The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources, Part 5

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897. cn
Publication date: 1897
Publisher: Boston ; New York : Houghton, Mifflin and Co.
Number of Pages: 622


USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 5


Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).


Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51


44


THE KENTUCKY REGION.


time might form a body dangerous to the peace and civil gov- ernment of this colony."


The royal proclamation had been a part of the policy of the government to strengthen, by turning the current of population thither, the newly acquired provinces of Nova Scotia and the Floridas. Still the Board of Trade had not yet taken the ad- verse stand which it later assumed towards the trans-Alleghany movements, and though prepared to check settlements in so remote regions as the Illinois country, were not quite ready to deny the possibility of a westward extension to the seaboard colonies, if made by easy advances beyond the mountains.


The pioneers were, in fact, well on their march. We have seen how, in 1767, their movements had alarmed the Indians, and Croghan had tried to quiet the tribes in a conference at Fort Pitt in May, 1768. Gage had little confidence in the re- sults. " When the proposed limits shall be fixed," he said, " I despair not of living long enough to hear that the frontier people have transgressed them ; " and there were, he felt, diffi- culties ahead in the determination of the Indians not to allow settlers on the prescribed lands till they were paid for them. Johnson, while he was arranging for the gathering of the tribes at Fort Stanwix in the autumn of that year, had been fearful lest Colonel Cresap's purchasing Indian lands near the Green- brier River, during the previous season, would disturb the tribes. ' But the daring hunters had gone much farther west. James . Smith, now a man of thirty, who had passed his early manhood in captivity among the savages, was at this date spending eleven months in coursing the valleys of the Cherokee and Cumber- land rivers, - the earliest, perhaps, except one Henry Scrag- gins, a hunter, to traverse this region. William Bean and his family had built a hut on a branch of the Watauga, - the first permanent habitation in the northeast corner of the modern Tennessee. Further south, James Harrod and Michael Stover had ventured to the neighborhood of the modern Nashville.


But fate was playing with a more famous name. The promi- nence which Daniel Boone maintains in this western story is due to his own recitals as preserved by his contemporaries. The honest habit of his talk is not completely hidden in the ambitious tone which Filson has given to Boone's language, in his early account of Kentucky. Boone's rugged, but tender


45


DANIEL BOONE.


personality was hard to shroud. We see his tall and slender figure, too muscular to be gaunt. His eyes idealized his head. He was old enough at five-and-thirty for a ripened manhood to make him thoughtful. His experience had both toughened his sinews and made his senses alert. Any emergency brought


DANIEL BOONE.


him well-nigh to the normal perfection of a man. His kind- ness draws us to him. His audacity makes us as confident as himself. Naturally, what we know of him are glimpses at his best, but we imagine for a background the dreary monotony of the wilderness. Such a character becomes subdued to the land- scape about his figure. His fringed hunting-shirt, belted so that


46


THE KENTUCKY REGION.


its ample folds carried his food, may be ragged ; his leggings may be tattered by the brush ; his moccasins ent by the ledge ; his knife clotted with the blood of a wolf ; but the rich copse and the bounding elk share our scrutiny with his person, and we look to the canopy of magnolia, laurel, and ash, to the spread of the buckeye and graceful catalpa, to the foaming stream and the limestone vagaries, - and all that the man stands for in bravery and constancy is mated with the enchantments of nature.


John Finlay, a trader from North Carolina, had before this thiridded the Cumberland Gap, and trudged on to the striking scenes on the Kentucky River. Impressed with the country, he had returned to the banks of the Yadkin, and had there imbued Boone with a desire to go thither too. The two, with some companions, started to make a new trial of the region. It was in the later spring of 1769 that Boone with James Rob- ertson, a young Scotch-Irishman, stood on a mountain path and looked down upon the rapid flow of the Watanga, winding in its rich valley, two thousand feet above the sea. We shall see that this first sight of the vale of the Watauga was not forgotten by Robertson and Boone. Two years' further wander- ing beyond, amid newer delights in the landscape, carried them back to the Yadkin valley in the spring of 1771, with instant purposes and resolves. 1


While these tentative efforts were making by wandering hunter and trader, projects of larger scope were developing. In 1769, Dr. Lee of Virginia, with thirty-two other Americans, - Washington cooperating, - and two Londoners, were organ- ized as the Mississippi Company, and were petitioning the crown for a grant of some back lands to the extent of two and a half million acres. Gage, who was watching the movement, advised (November 9, 1769) that the new province be put on a military basis, as a barrier between the present provinces and the Indians. Lee's application was in effect pigeon-holed by the Board of Trade, while, under other influences, a better rec- ognition was made of a rival movement. This was a project of speculators, mostly Americans from north of the Potomac, - a combination not unlikely to incite the jealousy of the Virgin- ians. The petitioners included among them a London banker,


47


THE WALPOLE COMPANY.


Thomas Walpole by name, who was so put in the front of the negotiations that his name beeame attached to the scheme. Franklin and Governor Pownall were the two most conspicuous advocates from the colonies. The stock of the company was divided into seventy-two shares. Pownall intended that the government of the new colony should be modeled upon the charter of Massachusetts, whose workings he had known. The company craved permission to buy of the Indians two million four hundred thousand acres of land, situated between latitude 38° and 42°. In general terms, the tract they desired lay west of the Alleghanies and south of the Ohio, and above the bound- ary of North Carolina. It was bounded on the west by a line drawn from the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Scioto to Cum- berland Gap. These limits covered the tract called " Indiana," which the traders had bargained for at Fort Stanwix in recom- pense for their losses in the Pontiac war. These sufferers now petitioned the king to be otherwise recompensed. The bounds also embraced the patent of the old Ohio Company, and it was a point of grievance with the members of this older company that the new organization should be "indebted to discoveries made at the expense of the Ohio Company." Colonel George Mercer, who was in London watching the interests of the Ohio Com- pany, failing to receive instruction for which he had applied, finally agreed, on his own responsibility, to merge that com- pany's interest in the new project, so that the old Virginia claimants received a thirty-sixth part of the shares in the Wal- pole Company. By the end of that year (1770), Colonel Mercer wrote to Washington that he had prevailed upon the new company to allow out of their intended grant two hundred thousand acres, which, under a proclamation by Governor Dinwiddie, had been granted to Washington and the sokliers who served with him in the opening campaign of the recent war.


By these measures there was gained a certain solidarity of interest, needful in negotiating with the government. An opposition to the project, not unexpected, as in the contest for the Illinois colony, was headed by the colonial minister.


Lord Hillsborough - representing under Lord North a Tory government destined to last for nearly a half century - made an adverse report to the king in council on behalf of the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations. This report enforced


48


THE KENTUCKY REGION.


what was called the " two capital objeets " of the royal proela- mation. These were, first, to keep the colonists within reach of the trade of the mother country, and, second, to hold them in due subjection. Any permission to settle the reserved Indian territory would be detrimental to these aims. The report was, of course, as we see it now, a failure to discern the inevitable expansion of the British people. As the contest moved on, no one in the discussion warmed with the throes of preseienee more effectively than Edmund Burke. "Many of the people in the back settlements," he said, " are already little attached to par- ticular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachians. From thence," he went on to say, with scant knowledge of the country, "they behold an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow." He intimated that such a population, if alienated, might turn upon the oppressor. They could elude any police in flying from seetion to section, if grants were denied them. Such independence, he said, " would be the hapless result of an endeavor to keep, as a lair of wild beasts, that earth which God by an express charter had given to the children of men." There happened, when he was speaking upon the point in Parliament, to be a season of want among the English communities. He used it with effeet. "The searcity which you have felt would have been a devastating famine, if this child of your old age, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youth- ' ful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent." At another moment, making it the occasion for a graceful compli- ment to Lord Bathurst, as having a memory to cover the inter- val, Burke reminded the House that in 1772 the trade of England with the American colonies alone was nearly what it had been in 1704 with the entire world.


Hillsborough said that the timely supplies to which Burke referred were practically interdicted by the distance and by the tardy service of transportation over the mountains. It was asserted, in reply, that produce could be carried from the Ohio country by the river, and over the passes to tide-water at Alex- andria, cheaper than it could be hauled from Northampton to London. Flour, beef, and naval stores could be floated down the Ohio to Florida and the West Indies easier than they could be taken to such markets from New York or Philadelphia ; and if forwarded by river and sea to those ports from the Ohio, it


49


ADVANCE OF SETTLERS.


would cost but half the expense of land carriage. It was said that to go by sea from Philadelphia to Pensacola took a month. and it took no longer by the river from Pittsburg. The Ohio, said Franklin, is navigable for large boats at all times, and from January to April it can carry vessels of large tonnage. Since the war, he added, the distance by a new road from Fort Cum- berland to navigable water over the mountains has been reduced from seventy to forty miles. Thus easy is it, he reasoned, to put this temperate and mueh-producing region into elose com- munication with the sea, - a region that has its silkworm and the mulberry, flax and cotton, for the manufacturer, hemp and iron for naval stores, and grapes and tobacco for the solaces of life.


No such statements availed, however, to swerve Hillsborough from his position. Lord Dunmore did much to strengthen the opposition when he wrote from Virginia that any such grant would be sure to bring on an Indian war.


These were two years of uncertainty in London. It seemed at times as if the applicants would get their grant, but every period of hope was succeeded by another of disheartenment. Meanwhile on the Ohio and its tributaries events were going on which made the decision less dependent on the government. Already in 1770, settlers were moving steadily on, and there was a proposal in the air to found a colony on the lands ceded at Fort Stanwix and call it Pittsylvania. The packhorse and the shirt of jeans, bnekskin leggings seraping together with lithe steps, were seen and heard everywhere along the route. whether by Fort Bedford and Loyalhannon, or by Fort Cum- berland and Redstone old fort. Phinging into the shelter of the large timber of the Kanawha and its branches. startling the elk, the bear, and the wild turkey, often following the beaten " traces " of the buffalo, the pioneers opened of themselves the paths which Captain Legge had thought to have done by an organized company of axemen. Blazing a tree near a spring, they marked it with a date and the acreage, and established the tacitly recognized "Tomahawk Claim : " on clearing and plant- ing, they established what passed under the designation of a " corn title." Sometimes adventurous parties of hunters pushed on even so far as the Green River and the mouth of the Cum- berland, and wandered about the site of the modern Nashville


50


THE KENTUCKY REGION.


The Walpole movement found little favor in Virginia. This combination of northern interests ignored the claim of Virginia to a western extension under her charter. If this expansion was not maintained, her right to give patents of this over-mountain domain was lost. Hillsborough, in July, 1770, had notified the Virginia authorities of the movement, but in their reply in October they made no protest, and ac- knowledged that " when that part of the country shall become sufficiently populated, it may be a wise and prudent measure." Before it became known that provision had been made to pre- serve Dinwiddie's grant to the soldiers of the late war, there was a strong feeling of injury in which Washington shared. Moreover, the claims of the Cherokees - who were to be ap- peased by the recognition, for they had been of late, as Cameron the Indian agent discovered, in a hostile mood - had been es- poused by Virginia against the pretensions of the Iroquois as recognized at Fort Stanwix.


While the Walpole petition was pending in London, and before Mercer's message about the engulfing of the old Ohio Company in the new project had been received, Washington started west to take for himself a new look at the country. He left Mount Vernon on October 5, 1770, and in a little more than a week was with Crawford on the Youghioghieny. He ' had various motives, -one was to sec land which Crawford had already selected for him, another was to understand better the difficulties of the portage connecting the Potomac and Ohio, so as to further the trade of what he called " a rising empire."


Near Redstone old fort, at the head of navigation on the Monongahela, where for some years the authorities had been trying unsuccessfully to oust the settlers, he found that Michael Cresap had built himself a house. Here he talked with that frontiersman about what he then supposed was the injury to his comrades of 1754, in their rights being covered -at least to the extent of four fifths - by the proposed Walpole grant. He looked upon himself as in some degree - so he had written in April to Lord Botetourt - " the representative of the officers and soldiers who claim the right to two hundred thousand acres of this very land." Settlements at this time had fairly


NOTE. - The opposite view of Pittsburg is from the Atlas of Collot's Journey in North America.


ـطاقم


52


THE KENTUCKY REGION.


begun along the Monongahela, and two years later occupaney was in full progress, and was stretching on to Laurel Ridge. Most of the settlers were coming by the Braddock route, which Washington had followed, but a lesser number poured in by the Pennsylvania route from Bedford and Ligonier.


On October 27, 1770, Washington was at Fort Pitt, now garrisoned by two companies of Royal Irish. He found rows of traders' houses along the Monongahela side, but the most active of the packmen were evidently the Pennsylvanians, di- verting the trade over the gaps toward Philadelphia, while they met the Indians in Virginia territory south of the Ohio. This, with the neglect which the petition of the Lees and himself had received, could but convinee Washington that the interests which supported Forbes and Bouquet in preferring a new route over the hills, ten years and more ago, were not short-lived. These rival agencies were further kept alive by the controversy over counter claims to this over-hill country about the forks of the Ohio. Everything was favoring the prominence Penn- sylvania was now acquiring among the older colonies. From 1771 to 1773, something like twenty-five thousand Presbyterian Scotch-Irish arrived at either Philadelphia or Newcastle, and they added greatly to the sturdier stock of the colony. ~ Frank- lin, now in England, was considering how the prosperity of the colony could be increased by a system of canalizing her rivers.


This western contest of Pennsylvania with Virginia was an evil destined to be surmounted, but during these years when Westmoreland County was formed, it proved irritating and even dangerous. Both colonies had, after the treaty at Fort Stan- wix, been issuing warrants for the same territory, while they bid against each other by alternately lowering the selling price.


Washington, leaving Pittsburg in October, 1770, went with a party down the Ohio to the Kanawha, and early in November he was examining the land about that stream. Returning to Pittsburg, he gave an entertainment at an inn in that place, and here met for the first time a nephew of George Croghan, Connolly by name, who, as a creature of Lord Dunmore, be- came a few years later notorious in furthering his lordship's schemes in this region in opposition to the claims of Pennsyl- vania. This land dispute turned upon the meaning to be given to the rather impracticable definition of Penn's charter for his


53


WASHINGTON'S LANDS.


western bounds, - five degrees west of the Delaware, a stream of in-and-out reaches. It was of importance for Pennsylvania to hold the forks within her jurisdiction, which it could do if Pittsburg could be made to lie within a westward curve to match a similar bend of the Delaware. To accomplish this, it was claimed by Croghan that certain interested parties, work- ing with Seull's map of the province, undertook to misplace the forks to accommodate that locality to some favoring curve. Such an act, if fraudulent, wronged in its consequences the new Walpole colony by depriving it of so eligible a site as the forks.


No one since Weiser's death had been so important a medi- ator with the Ohio tribes as Croghan. Gage was writing of him : "Croghan is generous ; gives all he has, and whilst he has anything to give the Indians will flock about him." The new patentees had made it for Croghan's advantage to watch their interests at the forks. He had thought that their lands would find purchasers at £10 the hundred acres, and half-penny sterling quitrent. When he had offered some of his own lands, lying between the Monongahela and Raccoon Creek, to Wash- ington, that vigilant speculator refused the chance because of the unsettled conditions, both as regards the controverted bounds of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and the pending Walpole grant, all of which might affect Croghan's title as derived from the Indians. Still Washington did not hesitate to add to his own rights under the Dinwiddie proclamation by buying simi- lar claims of others, and when he died, nearly thirty years later, his will shows that he still owned various lots on the Kanawha, aggregating nearly fourteen thousand acres in four parcels, beside a fine area above the modern Charleston, which he and Andrew Lewis had secured after being attracted by a bituminons spring upon it.


When it was known that the Dinwiddie grant was preserved, Washington, who had returned to Mount Vernon by the first of December, 1770, sent Captain William Crawford in the following May to mark out its bounds. Washington's journey had convinced him that the wagon road then in use, extending about two hundred miles from where it left the Monongahela to Alexandria, could be shortened to sixty and perhaps to twenty miles, if the Potomac could be made navigable by some system


54


THE KENTUCKY REGION.


A Long: W.mint


5 1 Philadelphia


2


FÜHLBIR


Teravoulies


afA Danone arilorvẻ


MINTHLU


The Northern


Boundary Sof


Pensilvania is, not


yet Settled ..


Cheneffies Canafadages & Chenandoanes Call'd bys the English SENE CAS


Canusades


PART


OF


LA


Ķ


E


---


Jadachığı®


E R


E


Portant to m. AJaduchque


Heads of the Chio


Presqu iste Portage IS In, French Ft


Purchased i


Ofzio


Aneorany R


the


Endlef


Palawa Thepi


Hills


Petrolaan


Shaningos


Tolvd Cr.


waage


41


Mr.Branch


Tobys Falls LaRift Mocha


of SusquehannaR.


15


Font


Kohků


rapid


F.du Quiegne


Akind Falls


1


12


Standing Siont


Junta.R.


Senichly Cr.


10


Ochron


Salt Lick


15


Rava T


Stuart


ustury


Conmucho


Redstone


18


Dichos


The Meadowvo


23


M


R


Y


I


A


N


Explanation .'


I


British Statute Miles 6g to a.Degree.


= Roads.


5 10' 20 30 40 50 60


- Trading Paths


81


80


0


-10


Ridge @> of Mountams


Magnetic


Macht


NishikuskAnd


Killaning


The Alle gany


Conmsinga it Branch, Indian Ff


DEL


LOSEST


Bald Eagle


Tall


Shan


rapid


A


Turtle C


Frank.T.


Carlisle


10


angahela . R. gentle


TochigiCent.


12


Parnels Mot


Monar


F!Cumberland


LA Indian Tonno


lites


Ohio R.


Bever.Cr.


Ohio R


Cananagy &. Buchalooney


Belle R.


Kuskusdule


und


Ruskuichve or Seneca I


Cavuga or Seneca R.


NOTE. - This map shows an attempt to define the western bounds of Pennsylvania by


of canalization, such as Franklin was contemplating for the Susquehanna and its branches. Some such enterprise was necessary if Virginia was going to hold a successful rivalry with Pennsylvania. No other Virginian added so much per- sonal interest to his urgency for the province's behoof, inas- much as he eventually held over thirty thousand acres through- out the Ohio valley. Washington's interest in the soldier's claims was superadded to his own, and he wrote to Dunmore in June, 1771, that "the officers and soldiers confide in me to transaet this business for them."


Tanbains


55


FRANKLIN AND HILLSBOROUGHI.


okin


At the same time


Washington repre- 3. ONONDAGAE S o Chery å Cayuga Valley sented that a report Canadaduli of the ultimate sule- P Jugarechny TUTELOES. Branch cess of the Walpole AND Towanenda don Onfonchip Motrocks Reven 12 MOHOCKS petitioners was gain- River Topochtunk Curvingo OKEJSYA P. o F ing ground notwith- standing the opposi- of Susquehan N.YORK tion of the Board of TIC Trade. The advo- Brauch Station Pt S M ountain, cates had carried the INA Great question to the king Swamp Mohocamat in council, and on Sclocka S N July 1, 1772, Franklin Malchassaing Malpack Wioming P. OF YARE read before that body Crucispong his masterly answer super o Union to Hillsborough's ob- Norton Trout Sidney T acker EN. JERSEY jeetions. Franklin's statement was an em- Readin Brunswick PrinichT. pre R anton Schuylkill Burlington iran. phatic denial of the Klomv 50 Nenvy Ephrata Virginian claim to a PureFond Title PERILADELPHIA anrafter of western extension, for Yorkip Peque Gr. he held that the Alle- AMAP of the ghanies bounded the D PROVINCE N Calde 0 do Vranz province, while the PENSILVANZ Drann firm the rights of all the colo- .. Beft Au tharitics By T. Richin G? nies were derived from the Iroquois cession of 7| LongsWest from London. lands, which they had curves corresponding to those of the Delaware River. obtained by conquest from the Shawnees. He was in due time answered by George Mason, in behalf of the Virginians. The Iroquois argument had been often used against the French, and it indicated how the policy of the min- istry had changed since the war, that it was now necessary to use this reasoning against the government's position.


Treaties with the southern Indians, beld at Hardlabor in 1768, and again at Loehabar, in South Carolina. October 18. had acknowledged that the Cherokees' right to this region to- wards the Kanawha was superior to that of the Iroquois, but


56


THE KENTUCKY REGION.


that tribe got no recognition from Franklin, and a large emi. gration had already begun to flow west, looking to the security which the treaty of Fort Stanwix gave them. Franklin said that he relied, to keep up this western exodus, " on the voluntary superflux of the inhabitants of the middle provinces."


The brothers Zane had built their cabin at the mouth of Wheeling Creek, the first white man's habitation, perhaps, in that section of the wilderness. Franklin reckoned that not less than five thousand families, averaging six heads each, un- able to meet the demands of the large landowners east of the mountains, had before this sought lands on the Ohio. This computation did not inelude several thousand families which had passed the gaps, but had tarried within the proposed limits of Pennsylvania.


Among these last, in 1769, had been Zeisberger and his Mo- ravians, but in 1772, to escape the troubles of Pennsylvania with the Susquehanna Company, they had pushed up the west branch of the Susquehanna in search of a new home. We have Bishop Ettwein's journal of their flight. Having worshiped for the last time in their old church, on June 11, 1772, they be- gan their wearisome march. On July 18, they were elimbing a precipitous mountain "to a spring, the headwaters of the Ohio." " Here," says the bishop, "I lifted up my heart in prayer as I looked westward." The band was probably now ' on the north branch of the Mahoning, an affluent of the Alle- ghany. They floated down the stream to Beaver Creek, and in August they had laid the foundations of a white settlement in Ohio, on the " second bottom " of the Tuscarawas valley (Muskingum), amid its walnuts and syeamores, its cedars, locusts, and laurels.




Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.