The Conquest of the Old Southwest: The Romantic Story of the Early Pioneers into Virginia, The Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky 1740-1790

Part 1 out of 4

THE CONQUEST OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST: THE ROMANTIC STORY OF THE
EARLY PIONEERS INTO VIRGINIA, THE CAROLINAS, TENNESSEE, AND
KENTUCKY 1740-1790

BY ARCHIBALD HENDERSON, Ph.D., D.C.L.

Some to endure and many to fail,
Some to conquer and many to quail
Toiling over the Wilderness Trail.

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1920

TO THE HISTORIAN OF
OLD WEST AND NEW WEST
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER
WITH ADMIRATION AND REGARD

The country might invite a prince from his palace, merely for the
pleasure of contemplating its beauty and excellence; but only add
the rapturous idea of property, and what allurements can the
world offer for the loss of so glorious a prospect?--Richard
Henderson.

The established Authority of any government in America, and the
policy of Government at home, are both insufficient to restrain
the Americans . . . . They acquire no attachment to Place: But
wandering about Seems engrafted in their Nature; and it is a
weakness incident to it, that they Should for ever imagine the
Lands further off, are Still better than those upon which they
are already settled.--Lord Dunmore, to the Earl of Dartmouth.

INTRODUCTION

The romantic and thrilling story of the southward and westward
migration of successive waves of transplanted European peoples
throughout the entire course of the eighteenth century is the
history of the growth and evolution of American democracy. Upon
the American continent was wrought out, through almost superhuman
daring, incredible hardship, and surpassing endurance, the
formation of a new society. The European rudely confronted with
the pitiless conditions of the wilderness soon discovered that
his maintenance, indeed his existence, was conditioned upon his
individual efficiency and his resourcefulness in adapting himself
to his environment. The very history of the human race, from the
age of primitive man to the modern era of enlightened
civilization, is traversed in the Old Southwest throughout the
course of half a century.

A series of dissolving views thrown upon the screen, picturing
the successive episodes in the history of a single family as it
wended its way southward along the eastern valleys, resolutely
repulsed the sudden attack of the Indians, toiled painfully up
the granite slopes of the Appalachians, and pitched down into the
transmontane wilderness upon the western waters, would give to
the spectator a vivid conception, in miniature, of the westward
movement. But certain basic elements in the grand procession,
revealed to the sociologist and the economist, would perhaps
escape his scrutiny. Back of the individual, back of the family,
even, lurk the creative and formative impulses of colonization,
expansion, and government. In the recognition of these social and
economic tendencies the individual merges into the group; the
group into the community; the community into a new society. In
this clear perspective of historic development the spectacular
hero at first sight seems to diminish; but the mass, the
movement, the social force which he epitomizes and interprets,
gain in impressiveness and dignity.

As the irresistible tide of migratory peoples swept ever
southward and westward, seeking room for expansion and economic
independence, a series of frontiers was gradually thrust out
toward the wilderness in successive waves of irregular
indentation. The true leader in this westward advance, to whom
less than his deserts has been accorded by the historian, is the
drab and mercenary trader with the Indians. The story of his
enterprise and of his adventures begins with the planting of
European civilization upon American soil. In the mind of the
aborigines he created the passion for the fruits, both good and
evil, of the white man's civilization, and he was welcomed by the
Indian because he also brought the means for repelling the
further advance of that civilization. The trader was of
incalculable service to the pioneer in first spying out the land
and charting the trackless wilderness. The trail rudely marked by
the buffalo became in time the Indian path and the trader's
"trace"; and the pioneers upon the westward march, following the
line of least resistance, cut out their, roads along these very
routes. It is not too much to say that had it not been for the
trader--brave, hardy, and adventurous however often crafty,
unscrupulous, and immoral--the expansionist movement upon the
American continent would have been greatly retarded.

So scattered and ramified were the enterprises and expeditions of
the traders with the Indians that the frontier which they
established was at best both shifting and unstable. Following far
in the wake of these advance agents of the civilization which
they so often disgraced, came the cattle-herder or rancher, who
took advantage of the extensive pastures and ranges along the
uplands and foot-hills to raise immense herds of cattle. Thus was
formed what might be called a rancher's frontier, thrust out in
advance of the ordinary farming settlements and serving as the
first serious barrier against the Indian invasion. The westward
movement of population is in this respect a direct advance from
the coast. Years before the influx into the Old Southwest of the
tides of settlement from the northeast, the more adventurous
struck straight westward in the wake of the fur-trader, and here
and there erected the cattle-ranges beyond the farming frontier
of the piedmont region. The wild horses and cattle which roamed
at will through the upland barrens and pea-vine pastures were
herded in and driven for sale to the city markets of the East.

The farming frontier of the piedmont plateau constituted the real
backbone of western settlement. The pioneering farmers, with the
adventurous instincts of the hunter and the explorer, plunged
deeper and ever deeper into the wilderness, lured on by the
prospect of free and still richer lands in the dim interior.
Settlements quickly sprang up in the neighborhood of military
posts or rude forts established to serve as safeguards against
hostile attack; and trade soon flourished between these
settlements and the eastern centers, following the trails of the
trader and the more beaten paths of emigration. The bolder
settlers who ventured farthest to the westward were held in
communication with the East through their dependence upon salt
and other necessities of life; and the search for salt-springs in
the virgin wilderness was an inevitable consequence of the desire
of the pioneer to shake off his dependence upon the coast.

The prime determinative principle of the progressive American
civilization of the eighteenth century was the passion for the
acquisition of land. The struggle for economic independence
developed the germ of American liberty and became the
differentiating principle of American character. Here was a vast
unappropriated region in the interior of the continent to be had
for the seeking, which served as lure and inspiration to the man
daring enough to risk his all in its acquisition. It was in
accordance with human nature and the principles of political
economy that this unknown extent of uninhabited transmontane
land, widely renowned for beauty, richness, and fertility, should
excite grandiose dreams in the minds of English and Colonials
alike. England was said to be "New Land mad and everybody there
has his eye fixed on this country." Groups of wealthy or
well-to-do individuals organized themselves into land companies
for the colonization and exploitation of the West. The pioneer
promoter was a powerful creative force in westward expansion; and
the activities of the early land companies were decisive factors
in the colonization of the wilderness. Whether acting under the
authority of a crown grant or proceeding on their own authority,
the land companies tended to give stability and permanence to
settlements otherwise hazardous and insecure.

The second determinative impulse of the pioneer civilization was
wanderlust--the passionately inquisitive instinct of the hunter,
the traveler, and the explorer. This restless class of nomadic
wanderers was responsible in part for the royal proclamation of
1763, a secondary object of which, according to Edmund Burke, was
the limitation of the colonies on the West, as "the charters of
many of our old colonies give them, with few exceptions, no
bounds to the westward but the South Sea." The Long Hunters,
taking their lives in their hands, fared boldly forth to a fabled
hunter's paradise in the far-away wilderness, because they were
driven by the irresistible desire of a Ponce de Leon or a De Soto
to find out the truth about the unknown lands beyond.

But the hunter was not only thrilled with the passion of the
chase and of discovery; he was intent also upon collecting the
furs and skins of wild animals for lucrative barter and sale in
the centers of trade. He was quick to make "tomahawk claims" and
to assert "corn rights" as he spied out the rich virgin land for
future location and cultivation. Free land and no taxes appealed
to the backwoodsman, tired of paying quit-rents to the agents of
wealthy lords across the sea. Thus the settler speedily followed
in the hunter's wake. In his wake also went many rude and lawless
characters of the border, horse thieves and criminals of
different sorts, who sought to hide their delinquencies in the
merciful liberality of the wilderness. For the most part,
however, it was the salutary instinct of the homebuilder--the man
with the ax, who made a little clearing in the forest and built
there a rude cabin that he bravely defended at all risks against
continued assaults--which, in defiance of every restraint,
irresistibly thrust westward the thin and jagged line of the
frontier. The ax and the surveyor's chain, along with the rifle
and the hunting-knife, constituted the armorial bearings of the
pioneer. With individual as with corporation, with explorer as
with landlord, land-hunger was the master impulse of the era.

The various desires which stimulated and promoted westward
expansion were, to be sure, often found in complete conjunction.
The trader sought to exploit the Indian for his own advantage,
selling him whisky, trinkets, and firearms in return for rich
furs and costly peltries; yet he was often a hunter himself and
collected great stores of peltries as the result of his solitary
and protracted hunting-expeditions. The rancher and the herder
sought to exploit the natural vegetation of marsh and upland, the
cane-brakes and pea-vines; yet the constantly recurring need for
fresh pasturage made him a pioneer also, drove him ever nearer to
the mountains, and furnished the economic motive for his westward
advance. The small farmer needed the virgin soil of the new
region, the alluvial river-bottoms, and the open prairies, for
the cultivation of his crops and the grazing of his cattle; yet
in the intervals between the tasks of farm life he scoured the
wilderness in search of game "and spied out new lands for future
settlement".

This restless and nomadic race, says the keenly observant Francis
Baily, "delight much to live on the frontiers, where they can
enjoy undisturbed, and free from the control of any laws, the
blessings which nature has bestowed upon them." Independence of
spirit, impatience of restraint, the inquisitive nature, and the
nomadic temperament--these are the strains in the American
character of the eighteenth century which ultimately blended to
create a typical democracy. The rolling of wave after wave of
settlement westward across the American continent, with a
reversion to primitive conditions along the line of the farthest
frontier, and a marked rise in the scale of civilization at each
successive stage of settlement, from the western limit to the
eastern coast, exemplifies from one aspect the history of the
American people during two centuries. This era, constituting the
first stage in our national existence, and productive of a
buoyant national character shaped in democracy upon a free soil,
closed only yesterday with the exhaustion of cultivable free
land, the disappearance of the last frontier, and the recent
death of "Buffalo Bill". The splendid inauguration of the period,
in the region of the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee, and
Kentucky, during the second half of the eighteenth century, is
the theme of this story of the pioneers of the Old Southwest.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I THE MIGRATION OF THE PEOPLES

II THE CRADLE OF WESTWARD EXPANSION

III THE BACK COUNTRY AND THE BORDER

IV THE INDIAN WAR

V IN DEFENSE OF CIVILIZATION

VI CRUSHING THE CHEROKEES

VII THE LAND COMPANIES

VIII THE LONG HUNTERS IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE

IX DANIEL BOONE AND WILDERNESS EXPLORATION

X DANIEL BOONE IN KENTUCKY

XI THE REGULATORS

XII WATAUGA--HAVEN OF LIBERTY

XIII OPENING THE GATEWAY--DUNMORE'S WAR

XIV RICHARD HENDERSON AND THE TRANSYLVANIA COMPANY

XV TRANSYLVANIA--A WILDERNESS COMMONWEALTH

XVI THE REPULSE OF THE RED MEN

XVII THE COLONIZATION OF THE CUMBERLAND

XVIII KING'S MOUNTAIN

XIX THE STATE OF FRANKLIN

XX THE LURE OF SPAIN--THE HAVEN OF STATEHOOD

THE CONQUEST OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST

Chapter I. The Migration of the Peoples

Inhabitants flock in here daily, mostly from Pensilvania and
other parts of America, who are over-stocked with people and Mike
directly from Europe, they commonly seat themselves towards the
West, and have got near the mountains.--Gabriel Johnston,
Governor of North Carolina, to the Secretary of the Board of
Trade, February 15, 1751.

At the opening of the eighteenth century the tide of population
had swept inland to the "fall line", the westward boundary of the
established settlements. The actual frontier had been advanced by
the more aggressive pioneers to within fifty miles of the Blue
Ridge. So rapid was the settlement in North Carolina that in the
interval 1717-32 the population quadrupled in numbers. A map of
the colonial settlements in 1725 reveals a narrow strip of
populated land along the Atlantic coast, of irregular
indentation, with occasional isolated nuclei of settlements
further in the interior. The civilization thus established
continued to maintain a close and unbroken communication with
England and the Continent. As long as the settlers, for economic
reasons, clung to the coast, they reacted but slowly to the
transforming influences of the frontier.. Within a triangle of
continental altitude with its apex in New England, bounded on the
east by the Atlantic, and on the west by the Appalachian range,
lay the settlements, divided into two zones--tidewater and
piedmont. As no break occurred in the great mountain system south
of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, the difficulties of cutting a
passage through the towering wall of living green long proved an
effective obstacle to the crossing of the grim mountain barrier.

In the beginning the settlements gradually extended westward from
the coast in irregular outline, the indentations taking form
around such natural centers of attraction as areas of fertile
soil, frontier posts, mines, salt-springs, and stretches of
upland favorable for grazing. After a time a second advance of
settlement was begun in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland,
running in a southwesterly direction along the broad terraces to
the east of the Appalachian Range, which in North Carolina lies
as far as two hundred and fifty miles from the sea. The Blue
Ridge in Virginia and a belt of pine barrens in North Carolina
were hindrances to this advance, but did not entirely check it.
This second streaming of the population thrust into the long,
narrow wedge of the piedmont zone a class of people differing in
spirit and in tendency from their more aristocratic and
complacent neighbors to the east.

These settlers of the Valley of Virginia and the North Carolina
piedmont region--English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Scotch, Irish,
Welsh, and a few French--were the first pioneers of the Old
Southwest. From the joint efforts of two strata of population,
geographically, socially, and economically distinct--tidewater
and piedmont, Old South and New South--originated and flowered
the third and greatest movement of westward expansion, opening
with the surmounting of the mountain barrier and ending in the
occupation and assumption of the vast medial valley of the
continent.

Synchronous with the founding of Jamestown in Virginia,
significantly enough, was the first planting of Ulster with the
English and Scotch. Emigrants from the Scotch Lowlands, sometimes
as many as four thousand a year (1625), continued throughout the
century to pour into Ulster. "Those of the North of Ireland . .
.," as pungently described in 1679 by the Secretary of State,
Leoline Jenkins, to the Duke of Ormond, "are most Scotch and
Scotch breed and are the Northern Presbyterians and phanatiques,
lusty, able bodied, hardy and stout men, where one may see three
or four hundred at every meeting-house on Sunday, and all the
North of Ireland is inhabited by these, which is the popular
place of all Ireland by far. They are very numerous and greedy
after land." During the quarter of a century after the English
Revolution of 1688 and the Jacobite uprising in Ireland, which
ended in 1691 with the complete submission of Ireland to William
and Mary, not less than fifty thousand Scotch, according to
Archbishop Synge, settled in Ulster. Until the beginning of the
eighteenth century there was no considerable emigration to
America; and it was first set up as a consequence of English
interference with trade and religion. Repressive measures passed
by the English parliament (1665 1699), prohibiting the
exportation from Ire land to England and Scotland of cattle,
beef, pork, dairy products, etc., and to any country whatever of
manufactured wool, had aroused deep resentment among the
Scotch-Irish, who had built up a great commerce. This discontent
was greatly aggravated by the imposition of religious
disabilities upon the Presbyterians, who, in addition to having
to pay tithes for the support of the established church, were
excluded from all civil and military office (1704), while their
ministers were made liable to penalties for celebrating
marriages.

This pressure upon a high-spirited people resulted inevitably in
an exodus to the New World. The principal ports by which the
Ulsterites entered America were Lewes and Newcastle (Delaware),
Philadelphia and Boston. The streams of immigration steadily
flowed up the Delaware Valley; and by 1720 the Scotch-Irish began
to arrive in Bucks County. So rapid was the rate of increase in
immigration that the number of arrivals soon mounted from a few
hundred to upward of six thousand, in a single year (1729); and
within a few years this number was doubled. According to the
meticulous Franklin, the proportion increased from a very small
element of the population of Pennsylvania in 1700 to one fourth
of the whole in 1749, and to one third of the whole (350,000) in
1774. Writing to the Penns in 1724, James Logan, Secretary of the
Province, caustically refers to the Ulster settlers on the
disputed Maryland line as "these bold and indigent strangers,
saying as their excuse when challenged for titles, that we had
solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly." The
spirit of these defiant squatters is succinctly expressed in
their statement to Logan that it "was against the laws of God and
nature that so much land should be idle while so many Christians
wanted it to work on and to raise their bread."

The rising scale of prices for Pennsylvania lands, changing from
ten pounds and two shillings quit-rents per hundred acres in 1719
to fifteen pounds ten shillings per hundred acres with a
quit-rent of a halfpenny per acre in 1732, soon turned the eyes
of the thrifty Scotch-Irish settlers southward and southwestward.
In Maryland in 1738 lands were offered at five pounds sterling
per hundred acres. Simultaneously, in the Valley of Virginia free
grants of a thousand acres per family were being made. In the
North Carolina piedmont region the proprietary, Lord Granville,
through his agents was disposing of the most desirable lands to
settlers at the rate of three shillings proclamation money for
six hundred and forty acres, the unit of land-division; and was
also making large free grants on the condition of seating a
certain proportion of settlers. "Lord Carteret's land in
Carolina," says North Carolina's first American historian, "where
the soil was cheap, presented a tempting residence to people of
every denomination. Emigrants from the north of Ireland, by the
way of Pennsylvania, flocked to that country; and a considerable
part of North Carolina . . . is inhabited by those people or
their descendants." From 1740 onward, attracted by the rich lure
of cheap and even free lands in Virginia and North Carolina, a
tide of immigration swept ceaselessly into the valleys of the
Shenandoah, the Yadkin, and the Catawba. The immensity of this
mobile, drifting mass, which sometimes brought "more than 400
families with horse waggons and cattle" into North Carolina in a
single year (1752-3), is attested by the fact that from 1732 to
1754, mainly as the result of the Scotch-Irish inundation, the
population of North Carolina more than doubled.

The second important racial stream of population in the
settlement of the same region was composed of Germans, attracted
to this country from the Palatinate. Lured on by the highly
colored stories of the commercial agents for promoting
immigration--the "newlanders," who were thoroughly unscrupulous
in their methods and extravagant in their representations--a
migration from Germany began in the second decade of the
eighteenth century and quickly assumed alarming proportions.
Although certain of the emigrants were well-to-do, a very great
number were "redemptioners" (indentured servants), who in order
to pay for their transportation were compelled to pledge
themselves to several years of servitude. This economic condition
caused the German immigrant, wherever he went, to become a
settler of the back country, necessity compelling him to pass by
the more expensive lands near the coast.

For well-nigh sixty years the influx of German immigrants of
various sects was very great, averaging something like fifteen
hundred a year into Pennsylvania alone from 1727 to 1775. Indeed,
Pennsylvania, one third of whose population at the beginning of
the Revolution was German, early became the great distributing
center for the Germans as well as for the Scotch-Irish. Certainly
by 1727 Adam Miller and his fellow Germans had established the
first permanent white settlement in the Valley of Virginia. By
1732 Jost Heydt, accompanied by sixteen families, came from York,
Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opeckon River, in the
neighborhood of the present Winchester. There is no longer any
doubt that "the portion of the Shenandoah Valley sloping to the
north was almost entirely settled by Germans."

It was about the middle of the century that these pioneers of the
Old Southwest, the shrewd, industrious, and thrifty Pennsylvania
Germans (who came to be generally called "Pennsylvania Dutch"
from the incorrect translation of Pennsylvanische Deutsche),
began to pour into the piedmont region of North Carolina. In the
autumn, after the harvest was in, these ambitious Pennsylvania
pioneers would pack up their belongings in wagons and on beasts
of burden and head for the southwest, trekking down in the manner
of the Boers of South Africa. This movement into the fertile
valley lands of the Yadkin and the Catawba continued unabated
throughout the entire third quarter of the century. Owing to
their unfamiliarity with the English language and the solidarity
of their instincts, the German settlers at first had little share
in government. But they devotedly played their part in the
defense of the exposed settlements and often bore the brunt of
Indian attack.

The bravery and hardihood displayed by the itinerant missionaries
sent out by the Pennsylvania Synod under the direction of Count
Zinzendorf (1742-8), and by the Moravian Church (1748-53), are
mirrored in the numerous diaries, written in German, happily
preserved to posterity in religious archives of Pennsylvania and
North Carolina. These simple, earnest crusaders, animated by pure
and unselfish motives, would visit on a single tour of a thousand
miles the principal German settlements in Maryland and Virginia
(including the present West Virginia). Sometimes they would make
an extended circuit through North Carolina, South Carolina, and
even Georgia, everywhere bearing witness to the truth of the
gospel and seeking to carry the most elemental forms of the
Christian religion, preaching and prayer, to the primitive
frontiersmen marooned along the outer fringe of white
settlements. These arduous journeys in the cause of piety place
this type of pioneer of the Old Southwest in alleviating contrast
to the often relentless and bloodthirsty figure of the rude
borderer.

Noteworthy among these pious pilgrimages is the Virginia journey
of Brothers Leonhard Schnell and John Brandmuller (October 12 to
December 12, 1749). At the last outpost of civilization, the
scattered settlements in Bath and Alleghany counties, these
courageous missionaries--feasting the while solely on bear meat,
for there was no bread--encountered conditions of almost
primitive savagery, of which they give this graphic picture:
"Then we came to a house, where we had to lie on bear skins
around the fire like the rest . . . . The clothes of the people
consist of deer skins, their food of Johnny cakes, deer and bear
meat. A kind of white people are found here, who live like
savages. Hunting is their chief occupation." Into the valley of
the Yadkin in December, 1752, came Bishop Spangenberg and a party
of Moravians, accompanied by a surveyor and two guides, for the
purpose of locating the one hundred thousand acres of land which
had been offered them on easy terms the preceding year by Lord
Granville. This journey was remarkable as an illustration of
sacrifices willingly made and extreme hardships uncomplainingly
endured for the sake of the Moravian brotherhood. In the back
country of North Carolina near the Mulberry Fields they found the
whole woods full of Cherokee Indians engaged in hunting. A
beautiful site for the projected settlement met their delighted
gaze at this place; but they soon learned to their regret that it
had already been "taken up" by Daniel Boone's future
father-in-law, Morgan Bryan.

On October 8, 1753, a party of twelve single men headed by the
Rev. Bernhard Adam Grube, set out from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
to trek down to the new-found haven in the Carolina
hinterland--"a corner which the Lord has reserved for the
Brethren"--in Anson County. Following for the most part the great
highway extending from Philadelphia to the Yadkin, over which
passed the great throng sweeping into the back country of North
Carolina--through the Valley of Virginia and past Robert Luhny's
mill on the James River--they encountered many hardships along
the way. Because of their "long wagon," they had much difficulty
in crossing one steep mountain; and of this experience Brother
Grube, with a touch of modest pride, observes: "People had told
us that this hill was most dangerous, and that we would scarcely
be able to cross it, for Morgan Bryan, the first to travel this
way, had to take the wheels off his wagon and carry it piecemeal
to the top, and had been three months on the journey from the
Shanidore [Shenandoah] to the Etkin [Yadkin]."

These men were the highest type of the pioneers of the Old
Southwest, inspired with the instinct of homemakers in a land
where, if idle rumor were to be credited, "the people lived like
wild men never hearing of God or His Word." In one hand they bore
the implement of agriculture, in the other the book of the gospel
of Jesus Christ. True faith shines forth in the simply eloquent
words: "We thanked our Saviour that he had so graciously led us
hither, and had helped us through all the hard places, for no
matter how dangerous it looked, nor how little we saw how we
could win through, everything always went better than seemed
possible." The promise of a new day--the dawn of the heroic
age--rings out in the pious carol of camaraderie at their
journey's end:

We hold arrival Lovefeast here,
In Carolina land,
A company of Brethren true,
A little Pilgrim-Band,
Called by the Lord to be of those
Who through the whole world go,
To bear Him witness everywhere,
And nought but Jesus know.

Chapter II. The Cradle of Westward Expansion

In the year 1746 I was up in the country that is now Anson,
Orange and Rowan Counties, there was not then above one hundred
fighting men there is now at least three thousand for the most
part Irish Protestants and Germans and dailey increasing.--
Matthew Rowan, President of the North Carolina Council, to the
Board of Trade, June 28, 1753.

The conquest of the West is usually attributed to the ready
initiative, the stern self-reliance, and the libertarian instinct
of the expert backwoodsmen. These bold, nomadic spirits were
animated by an unquenchable desire to plunge into the wilderness
in search of an El Dorado at the outer verge of civilization,
free of taxation, quit-rents, and the law's restraint. They
longed to build homes for themselves and their descendants in a
limitless, free domain; or else to fare deeper and deeper into
the trackless forests in search of adventure. Yet one must not
overlook the fact that behind Boone and pioneers of his stamp
were men of conspicuous civil and military genius, constructive
in purpose and creative in imagination, who devoted their best
gifts to actual conquest and colonization. These men of large
intellectual mold-themselves surveyors, hunters, and
pioneers--were inspired with the larger vision of the
expansionist. Whether colonizers, soldiers, or speculators on the
grand scale, they sought to open at one great stroke the vast
trans-Alleghany regions as a peaceful abode for mankind.

Two distinct classes of society were gradually drawing apart from
each other in North Carolina and later in Virginia--the pioneer
democracy of the back country and the upland, and the planter
aristocracy of the lowland and the tide-water region. From the
frontier came the pioneer explorers whose individual enterprise
and initiative were such potent factors in the exploitation of
the wilderness. From the border counties still in contact with
the East came a number of leaders. Thus in the heart of the Old
Southwest the two determinative principles already referred to,
the inquisitive and the acquisitive instincts, found a fortunate
conjunction. The exploratory passion of the pioneer, directed in
the interest of commercial enterprise, prepared the way for the
great westward migration. The warlike disposition of the hardy
backwoodsman, controlled by the exercise of military strategy,
accomplished the conquest of the trans-Alleghany country.

Fleeing from the traditional bonds of caste and aristocracy in
England and Europe, from economic boycott and civil oppression,
from religious persecution and favoritism, many worthy members of
society in the first quarter of the eighteenth century sought a
haven of refuge in the "Quackerthal" of William Penn, with its
trustworthy guarantees of free tolerance in religious faith and
the benefits of representative self-government. From East
Devonshire in England came George Boone, the grandfather of the
great pioneer, and from Wales came Edward Morgan, whose daughter
Sarah became the wife of Squire Boone, Daniel's father. These
were conspicuous representatives of the Society of Friends, drawn
thither by the roseate representations of the great Quaker,
William Penn, and by his advanced views on popular government and
religious toleration. Hither, too, from Ireland, whither he had
gone from Denmark, came Morgan Bryan, settling in Chester County,
prior to 1719; and his children, William, Joseph, James, and
Morgan, who more than half a century later gave the name to
Bryan's Station in Kentucky, were destined to play important
roles in the drama of westward migration. In September, 1734,
Michael Finley from County Armagh, Ireland, presumably
accompanied by his brother Archibald Finley, settled in Bucks
County, Pennsylvania. According to the best authorities,
Archibald Finley was the father of John Finley, or Findlay as he
signed himself, Boone's guide and companion in his exploration of
Kentucky in 1769-71. To Pennsylvania also came Mordecai Lincoln,
great grandson of Samuel Lincoln, who had emigrated from England
to Hingham, Massachusetts, as early as 1637. This Mordecai
Lincoln, who in 1720 settled in Chester County, Pennsylvania, the
great-great-grandfather of President Lincoln, was the father of
Sarah Lincoln, who was wedded to William Boone, and of Abraham
Lincoln, who married Anne Boone, William's first cousin. Early
settlers in Pennsylvania were members of the Hanks family, one of
whom was the maternal grandfather of President Lincoln.

No one race or breed of men can lay claim to exclusive credit for
leadership in the hinterland movement and the conquest of the
West. Yet one particular stock of people, the Ulster Scots,
exhibited with most completeness and picturesqueness a group of
conspicuous qualities and attitudes which we now recognize to be
typical of the American character as molded by the conditions of
frontier life. Cautious, wary, and reserved, these Scots
concealed beneath a cool and calculating manner a relentlessness
in reasoning power and an intensity of conviction which glowed
and burned with almost fanatical ardor. Strict in religious
observance and deep in spiritual fervor, they never lost sight of
the main chance, combining a shrewd practicality with a wealth of
devotion. It has been happily said of them that they kept the
Sabbath and everything else they could lay their hands on. In the
polity of these men religion and education went hand in hand; and
they habitually settled together in communities in order that
they might have teachers and preachers of their own choice and
persuasion.

In little-known letters and diaries of travelers and itinerant
ministers may be found many quaint descriptions and faithful
characterizations of the frontier settlers in their habits of
life and of the scenes amidst which they labored. In a letter to
Edmund Fanning, the cultured Robin Jones, agent of Lord Granville
and Attorney-General of North Carolina, summons to view a piquant
image of the western border and borderers: "The inhabitants are
hospitable in their way, live in plenty and dirt, are stout, of
great prowess in manly athletics; and, in private conversation,
bold, impertinent, and vain. In the art of war (after the Indian
manner) they are well-skilled, are enterprising and fruitful of
strategies; and, when in action, are as bold and intrepid as the
ancient Romans. The Shawnese acknowledge them their superiors
even in their own way of fighting . . . . [The land] may be truly
called the land of the mountains, for they are so numerous that
when you have reached the summit of one of them, you may see
thousands of every shape that the imagination can suggest,
seeming to vie with each other which should raise his lofty head
to touch the clouds . . . . It seems to me that nature has been
wanton in bestowing her blessings on that country."

An excellent pen-picture of educational and cultural conditions
in the backwoods of North Carolina, by one of the early settlers
in the middle of the century, exhibits in all their barren
cheerlessness the hardships and limitations of life in the
wilderness. The father of William Few, the narrator, had trekked
down from Maryland and settled in Orange County, some miles east
of the little hamlet of Hillsborough. "In that country at that
time there were no schools, no churches or parsons, or doctors or
lawyers; no stores, groceries or taverns, nor do I recollect
during the first two years any officer, ecclesiastical, civil or
military, except a justice of the peace, a constable and two or
three itinerant preachers . . . . These people had few wants, and
fewer temptations to vice than those who lived in more refined
society, though ignorant. They were more virtuous and more happy
. . . . A schoolmaster appeared and offered his services to teach
the children of the neighborhood for twenty shillings each per
year . . . . In that simple state of society money was but little
known; the schoolmaster was the welcome guest of his pupil, fed
at the bountiful table and clothed from the domestic loom . . . .
In that country at that time there was great scarcity of books."

The journals of itinerant ministers through the Valley of
Virginia and the Carolina piedmont zone yield precious mementoes
of the people, their longing after the things of the spirit, and
their pitiful isolation from the regular preaching of the gospel.
These missionaries were true pioneers in this Old Southwest,
ardent, dauntless, and heroic--carrying the word into remote
places and preaching the gospel beneath the trees of the forest.
In his journal (1755-6), the Rev. Hugh McAden, born in
Pennsylvania of Scotch-Irish parentage, a graduate of Nassau Hall
(1753), makes the unconsciously humorous observation that
wherever he found Presbyterians he found people who "seemed
highly pleased, and very desirous to hear the word"; whilst
elsewhere he found either dissension and defection to Baptist
principles, or "no appearance of the life of religion." In the
Scotch-Irish Presbyterian settlements in what is now Mecklenburg
County, the cradle of American liberty, he found "pretty serious,
judicious people" of the stamp of Moses, William, and James
Alexander. While traveling in the upper country of South
Carolina, he relates with gusto the story of "an old gentleman
who said to the Governor of South Carolina, when he was in those
parts, in treaty with the Cherokee Indians that 'he had never
seen a shirt, been in a fair, heard a sermon, or seen a minister
in all his life.' Upon which the governor promised to send him up
a minister, that he might hear one sermon before he died." The
minister came and preached; and this was all the preaching that
had been heard in the upper part of South Carolina before Mr.
McAden's visit.

Such, then, were the rude and simple people in the back country
of the Old Southwest--the deliberate and self-controlled English,
the aggressive, landmongering Scotch-Irish, the buoyant Welsh,
the thrifty Germans, the debonair French, the impetuous Irish,
and the calculating Scotch. The lives they led were marked by
independence of spirit, democratic instincts, and a forthright
simplicity. In describing the condition of the English settlers
in the backwoods of Virginia, one of their number, Doddridge,
says: "Most of the articles were of domestic manufacture. There
might have been incidentally a few things brought to the country
for sale in a primitive way, but there was no store for general
supply. The table furniture usually consisted of wooden vessels,
either turned or coopered. Iron forks, tin cups, etc., were
articles of rare and delicate luxury. The food was of the most
wholesome and primitive kind. The richest meat, the finest
butter, and best meal that ever delighted man's palate were here
eaten with a relish which health and labor only know. The
hospitality of the people was profuse and proverbial."

The circumstances of their lives compelled the pioneers to become
self-sustaining. Every immigrant was an adept at many trades. He
built his own house, forged his own tools, and made his own
clothes. At a very early date rifles were manufactured at the
High Shoals of the Yadkin; Squire Boone, Daniel's brother, was an
expert gunsmith. The difficulty of securing food for the
settlements forced every man to become a hunter and to scour the
forest for wild game. Thus the pioneer, through force of sheer
necessity, became a dead shot--which stood him in good stead in
the days of Indian incursions and bloody retaliatory raids.
Primitive in their games, recreations, and amusements, which not
infrequently degenerated into contests of savage brutality, the
pioneers always set the highest premium upon personal bravery,
physical prowess, and skill in manly sports. At all public
gatherings, general musters, "vendues" or auctions, and even
funerals, whisky flowed with extraordinary freedom. It is worthy
of record that among the effects of the Rev. Alexander Craighead,
the famous teacher and organizer of Presbyterianism in
Mecklenburg and the adjoining region prior to the Revolution,
were found a punch bowl and glasses.

The frontier life, with its purifying and hardening influence,
bred in these pioneers intellectual traits which constitute the
basis of the American character. The single-handed and successful
struggle with nature in the tense solitude of the forest
developed a spirit of individualism, restive under control. On
the other hand, the sense of sharing with others the arduous
tasks and dangers of conquering the wilderness gave birth to a
strong sense of solidarity arid of human sympathy. With the lure
of free lands ever before them, the pioneers developed a
restlessness and a nervous energy, blended with a buoyancy of
spirit, which are fundamentally American. Yet this same
untrammeled freedom occasioned a disregard for law and a defiance
of established government which have exhibited themselves
throughout the entire course of our history. Initiative,
self-reliance, boldness in conception, fertility in resource,
readiness in execution, acquisitiveness, inventive genius,
appreciation of material advantages--these, shot through with a
certain fine idealism, genial human sympathy, and a high romantic
strain--are the traits of the American national type as it
emerged from the Old Southwest.

CHAPTER III. The Back Country and the Border

Far from the bustle of the world, they live in the most
delightful climate, and richest soil imaginable; they are
everywhere surrounded with beautiful prospects and sylvan scenes;
lofty mountains, transparent streams, falls of water, rich
valleys, and majestic woods; the whole interspersed with an
infinite variety of flowering shrubs, constitute the landscape
surrounding them; they are subject to few diseases; are generally
robust; and live in perfect liberty; they are ignorant of want
and acquainted with but few vices. Their inexperience of the
elegancies of life precludes any regret that they possess not the
means of enjoying them, but they possess what many princes would
give half their dominion for, health, content, and tranquillity
of mind.--Andrew Burnaby: Travels Through North America.

The two streams of Ulstermen, the greater through Philadelphia,
the lesser through Charleston, which poured into the Carolinas
toward the middle of the century, quickly flooded the back
country. The former occupied the Yadkin Valley and tile region to
the westward, the latter the Waxhaws and the Anson County region
to the northwest. The first settlers were known as the
"Pennsylvania Irish," because they had first settled in
Pennsylvania after migrating from the north of Ireland; while
those who came by way of Charleston were known as the
"Scotch-Irish." The former, who had resided in Pennsylvania long
enough to be good judges of land, shrewdly made their settlements
along the rivers and creeks. The latter, new arrivals and less
experienced, settled on thinner land toward the heads of creeks
and water courses.

Shortly prior to 1735, Morgan Bryan, his wife Martha, and eight
children, together with other families of Quakers from
Pennsylvania, settled upon a large tract of land on the northwest
side of the Opeckon River near Winchester. A few years later they
removed up the Virginia Valley to the Big Lick in the present
Roanoke County, intent upon pushing westward to the very
outskirts of civilization. In the autumn of 1748, leaving behind
his brother William, who had followed him to Roanoke County,
Morgan Bryan removed with his family to the Forks of the Yadkin
River. The Morgans, with the exception of Richard, who emigrated
to Virginia, remained in Pennsylvania, spreading over
Philadelphia and Bucks counties; while the Hanks and Lincoln
families found homes in Virginia--Mordecai Lincoln's son, John,
the great-grandfather of President Lincoln, removing from Berks
to the Shenandoah Valley in 1765. On May 1, 1750, Squire Boone,
his wife Sarah (Morgan), and their eleven children--a veritable
caravan, traveling like the patriarchs of old--started south; and
tarried for a space, according to reliable tradition, on Linville
Creek in the Virginia Valley. In 1752 they removed to the Forks
of the Yadkin, and the following year received from Lord
Granville three tracts of land, all situated in Rowan County.
About the hamlet of Salisbury, which in 1755 consisted of seven
or eight log houses and the court house, there now rapidly
gathered a settlement of people marked by strong individuality,
sturdy independence, and virile self-reliance. The Boones and the
Bryans quickly accommodated themselves to frontier conditions and
immediately began to take an active part in the local affairs of
the county. Upon the organization of the county court Squire
Boone was chosen justice of the peace; and Morgan Bryan was soon
appearing as foreman of juries and director in road improvements.

The Great Trading Path, leading from Virginia to the towns of the
Catawbas and other Southern Indians, crossed the Yadkin at the
Trading Ford and passed a mile southeast of Salisbury. Above
Sapona Town near the Trading Ford was Swearing Creek, which,
according to constant and picturesque tradition, was the spot
where the traders stopped to take a solemn oath never to reveal
any unlawful proceedings that might occur during their sojourn
among the Indians. In his divertingly satirical "History of the
Dividing Line" William Byrd in 1728 thus speaks of this locality:
"The Soil is exceedingly rich on both sides the Yadkin, abounding
in rank Grass and prodigiously large Trees; and for plenty of
Fish, Fowl and Venison, is inferior to No Part of the Northern
Continent. There the Traders commonly lie Still for some days, to
recruit their Horses' Flesh as well as to recover their own
spirits." In this beautiful country happily chosen for settlement
by Squire Boone --who erected his cabin on the east side of the
Yadkin about a mile and a quarter from Alleman's, now Boone's,
Ford--wild game abounded. Buffaloes were encountered in eastern
North Carolina by Byrd while running the dividing line; and in
the upper country of South Carolina three or four men with their
dogs could kill fourteen to twenty buffaloes in a single day."
Deer and bears fell an easy prey to the hunter; wild turkeys
filled every thicket; the watercourses teemed with beaver, otter,
and muskrat, as well as with shad and other delicious fish.
Panthers, wildcats, and wolves overran the country; and the
veracious Brother Joseph, while near the present Wilkesboro,
amusingly records: "The wolves wh. are not like those in Germany,
Poland and Lifland (because they fear men and don't easily come
near) give us such music of six different cornets the like of wh.
I have never heard in my life." So plentiful was the game that
the wild deer mingled with the cattle grazing over the wide
stretches of luxuriant grass.

In the midst of this sylvan paradise grew up Squire Boone's son,
Daniel Boone, a Pennsylvania youth of English stock, Quaker
persuasion, and Baptist proclivities. Seen through a glorifying
halo after the lapse of a century and three quarters, he rises
before us a romantic figure, poised and resolute, simple,
benign--as naive and shy as some wild thing of the primeval
forest--five feet eight inches in height, with broad chest and
shoulders, dark locks, genial blue eyes arched with fair
eyebrows, thin lips and wide mouth, nose of slightly Roman cast,
and fair, ruddy countenance. Farming was irksome to this
restless, nomadic spirit, who on the slightest excuse would
exchange the plow and the grubbing hoe for the long rifle and
keen-edged hunting knife. In a single day during the autumn
season he would kill four or five deer; or as many bears as would
snake from two to three thousand pounds weight of bear-bacon.
Fascinated with the forest, he soon found profit as well as
pleasure in the pursuit of game; and at excellent fixed prices he
sold his peltries, most often at Salisbury, some thirteen miles
away, sometimes at the store of the old "Dutchman," George
Hartman, on the Yadkin, and occasionally at Bethabara, the
Moravian town sixty odd miles distant. Skins were in such demand
that they soon came to replace hard money, which was incredibly
scarce in the back country, as a medium of exchange. Upon one
occasion a caravan from Bethabara hauled three thousand pounds,
upon another four thousand pounds, of dressed deerskins to
Charleston. So immense was this trade that the year after Boone's
arrival at the Forks of Yadkin thirty thousand deerskins were
exported from the province of North Carolina. We like to think
that the young Daniel Boone was one of that band of whom Brother
Joseph, while in camp on the Catawba River (November 12, 1752)
wrote: "There are many hunters about here, who live like Indians,
they kill many deer selling their hides, and thus live without
much work."

In this very class of professional hunters, living like Indians,
was thus bred the spirit of individual initiative and strenuous
leadership in the great westward expansionist movement of the
coming decade. An English traveler gives the following minute
picture of the dress and accoutrement of the Carolina
backwoodsman.

"Their whole dress is very singular, and not very materially
different from that of the Indians; being a hunting shirt,
somewhat resembling a waggoner's frock, ornamented with a great
many fringes, tied round the middle with a broad belt, much
decorated also, in which is fastened a tomahawk, an instrument
that serves every purpose of defence and convenience; being a
hammer at one side and a sharp hatchet at the other; the shot bag
and powderhorn, carved with a variety of whimsical figures and
devices, hang from their necks over one shoulder; and on their
heads a flapped hat, of a reddish hue, proceeding from the
intensely hot beams of the sun.

Sometimes they wear leather breeches, made of Indian dressed elk,
or deer skins, but more frequently thin trowsers.

On their legs they have Indian boots, or leggings, made of coarse
woollen cloth, that either are wrapped round loosely and tied
with garters, or laced upon the outside, and always come better
than half-way up the thigh.

On their feet they sometimes wear pumps of their own manufacture,
but generally Indian moccossons, of their own construction also,
which are made of strong elk's, or buck's skin, dressed soft as
for gloves or breeches, drawn together in regular plaits over the
toe, and lacing from thence round to the fore part of the middle
of the ancle, without a seam in them, yet fitting close to the
feet, and are indeed perfectly easy and pliant.

Their hunting, or rifle shirts, they have also died in a variety
of colours, some yellow, others red, some brown, and many wear
them quite white."

No less unique and bizarre, though less picturesque, was the
dress of the women of the region--in particular of Surry County,
North Carolina, as described by General William Lenoir:

"The women wore linses [flax] petticoats and 'bedgowns' [like a
dressing-sack], and often went without shoes in the summer. Some
had bonnets and bedgowns made of calico, but generally of linsey;
and some of them wore men's hats. Their hair was commonly
clubbed. Once, at a large meeting, I noticed there but two women
that had on long gowns. One of these was laced genteelly, and the
body of the other was open, and the tail thereof drawn up and
tucked in her apron or coat-string."

While Daniel Boone was quietly engaged in the pleasant pursuits
of the chase, a vast world-struggle of which he little dreamed
was rapidly approaching a crisis. For three quarters of a century
this titanic contest between France and England for the interior
of the continent had been waged with slowly accumulating force.
The irrepressible conflict had been formally inaugurated at Sault
Ste. Marie in 1671, when Daumont de Saint Lusson, swinging aloft
his sword, proclaimed the sovereignty of France over "all
countries, rivers, lakes, and streams . . . both those which have
been discovered and those which may be discovered hereafter, in
all their length and breadth, bounded on the one side by the seas
of the North and of the West, and on the other by the South Sea."
Just three months later, three hardy pioneers of Virginia,
despatched upon their arduous mission by Colonel Abraham Wood in
behalf of the English crown, had crossed the Appalachian divide;
and upon the banks of a stream whose waters slipped into the Ohio
to join the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, had carved the
royal insignia upon the blazed trunk of a giant of the forest,
the while crying: "Long live Charles the Second, by the grace of
God, King of England, Scotland, France, Ireland and Virginia and
of the territories thereunto belonging."

La Salle's dream of a New France in the heart of America was
blotted out in his tragic death upon the banks of the River
Trinity (1687). Yet his mantle was to fall in turn upon the
square shoulders of Le Moyne d'Iberville and of his brother--the
good, the constant Bienville, who after countless and arduous
struggles laid firm the foundations of New Orleans. In the
precious treasury of Margry we learn that on reaching Rochelle
after his first voyage in 1699 Iberville in these prophetic words
voices his faith: "If France does not immediately seize this part
of America which is the most beautiful, and establish a colony
which is strong enough to resist any which England may have, the
English colonies (already considerable in Carolina) will so
thrive that in less than a hundred years they will be strong
enough to seize all America." But the world-weary Louis Quatorze,
nearing his end, quickly tired of that remote and unproductive
colony upon the shores of the gulf, so industriously described in
Paris as a "terrestrial paradise"; and the "paternal providence
of Versailles" willingly yielded place to the monumental
speculation of the great financier Antoine Crozat. In this Paris
of prolific promotion and amazed credulity, ripe for the colossal
scheme of Law, soon to blow to bursting-point the bubble of the
Mississippi, the very songs in the street echoed flamboyant,
half-satiric panegyrics upon the new Utopia, this Mississippi
Land of Cockayne:

It's to-day no contribution
To discuss the Constitution
And the Spanish war's forgot
For a new Utopian spot;
And the very latest phase
Is the Mississippi craze.

Interest in the new colony led to a great development of
southwesterly trade from New France. Already the French coureurs
de bois were following the water route from the Illinois to South
Carolina. Jean Couture, a deserter from the service in New
France, journeyed over the Ohio and Tennessee rivers to that
colony, and was known as "the greatest Trader and Traveller
amongst the Indians for more than Twenty years." In 1714 young
Charles Charleville accompanied an old trader from Crozat's
colony on the gulf to the great salt-springs on the Cumberland,
where a post for trading with the Shawanoes had already been
established by the French. But the British were preparing to
capture this trade as early as 1694, when Tonti warned Villermont
that Carolinians were already established on a branch of the
Ohio. Four years later, Nicholson, Governor of Maryland, was
urging trade with the Indians of the interior in the effort to
displace the French. At an early date the coast colonies began to
trade with the Indian tribes of the back country: the Catawbas of
the Yadkin Valley; the Cherokees, whose towns were scattered
through Tennessee; the Chickasaws, to the westward in northern
Mississippi; and the Choctaws farther to the southward. Even
before the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the South
Carolina settlements extended scarcely twenty miles from the
coast, English traders had established posts among the Indian
tribes four hundred miles to the west of Charleston. Following
the sporadic trading of individuals from Virginia with the inland
Indians, the heavily laden caravans of William Byrd were soon
regularly passing along the Great Trading Path from Virginia to
the towns of the Catawbas and other interior tribes of the
Carolinas, delighting the easily captivated fancy and provoking
the cupidity of the red men with "Guns, Powder, Shot, Hatchets
(which the Indians call Tomahawks), Kettles, red and blue Planes,
Duffields, Stroudwater blankets, and some Cutlary Wares, Brass
Rings and other Trinkets." In Pennsylvania, George Croghan, the
guileful diplomat, who was emissary from the Council to the Ohio
Indians (1748), had induced "all-most all the Ingans in the
Woods" to declare against the French; and was described by
Christopher Gist as a "meer idol among his countrymen, the Irish
traders."

Against these advances of British trade and civilization, the
French for four decades had artfully struggled, projecting tours
of exploration into the vast medial valley of the continent and
constructing a chain of forts and trading-posts designed to
establish their claims to the country and to hold in check the
threatened English thrust from the east. Soon the wilderness
ambassador of empire, Celoron de Bienville, was despatched by the
far-visioned Galissoniere at Quebec to sow broadcast with
ceremonial pomp in the heart of America the seeds of empire,
grandiosely graven plates of lasting lead, in defiant yet futile
symbol of the asserted sovereignty of France. Thus threatened in
the vindication of the rights of their colonial sea-to-sea
charters, the English threw off the lethargy with which they had
failed to protect their traders, and in grants to the Ohio and
Loyal land companies began resolutely to form plans looking to
the occupation of the interior. But the French seized the English
trading-house at Venango which they converted into a fort; and
Virginia's protest, conveyed by a calm and judicious young man, a
surveyor, George Washington, availed not to prevent the French
from seizing Captain Trent's hastily erected military post at the
forks of the Ohio and constructing there a formidable work, named
Fort Duquesne. Washington, with his expeditionary force sent to
garrison Captain Trent's fort, defeated Jumonville and his small
force near Great Meadows (May, 1754); but soon after he was
forced to surrender Fort Necessity to Coulon de Villiers.

The titanic struggle, fittingly precipitated in the backwoods of
the Old Southwest, was now on--a struggle in which the resolute
pioneers of these backwoods first seriously measured their
strength with the French and their copper-hued allies, and
learned to surpass the latter in their own mode of warfare. The
portentous conflict, destined to assure the eastern half of the
continent to Great Britain, is a grim, prophetic harbinger of the
mighty movement of the next quarter of a century into the
twilight zone of the trans-Alleghany territory:

CHAPTER IV. The Indian War

All met in companies with their wives and children, and set about
building little fortifications, to defend themselves from such
barbarian and inhuman enemies, whom they concluded would be let
loose upon them at pleasure.--The Reverend Hugh McAden--Diary,
July, 1755.

Long before the actual outbreak of hostilities powerful forces
were gradually converging to produce a clash between the
aggressive colonials and the crafty Indians. As the settlers
pressed farther westward into the domain of the red men,
arrogantly grazing their stock over the cherished hunting-grounds
of the Cherokees, the savages, who were already well disposed
toward the French, began to manifest a deep indignation against
the British colonists because of this callous encroachment upon
their territory. During the sporadic forays by scattered bands of
Northern Indians upon the Catawbas and other tribes friendly to
the pioneers the isolated settlements at the back part of the
Carolinas suffered rude and sanguinary onslaughts. In the summer
of 1753 a party of northern Indians warring in the French
interest made their appearance in Rowan County, which had just
been organized, and committed various depredations upon the
scattered settlements. To repel these attacks a band of the
Catawbas sallied forth, encountered a detached party of the
enemy, and slew five of their number. Among the spoils,
significantly enough, were silver crucifixes, beads,
looking-glasses, tomahawks and other implements of war, all of
French manufacture.

Intense rivalry for the good will of the near-by southern tribes
existed between Virginia and South Carolina. In strong
remonstrance against the alleged attempt of Governor Dinwiddie of
Virginia to alienate the Cherokees, Catawbas, Muscogees, and
Chickasaws from South Carolina and to attach them to Virginia,
Governor Glen of South Carolina made pungent observations to
Dinwiddie: "South Carolina is a weak frontier colony, and in case
of invasion by the French would be their first object of attack.
We have not much to fear, however, while we retain the affection
of the Indians around us; but should we forfeit that by any
mismanagement on our part, or by the superior address of the
French, we are in a miserable situation. The Cherokees alone have
several thousand gunmen well acquainted with every inch of the
province . . . their country is the key to Carolina." By a treaty
concluded at Saluda (November 24, 1753), Glen promised to build
the Cherokees a fort near the lower towns, for the protection of
themselves and their allies; and the Cherokees on their part
agreed to become the subjects of the King of Great Britain and
hold their lands under him. This fort, erected this same year on
the headwaters of the Savannah, within gunshot distance of the
important Indian town of Keowee, was named Fort Prince George.
"It is a square," says the founder of the fort (Governor Glen to
the Board of Trade, August 26, 1754), "with regular Bastions and
four Ravelins it is near Two hundred foot from Salient Angle to
Salient Angle and is made of Earth taken out of the Ditch,
secured with fachines and well rammed with a banquet on the
Inside for the men to stand upon when they fire over, the
Ravelins are made of Posts of Lightwood which is very durable,
they are ten foot in length sharp pointed three foot and a half
in the ground." The dire need for such a fort in the back country
was tragically illustrated by the sudden onslaught upon the
"House of John Gutry & James Anshers" in York County by a party
of sixty French Indians (December 16, 1754), who brutally
murdered sixteen of the twenty-one persons present, and carried
off as captives the remaining five."

At the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754 North
Carolina voted twelve thousand pounds for the raising of troops
and several thousand pounds additional for the construction of
forts--a sum considerably larger than that voted by Virginia. A
regiment of two hundred and fifty men was placed under the
command of Colonel James Innes of the Cape Fear section; and the
ablest officer under him was the young Irishman from the same
section, Lieutenant Hugh Waddell. On June 3, 1754, Dinwiddie
appointed Innes, his close friend, commander-in-chief of all the
forces against the French; and immediately after the disaster at
Great Meadows (July, 1754), Innes took command. Within two months
the supplies for the North Carolina troops were exhausted; and as
Virginia then failed to furnish additional supplies, Colonel
Innes had no recourse but to disband his troops and permit them
to return home. Appointed governor of Fort Cumberland by General
Braddock, he was in command there while Braddock advanced on his
disastrous march.

The lesson of Braddock's defeat (July 9, 1755) was memorable in
the history of the Old Southwest. Well might Braddock exclaim
with his last breath: "Who would have thought it? . . . We shall
know better how to deal with them another time." Led on by the
reckless and fiery Beaujeu, wearing an Indian gorget about his
neck, the savages from the protection of trees and rough
defenses, a pre pared ambuscade, poured a galling fire into the
compact divisions of the English, whose scarlet coats furnished
ideal targets. The obstinacy of the British commanders in
refusing to permit their troops to fight Indian fashion was
suicidal; for as Herman Alriclis wrote Governor Morris of
Pennsylvania (July 22, 1755): " . . . the French and Indians had
cast an Intrenchment across the road before our Army which they
Discovered not Untill they came Close up to it, from thence and
both sides of the road the enemy kept a constant fireing on them,
our Army being so confused, they could not fight, and they would
not be admitted by the Genl or Sir John St. Clair, to break thro'
their Ranks and Take behind trees." Daniel Boone, who went from
North Carolina as a wagoner in the company commanded by Edward
Brice Dobbs, was on the battle-field; but Dobbs's company at the
time was scouting in the woods. When the fierce attack fell upon
the baggage a train, Boone succeeded in effecting his escape only
by cutting the traces of his team and fleeing on one of the
horses. To his dying day Boone continued to censure Braddock's
conduct, and reprehended especially his fatal neglect to employ
strong flank-guards and a sufficient number of Provincial scouts
thoroughly acquainted with the wilderness and all the wiles and
strategies of savage warfare.

For a number of months following Braddock's defeat there was a
great rush of the frightened people southward. In a letter to
Dinwiddie, Washington expresses the apprehension that Augusta,
Frederick, and Hampshire County will soon be depopulated, as the
whole back country is in motion toward the southern colonies.
During this same summer Governor Arthur Dobbs of North Carolina
made a tour of exploration through the western part of the
colony, seeking a site for a fort to guard the frontier. The
frontier company of fifty men which was to garrison the projected
fort was placed under the command of Hugh Waddell, now promoted
to the rank of captain, though only twenty-one years old. In
addition to Waddell's company, armed patrols were required for
the protection of the Rowan County frontier; and during the
summer Indian alarms were frequent at the Moravian village of
Bethabara, whose inhabitants had heard with distress on March
31st of the slaughter of eleven Moravians on the Mahoni and of
the ruin of Gnadenhutten. Many of the settlers in the outlying
districts of Rowan fled for safety to the refuge of the little
village; and frequently every available house, every place of
temporary abode was filled with panic stricken refugees. So
persistent were the depredations of the Indians and so alarmed
were the scattered Rowan settlers by the news of the murders and
the destruction of Vaul's Fort in Virginia (June 25, 1756) that
at a conference on July 5th the Moravians "decided to protect our
houses with palisades, and make them safe before the enemy should
in vade our tract or attack us, for if the people were all going
to retreat we would be the last left on the frontier and the
first point of attack." By July 23d, they had constructed a
strong defense for their settlement, afterward called the "Dutch
Fort" by the Indians. The principal structure was a stockade,
triangular in plan, some three hundred feet on a side, enclosing
the principal buildings of the settlement; and the gateway was
guarded by an observation tower. The other defense was a stockade
embracing eight houses at the mill some distance away, around
which a small settlement had sprung up.

During the same year the fort planned by Dobbs was erected upon
the site he had chosen--between Third and Fourth creeks; and the
commissioners Richard Caswell and Francis Brown, sent out to
inspect the fort, made the following picturesque report to the
Assembly (December 21, 1756):

"That they had likewise viewed the State of Fort Dobbs, and found
it to be a good and Substantial Building of the Dimentions
following (that is to say) The Oblong Square fifty three feet by
forty, the opposite Angles Twenty four feet and Twenty-Two In
Height Twenty four and a half feet as by the Plan annexed
Appears, The Thickness of the Walls which are made of Oak Logs
regularly Diminished from sixteen Inches to Six, it contains
three floors and there may be discharged from each floor at one
and the same time about one hundred Musketts the same is
beautifully scituated in the fork of Fourth Creek a Branch of the
Yadkin River. And that they also found under Command of Cap' Hugh
Waddel Forty six Effective men Officers and Soldiers, the said
Officers and Soldiers Appearing well and in good Spirits."

As to the erection of a fort on the Tennessee, promised the
Cherokees by South Carolina, difficulties between the governor of
that province and of Virginia in regard to matters of policy and
the proportionate share of expenses made effective cooperation
between the two colonies well-nigh impossible. Glen, as we have
seen, had resented Dinwiddie's efforts to win the South Carolina
Indians over to Virginia's interest. And Dinwiddie had been very
indignant when the force promised him by the Indians to aid
General Braddock did not arrive, attributing this defection in
part to Glen's negotiations for a meeting with the chieftains and
in part to the influence of the South Carolina traders, who kept
the Indians away by hiring them to go on long hunts for furs and
skinns. But there was no such contention between Virginia and
North Carolina. Dinwiddie and Dobbs arranged (November 6, 1755)
to send a commission from these colonies to treat with the
Cherokees and the Catawbas. Virginia sent two commissioners,
Colonel William Byrd, third of that name, and Colonel Peter
Randolph; while North Carolina sent one, Captain Hugh Waddell.
Salisbury, North Carolina, was the place of rendezvous. The
treaty with the Catawbas was made at the Catawba Town, presumably
the village opposite the mouth of Sugaw Creek, in York County,
South Carolina, on February 20-21, 1756; that with the Cherokees
on Broad River, North Carolina, March 13-17. As a result of the
negotiations and after the receipt of a present of goods, the
Catawbas agreed to send forty warriors to aid Virginia within
forty days; and the Cherokees, in return for presents and
Virginia's promise to contribute her proportion toward the
erection of a strong fort, undertook to send four hundred
warriors within forty days, "as soon as the said fort shall be
built." Virginia and North Carolina thus wisely cooperated to
"straighten the path" and "brighten the chain" between the white
and the red men, in important treaties which Have largely escaped
the attention of historians."

On May 25, 1756, a conference was held at Salisbury between King
Heygler and warriors of the Catawba nation on the one side and
Chief Justice Henley, doubtless attended by Captain Waddell and
his frontier company, on the other. King Heygler, following the
lead set by the Cherokees, petitioned the Governor of North
Carolina to send the Catawbas some ammunition and to "build us a
fort for securing our old men, women and children when we turn
out to fight the Enemy on their coming." The chief justice
assured the King that the Catawbas would receive a necessary
supply of ammunition (one hundred pounds of gunpowder and four
hundred pounds of lead were later sent them) and promised to urge
with the governor their request to have a fort built as soon as
possible. Pathos not unmixed with dry humor tinges the eloquent
appeal of good old King Heygler, ever the loyal friend of the
whites, at this conference:

"I desire a stop may be put to the selling of strong Liquors by
the White people to my people especially near the Indian nation.
IF THE WHITE PEOPLE MAKE STRONG DRINK, LET THEM. SELL IT TO ONE
ANOTHER, OR DRINK IT IN THEIR OWN FAMILIES. This will avoid a
great deal of mischief which otherwise will, happen from my
people getting drunk and quarrelling with the White people. I
have no strong prisons like you to confine them for it. Our only
way is to put them under ground and all these (pointing proudly
to his Warriors) will be ready to do that to those who shall
deserve it."

In response to this request, the sum of four thousand pounds was
appropriated by the North Carolina Assembly for the erection of
"a Fort on our western frontier to protect and secure the
Catawbas" and for the support of two companies of fifty men each
to garrison this and another fort building on the sea coast. The
commissioners appointed for the purpose recommended (December 21,
1756) a site for the fort "near the 'Catawba nation"; and on
January 20, 1757, Governor Dobbs reported; " We are now building
a Fort in the midst of their towns at their own Request." The
fort thereupon begun must have stood near the mouth of the South
Fork of the Catawba River, as Dobbs says it was in the "midst" of
their towns, which are situated a "few miles north and south of
38 degrees" and might properly be included within a circle of
thirty miles radius."

During the succeeding months many depredations were committed by
the Indians upon the exposed and scattered settlements. Had it
not been for the protection afforded by all these forts, by the
militia companies under Alexander Osborne of Rowan and Nathaniel
Alexander of Anson, and by a special company of patrollers under
Green and Moore, the back settlers who had been so outrageously
"pilfered" by the Indians would have "retired from the Frontier
into the inner settlements."

CHAPTER V. In Defense of Civilization

We give thanks and praise for the safety and peace vouchsafed us
by our Heavenly Father in these times of war. Many of our
neighbors, driven hither and yon like deer before wild beasts,
came to us for shelter, yet the accustomed order of our
congregation life was not disturbed, no, not even by the more
than 150 Indians who at sundry times passed by, stopping for a
day at a time and being fed by us.--Wachovia Community Diary,
1757

With commendable energy and expedition Dinwiddie and Dobbs,
acting in concert, initiated steps for keeping the engagements
conjointly made by the two colonies with the Cherokees and the
Catawbas in tile spring and summer of 1756. Enlisting sixty men,
"most of them Artificers, with Tools and Provisions," Major
Andrew Lewis proceeded in the late spring to Echota in the
Cherokee country. Here during the hot summer months they erected
the Virginia Fort on the path from Virginia, upon the northern
bank of the Little Tennessee, nearly opposite the Indian town of
Echota and about twenty-five miles southwest of Knoxville." While
the fort was in process of construction, the Cherokees were
incessantly tampered with by emissaries from the Nuntewees and
the Savannahs in the French interest, and from the French
themselves at the Alibamu Fort. So effective were these
machinations, supported by extravagant promises and doubtless
rich bribes, that the Cherokees soon were outspokenly expressing
their desire for a French fort at Great Tellico.

Dinwiddie welcomed the departure from America of Governor Glen of
South Carolina, who in his opinion had always acted contrary to
the king's interest. From the new governor, William Henry
Lyttelton, who arrived in Charleston on June 1, 1756, he hoped to
secure effective cooperation in dealing with the Cherokees and
the Catawbas. This hope was based upon Lyttelton's recognition,
as stated in Dinwiddie's words, of the "Necessity of strict Union
between the whole Colonies, with't any of them considering their
particular Interest separate from the general Good of the whole."
After constructing the fort "with't the least assistance from
South Carolina," Major Lewis happened by accident upon a grand
council being held in Echota in September. At that time he
discovered to his great alarm that the machinations of the French
had already produced the greatest imaginable change in the
sentiment of the Cherokees. Captain Raymond Demere of the
Provincials, with two hundred English troops, had arrived to
garrison the fort; but the head men of all the Upper Towns were
secretly influenced to agree to write a letter to Captain Demere,
ordering him to return immediately to Charleston with all the
troops under his command. At the grand council, Atta-kulla-kulla,
the great Cherokee chieftain, passionately declared to the head
men, who listened approvingly, that "as to the few soldiers of
Captain Demere that was there, he would take their Guns, and give
them to his young men to hunt with and as to their clothes they
would soon be worn out and their skins would be tanned, and be of
the same colour as theirs, and that they should live among them
as slaves." With impressive dignity Major Lewis rose and
earnestly pleaded for the observance of the terms of the treaty
solemnly negotiated the preceding March. In response, the crafty
and treacherous chieftains desired Lewis to tell the Governor of
Virginia that "they had taken up the Hatchet against all Nations
that were Enemies to the English"; but Lewis, an astute student
of Indian Psychology, rightly surmised that all their glib
professions of friendship and assistance were "only to put a
gloss on their knavery." So it proved; for instead of the four
hundred warriors promised under the treaty for service in
Virginia, the Cherokees sent only seven warriors, accompanied by
three women. Al though the Cherokees petitioned Virginia for a
number of men to garrison the Virginia fort, Dinwiddie postponed
sending the fifty men provided for by the Virginia Assembly until
he could reassure himself in regard to the "Behaviour and
Intention" of the treacherous Indian allies. This proved to be a
prudent decision; for not long after its erection the Virginia
fort was destroyed by the Indians.

Whether on account of the dissatisfaction expressed by the
Cherokees over the erection of the Virginia fort or because of a
recognition of the mistaken policy of garrisoning a work erected
by Virginia with troops sent from Charleston, South Carolina
immediately proceeded to build another stronghold on the southern
bank of the Tennessee at the mouth of Tellico River, some seven
miles from the site of the Virginia fort; and here were posted
twelve great guns, brought thither at immense labor through the
wilderness. To this fort, named Fort Loudoun in honor of Lord
Loudoun, then commander-in-chief of all the English forces in
America, the Indians allured artisans by donations of land; and
during the next three or four years a little settlement sprang up
there.

The frontiers of Virginia suffered most from the incursions of
hostile Indians during the fourteen months following May 1, 1755.
In July, the Rev. Hugh McAden records that he preached in
Virginia on a day set apart for fasting and prayer "on account of
the wars and many murders, committed by the savage Indians on the
back inhabitants." On July 30th a large party of Shawano Indians
fell upon the New River settlement and wiped it out of existence.
William Ingles was absent at the time of the raid; and Mrs.
Ingles, who was captured, afterward effected her escape. The
following summer (June 25, 1756), Fort Vaux on the headwaters of
the Roanoke, under the command of Captain John Smith, was
captured by about one hundred French and Indians, who burnt the
fort, killed John Smith junior, John Robinson, John Tracey and
John Ingles, wounded four men, and captured twenty-two men,
women, and children. Among the captured was the famous Mrs. Mary
Ingles, whose husband, John Ingles, was killed; but after being
"carried away into Captivity, amongst whom she was barbarously
treated," according to her own statement, she finally escaped and
returned to Virginia." The frontier continued to be infested by
marauding bands of French and Indians; and Dinwiddie gloomily
confessed to Dobbs (July 22d): "I apprehend that we shall always
be harrass'd with fly'g Parties of these Banditti unless we form
an Expedit'n ag'st them, to attack 'em in y'r Towns." Such an
expedition, known as the Sandy River Expedition, had been sent
out in February to avenge the massacre of the New River settlers;
but the enterprise engaged in by about four hundred Virginians
and Cherokees under Major Andrew Lewis and Captain Richard
Pearis, proved a disastrous failure. Not a single Indian was
seen; and the party suffered extraordinary hardships and narrowly
escaped starvation.

In conformity with his treaty obligations with the Catawbas,
Governor Dobbs commissioned Captain Hugh Waddell to erect the
fort promised the Catawbas at the spot chosen by the
commissioners near the mouth of the South Fork of the Catawba
River. This fort, for which four thousand pounds had been
appropriated, was for the most part completed by midsummer, 1757.
But owing, it appears, both to the machinations of the French and
to the intermeddling of the South Carolina traders, who desired
to retain the trade of the Catawbas for that province, Oroloswa,
the Catawba King Heygler, sent a "talk" to Governor Lyttelton,
requesting that North Carolina desist from the work of
construction and that no fort be built except by South Carolina.
Accordingly, Governor Dobbs ordered Captain Waddell to discharge
the workmen (August 11, 1757); and every effort was made for many
months thereafter to conciliate the Catawbas, erstwhile friends
of North Carolina. The Catawba fort erected by North Carolina was
never fully completed; and several years later South Carolina,
having succeeded in alienating the Catawbas from North Carolina,
which colony had given them the best possible treatment, built
for them a fort at the mouth of Line Creek on the east bank of
the Catawba River.

In the spring and summer of 1758 the long expected Indian allies
arrived in Virginia, as many as four hundred by May--Cherokees,
Catawbas, Tuscaroras, and Nottaways. But Dinwiddie was wholly
unable to use them effectively; and in order to provide amusement
for them, he directed that they should go "a scalping" with the
whites--"a barbarous method of war," frankly acknowledged the
governor, "introduced by the French, which we are oblidged to
follow in our own defense." Most of the Indian allies
discontentedly returned home before the end of the year, but the
remainder waited until the next year, to take part in the
campaign against Fort Duquesne. Three North Carolina companies,
composed of trained soldiers and hardy frontiersmen, went through
this campaign under the command of Major Hugh Waddell, the
"Washington of North Carolina." Long of limb and broad of chest,
powerful, lithe, and active, Waddell was an ideal leader for this
arduous service, being fertile in expedient and skilful in the
employment of Indian tactics. With true provincial pride Governor
Dobbs records that Waddell "had great honor done him, being
employed in all reconnoitring parties, and dressed and acted as
an Indian; and his sergeant, Rogers, took the only Indian
prisoner, who gave Mr. Forbes certain intelligence of the forces
in Fort Duquesne, upon which they resolved to proceed." This
apparently trivial incident is remarkable, in that it proved to
be the decisive factor in a campaign that was about to be
abandoned. The information in regard to the state of the garrison
at Fort Duquesne, secured from the Indian, for the capture of
whom two leading officers had offered a reward of two hundred and
fifty pounds, emboldened Forbes to advance rather than to retire.
Upon reaching the fort (November 25th), he found it abandoned by
the enemy. Sergeant Rogers never received the reward promised by
General Forbes and the other English officer; but some time
afterward he was compensated by a modest sum from the colony of
North Carolina.

A series of unfortunate occurrences, chiefly the fault of the
whites, soon resulted in the precipitation of a terrible Indian
outbreak. A party of Cherokees, returning home in May, 1758,
seized some stray horses on the frontier of Virginia--never
dreaming of any wrong, says an old historian, as they saw it
frequently done by the whites. The owners of the horses, hastily
forming a party, went in pursuit of the Indians and killed twelve
or fourteen of the number. The relatives of the slain Indians,
greatly incensed, vowed vengeance upon the whites. Nor was the
tactless conduct of Forbes calculated to quiet this resentment;
for when Atta-kulla-kulla and nine other chieftains deserted in
disgust at the treatment accorded them, they were pursued by
Forbes's orders, apprehended and disarmed. This rude treatment,
coupled with the brutal and wanton murder of some Cherokee
hunters a little earlier, by an irresponsible band of Virginians
under Captain Robert Wade, still further aggravated the Indians.

Incited by the French, who had fled to the southward after the
fall of Fort Duquesne, parties of bloodthirsty young Indians
rushed down upon the settlements and left in their path death and
desolation along the frontiers of the Carolinas. On the upper
branch of the Yadkin and below the South Yadkin near Fort Dobbs
twenty-two whites fell in swift succession before the secret
onslaughts of the savages from the lower Cherokee towns. Many of
the settlers along the Yadkin fled to the Carolina Fort at
Bethabara and the stockade at the mill; and the sheriff of Rowan
County suffered siege by the Cherokees, in his home, until
rescued by a detachment under Brother Loesch from Bethabara.
While many families took refuge in Fort Dobbs, frontiersmen under
Captain Morgan Bryan ranged through the mountains to the west of
Salisbury and guarded the settlements from the hostile incursions
of the savages. So gravely alarmed were the Rowan settlers,
compelled by the Indians to desert their planting and crops, that
Colonel Harris was despatched post-haste for aid to Cape Fear,
arriving there on July 1st. With strenuous energy Captain
Waddell, then stationed in the east, rushed two companies of
thirty men each to the rescue, sending by water-carriage six
swivel guns and ammunition on before him; and these
reinforcements brought relief at last to the harassed Rowan
frontiers." During the remainder of the year, the borders were
kept clear by bold and tireless rangers-under the leadership of
expert Indian fighters of the stamp of Grifth Rutherford and
Morgan Bryan.

When the Cherokee warriors who had wrought havoc along the North
Carolina border in April arrived at their town of Settiquo, they
proudly displayed the twenty-two scalps of the slain Rowan
settlers. Upon the demand for these scalps by Captain Demere at
Fort Loudon and under direction of Atta-kulla-kulla, the Settiquo
warriors surrendered eleven of the scalps to Captain Demere who,
according to custom in time of peace, buried them. New murders on
Pacolet and along the Virginia Path, which occurred shortly
afterward, caused gloomy forebodings; and it was plain, says a
contemporary gazette, that "the lower Cherokees were not
satisfied with the murder of the Rowan settlers, but intended
further mischief". On October 1st and again on October 31st,
Governor Dobbs received urgent requests from Governor Lyttelton,
asking that the North Carolina provincials and militia cooperate
to bring him assistance. Although there was no law requiring the
troops to march out of the province and the exposed frontiers of
North Carolina sorely needed protection, Waddell, now
commissioned colonel, assembled a force of five small companies
and marched to the aid of Governor Lyttelton. But early in
January, 1760, while on the march, Waddell received a letter from
Lyttelton, informing him that the assistance was not needed and
that a treaty of peace had been negotiated with the Cherokees.

CHAPTER VI. Crushing the Cherokees

Thus ended the Cherokee war, which was among the last humbling
strokes given to the expiring power of France in North America.-
-Hewatt: An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the
Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. 1779.

Governor Lyttelton's treaty of "peace", negotiated with the
Cherokees at the close of 1759, was worse than a crime: it was a
crass and hideous blunder. His domineering attitude and
tyrannical treatment of these Indians had aroused the bitterest
animosity. Yet he did not realize that it was no longer safe to
trust their word. No sooner did the governor withdraw his army
from the borders than the cunning Cherokees, whose passions had
been inflamed by what may fairly be called the treacherous
conduct of Lyttelton, rushed down with merciless ferocity upon
the innocent and defenseless families on the frontier. On
February 1, 1760, while a large party (including the family of
Patrick Calhoun), numbering in all about one hundred and fifty
persons, were removing from the Long Cane settlement to Augusta,
they were suddenly attacked by a hundred mounted Cherokees, who
slaughtered about fifty of them. After the massacre, many of the
children were found helplessly wandering in the woods. One man
alone carried to Augusta no less than nine of the pitiful
innocents, some horribly mutilated with the tomahawk, others
scalped, and all yet alive.

Atrocities defying description continued to be committed, and
many people were slain. The Cherokees, under the leadership of
Si-lou-ee, or the Young Warrior of Estatoe, the Round O, Tiftoe,
and others, were baffled in their persistent efforts to capture
Fort Prince George. On February 16th the crafty Oconostota
appeared before the fort and under the pretext of desiring some
White man to accompany him on a visit to the governor on urgent
business, lured the commander, Lieutenant Coytomore, and two
attendants to a conference outside the gates. At a preconceived
signal a volley of shots rang out; the two attendants were
wounded, and Lieutenant Coytomore, riddled with bullets, fell
dead. Enraged by this act of treachery, the garrison put to death
the Indian hostages within. During the abortive attack upon the
fort, Oconostota, unaware of the murder of the hostages, was
heard shouting above the din of battle: "Fight strong, and you
shall be relieved."

Now began the dark days along the Rowan border, which were so
sorely to test human endurance. Many refugees fortified
themselves in the different stockades; and Colonel Hugh Waddell
with his redoubtable frontier company of Indian-fighters awaited
the onslaught of the savages, who were reported to have passed
through the mountain defiles and to be approaching along the
foot-hills. The story of the investment of Fort Dobbs and the
splendidly daring sortie of Waddell and Bailey is best told in
Waddell's report to Governor Dobbs (February 29, 1760):

"For several Days I observed a small party of Indians were
constantly about the fort, I sent out several parties after them
to no purpose, the Evening before last between 8 & 9 o'clock I
found by the Dogs making an uncommon Noise there must be a party
nigh a Spring which we sometimes use. As my Garrison is but
small, and I was apprehensive it might be a scheme to draw out
the Garrison, I took our Capt. Bailie who with myself and party
made up ten: We had not marched 300 yds. from the fort when we
were attacked by at least 60 or 70 Indians. I had given my party
Orders not to fire until I gave the word, which they punctually
observed: We rec'd the Indians' fire: When I perceived they had
almost all fired, I ordered my party to fire which We did not
further than 12 steps each loaded with a Bullet and 7 Buck Shot,
they had nothing to cover them as they were advancing either to
tomahawk us or make us Prisoners: They found the fire very hot
from so small a Number which a good deal confused them: I then
ordered my party to retreat, as I found the Instant our skirmish
began another party had attacked the fort, upon our reinforcing
the garrison the Indians were soon repulsed with I am sure a
considerable Loss, from what I myself saw as well as those I can
confide in they cou'd not have less than 10 or 12 killed and
wounded; The next Morning we found a great deal of Blood and one
dead whom I suppose they cou'd not find in the night. On my side
I had 2 Men wounded one of whom I am afraid will die as he is
scalped, the other is in way of Recovery, and one boy killed near
the fort whom they durst not advance to scalp. I expected they
would have paid me another visit last night, as they attack all
Fortifications by Night, but find they did not like their
Reception."

Alarmed by Waddell's "offensive-defensive," the Indians abandoned
the siege. Robert Campbell, Waddell's ranger, who was scalped in
this engagement, subsequently recovered from his wounds and was
recompensed by the colony with the sum of twenty pounds.

In addition to the frontier militia, four independent companies
were now placed under Waddell's command. Companies of volunteers
scoured the woods in search of the lurking Indian foe. These
rangers, who were clad in hunting-shirts and buckskin leggings,
and who employed Indian tactics in fighting, were captained by
such hardy leaders as the veteran Morgan Bryan, the intrepid
Griffith Ruthe ford, the German partisan, Martin Phifer
(Pfeiffer), and Anthony Hampton, the father of General Wade
Hampton. They visited periodically a chain of "forest castles"
erected by the settlers--extending all the way from Fort Dobbs
and the Moravian fortifications in the Wachau to Samuel
Stalnaker's stockade on the Middle Fork of the Holston in
Virginia. About the middle of March, thirty volunteer Rowan
County rangers encountered a band of forty Cherokees, who
fortified themselves in a deserted house near the Catawba River.
The famous scout and hunter, John Perkins, assisted by one of his
bolder companions, crept up to the house and flung lighted
torches upon the roof. One of the Indians, as the smoke became
suffocating and the flames burned hotter, exclaimed: "Better for
one to die bravely than for all to perish miserably in the
flames," and darting forth, dashed rapidly hither and thither, in
order to draw as many shots as possible. This act of superb
self-sacrifice was successful; and while the rifles of the
whites, who riddled the brave Indian with balls, were empty, the
other savages made a wild dash for liberty. Seven fell thus under
the deadly rain of bullets; but many escaped. Ten of the Indians,
all told, lost their scalps, for which the volunteer rangers were
subsequently paid one hundred pounds by the colony of North
Carolina.

Beaten back from Fort Dobbs, sorely defeated along the Catawba,
hotly pursued by the rangers, the Cherokees continued to lurk in
the shadows of the dense forests, and at every opportunity to
fall suddenly upon way faring settlers and isolated cabins remote
from any stronghold. On March 8th William Fish, his son, and
Thompson, a companion, were riding along the "trace," in search
of provisions for a group of families fortified on the Yadkin,
when a flight of arrows hurtled from the cane-brake, and Fish and
his son fell dead. Although pierced with two arrows, one in the
hip and one clean through his body, Thompson escaped upon his
fleet horse; and after a night of ghastly suffering finally
reached the Carolina Fort at Bethabara. The good Dr. Bonn, by
skilfully extracting the barbed shafts from his body, saved
Thompson's life. The pious Moravians rejoiced over the recovery
of the brave messenger, whose sensational arrival gave them
timely warning of the close proximity of the Indians. While
feeding their cattle, settlers were shot from ambush by the
lurking foe; and on March 11th, a family barricaded within a
burning house, which they were defending with desperate courage,
were rescued in the nick of time by the militia. No episode from
Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales surpasses in melancholy
interest Harry Hicks's heroic defense of his little fort on Bean
Island Creek. Surrounded by the Indians, Hicks and his family
took refuge within the small outer palisade around his humble
home. Fighting desperately against terrific odds, he was finally
driven from his yard into his log cabin, which he continued to
defend with dauntless courage. With every shot he tried to send a
redskin to the happy hunting-grounds; and it was only after his
powder was exhausted that he fell, fighting to the last, beneath
the deadly tomahawk. So impressed were the Indians by his bravery
that they spared the life of his wife and his little son; and
these were afterward rescued by Waddell when he marched to the
Cherokee towns in 1761.

The kindly Moravians had always entertained with generous
hospitality the roving bands of Cherokees, who accordingly held
them in much esteem and spoke of Bethabara as "the Dutch Fort,
where there are good people and much bread." But now, in these
dread days, the truth of their daily text was brought forcibly
home to the Moravians: "Neither Nehemiah nor his brethren put off
their clothes, but prayed as they watched." With Bible in one
hand and rifle in the other, the inhabitant of Wachovia sternly
marched to religious worship. No Puritan of bleak New England
ever showed more resolute courage or greater will to defend the
hard-won outpost of civilization than did the pious Moravian of
the Wachau. At the new settlement of Bethania on Easter Day, more
than four hundred souls, including sixty rangers, listened
devoutly to the eloquent sermon of Bishop Spangenberg concerning
the way of salvation--the while their arms, stacked without the
Gemein Haus, were guarded by the watchful sentinel. On March 14th
the watchmen at Bethania with well-aimed shots repelled the
Indians, whose hideous yells of baffled rage sounded down the
wind like "the howling of a hundred wolves". Religion was no
protection against the savages; for three ministers journeying to
the present site of Salem were set upon by the red men--one
escaping, another suffering capture, and the third, a Baptist,
losing his life. A little later word came to Fort Dobbs that John
Long and Robert Gillespie of Salisbury had been shot from ambush
and scalped--Long having been pierced with eight bullets and
Gillespie with seven.

There is one beautiful incident recorded by the Moravians, which
has a truly symbolic significance. While the war was at its
height, a strong party of Cherokees, who had lost their chief,
planned in retaliation to attack Bethabara. "When they went
home," sets forth the Moravian Diary, "they said they had been to
a great town, where there were a great many people, where the
bells rang often, and during the night, time after time, a horn
was blown, so that they feared to attack the town and had taken
no prisoners." The trumpet of the watchman, announcing the
passing of the hour, had convinced the Indians that their plans
for attack were discovered; and the regular evening bell,
summoning the pious to prayer, rang in the stricken ears of the
red men like the clamant call to arms.

Following the retirement from office of Governor Lyttelton,
Lieutenant-Governor Bull proceeded to prosecute the war with
vigor. On April 1, 1760, twelve hundred men under Colonel
Archibald Montgomerie arrived at Charleston, with instructions to
strike an immediate blow and to relieve Fort Loudon, then
invested by the Cherokees. With his own force, two hundred and
ninety-five South Carolina Rangers, forty picked men of the new
"levies," and "a good number of guides," Montgomerie moved from
Fort Ninety-Six on May 28th. On the first of June, crossing
Twelve-Mile River, Montgomerie began the campaign in earnest,
devastating and burning every Indian village in the Valley of
Keowee, killing and capturing more than a hundred of the
Cherokees, and destroying immense stores of corn. Receiving no
reply to his summons to the Cherokees of the Middle and Upper
Towns to make peace or suffer like treatment, Montgomerie took up
his march from Fort Prince George on June 24th, resolved to carry
out his threat. On the morning of the 27th, he was drawn into an
ambuscade within six miles of Et-chow-ee, eight miles south of
the present Franklin, North Carolina, a mile and a half below
Smith's Bridge, and was vigorously attacked from dense cover by
some six hundred and thirty warriors led by Si-lou-ee. Fighting
with Indian tactics, the Provincial Rangers under Patrick Calhoun
particularly distinguished themselves; and the bloodcurdling
yells of the painted savages were responded to by the wild huzzas
of the kilted Highlanders who, waving their Scotch bonnets,
impetuously charged the redskins and drove them again and again
from their lurking-places. Nevertheless Montgomerie lost from
eighty to one hundred in killed and wounded, while the loss of
the Indians was supposed to be about half the loss of the whites.
Unable to care for his wounded and lacking the means of removing
his baggage, Montgomerie silently withdrew his forces. In so
doing, he acknowledged defeat, since he was compelled to abandon
his original intention of relieving the beleaguered garrison of
Fort London.

Captain Demere and his devoted little band, who had been
resolutely holding out, were now left to their tragic fate. After
the bread was exhausted, the garrison was reduced to the
necessity of eating dogs and horses; and the loyal aid of the
Indian wives of some of the garrison, who secretly brought them
supplies of food daily, enabled them to hold out still longer.
Realizing at last the futility of prolonging the hopeless
contest, Captain Demere surrendered the fort on August 8, 1760.
At daylight the next morning, while on the march to Fort Prince
George, the soldiers were set upon by the treacherous Cherokees,
who at the first onset killed Captain Demere and twenty-nine
others. A humane chieftain, Outassitus, says one of the gazettes
of the day, "went around the field calling upon the Indians to
desist, and making such representations to them as stopped the
further progress and effects of their barbarous and brutal rage,"
which expressed itself in scalping and hacking off the arms and
legs of the defenseless whites. Atta-kulla-kulla, who was
friendly to the whites, claimed Captain Stuart, the second
officer, as his captive, and bore him away by stealth. After nine
days' journey through the wilderness they encountered an advance
party under Major Andrew Lewis, sent out by Colonel Byrd, head of
a relieving army, to rescue and succor any of the garrison who
might effect their escape. Thus Stuart was restored to his
friends. This abortive and tragic campaign, in which the victory
lay conclusively with the Indians, ended when Byrd disbanded his
new levies and Montgomerie sailed from Charleston for the north
(August, 1760).

During the remainder of the year, the province of North Carolina
remained free of further alarms from the Indians. But the view
was generally entertained that one more joint Effort of North
Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia would have to be made in
order to humble the Cherokees. At the sessions of the North
Carolina Assembly in November and again in December, matters in
dispute between Governor Dobbs and the representatives of the
people made impossible the passage of a proposed aid bill,
providing for five hundred men to cooperate with Virginia and
South Carolina. Nevertheless volunteers in large numbers
patriotically marched from North Carolina to Charleston and the
Congaree (December, 1760, to April, 1761), to enlist in the
famous regiment being organized by Colonel Thomas Middleton. On
March 31, 1761, Governor Dobbs called together the Assembly to
act upon a letter received from General Amherst, outlining a more
vigorous plan of campaign appropriate to the succession of a
young and vigorous sovereign, George III. An aid bill was passed,
providing twenty thousand pounds for men and supplies; and one
regiment of five companies of one hundred men each, under the
command of Colonel Hugh Waddell, was mustered into service for
seven months' duty, beginning May 1, 1761.

On July 7, 1761, Colonel James Grant, detached from the main army
in command of a force of twenty-six hundred men, took up his
march from Fort Prince George. Attacked on June l0th two miles
south of the spot where Montgomerie was engaged the preceding
year, Grant's army, after a vigorous engagement lasting several
hours, drove off the Indians. The army then proceeded at leisure
to lay waste the fifteen towns of the Middle Settlements; and,
after this work of systematic devastation was over, returned to
Fort Prince George. Peace was concluded in September as the
result of this campaign; and in consequence the frontier was
pushed seventy miles farther to the west.

Meantime, Colonel Waddell with his force of five hundred North
Carolinians had acted in concert with Colonel William Byrd,
commanding the Virginia detachment. The combined forces went into
camp at Captain Samuel Stalnaker's old place on the Middle Fork
of Holston. Because of his deliberately dilatory policy, Byrd was
superseded in the command by Colonel Adam Stephen. Marching their
forces to the Long Island of Holston, Stephen and Waddell erected
there Fort Robinson, in compliance with the instructions of
Governor Fauquier, of Virginia. The Cherokees, heartily tired of
the war, now sued for peace, which was concluded, independent of
the treaty at Charleston, on November 19, 1761.

The successful termination of this campaign had an effect of
signal importance in the development of the expansionist spirit.
The rich and beautiful lands which fell under the eye of the
North Carolina and Virginia pioneers under Waddell, Byrd, and
Stephen, lured them irresistibly on to wider casts for fortune
and bolder explorations into the unknown, beckoning West.

CHAPTER VII. The Land Companies

It was thought good policy to settle those lands as fast as
possible, and that the granting them to men of the first
consequence who were likeliest and best able to procure large
bodies of people to settle on them was the most probable means of
effecting the end proposed.--Acting-Governor Nelson of Virginia
to the Earl of Hillsborough: 1770.

Although for several decades the Virginia traders had been
passing over the Great Trading Path to the towns of the Cherokees
and the Catawbas, it was not until the early years of the
eighteenth century that Virginians of imaginative vision directed
their eyes to the westward, intent upon crossing the mountains
and locating settlements as a firm barrier against the
imperialistic designs of France. Acting upon his oft-expressed
conviction that once the English settlers had established
themselves at the source of the James River "it would not be in
the power of the French to dislodge them," Governor Alexander
Spotswood in 1716, animated with the spirit of the pioneer, led
an expedition of fifty men and a train of pack-horses to the
mountains, arduously ascended to the summit of the Blue Ridge,
and claimed the country by right of discovery in behalf of his
sovereign. In the journal of John Fontaine this vivacious account
is given of the historic episode: "I graved my name on a tree by
the river side; and the Governor buried a bottle with a paper
enclosed on which he writ that he took possession of this place
in the name and for King George the First of England. We had a
good dinner, and after it we got the men together and loaded all
their arms and we drank the King's health in Burgundy and fired a
volley, and all the rest of the Royal Family in claret and a
volley. We drank the Governor's health and fired another volley."

By this jovial picnic, which the governor afterward commemorated
by presenting to each of the gentlemen who accompanied him a
golden horseshoe, inscribed with the legend, Sic juvat
transcendere montes, Alexander Spotswood anticipated by a third
of a century the more ambitious expedition on behalf of France by
Celoron de Bienville (see Chapter III), and gave a memorable
object-lesson in the true spirit of westward expansion. During
the ensuing years it began to dawn upon the minds of men of the
stamp of William Byrd and Joshua Gee that there was imperative
need for the establishment of a chain of settlements in the
trans-Alleghany, a great human wall to withstand the advancing
wave of French influence and occupation. By the fifth decade of
the century, as we have seen, the Virginia settlers, with their
squatter's claims and tomahawk rights, had pushed on to the
mountains; and great pressure was brought to bear upon the
council to issue grants for vast tracts of land in the uncharted
wilderness of the interior.

At this period the English ministry adopted the aggressive policy
already mentioned in connection with the French and Indian war,
indicative of a determination to contest with France the right to
occupy the interior of the continent. This policy had been
inaugurated by Virginia with the express purpose of stimulating
the adoption of a similar policy by North Carolina and
Pennsylvania. Two land companies, organized almost
simultaneously, actively promoted the preliminaries necessary to
settlement, despatching parties under expert leadership to
discover the passes through the mountains and to locate the best
land in the trans-Alleghany.

In June, 1749, a great corporation, the Loyal Land Company of
Virginia, received a grant of eight hundred thousand acres above
the North Carolina line and west of the mountains. Dr. Thomas
Walker, an expert surveyor, who in company with several other
gentlemen had made a tour of exploration through eastern
Tennessee and the Holston region in 1748, was chosen as the agent
of this company. Starting from his home in Albemarle County,
Virginia, March 6, 1750, accompanied by five stalwart pioneers,
Walker made a tour of exploration to the westward, being absent
four months and one week. On this journey, which carried the
party as far west as the Rockcastle River (May 11th) and as far
north as the present Paintsville, Kentucky, they named many
natural objects, such as mountains and rivers, after members of
the party. Their two principal achievements were the erection of
the first house built by white men between the Cumberland
Mountains and the Ohio River a feat, however, which led to no
important developments; and the discovery of the wonderful gap in
the Alleghanies to which Walker gave the name Cumberland, in
honor of the ruthless conqueror at Culloden, the "bloody duke."

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