USA > Texas > Border fights & fighters; stories of the pioneers between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi and in the Texan republic > Part 8
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Two stakes were put in the ground converging towards each other at the top for him to stand upon, while his neck was fast by a rope from above, ready to hang him when the under support should be drawn away. He was permitted to stand in this attitude an hour, during which time he was constantly entreating Col. Cleaveland; " Oh, Col. Cleaveland, I pray pardon me, and I will be a good and faithful soldier ever after." In the mean time, Col. Campbell comes up and asks; " was you the de- serter, who left our troops to inform the enemy?" "No," said the other. " Now," added Col. Campbell, "you are quickly to stand be- fore your Maker in judgment. Tell me in truth, if you was that deserter." " Yes," said the other, "I was." And his execution took place accordingly. So many of our troops, as were judged needful for safty, accompanied the prisoners a journey of three weeks from King's Mountain to the Mulberry fields, Wilkesbor-
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ough in the state of North Carolina. Here they were met by a detachment of some hundreds of Carolina Militia and with these the prisoners were left in custody. Cols. Campbell; Shelby and Sevier attended the prisoners to this place; then left them and re- turned home.
In this expedition the exposures and privations were extreme. Four hundred or more were on foot. But these had kept up with the horse some distance beyond the Yellow Mountain. The speed of their march required bodies inured to the hardest service. The last day they rode forty five miles, and then encountered a disci- plined enemy posted on a high and advantageous position. Having no baggage waggons nor public stores, every man was, from ne- cessity, his own provider.
His fare was the plainest, the coarsest and the scarcest. His resources of provision, like the Sedonian widow's, were "a hand- full of meal." This placed in his saddle-bags, furnished the amount of his luxury. And when it was exhausted he was left at the mercy of fortune for the rest.
Their sick and wounded were hurried from the battle scene with all imaginable speed to avoid the afsault of a pursuing enemy.
The softest accommodation that could be made ready for con- veyance, was the fresh hides of the slaughtered cattle, fastened to two poles; these attached to two horses, one before and one behind, and thus the sufferer carried off in safety. To specify particulars would spin this narrative to a tedious prolixity Two instances only will be here inserted.
Alexander McMillan rode all night preceding the action; of course was without sleep. The second night, that is, the night after the action, he was attending with Henry Dickenson, to the wants of James Laird and Charles Kilgore, the latter was shot with two balls through the side, and the former with one, near the middle- These were constantly in want of water. Water was of very diffi- cult procurement. And the effort to keep them in a constant sup- ply, employed these men with very little intermission, and without allowing them a moment of rest. The next night Mr. McMillan was on guard. Here were three nights without a wink of sleep. The fourth night he was on guard-every two hours, with intervals of rest of the same length of time.
The guard stood so thick around the prisoners, as to be able to touch each other hands by reaching. Here stood McMillan, firmly braced, with his gun in his right hand resting upon the ground;
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Some time in the night, Major Evan Shelby, going the rounds of the watch to observe its order, comes to him and asks; " where is your gun?" The latter supposing it to have fallen at his feet, busily moved them without stooping down, in order to find it lying beneath him. But not finding it there, he felt constrained to reply to the unwelcome interrogatory, "really I cannot tell."
Shelby stepped aside, took it from a tree, against which it was leaning, and handed it back to the owner, with these words; " re- member it is death to sleep on guard." McMillan acknowledged that this was law, but added in apology, that he had been four days deprived of sleep, from the above mentioned unavoidable causes, Shelby rejoined : "you must sleep no more upon guard;" but never divulged the secret. And for this generous forbearance on the part of the inspecting officer, McMillan has ever since, cher- ished for him a sense of high personal regard. Though he thinks that if measures had been taken against him, and death adjudged for neglect of duty, the circumstances of the case would have been seen to urge so strong a plea in his own justification, as to secure a reprieve from the designated punishment.
The day after Wm. Campbell was chosen to the command he pro- posed to Robt. Campbell to lead off a detachment of men by night, and fall upon a party of tories, eight miles distant. The offer was gladly accepted, and a body of about eighty volunteers set off for the attack. The tories had retreated, our party had no fighting; they returned and rejoined the main body by daylight .- The next night Robert Campbell was on a similar expedition, under the com- mand of another officer.
On the next night they began the above mentioned march of 45 miles, previous to the action. Here were three successive nights and days of the hardest service, without a moment of sleep. The next, he was requested to take charge of some part of the guard. But he stated to the officer that this was impossible, from the above mentioned incefsent vigils. He then sunk down by a tree and knew nothing more till at daylight; he woke shivering in the frost. Col. Shelby that night being officer of the guard, was now seen with others, sitting at the guard fire, Campbell arose, approached the fire, and was presented by Shelby, with a bottle of rum for immediate relief. He drank of this, sat down by the fire, and undoubtedly felt the justice of the old Testament prescription; "Give strong drink to him that is ready to perish and wine to those that be of heavy hearts,"
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These two instances may perhaps suffice. For how can it be requisite to give publicity here, even if the writers information were adequate, to the individual suffering of the 60 wounded ?- to tell of broken limbs and mangled bodies, of bullet holes through the body, probed by a sympathizing fellow-soldier, with a smoothed twig of sassafras, of mortification spreading from one limb to an- other, of the want of all kinds of relief from a surgeon, when none was present but a wrathful swearing British Doctor ?- to prove that the privations and sufferings of these men were extreme? Nor does it seem any more necefsary to specify cases of individual valour. Two instances only of faltering courage have been men- tioned to the writer, from Col. Shelby's division. One was of a Captain lying flat upon his back in the beginning of the action. Another was of a captain who exclaimed for bullets to a comrade, who was passing him to go up the mountain.
" Bullets, bullets, my dear sir, I have not a bullet in my pouch." " Here is enough of them," said. his friend reaching out a handful to give him, " O, they will not fit my gun," said the other, who was accordingly left to this bloodlefs dilemma. The rest of these men were eager for action, and determined on victory, and seemed to have answered well to the sentiment of their Commander, who told them before leaving the waters of the Watauga, that he wanted no man to join the enterprize, who did not wish to fight the enemy. The troops of the other Cols. appear to have been actuated by a similar spirit.
And the whole history of the enterprize demonstrates, that our men were led to espouse it, not from a fear, that the enemy would execute his vain threats upon their villages, For to these Moun- taineers, nothing than such a scheme would have made prettier game for their rifles; nothing more desirable than to entice such an enemy from his pleasant roads, rich plantations, and gentle climate, with his ponderous baggage and valuable armory, into the very cen- ter of their own fastnesses, to hang upon his flank, to pick up his stragglers, to cut off his foragers, to make short and desperate sal- lies upon his camp, and finally to make him a certain prey without a struggle and without lofs. Nor was it the authority or influence of a state, which led them to engage in this hazardous service. They knew not whether to any or to what state they belonged .- From the rude circumstances of their early settlement, the difficulty of pass- ing the wide ridges of Mountains, and their constant seclusion from their eastern friends, they were living in a state of primitive inde- pendence.
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And it was not till several years after this, that from the apparent and urgent necessity of the case, they created a temporyry Gov- ernment of their own .* Nor can it be expected, that that gratiu- tous patriotism, from which this enterprise evidently sprung, so different from that of a paper victory, a scramble for office, & for gain, can be fully comprehended by modern politicians. In those days of different principles, to know that American liberty was in- vaded, and that the only apperent alternative in the case, was Amer- ican independence of subjugation, was enough to nerve their hearts to the boldest pulsation of freedom, and ripen their purposes to the fullest determination of putting down the aggressor. The suc- cess at King's Mountain was fraught with signal advantage to America. It broke up the royal interest in the upper section of Carolina. It enabled our Generals to concentrate their forces upon great objects; and was one in that series of happy incidents, which conspired in the progress of the next year, to consummate the splendid achievement at Yorktown.
NOTE BY THE REV. MR. FOSTER
The original letter is written on foolscap ; the paper is yellowed with age and very much worn, but the writing is easily decipherable. It appears to have been corrected some time after it was written. There is a peculiarity in the pen work and the ink of the editor, however, which betrays him. The above follows the original in spelling, punctuation, and form in every way, as closely as I could determine it. I have not thought it necessary to correct certain obvious errors in this letter, evidently written some time after the event, into which the writer has been betrayed by his uncertain mem- ory. But it may be well to state that the place of the battle was known as King's Mountain long before Ferguson's ar- rival, and its name did not refer to the English monarch, but to a settler named King who formerly lived at its foot.
C. T. B.
* The Frankland Government.
PART III KENTUCKY
I
Daniel Boone, the Greatest of the Pioneers
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DANIEL BOONE, THE GREATEST OF THE PIONEERS
" A dirge for the brave old Pioneer! Columbus of the land! Who guided freedom's proud career Beyond the conquered strand, And gave her pilgrim sons a home No monarch's step profanes,
Free as the chainless winds that roam Upon its boundless plains."
I. The Land Beyond the Mountains
B EYOND the Alleghenies, so long the western boundary of the new nation, lies a vast expanse of country between the Ohio and the Cumberland Rivers, cut by the thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth paral- lels of latitude, now known as Kentucky. No more beautiful region is to be found in the United States. Its soil is fertile and productive, its climate agreeable and invigorating. It is to-day one of the most delightful states in the Union, noted for the beauty of its women, the virility of its men, and the speed of its horses-to say nothing of the blueness of its green grass and the quality of its whiskey. One has to be genial and mellow even in speaking of the state and its people.
Certainly no other spot on the globe seems to be better designed for humanity, yet from the days of the
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mound builders to the time of the Revolution it was an uninhabited wilderness, given over to the buffalo, the elk, the deer, the bear and the wolf, who prowled through its dense forests or played in its grassy glades. From prehistoric times no race or tribe made its domicile there. Hunting parties of the Shawnees and even the distant Iroquois from the north, ranged its wildernesses and met in deadly conflict similar bodies of men from the Chero- kee lands to the south, or from the Chickamauga terri- tories on the west, so that its forests resounded often with war-cries of savage foemen.
Why it was not adopted as the settling place of one or the other of the tribes has never been ascertained. It may be that no tribe felt itself strong enough to hold the ground to the exclusion of the others. It was so desirable that its very beauty and fertility operated to make it no man's land. No tribe was strong enough to hold it alone, yet all combined to keep it free. It was not until the advent of that world-claimer, the white man, that it became a home for humanity. Danger, opposi- tion, prior claim, never deterred the pioneers. The first settlers were usually willing to purchase the right of emi- nent domain if they could do so from any recognized authority or power, but if they could not-well, the earth itself belonged to the pioneer and he took any portion of it without compunctions of conscience or questions of law.
Who was the first white man to see Kentucky? Some have said that it was Moscosco, the successor of De Soto, in 1542-3, but without doubt the honor of the discovery accrues to another member of the Latin race, the great explorer La Salle, who was the first white man to put foot upon its smiling, pleasant soil in 1669-70.
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Colonel Wood of Virginia and Captain Thomas Batts of the same mother state, the latter sent by Governor Berkeley, had crossed the mountain barriers in a search for a water route to China in 1664 and in 1671 respec- tively, but it was hardly likely that they went far into Kentucky, if they saw it at all. The first real explorer was Dr. Thomas Walker, also of Virginia, who reached the banks of the Cumberland River in 1750. It was he who first marched through that romantic pass in the mountains, which, with the mountains themselves, and the river upon which he made his camp, he called after His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland, the bloody butcher; and that was the first white man's name bestowed in Kentucky. It was indeed a name of ancient lineage traced down through the Cumbrians of the Brit- ish Isles, the Cymry of the continent, the Cimmerians of the Black Sea, directly from Gomer, son of Japhet !
The Walker expedition amounted to little and the in- terior of Kentucky remained a terra incognita until 1767, or thereabouts, when a certain John Finley, or Findlay, explored a small section of it and returned home to North Carolina to fill the minds of the adventurous young men with whom he came in contact, with tales of its romantic possibilities. Among those to whom he told the story of his adventures was a certain Daniel Boone, a settler, farmer, hunter and pioneer, who had already some knowledge of the country .*
* This inscription on an ancient beech tree still standing on Boone's Creek, a small tributary to the Watauga in Washington County, Tennessee, "D. Boon cilled a bar on tree in the year 1760," seems to indicate that Boone had hunted across the mountains long before he met Finley. But there is no evidence that the inscription is the work of Boone, and, in spite of local traditions, a probability against it.
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II. The Greatest of the Pioneers
Few men have been so written about as Daniel Boone* and most writers have succumbed to the temp- tation to romance about him, too; he is quite the hardest man to tell the truth about that I have ever attempted to discuss. Let the reader who differs from what is here set down give me credit for good intention.
The investigator experiences a feeling of relief to find that Boone was born in the state of Pennsylvania. Nearly every other pioneer, explorer, discoverer or ad- venturer of note, in the trans-Allegheny regions, was born in the South. It is only fair to say that the West between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi was discovered, ex- plored, settled, protected and won for the United States by the people of the Southern States-a fact not gener- ally known, I think. Young Boone, one of a numerous family, first saw the light on the 22nd of October, 1733, at his father's farm-house in Exeter township, Berks County, Pennsylvania, near the village of Oley, which is a few miles northeast of the present city of Reading. His fath- er, George Boone, came from Devonshire, where he had filled the humble station of a weaver. The family origi- nally belonged to the Church of England but had be- come Quakers. They removed to Pennsylvania in 1717, whither three of the older children preceded them, like Caleb and Joshua, to spy out the land.
They were plain substantial people, of limited educa-
* Miner's excellent Boone Bibliography contains nearly one hundred and seventy-five references to lives and other sources of information con- cerning his career, and I have found several additional references which he does not mention.
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tion; sturdy, honest, independent, and capable, living simple healthy lives and usually attaining to a great age. Daniel Boone's education in arts and letters was of the most primitive character. His spelling was quite the worst I have ever come across, though, singular to state, his handwriting was rather graceful and flowing, perhaps because it partook of the physical characteristics of the man. His brother George was sufficiently well educated to teach school, and some of the family subsequently be- came rather noted mathematicians.
But if young Daniel Boone knew but little about books and their contents, he was one of those who found " tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones "-yes, we may add-" and good in every- thing." It was a wild primitive country in those days. The rifle of the hunter with the plough of the husbandman afforded the only means of support, and more often the hostile Indians caused the plough to be laid aside and the sole dependence put upon the weapon.
So Daniel Boone grew up to strong vigorous man- hood in the forest far from urban influence, which in- deed he could never tolerate. His father moved to North Carolina in May, 1750, and established himself on a frontier farm on the Yadkin, then the very outpost of civilization. Daniel, by this time, one of a very nu- merous family, did his share of the work necessitated by the building of a wilderness home in that day, but he was ever fonder of the chase than of the plough, and as he was the most skilful member of the family with the rifle, he speedily became the hunter for them all. This indeed was no sinecure.
In the course of time other families followed the ex- ample of the elder Boone and the country began to be
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thickly populated. At a very early age Daniel had mar- ried Rebecca Bryan, daughter of a neighboring settler. One of the most heroic of that splendid breed of pioneer women, she proved herself for over half a century a worthy mate indeed for the great adventurer. Boone had prospered, he had a growing family and a good farm, yet he was not happy. Something, an instinct which he could never explain or understand, drove him forward.
He was one of those characters who are bound to be in the advance of civilization, who are made to lead it on, to " blaze " the pathway of progress. He grew rest- less and discontented. The advent of the settlers nat- urally destroyed the primeval character of the wilderness. Game became scarce and the ordinary demands of life more complex and harder to meet. Nomad that he was he felt that he must remove from his present settlement and find a new land to which to lead his family and in which to build his cabin.
Often and often he gazed at the mountains soaring into the heavens to the westward of him and wondered what lay on the farther side. When Finley came home with his marvellous tales of the beauty and loneliness of the hunter's paradise beyond the everlasting hills, he found in Boone a ready auditor to his representations.
III. The Exploration of Kentucky
A party of six men was made up in the spring of 1769 to cross the mountains under Finley's guidance and ex- plore the country. Be it remembered that this was to be no thoughtless excursion, no adventurous foray, no mere hunter's trip to a land teeming with game; it was a movement to found a home. They went to examine
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a land, to discover if it were suitable for settlement or not. Boone was unanimously chosen to lead this expe- dition in spite of the fact that Finley had been over the mountains before. On the 7th of June, 1769, late in the afternoon, they ascended the crowning range of the Alle- ghenies, crossed the ridge of the divide, stood upon the western slope and gazed down upon as enchanting a panorama as was ever spread before mortal vision, their first sight of Kentucky.
In popular acceptance that name is supposed to mean " dark and bloody ground." So far as it can be deter- mined the original meaning of the word Kentucky is " a pleasant meadow, a smiling land, whence the river flows." How it got its name of "dark and bloody ground " is perhaps not difficult to understand. Some years after- ward when Colonel Henderson was negotiating with the Cherokees for the purchase of the Transylvania territory, they strove to prevent him from acquiring any land south of the Ohio. In the words of old Dragging Canoe, the war chief of the Chickamaugas, it was a bloody land, there was a gloomy shadow over it, the dark spirits dwelt there, and the white man would do well to let it alone. There was no doubt whatever that the words by which it became known, " dark and bloody ground," were ap- posite to its early history.
The party immediately descended the mountains and began hunting and exploring until December. There- after the better to cover the country they divided and Boone and a companion named Stewart plunged steadily westward through the forests and openings. Near the Kentucky River they were captured by a band of wan- dering Indians and spent Christmas as prisoners. Boone, already showing that marvellous sagacity he manifested
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in dealing with Indians, seeing that resistance would be hopeless, directed his companion to make no opposition but to affect to acquiesce cheerfully in their captivity. Their demeanor so disarmed the suspicions of their cap- tors that after they had been in company with them for a week they found opportunity to escape in the night.
They shook off pursuit by their adroit woodmanship and finally reached the main camp. They found it plun- dered and destroyed and Finley and his companions gone. The four men have vanished from the pages of history. There is no record of their ever having returned to their friends across the mountains. It is believed that they were killed by the Indians and that their bones moul- dered away in the country that they had helped to dis- cover-the pioneer martyrs of a long line.
Boone and Stewart were sorely depressed by this un- toward happening, but they continued their hunting and exploring, carefully avoiding hunting parties of Indians by their watchfulness. They had almost reached the end of their resources, however, and were considering a re- turn across the mountains, when, ranging through the forest one day in the early winter, they perceived two men coming through the wood, being themselves dis- covered at the same moment.
The two parties took to the trees and approached each other cautiously, rifles primed and ready, each striv- ing to " draw a bead " on the other. What was their surprise and relief, however, to find that the two men were countrymen! And their joy was the greater when Daniel Boone recognized in one of them his brother Squire-Squire being his name, not title.
The coincidence was really marvellous, that in sixty thousand square miles of territory, these two parties
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should find each other. Squire had come to seek for Daniel and had brought him needed supplies of powder and salt. He brought news of the family on the Yadkin, who were prosperous and well under Mrs. Boone's fos- tering care. The four men determined to pass the win- ter in Kentucky.
While hunting one day Daniel and Stewart were sur- prised by Indians. Stewart was shot and instantly killed, but Boone after a desperate fight managed to escape. Squire's companion also went off on a hunting expedi- tion and never came back. It is supposed that he lost his way and died of starvation or exposure.
The brothers amassed a great store of peltries of much value. In the spring it was decided that Squire should return to North Carolina for supplies, while Daniel re- mained behind to protect the furs that had accumulated and to increase the stock. The redoubtable hunter was thus left entirely and absolutely alone in the midst of that vast territory; as he said, " without salt, bread, or sugar; without the society of a fellow creature; without the companionship of a horse or even a dog, often the affec- tionate companion of a lone hunter."
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