Sherry Chandler

How Braddock marched into slaughter

“Who would have thought it.” Ted Franklin Belue reports these to be General Edward Braddock’s last words as he died on the battlefield at Great Meadows on July 13, 1755. Four horses had been shot from under him.

I have posted about this battlefield before, how it became a major tourist attraction for those boating down the Ohio River into Kentucky in the 18^th century (here and here). The massacre was, in Belue’s words, a “crucible” for European Americans. And it was, incidentally, the making of a young Lieutenant Colonel named George Washington. Everybody who was anybody in frontier Kentucky was there: Daniel Boone, John Findley, Dr. Thomas Walker. (Boone was there as a teamster, not a soldier, though he had the rank of sargeant.)

Here is Belue’s description, from The Hunters of Kentucky: A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750-1792 (Stackpole Books, 2003), of the army he led out from Fort Cumberland on May 29, with the intention of “hack[ing] a war road 110 miles long along an old Indian path — leveling rises, building bridges, blasting out stumps, clearing brush, filling holdes — to deliver men and artillery to Ohio’s dogleg with the Monongahela to oust the French from Fort Duquesne . . . [p. 61]

On May 29, the mighty twenty-two hundred lumbered from Fort Cumberland, an unendingly unfolding phalanx twelve feet wide and stretching more than a mile along Nemacolin’s Path, blaxed three years earlier by Colonel [Christopher] Gist and Col. Thomas Cresap. Braddock’s army was a polyglot of English, Dutch, Africans, Catholics, Protestants, jews, Irishmen, and Scotsmen, followed by wagons, artillery, cattle, and swarms of venereal camp followers. Visitors passing nights visiting fire pits were taken aback at the myriad dialects and languages. But on race was conspicuously absent: Indians.

Braddock deemed the “exotics” troublesome. His three-day meeting with Algonquins and Iroquoians ended with a broadside &mdash: “No Savage Shall Inherit the Land.” Enraged, the Indians left to join the French. [p. 62]

And that was Braddock’s undoing. Had he employed indigenous scouts, he might not have marched his mighty army blithely into ambush.

A view of Rebecca Boone

From Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America (LSU Press, 2008):

While Boone and Stoner were out in Kentucky looking for the Fincastle County surveyors, Shawnees had begun to raid settlers near Castle’s Wood. The settlers along the Clinch gathered into the small forts they had built hurriedly and watied. Boone’s family was at Moore’s Fort, not far south of Castle’s Wood. As at many of the little forts, discipline was lax. Rebecca Boone decided to do something to make it less so. One time when many of the men were outside of the fort playing ball and others who were not playing were lying around, all without their guns, Rebecca Boone and some other wives, along with Rebecca’s oldest daughters, Susannah and Jemima, went out the other side of the fort with loaded rifles, fired a round of shots, and then ran back inside and locked both gates. The men sprinted back to the fort and ran around in terrified confusion when they discovered that the gates were bolted. Some men jumped into the pond. The women laughed at them, though the men did not think the joke was at all funny. Some of them threatened to have the women whipped, but that caused fistfights to break out among the men. Yet discipline did impove, especially after Boone came back and was placed in command of the fort. [pp. 62-63]

Battle of Point Pleasant

In the Proclamation of 1763, George III forbade surveys or land warrants west of the Appalachians. The Proclamation, in fact, did little to slow expansion westward. In April 1774, as Lord Dunmore’s War heated up, Col. William Preston, sheriff (among other things) of Fincastle County, Virginia sent John Floyd and a party of twenty-two men over into Kentucky to survey land for the likes of George Washington and Patrick Henry.

As Meredith Mason Brown explains in Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America (LSU Press, 2008):

The surveying trip itself increased the risk of Indian attack on whites living or hunting on the frontier. Hearing of the plans for the surveying expedition, the Shawnees, on March 8, 1774, complained . . . that the king’s orders forbade settlement west of the Great Kanawha River and that Shawnee hunting grounds were being overrun. They warned that young Shawnee warriors, if “the are disappointed in their hunting, and find the woods are covered with White People . . . are foolish enough to make reprisals.” [p. 58]

The stories we tell ourselves about settling Kentucky is of woodsmen and farmers coming over to homestead and having to fend off attacks from savage Indians. And there is some truth to that. But it is also true that the moneyed aristocracy saw land speculation in Kentucky as a way to get rich(er), and the whole thing was, as I’ve said before, a mad scramble for money into land that was not actually all that empty.

As George Washington stated it in 1767:

“I can never look upon that proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians” that “must fall in a few years . . . any Person therefore who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good Lands & in some Measure Marking & distinguishing them for their own (in order to keep others from settling them) will never regain it.” [quoted in Brown, p. 60]

And so Floyd surveyed out 2,000 acres for Washington along the Kanawha. The party also laid out thirty tracts around the Falls of the Ohio, the present site of Louisville, a total of 40,000 acres or 62 square miles. (They did all this in ten days.) These tracts were for the sheriff William Preston, William Christian, who was Patrick Henry’s brother-in-law, William Byrd, and Alexander Spottswood Dandridge, who was Martha Washington’s nephew. Then coming back toward central Kentucky, in the area of Lexington and Frankfort, Floyd laid out thousand-acre tracts for Preston, for himself, and 7,000 acres for Patrick Henry.

The Floyd party stayed in Kentucky until August when conditions became so dangerous they had to flee for their lives. Preston sent Daniel Boone and Michael Stoner to bring the party out of Kentucky, but Floyd’s party had already left and the rescuers never did find them.

Meanwhile, Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia who had an interest in a large tract of Kentucky land himself, ordered Preston to undertake an expedition against the Shawnee towns. In his recruiting letter, Preston wrote:

We may Perhaps never have so fair an Opportunity of reducing our old Inveterate Enemies to Reason . . . . The House of Burgesses will without all Doubt enable his Lordship to reward every Vollunteer in a handsome manner, over and above his Pay; as the plunder of the County will be valuable, & it is said the Shawnese have great Stock of Horses. . . . This useless People may now a[t] last be Oblidged to abandon thier County Theire Towns may be plundered & Burned, Their Cornfields Distroyed & they Distressed in such a manner as will prevent them giving us any future Trouble. [quoted in Brown, p. 61]

Sounds more like a mercenary force to me than a group of intrepid settlers protecting their families.

The upshot was the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774. Though the Shawnee put up a good fight, Cornstalk and some other Shawnee chiefs ultimately signed away their hunting rights to Kentucky om exchange for a promise from Lord Dunsmore to keep colonists south of the Ohio River.

We know how that worked out.

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Addendum, July 24:

From Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s “Squatters” in Blood Run (Salt, 2006)

We are farmers, settling.
We have right to work
lands in untamed wilderness
rife with beasts best done away
with blasphemous symbols—Snakes!

What good is this to savages
who have no learned appreciation
of possibility of a ripened, bountiful place?

They know no possibility, no progress, no personal greed!

They should be grateful we’ve brought
civilization onto this merciless barren flat. . . .

Forests

Two people have now told me that Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests. The Shadow of Civilization (Univ Chicago Press, 1992) is a must read. And so I have finally got my hands on it.

Here’s from the introduction:

The story is full of enigmas and paradoxes. If forests appear in our religions as places of profanity, they also appear as sacred. If they have typically been considered places of lawlessness, they have also provided havens for those who took up the cause of justice and fought the law’s corruption. If they evoke associations of danger and abandon in our minds, they also evoke scenes of enchantment. In other words, in the relilgions, mythologies, and literatures of the West, the forest appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray. Or where our subjective categories are confounded. Or where perceptions become promiscious with one another, disclosing latent dimensions of time and consciousness. In the forest the inanimate may suddenly become animate, the god turns into a beast, the outlaw stands for justice. Rosalind appears as a boy, the virtuous knight degenerates into a wild man, the straight line forms a circle, the ordinary gives way to the fabulous. . . .the forest, in its enduring antiquity, was the correlate of the poet’s memory, and once its remnants were gone, the poet would fall into oblivion. [pp x-xi]

The forests of Kentucky were, of course, the birthplace of one of this nation’s founding myths — the American Adam. Certainly the settling of Kentucky is full of enigmas and paradoxes, not the least of them being Daniel Boone, a man who was instrumental in destroying the Transylvanian forests that he loved and that provided him with such livelihood as he had.

A view of Dr. Thomas Walker

Dr. Thomas Walker, not Daniel Boone, is credited with being the first white colonist to “discover” the Cumberland Gap. Walker explored over into Kentucky in 1750, nearly two decades before Boone. He named both the Gap and the River for the Duke of Cumberland, the butcher of Culloden.

Here is a portrait of Walker from Ted Franklin Belue’s The Hunters of Kentucky. A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750-1792 (Stackpole Books, 2003):

Of all the [Loyal Land Company's] members—all of them bookish, rich, ambitious, and influential men who measured wealth and status in delicately manicured estates, in vast acreage, in two- and three-story stone and clapboard homes fitted with imported English panes, in cattle and horses, in corn and burley fields and barns, in African chattel bought and sold at slave auctions—Walker was the one man among them best suited for the heady task at hand. [This being to claim 800,000 acres of wilderness granted them by George II. They would then parcel out this land to settlers who would owe them quitrents.]

And, too, besides the adventure, there was the ultimate quid pro quo: land. A gentry tobacco farmer, growing “that stinking weed” that so exhausted the soil after a harvest or two, and a two-time member of the House of Burgesses who also served on the Privy Council, Dr. Walker found such prospects irresistible. So alluring, in fact, that it was said of him, “Had Virginia’s land companies been a spider web, Dr. Walker would have been the spider.”

His father had died when he was a boy. But tragedy and loss notwithstanding, Thomas Walker was intellectually keen and well tutored, energetic and disciplined. Even in his last years, his disposition, sad son Francis, inclined toward “fire and great spirit,” and he remained an optimistic, merry woodsman of robust health almost until his death in 1794, a month shy of his eightieth birthday.

Neighbors swapped tales of his practical jokes, pranks bordering on the macabre and played out at the expense of Virginia’s upper crust. Walker, all knew, loathed bourgeois pretentiousness.

Once, it was rumored, he had invited all the neighbors for a barbecue, laying before them plates heaped high with what his guests deemed succulent mutton, which was soon devoured and heartily complimented. Candles dimming, mugs full, and pipe smoke curling to the rafters, someone noticed that Old Fowler, Walker’s aging hound, had yet to show. Alas!—it was soon discovered that Old Fowler’s ribs were laid bare before them. [pp. 20-21]

Barrel of laughs, that Tom Walker.

Although Walker explored over into Kentucky, the Loyal Land Company’s activities were truncated by the French and Indian War. He had worked in partnership with Colonel James Patton, a notorious land speculator. Well, notorious if you were a Native American. It was Patton who was the target of the Shawnee raid at Draper’s Meadow in which Mary Ingles was taken captive.

Cat with long hunter

Boone hunted turkeys as food, not to sell, and he also occasionally killed panthers and wolves. Panther skin was not readily marketable but had ceremonial value.  When Boone and other Boonesborough leaders parleyed with their Indian besiegers during the siege of Boonesborough in 1778, the Indians spread a panther skin on a log for the negotiators to sit on.

–Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America. LSU Press, 2008

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I am off to Wildacres for the week. Though I will have wi-fi, I will also have good friends and Blue Ridge scenery so posting will be light to non-existent.

A good poor man’s country

From Stephen Arons, How the West Was Lost. The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. The Johns Hopkins Unversity Press, 1996.

A good poor man’s country. The phrase was ubiquitous among the contemporaries of Daniel Boone. Its meaning, however, was ambiguous. Indeed, that ambiguity helps explain why Kentucky did not become one. In its most common usage, the trope referred to a territory where men and the households they headed could get ahead. From the founding of British North America, promoters of settlement recommended various colonies as places where cheap land and high wages allowed Europeans of low stations and slim prospects to advance up social and economic ladders. In the era of the American Revolution, Kentucky became the latest and the most renowned land of opportunity. Tens of thousands of poor men and their families joined Boone in the conquest and colonizaton of trans-Appalachia, propelled by what Michel-Guillaume_Jean de Crèvecoeur described as “the happy restlessness . . . which is constantly urging us all to become better off than we are now.”

East and west of the Appalachians in the eighteenth century, poor men asked more of a good country than material prosperity. What drove pioneers across the mountains in the last quarter of the century was a hunger for lands that would allow families to get by with greater security and less effort. Fertile soil, ample range, and game-filled woods might not produce riches, but they captivated poor men who dreamed of achieving personal independence and providing more easily for dependents and descendants. While men of the backcountry from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas habitually testified to the hardships of border life, they also spoke often of the satisfactons of their simple, yet liberating, ways. Instead of “sigh[ing] for what was out of reach,” remembered one son of the Greater Pennsylvania backcountry, we were “happy and contented with such living, had fewer aches and pains . . . and slept more soundly.” Limiting wants and lending hands to neighbors in need held the key to a good poor man’s country in which how well people got along counted for more than how frequently or how far they got ahead.

That formula Ohio Indians well understood. Indian orators did not employ the metaphor of a good poor man’s country, and colonial writers did not attach the phrase to the Indian country beyond the Appalachians. Yet judged by the security and ease with which people got by and fellow villagers got along, the best poor man’s country belonged to the unconquered Indian peoples. Judge by almost any standard, Ohio Indian country was a better poor woman’s country than the adjacent backcountry. [pp. 192-193]

Arons’s argument is that Boone et al. had a unique opportunity to establish a variety of “new Eden” for the ordinary man. They blew it, not just because of men like Henry Clay who carved out huge estates using exploited slave labor, but because they themselves bought into the notion of land acquisition for wealth and profit. Instead they killed off all the game and lost the land to cannier exploiters. And so it was for the entire westward expansion.