GROWTH AND CIVIL ORGANIZATION OF KENTUCKY‚ 1776.

By the end of 1775 Kentucky had been occupied by those who were permanently to hold it.  Stouthearted men, able to keep what they had grasped moved in, and took with them their wives and children.  There was also of course a large shifting element, composing, indeed, the bulk of the population:  hunters who came out for the season; “cabinners,” or men who merely came out to build a cabin and partially clear a spot of ground, so as to gain a right to it under the law; surveyors, and those adventurers always to be found in a new country, who are too restless, or too timid, or too irresolute to remain.

The men with families and the young men who intended to make permanent homes formed the heart of the community, the only part worth taking into account.  There was a steady though thin stream of such immigrants, and they rapidly built up around them a life not very unlike that which they had left behind with their old homes.  Even in 1776 there was marrying and giving in marriage, and children were born in Kentucky.  The new-comers had to settle in forts, where the young men and maidens had many chances for courtship.  They married early, and were as fruitful as they were hardy. Most of these marriages were civil contracts, but some may have been solemnized by clergymen, for the commonwealth received from the outset occasional visits from ministers.

These ministers belonged to different denominations, but all were sure of a hearing.  The backwoodsmen were forced by their surroundings to exercise a grudging charity towards the various forms of religious belief entertained among themselves ­though they hated and despised French and Spanish Catholics.  When off in the wilderness they were obliged to take a man for what he did, not for what he thought.  Of course there were instances to the contrary, and there is an amusing and authentic story of two hunters, living alone and far from any settlement, who quarrelled because one was a Catholic and the other a Protestant.  The seceder took up his abode in a hollow tree within speaking distance of his companion’s cabin.  Every day on arising they bade each other good-morning; but not another word passed between them for the many months during which they saw no other white face. There was a single serious and important, albeit only partial, exception to this general rule of charity.  After the outbreak of the Revolution, the Kentuckians, in common with other backwoodsmen, grew to thoroughly dislike one religious body which they already distrusted; this was the Church of England, the Episcopal Church.  They long regarded it as merely the persecuting ecclesiastical arm of the British Government.  Such of them as had been brought up in any faith at all had for the most part originally professed some form of Calvinism; they had very probably learnt their letters from a primer which in one of its rude cuts represented John Rogers at the stake, surrounded by his wife and seven children, and in their after lives they were more familiar with the “Pilgrim’s Progress” than with any other book save the Bible; so that it was natural for them to distrust the successors of those who had persecuted Rogers and Bunyan. Still, the border communities were, as times then went very tolerant in religious matters; and of course most of the men had no chance to display, or indeed to feel, sectarianism of any kind, for they had no issue to join, and rarely a church about which to rally.

By the time Kentucky was settled the Baptists had begun to make headway on the frontier, at the expense of the Presbyterians.  The rough democracy of the border welcomed a sect which was itself essentially democratic.  To many of the backwoodsmen’s prejudices, notably their sullen and narrow hostility towards all rank, whether or not based on merit and learning, the Baptists’ creed appealed strongly.  Where their preachers obtained foothold, it was made a matter of reproach to the Presbyterian clergymen that they had been educated in early life for the ministry as for a profession.  The love of liberty, and the defiant assertion of equality, so universal in the backwoods, and so excellent in themselves, sometimes took very warped and twisted forms, notably when they betrayed the backwoodsmen into the belief that the true democratic spirit forbade any exclusive and special training for the professions that produce soldiers, statesmen, or ministers.

The fact that the Baptist preachers were men exactly similar to their fellows in all their habits of life, not only gave them a good standing at once, but likewise enabled them very early to visit the farthest settlements, travelling precisely like other backwoodsmen; and once there, each preacher, each earnest professor, doing bold and fearless missionary work, became the nucleus round which a little knot of true believers gathered.  Two or three of them made short visits to Kentucky during the first few years of its existence.  One, who went thither in the early spring of 1776, kept a journal of his trip. He travelled over the Wilderness Road with eight other men.  Three of them were Baptists like himself, who prayed every night; and their companions, though they did not take part in the praying, did not interrupt it.  Their journey through the melancholy and silent wilderness resembled in its incidents the countless other similar journeys that were made at that time and later.

They suffered from cold and hunger and lack of shelter; they became footsore and weary, and worn out with driving the pack-horses.  On the top of the lonely Cumberland Mountains they came upon the wolf-eaten remains of a previous traveller, who had recently been killed by Indians.  At another place they met four men returning ­cowards, whose hearts had failed them when in sight of the promised land.  While on the great Indian war-trail they killed a buffalo, and thenceforth lived on its jerked meat.  One night the wolves smelt the flesh, and came up to the camp-fire; the strong hunting-dogs rushed out with clamorous barking to drive them away, and the sudden alarm for a moment made the sleepy wayfarers think that roving Indians had attacked them.  When they reached Crab Orchard their dangers were for the moment past; all travellers grew to regard with affection the station by this little grove of wild apple-trees.  It is worthy of note that the early settlers loved to build their homes near these natural orchards, moved by the fragrance and beauty of the bloom in spring.

The tired Baptist was not overpleased with Harrodstown, though he there listened to the preaching of one of his own sect. He remarked “a poor town it was in those days,” a couple of rows of smoky cabins, tenanted by dirty women and ragged children, while the tall, unkempt frontiersmen lounged about in greasy hunting-shirts, breech-clouts, leggings, and moccasins.  There was little or no corn until the crops were gathered, and, like the rest, he had to learn to eat wild meat without salt.  The settlers, ­as is always the case in frontier towns where the people are wrapped up in their own pursuits and rivalries, and are obliged to talk of one another for lack of outside interests, ­were divided by bickering, gossiping jealousies; and at this time they were quarrelling as to whether the Virginian cabin-rights or Henderson’s land-grants would prove valid.  As usual, the zealous Baptist preacher found that the women were the first to “get religion,” as he phrased it.  Sometimes their husbands likewise came in with them; at other times they remained indifferent.  Often they savagely resented their wives and daughters being converted, visiting on the head of the preacher an anger that did not always find vent in mere words; for the backwoodsmen had strong, simple natures, powerfully excited for good or evil, and those who were not God-fearing usually became active and furious opponents of all religion.

It is curious to compare the description of life in a frontier fort as given by this undoubtedly prejudiced observer with the equally prejudiced, but golden- instead of sombre-hued, reminiscences of frontier life, over which the pioneers lovingly lingered in their old age.  To these old men the long-vanished stockades seemed to have held a band of brothers, who were ever generous, hospitable, courteous, and fearless, always ready to help one another, never envious, never flinching from any foe. Neither account is accurate; but the last is quite as near the truth as the first.  On the border, as elsewhere, but with the different qualities in even bolder contrast, there was much both of good and bad, of shiftless viciousness and resolute honesty.  Many of the hunters were mere restless wanderers, who soon surrendered their clearings to small farming squatters, but a degree less shiftless than themselves; the latter brought the ground a little more under cultivation, and then likewise left it and wandered onwards, giving place to the third set of frontiersmen, the steady men who had come to stay.  But often the first hunters themselves stayed and grew up as farmers and landed proprietors. Many of the earliest pioneers, including most of their leaders, founded families, which took root in the land and flourish to this day, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the old-time Indian fighters becoming Congressmen and judges, and officers in the regular army and in the Federal and Confederate forces during the civil war. In fact the very first comers to a wild and dangerous country are apt to be men with fine qualities of heart and head; it is not until they have partly tamed the land that the scum of the frontier drifts into it.

In 1776, as in after years, there were three routes that were taken by immigrants to Kentucky.  One led by backwoods trails to the Greenbriar settlements, and thence down the Kanawha to the Ohio; but the travel over this was insignificant compared to that along the others.  The two really important routes were the Wilderness Road, and that by water, from Fort Pitt down the Ohio River.  Those who chose the latter way embarked in roughly built little flat-boats at Fort Pitt, if they came from Pennsylvania, or else at the old Redstone Fort on the Monongahela, if from Maryland or Virginia, and drifted down with the current.  Though this was the easiest method, yet the danger from Indians was so very great that most immigrants, the Pennsylvanians as well as the Marylanders, Virginians, and North Carolinians, usually went overland by the Wilderness Road.  This was the trace marked out by Boon, which to the present day remains a monument to his skill as a practical surveyor and engineer.  Those going along it went on foot, driving their horses and cattle.  At the last important frontier town they fitted themselves out with pack-saddles; for in such places two of the leading industries were always those of the pack-saddle maker and the artisan in deer leather.  When there was need, the pioneer could of course make a rough pack-saddle for himself, working it up from two forked branches of a tree.  If several families were together, they moved slowly in true patriarchal style.  The elder boys drove the cattle, which usually headed the caravan; while the younger children were packed in crates of hickory withes and slung across the backs of the old quiet horses, or else were seated safely between the great rolls of bedding that were carried in similar fashion.  The women sometimes rode and sometimes walked, carrying the babies.  The men, rifle on shoulder, drove the pack-train, while some of them walked spread out in front, flank, and rear, to guard against the savages. A tent or brush lean-to gave cover at night.  Each morning the men packed the animals while the women cooked breakfast and made ready the children.  Special care had to be taken not to let the loaded animals brush against the yellow-jacket nests, which were always plentiful along the trail in the fall of the year; for in such a case the vicious swarms attacked man and beast, producing an immediate stampede, to the great detriment of the packs. In winter the fords and mountains often became impassable, and trains were kept in one place for weeks at a time, escaping starvation only by killing the lean cattle; for few deer at that season remained in the mountains.

Both the water route and the wilderness road were infested by the savages at all times, and whenever there was open war the sparsely settled regions from which they started were likewise harried.  When the northwestern tribes threatened Fort Pitt and Fort Henry ­or Pittsburg and Wheeling, as they were getting to be called, ­they threatened one of the two localities which served to cover the communications with Kentucky; but it was far more serious when the Holston region was menaced, because the land travel was at first much the more important.

The early settlers of course had to suffer great hardship even when they reached Kentucky.  The only two implements the men invariably carried were the axe and rifle, for they were almost equally proud of their skill as warriors, hunters, and wood-choppers.  Next in importance came the sickle or scythe.  The first three tasks of the pioneer farmer were to build a cabin, to make a clearing ­burning the brush, cutting down the small trees, and girdling the large ­and to plant corn.  Until the crop ripened he hunted steadily, and his family lived on the abundant game, save for which it would have been wholly impossible to have settled Kentucky so early.  If it was winter-time, however, all the wild meat was very lean and poor eating, unless by chance a bear was found in a hollow tree, when there was a royal feast, the breast of the wild turkey serving as a substitute for bread. If the men were suddenly called away by an Indian inroad, their families sometimes had to live for days on boiled tops of green nettles. Naturally the children watched the growth of the tasselled corn with hungry eagerness until the milky ears were fit for roasting.  When they hardened, the grains were pounded into hominy in the hominy-block, or else ground into meal in the rough hand-mill, made of two limestones in a hollow sycamore log.  Until flax could be grown the women were obliged to be content with lint made from the bark of dead nettles.  This was gathered in the spring-time by all the people of a station acting together, a portion of the men standing guard while the rest, with the women and children, plucked the dead stalks.  The smart girls of Irish ancestry spun many dozen cuts of linen from this lint, which was as fine as flax but not so strong.

Neither hardship nor danger could render the young people downhearted, especially when several families, each containing grown-up sons and daughters, were living together in almost every fort.  The chief amusements were hunting and dancing.  There being no permanent ministers, even the gloomy Calvinism of some of the pioneers was relaxed.  Long afterwards one of them wrote, in a spirit of quaint apology, that “dancing was not then considered criminal," and that it kept up the spirits of the young people, and made them more healthy and happy; and recalling somewhat uneasily the merriment in the stations, in spite of the terrible and interminable Indian warfare, the old moralist felt obliged to condemn it, remarking that, owing to the lack of ministers of the gospel, the impressions made by misfortune were not improved.

Though obliged to be very careful and to keep their families in forts, and in spite of a number of them being killed by the savages, the settlers in 1776 were able to wander about and explore the country thoroughly, making little clearings as the basis of “cabin claims,” and now and then gathering into stations which were for the most part broken up by the Indians and abandoned. What was much more important, the permanent settlers in the well-established stations proceeded to organize a civil government.

They by this time felt little but contempt for the Henderson or Transylvania government.  Having sent a petition against it to the provincial authorities, they were confident that what faint shadow of power it still retained would soon vanish; so they turned their attention to securing a representation in the Virginia convention.  All Kentucky was still considered as a part of Fincastle County, and the inhabitants were therefore unrepresented at the capital.  They determined to remedy this; and after due proclamation, gathered together at Harrodstown early in June, 1776.  During five days an election was held, and two delegates were chosen to go to Williamsburg, then the seat of government.

This was done at the suggestion of Clark, who, having spent the winter in Virginia had returned to Kentucky in the spring.  He came out alone and on foot, and by his sudden appearance surprised the settlers not a little.  The first to meet him was a young lad, who had gone a few miles out of Harrodstown to turn some horses on the range.  The boy had killed a teal duck that was feeding in a spring, and was roasting it nicely at a small fire, when he was startled by the approach of a fine soldierly man, who hailed him:  “How do you do my little fellow?  What is your name?  Ar’n’t you afraid of being in the woods by yourself?” The stranger was evidently hungry, for on being invited to eat he speedily finished the entire duck; and when the boy asked his name he answered that it was Clark, and that he had come out to see what the brave fellows in Kentucky were doing, and to help them if there was need.  He took up his temporary abode at Harrodstown ­visiting all the forts, however, and being much in the woods by himself, ­and his commanding mind and daring, adventurous temper speedily made him, what for ten critical years he remained, the leader among all the bold “hunters of Kentucky” ­as the early settlers loved to call themselves.

He had advised against delegates to the convention being chosen, thinking that instead the Kentuckians should send accredited agents to treat with the Virginian government.  If their terms were not agreed to, he declared that they ought to establish forthwith an independent state; an interesting example of how early the separatist spirit showed itself in Kentucky.  But the rest of the people were unwilling to go quite as far.  They elected two delegates, Clark of course being one.  With them they sent a petition for admission as a separate county.  They were primarily farmers, hunters, Indian fighters ­not scholars; and their petition was couched in English that was at times a little crooked; but the idea at any rate was perfectly straight, and could not be misunderstood.  They announced that if they were admitted they would cheerfully cooperate in every measure to secure the public peace and safety, and at the same time pointed out with marked emphasis “how impolitical it would be to suffer such a Respectable Body of Prime Riflemen to remain in a state of neutrality” during the then existing revolutionary struggle.

Armed with this document and their credentials, Clark and his companion set off across the desolate and Indian-haunted mountains.  They travelled very fast, the season was extremely wet, and they did not dare to kindle fires for fear of the Indians; in consequence they suffered torments from cold, hunger, and especially from “scalded” feet.  Yet they hurried on, and presented their petition to the Governor and Council ­the Legislature having adjourned.  Clark also asked for five hundred-weight of gunpowder, of which the Kentucky settlement stood in sore and pressing need.  This the Council at first refused to give; whereupon Clark informed them that if the country was not worth defending, it was not worth claiming, making it plain that if the request was not granted, and if Kentucky was forced to assume the burdens of independence, she would likewise assume its privileges.  After this plain statement the Council yielded.  Clark took the powder down the Ohio River, and got it safely through to Kentucky; though a party sent under John Todd to convey it overland from the Limestone Creek was met at the Licking and defeated by the Indians, Clark’s fellow delegate being among the killed.

Before returning Clark had attended the fall meeting of the Virginia Legislature, and in spite of the opposition of Henderson, who was likewise present, he procured the admission of Kentucky as a separate county, with boundaries corresponding to those of the present State.  Early in the ensuing year, 1777, the county was accordingly organized; Harrodstown, or Harrodsburg, as it was now beginning to be called, was made the county seat, having by this time supplanted Boonsborough in importance.  The court was composed of the six or eight men whom the governor of Virginia had commissioned as justices of the peace; they were empowered to meet monthly to transact necessary business, and had a sheriff and clerk. These took care of the internal concerns of the settlers.  To provide for their defence a county lieutenant was created, with the rank of colonel, who forthwith organized a militia regiment, placing all the citizens, whether permanent residents or not, into companies and battalions.  Finally, two burgesses were chosen to represent the county in the General Assembly of Virginia. In later years Daniel Boon himself served as a Kentucky burgess in the Virginia Legislature; a very different body from the little Transylvanian parliament in which he began his career as a law-maker.  The old backwoods hero led a strange life:  varying his long wanderings and explorations, his endless campaigns against savage men and savage beasts, by serving as road-maker, town-builder, and commonwealth-founder, sometimes organizing the frontiersmen for foreign war, and again doing his share in devising the laws under which they were to live and prosper.

But the pioneers were speedily drawn into a life-and-death struggle which engrossed their whole attention to the exclusion of all merely civil matters; a struggle in which their land became in truth what the Indians called it ­a dark and bloody ground, a land with blood-stained rivers.

It was impossible long to keep peace on the border between the ever-encroaching whites and their fickle and blood-thirsty foes.  The hard, reckless, often brutalized frontiersmen, greedy of land and embittered by the memories of untold injuries, regarded all Indians with sullen enmity, and could not be persuaded to distinguish between the good and the bad. The central government was as powerless to restrain as to protect these far-off and unruly citizens.  On the other hand, the Indians were as treacherous as they were ferocious; Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots, and all. While deceiving the commandants of the posts by peaceful protestations, they would steadily continue their ravages and murders; and while it was easy to persuade a number of the chiefs and warriors of a tribe to enter into a treaty, it was impossible to make the remainder respect it. The chiefs might be for peace, but the young braves were always for war, and could not be kept back.

In July, 1776, the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingo chiefs assembled at Fort Pitt and declared for neutrality; the Iroquois ambassadors, who were likewise present, haughtily announced that their tribes would permit neither the British nor the Americans to march an army through their territory.  They disclaimed any responsibility for what might be done by a few wayward young men; and requested the Delawares and Shawnees to do as they had promised, and to distribute the Iroquois “talk” among their people.  After the Indian fashion, they emphasized each point which they wished kept in mind by the presentation of a string of wampum.

Yet at this very time a party of Mingos tried to kill the American Indian agents, and were only prevented by Cornstalk, whose noble and faithful conduct was so soon to be rewarded by his own brutal murder.  Moreover, while the Shawnee chief was doing this, some of his warriors journeyed down to the Cherokees and gave them the war belt, assuring them that the Wyandots and Mingos would support them, and that they themselves had been promised ammunition by the French traders of Detroit and the Illinois. On their return home this party of Shawnees scalped two men in Kentucky near the Big Bone Lick, and captured a woman; but they were pursued by the Kentucky settlers, two were killed and the woman retaken.

Throughout the year the outlook continued to grow more and more threatening.  Parties of young men kept making inroads on the settlements, especially in Kentucky; not only did the Shawnees, Wyandots, Mingos, and Iroquois act thus, but they were even joined by bands of Ottawas, Pottawatomies, and Chippewas from the lakes, who thus attacked the white settlers long ere the latter had either the will or the chance to hurt them.

Until the spring of 1777 the outbreak was not general, and it was supposed that only some three or four hundred warriors had taken up the tomahawk. Yet the outlying settlers were all the time obliged to keep as sharp a look-out as if engaged in open war.  Throughout the summer of 1776 the Kentucky settlers were continually harassed.  Small parties of Indians were constantly lurking round the forts, to shoot down the men as they hunted or worked in the fields, and to carry off the women.  There was a constant and monotonous succession of unimportant forays and skirmishes.

One band of painted marauders carried off Boon’s daughter.  She was in a canoe with two other girls on the river near Boonsborough when they were pounced on by five Indians. As soon as he heard the news Boon went in pursuit with a party of seven men from the fort, including the three lovers of the captured girls.  After following the trail all of one day and the greater part of two nights, the pursuers came up with the savages, and, rushing in, scattered or slew them before they could either make resistance or kill their captives.  The rescuing party then returned in triumph to the fort.

Thus for two years the pioneers worked in the wilderness, harassed by unending individual warfare, but not threatened by any formidable attempt to oust them from the lands that they had won.  During this breathing spell they established civil government, explored the country, planted crops, and built strongholds.  Then came the inevitable struggle.  When in 1777 the snows began to melt before the lengthening spring days, the riflemen who guarded the log forts were called on to make head against a series of resolute efforts to drive them from Kentucky.