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In Colonial Days.
they interfere much more with the Indians, than if they pursued agriculture alone, and the Indian hunt- ers .... already begin to feel the scarcity this has oc- casioned, which greatly increases their resentment."*
Cresap's attack on the Indians brought on what is known as " Cresap's" or "Dunmore's War." Lord Dunmore had been transferred from the government of New York to that of Virginia and has been sus- pected of having brought on this conflict by his agent, Doctor John Connolly, in order to prevent the Virginians from taking up arms against the British ministry in the impending struggle for liberty. Two columns were to invade the Indian country. Lord Dunmore placed himself at the head of one, assembled at Fort Pitt, and dropping down the Ohio intended to meet the other, under General Andrew Lewis, coming from Lewisburg, in Greenbriar county, Vir- ginia, at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. Lord Dunmore, however, changed his plans, intending to land at the Big Hockhocking. In the meantime General Lewis fought the battle of Point Pleasant October 10, 1774, compelling the Indians to retreat, and then, contrary to Lord Dunmore's order, to make a halt at Salt Licks, + pressed on to Chillicothe, where he joined his superior officer. Here the Governor made a treaty with the Ohio Indians, who promised not to hunt south of the Ohio and not to molest voyagers on the river.
* N. Y. Col. Doc., VIII, 460.
+ Now Jackson, Ohio.
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The Ohio Valley in Colonial Days.
Settlements had been made before this time in the Muskingum valley. The Moravian community at Friedenshuetten, Pennsylvania, had gathered about them during the seven years of their labors there a number of Indian converts, but had also suffered much from persecution of their English neighbors. Cordially invited by the Delawares in 1772, to come to their country near the Muskingum, the Moravian settlers and their Indian friends had removed, and in their new homes among savages it seemed to them that their trials were ended .*
* Winsor, Narr. and Crit. Hist., VI, 734.
CHAPTER X.
SOUTH OF THE OHIO RIVER.
Reverend Hugh Jones, Chaplain to the Virginia Assembly and Minister at Jamestown, wrote in 1750: " If New England be called a receptacle of Dissent- ers and an Amsterdam of religion, Pennsylvania the nursery of Quakers, Maryland the retirement of Roman Catholics, North Carolina the refuge of Run- aways, etc." Yet this same North Carolina may be called an offshoot of Virginia, which our Reverend friend designates as the "happy retreat of true Britons and true Churchmen."
The truth is that North Carolina was originally settled by several shiploads of respectable English people coming from Barbadoes, who were followed by the French, Swiss and German Protestant fugi- tives from despotic Roman Catholic countries, and in 1745 by Scotch Jacobites, who found themselves en- dangered in their homes after the failure of their attempt to replace a Stuart on the throne of Eng- land. Runaways there were too, but they came from the "happy retreat" to which they had been trans- ported out of the slums and prisons of England. The result was necessarily and unavoidably, that we
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encounter "a marked absence of individuality in the history of North Carolina, and that she was sadly deficient in men of great abilities and commanding character, such as made Virginia illustrious."*
Another result was the absence of men belonging to the learned professions, for everybody was either planter or storekeeper, and in the western part of the Colony a hunter. When in the course of years these hunters had depleted the east side of the moun- tains of the animals, whose products were required for the purchase of the necessaries of life, they de- scended on the west side into the Ohio Valley. A map, spoken of in a previous chapter, tells us that one Walker had an establishment on the Cumberland river as early as 1750, and perhaps earlier. This Walker had been probably Doctor Walker, who about this time had crossed from Powell's Valley, in Virginia, over to Cumberland. Another mapt in- forms us that in 1755, this, most likely the first white, settlement in the southern intervales of the Ohio, had been destroyed. "A place called Kentucky," had become known about that time, for in May, 1753, Governor Hamilton, of Pennsylvania, wrote to Gov- ernor Clinton, of New York, of robberies committed upon English traders at that place by French In- dians. ¿
A nameless French author§ speaks of James Mc-
* H. C. Lodge, Short History of the English Colonies in America.
+ See Chapter II.
¿ N. Y. Council Minutes, MSS., XXXIII, 71.
§ Voyage au Kentoukey, etc., par M. ... , Paris, 1821.
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In Colonial Days.
Bride, who crossed the Ohio river with a party of friends in 1754, and near its mouth cut his name and the date of his arrival into an old lime-tree, still stand- ing when the writer came to the same place. His reports of the beautiful country seen were not be- lieved. Marshall treats this account of McBride as a tradition.
John Findlay or Finley, whose name is perpetuated in the counties of Hancock, Ohio, and of Alleghany, Pennsylvania, was one of a party of hunters who, driven to look for new hunting grounds, found them- selves upon the waters of the Kentucky river in 1767. " Of Finley and his comrades and of the course and extent of their journey little is known. That they were of the pure blood and endowed with the gen- uine qualities of the pioneers, is manifestly unde- niable. That they passed over the Cumberland and through the intermediate country to the Kentucky river and penetrated the beautiful valley of the Elk- horn, there are no sufficient reasons to doubt. It is enough, however, to embalm their memory in our hearts and to connect their names with the imperish- able memorials of our early history, that they were the first adventurers that plunged into the dark and enchanted wilderness of Kentucky,- that of all their cotemporaries they saw her first,- and saw her in the pride of her virgin beauty - at the dawn of summer - in the fullness of her vegetation - her soil instinct with fertility, covered with the most luxuriant ver- dure - the air perfumed with the fragrance of flowers
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and her tall forests looming in all their primeval magnificence. How long Finley lived or where he died, the silence of history does not enable us to know. That his remains are now mingled with the soil that he discovered, there is some reason to hope, for he conducted Boone to Kentucky in 1769 - and there the curtain drops on him forever."*
The country beyond the Cumberland mountains " appeared in 1767 to the dusky view of the gener- ality of the people of Virginia almost as obscure and doubtful as America itself to the people of Eu- rope before the voyage of Columbus. A country there was ; of this none could doubt, who thought at all; but whether land or water, mountain or plain, fertility or barrenness preponderated ; whether inhab- ited by men or beasts, or both, or neither, they knew not. If inhabited by men, they were supposed to be Indians; for such had always infested the frontiers. And this had been a powerful reason for not exploring the region west of the great mountain, which con- cealed Kentucky from their sight."+
If Judge Marshall is right in thus describing the reasons for not exploring a region, we must, in com- paring this pusillanimity of the colonial English with the intrepidity shown by colonial Frenchmen, cer- tainly wonder, that the former could drive the latter from this Continent.
Daniel Boone's family had moved from Berks
* Address of Governor Morehead at Boonesborough, Ky., May 25, 1840. + H. Marshall, History of Kentucky, I, 7.
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In Colonial Days.
county, Pennsylvania, to North Carolina, where they settled on the Yadkin river in 1753, and soon after their arrival there Daniel married, having provided a hut for his young wife in a solitary part of the Yadkin valley, where no neighbor could crowd him. But his solitude was soon disturbed by other settlers and he decided to move, if possible, to a wild and unex- plored region beyond the neighboring mountains, of which he heard strange stories .*
The white settlers around his cabin in the Yadkin valley began to increase and they added thereby to Boone's desire to move. Perhaps other things helped this determination to leave the frontier and plunge into the wilderness. Taxes, fees and costs were the necessary following of increased population and Boone was not inclined to fill the pockets of the officials, who were benefited by them. At this juncture Boone fell in with Finley, returned from his excursion to the west, and his heart and imagination were soon ablaze
* A modern writer relates of an expedition, which Daniel Boone appears to have undertaken about this time and says, that there is still standing on the bank of Boone's creek - a branch of the Watauga river - not far from Jonesboro, East Tennessee, a large beech tree, with the following inscription : D. Boon CillED A. BAR On
Tree
in yEAR
ThE
1760.
(Edmund Kirke, Rearguard of the Revolution following Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee.) The distance from Boone's settlement in the Yadkin valley to the above Boone's creek could not have been more than perhaps 200 miles. We may, therefore, consider that the occasion, on which Boone cut the inscription into the tree, was not an exploring, but only a somewhat ex- tended hunting excursion, such as the exigencies of their life often required the professional huntsmen to take.
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with the wild and romantic stories of the traveler. Boone had seen a little of this enchanted region, when in 1764 he had been sent on a tour of inspec- tion to a branch of the Cumberland river by a com- pany of land speculators. Now Finley and Boone set to work to form a new expeditionary party, but they did not succeed in recruiting the desired number until early in 1769. Boone tells the story of this expedition as follows :* "It was on the first of May, 1769, that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time and left my family and peaceful habitation on the Yadkin river, in North Carolina, to wander through the wilderness of America, in quest of the country of Kentucky, in company with John Finley, John Stewart, Joseph Holden, James Monay and William Cool. We proceeded successfully and after a long and fatiguing journey through a mountainous wilderness, in a westward direction, on the seventh day of June following, we found ourselves on Red river,t where John Finley had formerly been trading
* W. H. Bogart, in his " Daniel Boone," says of this narrative by John Filson: John Filson, who claimed to have been an early witness of the set- tlement of Kentucky, wrote, ostensibly from Boone's dictation, a life of the great Pioneer, but its style of language is so ornate and ambitious, as greatly to lessen its value. Evidently Filson received the leading facts from Boone and disdaining the simple words of the Pioneer, preferred the use of a dic- tion far beyond good taste or probability. Junlay, the editor of the book, calls it, curiously, "a narrative, written in a style of the utmost simplicity, by .... one of the hunters, who first penetrated into the bosom of that delectable region."
+ Either the tributary of the Cumberland river flowing through Robertson and Montgomery counties, Tennessee, or a small tributary of the Kentucky river, rising in Morgan county and flowing between Clark and Estill counties, Kentucky. Probably the latter.
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In Colonial Days.
with the Indians and from the top of an eminence saw with pleasure the beautiful level of Kentucky ...* At this place we encamped and made a shelter to defend us from the inclement season and began to hunt and reconnoiter the country. We found every- where abundance of wild beasts of all sorts, through this vast forest. The buffalo were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements. . . * In
this forest .... we practiced hunting with great suc- cess until the 22d day of December following. This day John Stewart and I had a pleasant ramble ; but fortune changed the scene in the close of it. We had passed through a great forest, on which stood myriads of trees, some gay with blossoms, others rich with fruits .... + In the decline of the day, near Kentucky river, as we ascended the brow of a small hill, a number of Indians rushed out of a thick cane- brake and made us prisoners."
After having been plundered and carried about as captives for a while, the two hunters managed to escape, but they found their camp on the Red river deserted and plundered. " About this time," con- tinues Boone, "my brother, Squire Boone, with an- other adventurer, who came to explore the country shortly after us, was wandering thro' the forest, deter- mined to find me if possible and accidentally found our camp. Soon after this my companion in
* General reflections in ornate language are omitted.
+ Neither Boone nor his biographer seem to have thought of the contra- diction - of blossoms and fruits on the trees in December.
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captivity, John Stewart, was killed by the Savages and the man that came with my brother returned home by himself. We were then in a dangerous, helpless situation, exposed daily to perils and death amongst the savages and wild beasts - not a white man in the country but ourselves. ... We continued not in a state of indolence, but hunted every day and prepared a little cottage to defend us from the winter storms. We remained there undisturbed through the winter. On the first day of May, 1770, my brother returned home to the settlement by himself, for a new recruit of horses and ammunition, leaving me by myself without bread, salt or sugar, without company of my fellow creatures or even a horse or dog."
Boone and his companions were, to a certain extent, trespassers. The territory, to which their expedition had extended, had originally belonged to the Chero- kees, who had been subjugated by the Six Nations of New York. But the claim of the Cherokees to this region had never been substantiated and hence the title of the Six Nations to it, which they had ceded to the British Crown by the treaty of Fort Stanwix* in 1768, was a very vague one. However, Boone and his party only anticipated for a short time, what they perhaps knew must come in the course of events. A treaty made at Lochaber, in South Caro- lina, October 5, 1770, extinguished the Indian claim completely.
* Now Rome, New York.
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In Colonial Days.
We can only briefly follow Boone's adventures ; how he and his brother, after thoroughly exploring the country, determined to settle in it; how, in Sep- tember, 1773, they started with their families from their homes in North Carolina ; how, after joining company with a party of forty odd people, near Powell's valley, bent on like removal, he had the misfortune to lose his eldest son in an Indian fight, and how, after this sad affair, in which five other men were killed, the disheartened majority of the party, after a council on Walden's mountain, compelled a return to the Clinch river in Virginia, where they made a welcome addition to an older settlement. The " place, called Kentucky" had, in the mean- time, become more extensively known. In 1771, a hunting company, which acquired fame under the name of the "Long Hunters," and consisted of Casper Mauser, James Knox, John Montgomery, Isaac Bledsoe and others, had gone on such a long and extensive hunt that we might be inclined to think they had been as far as the Mississippi and back. Their reports led the Assembly of Virginia to reward her soldiers, who had helped to drive the French from the Ohio Valley, with allotments of lands on the Kentucky river. Governor Dunmore, of Vir- ginia, knowing that Daniel Boone had demonstrated by his own experiences, that this was a country where people could live, sent surveyors into the regions to give some form and shape to the donations made in so liberal a manner by the Assembly. Captain
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The Ohio Valley
Thomas Bullitt, an officer who had seen and done good service in the expedition against Fort du Quesne, was placed in charge of a party of survey- ors, Taylor, Harrod and McAfee, and penetrated through the wilderness, as far as the Falls of the Ohio. Here they made the fortified head-quarters for their operations and thus laid, unwittingly, the foundation for the present city of Louisville, Ken- tucky. Sir W. Johnson complained in September, 1773, that Bullitt and a large number of people had gone beyond the limits of the new purchase and that Shawanoes were excited over it and treating with the Spaniards. Other surveyors followed. James Douglas, intending to join Captain Bullitt, explored the country about Big bone Lick creek. He saw " the lick and the large bones, of which fame had said so much, the learned risked so many conjectures, and everybody knew so little."* He revisited Ken- tucky the next year, exploring the country on Elk- horn, Hickman and Jessamine creeks, and became so enamored of the country, that he intended to settle there. But death, interfering in so many human plans, said "No."
Handcock Taylor, perhaps one of the original party, was killed by Indians in the execution of his duties, but his field notes were secured by his assist- ant, Hamptonstall, and later legalized by act of Legislature. In May, 1774, Captain James Harrod, at the head of a party of forty-one men, in descend-
* Marshall, History of Kentucky.
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In Colonial Days.
ing the Monongahela and the Ohio, reached the site of the present Harrodsburgh, or as first called, Har- rodstown or Old Town, which he laid out in lots of munificent size. They were the first white men who raised a crop of corn on Kentucky soil. John Floyd, " a deputy surveyor of Fincastle county,"* was en- gaged in this business also in 1774, and could in later years play an important rôle, as civil and as military officer, in the new territory. He made his station on the Bear Grass creek, some ten miles from the falls of the Ohio, and settled there. Doctor Wood's inten- tion in 1773 to descend the Ohio in quest of a new country and rich land, came to the knowledge of Simon Kenton, a young man of Fauquier county. For justifiable reasons he changed his name to Butler and joined Doctor Wood, with whom he went as far as Cabin creek, "making various improvements on the bottoms."+ Two years later Butler went down the Ohio again as far as the present site of Augusta, Bracken county, Kentucky, and striking inland made a settlement near the present town of Washington, Mason county.
Another pioneer of these days was William Whit- ley, also a Virginian. Hearing the reports of the marvelous country, Kentucky, he decided to have a look at it with a view of settling there. He set out with his brother-in-law, George Clark, and seven others, and found what he and his companions desired in the south-eastern section of Kentucky.
* Marshall, History of Kentucky; Botetourt county is probably meant. + Ib.
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Lord Dunmore, Governor of New York, later of Virginia, had, in 1770, considered the scheme of estab- lishing a Colony on the Ohio as impracticable. All the men, who were supposed to have any knowledge of such affairs and whom he consulted, concurred in a condemnation of such a project, giving as their reasons for doing so the great distances from the set- tled parts, an impossibility to establish commercial communications. "Such Colony must therefore be their own Manufacturers," he continues,* "and the great expense of maintaining Troops there for their protection be a dead weight on Govern without the hopes of reaping any advantage hereafter. , Add
to this the great probability, I may venture to say with certainty, that the attempting a settlement on the Ohio will draw on an Indian war ; it being well known how ill affected the Ohio Indians have always been to our interest and their jealousy of such a settlement, so near them, must be easily foreseen."
Lord Dunmore was not wrong in his anticipations. In the beginning of the following year, 1771, Sir William Johnson had to report that the Northern and Southern Indians were negotiating for a closer union between them to prevent further encroachments by the white intruders. " If a very small part of these people have been capable of reducing us to such straits as we were in a few years since, what may we not expect from such a formidable alliance as we are threatened with, when at the same time it is well
* Marshall, History of Kentucky, 253.
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In Colonial Days.
known, that we are not at this time more capable of Defence, if so much, as at the former period."*
Neither Sir William Johnson nor Lord Dunmore's warnings against pushing settlements to the west- ward were heeded by the home authorities in Eng- land. A grant of land was made in 1772 to Thomas Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, John Sargent and Samuel Wharton, the representatives of a land com- pany. This company offered to pay £10,460, the sum paid to the Six Nations for the land purchased from them at the Fort Stanwix treaty, and desired to receive therefor the title of a tract "beginning on the South Side of the River Ohio opposite to the mouth of Sioto, thence southerly through the pass in the Quasioto Mountains, to the South side of the said mountains, thence along the side of the said Mountains North Easterly to the Fork of the Great Kenhawa, made by the junction of Green Briar and new River, thence along the said Green Briar on the Easterly side of the same unto the Head or termi- nation of the North Easterly branch thereof, thence Easterly to the Allegheny mountains, thence along the said Allegheny mountains to Lord Fairfax's Line, thence along the same to the Spring head of the North Branch of the River Powtomack, thence along the Western Boundary Line of the Province of Maryland to the Southern Boundary Line of the Province of Pennsylvania to the End thereof, thence along the Western Boundary Line of the said prov-
* Marshall, History of Kentucky, 262.
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ince of Pennsylvania until the same shall strike the River Ohio, Thence down the said River Ohio to the place of beginning. " A glance at the map will show that this tract covered most of the present State of West Virginia and a small part of Eastern Kentucky. The lands granted had already partly been settled and were not " beyond the reach of ad- vantageous intercourse." The above warning was written while Lord Dunmore was still Governor of New York. As Governor of Virginia he visited the back settlements and remained some time at Pitts- burgh, engaged in a territorial dispute between Vir- ginia and Pennsylvania. He is accused of having excited the Indian war, which devastated the western settlements in 1774, with a view of distracting the councils of the patriots of those days. This conflict ended by the battle of Point Pleasant, above the mouth of the Great Kanhawa, on the 10th of October, 1774.
A letter from Sir William Johnson to Governor Tryon, of New York, speaking of the Indian situa- tion, says in 1774 :+ "The disorderly behaviour of the Frontier Inhabitants will confirm the Indians in their suspicions against us. . . For more than ten years past the most dissolute fellows united with debtors and persons of a wandering disposition have been removing from Pennsylvania, Virginia, etc., into the Indian Country, towards and on the Ohio and a
* N. Y. Coll. MSS., XCVIII, 127.
+ N. Y. Col. Hist., VIII, 460.
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In Colonial Days.
considerable number of settlements were made as early as 1765 .* The Cession to the Crown at the Treaty of 1768 was secured by the plainest and best natural boundaries and the Indians freely agreed to make it the more ample that our people should have no pretext of narrow limits and the remainder might be rendered the more secure to themselves and their posterity ; neither did they expect that we should push settlements immediately over the whole of their cession and His Majesty with great wisdom and dis- cretion was pleased to direct that none should be now made below the Great Kanhawa River, with which I acquainted the Indians agreeable to my orders, but number of settlements had been made there previous to the cession, attempts made since to form others on the Mississippi and great numbers in defiance of the cession or the orders of Government in conse- quence thereof have since removed not only below the Kanhawa, but even far beyond the limits of the
Cession . . ..; the body of these people are under no restraint, they perceive that they are in places of secu- rity and pay as little regard to Government, as they do to title for their possessions, whilst at the same time not only individuals but bodies of men are inter- ested in the growth of these settlements, however in- jurious to the old colonies and dangerous to all ; but till better order is restored elsewhere, little can be expected in that quarter & in the interim these set- tlements increase and what is much worse the disor-
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