The Mammoth Book of the West (4 page)

As early as 1750 Dr Thomas Walker of the Loyal Land Company had led a surveying party into Kentucky, after finding (or being shown by Indians) the massive gateway through the mountains which he named “Cumberland Gap”, in honour of the Duke of Cumberland. This road to the interior would direct the course of Western settlement until after the Revolution.

But Walker himself, to his dismay, failed to locate the bluegrass country of Indian lore. Two years later, a Pennsylvanian trader by the name of John Finley did. Like many of the West’s discoveries, it happened by accident. Finley was captured while canoeing down the Ohio with his wares by a party of Shawnees, who took him to their hunting encampment in the Kentucky lowlands. Finley escaped to tell his tale, but the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s Rebellion temporarily ended further exploration.

With the coming of peace, interest in bountiful Kentucky revived, especially among the backcountry’s famous “long hunters”, so-called because of the awesome distances they covered in pursuit of fur and flesh. For the coonskin-capped long hunters, the wild woods held no
dangers, only adventure, wealth and nearly everything they needed to live: hides for their clothes, game and wild vegetables for their food, salt from natural brine licks, and even the “panes” for their cabin windows (made from doeskin membranes made translucent with bear oil). The furs of bear, beaver and other lush-coated animals were used to barter for the few items, such as gun and powder, that nature omitted to provide.

Long hunters began infiltrating Kentucky from the summer of 1766, men like Captain James Smith, Isaac Lindsay, James Harrod (the Latin reader who founded the stockade on the trail known as the Wilderness Road that became the state’s first proper settlement) and Michael Stoner. But the most famous of them, and the one who would play the greatest role in the exploration of “Kentucke”, was Daniel Boone.

Boone was born on 2 November 1734, to a Quaker family in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Boone’s parents seem to have had problems with the Friends over a daughter’s marriage outside the faith. This, and the rising fever over Western land settlement caused the Boones to move to the raw Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There Daniel Boone learned to farm and, under the guidance of friendly Indians, the lore of the wild. For a period he fought in the Seven Years’ War (where he met John Finley, a fellow waggoner on Braddock’s ill-starred expedition), returning afterwards to the Yadkin. On 14 August 1756 he married a neighbourhood farm girl, Rebecca Bryan. Their marriage, however, was not the conventional frontier mating. Boone had the wanderlust. From spring to fall he farmed, but then took off for the winter on hunting trips, alone save for a packhorse to carry pelts.

Such was Daniel Boone’s life until 1766. In that year he met up with his brother-in-law, John Stewart, who had just been into Kentucky with the expedition of Virginian
Ben Cutbird. Hearing Stewart recount the verdant wonders of the region, Boone resolved to go himself. He made his first trip to Kentucky in the winter of 1767, hoping to find the bluegrass country of Finley’s captivity. Instead, he ending up wandering the hills south of the Big Sandy River. Boone made another try for the bluegrass land in May 1769 – he had now all but given up farming – this time accompanied by John Finley and two other long hunters. After passing through the Cumberland Gap the group followed the Warrior’s Path across Kentucky as far as Station Camp Creek where they built a shelter to protect their furs. They then split up to explore the wilderness. Alone for most of the time, Boone spent months dodging Shawnee war parties (he was once captured, but escaped by diving into a giant canebrake) and living off the land. His great wander took him as far north as the Ohio, and over most of the great bluegrass region. When he met up with his brother, Squire Boone, on the Red River on 27 July 1770, he knew more about Kentucky than any other White man.

He had also fallen in love with it, with its level bluegrass fields and gentle cool streams. “I returned home to my family,” he later recalled, “with a determination to bring them as soon as possible to live in Kentucke, which I esteemed a second paradise, at the risk of my life and fortune.” A first attempt by the Boones to move to the new territory, in 1773, was beaten back by Indians, with the Boones losing their eldest son. Two years later, in January 1775, Boone led a party through the Cumberland Gap and with 30 axemen cleared a muddy trail, which came to be known as the Wilderness Road, to the Kentucky River. There, on the south bank, he founded the fort of Boonesborough.

Although this remote settlement took the backwoods-man’s name, its real instigator was an old friend of Boone’s,
Judge Richard Henderson. This Carolina land-jobber possessed, to use his own words, a “rapturous idea of property”. Most rapturous of all was his dream to found a proprietary colony – Transylvania – beyond the mountains. The bluegrass region was ideal. It was lush almost beyond belief. More, the local Indians had been conveniently subdued.

The “Dark and Bloody Ground” had long been the hunting domain of both the Shawnees and Cherokees (although neither tribe lived there). But Chief Cornstalk’s Shawnees had been defeated in battle by the Virginians at Point Pleasant on 9 October 1774. By the terms of the truce they signed, they agreed not to molest the White Kentuckians. Left as the undisputed owners of the region, the Cherokees decided on peaceable discretion. Having learned something of the White man’s ways they were prepared to sell a great swathe of Kentucky. For £10,000 Henderson bought the land from the Kentucky River to the highland south of the Cumberland Gap. And he dispatched his friend Boone to blaze the emigrant trail to the Kentucky River.

Henderson’s colony was destined to fail. Aside from a personal autocracy which made his Kentucky woodsmen “subjects” rise up against him, new immigrants settled where they chose, regardless of “Carolina Dick’s” regulations. Henderson was powerless to stop them.

It was a problem the British Crown was dismally familiar with.

The Kentuckians were not the only westering pioneers to ignore Britain’s 1763 proclamation banning White expansion to the west of the Appalachians. Squatters had also filtered through into Tennessee and Pittsburgh. The law of Albion was no match for the lure of virgin land. There was money to be made, earth to be farmed. As George Washington observed: “Any person . . . who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands and . . . marking . . . them for his own . . . will never regain it.” Squatters visiting kin back in the land-hungry settlements, where farms were being divided over and over again to provide for maturing children, reported trans-Appalachia to be a “new Paradise”.

Under the pressure of the speculators and settlers, who were pushing the frontier west from the mountains towards the Ohio at an average rate of 17 miles a year, Britain turned pragmatic and moved the proclamation line westward. If the Crown hoped to buy colonial goodwill it was mistaken. The vexed matters of taxation and the Navigation Acts (which imposed stiff duties on the export of American goods) irked her subjects beyond acquiescence. In 1775 America revolted.

The West played only a minor role in the War of Independence, which was largely fought out in a series of set-piece battles on the coastal strip. Of the 2.4 million colonialists in 1775, only a brave few hundred had moved from the safety of the east to scratch a dangerous living beyond the mountains. Most of these frontier dwellers cared little for taxation without representation, the Boston port troubles, or the theory of natural rights. They joined the American side in the war because they feared that the Indian-loving British would form an alliance with the native people which would devastate the precarious frontier of White settlement. The struggle for that thousand-mile-long line on the edge of the wilderness would produce some of the bloodiest moments of the revolt.

The war in the West was fought in three theatres. Fighting began in the southern backcountry when Cherokees – against the wishes of their ally, the regional British superintendent of Indian affairs, Colonel John Stuart – swooped on Eaton’s Station in North Carolina on 20 July 1776. After a treasonous but humanitarian warning to the hamlet by Stuart, the Indians were rebuffed, and so moved on to Fort Watauga. Milkmaids in the fields outside just made the safety of the stockade, Kate Sherill being pulled over the wall by John Sevier, who shot her closest pursuer almost in the same motion. Again the Indians were rebuffed. Incensed by their double humiliation, Chief Dragging Canoe’s warriors, along with Creeks, Choctaws, Tories and renegade trader Alexander Cameron, struck isolated farms and settlements all along the Watauga and Nolichucky rivers. The settlers struck back with equal savagery. South Carolina offered a bounty of £75 for Indian scalps. And in the fall some 5,000 militiamen from Virginia and the Carolinas swept down like an avenging storm on the Overhill, Middle and Lower Town Cherokee. By the treaty of DeWitt’s Corner and
Long Island, the Cherokee were forced to surrender 5 million acres of tribal land, including most of the Tennessee basin. Settlers poured in, and in 1780 Nashville was founded.

In the northern theatre – New York’s Mohawk Valley and Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley – Iroquois braves and the loyalist Tory Rangers of John Butler battered the colonials almost into extinction. The Iroquois were led by the Mohawk chief Thayendanegea, better known to the Whites as Joseph Brant, a guerrilla leader of canny ability (and also a scholar of note: he would later translate St Mark’s Gospel and the Book of Common Prayer into Mohawk). In November 1778 Brant virtually wiped out the settlement of Cherry Valley. The Revolutionary cause was only saved when, in 1779, General Washington felt he could spare enough troops to send to the northern frontier. He desired “the total destruction and devastation of [Iroquois] settlements.” The means to this brutal end were Generals John Sullivan and John Clinton, whose retaliatory campaign in the Mohawk Valley removed 40 Iroquois towns from the face of the earth and burned 160,000 bushels of corn, plus apple, peach and pear orchards. They found a thriving country, and left a smoking ruin. By the end of the war, the once mighty Iroquois confederacy was broken for ever.

Between the northern and southern theatres lay the killing forests of Kentucky and western Pennsylvania. Shawnee and Delaware raids began in the summer of 1776, driving farmers and woodsmen into the posts at Harrodsburg, Boonesborough and St Asaph, which were hastily fortified with 10-foot-high stockades of pointed logs set vertically. The “forting up” of the Kentucky stations was no sooner finished in the spring of 1777, the infamous “year of the three sevens”, than Chief Blackfish and 300 Shawnee invested Boonesborough. So thoroughly
confined were the inhabitants that they were unable to plant crops. They might have starved if the siege had not been lifted by the arrival of Virginian troops.

Shortly after, Daniel Boone, who led the defence at the fort, took a party to get badly needed salt from the spring at Blue Licks. Shawnee captured the party and took tham to the village of Chillicothe, north of the Ohio, where the bravery of the Kentuckians so impressed the Indians that they were adopted into the tribe. For the Kentuckians the brotherhood of convenience lasted until June 1778, when Boone discovered that another Shawnee raid on Boonesborough was imminent. He determined to warn the settlement. Waiting until the Shawnees were preoccupied with a turkey hunt, he dashed into the woods. Four days later, on 20 June 1778, he reached Boonesborough, after running 160 miles through pathless forest in a matchless feat of frontiersmanship. His warning was in time, and when Blackfish and his war party arrived the fort was able to resist them. After nine days of siege the frustrated Blackfish – who loudly berated Boone for deserting the Shawnee – departed, to cheers from the settlers. But Blackfish had only quit to pursue easier targets. Throughout the fall of 1778 bands of Indians roved Kentucky, picking off travellers and careless settlers, and for the second year in succession stopped the harvest.

It was becoming obvious to even the most cautious patriot that the defensive policy on the middle frontier was a disaster. The war needed to be taken to the enemy. The man to do it was the young red-haired George Rogers Clark, son of a Virginia planter, whose war exploits already included running a 400-mile gauntlet of ambushes to get gunpowder to the Kentucky settlements. Now, with the sanction of the Virginia authorities, Clark decided to mount a counter-thrust against the British in Illinois country.
Accompanied by 175 seasoned Indian-fighters, Clark flat-boated down the Ohio in late June 1778, then marched to the town of Kaskaskia. Their arrival on 4 July was so complete a surprise that the first the British commander knew about it was when the Americans pushed open the gate of the palisade. By mid-August Clark and his men also held Cahokia and the key fort of Vincennes. In midwinter Vincennes was recaptured by a British force under Captain Hamilton. Not to be outdone, Clark made an audacious march through freezing weather, took the fort again and sent Hamilton to Virginia as a prisoner-of-war exhibit. Clark’s dazzling victories did much to ease pressure on the, upper Ohio. But when he withdrew hostile Shawnee and Wyandot poured into the vacuum left behind. Neither tribe had originally been inclined to partake in the White man’s war, until frontiersmen had massacred 90 friendly Christian Delawares – including women and children – as they sang hymns in their church at Gnadenhutten. In revenge, Indians scalped captured Americans and roasted them to death over beds of hot coals.

Despite the bloodiness of the war in the West it was ultimately inconclusive. Although American settlement west of the mountains had grown, British and Native American forces had the military edge in the wilderness at the war’s end, including a stunning ambush of American militiamen at Blue Licks in August 1782.

Yet the British had already lost the War of Independence with Lord Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in the main, coastal theatre. It was a defeat from which the British were unable to recover, no matter what their triumphs elsewhere. The Revolution produced many American war heroes, among them Clark and Boone, but the West was won for America by her diplomats at the peace table.