The Winning of the West, Volume Two by Theodore Roosevelt

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The peace negotiations are best discussed in John Jay's chapter thereon,
in the seventh volume of Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of
North America." Sparks' account is fundamentally wrong on several
points. Bancroft largely follows him, and therefore repeats and shares
his errors.]

This view of the case is amply confirmed by a consideration of what was
actually acquired under the treaty of peace which closed the
Revolutionary struggle. Map-makers down to the present day have almost
invariably misrepresented the territorial limits we gained by this
treaty. They represent our limits in the west in 1783 as being the Great
Lakes, the Mississippi, and the 31st parallel of latitude from the
Mississippi to the Chattahoochee; [Footnote: The map in Mr. Hinsdale's
book may be given as a late instance.] but in reality we did not acquire
these limits until a dozen years later, by the treaties of Jay and
Pinckney. Two points must be kept in mind: first, that during the war
our ally, Spain, had conquered from England that portion of the Gulf
coast known as West Florida; and second, that when the treaty was made
the United States and Great Britain mutually covenanted to do certain
things, some of which were never done. Great Britain agreed to recognize
the lakes as our northern boundary, but, on the alleged ground that we
did not fulfil certain of our promises, she declined to fulfil this
agreement, and the lake posts remained in her hands until the Jay treaty
was ratified. She likewise consented to recognize the 31st parallel as
our southern boundary, but by a secret article it was agreed that if by
the negotiations she recovered West Florida, then the boundary should
run about a hundred miles farther north, ending at the mouth of the
Yazoo. The discovery of this secret article aroused great indignation in
Spain. As a matter of fact, the disputed territory, the land drained by
the Gulf rivers, was not England's to grant, for it had been conquered
and was then held by Spain. Nor was it given up to us until we acquired
it by Pinckney's masterly diplomacy. The treaty represented a mere
promise which in part was not and in part could not be fulfilled. All
that it really did was to guarantee us what we already possessed--that
is, the Ohio valley and the Illinois, which we had settled and conquered
during the years of warfare. Our boundary lines were in reality left
very vague. On the north the basin of the Great Lakes remained British;
on the south the lands draining into the Gulf remained Spanish, or under
Spanish influence. The actual boundaries we acquired can be roughly
stated in the north to have followed the divide between the waters of
the lake and the waters of the Ohio, and in the south to have run across
the heads of the Gulf rivers. Had we remained a loose confederation
these boundaries, would more probably have shrunk than advanced; we did
not overleap them until some years after Washington had become the head
of a real, not merely a titular, nation. The peace of 1783, as far as
our western limits were affected, did nothing more than secure us
undisturbed possession of lands from which it had proved impossible to
oust us. We were in reality given nothing more than we had by our own
prowess gained; the inference is strong that we got what we did get only
because we had won and held it.

The Backwoods Governments.

The first duty of the backwoodsmen who thus conquered the west was to
institute civil government. Their efforts to overcome and beat back the
Indians went hand in hand with their efforts to introduce law and order
in the primitive communities they founded; and exactly as they relied
purely on themselves in withstanding outside foes, so they likewise
built up their social life and their first systems of government with
reference simply to their special needs, and without any outside help or
direction. The whole character of the westward movement, the methods of
warfare, of settlement, and government, were determined by the extreme
and defiant individualism of the backwoodsmen, their inborn independence
and self-reliance, and their intensely democratic spirit. The west was
won and settled by a number of groups of men, all acting independently
of one another, but with a common object, and at about the same time.
There was no one controlling spirit; it was essentially the movement of
a whole free people, not of a single master-mind. There were strong and
able leaders, who showed themselves fearless soldiers and just
law-givers, undaunted by danger, resolute to persevere in the teeth of
disaster; but even these leaders are most deeply interesting because
they stand foremost among a host of others like them. There were
hundreds of hunters and Indian fighters like Mansker, Wetzel, Kenton,
and Brady; there were scores of commonwealth founders like Logan, Todd,
Floyd, and Harrod; there were many adventurous land speculators like
Henderson; there were even plenty of commanders like Shelby and
Campbell. These were all men of mark; some of them exercised a powerful
and honorable influence on the course of events in the west. Above them
rise four greater figures, fit to be called not merely State or local,
but national heroes. Clark, Sevier, Robertson, and Boon are emphatically
American worthies. They were men of might in their day, born to sway the
minds of others, helpful in shaping the destiny of the continent. Yet of
Clark alone can it be said that he did a particular piece of work which
without him would have remained undone. Sevier, Robertson, and Boon only
hastened, and did more perfectly, a work which would have been done by
others had they themselves fallen by the wayside. [Footnote: Sevier's
place would certainly have been taken by some such man as his chief
rival, Tipton. Robertson led his colony to the Cumberland but a few days
before old Mansker led another; and though without Robertson the
settlements would have been temporarily abandoned, they would surely
have been reoccupied. If Henderson had not helped Boon found Kentucky,
then Hart or some other of Henderson's associates would doubtless have
done so; and if Boon had been lacking, his place would probably have
been taken by some such man as Logan. The loss of these men would have
been very serious, but of no one of them can it be said, as of Clark,
that he alone could have done the work he actually did.] Important
though they are for their own sakes, they are still more important as
types of the men who surrounded them.

The individualism of the backwoodsmen, however, was tempered by a sound
common-sense, and capacity for combination. The first hunters might come
alone or in couples, but the actual colonization was done not by
individuals, but by groups of individuals. The settlers brought their
families and belongings either on pack-horses along the forest trails,
or in scows down the streams; they settled in palisaded villages, and
immediately took steps to provide both a civil and military
organization. They were men of facts, not theories; and they showed
their usual hard common-sense in making a government. They did not try
to invent a new system; they simply took that under which they had grown
up, and applied it to their altered conditions. They were most familiar
with the government of the county; and therefore they adopted this for
the framework of their little independent, self-governing commonwealths
of Watauga, Cumberland, and Transylvania. [Footnote: The last of these
was the most pretentious and short-lived and least characteristic of the
three, as Henderson made an abortive effort to graft on it the utterly
foreign idea of a proprietary colony.]

They were also familiar with the representative system; and accordingly
they introduced it into the new communities, the little forted villages
serving as natural units of representation. They were already thoroughly
democratic, in instinct and principle, and as a matter of course they
made the offices elective, and gave full play to the majority. In
organizing the militia they kept the old system of county lieutenants,
making them elective, not appointive; and they organized the men on the
basis of a regiment, the companies representing territorial divisions,
each commanded by its own officers, who were thus chosen by the fighting
men of the fort or forts in their respective districts. Thus each of the
backwoods commonwealths, during its short-lived term of absolute
freedom, reproduced as its governmental system that of the old colonial
county, increasing the powers of the court, and changing the justices
into the elective representatives of an absolute democracy. The civil
head, the chairman of the court or committee, was also usually the
military head, the colonel-commandant. In fact the military side of the
organization rapidly became the most conspicuous, and, at least in
certain crises, the most important. There were always some years of
desperate warfare during which the entire strength of the little
commonwealth was drawn on to resist outside aggression, and during these
years the chief function of government was to provide for the griping
military needs of the community, and the one pressing duty of its chief
was to lead his followers with valor and wisdom in the struggle with the
stranger. [Footnote: My friend, Professor Alexander Johnson, of
Princeton, is inclined to regard these frontier county organizations as
reproductions of a very primitive type of government indeed, deeming
that they were formed primarily for war against outsiders, that their
military organization was the essential feature, the real reason for
their existence. I can hardly accept this view in its entirety; though
fully recognizing the extreme importance of the military side of the
little governments, it seems to me that the preservation of order, and
especially the necessity for regulating the disposition of the land,
were quite as powerful factors in impelling the settlers to act
together. It is important to keep in mind the territorial organization
of the militia companies and regiments; a county and a regiment, a
forted village and a company, were usually coextensive.]

These little communities were extremely independent in feeling, not only
of the Federal Government, but of their parent States, and even of one
another. They had won their positions by their own courage and
hardihood; very few State troops and hardly a Continental soldier had
appeared west of the Alleghanies. They had heartily sympathized with
their several mother colonies when they became the United States, and
had manfully played their part in the Revolutionary war. Moreover they
were united among themselves by ties of good-will and of services
mutually rendered. Kentucky, for instance, had been succored more than
once by troops raised among the Watauga Carolinians or the Holston
Virginians, and in her turn she had sent needed supplies to the
Cumberland. But when the strain of the war was over the separatist
spirit asserted itself very strongly. The groups of western settlements
not only looked on the Union itself very coldly, but they were also more
or less actively hostile to their parent States, and regarded even one
another as foreign communities; [Footnote: See in Gardoqui MSS. the
letters of George Rogers Clark to Gardoqui, March 15, 1788; and of John
Sevier to Gardoqui, September 12, 1788; and in the Robertson MS. the
letter of Robertson to McGillivray, August 3, 1788. It is necessary to
allude to the feeling here; but the separatist and disunion movements
did not gather full force until later, and are properly to be considered
in connection with post-revolutionary events.] they considered the
Confederation as being literally only a lax league of friendship.

Character of the Pioneer Population.

Up to the close of the Revolutionary contest the settlers who were
building homes and States beyond the Alleghanies formed a homogeneous
backwoods population. The wood-choppers, game hunters, and Indian
fighters, who dressed and lived alike, were the typical pioneers. They
were a shifting people. In every settlement the tide ebbed and flowed.
Some of the new-comers would be beaten in the hard struggle for
existence, and would drift back to whence they had come. Of those who
succeeded some would take root in the land, and others would move still
farther into the wilderness. Thus each generation rolled westward,
leaving its children at the point where the wave stopped no less than at
that where it started. The descendants of the victors of King's Mountain
are as likely to be found in the Rockies as in the Alleghanies.

With the close of the war came an enormous increase in the tide of
immigration; and many of the new-comers were of a very different stamp
from their predecessors. The main current flowed towards Kentucky, and
gave an entirely different character to its population. The two typical
figures in Kentucky so far had been Clark and Boon, but after the close
of the Revolution both of them sank into unimportance, whereas the
careers of Sevier and Robertson had only begun. The disappearance of the
two former from active life was partly accidental and partly a resultant
of the forces that assimilated Kentucky so much more rapidly than
Tennessee to the conditions prevailing in the old States. Kentucky was
the best known and the most accessible of the western regions; within
her own borders she was now comparatively safe from serious Indian
invasion, and the tide of immigration naturally flowed thither. So
strong was the current that, within a dozen years, it had completely
swamped the original settlers, and had changed Kentucky from a peculiar
pioneer and backwoods commonwealth into a State differing no more from
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina than these differed from one
another.

The men who gave the tone to this great flood of new-comers were the
gentry from the sea-coast country, the planters, the young lawyers, the
men of means who had been impoverished by the long-continued and
harassing civil war. Straitened in circumstances, desirous of winning
back wealth and position, they cast longing eyes towards the beautiful
and fertile country beyond the mountains, deeming it a place that
afforded unusual opportunities to the man with capital, no less than to
him whose sole trust was in his own adventurous energy.

Most of the gentle folks in Virginia and the Carolinas, the men who
lived in great roomy houses on their well-stocked and slave-tilled
plantations, had been forced to struggle hard to keep their heads above
water during the Revolution. They loyally supported the government, with
blood and money; and at the same time they endeavored to save some of
their property from the general wreck, and to fittingly educate their
girls, and those of their boys who were too young to be in the army. The
men of this stamp who now prepared to cast in their lot with the new
communities formed an exceptionally valuable class of immigrants; they
contributed the very qualities of which the raw settlements stood most
in need. They had suffered for no fault of their own; fate had gone hard
with them. The fathers had been in the Federal or Provincial congresses;
the older sons had served in the Continental line or in the militia. The
plantations were occasionally overrun by the enemy; and the general
disorder had completed their ruin. Nevertheless, the heads of the
families had striven to send the younger sons to school or college. For
their daughters they did even more; and throughout the contest, even in
its darkest hours, they sent them down to receive the final touches of a
lady-like education at some one of the State capitals not at the moment
in the hands of the enemy--such as Charleston or Philadelphia. There the
young ladies were taught dancing and music, for which, as well as for
their frocks and "pink calamanco shoes," their fathers paid enormous
sums in depreciated Continental currency. [Footnote: Clay MSS. Account
of Robert Morris with Miss Elizabeth Hart, during her residence in
Philadelphia in 1780-81. The account is so curious that I give it in
full in the Appendix.]

Even the close of active hostilities, when the British were driven from
the Southern States, brought at first but a slight betterment of
condition to the straggling people. There was no cash in the land, the
paper currency was nearly worthless, every one was heavily in debt, and
no one was able to collect what was owing to him. There was much mob
violence, and a general relaxation of the bonds of law and order. Even
nature turned hostile; a terrible drought shrunk up all the streams
until they could not turn the grist-mills, while from the same cause the
crops failed almost completely. A hard winter followed, and many cattle
and hogs died; so that the well-to-do were brought to the verge of
bankruptcy and the poor suffered extreme privations, being forced to go
fifty or sixty miles to purchase small quantities of meal and grain at
exorbitant prices. [Footnote: Clay MSS. Letters of Jesse Benton, 1782
and '83. See Appendix.]

This distress at home inclined many people of means and ambition to try
their fortunes in the west: while another and equally powerful motive
was the desire to secure great tracts of virgin lands, for possession or
speculation. Many distinguished soldiers had been rewarded by successive
warrants for unoccupied land, which they entered wherever they chose,
until they could claim thousands upon thousands of acres. [Footnote:
Thus Col. Wm. Christian, for his services in Braddock's and Dunmore's
wars and against the Cherokees, received many warrants; he visited
Kentucky to enter them, 9,000 acres in all. See "Life of Caleb Wallace,"
by Wm. H. Whitsitt, Louisville, 1888.] Sometimes they sold these
warrants to outsiders; but whether they remained in the hands of the
original holders or not, they served as a great stimulus to the westward
movement, and drew many of the representatives of the wealthiest and
most influential families in the parent States to the lands on the
farther side of the mountains.

At the close of the Revolution, however, the men from the sea-coast
region formed but an insignificant portion of the western pioneers. The
country beyond the Alleghanies was first won and settled by the
backwoodsmen themselves, acting under their own leaders, obeying their
own desires, and following their own methods. They were a marked and
peculiar people. The good and evil traits in their character were such
as naturally belonged to a strong, harsh, and homely race, which, with
all its shortcomings, was nevertheless bringing a tremendous work to a
triumphant conclusion. The backwoodsmen were above all things
characteristically American; and it is fitting that the two greatest and
most typical of all Americans should have been respectively a sharer and
an outcome of their work. Washington himself passed the most important
years of his youth heading the westward movement of his people; clad in
the traditional dress of the backwoodsmen, in tasselled hunting-shirt
and fringed leggings, he led them to battle against the French and
Indians, and helped to clear the way for the American advance. The only
other man who in the American roll of honor stands by the side of
Washington, was born when the distinctive work of the pioneers had
ended; and yet he was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh; for
from the loins of this gaunt frontier folk sprang mighty Abraham
Lincoln.

APPENDICES.

* * * * *

APPENDIX A--TO CHAPTER I.

During the early part of this century our more pretentious historians
who really did pay some heed to facts and wrote books that--in addition
to their mortal dulness--were quite accurate, felt it undignified and
beneath them to notice the deeds of mere ignorant Indian fighters. They
had lost all power of doing the best work; for they passed their lives
in a circle of small literary men, who shrank from any departure from
conventional European standards.

On the other hand, the men who wrote history for the mass of our people,
not for the scholars, although they preserved much important matter, had
not been educated up to the point of appreciating the value of evidence,
and accepted undoubted facts and absurd traditions with equal good
faith. Some of them (notably Flint and one or two of Boon's other
biographers) evidently scarcely regarded truthfulness and accuracy of
statement as being even desirable qualities in a history. Others wished
to tell the facts, but lacked all power of discrimination. Certain of
their books had a very wide circulation. In some out-of-the-way places
they formed, with the almanac, the staple of secular literature. But
they did not come under the consideration of trained scholars, so their
errors remained uncorrected; and at this day it is a difficult, and
often an impossible task, to tell which of the statements to accept and
which to reject.

Many of the earliest writers lived when young among the old companions
of the leading pioneers, and long afterwards wrote down from memory the
stories the old men had told them. They were themselves often clergymen,
and were usually utterly inexperienced in wild backwoods life, in spite
of their early surroundings--exactly as to-day any town in the Rocky
Mountains is sure to contain some half-educated men as ignorant of
mountain and plains life, of Indians and wild beasts, as the veriest
lout on an eastern farm. Accordingly they accepted the wildest stories
of frontier warfare with a faith that forcibly reminds one of the
equally simple credulity displayed by the average classical scholar
concerning early Greek and Roman prowess. Many of these primitive
historians give accounts of overwhelming Indian numbers and enormous
Indian losses, that read as if taken from the books that tell of the
Gaulish hosts the Romans conquered, and the Persian hordes the Greeks
repelled; and they are almost as untrustworthy.

Some of the anecdotes they relate are not far removed from the
Chinese-like tale--given, if my memory is correct, in Herodotus--of the
Athenian soldier, who went into action with a small grapnel or anchor
attached by a chain to his waist, that he might tether himself out to
resist the shock of the charging foe. A flagrant example is the story
which describes how the white man sees an Indian very far off making
insulting gestures; how he forthwith loads his rifle with two
bullets--which the narrator evidently thinks will go twice as far and
twice as straight as one,--and, taking careful aim, slays his enemy.
Like other similar anecdotes, this is told of a good many different
frontier heroes; the historian usually showing a delightful lack of
knowledge of what is and what is not possible in hunting, tracking, and
fighting. However, the utter ignorance of even the elementary principles
of rifle-shooting may not have been absolutely confined to the
historians. Any one accustomed to old hunters knows that their theories
concerning their own weapons are often rather startling. A year ago last
fall I was hunting some miles below my ranch (on the Little Missouri) to
lay in the winter stock of meat, and was encamped for a week with an old
hunter. We both had 45-75 Winchester rifles; and I was much amused at
his insisting that his gun "shot level" up to two hundred yards--a
distance at which the ball really drops considerably over a foot. Yet he
killed a good deal of game; so he must either in practice have
disregarded his theories, or else he must have always overestimated the
distances at which he fired.

The old writers of the simpler sort not only delighted in impossible
feats with the rifle, but in equally impossible deeds of strength,
tracking and the like; and they were very fond of attributing all the
wonderful feats of which they had heard to a single favorite hero, not
to speak of composing speeches for him.

It seems--though it ought not to be--necessary to point out to some
recent collectors of backwoods anecdotes, the very obvious truths: that
with the best intentions in the world the average backwoodsman often has
difficulty in describing a confused chain of events exactly as they took
place; that when the events are described after a long lapse of years
many errors are apt to creep in; and that when they are reported from
tradition it is the rarest thing imaginable for the report to be
correct.

* * * * *

APPENDIX B-TO CHAPTER II.

(The following account of the first negotiations of the Americans with
the Indians near Vincennes is curious as being the report of one of the
Indians; but it was evidently colored to suit his hearer, for as a
matter of fact the Indians of the Wabash were for the time being awed
into quiet, the Piankeshaws sided with the Americans, and none of them
dared rise until the British approached.)

(_Haldimand MSS._, Series B, Vol. 122, p. 219.)

Proceedings of the Rebels at St. Vincennes as related to Lieut Govr.
Hamilton by Neegik an Ottawa War Chief sent forward to gain
intelligence. Camp at Rocher de Bout 14th Octr. 1778--

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