American History Told by Contemporaries/Volume 2/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII —THE WEST
134. "The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon" (1769-1775)
BY JOHN FILSON (1784)
This narrative purports to be autobiographical, but was put into its literary form by John Filson, an emigrant from Pennsylvania just after the Revolutionary War. Filson was a school-teacher, surveyor, and historian. — Bibliography: Winsor, Narrative and Critical History, VI, 708; Roosevelt, Winning of the West, I, ch. vi.
IT was on the first of May, in the year 1769, that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time, and left my family and peaceable habitation on the Yadkin River, in North-Carolina, to wander through the wilderness of America, in quest of the country of Kentucke, in company with John Finley, John Stewart, Joseph Holden, James Monay, and William Cool. We proceeded successfully, and after a long and fatiguing journey through a mountainous wilderness, in a westward direction, on the seventh day of June following, we found ourselves on Red-River, where John Finley had formerly been trading with the Indians, and, from the top of an eminence, saw with pleasure the beautiful level of Kentucke. . . . In this forest, the habitation of beasts of every kind natural to America, we practised hunting with great success until the twenty-second day of December following.
This day John Stewart and I had a pleasing ramble, but fortune changed the scene in the close of it. . . . In the decline of the day, near Kentucke river, as we ascended the brow of a small hill, a number of Indians rushed out of a thick cane-brake upon us, and made us prisoners. The time of our sorrow was now arrived, and the scene fully opened. The Indians plundered us of what we had, and kept us in confinement seven days, treating us with common savage usage. During this time we discovered no uneasiness or desire to escape, which made them less suspicious of us ; but in the dead of night, as we lay in a thick cane-brake by a large fire, when sleep had locked up their senses, my situation not disposing me for rest, I touched my companion and gently awoke him. We improved this favourable opportunity, and departed, leaving them to take their rest, and speedily directed our course towards our old camp, but found it plundered, and the company dispersed and gone home. About this time my brother, Squire Boon, with another adventurer, who came to explore the country shortly after us, was wandering through the forest, determined to find me, if possible, and accidentally found our camp. . . .
. . . We were then in a dangerous, helpless situation, exposed daily to perils and death amongst savages and wild beasts, not a white man in the country but ourselves. . . .
We continued not in a state of indolence, but hunted every day, and prepared a little cottage to defend us from the Winter storms. We remained there undisturbed during the Winter ; and on the first day of May, 1770, my brother returned home to the settlement by himself, for a new recruit of horses and ammunition, leaving me by myself, without bread, salt or sugar, without company of my fellow creatures, or even a horse or dog. I confess I never before was under greater necessity of exercising philosophy and fortitude. . . .
Thus, through an uninterrupted scene of sylvan pleasures, I spent the time until the 27th day of July following, when my brother, to my great felicity, met me, according to appointment, at our old camp. Shortly after, we left this place, not thinking it safe to stay there longer, and proceeded to Cumberland river, reconnoitring that part of the country until March, 1771, and giving names to the different waters.
Soon after, I returned home to my family with a determination to bring them as soon as possible to live in Kentucke, which I esteemed a second paradise, at the risk of my life and fortune.
I returned safe to my old habitation, and found my family in happy circumstances. I sold my farm on the Yadkin, and what goods we could not carry with us ; and on the twenty-fifth day of September, 1773, bade a farewel to our friends, and proceeded on our journey to Kentucke, in company with five families more, and forty men that joined us in Powel's Valley, which is one hundred and fifty miles from the now settled parts of Kentucke. This promising beginning was soon overcast with a cloud of adversity ; for upon the tenth day of October, the rear of our company was attacked by a number of Indians, who killed six, and wounded one man. Of these my eldest son was one that fell in the action. Though we defended ourselves, and repulsed the enemy, yet this unhappy affair scattered our cattle, brought us into extreme difficulty, and so discouraged the whole company, that we retreated forty miles, to the settlement on Clench river. . . .
I remained with my family on Clench until the sixth of June, 1774, when I and one Michael Stoner were solicited by Governor Dunmore, of Virginia, to go to the Falls of the Ohio, to conduct into the settlement a number of surveyors that had been sent thither by him some months before ; this country having about this time drawn the attention of many adventurers. We immediately complied with the Governor's request, and conducted in the surveyors, compleating a tour of eight hundred miles, through many difficulties, in sixty-two days.
Soon after I returned home, I ... was solicited by a number of North-Carolina gentlemen, that were about purchasing the lands lying on the S. side of Kentucke River, from the Cherokee Indians, to attend their treaty at Wataga, in March, 1775, to negotiate with them, and, mention the boundaries of the purchase. This I accepted, and at the request of the same gentlemen, undertook to mark out a road in the best passage from the settlement through the wilderness to Kentucke . . . .
I soon began this work, having collected a number of enterprising men, well armed. We proceeded with all possible expedition until we came within fifteen miles of where Boonsborough now stands, and where we were fired upon by a party of Indians that killed two, and wounded two of our number ; yet, although surprised and taken at a disadvantage, we stood our ground. This was on the twentieth of March, 1775. Three days after, we were fired upon again, and had two men killed, and three wounded. Afterwards we proceeded on to Kentucke river without opposition ; and on the first day of April began to erect the fort of Boonsborough, at a salt lick, about sixty yards from the river, on the S. side.
On the fourth day, the Indians killed one of our men. — We were busily employed in building this fort, until the fourteenth day of June following, without any farther opposition from the Indians ; and having finished the works, I returned to my family, on Clench.
In a short time, I proceeded to remove my family from Clench to this garrison ; where we arrived safe without any other difficulties than such as are common to this passage, my wife and daughter being the first white women that ever stood on the banks of Kentucke river.
John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and present State of Kentucke, etc. (Wilmington, 1784), Appendix, 50-60 passim.
135. Cold Water on an Ohio Colony (1770)
BY GOVERNOR THE EARL OF DUNMORE
Dunmore was an unpopular governor, and at the Revolution was driven out of his colony. — On the proposition to establish a new "back colony," see Winsor, Narrative and Critical History, V, 570-574; Franklin, Works (Sparks's ed.), V, 1-82.
I HAVE made it my business to enquire and find out the opinion of the people here, on the scheme in agitation of establishing a Colony on the Ohio ; I find, all who have any knowledge of such affairs concurr in condemning the project ; they alledge among a variety of reasons, that a Colony, at such an immense distance from the settled parts of America and from the Ocean, can neither benefit either those settled parts or the mother Country ; that they must become immediately a lost people to both, & all communication of a commercial nature with them, be a vain attempt, from the difficulty and expence attending the Transport of commodities to them, which would so enhance the price thereof, as to make it utterly impossible for them to purchase such commodities, for they could not raise a produce of any kind, that would answer so difficult and expensive transport back ; such Colony must therefore be their own Manufacturers ; and the great expence of maintaining Troops there for their protection be a dead weight on Governt, without the hopes of reaping any advantage hereafter. The scheme alarms extremely all the settled parts of America, the people of property being justly apprehensive of consequences that must inevitably ensue ; that such a Colony will only become a drain to them (now but thinly peopled) of an infinite number of the lower Class of inhabitants, who, the desire of novelty alone will induce to change their situation ; and the withdrawing of those Inhabitants will reduce the value of Lands in the provinces even to nothing, and make it impossible for the Patentees to pay the Quit Rents ; by which, it is evident, His Majty's interest must be very much prejudiced. Add to this the great probability, I may venture to say . . . certainty, that the attempting a settlement on the Ohio, will draw on, an Indian war ; it being well known, how ill affected the Ohio Indians have always been to our interest, and their jealousy of such a settlement, so near them, must be easily foreseen ; therefore, as such a war would affect, at least, the nearest provinces, as well as the new Colony. Your Lordp must expect those provinces, will not fail to make heavy complaints of the inattention of Governt to their interest. I cannot therefore, but think it my duty to recommend to your Lordp, not to suffer this scheme to have effect, at least, until your Lordp shall have, from the most substantial and clear proofs, be [en] made thoroughly sensible of its utility.
E. B. O'Callaghan, editor, Documents relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York (Albany, 1857), VIII, 253.
136. The Settlement of the Western Country (1772-1774)
BY REVEREND JOSEPH DODDRIDGE (1824)
Doddridge grew up in the pioneer settlements which he describes. He was an itinerant Methodist preacher, becoming later an Episcopalian minister and physician. —Bibliography: Roosevelt, Winning of the West, I-II; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History, V, 580-584.
THE Settlements on this side of the mountains commenced along the Monongahela, and between that river and the Laurel Ridge, in the year 1772. In the succeeding year they reached the Ohio river. The greater number of the first settlers came from the upper parts of the then colonies of Maryland, and Virginia. Braddock's trail, as it was called, was the rout by which the greater number of them crossed the mountains. A less number of them came by the way of Bedford and Fort Ligonier, the military road from Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh. They effected their removals on horses furnished with pack-saddles. This was the more easily done, as but few of these early adventurers into the wilderness were encumbered with much baggage.
Land was the object which invited the greater number of these people to cross the mountain, for as the saying then was, "It was to be had here for taking up ;" that is, building a cabin and raising a crop of grain, however small, of any kind, entitled the occupant to four hundred acres of land, and a preemption right to one thousand acres more ad joining, to be secured by a land office warrant. This right was to take effect if there happened to be so much vacant land or any part thereof, adjoining the tract secured by the settlement right.
At an early period, the government of Virginia appointed three commissioners to give certificates of settlement rights. These certificates together with the surveyor's plat were sent to the land office of the state, where they laid six months, to await any caveat which might be offered. If none was offered the patent then issued. There was at an early period of our settlements an inferior kind of land title denominated a "tomahawk right," which was made by deadening a few trees near the head of a spring, and marking the bark of some one, or more of them with the initials of the name of the person who made the improvement. I remember having seen a number of those "tomahawk rights," when a boy. For a long time many of them bore the names of those who made them. I have no knowledge of the efficacy of the tomahawk improvement, or whether it conferred any right whatever, unless followed by an actual settlement. These rights however were often bought and sold. Those who wished to make settlements on their favorite tracts of land, bought up the tomahawk improvements, rather than enter into quarrels with those who had made them. Other improvers of the land with a view to actual settlement, and who happened to be stout veteran fellows, took a very different course from that of purchasing the "tomahawk rigths [rights]." When annoyed by the claimants under those rights, they deliberately cut a few good hiccories, and gave them what was called in those days " a laced jacket," that is a sound whipping.
Some of the early settlers took the precaution to come over the mountains in the spring, leaving their families behind to raise a crop of corn, and then return and bring them out in the fall. This I should think was the better way. Others, especially those whose families were small, brought them with them in the spring. My father took the latter course. His family was but small and he brought them all with him. The indian meal which he brought over the mountain was expended six weeks too soon, so that for that length of time we had to live without bread. The lean venison and the breast of the wild turkies, we were taught to call bread. The flesh of the bear was denominated meat. This artifice did not succeed very well, after living in this way for some time we became sickly, the stomach seemed to be always empty, and tormented with a sense of hunger. I remember how narrowly the children watched the growth of the potatoe tops, pumpkin and squash vines, hoping from day to day, to get something to answer in the place of bread. How delicious was the taste of the young potatoes when we got them ! What a jubilee when we were permitted to pull the young corn for roasting ears. Still more so when it had acquired sufficient hardness to be made into johnny cakes by the aid of a tin grater. We then became healthy, vigorous and contented with our situation, poor as it was.
My father with a small number of his neighbours made their settlements in the spring of 1773. Tho they were in a poor and destitute situation, they nevertheless lived in peace ; but their tranquility was not of long continuance. Those most attrocious murders of the peaceable inoffensive Indians at Captina and Yellow creek, brought on the war of Lord Dunmore in the spring of the year 1774. Our little settlement then broke up. The women and children were removed to Morris' fort in Sandy creek glade some distance to the east of Uniontown. The Fort consisted of an assemblage on [of] small hovels, situated on the margin of a large and noxious marsh, the effluvia of which gave the most of the women and children the fever and ague. The men were compelled by necessity to return home, and risk the tomahawk and scalping knife of the Indians, in raising corn to keep their families from starvation, the succeeding winter. Those sufferings, dangers, and losses were the tribute we had to pay to that thirst for blood, which actuated those veteran murderers who brought the war upon us ! The memory of the sufferers in this war as well as that of their descendants still looks back upon them with regret, and abhorrence, and the page of history will consign their names to posterity, with the full weight of infamy they deserve. . . .
. . . our early land laws . . . allowed four hundred acres, and no more, to a settlement right. Many of our first settlers seemed to regard this amount of the surface of the earth, as the allotment of divine providence for one family, and believed that any attempt to get more would be sinful. Most of them, therefore contented themselves with that amount ; although they might have evaded the law, which allowed but one settlement right to any one individual, by taking out the title papers in the names of others, to be afterwards transferred to them, as if by purchase. Some few indeed pursued this practice ; but it was held in de[te] station.
My father, like many others, believed, that having secured his legal allotment, the rest of the country belonged of right, to those who choose to settle in it. There was a piece of vacant land adjoining his tract amounting to about two hundred acres. To this tract of land he had the preemption right, and accordingly secured it by warrant ; but his conscience would not permit him to retain it in his family, he therefore gave it to an apprentice lad whom he had raised in his house. This lad sold it to an uncle of mine for a cow and calf, and a wool hat.
Owing to the equal distribution of real property directed by our land laws, and the sterling integrity of our forefathers, in their observance of them, we have no districts of "sold land" as it is called, that is large tracts of land in the hands of individuals, or companies who neither sell nor improve them, as is the case in Lower Canada, and the north-western part of Pennsylvania. These unsettled tracts make huge blanks in the population of the country where they exist.
The division lines between those whose lands adjoined, were generally made in an amicable manner, before any survey of them was made, by the parties concerned. In doing this they were guided mainly by the tops of ridges and water courses, but particularly the former. Hence the greater number of farms in the western parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia bear a striking resemblance to an amphitheatre. The buildings occupy a low situation and the tops of the surrounding hills are the boundaries of the tract to which the family mansion belongs.
Our forefathers were fond of farms of this description, because, as they said, they are attended with this convenience "that every thing comes to the house down hill." In the hilly parts of the state of Ohio, the land having been laid off in an arbitrary manner, by straight parellel lines, without regard to hill or dale, the farms present a different aspect from those on the east side of the river opposite. There the buildings as frequently occupy the tops of the hills, as any other situation.
Our people had become so accustomed to the mode of "getting land for taking it up," that for a long time it was generally believed, that the land on the west side of the Ohio would ultimately be disposed of in that way. Hence almost the whole tract of country between the Ohio and Muskingum was parcelled out in tomahawk improvements ; but these latter improvers did not content themselves with a single four hundred acre tract a piece. Many of them owned a great number of tracts of the best land, and thus, in imagination, were as "Wealthy as a South sea dream." Many of the land jobbers of this class did not content themselves with marking the trees, at the usual height, with the initials of their names ; but climbed up the large beech trees, and cut the letters in their bark, from twenty to forty feet from the ground. To enable them to identify those trees, at a future period, they made marks on other trees around them as references.
Most of the early settlers considered their land as of little value, from an apprehension that after a few years cultivation it would lose its fertility, at least for a long time. I have often heard them say that such a field would bear so many crops and another so many, more or less than that. The ground of this belief concerning the short lived fertility of the land in this country, was the poverty of a great proportion of the land in the lower parts of Maryland and Virginia, which after producing a few crops, became unfit for use and was thrown out into commons.
In their unfavorable opinion of the nature of the soil of our country, our forefathers were utterly mistaken. The native weeds were scarcely destroyed, before the white clover, and different kinds of grass made their appearance. — These soon covered the ground, so as to afford pasture for the cattle, by the time the wood range was eaten out, as well as protect the soil from being washed away by drenching rains, so often injurious in hilly countries. . . .
The furniture for the table, for several years after the settlement of this country, consisted of a few pewter dishes, plates, and spoons ; but mostly of wooden bowls, trenchers and noggins. If these last were scarce, gourds and hard shelled squashes made up the deficiency.
The iron pots, knives, and forks were brought from the east side of the mountains along with the salt, and iron on pack horses.
These articles of furniture, corresponded very well with the articles of diet, on which they were employed. "Hog and hominy" were proverbial for the dish of which they were the component parts. Jonny cake and pone were at the outset of the settlements of the country, the only forms of bread in use for breakfast and dinner. At supper, milk and mush were the standard dish. When milk was not plenty, which was often the case, owing to the scarcity of cattle, or the want of proper pasture for them, the substantial dish of hominy had to supply the place of them ; mush was frequently eaten with sweetened water, molasses, bears oil, or the gravey of fried meat. . . .
The introduction of delft ware was considered by many of the backwoods people as a culpable innovation. It was too easily broken, and the plates of that ware dulled their scalping and clasp knives ; tea ware was too small for men ; they might do for women and children. Tea and coffee were only slops, which in the adage of the day "did not stick by the ribs." The idea was that they were designed only for people of quality, who do not labor, or the sick. A genuine backwoods man would have thought himself disgraced by showing a fondness for those slops. Indeed, many of them have to this day, very little respect for them.
Jos[eph] Doddridge, Notes, on the Settlement and Indian Wars, of the Western Parts of Virginia & Pennsylvania (Wellsburgh, Virginia, 1824), 99-112 passim.
137. How the Frontiers were Settled (1780)
BY FRANÇOIS JEAN, MARQUIS DE CHASTELLUX (1786)
(Translated by George Greive, 1787)
Chastellux was one of the French officers who served in America under Rochambeau; and his travels, made during the years 1780-1782, give us the impressions of an intelligent and sympathetic foreign observer. — Bibliography: Roosevelt, Winning of the West, II; Channing and Hart, Guide, § 150.
WHILE I was meditating on the great process of Nature, which employs fifty thousand years in rendering the earth habitable, a new spectacle, well calculated as a contrast to those which I had been contemplating, fixed my attention, and excited my curiosity : this was the work of a single man, who in the space of a year had cut down several arpents of wood, and had built himself a house in the middle of a pretty extensive territory he had already cleared. I saw, for the first time, what I have since observed a hundred times ; for, in fact, whatever mountains I have climbed, whatever forests I have traversed, whatever bye-paths I have followed, I have never travelled three miles without meeting with a new settlement, either beginning to take form, or already in cultivation. The following is the manner of proceeding in these improvements, or new settlements. Any man who is able to procure a capital of five or six hundred livres of our money, or about twenty-five pounds sterling, and who has strength and inclination to work, may go into the woods and purchase a portion of one hundred and fifty or two hundred acres of land, which seldom costs him more than a dollar or four shillings and six-pence an acre, a small part of which only he pays in ready money. There he conducts a cow, some pigs, or a full sow, and two indifferent horses which do not cost him more than four guineas each. To these precautions he adds that of having a provision of flour and cyder. Provided with this first capital, he begins by felling all the smaller trees, and some strong branches of the large ones : these he makes use of as fences to the first field he wishes to clear ; he next boldly attacks those immense oaks, or pines, which one would take for the ancient lords of the territory he is usurping ; he strips them of their bark, or lays them open all round with his axe. These trees mortally wounded, are the next spring robbed of their honors ; their leaves no longer spring, their branches fall, and their trunk becomes a hideous skeleton. This trunk still seems to brave the efforts of the new colonist ; but where there are the smallest chinks or crevices, it is surrounded by fire, and the flames consume what the iron was unable to destroy. But it is enough for the small trees to be felled, and the great ones to lose their sap. This object compleated, the ground is cleared ; the air and the sun begin to operate upon that earth which is wholly formed of rotten vegetables, and teems with the latent principles of production. The grass grows rapidly ; there is pasturage for the cattle the very first year ; after which they are left to increase, or fresh ones are brought, and they are employed in tilling a piece of ground which yields the enormous increase of twenty or thirty fold. The next year the same course is repeated ; when, at the end of two years, the planter has wherewithal to subsist, and even to send some articles to market : at the end of four or five years, he completes the payment of his land, and finds himself a comfortable planter. Then his dwelling, which at first was no better than a large hut formed by a square of the trunks of trees, placed one upon another, with the intervals filled by mud, changes into a handsome wooden house, where he contrives more convenient, and certainly much cleaner apartments than those in the greatest part of our small towns. This is the work of three weeks or a month. His first habitation, that of eight and forty hours. I shall be asked, perhaps, how one man, or one family can be so quickly lodged? I answer, that in America a man is never alone, never an isolated being. The neighbours, for they are every where to be found, make it a point of hospitality to aid the new farmer. A cask of cyder drank in common, and with gaiety, or a gallon of rum, are the only recompence for these services. Such are the means by which North America, which one hundred years ago was nothing but a vast forest, is peopled with three millions of inhabitants ; and such is the immense, and certain benefit of agriculture, that notwithstanding the war, it not only maintains itself where-ever it has been established, but it extends to places which seems the least favourable to its introduction. Four years ago one might have travelled ten miles in the woods I traversed, without seeing a single habitation.
Marquis [François Jean] de Chastellux, Travels in North-America, in theYears 1780, 1781, and 1782 (London, 1787), I, 44-48.