Thus began the true American aristocracy, the aristocracy of ability. The dashing Cavalier, your high-churchman from England, was not the first over the Appalachians. It was the Protestant, the Quaker, the dissenter, the independent who led the way into another world and into another order of things.
Of this hardy folk who left home when yet there was no need of so doing, and who purposed never to come back from the land they were to discover,—types of that later proverb-making Western man who “came to stay,”—let us seek out one where there were many, some distant Phenician, some master of ways and means, some captain of his time. One man and one community may serve as typical of this epoch.
In 1779 one James Robertson, of the Watauga settlements of North Carolina, a steadfast man, heard certain voices that called him to the West. James Robertson, the steadfast, forming his company for this uncertain, perilous enterprise, said: “We are the advance guard of a civilization, and our way is across the continent.” Simple words,—yet that was in 1779!
Now, for the building of this one town, the town that is now the city of Nashville, and the capital of Tennessee, this leader had gathered three hundred and eighty persons, men, women, and children. All the women and children, one hundred and thirty in number, in charge of a few men, went by boat, scow, pirogue, and canoe, in the winter-time, down the bold waters of the Holston and Tennessee rivers. The rest traveled as best they might over the five hundred miles of “trace” across Kentucky. Of this whole party two hundred and twenty-six got through alive.
The boat party had many hundreds of miles of unknown and dangerous waters to travel, and the journey took them three months, a time longer than it now requires to travel around the world. They ran thirty miles of rapids on the shoals of the Tennessee, pursued and fired upon by Cherokees. Of this division of the party only ninety-seven got through alive, and nine of these were wounded. One was drowned, one died of natural causes and was buried, and the rest were killed by the Indians.
THE DOWN-RIVER MEN.
Their voyage was indeed “without a parallel in modern history.” Among those who survived the hardships of the journey was Rachel Donelson, later the wife of Andrew Jackson.
The path of empire in America, the path of corn and venison, was a highway that never ran backward. These men would never leave this country now that they had taken it. But what a tax was this that the barbaric land demanded of them! In November of 1780, less than a year after the party was first organized, there were only one hundred and thirty-four persons left alive out of the original three hundred and eighty, but in the settlement itself there had not been a natural death. The Indians killed these settlers, and the settlers killed the Indians. Death and wounds meant nothing to the adults. The very infants learned a stoic hardihood. Out of two hundred and fifty-six survivors, thirty-nine were killed in sixty days. Out of two hundred and seventeen survivors, the next season saw but one hundred and thirty-four left.
The spring of 1781 found only seventy persons left alive. But when the vote was cast whether to stay or return, not one man voted to give up the fight. In that West corn was worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel, and in its raising the rifle was as essential as the plow. Powder and lead were priceless. Man and woman together, fearless, changeless, they held the land, giving back not one inch of the west-bound distance they had gained!