—volunteered to come to the defence of the Government when it was thought that Burr might actually attack the city.

But Burr’s career was already ruined. Jefferson, goaded into action, had issued a proclamation for his arrest; and even before this proclamation was issued, the fabric of the conspiracy had crumbled into shifting dust. The Ohio Legislature passed resolutions demanding prompt action against the conspirators; and the other Western communities followed suit. There was no real support for Burr anywhere. All his plot had been but a dream; at the last he could not do anything which justified, in even the smallest degree, the alarm and curiosity he had excited. The men of keenest insight and best judgment feared his unmasked efforts less than they feared Wilkinson’s dark and tortuous treachery.[14] As he drifted down the Mississippi with his little flotilla, he was overtaken by Jefferson’s proclamation, which was sent from one to another of the small Federal garrisons. Near Natchez, in January, 1807, he surrendered his flotilla, without resistance, to the Acting-Governor of Mississippi Territory. He himself escaped into the land of the Choctaws and Creeks, disguised as a Mississippi boatman; but a month later he was arrested near the Spanish border, and sent back to Washington.

Thus ended ingloriously the wildest, most spectacular, and least dangerous, of all the intrigues for Western disunion. It never contained within itself the least hope of success. It was never a serious menace to the National Government. It was not by any means even a good example of Western particularistic feeling. It was simply a sporadic illustration of the looseness of national sentiment, here and there, throughout the country; but of no great significance, because it was in no sense a popular movement, and had its origin in the fantastic imagination of a single man.

It left scarcely a ripple in the West. When the danger was over Wilkinson appeared in New Orleans, where he strutted to the front for a little while, playing the part of a fussy dictator and arresting, among others, Adair of Kentucky. As the panic subsided, they were released. No Louisianian suffered in person or property from any retaliatory action of the Government; but lasting good was done by the abject failure of the plot and by the exhibition of unused strength by the American people. The Creoles ceased to mutter discontent, and all thought of sedition died away in the province.

The chief sufferers, aside from Blennerhassett, were Sebastian and Innes, of Kentucky. The former resigned from the bench, and the latter lost a prestige he never regained. A few of their intimate friends also suffered. But their opponents did not fare much better. Daviess and Marshall were the only men in the West whose action toward Burr had been thoroughly creditable, showing alike vigor, intelligence, and loyalty. To both of them the country was under an obligation. Jefferson showed his sense of this obligation in a not uncharacteristic way by removing Daviess from office; Marshall was already in private life, and all that could be done was to neglect him.

As for Burr, he was put on trial for high treason, with Wilkinson as State’s evidence. Jefferson made himself the especial champion of Wilkinson; nevertheless the General cut a contemptible figure at the trial, for no explanation could make his course square with honorable dealing. Burr was acquitted on a technicality. Wilkinson, the double traitor, the bribe-taker, the corrupt servant of a foreign government, remained at the head of the American Army.

[1] Pike’s letter, July 22, 1807, in Natchez ‘‘Herald”; in Col. Durrett’s collection; see Coue’s edition of Pike’s “Expedition,” LII; also Gayarre, III, 447.

[2] Report of Bishop Peñalvert, Nov. 1, 1795, Gayarré.

[3] Gayarre, III, 456.

[4] Gayarré, III, 576. The King of Spain, at the instigation of Godoy, disapproved the order of Morales, but so late that the news of the disapproval reached Louisiana only as the French were about to take possession. However, the reversal of the order rendered the course of the further negotiations easier.

[5] In Henry Adams’ ‘‘History of the United States,” the account of the diplomatic negotiations at this period, between Prance, Spain, and the United States, is the most brilliant piece of diplomatic history, so far as the doings of the diplomats themselves are concerned, that can be put to the credit of any American writer.

[6] Pontalba’s Memoir. He hoped that Louisiana might, in certain contingencies, be preserved for the French, but he insisted that it could only be by keeping peace with the American settlers, and by bringing about an immense increase of population in the province.

[7] Livingston to Madison, Sept. 1, 1802, Later Livingston himself became uneasy, fearing lest Napoleon’s wilfulness might plunge him into an undertaking which, though certain to end disastrously to the French, might meanwhile cause great trouble to the Americans.

[8] Jefferson was guilty of much weak and undignified con duct during these negotiations, but of nothing weaker and more petty than his attempt to flatter Talleyrand by pre tending that the Americans disbelieved his admitted venal ity, and were indignant with those who had exposed it. See Adams.

[9] Wilkinson’s “Memoirs,” II, 284.

[10] Adams, III, 221.

[11] For the Kentucky episode, see Marshall and Green, Gayarré is the authority for what occurred in New Orleans. For the whole conspiracy, see Adams.

[12] Gayarré, IV, 180.

[13] Gayarre, IV, 137, 151, etc.

[14] E. G. Cowles Meade; see Gayarré, IV, 169.

CHAPTER V

THE EXPLORERS OF THE FAR WEST, 1804–1807

THE FAR West, the West beyond the Mississippi, had been thrust on Jefferson, and given to the nation, by the rapid growth of the Old West, the West that lay between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. The actual title to the new territory had been acquired by the United States Government, acting for the whole nation. It remained to explore the territory thus newly added to the national domain. The Government did not yet know exactly what it had acquired, for the land was not only unmapped but unexplored. Nobody could tell what were the boundary lines which divided it from British America on the north and Mexico on the south, for nobody knew much of the country through which these lines ran; of most of it, indeed, nobody knew anything. On the new maps the country now showed as part of the United States; but the Indians who alone inhabited it were as little affected by the transfer as was the game they hunted.

Even the Northwestern portion of the land definitely ceded to the United States by Great Britain in Jay’s treaty was still left in actual possession of the Indian tribes, while the few whites who lived among them were traders owing allegiance to the British (344) Government. The headwaters of the Mississippi and the beautiful country lying round them were known only in a vague way; and it was necessary to explore and formally take possession of this land of lakes, glades, and forests.

Beyond the Mississippi all that was really well known was the territory in the immediate neighborhood of the little French villages near the mouth of the Missouri. The creole traders of these villages, and an occasional venturous American, had gone up the Mississippi to the country of the Sioux and the Mandans, where they had trapped and hunted and traded for furs with the Indians. At the northernmost points that they reached they occasionally encountered traders who had traveled south or southwesterly from the wintry regions where the British fur companies reigned supreme. The headwaters of the Missouri were absolutely unknown; nobody had penetrated the great plains, the vast seas of grass through which the Platte, the Little Missouri, and the Yellowstone ran. What lay beyond them, and between them and the Pacific, was not even guessed at. The Rocky Mountains were not known to exist, so far as the territory newly acquired by the United States was concerned, although under the name of “Stonies” their Northern extensions in British America were already down on some maps.

The West had passed beyond its first stage of uncontrolled individualism. Neither exploring nor fighting was thenceforth to be the work only of the individual settlers. The National Government was making its weight felt more and more in the West, because the West was itself becoming more and more an important integral portion of the Union. The work of exploring these new lands fell, not to the wild hunters and trappers, such as those who had first explored Kentucky and Tennessee, but to officers of the United States Army, leading parties of United States soldiers, in pursuance of the command of the Government or of its representatives. The earliest and most important expeditions of Americans into the unknown country which the nation had just purchased were led by young officers of the regular army.

The first of these expeditions was planned by Jefferson himself and authorized by Congress. Nominally its purpose was in part to find out the most advantageous places for the establishment of trading stations with the Indian tribes over which our government had acquired the titular suzerainty; but in reality it was purely a voyage of exploration, planned with intent to ascend the Missouri to its head, and thence to cross the continent to the Pacific. The explorers were carefully instructed to report upon the geography, physical characteristics, and zoology of the region traversed, as well as upon its wild human denizens. Jefferson was fond of science, and in appreciation of the desirability of non-remunerative scientific observation and investigation he stood honorably distinguished among the public men of the day. To him justly belongs the credit of originating this first exploring expedition ever undertaken by the United States Government.

The two officers chosen to carry through the work belonged to families already honorably distinguished for service on the Western border. One was Captain Meriwether Lewis, representatives of whose family had served so prominently in Dunmores war; the other was Lieutenant (by courtesy Captain) William Clark, a younger brother of George Rogers Clark.[1] Clark had served with credit through Wayne’s campaigns, and had taken part in the victory of the Fallen Timbers.[2] Lewis had seen his first service when he enlisted as a private in the forces which were marshaled to put down the whiskey insurrection. Later he served under Clark in Wayne’s army. He had also been President Jefferson’s private secretary.

The young officers started on their trip accompanied by twenty-seven men who intended to make the whole journey. Of this number one, the interpreter and incidentally the best hunter of the party, was a half-breed; two were French voyageurs; one was a negro servant of Clark; nine were volunteers from Kentucky, and fourteen were regular soldiers. All, however, except the black slave, were enlisted in the army before starting, so that they might be kept under regular discipline. In addition to these twenty-seven men there were seven soldiers and nine voyageurs who started only to go to the Mandan villages on the Missouri, where the party intended to spend the first winter. They embarked in three large boats, abundantly supplied with arms, powder, and lead, clothing, gifts for the Indians, and provisions.

The starting point was St. Louis, which had only just been surrendered to the United States Government by the Spaniards, without any French intermediaries. The explorers pushed off in May, 1804, and soon began stemming the strong current of the muddy Missouri, to whose unknown sources they intended to ascend. For two or three weeks they occasionally passed farms and hamlets. The most important of the little towns was St. Charles, where the people were all Creoles; the explorers in their journal commented upon the good temper and vivacity of these habitants, but dwelt on the shiftlessness they displayed and their readiness to sink back toward savagery, although they were brave and hardy enough. The next most considerable town was peopled mainly by Americans, who had already begun to make numerous settlements in the new land. The last squalid little village they passed claimed as one of its occasional residents old Daniel Boone himself.

After leaving the final straggling log cabins of the settled country, the explorers, with sails and paddles, made their way through what is now the State of Missouri. They lived well, for their hunters killed many deer and wild turkey and some black bear and beaver, and there was an abundance of breeding water fowl. Here and there were Indian encampments, but not many, for the tribes had gone westward to the great plains of what is now Kansas to hunt the buffalo. Already buffalo and elk were scarce in Missouri, and the party did not begin to find them in any numbers until they reached the neighborhood of what is now southern Nebraska.

From there onward the game was found in vast herds and the party began to come upon those characteristic animals of the Great Plains which were as yet unknown to white men of our race. The buffalo and the elk had once ranged eastward to the Alleghanies and were familiar to early wanderers through the wooded wilderness; but in no part of the East had their numbers ever remotely approached the astounding multitudes in which they were found on the Great Plains. The curious prong-buck or prong-horned antelope was unknown east of the Great Plains; so was the blacktail, or mule deer, which our adventurers began to find here and there as they gradually worked their way northwestward; so were the coyotes, whose uncanny wailing after nightfall varied the sinister baying of the gray wolves; so were many of the smaller animals, notably the prairie dogs, whose populous villages awakened the lively curiosity of Lewis and Clark.

In their note-books the two captains faithfully described all these new animals and all the strange sights they saw. They were men with no pretensions to scientific learning, but they were singularly close and accurate observers and truthful narrators. Very rarely have any similar explorers described so faithfully not only the physical features but the animals and plants of a newly discovered land. Their narrative was not published until some years later, and then it was badly edited, notably the purely scientific portion; yet it remains the best example of what such a narrative should be. Few explorers who did and saw so much that was absolutely new have written of their deeds with such quiet absence of boastfulness, and have drawn their descriptions with such complete freedom from exaggeration.

Moreover, what was of even greater importance, the two young captains possessed in perfection the qualities necessary to pilot such an expedition through unknown lands and among savage tribes. They kept good discipline among the men; they never hesitated to punish severely any wrong-doer; but they were never over-severe; and as they did their full part of the work, and ran all the risks and suffered all the hardship exactly like the other members of the expedition, they were regarded by their followers with devoted affection, and were served with loyalty and cheerfulness. In dealing with the Indians they showed good humor and common-sense mingled with ceaseless vigilance and unbending resolution. Only men who possessed their tact and daring could have piloted the party safely among the warlike tribes they encountered. Any act of weakness or timidity on the one hand, or of harshness or cruelty on the other, would have been fatal to the expedition; but they were careful to treat the tribes well and to try to secure their good-will, while at the same time putting an immediate stop to any insolence or outrage. Several times they were in much jeopardy when they reached the land of the Dakotas and passed among the various ferocious tribes whom they knew, and whom we yet know, as the Sioux. The French traders frequently came up river to the country of the Sioux, who often maltreated and robbed them. In consequence Lewis and Clark found that the Sioux were inclined to regard the whites as people whom they could safely oppress. The resolute bearing of the newcomers soon taught them that they were in error, and after a little hesitation the various tribes in each case became friendly.

With all the Indian tribes the two explorers held councils, and distributed presents, especially medals, among the head chiefs and warriors, informing them of the transfer of the territory from Spain to the United States and warning them that henceforth they must look to the President as their protector, and not to the King, whether of England or of Spain. The Indians all professed much satisfaction at the change, which of course they did not in the least understand, and for which they cared nothing. This easy acquiescence gave much groundless satisfaction to Lewis and Clark, who further, in a spirit of philanthropy, strove to make each tribe swear peace with its neighbors. After some hesitation the tribe usually consented to this also, and the explorers, greatly gratified, passed on. It is needless to say that as soon as they had disappeared the tribes promptly went to war again, and that in reality the Indians had only the vaguest idea as to what was meant by the ceremonies, and the hoisting of the American Flag. The wonder is that Clark, who had already had some experience with Indians, should have supposed that the councils, advice, and proclamations would have any effect of the kind hoped for upon these wild savages. However, together with the love of natural science inculcated by the fashionable philosophy of the day, they also possessed the much less admirable, though entirely amiable, theory of universal unintelligent philanthropy which was embodied in this philosophy. A very curious feature of our dealings with the Indians, not only in the days of Lewis and Clark, but since, has been the combination of extreme and indeed foolish benevolence of purpose on the part of the Government, with, on the part of the settlers, a brutality of action which this benevolent purpose could in no wise check or restrain.

As the fall weather grew cold the party reached the Mandan village, where they halted and went into camp for the winter, building huts and a stout stockade, which they christened Fort Mandan. Traders from St. Louis and also British traders from the North reached these villages, and the inhabitants were accustomed to dealing with the whites. Throughout the winter the party was well treated by the Indians, and kept in good health and spirits; the journals frequently mention the fondness the men showed for dancing, although without partners of the opposite sex. Yet they suffered much from the extreme cold, and at times from hunger, for it was hard to hunt in the winter weather, and the game was thin and poor. Generally game could be killed in a day’s hunt from the fort; but occasionally small parties of hunters went off for a trip of several days, anu returned laden with meat; in one case they killed thirty-two deer, eleven elk, and a buffalo; in another forty deer, sixteen elk, and three buffalo; thirty-six deer and fourteen elk, etc. The buffalo remaining in the neighborhood during the winter were mostly old bulls, too lean to eat; and as the snows came on most of the antelope left for the rugged country further west, swimming the Missouri in great bands. Before the bitter weather began the explorers were much interested by the methods of the Indians in hunting, especially when they surrounded and slaughtered bands of buffalo on horseback; and by the curious pens, with huge V-shaped wings, into which they drove antelope.

In the spring of 1805 Lewis and Clark again started westward, first sending down-stream ten of their companions, to carry home the notes of their trip so far, and a few valuable specimens. The party that started westward numbered thirty-two adults, all told; for one sergeant had died, and two or three persons had volunteered at the Mandan villages, including a rather worthless French “squaw-man,” with an intelligent Indian wife, whose baby was but a few weeks old.

From this point onward, when they began to travel west instead of north, the explorers were in a country where no white man had ever trod. It was not the first time the continent had been crossed. The Spaniards had crossed and re-crossed it, for two centuries, further south. In British America Mackenzie had already penetrated to the Pacific, while Hearne had made a far more noteworthy and difficult trip than Mackenzie, when he wandered over the terrible desolation of the Barren Grounds, which lie under the Arctic Circle. But no man had ever crossed or explored that part of the continent which the United States had just acquired; a part far better fitted to be the home of our stock than the regions to the north or south. It was the explorations of Lewis and Clark, and not those of Mackenzie on the north or of the Spaniards in the south which were to bear fruit, because they pointed the way to the tens of thousands of settlers who were to come after them, and who were to build thriving commonwealths in the lonely wilderness which they had traversed.

From the Little Missouri on to the head of the Missouri proper the explorers passed through a region where they saw few traces of Indians. It literally swarmed with game, for it was one of the finest hunting grounds in all the world.[3] There were great numbers of sage fowl, sharp-tailed prairie fowl, and ducks of all kinds; and swans, and tall white cranes; and geese, which nested in the tops of the cottonwood trees. But the hunters paid no heed to birds, when surrounded by such teeming myriads of big game. Buffalo, elk, and antelope, whitetail and black tail deer, and bighorn sheep swarmed in extraordinary abundance throughout the lands watered by the upper Missouri and the Yellowstone; in their journals the explorers dwell continually on the innumerable herds they encountered while on these plains, both when traveling upstream and again the following year when they were returning. The antelopes were sometimes quite shy; so were the bighorn, though on occasions both kinds seemed to lose their wariness, and in one instance the journal specifies the fact that, at the mouth of the Yellowstone, the deer were somewhat shy, while the antelope, like the elk and buffalo, paid no heed to the men whatever. Ordinarily all the kinds of game were very tame. Sometimes one of the many herds of elk that lay boldly, even at midday, on the sand-bars or on the brush-covered points, would wait until the explorers were within twenty yards of them before starting. The buffalo would scarcely move out of the path at all, and the bulls sometimes, even when unmolested, threatened to assail the hunters. Once, on the return voyage, when Clark was descending the Yellowstone River, a vast herd of buffalo, swimming and wading, plowed its way across the stream where it was a mile broad, in a column so thick that the explorers had to draw up on shore and wait for an hour, until it passed by, before, continuing their journey. Two or three times the expedition was thus brought to a halt; and as the buffalo were so plentiful, and so easy to kill, and as their flesh was very good, they were the mainstay for the explorers’ table. Both going and returning this wonderful hunting country was a place of plenty. The party of course lived almost exclusively on meat, and they needed much; for, when they could get it, they consumed either a buffalo, or an elk and a deer, or four deer, every day.

There was one kind of game which they at times found altogether too familiar. This was the grisly bear, which they were the first white men to discover. They called it indifferently the grisly, gray, brown, and even white bear, to distinguish it from its smaller, glossy, black-coated brother with which they were familiar in the Eastern woods. They found that the Indians greatly feared these bears, and after their first encounters they themselves treated them with much respect. The grisly was then the burly lord of the Western prairie, dreaded by all other game, and usually shunned even by the Indians. In consequence it was very bold and savage. Again and again these huge bears attacked the explorers of their own accord, when neither molested nor threatened. They galloped after the hunters when they met them on horseback even in the open; and they attacked them just as freely when they found them on foot. To go through the brush was dangerous; again and again one or another of the party was charged and forced to take to a tree, at the foot of which the bear sometimes mounted guard for hours before going off. When wounded the beasts fought with desperate courage, and showed astonishing tenacity of life, charging any number of assailants, and succumbing but slowly even to mortal wounds. In one case a bear that was on shore actually plunged into the water and swam out to attack one of the canoes as it passed. However, by this time all of the party had become good hunters, expert in the use of their rifles, and they killed great numbers of their ursine foes.

Nor were the bears their only brute enemies. The rattlesnakes were often troublesome. Unlike the bears, the wolves were generally timid, and preyed only on the swarming game; but one night a wolf crept into camp and seized a sleeper by the hand; when driven off he jumped upon another man, and was shot by a third. A less intentional assault was committed by a buffalo bull which one night blundered past the fires, narrowly escaped trampling on the sleepers, and had the whole camp in an uproar before it rushed off into the darkness. When hunted the buffalo occasionally charged; but there was not much danger in their chase.

All these larger foes paled into insignificance compared with the mosquitoes. There are very few places on earth where these pests are so formidable as in the bottom lands of the Missouri, and for weeks and even months they made the lives of our explorers a torture. No other danger, whether from hunger or cold, Indians or wild beasts, was so dreaded by the explorers as these tiny scourges.

In the plains country the life of the explorers was very pleasant save only for the mosquitoes and the incessant clouds of driving sand along the river bottoms. On their journey west through these true happy hunting grounds they did not meet with any Indians, and their encounters with the bears were only just sufficiently dangerous to add excitement to their life. Once or twice they were in peril from cloudbursts, and they were lamed by the cactus spines on the prairie, and by the stones and sand of the river bed while dragging the boats against the current; but all these trials, labors, and risks were only enough to give zest to their exploration of the unknown land. At the Great Falls of the Missouri they halted, and were enraptured with their beauty and majesty; and here, as everywhere, they found the game so abundant that they lived in plenty. As they journeyed up-stream through the bright summer weather, though they worked hard, it was work of a kind which was but a long holiday. At nightfall they camped by the boats on the river bank. Each day some of the party spent in hunting, either along the river bottoms through the groves of cottonwoods with shimmering, rustling leaves, or away from the river where the sunny prairie stretched into seas of brown grass, or where groups or rugged hills stood, fantastic in color and outline, and with stunted pines growing on the sides of their steep ravines. The only real suffering was that which occasionally befell some one who got lost, and was out for days at a time, until he exhausted all his powder and lead before finding the party.

Fall had nearly come when they reached the headwaters of the Missouri. The end of the holiday-time was at hand, for they had before them the labor of crossing the great mountains so as to strike the head-waters of the Columbia. Their success at this point depended somewhat upon the Indian wife of the Frenchman who had joined them at Mandan. She had been captured from one of the Rocky Mountain tribes, and they relied on her as interpreter. Partly through her aid, and partly by their own exertions, they were able to find, and make friends with, a band of wandering Shoshones, from whom they got horses. Having cached their boats and most of their goods they started westward through the forest-clad passes of the Rockies; before this they had wandered and explored in several directions through the mountains and the foothills. The open country had been left behind, and with it the time of plenty. In the mountain forests the game was far less abundant than on the plains and far harder to kill; though on the tops of the high peaks there was one new game animal, the white antelope goat, which they did not see, though the Indians brought them hides. The work was hard, and the party suffered much from toil and hunger, living largely on their horses, before they struck one of the tributaries of the Snake sufficiently low down to enable them once more to go by boat.

They now met many Indians of various tribes, all of them very different from the Indians of the Western Plains. At this time the Indians, both east and west of the Rockies, already owned numbers of horses. Although they had a few guns, they relied mainly on the spears and tomahawks, and bows and arrows with which they had warred and hunted from time immemorial; for only the tribes on the outer edges had come in contact with the whites, whether with occasional French and English traders who brought them goods, or with the mixed bloods of the Northern Spanish settlements, upon which they raided. Around the mouth of the Columbia, however, the Indians knew a good deal about the whites; the river had been discovered by Captain Gray of Boston thirteen years before, and ships came there continually, while some of the Indian tribes were occasionally visited by traders from the British fur companies.

With one or two of these tribes the explorers had some difficulty, and owed their safety to their unceasing vigilance, and to the prompt decision with which they gave the Indians to understand that they would tolerate no bad treatment, while yet themselves refraining carefully from committing any wrong. By most of the tribes they were well received, and obtained from them not only information of the route, but also a welcome supply of food. At first they rather shrank from eating the dogs which formed the favorite dish of the Indians; but after a while they grew quite reconciled to dog’s flesh; and in their journals noted that they preferred it to lean elk and deer meat, and were much more healthy while eating it.

They reached the rain-shrouded forests of the coast before cold weather set in, and there they passed the winter, suffering somewhat from the weather, and now and then from hunger, though the hunters generally killed plenty of elk, and deer of a new kind, the blacktail of the Columbia.

In March, 1806, they started eastward to retrace their steps. At first they did not live well, for it was before the time when the salmon came upstream, and game was not common. When they reached the snow-covered mountains[4] there came another period of toil and starvation, and they were glad indeed when they emerged once more on the happy hunting-grounds of the Great Plains. They found their caches undisturbed. Early in July they separated for a time, Clark descending the Yellowstone and Lewis the Missouri, until they met at the junction of the two rivers. The party which went down the Yellowstone at one time split into two, Clark taking command of one division, and a sergeant of the other; they built their own canoes, some of them made out of hollowed trees, while the others were bull boats, made of buffalo hides stretched on a frame. As before they reveled in the abundance of the game. They marveled at the incredible numbers of the buffalo, whose incessant bellowing at this season filled the air with one continuous roar, which terrified their horses; they were astonished at the abundance and tameness of the elk; they fought their old enemies the grisly bears, and they saw and noted many strange and wonderful beasts and birds.

To Lewis there befell other adventures. Once, while he was out with three men, a party of eight Blackfeet warriors joined them and suddenly made a treacherous attack upon them and strove to carry off their guns and horses. But the wilderness veterans sprang to arms with a readiness that had become second nature. One of them killed an Indian with a knife thrust; Lewis himself shot another Indian, and the remaining six fled, carrying with them one of Lewis’ horses, but losing four of their own, which the whites captured. This was the beginning of the long series of bloody skirmishes between the Blackfeet and the Rocky Mountain explorers and trappers. Clark at about the same time suffered at the hands of the Crows, who stole a number of his horses.

None of the party was hurt by the Indians, but some time after the skirmish with the Blackfeet Lewis was accidentally shot by one of the Frenchmen of the party and suffered much from the wound. Near the mouth of the Yellowstone Clark joined him, and the reunited company floated down the Missouri. Before they reached the Mandan villages they encountered two white men, the first strangers of their own color the party had seen for a year and a half. These were two American hunters named Dickson and Hancock, who were going up to trap the headwaters of the Missouri on their own account. They had come from the Illinois country a year before, to hunt and trap; they had been plundered, and one of them wounded in an encounter with the fierce Sioux, but were undauntedly pushing forward into the unknown wilderness toward the mountains.

These two hardy and daring adventurers formed the little vanguard of the bands of hunters and trappers, the famous Rocky Mountain men, who were to roam hither and thither across the great West in lawless freedom for the next three-quarters of a century. They accompanied the party back to the Mandan village; there one of the soldiers joined them, a man named Colter, so fascinated by the life of the wilderness that he was not willing to leave it, even for a moment’s glimpse of the civilization from which he had been so long exiled.[5] The three turned their canoe up-stream, while Lewis and Clark and the rest of the party drifted down past the Sioux.

The further voyage of the explorers was uneventful. They had difficulties with the Sioux of course, but they held them at bay. They killed game in abundance, and went down-stream as fast as sails, oars, and current could carry them. In September, they reached St. Louis and forwarded to Jefferson an account of what they had done.

They had done a great deed, for they had opened the door into the heart of the far West. Close on their tracks followed the hunters, trappers, and fur traders who themselves made ready the way for the settlers whose descendants were to possess the land. As for the two leaders of the explorers, Lewis was made Governor of Louisiana Territory, and a couple of years afterward died, as was supposed, by his own hand, in a squalid log cabin on the Chickasaw trace—though it was never certain that he had not been murdered. Clark was afterward Governor of the Territory, when its name had been changed to Missouri, and he also served honorably as Indian agent. But neither of them did anything further of note; nor indeed was it necessary, for they had performed a feat which will always give them a place on the honor roll of American worthies.

While Lewis and Clark were descending the Columbia and recrossing the continent from the Pacific coast, another army officer was conducting explorations which were only less important than theirs. This was Lieut. Zebulon Montgomery Pike. He was not by birth a Westerner, being from New Jersey, the son of an officer of the Revolutionary army; but his name will always be indelibly associated with the West. His two voyages of exploration, one to the headwaters of the Mississippi, the other to the springs of the Arkansas and the Rio Grande, were ordered by Wilkinson, without authority from Congress. When Wilkinson’s name was smirched by Burr’s conspiracy the lieutenant likewise fell under suspicion, for it was believed that his southwestern trip was undertaken in pursuance of some of Wilkinson’s schemes. Unquestionably this trip was intended by Pike to throw light on the exact nature of the Spanish boundary claims. In all probability he also intended to try to find out all he could of the military and civil situation in the northern provinces of Mexico. Such information could be gathered but for one purpose; and it seems probable that Wilkinson had hinted to him that part of his plan which included an assault of some kind or other on Spanish rule in Mexico; but Pike was an ardent patriot, and there is not the slightest ground for any belief that Wilkinson dared to hint to him his own disloyalty to the Union.

In August, 1805, Pike turned his face toward the headwaters of the Mississippi, his purpose being both to explore the sources of that river, and to show to the Indians, and to the British fur traders among them, that the United States was sovereign over the country in fact as well as in theory. He started in a large keel boat, with twenty soldiers of the regular army. The voyage up-stream was uneventful. The party lived largely on game they shot, Pike himself doing rather more hunting than any one else, and evidently taking much pride in his exploits; though in his journal he modestly disclaimed any pretensions to special skill. Unlike the later explorers, but like Lewis and Clark, Pike could not avail himself of the services of hunters having knowledge of the country. He and his regulars were forced to be their own pioneers and to do their own hunting, until by dint of hard knocks and hard work they grew experts, both as riflemen and as woodsmen.

The expedition occasionally encountered parties of Indians. The savages were nominally at peace with the whites, and although even at this time they occasionally murdered some solitary trapper or trader, they did not dare meddle with Pike’s well armed and well prepared soldiers, confining themselves to provocation that just fell short of causing conflict. Pike handled them well, and speedily brought those with whom he came into contact to a proper frame of mind, showing good temper and at the same time prompt vigor in putting down any attempt at bullying. On the journey up-stream only one misadventure befell the party. A couple of the men got lost while hunting and did not find the boat for six days, by which time they were nearly starved, having used up all their ammunition, so that they could not shoot game.

The winter was spent in what is now Minnesota. Pike made a permanent camp where he kept most of his men, while he himself traveled hither and thither, using dog sleds after the snow fell. They lived almost purely on game, and Pike, after the first enthusiasm of the sport had palled a little, commented on the hard slavery of a hunter’s life and its vicissitudes; for on one day he might kill enough meat to last the whole party a week, and when that was exhausted they might go three or four days without anything at all.[6] Deer and bear were the common game, though they saw both buffalo and elk, and killed several of the latter. Pike found his small-bore rifle too light for the chase of the buffalo.

At the beautiful falls of St. Anthony, Pike held a council with the Sioux, and got them to make a grant of about a hundred thousand acres in the neighborhood of the falls; and he tried vainly to make peace between the Sioux and the Chippewas. In his search for the source of the Mississippi he penetrated deep into the lovely lake-dotted region of forests and prairies which surrounds the headwaters of the river. He did not reach Lake Itasca; but he did explore the Leech Lake drainage system, which he mistook for the true source.

At the British trading-posts, strong log structures fitted to repel Indian attacks, Pike was well received. Where he found the British flag flying he had it hauled down and the American flag hoisted in its place, making both the Indians and the traders understand that the authority of the United States was supreme in the land. In the spring he floated down-stream and reached St. Louis on the last day of April, 1806.

In July he was again sent out, this time on a far more dangerous and important trip. He was to march west to the Rocky Mountains, and explore the country toward the head of the Rio Grande, where the boundary line between Mexico and Louisiana was very vaguely determined. His party numbered twenty-three all told, including Lieutenant J. B. Wilkinson, a son of the general, and a Dr. J. H. Robinson, whose special business it was to find out everything possible about the Spanish provinces, or, in plain English, to act as a spy. The party was also accompanied by fifty Osage Indians, chiefly women and children who had been captured by the Pottawatomies, and whose release and return to their homes had been brought about by the efforts of the United States Government. The presence of these redeemed captives of course kept the Osages in good humor with Pike’s party.

The party started in boats, and ascended the Osage River as far as it was navigable. They then procured horses and traveled to the great Pawnee village known as the Pawnee Republic, which gave its name to the Republican River. Before reaching the Pawnee village they found that a Spanish military expedition, several hundred strong, under an able commander named Malgares, had anticipated them, by traveling through the debatable land, and seeking to impress upon the Indians that the power of the Spanish nation was still supreme. Malgares had traveled from New Mexico across the Arkansas into the Pawnee country; during much of his subsequent route Pike followed the Spaniard’s trail. The Pawnees had received from Malgares Spanish flags, as tokens of Spanish sovereignty. Doubtless the ceremony meant little or nothing to them; and Pike had small difficulty in getting the chiefs and warriors of the village to hoist the American flag instead. But they showed a very decided disinclination to let him continue his journey westward. However, he would not be denied. Though with perfect good temper, he gave them to understand that he would use force if they ventured to bar his passage; and they finally let him go by. Later he had a somewhat similar experience with a large Pawnee war party.

The explorers had now left behind them the fertile, tree-clad country, and had entered on the great plains, across which they journeyed to the Arkansas, and then up that river. Like Lewis and Clark, Pike found the country literally swarming with game; for all the great plains region, from the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande, formed at this time one of the finest hunting grounds to be found in the whole world. At one place just on the border of the plains Pike mentions that he saw from a hill buffalo, elk, antelope, deer, and panther, all in sight at the same moment. When he reached the plains proper the three characteristic animals were the elk, antelope, and, above all, the buffalo.

The myriads of huge shaggy-maned bison formed the chief feature in this desolate land; no other wild animal of the same size, in any part of the world, then existed in such incredible numbers. All the early travelers seem to have been almost equally impressed by the interminable seas of grass, the strange, shifting, treacherous plains, rivers, and the swarming multitudes of this great wild ox of the West. Under the blue sky the yellow prairie spread out in endless expanse; across it the horseman might steer for days and weeks through a landscape almost as unbroken as the ocean. It was a region of light rainfall; the rivers ran in great curves through beds of quicksand, which usually contained only trickling pools of water, but in times of freshet would in a moment fill from bank to bank with boiling muddy torrents. Hither and thither across these plains led the deep buffalo-trails, worn by the hoofs of the herds that had passed and repassed through countless ages. For hundreds of miles a traveler might never be out of sight of buffalo. At noon they lay about in little groups all over the prairie, the yellow calves clumsily frisking beside their mothers, while on the slight mounds the great bulls moaned and muttered and pawed the dust. Toward nightfall the herds filed down in endless lines to drink at the river, walking at a quick, shuffling pace, with heads held low and beards almost sweeping the ground. When Pike reached the country the herds were going south from the Platte toward their wintering grounds below the Arkansas. At first he passed through nothing but droves of bulls. It was not until he was well toward the mountains that he came upon great herds of cows.

The prairie was dotted over with innumerable antelope. These have always been beasts of the open country; but the elk, once so plentiful in the great Eastern forests, and even now plentiful in parts of the Rockies, then also abounded on the plains, where there was not a tree of any kind, save the few twisted and wind-beaten cottonwoods that here and there, in sheltered places, fringed the banks of the rivers.

Lewis and Clark had seen the Mandan horsemen surround the buffalo herds and kill the great clumsy beasts with their arrows. Pike records with the utmost interest how he saw a band of Pawnees in similar fashion slaughter a great gang of elk, and he dwells with admiration on the training of the horses, the wonderful horsemanship of the naked warriors, and their skill in the use of bow and spear. It was a wild hunting scene, such as belonged properly to times primeval. But indeed the whole life of these wild red nomads, the plumed and painted horse-Indians of the great plains, belonged to time primeval. It was at once terrible and picturesque, and yet mean in its squalor and laziness. From the Blackfeet in the North to the Comanches in the South they were all alike; grim lords of war and the chase; warriors, hunters, gamblers, idlers; fearless, ferocious, treacherous, inconceivably cruel ; revengeful and fickle; foul and unclean in life and thought; disdaining work, but capable at times of undergoing unheard-of toil and hardship, and of braving every danger; doomed to live with ever before their eyes death in the form of famine or frost, battle or torture, and schooled to meet it, in whatever shape it came, with fierce and mutter less fortitude.[7]

When the party reached the Arkansas late in October Wilkinson and three or four men journeyed down it and returned to the settled country. Wilkinson left on record his delight when he at last escaped from the bleak windswept plains and again reached the land where deer supplanted the buffalo and antelope and where the cottonwood was no longer the only tree.

The others struck westward into the mountains, and late in November reached the neighborhood of the bold peak which was later named after Pike himself. Winter set in with severity soon after they penetrated the mountains. They were poorly clad to resist the bitter weather, and they endured frightful hardships while endeavoring to thread the tangle of high cliffs and sheer canyons. Moreover, as winter set in, the blacktail deer, upon which the party had begun to rely for meat, migrated to the wintering grounds, and the explorers suffered even more from hunger than from cold. They had nothing to eat but the game, not even salt.

The traveling through the deep snow, whether exploring or hunting, was heart-breaking work. The horses suffered most; the extreme toil, and scant pasturage weakened them so that some died from exhaustion; others fell over precipices; and the magpies proved evil foes, picking the sore backs of the wincing, saddle-galled beasts. In striving to find some pass for the horses the whole party was more than once strung out in detachments miles apart, through the mountains. Early in January, near the site of the present Canyon City, Pike found a valley where deer were plentiful. Here he built a fort of logs, and left the saddle-band and pack-animals in charge of two of the members of the expedition; intending to send back for them when he had discovered some practicable route.

He himself, with a dozen of the hardiest soldiers, struck through the mountains toward the Rio Grande. Their sufferings were terrible. They were almost starved, and so cold was the weather that at one time no less than nine of the men froze their feet. Pike and Robinson proved on the whole the hardiest, being kept up by their indomitable will, though Pike mentions with gratification that but once, in all their trials, did a single member of the party so much as grumble.

Pike and Robinson were also the best hunters; and it was their skill and stout-heartedness, shown in the time of direst need, that saved the whole party from death. In the Wet Mountain Valley, which they reached in mid-January, 1807, at the time that nine of the men froze their feet, starvation stared them in the face. There had been a heavy snowstorm ; no game was to be seen; and they had been two days without food. The men with frozen feet, exhausted by hunger, could no longer travel. Two of the soldiers went out to hunt, but got nothing. At the same time, Pike and Robinson started, determined not to return at all unless they could bring back meat. Pike wrote that they had resolved to stay out and die by themselves, rather than to go back to camp “and behold the misery of our poor lads.” All day they tramped wearily through the heavy snow. Toward evening they came on a buffalo, and wounded it; but faint and weak from hunger, they shot badly, and the buffalo escaped; a disappointment literally as bitter as death. That night they sat up among some rocks, all night long, unable to sleep because of the intense cold, shivering in their thin rags; they had not eaten for three days. But they were men of indomitable spirit, and next day, trudging painfully on, they at last succeeded, after another heart-breaking failure, in killing a buffalo. At midnight they staggered into camp with the meat, and all the party broke their four days’ fast. Two men lost their feet through frost-bite, and had to be left in this camp, with all the food. Only the fact that a small band of buffalo was wintering in the valley had saved the whole expedition from death by starvation.

After leaving this valley Pike and the remaining men of the expedition finally reached the Rio Grande, where the weather was milder and deer abounded. Here they built a little fort over which they flew the United States flag, though Pike well knew that he was in Spanish territory. When the Spanish commander at Santa Fé learned of their presence he promptly sent out a detachment of troops to bring them in, though showing great courtesy and elaborately pretending to believe that Pike had merely lost his way.

From Santa Fé Pike was sent home by a roundabout route through Chihuahua, and through Texas, where he noted the vast droves of wild horses, and the herds of peccaries. He was much impressed by the strange mixture of the new world savagery and old world feudalism in the provinces through which he passed. A nobility and a priesthood which survived unchanged from the middle ages held sway over serfs and made war upon savages. The Apache and Comanche raided on the outlying settlements; the mixed bloods, and the “tame” Indians on the great ranches and in the hamlets were in a state of peonage; in the little walled towns the Spanish commanders lived in half civilized, half barbaric luxury, and shared with the priests absolute rule over the people roundabout. The American lieutenant, used to the simplicity of his own service, was struck by the extravagance and luxury of the Spanish officers, who always traveled with sumpter mules laden with delicacies; and he was no less struck with the laxity of discipline in all ranks. The Spanish cavalry were armed with lances and shields; the militia carried not only old fashioned carbines but lassos and bows and arrows. There was small wonder that the Spanish authorities, civil, military, and ecclesiastical alike, should wish to keep intruders out of the land, and should jealously guard the secret of their own weakness.

When Pike reached home he found himself in disfavor, as was every one who was suspected of having any intimate relations with Wilkinson. However, he soon cleared himself, and continued to serve in the army. He rose to be a brigadier-general, and died gloriously in the hour of triumph, when in command of the American force which defeated the British and captured York.

Lewis, Clark, and Pike had been the pioneers in the exploration of the far West. The wandering trappers and traders were quick to follow in their tracks, and to roam hither and thither exploring on their own accord. In 1807 one of these restless adventurers reached Yellowstone Lake, and another Lake Itasca; and their little trading stations were built far up the Missouri and the Platte.

While these first rough explorations of the far West were taking place, the old West was steadily filling with population and becoming more and more a coherent portion of the Union. In the treaties made from time to time with the Northwestern Indians, they ceded so much land that at last the entire northern bank of the Ohio was in the hands of the settlers. But the Indians still held northwestern Ohio and the northern portions of what are now Indiana and Illinois, so that the settlement at Detroit was quite isolated, as were the few little stockades, or groups of fur-traders’ huts, in what are now northern Illinois and Wisconsin. The southern Indians also surrendered much territory, in various treaties. Georgia got control of much of the Indian land within her State limits. All the country between Knoxville and Nashville became part of Tennessee, so that the eastern and middle portions of the State were no longer sundered by a jutting fragment of wilderness, infested by Indian war parties whenever there were hostilities with the savages. The only Indian lands in Tennessee or Kentucky were those held by the Chickasaws, between the Tennessee and the Mississippi; and the Chickasaws were friendly to the Americans.

Year by year the West grew better able to defend itself if attacked, and more formidable in the event of its being necessary to undertake offensive warfare. Kentucky and Tennessee had become populous States, no longer fearing Indian inroads-, but able on the contrary to equip powerful armies for the aid of the settlers in the more scantily peopled regions north and south of them. Ohio was also growing steadily; and in the territory of Indiana, including what is now Illinois and the territory of Mississippi, including what is now northern Alabama, there were already many settlers.

Nevertheless the shadow of desperate war hung over the West. Neither the northern nor the southern Indians were yet subdued; sullen and angry they watched the growth of the whites, alert to seize a favorable moment to make one last appeal to arms before surrendering their hunting grounds. Moreover in New Orleans and Detroit the Westerners possessed two outposts which it would be difficult to retain in the event of war with England, the only European nation that had power seriously to injure them. These two outposts were sundered from the rest of the settled Western territory by vast regions tenanted only by warlike Indian tribes. Detroit was most in danger from the Indians, the British being powerless against it unless in alliance with the formidable tribes that had so long battled against American supremacy. Their superb navy gave the British the power to attack New Orleans at will. The Westerners could rally to the aid of New Orleans much more easily than to the aid of Detroit; for the Mississippi offered a sure channel of communication, and New Orleans, unlike Detroit, possessed some capacity for self-defence; whereas the difficulties of transit through the Indian-haunted wilderness south of the Great Lakes were certain to cause endless dangers and delays if it became necessary for the Westerners either to reinforce or to recapture the little city which commanded the straits between Huron and Erie.

During the dozen years which opened with Wayne’s campaigns, saw the treaties of Jay and Pinckney, and closed with the explorations of Lewis, Clark, and Pike, the West had grown with the growth of a giant, and for the first time had achieved peace; but it was not yet safe from danger of outside attack. Territories which had been won by war from the Indians and by treaty from Spain, France, and England, and which had been partially explored, were not yet entirely our own. Much had been accomplished by the deeds of the Indian-fighters, treaty-makers, and wilderness-wanderers; far more had been accomplished by the steady push of the settler folk themselves, as they thrust ever westward, and carved States out of the forest and the prairie; but much yet remained to be done before the West would reach its natural limits, would free itself forever from the pressure of outside foes, and would fill from frontier to frontier with populous commonwealths of its own citizens.

[1] He had already served as captain in the army; see Coues’ edition of the “History of the Expedition,” LXXI.

[2] See his letters, quoted in Part V, Chap. V. There is a good deal of hitherto unused material about him in the Draper MSS.

[3] It so continued for three-quarters of a century. Until after 1880 the region around the Little Missouri was essentially unchanged from what it was in the days of Lewis and Clark; game swarmed, and the few white hunters and trappers who followed the buffalo, the elk, and the beaver were still at times in conflict with hunting parties from various Indian tribes. While ranching in this region I myself killed every kind of game encountered by Lewis and Clark.

[4] The Bitter Root range, which they had originally crossed. For the bibliography, etc., of this expedition see Coues’ book. The MS. diary of one of the soldiers, Gass, has since been discovered in the Draper collection.

[5] For Colter, and the first explorers of this region, see “The Yellowstone National Park,” by Captain H. M. Chittenden.

[6] Pike’s Journal, entry of November 16, 1865.

[7] Fortunately these horse-Indians, and the game they chiefly hunted, have found a fit historian. In his books, especially upon the Pawnees and Blackfeet, Mr. George Bird Grinnell has portrayed them with a master hand; it is hard to see how his work can be bettered.

APPENDIX

IT IS a pleasure to be able to say that the valuable Robertson manuscripts are now in course of publication, under the direction of a most competent editor in the person of Mr. W. R. Garrett, Ph.D. They are appearing in the “American Historical Magazine,” at Nashville, Tennessee; the first instalment appeared in January, and the second in April, 1896. The “Magazine” is doing excellent work, exactly where this work is needed; and it could not render a better service to the study of American history than by printing these Robertson papers.

After the present volume was in press Mr. Oswald Garrison Villarcl, of Harvard, most kindly called my attention to the Knox Papers, in the archives of the New England Historical and Genealogical Society, of Boston. These papers are of great interest. They are preserved in a number of big volumes. I was able to make only a most cursory examination of them; but Mr. Villard with great kindness went carefully through them, and sent me copies of those which I deemed important. There are a number of papers referring to matters connected with the campaigns against the Western Indians. The most interesting and valuable is a long letter from Col. Darke giving a very vivid picture of St. Clair’s defeat, and of the rout which followed. While it can hardly be said to cast any new light on the defeat, it describes it in a very striking manner, and brings out well the gallantry of the officers and the inferior quality of the rank and file; and it gives a very unpleasant picture of St. Clair and Hamtranck.

Besides the Darke letter there are several other manuscripts containing information of value. In Volume XXIII, page 169, there is a letter from Knox to General Harmar, dated New York, September 3, 1790. After much preliminary apology, Knox states that it “has been reported, and under circumstances which appear to have gained pretty extensive credit on the frontiers, that you are too apt to indulge yourself to excess in a convivial glass”; and he then points out the inevitable ruin that such indulgence will bring to the General.

A letter from St. Clair to Knox, dated Lexington, September 4, 1791, runs in part: “Desertion and sickness have thinned our ranks. Still, if I can only get them into action before the time of the levies expires, I think my force sufficient, though that opinion is founded on the calculation of the probable number that is opposed to us, having no manner of information as to the force collected to oppose us.” On the 15th he writes from Ft. Washington about the coming expiration of enlistments and says: “I am very sensible how hazardous it is to approach, under such circumstances, and my only expectation is that the men will find themselves so far engaged that it will be obviously better to go forward than to return, at the same time it precludes the establishment of another post of communication however necessary, but that indeed is precluded also from our decreasing numbers, and the very little dependence that is to be placed upon the militia.”

Col. Winthrop Sargent writes to General Knox from Ft. Washington, on January 2, 1792. He states that there were fourteen hundred Indians opposed to St. Clair in the battle, and repeats a rumor that six hundred Indians from the Lakes quarreled with the Miamis over the plunder, and went home without sharing any part, warning their allies that thereafter they should fight their battles alone. Sargent dwells upon the need of spies, and the service these spies would have rendered St. Clair. A few days afterward he writes in reference to a rumor that his own office is to be dispensed with, protesting that this would be an outrage, and that he has always discharged his duties well, having entered the service simply from a desire to be of use to his country. He explains that the money he receives would hardly do more than equip him, and that he only went into the army because he valued reputation and honor more than fortune.

The letters of the early part of 1792 show that the survivors of St. Clair’s army were torn by jealousy, and that during the winter following his defeat there was much bitter wrangling among the various officers. Wilkinson frequently wrote to Knox giving his estimate of the various officers, and evidently Knox thought very well of him. Wilkinson spoke well of Sargent; but most of the other officers, whom he mentions at all, he mentions with some disfavor, and he tells at great length of the squabbles among them, his narrative being diversified at times by an account of some other incident such as “a most lawless outrage” by “a party of the soldiery on the person of a civil magistrate in the village of Cincinnati.” Knox gives his views as to promotions in a letter to Washington, which shows that he evidently felt a good deal of difficulty in getting men whom he deemed fit for high command, or even for the command of a regiment.

One of the worst quarrels was that of the Quartermaster, Hodgdon, first with Major Zeigler and then with Captain Ford. The Major resigned, and the Captain publicly insulted the Quartermaster and threatened to horsewhip him.

In one letter Caleb Swan, on March 11, 1792, advises Wilkinson that he had been to Kentucky and had paid off the Kentucky militia who had served under St. Clair. Wilkinson, in a letter of March 13, expresses the utmost anxiety for the retention of St. Clair in command. Among the numerous men whom Wilkinson had complained of was Harmar, who, he said, was not only addicted to drink, but was also a bad disciplinarian. He condemned the Quartermaster also, although less severely than most of the other officers.

Darke’s letter is worth quoting in full. Its spelling and punctuation are extraordinary; and some of the words can not be deciphered.

LETTER FROM COL. DARKE TO GEORGE WASHINGTON, PRESIDENT OF THE U. S., DATED AT FORT WASHINGTON, NINETH OF NOVR. 1791, (KNOX PAPERS, VOL. XXX, P. 12.)

I take the liberty to Communicate to your Excellency the disagreeable News of our defeat.

We left fort Washington the Begining of Septr a Jornel of our march to the place of action and the whole proseeding on our march I hoped to have had the honour to inclose to you but that and all other papers cloathing & &c., was Taken by the Indians. this Jornel I know would have gave you pain but thought it not amis to Give you a State of facts and Give you every Information in my power and had it Ready to Send to you the Very Morning we were attacked.

We advanced 24 miles from fort Washington and bult a Small fort which we I thought were long about from thence we advanced along the banks of the Meamme River where the fort was arected 441/2 Miles on a Streight Line by the Compass west 1/4 north though farther the way the Road went and bult another fort, which we Left on the 23 October and from that time to the 3d Novr Got 31 Miles where we incamped in two Lines about 60 yards apart the Right whing in frunt Commanded by General Butler, the Left in the Rear which I commanded, our piccquets Decovered Some Sculking Indians about Camp in the Night and fired on them. Those we expected were hors-stealers as they had Taken Many of our horses near fort Washington, and on the way and killed a few of our Men.

As Soon as it was Light in the Morning of the 4th Novr the advanced Guards of the Meletia fired the Meletia Being incamped a Small distance in frunt a Scattering fire Soon Commenced The Troops were instandly formed to Reserve them and the pannack Struck Meletia Soon broke in to the Center of our incampment in a few Munities our Guards were drove in and our whole Camp Surrounded by Savages advencing up nere to our Lines and Made from behind trees Logs &c, Grate Havoke with our Men I for Some time having no orders [indevanced?] to prevent the Soldiers from braking and Stil finding the enemy Growing More bold and Coming to the very Mouths of our Cannon and all the brave artilery officers Killed I ordered the Left whing to Charge which with the assistance of the Gallent officers that were then Left I with deficuaty prevailed on them to do, the Second U S Regt was then the Least disabled the Charge begat with them on the Left of the Left whing I placed a Small Company of Rifelmen on that flank on the Bank of a Small Crick and persued the enemy about four hundred yards who Ran off in all directions but this time the Left flank of the Right whing Gave way and Number of the Indians Got into our Camp and Got possession of the Artilery and Scalped I Sopose a hundred men or more I turned back and beat them quite off the Ground and Got posesion of the Cannon and had it been possible to Get the troops to form and push them we Should then have Soon beat them of the Ground but those that Came from the Lelf whing Run in a huddle with those of the Right the enemys fire being allmost over for Many Munites and all exertions Made by many of the brave officer to Get them in Some order to persue Victory was all in Vain, they would not form in any order in this Confution they Remained until the enemy finding they were not pushed and I dare say Active officers with them and I believe Several of them white they Came on again, and the whole Army Ran to Gether Like a Mob at a fair and had it not been for the Gratest Exertions of the officers would have stood there til all killed the Genl then Sent to me if possible to Get them off that Spot by Making a Charge I found my Endevours fruitless for Some time but at Length Got Several Soldiers together that I had observed behaving brave and In coraged them to lead off which they did with charged bayonetts Success the whole followed with Grate Rapidity I then endevoured to halt the frunt to Get them in Some order to turn and fire a few Shots but the horse I Rode being Good for little and I wounded in the thigh Early in the Action and having fatigued my Self much was So Stif I could make a poor hand of Running, the Confution in the Retreat is beyound description the Men throughing away their arms not withstanding all the indevour of the few Remaining Brave officers I think we must have Lost 1000 Stand of arms Meletia included. It is impossible to Give any Good account of the Loss of men at this time but from the Loss of officers you may Give Some Gess a list of their Names you have In Closed the Brave and Much to be Lemented G. B. at their Head I have Likewise in Closed you a Small Rough Scetch of the feald of battle. I at this time am Scarcely able to write being worn out with fatigue Not having Slept 6 hours Since the defeat. This fatigue has been occationed by the Cowardly behaviour of Major John F. Hamtramck, and I am Sorry to say Not the Same exertions of the Govenor that I expected. Hamtramck was about Twenty four Miles in our Rear with the first U S Regiment Consisting of upwards of 300 effective men and on hearing of our defeat insted of Coming on as his orders was I believe to follow us Retreated back 7 miles to fort Jefferson we knowing of his being on his march after us and was in hopes of Grate Releif from him in Covering the Retreat of perhaps upwards of 200 or 300 wounded men Many of whom might easily bean Saved with that fresh Regiment with whom I should not have been afraid to have passed the whole Indian army if they had persued as the would have bean worn down with the Chace and in Grate Disorder when we Got to the fort 31 miles in about 9 hours no one having eat any from the day before the action. we found the Garison without more than one days bred and no meat having bean on half alowence two days there was a Council Called to which I aftar I beleive they had agreed what was to be done was called it was Concluded to march of & Recommence the Retreat at 10 oclock which was begun I think an hour before that time more than 300 wounded and Tired in our Rear the Govenor assured me that he expected provition on every hour I at first Concluded to stay with my Son who was very dangerously and I expected Mortaly wounded but after Geting Several officers dressed and as well provided for as possible and Seing the Influance Hamtramck had with the Genl about twelve oclock I got a horse and followed the army as I thought from apearences that Major Hamtramck had Influance anough to pervent the Garison from being Supplied with the provition Coming on by Keeping the first Regt as a guard for himself. I Rode alone about ten Miles from twelve oclock at night until I overtook the Regiment and the Genl I still kept on until I met the pack horses about daylight Much alarmed at having heard Something of the defeat, the Horse master Could Not prevail on the drivers to Go on with him until I assured then I would Go back with them Lame as I was I ordered the horses to be loaded immediately and I Returned as fast as I could to hault the first Regiment as a guard, and when I met them told them to halt and make fires to Cook immediately as I made Sure they would be sent back with the provitions, but when I met the Govenor and Major Hamtramck I prevailed with Genl St. Clair to order 60 men back only which was all I could possibly get and had the bulock drivers known that was all the guard they were to have they would not have gone on nuther would the horse drivers I believe in Sted of the 120 hors loads Got on all the Rest went back with the army and though the Men had bean So Long Sterving and we then 47 miles from the place of action I could not pervail on them the Genl and his fammily or [advisers?] to halt for the sterved worn down Soldiers to Cook, nor did they I believe even Kill a bullock for their Releaf I went back to fort Jefferson that Night with the flour beaves &c. where they was No kind of provision but a Miserable Poor old horse and many Valuable officers wound there and perhaps 200 soldiers it was Night when I Got back I Slept not one moment that Night my son and other officers being in Such Distress. the next day I was busy all day—Getting—made to Carry of the wounded officers there being no Medison there Nor any Nourishment not even a quart of Salt but they were not able to bare the Motion of the horses. That Night I Set off for this place and Rode til about 12 oclock by which time my thigh was amassingly Sweld Near as large as my body and So hot that I could feel the warmth with my hand 2 foot off of it I could Sleep none and have Slept very Little Since the wounds begin to Separate and are much esier I am aprehensive that fort Jeferson is now besieged by the indians as Certain Information has bean Received that a large body were on Sunday night within fifteen miles of it Coming on the Road we Marched out and I am Sorey to Se no exertions to Releive it I Cannot tel whether they have the Cannon they took from us or Not if they have not, they Cannot take it Nor I don’t think they Can with for want of Ball which they have No Grate Number of. They took from us eight pieces of ordenence 130 bullocks, about 300 horses upwards of 200 Tents and a Considerable quantity of flour amunition and all the officers and Soldiers Cloathing and bagage except what they had on I believe they gave quarters to none as most of the Women were Killed before we left the Ground I think the Slaughter far Grater than Bradocks there being 33 brave officers Killd Dead on the Ground 27 wounded that we know of and Some Mising exclusive of the Meletia and I know their Cole. and two Captains were Killed I do not think our Loss so Grate as to Strike the Surviving officers with Ideas of despair as it Seems to. the Chief of the Men Killd are of the Levies and indeed many of them are as well out of the world as in it as for the Gallent officers they are much to be Lamented as the behaviour of all-most all of them would have done honour to the first Veterans in the world. the few that escaped without wounds it was Chiefly axedent that Saved them as it is impossible to Say more in their praise than they deserve.

In the few horse officers though they had no horses Good for anything Capt. Truman Lieut. Sedam Debuts Boins and Gleer behaved Like Soldiers. Capt. Snowder is I think Not Calculated for the army and Suliven Quartermaster and Commt is as Grate a poltoon as I ever saw in the world.1 Ensign Shambury of the first United States Regiment is as brave Good and determined a Hero as any in the work Lieutenant James Stephenson from Berkeley of the Levies aded to one of the most imspoted and Respectable Carectors in the world in private Life as Good an officer as ever drew breth, his Gal-lent behavior in Action drew the attention of every officer that was Near him more than any other, There is one Bisel perhaps a volenteer in the Second U S Regiment who Richly deserved preferment for his bravery through the whole action he made the freeest use of the Baonet of any Man I noticed in the Carcases of the Savages. John Hamelton I cant say too much in praise of who was along with the army a packhorse master he picked up the dead mens guns and used them freely when he found them Loaded and when the Indians entered the Camp he took up an ax and at them with it. I am Intirely at a loss to Give you any idea what General St. Clair intends to do. I well know what I would do if I was in his place and would venture to forfet my Life if the Indians have not moved the Cannon farther than the Meamme Towns if I did not Retake them by Going there in three days insted of two months I well know the have Lost many of their braves & wariors and I make no doubt the have Near 100 wounded Their killed I cannot think Bare any perpotion to ours as they Lay so Concealed but many I know were killd and those the most dareing fellows which has weakened them Grately and I know we were able to beat them and that a violent push with one hundred brave men when the Left whing Returned from per suing them would have turned the Scale in our fa vor indeed I think fifty would in the Scatered State they were in and five or Six hundred Mounted Rifle men from Conetuck aded to the force we have would Be as Sure of Suchsess as they went many have offer to Go with me a number of officers ofer to Go as privates and I never was Treated with So much Respect in any part of the world as I have bean this day in this wilderness in the time I am offered My Choice of any horse belonging to the town as I Lost all my own horses I shall Se the General in the morning and perhaps be no more Satisfied than I am now. Though I have Spoke of all the officers with that Respect they Richly deserve I Cannot in Justice to Capt. Hannah help mentioning him as when all his men were killed wounded and Scatered except four Got a (?) that belonged to Capt. Darkes Company when the Cannon was Retaken the Artilery men being all killed and Lying in heaps about the Peases who he draged away and Stood to the Cannon himSelf til the Retreat and then within a few yards of the enemy Spiked the Gun with his Baonet Capt. Brack (?) and all the Captains of the Maryland Line I cannot Say too much in their praise. 1 have taken the Liberty of Writing So perticculer to you as I think no one Can Give a better account nor do 1 think you will Get an account from any that Saw So much of the action Genl. St. Clair not Being able to Run about as I was if his inclination had been as Grate as I hope in the Course of the winter to have the pleasure of Seeing you when I may have it in my power to answer any questions you are pleased to ask Concerning the unfortunate Campain.

I Have the Honour to be

your Excellencys most obt.

and most humble servent

Wm. Darke.

10 Novr. I have prevailed on the Good Genl. to send a Strong party To Carry Supplies to fort Jeferson which I hope will be able to Releve it and as I have polticed wound and the Swelling much As-swaged if I find myself able to Set on hors back will Go with the party as I Can be very warm by Laping myself with blankets.

Wm. Darke,

His Excellency

The President of the United States.