A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier Read online

  French and Indian forces defeated General Braddock’s army near Fort Duquesne in 1755. Library of Congress.

  Led by brilliant—if somewhat mercurial—Prime Minister William Pitt, the British employed the power of the Royal Navy to control the seas and distracted the French on the European continent as they “destroyed their empire and captured their trade.”30 The 1763 Treaty of Paris stripped France of all Canadian possessions, forever ending its political and military influence in North America. However, the conduct of the war and the violence with France’s Indian allies along the frontier during its course led to critical changes in British colonial settlement policy, changes that resulted in turbulent relations with settlers and colonial governments alike.

  Although His Majesty’s government may have been fighting for power and trade, most American colonists, especially Virginians, fought for entirely different reasons. Those already living on or near the frontier supported the British war effort for more immediate and pressing concerns, primarily the safety of their frontier settlements. However, at the same time, many also saw defining and expanding the colony’s boundaries while ensuring the right to continued speculation as causes worth supporting. Nevertheless, as the end of the war approached, the British government had entirely different concerns regarding their colonial frontier.

  By 1762, Britain had accrued an overwhelming debt of £133.0 million with annual interest charges amounting to over £4.3 million.31 Therefore, the British desired to bring peace to the Ohio Valley and Allegheny Plateau by finding accommodation with the Indian nations of the region, almost all of whom had allied themselves with the French at some point during the war. Moreover, if this meant making concessions unpalatable to the American colonists, then so be it.

  In 1758, after decades of a highly confrontational style of settlement in which settlers were placed like military units at strategic locations along the frontier, the British government suddenly began imposing policies clearly intended to appease the Indians by closing the frontier to future settlement. In October of that year, a meeting called the Council of Easton was held near Philadelphia. The attendees included over five hundred Indians from thirteen different nations, along with colonial officials from Pennsylvania and the British Indian superintendent Sir William Johnson. The agreement negotiated by the council saw the government of Pennsylvania “cheerfully” release the Iroquois from abiding by the terms of the Albany Treaty of 1755, which had transferred ownership of most of western Pennsylvania to the British. This meant that all lands west of the Alleghenies were returned to the Iroquois Confederation, white settlement was prohibited and the Shawnee, Delaware and Mingo (also known as the Ohio Iroquois) could return to their lands.32

  The effects of this new policy were immediate, and while it succeeding in temporarily placating the Iroquois, the British did not stop there. Over the course of the next five years, they expanded and fortified the policy. In 1761, Colonel Bouquet issued a proclamation from his headquarters at Fort Pitt reminding everyone of the ban on settlement and then expanded the boundaries of the prohibition to include all of western Maryland and Virginia. Further, he announced that anyone caught violating the ban would be arrested and brought to Fort Pitt for trial by court martial. However, despite Bouquet’s pronouncement, many frontier settlers simply ignored the ban and, frankly, the cost and trouble to effectively enforce the policy required far more resources than Bouquet had available.33

  Two years after Bouquet made his announcement, the British government decided to take sterner measures. On October 7, 1763, His Majesty’s government issued the Proclamation of 1763, which formalized the policy banning settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains. Further, it ordered any British subject currently living there to leave the frontier and return east of the mountains and sought to regulate and restrict any contact between whites and Indians. Under its provisions, traders wanting to do business with the Indians were required to be licensed by the appropriate colonial governor and adhere to all trade regulations. Meanwhile, other colonists were prohibited from buying land directly from the Indians.

  Colonel Henry Bouquet receives Indian captives at a camp on the Muskingum River in this eighteenth-century drawing. Library of Congress.

  Almost immediately, speculators approached William Johnson and the other British Indian superintendent, John Stuart, clamoring loudly and insistently for relief from the proclamation’s provisions. In response, the British Secretary of State eventually gave both men permission to negotiate new agreements for a limited amount of land that would be given only as grants to war veterans. However, the speculators continued their assault and both Johnson and Stuart quickly succumbed to the incessant pressure. Within a few months, they had negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix with the Iroquois and the Treaty of Hard Labor with the Cherokee, which moved the proclamation line westward from the Alleghenies to the Ohio River, reopening the Allegheny Plateau to speculation and settlement. By the following spring of 1769, settlers began surging over the mountains once more.

  THE EARLY SETTLERS OF NORTHWEST VIRGINIA

  The first recorded settlement on the Allegheny Plateau occurred in 1749, and while there may have been some unrecorded settlers who arrived earlier, this was the first wave in a coming deluge. However, this first settlement was also somewhat unique. Located near present-day Marlinton, which bears the name of one of the settlers, it consisted of a homestead shared by two friends, Jacob Marlin and Stephen Sewell. The two men built a cabin, but soon, their friendship soured. Although they were best friends and agreed on most matters, they found that they had profound disagreement when it came to matters of religion. Apparently, this conflict caused such intense bickering that Sewell moved out of the cabin and took up residence in a nearby hollow sycamore tree. When a surveyor named Andrew Lewis passed through the area conducting a survey for the Greenbrier Company in 1751, he found Sewell still living in the tree.34 However, it is, hopefully, safe to say that most settlers were not quite so quirky.

  It is difficult, at best, to accurately characterize the settlers who made the arduous journey over the Alleghenies to their new homes west of the mountains. When most of us imagine these settlers, we probably envision the classic stereotype: Scot-Irish from the Ulster Plantations; poor, uneducated, independent and self-sufficient; Sabbath-observing, God-fearing Christians who still enjoy the occasional pull from a jug of corn whiskey; and someone who sees the Indian as a creature to disdain, hate and fear. As with all stereotypes, this one likely contains elements of truth.

  Unfortunately, there are no polls or surveys to provide us with a clear picture of the settlers of the plateau, and much of the historical evidence is anecdotal in nature. Still, the anecdotes do help provide important context, and what they show is a remarkably diverse population that reflected the nature and cultural flavor of America’s colonial immigrants. First, there were members of some dissenting Protestant religious groups, such as the Presbyterians, as well as others less welcome in the Anglican-dominated communities of the eastern seaboard, such as German Lutherans. However, these were more the exception than the rule. Instead, most settlers came to the frontier simply seeking farmland. Some would purchase their land from large speculators, such as the Greenbrier Company, but others would simply “squat” on the land, occupying it without a deed or title. Given that there were no land offices or often even a survey, a tomahawk in the settler’s hand was sufficient to claim the boundaries of his land. This approach became known by the term “tomahawk rights,” and it was not only respected by other settlers, but also formally recognized later in Virginia law.35

  However, historian John Boback provides what is perhaps the best and most concise description of the ethnic and social diversity of the Allegheny Plateau’s mid-eighteenth century settlers:

  A traveler passing through the region in 1753 might have encountered…Englishmen who had embraced the religious views of a German Evangelical Lutheran, an Islamic scholar from North Africa, Scots-Irish Presbyter
ians from the plantations of Ulster, German Pietists with an inclination toward religious mysticism and monasticism, English squatters, and a diverse array of hunters, trappers, indentured servants, escaped slaves, and fugitives from justice.36

  While some of these settlers came from eastern Virginia, owing to the government’s efforts to attract settlers from outside Virginia, most came from Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey, with a few arriving from New England or directly from Europe. Many of the arrivals from other colonies had been born and raised in America and almost all of the settlers, no matter their point of origin, moved west as part of a larger, extended kinship group.37 Therefore, most came as part of a family, and on many occasions, this would include members of multiple generations.

  Exactly how many settlers arrived after 1769 is difficult to calculate accurately, as there were no tax or census records until the 1780s. Nevertheless, historians have employed other record sources, both official and unofficial, to estimate the population of northwestern Virginia in the 1770s. Again, historian John Boback offers some insight here. In analyzing the account books from George and Sampson Matthews’s trading post in the Greenbrier Valley for 1771 through 1774, he found 401 distinct names, which we can safely assume as having primarily been male heads of household. If you also assume that not every settler family in the valley had an account at that trading post and add in an average family size, it is very possible that as many as two thousand settlers lived in the Greenbrier Valley at that time. Unfortunately, there are no trading post account records for the upper Monongahela Valley near Prickett’s Fort. However, Boback did find a 1777 dispatch from Colonel Zackwell Morgan to General Edward Hand at Fort Pitt in which Morgan states he had assembled five hundred men to fight the Indians and suppress a Tory uprising. Given that the law required every able-bodied man between the ages of sixteen and fifty to serve in the militia, it again appears safe to assume that the settler population of the upper Monongahela at that time also exceeded two thousand residents.38

  Whatever their numbers, it also seems that their fellow American colonists from the east did not appreciate them, and many saw the Alleghenies as not only a significant physical boundary but a cultural one, as well. One contemporary observer considered them to be a distinctive breed, the “back settler.” The men were “ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable,” while their wives and children “live in sloth and inactivity; and having no proper pursuits.” The result, he said, was “a mongrel breed, half civilized, half savage.”39 Another source, a young Massachusetts lawyer, noted the settlers were “altogether different from what they call the lowlanders, i.e., the people of the east side.” Meanwhile, he did compliment them for being “more industrious” than their fellow Virginians, but he also found “all sorts of indolent ignorant people, who raise a little corn, but depend chiefly on hunting for their support.”40 As unflattering as these observations might be, they contain kernels of truth simply because life on the Allegheny Plateau was very hard, even by the standards of the time, and those who lived there had to be tough and perhaps less refined if they were to survive.

  A living historian is dressed and equipped as an eighteenth-century militiaman at the modern-day site of a re-created Prickett’s Fort. Photo by the author.

  LIFE ON THE ALLEGHENY FRONTIER

  As he approached the last years of his life, William Haymond Jr., the son of Colonel William Haymond, thought back on his childhood growing up on the frontier and wrote, “When I think of those times…it seems strange to me how the people survived many times with-out [sic] anything to eat and with but little to wear.”41 As those words indicate, life on the Allegheny Plateau frontier was often a simple struggle for survival. Although natural resources were plentiful, the land could be very unforgiving, and settlers had to conduct a constant battle to maintain even a subsistence-based existence.

  There was no immediate source of supplies or European-manufactured tools and materials, and the terrain did not lend itself to traditional European farming methods. Not surprisingly, therefore, settlers soon began a process of cultural borrowing from the Indians. Indian clothing designs and the use of natural materials in them were quickly adopted, as was the use of canoes, herbal remedies, foods, farming techniques and even vocabulary. Employing natural materials also applied to settler’s homes, which were primarily constructed from logs, given the complete absence of any sawmills for more refined lumber. Swedes, Finns and Germans from Silesia, Bohemia and Moravia brought the practice and knowledge required for horizontal log homes from Europe to Delaware and eastern Pennsylvania, from where this custom spread to the Shenandoah Valley during the mid-eighteenth century. By the time settlers began crossing the Alleghenies in significant numbers, the basic skills needed to build log homes had proliferated to nearly every social and ethnic group.

  Furthermore, log homes were an ideal solution not solely because raw timber was so plentiful on the plateau but also because building them did not require anything but the most rudimentary of tools. Essentially, if a settler possessed a good felling axe, broad axe, adz,42 froe,43 crosscut saw, auger, hammer and perhaps a chisel or hand plane, he was in business. With these few tools and a forest filled with trees, a settler could build an entire log cabin in less than a week, assuming he had neighbors or extended family willing to lend a hand. In addition, the opportunity to have a communal cabin “raising” provided a welcome excuse for community socializing, combining much-needed merriment with the hard work of building the cabin.44

  While the typical cabin was relatively small, if the area was new to settlement and there was no one to share the workload, it could take substantial effort for a single family to complete just the preliminary steps required to build their home. First, you had to prepare the site, which often meant clearing trees and burning down the stumps. Then, using the felling axe, the settler cut down the trees required to provide the right amount of logs for the home. Next, the trees were cut to the proper length, their bark peeled and the resulting logs hewn flat on two opposite sides with a broad axe. Once the logs were prepared, the settlers used a horse to skid the logs through the forest to the construction site. If weather and time permitted, the logs were stacked and allowed to at least partially season, which helped prevent warping.45

  Photo of Daniel Boone’s Kentucky cabin, which was probably similar to many of those scattered across the Allegheny Plateau. New York Public Library.

  Log homes on the Allegheny Plateau were not only small, but they also had few, if any, amenities. The Reverend Francis Asbury described his stay with a northwest Virginia family in their isolated cabin, saying, “We have, not unfrequently [sic], to lodge in the same room with the family, the houses having but the one room, so that necessity compels us to seek retirement in the woods.” On one occasion, however, the good reverend did stay inside, recording, “we had, literally, to lie as thick as three in a bed.”46 Often, the floors were merely packed dirt, and many homes lacked even so much as one piece of iron hardware in their walls or roofs because, as settler Joseph Doddridge recalled, “Such things were not to be had.”47

  A few of the crudest cabins might not even have a fireplace, but, in most of them, the fireplace was the center of the home’s activity. The central fire would burn continuously throughout the year, providing a means of cooking and baking, as well as warming the house in the cold winter months. Usually, a greenwood lung pole bisected the chimney flue six to eight feet above the hearth, from which chains extended to suspend pots during cooking. When cooking more than one item, one would rake coals to the side of the hearth apron to create additional cooking stations. This also served to allow for a more controlled source of heat away from the open flame. Naturally, this required a great deal of fuel, and a typical cabin with a single fireplace burned between fifteen and twenty cords of wood each year.48

  While the traditional image of a colonial frontier fireplace includes a hearth filled with numerous pots, pans, griddles and skillets, the average frontier settler did no
t possess such a bounty of cooking equipment. Their “kitchens” were far more Spartan, as at least one early frontier probate inventory indicates, wherein the deceased left a wife, six children and an estate for which the household goods consisted of “some pewter, a pot, two bedstands [sic], bedding, one chest, and a box.”49

  The fireplace also served as an important source of light. Windows were usually small, and the light they provided was poor even on the brightest of days. However, lighting supplements were used, among them the pine knot, also referred to as “candlewood.” A Reverend Higginson, writing in 1633, described them, saying, “They are such candles as the Indians commonly use, having no other, and they are nothing else but the wood of the pine tree, cloven in two little slices, something thin, which are so full of the moysture [sic] of turpentine and pitch that they burne [sic] as cleere [sic] as a torch.” The candlewood was often held in an iron, pincer-like device, and it “droppeth [sic] a pitchy kind of substance where it stands.” For this reason and because they could fill the room with smoke, the candlewood was usually burned in a corner of the fireplace, on a flat stone.50

  Grease or fat lamps were also used. These were small, shallow containers, usually iron, containing tallow, grease or oil. A wick was held in a projecting spout, and these lamps often had a hook and chain link, allowing them be hung from a nail in the wall or from the back of a chair. When used on a table, they were placed on a thick wooden stand. The simplest form of candles were called “rushlights” because they were made by stripping away the outer layer of common rushes, leaving the pith. The pith was, in turn, soaked in tallow or grease and allowed to harden. When lit, rushlights were placed in holders similar to those that held the candlewood.51