Boone had the privilege of rejoicing in the peace that followed
the defeat of the northern tribes of Indians by General Wayne. His
perseverance had triumphed over all obstacles, and the kindred spirit
of his wife had aided and encouraged him in his various adventures,
whether descending the Alleghanies, tracing the course of the
Cumberland and Tennessee, roaming through the forests of Kentucky,
wandering a captive through the wilderness to the great lakes, or
following the waters of the Wabash, Miamis, and Scioto. When the tide
of emigration had poured into the country, and disputes and litigation
arose as to the ownership of land, the band of primitive pioneers was
dispersed, and Boone moved his family to the woods on the banks of the
Great Kanawha, having heard that deer and buffaloes were to be found
on the unsettled lands near that river. Their home was for some years
near Point Pleasant; but game was not so abundant as could be desired,
and the report of adventurers returned from the vast prairies and
unexplored forests of the Missouri, determined Boone once more to flee
from the encroaching advance of civilization. Taking up his rifle and
light luggage, he set out with the faithful companion of his wanderings
and their children, driving their stock before them, and passed through
Cincinnati in 1798. They settled in St. Charles County, about forty
miles above St. Louis. After Missouri had come under the government of
the United States, the tide of emigration and enterprise again swept by
the dwelling of our pioneers, driving off the game, and changing the
hunting grounds into farms. A follower too, even more sure to overtake
them, came on apace; old age with its consequent infirmities. Mrs.
Boone died in March 1813. A most faithful and efficient helpmeet had
she proved to the pioneer, possessing the same energy, heroism, and
firmness which he had shown in all the vicissitudes of his eventful
career, with the gentler qualities by which woman, as the centre of
the domestic system, diffuses happiness and trains her children to
become useful and honored in after life. Having shared willingly in the
hardships, labors and dangers of those adventurers whose names live in
grateful remembrance, she is entitled to some portion of the renown
that has embalmed them.
An anecdote or two illustrative of the insecurity of families in
those days, and of the horrors undescribed in most cases, may not
be inappropriate before closing this memoir. In the spring of 1780,
Alexander McConnel, who lived at Lexington, then a small cluster of
cabins, having killed a buck in the woods, went home for a horse, and
returning, was seized and carried off by five Indians. After several
days’ travel, when they reached the banks of the Ohio, they omitted
the precaution of binding him closely one night, merely tying the
buffalo tug around his wrists, and fastening it to their bodies; and
he resolved on making his escape. About midnight, casting his eyes in
the direction of his feet, they fell on the glittering blade of a knife
which had escaped its sheath, and was lying near the feet of one of the
Indians. He could not reach it with his hands, but with some difficulty
grasped the blade between his toes, and drew it within reach. He then
cut his cords, and silently extricated himself from his captors; but he
knew it would be necessary to kill them, to avoid pursuit and certain
death. After anxious reflection, his plan was formed, and carefully
removing the guns of the Indians, which were stacked near the fire,
and hiding them in the woods, he took two, and returning to the spot
where his enemies were still sleeping, he placed the muzzles of each
on a log within six feet of his victims, and pulled both triggers.
Both shots were fatal; he then ran to secure one of the other rifles,
and fired at two of the savages, standing in a line, killing one and
wounding the other, who limped off into the forest. The fifth darted
off like a deer, with a yell of astonishment and terror. McConnel not
wishing to fight any more such battles, selected his own rifle from
the stack, and made the best of his way to Lexington. A Mrs. Dunlap,
who had been several months a prisoner among the Indians on Mad River,
soon afterwards came to the same place, having made her escape, and
reported that the survivor had returned to his tribe with a lamentable
tale of an attack by a large party of white men, who had killed the
poor bound prisoners, as well as his companions![7]
An adventure of a different kind befel McKinley, a school teacher, in
the following year. While sitting alone at his desk, he heard a slight
noise at the door, and saw an enormous wild cat. He rose to snatch up
a cylindrical rule to defend himself, but the creature darted upon
him, tore his clothes from his side, and buried her claws and teeth
in his flesh. He threw himself on the edge of the table, and pressed
the assailant against its sharp corner with all his force. Her cries,
mingled with his own, now alarmed the neighbors, and after a few
moments the dead animal was disengaged from her prey, though her tusks
were dislodged with some difficulty from between his ribs.
In the beginning of 1794, a party of Indians killed George Mason,
on Flat Creek, twelve miles from Knoxville. In the night he heard a
noise in his stable, and stepped out; was intercepted before he could
return, by the savages, and fled, but was fired upon and wounded. He
reached a cave, from which he was dragged out and murdered, and the
Indians returned to the house to despatch his wife and children. Mrs.
Mason heard them talking as they approached, and hoped her neighbors,
aroused by the firing, had come to her assistance. But perceiving that
the conversation was neither in English nor German, she knew they
were enemies. She had that very morning learned how to set the double
trigger of a rifle. Fortunately the children were not awakened, and
she took care not to disturb them. She had shut the door, barred it
with benches and tables, and taking down her husband’s well charged
rifle, placed herself directly opposite the opening which would be made
by forcing the door. Her husband came not, and she was but too well
convinced he had been slain. She was alone in darkness, and the yelling
savages were pressing on the house. Pushing with great violence, they
gradually opened the door wide enough to attempt an entrance, and the
body of one was thrust into the opening and filled it, two or three
more urging him forward. Mrs. Mason set the trigger of the rifle, put
the muzzle near the body of the foremost, and fired. The first Indian
fell; the next uttered the scream of mortal agony. The intrepid woman
observed profound silence, and the savages were led to believe that
armed men were in the house. They withdrew, took three horses from the
stable, and set it on fire. It was afterwards ascertained that this
high-minded woman had saved herself and children from the attack of
twenty-five assailants.
The opportunity seems favorable to notice the spirit and manners of
those primitive times of Kentucky history. After the period of the
attack on Bryant’s Station, and the disastrous battle of the Blue
Licks, which took place on the 18th of August, 1782, notwithstanding
the dangers which surrounded the settlements, they began to have
more of the aspect of communities. The proportion of women, which
had hitherto been so small, became larger, and a license to marry is
said to have been the first process issued by the clerks of the new
counties. The first settlers having generally been composed of those
who had braved the perils of settling the frontiers of the adjacent
states, their helpmates were accustomed to labor and hardship. The
duties of the household were discharged by the females.
“They milked the cows, prepared the meats, spun and wove the garments
of their husbands and children; while the men hunted the game of the
woods, cleared the land, and planted the grain. To grind the Indian
corn into meal on the rude and laborious hand-mill, or to pound it
into hominy in a mortar, was occasionally the work of either sex. The
defence of the country, the building of forts and cabins, fell most
properly to the share of the men; though in those hardy times, it was
not at all uncommon for females, during a siege, to run bullets and
neck them for the rifle. Deer skins were extensively used for dress,
to compose the hunting shirt, the long overalls, the leggins, and
the soft and pliable moccasins; the buffalo and bear furnished the
principal covering for the night. Handkerchiefs tied round the head,
often supplied the place of hats; strips of buffalo hide were used for
ropes. Stores or shops were unknown; wooden vessels either prepared by
the _turner_, the _cooper_, or their rude representatives in the woods,
were the common substitutes for table furniture. A tin cup was an
article of delicate luxury almost as rare as an iron fork. Every hunter
carried a knife, too aptly called a _scalping knife_, in the hands of
the white man as well as in those of the Indian; and one or two knives
would compose the cutlery of families. The furniture of the cabin was
appropriate to the habitation; the table was made of a slab, or thick,
flat piece of timber, split and roughly hewn with the axe, with legs
prepared in the same manner. This latter instrument was the principal
tool in all mechanical operations, and with the adze, the auger, and
above all, the _rifle_, composed the richest mechanical assortment
of Kentucky. Stools of the same material and manufacture, filled the
place of chairs. When some one more curiously nice than his neighbors,
chose to elevate his bed above the floor (often the naked ground), it
was placed on slabs laid across poles which were again supported by
forks driven into the floor. If, however, the floor happened to be so
luxurious as to be made of puncheons (another larger sort of slabs),
the bedstead became hewed pieces, let into the sides of the cabin by
auger holes in the logs. The cradle of these times was a small rolling
trough, much like what is called the sugar trough, used to receive the
sap of the sugar maple. Still the food in these rude habitations, and
with this rough and inartificial furniture, was the richest milk and
finest butter furnished by the luxuriant pasture of the woods, covered
with the rich pea vine and the luscious cane. The game of the country,
it has been already seen, struck the experienced eye of even Boone
as profuse beyond measure; it was the theme of admiration to every
hunter; nor did the abundance afford slight assistance to the whites
in their conquest of the land. The enemy would never have permitted
provisions to have been transported, or to have grown by the slow and
peaceable processes of farming; and the consequence must have been
that the stations would have been starved into surrender, but for the
providential supply of the deer, the buffalo, and the bear. These were
to be obtained by every gallant rifleman; and this so abundantly that
the buffalo has often been shot in order to enjoy either its hump or
its tongue. The hospitality of these times was much less a merit than
an enjoyment; often a protection to both parties. The fare was rough,
but heartily and generously divided with every fellow-woodsman.”[8]
Generosity, hardihood, bravery, and endurance of suffering, were
prominent and undeniable features in the character of these first
settlers. But the female sex, though certainly an object of more regard
than among the Indians, had to endure much hardship, and occupy a rank
inferior to the male partner, among the _earliest_ emigrants, the state
of society exercising high physical qualities rather than mental or
artificial endowments.
* * * * *
ANNA INNIS, widow of Hon. Henry Innis, and mother of Mrs. J. J.
Crittenden, died at Cedar Hill, near Frankfort, Kentucky, May 12th,
1851. This lady was one of the pioneers of Kentucky, and has been the
pride of her State and an ornament to the country. Her early days were
spent in the wilderness, and yet in the society of such men as Clarke,
Wayne, Shelby, Scott, Boone, Henderson, Logan, Hart, Nicholas, Murray,
Allen, Breckenridge, and all the great and heroic spirits of the West.
She saw Washington as he led his broken army through the Jerseys, and
as he returned in triumph from Yorktown. Of this remarkable woman the
_Frankfort Commonwealth_ says:
“Her tenacious memory retained all she had seen, and she became
the chronicler of her own times, and interwove her narrative with
traditions of the past. Providence had been kind in all his dealings
with her. He had blest her with a strong mind and constitution,
and with great cheerfulness and courage. He had blessed her in her
‘basket and her store.’ He had blessed her in her children, and at
last when the message came, having borne all the trials of a long and
eventful life with heroic firmness, she died in the full communion and
fellowship of the Presbyterian Church, of which she had been long an
exemplary member.”
Another of the eminent daughters of Kentucky was the mother of Gen.
Leslie Combs, whose maiden name was Sarah Richardson. She was of a
respectable Quaker family of Maryland, connected by blood with the
Thomases and Snowdens. Leslie, the youngest of twelve children, was
just eighteen when he started as a volunteer to join the Kentucky
troops ordered to the northern frontier, under Gen. Winchester, in
1812. Two of his elder brothers had previously entered the service,
and with earnest entreaties he prevailed on his parents to let him
go, setting forward alone a few weeks after the army had marched.
“I shall never forget,” were his words in after years, “the parting
scene with my beloved and venerated mother, in which she reminded me
of my father’s history, and her own trials and dangers in the early
settlement of Kentucky, and closed by saying to me ‘as I had resolved
to become a soldier, I must never disgrace my parents by running from
danger; but die rather than fail to do my duty.’ This injunction was
ever present to me afterwards in the midst of dangers and difficulties
of which I had then formed no idea, and stimulated me to deeds I might
otherwise, perhaps, have hesitated to undertake or perform.”
The residence of Mrs. Combs, after her removal from the picketed
station where she first lived in Kentucky, was on a farm about
six miles from Boonesborough. The family suffered much from the
depredations of the Indians who then infested the country from the Ohio
to the Tennessee. Mrs. Combs’ riding horse was shot down under her
eldest son while he and his father were on a trapping excursion within
two or three miles of home. They did not return as soon as expected,
and the mother was left alone in the cabin with two or three little
children, a prey to the most agonizing apprehensions. It was through
her industry and energy that her children were enabled to obtain a
better education than was usual in the country in those days. This fact
is mentioned in the inscription on her tombstone, which stands on the
farm where they lived and died, alongside of that inscribed with the
name of her husband, recorded as “a Revolutionary officer and a Hunter
of Kentucky.”
NOTE.--See page 428.
IV.
CHARLOTTE ROBERTSON.
Charlotte Reeves was the second daughter of George Reeves and Mary
Jordan, and was born in Northampton County, N. C., in January 1751. Her
parents were poor in worldly possessions, and were able to give their
children only a limited education; but they trained them to labor and
habits of systematic industry, and in those strict principles which
guided and preserved their parents through life, and made their example
useful. Soon after the marriage of Charlotte with James Robertson, the
young couple crossed the mountains and fixed their abode in one of the
new settlements on the Watauga or Holston River.
In 1779, Robertson went with some others to explore the Cumberland
Valley, leaving his family behind. They explored the country to the
neighborhood of the spot where Nashville now stands, planted there a
field of corn, and leaving three of the party to keep the buffaloes
out of the corn, returned to East Tennessee for their families. The
fame of the fertile Cumberland lands, the salubrity of the air, the
excellence of the water, and the abundance of game of all sorts, was
soon diffused through all the frontier settlements, and many took the
resolution of emigrating to this land of plenty. Companies came and
built cabins and block houses and in the latter part of February or
first of March 1780, Mrs. Robertson left her home at the mouth of
Big Creek on the Holston, for the purpose of joining her husband. Her
party consisted of herself and four small children, her brother William
Reeves, Charles Robertson her husband’s brother, her sister-in-law,
and three little nieces, with two white men servants, a negro woman
and her infant. These voyagers were conveyed in two of the small and
frail flat-boats appointed to convey the families of emigrants to
their new homes in the wilderness. Capt. James Robertson was to head
the party travelling by land through Kentucky to the same point of
destination, and driving the cattle belonging to the little colony;
and had left home some weeks previously, with his eldest son, fourteen
years of age. Those who went by water descended the north fork of the
Holston, and proceeded down Tennessee River. The various difficulties
they encountered, the perils and fatigues of this tedious and dangerous
trip, were more numerous that it is now possible to detail. At the
mouth of Duck River they expected to land and make their way through
the wilderness to the “Cumberland County,” but the guides failing to
meet them, they continued their voyage to the mouth of the Tennessee.
At this point their difficulties were fearfully increased. The ice
was just broken up in the Ohio, the water was rising, and the aspect
of things appeared so discouraging to their pilot that he abandoned
the enterprise in despair, and left the company to make their way in
the best manner possible up the river, having to ascend against a
rapid current, with clumsy and scarcely manageable boats, some two
hundred miles. The emigrants were worn out and disheartened with the
toil of the voyage already accomplished, the men were strangers to
the navigation of the Ohio, which flowed for the most part through an
unbroken forest, infested on either side with wild beasts and more
merciless Indians; their lives seemed endangered at every step, and
so dreary was the prospect, that about one half the company decided
against pursuing the enterprise, bade adieu to their companions, and
shoving their boats into the smooth current of the Ohio, sought homes
for their families in Natchez. The others turned their bows up the
river. Of Mrs. Robertson’s party only two men were left, her brother
and brother-in-law. They lashed the two boats together; Mrs. Johnson,
the widowed sister of Capt. Robertson, undertook to serve as pilot, and
managed the steering oar, while Mrs. Robertson and Hagar, the African
woman, worked at the side oars alternately with Reeves and Robertson.
By this tedious and laborious progress, they made their way up the Ohio
to the mouth of the Cumberland, and up the Cumberland to the point of
destination, landing in the beginning of April at the site of Nashville.
Haywood, in his history of Tennessee, describes the voyage made by “The
Adventure” and other boats, which, leaving the fort on the Holston
the 22d of December, 1779, did not reach the “Big Salt Lick” till
the latter part of April. An extract may give an idea of the perils
of the expedition. In passing Indian villages on the Tennessee, the
voyagers had been accosted by many of the savages with professions of
friendship, designed to cover a hostile purpose.
“In a short time the crew came in sight of another town, situated on
the north side of the river, nearly opposite a small island. Here also
the Indians invited those on board to come on shore, calling them
brothers, and seeing the boats standing to the opposite side, told
the passengers that their side was the best for the boats to pass the
island on. A young man on board the boat of Capt. John Blackmore,
approaching too near the shore, was shot in the boat from the shore.
Mr. Stewart had set off in a boat on board which were blacks and
whites to the number of twenty-eight. His family being diseased with
the small pox, it was agreed that he should keep at some distance in
the rear. He was to be informed each night where the others lay by
the sound of a horn. The foremost boats having passed the town, the
Indians collected in considerable numbers. Seeing him far behind,
they intercepted him in their canoes, and killed and made prisoners
the whole crew. The crews of the other boats were not able to relieve
him, being alarmed for their own safety, for they perceived large
bodies of Indians marching on foot down the river, keeping pace with
the boats, till the Cumberland mountain covered them from view. The
boats were now arrived at the place called the Whirl or Suck, where
the river is compressed into less than half its common width, by the
Cumberland mountain jutting into it on both sides. In passing through
the upper part of these narrows, at a place termed the Boiling Pot,
a man of the name of John Cotton was descending the river in a canoe
with a small family, and had attached it to Robert Cartwright’s boat,
into which he and his family had entered for safety. The canoe was here
overturned, and the little cargo lost. The movers pitying his distress,
concluded to land and assist him in recovering his property. Having
landed on the north shore at a level spot they began to go towards the
place where the misfortune had happened, when the Indians, to their
astonishment, appeared on the opposite cliffs, and commenced firing
down upon them. The Indians continued their fire from heights upon the
boats. In the boat of Mr. Gower was his daughter Nancy. When the crew
were thrown into disorder and dismay, she took the helm, and steered
the boat, exposed to all the fire of the enemy. A ball passed through
her clothes, and penetrated the upper part of her thigh, going out on
the opposite side. It was not discovered that she was wounded by any
complaint she made, or a word she uttered, but after the danger was
over, her mother discovered the blood flowing through her clothes.”
Reaching the mouth of the Tennessee the 20th of March, they parted
with their companions who were discouraged from proceeding, and the
Adventure, with the boats which accompanied her, went up the Ohio.
“They made but little way on that day, and encamped on the south
bank of the Ohio, suffering on that and the two following days much
uneasiness from hunger and fatigue. On the 24th of March, they came
to the mouth of Cumberland River, but its size was so much less than
they had expected to find it, that some would not believe it to be the
Cumberland. It flowed in a gentle current; they had heard of no river
on the south side of the Ohio, between the Tennessee and Cumberland,
and they determined to go up this as the Cumberland, and did so. On
the 25th, the river seemed to grow wider; the current was very gentle,
and they were now convinced it was the Cumberland. The crews were now
without bread, and were obliged to hunt the buffalo, and feed on his
flesh. On the 24th of April, 1780, they came to the Big Salt Lick,
where they found Capt. James Robertson and his company, and where they
were gratified at meeting those friends whom, but a little before, it
was doubtful whether they should ever see again. They also found a few
log cabins, erected by Capt. Robertson and his associates, on a cedar
bluff, on the south side of the river, at some distance from the Salt
Spring.”
For years after their removal the families of the settlement suffered
many privations, and were compelled to live most of the time within
the shelter of the forts, being subjected to ferocious attacks by the
Indians. Two of Mrs. Robertson’s sons were murdered by the savages. It
was indeed a constant scene of anxiety and danger to the close of the
Indian war in 1794, and the frequent alarms, and incidents of persons
being killed or wounded at or near the fort occupied by our heroine,
gave her full experience of all the horrors of war. At one time she had
the agony of seeing brought in from the adjoining woods the headless
body of a beloved son; and it cannot be wondered at that she was heard
to say in after life--she would not live those years over again to be
insured the possession of the world.