James Robertson.

Robertson had no share in the glory of King’s Mountain, and no part in the subsequent career of the men who won it; for, at the time, he was doing his allotted work, a work of at least equal importance, in a different field.  The year before the mountaineers faced Ferguson, the man who had done more than any one in founding the settlements from which the victors came, had once more gone into the wilderness to build a new and even more typical frontier commonwealth, the westernmost of any yet founded by the backwoodsmen.

Robertson had been for ten years a leader among the Holston and Watauga people.  He had at different times played the foremost part in organizing the civil government and in repelling outside attack.  He had been particularly successful in his dealings with the Indians, and by his missions to them had managed to keep the peace unbroken on more than one occasion when a war would have been disastrous to the whites.  He was prosperous and successful in his private affairs; nevertheless, in 1779, the restless craving for change and adventure surged so strongly in his breast that it once more drove him forth to wander in the forest.  In the true border temper he determined to abandon the home he had made, and to seek out a new one hundreds of miles farther in the heart of the hunting-grounds of the red warriors.

The point pitched upon was the beautiful country lying along the great bend of the Cumberland.  Many adventurous settlers were anxious to accompany Robertson, and, like him, to take their wives and children with them into the new land.  It was agreed that a small party of explorers should go first in the early spring, to plant corn, that the families might have it to eat when they followed in the fall.

    The Cumberland Country.

The spot was already well known to hunters.  Who had first visited it cannot be said; though tradition has kept the names of several among the many who at times halted there while on their wanderings. Old Kasper Mansker and others had made hunting trips thither for ten years past; and they had sometimes met the Creole trappers from the Illinois.  When Mansker first went to the Bluffs, in 1769, the buffaloes were more numerous than he had ever seen them before; the ground literally shook under the gallop of the mighty herds, they crowded in dense throngs round the licks, and the forest resounded with their grunting bellows.  He and other woodsmen came back there off and on, hunting and trapping, and living in huts made of buffalo hides; just such huts as the hunters dwelt in on the Little Missouri and Powder rivers as late as 1883, except that the plainsmen generally made dug-outs in the sides of the buttes and used the hides only for the roofs and fronts.  So the place was well known, and the reports of the hunters had made many settlers eager to visit it, though as yet no regular path led thither.  In 1778 the first permanent settler arrived in the person of a hunter named Spencer, who spent the following winter entirely alone in this remote wilderness, living in a hollow sycamore-tree.  Spencer was a giant in his day, a man huge in body and limb, all whose life had been spent in the wilderness.  He came to the bend of the Cumberland from Kentucky in the early spring, being in search of good land on which to settle.  Other hunters were with him, and they stayed some time.  A créole trapper from the Wabash was then living in a cabin on the south side of the river.  He did not meet the new-comers; but one day he saw the huge moccasin tracks of Spencer, and on the following morning the party passed close by his cabin in chase of a wounded buffalo, halloing and shouting as they dashed through the underwood.  Whether he thought them Indians, or whether, as is more likely, he shared the fear and dislike felt by most of the Créoles for the American backwoodsmen, cannot be said; but certainly he left his cabin, swam the river, and plunging into the forest, straightway fled to his kinsfolk on the banks of the Wabash.  Spencer was soon left by his companions; though one of them stayed with him a short time, helping him to plant a field of corn.  Then this man, too, wished to return.  He had lost his hunting-knife; so Spencer went with him to the barrens of Kentucky, put him on the right path, and breaking his own knife, gave his departing friend a piece of the metal.  The undaunted old hunter himself returned to the banks of the Cumberland, and sojourned throughout the fall and winter in the neighborhood of the little clearing on which he had raised the corn crop; a strange, huge, solitary man, self-reliant, unflinching, cut off from all his fellows by endless leagues of shadowy forest.  Thus he dwelt alone in the vast dim wastes, wandering whithersoever he listed through the depths of the melancholy and wintry woods, sleeping by his camp-fire or in the hollow tree-trunk, ever ready to do battle against brute or human foe ­a stark and sombre harbinger of the oncoming civilization.

Spencer’s figure, seen through the mist that shrouds early western history, is striking and picturesque in itself; yet its chief interest lies in the fact that he was but a type of many other men whose lives were no less lonely and dangerous.  He had no qualities to make him a leader when settlements sprang up around him.  To the end of his days he remained a solitary hunter and Indian fighter, spurning restraint and comfort, and seeking the strong excitement of danger to give zest to his life.  Even in the time of the greatest peril from the savages he would not stay shut up in the forts, but continued his roving, wandering life, trusting to his own quick senses, wonderful strength, and iron nerves.  He even continued to lie out at night, kindling a fire, and then lying down to sleep far from it.

    Robertson Travels Thither.

Early in the year 1779 a leader of men came to the place where the old hunter had roamed and killed game; and with the new-comer came those who were to posses the land.  Robertson left the Watauga settlements soon after the spring opened, with eight companions, one of them a negro.  He followed Boon’s trace, ­Wilderness Road, ­through Cumberland Gap, and across the Cumberland River.  Then he struck off southwest through the wilderness, lightening his labor by taking the broad, well-beaten buffalo trails whenever they led in his direction; they were very distinct near the pools and springs, and especially going to and from the licks.  The adventurers reached the bend of the Cumberland without mishap, and fixed on the neighborhood of the Bluff, the ground near the French Lick, as that best suited for their purpose; and they planted a field of corn on the site of the future forted village of Nashborough.  A few days after their arrival they were joined by another batch of hunter-settlers, who had come out under the leadership of Kasper Mansker.

As soon as the corn was planted and cabins put up, most of the intending settlers returned to their old homes to bring out their families, leaving three of their number “to keep the buffaloes out of the corn.” Robertson himself first went north through the wilderness to see George Rogers Clark in Illinois, to purchase cabin-rights from him.  This act gives an insight into at least some of the motives that influenced the adventurers.  Doubtless they were impelled largely by sheer restlessness and love of change and excitement; and these motives would probably have induced them to act as they did, even had there been no others.  But another and most powerful spring of action was the desire to gain land ­not merely land for settlement, but land for speculative purposes.  Wild land was then so abundant that the quantity literally seemed inexhaustible; and it was absolutely valueless until settled.  Our forefathers may well be pardoned for failing to see that it was of more importance to have it owned in small lots by actual settlers than to have it filled up quickly under a system of huge grants to individuals or corporations.  Many wise and good men honestly believed that they would benefit the country at the same time that they enriched themselves by acquiring vast tracts of virgin wilderness, and then proceeding to people them.  There was a rage for land speculation and land companies of every kind.

The private correspondence of almost all the public men of the period, from Washington, Madison, and Gouverneur Morris down, is full of the subject.  Innumerable people of position and influence dreamed of acquiring untold wealth in this manner.  Almost every man of note was actually or potentially a land speculator; and in turn almost every prominent pioneer from Clark and Boon to Shelby and Robertson was either himself one of the speculators or an agent for those who were.  Many people did not understand the laws on the subject, or hoped to evade them; and the hope was as strong in the breast of the hunter, who made a “tomahawk claim” by blazing a few trees, and sold it for a small sum to a new-comer, as in that of the well-to-do schemer, who bought an Indian title for a song, and then got what he could from all outsiders who came in to dwell on the land.

This speculative spirit was a powerful stimulus to the settlement not only of Kentucky, but of middle Tennessee.  Henderson’s claim included the Cumberland country, and when North Carolina annulled his rights, she promised him a large but indefinitely located piece of land in their place.  He tried to undersell the state in the land market, and undoubtedly his offers had been among the main causes that induced Robertson and his associates to go to the Cumberland when they did.  But at the time it was uncertain whether Cumberland lay in Virginia or North Carolina, as the line was not run by the surveyors until the following spring; and Robertson went up to see Clark, because it was rumored that the latter had the disposal of Virginia “cabin-rights”; under which each man could, for a small sum, purchase a thousand acres, on condition of building a cabin and raising a crop.  However, as it turned out, he might have spared himself the journey, for the settlement proved to be well within the Carolina boundary.

    Many Settlers Join Him.

In the fall very many men came out to the new settlement, guided thither by Robertson and Mansker; the former persuading a number who were bound to Kentucky to come to the Cumberland instead.  Among them were two or three of the Long Hunters, whose wanderings had done so much to make the country known.  Robertson’s especial partner was a man named John Donelson.  The latter went by water and took a large party of immigrants, including all the women and children, down the Tennessee, and thence up the Ohio and Cumberland to the Bluff or French Lick. Among them were Robertson’s entire family, and Donelson’s daughter Rachel, the future wife of Andrew Jackson, who missed by so narrow a margin being mistress of the White House.  Robertson, meanwhile, was to lead the rest of the men by land, so that they should get there first and make ready for the coming of their families.

Robertson’s party started in the fall, being both preceded and followed by other companies of settlers, some of whom were accompanied by their wives and children.  Cold weather of extraordinary severity set in during November; for this was the famous “hard winter” of ’79-80, during which the Kentucky settlers suffered so much.  They were not molested by Indians, and reached the Bluff about Christmas.  The river was frozen solid, and they all crossed the ice in a body; when in mid-stream the ice jarred, and ­judging from the report ­the jar or crack must have gone miles up and down the stream; but the ice only settled a little and did not break.  By January first there were over two hundred people scattered on both sides of the river.  In Robertson’s company was a man named John Rains, who brought with him twenty-one horned cattle and seventeen horses; the only cattle and horses which any of the immigrants succeeded in bringing to the Cumberland.  But he was not the only man who had made the attempt.  One of the immigrants who went in Donelson’s flotilla, Daniel Dunham by name, offered his brother John, who went by land, L100 to drive along his horses and cattle.  John accepted, and tried his best to fulfil his share of the bargain; but he was seemingly neither a very expert woodsman nor yet a good stock hand.  There is no form of labor more arduous and dispiriting than driving unruly and unbroken stock along a faint forest or mountain trail, especially in bad weather; and this the would-be drover speedily found out.  The animals would not follow the trail; they incessantly broke away from it, got lost, scattered in the brush, and stampeded at night.  Finally the unfortunate John, being, as he expressed it, nearly “driven mad by the drove,” abandoned them all in the wilderness.

    Voyage of the “Adventure.”

The settlers who came by water passed through much greater peril and hardship.  By a stroke of good fortune the journal kept by Donelson, the leader of the expedition, has been preserved. As with all the other recorded wanderings and explorations of these backwoods adventurers, it must be remembered that while this trip was remarkable in itself, it is especially noteworthy because, out of many such, it is the only one of which we have a full account.  The adventures that befell Donelson’s company differed in degree, but not in kind, from those that befell the many similar flotillas that followed or preceded him.  From the time that settlers first came to the upper Tennessee valley occasional hardy hunters had floated down the stream in pirogues, or hollowed out tree-trunks.  Before the Revolution a few restless emigrants had adopted this method of reaching Natchez; some of them made the long and perilous trip in safety, others were killed by the Chickamaugas or else foundered in the whirlpools, or on the shoals.  The spring before Donelson started, a party of men, women, and children, in forty canoes or pirogues, went down the Tennessee to settle in the newly conquered Illinois country, and skirmished with the Cherokees or their way. [Footnote:  State Department MSS., N, Vol.  II., : 

“JAMES COLBERT TO CHAS. STUART.

“CHICKASAW NATION, May 25, 1779.

“Sir, ­I was this day informed that there is forty large Cannoes loaded with men women and children passed by here down the Cherokee River who on their way down they took a Dellaway Indian prisoner & kept him till they found out what Nation he was of ­they told him they had come from Long Island and were on their way to Illinois with an intent to settle ­Sir I have some reason to think they are a party of Rebels.  My reason is this after they let the Dellaway Indian at liberty they met with some Cherokees whom they endeavoured to decoy, but finding they would not be decoyed they fired on them but they all made their Escape with the Loss of their arms and ammunition and one fellow wounded, who arrived yesterday.  The Dellaway informs me that Lieut.  Governor Hamilton is defeated and himself taken prisoner,” etc.

It is curious that none of the Tennessee annalists have noticed the departure of this expedition; very, very few of the deeds and wanderings of the old frontiersmen have been recorded; and in consequence historians are apt to regard these few as being exceptional, instead of typical.  Donelson was merely one of a hundred leaders of flotillas that went down the western rivers at this time.]

Donelson’s flotilla, after being joined by a number of other boats, especially at the mouth of the Clinch, consisted of some thirty craft, all told ­flat-boats, dug-outs, and canoes.  There were probably two or three hundred people, perhaps many more, in the company; among them, as the journal records, “James Robertson’s lady and children,” the latter to the number of five.  The chief boat, the flag-ship of the flotilla, was the Adventure, a great scow, in which there were over thirty men, besides the families of some of them.

They embarked at Holston, Long Island, on December 22d, but falling water and heavy frosts detained them two months, and the voyage did not really begin until they left Cloud Creek on February 27, 1780.  The first ten days were uneventful.  The Adventure spent an afternoon and night on a shoal, until the water fortunately rose, and, all the men getting out, the clumsy scow was floated off.  Another boat was driven on the point of an island and sunk, her crew being nearly drowned; whereupon the rest of the flotilla put to shore, the sunken boat was raised and bailed out, and most of her cargo recovered.  At one landing-place a man went out to hunt, and got lost, not being taken up again for three days, though “many guns were fired to fetch him in,” and the four-pounder on the Adventure was discharged for the same purpose.  A negro became “much frosted in his feet and legs, of which he died.”  Where the river was wide a strong wind and high sea forced the whole flotilla to lay to, for the sake of the smaller craft.  This happened on March 7th, just before coming to the uppermost Chickamauga town; and that night, the wife of one Ephraim Peyton, who had himself gone with Robertson, overland, was delivered of a child.  She was in a boat whose owner was named Jonathan Jennings.

The next morning they soon came to an Indian village on the south shore.  The Indians made signs of friendliness, and two men started toward them in a canoe which the Adventure had in tow, while the flotilla drew up on the opposite side of the river.  But a half-breed and some Indians jumping into a pirogue paddled out to meet the two messengers and advised them to return to their comrades, which they did.  Several canoes then came off from the shore to the flotilla.  The Indians who were in them seemed friendly and were pleased with the presents they received; but while these were being distributed the whites saw a number of other canoes putting off, loaded with armed warriors, painted black and red.  The half-breed instantly told the Indians round about to paddle to the shore, and warned the whites to push off at once, at the same time giving them some instructions about the river.  The armed Indians went down along the shore for some time as if to intercept them; but at last they were seemingly left behind.

In a short time another Indian village was reached, where the warriors tried in vain to lure the whites ashore; and as the boats were hugging the opposite bank, they were suddenly fired at by a party in ambush, and one man slain.  Immediately afterwards a much more serious tragedy occurred.  There was with the flotilla a boat containing twenty-eight men, women, and children, among whom small-pox had broken out.  To guard against infection, it was agreed that it should keep well in the rear; being warned each night by the sound of a horn when it was time to go into camp.  As this forlorn boat-load of unfortunates came along, far behind the others, the Indians, seeing its defenceless position, sallied out in their canoes, and butchered or captured all who were aboard.  Their cries were distinctly heard by the rearmost of the other craft, who could not stem the current and come to their rescue.  But a dreadful retribution fell on the Indians; for they were infected with the disease of their victims, and for some months virulent small-pox raged among many of the bands of Creeks and Cherokees.  When stricken by the disease, the savages first went into the sweat-houses, and when heated to madness, plunged into the cool streams, and so perished in multitudes.

When the boats entered the Narrows they had lost sight of the Indians on shore, and thought they had left them behind.  A man, who was in a canoe, had gone aboard one of the larger boats with his family, for the sake of safety while passing through the rough water.  His canoe was towed alongside, and in the rapids it was overturned, and the cargo lost.  The rest of the company, pitying his distress over the loss of all his worldly goods, landed, to see if they could not help him recover some of his property.  Just as they got out on the shore to walk back, the Indians suddenly appeared almost over them, on the high cliffs opposite, and began to fire, causing a hurried retreat to the boats.  For some distance the Indians lined the bluffs, firing from the heights into the boats below.  Yet only four people were wounded, and they not dangerously.  One of them was a girl named Nancy Gower.  When, by the sudden onslaught of the Indians, the crew of the boat in which she was were thrown into dismay, she took the helm and steered, exposed to the fire of the savages.  A ball went through the upper part of one of her thighs, but she neither flinched nor uttered any cry; and it was not known that she was wounded until, after the danger was past, her mother saw the blood soaking through her clothes.  She recovered, married one of the frontiersmen, and lived for fifty years afterwards, long enough to see all the wilderness filled with flourishing and populous States.

One of the clumsy craft, however, did not share the good fortune that befell the rest, in escaping with so little loss and damage.  Jonathan Jennings’ boat, in which was Mrs. Peyton, with her new-born baby, struck on a rock at the upper end of the whirl, the swift current rendering it impossible for the others to go to his assistance; and they drifted by, leaving him to his fate.  The Indians soon turned their whole attention to him, and from the bluffs opened a most galling fire upon the disabled boat.  He returned it as well as he could, keeping them somewhat in check, for he was a most excellent marksman.  At the same time he directed his two negroes, a man and woman, his nearly grown son, and a young man who was with him, to lighten the boat by throwing his goods into the river.  Before this was done, the negro man, the son, and the other young man most basely jumped into the river, and swam ashore.  It is satisfactory to record that at least two of the three dastards met the fate they deserved.  The negro was killed in the water, and the other two captured, one of them being afterwards burned at the stake, while the other, it is said, was ultimately released.  Meanwhile Mrs. Jennings, assisted by the negro woman and Mrs. Peyton, actually succeeded in shoving the lightened boat off the rock, though their clothes were cut in many places by the bullets; and they rapidly drifted out of danger.  The poor little baby was killed in the hurry and confusion; but its mother, not eighteen hours from child-bed, in spite of the cold, wet, and exertion, kept in good health.  Sailing by night as well as day, they caught up with the rest of the flotilla before dawn on the second morning afterwards, the men being roused from their watch-fires by the cries of “help poor Jennings,” as the wretched and worn-out survivors in the disabled boat caught the first glimpse of the lights on shore.

Having successfully run the gauntlet of the Chickamauga banditti, the flotilla was not again molested by the Indians, save once when the boats that drifted near shore were fired on by a roving war party, and five men wounded.  They ran over the great Muscle Shoals in about three hours without accident, though the boats scraped on the bottom here and there.  The swift, broken water surged into high waves, and roared through the piles of driftwood that covered the points of the small islands, round which the currents ran in every direction; and those among the men who were unused to river-work were much relieved when they found themselves in safety.  One night, after the fires had been kindled, the tired travellers were alarmed by the barking of the dogs.  Fearing that Indians were near by, they hastily got into the boats and crossed to camp on the opposite shore.  In the morning two of them returned to pick up some things that had been left; they found that the alarm had been false, for the utensils that had been overlooked in the confusion were undisturbed, and a negro who had been left behind in the hurry was still sleeping quietly by the camp-fires.

On the 20th of the month they reached the Ohio.  Some of the boats then left for Natchez, and others for the Illinois country; while the remainder turned their prows up stream, to stem the rapid current ­a task for which they were but ill-suited.  The work was very hard, the provisions were nearly gone, and the crews were almost worn out by hunger and fatigue.  On the 24th they entered the mouth of the Cumberland.  The Adventure, the heaviest of all the craft, got much help from a small square-sail that was set in the bow.

Two days afterwards the hungry party killed some buffalo, and feasted on the lean meat, and the next day they shot a swan “which was very delicious,” as Donelson recorded.  Their meal was exhausted and they could make no more bread; but buffalo were plenty, and they hunted them steadily for their meat; and they also made what some of them called “Shawnee salad” from a kind of green herb that grew in the bottoms.

On the last day of the month they met Col.  Richard Henderson, who had just come out and was running the line between Virginia and North Carolina.  The crews were so exhausted that the progress of the boats became very slow, and it was not until April 24th that they reached the Big Salt Lick, and found Robertson awaiting them.  The long, toilsome, and perilous voyage had been brought to a safe end.

There were then probably nearly five hundred settlers on the Cumberland, one half of them being able-bodied men in the prime of life. The central station, the capitol of the little community, was that at the Bluff, where Robertson built a little stockaded hamlet and called it Nashborough; it was of the usual type of small frontier forted town.  Other stations were scattered along both sides of the river; some were stockades, others merely block-houses, with the yard and garden enclosed by stout palings.  As with all similar border forts or stations, these were sometimes called by the name of the founder; more rarely they were named with reference to some natural object, such as the river, ford, or hill by which they were, or commemorated some deed, or the name of a man the frontiersmen held in honor; and occasionally they afforded true instances of clan-settlement and clan-nomenclature, several kindred families of the same name building a village which grew to be called after them.  Among these Cumberland stations was Mansker’s (usually called Kasper’s or Gaspers ­he was not particular how his name was spelled), Stone River, Bledsoe’s, Freeland’s, Eatons’, Clover-Bottom, and Fort Union.

As the country where they had settled belonged to no tribe of Indians, some of the people thought they would not be molested, and, being eager to take up the best lands, scattered out to live on separate claims.  Robertson warned them that they would soon suffer from the savages; and his words speedily came true ­whereupon the outlying cabins were deserted and all gathered within the stockades.  In April roving parties of Delawares, Chickasaws, and Choctaws began to harass the settlement.  As in Kentucky, so on the banks of the Cumberland, the Indians were the first to begin the conflict.  The lands on which the whites settled were uninhabited, and were claimed as hunting-grounds by many hostile tribes; so that it is certain that no one tribe had any real title to them.

    Formation of a Government.

True to their customs and traditions, and to their race-capacity for self-rule, the settlers determined forthwith to organize some kind of government under which justice might be done among themselves, and protection afforded against outside attack.  Not only had the Indians begun their ravages, but turbulent and disorderly whites were also causing trouble.  Robertson, who had been so largely instrumental in founding the Watauga settlement, and giving it laws, naturally took the lead in organizing this, the second community which he had caused to spring up in the wilderness.  He summoned a meeting of delegates from the various stations, to be held at Nashborough; Henderson being foremost in advocating the adoption of the plan.

In fact, Henderson, the treaty-maker and land-speculator, whose purchase first gave the whites clear color of title to the valleys of the Kentucky and Cumberland, played somewhat the same part, though on a smaller scale, in the settlement made by Robertson as in that made by Boon.  He and the Virginian commissioner Walker, had surveyed the boundary line and found that the Cumberland settlements were well to the south of it.  He then claimed the soil as his under the Cherokee deed; and disposed of it to the settlers who contracted to pay ten dollars a thousand acres.  This was but a fraction of the State price, so the settlers were all eager to hold under Henderson’s deed; one of the causes of their coming out had been the chance of getting land so cheap.  But Henderson’s claim was annulled by the legislature, and the satisfaction-piece of 200,000 acres allotted him was laid off elsewhere; so his contracts with the settlers came to nothing, and they eventually got title in the usual way from North Carolina.  They suffered no loss in the matter, for they had merely given Henderson promises to pay when his title was made good.

The settlers, by their representatives, met together at Nashborough, and on May 1, 1780, entered into articles of agreement or a compact of government.  It was doubtless drawn up by Robertson, with perhaps the help of Henderson, and was modelled upon what may be called the “constitution” of Watauga, with some hints from that of Transylvania. The settlers ratified the deeds of their delegates on May 13th, when they signed the articles, binding themselves to obey them to the number of two hundred and fifty-six men.  The signers practically guaranteed one another their rights in the land, and their personal security against wrong-doers; those who did not sign were treated as having no rights whatever ­a proper and necessary measure as it was essential that the naturally lawless elements should be forced to acknowledge some kind of authority.

The compact provided that the affairs of the community should be administered by a Court or Committee of twelve Judges, Triers or General Arbitrators, to be elected in the different stations by vote of all the freemen in them who were over twenty-one years of age.  Three of the Triers were to come from Nashborough, two from Mansker’s, two from Bledsoe’s, and one from each of five other named stations. Whenever the freemen of any station were dissatisfied with their Triers, they could at once call a new election, at which others might be chosen in their stead.  The Triers had no salaries, but the Clerk of the Court was allowed some very small fees, just enough to pay for the pens, ink, and paper, all of them scarce commodities. The Court had jurisdiction in all cases of conflict over land titles; a land office being established and an entry taker appointed.  Over half of the compact was devoted to the rules of the land office.  The Court, acting by a majority of its members, was to have jurisdiction for the recovery of debt or damages, and to be allowed to tax costs.  Three Triers were competent to make a Court to decide a case where the debt or damage was a hundred dollars or less; and there was no appeal from their decision.  For a larger sum an appeal lay to the whole Court.  The Court appointed whomsoever it pleased to see decisions executed.  It had power to punish all offences against the peace of the community, all misdemeanors and criminal acts, provided only that its decisions did not go so far as to affect the life of the criminal.  If the misdeed of the accused was such as to be dangerous to the State, or one “for which the benefit of clergy was taken away by law,” he was to be bound and sent under guard to some place where he could be legally dealt with.  The Court levied fines, payable in money or provisions, entered up judgments and awarded executions, and granted letters of administration upon estates of deceased persons, and took bonds “payable to the chairman of the Committee.”  The expenses were to be paid proportionately by the various settlers.  It was provided, in view of the Indian incursions, that the militia officers elected at the various stations should have power to call out the militia when they deemed it necessary to repel or pursue the enemy.  They were also given power to fine such men as disobeyed them, and to impress horses if need be; if damaged, the horses were to be paid for by the people of the station in the proportion the Court might direct.  It was expressly declared that the compact was designed as a “temporary method of restraining the licentious”; that the settlement did not desire to be exempt from the ratable share of the expense for the Revolutionary war, and earnestly asked that North Carolina would immediately make it part of the State, erecting it into a county.  Robertson was elected chairman of the Court, and colonel of the militia, being thus made both civil and military commandant of the settlement.  In common with the other Triers he undertook the solemnization of marriages; and these were always held legal, which was fortunate, as it was a young and vigorous community, of which the members were much given to early wedlock.

Thus a little commonwealth, a self-governing state, was created.  It was an absolute democracy, the majority of freemen of full age in each stockade having power in every respect, and being able not only to elect, but to dismiss their delegates at any moment.  Their own good sense and a feeling of fair play could be depended upon to protect the rights of the minority, especially as a minority of such men would certainly not tolerate any thing even remotely resembling tyranny.  They had formed a representative government in which the legislative and judicial functions were not separated, and were even to a large extent combined with the executive.  They had proceeded in an eminently practical manner, having modelled their system on what was to them the familiar governmental unit of the county with its county court and county militia officers.  They made the changes that their peculiar position required, grafting the elective and representative systems on the one they adopted, and of course enlarging the scope of the court’s action.  Their compact was thus in some sort an unconscious reproduction of the laws and customs of the old-time court-leet, profoundly modified to suit the peculiar needs of backwoods life, the intensely democratic temper of the pioneers and above all the military necessities of their existence.  They had certain theories of liberty and justice; but they were too shrewd and hard-headed to try to build up a government on an entirely new foundation, when they had ready to hand materials with which they were familiar.  They knew by experience the workings of the county system; all they did was to alter the immediate channel from which the court drew its powers, and to adapt the representation to the needs of a community where constant warfare obliged the settlers to gather in little groups, which served as natural units.

When the settlers first came to the country they found no Indians living in it, no signs of cultivation or cleared land, and nothing to show that for ages past it had been inhabited.  It was a vast plain, covered with woods and canebrakes, through which the wild herds had beaten out broad trails.  The only open places were the licks, sometimes as large as corn-fields, where the hoofs of the game had trodden the ground bare of vegetation, and channelled its surface with winding seams and gullies.  It is even doubtful if the spot of bare ground which Mansker called an “old field” or sometimes a “Chickasaw old field” was not merely one of these licks.  Buffalo, deer, and bear abounded; elk, wolves, and panthers were plentiful.

Yet there were many signs that in long by-gone times a numerous population had dwelt in the land.  Round every spring were many graves, built in a peculiar way, and covered eight or ten inches deep by mould.  In some places there were earth-covered foundations of ancient walls and embankments that enclosed spaces of eight or ten acres.  The Indians knew as little as the whites about these long-vanished mound-builders, and were utterly ignorant of the race to which they had belonged.

    Indian Hostilities.

For some months the whites who first arrived dwelt in peace.  But in the spring, hunting and war parties from various tribes began to harass the settlers.  Unquestionably the savages felt jealous of the white hunters, who were killing and driving away the game, precisely as they all felt jealous of one another, and for the same reason.  The Chickasaws in particular, were much irritated by the fort Clark had built at Iron Bank, on the Mississippi.  But the most powerful motive for the attacks was doubtless simply the desire for scalps and plunder.  They gathered from different quarters to assail the colonists, just as the wild beasts gathered to prey on the tame herds.

The Indians began to commit murders, kill the stock, and drive off the horses in April, and their ravages continued unceasingly throughout the year.  Among the slain was a son of Robertson, and also the unfortunate Jonathan Jennings, the man who had suffered such loss when his boat was passing the whirl of the Tennessee River.  The settlers were shot as they worked on their clearings, gathered the corn crops, or ventured outside the walls of the stockades.  Hunters were killed as they stooped to drink at the springs, or lay in wait at the licks.  They were lured up to the Indians by imitations of the gobbling of a turkey or the cries of wild beasts.  They were regularly stalked as they still-hunted the game, or were ambushed as they returned with their horses laden with meat.  The inhabitants of one station were all either killed or captured.  Robertson led pursuing parties after one or two of the bands, and recovered some plunder; and once or twice small marauding parties were met and scattered, with some loss, by the hunters.  But, on the whole, very little could be done at first to parry or revenge the strokes of the Indians.

Horses and cattle had been brought into the new settlement in some number during the year; but the savages killed or drove off most of them, shooting the hogs and horned stock, and stealing the riding animals.  The loss of the milch cows in particular, was severely felt by the women.  Moreover, there were heavy freshets, flooding the low bottoms on which the corn had been planted, and destroying most of the crop.

These accumulated disasters wrought the greatest discouragement among the settlers.  Many left the country, and most of the remainder, when midsummer was past, began to urge that they should all go back in a body to the old settlements.  The panic became very great.  One by one the stockades were deserted, until finally all the settlers who remained were gathered in Nashborough and Freelands. The Cumberland country would have been abandoned to the Indians, had Robertson not shown himself to be exactly the man for whom the crisis called.

Robertson was not a dashing, brilliant Indian fighter and popular frontier leader, like Sevier.  He had rather the qualities of Boon, with the difference that he was less a wandering hunter and explorer, and better fitted to be head of a settled community.  He was far-seeing, tranquil, resolute, unshaken by misfortune and disaster; a most trustworthy man, with a certain severe fortitude of temper.  All people naturally turned to him in time of panic, when the ordinarily bold and daring became cowed and confused.  The straits to which the settlers were reduced, and their wild clamor for immediate flight, the danger from the Indians, the death of his own son all combined failed to make him waver one instant in his purpose.  He strongly urged on the settlers the danger of flight through the wilderness.  He did not attempt to make light of the perils that confronted them if they remained, but he asked them to ponder well if the beauty and fertility of the land did not warrant some risk being run to hold it, now that it was won.  They were at last in a fair country fitted for the homes of their children.  Now was the time to keep it.  If they abandoned it, they would lose all the advantages they had gained, and would be forced to suffer the like losses and privations if they ever wished to retake possession of it or of any similar tract of land.  He, at least, would not turn back, but would stay to the bitter end.

His words and his steadfast bearing gave heart to the settlers, and they no longer thought of flight.  As their corn had failed them they got their food from the woods.  Some gathered quantities of walnuts, hickory-nuts, and shelbarks, and the hunters wrought havoc among the vast herds of game.  During the early winter one party of twenty men that went up Caney Fork on a short trip, killed one hundred and five bears, seventy-five buffaloes, and eighty-seven deer, and brought the flesh and hides back to the stockades in canoes; so that through the winter there was no lack of jerked and smoke-dried meat.

The hunters were very accurate marksmen; game was plenty, and not shy, and so they got up close and rarely wasted a shot.  Moreover, their smallbore rifles took very little powder ­in fact the need of excessive economy in the use of ammunition when on their long hunting-trips was one of the chief reasons for the use of small bores.  They therefore used comparatively little ammunition.  Nevertheless, by the beginning of winter both powder and bullets began to fail.  In this emergency Robertson again came to the front to rescue the settlement he had founded and preserved.  He was accustomed to making long, solitary journeys through the forest, unmindful of the Indians; he had been one of the first to come from North Carolina to Watauga; he had repeatedly been on perilous missions to the Cherokees; he had the previous year gone north to the Illinois country to meet Clark.  He now announced that he would himself go to Kentucky and bring back the needed ammunition; and at once set forth on his journey, across the long stretches of snow-powdered barrens, and desolate, Indian-haunted woodland.