Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Strong, inhumanly self-reliant, endowed with an ecstatic dryness of temper which brushed aside the psychological complexities of mysticism, these puritans were geared for a life of action. They shunned objective contemplation and were determined to throw their fanatical energy into this struggle against Nature . . . they fought their own selves with gloomy energy, repressing instincts and emotions, disciplining their entire lives . . . remorselessly brushing aside all men who stood in their path.
No Anglo-Celt would have understood the elegant Riencourt. They had no real intention of destroying the Wilderness, or any people who lived in it. Their own sayings were "God helps them who help themselves," "There's no such thing as luck," and "Devil take the hindmost," and they were going West.
Chapter 7
THE WAY WEST
. . . The West became the mainstay of American power and vigor, the home of an Americanism that looked down on the slightly decadent Easterners who stayed behind.
AMAURY DE RIENCOURT
IN the folklore of inner America the real history of the United States did not begin at Philadelphia; it commenced when a thirty-five-year-old Anglo-Celt named Daniel Boone crossed over the barrier mountains and scouted the grasslands of Kentucky, in 1769.
Boone was not the first Anglo-American to see Kentucky or to reach the Mississippi. The Cumberland Gap had already been found and named. Other men had put outposts along the river. But Boone went back to North Carolina and brought his family and a party of pioneers across the mountains, who came to stay. He was big, sinewy, and typical, born in Pennsylvania in 1734, reared in Carolina, a restless child of the old frontier. He was a great man in his way. There were a hundred, maybe a thousand, Boones nurturing in Appalachia—but he was the first to break a permanent trail and to create a settlement beyond the mountains that was completely isolated from the East. He was instrumental in founding this colony, and in preserving it during some desperate years.
Kentucky was a country of striking beauty, green limestone hills, broken forests, and meadows rich with buffalo, bear, and deer. It lacked the gloomy, endless forests farther south, or the sullen, black-soiled prairies to the north and west. Boone and his people, who were more hunters and trappers than real farmers, fell in love with the country.
The land south of the Ohio was not closely held by any Indian tribe. It had become a sort of buffer and battleground between the mountain Cherokees and forest Creeks below the Tennessee, and the less civilized but more warlike Algonkian Amerinds to the north. The really dangerous tribes, Wyandots, Miamis, and Shawnees, lived north of the Ohio. All these made forays into the lands between. Kentucky was dangerous ground.
The desperate distances involved and the dangers of carving settlements out of this wilderness have faded with time. The people who remained East, even the frontiersmen up against Appalachia, stayed in another world. This world could not even assist the pioneers in the crucial years; in fact, embroiled in its troubles with the British, it paid them little attention. The tremendous Trans-Appalachian empire between the mountains and the Mississippi was won almost unnoticed by the people on the coast.
Historians have accumulated many theories as to what made Boone's people go. But it seems safe to say that the migration was due as much to the Anglo-Celtic borderer instinct as economic reasons or the press of population. There were no fortunes to be made in the wilds by frontiersmen. There was no gold or silver or precious minerals. There was boundless land, but a man could only use the land he worked himself. Boone's people wanted to see the other side of the mountain; they had no strong ties with Anglo-American civilization, and they were not afraid of war.
Certainly, the armed migration westward was no part of the Enlightenment or rational theories of human government evolving on the coast. As its manifestos clearly show, 18th-century America was not imperial. The invasion of the Trans-Appalachian West was no result of policy of any government, American or British. In fact, this human explosion was in many ways contradictory to American thought and theory as it was being formulated in the East. The Anglo-American historical experience was to be this: the people moved outward, on their own, and they sucked their government along behind, whether it wanted to go or not. This experience, from the first, was radically different from either the Spanish or the French.
No iron-willed Washington or idealistic Jefferson, pledged to defend the rights of man forever before the altar of God, guided or shaped this emigration. They had the keen good sense, in time, to take advantage of it. And even then, the notion that Anglo-America should dominate its continent, and take all the owned, but empty, lands from sea to sea for its own advantage and protection, was not universally adopted or admired by millions in the East.
However, more and more anthropologists believe that the desire to expand, to seize territory and hold it, is a human instinct easily aroused, and one that requires no rationalization. It is only when the rationalization is attempted that hypocrisy enters in. Ironically, the Amerinds understood blood and soil; many of the people who destroyed them did not. In fact, if many of the ideas and arguments expressed in Anglo-America concerning peace and human rights had been dominant, it is not inconceivable to contemplate a United States still cramped behind the Alleghenies, complaining to world opinion about Amerind raids.
The way into Kentucky was hard. Even the passage was disputed; Boone's oldest son was killed coming through the mountains, in 1773. This pattern was repeated; the accounts of many early parties show that they had brushes with the Indians coming through. If the frontiersmen had not already had considerable experience fighting Indians, the early Kentucky and Tennessee settlements could not have survived. But Indian wars had been endemic on the borders of Anglo-America since the first white men pushed their way onto the continent, and it had not been many years since Massachusetts and other colonies had paid bounties for all Indian hair. All Appalachia had been Indian ground when the Scotch-Irish moved up against it; Indian fighting was part of the folk culture of Daniel Boone.
However, the first Trans-Appalachian generation was isolated as no other. It was not so much an extension of civilization beyond a contiguous frontier as an armed intrusion into hostile territory. The experience certainly shaped this generation, and the one that followed. The men born in the late 18th century and the early 19th on the middle border were probably the toughest, and toughest-minded, in American history. As Toynbee and other historians pointed out, life in direct proximity to the Indian frontier was savage, and the frontiersman could not help but be brutalized. Yet this brutalization was held within reasonable limits, because with the exception of Kentucky the fighting frontier proved to be ephemeral, and the English-speaking peoples developed a unique attitude toward the native Amerinds.
The Indians were not considered human beings by the average frontiersman. In this way their title to the land was obviated without any need for ideological reasons such as the Spanish employed, and their suppression could be carried out without moral qualms. Killing Indians, to the frontiersman, was hardly more meaningful than killing catamounts or bears. They were all natural obstacles to his full development and enjoyment of the land.
However, there was no notion of deliberate extermination among the whites. They wanted two things: to be left alone by Indians, and for the Indians to move out of the way. The warlike traditions of the Indians and the white determination to preempt the land of course made war inevitable.
Indian warfare buttressed the frontier people's moral case. It was based on stealth, treachery, guerrilla tactics, and marked by ferocious cruelty to its victims. There were no humanizing codes or protocols, and few prisoner exchanges. Captives of the Indians were normally mutilated, emasculated, and burnt alive. It was one thing to hold a rational discussion about the brotherhood of man over a glass of Madeira in Philadelphia, but quite another to look on the blackened results of an Indian atrocity. Sympathy for the Indians existed in a marked progression back from the frontier. The frontiersmen's outlook was simple and followed a pattern. When he was weak or outnumbered, he tried to make peace with the Indians. When he was stronger, he sought to have them removed. In virtually every case the frontier people were successful in their basic aims. The true hypocrisy rested with a long succession of United States governments.
The Anglo-American frontierspeople were completely successful in establishing the moral superiority this protracted warfare required. They themselves suffered no trauma or self-doubt. They did leave a certain trauma to their descendants, and to Americans without a frontier heritage, because they never bothered to develop a ready rationale.
The frontier folk were splendidly equipped for the struggle. They had the inherited experience and organizational skills of European civilization. They had basic organizational discipline and the understanding of long-term goals, which the Indians completely lacked. The Indian's society was utterly democratic; no man had to obey any chief's orders for long or suffer if it did not suit him. The whites in time of danger could voluntarily forgo their freedoms and cooperate. The fact that during Indian uprisings no man could fail to muster was not entirely due to understanding the demands of common defense—frontier society did not tolerate any other course.
The Indians understood the country better, but the Anglo-American white was immensely adaptive. It was already an American characteristic to avoid rationales for action but to do what came naturally in the most pragmatic fashion. The Anglo-Celt might have been stubborn in his basic convictions toward the world, but he changed artifacts and techniques easily. These Americans took agronomy from the Indians, and quickly adapted their warfare to the foe. Men like Boone or Wetzel, a legendary Indian-killer, could track like Indians, and meet the savages tomahawk to tomahawk. They saw the advantages of the Indian tomahawk over pike or sword in the forest, and soon made better ones of iron. But the characteristic weapon of the frontier was also borrowed from outside the British experience. This was the Central European rifle.
The rifle had been used as a hunting and target weapon in the Central European forests and mountains for generations, and it was carried to Pennsylvania by German immigrants. The Scotch-Irish immediately saw its superiority for their purposes over the smoothbore musket and created an enormous demand. Thousands were forged in Pennsylvania, and it was also made as far south as the Carolinas, wherever the frontier ran.
This Pennsylvania (later called Kentucky) rifle was very heavy and very long, as tall as a man. It was small-bored, about .32 caliber, and forged from soft iron and fitted with a short, awkward, wooden stock. It was ungainly but immensely accurate up to 200 meters or more. The rifle's characteristics made it unsuited for formal military use, because of the tactics adopted at the time. It was difficult to load, and most effective when fired from a rest. It was perfectly suited for the western hills and forests of America, where combat was decentralized and individual, where there was plenty of cover, and men fought from concealment, lying down. This weapon made the American frontiersman the most formidable fighter and predator, on his own ground, of the time.
The rifle remained purely a frontier weapon. The tidewater militias, like continental armies, were armed with smoothbore muskets, some dating back to Queen Anne's day. New Englanders first saw the Pennsylvania rifle when Dan Morgan's Virginia backwoodsmen marched to the siege of Boston in 1775.
Although the invasion of Kentucky was unplanned and unpremeditated on any national scale, everywhere at this time the frontier began to burst. Robertson and Sevier moved with others into Wautauga, or Tennessee. All these frontier people were probably as remote from their centers of government, or even the recognition of government, as any in civilized history. Government, either British or colonial, did not impinge upon their lives. But while many of them consciously wanted to remain outside the jurisdiction of the governments they knew, they were not anarchical. They had that cohesion and sense of order that seems peculiar to the English-speaking. The Kentuckians rejected the authority of Virginia, and the weak regimes in North Carolina were despised along the Tennessee, but the frontiersmen quickly formed their own governments. Already in the 18th century, the parameters of social action, and cohesion, were outside the concepts of even elective government. Characteristically, frontier society made government, and not the other way around.
At the same time Boone founded Boonesboro, several other fortified settlements were established in Kentucky, at Harrodsburg, St. Asaph's, and Boiling Springs. Other new forts were soon built: McGee's, Bryan's, McConnell's, and more. Heavy stockades were thrown up, but only a sort of headquarters—usually the trading post—stayed permanently within these walls. The settlers cleared fields, and built crude log cabins, in the forts' proximities. Family units were scattered over wide areas. But in these extremely primitive conditions a certain order was established. The erection of forts, desperately needed in times of Indian forays, took cooperation, and around these forts the nucleus of county, not city, government was formed. Frontier Kentucky in the 1770s consisted of three more or less organized counties, whose legitimacy stemmed from the House of Burgesses in Virginia, although Burgesses had no effective control. Thus the legitimate political unit in the West became the county, under the state, something that would cause rising urban communities grief much later on.