While these disputes as to the government of the new communities were in progress an additional danger threatened the pioneers. For a whole year the British had been plying the various Indian tribes from the lakes to the gulf with presents, supplies, and ammunition. In the Northwest bounties had actually been offered for American scalps. During the spring of 1776 plans were concerted, chiefly through Stuart and Cameron, British agents among the Southern Indians, for uniting the Loyalists and the Indians in a crushing attack upon the Tennessee settlements and the back country of North Carolina. Already the frontier of South Carolina had passed through the horrors of Indian uprising; and warning of the approaching invasion had been mercifully sent the Holston settlers by Atta-kulla-kulla's niece, Nancy Ward, the "Pocahontas of the West"—doubtless through the influence of her daughter, who loved Joseph Martin. The settlers, flocking for refuge into their small stockaded forts, waited in readiness for the dreaded Indian attacks, which were made by two forces totaling some seven hundred warriors.
On July 20th, warned in advance of the approach of the Indians, the borderers, one hundred and seventy in all, marched in two columns from the rude breastwork, hastily thrown up at Eaton's Station, to meet the Indians, double their own number, led by The Dragging Canoe. The scouts surprised one party of Indians, hastily poured in a deadly fire, and rushed upon them with such impetuous fury that they fled precipitately. Withdrawing now toward their breastwork, in anticipation of encountering there a larger force, the backwoodsmen suddenly found themselves attacked in their rear and in grave danger of being surrounded. Extending their own line under the direction of Captain James Shelby, the frontiersmen steadily met the bold attack of the Indians, who, mistaking the rapid extension of the line for a movement to retreat, incautiously made a headlong onslaught upon the whites, giving the war-whoop and shouting: "The Unakas are running!" In the ensuing hot conflict at close quarters, in some places hand to hand, the Indians were utterly routed—The Dragging Canoe being shot down, many warriors wounded, and thirteen left dead upon the field.
On the day after Thompson, Cocke, Shelby, Campbell, Madison, and their men were thus winning the battle of the Long Island "flats," Robertson, Sevier, and their little band of forty-two men were engaged in repelling an attack, begun at sunrise, upon the Watauga fort near the Sycamore Shoals. This attack, which was led by Old Abraham, proved abortive; but as the result of the loose investment of the log fortress, maintained by the Indians for several weeks, a few rash venturers from the fort were killed or captured, notably a young boy who was carried to one of the Indian towns and burned at the stake, and the wife of the pioneer settler, William Been, who was rescued from a like fate by the intercession of the humane and noble Nancy Ward. It was during this siege, according to constant tradition, that a frontier lass, active and graceful as a young doe, was pursued to the very stockade by the fleet-footed savages. Seeing her plight, an athletic young officer mounted the stockade at a single leap, shot down the foremost of the pursuers, and leaning over, seized the maiden by the hands and lifted her over the stockade. The maiden who sank breathless into the arms of the young officer, John Sevier, was "Bonnie Kate Sherrill"—who, after the fashion of true romance, afterward became the wife of her gallant rescuer.
While the Tennessee settlements were undergoing the trials of siege and attack, the settlers on the frontiers of Rowan were falling beneath the tomahawk of the merciless savage. In the first and second weeks of July large forces of Indians penetrated to the outlying settlements; and in two days thirty-seven persons were killed along the Catawba River. On July 13th, the bluff old soldier of Rowan, General Griffith Rutherford, reported to the council of North Carolina that "three of our Captains are killed and one wounded"; and that he was setting out that day with what men he could muster to relieve Colonel McDowell, ten men, and one hundred and twenty women and children, who were "besieged in some kind of a fort." Aroused to extraordinary exertions by these daring and deadly blows, the governments of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia instituted a joint campaign against the Cherokees. It was believed that, by delivering a series of crushing blows to the Indians and so conclusively demonstrating the overwhelming superiority of the whites, the state governments in the Old Southwest would convince the savages of the futility of any attempt ever again to oppose them seriously.
Within less than a week after sending his despatches to the council Rutherford set forth at the head of twenty-five hundred men to protect the frontiers of North Carolina and to overwhelm the foe. Leading the South Carolina army of more than eighteen hundred men, Colonel Andrew Williamson directed his attack against the lower Cherokee towns; while Colonel Samuel Jack led two hundred Georgians against the Indian towns at the heads of the Chattahoochee and Tugaloo Rivers. Assembling a force of some sixteen hundred Virginians, Colonel William Christian rendezvoused in August at the Long Island of Holston, where his force was strengthened by between three and four hundred North Carolinians under Colonels Joseph Williams and Love, and Major Winston. The various expeditions met with little effective opposition on the whole, succeeding everywhere in their design of utterly laying waste the towns of the Cherokees. One serious engagement occurred when the Indians resolutely challenged Rutherford's advance at the gap of the Nantahala Mountains. Indian women—heroic Amazons disguised in war-paint and armed with the weapons of warriors and the courage of despair—fought side by side with the Indian braves in the effort to arrest Rutherford's progress and compass his defeat. More than forty frontiersmen fell beneath the deadly shots of this truly Spartan band before the final repulse of the savages.
The most picturesque figures in this overwhelmingly successful campaign were the bluff old Indian-fighter, Griffith Rutherford, wearing "a tow hunting shirt, dyed black, and trimmed with white fringe" as a uniform; Captain Benjamin Cleveland, a rude paladin of gigantic size, strength, and courage; Lieutenant William Lenoir (Le Noir), the gallant and recklessly brave French Huguenot, later to win a general's rank in the Revolution; and that militant man of God, the Reverend James Hall, graduate of Nassau Hall, stalwart and manly, who carried a rifle on his shoulder and, in the intervals between the slaughter of the savages, preached the gospel to the vindictive and bloodthirsty backwoodsmen. Such preaching was sorely needed on that campaign—when the whites, maddened beyond the bounds of self-control by the recent ghastly murders, gladly availed themselves of the South Carolina bounty offered for fresh Indian scalps. At times they exultantly displayed the reeking patches of hair above the gates of their stockades; at others, with many a bloody oath, they compelled their commanders either to sell the Indian captives into slavery or else see them scalped on the spot. Twenty years afterward Benjamin Hawkins relates that among Indian refugees in extreme western Georgia the children had been so terrorized by their parents' recitals of the atrocities of the enraged borderers in the campaign of 1776, that they ran screaming from the face of a white man.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
The Colonization of the Cumberland
March 31, 1780. Set out this day, and after running some distance, met with Col. Richard Henderson, who was running the line between Virginia and North Carolina. At this meeting we were much rejoiced. He gave us every information we wished, and further informed us that he had purchased a quantity of corn in Kentucky, to be shipped at the Falls of Ohio, for the use of the Cumberland settlement. We are now without bread, and are compelled to hunt the buffalo to preserve life.