Incited by the French, who had fled to the southward after the fall of Fort Duquesne, parties of bloodthirsty young Indians rushed down upon the settlements and left in their path death and desolation along the frontiers of the Carolinas. On the upper branch of the Yadkin and below the South Yadkin near Fort Dobbs twenty-two whites fell in swift succession before the secret onslaughts of the savages from the lower Cherokee towns. Many of the settlers along the Yadkin fled to the Carolina Fort at Bethabara and the stockade at the mill; and the sheriff of Rowan County suffered siege by the Cherokees, in his home, until rescued by a detachment under Brother Loesch from Bethabara. While many families took refuge in Fort Dobbs, frontiersmen under Captain Morgan Bryan ranged through the mountains to the west of Salisbury and guarded the settlements from the hostile incursions of the savages. So gravely alarmed were the Rowan settlers, compelled by the Indians to desert their planting and crops, that Colonel Harris was despatched post-haste for aid to Cape Fear, arriving there on July 1st. With strenuous energy Captain Waddell, then stationed in the east, rushed two companies of thirty men each to the rescue, sending by water-carriage six swivel guns and ammunition on before him; and these reinforcements brought relief at last to the harassed Rowan frontiers." During the remainder of the year, the borders were kept clear by bold and tireless rangers-under the leadership of expert Indian fighters of the stamp of Grifth Rutherford and Morgan Bryan.

When the Cherokee warriors who had wrought havoc along the North Carolina border in April arrived at their town of Settiquo, they proudly displayed the twenty-two scalps of the slain Rowan settlers. Upon the demand for these scalps by Captain Demere at Fort Loudon and under direction of Atta-kulla-kulla, the Settiquo warriors surrendered eleven of the scalps to Captain Demere who, according to custom in time of peace, buried them. New murders on Pacolet and along the Virginia Path, which occurred shortly afterward, caused gloomy forebodings; and it was plain, says a contemporary gazette, that "the lower Cherokees were not satisfied with the murder of the Rowan settlers, but intended further mischief". On October 1st and again on October 31st, Governor Dobbs received urgent requests from Governor Lyttelton, asking that the North Carolina provincials and militia cooperate to bring him assistance. Although there was no law requiring the troops to march out of the province and the exposed frontiers of North Carolina sorely needed protection, Waddell, now commissioned colonel, assembled a force of five small companies and marched to the aid of Governor Lyttelton. But early in January, 1760, while on the march, Waddell received a letter from Lyttelton, informing him that the assistance was not needed and that a treaty of peace had been negotiated with the Cherokees.



CHAPTER VI. Crushing the Cherokees

Thus ended the Cherokee war, which was among the last humbling strokes given to the expiring power of France in North America.—Hewatt: An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. 1779.

Governor Lyttelton's treaty of "peace", negotiated with the Cherokees at the close of 1759, was worse than a crime: it was a crass and hideous blunder. His domineering attitude and tyrannical treatment of these Indians had aroused the bitterest animosity. Yet he did not realize that it was no longer safe to trust their word. No sooner did the governor withdraw his army from the borders than the cunning Cherokees, whose passions had been inflamed by what may fairly be called the treacherous conduct of Lyttelton, rushed down with merciless ferocity upon the innocent and defenseless families on the frontier. On February 1, 1760, while a large party (including the family of Patrick Calhoun), numbering in all about one hundred and fifty persons, were removing from the Long Cane settlement to Augusta, they were suddenly attacked by a hundred mounted Cherokees, who slaughtered about fifty of them. After the massacre, many of the children were found helplessly wandering in the woods. One man alone carried to Augusta no less than nine of the pitiful innocents, some horribly mutilated with the tomahawk, others scalped, and all yet alive.

Atrocities defying description continued to be committed, and many people were slain. The Cherokees, under the leadership of Si-lou-ee, or the Young Warrior of Estatoe, the Round O, Tiftoe, and others, were baffled in their persistent efforts to capture Fort Prince George. On February 16th the crafty Oconostota appeared before the fort and under the pretext of desiring some White man to accompany him on a visit to the governor on urgent business, lured the commander, Lieutenant Coytomore, and two attendants to a conference outside the gates. At a preconceived signal a volley of shots rang out; the two attendants were wounded, and Lieutenant Coytomore, riddled with bullets, fell dead. Enraged by this act of treachery, the garrison put to death the Indian hostages within. During the abortive attack upon the fort, Oconostota, unaware of the murder of the hostages, was heard shouting above the din of battle: "Fight strong, and you shall be relieved."

Now began the dark days along the Rowan border, which were so sorely to test human endurance. Many refugees fortified themselves in the different stockades; and Colonel Hugh Waddell with his redoubtable frontier company of Indian-fighters awaited the onslaught of the savages, who were reported to have passed through the mountain defiles and to be approaching along the foot-hills. The story of the investment of Fort Dobbs and the splendidly daring sortie of Waddell and Bailey is best told in Waddell's report to Governor Dobbs (February 29, 1760):

"For several Days I observed a small party of Indians were constantly about the fort, I sent out several parties after them to no purpose, the Evening before last between 8 & 9 o'clock I found by the Dogs making an uncommon Noise there must be a party nigh a Spring which we sometimes use. As my Garrison is but small, and I was apprehensive it might be a scheme to draw out the Garrison, I took our Capt. Bailie who with myself and party made up ten: We had not marched 300 yds. from the fort when we were attacked by at least 60 or 70 Indians. I had given my party Orders not to fire until I gave the word, which they punctually observed: We rec'd the Indians' fire: When I perceived they had almost all fired, I ordered my party to fire which We did not further than 12 steps each loaded with a Bullet and 7 Buck Shot, they had nothing to cover them as they were advancing either to tomahawk us or make us Prisoners: They found the fire very hot from so small a Number which a good deal confused them: I then ordered my party to retreat, as I found the Instant our skirmish began another party had attacked the fort, upon our reinforcing the garrison the Indians were soon repulsed with I am sure a considerable Loss, from what I myself saw as well as those I can confide in they cou'd not have less than 10 or 12 killed and wounded; The next Morning we found a great deal of Blood and one dead whom I suppose they cou'd not find in the night. On my side I had 2 Men wounded one of whom I am afraid will die as he is scalped, the other is in way of Recovery, and one boy killed near the fort whom they durst not advance to scalp. I expected they would have paid me another visit last night, as they attack all Fortifications by Night, but find they did not like their Reception."

Alarmed by Waddell's "offensive-defensive," the Indians abandoned the siege. Robert Campbell, Waddell's ranger, who was scalped in this engagement, subsequently recovered from his wounds and was recompensed by the colony with the sum of twenty pounds.

In addition to the frontier militia, four independent companies were now placed under Waddell's command. Companies of volunteers scoured the woods in search of the lurking Indian foe. These rangers, who were clad in hunting-shirts and buckskin leggings, and who employed Indian tactics in fighting, were captained by such hardy leaders as the veteran Morgan Bryan, the intrepid Griffith Ruthe ford, the German partisan, Martin Phifer (Pfeiffer), and Anthony Hampton, the father of General Wade Hampton. They visited periodically a chain of "forest castles" erected by the settlers—extending all the way from Fort Dobbs and the Moravian fortifications in the Wachau to Samuel Stalnaker's stockade on the Middle Fork of the Holston in Virginia. About the middle of March, thirty volunteer Rowan County rangers encountered a band of forty Cherokees, who fortified themselves in a deserted house near the Catawba River. The famous scout and hunter, John Perkins, assisted by one of his bolder companions, crept up to the house and flung lighted torches upon the roof. One of the Indians, as the smoke became suffocating and the flames burned hotter, exclaimed: "Better for one to die bravely than for all to perish miserably in the flames," and darting forth, dashed rapidly hither and thither, in order to draw as many shots as possible. This act of superb self-sacrifice was successful; and while the rifles of the whites, who riddled the brave Indian with balls, were empty, the other savages made a wild dash for liberty. Seven fell thus under the deadly rain of bullets; but many escaped. Ten of the Indians, all told, lost their scalps, for which the volunteer rangers were subsequently paid one hundred pounds by the colony of North Carolina.

Beaten back from Fort Dobbs, sorely defeated along the Catawba, hotly pursued by the rangers, the Cherokees continued to lurk in the shadows of the dense forests, and at every opportunity to fall suddenly upon way faring settlers and isolated cabins remote from any stronghold. On March 8th William Fish, his son, and Thompson, a companion, were riding along the "trace," in search of provisions for a group of families fortified on the Yadkin, when a flight of arrows hurtled from the cane-brake, and Fish and his son fell dead. Although pierced with two arrows, one in the hip and one clean through his body, Thompson escaped upon his fleet horse; and after a night of ghastly suffering finally reached the Carolina Fort at Bethabara. The good Dr. Bonn, by skilfully extracting the barbed shafts from his body, saved Thompson's life. The pious Moravians rejoiced over the recovery of the brave messenger, whose sensational arrival gave them timely warning of the close proximity of the Indians. While feeding their cattle, settlers were shot from ambush by the lurking foe; and on March 11th, a family barricaded within a burning house, which they were defending with desperate courage, were rescued in the nick of time by the militia. No episode from Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales surpasses in melancholy interest Harry Hicks's heroic defense of his little fort on Bean Island Creek. Surrounded by the Indians, Hicks and his family took refuge within the small outer palisade around his humble home. Fighting desperately against terrific odds, he was finally driven from his yard into his log cabin, which he continued to defend with dauntless courage. With every shot he tried to send a redskin to the happy hunting-grounds; and it was only after his powder was exhausted that he fell, fighting to the last, beneath the deadly tomahawk. So impressed were the Indians by his bravery that they spared the life of his wife and his little son; and these were afterward rescued by Waddell when he marched to the Cherokee towns in 1761.

The kindly Moravians had always entertained with generous hospitality the roving bands of Cherokees, who accordingly held them in much esteem and spoke of Bethabara as "the Dutch Fort, where there are good people and much bread." But now, in these dread days, the truth of their daily text was brought forcibly home to the Moravians: "Neither Nehemiah nor his brethren put off their clothes, but prayed as they watched." With Bible in one hand and rifle in the other, the inhabitant of Wachovia sternly marched to religious worship. No Puritan of bleak New England ever showed more resolute courage or greater will to defend the hard-won outpost of civilization than did the pious Moravian of the Wachau. At the new settlement of Bethania on Easter Day, more than four hundred souls, including sixty rangers, listened devoutly to the eloquent sermon of Bishop Spangenberg concerning the way of salvation—the while their arms, stacked without the Gemein Haus, were guarded by the watchful sentinel. On March 14th the watchmen at Bethania with well-aimed shots repelled the Indians, whose hideous yells of baffled rage sounded down the wind like "the howling of a hundred wolves". Religion was no protection against the savages; for three ministers journeying to the present site of Salem were set upon by the red men—one escaping, another suffering capture, and the third, a Baptist, losing his life. A little later word came to Fort Dobbs that John Long and Robert Gillespie of Salisbury had been shot from ambush and scalped—Long having been pierced with eight bullets and Gillespie with seven.

There is one beautiful incident recorded by the Moravians, which has a truly symbolic significance. While the war was at its height, a strong party of Cherokees, who had lost their chief, planned in retaliation to attack Bethabara. "When they went home," sets forth the Moravian Diary, "they said they had been to a great town, where there were a great many people, where the bells rang often, and during the night, time after time, a horn was blown, so that they feared to attack the town and had taken no prisoners." The trumpet of the watchman, announcing the passing of the hour, had convinced the Indians that their plans for attack were discovered; and the regular evening bell, summoning the pious to prayer, rang in the stricken ears of the red men like the clamant call to arms.

Following the retirement from office of Governor Lyttelton, Lieutenant-Governor Bull proceeded to prosecute the war with vigor. On April 1, 1760, twelve hundred men under Colonel Archibald Montgomerie arrived at Charleston, with instructions to strike an immediate blow and to relieve Fort Loudon, then invested by the Cherokees. With his own force, two hundred and ninety-five South Carolina Rangers, forty picked men of the new "levies," and "a good number of guides," Montgomerie moved from Fort Ninety-Six on May 28th. On the first of June, crossing Twelve-Mile River, Montgomerie began the campaign in earnest, devastating and burning every Indian village in the Valley of Keowee, killing and capturing more than a hundred of the Cherokees, and destroying immense stores of corn. Receiving no reply to his summons to the Cherokees of the Middle and Upper Towns to make peace or suffer like treatment, Montgomerie took up his march from Fort Prince George on June 24th, resolved to carry out his threat. On the morning of the 27th, he was drawn into an ambuscade within six miles of Et-chow-ee, eight miles south of the present Franklin, North Carolina, a mile and a half below Smith's Bridge, and was vigorously attacked from dense cover by some six hundred and thirty warriors led by Si-lou-ee. Fighting with Indian tactics, the Provincial Rangers under Patrick Calhoun particularly distinguished themselves; and the bloodcurdling yells of the painted savages were responded to by the wild huzzas of the kilted Highlanders who, waving their Scotch bonnets, impetuously charged the redskins and drove them again and again from their lurking-places. Nevertheless Montgomerie lost from eighty to one hundred in killed and wounded, while the loss of the Indians was supposed to be about half the loss of the whites. Unable to care for his wounded and lacking the means of removing his baggage, Montgomerie silently withdrew his forces. In so doing, he acknowledged defeat, since he was compelled to abandon his original intention of relieving the beleaguered garrison of Fort London.

Captain Demere and his devoted little band, who had been resolutely holding out, were now left to their tragic fate. After the bread was exhausted, the garrison was reduced to the necessity of eating dogs and horses; and the loyal aid of the Indian wives of some of the garrison, who secretly brought them supplies of food daily, enabled them to hold out still longer. Realizing at last the futility of prolonging the hopeless contest, Captain Demere surrendered the fort on August 8, 1760. At daylight the next morning, while on the march to Fort Prince George, the soldiers were set upon by the treacherous Cherokees, who at the first onset killed Captain Demere and twenty-nine others. A humane chieftain, Outassitus, says one of the gazettes of the day, "went around the field calling upon the Indians to desist, and making such representations to them as stopped the further progress and effects of their barbarous and brutal rage," which expressed itself in scalping and hacking off the arms and legs of the defenseless whites. Atta-kulla-kulla, who was friendly to the whites, claimed Captain Stuart, the second officer, as his captive, and bore him away by stealth. After nine days' journey through the wilderness they encountered an advance party under Major Andrew Lewis, sent out by Colonel Byrd, head of a relieving army, to rescue and succor any of the garrison who might effect their escape. Thus Stuart was restored to his friends. This abortive and tragic campaign, in which the victory lay conclusively with the Indians, ended when Byrd disbanded his new levies and Montgomerie sailed from Charleston for the north (August, 1760).

During the remainder of the year, the province of North Carolina remained free of further alarms from the Indians. But the view was generally entertained that one more joint Effort of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia would have to be made in order to humble the Cherokees. At the sessions of the North Carolina Assembly in November and again in December, matters in dispute between Governor Dobbs and the representatives of the people made impossible the passage of a proposed aid bill, providing for five hundred men to cooperate with Virginia and South Carolina. Nevertheless volunteers in large numbers patriotically marched from North Carolina to Charleston and the Congaree (December, 1760, to April, 1761), to enlist in the famous regiment being organized by Colonel Thomas Middleton. On March 31, 1761, Governor Dobbs called together the Assembly to act upon a letter received from General Amherst, outlining a more vigorous plan of campaign appropriate to the succession of a young and vigorous sovereign, George III. An aid bill was passed, providing twenty thousand pounds for men and supplies; and one regiment of five companies of one hundred men each, under the command of Colonel Hugh Waddell, was mustered into service for seven months' duty, beginning May 1, 1761.

On July 7, 1761, Colonel James Grant, detached from the main army in command of a force of twenty-six hundred men, took up his march from Fort Prince George. Attacked on June 10th two miles south of the spot where Montgomerie was engaged the preceding year, Grant's army, after a vigorous engagement lasting several hours, drove off the Indians. The army then proceeded at leisure to lay waste the fifteen towns of the Middle Settlements; and, after this work of systematic devastation was over, returned to Fort Prince George. Peace was concluded in September as the result of this campaign; and in consequence the frontier was pushed seventy miles farther to the west.

Meantime, Colonel Waddell with his force of five hundred North Carolinians had acted in concert with Colonel William Byrd, commanding the Virginia detachment. The combined forces went into camp at Captain Samuel Stalnaker's old place on the Middle Fork of Holston. Because of his deliberately dilatory policy, Byrd was superseded in the command by Colonel Adam Stephen. Marching their forces to the Long Island of Holston, Stephen and Waddell erected there Fort Robinson, in compliance with the instructions of Governor Fauquier, of Virginia. The Cherokees, heartily tired of the war, now sued for peace, which was concluded, independent of the treaty at Charleston, on November 19, 1761.

The successful termination of this campaign had an effect of signal importance in the development of the expansionist spirit. The rich and beautiful lands which fell under the eye of the North Carolina and Virginia pioneers under Waddell, Byrd, and Stephen, lured them irresistibly on to wider casts for fortune and bolder explorations into the unknown, beckoning West.



CHAPTER VII. The Land Companies

It was thought good policy to settle those lands as fast as possible, and that the granting them to men of the first consequence who were likeliest and best able to procure large bodies of people to settle on them was the most probable means of effecting the end proposed.—Acting-Governor Nelson of Virginia to the Earl of Hillsborough: 1770.

Although for several decades the Virginia traders had been passing over the Great Trading Path to the towns of the Cherokees and the Catawbas, it was not until the early years of the eighteenth century that Virginians of imaginative vision directed their eyes to the westward, intent upon crossing the mountains and locating settlements as a firm barrier against the imperialistic designs of France. Acting upon his oft-expressed conviction that once the English settlers had established themselves at the source of the James River "it would not be in the power of the French to dislodge them," Governor Alexander Spotswood in 1716, animated with the spirit of the pioneer, led an expedition of fifty men and a train of pack-horses to the mountains, arduously ascended to the summit of the Blue Ridge, and claimed the country by right of discovery in behalf of his sovereign. In the journal of John Fontaine this vivacious account is given of the historic episode: "I graved my name on a tree by the river side; and the Governor buried a bottle with a paper enclosed on which he writ that he took possession of this place in the name and for King George the First of England. We had a good dinner, and after it we got the men together and loaded all their arms and we drank the King's health in Burgundy and fired a volley, and all the rest of the Royal Family in claret and a volley. We drank the Governor's health and fired another volley."

By this jovial picnic, which the governor afterward commemorated by presenting to each of the gentlemen who accompanied him a golden horseshoe, inscribed with the legend, Sic juvat transcendere montes, Alexander Spotswood anticipated by a third of a century the more ambitious expedition on behalf of France by Celoron de Bienville (see Chapter III), and gave a memorable object-lesson in the true spirit of westward expansion. During the ensuing years it began to dawn upon the minds of men of the stamp of William Byrd and Joshua Gee that there was imperative need for the establishment of a chain of settlements in the trans-Alleghany, a great human wall to withstand the advancing wave of French influence and occupation. By the fifth decade of the century, as we have seen, the Virginia settlers, with their squatter's claims and tomahawk rights, had pushed on to the mountains; and great pressure was brought to bear upon the council to issue grants for vast tracts of land in the uncharted wilderness of the interior.

At this period the English ministry adopted the aggressive policy already mentioned in connection with the French and Indian war, indicative of a determination to contest with France the right to occupy the interior of the continent. This policy had been inaugurated by Virginia with the express purpose of stimulating the adoption of a similar policy by North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Two land companies, organized almost simultaneously, actively promoted the preliminaries necessary to settlement, despatching parties under expert leadership to discover the passes through the mountains and to locate the best land in the trans-Alleghany.

In June, 1749, a great corporation, the Loyal Land Company of Virginia, received a grant of eight hundred thousand acres above the North Carolina line and west of the mountains. Dr. Thomas Walker, an expert surveyor, who in company with several other gentlemen had made a tour of exploration through eastern Tennessee and the Holston region in 1748, was chosen as the agent of this company. Starting from his home in Albemarle County, Virginia, March 6, 1750, accompanied by five stalwart pioneers, Walker made a tour of exploration to the westward, being absent four months and one week. On this journey, which carried the party as far west as the Rockcastle River (May 11th) and as far north as the present Paintsville, Kentucky, they named many natural objects, such as mountains and rivers, after members of the party. Their two principal achievements were the erection of the first house built by white men between the Cumberland Mountains and the Ohio River a feat, however, which led to no important developments; and the discovery of the wonderful gap in the Alleghanies to which Walker gave the name Cumberland, in honor of the ruthless conqueror at Culloden, the "bloody duke."

In 1748 the Ohio Company was organized by Colonel Thomas Lee, president of the Virginia council, and twelve other gentlemen, of Virginia and Maryland. In their petition for five hundred thousand acres, one of the declared objects of the company was "to anticipate the French by taking possession of that country southward of the Lakes to which the French had no right...." By the royal order of May 19, 1749, the company was awarded two hundred thousand acres, free of quit-rent for ten years; and the promise was made of an additional award of the remainder petitioned for, on condition of seating a hundred families upon the original grant and the building and maintaining of a fort. Christopher Gist, summoned from his remote home on the Yadkin in North Carolina, was instructed "to search out and discover the Lands upon the river Ohio & other adjoining branches of the Mississippi down as low as the great Falls thereof." In this journey, which began at Colonel Thomas Cresap's, in Maryland, in October, 1750, and ended at Gist's home on May 18, 1751, Gist visited the Lower Shawnee Town and the Lower Blue Licks, ascended Pilot Knob almost two decades before Find lay and Boone, from the same eminence, "saw with pleasure the beautiful level of Kentucky," intersected Walker's route at two points, and crossed Cumberland Mountain at Pound Gap on the return journey. This was a far more extended journey than Walker's, enabling Gist to explore the fertile valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami rivers and to gain a view of the beautiful meadows of Kentucky.

It is eminently significant of the spirit of the age, which was inaugurating an era of land hunger unparalleled in American history, that the first authentic records of the trans-Alleghany were made by surveyors who visited the country as the agents of great land companies. The outbreak of the French and Indian War so soon afterward delayed for a decade and more any important colonization of the West. Indeed, the explorations and findings of Walker and Gist were almost unknown, even to the companies they represented. But the conclusion of peace in 1763, which gave all the region between the mountains and the Mississippi to the British, heralded the true beginning of the westward expansionist movement in the Old Southwest, and inaugurated the constructive leadership of North Carolina in f he occupation and colonization of the imperial domain of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley.

In the middle years of the century many families of Virginia gentry removed to the back country of North Carolina in the fertile region ranging from Williamsborough on the east to Hillsborough on the west. There soon arose in this section of the colony a society marked by intellectual distinction, social graces, and the leisured dignity of the landlord and the large planter. So conspicuous for means, intellect, culture, and refinement were the people of this group, having "abundance of wealth and leisure for enjoyment," that Governor Josiah Martin, in passing through this region some years later, significantly observes: "They have great preeminence, as well with respect to soil and cultivation, as to the manners and condition of the inhabitants, in which last respect the difference is so great that one would be led to think them people of another region." This new wealthy class which was now turning its gaze toward the unoccupied lands along the frontier was "dominated by the democratic ideals of pioneers rather than by the aristocratic tendencies of slave-holding planters." From the cross-fertilization of the ideas of two social groups—this back-country gentry, of innate qualities of leadership, democratic instincts, economic independence, and expansive tendencies, and the primitive pioneer society of the frontier, frugal in taste, responsive to leadership, bold, ready, and thorough in execution—there evolved the militant American expansion in the Old Southwest.

A conspicuous figure in this society of Virginia emigrants was a young man named Richard Henderson, whose father had removed with his family from Hanover County, Virginia, to Bute, afterward Granville County, North Carolina, in 1742. Educated at home by a private tutor, he began his career as assistant of his father, Samuel Henderson, the High Sheriff of Granville County; and after receiving a law-license, quickly acquired an extensive practice. "Even in the superior courts where oratory and eloquence are as brilliant and powerful as in Westminster hall," records an English acquaintance, "he soon became distinguished and eminent, and his superior genius shone forth with great splendour, and universal applause." This young attorney, wedded to the daughter of an Irish lord, often visited Salisbury on his legal circuit; and here he became well acquainted with Squire Boone, one of the "Worshipfull Justices," and often appeared in suits before him. By his son, the nomadic Daniel Boone, conspicuous already for his solitary wanderings across the dark green mountains to the sun-lit valleys and boundless hunting-grounds beyond, Henderson was from time to time regaled with bizarre and fascinating tales of western exploration; and Boone, in his dark hour of poverty and distress, when he was heavily involved financially, turned for aid to this friend and his partner, who composed the law-firm of Williams and Henderson.

Boone's vivid descriptions of the paradise of the West stimulated Henderson's imaginative mind and attracted his attention to the rich possibilities of unoccupied lands there. While the Board of Trade in drafting the royal proclamation of October 7, 1763, forbade the granting of lands in the vast interior, which was specifically reserved to the Indians, it was clearly not their intention to set permanent western limits to the colonies. The prevailing opinion among the shrewdest men of the period was well expressed by George Washington, who wrote his agent for preempting western lands: "I can never look upon that proclamation in any other light (but I say this between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians." And again in 1767: "It (the proclamation of 1763) must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying the lands. Any person, therefore, who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking out and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it." Washington had added greatly to his holdings of bounty lands in the West by purchasing at trivial prices the claims of many of the officers and soldiers. Three years later we find him surveying extensive tracts along the Ohio and the Great Kanawha, and, with the vision of the expansionist, making large plans for the establishment of a colony to be seated upon his own lands. Henderson, too, recognized the importance of the great country west of the Appalachians. He agreed with the opinion of Benjamin Franklin, who in 1756 called it "one of the finest in North America for the extreme richness and fertility of the land, the healthy temperature of the air and the mildness of the climate, the plenty of hunting, fishing and fowling, the facility of trade with the Indians and the vast convenience of inland navigation or water carriage." Henderson therefore proceeded to organize a land company for the purpose of acquiring and colonizing a large domain in the West. This partnership, which was entitled Richard Henderson and Company, was composed of a few associates, including Richard Henderson, his uncle and law-partner, John Williams, and, in all probability, their close friends Thomas and Nathaniel Hart of Orange County, North Carolina, immigrants from Hanover County, Virginia.

Seizing the opportunity presented just after the conclusion of peace, the company engaged Daniel Boone as scout and surveyor. He was instructed, while hunting and trapping on his own account, to examine, with respect to their location and fertility, the lands which he visited, and to report his findings upon his return. The secret expedition must have been transacted with commendable circumspection; for although in after years it became common knowledge among his friends that he had acted as the company's agent, Boone himself consistently refrained from betraying the confidence of his employers. Upon a similar mission, Gist had carefully concealed from the suspicious Indians the fact that he carried a compass, which they wittily termed "land stealer"; and Washington likewise imposed secrecy upon his land agent Crawford, insisting that the operation be carried on under the guise of hunting game." The discreet Boone, taciturn and given to keeping his own counsel, in one instance at least deemed it advantageous to communicate the purpose of his mission to some hunters, well known to him, in order to secure the results of their information in regard to the best lands they had encountered in the course of their hunting expedition. Boone came among the hunters, known as the "Blevens connection," at one of their Tennessee station camps on their return from a long hunt in Kentucky, in order, as expressed in the quaint phraseology of the period, to be "informed of the geography and locography of these woods, saying that he was employed to explore them by Henderson & Company." The acquaintance which Boone on this occasion formed with a member of the party, Henry Scaggs, the skilled hunter and explorer, was soon to bear fruit; for shortly afterward Scaggs was employed as prospector by the same land company. In 1764 Scaggs had passed through Cumberland Gap and hunted for the season on the Cumberland; and accordingly the following year, as the agent of Richard Henderson and Company, he was despatched on an extended exploration to the lower Cumberland, fixing his station at the salt lick afterward known as Mansker's Lick.

Richard Henderson thus, it appears, "enlisted the Harts and others in an enterprise which his own genius planned," says Peck, the personal acquaintance and biographer of Boone, "and then encouraged several hunters to explore the country and learn where the best lands lay." Just why Henderson and his associates did not act sooner upon the reports brought back by the hunters—Boone and Scaggs and Callaway, who accompanied Boone in 1764 in the interest of the land company "is not known; but in all probability the fragmentary nature of these reports, however glowing and enthusiastic, was sufficient cause for the delay of five years before the land company, through the agency of Boone and Findlay, succeeded in having a thorough exploration inside of the Kentucky region. Delay was also caused by rival claims to the territory. In the Virginia Gazette of December 1, 1768, Henderson must have read with astonishment not unmixed with dismay that "the Six Nations and all their tributaries have granted a vast extent of country to his majesty, and the Proprietaries of Pennsylvania, and settled an advantageous boundary line between their hunting country and this, and the other colonies to the Southward as far as the Cherokee River, for which they received the most valuable present in goods and dollars that was ever given at any conference since the settlement of America." The news was now bruited about through the colony of North Carolina, that the Cherokees were hot in their resentment because the Northern Indians, the inveterate foes of the Cherokees and the perpetual disputants for the vast Middle Ground of Kentucky, had received at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, November 5, 1768, an immense compensation from the crown for the territory which they, the Cherokees, claimed from time immemorial. Only three weeks before, John Stuart, Superintendent for Indian Affairs in the Southern Department, had negotiated with the Cherokees the Treaty of Hard Labor, South Carolina (October 14th), by which Governor Tryon's line of 1767, from Reedy River to Tryon Mountain, was continued direct to Colonel Chiswell's mine, the present Wytheville, Virginia, and thence in a straight Brie to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. Thus at the close of the year 1768 the crown through both royal governor and superintendent of Indian affairs acknowledged in fair and open treaty the right of the Cherokees, whose Tennessee villages guarded the gateway, to the valley lands east of the mountain barrier as well as to the dim mid-region of Kentucky. In the very act of negotiating the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, Sir William Johnson privately acknowledged that possession of the trans-Alleghany could be legally obtained only by extinguishing the title of the Cherokees.

These conflicting claims soon led to collisions between the Indians and the company's settlers. In the spring of 1769 occurred one of those incidents in the westward advance which, though slight in itself, was to have a definite bearing upon the course of events in later years. In pursuance of his policy, as agent of the Loyal Land Company, of promoting settlement upon the company's lands, Dr. Thomas Walker, who had visited Powell's Valley the preceding year and come into possession of a very large tract there, simultaneously made proposals to one party of men including the Kirtleys, Captain Rucker, and others, and to another party led by Joseph Martin, trader of Orange County, Virginia, afterward a striking figure in the Old Southwest. The fevered race by these bands of eighteenth-century "sooners" for possession of an early "Cherokee Strip" was won by the latter band, who at once took possession and began to clear; so that when the Kirtleys arrived, Martin coolly handed them "a letter from Dr. Walker that informed them that if we got to the valley first, we were to have 21,000 acres of land, and they were not to interfere with us." Martin and his companions were delighted with the beautiful valley at the base of the Cumberland, quickly "eat and destroyed 23 deer—15 bears—2 buffaloes and a great quantity of turkeys," and entertained gentlemen from Virginia and Maryland who desired to settle more than a hundred families there. The company reckoned, however, without their hosts, the Cherokees, who, fortified by the treaty of Hard Labor (1768) which left this country within the Indian reservation, were determined to drive Martin and his company out. While hunting on the Cumberland River, northwest of Cumberland Gap, Martin and his company were surrounded and disarmed by a party of Cherokees who said they had orders from Cameron, the royal agent, to rob all white men hunting on their lands. When Martin and his party arrived at their station in Powell's Valley, they found it broken up and their goods stolen by the Indians, which left them no recourse but to return to the settlements in Virginia. It was not until six years later that Martin, under the stable influence of the Transylvania Company, was enabled to return to this spot and erect there the station which was to play an integral part in the progress of westward expansion.

Before going on to relate Boone's explorations of Kentucky under the auspices of the land company, it will be convenient to turn back for a moment and give some account of other hunters and explorers who visited that territory between the time of its discovery by Walker and Gist and the advent of Boone.



CHAPTER VIII. The Long Hunters in the Twilight Zone

The long Hunters principally resided in the upper countries of Virginia & North Carolina on New River & Holston River, and when they intended to make a long Hunt (as they calls it) they Collected near the head of Holston near whare Abingdon now stands....—General William Hall.

Before the coming of Walker and Gist in 1750 and 1751 respectively, the region now called Kentucky had, as far as we know, been twice visited by the French, once in 1729 when Chaussegros de Lery and his party visited the Big Bone Lick, and again in the summer of 1749 when the Baron de Longueuil with four hundred and fifty-two Frenchmen and Indians, going to join Bienville in an expedition against "the Cherickees and other Indians lying at the back of Carolina and Georgia," doubtless encamped on the Kentucky shore of the Ohio. Kentucky was also traversed by John Peter Salling with his three adventurous companions in their journey through the Middle West in 1742. But all these early visits, including the memorable expeditions of Walker and Gist, were so little known to the general public that when John Filson wrote the history of Kentucky in 1784 he attributed its discovery to James McBride in 1754. More influential upon the course of westward expansion was an adventure which occurred in 1752, the very year in which the Boones settled down in their Vadkin home.

In the autumn of 1752, a Pennsylvania trader, John Findlay, with three or four companions, descended the Ohio River in a canoe as far as the falls at the present Louisville, Kentucky, and accompanied a party of Shawnees to their town of Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki, eleven miles east of what is now Winchester.

This was the site of the "Indian Old Corn Field," the Iroquois name for which ("the place of many fields," or "prairie") was Ken-take, whence came the name of the state.

Five miles east of this spot, where still may be seen a mound and an ellipse showing the outline of the stockade, is the famous Pilot Knob, from the summit of which the fields surrounding the town lie visible in their smooth expanse. During Findlay's stay at the Indian town other traders from Pennsylvania and Virginia, who reported that they were "on their return from trading with the Cuttawas (Catawbas), a nation who live in the Territories of Carolina," assembled in the vicinity in January, 1753. Here, as the result of disputes arising from their barter, they were set upon and captured by a large party of straggling Indians (Coghnawagas from Montreal) on January 26th; but Findlay and another trader named James Lowry were so fortunate as to escape and return through the wilderness to the Pennsylvania settlements." The incident is of important historic significance; for it was from these traders, who must have followed the Great Warriors' Path to the country of the Catawbas, that Findlay learned of the Ouasioto (Cumberland) Gap traversed by the Indian path. His reminiscences of this gateway to Kentucky, of the site of the old Indian town on Lulbegrud Creek, a tributary of the Red River, and of the Pilot Knobwere sixteen years later to fire Boone to his great tour of exploration in behalf of the Transylvania Company.

During the next two decades, largely because of the hostility of the savage tribes, only a few traders and hunters from the east ranged through the trans-Alleghany. But in 1761, a party of hunters led by a rough frontiersman, Elisha Walden, penetrated into Powell's Valley, followed the Indian trail through Cumberland Gap, explored the Cumberland River, and finally reached the Laurel Mountain where, encountering a party of Indians, they deemed it expedient to return. With Walden went Henry Scaggs, afterward explorer for the Henderson Land Company, William Elevens and Charles Cox, the famous Virginia hunters, one Newman, and some fifteen other stout pioneers. Their itinerary may be traced from the names given to natural objects in honor of members of the party—Walden's Mountain and Walden's Creek, Scaggs' Ridge and Newman's Ridge. Following the peace of 1763, which made travel in this region moderately safe once more, the English proceeded to occupy the territory which they had won. In 1765 George Croghan with a small party, on the way to prepare the inhabitants of the Illinois country for transfer to English sovereignty, visited the Great Bone Licks of Kentucky (May 30th, 31st); and a year later Captain Harry Gordon, chief engineer in the Western Department in North America, visited and minutely described the same licks and the falls. But these, and numerous other water-journeys and expeditions of which no records were kept, though interesting enough in themselves, had little bearing upon the larger phases of westward expansion and colonization.

The decade opening with the year 1765 is the epoch of bold and ever bolder exploration—the more adventurous frontiersmen of the border pushing deep into the wilderness in search of game, lured on by the excitements of the chase and the profit to be derived from the sale of peltries. In midsummer, 1766, Captain James Smith, Joshua Horton, Uriah Stone, William Baker, and a young mulatto slave passed through Cumberland Gap, hunted through the country south of the Cherokee and along the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, and as Smith reports "found no vestige of any white man." During the same year a party of five hunters from South Carolina, led by Isaac Lindsey, penetrated the Kentucky wilderness to the tributary of the Cumberland, named Stone's River by the former party, for one of their number. Here they encountered two men, who were among the greatest of the western pioneers, and were destined to leave their names in historic association with the early settlement of Kentucky, James Harrod and Michael Stoner, a German, both of whom had descended the Ohio from Fort Pitt. With the year 1769 began those longer and more extended excursions into the interior which were to result in conveying at last to the outside world graphic and detailed information concerning "the wonderful new country of Cantucky." In the late spring of this year Hancock and Richard Taylor (the latter the father of President Zachary Taylor), Abraham Hempinstall, and one Barbour, all true-blue frontiersmen, left their homes in Orange County, Virginia, and hunted extensively in Kentucky and Arkansas. Two of the party traveled through Georgia and East and West Florida; while the other two hunted on the Washita during the winter of 1770-1. Explorations of this type became increasingly hazardous as the animosity of the Indians increased; and from this time onward for a number of years almost all the parties of roving hunters suffered capture or attack by the crafty red men. In this same year Major John McCulloch, living on the south branch of the Potomac, set out accompanied by a white man-servant and a negro, to explore the western country. While passing down the Ohio from Pittsburgh McCulloch was captured by the Indians near the mouth of the Wabash and carried to the present site of Terre Haute, Indiana. Set free after four or five months, he journeyed in company with some French voyageurs first to Natchez and then to New Orleans, whence he made the sea voyage to Philadelphia. Somewhat later, Benjamin Cleveland (afterward famous in the Revolution), attended by four companions, set out from his home on the upper Yadkin to explore the Kentucky wilderness. After passing through Cumberland Gap, they encountered a band of Cherokees who plundered them of everything they had, even to their hats and shoes, and ordered them to leave the Indian hunting-grounds. On their return journey they almost starved, and Cleveland, who was reluctantly forced to kill his faithful little hunting-dog, was wont to declare in after years that it was the sweetest meat he ever ate.

Fired to adventure by the glowing accounts brought back by Uriah Stone, a much more formidable band than any that had hitherto ventured westward—including Uriah Stone as pilot, Gasper Mansker, John Rains, Isaac Bledsoe, and a dozen others—assembled in June, 1769, in the New River region. "Each Man carried two horses," says an early pioneer in describing one of these parties, "traps, a large supply of powder and led, and a small hand vise and bellows, files and screw plate for the purpose of fixing the guns if any of them should get out of fix." Passing through Cumberland Gap, they continued their long journey until they reached Price's Meadow, in the present Wayne County, Kentucky, where they established their encampment. In the course of their explorations, during which they gave various names to prominent natural features, they established their "station camp" on a creek in Sumner County, Tennessee, whence originated the name of Station Camp Creek. Isaac Bledsoe and Gasper Mansker, agreeing to travel from here in opposite directions along a buffalo trace passing near the camp, each succeeded in discovering the famous salt-lick which bears his name—namely Bledsoe's Lick and Mansker's Lick. The flat surrounding the lick, about one hundred acres in extent, discovered by Bledsoe, according to his own statement "was principally Covered with buffelows in every direction—not hundreds but thousands." As he sat on his horse, he shot down two deer in the lick; but the buffaloes blindly trod them in the mud. They did not mind him and his horse except when the wind blew the scent in their nostrils, when they would break and run in droves. Indians often lurked in the neighbourhood of these hunters—plundering their camp, robbing them, and even shooting down one of their number, Robert Crockett, from ambush. After many trials and vicissitudes, which included a journey to the Spanish Natchez and the loss of a great mass of peltries when they were plundered by Piomingo and a war party of Chickasaws, they finilly reached home in the late spring of 1770."

The most notable expedition of this period, projected under the auspices of two bold leaders extraordinarily skilled in woodcraft, Joseph Drake and Henry Scaggs, was organized in the early autumn of 1770. This imposing band of stalwart hunters from the New River and Holston country, some forty in number, garbed in hunting shirts, leggings, and moccasins, with three pack-horses to each man, rifles, ammunition, traps, dogs, blankets, and salt, pushed boldly through Cumberland Gap into the heart of what was later justly named the "Dark and Bloody Ground" (see Chapter XIV)—"not doubting," says an old border chronicler, "that they were to be encountered by Indians, and to subsist on game." From the duration of their absence from home, they received the name of the Long Hunters—the romantic appellation by which they are known in the pioneer history of the Old Southwest. Many natural objects were named by this party—in particular Dick's River, after the noted Cherokee hunter, Captain Dick, who, pleased to be recognized by Charles Scaggs, told the Long Hunters that on HIS river, pointing it out, they would find meat plenty—adding with laconic signifigance: "Kill it and go home." From the Knob Lick, in Lincoln County, as reported by a member of the party, "they beheld largely over a thousand animals, including buffaloe, elk, bear, and deer, with many wild turkies scattered among them; all quite restless, some playing, and others busily employed in licking the earth.... The buffaloe and other animals had so eaten away the soil, that they could, in places, go entirely underground." Upon the return of a detachment to Virginia, fourteen fearless hunters chose to remain; and one day, during the absence of some of the band upon a long exploring trip, the camp was attacked by a straggling party of Indians under Will Emery, a halfbreed Cherokee. Two of the hunters were carried into captivity and never heard of again; a third managed to escape. In embittered commemoration of the plunder of the camp and the destruction of the peltries, they inscribed upon a poplar, which had lost its bark, this emphatic record, followed by their names:

2300 Deer Skins lost Ruination by God

Undismayed by this depressing stroke of fortune, they continued their hunt in the direction of the lick which Bledsoe had discovered the preceding year. Shortly after this discovery, a French voyageur from the Illinois who had hunted and traded in this region for a decade, Timothe de Monbreun, subsequently famous in the history of Tennessee, had visited the lick and killed an enormous number of buffaloes for their tallow and tongues with which he and his companion loaded a keel boat and descended the Cumberland. An early pioneer, William Hall, learned from Isaac Bledsoe that when "the long hunters Crossed the ridge and came down on Bledsoe's Creek in four or five miles of the Lick the Cane had grown up so thick in the woods that they thought they had mistaken the place until they Came to the Lick and saw what had been done.... One could walk for several hundred yards a round the Lick and in the lick on buffellows Skuls, & bones and the whole flat round the Lick was bleached with buffellows bones, and they found out the Cause of the Canes growing up so suddenly a few miles around the Lick which was in Consequence of so many buffellows being killed."

This expedition was of genuine importance, opening the eyes of the frontiersmen to the charms of the country and influencing many to settle subsequently in the West, some in Tennessee, some in Kentucky. The elaborate and detailed information brought back by Henry Scaggs exerted an appreciable influence, no doubt, in accelerating the plans of Richard Henderson and Company for the acquisition and colonization of the trans-Alleghany. But while the "Long Hunters" were in Tennessee and Kentucky the same region was being more extensively and systematically explored by Daniel Boone. To his life, character, and attainments, as the typical "long hunter" and the most influential pioneer we may now turn our particular attention.



CHAPTER IX. Daniel Boone and Wilderness Exploration

Here, where the hand of violence shed the blood of the innocent; where the horrid yells of the savages, and the groans of the distressed, sounded in our ears, we now hear the praises and adorations of our Creator; where wretched wigwams stood, the miserable abodes of savages, we behold the foundations of cities laid, that, in all probability, will equal the glory of the greatest upon earth.—Daniel Boone, 1781.

The wandering life of a border Nimrod in a surpassingly beautiful country teeming with game was the ideal of the frontiersman of the eighteenth century. AS early as 1728, while running the dividing line between North Carolina and Virginia, William Byrd encountered along the North Carolina frontier the typical figure of the professional hunter: "a famous Woodsman, call'd Epaphroditus Bainton. This Forester Spends all his time in ranging the Woods, and is said to make great Havock among the Deer, and other Inhabitants of the Forest, not much wilder than himself." By the middle of the century, as he was threading his way through the Carolina piedmont zone, the hunter's paradise of the Yadkin and Catawba country, Bishop Spangenberg found ranging there many hunters, living like Indians, who killed thousands of deer each year and sold the skins in the local markets or to the fur-traders from Virginia whose heavy pack-trains with their tinkling bells constantly traversed the course of the Great Trading Path. The superlative skill of one of these hunters, both as woodsman and marksman, was proverbial along the border. The name of Daniel Boone became synonymous with expert huntsmanship and almost uncanny wisdom in forest lore. The bottoms of the creek near the Boone home, three miles west of present Mocksville, contained a heavy growth of beech, which dropped large quantities of its rich nuts or mast, greatly relished by bears; and this creek received its name, Bear Creek, because Daniel and his father killed in its rich bottoms ninety-nine bears in a single hunting-season. After living for a time with his young wife, Rebecca Bryan, in a cabin in his father's yard, Daniel built a home of his own upon a tract of land, purchased from his father on October 12, 1759, and lying on Sugar Tree, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek. Here he dwelt for the next five years, with the exception of the period of his temporary removal to Virginia during the terrible era of the Indian war. Most of his time during the autumn and winter, when he was not engaged in wagoning or farming, he spent in long hunting-journeys into the mountains to the west and northwest. During the hunting-season of 1760 he struck deeper than ever before into the western mountain region and encamped in a natural rocky shelter amidst fine hunting-grounds, in what is now Washington County in east Tennessee. Of the scores of inscriptions commemorative of his hunting-feats, which Boone with pardonable pride was accustomed throughout his life time to engrave with his hunting-knife upon trees and rocks, the earliest known is found upon a leaning beech tree, only recently fallen, near his camp and the creek which since that day has borne his name. This is a characteristic and enduring record in the history of American exploration

D. Boon CillED A. BAR On Tree in The yEAR 1760

Late in the summer of the following year Boone marched under the command of the noted Indian-fighter of the border, Colonel Hugh Waddell, in his campaign against the Cherokees. From the lips of Waddell, who was outspoken in his condemnation of Byrd's futile delays in road-cutting and fort-building, Boone learned the true secret of success in Indian warfare, which was lost upon Braddock, Forbes, and later St. Clair: that the art of defeating red men was to deal them a sudden and unexpected blow, before they had time either to learn the strength of the force employed against them or to lay with subtle craft their artful ambuscade.

In the late autumn of 1761, Daniel Boone and Nathaniel Gist, the son of Washington's famous guide, who were both serving under Waddell, temporarily detached themselves from his command and led a small party on a "long hunt" in the Valley of the Holston, While encamping near the site of Black's Fort, subsequently built, they were violently assailed by a pack of fierce wolves which they had considerable difficulty in beating off; and from this incident the locality became known as Wolf Hills (now Abingdon, Virginia).

From this time forward Boone's roving instincts had full sway. For many months each year he threaded his way through that marvelously beautiful country of western North Carolina felicitously described as the Switzerland of America. Boone's love of solitude and the murmuring forest was surely inspired by the phenomenal beauties of the country' through which he roamed at will. Blowing Rock on one arm of a great horseshoe of mountains and Tryon Mountain upon the other arm, overlooked an enormous, primeval bowl, studded by a thousand emerald-clad eminences. There was the Pilot Mountain, the towering and isolated pile which from time immemorial had served the aborigines as a guide in their forest wanderings; there was the dizzy height of the Roan on the border; there was Mt. Mitchell, portentous in its grandeur, the tallest peak on the continent east of the Rockies; and there was the Grandfather, the oldest mountain on earth according to geologists, of which it has been written:

Oldest of all terrestrial things—still holding Thy wrinkled forehead high; Whose every scam, earth's history enfolding, Grim science doth defy!

Thou caught'st the far faint ray from Sirius rising, When through space first was hurled The primal gloom of ancient voids surprising, This atom, called the World!

What more gratifying to the eye of the wanderer than the luxuriant vegetation and lavish profusion of the gorgeous flowers upon the mountain slopes, radiant rhododendron, rosebay, and laurel, and the azalea rising like flame; or the rare beauties of the water—the cataract of Linville, taking its shimmering leap into the gorge, and that romantic river poetically celebrated in the lines:

Swannanoa, nymph of beauty, I would woo thee in my rhyme, Wildest, brightest, loveliest river Of our sunny Southern clime. * * * Gone forever from the borders But immortal in thy name, Are the Red Men of the forest Be thou keeper of their fame! Paler races dwell beside thee, Celt and Saxon till thy lands Wedding use unto thy beauty Linking over thee their hands.

The long rambling excursions which Boone made through western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee enabled him to explore every nook and corner of the rugged and beautiful mountain region. Among the companions and contemporaries with whom he hunted and explored the country were his little son James and his brother Jesse; the Linville who gave the name to the beautiful falls; Julius Caesar Dugger, whose rock house stood near the head of Elk Creek; and Nathaniel Gist, who described for him the lofty gateway to Kentucky, through which Christopher Gist had passed in 1751. Boone had already heard of this gateway, from Findlay, and it was one of the secret and cherished ambitions of his life to scale the mountain wall of the Appalachians and to reach that high portal of the Cumberland which beckoned to the mysterious new Eden beyond. Although hunting was an endless delight to Boone he was haunted in the midst of this pleasure, as was Kipling's Explorer, by the lure of the undiscovered:

Till a voice as bad as conscience, rang interminable changes On one everlasting whisper day and night repeated—so: 'Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the ranges—'Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go.'

Of Boone's preliminary explorations for the land company known as Richard Henderson and Company, an account has already been given; and the delay in following them up has been touched on and in part explained. Meanwhile Boone transferred his efforts for a time to another field. Toward the close of the summer of 1765 a party consisting of Major John Field, William Hill, one Slaughter, and two others, all from Culpeper County, Virginia, visited Boone and induced him to accompany them on the "long Journey" to Florida, whither they were attracted by the liberal offer of Colonel James Grant, governor of the eastern section, the Florida of to-day. On this long and arduous expedition they suffered many hardships and endured many privations, found little game, and on one occasion narrowly escaped starvation. They explored Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola; and Boone, who relished fresh scenes and a new environment, purchased a house and lot in Pensacola in anticipation of removal thither. But upon his return home, finding his wife unwilling to go, Boone once more turned his eager eye toward the West, that mysterious and alluring region beyond the great range, the fabled paradise of Kentucky.

The following year four young men from the Yadkin, Benjamin Cutbird, John Stewart (Boone's brother-in-law who afterwards accompanied him to Kentucky), John Baker, and James Ward made a remarkable journey to the westward, crossing the Appalachian mountain chain over some unknown route, and finally reaching the Mississippi. The significance of the journey, in its bearing upon westward expansion, inheres in the fact that while for more than half a century the English traders from South Carolina had been winning their way to the Mississippi along the lower routes and Indian trails, this was the first party from either of the Carolinas, as far as is known, that ever reached the Mississippi by crossing the great mountain barrier. When Cutbird, a superb woodsman and veritable Leather stocking, narrated to Boone the story of his adventures, it only confirmed Boone in his determination to find the passage through the mountain chain leading to the Mesopotamia of Kentucky.

Such an enterprise was attended by terrible dangers. During 1766 and 1767 the steady encroachments of the white settlers upon the ancestral domain which the Indians reserved for their imperial hunting-preserve aroused bitter feelings of resentment among the red men. Bloody reprisal was often the sequel to such encroachment. The vast region of Tennessee and the trans-Alleghany was a twilight zone, through which the savages roamed at will. From time to time war parties of northern Indians, the inveterate foes of the Cherokees, scouted through this no-man's land and even penetrated into the western region of North Carolina, committing murders and depredations upon the Cherokees and the whites indiscriminately. During the summer of 1766, while Boone's friend and close connection, Captain William Linville, his son John, and another young man, named John Williams, were in camp some ten miles below Linville Falls, they were unexpectedly fired upon by a hostile band of Northern Indians, and before they had time to fire a shot, a second volley killed both the Linvilles and severely wounded Williams, who after extraordinary sufferings finally reached the settlements." In May, 1767, four traders and a half-breed child of one of them were killed in the Cherokee country. In the summer of this year Governor William Tryon of North Carolina laid out the boundary line of the Cherokees, and upon his return issued a proclamation forbidding any purchase of land from the Indians and any issuance of grants for land within one mile of the boundary line. Despite this wise precaution, seven North Carolina hunters who during the following September had lawlessly ventured into the mountain region some sixty miles beyond the boundary were fired upon, and several of them killed, by the resentful Cherokees Undismayed by these signs of impending danger, undeterred even by the tragic fate of the Linvilles, Daniel Boone, with the determination of the indomitable pioneer, never dreamed of relinquishing his long-cherished design. Discouraged by the steady disappearance of game under the ruthless attack of innumerable hunters, Boone continued to direct his thoughts toward the project of exploring the fair region of Kentucky. The adventurous William Hill, to whom Boone communicated his purpose, readily consented to go with him; and in the autumn of 1768 Boone and Hill, accompanied, it is believed, by Squire Boone, Daniel's brother, set forth upon their almost inconceivably hazardous expedition. They crossed the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, the Holston and Clinch rivers near their sources, and finally reached the head waters of the West Fork of the Big Sand. Surmising from its course that this stream must flow into the Ohio, they pushed on a hundred miles to the westward and finally, by following a buffalo path, reached a salt-spring in what is now Floyd County, in the extreme eastern section of Kentucky. Here Boone beheld great droves of buffalo that visited the salt-spring to drink the water or lick the brackish soil. After spending the winter in hunting and trapping, the Boones and Hill, discouraged by the forbidding aspect of the hill-country which with its dense growth of laurel was exceedingly difficult to penetrate, abandoned all hope of finding Kentucky by this route and wended their arduous way back to the Yadkin.

The account of Boone's subsequent accomplishment of his purpose must be postponed to the next chapter.



CHAPTER X. Daniel Boone in Kentucky

He felt very much as Columbus did, gazing from his caravel on San Salvador; as Cortes, looking down, from the crest of Ahualco, on the Valley of Mexico; or Vasco Nunez, standing alone on the peak of Darien, and stretching his eyes over the hitherto undiscovered waters of the Pacific.—-William Gilmore Simms: Views and Reviews.

A chance acquaintance formed by Daniel Boone, during the French and Indian War, with the Irish lover of adventure, John Findlay, was the origin of Boone's cherished longing to reach the El Dorado of the West. In this slight incident we may discern the initial inspiration for the epochal movement of westward expansion. Findlay was a trader and horse peddler, who had early migrated to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He had been licensed a trader with the Indians in 1747. During the same year he was married to Elizabeth Harris, daughter of John Harris, the Indian-trader at Harris's Ferry on the Susquehanna River, after whom Harrisburg was named. During the next eight years Findlay carried on his business of trading in the interior. Upon the opening of the French and Indian War he was probably among "the young men about Paxtang who enlisted immediately," and served as a waggoner in Braddock's expedition. Over the campfires, during the ensuing campaign in 1765, young Boone was an eager listener to Findlay's stirring narrative of his adventures in the Ohio Valley and on the wonderfully beautiful levels of Kentucky in 1752. The fancies aroused in his brooding mind by Findlay's moving recital and his description of an ancient passage through the Ouasioto or Cumberland Gap and along the course of the Warrior's Path, inspired him with an irrepressible longing to reach that alluring promised land which was the perfect realization of the hunter's paradise.

Thirteen years later, while engaged in selling pins, needles, thread, and Irish linens in the Yadkin country, Findlay learned from the Pennsylvania settlers at Salisbury or at the Forks of the Yadkin of Boone's removal to the waters of the upper Yadkin. At Boone's rustic home, in the winter of 1768-9, Findlay visited his old comrade-in-arms of Braddock's campaign. On learning of Boone's failure during the preceding year to reach the Kentucky levels by way of the inhospitable Sandy region, Findlay again described to him the route through the Ouasioto Gap traversed sixteen years before by Pennsylvania traders in their traffic with the Catawbas. Boone, as we have seen, knew that Christopher Gist, who had formerly lived near him on the upper Yadkin, had found some passage through the lofty mountain defiles; but he had never been able to discover the passage. Findlay's renewed descriptions of the immense herds of buffaloes he had seen in Kentucky, the great salt-licks where they congregated, the abundance of bears, deer, and elk with which the country teemed, the innumerable flocks of wild turkeys, geese, and ducks, aroused in Boone the hunter's passion for the chase; while the beauty of the lands, as mirrored in the vivid fancy of the Irishman, inspired him with a new longing to explore the famous country which had, as John Filson records, "greatly engaged Mr. Findlay's attention."

In the comprehensive designs of Henderson, now a judge, for securing a "graphic report of the trans-Alleghany region in behalf of his land company", Boone divined the means of securing the financial backing for an expedition of considerable size and ample equipment. In numerous suits for debt, aggregating hundreds of dollars, which had been instituted against Boone by some of the leading citizens of Rowan, Williams and Henderson had acted as Boone's attorneys. In order to collect their legal fees, they likewise brought suit against Boone; but not wishing to press the action against the kindly scout who had hitherto acted as their agent in western exploration, they continued the litigation from court to court, in lieu of certain "conditions performed" on behalf of Boone, during his unbroken absence, by his attorney in this suit, Alexander Martin. Summoned to appear in 1769 at the March term of court at Salisbury, Boone seized upon the occasion to lay before Judge Henderson the designs for a renewed and extended exploration of Kentucky suggested by the golden opportunity of securing the services of Findlay as guide. Shortly after March 6th, when Judge Henderson reached Salisbury, the conference, doubtless attended by John Stewart, Boone's brother-in-law, John Findlay, and Boone, who were all present at this term of court, must have been held, for the purpose of devising ways and means for the expedition. Peck, the only reliable contemporary biographer of the pioneer, who derived many facts from Boone himself and his intimate acquaintances, draws the conclusion (1847): "Daniel Boone was engaged as the master spirit of this exploration, because in his judgment and fidelity entire confidence could be reposed.... He was known to Henderson and encouraged by him to make the exploration, and to examine particularly the whole country south of the Kentucky—or as then called the Louisa River." As confidential agent of the land company, Boone carried with him letters and instructions for his guidance upon this extended tour of exploration."

On May 1, 1769, with Findlay as guide, and accompanied by four of his neighbors, John Stewart, a skilled woodsman, Joseph Holden, James Mooney, and William Cooley, Boone left his "peaceable habitation" on the upper Yadkin and began his historic journey "in quest of the country of Kentucky." Already heavily burdened with debts, Boone must have incurred considerable further financial obligations to Judge Henderson and Colonel Williams, acting for the land company, in order to obtain the large amount of supplies requisite for so prolonged an expedition. Each of the adventurers rode a good horse of strength and endurance; and behind him were securely strapped the blanket, ammunition, salt, and cooking-utensils so indispensable for a long sojourn in the wilderness. In Powell's Valley they doubtless encountered the party led thither by Joseph Martin (see Chapter VII), and there fell into the "Hunter's Trail" commented on in a letter written by Martin only a fortnight before the passing of Boone's cavalcade. Crossing the mountain at the Ouasioto Gap, they made their first "station camp" in Kentucky on the creek, still named after that circumstance, on the Red Lick Fork. After a preliminary journey for the purpose of locating the spot, Findlay led the party to his old trading-camp at Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki, where then (June 7, 1769) remained but charred embers of the Indian huts, with some of the stockading and the gate-posts still standing. In Boone's own words, he and Findlay at once "proceeded to take a more thorough survey of the country;" and during the autumn and early winter, encountering on every hand apparently inexhaustible stocks of wild game and noting the ever-changing beauties of the country, the various members of the party made many hunting and exploring journeys from their "station camp" as base. On December 22, 1769, while engaged in a hunt, Boone and Stewart were surprised and captured by a large party of Shawanoes, led by Captain Will, who were returning from the autumn hunt on Green River to their villages north of the Ohio. Boone and Stewart were forced to pilot the Indians to their main camp, where the savages, after robbing them of all their peltries and supplies and leaving them inferior guns and little ammunition, set off to the northward. They left, on parting, this menacing admonition to the white intruders: "Now, brothers, go home and stay there. Don't come here any more, for this is the Indians' hunting-ground, and all the animals, skins, and furs are ours. If you are so foolish as to venture here again, you may be sure the wasps and yellow jackets will sting you severely."

Chagrined particularly by the loss of the horses, Boone and Stewart for two days pursued the Indians in hot haste. Finally approaching the Indians' camp by stealth in the dead of night, they secured two of the horses, upon which they fled at top speed. In turn they were immediately pursued by a detachment of the Indians, mounted upon their fleetest horses; and suffered the humiliation of recapture two days later. Indulging in wild hilarity over the capture of the crestfallen whites, the Indians took a bell from one of the horses and, fastening it about Boone's neck, compelled him under the threat of brandished tomahawks to caper about and jingle the bell, jeering at him the while with the derisive query, uttered in broken English: "Steal horse, eh?" With as good grace as they could summon—wry smiles at best—Boone and Stewart patiently endured these humiliations, following the Indians as captives. Some days later (about January 4, 1770), while the vigilance of the Indians was momentarily relaxed, the captives suddenly plunged into a dense canebrake and in the subsequent confusion succeeded in effecting their escape. Finding their camp deserted upon their return, Boone and Stewart hastened on and finally overtook their companions. Here Boone was both surprised and delighted to encounter his brother Squire, loaded down with supplies. Having heard nothing from Boone, the partners of the land company had surmised that he and his party must have run short of ammunition, flour, salt, and other things sorely needed in the wilderness; and because of their desire that the party should remain, in order to make an exhaustive exploration of the country, Squire Boone had been sent to him with supplies. Findlay, Holden, Mooney, and Cooley returned to the settlements; but Stewart, Squire Boone, and Alexander Neely, who had accompanied Squire, threw in their lot with the intrepid Daniel, and fared forth once more to the stirring and bracing adventures of the Kentucky wilderness. In Daniel Boone's own words, he expected "from the furs and peltries they had an opportunity of taking ... to recruit his shattered circumstances; discharge the debts he had contracted by the adventure; and shortly return under better auspices, to settle the newly discovered country."

Boone and his party now stationed themselves near the mouth of the Red River, and soon provided themselves, against the hard. ships of the long winter, with jerk, bear's oil, buffalo tallow, dried buffalo tongues, fresh meat, and marrow-bones as food, and buffalo robes and bearskins as shelter from the inclement weather. Neely had brought with him, to while away dull hours, a copy of "Gulliver's Travels"; and in describing Neely's successful hunt for buffalo one day, Boone in after years amusingly deposed: "In the year 1770 I encamped on Red River with five other men, and we had with us for our amusement the History of Samuel Gulliver's Travels, wherein he gave an account of his young master, Glumdelick, careing him on market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud. A young man of our company called Alexander Neely came to camp and told us he had been that day to Lulbegrud, and had killed two Brobdignags in their capital." Far from unlettered were pioneers who indulged together in such literary chat and gave to the near-by creek the name (after Dean Swift's Lorbrugrud) of Lulbegrud which name, first seen on Filson's map of Kentucky (1784), it bears to this day. From one of his long, solitary hunts Stewart never returned; and it was not until five years later, while cutting out the Transylvania Trail, that Boone and his companions discovered, near the old crossing at Rockcastle, Stewart's remains in a standing hollow sycamore. The wilderness never gave up its tragic secret.

The close of the winter and most of the spring were passed by the Boones, after Neely's return to the settlements, in exploration, hunting, and trapping beaver and otter, in which sport Daniel particularly excelled. Owing to the drain upon their ammunition, Squire was at length compelled to return to the settlements for supplies; and Daniel, who remained alone in the wilderness to complete his explorations for the land company, must often have shared the feelings of Balboa as, from lofty knob or towering ridge, he gazed over the waste of forest which spread from the dim out lines of the Alleghanies to the distant waters of the Mississippi. He now proceeded to make those remarkable solitary explorations of Kentucky which have given him immortality—through the valley of the Kentucky and the Licking, and along the "Belle Riviere" (Ohio) as low as the falls. He visited the Big Bone Lick and examined the wonderful fossil remains of the mammoth found there. Along the great buffalo roads, worn several feet below the surface of the ground, which led to the Blue Licks, he saw with amazement and delight thousands of huge shaggy buffalo gamboling, bellowing, and making the earth rumble beneath the trampling of their hooves. One day, while upon a cliff near the junction of the Kentucky and Dick's Rivers, he suddenly found himself hemmed in by a party of Indians. Seizing his only chance of escape, he leaped into the top of a maple tree growing beneath the cliffs and, sliding to safety full sixty feet below, made his escape, pursued by the sound of a chorus of guttural "Ughs" from the dumbfounded savages.

Finally making his way back to the old camp, Daniel was rejoined there by Squire on July 27, 1770. During the succeeding months, much of their time was spent in hunting and prospecting in Jessamine County, where two caves are still known as Boone's caves. Eventually, when ammunition and supplies had once more run low, Squire was compelled a second time to return to the settlements. Perturbed after a time by Squire's failure to rejoin him at the appointed time, Daniel started toward the settlements, in search of him; and by a stroke of good fortune encountered him along the trail. Overjoyed at this meeting (December, 1770) the indomitable Boones once more plunged into the wilderness, determined to conclude their explorations by examining the regions watered by the Green and Cumberland rivers and their tributaries. In after years, Gasper Mansker, the old German scout, was accustomed to describe with comic effect the consternation created among the Long Hunters, while hunting one day on Green River, by a singular noise which they could not explain. Stealthily slipping from tree to tree, Mansker finally beheld with mingled surprise and amusement a hunter, bareheaded, stretched flat upon his back on a deerskin spread on the ground, singing merrily at the top of his voice! It was Daniel Boone, joyously whiling away the solitary hours in singing one of his favorite songs of the border. In March, 1771, after spending some time in company with the Long Hunters, the Boones, their horses laden with furs, set their faces homeward. On their return journey, near Cumberland Gap, they had the misfortune to be surrounded by a party of Indians who robbed them of their guns and all their peltries. With this humiliating conclusion to his memorable tour of exploration, Daniel Boone, as he himself says, "once more reached home after experiencing hardships which would defy credulity in the recital."