The Winning of the West Page 26

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

  When the Transylvania Legislature dissolved, never to meet again, Henderson had nearly finished playing his short but important part in the founding of Kentucky. He was a man of the seacoast regions, who had little in common with the backwoodsmen by whom he was surrounded; he came from a comparatively old and sober community, and he could not grapple with his new associates; in his journal he alludes to them as a set of scoundrels who scarcely believed in God or feared the devil. A British friend26 of his, who at this time visited the settlement, also described the pioneers as being a lawless, narrow-minded, unpolished, and utterly insubordinate set, impatient of all restraint, and relying in every difficulty upon their individual might; though he grudgingly admitted that they were frank, hospitable, energetic, daring, and possessed of much common-sense. Of course it was hopeless to expect that such bold spirits, as they who conquered the wilderness, would be content to hold it even at a small quit-rent from Henderson. But the latter’s colony was toppled over by a thrust from without before it had time to be rent in sunder by violence from within.

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

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

  Boone remained to be for some years one of the Kentucky leaders. Soon after the fort at Boones-borough was built, he went back to North Carolina for his family, and in the fall returned, bringing out a band of new settlers, including twenty-seven “guns”—that is, rifle-bearing men—and four women, with their families, the first who came to Kentucky, though others shortly followed in their steps.28 A few roving hunters and daring pioneer settlers also came to his fort in the fall; among them, the famous scout, Simon Kenton, and John Todd,29 a man of high and noble character and well-trained mind, who afterward fell by Boone’s side when in command at the fatal battle of Blue Licks. In this year also Clark30 and Shelby31 first came to Kentucky; and many other men whose names became famous in frontier story, and whose sufferings and long wanderings, whose strength, hardihood, and fierce daring, whose prowess as Indian fighters and killers of big game, were told by the firesides of Kentucky to generations born when the elk and the buffalo had vanished from her borders as completely as the red Indian himself. Each leader gathered round him a little party of men, who helped him build the fort which was to be the stronghold of the district. Among the earliest of these town builders were Hugh McGarry, James Harrod, and Benjamin Logan. The first named was a coarse, bold, brutal man, always clashing with his associates (he once nearly shot Harrod in a dispute over work). He was as revengeful and foolhardy as he was daring, but a natural leader in spite of all. Soon after he came to Kentucky his son was slain by Indians while out boiling sugar from maples; and he mercilessly persecuted all redskins for ever after. Harrod and Logan were of far higher character, and superior to him in every respect. Like so many other backwoodsmen, they were tall, spare, athletic men, with dark hair and grave faces. They were as fearless as they were tireless, and were beloved by their followers. Harrod finally died alone in the wilderness, nor was it ever certainly known whether he was killed by Indian or white man, or perchance by some hunted beast. The old settlers always held up his memory as that of a man ever ready to do a good deed, whether it was to run to the rescue of some one attacked by Indians, or to hunt up the strayed plow-horse of a brother settler less skilful as a woodsman; yet he could hardly read or write. Logan was almost as good a woodsman and individual fighter, and in addition was far better suited to lead men. He was both just and generous. His father had died intestate, so that all of his property by law came to Logan, who was the eldest son; but the latter at once divided it equally with his brothers and sisters. As soon as he came to Kentucky he rose to leadership, and remained for many years among the foremost of the commonwealth founders.

  All this time there penetrated through the sombre forests faint echoes of the strife the men of the sea-coast had just begun against the British king. The rumors woke to passionate loyalty the hearts of the pioneers; and a roaming party of hunters, when camped on a branch32 of the Elkhorn, by the hut of one of their number, named McConnell, called the spot Lexington, in honor of the memory of the Massachusetts minute-men, about whose death and victory they had just heard.33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  6 McAfee MSS.

  7 Boone’s letter.

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

  9 April 5th.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  18 Boone’s deposition, July 29, 1795.

  19 Mann Butler, p. 31.

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

  21 Henderson’s Journal.

  22 “Our game, the only support of life among many of us, and without which the country would be abandoned ere tomorrow.” Henderson’s address.

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

  24 Possibly in 1775, certainly in 1776; MS. autobiography of Rev. Wm. Hickman. In Durrett’s library.

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

  26 Smyth, p. 330.

  27 Gov. James T. Morehead’s “address” at Boonesborough, in 1840 (Frankfort, Ky., 1841).

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

  29 Like Logan he was born in Pennsylvania, of Presbyterian Irish stock. He had received a good education.

  30 Morehead, p. 52.

  31 Shelby’s MS. autobiography, in Durrett’s library at, Louisville.]

  32 These frontiersmen called a stream a “run,” “branch,” “creek,” or “fork,” but never a “brook,” as in the Northeast.

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

  CHAPTER III

  IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION—THE SOUTHERN BACKWOODSMEN OVERWHELM THE CHEROKEES, 1776

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

  Hitherto the two chains of events had been only remotely connected; but in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the struggle between the king and his rebellious subjects shook the whole land, and the men of the Western border were drawn headlong into the full current of Revolutionary warfare. From that moment our politics became national, and the fate of each portion of our country was thenceforth in some sort dependent upon the welfare of every other. Each section had its own work to do; the East won independence while the West began to conquer the continent. Yet the deeds of each were of vital consequence to the other. Washington’s Continentals gave the West its freedom; and took in return for themselves and their children a share of the land that had been conquered and held by the scanty bands of tall backwoodsmen.

  The backwoodsmen, the men of the up-country, were, as a whole, ardent adherents of the patriot or American side. Yet there were among them many loyalists or tories; and these tories included in their ranks much the greater portion of the vicious and the disorderly elements. This was the direct reverse of what obtained along portions of the seaboard, where large numbers of the peaceable, well-to-do people stood loyally by the king. In the up-country, however, the Presbyterian Irish, with their fellows of Calvinistic stock and faith, formed the backbone of the moral and order-loving element; and the Presbyterian Irish1 were almost to a man stanch and furious upholders of the Continental Congress. Naturally, the large bands of murderers, horse-thieves, and other wild outlaws, whom these grim friends of order hunted down with merciless severity, were glad to throw in their lot with any party that promised revenge upon their foes. But of course there were lawless characters on both sides; in certain
localities where the crop of jealousies, always a rank backwoods growth, had been unusually large, and had therefore produced long-standing and bitter feuds,2 the rival families espoused opposite sides from sheer vindictive hatred of one another. As a result, the struggle in the backwoods between tories and whigs, king’s-men and congress-men,3 did not merely turn upon the questions everywhere at stake between the American and British parties. It was also in part a fight between the law-abiding and the lawless, and in part a slaking of savage personal animosities, wherein the borderers glutted their vengeance on one another. They exercised without restraint the right of private warfare, long abandoned in more civilized regions. It was natural that such a contest should be waged with appalling ferocity.

  Nevertheless this very ferocity was not only inevitable, but it was in a certain sense proper; or, at least, even if many of its manifestations were blamable, the spirit that lay behind them was right. The backwoodsmen were no sentimentalists; they were grim, hard, matter-of-fact men, engaged all their lives long in an unending struggle with hostile forces, both human and natural; men who in this struggle had acquired many unamiable qualities, but who had learned likewise to appreciate at their full value the inestimable virtues of courage and common-sense. The crisis demanded that they should be both strong and good; but, above all things, it demanded that they should be strong. Weakness would have ruined them. It was needful that justice should stand before mercy; and they could no longer have held their homes, had they not put down their foes, of every kind, with an iron hand. They did not have many theories; but they were too genuinely liberty-loving not to keenly feel that their freedom was jeopardized as much by domestic disorder as by foreign aggression.