In 1791 there were only fifteen persons left alive out of the three hundred and eighty that made this American migration. There had been only one natural death among them. In such a settlement there was no such thing as a hero, because all were heroes. Each man was a master of weapons, and incapable of fear. No fiction ever painted a hero like to any one of these. One man, after having been shot and stabbed many times, was scalped alive, and jested at it. A little girl was scalped alive, and lived to forget it. An army of Indians assaulted the settlement, and fifteen men and thirty women beat them off. Mrs. Sally Buchanan, a forgotten heroine, molded bullets all one night during an Indian attack, and on the next morning gave birth to a son.
This was the ancestral fiber of the West. What time had folk like these for powder-puff or ruffle, for fan or jeweled snuff-box? Their garb was made from the skin of the deer, the fox, the wolf. Their shoes were of hide, their beds were made of the robes of the bear and buffalo. They laid the land under tribute. Yet, so far from mere savagery was the spirit that animated these men that in ten years after they had first cut away the forest they were founding a college and establishing a court of law. Read this forgotten history, one chapter and a little one, in the history of the West, and then turn, if you like, to the chapters of fiction in an older world. You have your choice of lace or elkskin.
| [3] | The Century Magazine, November, 1901. |
| [4] | Kephart. |
CHAPTER VI
THE MISSISSIPPI, AND INDEPENDENCE[[5]]
There was a generation of this down-stream transportation, and it built up the first splendid, aggressive population of the West—a population that continued to edge farther outward and farther down-stream. The settlement at Nashville, the settlements of Kentucky, were at touch with the Ohio River, the broad highway that led easily down to the yet broader highway of the Mississippi, that great, mysterious stream so intimately connected with American history and American progress. It was easy to get to New Orleans, but hard to get back over the Alleghanies. Therefore, out of the mere fact that water runs downhill, arose one of the earliest and most dangerous political problems this country ever knew.
The riflemen of Sevier and Robertson saved Tennessee and Kentucky to the Union only that they might well-nigh be lost again to Spain. The Indian fighters of the West knew little how the scales trembled in the balance for the weak young government of the United States of America, lately come into place as an independent power. The authorities at Washington dared not be too firm with France or Spain, or even, with England. Diplomacy juggled across seas, while the riflemen of the West fought for the opening of that Great River which meant everything for them.
The league of Spain and the Cherokees kept up covert warfare against these early Westerners. The stark, staunch men of Robertson and Sevier hunted down the red fighters and killed them one by one over all the Western hunting-grounds and corn-grounds; and then they rebelled against Washington, and were for setting up a world of their own. They sent in a petition, a veritable prayer from the wilderness, the first words of complaint ever wrung from those hardy men.