Boone's Wilderness Road

by Archer Butler Hulbert

KENTUCKY IN THE REVOLUTION

History was fast being made in Kentucky when the Revolutionary struggle reached the crisis in 1775 at Concord and Lexington. South of the Ohio River Virginia’s new empire was filling with the conquerors of the West. The Mississippi Valley counted a population of thirteen thousand, three thousand being the population of New Orleans. St. Louis, in Spanish possession, was carrying on a brisk trade with the Indians on the Missouri. Vincennes, the British port on the Wabash, had a population of four hundred whites. Detroit, the metropolis of the West, numbered fifteen hundred inhabitants, more than double the number in the dashing days of Gladwin only a decade before. The British flag also waved at Kaskaskia on the Mississippi, and at Sandusky. This fringe of British forts on the north was separated from the American metropolis of the West, Pittsburg, and from the first fortresses built in Kentucky, by leagues of forests, dark as when Bouquet pierced them; and filled with sullen Indian nations, awed for the time being by Dunmore’s invasion, but silently biding their time to avenge themselves for the loss of the meadow lands of Ken-ta-kee.

Such was the condition of affairs when, in April 1775, the open struggle for independence of the American colonies was roughly precipitated at Lexington. It might seem to the casual observer that the colonists, who were now hastening by way of Boone’s Wilderness Road into the Virginian Kentucky, could not feel the intense jealousy for American interests which was felt by the patriots in the East. On the contrary, there is evidence that these first pioneers into the West had a profound knowledge of the situation; and a sympathy for the struggling patriots, which was enhanced even by the distance which separated them, and the hardships they had endured. Not a few of them, too, had known personally of the plundering British officials and the obnoxious taxes. It is the proud boast of Kentuckians that in the center of their beautiful Blue Grass country was erected the first monument to the first dead of the Revolution. A party of pioneers heard the news of the Battle of Lexington while sitting about their camp fire. Long into the night the rough men told and retold the news, and before morning named the new settlement they were to make, Lexington, in honor of New England’s dead.

It was not at all evident at first what the war was going to amount to in the West. Scarcely more was known in the West of the Revolutionary War than had been known two decades before of the French and Indian War. But at the outset it was plain that there was to be a tremendous struggle on both sides to gain the allegiance, as the British desired, of the Indian nations which lay between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. For two years the struggle in the East went on, engrossing the entire attention of both parties. During 1776 and 1777 the history of the West is merely the continuation of the bloody story of the years which led up to Dunmore’s campaign, like the savage attack on Wheeling, in September, 1777. Slowly the Indians forgot Lewis’s crushing victory at Point Pleasant, and their solemn pledges at Camp Charlotte; and were raiding the feeble Kentucky posts with undiminished relish, or giving the Long Knives plenty of provocation for the barbarities of which the latter are known to have been guilty.

The opening scene of the Revolutionary War in the West was the most important phase of the war in the history of Boone’s Wilderness Road; for at the very outset the question was decided once for all whether or not that thin, long, priceless path to Kentucky through the Watauga settlement was to be held or lost. If it could not be held, there was no hope left for the brave men who had gone to found that western empire beyond the Cumberland Mountains. With their line of retreat cut in two by the southern Indians, they were left without hope of succor or success: for the success of their enterprise depended upon the inspiration their advance gave to those behind them. None would come if the Wautauga settlement did not survive.

The British agents among the Southern Indians—the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws and Chickasaws—precipitated a quick and early struggle along this historic pathway by goading the Indians into a murderous attack upon the Watauga settlement. The Cherokees who had sold the Transylvania Company its lands, were the most easily incited to war, and fifty packhorse loads of ammunition scattered through their towns in those deep mountain valleys where the two Carolinas and Georgia meet, determined an outburst in July, 1776. Straight north from them lay the rude beginnings of civilization on the headwaters of the Tennessee, and further “in” was the frontier line of Virginia. The headquarters of the Watauga settlement may be said to have been Fort Watauga, commanded by the heroes Robertson and Sevier; here Boone had made the treaty with the Cherokees for Richard Henderson, a trifle over a year ago. Eaton’s, Evan Shelby’s, John Shelby’s, Campbell’s, and the Wommack forts were the important way stations on this path from Virginia to Kentucky. Two Indian parties larger than the others made for Fort Watauga and Eaton’s Station, and the defenders of the latter post, learning from their scouts that a formidable array under the notorious Dragging Canoe was coming, resolved to give them a hot, unexpected welcome. Accordingly, on the morning of July twentieth nearly two hundred brown forms could have been seen stealing away from the fort in two thin lines half lost in the fog toward the open land known as “the Flats” near the “Long Island” of the Holston. In the march an advance party of a score of savages was met and put to flight. No other signs of the enemy could be discovered and the men started back to their fort at the end of the day.

Dragging Canoe, not less audacious than his foes, awaited his time, and when the whites were marching homeward, came down upon them, his savages forming a wedge-shaped line of battle. Instantly the borderers fell back to the right and left, and with a desperate quietness awaited the onslaught. The Indian plan of rushing the whites off their feet by an overwhelming charge failed; the borderers settled deeper into the ground and met the rush and dashed the savage line into fragments. One charge—and all was over. There was no recovering from this form of attack for untrained soldiery, and the assaulting band instantly broke and fled. This battle of Long Island Flats was the first of the series of victories for the Watauga pioneers; its importance can hardly be measured today.

Its best fruit was that it brought other victories to the encouraged Wataugans. On the same day the other Indian horde invested and assailed Fort Watauga at dawn. Only about two score men were at home to defend a large number of women and children, but they were fully equal to the emergency and with a frightful burst of fire drove back the line of savages which could just be seen advancing at that hour when Indians invariably made their attacks—the early dawn. Robertson was senior officer in command, and Sevier his brave assistant. The latter, having learned of the Indian uprising, characteristically wrote a message to the people far away on the Virginia border to look well to their homes—never even asking that assistance be sent to the much more feeble and vastly more endangered Watauga settlement on the Kentucky road.

Elsewhere the border warfare was being waged with varying fortune; a small band of Georgian frontiersmen invaded the Cherokee country[20*] in the hope of capturing a notorious British agent, Cameron; it suffered heavily through the faithlessness of the Cherokees. The whole southern frontier was aroused, and plans for dashes into the Cherokee country were made but could not be forwarded simultaneously. Yet Cameron and his Tories and Indians acted in unison and brought sudden desolation into South Carolina. The force of the blow was broken by the brave Colonel Andrew Williamson, who, gathering over a thousand volunteers near the end of July began the first important invasion of the Cherokee country. Near Eseneka, the Cherokee town, the Carolinians found Cameron and won a costly victory. After some internal dissensions the little army got on its mettle and went steadily forward to wipe out the lower Cherokee towns, which was completely accomplished by the middle of August. Scarcity of ammunition, only, kept Williamson from attacking the middle towns.

This task fell to the lot of the second expedition into the Cherokee country. This was a joint campaign waged by North and South Carolina, and Virginia, each to furnish two thousand men. The North Carolinians under Rutherford were earliest in the field. This officer with twenty-four hundred men left the head of the Catawba and opened “Rutherford’s Trace” leading to Swananoa Gap in the Blue Ridge and on to the middle Cherokee towns by way of Warrior’s Ford of French Broad and Mount Cowee. The middle towns were destroyed, and, uniting with Williamson, the two bodies of men swept over the Cherokee valley towns until “all the Cherokee settlements west of the Appalachians had been destroyed from the face of the earth, neither crops nor cattle being left.”