THE GREAT VALLEY
Alexander Spotswood was a famous governor of the colony of Virginia. He
was of Scottish parentage, but he was born in Morocco, where his father
was a surgeon. The lad grew up to serve his country as a soldier, and
was wounded by a cannon ball in a great war then going on in Europe.
In 1710 the king sent him to Virginia to be governor, an office which
he filled for twelve years. The people liked him, though he made some
enemies because he kept his soldierly ways and did not always speak in
gentle phrases. He was a kind, warm-hearted man, nevertheless, loving
his family and friends. His energy, too, was well known, and he was
always ready to further a new scheme.
Because he started the first iron furnaces in America he was called
the “Tubal Cain of Virginia,” Tubal Cain being known in sacred history
as the first of metal workers. Nothing was more important to the
colonists than iron, for they could not always bring tools and kettles
and nails and gun metal from England. The governor showed his practical
ability in other ways. He brought over Germans who knew how to raise
grapes and make wine. He was interested in teaching the Indians, and
at one time he sent out ships and caught “Blackbeard,” who, with his
fellow-pirates, was prowling about the coast. When the young Benjamin
Franklin, in Boston, heard of the capture he wrote a poem about it.
In that day nearly all of Virginia was in the “tide-water country,” but
Spotswood had often heard of the valley beyond the Blue Ridge. He made
up his mind to go and see this region, and brought together a party to
make the journey. They took their servants and pack horses and carried
provisions and many bottles of the wine which the Germans had made.
There was good hunting in the unbroken forest and they had all the
venison and other wild meat they could have wished.
A good map of Virginia will show us Harpers Ferry, where the Potomac
river runs through a deep gap in the Blue Ridge. Looking along the
range to the southwest, we shall find, about eighty miles away, Swift
Run Gap, not so low a pass, but one which made it easy to cross the
mountains and go down into the lowlands along the Shenandoah river.
Spotswood and his friends climbed one of the peaks of the Blue Ridge
and named it Mt. George, after the king. Another peak was named
Alexander for the governor. Down by the Shenandoah they buried a bottle
(the historian of Virginia thinks that by this time they must have had
several that were empty), and in the bottle was a paper stating that
they took possession in the name of the king. They called the river the
Euphrates, but the name did not cling to it. We may be glad of that,
for the Indian name of Shenandoah is much more musical.
[Illustration: FIG. 50. LURAY, SHENANDOAH VALLEY]
If Spotswood had crossed the lowlands, he would have found himself
among other mountains running parallel to the Blue Ridge. Between the
two ranges is the valley of the Shenandoah, or, as it is quite as often
called, the valley of Virginia. The land is flat and the soil deep and
rich. The soft shales and limestone of ancient higher lands have wasted
away here, between the higher mountains on either side, and thus we
find a valley and a fertile valley floor.
The place was wild and lonely when this band of explorers visited it,
but to-day it is a country rich in interest and associations. If we go
northeast we shall pass Winchester, which became famous in the Civil
War. In another part of the valley is Luray, where the limestones have
been dissolved under the ground, making a large cavern with beautiful
stalactites. Still going northward, we shall pass Harpers Ferry on our
right and cross the Potomac. On our right also, after we cross the
river, is Antietam, where a severe battle was fought between Lee and
McClellan. A little farther on is Hagerstown, Colonel Rochester’s old
home, in the state of Maryland.
The next move would take us over into Pennsylvania, through
Chambersburg and Carlisle, about which we already know, and across the
Susquehanna to Harrisburg. On our right, as we go up into Pennsylvania,
is the low South mountain, which is the Blue Ridge continued. All this
time we are in the Great Valley. The valley of Virginia is but a part
of the whole, which reaches through several states and everywhere has
the Blue Ridge on the southeast and other ridges of the Appalachian
mountains on the northwest. Every part of the valley is thickly
settled and has fine houses and homes, because its soil produces good
crops and makes the people prosperous.
[Illustration: SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN REGION]
Spotswood’s journey opened the way for families from the tide-water
region to settle beyond the mountains, but they were not the
only settlers. It was easy for the people of the Great Valley in
Pennsylvania, where the land was earlier taken up, to push to the
southwest along the same valley. They found smoother traveling and
better farms than if they had gone up into the mountains on the west.
So we see that the valley, leading southwest, guided the stream of
emigrants in that direction. The result was that the valley of Virginia
was occupied partly by people entering through Pennsylvania, and partly
by those who, like Spotswood, came through passes in the Blue Ridge. It
was thirty years later, when most of the land was still a wilderness,
that we find George Washington crossing these same mountains to survey
for Lord Fairfax. His path lay between Harpers Ferry and Swift Run Gap.
In this valley, during the Civil War, “Stonewall” Jackson, Sheridan,
and other well-known generals took their armies up and down, and fought
a number of battles. The rich farms and full barns of the valley played
no small part in the strife by furnishing food for the soldiers.
The headwaters of the James river are in the Great Valley. One branch
flows southwest and another northeast. These come together and go
out to the southeast by a gap in the Blue Ridge. To-day we come up
the Shenandoah by the Norfolk and Western Railway, which continues
along these branches of the James. Before long we reach Roanoke, a
flourishing city just inside the Blue Ridge. Then follows the crossing
of the New river, which flows northwest across the valley on its long
course to the Ohio.
[Illustration: FIG. 51. JAMES RIVER GAP IN THE BLUE RIDGE, FROM THE
WEST]
Now we are looking toward Tennessee, and the Great Valley soon takes
us to several long streams which help to form the Tennessee river. The
heads of these streams we shall find in Virginia, and their names are
the Holston, the Clinch, and Powell’s river. The Great Valley in this
southwestern part of Virginia is really divided into several valleys by
long and rather high ridges that separate these rivers.
The main line of the Southern Railway, between Washington and
Knoxville, runs along the valley of the Holston river and crosses from
Virginia into Tennessee at Bristol.
After we come into Tennessee the ridges that separate the streams fall
away again, and we find one great valley, about forty miles wide. On
the northwest the Cumberland plateau and the Cumberland mountains rise
above it. On the southeast there loom up the Great Smoky mountains on
the border of North Carolina. Great Smoky is only another name for the
Blue Ridge, for it is the same range, only higher and wider than it is
farther north.
Although this valley is a part of the Great Valley, it is commonly
called the valley of east Tennessee, its people using the home name
as they do in Virginia. The Holston, the Clinch, and Powell’s river
are not the only branches of the Tennessee. Out of the Great Smoky
mountains there flow from the east the French Broad, the Little
Tennessee, and the Hiwassee. Knoxville stands a little below the place
where the Holston and French Broad flow together, and Chattanooga is a
hundred miles farther down, where the Tennessee, now a lordly stream,
leaves the Great Valley and flows westward through a deep valley in the
Cumberland plateau. This lesson in geography we must learn well, with
the help of a map, and we shall then see what the pioneers did as they
followed the rivers between the mountains.
It is an old road that runs from Pennsylvania to Tennessee by the
valley. It took the pioneer across the Potomac through Winchester and
Staunton in Virginia. Farther on was a fortified place, Fort Chissel,
built in 1758, which was on the way to the Watauga Settlement and
Cumberland Gap. Of Watauga we must now tell, and of the Cumberland Gap
in the next chapter.
Watauga is the name of a small river which flows out of the mountains
on the east, into the Great Valley, and enters the Holston. In a
pleasant spot on the banks of this stream the first settlement of
white men in Tennessee was made. Some of the people had come along the
valley from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and others had climbed over the
mountains from North Carolina because of the wrongs they had suffered
there.
Many of these men and women had come from the north of Ireland.
They were not of Irish but of Scotch blood, their ancestors having
originally come from Scotland to make the north of Ireland their home.
For this reason they are often called Scotch-Irish, but whatever we
name them, we are to remember that they were sturdy and intelligent
people. Conscientious and loyal Presbyterians they were in faith, and
by nature brave and full of endurance. Their fathers had shed their
blood for freedom on Scottish fields, and the sons were not likely to
be frightened by a wilderness full of red savages.
[Illustration: FIG. 52. HILLY FARM LANDS IN THE GREAT VALLEY, NEAR
KNOXVILLE]
Besides the Scotch-Irish, there were many Germans who had followed the
valley from Pennsylvania, and there were Huguenots also, besides a few
Hollanders and Swedes. A fort was built on the little river, and around
this defense grew up the Watauga Settlement. There was no Tennessee in
those days.
Many of the settlers had followed down the valleys from earlier homes
in Virginia, and it never occurred to them that they were not still
living in Virginia, and able to call on the colony for help. But after
a time a man came to the settlement who was a surveyor, and for some
reason he thought that he would run the boundary line of Virginia
farther west. When he had done it, what was the surprise of every one
to find that they were not in Virginia at all! If they belonged to any
colony, it was to North Carolina. Unfortunately there was a lack of
good government in that colony, and the prospect of belonging to it
was not a pleasant one; indeed, some of the settlers had run away from
North Carolina, and had felt safer because the great mountains rose
between them and their former home.
There seemed nothing to do but to make a government of their own, so
they formed the Watauga Association, about which writers of American
history have said a good deal. It would be interesting to see a copy
of the constitution that was drawn up by these backwoodsmen, but it
has been lost, with little hope that it will ever be recovered. It
is known, however, that there was a committee of thirteen, really a
legislature. This committee chose five of their own number to form
a court, which had a clerk and a sheriff and made laws for all the
settlers. Roosevelt, in his _Winning of the West_, says that these
pioneers were the first to build a “free and independent community” in
America.
The two most important men of this little state in the wild forest show
us that the settlers came from widely different places. James Robertson
was one, and he came over the mountains from North Carolina. John
Sevier was the other, and he came down the valley from Virginia. We
shall need to know what sort of men these were.
James Robertson belonged to the Scotch-Irish people. He was not one
of the very first settlers at Watauga, but came in the second year,
1770. He had no early education, and his wife, an intelligent woman,
taught him to read. He went alone over the mountains, with only his
horse and gun, in search of a place for a home. He found the settlers
and admired the place which they had chosen, but on his way back in
the fall he lost his horse and got his powder wet. He wandered about,
almost starved, until he met some hunters, who helped him home. He told
his neighbors of the lands in the valley, and as soon as the winter
was over his own family and sixteen others started out for Watauga.
He built a log house, went to work on the land, and by his wisdom and
energy soon came to be a leader of the new colony.
John Sevier did not come until 1772. His father had been a settler in
the Shenandoah valley, and John followed the streams, as we have traced
them, to the Great Valley. He was by birth a gentleman, using that word
to mean a man born of cultivated parents and familiar with the world.
He was well educated and was acquainted with prominent men, such as
Franklin and Madison. Both he and Robertson were good fighters, as we
shall see.
It was not long before seven hundred Indian warriors, angry because the
white people had made homes on their hunting grounds, stole in upon
the settlement. An Indian woman, Nancy Ward by name, who felt kindly
toward the whites, secretly warned them of the attack, so that when
the savages came they found all the men, women, and children in the
fort. It was not much of a fort, but it saved their lives. The Indians
kept up the attack for six days, but the colonists, led by Sevier and
Robertson, held out against them and killed a number of their braves.
When nearly a week had passed the red men, tired of the siege, went off
through the forest.
[Illustration: FIG. 53. FROM THE PINNACLE, CUMBERLAND GAP, LOOKING
NORTHEAST ALONG THE CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS. THE GREAT VALLEY AT THE RIGHT]
At one time, when some lawless whites had killed an Indian without
reason, the members of the tribe were very angry and threatened to
avenge the murder. Robertson, thinking that he could soften their
anger, went alone among the fierce Cherokees. He told them that the
Watauga people were very sorry the man had been killed, and that they
would try to find and punish the murderer. As the Indians believed
Robertson to be an honest man, they did as he asked them to do and the
settlers were not disturbed.
The Watauga colonists had to live in a very rough and simple way.
They built their cabins of logs, with what were called puncheon
floors,--that is, floors made of thick, rude slabs. Frequently a big
slab served for a table, three-legged stools for chairs, and a row
of pegs for a wardrobe. Roosevelt says that the dress of the men was
largely copied from that of the Indians, and included a fur cap,
leggings of buckskin or elk hide, and a fringed hunting shirt. A heavy
rifle was carried, which was usually fired from a rest.
Garments and bed clothing were made of wool, which was spun at home
by the wives and daughters. The women worked hard from morning till
night, and the men had many things to do. There were lands to be
cleared, crops to be raised, and game to be hunted and dressed. Besides
all these occupations it was necessary to keep a constant lookout for
hostile savages and to have all means of defense ready in case of a
sudden attack. The Indians were so crafty and deceitful that only
the closest watchfulness saved the palefaces from danger and death.
Sometimes an unwary hunter, hearing the gobbling of a turkey or the
call of an owl, would come out into an open place only to be laid low
by the red man’s bullet. These experiences developed a strong and brave
people.
The settlers often bartered things because they had no money, and
they were ignorant of many of the ways of civilized life. Some of the
frontiersmen did not know that tea leaves should be steeped and used
for a drink, and tried to eat them with butter or salt.
When a boy was twelve years old he had to begin to take a man’s part.
A gun was given to him, and he was placed at a loophole in the fort to
help keep off the savage foe. Thus the boys grew up to be real men,
knowing little fear, able to take care of themselves, and helping to
build one of the great states of the American Union.