USA > North Carolina > Watauga County > A history of Watauga County, North Carolina. With sketches of prominent families > Part 2
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A History of Watauga County
the first call to battle it was ready. Not only did the men do the manual labor, but, as time went on, the most capable of them became overseers in the various departments, until finally all the directors of this great estate, excepting a few of the highest officials, were drawn from the ranks of the people, who proved themselves so trustworthy and capable that in all these years only three or four of Biltmore's mountaineer employees have had to be dismissed for inefficiency or bad conduct."
Won the Revolution and Saved the Union .- Like Tenny- son's "foolish yeoman," we have been "too proud to care from whence we came," and it is a singular fact that in spite of all that has been written against us, no Southern mountaineer has taken the trouble to answer our detractors. And, when it is said that we have no annals, Mr. Kephart merely means that we have not written them, for he proceeds to prove that we have annals of the highest order. He credits the mountaineer with having been the principal force which drove the Indians from the Alleghany border (p. 151) and formed the rear-guard of the Revolution and the vanguard in the conquest of the West. He says: "Then came the Revolution. The backwoodsmen were loyal to the American government-loyal to a man. They not only fought off the Indians from the rear, but sent many of their incomparable riflemen to fight at the front as well. They were the first English-speaking people to use weapons of precision- the rifle, introduced by the Pennsylvania Dutch about 1700, which was used by our backwoodsmen exclusively throughout the war. They were the first to employ open-order formation in civilized warfare. They were the first outside colonists to assist their New England brethren at the siege of Boston . . They
were mustered in as the first regiment of the Continental Army (being the first troops enrolled by our Congress and the first to serve under a Federal banner). They carried the day at Saratoga, the Cowpens and King's Mountain. From the begin- ning to the end of the war, they were Washington's favorite troops." As to the Civil War, he says (p. 374) : "The Con- federates thought that they could throw a line of troops from Wheeling to the Lakes, and Captain Garnett, a West Point
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A History of Watauga County
graduate, started, but got no further than Harper's Ferry, when mountain men shot from ambush, cut down bridges, and killed Garnett with a bullet from a squirrel rifle at Harper's Ferry. Then the South began to realize what a long, lean, powerful arm of the Union it was that the Southern mountaineer stretched through its very vitals, for that arm helped to hold Kentucky in the Union, kept East Tennessee from aiding the Confederacy and caused West Virginia to secede from Seces- sion !" There was no Breed's Hill nor Bull Run panic among them in the Revolution or in the Civil War period! Has New England, which has a superabundance of annals, any that will compare with these? And yet, it took an outsider to tell us of them !
Not the Poor Whites of the South .- According to Kephart (p. 356), the poor whites of the South descended mainly from the convicts and indentured servants which England supplied to the Southern plantations before the days of slavery. The cavaliers who founded and dominated Southern society came from the conservative, the feudal element of England. "Their character and training were essentially aristocratic and military. They were not town dwellers, but masters of plantations These servants were obtained from convicted criminals, boys and girls kidnapped from the slums, impoverished people who sold their services for passage to America (p. 357). It was when the laboring classes of Europe had achieved emancipation from serfdom and feudalism was overthrown, that African slavery laid the foundation for a new feudalism in the Southern States. Its effect upon white labor was to free them from their thraldom ; but being unskilled and untrained, densely ignorant, and from a more or less degraded stock, these shiftless people generally became squatters on the pine barrens, and gradually sank lower in the scale till the slaves themselves were freed by the Civil War. There was then and still is plenty of wild land in the lowlands and they had neither the initiative nor the courage to seek a promised land far away among the unexplored and savage peaks of the western country."
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McKamie Wiseman's View .- This shrewd old mountaineer of Avery County, who is a wise man not only by name, but by nature also, had the true idea of the settlement of these moun- tains. He said that as population drifted westward from the Atlantic and downwards from western Virginia and Pennsyl- vania between the mountain troughs, the game was driven into the intervening mountains, and that only the bravest and the hardiest of the frontiersmen of the borders followed it and re- mained after it had been exterminated. Tradition and early documents bear out this view, the first settlers of the mountains having been almost without exception the men who lived on the mountain-tops, at the heads of creeks and in out-of-the-way places generally, disdaining the fertile bottom lands of the larger streams, preferring the most inaccessible places, because of the proximity to them of the game. Others, with more money and less daring, got the meadows and fertile valleys for agriculture, while the true pioneers dwelt afar in trackless mountains, in hunting camps and caverns, from which they watched their traps and hunted deer, bear and turkeys. The shiftless and dis- heartened poor whites would soon have perished in this wilder- ness, but the hunters waxed stronger and braver, and their descendants still people the mountain regions of the South. And he thought, also, that many came down from the New Eng- land States because of the religious unrest and dissensions which marked the earlier history of that region, and came where men might worship God in their own way, whether that way were the way of Puritan or Baptist. To use his words, "It was freedom that they were seeking, and it was freedom that they found in these unpeopled mountains." Kephart puts it in another form only when he says (p. 307), "The nature of the mountaineer de- mands that he have solitude for the unhampered growth of his personality, wing-room for his eagle heart." As another said of the Argonauts, "The cowards never started, and the weaklings died on the way." Mr. Wiseman died in July, 1915.
No Festering Warrens for Them .- Mr. Kephart also tells us (p. 309) that "our highlanders have neither memory nor tradi- tion of ever having been herded together, lorded over, perse-
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A History of Watauga County
cuted or denied the privileges of free men," and that, "although life has been one long, hard, cruel war against elemental powers, nothing else than warlike arts, nothing short of warlike hazards could have subdued the beasts and savages, felled the forests and made our land habitable for those teeming millions who can exist only in a state of mutual dependence and cultivation." And, more marvelous still, he adds, "By compulsion their self-reliance was more complete; hence, their independence grew more haughty, their individualism more intense. And these traits, exaggerated as they were by the force of environment, remain unweakened among their descendants to the present day."
Co-operation Has Ceased .- In the early time, co-operation was the watchword of the day. Neighbor helped neighbor, freely, gladly and enthusiastically. But, according to Kephart, all this has ceased, and we have become non-sociable, with each man fighting for his own hand, recognizing no social compact. Each is suspicious of the other. "They will not work together zealously, even to improve their neighborhood roads, each mis- trusting that the other may gain some trifling advantage over himself, or turn fewer shovelfuls of earth. Labor chiefs fail to organize granges or unions among them because they simply will not stick together . ." He quotes a Miss Mills as say- ing, "The mountaineers must awake to a consciousness of them- selves as a people." Including all the Southern highlanders, we constitute a distinct ethnic group of close on to four million souls, and with needs and problems identical. The population is almost absolutely unmixed, and completely segregated from each other (p. 311). The one redeeming feature is a passionate attachment for home and family, a survival of the old feudal idea, while the hived and promiscuous life in cities is breaking down the old fealty of kith and kin (p. 312). "My family, right or wrong" is said to be our slogan, and it is claimed that this is but the persistence of the old clan fealty to the chief and the clansmen.
Moonshining an Inheritance ?- Kephart seems to have made a study of blockading and moonshining, and to have reached the conclusion that they are really an inheritance, coming down to
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us from our Scotch and Irish ancestors, who resented the English excise law of 1659, which struck at the national drink of the Scotch and Irish, while the English themselves were then con- tent to drink ale. Our forebears killed the gaugers in sparsely settled regions, while the better-to-do people of the towns bribed them. Thus the Scotch-Irish, settled by James I in the north of Ireland, to replace the dispossessed native Hibernians, learned to make whiskey in little stills over peat fires on their hearths, call- ing it poteen, from the fact that it was made in little pots. Finally, these Scotch-Irish fell out with the British government and emigrated, for the most part, to western Pennsylvania, where they brought with them an undying hatred of the excise laws. When, therefore, after they had helped to establish a stable gov- ernment, an excise law was adopted by Congress, these Scotch- Irish were the very first to rebel. And it was to George Washington himself that the task fell of suppressing their re- sistance to the United States !
The Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion .- Owing to bad roads and the want of markets, there was no currency away from the seaboard. But, condensed into distilled spirits, a ready sale and easy transportation were found for the product of the grain of the mountaineers. For they could carry many gallons on a single horse or in a single wagon and get a fair price from people living where money circulated. When, therefore, they were required to pay a heavy tax on their product, they rebelled. When the Federal excisemen went among them, they blackened themselves and tarred and feathered these intruders on their rights. These "revenuers" then resigned, but were replaced by others. If a mountaineer took out a license, a gang of whiskey boys smashed his still and inflicted bodily punishment on him. All attempts to serve warrants resulted in an up-rising of the people, and, on July 16, 1794, a company of mountain militia marched to the house of General Neville, in command of the excise forces, and he fired on them, wounding five and killing one. The next day a regiment of 500 mountain men, led by Tom the Tinker, burned Neville's house and forced him to flee, one of his guard of United States soldiers being killed and sev-
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A History of Watauga County
eral wounded. On August 1, 1794, 2,000 armed mountain men met at the historic Braddock Field, and marched on Pittsburg, then a village. A committee of Pittsburg citizens met them. The mob of 5,400 men were then taken into town and treated to strong drink, after which they dispersed. The Governor of Pennsylvania refused to interfere, and Washington called for 15,000 militia to quell the insurrection. He also appointed com- missioners to induce the people to submit peacefully. Eighteen ring-leaders were arrested and the rest dispersed. Two of the leaders were convicted, but were afterwards pardoned. Even a secession movement was imminent, but as Jefferson soon became President, the excise law was repealed and peace restored. There was no other excise tax till 1812, when it was renewed, only to be repealed in 1817. From this time till 1862 there was no tax, and after that time it was only twenty cents a gallon. In 1864 it was raised to sixty cents a gallon and later in that year to $1.50, to be followed in 1865 by $2.00 a gallon. The result was again what it had been in Great Britain-fraud around the cen- ters of population and resistance in the mountains, the current price of distilled spirits even in the North being less than the tax. In 1868 the tax was reduced to fifty cents, and illicit stilling prac- tically ceased, the government collecting during the second year of the existence of this reduced tax three dollars for every one that had been collected before (p. 163). Since then every in- crease has resulted in moonshining in the mountains and graft in the cities. The whiskey frauds of Grant's administration in- vaded the very cabinet itself. So it seems the spirit of resistance makes moonshiners of us all, just as Shakespeare said that con- science makes cowards of us all.
CHAPTER II. Forerunners of Watauga.
Likeness of the Indians to the Hebrews .- The following has been condensed from the Literary Digest for September 21, 1912, page 472: "William Penn saw a striking likeness between the Jews of London and the American Indians. Some claim that the stories of the Old Testament are legends in some Indian tribes. In the Jewish Encyclopedia it is said that the Hebrews, after the captivity, separated themselves from the heathen in order to observe their peculiar laws; and Manasseh Ben Israel claims that America and India were once joined, at Bering Strait, by a peninsula, over which these Hebrews came to America. All Indian legends affirm that they came from the northwest. When first visited by Europeans, Indians were very religious, worship- ping one Great Spirit, but never bowing down to idols. Their name for the deity was Ale, the old Hebrew name for God. In their dances they said 'Hallelujah' distinctly. They had annual festivals, performed morning and evening sacrifices, offered their first fruits to God, practiced circumcision, and there were 'cities of refuge,' to which offenders might fly and be safe; they reck- oned time as did the Hebrews, similar superstitions mark their burial places 'and the same creeds were the rule of their lives, both as to the present and the future.' They had chief-ruled tribes, and forms of government almost identical with those of the Hebrews. Each tribe had a totem, usually some animal, as had the Israelites, and this explains why, in the blessing of Jacob upon his sons, Judah is surnamed a lion, Dan a serpent, Ben- jamin a wolf, and Joseph a bough." There are also resemblances in their languages to the Latin and Greek tongues, Chickamauga meaning the field of death, and Aquone the sound of water.
A Study in Ethnology and Philology .- We have seen that the legends show that the Indians came from the northwest. It must be remembered, however, that although they were of one
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color, they were of different tribes and spoke different tongues or dialects. There is not a labial in the entire Cherokee lan- guage, while the speech of the Choctaws, Creeks, Tuscaroras, Algonquins and many other tribes is full of them. They were nomads, wandering from place to place. The Cherokees were admittedly the most advanced of the Indians since the Spaniards decimated the Incas and Aztecs. They were certainly the most warlike. The name "Cherokee" has, however, no significance in their language, as they call themselves the Ani-Kituhwagi and the Yunwiga, or real people. This is likewise true of most of the names of streams and mountains which bear, according to popular belief, Indian names; for in the glossary, given in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1897, Part I, James Mooney, its author, shows that their meaning has been lost, if, indeed, they ever had a meaning in the Indian tongue. A glance through that collection of Cherokee words will dispel many a poetic idea of the significance of such words as Watauga, Swannanoa, Yonahlossee and others as mellifluous. How came this about? He offers no theory. But Martin V. Moore, who once did business in Boone, has published a small volume, "The Rhyme of Southern Rivers,"1 in which he makes it appear that most, if not all, of these names of streams and mountains have their roots in the languages of Europe and Asia. He cites an instance when an Indian was asked whether the Catawba tribe took their name from the Catawba River or the river from the tribe? The Indian answered by asking, "Which was here first?" If it was possible for one European or Asiatic tribe or clan to cross into America before Bering Strait divided the two continents, it was possible for many to have crossed also. If one tribe or clan spoke one tongue, other tribes which crossed probably spoke different languages. Thus, America might have become peopled with representatives of many peoples, each speak- ing a different dialect, and thus giving different names to the several streams and mountains along and among which they for a time abided. If this be so, it is easy to believe that the root or
1 This was originally published in Harper's Monthly for February, 1883, but without its introductory. It was published in complete form by M. E. Church, South, Pub. Co., Nashville, Tenn., 1897.
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A History of Watauga County
origin of many so-called Indian words can be found in the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Persian, African, Chinese and Japanese lan- guages. That many names of Southern rivers show such possi- bilities is made plain by this little volume.
"The Other Way About," as the English say, would make it possible that these Appalachian mountains being the oldest land in the world-older far than that of the Nile, the Euphrates and the Jordan-were really the birth-place and cradle of the ances- tors of the polyglot races which now people Europe and Asia ; for, if it was possible for people to come to America from those countries, it was equally possible for people to go from America there. So that, instead of being the New World, America is really the Old World. But, to the proofs : ยท
Words Derived from the Hebrews .- According to Mr. Moore, "te" or "de" in Hebrew means "deep." In its oldest form in Hebrew, it is "te-am," or "te-ho-ma," meaning deep waters- "am" or "homa" denoting waters. "Perpetuity" in Hebrew was denoted by "na." "The fact is illustrated," to quote Mr. Moore's words, "in the Hebrew name 'ama-na'-the river known in Isaiah," lviii, v. II (p. 99). Chota, the City of Refuge, as it is called in Cherokee, "was governed by the same laws as those which obtained among the Jewish nations of antiquity" (p. 89).
Telico, Jellico and Jerico (p. 44) are cognate words, and Pocataligo was the title of the river of that name in South Caro- lina, "long famed as one of the cities of refuge among the aborigines." Likewise, he shows that "toah" or "toe" is from the Hebrew "neph-toah," "the name of a water noted in Jewish history" (p. 29).
Latin, Manchu and Persian .- "The root word of the Missis- sippi River is traced to the Latin words 'meto' and 'messis,' whence come our words 'meter' and 'measure,' denoting in the original sense a gathering together, tersely characteristic of a stream which gathers to itself the waters of so many different lands" (p. 77). He also traces the root word of "saluda" to the Latin "salio" to leap (p. 41) or a "stream springing out of high places." In "unaka," the name of the mountains south of the Little Tennessee River, unquestionably "a native Indian word,"
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he finds a marked likeness to the Latin "unus," "unica" and our English equivalent "unique" (p. 92). "Watauga" has the Latin root "aqua," meaning water. Then, too, "esta" or "aesta," in Latin, refers to summer months, or leisure time, which, com- bined with the Hebrew "toah" or "toe," makes up our "Estatoe" river (p. 29). "Esseeola" is given as the native name of the river now called Linville, "ola" being from the Manchu dialect word "ou-li," meaning river; and if Miss Morley is right in thinking that it was named for the linden trees on its banks, one cannot help wondering if "esse," in Manchu, means linden! Mr. Moore thinks "catawba" is from the Persian root "au-ba" or "aub," of which the California writing is Yuba, meaning cat- fish, which is certainly characteristic of our Carolina stream of that name. He also calls attention to the fact that neither the Cherokees nor the Japanese use the letter "r" in their dialects ; and that the old Romans used "1" and "r" interchangeably, just as do the Cherokees (p. 50).
First Settlers of Watauga .- The Cherokee Indians were the first settlers of this county, but there is no record that white men ever came into actual contact with them in what is now Watauga county. Boone does not seem to have encountered any on his trip in 1769 until he reached Kentucky. Neither did Bishop Spangenburg on his trip in 1752. James Robertson saw none on his first trip to the Watauga Settlement in 1769, nor in 1770, when he brought his family with him to the new settlement on the Watauga River. Indeed, Virginia had concluded a treaty with the Cherokees in 1772 fixing the top of the Blue Ridge as the eastern boundary, and a line running due west from the White Top mountain (where North Carolina, Virginia and Ten- nessee join), and the general impression then was that this line included the Watauga Settlement near what is now Jonesboro, Tenn. But in 1771 Anthony Bledsoe extended the Virginia line far enough west to satisfy himself that the Watauga Settlement was not in Virginia territory, and, therefore, not within the treaty limits of 1772. This fact caused those settlers to lease for eight years all the country on the waters of the Watauga River. On March 19, 1775, the Watauga settlers bought in fee
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simple all the land on the waters of the Watauga, Holston and New Rivers. The western boundary of this tract ran from six miles above Long Island of the Holston, south, to the dividing ridge between the Watauga and the Toe rivers, thence in a south- easterly direction to the Blue Ridge, thence along the Blue Ridge to the Virginia line. This embraced the whole of Watauga, Ashe and Alleghany counties. So that, from 1775 on, the Indians had no right to be in this territory, and, although Wheeler tells us that Ashe was partially settled as early as 1755 by white people- principally hunters-there is nothing to tell us that the Indians ever lived here except arrow heads, broken bits of pottery and so forth. 2
The Cherokees Kept Faith .- Up to the commencement of the Revolutionary War there is no evidence that the Cherokees lived north of the dividing ridge between the Toe and Watauga clear up to the Virginia line. Thus, whether the lease and deed to the Watauga settlers near Jonesboro were legal or not, the untutored savage stood manfully to this agreement. It is true that war parties were sent through this territory to make trouble for the settlers east of the Blue Ridge, but they had no abiding place west of that divide. Bishop Spangenberg was here in December, 1752, but he saw no Indians, though speaking of an "old Indian field." There is a tradition in the settlement near Linville Falls and Pisgah Church (Altamont), now in Avery County, that William White was the first settler in that locality whose name is now remembered and lived where Melvin C. Bickerstaff now resides, but that another had preceded him at that place, and that while hunting one day he saw from a ridge a party of Indians kill two white men who were "lying out" in that locality in order to escape service in the Revolutionary War, and trample their bodies beyond sight in a mud-hole which then stood near the present residence of Rev. W. C. Franklin. This settler did not reveal himself to the Indians, but, hastening to his own cabin half a mile away, escaped with his wife and child to Fort Crider (which, in 1780, Dr. Draper tells us, p. 185, note, was situated on "a small eminence within the present limits of
2 Rev. W. R. Savage, of Blowing Rock, and W. S. Farthing, of Beaver Dams, have large collections of Indian relics.
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Lenoir"), after having been forced to eat while on the journey through the rough mountains the small pet dog which followed them. There is also another tradition that the American forces followed a party of marauding Cherokees to the rock cliff just above Pisgah Church in that locality, but retreated because the savages were too strong for them. These, however, are the only traditions diligent enquiry has revealed. There is, however, other evidence of forays across the Blue Ridge by Cherokees from their towns on the Little Tennessee.
Some Old Forts .- According to Archibald D. Murphey (Murphey Papers, Vol. II, pp. 385, 386), "there was a chain of forts from Black Water of Smith's River in Rockingham near to the Long Island of Holston: I, the fort at Bethabara; 2, Fort Waddell at the Forks of the Yadkin; 3, Fort Dobbs on the Catawba; 4, Fort Chisholm on New River, and 5, Fort Stalnaker near the Crab Orchard." Just where the fort on New River was located it is now difficult to determine, though it was probably at Old Field or Three Forks, as they were on the road from Wilkes- borough to Long Island in the Holston. The Crab Orchard was most likely two miles west of what is now called Roan Moun- tain, just in the edge of Tennessee. It is now only a flag station, however, the Gen. John Winder road from Roan Mountain station through Carver's gap, three miles southeast of the gap of the Yellow, starting from the latter station to the top of the Roan mountain, where, during the eighties, hundreds of visitors spent the "hay fever months" in comfort. The immense hotel there has been abandoned now, however, and the doors and windows are being carried away every day by marauders, the caretaker having left in 1914.
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