The Winning of the West, Volume One by Theodore Roosevelt
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Theodore Roosevelt >> The Winning of the West, Volume One
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25 PRESIDENTIAL EDITION
THE WINNING OF THE WEST
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
VOLUME ONE
FROM THE ALLEGHANIES TO THE MISSISSIPPI
1769-1776
WITH MAP
This book is dedicated, with his permission
to FRANCIS PARKMAN
To whom Americans who feel a pride in the pioneer history
of their country are so greatly indebted
"O strange New World that yit wast never young,
Whose youth from thee by gripin' need was wrung,
Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby-bed
Was prowled roun' by the Injun's cracklin' tread,
And who grew'st strong thru shifts an' wants an' pains,
Nursed by stern men with empires in their brains,
Who saw in vision their young Ishmel strain
With each hard hand a vassal ocean's mane;
Thou skilled by Freedom and by gret events
To pitch new states ez Old World men pitch tents.
Thou taught by fate to know Jehovah's plan,
Thet man's devices can't unmake a man.
* * * * *
Oh, my friends, thank your God, if you have one, that he
'Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea,
Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,
By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs."
--LOWELL.
PREFACE.
Much of the material on which this work is based is to be found in the
archives of the American Government, which date back to 1774, when the
first Continental Congress assembled. The earliest sets have been
published complete up to 1777, under the title of "American Archives,"
and will be hereafter designated by this name. These early volumes
contain an immense amount of material, because in them are to be found
memoranda of private individuals and many of the public papers of the
various colonial and State governments, as well as those of the
Confederation. The documents from 1789 on--no longer containing any
papers of the separate States--have also been gathered and printed
under the heading of "American State Papers"; by which term they will
be hereafter referred to.
The mass of public papers coming in between these two series, and
covering the period extending from 1776 to 1789, have never been
published, and in great part have either never been examined or else
have been examined in the most cursory manner. The original documents
are all in the Department of State at Washington, and for convenience
will be referred to as "State Department MSS." They are bound in two
or three hundred large volumes; exactly how many I cannot say,
because, though they are numbered, yet several of the numbers
themselves contain from two or three to ten or fifteen volumes apiece.
The volumes to which reference will most often be made are the
following:
* * * * *
No. 15. Letters of Huntington.
No. 16. Letters of the Presidents of Congress.
No. 18. Letter-Book B.
No. 20. Vol. 1. Reports of Committees on State Papers.
No. 27. Reports of Committees on the War Office. 1776 to 1778.
No. 30. Reports of Committees.
No. 32. Reports of Committees of the States and of the Week.
No. 41. Vol. 3. Memorials E. F. G. 1776-1788.
No. 41. Vol. 5. Memorials K. L. 1777-1789.
No. 50. Letters and Papers of Oliver Pollock. 1777-1792.
No. 51. Vol. 2 Intercepted Letters. 1779-1782.
No. 56. Indian Affairs.
No. 71. Vol. 1. Virginia State Papers.
No. 73. Georgia State Papers.
No. 81. Vol. 2. Reports of Secretary John Jay.
No. 120. Vol. 2. American Letters.
No. 124. Vol. 3. Reports of Jay.
No. 125. Negotiation Book.
No. 136. Vol. 1. Reports of Board of Treasury.
No. 136. Vol. 2. Reports of Board of Treasury.
No. 147. Vol. 2. Reports of Board of War.
No. 147. Vol. 5. Reports of Board of War.
No. 147. Vol. 6. Reports of Board of War.
No. 148. Vol. 1. Letters from Board of War.
No. 149. Vol. 1. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at
War.
No. 149. Vol. 2. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at
War.
No. 149. Vol. 3. Letters and Reports from B. Lincoln, Secretary at
War.
No. 150. Vol. 1. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War.
No. 150. Vol. 2. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War.
No. 150. Vol. 3. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary at War.
No. 152. Vol. 11. Letters of General Washington.
No. 163. Letters of Generals Clinton, Nixon, Nicola, Morgan, Harmar,
Muhlenburg.
No. 169. Vol. 9. Washington's Letters.
No. 180. Reports of Secretary of Congress.
Besides these numbered volumes, the State Department contains others,
such as Washington's letter-book, marked War Department 1792, '3, '4,
'5. There are also a series of numbered volumes of "Letters to
Washington," Nos. 33 and 49 containing reports from Geo. Rogers Clark.
The Jefferson papers, which are likewise preserved here, are bound in
several series, each containing a number of volumes. The Madison and
Monroe papers, also kept here, are not yet bound; I quote them as the
Madison MSS. and the Monroe MSS.
My thanks are due to Mr. W. C. Hamilton, Asst. Librarian, for giving
me every facility to examine the material.
At Nashville, Tennessee, I had access to a mass of original matter in
the shape of files of old newspapers, of unpublished letters, diaries,
reports, and other manuscripts. I was given every opportunity to
examine these at my leisure, and indeed to take such as were most
valuable to my own home. For this my thanks are especially due to
Judge John M. Lea, to whom, as well as to my many other friends in
Nashville, I shall always feel under a debt on account of the
unfailing courtesy with which I was treated. I must express my
particular acknowledgments to Mr. Lemuel R. Campbell. The Nashville
manuscripts, etc. of which I have made most use are the following:
* * * * *
The Robertson MSS., comprising two large volumes, entitled the
"Correspondence, etc., of Gen'l James Robertson," from 1781 to 1814.
They belong to the library of Nashville University; I had some
difficulty in finding the second volume but finally succeeded.
The Campbell MSS., consisting of letters and memoranda to and from
different members of the Campbell family who were prominent in the
Revolution; dealing for the most part with Lord Dunmore's war, the
Cherokee wars, the battle of King's Mountain, land speculations, etc.
They are in the possession of Mr. Lemuel R. Campbell, who most kindly
had copies of all the important ones sent me, at great personal
trouble.
Some of the Sevier and Jackson papers, the original MS. diaries of
Donelson on the famous voyage down the Tennessee and up the
Cumberland, and of Benj. Hawkins while surveying the Tennessee
boundary, memoranda of Thos. Washington, Overton and Dunham, the
earliest files of the Knoxville _Gazette_, from 1791 to 1795,
etc. These are all in the library of the Tennessee Historical Society.
For original matter connected with Kentucky, I am greatly indebted to
Col. Reuben T. Durrett, of Louisville, the founder of the "Filson
Club," which has done such admirable historical work of late years. He
allowed me to work at my leisure in his library, the most complete in
the world on all subjects connected with Kentucky history. Among other
matter, he possesses the Shelby MSS., containing a number of letters
to and from, and a dictated autobiography of, Isaac Shelby; MS.
journals of Rev. James Smith, during two tours in the western country
in 1785 and '95; early files of the "Kentucke _Gazette_"; books
owned by the early settlers; papers of Boon, and George Rogers Clark;
MS. notes on Kentucky by George Bradford, who settled there in 1779;
MS. copy of the record book of Col. John Todd, the first governor of
the Illinois country after Clark's conquest; the McAfee MSS.,
consisting of an Account of the First Settlement of Salt River, the
Autobiography of Robert McAfee, and a Brief Memorandum of the Civil
and Natural History of Kentucky; MS. autobiography of Rev. William
Hickman, who visited Kentucky in 1776, etc., etc.
I am also under great obligations to Col. John Mason Brown of
Louisville, another member of the Filson Club, for assistance rendered
me; particularly for having sent me six bound volumes of MSS.,
containing the correspondence of the Spanish Minister Gardoqui, copied
from the Spanish archives.
At Lexington I had access to the Breckenridge MSS., through the
kindness of Mr. Ethelbert D. Warfield; and to the Clay MSS. through
the kindness of Miss Lucretia Hart Clay. I am particularly indebted to
Miss Clay for her courtesy in sending me many of the most valuable old
Hart and Benton letters, depositions, accounts, and the like.
The Blount MSS. were sent to me from California by the Hon. W. D.
Stephens of Los Angeles, although I was not personally known to him;
an instance of courtesy and generosity, in return for which I could do
nothing save express my sincere appreciation and gratitude, which I
take this opportunity of publicly repeating.
The Gates MSS., from which I drew some important facts not hitherto
known concerning the King's Mountain campaign, are in the library of
the New York Historical Society.
The Virginia State Papers have recently been published, and are now
accessible to all.
Among the most valuable of the hitherto untouched manuscripts which I
have obtained are the Haldimand papers, preserved in the Canadian
archives at Ottawa. They give, for the first time, the British and
Indian side of all the northwestern fighting; including Clark's
campaigns, the siege of Boonsborough, the battle of the Blue Licks,
Crawford's defeat, etc. The Canadian archivist. Mr. Douglass Brymner,
furnished me copies of all I needed with a prompt courtesy for which I
am more indebted than I can well express.
I have been obliged to rely mainly on these collections of early
documents as my authorities, especially for that portion of western
history prior to 1783. Excluding the valuable, but very brief, and
often very inaccurate, sketch which Filson wrote down as coming from
Boon, there are no printed histories of Kentucky earlier than
Marshall's, in 1812; while the first Tennessee history was Haywood's,
in 1822. Both Marshall and Haywood did excellent work; the former was
an able writer, the latter was a student, and (like the Kentucky
historian Mann Butler) a sound political thinker, devoted to the
Union, and prompt to stand up for the right. But both of them, in
dealing with the early history of the country beyond the Alleghanies,
wrote about matters that had happened from thirty to fifty years
before, and were obliged to base most of their statements on tradition
or on what the pioneers remembered in their old age. The later
historians, for the most part, merely follow these two. In
consequence, the mass of original material, in the shape of official
reports and contemporary letters, contained in the Haldimand MSS., the
Campbell MSS., the McAfee MSS., the Gardoqui MSS., the State
Department MSS., the Virginia State Papers, etc., not only cast a
flood of new light upon this early history, but necessitate its being
entirely re-written. For instance, they give an absolutely new aspect
to, and in many cases completely reverse, the current accounts of all
the Indian fighting, both against the Cherokees and the Northwestern
tribes; they give for the first time a clear view of frontier
diplomacy, of the intrigues with the Spaniards, and even of the mode
of life in the backwoods, and of the workings of the civil government.
It may be mentioned that the various proper names are spelt in so many
different ways that it is difficult to know which to choose. Even
Clark is sometimes spelt Clarke, while Boon was apparently indifferent
as to whether his name should or should not contain the final silent
_e_. As for the original Indian titles, it is often quite
impossible to give them even approximately; the early writers often
wrote the same Indian words in such different ways that they bear no
resemblance whatever to one another.
In conclusion I would say that it has been to me emphatically a labor
of love to write of the great deeds of the border people. I am not
blind to their manifold shortcomings, nor yet am I ignorant of their
many strong and good qualities. For a number of years I spent most of
my time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other
frontiersman. The wild country in which we dwelt and across which we
wandered was in the far west; and there were of course many features
in which the life of a cattleman on the Great Plains and among the
Rockies differed from that led by a backwoodsman in the Alleghany
forests a century before. Yet the points of resemblance were far more
numerous and striking. We guarded our herds of branded cattle and
shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil
government, and put down evil-doers, white and red, on the banks of
the Little Missouri and among the wooded, precipitous foot-hills of
the Bighorn, exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years
previously built their log-cabins beside the Kentucky or in the
valleys of the Great Smokies. The men who have shared in the fast
vanishing frontier life of the present feel a peculiar sympathy with
the already long-vanished frontier life of the past.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL, _May_, 1889
FOREWORD.
In the year 1898 the United States finished the work begun over a
century before by the backwoodsman, and drove the Spaniard outright
from the western world. During the march of our people from the crests
of the Alleghanies to the Pacific, the Spaniard was for a long period
our chief white opponent; and after an interval his place among our
antagonists was taken by his Spanish-American heir. Although during
the Revolution the Spaniard at one time became America's friend in the
sense that he was England's foe, he almost from the outset hated and
dreaded his new ally more than his old enemy. In the peace
negotiations at the close of the contest he was jealously eager to
restrict our boundaries to the line of the Alleghanies; while even
during the concluding years of the war the Spanish soldiers on the
upper Mississippi were regarded by the Americans in Illinois as a
menace no less serious than the British troops at Detroit.
In the opening years of our national life the Western backwoodsman
found the Spanish ownership of the mouth of the Mississippi even more
hurtful and irksome than the retention by the British king of the
posts on the Great Lakes. After years of tedious public negotiations,
under and through which ran a dark woof of private intrigue, the
sinewy western hands so loosened the Spanish grip that in despair
Spain surrendered to France the mouth of the river and the vast
territories stretching thence into the dim Northwest. She hoped
thereby to establish a strong barrier between her remaining provinces
and her most dreaded foe. But France in her turn grew to understand
that America's position as regards Louisiana, thanks to the steady
westward movement of the backwoodsman, was such as to render it on the
one hand certain that the retention of the province by France would
mean an armed clash with the United States, and on the other hand no
less certain that in the long run such a conflict would result to
France's disadvantage. Louisiana thus passed from the hands of Spain,
after a brief interval, into those of the young Republic. There
remained to Spain, Mexico and Florida; and forthwith the pressure of
the stark forest riflemen began to be felt on the outskirts of these
two provinces. Florida was the first to fall. After a portion of it
had been forcibly annexed, after Andrew Jackson had marched at will
through part of the remainder, and after the increasing difficulty of
repressing the American filibustering efforts had shown the imminence
of some serious catastrophe, Spain ceded the peninsula to the United
States. Texas, New Mexico, and California did not fall into American
hands until they had passed from the Spaniard to his half-Indian sons.
Many decades went by after Spain had lost her foothold on the American
continent, and she still held her West Indian empire. She misgoverned
the islands as she had misgoverned the continent; and in the islands,
as once upon the continent, her own children became her deadliest
foes. But generation succeeded generation, and the prophecies of those
far-seeing statesmen who foretold that she would lose to the northern
Republic her West Indian possessions remained unfulfilled. At last, at
the close of one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars that even Spain
ever waged with her own colonists, the United States intervened, and
in a brief summer campaign destroyed the last vestiges of the mediaeval
Spanish domain in the tropic seas alike of the West and the remote
East.
We of this generation were but carrying to completion the work of our
fathers and of our fathers' fathers. It is moreover a matter for just
pride that while there was no falling off in the vigor and prowess
shown by our fighting men, there was a marked change for the better in
the spirit with which the deed was done. The backwoodsmen had pushed
the Spaniards from the Mississippi, had set up a slave-holding
republic in Texas, and had conquered the Californian gold-fields, in
the sheer masterful exercise of might. It is true that they won great
triumphs for civilization no less than for their own people; yet they
won them unwittingly, for they were merely doing as countless other
strong young races had done in the long contest carried on for so many
thousands of years between the fit and the unfit. But in 1898 the
United States, while having gained in strength, showed that there had
likewise been gain in justice, in mercy, in sense of responsibility.
Our conquest of the Southwest has been justified by the result. The
Latin peoples in the lands we won and settled have prospered like our
own stock. The sons and grandsons of those who had been our foes in
Louisiana and New Mexico came eagerly forward to serve in the army
that was to invade Cuba. Our people as a whole went into the war,
primarily, it is true, to drive out the Spaniard once for all from
America; but with the fixed determination to replace his rule by a
government of justice and orderly liberty.
To use the political terminology of the present day, the whole western
movement of our people was simply the most vital part of that great
movement of expansion which has been the central and all-important
feature of our history--a feature far more important than any other
since we became a nation, save only the preservation of the Union
itself. It was expansion which made us a great power; and at every
stage it has been bitterly antagonized, not only by the short-sighted
and the timid, but even by many who were neither one nor the other.
There were many men who opposed the movement west of the Alleghanies
and the peopling of the lands which now form Kentucky, Tennessee, and
the great States lying between the Ohio and the Lakes. Excellent
persons then foretold ruin to the country from bringing into it a
disorderly population of backwoodsmen, with the same solemnity that
has in our own day marked the prophecies of those who have seen
similar ruin in the intaking of Hawaii and Porto Rico. The annexation
of Louisiana, including the entire territory between the northern
Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean, aroused such frantic opposition in
the old-settled regions of the country, and especially in the
Northeast, as to call forth threats of disunion, the language used by
the opponents of our expansion into the Far West being as violent as
that sometimes used in denouncing our acquisition of the Philippines.
The taking of Texas and of California was complicated by the slave
question, but much of the opposition to both was simply the general
opposition to expansion--that is, to national growth and national
greatness. In our long-settled communities there have always been
people who opposed every war which marked the advance of American
civilization at the cost of savagery. The opposition was fundamentally
the same, whether these wars were campaigns in the old West against
the Shawnees and the Miamis, in the new West against the Sioux and the
Apaches, or in Luzon against the Tagals. In each case, in the end, the
believers in the historic American policy of expansion have triumphed.
Hitherto America has gone steadily forward along the path of
greatness, and has remained true to the policy of her early leaders
who felt within them the lift towards mighty things. Like every really
strong people, ours is stirred by the generous ardor for daring strife
and mighty deeds, and now with eyes undimmed looks far into the misty
future.
At bottom the question of expansion in 1898 was but a variant of the
problem we had to solve at every stage of the great western movement.
Whether the prize of the moment was Louisiana or Florida, Oregon or
Alaska, mattered little. The same forces, the same types of men, stood
for and against the cause of national growth, of national greatness,
at the end of the century as at the beginning.
My non-literary work has been so engrossing during the years that have
elapsed since my fourth volume was published, that I have been unable
to go on with "The Winning of the West"; but my design is to continue
the narrative as soon as I can get leisure, carrying it through the
stages which marked the taking of Florida and Oregon, the upbuilding
of the republic of Texas, and the acquisition of New Mexico and
California as the result of the Mexican war.
Theodore Roosevelt
EXECUTIVE CHAMBER, ALBANY, N. Y.
_January_ 1, 1900.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I.--THE SPREAD OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES
II.--THE FRENCH OF THE OHIO VALLEY, 1763-1775
III.--THE APPALACHIAN CONFEDERACIES, 1765-1775
IV.--THE ALGONQUINS OF THE NORTHWEST, 1769-1774
V.--THE BACKWOODSMEN OF THE ALLEGHANIES, 1769-1774
VI.--BOON AND THE LONG HUNTERS; AND THEIR HUNTING IN NO-MAN'S-LAND,
1769-1774
VII.--SEVIER, ROBERTSON, AND THE WATAUGA COMMONWEALTH, 1769-1774
VIII.--LORD DUNMORE'S WAR, 1774
IX.--THE BATTLE OF THE GREAT KANAWHA; AND LOGAN'S SPEECH, 1774
X.--BOON AND THE SETTLEMENT OF KENTUCKY, 1775
XI.--IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION--THE SOUTHERN BACKWOODSMEN
OVERWHELM THE CHEROKEES, 1776
XII.--GROWTH AND CIVIL ORGANIZATION OF KENTUCKY, 1776
APPENDICES:
APPENDIX A--TO CHAPTER IV.
APPENDIX B--TO CHAPTER V.
APPENDIX C--TO CHAPTER VI.
APPENDIX D--TO CHAPTER VI.
APPENDIX E--TO CHAPTER VII.
APPENDIX F--TO CHAPTER IX.
[Illustration: Map. The West during the Revolution. Showing Hamilton's
route from Detroit to Vincennes; Clark's route from Redstone to the
Illinois, and thence to Vincennes; Boon's trail, on the Wilderness
Road to Kentucky; Robertson's trail to the settlement he founded on
the Cumberland; the water route from the Watauga to Nashboro, that
taken by the _Adventure_; the march of the backwoodsmen from the
Sycamore Shoals to King's Mountain. The flags denote the battles of
the Great Kanawha, the Blue Licks, the Island Flats of the Holston,
and King's Mountain; and the assaults on Boonsboro and Vincennes.
Based on a map by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London.]
THE WINNING OF THE WEST.
CHAPTER I.
THE SPREAD OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES.
During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking
peoples over the world's waste spaces has been not only the most
striking feature in the world's history, but also the event of all
others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance.
The tongue which Bacon feared to use in his writings, lest they should
remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively
unimportant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two continents. The
Common Law which Coke jealously upheld in the southern half of a
single European island, is now the law of the land throughout the vast
regions of Australasia, and of America north of the Rio Grande. The
names of the plays that Shakespeare wrote are household words in the
mouths of mighty nations, whose wide domains were to him more unreal
than the realm of Prester John. Over half the descendants of their
fellow countrymen of that day now dwell in lands which, when these
three Englishmen were born, held not a single white inhabitant; the
race which, when they were in their prime, was hemmed in between the
North and the Irish seas, to-day holds sway over worlds, whose endless
coasts are washed by the waves of the three great oceans.
There have been many other races that at one time or another had their
great periods of race expansion--as distinguished from mere
conquest,--but there has never been another whose expansion has been
either so broad or so rapid.
At one time, many centuries ago, it seemed as if the Germanic peoples,
like their Celtic foes and neighbors, would be absorbed into the
all-conquering Roman power, and, merging their identity in that of the
victors, would accept their law, their speech, and their habits of
thought. But this danger vanished forever on the day of the slaughter
by the Teutoburger Wald, when the legions of Varus were broken by the
rush of Hermann's wild warriors.
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