The Mammoth Book of the West (3 page)

After the explorers came the settlers. By the turn of the
1700s pioneer hardscrabble farmers were streaming into the Valley, through the gaps in the mountain range carved by the Delaware and other rivers. Also entering the Great Appalachian Valley, but from the north, were German peasant immigrants displaced by war in the Rhinish Palatinate. Thousands settled in the Quaker province of William Penn, where the attraction was not religious pacifism – the Palatines were Lutheran or Reformed Church – but the rolling landscape which reminded them of home. The Germans, often misnamed the “Pennsylvania Dutch”, brought with them a long agricultural heritage, and their huge stone barns, carefully tended land and hard-working women marked them out for the wonder and envy of other colonialists. Many of the Palatinate Germans arrived as indentured servants, who worked a seven-year contract with the farmer who had financed their sea passage, before purchasing a place of their own.

Another group of immigrants from a troubled land, the “Scotch-Irish”, also found Pennsylvania to their liking. These were the descendants of the Scottish lowland Presbyterians who had moved to Ulster at the encouragement of James I as a means of subduing the Irish. Finding the best Pennsylvanian land already claimed by the Germans, the Scotch-Irish settled on the raw, westernmost frontier, an environment very similar to the Ireland their grandfathers had encountered. They began concentrating in the Cumberland valley of Pennsylvania west of Harrisburg during the 1720s. In the 1750s Pennsylvania was receiving as many as 10,000 Ulstermen a year. With each new wave, the Scotch-Irish pushed further on into the wilderness, built their rude log cabins and grubbed a few acres for corn and beans. By 1740 there were Scotch-Irish settlements in North Carolina; by 1760 they had reached South Carolina. They were incredibly fecund. “There is not a cabin but has ten or twelve children in it,” wrote the
Anglican itinerant Charles Woodmason. “When the boys are 18 and the girls 14 they marry – so that in many cabins you will see children . . . and the mother looking as young as the daughter.” A tenth of the population of America in 1776 was Scotch-Irish.

A rugged, determined people who feared only God, these Scotch-Irish were perhaps the first true Westerners. Years of clearing forests in Northern Ireland had taught them woodland lore even before they came to America. They also knew how to fight, for they had battled the Catholic tribes often enough. And they were possessed of a primitive democracy, for their church taught them that no man was great, only God.

Wherever the Scotch-Irish pioneers spread throughout the forest, the picture was the same. They chose the land they wanted, regardless of the forms of land patents or the claims of Indians, with whom they fought bloody running battles and whose scalps they hung in trophy from cabin walls. For the Scotch-Irish it was against “the law of God and nature that so much land be idle, while so many Christians wanted it to labor on, and to raise their bread.” Above all, they were ever prepared, even eager, to pull up stakes and keep moving westwards. They were restless almost beyond belief.

In the isolation of the backcountry, the Scotch-Irish, and the Germans, the English, the Yankees [native New Englanders], the Welsh and the Scots, who mixed with them, began to evolve a new society. As they worked on the wilderness, cutting trees in the shadows of the Appalachians or by the bright water of the Juniata River, they became transformed themselves. They became less European. The mentality of the woodlanders was that of the future American: pragmatic, wary of government, inclined to optimism, and loving of religious and political freedom.

The woodlanders also brought frontiering to its maturity. To visitors they seemed indistinguishable from Indians. One visitor wrote: “The clothes of the people consist of deer skins, their food of Johnny cakes, deer and bear meat. A kind of white people are found here, who live like savages.” Their tools were few, usually only the prerequisites of forest life: the long-handled axe and the rifle. With the axe they razed trees, built their log homes and carved the family utensils. With the rifle they fought Indians and shot game. Imported rifles were adapted by Pennsylvanian German gunsmiths for specific frontier needs. They lengthened the barrel to four feet for accuracy, reduced the bore size to half an inch (so saving on the lead for the projectile ball), and increased the size of the sights. An innovation was the “grease patch”, which was wrapped around the ball, giving it a snug fit in the barrel yet allowing it to be rammed home easily by a light hickory ramrod. In time the rifle would be given a name deriving from its great popularity with the settlers of the bluegrass state, but the “Kentucky Rifle” was in fact born east of the Appalachian crest. A skilled marksman could put a bullet through the head of a deer at 300 yards with a fine Kentucky piece. A man’s head could be drilled at 250 yards.

Such guns and the hardy souls needed to fire them were necessary if the British advance westwards was to continue.

Beyond the cloudy ridges of the Appalachians there were unfriendly Indians and equally unfriendly Europeans. For by the time the British were ready to move into the Ohio Valley in the mid-1700s the French had staked a claim to the continent from the Appalachians to the Rockies. They would be removed only by one hundred years of war.

While the British had been laboriously hewing their way westwards, the French in Canada had swept towards the setting sun with awesome speed. Unlike the settled British frontier, however, that of New France consisted of isolated trading posts, thrust rapidly into the wilderness by the profit-hungry fur business. After establishing their base in Quebec in 1608, the French had reached west of Lake Michigan in the 1630s; in the 1670s they had entered the Ohio Valley. In 1681 Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, and a party of 23 Frenchmen descended the Illinois River. After entering the Mississippi they sailed down its entire length, reaching the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, 9 April 1682. Disembarking onto the shore, the Cavalier ordered his personal Recollect friar, Zenobe Membre, to bless the cross and claim on behalf of the Sun King, Louis XIV, all the land the Mississippi drained.

The British colonialists, however, were not inclined to heed France’s staked claim. Against the need for land, legal niceties mattered little. After a series of indecisive wilderness clashes – King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War and King George’s War – the French and the British headed towards a final solution. The descent into war was inescapable. The French tightened their grip on the interior by building palisaded posts in the Illinois country. By
the 1740s British colonialists were poised at the very peak of the Appalachians ready to descend and occupy the interior. Land companies were formed to locate suitable territories for settlement: the Ohio Land Company in 1747, the Loyal Land Company in 1749. Traders from the Pennsylvania backcountry infiltrated the Ohio Valley to trade with the Indians.

It was one such trader, a tough Irishman called George Croghan, who sparked off the last great war for empire between Britain and France. Croghan ordered a post to be built at the Miami Indian village of Pickawillany – in the very heart of French territory. For a while this prospered, but then in spring 1753 a new French Governor, Marquis Duquesne, ordered an attack on Croghan’s post by French traders and Ottawa Indian allies. The post was destroyed and its defenders slain. A visiting Miami chief was unlucky enough to be killed, boiled and eaten. To prevent any future intrusions by Croghan and his trading ilk, Duquesne built a chain of four forts from Lake Erie to the Forks of the Ohio, sealing off the Ohio Valley from the trespassing Pennsylvanians. The last fort, on the Ohio Forks (the site of present-day Pittsburgh), Duquesne named after himself.

The French had thrown down the gauntlet. The British barely hesitated to pick it up. To lose the Ohio Valley would be to lose everything – the entire hinterland.

The Seven Years’ War began almost as the final log was being hauled into place at Fort Duquesne. Virginia’s Scots Governor Robert Dinwiddie had already sent the 21-year-old George Washington with a warning to the French to vacate it. When they refused, Washington returned with a small force. En route Washington’s men met and defeated a French scouting party. Realizing that he had noisily lost his advantage of surprise, Washington reconsidered the wisdom of attacking the French fort, withdrawing to the
treeless valley of Great Meadows. There he ordered his men to build an earth rampart. “The whole and the parts were not a design of engineering art but of frontier necessity”, he later wrote, “so I gave it the name, Fort Necessity.” Sheltered behind a dirt bank, Washington waited for the French to come to him. They did, on 3 July 1754. The outnumbered British fought valiantly all day, before surrendering honourably in the evening.

The next few years of the war were equally inglorious for the British. General Edward Braddock, who arrived from England to take command of the campaign, was cocksure and incompetent. In June 1755 he grandly marched his troops towards Fort Duquesne as though on parade. In their van went 300 axemen cutting a 12-foot road through the virgin forest. (“Braddock’s Road” would later prove of inestimable value to those settling the Ohio area.) Surprised by a smaller concealed force of French and Indians, the British became trapped in a valley clearing. They were mown down in their red-coated hundreds. Braddock himself was mortally wounded. George Washington, his aide, had a lucky escape with “four bullets through my coat and two horses shot under me.”

Afterwards, the Indians began to raid British settlements. “It is incredible,” wrote one French officer, “what a quantity of scalps they bring us.” The Indians may have disliked the fur trade of the French, but most perceived the populous British frontier as the greater threat.

Despite defeat upon defeat, the British managed to turn the war around. Although they termed the conflict “The French and Indian War”, not all Native Americans were allied to the cause of New France. Sir William Johnson, an Anglo-Irish immigrant who became a Mohawk blood brother, forged an alliance between Britain and the League of Iroquois Indians. The League, which called itself “The
Longhouse”, a reflection of the typical Iroquois dwelling, was composed of six tribes – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarara – and was versed in warfare, being frequent raiders of other tribes for the purpose of procuring prisoners for adoption or sacrificial torture. Armed with British guns the Iroquois successfully prevented the French resupplying their inland posts in the south and west.

Besides the Iroquois, the British had another irregular force which was expert at forest warfare, the rangers of Major Robert Rogers. A hard drinker of prodigious strength who had grown up on the border of New Hampshire, Rogers recruited to himself a band of frontiersmen of similar robust stock. They lived off the fruits of the land, travelled light and hit hard far inside New France. Their most famous exploit was the massacre of the St Francis Indians in 1759 at their village on the St Lawrence River. The village had long been a source of bloody raids, and New Englanders did not restrain their joy at its destruction.

Important though the Iroquois and Rogers’s Rangers were to British victory, its main cause was a change of ministry in London. The new regime, led by the energetic and charismatic William Pitt the Elder, swept out the dusty relics who staffed Britain’s army and replaced them with dynamic, brilliant unknowns. One of these, General James Wolfe, was dispatched to North America, which he dutifully won for king and country. The
coup de grâce
was administered on the Plains of Abraham beside the city of Quebec on 13 September 1759, when the French defenders were panicked into a bitter battle they could not win and which resulted in the Union Jack flying over France’s New World capital. A year later Montreal fell. Although official peace was still two years away, the French military in North America could now only lose. Their Indian allies,
seeing the way the war was heading, returned to their homes. Some even opportunistically changed to the British side, tempted by Rogers’s promise that under British dominion their “Rivers would flow with rum – that Presents from the Great King would be unlimited – that all sorts of Goods would be in the utmost plenty and so cheap.”

By the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, the French lost all their possessions on the continent. Canada and all land east of the Mississippi went to Britain. With no use for its holdings beyond the Mississippi, France transferred the western half of the giant territory of Louisiana to its ally, Spain. But Spain herself also had to pay the victor a price. She ceded the long-held land of flowers, Florida, to Britain.

To the victor in the Seven Years’ War went the spoils. So too all the difficulties of ruling a troublesome people, white and red. The ink on the Treaty of Paris was hardly dry before the tribes of the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes were rising up in arms. Unhappy at being transferred to the rule of Britain, the tribes’ unhappiness only increased when the British commander Jeffrey Amherst virtually abolished the annual gifts that were the staple of their economy. To Amherst the native peoples were “more nearly allied to the Brute than to the Human Creation” and he wanted to “extirpate them root and branch”. (He would recommend that smallpox germs be somehow spread among the tribes.) With the threat of poverty and death before them, the natives of the region, led by Pontiac of the Ottawas, launched a revolt which captured all the western forts except Pitt (Duquesne), Niagara and Detroit. The frontier from New York to Virginia was ravaged by the torch and tomahawk.

Already wearied by the war with the French, the British decided to give the insurgents no further cause for
discontent. On 7 October 1763, the British government issued a proclamation limiting White settlement to the east of the Appalachian crest.

The proclamation astounded America. With the removal of France, thousands of colonialists were expected to swarm into the fertile Ohio Valley. Many were volunteers who had served in the colonial militia with the lure of land as payment for service rendered. It now seemed that the interior would be barred to them forever. But when the shock died down, the colonialists realized that the proclamation was unenforceable. They simply ignored it and marched over the mountains. They had conquered one West, the wilderness up to the Appalachians. Now they would settle another, that between the Appalachians and the Mississippi.