USA > Tennessee > History of Tennessee the making of a state > Part 2
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It appears to have been the history of those times that each successful Indian war brought the vietors - the whites were always successful - an accession of population as well as of dignity and honor. The peace which followed
1 For an interesting account of this event by I. Christe, an eye- witness, see Nashville Politician, 15th September, 1847.
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THE FIRST APPROACH OF POPULATION.
Grant's victory attracted the attention of the New World, from St. Augustine to Salem, to the new settlements, and crowds of emigrants came pouring in from Europe and the older colonies. In a few years they were scattered up and down the banks of the rivers, and through the "alleys of all the western part of North Carolina and Virginia. But as yet no permanent foothold had been gained in Tennessee since the destruction of Fort Loudon. An active trade was carried on between the white man and the Indian, but no plow had entered the soil. Forts were built as they were demanded by the necessities of military or eivil life. Fort Loudon and other forts on Tennessee soil were of the former class. Fort Prince George was demanded by both, and from the battle of Etchoe in 1761 until 1769 the region around it became gradually covered with cow-pens, or, as the Texans of the present day say, " ranches "- little fields of corn and the cabins of settlers. The greater part of the most desirable ` had been taken possession of. It was no longer easy et on a horse, ride a few miles, and select a site for a n in the midst of grass, meadow, water, game, and fer- soil. The country was not yet thickly enough settled pay the tillage of any but the most exuberant fields. 1 settler who arrived at Fort Prince George, with his .store of household goods on one or two pack-horses. advised to go farther west. After a few days' rest, 1 ent, leaving the next comer to follow and go farther
1 himself, lapping one over another. Hence, after the victory of Grant over the Cherokees. the wave of emi- ration, which the destruction of Fort Loudon had caused to recede, may be said to have risen up the sides of the Alleghanies.
Occasionally a party of hunters passed over in search 1 game and adventure. As early as 1748 a party of Virginians, with Dr. Thomas Walker at their head. had penetrated the distant wilds, and given the name of Cum-
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HISTORY OF TENNESSEE.
berland to the mountains, the river, and the gap which still bear it, in honor of the royal duke of England.1 About 1761 a party of nineteen penetrated to the present Carter's Valley, and left in the geography of Tennes- see the name of Wallen's Creek and Wallen's Ridge, in honor of their leader and as souvenirs of the expedition. Daniel Boone, whose solitary figure and long unerring rifle are forever identified with the early history of the South- west as the type of all the finer qualities in the pioneer character, was also among those who first at this time ven- tured into the wilds of the unexplored West. The Wallen party returned several years in succession in pursuit of game, each year venturing farther into the interior. In 1764 Daniel Boone and Sam Callaway made an attempt to explore the country, and gather some details of its to- pography for practical purposes. Two years later Colonel James Smith explored the region beyond the Holston and south of Kentucky, and his account of its richness and beauty gave increased impetus to the flow of emigra- tion.
Nor were the Indians insensible to the danger which now threatened them. No particular tribe could establish a clear title to the valleys of the Cumberland and the Holston, and the vast tracts between the Ohio and the Tennessee. The treaty of Paris in 1763, which the ser- vility of a minister had negotiated for the stupidity of a master, but which, as the legacy of Pitt's powerful and om- niseient management, brought rich gains to the territory of England, gave the sovereignty of the region east of the Mississippi to George III. The Indians had never beer acknowledged as independent sovereigns by any Europear power, and no mention was made in the treaty of thos.
1 This is variously attributed to the Wood and to the Wallen part and to Governor Spotswood, who crossed the Appalachian rang about thirty years earlier, and whose attendants, having found : horse path, Cumberland Gap, were ealled Knights of the Horseshor
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THIE FIRST APPROACH OF POPULATION.
tribes who claimed to be independent of all European control some of whom had been allies of France. The apprehension of the Indians being excited by the frequent incursions of the whites, a proclamation of King George, in 1763, prohibited the granting of lands to any one in the region west of the mountains, or beyond the sources of those streams which emptied into the Atlantic, and no private person was to presume to purchase from the Indians themselves. The proclamation contained these significant words: " If the Indians should be inelined to dispose of their lands, the same shall be purchased only for us in our name, at some general meeting or assembly of the Indians to be held for that purpose, by the gov- ernor or commander-in-chief of our colony respectively." Traders were required to obtain licenses from their respec- tive governors.
In 1766 the cession which was foreshadowed in the proclamation was obtained. The Iroquois, whose posses- sion embraced the region of country around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario and the waters of the St. Lawrence, and who composed the Five Nations, appear to have made some claim to the section of country between the Ohio and the Tennessee. This title, however, was purely one of con- quest and of the vaguest description. Their union and their superior organization, which attracted the attention of the earliest French writers, gave them a terrible advantage in he endless warfare that raged among the original tribes, and enabled them literally to sweep unobstructed through vast regions of country with the same ease that a European army finds in attacking the Bedouins of the desert. It was for a time a repetition of the history of Wessex. But moving armed bodies across a country, and dispersing an occasional horde of assailants, is by no means a conquest of the country. They had no doubt destroyed or expelled many smaller tribes who inhabited that country, as the Cherokees had destroyed and expelled the Uchees. The
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HISTORY OF TENNESSEE.
country itself had never been subdued, and the original inhabitants returned after each raid, as untrammeled as before, acknowledging no master and paying no tribute.
Certainly that part which is now Tennessee was never under their domination. The region of the Holston and the Cumberland and the Tennessee was regarded by the Cherokees, the Creeks, the Miamis, the Choctaws, and the Chickasaws as a kind of common hunting and fighting ground. It was inhabited by none of them, because none of them could hold it. That the Iroquois laid elaim to it by conquest alone is evinced by the words of their envoys, who according to Ramsey are reputed to have said, " All the world knows that we conquered all the nations residing there and that land ; if the Virginians ever get a good right to it, it must be by ns." The deposition of George Croghan, a deputy superintendent of the Indians who had lived among them for thirty years, was taken 1781, in order to fix the limits of certain Indian claims. In this he said, "The Six Nations claim by right of conquest all the lands on the southeast side of the river called Stony River." 1 This is clear proof of how flimsy was the title upon which the Iroquois rested their claim. It was merely a piece of gasconade on the part of the Six Nations, which was taken advantage of by the colonists to excuse the occupation which would have been effected without the permission of their grantors, had permission been denied.
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On. the 5th of November, 1768,2 the Six Nations, in convention assembled, passed to the king of England their title to the tract of land beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains and down to the Tennessee. This embrac. 1 the best and the fairest portion of this State. It gave : pretext to the colonists, but it utterly failed to quiet i!". title in so far as the elaim of those in interest was con .. cerned. The ratification of the few Cherokees who br-
1 The Great Miami.
2 Haywood says 1776, but erroneously.
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THE FIRST APPROACH OF POPULATION.
pened to be present when the cession was made, and who very prudently acknowledged, though as indirectly as pos- sible, the right of the Six Nations to the country in ques- tion, was never regarded by the tribe itself as of the least validity. An attempt was made in 1768, during the pen- dency of the negotiations between the English and the Six Nations, to extinguish the claims of the Cherokees themselves by purchase. By a treaty which was con- cluded with them at Hard Labor, in South Carolina, in 1768, it was agreed that the boundary line of Virginia on the southwest should be a line " extending from the point where the northern line of North Carolina intersects the Cherokee hunting grounds, or about thirty-six miles east of Long Island, in the Holston River, and thence extending in a direct course, north by east, to Chiswell's mine, on the east bank of the Kenawha River, and thence down that stream to its junction with the Ohio." A di- viding line was run, but failed to take in all settlements which had actually been made, and a rew treaty was en- tered into in order to accomplish that purpose.
This was the beginning of a mournful repetition which still continues at the end of what has aptly been termed "a century of dishonor." Provincial governments had been issuing land grants and land warrants for mili- tary services against the French and their Indian allies, and their owners were in no mood to be bound by the Restrictions even of a proclamation from beyond the sea. 1 Where a trader had the opportunity of buying a tract of five thousand acres of the richest land in the richest part of the globe for a pair of blankets and a rifle, it required something more than an edict which he knew to be without power of enforcement to interrupt the bargain.
Having fixed the limits of encroachment, and seeing them daily disregarded, the Indians became jealous, full of revengeful fear, and bitterly exasperated. Each addi- tional encroachment they regarded as an injury, each hunt-
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HISTORY OF TENNESSEE.
ing party as an insult. From the Miami to the Tennessee. they were aroused to a sense of the danger which was im- pending. As usual, the red man was brought face to face with the white man, each filled with relentless determina. tion, and each recognizing in the other the impossible ele. ment of coexistence. As usual, the former, after a brave and despairing contest and superhuman desperation, yielded stubbornly but surely to the fate which to him meant passing away from the face of the earth. Even then the leading minds among the tribes, those who saw beyond the chasing of the deer and the trapping of the beaver, and whose mental vision was not circumscribed b: the orgies of the war dance and the preparations for the war path, realized the mournful destiny of oppression and dishonor and eventual annihilation which the future con- cealed from less penetrating sight. Oconostota was one of this class. He was brave, with all the impulse and daring of his race, and as noble as the unlearned ideas of his people would permit in a heart which found its ideal in the panther and the leopard, - fearless, bloodthirsty. and relentless, stealthy of foot, quick of stroke, and sharp of fang. At the treaty of the Sycamore Shoals, where Daniel Boone, Colonel Richard Henderson, and others had collected the Indians to buy from them the tract between the Kentucky and the Cumberland rivers, Oconostor predicted the fate of his tribe in a speech which. to Busby Head and his people of to-day, must be like the remer- bered words of the prophet to the children of Israel dur- ing the days of their bondage. In words full of tl imaginative glow and the pathetic eloquence of India oratory, he drew a picture of the gradual encroachmeu of the white people, impelled by an insatiable thirst f land, and the gradual yielding of those who had once pi sessed all the country of America as a great, free, a powerful people. "This is but the beginning," he sa " Whole nations have passed away, and there remains 1
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THE FIRST APPROACH OF POPULATION.
a stone to mark the place where rest the bones of our an- enstors. They have melted like the snow before the rays off the sun, and their names are unrecorded, save in the Needs and the charters of those who have brought destruc- fion upon them. The invader has crossed the great sea in ships; he has not been stayed by broad rivers, and now he has penetrated the wilderness and overcome the ruggedness of the mountains. Neither will he stop here. He will force the Indian steadily before him across the Mississippi ever towards the west, to find a shelter and a refuge in the seclusion of solitude. But even here he will Come at last ; and there being no place remaining where the Indian may dwell in the habitations of his people, he will proclaim the extinction of the race, till the red man be no longer a roamer of the forests and a pursuer of wild game." But the best words and the best actions of the fated race have never availed against that irresistible and unpitying personification which is called the spirit of eiv- ilization. Oeonostota himself signed the treaty against which he made his eloquent protest.
CHAPTER II.
THE FOUNDING OF THE HOUSEHOLD.
IN 1769 the waves poured over the mountains which had so long stemmed their tide, and carried with them the germs of a new dynasty of people among the republics of the earth. In 1769 we meet with William Bean's cabin and the beginnings of the Watauga Association. The first small beginnings of the Watanga settlement were made at a time peculiarly fortunate. The Indian warfare, which made Tennessee as dark and bloody a ground as Kentucky itself, had exterminated nearly all of the Indian race in the neighborhood of the Watauga. The Shawnees existed only in small, wandering detach- ments, and were, for the most part, hidden away in the lofty recesses of the Cumberland mountains. The Creeks of the Cumberland region had been massacred. almost to a man, by the Cherokees. These, emboldened by contin- ued success, had made an incursion into the country of the Chickasaws and had been repulsed with terrible slaughter. The Chickasaws. indeed, were kindly disposed, but were too far away either to injure or assist the infant settle- ment. For the time being, and until the Cherokees had recuperated sufficiently to make war upon the new race, the chief danger arose from bands of roving Indians. The great thoroughfare of Indian travel was along the range and through the valleys of the Cumberland and the Appalachian mountains. The stream of emigration hay- ing once begun, it kept on with the force of the incoming tide, each wave rising higher, rushing farther, and spread
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THE FOUNDING OF THE HOUSEHOLD.
ing broader than the one preceding it. A party of explor- ers in 1769 noticed, on their return along the banks of the Holston, that there was a cabin on every desirable site they passed, where only six weeks previous no sign of human habitation had been visible. Captain William Bean, from Pittsylvania County in Virginia, advanced far- ther into the wilderness than any one who had preceded him, and his son Russell was the first white child born in Tennessee. Each month, each week. brought new set- tlers. They spread daily down the Watauga, up the north fork of the Holston, down the Holston through the valley between the Watauga, and the north fork - from valley to valley, from creek to creek. More than a century has passed since the first ten families of whom Haywood tells came from the neighborhood of the present site of Raleigh to begin life anew on the banks of the Watauga, but the figures of the old emigrants are still as distinet and as clear-cut to us as to the sentinel who paced in front of the bastions of Fort Prince George, watching their anxious faces and listening to their eager cries as they rode slowly up on their way-worn horses to make inquiries about the unknown country they were seeking. They were not he- roes or heroines to themselves, neither had they any idea of founding a great empire. They recognized in them- selves merely commonplace people, actuated by common- place motives. They thought to improve their condition, and they were willing to run what risks might come to them from the casualties of tomahawk and rifle, for the sake of the experiment. But to us, who see them through a, lapse of time which in our history wraps them in the mists of a hoary antiquity, they are a picturesque group filled with great motives and suggestive of great ideas. Those earlier days are far away. Our Anglo-Saxon pro- genitors who lived upon the sandy marshes of the Baltic clo not appear so distant. Almost every book of those days tells us of what they did, how they did it, and how
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HISTORY OF TENNESSEE.
they dressed, - in short, how they acted their part. We can see them all, from the solitary hunter who follows on foot the blazed path to the group whose number makes a cavaleade. As a rule they come in groups for mutual pro- tection, and perhaps, also, despite their fearless indiffer. ence, for mutual encouragement. The household goods are borne on the backs of horses, called pack-horses, and consist, as a rule, of a few cooking utensils, a wooden trencher for kneading dough, several small packages con! taining salt and some seed corn, a flask or two of medi- eine, wearing apparel, a wife, and generally a baby at the breast. If of a luxurious turn of mind, - fortune and the last crop of tobacco permitting. - a little sugar and coffee, or perhaps, indeed, unexcised tea, were added, or :. flitch of bacon, as a relief from " dry jerk " or deer's meat. smoked or sun-dried ; sometimes even a peck or two of meal or flour, especially if the master and head man was fortunate enough to have an extra pack-horse. Their daughters walk beside the mother on the horse, and the sons are with the father a few paces in front. Each of them has a rifle on his shoulder, or dropped forward in the bend of the arm. The rifle, however, is but an unsatis- factory weapon in close quarters. The long-barreled horse-pistol is regarded as a child's weapon, capable at most of disposing of one Indian when the question is of dozens. The foe for whom all these preparations are made has himself supplied the requisite armor. The belt around the waist holds on one side a tomahawk, on the other a scalping-knife. The head is covered with a fur cap ; if inelined to be a little affected, the tail of the ani- mal furnishing the cap is allowed to remain and hangs down behind, reminding one strongly of the costume; of the gentleman whose morning walk was described by the two poets of the Lake. The body is covered with a hunt- ing shirt, which allows all manner of variations in the matter of fringe and savage embroidery. It is loose and 1
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THE FOUNDING OF THE HOUSEHOLD.
rather bagging, allowing free use of the arms. The legs are incased in buckskin " leggins " up to the thigh, where they are met by the breech-cloth. This is a kind of cloth which is passed between the legs, and the ends of which are passed under the girdle before and behind, and allowed to hang down. Some of the old writers say this idea was gotten from the Indians. Others say the suggestion eame from the baby on the arm of the mother who rides the (horse. The feet again pay tribute to Indian ingenuity, for they are incased in moccasins, each made of a single piece of dressed buekskin, as if it had been laid upon the round with the foot placed upon it, and then drawn up ound the leg, being cut and sewed so as to make it fit pth foot and leg. Thus accoutred, the wearer is ready to encounter any reasonable vicissitudes of weather and all the vicissitudes of a frontier life. If a cow and a few pigs are added to his outfit, the future founder of the commonwealth regards his lot as one peculiarly fortunate.
Having arrived at his place of destination, the new- comer seleets a site for his cabin. aceording to the relation he occupies towards those in whom the title vests. Fre- quently, but also erroneously, he imagines himself on Virginia soil. In this case he is entitled to buy for a song six hundred, afterwards a thousand, aeres of land, and one hundred each for his wife and children, provided he lives on the land. If not in Virginia, he is on Indian soil, and he thinks he can both take and keep. North Carolina has no interest in the matter, and is, at all exents, too indifferent ever to raise the question.
Having, therefore, selected his location, he and his family 1 t to work to do what is to be done, quickly and with good-will. He is in the midst of a wilderness so deep and so vast that the echoes from the strokes of his axe sound as if they came from the bowels of the mountains that rise up in blue perspective to the east and the north. Be- fore him runs the Watauga, a bright little stream that
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HISTORY OF TENNESSEE. 1 1
melts away into the gloom of the surrounding forest. He is far away from any source of assistance, except perhaps, some one no stronger than himself; and for all that the skies are so blue, and the woods are so green, and the splendor of the sun so gorgeous on cloud and on hilltop, the ruthless foe whom he is wronging may be lurking just. beyond his ken in the shadow of the oak, or hidden in the tangles of . the vine. At any moment he may hear a sound like the sereaming of a panther, then the hoot of an owl in daytime, and then a wild burst of human sound that is terrible even to those who, in the security of the frontier forts of to-day, pay to hear it as a tickling their curiosity. If his cabin is not built, if he has ne the security of his palisades, his venture is for nothin, His spirit is likely to rise into the hidden eternities from the smoke of a fire-heap and without a sealp. The chil- dren - as a rule there are children - are set to clearing away the wild brush in a glade as nearly open as can be found, and piling it up in heaps where it can be burnt. The father, and the sons if old enough to work, cut down trees, so as to serve the double purpose of clearing the land and building the cabin. If there is not force suffi- cient to build one of hewn logs, it is built of long poles on which the bark is allowed to remain, the roof being covered with grass and bark and brush and the like. elf possible, a cabin of hewn logs is preferred. Trees from eight to sixteen inches in diameter are cut down so as to present on two sides as much flat surface as is consistent with the maximum strength and power of resistance. Having been cut into logs from ten to sixteen feet long, and so notched at the end as to fit into each other, tlf are built into the cabin, apertures being left for doors, windows, and chimney. The largest oak to be found - if cypress, ash, or pine cannot be had -is laboriously and slowly split with mauls and wedges into shingles an indefi- nite number of feet long. These are called clapboards.
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THE FOUNDING OF THE HOUSEHOLD.
Next comes the labor of the floor. Logs are split in two parts, and the flat part of each half is hewn as smooth as possible. These are allowed to rest on the ground, mak- ing the celebrated puncheon floor. Frequently the floor is mother earth, with perhaps a covering of pine-tree nee- dles or oak leaves. The floor having been laid, the sides of the cabin are built up the requisite height. The roof is either level, or one side is lower than the other, or it is gabled by erecting ridge-poles running the length of the cabin. The clapboards are laid on in rows, each one being held in place by weights. The chimney, which is built outside the house, is of rock, if it is to be obtained. If mot, the lower part is of heavy logs cut the proper length and thickly plastered on the inside with a mixture of clay, in which hay or hog bristles or the hair from tanned deer- skins has been put to temper it. From a point sufficiently high to be beyond the flames. the chimney is made of small billets of oak with alternate layers of mud, hence called " dirt and stick " chimneys. The chimney grows smaller as it goes higher. This done, the cracks between the logs of the cabin are filled with pieces and blocks of wood, and these in turn are covered over with the plaster both inside and out until the walls are thoroughly weather and bullet proof. The door is of oaken elapboards pinned erosspieces, as also the window. The fireplace is of ock and pebbles or plastered and burnt elay. A tongue having been fastened in the chimney for pot-hooks and kettle, the cabin is ready for use.
The furniture is not less primitive than the cabin. It consists of a bedstead, a washstand, a few three-legged stools, a table perhaps, a water bucket, a gourd dipper, and pegs about the walls for hanging clothes, rifles, game, and the like. Partitions are made by suspending deer and bear skins, if the number and the size of the family require it. If the roof is gabled, an attic is often added by covering the top of the cabin with clapboards. The
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