Boone's Wilderness Road

by Archer Butler Hulbert

While the Carolinians had been sweeping into the lower Cherokee country, the Virginia troops had been assembling at the Long Island of the Holston under their leader Colonel William Christian. Their campaign against the Overhill towns was slowly formed here on the little westward pathway, and it was not until the first of October that all the contributions of men and arms from the settlements between Fort Watauga and the Virginia frontier were received. The advance, by way of Big Island of the Holston, was slow but determined—each encampment being made absolutely secure against surprise. The Indians, learning of the strength of Christian’s army, knew better than to resist. They retired without a struggle and the borderers reached the heart of the Overhill country on the fifth day of November. Here they ravaged, burned, and razed to their hearts’ content, until a deputation imploring peace came from the broken tribes. In this action old Dragging Canoe would have no part but stole away with a few followers toward the Chickamauga. Christian agreed to a treaty which definitely marked out the boundary line between the Indians and the whites, and then returned home leaving a garrison near the Kentucky path by the Holston. In the words of Roosevelt, who of all writers has done this campaign most justice: “The Watauga people and the westerners generally were the real gainers by the war. Had the Watauga settlements been destroyed, they would no longer have covered the Wilderness Road to Kentucky; and so Kentucky must perforce have been abandoned. But the followers of Robertson and Sevier stood stoutly for their homes; not one of them fled over the mountains. The Cherokees had been so roughly handled that for several years they did not again go to war as a body; and this not only gave the settlers a breathing time, but also enabled them to make themselves so strong that when the struggle was renewed they could easily hold their own. The war was thus another and important link in the chain of events by which the west was won; and had any link in the chain snapped during these early years, the peace of 1783 would probably have seen the trans-Alleghany country in the hands of a non-American power.” If the holding of this pathway was of such moment the value of the pathway is plainly understood.

Turning now to the end of Boone’s Road, it will be necessary to review briefly the Revolutionary War in the “far” West; though in many of the campaigns the road itself played no part, in a large and genuine sense it was the pilgrims of Boone’s Road who fought the most important battles of the Revolution in the West.

Early in the struggle in the West, far-sighted ones saw signs of the growing despicable alliance of the savages to British interests; and before the bloody year of 1778 opened, it was only a question of how much England wanted of the savage allies who were crowded about their forts along the lakes. It is a terrible blot on the history of British rule in America, that when driven to face the same situation, English officers in the West used every means of retaliation for the use of which they so roundly condemned French officials a quarter of a century before. American officers employed Indians as guides and scouts, and were guilty of provoking inter-tribal war; but they did not pay Indians for bringing in British scalps, or praise them for their murderous successes and equip them for further service. As a brave American officer said, “Let this reproach remain on them”—and the people of the West will never forget the reproach, nor forgive! They remember, and always will remember, the burning words of Washington written more than ten years after the close of the Revolution: “All the difficulties we encounter with the Indians, their hostilities, the murder of helpless women and children along all our frontiers, results from the conduct of the agents of Great Britain in this country.” There are today, in hundreds of homes of descendants of the pioneers in Kentucky, memories of the inhuman barbarities of British officers during the Revolution; these will never be forgotten, and will never fail to prejudice generations yet unborn. The reproach will remain on them.

At the outbreak of the war, chiefs of the Indian nations were invited to Pittsburg, where the nature of the struggle was explained to them in the following parable:

“Suppose a father had a little son whom he loved and indulged while young, but growing up to be a youth, began to think of having some help from him; and making up a small pack, he bid him carry it for him. The boy cheerfully takes this pack up, following his father with it. The father finding the boy willing and obedient, continues in this way; and as the boy grows stronger, so the father makes the pack in proportion larger; yet as long as the boy is able to carry the pack, he does so without grumbling. At length, however, the boy having arrived at manhood, while the father is making up the pack for him, in comes a person of an evil disposition, and, learning who was to be the carrier of the pack, advises the father to make it heavier, for surely the son is able to carry a larger pack. The father, listening rather to the bad adviser than consulting his own judgment and the feelings of tenderness, follows the advice of the hard-hearted adviser, and makes up a heavy load for his son to carry. The son, now grown up, examining the weight of the load he is to carry, addresses the father in these words: ‘Dear Father, this pack is too heavy for me to carry, do pray lighten it; I am willing to do what I can, but am unable to carry this load.’ The father’s heart having by this time become hardened, and the bad adviser calling to him, ‘Whip him if he disobeys,’ and he refusing to carry the pack, the father orders his son to take up the pack and carry it off or he will whip him, and already takes up a stick to beat him. ‘So,’ says the son, ‘am I to be served thus for not doing what I am unable to do? Well, if entreaties avail nothing with you, Father, and it is to be decided by blows, whether or not I am able to carry a pack so heavy, then I have no other choice left me, but that of resisting your unreasonable demand by my strength, and thus by striking each other learn who is the strongest.’”

The Indians were urged to become neutral in the struggle that was opening. Impossible as such a course would have been to men who loved war better than peace, certain tribes promised to maintain neutrality. In a few months, however, most of the nations were in open or secret alliance with British officers. Only the better element of the Delaware nation, led by Captain White Eyes, became attached to the American cause. England was always handicapped in her use of the American Indian, because of the want of men who could successfully exert control over him. Even when the forts of the French in the West passed into British possession, Frenchmen were retained in control, since no Englishman could so well rule the savages who made the forts their rendezvous. The beginning of the successful employment of the Indians against the growing Virginian empire south of the Ohio, and against the multiplying cabins and forts of the Long Knives, may loosely be said to have begun in the spring of 1778 when three northern renegades, Simon Girty, Matthew Elliott, and Alexander McKee, eluded the continental General Hand at Pittsburg and took service under Lieutenant-governor Hamilton at Detroit. Bred to border warfare, and well known among the Indians from the Susquehanna to the Missouri, these three men were the “most effective tools for the purposes of border warfare” that the British could have secured. Hamilton immediately began to plan the invasion of Pennsylvania and the conquest of Pittsburg. The campaign was condemned by his superiors in the East, and was forgotten by its originator—when the news of a bold invasion of his own territory by a Virginian army suddenly reached his ears.

The Transylvania Company came silently but suddenly to an end when the Kentuckians elected George Rogers Clark and Gabriel John Jones members of the Virginian assembly, for the assembly erected the county of Kentucky out of the land purchased by Henderson at Fort Watauga in 1775. Upon bringing this about, Clark, a native of Virginia and a hero of Dunmore’s War, returned to Kentucky nourishing greater plans. With clear eyes he saw that the increasing affiliation of Indian and British interests meant that England, even though she might be unsuccessful in the East, could keep up an interminable and disastrous warfare “along the rear of the colonies,” as long as she held forts on the northern edge of the Black Forest. Clark sent spies northward, who gained information confirming his suspicions; and then he hurried eastward, with his bold plan of conquering the “strongholds of British and Indian barbarity”—Kaskaskia, Vincennes, and Detroit.

He came at a fortunate time. The colonies were rejoicing over the first great victory of the early war, Saratoga. Hope, everywhere, was high. From Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia, Clark received two orders, one of which was to attack the British post Kaskaskia. He at once set out for Pittsburg to raise, in the West (where both Dunmore and Lewis raised their armies), troops for the most brilliant military achievement in western history. Descending the Ohio to Kentucky, where he received reënforcements, Clark marched silently through the forests—with one hundred and thirty-five chosen men—to Kaskaskia, which he took in utter surprise July 4, 1778. “Keep on with your merriment,” he said to revelers whom he surprised at a dance, “but remember you dance under Virginia, not Great Britain.” Clark brought the news of the alliance recently made between France and the United States into the Illinois country and used it with telling effect. A French priest at Vincennes raised a Virginian flag over that fort, telling the inhabitants and the Indians that their “French Father had come to life.” In October Virginia incorporated the “County of Illinois” within her western empire—the first portion of the land north of the Ohio River to come under the administration of one of the states of the Union.

Contemporaneously with Clark’s stirring conquest, an expedition was raised at Pittsburg to march against the Indians in the neighborhood of the British fort at Sandusky—possibly to counteract the rumored attempt to invade Pennsylvania, by Hamilton at Detroit. Troops and supplies were to be assembled at Fort Pitt, where the famous route of Bouquet was to be followed toward the lakes. The expedition was put in charge of General Lachlan McIntosh. Distressing delays made the half-hearted Indians who were to guide the army, chafe; and McIntosh started before his stores arrived, fearing that longer delay would alienate his friendly Indians, among whom was the Delaware, White Eyes, now turned from a neutral course. At the mouth of the Beaver River McIntosh built the fort which bears his name—the first fort built by the Americans on the northern side of the Ohio. Advancing westward over Bouquet’s tri-trail track with twelve hundred men, he reached the Muskingum (Tuscarawas) River in fourteen days, arriving November 19, 1778, where he erected Fort Laurens.

But Lieutenant-governor Hamilton, learning of Clark’s seizure of Kaskaskia and the treachery of the fickle inhabitants of Vincennes, set about to reconquer Illinois. Departing from Detroit on a beautiful October day, the expedition descended the Detroit River and entered the Maumee. The weather changed and it was seventy-one days before the American Captain Helm at Vincennes surrendered his wretched fort and became a prisoner of war. Hamilton was unable to push on to Kaskaskia because of the lack of provisions, and sat down to watch the winter out where he was. Thus the spectacular year 1778 closed—Clark at Kaskaskia, watching his antagonist feasting at Vincennes; McIntosh’s little guard at Fort Laurens undergoing continual harassing and siege. In the East the evacuation of Philadelphia, the battle of Monmouth, and the terrible Wyoming massacre were the events of the year.