Constance Lindsay Skinner

“ The great pile of the Appalachian peaks was not the only barrier which held back the settler with his plough and his rifle from following the trader's tinkling caravans into the valleys beyond. Over the hills the French were lords of the land. The frontiersman had already felt their enmity through the torch and tomahawk of their savage allies. By his own strength alone he could not cope with the power entrenched beyond the hills ”

“ The battle, which continued from dawn until an hour before sunset, was the bloodiest in Virginia's long series of Indian wars. The frontiersmen fought as such men ever fought—with the daring, bravery, swiftness of attack, and skill in taking cover which were the tactics of their day, even as at a later time many of these same men fought at King's Mountain and in Illinois the battles that did so much to turn the tide in the Revolution. ”

“ But to these Ulster immigrants such a choice was no choice at all. They knew themselves strong men, who had made the most of opportunity despite almost superhuman obstacles. The drumming of their feet along the banks of the Shenandoah, or up the rivers from Charleston, and on through the broad sweep of the Yadkin Valley, was a conquering people's challenge to the Wilderness which lay sleeping like an unready sentinel at the gates of their Future. ”

“ The red peril, indeed, influenced every side of frontier life. The bands of women and children at the harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings, were not there merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter and love-making. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins, for, to the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon his immemorial hunting grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater evil was the white man's family, bespeaking the increase of the dreaded palefaces. ”

“ Could a lengthier narrative, even if enriched with literary art and fancy, bring before us more vividly than do the simple entries of Donelson's log the spirit of the men and the women who won the West? If so little personal detail is recorded of the pioneer men of that day that we must deduce what they were from what they did, what do we know of their unfailing comrades, the pioneer women? Only that they were there and that they shared in every test of courage and endurance, save the march of troops and the hunt. ”

“ With France expelled and the Indians deprived 89 of their white allies, the westward path lay open to the pioneers, even though the red man himself would rise again and again in vain endeavor to bar the way. So a new era begins, the era of exploration for definite purpose, the era of commonwealth building. In entering on it, we part with the earliest pioneer—the trader, who first opened the road for both the lone home seeker and the great land company. He dwindles now to the mere barterer and so—save for a few chance glimpses—slips out of sight, for his brave days as Imperial Scout are done. ”

“ Early writers have usually represented the frontiersmen as saints in buckskin and the Indians as fiends without the shadow of a claim on either the land or humanity. Many later writers have merely reversed the shield. The truth is that the Indians and the borderers reacted upon each other to the hurt of both. Paradoxically, they grew like enough to hate one another with a savage hatred—and both wanted the land. ”

“ Once the colonies had freed themselves from England's protecting arm, it would be a simple matter for the Bourbons to gather them in like so many little lost chicks from a rainy yard. The intrigants of autocratic systems have never been able to understand that the urge of the spirit of independence in men is not primarily to break shackles but to stand alone and that the breaking of bonds is incidental to the true demonstration of freedom. ”

“ On the summit Ferguson pitched his camp.
The hill was a natural fortress, its sides forested, its bald top protected by rocks and bowlders. All the approaches led through dense forest. An enemy force, passing through the immediate, wooded territory, might easily fail to discover a small army nesting sixty feet above the shrouding leafage. Word was evidently brought to Ferguson here, telling him the now augmented number of his foe, for he dispatched another emissary to Cornwallis with a letter stating the number of his own troops and urging full and immediate assistance. ”

“ Dragging Canoe had come to life again and was emerging from the caves of the Tennessee with a substantial force of Chickamaugan warriors. Again the Wataugans, augmented by a detachment from Sullivan County, galloped forth, met the red warriors, chastised them heavily, put them to rout, burned their dwellings and provender, and drove them back into their hiding places. For some time after this, the Indians dipped not into the black paint pots of war but were content to streak their humbled countenances with the vermilion of beauty and innocence. ”

“ He must find the magic door that led through the vast mountain wall into Kentucky—Kentucky, with its green prairies where the buffalo and deer 96 were as “ten thousand thousand cattle feeding” in the wilds, and where the balmy air vibrated with the music of innumerable wings.
Accordingly, in the autumn of 1767, Boone began his quest of the delectable country in the company of his friend, William Hill, who had been with him in Florida. Autumn was the season of departure on all forest excursions, because by that time the summer crops had been gathered in and the day of the deer had come. ”

“ But Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which grew among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest legends about his ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a habit he had of pouncing on his foes in the middle of the night and pulling them out of bed to give fight or die. It was generally both fight and die, for these dark adventures of his were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no neutrals or conscientious 202 objectors; any man who would not carry arms for the King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeit. ”

“ Fifty years before John Findlay, 1 one of this class of pioneers, led Daniel Boone through Cumberland 53 Gap, the trader's bands of horses roamed the western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattle grazed among the deer on the green banks of the old Cherokee (Tennessee) River. He was the pioneer settler beyond the high hills; for he built, in the center of the Indian towns, the first white man's cabin—with its larger annex, the trading house—and dwelt there during the greater part of the year. He was America's first magnate of international commerce. ”

“ They flung themselves on the ground and embraced the sod upon which they had walked in freedom. They called their broken farewells to the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to see; and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the passes, their pipers played the dirge for the dead. ”

“ It is a dramatic picture we evolve for ourselves from the meager narratives of this event—a mass of painted Indians moving through the sycamores by the bright water, to come presently into a tense, immobile semicircle before the large group of armed frontiersmen seated or standing about Richard Henderson, the man with the imperial dream, the ready speaker whose flashing eyes and glowing oratory won the hearts of all who came under their sway. ”

“ Now it is, of course, an established fact that both the British and the American armies used Indians in the War of Independence, even as both together had used them against the French and the Spanish and their allied Indians. It was inevitable that the Indians should participate in any severe conflict between the whites. They were a numerous and a warlike people and, from their point of view, they had more at stake than the alien whites who were contesting for control of the red man's continent. ”

“ The Indian peril trained the pioneers to alertness, shaped them as warriors and hunters, suggested the fashion of their dress, knit their families into clans and the clans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in the protection of each and all and a unit of hate against their common enemy.
Too often the fields which the pioneer planted with corn were harvested by the Indian with fire. The hardest privations suffered by farmers and stock were due to the settlers having to flee to the forts, leaving to Indian devastation the crops on which their sustenance mainly depended. ”

“ From the pioneer time of the Old Southwest to the last frontier of the Far North today, the service berry is cherished alike by white men and Indians; and the red men have woven about it some of their prettiest legends. When June had ripened the tree's blue-black berries, the Back Country folk went out in parties to gather them. Though the service berry was a 38 food staple on the frontier and its gathering a matter of household economy, the folk made their berry-picking jaunt a gala occasion. ”

“ Where once were great herds of deer and buffalo, they had watched thousands of men at arms preparing for war. So many now were the white warriors and their women and children that the red men had been obliged to travel a great way on the other side of the Ohio and to make a detour of nearly three hundred miles to avoid being seen. Even on this outlying route they had crossed the fresh tracks of a great body of people with horses and cattle going still further towards the setting sun. ”

“ The scene of the mountaineers' victory, which marked the turn of the tide for the Revolution, became for years the chief resort of wolf hunters from both the Carolinas.
The importance of the overmountain men's victory lay in what it achieved for the cause of Independence. King's Mountain was the prelude to Cornwallis's defeat. It heartened the Southern Patriots, until then cast down by Gates's disaster. To the British the death of Ferguson was an irreparable loss because of its depressing effect on the Back Country Tories. King's Mountain, indeed, broke the Tory spirit. ”

“ A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country of Virginia or North Carolina would show, in primitive design, what is, perhaps, after all the perfect home—a place where the personal life and the work life are united and where nothing futile finds space. ”

“ Not content with putting the marauders to flight, Sevier pressed on after them, burned several of the upper towns, and took prisoner a number of women and children, thus putting the red warriors to the depth of shame, for the Indians never deserted their women in battle. The chiefs at once sued for peace. But they had made peace often before. Sevier drove down upon the Hiwassee towns, meanwhile proclaiming that those among the tribe who were friendly might send their families to the white settlement, where they would be fed and cared for until a sound peace should be assured. ”