CHAPTER XVIII
Fine situations and well inhabited banks—A gay party—Slate and coal strata—Point Pleasant—River Kenhawa—Battle of Point Pleasant—Lord Dunmore’s campaign against the Indians—Indians justified—Reasons why there are but few writers in their favour—Short account of the causes of the last Indian war, and the settlement of Kentucky.
Fine situations and well inhabited banks—A gay party—Slate and coal strata—Point Pleasant—River Kenhawa—Battle of Point Pleasant—Lord Dunmore’s campaign against the Indians—Indians justified—Reasons why there are but few writers in their favour—Short account of the causes of the last Indian war, and the settlement of Kentucky.
Two miles and a half below Jones’s is Leading creek, a beautiful little river with high sloping banks on the right, and just below it a Mr. Kerr has a good log house, and a garden with a handsome stoccado {122} fence, behind which is a small cleared farm. A vein of coal is said to be on the Virginia side opposite, not much approved of by the blacksmiths, probably because not wrought deep enough. Threemiles further on the right is a very good, new, two story house, clapboarded, and painted white, and a large horse mill; and half a mile lower on the opposite shore is a large unfinished house, lately purchased by a Mr. Long from Col. Clendinning, who began to build it nine years ago.[97]It resembles a church, and is not only a good feature in the prospect, but impresses the traveller with lively ideas of the advanced state of population of the neighbouring country.—Close to it is a small hamlet, or quarter, of a few cabins, the whole in a beautiful situation on a high bank commanding a view of Eight Mile island, just below, and both banks of the river, which are here well inhabited and very pleasant.
Two miles lower is Six Mile island, very small, and half a mile beyond it on the left is a house most delightfully situated, commanding the whole vista of the river seven miles up to Leading creek, with the two intermediate islands. The house is sheltered from the northern blasts of winter by a fine grove purposely left standing, when the surrounding farm was cleared.
I observed that in general, from Le Tart’s falls, trees were left standing very tastily in places where they can have a good or pleasing effect, particularly the gigantick beeches along the margin of the river.
About a mile lower down, we met a large canoe, paddled against the stream by five well drest young men, while a respectable looking elderly man steered. They had five very smart looking girls with them, and, from their gaiety, were apparently returning from somefrolick—the epithet used in this country for all neighbourly meetings for thepurpose of assisting each other in finishing some domestick or farming {123} business, which generally conclude with feasting and dancing, which sometimes lasts two or three days, and is not seldom the fruitful source of many a tender and lasting connexion.
Near this we perceived a stratum of slate over one of coal, but the latter too much under the level of the river to be wrought. The slate stratum extends several rods, and is topped and squared as if done by art.
It may not be amiss to remark that all strata throughout the whole of this western country, have been hitherto found to be horizontal.
The banks from hence four miles to Point Pleasant are apparently rich with good bottoms on both sides, yet but thinly inhabited.
Point Pleasant, where we arrived at seven o’clock in the evening, is beautifully situated on a bank, at least forty feet above the common level of the Ohio, at the conflux of the Great Kenhawa with that river. It contains twenty-one indifferent houses, including a court-house of square logs, this being the seat of justice of Mason county. The town does not thrive on account of the adjacent country not settling so fast as the opposite side in the state of Ohio, where lands can be bought in small tracts for farms, by real settlers, at a reasonable rate, whereas the Virginia lands belonging mostly to wealthy and great landholders, are held at four or five times the Ohio price.
The river Ohio is here six hundred yards wide, and the Kenhawa is two hundred and twenty-five, the latter navigable about eighty miles to the falls.
On the 10th of October, 1774, a battle was fought here by the Virginia and Pennsylvania militia under general Lewis, against the Indians, who had attacked them in great force, but were defeated and compelled to retreat across the Ohio,carrying their dead and wounded with them according to their invariable custom; as, like the ancient Greeks, they deem it an {124} irreparable disgrace, to leave the unburied bodies of their slain fellow warriours to the disposal of the victorious enemy. The Americans bought their victory at the expense of a number of their most active men, amongst whom was Col. Lewis, brother to the general, a brave and enterprizing officer. They were buried near the edge of the river bank, which has since mouldered away, occasionally discovering their remains to the present inhabitants, who have always re-interred them.
This was a military station above thirty years ago. It is twenty years since it was laid out for a town, but it had no houses erected in consequence until after Wayne’s Indian treaty, it being unsafe before to live outside the stoccado.
Lord Dunmore, who was then governour of Virginia, and commander-in-chief on the expedition against the Indians, at the time of the battle of Point Pleasant, had penetrated by the way of Wheeling across the Ohio, to within a short march of their principal settlement, near where Chilicothe now is; when, instead of following up Lewis’s success, while they were yet under the influence of the panick occasioned by it, and by his lordship’s approach with the main body of the militia, and of exterminating them, or of driving them out of the country, he received their submission and patched up a treaty with them, which they observed no longer than during the short time that he continued with a military force in their country, for which he was much blamed by the back settlers and hunters. Humanity, however, must plead his excuse with every thinking or philosophick mind; and volumes might be written to prove the justice of the Indian cause; but in all national concerns, it has never been controverted by the history of mankind from the earliest ages of which we have any record, but that interestand power always went hand in hand to serve the mighty against the {125} weak, and writers are never wanting to aid the cause of injustice, barbarity and oppression, with the sophistry of a distorted and unnatural philosophy; while the few who would be willing to espouse the rights of the feeble, have not enough of the spirit of chivalry, to expose themselves to an irreparable loss of time, and the general obloquy attending an unpopular theme: even in this so much boasted land of liberty and equality, where nothing is to be dreaded from the arbitrary acts of a king and council during a suspension of a habeas corpus law, or the mandate of an arbitrary hero in the full tide of victory.
Is not popular opinion frequently as tyrannical as star chambers, or lettres de cachets?
The Indians north of the Ohio, under the name of the Five Nations, and their dependants, had been gradually, but rapidly, forced back more and more remote from the country of their ancestors, by the irresistible and overswelling tide of population of Europeans and their descendants. They at last abandoned all the continent of America east of the great chain of the Allegheny mountains, to the enlightened intruders, and besides that natural barrier, they added an immense wilderness of nearly five hundred miles in breadth, west of those mountains, to the space which divided them; settling themselves in that country which has since become the state of Ohio, having Lake Erie for its northern boundary, and the river Ohio for its southern. The woods and savannahs to the southward of that river abounded in game, such as buffaloes, deer, elk, bears, and innumerable smaller animals, valuable for their flesh, skins, and furs. They were tempted to make hunting excursions into this country, during which they frequently met with parties of hunters of other Indian nations, called Chocktaws, Chickasaws,and Cherokees, who resided far south of it, but who had been accustomed to consider it as their exclusive property {126} for hunting in, from time immemorial. Battles with various success were generally the consequence of those meetings. The southern Indians were the most numerous—the northern the most warlike.
Finding that they exhausted each other to no purpose, by such constant hostility, necessity at last obliged them to make a peace, the basis of which was, that the hunting country should be common to both as such, to the exclusion of all other people, and that neither would ever settle on it themselves, nor permit others to do so.
They enjoyed in quiet the uninterrupted use of this immense common forest, for many years after; but the Virginians having extended their settlements to the westward of the mountains, the frontier inhabitants, who, like the aborigines, supported themselves principally by hunting, were led in quest of game, as far west as the banks of Kentucky river, in the very centre of the Indian hunting country.
On their return to their settlements, the report spread from them to the colonial government, that they had discovered a country most abundant in game, and far exceeding in natural fertility any of the settled parts of Virginia.
Small armed parties were sent out to establish blockhouses for the protection of hunters or settlers, while the lands were divided into tracts and granted or sold to proprietors, as suited the convenience of the government.
The Indians, indignant at being followed to so remote a part of the continent, after the great sacrifice to peace before made by them in the abandonment of their native country, did their utmost to repel the invaders. The northern tribes were the most ferocious and the most exasperated, and sometimes alone, and sometimes aided by their southern auxiliaries, carried on a most bloody andexterminating war against all the whites who had the temerity to brave {127} their decided and fixed determination to adhere to their mutual guarantee of their hunting grounds.
Much blood was shed on both sides, and many parties of the whites were cut off, but their perseverance at last prevailed, and Kentucky became one of the United States of America.
The negro who carried our baggage from the boat to the tavern, regretted much that we had not arrived a little earlier in the day, to get some of the people’s money who had been assembled at a gathering. On our inquiring “how”—he replied by asking if we were notplay-actors, and if we had not got ourpuppetshew thingsin some of the trunks and boxes we had with us. He had probably conceived this idea from our having in the skiff a large box of medicines, which we had taken in at Marietta for a doctor Merrit at French Grant, and besides we had more baggage than it was usual for him to see carried by travellers, who had occasion to stop at Point Pleasant.
Our landlord’s name was John Allen, a young man, who had lived here since his infancy twenty years.—On a late journey to Richmond he had married a young woman there, who sat at supper with us, but who seemed to wish to appear rather above the doing the honours of a tavern table. He had lately been chosen one of the members of the legislature for Mason county, and seemed fond of discussing politicks, but apparently more for the sake of information, than for insistingdogmatically, according to the prevailing mode, on any opinion of his own. In short, he seemed to regret the blind illiberality of the improperly self-termed federalists, and of their equally prejudiced democratick antagonists, and seemed desirous of meriting the character of a disinterested patriot, and a federal republican in its real and literal sense, without perhaps understanding either term.
FOOTNOTES:[97]Colonel George Clendennin, a prominent pioneer of Western Virginia, was born in Scotland in 1746. His first services in the West were in Colonel Lewis’s army at the battle of Point Pleasant (1774). Later he bought the site of Charleston, West Virginia, and laid out the town (1788). The house on the Ohio which Cuming saw had been built by Clendennin in 1796; the following year, however, he died at Marietta.—Ed.
[97]Colonel George Clendennin, a prominent pioneer of Western Virginia, was born in Scotland in 1746. His first services in the West were in Colonel Lewis’s army at the battle of Point Pleasant (1774). Later he bought the site of Charleston, West Virginia, and laid out the town (1788). The house on the Ohio which Cuming saw had been built by Clendennin in 1796; the following year, however, he died at Marietta.—Ed.
[97]Colonel George Clendennin, a prominent pioneer of Western Virginia, was born in Scotland in 1746. His first services in the West were in Colonel Lewis’s army at the battle of Point Pleasant (1774). Later he bought the site of Charleston, West Virginia, and laid out the town (1788). The house on the Ohio which Cuming saw had been built by Clendennin in 1796; the following year, however, he died at Marietta.—Ed.