Although New France was now tottering to its fall, the French officers at Fort Massac still continued, with their limited resources, to keep alive the Cherokee war spirit. French outrages occurred throughout the autumn and early winter of 1760. At nearly all of the forts, large and small, skirmishes took place, some of these giving occasion for exhibitions of rare enterprise and courage on the part of the garrisons, women and men alike.
During the winter, the governors of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina agreed upon a joint campaign against the hostiles. The southern column, comprising twenty-six hundred men, chiefly Highlanders, was under Lieutenant-Colonel James Grant. Starting early in June, they carried with them seven hundred packhorses, four hundred head of cattle, and a large train of baggage and supplies. Their route from Fort Prince George to the lower and middle Cherokee towns on the Little Tennessee lay through a rough, mountainous country; high water, storms, intensely warm weather, the lack of tents, and bruises from rocks and briers, caused the troops to suffer greatly. After heavy losses from ambuscades in narrow defiles, they finally reached their destination, and spent a month in burning and ravaging fifteen or more large villages and fourteen hundred acres of growing corn, and in driving five thousand men, women, and children into the hills to starve. Wrote one of the pious participators in this terrible work of devastation: "Heaven has blest us with the greatest success; we have finished our business as completely as the most sanguine of us could have wished." The Cherokees, completely crushed, humbly begged for peace, which was granted upon liberal terms and proved to be permanent.
The northern column was composed of backwoodsmen from Virginia and North Carolina, under Colonel William Byrd, an experienced campaigner. Byrd was much hampered for both men and supplies, and accomplished little. He appears to have largely spent his time in making roads and building blockhouses—laborious methods ill-fitted for Indian warfare, and loudly criticized by Waddell, who joined him with a regiment of five hundred North Carolinians, among whom was Daniel Boone, now returned to the Yadkin. Waddell and Boone had experienced the folly of this sort of thing in Braddock's ill-fated campaign. As a result of dissatisfaction, Byrd resigned, and Colonel Stephen succeeded him. The force, now composed of about twelve hundred men, pushed on to the Long Island of Holston River, where they were met by four hundred Cherokees, who, brought to their knees by Grant, likewise sought peace from Stephen. Articles were accordingly signed on the nineteenth of November. The North Carolina men returned home; but a portion of the Virginia regiment remained as a winter garrison for Fort Robinson, as the new fort at Long Island was called.
Now that the Yadkin region has, after its sad experience, been blessed with a promise of peace, we may well pause, briefly to consider the ethics of border warfare. This life-history will, to its close, have much to do with Indian forays and white reprisals, and it is well that we should consider them dispassionately.
The Cherokees were conducting a warfare in defense of their villages, fields, and hunting-grounds, which were being rapidly destroyed by the inrush of white settlers, who seemed to think that the Indians had no rights worth consideration. Encouraged by the French, who deemed the English intruders on lands which they had first explored, the American aborigines seriously thought that they might stem the tide of English settlement. It was impossible that they should win, for civilization has in such cases ever triumphed over savagery; but that they should make the attempt was to be expected from a high-spirited race trained to war. We can but sympathize with and honor them for making their several stout stands against the European wave which was ultimately to sweep them from their native land.[6] King Philip, Opecancano, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Red Jacket, Sitting Bull, Captain Jack, were types of successive leaders who, at various stages of our growth westward, have stood as bravely as any Spartan hero to contest our all-conquering advance.
It is the time-honored custom of historians of the frontier to consider Indians as all wrong and whites as all right; and that, of course, was the opinion of the borderers themselves—of Daniel Boone and all the men of his day. But we are now far enough removed from these events, and the fierce passions they engendered, to see them more clearly. The Indian was a savage and fought like a savage—cruel, bloodthirsty, unrelenting, treacherous, seldom a respecter of childhood, of age, or of women. But one can not read closely the chronicles of border warfare without discovering that civilized men at times could, in fighting savages, descend quite as low in the scale as they, in bloodthirstiness and treachery. Some of the most atrocious acts in the pioneer history of Kentucky and the Middle West were performed by whites; and some of the most Christianlike deeds—there were many such on both sides—were those of painted savages.
It is needless to blame either of the contending races; their conflict was inevitable. The frontiersman was generally unlettered, and used, without ceremony, to overcoming the obstacles which nature set in his path; one more patient could not have tamed the wilderness as quickly as he. His children often rose to high positions as scholars, statesmen, and diplomats. But he himself was a diamond in the rough, and not accustomed to nice ethical distinctions. To his mind the Indian was an inferior being, if not a child of Satan; he was not making the best use of the soil; his customs and habits of thought were such as to repel the British mind, however much they may have attracted the French. The tribesmen, whom the pioneer could not and would not understand, stood in his way, hence must be made to go or to die in his tracks. When the savage, quick to resentment, struck back, the turbulent passions of the overbearing white were aroused, and with compound interest he repaid the blow. Upon the theory that the devil must be fought with fire, the borderer not seldom adopted methods of reprisal that outdid the savage in brutality.
The red man fighting, after his own wild standards, for all that he held most dear, and the white man, who brooks no opposition from an inferior race, hitting back with a fury sometimes increased by fear—such, in brief, is the blood-stained history of the American border.