Voices; Birth-Marks; The Man and the Elephant Part 20

"Father if you are going, there is no reason why I might not go too, though Mr. Campbell has not asked me. I am a daughter of the tribe and have been told to come with Chief Cross-Bearer."

"Well Dorothy, when did I get to be Mr. Campbell? You know how much I wish you might go. There is no danger."

When he left for home is was tentatively arranged that Dorothy and her father were to go and the young people were very happy.

Some days later, in the gray of early morning, Dorothy and her father met the others on the trail near the plantation; and John, without asking, added to his own pack all of the traps Dorothy carried except her rifle.

All were dressed in Indian costume, not only for convenience but protection; as their only real danger was in being taken for unfriendly whites and ambushed before their ident.i.ty should be discovered.

The trail through the gap and down the mountain side, centuries old, had been made by the Indians and great herds of buffalo. After pa.s.sing through the gap to the western side one had a superb view down the deep valley of the upper Kanawha and the opposite mountain range, which seemed a twin to the one on which you stood. A virgin forest clothed its side and great bald peaks and precipices peeped out in grayish, rugged contrast. The trail threaded narrow coves, in which were great chestnut and poplar trees, and wound in ever descending curves and spirals around the base of great cliffs and from one natural terrace to a lower one.

The distance from the divide as the trail followed the river from its head fountains to where Mason and his Indian friends had cached their canoe was thirty miles, the usual first day's tramp; but as a concession to Dorothy, though she said it was not necessary, they camped when two-thirds of the distance had been covered.

While Dorothy, Mason and John made ready the camp and began supper; Captain Fairfax and the Indians hunting in the cliffs, killed a yearling bear, steaks from which were broiled for supper and breakfast.

By nine the next morning they made the willows, where the canoe was concealed; and from there in four days and without unusual incident paddled to Point Pleasant; and also in good time they completed their voyage from the mouth of the Kanawha, down the Ohio and up the Scioto, to Shauane-Town.

Word of their coming having preceded them they were met at the river by the whole village. John Calvin was lodged with his brothers by adoption, Tec.u.mseh or the Crouching Panther and Oliuachica or the Prophet; the others were taken to the guest lodge.

Their visit was made the occasion for several big hunts and festivals which were enjoyed by all. Oliuachica and two braves returned to Jackson River with them; not only as a guard for that journey but to act as guides and to protect their party upon its contemplated emigration to the District of Kentucky, by way of the Wilderness Road.

While they were away Donald McDonald died. Mrs. McDonald going from the room wherein she was spinning to the adjoining one, found him sitting in his old hickory split-bottom chair, with his Bible resting in his lap.

Though the door between the rooms had been open, she had heard no sound.

His death was not unexpected; he was quite feeble and in his eighty-third year. They buried him in the kirkyard of the church where he had preached for so many years.

Though his kindred a month or so later moved to Kentucky and never again visited the old place, his grave was not neglected. Friends and members of his flock, in testimony that his work was appreciated and his life had not been in vain, trimmed the turf of the green mound and in season strewed it with apple, laurel and rhododendron bloom.

CHAPTER XI.-The Kentucky Spirit or Why the Kentucky Colonel.

Orange County, Virginia, was formed by Colonial act in 1734; and its boundary was: "to the uttermost limits of Virginia." The limits of Virginia were; "westward to the Mississippi and so much further as the Colony had a mind to claim."

From Orange County, Augusta County was formed in 1738, extending beyond the Alleghanies to the "uttermost limits of Virginia." Botetourt was carved from Augusta in 1769 and Fincastle from Botetourt in 1772.

Kentucky County was carved by a part.i.tion of Fincastle in 1776, under one of the earliest acts of the new Commonwealth of Virginia; and Kentucky County, known as the District of Kentucky, was, in 1780, subdivided into Lincoln, Fayette and Jefferson Counties. These three counties were resubdivided in the making of the additional counties of Nelson, Bourbon, Mercer, Madison, Mason and Woodford; and these nine counties of Virginia, on June 1, 1792, became the State of Kentucky.

The days following the Revolution found the people of Virginia restless, poor and out of touch with the ordinary occupations of pre-war days.

Their market for tobacco, the product which had sustained the aristocrat in lavish prodigality and supported the colony, was lost and the plantations were mazes of briars and underbrush.

As was the intention of the statute, the abolition of entails by the legislature of the new Commonwealth of Virginia, first diluted, then dissipated the power of the aristocracy. The family estate, the plantation of thousands of acres, which had been kept intact in the family for generations, was subdivided and resubdivided between the proprietor's heirs and creditors and their vendors, until the old-style, feudal-lord-like life was impossible.

These still land-hungry "First Families," looked to the District of Kentucky, where land, more fertile than Tidewater Virginia, was almost free for the taking-to re-establish themselves as proprietors of vast landed estates, as their fathers had been; thus to revive the prestige and influence of the old family name; and many such emigrated to Kentucky. A great many plain farmers, impoverished by the war and seeing no hope for improved fortune at the old home, hazarded a try for better fortune in the new country. A yet more numerous and important element was the discharged veterans of the Continental Army; they had desired a more adventurous life than was to be found in clearing their old fields to start afresh the life of a poor farmer; and they came to Kentucky.

These three cla.s.ses of emigrants, and a conservative estimate places their number at exceeding ten thousand a year for the decade succeeding the Revolution, were of pure English stock, democratic, courteous, hardy, self-willed and trained to defend their rights-created the Kentucky Spirit.

Those who had preceded them could not be cla.s.sified as settlers. As a rule they were wilderness tramps, or land jobbers, or conscienceless traders, who built cabins surrounded by picketings of timbers planted deep in the ground to protect their "stations" from surprises by the Indians; and such cabins soon became widely known. It was around these stations the real immigrant settled.

In case of attack, the settlers near gathered at the "station." The owner, of course, a.s.sumed command and exercised all the rights of proprietor. Thus by consent he was designated as Colonel Boone, or Colonel Morgan, or Colonel Gibson, or Colonel Cresap; which t.i.tle he retained, as is the way of such adventurers, though his "station"

frequently degenerated into a joint for the sale of rum or brandy and a resort for the dissolute or criminal of those early days.

Thus the t.i.tle "Colonel" was applied to any one temporarily in authority; and in Kentucky might be said to have a local meaning. Not all "Kentucky Colonels" have seen military service or are holders of commissions designating them as such; though the secretaries of Kentucky's recent governors, spend much of their time issuing such commissions.

The writer has known instances where Kentuckians holding a commission as lieutenant or captain during actual service; as they grew in importance locally, or became a celebrity because the owner of a great race horse, or in appearance venerable, have been raised by the courtesy of their neighbors to the rank of "General."

Emigrants from Virginia to the District of Kentucky had the choice of the river route down the Ohio, or overland by way of the Old Wilderness Road.

Those coming by river had first to travel caravan style to the head of navigation of the Allegheny, Monongahela, or Kanawha river or to Pittsburgh. There they loaded their cattle into flat boats, or batteaux, or on rafts of poplar logs and floated down the Ohio; carefully keeping to the center of the stream, out of range from the sh.o.r.e. Reaching their destination, usually Limestone (Maysville) or Louisville, they sold their boat or raft and took to pack horse or wagon, completing their journey as they traveled on the first stage of it.

In 1787, M. St. John de Crevecoeur, a native of Normandy published in a Paris journal an account of his river trip from Pittsburgh to Louisville. Considering the date, the narrative seems somewhat overdrawn.

In part he said:

"After having waited twenty-two days at Pittsburgh I took advantage of the first boat which started for Louisville. It was 55 feet long, 12 wide and 6 deep, drawing 3 feet of water. On its deck had been built a low cabin, but very neat, divided into several compartments, and on the forecastle the cattle and horses were kept in a stable. It was loaded with bricks, boards, planks, bars of iron, coal, instruments of husbandry, dismounted wagons, anvils, bellows, dry goods, brandy, flour, biscuit, lard, salt meat, etc. These articles came in part from the country in the vicinity of Pittsburgh and from Indiana. (The Indiana here referred to was a section of Virginia lying east of the Alleghanies.) I observed the larger part of the pa.s.sengers were young men who came from nearly all of the middle (coast) states; pleasant, contented, full of buoyant hopes; having with them money coming from the sale of their old farms, or from the share received from their parents.

They were going to Kentucky to engage in business, to work at their trades and to acquire and establish new homes. What a singular but happy restlessness, that which is constantly urging us all to become better off than we are and which drives us from one end of a continent to the other. In the evening after laying up, the more skillful hunters would go to the land to shoot wild turkeys, which you are aware wait for the last rays of the sun to fade away before going to roost in the tops of the highest trees."

When the settler fixed upon his location he appropriated a four hundred acre boundary, the settler's allowance; and taking possession, held it by what was then known as the "Tomahawk Claim;" that is, he blazed his boundary lines with a tomahawk and hacked his initials on the corner trees. He then built a log cabin and felled a few trees to give notice to the world that the blazed boundary was appropriated. His appropriation was usually respected, mainly from custom and sentiment; though the right, if questioned, was usually defended by the rifle.

In the mid-summer of 1787 the Campbells with Mrs. McDonald, the Clarks, and the Fairfaxes, having sold their plantations, emigrated overland by the Wilderness Trail to Kentucky.

Their experiences were much the same as the many who had preceded them; except as they had Indian guides, Oliuachica and two Mingo braves, they were in little danger of attack from the Indians.

What was then known as the Wilderness Road extended from the last settlements on the east side of the Alleghanies, over the mountain on to the headwaters of Clinch River, down that river valley, thence across the mountain into Powell's Valley, thence with the valley to c.u.mberland Gap and thence through the Gap into the District of Kentucky.

The road had been marked off by Daniel Boone in 1774-5, some said at the direction of Lord Dunmore and others at the direction of Colonel Richard Henderson, as a highway to his colony of Transylvania; a vast boundary mostly in Kentucky, which he had purchased from the Cherokees at the Council of Sycamore Falls.

The road after crossing c.u.mberland Gap, as shown by John Filson's map of "Kentucke," forked at Flat Lick; the Indian trail known as the "Warrior's Path," pa.s.sing north across the Ohio River to old Shauane-Town and to the chief settlement of the Mingo Nation on the "Sciotha" River. The other fork, Boone's or the Wilderness Road, from Flat Lick followed a southwest course to Rock Castle River, where the road again forked, the right to Blue Licks and Boonesboro, the left on to the head of d.i.c.k's River, to Logan Station or St. Asaph's Plantation, then forks to Danville, to Lexington and to the Green River Settlements.

It was little more than a bridle path, being intended for pack horses and foot travelers, though it was possible to follow it in a wagon.

After 1780, quite a few came through carrying their heavy household effects in wagons; and a few of the aristocrats drove through their family carriages, the tops of which were usually torn off by trailing vines from the trees or overhanging limbs.

Along a good portion of the road at intervals of the average day's journey, were "stations" or taverns where travelers usually pa.s.sed the night; but if these were not reached they used well-known camp grounds cleared of underbrush and near a good spring, where they bivouaced around a great open fire and slept under awnings or in their wagons.

The caravan led by Colonel Campbell, used to frontier life, preferred the camping grounds. The taverns or stations had a bad name, as headquarters for bandits who frequently robbed and murdered travelers and then spread the rumor of an Indian raid.

The four families, with their slaves, servants and three Indian guides made a total of thirty-two persons. There were eight wagons, two carriages, thirty horses, six oxen, more than eighty head of beef and milk cattle, a small flock of sheep and on the back of each wagon, resting on the tail gate, was either a coop of chickens or a crate of pigs. The camp outfits were carried on pack horses so as not to disturb the loaded wagons. The five negro slaves with their three children, driving the three ox wagons and bringing up the rear, whistling, singing and laughing, were the boisterous ones of the party. The three Indians, Colonel Campbell and Richard Cameron took the lead, and John, when he was not driving the Fairfax carriage, rode with them, conversing with his Indian friends. The Indians were the watchful, silent leaders by day, and one of them with a white companion, the guard by night.

The train bore a marked resemblance to the caravan of a patriarch of ancient days, searching for verdant pasture lands and sweet water courses; who rode at the head with a body-guard and was followed by his dependents and herds.

They had cause to be thankful for their three Indian guides. Traveling through Powell's Valley, in a dense forest, one of the braves gave the signal for a halt and silence, while he stole silently ahead. In a half hour he returned accompanied by more than thirty Mingoes and Shauanese who had placed themselves in ambush, expecting to ma.s.sacre the party.

Several were members of the Prophet's own tribe and treated him and Chief Cross-Bearer with formal courtesy. In fact they had been sent to escort the Prophet back to his village. Had it not been for the three Indians it is probable some of their party would have been murdered, before John's girdle had been noticed or their ident.i.ty discovered. At their suggestion his sign was painted with pucc.o.o.n root stain upon the sides of the wagon covers. The Indians remained with them until they crossed over c.u.mberland Gap into the Yellow Creek Valley, where Middlesboro now stands.

There, Colonel Campbell, reminded of his old home in Scotland and his more recent one in Virginia, pleased with the beautiful meadow free of timber and the fruitful valley, which was a great deer and buffalo pasture, decided to settle; and sought to persuade his friends to do so; but they, with the exception of the Camerons, concluded to travel on until they reached the "cane-brake" or blue gra.s.s country.

He fixed upon his "Tomahawk Claim" of four hundred acres as did Mr.

Cameron; and their boundaries which joined were blazed off and marked by them and re-marked by their Indian friends with the Indian sign that this was the lodge of Chief Cross-Bearer and therefore sacred from attack. Then the Indians left them and took the "Warrior's Trail" for the Scioto Valley, the land of the Mingo nation.

The Clarks and Fairfaxes remained for a week at Campbell Station and helped get out the timbers for cabins and barns, but could not be persuaded to remain longer. Then they moved on to Logan's Station and subsequently pre-empted land in the vicinity of Danville, then the capital of the District of Kentucky.