USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 9
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The same day, another body of savages attacked the stockade at Watauga, where James Robertson commanded and Sevier was second. The fort held one hundred and forty souls, of whom forty were fit to fight. The enemy hung about the spot for three weeks, and then retreated, just as there appeared a force of three hundred men to suceor the besieged. These two movements were the principal ones, intended as a diversion to
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SOUTH OF THE OHIO.
assist the British attack on Charleston, but they were ill-timed. Parker, the English admiral, had been repulsed at Fort Moul- trie nearly a month earlier, so these savage demonstrations failed in every way to advance the British plans, and in the end left the southern colonies free to retaliate upon the Cherokees, the head and front of the harrowing work along the borders.
The united tribes of this nation, so long the allies of the Eng- lish against the French, had been stirred by Stuart and Hamil- ton's friends among the Ohio Indians to these acts of hostility, and were destined to have their power completely broken. The Cherokee people were grouped in three settlements. Their lower towns lay against the South Carolina frontiers, and could send between three and four hundred men upon the warpath. The middle towns farther north, joined with their villages in the mountain valleys, were more than twice as powerful ; while the over-hill settlements, the most northern of their positions, were nearly as strong for defense as the middle towns. Accord- ingly, the several sections could furnish, perhaps, two thousand braves for a campaign, and the more remote districts of the same stock might add enough to make their available fighting foree not far from two thousand five hundred.
Respecting the retaliatory campaign of the whites which we are now to touch upon, there is much confusion of statement among those who have in large part told the story from hear- 'say, and there are few contemporary records to help us to a certainty as to dates, movements, and numbers. In the lead- ing features of the campaign, however, there is little obscurity. The patriots in Georgia appear to have been the earliest to move. In March (1776), Colonel Bull, with a force of militia, had marched toward Savannah to overawe the Tories, and he is said to have had some Creeks in his ranks, for that tribe had of late been propitiated by a show of justice on the part of the Georgia authorities in the punishment of offenses com- mitted against members of their body. In July, Governor Bulloek was preparing a force to invade the lower Cherokee lands, and under Colonel Jack about two hundred savages devastated some of their hamlets on the Tugaloo River.
While this was going on, General Charles Lee, now in com- mand at Charleston, begged (July 7) the Virginia authorities to league the southern colonies in a joint expedition, and on the
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THE CHEROKEES ATTACKED.
30th, Congress recommended such a project to Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The Virginians were quite ready for their task. Jefferson, in August, was urging a foray into the heart of the Indians' country, with a determination to drive them beyond the Mississippi. President Page began prepara- tions, and notified the governors of the Carolinas that he was going to send a force against the upper towns of the Cherokees, and pressed them to attack the middle and lower towns. Colonel William Christian was selected for the command of the Vir- ginia forces. He was joined, as he went on, by a company from Pennsylvania under Martin, and by some recruits from the parts of North Carolina contiguous to the Virginia bounds. His force grew to be some two thousand strong. A trader, Isaac Thomas, served him as guide. His plan was to rendez- vous on the Holston, and on October 1, he started with such other contingents from Watauga and the Tennessee settlements as could be recruited. His expectation was to reach Broad River on October 15, where he looked for resistance. His orders were to make a junction with General Rutherford, who commanded a North Carolina force, moving at the same time ; but his communication with him failed, and on October 6, he wrote to Governor Henry that Rutherford might possibly be fortunate enough to reach the over-hill towns before him, and begin the work of devastation. Christian reached the Broad River a little ahead of his expectations, and crossed it by an unfamiliar ford in the night. He now found that the Indians had fled and lay in force before their towns, at a distance of four or five days' march. Early in November, he reached the towns, without a battle, and began destroying cabin and crops. For two weeks he was thus employed, and then, foreing the Indians to a truce and exacting an agreement from them to meet commissioners and arrange for a permanent peace in the spring, he began his return march. He had not lost a man. His force was generally impressed with the attractions of this over-hill country.
During this march he had not seen or heard of Rutherford. who, with an army of two thousand men and a train of supplies, had started from the head-streams of the Catawba on Sep- tember 1. He is thought to have had with him a small body of the vanishing Catawbas. He kept about a thousand of his
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SOUTH OF THE OHIO.
most effective troops and a small body of horse well ahead, and making a foreed march, he found the Cherokee towns abandoned. He had expected to meet here Colonel An- drew Williamson with a force from South Carolina, but that failing, he ravaged the omally L valley towns alone, and then pushed over LI ES Burning.T the mountains and made havoc among the H middle towns. He escaped on the way an ambush which had been prepared for him, S by reason of taking an unaccustomed path. Chattuirajoy Zes Returning on September 18 to the middle towns, he met the South Carolinians there. Williamson had, since the early days of An- gust, been leading a force of some eleven or twelve hundred rangers among the lower towns, burning and destroying all he could. Chatahoud Little Cholı.Tas He now pushed ahead by the route which 96 Rutherford had avoided and fell into the ambush. He was staggered for a while, but rallying his men, he drove the savages back and crossed the mountains successfully. Rutherford coming on, the two devastated the settlements, and late in September turned back. Here, again, a fearful penalty had been imposed upon the enemy, and the lar- gest force of all the Cherokee bands had been brought to obedience, though they had inflicted more loss upon Williamson than any other contingent had suffered. His casualties counted up on October 7, when he reached Fort Rutledge on his return, ninety-four in killed and wounded.
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The whites could reekon as the outcome of the campaign the almost complete prostration of the Cherokee nation. It proved an effectual warning to the neighboring tribes, and a respite for the frontiers. The government at Philadelphia were as much relieved as the frontiers, and the Committee of Secret Corre- spondence wrote to their agents in Europe that " they had now little to apprehend on account of the Indians." The whites had established new and enlarged bounds to the territory open
95
WILLIAMSON'S CAMPAIGN.
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for their oecupaney. They had brought the Tennessee settle- ments well within the jurisdiction of the older governments, and Watanga, as we have seen, was now ready to be annexed to North Carolina. During the next year (May 20 and July 20, 1777) definitive treaties were made by which lands on the Savannah were ceded to Georgia and South Carolina, and on the Holston to North Carolina and Virginia. The Chicka- mauga tribe of the Cherokees refused to join in the cessions, and moving down the Tennessee, a hundred miles below the mouth of the Holston, they settled on what is known as the Chickamauga Creek. Other sections of the nation withdrew from immediate eontaet with the English. Though humbled
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SOUTH OF THE OHIO.
they were not quelled, and the intermittent outrages which were reported in the settlements told how revenge still swayed them. Sevier and his rangers had enough to do in hovering about them to repress their audacity.
Of the two movements in the regions beyond the mountains likely to bring the claims of Virginia for a western extension to a sharp issue, - of which beginnings have been already sketched, - one was the resurrection of what was known as the Indiana grant. This had been made at the time of the Fort Stanwix treaty to an association of traders, seeking in this way to recoup themselves for losses incurred in the Pontiac war. Nothing had happened to make the grant of use, from the time it was secured in 1768 till the proprietors held a meeting in September, 1775. Four months later (January 19, 1776) they transferred their interests under this Indian title to three Phila- delphia merchants, who not long after (March, 1776) deter- mined to open a land office for the sale of the lands. With the unsettled quarrel which then existed between Pennsylvania and Virginia about their bounds, it was far from propitious for these merchants that their project must encounter the landed interests of a rival province. The new grantees were quite willing to make allowances to such settlers as were already in possession, but with the pretensions of Virginia to back them, these squatters did not propose to be mulcted at all.
Meanwhile, the people of the upper Ohio regions determined to bring an end, if possible, to the harassing complications im- posed upon them by the rival States and aspiring companies. They sought (August, 1776) an autonomy of their own, by asking Congress to set them up as the State of West Sylvania. They elaimed, rather extravagantly, that there were twenty-five thousand families between the mountains and the Scioto, and they would include them in a territory to be carved from Vir- ginia and Pennsylvania beyond the mountains, and to extend well into Kentucky. The project failed, and three years later (1779) Virginia forced an issue by declaring the native title of the Indiana grant invalid. The Vandalia and Indiana con- panies memorialized Congress (September 14, 1779) against the Virginia pretensions. In the end Congress (1782) sus- tained the grant, and a new company took the question (1792)
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TRANSYLVANIA.
to the Supreme Court of the United States. Here the cause . lingered till Virginia secured a change in the Constitution. This, the eleventh amendment (1794), prohibited individuals of one State bringing suit against another, and the question dropped.
The other movement to effect Virginia's western claims was more rapidly closed, notwithstanding an attempt to bring it before Congress. This was the Transylvania project already traced in its initial stages. By the close of 1775, Henderson had established an agent at Philadelphia. In December, this person was reporting to his principal that John and Samuel Adams were agreed to induce Congress to give countenance to the new colony. Even Jefferson was quite willing to forget the charter limits of Virginia, if a firm government could be estab- lished at the back of that province, and its jurisdiction main- tained as far as the Mississippi, in opposition to the provisions of the recent Quebec Bill. In such views he had a natural abettor in John Adams, who was anxious lest the British, reach- ing this western country by the St. Lawrence, should stir the tribes to embrace Dunmore's plan of harrying the country be- yond the Alleghanies. It was in part this fear that had induced Congress, in March (1776), to send a commission to Canada, whose work, as we have seen, was so hampered by Jay's ont- spoken denunciation of the Catholic Church.
Jefferson, notwithstanding his sympathy with Henderson's movement, was not quite prepared to favor congressional recog- nition of the new colony until Virginia had first agreed to it. But he reckoned too surely upon Virginia recognizing that the borders needed any such sacrifice on her part.
The war with the mother country had gone too far to be controlled by any moderate faction. France had already made ready to afford the revolting colonies the pecuniary assistance which they needed. Events were fast drifting to the verge of independence, and there were warnings of it everywhere. 1 Scotch-Irish settlement at Hanna's Town in western Pennsyl- vania had but just (May, 1776) given encouragement to such a movement, and not far from the same time the loyalists of the Watauga settlement had been drummed out of the valley.
With the inevitable in view, Congress in May, 1776, had
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SOUTH OF THE OHIO.
called upon each State to set up a form of government suffi- cient for the crisis. In June, Fort Moultrie had been attacked, while Stuart sought, as we have seen, by an Indian uprising in the South, to make a diversion to assist the attack. Three days later, resolutions of independence were laid before Con- gress (June 7), and the die was cast. Within a week Virginia passed her declaration of rights, and two weeks and a half later (June 29) she adopted her constitution. This last docu- ment gave her the opportunity to make a solemn declaration of her territorial rights. It was the beginning of a long con- troversy, which settled the destiny of the American West. She recognized the diminution of her charter limits of 1609, so far as the subsequent grants to Maryland and Pennsylvania im- paired them, but she insisted on her own definitions of those grants, and abated otherwise nothing of her trans-Alleghany claims. Jefferson shortly after tried to improvise a temporary line to divide the region on which Virginia disputed with Penn- sylvania, but no line eould prevent existing settlers of one province becoming ocenpants of the other. Maryland, mean- while, had raised a question which was far-reaching. Congress on September 16, 1776, in decreeing grants of land for services in the army, put Maryland (being a province of definite west- ern bounds) to a disadvantage as compared with Virginia as well as with other States, whose original charters gave them a , western extension. So Maryland began that movement, in which in the sequel her persisteney acquired that trans-Alle- ghany domain jointly for all the States.
Virginia herself removed all complications that the existence of such an independent government as Transylvania could in- terpose by declaring private purchase from the Indians without validity, and by promptly throwing the protection of her laws over the whole region. So Transylvania vanished, when all Kentucky was set up, December 7, 1776, as a county of the Old Dominion.
Two years later, in accordance with the recommendations of a committee headed by George Mason, Virginia made the Tran- sylvania proprietors some recompense for legislating them out of existence, by making to them a grant of two hundred thousand acres, between the Ohio and the Greenbrier River. In accept- ing this the proprietors disavowed their Cherokee title. This
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KENTUCKY.
denial of autonomy to Transylvania was the beginning of a new life in the great forest-shaded country of Kentucky, where the limestone lay bedded below and the blue grass flourished above. Jefferson said that nothing could stay the tide of emigration. It was indeed not a little swelled by the timid and half-hearted in the patriot cause whom the war was turning away from old associations. Some northern Indians passing athwart the west- ward paths of these wayfarers were struck with the multitude of fresh tracks of man and beast. This emigrant march fol- lowed what was known as the Wilderness Road, - already re- ferred to, - which, passing Cumberland Gap, proceeded, by the route which Boone had marked out, in a northwesterly direction to the great gateway of the enticing level lands of Kentucky. These began in the neighborhood of Crab Orchard, just short by a score of miles of the site of Danville, first laid out in 1784. Its course is at present intertwined with the modern railway. Not far away was Crow's Station, just coming into prominence as a sort of political centre of these distant communities. This vicinity was in the southeastern angle of a tract of country, roughly square, of about a hundred miles on each side, of which the three remaining angles were at the falls of the Ohio (Louis- ville), at the most northern turn which that river makes some twenty miles below Cincinnati, and at Limestone, the present Maysville, three hundred miles below Pittsburg and one hundred from Wheeling. So this fertile tract, with three of its angles touching the encircling Ohio, and a fourth at its mountain-gate, included the territory watered by the Lieking and Kentucky rivers in their more level courses. These streams thridded a vast forest of broad-leaved trees, whose lofty trunks, unembar- rassed by undergrowth, supported a canopy of verdure beneath which the country was easily traversed. The entrance for the overland pioneers near Crab Orchard was also the exit for nearly all who were returning to the Virginia settlements. In this way the traveler avoided the laborious pull against the eur- rent of the Ohio, whether bound for Pittsburg, or taking the alternative route up the Kanawha and Greenbrier. From near Crab Orchard, the pioneers seeking settlement turned much in the same direction in which the railways cross the country to-day. The borderer descending by the Ohio, and landing at Limestone, followed along the outline of this squarish tract to
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SOUTH OF THE OHIO.
Crab Orchard, and so could pass south to the Tennessee coun- try, by what Evans and Gibson's map marked as " the only way passable with horses from the Ohio three or four hundred miles southward." The overland wanderer less often took this same route in reverse. Commonly he passed by another trail through Harrodsburg, and so crossed the Kentucky near Frank- fort, and went on to the mouth of the Licking, opposite the later Cincinnati. A lesser number, probably, passed by a south- westerly curve, within sight of the mountainous barrier in that direction, and came upon the Ohio at the site of the modern Louisville. It was complained, as respects this latter spot, that a few gentlemen " had engrossed all the lands at and near the falls of the Ohio," which with the sanguine was likely to be " the most considerable mart in this part of the world."
CHAPTER VII.
THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
1766-1777.
THE war, which in the end had wrested the valley of the St. Lawrence from the French, and, as it turned out, had made the English share the valley of the Mississippi with the Spaniards, had in its beginning put an end to all schemes for penetrating the country lying west of the Mississippi and beyond the sources of the St. Lawrence. There was still the same uncertainty that there had always been regarding the sources of both these great rivers. It had been a question, even, if they did not unite somewhere, just as the waters of Lake Michigan and the Illinois commingled in the spring freshets. At all events, their sourees might not be far apart. Wynne, in his General History of the British Empire in America (1770), rather slur- ringly mentions a pretense that the St. Lawrence " was derived from remote northwestern lakes, as yet unknown to Europeans."
To solve this question and the other antiquated notion that there was, not far from these neighboring springs, yet another fountain, whose waters flowed to the Pacific, was a dream that had puzzled a Connecticut Yankee who had been brooding over the speculations of Hennepin, La Hontan, and Charlevoix. This man, Jonathan Carver, now four-and-thirty years old, was harboring some rather lordly notions of the future of the Mis- sissippi. "As the seat of empire," he says, "from time inne- morial has been gradually progressive towards the West, there is no doubt but that, at some future period, mighty kingdoms will emerge from these wildernesses, and stately palaces and solemn temples supplant the Indian huts." In this frame of mind, and three years after the Peace of Paris, he had deter- mined to probe the great western mysteries. and started from Boston in June, 1766, on a quest for he hardly knew what. 11- riving at Mackinac, the westernmost of the English post -. he
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THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
secured some goods for presents to the Indians and, on Sep- tember 3, he proceeded by the Green Bay portage and, entering the Mississippi, turned north and, passing the Falls of St. Anthony, reached his northernmost point at the St. Francis River. When near the site of the modern city of St. Paul, he comprehended what he conceived to be the vantage-ground
JONATHAN CARVER. [From his Travels, London, 1781.]
of that pivotal region of the northern valley of the Mississippi, with its down-current access to the Gulf of Mexico, and by the Iberville River to Mobile and Pensacola. Looking to the east, he dreamed of a water-way, yet to be made practicable, through the lakes to New York. Towards the setting sun, an up-eurrent struggle along the Minnesota River might reveal some distant portage or centring water, whenee a deseending stream would carry the trader to the Pacifie on his way to China. At a later day, Carver's heirs elaimed that, as evidence of his confidence in the future of this spot, he had acquired from the Sioux a title
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JONATHAN CARVER.
to the site of St. Paul, but unquestionable evidence of any deed was never produced. The British held it to be a transaction in contravention of the proclamation of 1763, and later, the United States, succeeding to all rights, through the Committee on Public Lands reported adversely on the claim in 1823 to the Senate of the United States. It was Carver's notion that the continent was broadest on the parallel which went athwart this commanding region, about the mouth of the Minnesota, which was almost midway in the passage from sea to sea. Here was destined to be a seat of British power. One of his maps marks out a north and south belt, bounded by the Mississippi on the west and by the meridian of Detroit on the east, and stretch- ing from the Chickasaw country on the south to the Chippewas and Ottawas on the north. Within this area he pricks out the bound of eleven prospective colonies of English. On the east, the Ohio and other tributaries of the Great River opened the way for these prospective populations to the passes of the Alle- ghanies and the old colonies of the seaboard. Carver found the country north of the Illinois and as far as the Wisconsin little known to the traders, and charged the French with having deceived the English about it in their maps. Farther north, up to the Mille Lacs region and the springs of the Mississippi, he still found the French maps at variance with the Indian reports.
It was here at the north, within a radius of thirty miles or less, that Carver placed the great continental divide, and in the midst of the best of hunting countries, where the white man had not yet penetrated. From this point, he said, one could go east by streams that connect with Lake Superior and the water-ways leading to the Atlantic. One went north from Red Lake through Winnipeg and the Bourbon River to Hudson's Bay, making the passage to Europe through Davis's Strait, as has been advocated in our day.
Just south of these northern springs lay the White Bear Lake, with a passage from it open to the Gulf of Mexico. In either direction there was a route of not far from two thousand miles, as he calculated, to the salt sea. Speaking of the conti- guity of these sources, and referring to a belief, long current, of a common source for streams flowing to different seas, he says : " I perceived a visibly distinct separation in all of them, notwithstanding in some places they approached so near that
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THE FORTUNES OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
I could have stepped from one to the other." In one of his maps, close by this source of the Mississippi, Carver places a smaller lake, out of which flows the "Origan " River, - a name now first used, - which, becoming in its passage the great river of the west, - the ultimate Columbia, - debouches at last somewhat vaguely into the Pacific near the Straits of Anian, a supposable northwest passage, long known in speculations. This was to be the great western outlet of his manifold colonies of the Mississippi basin. This seaside spot was already pre- empted for the English, as he avers, by the discoveries of Sir Francis Drake, while to this distant west the trails of French fur-traders for nearly a century running from Prairie du Chien, near the mouth of the Wisconsin, had opened a land carriage in the same direction.
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