Because so many settlers had fled and the others had come closer together for their common good, Harrodsburg and Boonesborough were now the only occupied posts in Kentucky. Other settlements, once, thriving, were abandoned; and, under the terror, the Wild reclaimed them. In April, 1777, Boonesborough underwent its first siege. Boone, leading a sortie, was shot and he fell with a shattered ankle. An Indian rushed upon him and was swinging the tomahawk over him when Simon Kenton, giant frontiersman and hero of many daring deeds, rushed forward, shot the Indian, threw Boone across his back, and fought his way desperately to safety. It was some months ere Boone was his nimble self again. But though he could not "stand up to the guns," he directed all operations from his cabin.

The next year Boone was ready for new ventures growing from the settlers' needs. Salt was necessary to preserve meat through the summer. Accordingly Boone and twenty-seven men went up to the Blue Licks in February, 1778, to replenish their supply by the simple process of boiling the salt water of the Licks till the saline particles adhered to the kettles. Boone was returning alone, with a pack-horse load of salt and game, when a blinding snowstorm overtook him and hid from view four stealthy Shawanoes on his trail. He was seized and carried to a camp of 120 warriors led by the French Canadian, Dequindre, and James and George Girty, two white renegades. Among the Indians were some of those who had captured him on his first exploring trip through Kentucky and whom he had twice given the slip. Their hilarity was unbounded. Boone quickly learned that this band was on its way to surprise Boonesborough. It was a season when Indian attacks were not expected; nearly threescore of the men were at the salt spring and, to make matters worse, the walls of the new fort where the settlers and their families had gathered were as yet completed on only three sides. Boonesborough was, in short, well-nigh defenseless. To turn the Indians from their purpose, Boone conceived the desperate scheme of offering to lead them to the salt makers' camp with the assurance that he and his companions were willing to join the tribe. He understood Indians well enough to feel sure that once possessed of nearly thirty prisoners, the Shawanoes would not trouble further about Boonesborough but would hasten to make a triumphal entry into their own towns. That some, perhaps all, of the white men would assuredly die, he knew well; but it was the only way to save the women and children in Boonesborough. In spite of Dequindre and the Girtys, who were leading a military expedition for the reduction of a fort, the Shawanoes fell in with the suggestion. When they had taken their prisoners, the more bloodthirsty warriors in the band wanted to tomahawk them all on the spot. By his diplomatic discourse, however, Boone dissuaded them, for the time being at least, and the whole company set off for the towns on the Little Miami.

The weather became severe, very little game crossed their route, and for days they subsisted on slippery elm bark. The lovers of blood did not hold back their scalping knives and several of the prisoners perished; but Black Fish, the chief then of most power in Shawanoe councils, adopted Boone as his son, and gave him the name of Sheltowee, or Big Turtle. Though watched zealously to prevent escape, Big Turtle was treated with every consideration and honor; and, as we would say today, he played the game. He entered into the Indian life with apparent zest, took part in hunts and sports and the races and shooting matches in which the Indians delighted, but he was always careful not to outrun or outshoot his opponents. Black Fish took him to Detroit when some of the tribe escorted the remainder of the prisoners to the British post. There he met Governor Hamilton and, in the hope of obtaining his liberty, he led that dignitary to believe that he and the other people of Boonesborough were eager to move to Detroit and take refuge under the British flag. * It is said that Boone always carried in a wallet round his neck the King's commission given him in Dunmore's War; and that he exhibited it to Hamilton to bear out his story. Hamilton sought to ransom him from the Indians, but Black Fish would not surrender his new son. The Governor gave Boone a pony, with saddle and trappings, and other presents, including trinkets to be used in procuring his needs and possibly his liberty from the Shawanoes.

* So well did Boone play his part that he aroused suspicion even in those who knew him best. After his return to Boonesborough his old friend, Calloway, formally accused him of treachery on two counts: that Boone had betrayed the salt makers to the Indians and had planned to betray Boonesborough to the British. Boone was tried and acquitted. His simple explanation of his acts satisfied the court-martial and made him a greater hero than ever among the frontier folk.

Black Fish then took his son home to Chillicothe. Here Boone found Delawares and Mingos assembling with the main body of the Shawanoe warriors. The war belt was being carried through the Ohio country. Again Boonesborough and Harrodsburg were to be the first settlements attacked. To escape and give warning was now the one purpose that obsessed Boone. He redoubled his efforts to throw the Indians off their guard. He sang and whistled blithely about the camp at the mouth of the Scioto River, whither he had accompanied his Indian father to help in the salt boiling. In short, he seemed so very happy that one day Black Fish took his eye off him for a few moments to watch the passing of a flock of turkeys. Big Turtle passed with the flock, leaving no trace. To his lamenting parent it must have seemed as though he had vanished into the air. Daniel crossed the Ohio and ran the 160 miles to Boonesborough in four days, during which time he had only one meal, from a buffalo he shot at the Blue Licks. When he reached the fort after an absence of nearly five months, he found that his wife had given him up for dead and had returned to the Yadkin.

Boone now began with all speed to direct preparations to withstand a siege. Owing to the Indian's leisurely system of councils and ceremonies before taking the warpath, it was not until the first week in September that Black Fish's painted warriors, with some Frenchmen under Dequindre, appeared before Boonesborough. Nine days the siege lasted and was the longest in border history. Dequindre, seeing that the fort might not be taken, resorted to trickery. He requested Boone and a few of his men to come out for a parley, saying that his orders from Hamilton were to protect the lives of the Americans as far as possible. Boone's friend, Calloway, urged against acceptance of the apparently benign proposal which was made, so Dequindre averred, for "bienfaisance et humanite." But the words were the words of a white man, and Boone hearkened to them. With eight of the garrison he went out to the parley. After a long talk in which good will was expressed on both sides, it was suggested by Black Fish that they all shake hands and, as there were so many more Indians than white men, two Indians should, of course, shake hands with one white man, each grasping one of his hands. The moment that their hands gripped, the trick was clear, for the Indians exerted their strength to drag off the white men. Desperate scuffling ensued in which the whites with difficulty freed themselves and ran for the fort. Calloway had prepared for emergencies. The pursuing Indians were met with a deadly fire. After a defeated attempt to mine the fort the enemy withdrew.

The successful defense of Boonesborough was an achievement of national importance, for had Boonesborough fallen, Harrodsburg alone could not have stood. The Indians under the British would have overrun Kentucky; and George Rogers Clark—whose base for his Illinois operations was the Kentucky forts—could not have made the campaigns which wrested the Northwest from the control of Great Britain.

Again Virginia took official note of Captain Boone when in 1779 the Legislature established Boonesborough "a town for the reception of traders" and appointed Boone himself one of the trustees to attend to the sale and registration of lots. An odd office that was for Daniel, who never learned to attend to the registration of his own; he declined it. His name appears again, however, a little later when Virginia made the whole of Kentucky one of her counties with the following officers: Colonel David Robinson, County Lieutenant; George Rogers Clark, Anthony Bledsoe, and John Bowman, Majors; Daniel Boone, James Harrod, Benjamin Logan, and John Todd, Captains.

Boonesborough's successful resistance caused land speculators as well as prospective settlers to take heart of grace. Parties made their way to Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and even to the Falls of the Ohio, where Clark's fort and blockhouses now stood. In the summer of 1779 Clark had erected on the Kentucky side of the river a large fort which became the nucleus of the town of Louisville. Here, while he was eating his heart out with impatience for money and men to enable him to march to the attack of Detroit, as he had planned, he amused himself by drawing up plans for a city. He laid out private sections and public parks and contemplated the bringing in of families only to inhabit his city, for, oddly enough, he who never married was going to make short shift of mere bachelors in his City Beautiful. Between pen scratches, no doubt, he looked out frequently upon the river to descry if possible a boatload of ammunition or the banners of the troops he had been promised.

When neither appeared, he gave up the idea of Detroit and set about erecting defenses on the southern border, for the Choctaws and Cherokees, united under a white leader named Colbert, were threatening Kentucky by way of the Mississippi. He built in 1780 Fort Jefferson in what is now Ballard County, and had barely completed the new post and garrisoned it with about thirty men when it was besieged by Colbert and his savages. The Indians, assaulting by night, were lured into a position directly before a cannon which poured lead into a mass of them. The remainder fled in terror from the vicinity of the fort; but Colbert succeeded in rallying them and was returning to the attack when he suddenly encountered Clark with a company of men and was forced to abandon his enterprise.

Clark knew that the Ohio Indians would come down on the settlements again during the summer and that to meet their onslaughts every man in Kentucky would be required. He learned that there was a new influx of land seekers over the Wilderness Road and that speculators were doing a thriving business in Harrodsburg; so, leaving his company to protect Fort Jefferson, he took two men with him and started across the wilds on foot for Harrodsburg. To evade the notice of the Indian bands which were moving about the country the three stripped and painted themselves as warriors and donned the feathered headdress. So successful was their disguise that they were fired on by a party of surveyors near the outskirts of Harrodsburg.

The records do not state what were the sensations of certain speculators in a land office in Harrodsburg when a blue-eyed savage in a war bonnet sprang through the doorway and, with uplifted weapon, declared the office closed; but we get a hint of the power of Clark's personality and of his genius for dominating men from the terse report that he "enrolled" the speculators. He was informed that another party of men, more nervous than these, was now on its way out of Kentucky. In haste he dispatched a dozen frontiersmen to cut the party off at Crab Orchard and take away the gun of every man who refused to turn back and do his bit for Kentucky. To Clark a man was a gun, and he meant that every gun should do its duty.

The leaders and pioneers of the Dark and Bloody Ground were now warriors, all under Clark's command, while for two years longer the Red Terror ranged Kentucky, falling with savage force now here, now there. In the first battle of 1780, at the Blue Licks, Daniel's brother, Edward Boone, was killed and scalped. Later on in the war his second son, Israel, suffered a like fate. The toll of life among the settlers was heavy. Many of the best-known border leaders were slain. Food and powder often ran short. Corn might be planted, but whether it would be harvested or not the planters never knew; and the hunter's rifle shot, necessary though it was, proved only too often an invitation to the lurking foe. But sometimes, through all the dangers of forest and trail, Daniel Boone slipped away silently to Harrodsburg to confer with Clark; or Clark himself, in the Indian guise that suited the wild man in him not ill, made his way to and from the garrisons which looked to him for everything.

Twice Clark gathered together the "guns" of Kentucky and, marching north into the enemy's country, swept down upon the Indian towns of Piqua and Chillicothe and razed them. In 1782, in the second of these enterprises, his cousin, Joseph Rogers, who had been taken prisoner and adopted by the Indians and then wore Indian garb, was shot down by one of Clark's men. On this expedition Boone and Harrod are said to have accompanied Clark.

The ever present terror and horror of those days, especially of the two years preceding this expedition, are vividly suggested by the quaint remark of an old woman who had lived through them, as recorded for us by a traveler. The most beautiful sight she had seen in Kentucky, she said, was a young man dying a natural death in his bed. Dead but unmarred by hatchet or scalping knife, he was so rare and comely a picture that the women of the post sat up all night looking at him.

But, we ask, what golden emoluments were showered by a grateful country on the men who thus held the land through those years of want and war, and saved an empire for the Union? What practical recognition was there of these brave and unselfish men who daily risked their lives and faced the stealth and cruelty lurking in the wilderness ways? There is meager eloquence in the records. Here, for instance, is a letter from George Rogers Clark to the Governor of Virginia, dated May 27, 1783:

"Sir. Nothing but necessity could induce me to make the following request to Your Excellency, which is to grant me a small sum of money on account; as I can assure you, Sir, that I am exceedingly distressed for the want of necessary clothing etc and don't know any channel through which I could procure any except of the Executive. The State I believe will fall considerably in my debt. Any supplies which Your Excellency favors me with might be deducted out of my accounts." *

* "Calendar of Virginia State Papers," vol. III, p. 487.

Clark had spent all his own substance and all else he could beg, borrow—or appropriate—in the conquest of Illinois and the defense of Kentucky. His only reward from Virginia was a grant of land from which he realized nothing, and dismissal from her service when she needed him no longer.

All that Clark had asked for himself was a commission in the Continental Army. This was denied him, as it appears now, not through his own errors, which had not at that time taken hold on him, but through the influence of powerful enemies. It is said that both Spain and England, seeing a great soldier without service for his sword, made him offers, which he refused. As long as any acreage remained to him on which to raise money, he continued to pay the debts he had contracted to finance his expeditions, and in this course he had the assistance of his youngest brother, William, to whom he assigned his Indiana grant.

His health impaired by hardship and exposure and his heart broken by his country's indifference, Clark sank into alcoholic excesses. In his sixtieth year, just six years before his death, and when he was a helpless paralytic, he was granted a pension of four hundred dollars. There is a ring of bitter irony in the words with which he accepted the sword sent him by Virginia in his crippled old age: "When Virginia needed a sword I gave her one." He died near Louisville on February 13, 1818.

Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792. But even before Kentucky became a State her affairs, particularly as to land, were arranged, let us say, on a practical business basis. Then it was discovered that Daniel Boone had no legal claim to any foot of ground in Kentucky. Daniel owned nothing but the clothes he wore; and for those—as well as for much powder, lead, food, and such trifles—he was heavily in debt.

So, in 1788, Daniel Boone put the list of his debts in his wallet, gathered his wife and his younger sons about him, and, shouldering his hunter's rifle, once more turned towards the wilds. The country of the Great Kanawha in West Virginia was still a wilderness, and a hunter and trapper might, in some years, earn enough to pay his debts. For others, now, the paths he had hewn and made safe; for Boone once more the wilderness road.



Chapter VIII. Tennessee

Indian law, tradition, and even superstition had shaped the conditions which the pioneers faced when they crossed the mountains. This savage inheritance had decreed that Kentucky should be a dark and bloody ground, fostering no life but that of four-footed beasts, its fertile sod never to stir with the green push of the corn. And so the white men who went into Kentucky to build and to plant went as warriors go, and for every cabin they erected they battled as warriors to hold a fort. In the first years they planted little corn and reaped less, for it may be said that their rifles were never out of their hands. We have seen how stations were built and abandoned until but two stood. Untiring vigilance and ceaseless warfare were the price paid by the first Kentuckians ere they turned the Indian's place of desolation and death into a land productive and a living habitation.

Herein lies the difference, slight apparently, yet significant, between the first Kentucky and the first Tennessee * colonies. Within the memory of the Indians only one tribe had ever attempted to make their home in Kentucky—a tribe of the fighting Shawanoes—and they had been terribly chastised for their temerity. But Tennessee was the home of the Cherokees, and at Chickasaw Bluffs (Memphis) began the southward trail to the principal towns of the Chickasaws. By the red man's fiat, then, human life might abide in Tennessee, though not in Kentucky, and it followed that in seasons of peace the frontiersmen might settle in Tennessee. So it was that as early as 1757, before the great Cherokee war, a company of Virginians under Andrew Lewis had, on an invitation from the Indians, erected Fort Loudon near Great Telliko, the Cherokees' principal town, and that, after the treaty of peace in 1761, Waddell and his rangers of North Carolina had erected a fort on the Holston.

* Tennessee. The name, Ten-as-se, appears on Adair's map as one of the old Cherokee towns. Apparently neither the meaning nor the reason why the colonists called both state and river by this name has been handed down to us.

Though Fort Loudon had fallen tragically during the war, and though Waddell's fort had been abandoned, neither was without influence in the colonization of Tennessee, for some of the men who built these forts drifted back a year or two later and setup the first cabins on the Holston. These earliest settlements, thin and scattered, did not survive; but in 1768 the same settlers or others of their kind—discharged militiamen from Back Country regiments—once more made homes on the Holston. They were joined by a few families from near the present Raleigh, North Carolina, who had despaired of seeing justice done to the tenants on the mismanaged estates of Lord Granville. About the same time there was erected the first cabin on the Watauga River, as is generally believed, by a man of the name of William Bean (or Been), hunter and frontier soldier from Pittsylvania County, Virginia. This man, who had hunted on the Watauga with Daniel Boone in 1760, chose as the site of his dwelling the place of the old hunting camp near the mouth of Boone's Creek. He soon began to have neighbors.

Meanwhile the Regulation Movement stirred the Back Country of both the Carolinas. In 1768, the year in which William Bean built his cabin on the bank of the Watauga, five hundred armed Regulators in North Carolina, aroused by irregularities in the conduct of public office, gathered to assert their displeasure, but dispersed peaceably on receipt of word from Governor Tryon that he had ordered the prosecution of any officer found guilty of extortion. Edmund Fanning, the most hated of Lord Granville's agents, though convicted, escaped punishment. Enraged at this miscarriage of justice, the Regulators began a system of terrorization by taking possession of the court, presided over by Richard Henderson. The judge himself was obliged to slip out by a back way to avoid personal injury. The Regulators burned his house and stable. They meted out mob treatment likewise to William Hooper, later one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Two elements, with antithetical aims, had been at work in the Regulation; and the unfortunate failure of justice in the case of Fanning had given the corrupt element its opportunity to seize control. In the petitions addressed to Governor Tryon by the leaders of the movement in its earlier stages the aims of liberty-loving thinkers are traceable. It is worthy of note that they included in their demands articles which are now constitutional. They desired that "suffrage be given by ticket and ballot"; that the mode of taxation be altered, and each person be taxed in proportion to the profits arising from his estate; that judges and clerks be given salaries instead of perquisites and fees. They likewise petitioned for repeal of the act prohibiting dissenting ministers from celebrating the rites of matrimony. The establishment of these reforms, the petitioners of the Regulation concluded, would "conciliate" their minds to "every just measure of government, and would make the laws what the Constitution ever designed they should be, their protection and not their bane." Herein clearly enough we can discern the thought and the phraseology of the Ulster Presbyterians.

But a change took place in both leaders and methods. During the Regulators' career of violence they were under the sway of an agitator named Hermon Husband. This demagogue was reported to have been expelled from the Quaker Society for cause; it is on record that he was expelled from the North Carolina Assembly because a vicious anonymous letter was traced to him. He deserted his dupes just before the shots cracked at Alamance Creek and fled from the colony. He was afterwards apprehended in Pennsylvania for complicity in the Whisky Insurrection.

Four of the leading Presbyterian ministers of the Back Country issued a letter in condemnation of the Regulators. One of these ministers was the famous David Caldwell, son-in-law of the Reverend Alexander Craighead, and a man who knew the difference between liberty and license and who proved himself the bravest of patriots in the War of Independence. The records of the time contain sworn testimony against the Regulators by Waightstill Avery, a signer of the Mecklenburg Resolves, who later presided honorably over courts in the western circuit of Tennessee; and there is evidence indicating Jacobite and French intrigue. That Governor Tryon recognized a hidden hand at work seems clearly revealed in his proclamation addressed to those "whose understandings have been run away with and whose passions have been led in captivity by some evil designing men who, actuated by cowardice and a sense of that Publick Justice which is due to their Crimes, have obscured themselves from Publick view." What the Assembly thought of the Regulators was expressed in 1770 in a drastic bill which so shocked the authorities in England that instructions were sent forbidding any Governor to approve such a bill in future, declaring it "a disgrace to the British Statute Books."

On May 16, 1771, some two thousand Regulators were precipitated by Husband into the Battle of Alamance, which took place in a district settled largely by a rough and ignorant type of Germans, many of whom Husband had lured to swell his mob. Opposed to him, were eleven hundred of Governor Tryon's troops, officered by such patriots as Griffith Rutherford, Hugh Waddell, and Francis Nash. During an hour's engagement about twenty Regulators were killed, while the Governor's troops had nine killed and sixty-one wounded. Six of the leaders were hanged. The rest took the oath of allegiance which Tryon administered.

It has been said about the Regulators that they were not cast down by their defeat at Alamance but "like the mammoth, they shook the bolt from their brow and crossed the mountains," but such flowery phrases do not seem to have been inspired by facts. Nor do the records show that "fifteen hundred Regulators" arrived at Watauga in 1771, as has also been stated. Nor are the names of the leaders of the Regulation to be found in the list of signatures affixed to the one "state paper" of Watauga which was preserved and written into historic annals. Nor yet do those names appear on the roster of the Watauga and Holston men who, in 1774, fought with Shelby under Andrew Lewis in the Battle of Point Pleasant. The Boones and the Bryans, the Robertsons, the Seviers, the Shelbys, the men who opened up the West and shaped the destiny of its inhabitants, were genuine freemen, with a sense of law and order as inseparable from liberty. They would follow a Washington but not a Hermon Husband.

James Hunter, whose signature leads on all Regulation manifestoes just prior to the Battle of Alamance, was a sycophant of Husband, to whom he addressed fulsome letters; and in the real battle for democracy—the War of Independence—he was a Tory. The Colonial Records show that those who, "like the mammoth," shook from them the ethical restraints which make man superior to the giant beast, and who later bolted into the mountains, contributed chiefly the lawlessness that harassed the new settlements. They were the banditti and, in 1776, the Tories of the western hills; they pillaged the homes of the men who were fighting for the democratic ideal.

It was not the Regulation Movement which turned westward the makers of the Old Southwest, but the free and enterprising spirit of the age. It was emphatically an age of doers; and if men who felt the constructive urge in them might not lay hold on conditions where they were and reshape them, then they must go forward seeking that environment which would give their genius its opportunity.

Of such adventurous spirits was James Robertson, a Virginian born of Ulster Scot parentage, and a resident of (the present) Wake County, North Carolina, since his boyhood. Robertson was twenty-eight years old when, in 1770, he rode over the hills to Watauga. We can imagine him as he was then, for the portrait taken much later in life shows the type of face that does not change. It is a high type combining the best qualities of his race. Intelligence, strength of purpose, fortitude, and moral power are there; they impress us at the first glance. At twenty-eight he must have been a serious young man, little given to laughter; indeed, spontaneity is perhaps the only good trait we miss in studying his face. He was a thinker who had not yet found his purpose—a thinker in leash, for at this time James Robertson could neither read nor write.

At Watauga, Robertson lived for a while in the cabin of a man named Honeycut. He chose land for himself and, in accordance with the custom of the time, sealed his right to it by planting corn. He remained to harvest his first crop and then set off to gather his family and some of his friends together and escort them to the new country. But on the way he missed the trail and wandered for a fortnight in the mountains. The heavy rains ruined his powder so that he could not hunt; for food he had only berries and nuts. At one place, where steep bluffs opposed him, he was obliged to abandon his horse and scale the mountain side on foot. He was in extremity when he chanced upon two huntsmen who gave him food and set him on the trail. If this experience proves his lack of the hunter's instinct and the woodsman's resourcefulness which Boone possessed, it proves also his special qualities of perseverance and endurance which were to reach their zenith in his successful struggle to colonize and hold western Tennessee. He returned to Watauga in the following spring (1771) with his family and a small group of colonists. Robertson's wife was an educated woman and under her instruction he now began to study.

Next year a young Virginian from the Shenandoah Valley rode on down Holston Valley on a hunting and exploring trip, and loitered at Watauga. Here he found not only a new settlement but an independent government in the making; and forthwith he determined to have a part in both. This young Virginian had already shown the inclination of a political colonist, for in the Shenandoah Valley he had, at the age of nineteen, laid out the town of New Market (which exists to this day) and had directed its municipal affairs and invited and fostered its clergy. This young Virginian—born on September 23, 1745, and so in 1772 twenty-seven years of age—was John Sevier, that John Sevier whose monument now towers from its site in Knoxville to testify of both the wild and the great deeds of old Tennessee's beloved knight. Like Robertson, Sevier hastened home and removed his whole family, including his wife and children, his parents and his brothers and sisters, to this new haven of freedom at Watauga.

The friendship formed between Robertson and Sevier in these first years of their work together was never broken, yet two more opposite types could hardly have been brought together. Robertson was a man of humble origin, unlettered, not a dour Scot but a solemn one. Sevier was cavalier as well as frontiersman. On his father's side he was of the patrician family of Xavier in France. His progenitors, having become Huguenots, had taken refuge in England, where the name Xavier was finally changed to Sevier. John Sevier's mother was an Englishwoman. Some years before his birth his parents had emigrated to the Shenandoah Valley. Thus it happened that John Sevier, who mingled good English blood with the blue blood of old France, was born an American and grew up a frontier hunter and soldier. He stood about five feet nine from his moccasins to his crown of light brown hair. He was well-proportioned and as graceful of body as he was hard-muscled and swift. His chin was firm, his nose of a Roman cast, his mouth well-shaped, its slightly full lips slanting in a smile that would not be repressed. Under the high, finely modeled brow, small keen dark blue eyes sparkled with health, with intelligence, and with the man's joy in life.

John Sevier indeed cannot be listed as a type; he was individual. There is no other character like him in border annals. He was cavalier and prince in his leadership of men; he had their homage. Yet he knew how to be comrade and brother to the lowliest. He won and held the confidence and friendship of the serious-minded Robertson no less than the idolatry of the wildest spirits on the frontier throughout the forty-three years of the spectacular career which began for him on the day he brought his tribe to Watauga. In his time he wore the governor's purple; and a portrait painted of him shows how well this descendant of the noble Xaviers could fit himself to the dignity and formal habiliments of state; Yet in the fringed deerskin of frontier garb, he was fleeter on the warpath than the Indians who fled before him; and he could outride and outshoot—and, it is said, outswear—the best and the worst of the men who followed him. Perhaps the lurking smile on John Sevier's face was a flicker of mirth that there should be found any man, red or white, with temerity enough to try conclusions with him. None ever did, successfully.

The historians of Tennessee state that the Wataugans formed their government in 1772 and that Sevier was one of its five commissioners. Yet, as Sevier did not settle in Tennessee before 1773, it is possible that the Watauga Association was not formed until then. Unhappily the written constitution of the little commonwealth was not preserved; but it is known that, following the Ulsterman's ideal, manhood suffrage and religious independence were two of its provisions. The commissioners enlisted a militia and they recorded deeds for land, issued marriage licenses, and tried offenders against the law. They believed themselves to be within the boundaries of Virginia and therefore adopted the laws of that State for their guidance. They had numerous offenders to deal with, for men fleeing from debt or from the consequence of crime sought the new settlements just across the mountains as a safe and adjacent harbor. The attempt of these men to pursue their lawlessness in Watauga was one reason why the Wataugans organized a government.

When the line was run between Virginia and North Carolina beyond the mountains, Watauga was discovered to be south of Virginia's limits and hence on Indian lands. This was in conflict with the King's Proclamation, and Alexander Cameron, British agent to the Cherokees, accordingly ordered the encroaching settlers to depart. The Indians, however, desired them to remain. But since it was illegal to purchase Indian lands, Robertson negotiated a lease for ten years. In 1775, when Henderson made his purchase from the Cherokees, at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga, Robertson and Sevier, who were present at the sale with other Watauga commissioners, followed Henderson's example and bought outright the lands they desired to include in Watauga's domain. In 1776 they petitioned North Carolina for "annexation." As they were already within North Carolina's bounds, it was recognition rather than annexation which they sought. This petition, which is the only Wataugan document to survive, is undated but marked as received in August, 1776. It is in Sevier's handwriting and its style suggests that it was composed by him, for in its manner of expression it has much in common with many later papers from his pen. That Wataugans were a law-loving community and had formed their government for the purpose of making law respected is reiterated throughout the document. As showing the quality of these first western statemakers, two paragraphs are quoted:

"Finding ourselves on the frontiers, and being apprehensive that for want of proper legislature we might become a shelter for such as endeavored to defraud their creditors; considering also the necessity of recording deeds, wills, and doing other public business; we, by consent of the people, formed a court for the purposes above mentioned, taking, by desire of our constituents, the Virginia laws for our guide, so near as the situation of affairs would permit. This was intended for ourselves, and WAS DONE BY CONSENT OF EVERY INDIVIDUAL."

The petition goes on to state that, among their measures for upholding law, the Wataugans had enlisted "a company of fine riflemen" and put them under command of "Captain James Robertson."

"We... thought proper to station them on our frontiers in defense of the common cause, at the expense and risque of our own private fortunes, till farther public orders, which we flatter ourselves will give no offense.... We pray your mature and deliberate consideration in our behalf, that you may annex us to your Province (whether as county, district, or other division) in such manner as may enable us to share in the glorious cause of Liberty: enforce our laws under authority and in every respect become the best members of society; and for ourselves and our constituents we hope we may venture to assure you that we shall adhere strictly to your determinations, and that nothing will be lacking or anything neglected that may add weight (in the civil or military establishments) to the glorious cause in which we are now struggling, or contribute to the welfare of our own or ages yet to come."

One hundred and thirteen names are signed to the document. In the following year (1777) North Carolina erected her overhill territory into Washington County. The Governor appointed justices of the peace and militia officers who in the following year organized the new county and its courts. And so Watauga's independent government, begun in the spirit of true liberty, came as lawfully to its end.

But for nearly three years before their political status was thus determined, the Wataugans were sharing "in the glorious cause of Liberty" by defending their settlements against Indian attacks. While the majority of the young Cherokee warriors were among their enemies, their chief battles were fought with those from the Chickamaugan towns on the Tennessee River, under the leadership of Dragging Canoe. The Chickamaugans embraced the more vicious and bloodthirsty Cherokees, with a mixture of Creeks and bad whites, who, driven from every law-abiding community, had cast in their lot with this tribe. The exact number of white thieves and murderers who had found harbor in the Indian towns during a score or more of years is not known; but the letters of the Indian agents, preserved in the records, would indicate that there were a good many of them. They were fit allies for Dragging Canoe; their hatred of those from whom their own degeneracy had separated them was not less than his.

In July, 1776, John Sevier wrote to the Virginia Committee as follows:

"Dear Gentlemen: Isaac Thomas, William Falling, Jaret Williams and one more have this moment come in by making their escape from the Indians and say six hundred Indians and whites were to start for this fort and intend to drive the country up to New River before they return."

Thus was heralded the beginning of a savage warfare which kept the borderers engaged for years.

It has been a tradition of the chroniclers that Isaac Thomas received a timely warning from Nancy Ward, a half-caste Cherokee prophetess who often showed her good will towards the whites; and that the Indians were roused to battle by Alexander Cameron and John Stuart, the British agents or superintendents among the overhill tribes. There was a letter bearing Cameron's name stating that fifteen hundred savages from the Cherokee and Creek nations were to join with British troops landed at Pensacola in an expedition against the southern frontier colonies. This letter was brought to Watauga at dead of night by a masked man who slipped it through a window and rode away. Apparently John Sevier did not believe the military information contained in the mysterious missive, for he communicated nothing of it to the Virginia Committee. In recent years the facts have come to light. This mysterious letter and others of a similar tenor bearing forged signatures are cited in a report by the British Agent, John Stuart, to his Government. It appears that such inflammatory missives had been industriously scattered through the back settlements of both Carolinas. There are also letters from Stuart to Lord Dartmouth, dated a year earlier, urging that something be done immediately to counteract rumors set afloat that the British were endeavoring to instigate both the Indians and the negroes to attack the Americans.

Now it is, of course, an established fact that both the British and the American armies used Indians in the War of Independence, even as both together had used them against the French and the Spanish and their allied Indians. It was inevitable that the Indians should participate in any severe conflict between the whites. They were a numerous and a warlike people and, from their point of view, they had more at stake than the alien whites who were contesting for control of the red man's continent. Both British and Americans have been blamed for "half-hearted attempts to keep the Indians neutral." The truth is that each side strove to enlist the Indians—to be used, if needed later, as warriors. Massacre was no part of this policy, though it may have been countenanced by individual officers in both camps. But it is obvious that, once the Indians took the warpath, they were to be restrained by no power and, no matter under whose nominal command, they would carry on warfare by their own methods. *

* "There is little doubt that either side, British or Americans, stood ready to enlist the Indians. Already before Boston the Americans had had the help of the Stockbridge tribe. Washington found the service committed to the practise when he arrived at Cambridge early in July. Dunmore had taken the initiative in securing such allies, at least is purpose; but the insurgent Virginians had had of late more direct contact with the tribes and were now striving to secure them but with little success." "The Westward Movement," by Justin Winsor, p. 87.

General Ethan Allen of Vermont, as his letters show, sent emissaries into Canada in an endeavor to enlist the French Canadians and the Canadian Indians against the British in Canada. See "American Archives," Fourth Series, vol. II, p. 714. The British General Gage wrote to Lord Dartmouth from Boston, June 18, 1775: "We need not be tender of calling on the Savages as the rebels have shown us the example, by bringing as many Indians down against us as they could collect." "American Archives." Fourth Series, vol. ii, p. 967.

In a letter to Lord Germain, dated August 23, 1776, John Stuart wrote: "Although Mr. Cameron was in constant danger of assassination and the Indians were threatened with invasion should they dare to, protect him, yet he still found means to prevent their falling on the settlement." See North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X, pp. 608 and 763. Proof that the British agents had succeeded in keeping the Cherokee neutral till the summer of 1776 is found in the instructions, dated the 7th of July, to Major Winston from President Rutledge of South Carolina, regarding the Cherokees, that they must be forced to give up the British agents and "INSTEAD OF REMAINING IN A STATE OF NEUTRALITY with respect to British Forces they must take part with us against them." See North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X, p. 658.

Whatever may have been the case elsewhere, the attacks on the Watauga and Holston settlements were not instigated by British agents. It was not Nancy Ward but Henry Stuart, John Stuart's deputy, who sent Isaac Thomas to warn the settlers. In their efforts to keep the friendship of the red men, the British and the Americans were providing them with powder and lead. The Indians had run short of ammunition and, since hunting was their only means of livelihood, they must shoot or starve. South Carolina sent the Cherokees a large supply of powder and lead which was captured en route by Tories. About the same time Henry Stuart set out from Pensacola with another consignment from the British. His report to Lord Germain of his arrival in the Chickamaugan towns and of what took place there just prior to the raids on the Tennessee settlements is one of the most illuminating as well as one of the most dramatic papers in the collected records of that time. *

* North Carolina "Colonial Records," vol. X, pp. 763-785.

Stuart's first act was secretly to send out Thomas, the trader, to warn the settlers of their peril, for a small war party of braves was even then concluding the preliminary war ceremonies. The reason for this Indian alarm and projected excursion was the fact that the settlers had built one fort at least on the Indian lands. Stuart finally persuaded the Indians to remain at peace until he could write to the settlers stating the grievances and asking for negotiations. The letters were to be carried by Thomas on his return.

But no sooner was Thomas on his way again with the letters than there arrived a deputation of warriors from the Northern tribes—from "the Confederate nations, the Mohawks, Ottawas, Nantucas, Shawanoes and Delawares"—fourteen men in all, who entered the council hall of the Old Beloved Town of Chota with their faces painted black and the war belt carried before them. They said that they had been seventy days on their journey. Everywhere along their way they had seen houses and forts springing up like, weeds across the green sod of their hunting lands. Where once were great herds of deer and buffalo, they had watched thousands of men at arms preparing for war. So many now were the white warriors and their women and children that the red men had been obliged to travel a great way on the other side of the Ohio and to make a detour of nearly three hundred miles to avoid being seen. Even on this outlying route they had crossed the fresh tracks of a great body of people with horses and cattle going still further towards the setting sun. But their cries were not to be in vain; for "their fathers, the French" had heard them and had promised to aid them if they would now strike as one for their lands.

After this preamble the deputy of the Mohawks rose. He said that some American people had made war on one of their towns and had seized the son of their Great Beloved Man, Sir William Johnson, imprisoned him, and put him to a cruel death; this crime demanded a great vengeance and they would not cease until they had taken it. One after another the fourteen delegates rose and made their "talks" and presented their wampum strings to Dragging Canoe. The last to speak was a chief of the Shawanoes. He also declared that "their fathers, the French," who had been so long dead, were "alive again," that they had supplied them plentifully with arms and ammunition and had promised to assist them in driving out the Americans and in reclaiming their country. Now all the Northern tribes were joined in one for this great purpose; and they themselves were on their way to all the Southern tribes and had resolved that, if any tribe refused to join, they would fall upon and extirpate that tribe, after having overcome the whites. At the conclusion of his oration the Shawanoe presented the war belt—nine feet of six-inch wide purple wampum spattered with vermilion—to Dragging Canoe, who held it extended between his two hands, in silence, and waited. Presently rose a headman whose wife had been a member of Sir William Johnson's household. He laid his hand on the belt and sang the war song. One by one, then, chiefs and warriors rose, laid hold of the great belt and chanted the war song. Only the older men, made wise by many defeats, sat still in their places, mute and dejected. "After that day every young fellow's face in the overhills towns appeared blackened and nothing was now talked of but war."

Stuart reports that "all the white men" in the tribe also laid hands on the belt. Dragging Canoe then demanded that Cameron and Stuart come forward and take hold of the war belt—"which we refused." Despite the offense their refusal gave—and it would seem a dangerous time to give such offense—Cameron delivered a "strong talk" for peace, warning the Cherokees of what must surely be the end of the rashness they contemplated. Stuart informed the chief that if the Indians persisted in attacking the settlements with out waiting for answers to his letters, he would not remain with them any longer or bring them any more ammunition. He went to his house and made ready to leave on the following day. Early the next morning Dragging Canoe appeared at his door and told him that the Indians were now very angry about the letters he had written, which could only have put the settlers on their guard; and that if any white man attempted to leave the nation "they had determined to follow him but NOT TO BRING HIM BACK." Dragging Canoe had painted his face black to carry this message. Thomas now returned with an answer from "the West Fincastle men," which was so unsatisfactory to the tribe that war ceremonies were immediately begun. Stuart and Cameron could no longer influence the Indians. "All that could now be done was to give them strict charge not to pass the Boundary Line, not to injure any of the King's faithful subjects, not to kill any women and children"; and to threaten to "stop all ammunition" if they did not obey these orders.

The major part of the Watauga militia went out to meet the Indians and defeated a large advance force at Long Island Flats on the Holston. The Watauga fort, where many of the settlers had taken refuge, contained forty fighting men under Robertson and Sevier. As Indians usually retreated and waited for a while after a defeat, those within the fort took it for granted that no immediate attack was to be expected; and the women went out at daybreak into the fields to milk the cows. Suddenly the war whoop shrilled from the edge of the clearing. Red warriors leaped from the green skirting of the forest. The women ran for the fort. Quickly the heavy gates swung to and the dropped bar secured them. Only then did the watchmen discover that one woman had been shut out. She was a young woman nearing her twenties and, if legend has reported her truly, "Bonnie Kate Sherrill" was a beauty. Through a porthole Sevier saw her running towards the shut gates, dodging and darting, her brown hair blowing from the wind of her race for life—and offering far too rich a prize to the yelling fiends who dashed after her. Sevier coolly shot the foremost of her pursuers, then sprang upon the wall, caught up Bonnie Kate, and tossed her inside to safety. And legend says further that when, after Sevier's brief widowerhood, she became his wife, four years later, Bonnie Kate was wont to say that she would be willing to run another such race any day to have another such introduction!

There were no casualties within the fort and, after three hours, the foe withdrew, leaving several of their warriors slain.

In the excursions against the Indians which followed this opening of hostilities Sevier won his first fame as an "Indian fighter"—the fame later crystallized in the phrase "thirty-five battles, thirty-five victories." His method was to take a very small company of the hardiest and swiftest horsemen—men who could keep their seat and endurance, and horses that could keep their feet and their speed, on any steep of the mountains no matter how tangled and rough the going might be—swoop down upon war camp, or town, and go through it with rifle and hatchet and fire, then dash homeward at the same pace before the enemy had begun to consider whether to follow him or not. In all his "thirty-five battles" it is said he lost not more than fifty men.

The Cherokees made peace in 1777, after about a year of almost continuous warfare, the treaty being concluded on their side by the old chiefs who had never countenanced the war. Dragging Canoe refused to take part, but he was rendered innocuous for the time being by the destruction of several of the Chickamaugan villages. James Robertson now went to Chota as Indian agent for North Carolina. So fast was population growing, owing to the opening of a wagon road into Burke County, North Carolina, that Washington County was divided. John Sevier became Colonel of Washington and Isaac Shelby Colonel of the newly erected Sullivan County. Jonesborough, the oldest town in Tennessee, was laid out as the county seat of Washington; and in the same year (1778) Sevier moved to the bank of the Nolichucky River, so-called after the Indian name of this dashing sparkling stream, meaning rapid or precipitous. Thus the nickname given John Sevier by his devotees had a dual application. He was well called Nolichucky Jack.

When Virginia annulled Richard Henderson's immense purchase but allowed him a large tract on the Cumberland, she by no means discouraged that intrepid pioneer. Henderson's tenure of Kentucky had been brief, but not unprofitable in experience. He had learned that colonies must be treated with less commercial pressure and with more regard to individual liberty, if they were to be held loyal either to a King beyond the water or to an uncrowned leader nearer at hand. He had been making his plans for colonization of that portion of the Transylvania purchase which lay within the bounds of North Carolina along the Cumberland and choosing his men to lay the foundations of his projected settlement in what was then a wholly uninhabited country; and he had decided on generous terms, such as ten dollars a thousand acres for land, the certificate of purchase to entitle the holder to further proceedings in the land office without extra fees. To head an enterprise of such danger and hardship Henderson required a man of more than mere courage; a man of resource, of stability, of proven powers, one whom other men would follow and obey with confidence. So it was that James Robertson was chosen to lead the first white settlers into middle Tennessee. He set out in February, 1779, accompanied by his brother, Mark Robertson, several other white men, and a negro, to select a site for settlement and to plant corn. Meanwhile another small party led by Gaspar Mansker had arrived. As the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina had not been run to this point, Robertson believed that the site he had chosen lay within Virginia and was in the disposal of General Clark. To protect the settlers, therefore, he journeyed into the Illinois country to purchase cabin rights from Clark, but there he was evidently convinced that the site on the Cumberland would be found to lie within North Carolina. He returned to Watauga to lead a party of settlers into the new territory, towards which they set out in October. After crossing the mountain chain through Cumberland Gap, the party followed Boone's road—the Warriors' Path—for some distance and then made their own trail southwestward through the wilderness to the bluffs on the Cumberland, where they built cabins to house them against one of the coldest winters ever experienced in that county. So were laid the first foundations of the present city of Nashville, at first named Nashborough by Robertson. * On the way, Robertson had fallen in with a party of men and families bound for Kentucky and had persuaded them to accompany his little band to the Cumberland. Robertson's own wife and children, as well as the families of his party, had been left to follow in the second expedition, which was to be made by water under the command of Captain John Donelson.

* In honor of General Francis Nash, of North Carolina, who was mortally wounded at Germantown, 1777.

The little fleet of boats containing the settlers, their families, and all their household goods, was to start from Fort Patrick Henry, near Long Island in the Holston River, to float down into the Tennessee and along the 652 miles of that widely wandering stream to the Ohio, and then to proceed up the Ohio to the mouth of the Cumberland and up the Cumberland until Robertson's station should appear—a journey, as it turned out, of some nine hundred miles through unknown country and on waters at any rate for the greater part never before navigated by white men.

"Journal of a voyage, intended by God's permission, in the good boat Adventure" is the title of the log book in which Captain Donelson entered the events of the four months' journey. Only a few pages endured to be put into print: but those few tell a tale of hazard and courage that seems complete. Could a lengthier narrative, even if enriched with literary art and fancy, bring before us more vividly than do the simple entries of Donelson's log the spirit of the men and the women who won the West? If so little personal detail is recorded of the pioneer men of that day that we must deduce what they were from what they did, what do we know of their unfailing comrades, the pioneer women? Only that they were there and that they shared in every test of courage and endurance, save the march of troops and the hunt. Donelson's "Journal" therefore has a special value, because in its terse account of Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Peyton it depicts unforgettably the quality of pioneer womanhood. *

* This Journal is printed in Ramsey's "Annals of Tennessee."

"December 22nd, 1779. Took our departure from the fort and fell down the river to the mouth of Reedy Creek where we were stopped by the fall of water and most excessive hard frost."

Perhaps part of the "Journal" was lost, or perhaps the "excessive hard frost" of that severe winter, when it is said even droves of wild game perished, prevented the boats, from going on, for the next entry is dated the 27th of February. On this date the Adventure and two other boats grounded and lay on the shoals all that afternoon and the succeeding night "in much distress."

"March 2nd. Rain about half the day.... Mr. Henry's boat being driven on the point of an island by the force of the current was sunk, the whole cargo much damaged and the crew's lives much endangered, which occasioned the whole fleet to put on shore and go to their assistance....

"Monday 6th. Got under way before sunrise; the morning proving very foggy, many of the fleet were much bogged—about 10 o'clock lay by for them; when collected, proceeded down. Camped on the north shore, where Captain Hutching's negro man died, being much frosted in his feet and legs, of which he died.

"Tuesday, 7th. Got under way very early; the day proving very windy, a S.S.W., and the river being wide occasioned a high sea, insomuch that some of the smaller crafts were in danger; therefore came to at the uppermost Chiccamauga town, which was then evacuated, where we lay by that afternoon and camped that night. The wife of Ephraim Peyton was here delivered of a child. Mr. Peyton has gone through by land with Captain Robertson.

"Wednesday 8th... proceed down to an Indian village which was inhabited... they insisted on us to come ashore, called us brothers, and showed other signs of friendship.... And here we must regret the unfortunate death of young Mr. Payne, on board Captain Blakemore's boat, who was mortally wounded by reason of the boat running too near the northern shore opposite the town, where some of the enemy lay concealed; and the more tragical misfortune of poor Stuart, his family and friends, to the number of twenty-eight persons. This man had embarked with us for the Western country, but his family being diseased with the small pox, it was agreed upon between him and the company that he should keep at some distance in the rear, for fear of the infection spreading, and he was warned each night when the encampment should take place by the sound of a horn.... The Indians having now collected to a considerable number, observing his helpless situation singled off from the rest of the fleet, intercepted him and killed and took prisoners the whole crew...; their cries were distinctly heard...".

After describing a running fight with Indians stationed on the bluffs on both shores where the river narrowed to half its width and boiled through a canyon, the entry for the day concludes: "Jennings's boat is missing."

"Friday 10th. This morning about 4 o'clock we were surprised by the cries of "help poor Jennings" at some distance in the rear. He had discovered us by our fires and came up in the most wretched condition. He states that as soon as the Indians discovered his situation [his boat had run on a rock] they turned their whole attention to him and kept up a most galling fire at his boat. He ordered his wife, a son nearly grown, a young man who accompanies them and his negro man and woman, to throw all his goods into the river to lighten their boat for the purpose of getting her off; himself returning their fire as well as he could, being a good soldier and an excellent marksman. But before they had accomplished their object, his son, the young man and the negro, jumped out of the boat and left.... Mrs. Jennings, however, and the negro woman, succeeded in unloading the boat, but chiefly by the exertions of Mrs. Jennings who got out of the boat and shoved her off, but was near falling a victim to her own intrepidity on account of the boat starting so suddenly as soon as loosened from the rock. Upon examination he appears to have made a wonderful escape for his boat is pierced in numberless places with bullets. It is to be remarked that Mrs. Peyton, who was the night before delivered of an infant, which was unfortunately killed upon the hurry and confusion consequent upon such a disaster, assisted them, being frequently exposed to wet and cold.... Their clothes were very much cut with bullets, especially Mrs. Jennings's."

Of the three men who deserted, while the women stood by under fire, the negro was drowned and Jennings's son and the other young man were captured by the Chickamaugans. The latter was burned at the stake. Young Jennings was to have shared the same fate; but a trader in the village, learning that the boy was known to John Sevier, ransomed him by a large payment of goods, as a return for an act of kindness Sevier had once done to him.

"Sunday 12th.... After running until about 10 o'clock came in sight of the Muscle Shoals. Halted on the northern shore at the appearance of the shoals, in order to search for the signs Captain James Robertson was to make for us at that place... that it was practicable for us to go across by land... we can find none—from which we conclude that it would not be prudent to make the attempt and are determined, knowing ourselves in such imminent danger, to pursue our journey down the river.... When we approached them [the Shoals] they had a dreadful appearance.... The water being high made a terrible roaring, which could be heard at some distance, among the driftwood heaped frightfully upon the points of the islands, the current running in every possible direction. Here we did not know how soon we should be dashed to pieces and all our troubles ended at once... Our boats frequently dragged on the bottom and appeared constantly in danger of striking. They warped as much as in a rough sea. But by the hand of Providence we are now preserved from this danger also. I know not the length of this wonderful shoal; it had been represented to me to be twenty-five or thirty miles. If so, we must have descended very rapidly, as indeed we did, for we passed it in about three hours."

On the twentieth the little fleet arrived at the mouth of the Tennessee and the voyagers landed on the bank of the Ohio.

"Our situation here is truly disagreeable. The river is very high and the current rapid, our boats not constructed for the purpose of stemming a rapid stream, our provisions exhausted, the crews almost worn down with hunger and fatigue, and know not what distance we have to go or what time it will take us to our place of destination. The scene is rendered still more melancholy as several boats will not attempt to ascend the rapid current. Some intend to descend the Mississippi to Natchez; others are bound for the Illinois—among the rest my son-in-law and daughter. We now part, perhaps to meet no more, for I am determined to pursue my course, happen what will.

"Tuesday 21st. Set out and on this day labored very hard and got but little way.... Passed the two following days as the former, suffering much from hunger and fatigue.

"Friday 24th. About three o'clock came to the mouth of a river which I thought was the Cumberland. Some of the company declared it could not be—it was so much smaller than was expected.... We determined however to make the trial, pushed up some distance and encamped for the night.

"Saturday 25th. Today we are much encouraged; the river grows wider;... we are now convinced it is the Cumberland....

"Sunday 26th... procured some buffalo meat; though poor it was palatable.

"Friday 31st... met with Colonel Richard Henderson, who is running the line between Virginia and North Carolina. At this meeting we were much rejoiced. He gave us every information we wished, and further informed us that he had purchased a quantity of corn in Kentucky, to be shipped at the Falls of Ohio for the use of the Cumberland settlement. We are now without bread and are compelled to hunt the buffalo to preserve life....

"Monday, April 24th. This day we arrived at our journey's end at the Big Salt Lick, where we have the pleasure of finding Captain Robertson and his company. It is a source of satisfaction to us to be enabled to restore to him and others their families and friends, who were entrusted to our care, and who, sometime since, perhaps, despaired of ever meeting again...."

Past the camps of the Chickamaugans—who were retreating farther and farther down the twisting flood, seeking a last standing ground in the giant caves by the Tennessee—these white voyagers had steered their pirogues. Near Robertson's station, where they landed after having traversed the triangle of the three great rivers which enclose the larger part of western Tennessee, stood a crumbling trading house marking the defeat of a Frenchman who had, one time, sailed in from the Ohio to establish an outpost of his nation there. At a little distance were the ruins of a rude fort cast up by the Cherokees in the days when the redoubtable Chickasaws had driven them from the pleasant shores of the western waters. Under the towering forest growth lay vast burial mounds and the sunken foundations of walled towns, telling of a departed race which had once flashed its rude paddles and had its dream of permanence along the courses of these great waterways. Now another tribe had come to dream that dream anew. Already its primitive keels had traced the opening lines of its history on the face of the immemorial rivers.



Chapter IX. King's Mountain

About the time when James Robertson went from Watauga to fling out the frontier line three hundred miles farther westward, the British took Savannah. In 1780 they took Charleston and Augusta, and overran Georgia. Augusta was the point where the old trading path forked north and west, and it was the key to the Back Country and the overhill domain. In Georgia and the Back Country of South Carolina there were many Tories ready to rally to the King's standard whenever a King's officer should carry it through their midst. A large number of these Tories were Scotch, chiefly from the Highlands. In fact, as we have seen, Scotch blood predominated among the racial streams in the Back Country from Georgia to Pennsylvania. Now, to insure a triumphant march northward for Cornwallis and his royal troops, these sons of Scotland must be gathered together, the loyal encouraged and those of rebellious tendencies converted, and they must be drilled and turned to account. This task, if it were to be accomplished successfully, must be entrusted to an officer with positive qualifications, one who would command respect, whose personal address would attract men and disarm opposition, and especially one who could go as a Scot among his own clan. Cornwallis found his man in Major. Patrick Ferguson.

Ferguson was a Highlander, a son of Lord Pitfour of Aberdeen, and thirty-six years of age. He was of short stature for a Highlander—about five feet eight—lean and dark, with straight black hair. He had a serious unhandsome countenance which, at casual glance, might not arrest attention; but when he spoke he became magnetic, by reason of the intelligence and innate force that gleamed in his eyes and the convincing sincerity of his manner. He was admired and respected by his brother officers and by the commanders under whom he had served, and he was loved by his men.

He had seen his first service in the Seven Years' War, having joined the British army in Flanders at the age of fifteen; and he had early distinguished himself for courage and coolness. In 1768, as a captain of infantry, he quelled an insurrection of the natives on the island of St. Vincent in the West Indies. Later, at Woolwich, he took up the scientific study of his profession of arms. He not only became a crack shot, but he invented a new type of rifle which he could load at the breach without ramrod and so quickly as to fire seven times in a minute. Generals and statesmen attended his exhibitions of shooting; and even the King rode over at the head of his guards to watch Ferguson rapidly loading and firing.

In America under Cornwallis, Ferguson had the reputation of being the best shot in the army; and it was soon said that, in his quickness at loading and firing, he excelled the most expert American frontiersman. Eyewitnesses have left their testimony that, seeing a bird alight on a bough or rail, he would drop his bridle rein, draw his pistol, toss it in the air, catch and aim it as it fell, and shoot the bird's head off. He was given command of a corps of picked riflemen; and in the Battle of the Brandywine in 1777 he rendered services which won acclaim from the whole army. For the honor of that day's service to his King, Ferguson paid what from him, with his passion for the rifle, must have been the dearest price that could have been demanded. His right arm was shattered, and for the remaining three years of his short life it hung useless at his side. Yet he took up swordplay and attained a remarkable degree of skill as a left-handed swordsman.

Such was Ferguson, the soldier. What of the man? For he has been pictured as a wolf and a fiend and a coward by early chroniclers, who evidently felt that they were adding to the virtue of those who fought in defense of liberty by representing all their foes as personally odious. We can read his quality of manhood in a few lines of the letter he sent to his kinsman, the noted Dr. Adam Ferguson, about an incident that occurred at Chads Ford. As he was lying with his men in the woods, in front of Knyphausen's army, so he relates, he saw two American officers ride out. He describes their dress minutely. One was in hussar uniform. The other was in a dark green and blue uniform with a high cocked hat and was mounted on a bay horse:

"I ordered three good shots to steal near to and fire at them; but the idea disgusting me, I recalled the order. The hussar in retiring made a circuit, but the other passed within a hundred yards of us, upon which I advanced from the wood towards him. Upon my calling he stopped; but after looking at me he proceeded. I again drew his attention and made signs to him to stop; levelling my piece at him; but he slowly cantered away. As I was within that distance, at which, in the quickest firing, I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out of my reach, I had only to determine. But it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual who was acquitting himself very coolly of his duty—so I let him alone. The day after, I had been telling this story to some wounded officers, who lay in the same room with me, when one of the surgeons who had been dressing the wounded rebel officers came in and told us that they had been informing him that General Washington was all the morning with the light troops, and only attended by a French officer in hussar dress, he himself dressed and mounted in every point as above described. I AM NOT SORRY THAT I DID NOT KNOW AT THE TIME WHO IT WAS." *

*Doubt that the officer in question was Washington was expressed by James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper stated that Major De Lancey, his father-in-law, was binding Ferguson's arm at the time when the two officers were seen and Ferguson recalled the order to fire, and that De Lancey said he believed the officer was Count Pulaski. But, as Ferguson, according to his own account, "leveled his piece" at the officer, his arm evidently was not wounded until later in the day. The probability is that Ferguson's version, written in a private letter to his relative, is correct as to the facts, whatever may be conjectured as to the identity of the officer. See Draper's King's "Mountain and its Heroes," pp. 52-54.

Ferguson had his code towards the foe's women also. On one occasion when he was assisting in an action carried out by Hessians and Dragoons, he learned that some American women had been shamefully maltreated. He went in a white fury to the colonel in command, and demanded that the men who had so disgraced their uniforms instantly be put to death.

In rallying the loyalists of the Back Country of Georgia and the Carolinas, Ferguson was very successful. He was presently in command of a thousand or more men, including small detachments of loyalists from New York and New Jersey, under American-born officers such as De Peyster and Allaire. There were good honest men among the loyalists and there were also rough and vicious men out for spoils—which was true as well of the Whigs or Patriots from the same counties. Among the rough element were Tory banditti from the overmountain region. It is to be gathered from Ferguson's records that he did not think any too highly of some of his new recruits, but he set to work with all energy to make them useful.

The American Patriots hastily prepared to oppose him. Colonel Charles McDowell of Burke County, North Carolina, with a small force of militia was just south of the line at a point on the Broad River when he heard that Ferguson was sweeping on northward. In haste he sent a call for help across the mountains to Sevier and Shelby. Sevier had his hands full at Watauga, but he dispatched two hundred of his troops; and Isaac Shelby, with a similar force from Sullivan County crossed the mountains to McDowell's assistance. These "overmountain men" or "backwater men," as they were called east of the hills, were trained in Sevier's method of Indian warfare—the secret approach through the dark, the swift dash, and the swifter flight. "Fight strong and run away fast" was the Indian motto, as their women had often been heard to call it after the red men as they ran yelling to fall on the whites. The frontiersmen had adapted the motto to fit their case, as they had also made their own the Indian tactics of ambuscade and surprise attacks at dawn. To sleep, or ride if needs must, by night, and to fight by day and make off, was to them a reasonable soldier's life.

But Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which grew among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest legends about his ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a habit he had of pouncing on his foes in the middle of the night and pulling them out of bed to give fight or die. It was generally both fight and die, for these dark adventures of his were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no neutrals or conscientious objectors; any man who would not carry arms for the King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeit. A report of his reads: "The attack being made at night, no quarter could be given." Hence his wolfish fame. "Werewolf" would have been a fit name for him for, though he was a wolf at night, in the daylight he was a man and, as we have seen, a chivalrous one.

In the guerrilla fighting that went on for a brief time between the overmountain men and various detachments of Ferguson's forces, sometimes one side, sometimes the other, won the heat. But the field remained open. Neither side could claim the mastery. In a minor engagement fought at Musgrove's Mill on the Enoree, Shelby's command came off victor and was about to pursue the enemy towards Ninety-Six when a messenger from McDowell galloped madly into camp with word of General Gates's crushing defeat at Camden. This was a warning for Shelby's guerrillas to flee as birds to their mountains, or Ferguson would cut them off from the north and wedge them in between his own force and the victorious Cornwallis. McDowell's men, also on the run for safety, joined them. For forty-eight hours without food or rest they rode a race with Ferguson, who kept hard on their trail until they disappeared into the mystery of the winding mountain paths they alone knew.

Ferguson reached the gap where they had swerved into the towering hills only half an hour after their horses' hoofs had pounded across it. Here he turned back. His troops were exhausted from the all-night ride and, in any case, there were not enough of them to enable him to cross the mountains and give the Watauga men battle on their own ground with a fair promise of victory. So keeping east of the hills but still close to them, Ferguson turned into Burke County, North Carolina. He sat him down in Gilbert Town (present Lincolnton, Lincoln County) at the foot of the Blue Ridge and indited a letter to the "Back Water Men," telling them that if they did not lay down their arms and return to their rightful allegiance, he would come over their hills and raze their settlements and hang their leaders. He paroled a kinsman of Shelby's, whom he had taken prisoner in the chase, and sent him home with the letter. Then he set about his usual business of gathering up Tories and making soldiers of them, and of hunting down rebels.

One of the "rebels" was a certain Captain Lytle. When Ferguson drew up at Lytle's door, Lytle had already made his escape; but Mrs. Lytle was there. She was a very handsome woman and she had dressed herself in her best to receive Ferguson, who was reported a gallant as well as a wolf. After a few spirited passages between the lady in the doorway and the officer on the white horse before it, the latter advised Mrs. Lytle to use her influence to bring her husband back to his duty. She became grave then and answered that her husband would never turn traitor to his country. Ferguson frowned at the word "traitor," but presently he said: "Madam, I admire you as the handsomest woman I have seen in North Carolina. I even half way admire your zeal in a bad cause. But take my word for it, the rebellion has had its day and is now virtually put down. Give my regards to Captain Lytle and tell him to come in. He will not be asked to compromise his honor. His verbal pledge not again to take up arms against the King is all that will be asked of him." *

* Draper,"King's Mountain and its Heroes," pp. 151-53.

This was another phase of the character of the one-armed Highlander whose final challenge to the backwater men was now being considered in every log cabin beyond the hills. A man who would not shoot an enemy in the back, who was ready to put the same faith in another soldier's honor which he knew was due to his own, yet in battle a wolfish fighter who leaped through the dark to give no quarter and to take none—he was fit challenger to those other mountaineers who also had a chivalry of their own, albeit they too were wolves of war.

When Shelby on the Holston received Ferguson's pungent letter, he flung himself on his horse and rode posthaste to Watauga to consult, with Sevier. He found the bank of the Nolichucky teeming with merrymakers. Nolichucky Jack was giving an immense barbecue and a horse race. Without letting the festival crowd have an inkling of the serious nature of Shelby's errand, the two men drew apart to confer. It is said to have been Sevier's idea that they should muster the forces of the western country and go in search of Ferguson ere the latter should be able to get sufficient reinforcements to cross the mountains. Sevier, like Ferguson, always preferred to seek his foe, knowing well the advantage of the offensive. Messengers were sent to Colonel William Campbell of the Virginia settlements on the Clinch, asking his aid. Campbell at first refused, thinking it better to fortify the positions they held and let Ferguson come and put the mountains between himself and Cornwallis. On receipt of a second message, however, he concurred. The call to arms was heard up and down the valleys, and the frontiersmen poured into Watauga. The overhill men were augmented by McDowell's troops from Burke County, who had dashed over the mountains a few weeks before in their escape from Ferguson.

At daybreak on the 26th of September they mustered at the Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga, over a thousand strong. It was a different picture they made from that other great gathering at the same spot when Henderson had made his purchase in money of the Dark and Bloody Ground, and Sevier and Robertson had bought for the Wataugans this strip of Tennessee. There were no Indians in this picture. Dragging Canoe, who had uttered his bloody prophecy, had by these very men been driven far south into the caves of the Tennessee River. But the Indian prophecy still hung over them, and in this day with a heavier menace. Not with money, now, were they to seal their purchase of the free land by the western waters. There had been no women in that other picture, only the white men who were going forward to open the way and the red men who were retreating. But in this picture there were women—wives and children, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts. All the women of the settlement were there at this daybreak muster to cheer on their way the men who were going out to battle that they might keep the way of liberty open not for men only but for women and children also. And the battle to which the men were now going forth must be fought against Back Country men of their own stripe under a leader who, in other circumstances, might well have been one of themselves—a primitive spirit of hardy mountain stock, who, having once taken his stand, would not barter and would not retreat.

"With the Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" cried their pastor, the Reverend Samuel Doak, with upraised hands, as the mountaineers swung into their saddles. And it is said that all the women took up his words and cried again and again, "With the sword of the Lord and of our Gideons!" To the shouts of their women, as bugles on the wind of dawn, the buckskin-shirted army dashed out upon the mountain trail.

The warriors' equipment included rifles and ammunition, tomahawks, knives, shot pouches, a knapsack, and a blanket for each man. Their uniforms were leggings, breeches, and long loose shirts of gayly fringed deerskin, or of the linsey-woolsey spun by their women. Their hunting shirts were bound in at the waist by bright-colored linsey sashes tied behind in a bow. They wore moccasins for footgear, and on their heads high fur or deerskin caps trimmed with colored bands of raveled cloth. Around their necks hung their powderhorns ornamented with their own rude carvings.

On the first day they drove along with them a number of beeves but, finding that the cattle impeded the march, they left them behind on the mountain side. Their provisions thereafter were wild game and the small supply each man carried of mixed corn meal and maple sugar. For drink, they had the hill streams.

They passed upward between Roan and Yellow mountains to the top of the range. Here, on the bald summit, where the loose snow lay to their ankles, they halted for drill and rifle practice. When Sevier called up his men, he discovered that two were missing. He suspected at once that they had slipped away to carry warning to Ferguson, for Watauga was known to be infested with Tories. Two problems now confronted the mountaineers. They must increase the speed of their march, so that Ferguson should not have time to get reinforcements from Cornwallis; and they must make that extra speed by another trail than they had intended taking so that they themselves could not be intercepted before they had picked up the Back Country militia under Colonels Cleveland, Hampbright, Chronicle, and Williams, who were moving to join them. We are not told who took the lead when they left the known trail, but we may suppose it was Sevier and his Wataugans, for the making of new warpaths and wild riding were two of the things which distinguished Nolichucky Jack's leadership. Down the steep side of the mountain, finding their way as they plunged, went the overhill men. They crossed the Blue Ridge at Gillespie's Gap and pushed on to Quaker Meadows, where Colonel Cleveland with 350 men swung into their column. Along their route, the Back Country Patriots with their rifles came out from the little hamlets and the farms and joined them.

They now had an army of perhaps fifteen hundred men but no commanding officer. Thus far, on the march, the four colonels had conferred together and agreed as to procedure; or, in reality, the influence of Sevier and Shelby, who had planned the enterprise and who seem always to have acted in unison, had swayed the others. It would be, however, manifestly improper to go into battle without a real general. Something must be done. McDowell volunteered to carry a letter explaining their need to General Gates, who had escaped with some of his staff into North Carolina and was not far off. It then occurred to Sevier and Shelby, evidently for the first time, that Gates, on receiving such a request, might well ask why the Governor of North Carolina, as the military head of the State, had not provided a commander. The truth is that Sevier and Shelby had been so busy drumming up the militia and planning their campaign that they had found no time to consult the Governor. Moreover, the means whereby the expedition had been financed might not have appealed to the chief executive. After finding it impossible to raise sufficient funds on his personal credit, Sevier had appropriated the entry money in the government land office to the business in hand—with the good will of the entry taker, who was a patriotic man, although, as he had pointed out, he could not, OFFICIALLY, hand over the money. Things being as they were, no doubt Nolichucky Jack felt that an interview with the Governor had better be deferred until after the capture of Ferguson. Hence the tenor of this communication to General Gates:

"As we have at this time called out our militia without any orders from the Executive of our different States and with the view of expelling the Enemy out of this part of the Country, we think such a body of men worthy of your attention and would request you to send a General Officer immediately to take the command.... All our Troops being Militia and but little acquainted with discipline, we could wish him to be a Gentleman of address, and able to keep up a proper discipline WITHOUT DISGUSTING THE SOLDIERY."

For some unknown reason—unless it might be the wording of this letter!—no officer was sent in reply. Shelby then suggested that, since all the officers but Campbell were North Carolinians and, therefore, no one of them could be promoted without arousing the jealousy of the others, Campbell, as the only Virginian, was the appropriate choice. The sweet reasonableness of selecting a commander from such a motive appealed to all, and Campbell became a general in fact if not in name! Shelby's principal aim, however, had been to get rid of McDowell, who, as their senior, would naturally expect to command and whom he considered "too far advanced in life and too inactive" for such an enterprise. At this time McDowell must have been nearly thirty-nine; and Shelby, who was just thirty, wisely refused to risk the campaign under a general who was in his dotage!

News of the frontiersmen's approach, with their augmented force, now numbering between sixteen and eighteen hundred, had reached Ferguson by the two Tories who had deserted from Sevier's troops. Ferguson thereupon had made all haste out of Gilbert Town and was marching southward to get in touch with Cornwallis. His force was much reduced, as some of his men were in pursuit of Elijah Clarke towards Augusta and a number of his other Tories were on furlough. As he passed through the Back Country he posted a notice calling on the loyalists to join him. If the overmountain men felt that they were out on a wolf hunt, Ferguson's proclamation shows what the wolf thought of his hunters.