and their live stock were of course huddled together so as to take up as
little room as possible. Sometimes the immigrants built or bought their
own boat, navigated it themselves, and sold it or broke it up on
reaching their destination. At other times they merely hired a passage.
A few of the more enterprising boat owners speedily introduced a regular
emigrant service, making trips at stated times from Pittsburg or perhaps
Limestone, and advertising the carriage capacity of their boats and the
times of starting. The trip from Pittsburg to Louisville took a week or
ten days; but in low water it might last a month.
Numbers of the Immigrants.
The number of boats passing down the Ohio, laden with would-be settlers
and their belongings, speedily became very great. An eye-witness stated
that between November 13th and December 22d, of 1785, thirty-nine boats,
with an average of ten souls in each, went down the Ohio to the Falls;
and there were others which stopped at some of the settlements farther
up the river. [Footnote: Draper MSS., _Massachusetts Gazette_, March 13,
1786; letter from Kentucky, December 22, 1785.] As time went on the
number of immigrants who adopted this method of travel increased; larger
boats were used, and the immigrants took more property with them. In the
last half of the year 1787 there passed by Fort Harmar 146 boats, with
3196 souls, 1371 horses, 165 wagons, 191 cattle, 245 sheep, and 24 hogs.
[Footnote: Harmar Papers, December 9, 1787.] In the year ending in
November, 1788, 967 boats, carrying 18,370 souls, with 7986 horses, 2372
cows, 1110 sheep, and 646 wagons, [Footnote: _Columbian Magazine_,
January, 1789. Letter from Fort Harmar, November 26, 1788. By what is
evidently a clerical error the time is put down as one month instead of
one year.] went down the Ohio. For many years this great river was the
main artery through which the fresh blood of the pioneers was pumped
into the west.
There are no means of procuring similar figures for the number of
immigrants who went over the Wilderness Road; but probably there were
not half as many as went down the Ohio. Perhaps from ten to twenty
thousand people a year came into Kentucky during the period immediately
succeeding the close of the Revolution; but the net gain to the
population was much less, because there was always a smaller, but almost
equally steady, counter-flow of men who, having failed as pioneers, were
struggling wearily back toward their deserted eastern homes.
Kentucky's Growth.
The inrush being so great Kentucky grew apace. In 1785 the population
was estimated at from twenty [Footnote: "Journey in the West in 1785,"
by Lewis Brantz.] to thirty thousand; and the leading towns, Louisville,
Lexington, Harrodsburg, Booneboro, St. Asaph's, were thriving little
hamlets, with stores and horse grist-mills, and no longer mere clusters
of stockaded cabins. At Louisville, for instance, there were already a
number of two-story frame houses, neatly painted, with verandahs running
the full length of each house, and fenced vegetable gardens alongside
[Footnote: "Lettres d'un cultivateur américan," St. John de Crêve Coeur.
Summer of 1784.]; while at the same time Nashville was a town of logs,
with but two houses that deserved the name, the others being mere huts.
[Footnote: Brantz.] The population of Louisville amounted to about 300
souls, of whom 116 were fighting men [Footnote: State Department MSS.
Papers Continental Congress, No. 150, vol. ii., p. 21. Letter from Major
W. North, August 23, 1786.]; between it and Lexington the whole country
was well settled; but fear of the Indians kept settlers back from the
Ohio.
The new-comers were mainly Americans from all the States of the Union;
but there were also a few people from nearly every country in Europe,
and even from Asia. [Footnote: Letter in _Massachusetts Gazette_, above
quoted.] The industrious and the adventurous, the homestead winners and
the land speculators, the criminal fleeing from justice, and the honest
man seeking a livelihood or a fortune, all alike prized the wild freedom
and absence of restraint so essentially characteristic of their new
life; a life in many ways very pleasant, but one which on the border of
the Indian country sank into mere savagery.
Kentucky was "a good poor man's country" [Footnote: State Department
MSS. Madison Papers. Caleb Wallace to Madison, July 12, 1785.] provided
the poor man was hardy and vigorous. The settlers were no longer in
danger of starvation, for they already raised more flour than they could
consume. Neither was there as yet anything approaching to luxury. But
between these two extremes there was almost every grade of misery and
well-being, according to the varying capacity shown by the different
settlers in grappling with the conditions of their new life. Among the
foreign-born immigrants success depended in part upon race; a
contemporary Kentucky observer estimated that, of twelve families of
each nationality, nine German, seven Scotch, and four Irish prospered,
while the others failed. [Footnote: "Description of Kentucky," 1792, by
Harry Toulmin, Secretary of State.] The German women worked just as hard
as the men, even in the fields, and both sexes were equally saving.
Naturally such thrifty immigrants did well materially; but they never
took any position of leadership or influence in the community until they
had assimilated themselves in speech and customs to their American
neighbors. The Scotch were frugal and industrious; for good or for bad
they speedily became indistinguishable from the native-born. The greater
proportion of failures among the Irish, brave and vigorous though they
were, was due to their quarrelsomeness, and their fondness for drink and
litigation; besides, remarks this Kentucky critic, "they soon take to
the gun, which is the ruin of everything." None of these foreign-born
elements were of any very great importance in the development of
Kentucky; its destiny was shaped and controlled by its men of native
stock.
Character of the Frontier Population.
In such a population there was of course much loosening of the bands,
social, political, moral, and religious, which knit a society together.
A great many of the restraints of their old life were thrown off, and
there was much social adjustment and readjustment before their relations
to one another under the new conditions became definitely settled. But
there came early into the land many men of high purpose and pure life
whose influence upon their fellows, though quiet, was very great.
Moreover, the clergyman and the school-teacher, the two beings who had
done so much for colonial civilization on the seaboard, were already
becoming important factors in the life of the frontier communities.
Austere Presbyterian ministers were people of mark in many of the towns.
The Baptist preachers lived and worked exactly as did their flocks;
their dwellings were little cabins with dirt floors and, instead of
bedsteads, skin-covered pole-bunks; they cleared the ground, split
rails, planted corn, and raised hogs on equal terms with their
parishioners. [Footnote: "History of Kentucky Baptists," by J. H.
Spencer.] After Methodism cut loose from its British connections in
1785, the time of its great advance began, and the circuit-riders were
speedily eating bear meat and buffalo tongues on the frontier.
[Footnote: "History of Methodism in Kentucky," by John B. McFerrier.]
Rough log schools were springing up everywhere, beside the rough log
meeting-houses, the same building often serving for both purposes. The
school-teacher might be a young surveyor out of work for the moment, a
New Englander fresh from some academy in the northeast, an Irishman with
a smattering of learning, or perhaps an English immigrant of the upper
class, unfit for and broken down by the work of a new country.
[Footnote: Durrett MSS. "Autobiography of Robert McAfee."] The boys and
girls were taught together, and at recess played together - tag, pawns,
and various kissing games. The rod was used unsparingly, for the elder
boys proved boisterous pupils. A favorite mutinous frolic was to "bar
out" the teacher, taking possession of the school-house and holding it
against the master with sticks and stones until he had either forced an
entrance or agreed to the terms of the defenders. Sometimes this barring
out represented a revolt against tyranny; often it was a conventional,
and half-acquiesced-in, method of showing exuberance of spirit, just
before the Christmas holidays. In most of the schools the teaching was
necessarily of the simplest, for the only books might be a Testament, a
primer, a spelling book, and a small arithmetic.
Frontier Society.
In such a society, simple, strong, and rude, both the good features and
the bad were nakedly prominent; and the views of observers in reference
thereto varied accordingly as they were struck by one set of
characteristics or another. One traveller would paint the frontiersmen
as little better than the Indians against whom they warred, and their
life as wild, squalid, and lawless; while the next would lay especial
and admiring stress on their enterprise, audacity, and hospitable
openhandedness. Though much alike, different portions of the frontier
stock were beginning to develop along different lines. The Holston
people, both in Virginia and North Carolina, were by this time
comparatively little affected by immigration from without those States,
and were on the whole homogeneous; but the Virginians and Carolinians of
the seaboard considered them rough, unlettered, and not of very good
character. One travelling clergyman spoke of them with particular
disfavor; he was probably prejudiced by their indifference to his
preaching, for he mentions with much dissatisfaction that the
congregations he addressed "though small, behaved extremely bad."
[Footnote: Durrett MSS. Rev. James Smith, "Tour in Western Country,"
1785.] The Kentuckians showed a mental breadth that was due largely to
the many different sources from which even the predominating American
elements in the population sprang. The Cumberland people seemed to
travellers the wildest and rudest of all, as was but natural, for these
fierce and stalwart settlers were still in the midst of a warfare as
savage as any ever waged among the cave-dwellers of the Stone Age.
The opinion of any mere passer-through a country is always less valuable
than that of an intelligent man who dwells and works among the people,
and who possesses both insight and sympathy. At this time one of the
recently created Kentucky judges, an educated Virginian, in writing to
his friend Madison, said: "We are as harmonious amongst ourselves as can
be expected of a mixture of people from various States and of various
Sentiments and Manners not yet assimilated. In point of Morals the bulk
of the inhabitants are far superior to what I expected to find in any
new settled country. We have not had a single instance of Murder, and
but one Criminal for Felony of any kind has yet been before the Supreme
Court. I wish I could say as much to vindicate the character of our
Land-jobbers. This Business has been attended with much villainy in
other parts. Here it is reduced to a system, and to take the advantage
of the ignorance or of the poverty of a neighbor is almost grown into
reputation." [Footnote: Wallace's letter, above quoted.]
The Gentry.
Of course, when the fever for land speculation raged so violently, many
who had embarked too eagerly in the purchase of large tracts became land
poor; Clark being among those who found that though they owned great
reaches of fertile wild land they had no means whatever of getting
money. [Footnote: Draper MSS. G. R. Clark to Jonathan Clark, April
20,178.] In Kentucky, while much land was taken up under Treasury
warrants, much was also allotted to the officers of the Continental
army; and the retired officers of the Continental line were the best of
all possible immigrants. A class of gentlefolks soon sprang up in the
land, whose members were not so separated from other citizens as to be
in any way alien to them, and who yet stood sufficiently above the mass
to be recognized as the natural leaders, social and political, of their
sturdy fellow-freemen. These men by degrees built themselves
comfortable, roomy houses, and their lives were very pleasant; at a
little later period Clark, having abandoned war and politics, describes
himself as living a retired life with, as his chief amusements, reading,
hunting, fishing, fowling, and corresponding with a few chosen friends.
[Footnote: _Do._, letter of Sept. 2, 1791.] Game was still very
plentiful: buffalo and elk abounded north of the Ohio, while bear and
deer, turkey, swans, and geese, [Footnote: _Magazine of American
History_, I., Letters of Laurence Butler from Kentucky, Nov. 20, 1786,
etc.] not to speak of ducks and prairie fowl swarmed in the immediate
neighborhood of the settlements.
The Army Officers.
The gentry offered to strangers the usual open-handed hospitality
characteristic of the frontier, with much more than the average frontier
refinement; a hospitality, moreover, which was never marred or
interfered with by the frontier suspiciousness of strangers which
sometimes made the humbler people of the border seem churlish to
travellers. When Federal garrisons were established along the Ohio the
officers were largely dependent for their social pleasures on the
gentle-folks of the several rather curious glimpses of the life of the
time. [Footnote: Major Erkuries Beattie. In the _Magazine of Am.
Hist._, I., p. 175.] He mentions being entertained by Clark at "a very
elegant dinner," [Footnote: 2 Aug. 25, 1786.] a number of gentlemen
being present. After dinner the guests adjourned to the dancing school,
"where there were twelve or fifteen young misses, some of whom had made
considerable improvement in that polite accomplishment, and indeed were
middling neatly dressed considering the distance from where luxuries are
to be bought and the expense attending the purchase of them here" - for
though beef and flour were cheap, all imported goods sold for at least
five times as much as they cost in Philadelphia or New York. The
officers sometimes gave dances in the forts, the ladies and their
escorts coming in to spend the night; and they attended the great
barbecues to which the people rode from far and near, many of the men
carrying their wives or sweethearts behind them on the saddle. At such a
barbecue an ox or a sheep, a bear, an elk, or a deer, was split in two
and roasted over the coals; dinner was eaten under the trees; and there
was every kind of amusement from horse-racing to dancing.
Friction with the Backwoodsmen.
Though the relations of the officers of the regular troops with the
gentry were so pleasant there was always much friction between them and
the ordinary frontiersmen; a friction which continued to exist as long
as the frontier itself, and which survives to this day in the wilder
parts of the country. The regular army officer and the frontiersman are
trained in fashions so diametrically opposite that, though the two men
be brothers, they must yet necessarily in all their thoughts and
instincts and ways of looking at life, be as alien as if they belonged
to two different races of mankind. The borderer, rude, suspicious, and
impatient of discipline, looks with distrust and with a mixture of
sneering envy and of hostility upon the officer; while the latter, with
his rigid training and his fixed ideals, feels little sympathy for the
other's good points, and is contemptuously aware of his numerous
failings. The only link between the two is the scout, the man who,
though one of the frontiersmen, is accustomed to act and fight in
company with the soldiers. In Kentucky, at the close of the Revolution,
this link was generally lacking; and there was no tie of habitual, even
though half-hostile, intercourse to unite the two parties. In
consequence the ill-will often showed itself by acts of violence. The
backwoods bullies were prone to browbeat and insult the officers if they
found them alone, trying to provoke them to rough-and-tumble fighting;
and in such a combat, carried on with the revolting brutality
necessarily attendant upon a contest where gouging and biting were
considered legitimate, the officers, who were accustomed only to use
their fists, generally had the worst of it; so that at last they made a
practice of carrying their side-arms - which secured them from
molestation.
Pursuits of the Settlers.
Besides raising more than enough flour and beef to keep themselves in
plenty, the settlers turned their attention to many other forms of
produce. Indian corn was still the leading crop; but melons, pumpkins,
and the like were grown, and there were many thriving orchards; while
tobacco cultivation was becoming of much importance. Great droves of
hogs and flocks of sheep flourished in every locality whence the bears
and wolves had been driven; the hogs running free in the woods with the
branded cattle and horses. Except in the most densely settled parts
much of the beef was still obtained from buffaloes, and much of the
bacon from bears. Venison was a staple commodity. The fur trade, largely
carried on by French trappers, was still of great importance in Kentucky
and Tennessee. North of the Ohio it was the attraction which tempted
white men into the wilderness. Its profitable nature was the chief
reason why the British persistently clung to the posts on the Lakes, and
stirred up the Indians to keep the American settlers out of all lands
that were tributary to the British fur merchants. From Kentucky and the
Cumberland country the peltries were sometimes sent east by packtrain,
and sometimes up the Ohio in bateaus or canoes.
Boone's Trading Ventures.
In addition to furs, quantities of ginseng were often carried to the
eastern settlements at this period when the commerce of the west was in
its first infancy, and was as yet only struggling for an outlet down the
Mississippi. One of those who went into this trade was Boone. Although
no longer a real leader in Kentucky life he still occupied quite a
prominent position, and served as a Representative in the Virginia
Legislature, [Footnote: Draper's MSS., Boone MSS., from Bourbon Co. The
papers cover the years from 1784 on to '95.] while his fame as a hunter
and explorer was now spread abroad in the United States, and even
Europe. To travellers and new-comers generally, he was always pointed out
as the first discoverer of Kentucky; and being modest, self-contained
and self-reliant he always impressed them favorably. He spent most of
his time in hunting, trapping, and surveying land warrants for men of
means, being paid, for instance, two shillings current money per acre
for all the good laud he could enter on a ten-thousand acre Treasury
warrant. [Footnote: _Do_., certificate of G. Imlay, 1784.] He also
traded up and down the Ohio River, at various places, such as Point
Pleasant and Limestone; and at times combined keeping a tavern with
keeping a store. His accounts contain much quaint information. Evidently
his guests drank as generously as they ate; he charges one four pounds
sixteen shillings for two months' board and two pounds four shillings
for liquor. He takes the note of another for ninety-three gallons of
cheap corn whiskey. Whiskey cost sixpence a pint, and rum one shilling;
while corn was three shillings a bushel, and salt twenty-four shillings,
flour, thirty-six shillings a barrel, bacon sixpence and fresh pork and
buffalo beef threepence a pound. Boone procured for his customers or for
himself such articles as linen, cloth, flannel, corduroy, chintz,
calico, broadcloth, and velvet at prices varying according to the
quality, from three to thirty shillings a yard; and there was also
evidently a ready market for "tea ware," knives and forks, scissors,
buttons, nails, and all kinds of hardware. Furs and skins usually appear
on the debit sides of the various accounts, ranging in value from the
skin of a beaver, worth eighteen shillings, or that of a bear worth ten,
to those of deer, wolves, coons, wildcats, and foxes, costing two to
four shillings apiece. Boone procured his goods from merchants in
Hagerstown and Williamsport, in Maryland, whither he and his sons guided
their own packtrains, laden with peltries and with kegs of ginseng, and
accompanied by droves of loose horses. He either followed some
well-beaten mountain trail or opened a new road through the wilderness
as seemed to him best at the moment. [Footnote: _Do., passim._]
Boone's creed in matters of morality and religion was as simple and
straightforward as his own character. Late in life he wrote to one of
his kinsfolk: "All the religion I have is to love and fear God, believe
in Jesus Christ, do all the good to my neighbors and myself that I can,
and do as little harm as I can help, and trust on God's mercy for the
rest." The old pioneer always kept the respect of red man and white, of
friend and foe, for he acted according to his belief. Yet there was one
evil to which he was no more sensitive than the other men of his time.
Among his accounts there is an entry recording his purchase, for another
man, of a negro woman for the sum of ninety pounds. [Footnote: _3 Do_.,
March 7, 1786.] There was already a strong feeling in the western
settlements against negro slavery, [Footnote: See Journals of Rev. James
Smith.] because of its moral evil, and of its inconsistency with all
true standards of humanity and Christianity, a feeling which continued
to exist and which later led to resolute efforts to forbid or abolish
slave-holding. But the consciences of the majority were too dull, and,
from the standpoint of the white race, they were too shortsighted to
take action in the right direction. The selfishness and mental obliquity
which imperil the future of a race for the sake of the lazy pleasure of
two or three generations prevailed; and in consequence the white people
of the middle west, and therefore eventually of the southwest, clutched
the one burden under which they ever staggered, the one evil which has
ever warped their development, the one danger which has ever seriously
threatened their very existence. Slavery must of necessity exercise the
most baleful influence upon any slave-holding people, and especially
upon those members of the dominant caste who do not themselves own
slaves. Moreover, the negro, unlike so many of the inferior races, does
not dwindle away in the presence of the white man. He holds his own;
indeed, under the conditions of American slavery he increased faster
than the white, threatening to supplant him. He actually has supplanted
him in certain of the West Indian islands, where the sin of the white in
enslaving the black has been visited upon the head of the wrongdoer by
his victim with a dramatically terrible completeness of revenge. What
has occurred in Hayti is what would eventually have occurred in our own
semi-tropical States if the slave-trade and slavery had continued to
flourish as their shortsighted advocates wished. Slavery is ethically
abhorrent to all right-minded men; and it is to be condemned without
stint on this ground alone. From the standpoint of the master caste it
is to condemned even more strongly because it invariably in the end
threatens the very existence of that master caste. From this point of
view the presence of the negro is the real problem; slavery is merely
the worst possible method of solving the problem. In their earlier
stages the problem and its solution, in America, were one. There may be
differences of opinion as to how to solve the problem; but there can be
none whatever as to the evil wrought by those who brought about that
problem; and it was only the slave-holders and the slave-traders who
were guilty on this last count. The worst foes, not only of humanity and
civilization, but especially of the white race in America, were those
white men who brought slaves from Africa, and who fostered the spread of
slavery in the States and territories of the American Republic.
CHAPTER II.
THE INDIAN WARS, 1784-1787.
Lull in the Border War.
After the close of the Revolution there was a short, uneasy lull in the
eternal border warfare between the white men and the red. The Indians
were for the moment daunted by a peace which left them without allies;
and the feeble Federal Government attempted for the first time to aid
and control the West by making treaties with the most powerful frontier