The Colonization of the Cumberland
March 31, 1780. Set out this day, and after running some distance, met
with Col. Richard Henderson, who was running the line between Virginia
and North Carolina. At this meeting we were much rejoiced. He gave us
every information we wished, and further informed us that he had
purchased a quantity of corn in Kentucky, to be shipped at the Falls of
Ohio, for the use of the Cumberland settlement. We are now without
bread, and are compelled to hunt the buffalo to preserve life.
--John Donelson: Journal of a Voyage, intended by God's permission, in
the good boat Adventure, from Fort Patrick Henry, on Holston River, to
the French Salt Springs on Cumberland River.
To the settlements in Tennessee and Kentucky, which they had seized and
occupied, the pioneers held on with a tenacious grip which never
relaxed. From these strongholds, won through sullen and desperate
strokes, they pushed deeper into the wilderness, once again to meet with
undimmed courage the bitter onslaughts of their resentful foes. The
crushing of the Cherokees in 1776 relieved the pressure upon the
Tennessee settlers, enabling them to strengthen their hold and prepare
effectively for future eventualities; the possession of the gateway to
Kentucky kept free the passage for Western settlement; Watauga and its
defenders continued to offer a formidable barrier to British invasion of
the East from Kentucky and the Northwest during the Revolution; while
these Tennessee frontiersmen were destined soon to set forth again to
invade a new wilderness and at frightful cost to colonize the
Cumberland.
The little chain of stockades along the far-flung frontier of Kentucky
was tenaciously held by the bravest of the race, grimly resolved that
this chain must not break. The Revolution precipitated against this
chain wave after wave of formidable Indian foes from the Northwest under
British leadership. At the very time when Griffith Rutherford set out
for the relief of McDowell's Fort, a marauding Indian band captured by
stealth near the Transylvania Fort, known as Boone's Fort
(Boonesborough), Elizabeth and Frances Callaway, and Jemima Boone, the
daughters of Richard Callaway and Daniel Boone, and rapidly marched them
away toward the Shawanoe towns on the Ohio. A relief party, in two
divisions, headed respectively by the young girls' fathers, and composed
among others of the lovers of the three girls, Samuel Henderson, John
Holder, and Flanders Callaway, pursued them with almost incredible
swiftness. Guided by broken twigs and bits of cloth surreptitiously
dropped by Elizabeth Callaway, they finally overtook the unsuspecting
savages, killed two of them, and rescued the three maidens unharmed.
This romantic episode--which gave Fenimore Cooper the theme for the most
memorable scene in one of his Leatherstocking Tales--had an even more
romantic sequel in the subsequent marriage of the three pairs of lovers.
This bold foray, so shrewdly executed and even more sagaciously foiled,
was a true precursor of the dread happenings of the coming years. Soon
the red men were lurking in the neighborhood of the stations; and relief
was felt when the Transylvania Fort, the great stockade planned by Judge
Henderson, was completed by the pioneers (July, 1776). Glad tidings
arrived only a few days later when the Declaration of Independence, read
aloud from the Virginia Gazette, was greeted with wild huzzas by the
patriotic backwoodsmen. During the ensuing months occasional invasions
were made by savage bands; but it was not until April 24, 1777, that
Henderson's "big fort" received its first attack, being invested by a
company of some seventy-five savages. The twenty-two riflemen in the
fort drove off the painted warriors, but not before Michael Stoner,
Daniel Boone, and several others were severely wounded. As he lay
helpless upon the ground, his ankle shattered by a bullet, Boone was
lifted by Simon Kenton and borne away upon his shoulders to the haven of
the stockade amid a veritable shower of balls. The stoical and taciturn
Boone clasped Kenton's hand and gave him the accolade of the wilderness
in the brief but heartfelt utterance; "You are a fine fellow." On July
4th of this same year the fort was again subjected to siege, when two
hundred gaudily painted savages surrounded it for two days. But owing to
the vigilance and superb markmanship of the defenders, as well as to the
lack of cannon by the besieging force, the Indians reluctantly abandoned
the siege, after leaving a number dead upon the field. Soon afterward
the arrival of two strong bodies of prime riflemen, who had been hastily
summoned from the frontiers of North Carolina and Virginia, once again
made firm the bulwark of white supremacy in the West.
Kentucky's terrible year, 1778, opened with a severe disaster to the
white settlers--when Boone with thirty men, while engaged in making salt
at the "Lower Salt Spring," was captured in February by more than a
hundred Indians, sent by Governor Hamilton of Detroit to drive the white
settlers from "Kentucke." Boone remained in captivity until early
summer, when, learning that his Indian captors were planning an attack
in force upon the Transylvania Fort, he succeeded in effecting his
escape. After a break-neck journey of one hundred and sixty miles,
during which he ate but one meal, Boone finally arrived at the big fort
on June 20th. The settlers were thus given ample time for preparation,
as the long siege did not begin until September 7th. The fort was
invested by a powerful force flying the English flag--four hundred and
forty-four savages gaudy in the vermilion and ochre of their war-paint,
and eleven Frenchmen, the whole being commanded by the French-Canadian,
Captain Dagniaux de Quindre, and the great Indian Chief, Black-fish, who
had adopted Boone as a son. [187] In the effort to gain his end de
Quindre resorted to a dishonorable stratagem, by which he hoped to
outwit the settlers and capture the fort with but slight loss. "They
formed a scheme to deceive us," says Boone, "declaring it was their
orders, from Governor Hamilton, to take us captives, and not to destroy
us; but if nine of us would come out and treat with them, they would
immediately withdraw their forces from our walls, and return home
peacably." Transparent as the stratagem was, Boone incautiously agreed
to a conference with the enemy; Callaway alone took the precaution to
guard against Indian duplicity. After a long talk, the Indians proposed
to Boone, Callaway, and the seven or eight pioneers who accompanied them
that they shake hands in token of peace and friendship. As picturesquely
described by Daniel Trabue:
The Indians sayed two Indians must shake hands with one white man to
make a Double or sure peace at this time the Indians had hold of the
white men's hands and held them. Col. Calloway objected to this but the
other Indians laid hold or tryed to lay hold of the other hand but
Colonel Calloway was the first that jerked away from them but the
Indians seized the men two Indians holt of one man or it was mostly the
case and did their best to hold them but while the man and Indians was a
scuffling the men from the Fort agreeable to Col. Calloway's order fired
on them they had a dreadful skuffel but our men all got in the fort safe
and the fire continued on both sides. [188]
During the siege Callaway, the leader of the pioneers, made a wooden
cannon wrapped with wagon tires, which on being fired at a group of
Indians "made them scamper perdidiously." The secret effort of the
Indians to tunnel a way underground into the fort, being discovered by
the defenders, was frustrated by a countermine. Unable to outwit,
outfight, or outmaneuver the resourceful Callaway, de Quindre finally
withdrew on September 16th, closing the longest and severest attack that
any of the fortified stations of Kentucky had ever been called upon to
withstand.
The successful defense of the Transylvania Fort, made by these
indomitable backwoodsmen who were lost sight of by the Continental
Congress and left to fight alone their battles in the forests, was of
national significance in its results. Had the Transylvania Fort fallen,
the northern Indians in overwhelming numbers, directed by Hamilton and
led by British officers, might well have swept Kentucky free of
defenders and fallen with devastating force upon the exposed settlements
along the western frontiers of North Carolina, Virginia, and
Pennsylvania. This defense of Boonesborough, therefore, is deserving of
commemoration in the annals of the Revolution, along with Lexington and
Bunker's Hill. Coupled with Clark's meteoric campaign in the Northwest
and the subsequent struggles in the defense of Kentucky, it may be
regarded as an event basically responsible for the retention of the
trans-Alleghany region by the United States. The bitter struggles,
desperate sieges, and bloody reprisals of these dark years came to a
close with the expeditions of Clark and Logan in November, 1782, which
appropriately concluded the Revolution in the West by putting a definite
end to all prospect of formidable invasion of Kentucky.
In November, 1777, "Washington District," the delegates of which had
been received in the preceding year by the Provincial Congress of North
Carolina, was formed by the North Carolina General Assembly into
Washington County; and to it were assigned the boundaries of the whole
of the present state of Tennessee. While this immense territory was thus
being definitely included within the bounds of North Carolina, Judge
Henderson on behalf of the Transylvania Company was making a vigorous
effort to secure the reëstablishment of its rights from the Virginia
Assembly. By order of the Virginia legislature, an exhaustive
investigation of the claims of the Transylvania Company was therefore
made, hearings being held at various points in the back country. On July
18, 1777, Judge Henderson presented to the peace commissioners for North
Carolina and Virginia at the Long Island treaty ground an elaborate
memorial in behalf of the Transylvania Company, which the commissioners
unanimously refused to consider, as not coming under their jurisdiction.
[189] Finally, after a full and impartial discussion before the Virginia
House of Delegates, that body declared the Transylvania purchase void.
[190] But in consideration of "the very great expense [incurred by the
company] in making the said purchase, and in settling the said lands, by
which the commonwealth is likely to receive great advantage, by
increasing its inhabitants, and establishing a barrier against the
Indians," the House of Delegates granted Richard Henderson and Company
two hundred thousand acres of land situated between the Ohio and Green
rivers, where the town of Henderson, Kentucky, now stands. [191] With
this bursting of the Transylvania bubble and the vanishing of the golden
dreams of Henderson and his associates for establishing the fourteenth
American colony in the heart of the trans-Alleghany, a first romantic
chapter in the history of Westward expansion comes to a close.
But another and more feasible project immediately succeeded.
Undiscouraged by Virginia's confiscation of Transylvania, and
disregarding North Carolina's action in extending her boundaries over
the trans-Alleghany region lying within her chartered limits, Henderson,
in whom the genius of the colonizer and the ambition of the speculative
capitalist were found in striking conjunction, was now inspired to
repeat, along broader and more solidly practical lines, the
revolutionary experiment of Transylvania. It was not his purpose,
however, to found an independent colony; for he believed that millions
of acres in the Transylvania purchase lay within the bounds of North
Carolina, and he wished to open for colonization, settlement, and the
sale of lands, the vast wilderness of the valley of the Cumberland
supposed to lie within those confines. But so universal was the
prevailing uncertainty in regard to boundaries that it was necessary to
prolong the North Carolina-Virginia line in order to determine whether
or not the Great French Lick, the ideal location for settlement, lay
within the chartered limits of North Carolina. [192]
Judge Henderson's comprehensive plans for the promotion of an extensive
colonization of the Cumberland region soon began to take form in
vigorous action. Just as in his Transylvania project Henderson had
chosen Daniel Boone, the ablest of the North Carolina pioneers, to spy
out the land and select sites for future location, so now he chose as
leader of the new colonizing party the ablest of the Tennessee pioneers,
James Robertson. Although he was the acknowledged leader of the Watauga
settlement and held the responsible position of Indian agent for North
Carolina, Robertson was induced by Henderson's liberal offers to leave
his comparatively peaceful home and to venture his life in this
desperate hazard of new fortunes. The advance party of eight white men
and one negro, under Robertson's leadership, set forth from the Holston
settlement on February 6, 1779, to make a preliminary exploration and to
plant corn "that bread might be prepared for the main body of emigrants
in the fall." After erecting a few cabins for dwellings and posts of
defense, Robertson plunged alone into the wilderness and made the long
journey to Post St. Vincent in the Illinois, in order to consult with
George Rogers Clark, who had entered for himself in the Virginia Land
Office several thousand acres of land at the French Lick. After
perfecting arrangements with Clark for securing "cabin rights" should
the land prove to lie in Virginia, Robertson returned to Watauga to take
command of the migration.
Toward the end of the year two parties set out, one by land, the other
by water, for the wonderful new country on the Cumberland of which Boone
and Scaggs and Mansker had brought back such glowing descriptions.
During the autumn Judge Henderson and other commissioners from North
Carolina, in conjunction with commissioners from Virginia, had been
running out the boundary line between the two states. On the very
day--Christmas, 1779--that Judge Henderson reached the site of the
Transylvania Fort, now called Boonesborough, the swarm of colonists from
the parent hive at Watauga, under Robertson's leadership, reached the
French Lick; and on New Year's Day, 1780, crossed the river on the ice
to the present site of Nashville.
The journal of the other party, which, as has been aptly said, reads
like a chapter from one of Captain Mayne Reid's fascinating novels of
adventure, was written by Colonel John Donelson, the father-in-law of
Andrew Jackson. Setting out from Fort Patrick Henry on Holston River,
December 22, 1779, with a flotilla consisting of about thirty flatboats,
dugouts, and canoes, they encountered few difficulties until they began
to run the gauntlet of the Chickamauga towns on the Tennessee. Here they
were furiously attacked by the Indians, terrible in their red and black
war-paint; and a well-filled boat lagging in the rear, with smallpox on
board, was driven to shore by the Indians. The occupants were massacred;
but the Indians at once contracted the disease and died by the hundreds.
This luckless sacrifice of "poor Stuart, his family and friends," while
a ghastly price to pay, undoubtedly procured for the Cumberland
settlements comparative immunity from Indian forays until the new-comers
had firmly established themselves in their wilderness stronghold.
Eloquent of the granite endurance and courageous spirit of the typical
American pioneer in its thankfulness for sanctuary, for reunion of
families and friends, and for the humble shelter of a log cabin, is the
last entry in Donelson's diary (April 24, 1780):
This day we arrived at our journey's end at the Big Salt Lick, where we
have the pleasure of finding Capt. Robertson and his company. It is a
source of satisfaction to us to be enabled to restore to him and others
their families and friends, who were intrusted to our care, and who,
some time since, perhaps, despaired of ever meeting again. Though our
prospects at present are dreary, we have found a few log cabins which
have been built on a cedar bluff above the Lick by Capt. Robertson and
his company. [193]
In the midst of the famine during this terrible period of the "hard
winter," Judge Henderson was sorely concerned for the fate of the new
colony which he had projected, and immediately proceeded to purchase at
huge cost a large stock of corn. On March 5, 1780, this corn, which had
been raised by Captain Nathaniel Hart, was "sent from Boonesborough in
perogues [pettiaugers or flatboats] under the command of William Bailey
Smith.... This corn was taken down the Kentucky River, and over the
Falls of Ohio, to the mouth of the Cumberland, and thence up that river
to the fort at the French Lick. It is believed have been the only bread
which the settlers had until it was raised there in 1781." [194] There
is genuine impressiveness in this heroic triumphing over the obstacles
of obdurate nature and this paternalistic provision for the exposed
Cumberland settlement--the purchase by Judge Henderson, the shipment by
Captain Hart, and the transportation by Colonel Smith, in an awful
winter of bitter cold and obstructed navigation, of this indispensable
quantity of corn purchased for sixty thousand dollars in depreciated
currency.
Upon his arrival at the French Lick, shortly after the middle of April,
Judge Henderson at once proceeded to organize a government for the
little community. On May 1st articles of association were drawn up; and
important additions thereto were made on May 13th, when the settlers
signed the complete series. The original document, still preserved, was
drafted by Judge Henderson, being written throughout in his own
handwriting; and his name heads the list of two hundred and fifty and
more signatures. [195] The "Cumberland Compact," as this paper is
called, is fundamentally a mutual contract between the copartners of the
Transylvania Company and the settlers upon the lands claimed by the
company. It represents the collective will of the community; and on
account of the careful provisions safeguarding the rights of each party
to the contract it may be called a bill of rights. The organization of
this pure democracy was sound and admirable--another notable early
example of the commission form of government. The most remarkable
feature of this backwoods constitution marks Judge Henderson as a
pioneer in the use of the political device so prominent to-day, one
hundred and forty years later--the "recall of judges." In the following
striking clause this innovation in government was recognized thus early
in American history as the most effective means of securing and
safeguarding justice in a democracy:
As often as the people in general are dissatisfied with the doings of
the Judges or Triers so to be chosen, they may call a new election in
any of the said stations, and elect others in their stead, having due
respect to the number now agreed to be elected at each station, which
persons so to be chosen shall have the same power with those in whose
room or place they shall or may be chosen to act.
A land-office was now opened, the entry-taker being appointed by Judge
Henderson, in accordance with the compact; and the lands, for costs of
entry, etc., were registered for the nominal fee of ten dollars per
thousand acres. But as the Transylvania Company was never able to secure
a "satisfactory and indisputable title," the clause resulted in
perpetual nonpayment. In 1783, following the lead of Virginia in the
case of Transylvania, North Carolina declared the Transylvania Company's
purchase void, but granted the company in compensation a tract of one
hundred and ninety thousand acres in Powell's Valley. [196] As
compensation, the grants of North Carolina and Virginia were quite
inadequate, considering the value of the service in behalf of permanent
western colonization rendered by the Transylvania company. [197]
James Robertson was chosen as presiding officer of the court of twelve
commissioners, and was also elected commander-in-chief of the military
forces of the eight little associated settlements on the Cumberland.
Here for the next two years the self-reliant settlers under Robertson's
wise and able leadership successfully repelled the Indians in their
guerrilla warfare, firmly entrenched themselves in their forest-girt
stronghold, and vindicated their claim to the territory by right of
occupation and conquest. Here sprang up in later times a great and
populous city--named, strangely enough, neither for Henderson, the
founder, nor for Robertson and Donelson, the leaders of the two
colonizing parties, but for one having no association with its history
or origins, the gallant North Carolinian, General Francis Nash, who was
killed at the Battle of Germantown.