The Winning of the West Page 13

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

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

  8 Foote, 78.

  9 Witness the Mecklenburg Declaration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  20 McAfee MSS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  32 Do.

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

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

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

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

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

  37 Watson.

  38 Doddridge.

  39 McAfee MSS.

  40 Watson.

  41 McAfee MSS. See also Doddridge and Watson.

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

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

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

  45 Schöpf, I., 404.

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

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

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

  49 Doddridge, 161, 185.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  56 See Doddridge.

  57 McAfee MSS.

  58 Doddridge.

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

  CHAPTER VI

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

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

  As yet they had been shielded by the forest which lay over the land like an unrent mantle. All through the mountains, and far beyond, it stretched without a break; but toward the mouth of the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers the landscape became varied with open groves of woodland, with flower-strewn glades and great barrens or prairies of long grass. This region, one of the fairest in the world, was the debatable ground between the Northern and the Southern Indians. Neither dared dwell therein,1 but both used it as their hunting-grounds; and it was traversed from end to end by the well marked war traces2 which they followed when they invaded each other’s territory. The whites, on trying to break through the barrier which hemmed them in from the western lands, naturally succeeded best when pressing along the line of least resistance; and so their first great advance was made in this debatable land, where the uncertainly defined hunting-grounds of the Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw marched upon those of Northern Algonquin and Wyandot.

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

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

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