Conquest of the Old Southwest - Chapters I-IV



CHAPTER I.
THE MIGRATION OF THE PEOPLES

Inhabitants flock in here daily, mostly from Pensilvania and other parts 
of America, who are over-stocked with people and Mike directly from 
Europe, they commonly seat themselves towards the West, and have got near 
the mountains.
--Gabriel Johnston, Governor of North Carolina, to the Secretary of the 
Board of Trade, February 15, 1751.

At the opening of the eighteenth century the tide of population had swept 
inland to the "fall line", the westward boundary of the established 
settlements. The actual frontier had been advanced by the more aggressive 
pioneers to within fifty miles of the Blue Ridge. So rapid was the 
settlement in North Carolina that in the interval 1717-32 the population 
quadrupled in numbers. A map of the colonial settlements in 1725 reveals a 
narrow strip of populated land along the Atlantic coast, of irregular 
indentation, with occasional isolated nuclei of settlements further in the 
interior. The civilization thus established continued to maintain a close 
and unbroken communication with England and the Continent. As long as the 
settlers, for economic reasons, clung to the coast, they reacted but 
slowly to the transforming influences of the frontier.. Within a triangle 
of continental altitude with its apex in New England, bounded on the east 
by the Atlantic, and on the west by the Appalachian range, lay the 
settlements, divided into two zones--tidewater and piedmont. As no break 
occurred in the great mountain system south of the Hudson and Mohawk 
valleys, the difficulties of cutting a passage through the towering wall 
of living green long proved an effective obstacle to the crossing of the 
grim mountain barrier.

In the beginning the settlements gradually extended westward from the 
coast in irregular outline, the indentations taking form around such 
natural centers of attraction as areas of fertile soil, frontier posts, 
mines, salt-springs, and stretches of upland favorable for grazing. After 
a time a second advance of settlement was begun in New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, and Maryland, running in a southwesterly direction along the 
broad terraces to the east of the Appalachian Range, which in North 
Carolina lies as far as two hundred and fifty miles from the sea. The Blue 
Ridge in Virginia and a belt of pine barrens in North Carolina were 
hindrances to this advance, but did not entirely check it. This second 
streaming of the population thrust into the long, narrow wedge of the 
piedmont zone a class of people differing in spirit and in tendency from 
their more aristocratic and complacent neighbors to the east.

These settlers of the Valley of Virginia and the North Carolina piedmont 
region--English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Scotch, Irish, Welsh, and a few 
French--were the first pioneers of the Old Southwest. From the joint 
efforts of two strata of population, geographically, socially, and 
economically distinct--tidewater and piedmont, Old South and New South--
originated and flowered the third and greatest movement of westward 
expansion, opening with the surmounting of the mountain barrier and ending 
in the occupation and assumption of the vast medial valley of the 
continent.

Synchronous with the founding of Jamestown in Virginia, significantly 
enough, was the first planting of Ulster with the English and Scotch. 
Emigrants from the Scotch Lowlands, sometimes as many as four thousand a 
year (1625), continued throughout the century to pour into Ulster. "Those 
of the North of Ireland . ..," as pungently described in 1679 by the 
Secretary of State, Leoline Jenkins, to the Duke of Ormond, "are most 
Scotch and Scotch breed and are the Northern Presbyterians and 
phanatiques, lusty, able bodied, hardy and stout men, where one may see 
three or four hundred at every meeting-house on Sunday, and all the North 
of Ireland is inhabited by these, which is the popular place of all 
Ireland by far. They are very numerous and greedy after land." During the 
quarter of a century after the English Revolution of 1688 and the Jacobite 
uprising in Ireland, which ended in 1691 with the complete submission of 
Ireland to William and Mary, not less than fifty thousand Scotch, 
according to Archbishop Synge, settled in Ulster. Until the beginning of 
the eighteenth century there was no considerable emigration to America; 
and it was first set up as a consequence of English interference with 
trade and religion. Repressive measures passed by the English parliament 
(1665 1699), prohibiting the exportation from Ire land to England and 
Scotland of cattle, beef, pork, dairy products, etc., and to any country 
whatever of manufactured wool, had aroused deep resentment among the 
Scotch-Irish, who had built up a great commerce. This discontent was 
greatly aggravated by the imposition of religious disabilities upon the 
Presbyterians, who, in addition to having to pay tithes for the support of 
the established church, were excluded from all civil and military office 
(1704), while their ministers were made liable to penalties for 
celebrating marriages.

This pressure upon a high-spirited people resulted inevitably in an exodus 
to the New World. The principal ports by which the Ulsterites entered 
America were Lewes and Newcastle (Delaware), Philadelphia and Boston. The 
streams of immigration steadily flowed up the Delaware Valley; and by 1720 
the Scotch-Irish began to arrive in Bucks County. So rapid was the rate of 
increase in immigration that the number of arrivals soon mounted from a 
few hundred to upward of six thousand, in a single year (1729); and within 
a few years this number was doubled. According to the meticulous Franklin, 
the proportion increased from a very small element of the population of 
Pennsylvania in 1700 to one fourth of the whole in 1749, and to one third 
of the whole (350,000) in 1774. Writing to the Penns in 1724, James Logan, 
Secretary of the Province, caustically refers to the Ulster settlers on 
the disputed Maryland line as "these bold and indigent strangers, saying 
as their excuse when challenged for titles, that we had solicited for 
colonists and they had come accordingly." The spirit of these defiant 
squatters is succinctly expressed in their statement to Logan that it "was 
against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle while 
so many Christians wanted it to work on and to raise their bread."

The rising scale of prices for Pennsylvania lands, changing from ten 
pounds and two shillings quit-rents per hundred acres in 1719 to fifteen 
pounds ten shillings per hundred acres with a quit-rent of a halfpenny per 
acre in 1732, soon turned the eyes of the thrifty Scotch-Irish settlers 
southward and southwestward. In Maryland in 1738 lands were offered at 
five pounds sterling per hundred acres. Simultaneously, in the Valley of 
Virginia free grants of a thousand acres per family were being made. In 
the North Carolina piedmont region the proprietary, Lord Granville, 
through his agents was disposing of the most desirable lands to settlers 
at the rate of three shillings proclamation money for six hundred and 
forty acres, the unit of land-division; and was also making large free 
grants on the condition of seating a certain proportion of settlers. "Lord 
Carteret's land in Carolina," says North Carolina's first American 
historian, "where the soil was cheap, presented a tempting residence to 
people of every denomination. Emigrants from the north of Ireland, by the 
way of Pennsylvania, flocked to that country; and a considerable part of 
North Carolina . . . is inhabited by those people or their descendants." 
From 1740 onward, attracted by the rich lure of cheap and even free lands 
in Virginia and North Carolina, a tide of immigration swept ceaselessly 
into the valleys of the Shenandoah, the Yadkin, and the Catawba. The 
immensity of this mobile, drifting mass, which sometimes brought "more 
than 400 families with horse waggons and cattle" into North Carolina in a 
single year (1752-3), is attested by the fact that from 1732 to 1754, 
mainly as the result of the Scotch-Irish inundation, the population of 
North Carolina more than doubled.

The second important racial stream of population in the settlement of the 
same region was composed of Germans, attracted to this country from the 
Palatinate. Lured on by the highly colored stories of the commercial 
agents for promoting immigration--the "newlanders," who were thoroughly 
unscrupulous in their methods and extravagant in their representations--a 
migration from Germany began in the second decade of the eighteenth 
century and quickly assumed alarming proportions. Although certain of the 
emigrants were well-to-do, a very great number were "redemptioners" 
(indentured servants), who in order to pay for their transportation were 
compelled to pledge themselves to several years of servitude. This 
economic condition caused the German immigrant, wherever he went, to 
become a settler of the back country, necessity compelling him to pass by 
the more expensive lands near the coast.

For well-nigh sixty years the influx of German immigrants of various sects 
was very great, averaging something like fifteen hundred a year into 
Pennsylvania alone from 1727 to 1775. Indeed, Pennsylvania, one third of 
whose population at the beginning of the Revolution was German, early 
became the great distributing center for the Germans as well as for the 
Scotch-Irish. Certainly by 1727 Adam Miller and his fellow Germans had 
established the first permanent white settlement in the Valley of 
Virginia. By 1732 Jost Heydt, accompanied by sixteen families, came from 
York, Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opeckon River, in the neighborhood 
of the present Winchester. There is no longer any doubt that "the portion 
of the Shenandoah Valley sloping to the north was almost entirely settled 
by Germans."

It was about the middle of the century that these pioneers of the Old 
Southwest, the shrewd, industrious, and thrifty Pennsylvania Germans (who 
came to be generally called "Pennsylvania Dutch" from the incorrect 
translation of Pennsylvanische Deutsche), began to pour into the piedmont 
region of North Carolina. In the autumn, after the harvest was in, these 
ambitious Pennsylvania pioneers would pack up their belongings in wagons 
and on beasts of burden and head for the southwest, trekking down in the 
manner of the Boers of South Africa. This movement into the fertile valley 
lands of the Yadkin and the Catawba continued unabated throughout the 
entire third quarter of the century. Owing to their unfamiliarity with the 
English language and the solidarity of their instincts, the German 
settlers at first had little share in government. But they devotedly 
played their part in the defense of the exposed settlements and often bore 
the brunt of Indian attack.

The bravery and hardihood displayed by the itinerant missionaries sent out 
by the Pennsylvania Synod under the direction of Count Zinzendorf (1742-
8), and by the Moravian Church (1748-53), are mirrored in the numerous 
diaries, written in German, happily preserved to posterity in religious 
archives of Pennsylvania and North Carolina. These simple, earnest 
crusaders, animated by pure and unselfish motives, would visit on a single 
tour of a thousand miles the principal German settlements in Maryland and 
Virginia (including the present West Virginia). Sometimes they would make 
an extended circuit through North Carolina, South Carolina, and even 
Georgia, everywhere bearing witness to the truth of the gospel and seeking 
to carry the most elemental forms of the Christian religion, preaching and 
prayer, to the primitive frontiersmen marooned along the outer fringe of 
white settlements. These arduous journeys in the cause of piety place this 
type of pioneer of the Old Southwest in alleviating contrast to the often 
relentless and bloodthirsty figure of the rude borderer.

Noteworthy among these pious pilgrimages is the Virginia journey of 
Brothers Leonhard Schnell and John Brandmuller (October 12 to December 12, 
1749). At the last outpost of civilization, the scattered settlements in 
Bath and Alleghany counties, these courageous missionaries--feasting the 
while solely on bear meat, for there was no bread--encountered conditions 
of almost primitive savagery, of which they give this graphic picture: 
"Then we came to a house, where we had to lie on bear skins around the 
fire like the rest . . . . The clothes of the people consist of deer 
skins, their food of Johnny cakes, deer and bear meat. A kind of white 
people are found here, who live like savages. Hunting is their chief 
occupation." Into the valley of the Yadkin in December, 1752, came Bishop 
Spangenberg and a party of Moravians, accompanied by a surveyor and two 
guides, for the purpose of locating the one hundred thousand acres of land 
which had been offered them on easy terms the preceding year by Lord 
Granville. This journey was remarkable as an illustration of sacrifices 
willingly made and extreme hardships uncomplainingly endured for the sake 
of the Moravian brotherhood. In the back country of North Carolina near 
the Mulberry Fields they found the whole woods full of Cherokee Indians 
engaged in hunting. A beautiful site for the projected settlement met 
their delighted gaze at this place; but they soon learned to their regret 
that it had already been "taken up" by Daniel Boone's future father-in-
law, Morgan Bryan.

On October 8, 1753, a party of twelve single men headed by the Rev. 
Bernhard Adam Grube, set out from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to trek down to 
the new-found haven in the Carolina hinterland--"a corner which the Lord 
has reserved for the Brethren"--in Anson County. Following for the most 
part the great highway extending from Philadelphia to the Yadkin, over 
which passed the great throng sweeping into the back country of North 
Carolina--through the Valley of Virginia and past Robert Luhny's mill on 
the James River--they encountered many hardships along the way. Because of 
their "long wagon," they had much difficulty in crossing one steep 
mountain; and of this experience Brother Grube, with a touch of modest 
pride, observes: "People had told us that this hill was most dangerous, 
and that we would scarcely be able to cross it, for Morgan Bryan, the 
first to travel this way, had to take the wheels off his wagon and carry 
it piecemeal to the top, and had been three months on the journey from the 
Shanidore [Shenandoah] to the Etkin [Yadkin]."

These men were the highest type of the pioneers of the Old Southwest, 
inspired with the instinct of homemakers in a land where, if idle rumor 
were to be credited, "the people lived like wild men never hearing of God 
or His Word." In one hand they bore the implement of agriculture, in the 
other the book of the gospel of Jesus Christ. True faith shines forth in 
the simply eloquent words: "We thanked our Saviour that he had so 
graciously led us hither, and had helped us through all the hard places, 
for no matter how dangerous it looked, nor how little we saw how we could 
win through, everything always went better than seemed possible." The 
promise of a new day--the dawn of the heroic age--rings out in the pious 
carol of camaraderie at their journey's end:

We hold arrival Lovefeast here,
In Carolina land,
A company of Brethren true,
A little Pilgrim-Band,
Called by the Lord to be of those
Who through the whole world go,
To bear Him witness everywhere,
And nought but Jesus know.



CHAPTER II.
THE CRADLE OF WESTWARD EXPANSION

In the year 1746 I was up in the country that is now Anson, Orange and 
Rowan Counties, there was not then above one hundred fighting men there is 
now at least three thousand for the most part Irish Protestants and 
Germans and dailey increasing.
--Matthew Rowan, President of the North Carolina Council, to the Board of 
Trade, June 28, 1753.

The conquest of the West is usually attributed to the ready initiative, 
the stern self-reliance, and the libertarian instinct of the expert 
backwoodsmen. These bold, nomadic spirits were animated by an unquenchable 
desire to plunge into the wilderness in search of an El Dorado at the 
outer verge of civilization, free of taxation, quit-rents, and the law's 
restraint. They longed to build homes for themselves and their descendants 
in a limitless, free domain; or else to fare deeper and deeper into the 
trackless forests in search of adventure. Yet one must not overlook the 
fact that behind Boone and pioneers of his stamp were men of conspicuous 
civil and military genius, constructive in purpose and creative in 
imagination, who devoted their best gifts to actual conquest and 
colonization. These men of large intellectual mold-themselves surveyors, 
hunters, and pioneers--were inspired with the larger vision of the 
expansionist. Whether colonizers, soldiers, or speculators on the grand 
scale, they sought to open at one great stroke the vast trans-Alleghany 
regions as a peaceful abode for mankind.

Two distinct classes of society were gradually drawing apart from each 
other in North Carolina and later in Virginia--the pioneer democracy of 
the back country and the upland, and the planter aristocracy of the 
lowland and the tide-water region. From the frontier came the pioneer 
explorers whose individual enterprise and initiative were such potent 
factors in the exploitation of the wilderness. From the border counties 
still in contact with the East came a number of leaders. Thus in the heart 
of the Old Southwest the two determinative principles already referred to, 
the inquisitive and the acquisitive instincts, found a fortunate 
conjunction. The exploratory passion of the pioneer, directed in the 
interest of commercial enterprise, prepared the way for the great westward 
migration. The warlike disposition of the hardy backwoodsman, controlled 
by the exercise of military strategy, accomplished the conquest of the 
trans-Alleghany country.

Fleeing from the traditional bonds of caste and aristocracy in England and 
Europe, from economic boycott and civil oppression, from religious 
persecution and favoritism, many worthy members of society in the first 
quarter of the eighteenth century sought a haven of refuge in the 
"Quackerthal" of William Penn, with its trustworthy guarantees of free 
tolerance in religious faith and the benefits of representative self-
government. From East Devonshire in England came George Boone, the 
grandfather of the great pioneer, and from Wales came Edward Morgan, whose 
daughter Sarah became the wife of Squire Boone, Daniel's father. These 
were conspicuous representatives of the Society of Friends, drawn thither 
by the roseate representations of the great Quaker, William Penn, and by 
his advanced views on popular government and religious toleration. Hither, 
too, from Ireland, whither he had gone from Denmark, came Morgan Bryan, 
settling in Chester County, prior to 1719; and his children, William, 
Joseph, James, and Morgan, who more than half a century later gave the 
name to Bryan's Station in Kentucky, were destined to play important roles 
in the drama of westward migration. In September, 1734, Michael Finley 
from County Armagh, Ireland, presumably accompanied by his brother 
Archibald Finley, settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. According to the 
best authorities, Archibald Finley was the father of John Finley, or 
Findlay as he signed himself, Boone's guide and companion in his 
exploration of Kentucky in 1769-71. To Pennsylvania also came Mordecai 
Lincoln, great grandson of Samuel Lincoln, who had emigrated from England 
to Hingham, Massachusetts, as early as 1637. This Mordecai Lincoln, who in 
1720 settled in Chester County, Pennsylvania, the great-great-grandfather 
of President Lincoln, was the father of Sarah Lincoln, who was wedded to 
William Boone, and of Abraham Lincoln, who married Anne Boone, William's 
first cousin. Early settlers in Pennsylvania were members of the Hanks 
family, one of whom was the maternal grandfather of President Lincoln.

No one race or breed of men can lay claim to exclusive credit for 
leadership in the hinterland movement and the conquest of the West. Yet 
one particular stock of people, the Ulster Scots, exhibited with most 
completeness and picturesqueness a group of conspicuous qualities and 
attitudes which we now recognize to be typical of the American character 
as molded by the conditions of frontier life. Cautious, wary, and 
reserved, these Scots concealed beneath a cool and calculating manner a 
relentlessness in reasoning power and an intensity of conviction which 
glowed and burned with almost fanatical ardor. Strict in religious 
observance and deep in spiritual fervor, they never lost sight of the main 
chance, combining a shrewd practicality with a wealth of devotion. It has 
been happily said of them that they kept the Sabbath and everything else 
they could lay their hands on. In the polity of these men religion and 
education went hand in hand; and they habitually settled together in 
communities in order that they might have teachers and preachers of their 
own choice and persuasion.

In little-known letters and diaries of travelers and itinerant ministers 
may be found many quaint descriptions and faithful characterizations of 
the frontier settlers in their habits of life and of the scenes amidst 
which they labored. In a letter to Edmund Fanning, the cultured Robin 
Jones, agent of Lord Granville and Attorney-General of North Carolina, 
summons to view a piquant image of the western border and borderers: "The 
inhabitants are hospitable in their way, live in plenty and dirt, are 
stout, of great prowess in manly athletics; and, in private conversation, 
bold, impertinent, and vain. In the art of war (after the Indian manner) 
they are well-skilled, are enterprising and fruitful of strategies; and, 
when in action, are as bold and intrepid as the ancient Romans. The 
Shawnese acknowledge them their superiors even in their own way of 
fighting . . . . [The land] may be truly called the land of the mountains, 
for they are so numerous that when you have reached the summit of one of 
them, you may see thousands of every shape that the imagination can 
suggest, seeming to vie with each other which should raise his lofty head 
to touch the clouds . . . . It seems to me that nature has been wanton in 
bestowing her blessings on that country."

An excellent pen-picture of educational and cultural conditions in the 
backwoods of North Carolina, by one of the early settlers in the middle of 
the century, exhibits in all their barren cheerlessness the hardships and 
limitations of life in the wilderness. The father of William Few, the 
narrator, had trekked down from Maryland and settled in Orange County, 
some miles east of the little hamlet of Hillsborough. "In that country at 
that time there were no schools, no churches or parsons, or doctors or 
lawyers; no stores, groceries or taverns, nor do I recollect during the 
first two years any officer, ecclesiastical, civil or military, except a 
justice of the peace, a constable and two or three itinerant preachers . . 
. . These people had few wants, and fewer temptations to vice than those 
who lived in more refined society, though ignorant. They were more 
virtuous and more happy. . . . A schoolmaster appeared and offered his 
services to teach the children of the neighborhood for twenty shillings 
each per year . . . . In that simple state of society money was but little 
known; the schoolmaster was the welcome guest of his pupil, fed at the 
bountiful table and clothed from the domestic loom . . . . In that country 
at that time there was great scarcity of books."

The journals of itinerant ministers through the Valley of Virginia and the 
Carolina piedmont zone yield precious mementoes of the people, their 
longing after the things of the spirit, and their pitiful isolation from 
the regular preaching of the gospel. These missionaries were true pioneers 
in this Old Southwest, ardent, dauntless, and heroic--carrying the word 
into remote places and preaching the gospel beneath the trees of the 
forest. In his journal (1755-6), the Rev. Hugh McAden, born in 
Pennsylvania of Scotch-Irish parentage, a graduate of Nassau Hall (1753), 
makes the unconsciously humorous observation that wherever he found 
Presbyterians he found people who "seemed highly pleased, and very 
desirous to hear the word"; whilst elsewhere he found either dissension 
and defection to Baptist principles, or "no appearance of the life of 
religion." In the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian settlements in what is now 
Mecklenburg County, the cradle of American liberty, he found "pretty 
serious, judicious people" of the stamp of Moses, William, and James 
Alexander. While traveling in the upper country of South Carolina, he 
relates with gusto the story of "an old gentleman who said to the Governor 
of South Carolina, when he was in those parts, in treaty with the Cherokee 
Indians that 'he had never seen a shirt, been in a fair, heard a sermon, 
or seen a minister in all his life.' Upon which the governor promised to 
send him up a minister, that he might hear one sermon before he died." The 
minister came and preached; and this was all the preaching that had been 
heard in the upper part of South Carolina before Mr. McAden's visit.

Such, then, were the rude and simple people in the back country of the Old 
Southwest--the deliberate and self-controlled English, the aggressive, 
landmongering Scotch-Irish, the buoyant Welsh, the thrifty Germans, the 
debonair French, the impetuous Irish, and the calculating Scotch. The 
lives they led were marked by independence of spirit, democratic 
instincts, and a forthright simplicity. In describing the condition of the 
English settlers in the backwoods of Virginia, one of their number, 
Doddridge, says: "Most of the articles were of domestic manufacture. There 
might have been incidentally a few things brought to the country for sale 
in a primitive way, but there was no store for general supply. The table 
furniture usually consisted of wooden vessels, either turned or coopered. 
Iron forks, tin cups, etc., were articles of rare and delicate luxury. The 
food was of the most wholesome and primitive kind. The richest meat, the 
finest butter, and best meal that ever delighted man's palate were here 
eaten with a relish which health and labor only know. The hospitality of 
the people was profuse and proverbial."

The circumstances of their lives compelled the pioneers to become self-
sustaining. Every immigrant was an adept at many trades. He built his own 
house, forged his own tools, and made his own clothes. At a very early 
date rifles were manufactured at the High Shoals of the Yadkin; Squire 
Boone, Daniel's brother, was an expert gunsmith. The difficulty of 
securing food for the settlements forced every man to become a hunter and 
to scour the forest for wild game. Thus the pioneer, through force of 
sheer necessity, became a dead shot--which stood him in good stead in the 
days of Indian incursions and bloody retaliatory raids. Primitive in their 
games, recreations, and amusements, which not infrequently degenerated 
into contests of savage brutality, the pioneers always set the highest 
premium upon personal bravery, physical prowess, and skill in manly 
sports. At all public gatherings, general musters, "vendues" or auctions, 
and even funerals, whisky flowed with extraordinary freedom. It is worthy 
of record that among the effects of the Rev. Alexander Craighead, the 
famous teacher and organizer of Presbyterianism in Mecklenburg and the 
adjoining region prior to the Revolution, were found a punch bowl and 
glasses.

The frontier life, with its purifying and hardening influence, bred in 
these pioneers intellectual traits which constitute the basis of the 
American character. The single-handed and successful struggle with nature 
in the tense solitude of the forest developed a spirit of individualism, 
restive under control. On the other hand, the sense of sharing with others 
the arduous tasks and dangers of conquering the wilderness gave birth to a 
strong sense of solidarity arid of human sympathy. With the lure of free 
lands ever before them, the pioneers developed a restlessness and a 
nervous energy, blended with a buoyancy of spirit, which are fundamentally 
American. Yet this same untrammeled freedom occasioned a disregard for law 
and a defiance of established government which have exhibited themselves 
throughout the entire course of our history. Initiative, self-reliance, 
boldness in conception, fertility in resource, readiness in execution, 
acquisitiveness, inventive genius, appreciation of material advantages--
these, shot through with a certain fine idealism, genial human sympathy, 
and a high romantic strain--are the traits of the American national type 
as it emerged from the Old Southwest.



CHAPTER III.
THE BACK COUNTRY AND THE BORDER

Far from the bustle of the world, they live in the most delightful 
climate, and richest soil imaginable; they are everywhere surrounded with 
beautiful prospects and sylvan scenes; lofty mountains, transparent 
streams, falls of water, rich valleys, and majestic woods; the whole 
interspersed with an infinite variety of flowering shrubs, constitute the 
landscape surrounding them; they are subject to few diseases; are 
generally robust; and live in perfect liberty; they are ignorant of want 
and acquainted with but few vices. Their inexperience of the elegancies of 
life precludes any regret that they possess not the means of enjoying 
them, but they possess what many princes would give half their dominion 
for, health, content, and tranquillity of mind.
--Andrew Burnaby: Travels Through North America.

The two streams of Ulstermen, the greater through Philadelphia, the lesser 
through Charleston, which poured into the Carolinas toward the middle of 
the century, quickly flooded the back country. The former occupied the 
Yadkin Valley and tile region to the westward, the latter the Waxhaws and 
the Anson County region to the northwest. The first settlers were known as 
the "Pennsylvania Irish," because they had first settled in Pennsylvania 
after migrating from the north of Ireland; while those who came by way of 
Charleston were known as the "Scotch-Irish." The former, who had resided 
in Pennsylvania long enough to be good judges of land, shrewdly made their 
settlements along the rivers and creeks. The latter, new arrivals and less 
experienced, settled on thinner land toward the heads of creeks and water 
courses.

Shortly prior to 1735, Morgan Bryan, his wife Martha, and eight children, 
together with other families of Quakers from Pennsylvania, settled upon a 
large tract of land on the northwest side of the Opeckon River near 
Winchester. A few years later they removed up the Virginia Valley to the 
Big Lick in the present Roanoke County, intent upon pushing westward to 
the very outskirts of civilization. In the autumn of 1748, leaving behind 
his brother William, who had followed him to Roanoke County, Morgan Bryan 
removed with his family to the Forks of the Yadkin River. The Morgans, 
with the exception of Richard, who emigrated to Virginia, remained in 
Pennsylvania, spreading over Philadelphia and Bucks counties; while the 
Hanks and Lincoln families found homes in Virginia--Mordecai Lincoln's 
son, John, the great-grandfather of President Lincoln, removing from Berks 
to the Shenandoah Valley in 1765. On May 1, 1750, Squire Boone, his wife 
Sarah (Morgan), and their eleven children--a veritable caravan, traveling 
like the patriarchs of old--started south; and tarried for a space, 
according to reliable tradition, on Linville Creek in the Virginia Valley. 
In 1752 they removed to the Forks of the Yadkin, and the following year 
received from Lord Granville three tracts of land, all situated in Rowan 
County. About the hamlet of Salisbury, which in 1755 consisted of seven or 
eight log houses and the court house, there now rapidly gathered a 
settlement of people marked by strong individuality, sturdy independence, 
and virile self-reliance. The Boones and the Bryans quickly accommodated 
themselves to frontier conditions and immediately began to take an active 
part in the local affairs of the county. Upon the organization of the 
county court Squire Boone was chosen justice of the peace; and Morgan 
Bryan was soon appearing as foreman of juries and director in road 
improvements.

The Great Trading Path, leading from Virginia to the towns of the Catawbas 
and other Southern Indians, crossed the Yadkin at the Trading Ford and 
passed a mile southeast of Salisbury. Above Sapona Town near the Trading 
Ford was Swearing Creek, which, according to constant and picturesque 
tradition, was the spot where the traders stopped to take a solemn oath 
never to reveal any unlawful proceedings that might occur during their 
sojourn among the Indians. In his divertingly satirical "History of the 
Dividing Line" William Byrd in 1728 thus speaks of this locality: "The 
Soil is exceedingly rich on both sides the Yadkin, abounding in rank Grass 
and prodigiously large Trees; and for plenty of Fish, Fowl and Venison, is 
inferior to No Part of the Northern Continent. There the Traders commonly 
lie Still for some days, to recruit their Horses' Flesh as well as to 
recover their own spirits." In this beautiful country happily chosen for 
settlement by Squire Boone --who erected his cabin on the east side of the 
Yadkin about a mile and a quarter from Alleman's, now Boone's, Ford--wild 
game abounded. Buffaloes were encountered in eastern North Carolina by 
Byrd while running the dividing line; and in the upper country of South 
Carolina three or four men with their dogs could kill fourteen to twenty 
buffaloes in a single day." Deer and bears fell an easy prey to the 
hunter; wild turkeys filled every thicket; the watercourses teemed with 
beaver, otter, and muskrat, as well as with shad and other delicious fish. 
Panthers, wildcats, and wolves overran the country; and the veracious 
Brother Joseph, while near the present Wilkesboro, amusingly records: "The 
wolves wh. are not like those in Germany, Poland and Lifland (because they 
fear men and don't easily come near) give us such music of six different 
cornets the like of wh. I have never heard in my life." So plentiful was 
the game that the wild deer mingled with the cattle grazing over the wide 
stretches of luxuriant grass.

In the midst of this sylvan paradise grew up Squire Boone's son, Daniel 
Boone, a Pennsylvania youth of English stock, Quaker persuasion, and 
Baptist proclivities. Seen through a glorifying halo after the lapse of a 
century and three quarters, he rises before us a romantic figure, poised 
and resolute, simple, benign--as naive and shy as some wild thing of the 
primeval forest--five feet eight inches in height, with broad chest and 
shoulders, dark locks, genial blue eyes arched with fair eyebrows, thin 
lips and wide mouth, nose of slightly Roman cast, and fair, ruddy 
countenance. Farming was irksome to this restless, nomadic spirit, who on 
the slightest excuse would exchange the plow and the grubbing hoe for the 
long rifle and keen-edged hunting knife. In a single day during the autumn 
season he would kill four or five deer; or as many bears as would snake 
from two to three thousand pounds weight of bear-bacon. Fascinated with 
the forest, he soon found profit as well as pleasure in the pursuit of 
game; and at excellent fixed prices he sold his peltries, most often at 
Salisbury, some thirteen miles away, sometimes at the store of the old 
"Dutchman," George Hartman, on the Yadkin, and occasionally at Bethabara, 
the Moravian town sixty odd miles distant. Skins were in such demand that 
they soon came to replace hard money, which was incredibly scarce in the 
back country, as a medium of exchange. Upon one occasion a caravan from 
Bethabara hauled three thousand pounds, upon another four thousand pounds, 
of dressed deerskins to Charleston. So immense was this trade that the 
year after Boone's arrival at the Forks of Yadkin thirty thousand 
deerskins were exported from the province of North Carolina. We like to 
think that the young Daniel Boone was one of that band of whom Brother 
Joseph, while in camp on the Catawba River (November 12, 1752) wrote: 
"There are many hunters about here, who live like Indians, they kill many 
deer selling their hides, and thus live without much work." 

In this very class of professional hunters, living like Indians, was thus 
bred the spirit of individual initiative and strenuous leadership in the 
great westward expansionist movement of the coming decade. An English 
traveler gives the following minute picture of the dress and accoutrement 
of the Carolina backwoodsman.

"Their whole dress is very singular, and not very materially different 
from that of the Indians; being a hunting shirt, somewhat resembling a 
waggoner's frock, ornamented with a great many fringes, tied round the 
middle with a broad belt, much decorated also, in which is fastened a 
tomahawk, an instrument that serves every purpose of defence and 
convenience; being a hammer at one side and a sharp hatchet at the other; 
the shot bag and powderhorn, carved with a variety of whimsical figures 
and devices, hang from their necks over one shoulder; and on their heads a 
flapped hat, of a reddish hue, proceeding from the intensely hot beams of 
the sun.

Sometimes they wear leather breeches, made of Indian dressed elk, or deer 
skins, but more frequently thin trowsers.

On their legs they have Indian boots, or leggings, made of coarse woollen 
cloth, that either are wrapped round loosely and tied with garters, or 
laced upon the outside, and always come better than half-way up the thigh.

On their feet they sometimes wear pumps of their own manufacture, but 
generally Indian moccossons, of their own construction also, which are 
made of strong elk's, or buck's skin, dressed soft as for gloves or 
breeches, drawn together in regular plaits over the toe, and lacing from 
thence round to the fore part of the middle of the ancle, without a seam 
in them, yet fitting close to the feet, and are indeed perfectly easy and 
pliant.

Their hunting, or rifle shirts, they have also died in a variety of 
colours, some yellow, others red, some brown, and many wear them quite 
white."

No less unique and bizarre, though less picturesque, was the dress of the 
women of the region--in particular of Surry County, North Carolina, as 
described by General William Lenoir:

"The women wore linses [flax] petticoats and 'bedgowns' [like a dressing-
sack], and often went without shoes in the summer. Some had bonnets and 
bedgowns made of calico, but generally of linsey; and some of them wore 
men's hats. Their hair was commonly clubbed. Once, at a large meeting, I 
noticed there but two women that had on long gowns. One of these was laced 
genteelly, and the body of the other was open, and the tail thereof drawn 
up and tucked in her apron or coat-string."

While Daniel Boone was quietly engaged in the pleasant pursuits of the 
chase, a vast world-struggle of which he little dreamed was rapidly 
approaching a crisis. For three quarters of a century this titanic contest 
between France and England for the interior of the continent had been 
waged with slowly accumulating force. The irrepressible conflict had been 
formally inaugurated at Sault Ste. Marie in 1671, when Daumont de Saint 
Lusson, swinging aloft his sword, proclaimed the sovereignty of France 
over "all countries, rivers, lakes, and streams . . . both those which 
have been discovered and those which may be discovered hereafter, in all 
their length and breadth, bounded on the one side by the seas of the North 
and of the West, and on the other by the South Sea." Just three months 
later, three hardy pioneers of Virginia, despatched upon their arduous 
mission by Colonel Abraham Wood in behalf of the English crown, had 
crossed the Appalachian divide; and upon the banks of a stream whose 
waters slipped into the Ohio to join the Mississippi and the Gulf of 
Mexico, had carved the royal insignia upon the blazed trunk of a giant of 
the forest, the while crying: "Long live Charles the Second, by the grace 
of God, King of England, Scotland, France, Ireland and Virginia and of the 
territories thereunto belonging."

La Salle's dream of a New France in the heart of America was blotted out 
in his tragic death upon the banks of the River Trinity (1687). Yet his 
mantle was to fall in turn upon the square shoulders of Le Moyne 
d'Iberville and of his brother--the good, the constant Bienville, who 
after countless and arduous struggles laid firm the foundations of New 
Orleans. In the precious treasury of Margry we learn that on reaching 
Rochelle after his first voyage in 1699 Iberville in these prophetic words 
voices his faith: "If France does not immediately seize this part of 
America which is the most beautiful, and establish a colony which is 
strong enough to resist any which England may have, the English colonies 
(already considerable in Carolina) will so thrive that in less than a 
hundred years they will be strong enough to seize all America." But the 
world-weary Louis Quatorze, nearing his end, quickly tired of that remote 
and unproductive colony upon the shores of the gulf, so industriously 
described in Paris as a "terrestrial paradise"; and the "paternal 
providence of Versailles" willingly yielded place to the monumental 
speculation of the great financier Antoine Crozat. In this Paris of 
prolific promotion and amazed credulity, ripe for the colossal scheme of 
Law, soon to blow to bursting-point the bubble of the Mississippi, the 
very songs in the street echoed flamboyant, half-satiric panegyrics upon 
the new Utopia, this Mississippi Land of Cockayne:

It's to-day no contribution To discuss the Constitution And the Spanish 
war's forgot For a new Utopian spot; And the very latest phase Is the 
Mississippi craze.

Interest in the new colony led to a great development of southwesterly 
trade from New France. Already the French coureurs de bois were following 
the water route from the Illinois to South Carolina. Jean Couture, a 
deserter from the service in New France, journeyed over the Ohio and 
Tennessee rivers to that colony, and was known as "the greatest Trader and 
Traveller amongst the Indians for more than Twenty years." In 1714 young 
Charles Charleville accompanied an old trader from Crozat's colony on the 
gulf to the great salt-springs on the Cumberland, where a post for trading 
with the Shawanoes had already been established by the French. But the 
British were preparing to capture this trade as early as 1694, when Tonti 
warned Villermont that Carolinians were already established on a branch of 
the Ohio. Four years later, Nicholson, Governor of Maryland, was urging 
trade with the Indians of the interior in the effort to displace the 
French. At an early date the coast colonies began to trade with the Indian 
tribes of the back country: the Catawbas of the Yadkin Valley; the 
Cherokees, whose towns were scattered through Tennessee; the Chickasaws, 
to the westward in northern Mississippi; and the Choctaws farther to the 
southward. Even before the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the 
South Carolina settlements extended scarcely twenty miles from the coast, 
English traders had established posts among the Indian tribes four hundred 
miles to the west of Charleston. Following the sporadic trading of 
individuals from Virginia with the inland Indians, the heavily laden 
caravans of William Byrd were soon regularly passing along the Great 
Trading Path from Virginia to the towns of the Catawbas and other interior 
tribes of the Carolinas, delighting the easily captivated fancy and 
provoking the cupidity of the red men with "Guns, Powder, Shot, Hatchets 
(which the Indians call Tomahawks), Kettles, red and blue Planes, 
Duffields, Stroudwater blankets, and some Cutlary Wares, Brass Rings and 
other Trinkets." In Pennsylvania, George Croghan, the guileful diplomat, 
who was emissary from the Council to the Ohio Indians (1748), had induced 
"all-most all the Ingans in the Woods" to declare against the French; and 
was described by Christopher Gist as a "meer idol among his countrymen, 
the Irish traders."

Against these advances of British trade and civilization, the French for 
four decades had artfully struggled, projecting tours of exploration into 
the vast medial valley of the continent and constructing a chain of forts 
and trading-posts designed to establish their claims to the country and to 
hold in check the threatened English thrust from the east. Soon the 
wilderness ambassador of empire, Celoron de Bienville, was despatched by 
the far-visioned Galissoniere at Quebec to sow broadcast with ceremonial 
pomp in the heart of America the seeds of empire, grandiosely graven 
plates of lasting lead, in defiant yet futile symbol of the asserted 
sovereignty of France. Thus threatened in the vindication of the rights of 
their colonial sea-to-sea charters, the English threw off the lethargy 
with which they had failed to protect their traders, and in grants to the 
Ohio and Loyal land companies began resolutely to form plans looking to 
the occupation of the interior. But the French seized the English trading-
house at Venango which they converted into a fort; and Virginia's protest, 
conveyed by a calm and judicious young man, a surveyor, George Washington, 
availed not to prevent the French from seizing Captain Trent's hastily 
erected military post at the forks of the Ohio and constructing there a 
formidable work, named Fort Duquesne. Washington, with his expeditionary 
force sent to garrison Captain Trent's fort, defeated Jumonville and his 
small force near Great Meadows (May, 1754); but soon after he was forced 
to surrender Fort Necessity to Coulon de Villiers.

The titanic struggle, fittingly precipitated in the backwoods of the Old 
Southwest, was now on--a struggle in which the resolute pioneers of these 
backwoods first seriously measured their strength with the French and 
their copper-hued allies, and learned to surpass the latter in their own 
mode of warfare. The portentous conflict, destined to assure the eastern 
half of the continent to Great Britain, is a grim, prophetic harbinger of 
the mighty movement of the next quarter of a century into the twilight 
zone of the trans-Alleghany territory:



CHAPTER IV.
THE INDIAN WAR

All met in companies with their wives and children, and set about building 
little fortifications, to defend themselves from such barbarian and 
inhuman enemies, whom they concluded would be let loose upon them at 
pleasure.
--The Reverend Hugh McAden--Diary, July, 1755.

Long before the actual outbreak of hostilities powerful forces were 
gradually converging to produce a clash between the aggressive colonials 
and the crafty Indians. As the settlers pressed farther westward into the 
domain of the red men, arrogantly grazing their stock over the cherished 
hunting-grounds of the Cherokees, the savages, who were already well 
disposed toward the French, began to manifest a deep indignation against 
the British colonists because of this callous encroachment upon their 
territory. During the sporadic forays by scattered bands of Northern 
Indians upon the Catawbas and other tribes friendly to the pioneers the 
isolated settlements at the back part of the Carolinas suffered rude and 
sanguinary onslaughts. In the summer of 1753 a party of northern Indians 
warring in the French interest made their appearance in Rowan County, 
which had just been organized, and committed various depredations upon the 
scattered settlements. To repel these attacks a band of the Catawbas 
sallied forth, encountered a detached party of the enemy, and slew five of 
their number. Among the spoils, significantly enough, were silver 
crucifixes, beads, looking-glasses, tomahawks and other implements of war, 
all of French manufacture.

Intense rivalry for the good will of the near-by southern tribes existed 
between Virginia and South Carolina. In strong remonstrance against the 
alleged attempt of Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to alienate the 
Cherokees, Catawbas, Muscogees, and Chickasaws from South Carolina and to 
attach them to Virginia, Governor Glen of South Carolina made pungent 
observations to Dinwiddie: "South Carolina is a weak frontier colony, and 
in case of invasion by the French would be their first object of attack. 
We have not much to fear, however, while we retain the affection of the 
Indians around us; but should we forfeit that by any mismanagement on our 
part, or by the superior address of the French, we are in a miserable 
situation. The Cherokees alone have several thousand gunmen well 
acquainted with every inch of the province . . . their country is the key 
to Carolina." By a treaty concluded at Saluda (November 24, 1753), Glen 
promised to build the Cherokees a fort near the lower towns, for the 
protection of themselves and their allies; and the Cherokees on their part 
agreed to become the subjects of the King of Great Britain and hold their 
lands under him. This fort, erected this same year on the headwaters of 
the Savannah, within gunshot distance of the important Indian town of 
Keowee, was named Fort Prince George. "It is a square," says the founder 
of the fort (Governor Glen to the Board of Trade, August 26, 1754), "with 
regular Bastions and four Ravelins it is near Two hundred foot from 
Salient Angle to Salient Angle and is made of Earth taken out of the 
Ditch, secured with fachines and well rammed with a banquet on the Inside 
for the men to stand upon when they fire over, the Ravelins are made of 
Posts of Lightwood which is very durable, they are ten foot in length 
sharp pointed three foot and a half in the ground." The dire need for such 
a fort in the back country was tragically illustrated by the sudden 
onslaught upon the "House of John Gutry & James Anshers" in York County by 
a party of sixty French Indians (December 16, 1754), who brutally murdered 
sixteen of the twenty-one persons present, and carried off as captives the 
remaining five."

At the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754 North Carolina voted 
twelve thousand pounds for the raising of troops and several thousand 
pounds additional for the construction of forts--a sum considerably larger 
than that voted by Virginia. A regiment of two hundred and fifty men was 
placed under the command of Colonel James Innes of the Cape Fear section; 
and the ablest officer under him was the young Irishman from the same 
section, Lieutenant Hugh Waddell. On June 3, 1754, Dinwiddie appointed 
Innes, his close friend, commander-in-chief of all the forces against the 
French; and immediately after the disaster at Great Meadows (July, 1754), 
Innes took command. Within two months the supplies for the North Carolina 
troops were exhausted; and as Virginia then failed to furnish additional 
supplies, Colonel Innes had no recourse but to disband his troops and 
permit them to return home. Appointed governor of Fort Cumberland by 
General Braddock, he was in command there while Braddock advanced on his 
disastrous march.

The lesson of Braddock's defeat (July 9, 1755) was memorable in the 
history of the Old Southwest. Well might Braddock exclaim with his last 
breath: "Who would have thought it? . . . We shall know better how to deal 
with them another time." Led on by the reckless and fiery Beaujeu, wearing 
an Indian gorget about his neck, the savages from the protection of trees 
and rough defenses, a pre pared ambuscade, poured a galling fire into the 
compact divisions of the English, whose scarlet coats furnished ideal 
targets. The obstinacy of the British commanders in refusing to permit 
their troops to fight Indian fashion was suicidal; for as Herman Alriclis 
wrote Governor Morris of Pennsylvania (July 22, 1755): " . . . the French 
and Indians had cast an Intrenchment across the road before our Army which 
they Discovered not Untill they came Close up to it, from thence and both 
sides of the road the enemy kept a constant fireing on them, our Army 
being so confused, they could not fight, and they would not be admitted by 
the Genl or Sir John St. Clair, to break thro' their Ranks and Take behind 
trees." Daniel Boone, who went from North Carolina as a wagoner in the 
company commanded by Edward Brice Dobbs, was on the battle-field; but 
Dobbs's company at the time was scouting in the woods. When the fierce 
attack fell upon the baggage a train, Boone succeeded in effecting his 
escape only by cutting the traces of his team and fleeing on one of the 
horses. To his dying day Boone continued to censure Braddock's conduct, 
and reprehended especially his fatal neglect to employ strong flank-guards 
and a sufficient number of Provincial scouts thoroughly acquainted with 
the wilderness and all the wiles and strategies of savage warfare.

For a number of months following Braddock's defeat there was a great rush 
of the frightened people southward. In a letter to Dinwiddie, Washington 
expresses the apprehension that Augusta, Frederick, and Hampshire County 
will soon be depopulated, as the whole back country is in motion toward 
the southern colonies. During this same summer Governor Arthur Dobbs of 
North Carolina made a tour of exploration through the western part of the 
colony, seeking a site for a fort to guard the frontier. The frontier 
company of fifty men which was to garrison the projected fort was placed 
under the command of Hugh Waddell, now promoted to the rank of captain, 
though only twenty-one years old. In addition to Waddell's company, armed 
patrols were required for the protection of the Rowan County frontier; and 
during the summer Indian alarms were frequent at the Moravian village of 
Bethabara, whose inhabitants had heard with distress on March 31st of the 
slaughter of eleven Moravians on the Mahoni and of the ruin of 
Gnadenhutten. Many of the settlers in the outlying districts of Rowan fled 
for safety to the refuge of the little village; and frequently every 
available house, every place of temporary abode was filled with panic 
stricken refugees. So persistent were the depredations of the Indians and 
so alarmed were the scattered Rowan settlers by the news of the murders 
and the destruction of Vaul's Fort in Virginia (June 25, 1756) that at a 
conference on July 5th the Moravians "decided to protect our houses with 
palisades, and make them safe before the enemy should in vade our tract or 
attack us, for if the people were all going to retreat we would be the 
last left on the frontier and the first point of attack." By July 23d, 
they had constructed a strong defense for their settlement, afterward 
called the "Dutch Fort" by the Indians. The principal structure was a 
stockade, triangular in plan, some three hundred feet on a side, enclosing 
the principal buildings of the settlement; and the gateway was guarded by 
an observation tower. The other defense was a stockade embracing eight 
houses at the mill some distance away, around which a small settlement had 
sprung up.

During the same year the fort planned by Dobbs was erected upon the site 
he had chosen--between Third and Fourth creeks; and the commissioners 
Richard Caswell and Francis Brown, sent out to inspect the fort, made the 
following picturesque report to the Assembly (December 21, 1756):

"That they had likewise viewed the State of Fort Dobbs, and found it to be 
a good and Substantial Building of the Dimentions following (that is to 
say) The Oblong Square fifty three feet by forty, the opposite Angles 
Twenty four feet and Twenty-Two In Height Twenty four and a half feet as 
by the Plan annexed Appears, The Thickness of the Walls which are made of 
Oak Logs regularly Diminished from sixteen Inches to Six, it contains 
three floors and there may be discharged from each floor at one and the 
same time about one hundred Musketts the same is beautifully scituated in 
the fork of Fourth Creek a Branch of the Yadkin River. And that they also 
found under Command of Cap' Hugh Waddel Forty six Effective men Officers 
and Soldiers, the said Officers and Soldiers Appearing well and in good 
Spirits."

As to the erection of a fort on the Tennessee, promised the Cherokees by 
South Carolina, difficulties between the governor of that province and of 
Virginia in regard to matters of policy and the proportionate share of 
expenses made effective cooperation between the two colonies well-nigh 
impossible. Glen, as we have seen, had resented Dinwiddie's efforts to win 
the South Carolina Indians over to Virginia's interest. And Dinwiddie had 
been very indignant when the force promised him by the Indians to aid 
General Braddock did not arrive, attributing this defection in part to 
Glen's negotiations for a meeting with the chieftains and in part to the 
influence of the South Carolina traders, who kept the Indians away by 
hiring them to go on long hunts for furs and skinns. But there was no such 
contention between Virginia and North Carolina. Dinwiddie and Dobbs 
arranged (November 6, 1755) to send a commission from these colonies to 
treat with the Cherokees and the Catawbas. Virginia sent two 
commissioners, Colonel William Byrd, third of that name, and Colonel Peter 
Randolph; while North Carolina sent one, Captain Hugh Waddell. Salisbury, 
North Carolina, was the place of rendezvous. The treaty with the Catawbas 
was made at the Catawba Town, presumably the village opposite the mouth of 
Sugaw Creek, in York County, South Carolina, on February 20-21, 1756; that 
with the Cherokees on Broad River, North Carolina, March 13-17. As a 
result of the negotiations and after the receipt of a present of goods, 
the Catawbas agreed to send forty warriors to aid Virginia within forty 
days; and the Cherokees, in return for presents and Virginia's promise to 
contribute her proportion toward the erection of a strong fort, undertook 
to send four hundred warriors within forty days, "as soon as the said fort 
shall be built." Virginia and North Carolina thus wisely cooperated to 
"straighten the path" and "brighten the chain" between the white and the 
red men, in important treaties which Have largely escaped the attention of 
historians."

On May 25, 1756, a conference was held at Salisbury between King Heygler 
and warriors of the Catawba nation on the one side and Chief Justice 
Henley, doubtless attended by Captain Waddell and his frontier company, on 
the other. King Heygler, following the lead set by the Cherokees, 
petitioned the Governor of North Carolina to send the Catawbas some 
ammunition and to "build us a fort for securing our old men, women and 
children when we turn out to fight the Enemy on their coming." The chief 
justice assured the King that the Catawbas would receive a necessary 
supply of ammunition (one hundred pounds of gunpowder and four hundred 
pounds of lead were later sent them) and promised to urge with the 
governor their request to have a fort built as soon as possible. Pathos 
not unmixed with dry humor tinges the eloquent appeal of good old King 
Heygler, ever the loyal friend of the whites, at this conference:

"I desire a stop may be put to the selling of strong Liquors by the White 
people to my people especially near the Indian nation. IF THE WHITE PEOPLE 
MAKE STRONG DRINK, LET THEM. SELL IT TO ONE ANOTHER, OR DRINK IT IN THEIR 
OWN FAMILIES. This will avoid a great deal of mischief which otherwise 
will, happen from my people getting drunk and quarrelling with the White 
people. I have no strong prisons like you to confine them for it. Our only 
way is to put them under ground and all these (pointing proudly to his 
Warriors) will be ready to do that to those who shall deserve it."

In response to this request, the sum of four thousand pounds was 
appropriated by the North Carolina Assembly for the erection of "a Fort on 
our western frontier to protect and secure the Catawbas" and for the 
support of two companies of fifty men each to garrison this and another 
fort building on the sea coast. The commissioners appointed for the 
purpose recommended (December 21, 1756) a site for the fort "near the 
'Catawba nation"; and on January 20, 1757, Governor Dobbs reported; "We 
are now building a Fort in the midst of their towns at their own Request." 
The fort thereupon begun must have stood near the mouth of the South Fork 
of the Catawba River, as Dobbs says it was in the "midst" of their towns, 
which are situated a "few miles north and south of 38 degrees" and might 
properly be included within a circle of thirty miles radius."

During the succeeding months many depredations were committed by the 
Indians upon the exposed and scattered settlements. Had it not been for 
the protection afforded by all these forts, by the militia companies under 
Alexander Osborne of Rowan and Nathaniel Alexander of Anson, and by a 
special company of patrollers under Green and Moore, the back settlers who 
had been so outrageously "pilfered" by the Indians would have "retired 
from the Frontier into the inner settlements."