A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier Read online

  Natural materials also found their way into the making of farm implements. Lucullus McWhorter, the stepson of Phebe Cunningham’s granddaughter, wrote that she told him how she and Thomas made horse collars from the soft fiber of the linden tree, saying, “When the sap was in full flow the bark was stripped from the trunk in long sheets and thrown into the water and left there until the sap-fiber became loosened; when it could be separated from the rough outer coating in thin ribbon-like layers. This was plaited into thick pads and used for horse collars. Grape vines or hickory bark twisted into ropes, answered for traces.”52

  Raw natural materials were also employed in clothing. Cotton and silk were very popular in colonial-era clothing, but they were seldom seen on the Virginia frontier because they had to be purchased at trading posts, which were few in number, and these fabrics tended to be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, the isolated, cash-strapped settlers of the plateau had to rely on what they could obtain from the forest and their fields, while applying some ingenuity. Wild game provided a source of leather, which settlers used for leggings, breeches and hunting shirts. However, leather provided little protection from the cold, so settlers relied heavily on cloth, primarily linen made from flax. As one settler recalled, “Everybody made their own clothes of flax beginning with the cultivation of the staple.”53

  Settlers planted flax in mid-spring by broadcasting seeds into a prepared field, which was referred to as a “flax patch.” The flax patch was decidedly low maintenance in that it only had to be weeded once prior to harvesting the crop in mid-July. Because the fiber needed for manufacturing linen was in the stalk, which stretches well downward into the root system, flax could not be harvested by merely cutting it down. Instead, the plants had to be carefully pulled from the ground, roots and all. Moreover, if the harvesting was labor-intensive, the process of turning the raw crop into fabric was even more so:

  As a general thing the people raised a patch of flax. This was pulled and spread on the ground to dry and then staked. After this it was spread out on a clear grassy sod to “rot” as it was called. When sufficiently rotted from the stem to break easily, it was taken up and securely stacked for use as it might be wanted. The next operation was to brake it on a home made wooden brake. Then it was “swingled” [sic] or skutched [sic] over the end of a board some 8 or 10 inches wide the other end being driven into the ground, and standing some three or four feet high. The fiber as it came from the brake was held in the left hand and about one half of it thrown over the board & scutched [sic] with a long wooden blade till it was clean and soft. It was then hackled which separated the courser part from the finer part of the [illegible]…The flax was then spun on a wheel by the mother and her daughters. The thread thus produced constituted the [illegible] of the finer quality of linsey [sic] which constituted the principal part of the material worn by the men and boys of the country.54

  However, one of the biggest challenges facing the frontier settler was farming and the ability to not just grow and transport sufficient crops to market but, more so, to simply provide enough food to feed themselves. When the first settlers crossed the mountains, they naturally brought the farming methods and practices they had used in the eastern lowlands and Shenandoah Valley with them. These included the use of horse-drawn plows in large, open, sunlit fields with widely diversified crops such as wheat, oats and rye, as well as orchards of apple, peach and cherry trees. However, while most of these same crops could be grown on the Allegheny Plateau, the dense forest made it far more difficult to produce them in any meaningful quantity, and it often took years of hard labor to gain enough headway against the woodlands to allow for something as sophisticated as an orchard.

  First, the dense forest made it almost impossible for the earliest of settlers to farm with a plow or any other horse-drawn implements. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the massive forest canopy placed most of the land in dark shade for a substantial portion of the growing season. As a result, the settlers again borrowed from the Indians and employed the “slash and burn” method used by generations of Native Americans. First, the settlers would clear the proposed field area of smaller trees using axes and then girdle the larger trees and strip off as many of their branches as possible. The branches were then dried until they could be burned, at which point they were stacked at the bases of the girdled trees and set afire. This killed the trees, and they were quickly cut down.55 In the early 1780s, an American Loyalist named John Ferdinand Smyth toured the rural regions of America and, after moving to England following the Revolutionary War, wrote a book on his observations in which he included a description of the clearing process: “The general mode of clearing the land in this country, where timber is of no value, and labour [sic] is of great, is by cutting a circle round the tree, through the bark, quite to the wood, before the sap rises, which kills it; and they cultivate the ground below immediately, leaving the trees to rot landing, which happens within a very few years, and they never bear leaves more.”56

  Once this process was complete, settlers cleared the “deadenings” away and planted crops between the dead stumps, which often were simply left in place. Sometimes the settlers would plant their crops in rows, as was traditional in European farming, or, more often than not, they would once more borrow from the Indians and build small mounds on which to plant. Although they probably did not realize it, the Indians had long ago figured out that planting their crops on these little hills helped reduce the damage done by frosts by trapping the cold air near the ground in the small valleys created between the mounds of earth.57

  Now the settlers could plant, and the typical farm on the Allegheny Plateau might include corn, potatoes, pumpkins, squash, beans, turnips and other vegetables. Once settlers harvested a crop, it needed to be stockpiled, which they accomplished via a variety of means. If the family managed to build a root cellar, they could store vegetables such as beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, parsnips, potatoes, radishes, turnips and winter squash. Absent this method, they packed vegetables in barrels filled with straw, the latter serving to prevent spoilage from spreading throughout the barrel. Carrots were often buried in sawdust or sandboxes, and other vegetables such as corn, beans and peas were dried and used later for cooking. Green corn, meanwhile, could be preserved by turning back the husk to expose the last, thin layer and then hanging it in the sun or a very warm room to dry. Sweet corn, however, was typically either parboiled, removed from the cob, dried in the sun and then bagged in a cool, dry place or dried in the husk and buried in salt. String beans, squash, apples and pumpkins were strung on thread and hung to dry.58

  Pioneer farmer J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur remarked, “Besides apples we dry pumpkins which are excellent in winter. They are cut into thin slices, peeled, and threaded. Their skins serve also for beer, and admirable pumpkin-pies are made with them. When thus dried they will keep the whole year.”59 He added:

  We often make apple-butter, and this is in the winter a most excellent food particularly where there are many children. For that purpose the best, the richest of our apples are peeled and boiled; a considerable quantity of sweet cider is mixed with it; and the whole is greatly reduced by evaporation. A due proportion of quinces and orange peels is added. This is afterwards preserved in earthern [sic] jars, and in our long winters is a very great delicacy and highly esteemed by some people. It saves sugar, and answers in the hands of an economical wife more purposes than I can well describe. Thus our industry has taught us to convert what Nature has given us into such food as is fit for people in our station.60

  However, lest this sound like a veritable cornucopia of food was available, it must be remembered that it took years for a settler to successfully clear enough land to grow sufficient crops to feed just his immediate family, much less provide a surplus to be sold. This meant that most settlers had to survive and struggle through some very lean years. One early settler, John Scripps, remembered his first years on the Allegheny Plateau, saying, “Few settlers had lan
d in cultivation more than sufficient to raise food for their own consumption, and generally by Spring there would be no bread in the country and people lived on [wild] greens…daily gathered by women and children.”61

  Another settler recalled running out of grain and having no bread for his family for six weeks in 1773. As a result, they survived on venison, wild turkey and bear meat but not without difficulty: “…after living in this way for some time,” the family “became sickly” and were “tormented with a sense of hunger.”62 In fact, without wild game and naturally growing nuts and fruits, most initial settlers would probably have not survived their first years on the plateau.

  Furthermore, while settlers might achieve a basic level of subsistence, they still required some materials that could only be bought in stores, such as tools, salt, black powder, lead for bullets and seeds for planting. This required both the existence of a store stocking these supplies and the cash to make these purchases, which, of course, meant that the settlers had to be able to sell commodities from their farms. Logically, it follows that, without a local store or trading post, there was nowhere nearby to sell those commodities, providing a classic Catch-22 scenario. In fact, it would be 1783 before the first trading post opened in the upper Monongahela Valley. Therefore, most early settlers on the plateau had to journey to the established commercial centers of the Shenandoah Valley, which was more easily said than done.

  Remember that the same Allegheny range these settlers had labored to cross to arrive at their new settlements also stood between them and markets in places such as Staunton and Winchester. The rugged trails over the mountains would not be upgraded to primitive roads capable of supporting the use of wagons until sometime after the Revolutionary War. That meant that, in the intervening years, only packhorses could make the arduous journey, which was described in many letters and journals. One Methodist circuit rider, Reverend Richard Whatcoat, made the trip from the Greenbrier Valley to the upper Monongahela in the summer of 1790 and described it “As Ruf a Road” as he had ever traveled.63 Others lamented the mountain’s steep grades, fallen trees, swift creeks and rivers, dangerously swollen fords, deep mud, badly marked trails, deep snows and even the low-hanging tree boughs that constantly threatened to knock a rider off his horse.

  As a result, trips to the Shenandoah markets were often only an annual event. Settler David Crouch remembered that his father would travel over the South Branch of the Potomac once a year to “get two/three bushels (80 lb. to a bushel) of salt,” which would last the family a year.64 Even George Washington commented on the traffic moving across the mountains during a September 1784 trip in which he encountered “numbers of Persons and Pack horses going” east to purchase “Salt and other articles at the Markets” on the far side of the mountains.65

  However, despite the travails of farming and supplying one’s family with enough food to eat, the greatest challenge to survival was the Indian raid. As indicated in the previous discussion of politics, wars and treaties, the presence of a Native American population that had lived in the Ohio Valley and on the Allegheny Plateau for decades led to a tragic and, perhaps, inevitable clash of cultures. Plus, the settlers were not merely living on the front lines: their very presence was often the cause of conflict. That conflict resulted in more than a century of continuous violence, bloodshed and death along the Allegheny frontier with great loss of life for Indians and settlers alike. And for the latter, the constant fear of Indian attack would impact almost every aspect of their daily lives.

  Chapter 2

  The Native Americans

  When the first settlers arrived on the Allegheny Plateau in the mid-eighteenth century, the forest they encountered was far from being a “virgin” wilderness, as Americans so often described it. In fact, the plateau had been subject to human occupation for millennia. However, European and, especially, Anglo-American cultural arrogance led to a narrow viewpoint that saw the frontier as a place absent any real “human” settlement. Instead, the Indians who had lived there for centuries were dismissed as being subhuman “brutes,” “savages” and unchristian demons.

  For much of the twentieth century, historians stated a commonly held view that by the time settlers arrived in the mid-eighteenth century, the Allegheny Plateau had no real permanent Indian population. They argued that the tribes once living there had long since migrated westward and that the plateau was merely a communal hunting ground for a variety of Native American nations. Therefore, the theory follows, European colonists were really settling on land that was there for the taking. This idea became so pervasive at one point that it was formally incorporated into the West Virginia public school curriculum.66

  However, the actual truth is that although the Indian tribes that lived on the plateau had already diminished in number due to the impact of European diseases, intertribal warfare and forced migration to the west, there were still resident populations of Shawnees and Mingos, as well as a few Delawares.67 Further, the plateau also saw Cherokees, Wyandots, Ottawas, Miamis and Iroquois pass through the area while hunting, trading, conducting diplomacy or, more ominously, when participating in war against the Anglo-American colonists. Tragically, this warfare, which would suddenly peak in 1774 and continue virtually unabated until the American victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794, was almost exclusively the product of a lack of cultural understanding and the steadfast refusal by first the British and then the Americans to even try to respect or accommodate the Indians’ view of the world.

  A CLASH OF CULTURES

  As one historian points out, the American frontier during the colonial period was not so much a “border” with Indians on one side and settlers on the other as “a shifting region of multiethnic villages in which whites and Indians lived in a world of cultural intermingling.”68 Within parts of this frontier, Indians and Europeans had been in social and economic contact for almost two hundred years. It is, therefore, somewhat amazing that they understood one another so poorly. However, as discussed earlier, whereas the French did seem to gain a good sense of Indian culture and were able to create strong economic and political ties with them, the British and their eventual American progeny were another matter.

  One of the basic problems with the British understanding of the Indian nations was their insistence on projecting European cultural, religious and even political values and norms onto Native American societies. The various Indian nations were composed of a myriad of individual villages with complex affiliations that were the product of millennia of clan and kinship evolution. Within a distinct Indian nation, such as the Shawnee, each village was only loosely tied to the others. As a result, the Shawnee and every other Native American nation had no concept of the term “nation” as a European would understand it.

  Yet despite almost two hundred years of contact, the British continued to arbitrarily define every Indian group that spoke a common dialect as a unified tribal “state.” Furthermore, as the British saw matters, this group also took on the characteristics of a nation-state, although far less sophisticated, of course. These characteristics included a single head of state, in this case the “chief,” whom the British artificially invested with all the powers of both king and prime minister. As such, the chief with whom they dealt must, in the British view, also have powers to decide matters of war, peace, alliance, trade and, importantly, territorial ownership.

  Iroquois chiefs meet with a French officer at the council fire. New York Public Library.

  Of course, the realities of Indian political leadership could not have been further from the British concept of things. More often than not, each village was, in actuality, considered a “tribe” with its own political leadership. That leadership included someone designated as a chief, but the person holding this lofty office was usually selected to the post, not born into it as a king, and ruled via a very democratic process of consensus. Additionally, in many nations, the village tribes had two chiefs: a “peace” chief, who oversaw what might be called “civil” matters,
and a “war” chief, who was responsible for directing the activities of the tribe’s warriors. Furthermore, unlike European society, the women of the village played a critical role in tribal politics as, oftentimes, the selection of a chief in the woodland tribes was the product of a consensus solely among the women.

  The only time the Indian nations even remotely approached the European model of a nation-state was when the various nations would formally ally themselves, such as in the Iroquois Confederation, the Wyandot Confederacy or the Six Nations. However, even then, they operated on a strict basis of consensus among the tribes. As a result, the British never seemed to comprehend the situation sufficiently to effectively and fairly deal with the Indians. It is little wonder then that they were surprised when one group within what they perceived as a “nation” refused to abide by the terms of a treaty. From the Indian perspective, if one “tribe” had negotiated an agreement with the British, the terms only applied to the village that had concluded it. However, what is most surprising is that this misunderstanding persisted not only after the American colonies gained their independence from Great Britain, but it also continued into the late nineteenth century. American officials dealing with the Comanche and Sioux in the 1870s and 1880s appear to have possessed no better understanding of Indian tribal organization than those of the 1780s.

  In general, the culture of the various Indian nations tended to be one that sought internal harmony within each village. The creation of conflict was looked down on, and tribal traditions, customs and laws were based on ensuring harmonious tranquility within the tribe. One frontier settler who was taken captive at Braddock’s defeat and subsequently adopted by the Indians developed a great admiration for their way of life, praising them for “living in love, peace and friendship together, without disputes. In this respect, they shame those who profess Christianity.”69 Moreover, while every tribe had its warriors and there was conflict between nations, prior to coming directly into contact with Europeans, few would have described them as being “warlike.” During his first visit to the Shawnee in 1673, the famous Jesuit explorer Father Marquette commented, “They are not at all warlike” and “cannot defend themselves,” being “like flocks of sheep.”70