Part 2 (2/2)
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 pa.s.sing 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, Outa.s.situs, 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 a.s.sembly in November and again in December, matters in dispute between Governor Dobbs and the representatives of the people made impossible the pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sembly 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sing 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 leaders.h.i.+p to discover the pa.s.ses 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 princ.i.p.al achievements were the erection of the first house built by white men between the c.u.mberland 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 c.u.mberland, in honor of the ruthless conqueror at Culloden, the ”b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pet.i.tion for five hundred thousand acres, one of the declared objects of the company was ”to antic.i.p.ate 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 pet.i.tioned 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 k.n.o.b 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 c.u.mberland 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.s 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 leaders.h.i.+p, democratic instincts, economic independence, and expansive tendencies, and the primitive pioneer society of the frontier, frugal in taste, responsive to leaders.h.i.+p, 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 a.s.sistant 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 ”Wors.h.i.+pfull 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 distinguis.h.i.+ng them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it.” Was.h.i.+ngton 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, fis.h.i.+ng 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 partners.h.i.+p, which was ent.i.tled Richard Henderson and Company, was composed of a few a.s.sociates, 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.
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