Volume I Part 12 (2/2)

The Watauga settlers outlined in advance the nation's work. They tamed the rugged and s.h.a.ggy wilderness, they bid defiance to outside foes, and they successfully solved the difficult problem of self-government.

1. Then called the Cherokee.

2. Volumes could be filled--and indeed it is hardly too much to say, have been filled--with worthless ”proofs” of the owners.h.i.+p of Iroquois, Shawnees, or Cherokees, as the case might be. In truth, it would probably have been difficult to get any two members of the same tribe to have pointed out with precision the tribal limits. Each tribe's country was elastic, for it included all lands from which it was deemed possible to drive out the possessors. In 1773 the various parties of Long Hunters had just the same right to the whole of the territory in question that the Indians themselves had.

3. Campbell MSS.

”The first settlers on Holston River were a remarkable race of people for their intelligence, enterprise, and hardy adventure. The greater portion of them had emigrated from the counties of Botetourt, Augusta, and Frederick, and others along the same valley, and from the upper counties of Maryland and Pennsylvania were mostly descendants of Irish stock, and generally where they had any religious opinions, were Presbyterians. A very large proportion were religious, and many were members of the church. There were some families, however, and amongst the most wealthy, that were extremely wild and dissipated in their habits.

”The first clergyman that came among them was the Rev. Charles c.u.mmings, an Irishman by birth but educated in Pennsylvania. This gentleman was one of the first settlers, defended his domicile for years with his rifle in hand, and built his first meeting house on the very spot where he and two or three neighbors and one of his servants had had a severe skirmish with the Indians, in which one of his party was killed and another wounded. Here he preached to a very large and most respectable congregation for twenty or thirty years. He was a zealous whig and contributed much to kindle the patriotic fire which blazed forth among these people in the revolutionary struggle.”

This is from a MS sketch of the Holston Pioneers by the Hon. David Campbell, a son of one of the first settlers. The Campbell family, of Presbyterian Irish stock, first came to Pennsylvania, and drifted south. In the revolutionary war it produced good soldiers and commanders, such as William and Arthur Campbell. The Campbells intermarried with the Prestons, Breckenridges and other historic families, and their blood now runs in the veins of many of the noted men of the States south of the Potomac and Ohio.

4. The first settlers on the Watauga included both Virginians (as ”Captain” William Bean, whose child was the first born in what is now Tennessee, Ramsey, 94) and Carolinians (Haywood, 37). But many of these Carolina hill people were, like Boon and Henderson, members of families who had drifted down from the north. The position of the Presbyterian churches in all this western hill country shows the origin of that portion of the people which gave the tone to the rest, and, as we have already seen, while some of the Presbyterians penetrated to the hills from Charleston, most came down from the north. The Presbyterian blood was, of course, Irish or Scotch, and the numerous English from the coast regions also mingled with the two former kindred stocks, and adopted their faith. The Huguenots, Hollanders, and many of the Germans being of Calvinistic creed, readily a.s.similated themselves to the Presbyterians.

The absence of Episcopacy on the western border, while in part indicating merely the lack of religion in the backwoods, and the natural growth of dissent in such a society, also indicates that the people were not of pure English descent, and were of different stock from those east of them.

5. Campbell MSS.

6. For this settlement see especially ”Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee,” John Haywood (Knoxville, 1823), p. 37; also ”Annals of Tennessee,” J. G. M. Ramsey (Charleston, 1853), p. 92, ”History of Middle Tennessee,” A. W. Putnam (Nashville, 1859), p. 21, the ”Address” of the Hon. John Allison to the Tennessee Press a.s.sociation (Nashville, 1887); and the ”History of Tennessee,” by James Phelan (Boston, 1888).

7. Now Abingdon.

8. It only went to Steep Rock.

9. November 5, 1768.

10. October 14, 1768, at Hard Labor, S. C., confirmed by the treaty of October 18, 1770, at Lockabar, S. C. Both of these treaties acknowledged the rights of the Cherokees to the major part of these northwestern hunting-grounds.

11. Anthony Bledson.

12. May 16, 1771.

13. It is said that the greatest proportion of the early settlers came from Wake County, N. C., as did Robertson; but many of them, like Robertson, were of Virginian birth; and the great majority were of the same stock as the Virginian and Pennsylvanian mountaineers. Of the five members of the ”court” or governing committee of Watauga, three were of Virginian birth, one came from South Carolina, and the origin of the other is not specified. Ramsey, 107.

14. In Collins, II., 345, is an account of what may be termed a type family of these frontier barbarians. They were named Harpe; and there is something revoltingly b.e.s.t.i.a.l in the record of their crimes; of how they travelled through the country, the elder brother, Micajah Harpe, with two wives, the younger with only one; of the appalling number of murders they committed, for even small sums of money, of their unnatural proposal to kill all their children, so that they should not be hampered in their flight; of their life in the woods, like wild beasts, and the ign.o.ble ferocity of their ends. Scarcely less sombre reading is the account of how they were hunted down, and of the wolfish eagerness the borderers showed to ma.s.sacre the women and children as well as the men.

15. In ”American Pioneers,” II., 445, is a full description of the better sort of backwoods log-cabin.

16. Both were born in Virginia; Sevier in Rockingham County, September 23, 1745, and Robertson in Brunswick County, June 28, 1742.

17. Putnam, p. 21; who, however, is evidently in error in thinking he was accompanied by Boon, as the latter was then in Kentucky. A recent writer revives this error in another form, stating that Robertson accompanied Boon to the Watauga in 1769. Boon, however, left on his travels on May 1, 1769, and in June was in Kentucky; whereas Putnam not only informs us definitely that Robertson went to the Watauga for the first time in 1770, but also mentions that when he went his eldest son was already born, and this event took place in June, 1769, so that it is certain Boon and Robertson were not together.

18. The description of his looks is taken from the statements of his descendants, and of the grandchildren of his contemporaries.

19. The importance of maize to the western settler is shown by the fact that in our tongue it has now monopolized the t.i.tle of corn.

20. Putnam, p. 24, says it was after the battle of the Great Alamance, which took place May 16, 1771. An untrustworthy tradition says March.

21. In examining numerous original drafts of pet.i.tions and the like, signed by hundreds of the original settlers of Tennessee and Kentucky, I have been struck by the small proportion--not much over three or four per cent. at the outside--of men who made their mark instead of signing.

22. See, in the collection of the Tenn. Hist. Soc., at Nashville, the MS. notes containing an account of Sevier, given by one of the old settlers named Hillsman. Hillsman especially dwells on the skill with which Sevier could persuade the backwoodsmen to come round to his own way of thinking, while at the same time making them believe that they were acting on their own ideas, and adds--”whatever he had was at the service of his friends and for the promotion of the Sevier party, which sometimes embraced nearly all the population.”

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