The Winning of the West, Volume Three by Theodore Roosevelt

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PRESIDENTIAL EDITION

THE WINNING OF THE WEST

BY

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

VOLUME THREE

THE FOUNDING OF THE TRANS-ALLEGHANY COMMONWEALTHS

1784-1790

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

PREFACE TO THIRD VOLUME.

The material used herein is that mentioned in the preface to the first
volume, save that I have also drawn freely on the Draper Manuscripts, in
the Library of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, at Madison.
For the privilege of examining these valuable manuscripts I am indebted
to the generous courtesy of the State Librarian, Mr. Reuben Gold
Thwaites; I take this opportunity of extending to him my hearty thanks.

The period covered in this volume includes the seven years immediately
succeeding the close of the Revolutionary War. It was during these seven
years that the Constitution was adopted, and actually went into effect;
an event if possible even more momentous for the West than the East. The
time was one of vital importance to the whole nation; alike to the
people of the inland frontier and to those of the seaboard. The course
of events during these years determined whether we should become a
mighty nation, or a mere snarl of weak and quarrelsome little
commonwealths, with a history as bloody and meaningless as that of the
Spanish-American states.

At the close of the Revolution the West was peopled by a few thousand
settlers, knit by but the slenderest ties to the Federal Government. A
remarkable inflow of population followed. The warfare with the Indians,
and the quarrels with the British and Spaniards over boundary questions,
reached no decided issue. But the rifle-bearing freemen who founded
their little republics on the western waters gradually solved the
question of combining personal liberty with national union. For years
there was much wavering. There were violent separatist movements, and
attempts to establish complete independence of the eastern States. There
were corrupt conspiracies between some of the western leaders and
various high Spanish officials, to bring about a disruption of the
Confederation. The extraordinary little backwoods state of Franklin
began and ended a career unique in our annals. But the current, though
eddying and sluggish, set towards Union. By 1790 a firm government had
been established west of the mountains, and the trans-Alleghany
commonwealths had become parts of the Federal Union.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

SAGAMORE HILL, LONG ISLAND, _October_, 1894.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. THE INRUSH OF SETTLERS, 1784-1787

II. THE INDIAN WARS, 1784-1787

III. THE NAVIGATION OF THE MISSISSIPPI; SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS AND SPANISH
INTRIGUES, 1784-1788

IV. THE STATE OF FRANKLIN, 1784-1788

V. KENTUCKY'S STRUGGLE FOR STATEHOOD, 1784-1790

VI. THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY; OHIO, 1787-1790

VII. THE WAR IN THE NORTHWEST, 1787-1790

VIII. THE SOUTHWEST TERRITORY; TENNESSEE, 1788-1890

[Illustration: The Western Land Claims at the Close of the Revolution.
Showing also the state of Franklin, Kentucky, and the Cumberland
Settlements, or Miro District. _Source:_ Based on a map by G. P.
Putnam's Sons, New York and London.]

THE WINNING OF THE WEST.

CHAPTER I.

THE INRUSH OF SETTLERS, 1784-1787.

At the beginning of 1784 peace was a definite fact, and the United
States had become one among the nations of the earth; a nation young and
lusty in her youth, but as yet loosely knit, and formidable in promise
rather than in actual capacity for performance.

The Western Frontier.

On the western frontier lay vast and fertile vacant spaces; for the
Americans had barely passed the threshold of the continent predestined
to be the inheritance of their children and children's children. For
generations the great feature in the nation's history, next only to the
preservation of its national life, was to be its westward growth; and
its distinguishing work was to be the settlement of the immense
wilderness which stretched across to the Pacific. But before the land
could be settled it had to be won.

The valley of the Ohio already belonged to the Americans by right of
conquest and of armed possession; it was held by rifle-bearing backwoods
farmers, hard and tenacious men, who never lightly yielded what once
they had grasped. North and south of the valley lay warlike and powerful
Indian confederacies, now at last thoroughly alarmed and angered by the
white advance; while behind these warrior tribes, urging them to
hostility, and furnishing them the weapons and means wherewith to fight,
stood the representatives of two great European nations, both bitterly
hostile to the new America, and both anxious to help in every way the
red savages who strove to stem the tide of settlement. The close
alliance between the soldiers and diplomatic agents of polished
old-world powers and the wild and squalid warriors of the wilderness was
an alliance against which the American settlers had always to make head
in the course of their long march westward. The kings and the peoples of
the old world ever showed themselves the inveterate enemies of their
blood-kin in the new; they always strove to delay the time when their
own race should rise to wellnigh universal supremacy. In mere blind
selfishness, or in a spirit of jealousy still blinder, the Europeans
refused to regard their kinsmen who had crossed the ocean to found new
realms in new continents as entitled to what they had won by their own
toil and hardihood. They persisted in treating the bold adventurers who
went abroad as having done so simply for the benefit of the men who
stayed at home; and they shaped their transatlantic policy in accordance
with this idea. The Briton and the Spaniard opposed the American settler
precisely as the Frenchman had done before them, in the interest of
their own merchants and fur-traders. They endeavored in vain to bar him
from the solitudes through which only the Indians roved.

All the ports around the Great Lakes were held by the British;
[Footnote: State Dep. MSS., No. 150, vol. ii., March, 1788. Report of
Secretary Knox.] their officers, military and civil, still kept
possession, administering the government of the scattered French hamlets,
and preserving their old-time relations with the Indian tribes, whom they
continued to treat as allies or feudatories. To the south and west the
Spaniards played the same part. They scornfully refused to heed the
boundary established to the southward by the treaty between England and
the United States, alleging that the former had ceded what it did not
possess. They claimed the land as theirs by right of conquest. The
territory which they controlled stretched from Florida along a vaguely
defined boundary to the Mississippi, up the east bank of the latter at
least to the Chickasaw Bluffs, and thence up the west bank; while the
Creeks and Choctaws were under their influence. The Spaniards dreaded
and hated the Americans even more than did the British, and they were
right; for three fourths of the present territory of the United States
then lay within the limits of the Spanish possessions. [Footnote: State
Dep. MSS., No. 81, vol. ii., pp. 189, 217. No. 120, vol. ii., June 30,
1786.]

Thus there were foes, both white and red, to be overcome, either by
force of arms or by diplomacy, before the northernmost and the
southernmost portions of the wilderness lying on our western border
could be thrown open to settlement. The lands lying between had already
been conquered, and yet were so sparsely settled as to seem almost
vacant. While they offered every advantage of soil and climate to the
farmer and cultivator, they also held out peculiar attractions to
ambitious men of hardy and adventurous temper.

The Rush of Settlers

With the ending of the Revolutionary War the rush of settlers to these
western lauds assumed striking proportions. The peace relieved the
pressure which had hitherto restrained this movement, on the one hand,
while on the other it tended to divert into the new channel of pioneer
work those bold spirits whose spare energies had thus far found an
outlet on stricken fields. To push the frontier westward in the teeth of
the forces of the wilderness was fighting work, such as suited well
enough many a stout soldier who had worn the blue and buff of the
Continental line, or who, with his fellow rough-riders, had followed in
the train of some grim partisan leader.

The people of the New England States and of New York, for the most part,
spread northward and westward within their own boundaries; and Georgia
likewise had room for all her growth within her borders; but in the
States between there was a stir of eager unrest over the tales told of
the beautiful and fertile lands lying along the Ohio, the Cumberland,
and the Tennessee. The days of the early pioneers, of the men who did
the hardest and roughest work, were over; farms were being laid out and
towns were growing up among the felled forests from which the game and
the Indians had alike been driven. There was still plenty of room for
the rude cabin and stump-dotted clearing of the ordinary frontier
settler, the wood-chopper and game hunter. Folk of the common backwoods
type were as yet more numerous than any others among the settlers. In
addition there were planters from among the gentry of the sea-coast;
there were men of means who had bought great tracts of wild land; there
were traders with more energy than capital; there were young lawyers;
there were gentlemen with a taste for an unfettered life of great
opportunity; in short there were adventurers of every kind.

All men who deemed that they could swim in troubled waters were drawn
towards the new country. The more turbulent and ambitious spirits saw
roads to distinction in frontier warfare, politics, and diplomacy.
Merchants dreamed of many fortunate ventures, in connection with the
river trade or the overland commerce by packtrain. Lawyers not only
expected to make their living by their proper calling, but also to rise
to the first places in the commonwealths, for in these new communities,
as in the older States, the law was then the most honored of the
professions, and that which most surely led to high social and political
standing. But the one great attraction for all classes was the chance of
procuring large quantities of fertile land at low prices.

Value of the Land.

To the average settler the land was the prime source of livelihood. A
man of hardihood, thrift, perseverance, and bodily strength could surely
make a comfortable living for himself and his family, if only he could
settle on a good tract of rich soil; and this he could do if he went to
the new country. As a matter of course, therefore, vigorous young
frontiersmen swarmed into the region so recently won.

These men merely wanted so much land as they could till. Others,
however, looked at it from a very different standpoint. The land was the
real treasury-chest of the country. It was the one commodity which
appealed to the ambitious and adventurous side of the industrial
character at that time and in that place. It was the one commodity the
management of which opened chances of procuring vast wealth, and
especially vast speculative wealth. To the American of the end of the
eighteenth century the roads leading to great riches were as few as
those leading to a competency were many. He could not prospect for mines
of gold and of silver, of iron, copper, and coal; he could not discover
and work wells of petroleum and natural gas; he could not build up,
sell, and speculate in railroad systems and steamship companies; he
could not gamble in the stock market; he could not build huge
manufactories of steel, of cottons, of woollens; he could not be a
banker or a merchant on a scale which is dwarfed when called princely;
he could not sit still and see an already great income double and
quadruple because of the mere growth in the value of real estate in some
teeming city. The chances offered him by the fur trade were very
uncertain. If he lived in a sea-coast town, he might do something with
the clipper ships that ran to Europe and China. If he lived elsewhere,
his one chance of acquiring great wealth, and his best chance to acquire
even moderate wealth without long and plodding labor, was to speculate
in wild land.

Land Speculators

Accordingly the audacious and enterprising business men who would
nowadays go into speculation in stocks, were then forced into
speculation in land. Sometimes as individuals, sometimes as large
companies, they sought to procure wild lands on the Wabash, the Ohio,
the Cumberland, the Yazoo. In addition to the ordinary methods of
settlement by, or purchase from private persons, they endeavored to
procure grants on favorable terms from the national and State
legislatures, or even from the Spanish government. They often made a
regular practice of buying the land rights which had accrued in lieu of
arrears of pay to different bodies of Continental troops. They even at
times purchased a vague and clouded title from some Indian tribe. As
with most other speculative business investments, the great land
companies rarely realized for the originators and investors anything
like what was expected; and the majority were absolute failures in every
sense. Nevertheless, a number of men made money out of them, often on
quite a large scale; and in many instances, where the people who planned
and carried out the scheme made nothing for themselves, they yet left
their mark in the shape of settlers who had come in to purchase their
lands, or even in the shape of a town built under their auspices.

Land speculation was by no means confined to those who went into it on a
large scale. The settler without money might content himself with
staking out an ordinary-sized farm; but the new-comer of any means was
sure not only to try to get a large estate for his own use, but also to
procure land beyond any immediate need, so that he might hold on to it
until it rose in value. He was apt to hold commissions to purchase land
for his friends who remained east of the mountains. The land was turned
to use by private individuals and by corporations; it was held for
speculative purposes; it was used for the liquidation of debts of every
kind. The official surveyors, when created, did most of their work by
deputy; Boone was deputy surveyor of Fayette County, in Kentucky.
[Footnote: Draper MSS.; Boone MSS. Entry of August court for 1783.] Some
men surveyed and staked out their own claims; the others employed
professional surveyors, or else hired old hunters like Boone and Kenton,
whose knowledge of woodcraft and acquaintance with the most fertile
grounds enabled them not only to survey the land, but to choose the
portions best fit for settlement. The lack of proper government surveys,
and the looseness with which the records were kept in the land office,
put a premium on fraud and encouraged carelessness. People could make
and record entries in secret, and have the land surveyed in secret, if
they feared a dispute over a title; no one save the particular deputy
surveyor employed needed to know. [Footnote: Draper MSS. in Wisconsin
State Hist. Ass. Clark papers. Walter Darrell to Col. William Fleming,
St. Asaphs, April 14, 1783. These valuable Draper MSS, have been opened
to me by Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, the State Librarian; I take this
opportunity of thanking him for his generous courtesy, to which I am so
greatly indebted.] The litigation over these confused titles dragged on
with interminable tediousness. Titles were often several deep on one
"location," as it was called; and whoever purchased land too often
purchased also an expensive and uncertain lawsuit.

The two chief topics of thought and conversation, the two subjects which
beyond all others engrossed and absorbed the minds of the settlers, were
the land and the Indians. We have already seen how on one occasion Clark
could raise no men for an expedition against the Indians until he closed
the land offices round which the settlers were thronging. Every hunter
kept a sharp lookout for some fertile bottom on which to build a cabin.
The volunteers who rode against the Indian towns also spied out the land
and chose the best spots whereon to build their blockhouses and
palisaded villages as soon as a truce might be made, or the foe driven
for the moment farther from the border. Sometimes settlers squatted on
land already held but not occupied under a good title; sometimes a man
who claimed the land under a defective title, or under pretence of
original occupation, attempted to oust or to blackmail him who had
cleared and tilled the soil in good faith; and these were both fruitful
causes not only of lawsuits but of bloody affrays. Among themselves, the
settlers' talk ran ever on land titles and land litigation, and schemes
for securing vast tracts of rich and well watered country. These were
the subjects with which they filled their letters to one another and to
their friends at home, and the subjects upon which these same friends
chiefly dwelt when they sent letters in return. [Footnote: Clay MSS. and
Draper MSS., _passim: e.g._, in former, J. Mercer to George Nicholas,
Nov. 28, 1789; J. Ware to George Nicholas, Nov. 29, 1789; letter to Mrs.
Byrd, Jan. 16, 1786, etc., etc., etc.] Often well-to-do men visited the
new country by themselves first, chose good sites for their farms and
plantations, surveyed and purchased them, and then returned to their old
homes, whence they sent out their field hands to break the soil and put
up buildings before bringing out their families.

Lines Followed in the Western Movement.

The westward movement of settlers took place along several different
lines. The dwellers in what is now eastern Tennessee were in close touch
with the old settled country; their Western farms and little towns
formed part of the chain of forest clearings which stretched unbroken
from the border of Virginia down the valleys of the Watauga and the
Holston. Though they were sundered by mountain ranges from the peopled
regions in the State to which they belonged, North Carolina, yet these
ranges were pierced by many trails, and were no longer haunted by
Indians. There were no great obstacles to be overcome in moving in to
this valley of the upper Tennessee. On the other hand, by this time it
held no very great prizes in the shape of vast tracts of rich and
unclaimed land. In consequence there was less temptation to speculation
among those who went to this part of the western country. It grew
rapidly, the population being composed chiefly of actual settlers who
had taken holdings with the purpose of cultivating them, and of building
homes thereon. The entire frontier of this region was continually
harassed by Indians; and it was steadily extended by the home-planting
of the rifle-bearing backwoodsmen.

The Cumberland Country.

The danger from Indian invasion and outrage was, however, far greater in
the distant communities which were growing up in the great bend of the
Cumberland, cut off, as they were, by immense reaches of forest from the
seaboard States. The settlers who went to this region for the most part
followed two routes, either descending the Tennessee and ascending the
Cumberland in flotillas of flat-boats and canoes, or else striking out
in large bodies through the wilderness, following the trails that led
westward from the settlements on the Holston. The population on the
Cumberland did not increase very fast for some years after the close of
the Revolutionary War; and the settlers were, as a rule, harsh, sturdy
backwoodsmen, who lived lives of toil and poverty. Nevertheless, there
was a good deal of speculation in Cumberland lands; great tracts of tens
of thousands of acres were purchased by men of means in the old
districts of North Carolina, who sometimes came out to live on their
estates. The looseness of the system of surveying in vogue is shown by
the fact that where possible these lands were entered and paid for under
a law which allowed a warrant to be shifted to new soil if it was
discovered that the first entry was made on what was already claimed by
some one else. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Jesse Benton to Thos. Hart, April 3,
1786.]

Hamlets and homesteads were springing up on the left bank of the upper
Ohio, in what is now West Virginia; and along the streams flowing into
it from the east. A few reckless adventurers were building cabins on the
right bank of this great river. Others, almost as adventurous, were
pushing into the neighborhood of the French villages on the Wabash and
in the Illinois. At Louisville men were already planning to colonize the
country just opposite on the Ohio, under the law of the State of
Virginia, which rewarded the victorious soldiers of Clark's famous
campaign with grants in the region they had conquered.

Movement of Settlers to Kentucky.

The great growth of the west took place in Kentucky. The Kentucky
country was by far the most widely renowned for its fertility; it was
much more accessible and more firmly held, and its government was on a
more permanent footing than was the case in the Wabash, Illinois, and
Cumberland regions. In consequence the majority of the men who went west
to build homes fixed their eyes on the vigorous young community which
lay north of the Ohio, and which already aspired to the honors of
statehood.

The Wilderness Road to Kentucky.

The immigrants came into Kentucky in two streams, following two
different routes--the Ohio River, and Boone's old Wilderness Trail.
Those who came overland, along the latter road, were much fewer in
number than those who came by water; and yet they were so numerous that
the trail at times was almost thronged, and much care had to be taken in
order to find camping places where there was enough feed for the horses.
The people who travelled this wilderness road went in the usual
backwoods manner, on horseback, with laden packtrains, and often with
their herds and flocks. Young men went out alone or in parties; and
groups of families from the same neighborhood often journeyed together.
They struggled over the narrow, ill-made roads which led from the
different back settlements, until they came to the last outposts of
civilization east of the Cumberland Mountains; scattered block-houses,
whose owners were by turns farmers, tavern-keepers, hunters, and Indian
fighters. Here they usually waited until a sufficient number had
gathered together to furnish a band of riflemen large enough to beat off
any prowling party of red marauders; and then set off to traverse by
slow stages the mountains and vast forests which lay between them and
the nearest Kentucky station. The time of the journey depended, of
course, upon the composition of the travelling party, and upon the
mishaps encountered; a party of young men on good horses might do it in
three days, while a large band of immigrants, who were hampered by
women, children, and cattle, and dogged by ill-luck, might take three
weeks. Ordinarily six or eight days were sufficient. Before starting
each man laid in a store of provisions for himself and his horse;
perhaps thirty pounds of flour, half a bushel of corn meal, and three
bushels of oats. There was no meat unless game was shot. Occasionally
several travellers clubbed together and carried a tent; otherwise they
slept in the open. The trail was very bad, especially at first, where it
climbed between the gloomy and forbidding cliffs that walled in
Cumberland Gap. Even when undisturbed by Indians, the trip was
accompanied by much fatigue and exposure; and, as always in frontier
travelling, one of the perpetual annoyances was the necessity for
hunting up strayed horses. [Footnote: Durrett MSS. Journal of Rev. James
Smith, 1785.]

The Travel down the Ohio.

The chief highway was the Ohio River; for to drift down stream in a scow
was easier and quicker, and no more dangerous, than to plod through
thick mountain forests. Moreover, it was much easier for the settler who
went by water to carry with him his household goods and implements of
husbandry; and even such cumbrous articles as wagons, or, if he was rich
and ambitious, the lumber wherewith to build a frame house. All kinds of
craft were used, even bark canoes and pirogues, or dugouts; but the
keel-boat, and especially the flat-bottomed scow with square ends, were
the ordinary means of conveyance. They were of all sizes. The passengers
and their live stock were of course huddled together so as to take up as
little room as possible. Sometimes the immigrants built or bought their
own boat, navigated it themselves, and sold it or broke it up on
reaching their destination. At other times they merely hired a passage.
A few of the more enterprising boat owners speedily introduced a regular
emigrant service, making trips at stated times from Pittsburg or perhaps
Limestone, and advertising the carriage capacity of their boats and the
times of starting. The trip from Pittsburg to Louisville took a week or
ten days; but in low water it might last a month.

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