THE BACKWOODSMEN OF THE ALLEGHANIES. 1769-1774.
Along the western frontier of the colonies that were so soon to be the
United States, among the foothills of the Alleghanies, on the slopes of
the wooded mountains, and in the long trough-like valleys that lay
between the ranges, dwelt a peculiar and characteristically American
people.
These frontier folk, the people of the up-country, or back-country, who
lived near and among the forest-clad mountains, far away from the
long-settled districts of flat coast plain and sluggish tidal river,
were known to themselves and to others as backwoodsmen. They all bore a
strong likeness to one another in their habits of thought and ways of
living, and differed markedly from the people of the older and more
civilized communities to the eastward. The western border of our country
was then formed by the great barrier-chains of the Alleghanies, which
ran north and south from Pennsylvania through Maryland, Virginia, and
the Carolinas,[1] the trend of the valleys being parallel to the
sea-coast, and the mountains rising highest to the southward. It was
difficult to cross the ranges from east to west, but it was both easy
and natural to follow the valleys between. From Fort Pitt to the high
hill-homes of the Cherokees this great tract of wooded and mountainous
country possessed nearly the same features and characteristics,
differing utterly in physical aspect from the alluvial plains bordering
the ocean.
So, likewise, the backwoods mountaineers who dwelt near the great
watershed that separates the Atlantic streams from the springs of the
Watauga, the Kanawha, and the Monongahela were all cast in the same
mould, and resembled each other much more than any of them did their
immediate neighbors of the plains. The backwoodsmen of Pennsylvania had
little in common with the peaceful population of Quakers and Germans who
lived between the Delaware and the Susquehanna; and their near kinsmen
of the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains were separated by an
equally wide gulf from the aristocratic planter communities that
flourished in the tide-water regions of Virginia and the Carolinas. Near
the coast the lines of division between the colonies corresponded fairly
well with the differences between the populations; but after striking
the foothills, though the political boundaries continued to go east and
west, those both of ethnic and of physical significance began to run
north and south.
The backwoodsmen were Americans by birth and parentage, and of mixed
race; but the dominant strain in their blood was that of the
Presbyterian Irish--the Scotch-Irish as they were often called. Full
credit has been awarded the Roundhead and the Cavalier for their
leadership in our history; nor have we been altogether blind to the
deeds of the Hollander and the Huguenot; but it is doubtful if we have
wholly realized the importance of the part played by that stern and
virile people, the Irish whose preachers taught the creed of Knox and
Calvin. These Irish representatives of the Covenanters were in the west
almost what the Puritans were in the northeast, and more than the
Cavaliers were in the south. Mingled with the descendants of many other
races, they nevertheless formed the kernel of the distinctively and
intensely American stock who were the pioneers of our people in their
march westward, the vanguard of the army of fighting settlers, who with
axe and rifle won their way from the Alleghanies to the Rio Grande and
the Pacific.[2]
The Presbyterian Irish were themselves already a mixed people. Though
mainly descended from Scotch ancestors--who came originally from both
lowlands and highlands, from among both the Scotch Saxons and the Scotch
Celts,[3]--many of them were of English, a few of French Huguenot,[4]
and quite a number of true old Milesian Irish[5] extraction. They were
the Protestants of the Protestants; they detested and despised the
Catholics, whom their ancestors had conquered, and regarded the
Episcopalians by whom they themselves had been oppressed, with a more
sullen, but scarcely less intense, hatred.[6] They were a truculent and
obstinate people, and gloried in the warlike renown of their
forefathers, the men who had followed Cromwell, and who had shared in
the defence of Derry and in the victories of the Boyne and Aughrim.[7]
They did not begin to come to America in any numbers till after the
opening of the eighteenth century; by 1730 they were fairly swarming
across the ocean, for the most part in two streams, the larger going to
the port of Philadelphia, the smaller to the port of Charleston.[8]
Pushing through the long settled lowlands of the seacoast, they at once
made their abode at the foot of the mountains, and became the outposts
of civilization. From Pennsylvania, whither the great majority had come,
they drifted south along the foothills, and down the long valleys, till
they met their brethren from Charleston who had pushed up into the
Carolina back-country. In this land of hills, covered by unbroken
forest, they took root and flourished, stretching in a broad belt from
north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of
the seaboard and the red warriors of the wilderness. All through this
region they were alike; they had as little kinship with the Cavalier as
with the Quaker; the west was won by those who have been rightly called
the Roundheads of the south, the same men who, before any others,
declared for American independence.[9]
The two facts of most importance to remember in dealing with our pioneer
history are, first, that the western portions of Virginia and the
Carolinas were peopled by an entirely different stock from that which
had long existed in the tide-water regions of those colonies; and,
secondly, that, except for those in the Carolinas who came from
Charleston, the immigrants of this stock were mostly from the north,
from their great breeding-ground and nursery in western
Pennsylvania.[10]
That these Irish Presbyterians were a bold and hardy race is proved by
their at once pushing past the settled regions, and plunging into the
wilderness as the leaders of the white advance. They were the first and
last set of immigrants to do this; all others have merely followed in
the wake of their predecessors. But, indeed, they were fitted to be
Americans from the very start; they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters;
they deemed it a religious duty to interpret their own Bible, and held
for a divine right the election of their own clergy. For generations
their whole ecclesiastic and scholastic systems had been fundamentally
democratic. In the hard life of the frontier they lost much of their
religion, and they had but scant opportunity to give their children the
schooling in which they believed; but what few meeting-houses and
school-houses there were on the border were theirs.[11] The numerous
families of colonial English who came among them adopted their religion
if they adopted any. The creed of the backwoodsman who had a creed at
all was Presbyterianism; for the Episcopacy of the tide-water lands
obtained no foothold in the mountains, and the Methodists and Baptists
had but just begun to appear in the west when the Revolution broke
out.[12]
These Presbyterian Irish were, however, far from being the only settlers
on the border, although more than any others they impressed the stamp of
their peculiar character on the pioneer civilization of the west and
southwest. Great numbers of immigrants of English descent came among
them from the settled districts on the east; and though these later
arrivals soon became indistinguishable from the people among whom they
settled, yet they certainly sometimes added a tone of their own to
backwoods society, giving it here and there a slight dash of what we are
accustomed to consider the distinctively southern or cavalier
spirit.[13] There was likewise a large German admixture, not only from
the Germans of Pennsylvania, but also from those of the Carolinas.[14] A
good many Huguenots likewise came,[15] and a few Hollanders[16] and even
Swedes,[17] from the banks of the Delaware, or perhaps from farther off
still.
A single generation, passed under the hard conditions of life in the
wilderness, was enough to weld together into one people the
representatives of these numerous and widely different races; and the
children of the next generation became indistinguishable from one
another. Long before the first Continental Congress assembled, the
backwoodsmen, whatever their blood, had become Americans, one in speech,
thought, and character, clutching firmly the land in which their fathers
and grandfathers had lived before them. They had lost all remembrance of
Europe and all sympathy with things European; they had become as
emphatically products native to the soil as were the tough and supple
hickories out of which they fashioned the handles of their long, light
axes. Their grim, harsh, narrow lives were yet strangely fascinating and
full of adventurous toil and danger; none but natures as strong, as
freedom-loving, and as full of bold defiance as theirs could have
endured existence on the terms which these men found pleasurable. Their
iron surroundings made a mould which turned out all alike in the same
shape. They resembled one another, and they differed from the rest of
the world--even the world of America, and infinitely more the world of
Europe--in dress, in customs, and in mode of life.
Where their lands abutted on the more settled districts to the eastward,
the population was of course thickest, and their peculiarities least.
Here and there at such points they built small backwoods burgs or towns,
rude, straggling, unkempt villages, with a store or two, a
tavern,--sometimes good, often a "scandalous hog-sty," where travellers
were devoured by fleas, and every one slept and ate in one room,[18]--a
small log school-house, and a little church, presided over by a
hard-featured Presbyterian preacher, gloomy, earnest, and zealous,
probably bigoted and narrow-minded, but nevertheless a great power for
good in the community.[19]
However, the backwoodsmen as a class neither built towns nor loved to
dwell therein. They were to be seen at their best in the vast,
interminable forests that formed their chosen home. They won and kept
their lands by force, and ever lived either at war or in dread of war.
Hence they settled always in groups of several families each, all banded
together for mutual protection. Their red foes were strong and terrible,
cunning in council, dreadful in battle, merciless beyond belief in
victory. The men of the border did not overcome and dispossess cowards
and weaklings; they marched forth to spoil the stout-hearted and to take
for a prey the possessions of the men of might. Every acre, every rood
of ground which they claimed had to be cleared by the axe and held with
the rifle. Not only was the chopping down of the forest the first
preliminary to cultivation, but it was also the surest means of subduing
the Indians, to whom the unending stretches of choked woodland were an
impenetrable cover behind which to move unseen, a shield in making
assaults, and a strong tower of defence in repelling counter-attacks. In
the conquest of the west the backwoods axe, shapely, well-poised, with
long haft and light head, was a servant hardly standing second even to
the rifle; the two were the national weapons of the American
backwoodsman, and in their use he has never been excelled.
When a group of families moved out into the wilderness they built
themselves a station or stockade fort; a square palisade of upright
logs, loop-holed, with strong blockhouses as bastions at the corners.
One side at least was generally formed by the backs of the cabins
themselves, all standing in a row; and there was a great door or gate,
that could be strongly barred in case of need. Often no iron whatever
was employed in any of the buildings. The square inside contained the
provision sheds and frequently a strong central blockhouse as well.
These forts, of course, could not stand against cannon, and they were
always in danger when attacked with fire; but save for this risk of
burning they were very effectual defences against men without artillery,
and were rarely taken, whether by whites or Indians, except by surprise.
Few other buildings have played so important a part in our history as
the rough stockade fort of the backwoods.
The families only lived in the fort when there was war with the Indians,
and even then not in the winter. At other times they all separated out
to their own farms, universally called clearings, as they were always
made by first cutting off the timber. The stumps were left to dot the
fields of grain and Indian corn. The corn in especial was the stand-by
and invariable resource of the western settler; it was the crop on which
he relied to feed his family, and when hunting or on a war trail the
parched grains were carried in his leather wallet to serve often as his
only food. But he planted orchards and raised melons, potatoes, and many
other fruits and vegetables as well; and he had usually a horse or two,
cows, and perhaps hogs and sheep, if the wolves and bears did not
interfere. If he was poor his cabin was made of unhewn logs, and held
but a single room; if well-to-do, the logs were neatly hewed, and
besides the large living- and eating-room with its huge stone fireplace,
there was also a small bedroom and a kitchen, while a ladder led to the
loft above, in which the boys slept. The floor was made of puncheons,
great slabs of wood hewed carefully out, and the roof of clapboards.
Pegs of wood were thrust into the sides of the house, to serve instead
of a wardrobe; and buck antlers, thrust into joists, held the ever-ready
rifles. The table was a great clapboard set on four wooden legs; there
were three-legged stools, and in the better sort of houses old-fashioned
rocking-chairs.[20] The couch or bed was warmly covered with blankets,
bear-skins, and deer-hides.[21]
These clearings lay far apart from one another in the wilderness. Up to
the door-sills of the log-huts stretched the solemn and mysterious
forest. There were no openings to break its continuity; nothing but
endless leagues on leagues of shadowy, wolf-haunted woodland. The great
trees towered aloft till their separate heads were lost in the mass of
foliage above, and the rank underbrush choked the spaces between the
trunks. On the higher peaks and ridge-crests of the mountains there were
straggling birches and pines, hemlocks and balsam firs;[22] elsewhere,
oaks, chestnuts, hickories, maples, beeches, walnuts, and great tulip
trees grew side by side with many other kinds. The sunlight could not
penetrate the roofed archway of murmuring leaves; through the gray
aisles of the forest men walked always in a kind of mid-day gloaming.
Those who had lived in the open plains felt when they came to the
backwoods as if their heads were hooded. Save on the border of a lake,
from a cliff top, or on a bald knob--that is, a bare hill-shoulder,--they
could not anywhere look out for any distance.
All the land was shrouded in one vast forest. It covered the mountains
from crest to river-bed, filled the plains, and stretched in sombre and
melancholy wastes towards the Mississippi. All that it contained, all
that lay hid within it and beyond it, none could tell; men only knew
that their boldest hunters, however deeply they had penetrated, had not
yet gone through it, that it was the home of the game they followed and
the wild beasts that preyed on their flocks, and that deep in its
tangled depths lurked their red foes, hawk-eyed and wolf-hearted.
Backwoods society was simple, and the duties and rights of each member
of the family were plain and clear. The man was the armed protector and
provider, the bread-winner; the woman was the housewife and
child-bearer. They married young and their families were large, for they
were strong and healthy, and their success in life depended on their own
stout arms and willing hearts. There was everywhere great equality of
conditions. Land was plenty and all else scarce; so courage, thrift, and
industry were sure of their reward. All had small farms, with the few
stock necessary to cultivate them; the farms being generally placed in
the hollows, the division lines between them, if they were close
together, being the tops of the ridges and the watercourses, especially
the former. The buildings of each farm were usually at its lowest point,
as if in the centre of an amphitheatre.[23] Each was on an average of
about 400 acres,[24] but sometimes more.[25] Tracts of low, swampy
grounds, possibly some miles from the cabin, were cleared for meadows,
the fodder being stacked, and hauled home in winter.
Each backwoodsman was not only a small farmer but also a hunter; for his
wife and children depended for their meat upon the venison and bear's
flesh procured by his rifle. The people were restless and always on the
move. After being a little while in a place, some of the men would
settle down permanently, while others would again drift off, farming and
hunting alternately to support their families.[26] The backwoodsman's
dress was in great part borrowed from his Indian foes. He wore a fur cap
or felt hat, moccasins, and either loose, thin trousers, or else simply
leggings of buckskin or elk-hide, and the Indian breech-clout. He was
always clad in the fringed hunting-shirt, of homespun or buckskin, the
most picturesque and distinctively national dress ever worn in America.
It was a loose smock or tunic, reaching nearly to the knees, and held in
at the waist by a broad belt, from which hung the tomahawk and
scalping-knife.[27] His weapon was the long, small-bore, flint-lock
rifle, clumsy, and ill-balanced, but exceedingly accurate. It was very
heavy, and when upright, reached to the chin of a tall man; for the
barrel of thick, soft iron, was four feet in length, while the stock was
short, and the butt scooped out. Sometimes it was plain, sometimes
ornamented. It was generally bored out--or, as the expression then was,
"sawed out"--to carry a ball of seventy, more rarely of thirty or forty,
to the pound; and was usually of backwoods manufacture.[28] The marksman
almost always fired from a rest, and rarely at a very long range; and
the shooting was marvellously accurate.[29]
In the backwoods there was very little money; barter was the common form
of exchange, and peltries were often used as a circulating medium, a
beaver, otter, fisher, dressed buckskin or large bearskin being reckoned
as equal to two foxes or wildcats, four coons, or eight minks.[30] A
young man inherited nothing from his father but his strong frame and
eager heart; but before him lay a whole continent wherein to pitch his
farm, and he felt ready to marry as soon as he became of age, even
though he had nothing but his clothes, his horses, his axe, and his
rifle.[31] If a girl was well off, and had been careful and industrious,
she might herself bring a dowry, of a cow and a calf, a brood mare, a
bed well stocked with blankets, and a chest containing her
clothes[32]--the latter not very elaborate, for a woman's dress
consisted of a hat or poke bonnet, a "bed gown," perhaps a jacket, and a
linsey petticoat, while her feet were thrust into coarse shoepacks or
moccasins. Fine clothes were rare; a suit of such cost more than 200
acres of good land.[33]
The first lesson the backwoodsmen learnt was the necessity of self-help;
the next, that such a community could only thrive if all joined in
helping one another. Log-rollings, house-raisings, house-warmings,
corn-shuckings, quiltings, and the like were occasions when all the
neighbors came together to do what the family itself could hardly
accomplish alone. Every such meeting was the occasion of a frolic and
dance for the young people, whisky and rum being plentiful, and the host
exerting his utmost power to spread the table with backwoods
delicacies--bear-meat and venison, vegetables from the "truck patch,"
where squashes, melons, beans, and the like were grown, wild fruits,
bowls of milk, and apple pies, which were the acknowledged standard of
luxury. At the better houses there was metheglin or small beer, cider,
cheese, and biscuits.[34] Tea was so little known that many of the
backwoods people were not aware it was a beverage and at first attempted
to eat the leaves with salt or butter.[35]
The young men prided themselves on their bodily strength, and were
always eager to contend against one another in athletic games, such as
wrestling, racing, jumping, and lifting flour-barrels; and they also
sought distinction in vieing with one another at their work. Sometimes
they strove against one another singly, sometimes they divided into
parties, each bending all its energies to be first in shucking a given
heap of corn or cutting (with sickles) an allotted patch of wheat. Among
the men the bravos or bullies often were dandies also in the backwoods
fashions, wearing their hair long and delighting in the rude finery of
hunting-shirts embroidered with porcupine quills; they were loud,
boastful, and profane, given to coarsely bantering one another. Brutally
savage fights were frequent; the combatants, who were surrounded by
rings of interested spectators, striking, kicking, biting, and gouging.
The fall of one of them did not stop the fight, for the man who was down
was maltreated without mercy until he called "enough." The victor always
bragged savagely of his prowess, often leaping on a stump, crowing and
flapping his arms. This last was a thoroughly American touch; but
otherwise one of these contests was less a boxing match than a kind of
backwoods _pankration,_ no less revolting than its ancient
prototype of Olympic fame. Yet, if the uncouth borderers were as brutal
as the highly polished Greeks, they were more manly; defeat was not
necessarily considered disgrace, a man often fighting when he was
certain to be beaten, while the onlookers neither hooted nor pelted the
conquered. We first hear of the noted scout and Indian fighter, Simon
Kenton, as leaving a rival for dead after one of these ferocious duels,
and fleeing from his home in terror of the punishment that might follow
the deed.[36] Such fights were specially frequent when the backwoodsmen
went into the little frontier towns to see horse races or fairs.
A wedding was always a time of festival. If there was a church anywhere
near, the bride rode thither on horseback behind her father, and after
the service her pillion was shifted to the bridegroom's steed.[37] If,
as generally happened, there was no church, the groom and his friends,
all armed, rode to the house of the bride's father, plenty of whisky
being drunk, and the men racing recklessly along the narrow
bridle-paths, for there were few roads or wheeled vehicles in the
backwoods. At the bride's house the ceremony was performed, and then a
huge dinner was eaten, after which the fiddling and dancing began, and
were continued all the afternoon, and most of the night as well. A party
of girls stole off the bride and put her to bed in the loft above; and a
party of young men then performed the like service for the groom. The
fun was hearty and coarse, and the toasts always included one to the
young couple, with the wish that they might have many big children; for
as long as they could remember the backwoodsmen had lived at war, while
looking ahead they saw no chance of its ever stopping, and so each son
was regarded as a future warrior, a help to the whole community.[38] The
neighbors all joined again in chopping and rolling the logs for the
young couple's future house, then in raising the house itself, and
finally in feasting and dancing at the house-warming.
Funerals were simple, the dead body being carried to the grave in a
coffin slung on poles and borne by four men.
There was not much schooling, and few boys or girls learnt much more
than reading, writing, and ciphering up to the rule of three.[39] Where
the school-houses existed they were only dark, mean log-huts, and if in
the southern colonies, were generally placed in the so-called "old
fields," or abandoned farms grown up with pines. The schoolmaster
boarded about with the families; his learning was rarely great, nor was
his discipline good, in spite of the frequency and severity of the
canings. The price for such tuition was at the rate of twenty shillings
a year, in Pennsylvania currency.[40]
Each family did every thing that could be done for itself. The father
and sons worked with axe, hoe, and sickle. Almost every house contained
a loom, and almost every woman was a weaver. Linsey-woolsey, made from
flax grown near the cabin, and of wool from the backs of the few sheep,
was the warmest and most substantial cloth; and when the flax crop
failed and the flocks were destroyed by wolves, the children had but
scanty covering to hide their nakedness. The man tanned the buckskin,
the woman was tailor and shoemaker, and made the deerskin sifters to be
used instead of bolting-cloths. There were a few pewter spoons in use;
but the table furniture consisted mainly of hand-made trenchers,
platters, noggins, and bowls. The cradle was of peeled hickory bark.[41]
Ploughshares had to be imported, but harrows and sleds were made without
difficulty; and the cooper work was well done. Chaff beds were thrown on
the floor of the loft, if the house-owner was well off. Each cabin had a
hand-mill and a hominy block; the last was borrowed from the Indians,
and was only a large block of wood, with a hole burned in the top, as a
mortar, where the pestle was worked. If there were any sugar maples
accessible, they were tapped every year.
But some articles, especially salt and iron, could not be produced in
the backwoods. In order to get them each family collected during the
year all the furs possible, these being valuable and yet easily carried
on pack-horses, the sole means of transport. Then, after seeding time,
in the fall, the people of a neighborhood ordinarily joined in sending
down a train of peltry-laden pack-horses to some large sea-coast or
tidal-river trading town, where their burdens were bartered for the
needed iron and salt. The unshod horses all had bells hung round their
neck; the clappers were stopped during the day, but when the train was
halted for the night, and the horses were hobbled and turned loose, the
bells were once more unstopped.[42] Several men accompanied each little
caravan, and sometimes they drove with them steers and hogs to sell on
the sea-coast. A bushel of alum salt was worth a good cow and calf, and
as each of the poorly fed, undersized pack animals could carry but two
bushels, the mountaineers prized it greatly, and instead of salting or
pickling their venison, they jerked it, by drying it in the sun or
smoking it over a fire.
The life of the backwoodsmen was one long struggle. The forest had to be
felled, droughts, deep snows, freshets, cloudbursts, forest fires, and
all the other dangers of a wilderness life faced. Swarms of deer-flies,
mosquitoes, and midges rendered life a torment in the weeks of hot
weather. Rattlesnakes and copperheads were very plentiful, and, the
former especially, constant sources of danger and death. Wolves and
bears were incessant and inveterate foes of the live stock, and the
cougar or panther occasionally attacked man as well.[43] More terrible
still, the wolves sometimes went mad, and the men who then encountered
them were almost certain to be bitten and to die of hydrophobia.[44]
Every true backwoodsman was a hunter. Wild turkeys were plentiful. The
pigeons at times filled the woods with clouds that hid the sun and broke
down the branches on their roosting grounds as if a whirlwind had
passed. The black and gray squirrels swarmed, devastating the
corn-fields, and at times gathering in immense companies and migrating
across mountain and river. The hunter's ordinary game was the deer, and
after that the bear; the elk was already growing uncommon. No form of
labor is harder than the chase, and none is so fascinating nor so
excellent as a training-school for war. The successful still-hunter of
necessity possessed skill in hiding and in creeping noiselessly upon the
wary quarry, as well as in imitating the notes and calls of the
different beasts and birds; skill in the use of the rifle and in
throwing the tomahawk he already had; and he perforce acquired keenness
of eye, thorough acquaintance with woodcraft, and the power of standing
the severest strains of fatigue, hardship and exposure. He lived out in
the woods for many months with no food but meat, and no shelter
whatever, unless he made a lean-to of brush or crawled into a hollow
sycamore.
Such training stood the frontier folk in good stead when they were
pitted against the Indians; without it they could not even have held
their own, and the white advance would have been absolutely checked. Our
frontiers were pushed westward by the warlike skill and adventurous
personal prowess of the individual settlers; regular armies by
themselves could have done little. For one square mile the regular
armies added to our domain, the settlers added ten,--a hundred would
probably be nearer the truth. A race of peaceful, unwarlike farmers
would have been helpless before such foes as the red Indians, and no
auxiliary military force could have protected them or enabled them to
move westward. Colonists fresh from the old world, no matter how
thrifty, steady-going, and industrious, could not hold their own on the
frontier; they had to settle where they were protected from the Indians
by a living barrier of bold and self-reliant American borderers.[45] The
west would never have been settled save for the fierce courage and the
eager desire to brave danger so characteristic of the stalwart
backwoodsmen.
These armed hunters, woodchoppers, and farmers were their own soldiers.
They built and manned their own forts; they did their own fighting under
their own commanders. There were no regiments of regular troops along
the frontier.[46] In the event of an Indian inroad each borderer had to
defend himself until there was time for them all to gather together to
repel or avenge it. Every man was accustomed to the use of arms from his
childhood; when a boy was twelve years old he was given a rifle and made
a fort-soldier, with a loophole where he was to stand if the station was
attacked. The war was never-ending, for even the times of so-called
peace were broken by forays and murders; a man might grow from babyhood
to middle age on the border, and yet never remember a year in which some
one of his neighbors did not fall a victim to the Indians.
There was everywhere a rude military organization, which included all
the able-bodied men of the community. Every settlement had its colonels
and captains; but these officers, both in their training and in the
authority they exercised, corresponded much more nearly to Indian chiefs
than to the regular army men whose titles they bore. They had no means
whatever of enforcing their orders, and their tumultuous and disorderly
levies of sinewy riflemen were hardly as well disciplined as the Indians
themselves.[47] The superior officer could advise, entreat, lead, and
influence his men, but he could not command them, or, if he did, the men
obeyed him only just so far as it suited them. If an officer planned a
scout or campaign, those who thought proper accompanied him, and the
others stayed at home, and even those who went out came back if the fit
seized them, or perchance followed the lead of an insubordinate junior
officer whom they liked better than they did his superior.[48] There was
no compulsion to perform military duties beyond dread of being disgraced
in the eyes of the neighbors, and there was no pecuniary reward for
performing them; nevertheless the moral sentiment of a backwoods
community was too robust to tolerate habitual remissness in military
affairs, and the coward and laggard were treated with utter scorn, and
were generally in the end either laughed out, or "hated out," of the
neighborhood, or else got rid of in a still more summary manner. Among a
people naturally brave and reckless, this public opinion acted fairly
effectively, and there was generally but little shrinking from military
service.[49]
A backwoods levy was formidable because of the high average courage and
prowess of the individuals composing it; it was on its own ground much
more effective than a like force of regular soldiers, but of course it
could not be trusted on a long campaign. The backwoodsmen used their
rifles better than the Indians, and also stood punishment better, but
they never matched them in surprises nor in skill in taking advantage of
cover, and very rarely equalled their discipline in the battle itself.
After all, the pioneer was primarily a husbandman; the time spent in
chopping trees and tilling the soil his foe spent in preparing for or
practising forest warfare, and so the former, thanks to the exercise of
the very qualities which in the end gave him the possession of the soil,
could not, as a rule, hope to rival his antagonist in the actual
conflict itself. When large bodies of the red men and white borderers
were pitted against each other, the former were if any thing the more
likely to have the advantage.[50] But the whites soon copied from the
Indians their system of individual and private warfare, and they
probably caused their foes far more damage and loss in this way than in
the large expeditions. Many noted border scouts and Indian
fighters--such men as Boon, Kenton, Wetzel, Brady, McCulloch,
Mansker[51]--grew to overmatch their Indian foes at their own game, and
held themselves above the most renowned warriors. But these men carried
the spirit of defiant self-reliance to such an extreme that their best
work was always done when they were alone or in small parties of but
four or five. They made long forays after scalps and horses, going a
wonderful distance, enduring extreme hardship, risking the most terrible
of deaths, and harrying the hostile tribes into a madness of terror and
revengeful hatred.
As it was in military matters, so it was with the administration of
justice by the frontiersmen; they had few courts, and knew but little
law, and yet they contrived to preserve order and morality with rough
effectiveness, by combining to frown down on the grosser misdeeds, and
to punish the more flagrant misdoers. Perhaps the spirit in which they
acted can be best shown by the recital of an incident in the career of
the three McAfee brothers, who were among the pioneer hunters of
Kentucky.[52] Previous to trying to move their families out to the new
country, they made a cache of clothing, implements, and provisions,
which in their absence was broken into and plundered. They caught the
thief, "a little diminutive, red-headed white man," a runaway convict
servant from one of the tide-water counties of Virginia. In the first
impulse of anger at finding that he was the criminal, one of the McAfees
rushed at him to kill him with his tomahawk; but the weapon turned, the
man was only knocked down, and his assailant's gusty anger subsided as
quickly as it had risen, giving way to a desire to do stern but fair
justice. So the three captors formed themselves into a court, examined
into the case, heard the man in his own defence, and after due
consultation decided that "according to their opinion of the laws he had
forfeited his life, and ought to be hung"; but none of them were willing
to execute the sentence in cold blood, and they ended by taking their
prisoner back to his master.
The incident was characteristic in more than one way. The prompt desire
of the backwoodsman to avenge his own wrong; his momentary furious
anger, speedily quelled and replaced by a dogged determination to be
fair but to exact full retribution; the acting entirely without regard
to legal forms or legal officials, but yet in a spirit which spoke well
for the doer's determination to uphold the essentials that make honest
men law-abiding; together with the good faith of the whole proceeding,
and the amusing ignorance that it would have been in the least unlawful
to execute their own rather harsh sentence--all these were typical
frontier traits. Some of the same traits appear in the treatment
commonly adopted in the backwoods to meet the case--of painfully
frequent occurrence in the times of Indian wars--where a man taken
prisoner by the savages, and supposed to be murdered, returned after two
or three years' captivity, only to find his wife married again. In the
wilderness a husband was almost a necessity to a woman; her surroundings
made the loss of the protector and provider an appalling calamity; and
the widow, no matter how sincere her sorrow, soon remarried--for there
were many suitors where women were not over-plenty. If in such a case
the one thought dead returned, the neighbors and the parties interested
seem frequently to have held a sort of informal court, and to have
decided that the woman should choose either of the two men she wished to
be her husband, the other being pledged to submit to the decision and
leave the settlement. Evidently no one had the least idea that there was
any legal irregularity in such proceedings.[53]
The McAfees themselves and the escaped convict servant whom they
captured typify the two prominent classes of the backwoods people. The
frontier, in spite of the outward uniformity of means and manners, is
preeminently the place of sharp contrasts. The two extremes of society,
the strongest, best, and most adventurous, and the weakest, most
shiftless, and vicious, are those which seem naturally to drift to the
border. Most of the men who came to the backwoods to hew out homes and
rear families were stern, manly, and honest; but there was also a large
influx of people drawn from the worst immigrants that perhaps ever were
brought to America--the mass of convict servants, redemptioners, and the
like, who formed such an excessively undesirable substratum to the
otherwise excellent population of the tide-water regions in Virginia and
the Carolinas.[54] Many of the southern crackers or poor whites spring
from this class, which also in the backwoods gave birth to generations
of violent and hardened criminals, and to an even greater number of
shiftless, lazy, cowardly cumberers of the earth's surface. They had in
many places a permanently bad effect upon the tone of the whole
community.
Moreover, the influence of heredity was no more plainly perceptible than
was the extent of individual variation. If a member of a bad family
wished to reform, he had every opportunity to do so; if a member of a
good family had vicious propensities, there was nothing to check them.
All qualities, good and bad, are intensified and accentuated in the life
of the wilderness. The man who in civilization is merely sullen and
bad-tempered becomes a murderous, treacherous ruffian when transplanted
to the wilds; while, on the other hand, his cheery, quiet neighbor
develops into a hero, ready uncomplainingly to lay down his life for his
friend. One who in an eastern city is merely a backbiter and slanderer,
in the western woods lies in wait for his foe with a rifle; sharp
practice in the east becomes highway robbery in the west; but at the
same time negative good-nature becomes active self-sacrifice, and a
general belief in virtue is translated into a prompt and determined war
upon vice. The ne'er-do-well of a family who in one place has his debts
paid a couple of times and is then forced to resign from his clubs and
lead a cloudy but innocuous existence on a small pension, in the other
abruptly finishes his career by being hung for horse-stealing.
In the backwoods the lawless led lives of abandoned wickedness; they
hated good for good's sake, and did their utmost to destroy it. Where
the bad element was large, gangs of horse thieves, highwaymen, and other
criminals often united with the uncontrollable young men of vicious
tastes who were given to gambling, fighting, and the like. They then
formed half-secret organizations, often of great extent and with wide
ramifications; and if they could control a community they established a
reign of terror, driving out both ministers and magistrates, and killing
without scruple those who interfered with them. The good men in such a
case banded themselves together as regulators and put down the wicked
with ruthless severity, by the exercise of lynch law, shooting and
hanging the worst off-hand.[55]
Jails were scarce in the wilderness, and often were entirely wanting in
a district, which, indeed, was quite likely to lack legal officers also.
If punishment was inflicted at all it was apt to be severe, and took the
form of death or whipping. An impromptu jury of neighbors decided with a
rough and ready sense of fair play and justice what punishment the crime
demanded, and then saw to the execution of their own decree. Whipping
was the usual reward of theft. Occasionally torture was resorted to, but
not often; and to their honor be it said, the backwoodsmen were
horrified at the treatment accorded both to black slaves and to white
convict servants in the lowlands.[56]
They were superstitious, of course, believing in witchcraft, and signs
and omens; and it may be noted that their superstition showed a singular
mixture of old-world survivals and of practices borrowed from the
savages or evolved by the very force of their strange surroundings. At
the bottom they were deeply religious in their tendencies; and although
ministers and meeting-houses were rare, yet the backwoods cabins often
contained Bibles, and the mothers used to instil into the minds of their
children reverence for Sunday,[57] while many even of the hunters
refused to hunt on that day.[58] Those of them who knew the right
honestly tried to live up to it, in spite of the manifold temptations to
backsliding offered by their lives of hard and fierce contention.[59]
But Calvinism, though more congenial to them than Episcopacy, and
infinitely more so than Catholicism, was too cold for the fiery hearts
of the borderers; they were not stirred to the depths of their natures
till other creeds, and, above all, Methodism, worked their way to the
wilderness.
Thus the backwoodsmen lived on the clearings they had hewed out of the
everlasting forest; a grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful
for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion, the love of
freedom rooted in their very hearts' core. Their lives were harsh and
narrow; they gained their bread by their blood and sweat, in the
unending struggle with the wild ruggedness of nature. They suffered
terrible injuries at the hands of the red men, and on their foes they
waged a terrible warfare in return. They were relentless, revengeful,
suspicious, knowing neither ruth nor pity; they were also upright,
resolute, and fearless, loyal to their friends, and devoted to their
country. In spite of their many failings, they were of all men the best
fitted to conquer the wilderness and hold it against all comers.
1. Georgia was then too weak and small to contribute much to the
backwoods stock; her frontier was still in the low country.
2. Among the dozen or so most prominent backwoods pioneers of the west
and southwest, the men who were the leaders in exploring and settling
the lands, and in fighting the Indians, British, and Mexicans, the
Presbyterian Irish stock furnished Andrew Jackson, Samuel Houston, David
Crockett, James Robertson; Lewis, the leader of the backwoods hosts in
their first great victory over the northwestern Indians; and Campbell,
their commander in their first great victory over the British. The other
pioneers who stand beside the above were such men as Sevier, a
Shenandoah Huguenot; Shelby, of Welsh blood; and Boon and Clark, both of
English stock, the former from Pennsylvania, the latter from Virginia.
3. Of course, generations before they ever came to America, the McAfees,
McClungs, Campbells, McCoshes, etc., had become indistinguishable from
the Todds, Armstrongs, Elliotts, and the like.
4. A notable instance being that of the Lewis family, of Great Kanawha
fame.
5. The Blount MSS. contain many muster-rolls and pay-rolls of the
frontier forces of North Carolina during the year 1788. In these, and in
the lists of names of settlers preserved in the Am. State Papers, Public
Lands, II., etc., we find numerous names such as Shea, Drennan, O'Neil,
O'Brien, Mahoney, Sullivan, O'Connell, Maguire, O'Donohue,--in fact
hardly a single Irish name is unrepresented. Of course, many of these
were the descendants of imported Irish bondservants; but many also were
free immigrants, belonging to the Presbyterian congregations, and
sometimes appearing as pastors thereof. For the numerous Irish names of
prominent pioneers (such as Donelly, Hogan, etc.) see McClung's "Western
Adventures" (Louisville, 1879), 52, 167, 207, 308, etc.; also DeHaas,
236, 289, etc.; Doddridge, 16, 288, 301, etc., etc.
6. "Sketches of North Carolina," William Henry Foote, New York, 1846. An
excellent book, written after much research.
7. For a few among many instances: Houston (see Lane's "Life of
Houston") had ancestors at Derry and Aughrim; the McAfees (see McAfee
MSS.) and Irvine, one of the commanders on Crawford's expedition, were
descendants of men who fought at the Boyne ("Crawford's Campaign," G. W.
Butterfield, Cincinnati, 1873, p. 26); so with Lewis, Campbell, etc.
8. Foote, 78.
9. Witness the Mecklenburg Declaration.
10. McAfee MSS. "Trans-Alleghany Pioneers" (John P. Hale), 17. Foote,
188. See also _Columbian Magazine_, I., 122, and Schopf, 406. Boon,
Crockett, Houston, Campbell, Lewis, were among the southwestern pioneers
whose families originally came from Pennsylvania. See "Annals of Augusta
County, Va.," by Joseph A. Waddell, Richmond, 1888 (an excellent book),
pp. 4, 276, 279, for a clear showing of the Presbyterian Irish origin of
the West Virginians, and of the large German admixture.
11. The Irish schoolmaster was everywhere a feature of early western
society.
12. McAfee MSS. MS. Autobiography of Rev. Wm. Hickman, born in Virginia
in 1747 (in Col. R. T. Durrett's library). "Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,"
147. "History of Kentucky Baptists," J. H. Spencer (Cincinnati, 1885)
13. Boon, though of English descent, had no Virginia blood in his veins;
he was an exact type of the regular backwoodsman; but in Clark, and
still more in Blount, we see strong traces of the "cavalier spirit." Of
course, the Cavaliers no more formed the bulk of the Virginia people
than they did of Rupert's armies; but the squires and yeomen who went to
make up the mass took their tone from their leaders.
14. Many of the most noted hunters and Indian fighters were of German
origin, (see "Early Times in Middle Tennessee," John Carr, Nashville,
1859, pp. 54 and 56, for Steiner and Mansker--or Stoner and Mansco.)
Such were the Wetzels, famous in border annals, who lived near Wheeling;
Michael Steiner, the Steiners being the forefathers of many of the
numerous Kentucky Stoners of to-day; and Kasper Mansker, the "Mr.
Mansco" of Tennessee writers. Every old western narrative contains many
allusions to "Dutchmen," as Americans very properly call the Germans.
Their names abound on the muster-rolls, pay-rolls, lists of settlers,
etc., of the day (Blount MSS., State Department MSS., McAfee MSS., Am.
State Papers, etc.); but it must be remembered that they are often
Anglicized, when nothing remains to show the origin of the owners. We
could not recognize in Custer and Herkomer, Kuster and Herckheimer, were
not the ancestral history of the two generals already known; and in the
backwoods, a man often loses sight of his ancestors in a couple of
generations. In the Carolinas the Germans seem to have been almost as
plentiful on the frontiers as the Irish (see Adair, 245, and Smyth's
"Tour," I., 236). In Pennsylvania they lived nearer civilization
(Schoolcraft, 3, 335, "Journey in the West in 1785," by Lewis Brantz),
although also mixed with the borderers, the more adventurous among them
naturally seeking the frontier.
15. Giving to the backwoods society such families as the Seviers and
Lenoirs. The Huguenots, like the Germans, frequently had their names
Anglicized. The best known and most often quoted example is that of the
Blancpied family, part of whom have become Whitefoots, while the others,
living on the coast, have suffered a marvellous sea-change, the name
reappearing as "Blumpy."
16. To the western American, who was not given to nice ethnic
distinctions, both German and Hollander were simply Dutchmen but
occasionally we find names like Van Meter, Van Buskirk, Van Sweanngen,
which carry their origin on their faces (De Haas, 317, 319. Doddridge,
307).
17. The Scandinavian names in an unlettered community, soon become
indistinguishable from those of the surrounding American's--Jansen,
Petersen, etc., being readily Americanized. It is therefore rarely that
they show their parentage. Still, we now and then come across one that
is unmistakable, as Erickson, for instance (see p. 51 of Col. Reuben T.
Durrett's admirable "Life and Writings of John Filson," Louisville and
Cincinnati, 1884).
18. MS. Journal of Matthew Clarkson, 1766. See also "Voyage dans les
Etats-Unis," La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Paris, L'an, VII., I., 104.
19. The borderers had the true Calvinistic taste in preaching. Clarkson,
in his journal of his western trip, mentions with approval a sermon he
heard as being "a very judicious and alarming discourse."
20. McAfee MSS.
21. In the McAfee MSS. there is an amusing mention of the skin of a huge
bull elk, killed by the father, which the youngsters christened "old
ellick"; they used to quarrel for the possession of it on cold nights,
as it was very warm, though if the hairside was turned in it became
slippery and apt to slide off the bed.
22. On the mountains the climate, flora, and fauna were all those of the
north, not of the adjacent southern lowlands. The ruffed grouse, red
squirrel, snow bird, various Canadian warblers, and a peculiar species
of boreal field-mouse, the _evotomys_, are all found as far south
as the Great Smokies.
23. Doddridge's "Settlements and Indian Wars," (133) written by an
eyewitness; it is the most valuable book we have on old-time frontier
ways and customs.
24. The land laws differed at different times in different colonies; but
this was the usual size at the outbreak of the Revolution, of the farms
along the western frontier, as under the laws of Virginia, then
obtaining from the Holston to the Alleghany, this amount was allotted
every settler who built a cabin or raised a crop of corn.
25. Beside the right to 400 acres, there was also a preemption right to
1,000 acres more adjoining to be secured by a land-office warrant. As
between themselves the settlers had what they called "tomahawk rights,"
made by simply deadening a certain number of trees with a hatchet. They
were similar to the rights conferred in the west now by what is called a
"claim shack" or hut, built to hold some good piece of land; that is,
they conferred no title whatever, except that sometimes men would pay
for them rather than have trouble with the claimant.
26. McAfee MSS. (particularly Autobiography of Robert McAfee).
27. To this day it is worn in parts of the Rocky Mountains, and even
occasionally, here and there, in the Alleghanies.
28. The above is the description of one of Boon's rifles, now in the
possession of Col. Durrett. According to the inscription on the barrel
it was made at Louisville (Ky.), in 1782, by M. Humble. It is perfectly
plain; whereas one of Floyd's rifles, which I have also seen, is much
more highly finished, and with some ornamentation.
29. For the opinion of a foreign military observer on the phenomenal
accuracy of backwoods markmanship, see General Victor Collot's "Voyage
en Amérique," p. 242.
30. MS. copy of Matthew Clarkson's Journal in 1766.
31. McAfee MSS. (Autobiography of Robert R. McAfee).
32. _Do._
33. Memoirs of the Hist. Soc. of Penn., 1826. Account of first
settlements, etc., by John Watson (1804).
34. _Do._ An admirable account of what such a frolic was some
thirty-five years later is to be found in Edward Eggleston's "Circuit
Rider."
35. Such incidents are mentioned again and again by Watson, Milfort,
Doddridge, Carr, and other writers.
36. McClung's "Western Adventures." All eastern and European observers
comment with horror on the border brawls, especially the eye-gouging.
Englishmen, of course, in true provincial spirit, complacently
contrasted them with their own boxing fights; Frenchmen, equally of
course, were more struck by the resemblances than the differences
between the two forms of combat. Milfort gives a very amusing account of
the "Anglo-Américains d'une espèce particulière," whom he calls
"crakeurs ou gaugeurs," (crackers or gougers). He remarks that he found
them "tous borgnes," (as a result of their pleasant fashion of
eye-gouging--a backwoods bully in speaking of another would often
threaten to "measure the length of his eye-strings,") and that he doubts
if there can exist in the world "des hommes plus méchants que ces
habitants."
These fights were among the numerous backwoods habits that showed Scotch
rather than English ancestry. "I attempted to keep him down, in order to
improve my success, after the manner of my own country." ("Roderick
Random").
37. Watson.
38. Doddridge.
39. McAfee MSS.
40. Watson.
41. McAfee MSS. See also Doddridge and Watson.
42. Doddridge, 156. He gives an interesting anecdote of one man engaged
in helping such a pack-train, the bell of whose horse was stolen. The
thief was recovered, and whipped as a punishment, the owner exclaiming
as he laid the strokes lustily on: "Think what a rascally figure I
should make in the streets of Baltimore without a bell on my horse." He
had never been out of the woods before; he naturally wished to look well
on his first appearance in civilized life, and it never occurred to him
that a good horse was left without a bell anywhere.
43. An instance of this, which happened in my mother's family, has been
mentioned elsewhere ("Hunting Trips of a Ranchman"). Even the wolves
occasionally attacked man; Audubon gives an example.
44. Doddridge, 194. Dodge, in his "Hunting Grounds of the Great West,"
gives some recent instances. Bears were sometimes dangerous to human
life. Doddridge, 64. A slave on the plantation of my great-grandfather
in Georgia was once regularly scalped by a she-bear whom he had tried to
rob of her cubs, and ever after he was called, both by the other negroes
and by the children on the plantation, "Bear Bob."
45. Schopf, I., 404.
46. The insignificant garrisons at one or two places need not be taken
into account, as they were of absolutely no effect.
47. Brantz Mayer, in "Tah-Gah-Jute, or Logan and Cresap" (Albany, 1867),
ix., speaks of the pioneers as "comparative few in numbers," and of the
Indian as "numerous, and fearing not only the superior weapons of his
foe, but the organization and discipline which together made the
comparatively few equal to the greater number." This sentence embodies a
variety of popular misconceptions. The pioneers were more numerous than
the Indians; the Indians were generally, at least in the northwest, as
well armed as the whites, and in military matters the Indians were
actually (see Smith's narrative, and almost all competent authorities)
superior in organization and discipline to their pioneer foes. Most of
our battles against the Indians of the western woods, whether won or
lost, were fought by superior numbers on our side. Individually, or in
small parties, the frontiersmen gradually grew to be a match for the
Indians, man for man, at least in many cases, but this was only true of
large bodies of them if they were commanded by some one naturally able
to control their unruly spirits.
48. As examples take Clark's last Indian campaign and the battle of Blue
Licks.
49. Doddridge, 161, 185.
50. At the best such a frontier levy was composed of men of the type of
Leatherstocking, Ishmael Bush, Tom Hutter, Harry March, Bill Kirby, and
Aaron Thousandacres. When animated by a common and overmastering
passion, such a body would be almost irresistible; but it could not hold
together long, and there was generally a plentiful mixture of men less
trained in woodcraft, and therefore useless in forest fighting, while
if, as must generally be the case in any body, there were a number of
cowards in the ranks, the total lack of discipline not only permitted
them to flinch from their work with impunity, but also allowed them, by
their example, to infect and demoralize their braver companions.
51. Haywood, DeHaas, Withers, McClung, and other border annalists, give
innumerable anecdotes about these and many other men, illustrating their
feats of fierce prowess and, too often, of brutal ferocity.
52. McAfee MSS. The story is told both in the "Autobiography of Robert
McAfee," and in the "History of the First Settlement on Salt River."
53. Incidents of this sort are frequently mentioned. Generally the woman
went back to her first husband. "Early Times in Middle Tennessee," John
Carr, Nashville, 1859, p. 231.
54. See "A Short History of the English Colonies in America," by Henry
Cabot Lodge (New York, 1886), for an account of these people.
55. The regulators of backwoods society corresponded exactly to the
vigilantes of the western border to-day. In many of the cases of lynch
law which have come to my knowledge the effect has been healthy for the
community; but sometimes great injustice is done. Generally the
vigilantes, by a series of summary executions, do really good work; but
I have rarely known them fail, among the men whom they killed for good
reason, to also kill one or two either by mistake or to gratify private
malice.
56. See Doddridge.
57. McAfee MSS.
58. Doddridge.
59. Said one old Indian fighter, a Col. Joseph Brown, of Tennessee, with
quaint truthfulness, "I have tried also to be a religious man, but have
not always, in a life of so much adventure and strife, been able to act
consistently."--_Southwestern Monthly_, Nashville, 1851, I., 80.