Part 3

The massacres of 1641 sent them across the uncharted seas in great numbers. And to stimulate and spur their continued migration to America these "adventurers" and "planters" were offered land in Maryland by Lord Baltimore--three thousand acres for every thirty persons brought into the state, with the provision of "free liberty of religion." But Pennsylvania offered a heartier welcome and "genuine religious liberty" besides.

Oppression and unfairness continued to grow in Ireland. Protestants there had never owned outright the land which they struggled to clear and cultivate. Moreover they toiled without pay. Protest availed them little. And the straw that broke the camel's back was laid on in the form of rent by Lord Donegal. In 1717 when their leases had expired in County Antrim, they found themselves in a worse predicament than ever. Their rents were doubled and trebled. Now, to hand over more than two thirds of what they had after all the other taxes that had been imposed upon them left them with little or nothing. How was a man to pay the added rent? Pay or get out! demanded Lord Donegal. Eviction from the lands which their toil had developed--a wasteland converted into fertile productive fields--stirred these Scotch-Irish to fury. They didn't sit and tweedle their thumbs. Not the Scotch-Irish.

In 1719, just two years after the Antrim Eviction, thirty thousand more Protestants left Ulster for America. They continued to come for the next half century, settling in various parts of our land. There was a goodly settlement in the Virginia Valley of Scotch-Irish. You'd know by their names--Grigsby, Caruthers, Crawford, and McCuen.

As early as 1728 a sturdy Scot from Ulster, by name Alexander Breckinridge, was settled in the Shenandoah Valley, though later he was to be carried with the tide of emigration that led to Kentucky.

Naturally, first come first served--so the settlers who arrived first on the scene chose for themselves the more accessible and fertile lands, the valleys and rich limestone belts at the foot of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies. The Proprietors of Pennsylvania, who had settled on vast tracts, were prevailed upon by the incoming Scotch-Irish to sell them parts of their lands. The newcomers argued that it was "contrary to the laws of God and nature that so much land should lie idle when Christians wanted it to labor on and raise their bread." But that wasn't the only reason the Scotch-Irish had. There were other things in the back of their heads. A burnt child fears the fire. Their unhappy experience in Ulster had taught them a bitter lesson and one they should never forget, not even to the third and fourth generation. They would not be renters! Hadn't they been tricked out of land in Ulster? They would not rent! They would buy outright. And buy they did from the Proprietors at a nominal figure. Nor were the Pennsylvanians blind to the fact that the newcomers were good fighters and that they could act as a barrier against Indian attacks on the settlement's fringe. There was still a fly in the ointment for the Scotch-Irish. That was--the Proprietors' exacting from them an annual payment of a few cents per acre. It wasn't so much the amount that irked the newcomers as the legal hold on their land it gave the Proprietors. They objected stoutly and didn't give up their protest until their perseverance put an end to the system of "quitrents."

This cautious characteristic persists to this day with the mountaineer and can be traced back to the persecution of his forbears in Ulster. Mountaineers in Kentucky refused point-blank to accept fruit trees offered them gratis by a legislator in 1913, fearing it would give the state a hold on their land.

But to get back to the settling of the Blue Ridge Country.

When political and religious refugees continued to come to America in such vast shoals they found the settlements along the Atlantic coast already well occupied by Huguenots who had been driven from France, by Quakers, Puritans, and Catholics from England, Palatine Germans escaping the scourge of the Thirty Years' War. Here too were Dunkers, Mennonites, Moravians from Holland and Germany. Among them also were followers of Cromwell who had fled the vengeance of Charles II, Scots of the Highlands who could not be loyal to the Stuarts and at the same time friends to King George.

The Scotch-Irish among the newcomers wanted land of their own--independence. Above all independence. So they drifted down the coast to the western fringe of settlement and established themselves in the foothills east of the Blue Ridge in what is now the Carolinas. Migration might just as well have moved west from Virginia and across the Alleghenies. However, not only did the mountains themselves present an impenetrable barrier, but settlers were forbidden to cross by "proclamation of the authorities" on account of the hostility of the Indians on the west of the mountain range. Then too there were inviting fertile valleys on this eastern side of the Blue Ridge, where they might dwell.

But these newcomers, at least the Scotch-Irish among them, were not primarily men who wanted to till the soil. They were not by nature farmers like the Germans in Pennsylvania. And they did not intend to become underlings of their more prosperous predecessors and neighbors who had already taken root in the valleys and who had set up projects to further their own gains. Furthermore, being younger in the new world they were more adventurous. The wilderness with its hunting and exploring beckoned. And so they pressed on deeper into the mountains. There was always more room the higher up they climbed. And as they moved on they carried along with them, as a surging stream gathers up the life along its course, a sprinkling of all the various denominations whose lives they touched among the settlements along the coast.

In that day many men were so eager for freedom and a chance to get a fresh start that before sailing, through the enterprises set up by shipowners and emigration agents, they bound themselves by written indentures to work for a certain period of time. These persons were called Indents. Their labor was sold, so that in reality they were little more than slaves. When finally they had worked out their time they had earned their freedom, and were called Redemptioners. The practice of selling Redemptioners continued until the year 1820, all of forty-four years after "Honest" John Hart had signed his name to the Declaration of Independence. It is said that a lineal descendant of Emperor Maximilian was so bound in Georgia.

Many were imposed upon in another way. Their baggage and possessions were often confiscated and even though friends waited on this side ready to pay their passage, innocent men and women were duped into sale.

Then there were the so-called convicts among the pioneers of the Blue Ridge. It must be remembered that in those days offense constituting crime was often a mere triviality. Men were imprisoned for debt; even so they were labeled convicts. But, as Dr. James Watt Raine assures us in his The Land of Saddle-Bags, the few such convicts who were sent by English judges to America could scarcely have produced the five million or more people who today are known as southern mountain people.

Widely different though they were in blood, speech, and customs, there was an underlying similarity in the nature of these pioneers. It was their love of independence. Independence that impelled them to give up the security of civilization to brave the perils of uncharted seas, the hazards of warfare with hostile Indians, to seek homes in an untamed wilderness.

BLAZING THE TRAIL

Sometimes a single explorer went ahead of the rest with a few friendly Indians to accompany him. If not he went alone, tramping into the forest, living in a rough shack, suffering untold hardship through bitter winter months. For weeks when he had neither meal nor flour he lived on meat alone--deer and bear. It was the stories of valuable furs and the vast quantities of them which trickled back to the settlements that lured others to follow. Hunters and trappers came bringing their families. The stories of furs and the promise of greater possessions to be had in the wilderness grew and so did the number of adventurers. They began to form little settlements and their coming crowded before them the earlier hunter or trapper who wanted always the field to himself.

In the meantime settlers in the Valley of Virginia were growing more smug and prosperous. They wanted to invest part of their earnings. They wanted to set up other undertakings. So they began sending out expeditions into the wilderness with the intention of trading with the Indians and possibly of securing lands for settlers.

As early as 1673 young Gabriel Arthur had set out on an expedition for his master Colonel Abraham Wood of Virginia with a small party. Through the Valley of Virginia went the young adventurer, taking the well-defined Warrior's Path; he followed watercourses and gaps that cut through high mountain walls, down the Holston River through Tennessee, through the "great gap" into the Cuttawa country. Finally separated from his companions, the lad lost all count of time. Even if he had had a calendar tucked away in the pocket of his deerskin coat, however, it would have done him no good for he could neither read nor write. Weeks and months passed. Winter came. Finally after many adventures young Arthur started on the long journey back to Virginia. As he drew near Colonel Wood's home he heard merriment within and the voice of his master wishing his household a merry Christmas. Not till then did the young adventurer know how long he had been away.

With the master and the household and the friends who had gathered to celebrate and offer thanks at the Yuletide season, with all listening eagerly, young Gabriel Arthur, though unable to bring back any written record, told many a stirring tale. A swig of wine may have spurred the telling of how he had been captured by the Shawnees (in Ohio), of how he had been surrounded by a wild, shouting tribe who tied him to a stake and were about to put a flaming torch to his feet when he thought of a way to save his life. They were charmed with the gun he carried, and the shiny knife at his belt. If they'd set him free he promised to bring them many, many knives and guns. Once young Gabriel made his escape he didn't intend to be caught napping again. He painted his fair face with wild berry juice, and color from bark and herbs. After much wandering he found himself with friendly Cherokees in the upper Tennessee Valley. They were so friendly, in fact, that a couple of them accompanied him on his return to Virginia. He returned along other watercourses--by way of the Rockcastle and Kentucky Rivers. He crossed the Big Sandy--the Indians called it Chatterawha and Totteroy. He got out of their canoe at a point where the Totteroy flows into the Ohio and stood on the bank and looked about at the far-off hills. So it was young Gabriel Arthur who was the first white man to set foot in Kentucky, and that at the mouth of the Big Sandy.

Young Gabriel's tales traveled far. Soon others, fired with the spirit of adventure, were turning to the wilderness. Nor was adventure the only spur. Investors as well as hunters and trappers saw promise of profits in Far Appalachia. Cartographers were put to work. A glimpse at their drawings shows interesting and similar observations.

In 1697 Louis Hennepin's map indicated the territory south of the Great Lakes, including the southern Appalachians and extending as far west as the Mississippi River and a route which passed through a "gap across the Appalachians to the Atlantic seaboard." Later the map of a Frenchman named Delisle labeled the great continental path leading to the Carolinas "Route que les Francois." Successive maps all showed the passing over the Cumberland Mountain at the great wind gap, indicating portages and villages of the Chaouanona (Shawnees) in the river valleys. Lewis Evans' map in 1755 of "The Middle British Colonies in America" shows the courses of the Totteroy (Big Sandy River) and of the Kentucky River. Thomas Hutchins in 1788, who became a Captain in the 60th Royal American Regiment of Foot, was appointed Geographer General under General Nathanael Greene and had unusual opportunity to observe geographically the vast wilderness beyond the Alleghenies. On his map the Kentucky River (where Boone was to establish a fort) was called the Cuttawa, the Green River was the Buffalo, the Cumberland was indicated as Shawanoe, and the Tennessee was the Cherokee. Though there were numerous trails in the Cumberland plateau, the Geographer General indicated only one, the Warrior's Path which he called the "Path to the Cuttawa Country." He too showed the Gap in the "Ouasioto" Mountains leading to the Cuttawa Country.

With the increase of map-making, more projects were launched. There were large colonizing schemes to induce settlement along the frontier, but colonizing was not the only idea in the heads of the wealthy Virginia investors. They were not unmindful of the riches in furs to be garnered in the Blue Ridge. In this connection Dr. Thomas Walker's expedition for the Loyal Land Company in 1750 was important. Dr. Walker, an Englishman, was sent into what is now Kentucky where the company had a grant of "eight hundred thousand acres." A man could buy fifty acres for five shillings sterling, the doctor explained. He was not only a physician but a surveyor as well, and primarily the purpose of these early expeditions was surveying--to lay out the boundaries of the land to be sold to incoming settlers. Such an expedition was composed usually of some six or eight men each equipped with horse, dog, and gun. Fortunately the doctor-surveyor was not illiterate like young Gabriel Arthur. Walker set down an interesting account of the expedition which was especially glowing from the trader's point of view. In their four months in the wilderness the Walker expedition killed, aside from buffalo, wild geese, and turkeys, fifty-three bears and twenty deer. And the doctor added that they could have trebled the number. Walker followed the Warrior's Path as young Gabriel Arthur had more than seventy years before. The rivers they crossed, as well as the places on the way which were sometimes no more than salt licks, bore Indian names. But when Dr. Walker reached the great barrier between Kentucky and Virginia he was so deeply moved by the vastness and grandeur of the mountains that he called his companions about him. "It is worthy of a noble name," said Dr. Walker. "Let us call it Cumberland for our Duke in far-off England." When the expedition reached the gap that permitted them to pass through into the Cuttawa country he cried exultantly, "This too shall be named for our Duke." So Cumberland Gap it became and the mountain known to pioneers as Laurel Mountain became instead Cumberland Mountain.

The doctor-surveyor could not know that one day he would be hailed as "the first white man in Cumberland Gap" by those sturdy settlers who were to follow his course. When Dr. Walker reached the Indians' Totteroy River, or rather the two forks that combine to make it, he called the stream to the right, which touched West Virginia soil, Louisa or Levisa for the wife of the Duke of Cumberland.

This leader of the expedition of the Loyal Land Company jotted down much that he saw. There was the amazing "burning spring" that shot up right out of the earth, its flame so brilliant the doctor could read his map by the glow at a distance of several miles. Apparently he was not concerned with the cause but rather with the effect of the burning spring. He saw the painted picture language of the Indians on mountain side and tree trunk.

Dr. Walker returned on a second expedition in 1758, but he gained only partial knowledge of the wilderness land. However, the mountain he named determined the course of the trail which was to be laid out by Daniel Boone, and the gap through which he passed became the gateway for thousands of horizon-seekers.

Their coming was not without hazard.

The southern Indians resented the invasion of their hunting ground by the English. The French-Indians incited by the French settlers in the Mississippi Valley who wanted the wealth of fur-bearing animals for themselves, began to swoop down on the settlements of the English-speaking people along the frontier, massacring them by the hundreds.

The Assembly in Philadelphia turned a deaf ear to the frontiersmen's plea for help, so the Scotch-Irish, accustomed to fighting for their rights, organized companies of Rangers to defend themselves against the attacks of the Indians. With continued massacre of their people their desperation grew. If they could have no voice in governmental matters in Pennsylvania and could expect no protection from that source against the warring Indians, they could move on. They did. On down the Valley of Virginia they came into Carolina. They built their little cabins, planted crops, and by 1764 had laid out two townships, one of which, Mecklenburg, figured in an important way in America's independence.