Sherry Chandler

Theater

From Neal Hammon and Richard Taylor, Virginia’s Western War 1775 – 1786 (Stackpole Books, 2002):

The next and perhaps the last council for some time between representatives of the United States and the Indians was held at the future site of Cincinnati on January 14, 1786. It was attended by 318 Shawnee. Upon hearing the terms offered by the Americans, the Shawnee signaled their disapproval. The U.S. commissioner, Richard Butler, then took the Shawnee’s string of wampun and dashed it on the table. Not to be outdone, George Rogers Clark pushed it off the table with his cane and walked over it as he left the council. [p. 190]

And, I suppose, counter theater:

By 1787 a Latin school had been established at [James Harrod's] Boiling Springs station. Malcomb Worley, a Latin teacher, was hired, and children from nearby towns were enrolled and boarded on Harrod’s farm. In November, however, after the school had been in operation for several months, young James McDaniel, the son of Ann Harrod, was captured by Indians after he left the school, and it was soon discovered that he had been burned at the stake. James Harrod disbanded the school and sent the pupils home. [p. 191]

Endnotes

In Neal Hammon and Richard Taylor, Virginia’s Western War 1775 – 1786 (Stackpole Books, 2002), I found a couple of endnotes that distressed me.

In describing distances at the Battle of Blue Licks, the authors note:

Estimated by the author, base upon the location of the northernmost ravine, now partly filled in by the state for the construction of a lodge. [p. 251]

and describing the death of John Floyd at The Fishpools, they note:

The Fishpools were a series of sinkholes that had an underground stream running exposed through their bottoms. White, eyeless fish were caught in the sinkholes by pioneers. About 1965 these holes were filled up by a subdivision developer and houses built over them. [p. 252]

Values

So, Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington in 1781 at Yorktown in Virginia and the American Revolution ended. Or so I think I was taught in school.

Now the colonies began to lick their wounds and calculate their tremendous war debt.

But over in the western frontier, the war was still on. Some count the Battle of Blue Licks (a defeat for the Kentuckians) in August 1782 as the last battle of the Revolutionary War, but Neal Hammon and Richard Taylor, in their book Virginia’s Western War 1775 – 1786 (Stackpole Books, 2002) say that is a ridiculous claim. In their estimation, the war in the west was not ended until the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

Meanwhile, there was that tremendous war debt, in Virginia about £4 million, in Massachusetts about £1 million. The Colonies were broke.

A couple of telling paragraphs from the Hammon/Taylor book:

People in Kentucky had hoped that when fighting ended in the East federal troops would be sent west to protect them from the Indians. But none were forthcoming. Although Congress had hoped it could maintain the army until ratification of the peace treaty, it was not able to raise money to pay the soldiers. Without pay, many of the soldiers demanded that they be released from duty. On May 26, Gen. George Washington was instructed to grant furloughs to those enlisted for the duration of the war. Finally, on June 1, 1783, most of the soldiers and many of the officers left for home without any farewell. In a single day the Continental Army disappeared as a major force in politics and war. [pp. 175-176]

This pretty much left George Rogers Clark stranded at Fort Nelson at the Falls of the Ohio [Louisville], charged with defending Kentucky but without sufficient men, provisions, or lead. They were being starved out by the Native Americans. At one point, Clark had a double-wall built from the fort to the river so that they could get water.

In the meantime, General Clark was writing to Richmond, pleading for the government to give his troops at least partial pay. By then, there was very little hope that many soldiers would reenlist when their time was up . . . Virginia at least made an attempt to keep an army in the field, even after the U.S. Congress had abandoned theirs.

In January, William Fleming visited Fort Nelson at Louisville and found the garrison had barely enough provisions for subsistence, mostly consisting of bad flour and beef. There was, however, an abundance of whiskey in town, which sold for about £1 per gallon. On the day that Fleming visited the fort, three boats from Pittsburgh arrived at Louisville with 2,000 gallons of whiskey. [p. 176]

At this point, Virginia was selling its public lands for a little better than a £1.5 or 60 pounds of tobacco. There was some trade in tobacco because the value government specie was questionable.

What I wonder is where the money was coming from to buy this whiskey and why, if whiskey could get through, flour could not. Does an army march on its stomach or on its supply of drugs?

When Virgina appointed commissioners to settle its war debts in Kentucky, one of the claims went like this:

One officer, Lt. John Craig, informed General Clark that he purchased twenty-five gallons of whiskey on state credit for his company, “for which I have made Bold to Draw an Order on you and your Honouring it will Infinitely Oblige me.” [p. 178]

A glimpse

From Colin G. Calloway’s The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007):

Shawnee social structure was loose and flexible, revolving around kinship and bands. It was a society that could accomodate movement, separation, and reassembling without falling apart. . . .

Political authority was limited and diffused: Chiefs seem to have been hereditary, but they led by reputation and example, not by rank or office. Like most eastern woodlands tribes, the Shawnees had civil or peace chiefs and war chiefs. . . . Women as well as men had war and civil chiefs. The Shawnee Prophet said the prinicipal duty of the female peace chief was to prevent unnecessary bloodshed: She would exert her influence to restrain the war cheifs and ensure that conflict occurred only as a last result. . . . A Quaker who was surprised to see an old woman speaking in an Indian council nearthe Susquehana River in 1706 and asked his interpreter why was told “that some women are wiser than some men, and that they had not done anything for many years without the council of this ancient, grave woman.” Increasing contact with Europeans disrupted the balance of influences that had traditionally worked to keep war in its place. White men ignored women when dealing with Indian allies, and escalating conflicts gave war chiefs greater clout in Indian communities. [pp. 15-16]

I know of one such Shawnee woman chief whose name has been preserved: Nonhelema, sister to Cornstalk. Whites called her “the Grenadier Squaw” because of her authority and her stature. She was reportedly well over six feet tall. Calloway said whites also called her Catherine but the only reference I’ve seen to this name used the more familiear “Katy.” I take that as an indication of the contempt with which Shawnee women were held.

According to Calloway, Nonhelema was determined to remain neutral and so was held in contempt by her people, though she was given into Daniel Boone’s custody once as surety for prisoner exchanges. In the end she left her people or was driven out. Calloway reports that

In her old age she petitioned Congress for support and for two thousand acres on the Scioto where sheonce lived and where her mother was buried. The committee appointed to consider her petition concluded she had “a just claim on the humanity of the people of the United States.” They recommended she be allowed “one suit or dress of Cloaths including a blanket per annum, and one ration of provisions each day during her lilfe.” [p. 66]

Apparently, however, gratitude didn’t run to granting her the land.

Portrait of a gentleman

Here is a provocative little passage from Virginia’s Western War, 1775-1786 (Stackpole Books, 2002), co-authored by Neil O. Hammon and Richard Taylor:

John Floyd and his little party became the first settlers of Beargrass Creek near the Falls [of the Ohio]. . . . Floyd, with little help from his friends, spent the winter trying to establish a station on his old military survey. In cutting down the first tree, Floyd’s only slave was injured when the trunk crushed his foot. Floyd did not take his place because he considered himself a gentleman, a member of a class of men who at that time were not expected to do physical labor [p. 119]

I find this just astounding. The year was 1780, the man has come into a Wilderness alive with hostile Shawnee and British who are fighting the western front of the Revolutionary War. Floyd had first come to Kentucky in 1774 to survey land around the Falls of the Ohio, site of present-day Louisville. He and his party had a squeaky escape from Shawnee fighting Lord Dunsmore’s War. He had participated in the rescue of Jemima Boone and would later take part in the Battle of Blue Licks. He obviously wasn’t a terribly rich man, having but the one slave. But he couldn’t pick up an axe to clear his own land.

Houses

From Daniel Drake‘s Pioneer Life in Kentucky 1785-1800 (Henry Schuman, Inc., 1948):

Now fancy to yourself a log cabin of the size and form of Dove’s dining room — one story high — without a window — with a door opening to the south — with a half finished wooden chimney — with a roof on one side only — without any upper or lower floor — and fancy, still further, a man and two women stepping from sleeper to sleeper (poles lad down to support the floor, when [my father] should have time to split the puncheons), with two children — a brother & sister — sitting on the ground between them, as joyous as you ever saw . . . and you will have the picture which constitutes my first memory. [ p. 15]

. . .

The first event I can remember I have described in my letter to Harriet Echo. It occurred in the autumn or beginning of the winter of 1788 when I had entered my 4^th year. For the next 6 years my father continued to reside at the same place, in the original log cabin, which in due course of time acquired a roof, a puncheon floor belown and a clap board floor above, a small square window without glass, and a chimney, carried up with cats & clay to the height of the ridge pole. These cats & clay were pieces of small poles, well imbeded in mortar. The rifle, indespensable both for hunting & defense, lay on two pegs driven into one of the logs. The axe and a scythe (no Jerseyman emigrated without that implement) were kep at night under the bed as weapons of defense, in case the Indians should make an attack. On the morning the first duty was to ascend the ladder which always stood, leaning behind the door, to the loft and look through the cracks for Indians lest they might have planted themselves near the door, to rush in when the strong crossbar should be removed, and the heavy latch raised from its resting place. But no attack was ever made on his or any other of the five cabins which composed the station.[p. 24]

From Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630 – 1860 (UNC Press, 1984):

As late as 1859, for example, the forty-eight-year-old Nicolas Stott Shaw accompanied her children on a week-long trek “through a dense and often trackless forest,” nervously making her way from the railroad station in Grand Rapids to a waiting cabin about ten miles from present-day Big Rapids, Michigan. Sustained by the belief “that we were going to a farm . . . [with] some resemblance at least to the prosperous farms we had seen in New England,” Nicolas was shocked to discover at the end of her journey only “the four walls and the roof of a good-sized log-house, standing in a small cleared strip of the wilderness, its doors and windows represented by square holes, its floor also a thing of the future, its whole effect achingly forlorn and desolate.” To be sure, Nicolas Shaw and her children succeeded in making a home of the cabin some “one hundred miles from a railroad, forty miles from the nearest post-office, and half a dozen miles from any neighbors save Indians, wolves, and wildcats.” But in the first shock of recognition “that this was really the place father had prepared for us,” she could only bury her face in her hands, and in that way she sat for hours without moving or speaking.” Indeed, as her daughter would insist many years later, Nicolas’s “face never lost the deep lines those first hours of her pioneer life had cut upon it.” [pp. 229-230]

A snowy woods in the 18th Century

In 1847-48, Daniel Drake, a prominent physician in the Ohio Valley, sat down to write a series of letters to his children about his life as an early settle in Kentucky. His parents came from New Jersey to Mays Lick, just a few miles down the road from where I now live, when he was three years old and he lived there until he left, at 15, to study medicine. The letters he wrote were subsequently published as Pioneer Life in Kentucky1785-1800. Drake was a charming writer, as many of these pioneers seem to be, if maybe just a little coy in apologizing to his children for rattling on about old times.

This morning I came across this passage, which seemed appropriately Currier and Ives for the Christmas season, and so I decided I’d share it here:

[In winter], my equipments were a substantial suite of butternut-linsey, a wool hat, a pair of mittens, and a pair of old stocking legs drawn down, like gaithers, over the tops of my shoes to keep out the snow which was quite as deep in those days as in later times and a great deal prettier. (Don’t smile, if you please, till you hear me out.) I do not mean that the separate flakes were more beautiful than at present; but that a snow in the woods in those days was far more picturesque than a snow in or around town as we see it now.

The woods immediately beyond our fields were unmutilated and not thinned out as you see them at present. They were, in fact, as nature received them from the hand of her Creator. When a snow had fallen without wind, the upper surface of every bough bent gracefully under its weight, and contrasted beautifully with the dark and rugged bark beneath; — the half decayed logs had their deformities covered up; the ground was overspread with a covering as pure and white as the souls of Nelly or Anna or Mary or Etta (sweet darlings, how I want to kiss them!). The cane as high as my head and shoulders, with its long green leaves made the alto relievo of the snowy carpet: — the winter grapes hung in what seemed rich clusters, from the limbs of many trees, which were decorated with tufts of green mistletoe, embellished with berries as white as pearls; while the Celastrus Scandens [Climbing bittersweet), a climbing vine hung out from others, its bunches of orange red berries, and the Indian Arrow wood (Euonymus Carolinensis) [E. Americanus, L., Strawberry Bush] below, displayed its scarlet seeds suspended by threads of the same colour. [pp. 76-77]

The bracketed interpolations were made by the editor, one Emmet Field Horine, M.D., of the old edition I found, published by Henry Schuman of New York in 1948.

Wild bittersweet used to grow in the fencerows of the country lane I lived on, but I haven’t seen it for years now. Farmers tend to clear out their fencerows. What he means by winter grapes I do not know. Back home in Owen County, I used to make wild grape jelly but we didn’t call them winter grapes. Cane, a form of bamboo, disappeared from Kentucky nearly as quickly as the buffalo.

For instance in central Kentucky in 1790, one canebrake was reported to be ‘‘15 miles long and nearly half as wide.’’ Today it is estimated that less than 2% of original habitat remains.

Overgrazing and cultivation are the primary culprits of native Arundinaria’s habitat loss. Decades of fire suppression have also been harmful in two ways: the canopy grows too thick for understory plants like river cane, and when fires do occur, they tend to be catastrophic and leave too much sunlight for the cane to reestablish itself.

I’m not sure what he means by Indian Arrow Wood, which is identified in my Google search as the wahoo (Euonymus atropurpurea), which is not the same as the strawberry bush, and neither is what we have in our yard and call a burning bush (Euonymus alata). Mistletoe is still around in abundance.

Butternut, I think, was a brown dye made from the bark of the butternut tree.