Pioneers of the Old Southwest...........................................................................................................................1

Constance Skinner...................................................................................................................................1

Chapter I. The Tread Of Pioneers ............................................................................................................1

Chapter II. Folkways ................................................................................................................................9

Chapter III. The Trader ..........................................................................................................................14

Chapter IV. The Passing Of The French Peril.......................................................................................20

Chapter V. Boone, The Wanderer ..........................................................................................................24

Chapter VI. The Fight For Kentucky .....................................................................................................28

Chapter VII. The Dark And Bloody Ground.........................................................................................35

Chapter VIII. Tennessee........................................................................................................................43

Chapter IX. King's Mountain .................................................................................................................54

Chapter X. Sevier, The Statemaker ........................................................................................................62

Chapter XI. Boone's Last Days ..............................................................................................................74

Bibliographical Note ..............................................................................................................................78

This narrative is founded largely on original sourceson the writings and journals of pioneers and

contemporary observers, such as Doddridge and Adair, and on the public documents of the period as printed

in the Colonial Records and in the American Archives. But the author is, nevertheless, greatly indebted to the

researches of, other writers, whose works are cited in the Bibliographical Note. The author's thanks are due,

also, to Dr. Archibald Henderson, of the University of North Carolina, for his kindness in reading the proofs

of this book for comparison with his own extended collection of unpublished manuscripts relating to the

The Ulster Presbyterians, or "ScotchIrish," to whom history has ascribed the dominant role among the

pioneer folk of the Old Southwest, began their migrations to America in the latter years of the seventeenth

century. It is not known with certainty precisely when or where the first immigrants of their race arrived in

this country, but soon after 1680 they were to be found in several of the colonies. It was not long, indeed,

before they were entering in numbers at the port of Philadelphia and were making Pennsylvania the chief

center of their activities in the New World. By 1726 they had established settlements in several counties

behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they had begun their great trek southward through the Shenandoah

Valley of Virginia and on to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There they met others of their own

racebold men like themselves, hungry after landwho were coming in through Charleston and pushing

their way up the rivers from the seacoast to the "Back Country," in search of homes.

These Ulstermen did not come to the New World as novices in the shaping of society; they had already made

history. Their ostensible object in America was to obtain land, but, like most external aims, it was secondary

to a deeper purpose. What had sent the Ulstermen to America was a passion for a whole freedom. They were

lusty men, shrewd and courageous, zealous to the death for an ideal and withal so practical to the moment in

business that it soon came to be commonly reported of them that "they kept the Sabbath and everything else

they could lay their hands on," though it is but fair to them to add that this phrase is current wherever Scots

dwell. They had contested in Parliament and with arms for their own form of worship and for their civil

rights. They were already frontiersmen, trained in the hardihood and craft of border warfare through years of

guerrilla fighting with the Irish Celts. They had pitted and proved their strength against a wilderness; they had

reclaimed the North of Ireland from desolation. For the time, many of them were educated men; under the

regulations of the Presbyterian Church every child was taught to read at an early age, since no person could

be admitted to the privileges of the Church who did not both understand and approve the Presbyterian

constitution and discipline. They were brought up on the Bible and on the writings of their famous pastors,

one of whom, as early as 1650, had given utterance to the democratic doctrine that "men are called to the

magistracy by the suffrage of the people whom they govern, and for men to assume unto themselves power is

mere tyranny and unjust usurpation." In subscribing to this doctrine and in resisting to the hilt all efforts of

successive English kings to interfere in the election of their pastors, the Scots of Ulster had already declared

It was shortly after James VI of Scotland became James I of England and while the English were founding

Jamestown that the Scots had first occupied Ulster; but the true origin of the Ulster Plantation lies further

back, in the reign of Henry VIII, in the days of the English Reformation. In Henry's Irish realm the

Reformation, though proclaimed by royal authority, had never been accomplished; and Henry's more famous

daughter, Elizabeth, had conceived the plan, later to be carried out by James, of planting colonies of

Protestants in Ireland to promote loyalty in that rebellious land. Six counties, comprising half a million acres,

formed the Ulster Plantation. The great majority of the colonists sent thither by James were Scotch

Lowlanders, but among them were many English and a smaller number of Highlanders. These three peoples

from the island of Britain brought forth, through intermarriage, the Ulster Scots.

The reign of Charles I had inaugurated for the Ulstermen an era of persecution. Charles practically

suppressed the Presbyterian religion in Ireland. His son, Charles II, struck at Ireland in 1666 through its cattle

trade, by prohibiting the exportation of beef to England and Scotland. The Navigation Acts, excluding Ireland

from direct trade with the colonies, ruined Irish commerce, while Corporation Acts and Test Acts requiring

conformity with the practices of the Church of England bore heavily on the Ulster Presbyterians.

It was largely by refugees from religious persecution that America in the beginning was colonized. But

religious persecution was only one of the influences which shaped the course and formed the character of the

Ulster Scots. In Ulster, whither they had originally been transplanted by James to found a loyal province in

the midst of the King's enemies, they had done their work too well and had waxed too powerful for the

comfort of later monarchs. The first attacks upon them struck at their religion; but the subsequent legislative

acts which successively ruined the woolen trade, barred nonconformists from public office, stifled Irish

commerce, pronounced nonEpiscopal marriages irregular, and instituted heavy taxation and high rentals for

the land their fathers had made productivethese were blows dealt chiefly for the political and commercial

These attacks, aimed through his religious conscience at the sources of his livelihood, made the Ulster Scot

perforce what he wasa zealot as a citizen and a zealot as a merchant no less than as a Presbyterian. Thanks

to his persecutors, he made a religion of everything he undertook and regarded his civil rights as divine

rights. Thus out of persecution emerged a type of man who was highprincipled and narrow, strong and

violent, as tenacious of his own rights as he was blind often to the rights of others, acquisitive yet

selfsacrificing, but most of all fearless, confident of his own power, determined to have and to hold.

Twenty thousand Ulstermen, it is estimated, left Ireland for America in the first three decades of the

eighteenth century. More than six thousand of them are known to have entered Pennsylvania in 1729 alone,

and twenty years later they numbered onequarter of that colony's population. During the five years

preceding the Revolutionary War more than thirty thousand Ulstermen crossed the ocean and arrived in

America just in time and in just the right frame of mind to return King George's compliment in kind, by

helping to deprive him of his American estates, a domain very much larger than the acres of Ulster. They

fully justified the fears of the good bishop who wrote Lord Dartmouth, Secretary for the Colonies, that he

trembled for the peace of the King's overseas realm, since these thousands of "phanatical and hungry

The Ulstermen who entered by Charleston were known to the inhabitants of the tidewater regions as the

"ScotchIrish." Those who came from the north, lured southward by the offer of cheap lands, were called the

"Pennsylvania Irish." Both were, however, of the same racea race twice expatriated, first from Scotland

and then from Ireland, and stripped of all that it had won throughout more than a century of persecution. To

these exiles the Back Country of North Carolina, with its cheap and even free tracts lying far from the seat of

government, must have seemed not only the Land of Promise but the Land of Last Chance. Here they must

strike their roots into the sod with such interlocking strength that no cataclysm of tyranny should ever

dislodge themor they must accept the fate dealt out to them by their former persecutors and become a tribe

of nomads and serfs. But to these Ulster immigrants such a choice was no choice at all. They knew

themselves strong men, who had made the most of opportunity despite almost superhuman obstacles. The

drumming of their feet along the banks of the Shenandoah, or up the rivers from Charleston, and on through

the broad sweep of the Yadkin Valley, was a conquering people's challenge to the Wilderness which lay

It is maintained still by many, however often disputed, that the Ulstermen were the first to declare for

American Independence, as in the Old Country they were the first to demand the separation of Church and

State. A Declaration of Independence is said to have been drawn up and signed in Mecklenburg County,

North Carolina, on May 20, 1775.* However that maybe, it is certain that these Mecklenburg Protestants had

received special schooling in the doctrine of independence. They had in their midst for eight years (175866)

the Reverend Alexander Craighead, a Presbyterian minister who, for his "republican doctrines" expressed in a

pamphlet, had been disowned by the Pennsylvania Synod acting on the Governor's protest, and so persecuted

in Virginia that he had at last fled to the North Carolina Back Country. There, during the remaining years of

his life, as the sole preacher and teacher in the settlements between the Yadkin and the Catawba rivers he

* See Hoyt, "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence"; and "American Archives," Fourth Series. vol.

There was another branch of the Scottish race which helped to people the Back Country. The Highlanders,

whose loyalty to their oath made them fight on the King's side in the Revolutionary War, have been

somewhat overlooked in history. Tradition, handed down among the transplanted clanswho, for the most

part, spoke only Gaelic for a generation and wrote nothingand latterly recorded by one or two of their

descendants, supplies us with all we are now able to learn of the early coming of the Gaels to Carolina. It

would seem that their first immigration to America in small bands took place after the suppression of the

Jacobite rising in 1715when Highlanders fled in numbers also to Francefor by 1729 there was a

settlement of them on the Cape Fear River. We know, too, that in 1748 it was charged against Gabriel

Johnston, Governor of North Carolina from 1734 to 1752, that he had shown no joy over the King's "glorious

victory of Culloden" and that "he had appointed one William McGregor, who had been in the Rebellion in the

year 1715 a Justice of the Peace during the last Rebellion [1745] and was not himself without suspicion of

disaffection to His Majesty's Government." It is indeed possible that Gabriel Johnston, formerly a professor at

St. Andrew's University, had himself not always been a stranger to the kilt. He induced large numbers of

highlanders to come to America and probably influenced the second George to moderate his treatment of the

vanquished Gaels in the Old Country and permit their emigration to the New World.

In contrast with the Ulstermen, whose secular ideals were dictated by the forms of their Church, these Scots

adhered still to the tribal or clan system, although they, too, in the majority, were Presbyterians, with a

minority of Roman Catholics and Episcopalians. In the Scotch Highlands they had occupied small holdings

on the land under the sway of their chief, or Head of the Clan, to whom they were bound by blood and fealty

but to whom they paid no rentals. The position of the Head of the Clan was hereditary, but no heir was bold

enough to step forward into that position until he had performed some deed of worth. They were principally

herders, their chief stock being the famous small black cattle of the Highlands. Their wars with each other

were cattle raids. Only in war, however, did the Gael lay hands on his neighbor's goods. There were no

highwaymen and housebreakers in the Highlands. No Highland mansion, cot, or barn was ever locked. Theft

and the breaking of an oath, sins against man's honor, were held in such abhorrence that no one guilty of them

could remain among his clansmen in the beloved glens. These Highlanders were a race of tall, robust men,

who lived simply and frugally and slept on the heath among their flocks in all weathers, with no other

covering from rain and snow than their plaidies. It is reported of the Laird of Keppoch, who was leading his

clan to war in winter time, that his men were divided as to the propriety of following him further because he

rolled a snowball to rest his head upon when he lay down. "Now we despair of victory," they said, "since our

* MacLean, "An Historical Account of the Settlement of Scotch High.landers in America."

The "King's glorious victory of Culloden" was followed by a policy of extermination carried on by the orders

and under the personal direction of the Duke of Cumberland. When King George at last restrained his son

from his orgy of blood, he offered the Gaels their lives and exile to America on condition of their taking the

full oath of allegiance. The majority accepted his terms, for not only were their lives forfeit but their crops

and cattle had been destroyed and the holdings on which their ancestors had lived for many centuries taken

from them. The descriptions of the scenes attending their leavetaking of the hills and glens they loved with

such passionate fervor are among the most pathetic in history. Strong men who had met the ravage of a brutal

sword without weakening abandoned themselves to the agony of sorrow. They kissed the walls of their

houses. They flung themselves on the ground and embraced the sod upon which they had walked in freedom.

They called their broken farewells to the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to see; and, as

they turned their backs and filed down through the passes, their pipers played the dirge for the dead.

Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race which entered North Carolina from the coast and

pushed up into the wilderness about the headwaters of Cape Fear River. Tradition indicates that these

hillsmen sought the interior because the grass and pea vine which overgrew the innercountry stretching

towards the mountains provided excellent fodder for the cattle which some of the chiefs are said to have

brought with them. These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible numbers, were in the Yadkin Valley before

1730, possibly even ten years earlier. In 1739 Neil MacNeill of Kintyre brought over a shipload of Gaels to

rejoin his kinsman, Hector MacNeill, called Bluff Hector from his residence near the bluffs at Cross Creek,

now Fayetteville. Some of these immigrants went on to the Yadkin, we are told, to unite with others of their

clan who had been for some time in that district. The exact time of the first Highlander on the Yadkin cannot

be ascertained, as there were no court records and the offices of the land companies were not then open for

the sale of these remote regions. But by 1753 there were not less than four thousand Gaels in Cumberland

County, where they occupied the chief magisterial posts; and they were already spreading over the lands now

comprised within Moore, Anson, Richmond, Robeson, Bladen, and Sampson counties. In these counties

In the years immediately preceding the Revolution and even in 1776 itself they came in increasing numbers.

They knew nothing of the smoldering fire just about to break into flames in the country of their choice, but

the Royal Governor, Josiah Martin, knew that Highland arms would soon be ceded by His Majesty. He knew

something of Highland honor, too; for he would not let the Gaels proceed after their landing until they had

bound themselves by oath to support the Government of King George. So it was that the unfortunate

Highlanders found themselves, according too their strict code of honor, forced to wield arms against the very

Americans who had received and befriended themand for the crowned brother of a prince whose name is

They were led by Allan MacDonald of Kingsborough; and tradition gives us a stirring picture of Allan's

wifethe famous Flora MacDonald, who in Scotland had protected the Young Pretender in his

flightmaking an impassioned address in Gaelic to the Highland soldiers and urging them on to die for

honor's sake. When this Highland force was conquered by the Americans, the large majority willingly bound

themselves not to fight further against the American cause and were set at liberty. Many of them felt that, by

offering their lives to the swords of the Americans, they had canceled their obligation to King George and

were now free to draw their swords again and, this time, in accordance with their sympathies; so they went

Although the brave glory of this pioneer age shines so brightly on the Lion Rampant of Caledonia, not to

Scots alone does that whole glory belong. The second largest racial stream which flowed into the Back

Country of Virginia and North Carolina was German. Most of these Germans went down from Pennsylvania

and were generally called "Pennsylvania Dutch," an incorrect rendering of Pennsylvanische Deutsche. The

upper Shenandoah Valley was settled almost entirely by Germans. They were members of the Lutheran,

German Reformed, and Moravian churches. The cause which sent vast numbers of this sturdy people across

the ocean, during the first years of the eighteenth century, was religious persecution. By statute and by word

the Roman Catholic powers of Austria sought to wipe out the Salzburg Lutherans and the Moravian followers

of John Huss. In that region of the Rhine country known in those days as the German Palatinate, now a part

of Bavaria, Protestants were being massacred by the troops of Louis of France, then engaged in the War of

the Spanish Succession (170113) and in the zealous effort to extirpate heretics from the soil of Europe. In

1708, by proclamation, Good Queen Anne offered protection to the persecuted Palatines and invited them to

her dominions. Twelve thousand of them went to England, where they were warmly received by the English.

But it was no slight task to settle twelve thousand immigrants of an alien speech in England and enable them

to become independent and selfsupporting. A better solution of their problem lay in the Western World: The

Germans needed homes and the Queen's overseas dominions needed colonists. They were settled at first

along the Hudson, and eventually many of them took up lands in the fertile valley of the Mohawk.

For fifty years or more German and Austrian Protestants poured into America. In Pennsylvania their influx

averaged about fifteen hundred a year, and that colony became the distributing center for the German race in

America. By 1727, Adam Muller and his little company had established the first white settlement in the

Valley of Virginia. In 1732 Joist Heydt went south from York, Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opequan

The life of Count Zinzendorf, called "the Apostle," one of the leaders of the Moravian immigrants, glows like

a star out of those dark and troublous times. Of high birth and gentle nurture, he forsook whatever of ease his

station promised him and fitted himsclf for evangelical work. In 1741 he visited the Wyoming Valley to bring

his religion to the Delawares and Shawanoes. He was not of those picturesque Captains of the Lord who bore

their muskets on their shoulders when they went forth to preach. Armored only with the shield of faith, the

helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, his feet "shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace," he

went out into the country of these bloodthirsty tribes and told them that he had come to them in their darkness

to teach the love of the Christ which lighteth the world. The Indians received him suspiciously. One day

while he sat in his tent writing, some Delawares drew near to slay him and were about to strike when they

saw two deadly snakes crawl in from the opposite side of the tent, move directly towards the Apostle, and

pass harmlessly over his body. Thereafter they regarded him as under spiritual protection. Indeed so

widespread was his good fame among the tribes that for some years all Moravian settlements along the

borders were unmolested. Painted savages passed through on their way to war with enemy bands or to raid

the border, but for the sake of one consecrated spirit, whom they had seen death avoid, they spared the lives

and goods of his fellow believers. When Zinzendorf departed a year later, his mantle fell on David

Zeisberger, who lived the love he taught for over fifty years and converted many savages. Zeisberger was

taken before the Governor and army heads at Philadelphia, who had only too good reason to be suspicious of

priestly counsels in the tents of Shem: but he was able to impress white men no less than simple savages with

In 1751 the Moravian Brotherhood purchased one hundred thousand acres in North Carolina from Lord

Granville. Bishop Spangenburg was commissioned to survey this large acreage, which was situated in the

present county of Forsyth east of the Yadkin, and which is historically listed as the Wachovia Tract. In 1753,

twelve Brethren left the Moravian settlements of Bethlehem and Nazareth, in Pennsylvania, and journeyed

southward to begin the founding of a colony on their new land. Brother Adam Grube, one of the twelve, kept

* This diary is printed in full in "Travels in the American Colonies." edited by N. D. Mereness.

Honor to whom honor is due. We have paid it, in some measure, to the primitive Gaels of the Highlands for

their warrior strength and their fealty, and to the enlightened Scots of Ulster for their enterprise and for their

sacrifice unto blood that free conscience and just laws might promote the progress and safeguard the

intercourse of their kind. Now let us take up for a moment Brother Grube's "Journal" even as we welcome,

perhaps the more gratefully, the mild light of evening after the flooding sun, or as our hearts, when too

strongly stirred by the deeds of men, turn for rest to the serene faith and the naive speech of little children.

The twelve, we learn, were under the leadership of one of their number, Brother Gottlob. Their earliest alarms

on the march were not caused, as we might expect, by anticipations of the painted Cherokee, but by

encounters with the strenuous "Irish." One of these came and laid himself to sleep beside the Brethren's camp

fire on their first night out, after they had sung their evening hymn and eleven had stretched themselves on

the earth for slumber, while Brother Gottlob, their leader, hanging his hammock between two trees,

ascendednot only in spirita little higher than his charges, and "rested well in it." Though the alarming

Irishman did not disturb them, the Brethren's doubts of that race continued, for Brother Grube wrote on the

14th of October: "About four in the morning we set up our tent, going four miles beyond Carl Isles [Carlisle,

seventeen miles southwest of Harrisburg] so as not to be too near the Irish Presbyterians. After breakfast the

Brethren shaved and then we rested under our tent.... People who were staying at the Tavern came to see what

kind of folk we were.... Br Gottlob held the evening service and then we lay down around our cheerful fire,

and Br Gottlob in his hammock." Two other jottings give us a racial kaleidoscope of the settlers and

wayfarers of that time. On one day the Brethren bought "some hay from a Swiss," later "some kraut from a

German which tasted very good to us"; and presently "an Englishman came by and drank a cup of tea with us

and was very grateful for it." Frequently the little band paused while some of the Brethren went off to the

farms along the route to help "cut hay." These kindly acts were usually repaid with gifts of food or produce.

One day while on the march they halted at a tavern and farm in Shenandoah Valley kept by a man whose

name Brother Grube wrote down as "Severe." Since we know that Brother Grube's spelling of names other

than German requires editing, we venture to hazard a guess that the name he attempted to set down as it

sounded to him was Sevier. And we wonder if, in his brief sojourn, he saw a lad of eight years, slim, tall, and

blond, with daring and mischievous blue eyes, and a certain, curve of the lips that threatened havoc in the

hearts of both sexes when he should be a man and reach out with swift hands and reckless will for his desires.

If he saw this lad, he beheld John Sevier, later to become one of the most picturesque and beloved heroes of

Hardships abounded on the Brethren's journey, but faith and the Christian's joy, which no man taketh from

him, met and surmounted them. "Three and a half miles beyond, the road forked.... We took the right hand

road but found no water for ten miles. It grew late and we had to drive five miles into the night to find a

stoppingplace." Two of the Brethren went ahead "to seek out the road" through the darkened wilderness.

There were rough hills in the way; and, the horses being exhausted, "Brethren had to help push." But, in due

season, "Br Nathanael held evening prayer and then we slept in the care of Jesus," with Brother Gottlob as

usual in his hammock. Three days later the record runs: "Toward evening we saw Jeams River, the road to it

ran down so very steep a hill that we fastened a small tree to the back of our wagon, locked the wheels, and

the Brethren held back by the tree with all their might." Even then the wagon went down so fast that most of

the Brethren lost their footing and rolled and tumbled pellmell. But Faith makes little of such mishaps: "No

harm was done and we thanked the Lord that he had so graciously protected us, for it looked dangerous and

we thought at times that it could not possibly be done without accident but we got down safely... we were all

very tired and sleepy and let the angels be our guard during the night." Rains fell in torrents, making streams

almost impassable and drenching the little band to the skin. The hammock was empty one night, for they had

to spend the dark hours trenchdigging about their tent to keep it from being washed away. Two days later

(the 10th of November) the weather cleared and "we spent most of the day drying our blankets and mending

and darning our stockings." They also bought supplies from settlers who, as Brother Grube observed without

"are glad we have to remain here so long and that it means money for them. In the afternoon we held a little

Lovefeast and rested our souls in the loving sacrifice of Jesus, wishing for beloved Brethren in Bethlehem

and that they and we might live ever close to Him.... Nov. 16. We rose early to ford the river. The bank was

so steep that we hung a tree behind the wagon, fastening it in such a way that we could quickly release it

when the wagon reached the water. The current was very swift and the lead horses were carried down a bit

with it. The water just missed running into the wagon but we came safely to the other bank, which however

we could not climb but had to take half the things out of the wagon, tie ropes to the axle on which we could

pull, help our horses which were quite stiff, and so we brought our ark again to dry land."

On the evening of the 17th of November the twelve arrived safely on their land on the "Etkin" (Yadkin),

having been six weeks on the march. They found with joy that, as ever, the Lord had provided for them. This

time the gift was a deserted cabin, "large enough that we could all lie down around the walls. We at once

made preparation for a little Lovefeast and rejoiced heartily with one another."

In the deserted log cabin, which, to their faith, seemed as one of those mansions "not built with hands" and

descended miraculously from the heavens, they held their Lovefeast, while wolves padded and howled about

the walls; and in that Pentacostal hour the tongue of fire descended upon Brother Gottlob, so that he made a

new song unto the Lord. Who shall venture to say it is not better worth preserving than many a classic?

We hold arrival Lovefeast here In Carolina land, A company of Brethren true, A little PilgrimBand, Called

by the Lord to be of those Who through the whole world go, To bear Him witness everywhere And nought

Then, we are told, the Brethren lay down to rest and "Br Gottlob hung his hammock above our heads"as

was most fitting on this of all nights; for is not the Poet's place always just a little nearer to the stars?

The pioneers did not always travel in groups. There were families who set off alone. One of these now claims

our attention, for there was a lad in this family whose name and deeds were to sound like a ballad of romance

Neither Scots nor Germans can claim Daniel Boone; he was in blood a blend of English and Welsh; in

character wholly English. His grandfather George Boone was born in 1666 in the hamlet of Stoak, near

Exeter in Devonshire. George Boone was a weaver by trade and a Quaker by religion. In England in his time

the Quakers were oppressed, and George Boone therefore sought information of William Penn, his

coreligionist, regarding the colony which Penn had established in America. In 1712 he sent his three elder

children, George, Sarah, and Squire, to spy out the land. Sarah and Squire remained in Pennsylvania, while

their brother returned to England with glowing reports. On August 17, 1717, George Boone, his wife, and the

rest of his children journeyed to Bristol and sailed for Philadelphia, arriving there on the 10th of October. The

Boones went first to Abingdon, the Quaker farmers' community. Later they moved to the northwestern

frontier hamlet of North Wales, a Welsh community which, a few years previously, had turned Quaker. Sarah

Boone married a German named Jacob Stover, who had settled in Oley Township, Berks County. In 1718

George Boone took up four hundred acres in Oley, or, to be exact, in the subdivision later called Exeter, and

there he lived in his log cabin until 1744, when he died at the age of seventyeight. He left eight children,

fiftytwo grandchildren, and ten greatgrandchildren, seventy descendants in allEnglish, German, Welsh,

Among the Welsh Quakers was a family of Morgans. In 1720 Squire Boone married Sarah Morgan. Ten

years later he obtained 250 acres in Oley on Owatin Creek, eight miles southeast of the present city of

Reading; and here, in 1734, Daniel Boone was born, the fourth son and sixth child of Squire and Sarah

Morgan Boone. Daniel Boone therefore was a son of the frontier. In his childhood he became familiar with

hunters and with Indians, for even the red men came often in friendly fashion to his grandfather's house.

Squire Boone enlarged his farm by thrift. He continued at his trade of weaving and kept five or six looms

Daniel's father owned grazing grounds several miles north of the homestead and each season he sent his stock

to the range. Sarah Boone and her little Daniel drove the cows. From early spring till late autumn, mother and

son lived in a rustic cabin alone on the frontier. A rude dairy house stood over a cool spring, and here Sarah

Boone made her butter and cheese. Daniel, aged ten at this time, watched the herds; at sunset he drove them

He was not allowed firearms at that age, so he shaped for himself a weapon that served him well. This was a

slender smoothly shaved sapling with a small bunch of gnarled roots at one end. So expert was he in the

launching of this primitive spear that he easily brought down birds and small game. When he reached his

twelfth year, his father bought him a rifle; and he soon became a crack shot. A year later we find him setting

off on the autumn huntafter driving the cattle in for the winterwith all the keenness and courage of a man

twice his thirteen years. His rifle enabled him to return with meat for the family and skins to be traded in

Philadelphia. When he was fourteen his brother Sam married Sarah Day, an intelligent young Quakeress who

took a special interest in her young brotherinlaw and taught him "the rudiments of three R's."

The Boones were prosperous and happy in Oley and it may be wondered why they left their farms and their

looms, both of which were profitable, and set their faces towards the Unknown. It is recorded that, though the

Boones were Quakers, they were of a high mettle and were not infrequently dealt with by the Meeting. Two

of Squire Boone's children married "worldlings"non Quakersand were in consequence "disowned" by

the Society. In defiance of his sect, which strove to make him sever all connection with his unruly offspring,

Squire Boone refused to shut his doors on the son and the daughter who had scandalized local Quakerdom.

The Society of Friends thereupon expelled him. This occurred apparently during the winter of 174849. In

the spring of 1750 we see the whole Boone family (save two sons) with their wives and children, their

household goods and their stock, on the great highway, bound for a land where the hot heart and the

Southward through the Shenandoah goes the Boone caravan. The women and children usually sit in the

wagons. The men march ahead or alongside, keeping a keen eye open for Indian or other enemy in the wild,

their rifles under arm or over the shoulder. Squire Boone, who has done with Quakerdom and is leading all

that he holds dear out to larger horizons, is ahead of the line, as we picture him, ready to meet first whatever

danger may assail his tribe. He is a strong wiry man of rather small stature, with ruddy complexion, red hair,

and gray eyes. Somewhere in the line, together, we think, are the mother and son who have herded cattle and

companioned each other through long months in the cabin on the frontier. We do not think of this woman as

riding in the wagon, though she may have done so, but prefer to picture her, with her tall robust body, her

black hair, and her black eyeswith the sudden Welsh snap in themwalking as sturdily as any of her sons.

If Daniel be beside her, what does she see when she looks at him? A lad well set up but not overtall for his

sixteen years, perhapsfor "eyewitnesses" differ in their estimates of Daniel Boone's heightor possibly

taller than he looks, because his figure has the forest hunter's natural slant forward and the droop of the neck

of one who must watch his path sometimes in order to tread silently. It is Squire Boone's blood which shows

in his ruddy facewhich would be fair but for its tanand in the English cut of feature, the strawcolored

eyebrows, and the blue eyes. But his Welsh mother's legacy is seen in the black hair that hangs long and loose

in the hunter's fashion to his shoulders. We can think of Daniel Boone only as exhilarated by this plunge into

the Wild. He sees aheadthe days of his great explorations and warfare, the discovery of Kentucky? Not at

all. This is a boy of sixteen in love with his rifle. He looks ahead to vistas of forest filled with deer and to

skies clouded with flocks of wild turkeys. In that dream there is happiness enough for Daniel Boone. Indeed,

for himself, even in later life, he asked little, if any, more. He trudges on blithely, whistling.

These migrations into the inland valleys of the Old South mark the first great westward thrust of the

American frontier. Thus the beginnings of the westward movement disclose to us a feature characteristic also

of the later migrations which flung the frontier over the Appalachians, across the Mississippi, and finally to

the shores of the Pacific. The pioneers, instead of moving westward by slow degrees, subduing the wilderness

as they went, overleaped great spaces and planted themselves beyond, out of contact with the life they had

left behind. Thus separated by hundreds of miles of intervening wilderness from the more civilized

communities, the conquerors of the first American "West," prototypes of the conquerors of succeeding

"Wests," inevitably struck out their own ways of life and developed their own customs. It would be difficult,

indeed, to find anywhere a more remarkable contrast in contemporary folkways than that presented by the

two great community groups of the Souththe inland or piedmont settlements, called the Back Country, and

The older society of the seaboard towns, as events were soon to prove, was not less independent in its ideals

than the frontier society of the Back Country; but it was aristocratic in tone and feeling. Its leaders were the

landed gentrymen of elegance, and not far behind their European contemporaries in the culture of the day.

They were rich, without effort, both from their plantations, where black slaves and indentured servants

labored, and from their coastwise and overseas trade. Their battles with forest and red man were long past.

They had leisure for diversions such as the chase, the breeding and racing of thoroughbred horses, the dance,

high play with dice and card, cockfighting, the gallantry of love, and the skill of the rapier. Law and politics

Very different were the conditions which confronted the pioneers in the first American "West." There every

jewel of promise was ringed round with hostility. The cheap land the pioneer had purchased at a nominal

price, or the free land he had taken by "tomahawk claim"that is by cutting his name into the bark of a

deadened tree, usually beside a springsupported a forest of tall trunks and interlacing leafage. The long

grass and weeds which covered the ground in a wealth of natural pasturage harbored the poisonous

copperhead and the rattlesnake and, being shaded by the overhead foliage, they held the heavy dews and bred

swarms of mosquitoes, gnats, and big flies which tortured both men and cattle. To protect the cattle and

horses from the attacks of these pests the settlers were obliged to build large "smudges"fires of green

timberagainst the wind. The animals soon learned to back up into the dense smoke and to move from one

grazing spot to another as the wind changed. But useful as were the green timber fires that rolled their smoke

on the wind to save the stock, they were at the same time a menace to the pioneer, for they proclaimed to

roving bands of Cherokees that a further encroachment on their territory had been made by their most hated

enemiesthe men who felled the hunter's forest. Many an outpost pioneer who had made the long hard

journey by sea and land from the old world of persecution to this new country of freedom, dropped from the

red man's shot ere he had hewn the threshold of his home, leaving his wife and children to the unrecorded

Those more fortunate pioneers who settled in groups won the first heat in the battle with the wilderness

through massed effort under wariness. They made their clearings in the forest, built their cabins and

stockades, and planted their cornfields, while lookouts kept watch and rifles were stacked within easy reach.

Every special task, such as a "raising," as cabin building was called, was undertaken by the community

chiefly because the Indian danger necessitated swift building and made group action imperative. But the

stanch heart is ever the glad heart. Nothing in this frontier history impresses us more than the joy of the

pioneer at his labors. His determined optimism turned danger's dictation into an occasion for jollity. On the

appointed day for the "raising," the neighbors would come, riding or afoot, to the newcomer's holdingthe

men with their rifles and axes, the women with their pots and kettles. Every child toddled along, too, helping

to carry the wooden dishes and spoons. These free givers of labor had something of the Oriental's notion of

The usual dimensions of a cabin were sixteen by twenty feet. The timber for the building, having been

already cut, lay at handlogs of hickory, oak, young pine, walnut, or persimmon. To make the foundations,

the men seized four of the thickest logs, laid them in place, and notched and grooved and hammered them

into as close a clinch as if they had grown so. The wood must grip by its own substance alone to hold up the

pioneer's dwelling, for there was not an iron nail to be had in the whole of the Back Country. Logs laid upon

the foundation logs and notched into each other at the four corners formed the walls; and, when these stood at

seven feet, the builders laid parallel timbers and puncheons to make both flooring and ceiling. The ridgepole

of the roof was supported by two crotched trees and the roofing was made of logs and wooden slabs. The

crevices of the walls were packed close with red clay and moss. Lastly, spaces for a door and windows were

cut out. The door was made thick and heavy to withstand the Indian's rush. And the windowpanes? They

When the sun stood overhead, the women would give the welcome call of "Dinner!" Their morning had not

been less busy than the men's. They had baked corn cakes on hot stones, roasted bear or pork, or broiled

venison steaks; andabove all and first of all they had concocted the great "stew pie" without which a

raising could hardly take place. This was a disputatious mixture of deer, hog, and bearanimals which, in

life, would surely have companioned each other as ill! It was made in sufficient quantity to last over for

supper when the day's labor was done. At supper the men took their ease on the ground, but with their rifles

always in reach. If the cabin just raised by their efforts stood in the Yadkin, within sight of the great

mountains the pioneers were one day to cross, perhaps a sudden bird note warning from the lookout, hidden

in the brush, would bring the builders with a leap to their feet. It might be only a hunting band of friendly

Catawbas that passed, or a lone Cherokee who knew that this was not his hour. If the latter, we can, in

imagination, see him look once at the new house on his hunting pasture, slacken rein for a moment in front of

the group of families, lift his hand in sign of peace, and silently go his way hillward. As he vanishes into the

shadows, the crimson sun, sinking into the unknown wilderness beyond the mountains, pours its last glow on

the roof of the cabin and on the group near its walls. With unfelt fingers, subtly, it puts the red touch of the

West in the faces of the menwho have just declared, through the building of a cabin, that here is Journey's

There were community holidays among these pioneers as well as labor days, especially in the fruit season;

and there were flowerpicking excursions in the warm spring days. Early in April the service berry bush

gleamed starrily along the watercourses, its hardy white blooms defying winter's lingering look. This

bushor tree, indeed, since it is not afraid to rear its slender trunk as high as cherry or crab applemight

well be considered emblematic of the frontier spirit in those regions where the white silence covers the earth

for several months and shuts the lonely homesteader in upon himself. From the pioneer time of the Old

Southwest to the last frontier of the Far North today, the service berry is cherished alike by white men and

Indians; and the red men have woven about it some of their prettiest legends. When June had ripened the

tree's blueblack berries, the Back Country folk went out in parties to gather them. Though the service berry

was a food staple on the frontier and its gathering a matter of household economy, the folk made their

berrypicking jaunt a gala occasion. The women and children with pots and basketsthe young girls vying

with each other, under the eyes of the youths, as to who could strip boughs the fastestplucked gayly while

the men, rifles in hand, kept guard. For these happy summer days were also the red man's scalping days and,

at any moment, the chatter of the picnickers might be interrupted by the chilling war whoop. When that sound

was heard, the berry pickers raced for the fort. The wild fruitsstrawberries, service berries, cherries, plums,

crab appleswere, however, too necessary a part of the pioneer's meager diet to be left unplucked out of fear

of an Indian attack. Another day would see the same group out again. The children would keep closer to their

mothers, no doubt; and the laughter of the young girls would be more subdued, even if their coquetry lacked

nothing of its former effectiveness. Early marriages were the rule in the Back Country and betrothals were

As we consider the descriptions of the frontiersman left for us by travelers of his own day, we are not more

interested in his battles with wilderness and Indian than in the visible effects of both wilderness and Indian

upon him. His countenance and bearing still show the European, but the European greatly altered by savage

contact. The red peril, indeed, influenced every side of frontier life. The bands of women and children at the

harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings, were not there merely to lighten the men's work by their

laughter and lovemaking. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins, for, to the Indian, the cabin thus

boldly thrust upon his immemorial hunting grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater evil was the white

man's family, bespeaking the increase of the dreaded palefaces. The Indian peril trained the pioneers to

alertness, shaped them as warriors and hunters, suggested the fashion of their dress, knit their families into

clans and the clans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in the protection of each and all and a unit of

Too often the fields which the pioneer planted with corn were harvested by the Indian with fire. The hardest

privations suffered by farmers and stock were due to the settlers having to flee to the forts, leaving to Indian

devastation the crops on which their sustenance mainly, depended. Sometimes, fortunately, the warning came

in time for the frontiersman to collect his goods and chattels in his wagon and to round up his live stock and

drive them safely into the common fortified enclosure. At others, the tap of the "express"as the herald of

Indian danger was calledat night on the windowpane and the low word whispered hastily, ere the "express"

ran on to the next abode, meant that the Indians had surprised the outlying cabins of the settlement.

The forts were built as centrally as possible in the scattered settlements. They consisted of cabins,

blockhouses, and stockades. A range of cabins often formed one side of a fort. The walls on the outside were

ten or twelve feet high with roofs sloping inward. The blockhouses built at the angles of the fort projected

two feet or so beyond the outer walls of the cabins and stockades, and were fitted with portholes for the

watchers and the marksmen. The entrance to the fort was a large folding gate of thick slabs. It was always on

the side nearest the spring. The whole structure of the fort was bulletproof and was erected without an iron

nail or spike. In the border wars these forts withstood all attacks. The savages, having proved that they could

not storm them, generally laid siege and waited for thirst to compel a sortie. But the crafty besieger was as

often outwitted by the equally cunning defender. Some daring soul, with silent feet and perhaps with naked

body painted in Indian fashion, would drop from the wall under cover of the night, pass among the foemen to

Into the pioneer's phrasemaking the Indian influence penetrated so that he named seasons for his foe. So

thoroughly has the term "Indian Summer," now to us redolent of charm, become disassociated from its

origins that it gives us a shock to be reminded that to these Back Country folk the balmy days following on

the cold snap meant the season when the red men would come back for a last murderous raid on the

settlements before winter should seal up the land. The "Powwowing Days" were the mellow days in the latter

part of February, when the red men in council made their medicine and learned of their redder gods whether

or no they should take the warpath when the sap pulsed the trees into leaf. Even the children at their play

acknowledged the redskinned schoolmaster, for their chief games were a training in his woodcraft and in the

use of his weapons. Tomahawkthrowing was a favorite sport because of its gruesome practical purposes.

The boys must learn to gauge the tomahawk's revolutions by the distance of the throw so as to bury the blade

in its objective. Swift running and high jumping through the brush and fallen timber were sports that taught

agility in escape. The boys learned to shoot accurately the long rifles of their time, with a log or a forked stick

for a rest, and a moss pad under the barrel to keep it from jerking and spoiling the aim. They wrestled with

each other, mastered the tricks of throwing an opponent, and learned the scalp hold instead of the toe hold. It

was part of their education to imitate the noises of every bird and beast of the forest. So they learned to lure

the turkey within range, or by the bleat of a fawn to bring her dam to the rifle. A wellsimulated wolf's howl

would call forth a response and so inform the lone hunter of the vicinity of the pack. This forest speech was

not only the language of diplomacy in the hunting season; it was the borderer's secret code in war. Stray

Indians put themselves in touch again with the band by turkey calls in the daytime and by owl or wolf notes

at night. The frontiersmen used the same means to trick the Indian band into betraying the place of its

In that age, before the forests had given place to farms and cities and when the sun had but slight

acquaintance with the sod, the summers were cool and the winters long and cold in the Back Country.

Sometimes in September severe frosts destroyed the corn. The first light powdering called "hunting snows"

fell in October, and then the men of the Back Country set out on the chase. Their object was meatbuffalo,

deer, elk, bearfor the winter larder, and skins to send out in the spring by packhorses to the coast in trade

for iron, steel, and salt. The rainfall in North Carolina was much heavier than in Virginia and, from autumn

into early winter, the Yadkin forests were sheeted with rain; but wet weather, so far from deterring the hunter,

aided him to the kill. In blowing rain, he knew he would find the deer herding in the sheltered places on the

hillsides. In windless rain, he knew that his quarry ranged the open woods and the high places. The fair play

of the pioneer held it a great disgrace to kill a deer in winter when the heavy frost had crusted the deep snow.

On the crust men and wolves could travel with ease, but the deer's sharp hoofs pierced through and made him

defenseless. Wolves and dogs destroyed great quantities of deer caught in this way; and men who shot deer

under these conditions were considered no huntsmen. There was, indeed, a practical side to this chivalry of

the chase, for meat and pelt were both poor at this season; but the true hunter also obeyed the finer tenet of

his code, for he would go to the rescue of deer caught in the crustsand he killed many a wolf sliding over

The community moral code of the frontier was brief and rigorous. What it lacked of the "whereas" and

"inasmuch" of legal ink it made up in sound hickory. In fact, when we review the activities of this solid yet

elastic wood in the moral, social, and economic phases of Back Country life, we are moved to wonder if the

pioneers would have been the same race of men had they been nurtured beneath a less strenuous and

adaptable vegetation! The hickory gave the frontiersman wood for all implements and furnishings where the

demand was equally for lightness, strength, and elasticity. It provided his straight logs for building, his block

mortars hollowedby fire and stonefor corngrinding, his solid plain furniture, his axles, rifle butts, ax

handles, and so forth. It supplied his magic wand for the searching out of iniquity in the junior members of

his household, and his most cogent argument, as a citizen, in convincing the slothful, the blasphemous, or the

dishonest adult whose errors disturbed communal harmony. Its nuts fed his hogs. Before he raised stock, the

unripe hickory nuts, crushed for their white liquid, supplied him with butter for his corn bread and helped out

his store of bear's fat. Both the name and the knowledge of the uses of this tree came to the earliest pioneers

through contact with the red man, whose hunting bow and fishing spear and the hobbles for his horses were

fashioned of the "pohickory" tree. The Indian women first made pohickory butter, and the wise old men of

the Cherokee towns, so we are told, first applied the pohickory rod to the vanity of youth!

A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country of Virginia or North Carolina would show, in

primitive design, what is, perhaps, after all the perfect homea place where the personal life and the work

life are united and where nothing futile finds space. Every object in the cabin was practical and had been

made by hand on the spot to answer a need. Besides the chairs hewn from hickory blocks, there were others

made of slabs set on three legs. A large slab or two with four legs served as a movable table; the permanent

table was built against the wall, its outer edge held up by two sticks. The low bed was built into the wall in

the same way and softened for slumber by a mattress of pine needles, chaff, or dried moss. In the best light

from the greased paper windowpanes stood the spinning wheel and loom, on which the housewife made cloth

for the family's garments. Over the fireplace or beside the doorway, and suspended usually on stags' antlers,

hung the firearms and the yellow powderhorns, the latter often carved in Indian fashion with scenes of the

hunt or war. On a shelf or on pegs were the wooden spoons, plates, bowls, and noggins. Also near the

fireplace, which was made of large flat stones with a mudplastered log chimney, stood the grinding block

for making hominy. If it were an evening in early spring, the men of the household would be tanning and

dressing deerskins to be sent out with the trade caravan, while the women sewed, made moccasins or mended

them, in the light of pine knots or candles of bear's grease. The larger children might be weaving cradles for

the babies, Indian fashion, out of hickory twigs; and there would surely be a sound of whetting steel, for

scalping knives and tomahawks must be kept keentempered now that the days have come when the red gods

The Back Country folk, as they came from several countries, generally settled in national groups, each

preserving its own speech and its own religion, each approaching frontier life through its own native

temperament. And the frontier met each and all alike, with the same need and the same menace, and molded

them after one general pattern. If the cabin stood in a typical Virginian settlement where the folk were of

English stock, it may be that the dulcimer and some old love song of the homeland enlivened the workor

perhaps chairs were pushed back and young people danced the country dances of the homeland and the

Virginia Reel, for these Virginian English were merry folk, and their religion did not frown upon the dance.

In a cabin on the Shenandoah or the upper Yadkin the German tongue clicked away over the evening dish of

kraut or sounded more sedately in a Lutheran hymn; while from some herder's but on the lower Yadkin the

wild note of the bagpipes or of the ancient fourstringed harp mingled with the Gaelic speech.

Among the homes in the Shenandoah where old England's ways prevailed, none was gayer than the tavern

kept by the man whom the good Moravian Brother called "Severe." There perhaps the feasting celebrated the

nuptials of John Sevier, who was barely past his seventeenth birthday when he took to himself a wife. Or

perhaps the dancing, in moccasined feet on the puncheon flooring, was a ceremonial to usher into Back

Country life the new municipality John had just organized, for John at nineteen had taken his earliest step

towards his larger career, which we shall follow later on, as the architect of the first little governments

In the Boone home on the Yadkin, we may guess that the talk was solely of the hunt, unless young Daniel

had already become possessed of his first compass and was studying its ways. On such an evening, while the

red afterglow lingered, he might be mending a passing trader's firearms by the fires of the primitive forge his

father had set up near the trading path running from Hillsborough to the Catawba towns. It was said by the

local nimrods that none could doctor a sick rifle better than young Daniel Boone, already the master

huntsman of them all. And perhaps some trader's tale, told when the caravan halted for the night, kindled the

youth's first desire to penetrate the mountainguarded wilderness, for the tales of these Romanies of

commerce were as the very badge of their freemasonry, and entry money at the doors of strangers.

Out on the border's edge, heedless of the shadow of the mountains looming between the newly built cabin

and that western land where they and their kind were to write the fame of the Ulster Scot in a shining script

that time cannot dull, there might sit a group of sternfaced men, all deep in discussion of some point of

spiritual doctrine or of the temporal rights of men. Yet, in every cabin, whatever the national differences, the

setting was the same The spirit of the frontier was modeling out of old clay a new Adam to answer the needs

It would be far less than just to leave the Back Country folk without further reference to the devoted labors of

their clergy. In the earliest days the settlers were cut off from their church systems; the pious had to maintain

their piety unaided, except in the rare cases where a pastor accompanied a group of settlers of his

denomination into the wilds. One of the first ministers who fared into the Back Country to remind the Ulster

Presbyterians of their spiritual duties was the Reverend Hugh McAden of Philadelphia. He made long

itineraries under the greatest hardships, in constant danger from Indians and wild beasts, carrying the counsel

of godliness to the far scattered flock. Among the Highland settlements the Reverend James Campbell for

thirty years traveled about, preaching each Sunday at some gathering point a sermon in both English and

Gaelic. A little later, in the Yadkin Valley, after Craighead's day there arose a small school of Presbyterian

ministers whose zeal and fearlessness in the cause of religion and of just government had an influence on the

But, in the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery of border life, grappled with it, and reacted to it

without guidance from other mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the primal threefold need

family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the day's work was done. We who look back with thoughtful eyes

upon the frontiersmanall links of contact with his racial past severed, at grips with destruction in the

contenting of his needssee something more, something larger, than he saw in the log cabin raised by his

hands, its structure held together solely by his close grooving and fitting of its own strength. Though the

walls he built for himself have gone with his own dust back to the earth, the symbol he erected for us stands.

The trader was the first pathfinder. His caravans began the change of purpose that was to come to the Indian

warrior's route, turning it slowly into the beaten track of communication and commerce. The settlers, the

rangers, the surveyors, went westward over the trails which he had blazed for them years before. Their

enduring works are commemorated in the cities and farms which today lie along every ancient border line;

but of their forerunner's hazardous Indian trade nothing remains. Let us therefore pay a moment's homage

here to the trader, who firstto borrow a phrase from Indian speechmade white for peace the red trails of

He was the first cattleman of the Old Southwest. Fifty years before John Findlay,* one of this class of

pioneers, led Daniel Boone through Cumberland Gap, the trader's bands of horses roamed the western slopes

of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattle grazed among the deer on the green banks of the old Cherokee

(Tennessee) River. He was the pioneer settler beyond the high hills; for he built, in the center of the Indian

towns, the first white man's cabinwith its larger annex, the trading houseand dwelt there during the

greater part of the year. He was America's first magnate of international commerce. His fursfor which he

paid in guns, knives, ammunition, vermilion paint, mirrors, and clothlined kings' mantles, and hatted the

Lords of Trade as they strode to their council chamber in London to discuss his business and to pass those

regulations which might have seriously hampered him but for his resourcefulness in circumventing them!

He was the first frontier warrior, for he either fought off or fell before small parties of hostile Indians who, in

the interest of the Spanish or French, raided his packhorse caravans on the march. Often, too, side by side

with the red brothers of his adoption, he fought in the intertribal wars. His was the first educative and

civilizing influence in the Indian towns. He endeavored to cure the Indians of their favorite midsummer

madness, war, by inducing them to raise stock and poultry and improve their corn, squash, and pea gardens. It

is not necessary to impute to him philanthropic motives. He was a practical man and he saw that war hurt his

trade: it endangered his summer caravans and hampered the autumn hunt for deerskins.

In the earliest days of the eighteenth century, when the colonists of Virginia and the Carolinas were only a

handful, it was the trader who defeated each successive attempt of French and Spanish agents to weld the

tribes into a confederacy for the annihilation of the English settlements. The English trader did his share to

prevent what is now the United States from becoming a part of a Latin empire and to save it for a race having

The colonial records of the period contain items which, taken singly, make small impression on the casual

reader but which, listed together, throw a strong light on the past and bring that mercenary figure, the trader,

into so bold a relief that the design verges on the heroic. If we wonder, for instance, why the Scotch

Highlanders who settled in the wilds at the headwaters of the Cape Fear River, about 1729, and were later

followed by Welsh and Huguenots, met with no opposition from the Indians, the mystery is solved when we

discover, almost by accident, a few printed lines which record that, in 1700, the hostile natives on the Cape

Fear were subdued to the English and brought into friendly alliance with them by Colonel William Bull, a

trader. We read further and learn that the Spaniards in Florida had long endeavored to unite the tribes in

Spanish and French territory against the English and that the influence of traders prevented the

consummation. The Spaniards, in 1702, had prepared to invade English territory with nine hundred Indians.

The plot was discovered by Creek Indians and disclosed to their friends, the traders, who immediately

gathered together five hundred warriors, marched swiftly to meet the invaders, and utterly routed them.

Again, when the Indians, incited by the Spanish at St. Augustine, rose against the English in 1715, and the

Yamasi Massacre occurred in South Carolina, it was due to the traders that some of the settlements at least

The early English trader was generally an intelligent man; sometimes educated, nearly always fearless and

resourceful. He knew the one sure basis on which men of alien blood and far separated stages of moral and

intellectual development can meet in understandingnamely, the truth of the spoken word. He recognized

honor as the bond of trade and the warp and woof of human intercourse. The uncorrupted savage also had his

plain interpretation of the true word in the mouths of men, and a name for it. He called it the "Old Beloved

Speech"; and he gave his confidence to the man who spoke this speech even in the close barter for furs.

We shall find it worth while to refer to the map of America as it was in the early days of the colonial fur

trade, about the beginning of the eighteenth century. A narrow strip of loosely strung English settlements

stretched from the north border of New England to the Florida line. North Florida was Spanish territory. On

the far distant southwestern borders of the English colonies were the southern possessions of France. The

French sphere of influence extended up the Mississippi, and thence by way of rivers and the Great Lakes to

its base in Canada on the borders of New England and New York. In South Carolina dwelt the Yamasi tribe

of about three thousand warriors, their chief towns only sixty or eighty miles distant from the Spanish town

of St. Augustine. On the west, about the same distance northeast of New Orleans, in what is now Alabama

and Georgia, lay the Creek nation. There French garrisons held Mobile and Fort Alabama. The Creeks at this

time numbered over four thousand warriors. The lands of the Choctaws, a tribe of even larger fighting

strength, began two hundred miles north of New Orleans and extended along the Mississippi. A hundred and

sixty miles northeast of the Choctaw towns were the Chickasaws, the bravest and most successful warriors of

all the tribes south of the Iroquois. The Cherokees, in part seated within the Carolinas, on the upper courses

of the Savannah River, mustered over six thousand men at arms. East of them were the Catawba towns. North

of them were the Shawanoes and Delawares, in easy communication with the tribes of Canada. Still farther

north, along the Mohawk and other rivers joining with the Hudson and Lake Ontario stood the "long houses"

of the fiercest and most warlike of all the savages, the Iroquois or Six Nations.

The Indians along the English borders outnumbered the colonists perhaps ten to one. If the Spanish and the

French had succeeded in the conspiracy to unite on their side all the tribes, a red billow of tomahawk wielders

would have engulfed and extinguished the English settlements. The French, it is true, made allies of the

Shawanoes, the Delawares, the Choctaws, and a strong faction of the Creeks; and they finally won over the

Cherokees after courting them for more than twenty years. But the Creeks in part, the powerful Chickasaws,

and the Iroquois Confederacy, or Six Nations, remained loyal to the English. In both North and South it was

the influence of the traders that kept these red tribes on the English side. The Iroquois were held loyal by Sir

William Johnson and his deputy, George Croghan, the "King of Traders." The Chickasaws followed their

"bestbeloved" trader, James Adair; and among the Creeks another trader, Lachlan McGillivray, wielded a

Lachlan McGillivray was a Highlander. He landed in Charleston in 1735 at the age of sixteen and presently

joined a trader's caravan as packhorse boy. A few years later he married a woman of the Creeks. On many

occasions he defeated French and Spanish plots with the Creeks for the extermination of the colonists in

Georgia and South Carolina. His action in the final war with the French (1760), when the Indian terror was

raging, is typical. News came that four thousand Creek warriors, reinforced by French Choctaws, were about

to fall on the southern settlements. At the risk of their lives, McGillivray and another trader named Galphin

hurried from Charleston to their trading house on the Georgia frontier. Thither they invited several hundred

Creek warriors, feasted and housed them for several days, and finally won them from their purpose.

McGillivray had a brilliant son, Alexander, who about this time became a chief in his mother's nation perhaps

on this very occasion, as it was an Indian custom, in making a brotherhood pact, to send a son to dwell in the

brother's house. We shall meet that son again as the Chief of the Creeks and the terrible scourge of Georgia

The bold deeds of the early traders, if all were to be told, would require a book as long as the huge volume

written by James Adair, the "English Chickasaw." Adair was an Englishman who entered the Indian trade in

1785 and launched upon the long and dangerous trail from Charleston to the upper towns of the Cherokees,

situated in the present Monroe County, Tennessee. Thus he was one of the earliest pioneers of the Old

Southwest; and he was Tennessee's first author. "I am well acquainted," he says, "with near two thousand

miles of the American continent"a statement which gives one some idea of an early trader's enterprise,

hardihood, and peril. Adair's "two thousand miles" were twisting Indian trails and paths he slashed out for

himself through uninhabited wilds, for when not engaged in trade, hunting, literature, or war, it pleased him

to make solitary trips of exploration. These seem to have led him chiefly northward through the

A manysided man was James Adaircultured, for his style suffers not by comparison with other writers of

his day, no stranger to Latin and Greek, and not ignorant of Hebrew, which he studied to assist him in setting

forth his ethnological theory that the American Indians were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

Before we dismiss his theory with a smile, let us remember that he had not at his disposal the data now

available which reveal points of likeness in custom, language formation, and symbolism among almost all

primitive peoples. The formidable titlepage of his book in itself suggests an author keenly observant,

accurate as to detail, and possessed of a versatile and substantial mind. Most of the pages were written in the

towns of the Chickasaws, with whom he lived "as a friend and brother," but from whose "natural jealousy"

and "prying disposition" he was obliged to conceal his papers. "Never," he assures us, "was a literary work

Despite these disabilities the author wrote a book of absorbing interest. His intimate sympathetic pictures of

Indian life as it was before the tribes had been conquered are richly valuable to the lover of native lore and to

the student of the history of white settlement. The author believes, as he must, in the supremacy of his own

race, but he nevertheless presents the Indians' side of the argument as no man could who had not made

himself one of them. He thereby adds interest to those fierce struggles which took place along the border; for

he shows us the red warrior not as a mere brute with a tomahawk but as a human creature with an ideal of his

own, albeit an ideal that must give place to a better. Even in view of the red man's hideous methods of battle

and inhuman treatment of captives, we cannot ponder unmoved Adair's description of his preparations for

warthe fasting, the abstention from all family intercourse, and the purification rites and prayers for three

days in the house set apart, while the women, who might not come close to their men in this fateful hour,

stood throughout the night till dawn chanting before the door. Another poetic touch the author gives us, from

the Cherokeeor Cheerake as he spells itexplaining that the root, cheera, means fire. A Cherokee never

extinguished fire save on the occasion of a death, when he thrust a burning torch into the water and said,

Neetah intahah"the days appointed him were finished." The warrior slain in battle was held to have been

balanced by death and it was said of him that "he was weighed on the path and made light." Adair writes that

the Cherokees, until corrupted by French agents and by the later class of traders who poured rum among them

like water, were honest, industrious, and friendly. They were ready to meet the white man with their

customary phrase of good will "I shall firmly shake hands with your speech." He was intimately associated

with this tribe from 1735 to 1744, when he diverted his activities to the Chickasaws.

It was from the Cherokees' chief town, Great Telliko, in the Appalachians, that Adair explored the mountains.

He describes the pass through the chain which was used by the Indians and which, from his outline of it, was

probably the Cumberland Gap. He relates many incidents of the struggle with the French manifestations

even in this remote wilderness of the vast conflict that was being waged for the New World by two imperial

Adair undertook, at the solicitation of Governor Glen of South Carolina, the dangerous task of opening up

trade with the Choctaws; a tribe mustering upwards of five thousand warriors who were wholly in the French

interest. Their country lay in what is now the State of Mississippi along the great river, some seven hundred

miles west and southwest of Charleston. After passing the friendly Creek towns the trail led on for 150 miles

through what was practically the enemy's country. Adair, owing to what he likes to term his "usual good

fortune," reached the Choctaw country safely and by his adroitness and substantial presents won the

friendship of the influential chief, Red Shoe, whom he found in a receptive mood, owing to a French agent's

breach of hospitality involving Red Shoe's favorite wife. Adair thus created a large proEnglish faction among

the Choctaws, and his success seriously impaired French prestige with all the southwestern tribes. Several

times French Choctaws bribed to murder him, waylaid Adair on the trailtwice when he was aloneonly to

be baffled by the imperturbable selfpossession and alert wit which never failed him in emergencies.

Winning a Choctaw trade cost Adair, besides attacks on his life, 2200 pounds, for which he was never

reimbursed, notwithstanding Governor Glen's agreement with him. And, on his return to Charleston, while

the Governor was detaining him "on one pretext or another," he found that a new expedition, which the

Governor was favoring for reasons of his own, had set out to capture his Chickasaw trade and gather in "the

expected great crop of deerskins and beaver...before I could possibly return to the Chikkasah Country."

"In the severity of winter, frost, snow, hail and heavy rains succeed each other in these climes, so that I partly

rode and partly swam to the Chikkasah country; for not expecting to stay long below [in Charleston] I took

no leathern canoe. Many of the broad, deep creeks...had now overflowed their banks, ran at a rapid rate and

were unpassable to any but DESPERATE PEOPLE... the rivers and swamps were dreadful by rafts of timber

driving down the former and the great fallen trees floating in the latter.... Being forced to wade deep through

cane swamps or woody thickets, it proved very troublesome to keep my firearms dry on which, as a second

Nevertheless Adair defeated the Governor's attempt to steal his trade, and later on published the whole story

in the Charleston press and sent in a statement of his claims to the Assembly, with frank observations on His

Excellency himself. We gather that his bold disregard of High Personages set all Charleston in an uproar!

Adair is tantalizingly modest about his own deeds. He devotes pages to prove that an Indian rite agrees with

the Book of Leviticus but only a paragraph to an exploit of courage and endurance such as that ride and swim

for the Indian trade. We have to read between the lines to find the man; but he well repays the search. Briefly,

incidentally, he mentions that on one trip he was captured by the French, who were so

"well acquainted with the great damages I had done to them and feared others I might occasion, as to confine

me a close prisoner ...in the Alebahma garrison. They were fully resolved to have sent me down to Mobile or

New Orleans as a capital criminal to be hanged...BUT I DOUBTED NOT OF BEING ABLE TO

EXTRICATE MYSELF SOME WAY OR OTHER. They appointed double centries over me for some days

before I was to be sent down in the French King's large boat. They were strongly charged against laying

down their weapons or suffering any hostile thing to be in the place where I was kept, as they deemed me

capable of any mischief.... About an hour before we were to set off by water I escaped from them by land.... I

took through the middle of the low land covered with briers at full speed. I heard the French clattering on

horseback along the path...and the howling savages pursuing..., but MY USUAL GOOD FORTUNE enabled

One feels that a few of the pages given up to Leviticus might well have been devoted to a detailed account of

this escape from "double centries" and a fortified garrison, and the plunge through the tangled wilds, by a

man without gun or knife or supplies, and who for days dared not show himself upon the trail.

There is too much of "my usual good fortune" in Adair's narrative; such luck as his argues for extraordinary

resources in the man. Sometimes we discover only through one phrase on a page that he must himself have

been the hero of an event he relates in the third person. This seems to be the case in the affair of Priber, which

was the worst of those "damages" Adair did to the French. Priber was "a gentleman of curious and

speculative temper" sent by the French in 1786 to Great Telliko to win the Cherokees to their interest. At this

"more effectually to answer the design of his commission...ate, drank, slept, danced, dressed, and painted

himself with the Indians, so that it was not easy to distinguish him from the natives,he married also with

them, and being endued with a strong understanding and retentive memory he soon learned their dialect, and

by gradual advances impressed them with a very ill opinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent,

avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflated the artless savages with a prodigious high

opinion of their own importance in the American scale of power.... Having thus infected them...he easily

formed them into a nominal republican governmentcrowned their old Archimagus emperor after a pleasing

new savage form, and invented a variety of highsounding titles for all the members of his imperial majesty's

Priber cemented the Cherokee empire "by slow but sure degrees to the very great danger of our southern

colonies." His position was that of Secretary of State and as such, with a studiedly provocative arrogance, he

carried on correspondence with the British authorities. The colonial Government seems, on this occasion, to

have listened to the traders and to have realized that Priber was a danger, for soldiers were sent to take him

prisoner. The Cherokees, however, had so firmly "shaked hands" with their Secretary's admired discourse that

they threatened to take the warpath if their beloved man were annoyed, and the soldiers went home without

himto the great hurt of English prestige. The Cherokee empire had now endured for five years and was

about to rise "into a far greater state of puissance by the acquisition of the Muskohge, Chocktaw and the

Western Mississippi Indians," when fortunately for the history of British colonization in America, "an

It is in connection with this "accident" that the reader suspects the modest but resourceful Adair of conniving

with Fate. Since the military had failed and the Government dared not again employ force, other means must

be found; the trader provided them. The Secretary with his Cherokee bodyguard journeyed south on his

mission to the Creeks. Secure, as he supposed, he lodged overnight in an Indian town. But there a company of

English traders took him into custody, along with his bundle of manuscripts presumably intended for the

French commandant at Fort Alabama, and handed him over to the Governor of Georgia, who imprisoned him

As a Briton, Adair contributed to Priber's fate; and as such he approves it. As a scholar with philosophical

and ethnological leanings, however, he deplores it, and hopes that Priber's valuable manuscripts may "escape

the despoiling hands of military power." Priber had spent his leisure in compiling a Cherokee dictionary;

Adair's occupation, while domiciled in his winter house in Great Telliko, was the writing of his Indian

Appendix to the Pentateuch. As became brothers in science, they had exchanged notes, so we gather from

Adair's references to conversations and correspondence. Adair's difficulties as an author, however, had been

increased by a treacherous lapse from professional etiquette on the part of the Secretary: "He told them [the

Indians] that in the very same manner as he was their great Secretary, I was the devil's clerk, or an accursed

one who marked on paper the bad speech of the evil ones of darkness." On his own part Adair admits that his

object in this correspondence was to trap the Secretary into something more serious than literary errata. That

is, he admits it by implication; he says the Secretary "feared" it. During the years of their duel, Adair

apparently knew that the scholarly compiler of the Cherokee dictionary was secretly inciting members of this

particular Lost Tribe to tomahawk the discoverer of their biblical origin; and Priber, it would seem, knew that

Adair shows, inferentially, that land encroachment was not the sole cause of those Indian wars with which we

shall deal in a later chapter. The earliest causes were the instigations of the French and the rewards which

they offered for English scalps. But equally provocative of Indian rancor were the acts of sometimes merely

stupid, sometimes dishonest, officials; the worst of these, Adair considered, was the cheapening of the trade

"Formerly each trader had a license for two [Indian] towns.... At my first setting out among them, a number

of traders... journeyed through our various nations in different companies and were generally men of worth;

of course they would have a living price for their goods, which they carried on horseback to the remote

Indian countries at very great expences.... [The Indians] were kept under proper restraint, were easy in their

minds and peaceable on account of the plain, honest lessons daily inculcated on them...but according to the

present unwise plan, two and even three Arablike peddlars sculk about in one of those villages...who are

generally the dregs and offscourings of our climes...by inebriating the Indians with their nominally prohibited

and poisoning spirits, they purchase the necessaries of life at four and five hundred per cent cheaper than the

orderly traders.... Instead of showing good examples of moral conduct, beside the other part of life, they

instruct the unknowing and imitating savages in many diabolical lessons of obscenity and blasphemy."

In these statements, contemporary records bear him out. There is no sadder reading than the many pleas

addressed by the Indian chiefs to various officials to stop the importation of liquor into their country, alleging

the debauchment of their young men and warning the white man, with whom they desired to be friends, that

Adair's book was published in London in 1775. He wrote it to be read by Englishmen as well as Americans;

and some of his reflections on liberty, justice, and AngloSaxon unity would not sound unworthily today. His

sympathies were with "the principles of our Magna Charta Americana"; but he thought the threatened

division of the Englishspeaking peoples the greatest evil that could befall civilization. His voluminous work

discloses a man not only of wide mental outlook but a practical man with a sense of commercial values. Yet,

instead of making a career for himself among his own caste, he made his home for over thirty years in the

Chickasaw towns; and it is plain that, with the exception of some of his older brother traders, he preferred the

The complete explanation of such men as Adair we need not expect to find stated anywherenot even in and

between the lines of his book. The conventionalist would seek it in moral obliquity; the radical, in a

temperament that is irked by the superficialities that comprise so large a part of conventional standards. The

reason for his being what he was is almost the only thing Adair did not analyze in his book. Perhaps, to him,

it was self evident. We may let it be so to us, and see it most clearly presented in a picture composed from

some of his brief sketches: A land of grass and green shade inset with bright waters, where deer and domestic

cattle herded together along the banks; a circling group of houses, their whiteclayed walls sparkling under

the sun's rays, and, within and without, the movement of "a friendly and sagacious people," who "kindly

treated and watchfully guarded" their white brother in peace and war, and who conversed daily with him in

the Old Beloved Speech learned first of Nature. "Like towers in cities beyond the common size of those of

the Indians" rose the winter and summer houses and the huge trading house which the tribe had built for their

best beloved friend in the town's center, because there he would be safest from attack. On the rafters hung the

smoked and barbecued delicacies taken in the hunt and prepared for him by his red servants, who were also

his comrades at home and on the dangerous trail. "Beloved old women" kept an eye on his small sons, put to

drowse on panther skins so that they might grow up brave warriors. Nothing was there of artifice or pretense,

only "the needful things to make a reasonable life happy." All was as primitive, naive, and contented as the

woman whose outline is given once in a few strokes, proudly and gayly penciled: "I have the pleasure of

writing this by the side of a Chikkasah female, as great a princess as ever lived among the ancient Peruvians

or Mexicans, and she bids me be sure not to mark the paper wrong after the manner of most of the traders;

His final chapter is the last news of James Adair, type of the earliest trader. Did his bold attacks on corrupt

officials and rum peddlersmade publicly before Assemblies and in printraise for him a dense cloud of

enmity that dropped oblivion on his memory? Perhaps. But, in truth, his own book is all the history of him we

need. It is the record of a man. He lived a full life and served his day; and it matters not that a mist envelops

the place where unafraid he met the Last Enemy, was "weighed on the path and made light."

The great pile of the Appalachian peaks was not the only barrier which held back the settler with his plough

and his rifle from following the trader's tinkling caravans into the valleys beyond. Over the hills the French

were lords of the land. The frontiersman had already felt their enmity through the torch and tomahawk of

their savage allies. By his own strength alone he could not cope with the power entrenched beyond the hills;

so he halted. But that power, by its unachievable desire to be overlord of two hemispheres, was itself to

The recurring hour in the cycle of history, when the issue of Autocracy against Democracy cleaves the world,

struck for the men of the eighteenth century as the second half of that century dawned. In our own day,

happily, that issue has been perceived by the rank and file of the people. In those darker days, as France and

England grappled in that conflict of systems which culminated in the Seven Years' War, the fundamental

But abstractions, whether clear or obscure, do not cause ambassadors to demand their passports. The

declaration of war awaits the overt act. Behold, then, how great a matter is kindled by a little fire! The casus

belli between France and England in the Seven Years' Warthe war which humbled France in Europe and

lost her India and Canadahad to do with a small log fort built by a few Virginians in 1754 at the Forks of

the Ohio River and wrested from them in the same year by a company of Frenchmen from Canada.

The French claimed the valley of the Ohio as their territory; the English claimed it as theirs. The dispute was

of long standing. The French claim was based on discovery; the English claim, on the seatosea charters of

Virginia and other colonies and on treaties with the Six Nations. The French refused to admit the right of the

Six Nations to dispose of the territory. The English were inclined to maintain the validity of their treaties with

the Indians. Especially was Virginia so inclined, for a large share of the Ohio lay within her chartered

The quarrel had entered its acute phase in 1749, when both the rival claimants took action to assert their

sovereignty. The Governor of Canada sent an envoy, Celoron de Blainville, with soldiers, to take formal

possession of the Ohio for the King of France. In the same year the English organized in Virginia the Ohio

Company for the colonization of the same country; and summoned Christopher Gist, explorer, trader, and

Then appeared on the scene that extraordinary man, Robert Dinwiddie, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia,

erstwhile citizen of Glasgow. His correspondence from Virginia during his seven years' tenure of office

(175158) depicts the man with a vividness surpassing paint. He was as honest as the dayas honest as he

was fearless and fussy. But he had no patience; he wanted things done and done at once, and his way was

THE way to do them. People who did not think as he thought didn't THINK at all. On this drastic premise he

went to work. There was of course continuous friction between him and the House of Burgesses. Dinwiddie

had all a Scot's native talent for sarcasm. His letters, his addresses, perhaps in particular his addresses to the

House, bristled with satirical thrusts at his opponents. If he had spelled out in full all the words he was so

eager to write, he would have been obliged to lessen his output; so he used a shorthand system of his own,

peculiar enough to be remarkable even though abbreviations were the rule in that day. Even the dignity of

Kings he sacrificed to speed, and we find "His Majesty" abbreviated to "H M'y"; yet a smaller luminary

known as "His Honor" fares better, losing only the last letter"His Hono." "Ho." stands for "house" and "yt"

for "that," "what," "it," and "anything else," as convenient. Many of his letters wind up with "I am ve'y much

It was a formidable task that confronted Dinwiddieto possess and defend the Ohio. Christopher Gist

returned in 1751, having surveyed the valley for the Ohio Company as far as the Scioto and Miami rivers, and

in the following year the survey was ratified by the Indians. The Company's men were busy blazing trails

through the territory and building fortified posts. But the French dominated the territory. They had built and

occupied with troops Fort Le Boeuf on French Creek, a stream flowing into the Allegheny. We may imagine

Dinwiddie's rage at this violation of British soil by French soldiers and how he must have sputtered to the

young George Washington, when he summoned that officer and made him the bearer of a letter to the French

commander at Fort Le Boeuf, to demand that French troops be at once withdrawn from the Ohio.

Washington made the journey to Fort Le Boeuf in December, 1753, but the mission of course proved

fruitless. Dinwiddie then wrote to London urging that a force be sent over to help the colonies maintain their

rights and, under orders from the Crown, suggested by himself, he wrote to the governors of all the other

colonies to join with Virginia in raising troops to settle the ownership of the disputed territory. From

Governor Dobbs of North Carolina he received an immediate response. By means of logic, sarcasm, and the

entire force of his prerogatives, Dinwiddie secured from his own balking Assembly 10,000 pounds with

which to raise troops. From Maryland he obtained nothing. There were three prominent Marylanders in the

Ohio Company, butor because of thisthe Maryland Assembly voted down the measure for a military

appropriation. On June 18, 1754, Dinwiddie wrote, with unusually full spelling for him:

"I am perswaded had His Majesty's Com'ds to the other Colonies been duely obey'd, and the necessary

Assistance given by them, the Fr. wou'd have long ago have been oblig'd entirely to have evacuated their

usurp'd Possession of the King's Lands, instead of w'ch they are daily becoming more formidable, whilst

every Gov't except No. Caro. has amus'd me with Expectations that have proved fruitless, and at length refuse

This saddened mood with its deliberate penmanship did not last long. Presently Dinwiddie was making a

Round Robin of himself in another series of letters to Governors, Councilors, and Assemblymen, frantically

beseeching them for "H. M'y's hono." and their own, and, if not, for "post'r'ty," to rise against the cruel

French whose Indians were harrying the borders again and "Basely, like Virmin, stealing and carrying off the

helpless infant"as nice a simile, by the way, as any Sheridan ever put into the mouth of Mrs. Malaprop.

Dinwiddie saw his desires thwarted on every hand by the selfish spirit of localism and jealousy which was

more rife in America in those days than it is today. Though the phrase "capitalistic war" had not yet been

coined, the great issues of English civilization on this continent were befogged, for the majority in the

colonies, by the trivial fact that the shareholders in the Ohio Company stood to win by a vigorous prosecution

of the war and to lose if it were not prosecuted at all. The irascible Governor, however, proceeded with such

And now in the summer of 1754 came the "overt act" which precipitated the inevitable war. The key to the

valley of the Ohio was the tongue of land at the Forks, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela join their

waters in the Beautiful River. This sitetoday Pittsburghif occupied and held by either nation would give

that nation the command of the Ohio. Occupied it was for a brief hour by a small party of Virginians, under

Captain William Trent; but no sooner had they erected on the spot a crude fort than the French descended

upon them. What happened then all the world knows: how the French built on the captured site their great

Fort Duquesne; how George Washington with an armed force, sent by Dinwiddie to recapture the place,

encountered French and Indians at Great Meadows and built Fort Necessity, which he was compelled to

surrender; how in the next year (1755) General Braddock arrived from across the sea and set out to take Fort

Duquesne, only to meet on the way the disaster called "Braddock's Defeat"; and how, before another year had

passed, the Seven Years' War was raging in Europe, and England was allied with the enemies of France.

>From the midst of the debacle of Braddock's defeat rises the figure of the young Washington. Twentythree

he was then, tall and spare and hardbodied from a life spent largely in the open. When Braddock fell, this

Washington appeared. Reckless of the enemy's bullets, which spanged about him and pierced his clothes, he

dashed up and down the lines in an effort to rally the panicstricken redcoats. He was too late to save the day,

but not to save a remnant of the army and bring out his own Virginians in good order. Whether among the

stayathomes and voters of credits there were some who would have ascribed Washington's conduct on that

day to the fact that his brothers were large shareholders in the Ohio Company and that Fort Duquesne was

their personal property or "private interest," history does not say. We may suppose so.

North Carolina, the one colony which had not "amus'd" the Governor of Virginia "with Expectations that

proved fruitless," had voted 12,000 pounds for the war and had raised two companies of troops. One of these,

under Edward Brice Dobbs, son of Governor Dobbs, marched with Braddock; and in that company as

wagoner went Daniel Boone, then in his twentysecond year. Of Boone's part in Braddock's campaign

nothing more is recorded save that on the march he made friends with John Findlay, the trader, his future

guide into Kentucky; and that, on the day of the defeat, when his wagons were surrounded, he escaped by

slashing the harness, leaping on the back of one of his horses, and dashing into the forest.

Meanwhile the southern tribes along the border were comparatively quiet. That they well knew a colossal

struggle between the two white races was pending and were predisposed to ally themselves with the stronger

is not to be doubted. French influence had long been sifting through the formidable Cherokee nation, which

still, however, held true in the main to its treaties with the English. It was the policy of the Governors of

Virginia and North Carolina to induce the Cherokees to enter strongly into the war as allies of the English.

Their efforts came to nothing chiefly because of the purely local and suicidal Indian policy of Governor Glen

of South Carolina. There had been some dispute between Glen and Dinwiddie as to the right of Virginia to

trade with the Cherokees; and Glen had sent to the tribes letters calculated to sow distrust of all other

aspirants for Indian favor, even promising that certain settlers in the Back Country of North Carolina should

be removed and their holdings restored to the Indians. These letters caused great indignation in North

Carolina, when they came to light, and had the worst possible effect upon Indian relations. The Indians now

inclined their ear to the French who, though fewer than the English, were at least united in purpose.

Governor Glen took this inauspicious moment to hold high festival with the Cherokees. It was the last year of

his administration and apparently he hoped to win promotion to some higher post by showing his

achievements for the fur trade and in the matter of new land acquired. He plied the Cherokees with drink and

induced them to make formal submission and to cede all their lands to the Crown. When the chiefs recovered

their sobriety, they were filled with rage at what had been done, and they remembered how the French had

told them that the English intended to make slaves of all the Indians and to steal their lands. The situation was

complicated by another incident. Several Cherokee warriors returning from the Ohio, whither they had gone

to fight for the British, were slain by frontiersmen. The tribe, in accordance with existing agreements, applied

There was thus plenty of powder for an explosion. Governor Lyttleton, Glen's successor, at last flung the

torch into the magazine. He seized, as hostages, a number of friendly chiefs who were coming to Charleston

to offer tokens of good will and forced them to march under guard on a military tour which the Governor was

making (1759) with intent to overawe the savages. When this expedition reached Prince George, on the upper

waters of the Savannah, the Indian hostages were confined within the fort; and the Governor, satisfied with

the result of his maneuver departed south for Charleston. Then followed a tragedy. Some Indian friends of the

imprisoned chiefs attacked the fort, and the commander, a popular young officer, was treacherously killed

during a parley. The infuriated frontiersmen within the fort fell upon the hostages and slew them

If all were to be told of the struggle which followed in the Back Country, the story could not be contained in

this book. Many brave and resourceful men went out against the savages. We can afford only a passing

glance at one of them. Hugh Waddell of North Carolina was the most brilliant of all the frontier fighters in

that war. He was a young Ulsterman from County Down, a born soldier, with a special genius for fighting

Indians, although he did not grow up on the border, for he arrived in North Carolina in 1753, at the age of

nineteen. He was appointed by Governor Dobbs to command the second company which North Carolina had

raised for the war, a force of 450 rangers to protect the border counties; and he presently became the most

conspicuous military figure in the colony. As to his personality, we have only a few meager details, with a

portrait that suggests plainly enough those qualities of boldness and craft which characterized his tactics.

Governor Dobbs appears to have had a special love towards Hugh, whose family he had known in Ireland, for

an undercurrent of almost fatherly pride is to be found in the old Governor's reports to the Assembly

The terror raged for nearly three years. Cabins and fields were burned, and women and children were

slaughtered or dragged away captives. Not only did immigration cease but many hardy settlers fled from the

country. At length, after horrors indescribable and great toll of life, the Cherokees gave up the struggle. Their

towns were invaded and laid waste by imperial and colonial troops, and they could do nothing but make

peace. In 1761 they signed a treaty with the English to hold "while rivers flow and grasses grow and sun and

In the previous year (1760) the imperial war had run its course in America. New France lay prostrate, and the

English were supreme not only on the Ohio but on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Louisbourg,

Hugh Waddell and his rangers, besides serving with distinction in the Indian war, had taken part in the

capture of Fort Duquesne. This feat had been accomplished in 1758 by an expedition under General Forbes.

The troops made a terrible march over a new route, cutting a road as they went. It was November when they

approached their objective. The wastes of snow and their diminished supplies caused such depression among

the men that the officers called a halt to discuss whether or not to proceed toward Fort Duquesne, where they

believed the French to be concentrated in force. Extravagant sums in guineas were named as suitable reward

for any man who would stalk and catch a French Indian and learn from him the real conditions inside the fort.

The honor, if not the guineas, fell to John Rogers, one of Waddell's rangers. From the Indian it was learned

that the French had already gone, leaving behind only a few of their number. As the English drew near, they

found that the garrison had blown up the magazine, set fire to the fort, and made off.

Thus, while New France was already tottering, but nearly two years before the final capitulation at Montreal,

the English again became masters of the Ohio Company's landmasters of the Forks of the Ohio. This time

they were there to stay. Where the walls of Fort Duquesne had crumbled in the fire Fort Pitt was to rise,

proudly bearing the name of England's Great Commoner who had directed English arms to victory on three

With France expelled and the Indians deprived of their white allies, the westward path lay open to the

pioneers, even though the red man himself would rise again and again in vain endeavor to bar the way. So a

new era begins, the era of exploration for definite purpose, the era of commonwealth building. In entering on

it, we part with the earliest pioneerthe trader, who first opened the road for both the lone home seeker and

the great land company. He dwindles now to the mere barterer and sosave for a few chance

What thoughts filled Daniel Boone's mind as he was returning from Braddock's disastrous campaign in 1755

we may only conjecture. Perhaps he was planning a career of soldiering, for in later years he was to

distinguish himself as a frontier commander in both defense and attack. Or it may be that his heart was full of

the wondrous tales told him by the trader, John Findlay, of that Hunter's Canaan, Kentucky, where buffalo

and deer roamed in thousands. Perhaps he meant to set out ere long in search of the great adventure of his

dreams, despite the terrible dangers of trail making across the zones of war into the unknown.

However that may be, Boone straightway followed neither of these possible plans on his return to the Yadkin

but halted for a different adventure. There, a rifle shot's distance from his threshold, was offered him the

oldest and sweetest of all hazards to the daring. He was twentytwo, strong and comely and a whole man;

and therefore he was in no mind to refuse what life held out to him in the person of Rebecca Bryan. Rebecca

was the daughter of Joseph Bryan, who had come to the Yadkin from Pennsylvania some time before the

Writers of an earlier and more sentimental period than ours have endeavored to supply, from the saccharine

stores of their fancy, the romantic episodes connected with Boone's wooing which history has omitted to

record. Hence the tale that the young hunter, walking abroad in the spring gloaming, saw Mistress Rebecca's

large dark eyes shining in the dusk of the forest, mistook them for a deer's eyes and shothis aim on this

occasion fortunately being bad! But if Boone's rifle was missing its mark at ten paces, Cupid's dart was

speeding home. So runs the story concocted a hundred years later by some gentle scribe ignorant alike of

game seasons, the habits of hunters, and the way of a man with a maid in a primitive world.

Daniel and Rebecca were married in the spring of 1756. Squire Boone, in his capacity as justice of the peace,

tied the knot; and in a small cabin built upon his spacious lands the young couple set up housekeeping. Here

Daniel's first two sons were born. In the third year of his marriage, when the second child was a babe in arms,

Daniel removed with his wife and their young and precious family to Culpeper County in eastern Virginia,

for the border was going through its darkest days of the French and Indian War. During the next two or three

years we find him in Virginia engaged as a wagoner, hauling tobacco in season; but back on the border with

his rifle, after the harvest, aiding in defense against the Indians. In 1759 he purchased from his father a lot on

Sugar Tree Creek, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek (Davie County, North Carolina) and built thereon a cabin

for himself. The date when he brought his wife and children to live in their new abode on the border is not

recorded. It was probably some time after the close of the Indian War. Of Boone himself during these years

we have but scant information. We hear of him again in Virginia and also as a member of the packhorse

caravan which brought into the Back Country the various necessaries for the settlers. We know, too, that in

the fall of 1760 he was on a lone hunting trip in the mountains west of the Yadkin; for until a few years ago

there might be seen, still standing on the banks of Boone's Creek (a small tributary of the Watauga) in eastern

Tennessee, a tree bearing the legend, "D Boon cilled A BAR on this tree 1760." Boone was always fond of

carving his exploits on trees, and his wanderings have been traced largely by his arboreal publications. In the

next year (1761) he went with Waddell's rangers when they marched with the army to the final subjugation of

That Boone and his family were back on the border in the new cabin shortly after the end of the war, we

gather from the fact that in 1764 he took his little son James, aged seven, on one of his long hunting

excursions. From this time dates the intimate comradeship of father and son through all the perils of the

wilderness, a comradeship to come to its tragic end ten years later when, as we shall see, the

seventeenyearold lad fell under the red man's tomahawk as his father was leading the first settlers towards

Kentucky. In the cold nights of the open camp, as Daniel and James lay under the frosty stars, the father kept

the boy warm snuggled to his breast under the broad flap of his hunting shirt. Sometimes the two were away

from home for months together, and Daniel declared little James to be as good a woodsman as his father.

Meanwhile fascinating accounts of the new land of Florida, ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763,

had leaked into the Back Country; and in the winter of 1765 Boone set off southward on horseback with,

seven companions. Colonel James Grant, with whose army Boone had fought in 1761, had been appointed

Governor of the new colony and was offering generous inducements to settlers. The party traveled along the

borders of South Carolina and Georgia. No doubt they made the greater part of their way over the old

Traders' Trace, the "whitened" warpath; and they suffered severe hardships. Game became scarcer as they

proceeded. Once they were nigh to perishing of starvation and were saved from that fate only through chance

meeting with a band of Indians who, seeing their plight, made camp and shared their food with

Boone's party explored Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola, and Daniel became sufficiently enamored of

the tropical south to purchase there land and a house. His wife, however, was unwilling to go to Florida, and

she was not long in convincing the hunter that he would soon tire of a gameless country. A gameless country!

Perhaps this was the very thought which turned the wanderer's desires again towards the land of Kentucky.*

The silencing of the enemy's whisper in the Cherokee camps had opened the border forests once more to the

nomadic rifleman. Boone was not alone in the desire to seek out what lay beyond. His brotherinlaw, John

Stewart, and a nephew by marriage, Benjamin Cutbirth, or Cutbird, with two other young men, John Baker

and James Ward, in 1766 crossed the Appalachian Mountains, probably by stumbling upon the Indian trail

winding from base to summit and from peak to base again over this part of the great hill barrier. They

eventually reached the Mississippi River and, having taken a good quantity of peltry on the way, they

launched upon the stream and came in time to New Orleans, where they made a satisfactory trade of their

* Kentucky, from Kentake, an Iroquois word meaning "the place of old fields." Adair calls the territory

"the old fields." The Indians apparently used the word "old," as we do in a sense of endearment and

Boone was fired anew by descriptions of this successful feat, in which two of his kinsmen had participated.

He could no longer be held back. He must find the magic door that led through the vast mountain wall into

KentuckyKentucky, with its green prairies where the buffalo and deer were as "ten thousand thousand

cattle feeding" in the wilds, and where the balmy air vibrated with the music of innumerable wings.

Accordingly, in the autumn of 1767, Boone began his quest of the delectable country in the company of his

friend, William Hill, who had been with him in Florida. Autumn was the season of departure on all forest

excursions, because by that time the summer crops had been gathered in and the day of the deer had come.

By hunting, the explorers must feed themselves on their travels and with deerskins and furs they must on

their return recompense those who had supplied their outfit. Boone, the incessant but not always lucky

Boone and Hill made their way over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies and crossed the Holston and Clinch

rivers. Then they came upon the west fork of the Big Sandy and, believing that it would lead them to the

Ohio, they continued for at least a hundred miles to the westward. Here they found a buffalo trace, one of the

many beaten out by the herds in their passage to the salt springs, and they followed it into what is now Floyd

County in eastern Kentucky. But this was not the prairie land described by Findlay; it was rough and hilly

and so overgrown with laurel as to be almost impenetrable. They therefore wended their way back towards

the river, doubtless erected the usual hunter's camp of skins or blankets and branches, and spent the winter in

hunting and trapping. Spring found them returning to their homes on the Yadkin with a fair winter's haul.

Such urgent desire as Boone's, however, was not to be defeated. The next year brought him his great

opportunity. John Findlay came to the Yadkin with a horse pack of needles and linen and peddler's wares to

tempt the slim purses of the Back Country folk. The two erstwhile comrades in arms were overjoyed to

encounter each other again, and Findlay spent the winter of 176869 in Boone's cabin. While the snow lay

deep outside and goodsmelling logs crackled on the hearth, they planned an expedition into Kentucky

through the Gap where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky touch one another, which Findlay felt confident he

could find. Findlay had learned of this route from crossmountain traders in 1753, when he had descended

the Ohio to the site of Louisville, whence he had gone with some Shawanoes as a prisoner to their town of

On the first day of May, 1769, Boone and Findlay, accompanied by John Stewart and three other

venturesome spirits, Joseph Holden, James Mooney, and William Cooley, took horse for the fabled land.

Passing through the Cumberland Gap, they built their first camp in Kentucky on the Red Lick fork of Station

This camp was their base of operations. From it, usually in couples, we infer, the explorers branched out to

hunt and to take their observations of the country. Here also they prepared the deer and buffalo meat for the

winter, dried or smoked the geese they shot in superabundance, made the tallow and oil needed to keep their

weapons in trim, their leather soft, and their kits waterproof. Their first ill luck befell them in December when

Boone and Stewart were captured by a band of Shawanoes who were returning from their autumn hunt on

Green River. The Indians compelled the two white men to show them the location of their camp, took

possession of all it contained in skins and furs and also helped themselves to the horses. They left the

explorers with just enough meat and ammunition to provide for their journey homeward, and told them to

depart and not to intrude again on the red men's hunting grounds. Having given this pointed warning, the

Shawanoes rode on northward towards their towns beyond the Ohio. On foot, swiftly and craftily, Boone and

his brotherinlaw trailed the band for two days. They came upon the camp in dead of night, recaptured their

horses, and fled. But this was a game in which the Indians themselves excelled, and at this date the

Shawanoes had an advantage over Boone in their thorough knowledge of the territory; so that within

fortyeight hours the white men were once more prisoners. After they had amused themselves by making

Boone caper about with a horse bell on his neck, while they jeered at him in broken English, "Steal horse,

eh?" the Shawanoes turned north again, this time taking the two unfortunate hunters with them. Boone and

Stewart escaped, one day on the march, by a plunge into the thick tall canebrake. Though the Indians did not

attempt to follow them through the mazes of the cane, the situation of the two hunters, without weapons or

food, was serious enough. When they found Station Camp deserted and realized that their four companions

had given them up for dead or lost and had set off on the trail for home, even such intrepid souls as theirs

may have felt fear. They raced on in pursuit and fortunately fell in not only with their party but with Squire

Boone, Daniel's brother, and Alexander Neely, who had brought in fresh supplies of rifles, ammunition, flour,

After this lucky encounter the group separated. Findlay was ill, and Holden, Mooney, and Cooley had had

their fill of Kentucky; but Squire, Neely, Stewart, and Daniel were ready for more adventures. Daniel, too,

felt under the positive necessity of putting in another year at hunting and trapping in order to discharge his

debts and provide for his family. Near the mouth of Red River the new party built their station camp. Here, in

idle hours, Neely read aloud from a copy of "Gulliver's Travels" to entertain the hunters while they dressed

their deerskins or tinkered their weapons. In honor of the "Lorbrulgrud" of the book, though with a

pronunciation all their own, they christened the nearest creek; and as "Lulbegrud Creek" it is still known.

Before the end of the winter the two Boones were alone in the wilderness. Their brotherinlaw, Stewart, had

disappeared; and Neely, discouraged by this tragic event, had returned to the Yadkin. In May, Squire Boone

fared forth, taking with him the season's catch of beaver, otter, and deerskins to exchange in the North

Carolinian trading houses for more supplies; and Daniel was left solitary in Kentucky.

Now followed those lonely explorations which gave Daniel Boone his special fame above all Kentucky's

pioneers. He was by no means the first white man to enter Kentucky; and when he did enter, it was as one of

a party, under another man's guidanceif we except his former disappointing journey into the laurel thickets

of Floyd County. But these others, barring Stewart, who fell there, turned back when they met with loss and

hardship and measured the certain risks against the possible gains. Boone, the man of imagination, turned to

wild earth as to his kin. His genius lay in the sense of oneness he felt with his wilderness environment. An

instinct he had which these other men, as courageous perhaps as he, did not possess.

Never in all the times when he was alone in the woods and had no other man's safety or counsel to consider,

did he suffer ill fortune. The nearest approach to trouble that befell him when alone occurred one day during

this summer when some Indians emerged from their green shelter and found him, off guard for the moment,

standing on a cliff gazing with rapture over the vast rolling stretches of Kentucky. He was apparently cut off

from escape, for the savages were on three sides, advancing without haste to take him, meanwhile greeting

him with mock amity. Over the cliff leaped Boone and into the outspread arms of a friendly maple, whose top

bloomed green about sixty feet below the cliff's rim, and left his wouldbe captors on the height above,

During this summer Boone journeyed through the valleys of the Kentucky and the Licking. He followed the

buffalo traces to the two Blue Licks and saw the enormous herds licking up the salt earth, a darkly ruddy

moving mass of beasts whose numbers could not be counted. For many miles he wound along the Ohio, as

In July, 1770, Daniel returned to the Red River camp and there met Squire Boone with another pack of

supplies. The two brothers continued their hunting and exploration together for some months, chiefly in

Jessamine County, where two caves still bear Boone's name. In that winter they even braved the Green River

ground, whence had come the hunting Shawanoes who had taken Daniel's first fruits a year before. In the

same year (1770) there had come into Kentucky from the Yadkin another party of hunters, called, from their

lengthy sojourn in the twilight zone, the Long Hunters. One of these, Gasper Mansker, afterwards related

how the Long Hunters were startled one day by hearing sounds such as no buffalo or turkey ever made, and

how Mansker himself stole silently under cover of the trees towards the place whence the strange noises

came, and descried Daniel Boone prone on his back with a deerskin under him, his famous tall black hat

beside him and his mouth opened wide in joyous but apparently none too tuneful song. This incident gives a

true character touch. It is not recorded of any of the men who turned back that they sang alone in the

In March, 1771, the two Boones started homeward, their horses bearing the rich harvest of furs and deerskins

which was to clear Daniel of debt and to insure the comfort of the family he had not seen for two years. But

again evil fortune met them, this time in the very gatesfor in the Cumberland Gap they were suddenly

surrounded by Indians who took everything from them, leaving them neither guns nor horses.

When Boone returned home he found the Back Country of North Carolina in the throes of the Regulation

Movement. This movement, which had arisen first from the colonists' need to police their settlements, had

more recently assumed a political character. The Regulators were now in conflict with the authorities,

because the frontier folk were suffering through excessive taxes, extortionate fees, dishonest land titles, and

the corruption of the courts. In May, 1771, the conflict lost its quasicivil nature. The Regulators resorted to

arms and were defeated by the forces under Governor Tryon in the Battle of the Alamance.

The Regulation Movement, which we shall follow in more detail further on, was a culmination of those

causes of unrest which turned men westward. To escape from oppression and to acquire land beyond the

bounds of tyranny became the earnest desire of independent spirits throughout the Back Country. But there

was another and more potent reason why the country east of the mountains no longer contented Boone.

Hunting and trapping were Boone's chief means of livelihood. In those days, deerskins sold for a dollar a skin

to the traders at the Forks or in Hillsborough; beaver at about two dollars and a half, and otter at from three to

five dollars. A packhorse could carry a load of one hundred dressed deerskins, and, as currency was scarce,

a hundred dollars was wealth. Game was fast disappearing from the Yadkin. To Boone above all men, then,

Kentucky beckoned. When he returned in the spring of 1771 from his explorations, it was with the resolve to

take his family at once into the great game country and to persuade some of his friends to join in this hazard

The perils of such a venture, only conjectural to us at this distance, he knew well; but in him there was

nothing that shrank from danger, though he did not court it after the rash manner of many of his compeers.

Neither reckless nor riotous, Boone was never found among those who opposed violence to authority, even

unjust authority; nor was he ever guilty of the savagery which characterized much of the retaliatory warfare

of that period when frenzied white men bettered the red man's instruction. In him, courage was illumined

with tenderness and made equable by selfcontrol. Yet, though he was no fiery zealot like the Ulstermen who

were to follow him along the path he had made and who loved and revered him perhaps because he was so

different from themselves, Boone nevertheless had his own religion. It was a simple faith best summed up

perhaps by himself in his old age when he said that he had been only an instrument in the hand of God to

Two years passed before Boone could muster a company of colonists for the dangerous and delectable land.

The dishonesty practiced by Lord Granville's agents in the matter of deeds had made it difficult for Daniel

and his friends to dispose of their acreage. When at last in the spring of 1773 the Wanderer was prepared to

depart, he was again delayed; this time by the arrival of a little son to whom was given the name of John. By

September, however, even this latest addition to the party was ready for travel; and that month saw the

Boones with a small caravan of families journeying towards Powell's Valley, whence the Warrior's Path took

its way through Cumberland Gap. At this point on the march they were to be joined by William Russell, a

famous pioneer, from the Clinch River, with his family and a few neighbors, and by some of Rebecca

Boone's kinsmen, the Bryans, from the lower Yadkin, with a company of forty men.

Of Rebecca Boone history tells us too littleonly that she was born a Bryan, was of low stature and dark

eyed, that she bore her husband ten children, and lived beside him to old age. Except on his hunts and

explorations, she went with him from one cabined home to another, always deeper into the wilds. There are

no portraits of her. We can see her only as a shadowy figure moving along the wilderness trails beside the

man who accepted his destiny of God to be a wayshower for those of lesser faith.

"He tires not forever on his leagues of march Because her feet are set to his footprints, And the gleam of her

Boone halted his company on Walden Mountain over Powell's Valley to await the Bryan contingent and

dispatched two young men under the leadership of his son James, then in his seventeenth year, to notify

Russell of the party's arrival. As the boys were returning with Russell's son, also a stripling, two of his slaves,

and some white laborers, they missed the path and went into camp for the night. When dawn broke,

disclosing the sleepers, a small war band of Shawanoes, who had been spying on Boone and his party, fell

upon them and slaughtered them. Only one of Russell's slaves and a laborer escaped. The tragedy seems

augmented by the fact that the point where the boys lost the trail and made their night quarters was hardly

three miles from the main campto which an hour later came the two survivors with their gloomy tidings.

Terror now took hold of the little band of emigrants, and there were loud outcries for turning back. The

Bryans, who had arrived meanwhile, also advised retreat, saying that the "signs" about the scene of blood

indicated an Indian uprising. Daniel carried the scalped body of his son, the boycomrade of his happy hunts,

to the camp and buried it there at the beginning of the trail. His voice alone urged that they go on.

Fortunately indeed, as events turned out, Boone was overruled, and the expedition was abandoned. The Bryan

party and the others from North Carolina went back to the Yadkin. Boone himself with his family

accompanied Russell to the Clinch settlement, where he erected a temporary cabin on the farm of one of the

settlers, and then set out alone on the chase to earn provision for his wife and children through the winter.

Those who prophesied an Indian war were not mistaken. When the snowy hunting season had passed and the

"Powwowing Days" were come, the Indian war drum rattled in the medicine house from the borders of

Pennsylvania to those of Carolina. The causes of the strife for which the red men were making ready must be

briefly noted to help us form a just opinion of the deeds that followed. Early writers have usually represented

the frontiersmen as saints in buckskin and the Indians as fiends without the shadow of a claim on either the

land or humanity. Many later writers have merely reversed the shield. The truth is that the Indians and the

borderers reacted upon each other to the hurt of both. Paradoxically, they grew like enough to hate one

Land! Land! was the slogan of all sorts and conditions of men. Tidewater officials held solemn powwows

with the chiefs, gave wampum strings, and forthwith incorporated.* Chiefs blessed their white brothers who

had "forever brightened the chain of friendship," departed home, and proceeded to brighten the blades of their

tomahawks and to await, not long, the opportunity to use them on casual hunters who carried in their kits the

compass, the "landstealer." Usually the surveying hunter was a borderer; and on him the tomahawk

descended with an accelerated gusto. Private citizens also formed land companies and sent out surveyors,

regardless of treaties. Bold frontiersmen went into No Man's Land and staked out their claims. In the very

year when disaster turned the Boone party back, James Harrod had entered Kentucky from Pennsylvania and

* The activities of the great land companies are described in Alvord's exhaustive work, "The Mississippi

Ten years earlier (1763), the King had issued the famous and much misunderstood Proclamation restricting

his "loving subjects" from the lands west of the mountains. The colonists interpreted this document as a

tyrannous curtailment of their liberties for the benefit of the fur trade. We know now that the portion of this

Proclamation relating to western settlement was a wise provision designed to protect the settlers on the

frontier by allaying the suspicions of the Indians, who viewed with apprehension the triumphal occupation of

that vast territory from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico by the colonizing English. By seeking to compel all

land purchase to be made through the Crown, it was designed likewise to protect the Indians from "whisky

purchase," and to make impossible the transfer of their lands except with consent of the Indian Council, or

full quota of headmen, whose joint action alone conveyed what the tribes considered to be legal title. Sales

made according to this form, Sir William Johnson declared to the Lords of Trade, he had never known to be

repudiated by the Indians. This paragraph of the Proclamation was in substance an embodiment of Johnson's

suggestions to the Lords of Trade. Its purpose was square dealing and pacification; and shrewd men such as

Washington recognized that it was not intended as a final check to expansion. "A temporary expedient to

quiet the minds of the Indians," Washington called it, and then himself went out along the Great Kanawha

It will be asked what had become of the Ohio Company of Virginia and that fort at the Forks of the Ohio;

once a bone of contention between France and England. Fort Pitt, as it was now called, had fallen foul of

another dispute, this time between Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia claimed that the far western corner of

her boundary ascended just far enough north to take in Fort Pitt. Pennsylvania asserted that it did nothing of

the sort. The Ohio Company had meanwhile been merged into the Walpole Company. George Croghan, at

Fort Pitt, was the Company's agent and as such was accused by Pennsylvania of favoring from ulterior

motives the claims of Virginia. Hotheads in both colonies asseverated that the Indians were secretly being

stirred up in connection with the boundary disputes. If it does not very clearly appear how an Indian rising

would have settled the ownership of Fort Pitt, it is evident enough where the interests of Virginia and

Pennsylvania clashed. Virginia wanted land for settlement and speculation; Pennsylvania wanted the Indians

left in possession for the benefit of the fur trade. So far from stirring up the Indians, as his enemies declared,

Croghan was as usual giving away all his substance to keep them quiet.* Indeed, during this summer of 1774,

* The suspicion that Croghan and Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia, were instigating the war appears

to have arisen out of the conduct of Dr. John Connolly, Dunmore's agent and Croghan's nephew. Croghan had

induced the Shawanoes to bring under escort to Fort Pitt certain English traders resident in the Indian towns.

The escort was fired on by militiamen under command of Connolly, who also issued a proclamation declaring

a state of war to exist. Connolly, however, probably acted on his own initiative. He was interested in land on

his own behalf and was by no means the only man at that time who was ready to commit outrages on Indians

in order to obtain it. As Croghan lamented, there was "too great a spirit in the frontier people for killing

Two hundred thousand acres in the WestKentucky and West Virginiahad been promised to the colonial

officers and soldiers who fought in the Seven Years' War. But after making the Proclamation the British

Government had delayed issuing the patents. Washington interested himself in trying to secure them; and

Lord Dunmore, who also had caught the "landfever,"* prodded the British authorities but won only rebuke

for his inconvenient activities. Insistent, however, Dunmore sent out parties of surveyors to fix the bounds of

the soldiers' claims. James Harrod, Captain Thomas Bullitt, Hancock Taylor, and three McAfee brothers

entered Kentucky, by the Ohio, under Dunmore's orders. John Floyd went in by the Kanawha as

Washington's agent. A bird'seye view of that period would disclose to us very few indeed of His Majesty's

loving subjects who were paying any attention to his proclamation. Early in 1774, Harrod began the building

of cabins and a fort, and planted corn on the site of Harrodsburg. Thus to him and not to Boone fell the honor

When summer came, its thick verdure proffering ambuscade, the air hung tense along the border. Traders had

sent in word that Shawanoes, Delawares, Mingos, Wyandots, and Cherokees were refusing all other exchange

than rifles, ammunition, knives, and hatchets. White men were shot down in their fields from ambush. Dead

Indians lay among their own young corn, their scalp locks taken. There were men of both races who wanted

Lord Dunmore, the Governor, resolved that, if war were inevitable, it should be fought out in the Indian

country. With this intent, he wrote to Colonel Andrew Lewis of Botetourt County, Commander of the

Southwest Militia, instructing him to raise a respectable body of troops and "join me either at the mouth of

the Great Kanawha or Wheeling, or such other part of the Ohio as may be most convenient for you to meet

me." The Governor himself with a force of twelve hundred proceeded to Fort Pitt, where Croghan, as we

have seen, was extending his hospitality to eleven hundred warriors from the disaffected tribes.

On receipt of the Governor's letter, Andrew Lewis sent out expresses to his brother Colonel Charles Lewis,

County Lieutenant of Augusta, and to Colonel William Preston, County Lieutenant of Fincastle, to raise men

and bring them with all speed to the rendezvous at Camp Union (Lewisburg) on the Big Levels of the

Greenbrier (West Virginia). Andrew Lewis summoned these officers to an expedition for "reducing our

inveterate enemies to reason." Preston called for volunteers to take advantage of "the opportunity we have so

long wished for...this useless People may now at last be oblidged to abandon their country." These men were

among not only the bravest but the best of their time; but this was their view of the Indian and his alleged

rights. To eliminate this "useless people," inveterate enemies of the white race, was, as they saw it, a political

necessity and a religious duty. And we today who profit by their deeds dare not condemn them.

Fervor less solemn was aroused in other quarters by Dunmore's call to arms. At Wheeling, some eighty or

ninety young adventurers, in charge of Captain Michael Cresap of Maryland, were waiting for the freshets to

sweep them down the Ohio into Kentucky. When the news reached them, they greeted it with the wild

monotone chant and the ceremonies preliminary to Indian warfare. They planted the war pole, stripped and

painted themselves, and starting the war dance called on Cresap to be their "white leader." The captain,

however, declined; but in that wild circling line was one who was a white leader indeed. He was a

sandyhaired boy of twentyone of the bold race of English Virginians, rugged and of fiery countenance,

with blue eyes intense of glance and deep set under a high brow that, while modeled for power, seemed

threatened in its promise by the too sensitive chiseling of his lips. With every nerve straining for the fray,

with thudding of feet and crooning of the blood song, he wheeled with those other mad spirits round the war

pole till the set of sun closed the rites. "That evening two scalps were brought into camp," so a letter of his

reads. Does the bold savage color of this picture affright us? Would we veil it? Then we should lose

something of the true lineaments of George Rogers Clark, who, within four short years, was to lead a tiny

army of tattered and starving backwoodsmen, ashamed to quail where he never flinched, through barrens and

Though Cresap had rejected the role of "white leader," he did not escape the touch of infamy. "Cresap's War"

was the name the Indians gave to the bloody encounters between small parties of whites and Indians, which

followed on that war dance and scalping, during the summer months. One of these encounters must be

detailed here because history has assigned it as the immediate cause of Dunmore's War.

Greathouse, Sapperton, and King, three traders who had a post on Yellow Creek, a tributary of the Ohio fifty

miles below Pittsburgh, invited several Indians from across the stream to come and drink with them and their

friends. Among the Indians were two or three men of importance in the Mingo tribe. There were also some

women, one of whom was the Indian wife of Colonel John Gibson, an educated man who had distinguished

himself as a soldier with Forbes in 1768. That the Indians came in amity and apprehended no treachery was

proved by the presence of the women. Gibson's wife carried her halfcaste baby in her shawl. The disreputable

traders plied their guests with drink to the point of intoxication and then murdered them. King shot the first

man and, when he fell, cut his throat, saying that he had served many a deer in that fashion. Gibson's Indian

wife fled and was shot down in the clearing. A man followed to dispatch her and her baby. She held the child

up to him pleading, with her last breath, that he would spare it because it was not Indian but "one of yours."

The mother dead, the child was later sent to Gibson. Twelve Indians in all were killed.

Meanwhile Croghan had persuaded the Iroquois to peace. With the help of David Zeisberger, the Moravian

missionary, and White Eyes, a Delaware chief, he and Dunmore had won over the Delaware warriors. In the

Cherokee councils, Oconostota demanded that the treaty of peace signed in 1761 be kept. The Shawanoes,

however, led by Cornstalk, were implacable; and they had as allies the Ottawas and Mingos, who had entered

A famous chief of the day and one of great influence over the Indians, and also among the white officials who

dealt with Indian affairs, was Tachnechdorus, or Branching Oak of the Forest, a Mingo who had taken the

name of Logan out of compliment to James Logan of Pennsylvania. Chief Logan had recently met with so

much reproach from his red brothers for his loyalty to the whites that he had departed from the Mingo town at

Yellow Creek. But, learning that his tribe had determined to assist the Shawanoes and had already taken some

white scalps, he repaired to the place where the Mingos were holding their war council to exert his powers for

peace. There, in presence of the warriors, after swaying them from their purpose by those oratorical gifts

which gave him his influence and his renown, he took the war hatchet that had already killed, and buried it in

proof that vengeance was appeased. Upon this scene there entered a Mingo from Yellow Creek with the news

of the murders committed there by the three traders. The Indian whose throat had been slit as King had served

deer was Logan's brother. Another man slain was his kinsman. The woman with the baby was his sister.

Logan tore up from the earth the bloody tomahawk and, raising it above his head, swore that he would not

rest till he had taken ten white lives to pay for each one of his kin. Again the Mingo warriors declared for war

and this time were not dissuaded. But Logan did not join this red army. He went out alone to wreak his

Meanwhile Dunmore prepared to push the war with the utmost vigor. His first concern was to recall the

surveying parties from Kentucky, and for so hazardous an errand he needed the services of a man whose

endurance, speed, and woodcraft were equal to those of any Indian scout afoot. Through Colonel Preston, his

orders were conveyed to Daniel Boone, for Boone's fame had now spread from the border to the tidewater

regions. It was stated that "Boone would lose no time," and "if they are alive, it is indisputable but Boone

So Boone set out in company with Michael Stoner, another expert woodsman. His general instructions were

to go down the Kentucky River to Preston's Salt Lick and across country to the Falls of the Ohio, and thence

home by Gaspar's Lick on the Cumberland River. Indian war parties were moving under cover across "the

Dark and Bloody Ground" to surround the various groups of surveyors still at large and to exterminate them.

Boone made his journey successfully. He found John Floyd, who was surveying for Washington; he sped up

to where Harrod and his band were building cabins and sent them out, just in time as it happened; he reached

all the outposts of Thomas Bullitt's party, only one of whom fell a victim to the foe*; and, undetected by the

Indians, he brought himself and Stoner home in safety, after covering eight hundred miles in sixtyone days.

Harrod and his homesteaders immediately enlisted in the army. How eager Boone was to go with the forces

under Lewis is seen in the official correspondence relative to Dunmore's War. Floyd wanted Boone's help in

raising a company: "Captain Bledsoe says that Boone has more [influence] than any man now disengaged;

and you know what Boone has done for me...for which reason I love the man." Even the border, it would

seem, had its species of pacifists who were willing to let others take risks for them, for men hung back from

recruiting, and desertions were the order of the day. Major Arthur Campbell hit upon a solution of the

difficulties in West Fincastle. He was convinced that Boone could raise a company and hold the men loyal.

For some reason, however, Daniel's desire to march with the army was denied. Perhaps it was because just

such a man as heand, indeed, there was no otherwas needed to guard the settlement. Presently he was

put in command of Moore's Fort in Clinch Valley, and his "diligence" received official approbation. A little

later the inhabitants of the valley sent out a petition to have Boone made a "captain" and given supreme

command of the lower forts. The settlers demanded Boone's promotion for their own security.

"The land it is good, it is just to our mind, Each will have his part if his Lordship be kind, The Ohio once

So sang the army poet, thus giving voice, as bards should ever do, to the theme nearest the hearts of his

hearersin this case, Land! Presumably his ditty was composed on the eve of the march from Lewisburg, for

On the evening of October 9,1774, Andrew Lewis with his force of eleven hundred frontiersmen was

encamped on Point Pleasant at the junction of the Great Kanawha with the Ohio. Dunmore in the meantime

had led his forces into Ohio and had erected Fort Gower at the mouth of the Hockhocking River, where he

* It has been customary to ascribe to Lord Dunmore motives of treachery in failing to make connections with

Lewis; but no real evidence has been advanced to support any of the charges made against him by local

historians. The charges were, as Theodore Roosevelt says, "an afterthought." Dunmore was a King's man in

the Revolution; and yet in March, 1775, the Convention of the Colony of Virginia, assembled in opposition to

the royal party, resolved: "The most cordial thanks of the people of this colony are a tribute justly due to our

worthy Governor Lord Dunmore, for his truly noble, wise, and spirited conduct which at once evinces his

Excellency's attention to the true interests of this colony, and a real in the executive department which no

dangers can divert, or difficulties hinder, from achieving the most important services to the people who have

the happiness to live under his administration." (See "American Archives," Fourth Series, vol. II, p. 170.)

Similar resolutions were passed by his officers on the march home from Ohio; at the same time, the officers

passed resolutions in sympathy with the American cause. Yet it was Andrew Lewis who later drove Dunmore

The movements of the two armies were being observed by scouts from the force of red warriors gathered in

Ohio under the great leader of the Shawanoes. Cornstalk purposed to isolate the two armies of his enemy and

to crush them in turn before they could come together. His first move was to launch an attack on Lewis at

Point Pleasant. In the dark of night, Cornstalk's Indians crossed the Ohio on rafts, intending to surprise the

white man's camp at dawn. They would have succeeded but for the chance that three or four of the

frontiersmen, who had risen before daybreak to hunt, came upon the Indians creeping towards the camp.

Shots were exchanged. An Indian and a white man dropped. The firing roused the camp. Three hundred men

in two lines under Charles Lewis and William Fleming sallied forth expecting to engage the vanguard of the

enemy but encountered almost the whole force of from eight hundred to a thousand Indians before the rest of

the army could come into action. Both officers were wounded, Charles Lewis fatally. The battle, which

continued from dawn until an hour before sunset, was the bloodiest in Virginia's long series of Indian wars.

The frontiersmen fought as such men ever foughtwith the daring, bravery, swiftness of attack, and skill in

taking cover which were the tactics of their day, even as at a later time many of these same men fought at

King's Mountain and in Illinois the battles that did so much to turn the tide in the Revolution.*

* With Andrew Lewis on this day were Isaac Shelby and William Campbell, the victorious leaders at King's

Mountain, James Robertson, the "father of Tennessee," Valentine Sevier, Daniel Morgan, hero of the

Cowpens, Major Arthur Campbell, Benjamin Logan, Anthony Bledsoe, and Simon Kenton. With Dunmore's

force were Adam Stephen, who distinguished himself at the Brandywine, George Rogers Clark, John Stuart,

already noted through the Cherokee wars, and John Montgomery, later one of Clark's four captains in Illinois.

The two last mentioned were Highlanders. Clark's Illinois force was largely recruited from the troops who

Colonel Preston wrote to Patrick Henry that the enemy behaved with "inconceivable bravery," the head men

walking about in the time of action exhorting their men to "lie close, shoot well, be strong, and fight." The

Shawanoes ran up to the muzzles of the English guns, disputing every foot of ground. Both sides knew well

what they were fighting forthe rich land held in a semicircle by the Beautiful River.

Shortly before sundown the Indians, mistaking a flank movement by Shelby's contingent for the arrival of

reinforcements, retreated across the Ohio. Many of their most noted warriors had fallen and among them the

Shawano chief, Puckeshinwa, father of a famous son, Tecumseh.* Yet they were unwilling to accept

defeat. When they heard that Dunmore was now marching overland to cut them off from their towns, their

fury blazed anew. "Shall we first kill all our women and children and then fight till we ourselves are slain?"

By the treaty compacted between the chiefs and Lord Dunmore, the Indians gave up all claim to the lands

south of the Ohio, even for hunting, and agreed to allow boats to pass unmolested. In this treaty the Mingos

refused to join, and a detachment of Dunmore's troops made a punitive expedition to their towns. Some

discord arose between Dunmore and Lewis's frontier forces because, since the Shawanoes had made peace,

Of all the chiefs, Logan alone still held aloof. Major Gibson undertook to fetch him, but Logan refused to

come to the treaty grounds. He sent by Gibson the short speech which has lived as an example of the best

"I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan's cabin hungry and he gave him not meat: if ever

he came cold and naked and he clothed him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan

remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites that my countrymen

pointed as they passed and said, 'Logan is the friend of the white men.' I had even thought to have lived with

you but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered

all the relations of Logan, not even sparing my women and children. There remains not a drop of my blood in

the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it; I have killed many; I have

fully glutted my vengeance: for my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbor a thought that

mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to

* Some writers have questioned the authenticity of Logan's speech, inclining to think that Gibson himself

composed it, partly because of the biblical suggestion in the first few lines. That Gibson gave biblical

phraseology to these lines is apparent, though, as Adair points out there are many examples of similitude in

Indian and biblical expression. But the thought is Indian and relates to the first article of the Indian's creed,

namely, to share his food with the needy. "There remains not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living

creature" is a truly Indian lament. Evidently the final four lines of the speech are the most literally translated,

for they have the form and the primitive rhythmic beat which a student of Indian poetry quickly recognizes.

The authenticity of the speech, as well as the innocence of Cresap, whom Logan mistakenly accused, was

vouched for by George Rogers Clark in a letter to Dr. Samuel Brown dated June 17, 1798. See Jefferson

papers, Series 6, quoted by English, "Conquest of the Country Northwest of the River Ohio." vol. II. p. 1029.

By rivers and trails, in large and small companies, started home the army that had won the land. The West

Fincastle troops, from the lower settlements of the Clinch and Holston valleys, were to return by the

Kentucky River, while those from the upper valley would take the shorter way up Sandy Creek. To keep

them in provisions during the journey it was ordered that hunters be sent out along these routes to kill and

The way home by the Kentucky was a long road for weary and wounded men with hunger gnawing under

their belts. We know who swung out along the trail to provide for that little band, "dressed in deerskins

colored black, and his hair plaited and bobbed up." It was Daniel Boonenow, by popular demand, Captain

Boonejust "discharged from Service," since the valley forts needed him no longer. Once more only a

hunter, he went his way over Walden Mountainpast his son's grave marking the place where HE had been

With the coming of spring Daniel Boone's desire, so long cherished and deferred, to make a way for his

neighbors through the wilderness was to be fulfilled at last. But ere his ax could slash the thickets from the

homeseekers' path, more than two hundred settlers had entered Kentucky by the northern waterways. Eighty

or more of these settled at Harrodsburg, where Harrod was laying out his town on a generous plan, with

"inlots" of half an acre and "outlots" of larger size. Among those associated with Harrod was George

Rogers Clark, who had surveyed claims for himself during the year before the war.

While over two hundred colonists were picking out home sites wherever their pleasure or prudence dictated, a

gigantic land promotion schemeinvolving the very tracts where they were sowing their first cornwas

being set afoot in North Carolina by a body of men who figure in the early history of Kentucky as the

Transylvania Company. The leader of this organization was Judge Richard Henderson.* Judge Henderson

dreamed a big dream. His castle in the air had imperial proportions. He resolved, in short, to purchase from

the Cherokee Indians the larger part of Kentucky and to establish there a colony after the manner and the

economic form of the English Lords Proprietors, whose day in America was so nearly done. Though in the

light of history the plan loses none of its dramatic features, it shows the practical defects that must surely

have prevented its realization. Like many another Caesar hungering for empire and staking all to win it, the

prospective lord of Kentucky, as we shall see, had left the human equation out of his calculations.

* Richard Henderson (17341785) was the son of the High Sheriff of Granville County. At first an assistant

to his father, he studied law and soon achieved a reputation by the brilliance of his mind and the magnetism

of his personality. As presiding Judge at Hillsborough he had come into conflict with the violent element

among the Regulators, who had driven him from the court and burned his house and barns. For some time

prior to his elevation to the bench, he had been engaged in land speculations. One of Boone's biographers

suggests that Boone may have been secretly acting as Henderson's agent during his first lonely explorations

of Kentucky. However this may be, it does not appear that Boone and his Yadkin neighbors were acting with

Henderson when in September, 1773, they made their first attempt to enter Kentucky as settlers.

Richard Henderson had known Daniel Boone on the Yadkin; and it was Boone's detailed reports of the

marvelous richness and beauty of Kentucky which had inspired him to formulate his gigantic scheme and had

enabled him also to win to his support several men of prominence in the Back Country. To sound the

Cherokees regarding the purchase and to arrange, if possible, for a conference, Henderson dispatched Boone

Since we have just learned that Dunmore's War compelled the Shawanoes and their allies to relinquish their

right to Kentucky, that, both before and after that event, government surveyors were in the territory surveying

for the soldiers' claims, and that private individuals had already laid out town sites and staked holdings, it

may be asked what right of ownership the Cherokees possessed in Kentucky, that Henderson desired to

purchase it of them. The Indian title to Kentucky seems to have been hardly less vague to the red men than it

was to the whites. Several of the nations had laid claim to the territory. As late as 1753, it will be

remembered, the Shawanoes had occupied a town at Blue Licks, for John Findlay had been taken there by

some of them. But, before Findlay guided Boone through the Gap in 1769, the Shawanoes had been driven

out by the Iroquois, who claimed suzerainty over them as well as over the Cherokees. In 1768, the Iroquois

had ceded Kentucky to the British Crown by the treaty of Fort Stanwix; whereupon the Cherokees had

protested so vociferously that the Crown's Indian agent, to quiet them, had signed a collateral agreement with

them. Though claimed by many, Kentucky was by common consent not inhabited by any of the tribes. It was

the great Middle Ground where the Indians hunted. It was the Warriors' Path over which they rode from north

and south to slaughter and where many of their fiercest encounters took place. However shadowy the title

which Henderson purposed to buy, there was one allsufficing reason why he must come to terms with the

Cherokees: their northernmost towns in Tennessee lay only fifty or sixty miles below Cumberland Gap and

hence commanded the route over which he must lead colonists into his empire beyond the hills.

The conference took place early in March, 1775, at the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga River. Twelve

hundred Indians, led by their "town chiefs"among whom were the old warrior and the old statesman of

their nation, Oconostota and Attakullakullacame to the treaty grounds and were received by Henderson

and his associates and several hundred white men who were eager for a chance to settle on new lands.

Though Boone was now on his way into Kentucky for the Transylvania Company, other border leaders of

renown or with their fame still to win were present, and among them James Robertson, of serious mien, and

It is a dramatic picture we evolve for ourselves from the meager narratives of this eventa mass of painted

Indians moving through the sycamores by the bright water, to come presently into a tense, immobile

semicircle before the large group of armed frontiersmen seated or standing about Richard Henderson, the

man with the imperial dream, the ready speaker whose flashing eyes and glowing oratory won the hearts of

all who came under their sway. What though the Cherokee title be a flimsy one at best and the price offered

for it a bagatelle! The spirit of Forward March! is there in that great canvas framed by forest and sky. The

somber note that tones its lustrous color, as by a sweep of the brush, is the figure of the Chickamaugan chief,

Dragging Canoe, warrior and seer and hater of white men, who urges his tribesmen against the sale and, when

they will not hearken, springs from their midst into the clear space before Henderson and his band of pioneers

and, pointing with uplifted arm, warns them that a dark cloud hangs over the land the white man covets which

* This utterance of Dragging Canoe's is generally supposed to be the origin of the descriptive phrase applied

to Kentucky"the Dark and Bloody Ground." See Roosevelt, "The Winning of the West," vol. I, p.229.

The purchase, finally consummated, included the country lying between the Kentucky and Cumberland

Rivers almost all the present State of Kentucky, with the adjacent land watered by the Cumberland River and

its tributaries, except certain lands previously leased by the Indians to the Watauga Colony. The tract

Daniel Boone's work was to cut out a road for the wagons of the Transylvania Company's colonists to pass

over. This was to be done by slashing away the briers and underbrush hedging the narrow Warriors' Path that

made a direct northward line from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio bank, opposite the mouth of the Scioto River.

Just prior to the conference Boone and "thirty guns" had set forth from the Holston to prepare the road and to

By April, Henderson and his first group of tenants were on the trail. In Powell's Valley they came up with a

party of Virginians Kentucky bound, led by Benjamin Logan; and the two bands joined together for the

march. They had not gone far when they heard disquieting news. After leaving Martin's Station, at the gates

of his new domain, Henderson received a letter from Boone telling of an attack by Indians, in which two of

his men had been killed, but "we stood on the ground and guarded our baggage till the day and lost

nothing."* These tidings, indicating that despite treaties and sales, the savages were again on the warpath,

might well alarm Henderson's colonists. While they halted, some indecisive, others frankly for retreat, there

appeared a company of men making all haste out of Kentucky because of Indian unrest. Six of these

Henderson persuaded to turn again and go in with him; but this addition hardly offset the loss of those

members of his party who thought it too perilous to proceed. Henderson's own courage did not falter. He had

staked his all on this stupendous venture and for him it was forward to wealth and glory or retreat into

poverty and eclipse. Boone, in the heart of the danger, was making the same stand. "If we give way to them

Signs of discord other than Indian opposition met Henderson as he resolutely pushed on. His conversations

with some of the fugitives from Kentucky disclosed the first indications of the storm that was to blow away

the empire he was going in to found. He told them that the claims they had staked in Kentucky would not

hold good with the Transylvania Company. Whereupon James McAfee, who was leading a group of returning

men, stated his opinion that the Transylvania Company's claim would not hold good with Virginia. After the

parley, three of McAfee's brothers turned back and went with Henderson's party, but whether with intent to

join his colony or to make good their own claims is not apparent. Benjamin Logan continued amicably with

Henderson on the march but did not recognize him as Lord Proprietor of Kentucky. He left the Transylvania

caravan shortly after entering the territory, branched off in the direction of Harrodsburg, and founded St.

Asaph's Station, in the present Lincoln County, independently of Henderson though the site lay within

Notwithstanding delays and apprehensions, Henderson and his colonists finally reached Boone's Fort, which

Daniel and his "thirty guns"lacking two since the Indian encounterhad erected at the mouth of Otter

An attractive buoyancy of temperament is revealed in Henderson's description in his journal of a giant elm

with tall straight trunk and even foliage that shaded a space of one hundred feet. Instantly he chose this

"divine elm" as the council chamber of Transylvania. Under its leafage he read the constitution of the new

colony. It would be too great a stretch of fancy to call it a democratic document, for it was not that, except in

deft phrases. Power was certainly declared to be vested in the people; but the substance of power remained in

Terms for land grants were generous enough in the beginning, although Henderson made the fatal mistake of

demanding quitrentsone of the causes of dissatisfaction which had led to the Regulators' rising in North

Carolina. In September he augmented this error by more than doubling the price of land, adding a fee of eight

shillings for surveying, and reserving to the Proprietors onehalf of all gold, silver, lead, and sulphur found

on the land. No land near sulphur springs or showing evidences of metals was to be granted to settlers.

Moreover, at the Company's store the prices charged for lead were said to be too highlead being necessary

for hunting, and hunting being the only means of procuring foodwhile the wages of labor, as fixed by the

Company, were too low. These terms bore too heavily on poor men who were risking their lives in the

Hence newcomers passed by Boonesborough, as the Transylvania settlement was presently called, and went

elsewhere. They settled on Henderson's land but refused his terms. They joined in their sympathies with

James Harrod, who, having established Harrodsburg in the previous year at the invitation of Virginia, was not

in the humor to acknowledge Henderson's claim or to pay him tribute. All were willing to combine with the

Transylvania Company for defense, and to enforce law they would unite in bonds of brotherhood in

Kentucky, even as they had been one with each other on the earlier frontier now left behind them. But they

would call no man master; they had done with feudalism. That Henderson should not have foreseen this,

especially after the upheaval in North Carolina, proves him, in spite of all his brilliant gifts, to have been a

The war of the Revolution broke forth and the Indians descended upon the Kentucky stations. Defense was

the one problem in all minds, and defense required powder and lead in plenty. The Transylvania Company

was not able to provide the means of defense against the hordes of savages whom Henry Hamilton, the

British Governor at Detroit, was sending to make war on the frontiers. Practical men like Harrod and George

Rogers Clarkwho, if not a practical man in his own interests, was a most practical soldiersaw that

unification of interests within the territory with the backing of either Virginia or Congress was necessary.

Clark personally would have preferred to see the settlers combine as a freemen's state. It was plain that they

would not combine and stake their lives as a unit to hold Kentucky for the benefit of the Transylvania

Company, whose authority some of the most prominent men in the territory had refused to recognize. The

Proprietary of Transylvania could continue to exist only to the danger of every life in Kentucky.

While the Proprietors sent a delegate to the Continental Congress to win official recognition for Transylvania,

eightyfour men at Harrodsburg drew up a petition addressed to Virginia stating their doubts of the legality

of Henderson's title and requesting Virginia to assert her authority according to the stipulations of her charter.

That defense was the primary and essential motive of the Harrodsburg Remonstrance seems plain, for when

George Rogers Clark set off on foot with one companion to lay the document before the Virginian

authorities, he also went to plead for a load of powder. In his account of that hazardous journey, as a matter

of fact, he makes scant reference to Transylvania, except to say that the greed of the Proprietors would soon

bring the colony to its end, but shows that his mind was seldom off the powder. It is a detail of history that

the Continental Congress refused to seat the delegate from Transylvania. Henderson himself went to Virginia

* In 1778 Virginia disallowed Henderson's title but granted him two hundred thousand acres between the

Green and Kentucky rivers for his trouble and expense in opening up the country.

The magnetic center of Boonesborough's life was the lovable and unassuming Daniel Boone. Soon after the

building of the fort Daniel had brought in his wife and family. He used often to state with a mild pride that

his wife and daughters were the first white women to stand on the banks of the Kentucky River. That pride

had not been unmixed with anxiety; his daughter Jemima and two daughters of his friend, Richard Galloway,

while boating on the river had been captured by Shawanoes and carried off. Boone, accompanied by the girls'

lovers and by John Floyd (eager to repay his debt of lifesaving to Boone) had pursued them, tracing the way

the captors had taken by broken twigs and scraps of dress goods which one of the girls had contrived to leave

in their path, had come on the Indians unawares, killed them, and recovered the three girls unhurt.

In the summer of 1776, Virginia took official note of "Captain Boone of Boonesborough," for she sent him a

small supply of powder. The men of the little colony, which had begun so pretentiously with its constitution

and assembly, were now obliged to put all other plans aside and to concentrate on the question of food and

defense. There was a dangerous scarcity of powder and lead. The nearest points at which these necessaries

could be procured were the Watauga and Holston River settlements, which were themselves none too well

stocked. Harrod and Logan, some time in 1777, reached the Watauga fort with three or four packhorses and

filled their packs from Sevier's store; but, as they neared home, they were detected by red scouts and Logan

was badly wounded before he and Harrod were able to drive their precious load safely through the gates at

Harrodsburg. In the autumn of 1777, Clark, with a boatload of ammunition, reached Maysville on the Ohio,

having successfully run the gauntlet between banks in possession of the foe. He had wrested the powder and

lead from the Virginia Council by threats to the effect that if Virginia was so willing to lose Kentuckyfor

of course "a country not worth defending is not worth claiming"he and his fellows were quite ready to take

Kentucky for themselves and to hold it with their swords against all comers, Virginia included. By even such

cogent reasoning had he convinced the Councilwhich had tried to hedge by expressing doubts that Virginia

would receive the Kentucky settlers as "citizens of the State"that it would be cheaper to give him the

Because so many settlers had fled and the others had come closer together for their common good,

Harrodsburg and Boonesborough were now the only occupied posts in Kentucky. Other settlements, once,

thriving, were abandoned; and, under the terror, the Wild reclaimed them. In April, 1777, Boonesborough

underwent its first siege. Boone, leading a sortie, was shot and he fell with a shattered ankle. An Indian

rushed upon him and was swinging the tomahawk over him when Simon Kenton, giant frontiersman and hero

of many daring deeds, rushed forward, shot the Indian, threw Boone across his back, and fought his way

desperately to safety. It was some months ere Boone was his nimble self again. But though he could not

The next year Boone was ready for new ventures growing from the settlers' needs. Salt was necessary to

preserve meat through the summer. Accordingly Boone and twentyseven men went up to the Blue Licks in

February, 1778, to replenish their supply by the simple process of boiling the salt water of the Licks till the

saline particles adhered to the kettles. Boone was returning alone, with a packhorse load of salt and game,

when a blinding snowstorm overtook him and hid from view four stealthy Shawanoes on his trail. He was

seized and carried to a camp of 120 warriors led by the French Canadian, Dequindre, and James and George

Girty, two white renegades. Among the Indians were some of those who had captured him on his first

exploring trip through Kentucky and whom he had twice given the slip. Their hilarity was unbounded. Boone

quickly learned that this band was on its way to surprise Boonesborough. It was a season when Indian attacks

were not expected; nearly threescore of the men were at the salt spring and, to make matters worse, the walls

of the new fort where the settlers and their families had gathered were as yet completed on only three sides.

Boonesborough was, in short, wellnigh defenseless. To turn the Indians from their purpose, Boone

conceived the desperate scheme of offering to lead them to the salt makers' camp with the assurance that he

and his companions were willing to join the tribe. He understood Indians well enough to feel sure that once

possessed of nearly thirty prisoners, the Shawanoes would not trouble further about Boonesborough but

would hasten to make a triumphal entry into their own towns. That some, perhaps all, of the white men would

assuredly die, he knew well; but it was the only way to save the women and children in Boonesborough. In

spite of Dequindre and the Girtys, who were leading a military expedition for the reduction of a fort, the

Shawanoes fell in with the suggestion. When they had taken their prisoners, the more bloodthirsty warriors in

the band wanted to tomahawk them all on the spot. By his diplomatic discourse, however, Boone dissuaded

them, for the time being at least, and the whole company set off for the towns on the Little Miami.

The weather became severe, very little game crossed their route, and for days they subsisted on slippery elm

bark. The lovers of blood did not hold back their scalping knives and several of the prisoners perished; but

Black Fish, the chief then of most power in Shawanoe councils, adopted Boone as his son, and gave him the

name of Sheltowee, or Big Turtle. Though watched zealously to prevent escape, Big Turtle was treated with

every consideration and honor; and, as we would say today, he played the game. He entered into the Indian

life with apparent zest, took part in hunts and sports and the races and shooting matches in which the Indians

delighted, but he was always careful not to outrun or outshoot his opponents. Black Fish took him to Detroit

when some of the tribe escorted the remainder of the prisoners to the British post. There he met Governor

Hamilton and, in the hope of obtaining his liberty, he led that dignitary to believe that he and the other people

of Boonesborough were eager to move to Detroit and take refuge under the British flag.* It is said that Boone

always carried in a wallet round his neck the King's commission given him in Dunmore's War; and that he

exhibited it to Hamilton to bear out his story. Hamilton sought to ransom him from the Indians, but Black

Fish would not surrender his new son. The Governor gave Boone a pony, with saddle and trappings, and

other presents, including trinkets to be used in procuring his needs and possibly his liberty from the

* So well did Boone play his part that he aroused suspicion even in those who knew him best. After his return

to Boonesborough his old friend, Calloway, formally accused him of treachery on two counts: that Boone had

betrayed the salt makers to the Indians and had planned to betray Boonesborough to the British. Boone was

tried and acquitted. His simple explanation of his acts satisfied the courtmartial and made him a greater hero

Black Fish then took his son home to Chillicothe. Here Boone found Delawares and Mingos assembling with

the main body of the Shawanoe warriors. The war belt was being carried through the Ohio country. Again

Boonesborough and Harrodsburg were to be the first settlements attacked. To escape and give warning was

now the one purpose that obsessed Boone. He redoubled his efforts to throw the Indians off their guard. He

sang and whistled blithely about the camp at the mouth of the Scioto River, whither he had accompanied his

Indian father to help in the salt boiling. In short, he seemed so very happy that one day Black Fish took his

eye off him for a few moments to watch the passing of a flock of turkeys. Big Turtle passed with the flock,

leaving no trace. To his lamenting parent it must have seemed as though he had vanished into the air. Daniel

crossed the Ohio and ran the 160 miles to Boonesborough in four days, during which time he had only one

meal, from a buffalo he shot at the Blue Licks. When he reached the fort after an absence of nearly five

months, he found that his wife had given him up for dead and had returned to the Yadkin.

Boone now began with all speed to direct preparations to withstand a siege. Owing to the Indian's leisurely

system of councils and ceremonies before taking the warpath, it was not until the first week in September that

Black Fish's painted warriors, with some Frenchmen under Dequindre, appeared before Boonesborough. Nine

days the siege lasted and was the longest in border history. Dequindre, seeing that the fort might not be taken,

resorted to trickery. He requested Boone and a few of his men to come out for a parley, saying that his orders

from Hamilton were to protect the lives of the Americans as far as possible. Boone's friend, Calloway, urged

against acceptance of the apparently benign proposal which was made, so Dequindre averred, for

"bienfaisance et humanite." But the words were the words of a white man, and Boone hearkened to them.

With eight of the garrison he went out to the parley. After a long talk in which good will was expressed on

both sides, it was suggested by Black Fish that they all shake hands and, as there were so many more Indians

than white men, two Indians should, of course, shake hands with one white man, each grasping one of his

hands. The moment that their hands gripped, the trick was clear, for the Indians exerted their strength to drag

off the white men. Desperate scuffling ensued in which the whites with difficulty freed themselves and ran

for the fort. Calloway had prepared for emergencies. The pursuing Indians were met with a deadly fire. After

The successful defense of Boonesborough was an achievement of national importance, for had

Boonesborough fallen, Harrodsburg alone could not have stood. The Indians under the British would have

overrun Kentucky; and George Rogers Clarkwhose base for his Illinois operations was the Kentucky

fortscould not have made the campaigns which wrested the Northwest from the control of Great Britain.

Again Virginia took official note of Captain Boone when in 1779 the Legislature established Boonesborough

"a town for the reception of traders" and appointed Boone himself one of the trustees to attend to the sale and

registration of lots. An odd office that was for Daniel, who never learned to attend to the registration of his

own; he declined it. His name appears again, however, a little later when Virginia made the whole of

Kentucky one of her counties with the following officers: Colonel David Robinson, County Lieutenant;

George Rogers Clark, Anthony Bledsoe, and John Bowman, Majors; Daniel Boone, James Harrod, Benjamin

Boonesborough's successful resistance caused land speculators as well as prospective settlers to take heart of

grace. Parties made their way to Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and even to the Falls of the Ohio, where

Clark's fort and blockhouses now stood. In the summer of 1779 Clark had erected on the Kentucky side of the

river a large fort which became the nucleus of the town of Louisville. Here, while he was eating his heart out

with impatience for money and men to enable him to march to the attack of Detroit, as he had planned, he

amused himself by drawing up plans for a city. He laid out private sections and public parks and

contemplated the bringing in of families only to inhabit his city, for, oddly enough, he who never married

was going to make short shift of mere bachelors in his City Beautiful. Between pen scratches, no doubt, he

looked out frequently upon the river to descry if possible a boatload of ammunition or the banners of the

When neither appeared, he gave up the idea of Detroit and set about erecting defenses on the southern border,

for the Choctaws and Cherokees, united under a white leader named Colbert, were threatening Kentucky by

way of the Mississippi. He built in 1780 Fort Jefferson in what is now Ballard County, and had barely

completed the new post and garrisoned it with about thirty men when it was besieged by Colbert and his

savages. The Indians, assaulting by night, were lured into a position directly before a cannon which poured

lead into a mass of them. The remainder fled in terror from the vicinity of the fort; but Colbert succeeded in

rallying them and was returning to the attack when he suddenly encountered Clark with a company of men

Clark knew that the Ohio Indians would come down on the settlements again during the summer and that to

meet their onslaughts every man in Kentucky would be required. He learned that there was a new influx of

land seekers over the Wilderness Road and that speculators were doing a thriving business in Harrodsburg;

so, leaving his company to protect Fort Jefferson, he took two men with him and started across the wilds on

foot for Harrodsburg. To evade the notice of the Indian bands which were moving about the country the three

stripped and painted themselves as warriors and donned the feathered headdress. So successful was their

disguise that they were fired on by a party of surveyors near the outskirts of Harrodsburg.

The records do not state what were the sensations of certain speculators in a land office in Harrodsburg when

a blueeyed savage in a war bonnet sprang through the doorway and, with uplifted weapon, declared the

office closed; but we get a hint of the power of Clark's personality and of his genius for dominating men from

the terse report that he "enrolled" the speculators. He was informed that another party of men, more nervous

than these, was now on its way out of Kentucky. In haste he dispatched a dozen frontiersmen to cut the party

off at Crab Orchard and take away the gun of every man who refused to turn back and do his bit for

Kentucky. To Clark a man was a gun, and he meant that every gun should do its duty.

The leaders and pioneers of the Dark and Bloody Ground were now warriors, all under Clark's command,

while for two years longer the Red Terror ranged Kentucky, falling with savage force now here, now there. In

the first battle of 1780, at the Blue Licks, Daniel's brother, Edward Boone, was killed and scalped. Later on in

the war his second son, Israel, suffered a like fate. The toll of life among the settlers was heavy. Many of the

bestknown border leaders were slain. Food and powder often ran short. Corn might be planted, but whether

it would be harvested or not the planters never knew; and the hunter's rifle shot, necessary though it was,

proved only too often an invitation to the lurking foe. But sometimes, through all the dangers of forest and

trail, Daniel Boone slipped away silently to Harrodsburg to confer with Clark; or Clark himself, in the Indian

guise that suited the wild man in him not ill, made his way to and from the garrisons which looked to him for

Twice Clark gathered together the "guns" of Kentucky and, marching north into the enemy's country, swept

down upon the Indian towns of Piqua and Chillicothe and razed them. In 1782, in the second of these

enterprises, his cousin, Joseph Rogers, who had been taken prisoner and adopted by the Indians and then

wore Indian garb, was shot down by one of Clark's men. On this expedition Boone and Harrod are said to

The ever present terror and horror of those days, especially of the two years preceding this expedition, are

vividly suggested by the quaint remark of an old woman who had lived through them, as recorded for us by a

traveler. The most beautiful sight she had seen in Kentucky, she said, was a young man dying a natural death

in his bed. Dead but unmarred by hatchet or scalping knife, he was so rare and comely a picture that the

But, we ask, what golden emoluments were showered by a grateful country on the men who thus held the

land through those years of want and war, and saved an empire for the Union? What practical recognition was

there of these brave and unselfish men who daily risked their lives and faced the stealth and cruelty lurking in

the wilderness ways? There is meager eloquence in the records. Here, for instance, is a letter from George

"Sir. Nothing but necessity could induce me to make the following request to Your Excellency, which is to

grant me a small sum of money on account; as I can assure you, Sir, that I am exceedingly distressed for the

want of necessary clothing etc and don't know any channel through which I could procure any except of the

Executive. The State I believe will fall considerably in my debt. Any supplies which Your Excellency favors

Clark had spent all his own substance and all else he could beg, borrowor appropriatein the conquest of

Illinois and the defense of Kentucky. His only reward from Virginia was a grant of land from which he

All that Clark had asked for himself was a commission in the Continental Army. This was denied him, as it

appears now, not through his own errors, which had not at that time taken hold on him, but through the

influence of powerful enemies. It is said that both Spain and England, seeing a great soldier without service

for his sword, made him offers, which he refused. As long as any acreage remained to him on which to raise

money, he continued to pay the debts he had contracted to finance his expeditions, and in this course he had

the assistance of his youngest brother, William, to whom he assigned his Indiana grant.

His health impaired by hardship and exposure and his heart broken by his country's indifference, Clark sank

into alcoholic excesses. In his sixtieth year, just six years before his death, and when he was a helpless

paralytic, he was granted a pension of four hundred dollars. There is a ring of bitter irony in the words with

which he accepted the sword sent him by Virginia in his crippled old age: "When Virginia needed a sword I

Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792. But even before Kentucky became a State her affairs,

particularly as to land, were arranged, let us say, on a practical business basis. Then it was discovered that

Daniel Boone had no legal claim to any foot of ground in Kentucky. Daniel owned nothing but the clothes he

wore; and for thoseas well as for much powder, lead, food, and such trifleshe was heavily in debt.

So, in 1788, Daniel Boone put the list of his debts in his wallet, gathered his wife and his younger sons about

him, and, shouldering his hunter's rifle, once more turned towards the wilds. The country of the Great

Kanawha in West Virginia was still a wilderness, and a hunter and trapper might, in some years, earn enough

to pay his debts. For others, now, the paths he had hewn and made safe; for Boone once more the wilderness

Indian law, tradition, and even superstition had shaped the conditions which the pioneers faced when they

crossed the mountains. This savage inheritance had decreed that Kentucky should be a dark and bloody

ground, fostering no life but that of fourfooted beasts, its fertile sod never to stir with the green push of the

corn. And so the white men who went into Kentucky to build and to plant went as warriors go, and for every

cabin they erected they battled as warriors to hold a fort. In the first years they planted little corn and reaped

less, for it may be said that their rifles were never out of their hands. We have seen how stations were built

and abandoned until but two stood. Untiring vigilance and ceaseless warfare were the price paid by the first

Kentuckians ere they turned the Indian's place of desolation and death into a land productive and a living

Herein lies the difference, slight apparently, yet significant, between the first Kentucky and the first

Tennessee* colonies. Within the memory of the Indians only one tribe had ever attempted to make their home

in Kentuckya tribe of the fighting Shawanoesand they had been terribly chastised for their temerity. But

Tennessee was the home of the Cherokees, and at Chickasaw Bluffs (Memphis) began the southward trail to

the principal towns of the Chickasaws. By the red man's fiat, then, human life might abide in Tennessee,

though not in Kentucky, and it followed that in seasons of peace the frontiersmen might settle in Tennessee.

So it was that as early as 1757, before the great Cherokee war, a company of Virginians under Andrew Lewis

had, on an invitation from the Indians, erected Fort Loudon near Great Telliko, the Cherokees' principal town,

and that, after the treaty of peace in 1761, Waddell and his rangers of North Carolina had erected a fort on the

* Tennessee. The name, Tenasse, appears on Adair's map as one of the old Cherokee towns. Apparently

neither the meaning nor the reason why the colonists called both state and river by this name has been handed

Though Fort Loudon had fallen tragically during the war, and though Waddell's fort had been abandoned,

neither was without influence in the colonization of Tennessee, for some of the men who built these forts

drifted back a year or two later and setup the first cabins on the Holston. These earliest settlements, thin and

scattered, did not survive; but in 1768 the same settlers or others of their kinddischarged militiamen from

Back Country regimentsonce more made homes on the Holston. They were joined by a few families from

near the present Raleigh, North Carolina, who had despaired of seeing justice done to the tenants on the

mismanaged estates of Lord Granville. About the same time there was erected the first cabin on the Watauga

River, as is generally believed, by a man of the name of William Bean (or Been), hunter and frontier soldier

from Pittsylvania County, Virginia. This man, who had hunted on the Watauga with Daniel Boone in 1760,

chose as the site of his dwelling the place of the old hunting camp near the mouth of Boone's Creek. He soon

Meanwhile the Regulation Movement stirred the Back Country of both the Carolinas. In 1768, the year in

which William Bean built his cabin on the bank of the Watauga, five hundred armed Regulators in North

Carolina, aroused by irregularities in the conduct of public office, gathered to assert their displeasure, but

dispersed peaceably on receipt of word from Governor Tryon that he had ordered the prosecution of any

officer found guilty of extortion. Edmund Fanning, the most hated of Lord Granville's agents, though

convicted, escaped punishment. Enraged at this miscarriage of justice, the Regulators began a system of

terrorization by taking possession of the court, presided over by Richard Henderson. The judge himself was

obliged to slip out by a back way to avoid personal injury. The Regulators burned his house and stable. They

meted out mob treatment likewise to William Hooper, later one of the signers of the Declaration of

Two elements, with antithetical aims, had been at work in the Regulation; and the unfortunate failure of

justice in the case of Fanning had given the corrupt element its opportunity to seize control. In the petitions

addressed to Governor Tryon by the leaders of the movement in its earlier stages the aims of libertyloving

thinkers are traceable. It is worthy of note that they included in their demands articles which are now

constitutional. They desired that "suffrage be given by ticket and ballot"; that the mode of taxation be altered,

and each person be taxed in proportion to the profits arising from his estate; that judges and clerks be given

salaries instead of perquisites and fees. They likewise petitioned for repeal of the act prohibiting dissenting

ministers from celebrating the rites of matrimony. The establishment of these reforms, the petitioners of the

Regulation concluded, would "conciliate" their minds to "every just measure of government, and would make

the laws what the Constitution ever designed they should be, their protection and not their bane." Herein

clearly enough we can discern the thought and the phraseology of the Ulster Presbyterians.

But a change took place in both leaders and methods. During the Regulators' career of violence they were

under the sway of an agitator named Hermon Husband. This demagogue was reported to have been expelled

from the Quaker Society for cause; it is on record that he was expelled from the North Carolina Assembly

because a vicious anonymous letter was traced to him. He deserted his dupes just before the shots cracked at

Alamance Creek and fled from the colony. He was afterwards apprehended in Pennsylvania for complicity in

Four of the leading Presbyterian ministers of the Back Country issued a letter in condemnation of the

Regulators. One of these ministers was the famous David Caldwell, soninlaw of the Reverend Alexander

Craighead, and a man who knew the difference between liberty and license and who proved himself the

bravest of patriots in the War of Independence. The records of the time contain sworn testimony against the

Regulators by Waightstill Avery, a signer of the Mecklenburg Resolves, who later presided honorably over

courts in the western circuit of Tennessee; and there is evidence indicating Jacobite and French intrigue. That

Governor Tryon recognized a hidden hand at work seems clearly revealed in his proclamation addressed to

those "whose understandings have been run away with and whose passions have been led in captivity by

some evil designing men who, actuated by cowardice and a sense of that Publick Justice which is due to their

Crimes, have obscured themselves from Publick view." What the Assembly thought of the Regulators was

expressed in 1770 in a drastic bill which so shocked the authorities in England that instructions were sent

forbidding any Governor to approve such a bill in future, declaring it "a disgrace to the British Statute

On May 16, 1771, some two thousand Regulators were precipitated by Husband into the Battle of Alamance,

which took place in a district settled largely by a rough and ignorant type of Germans, many of whom

Husband had lured to swell his mob. Opposed to him, were eleven hundred of Governor Tryon's troops,

officered by such patriots as Griffith Rutherford, Hugh Waddell, and Francis Nash. During an hour's

engagement about twenty Regulators were killed, while the Governor's troops had nine killed and sixtyone

wounded. Six of the leaders were hanged. The rest took the oath of allegiance which Tryon administered.

It has been said about the Regulators that they were not cast down by their defeat at Alamance but "like the

mammoth, they shook the bolt from their brow and crossed the mountains," but such flowery phrases do not

seem to have been inspired by facts. Nor do the records show that "fifteen hundred Regulators" arrived at

Watauga in 1771, as has also been stated. Nor are the names of the leaders of the Regulation to be found in

the list of signatures affixed to the one "state paper" of Watauga which was preserved and written into

historic annals. Nor yet do those names appear on the roster of the Watauga and Holston men who, in 1774,

fought with Shelby under Andrew Lewis in the Battle of Point Pleasant. The Boones and the Bryans, the

Robertsons, the Seviers, the Shelbys, the men who opened up the West and shaped the destiny of its

inhabitants, were genuine freemen, with a sense of law and order as inseparable from liberty. They would

James Hunter, whose signature leads on all Regulation manifestoes just prior to the Battle of Alamance, was

a sycophant of Husband, to whom he addressed fulsome letters; and in the real battle for democracythe

War of Independencehe was a Tory. The Colonial Records show that those who, "like the mammoth,"

shook from them the ethical restraints which make man superior to the giant beast, and who later bolted into

the mountains, contributed chiefly the lawlessness that harassed the new settlements. They were the banditti

and, in 1776, the Tories of the western hills; they pillaged the homes of the men who were fighting for the

It was not the Regulation Movement which turned westward the makers of the Old Southwest, but the free

and enterprising spirit of the age. It was emphatically an age of doers; and if men who felt the constructive

urge in them might not lay hold on conditions where they were and reshape them, then they must go forward

Of such adventurous spirits was James Robertson, a Virginian born of Ulster Scot parentage, and a resident of

(the present) Wake County, North Carolina, since his boyhood. Robertson was twentyeight years old when,

in 1770, he rode over the hills to Watauga. We can imagine him as he was then, for the portrait taken much

later in life shows the type of face that does not change. It is a high type combining the best qualities of his

race. Intelligence, strength of purpose, fortitude, and moral power are there; they impress us at the first

glance. At twentyeight he must have been a serious young man, little given to laughter; indeed, spontaneity

is perhaps the only good trait we miss in studying his face. He was a thinker who had not yet found his

purposea thinker in leash, for at this time James Robertson could neither read nor write.

At Watauga, Robertson lived for a while in the cabin of a man named Honeycut. He chose land for himself

and, in accordance with the custom of the time, sealed his right to it by planting corn. He remained to harvest

his first crop and then set off to gather his family and some of his friends together and escort them to the new

country. But on the way he missed the trail and wandered for a fortnight in the mountains. The heavy rains

ruined his powder so that he could not hunt; for food he had only berries and nuts. At one place, where steep

bluffs opposed him, he was obliged to abandon his horse and scale the mountain side on foot. He was in

extremity when he chanced upon two huntsmen who gave him food and set him on the trail. If this experience

proves his lack of the hunter's instinct and the woodsman's resourcefulness which Boone possessed, it proves

also his special qualities of perseverance and endurance which were to reach their zenith in his successful

struggle to colonize and hold western Tennessee. He returned to Watauga in the following spring (1771) with

his family and a small group of colonists. Robertson's wife was an educated woman and under her instruction

Next year a young Virginian from the Shenandoah Valley rode on down Holston Valley on a hunting and

exploring trip, and loitered at Watauga. Here he found not only a new settlement but an independent

government in the making; and forthwith he determined to have a part in both. This young Virginian had

already shown the inclination of a political colonist, for in the Shenandoah Valley he had, at the age of

nineteen, laid out the town of New Market (which exists to this day) and had directed its municipal affairs

and invited and fostered its clergy. This young Virginianborn on September 23, 1745, and so in 1772

twentyseven years of agewas John Sevier, that John Sevier whose monument now towers from its site in

Knoxville to testify of both the wild and the great deeds of old Tennessee's beloved knight. Like Robertson,

Sevier hastened home and removed his whole family, including his wife and children, his parents and his

The friendship formed between Robertson and Sevier in these first years of their work together was never

broken, yet two more opposite types could hardly have been brought together. Robertson was a man of

humble origin, unlettered, not a dour Scot but a solemn one. Sevier was cavalier as well as frontiersman. On

his father's side he was of the patrician family of Xavier in France. His progenitors, having become

Huguenots, had taken refuge in England, where the name Xavier was finally changed to Sevier. John Sevier's

mother was an Englishwoman. Some years before his birth his parents had emigrated to the Shenandoah

Valley. Thus it happened that John Sevier, who mingled good English blood with the blue blood of old

France, was born an American and grew up a frontier hunter and soldier. He stood about five feet nine from

his moccasins to his crown of light brown hair. He was wellproportioned and as graceful of body as he was

hardmuscled and swift. His chin was firm, his nose of a Roman cast, his mouth wellshaped, its slightly full

lips slanting in a smile that would not be repressed. Under the high, finely modeled brow, small keen dark

blue eyes sparkled with health, with intelligence, and with the man's joy in life.

John Sevier indeed cannot be listed as a type; he was individual. There is no other character like him in

border annals. He was cavalier and prince in his leadership of men; he had their homage. Yet he knew how to

be comrade and brother to the lowliest. He won and held the confidence and friendship of the seriousminded

Robertson no less than the idolatry of the wildest spirits on the frontier throughout the fortythree years of

the spectacular career which began for him on the day he brought his tribe to Watauga. In his time he wore

the governor's purple; and a portrait painted of him shows how well this descendant of the noble Xaviers

could fit himself to the dignity and formal habiliments of state; Yet in the fringed deerskin of frontier garb, he

was fleeter on the warpath than the Indians who fled before him; and he could outride and outshootand, it

is said, outswearthe best and the worst of the men who followed him. Perhaps the lurking smile on John

Sevier's face was a flicker of mirth that there should be found any man, red or white, with temerity enough to

The historians of Tennessee state that the Wataugans formed their government in 1772 and that Sevier was

one of its five commissioners. Yet, as Sevier did not settle in Tennessee before 1773, it is possible that the

Watauga Association was not formed until then. Unhappily the written constitution of the little

commonwealth was not preserved; but it is known that, following the Ulsterman's ideal, manhood suffrage

and religious independence were two of its provisions. The commissioners enlisted a militia and they

recorded deeds for land, issued marriage licenses, and tried offenders against the law. They believed

themselves to be within the boundaries of Virginia and therefore adopted the laws of that State for their

guidance. They had numerous offenders to deal with, for men fleeing from debt or from the consequence of

crime sought the new settlements just across the mountains as a safe and adjacent harbor. The attempt of

these men to pursue their lawlessness in Watauga was one reason why the Wataugans organized a

When the line was run between Virginia and North Carolina beyond the mountains, Watauga was discovered

to be south of Virginia's limits and hence on Indian lands. This was in conflict with the King's Proclamation,

and Alexander Cameron, British agent to the Cherokees, accordingly ordered the encroaching settlers to

depart. The Indians, however, desired them to remain. But since it was illegal to purchase Indian lands,

Robertson negotiated a lease for ten years. In 1775, when Henderson made his purchase from the Cherokees,

at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga, Robertson and Sevier, who were present at the sale with other Watauga

commissioners, followed Henderson's example and bought outright the lands they desired to include in

Watauga's domain. In 1776 they petitioned North Carolina for "annexation." As they were already within

North Carolina's bounds, it was recognition rather than annexation which they sought. This petition, which is

the only Wataugan document to survive, is undated but marked as received in August, 1776. It is in Sevier's

handwriting and its style suggests that it was composed by him, for in its manner of expression it has much in

common with many later papers from his pen. That Wataugans were a lawloving community and had

formed their government for the purpose of making law respected is reiterated throughout the document. As

showing the quality of these first western statemakers, two paragraphs are quoted:

"Finding ourselves on the frontiers, and being apprehensive that for want of proper legislature we might

become a shelter for such as endeavored to defraud their creditors; considering also the necessity of recording

deeds, wills, and doing other public business; we, by consent of the people, formed a court for the purposes

above mentioned, taking, by desire of our constituents, the Virginia laws for our guide, so near as the

situation of affairs would permit. This was intended for ourselves, and WAS DONE BY CONSENT OF

The petition goes on to state that, among their measures for upholding law, the Wataugans had enlisted "a

company of fine riflemen" and put them under command of "Captain James Robertson."

"We...thought proper to station them on our frontiers in defense of the common cause, at the expense and

risque of our own private fortunes, till farther public orders, which we flatter ourselves will give no offense....

We pray your mature and deliberate consideration in our behalf, that you may annex us to your Province

(whether as county, district, or other division) in such manner as may enable us to share in the glorious cause

of Liberty: enforce our laws under authority and in every respect become the best members of society; and

for ourselves and our constituents we hope we may venture to assure you that we shall adhere strictly to your

determinations, and that nothing will be lacking or anything neglected that may add weight (in the civil or

military establishments) to the glorious cause in which we are now struggling, or contribute to the welfare of

One hundred and thirteen names are signed to the document. In the following year (1777) North Carolina

erected her overhill territory into Washington County. The Governor appointed justices of the peace and

militia officers who in the following year organized the new county and its courts. And so Watauga's

independent government, begun in the spirit of true liberty, came as lawfully to its end.

But for nearly three years before their political status was thus determined, the Wataugans were sharing "in

the glorious cause of Liberty" by defending their settlements against Indian attacks. While the majority of the

young Cherokee warriors were among their enemies, their chief battles were fought with those from the

Chickamaugan towns on the Tennessee River, under the leadership of Dragging Canoe. The Chickamaugans

embraced the more vicious and bloodthirsty Cherokees, with a mixture of Creeks and bad whites, who, driven

from every lawabiding community, had cast in their lot with this tribe. The exact number of white thieves

and murderers who had found harbor in the Indian towns during a score or more of years is not known; but

the letters of the Indian agents, preserved in the records, would indicate that there were a good many of them.

They were fit allies for Dragging Canoe; their hatred of those from whom their own degeneracy had

"Dear Gentlemen: Isaac Thomas, William Falling, Jaret Williams and one more have this moment come in by

making their escape from the Indians and say six hundred Indians and whites were to start for this fort and

Thus was heralded the beginning of a savage warfare which kept the borderers engaged for years.

It has been a tradition of the chroniclers that Isaac Thomas received a timely warning from Nancy Ward, a

halfcaste Cherokee prophetess who often showed her good will towards the whites; and that the Indians

were roused to battle by Alexander Cameron and John Stuart, the British agents or superintendents among the

overhill tribes. There was a letter bearing Cameron's name stating that fifteen hundred savages from the

Cherokee and Creek nations were to join with British troops landed at Pensacola in an expedition against the

southern frontier colonies. This letter was brought to Watauga at dead of night by a masked man who slipped

it through a window and rode away. Apparently John Sevier did not believe the military information

contained in the mysterious missive, for he communicated nothing of it to the Virginia Committee. In recent

years the facts have come to light. This mysterious letter and others of a similar tenor bearing forged

signatures are cited in a report by the British Agent, John Stuart, to his Government. It appears that such

inflammatory missives had been industriously scattered through the back settlements of both Carolinas. There

are also letters from Stuart to Lord Dartmouth, dated a year earlier, urging that something be done

immediately to counteract rumors set afloat that the British were endeavoring to instigate both the Indians

Now it is, of course, an established fact that both the British and the American armies used Indians in the War

of Independence, even as both together had used them against the French and the Spanish and their allied

Indians. It was inevitable that the Indians should participate in any severe conflict between the whites. They

were a numerous and a warlike people and, from their point of view, they had more at stake than the alien

whites who were contesting for control of the red man's continent. Both British and Americans have been

blamed for "halfhearted attempts to keep the Indians neutral." The truth is that each side strove to enlist the

Indiansto be used, if needed later, as warriors. Massacre was no part of this policy, though it may have

been countenanced by individual officers in both camps. But it is obvious that, once the Indians took the

warpath, they were to be restrained by no power and, no matter under whose nominal command, they would

* "There is little doubt that either side, British or Americans, stood ready to enlist the Indians. Already before

Boston the Americans had had the help of the Stockbridge tribe. Washington found the service committed to

the practise when he arrived at Cambridge early in July. Dunmore had taken the initiative in securing such

allies, at least is purpose; but the insurgent Virginians had had of late more direct contact with the tribes and

were now striving to secure them but with little success." "The Westward Movement," by Justin Winsor, p.

General Ethan Allen of Vermont, as his letters show, sent emissaries into Canada in an endeavor to enlist the

French Canadians and the Canadian Indians against the British in Canada. See "American Archives," Fourth

Series, vol. II, p. 714. The British General Gage wrote to Lord Dartmouth from Boston, June 18, 1775: "We

need not be tender of calling on the Savages as the rebels have shown us the example, by bringing as many

Indians down against us as they could collect." "American Archives." Fourth Series, vol. ii, p. 967.

In a letter to Lord Germain, dated August 23, 1776, John Stuart wrote: "Although Mr. Cameron was in

constant danger of assassination and the Indians were threatened with invasion should they dare to, protect

him, yet he still found means to prevent their falling on the settlement." See North Carolina "Colonial

Records," vol. X, pp. 608 and 763. Proof that the British agents had succeeded in keeping the Cherokee

neutral till the summer of 1776 is found in the instructions, dated the 7th of July, to Major Winston from

President Rutledge of South Carolina, regarding the Cherokees, that they must be forced to give up the

British agents and "INSTEAD OF REMAINING IN A STATE OF NEUTRALITY with respect to British

Forces they must take part with us against them." See North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X, p. 658.

Whatever may have been the case elsewhere, the attacks on the Watauga and Holston settlements were not

instigated by British agents. It was not Nancy Ward but Henry Stuart, John Stuart's deputy, who sent Isaac

Thomas to warn the settlers. In their efforts to keep the friendship of the red men, the British and the

Americans were providing them with powder and lead. The Indians had run short of ammunition and, since

hunting was their only means of livelihood, they must shoot or starve. South Carolina sent the Cherokees a

large supply of powder and lead which was captured en route by Tories. About the same time Henry Stuart

set out from Pensacola with another consignment from the British. His report to Lord Germain of his arrival

in the Chickamaugan towns and of what took place there just prior to the raids on the Tennessee settlements

is one of the most illuminating as well as one of the most dramatic papers in the collected records of that

Stuart's first act was secretly to send out Thomas, the trader, to warn the settlers of their peril, for a small war

party of braves was even then concluding the preliminary war ceremonies. The reason for this Indian alarm

and projected excursion was the fact that the settlers had built one fort at least on the Indian lands. Stuart

finally persuaded the Indians to remain at peace until he could write to the settlers stating the grievances and

asking for negotiations. The letters were to be carried by Thomas on his return.

But no sooner was Thomas on his way again with the letters than there arrived a deputation of warriors from

the Northern tribesfrom "the Confederate nations, the Mohawks, Ottawas, Nantucas, Shawanoes and

Delawares"fourteen men in all, who entered the council hall of the Old Beloved Town of Chota with their

faces painted black and the war belt carried before them. They said that they had been seventy days on their

journey. Everywhere along their way they had seen houses and forts springing up like, weeds across the green

sod of their hunting lands. Where once were great herds of deer and buffalo, they had watched thousands of

men at arms preparing for war. So many now were the white warriors and their women and children that the

red men had been obliged to travel a great way on the other side of the Ohio and to make a detour of nearly

three hundred miles to avoid being seen. Even on this outlying route they had crossed the fresh tracks of a

great body of people with horses and cattle going still further towards the setting sun. But their cries were not

to be in vain; for "their fathers, the French" had heard them and had promised to aid them if they would now

After this preamble the deputy of the Mohawks rose. He said that some American people had made war on

one of their towns and had seized the son of their Great Beloved Man, Sir William Johnson, imprisoned him,

and put him to a cruel death; this crime demanded a great vengeance and they would not cease until they had

taken it. One after another the fourteen delegates rose and made their "talks" and presented their wampum

strings to Dragging Canoe. The last to speak was a chief of the Shawanoes. He also declared that "their

fathers, the French," who had been so long dead, were "alive again," that they had supplied them plentifully

with arms and ammunition and had promised to assist them in driving out the Americans and in reclaiming

their country. Now all the Northern tribes were joined in one for this great purpose; and they themselves were

on their way to all the Southern tribes and had resolved that, if any tribe refused to join, they would fall upon

and extirpate that tribe, after having overcome the whites. At the conclusion of his oration the Shawanoe

presented the war beltnine feet of sixinch wide purple wampum spattered with vermilionto Dragging

Canoe, who held it extended between his two hands, in silence, and waited. Presently rose a headman whose

wife had been a member of Sir William Johnson's household. He laid his hand on the belt and sang the war

song. One by one, then, chiefs and warriors rose, laid hold of the great belt and chanted the war song. Only

the older men, made wise by many defeats, sat still in their places, mute and dejected. "After that day every

young fellow's face in the overhills towns appeared blackened and nothing was now talked of but war."

Stuart reports that "all the white men" in the tribe also laid hands on the belt. Dragging Canoe then demanded

that Cameron and Stuart come forward and take hold of the war belt"which we refused." Despite the

offense their refusal gaveand it would seem a dangerous time to give such offenseCameron delivered a

"strong talk" for peace, warning the Cherokees of what must surely be the end of the rashness they

contemplated. Stuart informed the chief that if the Indians persisted in attacking the settlements with out

waiting for answers to his letters, he would not remain with them any longer or bring them any more

ammunition. He went to his house and made ready to leave on the following day. Early the next morning

Dragging Canoe appeared at his door and told him that the Indians were now very angry about the letters he

had written, which could only have put the settlers on their guard; and that if any white man attempted to

leave the nation "they had determined to follow him but NOT TO BRING HIM BACK." Dragging Canoe

had painted his face black to carry this message. Thomas now returned with an answer from "the West

Fincastle men," which was so unsatisfactory to the tribe that war ceremonies were immediately begun. Stuart

and Cameron could no longer influence the Indians. "All that could now be done was to give them strict

charge not to pass the Boundary Line, not to injure any of the King's faithful subjects, not to kill any women

and children"; and to threaten to "stop all ammunition" if they did not obey these orders.

The major part of the Watauga militia went out to meet the Indians and defeated a large advance force at

Long Island Flats on the Holston. The Watauga fort, where many of the settlers had taken refuge, contained

forty fighting men under Robertson and Sevier. As Indians usually retreated and waited for a while after a

defeat, those within the fort took it for granted that no immediate attack was to be expected; and the women

went out at daybreak into the fields to milk the cows. Suddenly the war whoop shrilled from the edge of the

clearing. Red warriors leaped from the green skirting of the forest. The women ran for the fort. Quickly the

heavy gates swung to and the dropped bar secured them. Only then did the watchmen discover that one

woman had been shut out. She was a young woman nearing her twenties and, if legend has reported her truly,

"Bonnie Kate Sherrill" was a beauty. Through a porthole Sevier saw her running towards the shut gates,

dodging and darting, her brown hair blowing from the wind of her race for lifeand offering far too rich a

prize to the yelling fiends who dashed after her. Sevier coolly shot the foremost of her pursuers, then sprang

upon the wall, caught up Bonnie Kate, and tossed her inside to safety. And legend says further that when,

after Sevier's brief widowerhood, she became his wife, four years later, Bonnie Kate was wont to say that she

would be willing to run another such race any day to have another such introduction!

There were no casualties within the fort and, after three hours, the foe withdrew, leaving several of their

In the excursions against the Indians which followed this opening of hostilities Sevier won his first fame as

an "Indian fighter"the fame later crystallized in the phrase "thirtyfive battles, thirtyfive victories." His

method was to take a very small company of the hardiest and swiftest horsemenmen who could keep their

seat and endurance, and horses that could keep their feet and their speed, on any steep of the mountains no

matter how tangled and rough the going might beswoop down upon war camp, or town, and go through it

with rifle and hatchet and fire, then dash homeward at the same pace before the enemy had begun to consider

whether to follow him or not. In all his "thirtyfive battles" it is said he lost not more than fifty men.

The Cherokees made peace in 1777, after about a year of almost continuous warfare, the treaty being

concluded on their side by the old chiefs who had never countenanced the war. Dragging Canoe refused to

take part, but he was rendered innocuous for the time being by the destruction of several of the

Chickamaugan villages. James Robertson now went to Chota as Indian agent for North Carolina. So fast was

population growing, owing to the opening of a wagon road into Burke County, North Carolina, that

Washington County was divided. John Sevier became Colonel of Washington and Isaac Shelby Colonel of

the newly erected Sullivan County. Jonesborough, the oldest town in Tennessee, was laid out as the county

seat of Washington; and in the same year (1778) Sevier moved to the bank of the Nolichucky River,

socalled after the Indian name of this dashing sparkling stream, meaning rapid or precipitous. Thus the

nickname given John Sevier by his devotees had a dual application. He was well called Nolichucky Jack.

When Virginia annulled Richard Henderson's immense purchase but allowed him a large tract on the

Cumberland, she by no means discouraged that intrepid pioneer. Henderson's tenure of Kentucky had been

brief, but not unprofitable in experience. He had learned that colonies must be treated with less commercial

pressure and with more regard to individual liberty, if they were to be held loyal either to a King beyond the

water or to an uncrowned leader nearer at hand. He had been making his plans for colonization of that portion

of the Transylvania purchase which lay within the bounds of North Carolina along the Cumberland and

choosing his men to lay the foundations of his projected settlement in what was then a wholly uninhabited

country; and he had decided on generous terms, such as ten dollars a thousand acres for land, the certificate of

purchase to entitle the holder to further proceedings in the land office without extra fees. To head an

enterprise of such danger and hardship Henderson required a man of more than mere courage; a man of

resource, of stability, of proven powers, one whom other men would follow and obey with confidence. So it

was that James Robertson was chosen to lead the first white settlers into middle Tennessee. He set out in

February, 1779, accompanied by his brother, Mark Robertson, several other white men, and a negro, to select

a site for settlement and to plant corn. Meanwhile another small party led by Gaspar Mansker had arrived. As

the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina had not been run to this point, Robertson believed

that the site he had chosen lay within Virginia and was in the disposal of General Clark. To protect the

settlers, therefore, he journeyed into the Illinois country to purchase cabin rights from Clark, but there he was

evidently convinced that the site on the Cumberland would be found to lie within North Carolina. He returned

to Watauga to lead a party of settlers into the new territory, towards which they set out in October. After

crossing the mountain chain through Cumberland Gap, the party followed Boone's roadthe Warriors'

Pathfor some distance and then made their own trail southwestward through the wilderness to the bluffs on

the Cumberland, where they built cabins to house them against one of the coldest winters ever experienced in

that county. So were laid the first foundations of the present city of Nashville, at first named Nashborough by

Robertson.* On the way, Robertson had fallen in with a party of men and families bound for Kentucky and

had persuaded them to accompany his little band to the Cumberland. Robertson's own wife and children, as

well as the families of his party, had been left to follow in the second expedition, which was to be made by

* In honor of General Francis Nash, of North Carolina, who was mortally wounded at Germantown, 1777.

The little fleet of boats containing the settlers, their families, and all their household goods, was to start from

Fort Patrick Henry, near Long Island in the Holston River, to float down into the Tennessee and along the

652 miles of that widely wandering stream to the Ohio, and then to proceed up the Ohio to the mouth of the

Cumberland and up the Cumberland until Robertson's station should appeara journey, as it turned out, of

some nine hundred miles through unknown country and on waters at any rate for the greater part never before

"Journal of a voyage, intended by God's permission, in the good boat Adventure" is the title of the log book

in which Captain Donelson entered the events of the four months' journey. Only a few pages endured to be

put into print: but those few tell a tale of hazard and courage that seems complete. Could a lengthier narrative,

even if enriched with literary art and fancy, bring before us more vividly than do the simple entries of

Donelson's log the spirit of the men and the women who won the West? If so little personal detail is recorded

of the pioneer men of that day that we must deduce what they were from what they did, what do we know of

their unfailing comrades, the pioneer women? Only that they were there and that they shared in every test of

courage and endurance, save the march of troops and the hunt. Donelson's "Journal" therefore has a special

value, because in its terse account of Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Peyton it depicts unforgettably the quality of

"December 22nd, 1779. Took our departure from the fort and fell down the river to the mouth of Reedy

Creek where we were stopped by the fall of water and most excessive hard frost."

Perhaps part of the "Journal" was lost, or perhaps the "excessive hard frost" of that severe winter, when it is

said even droves of wild game perished, prevented the boats, from going on, for the next entry is dated the

27th of February. On this date the Adventure and two other boats grounded and lay on the shoals all that

"March 2nd. Rain about half the day.... Mr. Henry's boat being driven on the point of an island by the force of

the current was sunk, the whole cargo much damaged and the crew's lives much endangered, which

"Monday 6th. Got under way before sunrise; the morning proving very foggy, many of the fleet were much

boggedabout 10 o'clock lay by for them; when collected, proceeded down. Camped on the north shore,

where Captain Hutching's negro man died, being much frosted in his feet and legs, of which he died.

"Tuesday, 7th. Got under way very early; the day proving very windy, a S.S.W., and the river being wide

occasioned a high sea, insomuch that some of the smaller crafts were in danger; therefore came to at the

uppermost Chiccamauga town, which was then evacuated, where we lay by that afternoon and camped that

night. The wife of Ephraim Peyton was here delivered of a child. Mr. Peyton has gone through by land with

"Wednesday 8th...proceed down to an Indian village which was inhabited...they insisted on us to come

ashore, called us brothers, and showed other signs of friendship.... And here we must regret the unfortunate

death of young Mr. Payne, on board Captain Blakemore's boat, who was mortally wounded by reason of the

boat running too near the northern shore opposite the town, where some of the enemy lay concealed; and the

more tragical misfortune of poor Stuart, his family and friends, to the number of twentyeight persons. This

man had embarked with us for the Western country, but his family being diseased with the small pox, it was

agreed upon between him and the company that he should keep at some distance in the rear, for fear of the

infection spreading, and he was warned each night when the encampment should take place by the sound of a

horn.... The Indians having now collected to a considerable number, observing his helpless situation singled

off from the rest of the fleet, intercepted him and killed and took prisoners the whole crew...; their cries were

After describing a running fight with Indians stationed on the bluffs on both shores where the river narrowed

to half its width and boiled through a canyon, the entry for the day concludes: "Jennings's boat is missing."

"Friday 10th. This morning about 4 o'clock we were surprised by the cries of "help poor Jennings" at some

distance in the rear. He had discovered us by our fires and came up in the most wretched condition. He states

that as soon as the Indians discovered his situation [his boat had run on a rock] they turned their whole

attention to him and kept up a most galling fire at his boat. He ordered his wife, a son nearly grown, a young

man who accompanies them and his negro man and woman, to throw all his goods into the river to lighten

their boat for the purpose of getting her off; himself returning their fire as well as he could, being a good

soldier and an excellent marksman. But before they had accomplished their object, his son, the young man

and the negro, jumped out of the boat and left.... Mrs. Jennings, however, and the negro woman, succeeded in

unloading the boat, but chiefly by the exertions of Mrs. Jennings who got out of the boat and shoved her off,

but was near falling a victim to her own intrepidity on account of the boat starting so suddenly as soon as

loosened from the rock. Upon examination he appears to have made a wonderful escape for his boat is

pierced in numberless places with bullets. It is to be remarked that Mrs. Peyton, who was the night before

delivered of an infant, which was unfortunately killed upon the hurry and confusion consequent upon such a

disaster, assisted them, being frequently exposed to wet and cold.... Their clothes were very much cut with

Of the three men who deserted, while the women stood by under fire, the negro was drowned and Jennings's

son and the other young man were captured by the Chickamaugans. The latter was burned at the stake. Young

Jennings was to have shared the same fate; but a trader in the village, learning that the boy was known to

John Sevier, ransomed him by a large payment of goods, as a return for an act of kindness Sevier had once

"Sunday 12th.... After running until about 10 o'clock came in sight of the Muscle Shoals. Halted on the

northern shore at the appearance of the shoals, in order to search for the signs Captain James Robertson was

to make for us at that place...that it was practicable for us to go across by land...we can find nonefrom

which we conclude that it would not be prudent to make the attempt and are determined, knowing ourselves

in such imminent danger, to pursue our journey down the river.... When we approached them [the Shoals]

they had a dreadful appearance.... The water being high made a terrible roaring, which could be heard at some

distance, among the driftwood heaped frightfully upon the points of the islands, the current running in every.

possible direction. Here we did not know how soon we should be dashed to pieces and all our troubles ended

at once... Our boats frequently dragged on the bottom and appeared constantly in danger of striking. They

warped as much as in a rough sea. But by the hand of Providence we are now preserved from this danger

also. I know not the length of this wonderful shoal; it had been represented to me to be twentyfive or thirty

miles. If so, we must have descended very rapidly, as indeed we did, for we passed it in about three hours."

On the twentieth the little fleet arrived at the mouth of the Tennessee and the voyagers landed on the bank of

"Our situation here is truly disagreeable. The river is very high and the current rapid, our boats not

constructed for the purpose of stemming a rapid stream, our provisions exhausted, the crews almost worn

down with hunger and fatigue, and know not what distance we have to go or what time it will take us to our

place of destination. The scene is rendered still more melancholy as several boats will not attempt to ascend

the rapid current. Some intend to descend the Mississippi to Natchez; others are bound for the

Illinoisamong the rest my soninlaw and daughter. We now part, perhaps to meet no more, for I am

"Tuesday 21st. Set out and on this day labored very hard and got but little way.... Passed the two following

"Friday 24th. About three o'clock came to the mouth of a river which I thought was the Cumberland. Some of

the company declared it could not beit was so much smaller than was expected.... We determined however

"Saturday 25th. Today we are much encouraged; the river grows wider;...we are now convinced it is the

"Friday 31st...met with Colonel Richard Henderson, who is running the line between Virginia and North

Carolina. At this meeting we were much rejoiced. He gave us every information we wished, and further

informed us that he had purchased a quantity of corn in Kentucky, to be shipped at the Falls of Ohio for the

use of the Cumberland settlement. We are now without bread and are compelled to hunt the buffalo to

"Monday, April 24th. This day we arrived at our journey's end at the Big Salt Lick, where we have the

pleasure of finding Captain Robertson and his company. It is a source of satisfaction to us to be enabled to

restore to him and others their families and friends, who were entrusted to our care, and who, sometime since,

Past the camps of the Chickamauganswho were retreating farther and farther down the twisting flood,

seeking a last standing ground in the giant caves by the Tennesseethese white voyagers had steered their

pirogues. Near Robertson's station, where they landed after having traversed the triangle of the three great

rivers which enclose the larger part of western Tennessee, stood a crumbling trading house marking the

defeat of a Frenchman who had, one time, sailed in from the Ohio to establish an outpost of his nation there.

At a little distance were the ruins of a rude fort cast up by the Cherokees in the days when the redoubtable

Chickasaws had driven them from the pleasant shores of the western waters. Under the towering forest

growth lay vast burial mounds and the sunken foundations of walled towns, telling of a departed race which

had once flashed its rude paddles and had its dream of permanence along the courses of these great

waterways. Now another tribe had come to dream that dream anew. Already its primitive keels had traced the

About the time when James Robertson went from Watauga to fling out the frontier line three hundred miles

farther westward, the British took Savannah. In 1780 they took Charleston and Augusta, and overran Georgia.

Augusta was the point where the old trading path forked north and west, and it was the key to the Back

Country and the overhill domain. In Georgia and the Back Country of South Carolina there were many Tories

ready to rally to the King's standard whenever a King's officer should carry it through their midst. A large

number of these Tories were Scotch, chiefly from the Highlands. In fact, as we have seen, Scotch blood

predominated among the racial streams in the Back Country from Georgia to Pennsylvania. Now, to insure a

triumphant march northward for Cornwallis and his royal troops, these sons of Scotland must be gathered

together, the loyal encouraged and those of rebellious tendencies converted, and they must be drilled and

turned to account. This task, if it were to be accomplished successfully, must be entrusted to an offcer with

positive qualifications, one who would command respect, whose personal address would attract men and

disarm opposition, and especially one who could go as a Scot among his own clan. Cornwallis found his man

Ferguson was a Highlander, a son of Lord Pitfour of Aberdeen, and thirtysix years of age. He was of short

stature for a Highlanderabout five feet eightlean and dark, with straight black hair. He had a serious

unhandsome countenance which, at casual glance, might not arrest attention; but when he spoke he became

magnetic, by reason of the intelligence and innate force that gleamed in his eyes and the convincing sincerity

of his manner. He was admired and respected by his brother officers and by the commanders under whom he

He had seen his first service in the Seven Years' War, having joined the British army in Flanders at the age of

fifteen; and he had early distinguished himself for courage and coolness. In 1768, as a captain of infantry, he

quelled an insurrection of the natives on the island of St. Vincent in the West Indies. Later, at Woolwich, he

took up the scientific study of his profession of arms. He not only became a crack shot, but he invented a new

type of rifle which he could load at the breach without ramrod and so quickly as to fire seven times in a

minute. Generals and statesmen attended his exhibitions of shooting; and even the King rode over at the head

In America under Cornwallis, Ferguson had the reputation of being the best shot in the army; and it was soon

said that, in his quickness at loading and firing, he excelled the most expert American frontiersman.

Eyewitnesses have left their testimony that, seeing a bird alight on a bough or rail, he would drop his bridle

rein, draw his pistol, toss it in the air, catch and aim it as it fell, and shoot the bird's head off. He was given

command of a corps of picked riflemen; and in the Battle of the Brandywine in 1777 he rendered services

which won acclaim from the whole army. For the honor of that day's service to his King, Ferguson paid what

from him, with his passion for the rifle, must have been the dearest price that could have been demanded. His

right arm was shattered, and for the remaining three years of his short life it hung useless at his side. Yet he

took up swordplay and attained a remarkable degree of skill as a lefthanded swordsman.

Such was Ferguson, the soldier. What of the man? For he has been pictured as a wolf and a fiend and a

coward by early chroniclers, who evidently felt that they were adding to the virtue of those who fought in

defense of liberty by representing all their foes as personally odious. We can read his quality of manhood in a

few lines of the letter he sent to his kinsman, the noted Dr. Adam Ferguson, about an incident that occurred at

Chads Ford. As he was lying with his men in the woods, in front of Knyphausen's army, so he relates, he saw

two American officers ride out. He describes their dress minutely. One was in hussar uniform. The other was

in a dark green and blue uniform with a high cocked hat and was mounted on a bay horse:

"I ordered three good shots to steal near to and fire at them; but the idea disgusting me, I recalled the order.

The hussar in retiring made a circuit, but the other passed within a hundred yards of us, upon which I

advanced from the wood towards him. Upon my calling he stopped; but after looking at me he proceeded. I

again drew his attention and made signs to him to stop; levelling my piece at him; but he slowly cantered

away. As I was within that distance, at which, in the quickest firing, I could have lodged half a dozen balls in

or about him before he was out of my reach, I had only to determine. But it was not pleasant to fire at the

back of an unoffending individual who was acquitting himself very coolly of his dutyso I let him alone.

The day after, I had been telling this story to some wounded officers, who lay in the same room with me,

when one of the surgeons who had been dressing the wounded rebel officers came in and told us that they had

been informing him that General Washington was all the morning with the light troops, and only attended by

a French officer in hussar dress, he himself dressed and mounted in every point as above described. I AM

*Doubt that the officer in question was Washington was expressed by James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper stated

that Major De Lancey, his fatherinlaw, was binding Ferguson's arm at the time when the two officers were

seen and Ferguson recalled the order to fire, and that De Lancey said he believed the officer was Count

Pulaski. But, as Ferguson, according to his own account, "leveled his piece" at the officer, his arm evidently

was not wounded until later in the day. The probability is that Ferguson's version, written in a private letter to

his relative, is correct as to the facts, whatever may be conjectured as to the identity of the officer. See

Ferguson had his code towards the foe's women also. On one occasion when he was assisting in an action

carried out by Hessians and Dragoons, he learned that some American women had been shamefully

maltreated. He went in a white fury to the colonel in command, and demanded that the men who had so

In rallying the loyalists of the Back Country of Georgia and the Carolinas, Ferguson was very successful. He

was presently in command of a thousand or more men, including small detachments of loyalists from New

York and New Jersey, under Americanborn officers such as De Peyster and Allaire. There were good honest

men among the loyalists and there were also rough and vicious men out for spoilswhich was true as well of

the Whigs or Patriots from the same counties. Among the rough element were Tory banditti from the

overmountain region. It is to be gathered from Ferguson's records that he did not think any too highly of some

The American Patriots hastily prepared to oppose him. Colonel Charles McDowell of Burke County, North

Carolina, with a small force of militia was just south of the line at a point on the Broad River when he heard

that Ferguson was sweeping on northward. In haste he sent a call for help across the mountains to Sevier and

Shelby. Sevier had his hands full at Watauga, but he dispatched two hundred of his troops; and Isaac Shelby,

with a similar force from Sullivan County crossed the mountains to McDowell's assistance. These

"overmountain men" or "backwater men," as they were called east of the hills, were trained in Sevier's

method of Indian warfarethe secret approach through the dark, the swift dash, and the swifter flight. "Fight

strong and run away fast" was the Indian motto, as their women had often been heard to call it after the red

men as they ran yelling to fall on the whites. The frontiersmen had adapted the motto to fit their case, as they

had also made their own the Indian tactics of ambuscade and surprise attacks at dawn. To sleep, or ride if

needs must, by night, and to fight by day and make off, was to them a reasonable soldier's life.

But Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which grew among the Whigs of the Back

Country until the wildest legends about his ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a habit he had of

pouncing on his foes in the middle of the night and pulling them out of bed to give fight or die. It was

generally both fight and die, for these dark adventures of his were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no

neutrals or conscientious objectors; any man who would not carry arms for the King was a traitor, and his life

and goods were forfeit. A report of his reads: "The attack being made at night, no quarter could be given."

Hence his wolfish fame. "Werewolf " would have been a fit name for him for, though he was a wolf at night,

In the guerrilla fighting that went on for a brief time between the overmountain men and various detachments

of Ferguson's forces, sometimes one side, sometimes the other, won the heat. But the field remained open.

Neither side could claim the mastery. In a minor engagement fought at Musgrove's Mill on the Enoree,

Shelby's command came off victor and was about to pursue the enemy towards NinetySix when a

messenger from McDowell galloped madly into camp with word of General Gates's crushing defeat at

Camden. This was a warning for Shelby's guerrillas to flee as birds to their mountains, or Ferguson would cut

them off from the north and wedge them in between his own force and the victorious Cornwallis. McDowell's

men, also on the run for safety, joined them. For fortyeight hours without food or rest they rode a race with

Ferguson, who kept hard on their trail until they disappeared into the mystery of the winding mountain paths

Ferguson reached the gap where they had swerved into the towering hills only half an hour after their horses'

hoofs had pounded across it. Here he turned back. His troops were exhausted from the allnight ride and, in

any case, there were not enough of them to enable him to cross the mountains and give the Watauga men

battle on their own ground with a fair promise of victory. So keeping east of the hills but still close to them,

Ferguson turned into Burke County, North Carolina. He sat him down in Gilbert Town (present Lincolnton,

Lincoln County) at the foot of the Blue Ridge and indited a letter to the "Back Water Men," telling them that

if they did not lay down their arms and return to their rightful allegiance, he would come over their hills and

raze their settlements and hang their leaders. He paroled a kinsman of Shelby's, whom he had taken prisoner

in the chase, and sent him home with the letter. Then he set about his usual business of gathering up Tories

One of the "rebels" was a certain Captain Lytle. When Ferguson drew up at Lytle's door, Lytle had already

made his escape; but Mrs. Lytle was there. She was a very handsome woman and she had dressed herself in

her best to receive Ferguson, who was reported a gallant as well as a wolf. After a few spirited passages

between the lady in the doorway and the officer on the white horse before it, the latter advised Mrs. Lytle to

use her influence to bring her husband back to his duty. She became grave then and answered that her

husband would never turn traitor to his country. Ferguson frowned at the word "traitor," but presently he said:

"Madam, I admire you as the handsomest woman I have seen in North Carolina. I even half way admire your

zeal in a bad cause. But take my word for it, the rebellion has had its day and is now virtually put down. Give

my regards to Captain Lytle and tell him to come in. He wiil not be asked to compromise his honor. His

verbal pledge not again to take up arms against the King is all that will be asked of him."*

This was another phase of the character of the onearmed Highlander whose final challenge to the backwater

men was now being considered in every log cabin beyond the hills. A man who would not shoot an enemy in

the back, who was ready to put the same faith in another soldier's honor which he knew was due to his own,

yet in battle a wolfish fighter who leaped through the dark to give no quarter and to take nonehe was fit

challenger to those other mountaineers who also had a chivalry of their own, albeit they too were wolves of

When Shelby on the Holston received Ferguson's pungent letter, he flung himself on his horse and rode

posthaste to Watauga to consult, with Sevier. He found the bank of the Nolichucky teeming with

merrymakers. Nolichucky ,Jack was giving an immense barbecue and a horse race. Without letting the

festival crowd have an inkling of the serious nature of Shelby's errand, the two men drew apart to confer. It is

said to have been Sevier's idea that they should muster the forces of the western country and go in search of

Ferguson ere the latter should be able to get sufficient reinforcements to cross the mountains. Sevier, like

Ferguson, always preferred to seek his foe, knowing well the advantage of the offensive. Messengers were

sent to Colonel William Campbell of the Virginia settlements on the Clinch, asking his aid. Campbell at first

refused, thinking it better to fortify the positions they held and let Ferguson come and put the mountains

between himself and Cornwallis. On receipt of a second message, however, he concurred. The call to arms

was heard up and down the valleys, and the frontiersmen poured into Watauga. The overhill men were

augmented by McDowell's troops from Burke County, who had dashed over the mountains a few weeks

At daybreak on the 26th of September they mustered at the Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga, over a

thousand strong. It was a different picture they made from that other great gathering at the same spot when

Henderson had made his purchase in money of the Dark and Bloody Ground, and Sevier and Robertson had

bought for the Wataugans this strip of Tennessee. There were no Indians in this picture. Dragging Canoe,

who had uttered his bloody prophecy, had by these very men been driven far south into the caves of the

Tennessee River. But the Indian prophecy still hung over them, and in this day with a heavier menace. Not

with money, now, were they to seal their purchase of the free land by the western waters. There had been no

women in that other picture, only the white men who were going forward to open the way and the red men

who were retreating. But in this picture there were womenwives and children, mothers, sisters, and

sweethearts. All the women of the settlement were there at this daybreak muster to cheer on their way the

men who were going out to battle that they might keep the way of liberty open not for men only but for

women and children also. And the battle to which the men were now going forth must be fought against Back

Country men of their own stripe under a leader who, in other circumstances, might well have been one of

themselvesa primitive spirit of hardy mountain stock, who, having once taken his stand, would not barter

"With the Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" cried their pastor, the Reverend Samuel Doak, with upraised

hands, as the mountaineers swung into their saddles. And it is said that all the women took up his words and

cried again and again, "With the sword of the Lord and of our Gideons!" To the shouts of their women, as

bugles on the wind of dawn, the buckskinshirted army dashed out upon the mountain trail.

The warriors' equipment included rifles and ammunition, tomahawks, knives, shot pouches, a knapsack, and a

blanket for each man. Their uniforms were leggings, breeches, and long loose shirts of gayly fringed

deerskin, or of the linseywoolsey spun by their women. Their hunting shirts were bound in at the waist by

brightcolored linsey sashes tied behind in a bow. They wore moccasins for footgear, and on their heads high

fur or deerskin caps trimmed with colored bands of raveled cloth. Around their necks hung their powderhorns

On the first day they drove along with them a number of beeves but, finding that the cattle impeded the

march, they left them behind on the mountain side. Their provisions thereafter were wild game and the small

supply each man carried of mixed corn meal and maple sugar. For drink, they had the hill streams.

They passed upward between Roan and Yellow mountains to the top of the range. Here, on the bald summit,

where the loose snow lay to their ankles, they halted for drill and rifle practice. When Sevier called up his

men, he discovered that two were missing. He suspected at once that they had slipped away to carry warning

to Ferguson, for Watauga was known to be infested with Tories. Two problems now confronted the

mountaineers. They must increase the speed of their march, so that Ferguson should not have time to get

reinforcements from Cornwallis; and they must make that extra speed by another trail than they had intended

taking so that they themselves could not be intercepted before they had picked up the Back Country militia

under Colonels Cleveland, Hampbright, Chronicle, and Williams, who were moving to join them. We are not

told who took the lead when they left the known trail, but we may suppose it was Sevier and his Wataugans,

for the making of new warpaths and wild riding were two of the things which distinguished Nolichucky

Jack's leadership. Down the steep side of the mountain, finding their way as they plunged, went the overhill

men. They crossed the Blue Ridge at Gillespie's Gap and pushed on to Quaker Meadows, where Colonel

Cleveland with 350 men swung into their column. Along their route, the Back Country Patriots with their

They now had an army of perhaps fifteen hundred men but no commanding officer. Thus far, on the march,

the four colonels had conferred together and agreed as to procedure; or, in reality, the influence of Sevier and

Shelby, who had planned the enterprise and who seem always to have acted in unison, had swayed the others.

It would be, however, manifestly improper to go into battle without a real general. Something must be done.

McDowell volunteered to carry a letter explaining their need to General Gates, who had escaped with some

of his staff into North Carolina and was not far off. It then occurred to Sevier and Shelby, evidently for the

first time, that Gates, on receiving such a request, might well ask why the Governor of North Carolina, as the

military head of the State, had not provided a commander. The truth is that Sevier and Shelby had been so

busy drumming up the militia and planning their campaign that they had found no time to consult the

Governor. Moreover, the means whereby the expedition had been financed might not have appealed to the

chief executive. After finding it impossible to raise sufficient funds on his personal credit, Sevier had

appropriated the entry money in the government land office to the business in handwith the good will of

the entry taker, who was a patriotic man, although, as he had pointed out, he could not, OFFICIALLY, hand

over the money. Things being as they were, no doubt Nolichucky Jack felt that an interview with the

Governor had better be deferred until after the capture of Ferguson. Hence the tenor of this communication to

"As we have at this time called out our militia without any orders from the Executive of our different States

and with the view of expelling the Enemy out of this part of the Country, we think such a body of men

worthy of your attention and would request you to send a General Officer immediately to take the

command.... All our Troops being Militia and but little acquainted with discipline, we could wish him to be a

Gentleman of address, and able to keep up a proper discipline WITHOUT DISGUSTING THE SOLDIERY."

For some unknown reasonunless it might be the wording of this letter!no officer was sent in reply.

Shelby then suggested that, since all the officers but Campbell were North Carolinians and, therefore, no one

of them could be promoted without arousing the jealousy of the others, Campbell, as the only Virginian, was

the appropriate choice. The sweet reasonableness of selecting a commander from such a motive appealed to

all, and Campbell became a general in fact if not in name! Shelby's principal aim, however, had been to get

rid of McDowell, who, as their senior, would naturally expect to command and whom he considered "too far

advanced in life and too inactive" for such an enterprise. At this time McDowell must have been nearly

thirtynine; and Shelby, who was just thirty, wisely refused to risk the campaign under a general who was in

News of the frontiersmen's approach, with their augmented force, now numbering between sixteen and

eighteen hundred, had reached Ferguson by the two Tories who had deserted from Sevier's troops. Ferguson

thereupon had made all haste out of Gilbert Town and was marching southward to get in touch with

Cornwallis. His force was much reduced, as some of his men were in pursuit of Elijah Clarke towards

Augusta and a number of his other Tories were on furlough. As he passed through the Back Country he

posted a notice calling on the loyalists to join him. If the overmountain men felt that they were out on a wolf

"Gentlemen: Unless you wish to be eat up by an innundation of barbarians, who have begun by murdering an

unarmed son before the aged father, and afterwards lopped off his arms, and who by their shocking cruelties

and irregularities give the best proof of their cowardice and want of discipline: I say if you wish to be

pinioned, robbed and murdered, and see your wives and daughters in four days, abused by the dregs of

mankindin short if you wish to deserve to live and bear the name of men, grasp your arms in a moment and

"The Back Water men have crossed the mountains: McDowell, Hampton, Shelby, and Cleveland are at their

head, so that you know what you have to depend upon. If you choose to be degraded forever and ever by a set

of mongrels, say so at once, and let your women turn their backs upon you, and look out for real men to

Ferguson's force has been estimated at about eleven hundred men, but it is likely that this estimate does not

take the absentees into consideration. In the diary of Lieutenant Allaire, one of his officers, the number is

given as only eight hundred. Because of the state of his army, chroniclers have found Ferguson's movements,

after leaving Gilbert Town, difficult to explain. It has been pointed out that he could easily have escaped, for

he had plenty of time, and Charlotte, Cornwallis's headquarters, was only sixty miles distant. We have seen

something of Ferguson's quality, however, and we may simply take it that he did not want to escape. He had

been planning to cross the high hillsto him, the Highlander, no barrier but a challengeto fight these men.

Now that they had taken the initiative he would not show them his back. He craved the battle. So he sent out

runners to the main army and rode on along the eastern base of the mountains, seeking a favorable site to go

into camp and wait for Cornwallis's aid. On the 6th of October he reached the southern end of the King's

Mountain ridge, in South Carolina, about half a mile south of the northern boundary. Here a rocky,

semiisolated spur juts out from the ridge, its summita tableland about six hundred yards long and one

hundred and twenty wide at its northern endrising not more than sixty feet above the surrounding country.

The hill was a natural fortress, its sides forested, its bald top protected by rocks and bowlders. All the

approaches led through dense forest. An enemy force, passing through the immediate, wooded territory,

might easily fail to discover a small army nesting sixty feet above the shrouding leafage. Word was evidently

brought to Ferguson here, telling him the now augmented number of his foe, for he dispatched another

emissary to Cornwallis with a letter stating the number of his own troops and urging full and immediate

Meanwhile the frontiersmen had halted at the Cowpens. There they feasted royally off roasted cattle and corn

belonging to the loyalist who owned the Cowpens. It is said that they mowed his fifty acres of corn in an

hour. And here one of their spies, in the assumed role of a Tory, learned Ferguson's plans, his approximate

force, his route, and his system of communication with Cornwallis. The officers now held council and

determined to take a detachment of the hardiest and fleetest horsemen and sweep down on the enemy before

aid could reach him. About nine o'clock that evening, according to Shelby's report, 910 mounted men set off

at full speed, leaving the main body of horse and foot to follow after at their best pace.

Rain poured down on them all that night as they rode. At daybreak they crossed the Broad at Cherokee Ford

and dashed on in the drenching rain all the forenoon. They kept their firearms and powder dry by wrapping

them in their knapsacks, blankets, and hunting shirts. The downpour had so churned up the soil that many of

the horses mired, but they were pulled out and whipped forward again. The wild horsemen made no halt for

food or rest. Within two miles of King's Mountain they captured Ferguson's messenger with the letter that

told of his desperate situation. They asked this man how they should know Ferguson. He told them that

Ferguson was in full uniform but wore a checkered shirt or dust cloak over it. This was not the only

messenger of Ferguson's who failed to carry through. The men he had sent out previously had been followed

and, to escape capture or death, they had been obliged to lie in hiding, so that they did not reach Cornwallis

At three o'clock on the afternoon of the 7th of October, the overmountain men were in the forest at the base

of the hill. The rain had ceased and the sun was shining. They dismounted and tethered their steaming horses.

Orders were given that every man was to "throw the priming out of his pan, pick his touchhole, prime anew,

examine bullets and see that everything was in readiness for battle." The plan of battle agreed on was to

surround the hill, hold the enemy on the top and, themselves screened by the trees, keep pouring in their fire.

There was a good chance that most of the answering fire would go over their heads.

As Shelby's men crossed a gap in the woods, the outposts on the hill discovered their presence and sounded

the alarm. Ferguson sprang to horse, blowing his silver whistle to call his men to attack. His riflemen poured

fire into Shelby's contingent, but meanwhile the frontiersmen on the other sides were creeping up, and

presently a circle of fire burst upon the hill. With fixed bayonets, some of Ferguson's men charged down the

face of the slope, against the advancing foe, only to be shot in the back as they charged. Still time and time

again they charged; the overhill men reeled and retreated; but always their comrades took toll with their

rifles; Ferguson's men, preparing for a mounted charge, were shot even as they swung to their saddles.

Ferguson, with his customary indifference to danger, rode up and down in front of his line blowing his

whistle to encourage his men. "Huzza, brave boys! The day is our own!" Thus he was heard to shout above

the triumphant war whoops of the circling foe, surging higher and higher about the hill.

But there were others in his band who knew the fight was lost. The overmountain men saw two white

handkerchiefs, axed to bayonets, raised above the rocks; and then they saw Ferguson dash by and slash them

down with his sword. Two horses were shot under Ferguson in the latter part of the action; but he mounted a

third and rode again into the thick of the fray. Suddenly the cry spread among the attacking troops that the

British officer, Tarleton, had come to Ferguson's rescue; and the mountaineers began to give way. But it was

only the galloping horses of their own comrades; Tarleton had not come. Nolichucky Jack spurred out in

front of his men and rode along the line. Fired by his courage they sounded the war whoop again and renewed

"These are the same yelling devils that were at Musgrove's Mill," said Captain De Peyster to Ferguson.

Now Shelby and Sevier, leading his Wataugans, had reached the summit. The firing circle pressed in. The

buckskinshirted warriors leaped the rocky barriers, swinging their tomahawks and long knives. Again the

white handkerchiefs fluttered. Ferguson saw that the morale of his troops was shattered.

Ferguson turned his horse's head downhill and charged into the Wataugans, hacking right and left with his

sword till it was broken at the hilt. A dozen rifles were leveled at him. An iron muzzle pushed at his breast,

but the powder flashed in the pan. He swerved and struck at the rifleman with his broken hilt. But the other

guns aimed at him spoke; and Ferguson's body jerked from the saddle pierced by eight bullets. Men seized

the bridle of the frenzied horse, plunging on with his dead master dragging from the stirrup.

The battle had lasted less than an hour. After Ferguson fell, De Peyster advanced with a white flag and

surrendered his sword to Campbell. Other white flags waved along the hilltop. But the killing did not yet

cease. It is said that many of the mountaineers did not know the significance of the white flag. Sevier's

sixteenyearold son, having heard that his father had fallen, kept on furiously loading and firing until

presently he saw Sevier ride in among the troops and command them to stop shooting men who had

The victors made a bonfire of the enemy's baggage wagons and supplies. Then they killed some of his beeves

and cooked them; they had had neither food nor sleep for eighteen hours. They dug shallow trenches for the

dead and scattered the loose earth over them. Ferguson's body, stripped of its uniform and boots and wrapped

in a beef hide, was thrown into one of these ditches by the men detailed to the burial work, while the officers

The triumphant army turned homeward as the dusk descended. The uninjured prisoners and the wounded who

were able to walk were marched off carrying their empty firearms. The badly wounded were left lying where

At Bickerstaff's Old Fields in Rutherford County the frontiersmen halted; and here they selected thirty of

their prisoners to be hanged. They swung them aloft, by torchlight, three at a time, until nine had gone to their

last account. Then Sevier interposed; and, with Shelby's added authority, saved the other twentyone. Among

those who thus weighted the gallows tree were some of the Tory brigands from Watauga; but not all the

victims were of this character. Some of the troops would have wreaked vengeance on the two Tories from

Sevier's command who had betrayed their army plans to Ferguson; but Sevier claimed them as under his

jurisdiction and refused consent. Nolichucky Jack dealt humanely by his foes. To the coarse and brutish

Cleveland, now astride of Ferguson's horse and wearing his sash, and to the three hundred who followed him,

Victors and vanquished drove on in the dark, close to the great flank of hills. From where King's Mountain,

strewn with dead and dying, reared its black shape like some rudely hewn tomb of a primordial age when

titans strove together, perhaps to the ears of the marching men came faintly through the night's stillness the

howl of a wolf and the answering chorus of the pack. For the wolves came down to King's Mountain from all

the surrounding hills, following the scent of blood, and made their lair where the Werewolf had fallen. The

scene of the mountaineers' victory, which marked the turn of the tide for the Revolution, became for years the

The importance of the overmountain men's victory lay in what it achieved for the cause of Independence.

King's Mountain was the prelude to Cornwallis's defeat. It heartened the Southern Patriots, until then cast

down by Gates's disaster. To the British the death of Ferguson was an irreparable loss because of its

depressing effect on the Back Country Tories. Ding's Mountain, indeed, broke the Tory spirit. Seven days

after the battle General Nathanael Greene succeeded to the command of the Southern Patriot army which

Gates had led to defeat. Greene's genius met the rising tide of the Patriots' courage and hope and took it at the

flood. His strategy, in dividing his army and thereby compelling the division of Cornwallis's force, led to

Daniel Morgan's victory at the Cowpens, in the Back Country of South Carolina, on January 17,

1781another frontiersmen's triumph. Though the British won the next engagement between Greene and

Cornwallisthe battle of Guilford Court House in the North Carolina Back Country, on the 15th of

MarchGreene madethem pay so dearly for their victory that Tarleton called it "the pledge of ultimate

defeat"; and, three days later, Cornwallis was retreating towards Wilmington. In a sense, then, King's

Mountain was the pivot of the war's revolving stage, which swung the British from their succession of

Shelby, Campbell, and Cleveland escorted the prisoners to Virginia. Sevier, with his men, rode home to

Watauga. When the prisoners had been delivered to the authorities in Virginia, the Holston men also turned

homeward through the hills. Their route lay down through the Clinch and Holston valleys to the settlement at

the base of the mountains. Sevier and his Wataugans had gone by Gillespie's Gap, over the pathway that hung

like a narrow ribbon about the breast of Roan Mountain, lifting its crest in dignified isolation sixtythree

hundred feet above the levels. The "Unakas" was the name the Cherokees had given to those white men who

first invaded their hills; and the Unakas is the name that white men at last gave to the mountain.

Great companies of men were to come over the mountain paths on their way to the Mississippi country and

beyond; and with them, as we know, were to go many of these mountain men, to pass away with their

customs in the transformations that come with progress. But there were others who clung to these hills. They

were of several stocksEnglish, Scotch, Highlanders, Ulstermen, who mingled by marriage and sometimes

took their mates from among the handsome maids of the Cherokees. They spread from the Unakas of

Tennessee into the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky; and they have remained to this day what they were

then, a primitive folk of strong and fiery men and brave women living as their forefathers of Watauga and

Holston lived. In the log cabins in those mountains today are heard the same ballads, sung still to the

dulcimer, that entertained the earliest settlers. The women still turn the oldfashioned spinning wheels. The

code of the men is still the code learned perhaps from the Gaelsthe code of the oath and the feud and the

open door to the stranger. Or were these, the ethical tenets of almost all uncorrupted primitive tribes,

transmitted from the Indian strain and association? Their young people marry at boy and girl ages, as the

pioneers did, and their wedding festivities are the same as those which made rejoicing at the first marriage in

Watauga. Their common speech today contains words that have been obsolete in England for a hundred

Thrice have the mountain men come down again from their fastnesses to war for America since the day of

King's Mountain and thrice they have acquitted themselves so that their deeds are noted in history. A

souvenir of their part in the War of 1812 at the Battle of the Thames is kept in one of the favorite names for

mountain girls"Lake Erie." In the Civil War many volunteers from the free, nonslaveholding mountain

regions of Kentucky and Tennessee joined the Union Army, and it is said that they exceeded all others in

stature and physical development. And in our own day their sons again came down from the mountains to

carry the torch of Liberty overseas, and to show the white stars in their flag side by side with the ancient cross

After King's Mountain, Sevier reached home just in time to fend off a Cherokee attack on Watauga. Again

warning had come to the settlements that the Indians were about to descend upon them. Sevier set out at once

to meet the red invaders. Learning from his scouts that the Indians were near he went into ambush with his

troops disposed in the figure of a halfmoon, the favorite Indian formation. He then sent out a small body of

men to fire on the Indians and make a scampering retreat, to lure the enemy on. The maneuver was so well

planned and the ground so well chosen that the Indian war party would probably have been annihilated but

for the delay of an officer at one horn of the halfmoon in bringing his troops into play. Through the gap thus

made the Indians escaped, with a loss of seventeen of their number. The delinquent officer was Jonathan

Tipton, younger brother of Colonel John Tipton, of whom we shall hear later. It is possible that from this

event dates the Tiptons' feud with Sevier, which supplies one of the breeziest pages in the story of early

Not content with putting the marauders to flight, Sevier pressed on after them, burned several of the upper

towns, and took prisoner a number of women and children, thus putting the red warriors to the depth of

shame, for the Indians never deserted their women in battle. The chiefs at once sued for peace. But they had

made peace often before. Sevier drove down upon the Hiwassee towns, meanwhile proclaiming that those

among the tribe who were friendly might send their families to the white settlement, where they would be fed

and cared for until a sound peace should be assured. He also threatened to continue to make war until his

enemies were wiped out, their town sites a heap of blackened ruins, and their whole country in possession of

Having compelled the submission of the Otari and Hiwassee towns, yet finding that depredations still

continued, Sevier determined to invade the group of towns hidden in the mountain fastnesses near the

headwaters of the Little Tennessee where, deeming themselves inaccessible except by their own trail, the

Cherokees freely plotted mischief and sent out raiding parties. These hill towns lay in the high gorges of the

Great Smoky Mountains, 150 miles distant. No one in Watauga had ever been in them except Thomas, the

trader, who, however, had reached them from the eastern side of the mountains. With no knowledge of the

Indians' path and without a guide, yet nothing daunted, Sevier, late in the summer of 1781 headed his force

into the mountains. So steep were some of the slopes they scaled that the men were obliged to dismount and

help their horses up. Unexpectedly to themselves perhaps, as well as to the Indians, they descended one

morning on a group of villages and destroyed them. Before the fleeing savages could rally, the mountaineers

had plunged up the steeps again. Sevier then turned southward into Georgia and inflicted a severe castigation

When, after thirty days of warfare and mad riding, Sevier arrived at his Bonnie Kate's door on the

Nolichucky, he found a messenger from General Greene calling on him for immediate assistance to cut off

Cornwallis from his expected retreat through North Carolina. Again he set out, and with two hundred men

crossed the mountains and made all speed to Charlotte, in Mecklenburg County, where he learned that

Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. Under Greene's orders he turned south to the

Santee to assist a fellow scion of the Huguenots, General Francis Marion, in the pursuit of Stuart's Britishers.

Having driven Stuart into Charleston, Sevier and his active Wataugans returned home, now perhaps looking

forward to a rest, which they had surely earned. Once more, however, they were hailed with alarming news.

Dragging Canoe had come to life again and was emerging from the caves of the Tennessee with a substantial

force of Chickamaugan warriors. Again the Wataugans, augmented by a detachment from Sullivan County,

galloped forth, met the red warriors, chastised them heavily, put them to rout, burned their dwellings and

provender, and drove them back into their hiding places. For some time after this, the Indians dipped not into

the black paint pots of war but were content to streak their humbled countenances with the vermilion of

It should be chronicled that Sevier, assisted possibly by other Wataugans, eventually returned to the State of

North Carolina the money which he had forcibly borrowed to finance the King's Mountain expedition; and

that neither he nor Shelby received any pay for their services, nor asked it. Before Shelby left the Holston in

1782 and moved to Kentucky, of which State he was to become the first Governor, the Assembly of North

Carolina passed a resolution of gratitude to the overmountain men in general, and to Sevier and Shelby in

particular, for their "very generous and patriotic services" with which the "General Assembly of this State are

feelingly impressed." The resolution concluded by urging the recipients of the Assembly's acknowledgments

to "continue" in their noble course. In view of what followed, this resolution is interesting!

For some time the overhill pioneers had been growing dissatisfied with the treatment they were receiving

from the State, which on the plea of poverty had refused to establish a Superior Court for them and to appoint

a prosecutor. As a result, crime was on the increase, and the lawabiding were deprived of the proper legal

means to check the lawless. In 1784 when the western soldiers' claims began to reach the Assembly, there to

be scrutinized by unkindly eyes, the dissatisfaction increased. The breasts of the mountain menthe men

who had made that spectacular ride to bring Ferguson to his endwere kindled with hot indignation when

they heard that they had been publicly assailed as grasping persons who seized on every pretense to "fabricate

demands against the Government." Nor were those fiery breasts cooled by further plaints to the effect that the

"industry and property" of those east of the hills were "becoming the funds appropriated to discharge the

debts" of the Westerners. They might with justice have asked what the industry and property of the Easterners

were worth on that day when the overhill men drilled in the snows on the high peak of Yellow Mountain and

looked down on Burke County overrun by Ferguson's Tories, and beyond, to Charlotte, where lay Cornwallis.

The North Carolina Assembly did not confine itself to impolite remarks. It proceeded to get rid of what it

deemed western rapacity by ceding the whole overmountain territory to the United States, with the proviso

that Congress must accept the gift within twelve months. And after passing the Cession Act, North Carolina

closed the land office in the undesired domain and nullified all entries made after May 25, 1784. The Cession

Act also enabled the State to evade its obligations to the Cherokees in the matter of an expensive

This clever stroke of the Assembly's brought about immediate consequences in the region beyond the hills.

The Cherokees, who knew nothing about the Assembly's system of political economy but who found their

own provokingly upset by the nonarrival of the promised goods, began again to darken the mixture in their

paint pots; and they dug up the war hatchet, never indeed so deeply patted down under the dust that it could

not be unearthed by a stub of the toe. Needless to say, it was not the thrifty and distant Easterners who felt

As for the white overhill dwellers, the last straw had been laid on their backs; and it felt like a hickory log.

No sooner had the Assembly adjourned than the men of Washington, Sullivan, and Greene counties, which

comprised the settled portion of what is now east Tennessee, elected delegates to convene for the purpose of

discussing the formation of a new State. They could assert that they were not acting illegally, for in her first

constitution North Carolina had made provision for a State beyond the mountains. And necessity compelled

them to take steps for their protection. Some of them, and Sevier was of the number, doubted if Congress

would accept the costly gift; and the majority realized that during the twelve months which were allowed for

the decision they would have no protection from either North Carolina or Congress and would not be able to

In August, 1784, the delegates met at Jonesborough and passed preliminary resolutions; and then adjourned

to meet later in the year. The news was soon disseminated through North Carolina and the Assembly

convened in October and hastily repealed the Cession Act, voted to establish the District of Washington out

of the four counties, and sent word of the altered policy to Sevier, with a commission for himself as Brigadier

General. From the steps of the improvised convention hall, before which the delegates had gathered, Sevier

read the Assembly's message and advised his neighbors to proceed no further, since North Carolina had of

her own accord redressed all their grievances. But for once Nolichucky Jack's followers refused to follow.

The adventure too greatly appealed. Obliged to choose between North Carolina and his own people, Sevier's

hesitation was short. The State of Frankland, or Land of the Free, was formed; and Nolichucky Jack was

elevated to the office of Governorwith a yearly salary of two hundred mink skins.

Perhaps John Tipton had hoped to head the new State, for he had been one of its prime movers and was a

delegate to this convention. But when the man whom he hatedapparently for no reason except that other

men loved himassented to the people's will and was appointed to the highest post within their gift, Tipton

withdrew, disavowing all connection with Frankland and affirming his loyalty to North Carolina. From this

That brief and now forgotten State, Frankland, the Land of the Free, which bequeathed its name as an

appellation for America, was founded as Watauga had been foundedto meet the practical needs and

aspirations of its people. It will be remembered that one of the things written by Sevier into the only Watauga

document extant was that they desired to become "in every way the best members of society." Frankland's

aims, as recorded, included the intent to "improve agriculture, perfect manufacturing, ENCOURAGE

The constitution of Frankland, agreed to on the 14th of November, 1785, appeals to us today rather by its

spirit than by its practical provisions. "This State shall be called the Commonwealth of Frankland and shall be

governed by a General Assembly of the representatives of the freemen of the same, a Governor and Council,

and proper courts of justice.... The supreme legislative power shall be vested in a single House of

Representatives of the freemen of the commonwealth of Frankland. The House of Representatives of the

freemen of the State shall consist of persons most noted for wisdom and virtue."

In these exalted desires of the primitive men who held by their rifles and hatchets the land by the western

waters, we see the influence of the Reverend Samuel Doak, their pastor, who founded the first church and the

first school beyond the great hills. Early in the life of Watauga he had come thither from Princeton, a zealous

and broadminded young man, and a sturdy one, too, for he came on foot driving before him a mule laden with

books. Legend credits another minister, the Reverend Samuel Houston, with suggesting the name of

Frankland, after he had opened the Convention with prayer. It is not surprising to learn that this glorified

constitution was presently put aside in favor of one modeled on that of North Carolina.

Sevier persuaded the more radical members of the community to abandon their extreme views and to adopt

the laws of North Carolina. However lawless his acts as Governor of a bolting colony may appear, Sevier was

essentially a constructive force. His purposes were right, and small motives are not discernible in his record.

He might reasonably urge that the Franklanders had only followed the example of North Carolina and the

other American States in seceding from the parent body, and for similar causes, for the State's system of

The whole transmontane populace welcomed Frankland with enthusiasm. Major Arthur Campbell, of the

Virginian settlements, on the Holston, was eager to join. Sevier and his Assembly took the necessary steps to

receive the overhill Virginians, provided that the transfer of allegiance could be made with Virginia's consent.

Meanwhile he replied in a dignified manner to the pained and menacing expostulations of North Carolina's

Governor. North Carolina was bidden to remember the epithets her assemblymen had hurled at the

Westerners, which they themselves had by no means forgotten. And was it any wonder that they now doubted

the love the parent State professed to feel for them? As for the puerile threat of blood, had their quality really

so soon become obliterated from the memory of North Carolina? At this sort of writing, Sevier, who always

pulsed hot with emotion and who had a pretty knack in turning a phrase, was more than a match for the

The overmountain men no longer needed to complain bitterly of the lack of legal machinery to keep them

"the best members of society." They now had courts to spare. Frankland had its courts, its judges, its

legislative body, its land officein fact, a full governmental equipment. North Carolina also performed all

the natural functions of political organism, within the western territory. Sevier appointed one David Campbell

a judge. Campbell held court in Jonesborough. Ten miles away, in Buffalo, Colonel John Tipton presided for

North Carolina. It happened frequently that officers and attendants of the rival law courts met, as they

pursued, their duties, and whenever they met they fought. The post of sheriffor sheriffs, for of course there

were twowas filled by the biggest and heaviest man and the hardest hitter in the ranks of the warring

factions. A favorite game was raiding each other's courts and carrying off the records. Frankland sent William

Cocke, later the first senator from Tennessee, to Congress with a memorial, asking Congress to accept the

territory North Carolina had offered and to receive it into the Union as a separate State. Congress ignored the

plea. It began to appear that North Carolina would be victor in the end; and so there were defections among

the Franklanders. Sevier wrote to Benjamin Franklin asking his aid in establishing the status of Frankland;

and, with a graceful flourish of his ready pen, changed the new State's name to Franklin by way of

reinforcing his arguments. But the old philosopher, more expert than Sevier in diplomatic calligraphy, only

acknowledged the compliment and advised the State of Franklin to make peace with North Carolina.

Sevier then appealed for aid and recognition to the Governor of Georgia, who had previously appointed him

Brigadier General of militia. But the Governor of Georgia also avoided giving the recognition requested,

though he earnestly besought Sevier to come down and settle the Creeks for him. There were others who sent

pleas to Sevier, the warrior, to save them from the savages. One of the writers who addressed him did not fear

to say "Your Excellency," nor to accord Nolichucky Jack the whole dignity of the purple in appealing to him

as the only man possessing the will and the power to prevent the isolated settlements on the Cumberland from

In 1787, while Sevier was on the frontier of Greene County, defending it from Indians, the legal forces of

North Carolina swooped down on his estate and took possession of his negroes. It was Tipton who

represented the law; and Tipton carried off the Governor's slaves to his own estate. When Nolichucky Jack

came home and found that his enemy had stripped him, he was in a towering rage. With a body of his troops

and one small cannon, he marched to Tipton's house and besieged it, threatening a bombardment. He did not,

however, fire into the dwelling, though he placed some shots about it and in the extreme corners. This opera

bouffe siege endured for several days, until Tipton was reinforced by some of his own clique. Then Tipton

sallied forth and attacked the besiegers, who hastily scattered rather than engage in a sanguinary fight with

their neighbors. Tipton captured Sevier's two elder sons and was only strained from hanging them on being

In March, 1788, the State of Franklin went into eclipse. Sevier was overthrown by the authorities of North

Carolina. Most of the officials who had served under him were soothed by being reappointed to their old

positions. Tipton's star was now in the ascendant, for his enemy was to be made the vicarious sacrifice for the

sins of all whom he had "led astray." Presently David Campbell, still graciously permitted to preside over the

Superior Court, received from the Governor of North Carolina the following letter:

"Sir: It has been represented to the Executive that John Sevier, who style's himself CaptainGeneral of the

State of Franklin, has been guilty of high treason in levying troops to oppose the laws and government of the

State.... You will issue your warrant to apprehend the said John Sevier, and in case he cannot be sufficiently

secured for trial in the District of Washington, order him to be committed to the public gaol."

The judge's authority was to be exercised after he had examined the "affidavits of credible persons."

Campbell's judicial opinion seems to have been that any affidavit against "the said John Sevier" could not be

made by a "credible person." He refused to issue the warrant. Tipton's friend, Spencer, who had been North

Carolina's judge of the Superior Court in the West and who was sharing that honor now with Campbell,

Sevier was at the Widow Brown's inn with some of his men when Tipton at last came up with him. It was

early morning. Tipton and his posse were about to enter when the portly and dauntless widow, surmising

their errand, drew her chair into the doorway, plumped herself down in it, and refused to budge for all the

writs in North Carolina. Tipton blustered and the widow rocked. The altercation awakened Sevier. He dressed

hurriedly and came down. As soon as he presented himself on the porch, Tipton thrust his pistol against his

body, evidently with intent to fire if Sevier made signs of resistance. Sevier's furious followers were not

disposed to let him be taken without a fight, but he admonished them to respect the law, and requested that

they would inform Bonnie Kate of his predicament. Then, debonair as ever, with perhaps a tinge of contempt

at the corners of his mouth, he held out his wrists for the manacles which Tipton insisted on fastening upon

It was not likely that any jail in the western country could hold Nolichucky Jack overnight. Tipton feared a

riot; and it was decided to send the prisoner for incarceration and trial to Morgantown in North Carolina, just

Tipton did not accompany the guards he sent with Sevier. It was stated and commonly believed that he had

given instructions of which the honorable men among his friends were ignorant. When the party entered the

mountains, two of the guards were to lag behind with the prisoner, till the others were out of sight on the

twisting trail. Then one of the two was to kill Sevier and assert that he had done it because Sevier had

attempted to escape. It fell out almost as planned, except that the other guard warned Sevier of the fate in

store for him and gave him a chance to flee. In plunging down the mountain, Sevier's horse was entangled in

a thicket. The wouldbe murderer overtook him and fired; but here again fate had interposed for her favorite.

The ball had dropped out of the assassin's pistol. So Sevier reached Morgantown in safety and was deposited

in care of the sheriff, who was doubtless cautioned to take a good look at the prisoner and know him for a

There is a story to the effect that, when Sevier was arraigned in the courthouse at Morgantown and presently

dashed through the door and away on a racer that had been brought up by some of his friends, among those

who witnessed the proceedings was a young Ulster Scot named Andrew Jackson; and that on this occasion

these two men, later to become foes, first saw each other. Jackson may have been in Morgantown at the time,

though this is disputed; but the rest of the tale is pure legend invented by some one whose love of the

spectacular led him far from the facts. The facts are less theatrical but much more dramatic. Sevier was not

arraigned at all, for no court was sitting in Morgantown at the time.* The sheriff to whom he was delivered

did not need to look twice at him to know him for a daring man. He had served with him at King's Mountain.

He struck off his handcuffs and set him at liberty at once. Perhaps he also notified General Charles McDowell

at his home in Quaker Meadows of the presence of a distinguished guest in Burke County, for McDowell and

his brother Joseph, another officer of militia, quickly appeared and went on Sevier's bond. Nolichucky Jack

was presently holding a court of his own in the tavern, with North Carolina's men at armsas many as were

within calldrinking his health. So his sons and a company of his Wataugans found him, when they rode

into Morgantown to give evidence in his behalfwith their rifles. Since none now disputed the way with

him, Sevier turned homeward with his cavalcade, McDowell and his men accompanying him as far as the

* Statement by John Sevier, Junior, in the Draper MSS., quoted by Turner, "Life of General John Sevier," p.

No further attempt was made to try John Sevier for treason, either west or east of the mountains. In

November, however, the Assembly passed the Pardon Act, and thereby granted absolution to every one who

had been associated with the State of Franklin, EXCEPT JOHN SEVIER. In a clause said to have been

introduced by Tipton, now a senator, or suggested by him, John Sevier was debarred forever from "the

enjoyment of any office of profit or honor or trust in the State of North Carolina."

The overhill men in Greene County took due note of the Assembly's fiat and at the next election sent Sevier

to the North Carolina Senate. Nolichucky Jack, whose demeanor was never so decorous as when the

illconsidered actions of those in authority had made him appear to have circumvented the law, considerately

waited outside until the House had lifted the banwhich it did perforce and by a large majority, despite

Tipton's oppositionand then took his seat on the senatorial bench beside his enemy. The records show that

he was reinstated as Brigadier General of the Western Counties and also appointed at the head of the

Not only in the region about Watauga did the pioneers of Tennessee endure the throes of danger and strife

during these years. The little settlements on the Cumberland, which were scattered over a short distance of

about twentyfive or thirty miles and had a frontier line of two hundred miles, were terribly afflicted. Their

nearest white neighbors among the Kentucky settlers were one hundred and fifty miles away; and through the

cruelest years these could render no aidcould not, indeed, hold their own stations. The Kentuckians, as we

have seen, were bottled up in Harrodsburg and Boonesborough; and, while the northern Indians led by Girty

and Dequindre darkened the Bloody Ground anew, the Cumberlanders were making a desperate stand against

the Chickasaws and the Creeks. So terrible was their situation that panic took hold on them, and they would

have fled but for the influence of Robertson. He may have put the question to them in the biblical words,

"Whither shall I flee?" For they were surrounded, and those who did attempt to escape were "weighed on the

path and made light." Robertson knew that their only chance of survival was to stand their ground. The

greater risks he was willing to take in person, for it was he who made trips to Boonesborough and

Harrodsburg for a share of the powder and lead which John Sevier was sending into Kentucky from time to

time. In the stress of conflict Robertson bore his full share of grief, for his two elder sons and his brother fell.

He himself was often near to death. One day he was cut off in the fields and was shot in the foot as he ran, yet

he managed to reach shelter. There is a story that, in an attack during one of his absences, the Indians forced

the outer gate of the fort and Mrs. Robertson went out of her cabin, firing, and let loose a band of the savage

dogs which the settlers kept for their protection, and so drove out the invaders.

The Chickasaws were loyal to the treaty they had made with the British in the early days of James Adair's

association with them. They were friends to England's friends and foes to her foes. While they resented the

new settlements made on land they considered theirs, they signed a peace with Robertson at the conclusion of

the War of Independence. They kept their word with him as they had kept it with the British. Furthermore,

their chief, Opimingo or the Mountain Leader, gave Robertson his assistance against the Creeks and the

Choctaws and, in so far as he understood its workings, informed him of the new Spanish and French

conspiracy, which we now come to consider. So once again the Chickasaws were servants of destiny to the

Englishspeaking race, for again they drove the wedge of their honor into an Indian solidarity welded with

Since it was generally believed at that date that the tribes were instigated to war by the British and supplied

by them with their ammunition, savage inroads were expected to cease with the signing of peace. But Indian

warfare not only continued; it increased. In the last two years of the Revolution, when the British were driven

from the Back Country of the Carolinas and could no longer reach the tribes with consignments of firearms

and powder, it should have been evident that the Indians had other sources of supply and other allies, for they

lacked nothing which could aid them in their efforts to exterminate the settlers of Tennessee.

Neither France nor Spain wished to see an Englishspeaking republic based on ideals of democracy

successfully established in America. Though in the Revolutionary War, France was a close ally of the

Americans and Spain something more than a nominal one, the secret diplomacy of the courts of the Bourbon

cousins ill matched with their open professions. Both cousins hated England. The American colonies,

smarting under injustice, had offered a field for their revenge. But hatred of England was not the only reason

why activities had been set afoot to increase the discord which should finally separate the colonies from Great

Britain and leave the destiny of the colonies to be decided by the House of Bourbon. Spain saw in the

Americans, with their English modes of thought, a menace to her authority in her own colonies on both the

northern and southern continents. This menace would not be stilled but augmented if the colonies should be

established as a republic. Such an example might be too readily followed. Though France had, by a secret

treaty in 1762, made over to Spain the province of Louisiana, she was not unmindful of the Bourbon motto,

"He who attacks the Crown of one attacks the other." And she saw her chance to deal a crippling blow at

In 1764, the French Minister, Choiseul, had sent a secret agent, named Pontleroy, to America to assist in

making trouble and to watch for any signs that might be turned to the advantage of les duex couronnes.

Evidently Pontleroy's reports were encouraging for, in 1768, Johann Kalbthe same Kalb who fell at

Camden in 1780arrived in Philadelphia to enlarge the good work. He was not only, like several of the

foreign officers in the War of Independence, a spy for his Government, but he was also the special emissary

of one Comte de Broglie who, after the colonies had broken with the mother country, was to put himself at

the head of American affairs. This Broglie had been for years one of Louis XV's chief agents in subterranean

diplomacy, and it is not to be supposed that he was going to attempt the stupendous task of controlling

America's destiny without substantial backing. Spain had been advised meanwhile to rule her new Louisiana

territory with great liberalityin fact, to let it shine as a republic before the yearning eyes of the oppressed

Americans, so that the English colonists would arise and cast off their fetters. Once the colonies had freed

themselves from England's protecting arm, it would be a simple matter for the Bourbons to gather them in

like so many little lost chicks from a rainy yard. The intrigants of autocratic systems have never been able to

understand that the urge of the spirit of independence in men is not primarily to break shackles but to STAND

ALONE and that the breaking of bonds is incidental to the true demonstration of freedom. The Bourbons and

their agents were no more nor less blind to the great principle stirring the hearts of men in their day than were

the Prussianized hosts over a hundred years later who, having themselves no acquaintance with the law of

liberty, could not foresee that half a world would rise in arms to maintain that law.

When the War of Independence had ended, the French Minister, Vergennes, and the Spanish Minister,

Floridablanca, secretly worked in unison to prevent England's recognition of the new republic; and

Floridablanca in 1782 even offered to assist England if she would make further efforts to subdue her "rebel

subjects." Both Latin powers had their own axes to grind, and America was to tend the grindstone. France

looked for recovery of her old prestige in Europe and expected to supersede England in commerce. She

would do this, in the beginning, chiefly through control of America and of America's commerce. Vergennes

therefore sought not only to dictate the final terms of peace but also to say what the American commissioners

should and should not demand. Of the latter gentlemen he said that they possessed "caracteres peu

maniables!" In writing to Luzerne, the French Ambassador in Philadelphia, on October 14, 1782, Vergennes

said: "it behooves us to leave them [the American commissioners] to their illusions, to do everything that can

make them fancy that we share them, and undertake only to defeat any attempts to which those illusions

might carry them if our cooperation is required." Among these "illusions" were America's desires in regard to

the fisheries and to the western territory. Concerning the West, Vergennes had written to Luzerne, as early as

July 18, 1780: "At the moment when the revolution broke out, the limits of the Thirteen States did not reach

the River [Mississippi] and it would be absurd for them to claim the rights of England, a power whose rule

they had abjured." By the secret treaty with Spain, furthermore, France had agreed to continue the war until

Gibraltar should be taken, andif the British should be driven from Newfoundlandto share the fisheries

only with Spain, and to support Spain in demanding that the Thirteen States renounce all territory west of the

Alleghanies. The American States must by no means achieve a genuine independence but must feel the need

* See John Jay, "On the Peace Negotiations of 17821788 as Illustrated by the Secret Correspondence of

So intent was Vergennes on these aims that he sent a secret emissary to England to further them there. This

act of his perhaps gave the first inkling to the English statesmen* that American and French desires were not

identical and hastened England's recognition of American independence and her agreement to American

demands in regard to the western territory. When, to his amazement, Vergennes learned that England had

acceded to all America's demands, he said that England had "bought the peace" rather than made it. The

policy of Vergennes in regard to America was not unjustly pronounced by a later French statesman "A VILE

* "Your Lordship was well founded in your suspicion that the granting of independence to America as a

previous measure is a point which the French have by no means at heart and perhaps are entirely averse

Through England's unexpected action, then, the Bourbon cousins had forever lost their opportunity to

dominate the young but spent and warweakened Republic, or to use America as a catspaw to snatch English

commerce for France. It was plain, too, that any frank move of the sort would range the English alongside of

their American kinsmen. Since American Independence was an accomplished fact and therefore could no

longer be prevented, the present object of the Bourbon cousins was to restrict it. The Appalachian Mountains

should be the western limits of the new nation. Therefore the settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee must be

broken up, or the settlers must be induced to secede from the Union and raise the Spanish banner. The latter

alternative was held to be preferable. To bring it about the same methods were to be continued which had

been used prior to and during the warnamely, the use of agents provocateurs to corrupt the ignorant and

incite the lawless, the instigation of Indian massacres to daunt the brave, and the distribution of gold to buy

As her final and supreme means of coercion, Spain refused to America the right of navigation on the

Mississippi and so deprived the Westerners of a market for their produce. The Northern States, having no

immediate use for the Mississippi, were willing to placate Spain by acknowledging her monopoly of the great

waterway. But Virginia and North Carolina were determined that America should not, by congressional

enactment, surrender her "natural right"; and they cited the proposed legislation as their reason for refusing to

ratify the Constitution. "The act which abandons it [the right of navigation] is an act of separation between

the eastern and western country," Jefferson realized at last. "An act of separation"that point had long been

Bounded as they were on one side by the precipitous mountains and on the other by the southward flow of the

Mississippi and its tributary, the Ohio, the trappers and growers of corn in Kentucky and western Tennessee

regarded New Orleans as their logical market, as the wide waters were their natural route. If market and route

were to be closed to them, their commercial advancement was something less than a dream.

In 1785, Don Estevan Miro, a gentleman of artful and winning address, became Governor of Louisiana and

fountainhead of the propaganda. He wrote benign and brotherly epistles to James Robertson of the

Cumberland and to His Excellency of Franklin, suggesting that to be of service to them was his dearest aim in

life; and at the same time he kept the southern Indians continually on the warpath. When Robertson wrote to

him of the Creek and Cherokee depredations, with a hint that the Spanish might have some responsibility in

the matter, Miro replied by offering the Cumberlander a safe home on Spanish territory with freedom of

religion and no taxes. He disclaimed stirring up the Indians. He had, in fact, advised Mr McGillivray, chief of

the Creeks, to make peace. He would try again what he could do with Mr. McGillivray. As to the Cherokees,

they resided in a very distant territory and he was not acquainted with them; he might have added that he did

not need to be: his friend McGillivray was the potent personality among the Southern tribes.

In Alexander McGillivray, Miro found a weapon fashioned to his hand. If the Creek chieftain's figure might

stand as the symbol of treachery, it is none the less one of the most picturesque and pathetic in our early

annals. McGillivray, it will be remembered, was the son of Adair's friend Lachlan McGillivray, the trader,

and a Creek woman whose sire had been a French officer. A brilliant and beautiful youth, he had given his

father a pride in him which is generally denied to the fathers of sons with Indian blood in them. The Highland

trader had spared nothing in his son's education and had placed him, after his school days, in the business

office of the large trading establishment of which he himself was a member. At about the age of seventeen

Alexander had become a chieftain in his mother's nation; and doubtless it is he who appears shortly

afterwards in the Colonial Records as the White Leader whose influence is seen to have been at work for

friendship between the colonists and the tribes. When the Revolutionary War broke out, Lachlan

McGillivray, like many of the old traders who had served British interests so long and so faithfully, held to

the British cause. Georgia confiscated all his property and Lachlan fled to Scotland. For this, his son hated the

people of Georgia with a perfect hatred. He remembered how often his father's courage alone had stood

between those same people and the warlike Creeks. He could recall the few days in 1760 when Lachlan and

his fellow trader, Galphin, at the risk of their lives had braved the Creek warriorsalready painted for war

and on the marchand so had saved the settlements of the Back Country from extermination. He looked

upon the men of Georgia as an Indian regards those who forget either a blood gift or a blood vengeance. And

In 1776 Alexander McGillivray was in his early thirtiesthe exact date of his birth is uncertain.* He had, we

are told, the tall, sturdy, but spare physique of the Gael, with a countenance of Indian color though not of

Indian cast. His overhanging brows made more striking his very large and luminous dark eyes. He bore

himself with great dignity; his voice was soft, his manner gentle. He might have been supposed to be some

Latin courtier but for the barbaric display of his dress and his ornaments. He possessed extraordinary personal

magnetism, and his power extended beyond the Creek nation to the Choctaws and Chickasaws and the

Southern Cherokees. He had long been wooed by the Louisiana authorities, but there is no evidence that he

* Probably about 1741 or 1742. Some writers give 1739 and others 1746. His father landed in Charleston,

Early in the war he joined the British, received a colonel's commission, and led his formidable Creeks against

the people of Georgia. When the British were driven from the Back Countries, McGillivray, in his British

uniform, went on with the war. When the British made peace, McGillivray exchanged his British uniform for

a Spanish one and went on with the war. In later days, when he had forced Congress to pay him for his

father's confiscated property and had made peace, he wore the uniform of an American Brigadier General;

but he did not keep the peace, never having intended to keep it. It was not until he had seen the Spanish plots

collapse and had realized that the Americans were to dominate the land, that the White Leader ceased from

Spent from hate and wasted with dissipation, he retired at last to the spot where Lachlan had set up his first

Creek home. Here he lived his few remaining days in a house which he built on the site of the old ruined

cabin about which still stood the little grove of apple trees his father had planted. He died at the age of fifty of

a fever contracted while he was on a business errand in Pensacola. Among those who visited him in his last

years, one has left this description of him: "Dissipation has sapped a constitution originally delicate and

feeble. He possesses an atticism of diction aided by a liberal education, a great fund of wit and humor

meliorated by a perfect good nature and politeness." Set beside that kindly picture this rough etching by

James Robertson: "The biggest devil among them [the Spaniards] is the half Spaniard, half Frenchman, half

How indefatigably McGillivray did his work we know from the bloody annals of the years which followed

the BritishAmerican peace, when the men of the Cumberland and of Franklin were on the defensive

continually. How cleverly Mire played his personal role we discover in the letters addressed to him by Sevier

and Robertson. These letters show that, as far as words go at any rate, the founders of Tennessee were willing

to negotiate with Spain. In a letter dated September 12, 1788, Sevier offered himself and his tottering State of

Franklin to the Spanish King. This offer may have been made to gain a respite, or it may have been genuine.

The situation in the Tennessee settlements was truly desperate, for neither North Carolina nor Congress

apparently cared in the least what befell them or how soon. North Carolina indeed was in an anomalous

position, as she had not yet ratified the Federal Constitution. If Franklin went out of existence and the

territory which it included became again part of North Carolina, Sevier knew that a large part of the newly

settled country would, under North Carolina's treaties, revert to the Indians. That meant ruin to large numbers

of those who had put their faith in his star, or else it meant renewed conflict either with the Indians or with

the parent State. The probabilities aria that Sevier hoped to play the Spaniards against the Easterners who,

even while denying the Westerners' contention that the mountains were a "natural" barrier between them,

were making of them a barrier of indifference. It would seem so, because, although this was the very aim of

all Miro's activities so that, had he been assured of the sincerity of the offer, he must have grasped at it, yet

nothing definite was done. And Sevier was presently informing Shelby, now in Kentucky, that there was a

Miro had other agents besides McGillivraywho, by the way, was costing Spain, for his own services and

those of four tribes aggregating over six thousand warriors, a sum of fiftyfive thousand dollars a year.

McGillivray did very well as superintendent of massacres; but the Spaniard required a different type of man,

an American who enjoyed his country's trust, to bring the larger plan to fruition. Miro found that man in

General James Wilkinson, lately of the Continental Army and now a resident of Kentucky, which territory

Wilkinson undertook to deliver to Spain, for a price. In 1787 Wilkinson secretly took the oath of allegiance to

Spain and is listed in the files of the Spanish secret service, appropriately, as "Number Thirteen." He was

indeed the thirteenth at table, the Judas at the feast. Somewhat under middle height, Wilkinson was

handsome, graceful, and remarkably magnetic. Of a good, if rather impoverished, Maryland family, he was

well educated and widely read for the times. With a brilliant and versatile intellectuality and ready gifts as a

speaker, he swayed men easily. He was a bold soldier and was endowed with physical courage, though when

engaged in personal contests he seldom exerted itpreferring the red tongue of slander or the hired assassin's

shot from behind cover. His record fails to disclose one commendable trait. He was inordinately avaricious,

but love of money was not his whole motive force: he had a spirit so jealous and malignant that he hated to

the death another man's good. He seemed to divine instantly wherein other men were weak and to understand

the speediest and best means of suborning them to his own interestsor of destroying them.

Wilkinson was able to lure a number of Kentuckians into the separatist movement. George Rogers Clark

seriously disturbed the arch plotter by seizing a Spanish trader's store wherewith to pay his soldiers, whom

Virginia had omitted to recompense. This act aroused the suspicions of the Spanish, either as to Number

Thirteen's perfect loyalty or as to his ability to deliver the western country. In 1786, when Clark led two

thousand men against the Ohio Indians in his last and his only unsuccessful campaign, Wilkinson had already

settled himself near the Falls (Louisville) and had looked about for mischief which he might do for profit.

Whether his influence had anything to do with what amounted virtually to a mutiny among Clark's forces is

not ascertainable; but, for a disinterested onlooker, he was overswift to spread the news of Clark's debacle

and to declare gleefully that Clark's sun of military glory had now forever set. It is also known that he later

served other generals treacherously in Indian expeditions and that he intrigued with Mad Anthony Wayne's

Spain did not wish to see the Indians crushed; and Wilkinson himself both hated and feared any other

officer's prestige. How long he had been in foreign pay we can only conjecture, for, several years before he

transplanted his activities to Kentucky, he had been one of a cabal against Washington. Not only his

ambitions but his nature must inevitably have brought him to the deathbattle with George Rogers Clark. As

a military leader, Clark had genius, and soldiering was his passion. In nature, he was open, frank, and bold to

make foes if he scorned a man's way as ignoble or dishonest. Wilkinson suavely set about scheming for

Clark's ruin. His communication or memorial to the Virginia Assemblysigned by himself and a number of

his friends villifying Clark, ended Clark's chances for the commission in the Continental Army which he

craved. It was Wilkinson who made public an incriminating letter which had Clark's signature attached and

which Clark said he had never seen. It is to be supposed that Number Thirteen was responsible also for the

malevolent anonymous letter accusing Clark of drunkenness and scheming which, so strangely, found its way

into the Calendar of State Papers of Virginia.* As a result, Clark was censured by Virginia. Thereupon he

petitioned for a Court of Inquiry, but this was not granted. Wilkinson had to get rid of Clark; for if Clark,

with his military gifts and his power over men, had been elevated to a position of command under the smile

of the Government, there would have been small opportunity for James W Wilkinson to lead the Kentuckians

and to gather in Spanish gold. So the machinations of one of the vilest traitors who ever sold his country were

employed to bring about the stultification and hence the downfall of a great servant.

* See Thomas M. Greene's "The Spanish Conspiracy," p. 78, footnote. It is possible that Wilkinson's intrigues

provide data for a new biography of Clark which may recast in some measure the accepted view of Clark at

Wilkinson's chief aids were the Irishmen, O'Fallon, Nolan, and Powers. Through Nolan, he also vended

Spanish secrets. He sold, indeed, whatever and whomever he could get his price for. So clever was he that he

escaped detection, though he was obliged to remove some suspicions. He succeeded Wayne as commander of

the regular army in 1796. He was one of the commissioners to receive Louisiana when the Purchase was

arranged in 1803. He was still on the Spanish pay roll at that time. Wilkinson's true record came to light only

There were British agents also in the Old Southwest, for the dissatisfaction of the Western men inspired in

Englishmen the hope of recovering the Mississippi Basin. Lord Dorchester, Governor of Canada, wrote to the

British Government that he had been approached by important Westerners; but he received advice from

England to move slowly. For complicity in the British schemes, William Blount, who was first territorial

Governor of Tennessee and later a senator from that State, was expelled from the Senate.

Surely there was never a more elaborate network of plots that came to nothing! The concession to Americans

in 1796 of the right of navigation on the Mississippi brought an end to the scheming.

In the same year Tennessee was admitted to the Union, and John Sevier was elected Governor Sevier's

popularity was undiminished, though there were at this time some sixty thousand souls in Tennessee, many of

whom were late comers who had not known him in his heyday. His old power to win men to him must have

been as strong as ever, for it is recorded that he had only to enter a political meetingno matter whosefor

This adulation of Sevier still annoyed a few men who had ambitions of their own. Among these was Andrew

Jackson, who had come to Jonesborough in 1788, just after the collapse of the State of Franklin. He was

twentyone at that time, and he is said to have entered Jonesborough riding a fine racer and leading another,

with a pack of hunting dogs baying or nosing along after him. A court record dated May 12, 1788, avers that

"Andrew Jackson, Esq. came into Court and produced a licence as an Attorney With A Certificate sufficiently

Attested of his Taking the Oath Necessary to said office and Was admitted to Practiss as an Attorney in the

County Courts." Jackson made no history in old Watauga during that year. Next year he moved to Nashville,

and one year later, when the Superior Court was established (1790), he became prosecuting attorney.

The feud between Jackson and Sevier began about the time that Tennessee entered the Union. Jackson, then

twentynine, was defeated for the post of Major General of the Militia through the influence which Sevier

exercised against him, and it seems that Jackson never forgave this opposition to his ambitions. By the close

of Sevier's third term, however, in 1802, when Archibald Roane became Governor, the post of Major General

was again vacant. Both Sevier and Jackson offered themselves for it, and Jackson was elected by the deciding

vote of the Governor, the military vote having resulted in a tie. A strong current of influence had now set in

against Sevier and involved charges against his honor. His old enemy Tipton was still active. The basis of the

charges was a file of papers from the entrytaker's office which a friend of Tipton's had laid before the

Governor; with an affidavit to the effect that the papers were fraudulent. Both the Governor and Jackson

believed the charges. When we consider what system or lack of system of land laws and land entries obtained

in Watauga and such: primitive communitieswhen a patch of corn sealed a right and claims were made by

notching trees with tomahawkswe may imagine that a file from the land office might appear easily enough

to smirch a landholder's integrity. The scandal was, of course, used in an attempt to ruin Sevier's candidacy

for a fourth term as Governor and to make certain Roane's reflection. To this end Jackson bent all his energies

but without success. Nolichucky Jack was elected, for the fourth time, as Governor of Tennessee.

Not long after his inauguration, Sevier met Jackson in Knoxville, where Jackson was holding court. The

charges against Sevier were then being made the subject of legislative investigation instituted by Tipton, and

Jackson had published a letter in the Knoxville "Gazette" supporting them. At the sight of Jackson, Sevier

flew into a rage, and a fiery altercation ensued. The two men were only restrained from leaping on each other

by the intervention of friends. The next day Jackson sent Sevier a challenge which Sevier accepted, but with

the stipulation that the duel take place outside the State. Jackson insisted on fighting in Knoxville, where the

insult had been offered. Sevier refused. "I have some respect," he wrote, "for the laws of the State over which

I have the honor to preside, although you, a judge, appear to have none." No duel followed; but, after some

further billetsdoux, Jackson published Sevier as "a base coward and poltroon. He will basely insult but has

not the courage to repair the wound." Again they met, by accident, and Jackson rushed upon Sevier with his

cane. Sevier dismounted and drew his pistol but made no move to fire. Jackson, thereupon, also drew his

weapon. Once more friends interfered. It is presumable that neither really desired the duel. By killing

Nolichucky Jack, Jackson would have ended his own career in Tennesseeif Sevier's tribe of sons had not,

by a swifter means, ended it for him. At this date Jackson was thirtysix. Sevier was fiftyeight; and he had

The charges against Sevier, though pressed with all the force that his enemies could bring to bear, came to

nothing. He remained the Governor of Tennessee for another six yearsthe three terms in eight years

allowed by the constitution. In 1811 he was sent to Congress for the second time, as he had represented the

Territory there twenty years earlier. He was returned again in 1813. At the conclusion of his term in 1815 he

went into the Creek country as commissioner to determine the Creek boundaries, and here, far from his

Bonnie Kate and his tribe, he died of fever at the age of seventy. His body was buried with full military

honors at Tuckabatchee, one of the Creek towns. In 1889, Sevier's remains were removed to Knoxville and a

His Indian enemies forgave the chastisement he had inflicted on them and honored him. In times of peace

they would come to him frequently for advice. And in his latter days, the chiefs would make state visits to his

home on the Nolichucky River. "John Sevier is a good man"so declared the Cherokee, Old Tassel, making

himself the spokesman of history. Sevier had survived his old friend, cofounder with him of Watauga, by

one year. James Robertson had died in 1814 at the age of seventytwo, among the Chickasaws, and his body,

like that of his fellow pioneer, was buried in an Indian town and lay there until 1825, when it was removed to

What of the red tribes who had fought these great pioneers for the wide land of the Old Southwest and who in

the end had received their dust and treasured it with honor in the little soil remaining to them? Always the

new boundary lines drew closer in, and the red men's foothold narrowed before the pushing tread of the

whites. The day came soon when there was no longer room for them in the land of their fathers. But far off

across the great river there was a land the white men did not covet yet. Thither at last the tribesCherokee,

Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creektook their way. With wives and children, maids and youths, the old and

the young, with all their goods, their cattle and horses, in the company of a regiment of American troops,

theylike the white men who had superseded themturned westward. In their faces also was the red color

of the west, but not newly there. From the beginning of their race, Destiny had painted them with the hue of

One spring day in 1799, there might have been observed a great stir through the valley of the Kanawha. With

the dawn, men were ahorse, and women, too. Wagons crowded with human freight wheeled over the rough

country, and boats, large and small, were afloat on the streams which pour into the Great Kanawha and at

length mingle with the Ohio at Point Pleasant, where the battle was fought which opened the gates of

Some of the travelers poured into the little settlement at the junction of the Elk and the Kanawha, where

Charleston now lies. Others, who had been later in starting or had come from a greater distance, gathered

along the banks of the Kanawha. At last shouts from those stationed farthest up the stream echoed down the

Several pirogues drifted into view on the river, now brightening in the sunshine. In the vessels were men and

their families; bales and bundles and pieces of household furnishings, heaped to the gunwale; a few cattle and

horses standing patiently. But it was for one man above all that the eager eyes of the settlers were watching,

and him they saw clearly as his boat swung bya tall figure, erect and powerful, his keen friendly blue eyes

undimmed and his ruddy face unlined by time, though sixtyfive winters had frosted his black hair.

For a decade these settlers had known Daniel Boone, as storekeeper, as surveyor, as guide and soldier. They

had eaten of the game he killed and lavishly distributed. And they toolike the folk of Clinch Valley in the

year of Dunmore's Warhad petitioned Virginia to bestow military rank upon their protector. "Lieutenant

Colonel" had been his title among them, by their demand. Once indeed he had represented them in the

Virginia Assembly and, for that purpose, trudged to Richmond with rifle and hunting dog. Not interested in

the Legislature's proceedings, he left early in the session and tramped home again.

But not even the esteem of friends and neighbors could hold the great hunter when the deer had fled. So

Daniel Boone was now on his way westward to Missouri, to a new land of fabled herds and wide spaces,

where the hunter's gun might speak its one word with authority and where the soul of a silent and fearless

man might find its true abode in Nature's solitude. Waving his last farewells, he floated past the little

groupstill their shouts of good will were long silenced, and his fleet swung out upon the Ohio.

As Boone sailed on down the Beautiful River which forms the northern boundary of Kentucky, old friends

and newcomers who had only heard his fame rode from far and near to greet and godspeed him on his way.

Sometimes he paused for a day with them. Once at leastthis, was in Cincinnati where he was taking on

suppliessome one asked him why, at his age, he was leaving the settled country to dare the frontier once

Boone settled at the Femme Osage Creek on the Missouri River, twentyfive miles above St. Charles, where

the Missouri flows into the Mississippi. There were four other Kentucky families at La Charette, as the

French inhabitants called the post, but these were the only Americans. The Spanish authorities granted Boone

840 acres of land, and here Daniel built the last cabin home he was to erect for himself and his Rebecca.

The region pleased him immensely. The governmental system, for instance, was wholly to his mind. Taxes

were infinitesimal. There were no elections, assemblies, or the like. A single magistrate, or Syndic, decided

all disputes and made the few regulations and enforced them. There were no land speculators, no

drymouthed sons of the commercial Tantalus, athirst for profits. Boone used to say that his first years in

Missouri were the happiest of his life, with the exception of his first long hunt in Kentucky.

In 1800 he was appointed Syndic of the district of Femme Osage, which office he filled for four years, until

Louisiana became American territory. He was held in high esteem as a magistrate because of his just and

wise treatment of his flock, who brought him all their small bickerings to settle. He had no use for legal

procedure, would not listen to any nice subtleties, saying that he did not care anything at all about the

EVIDENCE, what he wanted was the TRUTH. His favorite penalty for offenders was the hickory rod "well

laid on." Often he decided that both parties in a suit were equally to blame and chastised them both alike.

When in March, 1804, the American Commissioner received Louisiana for the United States, Delassus,

Lieutenant Governor of Upper Louisiana, reporting'on the various officials in the territory, wrote of the

Femme Osage Syndic: "Mr. Boone, a respectable old man, just and impartial, he has already, since I

appointed him, offered his resignation owing to his infirmities. Believing I know his probity, I have induced

*Thwaites, "Daniel Boone. "To this and other biographies of Boone, cited in the Bibliographical Note at the

end of this volume, the author is indebted for the material contained in this chapter.

Daniel, no doubt supposing that a Syndic's rights were inviolable, had neglected to apply to the Governor at

New Orleans for a ratification of his grant. He was therefore dispossessed. Not until 1810, and after he had

enlisted the Kentucky Legislature in his behalf, did he succeed in inducing Congress to restore his land. The

Kentucky Legislature's resolution was adopted because of "the many eminent services rendered by Colonel

Boone in exploring and settling the western country, from which great advantages have resulted not only to

the State but to the country in general, and that from circumstances over which he had no control he is now

reduced to poverty; not having so far as appears an acre of land out of the vast territory he has been a great

instrument in peopling." Daniel was seventysix then; so it was late in the day for him to have his first

experience of justice in the matter of land. Perhaps it pleased him, however, to hear that, in confirming his

grant, Congress had designated him as "the man who has opened the way for millions of his fellowmen."

The "infirmities" which had caused the good Syndic to seek relief from political cares must have been purely

magisterial. The hunter could have been very little affected by them, for as soon as he was freed from his

duties Boone took up again the silent challenge of the forest. Usually one or two of his sons or his

soninlaw, Flanders Calloway, accompanied him, but sometimes his only companions were an old Indian

and his hunting dog. On one of his hunting trips he explored a part of Kansas; and in 1814, when he was

eighty, he hunted big game in the Yellowstone where again his heart rejoiced over great herds as in the days

of his first lone wanderings in the Blue Grass country. At last, with the proceeds of these expeditions he was

able to pay the debts he had left behind in Kentucky thirty years before. The story runs that Daniel had only

fifty cents remaining when all the claims had been settled, but so contented was he to be able to look an

honest man in the face that he was in no disposition to murmur over his poverty.

When after a long and happy life his wife died in 1813, Boone lived with one or other of his sons* and

sometimes with Flanders Calloway. Nathan Boone, with whom Daniel chiefly made his home, built what is

said to have been the first stone house in Missouri. Evidently the old pioneer disapproved of stone houses and

of the "luxuries" in furnishings which were then becoming possible to the new generation, for one of his

biographers speaks of visiting him in a log addition to his son's house; and when Chester Harding, the painter,

visited him in 1819 for the purpose of doing his portrait, he found Boone dwelling in a small log cabin in

Nathan's yard. When Harding entered, Boone was broiling a venison steak on the end of his ramrod. During

the sitting, one day, Harding asked Boone if he had ever been lost in the woods when on his long hunts in the

* Boone's son Nathan won distinction in the War of 1812 and entered the regular army, rising to the rank of

Lieutenant Colonel. Daniel Morgan Boone is said to have been the first settler in Kansas (1827). One of

Daniel's grandsons, bearing the name of Albert Gallatin Boone, was a pioneer of Colorado and was to the

forefront in Rocky Mountain exploration. Another grandson was the scout, Kit Carson, who led Fremont to

"No, I never got lost," Boone replied reflectively, "but I was BEWILDERED once for three days." Though

now having reached the age of eightyfive, Daniel was intensely interested in California and was enthusiastic

to make the journey thither next spring and so to flee once more from the civilization which had crept

westward along his path. The resolute opposition of his sons, however, prevented the attempt.

A few men who sought out Boone in his old age have left us brief accounts of their impressions. Among

these was Audubon. "The stature and general appearance of this wanderer of the western forests," the

naturalist wrote, "approached the gigantic. His chest was broad, and prominent; his muscular powers

displayed themselves in every limb; his countenance gave indication of his great courage, enterprise and

perseverance; and, when he spoke, the very motion of his lips brought the impression that whatever he uttered

Audubon spent a night under Boone's roof. He related afterwards that the old hunter, having removed his

hunting shirt, spread his blankets on the floor and lay down there to sleep, saying that he found it more

comfortable than a bed. A striking sketch of Boone is contained in a few lines penned by one of his earliest

biographers: "He had what phrenologists would have considered a model headwith a forehead peculiarly

high, noble and bold, thin compressed lips, a mild clear blue eye, a large and prominent chin and a general

expression of countenance in which fearlessness and courage sat enthroned and which told the beholder at a

glance what he had been and was formed to be." In criticizing the various portraits of Daniel, the same writer

says: "They want the high port and noble daring of his countenance.... Never was old age more green, or gray

hairs more graceful. His high, calm, bold forehead seemed converted by years into iron."

Although we are indebted to these and other early chroniclers for many details of Boone's life, there was one

event which none of his biographers has related; yet we know that it must have taken place. Even the bare

indication of it is found only in the narrative of the adventures of two other explorers.

It was in the winter of 1803 that these two men came to Boone's Settlement, as La Charette was now

generally called. They had planned to make their winter camp there, for in the spring, when the Missouri rose

to the flood, they and their company of frontiersmen were to take their way up that uncharted stream and over

plains and mountains in quest of the Pacific Ocean. They were refused permission by the Spanish authorities

to camp at Boone's Settlement; so they lay through the winter some forty miles distant on the Illinois side of

the Mississippi, across from the mouth of the Missouri. Since the records are silent, we are free to picture as

we choose their coming to the settlement during the winter and again in the spring, for we know that they

We can imagine, for instance, the stir they made in La Charette on some sparkling day when the frost bit and

the crusty snow sent up a dancing haze of diamond points. We can see the friendly French habitants staring

after the two young leaders and their menall mere boys, though they were also husky, seasoned

frontiersmenwith their bronzed faces of English cast, as in their gayly fringed deerskins they swaggered

through the hamlet to pay their respects to the Syndic. We may think of that dignitary as smoking his pipe

before his fireplace, perhaps; or making out, in his fantastic spelling, a record of his primitive courtfor

instance, that he had on that day given Pierre a dozen hickory thwacks, "well laid on," for starting a brawl

with Antoine, and had bestowed the same upon Antoine for continuing the brawl with Pierre. A knock at the

door would bring the amiable invitation to enter, and the two young men would step across his threshold,

while their followers crowded about the open door and hailed the old pathfinder.

One of the two leadersthe dark slender man with a subtle touch of the dreamer in his resolute facewas a

stranger; but the other, with the more practical mien and the shock of hair that gave him the name of Red

Head among the tribes, Boone had known as a lad in Kentucky. To Daniel and this young visitor the

encounter would be a simple meeting of friends, heightened in pleasure and interest somewhat, naturally, by

the adventure in prospect. But to us there is something vast in the thought of Daniel Boone, on his last

As for the rough and hearty mob at the door, Daniel must have known not a few of them well; though they

had been children in the days when he and William Clark's brother strove for Kentucky. It seems fitting that

the soldiers with this expedition should have come from the garrison at Kaskaskia; since the taking of that

fort in 1778 by George Rogers Clark had opened the western way from the boundaries of Kentucky to the

Mississippi. And among the young Kentuckians enlisted by William Clark were sons of the sturdy fighters of

still an earlier border line, Clinch and Holston Valley men who had adventured under another Lewis at Point

Pleasant. Daniel would recognize in thesesuch as Charles Floydthe young kinsmen of his oldtime

comrades whom he had preserved from starvation in the Kentucky wilderness by the kill from his rifle as

In May, Lewis and Clark's pirogues ascended the Missouri and the leaders and men of the expedition spent

another day in La Charette. Once again, at least, Daniel was to watch the westward departure of pioneers. In

1811, when the Astorians passed, one of their number pointed to the immobile figure of "an old man on the

Sometimes the aged pioneer's mind cast forward to his last journey, for which his advancing years were

preparing him. He wrote on the subject to a sister, in 1816, revealing in a few simple lines that the faith

whereby he had crossed, if not more literally removed, mountains was a fixed star, and that he looked ahead

fearlessly to the dark trail he must tread by its single gleam. Autumn was tinting the forest and the tang he

loved was in the air when the great hunter passed. The date of Boone's death is given as September 26, 1820.

He was in his eightysixth year. Unburdened by the pangs of disease he went out serenely, by the gentle

The convention for drafting the constitution of Missouri, in session at St. Louis, adjourned for the day, and

for twenty days thereafter the members wore crape on their arms as a further mark of respect for the great

pioneer. Daniel was laid by Rebecca's side, on the bank of Teugue Creek, about a mile from the Missouri

River. In 1845, the Missouri legislators hearkened to oftrepeated pleas from Kentucky and surrendered the

remains of the pioneer couple. Their bones lie now in Frankfort, the capital of the once Dark and Bloody

To us it seems rather that Kentucky itself is Boone's monument; even as those other great corn States, Illinois

and Indiana, are Clark's. There, these two servants unafraid, who sacrificed without measure in the wintry

winds of man's ingratitude, are each year memorialized anew; when the earth in summerthe season when

the red man slaughteredlifts up the full grain in the ear, the life giving corn; and when autumn smiles in

golden peace over the stubble fields, where the reaping and binding machines have hummed a nation's

C. A. Hanna, "The ScotchIrish," 2 vols. New York, 1902. A very full if somewhat overenthusiastic study.

A. G. Spangenberg, Extracts from his Journal of travels in North Carolina, 1752. Publication of the Southern

J. P. MacLean, "An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America" (1900).

N. D. Mereness (editor), "Travels in the American Colonies." New York, 1916. This collection contains the

diary of the Moravian Brethren cited in the first chapter of the present volume.

Joseph Doddridge, "Notes on the Settlements and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and

Pennsylvania," from 1763 to 1783. Albany, 1876. An intimate description of the daily life of the early settlers

in the Back Country by one of themselves. J. F. D. Smyth, "Tour in the United States of America," 2 vols.

London, 1784. Minute descriptions of the Back Country and interesting pictures of the life of the settlers;

William H. Foote, "Sketches of North Carolina," New York, 1846. See Foote also for history of the first

Presbyterian ministers in the Back Country. As to political history, inaccurate.

J. S. Bassett (editor), "The Writings of Colonel William Byrd of Westover." New York, 1901. A

Thomas Walker, "Journal of an Exploration in the Spring of the Year 1750." Boston, 1888. The record of his

William M. Darlington (editor), "Christopher Gist's Journals." Pittsburgh, 1893. Contains Gist's account of

C. A. Hanna, "The Wilderness Trail," 2 vols. New York, 1911. An exhaustive work of research, with full

accounts of Croghan and Findlay. See also Croghan's and Johnson's correspondence in vol. VII, New York

James Adair, "The History of the American Indians," etc. London, 1775. The personal record of a trader who

was one of the earliest explorers of the Alleghanies and of the Mississippi region east of the river; a

C. W. Alvord, "The Genesis of the Proclamation of 1763." Reprinted from Canadian Archives Report, 1906.

A new and authoritative interpretation. In this connection see also the correspondence between Sir William

Justin Winsor, "The Mississippi Basin. The Struggle in America between England and France." Cambridge,

1895. Presents the results of exhaustive research and the coordination of facts by an historian of broad

"Colonial and State Records of North Carolina. 30 vols. The chief fountain source of the early history of

W. H. Hoyt, "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence." New York, 1907. This book presents the view

generally adopted by historians, that the alleged Declaration of May 20, 1775, is spurious.

Justin Winsor (editor), "Narrative and Critical History of America." 8 vols. (18841889). Also "The

Westward Movement. "Cambridge, 1897. Both works of incalculable value to the student.

C. W. Alvord, "The Mississippi. Valley in British Politics." 2 vols. Cleveland, 1917. A profound work of

R. G. Thwaites and L. P. Kellogg (editors), "Documentary History of Dunmore's War," 1774. Compiled from

the Draper Manuscripts in the library of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Madison, 1905. A collection of

R. G. Thwaites, "Daniel Boone." New York, 1902. A short and accurate narrative of Boone's life and

adventures compiled from the Draper Manuscripts and from earlier printed biographies.

John P. Hale, "Daniel Boone, Some Facts and Incidents not Hitherto Published." A pamphlet giving an

Timothy Flint, "The First White Man of the West or the Life and Exploits of Colonel Dan'l Boone."

John S. C. Abbott, "Daniel Boone, the Pioneer of Kentucky." New York, 1872. Fairly accurate throughout.

J. M. Peck, "Daniel Boone" (in Sparks, "Library of American Biography." Boston, 1847).

William Henry Bogart. "Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky." New York, 1856.

William Hayden English, "Conquest of the Country Northwest of the River Ohio, 17781783," and "Life of

General George Rogers Clark," 2 vols. Indianapolis, 1896. An accurate and valuable work for which the

author has made painstaking research among printed and unprinted documents. Contains Clark's own account

of his campaigns, letters he wrote on public and personal matters, and also letters from contemporaries in

Theodore Roosevelt, "The Winning of the West," 4 vols. New York, 18891896. A vigorous and spirited

J. G. M. Ramsey, "The Annals of Tennessee." Charleston, 1853. John Haywood, "The Civil and Political

(Reprint from 1828.) These works, with the North Carolina "Colonial Records," are the source books of early

Tennessee. In statistics, such as numbers of Indians and other foes defeated by Tennessee heroes, not reliable.

Incorrect as to causes of Indian wars during the Revolution. On this subject see letters and reports by John

and Henry Stuart in North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X; and letters by General Gage and letters and

proclamation by General Ethan Allen in American Archives, Fourth Series, vol. II, and by President Rutledge

of South Carolina in North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X. See also Justin Winsor, "The Westward

J. Allison, "Dropped Stitches in Tennessee History." Nashville, 1897. Contains interesting matter relative to

Andrew Jackson in his younger days as well as about other striking figures of the time.

F. M. Turner, "The Life of General John Sevier." New York, 1910. A fairly accurate narrative of events in

A. W. Putnam, "History of Middle Tennessee, or Life and Times of General James Robertson." Nashville,

1859. A rambling lengthy narrative containing some interesting material and much that is unreliable. Its

worst fault is distortion through sentimentality, and indulgence in the habit of putting the author's

J. S. Bassett, "Regulators of North Carolina," in Report of the American Historical Association, 1894.

L. C. Draper, "King's Mountain and its Heroes." Cincinnati, 1881. The source book on this event. Contains

Henry Doniol, "Histoire de la participation de la France d l'etablissement des EtatsUnis d'Amerique," 5 vols.

Paris, 18861892. A complete exposition of the French and Spanish policy towards America. during the

Manuel Serrano y Sanz, "El brigadier Jaime Wilkinson y sus tratos con Espana para la independencia del

Kentucky, anos 1787 a 1797." Madrid, 1915. A Spanish view of Wilkinson's intrigues with Spain, based on

Thomas Marshall Green, "The Spanish Conspiracy." Cincinnati, 1891. A good local account, from American

sources. The best material on this subject is found in Justin Winsor's "The Westward Movement and

Narrative and Critical History" because there viewed against a broad historical background. See Winsor also

for the Latin intrigues in Tennessee. For material on Alexander McGillivray see the American Archives and

Edward S. Corwin, "French Policy and the American Alliance of 1778." Princeton, 1916. Deals chiefly with

the commercial aspects of French policy and should be read in conjunction with Winsor, Jay, and

John Jay, "On the Peace Negotiations of 178283 as Illustrated by the Secret Correspondence of France and

England." New York, 1888. A paper read before the American Historical Association, May 23, 1887.