USA > Mississippi > A history of the Mississippi valley, from its discovery to the end of foreign domination. The narrative of the founding of an empire, shorn of current myth, and enlivened by the thrilling adventures of discoverers, pioneers, frontiersmen, Indian fighters, and homemakers > Part 14
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animals. It is a matter worth repeated considerations, when we think of the inferior peoples over whom we are yet guardians.
But this is not to withhold sympathy from the fron- tier home maker in his battles ; his sufferings were often heartbreaking. He was only fulfilling the destiny of his race, for in him the forward impulse was strongest. The frontiersmen were the instruments by which the race worked out its destiny. It was their part to meet and push on the red men, to endure the hardships of forest life, and to turn the wilderness into home lands for a more (if not wholly), civilized people. They were the advance guard sent ahead of the main army; they were to be sacrificed-shot down-for the good of the many. How they did their duty shall now be told.
Few of the explorers need be named. It was in 1748 that Dr. Thomas Walker, "surveyor and man of mark," reached the head of Cumberland River, and two years later he passed through the Gap. His party killed "thirteen buffaloes, eight elks, fifty-three bears, two deer and 150 turkeys." The abundance of all kinds of game found is, perhaps, the most important feature of the story of Walker's expedition, and of others like it; for every frontiersman knew that these wild animals swarmed only where their food was abundant, and that their food was abundant where the land was rich.
It was in 1749 that the Ohio Company of Virginia, the organization of capitalists already mentioned, who had tried to acquire a half million acres of land on the Ohio River for the purpose of speculation, now did
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some work. They employed Col. Thomas Cresap, a frontiersman and trader living on the headwaters of the Potomac, to mark a trail fit for pack horses, from where Cumberland, Md., now stands, over the moun- tains to the forks of the Ohio. A friendly Indian named Nemacolin, who lived with Cresap, did the work. He blazed the trees along the route followed by the Indians when crossing the mountains by that pass; that is the Indian with a tomahawk, cut patches of bark from all the trees along the route. It was this path that was eventually opened as a road fit for wagons by the axemen with Braddock's army, and it was thereafter known as Braddock's Road. The great National Road, made the next century, followed this trail in part.
On September 16, 1750, Christopher Gist, a not- able Indian trader, was commissioned by the "Ohio Company" to go over the range and prospect for lands on which they could locate their claim for 200,000 acres. His journey took him through the central and southern part of the State of Ohio as far as the mouth of the Scioto, whence he crossed to the Kentucky side, went up the Licking, climbed over the divide to the Kentucky River, up which he traveled to the Clinch, and so home by the way of the New River, and the head of the Roanoke. As a result of his explorations, the Ohio Company determined to locate their claims on the south side of the Ohio, and Gist was sent, in April, 1752, among the Indians to induce them to move their villages to the lands which the company purposed se- curing from them. In a dim way, this company saw the right method of dealing with the red men. They meant
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some work. They employed Col. Thomas Cresap, a frontiersman and trader living on the headwaters of the Potomac, to mark a trail fit for pack horses, from where Cumberland, Md., now stands, over the moun- tains to the forks of the Ohio. A friendly Indian named Nemacolin, who lived with Cresap, did the work. He blazed the trees along the route followed by the Indians when crossing the mountains by that pass; that is the Indian with a tomahawk, cut patches of bark from all the trees along the route. It was this path that was eventually opened as a road fit for wagons by the axemen with Braddock's army, and it was thereafter known as Braddock's Road. The great National Road, made the next century, followed this trail in part.
On September 16, 1750, Christopher Gist, a not- able Indian trader, was commissioned by the "Ohio Company" to go over the range and prospect for lands on which they could locate their claim for 200,000 acres. His journey took him through the central and southern part of the State of Ohio as far as the mouth of the Scioto, whence he crossed to the Kentucky side, went up the Licking, climbed over the divide to the Kentucky River, up which he traveled to the Clinch, and so home by the way of the New River, and the head of the Roanoke. As a result of his explorations, the Ohio Company determined to locate their claims on the south side of the Ohio, and Gist was sent, in April, 1752, among the Indians to induce them to move their villages to the lands which the company purposed se- curing from them. In a dim way, this company saw the right method of dealing with the red men. They meant
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lte Womans C
ARMY
LANDS
1
1,000,000 Aeres
SIOTA GRANT 10 SARGENT
and
others
relinquished
Muskingum
nearly 15,000, 000
Acres
R
-
?
Marietta
OHIO
COMPANY
Salt Springs
Bel preço
Hockhocking R.
1,0
.000 Acres
Rota. R.
Gallipohs
Gr. Kenhawa R.
To the French 24 000 .2
V
FROM THE MAP OF LEWIS, 1796, SHOWING LAND GRANTS IN OHIO.
Mississippi Valley.
to turn him from a roving to a sedentary life, for the purpose of trade first, of course, but ultimately that he might become an agriculturalist and a citizen.
Dr. Walker, who named Cumberland Gap for the Duke of Cumberland, explored a part of the Kentucky River in 1758, as agent of a British land company, of which the Duke was chief patron, and he gave this river the name of Louisa in honor of the Duchess-a name that is perpetuated only by the name of the Ken- tucky town of Louisa.
After this, Virginia sent Joshua Fry, Lunsford Lomax and James Patton, with Gist, to Logstown, when a treaty was made wherein the Indians agreed not to molest any settlements that might be made on the Virginia side of the Ohio. Then Gist was ordered to build a fort and lay out a town site on the Virginia side of the river, two miles below the forks, but before this work was accomplished, the French advent on the head of the river stopped all further progress toward settlement.
After Pontiac's war ended, and while yet the French were in possession of the Illinois posts, George Croghan, now deputy Indian agent under Siť William Johnson, was sent through the country north- west of the Ohio River to prepare the red men for British domination. It was known to be a dangerous mission, for Pontiac was still alive and unappeased, and the French residents of the region naturally hated the British.
The party left Fort Pitt on May 15, 1765, and without adventures worth noting here, passed down to the mouth of the Wabash River, where they arrived
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on June 6, and camped in a fortification that Croghan supposed to be of Indian origin. There, at daylight, on the morning of the 8th, they were attacked by a party of Kickapoo and other Wabash Valley Indians, two white men and three Indians of Croghan's party were killed and everybody else wounded (including Croghan), except two white men and one Indian. The Kickapoos then rushed in and plundered the camp.
When told that the Iroquois would come to take vengeance, they excused themselves by saying that "the French had spirited them up," and they appeared to be alarmed, but they kept the plunder they had taken.
After some discussion of the matter, the Kickapoos took Croghan and his party as prisoners to Vincennes, where "about eighty or ninety French families" were "settled on the east side of the river, being one of the finest situations that can be found," to quote one of Croghan's journals. They were "an idle, lazy people, a parcel of renegades from Canada, and much worse than the Indians," in Croghan's opinion. He had little reason to think well of them, for, before Croghan's eyes, they traded baubles and red paint to the Indians for the tools and other valuables of which Croghan had been robbed, including gold and silver coin. One trader sold a pound of vermillion paint for ten of Croghan's half johannes (a gold coin worth $8.25), and jeered at Croghan after the trade was completed.
However, Croghan was released, after a time, and was able to hold a number of important councils with the Indians, including one with Pontiac, who then agreed to keep the peace. Pontiac had raged to and
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GEORGE III., KING OF ENGLAND.
From a portrait made just before his accession to the throne (1760).
Mississippi Valley.
from Detroit to Ft. Chartres in a vain effort to rouse the Indians and French to make war again. He had "sent an embassy of warriors down the Mississippi, with an immense war-belt, with instructions to show it at every Indian village on the river," and to get aid of the French at New Orleans; but all in vain, for the French had made peace with the British. It was when this last hope had expired that Pontiac made peace. It was on August 28, 1765, at Detroit, that this council was held. Pontiac made a speech, in which he said: "Father, we have all smoked out of the pipe of peace. It's your children's pipe, and as the war is all over, and the Great Spirit and Giver of Light, who has made the earth and everything therein, has brought us all to- gether * I declare to all nations that I had settled my peace with you before I came here." (N. Y. Colonial Mems., vii., p. 783.) In 1768 the aggres- sive old chief was assassinated near St. Louis by an Illinois Indian who had been hired by a trader named Williams to do the deed. The price paid was a barrel of rum,
At the treaty meeting which followed the Pontiac war (held by Sir William Johnson, at the German Flats, Herkimer Co., N. Y.), the Indians proposed that the Alleghany River be established as a definite and permanent boundary between the white men and the red. This offer was evaded, but on October 24, 1768, delegates from the Six Nations, the Delawares and the Shawnees, met at Ft. Stanwix (Rome, N. Y.), and here a boundary line was agreed upon. It began in the Ohio River at the mouth of the Tennessee, passed up the Ohio to Ft. Pitt, up the Alleghany to Kittan-
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ning, and thence across to the Susquehanna. These Indians abandoned all claim on the land lying south and east of that line. The Six Nation deputies signed the treaty for all Indians, but, the Shawnee and Dela- ware chiefs, while orally agreeing to it, held a mental reservation in the matter that was troublesome later. The price paid the Indians for the cession was £ 10,430, 7s, 6d-200 boat loads of goods brought up the Mo- hawk. It was by this payment that the Indian title to Kentucky, a slice of Tennessee, and the Ohio water shed of Virginia was extinguished, save only as the Cherokees claimed part of that region. The Cherokees did not sell out until 1775, though it is worth noting that the Cherokees made a treaty at Hardlabor, S. C., on October 14, 1768, by which they ceded the lands between the Great Kanawha and the Ohio.
When Pontiac's warriors came to Fort Pitt, 100 women and children, the families of home makers, were within, as already noted. When this war ended the blue smoke was already rising serenely from the stick-and-mud chimneys of the cabins they had built at Redstone (now Brownsville, Pa.), on the Monon- gahela. The King's proclamation, limiting the colonial settlements to the slope east of the mountains, had ordered all settlers west of the mountains to return to the east side. The Pennsylvania legislature passed bills for the removal of these settlers, and sent com- missioners to enforce the acts. One bill provided the death penalty for all who should fail to remove as ordered. These acts were passed in sincerity, and the commissioners tried to enforce them. But it was work against a law of nature, and it failed, as all such work
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must fail. Even the Indians interfered to keep white settlers west of the mountains.
The purchase of lands by the treaty of Fort Stan- wix (November 5, 1768), was the first act in the gate-opening that let the white settlers legally across the mountains, to make homes in the Ohio Valley. A number of companies were formed, about this time, to acquire lands in the Ohio Valley and people them. Franklin was interested in one. Washington, the Lees, and other prominent people were in another that ab- sorbed the old Ohio company. Not one is worth more than mention here, because none of them accomplished anything beyond advertising the desirability of the lands of the Ohio Valley. Still, the agitation created by the application for grants evolved one practical Act in Council known as the Walpole Grant, by which the King gave, on August 14, 1772, a large tract of land west of the Alleghanies, which was to be erected into a new colony. Sir William Johnson, the Indian Agent, was instructed to inform the Indians that a new colony was to be formed in the Ohio Valley. This colony-on- paper ( for it was never organized), is commonly called Vandalia. Its capital was to be located on the Great Kanawha. It was to be organized to give a definite western limit to the seaboard colonies that were already in the ferment which led to the War of the Revolution. But before the work of organization could be com- pleted, a plan for placating the French inhabitants of Canada was turned to the purpose of limiting the sea- board colonies.
The French had petitioned, from time to time, for a restoration of their old-time laws and religious privi-
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leges. By an act of Parliament, approved June 22, 1774, known as the Quebec Bill, these privileges of law and religion were granted, and a vast region west of the Alleghanies was made a part of the Royal Prov- ince of Quebec. The Bill was to take effect in 1775, but the work of George Rogers Clark in the Revolu- tion, following on Lord Dunmore's war, to be des- cribed further on, ended that business.
In the meantime (1767 and 1770), Washington had gone down the Ohio twice to prospect for good land, and with such success that he eventually acquired through his claims as a soldier, and by the purchase of other claims, no less than 32,373 acres of land in great plots, besides a small plot of 587 acres located fifteen miles below Wheeling. He had a total water front of sixteen miles on the Ohio, and forty miles on the Great Kanawha. He estimated the value of this land at $3.33 per acre, but it is to be noted that he had great trouble to keep squatters off his holdings.
But the man whose name is best known in connec- tion with the movement of settlers across the Alle- ghanies was Daniel Boone. Daniel Boone, the fourth son of Squire and Sarah Boone, was born on Novem- ber 2, 1734, in Oley Township, Berkes County, Pa. The father owned 250 acres of land on Owatin Creek, "some eight miles southeast of the present city of Read- ing." (Thwaite's "Daniel Boone.") It was then a frontier region. In 1750 the Boones sold out their holdings in Pennsylvania and moved to the Yadkin Valley, in North Carolina, where they arrived after a leisurely, halting journey, in the fall of 1751.
On their way they stopped at a small settlement
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Mississippi Valley.
made on New River, just west of the Alleghany divide, but well within the limits of Virginia. Some Penn- sylvanians had staked claims there in 1748. They had gone at about the time Dr. Walker was exploring the Cumberland Gap, and they made the first settlement west of the divide, though by no means west of the Alleghany mountain system.
In 1755, Daniel Boone joined as a teamster, a party of neighbors who went up to Pennsylvania, to help Braddock drive the French from the forks of the Ohio.
It was during this campaign that young Boone met John Finley. Finley, as a fur buyer, had been in the Kentucky region, and as far down the Ohio at the falls. His stories of the game to be found there greatly interested young Boone, for he was already a notable woodsman and hunter, and his interest was the greater because Finley told him that the Kentucky grounds were to be reached easily by following the well-known buffalo trail through the Cumberland Gap. Accord- ingly, after Boone reached home he extended his hunt- ing trips westward, but it was years before he went to Kentucky, for on reaching home he was married to a handsome, black-eyed Irish girl named Rebecca Bryan.
As early as 1760, however, he had hunted on a branch of the Watauga, now called Boone Creek, where a beech tree was marked:
D. Boon
CillED A. Bar on tree
in THE yEAR
1760
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A History of the
In 1761 he accompanied an expedition under Capt. Hugh Waddell that went into the Cherokee country to avenge raids on the whites. In 1766 Benjamin Cutbirth, John Stuart, John Baker and John Ward, all neighbors of Boone on the Yadkin, crossed the Alle- ghanies on an exploring expedition, during which they reached the Mississippi, and this was the first expedition to do that of which there is any record. They gathered a harvest of skins, bear's oil and dried meat, which they sold at good prices in New Orleans. It was the first cargo of Kentucky produce sent down the Great River by British-Americans.
In the fall of the same year Boone and William Hill "crossed the mountain wall, were in the valleys of the Holsten and the Clinch, and reached the head wa- ters of the West Fork of the Big Sandy," (Thwaites). The winter was passed at a salt lick ten miles west of the site of the modern town of Prestonburg, Kentucky.
In the autumn of 1768 John Finley came to the Yadkin as a peddler and remained all winter with Boone. Boone had found game a plenty in the water shed of the Big Sandy, but the forest was not to his liking. In talking the matter over with Finley, how- ever, the latter proposed an expedition to the country further west, to be reached by a well-worn buffalo trail through Cumberland Gap, and after the crops had been planted in the spring of 1769, Boone, Finley, John Stuart, Joseph Holden, James Mooney and William Cooley, with the best outfit known to the frontier, went to a tributary of the Kentucky River, called Station Camp Creek, (Estill County, Kentucky), and built a camp. They were there, not as explorers, but as skin
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hunters. They were very successful until December 22, when Indians captured and robbed them, and then, after warning them to leave the country, set them free.
All but Boone and Stuart left. These two who remained were afterwards joined by Squire Boone, a brother of Daniel, and Alexander Neely. Eventually, (February, 1770), Stuart failed to return to the Camp -just why is not known,-but Daniel Boone found his skeleton in a hollow sycamore tree five years later. He may have been wounded by Indians from whom he escaped only to die in his hiding place. His skeleton was identified by his powder horn.
Being frightened by Stuart's disappearance, Neely went home. The Boone brothers remained until May, when Squire went to the settlements with their accumu- lated skins, and Daniel remained alone for three months, sleeping in caves, in the cane-brakes, or wher- ever a good hiding place could be found. After Squire returned with fresh supplies, the brothers killed another lot of skins which Squire carried to the settlements, leaving Daniel alone in the woods once more. In fact it was not until the spring of 1771 that Boone returned home. He had been for two years in the Kentucky wilderness, and had explored the fertile region as far as the falls, (Louisville).
It was the adventurous spirit of Boone, thus shown, rather than what he accomplished during these two years, that gave him immediate fame. For the Indians, as Boone's experience proved, were hostile, in spite of the treaty of Fort Stanwix. Boone for two years braved their wrath, and for months at a stretch, he was absolutely alone in the wilderness. It was an ad-
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venture that made the strongest possible appeal to the daring spirits among the frontiersmen on the east slope of the Alleghanies. That his accounts of the number of wild animals he had seen stirred the people who heard them scarcely need be said.
Daniel Boone, it may be said here, was the typical frontier explorer, rather than the typical home-builder. He was one of many good explorers. He founded Boonesborough, as the agent of Col. Richard Hender- son, as shall be told further on, but he did not settle down permanently, either as a farmer or a village resi- dent. He moved on, and died at last in Missouri-on the frontier-in 1820 (September 26). As one who blazed the trail he deserves fame. And having found a biographer (John Filson),-a reporter, literally, who took notes at various interviews, and published the story in 1784-Boone attained the recognition he de- served.
The home-builders, however, were among, or on, the heels of the explorers, and none of them was more notable than James Robertson. A North Carolinian, he, and his parents were so poor that they had been un- able to send him to school. He could not read or write when he married, but he got a wife who would teach him, and in every way take part in his career. Finding few chances of rising in the world among the settle- ments of North Carolina, Robertson, early in 1770, took his rifle and a bag of corn, and went afoot over the range.
On reaching Boone's Creek, he found one William Bean making a home. Bean had been of the party in that hunting trip when Boone "CillED A. Bar" in
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1760, and had liked the country so well that he had come with his family to make a home there.
Robertson selected a home site not far from Bean's, cleared a patch, planted it with corn, attended it until ripe, (living, the while, on game), harvested it, and having thus prepared in the wilderness, sufficient food for a small party of friends, as well as for his own fami- ly, he stored it away and went to his home in North Carolina. The next spring, March, 1771, he came back to the Watauga with a party that numbered eighty men, women and children-sixteen families. These people were going into the wilderness, trusting in the corn Robertson had stored, and in their rifles, for their food, until another crop could be harvested. They were look- ing for no other neighbor than William Bean, already there, but as they descended the western side of the range, they found ten cabins scattered along the stream, with men swinging the axe in the forest round about, or planting corn, while the women sang songs over their house work, and the children played at the work of clearing the land by gathering brush and building fires. A party had come from Fairfax County, Vir- ginia, and seldom have home-builders been more joy- fully surprised than those under Robertson.
This settlement was made near where Elizabeth- town, Carter County, Tenn., now stands. Robert- son's house stood near the head of the long island found there in the Watauga. Though not the first west of the divide, by many years, it was one of the most important in the history of the valley.
These pioneers had come to make homes about 300 miles from the "settlements." They supposed they were
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yet in Virginia, but when the Virginia line was sur- veyed out by Anthony Bledsoe, in 1771, they found themselves in a legal no-man's land. For North Caro- lina was then in a state of anarchy, owing to the re- volt of the people against Governor Tryon, and they were beyond the bounds of the lands bought of the Indians at Fort Stanwix.
Something of the story of this No-Man's settle- ment must be told. The settlers soon found frontier desperadoes coming over the range-men who fled from the old settlements to escape the penalty of crime.
Loving order and hating anarchy, the settlers got together and exercised the "divine right of self-govern- ment." This right was exercised for four years be- fore the Declaration of Independence. In 1772 they held a convention, signed articles of association for good government, and elected thirteen commissioners to enforce these self-made laws-"the first written compact for civil government west of the Alleghanies." It was an efficient government, too, in spite of the fact that it had no legal existence. It was good, that is to say, because the men who governed were entirely sincere in their desire to promote the public welfare, and they did not mistake selfish or private ends for the public good. To secure order they regarded justice, but not the forms found necessary in older commu- nities. A horse thief, for instance, was hanged four days after his arrest. Enough time was taken to defi- nitely ascertain the facts, but no time was wasted, once the facts were learned. This self-organized gov- ernment, being honestly administered, preserved order and compelled justice in this community in spite of
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criminals and vagabonds that fled to the mountains from the alongshore settlements. The love of order shown by these frontier home-builders has been deemed worthy of the highest praise. No one has ever denied the praise due, and no one is likely to do so. But it may be worth while pointing out to the lynch-law loving people of the United States that the praise given to Robertson, Sevier and Campbell has been ill-considered in that it was unmodified. Preserving order by lynch law was praiseworthy only because it was the only resource of the order-loving frontiersmen. Such a use of the rifle or halter was a frightful necessity, and it carried in its wake the long line of disgraceful outrages on human rights that have blackened the history of the Nation since that time. Let it be repeated for the sake of emphasis that the Americans are the only nation of lynchers, because they were obliged, during the Rev- olution, and at times on the frontier, to disregard the forms of Law in the search for Justice; they thus ac- quired the lynching habit. It is because of the success of the Deckhard-rifle government of the early days that we now see mobs of enraged men lynching sup- posed offenders in the midst of communities where the laws might be enforced in orderly fashion.
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