Pioneers of the Old Southwest

ht For

more recently assumed a political character. The Regulators were now in conflict with the authorities, because the frontier folk were suffering through excessive taxes, extortionate fees, dishonest land titl

ast of the mountains no longer contented Boone. Hunting and trapping were Boone's chief means of livelihood. In those days, deerskins sold for a dollar a skin to the traders at the Forks or in Hillsborough; beaver at about two dollars and a half, and otter at from three to five dollars. A pack-horse could carry a load of one hundred dressed deerskins, and, a

ority; nor was he ever guilty of the savagery which characterized much of the retaliatory warfare of that period when frenzied white men bettered the red man's instruction. In him, courage was illumined with tenderness and made equable by self-control. Yet, though he was no fiery zealot like the Ulstermen who were to follow hi

s prepared to depart, he was again delayed; this time by the arrival of a little son to whom was given the name of John. By September, however, even this latest addition to the party was ready for travel; and that month saw the Boones with a small caravan of families journeying towards Powell's Valley, when

him to old age. Except on his hunts and explorations, she went with him from one cabined home to another, always deeper into the wilds. There are no portraits of her.

orever on his

et are set to

r bare hand slants

closing the sleepers, a small war band of Shawanoes, who had been spying on Boone and his party, fell upon them and slaughtered them. Only one of Russell's slaves and a laborer escaped. The tragedy seems augmented by the fact that the point where the boys lost the trail and made their night quarters was hardly three miles from the main camp-to which an hour later came the two survivors with their gloomy tidings. Ter

Carolina went back to the Yadkin. Boone himself with his family accompanied Russell to the Clinch settlement, where he erected a temporary

which the red men were making ready must be briefly noted to help us form a just opinion of the deeds that followed. 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

righten the blades of their tomahawks and to await, not long, the opportunity to use them on casual hunters who carried in their kits the compass, the "land-stealer." Usually the surveying hunter was a borderer; and on him the tomahawk descended with an accelerated gusto. Private citizens also

s are described in Alvord's exhaustive work

the triumphal occupation of that vast territory from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico by the colonizing English. By seeking to compel all land purchase to be made through the Crown, it was designed likewise to protect the Indians from "whisky purchase," and to make impossible the transfer of their lands except with consent of the Indian Council, or full quota of headmen, whose joint action alone conveyed what the tribes considered to be legal title. Sales made according to this form, Sir William Johnson dec

o Company had meanwhile been merged into the Walpole Company. George Croghan, at Fort Pitt, was the Company's agent and as such was accused by Pennsylvania of favoring from ulterior motives the claims of Virginia. Hotheads in both colonies asseverated that the Indians were secretly being stirred up in connection with the boundary disputes. If it does not very clearly appear how an Indian rising would have settled the ownership of Fort Pitt, it i

t to Fort Pitt certain English traders resident in the Indian towns. The escort was fired on by militiamen under command of Connolly, who also issued a proclamation declaring a state of war to exist. Connolly, however, probably acted on his own initiativ

the British authorities but won only rebuke for his inconvenient activities. Insistent, however, Dunmore sent out parties of surveyors to fix the bounds of the soldiers' claims. James Harrod, Captain Thomas Bullitt, Hancock Taylor, and three McAfee brothers entered Kentucky, by the Ohio, under Dunmore's orders. John Floyd went in by the Kanawha as Washington's agent

ppi Valley in British Poli

yandots, and Cherokees were refusing all other exchange than rifles, ammunition, knives, and hatchets. White men were shot down in their fields from ambush.

outhwest Militia, instructing him to raise a respectable body of troops and "join me either at the mouth of the Great Kanawha or Wheeling, or such other part of the Ohio as may be most convenient for you

enbrier (West Virginia). Andrew Lewis summoned these officers to an expedition for "reducing our inveterate enemies to reason." Preston called for volunteers to take advantage of "the opportunity we have so long wished for... this useless People may now at last be Oblidged to abandon their country." These men were

e captain, however, declined; but in that wild circling line was one who was a white leader indeed. He was a sandy-haired boy of twenty-one of the bold race of English Virginians, rugged and of fiery countenance, with blue eyes intense of glance and deep set under a high brow that, while modeled for power, seemed threatened in its promise by the too sensitive chiseling of his lips. With every nerve straining for the fray, with thudding of feet and crooning of the blood song, he wheeled with those other m

gave to the bloody encounters between small parties of whites and Indians, which followed on that war dance and scalping, during the

ducated man who had distinguished himself as a soldier with Forbes in 1758. That the Indians came in amity and apprehended no treachery was proved by the presence of the women. Gibson's wife carried her half-caste baby in her shawl. The disreputable traders plied their guests with drink to the point of intoxication and then murdered them. King shot the first man and, when he fell, cut h

f, he and Dunmore had won over the Delaware warriors. In the Cherokee councils, Oconostota demanded that the treaty of peace signed in 1761 be kep

nd had already taken some white scalps, he repaired to the place where the Mingos were holding their war council to exert his powers for peace. There, in presence of the warriors, after swaying them from their purpose by those oratorical gifts which gave him his influence and his renown, he took the war hatchet that had already killed, and buried it in proof that vengeance was appeased. Upon this scene there entered a Mingo from Yellow Creek with the news of the murders committed there by the three traders

services of a man whose endurance, speed, and woodcraft were equal to those of any Indian scout afoot. Through Colonel Preston, his orders were conveyed to Daniel Boone, for Boone'

oving under cover across "the Dark and Bloody Ground" to surround the various groups of surveyors still at large and to exterminate them. Boone made his journey successfully. He found John Floyd, who was surveying for Washington; he sped up to where Harrod and his band were building c

ayed in getting out of th

ys that Boone has more [influence] than any man now disengaged; and you know what Boone has done for me... for which reason I love the man." Even the border, it would seem, had its species of pacifists who were willing to let others take risks for t

ard the settlement. Presently he was put in command of Moore's Fort in Clinch Valley, and his "diligence" received official approbation. A little later the inhabitants of

good, it is j

is part if his L

ours, we'll li

d glass to drink

earest the hearts of his hearers-in this case, Land! Presumably his ditty was com

nt Pleasant at the junction of the Great Kanawha with the Ohio. Dunmore in the meantime had led his forces into O

n to the royal party, resolved: "The most cordial thanks of the people of this colony are a tribute justly due to our worthy Governor, Lord Dunmore, for his truly noble, wise, and spirited conduct which at once evinces his Excellency's attention to the true interests of this colony, and a zeal in the executive department which no dangers can divert, or difficulties hinder, from achieving the most important services

the chance that three or four of the frontiersmen, who had risen before daybreak to hunt, came upon the Indians creeping towards the camp. Shots were exchanged. An Indian and a white man dropped. The firing roused the camp. Three hundred men in two lines under Charles Lewis and William Fleming sallied forth expecting to engage the vanguard of the enemy but encountered almost the whole force of from eight hundred to a thousand Indians before the rest of the army could come into action.

jor Arthur Campbell, Benjamin Logan, Anthony Bledsoe, and Simon Kenton. With Dunmore's force were Adam Stephen, who distinguished himself at the Brandywine, George Rogers Clark, John Stuart, already noted through th

ction exhorting their men to "lie close, shoot well, be strong, and fight." The Shawanoes ran up to the muzzles of the English guns, di

ng them the Shawano chief, Puck-e-shin-wa, father of a famous son, Tecumseh. 1 Yet they were unwilling to accept defeat. When they heard that Dunmore was now marching overland to cut them off from the

mentary History

ts to pass unmolested. In this treaty the Mingos refused to join, and a detachment of Dunmore's troops made a punitive expedition to their towns. Some discord arose

fetch him, but Logan refused to come to the treaty grounds. He sent by Gibs

sed and said, "Logan is the friend of the white men." I had even thought to have lived with you but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not even sparing my women and children. There remains not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living

thought is Indian and relates to the first article of the Indian's creed, namely, to share his food with the needy. "There remains not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature" is a truly Indian lament. Evidently the final four lines of the speech are the most literally translated, for they have the form and the primitive rhythmic beat which

linch and Holston valleys, were to return by the Kentucky River, while those from the upper valley would take the shorter way up Sandy Creek. To keep them in p

ed in deerskins colored black, and his hair plaited and bobbed up." It was Daniel Boone-now, by popular demand, Captain Boone-just "discharged from Service," since the valley forts needed