The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson

by Emerson Hough

It may profit us at this stage of our study to turn for a time from the individual frontiersman and settler, and to take up in more concrete form some of the things that these frontiersmen and settlers did in combination—some of the phases of the Western civilization as affected by the ever present problems of transportation.

The question of geography, which is the same as to say the question of transportation, led to more than one attempt to set up entirely independent governments west of the Allegheny Divide, just as it also much affected the destinies of the unborn states of the Northwest Territory—Asenesipia, Pelesipia, Cherronesus, and others. Of these divers attempts at secession, some were honestly based upon a wish for commercial development that did not seem possible in connection with a government situated far to the east, at the end of impassable mountain roads. Other attempts were mere personal intrigues, carried on with a view to personal advantage, as was the effort of the unspeakable Wilkinson to alienate the population of the Mississippi valley from the standards of the government at Washington. There were other attempts, honest attempts at secession, or more properly speaking, segregation, on the part of considerable communities whose interests, under the conditions of the time, seemed far from identical with those of the tidewater population.

Chief among the records of these movements for an honest Western secession stands the story of the famous Free State of Franklin—the story of an enterprise that to-day we ignorantly call a chimera, an absurdity or worse, though to the men concerned in it the project seemed not less than necessary, just and right. The history of this state, which was born of bad roads and populated by a new breed of Americans, fits nicely with our theme at this stage of its progress.

As to the extent of this state that once was, but is no more, we discover that it once included fifteen counties of Virginia, six of West Virginia, one-third of the state of Kentucky, one-half of Tennessee, two-thirds of Alabama and one-quarter of Georgia, as those states exist to-day. Wherefore it may seem that John Sevier and his friends were dealing with a considerable empire of their own, one much larger than most folk of to-day realize or understand.

It was one of those first republics west of the Alleghanies, one of those first instances of spontaneous self-government that have so often proved the vital strength of the restless yet self-respecting and law-abiding American character. How the men of the Free State of Franklin loved their little empire, how they defended it against the savages that pressed upon its borders, how they held the soil on which they had set the standard of west-bound civilization—all that is a legitimate part of the birth-history of the West.

Tennessee to-day honors John Sevier, founder of the Free State of Franklin, with a shaft recording thirty-five battles and thirty-five victories. This shaft perpetuates the memory of a population that “in fifteen years engaged in three revolutions, organized and lived under five different governments, established and administered the first independent government in America, founded the first church and the first college in the West, put in operation the first newspaper west of the Alleghanies, met and fought the soldiers of King George in half a dozen battles from King’s Mountain to the gates of Charleston, checked and beat back four of the most powerful tribes of America, and left to Tennessee the heritage of a fame founded upon courage and steadfastness.”

In the times just preceding and following the Revolutionary War, the American colonies, even though bold enough to encounter successfully the forces of the mother country, were none the less timid and lacking in self confidence. There was no strong centralized government, nor was the loyalty of the different colonies or the different men of each colony a thing grounded upon reason or even an imperative self interest.

In no thing was America so rich as in big men, by which I do not mean “great” men as the term commonly goes. The characters of those early days stand out clearly and distinctly before us now. It was still the day of individualism. The men of the Free State were the boldest of those bold individuals who headed out from the secure settlements of the seaboard, through gloomy forests, into the unknown wilderness, west of what was then the backbone of the United States, the rugged Alleghany range.

These men made their own trails, and they were more careful with the trails that led westward than with those that connected them with the East that they had left behind. It was no act of disloyalty that caused souls bold as these to cast about them in matters of organization and of government. The day of kings was gone for them. The day of Liberty was dawning. They carried with them, as have their west-bound fellows ever since, the principles of self-government. Where the community was, there arose the Law, there began the state.

With them the community was not the population they had left far behind, but that population close at hand, banded together, experiencing a common danger, and entertaining a common ambition,—the population that had come West and intended to remain. The branches of the Law no longer sheltered them. They were alone. There was no Law. What, then, was to be done except to plant anew the seeds of the Law, and let it blossom here, as it had done before, and has since, on the soil of America?