University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VIII

THE LONG HUNTERS IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE

BEFORE the coming of Walker and Gist
in 1750 and 1751 respectively, the region
now called Kentucky had, as far as we know,
been twice visited by the French, once in 1729
when Chaussegros de Léry and his party visited
the Big Bone Lick, and again in the summer
of 1749 when the Baron de Longueuil
with four hundred and fifty-two Frenchmen
and Indians, going to join Bienville in an expedition
against "the Cherickees and other Indians
lying at the back of Carolina and
Georgia," doubtless encamped on the Kentucky
shore of the Ohio. Kentucky was also

traversed by John Peter Salling with his three
adventurous companions in their journey
through the Middle West in 1742. But all
these early visits, including the memorable expeditions
of Walker and Gist, were so little
known to the general public that when John
Filson wrote the history of Kentucky in 1784
he attributed its discovery to James McBride
in 1754. More influential upon the course of
westward expansion was an adventure which
occurred in 1752, the very year in which the
Boones settled down in their Yadkin home.

In the autumn of 1752, a Pennsylvania
trader, John Findlay, with three or four companions,
descended the Ohio River in a canoe
as far as the falls at the present Louisville,
Kentucky, and accompanied a party of Shawanoes
to their town of Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki,
eleven miles east of what is now Winchester.
This was the site of the "Indian Old Corn
Field," the Iroquois name for which ("the
place of many fields," or "prairie") was Kenta-ke,
whence came the name of the state.
Five miles east of this spot, where still may

be seen a mound and an ellipse showing the
outline of the stockade, is the famous Pilot
Knob, from the summit of which the fields
surrounding the town lie visible in their smooth
expanse. During Findlay's stay at the Indian
town other traders from Pennsylvania
and Virginia, who reported that they were "on
their return from trading with the Cuttawas
(Catawbas), a nation who live in the Territories
of Carolina," assembled in the vicinity in
January, 1753. Here, as the result of disputes
arising from their barter, they were set
upon and captured by a large party of straggling
Indians (Coghnawagas from Montreal)
on January 26th; but Findlay and another
trader named James Lowry were so fortunate
as to escape and return through the wilderness
to the Pennsylvania settlements.[1] The
incident is of important historic significance;
for it was from these traders, who must have
followed the Great Warriors' Path to the country
of the Catawbas, that Findlay learned of
the Ouasioto (Cumberland) Gap traversed by
the Indian path. His reminiscences—of this
gateway to Kentucky, of the site of the old
Indian town on Lulbegrud Creek, a tributary
of the Red River, and of the Pilot Knob—
were sixteen years later to fire Boone to his
great tour of exploration in behalf of the
Transylvania Company.

During the next two decades, largely because
of the hostility of the savage tribes, only
a few traders and hunters from the east ranged
through the trans-Alleghany. But in 1761, a
party of hunters led by a rough frontiersman,
Elisha Walden, penetrated into Powell's Valley,
followed the Indian trail through Cumberland
Gap, explored the Cumberland River,
and finally reached the Laurel Mountain
where, encountering a party of Indians, they
deemed it expedient to return. With Walden
went Henry Scaggs, afterward explorer for
the Henderson Land Company, William
Blevens and Charles Cox, the famous Virginia
hunters, one Newman, and some fifteen other
stout pioneers. Their itinerary may be traced
from the names given to natural objects in
honor of members of the party—Walden's

Mountain and Walden's Creek, Scaggs' Ridge
and Newman's Ridge. Following the peace
of 1763, which made travel in this region moderately
safe once more, the English proceeded
to occupy the territory which they had won.
In 1765 George Croghan with a small party, on
the way to prepare the inhabitants of the Illinois
country for transfer to English sovereignty,
visited the Great Bone Licks of Kentucky
(May 30th, 31st); and a year later Captain
Harry Gordon, chief engineer in the
Western Department in North America, visited
and minutely described the same licks and
the falls. But these, and numerous other
water-journeys and expeditions of which no
records were kept, though interesting enough
in themselves, had little bearing upon the larger
phases of westward expansion and colonization.

The decade opening with the year 1765 is
the epoch of bold and ever bolder exploration
—the more adventurous frontiersmen of the
border pushing deep into the wilderness in
search of game, lured on by the excitements of

the chase and the profit to be derived from the
sale of peltries. In midsummer, 1766, Captain
James Smith, Joshua Horton, Uriah
Stone, William Baker, and a young mulatto
slave passed through Cumberland Gap,
hunted through the country south of the
Cherokee and along the Cumberland and
Tennessee rivers, and as Smith reports "found
no vestige of any white man." During the
same year a party of five hunters from
South Carolina, led by Isaac Lindsey, penetrated
the Kentucky wilderness to the tributary
of the Cumberland, named Stone's
River by the former party, for one of their
number. Here they encountered two men,
who were among the greatest of the western
pioneers, and were destined to leave their
names in historic association with the early
settlement of Kentucky—James Harrod and
Michael Stoner, a German, both of whom had
descended the Ohio from Fort Pitt. With the
year 1769 began those longer and more extended
excursions into the interior which were
to result in conveying at last to the outside
world graphic and detailed information concerning
"the wonderful new country of Cantucky."
In the late spring of this year Hancock
and Richard Taylor (the latter the father
of President Zachary Taylor), Abraham
Hempinstall, and one Barbour, all true-blue
frontiersmen, left their homes in Orange
County, Virginia, and hunted extensively in
Kentucky and Arkansas. Two of the party
traveled through Georgia and East and West
Florida; while the other two hunted on the
Washita during the winter of 1770-1. Explorations
of this type became increasingly
hazardous as the animosity of the Indians increased;
and from this time onward for a number
of years almost all the parties of roving
hunters suffered capture or attack by the
crafty red men. In this same year Major
John McCulloch, living on the south branch
of the Potomac, set out accompanied by a
white man-servant and a negro, to explore the
western country. While passing down the
Ohio from Pittsburgh McCulloch was captured
by the Indians near the mouth of the
Wabash and carried to the present site of
Terre Haute, Indiana. Set free after four
or five months, he journeyed in company with
some French voyageurs first to Natchez and
then to New Orleans, whence he made the sea
voyage to Philadelphia. Somewhat later,
Benjamin Cleveland (afterward famous in the
Revolution), attended by four companions, set
out from his home on the upper Yadkin to
explore the Kentucky wilderness. After passing
through Cumberland Gap, they encountered
a band of Cherokees who plundered them
of everything they had, even to their hats and
shoes, and ordered them to leave the Indian
hunting-grounds. On their return journey
they almost starved, and Cleveland, who was
reluctantly forced to kill his faithful little
hunting-dog, was wont to declare in after years
that it was the sweetest meat he ever ate.

Fired to adventure by the glowing accounts
brought back by Uriah Stone, a much more
formidable band than any that had hitherto
ventured westward—including Uriah Stone as
pilot, Gasper Mansker, John Rains, the Bledsoes,

and a dozen others—assembled in June,
1769, in the New River region. "Each Man
carried two horses," says an early pioneer in
describing one of these parties, "traps, a large
supply of powder and led, and a small hand
vise and bellows, files and screw plate for the
purpose of fixing the guns if any of them
should get out of fix." Passing through Cumberland
Gap, they continued their long journey
until they reached Price's Meadow, in the
present Wayne County, Kentucky, where they
established their encampment. In the course
of their explorations, during which they gave
various names to prominent natural features,
they established their "station camp" on a creek
in Sumner County, Tennessee, whence originated
the name of Station Camp Creek.
Isaac Bledsoe and Gasper Mansker, agreeing
to travel from here in opposite directions along
a buffalo trace passing near the camp, each
succeeded in discovering the famous salt-lick
which bears his name—namely Bledsoe's Lick
and Mansker's Lick. The flat surrounding
the lick, about one hundred acres in extent,
discovered by Bledsoe, according to his own
statement "was principally Covered with buffelows
in every direction—not hundreds but
thousands." As he sat on his horse, he shot
down two deer in the lick; but the buffaloes
blindly trod them in the mud. They did not
mind him and his horse except when the wind
blew the scent in their nostrils, when they
would break and run in droves. Indians often
lurked in the neighbourhood of these hunters
—plundering their camp, robbing them, and
even shooting down one of their number, Robert
Crockett, from ambush. After many
trials and vicissitudes, which included a journey
to the Spanish Natchez and the loss of a
great mass of peltries when they were plundered
by Piomingo and a war party of Chickasaws,
they finally reached home in the late
spring of 1770.[2]

The most notable expedition of this period,
projected under the auspices of two bold leaders
extraordinarily skilled in woodcraft, Joseph
Drake and Henry Scaggs, was organized in
the early autumn of 1770. This imposing

band of stalwart hunters from the New River
and Holston country, some forty in number,
garbed in hunting shirts, leggings, and moccasins,
with three pack-horses to each man, rifles,
ammunition, traps, dogs, blankets, and salt,
pushed boldly through Cumberland Gap into
the heart of what was later justly named the
"Dark and Bloody Ground" (see Chapter
XIV)—"not doubting," says an old border
chronicler, "that they were to be encountered
by Indians, and to subsist on game." From
the duration of their absence from home, they
received the name of the Long Hunters—the
romantic appellation by which they are known
in the pioneer history of the Old Southwest.
Many natural objects were named by this
party—in particular Dick's River, after the
noted Cherokee hunter, Captain Dick, who,
pleased to be recognized by Charles Scaggs,
told the Long Hunters that on his river, pointing
it out, they would find meat plenty—adding
with laconic significance: "Kill it and go
home." From the Knob Lick, in Lincoln
County, as reported by a member of the party,
"they beheld largely over a thousand animals,
including buffaloe, elk, bear, and deer, with
many wild turkies scattered among them; all
quite restless, some playing, and others busily
employed in licking the earth. . . . The buffaloe
and other animals had so eaten away the
soil, that they could, in places, go entirely underground."
Upon the return of a detachment
to Virginia, fourteen fearless hunters
chose to remain; and one day, during the absence
of some of the band upon a long exploring
trip, the camp was attacked by a straggling
party of Indians under Will Emery, a halfbreed
Cherokee. Two of the hunters were carried
into captivity and never heard of again;
a third managed to escape. In embittered
commemoration of the plunder of the camp and
the destruction of the peltries, they inscribed
upon a poplar, which had lost its bark, this
emphatic record, followed by their names:

Undismayed by this depressing stroke of
fortune, they continued their hunt in the direction

of the lick which Bledsoe had discovered
the preceding year. Shortly after this
discovery, a French voyageur from the Illinois
who had hunted and traded in this region for
a decade, Timothé de Monbreun, subsequently
famous in the history of Tennessee, had visited
the lick and killed an enormous number of
buffaloes for their tallow and tongues with
which he and his companion loaded a keel boat
and descended the Cumberland. An early
pioneer, William Hall, learned from Isaac
Bledsoe that when "the long hunters Crossed
the ridge and came down on Bledsoe's Creek
in four or five miles of the Lick the Cane had
grown up so thick in the woods that they
thought they had mistaken the place until they
Came to the Lick and saw what had been done.
. . . One could walk for several hundred yards
a round the Lick and in the lick on buffellows
Skuls, & bones and the whole flat round the
Lick was bleached with buffellows bones, and
they found out the Cause of the Canes growing
up so suddenly a few miles around the
Lick which was in Consequence of so many
buffellows being killed."

This expedition was of genuine importance,
opening the eyes of the frontiersmen to the
charms of the country and influencing many
to settle subsequently in the West—some in
Tennessee, some in Kentucky. The elaborate
and detailed information brought back by
Henry Scaggs exerted an appreciable influence,
no doubt, in accelerating the plans of
Richard Henderson and Company for the
acquisition and colonization of the trans-Alleghany.
But while the "Long Hunters" were
in Tennessee and Kentucky the same region
was being more extensively and systematically
explored by Daniel Boone. To his life, character,
and attainments, as the typical "long
hunter" and the most influential pioneer we
may now turn our particular attention.