Читать книгу: «The Winning of the West, Volume 1», страница 14

CHAPTER XI.
IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION—THE SOUTHERN BACKWOODSMEN OVERWHELM THE CHEROKEES, 1776

The great western drift of our people began almost at the moment when they became Americans, and ceased to be merely British colonists. They crossed the great divide which sundered the springs of the seaboard rivers from the sources of the western waters about the time that American citizens first publicly acted as American freemen, knit together by common ties, and with interests no longer akin to those of the mother country. The movement which was to make the future nation a continental power was begun immediately after the hitherto separate colonies had taken the first step towards solidification. While the communities of the sea-coast were yet in a fever heat from the uprising against the stamp tax, the first explorers were toiling painfully to Kentucky, and the first settlers were building their palisaded hamlets on the banks of the Watauga. The year that saw the first Continental Congress saw also the short, grim tragedy of Lord Dunmore's war. The early battles of the Revolution were fought while Boon's comrades were laying the foundations of their commonwealth.

Hitherto the two chains of events had been only remotely connected; but in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the struggle between the king and his rebellious subjects shook the whole land, and the men of the western border were drawn headlong into the full current of revolutionary warfare. From that moment our politics became national, and the fate of each portion of our country was thenceforth in some sort dependent upon the welfare of every other. Each section had its own work to do; the east won independence while the west began to conquer the continent. Yet the deeds of each were of vital consequence to the other. Washington's Continentals gave the west its freedom; and took in return for themselves and their children a share of the land that had been conquered and held by the scanty bands of tall backwoodsmen.

The backwoodsmen, the men of the up-country, were, as a whole, ardent adherents of the patriot or American side. Yet there were among them many loyalists or tories; and these tories included in their ranks much the greatest portion of the vicious and the disorderly elements. This was the direct reverse of what obtained along portions of the seaboard, where large numbers of the peaceable, well-to-do people stood loyally by the king. In the up-country, however, the Presbyterian Irish, with their fellows of Calvinistic stock and faith, formed the back-bone of the moral and order-loving element; and the Presbyterian Irish³⁸⁷ were almost to a man staunch and furious upholders of the Continental Congress. Naturally, the large bands of murderers, horse-thieves, and other wild outlaws, whom these grim friends of order hunted down with merciless severity, were glad to throw in their lot with any party that promised revenge upon their foes. But of course there were lawless characters on both sides; in certain localities where the crop of jealousies, always a rank backwoods growth, had been unusually large, and had therefore produced long-standing and bitter feuds,³⁸⁸ the rival families espoused opposite sides from sheer vindictive hatred of one another. As a result, the struggle in the backwoods between tories and whigs, king's-men and congress-men,³⁸⁹ did not merely turn upon the questions everywhere at stake between the American and British parties. It was also in part a fight between the law-abiding and the lawless, and in part a slaking of savage personal animosities, wherein the borderers glutted their vengeance on one another. They exercised without restraint the right of private warfare, long abandoned in more civilized regions. It was natural that such a contest should be waged with appalling ferocity.

Nevertheless this very ferocity was not only inevitable, but it was in a certain sense proper; or, at least, even if many of its manifestations were blamable, the spirit that lay behind them was right. The backwoodsmen were no sentimentalists; they were grim, hard, matter-of-fact men, engaged all their lives long in an unending struggle with hostile forces, both human and natural; men who in this struggle had acquired many unamiable qualities, but who had learned likewise to appreciate at their full value the inestimable virtues of courage and common-sense. The crisis demanded that they should be both strong and good; but, above all things, it demanded that they should be strong. Weakness would have ruined them. It was needful that justice should stand before mercy; and they could no longer have held their homes, had they not put down their foes, of every kind, with an iron hand. They did not have many theories; but they were too genuinely liberty-loving not to keenly feel that their freedom was jeopardized as much by domestic disorder as by foreign aggression.

The tories were obnoxious under two heads: they were the allies of a tyrant who lived beyond the sea, and they were the friends of anarchy at home. They were felt by the frontiersmen to be criminals rather than ordinary foes. They included in their ranks the mass of men who had been guilty of the two worst frontier crimes—horse-stealing and murder; and their own feats were in the eyes of their neighbors in no way distinguishable from those of other horse-thieves and murderers. Accordingly the backwoodsmen soon grew to regard toryism as merely another crime; and the courts sometimes executed equally summary justice on tory, desperado, and stock-thief, holding each as having forfeited his life.³⁹⁰

The backwoodsmen were engaged in a threefold contest. In the first place, they were occasionally, but not often, opposed to the hired British and German soldiers of a foreign king. Next, they were engaged in a fierce civil war with the tories of their own number. Finally, they were pitted against the Indians, in the ceaseless border struggle of a rude, vigorous civilization to overcome an inevitably hostile savagery. The regular British armies, marching to and fro in the course of their long campaigns on the seaboard, rarely went far enough back to threaten the frontiersmen; the latter had to do chiefly with tories led by British chiefs, and with Indians instigated by British agents.

Soon after the conflict with the revolted colonists became one of arms as well as one of opinions the British began to rouse the Indian tribes to take their part. In the northwest they were at first unsuccessful; the memory of Lord Dunmore's war was still fresh in the minds of the tribes beyond the Ohio, and they remained for the most part neutral. The Shawnees continued even in 1776 to send in to the Americans white prisoners collected from among their outlying bands, in accordance with the terms of the treaty entered into on the Pickaway plains.³⁹¹

But the southwestern Indians were not held in check by memories of recent defeat, and they were alarmed by the encroachments of the whites. Although the Cherokees had regularly ceded to the Watauga settlers their land, they still continued jealous of them; and both Creeks and Cherokees were much irritated at the conduct of some of the lawless Georgian frontiersmen.³⁹² The colonial authorities tried to put a stop to this lawlessness, and one of the chief offenders was actually seized and hung in the presence of two Indians.³⁹³ This had a momentary effect on the Creeks, and induced them for the time being to observe a kind of nominal neutrality, though they still furnished bodies of warriors to help the British and Cherokees.³⁹⁴

The latter, however, who were the nearest neighbors of the Americans, promptly took up the tomahawk at the bidding of the British. The royal agents among these southern Indians had so far successfully³⁹⁵ followed the perfectly cold-blooded though perhaps necessary policy of exciting the tribes to war with one another, in order that they might leave the whites at peace; but now, as they officially reported to the British commander, General Gage, they deemed this course no longer wise, and, instead of fomenting, they endeavored to allay, the strife between the Chickasaws and Creeks, so as to allow the latter to turn their full strength against the Georgians.³⁹⁶ At the same time every effort was made to induce the Cherokees to rise,³⁹⁷ and they were promised gunpowder, blankets, and the like although some of the promised stores were seized by the Americans while being forwarded to the Indians.³⁹⁸

In short, the British were active and successful in rousing the war spirit among Creeks, Cherokees, Chocktaws, and Chickasaws, having numerous agents in all these tribes.³⁹⁹ Their success, and the consequent ravages of the Indians, maddened the American frontiersmen upon whom the blow fell, and changed their resentment against the British king into a deadly and lasting hatred, which their sons and grandsons inherited. Indian warfare was of such peculiar atrocity that the employment of Indians as allies forbade any further hope of reconciliation. It is not necessary to accept the American estimate of the motives inspiring the act in order to sympathize fully with the horror and anger that it aroused among the frontiersmen. They saw their homes destroyed, their wives outraged, their children captured, their friends butchered and tortured wholesale by Indians armed with British weapons, bribed by British gold, and obeying the orders of British agents and commanders. Their stormy anger was not likely to be allayed by the consideration that Congress also had at first made some effort to enlist Indians in the patriot forces, nor were they apt to bear in mind the fact that the British, instead of being abnormally cruel, were in reality less so than our former French and Spanish opponents.⁴⁰⁰

Looking back it is easy to see that the Indians were the natural foes of the American people, and therefore the natural allies of the British Government. They had constantly to fear the advance of the Americans, while from the fur traders, Indian agents, and army officers who alone represented Britain, they had nothing but coveted treasures of every kind to expect. They seemed tools forged for the hands of the royal commanders, whose own people lay far beyond the reach of reprisals in kind; and it was perhaps too much to expect that in that age such tools should not be used.⁴⁰¹ We had less temptation to employ them, less means wherewith to pay them, and more cause to be hostile to and dread them; and moreover our skirts are not quite clear in the matter, after all, for we more than once showed a tendency to bid for their support.

But, after all is said, the fact remains that we have to deal, not with what, under other circumstances, the Americans might have done, but with what the British actually did; and for this there can be many apologies, but no sufficient excuse. When the commissioners to the southern Indians wrote to Lord George Germain, "we have been indefatigable in our endeavors to keep up a constant succession of parties of Indians to annoy the rebels," the writers must have well known, what the king's ministers should also have made it their business to know, that the war-parties whom they thus boasted of continually sending against the settlements directed their efforts mainly, indeed almost exclusively, not against bodies of armed men, but against the husbandmen as they unsuspectingly tilled the fields, and against the women and children who cowered helplessly in the log-cabins.⁴⁰² All men knew that the prisoners who fell into Indian hands, of whatever age or sex, often suffered a fate hideous and revolting beyond belief and beyond description. Such a letter as that quoted above makes the advisers of King George the Third directly responsible for the manifold and frightful crimes of their red allies.

It is small wonder that such a contest should have roused in the breasts of the frontiersmen not only ruthless and undying abhorrence of the Indians, but also a bitterly vindictive feeling of hostility towards Great Britain; a feeling that was all-powerful for a generation afterwards, and traces of which linger even to the present day. Moreover, the Indian forays, in some ways, damaged the loyalist cause. The savages had received strict instructions not to molest any of the king's friends;⁴⁰³ but they were far too intent on plunder and rapine to discriminate between whig and tory. Accordingly their ravages drove the best tories, who had at first hailed the Indian advance with joy, into the patriot ranks, making the frontier almost solidly whig; save for the refugees, who were willing to cast in their lot with the savages.⁴⁰⁴

While the Creeks were halting and considering, and while the Choctaws and Chickasaws were being visited by British emissaries, the Cherokees flung themselves on the frontier folk. They had been short of ammunition; but when the British agents sent them fifty horse-loads by a pack-train that was driven through the Creek towns, they no longer hesitated.⁴⁰⁵ The agents showed very poor generalship in making them rise so early, when there were no British troops in the southern States, and when the Americans were consequently unhampered and free to deal with the Indians.⁴⁰⁶ Had the rising been put off until a British army was in Georgia, it might well have proved successful.

The Cherokee villages stood in that cluster of high mountain chains which mark the ending of the present boundaries of Georgia and both Carolinas. These provinces lay east and southeast of them. Directly north were the forted villages of the Watauga pioneers, in the valley of the upper Tennessee, and beyond these again, in the same valley, the Virginian outpost settlements. Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia were alike threatened by the outbreak, while the Watauga people were certain to be the chief sufferers. The Cherokees were so near the settlements that their incursions were doubly dangerous. On the other hand, there was not nearly as much difficulty in dealing them a counter-blow as in the case of the northern Indians, for their towns lay thickly together and were comparatively easy of access. Moreover, they were not rated such formidable fighters. By comparing Lord Dunmore's war in 1774 with this struggle against the Cherokees in 1776, it is easy to see the difference between a contest against the northern and one against the southern tribes. In 1776 our Indian foes were more numerous than in 1774, for there were over two thousand Cherokee warriors—perhaps two thousand five hundred,—assisted by a few Creeks and tories; they were closer to the frontier, and so their ravages were more serious; but they did not prove such redoubtable foes as Cornstalk's warriors, their villages were easier reached, and a more telling punishment was inflicted.

The Cherokees had been showing signs of hostility for some time. They had murdered two Virginians the previous year;⁴⁰⁷ and word was brought to the settlements, early in the summer of '76, that they were undoubtedly preparing for war, as they were mending guns, making moccasins and beating flour for the march.⁴⁰⁸ In June their ravages began.⁴⁰⁹ The Otari, or Overhill Cherokees, had sent runners to the valley towns, asking their people to wait until all were ready before marching, that the settlements might be struck simultaneously; but some of the young braves among the lower towns could not be restrained, and in consequence the outlying settlers of Georgia and the Carolinas were the first to be assailed.

The main attack was made early in July, the warriors rushing down from their upland fastnesses in fierce and headlong haste, the different bands marching north, east, and southeast at the same moment. From the Holston to the Tugelou, from southwestern Virginia to northwestern Georgia, the back-county settlements were instantly wrapped in the sudden horror of savage warfare.

The Watauga people, the most exposed of all, received timely warning from a friendly squaw,⁴¹⁰ to whom the whites ever after showed respect and gratitude. They at once began to prepare for the stroke; and in all the western world of woodsmen there were no men better fitted for such a death grapple. They still formed a typical pioneer community; and their number had been swelled from time to time by the arrival of other bold and restless spirits. Their westernmost settlement this year was in Carter's valley; where four men had cleared a few acres of corn-land, and had hunted buffalo for their winter's meat.⁴¹¹

As soon as they learned definitely that the Otari warriors, some seven hundred in number, were marching against them, they took refuge in their wooden forts or stations. Among the most important of these were the one at Watauga, in which Sevier and Robertson held command, and another known as Baton's Station, placed just above the forks of the Holston.⁴¹² Some six miles from the latter, near the Long Island or Big Island of the Holston, lay quite a large tract of level land, covered with an open growth of saplings, and known as the Island flats.

The Indians were divided into several bands; some of their number crossed over into Carter's valley, and after ravaging it, passed on up the Clinch. The settlers at once gathered in the little stockades; those who delayed were surprised by the savages, and were slain as they fled, or else were captured, perhaps to die by torture,—men, women, and children alike. The cabins were burnt, the grain destroyed, the cattle and horses driven off, and the sheep and hogs shot down with arrows; the Indians carried bows and arrows for this express purpose, so as to avoid wasting powder and lead. The bolder war-parties, in their search for scalps and plunder, penetrated into Virginia a hundred miles beyond the frontier,⁴¹³ wasting the country with tomahawk and brand up to the Seven-Mile Ford. The roads leading to the wooden forts were crowded with settlers, who, in their mortal need of hurry, had barely time to snatch up a few of the household goods, and, if especially lucky, to mount the women and children on horses; as usual in such a flight, there occurred many deeds of cowardly selfishness, offset by many feats of courage and self-sacrifice. Once in the fort, the backwoodsmen often banded into parties, and sallied out to fall on the Indians. Sometimes these parties were worsted; at other times they overcame their foes either by ambush or in fair fight. One such party from the Wolf Hills fort killed eleven Indian warriors; and on their return they hung the scalps of their slain foes, as trophies of triumph, from a pole over the fort gate.⁴¹⁴ They were Bible-readers in this fort, and they had their Presbyterian minister with them, having organized a special party to bring in the books he had left in his cabin; they joined in prayer and thanksgiving for their successes; but this did not hinder them from scalping the men they killed. They were too well-read in the merciless wars of the Chosen People to feel the need of sparing the fallen; indeed they would have been most foolish had they done so; for they were battling with a heathen enemy more ruthless and terrible than ever was Canaanite or Philistine. The two largest of the invading Indian bands⁴¹⁵ moved, one by way of the mountains, to fall on the Watauga fort and its neighbors, and the other, led by the great war chief, Dragging Canoe, to lay waste the country guarded by Eaton's Station.

The white scouts—trained woodsmen, whose lives had been spent in the chase and in forest warfare—kept the commanders or headmen of the forts well informed of the Indian advance. As soon as it was known what part was really threatened, runners were sent to the settlements near by, calling on the riflemen to gather at Eaton's Station; whither they accordingly came in small bodies, under their respective militia captains.⁴¹⁶

No man was really in command; the senior captain exercised a vague kind of right of advice over the others, and the latter in turn got from their men such obedience as their own personal influence was able to procure. But the levy, if disorderly, was composed of excellent marksmen and woodsmen, sinewy, hardy, full of fight, and accustomed to act together. A council was held, and it was decided not to stay cooped up in the fort, like turkeys in a pen, while the Indians ravaged the fields and burnt the homesteads, but to march out at once and break the shock by a counter-stroke.

Accordingly, on the morning of the twentieth of July, they filed out of the fort, one hundred and seventy strong, and bent their steps towards the Island Flats. Well versed in woodland warfare, the frontier riflemen marched as well as fought on a system of their own, much more effective for this purpose than the discipline of European regulars. The men of this little levy walked strung out in Indian file, in two parallel lines,⁴¹⁷ with scouts in front, and flankers on each side. Marching thus they could not be surprised, and were ready at any moment to do battle with the Indians, in open order and taking shelter behind the trees; while regulars, crowded together, were helpless before the savages whom the forest screened from view, and who esteemed it an easy task to overcome any number of foes if gathered in a huddle.⁴¹⁸

When near the Flats the whites, walking silently with moccasined feet, came suddenly on a party of twenty Indians, who, on being attacked, fled in the utmost haste, leaving behind ten of their bundles—for the southern warriors carried with them, when on the war-path, small bundles containing their few necessaries.

After this trifling success a council was held, and, as the day was drawing to a close, it was decided to return to the fort. Some of the men were dissatisfied with the decision, and there followed an incident as characteristic in its way as was the bravery with which the battle was subsequently fought. The discontented soldiers expressed their feelings freely, commenting especially upon the supposed lack of courage on the part of one of the captains. The latter, after brooding over the matter until the men had begun to march off the ground towards home, suddenly halted the line in which he was walking, and proceeded to harangue the troops in defence of his own reputation. Apparently no one interfered to prevent this remarkable piece of military self-justification; the soldiers were evidently accustomed openly to criticise the conduct of their commanders, while the latter responded in any manner they saw fit. As soon as the address was over, and the lines once more straightened out, the march was renewed in the original order; and immediately afterwards the scouts brought news that a considerable body of Indians, misled by their retreat, was running rapidly up to assail their rear.⁴¹⁹

The right file was promptly wheeled to the right and the left to the left, forming a line of battle a quarter of a mile long, the men taking advantage of the cover when possible. There was at first some confusion and a momentary panic, which was instantly quelled, the officers and many of the men joining to encourage and rally the few whom the suddenness of the attack rendered faint-hearted. The Otari warriors, instead of showing the usual Indian caution, came running on at headlong speed, believing that the whites were fleeing in terror; while still some three hundred yards off⁴²⁰ they raised the war-whoop and charged without halting, the foremost chiefs hallooing out that the white men were running, and to come on and scalp them. They were led by Dragging Canoe himself, and were formed very curiously, their centre being cone-shaped, while their wings were curved outward; apparently they believed the white line to be wavering and hoped to break through its middle at the same time that they outflanked it, trusting to a single furious onset instead of to their usual tactics.⁴²¹ The result showed their folly. The frontiersmen on the right and left scattered out still farther, so that their line could not be outflanked; and waiting coolly till the Otari were close up, the whites fired into them. The long rifles cracked like four-horse whips; they were held in skilful hands, many of the assailants fell, and the rush was checked at once. A short fight at close quarters ensued here and there along the line, Dragging Canoe was struck down and severely wounded, and then the Indians fled in the utmost confusion, every man for himself. Yet they carried off their wounded and perhaps some of their dead. The whites took thirteen scalps, and of their own number but four were seriously hurt; they also took many guns and much plunder.

In this battle of the Island Flats⁴²² the whites were slightly superior⁴²³ in number to their foes; and they won without difficulty, inflicting a far heavier loss than they received. In this respect it differs markedly from most other Indian fights of the same time; and many of its particulars render it noteworthy. Moreover, it had a very good effect, cheering the frontiersmen greatly, and enabling them to make head against the discouraged Indians.

On the same day the Watauga fort⁴²⁴ was attacked by a large force at sunrise. It was crowded with women and children,⁴²⁵ but contained only forty or fifty men. The latter, however, were not only resolute and well-armed, but were also on the alert to guard against surprise; the Indians were discovered as they advanced in the gray light, and were at once beaten back with loss from the loopholed stockade. Robertson commanded in the fort, Sevier acting as his lieutenant. Of course, the only hope of assistance was from Virginia, North Carolina being separated from the Watauga people by great mountain chains; and Sevier had already notified the officers of Fincastle that the Indians were advancing. His letter was of laconic brevity, and contained no demand for help; it was merely a warning that the Indians were undoubtedly about to start, and that "they intended to drive the country up to New River before they returned"—so that it behooved the Fincastle men to look to their own hearthsides. Sevier was a very fearless, self-reliant man, and doubtless felt confident that the settlers themselves could beat back their assailants. His forecast proved correct; for the Indians, after maintaining an irregular siege of the fort for some three weeks, retired, almost at the moment that parties of frontiersmen came to the rescue from some of the neighboring forts.⁴²⁶

While the foe was still lurking about the fort the people within were forced to subsist solely on parched corn; and from time to time some of them became so irritated by the irksome monotony of their confinement, that they ventured out heedless of the danger. Three or four of them were killed by the Indians, and one boy was carried off to one of their towns, where he was burnt at the stake; while a woman who was also captured at this time was only saved from a like fate by the exertions of the same Cherokee squaw already mentioned as warning the settlers. Tradition relates that Sevier, now a young widower, fell in love with the woman he soon afterwards married during the siege. Her name was Kate Sherrill. She was a tall girl, brown-haired, comely, lithe and supple "as a hickory sapling." One day while without the fort she was almost surprised by some Indians. Running like a deer, she reached the stockade, sprang up so as to catch the top with her hands, and drawing herself over, was caught in Sevier's arms on the other side; through a loop-hole he had already shot the headmost of her pursuers.

Soon after the baffled Otari retreated from Robertson's fort the other war parties likewise left the settlements. The Watauga men together with the immediately adjoining Virginian frontiersmen had beaten back their foes unaided, save for some powder and lead they had received from the older settlements; and moreover had inflicted more loss than they suffered.⁴²⁷ They had made an exceedingly vigorous and successful fight.

The outlying settlements scattered along the western border of the Carolinas and Georgia had been attacked somewhat earlier; the Cherokees from the lower towns, accompanied by some Creeks and Tories, beginning their ravages in the last days of June.⁴²⁸ A small party of Georgians had, just previously, made a sudden march into the Cherokee country. They were trying to capture the British agent Cameron, who, being married to an Indian wife, dwelt in her town, and owned many negroes, horses, and cattle. The Cherokees, who had agreed not to interfere, broke faith and surprised the party, killing some and capturing others who were tortured to death.⁴²⁹

The frontiers were soon in a state of wild panic; for the Cherokee inroad was marked by the usual features. Cattle were driven off, houses burned, plantations laid waste, while the women and children were massacred indiscriminately with the men.⁴³⁰ The people fled from their homes and crowded into the stockade forts; they were greatly hampered by the scarcity of guns and ammunition, as much had been given to the troops called down to the coast by the war with Britain. All the southern colonies were maddened by the outbreak; and prepared for immediate revenge, knowing that if they were quick they would have time to give the Cherokees a good drubbing before the British could interfere.⁴³¹ The plan was that they should act together, the Virginians invading the Overhill country at the same time that the forces from North and South Carolina and Georgia destroyed the valley and lower towns. Thus the Cherokees would be crushed with little danger. It proved impossible, however, to get the attacks made quite simultaneously.

The back districts of North Carolina suffered heavily at the outset; however, the inhabitants showed that they were able to take care of themselves. The Cherokees came down the Catawba murdering many people; but most of the whites took refuge in the little forts, where they easily withstood the Indian assaults. General Griffith Rutherford raised a frontier levy and soon relieved the besieged stations. He sent word to the provincial authorities that if they could only get powder and lead the men of the Salisbury district were alone quite capable of beating off the Indians, but that if it was intended to invade the Cherokee country he must also have help from the Hillsborough men.⁴³² He was promised assistance, and was told to prepare a force to act on the offensive with the Virginians and South Carolinians.