University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER III

THE BACK COUNTRY AND THE BORDER

THE two streams of Ulstermen, the
greater through Philadelphia, the lesser
through Charleston, which poured into the
Carolinas toward the middle of the century,
quickly flooded the back country. The former
occupied the Yadkin Valley and the region to
the westward, the latter the Waxhaws and the
Anson County region to the northwest. The

first settlers were known as the "Pennsylvania
Irish," because they had first settled in Pennsylvania
after migrating from the north of Ireland;
while those who came by way of Charleston
were known as the "Scotch-Irish." The
former, who had resided in Pennsylvania long
enough to be good judges of land, shrewdly
made their settlements along the rivers and
creeks. The latter, new arrivals and less experienced,
settled on thinner land toward the
heads of creeks and water courses.[1]

Shortly prior to 1735, Morgan Bryan, his
wife Martha, and eight children, together with
other families of Quakers from Pennsylvania,
settled upon a large tract of land on the northwest
side of the Opeckon River near Winchester.[2]
A few years later they removed up
the Virginia Valley to the Big Lick in the
present Roanoke County, intent upon pushing
westward to the very outskirts of civilization.
In the autumn of 1748, leaving behind his
brother William, who had followed him to
Roanoke County, Morgan Bryan removed
with his family to the Forks of the Yadkin

River.[3] The Morgans, with the exception of
Richard, who emigrated to Virginia, remained
in Pennsylvania, spreading over Philadelphia
and Bucks counties; while the Hanks and Lincoln
families found homes in Virginia—Mordecai
Lincoln's son, John, the great-grandfather
of President Lincoln, removing from
Berks to the Shenandoah Valley in 1765. On
May 1, 1750, Squire Boone, his wife Sarah
(Morgan), and their eleven children—a veritable
caravan, traveling like the patriarchs of
old—started south; and tarried for a space,
according to reliable tradition, on Linville
Creek in the Virginia Valley. In 1752 they
removed to the Forks of the Yadkin, and the
following year received from Lord Granville
three tracts of land, all situated in Rowan
County.[4] About the hamlet of Salisbury,
which in 1755 consisted of seven or eight log
houses and the court house, there now rapidly
gathered a settlement of people marked by
strong individuality, sturdy independence, and
virile self-reliance. The Boones and the Bryans
quickly accommodated themselves to frontier
conditions and immediately began to
take an active part in the local affairs of the
county. Upon the organization of the county
court Squire Boone was chosen justice of the
peace; and Morgan Bryan was soon appearing
as foreman of juries and director in road
improvements.

The Great Trading Path, leading from Virginia
to the towns of the Catawbas and other
Southern Indians, crossed the Yadkin at the
Trading Ford and passed a mile southeast of
Salisbury. Above Sapona Town near the
Trading Ford was Swearing Creek, which, according
to constant and picturesque tradition,
was the spot where the traders stopped to take
a solemn oath never to reveal any unlawful
proceedings that might occur during their sojourn
among the Indians.[5] In his divertingly
satirical "History of the Dividing Line" William
Byrd in 1728 thus speaks of this locality:
"The Soil is exceedingly rich on both sides
the Yadkin, abounding in rank Grass and
prodigiously large Trees; and for plenty of
Fish, Fowl and Venison, is inferior to No Part

of the Northern Continent. There the
Traders commonly lie Still for some days, to
recruit their Horses' Flesh as well as to recover
their own spirits." In this beautiful country
happily chosen for settlement by Squire Boone
—who erected his cabin on the east side of the
Yadkin about a mile and a quarter from
Alleman's, now Boone's, Ford—wild game
abounded. Buffaloes were encountered in
eastern North Carolina by Byrd while running
the dividing line; and in the upper country of
South Carolina three or four men with their
dogs could kill fourteen to twenty buffaloes in
a single day.[6] Deer and bears fell an easy
prey to the hunter; wild turkeys filled every
thicket; the watercourses teemed with beaver,
otter, and muskrat, as well as with shad and
other delicious fish. Panthers, wildcats, and
wolves overran the country; and the veracious
Brother Joseph, while near the present
Wilkesboro, amusingly records: "The wolves
wh. are not like those in Germany, Poland,
and Lifland (because they fear men and don't
easily come near) give us such music of six

COLONEL DANIEL BOONE

From lithograph after Chester Harding in Jefferson Memorial
Courtesy Missouri Historical Society

different cornets the like of wh. I have never
heard in my life."[7] So plentiful was the
game that the wild deer mingled with the cattle
grazing over the wide stretches of luxuriant
grass.

In the midst of this sylvan paradise grew
up Squire Boone's son, Daniel Boone, a Pennsylvania
youth of English stock, Quaker
persuasion, and Baptist proclivities.[8] Seen
through a glorifying halo after the lapse of
a century and three quarters, he rises before
us a romantic figure, poised and resolute, simple,
benign—as naïve and shy as some wild
thing of the primeval forest—five feet eight
inches in height, with broad chest and shoulders,
dark locks, genial blue eyes arched with
fair eyebrows, thin lips and wide mouth, nose
of slightly Roman cast, and fair, ruddy countenance.
Farming was irksome to this restless,
nomadic spirit, who on the slightest excuse
would exchange the plow and the grubbing-hoe
for the long rifle and keen-edged hunting-knife.
In a single day during the autumn
season he would kill four or five deer; or as

many bears as would make from two to three
thousand pounds weight of bear-bacon. Fascinated
with the forest, he soon found profit
as well as pleasure in the pursuit of game;
and at excellent fixed prices he sold his peltries,
most often at Salisbury, some thirteen miles
away, sometimes at the store of the old "Dutchman,"
George Hartman, on the Yadkin, and
occasionally at Bethabara, the Moravian town
sixty-odd miles distant. Skins were in such
demand that they soon came to replace hard
money, which was incredibly scarce in the back
country, as a medium of exchange. Upon
one occasion a caravan from Bethabara hauled
three thousand pounds, upon another four
thousand pounds, of dressed deerskins to
Charleston.[9] So immense was this trade that
the year after Boone's arrival at the Forks of
Yadkin thirty thousand deerskins were exported
from the province of North Carolina.
We like to think that the young Daniel Boone
was one of that band of whom Brother Joseph,
while in camp on the Catawba River (November
12, 1752) wrote: "There are many
hunters about here, who live like Indians, they
kill many deer selling their hides, and thus live
without much work."[10]

In this very class of professional hunters,
living like Indians, was thus bred the spirit
of individual initiative and strenuous leadership
in the great westward expansionist movement
of the coming decade. An English
traveler gives the following minute picture of
the dress and accoutrement of the Carolina
backwoodsman:

No less unique and bizarre, though less picturesque,
was the dress of the women of the
region—in particular of Surry County, North
Carolina, as described by General William
Lenoir:

While Daniel Boone was quietly engaged
in the pleasant pursuits of the chase, a vast
world-struggle of which he little dreamed was
rapidly approaching a crisis. For three quarters
of a century this titanic contest between
France and England for the interior of the
continent had been waged with slowly accumulating
force. The irrepressible conflict had
been formally inaugurated at Sault Ste. Marie
in 1671, when Daumont de Saint Lusson,
swinging aloft his sword, proclaimed the sovereighty
of France over "all countries, rivers,
lakes, and streams . . . both those which have

been discovered and those which may be discovered
hereafter, in all their length and
breadth, bounded on the one side by the seas
of the North and of the West, and on the other
by the South Sea." Just three months later,
three hardy pioneers of Virginia, despatched
upon their arduous mission by Colonel Abraham
Wood in behalf of the English crown,
had crossed the Appalachian divide; and upon
the banks of a stream whose waters slipped
into the Ohio to join the Mississippi and the
Gulf of Mexico, had carved the royal insignia
upon the blazed trunk of a giant of the forest,
the while crying: "Long live Charles the
Second, by the grace of God, King of England,
Scotland, France, Ireland and Virginia
and of the territories thereunto belonging."

La Salle's dream of a New France in the
heart of America was blotted out in his tragic
death upon the banks of the River Trinity
(1687). Yet his mantle was to fall in turn
upon the square shoulders of Le Moyne d'Iberville
and of his brother—the good, the constant
Bienville, who after countless and arduous

struggles laid firm the foundations of New
Orleans. In the precious treasury of Margry
we learn that on reaching Rochelle after his
first voyage in 1699 Iberville in these prophetic
words voices his faith: "If France does not
immediately seize this part of America which
is the most beautiful, and establish a colony
which is strong enough to resist any which
England may have, the English colonies (already
considerable in Carolina) will so thrive
that in less than a hundred years they will be
strong enough to seize all America."[13] But
the world-weary Louis Quatorze, nearing his
end, quickly tired of that remote and unproductive
colony upon the shores of the gulf, so
industriously described in Paris as a "terrestrial
paradise"; and the "paternal providence
of Versailles" willingly yielded place to the
monumental speculation of the great financier
Antoine Crozat. In this Paris of prolific promotion
and amazed credulity, ripe for the
colossal scheme of Law, soon to blow to bursting-point
the bubble of the Mississippi, the
very songs in the street echoed flamboyant,
half-satiric panegyrics upon the new Utopia,
this Mississippi Land of Cockayne:

Interest in the new colony led to a great
development of southwesterly trade from New
France. Already the French coureurs de bois
were following the water route from the Illinois
to South Carolina. Jean Couture, a deserter
from the service in New France, journeyed
over the Ohio and Tennessee rivers to
that colony, and was known as "the greatest
Trader and Traveller amongst the Indians for
more than Twenty years." In 1714 young
Charles Charleville accompanied an old trader
from Crozat's colony on the gulf to the great
salt-springs on the Cumberland, where a post
for trading with the Shawanoes had already
been established by the French.[15] But the
British were preparing to capture this trade

as early as 1694, when Tonti warned Villermont
that Carolinians were already established
on a branch of the Ohio. Four years later,
Nicholson, Governor of Maryland, was urging
trade with the Indians of the interior in the
effort to displace the French. At an early
date the coast colonies began to trade with the
Indian tribes of the back country: the Catawbas
of the Yadkin Valley; the Cherokees,
whose towns were scattered through Tennessee;
the Chickasaws, to the westward in northern
Mississippi; and the Choctaws farther to
the southward. Even before the beginning of
the eighteenth century, when the South Carolina
settlements extended scarcely twenty miles
from the coast, English traders had established
posts among the Indian tribes four hundred
miles to the west of Charleston. Following
the sporadic trading of individuals from Virginia
with the inland Indians, the heavily laden
caravans of William Byrd were soon regularly
passing along the Great Trading Path from
Virginia to the towns of the Catawbas and
other interior tribes of the Carolinas, delighting
the easily captivated fancy and provoking
the cupidity of the red men with "Guns,
Powder, Shot, Hatchets (which the Indians
call Tomahawks), Kettles, red and blue
Planes, Duffields, Stroudwater blankets, and
some Cutlary Wares, Brass Rings and other
Trinkets."[16] In Pennsylvania, George Croghan,
the guileful diplomat, who was emissary
from the Council to the Ohio Indians (1748),
had induced "all-most all the Ingans in the
Woods" to declare against the French; and
was described by Christopher Gist as a "meer
idol among his countrymen, the Irish traders."

Against these advances of British trade and
civilization, the French for four decades had
artfully struggled, projecting tours of exploration
into the vast medial valley of the continent
and constructing a chain of forts and
trading-posts designed to establish their claims
to the country and to hold in check the threatened
English thrust from the east. Soon the
wilderness ambassador of empire, Céloron de
Bienville, was despatched by the far-visioned

Galissonière at Quebec to sow broadcast with
ceremonial pomp in the heart of America the
seeds of empire, grandiosely graven plates of
lasting lead, in defiant yet futile symbol of
the asserted sovereignty of France. Thus
threatened in the vindication of the rights of
their colonial sea-to-sea charters, the English
threw off the lethargy with which they had
failed to protect their traders, and in grants
to the Ohio and Loyal land companies began
resolutely to form plans looking to the occupation
of the interior. But the French seized
the English trading-house at Venango which
they converted into a fort; and Virginia's protest,
conveyed by a calm and judicious young
man, a surveyor, George Washington, availed
not to prevent the French from seizing Captain
Trent's hastily erected military post at
the forks of the Ohio and constructing there
a formidable work, named Fort Duquesne.
Washington, with his expeditionary force sent
to garrison Captain Trent's fort, defeated
Jumonville and his small force near Great
Meadows (May, 1754); but soon after he was
forced to surrender Fort Necessity to Coulon
de Villiers.

The titanic struggle, fittingly precipitated
in the backwoods of the Old Southwest, was
now on—a struggle in which the resolute pioneers
of these backwoods first seriously measured
their strength with the French and their
copper-hued allies, and learned to surpass the
latter in their own mode of warfare. The portentous
conflict, destined to assure the eastern
half of the continent to Great Britain, is a
grim, prophetic harbinger of the mighty movement
of the next quarter of a century into the
twilight zone of the trans-Alleghany territory.