The Conquest of the Old Southwest; the romantic story of the early pioneers into Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, 1740-1790Henderson, Archibald
History
The Conquest of the Old Southwest; the romantic story of the early pioneers into Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, 1740-1790
Henderson, Archibald
Frontier and pioneer life -- Southwest, Old; Kentucky -- History -- To 1792; Southwest, Old -- History; Tennessee -- History
At this very time, Patrick Henry, in conjunction with William Byrd 3d
and others, was negotiating for a private purchase of lands from the
Cherokees; and when Wharton, after answering Henry's inquiry as to where
he might buy Indian goods, remarked: "It's not possible you mean to
enter the Indian trade at this period," Henry laughingly replied: "The
wish-world is my hobby horse." "From whence I conclude," adds Wharton,
"he has some prospect of making a purchase of the natives, but where I
know not."
The war, thus promulgated, we believe, at Dunmore's secret instigation
and heralded by a series of ghastly atrocities, came on apace. After the
inhuman murder of the family of Logan, the Indian chieftain, by one
Greathouse and his drunken companions (April 30th), Logan, who contrary
to romantic views was a black-hearted and vengeful savage, harried the
Tennessee and Virginia borders, burning and slaughtering. Unable to
arouse the Cherokees, owing to the opposition of Atta-kulla-kulla, Logan
as late as July 21st said in a letter to the whites: "The Indians are
not angry, only myself," and not until then did Dunmore begin to give
full execution to his warlike plans. The best woodsmen of the border,
Daniel Boone and the German scout Michael Stoner, having been despatched
on July 27th by Colonel William Preston to warn the surveyors of the
trans-Alleghany, made a remarkable journey on foot of eight hundred
miles in sixty-one days. Harrod's company at Harrodsburg, a company of
surveyors at Fontainebleau, Floyd's party on the Kentucky, and the
surveyors at Mann's Lick, thus warned, hurried in to the settlements and
were saved. Meanwhile, Dunmore, in command of the Virginia forces,
invaded territory guaranteed to the Indians by the royal proclamation of
1763 and recently (1774) added to the province of Quebec, a fact of
which he was not aware, conducted a vigorous campaign, and fortified
Camp Charlotte, near Old Chillicothe. Andrew Lewis, however, in charge
of the other division of Dunmore's army, was the one destined to bear
the real brunt and burden of the campaign. His division, recruited from
the very flower of the pioneers of the Old Southwest, was the most
representative body of borderers of this region that up to this time had
assembled to measure strength with the red men. It was an army of the
true stalwarts of the frontier, with fringed leggings and hunting-capes,
rifles and powder-horns, hunting-knives and tomahawks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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