The Long Hunters in the Twilight Zone
The long Hunters principally resided in the upper countries of Virginia
& North Carolina on New River & Holston River, and when they intended to
make a long Hunt (as they calld it) they Collected near the head of
Holston near whare Abingdon now stands....
--General William Hall.
Before the coming of Walker and Gist in 1750 and 1751 respectively, the
region now called Kentucky had, as far as we know, been twice visited by
the French, once in 1729 when Chaussegros de Léry and his party visited
the Big Bone Lick, and again in the summer of 1749 when the Baron de
Longueuil with four hundred and fifty-two Frenchmen and Indians, going
to join Bienville in an expedition against "the Cherickees and other
Indians lying at the back of Carolina and Georgia," doubtless encamped
on the Kentucky shore of the Ohio. Kentucky was also traversed by John
Peter Salling with his three adventurous companions in their journey
through the Middle West in 1742. But all these early visits, including
the memorable expeditions of Walker and Gist, were so little known to
the general public that when John Filson wrote the history of Kentucky
in 1784 he attributed its discovery to James McBride in 1754. More
influential upon the course of westward expansion was an adventure which
occurred in 1752, the very year in which the Boones settled down in
their Yadkin home.
In the autumn of 1752, a Pennsylvania trader, John Findlay, with three
or four companions, descended the Ohio River in a canoe as far as the
falls at the present Louisville, Kentucky, and accompanied a party of
Shawanoes to their town of Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki, eleven miles east of
what is now Winchester. This was the site of the "Indian Old Corn
Field," the Iroquois name for which ("the place of many fields," or
"prairie") was Ken-ta-ke, whence came the name of the state. Five miles
east of this spot, where still may be seen a mound and an ellipse
showing the outline of the stockade, is the famous Pilot Knob, from the
summit of which the fields surrounding the town lie visible in their
smooth expanse. During Findlay's stay at the Indian town other traders
from Pennsylvania and Virginia, who reported that they were "on their
return from trading with the Cuttawas (Catawbas), a nation who live in
the Territories of Carolina," assembled in the vicinity in January,
1753. Here, as the result of disputes arising from their barter, they
were set upon and captured by a large party of straggling Indians
(Coghnawagas from Montreal) on January 26th; but Findlay and another
trader named James Lowry were so fortunate as to escape and return
through the wilderness to the Pennsylvania settlements. [89] The
incident is of important historic significance; for it was from these
traders, who must have followed the Great Warriors' Path to the country
of the Catawbas, that Findlay learned of the Ouasioto (Cumberland) Gap
traversed by the Indian path. His reminiscences--of this gateway to
Kentucky, of the site of the old Indian town on Lulbegrud Creek, a
tributary of the Red River, and of the Pilot Knob--were sixteen years
later to fire Boone to his great tour of exploration in behalf of the
Transylvania Company.
During the next two decades, largely because of the hostility of the
savage tribes, only a few traders and hunters from the east ranged
through the trans-Alleghany. But in 1761, a party of hunters led by a
rough frontiersman, Elisha Walden, penetrated into Powell's Valley,
followed the Indian trail through Cumberland Gap, explored the
Cumberland River, and finally reached the Laurel Mountain where,
encountering a party of Indians, they deemed it expedient to return.
With Walden went Henry Scaggs, afterward explorer for the Henderson Land
Company, William Blevens and Charles Cox, the famous Virginia hunters,
one Newman, and some fifteen other stout pioneers. Their itinerary may
be traced from the names given to natural objects in honor of members of
the party--Walden's Mountain and Walden's Creek, Scaggs' Ridge and
Newman's Ridge. Following the peace of 1763, which made travel in this
region moderately safe once more, the English proceeded to occupy the
territory which they had won. In 1765 George Croghan with a small party,
on the way to prepare the inhabitants of the Illinois country for
transfer to English sovereignty, visited the Great Bone Licks of
Kentucky (May 30th, 31st); and a year later Captain Harry Gordon, chief
engineer in the Western Department in North America, visited and
minutely described the same licks and the falls. But these, and numerous
other water-journeys and expeditions of which no records were kept,
though interesting enough in themselves, had little bearing upon the
larger phases of westward expansion and colonization.
The decade opening with the year 1765 is the epoch of bold and ever
bolder exploration--the more adventurous frontiersmen of the border
pushing deep into the wilderness in search of game, lured on by the
excitements of the chase and the profit to be derived from the sale of
peltries. In midsummer, 1766, Captain James Smith, Joshua Horton, Uriah
Stone, William Baker, and a young mulatto slave passed through
Cumberland Gap, hunted through the country south of the Cherokee and
along the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, and as Smith reports "found
no vestige of any white man." During the same year a party of five
hunters from South Carolina, led by Isaac Lindsey, penetrated the
Kentucky wilderness to the tributary of the Cumberland, named Stone's
River by the former party, for one of their number. Here they
encountered two men, who were among the greatest of the western
pioneers, and were destined to leave their names in historic association
with the early settlement of Kentucky--James Harrod and Michael Stoner,
a German, both of whom had descended the Ohio from Fort Pitt. With the
year 1769 began those longer and more extended excursions into the
interior which were to result in conveying at last to the outside world
graphic and detailed information concerning "the wonderful new country
of Cantucky." In the late spring of this year Hancock and Richard Taylor
(the latter the father of President Zachary Taylor), Abraham
Hempinstall, and one Barbour, all true-blue frontiersmen, left their
homes in Orange County, Virginia, and hunted extensively in Kentucky and
Arkansas. Two of the party traveled through Georgia and East and West
Florida; while the other two hunted on the Washita during the winter of
1770-1. Explorations of this type became increasingly hazardous as the
animosity of the Indians increased; and from this time onward for a
number of years almost all the parties of roving hunters suffered
capture or attack by the crafty red men. In this same year Major John
McCulloch, living on the south branch of the Potomac, set out
accompanied by a white man-servant and a negro, to explore the western
country. While passing down the Ohio from Pittsburgh McCulloch was
captured by the Indians near the mouth of the Wabash and carried to the
present site of Terre Haute, Indiana. Set free after four or five
months, he journeyed in company with some French voyageurs first to
Natchez and then to New Orleans, whence he made the sea voyage to
Philadelphia. Somewhat later, Benjamin Cleveland (afterward famous in
the Revolution), attended by four companions, set out from his home on
the upper Yadkin to explore the Kentucky wilderness. After passing
through Cumberland Gap, they encountered a band of Cherokees who
plundered them of everything they had, even to their hats and shoes, and
ordered them to leave the Indian hunting-grounds. On their return
journey they almost starved, and Cleveland, who was reluctantly forced
to kill his faithful little hunting-dog, was wont to declare in after
years that it was the sweetest meat he ever ate.
Fired to adventure by the glowing accounts brought back by Uriah Stone,
a much more formidable band than any that had hitherto ventured
westward--including Uriah Stone as pilot, Gasper Mansker, John Rains,
the Bledsoes, and a dozen others--assembled in June, 1769, in the New
River region. "Each Man carried two horses," says an early pioneer in
describing one of these parties, "traps, a large supply of powder and
led, and a small hand vise and bellows, files and screw plate for the
purpose of fixing the guns if any of them should get out of fix."
Passing through Cumberland Gap, they continued their long journey until
they reached Price's Meadow, in the present Wayne County, Kentucky,
where they established their encampment. In the course of their
explorations, during which they gave various names to prominent natural
features, they established their "station camp" on a creek in Sumner
County, Tennessee, whence originated the name of Station Camp Creek.
Isaac Bledsoe and Gasper Mansker, agreeing to travel from here in
opposite directions along a buffalo trace passing near the camp, each
succeeded in discovering the famous salt-lick which bears his
name--namely Bledsoe's Lick and Mansker's Lick. The flat surrounding the
lick, about one hundred acres in extent, discovered by Bledsoe,
according to his own statement "was principally Covered with buffelows
in every direction--not hundreds but thousands." As he sat on his horse,
he shot down two deer in the lick; but the buffaloes blindly trod them
in the mud. They did not mind him and his horse except when the wind
blew the scent in their nostrils, when they would break and run in
droves. Indians often lurked in the neighbourhood of these
hunters--plundering their camp, robbing them, and even shooting down one
of their number, Robert Crockett, from ambush. After many trials and
vicissitudes, which included a journey to the Spanish Natchez and the
loss of a great mass of peltries when they were plundered by Piomingo
and a war party of Chickasaws, they finally reached home in the late
spring of 1770. [90]
The most notable expedition of this period, projected under the auspices
of two bold leaders extraordinarily skilled in woodcraft, Joseph Drake
and Henry Scaggs, was organized in the early autumn of 1770. This
imposing band of stalwart hunters from the New River and Holston
country, some forty in number, garbed in hunting shirts, leggings, and
moccasins, with three pack-horses to each man, rifles, ammunition,
traps, dogs, blankets, and salt, pushed boldly through Cumberland Gap
into the heart of what was later justly named the "Dark and Bloody
Ground" (see Chapter XIV)--"not doubting," says an old border
chronicler, "that they were to be encountered by Indians, and to subsist
on game." From the duration of their absence from home, they received
the name of the Long Hunters--the romantic appellation by which they are
known in the pioneer history of the Old Southwest. Many natural objects
were named by this party--in particular Dick's River, after the noted
Cherokee hunter, Captain Dick, who, pleased to be recognized by Charles
Scaggs, told the Long Hunters that on his river, pointing it out, they
would find meat plenty--adding with laconic significance: "Kill it and
go home." From the Knob Lick, in Lincoln County, as reported by a member
of the party, "they beheld largely over a thousand animals, including
buffaloe, elk, bear, and deer, with many wild turkies scattered among
them; all quite restless, some playing, and others busily employed in
licking the earth.... The buffaloe and other animals had so eaten away
the soil, that they could, in places, go entirely underground." Upon the
return of a detachment to Virginia, fourteen fearless hunters chose to
remain; and one day, during the absence of some of the band upon a long
exploring trip, the camp was attacked by a straggling party of Indians
under Will Emery, a half-breed Cherokee. Two of the hunters were carried
into captivity and never heard of again; a third managed to escape. In
embittered commemoration of the plunder of the camp and the destruction
of the peltries, they inscribed upon a poplar, which had lost its bark,
this emphatic record, followed by their names:
2300 Deer Skins lost Ruination by God [91]
Undismayed by this depressing stroke of fortune, they continued their
hunt in the direction of the lick which Bledsoe had discovered the
preceding year. Shortly after this discovery, a French voyageur from the
Illinois who had hunted and traded in this region for a decade, Timothé
de Monbreun, subsequently famous in the history of Tennessee, had
visited the lick and killed an enormous number of buffaloes for their
tallow and tongues with which he and his companion loaded a keel boat
and descended the Cumberland. An early pioneer, William Hall, learned
from Isaac Bledsoe that when "the long hunters Crossed the ridge and
came down on Bledsoe's Creek in four or five miles of the Lick the Cane
had grown up so thick in the woods that they thought they had mistaken
the place until they Came to the Lick and saw what had been done.... One
could walk for several hundred yards a round the Lick and in the lick on
buffellows Skuls, & bones and the whole flat round the Lick was bleached
with buffellows bones, and they found out the Cause of the Canes growing
up so suddenly a few miles around the Lick which was in Consequence of
so many buffellows being killed."
This expedition was of genuine importance, opening the eyes of the
frontiersmen to the charms of the country and influencing many to settle
subsequently in the West--some in Tennessee, some in Kentucky. The
elaborate and detailed information brought back by Henry Scaggs exerted
an appreciable influence, no doubt, in accelerating the plans of Richard
Henderson and Company for the acquisition and colonization of the
trans-Alleghany. But while the "Long Hunters" were in Tennessee and
Kentucky the same region was being more extensively and systematically
explored by Daniel Boone. To his life, character, and attainments, as
the typical "long hunter" and the most influential pioneer we may now
turn our particular attention.